Eleison Comments

Real Islam

Real Islam on November 4, 2017

When Britain had an Empire, its administrators were in direct contact with peoples, races and religions all over the world, and they were apt to speak from experience. Today, by and large, the rulers of Britain have only their liberalism and its unreal ideology, which is why so few of them know what they are talking about. On the contrary Fr. Henry Boulad is an old-school Jesuit priest born 86 years ago in Alexandria, Egypt, of an old Syrian Christian family of the Melkite rite, former Professor of Theology in Cairo, Superior of the Jesuits in Alexandria and of the Jesuits in Egypt, with, obviously, a direct life-long experience of Islam and Muslims. The terrorist attacks last spring on two Christian Churches in Egypt impelled him to give an interview in France and to write a book from which the following remarks are adapted. He certainly knows what he is talking about! –

“I accuse Islam but not individual Muslims, who are the prime victims of Islam. I have made up my mind to denounce the source of the terrorism: the main source of Islamic radicalism in the world is the University of al-Azhar” in Cairo, Egypt, where the deadly ideology is taught as the official doctrine of Islam. I accuse the University of al-Azhar in Cairo, supposedly the embodiment of moderate Islam, of creating a spirit of fanaticism, intolerance and hatred in millions of students and Muslim clerics coming from all over the world to receive a formation in its institutes. By this means al-Azhar becomes one of the main sources of terrorism worldwide.

I accuse Islam itself and not just “extremist Islamism,” because Islam is by nature both political and radical. 25 years ago I wrote that Islamism is merely Islam stripped bare, in all its logic and rigour. It plans for a society aiming for a worldwide caliphate based on Shariah law, which is the only legitimate law, as coming from God. It is a plan taking in the entire globe, all-encompassing and wholly totalitarian. I accuse all those who pretend that the crimes committed by Muslims “have nothing to do with Islam,” of being deliberate liars. These crimes are committed in the name of the Koran and its clear instructions. The mere fact that the Muslim call to prayer and the call to kill non-Muslims are preceded by the same cry “Allah-ou Akhbar” (God is great), is highly significant.

I accuse learned Muslims of the 10th century of promulgating the decrees, now irreversible, which have led Islam into its present frozen state. The first of these decrees cancelled every kind of precedence for the Koran’s verses from Mecca calling for peace and harmony, and it gave priority instead to the verses from Medina which call for intolerance and violence. Two further decrees were promulgated to make this first decree irreversible: the Koran was decreed to be the uncreated word of Allah, hence immutable; and any further effort at reflection was forbidden by “the gate of ijtihad (reflection) being closed once and for all.” These three decrees, made sacred, have fossilized Muslim thinking, and contributed to the keeping of Muslim countries in a state of backwardness and chronic stagnation.

I accuse the Vatican II Decree “Nostra Aetate” of launching an inter-religious dialogue meant to be open, welcoming and understanding of Muslims, because for 50 years we have not taken one step forward, and now we are stopped dead. The dialogue with a sheikh from al-Azhar ended up with his proclaiming that “all Christians are going to Hell.” Nothing is moving, just as nothing has moved for the last 11 centuries. Dialogue, yes, but I want a dialogue based on truth. Charity without truth goes nowhere! I accuse the Catholic Church of pursuing a dialogue with Islam based on seeking to please, on making compromises and on double-dealing. After 50 years of initiatives all going one way, the Church’s monologue has got nowhere. By giving way to the “politically correct,” by pretending that the dialogue must not offend the Muslims because we must “live together,” all thorny but vital questions are studiously avoided. But true dialogue begins with the truth. I have asked to meet Pope Francis. No reply.

Kyrie eleison.

Sorcerers Control?

Sorcerers Control? on October 28, 2017

In a recent interview the Managing Director of Mercedes Benz, a state-of-the-art German firm for the production of high quality motor cars, painted a picture of mankind’s near future in which computer software will disrupt most traditional industries, and in which their own main competitors will no longer be other motor car firms but Google, Apple and Amazon! Law, he says, nursing, car driving, insurance, real estate will all be substantially affected by computers. By 2027 10% of everything produced will be 3D printed. By 2037 70 to 80% of jobs will disappear. Cheap smart-phones will make world class education available worldwide, and so on, and so on. But such dramatic predictions need to be put in their place, which is secondary. Machines are only machines, and computers are only machines.

It is ever since the Industrial Revolution broke out over mankind in the 18th and 19th centuries that men began to wonder what the inhuman machines meant for the future of human beings. Since then many a wise observer has raised serious doubts as to the ultimate impact of the materially more and more marvellous inventions, but mankind as a whole has only hurtled forwards, trusting that the onrush of machines, compounded by electronics and computers, could only be more and more beneficent. Yet is it a wise or happy man whose nose is always buried in his smart-phone?

The basic problem is that machines are purely material while human beings are primarily spiritual. So the most useful of machines can only sub-serve what is primary or most important in the life of human beings. Man is indeed composed of material body as well as spiritual soul, so that material machines can certainly serve his body, but that body is merely the carrier of his spiritual soul for the duration of his brief life on earth, and then at death either the soul without supernatural grace drags the body down to the eternal torments of Hell, or the soul with the grace of Christ lifts the body, normally through the temporary torments of Purgatory, to the permanent bliss of Heaven. Either way, whatever the body may have done or not done to the soul during life, after death it is the state of the soul which determines the fate of the body, and not the other way round.

However, in our terrible times even Catholics can lose their grip on these elementary realities of body and soul, life and death, so let us turn to music to illustrate the limitations of matter and machines. In a modern recording studio there may be dozens of high-performing machines and thousands of brilliant buttons, knobs and dials making up ever more perfect machines for the recording of what? For the ever more faithful reproduction of sound? What sound? The sound of a human being either singing or playing an instrument. And why record it? Because the recording will sell and make money. And why will it make money? Because music is a unique language for expressing emotions in the human soul, and be it Furtwaengler conducting a classical orchestra, or the Beatles strumming on guitars, the human musicians are by their musical gifts expressing through the material means of orchestra or guitar in the material-spiritual language of music those spiritual emotions which a whole public wants musicians to express for it. And if the musicians are soulless, the most brilliant of recording engineers will never make a living. In every human art, the mechanics are necessarily subordinate to the artists.

Therefore the more spiritual are the lives and activities of men, the less seriously will they take merely material upheavals in human affairs, such as the managing Director of Mercedes Benz evokes. On the other hand the more men turn away from God, the larger such upheavals bulk in their lives. Readers, take a spiritual Rosary into your material hands, and leave well behind you the looming disasters of our materialistic “civilisation.”

Kyrie eleison.

La Salette, Applied

La Salette, Applied on October 21, 2017

All prophecies are mysterious, including the famous Secret of La Salette revealed to a French peasant girl in the Alps of eastern France in 1846. However, that Secret certainly follows the Venerable Holzhauser’s broad outlines of the Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Ages of the Church, so that a large part of the Secret applies to our own end of the Fifth Age. Here is a substantial extract from that part of the Secret, in italics, followed by a Resistant priest’s presentation of how that end of an Age looks in our very own time. Firstly, Our Lady of La Salette:—

“There will be extraordinary wonders in every place because the true Faith has been extinguished and a false light lights up the world. ( . . . ) My Son’s Vicar will have much to suffer, because for a time the Church will be handed over to great persecutions: it will be the time of darkness; the Church will undergo a frightful crisis. With God’s holy Faith forgotten, each individual will want to direct himself and rise above his peers. Civil and ecclesiastical authority will be abolished, all order and justice will be trampled underfoot. Only murders, hatred, jealousy, lying and discord will be seen, with no love of country or family. ( . . . ) Civil governments will all have the same objective, which will be to abolish and make every religious principle disappear, to make way for materialism, atheism, spiritism and vices of all kinds . . .”

And secondly a priest of today:—“The Revolution has had a huge impact, and in 2017 it is a storm which is reaching its climax. Now is the time for us to hunker down, and help one another to survive the storm. This requires total abandonment to God’s Providence, and it requires more prayer and study to navigate and survive in the storm. It is no use hankering for that “Sunday Catholic” life-style which Traditionalists made a great effort to restore after the earthquake of Vatican II. Both the 1950’s and the 1970’s are gone for ever. By this crisis God is purifying His Church, which may be reduced to numbers and to a life-style close to those of the early Church. The beautiful buildings, relics, artwork and museums have been lost once to the Modernists, and they will be lost again to the Muslims, to natural causes, to wars. Let us brace ourselves to see the whole Christian heritage disappear, and as Lot fled Sodom, let us flee Neo-modernist Rome without looking back!

“For let us dream that at the next Conclave in Rome, by a direct intervention of God, the truly best of Cardinals is elected Pope. What could he do to restore the Church? Practically nothing, except offer up all the persecutions that would befall him the day after the election. Why? Because, surely as with President Trump in the United States, all the administrative machinery of the Church would still be in the hands of the Pope’s enemies, and he would not have the good men to replace them. And even if by a series of miracles, the whole of Rome was truly Catholic once more, would not the rest of the world on its present course have become virtually inconvertible? What can now stop mankind from becoming almost totally inhuman, unnatural, unreal? How could even a converted Rome evangelize tomorrow’s Zombies?

“We are going through a New Deluge, that of the Revolution, where the saving Ark which once was Rome has been hijacked by the enemies of God, and they are in the process of scuttling it. The Society of St Pius X was a lifeboat. But since 2012 it has thrown a rope towards the sinking Ark and is now attached to it. We poor souls of the “Resistance” are bobbing up and down on the waters, grabbing at pieces of wood for dear life. And that is how it is, and we had better face the reality around us.”

Kyrie eleison.

Putin Speaks

Putin Speaks on October 14, 2017

When everything in the world around us is being turned upside down, it should not surprise us to find the Pope talking like a Communist politician and the leader of Russia talking like a Catholic Pope. Thus one reader of these “Comments” was surprised to see them (August 5) referring to “Holy Russia,” when since 1917 it is Russia that has been spreading its errors throughout the world. But “Holy Russia” is an expression that goes much further back than the 20th century. It refers to the Russian people’s natural inclination to religion. If from 1917 to 1989 they were the spring-bed of international Communism, that is only because they served it with a religious fervour, because it was – and still is – the messianism of materialism, the main Jewish substitute religion for post-Christians (who have only themselves to blame).

But 72 years of Communism caused the Russians so much suffering that they learned their lesson and are now finding their way back to God, and their nation’s turning to Him has deserved for them from God a true statesman for their leader, who is the hope of many decent souls all over the world. Some experts in the perfidy of the New World Order are still distrustful of Vladimir Putin, which is understandable, but as Americans say, if he talks, walks and quacks like a follower of Christ, then common sense says that he is a follower of Christ. Read here a version (taken from video sub-titles) of a speech of his one year ago in Russia, and judge for yourselves if his world-vision is not Christian:—

A further challenge for the Russian national identity is connected to the processes we observe outside of Russia. They include foreign policy, morals and other aspects. We see that many Euro-Atlantic States have taken the path of denying or rejecting their Christian roots which form the basis of Western civilisation. In these countries the basis of morals and of any traditional identity is being denied – national, religious, cultural and even gender identities are being denied or relativized. There, politics treat a family with many children as juridically equal to a homosexual partnership – faith in God is equal to faith in Satan. The excesses and exaggerations of “political correctness” in these countries lead to serious consideration for the legitimising of political parties that promote propaganda for paedophilia.

The people in European States are actually ashamed of their religious affiliations and are even frightened to speak about them. Christian holidays and celebrations are abolished or given neutral names, as if one were ashamed of those Christian holidays. By this means the deeper moral value of these celebrations is hidden from view. And these countries try to force this model onto other countries. I am deeply convinced that to live this way will lead directly to culture being degraded and returned to a primitive condition. And this makes the demographic and moral crisis of the West still deeper. Today nearly all countries of the West cannot survive reproductively, not even with the inflow of population by immigration. What clearer proof of the moral crisis in the West could there be than this inability to reproduce itself?

Without the moral values that are rooted in Christianity and other world religions, without rules and moral values that have been formed and developed over thousands of years, people inevitably lose their human dignity. As for ourselves we think it is right and natural to defend these moral values coming from Christianity. We must respect the right to self-determination of every minority, but by the same token there cannot and must not be any doubt about the rights of the majority.

At the same time as we observe this decadence at the national level in the West, on the international level we observe the attempt to unify the world in accordance with a unipolar model, to relativize and remove institutions of international law and national sovereignty. In such a unipolar unified world there is no place for sovereign States, because such a world requires only vassals. From a historical perspective such a unipolar world would mean the surrender of one’s own identity and God-created diversity.

Kyrie eleison.

Faith Crucial – I

Faith Crucial – I on October 7, 2017

The great lesson taught by Archbishop Lefebvre (1905–1991) to Catholics who had ears to hear was that the Faith is higher than obedience. The sad lesson we have learned since then is that obedience keeps on being rated higher than the Faith. These “Comments,” driven continually by today’s confusion to get back to basics, have often attempted to explain why the Faith must come first. One more attempt from a slightly different angle will not be one too many.

Every single human being alive on earth – and not just the Catholics! – has an immortal soul without which he would not be alive. This soul was not mass-produced but was created individually by God, out of nothing, for it to be happy with Him in Heaven for ever. It is the most important part of human nature, so it belongs to the natural order and is not by itself supernatural, but it will get to God’s supernatural Heaven if it makes the right use of its natural faculty of free-will to co-operate with God’s supernatural grace. His grace will not be lacking, in whatever form God chooses to offer it, because God wants every soul to get to Heaven (I Tim. II, 4). The question then becomes, what human co-operation is needed – and not just from Catholics – to get to Heaven?

Faith is undoubtedly the basis of that co-operation. The Council of Trent calls faith “the beginning of salvation,” and God’s own Word says that “Without faith it is impossible to please God” (Heb. XI, 6). Many times in the Gospels when Our Lord works a miracle, he says that it is the reward of the “faith” of those concerned, for example Mt. XV, 28 (cure of the Canaanite woman), Mk.X, 52 (sight for a blind man), Lk.VII, 50 (conversion of Mary Magdalene), and so on. In what does this “faith” consist, and why is it so precious to God, and therefore to souls?

Let us immediately distinguish two realities, different but connected: the subjective quality of faith in the soul, by which someone supernaturally believes, and the objective body of supernatural realities, objects of the Catholic Faith, in which a Catholic believes. To distinguish them, we might spell the first with a small “f” and the second with a capital “F.” That they are distinct is obvious: a man can lose his (subjective) faith without the least change taking place in the (objective) Faith.

Two things then become clear. Firstly, the faith which saves a soul is that subjective quality of the person which Our Lord so praises and rewards in the Gospels. He is not praising or rewarding an objective body of truths. On the other hand, secondly, the subjective quality of faith is determined or specified by the objective Faith. I am not saved, I do not deserve to be praised or rewarded, by my believing in any silly nonsense. The Canaanite woman did not believe in any silliness, she certainly believed in the goodness and some divine power of Our Lord. What she believed in was both supernatural, or above the merely natural powers of her mind to grasp, and true. And most likely, as soon as the Apostles began to establish soon after Our Lord’s ascension to Heaven the basic truths that a follower of Our Lord must believe in, she was happy to have her subjective faith focused and specified or determined by the then emerging objective Faith.

In other words the objective Faith focuses that subjective faith without which no soul is saved. Therefore churchmen who tamper with the objective Faith are placing in peril the eternal salvation of souls. If then subjective faith is priceless, so is the objective Faith. It must come first.

Kyrie eleison.

Historical Truth – III

Historical Truth – III on September 30, 2017

The dreadful punishment of persistence in lying is that one loses all sense of reality. This punishment is closing in on our Western “civilisation.” People can no longer distinguish between truth and falsehood, between fantasy and reality. Alas, fantasy may be sweeter, but reality always re-asserts itself in the end, and the more obstinately one has clung to fantasy, the more violently reality is liable to return. The two World Wars of the last century were violent returns of reality. We are heading straight for a third, because the preference of fantasy is being raised to an ideology. The following clear example of the turning of lies into an ideology comes from a website striving to uphold truth:—

In 2009 a Polish-born American, Herman Rosenblat, wrote a touching Holocaust memoir for which, even before it could be published as a book, the film rights were sold for $25,000. Angel at the fence tells how Rosenblat, imprisoned during World War II in Buchenwald concentration camp, met through the camp’s outer fence a nine-year old girl who tossed to him apples and bread over the fence. By war’s end they had lost touch with one another, and he emigrated to the United States. Years later in New York he resorted to a matrimonial agency to find a bride, and who should turn up on the blind date but the same girl? She was now an adult, but he recognised her immediately and proposed to her, was accepted, and they have lived happily ever after.

The story is most touching. Rosenblat gave everyone to understand that it had all happened in reality, and it seems that everybody believed him. However, researchers into the story proved from wartime facts, for instance from the impossibility for Buchenwald inmates to approach the camp’s outer fence, that the story was a pure figment of Rosenblat’s imagination. It was one more “fake Holocaust story.” But a regular visitor to the website mentioned above, Seymour Zak, protested vehemently that there is no such thing as a “fake Holocaust story.” What is frightening is his reasoning –

 . . . . What anti-Semites keep insisting are “fake Holocaust stories” need to be seen in a more positive light as “the truth of imagination,” to quote the famous phrase of the poet John Keats. If something is perceived as true by the mind, though strictly speaking it may not have happened, and if that event is subsequently seen as a living truth in the minds of millions of other good people who have been exposed to that same heightened version of reality, then it must on no account be dismissed as a “lie” ( . . . ) All such stories are true in a higher metaphysical sense, and to deny them is a sacrilege ( . . . ) We have a sacred obligation to the six million who died under the tyranny of the evil Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler to remember the dead and dismiss with contempt all attempts to deny the Holocaust by referring to “fake Holocaust stories.” I repeat: there is no such thing as a fake Holocaust story. Every Holocaust story is true, 100 per cent true, whether it happened or not. ( . . . ) In the sublime words of Elie Wiesel: “In literature, certain things are true though they didn’t happen, while others are not true, even if they did happen.”

On Seymour Zak’s reasoning, it is of no importance whether the six million mentioned here really died “under the tyranny, etc.” or not. What matters is whether the Six Million constitute a “heightened version of reality . . . . seen as a living truth in the minds of millions of good people, etc.” and if they do, then to state that they died when in reality they did not die is no longer a lie, but a higher truth! Reality is no longer the measure of truth, especially if that higher truth is quasi-religious, namely a “sacred obligation” which it is “sacrilege” to deny, namely Holocaustianity. In other words, there is historical reality and non-historical reality, and only the second deserves the name of “reality”!

This is utter madness, but it is in society all around us, more and more so, and we human beings are social animals, necessarily influenced by the society around us. Catholics – and non-Catholics – if you want to keep your head above the rising flood of madness, pray 15 Mysteries a day of the Holy Rosary. Our Lady can protect your sanity. These “Comments” have no other remedy to suggest.

Kyrie eleison.