Eleison Comments

Guidelines

Guidelines posted in Eleison Comments on March 8, 2008

A young German friend asks me some questions which deserve straight answers. Here is how he expresses his main concern:—

Question:— Since the promulgation last July of the ‘Motu Proprio’ of Benedict XVI partially liberating the Tridentine rite of the Mass, there are various views and opinions as to what it means or can mean for the Society of St. Pius X. Some people are optimistic. Others say it is a trap for the SSPX. Some go so far as to say that the leadership of the SSPX is preparing a sell-out to Rome . . . I have the feeling that the average SSPX faithful are somewhat confused. What can you give me by way of a guideline, so that I don’t get lost in useless guessing-games or needless fears? Answer:— We must save our souls. To save our souls we must keep the Catholic Faith, because “without faith it is impossible to please God” (Heb. XI, 6). The stupendous achievement of Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre between 1970 when he founded the SSPX and 1991 when he died, is that he enabled many souls to keep the true Faith in a Church where millions of Catholics were losing it, consciously or unconsciously, because the leading churchmen had come to believe in the anti-Catholic ideals of the modern world. Ever since the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), these churchmen have behaved like ice-salesmen who are convinced they must expose their wares in bright sunshine! The Church has been melting before their eyes ever since!

Yet still they cling to the anti-Catholic ideas of Vatican II. Alongside the “Motu Proprio” apparently favoring the Mass of the true Faith, Benedict XVI organizes and presides over ecumenical meetings which, by placing the Catholic religion on a more or less equal footing with all other religions, officially represented and all necessarily more or less false, are a grave offence to God. So any apparent benevolence shown by Benedict XVI towards the true Faith or the true Mass can only mean that he wishes them to be reconciled with the Conciliar religion and all other religions! Therefore if he is not a conscious agent of truth-dissolving Freemasonry, at any rate he has no understanding of the true Faith, and so he cannot grasp how absolutely opposed it is to the man-centred religion of Vatican II.

Question:— Then was the ‘Motu Proprio’ a trap to draw the SSPX (along with others) towards reconciliation with this false Rome? Answer:— God alone knows for sure what were Benedict XVI’s intentions. Any benevolence of his towards Tradition, towards the SSPX, towards the true Mass, may, for all we know, be subjectively sincere. But objectively the Motu Proprio and the Letter to the Bishopswhich accompanied it, by no means recognize the full rights of the True Mass or the true Faith. So if someone suggested that either of these documents did recognize those rights, he would indeed be falling into a trap.

Question:— Yet there has been much praise and little criticism of the ‘Motu Proprio’ from within the SSPX.

Answer:— Catholics are so longing for the Roman churchmen to come back to the Faith that they rejoice at the least indication of Rome’s doing so, but, sadly, that can be a mistake. What use is it if an arithmetician says two and two are four when you know that alongside, and all the time, he is also saying they are five? He obviously has no grasp of true arithmetic. What use is it for Benedict XVI to say that the true Mass has never been abrogated, and (within limits) to set it free, when he is also constantly organizing ecumenical meetings? He obviously has no grasp on the true Faith.

Question:— What about the rumor of the SSPX preparing a sell-out to Rome? Answer:— Certainly the SSPX has no intention of betraying Archbishop Lefebvre’s defence of the Faith. So if any of the members entertain any serious thought of going in with Rome’s Neo-modernists, it is because they will have been deceived by the modern world, like so many before them. This time round the deceit will have taken the form that things have got better in Rome since the Archbishop’s time. But they have not. The apostasy at least objective is as wild as ever. So I cannot believe that the heirs of Archbishop Lefebvre would let themselves be deceived to that extent.

However, I have often made myself unpopular with colleagues in the SSPX by recalling the obvious fact that the SSPX does not have the guarantee of indefectibility that the Catholic Church has. The SSPX could fail. That is why, given what service it has rendered since 1970 to the Universal Church in guarding the Faith, and what service it can still render, Catholics must pray for it, especially for the leadership, that it may not fail.

Question:— If the SSPX were to be re-absorbed into the mainstream Church, would that mean the crisis of the Church had come to an end?

Answer:— By no means. The SSPX being “re-absorbed” or not is not the problem. The problem is the Roman churchmen, especially the Pope. When they come back to the true Faith, and only then, will the crisis be over.

Question:— And what if the SSPX is re-absorbed without the crisis being over?

Answer:— Our Lord says, “Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof.” In other words, we will cross that bridge when we come to it, as the proverb says. However, one thing is certain: the Good Shepherd CANNOT abandon sheep that do not want to abandon him. Have no fear! If in His wisdom and providence He were to allow the SSPX to fail – and that is merely a possibility, not a certainty – he would offer to all sheep of good will, in some other form, all the guidance and support they would need to save their souls.

Question:— I have a strange sense of violent storms on the horizon. What do you think? Answer:— Nothing seems to me more likely. The financial storm has started, and is increasing every day in weight and speed. Storms economic and political are bound to follow, and, as a chastisement of God, I do believe, World War III, which will be terrible.

“In the world you shall have distress,” says Our Lord, “but have confidence, I have overcome the world.” (Jn XV, 33).

Kyrie eleison.

False Anti-Semitism

False Anti-Semitism posted in Eleison Comments on March 1, 2008

When “Eleison Comments” last week argued that insofar as Pope Benedict XVI’s Good Friday prayer change worked against the eternal salvation of Jews, he had proved himself – no doubt unintentionally – to be a true anti-semite, ie enemy of Jews purely as Jews, a number of readers apparently agreed. I congratulate them, because they had to be thinking with their Catholic minds instead of merely emoting with their (objectively) vile media. Let us think a little further.

Obviously, the basic principles apply to all men and not just to Jews: to wish them eternal salvation is to love them truly, because it is to wish them the greatest good of all, namely everlasting happiness in Heaven, through and with Our Lord Jesus Christ. To wish them welfare or prosperity merely in this little life on earth is to love them much less, especially if that worldly success would get in the way of their eternal salvation, as it all too easily can do – Mt.XIX, 24.

But fewer and fewer people today believe in life everlasting or in Our Lord, and so naturally the perspective of such people is different. If I urge upon them eternal life, or if I do what I prudently can to obstruct their campaigning against Our Lord, then I will seem to them to be their enemy when I am in fact their best friend. It is all a question of perspective, but it is not a question of opinion: the eternal perspective is true, while the anti-Christian perspective is objectively and absolutely false.

Now ever since the Jews were responsible for the crucifying of Our Lord Jesus Christ – “His blood be upon us and upon our children,” Mt.XXVII,25 – they have as a race and as a religion, always with noble exceptions, continued to reject him down to our day. Thus St. Paul observed that they not only “killed the Lord Jesus and the prophets,” but they also prohibited St. Paul himself from “speaking to the Gentiles so as to save them.” In brief, their behavior was such that “they please not God and are adversaries to men” (I Thess. II, 14–16). Closer to our own time, it is a matter of historical record that the designing and launching of, for instance, Communism, to wrest mankind away from God and to replace his Heaven with a man-made paradise, was largely their achievement.

So they persecuted St. Paul at every turn (see Acts of the Apostles) as being one of their arch-enemies, when in fact nobody loved them more truly or laboured more for their real well-being than did St. Paul (cf. Rom. IX,1–5). Similarly today, they will call an “anti-semite” anybody who gets in the way of any godlessness of theirs, when in fact all people labouring for their salvation, as for the salvation of Gentiles, are their best friends.

St Paul, pray for us!

Kyrie eleison.

True Anti-Semitism

True Anti-Semitism posted in Eleison Comments on February 23, 2008

Most people seeing how Pope Benedict XVI has changed the Church’s Good Friday prayer for the Jews will think he has been their friend, because the change was in a direction demanded by spokesmen of theirs, who made themselves heard. However, for any Catholic who has the Catholic Faith, Benedict XVI has been in this not their friend but their enemy.

The difference is quite simply the difference between our brief life here below, and life everlasting: For purposes of this life, lasting for each of us, let us say, 70 years, he has been their friend, because by, for instance, taking out of the 1962 text the references to the Jews’ “blindness,” “darkness” and “the veil over their hearts,” he has softened the Church’s solemn criticism of their condition. On the other hand by the same softening he will also have diminished Catholics’ awareness of how especially Jews need the charity of Catholics’ prayers.

For indeed from Adam to world’s end, faith in the one and only Redeemer, to come or having come, can alone save any soul from eternal damnation, unless that soul lives without serious sin and is honestly ignorant of the Redeemer. But honest ignorance presents a particular difficulty for the Jews who had all the privileges of the Old Testament to prepare them for the coming of their Messiah, Jesus Christ, and who ever since have had to put “the veil over their hearts” in order not to recognize him in the multiple prophecies of their Old Testament, notably Isaiah, Chapter LIII.

Therefore the recent Good Friday liturgy change, by diminishing Catholics’ awareness of that real “veil,” etc, has done a disservice to Jews’ eternal salvation. In this respect of the Catholic Faith, Benedict XVI has, objectively, shown himself to be against the Jews purely as Jews. Is there any other possible true definition of the expression “anti-semite”?

Sacred Heart of Jesus, between now and world’s end, grant to your Church many martyrs to die for the eternal salvation of your racial kinsmen, beloved by you!

Kyrie eleison.

Unravellijng Fast

Unravellijng Fast posted in Eleison Comments on February 16, 2008

The state of the nations is such, being also now precipitated by the ever worsening financial crisis in the United States, that I said to an American friend who has known people in high places, “Do you know anybody intelligent in government who would be asking serious questions about what is going on? I would be interested in their answers!”

“Nobody,” he replied. “In my experience they are immensely arrogant, contemptuous of the people and so far out of touch with reality, that they cannot be calling in question their handling of things. Besides, for any of them to talk to you, you would need the Masonic hand-shake.”

Another friend, also having some acquaintance with the ruling mentality, agreed. “For the longest time,” he said, “they have been easing out, or moving out, anybody liable to question their system. Minds inclined to serious thought are now car mechanics in Arizona . . . . The inflation is unspeakable in the stores. Food shortages are foreseeable. If everything breaks down . . . .it will be horrible. The people are just beginning to wake up.”

In fact, without God, the Masonic governments must be making plans for population control: either a foreign war – WWIII? – to distract the people from their woes at home; or the National Guard(s), food rationing and concentration camps for all “dissidents.”

With God, here are two timely prayers from the Lenten liturgy:— from Thursday after Ash Wednesday, “Spare, O Lord, spare thy people, that whereas they are deservedly chastised, they may find relief in thy tender mercy . . .” And from the Friday after Ash Wednesday, “O Lord, preserve thy people, and in thy mercy cleanse them from all their sins: for no adversity shall harm them if no wickedness holds sway over them . . .”

Kyrie eleison.

Nationalism’s Impotency

Nationalism’s Impotency posted in Eleison Comments on February 9, 2008

Nationalism alone cannot save nations. Only God can save nations. This is sad because many nationalists today, young and old, are good men who love their country, and wish to save its history, identity and culture from being washed out by internationalism. They recognize globalism as the enemy, but at best they do not see, at worst they do not want to see, what the Psalmist said long ago:—

“Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain.

Unless the Lord watches over the city, the watchman stays awake in vain.” (Ps. CXXVI,1–2)

In Paris two weeks ago, I met just such a watchman. He is a French journalist who published recently a booklet entitled “Inquiry into the Future of the National Movement,” with which he sympathizes. The booklet consists of interviews which he held with 16 leading French nationalists (not a pejorative term), and it concludes with his own summary of the situation. Amongst other things he writes what must be familiar to many a national movement today:—

“Looking back objectively at the 35-year record of the “Front National,” one is bound to admit that despite the movement’s merits, the commitment of its members and the courage of its leaders, it has succeeded in stopping nothing: neither the foreign invasion of France, nor the passing of laws cutting back freedom, nor the dismantling of our sovereignty, nor the giving away of our frontiers, nor the giving up of our currency, nor the destruction of our agricultural and industrial infra-structure, nor the promulgation of laws opposed to family and to natural morality . . .”

Dear watchman, until the French people turn back to Our Lord, you nationalists are trying to make bricks without straw. Any nation is doomed where in the public domain the Lord God has been allowed to become the Great Unmentionable. May he have mercy upon all of our apostate nations.

Kyrie eleison.

Peak Oil

Peak Oil posted in Eleison Comments on February 2, 2008

Today’s Western way of life, imitated now all over the world, is under sentence of death. One may or may not believe in Almighty God, in sin, in God’s justice or warnings or punishments upon sin, but it is impossible to believe that planet earth’s resources of oil can or will sustain indefinitely a way of life consuming 84 million barrels of oil a day, and every day thirsting for more.

A while after oil-wells have been discovered, their production reaches a peak, and then steadily and inexorably declines. In the USA, discovery of oil peaked in 1930, and production peaked in 1970, a period coinciding with the USA’s greatest economic power. As its own oil declined, so the USA changed from being the world’s greatest oil exporter and creditor nation to being its greatest importer and debtor nation. Global oil discovery peaked in 1964, global oil production is peaking anywhere from now to around 2015, and from then on it must decline. There are few new oil fields. Three times more oil is now consumed each year than is discovered. 53 countries are past their producing peak.

Over the last 150 years since rock-oil (petr-oleum) began replacing whale-oil in the USA, rock-oil has become an incomparable source of dense and cheap energy, versatile and powerful. As such it has been the engine of global economic growth, and there is no replacement in sight. What will happen to the West’s industry, agriculture, transportation, military forces and even electricity when there is no more oil? It has been central to developing the “freedom” of Western ways. The imminent necessity for these to change radically is a theme no democratic politician cares to touch.

Yet the governments know. That is why it makes complete sense that 9/11 was organized to make possible (amongst other things) the invasion of countries where military bases could be built amongst, and all around, the present most important sources of world oil. Such governments seem to envisage no alternative to oil, but the writing is on the wall – the party will soon be over!

Any individual, nation or world that builds on anything other than on the Gospel is building on sand, said Our Lord, and he might have added, even sand soaked in oil.

Kyrie eleison.