“There is no Devil,” says Father Matthieu Jasseron, pastor of St. John the Baptist Church in the Sens-Auxeve Archdiocese of France.

Hearing this sort of thing from a Catholic priest is no longer scandalous given the worms that have been eating at the Catholic Church since the close of the Second Vatican Council.

Fr. Jasseron is a young, smart-alecky cosmopolitan out-gay-man who was ordained in 2019 by Archbishop Herve Jean Robert Giraud, known as the first Bishop in France to have a social network Twitter account. In the three years since his ordination, Jasseron has gained some notoriety as the so called Tik Tok priest whose videos and posts specialize in satirical and sacrilegious skits.

In one video, Jasseron impersonates a DJ at the altar while celebrating Mass. In addition to his vestment he wears a hoodie reminiscent of Cistercian monks but on closer inspection one sees that it’s actuality a street hoodie from the world of rappers. Primed and pumped, Jasseron is in full DJ mode, gyrating and dancing while working his hands over imaginary scratchy disco records a mere few inches from a (very real) ornate chalice.

Jasserson picks up the chalice and gives it a whirl. Pachamama meets Rap and Hip Hop on the altar of the Most High.

In another video, Jasseron is dressed in an alb and stole and mimics a look of confusion while holding a chalice and a nearly empty bottle of Mass wine. Suddenly a floosy nun in a short mini skirt – with most of her legs exposed – rushes towards him holding a full bottle of wine. Jasseron, looking relieved, grimaces and scolds her with his forefinger.

The skit is supposed to be “comedy” but it’s more the kind of thing you’d expect from a 14-year-old putting on a show in order to shock his devout Catholic parents.

Jasseron should not only be excommunicated for the obvious sacrilege here but for thinking that tacky juvenile productions like this have artistic merit.

Ordinarily, in the old days at least, one could call the local bishop and report the offense. Yet Archbishop Herve Jean Robert Giraud seems to have turned a blind eye to the liturgical abuse happening at St. John the Baptist parish. The Bishop’s abdication or lack of interest in these abuses is indicative of the state of Catholicism in 2022, a Church in a rush to destroy itself, not only in liturgical matters but on moral issues as well.

The numbers of Catholics today who are ‘Catholics in name only’ (because they support abortion and the radical sexual and gender policies of U.S. Democrats) have come to represent (in the public mind) the whole of Catholicism. It’s a sad fact that the Catholic Church is now really two Churches: the old or traditional one, and the imposter Church that apes the values of the secular culture.

In a video of Jasseron’s ordination Mass, one can see a number of very pleased looking older priests laying hands on his head in a way that suggests they have more than an inkling of who Jasseron really is, what he thinks, and what kind of priest he will become.

While the Bishop should take most of blame for allowing a priest like Jasseron to flourish, the parishioners of St. John the Baptist are just as guilty. In most of Jasseron’s videotaped sermons one can see that most of his congregation consists of older women. The women sit passively in the pews as if in a trance.

The adoration they seem to have for the young priest gives you the feeling that were Jasseron to remove his priestly vestments and strip down to his underwear, most of them wouldn’t flinch.

“Do as ‘the spirit’ leads you, dear Father. God bless,” one imagines them thinking. “Just do it.”

It’s pertinent, somehow, that this Tik Tok priest should also come to represent a ticking clock, the Catholic meltdown clock that seems to be rushing towards some kind of Apocalypse.

All of which means: Being Catholic doesn’t mean what it used to mean.

This was ruthlessly confirmed for me this November 8 when I worked as a poll watcher for my Philadelphia Republican Ward. Poll watching is long and tedious, so to speed the hours I spent considerable time talking with the Democrat poll watchers, one of whom was the local Ward leader. It wasn’t long before she and I got into a heated political conversation about certain issues, mainly abortion.

Describing herself as a lifelong Catholic, this Ward leader might as well have been a walking billboard for her party’s stand on abortion.

“You don’t tell a woman what to do with her body,” she told me, despite my reminding her that it was not only about a woman’s body but the life of another body with different DNA inside the woman’s body. Though claiming to be Catholic, the Ward leader was adamant when she stated that she didn’t care a hoot what the Church or the pope taught about abortion – that being that life begins at conception – although when speaking to someone else about the pleasures of overindulging in a hot fudge ice cream Sunday, she prefaced that comment by asking forgiveness from the Virgin Mary for the sin of gluttony.

Meanwhile, the other Catholic Democrat committee person was equally as adamant. A former cop and father of seven sons, he repeated the Ward leader’s mantra, “My body, my choice,” with the added caveat that he could care less what the Church teaches about abortion. “I’m not about to listen to some pope when it comes to that,” he said.

Never mind, of course, that the issue has nothing to do with who is pope but everything to do with the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

Another Catholic Democrat concurred until it seemed that almost every Democrat at the polling place was agreeing that obeying the Church was not an option when it came to abortion, and that they were free, as Catholics, to reject the Church on this one issue. Or any other issue if they were ordered to do so by Democrat chieftains.

These Democrat Tik Tok Catholics confirmed for me what podcaster (and convert from Judaism), Mother Miriam, has stated many times: “You can’t be a Catholic and be a Democrat.”

“Wow,” I thought when I first heard that statement, “Somebody actually said it.”

Of course, Mother Meriam is considered an old fossil by ‘with it’ modern Catholics who would no more watch her videos than they would watch reruns of Lawrence Welk.

Hearing these Catholic Democrats go on about a woman’s right to choose made me think of Jasseron and the Tik Tok Catholicism that created him. Was he cuddled by liberal priests in the seminary? Was he was made to feel special because of his mildly good looks and animated personality? Was he “cuddled” in suspicious ways behind closed doors?

One thing is certain: France has not yet been swallowed up by the pagan forces that succeeded in devouring (once Catholic) Ireland. When Pope Franics issued his Traditionis Custodes on July 16, 2022, most French bishops rallied around traditional Catholic communities. The French Catholic publication, La NEF, estimates that there are 60,000 traditional Catholics in France and those numbers are growing every year. These numbers include younger and younger members, so the TLM (Traditional Latin Mass) and traditional Catholicism has hardly been eradicated by Francis modernists who wish to see the Catholic Church become a kind of Roman Episcopal Low Church.

An especially strong bastion of traditional Catholicism is the Diocese of Versailles, located in the western suburbs of Paris, where congregants use the 1962 Roman Missal.

In France, appreciation for traditional Catholicism in the form of the TLM, even comes from atheist, left wing philosophers like Michel Onfray, who wrote,” The TLM embodies the heritage of the genealogical time of our civilization.  “It inherits historically and spiritually a long lineage of sacred rituals, celebrations, and prayers, all crystallized in a form that offers a total spectacle.”

Jasseron, when all is said and done, represents the kind of Catholic that is stuck eternally in Saint Peter’s sins of denial. Saint Peter may have denied Christ three times but he also repented for his denials, whereas the abortion Catholics (who might also approve mastectomies for adolescent girls) are not about to bow their heads in penance, especially to a pope or a catechism. They are as adamant and focused politically as the feminist I observed at the polls wearing a specially made pant suit with ‘My Body My Choice’ written all over it in Keith Harring script.

What to do?

History offers one perspective, even if it’s not a solution.

Leon Bloy the 19^th Century Catholic French novelist and mystic, wrote to a friend in 1884:

“Our so-called Catholics hold virtues in horror; in the place of devotion, they want nothing anymore than the insipid and somniferous devotions compatible with the oblivion of all the sacrifices that are demanded by the situation we find ourselves in.

Politics cannot count on them any more than religion can.

Where then is the courage and the strength of those lions nourished by J.C. and the Holy Spirit that John Chrysostom speaks about? Ah! Dear friend, we are bound to grow desperate like Jeremiah over the moral ruins that the Revolution created. There are no more souls anymore.”

There are certainly few Catholic souls in the Democrat party.