This Time, We Must Have a True Shepherd at the Vatican

Studies had been coming in for decades. Catholics were being kidnapped and tortured to death by Muslim Turks. Religious people were being raped. Christian children were being sold into slavery or pressed into military assistance to take up arms against Western civilization. Christian holy places were desecrated, and the Christian travellers who were allowed to pass through occupied country en route to these websites were forced to pay more fees and taxes because of their trust.

To top it off, the brutal Muslim expansion into Christian Byzantium ( modern-day Turkey ) continued unabated. Orthodox Christians had repeatedly requested help from their Eastern European comrades to help ward off this abuse on all civilized, respectable, and valuable.

Having heard much, Pope Urban II decided to do something. He exhorted the leading nobility and kings of Europe to set aside their provincial, philosophical, and cultural differences and concentrate on the greater danger at hand. In 1095, in Clermont, France, he delivered a excited, stirring speech calling for a war, the first of many, to support Christendom and society itself against the forces of darkness and barbarism.  

The First Crusade was a spectacular achievement. Every war that followed was a mixture of limited victory and dismal failure. The Arab growth into Christendom continued until 1683, when the Next Siege of Vienna was broken and Germans began the gradual battle that finally drove the enemy out of Europe.

Taken in this light, the Knights can be seen as a defender actions that immediately caught the enemy off guard but was immediately forced onto the defense. But had Pope Urban II not acted when he did, who knows how much more quickly or completely Islam would have consumed Europe.

Fast forward to today, where much of the West’s leadership, both religious and secular, is engaged in not just ignoring this very same Islamic threat to the West, but is actively aiding and abetting our would-be enslavers. Other reporters and I have written at length about both the existential threat of Islam and our religious leaders ‘ cowardice in response to it. I have little to add to this beyond the observation that Pope Francis was the most vocal and influential religious voice to these suicidal exhortations.

Pope Francis didn’t like me. He insisted that I was a hate-filled bigot who cared nothing for the poor. He found fault with me for attending Latin Mass. He wagged his finger at me for being insufficiently concerned with” climate change” while he cut secret treaties with the world’s biggest polluter. He harbored a bitter animus towards Americans in particular, most likely the result of his immersion in pseudo-Marxist liberation theology. So, while I pray for the redemption of his soul and for his acceptance into God’s everlasting kingdom, I nonetheless long for real leadership at the Vatican.

Here are a few unpleasant occurrences that took place during his last few months of life:

• During Holy Week, over 50 Christian farmers were massacred in rural Nigeria.
• This past February, at least 70 Christian villagers were massacred in the Congo.
• Also in February, another “refugee” in Austria went on a stabbing rampage, injuring five and killing a 14-year-old boy. ( Mass stabbings in Europe have reached a point where the phenomenon has earned itself its own Wikipedia page. Congrats, Europe. )
• Anywhere between 800 and 1,800 Christians have been murdered in their homes in Syria.
• In Sudan, Christian girls are being gang raped at gunpoint while their families are being forced to watch.
• In England, the organized sex rings of Pakistani men targeting English girls continue unabated, the police being too busy arresting those who call attention to it on social media rather than arresting the perpetrators themselves.
• And here in America, the most recent “lone wolf” terrorist attack took the lives of 14 people on Bourbon Street in New Orleans.

These terrible attacks have three things in common:

1. None of the victims were collateral damage caught in the crossfire between two warring armies. Every one of these victims was specifically targeted because, and only because, they were Christian and/or Western;
2. Every single one of the perpetrators was Muslim, and;
3. Pope Francis had little, if anything, to say about any of this.

All eyes are now on the College of Cardinals, who, in the next few weeks, will give us our next pope. We will know soon enough whether their priority is to get the Church back on track or if they double down on civilizational suicide.

Now, whenever I write an article regarding Christianity, the papacy, or whatnot, I get inevitable comments criticizing this denomination or that branch, this synod or that council, this doctrine or that encyclical, whether this side is right for lighting the candle on Monday or that side is wrong for ringing the bells on Tuesday, blah blah blah.

Can you please just stop? Can you not see there’s a far more dire threat at hand than whether or not you personally agree with the other sect’s hierarchical structure? A significant and assertive number of the world’s billion Muslims are on a divine mission to exterminate us, all of us, forever. They don’t make distinctions between Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox, or anyone else.

Do you want to refight the Thirty Years ‘ War? Or can you relax a bit on pointing out what you consider to be the flaws in other Christian denominations to notice that we’re currently in a Fourteen Hundred Years ‘ War, and that this war ends only one of two ways?

In secular terms, you’re behaving like the congressional Republicans who keep torpedoing Trump’s agenda by throwing hissy fits about single budgetary line items, while all the while the Democrats chortle at our petty infighting, unable to believe their luck at how short-sighted we’re acting while we tenuously hold the slightest of advantages.

We can argue about doctrinal and hierarchical differences later. But for better or worse, the pope holds more authority and his words carry more weight for the whole of Christendom than, let’s say, the Presbyterian General Assembly or the elders of an Amish sect in southern Indiana. That’s not meant to be offensive; it’s simply the situation we find ourselves in. And for that reason, both Catholics and non-Catholics have cause for concern regarding who the next pope will be.

Related: John Roberts Needs to Do His Job Already

Simply put, Christendom cannot afford another woke pope. We need another Urban II, not Joe Biden in a tiara. Christians are not bigots for wanting to protect our families and communities from a sociopathic death cult. I’m not saying the next pope needs to lead armies. I’m saying the next pope needs to advocate for us. And for that to happen, the cardinals who elect him need to understand this as well.

If they don’t, there won’t be a schism. There won’t be any councils or synods of any significance for the laity. There will simply be an acceleration of people leaving churches of every denomination. It will be quiet. It will be uneventful. The pews of churches across the West will simply lie empty, as they already do in all of Europe and in much of America. And the rise of colonialist Islam will continue.

Congregants don’t follow leaders who have no faith in themselves, their congregants, or their own religion. The College of Cardinals has a choice. It can elevate to the papacy another willing camp guard who openly colludes with the forces of oppression. Or it can elevate to the papacy a true shepherd who protects the flock.

It is not hyperbole to state that Christendom is in the most perilous position it has been for centuries. Europe is almost overrun. In the third world, Christians are murdered en masse with impunity. We cannot afford another two decades of wokeness from our religious leaders. If the Cardinals choose wisely, other denominations would follow suit. If they choose poorly, Christians will continue to die, as will civilization along with them.

Let’s pray they choose wisely.

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