David Clements: Ascension
IT STARTED LIKE A BAD JOKE in Las Vegas.
A professor, priest, and prophet walk into a bar….
I had spoken at a freedom event on the Strip. Tina Peters debuted free of prison irons to an adoring public. The room was full of people who wanted the truth told out loud.
After, I walked to a quiet bar for dinner.
Friendly faces gathered. The table grew. The steak came. Bourbon was poured. A man dressed in black sat a few chairs down. After visiting with those on my end of the table, I went to introduce myself feeling the Spirit’s tug. The man in black wore a white collar.
A priest.
His eyes were steady. I was astonished when he said, “I didn’t know how to approach you, but God told me I need to speak with you. And here you are, sitting next to me.” His tone was kind but urgent. He spoke of danger. That I needed the protection of the Church. I needed to take hold of the Eucharist. That an encounter with Christ was required to meet the demands that awaited my future.
What could the priest know of me? Was his warning the byproduct of a hasty internet search? Articles about me are plenty. Media Matters provided two hit pieces after I predicted Trump could terminate the entire Election Assistance Commission after the Slaughter decision. A day later, he did.
Moreover, I was already acquainted with danger of a kind. I had put murderers behind bars for life. Killers with cartel friends. I’ve listened to the jail calls. Vows made to put me in the ground. My wife and kids too. I made an uneasy peace with that years ago. The threats changed over the years. Now it was the wreckage of 2020 lawfare, reputation gutted, resources thin, or the occasional two-a.m. call saying I was watched, movements tracked, number blocked.
It is with this in mind—I stared at the priest with a mix of intrigue and irritation. I’m a believer with no doubt about my salvation. I see no defect in my absence from the Catholic rolls of the confirmed. But I know that my weekly Nicene confession of belonging to “one Apostolic and Catholic church” comes with a “disclaimer” to their rank and file. That I’m little more than a small “c” catholic missing out on the fullness of the faith, or so it goes. And they wouldn’t be entirely wrong. The Catholic Church’s history, its reverence, the ritual that remembers, has caused me to lament the absence of their ancient wisdom in the modern evangelical church. Smoke machines and rock music have replaced incense and Gregorian chants. Personally, I prefer the latter.
So, I’m a catholic not recognized by Catholics. But does that make me a Protestant?
No.
I reject the label, if for no other reason, Catholics paved the way on protests, reforms, and schisms, long before Luther nailed his thesis to wood.
Here is a bit of “Protestant” history within the Catholic Church:
First, leadership tension between Peter and James was evident as early as the 40s–50s AD. James functioned as the primary leader of the Jerusalem church—the mother church—while Peter shifted toward broader missionary work. Paul’s public rebuke of Peter occurred around the early 50s AD. In Antioch, he opposed Pope Peter “to his face” over hypocrisy in withdrawing from Gentile table fellowship under pressure from the circumcision party associated with James, declaring Peter’s actions not in step with the truth of the gospel (Galatians 2:11–14).
Next, you have the Novatian schism of 251. Novatianus was elected as a rival (antipope) in Rome over the question of reconciling those who had lapsed under persecution. Then, the Donatist schism was born in 311. North African Christians rejected bishops who had handed over scriptures during persecution (traditores), creating a long-lasting alternative church structure that rejected Roman reconciliation and required re-baptism.
After that, the Arian crisis fractured the church from the 320s onward. Multiple councils, imperial interventions, and repeated exiles of orthodox leaders (Athanasius of Alexandria was banished five times; others such as Hilary of Poitiers and numerous bishops were sent into exile or deposed) produced competing hierarchies and prolonged doctrinal division across the empire.
But then the biggie came.
The East–West (Great) Schism of 1054. Mutual excommunications between papal legates and Patriarch Michael Cerularius of Constantinople capped centuries of growing estrangement over papal primacy, the Filioque, liturgical practices, and jurisdiction, permanently separating the Eastern Orthodox churches from Rome.
That was followed by the Western Schism of 1378. Rival lines of popes produced up to three simultaneous claimants, each with their own cardinals and obedience; the crisis lasted nearly forty years until the Council of Constance. Across the roughly 1,500 years from the apostolic age to the Reformation, the historical record documents around 30–40 antipopes—rival claimants backed by factions, emperors, or cardinals.
As a side note, the once-Catholic Martin Luther’s critique over the selling of indulgences, pales in comparison to these controversies. Even Pope Pius V agreed with Luther about the scandal and later canceled all grants of indulgences that involved any fees or financial transactions.
And I’ve left off dozens more fractures and parallel communities: the Meletian schism, the Nestorian and Monophysite separations (producing the Church of the East and the Oriental Orthodox). In summation, long before 1517, the institutional history of the church that later called itself Catholic already displayed repeated patterns of contested authority, rival hierarchies, doctrinal splits, exiles, and fragmentation.
So, if I may be so bold, Catholics were the OG Protestants.
At present, excommunications are rampant for the faithful that contend the Church continues to be in error since Vatican II. More on this in a moment. If the argument of unity is to be won by use of an authoritative cudgel, or by Holy See pen, I suppose Catholics could claim the victory here. But as I fellowship with lay Catholics, one thing has been made clear. They remain Catholic not because of Pope Benedict, Francis or Leo, but oftentimes, in spite of them.
So, in my best schoolyard tone I mutter—”I’m not a Protestant, you are”—or my creed of belonging to “one Catholic and Apostolic Church” means nothing.
Back to priest in front of me.
He couldn’t know I carried this dialogue in my head for years. Or that I know the antichrist is coming, and its spirit had taken up a residence in the Vatican in the 1960s. But something told me, he already knew.
I would soon learn the priest had been defrocked for naming errors inside the Church. Its sexual depravity. The abuse of children. The knowledge of secret blackmail files that kept the Vatican a whorehouse, with popes too afraid to expose what it held. That he performed an exorcism in the White House after the Obama administration.
Proximity to Trump made the priest a pariah amongst captured leaders in the Catholic Church, and evangelical witches offering spiritual advice to the President. They bid their time. When Trump was ousted in the 2020 soft power coup, they seized the opportunity and invented a tale of financial impropriety. Enough to stain his name and confuse his parish. Now he sat in a bar telling a stranger that the same Church offered safety. I could sense he meant “the divine Church” and not the corruption of the Vatican. Still, the irony was thick enough to cut.
This won’t be a short record. Church unity wasn’t my problem until I met the priest. His pain affected me. Now, I’m presented with an intellectual and spiritual mountain to climb. 2,000 years of fragmentation. Is there an answer? To look at the pitch of that mountain, to feel the scorching heat of modern-day Pharisees, is to desire quitting before taking the first step. But since I write about the things that burden my mind, up we must go.
And that’s the topic for today.
ASCENSION
Let’s ask the question. Why is church unity important? Because Christ and His Church have enemies. The antichrist. Maybe you’ve heard of him.
2 Thessalonians 2:3–4 declares:
“Let no one deceive you in any way. For that day [Christ’s return] will not come, unless the rebellion comes first, and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the son of destruction, who opposes and exalts himself against every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, proclaiming himself to be God….”
The temple of God.