Jack Shine

This is not an indictment of the Roman Catholic Church. I know faithful, dedicated followers of that church who fervently believe in Jesus Christ, and I consider them friends. I love the people of the Roman Catholic Church. I still love so much of what it has accomplished, the proliferation of Christianity across the earth. I’m a diehard Notre Dame Fighting Irish football supporter, a lover of Friday fish fries, and I hope to one day lay my eyes upon the beauty of the Sistine Chapel. Every afternoon I walk my dog past the local Catholic church — a beautiful stone cathedral stretching what looks like a hundred feet into the air, with a clocktower that sings and chimes for the turn of every hour throughout the day, its the very cathedral my grandmother was baptized, married, and eulogized over the span of almost a century. I have no quarrel with that building or the people inside it. My quarrel is with the hierarchical structure of the church, with what I perceive to be serious problems in the development of the Papacy, and with a drive I couldn’t shake to acquire a fuller understanding of what I actually believed.

I’m just a layman. A man who decided to search for answers, and who, when presented with information that changed his views, felt obligated to act upon that new understanding and follow it through.

For a time I drifted. I didn’t know what to call myself — I never denied the existence of God — but I was somewhere in the neighborhood of agnostic, trying to grasp it for myself, to really know it in my heart rather than inherit it secondhand.

But I kept praying. I continued to pray the rosary, often daily, with stretches of latency creeping in. The belief in the divinity of Christ, the sanctity of the Virgin Mary, her miraculous ability as an intercessor — that was the weapon I carried through the wilderness.

For a few months in that period I attended an SSPX chapel. The Society of St. Pius X — the traditionalist Catholic group that rejects certain teachings and reforms of the Second Vatican Council, particularly on religious liberty and ecumenism, and celebrates exclusively the Traditional Latin Mass. I understood the appeal immediately. The reverence was there. The beauty was there. The sense that something ancient was being guarded rather than renovated. I did so because I felt the faith of my grandparents and my ancestors had been lost somewhere along the way, and I wasn’t sure what had replaced it.

But something felt off, and it took me a while to name it.

Here is the problem, and it is a genuinely brutal one for a Traditional Roman Catholic. If you believe the Pope is the visible head of the Church, the successor of Peter, endowed with universal and immediate jurisdiction, and — since Vatican I in 1870 — capable of teaching infallibly, then what exactly are you doing when you sit in a chapel where everyone around you is disappointed in him? Where the shared assumption is that Rome has gone wrong? You cannot be a good Catholic and hold the Pope in contempt. The structure doesn’t permit it. You are, functionally, in a state of protest against the very office that defines your ecclesiology. You are — and I don’t use this word lightly — flirting with heresy by the standards of your own church.

I sat in those pews and thought: this can’t hold. It’s only a matter of time before this is excommunicated.

And how, I kept asking, is that not antithetical to what Christ said? “The gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” If the Church is indefectible, what am I looking at?

It’s the main reason I stopped going. And then, this month, I watched what myself and others had long been expecting finally happen.

On July 1, 2026, at the seminary in Écône, Switzerland, the SSPX consecrated four bishops without a papal mandate, before roughly seventeen thousand of the faithful gathered from some seventy countries. The Vatican had warned them in May that this would constitute a schismatic act carrying automatic excommunication. On June 30, the eve of the ceremony, Pope Leo XIV published a final letter pleading with them — “Please turn back!” — and warning that to tear the seamless garment of Christ is a sin of extreme gravity. The Society’s answer, delivered through its media office, was that they were changing absolutely nothing in their plans. They went ahead. The following day, Rome formally excommunicated the bishops, the priests, and some of the lay faithful.

It happened at Écône, on the same ground where Archbishop Lefebvre consecrated four bishops without a mandate thirty-eight years before. The circle closed exactly where it opened.

I don’t write that with any satisfaction. I write it because I suspect there are men in those pews right now — men I knew — sitting with the same thoughts I was sitting with, and they are running out of room to avoid them. If you love the Latin Mass, if you love Tradition, if you believe the Church cannot err, and you now find yourself formally severed from the See of Peter for the crime of trying to preserve what you were given — then the question I had to ask is the question sitting in front of them. What if the fracture didn’t start in 1965? What if it didn’t start in 1870? What if it started a very long time ago, and you have been living in the aftermath your whole life without knowing the name of it?

Now, insofar as all of that deals with the administrative layers of the church, it wasn’t the only thing that moved me. As layer upon layer of evil has been uncovered in our world over the last two decades, crimes against children committed at scale, famine, genocide, I noticed a pattern. What’s happening looks like far more than man’s ordinary penchant for his own fleshly desires. It looks outright demonic.

And it is not new. When the Bolsheviks took Russia, the first thing they came for was the Church. Tsar Nicholas II, the Tsarina Alexandra, and their five children — Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia, and the boy Alexei — were shot and bayoneted in a cellar in Yekaterinburg on the night of July 16 and 17, 1918, along with their doctor and three of their servants. Their bodies were carted into the forest, mutilated with acid and grenades so they could not be identified, and buried in the dirt. The Russian Orthodox Church Abroad glorified them as martyrs in 1981. The Moscow Patriarchate glorified them in 2000 as passion-bearers — a category the Church reserves for those who are killed by persecutors and who meet that death in the manner of Christ, in humility and without hatred, forgiving their murderers, even where the killers’ stated motive was political rather than religious. It is the title given to Saints Boris and Gleb.

But the family was only the beginning. Within five years of the revolution, twenty-eight Orthodox bishops and some twelve hundred priests had been executed. Over the following decades the numbers become almost impossible to hold in the mind: tens of thousands of clergy arrested, the great majority of them shot or worked to death in the camps. Between 1927 and 1949 the number of functioning Orthodox churches in Russia fell from roughly twenty-nine thousand to fewer than five hundred. The seminaries were shuttered, the monasteries emptied, the icons burned or sold abroad for hard currency, and what survived of the faith survived underground, in kitchens and cellars and forests, passed hand to hand by people who understood exactly what it would cost them if they were caught.

That was not an economic program with unfortunate religious side effects. That was a direct assault on Christianity, executed with method and enthusiasm, and it is the single largest persecution of Christians in the history of the world.

And none of it was new. The Church has a name for the men and women the Soviets killed: the New Martyrs. Sit with that word for a second, because it is a claim and not a decoration. New is only intelligible if there are old ones.

For nearly three hundred years Rome did to the Church what Moscow would do to it later. And Rome did not especially care what Christians believed in their hearts — Rome cared that they would not perform. The public sacrifice was simply what it meant to be a loyal subject, and the Christians would not do it. That refusal is what the Empire could not tolerate. Nero began it around the year 64, when he needed someone to blame for the fire and found a small strange sect ready to hand. He had them torn apart by dogs, crucified, coated in pitch and set alight in his gardens to light the paths at night.

Then in 250 the Emperor Decius ordered every citizen in the Empire to sacrifice to the gods, and sent commissions traveling through the cities and villages to supervise it and to issue a written certificate to every person who complied. A libellus. A piece of paper proving you had done what the state demanded, so that you might be permitted to go on existing. Some fled. Some bought the paper without performing the sacrifice. Some refused, and were arrested, and tortured, and killed.

It peaked under Diocletian, who issued his first edict on February 24 in the year 303 and timed it deliberately to fall on the feast of Terminus, the god of boundaries. The scriptures were burned. The churches were pulled down. Men, women and children were beheaded and thrown to the beasts for refusing to renounce Christ. The Christians called that era the Age of Martyrs.

And within a decade of that edict, the Empire was Christian.

It did not work in Rome and it did not work in Russia. The persecution never thins the Church. It feeds it. So when I say what I am watching in our own time looks demonic, I am not reaching for a metaphor. I am saying I recognize it. Nero and Lenin are separated by nineteen centuries and every conceivable difference of language and pretext, and they wanted precisely the same thing, and they were each of them beaten by an unarmed people.

These are attacks on God’s natural order, and they are aimed with precision at the things most necessary to upholding it: the Church, the family, the schools, the community, the nation, and those least able to defend themselves — children, the broken, and the apathetically asleep. These served as a foundation of which I began to build out my understanding, and this is what I arrived at: Jesus Christ is the Lord of Spirits.

My brief but impactful study of demonic possession is what made that crystal clear to me. Read the Gospels with an eye for it and it is impossible to miss how much of Christ’s public ministry consists of casting out demons, and how the demons behave when He arrives. They recognize Him before anyone else does. They know exactly who He is while the crowds are still arguing about it. They cry out that He is the Son of God, they beg not to be tormented, they ask where they are permitted to go — and they go where He sends them. They do not debate Him. They do not resist Him. There is no contest. And when He gives His disciples authority to do the same, it is explicitly delegated authority, exercised in His name.

That asymmetry is significant. There is no dualism here, no two equal powers grinding against each other in the dark. There is a Lord, and there are creatures in rebellion against Him who cannot stand in His presence and know it. He is the Son of God. He is what they most despise and relentlessly seek to subvert. The nations that hold His followers are currently under siege by several means at once, and what we are watching is spiritual warfare playing out in front of us — only part of which our limited sensory perception permits us to see.

And there is a hell. We have all lived our own private versions of it at one time or another. It is not merely the presence of evil; it is the absence of God. God is the umbrella from the storm. He doesn’t command us to abstain from sin and wickedness to torment us, He does so because to do so opens us up to spiritual harassment. When you have seen the abyss of darkness laid bare, you understand that you must find your way to the light, and that it is a choice each of us is confronted with.

So that is the first pillar. Christ is Lord.

Which left me with one remaining question — the hard one. Where is His Church?

I was convinced of one thing: there is One True Church. Christ did not say churches. He said “upon this rock I will build My church,” singular, and He promised that the gates of hell would not prevail against it. When He gave His disciples instructions for resolving a dispute among the brethren, the final court of appeal He named was not a text and not a man — He told them to take it to the church, and if a man will not hear the church, let him be as a heathen. That only means something if the church is a visible, identifiable body with the authority to be heard. He prayed on the night He was betrayed that His followers would be one, as He and the Father are one. And when Paul went looking for a metaphor, he did not reach for a federation or a marketplace. He called it a body. You do not have five bodies. You have one, or you have dismemberment.

And to my understanding at the time, it could only be the Roman Catholic Church or the Eastern Orthodox Church. Both have apostolic succession. Both trace to Pentecost. Both survived the pre-New Testament years, the Roman persecutions, and the heresies of the first few centuries — many of which have simply been repackaged for a modern audience under different branding.

In that state of flux, I kept returning to the same instinct: But it must be Rome, right? The East broke away. They committed an apostasy in rejecting Rome, and they must simply acquiesce and come home.

That was my thinking. Then I talked to a friend who is downright rabid in his study of this question, he made several compelling arguments, and I began to look into the possibility that there was something more to Orthodoxy after all.

Something exists now that did not exist for most of Church history, and it has evangelized thousands of Orthodox Christians: the internet. Video platforms — YouTube, Instagram, TikTok — they can rot your brain, but they can also deliver simple, direct, plainly stated arguments, and there are many individuals on those applications who do so for the faith. Formal debates between scholars of both churches, available to any layman willing to sit and watch and think. Explanations from men vastly more theologically literate than I could hope to be, many of them converts themselves, who had walked the road ahead of me and left markers.

And then it led me to one book that sealed it: The Orthodox Church, by Kallistos Ware. It is an entry-level explanation for inquirers and catechumens. After months of deep dives and videos and debates and articles, it took roughly fifty pages of that text to finish the job.

Here is what I found, and here is why it changed me.

For the first millennium, the Church governed itself through councils — not through a single man. When a controversy threatened the faith, the bishops of the whole Church assembled, guided by the Holy Spirit, they argued, prayed, and decided together. Seven of these are recognized as Ecumenical: Nicaea I in 325, Constantinople I in 381, Ephesus in 431, Chalcedon in 451, Constantinople II in 553, Constantinople III in 680 and 681, and Nicaea II in 787.

Presiding over the ancient Church were five great patriarchal sees, what came to be called the Pentarchy: Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem. Rome held pride of place. Rome was primus inter pares — first among equals.

Sit with that phrase, because everything turns on it.

First — yes. Genuinely first. Rome held a primacy of honor that the East never denied and that Orthodoxy does not deny to this day.

Among equals — also yes. First among them. Not above them. Not over them. Not possessing them. A primacy of honor is not a supremacy of power, and the difference between those two things is the difference between two churches.

The disputed ground is Christ’s word to Peter in Matthew 16:18 — “And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” Rome came to read that as a grant of universal, immediate jurisdiction over the whole Church. The East read it as a primacy of honor and of witness, held by the see of Peter but not conferring the right to rule the other patriarchates or to define the faith alone.

For a thousand years, Rome did not act alone. Rome made no unilateral changes to the faith of the Church. It moved in concert with the council and the other four sees. That was not a courtesy. That was the constitution of the Church.

And then it stopped being true.

The Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed — the one hammered out at Nicaea in 325 and completed at Constantinople in 381, the one recited every Sunday by Catholics and Orthodox alike, and by a great many Protestants besides — says the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father.

In the West, a word was added. Filioque. And the Son.

Now here is the detail that mattered most to me, because it demolished the story I had been telling myself. Rome did not invent it, and for a long time Rome resisted it. The addition arose regionally — in Spain, then among the Franks — and worked its way inward. Popes fought it. Leo III went so far as to have the original creed, without the addition, inscribed on silver plates and set up at St. Peter’s, precisely so that no one would tamper with it. Rome held the line for generations before finally yielding.

Which means the East was not innovating by rejecting the Filioque. The East was conserving. And Rome, in the end, accepted an alteration to an ecumenical creed — a creed produced by the whole Church in council — without the whole Church in council.

That is not a footnote. That is the thing itself.

By the middle of the eleventh century, the two halves of the Church had been drifting apart for a long time — different languages, different liturgical customs, a widening disagreement over what Rome’s primacy actually entitled Rome to do, and the Filioque sitting unresolved between them. In 1054, Pope Leo IX — the Bishop of Rome, the Patriarch of the West, one of the five — sent a delegation east to settle matters with Constantinople. A legate is an ambassador, a man dispatched to speak with the authority of the one who sent him. The man Leo sent was Cardinal Humbert of Silva Candida.

Humbert arrived in Constantinople as papal legate with two companions and a temper. His counterpart was Michael Cerularius, the Patriarch of Constantinople — the senior bishop of the East, and a man every bit as immovable as Humbert. Negotiations between them collapsed. Neither man was built for concession. Humbert waited. Then he acted.

On Saturday, July 16, 1054, as the Divine Liturgy was beginning, Humbert strode into Hagia Sophia, walked to the high altar, and laid upon it a bull of excommunication against the Patriarch and those who support his folly. He turned and walked out. At the threshold he stopped, shook the dust of that cathedral from his feet, and shouted: Videat Deus et judicet. May God see and judge.

And a deacon ran out into the road after him.

He ran out into the street in great distress and begged the Cardinal to take the bull back. To undo it. Humbert refused. The document was dropped in the street.

That deacon understood — instantly, viscerally, in a way it took the rest of Christendom centuries to catch up to — that something enormous and irreversible had just happened, and he ran into the road to try to stop it with his hands. Four days later, Cerularius convened a synod of his own bishops and excommunicated Humbert and his companions in return.

There is one more thing, and it is also worth noting. Pope Leo IX, who had sent Humbert, was already dead. He had died that April, months before. Humbert acted on the authority of a man in his grave, and some historians have argued the excommunication was therefore invalid on its face — the legates’ mandate died with the pope who issued it.

The most famous rupture in the history of the Church may have been executed without valid authority, by a man badly overmatched by his own certainty, in a foreign cathedral, in front of a deacon who begged him to stop.

I should say plainly: no serious historian now claims the schism began that day. The break was a long estrangement, not a clean snap. Communion continued in various places for decades afterward; the East and West were still cooperating at the launch of the First Crusade in 1095. The cracks had been forming for centuries, and they would take centuries more to fully open.

But that is my point, not an objection to it.

That was the unlock. The changes in the Roman Catholic Church didn’t go back to Vatican II. It didn’t go back to Vatican I. It went back to 1054, and the cracks had appeared long before that. Rome, which for over a thousand years had never altered the faith unilaterally — always in concert with the council and the other four sees — had separated itself. And having separated itself, it would go on granting more and more authority to its Pope, and that accumulating authority would produce fundamental changes to the faith.

Here is what I did not expect to find, and what I have come to see as a mercy rather than a defect. The Orthodox Church has not made those changes — and it does not possess a mechanism for making them.

To be precise, because this matters: the Orthodox Church holds councils. It has held them throughout its history and holds them still. What it cannot do is convene an Ecumenical Council, because an Ecumenical Council in the Orthodox understanding requires the whole Church — the full body, all the ancient sees in communion — and its authority is not merely declared from above but received by the whole body of the faithful. With Rome out of communion, that fullness does not exist. The Church cannot assemble in its entirety, and so no council of that authority can be convened.

For a thousand years, this has held the Orthodox Church in place. It has prevented the sweeping reforms and redefinitions of the modern era. It has meant, for better and worse, that Orthodoxy has been unable to renovate itself.

But that inability is precisely what has protected it. The Church has not been able to be dragged along by the changing times, because there is no lever with which to drag it.

And this is the point I want to land on cleanly, because it’s the whole thing. No see in the East can do what Rome did. Not Constantinople. Not Moscow. Not Antioch, not Alexandria, not Jerusalem. There is no throne in Orthodoxy from which one man may alter the faith of the whole Church by his own authority. That power does not exist there. It was never claimed, never granted, never assumed.

That, finally, is what I could not stop thinking about.

Once the lightbulb went on, I went deeper — into the beliefs, the practices, the literature. What began as an intellectual conviction that this was the right one became something else. The writings of Orthodox priests and monks range from dense theology to what amounts to survival guides for a Christian trying to navigate the modern world, and both halves of that spoke to me. It captured me intellectually, spiritually, and eventually through experience.

I kept reading about the Church for months before I could muster the courage to get myself to walk into one.

The first Liturgy, I nearly didn’t go. The doubts swirled: You’ll be rejected. You’re not good enough to even enter the building. You’re not ready.

After putting it off time and time again, I finally went.

Now to offer a bit of brevity: Billy Crystal talks about the first time he walked into Yankee Stadium — after years of listening to games on the radio and watching them on a black-and-white television — and seeing the green of the grass, the pinstripes, the crowd, the smell of popcorn and hot dogs, and being knocked flat by it. That, in a secular register, is close to what I felt walking into the parish. The colors of the icons. The imagery. The incense. I could see the roots of much of what I had missed about the Catholic Church there, waiting — but without the inner turmoil I had carried before. That is a problem a great many Roman Catholics are still carrying today. When I finally attended my first Divine Liturgy, I felt like I had come home.

Every piece of information, every belief, every experience of revelation across my life has been an accumulating step that got me here. I have seen the modernist waves, and the spiritualists, I have seen those running on vibes. I have seen them attempt to reduce Jesus Christ to merely being a higher level of consciousness. None of it felt authentic. None of it could carry the true weight of the full faith.

And even at the end of it — after all the books read, the videos watched, the documentaries studied, the catechism classes attended — I did not feel worthy to be part of it. I’m not sure that feeling is supposed to, or ever will, go away.

There was a euphoria and a relief when I was chrismated into the Orthodox Church. And then there is the rest of it: the lifelong commission of carrying your Cross, of bearing your burdens, of struggling against your passions. It is the long, slow labor of a man working against his lesser instincts to unite his heart and his mind and his soul with Christ. That is what I know I must do.

To keep pressing on even when I falter — striving to improve, to atone, and to attain.

The race is never finished until you are.