Eleison Comments

Madiran’s Philosophy

Madiran's Philosophy on October 17, 2020

Like Pope Pius X in his great anti-modernist Encyclical of 1907, Pascendi, Jean Madiran in his book “The Heresy of the 20th Century” starts out from philosophy, because both of them see that the problem which makes it so difficult for modern minds really to grasp Catholicism is rather philosophical than theological. Thus the first of six Parts of Madiran’s book has for its title “Philosophical Preamble.”

Surprisingly, Madiran himself tells readers that they can skip the Preamble if they like, but that can only have been to spare many a modern reader who is rightly allergic to the delinquent nonsense which proceeds from the so-called “universities” of today. In fact, the argument of Madiran’s book is as dependent on true philosophy as it is independent of today’s “philosophistry,” or pseudo-philosophy.

But how and why can supernatural Faith be so dependent on philosophy, which is the rational study of all natural reality, the raising of (true) common sense, from an amateur to a professional level, so to speak? Answer, a good wine-maker does not depend on clean and uncracked glass bottles to make good wine, but he cannot run his wine business without such bottles, because if all the bottles are dirty inside, nobody is going to buy his wine, however good it is. The wine-maker presupposes that he will get automatically clean bottles. Compared with the wine, the glass bottle is worth next to nothing when it is empty of wine, but it is absolutely necessary without cracks or dirt for the wine-maker to contain his wine.

Now human reason is like the bottle. It is only a natural faculty but by the time it reaches death it is meant on pain of eternal condemnation to contain the supernatural wine of the Faith (Mk. XVI, 16). The Faith is a supreme gift of God by which a man’s reason is supernaturally elevated to believe , but if that faculty of reason is fouled up by human errors and misbeliefs, then like the dirty bottle it risks fouling up God’s wine of belief, however divine that belief is in itself. Now just a little dirt in the bottle will spoil the wine it contains, but modernism in the mind is such a radical error that it will spoil, or undermine, any Faith poured into that mind. And as wine poured into a dirty bottle cannot help being spoiled, so Catholic Faith poured into a modern mind can hardly help being undermined. So teach Pius X, de Corte, Calderón and Madiran, along with all others who have grasped the full objective malice of a modernist mind.

So how does Madiran in particular prove that the French bishops in the 1960’s were out of their Catholic minds? He starts out from an official declaration of theirs in December of 1966 (p. 40) where they affirm that “for a philosophical mind,” the words “person” and “nature,” crucial for Christology (Catholic theology of Christ) have changed their meaning since the time of Boethius (who hammered out the definition of “person”) and of Aquinas (who did similarly for “nature”). In other words, for the French bishops modern philosophy has left behind the Church’s classic philosophy embedded in unchanging Church doctrine, so that for them, thomism is obsolete “for a philosophical mind,” and to be discarded.

But in a Church whose doctrine always corresponded to what never changes in extra-mental reality, this perspective of the French bishops is absolutely revolutionary. It can only mean, says Madiran (43), that they are accepting the Copernican revolution in philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), who placed “reality”no longer outside but inside the mind. However (45, 46), there is no obligation, except in Kantian philosophy, to accept this internalising of reality. Only on its own premisses must one arrive at its unreal conclusions. By their moral choice of Kant over Aquinas, the French bishops were in fact demonstrating their implicit apostasy (50) and their anti-natural religion. They were declaring their independence from God’s Truth by their rejection of God’s reality, and of the Order which He implanted in Nature (60–63).

Madiran concludes his Part I by saying that whereas Thomism corresponds to the human experience of all times and all places (66), Kantism has cut the French bishops mentally adrift, like the modern age they so seek to please (67).

Kyrie eleison.

Vocations Still?

Vocations Still? on October 10, 2020

Can there still be vocations of younger or older souls to the service of God in a seminary, convent, friary or monastery, amidst the distress of the Catholic Church today? The answer can only be in the positive because the fact is that God is still calling souls to His service, and “A fact is stronger than the Lord Mayor.” On the other hand Superiors of seminaries or religious houses need to take into consideration two circumstances special to the situation of the Church today which should render them more careful than ever in accepting vocations beneath their roof. These are firstly the ever increasing immaturity of souls growing up in the modern world, and secondly, the ever growing unreliability of Church leaders.

To begin with, let us remind ourselves that the Catholic Church comes directly from Jesus Christ who will preserve it until the end of the world (Mt. XXVIII, 20), and into eternity. He has with the Father and the Holy Ghost all the power needed, and much more, to provide it with all means necessary for its survival. Now those means necessarily include a priesthood, bishops and priests and in some sort of hierarchy, to ensure those sacraments which are essential to the life of supernatural grace of the Church’s members. Therefore until world’s end Our Lord will always be giving enough vocations to men to guarantee that the Church has the men it needs as ministers. As for the women into whose nature it is built by God to be the “helpers” or “helpmates” of man (Gen.II, 18), they are not to be priests nor as necessary to the Church as priests, but by the gifts which God gives to them and not to men, they can render to the Church such precious services that it one cannot imagine the Church being without feminine vocations. For instance, where would the Church’s apostolate be without the prayers of Sisters, grandmothers, etc.?

However God is God, and His ways are inscrutable by men. See the end of Romans XI, and all of the Book of Job, Chapters XXXVII to XLI. He reaches far beyond our human minds, and in the fallibility of the last six Popes inclusive, He is already reaching well beyond what many Catholic minds can bear. They need to read Job. Nor is the Almighty finished yet by any means. Our Lady has told us that fire will fall from the sky, eliminating a large part of mankind, and if sins do not slow down there will be no more forgiveness for them, a prediction easier to understand ever since the Covid scam recently made so many of the very churchmen shut down their confessionals. Let us pray and work for Our Lord to send workers into His vineyard, but let us not try to tell Him how many He needs. Only He knows that.

Meanwhile we human beings must confess that, as said above, we throw at least two serious obstacles in the way of His calling souls to serve Him. Firstly, the immaturity of souls leading a modern life. If there is one thing that makes a boy or girl grow up so as to become capable of enduring the discipline of religious life or the hardships of married life, it is suffering, but is not the illusion everywhere today that suffering can be blamed on somebody else, may be avoided, and need not be endured? Nor are the characters of children formed when parents less and less know how to bring them up. Nor are they given much responsibility to bear, which could also mature them. City and suburban life hardly favour vocations.

But secondly the disorder in the Church also discourages vocations. For as long as the Church was, despite all human failings, a doctrinal and structural rock of ages, I could as a young person entrust my life to it and be sure that several layers of Superiors above me would function on a basis of objective truth and justice overall. But ever since Vatican II changed Church doctrine and the basis on which it operates, how can I still be sure of an objective and stable framework within which to lead the rest of my life? One great lesson of this Church crisis is that the Catholic Church can no more do without the Pope than a puppet can do without its puppeteer – it becomes a jumbled heap of strings and bits of coloured wood.

Of course God can and will supply for the good of His Church, but we can hardly expect vocations to come forward tomorrow just like they did the day before yesterday.

Kyrie eleison.

Madiran’s Foreword

Madiran's Foreword on October 3, 2020

In the Foreword to his book on The Heresy of the 20th Century Jean Madiran begins with the direct statement that it is the Catholic bishops who are responsible for the heresy of the 20th century (p.17 in the 2018 re-edition of the book from via.romana@yahoo.fr). Knowing that he will be accused as a mere layman of speaking out of turn, he states defiantly (28) that when the shepherds or bishops have turned into wolves or destroyers of the Faith. he needed as a baptised Catholic neither to ask for, nor to be given, any mandate to defend the Faith

And he makes (26) a crucial distinction which announces the thesis of his whole book. Heresy in the strict sense of the word means the wilful denial of what one knows to be a defined proposition of the Faith, but in the broad sense it means the acceptance of a whole teaching radically alien to the Faith. The heresy he will be attacking is in this broad sense, going far beyond the contradiction of just any one proposition of the Faith. The “20th century heresy” is to be found rather “in the night, in emptiness, in nothingness.”

And how did the French bishops get emptied out? Madiran writes (20) that for 100 years, reaching back then to the middle of the 19th century, they had been out of touch with Rome, at that time the truly Catholic Rome of Pius IX and the Syllabus, because their whole mentality (21) had slipped away from Rome. Theirs was Catholic discipline without conviction, Catholic obedience without understanding of what the obedience was for. In a few words Madiran is hitting on the essence of the pre-conciliar Church: under the influence of the modern world, a progressive loss of Catholic faith had resulted in a Church where the appearances were still standing but the substance behind the appearances was gone. How the true Church needed to resist that new Revolutionary world the anti-liberal Popes did lay out, especially Popes Pius IX, Leo XIII and Pius X in their social teaching, but of their Encyclicals Madiran (23) says that the bishops in the 1950’s knew virtually nothing.

Graver still for Madiran, foreshadowing the whole Part VI of the book to come, the 20th century heresy of these bishops was their all-engulfing faithless mentality, which denies that there is any such thing as the natural law (24). Magnetised by the modern world, infected by its liberalism, they had long been mentally slipping away from Rome and rejecting its social doctrine, but in the 1950’s they were still mouthing certain formulae of the old catechism. However, in their hearts all sense of the natural law was being lost, and this meant that in the years immediately following the Council they were ready to lay hands on dogma and the catechism which they had left up till then outwardly intact. Thus their disagreement with Rome on social doctrine contained implicitly that total uprooting of the Christian religion from which the entire Church suffered in the aftermath of the Council (25).

For if there is no natural law or rational order embedded by God in all of Creation around us, then all reason and faith are shipwrecked, and while the formulae of the Gospel and the dogmatic definitions may for a while be accurately recited and repeated, their substance has been drained out and all religion has been radically subverted. Bishops without natural law have no more access to the Gospel or to dogmatic definitions. They can no longer preserve or hand down anything (26). They are ripe to swing left towards the substitute religion of modernity, which is Communism (26).

And to conclude the Foreword, Madiran appeals to a compatriot who foresaw this decadence in the clergy even before the First World War. Charles Péguy (1873–1914) wrote in 1909 that the clergy (30) were successfully destroying Christianity by wanting it to progress with the times. They were themselves losing the faith (32), accepting its disappearance as something natural.

Kyrie eleison.

Archbishop Tranferred

Archbishop Tranferred on September 26, 2020

Two days ago, the mortal remains of Archbishop Lefebvre were transferred from the vault next to the Seminary of Écône where they had rested temporarily since his death in 1991, to a solid marble sarcophagus in the crypt beneath the Seminary Chapel specially prepared for their permanent repose. All splendour is fitting for the place of burial of the greatest man of God, the greatest hero of the Catholic Faith, of modern times, the Archbishop who virtually single-handed saved the Catholic doctrine, sacraments and priesthood from perishing, from their corruption and elimination by modern men who no longer believed in them as they had been handed down by the faithful Catholic Church through nearly two thousand years.

And one may say that after his death his successors continued his work more or less faithfully for another 20 years, but then in 2012 occurred a change in his Society of St Pius X which obliged many souls to speak of a New-society, somewhat as the changes in the Church following on the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) obliged many Catholics to speak of a New-church, so radical were the changes. Alas, the ceremony of transferral of the Archbishop’s remains reflected this transferral of his work from Society to New-society, because it was celebrated not by the present Superior General, Fr. David Pagliarani, but by his predecessor as Superior General, the one who was mainly responsible for the transfer from Society to New-society. This choice of Fr. Pagliarani’s predecessor to celebrate such an outstanding event in honour of the Society’s Founder is neither a good omen nor is it an accident. It reminds us of the quote of Our Lord (Mt. XXIII):

29  Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for you build the tombs of the prophets and adorn the monuments of the righteous, 30 saying, ‘If we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.’

It may well be that today the universal hypocrisy of a world spurning Our Lord runs so deep that many souls taking part in the ceremony of two days ago were not conscious hypocrites, God knows, nor so severely to be condemned as Our Lord condemned those who He knew were about to crucify Him. For indeed many Catholics, who had been faithfully following the Archbishop in his “disobedience” towards the Church’s unfaithful officials, were skilfully mislead by his successors back towards the same officials with their Conciliar religion of man. Nevertheless, objectively speaking, the parallel is clear.

* The Pharisees built monuments to honour the prophets that they themselves would also have killed.

The New-society builds a sarcophagus for its Founder when it itself has been making friends with the Pachamamists whom he already abominated.

* To the Pharisees Our Lord promised to send messengers to denounce their infidelity, but these they would kill just the same.

To the New-church and New-society he sends an Archbishop Viganò to remind them of their infidelity. As for the New-church, it would kill him. The New-society does its best to pay no attention to him.

* The Pharisees were warned by Our Lord of the grave consequences of their infidelity, and indeed in 70 AD Jerusalem was utterly destroyed.

As for the New-society, it has for now reduced the work of Archbishop to radical impotency, because the worldwide network of the Faith which he built up is in absolute need of new bishops to maintain that Faith, but by the New-society’s refusal to consecrate new bishops without the Pachamamists’ consent, it is refusing new bishops who will maintain the faith of Archbishop Lefebvre, because the Pachamamists will never consent to the consecration of bishops who will defend that faith.

In brief, the New-society’s members allowed that predecessor of Fr Pagliarani to honour their Founder’s place of burial who did more than anyone else to bury his work. Are they aware of how they risk contributing to the transferral of a gathering for heroes into a playpen of Neo-pharisees?

Kyrie eleison.

Madiran Introduced

Madiran Introduced on September 19, 2020

As eldest daughter of the Church, France has always had thinkers and writers in the forefront of the defence of the Church, and modern times are no exception. In the confusion and disarray of Catholics arising immediately out of the end of the Second Vatican Council in 1965, an outstanding pioneer of what would come to be “Traditional” thinking was the Frenchman Jean Madiran (1920–2013), creator and editor of the right-wing and nationalist monthly magazine “Itinéraires” (Itineraries) from 1956 to 1996. Already a genuine defender of the Faith before the Council, he made his magazine a centre-piece of that defence after the Council, when it became essential reading for many Catholics trying not to lose their heads or their faith.

In the 1960’s Madiran certainly contributed to maintaining in France the literate public that would provide a basis of support in the 1970’s for Archbishop Lefebvre to be able to lead a “Traditional” movement in France to oppose the destruction of the Church from within by the Conciliar clergy. Madiran and his magazine may also have seriously helped the Archbishop himself to arrive at his momentous decision at the end of the 1960’s to found in French Switzerland the Society of St Pius X, destined to make its decisive contribution to the saving of Catholic Tradition over the next 40 years. The one time that this writer can remember having seen the Archbishop run was when Madiran was once visiting the seminary in Écône, and the Archbishop had to catch him just before he returned to Paris.

Alas, their collaboration came to an end when John-Paul II became Pope in 1978, and Madiran thought that he would rescue the Church, but as far as the Archbishop was concerned, Madiran had had his good influence, and “Tradition” was by now well established. We need today to remember just how unthinkable it was in the 1950’s and 1960’s for Catholics to doubt their clergy. Here is the enormous merit of Madiran: a true faith unshaken by an almost entire Catholic hierarchy gone astray, together with the courage to stand up and write in public against the mass of people either “faithfully” following that hierarchy out of “obedience,” or faithlessly rejoicing in its undermining of the Church by freemasonry. That Madiran let himself be subsequently misled by John-Paul II only testifies to the force of the magnetism of Rome which for a crucial period of time he himself had succeeded in overcoming in the service of Catholic Truth.

That something in him never wavered is suggested by the fact that among all the books that he wrote in a long and productive life, the one in which he himself said that he best said what he essentially wanted to say was the book we are going to look at in these “Eleison Comments” – L’hérésie du vingtième siècle, The Heresy of the 20th Century. It first appeared in 1968, in other words in the thick of the controversy swirling around Vatican II. It contains a Prologue and six Parts, making perhaps seven issues of these “Comments,” because the book is a classic, even if it has not had many – or any – translations.

It is a classic because it takes a thomistic philosopher to take modernism to the cleaners – how does one analyse a fog? – and Madiran was a thomistic philosopher. But not just any thomistic philosopher, because the mass of Vatican II bishops had been drilled at their seminary or Congregation in the principles of the philosophy of St Thomas Aquinas. But they had not learned or understood how those principles apply to reality. This is because it is relatively easy to teach that philosophy like a coherent telephone book. Catholic pupils are docile and they drink it all in, without necessarily grasping that it is the one and only possible account of the one and only reality around us. But who can teach reality to pupils born in central heating and suckled on television? Madiran was of an earlier generation, which helps, but even then, to see modernism as clearly as he did, he needed a special grace of realism, like Pius X de Corte, Calderón and a select few others.

Fasten your seat-belts. Madiran is worth it. Next week perhaps, his Foreword.

Kyrie eleison.

Economic Reality

Economic Reality on September 12, 2020

<p>It is very short-sighted to say that economics have nothing to do with religion, because economics (the <u>material</u> relations between men) flow from politics (the <i>human</i> relations between men), and politics (a man&#8217;s relations with his <u>fellow-men</u>) descend necessarily from his relations with his <u>God</u> (his religion). At this moment The United States have been brought to the brink of a tremendous economic crisis, and with the USA, the rest of the world. Let us try to see this crisis in a little more than just a material perspective, in order to prevent the situation from making no sense, if and when many things soon crash.</p><p>Money playing in a nation&#8217;s economic life a part as essential as that of oil in the engine of a car, it is normal that any State&#8217;s government will want to control the creation of money in that State. It is not normal for private citizens to control their State&#8217;s money because they risk doing so in their own interests, and not for the common good. Yet all over the world today the States&#8217; money is controlled by central banks which are strictly independent of these States. In the USA in particular, the founding Constitution of 1787 laid down that the new State&#8217;s money should be created and controlled by the government (Congress), and this remained the normal situation until 1913, when a consortium of private citizens, money-men, after many vain attempts, at last succeeded in tricking Congress into handing over to the &#8220;Federal Reserve,&#8221; their brand new central bank, all power over the money of the USA.</p><p>These money-men had promised that the Fed, as it came to be known, would solve the problem of recurring economic crises, like the cycle of economic booms and busts. It did nothing of the kind, on the contrary it made them even worse, like the Great Depression of 1929 and the years following, and like now the Depression of the 2020&#8217;s which risks making 1929 look like a picnic, and risks stripping the United States of its prosperity and enslaving its liberty by making all American citizens into debt-slaves. The middle class will soon be no more. Could this have happened if they had listened to Our Lord? &#8211; &#8220;Seek ye first <u>the kingdom of God and His justice</u>, and all these things will be added unto you&#8221; &#8211; no. The same citizens had allowed themselves to be bewitched by the Fed&#8217;s promise of ever more easy money.</p><p>For in real life money is difficult to come by, and it has to be earned by the sweat of a worker&#8217;s brow. That is the real economy where bills and the rent must be paid, where real goods and services are produced generating real wealth, the industry and commerce which created the material success and prestige of the USA. But then there is the world of finance which rides on the top of the real economy like Wall Street rides on Main Street, where some fantastical way can be found or engineered around realities like bills and rent, where money grows out of investment, leverage and speculation, where for instance one young banker can in a few days ruin a centuries-old bank (Barings, 1995). It is a world which is wide open to propaganda and manipulation and fantasy, apt to be ever less tethered to the real world, apt to be swept away in dreams of unlimited wealth at the cost of no effort. Such dreaming is not Catholic!</p><p>But the Fed let it loose from 1987, in 2008 and in 2019 in particular. In 1987 Alan Greenspan became Chairman of the Fed and began encouraging fantasy finance over real economy. The commercial banks were allowed to speculate with their customers&#8217; money. In 2008 their malinvestment generated a huge economic crisis, &#8220;solved&#8221; by the Fed beginning to create fabulous amounts of &#8220;money&#8221; out of thin air.</p><p>By 2019 as the public was more and more hooked on fantasy money, the Fed&#8217;s <u>public</u> balance sheet took off into complete unreality, seven trillion dollars and counting, and it is now crashing the real economy with the corona-panic, then &#8220;paying&#8221; the crash debts that everybody gets into with its unreal trillions, but turning the whole world into real slaves.</p><p>And the solution? God is the supreme reality. Let men return to Him, and their perspective would change wholly, and these fantasies of His enemies would begin to lift, like fog in the morning sun.</p><p>Kyrie eleison.</p>