Eleison Comments

Last Cartridge?

Last Cartridge? on May 24, 2008

A priestly colleague of the Society of St. Pius X has just written (or maybe adopted) a parable whereby the Society is the last cartridge of a hunter who must shoot to kill the monster of Neo-modernism entrenched within the structures of the Catholic Church. Since it is the last cartridge, the hunter cannot afford to miss! Well, the “hunter” may be burdened, but let me attempt to assure him that he is not burdened that much!

First and foremost, the Catholic Church belongs to Almighty God who has numerous possible ways of coming to its rescue that we men cannot even imagine. “Is my arm shortened because you men are wicked?” asks the Lord God (Isaiah L:2). To imagine that the Lord God depends upon the SSPX to deal with the monster of Neo-modernism is gravely to underestimate His powers!

Secondly, Neo-modernism is surely far too entrenched in Catholics (or former Catholics) for a little Congregation of some 450 priests to be able to dislodge it! Just as the crime of abortion has become more and more normal and accepted over the last 40 years, so too has the heresy of Neo-modernism more and more established itself over the same time-period in the hearts and minds of the mass of Catholics (or once Catholics). By the grace of God, the SSPX may still have the Truth, but what grip or leverage does truth still have on diabolically disoriented minds, starting with those of today’s leading churchmen?

Thirdly, what power does the SSPX have other than the – today – powerless Truth? Besides the Faith, the SSPX has neither great numbers nor great theologians nor great writers. It is holding its own all over the world, which is already a miracle, but it is fragile and in worldly terms it is advancing surely no more than one little step at a time, whereas the worldwide Revolution is advancing by leaps and bounds.

No, dear colleague. The humble mission of the SSPX is surely not to kill the storm dead (as only Our Lord could do), but to ride it out. Not to overwhelm the lies, but to sustain the Truth. Not to conquer, but to give witness. Not to be in a hurry, but to wait for God’s good time. It is his Church, and he is certainly looking after it by, amongst other things, sustaining thus far the SSPX. But he is never short of cartridges!

Kyrie eleison.

Liberty vs. Nature

Liberty vs. Nature on May 17, 2008

Why is modern youth so goofy? The movies shown on long-haul airplane flights rarely promise to be anything but silly, but a movie from Catalonia recently made this ever hopeful 12-hour prisoner watch, and suggested an answer – liberty! The movie may have said more than it meant.

Here is the story. A young couple, unmarried but living together as is the way of “partners” today, are shown agreeing to part company if either of them ever feels like it. However, they love one another enough to hire together an apartment where she is happy to make with her man her first domestic nest. Alas, he has to be hospitalized with a grave liver problem, requiring a transplant for him to survive.

Visiting him regularly and caringly in the hospital, she offers him a part of her own liver. At last he accepts. The doctors find her compatible. The transplant is performed. Both recover from the operation. Joyfully he returns to the apartment to rejoin the girl who has saved his life, but he finds her . . . different! While he was in the hospital, a male colleague at her place of work took an interest in her, and she in turn found him attractive. So when the “partner” whom she saved rejoins her, she tells him that they may be bonded by his having in him a physical part of her, but he no longer has the best part of her, which is her heart! Weakly he comments, “What a pity!” But given their original agreement, what more was there to say?

The movie ends with her gently weeping in his arms, leaving open the possibility of a happy-ever-after ending, whereby he would regain her heart’s affections, etc, etc. However, it seems just as probable that she will “move on” (as they say today) to her new “partner.” In fact, to any bond created by her considerable sacrifice she even seems likely to prefer freedom for her feelings.

Now nothing in the movie remotely promotes the Catholic formula for such domestic happiness of man and woman as this “valley of tears” allows of, namely, a girl keeps her heart in reserve for the one man she will marry, marries him, and then never lets him go. But the movie does quite objectively suggest that that “liberty” which can cut off a girl’s deepest natural instincts of nest-making and self-sacrifice for her man, is not necessarily going to make her happy. Girls, if you are looking for happiness in this life, let alone for eternity, trust Mother Church.

Kyrie eleison.

Old-Fashioned Advice

Old-Fashioned Advice on May 10, 2008

A priestly colleague of the Society of St. Pius X in the United States who judges, as I do, that it is not outside our duties to watch the unfolding of the dramatic crisis now engulfing the world’s entire financial structure, as put in place after World War II, gave me last month a copy of a series of practical points of advice which he hands out to his threatened flock. Let them be shared with readers of “Eleison Comments.”

Since the situation is grave enough for panic to emerge as a possible temptation, he begins with an important principle: “Do not panic, but use prudence,” i.e. realistic good sense as to what is not only desirable but also practicable . He continues with seven points on the handling of HOME FINANCES:

– Stay out of debt, or, at least go into no more debt.

– Pay off credit cards.

– If you cannot pay for it with cash, do not buy it.

– Pay off the car. Buy a used car with cash, if that is what it will take to get rid of heavy monthly payments.

– If you are in an adjustable rate mortgage, get out of it fast, and change to a fixed rate mortgage. The latter may be more expensive, but it is certainly less risky. On any monthly mortgage payment, always pay down more against the principal, if possible. Better still, pay off the entire mortgage with the bank, if you can, by borrowing from a relative, but make a mortgage with the relative, so that it remains tax deductible.

– Consider down-sizing your home if that is what it will take to get rid of the bank mortgage.

– If you have savings, hold gold and silver.

As to HOME LOCATION, my colleague continues: “You should consider moving if you live in a big city. If the dollar goes bust, the State will be unable to make welfare payments, and neighborhoods and even suburbs will become much more dangerous places.”

Finally, as to the MEDIA (firmly in the hands of the enemies of true order), he makes three precious points:

– Do not believe what the media tell you.

– Axe the television set, prime poisoner of people’s minds.

– Forget the big newspapers and “conservative” talk radio.

To this excellent old-fashioned advice, but which it may or may not still be possible to put into practice, let me myself add one point, which can always be put into practice: if the family is not yet praying the daily Rosary, start tonight!

Kyrie eleison.

Masking Apostasy

Masking Apostasy on May 3, 2008

Question: Why do so many politicians of modern times talk right-wing while acting left-wing? Because the people want to go left while pretending to stay right. And why do the crowds want to slide leftwards while pretending not to do so? Because they want to bask in a godless future even while they pay hypocritical homage to a godly past.

For if there is one word to sum up the last 500 years of world history, it is the word “apostasy,” i.e. a falling away from God. Now, ever since God revealed himself in the Incarnation, that has meant a falling away from the Incarnate God, Our Lord Jesus Christ, and His Catholic Church. Before the Incarnation, apostasy could never be so clear. Ever since the Church established Christendom, if one wished to descend from those medieval heights, it made such apostasy necessary.

But from the end of the Middle Ages onwards it was so clear that those heights were truly high, that all those choosing to descend had to honour what they were quitting even while they were quitting what they claimed to honour. Hence the hypocrisy intrinsic to, for instance, liberal and socialist politicians. For instance, when somebody tried to sing the praises of Communism to Winston Churchill, he snorted: “Christianity with a tomahawk!”

However, as usual since the Incarnation, the heart of the problem lies not in politics but in the Church. “Left-wing” and “right-wing” are terms arising from the division of the French Revolutionaries of 1789 into violent and only semi-violent, destroyers of the Old Order, that of throne and – altar. Now King Louis XVI was guillotined, but the real target was the altar. Therefore what differentiates left-wingers from right-wingers is their more or less explicit apostasy.

So when Cardinal Suenens described Vatican II as the French Revolution of 1789 within the Church, it is not surprising if the mass of churchmen divided into extreme or only moderate destroyers of the Old Order, i.e. of the true religion. But, as in 1789, the moderates were, and remain, destroyers still. Woe then to churchmen of today who would try to blend with these “moderates”! They risk adding themselves on to the end of a 500-year list of hypocritical traitors, however well-meaning!

Kyrie eleison.

Flight-Seeing

Flight-Seeing on April 26, 2008

If anyone loves mountains, they should fly in day-time on a sunny day up the north-western coast of the United States and Canada, say from Seattle to Anchorage in Alaska. Beneath them stretch out, often on both sides of the airplane, the splendors of the lofty Northern Rockies in an uninterrupted series for hours on end, a spectacle no way to be compared with that provided by the mere half-hour crossing of these mountains between east and west.

And if, when such a traveller arrived in Anchorage, he still admired the long snow-capped horizon framing that city to the east, then he should try, as I did a few days ago, “flight-seeing.” I had never before heard the expression, but its meaning in Alaska is not difficult to guess – you get into a little four-seater airplane and go flying up amongst the glaciers and peaks for an hour and a half.

Not even mountaineers who conquer the peaks on foot can enjoy such an overview of the majestic scenery as flying provides. Clambering at first upwards like the trees, but then leaving them behind, one lifts above rocks and snow, then above more and more snow, amidst ever higher peaks, with an intimacy and freedom such as only flying can give. One is so effortlessly close to the majestic slopes dazzling in the sunshine that one could think one was their companion . . . but they remain silent, quite silent, as though mocking the mechanical fly that intrudes on their nobility.

For let no-one say they are dead! Local inhabitants who watch them year round comment on their constant change by way of mist and light and wind and cloud, and such change is surely effect rather than cause of their life, because the mountains present a prospect of infinitely more power than that of any of the fickle phenomena of weather at play amongst them.

Nor let anyone say the mountains are serene! With their zig-zag outlines, jagged crests, precipitous sides, they evoke, according to all sane geology, that cosmic upheaval which tore up the surface of the globe and gave us earth’s present mountain ranges, the tortured up-thrust of titanic masses of granite and rock, driven, crashing, crumpling into one another.

That upheaval was the Flood of Noah’s time, some 5,000 years ago. That Flood was the result of men’s “corrupting their ways” – Scripture’s own words. Earth’s mountains are then monuments of the grandeur of God, to be sure, but also of his wrath. Mankind has now again corrupted its ways, so . . .

Kyrie eleison.

Deadly Mush

Deadly Mush on April 19, 2008

I have never believed any of the Conciliar Popes not to be truly popes. Modern thinking turns minds into mush, and I have always held the Conciliar Popes to be too modern to be capable of the clear firm thinking in matters of Faith necessary to make them such clear firm heretics as could no longer hold their high office in the Church.

By no means everybody agrees with me when I say this, but I do believe Archbishop Lefebvre was making the same point in a different way when he said that these popes were liberals, but being liberals did not necessarily put them out of the Church. Here for example is what he said in an interview he gave in 1987:

“I think we must judge of today’s churchmen in Rome, and of all churchmen and bishops coming under their influence, in the same way that Popes Pius IX and Pius X judged of liberals and modernists. Pius IX condemned liberal Catholics, going so far as to say that they were “the Church’s worst enemies.” What worse could he say of them? Yet he did not say that all liberal Catholics were excommunicated, or were out of the Church or had to be refused Communion . . . Pius X in ‘Pascendi’ was just as severe on modernism, saying it was “where all heresies come together.” Could any movement be more severely condemned? Yet he never said that henceforth all modernists were excommunicated, out of the Church and to be refused Communion. In fact he only excommunicated a few of them. So, following Pius IX and Pius X, I think we should judge of these churchmen in Rome severely, but without concluding that they are necessarily out of the Church.”

Two objections immediately come to mind. Firstly, how can a liberal Catholic be worse than the formal heretic who flatly refuses the Faith which is the foundation of Catholic living and of eternal salvation? Answer, the enemy without can never do so much damage as the enemy within. Whereas the heretic puts himself out of the Church, the liberal Catholic stays within, from where the higher his office, the more he can harm the Church. Is not the very havoc wrought upon the Church by recent popes better accounted for by their being the enemy within rather than, as “sedevacantists” would have it, the enemy without?

But then – second objection – if the Church cannot excommunicate such damaging enemies within, what means does she still have to her to defend herself? Answer, that is perhaps the most serious reason of all for thinking that only a divine chastisement comparable to the Flood can clean out the present corruption in Church and world. Catholic Tradition is today’s Ark.

Kyrie eleison.