Bishop Strickland names the year the Church stopped defending itself against modernism — and it is not the year most Catholics blame.

The Oath Against Modernism was abolished in 1967. Every father of the Second Vatican Council had taken it, and it remained in force the entire time the Council was in session. Within a few years the liturgy was unraveling. Bishop Joseph Strickland argues those facts are not unrelated — that what we are living through came not from the Council itself, but from what was quietly let go two years after it closed.

In this conversation he walks through Pope St. Pius X's warning in Pascendi Dominici Gregis (1907) that modernism is "the synthesis of all heresies," and why an oath almost no living priest has taken still describes our moment with uncomfortable precision. We get into synodality as a modernist instrument, the collapse of belief in the Real Presence, the warnings given at Quito to Mother Mariana, and why Traditionis Custodes was a strategic mistake as well as a pastoral one.

Then the harder half. Bishop Strickland turns the question back on us: how do Catholics who are right about the crisis keep from losing charity in the middle of it? "Think about that person who absolutely drives you up the wall — and remember that God loves them unfathomably." Truth without charity is not Catholic. Neither is charity without truth. We close where Our Lord does — with loving your enemies, and why wishing hell on anyone endangers your own soul.

"I am the way, and the truth, and the life." — John 14:6
"Love your enemies: do good to them that hate you." — Matthew 5:44
"Doing the truth in charity, we may in all things grow up in him." — Ephesians 4:15

CHAPTERS
00:00 The year they cancelled the oath
01:10 Why modernism is still the synthesis of all heresies
03:30 Every father of Vatican II took the oath
06:00 Synodality, or a religion revealed by God?
08:00 The greatest upheaval in the Church's history
10:10 Our Lady of Good Success: blasphemy, heresy, impurity
12:50 Traditionis Custodes was the wrong move
15:20 Truth AND charity: the blind spot
18:00 It is not AI, it is JC
19:50 Never wish hell on anyone

REFERENCED IN THIS EPISODE
Pascendi Dominici Gregis — Pope St. Pius X, 1907
Lamentabili Sane — Holy Office, 1907
Sacrorum Antistitum, the Oath Against Modernism — Pope St. Pius X, 1910
Our Lady of Good Success — revelations to Mother Mariana de Jesus Torres, Quito

BISHOP JOSEPH STRICKLAND
New podcast, The Synthesis of All Heresies: https://pillarsoffaith.net

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