Two recent statements from Bishop Joseph Strickland highlight the opportunities and challenges facing serious Catholics today. In his reflections on the 2024 elections, Bishop Strickland encouraged Catholics to take advantage of the opportunity to “bring the light of Christ more powerfully to the world”:
We all need to reform our lives and grow closer to the Lord, but we must embrace this challenge, this opportunity, as people of faith. Let us not relax, but instead become more vigorous, more joyful, more powerfully committed to the truth that we know that flows from the Sacred Heart of Jesus Christ. Let us do the work I believe we’re called to as a nation where we are free to proclaim God – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – and live in godly ways, if only we will choose to. Let us use this opportunity to bring the light of Christ more powerfully to the world and to pray for the Church and her leaders to once again be those vigorous and strong voices of the apostles proclaiming Jesus Christ.
Many of us who were grateful for having avoided an anti-Catholic Harris presidency saw the comparatively favorable results of the 2024 election as a call to return thanks to God by doing as Bishop Strickland encouraged us to do. If we can truly spread the Catholic Faith throughout society, then we will honor God, combat evil, and ultimately make it more likely that future voters and politicians will favor policies that correspond with Natural Law and Divine Law.
Less than two weeks after the election, Bishop Strickland put his words into action as only a successor of the Apostles can do authoritatively, by calling out his fellow bishops for their silence in the face of the Synod on Synodality:
Do you not know that Our Lord will send forth His avenging angels to heap coals of fire upon the heads of those who were called to be His apostles and who have not guarded what He has given unto them? And yet almost all of you, my brothers, stood by silently watching as the Synod on Synodality took place, an abomination constructed not to guard the Deposit of Faith but to dismantle it, and yet few were the cries heard from you – men who should be willing to die for Christ and His Church.
Bishop Strickland’s description of the Synod on Synodality as “an abomination constructed not to guard the Deposit of Faith but to dismantle it” probably could not have been more accurate. Not only that, but the Synodal assault on the Catholic Church has taken place in the open over the past three years, with no attempt to disguise the anti-Catholic objective. If ever there was cause for the bishops to speak out, it has been Francis’s construction of the unholy Synodal Church.
These two statements from Bishop Strickland underscore a challenge that is central to the spiritual battle that rages around the world: serious Catholics must cooperate with God’s grace to spread the true Faith at the same time that the majority of bishops and priests work in the opposite direction. This challenge may be greater today than in the past, but we can see the core conflict is one that has long existed: it is the conflict between those who genuinely seek to follow the Catholic Faith in its entirety, and those who identify as Catholic but follow only those teachings that fit their personal desires.
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