Hoist Ladder – II

Hoist Ladder – II on May 9, 2020

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Last week these “Comments” started out from words of Archbishop Lefebvre in 1990 on the mindset of the officials at the top of the Conciliar Church in Rome, and they finished with his strong conclusion –

All we can do is pull up the ladder (i.e. cut all contact) . There is nothing we can do with these people, because we have nothing in common with them.

Such words may seem to be lacking either in charity, or at least in the respect due to the princes of the Church of Our Lord, but in fact they are neither uncharitable nor disrespectful, because the very purpose of Our Lord’s Church is 1/ the Faith on which 2/ must be based charity and 3/ respect for the officials who are meant to be caring for that Church.

1/ “Without faith it is impossible to please God. For whoever would draw near to God must believe that He exists and that He rewards those who seek Him.” (Hebrews XI, 6). (Atheists, if you wish you could believe in God, notice immediately that “He rewards those who seek Him,” and if you do persevere in seeking Him, your reward will most likely be that you will find Him, as many quotations in Scripture attest, but that is a story for another time.) All spiritual souls, by which alone human beings live, come from God in accordance with His wish that they use their brief lives to choose to return to Him for eternal bliss in His heaven. However, while that choice is encouraged by all the goodness in creation, it is discouraged by the soul’s three great enemies, the world, the flesh and the Devil, and by all the evil that God chooses to allow in his creation, so that there is a genuine choice to be made, requiring virtue, otherwise I will incline away from God towards the evil.

Now such is the display of goodness in God’s creation that those who see it and still do not believe in God are called by St Paul “inexcusable” (Romans, I, 20). Nevertheless God Himself normally remains invisible (e.g. Col. I, 15), so that the prime virtue needed to begin to make one’s way towards Him is the virtue of faith, by which I choose to make the jump, from what I see with my eyes to what or Who I must know with my mind is behind what I see with my eyes. Hence the Council of Trent (VI, 6) calls faith “the foundation of salvation,” and the Catholic Church by its Creeds simply spells out what I need to believe in order to have faith in the truth, and not falsehoods, about God.

2/ Now there cannot be a desire in a human will which is not preceded by some thought in the same person’s mind. A desire without object is a non-desire. That object is presented to a human will by a mind.

Now charity is a kind of desire seated in the will, so it presupposes a thought in the mind. And if the charity is to be truly supernatural and not just humanist or sentimental, it presupposes a supernatural object in the mind, and that is the supernatural object which is believed in by faith. Therefore true charity presupposes true faith, and without true supernatural faith there cannot be true charity. It follows that if today’s Roman officials have a faith at least seriously contaminated by Vatican II, as is certainly the case, then people wishing to keep the true Faith must be seriously warned to stay away from such officials lest their own faith be also contaminated. In other words they must be told to “pull up the ladder.”

3/ And while to those “seated on the chair of Moses” (Mt. XXIII, 2) is due all respect due to the chair of Moses, all the more to the See of Rome, and while to high Church officials is due all charity towards souls with a tremendous responsibility at their Particular Judgment, nevertheless the Catholic faith comes first, so that neither the respect nor the charity can include my exposing my own soul or anyone else’s to contamination of our faith by imprudent contacts risking just such contamination. the Conciliarists in 2020 are still crusaders for the idolatry of man peddled by their wretched Council. Archbishop Lefebvre was right – pull up the ladder. Catholics and Conciliarists are in a war of religions, a war to the death.

Kyrie eleison.