Eleison Comments

Eternal Damnation? – I

Eternal Damnation? – I on May 18, 2013

A reader has raised once more a classic problem that has arisen a few times, directly or indirectly, in these “Comments,” but it is so serious that it deserves to be treated again on its own. He writes: “I find it difficult to be the Catholic I want to be because of the doctrine of eternal damnation. I cannot seem to accept the idea that a soul could be tormented ceaselessly for all eternity. It’s just too horrible. There has to be some Catholic doctrine that it’s not so cut and dried.” In brief, how can even one soul be justly condemned to an eternity of frightful torment?

Notice that in a cave one can still visit in Segovia in Spain, a great Saint like St Dominic spent a night agonising in prayer over this question. But let us lay down immediately that there can be no question of putting Almighty God in the dock, as though he either deserves to be condemned or needs to be acquitted. If his Church teaches, as it does, that one mortal sin can condemn a soul to eternal hellfire, and if I disagree, then it is I that am wrong, and not his Church. Why am I wrong?

For either or both of two connected reasons. Either I do not grasp the greatness and goodness of God, which it is easy to do, because my little mind is finite and God is infinite. Or I do not grasp the seriousness of sin, which it is also easy to do, because sin primarily offends God, only secondarily myself and only in third place my neighbour. So if I fail to grasp the greatness of the God offended by sin, naturally I will not grasp the seriousness of sin.

The question then becomes, has the great and good God given to every human being that ever lived sufficient means during its short life on earth of knowing that he exists, that he can be offended, what basically offends him and how serious it is to offend him? The answer can only be affirmative on all four headings.

* I do not need supernatural faith to know the existence of God. Upright reason alone tells that behind all the good things in a man’s life is a Supremely Good Being. Reason twisted out of true by pride or darkened by sin may not tell of this Being, but any twisting and darkening are my fault, not God’s, and they deserve a punishment proportionate to all of the goodness which I have experienced in this life and which it was “inexcusable” of me (Rom. I, 20) not to ascribe to God. * The reality of free-will is an everyday experience, and every one of us has the natural light of conscience to tell us that we owe worship to the Supreme Being, and that to refuse that worship is to offend him. Such is the First Commandment, and it does not need faith to be known. * Natural conscience also tells me of the other nine Commandments, which merely spell out the natural law, and it also tells me that to break them offends not only my neighbour but also, and even primarily, the Supreme Being. * And lastly, the cleaner my conscience is, the more clearly it tells me how serious it is to offend Him. The problem is that we are all sinners, and any sin helps to darken our conscience. But our sin is our own fault, not God’s, and he is entirely just to punish us for how we darken our minds.

Alright, one may object, then all men are given in this life to know enough of God to deserve punishment after this life in proportion to how much they have offended him. But how can any mere man offend him so seriously that a punishment eternal and unimaginable is just? Let next week’s “Comments” attempt to approach a mystery which is as deep in a way as God is deep.

Kyrie eleison.

More Encouragement

More Encouragement on May 11, 2013

The news from a one-week visit to Germany, France and Switzerland is encouraging. Certain leaders might do well to remember the famous words of Abraham Lincoln: “You can fool some of the people all the time, all the people some of the time, but not all the people all the time.” Fewer people all the time are being fooled by what is happening within the Newsociety of St Pius X.

The journey began in Germany where some people feared I might run into difficulties, but for four days I was not troubled in any way. A good young layman picked me up at Frankfurt’s huge railway station and drove me north to Brilon Wald to meet the half dozen Carmelite Sisters who have become famous throughout the world of Catholic Tradition for having separated themselves, for all the right reasons, from the SSPX in its present state. They are clear in mind, resolute and cheerful. As Mother Superior told me, their greatest sorrow is that for over 20 years no novice has persevered with them. The Carmelite Sisters are not being expelled from their present convent, as has been feared, but they are hoping to move south for greater local support. May God be with them. Their prayers are precious to all of us.

Then I was driven back south of Frankfurt to address a private meeting of some two dozen adults, mostly men, in a countryside setting. They listened attentively in the afternoon to an in-depth analysis of the background crisis of the New World Order and the Newchurch, and on the following morning to a presentation of the foreground problems in the Newsociety. There were plenty of good questions and a good deal of hearty singing from the compatriots of Beethoven. The springtime birds in the German trees were given a good run for their money!

Further south, in Munich, I met with an old friend and the two lawyers who will be going to bat for me at my fifth trial for denying the “Holocaust,” due to take place in Regensburg in September. They are well aware that national politics make a just verdict at the regional level virtually impossible, but they will do their best. Precisely because the Six Million serve as a substitute Redeemer in millions of minds, I had no scruple in remunerating the lawyers from the St Marcel Initiative, but its funds are being depleted. Thank you for all and any help.

Then to the Black Forest in southwest Germany, where there is another community of half a dozen Sisters, likewise cheerful and resolved not to follow the present misdirection of the SSPX. Founded in 1988, they have recently finished building and decorating a beautiful chapel with some two dozen choir-stalls “as a sign of hope,” their chaplain told me. Girls, if you think you may have a vocation, here are two firmly anti-modern convents in Germany that you can try.

Lastly, one night in Switzerland, close but unknown to Écône, where they may have learned only afterwards that I passed by to meet a group of good layfolk. And one night in Paris where I learned to my delight that many SSPX priests in France have lost all trust in the present management of the SSPX. Let us be patient. Almighty God is fooled by none of us.

My next engagement is in London on May 19, when I should be addressing British Friends of Palestine on Hamlet. Why? In that play Shakespeare cries out with pain at the loss of England’s soul. Were England still Catholic, not only Palestine but the whole world would be better off.

Kyrie eleison.

Doctrinal Declaration – II

Doctrinal Declaration – II on May 4, 2013

Forgive me, dear readers, if I return to the seventh paragraph of the Doctrinal Declaration of April 15 a year ago. The Declaration was to serve as no less than a basis for all future relations between the Society of St Pius X and Rome. On June 13 (not 11) Rome refused it, so SSPX Headquarters may now have repudiated it, but it serves to show what the present SSPX HQ is capable of. As for the seventh paragraph, it is a masterpiece of confusion. These “Comments” three weeks ago (EC 300, April 13) explained in part with a twofold distinction, but the confusion requires a fourfold distinction to do it justice. Here is the complete paragraph:

Declaration III, 5: “The statements of Vatican II and the post-conciliar Magisterium with regard to the relation between the Catholic Church and non-catholic confessions and to the social duty of religion and the right to religious liberty, (1) the formulation of which it is difficult to reconcile with previous doctrinal statements of the Magisterium, (2) must be understood in the light of Tradition complete and uninterrupted, (3) in a manner coherent with the truths previously taught by the Church’s Magisterium, (4) without accepting any interpretation of these statements which can lead to Catholic doctrine being laid out in opposition to, or breaking with, Tradition and that Magisterium.”

The underlinings are my own, to highlight the trickery of the paragraph. Notice (1) how it is not the statements of Vatican II that are problematic, but only their “formulation.” We are already moving away from words meaning what they objectively say. Words float around, according to how they are subjectively “understood” (2), or “interpreted” (4). Our minds are being made to slip anchor from a spade being called a spade. There is suggested no objective impossibility of reconciling Conciliar nonsense with Catholic sense, they are merely “difficult” to reconcile subjectively (that is to say, in the darkened minds of backward Traditional Catholics).

Notice above all in (2) and (3) the subtle but crucial slide from “in the light of” to “in a manner coherent with.” Truly understanding the Vatican II novelties “in the light of” Tradition is to understand that they are wholly irreconcilable. Understanding them “in a manner coherent with” Tradition is to understand them as though they are reconcilable. Our minds are being made to slide again, because “in the light of” and “in a manner coherent with” do not mean the same thing. Sure enough, (4) any subjective understanding of the novelties that makes them clash with Tradition and the age-old Magisterium is absolutely to be rejected.

Thus clause (2) may tip the hat to “Tradition complete and uninterrupted,” and so (2) could be aligned with Catholic sense, but (3) suggests modernist nonsense, and (4) drives home the nonsense. Thus the paragraph as a whole constitutes a most clever step-wise movement from a shadow of truth to the outright error of the “hermeneutic of continuity,” which is pure Alice in Wonderland – “Words mean what I say they mean,” thunders Humpty Dumpty.

Whoever wrote this paragraph, God knows. It may not have been the Superior General of the SSPX. But can anybody who studies it carefully deny that, as it stands, it is designed to lead minds from Catholic Truth into Conciliar error? It makes words dance like heretics make them dance, and heretics that make words dance make souls lose their faith and fall into Hell. Whoever was responsible for this seventh paragraph, let him be anathema!

Kyrie eleison.

GREC – IV

GREC – IV on April 27, 2013

A lady having read the first “Eleison Comments” on GREC (EC 294, March 2) wrote to complain that I misrepresented GREC, the Parisian group of Catholics founded in the late 1990’s to bring together Traditionalists and mainstream Catholics so that they could think and talk peacefully with one another for the good of Mother Church. I am happy to correct errors of fact which she pointed out. I have no problem admitting personal faults of mine which she highlighted. However on one major point I must disagree with her.

As for the errors of fact, Mr Gilbert Pérol was French Ambassador to the Italian government, and not to the Vatican. Also he was not a “lay collaborator,” but a personal friend of Fr Michel Lelong, a White Father. Also GREC was launched not “in the salons of Paris,” but in the flat of the Ambassador’s widow, Mrs. Huguette Pérol, who, I was told, takes full responsibility for having founded GREC, purely to help the Church, and with the help of people “competent and concerned to be faithful to the Gospel and to Tradition.”

As for my faults, she wrote that I was “full of myself” and “ignorant,” that I lacked modesty and diplomacy, that I showed insufficient respect for the dead, and that I wrote with a sarcastic tone befitting neither an educated person nor a priest. Madam, how happy I would be if these were the worst faults for which I shall have to answer before God. Do pray for my particular judgment.

However, as to the sarcasm, let me plead that if I mocked the nostalgia of Catholics today for the Catholicism of the 1950’s, I was thinking not of Ambassador Pérol in person, but of the multitudes of present-day Catholics, who, not realizing why God allowed Vatican II to split the mainstream Church from Catholic Tradition in the first place, wish to return to that sentimentalized faith of the previous decade which led directly to Vatican II! Madam, the crucial point has nothing to do with subjective persons, it has everything to do with objective doctrine.

That is why I must disagree with you as to the competence of the people helping Mrs Pérol to found GREC. That a professional diplomat like Ambassador Pérol should have resorted to diplomacy to solve major problems of doctrine is misguided, but understandable. That a Conciliar priest like Fr Lelong should have encouraged such a diplomatic undertaking is graver, but still understandable, given how Vatican II undermined all doctrine by officialising subjectivism within the Church. What is much less easy to accept is the “competence and concern for the Gospel and Tradition” on the part of priests who were trained under Archbishop Lefebvre to understand the doctrinal disaster of Vatican II. Such priests should never have encouraged, let alone taken any active part in, an essentially diplomatic effort to solve an essentially doctrinal disaster, however well-intentioned that effort may have been.

And yet, even in their case the French proverb to some extent applies: “To understand everything means to forgive everything.” The Archbishop was of an earlier and saner generation. They are all children of the world shattered by two World Wars. All credit to them for resorting to his person for their priestly formation, and while he lived he raised us all up. But they never truly absorbed his doctrine, and so once he was dead they began within a few years to fall back. But he was right, and they, and GREC – forgive me, gracious lady – are wrong. Please God they may come right.

Kyrie eleison.

Resistance Rising

Resistance Rising on April 20, 2013

Another three-week journey on the western side of the Atlantic Ocean has just given me to see that the resistance to the collapse of the Society of St Pius X into the embrace of apostate Rome is rising, more in quality than in quantity (but Catholic quantity follows Catholic quality, and not the other way round). Traditionalists have been deliberately kept in the dark as to what is going on between the Society and Rome, but as they find out just how the true Catholic religion is being endangered, so a number of good men are reacting with seriousness and resolution.

I visited first of all Fr Jahir’s community of some dozen religious in northern Brazil, behind the city of Salvador where Fr Jahir was a parish priest for many years. Having fled the Newchurch, he sees the situation of the Newsociety very clearly. He has founded his own community in the true Faith, and it is easy to imagine several of his men becoming in a few years’ time valiant priests who will hold that Faith. I gave to one of them Tonsure and the first two Minor Orders, and then headed south to visit another Brazilian priest becoming famous for his staunch adherence to Tradition, as Archbishop Lefebvre understood it.

The Benedictine Dom Thomas is Prior of the Monastery in the mountains near Nova Friburgo behind Rio de Janeiro. It was founded in the 1980’s by Dom Gérard as an offshoot from the Traditional Benedictine Monastery which Dom Gérard had also founded in France in the 1970’s, with the encouragement and support of Archbishop Lefebvre. However, when the Archbishop consecrated bishops in 1988, Dom Gérard broke with him, took his monastery into the Newchurch, and crossed the ocean to do the same with the Brazilian monastery.

Here he ran into the resistance of Dom Thomas, who was still only a young monk, but who before becoming a monk had learned in depth from a famous Brazilian lay Catholic, Gustavo Corçâo, the wrongness of the Newchurch. With help from good laymen and with the support of Archbishop Lefebvre, Dom Thomas stood up to Dom Gérard and saved the Monastery for Tradition. With such a clash behind him it is not surprising that Dom Thomas also sees very clearly the situation both of the Newchurch and of the Newsociety. In a tent set up outside the small Monastery church for the extra visitors to the Holy Week ceremonies, we celebrated with few priests but with all the essentials the Maundy Thursday Consecration of Holy Oils. These the Monastery can now supply for this year to priests in particular whose supply could be cut off by the Newsociety.

Then I flew north to visit three more centres of the Resistance being launched in the USA by the brave Frs Joseph Pfeiffer and David Hewko. Near Connecticut, in New Jersey and in Minnesota I was able to give Confirmations and conferences to Catholics suspicious of what is going on in the Newsociety. They had good questions, deserving of truthful answers.

Good news for benefactors in Euroland: the St Marcel Initiative has at last a RIB and an IBAN, based in France, to facilitate donations in euros to the St Marcel Initiative. To make a bank transfer from inside France use the following RIB: [write to letters@eleisoncomments.com for the number]; from outside France use the following IBAN: [write to letters@eleisoncomments.com for the number]. The St Marcel Initiative has just been able to give a little serious aid, much needed, to Dom Thomas’ Monastery. He thanks all of you who have contributed to the Initiative.

Kyrie eleison.

Doctrinal Declaration – II

Doctrinal Declaration – II on April 13, 2013

The Doctrinal Declaration of April 15 of last year, drawn up by the Superior General (SG) of the Society of St Pius X as a basis for the Society’s reintegration into the mainstream Church, has emerged nearly one year later into public view. It was designed by the SG to please both the Conciliar Romans and Traditionalists (“It can be read with dark or rose-coloured glasses,” he said in public). It did please the Romans who declared that it represented an “advance” in their direction. It did not please Traditionalists who saw in it (what they knew of it) such ambiguity as to represent a betrayal of Archbishop Lefebvre’s stand for the Catholic Faith, to the point that they considered that the Romans need only have accepted it to destroy his Society.

In fact when the SG met the Romans on June 11 in Rome to receive their decision, he fully expected they would accept it. Numerous observers speculate that if they did not accept it, it was only because the intervening publication of the April 7 Letter of the Three Bishops to the SG warned the Romans that he would not be able to bring the whole Society with him into the bosom of their Conciliar Rome, as he may have given them to understand he would do, and as they wanted him to do. They did and do not want another split to start Tradition all over again.

Be all that as it may, space remains here for nothing but one major argument that the proposal of the Doctrinal Declaration, had it been accepted by Rome, would have destroyed the SSPX. Archbishop Lefebvre declared, and proved, that Vatican II was a break or rupture with previous Church teaching. On that premise arose, and rests, the Traditional Catholic movement. So, confronted by the on-going resistance of that movement to his beloved Vatican II, Benedict XVI proclaimed at the outset of his pontificate in 2005 the “hermeneutic of continuity,” whereby the Council (objectively) contradicting Tradition was to be (subjectively) so interpreted as not to contradict it. Thus there would be no break or rupture between it and Catholic Tradition!

Now see the seventh paragraph (III, 5) of the Doctrinal Declaration. It declares that Vatican II statements difficult to reconcile with all previous Church teaching, (1) “must be understood in the light of Tradition entire and uninterrupted, in line with the truths taught by the Church’s preceding Magisterium, (2) not accepting any interpretation of those statements which can lead Catholic doctrine to be exposed in opposition or rupture with Tradition and that Magisterium.”

The first part here (1) is perfectly true, so long as it means that any Conciliar novelty “difficult to reconcile” will be flatly rejected if it objectively contradicts previous Church teaching. But (1) is directly contradicted by (2) when (2) says that no Conciliar novelty may be “interpreted” as being in rupture with Tradition. It is as though one said that all football teams must wear blue shirts, but football team shirts of any other colour are all to be interpreted as being nothing other than blue! What nonsense! But it is pure “hermeneutic of continuity.”

Now, do the soldiers holding the last fortress of the Faith that is organised worldwide realize what their Commander is thinking? Do they realize that his solemn declaration of SSPX doctrine shows him to be thinking like an enemy leader? Are they happy that they are being led to think like the enemies of the Faith? All ideas must be Catholic, while non-Catholic ideas will be “interpreted” as Catholic. Wake up, comrades! Enemy thinking is in Headquarters.

Kyrie eleison.