The Boniface Group@bonifacegroup
The based bros need to stop going wobbly for this cringe "just so" story. There is nothing less based than the papacy.
Vatican 2 was not when things went wrong in popedom.
The so-called "Roman Catholic Church" is not the ancient Church of Rome, subsisting in pristine material and formal perpetuity since the time of the apostles. The early church fathers did not believe in the supremacy of the bishop of Rome, still less in his infallibility.
The notion that the Church catholic was truly and essentially "Roman," and that churches are/were catholic only insofar as they were in submission to Rome's local bishop is an invention of the high Middle Ages. It is not the ancient "ubique et semper" consensus of the churches of God. More importantly, it is a notion completely at odds with the Scriptures. It is not Christian. It is faithless, sorcerous, and cargo-cultic. Small wonder that it so easily infects the minds of low-rent perennialists and occultists.
So what is the RCC, if it is not "the Church"?
The RCC is a parachurch organization. It is in fact the parachurch org par excellence, the original parachurch org, the (forgive me) OG parachurch org . . . and you can hold the forgiveness, actually, because now that I think about it, that is literally true.
If you find it less conceptually jarring to think of the RCC as a denomination, fine — I don't think there's any real distinction between those two things.
Whichever you prefer, the RCC as an institution formally came into being in 1563 with the close of the so-called "Council of Trent" — scare quotes because calling it a "council" concedes the frame. It certainly was not a true council.
The RCC is not "the Church." It is at best a sect. It was founded by men who rejected the Reformation of the Church. In rejecting the Reformation, it embraced Jewish errors. It Judaized. It rejected the real Christ and followed after a false one.
The Synagogue — Jewry, Jerusalem below — is the Antichrist simpliciter. This is very clear from the New Testament. It is especially clear from the Epistles and Revelation of St. John, where the term "Antichrist" is explicitly used — and, of course, from his gospel.
The pope is the Antichrist, yes, and it is Scriptural to say so. (And Martin Luther was not the first person to scripturally say so, as you may or may not know.) Still, we must understand what this means: the pope is the Antichrist in a derivative sense, because he is the chief Judaizer in the Church.
The RCC is not built upon the Confession of St. Peter. It is built upon the rejection of the Reformation which put that confession back where it belongs.
The RCC is organized around a declaration that the Gospel itself — the good news of the forgiveness of sins through faith in Christ, the promised Seed of the Woman — is anathema, which is to say "accursed."
In 1563 the papacy definitively cast in its lot with the Synagogue, and it has fought shoulder to shoulder with the Synagogue against Christendom ever since — in spiritual matters and, increasingly, in temporal ones as well.
So, no, the "Catholic Church" was not subverted by Jews in the 1960s. The Church has never been subverted by Jews, and it never will be. The gates of Hell itself cannot and will not prevail against it. For it consists of all who are united to Christ by faith. As surely as He is risen from the dead, lives and reigns to all eternity, so, too, are His members. They have eternal life. Death itself cannot appall them. This is Christianity, and this Christianity is what makes the Church catholic — or, if you prefer, Catholic.
The one holy Church which endures forever is manifest wherever Christians gather around Christ's Word and sacraments — and the right and power to preach the Word and administer the sacraments does not belong to a papacy or an episcopacy or a presbytery or a ministerium but to all believers, and the local instantiation of the public ministry of those holy things does not rely on the approval or certification or validation or permission or licensing of royal or papal or episcopal or presbyteral or synodical parties for its reality or lawfulness or propriety, even though propriety has commended the involvement of such parties (variously named, variously defined) in the support and organization of the ministry in different historical circumstances in the past and may yet again in the future, if the Lord tarries.
Sedevacantist papists like Hutton Gibson and his son Mel are right to look at the abominations of Vatican 2 and the post-V2 RCC and say "THAT is not Catholic!"
But they are wrong — ludicrously wrong — to point to the 1563-1958 RCC and say "but that IS Catholic!" It is not, and it never has been, because it is, simply put, not Christian. It was and always has been a syncretistic mashup of Christianity and Judaism. And after Vatican 2, it simply forked:
1. Traditionalist Catholicism (Pre-V2): same old closeted pederasty as always, Tridentine "orthodoxy," Latin abomination of the mass, open hatred of the Gospel, pope is still the Antichrist (but the seat of Antichrist is vacant, pending a "valid election").
2. Post V2 Catholicism: out-and-proud pederasty, gay universalism, hippie vernacular abomination of the mass, Laodicean hatred of the Gospel, pope is still the Antichrist — and sometimes he is the world's foremost leftist, too.
There is nothing more cringe than Lutheran sacerdotalist wannabes simping for (1) over against (2).
Anyway, what I've told you here is the truth. You can hate it at all you want, but that's not going to change a thing.
You must understand that if you sow Satan's wind, you will in time reap a whirlwind.
This is the lesson of the RCC.
You must understand that if you wash your hands in Jewish works-righteousness and necromancy and theurgy and sprinkle your house "clean" with the uncleannesses of the Whore of Babylon, you will be visited by seven Judaizing spirits even stronger than the last.
This is the same lesson, just in different terms.
The RCC just is the model for all Judaizing, which makes Vatican 2 about the most predictable occurrence imaginable, if you knew what you were looking at.
Lutherans used to know. Our fathers in the faith knew.** Real ones still do. But the neo-Lutherans of today, including a large number of clerics, love nothing so much as to simp for the RCC and flirt with its incubi. Yes, incubi, not succubi: this is gay flirting.
"We're actually MUCH closer to Rome than we are to other Protestants. In fact we're NOT Protestant."
"As Luther said*, 'I'd rather drink pure blood with the pope than pure wine with the Anabaptists!'" (*Luther never said this.)
"You know we actually DO have apostolic succession, which is why our sacraments are valid."
I could go on. And in time I will. Suffice it to say for now, neo-Lutherans pine for the Judaized religion of the RCC as hotly as the children of Israel pined for the fleshpots of Egypt. To be blunt, their obsession borders on the sexual, and it is as it repulsive to behold as it is objectively pathetic.
Some caveats:
The RCC contains many deluded souls who mercifully do not understand, let alone believe, all of the heresies that its "magisterium" teaches, and despite their carnal confusion they believe in and trust in Jesus Christ as their Savior. They have the Holy Spirit. They are Christians. They are still fairly called papists, inasmuch as all of them are outwardly subject to the pope, even if in their hearts they are Christians. They are in great spiritual danger.
The RCC also contains many who do indeed understand, believe in, and fervently cling to the heresies of the papacy and "magisterium." They do not trust in Jesus Christ as their Savior. None of the key terms in the preceding sentence mean the same for them as they do for a Christian. They reject the Holy Spirit and serve a different spirit. They are as deluded regarding the person and work of Jesus Christ as any Jew or Mohammedan. They are not Christians. They are papists, through and through. And they are hellbound. If they do not repent, they will perish everlastingly.
"This is so harsh! There are false believers in every church!" Indeed. But I am making a different point, which is that while "all sects, by their teaching, obscure the Gospel, but they do not, as the Pope does, anathematize and curse it" (Walther, see below).
Insofar as we may have to interact with so-called "Catholics" — and frequently we do, inasmuch as our civil rulers have foolishly and impiously given liberty to the RCC, as they have to many other idolaters, blasphemers, heretics — we should, as we have opportunity, rebuke their error sharply and show no sympathy for the cursed religion which ensnares their souls and either prevents saving faith or constantly threatens to engulf its dimly burning wick. We should rather instruct and admonish them.
God knows His own. His arm is not shortened that He cannot save. But we do not for that reason shrug and say, "It's no big deal, they're fine, they're Christians, the papacy isn't that bad."
My friends, it is that bad. Do not be deceived. Only the Jewish people itself is more Jewish than the "Roman Catholic Church." By the same token, there is nothing less based. For nothing is based that is not based on the perfect and forever-enduring Word of God, which instructs the soul, enlightens the eyes, and makes a man wise unto salvation.
To God alone be the glory.
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**C. F. W. Walther:
"In its sixth session the Council of Trent passed this decree: 'If any one says that men are made righteous solely through the imputation of the righteousness of Christ or solely through the forgiveness of sin, to the exclusion of the grace and love which by the Holy Spirit is poured out in their hearts and is inherent in them; or that the grace by which we are made righteous is nothing else than the favor of God, — let him be accursed. If any one says that the faith which makes men righteous is nothing else than trust in the divine mercy, which remits sins for Christ's sake, or that it is only this trust that makes us righteous, — let him be accursed. ... If any one says that a justified person does not, by reason of the good works which are done by him through the grace of God and the merit of Jesus Christ, whose living member he is, truly merit an increase of grace, eternal life, and the actual obtainment of eternal life, provided he dies in grace, — let him be accursed.' Unless you are utterly blind and know nothing of the Christian religion, I believe that a plainer proof that the Pope is the Antichrist cannot be offered you.
"Everywhere the papists set up the cross and make the sign of the cross; but that is sheer hypocrisy. They have the cross, but without its meaning in connection with Christ. Again and again we read that they call upon Mary to keep the ship of Peter from perishing. They do not readily say: 'Jesus is our Fortress, our Rock,' etc. Verily, the worst sects in the Christian Church are less harmful than the Pope. For all sects without exception admit that the only way in which a person may be saved is by faith in the grace of God in Christ Jesus. All sects, by their teaching, obscure the Gospel, but they do not, as the Pope does, anathematize and curse it. Inasmuch as all sects allow this thesis, that salvation is by the grace of God, through faith in Christ Jesus, to stand, they are incomparably superior to the Papacy. They are corrupted churches, but the Papacy is a false Church. Just as counterfeit money is no money, so the papal Church, being a false Church, is no Church. Compared with the corrupted sectarian churches, the Papacy is a non-church, a denial of the Church of Christ. I am not speaking of the Roman Catholic, but of the papistic Church, the Church which submits to the Pope, accepts his decrees, and repeats his anathemas. This Church is the one which history knows as the ecclesia maligna, the malign, pernicious Church, and the synagog of Satan."
(C. F. W. Walther, The Proper Distinction Between Law and Gospel, Ninth Evening Lecture, 74-75)
