Catholic Church

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.

Bleeding Church

Bleeding Church on May 5, 2018

A colleague resisting the change of Archbishop Lefebvre’s Society of St Pius X into Menzingen’s Newsociety, just like the change of the Catholic Church of Tradition into the Newchurch of Vatican II, has written some interesting considerations, translated here below. They were private, but they are too precious not to be shared more widely. A colleague of his had written to him expressing the hope for Easter that “the Church (and the SSPX) might soon rise from the dead.” He replied:—

A 60-year old man who I take to be wise, said to me on Holy Saturday, “The Church must be crucified as was her divine Master on Good Friday . . . we are now living through Good Friday . . . . Holy Saturday is still to come, and it will last a while yet.”

To which I would like to add a few thoughts.

The Church is by no means about to rise again, rather it is going to bleed to death in a most painful way until it even seems to be no longer there. Whether the SSPX (above all its priests) will be part of this glorious bleeding to death, Heaven alone knows. In any case it is the death by bleeding which is sowing seed for the resurrection.

If the SSPX refuses to belong to the bleeding Church by wanting to continue to work its way little by little into the multi-religious community presided over by Pope (?) Francis – and Menzingen and Fr Schmidberger have been at work for years to turn the Society into another such Fraternity of St Peter – then the Society will still bleed to death, because one way or another the persecution is probably coming for everybody, especially for people wearing the cassock. However, the Society will not then be suffering as glorious Apostles of the end-times, but rather, alas, as a punishment for their material comfort, lukewarmness and unfaithfulness to the Archbishop who founded their Society . . .

(If there is above a question mark against “Pope Francis,” it is because for objective reasons there is at the least some uncertainty, some doubt, as to whether he is Pope. That is precisely why in 1988 in the gentlest of ways Heaven separated the Society from a Rome which had become somewhat schismatic . . . . Indeed we have no communion in the Faith with the present authorities in the Vatican, we are truly outside of their communion, or ex-communicated – which is our good fortune and to our honour – just as on the afternoon of the first Good Friday, the Church severely reduced in numbers was also to be found only outside of Jerusalem, on Calvary . . . )

In truth, nothing throws so much light on the present state of the Church as the Gospel narrative of the Passion of Christ, and conversely one can say that nothing throws so much light on the Gospel narrative as the present desolation of the Church. And just as then the Apostles themselves, even after being repeatedly warned by Our Lord of his coming Passion (Mt. XVI, 21; XVII, 21; XX, 17–19) could still not believe it was real when it came upon them, so too now many a good Catholic can hardly believe that it is the Church of Christ which has such tormenting problems and such inadequate Popes.

But God’s purpose in creating the universe was to share His divine happiness by populating His Heaven with rational creatures, angelic or human, that would freely choose to join Him in His Heaven. The key word here is “freely.” With the faculty of reason God gives to every human being capable of using it, also free-will, and He so balances circumstances for each of us as to make the choice real between Heaven and Hell. Therefore He allows as much freedom as possible for human beings to kill His own Son or to pull down His Son’s Church, but never so much freedom as completely to frustrate His Son or His Church. Therefore He allows unimaginable tribulations for His Church such as only time will fully tell between now and world’s end, but the wisdom of God reaches way beyond our little imaginations (Is. LV, 8,9).

Kyrie eleison.

Church Resurrection?

Church Resurrection? on March 31, 2018

And the day before Easter should be a good moment to think of how Mother Church is going to rise from her present stricken state. By our Catholic Faith we know with absolute certainty that she will rise again, and that she will last to the end of the world (Mt. XXVIII, 20). But it is a great mistake to think that she will rise this time by human means, because then I start believing for instance in human means to come to her rescue, like for instance “theological discussions” or diplomatic negotiations with her present masters in the Vatican.

Thus the theological discussions of 2009–2011 led nowhere, which is why we have heard almost nothing of them ever since, because they proved that the doctrinal gulf between Conciliar Rome and Catholic Tradition cannot be bridged. And diplomatic negotiations can lead at most to the mere appearance of a rescue for Tradition, because today’s Romans have 2000 years’ experience of diplomacy, and they do not want Tradition, because it is a serious obstacle in the way of their New World Order, where Our Lord Jesus Christ has no business to be doing any more reigning. The problem is a wholesale rejection of God on the part of mankind in general, and on the part of His own churchmen in Rome in particular.

Therefore the problem is not going to be solved by merely human means. As Cardinal Villot (1905–1979), a former Secretary of State in the Vatican under three Conciliar Popes (1969–1979), admitted on his deathbed, “Humanly, the Church is finished.” And it is a great lack of supernatural spirit, not without some arrogance, on the part of the present leaders of the Society of St Pius X to argue as they do that the Society must negotiate some settlement with the Church officials in Rome because there is no other solution for the crisis of the Church. Do these men really think that the Lord God is short of means to come to the rescue of His Church? Do they really think that the arm of God is shortened by the wickedness of men? Here speaks His prophet Isaiah (LIX, 1–3):—

1 Behold, the LORD’s hand is not shortened, that it cannot save, or his ear dull, that it cannot hear; 2 but your iniquities have made a separation between you and your God, and your sins have hid his face from you so that he does not hear. 3 For your hands are defiled with blood and your fingers with iniquity; your lips have spoken lies, your tongue mutters wickedness. 4 No one enters suit justly, no one goes to law honestly; they rely on empty pleas, they speak lies, they conceive mischief and bring forth iniquity.

Men’s iniquities are the problem. And is it likely that God has no solution? No. And is it likely that He wants men to play no part in His solution? No. And is it likely that what He wants them to do to save His Church is specially difficult or complicated? No. But is it likely that it will require some humility? Yes, because “God resists the proud and gives grace to the humble” (James IV, 6). And will it require some faith? Certainly, because “Without faith it is impossible to please God” (Heb.XI, 6). And is there any chance that God will not have told mankind, on the brink of destroying itself, what humble means He wants men to believe in and to apply, for Himself to step in and save them from destruction? There is no such chance at all. Then what has He in fact told mankind for His Church to be able to rise again?

He said it through His Mother, at Fatima, in 1917, in Pontevedra in 1925, and in Akita in 1973. In Fatima: Russia must be consecrated to the Immaculate Heart of Mary by the Pope with all the Catholic bishops. In Pontevedra: Catholics must practise the Devotion of the First Saturdays. In Akita; Catholics must pray the Rosary, for the Pope, for bishops, for priests. Are these three points humble? Yes. Are they supernatural, requiring supernatural faith? Definitely. Are any of them too much to ask, for the Church to rise again, and for mankind to come back from the brink of destruction? Definitely not. Then let nobody complain that there is nothing they can do!

Kyrie eleison.