Eleison Comments

General Chapter – I

General Chapter – I on July 28, 2018

So the latest General Chapter of the Society of St Pius X, the fourth with elections (1982, 1994, 2006 and 2018), came to a close in Écône, Switzerland, last Saturday. The event was followed with interest in many quarters, because for about 40 years from its founding in 1970 the Society emerged as a most important bastion of the Catholic Faith in the wake of the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), which had in effect officially undermined that Faith. However, over the last 20 years or so the Society had given increasing signs of a change of direction, more in line with the Church’s Conciliar officials, and less in line with its Founder, Archbishop Lefebvre. Which direction would the General Chapter now show the Society to be taking?

The detailed proceedings of a Chapter are meant to remain private, like those of the election of a Pope, but at the end of the Chapter emerged public words and actions. The words were the Chapter’s official Declaration of policy for the future, which aligned itself on Archbishop Lefebvre’s famous declaration of November of 1974, “in its entirety.” However, as the website Non Possumus has clearly shown by quoting truly in its entirety that declaration of war against the new religion of Vatican II, the Chapter has deliberately chosen to quote only its more peaceful parts. This is not promising for the Society’s continuation of the Archbishop’s holy war against the dreadful apostasy of Vatican II.

Of course the Archbishop was Catholic first and only as a consequence anti-Conciliar, which is why his declaration of war contains peaceful parts. But how can truth be loved without a hatred of error? Anti-Conciliarism follows immediately and necessarily upon love of Catholicism, which is why hordes of true Catholics came to follow the Society and its Founder who clearly and openly denounced the apostasy of the Church’s officials. Under him, the seminary in Écône once had well over a hundred seminarians, and crowds of thousands would attend each summer the ordination of a dozen or more new priests. In June of this year an estimated crowd of 450 souls attended the ordination of three new priests from among about 40 seminarians. Catholics are voting with their feet – and closing their wallets – against the Newsociety.

As for the Chapter’s public actions, which always speak louder than words, these consisted in the election of a new Superior General and two new Assistants. Participants in the Chapter must be congratulated on having deposed the previous General and Assistants, because these had striven for 12 years to change the Society’s direction in order to pursue official recognition from the Roman apostates. The recognition was not obtained, but the Society was seriously weakened and its best priests disoriented. So who did the Chapter choose as rulers in their place? The two new Assistants have been loyal executives of the previous General with his policy of currying favour with Conciliar Rome. For the common good of the Society? But when was there ever a Catholic common good opposed to the Faith? As for the new General, he may not himself know what he means to do as General, because God alone knows for sure what a man will do when he is put in power. Often he will disappoint, because “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely” (Lord Acton) – but he can prove to be surprisingly good. Fr Pagliarani certainly needs our prayers.

In this respect however, the Chapter’s last public action came like a thunderclap. Just before the Chapter’s close they voted to add to the Society’s governing Council of General and two Assistants another two “Counsellors,” and who did they choose? The Society’s last two Generals, Fr Schmidberger (1982–1994) and Bishop Fellay, who between 1994 when he was first elected and 2018 when he was at last dethroned, was the main architect of the Society’s weakening and decline! Whose doing was it to put Bishop Fellay right back next to the throne, together with his closest collaborator, Fr Schmidberger? What wise Superior wants his predecessor to be hanging around for another 12 years? What did the Chapter think it was doing? In any case, it is not a good sign if the Society is to love truth and hate error.

Kyrie eleison.

Artificial Intelligence – II

Artificial Intelligence – II on July 21, 2018

Artificial Intelligence is in fact a contradiction in terms. Anything artificial cannot be intelligent. Anything truly intelligent cannot be artificial. Any intelligent being must (as such) be living, spiritual and free. Anything artificial must (as such) be non-living and material and cannot be free. Therefore nothing artificial can be intelligent in the true sense of the word, and nothing truly intelligent can be artificial. An intelligence can be created by God alone. Man can create only things artificial.

To show as much, let us assume with the “Comments” of last week that there are three ranks of spiritual beings: the (1) Creator, (2) angels and (3) men, and four ranks of material beings: (3) men, (4) animal, (5) vegetable and (6) mineral. This means that man is the most complicated of creatures, because he alone is both spiritual and material. If anybody claims that man is purely material, he is probably making the most elementary of errors in philosophy, namely that only material beings exist. That error is widespread in our materialistic world of today, but either such a man has never thought or loved, or he is denying the full nature of his own experience. But if then he is nothing but matter, why does he have such a sharp sense of his own human dignity? And why does he behave as though freedom is of supreme importance to him?

In fact the six ranks of being can be graded by how far they climb out of matter. (6) Mineral is locked into matter but (5) plants are not so locked – they live and move, but still they are fixed in place and know nothing outside of themselves. (4) Animals live and move, but are not fixed in place and they have sense-knowledge and sense-desire of material things outside themselves. (5) Men live and move, are not fixed in place, and have not only sense-knowledge and sense-desire of material particulars outside themselves, but also intelligence and desire by will of non-material universals outside themselves, which is a huge step forward in climbing free of matter. The word “intelligence” comes from the Latin “intus-lego,” meaning “within I read,” that is to say, intelligence reads within things sensed their non-material form or essence. This is because intelligence, and the will which follows it, are both spiritual faculties, belonging to that part of man which is, as such, free from matter and above matter.

And upon these two faculties follows the freedom of (3) man’s will, shared by no other (4) animals which are all locked into their instincts. And that freedom manifests even to the most atheistic of materialists his superior dignity above all mere (4) animals, if he is only honest enough to recognise the fact. Above man are the (2) angels who are purely spiritual and intelligent but still particular beings, whereas (1) the Creator is universal spiritual Being Itself, locked into no matter nor even into any particularity.

Thus (3) man is living, and spiritual by his immortal soul with its intelligence and will which are the foundation of his free-will, making him free. Now is anything “artificial,” like a computer or a robot, either living or spiritual or free? Firstly, is not living from within itself. Nature spills human, animal and plant seed in all directions, and every seed contains life. But despite tremendous effort now for many years, human art has not succeeded in creating one seed with life inside it (and one suspects it never will). Secondly, if nothing made by human art is living, still less can it be spiritual, because a spiritual being presupposes a high (3) form of life. And thirdly no computer or robot made by man can possibly be free, because free-will presupposes a spiritual intelligence which no human art can fabricate. A (3) spiritual intelligence can be created not even by a (2) angel, but by (1) the Creator alone, God.

Therefore (6) computers and computer-driven robots cannot be living, and can initiate nothing outside what has been programmed into them. They cannot be intelligent in the full sense of the word, because that requires a spiritual being which God alone can create. And so they cannot be free to make any decision on their own, they are mere (6) machines, locked inside their (6) material programme. To credit them with any human passions, original thinking or freedom is simply childish materialism.

Kyrie eleison.

Artificial Intelligence? – I

Artificial Intelligence? – I on July 14, 2018

It seems that there is currently more and more talk of AI, or Artificial Intelligence. In other words, so many people are so impressed by the extraordinary progress made over the last few years in the development of computers and of machines directed by computers, that they seriously consider the taking over of more and more normally human and even divine tasks by computer robots. Anybody with a grain of common sense knows that there are strict limits to what machines are capable of, but any such person also knows how common sense is being eroded today by the New World Order, which has a major vested interest in using its media, politics, education, etcetera, to detach people more and more from reality so that they can be the more easily controlled. It is time to repeat a few very simple basics.

All beings whatsoever fall into one of six categories: beneath God the Creator there are five ordered ranks of His creatures: angels, human beings, animal, vegetable and mineral. These five ranks are clearly distinct from one another, even though television programmes do their best to blur the distinctions, especially between men and animals. But the distinctions are clear in reality. Starting from below,

Mineral merely exists, because it has within it no principle or origin of life or movement.

Vegetable both exists and lives, because from within, it ingests (eg water), grows and reproduces itself.

Animal has all these three abilities within it, but it also senses, in other words by some or all of the five sense faculties (sight, hearing, smell, touch and taste) it has sense knowledge of things outside it.

Man has all of these material abilities or faculties of animal and vegetable, but he also shares with the angels the spiritual faculties of mind and will, in other words he has sensation and reason, meaning the ability of the mind to read within particular sensations their universal essences, and the ability of will to desire in accordance with what his mind has read. These two faculties no animal has (when an animal behaves with apparent intelligence, like a bee for instance, that is thanks only to the animal instincts implanted in it by its supremely intelligent Creator).

Angels have mind and will, but no material faculties of the animals, because angels are purely spiritual. (The animal faculties of sense-knowledge and sense-desire all involve matter, absent in the angels.)

Now whatever is truly human, or human as such, is what men have that neither animals, vegetable nor mineral have. But all machines are purely mineral and essentially, by their essence, inanimate. At their most complicated they still have no principle or origin of life or movement from within them. Any movement of them by electricity for instance, is from without. It follows that computers have no inner grasp whatsoever of any truly human activity, which, as human, completely escapes them. All they can do is register from outside what is observable and computable in people’s behaviour, and churn out statistics and spread-sheets, i.e. numbers, which they are good at. But Churchill said – he was no Saint but he was a human politician – “there are lies, damned lies, and statistics.” And why do statistics lie, if not because the essentially human essentially escapes them?

Here is an example. In New York maybe 15 years back, a group of computer experts set up a computer, Deep Blue, to play chess against Kasparov, the world chess champion. Now if there is a game suited to computers, it is chess, because if only one can process billions of alternative moves in a few minutes, or seconds, one can come up with the best move that leaves nothing to chance. Guess what? After a few games the experts had to reset the computer to respond to how Kasparov was playing! Computers have no inner life or initiative, they cannot think outside of the box programmed into them, they cannot possibly respond to any eventuality outside of their box. Game, set and match to human beings!

Kyrie eleison.

Attention, Capitulants!

Attention, Capitulants! on July 7, 2018

Remember, all of you Capitulants of the Society of St Pius X, preparing to take part in votes that will shape the Society for the next 12 years, remember your grave responsibility! You are not in a few days’ time taking part in a children’s garden-party, but in contributing to decisions with potential repercussions for the entire Church – and world!

Beware of an atmosphere being created at the Chapters by which everybody is made to feel they are being nice together, like in a garden-party, where nobody must break everybody’s nice feelings. You are all on the front line of the final battle between the Blessed Virgin and the Devil (Sister Lucy of Fatima).

Remember the Church crisis, let loose by Vatican II, which gave rise to the founding of your Society. True, Archbishop Lefebvre created seminaries for the true Catholic priesthood and spirituality, but these he fought to uphold in order to save the Catholic Faith. What use would priests be, or spirituality, if nobody had the Faith? In this respect even the true Mass is a means and not the end.

Beware of anybody pretending that the crisis is over, or that Conciliar Rome is no longer Conciliar, or that Pope Francis likes the Society. He and the officials that he has chosen to surround him can only like the Society if and when it stops resisting their Council. Then they will love the Society, because it will make itself into an outstanding advocate for the Universal Church’s apostasy.

Remember your Founder, Archbishop Lefebvre, especially the advice and warnings of his last few years, between the episcopal consecrations of 1988 and his death in 1991. Those consecrations against the Pope’s express will did not contradict all his previous loyal service of the Church, they were its crowning glory, because nothing else he ever did so served to defend and uphold the Catholic Faith!

Beware of being told that the Archbishop was always trying to come to an agreement with the Roman authorities. True, he would talk with them, but when in 1988 they finally refused to protect Tradition, then he resolutely put doctrine in front of diplomacy. Since 2012 it is diplomacy back in front of doctrine

Remember how the whole Church had to listen to the Archbishop, because he stood for the Truth and his Society was in the forefront of the glorious fight for the Faith. From 2012 what has the Society stood for? Ever since it renounced the primacy of doctrine, it is less and less different from several Congregations coming under Ecclesia Dei, and the best of Society priests are confused – “What are we now meant to be defending?”

Beware of your decisions completing the Society’s 2012 primacy of practice over doctrine, of men’s unity over God’s truth, of man over God. Never has the world so needed God! Never has the Church been more in need of witness to God’s Truth! And just now the Society’s witness is to fade out?

Remember how meetings like a General Chapter can be skilfully manipulated, like Vatican II, by liberals well prepared beforehand. Do not be afraid of meeting and discussing with fellow-priests before the Chapter begins. Liberals have certainly done so, and they can even have decided all major questions. By all means throw monkey-wrenches into their smooth machinery! Speak up, before the Truth goes down!

Beware of giving up on grace, of renouncing reality, of being docile in dreamland! Beware of “peace and unity” in anything except the Truth. 2018 is do-or-die for the Society. Compromise is not victory. Do not be mere rubber-stamps, but thrash out what the true Church requires of the true Society!

Kyrie eleison.

Vital Election

Vital Election on June 30, 2018

Upon the up-coming election in two weeks or so of the three senior officials of the Society of St Pius X hangs a great deal. For the first 20 years of its existence it was a unique obstacle in the way of the new man-centred religion taking over and occupying the Catholic Church in the wake of the Second Vatican Council. Alas, for the last 20 years its Superior General has been making the Society less and less resistant to the Conciliar officials in Rome at the head of the new religion. Will he be re-elected for a third term in mid-July, or not? If he is re-elected, it is difficult to see how the Society will not come under Conciliar control. If he is not re-elected, whoever is elected in his place will need a divine miracle or much human skill to bring the Society back in line with its Founder’s original intention, to put Jesus Christ back on His throne as God and King of all human society. It is not enemies but friends of the Society who point out how liberalism has been allowed to soak into it.

Perhaps Archbishop Lefebvre’s noble attempt to fight godless liberalism by founding the Society in 1970 was doomed from the start. After all, he had on the one hand Almighty God with him, as so many quasi-miraculous interventions in the Society’s early history prove. On the other hand he had the whole modern world and Conciliar Church against him, so that what had for all the centuries since the early Church of the Apostles and martyrs become normal, namely Christian civilisation, was by his time thoroughly abnormal. And so how could the young men who were drawn to him in the 1970’s and 1980’s, and who are now at the head of his Society, know the relatively normal order of the Church as he himself had known it between the two World Wars? And how could they build what they did not know? And, humanly speaking, how could they not be vulnerable to the universal pressure of today’s abnormality?

For indeed it has become normal for men to disbelieve in God, or if they believe in Him, to treat Him as though He is of little importance. All He has to do is get out of the way. Heads man wins, tails God loses. After all, God is so good that he could never condemn any human being to eternal fires of Hell, and men are so good that merely by being men they have such dignity that they all deserve to go to Heaven. He gave us this life for us to enjoy it. He cannot possibly have meant His ten Commandments to stop us from enjoying it. Yesterday’s Church gave that impression, but technological man has come of age after centuries of backward peasantry, and so it was high time for that old Church to give way to a church of the New World Order, a church bright with inclusion instead of exclusion, with liberty instead of prohibitions, with liberalism instead of Catholicism!

Therefore, divinely speaking, let nobody exclude the possibility of miraculous help from Heaven whereby the Society’s General Chapter will choose three top officials who understand what God wants from the Society, and mean with His help to give it to Him, namely the Society’s continuing or restored witness throughout the Church to the Social Kingship of Christ the King and to the one true religion instituted by the Incarnate God. But humanly speaking, let nobody be under any illusion as to the likelihood of such miraculous help. God owes His miracles to nobody. It was already a miracle that the Society came into existence, survived and thrived for 40 years, and shone throughout the Church. It may have played its part of handing down Tradition for as long as God meant it to, and now all it has to do is to watch while the same torch is handed down to others. God knows. Men choose. God decides.

For our part, we pray: Blessed Mother of God, from your divine Son we beg of you to obtain for the Society’s General Chapter to choose for its leaders for the next 12 years servants of His who put no merely human calculation or ambition in front of His interests alone – the restoration of His own Kingship over all mankind, the Triumph of your own Immaculate Heart, and the salvation of souls. Amen.

Kyrie eleison.

Fiftiesist SSPX

Fiftiesist SSPX on June 23, 2018

The parallels between the state of the Universal Church in the 1950’s and the state of the Society of St Pius X in the 2000’s keep arising, because it is the same malady that has afflicted both Church and SSPX. In what does that malady consist? In a desire so to reach out to man slipping further and further away from God, that the true God is distorted beyond all recognition by being brought down to the level of godless modern man. With the Church, the Faith of all time was to be adapted to fit our modern world, giving rise to the Second Vatican Council. With the SSPX, Catholic Tradition of all time was to be made to fit that Council, giving rise to the slide of the SSPX. “The same causes produce the same effects.”

Last year was the 100th anniversary of the great Apparitions of Our Lady in Fatima, Portugal. She warned of terrible disasters that would befall mankind if her warnings were not heeded. The churchmen reacted inadequately, because after several years She had to tell Sister Lucy that even good souls were not paying sufficient attention to Her requests, while bad people were of course going on their sinful way. Thus the first part of Pope Pius XII’s reign (1939–1958) was marked by his devotion to Fatima, but in the 1950’s he was persuaded to split the devotional aspect of the Apparitions from their political aspect, notably the Consecration of Russia, and to disregard the political aspect while retaining the devotional, a great mistake. Now see exactly the same mistake being made by certain Superiors of the Society in the 2010’s.

A colleague in the Society of St Pius X heard last year (2017) sermons on the subject of Fatima (1917) from two of its senior members. Where he expected a thorough treatment of the Apparitions of Fatima, all he heard was words pious, by no means false, but both of the preachers pictured a world in good health! The greatness, goodness and mercy of Our Lady were spoken of, and of course Her Immaculate Heart as a mighty place of refuge for us Catholics. Nothing wrong so far. But, our colleague goes on –

“There was not a word on the catastrophic situation in which individuals, nations and the Church find themselves today. The First Part of the Secret of Fatima was mentioned, but neither the Second nor the Third Part. Are the nations not in all kinds of trouble? Is not Mother Church with Pope Francis at its head in unimaginable trouble? Given this situation, how can anyone dare to pass over in silence the Second and Third Parts, with not even a mention?

Our Superiors are taking on a huge responsibility. They are lulling our Catholics to sleep, a religious sleep – “We have the true Mass, we have the Faith, we have priories, we are members of the Catholic Church . . . what more do we need?” Sermons like this prevent any reaction, there is no engagement in the battles of the Mother of God, no word of warning against today’s electronic gadgets. Here is how Catholics become lukewarm.

“When the children of Fatima were obliged to look into the fires of Hell, their prayers, efforts and sacrifices markedly increased. Do we Catholics of the 21st century no longer need such a view of Hell, such a view of the catastrophic condition of current politics and the Catholic Church? Many of our faithful do not even notice that something important is being kept from them. When they hear sermons of this kind, they are enthusiastic, they praise the preachers, they are happy as can be. Alas, it is all too understandable that men prefer what is light and pleasing to what is harsh and true.”

Kyrie eleison.