Eleison Comments

Thursday Thoughts

Thursday Thoughts on April 3, 2020

Most likely many readers know from the Holy Week liturgy, normally celebrated next week, the Gospel narratives of the Passion of Our Lord, but they may not have thought about how many of the various moments of the Passion can be applied to the situation of Catholics today. Take for example the captivity of Our Lord in the Garden of Gethsemane. He said many things, each of which is a world in interpretation.

On the Thursday evening Jerusalem is full of pilgrims from Judaea, Galilee and the Diaspora, and there is an electric tension throughout the city because everybody that is anybody is there for the great Feast of the Passover, and the tension centres around Jesus. He is dearly loved by his Apostles and disciples and the large number of people that he has taught and healed and consoled and helped over the last three years of his earthly ministry. On the other hand it seems that the religious authorities of the Temple, the chief priests and the scribes and pharisees, disapprove of him severely, and want him absolutely out of the way. What has he done wrong? And what are they going to do to him? The whole city is abuzz with Jesus.

In this tense atmosphere He has held the Last Supper with His Apostles, adding strange but immensely serious ceremonies to those of the Old Testament, and speaking as though He is about to leave them. He sends Judas Iscariot on his way, and then He leads the others out to the Garden of Gethsemane. The Apostles are frightened and uneasy, but Peter is ready to fight, having brought a sword with him. Eight out of the eleven Jesus leaves behind, taking Peter, James and John still deeper into the olive grove, where He asks them to pray, warning them that if they do not pray, temptation may catch them. Then he leaves them too behind, and He prays alone His terrible Agony in three parts, finding them asleep each time He rejoins them. Finally Judas Iscariot brings on the Temple Guard to arrest Our Lord, away from the people who risked protecting Him, and betrays Him with a kiss. Peter is furious, whips out his sword, and in defence of his beloved Master slashes off the ear of a servant of the High Priest, only to be told by Jesus to put up his sword. Jesus gives three reasons.

Firstly, “All who take the sword will perish by the sword.” Our Lord needs to be not the Knave of Clubs, but the King of Hearts, in the essentially spiritual struggle for the eternal salvation of souls. This He can never do by means of violence which will beget only counter-violence. Secondly, similarly, “Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and He will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels?” Obviously, the Creator of the universe has ample physical force to overthrow whole armies of enemies of His Son, but that is not how They would win souls, on the contrary. Superior force would merely alienate souls physically crushed by God. And thirdly, “How then should the Scriptures be fulfilled, that it must be so?” The plan of God, consigned to Holy Scripture, has been from all eternity that Jesus will get through to souls (a minority) by Himself being crushed! Jesus will win by being, as we say today, at least to all appearances, a “loser”! At this point Peter is the one who “loses it,” and in total incomprehension of his beloved Master, he runs away, followed by the ten other Apostles.

Like many a male Traditionalist today, Peter is a men’s man. He is “macho.” He lacks nothing in faith or courage or devotion to his divine Master, but he has slept instead of praying in the Garden. Had he prayed instead of sleeping, his thoughts could have been divine instead of human, all too human, and he might have understood that Jesus was marching to a far higher drum than Peter’s, however courageous and devoted Peter may have been. By liberalism or sedevacantism, Catholics today slice off not only an ear of one of the High Priest’s servants, they slice off the High Priest’s very own head by soft quasi-heresy or hard quasi-schism. But has not Our Lord Himself warned us that His Church too will win by losing? At world’s end (Lk. XVIII, 8), will it not almost have disappeared? Mystery . . .

Kyrie eleison.

World Transformed

World Transformed on March 28, 2020

Two events are shaking the world, the corona-virus and the breakdown of what has been the world’s financial system for, maybe, the last two centuries. The two events may well be connected. Several commentators are actually mentioning Almighty God, at least in connection with the worldwide spread of the corona-virus, because that spread is like a plague, and in times past when there was no other remedy, plagues would often make men turn to God. But that God – who has not changed – is almost certainly playing a more important part in both events today than most people think.

Is that to say that God caused the worldwide corona-virus infection? Indirectly, yes, because He foresaw it from eternity and decided to let it happen. And what greater good might His permission for the infection be bringing about? We have seen the governments of many countries impose such restrictions on movements of their citizens that these countries are virtually brought to a halt. That is giving to the citizens a serious chance firstly to realise how fragile is the functioning of their much vaunted modern way of life: neither is it so robust, nor are they such champions of reality, as they may have thought. And secondly, by the serious interruption of their normal rat-race they are being given time and opportunity they would never normally have to reflect on that rat-race: Who am I? What is my life? What am I doing with it? Where am I going? Alas, many modern citizens thus providentially slowed down will only want to speed up again so as to distract themselves from thoughts that evoke anything higher than their all-engrossing rat-race . . .

Another reason why God may not directly have caused the corona-virus is the amount of serious speculation that the virus comes not from God’s Nature but from men’s laboratories, where viruses of Nature are made artificially much more harmful and contagious in order to serve as potential weapons of war. And if that is where the corona-virus came from, who can men blame for it except other men?

And then there is not only the fabrication of the virus but also its release – how did it escape from the laboratories to threaten mankind? Was the escape an accident, or was it a deliberate release? Again, there is much speculation that it was not an accident, but criminally timed to coincide with the crashing of the world’s financial system, also engineered. The virus would help the crash in two ways: firstly it would, however briefly, bring to a halt a significant part of the functioning of the world’s economies, forcing bankruptcies and a widespread increase of indebtedness and enslavement to the global Money Power; and secondly, an exaggerated panic over the virus in the same globalists’ media would serve to distract mankind from its enslavement taking an important step forwards. Certainly if the financial crash was deliberate, the coincidence of the virus was a windfall for whoever was behind the crash.

And so was, or is, anybody behind the March crash of the world’s stock markets, which is by no means over? Of course there was. The Money Power, controlling the governments with which it works, has so much money at its disposal that it can swing at will supposedly free stock markets, up or down. Such crashes as of this March are designed to cause a great transfer of wealth from little investors to the Money Power. In this case it created from 1987 a 33-year rising market to lure them in, and once they were well in, it crashed the market to strip them of their assets while it has itself bet on the falling market and made a fortune. And the governments protect the Money Power because it bought them off long ago.

And Almighty God? “My children, if you insist on worshipping Mammon and materialism instead of Me, this is what will happen to you. You have scorned My religion to replace it with politics. You have worshipped your governments instead of your God. You have believed in money instead of charity towards your fellow-men. Are you now surprised that governments, politics and money let you down? Or are you hurt that I let them let you down? Children, I am offering you Paradise, and for all eternity!”

Kyrie eleison.

Modernism’s Malice – III

Modernism’s Malice – III on March 21, 2020

If there is any one thing that a Catholic priest needs to know and to understand thoroughly today, it is the one key sentence at the heart of St Pius X’s great Encyclical letter, Pascendi, written in 1907 to defend the Church and mankind from the deadly threat of modernism. Modernism is that movement of thought and action by which men give up changing the world to fit Christ and His Church, and work instead on changing Christ and His Church to fit the modern world. And what is the key sentence from Pascendi by which this is to be done? Here it is, from paragraph 6 (or thereabouts) of the Encyclical:

“Human reason is confined entirely within the field of phenomena, i.e. things perceptible to the senses and in the manner in which they are perceptible; it has no right and no power to go beyond these limits.”

In other words the human mind, which in fact is all day long reading behind what appears to the senses, is finally declared by modern man to be incapable of reading behind the appearances! In other words what looks to me like a door might be a wall, what looks to me like a wall might in fact be the door. From which it would follow that I might better try to walk through the wall than through the door! Of course this is such utter stupidity that nobody will be surprised to know that even modern followers of Immanuel Kant (1732–1804) who invented the stupidity, rarely actually try to walk through walls. In other words they succeed in living by not taking their own philosophy seriously. Here is why modern philosophy has gotten for itself such a bad name. Yet the utterly stupid Kant reigns supreme in the philosophy department of almost all “universities” of our own time! How can that possibly be?

Because Kant is the great Liberator. It is he who once and for all liberated the mind from reality. It is he who decreed that the mind is free from external reality because it has no access to it! The mind cannot get to reality as it is in itself, the “Ding an sich,” because it cannot get behind what the senses show to it. No matter if I can only live by assuming 24/7 both that my senses are telling me what is real around me, and that my mind or intellect is capable of deciphering or of “intelliging” what my senses tell me. From Kant onwards, reality around me is of less and less interest. What matters is “transcendental philosophy” as he calls it, i.e. thinking which will climb the heights and plumb the depths of my fantasy quite independently of humdrum day-to-day reality such as doors and walls. My mind has taken off! My mind is free from reality! Henceforth anything I want is “true”! In fact the word “Truth” has taken on a quite different meaning. In fact all words take on a transcendental meaning. Liberty reigns in my head!

Yet if you insist on pulling me back to what you call the real world, then I can still choose to assume, like all poor non-universitarians, that to continue to survive (“ugh!”) in the humdrum world (“ugh!”), it is best not to try to walk through what look like walls, and best not to try eating stones. In other words my mind is transcendentally superior to, and free from, all your base “common sense” (“ugh!”), but I can still operate in accordance with it – when I choose to – for purposes of daily living (“ugh!”).

Now liberty is the real religion of modern man, and it is the apparent religion, that which has all the trappings but none of the substance of religion, in the lives of far too many Catholics. As St Paul says, “In the end times . . . men will be . . . holding the form of religion but denying the power of it” (II Tim. III, 1–5), in other words keeping the appearances but denying the substance. What are such Catholics? They are precisely Kantian Catholics, or modernists, because almost everybody today is Kantian, because almost everybody today worships liberty, and it is Kant who finally gave them the key to get out of the prison of God’s reality and to escape into clouds of transcendental modernity. I can always submit to God again for as long as I choose, but He can no longer keep me in bonds. I am free, I am free, I am free!

The incredible perversity, pride and perfidy of Kant should be coming into view. More than ever,

Lord, have mercy.

Modernism’s Malice – II

Modernism’s Malice – II on March 14, 2020

The malice of modernism is a huge subject, no less than that of a whole world turning against its Creator at the end of a process lasting several centuries, when at the height of the Middle Ages Christendom tipped over from rising to falling instead. The rise had begun in 33AD of course, when Our Incarnate Lord founded God’s one true Church by His sacrifice on the Cross. The Middle Ages might be dated from the Pontificate of Gregory the Great (590–604), lasting nearly a millennium until the outbreak of Protestantism and the onset of the modern age in 1517.

But there was a huge difference, naturally, between mankind’s attitude towards Christ and His Church before and after the Middle Ages: before the Middle Ages Christianity was proving itself steadily more and more to be the best foundation for civilisation, whereas after the Middle Ages it had amply proved itself, so that after the Middle Ages its superiority to all other religions had to be recognised even while it was being in practice refused. This means that all substitutes for Catholicism that have followed the Middle Ages are characterised by a hypocrisy that needed to be steadily more subtle in order to pass itself off as the true replacement for Catholicism.

Thus Luther brutally rejected Catholicism but still pretended that his revolution was a “Reformation,” and after the Catholic Church threw off Luther, the revolutionary Jansenists created in the 16th century a Protestant form of Catholicism. The Jansenists in turn morphed into liberals in the 18th century, pretending to have in their Freemasonry a superiorly enlightened cult to that of Protestants or Catholics, and when the true Church resolutely threw off Freemasonry from the 18th century onwards, then the liberals disguised themselves as liberal Catholics in the 19th century and as “up-dated” or superiorly Catholic liberals in the 20th century. St Pius X rapidly diagnosed and dismissed this Modernism in Pascendi, but by passing itself off still more subtly as an up-dated Catholicism, it swept almost the whole Church with it at Vatican II (1962–1965), and in the 21st century the disguise was so good that even the official Society of St Pius X, founded to resist that Neo-modernism, was essentially swept away also.

Humanly speaking, it is daunting to realise in 2020 how little Catholic resistance is left to this rise of the Devil and of his attacks against the Church, but this is what the all-wise God has chosen to allow, and without question He is still looking after His “little flock,” as Our Lord calls it: “Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s pleasure to give you the kingdom. Sell your possessions and give alms; provide yourselves with purses that do not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that does not fail, where no thief approaches and no moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” (Lk. XII, 32–34). In other words, renounce money and materialism, because Our Lord warns us that we cannot serve two gods at the same time, and if we serve Mammon, we cannot serve God (Mt. VI, 24).

And if we recognise how vulnerable we are to the subtle errors and lies and blasphemies of the Devil which have overwhelmed the world all around us, then by way of antidote let us pray the Rosary of Our Lady, preferably all 15 Mysteries a day, because She and She alone has him under her feet, as any good image of Her, picture or statue, reminds us, and so overwhelming is the evil today that 15 Mysteries are not too many, if they are at all reasonable and possible.

How it is that a humble Jewish maiden is more than a match for Satan with all his “pomps and works” is God’s secret, revealed both by Our Lord – “I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to infants” (MT. XI, 25) – and by St Paul – “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong” (I Cor. 18–30). Next week, a closer look into the hypocrisy of modernism.

Kyrie eleison.

Modernism’s Malice – I

Modernism’s Malice – I on March 7, 2020

If the Society of St Pius X is no longer an outstanding spearhead of the defence of the Catholic Faith as it was under Archbishop Lefebvre (1905–1991), that is surely because his successors at the head of the Society never understood as well as he did the full malice of that error presently devastating the Church, which is modernism. In fact towards the end of his days the Archbishop is quoted as saying that if only he had read sooner in his career the History of Liberal Catholicism in France from 1870 to 1914 by Fr. Emmanuel Barbier (1851–1925), he would have given to his seminarians a different direction. If this remark is authentic, it suggests that even the Archbishop had been overtaken by the malice of modernity. Similarly the valiant founder of the periodical Si si no no in Italy, Don Francesco Putti (1909–1984), is quoted as having told his good friend, the Archbishop, “Half of your seminarians are modernists.”

But the malice of modernity is easy to underestimate, because it has been building up in the West for centuries, and because all Westerners are soaked in it from the cradle to the grave. From this modernity came modernism in the Church, precisely to adapt to it, and this same modernity provided the background of all Council Fathers in the 1960’s, and of the Archbishop’s successors from the 1980’s onwards. In fact it can only have been by a special grace of God that the Archbishop saw the problem as clearly as he did.

Let us suggest how the failure to understand modernism underlies most of his successors’ errors –

1 95% of the texts of Vatican II are acceptable. On the contrary, Archbishop Lefebvre said that the problem with Vatican II is not so much even its great errors of religious liberty, collegiality and ecumenism as the subjectivism suffusing all its texts, whereby objective truth, God and the Catholic Faith dissolve ultimately into nothingness. By the Copernican revolution wrought in philosophy by Kant (1724–1804) and denounced by Pius X in Pascendi (1907), instead of the subject turning around the object, henceforth the object was to turn around the subject. Around this madness now turns the entire world.

2 True, the Council was bad, but it is losing its grip on Romans today. Really? And Pachamama? Since when have we seen such public idolatry in the Vatican Gardens and in churches of Rome itself?

3 It is no use for the Society to wait until Rome converts from its modernism, but if they are willing to accept us “as we are” it means that Rome is on its way to converting, so we should come to an agreement. Indeed it is useless to wait for the Roman modernists to convert, because they are liberals. It takes a miracle to convert a liberal (Fr Vallet), because liberalism is a comfortable and flattering trap out of which humanly speaking it is virtually impossible to climb without a miracle, and that miracle for world and Church will be the Consecration of Russia, not a Society that is going the liberals’ way. If they accept “as is” the formerly recalcitrant SSPX, that is only because the SSPX is no longer anti-liberal as it once was, because the salt of the Society has lost its savour (cf. Mt. V, 13).

4 We need patience and tact in order to understand how the Romans think in order not to offend them.

To understand how these modernists in Rome think, we need humility and realism and shattering courses in Pascendi in order to make sure that we properly understand the virus of their modernism, vicious and highly contagious, before we go anywhere near them. What they would most need, if they could take it, is to be offended and shocked out of their modernism, until they grasp what Fr Calmel meant when he said, “A modernist is a heretic combined with a traitor.”

5 No proper agreement between Rome and the Society has been signed, so no harm is yet done.

There has been immense harm in a series of partial agreements, e.g. on confessions and marriages, by which large numbers of Society priests and laity understand less and less what their Founder meant when he wrote in his last book that any priest wishing to keep the Faith should stay away from these Romans. They may be “nice” men. They may “mean well.” But, objectively, they are murdering Mother Church.

Kyrie eleison.

Valtorta Fruits

Valtorta Fruits on February 29, 2020

<p>Our Lord Jesus Christ never expected his sheep to be, still less to pretend to be, great theologians, but he did expect them to have enough common sense to be able, in case of somebody or something confusing, to judge them by their fruits. &#8220;You will know them by their fruits&#8221; &#8211; Mt. VII, 15&#8211;20. Now the works of Maria Valtorta (bed-ridden Italian spinster, 1897&#8211;1961), especially her <i>Poem of the Man-God</i> (1943&#8211;1947), are highly controversial, with her defenders being as enthusiastic as her attackers are violent. Then what are her <u>fruits</u>? Here is a testimony received recently by the editor of these &#8220;Comments,&#8221; adapted as usual for these &#8220;Comments&#8221;:&#8212;</p><p><i>I would like to share with you my astonishment over the</i>&#160;Poem of the Man-God <i>by Maria Valtorta, following on my patient reading of all ten volumes, and after arguing with the books&#8217; editor and with writers who support Maria Valtorta</i>. <i>I had already heard you quoting in private this Italian mystic, but then the attack on the</i> Poem <i>by Fr. H. and its subsequent stigmatisation by the Society of St Pius X made me hang back for ten years before actually reading it. However, Providence finally put in my hands a copy of this highly detailed version of the Gospel, and of a biography of Maria Valtorta, both of which I read carefully, with pencil in hand to make notes. After five months of hard labour, I was surprised to find how orthodox the ten books are, and <b>how much good they did to my own soul and to all my family.</b></i></p><p><i>There are Dominicans who condemn it. I find that unfortunate. Have they actually read it? I am made to feel as though it is taboo to talk about it in the open. I have also studied everything about how the work came into existence (it was approved by Pius XII), and I find unjust the way in which Traditionalists have put this noble victim soul on trial and condemned her. I fear for her critics lest her revelations are truly from Our Lord, and are meant for our own times.</i></p><p><i>The back issues of your &#8220;Comments&#8221; from 2011 and 2012 on the </i>Poem<i>&#160;are a true consolation for someone like myself who feels as though he is committing a fault when he uses for his daily spiritual nourishment</i> &#8220;The Gospel as it was revealed to me&#8221; (the Poem&#8217;s alternative title)<i>. We have got hold of a variety of versions of this monumental Life of Jesus: not only the ten full volumes for adults, but also handsomely produced picture books for children from the age of eight years old, and a simplified version for 13-year olds. The result is that <b>the whole family is united in these luminous pages</b> on the Man-God and His relations with the world, with His Mother, and above all for our own times, with Judas Iscariot. His relations with the other eleven Apostles, the holy women and His enemies are equally edifying.</i></p><p><i>To understand today&#8217;s Passion of the Church, suffering and dying at the hands of her own ministers, it is particularly helpful to compare the modern character and liberal nature of Judas, traitor within the Church as he is portrayed in the</i> Poem, <i>with our own Conciliar churchmen, but also I would add with the sleepy liberal &#8220;Christian&#8221; inside each of us. For indeed the drama is playing out not only at the head of the Church but also in and through the families giving up the fight to live in accordance with the Gospel, exactly as it was revealed to Maria Valtorta&#160;.&#160;.&#160;.</i> (Here ends the reader&#8217;s testimony)</p><p>In conclusion, the <i>Poem of the Man-God</i> of Maria Valtorta is highly controversial, but it need not be. On the one hand it is not on a par with the four Gospels or with Holy Scripture, nor has it been declared authentic by the Church, nor is it necessary for salvation, nor is it to the taste of all serious Catholics. Nor is it claimed to be any of these things by any Catholic in his right mind. On the other hand, as with the Shroud of Turin or the Tilma of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the astonishing evidence for the <i>Poem&#8217;s</i> authenticity seems only to increase with the passage of time. It has put countless souls on the spiritual path of conversion or perfection, towards salvation. And it has been warmly recommended and approved by numbers of serious Catholics, including theologians and bishops. As Pius XII said about the <i>Poem</i>, &#8220;Let him that hath ears to hear, hear.&#8221;</p><p>Kyrie eleison.</p>