Eleison Comments

Campos Resilient

Campos Resilient on December 20, 2008

Catholics regularly ask, “What has happened to Campos?” They are referring of course to the Brazilian diocese which Bishop de Castro Mayer, lone hero of the post-Conciliar episcopate alongside Archbishop Lefebvre, maintained in Catholic Tradition until his death in 1991, but which his second successor, Bishop Rifan, led back under the Roman authorities ten or so years later. The question then is, how well is Catholic Tradition faring in the Campos now under Roman control?

And the answer is that the 40-plus-year war between Catholicism and Conciliarism is unfolding along the usual lines: the laity who cleave to Tradition are tranquil in their Faith; the best of the priests now under, ultimately, neo-modernist Rome are suffering from split loyalties; their bishop, loyal to the same Rome – or to his own ambition – is manoeuvring all the time to Conciliarise the work of Bishop de Castro Mayer.

Ambition is the only explanation that the most clear-sighted layfolk can find for the defection to neo-modernist Rome of Bishop Rifan. These layfolk say, “If he was wrong to follow Tradition for so long, why should he be right now? The valid books he wrote then, are they invalid now?” The Bishop threatens them with taking away their priests. Reply of one of these layfolk: “Your Excellency, that’s entirely up to you. As for me, at Easter I will bring in a priest from outside, if necessary.” Over such souls the Bishop has lost all influence.

Some of the laity say that nothing has changed in the eleven parishes of Tradition, and they declare that Bishop Rifan can do no wrong. Others notice the beginning of changes, for instance how the priests no longer tell the people to throw out the television set because it is enough to keep it under control. Logically, for a bishop and priests letting go of the complete truth, their preaching is tending to become more authoritarian. However, they are liable to back down where they sense a resistance which would diminish the numbers of their flock.

Typically, the clear-sighted laity, in particular a group of some 180 souls in three chapels of the Traditional parish of Vari Sai, are turning to priests uncompromisingly Traditional to say Mass for them and to maintain their Faith. Long term, their hope is in the Society of St. Pius X, which is the major support system of such priests, and which is showing no signs of being about to fall in with the neo-modernists of Rome. But the struggle must continue. As Our Lord says, “If these days were not shortened . . .”

Kyrie eleison.

Extrarchal Cogitation

Extrarchal Cogitation on December 13, 2008

“Archa, archae” is the Latin for “box.” Thinking outside the box is not a popular activity – who wants to be shaken out of their comfortable mental routine? – but circumstances may soon force it upon all of us. It may not be a bad idea to get a little used to it sooner rather than later. Here are some considerations of an American, James Kunstler, who is not afraid to cogitate extrarchally!

The recent succession of massive bailouts by the USA government of mega-banks and mega-corporations TBTF (too big to fail), he says, is no better than injections of embalming fluid into the walking dead. Worse, the corresponding fabrication of trillions of dollars out of nothing virtually guarantees hyper-inflation in anything from six to eighteen months. But if the dollar is destroyed, how will the USA pay for imported oil? And without oil, what happens to our whole oil-based way of life?

Moreover, with the collapse of the debt pyramid, what happens to the whole fantasyland, built like most everybody’s houses and cars, on credit and debt? People will have to get back to real as opposed to virtual activity. Back to the distribution of property and growing of food as before the arrival of petro-agriculture. Back to the land, or social chaos! We must start thinking – outside the box – of alternate energies in place of oil, of production instead of consumerism, of localism in place of globalism.

Mr. Kunstler recognizes that a “zombie disease” has “eaten away our brains,” but he still puts his hope in a young generation of Americans realizing what an opportunity to rebuild is offered to us all by this meltdown, and he hopes that a revived American people will set its shoulder to the wheel. I wish I shared his hope, but the whole question is religious, and the closest that he gets to mentioning the Lord God is when he comments that “the meltdown is building straight into the Christmas holidays”!

Yet as the Psalmist says, to build the city without God is to build in vain (Ps. CXXVI). And, as Our Lord says, “He that gathereth not with me, scattereth” (Mt. XII, 30). All the suffering that lies in wait for us next year will be allowed by God for one supreme purpose, to help us to save our souls for eternity. If the collapse of our gimcrack paradise on earth merely makes us want to build a solid paradise on earth, he may have to increase the dose of suffering until we get the point.

Kyrie eleison.

Prophetic Protocol

Prophetic Protocol on December 6, 2008

In the unfolding crisis of global finance and economics, it is important to discern (as best one can) the plans both of the Lord God and of his enemies. Many people may be hoping that the crisis will ease off in the near future, thanks to the apparently energetic interventions of many governments, but such an easing would serve neither the justice and mercy of God, nor the ambition of his enemies . . .

One commentator gives seven structural reasons why the crisis is by no means over. Four of them concern our present lamentable money system, whereby the mass of money circulating in the world is loaned into existence, so that if nobody lends or borrows, there will be no money to circulate: 1 Most potential borrowers in the USA, private or corporate, are now tapped out, so anybody lending to them is liable to go under. 2 Nobody can force households or businesses to borrow or spend. 3 Nobody can force lenders to lend, especially when most borrowers are insolvent. 4 Whatever money people can get hold of is going to paying down debt, or to savings.

The other reasons for the party being over are: 5 The real estate-finance-insurance economy is dead, because transaction and debt velocity are way down, with nothing to stop them falling still further. 6 Governments and corporations alike are living with fantasyland expectations of yesterday`s revenues being sustained tomorrow. 7 The USA already has too much of everything, e.g. hotels, offices, homes, cars, television sets, etc, etc. Inventories are full, and liable to move slowly at best. The party is over. Over.

Now money-men are amongst the most astute and motivated of mortals. It is inconceivable that they did not see this crash coming. Consider this text, published in 1905: “We shall create by all the underground methods available to us, and with the aid of gold which is all in our hands, a universal economic crisis whereby we shall throw on the streets whole mobs of workers simultaneously in all the countries of Europe. These mobs will rush delightedly to shed the blood of those whom, in the simplicity of their ignorance, they have envied from their cradles, and whose property they will then be able to loot. But “ours” they will not touch . . . we shall take measures to protect our own.”

Now the class warfare planned for 20th century Europe by means of Communism may have been replaced by race warfare planned for the 21st century globe by means of immigration, but the basic plan, to be achieved by gold through a “universal economic crisis,” has apparently not changed.

And the Lord God`s plan? To use his very enemies, the Masters of Gold hungering for global domination, as a scourge to lay across the backs of his apostate children throughout the world, who have turned away from him, to materialism . . . to gold.

Kyrie eleison.

Juvenal Again

Juvenal Again on November 29, 2008

Last week “Eleison Comments” drew attention to the remarkable (in a pagan) natural wisdom in matters spiritual of the Roman satirist Juvenal, who was in his prime about 100 years after Our Lord was born, but who is not known (as far as I can discover) for any contact with the Catholic religion then rising in Rome.

A first lesson drawn from the passage concluding the Tenth Satire was that grace is in line with that God-given nature of ours from which Juvenal was working. Grace is only out of line with our fallen nature, which fell with Adam and has ever since been flawed with original sin in all of us, making all too easy the succession of our personal sins. On this sinful nature, as sinful, grace does make war, but only to heal and elevate that God-given nature which necessarily underlies the sinful nature, as some apple necessarily underlies the rot of any rotten apple. That Juvenal with no apparent help from grace could write so well not only of human rot but also of the underlying nature refutes the dreadful heresy that there is nothing in human nature which is not rotten.

A second lesson for our own times was that the ancient pagan satirist who promoted natural sanity even without any notion of supernatural grace, was a better man than the mass of apostate post-Christian pagans who are today rotting and rooting out both nature and grace. Similarly, to one who visited a week ago the Washington DC Museum of Modern Art, the current exhibition of ancient artistic pieces from pagan Pompeii offered much more for the human heart and mind than did all the modern exhibits put together.

A third lesson, accentuated by modern times, might be the value of reading the classical Latin authors, such as Juvenal. When it comes to the learning of Latin, some pious souls argue that Catholic youth should be immersed rather in the abundant Latin texts of the grace-filled Church Fathers than in pagans like Juvenal. True, the Church Fathers are stainless where pagan authors are always more or less stained, but precisely because the Fathers are filled with grace, surely they cannot in the same way testify to that God-given nature in us which is prior in being, not in value, to God-given grace. Does not this nature need today all the help it can get?

Kyrie eleison.

Intelligent Paganism

Intelligent Paganism on November 22, 2008

Of the famous Roman satirist, Juvenal (67–130 A.D?), there are two especially known quotes: “Bread and circuses,” and “A healthy mind in a healthy body.” The context of this second quote is truly interesting. Here is the whole passage from the Tenth Satire, in a free translation:

“Should men then pray for nothing? Take my advice,

And let the gods themselves judge what is nice

For us and our affairs, since they will heed

Not what we like, but what we truly need.

Dearer to them than to himself is man

Who driven by vain desire, blind worry, can

Beg for this kind of child, that kind of wife

When the gods alone can shape a happy life.

“But beg if you must for something at each shrine

Where you feel bound to offer guts of swine,

Pray to the gods for this – a healthy mind

In a healthy body. Pray that death may find

Your spirit unperturbed, not wishing to live

Any more than Mother Nature wants to give,

A spirit ready to bear all kinds of pain,

Forsaking anger, free from desire of gain,

Preferring heavy and noble work to all

The pleasures available at the local mall.

All this lies in your power – your own virtue

Is the only path to a happy life for you.

Whoever has good sense will never be stuck –

‘Tis we who place in Heaven a god of luck.”

What is remarkable here is how the pagan Juvenal says so many things that the Christian writers say. For instance, how we men are loved from above more than we love ourselves, how the powers above know better than we do what we need, and will only give us what we really need. Also how virtue is the only path to happiness, and how it depends upon ourselves to live wisely, and not upon our stars, or whatever.

There are at least two lessons to be drawn by Christians from the Roman satirist’s wisdom. Firstly, grace is in line with the nature that God gave us, and does not come down, like on a parachute with a machine-gun, to get nature into line. When the pagan writer without grace can see so many spiritual truths from nature alone, it proves that nature and grace are aligned, even if grace is infinitely far above nature, and nature has no claim at all upon it. Too many Catholics see the grace of our religion as a kind of policeman with a truncheon to beat us into shape. Similarly law (good law) is a friend and not an enemy of nature!

A second lesson might be that the pre-Christian pagans, like Juvenal, have rather more grip on reality than the post-Christian pagans of our own time. Apostates of today are washing out both grace and nature, in such a way that they would never utter the good sense that Juvenal here utters.

Kyrie eleison.

Masterly Confusion

Masterly Confusion on November 15, 2008

Ever since Vatican II (1962–1965), a number of intelligent and serious Catholic souls have striven to prove that the changes made to the Latin Church’s sacramental rites by Pope Paul VI in particular render these rites automatically invalid. One might reply, if only it were that simple! But simplicity is no substitute for truth.

Here is how one such soul seeks to prove that the new rite of priestly Ordination is automatically invalid, and his argument is not without value:

Major: Wherever the words of a sacramental Form, essential to the validity of the sacrament, are significantly changed, or wherever the same words are being given in context a significantly different meaning, the Form, and with it the sacrament, can only be invalid.

Minor: Now the words themselves of the new Form of priestly Ordination have not been significantly changed, but in the context of the new rite taken as a whole, the same word of “priest” is being given a significantly different meaning, in accordance with the Council’s total revolutionizing of the Catholic priesthood.

Conclusion: Therefore never can a priest be validly ordained with the new rite.

In this argument, there is no problem with the Major, which is Catholic doctrine. As for the Minor, it is true that the words of the Form have remained essentially intact. It is also true that the whole drift of Vatican II and the post-Conciliar reforms is towards an emptying out of the Catholic priesthood, as of the whole Catholic religion, to replace it with a religion of man. But the argument above, to arrive at its conclusion, would have to prove that Conciliar documents and reforms in themselves positively exclude the Catholic priesthood and religion, because so long as the new rite can be taken not to exclude the true priesthood, it can still be used validly to ordain a true priest.

Alas (for purposes of clarity), the will of Paul VI as seen in all his reforms (and now of Benedict XVI) is so to introduce the new religion of man alongside the Catholic religion of God as to include and not exclude the latter! Now any sane mind cannot stand the idea of 2 and 2 being 5 in such a way as not to exclude their being 4. But Conciliar minds are not sane. They want to apostatize while still remaining Catholic! Thus the new rite of Ordination may omit many features of the Catholic ordination, but it introduces nothing that positively excludes a true ordination. If only it did! Then it could no longer deceive so many souls into thinking that it presents no problem for Catholics. Here is the problem: the drift of the text is to invalidate the true priesthood (2+2=5), but the text may still be used validly (2+2=4)! Sister Lucy of Fatima called it “Diabolical disorientation.”

Kyrie eleison.