The Good Shepherd (I): Some errors on the division between Shepherds and the Faithful in the Church

Jesus Christ founded His Church by establishing two kinds of believers: Shepherds and simple faithful. Hence Catholic Doctrine has always maintained that the Church, though forming one Body, is divided into two separate classes: the teaching Church or the Shepherds, and the learning Church, made up of the rest of the faithful.

The mission of the first class, the Shepherds, is sanctifying, teaching, and governing the rest of the faithful. It falls upon the second class to listen to the sound doctrine uttered by their Shepherds, receiving from them the means to attain holiness and obeying their commands.

This constitution of the Church was divinely established and therefore cannot be changed, not even by the Church herself, which is a truth of faith the Church has always maintained and which is not subject to emendation or variation. At least this is how it should be; the fact of the matter is that this has not been always the case, especially in recent times.

Although man is a being with a rational nature, it would be false to assume that he always acts rationally. Truly speaking, we must recognize that most of the time man is far from behaving in a manner in keeping with his nature.

It does seem hard to believe, but one must recognize that fidelity to Christ is a matter of exception in the Church, on the part of both the Shepherds and the faithful. The most obvious consequence of this is the emergence of Shepherds who have never managed to become Shepherds– a group of people made up of the most diverse set of species, as we shall see. There has also emerged a large number of sheep who believe they are Shepherds because they have not come to understand the charism of the laity and their role in the Church. All this mess is but the result of a variety of confused ideas largely introduced by the theology of the New Church.

But, before we continue with this issue, we must make a reference to the reasons that have helped make possible the emergence of a phenomenon that has transformed the life of the Church and has turned all her structures upside down. Major changes of ideas in a society do not arise suddenly nor are they improvised; they usually come into being at the convergence of very complex antecedents and causes.

In our particular case, the nearest antecedent is the number of new ideas brought about by the Second Vatican Council.  A Council which was manipulated, whether one admits it or not, by progressive groups imbued with the heresy of Modernism and which determined the procedures and lines of action to be followed. Modernism’s main weapon, as everybody knows, is resorting to confusion, mainly by using intelligently manipulated language as a means of introducing those ideas it wants to disseminate.

The fact that more than two thousand bishops of the Church, from all over the world, agreed to sign and proclaim a number of ideas and doctrines often contrary to the tradition of the Church –an unprecedented event, after all, in the life of the Church and in the history of Councils— is a mystery that cannot be explained by referring to historical or sociological reasons which will always be insufficient, despite all one may say. More than fifty years have passed since the closing of this Council; it does not seem very probable that someone will dare to raise this issue now.

Actually, people are not accustomed to accepting these facts, for they have always been reluctant to explain the real reasons for certain serious events in history; so they refuse to apply the means to discover the real causes that gave rise to them; perhaps because, deep down, people know them and are horrified at the prospect of being in the situation of admitting them, as it occurs with certain unpleasant truths that often plague the life of any human being.

The Modernist spirit of some Documents of the Council, along with their deliberately ambiguous language used to give way to doctrines foreign to Revelation and the bimillennial Tradition of the Church, unleashed adevastating wave of confusion that affected both Shepherds and the Faithful. The immediate consequence took the shape of an apostasy that led to the desertion of nearly most of the Shepherds and of innumerable thousands upon thousands of faithful; all of whom, in a more or less conscious but always guilty manner, became part of the New Church.

This desertion, whose true motivation is apostasy, has manifested itself, it could not be otherwise, in many and varied ways. Most particularly, the issue of the distinction between Shepherds and the simple faithful has produced extremely peculiar and even curious external manifestations which nobody has dared to recognize. Entirely hybrid and even ridiculous characters have emerged: Shepherds determined to not distinguish themselves from the world or the secularized cleric and its opposite, the clericalized layperson, are ultimately the result of a shameful though unacknowledged inferiority complex, the offspring, in turn, of fear.

When Pope John XXIII solemnly pronounced, at the opening address of Vatican II, the slogan proclaiming that the Church was finally opened to the world, he unwittingly gave free entry to a legion of demons that had thus far been waiting impatiently at the Doors of an until-then impregnable Enclosure.

Any course of action undertaken in detriment to the nature of things always ends in a disaster whose damages and consequences are difficult to gauge at the moment and impossible to foresee as a more or less near future.

The stark truth, which nobody recognizes, is that the Church cannot be opened to the world in any way because it would undermine her nature as created and instituted by Jesus Christ. Unfortunately, however, by the time the Council took place many years of Protestant rationalistic biblical criticism had already made a dent in Catholic theology, which went so far as to barely believe any longer in Revelation. But the doctrine concerning this issue contained in Revelation was all too clear: Adulterers, know you not that the friendship of this world is the enemy of God? Whosoever therefore will be a friend of this world, becometh an enemy of God.[2] And Jesus Christ Himself, speaking to His disciples in His Priestly Prayer to His Father, stated: I have given them thy word, and the world hath hated them, because they are not of the world; as I also am not of the world. I pray not that thou shouldst take them out of the world, but that thou shouldst keep them from evil. They are not of the world, as I also am not of the world.[3] The same apostle John went deeper into this issue, urging in his First Letter:Love not the world, nor the things which are in the world. If any man love the world, the charity of the Father is not in him.[4]

If sin brought death into the world, the inaugural speech of John XXIII introduced confusion in the Church at all levels. Bishops, for example, felt compelled to approach the faithful with flaunting (actually rather stupid) gestures of apparent humility. It is difficult to explain why a Bishop, in the ceremonial Mass of his installation as the supreme shepherd of a new diocese, greets the faithful with the announcement that he has come to them with the intention oflearning; for he is the successor of the Apostles, Teacher and Father in the Faith, entrusted with the delicate task of guiding the sheep. Anyone can imagine what would happen in a school where the teacher would introduce himself to the children saying that he had gone there to learn. No wonder, therefore, that all Christendom felt confused by the gesture of the new Pope Francis when he appeared on the balcony to greet the crowds and asked them to bless him.

The mass havoc wreaked among common clergy and the laity was even worse, if possible. Two major lies, gross as well as extravagant, each disseminated among these two different states by the modernist periti of the Council, well versed in handling instruments of confusion by using all sorts of necessary deceptions (manipulation of the Scripture, ambiguous language, discrediting the value of Tradition and Authority of previous Councils, mocking Thomism, declaring the entire pre-conciliar Magisterium obsolete, etc.) were enough to disrupt both states within the Church and achieve their virtual destruction.

The fact that important sectors of society, and sometimes even the whole society, accept without any discussion the most absurd lies would be a difficult mystery were the effectiveness of Lenin’s slogan not sufficiently attested by experience: Lie in the widest possible way, since the acceptance of the lie is directly proportional to its size.

The fallacy introduced into the common clergy would seem too wild and coarse as to be accepted by any being gifted with understanding. But the fact is that the fallacy was accepted without the slightest consideration by the clergy as a whole, with the result being the acceptance of the need to eliminate any difference in appearance between the priest and the layman in order to achieve greater pastoral effectiveness. Since the Church had just opened herself completely to the world, it was necessary that the priest did not appear as different from other men, once it was demonstrated that the best approach to them required him to be just one more in the crowd. Or, in other words, the most effective way of being a priest was none other than the priest not appearing to be or acting like a priest. After all, it was a way of turning rationality into something absurd, of sending Logic to the trash can.

The consequence of this hallucination is that Christianity was astonished at the appearance of the character of the layman priest. The ecclesial and pastoral world was filled with priests wearing open shirts and jeans; clerics in their sixties adopting the clothing style of fifteen-year-old kids; priests, especially young ones, trying to adopt mannerisms thought to facilitate their getting closer to the youth (call me Peter, not Father Peter!); etc. In short, to the immense and incalculable damage done to all the faithful must be added the ridiculous situation generally offered by the clergy of the Church to the world: by both the lower clergy and the high clergy.

(To Be Continued)

Fr. Alfonso Gálvez

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