Eleison Comments

Home Reading

Home Reading on October 20, 2012

When a while back these “Comments” advised readers to fortify their homes in case public bastions of the Faith might, due to the wickedness of the times, prove to be a thing of the past, a few readers wrote in to ask just how homes might be fortified. In fact various spiritual and material means of defending home and family have been suggested in previous numbers of the “Comments,” notably of course the Holy Rosary, but one fortification has gone unmentioned which I think I would try in place of television if I had a family to defend: reading aloud each night to the children selected chapters from Maria Valtorta’s Poem of the Man-God. And when we had reached the end of the five volumes in English, I imagine us starting again from the beginning, and so on, until all the children had left home!

Yet the Poem has many and eloquent enemies. It consists of episodes from the lives of Our Lord and Our Lady, from her immaculate conception through to her assumption into Heaven, as seen in visions received, believably from Heaven, during the Second World War in northern Italy by Maria Valtorta, an unmarried woman of mature age lying in a sick-bed, permanently crippled from an injury to her back inflicted several years earlier. Notes included in the Italian edition (running to over four thousand pages in ten volumes) show how afraid she was of being deceived by the Devil, and many people are not in fact convinced that the Poem truly came from God. Let us look at three main objections.

Firstly, the Poemwas put on the Church’s Index of forbidden books in the 1950’s, which was before Rome went neo-modernist in the 1960’s. The reason given for the condemnation was the romanticizing and sentimentalizing of the Gospel events. Secondly the Poem is accused of countless doctrinal errors. Thirdly Archbishop Lefebvre objected to the Poem that its giving so many physical details of Our Lord’s daily life makes him too material, and brings us too far down from the spiritual level of the four Gospels.

But firstly, how could the modernists have taken over Rome in the 1960’s, as they did, had they not already been well established within Rome in the 1950’s? The Poem, like the Gospels (e.g. Jn.XI, 35, etc.), is full of sentiment but always proportional to its object. The Poemis for any sane judge, in my opinion, neither sentimental nor romanticized. Secondly, the seeming doctrinal errors are not difficult to explain, one by one, as is done by a competent theologian in the notes to be found in the Italian edition of the Poem. And thirdly, with all due respect to Archbishop Lefebvre, I would argue that modern man needs the material detail for him to believe again in the reality of the Gospels. Has not too much “spirituality” kicked Our Lord upstairs, so to speak, while cinema and television have taken over modern man’s sense of reality on the ground floor? As Our Lord was true man and true God, so the Poem is at every moment both fully spiritual and fully material.

From non-electronic reading of the Poem in the home, I can imagine many benefits, besides the real live contact between parents reading and children listening. Children soak in from their surroundings like sponges soak in water. From the reading of chapters of the Poem selected according to the children’s age, I can imagine almost no end to how much they could learn about Our Lord and Our Lady. And the questions they would ask! And the answers that the parents would have to come up with! I do believe the Poem could greatly fortify a home.

Kyrie eleison.

Elmer Gantry

Elmer Gantry on October 13, 2012

On the in-seat entertainment system of a long-distance flight I recently found, listed as a “classic,” a film I could remember from having watched it some 50 years ago – the film version made in 1960 of Sinclair Lewis’ novel, Elmer Gantry. I remembered the film because two remarks from the dialogue have stayed with me ever since. One is of an old man comparing religious conversion to getting drunk. The other is of a young woman begging to be lied to. I watched the film again . . .

Elmer Gantry is an American con-man of the 1920’s who falls for a revivalist woman preacher, Sister Falconer, while she is conducting a cross-country crusade for conversions in a big travelling tent. Lacking any real religion, the film is somewhat confused, but it does portray both the genuine need that souls have of some religion, and the falsehood of the fundamentalist Protestant “religion.” The true need and the false satisfaction are highlighted together when Elmer puts questions to an old man cleaning up in the tent: “Mister,” he replies, leaning on his broom, “I’ve been converted five times. Billy Sunday, Reverend Biederwolf, Gypsy Smith and twice by Sister Falconer. I get terrible drunk, and then I get good and saved. Both of them done me a powerful lot of good – gettin’ drunk and gettin’ saved.”

Of course the remark has its comic side, but it is tragic when one thinks of all the souls for whom it has become a kind of common sense to put religious conversion on a level with drink. That is survivalism replacing revivalism, well on the way to religion being ridiculed altogether. How many souls there must be for whom the Holy Name of “Jesus” has been virtually burnt out by its association with the emotionalism of fundamentalist preachers! Read “Wise Blood” and other stories by Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964), a Catholic writer who shocks but is not confused, and who portrays just how far man’s religious instinct can be bent out of shape by the Protestantism of America’s Deep South. God can make roses grow out of a sewer, but heresy does terrible damage!

The second remark that I remembered from the film arises in a private context, but its potential application is far wider. While pursuing Sister Falconer, Elmer runs by chance into a woman that he mistreated and abandoned years earlier. When this woman learns of his affair with Sister, she wants her revenge, but even whilst laying a honey-trap for Elmer to discredit him utterly in the media, she cannot help herself wanting him to tell her that he loves her. She says: “Tell me a good, strong lie I can believe, but hold me tight.” Loving him still as she does, all she wants is to be deceived.

Such is the world around us. All it asks is to be deceived. That is why we are living in a world of Satan’s lies. We do not want God. Now, life without him cannot work – see Ps. 126, v.1, and just look around you – but we desperately want to believe that life works best of all without him. In effect we say to our leaders, “We elected you to tell us good, strong lies, and to hold us tight in our godlessness. Please do a 9/11, a 7/7 (U.K.’s 9/11), or anything you like, just so long as we can go on believing in you as a substitute for God to look after us. The bigger the lie, the more we will believe it, but you must hold us tight. Tighten up our police states as much as you like, but you must keep out God.”

Is it any wonder we have the satanic world we have?

Kyrie eleison.

More Ammunition

More Ammunition on October 6, 2012

Enjoying the privilege of having a variety of friends shooting at me from all directions, I cannot bear the thought of them running out of ammunition, so here is a collection of bullets and shells gathered from the battlefield. The comments came from priests, layfolk and Sisters, mainly upset by a certain episode in modern history being denied on Swedish TV in November of 2008. (And yet . . . and yet . . .) As Americans say, “Enjoy!”

“That bishop has a strong temperament with much prestige and authority, so he could not bear not being Number One in the Society of St Pius X. Wishing then to make himself a name in the history books, but realizing that at 68 years of age he would have no more chance of being elected Superior General, he detonated on Swedish TV the “Revisionist Bomb” in order to get attention and come out top dog. To gain influence he was willing to risk splitting the SSPX.”

“He decided on all-out provocation by the broadcast in order to throw a monkey-wrench into the Rome-SSPX talks which he disapproved of. But being in a subordinate position, only by such a scandal could he stop the dialogue and the agreement that might have come of it.”

“He loves provoking because he is an infiltrator, a former Anglican who is still basically hostile to the Catholic Church. Any Rome-SSPX agreement he wanted to block, because it would be too favourable to the SSPX, i.e. to the Catholic Church.”

“He is an illuminated supernaturalist, a conspiracy nut, obsessed with the Jewish peril. He sees the Apocalypse coming tomorrow. Neither he nor Revisionism are serious.”

“He has natural qualities that make him worldly and ambitious. He is used to everybody paying him homage. He used to have influence over many people, and he was treated like a little god when he was still travelling. However, because of his personal qualities he is proud and jealous of Bishop Fellay, so out of envy and resentment he let loose on Swedish TV.”

“Actually, long before the Swedish affair he was too political and too independent of the rest of the SSPX, whose spirit he did not entirely share. In 2004 he publicly attacked the leadership of the SSPX for its jansenizing spirit and its supernaturalism. In reality he was merely settling personal accounts, as churchmen are liable to do.”

“His originality goes with a complete lack of sense of responsibility, which is why he rode that anti-semitic hobby-horse of his in public without a thought for the harm he might do to Tradition. In fact he was manipulated by Fascists and Neo-pagans, or at least he was exploited by them. He was not out for personal power on that occasion, but he is unpredictable, and he is not to be trusted.” And all these things are being said about me! I just love the attention!

Kyrie eleison.

Sarto, Siri?

Sarto, Siri? on September 29, 2012

In a sermon for the Feast of St Pius X I found myself uttering « almost a heresy »: I wondered aloud whether Giuseppe Sarto would have disobeyed Paul VI’s destruction of the Church, if, instead of dying as Pope Pius X in 1914, he had died as a Cardinal in, say, 1974. Within the Society of St Pius X that must sound like a heresy because how can the wisdom of the heavenly patron of the SSPX be in any way flawed? Yet the question is not idle.

In the 1970’s Archbishop Lefebvre made personal visits to a number of the Church’s best cardinals and bishops in the hope of persuading a mere handful of them to offer public resistance to the Vatican II revolution. He used to say that just half a dozen bishops resisting together could have seriously obstructed the Conciliar devastation of the Church. Alas, not even Pius XII’s choice of successor, Cardinal Siri of Genoa, would make a public move against the Church Establishment. Finally Bishop de Castro Mayer stepped forward, but only in the 1980’s, by when the Conciliar Revolution was well ensconced at the top of the Church.

So how could the best of well-trained minds have been so darkened? How could so few of the best churchmen at that time not have seen what the Archbishop was seeing, for instance that the “law” establishing the Novus Ordo Mass was no law at all, because it belongs to the very nature of law to be an ordinance of reason for the common good? How could he have been so relatively alone in not letting such a basic principle of common sense be smothered by respect for authority, when the Church’s very survival was being placed in peril by Vatican II and the New Mass? How can authority have so gained the upper hand on reality and truth?

My own answer is that for seven centuries Christendom has been sliding into apostasy. For 700 years, with noble interruptions like the Counter-Reformation, the reality of Catholicism has been slowly eaten away by the cancerous fantasy of liberalism, which is the freeing of man from God by the freeing of nature from grace, of mind from objective truth and of will from objective right and wrong. For the longest time, 650 years, the Catholic churchmen clung to and defended reality, but finally enough of the engrossing fantasy of glamorous modernity worked its way into their bones for reality to lose its grip on their minds and wills. Lacking grace, as St Thomas More said of the English bishops in his time betraying the Catholic Church, the Conciliar bishops let men’s fantasy take over from God’s reality, and authority take over from truth. There are practical lessons for clergy and laity alike.

Colleagues inside and outside the SSPX, to serve God, let us beware of reacting like Giuseppe Siri when we need to be reacting like Giuseppe Sarto, with his magnificent denunciations of the modern errors in Pascendi, Lamentabiliand the Letter on the Sillon. And to obtain the grace we need in this most tremendous crisis of all Church history, we need tremendously to pray.

Layfolk, if horrors of modern life make you “hunger and thirst after justice,” rejoice if you can that the horrors are keeping you real, and do not doubt that if you persevere in your hunger, you will “have your fill” (Mt.V, 6). Blessed are the poor in spirit, the meek, and they that mourn, says Our Lord, in the same place. As for the surest protection against your minds and hearts being taken over by the fantasy, pray five, better fifteen, Mysteries a day of Our Lady’s Holy Rosary.

Kyrie eleison.

Reversible Declaration

Reversible Declaration on September 22, 2012

Not everything about the General Chapter of the Society of St Pius X held in Switzerland in July may have been disastrous, but of its two official fruits, the “Six Conditions” were “alarmingly weak” (cf. EC 268, Sept. 1), and its final “Declaration” leaves much to be desired. Here is the briefest of summaries of its ten paragraphs:—

1 We thank God for 42 years of our Society’s existence. 2 We have rediscovered our unity after the recent crisis(really?), 3 in order to profess our faith 4 in the Church, in the Pope, in Christ the King. 5 We hold to the Church’s constant Magisterium, 6 as also to its constant Tradition. 7 We join with all Catholics now being persecuted. 8 We pray for help to the Blessed Virgin Mary, 9 to St. Michael 10 and to St Pius X. This is a Declaration not lacking in piety, which St Paul says is useful for all purposes (I Tim. IV, 8). However, to his two disciples, Timothy and Titus, he is constantly emphasizing the need for doctrine, which is the foundation of true piety. Alas, the Declaration is rather less strong in doctrine. Instead of blasting the Council’s doctrinal errors which have been devastating the Church for the last 50 years, it has in its most doctrinal paragraphs, 5 and 6, only a timid condemnation of those errors, together with a tribute to the unchanging Magisterium (5) and Tradition (6) of the Church, accurate but constituting an argument all too easily reversible by a Conciliarist. See how:—

Paragraph 5 mentions Vatican II novelties being “stained with errors,” whereas the Church’s constant Magisterium is uninterrupted: “By its act of teaching it transmits the revealed deposit in perfect harmony with everything the universal Church has taught in all times and places.” Which of course implies that Rome should take Vatican II to the cleaners to take out the stains. But see how a Roman can reply: “The Chapter’s expression of the continuity of the Magisterium is wholly admirable! But we Romans are that Magisterium, and we say that Vatican II is not stained!”

Similarly with paragraph 6. The Declaration states, “The constant Tradition of the Church transmits and will transmit to the end of time the collection of teachings necessary to keep the Faith and save one’s soul.” So the Church authorities need to return to Tradition. Roman reply: “ The Chapter’s description of how Tradition hands down the Faith is wholly admirable! But we Romans are the guardians of that Tradition, and we say, by the hermeneutic of continuity, that Vatican II does not interrupt it but continues it. So the Chapter is entirely wrong to suggest that we need to return to it.”

Contrast the force of Archbishop Lefebvre’s irreversible attack on the errors of Vatican II in his famous Declaration of November, 1974. He declares that Conciliar Rome is not Catholic Rome because the Conciliar reform is “naturalist, Teilhardian, liberal and Protestant . . . poisoned through and through . . . coming from heresy and leading to heresy,” etc, etc. His conclusion is a categorical refusal to have anything to do with the Newrome because it is absolutely not the true Rome.

Pull up on the Internet both Declarations, and see which is an unmistakeable trumpet-call for the necessary battle (I Cor.XIV, 8)! One has to wonder how many of the 2012 capitulants have ever studied what the Archbishop said, and why.

Kyrie eleison.

“Rebellious, Divisive”

“Rebellious, Divisive” on September 15, 2012

The seventh chapter of the Gospel of St John has a special lesson for today: who are the real rebels against authority, and who are the merely apparent rebels? Who appears to be dividing the people of God, and who is really dividing them? Things are not always what they appear. It is necessary always to “Judge not according to the appearances, but judge just judgment” (Jn. VII, 24).

John VII is close to the end of Our Lord’s life on earth. The Jews are seeking to kill Jesus (verse 1), but Our Lord nevertheless goes up to Jerusalem and teaches in the Temple (14). The crowd is already divided (12), and so the effect of his teaching is that some people (40) recognize in him the prophet (cf. Deut.XVIII, 15–19), while others (41, 42) refuse him that recognition because he is from Galilee. So there is division and dissension. Now division as such is blameworthy, so who is to blame? Certainly not Our Lord, who is merely preaching the doctrine of his Father in Heaven (16–17). Nor can that part of the crowd be blamed which accepted the divine teaching. Clearly the blame for the dissension lies with the Temple authorities and that part of the crowd that was refusing the Truth.

Similarly in the 1970’s and 1980’s Archbishop Lefebvre divided Catholics by teaching and practising the truth of Catholic Tradition, but what Catholic that now boasts of being Traditional blames him for that division? Clearly the blame for the division of the Church lay neither with the Archbishop nor with those who followed him, but mainly with those Church authorities who were twisting the true religion, like the Temple authorities in Our Lord’s own day. Again and again the Archbishop pleaded with them to “judge just judgment” by confronting the central problem created by their Conciliar adultery with the modern world. To this day they refuse that confrontation. Again and again their only answer has been, “Obedience!,” “Unity!.” Does not their lack of arguments as to the basic questions of truth suggest it is they who are the true rebels and dividers of the Church?

Yet dissension as such is not a good thing, and both Our Lord and Archbishop Lefebvre knew ahead that dissension would follow on their teaching. Why then did they still go ahead? Because souls can be saved with dissension (cf. Lk.XII, 51–53), but they cannot be saved without Truth. If the religious authorities are misleading the people – and the Devil works especially hard on them because of their power to lead many other souls astray – then the Truth must be told to bring people back on the path to Heaven, even if dissension will be the result. In this respect Truth is above authority or unity.

And where is that truth in 2012? Vatican II was a disaster for the Church – true or false? The Church authorities who brought about Assisi III and John-Paul II’s “beatification” are clinging to Vatican II – true or false? And so if the Society of Pius X puts itself under those same authorities, they will use all their prestige, and the power over the SSPX that it will have given them, to dissolve its resistance to Vatican II – true or false? So the SSPX runs a grave risk of losing steadily whatever will it still has to resist that prestige and power – true or false? As Romans say, “Rome can wait”!

Then in the SSPX today, if one “judges not according to the appearance but just judgment,” who is it that is being truly “divisive”? Who are the real “rebels against authority”? Those who criticize such a risk of blending Catholic Truth with Conciliar error, or those who are promoting it?

Kyrie eleison.