Blessed Mother

Inside Story – IV

Inside Story – IV on November 8, 2014

And so we come to the climax of the inside story of the outside events of the Rosary Crusades of the Society of St Pius X six years ago. Would Bishop Fellay choose Heaven’s solution to the crisis of Church and World, trusting in Our Lady’s promise at Fatima of Russia’s conversion and a “period of peace” if only Russia is consecrated to Her Immaculate Heart, or would he choose the human solution of talks with Rome to fabricate a synthesis of Tradition (2+2=4) with the Council (2+2=4 or 5)? We can be certain that this is not how the Devil presented the choice to the Bishop, especially when in June 2008 the Romans came back into play.

In that month the Vatican became aware of the possible Rosary Crusade for the Consecration of Russia through a letter which the same messenger of Our Lady had addressed to Pope Benedict XVI, invoking his blessing upon such an endeavor. The Vatican took the letter seriously. Cardinal Darío Castrillón Hoyos ordered Bishop Fellay to return directly to Rome from Hawaii where His Excellency had gone to administer the sacrament of Confirmation. On June 4, Cardinal Castrillón with a group of several Roman prelates threatened Bishop Fellay that if he were to call for a Rosary Crusade for the Consecration of Russia, Rome would close the door to any future discussions, and Rome would revive the dormant “excommunications” which had for the time being been rendered inoperative. That was also when the Vatican tried to impose on Bishop Fellay the “Vatican Ultimatum,” or five conditions necessary for any discussions.

So under this Roman pressure, Bishop Fellay had still not decided in the early autumn of 2008 to do as Our Lady asked, despite her repeated requests, and in fact on October 5, 2008, despite her direct warnings, he chose to apply the Second Rosary Crusade, set to run from November 1 until Christmas, to the intention of the “excommunications” of 1988 being lifted. On the same day Our Lord displayed His anger to the messenger of Our Lady by a vision of Him bringing down His hand to destroy the SSPX, while he referred to them as “Pharisees and hypocrites,” and said, “I can no longer put up with them.” But in the very moment of Our Lord’s hand falling, the messenger saw the Blessed Virgin Mary interceding on the Society’s behalf, pleading for mercy and saying “Remember the weakness of men.” The messenger then saw Our Lord’s anger immediately give way to His mercy.

But the Bishop’s mind was now made up. Three weeks later on October 26, at the Pontifical Mass climaxing the Society’s pilgrimage to Lourdes for the 150th Jubilee of Our Lady’s apparitions at Lourdes, he went ahead with announcing that the second Rosary Crusade would be dedicated to the lifting of the “excommunications” of 1988. On December 16 he wrote in private to the Pope, as requested by Benedict XVI, the letter asking the Pope for the lifting of the excommunications of 1988. On January 24, 2009, these were partially lifted by Rome. Bishop Fellay directly attributed this to the intervention of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and he must have exulted in this seeming triumph of his patient diplomacy.

Alas, any triumph was short-lived, because within days the enemies of Catholic Tradition fired off in their worldwide media a torpedo perfectly designed to blow out of the water the threatening reunion of the Catholic Pope with Catholic Tradition. When the six-minute film clip from November 1 of an SSPX Bishop casting serious doubt on the “holocaust” and “gas chambers” of World War II was made public, Benedict XVI had to run for cover from the deadly accusation of consorting with “anti-semites.” The SSPX-Rome agreement was blocked, for at least a few years. (To be concluded.)

Kyrie eleison.

Inside Story – III

Inside Story – III on November 1, 2014

To continue the story of Our Lady’s messages to the Superior General of the Society of St Pius X (SSPX) six years ago, some background is needed. Vatican II (1962–1965) wrenched the Catholic Church off course to reconcile it with the godless modern world. Archbishop Lefebvre (1905–1991) founded the SSPX in 1970 to help Catholics to stay on course, and for 21 years he kept it on course. But as soon as he died, mistakenly convinced (or self-deluded, God knows) that they were still following him, his younger successors in fact dreamt of a reconciliation with Conciliar Rome.

In 2000 the Conciliar leaders sat up and took notice of the SSPX when it made a highly successful Jubilee pilgrimage to the Basilicas of Rome. Public (as opposed to private) contacts were re-opened between the SSPX and the Romans, who now set about swallowing that SSPX which they had proved unable to spit out. “Let us talk,” they said. The SSPX leaders appeared to be wary: “You must prove your good will by liberating the Tridentine Mass and lifting the excommunications imposed on the SSPX bishops consecrated on June 30, 1988.” Little then happened, at least in public, because on both sides the idea of reconciliation needed to mature, but in 2006 Bishop Fellay, SSPX ringleader of the reconciliation, was re-elected Superior General. As we have seen, this was soon after Our Lady began to intervene with the messages of which we are telling the story.

In 2006 her desire for a Rosary Crusade for Russia’s Consecration was adopted by Bishop Fellay, but re-directed by him towards the first pre-condition for talks with Rome, the liberation of the Mass. In 2007 Benedict XVI partially satisfied the pre-conditon with his Motu Proprio. Rejoicing as though it were a complete satisfaction, Bishop Fellay moved on to the second pre-condition, the lifting of the excommunications, whereas Our Lady, immediately after the Motu Proprio, began a series of messages in August of 2007 insistently requesting that any second Rosary Crusade be dedicated to the Consecration of Russia. But Bishop Fellay would not commit himself because he knew that this Consecration did not appeal to the Romans. They wanted talks, and so did he, to reconcile the irreconcilable, Vatican II and Catholic Tradition. Now we can continue with the story.

In early 2008 Our Lady, observing how the Bishop was still hesitating, told him quite firmly through the messenger that he was “not to use the (second) Crusade for the intention of lifting the excommunications,” and that if he did, “it would be fatal for the Society of St Pius X.” She added that she would not bless any such effort, but would instead use the rosaries prayed by the faithful for other purposes. And on March 22, Holy Saturday, she said most specifically, “Tell Bishop Fellay that he cannot move any closer to Rome than he already is, however well-intentioned the Holy Father may be.” And she repeated, “Remember, however well-intentioned the Holy Father may be.”

Let the story again be interrupted to point out how pertinent this message was for the defence of the Faith, and how perfectly this inside story corresponds to the outside facts. At the head of the last worldwide bastion of the true Faith, Bishop Fellay is being tempted to put it back under the Conciliar Romans, terrible enemies of that Faith. Because he does not understand the modern world, he believes that the Conciliar Church is the Catholic Church and he trusts in the good intentions of its authorities (on the contrary Archbishop Lefebvre, after years of negotiations with the Roman authorities, described them – in private – as “a snake”). So if this inside story is true, and if Bishop Fellay makes the wrong decision, the SSPX is doomed. What happened? (To be continued.)

Kyrie eleison.

Inside Story – I

Inside Story – I on October 18, 2014

After 1917 it was made clear to the world by Our Lady of Fatima that the salvation of Church and world (“a period of peace”) depended upon two things: not only upon the Consecration of Russia to her Immaculate Heart by the Pope with all the bishops of the world, but also upon Catholics making reparation to her Heart by receiving Confession and Communion and by meditating for 15 minutes and praying a rosary on each first Saturday of the month. Therefore let no Catholic think that there is nothing they can do to help Church and world out of their present appalling crisis. Every single Catholic responding to her second request will help the Pope to respond to her first request.

But this response has not yet been sufficient. For instance in the 1930’s, Pope Pius XI was well aware of Our Lady’s first request, but he never performed the Consecration of Russia. Why not? According to Brother Michael of the Holy Trinity in the second of his excellent three volumes on The Whole Truth About Fatima, it was because Pius XI was engaged at that time in diplomatic contacts with the Russian authorities in Moscow, and he thought that his own diplomacy was a better way of dealing with Communists than Our Lady’s Consecration. He preferred the human to the divine way of dealing with the problem, and so of course the problem remained unsolved. The world plunged into World War II, and the Church was broken from within by Vatican II.

Now in the 2010’s a parallel story has been coming to light of Our Lady appealing through a messenger to Bishop Fellay for the Society of St Pius X to organize a Rosary Crusade to pray for the Consecration of Russia to take place. If this story is true (as I believe it is, and some other priests also believe), it is worth telling in a few issues of these Comments, not to discredit Bishop Fellay (whose preference for human means is as understandable as that of Pius XI – God is their judge), but in order to emphasize how urgent the Consecration of Russia remains, and especially the devout practice of the five first Saturdays, even nigh on 100 years later. But is the story true? In particular, how reliable is the messenger?

I myself have met with her several times, and I believe her story has every likelihood of being true, firstly because she is a serious adult person who gives every sign of telling the truth, but mainly because what she tells is an inside story that corresponds to, and explains, a large number of public facts and well-known events on the outside, so to speak. As to the messenger, readers are entitled to distrust my personal judgment, but as to the perfect correspondence between inside story and outside facts, readers can judge for themselves.

The story begins on Good Shepherd Sunday of 2004, when the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared to the messenger and gave her a message to be passed on to the Bishop of the Society of St Pius X. In it she asked for the SSPX to lead the faithful in a Rosary Crusade for the Consecration of Russia to her Immaculate Heart, that same Consecration that Heaven has been asking for since the 1920’s. The understanding in the 2000’s was that if this were done as she asked, it would at last obtain, through her, the graces to bring about the much needed Consecration.

In June of 2006 the messenger gave the message in person to Bishop Fellay. He discussed it with her, but did not yet know that it was in fact a directive from the Mother of God. And so on his way back to Switzerland he took a first important decision. As Americans say, “Stay tuned”!

Kyrie eleison.

Israelites, Israelis?

Israelites, Israelis? on August 9, 2014

Let us then grant (EC 368) that the orders of Almighty God to exterminate certain peoples in the Old Testament (e.g. I Sam. XV) were an act of justice and mercy towards the pagans themselves, and an act also designed to help the Israelites forward towards cradling the Incarnate God, Our Lord Jesus Christ, when he would come many centuries later. This cradle the Israelites did provide, especially through the Blessed Virgin Mary, to whom the entire human race owes a boundless debt of gratitude. If any of us does get to Heaven, it will be only through her intercession.

Then what connection can there be between those Jews through whom salvation comes (Jn. IV, 22) and the mass of Jews today, who are either massacring Palestine or supporting the massacre, morally or financially? The majority of today’s Jews being Ashkenazy Jews, they may well be no blood-descendants of Abraham, but be that as it may, they have certainly absorbed through the Talmud, the holy book of post-Christian Judaism, what Our Lord called “the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees” (Mt. XVI, 11), meaning the spirit of his bitter enemies who crucified him and have fought his Church ever since. How can his Chosen People have turned into some of his consistently worst enemies? (If the mere question seems “anti-semitic,” let it be recalled that truth is good while “anti-semitism” is bad, so nothing true can be “anti-semitic” and nothing “anti-semitic” can be true. What follows is the truth, and has nothing whatsoever to do with so-called “anti-semitism”).

Firstly, if the Chosen People turned against their God, the problem may seem chronological but it is not. Throughout the Old Testament there were Israelites who turned against God, for instance the worshippers of the Golden Calf or the Jews exiled to Babylon. God frequently had to punish his own “stiff-necked” and rebellious people. Likewise from the beginning of the New Testament down to our own day there have always been outstanding Jewish converts, like St Paul, who was as Jewish as could be (cf. Rom. IX, 1–5; II Cor. XI, 21–22; Phil. III, 4–6). The difference between Israelites and Israelis is the same difference as there has always been between those of any race who love God and those who rebel against him. The true “Judeo-Christian” line stretches from Abel through, for instance, Abraham, Moses, David and the Mother of God to the Catholic Church. The false “Judeo-Christian” but true “Judeo-Masonic” line stretches from the accursed Cain through, for instance, the killers of God’s prophets to Anas and Caiphas to modern Freemasonry, which was created by Jews and is still controlled by them for purposes of fighting the Catholic Church, even if many Masons are ignorant of the fact.

Well and good, but is not the contrast between Israelites and Israelis especially sharp? Yes, because as the old saying goes, “The higher they are, the harder they fall.” Once the Chosen People refused to be the special servants of God, as they have largely done from the Incarnation onwards, they were bound to become the special servants of the Devil. For them there could be nothing in between. And what was behind that refusal? In one word, pride. Instead of using God’s special gifts to them for his glory, they bent them to their own glory. Before their Messiah came, they misconceived him as their material instead of spiritual saviour, so that when he came they refused to recognize him, and from then on they fought him for having replaced their racially exclusive Mosaic religion with the racially all-inclusive Catholic religion, open to all races.

And what can Catholics do to resist the overwhelming material dominance of the once Chosen Ones all around us? Materially, next to nothing, but a single soul praying spiritually and sincerely for God’s kingdom to come and for his will to be done can prevail on God to move material mountains, child’s play for God. He only allows that dominance in order to drive us back to him.

Kyrie Eleison.

Holy Saturday

Holy Saturday on March 30, 2013

Holy Saturday in the life of Our Lord was that day between his appalling death on the Cross and his glorious Resurrection, when his human body, lifeless without its human soul, lay in the dark tomb, unseen to human eye. Our Lord’s enemies seemed so successfully to have crushed him that the Incarnate God was in complete eclipse, and only the faith of Our Lady in her Divine Son remained unshaken. All his other followers she had to sustain, because even the most devout of them felt bewildered and lost.

Now as being the Mystical Body of Christ, the Catholic Church follows the life’s course of his physical body. Down all its 2,000 years of history the Church has always been persecuted by the enemies of Christ, and in many parts of the world at various times it has been virtually wiped out. Yet surely it has never been going into complete eclipse like it seems to be doing today. God designed his Church as a monarchy, to be held together by the Pope, and we have just seen a Pope resigning, no doubt in part because he himself, mesmerized by modern democratic thinking, never fully believed in his own supreme office. Taking the papal tiara off his coat of arms, and signing himself always as “Bishop of Rome,” whatever were his intentions when he resigned in February, he surely helped, humanly speaking, to undermine the divine institution of the Papacy.

Certainly by Benedict XVI’s resignation and by the succeeding conclave the enemies of Christ will have been doing all they could for their part to undo the Papacy. By a just punishment of God for the universal apostasy of our age, they have received from him a great power over his Church. They have been working for centuries to get a stranglehold over the Vatican, and they are now entrenched there. With no intention of giving way to a pious little Society, they are, as Anne Catherine Emmerich saw in a vision 200 years ago, dismantling the Church stone by stone. Humanly speaking, today’s followers of Our Lord have as little seeming hope as they had on the original Holy Saturday.

But no more than Our Lord himself is the Catholic Church a merely human affair. In 1846 Our Lady of Salette said about our own times: “The righteous will suffer greatly. Their prayers, penance and their tears will rise up to Heaven, and all of God’s people will beg for forgiveness and mercy and will plead for my help and intercession. And then Jesus Christ in an act of his justice and great mercy will command his Angels to have all his enemies put to death. Suddenly the persecutors of the Church of Jesus Christ and all those given over to sin will perish, and the earth will become desert-like. And then peace will be made, and man will be reconciled with God, Jesus Christ will be served, worshipped and glorified. Charity will flourish everywhere . . . The Gospel will be preached everywhere . . . and man will live in fear of God.”

In other words, God will most certainly resurrect his Church from its present distress. When the eclipse becomes still darker, as it is sure to do, let us merely hold more closely than ever to the Mother of God, and let us resolve now not to weigh upon her then by our disbelief, as did Our Lord’s Apostles and disciples on the first Holy Saturday. Let us undertake to rejoice her Immaculate Heart with our unshakeable faith in her Divine Son and his one true Church.

Kyrie eleison.

Theresa’s Prayer

Theresa’s Prayer on February 2, 2013

It is extraordinary how far God is lost to the great number of souls around us today. It is in him that every one of us “lives and moves and has his being” (Acts, XVII, 28). Without him we cannot lift a finger, think a thought or do any naturally good action, let alone any supernaturally good action. All that we can do by ourselves, without him, is to sin, and even then the sinful action as action comes from God, only its sinfulness comes from ourselves, because the sinfulness is in itself something not positive but defective.

Yet the mass of souls around us treat God as though he does not exist, or, if he does exist, as though he is of no importance. It is a truly incredible state of affairs. It is getting worse day by day. It cannot last. It can only be compared with the state of mankind in the time of Noah. Men’s corruption at that time was such (Gen. VI, 11–12) that unless God took away from them the use of their most precious endowment, their free-will – just see how most men react when one tries to force them to do something! – then the only way they left for him to save any significant number of them was to inflict a universal chastisement in which they would nevertheless have time to repent. That was the Flood, a historical event proved by a mass of geological evidence.

Similarly today, a worldwide chastisement is surely, before God, the only way that mankind has left for him to save still any large number of souls from the horror of their damning themselves for eternity. As in Noah’s time, the mercy of God makes it virtually certain that the huge number of souls will be given the time and knowledge necessary to save themselves if they wish. And afterwards many of the large number that will be saved (alas, not the majority) will recognize that only that chastisement saved them from drifting with today’s corruption all the way down to Hell.

Still, it will be easy to be frightened by the explosion of the just anger of a majestic God. From miles and miles away the Israelites were terrified by a demonstration of his power on the top of Mount Sinai (Exod. XX, 18). In our own times it will be well to recall the famous prayer of St Theresa of Avila (given here with a rhyming translation into English to facilitate memorisation):—

Nada te turbe, Let nothing fret you, Nada te espante, Nothing upset you. Todo se pasa, Everything falters, Dios no se muda. God never alters. La paciencia Patience withal Todo lo alcanza. Will obtain all. Quien a Dios tiene Who to God will cling Nada le falta. Can lack for no thing. Solo Dios basta. God alone is enough.

Sacred Heart of Jesus, I put in you all the trust I can lay my hands on. But help my lack of trust!

Kyrie eleison.