With the death of the most controversial pope in centuries, perhaps of all time, the entire planet will be focusing on the election of a new supreme pontiff for the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church.

You do not have to be Catholic in order to fully grasp the significance of this event. American Catholics and non-Catholics alike have watched, with largely muted shock and disdain, what happens to planetary morality, and truth in general, when we do not possess a giant of a man who fills the Shoes of the Fisherman. It has happened before. The Catholic Church and its popes, for two thousand years, have demonstrated the full display of human strengths and weaknesses, virtues and sinfulness.

The world was spoiled by the magnificence of John Paul II’s long, strong and eventful papacy, from 1978 until 2005. Even his predecessor, the generally weak and feckless Paul VI, held the line against the worldwide sexual revolution with the 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae. It was once ridiculed. It is now seen as prophetic. The papacy’s strength was further encouraged by the election of Pope Benedict XVI [2005-2013], but his early promise slowly devolved into a flat tire.

But none of them, which also apparently included John XXIII [1958-63] and Pius XII [1939-58] were immune to the nefarious machinations within the Vatican that led to the appointment of many bishops and cardinals who were anything but faithful to moral and religious truth. The stars were subsequently lined up for the Francis papacy, whose legacy has been confusion and credible accusations of outright heresy.

The initial charm of the Francine papacy did not last long. Becoming “up-beat”, informal, or accessible did not lead to an increase of faith among Catholics. Rather, it discouraged them and the rest of the world with foolishness, contradiction and confusion. Off-the-cuff press conferences and informal interviews which questioned the existence of hell, encouraged the heretical idea that all religions were the same, and the appointment of morally questionable bishops and cardinals, all made the term “papal infallibility” misunderstood by Catholics and non-Catholics alike.

Some of the events were downright childish. We can begin with the absurd use of St. Peter’s basilica for a laser light show, or allowing the hard-edged rock group U-2 to perform in, of all places, the Sistine Chapel. Accepting a hammer-and-sickle crucifix and allowing intercommunion with non-Catholics made a mockery of the Church’s historic stand against communism, as well as faith in the sacredness of the most precious of all sacraments.

But far and away THE worst event was the Pachamama episode, an embarrassment so colossal that it pains this writer to even recall it. It was an absurd piece of rank idolatry, which culminated in a poorly orchestrated Papal Garden fertility goddess worship. For non-Catholics who have long decried devotion to the Blessed Virgin as something similar, I won’t waste the time here, but invite an open debate about their 500 year-long misunderstanding of Mary’s role in salvation history. This was hardly the same thing.

Pachamama was stolen by an authentic young Catholic from Austria who tossed it into the Tiber River at dawn. His courage saved the honor of the Church.

None of this can be understood unless we look at the momentum created by one of the most evil of all men in history, Joseph Stalin. His infiltration of Russian Orthodoxy by the Soviet secret police is an historic and accepted fact. But far less known is his green-lighting of the same tactic for the Catholic Church. His chosen acolytes were not only communist agents but also known homosexuals, neither of which demonstrated faith nor care for their own eternal destiny.

Bella Dodd was an Italian communist immigrant and naturalized American citizen. By the 1950s, she had been expelled from the communist party and openly embraced her Catholicism, thanks to the influence of Fulton J. Sheen, the American television icon of the 1950s. She testified before congressional committees on her work:

“In the late 1920s and 1930s, I personally put eleven hundred men into the priesthood in order to weaken the Catholic Church from within. The idea was for these men to be ordained and progress to positions of influence and authority as Monsignors and Bishops…. Right now, they are in the highest places, where they are working to bring about change in order to weaken the Church’s effectiveness against Communism. These changes will be so drastic that you will not even recognize the Catholic Church.

“Of all the world’s religions, the Catholic Church was the only one feared by the Communists, for it was its only effective opponent. The whole idea was to destroy, not the institution of the Church, but rather the faith of the people, and even use the institution of the Church, if possible, to destroy the faith through the promotion of a pseudo-religion. Something that resembled Catholicism but was not the real thing.

“Once the faith was destroyed, there would be a guilt complex introduced into the Church … to label the ‘Church of the past’ as being oppressive, authoritarian, full of prejudices, arrogant in claiming to be the sole possessor of truth, and responsible for the divisions of religious bodies throughout the centuries. This would be necessary in order to shame Church leaders into an ‘openness to the world,’ and to a more flexible attitude toward all religions and philosophies. The Communists would then exploit this openness in order to undermine the Church.”

Read it all here: https://catholicinsight.com/beware-of-communists-bearing-gifts/.

One can now see how the Francis papacy brought to fruition the communist plan. Even now, as the conclave meets to select a successor, only God can save the Church.

It would seem, due to the late Pope Francis’ appointments to the College of Cardinals, that there is an apparent strangle-hold and lock on the papal office. But the workings of the Holy Spirit on each individual Cardinal is the wild card in every conclave. Papal conclaves in the past have involved coercion, death threats and worldly politics — but also courage, faith and a willingness to defy the evil powers, which the world will continue to experience until the end of time.

The story of Christianity is the story of repentant sinners. This means all of us. And as C. S. Lewis wrote in The Great Divorce, those who adhere to spectacular evil are often more apt to accept repentance and conversion than the lukewarm or indifferent.

Christ said, “The reason I came into the world was to testify to the truth. All who desire the truth hear my voice.”

Yet Pilate asked, “What is truth?”

The corpus of Catholic doctrine, held for 2,000 years, dares to proclaim it, in the face of internal and external denials.

All men of good faith, Catholic or not, should pray for a pope faithful to the truth.