A recent article on the website onepeterfive asserts that the financing of the Catholic clergy by the state in Italy “represents one of the most insidious… tools” for subjecting the Catholic Church to secular interests.  The author, Gaetano Masciullo, argues that the impoverishment of the Italian clergy, originating in the confiscation in the nineteenth century of the Papal States and the consequent loss of income, has resulted in a process which sees the Catholic clergy now deferring to the state and its secular mores in the twenty first.[1]

 

This assessment is, with respect, flawed:  it focuses on the material cause of the problems at the expense of their formal cause.

 

In the first place, it assumes that the country’s current bishops and priests are serving the Catholic faithful as they have ever done when, in the vast majority of cases, this is not the case.  Under the insidious influence of the pseudo-synod denominated “the Second Vatican Council” conducted under the auspices of John XXIII and Paul VI between 1962 and 1965, the modern Italian clergy are busily engaged in promoting another religion, modernist and masonic in character, which reduces Christ’s teachings to conformity with the world in line with the ‘teachings’ of that pseudo-synod.

 

One of the foundations of “Vatican II’s” departure from Catholic principle was its rejection of the Church’s teaching that the state, no less than the individual, has a duty to submit to the reign of Jesus Christ.  Masciullo adverts to this obliquely when he contrasts Pius XI’s denouncing of Mussolini’s imposition on the Church in 1931 with the step taken in 1984 where the apparatchiks in the Vatican under John Paul II, in line with “Vatican II’s” protocols, abandoned the concordat which acknowledged Italy’s recognition of Catholicism as the country’s religion.  

 

In furtherance of his program to enforce the “Council’s” undermining of Catholic principle, Paul VI imposed upon the Catholic faithful a novel rite of Mass, the novus ordo missae, whose ersatz liturgy served to inculcate in them Vatican II’s deference to the secular.  An inevitable effect of this anti-Catholic imposture over the fifty years since its introduction, has been substantial loss of attendance by the faithful at Sunday Mass, not to mention the condign loss of faith that accompanied it.

 

Equally inevitable has been substantial loss of income for the clergy, in Italy and elsewhere.  It is this abuse, not the submission of the clergy to the secular protocols dictated by the Italian state that has – to quote Masciullo again - “profoundly altered the freedom of the ecclesiastical hierarchy” in Italy.  Universally the faithful, clergy and laity, are quite capable of standing up to the secular state in support of the Catholic religion.  It is another matter entirely when episcopacy and clergy set out to embrace a false religion. 

 

As we have argued on this website the effect of the calculated endeavours by “the Council’s” bishops and their successors to force the Church established by Jesus Christ to conform to the mores of the world had an effect they did not foresee.[2]  They thought they had altered the focus of Christ’s Church.  But the Church is a divine thing; men cannot alter its focus or its divine end.  She remains the pillar and ground of truth.  What they did instead was to produce a counterfeit, an entity whose proponents have ever since pretended is identical with the Catholic Church.

 

This ‘Church’ – which we have labelled the Church of Vatican II, became confused with the Catholic Church, its operations intermingled with her operations, its teachings advanced as her teachings, its administration asserted to be her administration.

 

This entity, a human invention whose inspiration was the devil, is a fraud – schismatic - teaching a false religion.  The effect of its appearance after the “Council” was to render every Catholic bishop at once bishop of Christ’s Church and officer in this heterodox entity.  This submission had—continues to have—two effects upon each bishop.  It blinds him 1. to the reality that the demands of this ersatz Church are fundamentally at odds with those of the Catholic Church; and 2. that his fidelity to its fraudulent claims, its diabolical demands and poisonous programs, subverts the divine authority invested on him by Christ at his consecration. 

 

This is the reason why the Italian Church, “once a bastion of Catholic doctrine,” has become “transformed into an institution that avoids confrontation with secularist ideologies” and embraces “progressive narratives”.

 

 

Michael Baker

June 8^th, 2025—Pentecost Sunday