Eleison Comments

Hebdomania

Hebdomania on January 24, 2015

The Charlie Hebdo attack of January 7 in which two muslim gunmen killed a dozen cartoonists and journalists in the Paris office of a satirical French weekly, and the enormous public protest of Jan. 11 against the attack in which leaders of several European nations were photo-opped as taking part, are best understood as one more episode in the war being waged by the enemies of God upon what little remains of Christian civilisation. Let us consider in order the cartoonists, the gunmen, the puppet politicians and peoples pandering to Islam and the puppet-masters behind them all.

The cartoonists lampooned not only Islam and muslims but also, from the world’s one true religion, the Holy Trinity, our divine Saviour and the Blessed Virgin Mary. Now the one true God is extremely patient, but he is not mocked (Gal. VI, 7). As men have a right not to suffer from terrorism, so the true God has a right not to endure the public repetition of obscene and blasphemous cartoons. Then nobody justifies terrorism as such, but given that the French Church and State authorities refuse to censor obscene blasphemy, is it surprising if God allowed muslims to avenge his honour?

The gunmen, two young muslims, must have been acting religiously, because politically it was entirely foreseeable that their action would rouse opinion against Islam. Still, how could they dare to attack? Because across Europe muslims are by their birthrate and immigration getting stronger in numbers all the time, and they make no secret of the fact that, as soon as they are strong enough, by a bloodbath if necessary, they will islamize the once Christian nations of Europe.

So who persuaded these nations to adopt the suicidal policy of almost unrestricted immigration and unbelievable welfare benefits for the in fact unassimilable immigrants, and so on? Who but our bribed or bullied puppet politicians? In a moment of truth a year or so ago, the Chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel, admitted that “multi-culti,” the mixing of contrary cultures, does not work. But a week or so ago in connection with the Hebdo attack, did she not proclaim that “Islam belongs to Germany”? She had been brought to heel. She is a puppet because she is constantly acting against Germany’s true interests. For instance, were there not so many muslims in France, would Charlie Hebdo ever have bothered to ridicule Islam? And who votes for these puppet politicians? Puppet peoples, who allow their thinking to be enslaved by their vile media.

Then who are the puppet-masters? They are enemies of God, intent upon establishing their own godless New World Order, a police State designed to ensure that not one living soul escapes eternal Hell. Let us call them “Globalists.” Then was the Hebdo attack their work, one of their events like 9/11 in the USA and 7/7 in the UK, engineered to move public opinion, this time towards freedom for blasphemers and civil war? Most likely. The event was certainly not what it was made to seem. Famous example: the three-minute film clip showing a gunman shooting in the head point-blank a “muslim policeman” lying on the ground, with no blood, no recoil of the gun, and little movement of the “victim.” The clip may still be found, starting from here – http://youtu.be/gobYWXgzWgY.

And the Good Lord amidst all this madness? “Those whom he wishes to destroy, he first makes mad,” is the old saying. Pray 15 Mysteries a day for the triumph that he will engineer, through his Mother alone. Are the poor Globalists ever going to be taken by surprise!

Kyrie eleison.

Contradictory Epitaph

Contradictory Epitaph on January 17, 2015

Under the wide and starry sky
Dig the grave and let me lie
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you ’grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be.
Home is the sailor, home from sea
And the hunter home from the hill

     —R.L.Stevenson (1850–1894)

This epitaph for the poet himself is eloquent by its simplicity, and touching, because it touches on death, that inevitable tragedy of human life. Commemorating life and love, poets often treat of death, which so mysteriously cuts off both. Not wishing to think on the meaning of life or death, poor materialists cut off poetry and will print it as prose if they can, precisely to avoid having to think about anything higher than matter. But the mystery remains . . .

In theory, Stevenson’s epitaph is brave. In the last three lines of each verse, in six lines out of eight, he says in six different ways that he is happy to die. But the poem is laden with contradiction. If “Glad did he live,” how could he gladly die? If he was so glad to die, how could he have been glad to live? To be as glad to die as he claims, he must have lost his will to live, or shut it down, which he could only do by refusing to his life any destiny or meaning or existence beyond his animal death, and this he could only do by pretending to be no more than an animal. But what animals take the trouble to write poems eloquent and touching?

O Robert Louis, you knew you were not just an animal. You took the trouble to write many literary works, including a spellbinding tale of life and adventure for boys, Treasure Island, and a harrowing tale of corruption and death for adults, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and your collected works make of you currently the 26th most translated author in the world. True, your parents were Scottish Presbyterians, a Calvinist sect dour enough in mid-19th century to turn many a good man into an atheist. But how could you sell yourself so short at death? How could you pretend that death is “home”?

The Creator did not originally design for animal death the rational animal that is man. Had all men from Adam and Eve made the right use of their rationality, or reason, for the appointed duration of their earthly lives, then instead of their now inevitable animal death they would have glided painlessly into the eternal life which the right use of their reason would have deserved for them. But that original design was frustrated when Adam disobeyed his Creator, and when by the mysterious solidarity of all future mankind with its first Father, he dragged down all men into original sin. From that moment on, contradiction is intrinsic to all human nature and life, because we have a created nature from God at war with our fallen nature from Adam. Our true – not false – “immortal longings” come from our nature as made by God and for God, while our animal death is “home” only to our nature as fallen. “Unhappy man that I am,” cries out St Paul (Rom.VII, 24–25), “who will deliver me from this body of death? The grace of God, by Jesus Christ Our Lord.”

Kyrie eleison.

Archbishop Commented – II

Archbishop Commented – II on January 10, 2015

Before leaving Archbishop Lefebvre’s realistic remarks of 1991 (cf. the last two EC’s), let us comment further, in the hope of helping Catholics to keep their balance between scorning authority in the name of truth and belittling truth for the sake of authority. For ever since the churchmen of Vatican II (1962–1965) put their full authority behind the Church Revolution (religious liberty, collegial equality and ecumenical fraternity), Catholics have been thrown off balance: when Authority tramples upon Truth, how indeed is one to maintain one’s respect for both?

Now in the tormented aftermath of Vatican II, who can be said to have borne fruits comparable to that preservation of Catholic doctrine, Mass and sacraments for which the Archbishop was mainly (albeit not solely) responsible? In which case, the balance that he himself struck between Truth and Authority must be especially deserving of consideration.

Firstly, let us consider a simple observation of the Archbishop on authority: “Now we have the tyranny of authority because there are no more rules from the past.” Amongst human beings all with original sin, truth needs authority to back it, because it is a Jeffersonian illusion that truth thrown into the market-place will prevail all on its own without a disaster being necessary to teach reality. Authority is to truth as means to end, not end to means. It is Catholic faith which saves, and that Faith lies in a series of truths, not in authority. Those truths are so much the substance and purpose of Catholic Authority that when it is cut loose from them, as by Vatican II, then it is cut adrift until the first tyrant to lay hands on it bends it to his will. The tyranny of Paul VI followed naturally on the Council, just as by pursuing approval from the champions of the same Council, the leadership of the Society of St Pius X has likewise behaved itself tyranically in recent years. Contrast how the Archbishop built up his authority over Tradition by serving the truth.

A second remark of his from 1991 deserving of further comment is where he said that when in 1988 he tried to reach an agreement with Rome by means of his Protocol of May 5, “I think I can say that I went even further than I should have.” Indeed that Protocol lays itself open to criticism on important points, so here is the Archbishop himself admitting that he momentarily lost his balance, tilting briefly in favour of Rome’s authority and against Tradition’s truth. But he tilted only briefly, because as is well-known, on the very next morning he repudiated the Protocol, and he never again wavered until his death, so that from then on nobody could say either that he had not done all he could to reach agreement with Authority, or that it is an easy thing to get the balance always right between Truth and Authority.

A third remark throws light on his motivation in seeking from 1975 to 1988 some agreement with Roman Authority. Judging his motives by their own, his successors at the head of the SSPX talk as though he was always seeking its canonical regularisation. But he explained the Protocol as follows: “I hoped until the last minute that in Rome we would witness a little bit of loyalty.” In other words he was always pursuing the good of the Faith, and he never honoured Authority for anything other than for the sake of the Truth. Can as much be said for his successors?

Kyrie eleison.

Archbishop Commented – I

Archbishop Commented – I on January 3, 2015

For today’s Church authorities “there is no fixed truth, there is no dogma. Everything is evolving.” So said Archbishop Lefebvre (1905–1991) in 1991 (see last week’s “Eleison Comments”). For at the end of his life the Archbishop saw more clearly than ever what he had been up against in his heroic defence of the Faith. Since then the liberals (unknown to themselves as such?) who took over his Society of St Pius X as soon as he was gone, have still not understood the gravity of the problem as identified by the Archbishop. Therefore let these “Comments” open the New Year by attempting once more to lay open the mortal wound of today’s Church and world.

When Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) erected man’s refusal of God’s reality into a philosophical system, based on his utterly false proclamation that the human mind cannot know the object as it is in itself, then the philosophy department of universities all over the world began to spill craziness into the streets, because people wanted to make freedom their god and Kant offered them the supreme liberation, that of the mind from its object.

Now Catholics not yet contaminated by the Kantian fantasy know that God and his Heaven exist quite outside of, and independently of, their little minds, and so if they want to be happy for eternity their minds had better deal in objective reality and not in subjective fantasy. Therefore for a century and a half a God-given series of anti-liberal Popes stood up to the liberal world going constantly more crazy all around, and these protected the Church from the prestigious and popular subjectivism. But by the 1950’s the Church’s cardinals and bishops were not praying enough to maintain this protection of their minds and hearts from the madness, known within the Church as “modernism,” and so in the conclave of 1958 they elected one of their own, the supposedly “good” John XXIII, a liberal (unknown to himself as such? God knows), who duly launched in 1962 the disastrous Second Vatican Council.

Why disastrous? Because the madness of subjectivism (the refusal of objective reality), instead of being still utterly condemned by the Church’s highest authorities, was now adopted by them and made (consciously or unconsciously? – God knows) into the official basis of Church doctrine and action. The problem could not be graver. The officials of God’s true Church, appointed to proclaim and defend God’s objective truths of salvation, were henceforth filtering these through their subjectivist minds. Imagine having nothing other than filthy bottles in which to store the best of wine. It can only be ruined. Today’s Conciliar Church officials can only ruin God’s truth.

Here is why the Archbishop said in 1991, “We are dealing with people (at the top of the Church) who have a different philosophy from ours, a different way of seeing, who are influenced by all modern subjectivist philosophers. For them, there is no fixed truth, no fixed dogma. Everything is evolving. This is really the Masonic destruction of the Faith. Fortunately we (Traditionalists) have Tradition to lean on.”

But what has happened to Tradition without the Archbishop to guide it? Alas, the authorities at the top of his Society of St Pius X, which for some 40 years spearheaded the defence of the objective Faith, cannot have been praying seriously enough to protect their minds and hearts from being in turn infected by subjectivism. They too have lost the primacy of objective truth, and so they are being played by the Romans like a fish is played by a fisherman. Archbishop Lefebvre, pray for us!

Kyrie eleison.

Archbishop’s Sense – II

Archbishop’s Sense – II on December 27, 2014

Twelve weeks ago (Oct. 5) “Eleison Comments” presented a first series of extracts from the last public interview of Archbishop Lefebvre, given to Fideliter magazine in early 1991. Here follows a second and last series of extracts, slightly edited but only for the sake of brevity and clarity:—

Q: What conclusions can we draw from the Society of St Pius X after 20 years of its existence?

A: The Good Lord wanted Catholic Tradition. I am deeply convinced that the Society is the means that God wanted to keep and maintain the Faith, the truth of the Church. We must continue faithfully to keep the treasures of the Church, hoping that one day they may resume the place which they should never have lost in Rome.

Q: You often say that, more than the liturgy, it is now the Faith which opposes us to modern Rome.

A: Certainly the question of the liturgy and the sacraments is very important, but the most important is the question of the Faith. This is not a question for us. We have the Faith of all time, of the Council of Trent, of the Catechism of St. Pius X, of all the Councils and all the Popes before Vatican II. For years they have tried in Rome to show that everything in the Council was fully consistent with this Tradition. Now they are showing their true colours by saying there is no longer any Tradition or Deposit to be transmitted. Tradition in the Church is whatever the Pope is saying today. You must submit to what the Pope and the bishops say today. Here is their famous ‘Living Tradition,’ which was the only basis for our condemnation in 1988.

Now they have given up trying to prove that what they say is consistent with what Pius IX wrote or with what the Council of Trent promulgated. No, all of that is over; it’s outdated, as Cardinal Ratzinger said. It is clear, and they might have said so earlier. There was no point in our talking, in our discussing with them. Now we suffer from the tyranny of authority, because there are no longer any rules from the past.

They are showing more and more that we are right. We are dealing with people who have a different philosophy from ours, a different way of seeing, who are influenced by all modern subjectivist philosophers. For them there is no fixed truth, there is no dogma. Everything is evolving. This is really the Masonic destruction of the Faith. Fortunately, we have Tradition to lean on!

Q: You have emphasized that you are sure that the Society is blessed by God, because at several points it could have disappeared.

A: Indeed. It has kept coming under very difficult attacks. That is very painful, but we must nonetheless believe that the line of Faith and Tradition that we are following, is imperishable, because God cannot allow his Church to perish.

Q; What can you say to those of the faithful who still hope in the possibility of an agreement with Rome?

A: Our true faithful, those who have understood the problem and who have precisely helped us to continue along the straight and firm path of Tradition and the Faith, told me that the approaches I was making towards Rome were dangerous and that I was wasting my time. Yet I hoped until the last minute that in Rome we would witness a little bit of loyalty, so I cannot be blamed for not having done the maximum. So now too, to those who say to me, “You’ve got to reach an agreement with Rome,” I think I can say that I then went even further than I should have.

Kyrie eleison.

Psalmist’s Cry

Psalmist’s Cry on December 20, 2014

The season of Our Redeemer’s coming amongst us is surely a suitable moment to remind ourselves how much we need God. Of course it has always been so. Before Christ, God came into the ever more wicked pagan world specially to the Israelites with the Old Testament to prepare for the coming of his own Son. Here is Psalm 43, all of which applies both to the Israelites and to Catholics, God’s people in Old and New Testaments (Revised Standard Version, titles and brackets added):—

A. GOD USED TO PROTECT HIS PEOPLE.

1 We have heard with our ears, O God, our fathers have told us, what deeds thou didst perform in their days, in the days of old: 2 thou with thy own hand didst drive out the nations (pagans), but them ( our fathers ) thou didst plant; thou didst afflict the peoples ( pagans), but them (our fathers) thou didst set free; 3 for not by their own sword did they (our fathers) win the land, nor did their own arm give them victory; but thy right hand, and thy arm, and the light of thy countenance; for thou didst delight in them. 4 Thou art my King and my God, who ordainest victories for Jacob. 5 Through thee we push down our foes; through thy name we tread down our assailants. 6 For not in my bow do I trust, nor can my sword save me. 7 But thou hast saved us from our foes, and hast put to confusion those who hate us. 8 In God we have boasted continually, and we will give thanks to thy name for ever.

B NOW HE HAS REJECTED THEM.

9 Yet thou hast cast us (Israelites) off and abased us, and hast not gone out with our armies. 10 Thou hast made us turn back from the foe; and our enemies have gotten spoil. 11 Thou hast made us like sheep for slaughter, and hast scattered us among the nations. 12 Thou hast sold thy people for a trifle, demanding no high price for them. 13 Thou hast made us the taunt of our neighbors, the derision and scorn of those about us. 14 Thou hast made us a byword among the nations, a laughingstock among the peoples. 15 All day long my disgrace is before me, and shame has covered my face, 16 at the words of the taunters and revilers, at the sight of the enemy and the avenger.

C YET WE HAVE BEEN FAITHFUL.

17 All this has come upon us, though we have not forgotten thee, or been false to thy (Mosaic) covenant. 18 Our heart has not turned back, nor have our steps departed from thy way, 19 that thou shouldst have broken us in the place of jackals, and covered us with deep darkness. 20 If we had forgotten the name of our God, or spread forth our hands to a strange god, 21 would not God discover this? For he knows the secrets of the heart.

D O GOD, COME TO OUR HELP!

22 Nay, for thy sake we are slain all the day long, and accounted as sheep for the slaughter. 23 Rouse thyself! Why sleepest thou, O Lord? Awake! Do not cast us off for ever! 24 Why dost thou hide thy face? Why dost thou forget our affliction and oppression? 25 For our soul is bowed down to the dust; our body cleaves to the ground. 26 Rise up, come to our help! Deliver us for the sake of thy steadfast love! (end of Psalm 43)

In other words, there was a time when God raised up his Catholic Church to great heights. But today it is making itself the laughing-stock of the world, to the point that one can almost be ashamed to be a Catholic. However, there are still faithful Catholics. O God, come to their help, O God, come to our help!

Kyrie eleison.