Hoist Ladder – III
The last two issues of these “Comments,” # 668 and # 669 of May 2 and 9 respectively, sought to defend the apparent harshness of Archbishop Lefebvre’s parting advice in 1990 to the priests of the Society he founded when he said to them that they should have nothing further to do with the Church’s Conciliar officials in Rome. # 668 underlined the gravity of the subjectivism denounced by the Archbishop as underlying all the Council’s main documents. # 669 recognised that respect and charity are due to the highest officials of Our Lord’s true Church, but repeated yet again that their subjectivism is so grave for the Church’s Faith that the due respect and charity had to be measured by the Faith and not the reverse.
However, the “apparent harshness” may need further defence, and those “Comments” some explanation.
Firstly, a brief reminder of some Society history of those crucial years between 1988 and 2012. In 1988 the Archbishop at the end of a long and outstanding career in the Church’s service apparently performed a grave disservice to the Church by consecrating four bishops against the express will of Pope John-Paul II in order to defend the Faith and the Church from the ravages of the new Conciliar religion being promoted worldwide by the Pope. Of course the Pope did not understand his action, and behaved like a swine in the comparison of Our Lord warning us not to throw pearls in front of swine because they will trample on the pearls and then turn and rend us ourselves. Indeed until 2000 John-Paul II trampled upon the Church’s Tradition as defended by the Archbishop and did his best to “rend” the Society.
However, all over the world there were serious and believing Catholics who fully understood and supported the Archbishop, and who so rallied to his support that the Society arguably enjoyed its golden years in defending the Faith between 1988 and 2000. As a result, not only did the trampling of Rome and the Pope upon the Society not succeed, but it was even counter-productive, attracting more and more customers to buy the Church’s true pearls of Tradition, thanks to the Archbishop and his Society. The official Church’s failure to tread those pearls into the mud became absolutely clear with the success of the Society’s Jubilee Year Pilgrimage to Rome in the spring of 2000. That was when the “swine” of Rome switched their strategy from the stick to the carrot, and began cooing like doves in order to entice the Society to descend from its impregnable fortress of doctrine down to the shifting sands of diplomacy.
And the Archbishop having died in 1991, his charisma and wisdom were no longer there to prevent his relatively young successors from being seduced by the cooing of the apparent doves.
And so the battle-lines in the fight for the Faith seem to have been re-drawn, with the official Society having gone over to the enemy, so that it is now more angry with the lightweight “Resistance” than it is with heavyweight Conciliar Rome. In fairness however, the present Society leaders have not yet signed over the store, and a good number of Society priests are truly opposed to their store being signed over. But any Catholic must wish that the Society never cease to stand for what the Archbishop stood for.
And his “harshness”? Pachamama is merely one very clear example of how right he was to sound the alarm and to take action in the wake of Vatican II. The same “swine” as later had cooed like doves also at the Council (1962–1965) to fool a huge number of Catholic sheep and shepherds at the time, by no means all of whom woke up later or in the next 55 years to date. But the Archbishop had learned to value the good philosophy he had been given at the seminary to fortify his common sense, and so he judged everything in the light of true principles and the Faith. In that light the modern world and its wretched Council are a sorry affair, leaving only an appearance of Christianity while the substance is becoming something completely different. To say, take to the hills and do not look back, is only what God Himself told Lot. It is good advice, however difficult now to apply, for a world being confined in folly.
Kyrie eleison.
