Eleison Comments

Convert Today – III

Convert Today – III on March 16, 2019

Dear young friend,

Two weeks ago these “Comments” related your own story of your conversion from the wasteland of a modern university to the truth of the Catholic Faith. It ended with your request for advice because you yourself realised that God had given you the Truth, but you needed to get your bearings in a very confused situation of Church and world. It took last week’s issue of the “Comments” to give you the basic advice that is valid for a Catholic convert in general, i.e. in all times and places. It will take this issue to offer you the particular advice recommended for you to see where you are in today’s chaos of the Church, unprecedented in all 20 centuries of Church history.

The crisis is unprecedented because the world will have only one ending, and we are approaching it. See Our Lord’s own description of the last times (Mt. XXIV, Lk. XXI), and see St Paul’s warning, dating from around 67AD, for these times (II Tim. III, 1–9), especially verses 5 and 8: men will be “corrupted in mind, reprobate concerning the faith,” “having the appearance of godliness, but denying the power thereof. Now these avoid.” Excellent advice for 2019AD, because it is important to realise that today men in general and Catholics in particular are as a whole not “normal,” but men at the wrong end of a long process of degeneration. The purpose of such a realisation is neither to scorn them, nor to despair, but to take the right measure of what it means to live as a Catholic in a post- and anti-Christian world. In God it can be done – “I can do all things in Him who strengthens me ” (Phil. IV, 13).

The chaos in the Church is special today because never before Vatican II in the 1960’s had the official Church in Rome departed officially from the Catholic Faith. Now Catholic Truth and Catholic Authority were designed by Our Lord to go hand in hand – when Peter is to be confirmed in the Faith (Catholic Truth), then he is to confirm the other Apostles (Catholic Authority – Lk. XXII, 32). Thus Truth is the very purpose of Authority, but it needs Authority to protect it. Each needs the other, but at Vatican II they were split apart, because the Popes and Cardinals and Bishops (Authority), magnetised by the modern world, gave up the old religion (Truth). From now on all Catholics had to be schizophrenic – either they clung to Truth and let go of the false authority, or they clung to Authority and let go of the Truth, or they found their way somewhere in between. From now on every Catholic sheep had to find its own way through the thorn-hedge set up by the bad shepherds of Vatican II.

Judging by the fruits (Mt. VII, 15–20), Archbishop Lefebvre’s way, of resisting the false shepherds while still recognising their authority, has proved to be one of the most fruitful ways of dealing with the confusion let loose by the Council, but his successors at the head of his Society have not proved faithful to his balance between Truth and Authority. Even now many are crawling back to false Rome, when it is falser than ever! Let this be a warning to you of the danger of thinking today that the appearance of Catholicism is the same thing as its substance. Then how do you know where the substance is to be found? The best answer is Our Lord’s, just mentioned – judge by the fruits. By what fruits? By supernatural faith, as God has just given you to understand it, and by genuine supernatural charity.

Then mix for a while with all kinds of Catholics, but listen more than you talk. Be in no hurry to pursue a vocation because God is never in a hurry (Gal. I, 18; II, 1). Have a boundless trust in His Wisdom and Providence, and be careful of clinging to any human leader or leaders, until God puts His Church back on its feet (as He certainly will do). Always honour your father and mother, however wrong they may seem to be (God has not given them the grace He has given to you). Have a boundless compassion on the mass of confused souls around you, but never confuse subjective sincerity with objective truth. Love the Mother of God, and pray every day for as long as you can all 15 Mysteries of Her Holy Rosary. And God be with you.

Kyrie eleison.

Convert Today – II

Convert Today – II on March 9, 2019

Dear young friend,

Congratulations on having received from God important graces of conversion which give you a fighting chance of saving your soul for eternity! For you may fall by the wayside like any of the rest of us (I Cor. X, 12) on the narrow path leading to Heaven (Mt. VII, 14), but if you want to get to Heaven, then with the grace of God you will do so, despite anything that the world, the flesh and the Devil can throw at you. For make no mistake, you and I are alive and Catholics in order to save our souls by loving God and by loving our neighbour as ourselves. On these two Commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets, yesterday, today and tomorrow, down to world’s end. Not even the modern world changes such basics.

Therefore today’s situation of Church and world may appear more frightening than ever, but you need not let yourself be frightened. “For I am sure,” cries out St Paul “that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus Our Lord.” (Rom. VIII, conclusion). However, there is one thing that can separate us from God, and which fills Hell with the damned souls of the majority of human beings that ever lived or will live (Mt. VII, 13), and that is – sin. Therefore whatever else you do, “Work out your salvation with fear and trembling” (Phil. II, 12), because the prospect of eternal damnation is too horrible to think of, and keep constantly in front of your mind the Four Last Things: Death, Judgement, Hell and Heaven. And stay close, wherever reasonably possible, to the Sacraments, especially Confession and Mass, so as to be living regularly in the state of grace.

In this connection, to save our souls Our Lady knows that modern times do make Catholic life difficult, so she has given us a special remedy – the Five First Saturdays. Find out all about them, in all their detail, especially by means of this flyer, and then do them as soon and as faithfully as possible, because any Catholic who knows about them and does not pick up on Our Lady’s offer of this easiest possible means of salvation, needs to have his head examined. Her offer is too generous to be true? No, She knows exactly what you yourself have learned the hard way, namely that today’s atheistic materialism, lies and corruption, excessive comfort and freedom, do all act as obstacles between her human children and her divine Son, so here is Her answer. By doing exactly what She asks, you will also be doing the most you can to obtain for the Pope the grace to consecrate Russia to Her Heart, which is the God-given key to unlocking today’s universal troubles.

Meantime on the supernatural level, use the time presently available to you to pray and study. Pray as many as you can each day of the 15 Mysteries of the Rosary, the next greatest prayer to Mass, and study everything that you can lay your hands on said and written by Archbishop Lefebvre, God’s own guide through this unprecedented Church crisis. Read also any other Catholic books (from before the 1960’s) which catch your interest. Dutiful but uninteresting books will not give you as much. Likewise exploit, but beware of, the Internet, where treasures are surrounded by traps. By all means meet a variety of Catholic priests and learn from each of them, but not to the point where you would get confused. Visit communities, and stay as long as you are welcome in any surroundings where you find God.

And lastly, on the natural level, by all means look for honest work if you find that as a man you are getting out of balance without it, but avoid committing yourself long-term until you are sure that you have found God’s will for you. By the same token, treat the girls chivalrously and avoid choosing a wife until you have found your life’s work. A wise girl hangs back from a man who has not yet found his work.

And may God bless you, and His Mother protect you. Vaya con Dios!

Kyrie eleison.

A Convert Today – I

A Convert Today – I on March 2, 2019

A colleague has just written to tell the Editor of these “Comments” that the situation of the Church is much worse then he thinks – “It is an illusion to think that we can restore things. We must be faithful, and save the few souls that God will make use of when the time comes.” This Editor agrees entirely, and he thinks of a line from Virgil’s Aeneid (II, 353): For the doomed, hope lies in giving up all hope. However, for a follower of Christ, to trust in man is only less foolish than to distrust in God. Here is a recent e-mail to the Editor which shows Almighty God clearly at work, converting a young soul previously far from Him. In this week’s “Comments” he asks for the advice which for the next two weeks they will offer.

Excellency, I am a young man in some despair because I do not know what to do. Maybe Your Excellency can give me some advice. Let me give you briefly my background.

Until I was about 18 I was a “normal” teenager, completely deluded, because I accepted everything that the new modern world gave me. I tried to fit in with it, but I always felt that it was against human nature, and deep down something was lacking. Although I was baptised, I had never lived like a Catholic, nor ever really thought of God, since I was just too caught up in the atheistic material world. However, I was a good student and my parents could afford to pay, so at 18 I went to University to study Management. But after a while by the grace of God I started seeing that things are not after all how the media and people portray them. Filled with anger and contempt for modern society because of the lies and corruption, I dropped out of university and then tried the Army Officers’ Academy since I was always physically fit and ready to stand up to the “mushy leftist society.”

But that was not God’s plan for me either. In boot camp God gave me the immense grace to start converting and to foster my faith. When after a short time I came out I was a different person, no longer filled with rage and contempt but disappointed and lost. I had realised how weak my generation is because of our liberal parenting and teaching and how hard it is to counteract it. We are so uprooted in comfort and in complete freedom to do as we like, that it makes us useless. But my liberal parents continued to press me against my will to go to University, so I had to go – this was not all that long ago. At that moment God gave me to find the SSPX and the “Resistance,” thanks to Archbishop Lefebvre. My faith started to grow rapidly, because I was getting the Truth. I started to read the Bible and to look into the problems of the Conciliar Church and the modern world, and I started praying the 15 mysteries of the Rosary, since there is no Tridentine Mass anywhere nearby.

So now I am thinking about what I should do. I feel a desire to renounce the material life, to get closer to God and to study the Faith in depth so as to learn everything about Catholicism and to convert others, but since I am young and I do not have any skills, I thought it might be better first to learn a practical skill – carpentry, for instance. At this point in time I would not even exclude a priestly vocation. My greatest struggle has been trying to reason with my parents and to convert them, but they thought I was nuts or had had a breakdown, and since then it has been big arguments at home about my not wanting to go to University. So I don’t know what to do. I am all alone, nobody in my family or among my friends is a Traditional Catholic. Since I am still unemployed, I have thought of moving not far away to where there is a Traditional Catholic community. What advice might you give me?

Kyrie eleison.

USA Misled

USA Misled on February 23, 2019

Last week these “Comments” quoted President Putin of Russia in 2014 accusing the United States of America of having “ruined all systems of global collective security.” What was he referring to?

In the 1980’s Presidents Reagan and Gorbachev of the USA and Russia respectively, realising the danger of the store of nuclear weapons on each side capable of ending life on earth, together made agreements to reduce the weapons they had, and to abstain from producing any more armaments of specifically perilous kinds that they did not yet have. These agreements served well to relax tensions and to keep the peace between the two nations until the end of the Cold War in 1989 and beyond, but the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Soviet Russia created a new situation on the world stage – the USA was now the only super-power. Would it have the wisdom not to misuse its now overwhelming military might?

A number of leaders inside the USA called for a severe reduction in military expenditure – what was it needed for any longer? – but as far back as 1961 the outgoing President Eisenhower had famously warned US citizens in his farewell address to the nation against its “military-industrial complex” exerting too great an influence on public policy. By the “MIC” he meant the informal triangular alliance that had arisen between the USA’s armed forces, heavy industry and Congress, and the danger was that together they would want war for the sake of the immense profits to be made from the production of expensive weapons – in 2011 the USA spent more on its armed forces than the next 13 nations combined.

The truth is that a capitalist economy thrives on war, insofar as weapons can be expensive to produce, and if they are destroyed and have to be replaced, that is all the more turnover for the producers. So at the end of the Cold War, there were at least three arguments for maintaining the heavy expenditure on weapons: the USA must still be ready to defend itself against threats that can arise, the economy needs the turnover, and the world needs a policeman. Within reason, each of the arguments is valid, but the Plan which US leaders (especially Dick Cheney) worked out in the 1990’s to guide US policy was not necessarily reasonable, because it was a plan for the US to rule the world. It calls for the US to maintain its overwhelming military superiority and prevent new rivals from rising up to challenge it on the world stage. It calls for dominion over friends and enemies alike. It says not that the US must be more or most powerful, but that it must be absolutely powerful. The Plan has turned disarming back into rearming.

(For the Cheney Plan, see http://​www.​informationclearinghouse.​info/​article1544.​htm).

That a plan expressed in such terms suffers from dangerous pride and overweening ambition should be obvious to anyone with the least knowledge of human nature. Under President Clinton (1992–2000) the Plan was slowed down, but as soon as Dick Cheney came back to power with the Republicans as Vice-President, the wicked idea of a new Pearl Harbour as a contrived event to mobilise the people behind a policy they would never in their right minds approve of, was put into practice – 9/11, one of the greatest lies of all history, which can only have been engineered by the secret government (the true “Deep State”) from deep within the public government, but which eminently succeeded at the time in furthering Cheney’s Plan. 9/11 immediately made the military invasion of Iraq possible, and how many more wars of aggression since then. It also made the worldwide police State take gigantic strides forward.

But lies are the sure footprint of Satan. It would follow from the huge lie of 9/11 that there is something satanic about Cheney’s Plan with its design for military domination of the world by the USA, all in the name of “democracy.” For a sane view of insane US policy heading straight for World War III, read at PaulCraigRoberts.org the sanity of a former official high under President Reagan in the US government, who watched at first hand and admired how Reagan and Gorbachev succeeded in working together to protect world peace. And let us pray for both Trump and Putin. With all their respective faults, both are surely gifts of God for which we need to be grateful to God.

Kyrie eleison.

Russia Vilified

Russia Vilified on February 16, 2019

On the international scene for several years now Russia has been vilified and its President has been blackened in the vile Western media, because the powers that control the Western nations and their media and their politicians want the third World War to give them hegemony or control over the entire world, and Russia is the main obstacle in the way of that worldwide monopoly of power. However, many souls all over the world have come to trust more in the fruits of Putin’s Russia avoiding war than in the fruits of the Western politicians and media doing their best to provoke war. Here follows the summary by Russians of a major speech of Putin given at the Valdai conference in Socchi, Russia, in October of 2014. Let readers judge for themselves if Putin’s words are reasonable, and if they correspond to his deeds:

1. Russia will no longer play games and engage in back-room negotiations over trifles. But Russia is prepared for serious conversations and agreements, if these are conducive to collective security, are based on fairness and take into account the interests of each side.

2. All systems of global collective security now lie in ruins. There are no longer any international security guarantees at all. And the entity that destroyed them has a name: The United States of America.

3. The builders of the New World Order have failed, having built a sand castle. Whether or not a new world order of any sort is to be built is not just Russia’s decision, but it is a decision that will not be made without Russia.

4. Russia favours a conservative approach to introducing innovations into the social order, but is not opposed to investigating and discussing such innovations, to see if introducing any of them might be justified.

5. Russia has no intention of going fishing in the murky waters created by America’s ever-expanding “empire of chaos,” and has no interest in building a new empire of her own (this is unnecessary; Russia’s challenges lie in developing her already vast territory). Neither is Russia willing to act as a saviour of the world, as she has done in the past.

6. Russia will not attempt to reformat the world in her own image, but neither will she allow anyone to reformat her in their image. Russia will not close herself off from the world, but anyone who tries to close her off from the world will be sure to reap a whirlwind.

7. Russia does not wish for the chaos to spread, does not want war, and has no intention of starting one. However, today Russia sees the outbreak of global war as almost inevitable, is prepared for it, and is continuing to prepare for it. Russia does not want war – nor does she fear it.

8. Russia does not intend to take an active role in thwarting those who are still attempting to construct their New World Order – until their efforts start to impinge on Russia’s key interests. Russia would prefer to stand by and watch them give themselves as many lumps as their poor heads can take. But those who manage to drag Russia into this process, through disregard for her interests, will be taught the true meaning of pain.

9. In her external, and, even more so, internal politics, Russia’s power will rely not on the elites and their back-room dealing, but on the will of the people. (End of the summary of Putin’s speech.)

If, when and how another World War breaks out, is entirely in God’s hands, depending on what mankind deserves. But if God must punish us for our own good, all sincere prayer between now and then will help to mitigate the human disaster. It is the enemies of God on both sides who will really have caused it.

Kyrie eleison.

Emotions Rampant

Emotions Rampant on February 9, 2019

In another interesting article from the regular bulletin of the American TFP (Tradition, Family, Property, January 4th edition), John Horvat observes and criticises a widespread phenomenon of modern society – emotions running out of control, and dominating people’s lives. Again (cf. these “Comments,” 590 of Nov. 3, 2018), from a Catholic point of view, the international TFP may be open as an organisation to more or less severe criticism (notably for by-passing the true Church), but its American bulletin has many thoughtful yet accessible articles for today’s Catholics having to live in a godless world. How Wisdom helps People Destroy the Dictatorship of the Emojis by John Horvat is one of these articles.

An “emoji” is one of those small digital images or icons used to express an idea or emotion, especially the tiny smiley or frowny faces freely available on computers and easily inserted in a text to express any one of a variety of emotions. Horvat uses emojis as a concrete example of the frequency with which emotions figure in today’s society. He argues that emotions are not bad in themselves, but they are presently playing too large a part in daily living, with disastrous results for the whole of society. When people do not want to face the reality of a world that includes hardship and suffering, then feelings prevail over facts, says Horvat, and instead of thinking they emote, so that, for instance, raw emotions fuel the anger politics that are rocking the world. Where it hurts to have to think, in order to work out why the world’s problems are as they are, on the contrary emotions make me feel good, and so I prefer to emote. But emotions have a necessarily incomplete grasp on reality. Here is why many a good wife has valuable instincts and intuitions, but she recognises that these need to be subordinated to the normally higher reasoning of her husband (not to his tyranny). And here is why our emotive politics of today are so crazy. And why the Newchurch of Vatican II and its Conciliar priests are so effeminate.

So why is reasoning superior to emotion? Because reasoning belongs to the higher part of man, to his mind and will, whereas human emotions belong to his higher and lower parts, to his passions and will. Certainly Our Lord and Our Lady had emotions. Our Lord wept over the grave of Lazarus (Jn. XI, 35). Our Lady suffered intensely when she lost her 12-year old Boy (Lk. II, 48). But just as by her reason she submitted her motherly grief to His mystery (Lk. II, 50), so He submitted 21 years later His human agony in the Garden of Gethsemane to the will of His Father in Heaven (Mt. XXVI, 39). For whereas all animals have sense appetite or passions, responding to sense stimuli from outside them, only the rational animal, man, has also the higher faculty of will which responds to intellective information fed to it by his mind. This intellective or rational dimension of man is wholly lacking to all the non-rational or brute animals.

Now nobody in his right mind accuses any non-rational animal of committing sin. At worst it is only following its instincts. This is because right and wrong are perceived only by man’s mind and performed as such by his will. That is because only by having mind and will does man have a conscience aware of sin (Jn. I, 9), making him able to sin. That is why man’s will must follow his higher reason and control his lower emotions, neither crushing them too tightly nor letting them completely go, but harnessing them in accordance with reason, with what his natural reason (Jn I, 9) tells him is right and not wrong.

It follows that if men want to sin, they will begin by dulling or obscuring their conscience, and they may well finish by denying that they have reason at all, and by affirming that animals are just as rational as they are. Anywhere in between they will let their emotions loose so that they no longer have to think, but are free to wallow in their passions. Horvat does not go this deep, but in fact this modern unleashing of emotion is part and parcel of modern man’s total war on God. God has only to get out of His own universe so that man can take His place, and do with it what he likes. Dear God, have mercy upon us!

Kyrie eleison.