The crisis in the church along with how it came to be and why the church is hemorrhaging adherents and not getting as many priestly and religious vocations as in the 1950s despite the lessening of many of the former disciplinary rules, may be a complex problem and therefore I will describe as part of this blog, and divide and specify the quite a few references in the next blog. Fortunately, the complex part is how we got here or how the crises came to be, though I also think it is fortunate that what caused it is easy to discern. What caused it is the fact that the proven truth of Latin adage “lex orandi, lex credenda,” (English translation: the way we worship is the way we believe) was either ignored by gullible clergy or purposely understood and used to actively try to destroy the church by either secular governments, masons or communists who infiltrated/influenced the church just before Vatican II and/or who were able to become a part of Vatican II. I say proven truth because it was used by both Martin Luther in Germany and Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer of England to corrupt the mass and thereby the Catholic religion in those two countries to produce the Lutheran and Anglican congragations.
The significance of the above Latin adage and why it was able to splinter the Catholic Church into the 25,000 separate Christian denominations we have in 2022 is summarized in a quote by Martin Luther: “take away the mass destroy the church” the extensive ramifications of which can be found at the sites https://beggarsallreformation.blogspot.com/2014/10/luther-take-away-mass-destroy-church.html and http://www.olrl.org/new_mass/evils.shtml wherein a quote summarizing the ramifications taken from these sites is as follows:
The Destruction of Catholic Worship is the Destruction of the Catholic Faith
The Church has always set forth the firm and clear principle that: “The way we worship is the way we believe.” The doctrinal truths of the Faith are embodied in the worship we offer to God. In other words, it is the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass that teaches us our theology and not the reverse. The True Mass comprises the Apostolic Tradition of faith and morals in its very essence. Every doctrine essential to the Faith is taught therein. Pope Leo XIII points out in Apostolicae Curae that the Church’s enemies have always understood this principle as “They knew only too well the intimate bond that unites faith with worship, the law of belief with the law of prayer, and so, under the pretext of restoring the order of the liturgy to its primitive form, they corrupted it in many respects to adapt it to the errors of the Innovators.” It is no wonder, then, that Luther coined the slogan: “Take away the Mass, destroy the Church.”
We must understand that the crux of what Martin Luther wanted to destroy is the power of the papacy. He wanted to do this to basically undermine the church’s authority to specify leaders through apostolic succession, to delegating the power to forgive sins as well as the power to confect the sacrament of the Eucharist and its true meaning of the real presence (by real presence we mean that the unleavened bread wafer/host in communion becomes the actual body blood soul and divinity of Jesus Christ), and making marriage a bond for life etc. This would clear the path so he and his followers could believe what they pleased, so he could gain fame, power and favor from politicians/countries that wanted to break the churches secular power, and follow an easier theology, possibly more satisfying theology, but extremely unfortunately for them and all who followed the protestant thinkers, not the truth, and therefore not able to lead them to heaven. This is despite the fact that knowing any church history, but for the pride of man, the one true, Catholic (universal), holy and apostolic church should be something easily discernable by mere common sense – the first church, which existed for 1500 years and basically built western civilizations with innovations like the university system as well as the concept of hospitals to cater to more than just war wounded soldiers, in a word Catholic, where the most shocking unrepaired division/heresy, was first caused by Martin Luther not liking the Catholic Church.
The pope was part of the order Jesus Christ established (Matthew 16:18) not only to help maintain the integrity of the Catholic religion (from the Greek word katholikos meaning universal as opposed to “Christian,” the thing specified by the moniker “Christianity” being a philosophy more than anything else since there is no single standard of worship) but to help refine and standardize Catholic religious ceremony, which when Judaism was the true faith – precursing Catholicism, the high priest specified the standard of worship at the temple in Jerusalem. But in my opinion, the pope was also used to clearly delineate the one true religion, i.e. followers of Peter’s successors. This constructed delineation of the structure of the religion required to be provided in concert with revelation (in both the Old and New Testament), unlike the one true God (i.e. the non-contingent Being), who, according to not only the many great secular philosophers like Aristotle as well as the preeminent Catholic philosopher St. Thomas Aquinas, could be deduced from purely natural philosophical considerations (although the Trinitarian nature of God is only knowable through revelation). The outline of the ceremonial worship was provided by Jesus Christ in the New Testament (e.g. Luke 22:19 along with passages in acts as well as the letters of the apostles), In that the church is a hierarchical monarchical organization, the worship can be standardized and specified as perfected, for most if not all intents and purposes, as pope Saint Pius V did in Quo Primum.
The thing we must recognize about the mass is that it is fundamentally an unbloodied-one-in-the same-co-enactment of the bloody sacrifice offered on Calvary where, Jesus Christ, God, actually returns truly body, blood soul and divinity to guide and strengthen His people with the “bread of heaven” (see John 6). All other “Christian” attend Sunday services but Catholics are obliged to attend the Holy Sacrifice of the mass every Sunday, on pain committing a mortal sin for having missed it.
With the New Testament saying Christ was the same now and forever (Hebrews 13:8) and equating the church with his mystical body (1 Cor 12:12-31), or spouse we can think of the church being “born” on Pentecost maturing until the codification of the mass during which the church splintered, we can surmise that what happened recently in trying to go back and saying they wanted to imitate the early church, the gullible or corrupt clergy wanted to push the church back to its child stage so that they could take it from there to corrupt it in the manner they saw fit to advance their agenda. The church was Created by God to worship Him the way He wanted to be worshipped and He developed it for a millennium and a half through small changes organically to be what He wanted. In so doing, He created many saints, all of those saints up until 1962 being created through attending the traditional Latin mass every Sunday. I say that because the Latin mass is the one thing that had not changed to any great extent for 1000 years when it was codified and then for 400 years in its codified form, until the recent Vatican II “modernizations” which has arguably caused the loss of faith we are witnessing. The evil prelates who crafted doctrinal “time-bombs” into the documents which were produced by Vatican II, which they would exploit to advance their agenda after the end of the council.
”And I say also unto thee, thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” (Matthew 16:18) This passage ends with “It” because what the gates of hell will not prevail against is not referring to Peter but of the whole church because enemies will try to attack the church through any means necessary, therefore trying to infiltrating through Peters successors, and actually putting in a “bad pope” is not out of the question. Arguably this has happened at least once or twice during church history (the Borgia pope and the anti-popes). When evil forces test the spouse/body of Christ – the church (1 Cor 12:12-31), It will possibly have to react, sometime, to prevent total corruption as when these evil popes of earlier times have attacked her to lead the current day people of God back onto the right track. When the need arises God sends great saints as he did in Saint Athanasius to fight the Arian heresy (the heresy that Jesus Christ was a creature of like, but not of the same, substance as God the Father – i.e. He was not actually God but a created being).
Traditional Thomistic Catholic 