Catholic Church

God Disposes

God Disposes on August 15, 2009

If it is true, as the proverb has it, that “Man proposes while God disposes,” then it can be wise to moderate in the light of God’s dispositions or Providence the fear one may have of men’s propositions or intentions. Even in this appalling crisis of Church and world, we need not panic, because in the words of another proverb, the lines of men may be crooked but with them the Lord God is still writing straight.

For instance, if the Church crisis, core of the world’s crisis, was let loose by Vatican II’s unprecedented split in all Church history between Catholic Truth and Catholic Authority, then Catholics clinging to Truth – broadly, “Traditionalists” – will be short on Authority, while Catholics clinging to Authority – broadly the mainstream Church – will be short on Truth. Do we not observe how “Traditionalists” who have not lost their sense of Catholic Authority are somehow or other proposing or intending to rejoin it, while mainstream Catholics who have not lost all sense of Catholic Truth (countless hordes have lost today all sense of any truth!) are somehow or other proposing or intending to recover it?

But both of these good intentions can become crooked. If on the one hand “Traditionalists” seek to please the world by using ambiguity, the classic start of abandoning Truth, they may please men (especially journalists) but they will certainly not please God, who “hates a double tongue” (Proverbs VIII, 13). On the other hand if Benedict XVI is seeking to re-incorporate the Society of St Pius X in the mainstream ecumenical Church as though Tradition were merely one option amongst many, then he too will be displeasing God by his refusal to see how absolute are the demands of Catholic Truth.

Yet even supposing such intentions are or become crooked, God can still be seen writing straight with them. For instance are not both “Traditionalists” who strive to maintain their sense of Catholic Authority and this Pope striving to maintain contact with Catholic Tradition, each in their own way serving God in His preparation of the future re-uniting of Truth and Authority? That re-uniting may not come as soon as we might like, but we need not panic. The Lord God is visibly at work, looking after His Church.

In the meantime, however, let no Catholic think there is equivalence between Tradition’s pulling of Authority towards Truth and the Pope’s pulling of Truth towards Authority. Truth has the absolute priority: “For this was I born, and for this came I into the world, that I should give testimony to the truth,” says the Incarnate Word (Jn. XVIII, 37). The highest Authority of all subordinated himself to Truth. Mistaken Authority must give way. As for Tradition, however truthful it may be, it must remain humble and charitable, always looking towards Authority, without any illusions but with an unshakeable hope.

Kyrie eleison.

Fifteen Decades

Fifteen Decades on July 25, 2009

Just before “Eleison Comments” become a little more discrete (make sure to register with dinoscopus.com if you wish to be sure of continuing to receive them in private), let someone else write their last public word for me. I quote word for word from a reader to whom I had recommended praying, if at all reasonably possible, all fifteen Mysteries of the Rosary each day.

“ . . .Sometimes it is difficult to fit in, but . . . it has already made an enormous difference in my life. Certainly my faith and hope have been noticeably strengthened; they’d become weak from constant attack from every direction and no real sacramental defences (my emphasis) . . . Besides contributing to my personal sanctification I can see many other benefits . . . It is an act of reparation. It is a participation in Bishop Fellay’s Rosary Crusade . . . It frees up graces for Our Lady to use, and will help save souls (I often feel anguish thinking of how many souls, including some quite close to me, seem to be on the road to perdition, and I’ve felt utterly impotent about it – but now I feel as if I’m doing something to help).

“And finally I can see that the Rosary is a tremendously powerful weapon against Lucifer and his New World Order. I’ve known for ages that something was very wrong with the world, and within the past ten years or so, particularly since 9/11, I’ve learned more than I ever wanted to know about what’s really going on. When the scales dropped from my eyes I felt absolutely devastated, and close to despair. But now I feel like I’ve got my hands on some heavy artillery, and am doing some real damage to the enemy” (My emphasis).

Readers, do believe it! The Lord God is only allowing this dreadful crisis of Church and world in order to wake us out of our deadly slumbers and bring us back to him, so that we can be happy with him instead of wretched without him for all eternity. Faced with the seemingly imminent global triumph of his enemies, we can feel there is nothing we can do. Wrong! Our friend has got it right. Fifteen Mysteries a day is “heavy artillery” in all senses! As he suggests, one can prefer not to know what is going on, it is so horrid. But far better than dreaming on in the wetland of the “Sound of Music” is to re-enter reality and do what one can do about it. The bombs fall soon.

In the same vein our friend writes, “Since beginning to pray at least fifteen decades of Our Lady’s Rosary every day . . . I haven’t the stomach to step into a Novus Ordo church . . .” He says he found it a bit scary not going to Mass on Sunday, but I told him that the Third Commandment is to “keep the Sabbath holy,” and not to keep it on a slide into apostasy, and I gave him the advice Archbishop Lefebvre used to give in such cases, namely to get rather to the true Mass whenever he can. God bless him. The Cross lies ahead of him, but he has the Rosary in hand.

Kyrie eleison.

Unthinkable Reality

Unthinkable Reality on July 18, 2009

Whereas “Eleison Comments” ten weeks ago said that the split between Catholic Authority and Catholic Truth was responsible for today’s incomparable ruination of the Church, a recent objector said that such a split was unthinkable because Catholic Truth comes through Catholic Authority. The brief answer is: normally, yes; today, no. Let us see that the objection is mistaken, and then why.

That Truth and Authority are split is proved by the fruits (cf. Mt.VII, 15–20). Catholic Truth bears good fruit, but the Conciliarism that Catholic Authority has been pushing ever since Vatican II has borne only bad fruit – on all fronts the Conciliar Church is collapsing, unless one re-defines the word “collapse.” This collapse can be recognized by the laity more easily than by the clergy, partly because the laity do not usually undergo that heavy Conciliar indoctrination now normal for the clergy, partly because the laity have not usually staked their lives and reputations on the success of the Council, as by and large today’s Church authorities have done.

One way of describing the greatness of Archbishop Lefebvre is to say that he was one of the very few Church authorities who in the aftermath of the Council not only saw how Catholic Truth had been abandoned by Catholic Authority, but also at great personal cost stood by what he saw. How often we heard him say, in the 1970’s, “C’est inconcevable, c’est inimaginable,” meaning that the disaster going on in the Church was – “unthinkable.”

But that never stopped him from recognizing that it was the reality.

Why it had become the reality he used to explain by the preceding 500 years of Church history: Protestantism rose up against Catholicism, and once it had established itself in the face of Catholicism it gave rise to Liberalism, whereby all “truths” are as good as one another. For a time such nonsense was resisted by what remained still of men’s common sense and Faith, and especially by the Catholic churchmen – Authority still clung to Truth – but eventually, at the Council, these churchmen too gave up resisting. If the sun goes on sinking, eventually it sets. If you go on drinking, eventually you get drunk. If the tide goes on and on rising, eventually it goes over the top of all dikes built to hold it back.

St. Pius X’s great Encyclical on Modernism, “Pascendi,” portrays that final corruption of the mind which by spilling over all dikes spells the end of times, if not the end of the world. That corruption swamped the Catholic churchmen at Vatican II, and they abandoned the Catholic Truth. Has then Almighty God abandoned His Catholic Church? By no means (Mt.XXVIII, 20). But He never promised that His Church could not shrink to a tiny remnant, whether now or at the end of the world (Lk.XVIII,8).

Kyrie eleison.

Conciliar Church

Conciliar Church on July 11, 2009

The expression “Conciliar Church” gives rise to much confusion. For instance, how can the Catholic Church, the spotless Bride of Christ (Eph.V, 27), be stained with the new man-centred religion of Vatican II, i.e. Conciliarism? Yet Our Lord founded only one Church, so if the “Conciliar Church” is not Catholic, there must be two Churches, a Conciliar Church and a Catholic Church? Impossible.

Indeed there are not two Churches. There is only the one Church of Our Lord Jesus Christ, and that is the Catholic Church. But this Catholic Church is embodied in human beings who are necessarily imperfect. Our Lord instituted it to save not angels or animals, but exclusively us poor human beings who tend by ourselves, because of original sin, only to fall further and further away from Heaven and from God.

So the Catholic Church always has two aspects: divine by its origin or beginning (Jesus Christ) and by its end (bringing souls to Heaven), it is, in between, also necessarily human, by its involvement in amongst the human beings it came to save. Therefore as there must be human beings inside the Church, so too there will always be imperfections inside the Church, sometimes very visible, but these imperfections will still be incapable of staining the Bride of Christ, spotless in herself.

Now Conciliarism, as the new religion of Vatican II putting man in the place of God, is error and imperfection, purely human, in no way divine. So the expression “Conciliar Church” means the Catholic Church in its purely human and imperfect aspect, the Church as disfigured by modern man organising Vatican II to put himself in the place of God. Yet the divine Church remains stainless beneath all the disfigurement, as if it were a kingfisher swooping down on a lake to pick up a fish and fly again heavenward, flicking off as it flies any water it momentarily picked up.

Then there are two Churches? No way. There is only the one immaculate Bride of Christ. Then does the expression “Conciliar Church” have no real meaning? Alas, it names an all too real reality. It names all those members and structures of the one true Church as caught up in the toils of the subtle errors of Vatican II, and as tending all the time to be taken out of the true Church by those errors. This is the “Conciliar Church” from which Archbishop Lefebvre did not mind being “excommunicated,” because, as he said, he never belonged to it in the first place.

Kyrie eleison.

81 / 121 Re-Structuring

81 / 121 Re-Structuring on June 27, 2009

Tomorrow, or the day after, there is hardly a box outside of which it will not be necessary to think. In Church and world, the mentalities and structures of so-called “Western civilization” are collapsing around our ears. Still the mass of Western souls are preferring to slumber on in their audio-visual dream, but reality is closing in all the time – they may awake not before they are shackled into the New World Order.

The USA has for nearly a century acted as the shield and sword-bearer of “Western civilization.” Now its financial, economic and political power structures are melting down in a welter of greed, corruption, selfishness and dissolution slung between Wall Street, New York, and Washington, DC. However – let it never be said too often – “We the people” have only ourselves to blame. We have wanted the cause: godless materialism. Now we must live with the effects: the final breakdown of fractional reserve “banking,” of paper “money,” of democratic “politics.”

City structures are crumpling. In Flint, Michigan, original home of General Motors presently employing 8,000 local people where once it employed 79,000 and now bankrupt, local politicians are pioneering an idea to save their dwindling city: raze entire districts and return the land to nature. This idea so appeals to the Federal Government that another 50 cities have been earmarked as potential candidates for salvation by the bulldozer, including Detroit, Philadelphia and Baltimore.

State structures are failing. In California, Controller John Chiang said a few days ago that if State lawmakers cannot quickly solve California’s 24 billion dollar deficit, then next week he will have to pay State debts with paper promises to pay. “Unfortunately,” said he, “the State’s inability to balance the check-book will now mean short-changing taxpayers, local governments and small businesses.” It is easy to imagine how these will react, but it is not easy to imagine how the budget deficit will be solved.

As for our national structures, if we will not acquiesce to their being merged into the international New World Order, then surely a Third World War will be engineered to persuade us, starting with an 81/121 (a 9/11 squared)! Yet all these collapses pale in comparison with Vatican II, because it was the Catholic Church that was upholding “Western civilization.” If the Catholic collapse is not soon reversed by the Consecration of Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, then one must wonder if the healthiest elements in the Church will not need re-structuring as an underground resistance movement.

Kyrie eleison.

Sacred Heart

Sacred Heart on June 20, 2009

Yesterday was the Feast of the Sacred Heart. Before I became a Catholic the mere expression “Sacred Heart of Jesus” would have made my blood curdle, because it sounded too sweet and sticky for words. This impression would have been confirmed by a number of pictures representing the Sacred Heart, which are so melting that one is surprised not to find, in place of the picture on the wall, a pictorial puddle at the foot of the wall!

However, as one grows older, one may hope one grows a little wiser as well as sadder. Soon after I entered the Church, the Lord God put in my hands a marvellous book on the Sacred Heart, one could say written by the Sacred Heart: “The Way of Divine Love” by Sister Josefa Menendez (1890–1923). She was a little Spanish nun buried away from all publicity in a convent of the Sacred Heart Sisters in Poitiers, France, who during the last three years of her short life acted as messenger for the Sacred Heart of Jesus, to deliver one more urgent message of God’s love to modern souls in ever more danger of falling away from Him.

“I am God” (page 377 of the first edition in English), “but a God of love! I am a Father, but a Father full of compassion and never harsh. My Heart is infinitely holy but also infinitely wise, and knowing human frailty and infirmity stoops to poor sinners with infinite mercy.” This book gave me to understand that just as the special revelations of the Sacred Heart had begun in the 17th century which was growing cold with rationalism and Jansenism, so those revelations became progressively warmer as the world grew colder and colder, until the pictures indeed almost melted off the wall! As though Our Lord were saying to us, it no longer matters if we understand His Justice, or appreciate the fine arts, just so long as we understand His true Mercy.

“I love those who after a first fall come to me for pardon . . . I love them still more when they beg pardon for their second sin, and should this happen again, I do not say a million times but a million million times, I still love them and pardon them, and I will wash in My Blood their last as fully as their first sin. Never shall I weary of repentant sinners, nor cease from hoping for their return, and the greater their distress, the greater My welcome . . .This is what I wish all to know. I will teach sinners that the mercy of my Heart is inexhaustible . . . It is so easy to trust completely in My Heart!”

It is so easy to trust in His Heart. But we modern men are distracted, and we are proud. Sacred Heart of Jesus, have mercy on us.

Kyrie eleison.