Eleison Comments

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.

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.