Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre

VATICAN II SHORT – SIGHTED

VATICAN II SHORT – SIGHTED on October 19, 2024

Poor modern man, so drastically short-sighted,

His whole life being, by that short sight, blighted!

If we want to save our souls for eternity, as God wants all of us to do (I Tim. II,4), then the world now surrounding us is a dangerous environment for that purpose because, broadly speaking, for seven centuries mankind has been slowly but surely demoting God in order to take His place. It is a foolish attempt, doomed to fail, but in the meantime it has brought mankind to the brink of nuclear suicide. Now, on that road to ruin, from the Incarnation onwards, the greatest obstacle to the folly of man was God’s own Church instituted by God’s own Son, Our Lord Jesus Christ, to be the continuation of His Incarnation amongst men, as the Light of the World to dispel men’s confusion, and the Salt of the Earth to prevent men’s corruption. Alas, Vatican II in the 1960’s was the summit of men’s attempts to serve the Devil by crippling that Church, so as to send all men’s souls to Hell instead of Heaven. From here came the confusion and corruption all around us.

But Vatican II had to be subtle, because by the 20th century Mother Church had already analysed and refuted the great errors leading up to Vatican II, especially Protestantism (1517) and its progeny, Liberalism (1717) and Communism (1917). Among the host of errors accompanying these three, surely the most dangerous was Modernism (1907), because it was led by priests from inside the Church, wishing to update God’s Church by adapting it to godless modern man. Therefore subtlety was needed to deceive Catholics alerted to Protestantism in all its forms (and for the same reason, even more subtlety will be needed by the Antichrist to fool a mankind alerted by the divine Chastisement occurring between now and then).

When Archbishop Lefebvre died in 1991, one of his hopes was that the Society of priests which he had founded in 1970 would work on the subtle errors of Vatican II to analyse and denounce them. This is precious work for the salvation of souls, and one book is outstanding in this respect, Prometheus, the Religion of Man, by Fr Alvaro Calderon, translated into French and published last May by the Society’s printing-house in France, accessible at www.clovis-diffusion.com The book is not an easy read, but it is highly to be recommended for its masterly thomistic breakdown of Vatican II. Here for instance is, in very brief form, the first major error of Vatican II, denounced by Fr Calderon:

Man must be the centre of religion, because he is, amongst all other material creatures, the only creature that is also spiritual. Therefore he is superior to all of them, he is the main purpose of all of them, and he is the main purpose of all material creation, being the only creature created for himself, all other material creatures having been created only for him. Therefore he must be at the centre of any true religion of that creation.

But all of this argument leaves out the Creator. If we start out from God and not from man, then we know that the one and only ultimate cause of the creation of man must be the essence of God Himself, because the one and only object possible of God’s willing anything at all is His own goodness, because that infinite goodness alone can fulfil His infinite willing. Any creature and everything that He chooses freely to create, He can only will in and through His willing of His own uncreated Self.

Therefore it can only be Himself, and not man, who is the ultimate purpose of creation, and He alone who can be at the centre of any true religion of that creation. All of the arguments in the documents of Vatican II which attempt to put man instead of God at the centre of creation around us, fail, for ignorance, witting or unwitting, wilful or unwilful, of Catholic Tradition’s supreme treasures of philosophy and theology. Thus one of the last and worst of all the Vatican II documents, Gaudium et Spes, is, says Fr Calderon, shot through with the very inadequate modern philosophy of Personalism, by which the human person is at the centre of everything. No, he is not. It is God who is at the centre of everything.

Kyrie eleison

LEFEBVRE post 1988 – II

<b>LEFEBVRE post 1988 – II</b> on October 5, 2024

It takes a Saint to see how evil is bad.

And most of us? Evil can make us glad!

Three weeks ago these “Comments” concluded with a few lines of verse, but a few more lines than usual, in order to draw the lesson from words of wisdom spoken by Archbishop Lefebvre in 1989 concerning that controversial consecration of four bishops which he had performed in the summer of 1988 without the official permission of Rome, normally necessary. However, not all readers may have understood how the lines of verse were connected to the Archbishop’s line of thinking. And even for those who did understand, the crucial question of those consecrations deserves always to be developed, so we return to the subject. Here are those lines of verse, in heavy black, with explanation following –

A liberal is a wolf dressed like a sheep

Here is the central problem. A “liberal” is somebody whose real religion is not Catholicism, as he may deceive himself, but liberty. Thus he can come to think that Catholicism, the one true religion of the one true God, is a matter of choice, of his own choice, and he personally chooses it, but if anybody else wants to choose any other of the numberless false religions, he is at liberty to do so. He is not. True, God gives to every one of us human beings at the age of reason the faculty of free-will enabling us to choose between truth and error, between right and wrong, but He gives us no moral right to choose error or moral wrong. If He gives me the faculty of reason with its free-will, it is only so that I will make good use of it by choosing whatever is true and right, so that by rewarding me with Heaven He can share His infinite bliss. If I have the free-will to choose error or wrong, I have no “liberty” to escape the consequences of my choice, which will ultimately be, if I do not repent, the fires of eternal Hell. I will have freely chosen Hell. Only in this sense are human beings “free” to choose for themselves (what they know to be) any false religion.

It follows that if anybody wants to persuade me that my worth or dignity as a human being depends on my mere faculty of free-will, and not on the right use I make of it, then he is wanting to persuade me of a terrible error (he is a wolf), even while he is pretending to encourage my dignity (he is in sheep’s clothing). Every soul in Hell has the “dignity” of having itself chosen its torment, but what real dignity is that? The “dignity” to blaspheme, for ever and ever!? Yet such is the doctrine of Vatican II, with its Decree on “Human Dignity”: the State must protect the right, not just faculty, of every citizen to choose his own religion. This Decree is absolutely not Catholic. No wonder the Archbishop never signed it!

Judge by his fruits – sheep corpses in a heap

Are not the fruits of Vatican II millions upon millions of Catholics losing the Faith? Of course! The Council has told them that their dignity consists in choosing whatever religion they like! There are so many religions much easier to practise than Catholicism!

For what use is it to him to be “free”

If by God’s tenfold Law still bound he be?

Here is why the worshippers of “liberty” must have religious liberty, because whoever or whatever else they are free from, if they are not free from God Himself with His Ten Commandments, what are they really free from? Here is why religious liberty is the key to “liberty,” and why every liberal inclines to join in that war on God, war against God, which rages all around us. Here is why the Decree of Vatican II on “Human Dignity” is an unbelievable crime against all mankind. And in the half century since Vatican II, do the high Church officials in Rome show any sign of abandoning their wretched Council? In real terms, none at all!

To Hell with Heaven! I will do as I like,

And let God with His Hell for ever strike!

Among liberals, at least the ring-leaders know exactly what they are doing. Theirs is a diabolical pride. They know they are destroying the Catholic Church, and they are defying God to do His worst. God, have mercy! Archbishop Lefebvre understood what they were up to, but not all his followers understand.

Kyrie eleison

VIGANO-CARLSON II

VIGANO-CARLSON II on September 28, 2024

By Christendom Christ is absolutely needed.

Archbishop Vigano’s teaching must be heeded.

Last week these “Comments” presented in summary form the first part of a most interesting article of Archbishop Vigano from last year, inspired by a broadcast of the American journalist, Tucker Carlson. Carlson argued that secular humanism may claim to repudiate all religion, but it does that only by itself acting as a full-blown substitute religion. In this idea the Archbishop supported Carlson as only an eminent Catholic churchman can do, because only such a churchman can have the sufficient truth, height and breadth of view to grasp fully what is at stake. With this or that solution proposed by Archb. Vigano one may beg to differ, for instance sedevacantism (if that is still tempting him), or the driving out of mankind’s treacherous authorities in Church and State (how could that be done, when they hold all the levers of power, as never before?). But the Archbishop is at least grappling with the full depths of the problem. If only Mother Church had today a dozen bishops with his clarity and courage, she would not be in the same trouble. For a summary of the rest of the Archbishop’s article, read on –

It is disconcerting that among the number of converts to the universal religion we can also count Jorge Mario Bergoglio, with all the cowardliness of the churchmen who remain faithful to him. The apostasy of the Catholic hierarchy has reached the point of worshipping the idol of the Pachamama, who is the demonic personification of ecumenical, inclusive, and sustainable “Amazonian” globalism. What we are witnessing is nothing more than the reverse application of the process that led to the spread of Christianity in the Roman Empire and throughout the world, a sort of revenge of barbarism and paganism on the Faith of Christ. What Julian the Apostate tried to do in the 4th century, that is, to restore the cult of pagan gods, today is pursued zealously by new apostates, all united by a “sacred fury” that makes them as dangerous as they are convinced of being able to succeed in their intentions, because of the endless means at their disposal.

This religion is nothing more than a modern realisation of the cult of Lucifer. It is no mystery that the ideologues of globalist thought are all anti-Christian and anti-clerical, significantly hostile to Christian morality, opposed to the civilization and culture that the Gospel has shaped in two thousand years of history. All the precepts of the globalist religion are a counterfeit version of the Ten Commandments, their grotesque inversion, an obscene reversal. In practice, they use the same means that the Church has used for evangelization, but with the aim of damning souls and subjecting them not to the Law of God, but to the tyranny of the devil, under the inquisitorial control of the anti-church of Satan. At the bottom of all this, there is the hatred of God and envy for the supernatural bliss that He has reserved for men by redeeming them from sin through the Sacrifice of the Cross of His Son.

The enmity between the seed of the Woman and that of the serpent (Gen 3:15) is a theological reality in which the enemies of God believe above all. One of the signs of the end times is the abolition of the Holy Sacrifice and the presence of the abomination of desolation in the temple (Dan 9: 27). The attempts to suppress or limit the traditional Mass unite Deep church and Deep State, revealing the essentially Luciferian matrix of both. They know very well what are the infinite graces that pour out on the Church and on the world through that Mass, and they want to prevent those graces from being given so that they do not hinder their plans.

For too long citizens and faithful have passively suffered the decisions of their political and religious leaders in the face of the evidence of their betrayal. If those in authority in the State and Church act against the citizens and the faithful, their power is usurped and their authority null and void. If they do not want to be like fathers to us; if they do not want our good and if indeed they do everything to corrupt us in body and spirit, it is time to drive them out of their positions and call them to account for their betrayal, their crimes, and their scandalous lies.

Kyrie eleison

LEFEBVRE post 1988 – I

LEFEBVRE post 1988 – I on September 14, 2024

A liberal is a wolf, dressed like a sheep.

Judge by the fruits – sheep corpses in a heap.

For what use is it to him to be “free,”

If by God’s tenfold Law still bound he be?

“To Hell with Heaven! I will do as I like!

And let God with His Hell for ever strike!”

After consecrating four bishops in June of 1988, Archbishop Lefebvre saw more clearly than ever that the Conciliar Romans are no servants of the Catholic Faith. In 1989 he gave a long interview in France, cruelly shortened below. For the complete original, see https://sspx.org/en/one-year-after-consecrations-30335

Why the consecrations?

For several years I had been trying to get Rome to understand that as I was advancing in age, I had to ensure my succession. They were afraid that I would consecrate bishops, so they alluded to the possibility of our having a bishop who would be my successor.

I went to Rome for conversations, but without any confidence in their success. I wished to go as far as possible to show what good will we had. Very soon, however, we realized that we were dealing with people who are not honest. Rome brought up the question of the Council, which we did not want to hear of. A formula for an agreement was found which was at the very limits of what we could accept. I obtained only one bishop, whereas I was asking for three. That was already virtually unacceptable. And, when, even before signing the protocol, we asked when we could have this bishop, the answer was evasive or null.

The accumulation of distrust and reticence impelled me to demand the nomination of a bishop for the 30th June. Either that, or I would go ahead and consecrate. Faced with such a choice, Cardinal Ratzinger said, “If that’s how it is, the protocol is over. It’s finished, and there is no more protocol. You are breaking off relations.” It’s he who said it, not I.

Lefebvre should have stayed in the Church

What Church are we talking about? If you mean the Conciliar Church, then we who have struggled against the Council for twenty years, because we want the Catholic Church, would have to re-enter this Conciliar Church in order, supposedly, to make it Catholic. That is a complete illusion.

Danger of schism?

To say that we are not the “visible Church”, that we are quitting the “visible Church”, which is infallible, all that is just words which do not correspond to reality. It is incredible that anyone can talk of the “visible Church”, meaning the Conciliar Church, as opposed to the Catholic Church which we are trying to represent and continue. We are against the Conciliar Church which is virtually schismatic, even if they deny it. In practice, it is a Church virtually excommunicated because it is a Modernist Church. We are not making a parallel Church. We are what we have always been – Catholics carrying on. That is all.

Each of these recent popes is truly two popes in one. It was John XXIII who launched the opening of the Church to the world. From that point on, we were framed within ambiguity and duplicity, i.e. the two-faced way of acting proper to the liberal.

We are not against the pope insofar as he represents the values of the Apostolic See which are unchanging. But we are against the pope insofar as he is a modernist who does not believe in his own infallibility, who practises ecumenism. So long as in Rome they stay attached to the ideas of the Council: religious liberty, ecumenism, collegiality, they are going the wrong way.

Reconciliation?

I do not think it is opportune to try contacting Rome. I think we must still wait. Wait, alas, for the situation to get still worse on their side. But up till now, they do not want to recognize that fact.

Kyrie eleison

Bp. THOMAS SPEAKS

Bp. THOMAS SPEAKS on August 17, 2024

This true disciple made no compromise,

And, to his Master, proves still faithful and wise.

Bishop Thomas Aquinas, Superior of the “Resistance” Benedictine Monastery in the hills behind Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, does not often make public declarations, but the one that he made at the end of last month on “Archbishop Lefebvre, Archbishop Vigano and Sedevacantism” might make us wish that he took position in public more often. In those crucial years of the 1970’s and 1980’s Fr. Thomas Aquinas was never a seminarian directly under Archbishop Lefebvre inside the Archbishop’s Society of St Pius X, but he was closer to the Archbishop in thought and mind than many of his own seminarians, and could be called at that time a confidant of the Archbishop. His faithfulness to the Archbishop’s way of thinking is clear from this recent article of Bishop Thomas, translated below, complete, from a French version of the original –

Archbishop Vigano has behaved like a true hero ever since he realised, or began to realise, just how the Conciliar Church is doctrinally and morally decomposing. Unfortunately he seems to be leaning towards the position that the Apostolic See is vacant. Time will tell if he is truly a sedevacantist.

As for Archbishop Lefebvre, he had already begun this fight with the Conciliar Church when it was even more decisive than it is today. He had gained the trust of Catholics all over the world, thanks to his solid doctrinal formation and to his superior practical judgment. The latter enabled him to avoid both the trap to the left of the Ecclesia Dei communities going back under Rome, and the trap to the right of sedevacantism. He pointed out precisely how on the left Dom Gerard and others like him were leading their communities to commit suicide by placing themselves under the authority of the modernists, while the sedevacantists on the right were putting themselves in a position as uncertain as it is dangerous, by stating more than Church teaching allows one to state.

Some people think that Archbishop Lefebvre would be a sedevacantist today. I do not think so. I even think the opposite. I think the arguments he gave when he was alive have lost nothing of their force or relevance today. His arguments are simple. What becomes of the Church if the Popes from John XXIII to Francis were never Popes? Were the Cardinals appointed by them not valid Cardinals? Who will elect the next Pope? How can we ever have a Pope again? Sedevacantism would seem to imperil the very existence of the Church. Let us rather wait for the Church to give official judgment on the question one day, so as to resolve it once and for all.

Given how opinions held and measures undertaken diverge within Tradition today, I see only one reasonable line of conduct: to hold on to and to hand down what we received from Archbishop Lefebvre, in doctrine and in practice. Many will object that in practice one needs to take into account how the state of the Church crisis has evolved from the Archbishop’s day to our own. True, there have been changes, but they are not essential. The crisis remains essentially the same. Like the Arian crisis which lasted 60 years, this crisis carries on, unchanged. Hence the relevance of the Archbishop’s example.

May Our Lady, conqueror of all heresies, grant us the grace to overcome the attacks of the Devil and of the modernists.

+Tomas Aquinas, O.S.B.

Here is the Catholic wisdom of Archbishop Lefebvre, restated for our times, most fruitful for the Church when judged by its fruits, of not deviating to the right or to the left, as the Lord God commanded Joshua when he succeeded to Moses as leader of the Israelites (Joshua I, 7). Truth is the measure of this centre position, and not where right or left may happen to find themselves, because Truth is of God.

Kyrie eleison.

LAW DEFINED

LAW DEFINED on August 3, 2024

And if I don’t see the monstrosity, I must pray,

As often urged, full fifteen Mysteries a day!

The desperate attempts of Pope Francis to use all of his papal Authority to crush the Tridentine rite of Mass and eliminate it from the Catholic Church once and for all, are rightly gaining less and less traction from among Catholics. Just how Almighty God can have allowed His own Authority that He entrusts to His Vicar on earth to be so misused, remains a mystery, because of course He gives it into the hands of men to build up His Church and not to pull it down. Many Catholics are so agonised by the problem that they are resorting to the simple solution of sedevacantism, because by that theory of there having been no valid Pope since John XXIII (1958–1963), all six Popes since Vatican II (1962–1965) have not been Popes at all. But that theory, which seems to solve the problem of the Conciliar Popes with such ease, takes many contradictory forms, and can lead to Catholics abandoning the Faith altogether, on the grounds that there can be no valid priesthood left at all, so they might as well stay at home rather than go to Mass. Thus sedevacantism can raise rather more problems than it seems to solve.

Such fruits suggest that sedevacantism may well not be the right solution to the serious problem set by all six Conciliar Popes, one after another, and culminating in the special horrors of Pope Francis. It may be a good moment to remember the fruitful solution of Archbishop Lefebvre (1905–1991), Traditionalism, of which he was the outstanding pioneer in its opposition today to the modernism of Vatican II.

Tradition is Catholicism, he said, and Catholicism is Tradition. “Jesus is the same, yesterday, today and for ever” (Heb. XIII, 8). Centuries of Protestantism and Liberalism have created a modern world which is so glamorous and seductive that in the end even the Vicars of Christ on earth have allowed themselves to be persuaded that Jesus needs to adapt himself to modern man, and not the other way round. But Jesus and His Church need no modernisation, all they need is to be presented as Catholic Tradition always used to do in times past. And the astonishing success of the Archbishop’s Society of St Pius X all over the world, at least until he died in 1991, proved that the Traditional version of Jesus and His Church can still flourish, despite modernity.

Then what did the Archbishop say about modernist Catholic Authority? He said that even Catholic Popes remain by themselves fallible men, unless they engage their infallible Authority, which they can only do on the four strict conditions clearly laid down in the solemn Definition of infallibility of 1870. If all four of those conditions are not present – and the Conciliar Popes never presented all four in their promotion of the Conciliar novelties – then Popes are as capable as any normal human being of making mistakes. And so all the modernist novelties of Vatican II in no way come under the protection of papal infallibility, which is highly restricted in its practical application.

But what about the Pope’s papal commands to abandon the Traditional rite of the Latin Mass? Are we not bound to obey him? No, we are not bound to obey him because it is not a lawful command, as Archbishop Lefebvre always said, and as the Catholic Church has always said. The Pope has no power from God to command just anything that comes into his head. The definition of law is that it is a command of reason for the common good made by those who are responsible for the common good. So if it is not for the common good, like any law pretending to legalise abortion, then it is no law at all.

Therefore when it comes to the sacrifice of the Mass, of which Padre Pio said that our planet earth can sooner do without the light of the sun than without that sacrifice, to replace its most venerable and dignified rite in Latin, centred on God, with a new rite in modern languages, doctrinally doubtful, without dignity, invented to centre on man, is so clearly opposed to the true common good of the Catholic Church that it cannot possibly be the object of a true law of the Church. Therefore no such pretended law need be obeyed, however many times Pope Paul VI or Pope Francis or their successors may try to impose any such monstrosity.

Kyrie eleison.