The rip or tear within the ecclesial fabric already happened over the past 60 or 70 years. It just became fully-open in 2013.
This is a long one, but I think it’s worth the read. Before getting into the recent news in the Vatican, we need to go through a few definitions. Apostasy is the denial of Christ by a person who once claimed to be Christian. Heresy is the denial of one or several dogmas of the Catholic Church. Schism is to break ties with the Pope in Rome and/or the Holy See.
However, the last definition requires some qualification. A Catholic cannot be called “a schismatic” for failure to join his heart and mind to a heretic. A Christian cannot be called “a schismatic” for failure to unite to a heretic.
When St. Catherine of Siena saw that the Cardinals chose an obvious antipope to call “the Pope in Rome,” she wrote them these exact words, among many others: “That evil which you have in yourselves you wish to infect us with, withdrawing us from obedience to Christ on earth, and leading us into obedience to antichrist, a member of the devil, as you are too, so long as you shall abide in this heresy.”
As far as the man the Cardinals labeled “the Pope,” well, she called him “an antichrist.” And she accused the Cardinals of leading the entire Catholic world into obedience to that very antichrist who she insisted was an anti-pope. The Catholic Church eventually sided with her.
But we don’t have a St. Catherine of Siena now, nor do we have a St. Bernard of Clairvaux to name for us who is an antipope. Therefore, schism in 2025 is harder to define. I think it’s now safer to say that the only schism dangerous to one’s soul today would be refraining from union with Eternal Rome as Archbishop Lefebvre labeled it. There is no chance that failure to unify with an apostate-Vatican could be dangerous to one’s soul.
Continue reading at Padre Peregrino