Eleison Comments

Culture Matters!

Culture Matters! on April 25, 2015

From Friday evening, May 1st, to Sunday mid-day, May 3rd, there will be held here in Queen of Martyrs House, Broadstairs, another seminar by Dr. David White, as last year on Charles Dickens, so this year on T.S. Eliot (1888–1965), another giant of English literature with a direct connection to this corner of England. It was in an open-air pavilion overlooking Margate beach about five miles north of Broadstairs that between October and November of 1921 the world famous Anglo-American poet broke a writing-block and composed some 50 lines of the third of five parts of the most influential poem of the 20th century, at any rate in the English language, The Wasteland (1922).

The poem is a brilliant portrait of the nothingness in men’s hearts and minds in the wake of World War I (1914–1918). In The Wasteland Eliot forged a new fragmentary way of writing poetry that captured the broken spiritual condition of modern man. By his broad and deep grasp of the artistic masterpieces from the past, notably Dante and Shakespeare, Eliot was able to give shape to the spiritual poverty of today. For instance in the six lines of the peom which are clearly connected to Margate, one of three working-class girls tells how she gave away her honour, for nothing, and to highlight the emptiness of the lives of all three maidens, their words are framed within fragments from the song of the three Rhine maidens who open and close the cosmic vision of Wagner’s epic Ring of the Nibelungs.

Emptiness and nothingness. Why on earth should Catholics bother with such depressing authors? Salvation is by Our Lord Jesus Christ, not by culture, especially not by nihilistic culture. A particular answer concerns T S Eliot. A general answer concerns all “culture,” defined as those stories, pictures and music with which all men of all ages cannot help furnishing and forming their hearts and minds.

As for T S Eliot, he himself soon dismissed The Wasteland as “rhythmic grumbling,” and a few years later he became a member of the Church of England. He had given brilliant expression to modern nothingness, but he did not wallow in it. He went on to write a number of plays and especially the long poem of the Four Quartets, which are by no means nihilistic, and about which Dr White, who loves Eliot, will also be talking in Broadstairs in a few days’ time. Having grappled honestly with the problem, Eliot came up with no ostrich solution, like countless Catholics that have fallen for Vatican II.

For indeed culture in general is to religion (or irreligion) like the suburbs of a city are to the city centre. And just as a military general with the task of defending a city would be most foolish to leave the suburbs to be occupied by the enemy, so any Catholic concerned for his religion cannot be indifferent to the stories, pictures and music which are moulding the souls all around him. Of course religion (or irreligion) is central to a man’s life, compared with which “culture” is peripheral, because men’s culture is, deep down, a spin-off from their relation with their God. Nevertheless culture and religion interact. For instance, were so many Catholics not under the spell of “The Sound of Music,” would they so easily have fallen for Vatican II? Or had the present leaders of the Society of St Pius X, by contrasting Catholic culture and modern anti-culture, grasped the depth of the modern problem, would they be now so intent on getting back under the perpetrators of Vatican II? Culture can matter like Heaven and Hell!

Kyrie eleison.

Vacancy Sense – I

Vacancy Sense – I on April 18, 2015

The Dominican priests of Avrillé, France, have done us all a great favour by republishing the considerations on the vacant See of Rome written some 400 years ago by a famous thomist theologian from Spain, John of St Thomas (1589–1644). Being a faithful successor of St Thomas

Aquinas, he benefits from that higher wisdom of the Middle Ages when theologians could still measure men by God instead of having to measure God by men, a tendency which began as a necessity (if souls could no longer take medieval penicillin, they had to take a lesser medicine), but which culminated in Vatican II. Here, much abbreviated, are the main ideas of John of St Thomas on the deposition of a Pope:—

I Can a Pope be deposed?

Answer, yes, because Catholics are obliged to separate themselves from heretics, after the heretics have been warned (Titus III, 10). Also, a heretical Pope puts the whole Church in a state of legitimate self-defence. But the Pope must be warned first, as officially as possible, in case he would retract. Also his heresy must be public, and declared as officially as possible, to prevent wholesale confusion among Catholics, by their being bound to follow.

II By whom must he be officially declared a heretic?

Answer, not by the Cardinals because although they may elect a Pope, they cannot depose one, because it is the Universal Church that is threatened by a heretical Pope, and so the most universal possible authority of the Church can alone depose him, namely a Church Council composed of a quorum of all the Church’s Cardinals and Bishops. These would be convoked not authoritatively (which the Pope alone can do) but among themselves.

III By what authority would a Church Council depose the Pope?

(Here is the main difficulty because Christ gives to the Pope supreme power over the entire Church, with no exception, as Vatican I defined in 1870. Already John of St Thomas gave arguments of authority, reason and Canon Law to prove this supreme power of the Pope. Then how can a Council, being beneath the Pope, yet depose him? John of St Thomas adopts the solution laid out by another famous Dominican theologian, Thomas Cajetan (1469–1534). The Church’s deposition of the Pope would fall not upon the Pope as Pope, but upon the bond between the man and his Papacy. That may seem hair-splitting, but it is logical.)

On the one hand not even a Church Council has authority over the Pope. On the other hand the Church is obliged to avoid heretics and to protect the sheep. Therefore, just as in a Conclave the Cardinals are the ministers of Christ to bind this man to the Papacy, but Christ alone gives him his papal authority, so the Church Council would be the ministers of Christ to unbind this heretic from the Papacy by their solemn declaration, but Christ alone, by his divine authority over the Pope, would authoritatively depose him. In other words, the Church Council would be deposing the Pope not authoritatively from above, but only ministerially from below. John of St Thomas confirms this conclusion from the Church’s Canon Law, which states in several places that God alone can depose the Pope, but the Church can pass judgment on his heresy.

Alas, as the Dominicans of Avrillé point out, nearly all Cardinals and Bishops of the Church today are so largely infected with modernism that there is no human hope of a Church Council seeing clear to condemn the modernism of the Conciliar Popes. We can only pray and wait for the divine solution, which will come in God’s good time. To follow, is a Pope not automatically deposed by his mere heresy?

Kyrie eleison.

Faith Undermined

Faith Undermined on April 11, 2015

The editorial in a recent Priory bulletin of an honourable colleague of the Society of St Pius X shows one major reason why Society priests are not yet joining the “Resistance” – they do not yet believe that the Faith is at stake. We wonder what it will take to persuade them. We can be sure that the leaders in XSPX headquarters are convinced that they are not themselves changing the Faith, and that they find it that much easier to continue persuading Society priests and laity that they are not changing the Faith. But if they had the true Faith, how could they dream of putting its Lefebvrian defence under the neo-modernists’ control in Rome?

The editorial is entitled “Obeying Fallible Superiors.” It recognizes that resistance to fallible Superiors is legitimate when the Faith is at stake, but the editorial’s emphasis is rather on the limits to be set to such resistance: anarchy and disrespect for authority are never lawful; obedience to lawful Superiors is essential to any society; Superiors have special graces of state; care must be taken in warning sheep that cannot make the necessary distinctions; there is a dangerous spirit of independence abroad today (Benedict XV); name-calling should be avoided, etc. – the principles are impeccable, the problem lies in their application.

For instance, while shunning name-calling the editorial nevertheless recognizes that Pius IX named “liberal Catholics” as being the Church’s “worst enemies.” Indeed in any Church crisis to identify and name the Church’s enemies, e.g. “Protestants” in the Reformation, is a major first step towards being able to fight them. No doubt the editorial’s author would grant as much where the Faith is at stake, only he would deny that there is any crisis of the Faith taking place within the Society. But, Father, do you think that liberal Catholics of the 19th century who came under Pius IX’s condemnation would have denied a single Article of the Faith? On the contrary, they would have vigorously affirmed their belief in every such Article. And yet would they not with equal vigour have condemned Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors? The problem for a modern mind to be Catholic lies not in its accepting or rejecting any one truth of the Faith, but in its instinctive undermining of all truths whatsoever, and this dreadful dissolution of the mind is, without a divine miracle, a virtually insoluble problem for and of the Faith.

And it has reached to the top of the Society. Father, do you recognize that Benedict XVI’s “hermeneutic of continuity” is tantamount to the suspension of the law of non-contradiction? And have you studied paragraph III.5 of Bishop Fellay’s Doctrinal Declaration of April, 2012, a document which he circumstantially “withdrew,” but never substantially retracted? It states that non-Traditional statements of Vatican II must be interpreted as Traditional. Is that not a perfect example of the “hermeneutic of continuity,” of interpretation overtaking reality? Then do you really think that the Society has no problem of the Faith when its Superior joins in Rome’s suspending the law of non-contradiction, and swims in contradictions and in what Churchill graciously named “terminological inexactitudes,” as happily as a fish swims in water?

By the way, you also say that anybody who “doubts that hierarchy can still exist in the early 21st century excludes himself from all Catholic life.” If he doubts it in principle, one might agree with you, but if he is merely relating what he observes in practice, might he not be merely observing the extension one century later of what you quote Benedict XV already observing as “the dangerous spirit of independence abroad” in 1914?

Kyrie eleison.

Sickness Imagined

Sickness Imagined on April 4, 2015

The iniquity of true Popes steadily destroying everything Catholic is so mysterious that in these “Comments” four weeks ago we saw Archbishop Lefebvre considering seriously whether the See of Rome might be vacant. He would never pretend with the liberals that the destruction is not really destruction, but at the same time his sense of the Church was too strong for him ever to adopt the sedevacantist solution, so at least in August of 1976 the problem seemed to him “theologically insoluble.” These “Comments” suggested that there might be another line of solution which people as sane of mind as the Archbishop could hardly imagine. Let us try to imagine it.

To ridicule this solution a hard-bitten sedevacantist once dubbed it “mentevacantism,” but the label will do. It means not the See of Rome being vacant, but the Popes’ minds being vacant, or let us say, their minds having had the sense of reality emptied out of them, their minds being empty of reality. Especially since the Protestant Reformation, men have been steadily more liberating themselves from God. To do this they must liberate their minds from the reality around them, because all reality comes from God and points back to God. Here is the liberal illusion, the ultimate liberation, known otherwise as “mind-rot,” “mental sickness” or “mentevacantism,” because the human mind was designed by God to run on reality and not on fantasy or illusion.

Now from 1517 to 1958 the Catholic Popes resisted and beat back the mind-rot steadily engulfing the rest of the world, on its slow way to its end, but all too many of the Catholic laity, priests, bishops and finally cardinals were being progressively infected with the liberal illusion, coming to be convinced that it would create a brave new Church for the Brave New World. So in the papal Conclave of 1958, even if Cardinal Siri was validly elected, the liberals had the power to force the election of John XXIII upon the Conclave, and then by convalidation upon the Universal Church.

But what is a liberal? He is a dreamer, living not in the real world but in a Wonderland of man’s own fabrication. However, as more and more human minds switch off reality and launch into the dream, so he has less and less chance of realizing what he has done, because more and more the world all around him is being taken over by the Wonderland. This means that in modern times it is easier and easier for a man – and every Pope remains a man – to be objectively in Wonderland and yet subjectively convinced that he is in reality. Here is that mental sickness observed at first hand by an SSPX priest in all four Roman “theologians” taking part in the Rome-SSPX Discussions of 2009–2011 (Note the inverted commas – in Wonderland everything is an unreal imitation of the real, so that without some such sign as the inverted commas, we easily take the imitation for the reality.)

On this reckoning the Conciliar Popes are, at least in part, “sincerely” wrong. What that “sincerity” is internally worth, God alone can judge. But externally it is an objective reality, more and more around us day by day. Then the Conciliar Popes are not wholly conscious villains, because in their sick minds they are serving the true Church by changing the old Church out of all recognition, by Wonderlanding it. Now their subjectively good intentions have objectively paved the way to Hell for the real true Church, but can one not say that these good intentions show that the prayer of Our Lord has prevented their faith from failing completely (cf. Lk.XXII, 32)? Even Paul VI condemned contraception, issued a relatively good “Credo,” wept for the loss of vocations, and spoke of the smoke of Satan entering the Church after Vatican II. Then can one not say that even with Paul VI Our Lord kept his promise to look after Peter?

Kyrie eleison.

New Bishop

New Bishop on March 28, 2015

Fr. Jean-Michel Faure’s consecration as bishop at the Monastery of the Holy Cross in Brazil last week was a delightful occasion. The weather was warm and dry. The sun shone. Fr Thomas Aquinas’ monks and the nearby Sisters had excelled themselves in transforming a concrete and metal garage into a sanctuary worthy of the noble liturgy, which they had also very well prepared. Despite the late notice, a group of priests was present from all over the Americas and France, and a congregation of a hundred souls, also from many different countries, followed attentively the three-hour ceremony.

Since then all Catholics have rejoiced who see the need for at least one more bishop to help ensure the survival of a “Resistant Tradition.” Archbishop Lefebvre’s understanding of the defence of the Catholic Faith could not be left for very much longer to depend on one bishop alone. His consecration of four bishops in 1988 without Rome’s permission, by “Operation Survival” as opposed to “Operation Suicide,” had to be extended into the 21st century. Apologies go to all Catholics who would love to have attended if only they had had enough notice, but everything had to be done, including a measure of discretion, to make sure that the consecration would take place.

It had powerful adversaries. The official Church in Rome reacted by declaring the consecrator to be “automatically excommunicated,” but as in 1988 this declaration is false, because by Church Law whoever commits a punishable act does not incur the normal penalty, e.g. excommunication for consecrating a bishop without Rome’s permission, if he acted out of necessity. That is common sense, and there was certainly necessity here. As the world draws closer and closer to World War III, what individual on earth can be sure of his own survival?

Also the official Society of St Pius X in Menzingen, Switzerland, condemned Bishop Faure’s consecration in a press statement issued on the day itself. Worthy of note in it is the admission that the consecrator was excluded from the Society in 2012 because of his “vigorous criticism” of the Society’s contacts with Rome in recent years. Menzingen claimed for the longest time that the problem was one of “disobedience.” Now at last Menzingen admits that it was being steadily accused of “betraying Archbishop Lefebvre’s work.” Indeed. Betraying and destroying.

Rome itself confirms the betrayal. On the day after the consecration, Monsignor Guido Pozzo, Secretary of the Pontifical Commission Ecclesia Dei, besides declaring the non-existent “excommunication,” went on to say, Several meetings (between Rome and the SSPX) have taken place and more are planned with certain (Roman) prelates, to go into the problems still needing to be cleared up in a relationship of trust,” problems “doctrinal and internal to the Society.”

Monsignor Pozzo went on: The Pope is waiting for the Society to make up its mind to enter the Church, and we are always ready with a familiar canonical project (a personal prelature). A little time is needed for things to become clear within the Society and for Bishop Fellay to obtain a broad enough consensus before taking this step.

What more can anyone need to see the writing on the wall?

Kyrie eleison.

Emotional Arguing

Emotional Arguing on March 21, 2015

An old-fashioned comparison has the advantage of being very clear: on the back of a mule a heavy pack can be difficult to balance. If it shifts to the left, one must push it to the right. If it tilts to the right, it must be pushed to the left. But such double pushing is not contrary – it has the single purpose of keeping the pack balanced. Similarly, for these “Comments” to argue repeatedly against sedevacantism is not to push towards liberalism, nor is it to suggest that sedevacantism is as bad as liberalism. It is merely to recognize that the outrageous words and deeds of the present occupant of the Holy See are tempting many good Catholics to renounce their reason and to judge of reality by their emotions. That is a common practice today, but it is not Catholic.

For instance sedevacantist arguments are, upon examination, never as strong as they can seem. Let us look at two that have crossed my desk recently, both from devout Catholics, strong in the Faith. Here is the first: Conciliar Popes, especially Francis, have not confirmed their brethren in the Faith. But it is of the essence of a Pope to do that. Therefore the Conciliar Popes are not essentially Popes. In reply one must distinguish a Pope in his being from a Pope in his action. A Pope becomes essentially Pope in his being by his valid election in a Conclave of Cardinals, or by his election, if it was invalid in itself, being convalidated by his subsequent acceptance as Pope by the Universal Church (which may have been the case for more than one Conciliar Pope, God knows). On the contrary, by confirming his brethren in the Faith a Pope is essentially Pope in his action. The two things are different and can be separated. Therefore a Pope can fail in action without necessarily ceasing to be a Pope in his being. That is surely the case of several, if not all, the Conciliar Popes.

And here is the second argument: for the individual and fallible Catholic to set himself up as judge of error by the Church’s infallible Magisterium is ridiculous. Faced then by obvious error (e.g. Conciliarism) by that Magisterium (e.g. the Conciliar Popes), he can only conclude that they have not been true Popes. But, in reply, the Pope is not necessarily the Church’s infallible Magisterium. If he neither engages all four strict conditions of the Extraordinary Magisterium, nor teaches in accordance with the Church’s Ordinary Magisterium, then he is fallible, and if he contradicts that Ordinary Magisterium then he is certainly in error, and can be judged to be such by any Catholic (or non-Catholic!) making the right use of his God-given mind. Otherwise how could Our Lord have warned us to beware of false prophets and of wolves in sheeps’ clothing (Mt. VII, 15–20)?

In fact both arguments can come from an emotional rejection of the Conciliar Popes: “They have so maltreated the Church that I simply cannot accept that they were Popes!” But what if I had been a bystander watching the original Way of the Cross? – “This is such maltreatment of Jesus that I simply cannot accept any longer that he is the Son of God!” Would not my emotional rejection of the maltreatment have been right, and yet my conclusion wrong? There is a mystery involved in the Conciliar Popes which sedevacantism passes by.

Now it may be, when the Church one day comes back to her senses, that the alone competent authority will declare that the Conciliar Popes were not Popes, but between now and then the arguments so far brought forward to prove the See of Rome to be vacant are not as conclusive as they can be made to appear.

Kyrie eleison.