The Pillar Catholic portal presents another episode of its “Sunday School” podcast series, featuring JD Flynn and Dr. Scott Powell discussing the readings for the Twelfth Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year A). The episode, titled “The Weeping Prophet and the Door Keeper,” examines Jeremiah 20:10-13, Psalm 69, Romans 5:12-15, and Matthew 10:26-33. While the surface-level discussion appears innocuous, the very framework of analysis employed by these conciliar commentators reveals the fundamental theological impoverishment of the post-conciliar approach to Sacred Scripture—an approach that systematically evacuates the supernatural content of the liturgical readings in favor of psychological self-help and naturalistic moralism.
The Jeremiah Reading: Persecution Reduced to Personal Struggle
The first reading from Jeremiah 20:10-13 presents the prophet’s lament amid persecution: “I hear the whispering of many: ‘Terror on every side! Denounce! Let us denounce him!’ All my friends are watching for my fall.” This is a passage saturated with prophetic anguish, the suffering of a man who speaks truth to power and faces the consequences. In the integral Catholic hermeneutic, Jeremiah’s suffering is typological—it prefigures the suffering of Christ Himself, the Prophet par excellence, and by extension, the suffering of all who bear witness to divine truth in a world hostile to God.
The conciliar approach, as exemplified by Flynn and Powell, characteristically reduces this to a discussion of “persecution” in the abstract, divorced from its theological substance. The prophet’s cry—“But the Lord is with me like a mighty champion; therefore my persecutors will stumble”—is not merely a psychological comfort mechanism. It is a declaration of divine justice and the ultimate triumph of God’s truth over the machinations of the wicked. The prophet does not merely “feel” persecuted; he is persecuted because he speaks the word of God to a people in rebellion against their Creator.
What is conspicuously absent from the conciliar reading is any mention of the cause of Jeremiah’s persecution: the apostasy of Israel, the abandonment of the covenant, the worship of false gods, and the rejection of divine law. Jeremiah suffers not because he is a nice man facing mean people, but because he is the mouthpiece of the Almighty confronting a nation in mortal sin. To strip this context is to commit the very error condemned by Pope Pius IX in the Syllabus of Errors (1864), which rejects the notion that “the Church has not the power of defining dogmatically that the religion of the Catholic Church is the only true religion” (Proposition 21). Jeremiah’s entire prophetic mission is predicated on the exclusivity of the true faith and the catastrophic consequences of abandoning it.
The Psalm of Lament: David’s Cry Without Its Christological Fulfillment
Psalm 69, from which the responsorial psalm is drawn, is one of the most profoundly Christological psalms in the entire Psalter. “It is for your sake that I have borne reproach, that shame has covered my face” (v. 7) is applied directly to Our Lord in the New Testament. Saint Paul quotes this psalm in Romans 11:9-10, and the Evangelists apply its verses to Christ’s Passion—the gall and vinegar offered to Him on the Cross (v. 21), His zeal for the Father’s house (v. 9).
The conciliar commentators, however, treat this psalm as a generic expression of human suffering and lament. The reduction of David’s prophetic utterance to a template for “feeling sad about hard times” is a textbook example of the modernist hermeneutic condemned by Saint Pius X in Lamentabili sane exitu (1907), which rejects the proposition that “the natural sense of the Gospel texts cannot be reconciled with the teaching of Catholic theologians about the consciousness and infallible knowledge of Jesus Christ” (Proposition 32). When the psalmist cries, “But I, in my affliction, cry to the Lord; God, hear my prayer”, this is not merely a man in distress—it is the voice of Christ speaking through His prophet, and the voice of every soul in the state of grace calling upon God amidst the tribulations of a fallen world.
The omission of the Christological dimension is not accidental; it is structural. The conciliar hermeneutic, shaped by the rationalism condemned in the Syllabus (Proposition 7: “The prophecies and miracles set forth and recorded in the Sacred Scriptures are the fiction of poets, and the mysteries of the Christian faith the result of philosophical investigations”), systematically denies the supernatural sense of Scripture. What remains is a flattened, naturalistic text that can be mined for “inspiration” but never encountered as the living Word of God.
Romans 5:12-15: Original Sin Diluted
The second reading from Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Romans addresses the doctrine of original sin and the superabundance of grace: “Therefore, just as through one person sin entered the world, and through sin, death, and thus death came to all, inasmuch as all sinned.” This is the foundational Catholic teaching on the Fall—the dogma defined at the Council of Trent (Session V) that Adam’s sin is transmitted to all his descendants not by imitation but by propagation, and that it is remitted only through the sacrament of Baptism.
The conciliar approach to this passage, as one can readily discern from the methodology of Flynn and Powell, tends toward a softening of the doctrine. The emphasis falls on “God’s grace” and “the gift” in a manner that abstracts from the juridical and sacramental framework within which Saint Paul operates. Grace is not a vague benevolence; it is the supernatural life infused into the soul by Baptism, without which no one can be saved. As Pope Pius IX declared in Quanto conficiamur (1863), those who are “in the true Church of Christ” alone can find the way of eternal salvation—a proposition directly contradicted by the indifferentism condemned in the Syllabus (Proposition 17: “Good hope at least is to be entertained of the eternal salvation of all those who are not at all in the true Church of Christ”).
The conciliar commentators’ characteristic silence on the necessity of Baptism for the remission of original sin—and by extension, the necessity of the Catholic Church for salvation—is not merely an omission; it is a dogmatic betrayal. It aligns precisely with the error condemned by the Syllabus (Proposition 18): “Protestantism is nothing more than another form of the same true Christian religion, in which form it is given to please God equally as in the Catholic Church.” When grace is discussed without the sacramental system, without the Church as the sole ark of salvation, the result is the very naturalism and rationalism that the Syllabus condemns in its opening propositions.
Matthew 10:26-33: The Gospel of Fear Without the Fear of God
The Gospel reading from Matthew 10:26-33 contains Our Lord’s instruction to the Apostles as He sends them forth: “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather, be afraid of the one who can destroy both soul and body in Gehenna.” This is one of the most terrifying passages in the entire Gospel—a direct warning from the Incarnate God about the reality of eternal damnation.
The conciliar treatment of this passage, predictable in its trajectory, will almost certainly emphasize “not being afraid” while minimizing or entirely omitting the second half of the verse: the fear of Hell. This is the characteristic inversion of the post-conciliar hermeneutic: Our Lord’s consolations are amplified while His warnings are suppressed. The result is a Christ who is merely a supportive companion rather than the Divine Judge before whom every knee shall bend.
Pope Saint Pius X, in Pascendi Dominici gregis (1907), condemned the modernist error that “the teaching about Christ transmitted by Paul, John, and by the Councils of Nicaea, Ephesus, and Chalcedon does not correspond to the teaching of Jesus, but is a teaching about Jesus formulated by Christian consciousness” (Proposition 31). The conciliar approach to the Gospel does precisely this: it reconstructs a Christ who would never threaten anyone with Hell, who would never demand the total surrender of every faculty to His divine authority. This is not the Christ of the Gospels; it is the Christ of liberal Protestantism, the “historical Christ” who is “considerably lower than the Christ of faith”—another proposition condemned in Lamentabili (Proposition 29).
The Structural Apostasy of Conciliar Biblical Commentary
What is most revealing about this Pillar Catholic podcast episode is not any single error but the comprehensive framework within which the discussion operates. The very title—”The Weeping Prophet and the Door Keeper”—suggests a narrative of human vulnerability and divine companionship that is, at best, a half-truth. Jeremiah is not merely “weeping”; he is proclaiming divine judgment. The “door keeper” is not merely a sympathetic listener; he is the guardian of the threshold between the sacred and the profane, between the covenant and apostasy.
The conciliar approach to Sacred Scripture is characterized by what might be called hermeneutical naturalism—the systematic reduction of supernatural realities to natural categories. Prophecy becomes “speaking truth to power.” Divine judgment becomes “consequences of sin.” Hell becomes “separation from God” (a phrase that, while technically accurate, is deployed in the conciar context to minimize the reality of eternal punishment). The sacraments become “encounters with Christ.” The Church becomes “the people of God.” Every supernatural reality is translated into a naturalistic equivalent that can be discussed without discomfort in the drawing rooms of the bourgeoisie.
This is precisely the error condemned by Pope Pius IX in the Syllabus (Proposition 4): “All the truths of religion proceed from the innate strength of human reason; hence reason is the ultimate standard by which man can and ought to arrive at the knowledge of all truths of every kind.” When the conciar commentators approach Scripture, they do so not as faithful sons of the Church submitting to the Magisterium’s interpretation, but as autonomous reasoners extracting “meaning” from a text they no longer fully believe to be the inspired, inerrant Word of God.
The Liturgical Context: Readings Without the Mass
Perhaps the most damning omission in the entire Pillar Catholic treatment is the absence of any serious engagement with the liturgical context of these readings. The Twelfth Sunday in Ordinary Time is not merely a convenient grouping of texts; it is a moment in the Church’s liturgical year, a year that is itself a catechetical instrument designed to form the faithful in the mysteries of the faith.
The “Ordinary Time” of the conciliar liturgical calendar is itself a departure from the traditional Roman liturgical year, which structured the faithful’s encounter with Scripture according to a theological logic far richer and more coherent than the post-conciliar arrangement. The traditional calendar, codified by Saint Pius V and refined over centuries, ensured that the faithful encountered the fullness of Catholic doctrine through the liturgical cycle. The conciliar reform, the work of the Masonic-influenced Consilium under Annibale Bugnini, disrupted this coherence in favor of a three-year lectionary that, while increasing the quantity of Scripture read, has arguably decreased the depth of doctrinal formation.
The Pillar Catholic podcast, by treating the readings as standalone texts for discussion rather than as integral parts of the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, perpetuates the very error that the conciar liturgical reform introduced: the separation of the Word from the Sacrament, of the Liturgy of the Word from the Liturgy of the Eucharist. In the traditional Mass, the readings flow organically into the Offertory, the Canon, and the Communion—they are not a “Bible study” but a preparation for the unbloody renewal of Calvary. To treat them as the former rather than the latter is to reveal the extent to which the conciliar mentality has penetrated even those who claim to take Scripture seriously.
Conclusion: The Bankruptcy of Conciliar Catholicism
The Pillar Catholic “Sunday School” podcast, for all its apparent fidelity to the weekly readings, exemplifies the fundamental bankruptcy of the conciliar approach to the faith. By reducing prophetic lament to psychological comfort, by stripping psalms of their Christological content, by diluting the doctrine of original sin, by minimizing the reality of Hell, and by divorcing the readings from their liturgical and sacramental context, Flynn and Powell demonstrate that even the most “faithful” expressions of conciliar Catholicism are incapable of transmitting the fullness of the Catholic faith.
The faithful are not served by a Catholicism that has been systematically emptied of its supernatural content. They are served only by the integral, unchanging faith of the Church—the faith that produced the Scriptures, that defined the canon, that interpreted the texts through the Fathers and the Magisterium, and that offered the Most Holy Sacrifice as the context in which those texts find their ultimate meaning. As Pope Pius XI declared in Quas primas (1925), “His reign, namely, extends not only to Catholic nations or to those who, by receiving baptism according to law, belong to the Church, even though their erroneous opinions have led them astray or discord has separated them from love, but His reign encompasses also all non-Christians, so that most truly the entire human race is subject to the authority of Jesus Christ.”
The conciliar project, in all its manifestations—including the seemingly innocuous Pillar Catholic podcast—is a systematic denial of that reign. It is the abomination of desolation standing in the holy place, offering a Christ without the Cross, a Church without authority, a Scripture without the Magisterium, and a salvation without the sacraments. The faithful must reject it utterly and return to the immutable Tradition of the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church.
Source:
The weeping prophet and the door keeper (pillarcatholic.com)
Date: 16.06.2026