“The alternative is to vote for a person who is manipulated by the deep state, gravely compromised by scandals and corruption, who will do to the United States what Jorge Mario Bergoglio is doing to the Church,” he wrote, referring to the pope by his given name—and thereby not recognizing him as pope. Within hours Q posted each page of the letter.
Fr. Altman, enjoying his own victory tour, went on Church Militant and—nearly bouncing with excitement as he called Voris a personal hero—traced “the disaster that has erupted everywhere” back to the 2019 synod, when “a pagan idol gets waltzed right into the Catholic Church, and set before the altar of St. Peter.” Just weeks after that, he continued, the real start of the pandemic had come, at a global military gathering in Wuhan. “That’s not a conspiracy theory, that’s facts,” said Altman. “But all you need to know: An abomination is brought into the temple, and throughout salvation history, that happens, all hell does in fact break loose.”
It will get worse before it gets better, he added. “I foresee blood in the streets.”
APOCALYPSE NOW
“It’s a campaign made of kamikazes,” says Massimo Faggioli. “I don’t know if they’ll change the electoral math, but it’s part of where the Catholic Church is today, and they know that and they’re using it. And part of the calculus is, ‘We may lose this election, but we will continue to foment and feed this insurgency even after November 3.’… This is not only for the election; it’s a longer game.”
Mike Lewis founded Where Peter Is “to give a voice to those of us whose families, friendships, and communities have been damaged by the backlash” over Pope Francis. He’d watched the schism play out in his own family, as his mother became convinced, in her final years, that Francis was a heretic—a belief, Lewis says, she’d come to through EWTN and the right-wing Catholic press.
“When she became sick, I raised the subject a few more times, but it was clear that her views had become entrenched,” Lewis wrote at the liberal Catholic magazine America. “She even had a coffee mug with the word ‘Viganò’ written on it in capital letters. And every conversation we had about religion drifted into an argument about Pope Francis. Being unable to talk about God with the person who gave me my faith as she lay dying was agonizing.”
This was a story, he tells me, that he heard repeatedly from readers: people who wanted to know why their friends or pastors were suddenly “going nuts about idolatry” but couldn’t find rebuttal anywhere, because the responsible voices in church hierarchy think it best to ignore the fringe.
“You hear about these people who say, ‘I lost my mother to QAnon,’ but it’s happening in Catholic families as well,” says Lewis. “I’ve been one of the few Catholic moderates banging the drum, saying this is not a movement we can ignore. They are getting more and more radical, becoming more and more conspiratorial, and causing serious polarization. And if we don’t dial it back right now—” He stops. “I mean, I don’t even know if we can come back from it now.” Indeed, by the time Francis released a new encyclical earlier this month, sharply rebuking nationalism and appealing for universal fraternity, Catholic traditionalists could only respond that it would be “the ultimate Masonic document,” and that there was no unity they could have with him.
In 2017, the Italian Jesuit journal La Civiltà Cattolica, which is authorized by the pope, published an article charging that conservative American Catholics were getting lost in polarization, joining conservative evangelicals in “an ecumenism of hate” to promote “an apocalyptic geopolitics” that thrives on fear and uses theology to justify belligerence.
“Theirs is a prophetic formula: fight the threats to American Christian values and prepare for the imminent justice of an Armageddon, a final showdown between Good and Evil, between God and Satan. In this sense, every process (be it of peace, dialogue, etc.) collapses before the needs of the end, the final battle against the enemy,” wrote the authors, one of whom is a close associate of Pope Francis.
To Faggioli it was a stunning historical document, marking the drift of American Catholicism away from the global church.
“I think it’s the beginning of a trajectory that is likely, unfortunately, to make the Catholic Church in the U.S. what happened to white evangelicals over the last 40, 50 years—placing the deep feeling of their theological tradition at the service of nationalism and now ethnic–racial nationalism,” he says, citing the 1994 Mark Noll book, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, which describes a whittling down of Christian theology to an unrecognizable sliver—part self-help, part prosperity gospel, part permanent Republican surrogacy.
“I’m afraid that could be the path U.S. Catholicism will follow,” Faggioli says. “Which means Catholicism will no longer define itself by a series of texts, positions, and international connections, but on the basis of party affiliation and ideological adhesion to a libertarian view of the economy, where you deserve what you get and you get what you deserve.”
And so, beside a global Catholic Church, it would become something separate: isolated, angry, and alone, shouting accusations into the air.
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