Bishop Bernard Fellay

Excellent Communiqué?

Excellent Communiqué? on November 19, 2016

On October 31 Pope Francis held in Sweden an ecumenical meeting with leading Lutherans to prepare for next year’s 500th anniversary of Luther’s revolt against the Catholic Church. After the meeting the Pope signed with the President of the Lutheran World Federation a joint Declaration, which is yet another utter scandal, coming as it does from the man who is meant to be the Vicar of Christ. On November 2, in protest, the Superior of the French District of the Society of St Pius X issued a Communiqué to condemn that scandalous Declaration. Much of the Communiqué is excellent, and it should be what is needed from Society Superiors in order to place a serious obstacle in the way of the Archbishop’s Society being betrayed to the Roman neo-modernists, but the conclusion is weak, and so the Communiqué may have the opposite effect.

Fr Bouchacourt opens his Communiqué by stating that the scandal of the Pope’s pro-Lutheran Declaration is such that he “cannot keep silent.” And the whole passage where he denounces Luther is beyond reproach. Here it is:—

How can we be “profoundly thankful for the spiritual and theological gifts received through the Reformation” (quotation from the joint Declaration) , when Luther manifested a diabolical hatred towards the Sovereign Pontiff, a blasphemous scorn for the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, as well as a refusal of the saving Grace of Our Lord Jesus Christ? He also destroyed the doctrine on the Eucharist by refusing Transsubstantiation, turned souls away from the Most Blessed Virgin Mary and denied the existence of Purgatory. No, Protestantism brought nothing to Catholicism! It ruined the unity of Christendom, separated whole countries from the Catholic Church, plunged souls into error, putting their eternal salvation in peril. We Catholics want Protestants to return to the unique fold of Christ which is the Catholic Church, and we pray for this intention. In these days when we celebrate all the Saints, we call out to Saint Pius V, Saint Charles Borromeo, Saint Ignatius and Saint Peter Canisius who heroically fought the Protestant heresy and saved the Catholic Church.

But compared with this denunciation, Fr. Bouchacourt’s conclusion is relatively lame:—

We invite the faithful of the District of France to pray and do penance for the Sovereign Pontiff so that Our Lord, whose Vicar he is, may preserve him from error and keep him in the Truth of which he is the guardian. I invite the priests of the District to celebrate a Mass of reparation and to organise a Holy Hour before the Blessed Sacrament, to ask pardon for these scandals and to beg Our Lord to calm the tempest which has been shaking the Church for more than half a century now. Our Lady Help of Christians, save the Catholic Church and pray for us!

Fr Christian Bouchacourt, SSPX French District Superior.

This conclusion is pious, and perfectly respectful towards Pope Francis, but does it give any idea of the gravity of the Pope’s disorientation when the Pope so praises one of the greatest anti-Christian heretics in all Church history? It is difficult to imagine Fr Bouchacourt not having obtained from Bishop Fellay prior permission to publish his Communiqué. Was it Bishop Fellay who had no problem with the Luther of 500 years ago being denounced, but insisted on toning down the criticism of the major wrecker of the Church here and now? In any case the Communiqué serves Bishop Fellay’s purpose of deceiving Traditional priests and laity and putting them to sleep by suggesting that the supposedly imminent Personal Prelature will prevent none of them from denouncing Papal scandals, etc . . .

Then does Fr Bouchacourt realize how, like his predecessor, he may be serving, even against his own will, the betrayal of the Society? Let us be “simple as doves” but also “as wise as serpents” (Mt. X, 16).

Kyrie eleison.

Churchmen Aware? – II

Churchmen Aware? – II on November 12, 2016

Last week these “Comments” raised the question whether the Superior General of the Society of St Pius X (SG for short) knows what he is doing when he constantly makes contradictory statements, now in favour of Catholic Tradition, now in line with the Romans and their Conciliar Revolution. At best the SG would be merely a confused and confusing liberal, torn between Catholicism and Conciliarism. At worst he could be a true wolf in sheep’s clothing, using words merely as political instruments to enable the Romans to absorb Archbishop Lefebvre’s once Catholic Society into their Conciliar Newchurch. The Faith is at stake. It is important for many priests and laity alike to see clearly whether the SG is shepherd or wolf, or somewhere in between. See the latest issue of the French bi-monthly magazine, “Sous la Bannière,” for a very clear answer by a Resistant French priest, Fr Olivier Rioult.

He starts out from the SG’s June 29 communiqué which followed on the SSPX Superiors’ meeting held just previously near Écône, and he quotes from it sentences which might re-assure some Catholics that the SSPX is coming back on Traditional track. But, says Fr Rioult, the SG has in the past so often said one thing and done another that his words are of no value so far as truth is concerned. They are, as for countless modern politicians, merely instruments of policy to be used or abused as the occasion requires, in this case to make the SSPX submit to Newchurch authorities without its even realizing what is happening. The proof is in the SG’s actions. Actions speak always louder than words. What the SG really means is best judged by his actions, which work steadily in favour of Conciliar Rome.

Here are some of them – the acceptance of the “excommunications” being “lifted” in 2009; the acceptance of official jurisdiction for confessions, and of official jurisdiction for the SG to deliver first instance judgments of cases within the SSPX; the submission to quoting of names for priestly ordinands in the USA, and acceptance of diocesan toleration for priestly ordinations in Germany. Going in the same direction within the SSPX is his steady demotion or purging of opponents to his Roman policy, and his promotion of docile substitutes, often youngsters relatively unfit for the heavier responsibilities. And Fr Rioult points out that this series of actions is clearly in line with the joint statement of the SG and Rome’s Number Two, Cardinal Müller, issued after their meeting in September of 2014, that they would “proceed in stages . . . taking the time necessary to iron out difficulties . . . with a view to achieving full reconciliation.”

This step-by-step procedure, says Fr Rioult, has the great advantage for both parties of avoiding any clear-cut moment such as the joint signing of a public document which would risk alerting followers of Tradition to what was going on. As it is, the SG’s contradictions create confusion, and if only they are “subtle” or “delicate” enough, put Catholics to sleep who are not watching and praying. Thus the SG’s words are merely laid down as a smokescreen to disguise especially from SSPX priests what he is really up to, because if enough of them were awake and aware, it would be that much more difficult for him to persuade Rome that he could bring the whole Society into the Newchurch, which is what Rome wants, to put an end to the main body of resistance to their New World Order religion. Already in 2012 the SG had the bitter experience of setting up everything, as he thought, for the sell-out, only to have Rome refuse the agreement because at that moment in time his three fellow-bishops in the SSPX were all against it, as Rome well knew. The Newchurch needs to cripple Tradition, once and for all.

Pray for SSPX priests, that they see through the Menzingen mafia, block it, and finally get rid of it.

Kyrie eleison.

Churchmen Aware? – I

Churchmen Aware? – I on November 5, 2016

A reader of these “Comments” just raised a question once often asked, now probably less often, but still of interest: is the Superior General of the Society of St Pius X (SG for short) aware of how he contradicts himself? – in July of this year he called for a new Rosary Crusade “exclusively” to obtain the Triumph of the Immaculate Heart through the Consecration of Russia, while more recently he claimed that Rome wants the SSPX to fill important positions in the Church to help it to overcome modernism. The contradiction is clear, because the churchmen presently holding position in Rome are certainly opposed to the Consecration as asked for by Our Lady, and the reasons for that run deep.

Write to Fr Guy Castelain at Le Moulin du Pin, F53290 Beaumont-Pied-de-Boeuf, France, for a copy of the excellent editorial in his SSPX bulletin of this month, where he lays out ten reasons why Vatican II is the main obstacle to Our Lady’s Consecration of Russia. In very brief, the Consecration represents political involvement against political neutrality, the reign of Christ against his dethronement, Catholicism against religious liberty, the Pope against collegiality, the one true religion against ecumenism, the Immaculate Heart against a glorification of human dignity forgetting original maculation or sin, the one true Church against salvation in other religions, peace by the Catholic Pope against peace by “the Spirit of Assisi,” and so on. No wonder Pope Francis told Vladimir Putin who came to see him and expressed an interest in the Consecration: “We do not speak about Fatima”!

Now human politics and politicians can solve by compromise many a human clash between man and man, but Fr Castelain’s ten reasons prove that the clash between Fatima and the Conciliarists is no less than the clash between the “old” religion of Rome, as fresh as eternity, and the “new” religion of Vatican II, as stale as sin. Here is one of those clashes between God and man where political compromise is out of the question. In 1973 had not Our Lady warned in Akita, Japan, that “. . . the Church will be filled with agents of compromise . . .” The question for the SG then becomes, is he aware that he is an “agent of compromise”? Does he or does he not see that he is promoting an irreconcilable contradiction? If he does see it, then he is a liar, either when he promotes Fatima or when he protects the Conciliarists, or both. If on the contrary he does not see it, then he is blind.

A number of Catholics are by now convinced that his latest call for a Rosary Crusade is merely a political ploy to deceive his more Traditional followers. Certainly in his first term as SG plenty of his words and deeds indicate that he did then see the clash as clearly as Archbishop Lefebvre saw it. But there must have come a turning-point since then when instead of holding to the interests of God he wished also to serve the interests of men. It cannot be done (Mt.VI, 24; Gal. I, 10), but like many of us, he wanted to have his cake and eat it, and nature is expert at dressing itself up as grace, says the Imitation of Christ. So there must have followed a time of transition when he was wilfully blind, but if wilful blindness goes on for too long, it turns into habitual blindness, which is a terrible punishment from God. Assuredly between 2006 and 2008 Our Lady obtained for him more than enough graces to see what he was doing, but like the Conciliarists and Macbeth, instead he “waded on in blood” (Act III, Scene 4) – that of the Church. Like the Conciliarists in Rome, he certainly needs our prayers.

Readers, if you wish to see clear, pray the Rosary, and if in our dark times you wish never to stop seeing clear, pray all 15 Mysteries of the Rosary every day. The Mother of God cannot fail you.

Kyrie eleison.

Bishop Fellay – III

Bishop Fellay – III on August 20, 2016

Reading the two recent issues of these “Comments” on the mindset which induces the Superior General of the Society of St Pius X to pursue implacably a merely practical agreement with Church authorities in Rome, a good friend reminded me that the ideas driving him were laid out four years ago in his Letter of April 14, 2012, in which he replied to the Society’s three other bishops, who warned him seriously against making any merely practical agreement with Rome. Many readers today of these “Comments” may have forgotten, or never known of, that warning, or Bishop Fellay’s reply. Indeed the exchange of letters tells a great deal that is worth recalling. Here they are, summarised as cruelly as usual, with brief comments:—

The three bishops’ main objection to any practical agreement with Rome being made without a doctrinal agreement was the depth of the doctrinal gulf between Conciliar Rome and the Traditional Catholic Society. Half a year before he died Archbishop Lefebvre said that the more one analyses the documents and aftermath of Vatican II, the more one comes to realise that the problem is less any classic errors in particular, even such as religious liberty, collegiality and ecumenism, than “a total perversion of mind” in general, underlying all the particular errors and proceeding from “a whole new philosophy founded on subjectivism.” To a key argument of Bishop Fellay that the Romans are no longer hostile but benevolent towards the Society, the three bishops replied with another quote from the Archbishop: such benevolence is just a “manoeuvre,” and nothing could be more dangerous for “our people” than to “put ourselves into the hands of Conciliar bishops and modernist Rome.” The three bishops concluded that a merely practical agreement would tear the Society apart, and destroy it.

To this deep objection, as deep as the gulf between subjectivism and objective truth, Bishop Fellay replied (google Bishop Fellay, April 14, 2012):— 1 that the bishops were “too human and fatalistic.” 2 The Church is guided by the Holy Ghost. 3 Behind Rome’s real benevolence towards the SSPX is God’s Providence. 4 To make the Council’s errors amount to a “super-heresy” is an inappropriate exaggeration, 5 which will logically lead Traditionalists into schism. 6 Not all Romans are modernists because fewer and fewer of them believe in Vatican II, 7 to the point that were the Archbishop alive today he would not have hesitated to accept what the SSPX is being offered. 8 In the Church there will always be wheat and chaff, so Conciliar chaff is no reason to back away. 9 How I wish I could have turned to the three of you for advice, but each of you in different ways “strongly and passionately failed to understand me,” and even threatened me in public. 10 To oppose Faith to Authority is “contrary to the priestly spirit.”

And finally, the briefest of comments on each of Bishop Fellay’s arguments:—

1 “Too human”? As the Archbishop said, the great gulf in question is philosophical (natural) rather than theological (supernatural). “Too fatalistic”? The three bishops were rather realistic than fatalistic. 2 Are Conciliar churchmen guided by the Holy Ghost when they destroy the Church? 3 Behind Rome’s real malevolence is its firm resolve to dissolve the SSPX’s resistance to the new Conciliar religion – as of how many Traditional Congregations before it! 4 Only subjectivists themselves cannot see the depth of the gulf between subjectivism and Truth. 5 Objectivist Catholics clinging to Truth are far from schism. 6 Freemasons hold the ring in Rome. Any non-modernists have no power there to speak of. 7 To believe that the Archbishop would have accepted Rome’s present offers is to mistake him completely. The basic problem has got only much worse since his day. 8 Bishop Fellay’s spoon is much too short for him to sup with the Roman devils (objectively speaking). 9 The three bishops understood Bishop Fellay only too well, but he did not want to hear what all three of them separately had to say. Does he take himself to be infallible? 10 St Paul for sure imagined that Authority could oppose Faith – Gal. I, 8–9, and II, 11. Did St Paul lack “priestly spirit”?

Kyrie eleison.

Bishop Fellay – II

Bishop Fellay – II on August 13, 2016

An error is never properly refuted until it is uprooted. In other words truly to overcome an error one needs to show not only that it is an error, but why it is an error. Let us suppose, with last week’s “Comments,” that the June 28 statement of the Superior General of the Society of St Pius X, by looking forward to the Society’s pious priesthood resolving the Church’s crisis of Faith, commits the error of putting the cart of the priesthood before the horse of the Faith. Then let us show that this error has its roots in our age’s almost universal undervaluing of the mind and overvaluing of the will, resulting even unconsciously in a scorn for doctrine (except for the Beatles’ doctrine of “All you need is luv”).

Already towards the beginning of the Statement there occurs a hint of this error when the Statement says that the central principle condemned in Pascendi, Pius X’s great condemnation of modernism, is that of “independence.” No. The principle he constantly condemns as being at the root of modernism is rather agnosticism, the doctrine that the mind can know nothing behind what appears to the senses. Upon that unknowing follows the independence of the mind from its object, followed in turn by the will’s declaration of independence from everything else on which it does not want to depend. It is in the nature of things that the mind must first be suicided before the will can declare its independence. So when the Statement puts independence before agnosticism at the heart of Pascendi, that is a hint that the Statement is a part rather of the Church’s problem than of its solution.

And where does this downgrading of the mind and doctrine in turn come from? Primarily from Luther who called human reason a “prostitute,” and who more than anybody else launched Chistendom on the sentimental path to its self-destruction today. But that took all of 500 years? Yes, because there was natural and Catholic resistance along the way. But Luther was right when he told the Pope that in the end he would destroy him – “Pestis eram vivus, functus tua mors ero, Papa” – A plague to you I was when I had breath, But once I’m dead, O Pope, I’ll be your death.

To this radical and gigantic error of the downgrading of mind and doctrine may be attributed two sub-errors in the case of the author of the June 28 Statement: firstly, his misunderstanding of Archbishop Lefebvre, and secondly his too great understanding of Madame Cornaz (pen-name Rossinière).

Like many of us seminarians in Écône when Archbishop Lefebvre himself presided there, Bernard Fellay was rightly enchanted and bewitched by the outstanding example before our very eyes of what a Catholic priest could and should be. But the backbone of his priesthood and of his heroic fight for the Faith was not his piety – many modernists are “pious” – but his doctrine, doctrine of the eternal priesthood, profoundly allergic to liberalism and modernism. Nor did the Archbishop ever say that his Society would save the Church. Rather its priests were to safeguard the Church’s priceless treasures for better days.

The person who did say that the Society’s priests would save the Church, as Fr Ortiz has reminded us, was Madame Cornaz, a family mother from Lausanne, Switzerland, whose life spanned most of the 20th century, and who between 1928 and 1969 received communications supposedly from Heaven on how married couples should sanctify the priesthood (!). The communications started again in 1995 (!) when she met a Society priest whom she persuaded, and through him Bishop Fellay, that it was the SSPX priests who were destined by Providence to save the Church by propagating her “Homes of Christ the Priest.” With all his authority the Superior General supported her project, but the negative reaction of Society priests made him rapidly renounce it in public. Inwardly however, did her mystical vision of the Society’s exalted future stay with him? It seems quite possible. Like Martin Luther King, the Superior General “has a dream.”

Kyrie eleison.

Bishop Fellay – I

Bishop Fellay – I on August 6, 2016

After the June 26–28 meeting of SSPX Superiors in Switzerland, the Superior General made not only for the general public the Communiqué of June 29, already examined in these “Comments” three weeks ago, but also a Statement on June 28 for the benefit of SSPX members, i.e. primarily SSPX priests. The Statement is in itself cryptic, but once deciphered (with the help of Fr Girouard), it is heavy with significance for the future of Catholic Tradition. Here is the merest outline of the first six paragraphs of the Statement, and the full text of the seventh:—

(1–4) Church and world are in crisis, because instead of turning around the Cross of Christ, they turn around man. The SSPX opposes this “deconstruction” of the Church and human society. (5) God’s own remedy for this disorder was to inspire an Archbishop to found a hierarchical Catholic Congregation turning around the sacrament of Holy Orders – Jesus Christ, his Cross, Kingship, sacrifice and priesthood, source of all order and grace, are what the Society founded by the Archbishop is all about.

(6) So the SSPX is neither Conciliar (it turns around Christ) nor rebellious (it is hierarchical).

(7) “Has the moment come for the general restoration of the Church? God’s Providence does not abandon God’s Church whose head is the Pope, the Vicar of Christ. That is why an indisputable sign of the general restoration will be when the Pope gives a sign of what he wants by granting the means to restore order in the priesthood, Faith and Tradition. This sign will in addition guarantee the Catholic unity necessary to the family of Tradition.”

Clearly the first six paragraphs lead up to the seventh. And it is not unreasonable to take the seventh to mean that when Pope Francis gives official approval to the Society, then that will be the proof that the moment has come at last for the whole of the Catholic Church to get back on its feet, for the Catholic priesthood, Catholic Faith and Catholic Tradition to be restored, and for all Traditionalists to join with the Society of St Pius X behind its Superior General. Bishop Fellay would seem to be repeating here for the benefit of all Society priests his steady vision of the Society’s glorious role, because at the Swiss meeting, as we hear, at least some of their Superiors had just questioned that glory coming in the form of reunion with official Rome. But those Superiors in opposition were right, because Bishop Fellay is here dreaming! It is a noble but deadly dream.

The dream is noble, because it is all to the honour of Our Lord Jesus Christ, of his Church, of his sacrifice, of Archbishop Lefebvre, of the Catholic priesthood and so on. The dream is deadly because it turns rather on the priesthood than on the Faith, and while it credits quite correctly Pope Francis and the Romans with being the holders of Church Authority, it takes no account of how far they are from holding the Catholic Faith. If Archbishop Lefebvre can be said to have saved the Catholic priesthood and Mass, that was for him only as a means of saving the Faith. The Faith is to the priesthood as end to means, and not as means to end. What would the priesthood be without the Faith? Who would believe in the Sacraments? Who would need priests?

And as to that Faith, the present Pope and the Roman officials who hold sway around him have lost their grip on Truth as being one, objective, non-contradictory and exclusive, and therewith they have lost their grip on the true Faith, not to say, lost the true Faith. That means that if Pope Francis did indeed approve officially of the Society, it would by no means be a sign of the Society restoring the Church to sanity, but rather of the official Church absorbing the Society into its insanity.

Kyrie eleison.