Catholic Church

Fortunate Family

Fortunate Family on October 24, 2020

When the horizon is, humanly speaking, so dark all around, and when demonic forces are intent on tearing the family apart because it is the means designed by God to start human beings out on the road to His Heaven, then it may be a good time to summarise for readers of these “Comments” an email sent to their editor by the father of a family of eight children in the United States, who is neither hopeless nor afraid. He lives in the middle of nowhere. He has Mass only once a month in a Traditional Chapel nearby. But sanity is still possible. Here is the essence of his email –

Spiritually and sacramentally, we continue to survive with monthly Mass at our Resistance chapel which we will need as long as we have need of Mass and the Sacraments. And I do not see that need (or the crisis in the Church) ending any time soon. The chapel is up and running, but there have been some poor turnouts at the last couple of Masses. For various reasons, a good number of Traditional Catholics seem to be giving in to the media-induced panic.

Our family is doing well; we have no complaints. We are expecting our ninth child soon. We had another boy recently. Everyone notices how different he is from the girls. He explores everything, gets into everything, is more interested in “things”, machines, equipment, etc., than people. Since we have several girls, we really notice the innate differences between boys and girls. Our children are all into music, because I am teaching them to love and appreciate music with melody, harmony, rhythm, and good lyrics. We listen to folk music, especially Irish, various instrumental music, classical, and chant. Any songs coming from a place of angst, despair, depression, hate, etc. are evil, ugly, and to be shunned.

I have been working full time from my home office for a Catholic operation which seems to be waking up more with every passing year, unlike the SSPX which once had the full package of truth, but is losing it year-by-year. If where I work continues to be faithful to the Truth as they have been, it will eventually have to become full Trad or change course/betray at some point. There are no other options. I also work manually in our gardens which we have just finished expanding, having learned about “Back to Eden” gardening a couple of years ago. Our soil is pure clay and very poor, but with mulch one can imitate God’s nature, letting rich soil form from organic material by rotting down. With a recently discovered source of free wood chips, I can make quantities of my own mulch. So the children are all helping me to use this new technique to treat our fruit trees and start garden beds. We hope we will soon be able to grow a decent amount of food here. Our two garden beds measure 1,500 square feet, so far.

We are especially concerned with the results of the election this year. My gut feeling is that 2020 will make 2016 look like child’s play. Then there’s the whole COVID madness and the nationwide riots over a black man who overdosed on Fentanyl. Maybe the fight is merely between the really bad guys (Deep State) and some lesser or rival bad guys (Trump and his associates). Maybe Trump is merely less evil, i.e. he hasn’t partaken in the child sacrifice, child torture, and other devilry that the rest of them have? My hopes are limited. Still, I do not think that Trump is on the side of the Deep State. I will be voting for him because of his unprecedented actions against abortion and in favour of freedom in general.

We are doing fine financially, thanks to many blessings from God. But the biggest blessing has been that I learned as a teenager the evils of the banksters’ usury. Without this grasp of economics, I might be blameless and sinless but still deep in debt and related miseries. Also my wife has always been frugal, so we have always lived within our means, giving up many luxuries and working hard, but now we are reaping the benefits. We are now completely debt-free, even with eight children and only one modest income. I point out to my children that it took years of frugality and hard work, but eventually it can be done.

As for the local chapel, alas, many souls come and do not come back, but today some are looking for a Tridentine Mass where they can continue to receive Holy Communion on the tongue, as forbidden by our official diocese for “Covid” reasons. So much for Tradition depending on the official Church! I often wonder why God is allowing so many setbacks for Tradition. Is He purifying the remnant, looking for more quality over quantity? Both among non-Catholics and in Traditional Catholic families, even when the parents seem solid, I do not see their children “fully taking their place” in the next generation. The tides of the World beat on them relentlessly, wearing them down, some slightly, some greatly, while some completely collapse. Truly, if these days are not shortened, even the Elect will not be saved.

Kyrie eleison.

Madiran’s Philosophy

Madiran's Philosophy on October 17, 2020

Like Pope Pius X in his great anti-modernist Encyclical of 1907, Pascendi, Jean Madiran in his book “The Heresy of the 20th Century” starts out from philosophy, because both of them see that the problem which makes it so difficult for modern minds really to grasp Catholicism is rather philosophical than theological. Thus the first of six Parts of Madiran’s book has for its title “Philosophical Preamble.”

Surprisingly, Madiran himself tells readers that they can skip the Preamble if they like, but that can only have been to spare many a modern reader who is rightly allergic to the delinquent nonsense which proceeds from the so-called “universities” of today. In fact, the argument of Madiran’s book is as dependent on true philosophy as it is independent of today’s “philosophistry,” or pseudo-philosophy.

But how and why can supernatural Faith be so dependent on philosophy, which is the rational study of all natural reality, the raising of (true) common sense, from an amateur to a professional level, so to speak? Answer, a good wine-maker does not depend on clean and uncracked glass bottles to make good wine, but he cannot run his wine business without such bottles, because if all the bottles are dirty inside, nobody is going to buy his wine, however good it is. The wine-maker presupposes that he will get automatically clean bottles. Compared with the wine, the glass bottle is worth next to nothing when it is empty of wine, but it is absolutely necessary without cracks or dirt for the wine-maker to contain his wine.

Now human reason is like the bottle. It is only a natural faculty but by the time it reaches death it is meant on pain of eternal condemnation to contain the supernatural wine of the Faith (Mk. XVI, 16). The Faith is a supreme gift of God by which a man’s reason is supernaturally elevated to believe , but if that faculty of reason is fouled up by human errors and misbeliefs, then like the dirty bottle it risks fouling up God’s wine of belief, however divine that belief is in itself. Now just a little dirt in the bottle will spoil the wine it contains, but modernism in the mind is such a radical error that it will spoil, or undermine, any Faith poured into that mind. And as wine poured into a dirty bottle cannot help being spoiled, so Catholic Faith poured into a modern mind can hardly help being undermined. So teach Pius X, de Corte, Calderón and Madiran, along with all others who have grasped the full objective malice of a modernist mind.

So how does Madiran in particular prove that the French bishops in the 1960’s were out of their Catholic minds? He starts out from an official declaration of theirs in December of 1966 (p. 40) where they affirm that “for a philosophical mind,” the words “person” and “nature,” crucial for Christology (Catholic theology of Christ) have changed their meaning since the time of Boethius (who hammered out the definition of “person”) and of Aquinas (who did similarly for “nature”). In other words, for the French bishops modern philosophy has left behind the Church’s classic philosophy embedded in unchanging Church doctrine, so that for them, thomism is obsolete “for a philosophical mind,” and to be discarded.

But in a Church whose doctrine always corresponded to what never changes in extra-mental reality, this perspective of the French bishops is absolutely revolutionary. It can only mean, says Madiran (43), that they are accepting the Copernican revolution in philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), who placed “reality”no longer outside but inside the mind. However (45, 46), there is no obligation, except in Kantian philosophy, to accept this internalising of reality. Only on its own premisses must one arrive at its unreal conclusions. By their moral choice of Kant over Aquinas, the French bishops were in fact demonstrating their implicit apostasy (50) and their anti-natural religion. They were declaring their independence from God’s Truth by their rejection of God’s reality, and of the Order which He implanted in Nature (60–63).

Madiran concludes his Part I by saying that whereas Thomism corresponds to the human experience of all times and all places (66), Kantism has cut the French bishops mentally adrift, like the modern age they so seek to please (67).

Kyrie eleison.

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.

Madiran’s Foreword

Madiran's Foreword on October 3, 2020

In the Foreword to his book on The Heresy of the 20th Century Jean Madiran begins with the direct statement that it is the Catholic bishops who are responsible for the heresy of the 20th century (p.17 in the 2018 re-edition of the book from via.romana@yahoo.fr). Knowing that he will be accused as a mere layman of speaking out of turn, he states defiantly (28) that when the shepherds or bishops have turned into wolves or destroyers of the Faith. he needed as a baptised Catholic neither to ask for, nor to be given, any mandate to defend the Faith

And he makes (26) a crucial distinction which announces the thesis of his whole book. Heresy in the strict sense of the word means the wilful denial of what one knows to be a defined proposition of the Faith, but in the broad sense it means the acceptance of a whole teaching radically alien to the Faith. The heresy he will be attacking is in this broad sense, going far beyond the contradiction of just any one proposition of the Faith. The “20th century heresy” is to be found rather “in the night, in emptiness, in nothingness.”

And how did the French bishops get emptied out? Madiran writes (20) that for 100 years, reaching back then to the middle of the 19th century, they had been out of touch with Rome, at that time the truly Catholic Rome of Pius IX and the Syllabus, because their whole mentality (21) had slipped away from Rome. Theirs was Catholic discipline without conviction, Catholic obedience without understanding of what the obedience was for. In a few words Madiran is hitting on the essence of the pre-conciliar Church: under the influence of the modern world, a progressive loss of Catholic faith had resulted in a Church where the appearances were still standing but the substance behind the appearances was gone. How the true Church needed to resist that new Revolutionary world the anti-liberal Popes did lay out, especially Popes Pius IX, Leo XIII and Pius X in their social teaching, but of their Encyclicals Madiran (23) says that the bishops in the 1950’s knew virtually nothing.

Graver still for Madiran, foreshadowing the whole Part VI of the book to come, the 20th century heresy of these bishops was their all-engulfing faithless mentality, which denies that there is any such thing as the natural law (24). Magnetised by the modern world, infected by its liberalism, they had long been mentally slipping away from Rome and rejecting its social doctrine, but in the 1950’s they were still mouthing certain formulae of the old catechism. However, in their hearts all sense of the natural law was being lost, and this meant that in the years immediately following the Council they were ready to lay hands on dogma and the catechism which they had left up till then outwardly intact. Thus their disagreement with Rome on social doctrine contained implicitly that total uprooting of the Christian religion from which the entire Church suffered in the aftermath of the Council (25).

For if there is no natural law or rational order embedded by God in all of Creation around us, then all reason and faith are shipwrecked, and while the formulae of the Gospel and the dogmatic definitions may for a while be accurately recited and repeated, their substance has been drained out and all religion has been radically subverted. Bishops without natural law have no more access to the Gospel or to dogmatic definitions. They can no longer preserve or hand down anything (26). They are ripe to swing left towards the substitute religion of modernity, which is Communism (26).

And to conclude the Foreword, Madiran appeals to a compatriot who foresaw this decadence in the clergy even before the First World War. Charles Péguy (1873–1914) wrote in 1909 that the clergy (30) were successfully destroying Christianity by wanting it to progress with the times. They were themselves losing the faith (32), accepting its disappearance as something natural.

Kyrie eleison.

Trap Closing?

Trap Closing? on January 12, 2019

And so Church and world have staggered into another calendar year with everything coming into place for a third World War to wipe mankind off the face of the earth. And these “Comments” have reached their 600th issue when it seems just yesterday that they were celebrating their 500th issue. The world is spinning at a giddy pace – in Latin, “volvitur orbis” – but Almighty God is in full command, and His Cross is firmly planted, nor does it budge – “stat crux.” God gives a great degree of liberty to His enemies to act as His scourge upon a godless generation, but the scourging is for their good, to separate the sheep from the goats and to stop the sheep from sliding into Hell. And let His enemies not think that they will get the better of Him – He used the Assyrians to chastise the Israelites, but woe to the Assyrians if they thought they would escape His justice! – Isaiah X, especially verse 15 – God is not mocked.

But at the very heart of the world’s problems is the unprecedented problem of the Catholic Church. The Church depends on its hierarchy of bishops and priests, so it was logical that if God planned for His Church to decline before the end of the world (Lk. XVIII, 8), then the hierarchy would be involved in the decline, and that was the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965). The time for their holding strong had lasted from the Counter-Reformation in the 1500s, four admirable centuries of Catholicism, but after that resistance they gave way, and replaced God’s Catholic Church with their own Newchurch, or Conciliar Church. In the 1970’s there was still enough faith in Catholics to make possible a serious continuation of the resistance, for which Archbishop Lefebvre and his Society of St Pius X provided a lead, but after another 40 years his successors gave up that effort, and then Catholics were more abandoned than ever.

Today the life still seems to be draining out of them. It is an illusion to act or to react as though we are still in the 1970s. “Volvitur orbis.” The world has moved on, and with it, the Church. Extreme conditions call for extreme measures. As one once thriving Catholic institution after another turns slowly into a shell-game, Catholics turn slowly into walking ghosts of their former selves, and it seems as though there is little they can do about it. Nor are rhetoric or fine words the answer. The fine words are worn out, and the rhetoric is hollow. Catholics depend on their hierarchy, and their hierarchy is stricken. The Shepherd is struck, and the sheep are scattered, and it is no use their turning to the stricken Shepherd. He is gone!

A recent piece of news, or rumour – the geometry is variable, according to public reaction – is that the Roman sub-Congregation of Ecclesia Dei (ED) , founded by Rome immediately after the Society’s 1988 Consecrations, to reach out to Catholics tempted to follow Archbishop Lefebvre instead of Rome, is going to be re-absorbed into the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF). Apparently the re-absorption was due to be announced on December 20, but perhaps Rome thought twice. For while the Society’s present leaders might be only too happy to renounce the special outreach of ED and to put an end to their own “schism” (as they see it) by their coming fully under the “normal” CDF, there may still be enough Catholics Catholic enough to want Rome to make at least some gesture still in favour of Tradition. But ED is long since a shell-game. Both Rome and the Society leaders want the Roman trap to be closed . . .

Then what do Catholics do who have the Faith and want to keep it? First of all, take stock. The Church building in Rome was cemented by 250 years’ worth of the blood of martyrs, blood gushing red, including of many young girls. Where are the potential martyrs today? Almighty God has had enough of Catholics growing over centuries weaker and weaker in the Faith, and He is bringing back the lions to make some worthy candidates for Heaven. Secondly, let us gird our loins accordingly, prepare to play the man, as did those girls (without a trace of feminism), and humble ourselves beneath the Wisdom and Justice of God. Thirdly, let us remember that many presently last may soon be first, and vice versa. And fourthly, always, “Watch and pray, watch and pray, Fifteen Mysteries every day.”

Kyrie eleison.

“Diabolical Disorientation”

“Diabolical Disorientation” on November 24, 2018

For a long time now there are Catholics who have judged, especially if they are familiar with the judeo-masonic plot to destroy the Church, that the churchmen governing the Church since Vatican II are true criminals. But many Catholics, because of the charity and respect for priests that is ingrained in them, have hesitated to draw such a drastic conclusion. However, in 2018 the rotten fruits of Vatican II are showing more and more clearly. Here is a testimonial from an American priest outside the SSPX:—

It is necessary to take a hard stance on the situation within the Church. The words of Sister Lucy, “diabolical disorientation” call to mind an interview published in 2001 in the Vatican magazine, 30 Days. Fr. Gabriel Amorth, chief exorcist for the Vatican at that time, was commenting on the newly revised rite of exorcism. He claimed that the Newritual is so watered down that it is virtually ineffective against the Devil. Sister Lucy was correct – here is”diabolical disorientation,” if ever there was, but it has become far worse since 2001. Why would Satan have stopped there? That was just the beginning.

For instance, there are those who say that the new Rite of Priestly Ordination is invalid, while the use of the traditional Rite is forbidden. For goodness’ sakes, why? Is it the plan of the Newchurch to rid the world of a valid priesthood? How could one better pave the way for the Anti-Christ? Without a valid form of exorcism, as Fr. Amorth states, and without a valid priesthood, is not mankind defenceless against the Devil? The powers-that-be, and have been since Vatican II, set out on a very swift and deliberate path. I am thoroughly convinced of it. The evidence is simply too incriminating. The hierarchy of the Church no longer believes that the sacraments are actually relevant anyway. That is the position of Luther, who is now commemorated with a statue in the Vatican by the current Pontiff – it’s total madness!

As for the world, the United States is in a state of chaos. The country is completely divided and consumed with hatred for all that is right and just. It hates all that stems from God and it revels in dispute and ugliness. The Church which once stood as a place of comfort and peace, seems to have become irrelevant. The New Mass is enough to make one wish that all the Newbishops were dead!

I sincerely do not think that the Church can be restored by human means. The diabolical influence runs too deep, and the true intentions of Vatican II are now being made manifest. Fifty years of brainwashing and of forced compliance have made Catholics blind, and, even worse, indifferent to what is happening. The Devil seems to have been successful in destroying what was once the Church. Archbishop Lefebvre mounted a rescue operation, but now Satan means to infiltrate and destroy all that remains of the Archbishop’s SSPX, and Tradition. Slowly but surely the Devil is luring them in, just as he did with the pre-conciliar bishops. The Society’s rulers may know that they have gone wrong, but if they insist on playing with fire nevertheless, they will inevitably get burnt.

So it may seem to be man who rules here below in Church and world, but it is undoubtedly diabolical influence that is driving the confusion and utter madness. Sceptical reactions of most Catholics have made me hesitate to name the churchmen as the true culprits, but one can hesitate no longer. If Scripture on the Apocalypse applies, then maybe nothing can be done to stop the disorder, and Christ alone will restore order. He says there will be only a remnant left.

Kyrie eleison.