For me personally, I think 2018 was the pivotal “before/after” year politically and ecclesiastically. Before 2018 things felt stable, more or less. Sure the pope had put out the controversial AMORIS LÆTITIA in 2016 and an argument could easily be made that that was the signal event, but at the time I thought perhaps it could be explained away or that it was a trial balloon of some sort. I had no expectations of this being a positive papacy but my attitude was, “we had two decades of conservative popes, now we shall have a decade of liberal”. Fair is fair.
On the political front, Trump had won in ’16 and was drawing a vitriol that was shocking if not unprecedented (see George W Bush). You could say that in 2016 the “germs” of great destabilization had been planted (Francis’s ’16 synod and the FBI’s Russia probe of Trump which began in ’16). But it took 2-3 years for the fruits to be exposed and me to catch up with the reality.
2018 was the crazy year in the Church. We learned of Cardinal McCarrick, who had helped write church policy in the U.S. on pedophilia while having a record of it himself. It was a wake-up call that the corruption in the church was far greater than we knew. At the same time an innocent prelate trying to fix church finances, Cardinal Pell of Australia, was jailed on a made-up charge. The combo was so unsettling. Pell would eventually be free’d after a couple years awaiting trials, but McCarrick’s allies continue in the church unaffected.
Politically 2018 was a watershed year because of the Kavannaugh hearings. The level of bloodsport was off the charts and it didn’t feel like politics but something more demonic.
Meanwhile, Robert Mueller was still dragging out his report. For three years they’d been investigating Trump on a hunch that he colluded with the Russia government to win the ’16 election and serve Russian interests. Mueller was seen by some as a Boy Scout, a patriot, who would close the case within a month when he realized that there was no case. Instead he dragged it on till mid-2019 -- thus diverting, distracting, and dividing the American people. After 2018 I could never see the Democrats, media, or FBI/DOJ the same way.
So ’18 was the pivotal “before/after” year politically & ecclesiastically. Before then there seemed a stability, a quality of “things are different but not radically so”. But the guilty McCarrick and innocent Pell red-pilled me. As did the Kavannaugh hearings in ’18 and Russia hoax.
2019 followed up with further confirmations of the destabilization. You could say that 2018 was the intellectual awakening while 2019 was the more intangible, emotional kind. There was the weird Pope Francis Amazon synod with the Pachamama idol and the fire at Notre Dame in Paris which felt somehow prophetic. The Mueller report landed with a dud (the equivalent of George Bush rolling into the Baghdad and finding no weapons of mass destruction in 2003), and then the sham House impeachment of Trump.
So before covid, before the Antifa and BLM riots in ’20, before the stolen ’20 election, before the January 6th entrapment and subsequent hostage-taking by the government, we were already living in a world that felt very different from, say, the Bill Clinton years.
