Eleison Comments

Pope Indispensable – II

Pope Indispensable – II on February 8, 2020

It is to the unfaithfulness of Catholic Authority to Catholic Truth at the Second Vatican Council that these “Comments” last week (DCLV, Feb.1) attributed the unprecedented crisis of the Catholic Church, now well over 50 years old. The logical conclusion was that the crisis will only come to an end when Catholic Authority comes back to the Truth, because the Truth does not change, and so it cannot move to rejoin the Pope and bishops who are meant to be defending it. Moreover it was stated that the Pope must restore the bishops, and that Almighty God alone can restore the Pope, and that God will put the Pope back on his feet only “when we have learned our lesson.” That is because if God lifted us back up the mud-slide too soon, we naughty human beings would profit merely to slide down once more. God cannot afford to be too generous with our perverse generation. So what lesson or lessons do we need to be taught?

Amongst others, that the world cannot do without a sane Church, and the Church to be sane must have a sane Pope, and the sane Pope must be obeyed. For example, by the time Vatican II came to an end at the end of 1965, the churchmen were in full-blooded apostasy. Yet still God gave mankind another chance. In front of Paul VI was the pressing question of artificial means of birth control, contraception for short. Conditions in modern cities were persuading a mass of bishops, priests and lay-folk that the Church’s strict and ancient condemnation had to be relaxed, that the modern city was right and that the unchanging rule of the Church, in other words God, was wrong. Paul VI too wanted to make the rule easier.

However, when the commission of experts which he had appointed to study the question made their report, he himself saw that the rule could not be relaxed. His final arguments for maintaining the rule have not the force of the old arguments based on the immutable natural law, but nevertheless Paul VI did uphold the essential law in his Encyclical “Humanae Vitae” of 1968. But when he published it, all hell promptly broke loose in the Church. And in 1969 he imposed on the entire Church the Novus Ordo Mass. Is it idle speculation that if the bishops and priests had obeyed the Pope, instead of rejecting God’s unchanging law, God might have spared them the New Mass? As it was, disobeying the Pope when he was faithful to God’s law, they all contributed to the breakdown of Authority in the Church. All bets were then off, and chaos took over inside the Church.

Here is a classic example of Truth needing Authority, of the world needing the Church and of the Church needing the Pope. Especially in today’s big city, men cannot see what is wrong with contraception, on the contrary, it seems to be mere common sense. Thus if there is no divine Authority to forbid contraception, nothing and nobody else will stand up to the human passions which drive towards it. In this way Vatican II (Gaudium et Spes # 48) suggested that in the act of marriage recreation comes before procreation, and it opened the flood-gates to divorce, adultery, pre-birth then post-birth abortion, euthanasia, homosexuality, gender change, and horrors yet unknown, but all implicit in the breakdown of the subordination of recreation to procreation. Mother Church always knew that to smash the act of marriage is to smash successively marriage, the individual person, the family, society, the nation and the world. This chaos is where we are today. Such is the need of Authority.

And the most important Authority is that of the Church, to impose upon men’s erring minds God’s infallible Truth, and upon their wayward wills God’s eternal Law, so that they can get to His Heaven and avoid their Hell. And to embody that Authority and to project it before men, the Incarnate God instituted His One Catholic Church as a monarchy of which the single ruler is the Roman Pope, who alone has the mission and the grace to govern and to hold together, in the Catholic Truth, all members of the Church. It follows that when he quits the Truth, as with Vatican II, then the sheep are necessarily scattered, because nobody other than the Pope has from God the mission or the grace to unite them (cf. Lk. XXII, 32).

Kyrie eleison.

Pope Indispensable – I

Pope Indispensable – I on February 1, 2020

As the years slip by, one after another, without the insane situation of the Church seeming to improve, Catholics who follow Tradition keep asking themselves, why cannot at least our Traditional priests get together and stop fighting one another? They all believe in the same Tradition of the Church, they are all agreed that the Second Vatican Council was a disaster for the Church. They all know that fighting among priests is unedifying and discouraging for the followers of Tradition. Why then can they not forget their differences and concentrate on what unites all of them, that is, on what the Church teaches and does, and has always taught and done, to save souls? This question has an answer, and to help Catholics to persevere in the Faith, they may need to be reminded of it at regular intervals.

Always assuming that this crisis of the Church is nothing normal in Church history but is an integral part of the one and only lead-up to the one and only end of the world, then if there is in these “Comments” a pair of words most often chosen to pin down the structure of that crisis, it is “Truth” and “Authority.” The crisis had its origins much further back than Vatican II, notably in the “Reformation” let loose by Luther (1483–1546), but whereas up until Vatican II the Catholic Church fought to keep the Protestant poison out, at Vatican II the highest Catholic Authority, two Popes and 2,000 bishops, gave up the fight and let the poison in. This meant that the Council texts are characterised by ambiguity, because Catholic appearances had to be maintained, but underneath the appearances the real thrust of the texts, the “spirit of the Council,” is towards assimilation of the liberalism and modernism which followed on Protestantism, and which will empty out any remaining Catholicism as soon as it is allowed to do so.

This means that at the Council, Catholic Authority essentially abandoned Catholic Truth to adopt a doctrine more in tune with modern times. And since Catholic Authority and Catholic Truth had now parted company, then Catholics, to remain Catholic, had – and still have – to make a terrible choice: either they cleave to the Church authorities from the Pope downwards and let go of Catholic doctrine, or they cleave to the doctrine and let go of Catholic Authority, or they choose one of the many possible compromises anywhere between the two poles. In any case the sheep are scattered, through no fault of their own when compared with the fault of the two Shepherds and 2,000 shepherds who were responsible for Church Authority betraying Church Truth at the Council. In this split between Truth and Authority lies the heart of today’s half-century old crisis.

And since Truth is vital to the one true religion of the one true God, and His own authority is essential for the protection of that one Truth from all the effects in men of original sin, then the only possible solution for the crisis that will put an end to the schizophrenia and scattering of the sheep is when the Shepherd and shepherds, Pope and bishops, will return to the Catholic Truth. That is certainly not happening yet, in the Church or in the Society of St Pius X, which is still – to all appearances – striving to get back under the authority of the Conciliar churchmen. (And Archbishop Lefebvre? “He’s dead,” some will say!)

Therefore until Almighty God – nobody less can do it! – puts the Pope back on his feet, and the Pope in turn, “once converted, strengthens his brethren” (Lk.XXII, 32), in other words straightens out the world’s bishops, until then this crisis can only go on getting worse, until we have learned our lesson and God has mercy upon us. Until then, as the English proverb has it, “What can’t be cured, must be endured.”

Kyrie eleison.

“…Into Temptation…” ?

“...Into Temptation...” ? on January 25, 2020

A reader asks a classic question concerning the Lord’s Prayer, where it says, “Lead us not into temptation.” Surely temptation is an evil. How can the infinitely good God lead us into an evil? Yet if we pray to Him not to lead us into evil, it stands to reason that He can do so. But how is that possible? For “Lead us not into temptation” is the literal translation of the original text in Greek – “μη εισενεγκης ημ ας εις πειρασμον”– and the Church teaches that the original text in Greek was inspired by God Himself. How can God Himself declare that He can lead us into temptation? Four truths need to be established:—

1 Firstly, God can want physical evil, like for instance an illness to punish morally evil human beings, but it is absolutely impossible for God to want moral evil, because that is sin, and God cannot possibly sin, because He is Goodness Itself, because He is Being Itself. For if anything at all exists, then a First Cause must exist, and that First Cause can have had no finite limits set to its Being by any cause prior to Its First self, so it is Infinite Being. Now where there is being there is goodness, and vice versa, in fact the two are interchangeable – evil is always the lack in a being of something due to it, for instance blindness is no evil in a stone, but it is an evil in an animal that normally has sight. Therefore the Infinite Being is infinitely good, or Infinite Goodness, incapable of directly wanting or causing moral evil. Few things are more absolutely certain than that.

2 However, God can allow moral evil because He can and does always draw out of it a greater good. We human beings can by no means always see in what that greater good consists, but at the latest at the General Judgment, all of us will see clearly the supreme Wisdom of allowing every moral evil which He ever allowed. Here is a useful comparison – from the underside of a woven carpet I can only guess at the beauty of the pattern on the carpet’s over-side. But that beauty exists, and without it I would not be seeing the underside which enables me at least to guess at the beauty invisible from the underside.

3 Objection: but God is still acting in order to allow moral evil, e.g. temptation to sin. For instance in several verses of Exodus VII-XIII, Scripture says that God “hardened the Pharaoh’s heart,” for him to sin against the Israelites. Solution: no, whenever God allows a moral evil, He commits no positive act, He merely abstains from granting the grace or help with which the sinner would not have sinned. But by choosing to allow the Pharaoh to sin, he was positively leading the Pharaoh into temptation and sin. No, because Scripture says, “God is faithful, and He will not let you be tempted beyond your strength, but with the temptation will also provide the way of escape that you may be able to endure it” (I Cor. X, 13).

Therefore sinners being tempted are being given by God all the grace they need not to sin, so long as they themselves want not to sin. It is their own fault if they fall in the temptation.

4 But whenever sinners fell in temptation, God foresaw that they would do so. Why then did He lead them into it, by allowing it, and by abstaining from giving the grace needed by them not to fall in it? Negatively, because it is only ever the sinners’ fault if in temptation they fall. Positively, St Ignatius in his Spiritual Exercises (#322) gives three positive reasons why God can allow spiritual desolation for a soul, and the same reasons apply to spiritual temptation: God can make good use of moral temptation to punish us, or to try us, or to teach us. He can punish us by the next temptation for the last sin we committed. Then by putting us to the trial by a temptation, He can make it possible for us to earn great merit, so long as we resist and do not fall. Padre Pio said, “If only souls knew how much they can merit by resisting temptation, they would positively ask to be tempted.” And lastly God can teach us how truly dependent we are on His help by a temptation that shows us how humble and weak we are without His help.

In conclusion, there is so much good for us sinners that God can draw out of allowing us to be tempted that we need not even ask not to be tempted, but we must ask for the grace not to fall when we are being tempted. Lord, let fire warm me, but never burn me. Let temptation make me merit, but never fall.

Professor Drexel – III

Professor Drexel – III on January 18, 2020

In the third and last extracts for these “Comments” from the admirable book of Professor Drexel from the 1970’s in Austria, “Faith is greater than Obedience,” we are entitled to think that it is Our Lord speaking, because in itself the message is entirely orthodox, and in the context of the confusion in the Church which followed on Vatican II (1962–1965), it is a clear signpost that the official Church was going the wrong way, as it is still doing, well into the 20th century. For the Catholic clergy, the message is a clear warning: if you insist on following men’s new direction so as to abandon God’s true religion, you face a frightening condemnation in Hell when you die. For the Catholic lay-folk, the book is an encouragement equally clear: if with faith and courage you remain faithful to the true Church, your reward will be great in Heaven. For clergy and laity alike, the message is entirely up-to-date in 2020.

MAY, 1974.

Do not become dejected because of the confusion and heresies of unfaithful and apostate priests, whose body and sensual enjoyment count more than the love of My Church and of immortal souls. Let all the real, true believers know that the interior and exterior enemies of the Church shall perish – forever – unless they return with interior repentance to the one and only doctrine of the Church.

I tell you: Priests will arise, who are even now being trained, hidden away in silence for the future and for the time – coming soon – when with an apostolic spirit, following in the footsteps of the saints, for that divine order and for that unity of My Catholic Church which I desire, they will step forward with a holy reverence for the mystery and miracle of the Holy Eucharist. (This is surely a prophecy of the young priests of Tradition who would start coming out of Écône in small but significant numbers in 1976.)

JULY, 1975.

My Church lives in the midst of apostasy and destruction. She lives on among numerous faithful and loyal people. In the history of My Church, there have always been times of decline, desertion and devastation, because of bad priests and tepid shepherds. But the spirit of God is stronger, and upon the ruins and graveyard of infidelity and betrayal it has raised up the Church and caused it to blossom again, only smaller than before. My servant Marcel’s work in Écône is not about to perish! (The “Marcel” here mentioned is of course Archbishop Lefebvre who founded in 1970 the Traditional seminary of Écône.)

MARCH, 1976.

My faithful son Marcel, who is suffering so much for the sake of the Faith, is on the right track. He is like a light and pillar of truth, which many ordained priests of Mine are betraying. Faith is greater than

obedience. Therefore, it is My will that the work for the theological education of priests should continue, in the spirit and according to the will of My son Marcel, so as to contribute powerfully to the rescue of My one true Church. (Whoever has ears to hear, has here the clearest endorsement of Catholic Tradition.)

DECEMBER, 1976.

Those who prepare themselves for the priesthood and enter seminaries under the diocesan bishops, enter without having a whole or deep faith in Transsubstantiation; and not a few priestly candidates flirt with the idea of one day getting married. Therefore, the time is not far away when people will be without priests in many places.

Yet those priests who see in the sacramental Sacrifice of the Mass the truest and holiest of sacrifices, and who celebrate with a holy reverence the mystery of My Body and Blood, as does My worthy servant Marcel, are persecuted, despised, and outlawed.

Kyrie eleison.

Professor Drexel – II

Professor Drexel – II on January 11, 2020

As with many alleged messages from Heaven, if anyone were to say that the essence of the messages given to Professor Drexel from 1970 to 1977 is already in the Gospel, namely “Blessed are you when men revile and persecute you . . . for your reward is great in Heaven” (Mt. V, 11–12), they would be quite right. But if they went on to say that his messages are not necessary because they are already in the Gospel, they would be quite wrong. In the 1970’s began the moral torture of many good Catholics torn by the priests of Vatican II between their Catholic faith and their Catholic obedience. It took Our Lord to tell souls like Prof. Drexler, again and again, that it was His own priests who had betrayed.

For indeed Catholics who for 400 years had been saved by their obedience to the faithful Council of Trent (1545–1563) could not, to begin with, grasp that the same obedience could no longer be given to the unfaithful Second Vatican Council (1962–1965). By 2020 the fidelity of Archbishop Lefebvre to the unchanging pre-Conciliar faith and Mass have had time to raise Tradition all over the Church (although there is still a long way to go), but in 1970 it was simply inconceivable except to a very few souls that the Catholic Pope and bishops and priests could be demolishing the Church. Hence the need for messages like this one of July 3, 1970 from Our Lord (as one may well believe) to Professor Drexel:—

“Be in good spirit and do not let yourself be discouraged by the unrest and attempted demolition of My Church, nor by the subversion of the order of the world. It is true that Satan and his demoniacal powers are in action as never before in the history of mankind and the Church. But through the influence of God and the action of the Holy Ghost, is not a Work being created, which, more than any other work, calls upon the help of the angels, the supernatural powers and the good spirits? This work is of divine origin!

May all the faithful of My Church walk in peace and with firmness towards the future.

Satan will rage, and his best helpers are the priests who have fallen away, interiorly and exteriorly, from their faith and their consecration. Mary Immaculate, never touched by sin, shall be victorious. Although My flock that follows me and My cross, and that is faithful and with love believes in the holy presence of My Body and Blood, may become smaller, nevertheless faith and prayer, the profession of faith and hope, and the love of truth, shall triumph in the end. The storms may rage. In nature they can crack rocks and burst dams. But God is all-powerful, truth is stronger, grace richer and more abundant, and therefore the Rock which I have founded will last until the end!”

In the same vein are words from the message of March 5, 1971, to Professor Drexel:—

“Do not be discouraged by the present internal and external oppression of My Church. It is from within that the servants of God have become unfaithful to their vocation and their grace ( . . . ) These are the priests and theologians, as they call themselves, who have abandoned and betrayed me, and who are still persecuting me. Their number increases ( . . . ) Never since I walked visibly among men have the troubles of My one and true Church been so great as at this present time – and the distress is still growing.

Nevertheless, do not despair – even if the flock of which I as Divine and Good Shepherd spoke, becomes very small, that Church which I founded on Peter and which I compared to a rock, shall be destroyed neither from without nor from within. But you and all souls who have been entrusted to you by the Father, must continue to work for the Church, for the faith and for souls. The people helping you shall harvest blessings for their good deeds, and this blessing cannot be compared to anything in this world.”

Kyrie eleison.

Professor Drexel – I

Professor Drexel – I on January 4, 2020

As the crisis of Church and world continues relentlessly from one year to the next, at another New Year’s beginning it may be the moment to return to messages of Our Lord from the early 1970’s when countless good Catholics were starting to suffer seriously from the confusion and distress following on the imposition upon them of the new religion of the Second Vatican Council, which had just come to an end in 1965. One such victim of Vatican II was Fr. Albert Drexel (1889–1977), a prestigious professor of philology from the Vorarlberg in Austria but also a devout Catholic priest, to whom from 1922 Our Lord appeared with a message on every First Friday of the month, to guide his devotion.However, only from 1970 were the messages written down, to be gathered together until his death, after which they were published in a little book still available today, entitled “Faith is greater than obedience.” No Catholic is obliged to believe that these are words of Our Lord Himself, but the First Friday messages from 1970 to 1977 are their own validation for many sheep that recognise in them the Master’s voice. Here for instance is the message of March 5, 1976, from which the words above are taken, just when the Faith of the true Church and obedience to the false Church were coming into sharpest conflict:— “The future looks dark for you. Your interior struggle for true perception and the way to take in the confusion is known to me. And so I shall enlighten you. My faithful son Marcel (Archbishop Lefebvre), who suffers a great deal for the faith, is going on the right path. He is like a light and pillar of truth, which many ordained priests of mine are betraying. Faith is greater than obedience. Therefore it is my will that the work of theological education for priests continues in the spirit and will of my son Marcel, for the salvation and great help of my one and true Church. “The spirit of the world has infiltrated the Church, and the Spirit of God has abandoned many hearts who were called to proclaim His Spirit. They talk about other things and lose themselves in the tricks and snares of Satan. And thus they corrupt the people and even the children ( . . . ) This spirit has penetrated the ecclesiastics and monasteries and convents, because the monks and nuns have lost and deserted the spirit of the Founders of their Orders. They have become a scandal for the people and the world. They have lost not only love towards My most holy Mother, but also reverence towards My sacramental presence. Instead the monks preach about things of the world, of luxury, of a life of pleasure, and the nuns do not talk about the holy angels, and many not even about the most holy Virgin and Mother Mary. Still, places do exist of quiet and of prayer, special shrines in which Mary, My Mother and the Mother of grace, is honoured.” Perhaps this message of 1976 is a little dated, insofar as the difference between the fruits of Vatican II and those of Archbishop Lefebvre have had time to make clear to many souls where the true Spirit of God is to be found. Today in fact the Archbishop is bearing more and more fruit outside of the limits of the Society he founded. Nevertheless, God’s true Church is still being torn to pieces by the modernist wolves in sheep’s clothing, and many souls are still being tempted to abandon the true Faith and the true Church. Let them heed one of many extracts from the messages to Fr Drexel, e.g. from New Year’s Day, 1971:— “A darkness hangs over my holy Church. The confusion is growing; more and more priests become unfaithful to their mission and grace ( . . . ) but while the fruit of the wicked and godless ends in corruption, the fruit of the faithful souls shall blossom into a purer and more beautiful Church. Hail to those who understand the hour and remain in my love, confess My Mother, follow the path of the saints, and who confide in the guidance of the angels; these faithful souls shall shine in the darkness, shall not waver under attack and shall not crumble amidst trials . . .” Kyrie eleison.