The Church of the Titanic Slide

By Christopher A. Ferrara

As Leo XIV excommunicates the SSPX on account of the episcopal consecrations scheduled for July 1 at Econe, we witness a tableau that could not have reified more perfectly the current state of the human element of the Church after sixty years of ecclesial entrainment in the turbulent wake of Vatican II. At a summer camp staged inside the hideous Paul VI Audience Hall—an embarrassing relic of Seventies “Space Age” kitsch—the campers were provided with an inflatable model of the sinking Titanic marketed as a slide for children. The Pope blessed the campers with the sinking ship to his right, oblivious to the exquisite irony of the scene.

Leo’s immediate predecessor introduced what has to be the terminal stage of what Cardinal Ratzinger admitted in the 1980’s is a “progressive process of decadence that to a large measure has been unfolding under the summons to a presumed ‘spirit of the Council’ and by doing so has actually and increasingly discredited it.”[1] With Traditiones custodes, Bergoglio reversed Pope Benedict’s liberation of the Latin liturgy, reimposing the tyrannical regime of suppression. With Amoris Laetitia and his subsequent official approval of the Buenos Aires episcopal guidelines, published in the AAS, he authorized Holy Communion for public adulterers on the basis of a situation ethic relaxing exceptionless moral strictures in “concrete situations”, thus undermining the entire edifice of infallible Church teaching on the absolute divine prohibition of intrinsic evils. And then, while strutting off into eternity stage left, he authorized “spontaneous” and “informal” blessings for homosexual and adulterous couples with Fiducia supplicans, a “text signed and approved by the Supreme Pontiff himself.”

Let the aptly named Bishop Athanasius Schneider summarize the moral debacle of the Bergoglian papacy in his comments on Fiducia supplicans:

This document and its impudent use of pious words struck me as an artifice of Pharisaism and a mockery of the natural and revealed law of God. In applying Fiducia supplicans, St John the Baptist could have imparted a “spontaneous” and “pastoral blessing” to the irregular union of Herod and Herodias.

This document clearly, albeit cunningly, undermines the natural and revealed law of God regarding marriage and the meaning and exercise of human sexuality. Therefore, it cannot be the expression of the Church’s authentic Magisterium and forfeits any binding authority. For the authentic Magisterium “is not above the word of God, but serves it, teaching only what has been handed on, listening to it devoutly, guarding it scrupulously and explaining it faithfully” (Second Vatican Council, Dei Verbum, 10)….

True Catholic bishops can only respond in one way: by determinedly rejecting the declaration, as it permits priests to perform an intrinsically immoral act by invoking God’s holy name — through a blessing — upon an objectively sinful situation that is known to the public.

Elsewhere, Bishop Schneider put it this way: “Fiducia Supplicans seriously undermines the Catholic faith and morals, turning the Catholic Church, at least in practice, into a welcoming and nurturing environment for unrepentant homosexuals and adulterers who lead sinful lifestyles, instead of calling such sinners to repentance.”[2]

A Pope who undermines Catholic faith and morals; a Pope who undermines unchanging divine truth, and the constant teaching of the Magisterium; a Pope who, in practice, turns the Church into a welcoming place for unrepentant homosexuals and adulterers; a Pope who impedes the Church’s very ability to reflect the truth of Christ.

Yet this very Pope, says the current Pope, is to be lauded because “in harmony with his predecessors, he took up the legacy of the Second Vatican Council…” In fact, Bergoglio trampled on the teaching of both John Paul II and Benedict XVI reaffirming the Church’s irreformable teaching on the moral impossibility of Holy Communion for public adulterers or those who are living in objectively immoral unions, including those involving “acts of grave depravity.” And Bergoglio slapped his still-living predecessor in the face by revoking Summorum while hiding the results of an episcopal survey which showed—contrary to his deceptive intimations—that the Latin liturgical revival Benedict had launched was having positive results throughout the Church.

Then again, Bergoglio was not in harmony with his own teaching on “blessings” for homosexual couples and those living in adultery. Compare the Responsum of the former Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 2021 with the text of Fiducia supplicans, issued by the renamed Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith 2024 in following the furor raised by homosexual activists and their complicit clerics in “full communion” with Francis:

2021 Responsum

“For this reason, it is not licit to impart a blessing on relationships, or partnerships, even stable, that involve sexual activity outside of marriage (i.e., outside the indissoluble union of a man and a woman open in itself to the transmission of life), as is the case of the unions between persons of the same sex.”

Fiducia Supplicans (2024)

“Within the horizon outlined here appears the possibility of blessings for couples in irregular situations and for couples of the same sex, the form of which should not be fixed ritually by ecclesial authorities to avoid producing confusion with the blessing proper to the Sacrament of Marriage.”

But while Bergoglio undermined faith and morals, he did take up “the legacy of Vatican II.” For this, Leo XIV honors Bergoglio. Vatican II, Vatican II, Vatican II. It seems that absent divine intervention by the emergence of a Pope who honors his preconciliar predecessors and their constant teaching just as it was constantly presented, the Church will never escape the thrall of the one ecumenical council that has eclipsed all the others along with the uncompromising teaching of all the Popes who preceded “the conciliar springtime” of 1962.