ROME — Conservative Bishop Joseph Strickland, who was ousted from his Texas diocese by Pope Francis in 2023, has rebuked his fellow U.S. bishops as “silent shepherds” for their failure to speak out against “false messages” coming out of the Vatican.
In an open letter addressed to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) during their 2024 fall plenary assembly in Baltimore this week, Bishop Strickland repeatedly asks what it will take for the bishops to “finally speak up against the false messages constantly flowing from the Vatican under the leadership of Pope Francis”:
Almost all of you “stood by silently watching as the Synod on Synodality took place, an abomination constructed not to guard the Deposit of Faith but to dismantle it,” Strickland states in reference to a recent month-long meeting in the Vatican.
Pope Francis “has abdicated his responsibility to serve as the primary guardian of the Deposit of Faith,” the bishop adds.
The pope’s actions and his policies “promote a relativized version of truth that is not truth at all,” he writes, leading to the “devastating conclusion” that “the man who occupies the Chair of St. Peter does not love the truth and seeks to reshape it in the image of man.”
For example, he continues, “Francis has stated publicly that God wills the existence of all religions and that all religions are a path to God,” and in so doing, he “has denied an integral part of the Catholic faith.”
“Every bishop and cardinal should publicly and unequivocally state that Francis no longer teaches the Catholic faith,” he declares.
Moreover, with a pope who is actively opposing the divine truths of the Catholic faith, “the responsibility falls to the bishops of the world to profess their own love of Our Lord, to guard the Sacred Deposit of Faith, and to oppose any attempt to dismantle the Truth,” he states.
Strickland goes on to assert that he has taken up the cause for the simple reason that someone had to speak out.
“I was an obscure bishop who should have remained obscure,” he writes, and there are many more talented men gathered at the bishops’ annual meeting, “who could be described as a Catholic brain-trust.”
“Sadly, they are for the most part silent shepherds, unwilling to risk speaking up in the face of evil and destructive forces that threaten the Church,” he states. “These forces have attempted to silence me, but there was no need to silence these men – they never made a sound.”
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