Eleison Comments

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.

“Resistance” Failing?

“Resistance” Failing? on August 23, 2014

Some readers of these Comments no doubt objected to the reference made last week (EC 370) to the “Resistance” presently making “little apparent headway.” They might have preferred a valiant call to arms. But we must stay real. For instance, when the Traditional diocese of Campos in Brazil fell back into the arms of Newrome back in 2001, did not several of us say that out of some 25 priests formed in Bishop de Castro Mayer’s school, at least a few would break ranks? Yet not one of them has gone independent since then to continue defending Tradition as Campos had always defended it, and so all of them are more or less on the neo-modernist slide. However, if we do stay real, there is not nothing to be said.

First of all, God is God, and he is conducting this crisis his way and not ours. “My thoughts are not your thoughts, your ways are not my ways, says the Lord” (Is. LV, 8). We dream of the clear-sighted priests and laity banding together to stand up to his enemies, but God does not need anybody’s “Resistance” to look after his sheep or save his Church. Forty years ago when Archbishop Lefebvre hoped for and looked for a handful of fellow-bishops to stand beside him in public and throw up a real road-block in the way of the Conciliar steam-roller, surely he might have found them, but he never did. In fact when God intervenes to save the situation, as he certainly will, it will be obvious that the rescue was his doing, through his Mother.

Secondly, more than five centuries of rampant humanism have made man so ignorant of God, the Lord God of Hosts, that mankind has to be taught a lesson which it will not learn except the hard way. The ninth of St Ignatius’ 14 Rules for the Discernment of Spirits (first week) gives three main reasons for a soul’s spiritual desolation, which can be applied to the Church’s present desolation:‍—

1. God punishes us for our spiritual lukewarmness and negligence. God alone knows today just what a worldwide chastisement is deserved by our worldwide apostasy and plunge into materialism and hedonism.

2. God puts us to the trial to show us what is really inside us, and how we depend on him. Does not modern man seriously think that he can do a better job of running the universe than Almighty God? And might it be that the truth will not sink in until all of his own little efforts have failed?

3. God humbles us with desolation to cut short our pride and vainglory. Coming from the chief ministers of the one true religion of the one true God, was not Vatican II an unprecedented outburst of human vainglory, preferring man’s modern world to God’s unchanging Church? And the little Society of St Pius X thought that it could save the Church? Unless the “Resistance” remains duly modest in its claims and ambitions, it is doomed in advance.

Then what should those ambitions be? First and foremost, to keep the Faith, without which it is impossible to please God (Heb. XI, 6), and which is expressed in doctrine, in the Catholic Creed. Secondly, to give witness to that Faith, especially by example, if necessary unto martyrdom (“martyr” is the Greek word for “witness”). So howsoever the “Resistance” is or is not organized, it must devote its resources, however meagre, to whatever will help souls to keep the Faith. Then, since its stand for the Truth is bound to be recognizable as such, merely by existing it will not be failing, because it will be giving witness.

Kyrie eleison.

Dickens Conference

Dickens Conference on August 16, 2014

The Dickens Conference held two weeks ago at Queen of Martyrs House in Broadstairs, England, went very well, within its modest limits. On the Saturday there was only a little rain, the Sunday was all sunshine, and nearly 30 participants, mostly from England but also from Denmark, France and the USA, much enjoyed the house, one another’s Catholic company, and the three lectures of Dr David White on three novels of Charles Dickens (1812–1870), England’s best loved writer after William Shakespeare.

“Within its modest limits” because outside of the devoutly attended Masses on the Saturday and Sunday, there was little outwardly supernatural about the Conference. Let us say that it was a session of sanity rather than sanctity, but we notice immediately that at least in English the word “sanity” makes up three quarters of the word “sanctity.” Grace builds on nature, and it can hardly build on the insanity and corruption of nature to which the world around us is giving itself over, day by day. Sanity is therefore more important than ever, even for supernatural purposes. If the “Resistance” is presently making so little apparent headway, is it not because there is just not enough sanity still around to recognize and cast out the mind-rot, and the rot of true obedience and sanctity?

In Dr White’s first lecture he spoke of David Copperfield, Dickens’ own favourite amongst his many novels, and specially linked to Broadstairs. This is because on Dickens’ many visits for work or holidays to his beloved seaside town, he came to know an eccentric old lady who lived in a small house still existing on the sea-front. She so impressed him that he built her into David Copperfield as Betsy Trotwood, an eccentric old lady who takes in the orphaned hero of the novel and protects him until he finds his way in life. In her mouth Dickens puts his own hatred of Puritanism and Calvinism, said Dr White. At least once in his life Dickens was told that Catholicism is the one true religion, but he never became a Catholic. However, he had a supreme respect for the Gospel of Christ, and genuinely good-hearted characters tumble over one another in the pages of his novels.

On Saturday afternoon there followed a visit to the sea-front house of “Betsy Trotwood,” now a Dickens Museum; full of Dickensian memorabilia and with a Dickensian curator. Then the second conference was on Bleak House, first novel of Dickens’ second period, when England was growing darker. Bleak House attacks lawyers and the law in particular, but in general, said Dr White, it attacks a System more and more in control of society, demoralizing and crushing the innocent sheep. Politics are becoming meaningless and the aristocracy is losing touch with reality, but an inhuman System is driving forward until it will finally collapse under its faksehood, in the manner of Vatican II, added Dr White.

The third lecture presented on Sunday morning Hard Times, another of the darker novels, about the total lack of real education, 150 years ago! Without education of the heart, Dickens knew that human beings will be cold and inhuman. Dr White drew on his decades of teaching in the USA Naval Academy to back up Dickens’ portrait of the enormous stupidity of the social robots engineered by an “education” spurning history, the arts, music, literature and especially poetry. The result, he said, is the boundless boredom of youngsters today, a reflection of pure nihilism.

However, Conference participants went home feeling neither bored nor nihilistic, but much refreshed. Deo Gratias.

Kyrie eleison.

Israelites, Israelis?

Israelites, Israelis? on August 9, 2014

Let us then grant (EC 368) that the orders of Almighty God to exterminate certain peoples in the Old Testament (e.g. I Sam. XV) were an act of justice and mercy towards the pagans themselves, and an act also designed to help the Israelites forward towards cradling the Incarnate God, Our Lord Jesus Christ, when he would come many centuries later. This cradle the Israelites did provide, especially through the Blessed Virgin Mary, to whom the entire human race owes a boundless debt of gratitude. If any of us does get to Heaven, it will be only through her intercession.

Then what connection can there be between those Jews through whom salvation comes (Jn. IV, 22) and the mass of Jews today, who are either massacring Palestine or supporting the massacre, morally or financially? The majority of today’s Jews being Ashkenazy Jews, they may well be no blood-descendants of Abraham, but be that as it may, they have certainly absorbed through the Talmud, the holy book of post-Christian Judaism, what Our Lord called “the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees” (Mt. XVI, 11), meaning the spirit of his bitter enemies who crucified him and have fought his Church ever since. How can his Chosen People have turned into some of his consistently worst enemies? (If the mere question seems “anti-semitic,” let it be recalled that truth is good while “anti-semitism” is bad, so nothing true can be “anti-semitic” and nothing “anti-semitic” can be true. What follows is the truth, and has nothing whatsoever to do with so-called “anti-semitism”).

Firstly, if the Chosen People turned against their God, the problem may seem chronological but it is not. Throughout the Old Testament there were Israelites who turned against God, for instance the worshippers of the Golden Calf or the Jews exiled to Babylon. God frequently had to punish his own “stiff-necked” and rebellious people. Likewise from the beginning of the New Testament down to our own day there have always been outstanding Jewish converts, like St Paul, who was as Jewish as could be (cf. Rom. IX, 1–5; II Cor. XI, 21–22; Phil. III, 4–6). The difference between Israelites and Israelis is the same difference as there has always been between those of any race who love God and those who rebel against him. The true “Judeo-Christian” line stretches from Abel through, for instance, Abraham, Moses, David and the Mother of God to the Catholic Church. The false “Judeo-Christian” but true “Judeo-Masonic” line stretches from the accursed Cain through, for instance, the killers of God’s prophets to Anas and Caiphas to modern Freemasonry, which was created by Jews and is still controlled by them for purposes of fighting the Catholic Church, even if many Masons are ignorant of the fact.

Well and good, but is not the contrast between Israelites and Israelis especially sharp? Yes, because as the old saying goes, “The higher they are, the harder they fall.” Once the Chosen People refused to be the special servants of God, as they have largely done from the Incarnation onwards, they were bound to become the special servants of the Devil. For them there could be nothing in between. And what was behind that refusal? In one word, pride. Instead of using God’s special gifts to them for his glory, they bent them to their own glory. Before their Messiah came, they misconceived him as their material instead of spiritual saviour, so that when he came they refused to recognize him, and from then on they fought him for having replaced their racially exclusive Mosaic religion with the racially all-inclusive Catholic religion, open to all races.

And what can Catholics do to resist the overwhelming material dominance of the once Chosen Ones all around us? Materially, next to nothing, but a single soul praying spiritually and sincerely for God’s kingdom to come and for his will to be done can prevail on God to move material mountains, child’s play for God. He only allows that dominance in order to drive us back to him.

Kyrie Eleison.

Avenging God?

Avenging God? on August 2, 2014

The latest horrible onslaught let loose against the virtually defenceless Palestinians in Gaza can raise in many people’s minds an obstacle to the true worship of the true God, because it is well known that many of today’s Israelis claim that they have from the Old Testament a God-given right to take all the land occupied by the Palestinians, by force if necessary. A reasonable person might ask two questions: what kind of a God can even remotely be pulled in to ‘justify’ such barbarous cruelty, together with such utter contempt for any world opinion condemning that barbarity? And what kind of a ‘Chosen People’ are these? The answer to both questions turns around Our Lord Jesus Christ, around whom of course all human history turns.

The Old Testament tells the story of mankind before Christ, especially the story of the Israelites, the people that God chose out from the rest of the human race to act as the cradle for the coming down from Heaven of the Incarnate God, Jesus Christ. About a thousand years after Adam, mankind had grown so corrupt that God had to wash it out and start again with the eight souls saved on Noah’s Ark. About another thousand years later, mankind is again so corrupt that God has to pull Abraham out of the degenerate city Ur to be the founder of a race that must stay clear of all surrounding human contamination in order to be clean enough to act as that cradle. Here is the origin of that racial exclusivity observable in Jews ever since. It began with God, but it has fallen into the hands of men.

The Jews were indeed once, for the sake of Jesus Christ, the Chosen People. Thus St Thomas Aquinas has a tremendous article in his Summa Theologiae where he shows how every single detail in the furnishing of the Israelites’ exclusive Temple in Jerusalem pointed forward to Jesus Christ (Ia IIae, 102, 4). However, to clear the Promised Land for the Israelites to take over, there is no question that Almighty God gave them more than once the command to exterminate utterly the pagans occupying the land, and He punished King Saul severely for not observing this command to the letter (I Sam XV). What could justify such a command?

It is the same as what explains God’s exterminating all mankind (except eight souls) in Noah’s time. Firstly men’s sins. God creates men for Heaven, they choose sin that deserves Hell. For indeed sin offends God first of all. So the sense of God and the sense of sin get lost together, as all around us today. A godless generation like ours cannot possibly understand the justice of God. Secondly, God’s mercy, which goes hand in hand with His justice, and is today equally misunderstood. But given the reality of Hell, is it not a mercy of God if he cuts men off so that they can repent before they die, or at least be stopped from sinning so as not to deserve to go any deeper in Hell?

That is how it will have been with the pagan enemies of the Israelites between Abraham and Jesus Christ. To read the Old Testament is to see how often the Israelites were tempted to abandon the true God and to worship devils by the pagans all around them. As the Curé of Ars once said, ‘Get rid of the priest, and within 25 years men will be worshipping beasts.’ It is to the eternal credit of the Israelites that they did succeed in providing the cradle for the Messiah, for instance St Joachim and St Anne, especially their child, the Blessed Virgin Mary, the twelve Apostles and all other good Israelites who helped to launch their Messiah’s Catholic Church. For today’s Israelis see next week.

Kyrie eleison.

France Stirs

France Stirs on July 26, 2014

Many of you know that on Tuesday and Wednesday of last week was held in the Dominican Friary of Avrillé close to Angers in North-west France a meeting of resistant priests from wherever the “Resistance” is up and running, but mainly from France. This was the third such meeting of French priests held in Avrillé since the beginning of the year, and it was the most important. This time they began to co-ordinate and to organize their activities in France, a country often decisive for the Church in various ways.

The credit for calling these meetings goes to the Prior of Avrillé, Fr Pierre-Marie. For several years Avrillé has been offering support and a refuge to priests of the Society of St Pius X who have been finding their priestly life more and more difficult under its present leadership, whose pursuit of reconciliation with the Newchurch in Rome is, despite the disguise and denials, relentless. Only a few weeks ago the Society’s Second Assistant is reported to have said, “The train is leaving for Rome, and those who want to get off will get off.” For as long as possible Fr Pierre-Marie sought not to break off relations with the official SSPX, but earlier this year came the letter from Bishop Fellay finalising the rupture. That was inevitable, unless Avrillé would also betray Tradition.

Originally Fr Pierre-Marie designed last week’s meeting for the French priests, but I suggested to him that resistant priests from outside France might also be invited for a double reason: the priests from outside would be encouraged to see the “Resistance” stirring in France, where it has stirred little – outwardly – up till now, and the French priests in turn might be reminded that there is not only France. Fr Pierre-Marie accepted my suggestion, and that is how it turned out, some 18 priests in all.

The meeting went very well. There was little looking back and no bitterness, much looking forward. The first day’s business was largely for the French priests. They began by nominating as their co-ordinator Fr. de Mérode, a priest from Belgium with 30 years’ experience in the SSPX, all over the world. Then for their organisation being born they chose the name of “Priestly Union of Marcel Lefebvre,” a name that announces clearly the orientation. And finally Fr. De Mérode began organising a network of Mass centres all over France – back to the 1970’s, but in harsher conditions, and with very limited resources, at least for the moment.

The second day’s business was given over to international concerns for the defence of the Faith, and here of course arose the question of episcopal consecrations, because I for one wished to know the mind of the priests present. It was relatively unanimous. Readers will be encouraged to know that while the priests thought that the time for consecrations had not yet come, nevertheless it could not be too far off. For indeed as of now it is very difficult to imagine any of the three bishops who remain within the SSPX undertaking to consecrate anybody without the approval of |Rome, and it is impossible to imagine neo-modernist Rome approving of any anti-modernist candidate! Patience.

Do pray, both for the quiet success of the budding Priestly Union, and for God to give us, in his good time, the additional bishops needed for the defence of the Faith.

Kyrie eleison.