Quite an indictment of this papacy

His legacy of vicious hostility is a gift that keeps on giving.

Whatever he expected to accomplish with his divisive rhetoric, the fifty years of the manipulative, covert operation of building a counterfeit church inside of the Mystical Body of Christ is now out in the open.

This priest's op-ed brings to light the unexpected reality the counterfeiters are facing: They are the minority and the majority has no intention of choosing allegiance to mammon over God.

Only the manipulations of the Synod and its results made it possible for these innovations to make their way into the pope’s exhortation. But the manipulators obviously thought that blind obedience would follow once the pope had spoken.

It didn’t. And what this grand silence really bespeaks, therefore, is collegiality in the true sense of that term. It seems the bishops of the world have great respect for the papal office and are hesitant to make any public display of disagreement that might embarrass the pope and undermine his office. A friend told me it was sort of like the sons of Noah covering the nakedness of their drunken father so that he would not be embarrassed.

Nonetheless, it’s simply a fact that the vast majority of bishops have not signed on to the interpretation of the Germans, the Argentineans, or the Maltese bishops. Nor have they given a rousing support to the “official” interpretation of Vienna’s Cardinal Schönborn.

One of the ecclesiological purposes for calling Vatican II was to establish a certain re-balancing of the teaching on papal primacy in Vatican I. This balancing was, in fact, the teaching on collegiality, the close official relationship of all the bishops of the world to the pope, and the importance of collegiality in the exercise of the papal prerogatives.

The way this collegiality is exercised is complex. For instance, synods are a certain exercise of collegiality, but they do not exhaust the ways in which collegiality can take place.

We’ve now learned that one exercise of collegiality, perhaps not anticipated at that Council, may well occur through silence in the face of a possible case of papal overreach.

And they really don't know the half of it. Because if they did, they'd realize they stand a better chance of asking us to pledge our allegiance to a pedophile ring.