Eleison Comments

The last two issues of these “Comments” concluded that in today’s confusion in the Universal Church, descending from Popes possessed by Revolutionary ideals, Catholics should turn to God for God’s own solution, because he cannot abandon souls that have not first abandoned him. This solution exists, not complicated, accessible to all, guaranteeing eternal salvation, requiring only a little faith, humility and effort. It is the Devotion to the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary by the practice of the Five First Saturdays, in a spirit of reparation for the insults, blasphemies and outrages committed against the Mother of God.

Why reparation to the Blessed Virgin Mary? Because God, knowing from eternity how perverse the world would become towards its end, gave to his Mother, as St Grignion de Montfort foresaw in the 18^th century, a special motherly part to play from the upheaval of the French Revolution (1789) onwards. Through the 19^th century she was indeed able, for instance through Lourdes, to reach a multitude of souls that liberalism and scientism could otherwise have damned, but by the 20^th century too many souls were spurning even her motherly care. So as God had given to his Church in the 17^th century the Devotion to his own Sacred Heart, so in the 20^th century he gave the Devotion to his Mother’s Immaculate Heart, with the warning to mankind that this would be his last such gift before world’s end. And insults being for him worse to his Mother than to himself, then men’s spurning of her special efforts to save them called for special reparation.

She herself from May to October of 1917 in Fatima, Portugal, presented her Heart as the remedy for the ills of mankind which were about to be made much worse by the outbreak of the Russian Revolution that same October. And as the world plunged downhill in the 1920’s, to the point where today countless Catholics are holding onto their faith only by their fingertips, she gave to any soul a sure and easy means of ensuring its eternal salvation if only it will take, for once in its life, a little trouble on her behalf: to make reparation on five first Saturdays of the month successively for outrages against 1) her Immaculate Conception, 2) her perpetual Virginity, 3) her universal spiritual Motherhood, 4) her images and statues and 5) the little children being cut off from access to her. Press HERE to see the attached flyer for precise details.

The offer of so much in exchange for so relatively little is incredible, but as the flyer says, it makes sense. God has known from eternity all the chaos now closing in on us in which the Fifth Age of the Church is drawing to its close. We are losing our health, our families, our freedom, our countries, our priests, our sacraments, our Church, and soon very possibly our lives. Our world is sinking into a chaos organized by the enemies of God to wipe out the last traces of him. All this of course he knows, and the growing difficulty, even seeming impossibility, of leading Catholic lives. Therefore he offers us the guarantee of salvation if we will make just a little effort to make reparation to his Mother. Thereafter we may go crazy, go to prison, go to our deaths, even lose the faith, but at the moment of death we have God’s promise that she will be there with all graces necessary for salvation. How can any believing Catholic not take up on the offer? There are certainly priests in all parts of the Church who will do their best to help.

But the least we can do for our part is fulfil exactly what Heaven requests, notably the five distinct intentions of reparation, and here is where the flyer must help. Ordered in bulk on paper from the Fatima Centre in Canada, or downloaded on paper, it presents 20 little boxes to tick for the diagonal climb from modern storm to Heavenly calm. Children love ticking boxes. It does no harm to adults. All aboard for Heaven!

Kyrie eleison.

Yesterday, March 25, was the 25th anniversary of the death of a great man of God, Archbishop Lefebvre, to whom so many Catholics keeping the Faith today have such a great debt. When in the 1960’s the Revolutionary demons of the modern world succeeded in bringing under their yoke the mass of Catholic churchmen either during or after the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), it was the Archbishop who almost single-handed stood by that Catholic Truth which Catholic Authority, blinded or cowed, was abandoning. For indeed to obey that Authority given over to the principles of the Revolution, Catholics had to abandon the Truth of the Church’s unchanging Tradition. Or else, to remain faithful to that Truth, they had to enter into “disobedience” to the Church Authorities.

Of course neither the Archbishop nor the Society of St Pius X which he founded in 1970 were in real disobedience, because Catholic Authority is the indispensable servant of Catholic Truth: indispensable, becaue Truth without Authority is torn to pieces amid the warring opinions of fallible men, but servant, because Authority is a means and not an end, the means of protecting and preserving that infallible Truth of Christ which alone can save souls. To this immutable Church Tradition Archbishop Lefebvre remained faithful to the end, yet without scorning or defying those Church Authorities which condemned him to the end. On the contrary he did all he could have done, in fact at a given moment, on his own admission, even more than he should have done, to help them to see the Truth and serve it, for the good of the whole Church, but in vain.

That is when, to ensure the survival of the Truth of salvation, in June of 1988 he consecrated four bishops without that permission of Church Authorities which is normally necessary. They must have hoped that his proceeding without their permission would spell the ruin of his Society, but on the contrary it flourished, because by now a significant number of souls had climbed out of their pre-Conciliar “obedience” to understand that Truth has to come first, and that truthful bishops are essential to the survival of the Church’s Truth.

But what happened to the Society which he left behind him when he died two and a half years later? His Catholic wisdom and personal charisma were no longer there to protect them from the magnetic pull of pre-Conciliar “obedience,” which took the form of seemingly reasonable propositions of a diplomatic compromise between Conciliar Authority and Catholic Tradition. False “obedience,” preferring Authority to Truth, now crept back at the top of the Society from which the Archbishop had exorcised it, and within a few more years his Society was hardly recognisable as its misleaders went to Rome, cap in hand, begging for official recognition from the Church Authorities.

Now Truth has no right to put itself in a position of begging for anything from a group of liars – “Catholicism is Revolutionary” is a dreadful lie – but the Society’s misleaders, then and now, justified their humiliating of Truth by appealing to the Archbishop’s example. For years, they said, he went down to Rome seeking official approval of the Society, and they were doing nothing else. But what might have seemed similar was in reality quite different. While they were going down to Rome in pursuit of some political agreement, by which, as became clear at the latest in the spring of 2012, they were ready to compromise doctrine, on the contrary the Archbishop only ever went down to Rome for the good of the Faith and the Church. For him the offical approval of the Society by Church Authority was only ever a means to help that Authority back towards Tradition and Truth, and when that Authority in the spring of 1988 demonstrated once and for all its refusal to look after Tradition, then the Archbishop broke off all negotiations and diplomatic contacts, and roundly declared that they would only resume when Rome returned to doctrinal Truth. In fact the Archbishop’s successors had never understood him. And today? See next week’s “Comments.”

Kyrie eleison.

On the day of the consecration, please God, of Dom Thomas Aquinas as third bishop for today’s Catholic “Resistance,” it seems appropriate to reproduce the testimony of a close friend of his, Professor Carlos Nougué, now leading a House of Studies attached to Dom Thomas’ Monastery of the Holy Cross. This testimony, which many of you may not have seen, is only slightly adapted from the original, which is accessible on the excellent Mexican site, Non Possumus. Note in particular the good influence of Corção, the close connection with Archbishop Lefebvre, the refusal to approach neo-modernist Rome and the Stalinist methods of Bp Fellay.

Kyrie eleison.!

Miguel Ferreira da Costa was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1954. Before beginning his career in the law, he studied at Saint Benedict College in Rio de Janeiro, where I had the opportunity to be his classmate for a brief while. He took part in the traditionalist and anti-modernist movement organized around Gustavo Corção and Permanencia magazine; then he began his life of “faithful warrior and veteran of the post-Conciliar war for the Faith” – he quit the law to become a monk with the name of Thomas Aquinas, in the French monastery of le Barroux, where Dom Gérard was Prior at that time, and he was ordained priest in 1980, in Écône, by Archbishop Lefebvre. There he enjoyed the friendship, the example and the teaching of the SSPX’s Founder.

In 1987 he came to Brazil with a group of monks from le Barroux to found the Monastery of the Holy Cross in Nova Friburgo, up in the hills behind Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. But in the meantime Dom Gérard, despite the grave warnings of the Archbishop, was advancing towards an agreement with Conciliar Rome, to which Dom Thomas Aquinas was also opposed. A split was inevitable. The Monastery of the Holy Cross, with Archbishop Lefebvre’s support, became independent in 1988, while retaining good relations with the SSPX. However, upon written advice of the Archbishop, the SSPX was not to have jurisdiction over him, because as Prior of the Monastery he needed autonomy.

Providential advice, because relations between the SSPX and the Monastery were deteriorating, especially with the approach of the SSPX to neo-modernist Rome. Dom Thomas refused to sing at Sunday Mass the Te Deum asked for by Bp. Fellay to celebrate Benedict XVI’s Motu Proprio on the Mass. Similarly, for the “lifting of the excommunications” by the same Pope, Dom Thomas wrote to Bp. Fellay a letter refusing to follow him towards an agreement with Conciliar Rome. Thereupon I myself saw Bp. De Galarreta and Fr. Bouchacourt when they came to the Monastery to tell Dom Thomas that he had 15 days to leave the Monastery if he wanted the Monastery to continue receiving help and the sacraments (including Ordinations) from the SSPX.

I wrote to Bp. Fellay to complain about this injustice. He answered me that Dom Thomas had a mental problem, and as long as he did not leave the Monastery, it would not receive the Society’s help. I replied: “Then I should have the same mental problem, because I have known him for twelve years and I never realized.” It was truly like Stalinism, with its psychiatric hospitals for opponents of the Stalinist regime. But Dom Thomas hesitated: if he left the Monastery, that would be its ruin regarding the Faith, but if he stayed, he would deprive it of needed help. Then Bp. Williamson wrote to Dom Thomas promising the Monastery all the sacraments it would need. This meant Dom Thomas could stay.

This was enough for all of us to start reacting: it was the beginning of what is now known as the Resistance, which had as its first organ the website called SPES, no longer on line. The Monastery then became a reception center for refugee priests from the SSPX with nowhere to live. It was where Bp. Faure was consecrated, and now it is where Dom Thomas Aquino Ferreira da Costa himself will be consecrated, my spiritual father and the closest friend that God could have given to me.

Here are some small good news and some big bad news, but the balance may be a little redressed by the bad news being of the world while the good news is of the Church. First, the triple good news.

At the beginning of February at the “Resistance” Seminary of St Grignion de Montfort near Angers in France there was a meeting of the half dozen French priests of the Priestly Union of Marcel Lefebvre, USML for short. Bishop Faure presided. Fr Bruno, Benedictine monk, co-ordinated. The USML still has no structure worth speaking of, any more than did the remnant of faithful priests surviving the disaster of the NOM and Vatican II, but vigorous discussion of action to be taken did not prevent a meeting of minds. Faith may hold the USML friends together for a while yet.

Next, on the following day five young men, three from France, one each from England and Italy, received the cassock at the hands of Bishop Faure in a Pontifical Mass celebrated in the church of the Dominican Friary in Avrillé. Under the impulse of the USML the Seminary opened last autumn with eight seminarians, only one of whom is no longer there. They receive a large part of their daily schooling in the same Friary from the Dominican priests who are thus repaying a debt of their own origins to the Archbishop’s Society and Seminary in Écône, where their three pioneers, still their leaders of today, received their initial schooling in philosophy and theology in the late 1970’s and early ‘80’s. Truly, “What goes around, comes around,” but from Bishop Fellay’s Newsociety, hell-bound for Conciliar Rome, the Dominicans parted company prudently last year.

And the last part of the good news from France is that by no means all the SSPX priests in the French District are blindly following their misleader. How could they, when the present head of Conciliar Rome commits day by day, in word and deed, one outrage after another against the Catholic Faith, as though he were set upon destroying the entire Church? The Archbishop’s Society may be sinking, and it may yet sink in this overwhelming storm of liberalism and neo-modernism, but it has not yet sunk. We must pray to the Archbishop in case he can save his Society from the deluded liberals into whose hands it has fallen.

The bad news from the world (see http://​www.​tfmetalsreport.​com/​blog/​7422/​dangerous-moves-new-cold-war) is that the Cold War between the West and Russia is heating up again and becoming more dangerous than ever since the Cuban missiles crisis of 1961. In particular at the end of January the United States government announced its decision to put a fully equipped combat brigade, mobile but permanent, in the countries of East Europe bordering directly on Russia, from the Baltic States down to Syria. Never has US military force been placed so close to Russia. The previous closest was Berlin. And the arms race is back on. Both sides are modernising their nuclear weapons, now much more expensive and dangerous, being smaller, more precise, more controllable and therefore more “usable.” The nuclear clock is ticking – at 11h57, say some – and there is no debate.

How can the Western media not be making known a situation developing so dramatically? Because they are controlled by the enemies of God and man who want the Third World War to give them that global dictatorship to which they are convinced that they are entitled. Is there a human hope of stopping them from inflicting upon all of us their folly? It depends not on them but upon Almighty God, whom they are serving as a scourge for ourselves, godless mankind. Let each of us pray the Rosary and do our daily duty. We can do little more. We can do no less.

Kyrie eleison.