In the long history of the Catholic Church, no doubt the most devastating and destructive attack on the Catholic Faith has been the Second Vatican Council. Just consider the following (partial) list of the damage:

• Complete destruction of every religious order
• The loss of faith by millions; the percentage of church attendance on Sundays is in the single digits or low double digits world-wide
• Anti-Catholic sex education for our children
• The closing of thousands of Catholic churches and schools
• Stripping the remaining churches of Catholic furnishings
• Last but certainly not least, forbidding the traditional Mass whose purpose was to worship God, and substituting the worship of man in the Novus Ordo Mass

With all this going on, we traditionalists found a home and went to sleep in the secure comfort of Archbishop Lefebvre and the SSPX. This lasted some 30 years. Then the Society leadership changed. Our slumber was so deep that when liberal changes crept in little by little, we just smiled and rolled over. Even when the liberal Superior General of the SSPX said, “I accept 95% of Vatican II” (the same council which resulted in the disasters noted above), very few woke up and made a break for the door. Most remained sound asleep.

From that moment on the leaders of the SSPX felt confident they could say or do anything and not wake up anyone. This is still true, even more so today as the Society leans liberal and is soft on Modernism. Most sleep on.

How could this happen to conscientious traditional Catholics?  One reason is the devil’s tactics. In the 1970s, we were pushed to worship man over God, but we were told we are now more charitable and compassionate. Today when we avoid church doctrine on marriage and unnatural lifestyle, we’re said to be “more merciful” (per Pope Francis). It could also be that political correctness has crept in—(Who am I to judge?)  Go along to get along.

Even considering the above wake-up call, most laymen in the SSPX are still enjoying their slumber. The sleepers say, “It is way too early to leave the Society at this time; nothing has changed in our parish.”  When you “sleep” with leaning left and soft on Modernism, you become a liberal Modernist, as has been documented in the 1970s, post VC II, when 99% of laymen failed to wake up, and consequently lost their dearest gift, the Catholic Faith.

Maybe we could wake up the sleeping traditionalists with an analogy that VC II Modernism is like the Black Plague that ravaged Europe in the 14th century, but worse because eternal life is now at stake. This analogy might wake them up because the SSPX wants Cardinals and Bishops with the “Black Plague” to visit Society seminaries and priories to spread the plague, i.e. Modernism.

The bottom line is WAKE UP!  Don’t wait for a dramatic sign that Modernism has taken over your parish and the SSPX—because it may never come. That’s not the way the devil operates, and it never has been. It is rather always little by little, compromise by compromise, until gradually you die spiritually.

As Dom Guéranger declared:

When the shepherd turns into a wolf, the first duty of the flock is to defend itself .... The true children of Holy Church (in times of crisis...) are not the cowardly souls who, under the specious pretext of submission to the powers that be [i.e., those in charge], delay their opposition to the enemy in the hope of receiving instructions..... 

The Liturgical Year, Vol. IV, Dom Guéranger; see the entry for the Feast of St. Cyril of Alexandria, February 9th.