Eleison Comments

Church’s Infallibility

<u>Church’s</u> Infallibility on September 17, 2016

From earth to Heaven go up problems. From heaven to earth come down solutions. Many a Catholic problem needs only to be taken on high to become rather less problematic. A classic example might be the problem of the Conciliar Popes, a problem with which we have been confronted since 2013 as never before, at least so brutally. There is in any case a mystery involved, but if we do not climb high enough, we fall easily prey to one of the two classic temptations: either he is the Pope so I must obey, or I cannot obey so he cannot be Pope. But if I climb above the humanity of the Pope to the divinity of the Church, then I realise that so-called Papal infallibility is actually Church infallibility, which leaves much more room for this or that Pope, or even a series of Popes, to be rather less than satisfactory. Let us go straight to the 1870 definition of infallibility, itself infallible. Here is the text, with some words highlighted, and figures inserted:—

We teach and define that it is a dogma Divinely revealed that the Roman pontiff, when he speaks ex cathedra , that is when in discharge of the office of pastor and doctor of all Christians, 1 by virtue of his supreme Apostolic authority, he 2 defines 3 a doctrine regarding faith or morals 4 to be held by the universal Church, by the Divine assistance promised to him in Blessed Peter, is possessed of that infallibility with which the Divine Redeemer willed that his Church should be endowed in defining doctrine regarding faith or morals, and that therefore such definitions of the Roman pontiff are of themselves and not from the consent of the Church irreformable. —?Vatican Council, Sess. IV, Const. de Ecclesiâ Christi, Chapter iv.

In this text we see clearly the famous four conditions for the Pope to be speaking infallibly, but we see also immediately following the two words here highlighted which seem to be not often noticed, but which make very clear where the Pope’s infallibility comes from: it comes not from himself but from the Church. Let us draw a familiar comparison from modern life, from a housewife plugging her electric iron into a socket in the wall. For the iron to be heated, she must plug it into the socket, but the electricity which will then heat her iron comes obviously not from herself but from the local power station.

For a Papal definition to be infallible, the Pope must plug the four conditions into the Church, so to speak, and he is the one and only person on earth that can do that, which is why it is called “Papal infallibility,” but the infallible protection from error which he then obtains comes not from himself but from the Holy Ghost through the Church, somewhat as the electricity comes not from the housewife but from the power station through the socket. And so just as the housewife may have all kinds of personal qualities or defects, but just so long as she puts the plug into the socket, they make no difference to her iron being heated or not, similarly the Pope may be a Saint or much less than a saint, but if he is the duly appointed or elected Pope, then from the moment that he engages the four conditions, his definition will be necessarily free from error.

What this means is that whenever the Pope does not engage those four conditions, strictly speaking he can talk nonsense just like the rest of us, without the Church ceasing to be infallible. And in fact her Ordinary Infallibility is much more important than this Extraordinary Infallibility of Papal definitions, as previous issues of these “Comments” sought to illustrate with another familiar comparison, that between a mountain and its snowcap (see ECs 343 and 344, Feb 8 and 15 of 2014). The snowcap may provide greater visibility, but to be visible where it is seen it totally depends on the mountain’s bulk beneath it. So once we take the problem on high, it is not so important for the Church if the Conciliar Popes are out of their minds. We may suffer here below from fallible Popes, but Mother Church remains serenely infallible.

Kyrie eleison.

Islam’s Origins

Islam’s Origins on September 10, 2016

In recommending to readers “Plot Against the Church” by Maurice Pinay, a book which proves with a wealth of documents that the main external enemy of the Catholic Church for 2,000 years has been the Jews, these “Comments” stated that Jews were behind Islam, Freemasonry and Communism. No readers contested that they were behind Freemasonry and Communism, but a few asked what shows that they were also behind Islam. Indeed since Islam arose in the seventh century after Christ there is for Islam nothing like the documentation that exists for the modern roots of Freemasonry and Communism. In fact experts on Islam will say that even many original documents on the beginning of Islam may have been destroyed, precisely to cover up its true origins. We are left with the text of the Koran itself and historical arguments to point to Jews as the originators of Islam.

As for the text of the Koran, one who studied it closely before the Council, Hanna Zakarias, came to the conclusion in his book “True Mohammed, False Koran” that it was entirely the work of a Jewish Rabbi. To support his thesis that Islam is simply Judaism explained to Arabs by a Rabbi to convert them to the one true God of the Old Testament, Zakarias maintains that there is no story, no detail in the Koran that is not specifically Jewish, referring to the Old Testament, the Talmud or other Jewish literature. Only a Jew, he argues, could so glorify Israel as the Koran does, at the head of the nations, sole receiver of the one Revelation of the one true God. Thus passages in the Koran honouring for instance John the Baptist and the Blessed Virgin honour them purely as Jews, cutting out all connection to Christianity (Sourat XIX, 1–21). As for Jesus, he may have been the son of Mary, but he was certainly not the Son of God.

On the contrary a post-conciliar student of Islam, Laurent Lagartempe, states in his book “Origins of Islam” that there are many questions as to the historical person of Mohammed, and he argues that the Koran is a medley of disparate texts, more or less stabilized only two centuries after the beginning of Islam, to justify the new religion, and to act as its holy text to rival with the Old and New Testaments of Moses and Jesus Christ respectively. But Lagartempe does not contest a significant presence of Judaism in the Koran, nor its influence.

As for the historical arguments for Jews being behind Islam, Pinay’s book documents the well-known part played by Jews in helping the Arabs to conquer Catholic Spain between 711 and 788, reconquered by the Catholics only in 1492. Lagartempe reasonably supposes that the preceding Arab conquest of North Africa from 647 to 710 was also helped by the Jews, because those countries south of the Mediterranean, once a thriving part of Christendom, have ever since remained mostly under Arab control.

However, perhaps the main argument for Jews being behind Islam is of a more general order, and hardly disputable, resting on the quite special role played in history by the people of the Messiah, Our Lord Jesus Christ. To begin with, the training of the Israelites for that role by God himself stretched over 2,000 years from Abraham to Christ. See in the Old Testament how specially God both rewarded and punished them, to form them as the cradle of the Messiah to come. This formation gave to the Jews a quite special familiarity with the one true God, and they have never entirely lost it ever since. And that familiarity gives them a special ability to fabricate substitute religions that seem to satisfy men’s real religious needs.

Alas, they refused their Messiah when he came, and that refusal gives them a special motivation to fabricate false religions to pull human beings away from Christ and away from eternal salvation. Here is why Maurice Pinay can show how they have fought down all the centuries against the Catholic Church. Today they are indisputably behind the Muslim invasion of the once Catholic nations of Europe, to dissolve the last remnants of the Faith, and so stop those nations from opposing their New World Order.

Kyrie eleison.

Mary’s Glory

Mary’s Glory on September 3, 2016

Between the Catholic Feasts of Our Lady’s Assumption into Heaven (August 15) and Our Lady’s Birthday (September 8), it may be a good moment to reflect upon a major Protestant objection to the devotion of Catholics to Our Lady, namely, all attention, honour and prayer directed towards Our Lady is so much taken away from Our Lord – he alone is our Redeemer, so to him alone should all our devotion, worship and prayer be directed. The following quotation, coming as from Our Lord himself, puts many such objections in a different perspective:—

The human eye cannot stare at the sun, whereas it has no difficulty in gazing upon the moon. The spiritual eye of the human soul cannot behold the perfection of God as it is in itself, but it can look upon the perfection of Mary. Mary is like the moon with regard to the sun. By its light she is lit up, and that light is what she reflects upon yourselves, but she softens that light in a kind of spiritual mist by which it becomes bearable to behold for your limited nature. That is why for centuries it is her that I have been putting forward as a model for all of you that I wish to have as brothers, precisely as children of Mary, like myself.

She is the Mother. How sweet it is for children to look upon their mother! I gave her to you for that reason, so that you would have a gentle Majesty to behold, splendid enough to seize and to hold your gaze but not so brilliant as to dazzle your sight. Only to souls chosen out by me for special reasons which you cannot dispute have I shown myself in all the brilliance of the God-Man, absolute Intelligence and Perfection. However, the gift of that vision had to be accompanied by another gift to make living souls capable of enduring such knowledge of me without being annihilated by it.

Whereas all of you can look upon Mary. Not because she is like you, far from it! Her purity raises her so high that I, her Son and her God, treat her with veneration. Her perfection is so great that all Paradise bows before her throne which bathes in the changeless smile and everlasting brilliance of Our Threeness. But this brilliance which permeates and imbues her more than it does any other creature of God is tempered by the purest veils of her stainless flesh through which she shines like a star, gathering together all of God’s light and spreading it around like a gentle illumination upon all his creatures.

And then she is for ever your Mother. And she has all forms of the Mother’s kindness, making excuses and interceding for you and patiently leading you on. Great is Mary’s joy when she can say to a soul that loves her, “Love my Son.” Great is my own joy when I can say to a soul that loves me, “Love my Mother.” And greatest of all is our double joy when we see either a soul at my feet leaving me to go to my Mother, or one of you held in my Mother’s arms leaving her to come to me. Because the Mother is jubilant when she can give to her Son more souls enamoured of her, and the Son is jubilant when he sees more souls loving his Mother. For when it comes to our glory neither of us seeks to overcome the other, the glory of each of us being complete in the glory of the other.

That is why I say to you, “My child, love Mary. I give her to you. She loves you, and with nothing but the gentleness of her smile she will light up your existence.”

If Catholics knew how to let her light shine through them, they would draw numberless souls towards her Son and towards God, as truly devout Protestants can only wish.

Against N.O.M.

Against N.O.M. on August 27, 2016

The principle is clear in theory: to follow Our Lord we need, in the immortal words of St Augustine, to “slay the errors but love the erring.” That means that we should never so slay the errors as to slay also the erring (i.e. those who are in error, unless they are dangerous and incorrigible), and we should never so love the erring as to love also their errors. In practice it can be all too easy to slide from slaying the error into slaying the erring, or to slide from loving the erring into loving their error. In different words: “The Church is uncompromising in principle because she believes, she is tolerant in practice because she loves.The enemies of the Church are tolerant in principle because they do not believe, and uncompromising in practice because they do not love.” That is well said.

In case anybody still thinks that the author of these “Comments” slides from compassion for the misled sheep within the Novus Ordo into love of the errors of the New Mass of Paul VI, here are extracts from the letter of an older reader whose own bitter experience has led him to the conclusion that Novus Ordo Catholics do not deserve to be given too much benefit of the doubt. He has obviously run into some of the worst of the Newchurch. By its fruits . . .

I was a typical grade school child in a parish of 2500 families in a neighbourhood that was nearly 60% Catholic.All of us were formed in the old religion, and when the Conciliar Revolution began destroying the Church in the 1970’s we all of us had to sense that something was wrong. All Catholics have a duty to be faithful to Tradition and to find out where it lies, for instance in the reading materials available to everybody. For 50 years I myself have pleaded, begged and prayed for my Catholic friends and family to read the things that I have read, but they simply do not want to.The great majority enjoy the Conciliar religion: divorce and easy annulments, accommodating preachers, feminism, democracy, adultery, homosexuality and LUV hold them fast to the Novus Ordo, just the opposite of a love of truth.

I would say I know the Novus Ordo mentality because for over two years I came into close contact with Novus Ordo judges and priests and laity. I can assure you that it is not love of truth that motivates them. These Church authorities can be trusted to do exactly what nearly all, if not all, Novus Ordo catholics want them to do, which is to ignore their sinful lives. It seems as though the only ‘sinners’ they dare to admonish, instruct or counsel are smokers, polluters, insensitive Tradcats and overpopulators. Remember, more than 90% of married Catholics use birth control and teach their children to do the same.The Novus Ordo has become a global organisation of conscience placation and novelty on a grand scale. Novus Ordo Catholics really do believe that everybody goes to Heaven. To ‘work out their salvation in fear and trembling’ (Phil.II, 12) is not a thought they entertain.

Birth control was in modern times a turning point from the will of God to the will of man. Not to use birth control for those living in a big city can seem almost impossible, but who got it wrong? God, or the modern city? God gave to his Church in 1968 a great chance to stay on track when he inspired a reluctant Paul VI to remain faithful to the Church’ s unchangeable doctrine, but a mass of churchmen were promptly unfaithful to the Pope. And the result was that “organisation of conscience placation” denounced above. And who can deny that the replacement of the true sacrifice of the Mass played from 1969 a huge part in Catholics giving up sacrificial lives to get to Heaven, in order to enjoy the easy life and go to Hell? What a responsibility of the priests!

Kyrie eleison.

Bishop Fellay – III

Bishop Fellay – III on August 20, 2016

Reading the two recent issues of these “Comments” on the mindset which induces the Superior General of the Society of St Pius X to pursue implacably a merely practical agreement with Church authorities in Rome, a good friend reminded me that the ideas driving him were laid out four years ago in his Letter of April 14, 2012, in which he replied to the Society’s three other bishops, who warned him seriously against making any merely practical agreement with Rome. Many readers today of these “Comments” may have forgotten, or never known of, that warning, or Bishop Fellay’s reply. Indeed the exchange of letters tells a great deal that is worth recalling. Here they are, summarised as cruelly as usual, with brief comments:—

The three bishops’ main objection to any practical agreement with Rome being made without a doctrinal agreement was the depth of the doctrinal gulf between Conciliar Rome and the Traditional Catholic Society. Half a year before he died Archbishop Lefebvre said that the more one analyses the documents and aftermath of Vatican II, the more one comes to realise that the problem is less any classic errors in particular, even such as religious liberty, collegiality and ecumenism, than “a total perversion of mind” in general, underlying all the particular errors and proceeding from “a whole new philosophy founded on subjectivism.” To a key argument of Bishop Fellay that the Romans are no longer hostile but benevolent towards the Society, the three bishops replied with another quote from the Archbishop: such benevolence is just a “manoeuvre,” and nothing could be more dangerous for “our people” than to “put ourselves into the hands of Conciliar bishops and modernist Rome.” The three bishops concluded that a merely practical agreement would tear the Society apart, and destroy it.

To this deep objection, as deep as the gulf between subjectivism and objective truth, Bishop Fellay replied (google Bishop Fellay, April 14, 2012):— 1 that the bishops were “too human and fatalistic.” 2 The Church is guided by the Holy Ghost. 3 Behind Rome’s real benevolence towards the SSPX is God’s Providence. 4 To make the Council’s errors amount to a “super-heresy” is an inappropriate exaggeration, 5 which will logically lead Traditionalists into schism. 6 Not all Romans are modernists because fewer and fewer of them believe in Vatican II, 7 to the point that were the Archbishop alive today he would not have hesitated to accept what the SSPX is being offered. 8 In the Church there will always be wheat and chaff, so Conciliar chaff is no reason to back away. 9 How I wish I could have turned to the three of you for advice, but each of you in different ways “strongly and passionately failed to understand me,” and even threatened me in public. 10 To oppose Faith to Authority is “contrary to the priestly spirit.”

And finally, the briefest of comments on each of Bishop Fellay’s arguments:—

1 “Too human”? As the Archbishop said, the great gulf in question is philosophical (natural) rather than theological (supernatural). “Too fatalistic”? The three bishops were rather realistic than fatalistic. 2 Are Conciliar churchmen guided by the Holy Ghost when they destroy the Church? 3 Behind Rome’s real malevolence is its firm resolve to dissolve the SSPX’s resistance to the new Conciliar religion – as of how many Traditional Congregations before it! 4 Only subjectivists themselves cannot see the depth of the gulf between subjectivism and Truth. 5 Objectivist Catholics clinging to Truth are far from schism. 6 Freemasons hold the ring in Rome. Any non-modernists have no power there to speak of. 7 To believe that the Archbishop would have accepted Rome’s present offers is to mistake him completely. The basic problem has got only much worse since his day. 8 Bishop Fellay’s spoon is much too short for him to sup with the Roman devils (objectively speaking). 9 The three bishops understood Bishop Fellay only too well, but he did not want to hear what all three of them separately had to say. Does he take himself to be infallible? 10 St Paul for sure imagined that Authority could oppose Faith – Gal. I, 8–9, and II, 11. Did St Paul lack “priestly spirit”?

Kyrie eleison.

Bishop Fellay – II

Bishop Fellay – II on August 13, 2016

An error is never properly refuted until it is uprooted. In other words truly to overcome an error one needs to show not only that it is an error, but why it is an error. Let us suppose, with last week’s “Comments,” that the June 28 statement of the Superior General of the Society of St Pius X, by looking forward to the Society’s pious priesthood resolving the Church’s crisis of Faith, commits the error of putting the cart of the priesthood before the horse of the Faith. Then let us show that this error has its roots in our age’s almost universal undervaluing of the mind and overvaluing of the will, resulting even unconsciously in a scorn for doctrine (except for the Beatles’ doctrine of “All you need is luv”).

Already towards the beginning of the Statement there occurs a hint of this error when the Statement says that the central principle condemned in Pascendi, Pius X’s great condemnation of modernism, is that of “independence.” No. The principle he constantly condemns as being at the root of modernism is rather agnosticism, the doctrine that the mind can know nothing behind what appears to the senses. Upon that unknowing follows the independence of the mind from its object, followed in turn by the will’s declaration of independence from everything else on which it does not want to depend. It is in the nature of things that the mind must first be suicided before the will can declare its independence. So when the Statement puts independence before agnosticism at the heart of Pascendi, that is a hint that the Statement is a part rather of the Church’s problem than of its solution.

And where does this downgrading of the mind and doctrine in turn come from? Primarily from Luther who called human reason a “prostitute,” and who more than anybody else launched Chistendom on the sentimental path to its self-destruction today. But that took all of 500 years? Yes, because there was natural and Catholic resistance along the way. But Luther was right when he told the Pope that in the end he would destroy him – “Pestis eram vivus, functus tua mors ero, Papa” – A plague to you I was when I had breath, But once I’m dead, O Pope, I’ll be your death.

To this radical and gigantic error of the downgrading of mind and doctrine may be attributed two sub-errors in the case of the author of the June 28 Statement: firstly, his misunderstanding of Archbishop Lefebvre, and secondly his too great understanding of Madame Cornaz (pen-name Rossinière).

Like many of us seminarians in Écône when Archbishop Lefebvre himself presided there, Bernard Fellay was rightly enchanted and bewitched by the outstanding example before our very eyes of what a Catholic priest could and should be. But the backbone of his priesthood and of his heroic fight for the Faith was not his piety – many modernists are “pious” – but his doctrine, doctrine of the eternal priesthood, profoundly allergic to liberalism and modernism. Nor did the Archbishop ever say that his Society would save the Church. Rather its priests were to safeguard the Church’s priceless treasures for better days.

The person who did say that the Society’s priests would save the Church, as Fr Ortiz has reminded us, was Madame Cornaz, a family mother from Lausanne, Switzerland, whose life spanned most of the 20th century, and who between 1928 and 1969 received communications supposedly from Heaven on how married couples should sanctify the priesthood (!). The communications started again in 1995 (!) when she met a Society priest whom she persuaded, and through him Bishop Fellay, that it was the SSPX priests who were destined by Providence to save the Church by propagating her “Homes of Christ the Priest.” With all his authority the Superior General supported her project, but the negative reaction of Society priests made him rapidly renounce it in public. Inwardly however, did her mystical vision of the Society’s exalted future stay with him? It seems quite possible. Like Martin Luther King, the Superior General “has a dream.”

Kyrie eleison.