Francis and Manasseh: Why We Must Oppose Bad Leaders and Pray for Them

The sad plight of Catholics enduring over 60 years and counting of weak and compromised leaderhship from Rome has a precedent as well in the Old Covenant with the string of bad kings that were sent as a chastisement to Israel. Even when the Old Covenant kings were commiting all sorts of apostate atrocities and enforcing griveous heretical sins, they were still the legal rulers even if they did not formally belong to the Kingdom of God in spirit.

Christians face a very similar plight today as the Jews did back then. We presently live under the Francis pontificate, in which we have seen sanctioned idol worship under the guise of Pachamama, sanctioned sacrilege with Communion for the divorced and remarried, sanctioned blasphemy with the Abrahamic Family House, and all sorts of heretical nonsense spouted in interviews. And just as we often saw the Old Covenant kings persecute Israel for worshipping the one true God, so now today we see New Covenant popes persecuting Christians for being faithful to the Traditional Mass which traces to the Apostolic era and was codified in perpetuity.

Let us examine the case of king Manasseh from 2 Kings 21 (in the Douay Rheims, 4 Kings 21):

Manasseh did what was evil in the sight of the Lord, according to the despicable practices of the nations whom the Lord drove out before the people of Israel. For he rebuilt the high places that Hezekiah his father had destroyed, and he erected altars for Baal... he burned his son as an offering and used fortune-telling and omens and dealt with mediums and with necromancers. He did much evil in the sight of the Lord, provoking him to anger... Manasseh led Israel astray to do more evil than the nations had done.

We see here an evil king not just committing evil, but also enforcing and sanctioning evil, who then leads Israel astray. He was still legally the king of Israel, yet can anyone truly say he himself belonged to the People of God? He worshipped Baal, dealt with mediums and necromancers, and provoked God to anger. There is also possible extrabiblcal data that suggests the prophet Isaiah was put to death by him. Yet, in all this, he was legally the king and is still listed to this day as a king of Israel.

Now, let us examine Manasseh's repentance, as recorded in 2 Chronicles 33:

When Manasseh was in distress, he entreated the favor of the Lord his God and humbled himself greatly before the God of his fathers. He prayed to him, and God was moved by his entreaty and heard his plea and brought him again to Jerusalem into his kingdom... And he took away the foreign gods and the idol from the house of the Lord, and all the altars that he had built on the mountain of the house of the Lord and in Jerusalem, and he threw them outside of the city. He also restored the altar of the Lord and offered on it sacrifices of peace offerings and of thanksgiving, and he commanded Judah to serve the Lord, the God of Israel.

So let us note that Manasseh repented, God forgave him, and he ceased worshipping false idols and also returned proper litutgical worship to Almighty God. And then he commands the people to turn from their sin and to worship the one true God.

When Manasseh was worshipping Baal, as well as Asheroth, and leading the people to sin, do you suspect they ought to have obeyed him since he was the lawful king? The answer of course is no. For even if he was enforcing certain practices and laws, they were evil laws and he himself was an apostate. So they could not trust his decisions in such matters, even though they recognized him legally as the king. He may have been the true king lawfully, but he was not a servant of the one true God spiritually. But as soon as he called out to God and repented, his conversion was reflected in the good laws he began to enforce. We can then see clearly that he could be trusted, because grace was now guiding him decision making as king.

The pontiffs since Vatican II may legally and lawfully be named as successors to St. Peter, and thus as popes, yet their compromises with Modernism have clearly affected their decision making in disciplinary and pastoral guidance. We must pray for their repentance and conversion, so that they can truly be godly leaders. While they may be legally named as popes, spiritually they reject the one true God and His One Holy Catholic Apostolic Church. Just as one could argue that Manasseh was king of a Counter Israel, we could say today that these individuals are leaders of a Counter Church. But look what happens as soon as Manasseh repents and converts, and look at how it impacts even the people who had been led astray. This is our prayer for Francis. We pray he repents and converts from any trace of Modernism, so that he can be a Holy and Supreme Pontiff worth emulating and one we can trust with disciplinary laws.