Eleison Comments

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.

Trump’s Election

Trump’s Election on December 10, 2016

The essential thing to say about the election last month of Donald Trump as the next President of the United States is that it is a God-given reprieve from years and years of liberal government, but unless the American people themselves turn back seriously to Almighty God, then the reprieve will be swept away by a return of the liberals in force to destroy the United States once and for all, as Hilary Clinton would have done, had she been elected.

Now it is true that not many people today think of politics in terms of Almighty God, but that is exactly the problem. To shut him out of life, especially out of politics, has been a crusade for Freemasons and liberals ever since the end of their 18th century. Liberty from God has been the crusade of their substitute religion, secular humanism. Similarly in the 20th century Communism with or without the name has triumphed against nature all over the world because it acts like a religion, being, as Pius XI calls it, the messianism of materialism. And liberalism and Communism are why the entire Western world has been tilting to the left for hundreds of years.

And that is no doubt why a large number of voters in that American election voted for the candidate who lost. She was known all over the nation for her lying, immorality and treason. Her criminal record was notorious, including the suspicion of her having been responsible with her husband for the murder of well over fifty men and women who had got in the way of their ambition and careers. How could anybody halfway decent have even thought of voting for her, let alone more than half of all Americans who voted (she did not win the Electoral College)? Paul Craig Roberts himself, excellent commentator on the American political scene, is baffled by that question. The missing answer is surely that that woman incarnated the war against God. For liberals, liberty is their religion. That she proudly broke all of God’s commandments was an argument not against her, but for her. She is a Saint of liberalism.

Now her conqueror, Donald Trump, is not, to all appearances, a specially godly man, and he is still liberal in various ways – who is not? – but he has within him a good dose of that old-fashioned decency and generosity which used to be typical of the best in America and Americans. Therefore he is instinctively against ungodly people, and after years and years of self-righteous liberals under a series of liberal Presidents trampling all over decent Americans, he had had enough, and he stepped into politics “to give back to this country some of what it has given to me.” And after the same years and years of what had in fact been a one-party System, because there had not been since Governor Wallace’s time “a dime’s worth of difference between the Republicans and the Democrats,” Trump bucked the System, gave voice to the people’s frustration, and a host of decent souls voted him into office. But the System is furious.

Therefore he must now think hard. He has become President-elect on the strength of decent instincts against liberal ideology. But that is a flash in the pan, because to fight against ideology with instincts is like fighting tanks with a pea-shooter. To fight a false ideology one needs a true ideology, and to fight against war on God one needs peace with God, which will be on God’s terms and not on man’s. Now God is all-powerful and infinitely good, and he can undo the worst that his enemies can attempt to do against him with the merest flick of his little finger, so to speak. But he is not going to grant victory over the Synagogue of Satan if he knows that the people that he is saving are going to go straight back to Satan. The people must come away from Satan and turn back sincerely to God, who is not deceived.

At the very least Donald Trump himself must pray – ACTS – with Adoration, Contrition, Thanksgiving and Supplication. God has been with him, to grant this reprieve. Let us all include him and President Putin in our own prayers, to prolong the reprieve. Otherwise it could soon be over.

Kyrie eleison.

NOM Miracles?

NOM Miracles? on December 3, 2016

In the United Sates last year there arose a serious controversy as to whether God can work miracles within the framework of the Novus Ordo Mass. Now if God does work supernatural miracles, it is obviously for them to be believed in, so that they will strengthen people’s supernatural faith. And if he wants something outside of the natural order to be believed in, he is obviously going to provide enough evidence, like Lazarus walking out of his tomb in front of a large crowd of bystanders. And in this respect the most convincing evidence is of a material and physical sort, such as can in no way be the product of any human mind (however pious), like the fireworks of the sun in Fatima in October, 1917. Then what is the material and physical evidence of a eucharistic miracle having taken place in any Novus Ordo Mass?

One such miracle is alleged to have taken place in the parish church of Sokulka, Eastern Poland. On October 12, 2008, a priest, ordained five years ago by a Polish bishop consecrated in 1980, dropped a Sacred Host on the altar step while distributing Holy Communion. He stopped to pick it up and placed it in the small vessel containing water next to the Tabernacle. After Mass it was locked inside the sacristy safe for the Host to dissolve in the water, so that the Real Presence would no longer be there and the water could be safely discarded. This procedure is altogether normal for such accidents in the Catholic liturgy.

But when on October 19 a parish Sister went to check on the dissolving Host, she saw in its centre some matter intensely red in colour, like a blood clot. She immediately informed the parish priest who came with other priests to observe what looked like a piece of living flesh. All observers were amazed. Next came the local Archbishop, of Bialystok, with several diocesan officials. All of them were deeply moved. By the Archbishop’s instructions, on October 30 the Host was removed from the water, transferred onto a small corporal and placed in the Tabernacle to dry out. To this day it retains the form of a blood clot.

On January 7, 2009, a sample from the Host was taken to be examined by two pathomorphologists, separately, at the nearby Medical University of Bialystok. Their unanimous judgment, but independent of one another, was that “of all the tissues of living organisms, the sample most resembles human myocardial tissue,” from the left ventricle of the heart, typical for a living person in a state of agony. Furthermore both pathologists found, presumably under their microscopes, that the fibres of the myocardial tissue and the structure of the bread were so tightly bonded together that any possibility of a human fabrication was ruled out. On January 29 this material and physical evidence was presented to the Metropolitan Curia in Bialystok, where the Church’s official judgment upon the supernatural origin of the occurrence is patiently awaited. In that wait, said the Archbishop in a sermon of October, 2009, decisive will be the spiritual fruits among Catholics. Already there has been a significant rise in the piety and religious practice of local Catholics, and from abroad there have been hundreds of pilgrimages, with numerous miracles of healing and conversion also taking place.

If the material evidence is to be believed, then in Sokulka God worked one more in a long series down the ages of eucharistic miracles to help souls to believe in something normally difficult enough to believe in, namely that he is Really Present beneath the appearances, once consecrated, of bread and wine. But how is that possible when Traditional Catholics know that the New Mass is the single major cause of the Church’s destruction by loss of faith since Vatican II? An answer may be that the Sacred Heart, knowing that the shepherds were mainly responsible for the ambiguous NOM, refused to abandon his sheep, and continues to feed them with what is still Catholic amidst the ambiguity. And amidst all the Newchurch’s relative carelessness in dealing with the Holy Eucharist, the Sokulka event is also a daunting reminder to shepherds and sheep alike – “Remember whom you are handling – it is I, your God!”

Kyrie eleison.

Five “Dubia”

Five “Dubia” on November 26, 2016

In a scandal of a gravity unprecedented even in Pope Francis’ scandal-ridden reign as Catholic Pope since 2013, when challenged by four honourable Cardinals on his seeming denial of the very basis of the Church’s teaching on morals, he has just given answers in public which virtually affirm the freedom of man from the moral law of Almighty God. With this papal affirmation of the Conciliar religion of man as opposed to the Catholic religion of God, a schism in the Universal Church draws that much closer. For half a century since Vatican II, the Conciliar Popes have managed to remain in a way the one head of two opposing religions, but that contradiction could not last indefinitely, and it must soon result in a split.

In 2014 and 2015 Francis held Synods in Rome to consult the world’s bishops on questions concerning the human family. On March 19 of this year he published his post-synodal Apostolic Exhortation on “Love in the Family,” the eighth of whose nine chapters raised controversy from the very start. On September 15 four Cardinals in particular sent to the Pope a private and perfectly respectful letter in which they asked him as Supreme Pontiff to clear up five “dubia” or doubtful points of doctrine, left unclear in the Exhortation. Here is the essence of the five points:—

1 From the Exhortation’s #305, can a married person living like husband and wife with a person not their lawful spouse from now on be given sacramental Absolution and Communion while they continue to live in their quasi-married state?

2 From #304, need one still believe that there are absolute moral norms which prohibit intrinsically evil acts, and which are binding without exception?

3 From #301, can one still say that a person living in violation of one of God’s commandments, e.g. in adultery, is in an objective state of grave habitual sin?

4 From #302, can one still say that the circumstances or intentions surrounding an act intrinsically evil by its object can never change it into being subjectively good, or acceptable as a choice?

5 From #303, must we still exclude any creative role of conscience, so that conscience may still never authorize exceptions to absolute moral norms which forbid acts intrinsically evil by their object?

To these five designedly yes-or-no questions the answer of the Catholic Church from Our Divine Lord onwards has always been clear, and has never changed: Communion may not be given to adulterers; there are absolute moral norms; there is such a thing as “grave habitual sin”; good intentions cannot make evil acts good; conscience cannot make evil acts lawful. In other words, to the five yes-or-no, black-or-white questions, the Church’s answer has always been, 1 No, 2 Yes, 3 Yes, 4 Yes, 5 Yes.

On November 16, just ten days ago, the four Cardinals made their letter public (cf. Mt.XVIII, 15–17). On Nov. 18, in an interview given to the italian newspaper Avvenire, Pope Francis gave the exact opposite yes-or-no answers: 1 Yes, 2 No, 3 No, 4 No, 5 No. (He did affirm each time that “Such things are not black-or-white, we are called to discern,” but he was merely attempting thereby to confuse the unmoving questions of principle with moving questions of application of principle, which come after the questions of principle.)

All credit to the four Cardinals for obtaining light and truth for many confused sheep that wish to get to Heaven: Brandmüller, Burke, Caffarra and Meisner. They may be immersed in the Novus Ordo, but they have obviously not lost all courage or sense of their duty. There can be no question of their having acted out of any but the best of motives in pressing the Pope to make himself clear. And where does that clarity leave the Church? It must be on the brink of schism.

Kyrie eleison.