Pope Francis is Dead, But the Damage is Done.

He was my archnemesis for nearly a decade. Now that he's gone, I'm not sure what I feel.

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If anyone should have an opinion on the death of Pope Francis, it’s probably me. After all, I was one of the most prominent figures leading the charge against his kakistocratic papacy for years.

It was, though I’m not particularly fond to admit it, the thing that made me “famous.”

When I decided to start my little revolutionary publication, OnePeterFive, it stemmed from the strong, inexplicable sense I had, when I first laid eyes on Bergoglio as he emerged as Pope Francis, that there was something deeply evil at work. It was a powerful, preternatural experience, one I later learned was shared by a number of people around the world — enough to make it more than a coincidence. Too few to be sure what it meant.

Maybe it was apophenia. Maybe it wasn’t. But the impression that feeling made on me was undeniable. Confirmation from others experiencing the same only drove it home.

I didn’t know the man from Adam. I was watching to see the announcement of the new pope on a livestream from my desktop computer at work. Half-watching, half-working, I didn’t catch all the little details. Somehow, I didn’t even register that he was a Jesuit, or the magnitude of the problem that this represented.

In fact, I went into the conclave hopeful, and wasn’t expecting a bad outcome. I just do not have an explanation for why I felt this sense of monstrous alarm, like I was watching a livestream of Satan in a meat suit, looking out over the crowd with an all-consuming hunger.

Truth was, I was already struggling with my faith at the time. This feeling that there was some new enemy to fight was like a bellows on the embers of belief. As they glowed back to life, producing new flame, I felt as though I had to take action. The idea of a new publication, a way to translate my years of experience writing and designing and doing work in social media and community outreach all shoehorned into one little project that could maybe, just maybe, really change things.

The seed in my mind grew and grew until the idea took on a life of its own. I knew I needed to make it happen. I just needed to give it form. Make it real. And inasmuch as I had been reading night prayers from the old breviary to one of my boys who was suffering from nightmares, I had the perfect theme in mind:

"Be sober and watch: because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, goeth about seeking whom he may devour. Whom resist ye, strong in faith…”

— 1 Peter 5:8-9

I had already found solace, richness, and reverence in traditionalist Catholicism that I had not been able to find elsewhere, and I had been drawn to it, finding it helped strengthen my faith, despite the difficulty of getting to most traditional Masses. Yes, I had my struggles, but their nature and origins were unclear to me. This new thing felt like zeal, blossoming once more, and I thought perhaps if I could persuade others to look in that direction, they, too, could be invigorated by it.

I began to see a recurring image in my mind: a sky full of heavy, dark clouds, moving inexorably towards the Catholic Church. It looked like the sky before a tornado. And I believed, since I appeared to have seen it before anyone else around me, that it was my duty to warn others.

It was a pre-emptive action. I thought if I could buttress people’s faith by appealing to tradition, history, and the theology of the past, I could perhaps help them weather the storm. It was a tall order to get people to look critically at a pope after so many years of papal celebrity, beginning with John Paul II, but maybe, if I simply gave them the teaching and let them see for themselves how he was contradicting it, they would reach that conclusion themselves. And I wanted the whole thing to appeal to the kind of reader who simply wouldn’t go to other, more established traditionalist media outlets.

A traditionalist publication with a modern edge. A guy in his 30s talking about the old ways that died before he was even born. Humor, intelligence, depth, and visual appeal. From this vision, OnePeterFive (1P5) was born.

I did not expect it to become so successful, so fast. 300,000 pageviews the first month, without so much as a dollar of advertising. It was all word of mouth. The strength of the writing, on opening day, from multiple authors with unique perspectives, made a real impact. The whole thing took on a life of its own, and I became a victim of my own success. I couldn’t look away. I didn’t know how to stop. When the Francis agenda ramped up, I met it with similar intensity. I cast aside subtlety and went for straight confrontation. Soon, I found myself awaking every day to the thought, “What fresh hells has he introduced today?” I was a heresy hunter, a zealot with a righteous cause, and like Morpheus, I would awake the slumbering faithful to the reality of the Matrix.

But that fight against Francis and his destabilizing, undermining agenda, drawn out over 7 years — 8 if you count the post that started it all — drew me too deeply into the chaos and corruption within the Church. As I confronted the contradictions, I felt my confidence in Catholicism erode. At one point, about three years in, my wife asked me, “Why are you doing this if it makes you so miserable?” I hadn’t realized I was miserable, but the truth was, I was complaining all the time. “Have you seen what Francis did now?” I’d ask, almost daily. She got to a point where she didn’t want to know. She believed, and the knowledge I carried was poisonous to belief. She recognized it long before I did.

Her question sat with me for days. When I finally realized the answer, it surprised me.

“Being Catholic is my whole identity,” I told her. “I’m not just fighting him, or fighting for the Church. I’m fighting not to lose myself.”

It was a fight I ultimately lost. My work, staring into the abyss of how the Church really operated — as opposed to all the mythology I’d always been taught — shattered what faith I had, and left me a broken, directionless shadow of what I thought I was. I really had been fighting for my identity. And in the final few years of my work, I felt my belief, and my sense of confidence in the Church, and my notion of self all draining away.

I couldn’t see it when I was in it, but everything in my life began falling apart after I started 1P5. Not all at once, but dragged out, over time. That’s ongoing, even right now. It’s as though I’m trapped at the leading edge of some karmic avalanche that is rolling me down a very long slope. And the rocks are sharp.

Some people tell me I was being spiritually attacked for the work I was doing. Others think the work itself was corrosive, and that by giving myself over to it, I engaged in self destruction. Austin Ruse, author, president of C-FAM, and most importantly for the purposes of our ongoing disagreements, member of Opus Dei — who have a cult of docility and silence around the actions of the pope that is unrivaled anywhere in Catholicism — wrote a post-mortem on me after I had left. He said:

I did not know until a Rod Dreher column this week that Catholic pugilist Steve Skojec is now ex-Catholic pugilist Steve Skojec. Dreher says Skojec is now an agnostic. He didn’t even slow down and join the Orthodox, like Rod did. He went right out the back door into disbelief. Skojec says he has not attended Mass in a year.

[…]

Long ago, I figured Skojec would leave the Church.

His story reminds me of Rod Dreher’s who spent years looking into the abyss of priest sexual abuse. I have gone on record that Rod was right about all that and I was wrong. But maybe where Rod did go wrong was spending so long looking into the abyss and feeding his anger, which led him to question the theological claims of the Catholic Church. He left for Orthodoxy.

Their stories remind me of Joseph Sciambra, a man I deeply admire. Joe spent years living in the homosexual abyss and came out of it quite damaged. He looked for succor from the same Church he accuses of encouraging his behavior and abetting his abuse. Understand that Joe is the guy who tries to save gay men by going to the most sexually perverse San Francisco festivals wearing a “Jesus Loves Gay Men” tee-shirt and handing out rosaries.

Sciambra tried for years to convince various Churchmen that the Church was allowing the rise of homosexualism in the Church. He pointed to openly homosexual parishes in San Francisco and New York. He tried to convince Archbishop Jose Gomez of Los Angeles that Fr. James Martin ought not be featured at the annual education conference in L.A. No one would listen. I think the only Bishop who formally met with him was Cardinal Burke, a meeting that I arranged.

It seems to me that when you set yourself up to fight the institutional Church, you run the risk of walking out the door. Make no mistake, Rod’s fight was just. Joe’s fight was just. I am not sure exactly what Steve’s fight was because it seemed so immense and multi-faceted, but without a doubt, he believes it was just. Even so, when you set yourself up to fight the institutional Church and you never give up, you run the risk of allowing your frustration and anger to lead you right out of the Church.

I know Rod. I know Joseph. I understand why they left, and I don’t blame them. Maybe fighting the institutional Church really does run the risk of causing you to leave.

But maybe that happens because it simply cannot bear real scrutiny.

Still, I have wondered if it was worth it. For the first time in my life, I empathize with Cypher, the character from the aforementioned Matrix films who betrayed his real-world friends for a blue pill; a chance to go back into the Matrix and eat steak, instead of the disgusting gruel available amidst the dark, dingy environs of the truth-seekers.

Ignorance is bliss for many people. It’s probably why the priests I spoke to in various confessionals about the way the papacy was challenging my faith told me to stop paying attention to what was going on.

They knew that the only way to love the Church was never to look too closely at what it really is.

But that was never good enough for me. I don’t like living with self-deception. It eats at me, whispering that there is something more, something I should know, and that I cannot be content until I face it. Even if it hurts me.

Even if it destroys me.

I hear from individuals still, to this day, who say the things I wrote or that we published in those days were a real help to them. But I can’t tell you what difference I really made in the big picture.

It’s not like I stopped Francis. It’s not like I even slowed him down. I managed to build an audience of millions, with the help of some very talented writers, and it felt like a tidal wave of voices crying out in unison against some seemingly unassailable bastion…until the wave hit with a thundering crash and dissipated, leaving the seawall unscathed.

We could not stop the juggernaut.

They were running an unsophisticated operation and we were eating their lunch. They didn’t understand asymmetrical information warfare and we did. But no matter how many people we woke up — we were using “red pill” before the alt right got ahold of it — it didn’t matter, because this is the Catholic Church we’re talking about here, and they are as entrenched as an institution could be. Catholicism created Western culture. It could absorb everything we threw at it and more. We had no hope of laying siege to the corrupt Vatican merely through the power of the pen.

We moved the needle for a lot of people, but Rome never budged an inch. If anything, it continued its inexorable advance, away from what it had always been, and towards some new thing it was becoming. To paraphrase Yeats:

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Rome to be born?

The deeper this realization became, the more futile my efforts felt. I had run out of reassurances to give my audience. “God will not allow this to continue” can only be said so many times before it becomes clear that yes, he absolutely will allow it to continue.

Nobody is coming to save us. Not men. Not God. Nobody.

I began to realize, long before I was willing to concede the point, that Catholicism would be dismantled piece by piece, like being digested slowly by some titanic leviathan, and those who remained within would either be eaten up with it, or would have to live in a state of perpetual denial and fantasy.

I was unwilling to do either of those things.

I left the field of battle before Francis did. Forfeited. Took my ball and went home. I had gotten to a point where I’d stopped caring about the stupid, unwinnable fight in the first place. Optimism was replaced by deep, black cynicism. Francis had crossed lines I didn’t believe were metaphysically possible in a divinely-protected Church. He broke my understanding of the rules of engagement. And every time he did it again, it was another bloodletting. A collection of wounds, none of which might be fatal on their own, but taken together, meant certain death.

To make matters worse, my devotion to…no, my obsession with my work, combined with the delusion that I was literally on a mission from God, meant I spent all my waking hours immersed in that world. The soldier on the battlefield doesn’t stop to write love letters until there is a lull in the fighting, after all. I often ignored my family (God comes first!) and was always distracted. Hearing the words of my friends who said, “the only way to survive this papacy is copious amounts of alcohol,” I drank too much. I was at my desk for over 12 hours a day, and getting fatter. I was stressed out and had an explosive temper. I had borrowed ideas from within the toxic hivemind of traditionalism of what it meant to be a husband and a father: the respect I was due, the obedience I should demand. I clashed with my wife and children in ugly ways.

I certainly wasn’t growing in virtue because of this “God-mandated” work.

And then it all came apart, at a moment not directly related to Church or pope or religion. A personal crisis, involving someone I loved who I thought I was about to lose because of my own behaviors, knocked the wind right out of me. I looked around at the destruction I was creating, at the life I was living and the beliefs I held because I was meeting the expectations I had borrowed from others, and I knew that everything had to change.

It was God’s problem, if he cared at all, and his mess to fix, not mine. Nobody appointed me to be Jesus’s assistant manager. Years of unanswered prayers and clerical frustrations and a life spent trying to make sacrifices to pay homage to a God who seemed intent on exclusively punishing the most faithful broke me down. Theological objections that I had long-suppressed began surfacing, now free of their fetters. Unanswered prayers — like those I had prayed not to lose my faith when I felt it slipping — began piling up, suffocating any lingering sense of trust in the divine.

My entire world began unravelling at an uncanny pace.

The first thing I tried to do was put my family first. I’ve spent the past four years trying to repair the damage I did to the people I loved during that time, and even before. Living as a Catholic had never made me more virtuous. In reality, it made me more anxious and more neurotic and more angry than living without that ever has.

Five years on from zero hour, I have made some progress in rebuilding some of my relationships, but others remain critically damaged.

There are things you can’t take back.

I was always Catholic Steve. Catholic first. Catholic Catholic Catholic. When I decided to be public about my deconstruction and eventual apostasy, it strained ties with friends and family. My entire social sphere has always been exclusively Catholic. My wife felt judged if she set foot in a traditionalism parish even without me. Someone would inevitably ask her who she was, and when she told them, she knew what came next. There wasn’t a traditionalist parish in America I’d been able to go to without being recognized. Those millions of readers seem abstract until someone you’ve never met calls out your name in a grocery store.

Hearkening back to my wife’s question, I was left feeling as though I had no identity, since being Catholic had been all I ever really cared about.

I had a lot of resentment towards Francis for a long time. When I was still engaged in the fight, I had dreams about confrontations with him in which my refusal of obeisance led to whatever demon was within him to rise up, distort his features, and threaten me. After I left, I tended to want to blame him for why it all happened. But while he was certainly the catalyst, he doesn’t get all the credit. I had an entire revolution all bound up and ready to deploy deep within me. A self-destruct sequence I hadn’t even consciously known was there, just waiting for a reason to deploy its payload.

Part of me wanted to point the finger at him for my loss of faith. Another part felt grateful to him for waking me up to the things I had been too brainwashed to see, and freeing me to look deeper. I remained irritated whenever I found myself agreeing with him. As my way of looking at the Church began to change, that happened more often than it ever had in my traddie days.

But my animosity towards him was more than just theological. He was a corrupt, lying, petty, vindictive, power-hungry, pseudo-humble narcissist. He was notorious for treating his staff with contempt. He was routinely insulting and abusive towards the faithful, from mocking their devotions to the number of children they have to the manner of dress among some priests seeking a return to more traditional clerical garb. He refused to grant the four cardinals who sent him the dubia about Amoris Laetitia an audience. He surrounded himself with notoriously perverse priests who engaged in scandalous behavior with impunity. He protected child abusers and other sexual predators within the clergy on multiple occasions. He sold out Chinese Catholics to the most anti-religious regime in China since Mao, and he wouldn’t even dignify Joseph Cardinal Zen — a man who knew that persecution first hand — an audience.

And more personally to people I know and care about: he crushed the Traditional Latin Mass purely out of spite.

So when I got a text yesterday morning that Francis had died, I was surprised to discover I didn’t feel exuberant, or relieved, or freed, or much of anything at all.

My feelings were much deeper. Not so much about him, but about what my fight with him had cost me.

That path, which I ardently believed at the time I had been called by God to follow, led to the implosion of so much that was central in my life. And I feel resentment and regret over pouring everything I had into what appears now to have been a meaningless fight that accomplished nothing and left me wounded and adrift.

In some respects, it’s better for Catholics now that Francis is gone. But the damage is done. Early in his tenure, I referred to it as “The Kamikaze Papacy,” because it looked to me like he was drawing as much of the office’s power as he could in order to destroy that very office.

And he largely succeeded. There is a smoldering crater where the papacy used to be.

And his successor will almost certainly not be better. If anything, he will quite likely be less overt, more subtle, and have an even longer tenure. Even Francis’s allies were not fans of his boorish, bull-in-a-china-shop ways. He lacked tact and refinement, and he rewarded allies and punished enemies in a way that was incredibly gauche.

He also stacked the deck with the Cardinal electors, so despite the fantasy that the Holy Spirit will work some miracle, the odds are ominously bad. If you think I’m kidding, the numbers don’t lie: he elevated 108 of the 135 cardinal electors. That’s roughly 80%. He chose the kind of men who would continue on the path he blazed.

The Church has already been remade in his image. There is no going back.

In a way, it all feels like a cosmic joke at the expense of the faithful. Of those who care most. (Or cared, in my case.)

But some part of me still wonders. Some part of me — the part that’s never quite sure, no matter how many times I check the math, whether I got the answer to the religion problem wrong — wants to keep an eye pointed in that direction. To see if maybe I hadn’t been patient enough. To see if maybe, God really will save the Church.

Maybe there really will be a deus ex machina solution, and because it’s God, that won’t just be lazy writing.

Perhaps I might indeed live to see the spectacle of another Cadaver Synod, and observe that fetid, porcine corpse relieved of its first three fingers, stripped of its symbols of office, tied down with weights and tossed into the Tiber.

(For the record, I don’t actually want to see this, but the image is tantalizing in a darkly humorous way.)

The bottom line is this: I fought that bloody Peronist in ecclesial drag for the better part of a decade, and in the end, he won.

He may be dead, while I’m here writing this to you, but that’s hardly indicative of a victory. My life, like the office of the papacy, has been disassembled because I came into contact with that black hole of a man. Four years after leaving 1P5, I am lost without a purpose, caught in a web of professional struggles and personal estrangements and difficulties I can’t seem to overcome.

This one thing, this “mission” I thought I had from God, was in fact a siren’s song.

I was lured into the abyss. I have never returned from the depths.

Yesterday morning, when I told my wife he’d died, and that I felt nothing, and that I didn’t know what to think about that, I got an unexpected response.

“Why would you? You didn’t even know him,” she deadpanned.

Emotion instantly surged through me. I didn’t know how to process that statement. It felt like the most ridiculous thing I’d ever heard. Of course I knew him. I had made it a point to know more about him than just about anyone else did. I had devoted all this time, and all this effort, written over a thousand articles and produced dozens and dozens of podcasts, been on television and in the papers and on radio and on podcasts…I had been on the front lines against Francis for years! How could she?!?

The deeper feelings, the ones I didn’t know were there, were doing their work. So of course, I got defensive and loud and I picked a big fight. There’s a damaged little boy with a lot of Catholic guilt and fear and a need for affirmation and a fragile ego still fighting for control of my brain, and when we work together, we do the dumbest of things.

I hate that I did it. I’m supposed to be done with that kind of thing. The exact kind of thing I used to always do, back in those days.

Over Francis, no less. Still stirring up discord from beyond the grave.

But at the end of the day, she was right. Looking back on it right now, I think she had my number, and that’s why I bucked.

How could I let someone I didn’t actually know, in real life, consume such a large portion of MY real life? Of my children’s lives? What kind of fucked up parasocial relationship is that? What was my anger really about? Was it honestly directed at my wife? Or at Francis?

Or was it at me?

I’m angry at myself. Me and my stupid hyperfixation, faux-mission, messiah complex, and inability to prioritize what really matters.

That’s one of my biggest resentments about the way I lived my religion. “God comes before everything, even your family” is one of those tropes you hear over and over in certain circles until you stop questioning it. And to my autistic brain, that had meant I had to go all in. It meant that my clear purpose in life was just to act as a viral spreader of the Catholic thing. And if my family missed me at the dinner table or at bedtime or during the rosary or whatever else was going on, that was a sacrifice we just had to make, because someone was wrong about a current Church issue in a comment thread on Facebook, and I had to go put things right.

Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam.

Sweet fancy Moses, I was so full of shit.

I don’t, if I’m being honest, know how to face the full accounting of my mistakes. Not just these ones, but all the ones I’m never going to write about, because they’re too embarrassing. The thought of them fills me with too much shame, and I already have a low enough opinion of myself. They have cost me dearly already, and are continuing to do so. I’m not getting younger. I can’t outrun them anymore.

So maybe, in some universe where God cares, I had to go through all this. Perhaps it was intended, through some weird circuitous route, to help me shed the messiah complex, deconstruct the warped and twisted skeleton of my childhood faith, break free of ideological attachments, and so on, and so forth, all so I could come back around at some date TBD, have my Damascus Moment, and become the right kind of zealous next time.

It’s a nice thought. Even pious.

But in this universe, the one I live in, I screwed the pooch. I made the Church an idol because I couldn’t find God, and I made my work into a shrine to that idol at the expense of the things that truly matter.

I can’t take that back.

And I can’t find a way forward.

And thanks to those extra strength Bergoglian smelling salts, I can’t even find a spiritual home. Uprooted. Turned around. Tired of dialing God’s number and not even getting voicemail.

I don’t get to go back into the Matrix. I don’t get to enjoy my faux-steak.

I hated you, Francis. You were my archnemesis, even if I wasn’t significant enough to be yours. My faith wasn’t much, but you caused me to apply a scrutiny to it that it could not bear. I am flattened now, a dimensionless thing cut off from that numinous signal that draws men heavenward.

By all rights, you and Montini should be together, choking on the coal-black smoke of the hell you thought did not exist. But I hope you’re not, and that if there is a God, he shows both of you the mercy of a long stay in purgatory, because we both know Paul VI is not a saint, and neither are you.

And neither am I. And I need that kind of mercy, too.

But if they ever declare you a saint, as some are agitating for even now, may no one ever bend the knee.