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In today’s crisis of the Church, of an unprecedented gravity in all Church history, it is most important that Catholics should give due importance both to the Traditional movement and to the Catholic Church outside the Traditional movement. Tradition in its broadest sense, meaning everything which Our Lord entrusted to his Church to be handed down ( tradendum in Latin) to world’s end, is indispensable to the Church, and the Traditional movement has played an indispensable part in preserving Traditional doctrine and sacraments from their destruction by the Conciliar Revolution over the last half-century. But to survive, the Traditional movement had to place itself outside the normal hierarchical structure of the Church, and that structure is very much part of Tradition – “Peter, feed my sheep” (Jn XXI, 17). Therefore however deep is the Conciliar corruption in Rome, Catholics must still be looking to Rome.

Hence the interest of the following report from inside Rome by the Founder and Director of an American Novus Ordo publication, LifeSiteNews. Steve Jalsevac normally visits Rome twice a year with colleagues to talk with all kinds of contacts in Rome, the better to be able to assess how the situation in the Church is developing. From his late November visit he published on December 16 a “deeply worrying” report of his impressions of the situation in Rome today. Extracts follow:—

“Our Nov. 16–23 visit to Rome was the most dramatic of many such twice-per-year work trips we have taken there during the past 10 years. After meeting with cardinals, bishops and other Vatican agency and dicastery staff, our new Rome reporter John-Henry Westen, Jan Bentz, and I saw a consistent pattern of widespread anxiety and very real fear among faithful Church servants. We have never encountered this before. Many were afraid of being removed from their positions, fired from their jobs in Vatican agencies or of encountering severe public or private reprimands and personal accusations from those around the Pope or even from Francis himself. They are also fearful and anxious about the great damage being done to the Church and being helpless to stop it.

“. . . . Catholic universities in Rome are watched and professors’ lectures screened to ensure they fall in line with a liberal interpretation of Amoris Laetitia. Clerics are reported to Superiors if they are overheard expressing concerns about Pope Francis. Many are afraid to speak openly, even though in the past they were always very willing. Vatican reporters told us they were warned numerous times not to report on the dubia (the questions raised by Cardinal Burke and three other Cardinals as to doctrine contained in Amoris Laetitia). I have heard reports that the Vatican is like an occupied state. Certain sources I’ve spoken with have a fear that communications with Vatican officials are being monitored; some have even reported suspicious anomalies in their telephone conversations in which, after a dropped call, the audio of the last moments of their conversation has played over and over again on a loop, as though they are hearing a recording. Some individuals who work within the Vatican are advising their contacts on the outside not to share sensitive information via email or their Vatican-issued cell phones.

“We have to wonder where all of this is going. It is deeply, deeply concerning. The common phrase we kept hearing that week in Rome is that there is a “war” going on in the Church – a war of the “The Spirit of Vatican II” progressives against the orthodox Catholics. One person after another shockingly used the word “war.” I have never experienced anything like this in my lifetime and I am sure most, if not all regular LifeSite readers, can say the same thing.”

Traditionalists may say that the four Cardinals and Mr Jalsevac are victims of Vatican II, waking up a little late, but let nobody say that they do not mean or intend to be Catholic. The Church will only be healed when true Doctrine and the true Hierarchy come together again, so let Traditionalists pray urgently for these souls waking up to the Conciliar war. May God give them light and strength.

Kyrie eleison.