I received an email from a reader whose initials are “F.M.” last night. My attempted reply was bounced back twice. In the hopes that he will see this on our site — and because I believe that the subject is of more general interest — I post my reply below after his email to me.
First, the email of F.M.:
Brother Andre, I cannot wait to stand before the beautiful iconostasis at the Holy Orthodox Church and formally renounce Bergoglio as “Pope”. Filthy Marxist scum. I pray every day his death be sudden, violent and unprovided for. I will his damnation! You can’t have it both ways my friend. If you believe atheists, marxists, and promoters of abortion and sodomy constitute a “magisterium” then you should be at the local Novus Ordo auditorium. It is sad, I went to the TLM for 30 years and my family has been Catholic for centuries. It is no longer a Christian entity. I must leave in order to have a Christian home. That I must do before God.
Here is my reply:
Dear Mr. M…,
Pax Christi. You will be abandoning not only Pope Francis, but Saint Thomas Aquinas, Saint Bonaventure, Saint Robert Bellarmine, and other saints too many to number here who accept the entire Deposit of Faith and who acknowledge that the so-called “Orthodox” Church is an objectively schismatic entity.
There is “communist scum” in the Orthodox Churches, too, and has been for a long time — especially in its largest communion, the Moscow Patriarchate. I wish them no evil. I pray for the fulfillment of Our Lady of Fatima’s prophesy that they will be consecrated and converted. (By the way, you’d be abandoning her, too: Our Lady of Fatima!)
Reading your uncharitable and profoundly unChristian sentiments toward a fellow baptized Christian (“I pray every day his death be sudden, violent and unprovided for. I will his damnation!”), I can see why you wish to go into schism and leave the One, Holy Catholic, and Apostolic Church. Schism is a sin against Charity (so say Saints Jerome, Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas), as it opposes the unity of the Church, which is a bond of Charity.
I will pray for you.
The temptation to abandon ship during a bad storm — in this case, the Bark of Peter, outside of which there is no salvation — is real. I understand how bad things are. But so to abandon ship is also self-destructive madness that gives no glory to God.
F.M. will learn, if he does indeed make the leap of perfidy he proposes, that the communion into which he is entering is itself quite fractured. He will also learn that many of the more “traditional” Orthodox are also that much more anti-Western and anti-Papal (regardless of who wears or doesn’t wear the Tiara).
He will also be accepting the chief “error of Russia” our Lady warned us would spread, schism from the Holy See of Peter.
Let us pray for him and for all others who have been so scandalized by the reckless Modernism that is causing so much destruction.
