The main opponent of truth anywhere will be pride and ignorance. And I suspect strongly that every error has it's foundation in one or both of them.

 As for churchmen, I try to reserve judgment upon how to take a man's words or whether to trust him, based upon evidence I can trust, or where there is question of his ideas, upon the teachings of the church until now. Anyhow, God alone knows the minds and hearts of the men, and as one wise man once said, in so many words... It doesn't matter to the "bad guys" whether the guy they want to use is one of them or not. It's enough for them that the man, however well meaning and however good his intentions, thinks and acts like they do.

 The devil doesn't need men who worship him in order to achieve his ends. All he needs at minimum to have the same effect, is to have a man with the purest and most pious intentions, who simply has the wrong ideas. The man could mean to love God and serve God with his whole heart... but if he sincerely thinks that to hold and propagate a destructive error is the way to please God, then without being "a bad man" at all, he nevertheless will do the work of a very wicked and intentionally evil man, who holds the same error knowing exactly why it's wrong and how it destroys. The end result will be the same of holding and teaching the error, regardless of how "evil" the man is, or how good he really was at heart.

 The problem with modern Catholics, is that they like to sit in "couch tribunals" and judge all of the churchmen based on a lot of rumors and conjecture and hearsay, and totally and completely disregard the mind and heart of the man. (edit- or regard them too much and in an un-Catholic way.) God sees not only actions, but in His mercy, He judges also by intentions. Thus if a pious Catholic goes to church, and mistakingly "steals" another man's rosary by taking it home because he thought it was his own, the man commits no sin. (Edit-correct me promptly if this is not correct!) The church, in it's rules of excommunication, has a clause that says even if a churchman is in total error, and is teaching that error, he cannot be excommunicated (I forget if this was about automatic excommunications or in general) unless he knows he's in error. (edit- if someone could supply the quote to straighten this out... I haven't got it on hand.) Eg, it comes back to the catechism of every 7-year-old that says, "if you didn't know a thing was a sin when you did it, then there is no sin." (edit- or is it venial?)

 Now it's simple enough for us all to sit back and judge these men based on what we hear or what some blog on the internet says about them, or what some supposedly official site says... but only God knows whether the man is truly evil, or sincerely trying to be good, and just has blindly fallen into error.

 That being said, it's historical fact (I think I can safely say), that there are certain secret societies of men who have plotted the destruction of the church from within and without. We know this because, for one thing, freemasons and the like have left their secret societies and then confessed all to the Church. Anyone who doubts there are such societies, has only to watch license plates more closely... the masons actually have specialized plates sometimes. If you know the symbol on their lodges, you can't miss it. So that much is not mere "pious paranoia" or "religious schizophrenia." I know a woman married to the son of a man who was a mason of some high degree. (edit- if I recall correctly, it was at least not a low degree. Not sure how their ranking works though.)

 The question most Catholics neglect though, is not whether such men exist and are working in the church or not. They are, and we know they are. The thing most Catholics in this topic forget, is that not all of the men in rome who are in error and teach it are necessarily one of them. As I said before, a man may have the holiest intentions on earth, but if he believes in an error, he need not be a mason to get their agenda done, if their agenda uses that error. He will go right along with a clean conscience, and really, honestly for the love of God, carry out the same work of a mason with a dirty conscience who knows exactly what he's doing.

 It's a dangerous and sinful business to judge the man, which is why that's where I generally draw the line. I will and MUST, as a Catholic, judge the doctrine in this tricky age of "teachers with itching ears." I must, as a Catholic WATCH, as well as pray. I must know that the words coming out of the mouth of my bishop are not infected with the poison of error. But as a Catholic, I must not presume, no matter what, to judge the man's conscience or the man's character.

There are a whole generation or so of now very aged churchmen, who were formed in seminaries infected with errors or the attitudes that encourage them. You might as well quarrel about whether those men were masons or satanists. But the young men who went honestly to seminary, who weren't masons, who thought they could just go in and sit down, and nod and smile, and take in every word their professors of theology taught them... those young men did not really have an idea that they could not, in fact, trust what was coming out of the mouths of their teachers. They THOUGHT, surely, that they were getting a good Catholic priestly formation. There was already, well before the 60's, a disassociation with many Catholic truths and many Catholic principals, and an infatuation with modern ideas that the church had long ago condemned. But if nobody bothered to pick up, for instance, the old papal docuмents, slamming many of these errors outright... they had no way of knowing that what they were drinking was poison.

 The modern Catholic who has picked up the scent of the wolf, and who has, if he has any sense, gone back to his 1920's catechisms and his 1950's Mass, and who has picked up and dusted off St. Thomas and Lamentabili (sp?) and all of the other papal docuмents of history... That catholic IS decently informed. He then turns round on the churchmen in Rome, and condemns them left and right, on the assumption that they were CERTAINLY informed, because they'd been to seminary and they'd had theology at Rome, and so they must all definitely be masons and satanists and evil men of the worst sort. We say that, who have been jarred awake to the fact that there is a problem. But they were educated long before anything could be jarring, and what education they were given was precisely in the errors and attitudes that jarred those who had been taught differently. A man educated in error is not going to be shocked at error. In his book, it carries the noble label truth, and weirdos and the absurd ones to him, are the ones who say anything different than what he got in the seminary.

There are evil men at work in the church. But before that, they were at work in the seminaries. And before that, they were at work on all of society, since the French Revolution or before it, and probably since shortly after the serpent offered the apple to Eve. The serpent is still offering the apple to men of every age and every country and every creed. The only thing we must remember, is that there are those who know it is forbidden fruit, and then there are those to whom it is only an apple, and who will take and eat it like any other apple.

 I think the best compass is the reverse of the diabolical twofold foundation of every error: humility in direct opposition to pride, and education in direct opposition to ignorance. An educated man may know that most men in Rome have heads full of error, and will probably even realize that some of them got that way on purpose, and some of them on accident, out of ignorance. But a humble man will not be fool enough to sin and guess at which are which.

Actually, I think I should post this in the general forum somewhere. There is far too much of this judging going on everywhere. While I am sure people are doing it only to try and see the wolves from the shepherds, it remains a sin to judge men, even if not to judge their doctrine.

 That being said, I'm sure you didn't mean to judge them personally, or if that's what you did do, I'm sure you simply hadn't thought of it that way. But no man hopes, upon getting to the judgment seat of God, that God will in his regard dismiss his intentions or ignorance. So it is our duty that as we wish to be judged, with every consideration to our own weakness, ignorance or intentions, we ought to do the same for our fellow man, and judge him not at all. The doctrines, however, must be judged (ordinarily by the Church, but today, by sad necessity, by the people) if we Catholics are to remain Catholics. I say, let's not mind so much the souls and intentions of men, so much as we ought to address the errors which they spout. Mason or not, satanist or not, if no decent Catholic believed or accepted that, for instance, the Novus Ordo mass was a good thing, the guys in Rome, good or bad of heart, would be helpless to impose it upon us.

Education in truth and humility are that which will defeat all errors, taught by all men, in any age... provided of course that we make use of them.

...Which means that according to God's law, we are bound to obey parents and popes alike, in everything they command which is not sinful, and to promptly disobey them in order to rather obey God ONLY IN THOSE THINGS WHICH ARE CONTRARY TO GOD'S LAW...

... That is a bit different than saying, "if the pope commands you to sin, you must disobey him in everything." ...