How terrible it must have been for those poor Catholics living in the early fourth century as the Arian heresy was raging throughout the Church like a wild fire.
In a June 2014 interview, Bishop Athanasius Schneider described it as the “deepest crisis” in Church history:
This was a tremendous crisis, all the episcopacy, almost all, collaborated with the heresy. Only some bishops remained faithful, you could count them on the fingers of one hand. This crisis lasted more or less 60 years.
Imagine, for the overwhelming majority of Catholics alive at that time, their very own bishop was either entirely complicit, or was at the very least silently complacent, in the heresy. How tragic!
For those who may perhaps be unaware, the Arian heresy derives its name from the heresiarch, Arius, a priest. To briefly quote from the 1917 Catholic Encyclopedia:
He described the Son as a second, or inferior God, standing midway between the First Cause and creatures … Such is the genuine doctrine of Arius. Using Greek terms, it denies that the Son is of one essence, nature, or substance with God; He is not consubstantial (homoousios) with the Father, and therefore not like Him, or equal in dignity, or co-eternal, or within the real sphere of Deity.
As for Arius himself, the Catholic Encyclopedia states that “his moral character was never impeached.”
The historical record on the man Arius, beyond his involvement in popularizing the heresy that bears his name, is rather thin, but there is no indication whatsoever that he was in any way negligent in his sacred pastoral duty to safeguard the Most Holy Eucharist, or was somehow wont to downplay the gravity of mortal sin.
Within the confines of my own diocese (and very likely yours as well), there are any number of parishes where the members would arguably be more likely to attain to, and remain in, a state of grace if Arius was their pastor!
Please don’t misunderstand me – the Arian heresy represented a “tremendous crisis” indeed, but even as churchmen were arguing about the divinity of Christ and bickering over the precise theological language necessary to define the Son’s relationship to the Father, there is evidence that the faithful were still being well-formed as to the demands of the Christian life and firmly instructed on the requirements for receiving Holy Communion. (See Council of Elvira, 309 A.D.)
Admittedly, I’m no historian, but I’ve read nothing to suggest that the laity at the time of the Arian heresy, unlike today, were routinely led by their pastors into moral laxity on matters like adultery, fornication and homosexual activity, nor is there any indication that the faithful were invited to engage in grave acts of Eucharistic sacrilege by their bishops and priests; much less their pope.
While Pope Liberius is alleged to have signed a semi-Arian profession under duress, and Pope Honorius some three centuries later failed to safeguard the doctrine of the faith against the Monothelites in letters addressed to the Patriarch of Constantinople, and Pope John XXII (b. 1249) preached sermons containing an error of which he later recanted, Francis stands alone.
In fact, it’s not a stretch to imagine that, if alive today, all three of the aforementioned popes of history would gladly affix their own names to the now famous dubium!
Never before has a pope made use of a formal papal instrument to disseminate throughout the Universal Church errors that were plainly condemned, almost verbatim, by an ecumenical council. (See HERE and HERE.)
Francis has even gone so far as to call into question – again, via a formal papal instrument disseminated throughout the Universal Church – the very existence of intrinsically evil acts that admit of no exception!
As Bishop Schneider reflected on the Arian heresy (above), the opening of the first of the two Synods on the Family was still more than three months away.
Even so, he put that tumultuous period in the Church’s history in perspective for those of us living in the dark shadow of Amrois Laetitia by saying:
“To my knowledge and experience, the deepest wound in the actual crisis of the Church is the Eucharistic wound; the abuses of the Blessed Sacrament.”
Let it be said, and perhaps Bishop Schneider would agree, today, the wound in the Church is without question the deepest it has ever been.
While there is much about which we can debate, that the present crisis is entirely unprecedented is beyond all doubt; so much so that it is no exaggeration to say that the Church vis-à-vis her mission of leading souls to salvation is in far more disarray today than it was even during the days of the Arian heresy.
Pray and fast for the conversion of Jorge Bergoglio indeed; make acts of reparation for the terrible offenses leveled against Christ the King often, but be certain to intercede for yourself and your loved ones as well – that we may be given the grace to discern and defend the truth amid so much confusion.
The present crisis is far worse! All one needs to do is to look at the extra ordinary lengths that the Blessed Virgin Mary has gone to in warning us.
God, our Loving Father, has chosen us to live in this day and age and face the most devastating storm the Church has ever encountered. What an honor, undeserved, to be picked to fight in this most important battle. How God must be counting on us to pray, fast and live as good a Catholic life as we can until He sets things straight and ushers in the triumph of the Immaculate Heart. What an unspeakably glorious time that will be and I believe that it will happen relatively soon. Blessed are the people who have been chosen to live under her reign. God willing, we will be among them. In the meantime, take up your rosary and pray away!
Happy Feast of St. Nicholas, the saint who punched the heretic Arius in the face.
Here is a great sermon about the great bishop St. Nicholas who guarded the True Faith in his time:
–
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7m9KhrUC9jU
Louie wisely and charitable said,
“Pray and fast for the conversion of Jorge Bergoglio indeed; make acts of reparation for the terrible offenses leveled against Christ the King often, but be certain to intercede for yourself and your loved ones as well – that we may be given the grace to discern and defend the truth amid so much confusion.”
–
I suppose that is our only course of action since we are not bishops in the Holy Catholic Church. It would, therefore, not be permissible for us (along with prayer and fasting, of course) to “punch the heretics,” as did the great St. Nicholas to the heretic Arius. 😉
–
Comic relief in the midst of the confusion (which is really not so confusing as it is righteously infuriating)!
http://voxcantor.blogspot.com/2016/12/a-blessed-punch-heretic-day.html
I think it is wrong to call the heresy ‘Bergoglianism’. Bergoglianism is simply V2 ‘Conciliarism’ stripped of all inhibition.
I agree ‘Bergoglianism’ is far more damaging as it affect the common Catholic which Arianism was mainly a matter for theologians with minimum awareness from the folks in the pews.
It is simply modernism. The syntesis of all heresies as called by Pope St Pius X. Vatican 2 was the modernist council and the Novus Ordo is their new modernist mass. This upcoming schism in the concilior church is nothing more than a battle between modernists. Conservstive vs. progressives, each side endlessly bickering over their interpretation of the purposely designed ambiguities of Vatican 2. Its time for trads to unite and restore the Church without these modernist heretics.
https://youtu.be/HUsvVJpHQAM
He punched the Pope in the nose and made saint. Remember that, you who get within arm’s length.
D’Oh! Jolly Old St. Nicholas punched the heretic Arius in the nose, not the Pope.
Archbishop Lefebvre:
“Now, this virtue of Hope is disappearing today precisely because all hope is here below. Now social progress, social justice, material progress, the equal distribution of goods of this world: these are the great themes of today’s sermons!
But we were not made for this. We are made, first of all, to be the children of God, to live with God. It does not matter whether we have lived in poverty or at ease, all that matters is the love that we have had for God, how we have spent these years which the Good Lord has given us to live here below with Him. How did we spend them in regard to this hope of heaven? How did we hand on this hope of heaven to our children, these heavenly realities? This is what the Good Lord shall ask of us.
Thus, my very dear friends, who in a few moments are going to pronounce your Profession of Faith and to repeat the Anti-Modernist Oath, you shall notice that this Anti-Modernist Oath is precisely almost in each one of its points a profession of the supernatural realities, against those who want to destroy the grace of the Good Lord, to destroy the Divine reality of the grace of God and of Our Divine filiation. Doing this they reduce to naught their very own intelligence. They pretend that their intelligence is incapable to know God, this is the first part [of the oath].
These people despise the Divine intelligence, the Divine life in which we somehow partake; despising the grace which the Good Lord has given us, the light which the Good Lord has put in our hearts and in our minds, they lose at the same time their own reason. They themselves say that they are no longer capable of knowing God. Thus according to them man is radically, definitively cut off from God, incapable of knowing Him. As a consequence they despise all the goods that Our Lord Jesus Christ has given us – Divine grace, the Sacraments, the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass – all this is reduced to a natural state.
But you, on the contrary, you shall profess your faith in the grace of the Good Lord, in the supernatural life which the Good Lord has given us and in which He enables us to participate…
…all these blessings which the Good Lord has given us, this great charity which the Good Lord has had for us.
Indeed, it is a blasphemy to say what the Modernists say. It is to blaspheme against Our Lord Jesus Christ because they deny all that Our Lord Jesus Christ came to do here below: they deny His Church, they deny His Sacrifice, they deny His Sacraments, they deny everything and nothing is left. And this is what the modern catechisms teach today. For this reason these catechisms are very harmful because they reduce to nought the entire life of grace, the entire Divine Life, which is what is most precious to us.
Let us ask the Most Blessed Virgin Mary on this day of her Assumption to help us truly understand what our supernatural life is, a participation in the Divine Life. God knows that She knows it, this participation in the Divine Life, She who has given natural life to Our Lord Jesus Christ, through the grace of the Holy Ghost. How much did the Good Lord flood her with spiritual graces! And how much is She capable of making us understand how beautiful, how good, how sweet it is to be united with Our Lord, to know the Good Lord and to live with God!
Let us ask the Most Blessed Virgin Mary to put in our souls, in our hearts, this immense desire, this unquenchable desire, of all the moments of our life, of our whole life, of each week, month and year, to be with God for all eternity.”
Wow! That truly is the only way to look at this crisis. We have been given the honor by our Lord to be the faithful soldiers to defend Him in this time of great apostasy. The Arian Heresy was basically over one word. We are combating the synthesis of all heresies, modernism.
Father,
you prepared the Virgin Mary
to be the worthy mother of your Son.
You let her share beforehand
in the salvation Christ
would bring by his death,
and kept her sinless
from the first moment of her conception.
Help us by her prayers
to live in your presence without sin.
We ask this through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son,
who lives and reigns
with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God for ever and ever. Amen
The Liturgy of the Hours
From Vatican II until the consecration of the four bishops by Archbishop Lefebvre, the Archbishop stood alone with only one other bishop, Bishop de Castro Mayer. Two bishops alone for all those years. These two were the only ones who steadfastly refuted the errors in a public manner and led those who were fortunate enough to follow them into safe pastures. Thank God for them!
Arianism destroyed the Blessed Trinity claiming that Our Lord was a creature, and subordinate to the Father. They denied the Divinity of Our Lord. The Modernists do the same thing really, without saying it outright. They have denied at one time or another almost every doctrine of the Church.
Both Arianism and Modernism are evil but it has been said by Archbishop Lefebvre and many others that Modernism contains all of the previous heresies combined. Morals are lower than at any time since Christ. And the very sense of sin has been lost by most all people, even those who claim to be Catholic. Today a substantial portion of nominal Catholics support abortion, contraception, divorce and homosexuality. This is a state of affairs that has never existed in the Church.
While I appreciate the efforts of those few Novus Ordo prelates, such as Cardinal Burke, who are trying to hold Francis’ feet to the fire, in my opinion, it is too little, and much too late. The whole Catholic world is speaking of the Bergoglian mess as though the Church is just now sliding into the abyss when it has been doing it for 50 years at least! I believe it is going to take Divine intervention by way of chastisement as it has been prophesied by Our Lady and countless saints over the centuries and at Fatima and Akita and possibly Garabandal, to set things right. Also it will take the consecration of Russia that She has repeatedly asked for and which I will be astonished beyond anything if Francis does. And at this point I have to wonder, is he the pope or is it Benedict or do we currently have a pope at all? I don’t say which, because I don’t know which.
This chastisement, according to Our Lady will encompass the whole world, will kill 2/3 to 3/4 of humanity and will be terrible. I think we are looking down the barrel at the end of the world as we have known it for centuries and those who survive what is coming will find that they must be very, very good indeed. The restoration of all the old disciplines of the Church is also prophesied. God help us to bear up under the punishment we so richly deserve and give us the grace of final perseverance and holy deaths whenever we are meant to die. May we use this Advent Season to our advantage and have a very holy Christmas Season.
The Church endured and overcame the Arian crisis.
I’d argue that the 1054 schism, and the protestant reformation, caused more damage to the Church.
A hireling has commandeered the papacy. He needs to be deposed immediately.
One of the first acts of proof that the heretics were bent on destroying the faith was the suppression of Anti-Modernist Oath. Also of note: The suppression of the Last Gospel, the suppression of the Hail, Holy Queen prayer, and the suppression of the Prayer to St. Michael at the end of their UNHOLY Mass. And Paul VI’s dissembling of the List of Forbidden Books allowing the Modernist’s free reign to spread their evil lies throughout the Catholic world.