Eleison Comments

First, get things straight with God – the rest will follow.

Amidst Traditional Catholics there has recently been disputed again the question of whether Catholic bishops’ Consecrations performed with the new rite fabricated by Pope Paul VI following on Vatican II are valid as Consecrations, or not. In other words, can we be sure that a priest who has undergone the new rite of Consecration is himself truly a bishop? The question is of immense importance, because upon valid bishops depends the very survival of the Catholic Church and of souls being able to get to Heaven, because souls absolutely need priests and sacraments to die in that state of sanctifying grace without which they they gravely risk falling into Hell. 

Broadly speaking, there are two schools of thought on the question. The huge majority of Catholics, down to and including the Newsociety of St Pius X, as reoriented in 2012 by the successors of Archbishop Lefebvre at the head of the Society which he first oriented in 1970 to defend Faith and Church against the ravages of the Conciliar revolution, see no problem. Of course Vatican II (1962–1965) was not such a disaster, they say, that God allowed His enemies to gain so much power inside the Church that they could succeed in tampering seriously with the very wellsprings of its future, the rite of consecration of its future leaders. The mere idea is ridiculous! Vatican II was bad, but it cannot have been that bad. Alas, it was! 

Just look at the fruits, which show infallibly what is at work. Between 20 years before and 20 years after the Council, a mass of Catholic hospitals, schools, convents, seminaries, priories, monasteries – all closed down or turned over for the keeping of apples (Ps. 78, 1). Have there ever been at any one time so many vocations abandoned, or so few new vocations arising, as in the period after Vatican II? Why? Surely because, for instance, the mass of citizens today are persuaded that a social worker is more useful than a priest. Where there is no Faith, at least as it used to be understood before the Council, the bishop and the priest are at a discount for what they properly are, and all that is left for them is to do a bad imitation of somebody who they are not at all, like a social worker. And who should be preaching that Faith? Bishops and priests! How brilliantly with Vatican II the Devil turned the churchmen’s minds inside out and upside down! Maybe the new rite of Consecration has, somehow, been a problem for the bishops after all . . . 

Fr. Alvaro Calderon is one of the Society’s best theologians, stationed at the Society’s priestly seminary in Argentina. Over ten years ago he wrote a tract on this question of the validity of the new rite of bishops’ Consecration. He concludes that it is “very probably valid,” but not certainly. However, since valid bishops are absolutely essential to the life and survival of the Church, then that shadow of doubt involved is still that too much doubt, and all Catholic bishops consecrated only with the new rite should consent to being reconsecrated conditionally also with the old rite, with its old, certainly valid, sacramental Form. Likewise, he says, all priests ordained only with the Conciliar rite of ordination should seek conditional re-ordination with the traditional rite to repair any serious defects in their Conciliar priesthood. 

And where does Fr Calderon say that this shadow of a doubt lies? He says the intention of the new rite is not to make regal authoritative bishops, with a divine authority behind them immediately over the sheep, true thunderclouds of God; but rather a diocesan facilitator, a nice man, a democratic administrator, ready to obey to the letter the local Sister Snap-dragon who rules all cocks in the roost for miles around, and who is dreaming of the day when she can at last celebrate what tatters remain of the Holy Mass. Boys, keep the women in their place, because they are unbearable when they are out of control! God first! 

Kyrie eleison.

Fear not,” said Jesus, “I’ve overcome the world” (Jn. XVI, 33).

On the last day of 2023 a Franciscan priest of the Capucin Friary of Morgon in France gave a sermon on that recent document of Pope Francis, Fiducia Supplicans (“Begging with Confidence”) , which has given scandal to souls all over the world. This sermon is a notable summary of why the document has given such scandal. The sermon is in its turn summarised here below, to less than half its original length.

In the account of the Presentation of the Child Jesus in the Gospel of St Luke (II, 34), we read how the old man Simeon prophesied that the new-born child just laid in his arms by Mary would be a sign of contradiction for the entire world. All men would have to accept Him or reject Him, because they cannot remain neutral. A classic example of this contradiction is the Catholic laws of marriage. If in practice Catholics break these laws out of weakness, that is already grave, but if they deny those laws in principle, it is a spiritual sin, much graver still.

In this respect, the Pope’s recent signing of “Fiducia Supplicans” will cause untold damage to the Church, because it will entitle all kinds of couples presently living in sin to “beg with confidence” for a blessing from any Catholic priest, and thereby to think that they are no longer living in sin. This will put in peril their eternal salvation. For were John the Baptist and Thomas More then mere fools for giving their lives to defend God’s laws of marriage? True, Our Lord himself did not condemn the woman caught in adultery (Jn.VIII, 3–11), but He never blessed her either, rather He told her to sin no more (v.11). To bless sinners, with no instruction or rebuke for their sin, can only encourage them to continue in their sin.

Entering the New Year, we must pray for all those who risk being victims of this terrible document. Firstly for Catholic priests, that they have the courage of John the Baptist and Thomas More to stand up to the joint pressure of today’s bad authorities in Church and State, who would both want to make priests go with the flow of today’s godless world so as to abandon God, by breaking His clear and strict laws of marriage. Secondly we must pray for Catholic families striving against all odds to uphold God’s laws of marriage, especially for abandoned spouses seeing the pope encourage those who do not keep, but break, His law. Thirdly, we must pray for souls worldwide, offended by such a scandal, coming from the Pope.

For indeed any scandal is all the greater for the height of the authority from which it comes, for the obviousness of the immorality it promotes, and for the number of souls which it offends. On all three counts, the scandal of “Fiducia Supplicans” is immeasurable. As for the authority scandalising, there is no higher moral authority on earth than that of the (at least seeming) Vicar of Christ, the Pope. As for the immorality promoted, what is more basic to human society than the natural laws of marriage which Christ reinforced, but which even pagans clearly grasp who abominate adultery and homosexuality? And as for the extension of souls scandalised, what human society is not undermined in the formation of its building bricks, its families, by the Vicar of Christ using all of his authority on earth to command the priests of Christ to bless sinful souls that are living in defiance of God’s natural laws of marriage?

One may wonder if ever in all the 2,000 years of Church history such a huge scandal has been seen. We must pray even for Pope Bergoglio, that he may save his soul – right now, it is in grave danger.

And finally we must pray not for Our Divine Lord but to Him, to thank Him for taking upon Himself to rescue us from the devastation of sin being wrought all around us, especially by sinful churchmen. He alone paid for us the debt otherwise unpayable to His Father for our sins. He alone opens for us the otherwise barred gates of Heaven. He alone enables us to sing at the end of Mass not the “Miserere” but the “Te Deum Laudamus” – we praise Thee, O God, for Thy wisdom in allowing sin and death, to be conquered by Thine own suffering. We beg Thee only for the grace of perseverance to the end.

Kyrie eleison.

Maybe, but the truth was told in a manner clear.

“Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labour in vain. Unless the Lord watches over the city, the watchman stays awake in vain” (Ps. CXXVI, 1). All the more true for those building a State! Lucky the politicians today who have Catholic priests to remind them of how truly to serve their land. Alas, today’s politicians hardly have ears to hear those ancient and important truths. The leaders of Switzerland have recently had such a priest, a Swiss priest of the “ Resistance,” appealing to them to submit the direction of their country’s affairs to the one true God of Switzerland’s Catholic past. Their reaction seems to have been minimal. Like all the rest of us, they may have to learn the hard way. But in the meantime, here below is this priest’s appeal, only abbreviated to fit into an A4 page –

Honourable Lady President, honourable ladies and gentlemen recently re-elected as Federal, State or Local Councillors for 2023 to 2027, warm congratulations on your re-election! Please allow me as a Catholic priest of the Apostles of Jesus and Mary to bring to you a request for the government of our country to make a public return to the profession and respect of the Christian religion. Thereby we may hope for God’s blessing and protection from harm for our beloved country. Here are four thoughts –

1 At the last major meeting of the oldest of all Christian churches, the Second Vatican Council of the Roman Catholic Church held in Rome from 1962 to 1965, many Catholic leaders, faced with our godless times, judged it best for God’s Church to be modernised. That was the right problem but the wrong solution, as it meant, for instance, that religion would henceforth be a merely private affair. Grave error. From long before the founding of Switzerland in 1291, Jesus Christ had been Creator and Redeemer of all men ever alive, and until world’s end, Lord, Judge and King, of Switzerland and the entire world.

2 As a result of Christ and His one true Church being cut out by deism, naturalism and liberalism, Christ is brought down to the same level as all other religions, and anything supposedly supernatural loses all interest, and mankind is handed over to the tyranny of the now purely secular civil States. For wherever the Majesty of the one true God is bracketed out, some anti-god is bound to step in to take His place.

3 In the mid-17th century a saintly German priest, the Venerable Bartholomew Holzhauser (1613–1658), was given by Heaven visions of the whole history of the Church in seven Ages, including the Fifth Age of Apostasy from Luther to today. But we have become too blind to be able to see our times like this.

4 Switzerland’s Patron Saint, Nicholas of Flue (1417–1487), is famous for his saying that, “If God is driven out of a State, it is doomed to destruction.” Thus Switzerland’s 700-year existence as a Christian democracy is at an end, unless we can revive the profession of faith in God of our forefathers.

Honourable leaders of our government, Jesus Christ alone can bring us to Heaven. Witnesses to that fact are the churches, crosses and chapels strewn all over our country, as are the Christian values still buried in the depths of many a Swiss conscience. But these values are being smothered in dirt, or washed out altogether, so that our country is well on the way to its destruction, as when three years ago the Swiss people were misled into voting for a law opposed to God and to Nature, in favour of same-sex marriage. If that is freedom of religion and conscience, it will lead to the loss of all religion and all conscience.

Ahead of us is either Christianity or Communism. We are all of us made for Heaven. Let our rulers create favourable conditions for the Church, and the Church will look after our people and our youth. Ladies and Gentlemen, rulers all, let me ask of you to respect the rights of God and the Catholic family, to profess and promote the Christian religion, and to maintain the Christian neutrality of our land. And may God be with you all. I pray for you every day, at Mass and with the Holy Rosary.

With the greatest respect, and with all blessings, Fr. Aloysius Bruehwiler.

Kyrie eleison

In one direction mainly – the Catholic Church!

Ever since Archbishop Vigano, once Number Four in the Secretariat of State, left behind the Second Vatican Council and all its pomps and all its works, some of his observations concerning Pope Bergoglio have been so caustic that many Catholics have wondered if the Archbishop still considers him to be Pope at all. Has he not joined the ranks of the “sedevacantists,” ie. those Catholics who consider that the See of Peter has been vacant ever since that accursed Council did so much damage to the Catholic Church? How is it possible that truly Catholic Popes presided over that Council and its aftermath?

The problem is agonising, because by that Council, Catholic Authority split itself from Catholic Truth, forcing Catholics to abandon one or the other, wholly or in part, because they could no longer follow both. Catholics either clung to the Truth and more or less “disobeyed” what seemed to be Catholic Authority, or they clung to falsified “Authority” and were more or less unfaithful to the unchanging Truth. As for Archbishop Vigano, for tens of years after the Council (1962–1965) he was faithful to his colleagues and comrades in the highest ranks of Church Authority, because, on his own confession, he “could not believe that they meant to destroy the Church.” But in 2018, he met with such corruption in the United States of America where he was Papal Nuncio and also in the Vatican Curia, that he was forced to seek the proportionate cause, and he found it in the Council. From there he found it especially in the Conciliar Pope of his own time, the “Argentine Jesuit,” as he calls him, about whom he has made such scathing remarks that many observers have been driven to wonder if the Archbishop still believes that Bergoglio is Pope. Let us see what he said on December 9.

See the “Eleison Comments” of last week (#859 of December 30) for a six-paragraph summary of what he said, to which the following numbers in heavy print correspond. Better still, look up on the Internet his full original words, accessible in English at catholicfamilynews.com orlifesitenews.com

1- Over the last 10 years, the Catholic Church has been turned over to revolution and chaos.

2 – Cardinals, Bishops should be blocking this destruction, but they are too Conciliar themselves to do so.

3 – Church Authority, so paralysed, is explicable only by the “operation of error” foretold for world’s end.

4 – It makes Bergoglio a usurper on Peter’s Throne. He is a false prophet. We need not obey him.

5 – However, we have no Authority to declare officially that he is not Pope, so there is no human solution.

6 – Nor is our whole battle merely between men, and to think so is to invite still further serious trouble.

Here is the merest skeleton of the Archbishop’s rich argument – do see the original to let him speak for himself – but it is enough to indicate that he is hanging back from public “sedevacantism.” After building up his case against the one he calls “Bergoglio” for the large part of his discourse (1–4), just as he arrives at the climactic point where he will propose his own solution (5), he may well himself share the conviction of many serious Catholics that this or that Conciliar Pope, anywhere from John XXIII to Francis inclusive, has not been a true Pope, but that conviction, shared by however many of them, can never amount to an official Church declaration, and any such declaration will have to wait until Mother Church has recovered from her present deadly attack of modernism, a barely curable mental disease.

In the meantime this apparent stop of Archbishop Vigano on the road to sedevacantism is highly reasonable, because it safeguards in a Catholic mind and heart a measure of respect for Catholic Authority which might otherwise go completely by the board. Woe to Catholic Tradition, or to its “Resistance,” that would lose all respect for Catholic Authority, because that Authority is divine, and it must and will come back, in full force, one day, just like the sun after an eclipse, and before world’s end.

Kyrie eleison.

These thoughts of a churchman, valiant and wise.

1 On the ninth of this last month of the year, Archbishop Vigano gave another of his splendid Conferences, asking whether Pope Bergoglio is truly Pope. The problem is well-known to Catholics: over the last 10 years Catholic Authority has been twisted into arrogant authoritarianism, God’s own priesthood into man’s clericalism, and God’s revealed Truth into man’s permanent revolution and chaos. 

2 As for the Church authorities beneath the Pope to help him to protect that Truth, they are either his accomplices or they are so scared of him, that the few discordant voices do not dare to draw the necessary conclusions, mainly because they idolise Vatican II. One may criticize Bergoglio, and dissent from him, but not from Vatican II. These good men do not want to acknowledge that the revolutionary process that allowed a person like Bergoglio to be made a bishop and Cardinal and finally to enter the Conclave and to come out “pope”, was due to the Council, which is in their minds untouchable. One is driven to conclude that certain people care more about the doctrine of the Papacy than about the salvation of souls. They find themselves preferring to be governed by a heretic and apostate pope rather than recognize that a heretic or an apostate cannot be head of the Church to which, as such, he does not belong.

3 No Doctor of the Church has ever contemplated the case of such an apostate Pope as Bergoglio. Such an enormity could only happen in a unique and extraordinary context such as that of the final persecution foretold by the Prophet Daniel and described by St. Paul. And this “operation of error” (II Thess. II, 13) is so efficient and well organized that it clearly shows a Luciferian intelligence at work. This is why the “Bergoglio problem” cannot be solved in any ordinary way: no society can survive the total corruption of the authority that governs it, and the Church is no different. 

4 Nor is this “operation” merely the matter of a pope adhering to a specific heresy (which, moreover, Bergoglio has done repeatedly). We are dealing with a personage sent to the Conclave with orders to revolutionize the Church from atop the Chair of Peter. It is this malicious intention to abuse the authority and power of the Papacy, acquired by deception, that makes Bergoglio a usurper of the Throne of Peter.  Nor can we behave as if we were solving a question of Canon Law: the Lord is outraged, the Church is being humiliated, and souls are being lost because the one sitting on the Throne of Peter is a usurper. Bergoglio’s unchanging behaviour – before, during and after his election – is enough evidence of his inherent iniquity. Can we therefore be morally certain that he is a false prophet? Yes. Are we therefore authorized in conscience to revoke our obedience to one who, presenting himself as Pope, acts like the biblical boar in the Lord’s Vineyard? Yes. 

5 However, we can make no official declaration that Bergoglio is not Pope because we have no Authority to do so. This terrible impasse in which we find ourselves makes any merely human solution impossible. Our task must not be to grapple with abstract canonist speculations, but to resist with all our strength – and with the help of God’s grace – the explicitly destructive action of the Argentine Jesuit, rejecting with courage and determination any collaboration, even indirect, with him or his accomplices. 

6 Let us not delude ourselves: those who persist in reading the present situation with merely human eyes expose not only themselves but all of mankind to the continuation and aggravation of this situation: For our battle is not against creatures made of flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers, against the rulers of this world of darkness, against the spirits of evil that dwell in the regions above (Eph. VI:12). 

Kyrie Eleison.

Turning to God is now most opportune.

Here is another recent convert who has received a great deal of light in a world engulfed in darkness by pride. Modern man really thinks that with his petty “reason” and his materialistic “science” he has found the true way to the good life, and that he no longer needs Almighty God. But God is not abandoning His poor human creatures gone astray, in fact the old Irish Catholic saying is as true as ever, if not more so: The help of God is closer than the door. “If not more so,” because, as Scripture says, “Where sin increased, grace abounded all the more” (Romans V, 20). This can only mean that today’s abundance of evil all around us must be a good time to be looking for God, through Jesus Christ – “I am the Light of the world; he who follows Me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” (Jn. VIII, 12). Does that not mean that he who does not follow Christ will be walking in darkness? Read on.

Let me write to give thanks for all the help I received to find my way back to the true Catholic faith through the Latin Mass. I was born in 1963, I grew up in Melbourne, Australia, and was raised Catholic in the Novus Ordo. I had no idea at all about Vatican II until recently, nor that the Mass and the Faith had been so disastrously altered that it had led to a collapse of the Church. I just took the way the Mass had been changed as being normal. Actually, in my twenties I stopped going to that Mass and I left the Faith, because of the distractions of the world, and because I felt there was very little there that really connected with my spirit. 

It was only when the Corona “pandemic” suddenly emerged that I realized something was deeply evil about the world. Over the years, I listened to you on various podcasts like Andrew Carrington Hitchcock and to your sermons on Youtube, in the days when you were not so censored as now.Gradually, I discovered what the true Catholic Faith was all about, and how the direction of the modern world is totally against both the Faith and common sense. Then when I watched the four parts of “Confusion now hath made his masterpiece,” everything clicked into place. I could see what liberalism and the decline of belief in Jesus Christ had done to the western world: Liberalism has made the world a cesspit of wickedness and insanity. 

Eventually, I returned to Mass and to the sacraments. I also began to go to the Latin Mass in Melbourne, where I gained a much broader exposure to true Catholicism, and realized that the reception of Communion and many other practices in the Novus Ordo are not reverent at all. These things obviously grew out of Vatican II. During the lock-downs, I frequently walked with a friend of mine, and one day he told me about the day when he saw a surf life-saver have a heart attack while he was out swimming at a local beach. I realized that I could die at any time, and that I would then face judgment and eternity. 

Today, the world is totally sick, as most people have abandoned any faith in God. Mankind wants Satan as its master. That is why human beings have been so easily manipulated by the Covid scamdemic with all its asinine restrictions, and they have also been fooled into taking the deadly vaccine. I am grateful that God gave me the grace to see through the lies which the media were telling us very early in the so-called pandemic. 

I have come to the conclusion that the Holy Rosary is the only weapon that can turn the tide against evil. This is why Our Lady is always calling for it. The world is heading straight to hell and only the intervention of Almighty God can stop the deadly rot, and restore order. I really do believe that a major Chastisement will befall this world in the next five to ten years at most, and that the Three Days of Darkness will be at our door very soon, because this is the only way for God to correct mankind. 

Kyrie eleison