Father Linus Clovis: ‘The Francis Effect’ Silences Catholics

LifeSiteNews.com notes: Father Linus Clovis of Saint Lucia gave the following address at the Rome Life Forum on May 9, 2015.

A crisis is a time of intense difficulty or danger.  Medically, it is the turning point of a disease when an important change takes place, indicating either recovery or death.

Bishop Athanasius Schneider has identified four great crises in the Church: Arianism, the Western Schism, the Reformation and Modernism.  This last, which the Church has been fighting for well over a century, has managed to get a stranglehold on the Church ever since the close of the Second Vatican Council. St. Pius X called it the synthesis of all heresies.

For the last half century, the majority of Catholics, entrusting themselves to the vigilance of their pastors, have been fitfully sleeping up until now, when they were rudely awaken by the alarm bells set off by the 2014 Extraordinary Synod on the Family.  A future Jerome may well lament that “on awaking, they groan to find themselves modernist.”  The drama of the Synod played out in the media with cardinal opposed to cardinal, bishop against bishop, and national conferences of bishops resisting other national conferences, thus appearing as a literal fulfilment of the prophecy made by Our Lady at Akita on October 13, 1973: “The work of the devil will infiltrate even into the Church in such a way that one will see cardinals opposing cardinals, bishops against bishops. The priests who venerate me will be scorned and opposed by their confreres… the Church will be full of those who accept compromises.”

Then suddenly, some shepherds began to speak with a strange voice.  With stupefying temerity, Timothy Cardinal Dolan, commenting on the “coming out” of a “gay” college football star, told NBC’s “Meet the Press”: “Good for him… I would have no sense of judgment on him…. God bless ya. I don’t think, look, the same Bible that tells us, that teaches us well about the virtues of chastity and the virtue of fidelity and marriage also tells us not to judge people. So I would say ‘Bravo’.”

With such statements and actions by prominent and powerful prelates, crowned with the pontifical saw “who am I to judge,” traditional minded bishops, priests and even laity are disarmed and hamstrung.  After all, in holding to the traditional Catholic moral teaching and order they would soon be accused of being more Catholic than the Pope.  This disarming of the clergy and hierarchy constitutes the Francis Effect.

The Pope

Catholics love the Pope.  Whoever he is, wherever he hails from, he always represents for them an evident and effectual sign of the presence of Christ in the world.  Even before Our Lady asked the children at Fatima to pray for the Holy Father, repeating this request at Akita on 13 October, 1973, saying “pray very much for the Pope, bishops and priests,” Catholics have prayed for him daily and not only look to him for leadership but also regard him as that firm and sure foundation on which the Church’s teaching authority is built.   For Catholics the purity of teaching is so important that it is easier for them to accept the possibility that the ‘pope’ may not, in fact, be the pope than it is for them to believe that a pope could be a teacher of error.

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