Praise be Jesus and Mary, Now and forever. 
In today's first reading, we hear of King Jeroboam, the first king of the northern kingdom of Israel, after Solomon.
In Solomon's days, the prophet Ahijah had predicted the division of the kingdom, and he predicted that Jeroboam would claim ten parts of it, meaning ten of the twelve tribes.
Ahijah signified the event with a prophetic gesture.
He tore his own cloak into twelve pieces, gave ten of them to Jeroboam.
After Solomon died, only two of the twelve tribes, Judah and Benjamin, only two of them remained faithful to the true heir, who was Rehoboam.
And so from that time on the nation of Israel was divided in two.
A large number of Jeroboam's subjects continued to go up to Jerusalem to worship.
Jeroboam wasn't happy with this, because in doing so they were acknowledging the superiority of Judah, at least in religious matters.
So what did Jeroboam do?
We heard it in today's first reading.
He established two new centers of worship in his territory, one at Bethel, the southern extreme, the other at Dan, on the northern border of the kingdom, and he erected golden calves for the people to worship.
Does that sound familiar to anyone, right?
What did God's people do in the desert when they left Egypt?
They fashioned a golden calf to worship.
We hear this, and we think to ourselves, well it's obvious that God's people wouldn't be foolish enough to fall into that again, right?
Worshipping calves.
First Kings 12 verse 30 says, this led to sin because the people frequented those calves in Bethel and in Dan.
So yes, they did it again.
And then it says, Jeroboam also built temples on the high places and made priests from among the people who were not Levites, so fake priests.
Jeroboam established a feast in the eighth month on the fifteenth day of the month to duplicate in Bethel the pilgrimage feast to Judah with sacrifices to the calves he had made.
And he stationed in Bethel priests of the high places he had built.
First Kings 12 verses 31 and 32.
In our present-day lingo, we'd say that King Jeroboam set up a parallel church, false church.
And notice how he did it, one, by turning the hearts of the people away from Jerusalem and God's temple, two, by establishing essentially a rebel priesthood, a priesthood apart from the Levitical law, Levitical priesthood, three, Jeroboam set up false places of worship and had the people offer unholy sacrifices to idols.
So history sadly shows that it's very easy for God's people to be led astray.
And if God's people could be led astray back then, we've got some bad news for you.
It can happen again, even today.
In general, those who strive to be faithful Catholics are wary of being led astray by the seductions of the world, by the temptations to sin, by the lies of the culture, by the false ideologies of the day.
We know we can be led astray if we're constantly in environments that are hostile to the faith, so we tend to be vigilant or at least aware of these dangers.
To put it in boxing terms, if the devil's left-handed, we know we have to watch out for his left.
Why?
Because that's his strong arm.
Our word sinister comes from the Latin word sinistere, spelled exactly the same way.
Sinistere means on the left-hand side.
The devil is sinister, so we have to watch out for the left.
The problem is that we're not aware that the devil has a right hand, too.
He's got a sneaky right-hand jab and an uppercut, and unfortunately, he can knock us out from that side as well.
We'll use the signs from Jeroboam's time to try to illustrate what we're saying here.
We said that Jeroboam worked to turn the people's hearts away from the nation, which is Jerusalem, from the heart of the nation, Jerusalem.
Sadly, there are many forces within the Church working to turn us away from the heart of Catholicism, which is Rome.
Many faithful or seemingly faithful Catholics voluntarily listen to voices that are constantly bashing the Pope and the Magisterium.
They feast on YouTube videos and websites and internet posts and other interviews and discourses that are imbued with this spirit of dissent and criticism.
We will note that there is a difference between constructive and destructive criticism.
There's a difference between criticism and a spirit of criticism.
Spirit of criticism is rooted in pride and self-righteousness, and it's a constant critical attitude that feeds dissent and foments schism.
Many of the criticisms I hear leveled against the Vatican and the Holy Father fall into this category, not into the constructive criticism one.
So yes, if your spiritual diet includes the Wanderer or Crisis magazine or frequenting places like LifeSite News or Taylor Marshall or, sadly, even nowadays, traditionally good programs like The World Over, if you're filling your mind with that spirit of dissent and hyper-criticism, your faith in the Church and your charity towards the Holy Father are going to diminish.
It's not that all the things that these people say are bad, obviously, or that they present.
It's just that the anti-papal, traditionalist slant are not good or spiritually healthy things.
Yes, there is a difference between being traditional and being traditionalist.
It's what we've been trying to say for a few years now.
It's the reason why a number of people have stopped coming here, frankly.
They don't want to hear it.
As we've said in other reflections, the fourth commandment, honor your father and your mother, also applies to our spiritual family, too.
We must honor and respect the Holy Father and our Holy Mother, the Church.
The opposite of honoring them and respecting them is dishonoring them, disrespecting them, disparaging them, taking jabs at them, campaigning against them as if the Church were just another political reality, speaking with detraction or even slander about the Holy Father and now Cardinal Fernandez, ignoring or belittling or dismissing the living magisterium, smear campaigns against the Pope and others, which with the Pope it's been going on ever since he's been elected.
I have a pretty good memory of that.
All of these things are not pleasing to Our Lord and to Our Lady.
Instead of being humble and faithful subjects of the Church and of Church authority, what all this does is it turns us into critics and judges of the Church.
People get to the point where their attitude towards Pope Francis is so poisoned that they literally cannot hear anything he has to say because they've been conditioned to think the worst of him.
And some can't even see a picture of him without giving a knee-jerk reaction or a response of disgust.
Unwittingly, by feeding on voices of dissent, God's children can become like those people in the Gospels who had ears but truly could not hear what Jesus was saying.
Many people's hearts have been turned away from the visible source of unity in the Church, which is Rome and the Vicar of Christ, and we say that's the devil's right-hand jab.
Then there's his right-hand uppercut.
We mentioned how Jeroboam established a rebel priesthood in his territory, priests that encouraged the people to offend God and facilitated those offenses.
In the Church today, there are a number of clergymen that are facilitating a spirit of rebellion and distrust in the Church by sowing seeds of dissent, discord, and division.
Yes, of course, there are clerics on the left-hand side who do this.
Of course, there are.
The more traditional Catholics are aware of them.
But usually, we don't see it coming or we don't see the problem when it comes from the right.
In passing, I heard recently that a noted Cardinal spoke of people in the Church as making a sort of idol out of the Pope, that whatever he says or does is in a sense being treated as if it's divine and infallible, everything he does or says.
When I heard that, I thought, that's exactly something that the Protestants would say.
I personally know of no Catholic that makes a sort of idol out of the Pope, and I'm pretty sure that at least borders on slander, like when Protestants accuse us of making an idol out of Our Lady.
But be that as it may, we need to be aware and be on our guard when prelates start speaking like Protestants.
For the most part, they could be very good on a number of issues regarding faith and morals, but then Martin Luther or John Calvin-esque comments jump out when they're speaking about the Magisterium and the Holy Father.
In Illo Tempere, back in the day, Pope Pius X said of the modernists that, for example, in their writings, one page of their work will read like a masterpiece of Catholic doctrine and reasoning, and the next page, they're lost out in left field somewhere.
Same person, different page, different attitude.
Interesting observation.
And here prelates say that with the papacy, you need to make the distinction between the person of the Pope and his office, which is true.
It's a true distinction, but it's a subtle distinction.
But they basically use that to say, I'm attacking the person of the Pope, I'm not criticizing his office.
Well, okay.
But then when you try to make distinctions to defend and explain what the Pope and the Magisterium are teaching, then some of these same people say that you're naive, or you're a modernist, or you're just in fairyland whitewashing things.
In other words, you can make important and even subtle theological distinctions when you want to criticize the Pope, but not when you want to defend him.
Something about that doesn't sound right, or it doesn't sit right, or at least it shouldn't sound right, it shouldn't sit right, because it's not right.
The issue here is often the forma mentis, as they say in Latin.
It's the way of thinking, or the mindset, or the attitude of the person, or the prelate.
We'll give you a very simple, simplistic example.
Two people attend a Mass.
One person listens to the readings, unites their heart to the sacrifice, is grateful to God just for the grace to be able to attend Mass and to receive our Lord.
The other person is noticing everything that's wrong with the Church, or the chapel, or the celebration, or the celebrant, or the congregation.
That's where their focus is.
Same Mass, two different perspectives, two different responses.
It's a forma mentis problem.
In their pride, or perhaps in their simple lack of understanding, prelates who spread this new spirit of dissent and resistance are unable to see the damage that they do to the body of Christ and to the unity of the Church, and the scandal and confusion that they themselves are sowing among the faithful.
They have eyes, but they cannot see.
Why can't they see?
Well, for one, I think it's because they've got a lot of people patting them on the back, for one.
Two, I think they just can't see because they're convinced that they're right.
Essentially, they accuse the Pope of doing what they themselves and the media do, which is sow confusion and scandal.
Yes, sadly, Catholics continue to put their faith in these clerics because they're considered traditional or super orthodox, two things which they are not, either one.
They're not traditional or orthodox because there's nothing traditional and orthodox about dissenting from the magisterium, and constantly criticizing the Vatican, and calling the Pope a heretic, or insinuating that he is one, or maybe that he might be one.
Traditionally, again, that's what the Protestants do.
Catholics defend the Holy Father.
They interpret him in a favorable light.
They try to understand him.
Doesn't mean that they always agree with everything he says or does, but they at least try to cut him some slack.
And traditionally, Catholics only listen to those who do interpret the Pope's teachings in continuity with the faith, what Pope Benedict XVI called the hermeneutic of continuity.
And traditionally, Catholics don't give ear to those who oppose papal and magisterial teaching.
It's the Protestants who protest, and oppose, and resist, and insult, and criticize.
In simple terms, Pope bashing is traditionally a Protestant sport, not a Catholic one.
So please don't tell me you're traditional if you're doing that.
The spirit of schism is unfortunately very alive in the Church today, and in many or most of cases, it's thanks to us, the clergy, and not just those on the ideological left, as it were.
Thirdly, there's the devil's right hand, his knockout punch.
Jeroboam established false places of worship, and had the people offer unholy sacrifices to idols.
Some Catholics in their spirit of schism have been knocked out of the Church.
They literally do attend false places of worship, like frequenting the SSPX, or the Sedevacantists, or even defecting to the Orthodox Church.
That's where the proud spirit of resistance and dissent naturally leads.
And for others, maybe they're still bodily in the Church, but where's their heart?
What type of sacrifice and spiritual worship are they offering to God?
The psalmist says in Psalm 51, verse 17, the sacrifice acceptable to God is a humble spirit, a humble and contrite heart, God, you will not despise.
So in your spiritual life, you need to be very attentive to what type of spirit is moving you.
In 1 John 4:1, we read, Beloved, do not trust every spirit, but test the spirits to see if they're from God.
St. Paul, in Galatians 5, verses 19 through 23, contrasts the spirit of the flesh, essentially, with the Holy Spirit.
He includes among the works of the flesh, he says, enmity, meaning hostility, hatred, strife, meaning discord or quarreling, anger, selfishness, dissension, which means sedition or division, Galatians 5:20.
So if these dispositions are present within me and are guiding me in my thoughts and words and actions towards the Church and the Holy Father, I'm not being led by the Holy Spirit.
I'm being led by a different spirit.
According to St. Paul's signs, the presence of the Holy Spirit within me are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control, Galatians 5:22-23.
So which spirit is guiding me?
It's a very important question to ask and to answer.
Lastly, for today, how do I survive in this crazy Church reality?
We'll offer seven quick points for surviving and thriving.
One, maintain a supernatural vision of the Church.
And remember that the Lord promises that the gates of hell will not prevail against it, and neither will the dissenters.
Two, reject whatever is dishonoring or overly critical of the Holy Father, and pray and stop listening to those prelates and personalities and websites and YouTube sites and newspapers that are constantly critical of the Vatican and the Holy Father.
A general diet or fast from Church news is probably the best thing for most of us, and with Lent coming up, it might be a good idea.
Three, listen to those who know how to harmonize magisterial teaching with the present, of the present, with the past.
They're out there.
Pray for them as well, because they need it.
Four, be attentive to when anger is boiling up in your spirit, when charity is diminishing in your heart, and when trust in the Church is waning in your thoughts, and let that be an important indicator regarding your media intake.
Five, focus on growing in holiness and reforming yourself.
That's what we always counsel.
That's what people don't want to hear, because it's hard.
Don't focus on the problems you can't solve.
Focus on your own spiritual struggles and problems.
Work on correcting your own ways, and you'll be a tremendous help to the Church.
Six, I like to tell people that you and God have the same desire, basically, the desire to be loved.
God desires your love.
Deep down, you desire His.
Let that be your spiritual focus, not the latest Church headlines.
And lastly, seven, in order to survive and thrive spiritually, humble yourself.
Humble yourself.
Aim at having a heart like Christ, a heart that is charitable, humble, and merciful.
Humble yourself, and the devil won't do any damage to you.
Neither with his left, nor with his right.
May Our Lady keep us safe, sound, and truly Catholic in these troubled times, where sin is abounding, yes, but thankfully, grace is abounding all the more, Romans 5:20.
Praise be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.