Eleison Comments

Ruinations Causes

Ruinations Causes on March 13, 2021

Two weeks ago in these “Comments” a veteran Traditionalist made some interesting comments on the subject of infiltrators, conscious or unconscious, wrecking the Catholic Church from within. Readers may recall how he strove in vain to restore Catholic Tradition within the Conciliar structure. He found out that it could not be done. When further asked, “But how could the very churchmen commit the Church’s suicide? That makes no sense!,” he had further interesting things to say –

I think all of this comes down to a love of the Truth or a lack of Truth. In my opinion, those who truly love the Truth will find it – or struggle until they do find it, and then act upon it. I think the Faith collapsed in the 1960 and ‘70s because Catholics had become so weak. At the noon Mass at my parish in the 1950s, practically no one went to Communion. Priests come from the people, and the people had become soft. When the changes came, one half of those people gladly accepted those changes since it made living the “Faith” much easier, because non-Catholics were no longer hostile, one faith was as good as another, we could now all smile at each other, and did the clergy ever lead lead the way! Most of the other half either joined Protestant sects or simply gave up religion altogether. A few brave souls, a tiny minority who still possessed that love of the Faith, formed their own chapels. Their greatest inspiration was Archbishop Lefebvre, who alone had the faith to grasp that the hierarchy was in a hopeless state of apostasy.

God alone can judge men’s hearts, but in my opinion there is no excuse for those who abandoned the Faith. Perhaps nearly all who did so will pay with their souls. My generation is the worst because we were born and raised in the Faith and we abandoned it because we thought it would make life easier and far less of a challenge. The following generations, although a bit less guilty because they were denied their Catholic heritage, still had little excuse, as everyone has a duty to live the Truth. Where the faith is soft, Catholics are cowards, particularly when it comes to abortion. The bishops won’t even speak out against it, for fear of losing their tax status or of offending someone. Senator Timothy Kaine who lives in our city is as pro-abort and pro-perversion as one can be, while still claiming that the Catholic Faith is the most important thing in his life. He said it all when he said, “I am a Francis-type Catholic.” To my knowledge, the Bishop of Richmond has never challenged him on abortion, much less denied him what passes for Holy Communion, when he should have excommunicated him long ago.

The veteran above is probing the general collapse of Catholics after Vatican II. Another reader of these “Comments” seeks below the cause of the particular slide of the Society of St Pius X, which had nevertheless been raised by God to resist that general collapse –

I think it’s Pharisaism. It’s the same Pharisaism that killed Our Lord that is now killing the Church and the Society. True humility and charity have been lost. Pharisaism, as of the “whited sepulchres” in the Gospel, leads to spiritual blindness – “Make this people blind, so that seeing they may not see, hearing they may not hear” . . . . The Pharisees had a perfect knowledge of the Scriptures and the Law, yet still they killed their Messiah. Today they are killing the Church, and they simply cannot see it, they are blind . . .

In the Society I do believe there were at least subversive priests, and at the top some leaders suffering from complete blindness, but these would have gotten nowhere if the Society as a whole had not fallen into Pharisaism. Had they humbly followed their saintly Founder, they would not have thought they knew better than he did, nor would they have pushed aside Our Lady’s requests for Rosaries for the Consecration of Russia, thinking they knew better than God Himself. Such an insult could not go unpunished by Him. The punishment was the spiritual blindness as of the Pharisees, a dreadful punishment! God, have mercy upon us!

Kyrie eleison.

Science Doubted

Science Doubted on March 6, 2021

Few people today still call in question the priority of science when it comes to providing us men with a happy world and the good life. Replace religion with science and materialism, said the Protocols of the Sages of Sion (EC 699), as though science and materialism solve all problems of life. The famous Greek philosopher Aristotle (384–322 B.C.) needed four causes to analyse reality: purpose, maker, form and material, but modern man has effectively rubbed out the final cause or purpose and the efficient cause or maker, no doubt because both of these lead in reality to God, who is not thus needed for a thing’s intrinsic form or matter. And from Galileo (1564–1642) onwards, “science” has been more and more godless.

However, the wisdom of Shakespeare (1564–1616) recognised that there was more in Heaven and earth than there was in Horatio’s philosophy (Hamlet I), and Germany’s greatest writer, Goethe (1749–1832), knew that there was a superior knowledge of Nature to that of science, a knowledge which seized Nature’s inner spirit. Another contemporary, the English poet William Wordsworth (1770–1850), was also aware at the turn from the 18th to the 19th centuries that mankind was taking with the industrial revolution and the promotion of the physical sciences, a direction which in some respects was not progressing but regressing: as the mastery of matter was advancing, so the mastery of spirit was receding. One of Wordsworth’s disciples was the famous Catholic convert and writer of popular spiritual books, Fr. William Faber (1814–1863). Wordsworth never converted himself, but he bore Catholic fruit. Here is a famous sonnet of his on the anti-spiritual modern world:—

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; Modern shopping!

Little we see in Nature that is ours; What do suburbanites know of Nature?

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon; Wordsworth himself spent a very happy

The winds that will be howling at all hours, childhood amid the delights of Nature in

And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers; the Lake District in North England.

For this, for everything, we are out of tune;

It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be He cries out that he would rather be a

A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn; pre-Christian than a post-Christian, for at

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, least his belief in pagan gods would give

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; him some sense of union with the glorious

Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; spectacle of Nature in front of him.

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn. As it is, he feels only “forlorn” – burnt out.

As a rule, suburbanites do not like poetry and their vile media will write it out like prose if they can. To say what they have to say, poets as such take the extra trouble to say it with rhyme and rhythm, and that mere fact is enough to suggest that there is more to life than just materialistic suburbs. But most suburbanites are content with their materialism and prefer not to be reminded of its deficiency. And so love of Nature turns into skiing and speedboats, while poetry is discredited, discounted, waiting to be revived by a revaluing of things spiritual. That will come, but it depends on the Catholic Church. Man is enough to pull Nature and himself down, but only God can lift either of them back up. Fr. Faber showed the way. He at least did not end up forlorn.

Kyrie eleison.

Unconscious “Infiltrators”

Unconscious "Infiltrators" on February 27, 2021

In these “Comments” of three weeks ago, where a reader was looking for an explanation of the decline of the Society of St Pius X after the death in 1991 of its Founder, Archbishop Lefebvre, the question arose of possible infiltration of the SSPX by enemies of Catholic Tradition. Had there been infiltrators? These “Comments” took the position that no conscious or clear infiltrators had ever been discovered, but there had been a number of SSPX priests at the top of the Society who had used all their influence at the top to change the Society’s direction from that given to it by the Archbishop, without their being necessarily conscious of acting as infiltrators. In fact they may have infiltrated all the more effectively for being unconscious infiltrators! God knows, one or the other of them may have known exactly what he was doing to cripple the Society from within, but it never seemed so outwardly.

We are right up against the mystery of modernism, which must have sent millions of souls to Hell. Let us take yet another look, with another witness, a veteran Traditionalist who has spent tens of years in the fight for Catholic Tradition in Traditional chapels of the United States. The heavy black print is from the editor of the “Comments,” but every word in italics is from the veteran –

As one who has been a member of three Traditional parishes, a principal founder of two, and an activist in all three, I remember saying many years ago and many times over that the Devil infiltrates with his own people every single Traditional parish, that is, with people who are usually “sleepers,” who bide their time waiting for the right moment to strike. Having an Angelic intelligence and having been around for thousands of years, he is far from stupid and knows it is much easier to destroy a parish from within rather than from the outside. I have encountered these people in all three parishes. No doubt they are within the SSPX, with most not conscious that they are the Devil’s helpers, but he knows it. In fact, if they are not there, he is not doing his job.

The SSPX should disengage all contact with the Conciliar Church until that day when that masterpiece creation of the Devil is converted, which will be almost certainly after God chastises it in the most severe way along with its partner: the world. The SSPX is attempting to do what I attempted to do locally when I and another individual sat down three times in 1990–91 with Richmond’s two bishops and requested and negotiated the founding of St. Joseph’s parish, which, incidentally, was at that time the first and only Traditional Catholic parish in the world in union with Modernist Rome, with the Mass and all Sacraments in the Traditional Rite. ( . . . )

With St. Joseph’s, it was my intent to draw in hundreds of Novus Ordo Catholics and over time to make them all good Traditionalists. I was dreaming. St. Joseph’s today, with its likely thousand plus parishioners and its paid for 2 ½ million dollar building on multiple acres is in the hands of the doubtfully ordained Fraternity of St. Peter priests. It is a hybrid parish, with the “Traditional Mass and Sacraments” but in every other way Novus Ordo. I have not the slightest doubt that should it close its doors today, nearly every parishioner would be at a Novus Ordo “Mass” next Sunday. Such a fate awaits the SSPX should it merge with the Novus Ordo.

Now, were the two bishops and our veteran conscious “infiltrators”? The veteran certainly not. The two bishops possibly, but is it not equally possible that they too were acting in good faith? What seems most likely is that all three men were “dreaming.” Of what? Surely of mixing oil and water. Of mixing Traditional Truth with Conciliar Authority. But it cannot be done. The Archbishop knew that from the beginning. Our veteran came to know it, God bless him. Many souls in the Society still do not know it. They are dreaming, and they are all, in effect, unconscious “infiltrators.”

Kyrie eleison.

White Identity – III

White Identity - III on February 20, 2021

That identity today should be such a problem for many people (see the two previous issues of these “Comments”) is an artificial state of affairs. Something is out of true. When people are leading normal lives, they have a natural identity corresponding to who they are, and they may never even think about it. But today white people are being twisted out of true, by somebody else but they have only themselves to blame, and the result is that they have all kinds of problems which they do not need. To get to the heart of the matter may take a few more questions:

You said last week that everything turns on Christ and that returning to Him would solve all identity questions. But billions of non-Christians have no identity problem. Billions of non-Christians lead normal and decent lives without Christ. Why should He have to be brought into it?

Christianity obviously began in the Holy Land, but with the Apostles it spread rapidly all over the known world: with St Thomas to India, St John and St Phillip in Asia Minor, Nathanael in Armenia, Matthew in Africa, Thaddeus in Persia, and so on. Now in any of these regions the new religion could have caught on as it did in Europe with Peter, Paul, Andrew and James the Greater, but it is to the continent of Europe that God gave special gifts of nature, and graces of conversion, to make of Europeans the missionaries of the world. Thus whereas after 600 years the Middle East largely forsook Christianity to adopt Islam, on the contrary Europe was gifted and famed for its orthodoxy, Rome especially soon (Rom.I, 8), and God had before prepared the whole of Europe to support the Catholic destiny of Rome by the Roman Empire. One might dare to say that in the mind of God Europe and the Faith are closely identified with one another, which suggests that Christ is an essential part of European or white identity in particular.

And what part did the Jews play in all of this?

You are right to ask the question, because for good or ill they are always special in the mind of God. In fact they fought against the Church, tooth and nail, from the very beginning, as we read in the Epistles of St Paul, e.g. I Thess. II, 14–16. And it is they who for instance persuaded the Roman Emperor Claudius (41–54 A.D.) to persecute the Christians. And if they see in the white race the people most responsible in the past for the success over many centuries of the religion of Jesus Christ, it can come as no surprise if they use all of the power they have built up today in politics, the media and films and academia to blacken the whites to the point of making them ashamed of being white. Hence the lack of identity for the whites.

But why do the whites not defend themselves if they are God’s champions? Why does God abandon them?

The answer to both questions is because they have abandoned Him. Who can deny that the great mass of whites today either no longer believe in God at all, or at least no longer take Him seriously ? And you think He does not notice? Think again! There is an old pagan proverb which nevertheless corresponds to the natural law: “Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad.” Whites today are blind, and going suicidally mad, and all peoples following are being led to madness. And if they are being scourged by the Jews accordingly, it is absolutely their own fault for having abandoned God, Who cares for His children too much to let them roll down to Hell without having serious problems beforehand.

So what is the answer, finally?

Forget about identity! Think about Our Lord Jesus Christ. Think about the tremendous death He suffered for you and me. Turn to His Mother to plead with Him for you. Pick up Her Holy Rosary and pray at least five Mysteries a day. And beg Her to obtain Russia’s Consecration to Her Immaculate Heart, which alone will unlock the salvation of mankind, which is at the moment more problematic and locked up by the day. She will prevail. And God bless you.

Kyrie eleison.

White Identity – II

White Identity - II on February 13, 2021

The dialogue continues with a young white man of today who is looking for who he is, for his identity, but who fears to look for it in the direction of Christ, because Christianity seems subordinate to Judaism, which makes Christians inferior. Yet he cannot believe that Christ is lesser than the Old Testament.

I have learned that Noah was not Jewish! Then when did Gentiles become different from Jews?

With Abraham, around 2000 B.C. Adam and Eve were created by God around 4000 B.C. For 1000 years mankind so degenerated that around 3000 B.C. Noah was raised by God to save mankind from the Flood, necessary to give mankind another start with only eight souls on the Ark. After another 1000 years men were again corrupt, but this time God picked out Abraham to form a race of men (the future Jews) who by being set apart from the corruption of the rest of men (the future Gentiles) would be fit to provide another 2000 years later the human background of the Saviour or Messiah of all men, Jesus Christ. Thus the Jews were from Abraham to Christ the special People of God by race, to serve in future all mankind, but when the Messiah came and made clear that God’s own People would be no longer by race but by faith, then the Jews out of hurt pride turned against God, killed His Messiah and became the special people of Satan.

Then were the Jews the origin of Christianity?

Christianity is part human, part divine. The divine part came, and comes, entirely from the Holy Trinity, God, and through the God-man, Second Person of the Holy Trinity, Jesus Christ. It is only the human part, Mary, Joseph, 12 Apostles, etc., that came from among the Jews, to whom all Christians owe a huge debt.

Then is Christianity a duping of the Gentiles by the Jews?

Not at all, and it never has been, because God gave to the Jews as His human instruments, His Truth and salvation to give to the Gentiles. The Jews largely dropped faith in Christ soon after – mystery of iniquity, pride – but the Gentiles picked up the ball and ran with it all the way to Vatican II (1962–1965) when, essentially, they too dropped Christianity – mystery of iniquity, foretold in Scripture (Lk. XXI, 24).

Then is the New Testament still Jewish brainwork?

Yes, but only in the very insignificant sense, that to tell Jews and Gentiles at the beginning of Christianity the great new truths of salvation, as in the Epistles of St Paul, God used the human brains of Jews. But soon after those beginnings, it was Gentiles who took over, and from then on, few Jews told those truths.

Jacob was the favoured son of Isaac, Esau the unfavoured son. Jews call Christians Esau? Are they right to consider that Christians are unfavoured in comparison with them selves in the eyes of God?

Not at all, it is the other way round. Read Romans IX, 6–9. Esau is the figure of the unfavoured Jews because they largely rejected and reject His Son, whereas Jacob figures the favoured Christians who accepted and accept His Son. St Paul wrestled with the confusion in the minds of his listeners over this vexed question of Jews and Gentiles in three major Epistles: Galatians, Romans and Hebrews. His teaching is the Word of God, Scripture, basically clear and absolutely authoritative. Read those Epistles.

Are the Jews right that Gentiles are stupid?

Certainly, when the Gentiles abandon Christ, and then the Jews can easily dominate them, like today. But when the Gentiles are faithful to Christ, which means they are then faithful to God and to the Truth, then neither Jews nor Communists can deceive them, and that is when true civilisation flourishes and many more souls are saved, like in the Middle Ages.

Kyrie eleison.

White Identity – I

White Identity – I on February 6, 2021

A young white couple that reads these “Comments” wants to come back to the Church, but it has a special difficulty which the 31-year old husband suspects is shared by many of his contemporaries: the present lack of an identity for whites. Both he and his wife have some German in their ancestry, and so in search of identity they have been seriously attracted by Germanic paganism. But they were both born Catholic and they suspect that their Catholic schooling was not all that it should have been. The questions that he asks certainly prove that this was the case, but they also show that he is seeking the truth, so that if he perseveres in his quest he can be sure that God will give him the answers he needs. He asks –

Is Germanic paganism our true identity?

Yes and no. A human being’s true identity is to go to Heaven to be blissfully happy with God for all eternity. That is why so many young people (and older people) are so deeply dissatisfied with their present materialistic way of life – they know that they are meant for something much more, but they do not know what. Now there is much that is noble in Germanic paganism, for instance in the operas of Richard Wagner, but it is wholly incapable of getting a man to Heaven because it has no supernatural grace in it. Grace alone can open God’s Heaven for us. And God’s grace is available to us only through God’s one true religion, which is the Roman Catholic religion. If I refuse it, I am refusing Heaven. This religion, for instance Charlemagne, made Europe, and forged the identity of all the white European nations. Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953) said, “Europe is the (Catholic) Faith and the Faith is Europe.”

But Christianity was invented by the Jews?

The Catholic religion was invented by no human being or beings. It was “invented” from eternity by God alone, and revealed to men through His Divine Son, Jesus Christ, who as a man was a Jew, the son of Mary, and who was helped to found the Catholic Church by a small number of Jews. Hence John IV, 22. But it was also the Jews, leaders and people (Mt.XXVII, 20), who crucified Jesus, and the large majority of Jews have ever since hated Christ and done their best to go on crucifying Him in His Church. So the best of Israelites were incomparable friends of God, but the Talmudists have been His incomparable enemies. It is essential to distinguish between Jews like St Paul, and Jews like Caiaphas. The huge difference is between those who accept Christ and those who reject Him. All turns on Christ.

But is not the New Testament still playing the Old Testament game, so to speak? Are not Christians worshipping Jews, and following the “design” and “rules” of Jews?

Christians are worshipping God, Father, Son and Holy Ghost, the Holy Trinity as revealed by God, Jesus Christ, a revelation far surpassing that of all the rest of the Jews put together. He was and is God. They were and are mere men.

So why was God in the Old Testament so protective of Jews and yet so annoyed by them?

Because He had given them a great part to play, to prepare for the coming on earth of the Messiah, and they were not always faithful to the task. Our vile media and the mere word “anti-semitism” suggest that Jews can never be bad, but they can be very bad indeed. Then they deserve punishment, like anyone else.

But why did God choose the Jews? And why did He choose the Jews in particular?

He had to choose some people to provide the Messiah with a human Mother, family, village, people and religious practice. With Mary, Joseph, Nazareth, the Temple of Jerusalem and the Mosaic religion the Jews did finally provide the Messiah with His earthly framework, only to crucify Him out of their pride.

Why the Jews in particular? God’s mystery. Belloc again: “How odd of God to choose the Jews!”

Kyrie eleison.