Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre

Archbishop Tranferred

Archbishop Tranferred on September 26, 2020

Two days ago, the mortal remains of Archbishop Lefebvre were transferred from the vault next to the Seminary of Écône where they had rested temporarily since his death in 1991, to a solid marble sarcophagus in the crypt beneath the Seminary Chapel specially prepared for their permanent repose. All splendour is fitting for the place of burial of the greatest man of God, the greatest hero of the Catholic Faith, of modern times, the Archbishop who virtually single-handed saved the Catholic doctrine, sacraments and priesthood from perishing, from their corruption and elimination by modern men who no longer believed in them as they had been handed down by the faithful Catholic Church through nearly two thousand years.

And one may say that after his death his successors continued his work more or less faithfully for another 20 years, but then in 2012 occurred a change in his Society of St Pius X which obliged many souls to speak of a New-society, somewhat as the changes in the Church following on the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) obliged many Catholics to speak of a New-church, so radical were the changes. Alas, the ceremony of transferral of the Archbishop’s remains reflected this transferral of his work from Society to New-society, because it was celebrated not by the present Superior General, Fr. David Pagliarani, but by his predecessor as Superior General, the one who was mainly responsible for the transfer from Society to New-society. This choice of Fr. Pagliarani’s predecessor to celebrate such an outstanding event in honour of the Society’s Founder is neither a good omen nor is it an accident. It reminds us of the quote of Our Lord (Mt. XXIII):

29  Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for you build the tombs of the prophets and adorn the monuments of the righteous, 30 saying, ‘If we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.’

It may well be that today the universal hypocrisy of a world spurning Our Lord runs so deep that many souls taking part in the ceremony of two days ago were not conscious hypocrites, God knows, nor so severely to be condemned as Our Lord condemned those who He knew were about to crucify Him. For indeed many Catholics, who had been faithfully following the Archbishop in his “disobedience” towards the Church’s unfaithful officials, were skilfully mislead by his successors back towards the same officials with their Conciliar religion of man. Nevertheless, objectively speaking, the parallel is clear.

* The Pharisees built monuments to honour the prophets that they themselves would also have killed.

The New-society builds a sarcophagus for its Founder when it itself has been making friends with the Pachamamists whom he already abominated.

* To the Pharisees Our Lord promised to send messengers to denounce their infidelity, but these they would kill just the same.

To the New-church and New-society he sends an Archbishop Viganò to remind them of their infidelity. As for the New-church, it would kill him. The New-society does its best to pay no attention to him.

* The Pharisees were warned by Our Lord of the grave consequences of their infidelity, and indeed in 70 AD Jerusalem was utterly destroyed.

As for the New-society, it has for now reduced the work of Archbishop to radical impotency, because the worldwide network of the Faith which he built up is in absolute need of new bishops to maintain that Faith, but by the New-society’s refusal to consecrate new bishops without the Pachamamists’ consent, it is refusing new bishops who will maintain the faith of Archbishop Lefebvre, because the Pachamamists will never consent to the consecration of bishops who will defend that faith.

In brief, the New-society’s members allowed that predecessor of Fr Pagliarani to honour their Founder’s place of burial who did more than anyone else to bury his work. Are they aware of how they risk contributing to the transferral of a gathering for heroes into a playpen of Neo-pharisees?

Kyrie eleison.

Men Lacking

Men Lacking on May 23, 2020

When Authority abandons Truth in the Catholic Church as it has been doing ever since Vatican II, then it is easier said than done to walk the fine line between heresy on the left and schism on the right. So it is not surprising if an unusually sharp remark like that of Archbishop Lefebvre quoted in the last two issues of these “Comments” (“Hoist the ladder . . . ”) arouses interest.

One layman even doubted the authenticity of the remark – could the sweet Archbishop really have said such a thing? Oh yes, he did. The original words are a little less elegant than the polished quotation, but the substance is identical – “With that, all that’s left is to pull up the ladder. There’s nothing to be done with these people (the Conciliar Romans). What have we got in common with them? Nothing! It’s not possible. It’s not possible” (6 Sept. 1990). The 1990 audio tape reference is Audio – Retrec – PASCALE90 or SACERDOTALE90. (However, let anyone wishing to check the quotation for himself beware of “revised” collections of the Archbishop’s tapes, because any words of his strongly opposed, like these to the Conciliarists in Rome, may well have been cut out by “editors” of the pro-Rome Newsociety.)

Another reader who reacted to the quotation is a priest, from the Novus Ordo, but now firmly established in a Newsociety Priory in Switzerland (without having been conditionally re-ordained, as best we know).

He thinks that “things really look different today” because the present generation of officials in Rome are a different breed from those that the Archbishop was reacting to in the 1980’s, and the best of them want a genuine restoration of the Church. He concludes that to adopt the Archbishop’s attitude today leaves only two solutions – either the “Resistance” or sedevacantism.

But, Father, while the present breed of Church leaders may be different men from the traitor-priests of the Archbishop’s time, who did all they could to destroy the true Church, have they understood (or read) Pascendi? And what use are sweet and well-meaning Church authorities to the Faith or to the Church or to the SSPX or to the “Resistance,” if they have not grasped that the problem is rubber minds which cannot even conceive of truth condemning error or of dogma condemning heresy? A rubber mind sympathetic to Tradition is basically no more use to Tradition than a rubber mind condemning Tradition. Nor is it true that things are “really different” from the Archbishop’s time. The sign that a priest has really understood the problem is when – at least figuratively – he wants to go down to Rome with a machine-gun and send all sweetie-pies to meet their Maker, as Putin would say. In brief, the “Resistance” must stay on the road, otherwise the road will be torn up to provide stones to cry out the Truth in place of the silent shepherds and their non-barking dogs (cf. Lk XIX, 40). The “Resistance” must not, may not, give way!

Finally a good priest seeks to console us with the news from a Society Prior that the Newsociety Superior General told a meeting in February of all Newsociety Priors in France that discussions between the SSPX and Rome are at a standstill because the SSPX is still insisting on doctrine first – well done, Fr Pagliarani – while Rome insists on fixing first a practical agreement. But need Rome even be concerned? Need it not merely wait for the ripe fruit to fall into its lap? Bishop Tissier is now so unwell that reportedly a room is being hospitalised inside Écône for him to retire to. Only two SSPX bishops remain to look after its worldwide needs. So either the Superior General must submit to Rome’s terms for the consecration of further bishops, continuing his predecessor’s disastrous conciliating of Church leaders who, however sweet they are, have lost the Faith, as the Archbishop said. Or he must consecrate more bishops without the Pope’s permission, as the Archbishop did. But would the Newsociety still follow in the Archbishop’s heroic line, of defying the (at least) objective traitors in Rome? One may doubt it.

Kyrie eleison.

Modernism’s Malice – I

Modernism’s Malice – I on March 7, 2020

If the Society of St Pius X is no longer an outstanding spearhead of the defence of the Catholic Faith as it was under Archbishop Lefebvre (1905–1991), that is surely because his successors at the head of the Society never understood as well as he did the full malice of that error presently devastating the Church, which is modernism. In fact towards the end of his days the Archbishop is quoted as saying that if only he had read sooner in his career the History of Liberal Catholicism in France from 1870 to 1914 by Fr. Emmanuel Barbier (1851–1925), he would have given to his seminarians a different direction. If this remark is authentic, it suggests that even the Archbishop had been overtaken by the malice of modernity. Similarly the valiant founder of the periodical Si si no no in Italy, Don Francesco Putti (1909–1984), is quoted as having told his good friend, the Archbishop, “Half of your seminarians are modernists.”

But the malice of modernity is easy to underestimate, because it has been building up in the West for centuries, and because all Westerners are soaked in it from the cradle to the grave. From this modernity came modernism in the Church, precisely to adapt to it, and this same modernity provided the background of all Council Fathers in the 1960’s, and of the Archbishop’s successors from the 1980’s onwards. In fact it can only have been by a special grace of God that the Archbishop saw the problem as clearly as he did.

Let us suggest how the failure to understand modernism underlies most of his successors’ errors –

1 95% of the texts of Vatican II are acceptable. On the contrary, Archbishop Lefebvre said that the problem with Vatican II is not so much even its great errors of religious liberty, collegiality and ecumenism as the subjectivism suffusing all its texts, whereby objective truth, God and the Catholic Faith dissolve ultimately into nothingness. By the Copernican revolution wrought in philosophy by Kant (1724–1804) and denounced by Pius X in Pascendi (1907), instead of the subject turning around the object, henceforth the object was to turn around the subject. Around this madness now turns the entire world.

2 True, the Council was bad, but it is losing its grip on Romans today. Really? And Pachamama? Since when have we seen such public idolatry in the Vatican Gardens and in churches of Rome itself?

3 It is no use for the Society to wait until Rome converts from its modernism, but if they are willing to accept us “as we are” it means that Rome is on its way to converting, so we should come to an agreement. Indeed it is useless to wait for the Roman modernists to convert, because they are liberals. It takes a miracle to convert a liberal (Fr Vallet), because liberalism is a comfortable and flattering trap out of which humanly speaking it is virtually impossible to climb without a miracle, and that miracle for world and Church will be the Consecration of Russia, not a Society that is going the liberals’ way. If they accept “as is” the formerly recalcitrant SSPX, that is only because the SSPX is no longer anti-liberal as it once was, because the salt of the Society has lost its savour (cf. Mt. V, 13).

4 We need patience and tact in order to understand how the Romans think in order not to offend them.

To understand how these modernists in Rome think, we need humility and realism and shattering courses in Pascendi in order to make sure that we properly understand the virus of their modernism, vicious and highly contagious, before we go anywhere near them. What they would most need, if they could take it, is to be offended and shocked out of their modernism, until they grasp what Fr Calmel meant when he said, “A modernist is a heretic combined with a traitor.”

5 No proper agreement between Rome and the Society has been signed, so no harm is yet done.

There has been immense harm in a series of partial agreements, e.g. on confessions and marriages, by which large numbers of Society priests and laity understand less and less what their Founder meant when he wrote in his last book that any priest wishing to keep the Faith should stay away from these Romans. They may be “nice” men. They may “mean well.” But, objectively, they are murdering Mother Church.

Kyrie eleison.

Archbishop’s Authority – I

Archbishop’s Authority – I on February 15, 2020

Let us illustrate the relationship between Catholic Truth and Catholic Authority with the concrete example of the Athanasius of modern times that God gave us to show us the way through our pre-apocalyptic crisis: Archbishop Lefebvre (1905–1991). When the mass of the Church’s leaders were persuaded at Vatican II to change the nature of the Faith, and a few years later in the name of obedience to abandon the true rite of the Mass, by the strength of his faith the Archbishop remained faithful to the Church’s unchanging Truth and showed that it is the heart and soul of its divine Authority. As the Spanish proverb says, “Obedience is not the servant of obedience.”

Certainly the Archbishop believed in the Church’s authority to give commands to its members at all levels for the salvation of their souls. That is why in the first few years of the existence of the Society of St Pius X (1970–1974) he took care to obey Canon Law and the Pope, Paul VI, as far as he was able, but when officials sent from Rome to inspect his Seminary in Écône departed far from Catholic Truth in things they said to seminarians, he wrote his famous Declaration of November, 1974, in protest against the whole of Rome’s abandoning the Catholic faith for the new Conciliar religion, and this Declaration served like a charter for what emerged as the Traditional movement at the Mass of Lille in the summer of 1976.

Now the Archbishop himself always resolutely denied that he was the leader of Tradition, because to this day Catholic Tradition is an unofficial movement and has no kind of official structure. Nor was he the only leader among Traditionalists, nor did all of them agree with him or pay him homage. Nevertheless a large number of Catholics saw in him their leader, trusted him and followed his lead. Why? Because in him they saw the continuation of that Catholic Faith by which alone they could save their souls. In other words the Archbishop may have had no official authority over them, because jurisdiction is the prerogative of Church officials duly elected or appointed, but he built up until his death an enormous moral authority by his faithfulness to the true Faith. In other words his truth created his authority, unofficial but real, whereas the officials’ lack of Truth has been undermining their Authority ever since.

The dependence of authority, at least Catholic authority, upon truth, was as clear as clear could be.

However, with the Society of St Pius X which the Archbishop founded in 1970, things were slightly different, because here he did receive from the official Church some jurisdiction from Bishop Charrière of the Diocese of Geneva, Lausanne and Fribourg, a jurisdiction which he cherished because it proved that he was not making things up as he went along but was doing work of the Church. And so he did his best to govern the SSPX as though he was the normal head of a normal Catholic Congregation under Rome, which the defence of the true Faith gave him every right to do. However, the public and official Romans used all their jurisdiction to give him the lie, thereby alienating from him a mass of Catholics who would otherwise have followed him.

Moreover, the Newchurch that they were creating all around him meant that even inside the Society his authority was seriously weakened. For instance, if before the Council a priest dissatisfied with his diocesan bishop applied to enter the diocese of another, the second bishop naturally consulted the first about the applicant, and if the first advised the second to have nothing to do with him, that was the immediate end of the application. On the contrary, if a Society priest dissatisfied with the Society applied to join a Newchurch diocese, the Newchurch bishop was liable to “welcome him back into the official fold” as a fugitive from the “Lefebvrist schism.” Thus the Archbishop was not supported by his brother bishops, which meant that he could not discipline his priests inside the Society as he should have been able to. His authority was walking on eggshells, insofar as he had at his disposal no sanction with which to keep wayward priests in check. Thus lack of truth in the Newchurch left truth in the Society without the Catholic authority due to it to protect it.

Therefore to make up for the lack of unity in Truth coming from the hierarchy, Traditional priests today must exercise a more than normal forbearance towards one another, and Traditional Catholics must pray more than usual for their priests to find this forbearance. It is not impossible.

Kyrie eleison.

Professor Drexel – III

Professor Drexel – III on January 18, 2020

In the third and last extracts for these “Comments” from the admirable book of Professor Drexel from the 1970’s in Austria, “Faith is greater than Obedience,” we are entitled to think that it is Our Lord speaking, because in itself the message is entirely orthodox, and in the context of the confusion in the Church which followed on Vatican II (1962–1965), it is a clear signpost that the official Church was going the wrong way, as it is still doing, well into the 20th century. For the Catholic clergy, the message is a clear warning: if you insist on following men’s new direction so as to abandon God’s true religion, you face a frightening condemnation in Hell when you die. For the Catholic lay-folk, the book is an encouragement equally clear: if with faith and courage you remain faithful to the true Church, your reward will be great in Heaven. For clergy and laity alike, the message is entirely up-to-date in 2020.

MAY, 1974.

Do not become dejected because of the confusion and heresies of unfaithful and apostate priests, whose body and sensual enjoyment count more than the love of My Church and of immortal souls. Let all the real, true believers know that the interior and exterior enemies of the Church shall perish – forever – unless they return with interior repentance to the one and only doctrine of the Church.

I tell you: Priests will arise, who are even now being trained, hidden away in silence for the future and for the time – coming soon – when with an apostolic spirit, following in the footsteps of the saints, for that divine order and for that unity of My Catholic Church which I desire, they will step forward with a holy reverence for the mystery and miracle of the Holy Eucharist. (This is surely a prophecy of the young priests of Tradition who would start coming out of Écône in small but significant numbers in 1976.)

JULY, 1975.

My Church lives in the midst of apostasy and destruction. She lives on among numerous faithful and loyal people. In the history of My Church, there have always been times of decline, desertion and devastation, because of bad priests and tepid shepherds. But the spirit of God is stronger, and upon the ruins and graveyard of infidelity and betrayal it has raised up the Church and caused it to blossom again, only smaller than before. My servant Marcel’s work in Écône is not about to perish! (The “Marcel” here mentioned is of course Archbishop Lefebvre who founded in 1970 the Traditional seminary of Écône.)

MARCH, 1976.

My faithful son Marcel, who is suffering so much for the sake of the Faith, is on the right track. He is like a light and pillar of truth, which many ordained priests of Mine are betraying. Faith is greater than

obedience. Therefore, it is My will that the work for the theological education of priests should continue, in the spirit and according to the will of My son Marcel, so as to contribute powerfully to the rescue of My one true Church. (Whoever has ears to hear, has here the clearest endorsement of Catholic Tradition.)

DECEMBER, 1976.

Those who prepare themselves for the priesthood and enter seminaries under the diocesan bishops, enter without having a whole or deep faith in Transsubstantiation; and not a few priestly candidates flirt with the idea of one day getting married. Therefore, the time is not far away when people will be without priests in many places.

Yet those priests who see in the sacramental Sacrifice of the Mass the truest and holiest of sacrifices, and who celebrate with a holy reverence the mystery of My Body and Blood, as does My worthy servant Marcel, are persecuted, despised, and outlawed.

Kyrie eleison.

Speak Up!

Speak Up! on December 28, 2019

If there have been great minds from the past, it is because they will have been thinking on great matters, which means, explicitly or implicitly, matters of God, and if they were truly great minds, their thinking will have been not just destructive. One such mind was certainly England’s Shakespeare. As a Catholic he grappled with his country’s apostasy being fulfilled just as he was reaching his prime, around 1600. But that turning of England to Protestantism meant that if he did not want to be hanged, drawn and quartered, he had to disguise his Catholic message, as Clare Asquith proved in her book of 2005, “Shadowplay,” where she took English literature way above English “patriots” and the dwarves of literary criticism.

To take just one example, in the book’s Appendix on Shakespeare’s Sonnet 152, she shows how from start to finish, beneath the obvious application to a woman Shakespeare has known, there is a complete second meaning of far wider application to himself as a writer who has failed to warn his countrymen as he should have done. Here are the 14 lines of the sonnet together with their obvious meaning:—

In loving thee thou know’st I am forsworn
But thou art twice forsworn to me love swearing,
In act thy bed-vow broke and new faith torn,
In vowing new hate after new love bearing.
But why of two oaths’ breach do I accuse thee,
When I break twenty? I am perjured most,
For all my vows are oaths but to misuse thee,
And all my honest faith in thee is lost;
For I have sworn deep oaths of thy deep kindness,
Oaths of thy love, thy truth, thy constancy,
And, to enlighten thee, gave eyes to blindness,
Or made them swear against the thing they see.
    For I have sworn thee fair: more perjured eye,
    To swear against the truth so foul a lie.

You know I break a promise by loving you, but by
swearing you love me, you break two promises: you
forsook your husband’s bed, then returned to him
(“new faith,” “new love”) only to forsake him again.
But why do I accuse you of breaking two oaths when
I break twenty oaths? It is I the greater perjurer, for
To your own harm I have sworn oath upon oath about
your goodness when I well knew you were not good.
Thus I have been swearing that you are very kind,
very loving, very truthful, very constant, and to
put you in a good light, I have made me see what I
Did not see, or, have sworn I saw not what eye saw.
    For I have sworn you were good. What terrible
    Perjury on my part, when that is so untrue!

Interestingly, the sonnet’s text makes more sense in its hidden meaning, referring to faithless England, than in its apparent meaning, referring to Shakespeare’s unfaithful mistress. Thus “Merrie Englande” had been a faithful wife of the Catholic Church for 900 years. By Henry VIII’s Act of Supremacy (1534), (“In Act”) England broke its marriage (“bed-vow”) with the Catholic Church and took Protestantism as its lover. Then it remarried the Catholic Church under Mary Tudor (1553, “new faith,” “new love”), only to fall back into adultery with Protestantism under Elizabeth I (1558, “new faith torn,” “new hate” of the Catholic Church). But Shakespeare (1564–1616) blames himself for much worse infidelity, because down these years he has repeatedly glorified (“to enlighten thee”) England with its unfaithful Tudor rulers, for instance in his History Plays, glorified to England’s harm (“to misuse thee”), because as a Catholic he knew full well that Protestantism would be the ruin of “Merrie Englande.” Sure enough!

And today? The pattern repeats itself: for over 1900 years Catholics were faithfully married to the true Church, but with Vatican II (1962–1965) the mass of them followed bad leaders into more or less of adultery with the modern world (“bed-vow broke”). Then Archbishop Lefebvre (1905–1991) led many back to the truly Catholic Church (“new faith,” “new love,” or renewal of the old faith and the old love), only to see his successors at the head of the Society of St Pius X which he founded in 1970 fall back into an adulterous longing for a reunion with Conciliar Rome, by a “new hate” for the pre-Conciliar truth.

Conclusion? Any Shakespeares amongst us, or any Catholics, must speak up, that Pachamama Rome is, as such, nothing other than an abomination, to be shunned.

Kyrie eleison.