Billot – III
The present leaders of the Society of St Pius X are working steadily and craftily towards inserting it into the framework of the mainstream Church, which is steadily and craftily pushing forward the Revolutionary and Conciliar ideals of liberty (religious liberty), equality (collegiality) and fraternity (ecumenism). Yet these leaders surely take Cardinal Billot seriously. They should meditate on his reflections on our Fifth Age of the Church which follow his exposition of the Seven Ages in the Epilogue to the first volume of his celebrated Treatise on the Church of Christ. Here are some of those reflections, freely translated and adapted from the Latin:—
“Our own age would then be the Fifth Age, Age of defection, apostasy and liberalism, coming between the end of the Holy Roman Empire and what St Paul calls a“resurrection from the dead” (Rom. XI, 15). May it be so! It gives us all amidst our so many and so great tribulations of today(the Cardinal wrote in 1927 – what would he have written in 2013?) hope of a future restoration and – forgive the expression – Counter-revolution. Already today many leading scientists, politicians and economists are recognizing and freely admitting how poisoned are the fruits of the French Revolution of 1789, which proclaimed that the one and only source of all the world’s ills was scorn for the “rights of man.” What frivolity! What silliness! What stupidity!
“The Revolutionaries’ liberty results in tyranny of the strong over the weak; their equality results in a few millionaires lording it ever more over the people(one thinks of Wall Street, 2013!); their fraternity results in internal strife and class hatred. Some people grasp this, while many do not see the essentially satanic character of the Revolution. However those who go beneath the surface see that the religious question underlies all other questions presently agitating mankind: that the plague of political and economic liberalism arises from the atheistic and anti-Christian liberalism laid out above; that the social order can in no way be restored unless the Church’s principles once more direct public life.
“Would that this recognition of the theory might bear practical fruit! With all our heart we call for such a restoration, knowing how the pagan laws under which we are now living may still allow individuals to be Christian(in 2013, how much longer?), but they make a Christian society altogether impossible. Therefore we seek above all the kingdom of God and his justice, without despising the rest that will be added unto us(cf. Mt. VI, 33). As St Paul says of godliness that it is, “profitable to all things,” so too is the Church’s influence, “having promise of the life that now is, and of that which is to come”(cf. I Tim. IV, 8).” It is not difficult to see here how the Cardinal was not one of the many souls he mentions that do not see through the false glamour of the modern world. On the contrary his firm grasp of Catholic doctrine enables him to describe our own times, nearly a century later.
SSPX Headquarters, wake up from your foolish dream of converting the liberals now controlling the Church, and stop pretending with a flow of ambiguous Declarations that you are still defending Tradition. Your actions prove the contrary, and actions speak louder than a series of Declarations! You have the name of being alive, but you are dead. Wake up, and strengthen the things that remain, which are ready to die. Have in mind what you received from the Archbishop, and put it into practice, and do penance. Kyrie eleison.
