Peter lays aside the keys to the Kingdom of Heaven

And Jerusalem shall be trampled down until the times of the nations are fulfilled

IX Kalendas Octobris (23 September) Anno Incarnationis MMXXIV

The Feast of Saint Linus, Pope and Martyr

Commemoration of Thecla, Virgin and Martyr

An event of world historical importance for the entirety of the human race that will probably nowhere¹ receive the type of attention it deserves took place a week and a half ago in Singapore. 

The occupant of the See of Peter whose office is founded on that momentous occasion now almost twenty centuries ago during the reign of Tiberius Caesar when in a rural place in what is now called the Golan Heights Simon Peter confessed before the God-man Jesus Christ Himself that He was the Son of the Living God - this man spoke before the world and told that world that Jesus Christ was neither particularly unique nor necessary.

In a meeting with students wearing his papal white, his pectoral cross, and sitting on something that was made very much to look like a throne made the following statement which the Vatican published on its website:

All religions are paths to God. I will use an analogy, they are like different languages that express the divine. But God is for everyone, and therefore, we are all God’s children. “But my God is more important than yours!”. Is this true? There is only one God, and religions are like languages, paths to reach God. Some Sikh, some Muslim, some Hindu, some Christian. Understood?²

Taken on its own terms this statement is absurd.  The religions he mentions, take for example Islam and Hinduism, violently contradict each other at almost every major (and most minor) points of doctrine.  How could they both possibly be paths to this same single and at least in theory unitary God of which he speaks?  They can’t of course - nor could such a ‘God’ possibly exist.  Which is why this way of thinking is moronic.

But at the deeper level what this Bishop of Rome dressed in the trappings of Peter is here saying before the world in his official role is that Jesus Christ doesn’t matter.  This is an epochal turning point in human history.

For it is this confession of faith in Jesus Christ, the Son of the living God, i.e. the Incarnation and his utter uniqueness and irreplaceability that binds the papacy together through history.  This confession is the Rock on which the Catholic Church stands and the Bishop of Rome as successor of the man who first made it is the guardian of that Confession.

And so they have guarded it throughout history for century upon century: from the reign of Tiberius Caesar to the presidency of Joe Biden, and for all of the long ages in between.  Some have done it better than others.  Some might have waffled when firmness would have served better and others might have been overly aggressive and strong willed when humility and tact would have borne better fruit.  But they all guarded this confession of faith. 

Even if the evidence of their behavior shows that at least some of the more recent occupants of the See of Peter may not have actually believed it they still at least from their own lips would not publicly contradict it.

Yet here we are on the Ides of September, September 13 2024 AD, the one hundred and seventh anniversary of the fifth Apparition of Our Lady of Fatima, where the man who occupies this See publicly states before the world that Jesus Christ does not matter, that He is an irrelevant figure.

The thing to do here really would be for all the bishops of the world to immediately demand that he very publicly recant that statement and do very public repentance up to including his immediate resignation.  Because if the man occupying the See of Peter is willing to publicly teach against the necessity of Jesus Christ then he acts contrary to the purpose behind the existence of that See and his continued presence there can no longer serve purpose, and he should be dispatched forthwith.

That said we all know that the likelihood of this happening under present conditions is nonexistent.  So now what?

A sign of the times

I don’t know.  But I do know one thing: Our Lord established the See of Peter for a purpose.  And that purpose was to guard throughout the night of history that Confession of Jesus Christ as the unique and irreplaceable Son of God which its first occupant made now almost exactly twenty centuries ago in the highlands north and east of the Lake of Gennesaret.  If its occupants now refuse to do that then He may very well conclude, as He once concluded about the Temple of the Old Covenant and its rites of worship, that this See no longer serves any purpose and since it is doing more harm than good to simply do away with it – at least in the form that we have known it.

None of this is to vindicate any of the multitude of false charges levelled against the papacy during the last millennium.  It is simply to say that it was an institution created to serve a purpose and it may be that the time of that purpose³ is now concluded.

Christendom, the way it was, was a great and wondrous thing – but it was never going to be forever.  The purpose of the Catholic Church is to preach the Name of Jesus Christ to the nations and to bring them to Him through her doctrine, her faith, her rites of worship, etc.  But it is also to be a sign to the world that it is passing away and to prepare that world for Our Lord’s return.

While He was on earth He many times gave warning of this.  At that moment the Law and the Covenant were passing out of the hands of those who were the blood descendants of Abraham to those among the nations who would accept baptism into the New Covenant.  But no one seemed to understand that. 

His words on that score seemed oblique and their consequences unimaginable to those who first heard them in the green hills of Galilee and on the dusty byroads of Judea - but all too soon their meaning would become abundantly clear.

And He was equally clear that neither would the time of the nations who would succeed ancient Israel last forever.  Again, as the role of ancient Israel of the Old Covenant had been to prepare the world for the First Coming of the Incarnate Word in the flesh so the role of the Church, the ecclesia sanctorum, was to gather in the full number of the nations and prepare the world for his Second Coming in glory to take back from the grip of the devil the world that He had created.

While an immense multiplicity of signs for this last event are given throughout the Old and New Testaments I would like to focus on one in particular: the words of Our Lord himself recorded in Luke 21:24-25 which prophesied both the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70 and the final elimination of Jewish life in Palestine sixty years later following the Bar Kokhba revolt in AD 135 that also gave a sign concerning when, a long time later, the time of the nations would also be fulfilled:

Et cadent in ore gladii et captivi ducentur in omnes gentes et Ierusalem calcabitur a gentibus donec impleantur tempora nationum.  Et erunt signa in sole et luna et stellis et in terris pressura gentium prae confusione sonitus maris et fluctuum

And they will fall into the mouth of the sword and be led captive into all the peoples and Jerusalem will be trampled upon by the gentiles until the time of the nations is fulfilled.  And there will be signs in the sun and the moon⁴ and the stars and a throng of peoples in the lands before the confusion of the roaring sea and its waves

Christ’s words here in the Gospel of Luke were fulfilled to the letter.  To say that the Jews fell into the mouth of the sword is actually somewhat of an understatement.  They were slaughtered likely by the hundreds of thousands and their Temple was razed to the ground never to be rebuilt in 70 AD as a result of the disastrous siege of Jerusalem which they themselves had provoked and were entirely responsible for. And then what small population remained was driven out completely sixty years later following the failed Bar Kokhba revolt and no Jew was permitted under pain of death to enter what for a thousand years had been their capital. 

The famous inner image of the Arch of Titus in Rome which has stood in that city since the end of the first century. It depicts the Roman legions carting off the spoils, likely in some sort of Triumph celebration, from the Jewish Temple in AD 70. That this image has stood in Rome the center of the Catholic world for all this time is likely no coincidence. (Photo credit: Author from April, 2013)

They were driven to the far ends of the earth and dwelt as aliens and strangers among all the nations unable to assimilate and driven to keep their own identity through the centuries.  Meanwhile the Catholic Church, those followers of Jesus Christ who in the beginning they had ridiculed, grew in prominence and grandeur.  The blood of her martyrs conquered the Roman Empire and even as the political and military might of that empire began to crumble the Church did not.  She absorbed one by one the kingdoms of the north and west and converted what had been very crude barbarian tribesmen into the most civilized people on earth.

Even when the hammer blow of Islam fell upon the East and Muhammad and his first followers conquered Jerusalem and wrested it from Christian political and military control in the early seventh century their situation did not improve.  The Roman ban of death had been removed but its new masters made Jerusalem their own city, al-Quds, and where the ancient Temple had stood they built a mosque which has endured to this day fourteen centuries later with the long enduring (with the exception of the very brief period of the Crusades) iron clad Mohammedan political and military control of the city and the country blocking off even the remotest thought of any Jewish return to the city. 

And the nations of the north and west who had accepted Baptism and come into the Catholic Church despite many challenges grew strong and created Christendom, the greatest civilization the world had known, eventually flanking the Mohammedan power by sea and spreading the Gospel of Jesus Christ throughout the entire planet, as He Himself had long before prophesied would ultimately be the case.

Until the time of the nations is fulfilled

But then Christian power started to fade as the time of the nations began to wane.  Those nations north and west of Jerusalem who had for more than a thousand years gloried in the name of Christian began to feel that the merciful yoke of Christ was now an unnecessary burden and one by one began to cast it off until all that remained was the institutional Catholic Church in the West led by the Roman Pontiff, the Successor of Saint Peter.  And here is where the story for our purposes at least begins to get interesting.

For it was now when the external institutions of the Catholic Church that governed her work on the spiritual plane, which if they had held together may yet have drawn the nations back to her, began a process of willful and incomprehensible internal self destruction that strangely seemed to coincide almost exactly with the rather sudden and hitherto unexpected return of the Jews to the ancient land of Israel from which they had been expelled more than seventeen centuries before.

By the last part of the nineteenth century the Christian nations were gone.  The Gospel was no longer the guidestone of any of their laws and their governments and educational systems became hell-bent on bringing up a new generation which was manifestly hostile to the Catholic religion.  Even the Papal States were now gone.  The temporal sovereignty of the See of Peter over the City of Rome and central Italy which had been a constant in practical terms since the destruction of the Western Empire fourteen centuries before and had been one of the two great long lived inheritances of the conquest of the Roman Empire by the blood of the martyrs had now vanished.

On July 6, 1882, not even a dozen years after the fall of Papal Rome in September, 1870⁵ and the erasure of the last vestige of socio-political Christendom, the first Jewish immigrants of what came to be called the first Aliyah⁶ disembarked at the port of Jaffa in what was then Turkish Palestine. During the following two decades the Zionist movement began to gain momentum culminating in Theodore Herzl’s first Zionist congress in 1897 and the first serious and successful efforts to form the political and cultural organizations that would go on to reestablish Jewish life in Palestine for the first time since the second century.

Meanwhile at this very same moment there was an increased spirit of whining and complaining among the Catholic clergy about the Roman Psalter.  They said that this thing they had inherited from antiquity and had been daily sung⁷ in the West very likely going back at the latest to the fall of the Western Empire was too long, too boring, and required them to get up too early in the morning to say it.

So in 1911 Pius X bowed to their demands and forbid its use, replacing it with a creation of his own that was utterly foreign to the Roman tradition.  Gone (among many other things) were Psalms 62 and 66 being sung together at Laudes.  Gone were Psalms 148, 149, and 150 which closed the hour.  These two traditions were so old that literally the hills don’t even remember who instituted them.  They had been an integral and defining feature of the daily life of Western Christendom going back to the beginning.  And now they were gone.

Scarcely eighteen months after this decree of Pius X came into effect (January 1, 1913)⁸ on June 28, 1914 Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo.  This precipitated the First World War which ended up being the defining event in reestablishing a Jewish state in Palestine. 

The Turkish Empire the then rulers of Palestine and successor to the Mohammedan empires who had dominated the Middle East for almost thirteen centuries got dragged into that war and ended up being destroyed in the process.

The British army⁹ invaded out of Egypt and captured Jerusalem on the night of December 8-9, 1917¹⁰ and wound up ruling Palestine for the next thirty years.  The Zionist movement had effectively lobbied the British government throughout 1916-17 and ended up obtaining the famous declaration from its foreign secretary Lord Balfour about a month prior to the capture of Jerusalem concerning the establishment of a ‘Jewish homeland’ in Palestine.

From then on Jewish immigration massively increased to the point where on the eve of the Second World War their numbers in Palestine almost guaranteed that some sort of Jewish political entity would end up being formed on the lands of ancient Israel – something that would have been inconceivable seventy five years earlier when the Popes were still ruling Rome and the ancient Roman Psalter was still being sung daily throughout the West.  And as we all know this state did come into existence in 1948.

The incomprehensible internal self-demolition of the Catholic Church

Following this the Catholic Church suffered during the period from 1945-1971 through possibly the three worst papacies in her history one after another: Pius XII, John XXIII, and Paul VI.  Each one of these men worked at breakneck speed to dismantle and destroy everything in Catholic life which remained from antiquity.

Pius XII made a very serious effort to remove Saint Jerome’s Latin translation of the Psalms that had been the mainstay of the West since the Carolingian period from the Western Church’s liturgical life and replace it with his own insipid creation.  From there he went on to do great violence to the various ancient forms of the Divine Office and to butcher the liturgical calendar removing Feasts¹¹ that were more than a millennium old and just about every Octave he could find.

John XXIII then finished his work by destroying the liturgical day – suppressing the practice of the day beginning at eventide which predates the existence of the papacy itself by many centuries and millennia going deep into the Old Testament to the beginnings of Genesis. 

Paul VI - well we know what he did but I would like to focus briefly on one single point which brings us back to those words that Our Lord had spoken in Jerusalem some nineteen centuries before: that this city would be trampled down by the gentiles until the times of the nations were fulfilled.  But first the goings on in the Middle East.

You see when the Jewish state of Israel was created in 1948, the same year incidentally that Pius XII instituted his ‘liturgical commission’ which would go on over the next quarter century to eviscerate everything that remained from antiquity in the Roman Mass and Divine Office, they actually didn’t manage to conquer Jerusalem.  They got to the gates of it and established ‘West Jerusalem’ but they weren’t able to get hold of the area that was the ancient city of Jerusalem i.e. modern ‘East Jerusalem.’  This was the Jerusalem that Our Lord knew and it fell under the rule of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan who became the final Mohammedan power to control the city.

Nineteen years later however the situation changed completely.  The Kingdom of Jordan allowed itself to get drawn into a war against the Jewish state alongside Syria and Egypt and in short order lost Jerusalem to them along with all of the rest of the land the Arabs had retained west of the Jordan river.  And thus all of the sudden in the second week of June, 1967 the Jews now found themselves after eighteen centuries of exile to be once again in control not only of the city of Jerusalem their ancient capital but of the whole of the territory of ancient Israel from the Jordan river to the Mediterranean Sea.

And what was the Catholic Church doing at precisely this moment in the summer of 1967 when the Jews were taking full control of Jerusalem for the first time since the Bar Kokhba revolt of the second century?  She was in the full throes of voluntarily and of her own volition (and congratulating herself for it) removing the last surviving link which connected her to the ancient glory of Christendom.  She completely banished the the Latin language from her life which had been probably the greatest inheritance¹² she had received from the conquest of the Roman Empire by the blood of her martyrs during those early centuries which immediately followed the expulsion of the Jews from Palestine and had endured ever since up to that point.

And in the years and decades which have elapsed since that summer of 1967 she has in her exterior become rootless and shrunk back into nothingness.  Her leaders by 1971 under Paul VI created new liturgical forms for the Mass and what they called the Divine Office that were as puerile and stupid as the ancient had been sublime.  In her exterior appearance she cast aside all the gifts her Lord had given her and her martyrs had bought for her with their blood.  To all appearances she had ceased to be that incomparably ancient mountain which had stood throughout history and given the Law to the nations. 

Instead she became embarrassed of Christ and of his Law and sought to avoid Him at every opportunity.  She was ashamed of her glorious past and no longer wished to have the burden of guiding the nations whom she had once midwifed into existence and whose course she had directed for fifteen centuries.  She told the world that she was sorry.  That things would be different now and she would just blend in and be like everybody else.  If only they would just leave her in peace.

The Jews however became strong.  This people who a few decades before had been hopeless wanderers and persecuted exiles among the nations now seemed for a time at least to have brought their enemies to heel.  They became one of the strongest military powers on earth – even to the point of possessing nuclear weapons.  But they were not there yet.

Yes the state of Israel had conquered Jerusalem but the Jews did not yet rule it.  The city of Jerusalem that Our Lord knew, modern East Jerusalem, is still populated by Muslim Arabs who doggedly fight against Jewish control of the city.  It became a relentless house by house, apartment by apartment battle¹³ that has endured for decades to see who would gain the upper hand in the city.

Photo from August, 2011 looking across the Kidron Valley southward from underneath the southern edge of the Temple Mount below the grey dome of the Al Aqsa Mosque. It looks south into the Arab neighborhood of Silwan (the Arabized name of Siloam) which is the area that comprised the ancient city of Jerusalem that Our Lord knew. The blue tarp seen on those buildings in the center signifies that Jews have somehow or other obtained those apartments and are living there. (Photo credit: Author)

Enter the Pope who says that Christ is not necessary

And now in the last days of summer of 2024 the Jewish state of Israel is in the midst of a bloody war in Gaza and for the first time in its history its government includes members who have expressed their desire to destroy the mosques in Jerusalem and rebuild the Jewish temple.  In addition all hell seems about to break loose on its northern border at any moment with an all out war seeming ever more likely by the hour to break out in Lebanon and possibly suck in a very well armed Islamic Republic of Iran which is fueled by an apocalyptic ideology¹⁴ of its own as well.  

And in the midst of all this the seemingly duly elected Bishop of Rome, the inheritor of Simon Peter the Prince of the Apostles, steps forth wearing his papal white to publicly declare to the world…  that the religion of Jesus Christ is of no more value than any other. 

He withdraws the public confession of the uniqueness and necessity of Christ on which his office is founded and says that the demon gods of the Hindus are as sure a path to the divine as Jesus Christ.  That the revelation of God in the Catholic Church means nothing.  That in the end Jesus Christ, his Life, Death, and Resurrection, do not matter.  This man wearing white looks like a lamb yet speaks like the dragon.

But don’t worry.  I’m sure none of this means anything.  These are all just a random series of coincidences that have absolutely nothing to do with each other.  Just look the other way and move along.

Implentur tempora nationum.

But we must all remember something: there is someone with a much greater Faith than Peter.  It was her Faith that brought Jesus Christ into the world in the first place and unlike Peter she never abandoned Him.  She stood before his Cross when Peter ran away.  She is the Woman clothed with the sun, with the moon at her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars.  And it is she who will have the last word against the dragon and his allies.

1. Most of the feigned ‘trad’ media outrage which is already starting to fade has been focused on quoting Pope Pius the whatever about ‘indifferentism’ and debating whether a Pope can ever be a heretic etc. etc.

But all of that entirely misses the point. This is so far beyond ‘heresy’ as to not even occupy the same universe. It effectively removes the last bulwark, or one might say restrainer, against the plunge back at least exteriorly into the pre-Christian darkness.

2. https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/speeches/2024/september/documents/20240913-singapore-giovani.html

3. In all honesty after twenty centuries, twenty something ecumenical Councils, two hundred sixty something popes we all know what the Catholic Faith is - if we care enough to look. Part of the weakness of the contemporary papacy is that they talk too much when really there isn’t much more to say.

4. Augustine and many others interpreted the ‘signs in the sun and the moon’ to refer to an eclipse of the Church and well- you be the judge…

5. It is really fascinating that the fall of Papal Rome took place almost exactly eighteen centuries after the destruction of the Jewish Temple. August 9, AD 70 - September 20, AD 1870. But don’t worry. I’m sure it’s just a random coincidence.

6. https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-first-aliyah-1882-1903

7. https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/11219a.htm

8. An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Divino Afflatu came into effect on January 1, 1912. My apologies.

9. It is one of those weird workings of Divine Providence that it ended up being the British who destroyed the Ottoman Empire since for the entirety of the 19th century they had sought to preserve its existence at all costs because they saw its continued existence as a buffer to protect their rule of India. They even went to war against Russia in the 1850s to preserve the Turkish rule of Crimea.

10. The Ottoman army is said to have abandoned the defense of Jerusalem on the evening of December 8 or sometime around Second Vespers on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception.

11. The Invention (finding) of the Holy Cross, Saint John at the Latin Gate, the Apparition of Saint Michael on Mount Gargano. And he replaced them with his quasi Marxist (the Marxism of that era not 21st century Marxism) Feast of Saint Joseph the Worker.

12. I have been speaking throughout this article primarily of the West but this last part applies to the East as well as many of the ancient Churches of the East have followed the Vatican’s lead here in abandoning their ancient liturgical language to ‘vernacularize’ their liturgy.

13. This is a highly significant story that, despite the oceans of ink spilled about the Middle East over the last quarter century, goes almost entirely unreported. A lot of money gets funneled into Israel to fund groups working by any means necessary to obtain the homes of Arabs living in ancient Jerusalem especially in areas adjacent to the Temple Mount. And I mean ‘any means’. In response gangs of Palestinian youths have been formed to attack any Jews moving into the area who of course are protected by the Israeli police.

14. Twelver Shi’ism. Don’t have the time or the space to explain it here. But it is also the religion of the unfathomably well armed Hezbollah militia in Lebanon.