Eleison Comments

GREC – III

GREC – III on April 6, 2013

Wishing to put himself in the place of God, modern man seeks to replace God’s order of the world with his own. But God’s order is real, outside of and independent of man’s mind. So modern man unhooks his mind from that reality, and selects from it only such pieces as he wishes to build into his own fantasy. Now the highest order of God’s Creation is best expressed in his Church’s doctrine. Therefore all churchmen or laymen today undergoing the influence of everything “normal” in the world around them suffer from a deep refusal or ignorance of the nature and necessity of doctrine.

Here is the essential problem of GREC, as presented in two previous issues of “Eleison Comments” (294 and 295). The Groupe de Réflexion Entre Catholiques was founded in 1997 in the salons of Paris to promote friendly meetings and exchanges between Catholics of Tradition and Catholics of the mainstream Church, in order to create a climate of mutual trust and respect which would facilitate a reconciliation between them, and an end to their unnecessary estrangement. Such a purpose gravely overlooks the importance of doctrine, not necessarily with malice aforethought, of which God is judge, but whatever foolish men may think, doctrine can no more be left out of account than can reality.

In Fr. Lelong’s book on GREC, For the Necessary Reconciliation, he tells how two Society of St Pius X priests and its Superior General “made a decisive contribution to the launching and continuance of GREC.” Even before it was launched, Fr. Du Chalard gave to Fr Lelong a friendly reception in his SSPX priory, and “in following years never ceased to support GREC in a discrete and attentive way.” At the launching of GREC, Fr. Lorans, then Rector of the SSPX Institute in Paris and exercising from Paris a decisive influence from then until now on SSPX publications, welcomed the idea of “dialogue between Catholics,” and very soon obtained from the SSPX Superior General in Switzerland approval for his participation in GREC. From then on Fr. Lorans played a leading part in all of its activities.

Those activities began on a small scale and in private. In May of 2000 was held GREC’s first public meeting to which Fr. Lorans contributed, with 150 people attending. Meetings became more and more frequent, with SSPX priests participating. Church authorities at the highest level were regularly consulted and kept informed. Fr. Lorans for his part made possible “a contact of deepening trust” and friendly exchanges with the SSPX Superior General. From 2004 GREC meetings were opened wider still to the public, and in September of that year a “theological working group” was set up with Fr. Lorans participating, and another SSPX priest and a theologian from Rome, both of whom would later be taking part in the Doctrinal Discussions between Rome and the SSPX from 2009 to 2011. GREC may well have seen in these Discussions the realization of its fondest hopes – at last the theologians were meeting in a climate which GREC had done so much to create “for the necessary reconciliation.”

Thanks be to God, the Discussions gave back to doctrine its proper primacy. They demonstrated that between Catholic and Conciliar doctrine is an unbridgeable gulf. But was GREC’s way of thinking then blocked within the SSPX? Far from it! SSPX Headquarters switched overnight from “We pursue no practical agreement without a doctrinal agreement” to “There can be no doctrinal agreement, so we pursue a practical agreement”! Alas, the springtime uprising of protest last year from within the SSPX was smothered and confused again at the General Chapter of July, but SSPX HQ’s continued pursuit of a practical agreement has hardly been smothered.

“Our help is in the name of the Lord,” in particular in the Consecration of Russia. Nowhere else.

Kyrie eleison.

Holy Saturday

Holy Saturday on March 30, 2013

Holy Saturday in the life of Our Lord was that day between his appalling death on the Cross and his glorious Resurrection, when his human body, lifeless without its human soul, lay in the dark tomb, unseen to human eye. Our Lord’s enemies seemed so successfully to have crushed him that the Incarnate God was in complete eclipse, and only the faith of Our Lady in her Divine Son remained unshaken. All his other followers she had to sustain, because even the most devout of them felt bewildered and lost.

Now as being the Mystical Body of Christ, the Catholic Church follows the life’s course of his physical body. Down all its 2,000 years of history the Church has always been persecuted by the enemies of Christ, and in many parts of the world at various times it has been virtually wiped out. Yet surely it has never been going into complete eclipse like it seems to be doing today. God designed his Church as a monarchy, to be held together by the Pope, and we have just seen a Pope resigning, no doubt in part because he himself, mesmerized by modern democratic thinking, never fully believed in his own supreme office. Taking the papal tiara off his coat of arms, and signing himself always as “Bishop of Rome,” whatever were his intentions when he resigned in February, he surely helped, humanly speaking, to undermine the divine institution of the Papacy.

Certainly by Benedict XVI’s resignation and by the succeeding conclave the enemies of Christ will have been doing all they could for their part to undo the Papacy. By a just punishment of God for the universal apostasy of our age, they have received from him a great power over his Church. They have been working for centuries to get a stranglehold over the Vatican, and they are now entrenched there. With no intention of giving way to a pious little Society, they are, as Anne Catherine Emmerich saw in a vision 200 years ago, dismantling the Church stone by stone. Humanly speaking, today’s followers of Our Lord have as little seeming hope as they had on the original Holy Saturday.

But no more than Our Lord himself is the Catholic Church a merely human affair. In 1846 Our Lady of Salette said about our own times: “The righteous will suffer greatly. Their prayers, penance and their tears will rise up to Heaven, and all of God’s people will beg for forgiveness and mercy and will plead for my help and intercession. And then Jesus Christ in an act of his justice and great mercy will command his Angels to have all his enemies put to death. Suddenly the persecutors of the Church of Jesus Christ and all those given over to sin will perish, and the earth will become desert-like. And then peace will be made, and man will be reconciled with God, Jesus Christ will be served, worshipped and glorified. Charity will flourish everywhere . . . The Gospel will be preached everywhere . . . and man will live in fear of God.”

In other words, God will most certainly resurrect his Church from its present distress. When the eclipse becomes still darker, as it is sure to do, let us merely hold more closely than ever to the Mother of God, and let us resolve now not to weigh upon her then by our disbelief, as did Our Lord’s Apostles and disciples on the first Holy Saturday. Let us undertake to rejoice her Immaculate Heart with our unshakeable faith in her Divine Son and his one true Church.

Kyrie eleison.

“You Choose”

“You Choose” on March 23, 2013

What confusion reigns in the Church and so in the world! We see one after another the best of men, with perhaps the best of intentions, giving up the struggle and making the decision to resist no longer, to go with the flow, to follow the current, to do what everybody else is doing. Yet that flow remains godless, and it is condemned by God without appeal, because he does not change. No doubt he is right now appealing to the new Pope to do what is right, cost what it may.

Between 1966 and 1975 he seems to have appealed to a woman in France to get a French prelate to put in Paul VI’s own hands a series of divine messages calling for the Pope to lead massive pilgrimages of penance to the famous basilica of Vézelay (and, from 1972, to restore the Tridentine Mass). The messages are given the title of the Lenten Chant, Parce, Domine, Populo Tuo(Spare, O Lord, Thy People), They come with no official authorization but they fit Holy Week. Readers who care to read these brief extracts can judge for themselves if they ring true:—

16-X-65: The world is on the brink of catastrophe. However, do believe that the entreaty in prayer of a few humble souls has great power over My heart.

3-III-68:Tell the Holy Father to sing imploringly the Parce, Domine with his arms held up in the form of a cross, in front of the crowds that he is to gather together in Vézelay.

2-III-70:If My appeal is not heeded, the waters of My wrath will drown everything. What weeping and groaning there will be at that moment, but it will be too late.

13-II-71:Tell the priests to call for prayer and penance amidst collapsing Christendom, and to set the example themselves. Otherwise there will be massacres on French soil. If you refuse to send up to My Father cries of humble repentant prayer, you will perforce send up cries of terror. You choose! 25-III-71:My little children, if you do not want processions of love, you will have processions of hate. These are already starting. What more do you need to believe in My appeal to you?

28-IV-72:If they don’t want to genuflect in front of the Blessed Sacrament, they will genuflect in the salt-mines! 10-VII-72:If the Pope does not do what I have asked for, divine Justice will come down heavily on the world, and you will have to undergo such suffering that if you knew the details now, you would be frozen with terror. 15-VII-72:I appeal to My faithful children. Am I to find only deserters? If you knew, my children, what awaits you, how you would hasten to fulfil My desires. But justice will soon be done. You will cry out to Me in your terror, but it will be too late. 6-XI-72:Were I to show you what awaits you, you would spend entire nights in prayer at My feet, to keep the terrible chastisement away.

13-VII-73: The laity are presently the hope of the Church. Pray for your unfaithful shepherds.

2-V-75:In the evil times coming, Christian families will have to get together and work out how to look after the needs of My faithful priests, who will have to exercise their ministry hidden from public view . . . It is back to the catacombs. There is no other way.

Parce, Domine.

Undignified Dignity

Undignified Dignity on March 16, 2013

A reader has argued in favour of the Vatican II teaching on religious liberty. Even if the subject has often come up in “Eleison Comments,” her arguments are surely worth going through, because it is vital for Catholics today to grasp thoroughly the falsehood of that teaching. What the Council taught in paragraph #2 of its Declaration on Religious Liberty (Dignitatis Humanae), is that all men are to be free from all coercion by any other men or group of men when it comes to acting in private or in public in accordance with their beliefs. Moreover every human State must make this natural right into a constitutional or civil right.

On the contrary, all the way up to Vatican II the Catholic Church consistently taught that every State, as embodying God’s civil authority over God’s human creatures, is obliged as such to use that authority to protect and favour God’s one true Church, the Catholic Church of the Incarnate God, Our Lord Jesus Christ. Obviously, non-Catholic States will be condemned rather for their lack of faith than for not giving civil protection to that faith. Likewise Catholic States may refrain from prohibiting the public practice of false religions where such prohibition will do more harm than good for the salvation of the citizens’ souls. But the principle remains intact: God’s States must protect God’s true religion.

In fact the Conciliar teaching implies either that States are not from God, or that there is no one true religion of God. Either way it is implicitly liberating the State from God, and so putting the liberty of man above the rights of God, or, simply, man above God. That is why Archbishop Lefebvre said that the Conciliar teaching was blasphemy. And it is no use saying that the other paragraphs of DH contain good Catholic teaching. One gash by the iceberg was enough to sink the Titanic. DH#2 alone is enough to sink Catholic doctrine. But let us see the arguments in defence of the Council’s teaching.

1 DH is part of the Church’s Ordinary Magisterium, which must be taken seriously. DH came from the Church’s Magisters, or masters, yes, but not from the infallible Ordinary Magisterium, because DH contradicts the Church’s traditional teaching, as shown above. 2 DH merely makes clear human rights that are granted by natural law.Natural law puts the rights of man below, and not above, the rights of God. 3 DH does not negate the Catholic model for Church-State relations.It most certainly does! Paragraph #2 liberates the State from its intrinsic obligation to the one true Church. 4 DH is written in the context of the modern world where everybody believes in human rights. Since when must the Church be adapted to the world, and not the world to the Church? 5 DH does not teach that man has a right to error. If God’s State must grant a civil right to practise, in public, false religions, then God is being made to grant a right to error. 6 DH is a plea to modern governments to grant half a loaf, which is better than no bread.True Catholic doctrine is so logical and so coherent that to give away any of it is to give away all of it. And what sheep saved itself by offering itself to the wolf? 7 Catholics must not retreat from the modern world into a doctrinal ghetto.Catholics must do whatever they have to do, go wherever they have to go, in order not to give away the rights of God or compromise his honour. If that means martyrdom, so be it!

Kyrie eleison.

GREC – II

GREC – II on March 9, 2013

Before we continue with the story of GREC, namely the Parisian group of laity and clergy meeting from the late 1990’s onwards in pursuit of reconciliation between Vatican II and Catholic Tradition, we must consider the basic attitude of GREC participants. The Church’s future depends on those Catholics who will understand GREC’s error, i.e. how modern minds lose their grip on truth. To illustrate that attitude let us take at random four quotes, typical of dozens and dozens in the book For the Necessary Reconciliationby the Newchurch priest, Fr Michel Lelong, one of the founders of GREC. In a letter he wrote to the Pope in July of 2008 are to be found the first two quotes:—

“We also wish that the excommunications(of the four SSPX bishops in 1988) be lifted and that the SSPX recover its place within the Church to which it has so much to give. That is why we ask the authorities of the SSPX to put an end to the polemical statements and articles criticizing the Holy See.”Comment: (Has that not happened over the last 10 years?) But if polemics are so bad, why were a number of Church Fathers – and Archbishop Lefebvre – so polemical? Polemics are only that bad if unity is that good. But unity is only as good as that around which it unites.

“In our society so tempted by materialism, indifferentism and sectarisms, we think that in response to your request, Holy Father, all Catholics must strive together to be faithful to Christ’s recommendation, ‘Be united so that the whole world may believe’.”Comment: “United” around what? Around Catholic truth, or around the lie that Catholic truth is reconcilable with Vatican II? Then the primary and crucial question for Catholic unity is where Catholic truth is to be found. But GREC leaves questions of truth to the “theologians.” So non-theologians can be saved by lies!?

This letter of Fr Lelong was so well received by Benedict XVI that GREC leaders and sympathisers wrote again a few months later. Here are two more quotes from the second letter to the Pope:—

“For sure we were saddened that the Holy See’s recent proposals were not accepted by the SSPX authorities, but we know that to heal wounds amongst Catholics always requires generosity and patience to restore confidence on both sides and to make reconciliation possible.”Comment: Are wounds only ever to be healed, and never inflicted? Did Our Lord not twice use a lash across the backs of the money-lenders in the Temple? There is a God, his honour is to be defended above all things, and men can be wicked enough to understand nothing but the lash, be it physical or verbal.

“We think that lifting the excommunications would set in motion an irresistible process of drawing closer, with a view to an agreement between the Holy See and the SSPX, or at least an agreement with a large part of the SSPX priests and faithful.”Comment: indeed the friendly contacts between Rome and the SSPX were setting such a motion in process in January of 2009, and only an outburst from within the SSPX of the most horrible heresy of modern times – “anti-semitism” – stopped that process. But either Catholic reconciliation with Vatican II is no problem, or one has to say that that outburst was providential, because it also stopped, at least for a while, the false reconciliation.

In conclusion, GREC, like millions of modern Catholics, above all else seeks unity, non-polemics, reconciliation, agreement, etc. But where does the God of truth figure amongst all these sweet sentiments? Is he a sugar-daddy who blesses all men’s lies, just so long as they lie in unison?

Kyrie eleison.

GREC – I

GREC – I on March 2, 2013

Just over one year ago was published in France a little book of some 150 pages which has to be a big embarrassment for the leaders of a certain religious Society, because it shows how their promotion of union with the Newchurch goes back many years, at least to the 1990’s. Of course if they are proud of that promotion, they will feel no embarrassment, but if they have for many years been disguising that promotion, then let at least readers of the little book open their eyes.

“For the Necessary Reconciliation” was written by a Newchurch priest, Fr Michel Lelong, no doubt because he for one is openly proud of the leading part he played in GREC’s attempt to bring about the “necessary reconciliation” of Vatican II with Tradition, or of the Roman authorities with the Society of St Pius X. Ordained in 1948, and heavily involved in inter-religious relations even before Vatican II, he welcomed “with joy and hope” (does that ring a bell? – Gaudium et Spes?) the Council that would strive to relate the Church to modern times. One of the lay collaborators in his work was a distinguished French diplomat and high government official, Gilbert Pérol, French Ambassador to the Vatican from 1988 to 1992.

As a professional diplomat and practising Catholic, Pérol believed profoundly in reconciling the truly Catholic SSPX with the assuredly Catholic Vatican. How could there be such a clash between the two? Both were Catholic! The clash was not reasonable. So in 1995 he sketched out a solution in a brief text which would serve like a charter for what became GREC, a Parisian think-tank for Catholics, named from the initials of Groupe de Réflexion Entre Catholiques. Expressing the concern of millions of Catholics torn from the 1960’s onwards between the Council and Tradition, Pérol’s text deserves a moment’s attention.

Not being a theologian, he says, he thinks that the present situation of Church and world requires that the problem of the divisions between Catholics following on the Council “should be stated in entirely new terms.” It is rather as a diplomat that he proposes that on the one side Rome should admit that it has gravely mistreated the Tridentine rite of Mass, and it should suspend the excommunications of 1988, while on the other hand the SSPX must not totally reject the Council and it must recognize that Rome is still the highest authority in the Church.

In other words as a diplomat Pérol proposed that if only there were a little give and take on each side, then the agony could be emptied out of the clash between the Council and Tradition, and all Catholics could once more live happily ever after. Thus he and millions of other Catholics would no longer be faced with having to either abandon Rome for the sake of Tradition, or abandon Tradition for the sake of Rome. Lovely! Back to the comfort zone of the 1950’s! But the 1950’s are gone, and gone for ever. Then where is the flaw in his thinking?

It is at the very outset when he says he is no theologian. True, he may have been no professional theologian, but every Catholic must be an amateur theologian, or, better said, must know his catechism, because only in the light of its doctrine can he judge questions of the Faith. Our Lord’s warning to discern between sheep and wolves (Mt.VII, 15–20) was not addressed only to professional theologians! So Pérol’s renouncing “theology” in favour of diplomacy is yet one more example of modern man’s failure to grasp the importance of doctrine. This failure is the most important lesson to be drawn from this book on GREC.

Kyrie eleison.