Eleison Comments

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>

Archbishop’s Authority – II

Archbishop’s Authority – II on February 22, 2020

DCLV – in theory, the Pope’s authority is indispensable to the Church. DCLVI – in theory, priests need absolutely the Pope to unite them. DCLVII – in practice, Archbishop Lefebvre’s authority was seriously handicapped by his not having the living Pope behind him. DCLVIII – in practice, the Archbishop exercised the authority he still had in at least three different ways, depending on the subjects over whom he exercised it: those who asked him to exercise authority over them on his terms, or those who asked only for a partial authority on their own terms, or those who asked for none at all.

Notice first of all how the classification is not by the authority, but by those under it. In other words, the subjects are, to a certain extent, “calling the shots.” This abnormal situation in the Church is the direct result of Vatican II, where Catholic Authority radically undermined itself by its wholesale betrayal of Catholic Truth, when it attempted to replace God’s objective religion with a man-made substitute, and to change the God-centred Catholic Church into the man-centred Newchurch. By this Council all Catholic priests were essentially discredited, as they remain to this day, and so will remain, until the churchmen return to telling God’s Truth. Then they will recover their full Authority.

Those who asked the Archbishop to exercise his authority on his terms were of course the members of the Catholic Congregations which he himself founded, notably of secular priests but also of religious Brothers and Sisters and Tertiaries. These Congregations he made as normal as possible, with grades of obedience to himself as the Superior General, with vows at ordinations for the priests and solemn promises on formal entry of priests, Brothers or Sisters into their corresponding Congregations. The vows were to God, and in case of need have often been dissolved (discreetly) by Roman authority, as is normal. The promises have depended rather more on the choice of those who made them, and here the authority of the Archbishop was seriously undermined, as told in last week’s “Comments,” by his being condemned officially by the Pope and his fellow-bishops. If a priest decided to leave the Society for liberalism on the left or for sedevacantism on the right, the Archbishop could, as he said, do nothing more than cut off all future contact, in order that such priests could not pretend that they were still on good terms with the Society. They had chosen to do without him.

Those who, secondly, asked the Archbishop to exercise his authority on their own terms, for instance to receive the sacrament of Confirmation, he would readily satisfy, as far as he could within the norms of the Church, because of the Church crisis which makes questionable the validity of Confirmations conferred with the Newrite of Confirmation. On the one hand, he said, Catholics have a right to certainly valid sacraments, and if on the other hand they wanted nothing further to do with him personally, that was their choice and their responsibility before God.

And thirdly, for those who asked him in no way to exercise authority over him, like a large number of Traditional priests who were sympathetic to his Society but who never wanted to join it, he was always generous with whatever contact, friendship, encouragement or advice they may have asked of him, but never did he remotely pretend or behave as though he had any authority over them. And the same with the laity. Many Catholics never agreed with the stand he took, apparently opposed to the Pope, but he was unfailingly courteous and ready to answer questions, if only the questioner was remotely deserving of an answer. And it was the objectivity and reasonableness of his answers which turned many Newchurchers into Traditionalists who would put themselves under his ministry or the guidance of his priests.

In brief, the Council crippled Church Authority, but where there was a will there was a way, or at least a substitute way, for souls to seek eternal salvation, which is extremely difficult without priests. Through the Archbishop especially but not only, God guaranteed this substitute way for souls, which is still there.

Kyrie eleison.

Archbishop’s Authority – I

Archbishop’s Authority – I on February 15, 2020

Let us illustrate the relationship between Catholic Truth and Catholic Authority with the concrete example of the Athanasius of modern times that God gave us to show us the way through our pre-apocalyptic crisis: Archbishop Lefebvre (1905–1991). When the mass of the Church’s leaders were persuaded at Vatican II to change the nature of the Faith, and a few years later in the name of obedience to abandon the true rite of the Mass, by the strength of his faith the Archbishop remained faithful to the Church’s unchanging Truth and showed that it is the heart and soul of its divine Authority. As the Spanish proverb says, “Obedience is not the servant of obedience.”

Certainly the Archbishop believed in the Church’s authority to give commands to its members at all levels for the salvation of their souls. That is why in the first few years of the existence of the Society of St Pius X (1970–1974) he took care to obey Canon Law and the Pope, Paul VI, as far as he was able, but when officials sent from Rome to inspect his Seminary in Écône departed far from Catholic Truth in things they said to seminarians, he wrote his famous Declaration of November, 1974, in protest against the whole of Rome’s abandoning the Catholic faith for the new Conciliar religion, and this Declaration served like a charter for what emerged as the Traditional movement at the Mass of Lille in the summer of 1976.

Now the Archbishop himself always resolutely denied that he was the leader of Tradition, because to this day Catholic Tradition is an unofficial movement and has no kind of official structure. Nor was he the only leader among Traditionalists, nor did all of them agree with him or pay him homage. Nevertheless a large number of Catholics saw in him their leader, trusted him and followed his lead. Why? Because in him they saw the continuation of that Catholic Faith by which alone they could save their souls. In other words the Archbishop may have had no official authority over them, because jurisdiction is the prerogative of Church officials duly elected or appointed, but he built up until his death an enormous moral authority by his faithfulness to the true Faith. In other words his truth created his authority, unofficial but real, whereas the officials’ lack of Truth has been undermining their Authority ever since.

The dependence of authority, at least Catholic authority, upon truth, was as clear as clear could be.

However, with the Society of St Pius X which the Archbishop founded in 1970, things were slightly different, because here he did receive from the official Church some jurisdiction from Bishop Charrière of the Diocese of Geneva, Lausanne and Fribourg, a jurisdiction which he cherished because it proved that he was not making things up as he went along but was doing work of the Church. And so he did his best to govern the SSPX as though he was the normal head of a normal Catholic Congregation under Rome, which the defence of the true Faith gave him every right to do. However, the public and official Romans used all their jurisdiction to give him the lie, thereby alienating from him a mass of Catholics who would otherwise have followed him.

Moreover, the Newchurch that they were creating all around him meant that even inside the Society his authority was seriously weakened. For instance, if before the Council a priest dissatisfied with his diocesan bishop applied to enter the diocese of another, the second bishop naturally consulted the first about the applicant, and if the first advised the second to have nothing to do with him, that was the immediate end of the application. On the contrary, if a Society priest dissatisfied with the Society applied to join a Newchurch diocese, the Newchurch bishop was liable to “welcome him back into the official fold” as a fugitive from the “Lefebvrist schism.” Thus the Archbishop was not supported by his brother bishops, which meant that he could not discipline his priests inside the Society as he should have been able to. His authority was walking on eggshells, insofar as he had at his disposal no sanction with which to keep wayward priests in check. Thus lack of truth in the Newchurch left truth in the Society without the Catholic authority due to it to protect it.

Therefore to make up for the lack of unity in Truth coming from the hierarchy, Traditional priests today must exercise a more than normal forbearance towards one another, and Traditional Catholics must pray more than usual for their priests to find this forbearance. It is not impossible.

Kyrie eleison.