Eleison Comments

“Mental Sickness”

“Mental Sickness” on January 21, 2012

A long-standing correspondent wrote to me recently with a dozen arguments to show why the SSPX should come to some agreement with Rome, even if the doctrinal Discussions of 2009–2011 showed that the Rome-SSPX doctrinal disagreement is radical. Let me dwell here on one of his arguments, because I think it opens up the full dimensions of what the SSPX is up against.

He wrote that if the SSPX does not soon “normalize” its standing with Rome, then it runs the risk of losing the sense of what it means to belong to the Church. For there are layfolk and even SSPX priests who are comfortable with their present abnormal situation and have adapted to it, because the SSPX “has all that it needs, notably bishops.” Such adaptation, wrote my colleague, tends towards a schismatic mentality and a practical, if not theoretical, sedevacantism. I replied that in my opinion a much greater risk than that of acquiring a schismatic mentality is that of contracting “the spiritual and mental sickness of today’s Romans by getting too close to them.” A scandalous reply? Let me explain.

“Mental sickness” is the phrase applied to Roman churchmen with whom a second friend recently held long conversations. He said that they are intelligent and sincere men, fully capable of grasping the arguments of Tradition put before them, but he concluded, “They are mentally sick. Only, they have the authority.” Certainly he meant no personal insult to these Romans when he called them “mentally sick.” What he was uttering was something far more serious than a mere personal insult. He was commenting on the objective state of the Romans’ minds, as confirmed by his long conversations with them. Their minds are no longer running on truth.

A third friend also in contact with Romans said the same thing in different words. I asked him, “Could you not have gone to the root of the matter and opened up with them the basic question of the mind and truth?” He replied, “No. All they would have said was that they were the authority, that they were the Catholic Church, and if we wanted to be Catholics, it was for them to tell us how.” Such minds are running not on truth but on authority. Now milk is a beautiful thing, but imagine a car-owner quite calmly insisting on filling his car’s gas-tank with milk! The gigantic problem is that almost the entire modern world has lost all sense and love of truth. For the longest time the Church resisted this loss of truth, but with Vatican II that last resistance also collapsed.

For indeed the modern world is glamorous and weighty, and so is Rome! Here is how an Italian friend senses the glamour of the Vatican offices: “To step into the Roman palaces is a daring enterprise because the very air you breathe within is irresistible. The fascination of these hallowed halls comes not so much from the charming officials (by no means all of them are charming) as from the sense the halls exude of the 2000-year duration of Church history. Is the fascination from Heaven? Is it from Hell? In any case the mere atmosphere of the Vatican seduces visitors and tames their wills.”

And the fascination of the Vatican is only a small part of the total pressure of the modern world seeping into minds to disable them, and to make us follow its current. Dear friend of mine, I would rather be a schismatic sedevacantist than a Roman apostate. With the grace of God, neither!

Kyrie eleison.

State Religion – III

State Religion – III on January 14, 2012

To claim that States need not profess or protect the Catholic religion is a classic liberal error, and one of the major errors of Vatican II. Liberalism said, so to speak, “Let us not attack Catholicism head on, but let us divide and rule. Let us divide the individual man from society by pretending that man is not a social animal, and then we can pretend that religion is purely an individual affair. This will enable us to take over society, and once we have made it liberal, we can turn it back on the individual as a mighty weapon to liberalize him too, because of course man is a social animal! If any individual then wants not to be liberal, he will have great difficulty in resisting his society that we have liberalized.” Not so? Look around! Then let us answer three more objections to the doctrine that, for the salvation of souls, every State should be Catholic.

Your Excellency, Our Lord himself said, “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s” (Mt. XXII, 21). Here Our Lord is clearly separating Church from State. Therefore no State should get involved in Catholicism or any other religion Answer, no, Our Lord is not here separating Church from State! He is making the common sense distinction between what the individual owes to the State (taxes, etc.) and what he owes to God (worship). Our Lord is absolutely not saying that the temporal State owes nothing to the eternal God. In fact the State, as being the collective temporal authority of a collection of human beings, owes to God in its acts of authority what they owe to him as social beings, namely the social observance of his natural law, and to that Church which natural reason on its own can see to be true, as much social recognition and promotion as will not get in the way of the salvation of souls.

But discerning which is the true religion is something for the individual to do. How then can the State as State be obliged in principle to be Catholic?Answer, the State is nothing but the moral (i.e. non-material) association in a political body of a greater or lesser number of physical (i.e. material) human beings. But every one of these human beings, merely by the upright use of his natural reason, whether or not he has the supernatural virtue of the Faith, is capable of discerning that God exists, that Jesus Christ is God, and that the Catholic Church is the one Church founded by Jesus Christ. If then any given State does not discern which is the true religion, that is not because its citizens cannot discern, but because for a variety of reasons they will not, or do not want to do so, by making an upright use of their God-given reason. In fact they can discern, and before God they will all bear a greater or lesser responsibility, perfectly measured by him according to their circumstances, for failing to do so.

But, your Excellency, if you insist on every State’s obligation to be Catholic, you are merely going to make a lot of martyrs for evil.It is for the glory of God and the eternal salvation of souls that every State should be Catholic. To men therefore too ignorant or corrupt for this truth to do anything but alienate them, one may, without minimising the principle, hesitate to proclaim it, but that does not make it any less true. True principles are no less true for sometimes requiring in practice a measure of prudence in the way they are to be told. Surely readers of this “Commentary” can be told the whole truth!

Kyrie eleison.

Blasting Ahead

Blasting Ahead on January 7, 2012

If some readers found last week’s “Eleison Comments” a little dark for the beginning of a new year, I do apologize, and I promise that this week’s will end on a more hopeful quote. But the truth of the matter is that, as I am told, many people are still blissfully unaware of how serious is the world’s impending economic calamity. Worse, they do not grasp the pre-apocalyptic gravity of the crisis in the Church. Let us dwell for a moment on the latter.

The vision even of some priests within the Society of St Pius X is that the SSPX is a normal religious Congregation while today’s Rome is not excessively abnormal. It is true that Archbishop Lefebvre spoke very harshly of Vatican II and of the “antichrists” in the Vatican, but in the 20 years that have passed since his death, things have changed for the better. We now have a Pope, they think, who is a Traditionalist at heart, as is proved by his liberation of the Tridentine Mass and by his “remission” of the 1988 “excommunication” of the four SSPX bishops. So with just a little flexibility on each side surely Rome and the SSPX can arrive at some arrangement whereby Rome gives back to the SSPX that respectability which it should never have lost, while the SSPX can re-enter Rome in a triumphal procession on the way to the two together re-conquering the world for Christ. The Doctrinal Discussions of 2009–2011 may have highlighted an absolute doctrinal divergence, but that merely proves that the arrangement needs to be purely practical (!).

Alas, priests allowing themselves to be lulled by any such dream have either not read Pascendi or not understood what they read. In his great Encyclical Letter of 1907 St Pius X warned that Modernism represented a major threat to the Church’s existence, because Modernism is the end of the road in cutting off the soul from reality, natural or supernatural. It is the ultimate self-sealing of the mind within its God-less dreamland. Error can go no further. Here is an example of the self-sealing:—

Towards the end of the section on the Modernist theologian, Pascendi explains how the Modernist rejoices in being condemned by Church authority. Just as a garden-hose must not be separated from the tap that enables it to water, so the Church must not be cut off from its source in Tradition. The Church needs then to progress by an inter-play between Modernism and Tradition. Therefore the Modernists need authority to be Traditional, and to do the Traditional thing by condemning them as Modernists. So if the Pope does not condemn them, they will forge ahead, and if he does condemn them they will go ahead anyway because by their very condemnation he is contributing to the progress of the Church! Heads he loses, tails they win. That is self-sealing error. God cannot win.

Well, the great and good God has a surprise in store for those who think so. To save souls he washed out men’s whole wretched system in the time of Noah, and to save souls again he may this time round blast it clean. The blasting may or may not start in 2012. And the consoling quote? –

“When these things begin to come to pass, look up, and lift your heads, because your redemption is at hand.” (Lk.XXI, 28). The hour is darkest, they say, just before dawn.

Kyrie eleison.

New Year

New Year on December 31, 2011

And so another year closes out without the sky having fallen in. I have for decades been saying that it is falling in, for instance to a little group of people in France some five or seven years ago. Amongst them was an SSPX priest who had been a seminarian in Econe when I was a professor there in the late ‘70’s and early ‘80’s. “Your Excellency,” he said, “Weren’t you saying that 25 years ago?” But he said it with a smile, so he may have thought that one day I could be right.

Then will 2012 be the year when the sky falls in? Plenty of worldly commentators think that it could well be the year in which the world economy implodes. Certainly debt cannot keep on piling up the way it has been piling up for decades. For instance welfare entitlements are an unbearable burden on the budget of many a Western democracy, but almost by definition a democratic politician is incapable of taking the severe decisions necessary to restore fiscal sanity, because if he wants to be re-elected he cannot touch them. It has been well said that a democracy can last for only as long as the people do not realize that the cash till belongs to them.

Then is 2012 the year in which the Western democracies finally crash? Maybe. But maybe not. Many people today have a sense of some disaster looming. Surely it cannot take yet another 30 years to arrive, one says. But one has been saying that now for many years. Perhaps people are so drunk on liberalism that ever increasing doses of chaos leave them unconcerned. Nevertheless while the wheels of God grind slowly, says the proverb, they do grind exceeding small. In other words all of God’s bills have to be paid, and the day of reckoning will come, and on accounts far more serious than those of mere welfare entitlements.

This year, next year, some time, never? Certainly not never. It will come in God’s good time. The year is relatively unimportant. As Hamlet says (Act V, 2), “There is a providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ‘tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all.” There is a Providence. There is a God, and his timing is the best of all. “Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit,” says the German proverb.

Nor does God require of easily most of us to undertake action to attempt to hold back Church and world on their present course to destruction. I am willing to bet that many of the world’s public leaders feel in private helpless to do anything, and I wonder if even the world’s secret controllers, hell-bent on world domination, feel at all times confident that they have their game in hand. “Only I can help you now,” the Mother of God has said.

What God does require of us is to live in his grace and to trust him. When the crash comes, in 2012 or whenever, from a human point of view it will no doubt be rather unpleasant, but from God’s point of view his chastisements are acts of mercy. St. Paul quotes Proverbs (III, 11–12): “My son, reject not the correction of the Lord, and do not faint when thou art chastised by him. For whom the Lord loveth, he chastiseth.” And St Paul goes on (Heb.XII, 7–8): “Persevere under discipline. God dealeth with you as with his sons. For what son is there whom the father doth not correct? But if you be without chastisement, whereof all are made partakers, then are you bastards and not sons.”

The Catholic readiness is all, as of the wise virgins (Mt.XXV, 13). Happy New Year.

Kyrie eleison.

Necessary Child

Necessary Child on December 24, 2011

Constantly in the news today is the world’s financial and economic crisis, especially in Euroland. A Dutch commentator (courtfool.info) proposes for his country a classic solution: get State money out of the hands of the banksters. Christmas may seem a strange moment to consider such money problems, but the whole question is whether apparent solutions are real solutions.

Unless the Euro was positively designed as a means of forcing political unity upon the variety of European nations, it was, as a common currency for a dozen very different national economies, flawed from the start. To begin with it did enable the poorer member nations to borrow and spend, borrow and spend, while it did help the richer nations to export and lend, export and lend, but the process could not go on for ever. When the poorer countries could no longer manage even the interest on their debts, the richer countries were also threatened with the paralysis of their economies by the bankruptcy of their major banks that had made the foolish loans.

At this point the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund co-operate to provide emergency funding, in other words to solve the problem of debt by more debt! However, a condition of receiving these funds is that the hopelessly indebted countries must submit to international guardianship, which will impose spending cuts that make the national governments less and less able to rule. As for the richer governments, they too must make themselves unpopular by cutting spending, in order to cover the losses incurred by their major banks’ foolish loans, says Mr.de Ruijter.

Now comes his solution. He says it is simple. Instead of pouring dozens of billions more into a Euro that is doomed to disappear sooner or later, and instead of having the international agencies impose spending cuts, “we can introduce State money.” A State central bank will replace the present central bank which, as in almost all States of the world, is now under private control. The State bank alone will be authorized to create money. All loans will be supplied as State money. All private or non-State banks will be forbidden to create balances out of thin air, in other words fractional reserve banking will be forbidden (cf. EC 224). These non-State banks will receive a fee for their services, but they will not be allowed to charge interest.

And who will control the State bank? Mr.de Ruijter writes, “It will fall under the responsibility of the Minister of Finance, and it will be controlled by Parliament. A commission of well formed people will watch over the long term interest of the money system.”

Well and good. But, Mr. De Ruijter, who will do the forming of these “well formed” people? At what school will they learn truly to look after the common good? And what motivation will be given to them powerful enough to prevent them from being cunningly bought out by the banksters? Democracy? It is democracy that has landed Europe in its present mess!

There is only one true and complete solution: the divine Child in the Crib of Bethlehem. Happy Christmas, dear readers (and thanks to all of you that sent me a Christmas card, but thanks also to those that didn’t!).

Kyrie eleison.

Rome Insists

Rome Insists on December 17, 2011

At about the same time that Bishop Fellay was letting it be known that the SSPX will ask for clarification of the Doctrinal Preamble (Rome’s reaction to the doctrinal discussions running from 2009 to spring of this year), one of Rome’s four theologians taking part in those discussions, Monsignore Fernando Ocariz, published an essay “On Adhesion to the Second Vatican Council.” His timing shows that we are not out of the woods, on the contrary! But let us look at his arguments, which are at least clear.

In his introduction he argues that the “pastoral” Council was nonetheless doctrinal. What is pastoral is based on doctrine. What is pastoral seeks to save souls, which involves doctrine. The Council documents contain much doctrine. Good! The Monsignore is at least not going to dodge doctrinal accusations levelled at the Council by pretending the Council was not doctrinal, as have done many of its defenders.

Then on the Church’s Magisterium in general, he says that Vatican II consisted of the Catholic bishops who have “the charism of truth, the authority of Christ and the light of the Holy Spirit.” To deny that, he says, is to deny something of the very essence of the Church. But, Monsignore, what about the mass of Catholic bishops going along with the Arian heresy under Pope Liberius? Exceptionally, even the near unanimity of Catholic bishops can go doctrinally astray. If it happened once, it can happen again. It happened at Vatican II, as its documents show.

He proceeds to argue that the Council’s non-dogmatic and non-defined teachings nevertheless require of Catholics their assent, called “religious submission of will and intellect,” which is “an act of obedience well-rooted in confidence in the divine assistance given to the Magisterium.” Monsignore, to the Conciliar as to the Arian bishops no doubt God offered all the assistance they needed, but they refused it, as is shown by the departure of their documents from his Tradition.

Finally Monsignore Ocariz begs the question by arguing that since the Catholic Magisterium is continuous and Vatican II was the Magisterium, therefore its teachings can only be continuous with the past. And if they look like a break with the past, then the Catholic thing to do is to interpret them as though there is no such break, as does for instance Benedict XVI’s “hermeneutic of continuity.” But Monsignore, these arguments can be turned around. In fact there is a doctrinal break, as is clear from examining the Conciliar documents themselves. (For instance, is there (Vatican II), or is there not (Tradition), a human right not to be prevented from spreading error?) Therefore Vatican II was not the Church’s true Magisterium, and the Catholic thing is to show that there is indeed this break with Tradition, as did Archbishop Lefebvre, and not to pretend that there is no such break.

The Monsignore’s last word is to claim that only the Magisterium can interpret the Magisterium. Which takes us right back to Square One.

Dear readers, Rome is not by any means out of the woods. Heaven help us.

Kyrie eleison.