"Meanwhile, Venerable Brethren, fully confident in your zeal and work, we beseech for you with our whole heart and soul the abundance of heavenly light, so that in the midst of this great perturbation of men's minds from the insidious invasions of error from every side, you may see clearly what you ought to do and may perform the task with all your strength and courage. May Jesus Christ, the author and finisher of our faith, be with you by His power; and may the Immaculate Virgin, the destroyer of all heresies, be with you by her prayers and aid." Pope St. Pius X, Pascendi Dominici Gregis
Long before the Amazon Synod and the Pachamama, this canonized Pope made the synod possible:
"If you see me traveling the length and breadth of the whole world in my efforts to meet with people of all civilizations and religions, it is because I have faith in the seeds of wisdom which the Spirit has planted in the conscience of all these various peoples, tribes and clans; from these hidden grains will come the true resource for the future of mankind in this world of ours."
(John Paul II's speech to youth in Ravenna, May 11, 1986, quoted in Tutte le encicliche dei Sommi Pontefici, ed. dall'Oglio, p.1821).
While I sincerely applaud both Cardinal Muller and Arcadia Films for this short but potent video, I can only recommend it to those who are outside the Church and are perhaps in doubt about the basics (what the video calls the fundamentals) of Catholic faith.
I know this will sound super negative and hyper critical, but you simply cannot utilize the sources of the conciliar religion to successfully defend the faith of all ages. No amount of appeals to the CCC, Vatican II, or "Saint John Paul II" can provide the required separation from this generation's submersion into the cesspool of errors ushered in by the Copernican Revolution and sealed at Vatican II.
This video is head and shoulders above Bishop Robert Barron's glossy, airbrushed travel brochure "Catholicism" but unfortunately draws from the same reference points and will not persuade many other than the already persuaded. It is bound to please conservative Catholics but does not rise to level of divine, apostolic, nor ecclesiastical tradition.
Cardinal Muller's manifesto reads much like Paul VI's Credo of the People of God: it seems to be saying all the right things but without the supernatural power that ought to accompany such proclamation.
In summary: using Vatican II to defend the Catholic faith on a polemical level is a fool's errand. It's elastic, amorphous 'pastoral language' is easy to manipulate and even use against divine and Catholic faith. We will follow Cardinals Muller, Burke, Sarah, and their conservative confreres as far as they will take us. Unfortunately that will be short of the distance required to conquer what we are now facing.
