A VERY ABUSIVE FATHER, AND THE ABUSED CHILDREN

I can remain silent no longer.

Imagine for a moment a large family with beautiful children, a loving mother, but a terrible and abusive father. The father is drunk with his own power and status as head of the household, and is constantly testing the loyalty and obedience of his family with tasks and chores that seem tedious, or unnecessary, or even immoral or irrational. When the objection is raised by his children that some of the tasks fly in the face of common morality, he reminds them that God has placed him in authority over them, and to disobey his authority is to rend the family asunder, and rending any family asunder is one of the most grievous things any son or daughter can do.

But if your father came home from work in a drunken fury of power, and demanded that you go and steal from a neighbor, or beat a helpless animal, or do any other immoral thing, because he invoked his authority from God, and demanded you do it as an “obedience” out of loyalty to him, would you do it? Or would you consider him an abusive father? Would you want his children to remain in such a situation? Or would you sympathize with them in resisting a tyranny that had ceased to be a genuine father?

After several such instances have occurred, the father reminds his bruised children – for he has beaten them often as punishments for disobedience or questioning the tasks he assigns – that they have subscribed promises to be obedient in all things to him, not deviating in seemingly the slightest or most trivial detail. Indeed, he has written out these promises, and forced his children to sign their names to these documents, lest again they demonstrate their disobedient spirit by not signing them. He reminds them that according to the ideas of his paternal ancester Anselm, that God the Father Himself poured out all His righteous rage on His Own Son because the Son took on all the human disobedience and sin. “See?” the father says, “the pattern is there in God Himself, so we must follow that example; you must follow that example of unquestioning obedience.” The abusive father is merely copying the abuse he sees as the pattern of God’s own household, while ignoring the fact that that view itself arose on his own watch; it was never a part of his family’s ancient belief. When the children cry out to their abusive father that their grandfather and great grandfathers did not demand such irrational and immoral obediences, this is taken by the abusive father as further proof of their rebellious and family-rending spirit.

So, to test the family further, the abusive father conceives of a most diabolical test for his children. Since his authority is from God Himself and therefore unquestionable and irreformable, it must – he reasons – act as a kind of guarantee that no matter what he says or does, he can never really require any immoral act, for anything that he could require has the authority of God behind it, and thus makes it automatically acceptable. He therefore demanded loyalty from all his family when he decided to allow his family’s most treasured memories and customs to be desecrated by welcoming people of strange and alien faith and practice into his household as honored guests, and honored their gods and venerated the symbols and icons of their faith while those of his own household were not only neglected, but positively shunned.

When his family protested this newest measure, he ordered them to be obedient, to make the sacrifice of their intellect and conscience on the altar of his authority, and to remain silent.

When questioned even further about these demands for obedience by some of the older children, he took the final step, and threw those members of his own family out of the household, because they kept to their old ways, and refused the new ones, all while he was welcoming those of alien faith and going out of his way to fawn over them and shower them with his praise. That, too, is part of the millennium-long pattern of abuse: being told one day that something is wrong, or not permitted, but then, a little later, that it’s now ok. Yesterday it was wrong to worship the devil, or Pachamama. Today it’s ok, because he’s the head of the family, and because he said so.

Being a real father is about more than just biological, legal, or juridical relationships. Being a father means not provoking one’s children to wrath by endless tests and demands which are constantly shifting and changing because the only real measure of being part of the family, on this sick and twisted view, is obedience to its sick and twisted head. It means being loyal to the family by being within it, and not above it, by honoring and cherishing its customs, not abolishing them and replacing them with something sterile and ugly, and then demanding everyone celebrate that ugliness and sterility out of obedience.

Leo XIV and the Vatican, by excommunicating its own traditional faithful, have shown, once again, why the Papacy and its claims are utterly false, spurious, schismatic, heretical, and why it is still excommunicate. Leo XIV has demonstrated again why the Reformation – whatever one may think of its own ultimate issues – happened. He has re-enacted and revisited a millennium-long pattern of abusive behavior and destruction upon his own church, upon his own flock, upon the children that God in His mercy, gave him, that shows again why the papacy is not the “chair of unity” it claims to be, but merely an exhibit of the devil’s own limitless hubris locked within its own spurious claims, unable to repent or reverse course, because that would endanger its alleged infallibility and authority. An infallible and irreformable authority that can today be traditional, can tomorrow be modernist, because both are mere manifestations of a claim of hubris.

You, Leo, have shown why so many churches are struggling, and dying. They are dying because the children have been abused and abandoned, and because the fathers and shepherds are not fathers and shepherds loyal to their own family customs, but revolutionary bureaucrats in love with the ways of power, and jealous of everyone else’s family, and who are willing to use the symbols of tradition in the service of its abandonment. The somersaulting hypocrisy is hard to believe, yet it is real, for on the one hand with all the blithering blather about “Synods on Synodality” and acknowledgements that local churches chose their own bishops without papal approval, you turn around and deny one of your own communities the right to do so. You acknowledge the validity of Orthodox sacraments, even while saying we are in schism from you, while pronouncing those of your own faithful traditionalists invalid! I am breathless, Leo, at your diabolical, sick, twisted and hypocritical hubris, and my heart truly, truly, and deeply goes out to your victims, even though I know they would be vehemently disagreed with me on so many things.

Shame upon you, Robert Francis Prevost. Shame on you, and all your predecessors unto Leo IX, for inflicting your abuses, your crusades, your inquisitions, your indults, taxes, promises, patrimonies, your wars, your own departures from the ancient ecumenical faith with the endless obfuscations, caveats, hedges, explanations, theories of dogmatic "development"  and feigned “repentences” and ecumenical stunts of your office – upon your own children.

No, Mr. Prevost. One of your predecessors in hubris complained that the smoke of the anti-Christ had entered your church. Indeed, it has. And that smoke is the claims of your office, and all the damage those claims have wrought throughout the last millennium. They have merely claimed their latest victims.