Bear with One Another

 

Traditional Mass attendees are more likely to be unusually knowledgeable about liturgy and theology, and thus have higher standards for both. They’re also more likely to be embittered by experiencing poor liturgy, catechesis, and homilies, then being swatted by a priest or parish office when they dare to speak up about it. They feel that traditional parishes should be a safe space to ask hard questions and push for the best in liturgy. 

Diocesan priests who celebrate the traditional Mass are more likely to feel entitled to heightened deference and loyalty from their parishioners, feeling that they are doing their parishioners a huge favor by offering the Mass at all. Witness this article and comment section in which dozens of people pile on traditionalists whose worst crime, while obnoxious, was occasionally whining and nagging to improve the liturgy. 

Priests in traditional orders are more likely to have been formed in an older ethic that emphasizes obedience above all else and especially the laity’s duty to be subordinate to their priests in all matters. 

This is a recipe for frustration. On one side, you have laity puffed up by their heightened knowledge who demand the highest standards from their priests. On the other side you have priests who expect the laity to be submissive and eternally grateful for whatever the priest is willing to give them. 

This is why Saint Paul reminds us to bear with one another. Both sides need to manage their expectations. 

The laity need to understand that diocesan priests often have an exhaustive workload due to the shortage of priests. They are unlikely to feel that they have the time to perfect their Latin pronunciation or celebrate the liturgy to the utmost every week, complete with solemn Mass and sung Sunday Vespers. 

Those priests are also unlikely to push the envelope on liturgy with the bishop, whether it’s celebrating pre1955 Holy Week or vigils and octaves suppressed before 1962. 

Remember, priests are formed in seminaries, largely separated from the communities they will one day serve. They are assigned to parishes by bishops who are almost never traditional and who have almost unlimited authority about where and when to send a priest (even a pastor) at any given time. 

Their loyalty is to their bishop, and their culture is often that of their brother priests, complete with praying the new Liturgy of the Hours rather than the traditional Office and celebrating the Novus Ordo for most of their Masses. And now, they especially fear offending their bishop given that the bishop can cancel the traditional Mass entirely. 

The bishops in turn are loyal to Rome, since they are almost always elected by the Pope and curia to serve a diocese to which they have no prior connection. And Rome is currently hostile to tradition and to taking hard stances on moral and doctrinal teaching. 

The laity also need to understand that a certain amount of disagreement and even argument with priests comes with the territory. The priests are in charge of the liturgy, sacraments, and church administration. The laity are not, even if the laity are more knowledgeable about some of those matters than the priest. 

The clergy in turn need to understand that the laity have many reasons to be frustrated with the state of the Church and to insist on high standards, especially in the liturgy. A certain amount of annoying questioning and occasional nagging comes with the territory. These tendencies can be gently corrected or harnessed to get such laity involved in altar serving, choirs, or church decoration. Casting off an entire traditional Mass congregation because 5 out of 75 people occasionally whine and nag is unreasonable and not healthy for priest or laity. 

After Traditionis Custodes, these laity are also way past the notion that they have to obey whatever a Church authority figure says. Priests need to be prepared for some pushback and tough questions, not unflinching obedience. 

Laity at traditional Masses will likely have large numbers of children, as the Church demands openness to life, and it is not always possible to keep children quiet for an extended period in an enclosed environment at Mass. This demands patience from priests. And creative solutions would be nice. The FSSP parish in Allentown for instance has a glass enclosed, sound insulated cry room in the choir loft with a full speaker system so that parents with difficult children can see and hear the entire Mass while the rest of the parish doesn’t hear the children’s squawking. 

We’re going to have to deal with each other. Given the paucity of traditional Masses, the laity don’t often have options to move parishes, and priests can’t control where they’re assigned. 

Demographic Collapse

 

Warnings of demographic collapse due to low fertility abound. There’s this video on the European collapse. 

In the main, these come across as reverse Malthusians. Both sides are forever prophesying society’s collapse due to population swings in one direction or another. And it never seems to happen the way they say it will.

The problem with the reverse Malthusian position is that it has even less evidence behind it than the Malthusian position. Malthusians can at least point to real social collapses due at least in part to high population, including Easter Island and even modern Haiti and Rwanda. They can also point to the fact that the global population has multiplied by 8 in just over 200 years. 

The reverse Malthusians can point to… well some economic stagnation in Japan and parts of Europe. Population globally and in most countries isn’t even going down any time soon. This isn’t a social collapse. As for the dire warnings that these economies don’t have enough young people, Spain’s youth unemployment is worse than US unemployment during the Great Depression.

Which brings me to another point. Conservatives complain that Europeans are not having enough kids and that they get married too late or not at all. They then complain about urbanization. 

What’s the alternative? As the video notes, in many of these countries, there isn’t room for many Europeans to live in areas with lower population densities. Where there is room, there isn’t economic opportunity. Even in more successful (and fertile) France, youth unemployment is twice that of the US, and it’s hard enough to build a family in the US. The US trend of conservative families buying farm land and going rural isn’t available to many Europeans, where land and gas costs are much higher. 

Let’s be reasonable: these are small countries where population surged in the 20th century, population in most of them isn’t even going down, and they already have heavy competition for scarce land and jobs. 

Back to my original point: the collapse never seems to come. And I doubt it will, at least in the way we typically think of a societal collapse. Rich western countries have had declining fertility for two full generations and any deficit of young workers is simply recouped through immigration and technology. In China, demographics are even worse but that hasn’t stopped their economy from being one of the most dynamic in the world. 

This isn’t to say that the general lifestyle of having dogs instead of children and building culture on contraception is a good thing. Childless Europeans will be miserable and likely abused in their old age with no family to care for them. But for many, especially those who grew up in secular families without strong communities, it’s tough to see an alternative. They’ll continue to muddle along with a wealthy country middle class lifestyle supported by the welfare state with the hard work (including elderly care) being done by poorer immigrants. It’s not a good life, but it’s also not the French Revolution. 

The Flaw in the Plan

The flaw in the plan of the bishops of the Second Vatican Council, or at least the groupthink that prevailed, was the belief that the average Catholic’s faith was far deeper than it really was. 

The documents give the impression that, if only the Church would remove the brakes applied following the Council of Trent, modern Catholics would Christianize the world, beginning with unity amongst Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants.

This foundational assumption was backwards. The popular devotions and disciplines of the post Trent Church were not barriers to the fullness of the Christian life for most Catholics. Rather, these were the faith for many Catholics. Removing them by force all at once proved devastating, alienating many who hadn’t already chosen to leave the Church in favor of secularist culture. 

There are several clear examples, each of which identified a real problem, but provided a kneejerk solution that backfired. 

Liturgy

Most Catholics today, even traditionalists, agree that praying the rosary through Mass is not the ideal way to assist at Mass. It was said that Catholics at Mass should be full and active participants, meaning they must be fully conscious of what’s going on at Mass. Presumably this means that they are engaging in some way with the prayers of the Mass itself and not some private devotion. 

This is reasonable, and lack of understanding of the Mass was a real issue. Still, what was the appropriate pastoral way to address this? Many Catholics had no other experience of the Mass through multiple decades than silent personal prayer. This is probably why the rosary in particular was regarded as a barrier to fully experiencing the Mass. 

Was it appropriate to take a man who had quietly prayed his rosary through a mostly silent low Mass for 30 years and force him to show up at a Mass one Sunday where everything was now audible, and in English, and where he was expected to verbalize responses, shake hands, and look a priest in the face for close to an hour? This is exactly what happened, and it seems spiritually cruel. 

The rosary wasn’t a barrier to the experience of the Mass for those people, it was their experience of the Mass. Any movement toward a more direct participation in the prayers of the Mass could have been handled more gradually, and in a less condescending manner. Moreover, it was already happening. I know someone who entered high school in 1958 and received a Latin/English Missal on day 1 of grade 9. Greater engagement with the prayers of the Mass was coming, though apparently not fast enough for the authorities. 

Cathechesis

The older generations seem to positively loathe the Baltimore Catechism. And yet 60 years after it was largely thrown out, the boomers who studied it still remember the responses. And we haven’t found a better way of teaching children the basic truths of the faith in a way that sticks. Embarrassing mistakes and accidental heresy on basic matters abound, often in priests’ homilies. 

And many who have discovered the Baltimore Catechism as adults, myself included, find it a refreshing way to understand and explain key concepts of the faith clearly and concisely. 

Yes, the fact that, for many, the faith was reduced to a set of rote questions and responses was a real issue. 

The problem though, was not the Baltimore Catechism, the problem was that catechesis often stopped there. The catechesis of the day did not sufficiently teach Scripture, the lives of the saints, and how those could be realistically lived out in the real world. But you’d be hard pressed to say we’re doing better today.

Error

Pope John XXIII’s opening address to the Council assumed that the faithful were well formed enough to be able to spot and reject error, even if error were no longer censored and punished by Church authorities. In conjunction with throwing out the Baltimore Catechism and Thomist-based education in seminaries, this was also an unsafe assumption. 

Barely three years after the Council, the media was filled with theologians, bishops, lay “experts” and everyone else explaining why Humanae Vitae was wrong or did not need to be accepted by the faithful. If the Conciliar assumption was correct, the faithful should have been able to sort truth from error and do the right thing. Only they didn’t, and Catholics contracept at the same rates as any other demographic group. Widespread acceptance of abortion and divorce weren’t long in following. 

This also filters down to more critical matters. Over 2/3 of Catholics who regularly attend Mass don’t believe in the Real Presence. Plenty others believe that people become angels when they die, and we can’t blame It’s a Wonderful Life for that. Others don’t realize that Jesus Christ is God. 

While the prosecution of error in the Church could certainly get out of hand, some restraint of error by proper authority was all that kept the faithful safe from endless spiritual confusion and questioning on every subject. The faith is not supposed to be an independent research project, it is supposed to be something handed down. There needs to be something to hand down that isn’t clouded by endless uncertainty and dissension.

Fasting

While I’m admittedly more fuzzy on the rationales here, there was a strong belief that the Church’s rules around fasting made remaining in a state of grace inaccessible to many and relegated the faith to a set of legalistic rules. 

Still, fasting has proven to be one of the more enduring aspects of the Christian life. I know plenty of people who do not attend Mass but who still give up something dear to them for Lent. I know people who aren’t even Catholic who attend Friday Fish Fries. And it’s well known that Ash Wednesday remains one of the most popularly attended Masses despite not being a holy day of obligation. An elderly relative whose grandfather was Catholic often recalls his grandparents’ house smelling of fish every Friday, when his protestant grandmother (who refused to raise their children Catholic) consented to cooking meatless dinners each week. 

And the loss of fasting discipline has been disastrous. If one wonders why stores are filled with Christmas merchandise in mid-October, you could do worse than pointing to the Church’s dropping of the traditional fasting practice on vigils (like Christmas Eve) in the 50s. If you’re struggling to understand why belief in the Real Presence is flagging, the reduction of the Eucharistic fast from midnight to one hour is a contributing factor. I know several priests who have complained about the loss of any real penitential character to Lent- without bringing up that Lent used to require daily fasting. While the full breadth of traditional fasting may have been a struggle for the upper classes, this is one precept that simpler people could and did fulfill that gave their faith real physical grounding. 

If the Church no longer asks anything of its faithful, it’s easy to conclude that the Church and her teachings just aren’t all that important. This is especially true when one contrasts the attitude of the modern Catholic Church with fasting practices still observed by the Orthodox (no meat and dairy most Wednesdays and Fridays, fasting each day in Lent), Muslims (fasting from sunup to sundown through Ramadan), and Orthodox Jews (kosher laws). 

Legalism was and remains a problem in the Church. But this is inevitable given that the faithful need minimum guardrails from those in authority so as not to drift, especially in a secular world of plenty. And some will always misuse those minimums to marginalize and claim superiority over those who struggle in one area or another. 

A lighter approach may have been to reiterate longstanding exceptions for the sick and infirm, loosen the reigns to grant local bishops more authority over local fasting practices (which they should be expected to uphold rather than ignore), and enable other pastoral exceptions on the advice of a confessor. The traditional practices though, could remain as the gold standard, to be striven after by most, even if not achieved perfectly by many. 

Why? Quebec Edition

 

Why did the Catholic Church in Quebec collapse in the 1960s? Traditionalists would do well to consider the matter. Quebec is different in that it is not enough to point to the changes in the liturgy or the confusion surrounding the Second Vatican Council because the visible collapse started earlier. 

The Catholic Church was the foundation of the culture of Quebec. To this day, many street names, town names, and neighborhood names are drawn from saints. Montreal is known as the city of a thousand steeples. The churches there are breathtaking on a level not encountered in the United States or even some areas of Europe. 

The province’s Catholic culture and practice survived the takeover by the British after the French and Indian War, industrialization, the world wars, and the fraught politics of a francophone province in an anglo nation. It did not survive the 1960s. 

Paul Mavern has an excellent article on Cultural Witness chronicling this rise and fall. Over 90% of French Catholics confessed and received Communion during the Easter season near the turn of the 20th century. It was down to 15%, even before covid. Friends staying in Montreal can attest that it’s even lower now. 

Every issue that plagues a typical diocese in the West is present in exaggerated form in Quebec. Your diocese has low baptisms, marriages, Mass attendance, high divorce, decaying church buildings, immoral government? Quebec likely has more of them. 

At a recent event with George Weigel, the author stated “There is not a more spiritually arid place from the North Pole to the Tierra del Fuego.” 

So what happened? 

In short, two things. First, the church overcommitted to the conservative political order in Quebec, and once that political ideology lost its shine with the totalitarian tendencies and then death of powerful leader Maurice Duplessis, there was little left. 

The point is: compromises with totalitarian leaders have consequences, particularly when the Church has no answer for what comes after. This is something to keep in mind as we US Catholics dally with Trump and DeSantis. There are few places where the Church is worse off than Quebec, Spain, and Portugal. 

In all three cases, the Church allied itself (at least in the public mind) with authoritarian, nominally Catholic rulers who had brutal tendencies.

Second, the Church in the 1960s retreated and allowed a socialist government to take over vital education and health services. With the Church no longer taking an active role in the trenches helping people with day to day problems, people saw little reason to stay loyal to the institution. And far from standing for the truth in an age of change, the Canadian bishops issued the Winnipeg Statement which essentially gave a green light to disregarding Humanae Vitae, regardless of what its apologists say. The result is predictable if you know anything about the curses promised in the Old Testament for those who depart from God’s law. 

When the strongmen were gone, the Church retreated and made no attempt to step into the power vacuum with a new social order that upheld natural law and faith while lightening the heavy discipline. It was a worse case scenario combination of Rehoboam not lightening the burden imposed by his father Solomon on the northern tribes, followed by Aaron’s shameful allowance of mass apostasy. 

So what’s the answer? 

I would suggest helping people with real world problems. Giving people parish communities worth the name. Matching the beauty of the churches with beautiful liturgy. And helping people who are struggling, ranging from those on the streets with psychological problems, those from broken homes in need of someone to take on the role of family, the elderly with someone willing to listen to their stories, young families with childcare and education options that are authentically Catholic, and young people with intellectually engaging spiritual formation. 

It’s obviously not coming from the hierarchy. In a few days in Montreal, I witnessed a historic church dedicated to an early Canadian saint hosting a Christmas concert in which the sanctuary was treated liking a casual social parlor by all and sundry for a solid hour. I was then barred from entering the basilica more than 15 minutes before a Sunday Mass, being forced to stand out in the cold for 20 minutes while the money changers collecting fees for entry stood clustered around a heat lamp and turned away visitor after visitor. 

We can begin refilling the pews, but the average Catholic vastly underestimates the sheer amount of work, outreach, rejection, mortification, prayer, and fight against bureaucracy that will be required. Not for nothing do biographies of Saint Patrick recount that he prayed the entire psalter daily and struggled with betrayal from those in the Church administration who should have been his greatest supporters. At this point, modern Quebec and Ireland need someone similar. Or more impressive if C.S Lewis is correct that post Christian society is worse than pre Christian society. 

The Return of Baal and Asherah

 

Anyone who has read the Old Testament is bound to have asked how the Israelites could have been so stupid as to repeatedly worship false gods. Couldn’t they see that these gods were not real, could not save them, and that their worship always had bad consequences? We may have our own problems, but we’re not stupid enough to commit actual idolatry with false gods in such a blunt fashion. 

There is a problem with this reasoning. Two of the most popular idols in Ancient Israel were Baal and Asherah. 

Baal was a Canaanite storm god. Asherah was a local fertility goddess. And in extreme cases, the Israelites slaughtered their own children as an offering to the Moabite god Moloch. 

In the contemporary West there are few causes that attract more devotion, and stifle dissent more, than climate change and sexual expression. 

I know many people at work who devote their whole public lives (career, politics) and much of their private lives (housing, diet) to climate change. Many people, from the height of western political and corporate power down to penniless college students insist that humanity must change everything about economic life, technology, and much of politics to resolve climate change. 

I know many people, including some in my own family whose sense of self is driven mainly by sexuality. I have an elderly relative who often has a book with him when I see him once or twice a year. Since the Windsor and Obergefell rulings though, the books I see him reading have mostly been driven by homosexuality. The recent books have focused on Barney Frank, Neil Patrick Harris, the emperor Hadrian, and Harvey Fierstein. 

The US Supreme Court has banned states from restricting contraception’s availability to people as young as 16. The US federal government has mandated that most employers provide contraception free to employees. No fault divorce is enshrined in the law of most US states. Planned Parenthood is the US’s largest abortion provider and is one of the most powerful lobbying groups in the country. 

Even the hint of a suggestion that certain forms of sexual expression might be restricted in some states in the US provokes a massive backlash, even among people like the current US President who aren’t personally interested in sex outside marriage, abortion, homosexuality, or alternative forms of sexuality.

As Maui says in the movie Moana: it’s nice to see that humans never change. 

The Fasting Trigger

 

“As soon as you enter the city, you will find him, before he goes up to the high place to eat; for the people will not eat till he comes, since he must bless the sacrifice; afterward those eat who are invited."- 1 Samuel 9:13

Yesterday, the topic of the immemorial Eucharistic fast (no food and water from midnight until receiving the Eucharist) came up in conversation. The immediate response was: “The Church requires one hour, we don’t want to be holier than the Church.” This is almost identical to a response I received from a friend when I encouraged him to look into it a couple of years ago. And when I described my typical Ash Wednesday and Good Friday Black Fast routine to another friend a few years ago, the “holier than the Church” response was also immediate. Two of these friends are priests. 

I can’t understand this attitude. It is true the Church requires a fast of one hour before receiving the Eucharist (canon 919). It’s also true that the Church requires both the sacrament of confession and the reception of Communion once a year (the latter laid out in canon 920, right next to the current fasting requirement). The Church also requires attending Mass on Sundays. 

I’ve never heard any serious Catholic reject the practice of confessing, receiving Communion more than once a year, or attending daily Mass as harmful, or as a pretentious attempt at being “holier than the Church.” 

Pius XII’s Christus Dominus changed the midnight fast to three hours, but he made it clear that those physically able to observe the traditional fast should do so:

We wish also to admonish those who are able to observe that same law that they should continue diligently to observe it, so that only those who need these concessions can enjoy them according to the nature of their need.

While I can’t find the document in which Paul VI changed the fast to one hour, the FSSP calendar in my room assures me that Paul VI expressed the same spirit of “those who can, should observe the traditional fast”.

What is it about fasting, and the traditional Eucharistic fast in particular, that provokes this harsh, almost defensive reaction?  

Judean Kings and Popes

 

The stories of the Judean kings of David’s dynasty are given to us in Scripture to show us what good and bad spiritual leadership look like. They are meant as examples for all ages. They show leaders what to do and what to avoid, and they help the faithful understand whether their leaders are acting rightly or wrongly. Notably, the best kings are those who eliminated false worship. 

There are obvious parallels with the papacy. Both were founded on the faith of the first ruler: David’s faith and Peter’s confession of faith. Both contain stories of those first rulers committing grave sin, repenting, and being forgiven. And both contain sterling men and dreadful men. 

Therefore, it’s fair for us to see Popes through this lens. 

Judean king: Josiah

Pope: Saint Pius X

Josiah was one of the few kings to eliminate the high places of pagan worship. Pius X launched an aggressive campaign against heresy, in particular Modernism. Josiah did his best to restore the fullness of temple worship. Pius X made great efforts to restore sacred music and a strong sense of Eucharistic faith to the Church by ensuring First Communion was administered at the age of reason, and not at adolescence.  Josiah found the Mosaic law and demanded it be read aloud to all the people. Pius X codified the Code of Canon Law. 

Both died during and because of an outbreak of war. 

Their efforts did not produce the lasting effects these men sought. Judea quickly returned to idolatry after Josiah’s death (and archaeological evidence of idols in private homes suggest they never really left it). Likewise, Catholics generally preferred nationalism and assimilation to Christendom, obeying their suicidal national war cries without question. And we all now what happened fifty years later, in the 1960s. 

Judean king: Hezekiah

Pope: Pius XII

Hezekiah begin co-reigning with his father Ahaz, much like Pius XII (then Cardinal Pacelli) exercised significant power as Cardinal Secretary of State under Pius XI. As Hezekiah fought against false worship, Pius XII fought against Nazism, fascism, and communism going back to his time as a nuncio in Germany in the 1920s. He had no qualms about publicly reprimanding out-of-line clerics, including Cardinal Innitzer after the Austrian cardinal welcomed the anschluss and Father Leonard Feeney due to his overly stringent teaching of “outside the Church there is no salvation.” 

As Hezekiah trusted in the Lord when the enemy was ravaging the land, Pius XII likewise was a public voice of continued faith as Europe was annihilated and Italy itself was a focal point of the war. 

Both went through a gut wrenching illness. Hezekiah’s is dramatically related in the canticle in Isaiah 38. Pius XII’s began in 1954, and led him to treatment that produced hallucinations and nightmares. 

Both were sidetracked by politics toward the end of their reigns. Hezekiah proudly showed the Babylonians all he had in the aftermath of the Assyrian attack on Judea. Pius XII likewise became “NATO’s chaplain”, throwing the Vatican’s lot in with the secular postwar order of the western allies. Pius XII also prioritized material aid to postwar Europe over a fundamental effort to restore Europe’s spiritual health. Both rulers thus cozied up to regimes that would sow the seeds of later destruction. 

The legacy of both is tarnished by their last years. Hezekiah’s son Manasseh, born in the extra years of life granted to Hezekiah after his illness, became one of the most wicked kings in Judean history. Pius XII revved up the “liturgical reforms”, throwing out Holy Week, the ranking of the saints’ feasts in the calendar, and small but noticeable aspects of the Mass like multiple Collects and proper last Gospels. He also put in position those who would annihilate the Mass in the decade after his death. 

Both ultimately failed to inculcate virtue in their successors and administrators. Manasseh presided over mass immorality so bad that it doomed Judea to destruction regardless of Josiah’s later repentenace. Many of the bishops who failed to act against heretical theology, liturgical abuses, or who publicly denounced Humanae Vite and Catholic tradition were appointed by Pius XII (though so was Bishop Wojtyla). Paul VI was mentored for decades by Pius XII and led the Church into a full blown crisis from which it has not emerged. 

Judean King: Jehoshaphat

Popes: John Paul II and Benedict XVI

Jehoshaphat was a good man who followed the Lord. “Yet, the [pagan] high places were not taken away.” Not only that, but Jehoshaphat continually allied himself with King Ahab of Israel despite abundant evidence, and warnings from the prophets, that Ahab was a bad man who would bring judgment down upon Israel. The effects were disastrous: Ahab’s line intermarried with Jehoshaphat’s, leading to mass murder within the Judean royal family. 

Saint John Paul II and Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI were both good men who followed the Lord with their hearts. But they were not willing to take away the high places of false worship. Heretical catechesis, shockingly irreverent liturgy, public contradiction of Church doctrine by prominent Catholic figures all continued largely unchecked during their reigns. 

And they could not bring themselves to break their alliance with the extreme reform party that triumphed in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council. Historian Roberto de Mattei indicates that John Paul II let those men appoint most bishops throughout his 27 year reign. This includes appointing Theodore McCarick to the position of cardinal, despite clear warnings from trustworthy figures about his history of sexual abuse. 

The results are reminiscent of the turmoil in Judea, both within the Church hierarchy and within the wider world. 

Judean King: Ahaz

Pope: Francis

King Ahaz sought to aggressively copy the worship of the politically powerful of the day, to the point of building a Syrian style altar in the temple. The current papacy seems no different, with the synod on synodality mischaracterizing proceedings to favor a liberal agenda that contradicts Church doctrine, the well known episode of the pachamama at the Amazon Synod, the almost slavish prioritization of liberal political causes like climate change and immigration, and the desperate attempts to ban the traditional Mass that looks so different from the worship of most of today’s elites. 

Ahaz would not listen to Isaiah and favored political alliances with the powerful, like Assyria, over trust in the Lord and fidelity to his law. Likewise the modern Church hierarchy continuously seeks “renewal” by warping Church doctrine and liturgy to please those who hold political and financial power, mostly political and social progressives in Western nations. 

Honorable Mention-

Judean King: Rehoboam

Pope: Urban VI

Urban’s heavy handed rule drove the cardinals of the day to start the Great Western Schism, which last for 40 years, much as Rehoboam’s rough treatment of the northern tribes of Israel led to the permanent secession of the 10 northern tribes from rule by the Davidic royal family.