As those of you who follow my work know, I am a Traditional Roman Catholic who raises questions about Church history, particularly–to keep it simple for what is mostly newcomers to this topic–the sweeping changes made in the 1960s.

Many know it goes deeper and beyond that in the scope of history, but simplicity must reign if we are to get Catholics to thinking and moving the Overton Window.

Souls are on the line, including my own, not whether or not anyone can impress with their knowledge of history.

Two Stories, One Fault-Line

First of all, let us hope this bishop was not involved in any “underground” nefarious activity himself. We all should understand what controlled opposition is. But based solely on surface level details…

When the underground bishop Julius Jia Zhiguo, leader of China’s underground Catholic Church who endured decades of persecution under the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), died at age 90 almost two weeks ago now–and the Vatican remains silent–one has to ask: whose Church does Rome serve?

In 2009, Jia’s arrest led to a stalemate in negotiations between the Vatican and China’s state-approved Catholic Patriotic Association. Under the pontificate of Benedict XVI, Rome expressed caution in its relations with Chinese prelates, as persecution of the underground Church loyal to the Vatican intensified.

“Situations of this kind create obstacles to that constructive dialogue with the competent authorities.… This is not, unfortunately, an isolated case,” stated the Vatican commission.

After the Sino-Vatican agreement, overseen by Cardinal Pietro Parolin, this tone changed. As tensions grow within the Vatican regarding the Provisional Agreement with China, which grants the CCP authority in the appointment of bishops, many members of China’s underground Catholic Church feel abandoned by Rome.

The Vatican insisted in L’Osservatore Romano that the agreement was in the name of “unity.”

“The main purpose of the Provisional Agreement on the Appointment of Bishops in China is to support and promote the proclamation of the Gospel in those lands, reconstituting the full and visible unity of the Church,” stated the Vatican.

The unity the Vatican sought to achieve has yet to materialize, as persecution of Catholics in China continues.

Jia operated an orphanage in China for 30 years, enduring constant pressure from the Chinese government to remove the children from his care. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the CCP reportedly attempted to make him sign an agreement allowing his church to remain open only if he promised that no children under 18 would attend.

Remember, as we’ve been saying, beware of that cozy little word “unity.”

And when the traditionalist community of the Sons of the Most Holy Redeemer (Transalpine Redemptorists) publicly declared that the “Synodal Church” is not the Divinely-constituted Catholic Church, only to see the Vatican swing into evaluation mode–what does that tell us about the architects of the “new Church”?

“In such a religion there might be a place in a corner for the Traditional Latin Mass of All Time. But there will be no place at all for the Traditional Catholic Faith of All Time. The Truth of the past, and the truth of today cannot both exist at the same time in the one body,” [Father Michael Mary] said.

[Cardinal Matteo] Zuppi has repeatedly expressed pro-LGBT sentiments. He previously endorsed the book written by dissident Jesuit priest James Martin and heralded Fiducia Supplicans, which allows for clergy to bless same-sex “couples.” Zuppi, who was named cardinal in 2019 and appointed head of the Italian bishops’ conference by Pope Francis in 2022, also performed the wedding of the former Grand Master Mason of Rome in 2020.

During the Vatican celebration on Nostra Aetate, Cardinal Kurt Koch, prefect of the Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity, shared that the document remarkably was in part prompted by the request of a Jewish historian.

“On the occasion of the meeting between Jules Isaac and Pope John XXIII on June 13, 1960, the Jewish historian presented the pope with a memorandum urgently calling for a new (way) of the Church relationship with today’s (man),” said Koch. “Pope John took up this request and commissioned the drafting of a declaration which … resulted in Nostra Aetate.”

Bishop Julius Jia Zhiguo. The Transalpine Redemptorists. These are not isolated stories. They are a single fault-line. They bring into question the theatre of Modernism in the synodal Church–and its mirror-image in the State.

Truth is not prey to data, to the algorithm, to the numbers of a crowd.

If this were so, the choice of Barabbas 2000 years ago would have been the correct one.

One Relevance

Why should any of this matter, particularly to my Catholic family and friends, particularly to those few non-Catholic friends whom I’ve been working with on Church history? Because the method remains the same. The syllabus of Modernism laid out in Pascendi Dominici Gregis (1907) is clear: undermine scholastic philosophy, weaken tradition, diminish law and order, flood seminaries and institutions with propaganda that masquerades as reform and relevance.

So much of what Protestant preachers are saying about the Catholic Church is true, but are we dealing with an issue of the argument of a false premise? If the Transalpine Redemptorist statement is correct, then so much of what is being taught about Catholicism is indeed based on a premise that isn’t even the truth.

The climate is a Church that lives by the logic of press release and spin just as much as the political world, by fond feelings and sentiment–democracy!–rather than sacrament and truth. A Church that recoils before Caesar’s agenda and becomes indistinguishable from the bureaucratic state.

In other words, how can we as Catholics voice our complaints about a progressive, liberal, immoral State but turn a blind eye–all in the name of “obedience,” of course–to the same Modernist dealings, education, and “reform” within the Church?

The result is creating a mass, societal schizophrenia, one precisely planned by the architects of all of this–both within the Church and the State.

And yes, it goes well past the 1960s. Well past even Pius X’s Pascendi and his early 20th century seeming-war against Modernism.

This is so beyond serious, that I have a hard time understanding how it is I can still commit even one sin sometimes.

Let’s ask some questions:

1. First and foremost–and this informs every other question/response out there–who exactly is behind Communism, or Bolshevism, including that found in China today?

2. If a supposed pope will not publicly honour a bishop who spent a lifetime in loyalty to the Catholic faith under the threat of oppression, what does that say about whose loyalty matters?

3. If a Church-community that insists on the Faith of all time is flagged as problematic while the “new Church”–including any and every priest who has contributed to its scandal and loathing–remains unconfronted, what does that tell us about who holds the power and whom they fear most?

4. And in both cases–is the suffering of the faithful, including the bishop and the community, merely fodder for diplomatic optics, for a means of controlled opposition and propaganda, or is it an actual battlefield for truth?

Bishop Jia Zhiguo’s death and Rome’s silence tell us more than any press release. They reveal a Church that negotiates rather than confronts, a Church that trades fidelity for freedom-of-dialogue, for a false peace under the false virtue of ecumenism instead of the holy dividing sword Christ teaches in the Bible. The underground Catholic Church in China suffered this silence as abandonment–while the visible institutional Church has engaged in “unity” talks with those who persecute faith, and the most visible marker of that shift occurred in the 1960s with still-Communist Russia.

See the Vatican-Moscow Agreement, or the Metz Pact.

The Transalpine Redemptorists expose another facet: a Church that no longer knows what it means to insist on the Faith. Their denunciation of Nostra Aetate and the Synodal Church as incompatible with the old Faith signals that for many, the rupture is not in the fringes–it’s at the center.

Divine Irony

Here lies the divine irony. The same Church that once rebuked propaganda now thrives in its grammar, a manner of speaking that has become equally abominable when it comes to the State. The same institution that championed truth now flinches before pluralism. They issue statements, release podcasts, talk about “listening” and “synodality,” do gymnastics to force ambiguous (non-Catholic) wording into Catholic teaching–while the little bishop of the underground suffers and dies in silence. They chase relevance, especially from anyone who just wants to go along to get along, but lose fidelity.

And the story isn’t only ecclesial. The State has learned its lessons well. Politics, elections, “scientific consensus,” clicks, comments, algorithmic truth–all are built on the Modernist method. Silence the dissenters, amplify the approved, baptize the whir of data and clicks as progress.

The parallel is staggering: The State demands compliance through electoral machinery that provides a false “consensus”; the Church welcomes synodality through doctrinal ambiguity, thus doing the same.

Are these merely unfortunate coincidences, or part of a single system? One that collapses the Church’s spiritual authority into the State’s technocratic authority? One where conscience is filibustered by committees, and truth is replaced by “process” and the drive for “unity”?

The revolution today does not roar as the French and American ones did; it whispers, in such documents as the Alta Vendita. It tells you you’ll be as gods if you merely trust the system. It shouts progress while silencing Fatima and the saints–the ancient ones and some not so ancient like Padre Pio–who have been warning about a revolutionary counter-Church to come. And the shepherds of a Church that cared once for nothing but Christ and his Kingdom now harbours an irony so serpentine that even Adam and Eve might tremble.

Hope remains, but perhaps only through the questions all of this raises, the questions that have stirred a fire in me to be a better Christian, a better disciple of the King. The bishop and the traditional community’s courage says that the Faith is not negotiable. It is not trending. It is not up for reinterpretation.

So if the Church and the State both stand on the same propaganda stage, let one question rise above the noise:

Who is the master now–the servant and the system? Or the King?

Act accordingly.

Because truth–the real Truth–doesn’t trend.

It doesn’t negotiate.

It is the Way and the Life, and it conquers.