Last month I traveled to Baltimore to cover the USCCB’s Fall Plenary Assembly. There were some worthwhile speeches and discussions at the meeting, as well as some interesting results in a couple of elections for new committee chairmen. For an influential segment of US Catholics, however, the main event didn’t take place inside the conference hotel, but on the sidewalk outside.

For the second year in a row, Bishop Joseph Strickland, emeritus of Tyler, Texas, chose not to participate in the meeting but to address a small group of his supporters outside. This year he read a letter to the bishops, extolling them “to finally speak up against the false messages constantly flowing from the Vatican under the leadership of Pope Francis,” insisting that, “Every bishop and cardinal should publicly and unequivocally state that Francis no longer teaches the Catholic faith,” and deriding them as instead “patting one another on the back, listening to words that they know beyond a doubt are not the Truth, frolicking with the darkness, and blaspheming the very Truth that the original Apostles died to preserve.”

Strickland made dramatic claims about alleged “statements that Pope Francis has made that are unambiguous denials of the Catholic faith,” and decrying the Synod on Synodality as “an abomination constructed not to guard the Deposit of Faith but to dismantle it.”

In other words, it was just the latest episode in the escalating drama surrounding “America’s bishop.”

This year’s demonstration was a brief affair. The event began at 11:45 Wednesday morning and Strickland opened his remarks by stating that he had to leave to catch a plane at 1:15. Rhina Guidos of the National Catholic Reporter noted that Strickland’s crowd was not even the largest group of protestors there. They were outnumbered by a group of nurses calling for better conditions for patients and better pay for employees at Ascension, a Catholic chain of hospitals.

On Saturday, Bishop Strickland published another missive, this one an ode to the founder of the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX), the late Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre. In his new statement, Strickland says Lefebvre, who died in 1991 under the penalty of excommunication, “walked an apostle’s path and was led to establish a safe place, a refuge, where could be found the Mass of the ages in its pure form, a place where the Deposit of Faith would be protected, and the staircase preserved intact, even while the ape of the Church was pulling off boards and throwing out all that is most precious.”

Strickland followed that assertion with the full text of Lefebvre’s “1974 Declaration” and stating, “I offer this same declaration as also my battle cry to fight for Him.”

The 1974 Declaration is an unambiguous manifesto of radical schismatic traditionalism, in which Lefebvre says that he and his followers “have always refused to follow the Rome of neo-Modernist and neo-Protestant tendencies which were clearly evident in the Second Vatican Council and, after the Council, in all the reforms which issued from it.” It also says, “Corresponding with a new mass we have a new catechism, a new priesthood, new seminaries, a charismatic Pentecostal Church—all things opposed to orthodoxy and the perennial teaching of the Church.”

In these times in the Church, it is disappointing but not surprising to see a bishop adopt the belligerent manifesto of the schismatic founder of the SSPX as his own — even a bishop who wrote less than two years ago that the SSPX was a “schismatic movement.”

Strickland’s public adoption of the Lefebvrist ideology, although tragic, is just another data point in the madness that has beset the once-respectable world of conservative Catholicism. This is a world where the former Vatican prefect for the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith underwent an existential crisis about “the end of the Catholic Church” on broadcast television in 2022. In 2024 this former prefect still receives prestigious speaking invitations despite his penchant for paranoid statements, such as the time he described synodality as “a brainwashing tool to discredit so-called conservatives as yesterday’s men and disguised Pharisees.”

This is a world where the USCCB’s former Executive Director of the Secretariat on Doctrine has said that he can no longer listen to Newman (let alone the Magisterium) on the development of doctrine and about adhering to the teachings of the pope and bishops. He has instead decided that his private interpretation has primacy, saying “that any pontifical teaching or teaching from bishops that overtly and deliberately contradicts the perennial teaching of previous councils and pontiffs is not magisterial teaching.”

This is a world where the former friendly host of the radio program Catholic Answers Live is now a full-blown conspiracy theorist and sedevacantist, organizing conferences and leading “Catholic” pilgrimages in Europe alongside equally reactionary figures (including Bishop Strickland). This is a world where Catholic Answers sells books that support the death penalty or are written by Strickland.

This is a world where editors of the once-serious conservative Catholic magazines First Things and Crisis have, respectively, written articles dismissing the severity of Covid at the height of the pandemic and stating that “giving ladies the right to vote was the single greatest catastrophe in the history of our storied republic.”

This is a world where the current editor of the aforementioned Crisis Magazine and the country’s second-most popular “celebrity exorcist” both believe that the Covid pandemic was caused by “idolatry” allegedly on display during the Amazon Synod in the Vatican — a ridiculous, racist, and thoroughly debunked moral panic that only the most gullible and ignorant can possibly believe at this point.

This is a world where highly-trafficked websites like LifeSite News and One Peter Five provide an open forum for sedevacantists to argue their positions. This is a world where open antisemitism is given a platform and no one bats an eye.

This is a world where archbishops turn a blind eye to the dangerous and heterodox views of the reactionary clergy under their authority and who do nothing when heretical radical traditionalists speak in their parishes. This is a world where bishops grant imprimaturs to heretical books and refuse to comment further.

These examples barely scratch the surface of the irrational, paranoid, unhinged hatred of the schismatic, anti-Francis movement. It’s an anti-Catholic movement led by gullible and brainwashed Catholics, many of whom are seminarians, priests, bishops, and cardinals. Many, like Strickland, have abandoned the faith they once believed for an irrational crash-and-burn ideology that is clearly headed for disaster. Others are attracted to this ideology and become Catholic because these notions appeal to them.

This is a world where once-prominent “JP2 Catholic” thinkers like Larry Chapp and George Weigel devote their efforts to sitting on the porch and shaking their canes because they imagine Pope Francis is on their lawn — ignoring that their longtime ideological and theological peers have collectively gone mad and are trying to burn down the house.

There’s no reasoning with this, and there’s very little chance that Pope Francis will do anything about it because — despite what virtually every person mentioned above will try to tell you — Pope Francis is not a dictator. In fact, he’s quite the opposite. And quietly so. Has anyone noticed that a year since Francis’s meeting with Cardinal Raymond Burke, there have been no reports of Burke moving from his apartment?

Given Francis’s leniency and the fact that the hierarchy has done very little to address this problem means that this ugly movement will continue, unobstructed, to reach new lows. There is no bottom. Prolonged and sustained media promotion of figures like Strickland and Cardinal Burke has turned them into populist folk heroes. The rot has set in and recovery will not be easy.

For those of us who were raised and formed in the conservative Catholic milieu during the John Paul II and Benedict XVI papacies but did not succumb to the anti-papal madness, this is impossible to ignore. What happened? It was as if we woke up one morning and all our Catholic friends hated the pope. It is like the morning after the outbreak at the beginning of a science fiction movie: a handful of survivors wander out into the open, somehow immune from the Viganò virus.

How did we arrive here?

I recently had an email exchange with a wise Irish priest, who has noticed parallels in his country. He observed something similar to what I attempted to articulate in my most recent article about the death penalty, writing, “The role of theology in helping explore and trace some of the possible avenues for doctrinal development is all but ignored. You either fit into the box of verbatim repetition of doctrines, the older the formulation the better, or you are a dangerous liberal seeking the destruction of all that is true and good.”

In other words, when doctrine develops in a way you don’t expect, the theologian should seek to understand and explain the development. They should not reject it simply because it doesn’t line up with their rigid personal notion of tradition. The trads have it exactly backwards.

But why do so many of those who begin with straightforward doctrinal disagreements (over Amoris Laetitia, the death penalty, or interreligious affairs, for example) then begin to slide into schism, sedevacantism, conspiracism, antisemitism, and even denial of science and reality. The Irish priest has given it a lot of thought, and he gave me the best explanation I have heard to date (emphasis added):

“Having prayed a lot about this, my personal conclusion is that, from the moment a person decides in their heart to reject the Magisterium of the Holy Father, no matter how they butter it up or justify it to themselves or to others, a veil is thrown over their hearts and minds. From that moment they become blinded to their own pride and increasingly obsessed with the faults and failings they perceive in the Pope and/or in other bishops, priests and faithful in genuine communion with him. It becomes a sort of spiritual sickness that marries an evermore heightened external piety with a deep resentment toward ‘Bergoglio’. As part of their justification for their rejection of his Magisterium they flirt with the idea that these may be the last times and that the Lord’s second coming is imminent. Even attempting to dialogue in a reasoned way with those infected with this mindset has often left me feeling profoundly disturbed, not by their ideas which are clearly erroneous, but at a deeper, spiritual level.”

“From the moment the person decides … a veil is thrown over their hearts and minds.” Just as sin entered the world with the non serviam of Adam and Eve, this spiritual blindness and irrationality enters the hearts and minds at the moment someone decides in their heart to reject the Magisterium of the pope and to follow this deadly backwardist ideology instead.

It is clear to me that this movement’s most damaging and sinister “moment of decision” was when four cardinals published their dubia on Amoris Laetitia through the mass media. This document — along with a letter insinuating that an official magisterial document promulgated by the pope to the entire Church contained doctrinal errors — was a public declaration of non serviam by four “princes of the Church.” By the act of publishing, these cardinals signaled to Catholics that open, public defiance against the pope on matters of doctrine was not only licit, but a solemn duty.

And then all hell broke loose.

The declaration of non serviam — “I will not serve” — has become the defining spirit of an increasingly radicalized segment of the Church. The dubia and public dissent over Amoris Laetitia signaled the tipping point where this rejection of papal authority became legitimized. The consequences have been disastrous: conspiracy theories, schism, and outright denial of reality have flourished. If left unchecked, this ideology threatens to consume more souls and fracture the Church further.

Those of us who feel like survivors in the aftermath of this spiritual plague must continue to speak the truth in love, offer clear and faithful witness, and pray for the conversion of those who have fallen into this destructive ideology. The Church has weathered schisms and crises before, and with God’s grace, it will emerge from this one, too — and more committed to its mission than ever.

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Image: Screenshot of Bishop Strickland in Baltimore (YouTube)