Eleison Comments

Colour, Poetry…

Colour, Poetry... on January 21, 2017

“One cannot live any longer on politics, on balance-sheets, and crossword puzzles. One cannot live any longer without poetry, colour, love” – words of Antoine de St Exupéry (1900–1944), French aristocrat, aviator and writer, not Catholic, but struggling in his soul with 20th century materialism. He said of himself, “I am a man raking through ashes, a man struggling to find the embers of life in the bottom of a fireplace.” And describing in his philosophic memoir Wind, Sand and Stars (1939) a scene of workers and their families huddled all over a night train from Paris to Warsaw, he wrote that he was tormented not by their desolate condition, but by “seeing, a little bit in all these men, of Mozart murdered.”

These quotes come to mind after a visit last year to the Bertramka, a villa lying close outside the centre of Prague in the Czech Republic, and made known in the late 18th century by visits there of the famous composer, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. At that time it was reached from the city by a half-hour walk along country roads and a path lined with horse chestnuts to the gate into the front courtyard, opening onto a sloping garden with flower-beds and fruit-trees. Today the shady lane has given way to an enormous shopping and business centre along a city street loaded with heavy traffic, heeding only the traffic-lights. The gate is still there but the sloping garden has run wild, with a lonely statue of the great musician and with the stone table where he is supposed to have finished composing his world-renowned opera Don Giovanni. Soon afterwards he conducted its first performance in the city opera-house, still in use. As for the two rooms occupied in the Bertramka by Mozart, they have been faithfully preserved, but a once handsome collection of Mozartian exhibits was no longer there this October. The Bertramka still has atmosphere, but much there whispers only of “Mozart murdered.”

Yet 18th century Prague had been very kind to him. In 1786, unlike Vienna, it gave a rapturous reception to Mozart’s equally popular and famous opera the Marriage of Figaro, as it gave in the following year to Don Giovanni. And when Mozart died in 1791, his home city,Vienna, gave him merely a poor man’s grave, whereas Prague honoured him with a lavish Requiem Mass attended by thousands, and performed by a hundred musicians refusing any payment. It was Catholic Emperors and nobles who, to restore Catholic Bohemia after the devastating 30 years’ religious war (1618–1648), had established widespread musical education for Bohemian youth to be able to play music in Church services. It was this Catholic education which generated in Prague a public capable immediately of loving Mozart and his music.

Can the same be said for Catholics today, or are we also “murderers of Mozart”? For St Exupéry, Mozart was somehow the very opposite of materialism. But how many Traditionalists today are bored with a sung Mass, and cannot wait to get back to their balance-sheets and crossword-puzzles? Alas, are not many of our boys almost ashamed of knowing how to sing? And as for our girls, Oh my! Would a mass of them not prefer to be astronauts or volleyball stars rather than know how to play a musical instrument which might help them to civilise their husbands, humanise their children and put harmony in their home? A German proverb says that men make the culture but women transmit it. Is it not suicidal for a society not to promote in its girls the true “culture, poetry and love” which will go deep into their future families and through their families into society?

As for Mozart, he is certainly not the height of spirituality in Western music, and later in life he did join Freemasonry, then fashionable in Vienna. But he is far more spiritual than the world of shopping centres and traffic lights, as St Exupéry well saw, and it was certainly not Masons but deeply Catholic parents who formed in the child and youth the Catholic heart from which sprang all the spirituality of the music of the adult. Surely the most often performed piece of all Mozart’s music, composed shortly before he died, is his Ave Verum Corpus, because it is so frequently performed at Mass. And his deeply Catholic Requiem he was still composing on his deathbed. May his soul rest in peace.

Kyrie eleison.

Prayer Urgent

Prayer Urgent on January 14, 2017

When the Titanic began sinking in 1912, it is well-known that the first lifeboats to be launched were not filled to capacity because not yet enough passengers took seriously the stricken ship’s doomed condition. But as the full truth became widely known, so the rest of the lifeboats each of them had more than enough people wanting to get on board. Now, the sinking of the Titanic was a mirror of God held up to the modern world, but by no means all people alive today believe that, and so the lifeboats of Catholic Tradition are being emptied rather than filled. Nothing like enough souls are yet grasping the full truth of our doomed condition to be doing what they need to be doing – praying urgently.

Here is how a friend from Switzerland puts it: “In our country as elsewhere, every last trace of Catholicism is disappearing, and the (once very Catholic canton of the) Valais is no exception. Everything needs to start all over again, while the enemies of Truth are more numerous every day.” Can anyone say that this description does not fit his own part of the world? Certainly it fits England! In a poll of 1595 English adults taken on December 18 and 19, only 28% believe in God while 38% are positive atheists. A little under two years ago those figures were 32% for the believers, 33% for the atheists. It is clear that the disbelievers are pulling significantly ahead. Poor England!

But why is belief in God so important? St Thomas Aquinas explains in his Treatise on the Angels: just as all Creation proceeds by an overflow of goodness from God, so this goodness in creatures seeks to make its way back to the Supreme Goodness of the Creator, each in its own way: vegetable and mineral by a natural inclination, animals by a sense inclination, most perfectly men and angels by an intellective inclination of mind and free-will (1a, 59, 1). Thus human beings come from God to go back to Him, by the right use of their mind, the mind being “inexcusable,” says St Paul, if it pretends that it cannot recognise God in His Creation (Rom. I, 20), and by the right use of their free-will, to choose Him rather than refuse Him. Alas, sense attractions draw most men away from God (1a, 63, 9 ad 1).

However, to be drawn away from Him is not what God meant men for. Every single human being that He created, He meant for Heaven (I Tim. II, 4), and to all men He gives grace sufficient for them to know Him and love Him and so get to Heaven. Heaven is therefore what every man is for, whether or not he accepts the fact, and if he refuses it, he is blinding himself and can have no understanding of what life is all about. It would follow that all such men who are leaders in any domain are ultimately the blind leading the blind, while all such followers are the blind following the blind. “I am the Light of the World,” says Our Lord Jesus Christ, “he that followeth me walketh not in darkness” (Jn. VIII, 12).

Then he who refuses to follow God, let alone Jesus Christ and his Catholic Church, walks in darkness, and the obstinate preference today of global “Westerners” for more and more darkness is preparing a terrible Chastisement, comparable only to the Flood in the time of Noah. As then men had so “corrupted their ways” (Gen. VI, 12) that God had to intervene with the Flood to prevent absolutely all men from choosing to go to Hell, so too today the corruption is so terrible that God alone can interrupt it.

But men can always pray, and prayer still works like nothing else still works. For it is easy to imagine, amidst millions and millions of souls turning to Mammon and away from God, how He positively watches out for, and listens to, the fewer and fewer souls that turn to Him. The hour is to prayer, through his Mother, the prayer of the Holy Rosary, fifteen Mysteries a day, if that is at all reasonably possible.

Kyrie eleison.

Vatican “War”

Vatican “War” on January 7, 2017

In today’s crisis of the Church, of an unprecedented gravity in all Church history, it is most important that Catholics should give due importance both to the Traditional movement and to the Catholic Church outside the Traditional movement. Tradition in its broadest sense, meaning everything which Our Lord entrusted to his Church to be handed down ( tradendum in Latin) to world’s end, is indispensable to the Church, and the Traditional movement has played an indispensable part in preserving Traditional doctrine and sacraments from their destruction by the Conciliar Revolution over the last half-century. But to survive, the Traditional movement had to place itself outside the normal hierarchical structure of the Church, and that structure is very much part of Tradition – “Peter, feed my sheep” (Jn XXI, 17). Therefore however deep is the Conciliar corruption in Rome, Catholics must still be looking to Rome.

Hence the interest of the following report from inside Rome by the Founder and Director of an American Novus Ordo publication, LifeSiteNews. Steve Jalsevac normally visits Rome twice a year with colleagues to talk with all kinds of contacts in Rome, the better to be able to assess how the situation in the Church is developing. From his late November visit he published on December 16 a “deeply worrying” report of his impressions of the situation in Rome today. Extracts follow:—

“Our Nov. 16–23 visit to Rome was the most dramatic of many such twice-per-year work trips we have taken there during the past 10 years. After meeting with cardinals, bishops and other Vatican agency and dicastery staff, our new Rome reporter John-Henry Westen, Jan Bentz, and I saw a consistent pattern of widespread anxiety and very real fear among faithful Church servants. We have never encountered this before. Many were afraid of being removed from their positions, fired from their jobs in Vatican agencies or of encountering severe public or private reprimands and personal accusations from those around the Pope or even from Francis himself. They are also fearful and anxious about the great damage being done to the Church and being helpless to stop it.

“. . . . Catholic universities in Rome are watched and professors’ lectures screened to ensure they fall in line with a liberal interpretation of Amoris Laetitia. Clerics are reported to Superiors if they are overheard expressing concerns about Pope Francis. Many are afraid to speak openly, even though in the past they were always very willing. Vatican reporters told us they were warned numerous times not to report on the dubia (the questions raised by Cardinal Burke and three other Cardinals as to doctrine contained in Amoris Laetitia). I have heard reports that the Vatican is like an occupied state. Certain sources I’ve spoken with have a fear that communications with Vatican officials are being monitored; some have even reported suspicious anomalies in their telephone conversations in which, after a dropped call, the audio of the last moments of their conversation has played over and over again on a loop, as though they are hearing a recording. Some individuals who work within the Vatican are advising their contacts on the outside not to share sensitive information via email or their Vatican-issued cell phones.

“We have to wonder where all of this is going. It is deeply, deeply concerning. The common phrase we kept hearing that week in Rome is that there is a “war” going on in the Church – a war of the “The Spirit of Vatican II” progressives against the orthodox Catholics. One person after another shockingly used the word “war.” I have never experienced anything like this in my lifetime and I am sure most, if not all regular LifeSite readers, can say the same thing.”

Traditionalists may say that the four Cardinals and Mr Jalsevac are victims of Vatican II, waking up a little late, but let nobody say that they do not mean or intend to be Catholic. The Church will only be healed when true Doctrine and the true Hierarchy come together again, so let Traditionalists pray urgently for these souls waking up to the Conciliar war. May God give them light and strength.

Kyrie eleison.

Fifteen Countries

Fifteen Countries on December 31, 2016

The last day of the year may be a good time to take a survey of the battle for the Catholic Faith in 15 different countries visited in the course of calendar year 2016 by the author of these “Comments.” It is a battle being fought in very difficult conditions, because of course the Catholic Church depends like any organisation on its head, and Pope Francis has been giving all year long the impression of wanting to destroy the Church as it has been for 2,000 years, and to replace it with anything that will please the modern crowds, which means the media, which means the enemies of God. Truly “the Shepherd is struck and the sheep are scattered,” which includes the Society of St Pius X, but let us tell rather how all over the world God is raising up children of Abraham from stones (Mt.III, 9), who if they were to keep quiet, the very stones would have to cry out (Lk. XIX, 40).

In India, a former Society priest and Society seminarian, now a priest, are maintaining the only priory and parish of the Resistance as such on the whole sub-continent. May God be with them. In Brazil, it does seem that the episcopal consecration of Bishop Thomas Aquinas has strengthened the defence of the Faith around his Monastery. Thanks be to God. Mexico has always been strong in the Faith, and it is now the base of the excellent website in Spanish, Non Possumus. In Switzerland a small group of layfolk is happy in the shadow of Écône to learn some of the things that can no longer be so firmly taught in the Seminary itself, as when Archbishop Lefebvre gave so much to so many of us. In the United States where the Society had succeeded in replanting the Church’s anti-liberal doctrine all over the continent, liberalism is regaining lost ground, thanks to the Society’s disastrous change of direction since the Archbishop died. However, the US priests have not yet said their last word, and Fr Zendejas, who was one of them, is bravely rebuilding in their midst.

Two more former Society priests, Fr Chazal and Fr Picot, range all over the Far East and down to Australia and New Zealand. In Korea, a Resistance chapel is maintained in the capital, Seoul, by a courageous medical doctor. In Japan Catholics have been decimated by World War II, Vatican II and now the slide of the Society, but there remain a few Resistance contacts, including one veteran Japanese priest. On the other hand in Asia’s most Catholic country, the Philippines, Fr Chazal has dozens of Mass centres and a seminary which it will become easier to serve with the recent priestly ordination of Fr John, a native Philippino.

Back in Europe, Ireland has a new Resistance priory near Cork in the South, and Poland has a group of Catholics waking up to the Society’s dangerous slide towards Rome, but they have for the moment only one aged Polish priest. Patience. In the Czech Republic there is a parallel group of ardent Catholics, looking towards priestly conversions to Tradition from the mainstream Church. Their faith is strong. In Belgium there is also a strong group in one provincial city, going back to one good priest who many years ago left behind him a legacy of Catholic conviction and piety. In Germany the Resistance is proving slow to take shape because of Germans’ instinctive obedience to authority, but there are stirrings. In Italy also the Resistance is slow off the mark, because the conservatism of Catholics made the Conciliar Revolution tame compared with how it raged in some countries, but Pope Francis may change all that!

And last but not least there is France, which is always a leader in the Church, for good or ill (e.g. either Archbishop Lefebvre, or Teilhard de Chardin). French priests have always predominated within the Society, and they are now predominating in the Resistance, and hundreds of French laity come to regular conferences on the classic anti-liberal Encyclicals of pre-Conciliar Popes. But France as a country is for the moment disintegrating, because the Catholics have no true Pope to unite them, and the citizens want no Catholic King to rally them to the cause of God. However, let us have patience, because God will raise up France again, and he will lift us all up with it.

Kyrie eleison.

Isaiah’s Card

Isaiah’s Card on December 24, 2016

If Almighty God were himself to send Christmas cards, what might he write in his about the coming of his own Son to be born on earth as a human child of his human Mother? In fact God wrote many things about the Messiah through the writers whom he directly inspired to put together the books of the Old Testament, and of course one of the best-known of these quotes comes from the prophet Isaiah, Chapter IX. In the preceding Chapter Isaiah has been prophesying the desolation and ruin that will come upon the Jews for their sins. In IX he turns to the glory of the Messianic age: a great light will light up Galilee – v. 1,2. (Jesus’ home province). Then joy as at harvest-time or after a military victory will come(v.3), after the defeat of the Assyrians, as after Gideon’s defeat of the Madianites (v.4), and the features of war will disappear (v.5). Isaiah continues with the “Christmas card” (glorified in the music of Handel’s Messiah):

6: For a CHILD IS BORN to us, and a son is given to us, and the government is upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called, Wonderful, Counsellor, God the Mighty, the Father of the world to come, the Prince of Peace. 7: His empire shall be multiplied, and there shall be no end of peace: he shall sit upon the throne of David, and upon his kingdom; to establish it and strengthen it with judgment and with justice, from henceforth and for ever: the zeal of the Lord of hosts will perform this.

6: Thus the supreme reason for joy is the coming of the Messiah: to us, to redeem all of us will be born a royal child and son, who will take the weight of the world upon his shoulder (the Church Fathers take this weight to be the Cross), and with a series of epithets Isaiah tells who the child will be: Wonderful, Counsellor, more than able to counsel all nations for their true happiness and prosperity down to the end of the world. God the Mighty – Talmudic Scripture scholars do their best to avoid admitting that Isaiah is saying that the Messiah will also be God (as Catholics know, Second Person of the Holy Trinity), but the definite article in the Hebrew and the meaning of the expression “God the Mighty” everywhere else in the Old Testament strongly indicate that Isaiah means exactly that. The Father of the world to come – the Messiah will be a true and tender Father for the messianic age, for ever and ever (cf. Mt. XI, 28).

7: His empire shall be multiplied – the Catholic Church will spread all over the world and there shall be no end of peace because the Messiah’s Church will generate peace wherever it is respected, until world’s end. He will be a royal descendant of David to sit upon the throne of David to which it was promised that it would last for ever (II Sam. VII), as Our Lord promised to his Church (Mt. XVI, 18; XXVIII, 20). But this kingdom will be a kingdom of the King of Hearts (Jn. XII, 32), strengthened with judgment and with justice, not a kingdom of the Knave of Clubs, established by force (Mt. XXVI, 52; Jn. XVIII, 36). All these marvels will come from the zeal of the Lord God, from his burning desire to bring souls to Heaven to share eternal and uninterrupted bliss with him, for ever and ever.

What makes it difficult for us today to appreciate Isaiah’s glorious vision of the messianic future is that it has turned into the masonic past. The fifth age of the Messiah’s Church, the Age of Apostasy, began 500 years ago when Luther broke up Christendom, so that when another 200 years later it was still not yet obvious for many men that the benefits of Christendom were well on the way to being undermined, Judeo-masons could begin to persuade men that Christendom, or Christ, was no longer necessary. And not even the horrors of another 200 years later of anti-Christian Communism, let loose by the Russian Revolution and spreading worldwide, could persuade men that from the Incarnation onwards, the alternatives for any civilisation are Jesus Christ and his Catholic Church, or the Devil. But it is true.

Happy Christmas, readers!

Kyrie eleison.

Distinguish, Discriminate

Distinguish, Discriminate on December 17, 2016

If the evidence, apparently serious, for Eucharistic miracles taking place within the Novus Ordo Mass (NOM) is to be believed – and such miracles may even be happening frequently, one of the latest seeming to come from Legnica, also in Poland (see here) on Christmas Day of 2013 – then indeed some of us may need to do some rethinking. Here is how one reader put it: “God cannot contradict himself, so his miracles cannot contradict his Church’s teaching. But the NOM does depart from essential Catholic doctrine on the Mass. Therefore either the miracles are false or the NOM is from God, in which case what is the justification for Traditionalists clinging to Tradition? For if the NOM at the heart of the Newchurch is confirmed by miracles, then the Newchurch is also confirmed by God, and the Newpopes, and I have to obey them. I cannot pick and choose, can I?” Yes, you can, and not only you can, but you must, in order to fulfil your absolute duty to keep the Faith.

That is because another name for what you call “picking and choosing” is “distinguishing.” All of us need to distinguish all day long. That is common sense, and that is what St Thomas Aquinas does from beginning to end of his miraculous Summa Theologiae. Let us take a closer look at our friend’s argument.

The basic bone of contention is the NOM. The NOM is a rite of Mass, a book of hundreds if not a thousand pages, containing many things. From a Catholic standpoint the rite as a whole is unquestionably bad, because it radically changes the concept of the Mass from being a propitiatory sacrifice centred on God to being a community meal centred on man. As such, since most Catholics live their religion by attending Mass, then when its concept changes, their religion in effect changes. That is why the NOM is the principal destroyer of the true Church, and the main engine of the Newchurch. That is why the NOM as a whole is not only bad, but very bad indeed.

But that does not mean that all its parts, as parts, are bad. As parts, some are still Catholic because they had to be, in order to deceive the mass of priests when the NOM was introduced in 1969, that it was not essentially different from the Tridentine rite of Mass, especially in the Consecration. Otherwise they would have refused it, and it could not have done its work of destroying the Church. So the NOM is, as to its parts, part good and part bad, while as a whole, it is ambiguous, treacherous, a crooked piece of work.

However, as for men, “to the pure all things are pure” ( Titus I, 15), and so to innocent souls not yet aware of its intrinsic danger for the Faith, it can by its Consecration and good parts, still give grace and spiritual nourishment, especially when these are less strangled by a priest making the ambiguities as Catholic as possible. And as for God, he “writes straight with crooked lines,” says the proverb, and so the bad parts of the NOM need not stop him from working miracles with the Catholic parts to nourish the innocent and to warn the guilty.

Therefore on the one hand the NOM as a whole is very bad, and Traditionalists are absolutely necessary to the Church to witness to its badness, and to make available a true Mass for when souls wake up to the NOM’s badness, as they do at different times and different speeds, so that such souls can keep the Faith and last out the crisis. On the other hand the NOM is in parts still good enough to nourish innocent souls and to enable God to work miracles, also for souls’ nourishment or for their warning. God is not thereby confirming either the NOM as a whole, or the Newchurch as a whole, or the Newpopes as a whole, but he is relying on me to use my brain and the Faith which he gave me to discern good from bad. He wants no mindless robots in his glorious Heaven!

Kyrie eleison.