If you are on the front lines of the culture war that Catholics find themselves interlocked in, then you are familiar with Dr. E Michael Jones’s phrase “Logos is Rising.” Logos is Greek for “word,” which in context has the definition of “meaning or existence.” Since God is existence, meaning nothing exists outside of Him, it thus follows that Logos is a synonym for Christ, who is meaning. When it is thus said that “Christ is rising,” it is to denote that mankind, stained by original sin, is moving closer to recognizing the proper social kingship of Christ, and thus men are living in more accordance with His will. In short, we as Catholics want Logos to rise, but many who champion this battle-cry of truth miss an important aspect, and that is the power of Christ’s Church that coincides with His rise in the hearts of men.
Christ founded a visible society by which we are reconciled with Him, since it is His Bride which allows us to access the immeasurable grace He wants to offer us. It is only through this grace that we can win the culture for Christ, and so it thus follows that membership in Christ’s Church and the assenting of our will to Her teachings is how we will reclaim His Kingship.
We know, too, that we don’t have the Church if we don’t have he who Christ set over his flock, St. Peter and his successors. It is said by St. Ambrose, “Where Peter is, there is the Church. And where the Church, no death is there, but life eternal” (Commentary on Twelve Psalms of David). The power of the Church is most fully exercised in the Petrine charism of the Pope, and so the Pope is said to possess the fullness of power, or Plenitudo Potestatis, while exercising his ministry in the Church.
This phrase so commonly used in the Middle Ages, Plenitudo Potestatis, denotes the Pope’s promise of Christ to “confirm his brethren” (Luke 22:32), and thus safeguard the Faith. This concept is integral to ecclesiology because without it the Heavenly Monarchy is not reflected in Christ’s Church, as it was in the Kingdom of Israel or the Prophets. The unifying and visible aspect of communion with Logos is lost by which to identify Christ’s Mystical Body versus those schisms and heresies which are a rejection of Him, thus damaging any possibility to establish His social kingship here on Earth.
One is reminded of the crisis the Israelites found themselves in in the Book of Judges. “In those days there was no king in Israel: but every one did that which seemed right to himself” (Judges 21:25). This exaltation of the individual judge over the appointed steward of Christ leads to vain pursuits of His glory, either manifested in a twisted effigy of an ascendant Logos, such as the plans for Calvinist theocracies that always failed by their own epistemological sinkholes, or the world order we find ourselves under at this present moment in which the prince of darkness triumphs unabated. Therefore, Catholics who wish for the rise of Our Lord in the hearts of men, yet reject the humble obedience that is due to the Vicar of Christ, thus impede any and all possibility to make His kingly rule manifest in our own time.
One could compare these dissident Catholics to the Gallicans, or “Old Catholics” of the 19th century, many of whom still wished for Christ to reign in the hearts of all men, but either corrupted this pursuit through deviations from the approved Papal teachings or through the rejection of the Papal prerogatives in favor of a Caesaropapist shortcut to the rising of Logos.
The Old Catholics here might at first seem irrelevant, since many rejected the Syllabus of Errors (or Quanta Cura) that the current dissident Catholic may claim to accept. However, what is forgotten is that in their rejection of these documents was a false ecclesiology that motivated their rebellion, seeing the Pope as a mere overseer of the Church that could be rebuffed or disobeyed at the slightest perception of deviance from whatever their party’s line determined as “tradition”. Dollinger vainly appealed to an unspotted primitive Church in his rejection of the First Vatican Council, exclaiming that it was he who was following the tradition handed down from the Apostles, and that the Church hierarchy defected from said tradition.
Ultimately, his vain pursuit led not to Logos triumphing in his native Germany, but rather to the kulturkampf that tolerated his newfound schism. It resulted in the rejection of St. Peter, and the birth of an acceptable “German variant” of Catholicism, a Catholicism that moves with the current order and not the eternality that Christ the King holds in His mystical body. This schism has all but capitulated to modernity in its promotion of sodomy and the rejection of the proper apostolic priesthood, and thus has rejected Logos in His entirety.
The Gallicans, while reflecting a greater shade of orthodoxy in terms of a greater rejection of liberalism, still wanted to be subject to the power of Caesar and not that of the Church of Christ. Many Gallicans thought that the Earthly Kingdom could better safeguard the Divine Order of Logos than the Church Christ founded, since the employment of force offered by the military and the constitution of the state could seemingly lead to the Catholicizing of society. This, however, forgets the many tribulations that the Church endured when the profane order tried to take over the Sacramental order. One need only look at the iconoclasm and adultery of the Byzantine emperors in the East, or at the Investiture Controversy in the West, to see that the temporal order needs to be subject to the Eternal Order per the Gelasian Dyarchy, lest the profane corrupts the spiritual.
This is why the thesis of Archbishop Lefebvre’s book They Have Uncrowned Him fails miserably in the end, despite making good critiques of the secular spirit in some parts of the Church. By rejecting St. Paul and St. John Paul II’s extension to Lefebvre to establish a sacramental world order, Lefebvre was essentially left with a Gallican conception of Christ’s Kingship, in which the state would take the place of the Hierarchy in establishing Logos’ reign. One need only read the many excerpts of Liberalism is a Sin by Father Felix Sarda y Sardany, Cardinal Billot’s Liberalism, or Liberal Illusion to know that the only way to destroy the satanic liberal world order is with the might of the Papal monarchy. All the writers on the social kingship of Christ understood this, and so it is incumbent upon all Catholics to carry on the torch of our fathers in proclaiming our allegiance to Peter in order that Logos may rise.
Addendum: To clarify, I speak here of obeying the magisterial statements and prescriptions of the Pope in this conception of obedience, not particularly what one may reasonably differ in opinion on from the Holy Father when it comes to his personal writings. I have even found myself at times respectfully supplementing material from Cardinal Pie in order to bolster Pope Benedict XVI’s books on politics since Pie offered the solution to the many diagnoses that Pope Benedict gave in these books. Obedience lies in submission to the Pope’s teaching authority exercised in the Church, not his personal writings, of which we still should be respectful.