Eleison Comments

Documenting Distress

Documenting Distress on April 12, 2008

Commenting on last week’s „Eleison Comments” which were highly critical of the modern Revolutionary art movement known as Dadaism, a Catholic friend wrote to me, „I love Dadaism.” I am not sure of my friend’s reasons, but there is one lovable aspect to many a modern Revolutionary movement, even for Catholics, in fact primarily for Catholics!

This is because Catholics are best able to grasp how the key to the last 500 (or 700) years of the history of mankind has been its apostasy, its slow but steady turning away from God, in particular from his divine Son, Our Lord Jesus Christ. This eliminating of the true Messiah has left in men’s lives an enormous gap to be filled, a gap unknown before the Incarnation. Hence a variety of false messianisms in modern times.

Communism is an outstanding example. It is the messianism of materialism. For it may be just as materialistic as the bourgeois society it seeks to destroy, even more so; and it certainly has nothing better with which to replace the residual human values of that society. Yet Communists are driven by a quasi-messianic urge to create their horrible new world. It is as though they are saying, „Better no god than your false hypocritical »God«!” And to the extent that the God of the bourgeoisie is a false god, the Communist messianism rejecting it is not false. In this respect Communists may at least be credited with a messianic dimension. Similarly in the scream of protest of Rock musicians there is something just, however negative their protest proves finally to be.

Now Art, Literature, History, Culture, Music, each of them with a capital letter, are all worshipped as substitute religions by modern devotees who, because they have no present religion, pump up these by-products of true religion in the past to take its place. Hence the Dadaists’ refusal of „Art,” and their „re-definition” of art. „What is your Art?” they ask. „It is our godless god,” say the Art-worshippers.„Your godless god is a urinal!” snorts Dada.

Alas! How many Dadaists or Art-worshippers, or Rockers, or Communists, show any signs of looking for the real solution to that problem which they all share?

Kyrie eleison.

Documenting Disintegration

Documenting Disintegration on April 5, 2008

Modern art exhibitions should not interest me as much as they do, because there is really next to no hope of modern art as such putting Humpty Dumpty visually together again. But “Hope springs eternal in the human breast,” so on passing through London just now I went to see an Exhibition of Duchamp, Man Ray and Picabia, programmed as “three pioneering artists and friends whose meeting together during the first World War led to the creation of the New York Dada movement and changed the art world for ever.”

Alas, the programme sounded good, but the actual exhibits were as disappointing as ever. Born between 1887 and 1890, all three artists showed some conventional talent before they met up, but from the moment they worked together to achieve their common goal of breaking all artistic convention, the exhibits of this Exhibition betray their almost complete inability to put anything of value in place of what they broke.

From the Frenchman Duchamp, thinker of the group, typical and notorious is his 1917 exhibit entitled “Fountain,” consisting of nothing but an everyday porcelain urinal laid on its back. Some thinking! Art, said Duchamp, need neither be made by the artist himself, nor need it be visually appealing. Henceforth art could be anything ready-made, so long as it was designated by an “artist” as a work of “art.” Hence the twisted steel garbage designated as “statues” to be found in so many a modern city. The three friends had set out to change the definition of art. They seem to have succeeded!

Francis Picabia’s first wife said about Duchamp and her husband that they “displayed an extraordinary adherence to paradoxical, destructive principles in their blasphemies and inhumanities, which were directed not only against the old myths of art, but against all the foundations of life in general.”

As for Man Ray, in 1951 he was still saying that he wanted “to paint as much as possible unlike other painters, above all, to paint unlike myself – so that each succeeding work, or series of works, shall be entirely different from preceding works.”

Fundamental destruction, not excluding self-destruction, was the programme of all three – re-defined – “artists.” How can their programme have achieved that universal prestige and popularity which it enjoys today? – the Exhibition was well attended by devout spectators! Answer, because any civilization that turns away from God must turn in on itself, and then, by a just vengeance, turn on itself. Here is why millions of souls want modernism in their art – and in their religion.

Kyrie eleison.

Romans Measured

Romans Measured on March 29, 2008

From France I received earlier this month what seems to me a well-balanced assessment of who exactly today’s Roman churchmen are and what they are trying to achieve. Here are extracts:

” . . .The churchmen in Rome are battling with us (clergy and laity of the Society of St. Pius X) to bring us around to accepting their Conciliar religion. Cardinal Castrillon and even the Pope are convinced that we are mistaken, and that it is their duty by all means fair and borderline foul to get us to accept the essence of the Second Vatican Council, which has become their Credo. To this end they work on us with determination and patience, but also with authority, always “for our own good.”

“On our side, because we insist on sane thinking as an essential pre-condition to staying faithful to the irreformable doctrine that has been handed down to us, we find ourselves obliged to resist their pressure and so to disobey today’s Magisterium in order to obey the God who does not change. However . . . we must never forget that despite their courtesy and subjective kindness, these Romans are, objectively speaking, our enemies. Beneath the appearance of good they are motivated by a spirit that is not good. An old proverb says that if you sup with the Devil, you need a long spoon . . .”

The writer’s conclusion is also wise: “ . . .On our side we should be devoting all our energies and abilities to keeping our faithful informed, to strengthening them spiritually and to forming them doctrinally . . . by not doing this enough, we lose in men and resources every time Rome attacks. In the trials lying ahead of us, reinforcing the quality of our troops will have more effect than trying to amass large numbers of Catholics who do not understand the need to fight.”

“As Archbishop Lefebvre said on September 4, 1987, in Econe, “We must hold on, absolutely, through thick and thin . . . Rome, I declare, has lost the Faith, Rome has apostatized.” End of the writer’s quote.

Kyrie eleison.

Guideline Queries

Guideline Queries on March 22, 2008

A reader of “Eleison Comments” of two weeks ago had some reasonable questions. Here are some answers:

Q.1 If the Conciliar Church is proving defectible by its Conciliarism while the Society of St.Pius X is defectible by nature (not having the Church’s guarantees of indefectibility), then where is that indefectible Church?

A 1 Defectible plus defectible equals defectible. But defectible plus defectible plus God equals indefectible. In the Arian crisis of the fourth century, Pope Liberius was proving defectible by his support of Arian bishops while St. Athanasius enjoyed no guarantee of indefectibility. Yet the Lord God used both to carry the Church through until the Papacy came back to its Catholic senses. Even with the best of Popes, the Lord God alone is responsible for his Church’s indefectibility. In God’s good time he will rescue his popes from Conciliarism. Meanwhile the SSPX, amongst others, is playing the part of St. Athanasius, but even if the SSPX were to defect – God forbid! – it would be child’s play for the Lord God to raise other carriers of his Church’s indefectible Truth.

Q 2 Does the indefectible Church still exist outside the SSPX?

A 2 Of course it does. Catholic Authority and Catholic Truth, meant to be firmly united, were split by Vatican II, but the Authority continues through the line of popes (unless and until we have clear proof to the contrary, which we do not yet have, and may or may not ever have), while the Truth continues outstandingly (for the moment) through the SSPX. In God’s good time that Authority and Truth will be reunited. Meanwhile the SSPX’s function is to carry, and not betray, the Truth.

Q 3 But both the Conciliar Church is defectible, and the SSPX is defectible! I insist – how can the indefectible Church be continuing?

A 3 A river split into two streams still continues to flow. Normally the two streams rejoin. Certainly the stream of Catholic Authority and the stream of Catholic Truth will rejoin. Meanwhile the Lord God is obtaining the purification of his Church . . .

Q 4 Did not Archbishop Lefebvre sign on finally to all the supposedly heretical documents of Vatican II? Was he not then also a heretic? A 4 Firstly, the Archbishop always said that he never signed on to two of the worst documents, namely Gaudium et Spes and Dignitatis Humanae, and when people used to say that he did sign on to them, he replied that he himself should know what he did or did not sign on to.

Secondly, what more than anything characterizes the Council documents is their ambiguity (see the first Volumes of Prof. Doermann’s series on the theology of John-Paul II, and of Atila Guimaraes’ series on the Council). Countless propositions in those documents can be read in a Catholic or in a non-Catholic way. Whatever the Archbishop signed on to, he no doubt signed on to in its Catholic sense.

Q 5 But where, if anywhere, did the Archbishop clearly repudiate the non-Catholic sense of the Council’s ambiguities? A 5 In most everything he wrote and said about the Council, he was attacking the errors disguised within the ambiguities. However, for as long as a heretic is still being ambiguous, he may not yet be clearly heretical, and it is correspondingly difficult for him to be clearly “repudiated.” Precisely here is the deadly character of Vatican II. Whenever the defenders of Vatican II are attacked for their Neo-modernism, they can scuttle back within the Catholic sense of their ambiguities, and the liberalism in which the mass of us are today marinated enables them to get away with it. It would follow that God alone can clean up this mess in his Church.

Kyrie eleison.

Fallon Fall-Out

Fallon Fall-Out on March 15, 2008

Earlier this week, it is reported, Admiral Fallon, CENTCOM commander of all USA military action in the Middle East, resigned (or was driven) from his post. The frightening significance of this event is sure to be disguised or distorted by the Western media which are under the control of those people who absolutely want the United States to attack Iran.

The Admiral clearly saw, like now a huge number of people see, that the attack on Iraq was a disastrous mistake, severely weakening the US military and draining the US Treasury. He knew just how vulnerable are the US navy ships and ground forces presently deployed in the Middle East, especially if Iran is supplied with the latest Russian weapons. So he is reported as having said that there would never be a US attack on Iran “on his watch.”

Thus he is also reported as having foiled last year, together with the US Chiefs of Staff, an autumn nuclear attack on Iran. On August 30 a B-52 bomber took off from the nuclear weapons storage base in Minot ND, with six live missiles, and landed in Barksdale LA, the US military take-off base for the Middle East. It is not wild to surmise that this secretive and unprecedented move was to permit a US nuclear attack on Iran to coincide with Israel’s attack on Syria’s nuclear facility, which took place on September 6.

People may object that they never saw any such news item in their news media at the time. Of course not. And the same media continue to press for an attack on Iran, which if Russia fulfils President Putin’s October 16 promise to defend Iran against any aggressor, could easily precipitate World War III. The ancients had a saying – “Whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad.”

In this threat of a worldwide conflagration hanging over our heads, we must recognize the justice of a merciful God. If men choose to make the storm break, it will be terrible, but it will also cleanse. We must pray quietly and steadily to the Sacred Heart, and trust him, trust him, trust him.

Kyrie eleison.

Guidelines

Guidelines 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.