Would that all bishops, priests, and deacons heed this warning, especially the bishops, and especially the bishops of the Church of England who are the most recent ones to lead their denomination down the road to perdition. These men and women took an oath to God to defend the faith against all kinds of heresy. But no, they couldn’t be bothered to do this. Why? Because most don’t believe their own Story in the first place! And as Saint Cyprian has warned, heresy is so dangerous because it inevitably leads to apostasy and apostasy leads to eternal destruction.

Nor are the bishops of the CoE the only ones who have led their denominations down the path of destruction. Just look at the Episcopal and United Methodist Churches. It makes the heart sad and angry. Lord have mercy on us.

Heresies have frequently arisen and continue to do so because of the fact that disgruntled minds find no peace and faithless rabble-rousers undermine unity. But the Lord allows and endures these things, while not touching our freedom, so that when our hearts and minds are examined by the norm of truth, the sound faith of those who are approved may clearly stand out. This is foretold by the Holy Spirit through the Apostle when he says: “There may even have to be factions among you for the tried and true to stand out clearly.”

Thus are the faithful approved, thus are the faithless detected; thus even here, before the day of judgment, are the souls of the just and the unjust set apart, and the chaff separated from the wheat. This explains why some, of their own accord and without divine appointment, set themselves over daring strangers, making themselves into prelates regardless of the rules of ordination, and assume the title of bishop on their own authority, although no one confers the episcopate on them.

In the Psalms, the Holy Spirit designates these as sitting in the chair of pestilence; they are the plague and disease for the faith, serpent-tongued deceivers and skilled corruptors of the truth, spewing forth lethal venom from their poisonous tongues; their speech resembles a creeping cancer and their preaching injects a fatal virus in the heart and breast of everyone.

Against such persons the Lord cries out, and from these he restrains and recalls his wandering people, saying: “Listen not to the voice of your [false] prophets, who fill you with emptiness; visions of their own fancy they speak, not from the mouth of the Lord. They say to those who despise the word of the Lord: ‘Peace shall be yours’; and to everyone who walks in hardness of heart, ‘No one shall overtake you.’ I did not speak to them, yet they prophesied. Had they stood in my counsel, and did they but proclaim to my people my words, they would have brought them back from evil ways and from their wicked deeds.”

It is these same persons whom the Lord designates and censures when he says: ‘‘They have forsaken me, the source of living waters; they have dug themselves cisterns, broken cisterns, that hold no water.” Although there can be only the one baptism, they think they can baptize: and although they forsake the fountain of life, they still promise the grace of life and saving water. People are not cleansed by them but simply made foul; and sins are not taken away but only accumulated.

Such a ‘‘new birth’’ does not bring forth children for God but for the devil. Born by a lie, they do not receive the promises of truth. Begotten by perfidy, they lose the grace of faith. They cannot attain to the reward of peace, since they have broken the peace of the Lord with the madness of discord.

—On the Unity of the Catholic Church 10-11