‘It’s Those Bishops’

TRANSCRIPT

Those of you who have been longtime supporters may recall this story, so please excuse me for taking a brief moment to repeat it — but considering the current climate, it bears repeating. A splendid, holy, dedicated priest — Fr. Pablo Straub — was a good friend of the apostolate back in its early days. Please offer an "Eternal Rest" for him.

Some of you remember he was a regular on EWTN with Mother Angelica — until she was forced out by crooked bishops and he was, shall we say, "disinvited" by the new regime. He was a little "too direct" for them; not "nuanced" enough; too much clarity, not enough charity (as Cdl. Thomas Collins of Toronto once said of Church Militant).

You'll see Fr. Pablo at the beginning of every One True Faith episode we have and two stand-alone episodes with him and me. He was a lovely man — a man's man — and it was an honor to have known him and to have his constant blessing and support.

On one trip here to Detroit, around 2007 or so, we had come back to my house after a taping and we settled into the back room and started talking. Father Pablo was a loving man, and by that I mean he loved the truth and wanted everyone to know it. In that way, he was very much like my father. An "Eternal Rest" for him also would be appreciated.

I was still pretty naïve to overall affairs in the Church back then, but I suspected something was seriously wrong. I just didn't have the full picture yet, so I couldn't express it or put my finger on it. Father Pablo, never one to spare words, did, however. He was somewhat elderly, in poor health and was pretty wiped out from the taping and couple hours of visits with audience members.

But when the topic came up, none of that mattered. In a display of righteous anger, veins popping in his neck, shaking a tight fist into the air, he looked at me and said, "Michael, it's those bishops!" It was a "John the Baptist" type moment. He was clear as crystal. And we talked further, and my real education began.

Over the following years, every single thing he said to me has proven to be correct. He talked about gay bishops, corrupt bishops, unfaithful bishops. And, as the years have unfolded, all of it has followed on itself. You look at various bishops and their lines of succession, who consecrated them and so forth. It's one giant, corrupt, often-gay, faithless system where easily manipulated, emasculated men are put into positions so they can be used down the road if needed. Wicked men are running the entire system from behind the scenes.

People go on and on about Pope Francis, but Pope Francis did not just drop out of the sky. He is a product of this corrupt episcopal swamp. Granted, he certainly gives faithful Catholics pause, some even asking whether he is a heretic or a valid pope (i.e., all those online discussions). Those kinds of evaluations are not for the laity to make, whatever an individual may personally think.

Only a future pope — someone of equal standing — can make such a declaration. But none of that is the point of this Vortex. The point of this Vortex is to say, "The entire system is corrupt from top to bottom: how men are selected, who's doing the selecting, who's giving the recommendations. There is not one single area untouched by this secretive, corrupt process."

What has happened over the recent decades is that enemies of the Church got into a few key positions — a few rotten apples — and the whole barrel (with very little exception) is now rotten. So what do we have? Well, a few scenarios:

• Cowardly men, who might themselves privately believe the Faith, but are lacking the necessary testosterone to actually proclaim it and run their diocese according to it
• Men with disordered sexualities who entered the seminary as a refuge for their own head problems, who fell in with others of the same stripe and advanced their joint careers
• Ambitious men (maybe gay, maybe not, but sympathetic nonetheless) who see the Church and their episcopal careers as some personal playground to advance their own self-image and acquire prestige (and in the more extreme cases, live lifestyles most faithful only see in movies)
• Those absorbed with the adulation of the crowd, who resultantly, will not say the hard truths when the chips are down and the rubber hits the road. They waffle, and souls are deprived. Call this crowd "the celebrity priests/bishops"
• The actually wicked men who do not have (and perhaps never had) a love of Christ and the Church, but if they did, they long-ago lost it. They simply do not believe anything about the supernatural aspect of the Church. To them, it's just a large, earthly institution that can be used to effect earthly change; they just use somewhat religious-sounding language to cover up their real designs; and
• The financially corrupt men — the thieves among them — who will hoard to themselves whatever denari they can grab. No annual diocesan fundraising appeal is too large, no parish collection too small to tax for this crowd

All these types — and many of them overlap at various points — pretty much encapsulate the state of the episcopate, certainly in the United States, and we suspect in many other places around the world. And, of course, it's plainly evident that a large number of these men were insufficiently formed or were malformed in the Faith during their seminary years. 

Of course, that's understandable, considering many of them were having sex with each other. But they've taken their own broken spirituality and foisted it onto the faithful, perverted Church teaching or sidestepped it — or so greatly overemphasized one aspect that another is overshadowed or even blotted out, like the insane notion that every human being might be in Heaven; that, in fact, we even have a reasonable hope for that. That's a moronic claim for many reasons we've cited numerous times.

So you want to know why your parishes are shrinking; your diocese is under State investigation for criminal cover-up; billions of your collection-plate dollars have been paid out in suits; over two dozen dioceses have declared bankruptcy; why your bishops refuse to publish the dioceses' financials; why (even now) the sacraments are sometimes difficult to receive; why your children and grandchildren have left the Faith; why seven out of 10 Catholics do not believe in the Real Presence; why so many, many priests sound and act like drama queens and Broadway showgirls; why so many bishops are so vengeful and vindictive? All of this and more has been brought you by a near-totally corrupt, self-deluding episcopate.

Or, as Fr. Pablo neatly summed up in three little words with big implications, "It's those bishops." Mid-week last week, Church Militant's good friend (and stalwart Catholic) Joseph Sciambra put out a tweet that was one of those blinding, clear bolts of lightning. He used a few more words than Fr. Pablo did, but the point was the same: "As devout Catholics, we've spent too much time focused on what was taking place at Pride parades and at drag queen story hours; while we were distracted, homosexual bishops/priests/cardinals were celebrating gay Masses, blessing same-sex unions and grooming vulnerable young men."

While it's all very difficult to hear and process and weigh the implications of, we need to be grateful that all this is coming out. No other response could be authentically Catholic. We've been lied to, stolen from and spiritually abused by the leaders for decades. "It's those bishops."