The Catholics have magisterium, which the Protestants rejected late and the Orthodox rejected early. for the Orthodox stated that they need no gloss, and the church fathers sorted their theology, while the protestants say scripture alone suffices to bring a saving faith. But I’m starting this morning (since we are in the letters of Peter) with a risk of the magisterium. Because the Roman Church has a formal structure and formal teaching, people can work their way through the hierarchy and they can then teach that which contradicts the regulations of teaching as the offices of the faith compile them.

This was what Luther rebelled against. But our papist brothers note, there is worse than Luther on the Papal Throne. Luther, at least, believed.

The situation is, if you ask me, as clear as the sun, because it appears in front of our eyes with all the evidence of hard facts: a heretic seats on the throne of Peter. Still a heretic, and still sitting, with no challenger in sight. This has happened in the past, will happen in the future, is very sad, and has probably never happened with such virulence (even Honorius could have been weakly defended; Francis is indefensible) in the entire history of the Church. Still, here we are, confronted with facts, not our fanciful and very Protestant interpretation of them.

A heretic seats on the throne of Peter, and we were never given assurance that this would not be the case. His heretical energy and hate for the Church is unprecedented, but do is the rebellion of Vatican II. The most astonishing betrayal of proper theology and abandonment of proper governance must perforce lead to the most astonishing explosion of heresy from the top and abuse from the bottom. This is what V II looked like from the very start; it merely needed sixty years for the ugly face of heterodoxy to completely emerge.

I am merely a layman. No Pope has ever depended on my opinion to decide whether he is really Pope, and it is perfectly right this way. Do not escape from reality. Use it as you would for everything else. Apply common sense and Church Teaching. The Church will get out of this as she has from all the rest.

What this is doing is removing the authority that the church has, for that authority flows not through secular means, but my the work of the Spirit of God. Without the connection to the Spirit, and with Christ, we can do nothing and we are worse than falls, for we await a better time, and we are told by the prophets and apostles that this world is not all that there is. Indeed, our world will burn.

2 Peter 3:11-18

¹¹Since all these things are to be dissolved in this way, what sort of persons ought you to be in leading lives of holiness and godliness, ¹²waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be set ablaze and dissolved, and the elements will melt with fire? ¹³But, in accordance with his promise, we wait for new heavens and a new earth, where righteousness is at home.

¹⁴Therefore, beloved, while you are waiting for these things, strive to be found by him at peace, without spot or blemish; ¹⁵and regard the patience of our Lord as salvation. So also our beloved brother Paul wrote to you according to the wisdom given him, ¹⁶speaking of this as he does in all his letters. There are some things in them hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other scriptures. ¹⁷You therefore, beloved, since you are forewarned, beware that you are not carried away with the error of the lawless and lose your own stability. ¹⁸But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To him be the glory both now and to the day of eternity. Amen.

What we need at this time is to be grounded completely in the law of God. All of us. The women in the church who can teach and preach need to be working. Hard. With the women. Because we don’t have a society that is righteous. If in Roman times a man would marry for alliances and be ordered to divorce his wife by the head of the clan to marry another because that was more advantageous, (Go read some Roman history — they considered loving your wife a perversion and sought power above all), now in some societies the power is now wirh the woman, who must be believed at all times, and in all circumstances.

And this twists all right teaching, as Scott witnesses.

From a Christian perspective, the Duluth model was caused by weak men (called “white knights” in the manosphere, allowing full on rebellion against any male authority (see: Eves curse) to become codified into law. Any woman–even the sweet, Christian wives who are on this page has the right to have her husband summarily dismissed from their home, from seeing his children, and can secure a portion of his income for the rest of his life. Just because she had a bad day, or got mad at him for not leading exactly right in that moment. Women are 100% in the driver seat of marriage–by law. It just takes one phone call. SO AGAIN. These are the risks men take in American marriage. Only a woman of particularly high character whom you trust to NEVER use the coercive power of the state to destroy your family should be considered for marriage.

The men I counseled at the agency were part of a statistical distribution, like every other population on earth. On the left end of the tail you would find, antisocials/psychopaths who were extreme violent offenders. But as you know, normal distributions mean that this group is VERY small. These men (and there were womens groups too) are monsters. They have no business being married, and their wives had significant personality psychopathology. This does not excuse them, but the relationships were just like something you would see on the show “Cops.” But this distribution is not normal. It was negatively skewed. That means, the right “tail” consisted of normal, working class dads/husbands like Jim, who might have been a little rough around the edges, but were not “abusing” anyone. They were operating in a system that is totally hostile to them–just because they are heterosexual married men who expect to have some place of honor in their homes and in their society.

So the burden on women to choose well and continue to choose well is high. The number of people who twist scripture to justify this time is greater, within the church, than those who will teach that this will end, and we need to preserve our faith and family in a fallen time.

And yes, I’ve assessed too many men who have tried to kill themselves when the cops require them to leave their house after the wife called the cops on them. It is as if the cops are now the father, because fatherhood has become weak.

But cops do not love a woman. They are not a husband: they are not fathers. Now I am raising a blended family, and have grand daughters this I know: they are different. They push against the bounds, but without them they fear.

There is nothing crazy about a father being protective of his daughters. There is nothing even remotely crazy about a young woman wanting to feel protected by her daddy. While people can, and do, go too far – and anything that is more suited for a wedding or a high school prom is going too far – there is nothing overprotective or “sexually jealous” about paternal protectiveness; anyone leaping to that conclusion is raising serious questions about their own psychosexual issues. The ironic thing about citing Dalrock in this regard is that Dalrock regularly complains about “feral” young women; he even has a category called Feral Females.

Now, where do you suppose feral young women come from, families where men protect their daughters or families where men simply throw their daughters to the vagaries of sexual selection, to fend off the predators as best they can on their own? The symbolism of the t-shirt is less about winnowing the suitable young grooms, than it is about giving the daughter the strength and the permission to say “no” to the wrong ones in the full knowledge that her father will have her back.

But as it happens, the real target of the message is not men. The t-shirt is actually status-signaling on the part of the daughter, or the wife, when that version of the t-shirt is ready. It is less a warning to young men than it is bragging to other young women that she is valued, that she is loved, and that she is worthy of protection by a man who is strong enough to provide it for her. Both Dalrock and Rollory appear to have forgotten that support and protection are the two primary male roles in every relationship with women and children, and that stable young women really do treasure those things.

I suspect a telling determinant will be who loves these shirts and who hates them. My prediction is that good girls from strong families will love the message and feminists will furiously hate it. The more interesting question, and one to which I do not have an answer, is: why do men like Dalrock and Rollory dislike it so much?

For those who are curious, the above quote is about this T shirt.

The trouble that the Church is finding itself is that those who twist scripture hare subverting all structures that protect, and then families and churches lose their stability. They go feral.

Do not teach such. Do not support it. Do not be the heretics who are destroying the church, and do not be like them.