Catholic Authority

Vocations Still?

Vocations Still? on October 10, 2020

Can there still be vocations of younger or older souls to the service of God in a seminary, convent, friary or monastery, amidst the distress of the Catholic Church today? The answer can only be in the positive because the fact is that God is still calling souls to His service, and “A fact is stronger than the Lord Mayor.” On the other hand Superiors of seminaries or religious houses need to take into consideration two circumstances special to the situation of the Church today which should render them more careful than ever in accepting vocations beneath their roof. These are firstly the ever increasing immaturity of souls growing up in the modern world, and secondly, the ever growing unreliability of Church leaders.

To begin with, let us remind ourselves that the Catholic Church comes directly from Jesus Christ who will preserve it until the end of the world (Mt. XXVIII, 20), and into eternity. He has with the Father and the Holy Ghost all the power needed, and much more, to provide it with all means necessary for its survival. Now those means necessarily include a priesthood, bishops and priests and in some sort of hierarchy, to ensure those sacraments which are essential to the life of supernatural grace of the Church’s members. Therefore until world’s end Our Lord will always be giving enough vocations to men to guarantee that the Church has the men it needs as ministers. As for the women into whose nature it is built by God to be the “helpers” or “helpmates” of man (Gen.II, 18), they are not to be priests nor as necessary to the Church as priests, but by the gifts which God gives to them and not to men, they can render to the Church such precious services that it one cannot imagine the Church being without feminine vocations. For instance, where would the Church’s apostolate be without the prayers of Sisters, grandmothers, etc.?

However God is God, and His ways are inscrutable by men. See the end of Romans XI, and all of the Book of Job, Chapters XXXVII to XLI. He reaches far beyond our human minds, and in the fallibility of the last six Popes inclusive, He is already reaching well beyond what many Catholic minds can bear. They need to read Job. Nor is the Almighty finished yet by any means. Our Lady has told us that fire will fall from the sky, eliminating a large part of mankind, and if sins do not slow down there will be no more forgiveness for them, a prediction easier to understand ever since the Covid scam recently made so many of the very churchmen shut down their confessionals. Let us pray and work for Our Lord to send workers into His vineyard, but let us not try to tell Him how many He needs. Only He knows that.

Meanwhile we human beings must confess that, as said above, we throw at least two serious obstacles in the way of His calling souls to serve Him. Firstly, the immaturity of souls leading a modern life. If there is one thing that makes a boy or girl grow up so as to become capable of enduring the discipline of religious life or the hardships of married life, it is suffering, but is not the illusion everywhere today that suffering can be blamed on somebody else, may be avoided, and need not be endured? Nor are the characters of children formed when parents less and less know how to bring them up. Nor are they given much responsibility to bear, which could also mature them. City and suburban life hardly favour vocations.

But secondly the disorder in the Church also discourages vocations. For as long as the Church was, despite all human failings, a doctrinal and structural rock of ages, I could as a young person entrust my life to it and be sure that several layers of Superiors above me would function on a basis of objective truth and justice overall. But ever since Vatican II changed Church doctrine and the basis on which it operates, how can I still be sure of an objective and stable framework within which to lead the rest of my life? One great lesson of this Church crisis is that the Catholic Church can no more do without the Pope than a puppet can do without its puppeteer – it becomes a jumbled heap of strings and bits of coloured wood.

Of course God can and will supply for the good of His Church, but we can hardly expect vocations to come forward tomorrow just like they did the day before yesterday.

Kyrie eleison.

Hoist Ladder – II

Hoist Ladder – II on May 9, 2020

Last week these “Comments” started out from words of Archbishop Lefebvre in 1990 on the mindset of the officials at the top of the Conciliar Church in Rome, and they finished with his strong conclusion –

All we can do is pull up the ladder (i.e. cut all contact) . There is nothing we can do with these people, because we have nothing in common with them.

Such words may seem to be lacking either in charity, or at least in the respect due to the princes of the Church of Our Lord, but in fact they are neither uncharitable nor disrespectful, because the very purpose of Our Lord’s Church is 1/ the Faith on which 2/ must be based charity and 3/ respect for the officials who are meant to be caring for that Church.

1/ “Without faith it is impossible to please God. For whoever would draw near to God must believe that He exists and that He rewards those who seek Him.” (Hebrews XI, 6). (Atheists, if you wish you could believe in God, notice immediately that “He rewards those who seek Him,” and if you do persevere in seeking Him, your reward will most likely be that you will find Him, as many quotations in Scripture attest, but that is a story for another time.) All spiritual souls, by which alone human beings live, come from God in accordance with His wish that they use their brief lives to choose to return to Him for eternal bliss in His heaven. However, while that choice is encouraged by all the goodness in creation, it is discouraged by the soul’s three great enemies, the world, the flesh and the Devil, and by all the evil that God chooses to allow in his creation, so that there is a genuine choice to be made, requiring virtue, otherwise I will incline away from God towards the evil.

Now such is the display of goodness in God’s creation that those who see it and still do not believe in God are called by St Paul “inexcusable” (Romans, I, 20). Nevertheless God Himself normally remains invisible (e.g. Col. I, 15), so that the prime virtue needed to begin to make one’s way towards Him is the virtue of faith, by which I choose to make the jump, from what I see with my eyes to what or Who I must know with my mind is behind what I see with my eyes. Hence the Council of Trent (VI, 6) calls faith “the foundation of salvation,” and the Catholic Church by its Creeds simply spells out what I need to believe in order to have faith in the truth, and not falsehoods, about God.

2/ Now there cannot be a desire in a human will which is not preceded by some thought in the same person’s mind. A desire without object is a non-desire. That object is presented to a human will by a mind.

Now charity is a kind of desire seated in the will, so it presupposes a thought in the mind. And if the charity is to be truly supernatural and not just humanist or sentimental, it presupposes a supernatural object in the mind, and that is the supernatural object which is believed in by faith. Therefore true charity presupposes true faith, and without true supernatural faith there cannot be true charity. It follows that if today’s Roman officials have a faith at least seriously contaminated by Vatican II, as is certainly the case, then people wishing to keep the true Faith must be seriously warned to stay away from such officials lest their own faith be also contaminated. In other words they must be told to “pull up the ladder.”

3/ And while to those “seated on the chair of Moses” (Mt. XXIII, 2) is due all respect due to the chair of Moses, all the more to the See of Rome, and while to high Church officials is due all charity towards souls with a tremendous responsibility at their Particular Judgment, nevertheless the Catholic faith comes first, so that neither the respect nor the charity can include my exposing my own soul or anyone else’s to contamination of our faith by imprudent contacts risking just such contamination. the Conciliarists in 2020 are still crusaders for the idolatry of man peddled by their wretched Council. Archbishop Lefebvre was right – pull up the ladder. Catholics and Conciliarists are in a war of religions, a war to the death.

Kyrie eleison.

Archbishop’s Authority – II

Archbishop’s Authority – II on February 22, 2020

DCLV – in theory, the Pope’s authority is indispensable to the Church. DCLVI – in theory, priests need absolutely the Pope to unite them. DCLVII – in practice, Archbishop Lefebvre’s authority was seriously handicapped by his not having the living Pope behind him. DCLVIII – in practice, the Archbishop exercised the authority he still had in at least three different ways, depending on the subjects over whom he exercised it: those who asked him to exercise authority over them on his terms, or those who asked only for a partial authority on their own terms, or those who asked for none at all.

Notice first of all how the classification is not by the authority, but by those under it. In other words, the subjects are, to a certain extent, “calling the shots.” This abnormal situation in the Church is the direct result of Vatican II, where Catholic Authority radically undermined itself by its wholesale betrayal of Catholic Truth, when it attempted to replace God’s objective religion with a man-made substitute, and to change the God-centred Catholic Church into the man-centred Newchurch. By this Council all Catholic priests were essentially discredited, as they remain to this day, and so will remain, until the churchmen return to telling God’s Truth. Then they will recover their full Authority.

Those who asked the Archbishop to exercise his authority on his terms were of course the members of the Catholic Congregations which he himself founded, notably of secular priests but also of religious Brothers and Sisters and Tertiaries. These Congregations he made as normal as possible, with grades of obedience to himself as the Superior General, with vows at ordinations for the priests and solemn promises on formal entry of priests, Brothers or Sisters into their corresponding Congregations. The vows were to God, and in case of need have often been dissolved (discreetly) by Roman authority, as is normal. The promises have depended rather more on the choice of those who made them, and here the authority of the Archbishop was seriously undermined, as told in last week’s “Comments,” by his being condemned officially by the Pope and his fellow-bishops. If a priest decided to leave the Society for liberalism on the left or for sedevacantism on the right, the Archbishop could, as he said, do nothing more than cut off all future contact, in order that such priests could not pretend that they were still on good terms with the Society. They had chosen to do without him.

Those who, secondly, asked the Archbishop to exercise his authority on their own terms, for instance to receive the sacrament of Confirmation, he would readily satisfy, as far as he could within the norms of the Church, because of the Church crisis which makes questionable the validity of Confirmations conferred with the Newrite of Confirmation. On the one hand, he said, Catholics have a right to certainly valid sacraments, and if on the other hand they wanted nothing further to do with him personally, that was their choice and their responsibility before God.

And thirdly, for those who asked him in no way to exercise authority over him, like a large number of Traditional priests who were sympathetic to his Society but who never wanted to join it, he was always generous with whatever contact, friendship, encouragement or advice they may have asked of him, but never did he remotely pretend or behave as though he had any authority over them. And the same with the laity. Many Catholics never agreed with the stand he took, apparently opposed to the Pope, but he was unfailingly courteous and ready to answer questions, if only the questioner was remotely deserving of an answer. And it was the objectivity and reasonableness of his answers which turned many Newchurchers into Traditionalists who would put themselves under his ministry or the guidance of his priests.

In brief, the Council crippled Church Authority, but where there was a will there was a way, or at least a substitute way, for souls to seek eternal salvation, which is extremely difficult without priests. Through the Archbishop especially but not only, God guaranteed this substitute way for souls, which is still there.

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.

Pope Indispensable – II

Pope Indispensable – II on February 8, 2020

It is to the unfaithfulness of Catholic Authority to Catholic Truth at the Second Vatican Council that these “Comments” last week (DCLV, Feb.1) attributed the unprecedented crisis of the Catholic Church, now well over 50 years old. The logical conclusion was that the crisis will only come to an end when Catholic Authority comes back to the Truth, because the Truth does not change, and so it cannot move to rejoin the Pope and bishops who are meant to be defending it. Moreover it was stated that the Pope must restore the bishops, and that Almighty God alone can restore the Pope, and that God will put the Pope back on his feet only “when we have learned our lesson.” That is because if God lifted us back up the mud-slide too soon, we naughty human beings would profit merely to slide down once more. God cannot afford to be too generous with our perverse generation. So what lesson or lessons do we need to be taught?

Amongst others, that the world cannot do without a sane Church, and the Church to be sane must have a sane Pope, and the sane Pope must be obeyed. For example, by the time Vatican II came to an end at the end of 1965, the churchmen were in full-blooded apostasy. Yet still God gave mankind another chance. In front of Paul VI was the pressing question of artificial means of birth control, contraception for short. Conditions in modern cities were persuading a mass of bishops, priests and lay-folk that the Church’s strict and ancient condemnation had to be relaxed, that the modern city was right and that the unchanging rule of the Church, in other words God, was wrong. Paul VI too wanted to make the rule easier.

However, when the commission of experts which he had appointed to study the question made their report, he himself saw that the rule could not be relaxed. His final arguments for maintaining the rule have not the force of the old arguments based on the immutable natural law, but nevertheless Paul VI did uphold the essential law in his Encyclical “Humanae Vitae” of 1968. But when he published it, all hell promptly broke loose in the Church. And in 1969 he imposed on the entire Church the Novus Ordo Mass. Is it idle speculation that if the bishops and priests had obeyed the Pope, instead of rejecting God’s unchanging law, God might have spared them the New Mass? As it was, disobeying the Pope when he was faithful to God’s law, they all contributed to the breakdown of Authority in the Church. All bets were then off, and chaos took over inside the Church.

Here is a classic example of Truth needing Authority, of the world needing the Church and of the Church needing the Pope. Especially in today’s big city, men cannot see what is wrong with contraception, on the contrary, it seems to be mere common sense. Thus if there is no divine Authority to forbid contraception, nothing and nobody else will stand up to the human passions which drive towards it. In this way Vatican II (Gaudium et Spes # 48) suggested that in the act of marriage recreation comes before procreation, and it opened the flood-gates to divorce, adultery, pre-birth then post-birth abortion, euthanasia, homosexuality, gender change, and horrors yet unknown, but all implicit in the breakdown of the subordination of recreation to procreation. Mother Church always knew that to smash the act of marriage is to smash successively marriage, the individual person, the family, society, the nation and the world. This chaos is where we are today. Such is the need of Authority.

And the most important Authority is that of the Church, to impose upon men’s erring minds God’s infallible Truth, and upon their wayward wills God’s eternal Law, so that they can get to His Heaven and avoid their Hell. And to embody that Authority and to project it before men, the Incarnate God instituted His One Catholic Church as a monarchy of which the single ruler is the Roman Pope, who alone has the mission and the grace to govern and to hold together, in the Catholic Truth, all members of the Church. It follows that when he quits the Truth, as with Vatican II, then the sheep are necessarily scattered, because nobody other than the Pope has from God the mission or the grace to unite them (cf. Lk. XXII, 32).

Kyrie eleison.

Restoring Authority

Restoring Authority on April 20, 2019

Whereas the post-Christian pagan Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) claimed that man is by nature an anti-social animal so that human society is essentially artificial, the pre-Christian pagan Aristotle (384–322), a much wiser man, knew that society is natural because man is by nature a social animal – watch how he gathers with his fellow-men from dawn to dusk in all kinds of human societies, especially the human family. But every man has free-will, so that all those kinds of societies must have somebody in authority to co-ordinate those free-wills which by themselves are liable to fly apart. Hence every society needs authority, as natural and as needed by man as is society. See how the Roman centurion recognises Our Lord as a man in authority from his own exercise of authority in the Roman army (Mt. VIII, 8–9).

But authority being as natural to men as is their social nature, and their social nature coming from God, then all authority amongst men must come ultimately from God (cf. Eph. III, 15), which is why in our own sunset of the world where almost all mankind is turning its back on God, men are also revolting against any kind of authority, and all kinds of authority are becoming more and more fragile. For instance is it not more and more common today for wives to be declaring independence from their husbands and for children to be running their parents? That is not natural in any true sense of the word, but it is today more and more common, because revolt against authority is in the bloodstream of all of us. Then how can it be restored? We have a classic example from the book of Numbers (Ch.16) in the Old Testament.

Moses and his brother Aaron were the political and religious leaders respectively of the Israelite people to bring them out of Egypt into the Promised Land. They had both been appointed by God, as the people well knew, but the Israelites were a proud and hard-necked people, and the moment came in the desert when Core, a first cousin of Aaron and jealous of his privileges, stirred up another 250 Levites and two leading Rubenites, Dathan and Abiron, to revolt, and the people rose up in a tumult behind them against the authority of Moses and Aaron. These two immediately appealed to the Lord, who told them to assemble the people on the next day in front of the Tabernacle. Then Moses told the people to get away from the tents of Dathan and Abiron standing there with all their extended families, whereupon the earth opened up and swallowed down the revolutionaries straight into Hell. Fire from God then devoured Core and his 250 Levites demanding privileges and prestige given by God only to the family of Aaron.

By this means God Himself demonstrated to whom He had given authority over the Israelites. Authority was so important for the Israelites in the desert because despite the miraculous crossing of the Red Sea (Exodus XIV), they were still hankering for the onions of Egypt, and Dathan was complaining of the hardships of the desert (Numb. XVI, 13–14). Yet Moses was no tyrant, but the gentlest of men (Numb. XII, 3), and Aaron had done the people no harm (Numb. XVI, 11). However, had God not resorted to an extreme punishment of the rebels, one may wonder if Moses and Aaron would have been able to lead the Israelites into the Promised Land. Would anything less have restored their authority? As it was, it is easy to imagine that after the double miraculous fire no Israelite was in a hurry to disobey Moses or Aaron!

In 2019 rampant materialism all over the world is making ever fewer human beings even believe in God, let alone take Him seriously. Science and technology seem to guarantee the good life for us all, so who still needs God? And without Him, all basis of authority is gone, and authority in every form of human society is melting into thin air, but especially in the Catholic Church. Moreover Neo-modernism holds its victims in such a grip that they are virtually inconvertible, being persuaded that they are still Catholic. How can the Church survive? If Catholic authority is to be restored before world’s end, will not another miraculous and deadly fire from Heaven be necessary, as with Dathan, Core and Abiron? God is not mocked (Gal. VI, 7).

Kyrie eleison.