Fr. John Mary addresses the question of obedience to God vs. obedience to man.

WE MUST OBEY GOD

 We know that many people are concerned that the Mission of Divine Mercy is being disobedient to our Archbishop in publishing these Messages. And that our “disobedience” discredits these Messages.

That is a very legitimate concern.

The key question is:  Are we obeying God?

We should always obey God. And normally, we should obey legitimate human authorities—but only in those cases where human authorities are acting in accord with God’s law. There are occasions, as the Church has clearly taught, when we are called to obey God even though it means disobeying human authorities.[1] We see many examples in the life of Our Lord Himself as we will discuss below.

Is our situation one of those occasions?

We are making three claims that may be shocking to many:

1. That these Messages are coming from God. They are prophetic Messages.
2. That the Church is facing an extreme crisis, beyond any she has faced before, because, as a Message we recently published says “the usurper [is sitting] on the chair of My Peter—he who is carrying out the Great Treason.”[2]This extreme crisis calls for extreme measures.
3. Given this extreme crisis, we are obeying God in publishing these messages, even without our Archbishop’s permission.

Let us look more carefully at these three points.

Before we go further, we want to say that we are neither theologians, nor canonists, nor Church historians. But neither were the prophets nor the Apostles.[3] We are encouraged that Our Lord Himself thanked His Father for having revealed to little ones what He had hidden from the wise and learned.[4] So, this is not a treatise but our attempt to explain the reasoning, after much prayer and study, which has led us to make this decision.

Now, the three points.

1. Messages from God

We believe that God Himself is revealing these Messages to a member of our community, through what is called interior locution, in which a person perceives interiorly distinct words. That is a grace of prophecy, and, as Scripture says, “no prophecy ever came by the impulse of man, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God” (2 Pt 1:20).

We understand that for many this statement will be hard to believe. As we said in the introduction that we published with the release of the first Message,[5] we cannot prove that these Messages are from God, but such was also often the case with His prophets.

But if these messages are true, two key conclusions follow:

First, that what is expressed in the Messages is not based on human opinions or evidence, but on God’s special revelation.[6]

Second, that the mission to proclaim it is coming directly from God. In prophecy, it is God Himself Who chooses His messenger and gives him the mission to share it. The authority comes directly from God.

There are many examples of this in the Old Testament, when the prophets had to denounce the corruption of the shepherds of Israel: the kings and priests. For example, when the Lord says to Ezekiel, “prophesy against the shepherds of Israel” (Ez 24:2), this command obviously does not come to him from the authorities or from his own human analysis—it comes directly from God.

We especially see such examples in the life of Jesus Himself. For instance, when the Gospel says:

[T]he chief priests and the scribes with the elders came up and said to him, “Tell us by what authority you do these things, or who it is that gave you this authority.” He answered them, “I also will ask you a question; now tell me, was the baptism of John from heaven or from men?” (Lk 20:1-4)

They did not want to admit that His authority, as did John’s, came directly from Heaven.

Cardinal Ratzinger

Speaking about the role of prophecy, Cardinal Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI, stated:

[P]rophecy is eminently the place God reserves for Himself to intervene personally and anew each time, taking the initiative…. [T]hrough charisms, [He] reserves for himself the right to intervene directly in the Church to awaken it, warn it, promote it and sanctify it.[7]

The Cardinal states categorically that God reserves the right to intervene directly, rather than through the hierarchy, in our world and in His Church, particularly in times of crisis.

God speaks through His prophets; but Jesus also warns against false prophets. So obviously discernment is needed. That is the role of the Shepherds of the Church. Which begs the question: shouldn’t we be submitting these Messages to their judgment prior to sharing them with the world?

Normally, yes.

But these are not normal times. That leads us to the second point.

2. Unprecedented Crisis

For many people, the situation in the Church seems more or less normal. Mass takes place in their parish on Sunday. Their children can be baptized, their adult children married, and their grandparents buried. Everything appears… normal. To speak of a great crisis in the Church sounds puzzling, perhaps even shocking. But that is precisely one of the problems that can precipitate a crisis: people are unaware. Thus, Our Lord uses the example of the days of Noah when people were unaware of the chastisement that was coming until the flood began.[8] The prophets often had to   awaken people to the corruption that had become “normal.”

Warnings

Already, in 1972, Pope St. Paul VI famously warned that “from some crack the smoke of Satan has entered the Temple of God,” and that the Church was experiencing “days of clouds, of storms, of darkness, of searching, of uncertainty.”[9]

And in 1976, the future Pope St. John Paul II said:

We are now standing in the face of the greatest historical confrontation humanity has gone through. I do not think that wide circles of the American society or wide circles of the Christian community realize this fully. We are now facing the final confrontation between the Church and the anti-Church, of the Gospel and the anti-Gospel. This confrontation lies within the plans of divine providence. It is a trial which the whole Church… must take up.[10]

Sadly, we have come to believe, and these Messages confirm that the “smoke of Satan has entered the Temple of God.” The “confrontation between the Church and the anti-Church” has reached a critical stage.

Prophecies

Many credible prophecies, beginning in Scripture and continuing up to our time, have spoken of times of extreme tribulation and distress, of confusion and evil for the Church, even at the very highest levels.[11]  One striking example is from Don Stefano Gobbi whose book “Our Lady Speaks to Her Beloved Priests” has the imprimatur and has been promoted by many bishops.  In it, he claims our Blessed Mother spoke to him of the Beast like a Lamb described in chapter 13 of the Book of Revelation[12] and how it relates to the spirit of freemasonry that has infiltrated the Church.  We are including this in an appendix.

Current Message

Now, we have received Messages from the Lord that speak to an unprecedented crisis in the Church.

In the Message titled Time to Join My Army—A Call to Priests and Bishops that was received between February 22 and 26, 2024, the Lord, speaking to Bishops states,

You have not only let the smoke of Satan infiltrate into My Sanctuary; but you have allowed a whole army of demons to take your places.

And you have allowed the usurper to sit on the chair of My Peter—he who is carrying out the Great Treason that will leave My Church desolate….

You have not recognized the wolves that surround you.  You have received them as true shepherds.  And instead of speaking only My Words, My Truth, you have let them howl and you have begun to imitate them as well.

From this statement and others of a similar nature that we’ve received, the terrible conclusion seems clear: Bergoglio is exercising illegitimate authority and acting as the enemy of Christ and His Church.

What about Jesus’s words to Peter?  He promised that the gates of Hell would not prevail against the Church founded on Peter (Mt 16:18).  However, that does not mean:

• We will never have evil popes;[13]
• The Church will never be without a pope for extended periods;[14]
• There will never be extended times where there is great confusion about who the pope is, including the presence of anti-popes.[15]

The history of the Church has seen all of these happenings.  Nor does it mean, that in a final trial, Hell will not seem to triumph, for a brief time, over the Church, as it seemed to triumph for a moment when Jesus was crucified and died.

What it does mean is that, despite these problems with the papacy, and despite all attacks from without and corruption and betrayal from within, Christ’s Church, His Mystical Body, will triumph.[16]

Many will find the conclusion that Bergoglio is a usurper and the enemy of the Church shocking. But is it really?

For those who have been paying attention, we don’t think so. Even without prophetic messages, there have been plenty of warning signs of the profound problems in the Church in general and the papacy in particular.

Human Evidence

Many commentators have pointed out that for centuries enemies of the Church have worked patiently to infiltrate her with the goal of subverting and destroying her faith, the Deposit of Faith given her by Our Lord Jesus Christ.[17] Their efforts have seen some bad men placed in powerful positions in the hierarchy, including bishops, cardinals, and members of the Curia. Such infiltrators have already done great damage. Now, however, they have “have allowed the usurper to sit on the chair of My Peter.” An unprecedented attack on the Church.

These infiltrators are not alone, but working in league with powerful secular elites for purposes that are profoundly hostile to Our Lord and His Church.

Regarding the legitimacy of Bergoglio’s papacy, serious questions have been raised by individuals who are much more competent in this area than we are.[18] We are not pretending to resolve here from a human standpoint all those difficult questions, but we are trying to transmit the crucial point made by the Lord in His Messages to us. We do believe that whatever scholars and canonists may say is the official or technical status of the man currently occupying the papacy, that man is a usurper and leading the most dangerous attack the Church has ever faced.

This attack is all the more dangerous because it is subtle and camouflaged, and many Catholics are completely unaware of it.

Many prelates, however, have spoken out about the great harm Bergoglio and his actions have done to the Church, among them, Cardinals Burke, Caffarra, Muller, Pell, Sarah and Zen; Archbishops Aguer, Chaput, Lenga and Vigano; Bishops Gracida, Mutsaerts, Schneider, and Strickland, to name a few. The late Cardinal Pell, for example, writing under the pseudonym Demos, stated, “Commentators of every school… agree that this pontificate is a disaster in many or most respects; a catastrophe.”[19] Many thoughtful priests and lay commentators have also spoken out as well. The noted English philosopher, John Rist, for example, speaking of the Bergoglian crisis, said,

You’ve got to go back to the Arian controversy to find something comparable. But I think that, in terms of the damage that it now might cause, what might happen to the Church in the future, this is going to cause more trouble, more than anything else we’ve seen before.[20]

The evidence of the many ways that Bergoglio has harmed the Church—ranging from the eroding of the integrity of the Sacraments and the Church’s teaching on faith and morals, to the ostracizing of traditionalist Catholics, to the tragic betrayal of the Chinese Catholic faithful—is abundant and far too long to be listed here, but please note that we have posted on our website two resource lists that provide links to works by many of the prelates listed above as well as other commentators. I encourage you to have a look at them.

But just to take one recent example, there is the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith’s declaration Fiducia Supplicans to which so many bishops and bishop conferences have shown outright opposition. Not simply questioning it, butrefusing to comply with its authorization of blessings for people in sinful relationships presenting as a “couple.” Such publicly declared opposition to an apparently papal-approved teaching from large sectors of the episcopate seems unprecedented in modern Church history. It is but one of many instances in which Bergoglio’s actions, instead of providing clarity and light, have sown confusion and harm.

That harm has been grievous. Scripture teaches us, “You will know them by their fruits… every sound tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears evil fruit.” (Mt 7:16-17). The fruits of the past ten years have produced profound error, division, and confusion, and in the process have betrayed and subverted two thousand years of Church teaching.

There have been immoral popes before. But never an apparent one, a usurper, who was part of a powerful, intentionaleffort to corrupt our Catholic Faith and destroy the Church.

And a bad pope whose life is clearly scandalous is less dangerous than one who is held up by much of the media as a model of compassion and simplicity.

To reiterate, the human evidence for the damage done by Bergoglio is abundant, and again we would encourage you to peruse the sources we have listed for a greater understanding of that evidence.

But fundamentally it is not human evidence that persuades us, but the Lord’s prophetic testimony.

Given that, how then are we called to respond?

Extraordinary Measures Called for in Time of Crisis

Normal times call for normal responses. But we repeat—these are not normal times.

St. Thomas Aquinas teaches that a law which in ordinary circumstances is good, can at times cause great harm when unthinkingly obeyed in a crisis. Thus, the speed limit is a good law, but when a person’s life is at stake, I may be obliged to break it. St. Thomas states, “[In] these … cases it is bad to follow the law, and it is good to set aside the letter of the law and to follow the dictates of justice and the common good.”[21]

In these cases, we must follow a higher law.

This is something which the Church’s canon law itself asserts. The most important canon in the Church, Canon 1752, is the measure by which all other canon laws are to be understood and implemented. It states that the supreme law in the Church is the salvation of souls.[22]  Therefore, in extraordinary circumstances, sometimes good, but lesser laws, may have to give way to this supreme law.

Arian Crisis

The Arian Crisis of the fourth century provides a number of famous examples of the need to set aside lower laws in a time of crisis. As St. John Henry Cardinal Newman has explained, at that time a majority of the world’s bishops and even the pope were compromised with the heretical teaching that Jesus was not truly God.[23] Because of the rampant confusion in the Church, good Catholics had to do things which in ordinary times would have been wrong, but which in this crisis were holy and devout.

Speaking to how dire the situation had become, St. Basil said, “the better laity shun the churches as schools of impiety; and lift their hands in the deserts with sighs and tears to their Lord in heaven.”[24]

St. Athanasius was excommunicated by hundreds of bishops, and even the pope, because he held to the belief that Jesus was truly God. But he continued to preach, celebrate the sacraments, and ordain priests even though he did not have permission.[25]  These were things he would never have done in ordinary times, but in that time of crisis he had to obey the higher law. And he who was once considered disobedient, is now called Saint, Doctor, the Great.

As these examples so clearly indicate, there have been exceptional times in history when members of the faithful have had to withdraw obedience from human authorities for a time—due to extraordinary circumstances—in order to obey God faithfully. We see that this may be necessary for us also in this time of extreme crisis.

If it is true that a usurper, intending to subvert the faith, is on the throne of Peter, are we to obey him and those under his dominion when they command unjust actions?

3.  Obedience to God and to Human Authorities

We should always obey God. That is absolute. Our Lord Jesus gives us the perfect example.

As to human authorities, obedience is right and just when their laws are in harmony with God’s law. But when human law conflicts with God’s law, St. Thomas Aquinas says, “laws of this kind must nowise be observed, because, as stated in Acts 5:29, ‘we ought to obey God rather than man.’”^[26]

But don’t the saints show us heroic examples of obedience to what seem unjust orders? And, for example, didn’t the Lord commend St. Faustina for obeying her superior rather than what she had sensed interiorly from Him?[27]

Certainly. That is normal and good in normal times. But these times are different.

When superiors are actively committing or commanding grave evil, one is not obliged to obey them.

We don’t believe our Archbishop intends to do evil. We believe he is good-hearted. But he is enthusiastically following Bergoglio, whom we do believe is trying to subvert the Church.

Legitimate Disobedience to Human Authorities

We see this distinction clearly in the example of Our Lord Himself.  He was normally obedient to legitimate human authorities.  But sometimes there was a conflict between obeying them and being obedient to the Father.  And, in these cases, He was always obedient to His Father, even if it meant disobeying human authorities.

No human authorities were more worthy of obedience than His Blessed Mother and St. Joseph. And normally, He “was subject to them.”  But, at twelve years old, He had to disobey them to obey His Father, and thus He remained in the Temple without notifying His parents.

And when the time came for His public life, Jesus quickly and often came into conflict with the religious leaders of His people, leaders who had become corrupted.  For instance, when He cleansed the Temple, or when He was told not to heal on the sabbath, or to forgive sins, or to preach in the Temple, or to preach in His Father’s name. In all these instances, Jesus obeyed God rather than man. And these leaders responded by eventually condemning Him.

Apostles With the Sanhedrin

Consider the Apostles when they were imprisoned and brought before the Sanhedrin.

And when they had brought them, they set them before the council. And the high priest questioned them, saying, “We strictly charged you not to teach in this name, yet here you have filled Jerusalem with your teaching and you intend to bring this man’s blood upon us.” But Peter and the apostles answered, “We must obey God rather than men. (Acts 5:27-29)

Joan of Arc

And then there is St. Joan of Arc. Listening to voices from Heaven, she had heroically led an army. When under trial in an ecclesiastical tribunal, she was

asked whether she would submit to the Church if the Church Militant said that her revelations were false and devilish things, superstitious and evil. She answered that she would submit to Our Lord, whose bidding she will ever perform, it would be impossible for her to do other than what she declares she has done at God’s bidding. If the Church Militant told her to do otherwise, she would submit to none other than Our Lord, whose good bidding she always performed.^[28]

In other words, even in the face of lethal opposition from Church authorities, Joan held fast to what she knew to be true—obedience to God’s authentic calling must come first.

Pope Leo XIII

Unfortunately, it is possible for the pastors not to represent Christ faithfully and even to deliberately oppose Him. When that is the case we must follow the advice of Pope Leo XIII, who, summarizing St. Thomas teaching, says:

But where the power to command is wanting, or where a law is enacted contrary to reason, or to the eternal law, or to some ordinance of God, obedience is unlawful, lest, while obeying man, we become disobedient to God.[29]

Conclusion

In summary, we must always obey God.

Normally, obeying God includes obeying the authorities of the Church.

But we are living in an unprecedented crisis. God is telling us that the Throne of Peter is occupied by a usurper, and we should not submit to him nor those who are carrying out his unjust designs.

Yet God has not abandoned us. He is giving us special, direct guidance to lead us through this terrible, but temporary trial. And we believe that God is asking us to speak the Truth, the words He is giving us, even without human ecclesiastical permission.

To those who suggest we are leaving the Church or being schismatic, we can only reply with an emphatic NO. We are defending Christ’s Church and her Deposit of Faith. We love and defend the papacy, which is why Bergoglio’s usurpation is so painful. It is those who willfully sow confusion and disorder and subvert the Deposit of Faith that have—worse than leaving the Church—betrayed the Church.

It is painful for our quiet community now to be seen as divisive and disobedient. We think of the prophet Jeremiah’s suffering at having to deliver harsh, unpopular words.[30] But we do so because we are trying to be faithful to the Lord.

Each person must choose to be faithful to Our Lord or to the world. We believe in these coming times that that choice will become acutely stark.

We ask for your prayers. If we are wrong, to bring us back to the truth. If we are right, to have the strength to be faithful.

We are praying for all of you. We entrust ourselves and all of you to the Immaculate Heart of the Holy Mother of God, our Mother, begging that this painful time of division in the Church may soon be healed.

Faith, so that God can act.

Jesus, we trust in You!  Amen.

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[1] Cf. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd Revised & enlarged edition (Vatican City : Washington, DC: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2000) 1902-1903. Also cf. Code of Canon Law, C. 212 §1.

[2] 2024-02-22 and 26 @GRAL Hour to Join His army – A Call to Priests and Bishops.

[3] Now when they saw the boldness of Peter and John, and perceived that they were uneducated, common men, they wondered; and they recognized that they had been with Jesus. Acts 4:13

[4] Lk 10:21.

[5] The introduction is here: https://missionofdivinemercy.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/2024-02-28-Announcement-Listening-to-the-Lord.pdf

The first Message, A Call to All the Children of God, is here: https://missionofdivinemercy.org/a-call-to-all-the-children-of-god/

[6] The term “private revelation” is often used today, but that term is problematic.

[7] Ratzinger, “Das Problem der Christlichen Prophetie,” 181. Cited in: Hvidt, Niels Christian. Christian Prophecy: The Post-Biblical Tradition. 1st edition. Oxford University Press, USA, 2007, 80.

[8] Mt. 24:38-39.

[9] Pope Paul VI, Homily on the IX anniversary of His Coronation as Pope (Solemnity of Sts. Peter and Paul, June 29, 1972).

[10] Cardinal Karol Wojtyla (John Paul II), reprinted November 9, 1978, issue of The Wall Street Journal from a 1976 speech to the American bishops.

[11] To name only a few: in Scripture, we have the examples of Daniel, St. Paul and St. John; the teachings of numerous Fathers of the Church are summarized and interpreted by Saint and Doctor Robert Bellarmine in his book on the Antichrist, notably Saint and Doctor Irenaeus, disciple of St. John through St. Polycarpe; among medieval saints, Saint and Doctor Hildegard received particularly striking revelations; and in the modern age we have the approved Marian apparitions of our Lady of Good Success, LaSalette, Fatima, and Akita and the teaching and revelations of many saints such as Ven. Futon Sheen, Bl. Anne Catherine Emmerich, Bl. Elizabeth Canori Mora, Bl. Anna Maria Tiagi, St. John Bosco and many others, and locutions which bear the imprimatur such as those given to Fr. Stefano Gobbi.

[12] Re 13:11-18.

[13] For example, The Catholic Encyclopedia entry for Pope John XII describes him as “…a coarse, immoral man…accused of sacrilege, simony, perjury, murder, adultery, and incest…”

[14] For example, due to political factions among the cardinals, the Church was without a pope for  almost two and a half years from years 1268-1271 until the election of Gregory X.

[15] This was the case during the Western Schism when there were three papal claimants, and even great saints, such as St. Vincent Ferrer, at times supported a false pope.

[16] Catechism of the Catholic Church: 675 Before Christ’s second coming the Church must pass through a final trial that will shake the faith of many believers. The persecution that accompanies her pilgrimage on earth will unveil the “mystery of iniquity” in the form of a religious deception offering men an apparent solution to their problems at the price of apostasy from the truth. the supreme religious deception is that of the Antichrist, a pseudo-messianism by which man glorifies himself in place of God and of his Messiah come in the flesh.

677 The Church will enter the glory of the kingdom only through this final Passover, when she will follow her Lord in his death and Resurrection. The kingdom will be fulfilled, then, not by a historic triumph of the Church through a progressive ascendancy, but only by God’s victory over the final unleashing of evil, which will cause his Bride to come down from heaven. God’s triumph over the revolt of evil will take the form of the Last Judgement after the final cosmic upheaval of this passing world.

[17] See, for example, Taylor Marshall’s Infiltration: The Plot to Destroy the Church from Within (Sophia Institute Press, 2019), Fr. Charles Murr’s Murder in the 33rd Degree: The Gagnon Investigation into Vatican Freemasonry (Independently published, 2022), and Mary Nicholas and Paul Kengor’s The Devil and Bella Dodd: One Woman’s Struggle Against Communism and Her Redemption (TAN Books, 2022).

[18] For example, was Pope Benedict’s resignation valid? Was the process that elected Bergoglio valid, given the rules established by Pope St. John Paul in 1996 and the seeming violation of them by the so-called “St. Gallen Mafia”? Has he taught heresy and thus deposed himself? Did Jorge Bergoglio truly intend to uphold the Petrine office?

This last question has been raised explicitly by, among others, Archbishop Vigano: “I believe instead that [Bergoglio’s] acceptance of the papacy is invalidated, because he considers the papacy something other than what it is, like a spouse who gets married in church but excludes the specific purposes of marriage from his intention, thus making the marriage null and void precisely due to his lack of consent…. I would like us to take seriously, very seriously, the possibility that Bergoglio intended to obtain the election by means fraud, and that he intended to abuse the authority of the Roman Pontiff in order to do the exact opposite of what Jesus Christ gave a mandate to Saint Peter and his Successors to do: confirm the faithful in the Catholic Faith, feeding and governing the Flock of the Lord, preaching the Gospel to the nations. All the acts of Bergoglio’s governance and magisterium – since his first appearance on the Vatican Loggia, when he introduced himself with his disturbing “Good evening” – has unraveled in a direction diametrically opposed to the Petrine mandate: he has adulterated and continues to adulterate the Depositum Fidei, he has created confusion and misled the faithful, he has dispersed the flock, he has declared that he considers the evangelization of peoples to be “a solemn nonsense,” and he systematically abuses the power of the Holy Keys to loose what cannot be loosed and to bind what cannot be bound.”   “Vitium Consensus”: Speech by Carlos Maria Vigano at the Catholic Identity Conference, Pittsburg, October 1, 2023.  https://exsurgedomine.it/230930-cic-eng/

[19] https://www.cal-catholic.com/the-cardinal-pell-memo-in-full/

[20] https://edwardpentin.co.uk/professor-rist-the-catholic-church-could-be-facing-a-crisis-worse-than-the-arian-controversy-of-the-4th-century/

 

[21] St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, T, II-II, Q 120, Art. 1.

[22] Code of Canon Law, C. 1752.

[23] St. John Henry Cardinal Newmann, Arians of the Fourth Century, appendix 5.1:13, 15-17, 20; 5.2:20.

[24] St. Basil of Caesarea, Letter 92.2. See also Letter 242.2.

[25] St. John Henry Cardinal Newman, Development of Christian Doctrine, Ch. 6:14. See also Michael Davies, Saint Athanasius: Defender of the Faith (Angelus Press, 2012).

[26] ST, I-II, Q. 96, A. 4.

[27] Saint Maria Faustina Kowalska, Divine Mercy In My Soul-Diary of Sister M. Faustina Kowalska, 3rd edition (Stockbridge, Mass: Marian Press, 2003), 28.

[28] The Trial of Jeane D’Arc, trans. W.P. Barrett, 233.

[29] Leo XIII, On the Nature of Human Liberty, Libertas (28, June 1888) § 13.

[30] Jeremiah 20:7b-9.