Eleison Comments

Music is gravely misunderstood and its power seriously underestimated by liberals. They are still human enough to enjoy some music or other, logically some kind of trash – and to see how much music matters to people just try telling them that theirs is trash. But in any case liberals’ subjectivist ideology, whereby man is the master of reality (up to and including Almighty God), makes them deny that there is anything objective about music. So for liberals there is no such thing as a composer using certain means to attain certain ends, and there can be no saying that any one piece or kind of music is “better” than another. Music, they will say, is purely a matter of the listener’s mood or taste – “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” and horribly discordant music is just as “good” as the most famous music from the past.

Of course such liberals are completely wrong. A Chinese proverb says that “when the mode of the music changes, the walls of the city shake,” a truth amply illustrated by the advent of Rock music in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Plato knew so well the moral influence of music for good or ill that in his ideal Republic certain kinds of music would have been banned. Woe to parents today who do not care what music their children listen to! “It’s only music,” they will say, and so saying they will deserve to lose their children to the Pied Pipers of Rock. Music is supremely important, and it is objective in nature – is it not common sense that all military music and no lullaby will emphasize rhythm? But what do liberals care for common sense? They are doing everything possible to wipe it out. It is too real for their dream.

A major turning-point in modern times between men’s recognition and their refusal of the objective order of reality planted by God in all his works was the French Revolution (1789–1794). Because Beethoven’s life straddled that Revolution and gave to it its outstanding musical expression, some of his best-known works can be used to illustrate clearly certain objective truths concerning music. From Haydn and Mozart he inherited the objective order of the 18^th century. To his successors it was mainly Beethoven who bequeathed the increasing musical disorder (not without its beauties) of the 19^th century, to be followed by the musical chaos and disintegration (with exceptions) of supposedly “serious” music in the 20^th and 21^st centuries. Beethoven might then be called the grandfather or great-grandfather of Rock. That statement may so shock many a lover of Beethoven that it must immediately be qualified by saying that it took a great musician to launch the destruction of music.

Fast approaching – February 19 to 21 – is the “Beethoven Blast” to be held here in Broadstairs from the Friday 18h00, to the Sunday mid-day. A young American pianist who can sight-read nearly all of the 32 piano sonatas and Liszt’s piano versions for two hands of the nine symphonies, has offered to play as many of the sonatas as can be made to fit into one weekend, together with extracts from the symphonies chosen to illustrate the nature of music and how Beethoven works. The idea of the “Blast” originated in sheer self-indulgence, but then there occurred the temptation to throw it open to whoever might like either just to listen to the music (which should be a feast in itself for lovers of Beethoven), or to find out why liberals are so wrong, in music as in everything else.

So if anyone is interested besides readers who have already signed on, let them come between the times mentioned above. Bed and breakfast in the off-season of Broadstairs should be findable on the Internet, and if you let us know when you may plan to come, we may be able to manage in-house lunch and supper. In all things may God be served.

Kyrie eleison.

The purpose of saying half a year ago that a priest is not obliged in every case to forbid a Catholic to attend the New Mass (NOM) was obviously not to say that the NOM is perfectly alright to attend. The NOM rite is, in itself, the central act of worship of the false man-centred religion of Vatican II, in whose wake it followed in 1969. In fact the obligation to stay away from the NOM is proportional to one’s knowledge of how wrong it is. It has enormously contributed to countless Catholics losing their faith, almost without realizing it.

But there are two factors which even to this day have made it easy for Catholics to be deceived by the NOM. Firstly, it was imposed on the entire Latin-rite Church by what Paul VI did all he could to make look like the full force of his Papal authority, which in 1969 seemed immense. Still today the NOM passes for the “ordinary” rite, while the Mass of all time is officially discounted as the “extraordinary” rite, so that even 47 years later an honest Catholic can still feel obliged in obedience to attend the NOM. Of course in reality there can be no such obligation, because no Church law can oblige a Catholic to put his faith in danger, which he normally does by attending the NOM, such is its falsity.

And secondly, the NOM was introduced gradually, in a series of skilfully graduated changes, notably in 1962, 1964 and 1967, so that the wholesale revolution of 1969 found Catholics ready for novelty. In fact even today the NOM rite includes options for the celebrant which make it possible for him to celebrate the NOM either as a full-blooded ceremony of the new humanist religion, or as a ceremony resembling the true Mass closely enough to deceive many a Catholic that there is no significant difference between the old and the new rites. Of course in reality, as Archbishop Lefebvre always said, better the old rite in a modern language than the new rite in Latin, because of the diminution or downright falsification of the Catholic doctrine of the Mass in the NOM.

Moreover these two factors, the official imposition of the changes and their sometimes optional character intrinsic to the NOM, more than suffice to explain that to this day there must be multitudes of Catholics who want and mean to be Catholics and yet assume that the right way to be Catholics is to attend the NOM every Sunday. And who will dare say that out of these multitudes there are none who are still nourishing their faith by obeying what seems to them (subjectively) to be their (objective) duty? God is their judge, but for how many years did easily most followers of Catholic Tradition have to attend the NOM before they understood that their faith obliged them not to do so? And if the NOM had in all those years made them lose the faith, how would they have come to Catholic Tradition? Depending on how a celebrant uses the options in the NOM, not all the elements that can nourish faith are necessarily eliminated from it, especially if the Consecration is valid, a possibility which nobody who knows his sacramental theology can deny.

However, given the weakness of human nature and so the risk of encouraging Catholics to go with the new and easy religion by the least word said in favour of its central rite of worship, why say a word in favour of any feature of the Newchurch? For at least two reasons. Secondly, to ward off potentially pharisaical scorn of any believers outside of the Traditional movement, and firstly to ward off what is coming to be called “ecclesiavacantism,” namely the idea that the Newchurch has nothing Catholic left in it whatsoever. In theory the Newchurch is pure rot, but in practice that rot could not exist without something not yet rotted still being there to be rotted. Every parasite needs a host. Also, had this particular host, the true Church, completely disappeared, would not the gates of Hell have prevailed against it? Impossible (Mt.XVI, 18).

Kyrie eleison.

A thinking reader of these “Comments” from the United States made several months ago some shrewd remarks. Here they are:— “Religious Liberty” is really coming home to roost over here in the colonies. A “Catholic” federal judge has jailed a Protestant county clerk, for refusing to issue same-sex marriage licences. The well-meaning defenders of the clerk keep citing “religious liberty,” not realizing that religious liberty is precisely the problem, not the solution. Amazing. We descend into moral chaos, and no one seems to understand why. “We descend into moral chaos, and nobody seems to understand why.” Well said, indeed! But “Traditionalists” who take Tradition seriously should be able to sort it out.

This is because if I take Tradition seriously, I understand that DOCTRINE comes first, in other words the Catholic religion is not mind-mush, morality and the Mass, but it is doctrinal realities that govern both morals and the Mass. These realities start with the existence of Almighty God, on whom all creation depends every moment for its being upheld in existence, whereas He could let it all drop out of existence without in the least way changing Himself. He creates every human soul by Himself at the moment of its body’s conception for the purpose that it will use the free-will with which he endows that soul to choose to live and die in accordance with His unchanging moral Law, so that it can spend in Heaven its eternity in bliss with Himself. The free-will, to be genuine, means that souls can choose to break His Law, and if they do not repent, they will be choosing to spend eternity defying Him in Hell. So they themselves will be broken, but not His Law. That Law is summed up in the Ten Commandments, and it is not an arbitrary law, but it fits the human nature for which it was made, just as the manufacturer’s operating manual for a machine corresponds to the machine for which it was made.

Now the Sixth and Ninth of those Commandments instruct human beings to make the proper use of the reproductive mechanism built into their bodies. This mechanism is not a toy, but a sacred instrument designed by God for the forming of human families here below to populate Heaven above. Neither two men alone nor two women alone but only a man and a woman together can have children and form a family, and since the populating of Heaven is a sacred affair, then any breaking of those two Commandments rapidly becomes grave enough to deserve eternal damnation. “God is not mocked” – Galatians VI, 7. Therefore same-sex frustration of the act of marriage is one of the four offences against God crying to Heaven for vengeance, as the Catholic Church teaches, and same-sex “marriage” is a mockery of God’s holy institution into the bargain. In all of this doctrine there is not one iota of chaos.

Then where does the chaos come from? From liberalism. From the false religion of liberalism. From making an idol of liberty. For in Romans I St Paul hammers home the point that this particular sin crying to Heaven for vengeance derives from idolatry. It is after men break the First Commandment that God gives them up to disgraceful practices against the Sixth Commandment, no doubt in the hope that the unmistakeable foulness of their breaking the latter will wake them up to the foulness much greater in itself, but less easy to recognize, of breaking the former. That our liberty has become from an ideal an idol is in our own day more and more difficult to recognize, because idolizing religious liberty has been going on now for well over 200 years, and nothing seems more natural. Men have lost all sense of the true God. On the contrary, religious liberty is the supreme liberty, without which all other liberties seem little.

And liberty ends by lifting people’s minds right off their hinges:—“Any truth or reality pretending to impose itself on my mind is a diminution of my liberty, so I refuse to recognize it, unless it suits me. Many moral rules do not suit me. I refuse them, in the name of liberty. I descend thus into moral chaos, convinced that I am exercising a sacred right of mine, so that I cannot understand why I end up in chaos, mental then social. But I have myself unhinged my mind, and cut my society adrift.” The chaos is wholly comprehensible.

Kyrie eleison.

Here is another good letter from a reader of these “Comments.” He takes a sane view of an insane scene. Readers may be discouraged by what he describes, or they may be encouraged by how he describes it. A number of readers must recognize what they are up against every day when they go to work, and this letter may help them to see why and how their place of work is eroding their Catholic faith. He writes:—

I have worked in a factory building cars for over two years now and while it does pay well the environment is a sort of microcosm of the world at large. Let me explain . . .

1) Mixing up of the sexes – men and women work together in close proximity. Such work completely destroys a woman’s femininity. Of course, there are certain jobs which women cannot do, but because of this false sense of equality, the company needs to allow women to work there. The stories that I have heard about the transgressions against the 6th and 9th commandments are truly disturbing. I need not elaborate. But what else did anybody expect? Why would a woman even want to work in such a place?

2) Men’s minds are incapable of making moral judgments – I generalize of course, but most of the men I have talked to do not think in terms of morality (i.e. good and evil) but in terms of what pleasures can keep them entertained. I have talked to several co-workers and have tried to bring up questions of morality in a way that they might understand, but it seems to go over their heads. When a man has steeped himself in the things of the flesh, he is incapable of thinking of the soul. Worse, some of these co-workers have absolutely no shame in boasting of their sins. Once upon a time men had shame. No longer, it would seem.

3) I am my own god – False liberty is exalted as the guiding principle in men’s lives. I have had a few discussions with some of my co-workers and what I get every single time is that truth and morality are purely a subjective affair. What you believe to be truth is fine for you, but you cannot impose your way of thinking on anyone else. I told a supervisor of mine that such thinking is nonsense. I said, what if someone thinks that having more than one wife is fine? He said, belief is up to the individual. If a man denies such a basic principle as that truth is not subjective, then there is no point in talking to him. In essence, every individual becomes his own god because HE has constructed his own reality instead of submitting to something outside of him.

The environment of a modern factory breeds a sort of godlessness. I don’t expect factory workers to be examples of stellar virtue but I would say that modern factories are exponentially worse than what Charles Dickens wrote about in his times. I can go on and on, but the point I am trying to make is this: how can grace operate in lives which are destroyed through sin and a life of seeking pleasure? How does one reach out to men who cannot even grasp the most elementary norms of morality? It is frustrating to say the least. Please pray for us in the trenches.

Woman freeing herself from femininity and family, man freeing himself from objective morality and objective truth – how indeed can one reach out to, or even talk with, such a “faithless and perverse generation” (Lk. IX, 41)? By example, charity and prayer. I advised the writer to take a finger rosary to work to be able to pray discreetly decade after decade to pray for his fellow-workers and to protect himself spiritually from his work environment. But he will need to be discreet.

Kyrie eleison.

So we have reached a new year without either the Church having completely collapsed, or the world having crashed into its Third World War, but both disasters have been brought significantly closer. What path are we on? What chance do we have of avoiding disaster?

As for the world, Syria in particular is being turned into a powder-keg where the powder is being piled up for a bigger and bigger explosion. America and Russia, each with their allies, are ready to fight for either of two contending visions of the world’s future: the banksters presently controlling the USA want a unipolar world where their New World Order will exercise a worldwide hegemony; the Russians on the contrary want a multipolar world where they can retain their national independence and look after their own interests. And who can blame the Russians if they want to prevent the NWO from taking over the world? So far they have acted with great restraint in the face of vile provocation from the West.

But as ever, man proposes while God disposes. If men will not stop sinning, then at the moment chosen not by them but by him the dogs of war will be let loose. As usual, men will know why they started the war, but God alone knows how it will end. The Russians have some remarkable weapons, so that the West is by no means sure of “winning,” especially if enough prayers go up from all of us to Heaven for the Consecration of Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, because then the Russians might obtain for all of us an interruption of the world’s march to the abyss. In any case the war will be just as long and as devastating as God needs for his purpose of saving not civilisations (so called) but souls. Will souls learn their lesson? If not, God may need to allow them to wreak even more havoc upon themselves.

As for the Church, its influence on world events is decisive. Wherever true Catholic priests are administering true Sacraments, they are extinguishing those sins which are the cause of war (James, IV, 1). But what have we seen through 2015? The churchmen presently controlling the Church have shown little to no sign of wanting to return to the true doctrine of the New Testament from the false principles of Vatican II, and Pope Francis in particular by his unrestrained application of those principles seems intent upon nothing so much as upon destroying the Catholic Church. Now back in the 1970’s when the Council’s work of devastation seemed irresistible, God in his mercy gave to his Church an Archbishop who would raise a new generation of Catholic priests to witness to the true Faith and show in real life that it was not out of date, thereby acting as a brake upon the devastation. But Archbishop Lefebvre died in 1991, and his successors at the top of his Society soon began losing his grip on the necessity of resisting the modern world with its sinister Council. Through 2015 we saw only one sign after another of the Society drawing closer and closer to neo-modernist Rome.

We are driven to ask, do these successors still have any understanding of why the Archbishop set up his Society of St Pius X in the first place? Do they still have a sense of the true Faith? Do they realize their grave responsibility to witness to that Faith, and not let it be blurred into the world? Let them think hard in 2016, before it is too late, before the Society finally dooms itself to lose all its savour by joining in the Conciliar apostasy, by no longer acting as a thorn in the side of the neo-modernists and by ceasing to sustain that true Church which alone has the secret of world peace, Our Lord Jesus Christ, “yesterday, today and for ever, neither liberal nor modernist” (quotation of Archbishop Lefebvre).

Kyrie eleison.

Whereas arguments at best prove, comparisons at best illustrate. So comparisons do not prove but they can throw a lot of light from what one does know onto what one does not know. Now concerning the present crisis of the Church, half a century old, we need all the light we can get, because with each day that passes it becomes less and not more understandable. So here is a fruitful comparison sent to me recently by a recent convert to Tradition. He compares the Catholic Church and the Conciliar Church, or the Newchurch, to the legitimate and illegitimate families of one and the same man. Let us apply the comparison to his marriage, to his authority and to his children.

By a lawful marriage to his true wife a man starts a family and has legitimate children. But after a while he is unfaithful to her and divorces her to live with his mistress, by adultery with whom he also has children, who are bastards. Similarly by a Cardinal’s lawful canonical election as Pope, the Cardinal becomes the legitimate father of the Catholic Church and the spiritual father by the true Faith of a multitude of true Catholics. But after a while as a Conciliar Pope he goes whoring after the modern world, and by adultery with it he engenders a new family of Conciliar bastards. Thus as one man can be the father of both a lawful and an unlawful family, so one Pope can at the same time be head of the Catholic Church and of the Newchurch.

Secondly, as the family father has true authority over his true family but no true authority over his second family because it is not his true family, so the Conciliar Pope has true authority over all true Catholics but no true authority over the Newchurch with its Conciliar Catholics. And as the first family needs its true father, and both wife and children do all they can to bring him home, but he clings to his partner in adultery and to his illegitimate children who also do all they can to hold onto him, so each Conciliar Pope is still respected by Traditional Catholics who call upon him to do his duty by them, but he prefers Conciliar Catholics who have little real respect for him but who also hold onto him to cover their unlawful status.

And thirdly, as no true wife will accept to be put on the same footing as the adulterous partner that has supplanted her, nor will the true children (if they are mature enough) accept to be adopted by the false family and thus likened to the bastards, so Tradition is absolutely incompatible with the Newchurch, nor can true Catholics accept to be incorporated into it by any kind of sell-out or betrayal of Tradition. It is not for them to go whoring after their true father in his adulterous environment, even if he is their true father and they truly need him. It is for the father to return to his true family. Nor can the lawful children reasonably expect to bring their father home by joining him in his seductive surroundings. The much greater likelihood is that they too will be seduced.

This comparison of any Newpope to a father of two families is fruitful on many more points becaue it is in the nature of a Pope to be a father. But « Every comparison limps » (another brilliant comparison), and the bad leg of this comparison consists mainly in the fact that whereas the distinction between the two families of the one father is perfectly clear in real life, on the contrary the distinction between the Catholic Church and the Newchurch, while perfectly clear in theory, is very difficult to disentangle in practice, because they are almost hopelessly intertwined in real life.

To keep a Catholic head on one’s shoulders it is as necessary to know the clear distinction in theory as it is to recognize the desperate confusion in practice.

Kyrie eleison.