“THE CHURCH CANNOT CHANGE WHAT GOD HIMSELF HAS REVEALED!” BISHOP JOSEPH E. STRICKLAND WARNS OF AN EMERGENCY IN THE CHURCH.

U.S. Bishop Joseph E. Strickland issued a strong message warning of what he considers a serious doctrinal crisis within the Catholic Church, following the recent report from Synod Study Group 9 on synodality.

In his statement, the bishop expressed deep concern about attempts to reinterpret Catholic teaching on marriage, sexuality, sin, and moral law, stating that “the Church cannot change what God Himself has revealed.”

📖 Here’s what Bishop Joseph E. Strickland said:

An emergency in the Church.

The recent report published by Synod Study Group 9 on synodality is deeply alarming and directly contradicts the Catholic Church's consistent teaching on human sexuality, sin, marriage, and the moral law.

The Church cannot change what God himself has revealed.

Sacred Scripture speaks clearly about the sin of sodomy and homosexual acts. St. Paul writes in Romans 1 that such acts are “contrary to nature,” and the Catechism of the Catholic Church clearly teaches that homosexual acts are “intrinsically disordered” and “contrary to the natural law” (CCC 2357). This teaching does not stem from prejudice, politics, or cultural customs. It comes from Divine Revelation, Sacred Tradition, and the perennial Magisterium of the Church.

To suggest that the sin does not reside in the homosexual relationship itself is not merely confusing language. It is a direct attack on Catholic moral doctrine and on Scripture itself.

In every age, the Church is called to love sinners without ever blessing sin. Authentic charity calls every soul to repentance, chastity, holiness, and conversion through Jesus Christ. True pastoral care does not affirm behaviors that distance souls from God.  A pastor who sees the danger and remains silent is not merciful.

The attempt to normalize or redefine homosexual relationships within the Church is part of a broader effort to transform Catholicism into something more acceptable to the modern world. But the Church does not belong to the modern world. The Church belongs to Jesus Christ.

The destruction of doctrine under the pretext of “discernment,” “listening,” and “lived experience” is one of the most serious spiritual dangers of our time. Truth is not determined by experience. Truth is revealed by God.

Our Lord destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah as a warning to all generations against grave sexual sin and rebellion against the order established by the Creator. Yet even these truths are being reinterpreted and minimized by voices within the Church itself. This should cause deep sorrow and holy alarm among the faithful.

For this reason, many Catholics increasingly recognize that we are living through a genuine emergency in the life of the Church.  When fundamental moral truths about marriage, sexuality, sin, repentance, and salvation are addressed as open questions, the crisis ceases to be theoretical. It becomes a present and palpable reality.

It is precisely events like these that have led many faithful Catholics to conclude that the Church is experiencing a genuine doctrinal and pastoral emergency. When truths that Catholics have always considered established and immutable are suddenly treated as matters of “discernment” or reinterpretation, confusion spreads rapidly among the faithful.

This climate of doctrinal instability also partly explains why groups like the Society of Saint Pius X argue that extraordinary measures are necessary in our times. They justify their planned episcopal consecrations, without the explicit approval of Rome, as a response to what they perceive as a grave emergency within the Church itself.

While Catholics may debate the prudence or canonical issues surrounding such actions, no honest observer can deny that statements and documents like this Synod report intensify the crisis and deepen the concern of countless Catholic faithful worldwide. When voices within the Church question Divine Revelation and the Church’s perennial moral teaching, the alarm among the faithful is neither irrational nor imagined.

The warnings of Our Lady of Fatima and the great saints of the modern age resonate now with greater urgency than ever. Sister Lucia of Fatima wrote that “the final battle between the Lord and the kingdom of Satan will revolve around marriage and the family.” We are witnessing that battle unfolding before our very eyes. The attack on marriage is never limited to human relationships; it is an attack on God the Creator, on the order of creation, on the family as the domestic church, and ultimately, on the salvation of souls. When the meaning of marriage is distorted, the understanding of humanity itself is distorted.

The confusion now spreading in some sectors of the Church regarding sexuality, marriage, and sin does not reflect the voice of Christ the Bridegroom, but rather the spiritual battle that the Virgin Mary warned would come. Therefore, the faithful must return with renewed fervor to prayer, penance, the Rosary, Eucharistic devotion, and fidelity to the truths handed down throughout the centuries. At Fatima, the Virgin Mary did not call the world to adapt to modern errors, but to repentance, conversion, and reparation.

As a pastor, I call today on all the faithful to remain faithful to Christ, to Sacred Tradition, to the perennial Magisterium, and to the truths that the Church has always taught. No synod, committee, study group, or ecclesiastical initiative has the authority to annul the law of God.

We must pray and do penance for the Church. We must pray for those who promote confusion, that they may return fully to the truth entrusted to the Apostles. And we must ask the Holy Spirit to raise up pastors with the courage to speak clearly in defense of the Catholic faith, no matter the cost.

“Our Lord Jesus Christ, who is Truth itself, does not contradict himself. What was sin yesterday cannot be holy today.”

May the Blessed Virgin Mary, Destroyer of Heresies, intercede for the Church in this dark hour.

Bishop Joseph E. Strickland

MONS. STRICKLAND DIXIT

 

BISHOP SCHNEIDER STANDS UP FOR BISHOP STRICKLAND

“The one charge which is now sure to secure severe punishment is the careful keeping of the traditions of the Fathers.” These words of St. Basil (Ep. 243) can most aptly illustrate the deposition of the Bishop of Tyler, TX/USA, His Excellency Joseph E. Strickland. The deposition of Bishop Joseph E. Strickland signifies a black day for the Catholic Church of our day. We are witnessing a blatant injustice towards a bishop who did his duty in preaching and defending with parrhesia the immutable Catholic faith and morals and in promoting the sacredness of the liturgy, especially in the immemorial traditional rite of the Mass. All understand, and even the declared enemies of this Confessor Bishop, that the accusations brought against him are ultimately insubstantial and disproportionate and were used as a welcome opportunity to silence an uncomfortable prophetic voice within the Church.

What happened to the Bishops during the Arian crisis in the 4th century, who were deposed and exiled only because they intrepidly preached the traditional Catholic Faith, is again happening in our day. At the same time several Bishops, who publicly support heresy, liturgical abuses, gender ideology and openly invite their priests to bless same-sex couples, are not in the least importuned or sanctioned by the Holy See.

Bishop Strickland will probably go down in history as an “Athanasius of the Church in the USA,” who however, unlike St. Athanasius, is not persecuted by the secular power, but incredibly by the Pope himself. It seems that a kind of “purge” of Bishops, who are faithful to the immutable Catholic Faith and the Apostolic discipline, and which has been going on already for some time, has reached now a decisive phase.

May the sacrifice, which Our Lord asked from Bishop Strickland bear plenty spiritual fruits for time and eternity. Bishop Strickland and other faithful Bishops, who were already asked to resign, who are currently marginalized or who will be the next in this row, should say in all sincerity to Pope Francis: “Holy Father, why are you persecuting and beating us? We tried to do what all holy Popes asked us to do? With fraternal love we offer the sacrifice of this kind of persecution and exile for the salvation of your soul and for the good state of the Holy Roman Church. Indeed, we are your best friends, Most Holy Father!”

+ Athanasius Schneider, Auxiliary Bishop of Saint Mary in Astana

November 13, 2023

IMPORTANT LETTER FROM BISHOP ATHANASIUS SCHNEIDER TO BISHOP JOSEPH STRICKLAND

Your Excellency, Bishop Strickland, dear and esteemed brother in the episcopate!

It is for me a privilege and a joy to express to you all my gratitude and appreciation for your intrepid dedication to uncompromisingly keep, transmit, and defend the Catholic faith, which the apostles handed over to the Church and with which all the generations of Catholics, especially our ancestors, our fathers and mothers, our priests and religious sisters-catechists, were themselves nurtured. In all truth we can apply to you, dear Bishop Strickland, what St. Basil once stated in his time: 

"The one charge which is now sure to secure severe punishment is the careful keeping of the traditions of the Fathers." (Ep. 243)

Let me share with you the following highly timely words of the same great and saint bishop:

The doctrines of true religion are overthrown. The laws of the Church are in confusion. The ambition of men, who have no fear of God, rushes into high posts in the Church, and exalted office is now publicly known as the prize of impiety. The result is that the worse a man blasphemes, the fitter the people think him to be a bishop. Clerical dignity is a thing of the past. 

There is a complete lack of men shepherding the Lord's flock with knowledge. Churchmen in authority are afraid to speak, for those of them who have reached power by human interest are the slaves of those to whom they owe their advancement. Faith is uncertain; souls are drenched in ignorance because adulterators of the word imitate the truth. The mouths of true believers are dumb, while every blasphemous tongue wags free; holy things are trodden under foot. (Ep. 92)

We are living indeed in such a time, as described by St. Basil with such a striking similarity.

The words of St. Basil in his Letter to Pope St. Damasus, in which he was asking the pope's help and efficacious intervention, are fully applicable to our situation today:

The wisdom of this world wins the highest prizes in the Church and has rejected the glory of the cross. Shepherds are banished, and in their places are introduced grievous wolves hurrying the flock of Christ. Houses of prayer have none to assemble in them; desert places are full of lamenting crowds. The elders lament when they compare the present with the past. The younger are yet more to be compassionated, for they do not know of what they have been deprived. (Ep. 90)

Dear Bishop Strickland, unlike St. Basil who addressed Pope Damasus, you don't have, unfortunately, the real chance to address Pope Francis in order that he may help you to keep zealously the holy traditions of the past. On the contrary, the Holy See put you now under scrutiny and threatens you with intimidations and deprivation of the episcopal care of your flock in Tyler, basically only for the one reason, that you, like St. Basil, St. Athanasius, and many other confessor-bishops in history, are keeping the traditions of the Fathers; only because you are not silencing the truth, only because you are not behaving like not a few of the bishops of our day, who -- using the words of St. Gregory of Nazianzus -- "are serving the times and demands of the masses, leaving their boat to the wind which happens to blow at the moment, and like chameleons, know how to give their word many colors" (De vita sua (Carmina) 2, 11)."

However, dear Bishop Strickland, you have the happiness, that all the popes of the past, all the courageous confessor-bishops of the past, all the Catholic martyrs, who in the words of St. Theresa of Avila, were "resolved to undergo a thousand deaths for any one article of the creed" (The Life of Teresa of Jesus, 25:12), are supporting and encouraging you. Furthermore, the little ones in the Church pray for you and support you; they are an ever growing, yet small, army of lay faithful -- in the United States as well as all over the world -- who were put on the periphery by high ranking churchmen, even in the Vatican, whose main concerns seems to be pleasing the world and promoting their naturalistic agenda and the approval of the sin of homosexual activity under the guise of welcoming and inclusion.

Dear Bishop Strickland, thank you, that you are resolved "to serve the Lord, and not the time," as St. Athanasius once admonished the bishops (Ep. ad Dracontium). I pray that more bishops in our day may, like you, raise their voice in defence of the Catholic Faith, providing thereby the spiritual nourishment and consolation for many Catholics, who feel themselves often abandoned like orphans.

For sure, future popes will thank you for your intrepid fidelity to the Catholic Faith and to its holy traditions, by which you contributed to the honor of the Apostolic See, which was partly darkened and stained by our unfavourable time.

St. Joseph, your patron, the "good and faithful servant," be always on your side and the Blessed Virgin Mary, our sweet heavenly Mother, the destroyer of all heresies, be your strength and refuge.

With deep esteem, united in the holy battle for the Faith and in prayers,

Bishop Athanasius Schneider of St. Mary's in Astana, Kazakhstan, August 2, 2023