Before we begin, know that I am raising my hand, not pointing the finger. To a different degree, I am held captive by these things too.

And before readers trained by media psyop after media psyop assume this is a staunch defense of the SSPX, it is not. I have not been SSPX-proper for a long time, even though, for reasons I will not get into here, I believe it remains our liturgy of choice. This article is not about whether the SSPX was right to consecrate bishops or whether the apparent juridical penalty is valid. Most people opining on the Catholic story in the “news” do not even know about the rift inside the SSPX itself. They do not know about many things our famous YouTube podcasters will not tell them.

There is a reason this story is showing up so heavily in our feeds, the very feeds we all know are manipulated against us, a point we have tried to raise in article after article for years now.

The old Matins for the Feast of the Most Precious Blood does something modern Catholics would do well to notice. After the hymn, which we ended with on Wednesday, the Office does not leave the Blood of Christ in abstraction. It goes back 33 years, in fact, beginning immediately in Christ’s life with the Circumcision: “And when eight days were accomplished for the circumcising of the child, His Name was called Jesus.”

Before Calvary, before Pilate, before the lance, before His side is opened, the Blood is already tied to the Holy Name—the only name that saves.

That is not incidental. It is the language of real freedom.

Most Precious Blood of Jesus, salva nos.

The Hook and the Hypocrisy

America is worth honoring today, but the Fourth of July can become a strange little mirror for Catholics.

A nation may celebrate liberty while its people remain obedient to every approved group-think. A man may wave a flag, quote the founders, distrust the federal government, and still surrender his Catholic mind the moment an official churchman tells him which traditional Catholics deserve contempt.

That is one reason why this week’s SSPX story is crucial beyond the SSPX.

I write as a Catholic who is not SSPX-proper or sedevacantist. I have no interest in pretending that every question surrounding the Society is simple. But I have even less interest in pretending that millions of Catholics suddenly became canon lawyers because a Vatican office in today’s Church climate told them what to think.

I would say read all of the work we’ve put in here on these topics for many months now, but I know even from the responses from close friends that no one has time to read anymore, and certainly not to read someone who isn’t recognizable on YouTube. So I don’t know what to say other than that there is a great deal more to this than we’re being allowed to see even in the “alternative” media.

The current hook is simple: On July 1, 2026, the SSPX, the official face of it anyway, consecrated bishops without a papal mandate, and the Vatican soon declared excommunication for the bishops involved, with reports saying that excommunication extends to priests and lay faithful who adhere to the SSPX. That is the “news” that has my feed and so many others’ feeds filled with suddenly astute theologians’ and uninformed priests’ opinions on the matter.

And for conversation’s sake, that includes both “sides” of the argument.

But one deeper point, not even the deepest we have explored in this space, is that the online reactions from Catholics in both factions of this intentionally curated binary reveal how little they understand either Catholic doctrine or Catholic liberty. They hear “Rome has spoken” and feel the strange pride they have developed over years of arguing with Protestants, as though obedience to whoever currently speaks from Rome settles every doctrinal question Rome itself has spent the last century destroying.

They argue “Tradition” but don’t even honor the popes who came before this ridiculous modern era where everyone has a vote and everyone has an opinion, where Rome itself doesn’t even listen to its own past.

And we mock the Protestants?

Catholics like this have long stopped thinking. They forward a famous podcaster’s opinion or even a trusted online priest’s opinion, they sneer, they post uncharitable comments in line with what they’ve done over the years with the Protestants, they celebrate what the SSPX “had coming to them,” or they give any number of other responses that do not have charity, certainly, but more importantly for my purposes today, betray a lack of the “wisdom of serpents” Christ commanded his disciples to have. They become mysterious little digital inquisitors, without having studied Vatican II or the documents and many many decades leading up to it, the New Mass and all it rejected in relation to past popes and a past ecumenical council, or the last century of doctrinal wreckage that is in direct contradiction to everything Catholic pope after Catholic pope taught, all while they cling to this notion of obedience to the pope as necessary to be a member of the Catholic Church.

In other words, the message has become this: As soon as a pope dies, his teachings go from eternally binding to disposable, based on the politics, personality, and mood of the day for the next pope.

No wonder so many Protestants protest. No wonder so many Protestants mock us. No wonder it is impossible for me to help young Protestant minds coming to me for answers about what Catholicism is when all they know of it is so contradictory and hypocritical.

The Catholic Church visible to the world, the Catholic Church so many an online inquisitor is propping up right now, doesn’t even follow its own law.

What Scripture Warns

This, all of this and more, is why Saint Paul’s warning in 2 Thessalonians 2 is not some lofty words to skim as a warning for a prior age. It is a present-tense diagnostic of the problem, of the sin:

“Whose coming is according to the working of Satan, in all power, and signs, and lying wonders, and in all seduction of iniquity to them that perish; because they receive not the love of the truth, that they might be saved. Therefore God shall send them the operation of error, to believe lying: That all may be judged who have not believed the truth, but have consented to iniquity” (2 Thess 9-12).

They did not receive the love of the truth, and when men refuse that love, God permits something worse than ignorance. He permits the operation of error, the condition in which men become confident precisely when they should be most afraid of their own confidence, precisely when the “fear and trembling” of Saints Paul and Peter should be the order of the day.

But I thought God was all-merciful?

So many of us are so confident in the last few days in our opinions on the Catholic news.

Romans 1 says the same thing another way. When men change the truth of God into a lie, God gives them up. When they choose against having God in their knowledge, He delivers them up “to a reprobate sense,” or to a mind captured by their sinful desires. The punishment is not always lightning from the sky or a car wreck or a broken plate in the kitchen. Sometimes the punishment is a mind that can no longer recognize its own prison, a mind that simply continues to multiply its own sins.

And, it is something that God permits.

Psalms 77 through 80, a staple of the Divine Office devotion I see multiple times a week, have the holy terror of God in them as well. Again and again, Israel forgets. Israel refuses to obey. Israel receives chastisement. Israel must be called back to the works of God, the law of God, the Shepherd of Israel, and the vine He planted. The pattern is not complicated. A people forgets, then decays, then suffers, then must be restored by grace. And amidst the forgetting, the decaying, and the suffering, God is, again, permitting and giving them up to things they can’t even see.

Finally, at least for this piece, though certainly not for the number of times this theme appears in Scripture, we see Our Lord’s question in Luke 18.8:

“But yet the Son of man, when he cometh, shall he find, think you, faith on earth?”

That is the question underneath this week’s Catholic spectacle. It is not about who has the cleverest take, the most likes, or the most agreeable comments. It isn’t whether our favorite podcasts shot to No. 1 on the charts.

The question clearly indicates that when He returns, there will not be much faith at all left on Earth, and the fact that He says elsewhere that the gate of Heaven is narrow should caution us against believing that God is impressed with the number of followers, reactions, or comments we get on a post.

He may not even be impressed with our large families.

It should caution us against so brazenly assuming we are right with any of this.

Happy July 4th, American Catholics!

Last year for this national holiday we put out a piece called “A King That Bleeds Red — A July 4th Reminder to Catholics,” and one year later it has proven most prescient, as so much of our work here, all glory to God, has been.

So yes, America’s civil freedom is worth honoring to some degree, but this week’s Catholic news shows yet again how many people who call themselves free are not free at all in their thinking. True freedom is not the liberty to repeat official narratives fed to us by the algorithm or the consensus of our own little mobs here and there. The mob chose Barabbas, after all.

No, true freedom is the liberty to seek truth under God, purified by the Blood of Christ, seasoned with the salt of doctrine, and guarded against the great delusion Saint Paul warned would come upon those who receive not the love of the truth. And all of that takes time. All of that takes prayer. All of that takes fasting. All of that takes sacrifice. All of that takes suffering. All of that takes humility. All of that takes a whole bunch of things we frankly never see on a consistent basis from even well-meaning Catholics across the country.

The proof is there in the feed. And to be clear, this is not about Taylor Swift herself; I will not risk my own soul by judging hers. But I have seen more Catholic attention given to celebrity wedding chatter than to the Feast of the Most Precious Blood of Jesus, and that is not a small oversight. Catholics were not asking whether such a union reflected sacramental marriage, ecclesiastical order, or the Church’s own teaching on matrimony—admittedly teaching one must now dig through older catechisms, councils, and papal documents to find. They were simply reacting as the feed has trained them to react. That is not merely embarrassing. It is diagnostic—a people that notices celebrity spectacle more readily than the Blood of Christ should at least ask whether it is as free as it thinks.

Indeed, the proof is there in the feed. But the proof is also there in the fruits. Christ said we would know them by their fruits, and all we need to do is take a look at the morality this country has produced over the decades, myself included in that indictment. We are not even aware of the litany of what we think are “little sins” that accumulate over time and have stirred, increasingly to the point of no return, the wrath of God.

Just look how quickly Catholics celebrated this week a punishment they barely understand from authorities they have never tested against their own supposed Tradition. That is not faith. That is captivity under the guise of it, a life spent sitting idly in a cave under the flag of obedience.