Catholic Church

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.

Just Claims

Just Claims on May 30, 2009

On the assumption that the Second Vatican Council established within the Catholic Church a serious split between Catholic Truth and Catholic Authority, “Eleison Comments” three weeks ago (“Flat Contradiction”) divided today’s Catholics between those who cling to Truth and have problems with Catholic Authority, and those who cling to Catholic Authority and have problems with Catholic Truth or doctrine, for instance on religious liberty.

Setting up such a parallel between “Conciliarists” following Vatican II and “Traditionalists” following the age-old doctrine and liturgy, may well shock numbers of both, for the reasons evoked above, but let us appeal to the realities in the Church around us. Do we not observe that as Traditionalists who wholly reject present Church authorities risk losing their Catholic sense, so too Conciliarists who wholly scorn present Traditionalists (as do most German bishops) risk ceasing to be Catholics for lack of any sense of doctrinal truth?

However, the parallel only goes so far. For while outright “sedevacantism” and outright Neo-modernism are in this logical respect comparable, they are by no means equivalent, because Truth is higher than Authority, which only exists to serve Truth. If all Authority disappeared, Truth would still be there (“My words will not pass away,” says Our Lord – Mk.XXV, 35). But if all Truth were smothered in lies, as is happening today, we would see, as we are seeing, all Authority discredited with it, and being replaced by brute force. Truth and its ensuing Justice are the life-blood of Authority. Authority is merely the servant and protector of Truth and Justice.

This is why Traditionalists clinging to Truth are, as such, repeat, as such, better Catholics than Conciliarists clinging to Authority – judge by the fruits! And while Truth, by its nature of corresponding to the object and not to the subject, cannot bend to Authority, on the contrary the Church authorities, Popes and Cardinals and Bishops, must one day bend back to the Truth, and the sooner the better. Nor is saying so remotely an arrogant claim on the part of Traditionalists, as Cardinal Ratzinger once opined, because Traditionalists never invented Tradition, Tradition was a given, from being merely faithful to which they got their name. Archbishop Lefebvre had engraved on his tombstone St. Paul’s “Tradidi quod et accepi” (I Cor.XI, 23), because he was the very first to maintain that he had done no more than hand on what had been handed down to him.

This fundamental primacy of Truth over Authority applies inside and outside the Catholic Church, inside and outside any part of the Church. But modern souls have lost almost all grip on Truth. Here is the drama.

Kyrie eleison.

Sick Claims

Sick Claims on May 23, 2009

Another friend of mine tells me that on the occasion of some anniversary of Shakespeare (1564–1616), numbers of people, no doubt to battle “homophobia,” are maintaining once more that he was one of “them.” For proof that the Bard belonged to what is often called the Lavender Brigade, they are resorting as usual to the Sonnets, many of which were indeed lovingly addressed to a certain young man. Let us attempt to disentangle the mess.

Firstly, for men to misuse with men or for women to misuse with women that process which God gave to both to use properly with one another for the reproduction and continuation of the human race, is so grave a sin against God and human society that the Catholic Church calls it one of the four sins “crying to Heaven for vengeance.” To ensure that mankind continues, God gave to every one of us a deep and natural repugnance for man on man, or woman on woman. To whitewash the sin by blackening the repugnance for it as “homophobia,” is mentally and morally sick.

However, “to them that are defiled, and to unbelievers, nothing is clean” (Titus I, 15). For sick minds, there can be no such thing as a clean love between man and man. Therefore when Scripture (I Kings I, 26) presents to us such a love as noble in the extreme, as when David grieves for his dead friend Jonathan – “I grieve for thee, my brother Jonathan: exceeding beautiful, and amiable to me above the love of women. As the mother loveth her only son, so did I love thee,” these sick minds will declare that such love is to be approved of not because it could be void of sin, but only because to condemn it as sin is “homophobia.”

The case of Shakespeare’s love for the young man that he made famous in his Sonnets is surely similar. Many of them tell us how this young man was graced with a beauty comparable to that of women, or even more beautiful, says Shakespeare. And apparently those now trying to enlist the Bard in their ranks appeal in particular to Sonnet 20 for proof of his perversion. But I ask me: can they read? The first eight lines of this Sonnet may praise the young man’s feminine beauty, but the next four go on to tell how Nature endowed him also with a masculine feature which is (l.12) of no use to Shakespeare, but only to women (l.13). Conclusion? – “Mine be thy love, and thy love’s use their treasure” (l.14).

If people who have let themselves get caught in the vice against nature do all they can to get out of it, they deserve the sympathy of all sane souls. But if they so wallow in their perversion as to pretend that sane heroes of the past were like them, they need to be vigorously and clearly denounced – for as long as it is not illegal to do so!

Kyrie eleison.

Flat Objection

Flat Objection on May 16, 2009

A friend has just reminded me of the classic objection to the teaching of the true Catholic Church on religious liberty, outlined here last week. Here is the objection: Major: To force anyone’s belief is absurd, because belief is not something that can be forced. Minor: But to refuse people’s religious liberty is to force their beliefs. Conclusion: Therefore to refuse religious liberty is absurd.

The Major here is true. What someone does or does not believe in matters of religion is the choice of his inner free-will, which either cannot be gotten at from outside of him, and/or – especially in the case of the Catholic Faith – should not be gotten at from outside, because “Nemo nolens credit” (St. Augustine), i.e. nobody can believe against his will. So outer forcing of Catholic belief is either impossible or wrong.

The problem lies in the Minor of the objection. The Traditional Church doctrine that a Catholic State should not grant to its citizens religious liberty does not mean that the State should force anyone’s private belief, nor does it mean that the State should force anyone to act in public in accordance with Catholic belief. What it does mean is that a Catholic State has the right to prevent the public practice of any religion contrary to Catholic belief, and if the prohibition will do more good than harm, it has the duty to prohibit such practice. This is because every State made up of human beings comes from God as do they, and it has from God a corresponding duty to provide temporally (i.e. to do what it can in time, here below on earth) for the eternal welfare of its citizens (i.e. their salvation in Heaven). Citizens are normally influenced by everything going on in the State around them, so their eternal salvation is normally hindered by the public practice of false religions.

Thus the Catholic Church teaches that religious liberty must be denied 1) only in the case of false religions, 2) only in their public practice, and 3) only where it will do more good than harm to prohibit such practice. This used to mean only in Catholic States, because where there is little or no Catholic Faith, such a prohibition makes little to no sense. Today it means in hardly any States at all, because the citizens of all modern States are so steeped in liberalism (the quasi-religion of liberty) that even in supposedly Catholic States today such a prohibition would outrage people’s worship of freedom and so it would do more harm than good.

However, of these three conditions, the first is the key. If I do not grasp that Catholicism is the one and only completely true religion, I shall never conceive why all other religions should ever be blocked in public. Contrariwise, if I grasp that Catholicism alone (accepted at least implicitly) can send souls to Heaven, and that all other religions, as such, repeat, as such, send souls to Hell, then it follows automatically that their public practice should, where reasonable, be blocked. It comes down to a question of Faith. “Lord, I believe, help thou my unbelief” (Mk.IX, 23).

Kyrie eleison.