Eleison Comments

Archbishop’s Sense – I

Archbishop’s Sense – I on October 4, 2014

In last month’s issue of The Recusant (www.The Recusant.com) is a translation into English of Archbishop Lefebvre’s last interview, published in French ( Fideliter #79) shortly before his death in March of 1991. He is always refreshing to read. He is clear, because he thinks from basic Catholic principles. He is transparent, because he has nothing to hide. He is unambiguous, because he is not trying to compromise Our Lord’s Church with Satan’s Vatican II. But notice how the interviewer’s questions indicate that the readership of Fideliter was naturally inclining to take the direction which the Society of St Pius X would begin to take a few years after the Archbishop’s death. Here is a selection of the questions and answers, somewhat abbreviated:—

Q: Why can you not make one last approach to Rome? We hear the Pope is “ready to receive you.” A: That is absolutely impossible, because the principles which now guide the Conciliar church are more and more openly contrary to Catholic doctrine. For instance Cardinal Ratzinger recently said that the Popes’ great anti-modernist documents of the 19 th and 20 th centuries rendered a great service in their day, but are now outdated. And John-Paul II is more ecumenical than ever (1990). “It is absolutely inconceivable that we can agree to work with such a hierarchy.”

Q; Has the situation in Rome deteriorated even since the negotiations of 1988?

A: Oh yes! “We will have to wait some time before considering the prospect of making an agreement. For my part I believe that God alone can save the situation, as humanly we see no possibility of Rome straightening things out.”

Q: But there are Traditionalists who have made an agreement with Rome while conceding nothing. A: That is false. They have given up their ability to oppose Rome. They must remain silent, given the favours they have been granted. Then they begin to slide ever so slowly, until they end up admitting the errors of Vatican II. “It’s a very dangerous situation.” Such concessions by Rome are meant only to get Traditionalists to break with the SSPX and submit to Rome.

Q: You say that such Traditionalists have “betrayed.” Isn’t that a bit harsh?

A: Not at all! For instance Dom Gérard made use of me, of the SSPX and its chapels and benefactors, and now they suddenly abandon us and join with the destroyers of the Faith. They have abandoned the fight for the Faith. They can no longer attack Rome. They have understood nothing of the doctrinal question. It is awful to think of the youngsters who joined them for the sake of Tradition and are now following them to Conciliar Rome.

Q: Is there a danger in remaining friends with Traditionalists who have gone over to Rome, and in attending their Masses?

A: Yes, because at Mass there is not only the Mass but there is also the sermon, the atmosphere, the surroundings, the conversations before and after Mass, and so on. All of these things make you little by little change your ideas. There is a climate of ambiguity. One is in an atmosphere submissive to the Vatican, subject ultimately to the Council, so one ends up by becoming ecumenical.

Q; John-Paul II is very popular. He wants to unite all Christians.

A: But in what unity? No longer in the Faith which a soul must accept, and which calls for conversion. The Church has been distorted, from being a hierarchical society into being a “communion.” Communion in what? Not in the Faith. No wonder one hears that Catholics are leaving the Faith in droves. (to be continued)

Kyrie eleison.

Chastisement Coming

Chastisement Coming on September 27, 2014

Father Constant Louis Marie PEL (1876–1966) is not a name well-known among the souls gifted by God with a knowledge of how God is going to set today’s world straight, but for those who knew him he was a priest very close to God. Doctor in theology, seminary professor, founder of a convent for women and of a seminary for men, with a great devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, he was a personal friend of Padre Pio who said of him to some French pilgrims in San Giovanni Rotondo, “Why do you come to see me when you have so great a Saint in France?”

Fr Pel would spend nights on his feet in church with his forehead leaning against the Tabernacle, conversing with God in a permanent ecstasy. He died in a car accident just after Vatican II, but not before a seminarian, one of his spiritual sons, had been able to note down a prophecy of his, dating from 1945, concerning the chastisement which will strike France in particular. Here it is, quoted or abbreviated:—

“My son,” said Fr Pel, “know that with the sins of the world increasing in horror as this age wears on, great punishments from God will come down on the world and no continent will be spared by the Wrath of God. France being guilty of apostasy and denying its vocation will be severely chastised. East of a line stretching from Bordeaux in the south-west to Lille in the north-east, everything will be laid waste and set on fire by peoples invading from the east, and also by great flaming meteorites falling in a rain of fire upon all the earth and upon these regions especially. Revolution, war, epidemics, plagues, chemical poison gases, violent earthquakes and the re-awakening of France’s extinct volcanoes will destroy everything . .

“France to the west of that line will be less affected . . . because of the faith rooted in the Vendée and in Brittany . . . but any of God’s worst enemies seeking refuge there from the worldwide cataclysm will be found out, wherever they hide, and put to death by devils, because the Wrath of the Lord is just and holy. Thick darkness caused by the war, gigantic fires and fragments of burning stars falling for three days and nights will cause the sun to disappear, and only candles blessed on Candlemas (February 2) will give light in the hands of believers, but the godless will not see this miraculous light because they have darkness in their souls.

“In this way, my son, three quarters of mankind will be destroyed, and in certain parts of France survivors will have to go 60 miles to find another live human being . . . . Several nations will disappear off the face of the map . . . . A France thus purified will become the renewed “Eldest Daughter of the Church,” because all the Cains and Judases will have disappeared in this ‘Judgment upon the Nations’”. This Judgment is not yet the end of times, but so great is the punishment due to the sins of the nations that Our Lord told Fr Pel that the desolation at world’s end will be lesser.

Dear readers, what do we conclude? Let each of us strive with might and main, and with the help of the Catholic sacraments given to us by God for that purpose, to live in God’s grace and not in the state of sin, and let us make full use of the time he gives us between now and the Hour of his Justice to pray for the largest possible number of sinners to repent and save their souls for eternity when the Chastisement closes in. God, have mercy. Mary, help.

Kyrie eleison.

Context Upended

Context Upended on September 20, 2014

Starting out from arguments against sedevacantism as being a short-sighted error in a wholly abnormal situation, an Italian friend (C.C.) takes a longer view of that situation. Without being a priest or theologian, he ventures the opinion that sedevacantism is merely one of several attempts in the Church to fit the crisis of today into the categories of yesterday. There is no question of Catholic theology changing, but the real situation to which that theology has to be applied underwent a sea-change with Vatican II. Here is a key paragraph of his on that upended reality:—

“By its refusal of the objective reality of God’s existence and of the need to submit to his Law, today’s world is not normal, and the present Catholic unity is not normal either which has put man instead of God at the centre of things. Nor is it by a sudden swerve that the Church has arrived at this abnormal state of things, but following on a long and complex process of moving away from God, the disruptive effects of which showed up at Vatican II. For hundreds of years the germs of dissolution have been fostered within the Church, as have the men harbouring these germs, and they have beeen allowed to occupy all ranks of the hierarchy, up to and including the See of Peter.”

My friend goes on that if one fails to take into consideration this overall abnormality of the present state of the Church, which is unbelievably, yet truly, worse than ever, one runs the risk of dealing with a reality that no longer exists, in terms of reference that no longer apply. Thus for example the sedevacantists will say that today’s churchmen must know what they are doing, because they are intelligent and educated men. Not so, says C.C.: their preaching and practice may well no longer be Catholic, but they are convinced that they are wholly orthodox. The whole world has gone mad. They have merely gone mad with it, not by a loss of reason but by having given up the use of it, and as their Catholic faith grows weaker, so there is less and less to stop them from losing it altogether.

But then, one might object, God must have abandoned his Church. To reply, CC resorts to three quotations from Scripture. Firstly, Lk.XVIII, 8, where Our Lord wonders if he will even find the Faith on earth when he comes back. Obviously a small remainder of priests and laity (with perhaps some bishops) will be enough to ensure the indefectibility of the Church until the end of the world (one thinks of the present difficulties of the “Resistance” in taking shape). Likewise, secondly, Mt.XXIV, 11–14, where it is foreseen that many false prophets will deceive many souls, and charity will grow cold. And thirdly, Lk.XXII, 31–32, where Our Lord instructs Peter to confirm his brethren in the faith after he has converted, strongly suggesting that his faith will first have failed. So almost the whole hierarchy can fail, including Peter, without the Church ceasing to be indefectible, somewhat like when the Apostles all ran away in the Garden of Gethsemane (Mt.XXVI, 56).

In conclusion, CC’s vision for the Church of tomorrow or the day after strongly resembles that of Fr Calmel: let each of us do his duty according to his state of life, and take part in building a network of little forts of the Faith, each with a priest to ensure the sacraments, but with no henceforth inapplicable theology of the Church, nor unobtainable canonical approval, nor with any out-dated dividing-walls over the top of which the Faith will have flowed. The forts will be united by the Truth and will have mutual contacts of charity. The rest is in God’s hands.

Kyrie eleison.

Popes Fallible

Popes Fallible on September 13, 2014

Neither liberals nor sedevacantists appreciate being told that they are like heads and tails of the same coin, but it is true. For instance, neither of them can conceive of a third alternative. See for instance in his Letter to Three Bishops of April 14, 2012 , how Bishop Fellay could see no alternative to his liberalism except sedevacantism. Conversely, for many a sedevacantist if one accepts that any of the Conciliar Popes has really been Pope, then one can only be a liberal, and if one criticises sedevacantism, then one is promoting liberalism. But not at all!

Why not? Because both of them are making the same error of exaggerating the Pope’s infallibility. Why? Might it be because both of them are modern men who believe more in persons than in institutions? And why should that be a feature of modern men? Because from more or less Protestantism onwards, fewer and fewer institutions have truly sought the common good, while more and more seek some private interest such as money (my claim on you), which of course diminishes our respect for them. For instance, good men saved for a while the rotten institution of modern banking from having immediately all its evil effects, but the rotten banksters are at last showing what the institutions of fractional reserve banking and central banks were, in themselves, from the beginning. The Devil is in modern structures, thanks to the enemies of God and man.

So it is understandable if modern Catholics have tended to put too much faith in the Pope and too little in the Church, and here is the answer to that reader who asked me why I do not write about infallibility in the same way that the classic Catholic theology manuals do. Those manuals are marvellous in their way, but they were all written before Vatican II, and they tended to attach to the Pope an infallibility which belongs to the Church. For instance, the summit of infallibility is liable to be presented in the manuals as a solemn definition by the Pope, or by Pope with Council, but in any case by the Pope. The liberal-sedevacantist dilemma has been the consequence and, as it were, a punishment of this tendency to overrate the person and underrate the institution, because the Church is no merely human institution.

For, firstly, the Solemn Magisterium’s snow-cap on the Ordinary Magisterium’s mountain is its summit only in a very limited way – it is completely supported by the rock summit beneath the snow. And secondly, by the Church’s most authoritative text on infallibility, the Definition of the truly Catholic Council of Vatican I (1870), we know that the Pope’s infallibility comes from the Church, and not the other way round. When the Pope engages all four conditions necessary for ex cathedra teaching, then, says the Definition, he possesses “that infallibility which the divine Redeemer willed his Church to enjoy in defining doctrine.” But of course! Where else can infallibility come from, except from God? The best of human beings, and some Popes have been very good human beings, may be inerrant, i.e. make no mistakes, but as long as they have original sin they cannot be infallible as God alone can be. If they are infallible, the infallibility must come through, but from outside, their humanity, from God, who chooses to bestow it through the Catholic Church, and that infallibility need only be a momentary gift, for the duration of the Definition.

Therefore outside of a Pope’s ex cathedra moments, nothing stops him from talking nonsense such as the new religion of Vatican II. Therefore neither liberals nor sedevacantists need or should heed that nonsense, because, as Archbishop Lefebvre said, they have 2000 years’ worth of Ordinarily infallible Church teaching by which to judge that it is nonsense.

Kyrie eleison.

Donoso Cortés – I

Donoso Cortés – I on September 6, 2014

One of the most important Catholic dogmas is that of original sin, whereby all human beings (except Our Lord and his Mother) have a nature seriously wounded from birth through our mysterious solidarity with Adam, father of all mankind, when with Eve he fell into the first of all human sins in the garden of Eden. Of course for most people today that Fall is just a fairy-tale, or mythology, and that is why they have built a Disneyworld all around us. In principle Catholics believe in original sin, but so seductive is Disneyworld that many hardly take original sin seriously in practice. After all, ith not at all nithe to believe we are all thinnerth. We are all thwimming in luv, luv, luv, ar’n’twe!

But a man who saw very clearly original sin in action was the Spanish nobleman, writer and diplomat, Donoso Cortés (1808–1853). His life spanned that first half of the 19 th century when in the wake of the French Revolution (1789), Europe was slowly but steadily replacing the old Christian order (“ancien régime”) with the Judeo-masonic New World Order. Outwardly the old order was put back in place by the Congress of Vienna (1815), but inwardly it was not at all the same as before, because men’s minds were now resting on quite different foundations, liberal foundations, notably the separation of Church and State. When Donoso entered Spanish politics at a young age, he proclaimed himself to be a liberal, but as he observed the Revolutionary ideas working out in practice, he became more and more conservative until in 1847 he converted to Spain’s ancient Catholic religion. From then on until his early death his written and spoken words carried all over Europe his prophetic Catholic analysis of the radical modern errors forging the New World Order.

At the back of all these errors he discerned two: the denial of God’s supernatural care for his creatures, and the denial of original sin. From Donoso’s Letter to Cardinal Fornari (1852) come the following two paragraphs which connect to original sin the rise of democracy and the diminution of the Church (the translation here is from a French translation):—

“If the light of men’s reason is in no way darkened, its light is enough, without need of the Faith, to discover the truth. If the Faith is not needed, then man’s reason is sovereign and independent. The progress of truth then depends on the progress of reason, which depends upon the exercise of reason; such an exercise is to be found in discussion; hence discussion constitutes the true basic law of modern societies, the matchless crucible in which by a process of melting, truths are separated from errors. From this principle of discussion flow freedom of the press, the inviolability of freedom of speech and the real sovereignty of parliaments.”

Donoso continues with a parallel diagnosis of the consequences of man’s will being supposed to be free from original sin: “If man’s will is not sick, then he needs none of the supernatural help of grace to pursue good, its attraction being enough: if he needs no grace, then he can do without prayer and the sacraments which provide it.” If prayer is not needed, it is useless, and so are contemplation and the contemplative religious Orders, which duly disappear. If man needs no sacraments, then he has no need of priests to administer them, and they are duly banned. And scorn of the priesthood results everywhere in scorn of the Church, which amounts in all places to the scorn of God.

From such false principles Donoso Cortés foresaw an unparallelled disaster in the very near future. Actually it has been delayed for over 150 years, but how much longer?

Kyrie eleison.

Moses Explains

Moses Explains on August 30, 2014

If any Catholic seeks an in-depth explanation of the on-going madness in Gaza, he should read Moses in the Old Testament. For instance, if the Israelites do not keep the commandments of God, they will be stricken with “madness and blindness and fury of mind” (Deut. XXVIII, 28), among many other curses. As Fr Meinvielle said, the Jews are a theological race, and they cannot escape their theological destiny – they are bound to God like no other people on earth.

In Deuteronomy Moses is giving to the Israelites their last solemn instructions before they enter the Promised Land, and before he dies. In Chapter 28 (parallelled by Levit. XXVI) Moses makes very clear the mind of Jehovah (or Yahweh), the God of the Old Testament, identical with the God of the New Testament: the Jews will be specially blessed (v.1–14) if they obey the one true God, they will be specially cursed (v. 15–68) if they disobey him. Either way, they are a special race being given a special knowledge of the one true God for a special mission that they must fulfil for him, with a special reward or punishment from him, depending on how they fulfil that mission.

No wonder Jews think they are special! Among the blessings listed here by Moses, God will raise them “higher than all nations” (v.1); “to be a holy people unto himself” (v.9); to be “the head and not the tail” (v.13). But in every one of these three verses it is noteworthy how Moses makes the Israelites’ superiority depend on their obedience to God: if they will “hear the voice of God and keep all his commandments” (v.1); if they “hear his commandments and walk in his ways” (v.9); if they will “hear the commandments of God and keep and do them” (v.13).

On the other hand if the Israelites try to be that superior nation on their own terms, disobeying God (v.15), then a multitude of curses will come upon them (v.16–68), and they will be scorned, hated and trampled upon by all other nations: they will be “scattered throughout all the kingdoms of the earth” (v.25); they will be stricken with “madness and blindness and fury of mind” (v.28 – think of Gaza!); the stranger with whom they live will “rise up over” them, he will be the head and they will be the tail (v.43–44); their enemy will put an “iron yoke” upon their neck (v.48); the Lord God will afflict them with all kinds of sufferings (v.59–61), and they will be “taken away from the land which they will go in to possess” (v.63). And all of this they will suffer because of not keeping and fulfilling the words of God’s law (v.58).

Alas, did all these blessings and curses announced by the great Moses avail to make the Israelites recognize and serve their Messiah and Incarnate God when he came, as also prophesied by Moses (Deut. XVIII, 15–18)? No, they crucified him instead, which has for now nearly 2000 years brought down on their heads all of Moses’ curses. They made themselves into the most despised and downtrodden nation on earth, and they lost their right to the Promised Land, being driven out and scattered everywhere else from the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D.

Nor does their regaining possession of the Holy Land mean that the curse is being lifted, because they are doing it on their own terms and not on God’s, so that the very re-possession turns into part of the curse. As Plato said (Georgias), it is better to suffer than to commit an injustice, and therefore in spiritual reality, the Israelis are more to be pitied than the Palestinians. Patience. We “all have sinned and do need the glory of God” (Rom. III, 22–23).

Kyrie eleison.