Eleison Comments

Muslim Distress

Muslim Distress on February 27, 2010

A little example of a big problem came across my path last month when I met in London a Muslim born and living in France, being torn between his Mohammedan ancestry and his European environment. The clash for him between loyalty to his ancestral roots and loyalty to his land of birth was clearly agonising. Some Mohammedans might completely adopt French values, many others might completely reject them, but he could do neither.

His problem is of course much more than just cultural or political or even historical. It is religious. Islam began some 1400 years ago as a breakaway from Catholic Christendom in the Middle East. Rooted in the Monophysite heresy which holds that there is only one Person in God, it spread like wildfire through a dried out Christendom in the Middle East and North Africa, occupied Spain for many centuries and broke briefly into France. A simple and violent religion, it seeks to conquer the whole world by the sword. It is a scourge of God, which for a thousand years Christendom could only hold at bay by the sword.

However, now that the European Christians themselves are losing nearly all belief in Christ or in Christendom, they are allowing – and their anti-Christian governments are positively encouraging – Mohammedans to come back into Europe, not by the sword but by immigration, which is how this young man’s family have been in France for two or three generations. What is behind this immigration? The Globalists want it to help dissolve the once glorious Christian nations, and melt them down into the New World Order. Liberals want it to proclaim their folly that men’s differences of race or religion are insignificant. The Mohammedans want it to enable them to take over Europe.

Yet even though Europe is daily more rotten, still there are traces of its ancient glory, a glory which it owed to the Catholic Church. These traces are enough on the one hand to inspire in someone like this young man a loyalty of patriotism rivalling the loyalty of blood to his ancestors, on the other hand to rouse still in many Europeans such a love of their own way of life that they will defend it with a bloodbath if it seems or becomes too threatened from outside. Satan is no doubt planning for that bloodbath. God may allow it as a punishment. It is looking more and more likely.

Meanwhile what should this young man do? Ideally, he will go to the root of the problem, which is whether Jesus Christ is the Second of the three Persons of God, or just a Prophet, however sublime. Then if he is intelligent, he will connect the gifts of France he so admires with their giver, the same Incarnate God, and if he then became a true Catholic, not only for himself would he see how to combine all true good in his roots with all true good in his land of birth, but also for others he would be able to contribute, in however limited a way, to the avoidance of the looming bloodbath.

And what should the ancestral Europeans do to avoid it? Return to their ancestral Faith and to its practice, which alone has the power to unite all peoples and races in the Truth, in justice and in peace. This is their ancient responsibility and vocation from God, to give such an example as will draw the whole world to Our Lord Jesus Christ. If they continue to be unfaithful, the blood is sure to flow.

Kyrie eleison.

Mane, Thecel . . .

Mane, Thecel . . . on February 13, 2010

Should a Catholic bishop leave to one side matters of economics on the grounds that he should keep to matters of religion? By no means! What a narrow view of religion one must take in order not to see that economics, or the art of managing the material goods necessary for life, is entirely governed by the view one takes of life, and the view one takes of life depends on religion. For how can religion (or its lack) be adequately understood except as the total view of life by which a man binds himself (or refuses to be bound) to the God who gave and gives him his life?

If multitudes of men today think that economics have nothing to do with God, it is only because beforehand they think that he is either non-existent or insignificant. And supposing that there is an after-life, think they, then Hell is either non-existent (“We all go to Heaven”) or unimportant (“At least all my friends will be there,” they joke). Upon which presuppositions follow the shift from the economics of yesterday, economics of thrift, to those of today, spendthrift economics.

Yesterday, do not spend more than you earn. Save, and do not borrow, to invest. Do not solve debt with more debt. Today, it is patriotic to spend. Everybody will be prosperous if you spend regardless of what you earn. Do not save, because idle money benefits nobody. By all means borrow to make profitable investments. And if your debts turn sour, borrow more to get out of them.

These eat-drink-and-be-merry economics were intellectualised in particular by the highly influential British economist, John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946), who once famously said, “In the end we all die.” By the 1970’s President Nixon (1913–1994) was saying, “We are all Keynesians now.” And since the 1970’s the Keynesian build-up has been continuous all the way to the 2000’s orgy of lending, borrowing and spending, made possible only by the people’s having given up on the old common sense of not spending more than you earn, and of shunning debt – “Owe no man anything but to love one another,” says the Word of God (Rom. XIII, 8), and “The borrower is servant to him that lendeth” (Prov. XXII, 7).

Right now the world is enslaving itself to the money-men, the orgy is collapsing, and the collapse is by no means over. Unemployment is far higher than the politicians can afford to admit, yet still they garner votes by promising jobs and free lunches for the people. The politicians have encouraged these unreal expectations by which they rise to power but on which they will not be able to deliver. The people are about to rise up, are rising up, in anger. The politicians will have to start foreign wars to take the people’s mind off domestic troubles. War is around the corner, to be followed, if God permits, by the usurers’ World Government. All because the people thought that God had nothing to do with life, and life nothing to do with God.

But see Daniel V, 5–6 and 24–28! The Lord God has our number (“Mane”), we have been weighed in his balance and found wanting (“Thecel”), our fun-land is over (“Phares”). It remains for us to take our medicine.

Kyrie eleison.

Papal Error – II

Papal Error – II on February 6, 2010

Just coming out in English (see truerestoration.blogspot.com) is the valuable 100-page treatise in French by Bishop Tissier de Mallerais of the Society of St Pius X on the doctrine of Pope Benedict XVI: “The Faith imperilled by Reason.” The title says it all. Bishop Tissier’s thesis is that Benedict XVI allows human reasoning to adulterate the Catholic Faith. Let me paraphrase a paragraph from the Bishop’s conclusion which goes to the heart of the matter:—

“Benedict XVI frequently calls for a “hermeneutic of continuity,” meaning an interpretation of Vatican II and of Catholic Tradition which shows that there is no break but continuity

between them. After studying the Pope’s teachings, I now realize that this “hermeneutic” goes further than I originally thought. It means not just a new reading of Faith and Reason, but a new birth of both, and it is of universal application. Firstly, each is to purify the other: Reason will stop Faith from sliding into intolerance, while Faith will heal Reason’s blind independence. Secondly, each is to regenerate the other: Reason will enrich the Faith with the liberal values of Enlightenment thinking, while Faith, suitably re-expressed for modern times, will win a hearing from Reason. And this process is to be applied across the board to all religions and all ways of reasoning. Without any one system of values being imposed on everybody, those values which keep the world going will be strengthened.”

Note here firstly how, on his own admission, Bishop Tissier originally under-estimated the breadth and depth of the Pope’s vision. Catholics following Tradition know that the Conciliar reconciling of the Faith with modernity (especially the sentence that I have underlined above) is wrong, and is destroying the Church, but they do need to recognize that it has been thought out with intelligence, however misguided, and it is held with conviction. Benedict XVI believes profoundly both in the old way of believing and in the new way of thinking, and he is confident that by his own way of solving any apparent problems between them, all men can be brought together. This “solution” drives his Papacy.

Alas, I cannot reconcile 2+2=4 with 2=2=5 by saying that four is “more or less than four and a half,” while five is “more or less than four and a half,” because four apples will remain obstinately four, while five oranges will persist in being five. Thus the true Faith may tolerate the person erring, but it cannot tolerate their error, whereas modern Reason may wish to see, but as long as it is modern it insists on putting its own eyes out, the eyes of the mind (Kant). At every turn Bishop Tissier demonstrates that the eternal Faith, revealed by God, cannot lie down with modern reasoning, fabricated by men, which is designed to exclude either God or at least his demands on men (Religious Liberty).

Thank you, your Excellency! For, however charming may be the Pope’s prospect of “peace in our time,” it is not charm but truth in charity that will get us to Heaven.

Kyrie eleison.

Papal Error – I

Papal Error – I on January 30, 2010

Speaking two weeks ago on relations between the Rome of Vatican II and the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX), Pope Benedict XVI showed once more how subtle and powerful the Conciliar error is. He was addressing on Jan.15 a plenary session of the Roman Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (formerly known as the Holy Office). The three first paragraphs of his twelve-paragraph address need to be quoted in full, but a summary, as faithful as possible, will have to do.

1. Your Congregation shares in the special ministry of the Pope to ensure Church unity by safeguarding Catholic doctrine. That unity depends on unity in the Faith of which the Pope is the foremost defender. To confirm the brethren in the Faith and keep them united is his prime task. 2 Your teaching authority, like the Pope’s, involves obedience to the Faith, so that there may be one flock under the one Shepherd. 3. At all times the Church must get all Christians to witness together to the Faith, “In this spirit I place a particular trust in your commitment to overcoming any remaining doctrinal problems in the way of the SSPX achieving full communion with the Church.”

The problem here is much more than just whether or not the SSPX is in “full communion with the Church.” The problem is the whole relationship between unity and the Faith. In reality, Catholic unity is essentially dependent on the Catholic Faith. A Catholic being defined firstly by what he believes, then wherever there is no Catholic Faith there can be no Catholics to unite, and wherever there is that Faith there is the essential basis of Catholic unity. Now the Pope does say (1) that “Unity is in fact primarily unity in the Faith,” but generally (1,2,3) he connects unity and Faith as though they are on an equal footing, almost as though they are interdependent, whereas true unity is entirely dependent on the true Faith. How else could he arrive at his conclusion of (3), quoted above in full, where he gives the impression of instructing his Congregation to overcome doctrinal problems for the sake of Rome-SSPX unity?

Yet the duty of Christ’s Vicar is not to unite Rome and the SSPX at any cost, so to speak, but to unite them in the Catholic Faith as given us by Christ. So if there is a doctrinal difference between Rome and the SSPX (and there is, and it is huge!), then his prime problem is which of the two has the Catholic Faith, and which has not. And then he must unite the whole Church around whichever of them has that Faith, even if that happens to be the poor li’l SSPX! “Li’l,” or little, because it is insignificant except by its Faith!

Alas, Benedict XVI is more Conciliar than he is Catholic. But the Council, putting man before God, constantly undermined the Revealed doctrine of God, or the Faith, in the name of the ecumenical unity of men. That is why Benedict XVI is incapable of grasping, short of a miracle, the significance of the SSPX’s doctrinal stand. Yet how many Catholics are not liable to be deceived by the smoothness of his transition from much Truth (in 1,2) to its undoing (in 3)? Few! The error is as powerful as it is subtly conceived and expressed! We must pray for the miracle.

Kyrie eleison.

Sensible Economics

Sensible Economics on January 23, 2010

When too many powerful people have a vested interest in “economists” being confused and confusing, it is a relief to come across (on jsmineset.com) the common sense of the “Seven Commandments”of the Austrian School of Economics. The first two, as listed below, are elementary. The last five condemn five ways in which many State governments today, no doubt under political pressure, are trying to get out of obeying the first two. Here they are, each with a commentary:—

1) “Thou must earn.” With all men’s continual need to spend on food, clothing and shelter, every person, family and State must somehow earn. They can only earn by producing or providing the other members of the community (or other States) with goods or services which those others are willing to buy.

2) “Thou shalt not spend more than thou earnest.” No person, family or State can go on for ever spending more than it earns. Otherwise it must pile up debt until the creditors call a halt. Then the debt must at last be repaid, which is painful, or it must be defaulted on, which can be disastrous

3) “No State may make too many rules.” A State must make rules for the common good, but if it restricts the citizens’ productive activity by making too many rules, it will harm the common good by restricting instead of promoting that activity.

4) “No State may tax too much.” Similarly too much State taxation levied on productive activity will hinder, even paralyse, that activity, so that an excess of taxation will even diminish a State’s tax income.

5) “No State may spend its way out of a recession.” In a recession where most citizens of a State are both earning and spending less, no government can resurrect that earning and spending simply by spending more itself, because to get that extra money to spend, it must either borrow (see 2) or tax (see 4) or print money out of thin air (see 6). All three alternatives have strict limits.

6) “No State may print its way out of a recession.” Nor can a government solve a recession by fabricating extra money to spend merely by printing more and more banknotes or by hitting more computer keys, because unless there is an increase in the production of goods corresponding to the increase in the money supply, too much money chasing too few goods will force up prices until hyper-inflation can eventually destroy the money altogether.

7) “No State may employ its way out of a recession.” Nor can a Government solve unemployment merely by hiring the unemployed as non-productive government bureaucrats (see 1), or by paying out more and more unemployment checks (see 5).

However, if “democratic” peoples so adore Mammon that they keep on voting for politicians bought out by the servants of Mammon, who can they blame but themselves if these money-men take over their government? And if the result will be a living misery for the same peoples, will not the Lord God have punished them by where they have sinned? And will they have left him with any other way of making them understand that he did not give them life just for production, economics and money or even the Austrian School? Or of bringing home to them that these things are necessary in their rightful place, but that above and beyond all of them there is an eternal Heaven and an eternal Hell?

Kyrie eleison.

Undesired Celibacy

Undesired Celibacy on January 16, 2010

Last Sunday’s Feast of the Holy Family may be a suitable moment to quote a reader’s question arising from the pronouncement of “Eleison Comments” three weeks ago that, normally speaking, an unmarried man is a “zero” while an unmarried woman is “less than a zero”: what about a man or woman who might have liked to get married, but for whatever reason either could not or did not do so? Not everybody that does not marry has a religious vocation, the reader added.

I began by replying that unnatural loneliness is all too normal today. Modern life, especially big city life, causes not only marriages not to happen which should happen, but also many marriages which have happened to come apart. That is one punishment amongst many others of liberalism, which by glorifying individualism engenders an inaptitude to live in the married state. Liberalism also glorifies freedom from all ties, and the marriage bond is nothing if not a tie. “Hence the collapsing birth-rates of the Western nations and the suicide of once Catholic Europe. It is all immensely sad and immensely serious.”

I continued: “Obviously to call all men “zeros” is a colorful way of saying that, firstly, we are all before God minute creatures, and secondly, men are not nearly as great as they think they are. (Two Russian proverbs say that a man without a woman is like a garden without a hedge (to surround it), or like a man out in January (in Russia) without a fur cap!) To go on to call women “less than zeros” is a likewise provocative way of saying that firstly, contrary to the dreadful disparaging of their complementarity by the enemies of God everywhere today, women are not the same as men, and secondly, they are more profoundly dependent on men than men are on women – see Eve’s punishment in Genesis III, 16: “Thou shalt be under thy husband’s power, and he shall have dominion over thee.” But the “zero” and “less than zero” are not primarily to provoke but to be put together in an eight, to demonstrate graphically the natural power of the union of marriage.”

Alas, today many a priest comes across young women who would love to marry but can hardly find a young man that strikes them as fit to be a husband. The young men seem all too often virtual dishrags, washed out by a liberalism which dissolves their minds by which God meant them to lead. Liberalism does not so easily undo the instincts and emotions which God makes natural to woman, although when it does, the results can be even more terrible.

In conclusion, I referred to the Eighth Station of the Way of the Cross, where Our Lord consoled the weeping women of Jerusalem (Lk. XXIII, 27–31): such a punishment, he warned, would soon come down on deicide Jerusalem as would make them envy the women who had never had husband or family. In our own day that is not a reason not to marry, but it may be a consolation for anyone to whom Providence has not given to marry but who might have liked to do so, because coming down upon us in what cannot be the too far distant future is . . . tremendous reason to start putting now more trust than ever in God’s unfailing Providence . . .

Kyrie eleison.