Eleison Comments

In two months’ time, from 18h00 on Friday evening of Feb. 19 to Sunday mid-day of Feb. 21, there will be held here in Broadstairs a three-day blast of the music of Beethoven. A young American pianist who can read at sight any of his 32 piano sonatas, and loves them all, is crossing the Atlantic to play some of them for us, we do not yet know which.

No doubt he will play the three great favourites, the Pathétique, Moonlight and Appassionata, also the Waldstein, but there will be time for him to analyze and present many others. Right now there will be no fixed programme for the three days. There will be room for plenty of questions and discussion and improvisation. A certain bishop will also be contributing to the analysis in some depth of his favourite composer. The purpose of the weekend will be for participants to take away with them an understanding they may not have had before, of how classical music ticks and of what makes Beethoven in particular one of its most famous composers.

But, somebody will object, what has music, especially Revolutionary music, to do with the defence and propagation of the Catholic Faith? The answer here has to be brief. Firstly, let nobody despise music. Both the Catholic Church and the Devil are acutely aware that it is a language uniquely capable of expressing and of shaping what goes on in the human soul, and therefore of influencing the direction which a soul is taking, towards Heaven (by Gregorian chant, for instance) or towards Hell (were not the victims of the recent shooting in Paris just then partaking in a Rock song that called on the Devil?). Almost every human being has some music or other in his soul, and that music normally runs deep, for good or ill. It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that if a man does not have in him the music of his religion, he will have in him the religion of his music, e.g. the Devil. Catholics who realize that the music they love flies not much higher than Pop or Rock, may well seize the opportunity to get a handle on classical music, via a studious blast of Beethoven.

Now it is true that there is a great deal of music higher than Beethoven. He was born under the Old Order, 19 years before the French Revolution broke out in 1789, but he died 38 years later when the modern Revolutionary age was well under way, in 1827, so that his life straddled that tremendous upheaval which he expressed musically in a number of his masterworks, notably in the Appassionata piano sonata and in his Eroica Symphony, originally dedicated to that hero of the Revolution, Napoleon Bonaparte. However, while the relative serenity of the musical masterworks prior to the Revolution is free of its agitation and Romantic disturbance, at the same time it is that much further removed from our own world of today, marinated in the Revolution. Therefore Beethoven can speak to souls of today that find little or no interest in music of the earlier masters. Nor is Beethoven only Revolutionary. The unique power of his best loved masterpieces derives from their Romantic wine being contained and ordered within the classical skins which he inherited from Haydn and Mozart.

To give us an idea of numbers, please let us know if you plan to attend the Beethoven weekend. Off season, local boarding-houses should have plenty of room to overnight. And if male readers would prefer something more directly Catholic, let them sign up as soon as possible for the Ignatian Exercises to be given here by Fr Abraham and myself between 18h00, December 26 and 18h00, December 31.

Kyrie eleison.

If the evidence for eucharistic miracles taking place within the Novus Ordo Church (see EC 436 and 437) is as serious as it seems, then Catholics must conform their minds to the mind of God, and not the other way round. And Catholics cleaving to Tradition have a special need to work out what God meant by the miracles, because they will not easily understand what he can have meant, when they know how distasteful to him the Novus Ordo Mass (NOM) must be in itself.

For many centuries God has been working such miracles. The primary reason has always been to strengthen the faith of Catholics in a truth of the Faith not easy to believe, but very close to the Heart of God. That after the Consecration at Mass of the bread and wine God himself takes the place of their substance is an occurrence so outside the normal course of nature that this invention of the love of God wishing to give himself as food and drink to his sheep may be practical, but it seems also incredible. So in due time and place God has wrought visible miracles in some shape or form to help doubting souls to believe. A secondary reason for these miracles, especially where there has been some profanation or other of the Holy Eucharist, is to remind Catholics of the sacred treatment and adoration always due to the humble appearances behind which hides God himself.

Both of these reasons apply today when the NOM has severely diminished the sense of the Real Presence without always nullifying it (see EC 437). Who can deny that the rite of the NOM and its practice throughout the Novus Ordo Church, e.g Communion standing and in the hand, have set countless Catholics on their way to disbelieving in the Real Presence, and countless priests on their way to a lack of due respect in their handling of the Holy Eucharist? Who can deny that both disbelief and disrespect towards it have hugely increased since the NOM was introduced in 1969? Humanly speaking, the wonder may be not that there have been miracles at all within the framework of the NOM, but that there have not been many more. In any case, God knows best.

However, these miracles – always assuming they are authentic – have lessons also for the Catholics of Tradition who have to some extent or another stood back from the Novus Ordo framework. The lesson most obvious is that not all Novus Ordo Masses are invalid, nor all Novus Ordo episcopal Consecrations nor all priestly Ordinations, as “Traditionalists” can be tempted to think. This is surely because while since the 1960’s a mass of Catholic sheep have become too worldly to deserve to keep the true rite of Mass, they have loved the Mass enough not to lose it altogether. The NOM may have been allowed by God to make it easier for Catholics to leave the Faith if they wanted to, but not impossible to keep it if they wanted to.

Therefore the NOM and the Novus Ordo Church as a whole are dangerous for the Faith, and Catholics are right who have clung to Tradition to avoid the danger. But as they have had to put a distance between themselves and the mainstream Church, so they have exposed themselves to the opposite danger of an isolation leading to a sectarian and even pharisaical spirit, disconnected from reality. There are true sacraments in the Novus Ordo and true Catholics, for whom God cares, and “Traditionalists” should be happy that there are. Let Traditionalists’ relative isolation not make them feel that they are bound to deny that there is anything Catholic at all left in the Novus Ordo. That is unreal, and reality’s pendulum will swing back, as with the leadership of the SSPX, presently failing to see the on-going need for isolation from the mainstream Church. No. Tradition still needs isolation, but with a generous and not an isolationist spirit.

Kyrie eleison.

Facts are stubborn — as long as they are facts. If readers doubt that the eucharistic miracle of 1996 in Buenos Aires is a fact, let them undertake their own research: http://youtu.be/3gPAbD43fTI. But if their research of that case leaves them unconvinced, then let them look up the parallel case of Sokólka in Poland, where a whole centre of pilgrimage has arisen around a eucharistic miracle of 2008 (e.g. jloughnan.tripod.com/sokolka.htm). And a little more Internet research would surely discover accounts of more such Novus Ordo miracles, with at least some of them being authentic.

But how is that possible? Traditional Catholics absorb with their mother’s milk that the new rite of Mass (NOM) is an abomination in the eyes of God, and has helped to make countless Catholics lose the Faith. This is because the NOM, like Vatican II which it followed, is ambiguous, favours heresy and has led numberless souls out of the Church, whom regular attendance at the Protestantised rite has turned into virtual Protestants. Most Traditional Catholics should be familiar with the serious doctrinal problems of this new rite, designed to diminish the essential Catholic doctrines of the Real Presence, the propitiatory Sacrifice and the sacrificing priesthood, amongst others. Then how can God work with it eucharistic miracles such as have made of Sokólka a national centre of pilgrimage for all Poland?

Doctrinally, the NOM is ambiguous, poised between the religion of God and the Conciliar religion of man. Now in matters of faith, ambiguity is deadly, being normally designed to undermine the Faith, as the NOM frequently does. But as ambiguity is precisely open to two interpretations, so the NOM does not absolutely exclude the old religion. Thus by a devout priest its ambiguities can all be turned in the old direction. That does not make the NOM acceptable as such, because its intrinsic ambiguity still favours the new direction, but it does mean for instance that the Consecration can still be valid, as Archbishop Lefebvre never denied. Moreover, if the eucharistic miracles are genuine, clearly not all Consecrations of Novus Ordo bishops or Ordinations of Novus Ordo priests are invalid either. In brief, the NOM as such is bad as a whole, bad in parts, but not bad in all its parts.

Now let us imagine, with the utmost respect, how Almighty God stands towards the new rite of Mass. On the one hand God loves his Church like the apple of His eye, and will preserve it to the end of the world (Mt. XVI, 18). On the other hand He has chosen to entrust its government to human and fallible churchmen, whom He will guide, but to whose free-will He evidently grants a remarkable degree of free play to govern it well or badly, starting with the betrayal of His own Son. Now in modern times the Revolution, be it Jewish, Masonic, communist or globalist, finds its main adversary in His Church, and it has worked especially on the Church’s leaders to make the Church collapse. Their most terrible success was Vatican II and its NOM, which were surely much more the fault of the shepherds than of the sheep. “The fort is betrayed even of them that should have defended it,” said St John Fisher at a parallel moment in the Reformation. Then how will God look after His sheep, many of whom – not all – are relatively innocent of the Conciliar betrayal?

After Vatican II, some priests and laity had the grace to see immediately what a betrayal it was, and within a few years the Traditional movement was under way. To other sheep God gave the grace to see it later. But can we not all admit that there are many good Catholics who trusted their bishops, as good Catholics normally should do? And did not these bishops insist on the lie that the NOM was no different from the true Mass? What specified Vatican II and the NOM was precisely the officialisation of the modernist heresy within the Church. So does it not make sense that in punishment of their modern worldliness these sheep would broadly lose the true rite of Mass, while in reward of their desire for Mass they would not lose every valid Mass? But the Church’s future depends on the souls that understand the Revolution and utterly repudiate all ambiguities of Vatican II and the NOM.

Kyrie eleison.

“Facts are stubborn things,” is a famous quote of the United States’ second President, John Adams (1735–1826), “and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” Concerning the New Order of Mass imposed upon the entire Latin Rite Church by Paul VI in 1969, there are some stubborn facts, apt to perturb the “wishes and inclinations” of Catholics cleaving to Catholic Tradition. Let successive issues of these “Comments” first of all present some of these facts; secondly let us see how they may be explained in view of the disastrous role played over the last 46 years by the NOM in helping Catholics to lose the Faith, and thirdly let us deliberate as to what conclusions a wise Catholic needs to draw. First of all, some facts:—

On august 18, 1996, in St Mary’s parish church in the centre of Buenos Aires, Argentina, Fr Alejandro Pezet was finishing distributing communion (of a new Mass, for sure) when a woman told him of a discarded host at the back of the church. A parishioner having received communion in the hand must have dropped it on their way out of church and abandoned it as being too dirty to be consumed off the floor. Fr Pezet picked it up, put it correctly in a vase of water and placed it in the tabernacle where in a few days it would normally dissolve and could be properly disposed of. However, when on August 26 he opened the tabernacle, what was his surprise to find that the host had turned into a bloody substance. Photographs taken on Bishop Bergoglio’s orders 11 days later showed that it had significantly increased in size. For three years it was kept under strict secret in the tabernacle, but in 1999 then Archbishop Bergoglio decided to carry out a scientific analysis. On October 15, 1999, in the presence of witnesses he allowed Dr Ricardo Castañon, a neuro-psycho physiologist approved of by Rome, to take a sample for testing.

Dr Castañon took the sample firstly to a forensic laboratory in San Francisco which recognized human ADN. A Dr Robert Lawrence located white globules. A Dr. Ardonidoli in Italy thought it was probably heart tissue. An Australian Professor, John Walker, recognized muscular tissue with white globules intact.

To remove all doubt Dr Castañon resorted to a renowned cardiologist and forensic pathologist from Columbia University, New York, Dr Federico Zugibe,without telling him where the specimen came from.

Looking down his microscope Dr Zugibe is quoted as having said, “I can tell you exactly what it is. It is part of the muscle found in the wall of the heart’s left ventricle which makes the heart beat and gives the body its life. Intermingled in the tissue are white blood-cells, which tells me firstly that the heart was alive at the moment when the sample was taken because white blood-cells die outside of a living organism, and secondly that white cells go to the aid of an injury, so this heart has suffered. This is the sort of thing I see in patients who have been beaten about the chest.” When asked how long these cells would have remained alive had they come from a sample kept in water, DrZugibe replied that they would have ceased to exist in a matter of minutes.

When in June of 1976 Archbishop lefebvre was on the brink of ordaining the first large batch of SSPX priests despite Rome’s disapproval, a Roman official came to promise him the end of all problems with Rome if only he would celebrate one NOM. On principle, for doctrinal reasons, he refused. Then how can Almighty God have worked eucharistic miracles with and for this new Mass? Read here next week a suggested answer.

Kyrie eleison.

As the faltering remains of Christendom face today a Muslim invasion organized by the millennial enemies of God, and made possible by the Western nations’ wretched politicians and vile media, it is well to remember how often in times past Christendom was threatened by Muslim invasions, and how Christendom then defended itself, by turning to God. In the summer of 1683, a huge Muslim army of anything from 150 to 300 thousand soldiers besieged Vienna and threatened to engulf Europe from the south-east. The Muslims even envisaged capturing Rome, for the glory of Islam.

With the help of a saintly Capucin, Fr. Marco da Aviano, Pope Innocent XI succeeded in putting together a Christian army from several European nations to relieve Vienna. Here is the prayer of the Capucin just before the battle:—

“O Lord God of Hosts, Behold us prostrate at the feet of your Majesty, to obtain forgiveness for our sins. Well do we know how we have deserved that the infidels take up arms to oppress us, because the iniquities committed by us every day against your goodness have justly provoked your wrath. O great God, from the depth of our hearts we ask you to forgive us; we execrate sin because you abhor it; it pains us that we have often angered your supreme goodness. For love of you we would rather die a thousand times than commit the least act to displease you. Come to our aid, O Lord, with your grace, and let not your servants break the pact which we have made with you alone. Have pity upon us, have pity on your Church, which the fury and strength of the infidels are even now preparing to oppress. Even if it is by our own fault that they have broken in on the serenity of these Christian countries, and even if all the ills coming upon us are none other than the consequence of our own wickedness, still be propitious towards us, O God of all goodness, and despise not the work of your own hands. Remember how, to save us from the slavery of Satan, you shed all of your Precious Blood.

“Will you allow it to be trodden underfoot by these dogs? Can it be that you will permit the precious pearl of the faith, which you sought out with such zeal and rescued with so much suffering, to be thrown to these swine to be trampled on? Forget not, O Lord, that if you allow the infidels to prevail over us, they will blaspheme your holy Name and mock your power, crying out a thousand times, “Where is their God, the God who was powerless to save them from our hands?” Let it not be held against you, O Lord, that you gave way to the fury of the wolves, just when we were calling upon you in our misery and anguish. Great God of battles, come to our aid! If you favour our cause, the armies of the infidels cannot harm us. Scatter these people that have wanted war! For our part, we ask no more than to be at peace with you, with ourselves and with our neighbour . . .”

The prayer continues with the request for the Christian army’s leaders and soldiers to be strengthened with God’s grace, with the spirit and courage of the heroes of the Old Testament, so that they may reduce to nought the enemies of the Christian name, and show forth God’s power. Let God look down on the Christian soldiers’ faith, hope and charity. On His behalf Marco will bless them on their way to battle. Let God hold back the arm of his wrath raised over them, and let His enemies know that there is no other God beside Him. Like Moses, Marco will lift his arms to bless the Christian soldiers. May God grant them victory, and the ruin of His and their enemies, Amen.

How politically incorrect! “Dogs” and “swine” – How racist! Intolerable! But the fact is that God granted to the Christians a sensational victory which threw back the Muslims for 300 years. Now they are back. And this time there is virtually no repentance left to call upon Almighty God . . .

Kyrie eleison.

I have just been re-reading Michael Davies’ Pope John’s Council, written in 1977 and hardly needing to be up-dated nearly 40 years later. If anything, Michael Davies was too kind to the Council, but there are many home truths in the book, so that it can be warmly recommended to anybody beginning to study the Council. Especially interesting is the Appendix VI consisting of a review by Professor Louis Salleron from 1936 of the French philosopher Jacques Maritain’s (1882–1973) then recently appeared book, Integral Humanism. This book so interested an Italian priest, Giovanni-Battista Montini, that he translated it into Italian. Later he became Pope Paul VI, the main architect of Vatican II. Thus Salleron uncovers the roots of the Council, 26 years before it began.

Integral Humanism presents Maritain’s vision of a new future for a remodelled Christendom. Bourgeois civilisation is doomed, but instead of the Church continually condemning the man-centred humanism which gave rise to the French Revolution (1789) which gave rise to that bourgeoisie, the Revolution needs to be recognised as part of an on-going and inevitable historical process with which Christianity can and must come to terms. By this means, while the whole course of modern history cannot be stopped, nevertheless by Christ the humanism can be made truly, fully human, becoming “integral humanism.” Christianity thus rebuilt on modern foundations will bring Christ to modern man and modern man to Christ, the admirable intention of Maritain and Paul VI and Bishop Fellay.

But “the way to Hell is paved with good intentions,” says the wise old proverb. Salleron admires all kinds of things in the book of Maritain, who was a philosopher skilled in Thomism and knew well, says Salleron, how to present any idea in such a way as not to contradict Catholic doctrine. But Salleron objects strongly to Maritain’s reading of modern history and calls it “Marxist.” Karl Marx (1818–1883) also started out from the rot of bourgeois civilisation but concluded that it must be completely torn down by on-going Revolution to make way for the dream of the classless society, which worked out in reality as the nightmare of Communism. So Maritain rejected Marx’ conclusion but accepted his analysis of history, so as to fashion a new compromise Christianity that would work for modern man: neither modernity on modern foundations (Marx – and Wagner), nor Christ on Christ’s foundations (Pius X – see especially his Letter on the Sillon – and Archbishop Lefebvre), but Christ on modern foundations. The result is that Newchristianity which is to be found throughout the documents of Vatican II, namely Christ is the true fulfilment of man – not man is ordered to Christ and to God, but God and Christ are ordered to man.

Alas, compromise solutions do not work with Our Lord. He says, “Let your speech be yes, yes or no, no: and that which is over and above these, is of evil” (Mt. V, 37). And “He that is not with me, is against me” (Mt. XII, 30). A man-centred religion of the true God is a contradiction in terms. Salleron points out that there is nothing inevitable in the march of modern history such as Marx and Maritain imagined. If modern man is going to the Devil, it is by man’s own free choice. What liberals like Maritain and Paul VI and Bishop Fellay do not grasp is the reality of evil. They do not grasp that modern man simply does not want Christ, and God will not force man to do so. Liberals will diminish God so as to make him appealing to modern man, but most modern men will turn away, in indifference or disgust. Vatican II has been a colossal failure, and “integral humanism” has been just one more example of disintegrating humanism, because it is not centred on God.

Politics, economics, the banks, finance, the arts, medicine, law, agriculture, the whole of modern society must come back under the Social Kingship of Christ the King. That was Archbishop Lefebvre’s solution. It is the only solution.

Kyrie eleison.