WHERE IS THE NEED FOR THE REAL IRON FIST TO PREVENT AN ACTUAL SCHISM IN THE CHURCH? HINT: IT ISN’T THOSE WHO WANT THE TLM OR IN THE BUGNINI RITE, KNEELING FOR HOLY COMMUNION AND MASS AD ORIENTEM!

So much smoke screen, faux-hysteria is directed towards TLM communities and those parishes that celebrate the Bugnini Mass by the book, ad orientem and kneeling for Holy Communion. We already know how harshly Pope Francis treated these Catholics and in my own province of Atlanta, the Conventual Franciscan bishop in Charlotte is using Orwellian measures to crush traditional minded Catholics, who are orthodox by the way, and force them into a uniformity in the most rigid pre-Vatican II authoritarian way possible. 

But the Italian journal, “Il Giornale” hits the nail on the head about the true schism in the Church that needs more than Orwellian means to crush it but no crushing thus far has taken place. Pope Francis called them out but coddled them at the same time and things continue to spiral toward schism. 

Yet, the harshest measures are taken against orthodox traditionalists, an Orwellian smoke screen to mask the real problem. One wonders if the harshest measures against traditionalists is to neutralize grassroots pushback against heterodox/heretical Catholics, in high places, who want the Catholic Church to be a different Church. 

Where are we talking about? GERMANY, the home of the Protestant Reformation in the 1500’s is fomenting another world-wide schism, much nastier than their first one, as nasty as that was. 

For many in the Vatican, the German Synodal Church was moving too fast but in the right direction. Pope Francis wanted the synod on synodality to move in a more stealthy way, beginning processes that would eventually lead to where Germany arrived way too quickly. The Pope Francis’ synodlalty, while feigning orthodoxy, created so many cracks in the dam of orthodoxy that everyone knew what the end point would be—the Church would be like Germany’s Church about to become. Germany is more honest in arriving at the logical conclusion of synodality. 

While the FSSPX and even sedevacantists are in an irregular union with the pope, or, outright schism, they are not heretical unlike the looming German schism which is as heterodox and heretical, not to mention, schismatic, as you can get! 

Yet, you have heterodox left leaning Catholics around the world screaming at traditional minded Catholics and demonizing them. It really is a smokescreen, no? And that smoke—it’s the smoke of Satan. 

This is the “Il Giornale” commentary:

Schism in Berlin, Leo’s High-Stakes Game

By Nico Spuntoni

The German nuncio meets the Pope. Unpublished letter from Ratzinger to Cardinal Marx.

Germany is where the most explosive dossier Leo XIV inherited from Francis is being played out. Neither the Jubilee year nor the conclave has halted what Cardinal Gerhard Müller has defined as the “process of Protestantization” of the Catholic Church in Germany. And while Rome has so far bided its time in the face of the continual steps forward from beyond the Rhine, now the knots are coming to a head.

In the coming hours the Pope is expected to receive Archbishop Nikola Eterović, apostolic nuncio to Berlin. It is inevitable that the conversation will be dominated by the imminent vote of the German Bishops’ Conference on the Statute of the Synodal Conference.

This is a project, already approved by the highly powerful Central Committee of German Catholics, that will give rise to a permanent body in which lay people will be placed on an equal footing with bishops. This Synodal Conference will have decision-making power and will be able to introduce changes to doctrine by majority vote, forcing those who dissent to provide a public justification. Moreover, the Conference will take over the management of the financial resources of the extremely wealthy German Church.

All this is exactly what the Holy See feared would happen in 2019, when the contested Synodal Path was launched in Germany and the current prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops, Archbishop Filippo Iannone, wrote to the then head of the German Bishops’ Conference, Cardinal Reinhard Marx, warning that issues such as ordained ministries for women, the separation of powers between laity and clergy, and priestly celibacy “do not concern the Church in Germany but the universal Church and, with few exceptions, cannot be the object of deliberations or decisions by a particular Church.”

Over these years the German bishops have repeatedly ignored Rome’s warnings. Their objective, however, appears to go further and would seek to trigger a German “contagion” in the rest of the Church. This is demonstrated by the recent consistory in the Vatican in which — as we can reveal — Cardinal Marx intervened to express the hope of arriving very soon at the female diaconate. The cardinal is the principal architect of the German synodal process and has retained his leadership even after being replaced at the head of the Bishops’ Conference.

Today Il Giornale can reveal an unprecedented episode involving Marx: in 2021, in fact, Benedict XVI made himself heard by his successor as Archbishop of Munich and Freising to express his “great concern” about the synodal process in Germany. Vatican sources confirm to us that in his final years Ratzinger was deeply skeptical about the direction taken by the German Church and was convinced that “this Path will do harm and will end badly if it is not stopped.” Marx ignored the appeal of the Pope emeritus, who a few months later was heavily discredited in his homeland because of a report on abuses commissioned precisely by the Archdiocese of Munich, without being defended by his successor in office.

Now it is Leo XIV’s turn. He receives support from the report presented by Cardinal Mario Grech to the consistory, which states that “it always belongs to the Bishop of Rome, if necessary, to suspend the synodal process.” Prevost shares Benedict XVI’s misgivings, but if he does not have the strength to say “no” to the Synodal Conference project, the risk is that the German landslide may become, for the universal Church, an avalanche called schism.