We have been concretized in the realm of the horizontal beam of the cross and made to forget the vertical.

Assuredly, this problem goes well beyond into history before Pope Pius X. If you’re looking for an earlier markers, think the French Revolution, the “Enlightenment,” and any movement that was about the business of destroying apostolic Christianity and Christian civilization. If there is any doubt in that, look at what has happened to societies–to western Christendom–over the last few centuries.

That said, Pius X and his early 20th century papacy gives us some sense of history and the traditional while keeping somewhat in line with current times. People are still talking about things like the Great Depression and the World Wars, which Pius X immediately preceded.

Understand that I am addressing the Catholic teachings–as they reflect traditional teachings they follow–of these chief shepherds. To go deeper into more nefarious possibilities is beyond the scope of my efforts to show the difference between pre- and post-conciliar Catholicism–particularly in the Liturgy (before and after the 1960s).

I have numerous articles and videos on this topic, posted just recently, if you’d like to peruse my site.

Pius X saw it happening in society and saw it coming specifically in the Church–the quiet divorce of heaven and earth, of faith and reason, of Church and State. It was the slow-motion coup that would put the final nail in Christendom without firing a single shot. “Formerly,” he wrote in Pascendi, “it was possible to subordinate the temporal to the spiritual.” Formerly–before man decided to crown himself.

From his pivotal encyclical Pascendi:

24. But it is not with its own members alone that the Church must come to an amicable arrangement – besides its relations with those within, it has others outside. The Church does not occupy the world all by itself; there are other societies in the world, with which it must necessarily have contact and relations. The rights and duties of the Church towards civil societies must, therefore, be determined, and determined, of course, by its own nature as it has been already described. The rules to be applied in this matter are those which have been laid down for science and faith, though in the latter case the question is one of objects while here we have one of ends. In the same way, then, as faith and science are strangers to each other by reason of the diversity of their objects, Church and State are strangers by reason of the diversity of their ends, that of the Church being spiritual while that of the State is temporal. Formerly it was possible to subordinate the temporal to the spiritual and to speak of some questions as mixed, allowing to the Church the position of queen and mistress in all such, because the Church was then regarded as having been instituted immediately by God as the author of the supernatural order. But his doctrine is today repudiated alike by philosophy and history. The State must, therefore, be separated from the Church, and the Catholic from the citizen. Every Catholic, from the fact that he is also a citizen, has the right and the duty to work for the common good in the way he thinks best, without troubling himself about the authority of the Church, without paying any heed to its wishes, its counsels, its orders – nay, even in spite of its reprimands. To trace out and prescribe for the citizen any line of conduct, on any pretext whatsoever, is to be guilty of an abuse of ecclesiastical authority, against which one is bound to act with all one’s might. The principles from which these doctrines spring have been solemnly condemned by our predecessor Pius VI. in his Constitution Auctorem fidei.

Note that the bold is what the Modernist thinks, not Pius X. He typically does this–present the opposing, parasitic argument as though he were saying it himself (we all do this in conversation). Also note that Pius X builds on his predecessor, something all popes did. They don’t do that anymore. Instead they teach the exact opposite of everything the Church taught for two millenia.

This is the crucial point that I’m trying to get my Catholic friends and family to consider. Just think about it. It is perfectly within our rights as laymen to question such blatant contradictions while not formally declaring open heresy. God does not ask us to insist on a schizophrenic mental posture that forces us to lie to ourselves, thus breaking the eighth commandment.

The Modernists and those who incited the French Revolution two centuries prior insisted that the State and the Church are “strangers,” each with its own ends, the one temporal and the other spiritual. They deceived people into thinking that all kingship was tyranny, using of course cherry picked examples. What they really intended was for Caesar to eventually rule without Christ, that man must govern without the Cross. Once the supernatural order was declared a myth–and its temporal specter tyrannical by definition–the Church was evicted from the public square and locked in the sacristy. What began as a polite separation of “spheres” became an armed exile.

This is how it was even possible for the insanity of the woke “left” to take root. It was the “right” that allowed it, perhaps out of a misplaced sense of political decorum and compassion.

A lie is a lie, no matter how far back into history we must go. The narcissist doesn’t win or emerge unscathed just because he manipulates time and sweeps problems under the rug.

The Church was never meant to “co-exist” with the world–she was meant to conquer it–in a good way. In a commanded way, by Christ himself.

That’s not triumphalism. It’s the Great Commission from the Gospel of St Matthew. It’s why Pius X, decades before Vatican II’s spiritual détente, warned that this “agreement” and false peace was creating false Catholics–citizens who claim dual loyalty to the Church and America but live as though the temporal–America–were supreme. He saw that when the Church ceases to command on Monday through Saturday, she begins to negotiate. And once she negotiates, she begins to beg.

Sunday thus becomes irrelevant, dare I say, a cruel joke.

We are now the children of that beggarly Church. Alleged shepherds who speak more fluently about “climate change” than conversion of individual hearts. Shepherds who apologize for crusaders but not for cowards. Shepherds who tell you to “follow the science” but never to follow Christ to Calvary. The Church Militant has become the Church Mildlike.

And yes, these shepherds may very well involve our favorites.

I know that is hard to believe.

This is the core of the Modernist heresy: the refusal to believe that grace should govern nature. The insistence that science commands faith. That the State commands conscience. And that the Church, stripped of her sword, is expected to smile and bless both tyrants and technocrats.

The citizen has become his own pope, and we’ve got millions of them now.

Pius X saw this inversion in both the past and the future with prophetic precision. Once the State is separated from the Church, the Catholic is separated from his King. The faith becomes a private hobby, and truth becomes a matter of “consensus,” indoctrinated by our “democracy” and the what-should-now-be-the-absurd belief that we all actually have a vote. The result is what we now inhabit: a global regime of moral relativism pretending to be compassion, and a hierarchy that mistakes diplomacy for holiness.

And most of it occurs on the political right, where all the people whom I would have generally agreed with in the past are.

The boys-in-girls-bathrooms-thing was and is just the other side of the dialectic to deceive us, you know.

We have been concretized in the realm of the horizontal beam of the cross and made to forget the vertical. And our favorite “Catholic” YouTube influencers are part of the game, part of the intended dialectic, all avoiding the core soul questions that determine heaven and hell.

We have to get clicks, you know. We have to keep our sponsors happy.

Well, I don’t.

Make no mistake–this is war. A spiritual war disguised as progress, fought not with bullets but with bureaucracies, not with swords but with sentiments. It’s what Pius X called the “synthesis of all heresies” because it does not merely deny a doctrine; it denies God’s universal order itself.

The Church that forgot she is militant has now forgotten that she is divine.

Pius X remembered both.

While recent voices do just the opposite.

And until we remember with him—until we again confess that Christ is King not only of hearts but of nations—we will keep mistaking surrender for mercy, and silence for peace.