The news of the church being so divided when Jesus promised that no gates of Hell will prevail against it, being told that there is no leadership or power in the Church that can lead the laity or deal with my annulment, or we can't even trust priests....all these show me (a novice Catholic) that the fruits produced pertaining to these are strife, confusion and dissent, that or Jesus lied when he said no gates of Hell will prevail against the Church.
All these confusion, anguish and turmoil I face now that I am at the position that I either have faith in what He promised, or if I am not careful, I fear I might just abandon it all together again. Somehow I find it hard to believe that despite the politics, the trials of the Church and the human errors within the Church, that God would leave the leadership unmanned. The damage cause by the divisions among the laity and the Church is very devastating, and souls get lost due to such fruits.
That would not be love and mercy at all if the Chair of St Peter is redundant now, and letting the laity float around lost in confusion, while having to deal with their own afflictions in their daily lives. This whole thing opened a whole new can of worms, so yes something is definitely not right here, unfortunately.
Precisely because the gates of hell cannot prevail do we have to conclude that these impostors are not the hierarchy.
You've used the term 'gates of Hell', but do you know what it means?
The gates fo Hell are defined as the "death-dealing tongues of heretics" or "the disputations of heretics".
If the Church were led by the notorious heretics leading the fake Novus Ordo Church, then that would mean the gates of Hell have prevailed.
But since that's impossible, the only possible conclusion is that they're not true popes and bishops of the Catholic Church.
With regard to the confusion, it's in line with the maxim "strike the shepherd and the sheep shall be scattered". It's just more evidence of the shepherd being missing.
Regarding your idea that God wouldn't allow this to happen, that's just your feeling, and as they say, facts don't care about your feelings.
Father Edmund James O'Reilly, The Relations of the Church to Society - Theological Essays, 1882, Page 287-288: "The great schism of the West suggests to me a reflection which I take the liberty of expressing here. If this schism had not occurred, the hypothesis of such a thing happening would appear to many chimerical.
They would say it could not be; God would not permit the Church to come into so unhappy a situation.Heresies might spring up and spread and last painfully long, through the fault and to the perdition of their authors and abettors, to the great distress too of the faithful, increased by actual persecution in many places where the heretics were dominant.
But that Catholics should be divided on the question of who was Pontiff, that the true Church should remain between thirty and forty years without a thoroughly ascertained Head, and representative of Christ on earth, this would not be. Yet it has been and we have no guarantee that it will not be again, though we may fervently hope other wise. What I would infer is,
that we must not be too ready to pronounce on what God may permit. We know with absolute certainty that He will fulfil His promises; that He will not allow anything to occur at variance with them; that He will sustain His Church and enable her to triumph over all enemies and difficulties ; [...] But we, or our successors in future generations of Christians, shall perhaps see stranger evils than have yet been experienced, even before the immediate approach of that great winding up of all things on earth that will precede the day of judgment. I am not setting up for a prophet, nor pretending to see unhappy wonders, of which I have no knowledge whatever.
All I mean to convey is that contingencies regarding the Church, not excluded by the Divine promises, cannot be regarded as practically impossible, because they would be terrible and distressing in a very high degree."