Catholic Church

GREC – IV

GREC – IV on April 27, 2013

A lady having read the first “Eleison Comments” on GREC (EC 294, March 2) wrote to complain that I misrepresented GREC, the Parisian group of Catholics founded in the late 1990’s to bring together Traditionalists and mainstream Catholics so that they could think and talk peacefully with one another for the good of Mother Church. I am happy to correct errors of fact which she pointed out. I have no problem admitting personal faults of mine which she highlighted. However on one major point I must disagree with her.

As for the errors of fact, Mr Gilbert Pérol was French Ambassador to the Italian government, and not to the Vatican. Also he was not a “lay collaborator,” but a personal friend of Fr Michel Lelong, a White Father. Also GREC was launched not “in the salons of Paris,” but in the flat of the Ambassador’s widow, Mrs. Huguette Pérol, who, I was told, takes full responsibility for having founded GREC, purely to help the Church, and with the help of people “competent and concerned to be faithful to the Gospel and to Tradition.”

As for my faults, she wrote that I was “full of myself” and “ignorant,” that I lacked modesty and diplomacy, that I showed insufficient respect for the dead, and that I wrote with a sarcastic tone befitting neither an educated person nor a priest. Madam, how happy I would be if these were the worst faults for which I shall have to answer before God. Do pray for my particular judgment.

However, as to the sarcasm, let me plead that if I mocked the nostalgia of Catholics today for the Catholicism of the 1950’s, I was thinking not of Ambassador Pérol in person, but of the multitudes of present-day Catholics, who, not realizing why God allowed Vatican II to split the mainstream Church from Catholic Tradition in the first place, wish to return to that sentimentalized faith of the previous decade which led directly to Vatican II! Madam, the crucial point has nothing to do with subjective persons, it has everything to do with objective doctrine.

That is why I must disagree with you as to the competence of the people helping Mrs Pérol to found GREC. That a professional diplomat like Ambassador Pérol should have resorted to diplomacy to solve major problems of doctrine is misguided, but understandable. That a Conciliar priest like Fr Lelong should have encouraged such a diplomatic undertaking is graver, but still understandable, given how Vatican II undermined all doctrine by officialising subjectivism within the Church. What is much less easy to accept is the “competence and concern for the Gospel and Tradition” on the part of priests who were trained under Archbishop Lefebvre to understand the doctrinal disaster of Vatican II. Such priests should never have encouraged, let alone taken any active part in, an essentially diplomatic effort to solve an essentially doctrinal disaster, however well-intentioned that effort may have been.

And yet, even in their case the French proverb to some extent applies: “To understand everything means to forgive everything.” The Archbishop was of an earlier and saner generation. They are all children of the world shattered by two World Wars. All credit to them for resorting to his person for their priestly formation, and while he lived he raised us all up. But they never truly absorbed his doctrine, and so once he was dead they began within a few years to fall back. But he was right, and they, and GREC – forgive me, gracious lady – are wrong. Please God they may come right.

Kyrie eleison.

Holy Saturday

Holy Saturday on March 30, 2013

Holy Saturday in the life of Our Lord was that day between his appalling death on the Cross and his glorious Resurrection, when his human body, lifeless without its human soul, lay in the dark tomb, unseen to human eye. Our Lord’s enemies seemed so successfully to have crushed him that the Incarnate God was in complete eclipse, and only the faith of Our Lady in her Divine Son remained unshaken. All his other followers she had to sustain, because even the most devout of them felt bewildered and lost.

Now as being the Mystical Body of Christ, the Catholic Church follows the life’s course of his physical body. Down all its 2,000 years of history the Church has always been persecuted by the enemies of Christ, and in many parts of the world at various times it has been virtually wiped out. Yet surely it has never been going into complete eclipse like it seems to be doing today. God designed his Church as a monarchy, to be held together by the Pope, and we have just seen a Pope resigning, no doubt in part because he himself, mesmerized by modern democratic thinking, never fully believed in his own supreme office. Taking the papal tiara off his coat of arms, and signing himself always as “Bishop of Rome,” whatever were his intentions when he resigned in February, he surely helped, humanly speaking, to undermine the divine institution of the Papacy.

Certainly by Benedict XVI’s resignation and by the succeeding conclave the enemies of Christ will have been doing all they could for their part to undo the Papacy. By a just punishment of God for the universal apostasy of our age, they have received from him a great power over his Church. They have been working for centuries to get a stranglehold over the Vatican, and they are now entrenched there. With no intention of giving way to a pious little Society, they are, as Anne Catherine Emmerich saw in a vision 200 years ago, dismantling the Church stone by stone. Humanly speaking, today’s followers of Our Lord have as little seeming hope as they had on the original Holy Saturday.

But no more than Our Lord himself is the Catholic Church a merely human affair. In 1846 Our Lady of Salette said about our own times: “The righteous will suffer greatly. Their prayers, penance and their tears will rise up to Heaven, and all of God’s people will beg for forgiveness and mercy and will plead for my help and intercession. And then Jesus Christ in an act of his justice and great mercy will command his Angels to have all his enemies put to death. Suddenly the persecutors of the Church of Jesus Christ and all those given over to sin will perish, and the earth will become desert-like. And then peace will be made, and man will be reconciled with God, Jesus Christ will be served, worshipped and glorified. Charity will flourish everywhere . . . The Gospel will be preached everywhere . . . and man will live in fear of God.”

In other words, God will most certainly resurrect his Church from its present distress. When the eclipse becomes still darker, as it is sure to do, let us merely hold more closely than ever to the Mother of God, and let us resolve now not to weigh upon her then by our disbelief, as did Our Lord’s Apostles and disciples on the first Holy Saturday. Let us undertake to rejoice her Immaculate Heart with our unshakeable faith in her Divine Son and his one true Church.

Kyrie eleison.

“You Choose”

“You Choose” on March 23, 2013

What confusion reigns in the Church and so in the world! We see one after another the best of men, with perhaps the best of intentions, giving up the struggle and making the decision to resist no longer, to go with the flow, to follow the current, to do what everybody else is doing. Yet that flow remains godless, and it is condemned by God without appeal, because he does not change. No doubt he is right now appealing to the new Pope to do what is right, cost what it may.

Between 1966 and 1975 he seems to have appealed to a woman in France to get a French prelate to put in Paul VI’s own hands a series of divine messages calling for the Pope to lead massive pilgrimages of penance to the famous basilica of Vézelay (and, from 1972, to restore the Tridentine Mass). The messages are given the title of the Lenten Chant, Parce, Domine, Populo Tuo(Spare, O Lord, Thy People), They come with no official authorization but they fit Holy Week. Readers who care to read these brief extracts can judge for themselves if they ring true:—

16-X-65: The world is on the brink of catastrophe. However, do believe that the entreaty in prayer of a few humble souls has great power over My heart.

3-III-68:Tell the Holy Father to sing imploringly the Parce, Domine with his arms held up in the form of a cross, in front of the crowds that he is to gather together in Vézelay.

2-III-70:If My appeal is not heeded, the waters of My wrath will drown everything. What weeping and groaning there will be at that moment, but it will be too late.

13-II-71:Tell the priests to call for prayer and penance amidst collapsing Christendom, and to set the example themselves. Otherwise there will be massacres on French soil. If you refuse to send up to My Father cries of humble repentant prayer, you will perforce send up cries of terror. You choose! 25-III-71:My little children, if you do not want processions of love, you will have processions of hate. These are already starting. What more do you need to believe in My appeal to you?

28-IV-72:If they don’t want to genuflect in front of the Blessed Sacrament, they will genuflect in the salt-mines! 10-VII-72:If the Pope does not do what I have asked for, divine Justice will come down heavily on the world, and you will have to undergo such suffering that if you knew the details now, you would be frozen with terror. 15-VII-72:I appeal to My faithful children. Am I to find only deserters? If you knew, my children, what awaits you, how you would hasten to fulfil My desires. But justice will soon be done. You will cry out to Me in your terror, but it will be too late. 6-XI-72:Were I to show you what awaits you, you would spend entire nights in prayer at My feet, to keep the terrible chastisement away.

13-VII-73: The laity are presently the hope of the Church. Pray for your unfaithful shepherds.

2-V-75:In the evil times coming, Christian families will have to get together and work out how to look after the needs of My faithful priests, who will have to exercise their ministry hidden from public view . . . It is back to the catacombs. There is no other way.

Parce, Domine.

Undignified Dignity

Undignified Dignity on March 16, 2013

A reader has argued in favour of the Vatican II teaching on religious liberty. Even if the subject has often come up in “Eleison Comments,” her arguments are surely worth going through, because it is vital for Catholics today to grasp thoroughly the falsehood of that teaching. What the Council taught in paragraph #2 of its Declaration on Religious Liberty (Dignitatis Humanae), is that all men are to be free from all coercion by any other men or group of men when it comes to acting in private or in public in accordance with their beliefs. Moreover every human State must make this natural right into a constitutional or civil right.

On the contrary, all the way up to Vatican II the Catholic Church consistently taught that every State, as embodying God’s civil authority over God’s human creatures, is obliged as such to use that authority to protect and favour God’s one true Church, the Catholic Church of the Incarnate God, Our Lord Jesus Christ. Obviously, non-Catholic States will be condemned rather for their lack of faith than for not giving civil protection to that faith. Likewise Catholic States may refrain from prohibiting the public practice of false religions where such prohibition will do more harm than good for the salvation of the citizens’ souls. But the principle remains intact: God’s States must protect God’s true religion.

In fact the Conciliar teaching implies either that States are not from God, or that there is no one true religion of God. Either way it is implicitly liberating the State from God, and so putting the liberty of man above the rights of God, or, simply, man above God. That is why Archbishop Lefebvre said that the Conciliar teaching was blasphemy. And it is no use saying that the other paragraphs of DH contain good Catholic teaching. One gash by the iceberg was enough to sink the Titanic. DH#2 alone is enough to sink Catholic doctrine. But let us see the arguments in defence of the Council’s teaching.

1 DH is part of the Church’s Ordinary Magisterium, which must be taken seriously. DH came from the Church’s Magisters, or masters, yes, but not from the infallible Ordinary Magisterium, because DH contradicts the Church’s traditional teaching, as shown above. 2 DH merely makes clear human rights that are granted by natural law.Natural law puts the rights of man below, and not above, the rights of God. 3 DH does not negate the Catholic model for Church-State relations.It most certainly does! Paragraph #2 liberates the State from its intrinsic obligation to the one true Church. 4 DH is written in the context of the modern world where everybody believes in human rights. Since when must the Church be adapted to the world, and not the world to the Church? 5 DH does not teach that man has a right to error. If God’s State must grant a civil right to practise, in public, false religions, then God is being made to grant a right to error. 6 DH is a plea to modern governments to grant half a loaf, which is better than no bread.True Catholic doctrine is so logical and so coherent that to give away any of it is to give away all of it. And what sheep saved itself by offering itself to the wolf? 7 Catholics must not retreat from the modern world into a doctrinal ghetto.Catholics must do whatever they have to do, go wherever they have to go, in order not to give away the rights of God or compromise his honour. If that means martyrdom, so be it!

Kyrie eleison.

GREC – II

GREC – II on March 9, 2013

Before we continue with the story of GREC, namely the Parisian group of laity and clergy meeting from the late 1990’s onwards in pursuit of reconciliation between Vatican II and Catholic Tradition, we must consider the basic attitude of GREC participants. The Church’s future depends on those Catholics who will understand GREC’s error, i.e. how modern minds lose their grip on truth. To illustrate that attitude let us take at random four quotes, typical of dozens and dozens in the book For the Necessary Reconciliationby the Newchurch priest, Fr Michel Lelong, one of the founders of GREC. In a letter he wrote to the Pope in July of 2008 are to be found the first two quotes:—

“We also wish that the excommunications(of the four SSPX bishops in 1988) be lifted and that the SSPX recover its place within the Church to which it has so much to give. That is why we ask the authorities of the SSPX to put an end to the polemical statements and articles criticizing the Holy See.”Comment: (Has that not happened over the last 10 years?) But if polemics are so bad, why were a number of Church Fathers – and Archbishop Lefebvre – so polemical? Polemics are only that bad if unity is that good. But unity is only as good as that around which it unites.

“In our society so tempted by materialism, indifferentism and sectarisms, we think that in response to your request, Holy Father, all Catholics must strive together to be faithful to Christ’s recommendation, ‘Be united so that the whole world may believe’.”Comment: “United” around what? Around Catholic truth, or around the lie that Catholic truth is reconcilable with Vatican II? Then the primary and crucial question for Catholic unity is where Catholic truth is to be found. But GREC leaves questions of truth to the “theologians.” So non-theologians can be saved by lies!?

This letter of Fr Lelong was so well received by Benedict XVI that GREC leaders and sympathisers wrote again a few months later. Here are two more quotes from the second letter to the Pope:—

“For sure we were saddened that the Holy See’s recent proposals were not accepted by the SSPX authorities, but we know that to heal wounds amongst Catholics always requires generosity and patience to restore confidence on both sides and to make reconciliation possible.”Comment: Are wounds only ever to be healed, and never inflicted? Did Our Lord not twice use a lash across the backs of the money-lenders in the Temple? There is a God, his honour is to be defended above all things, and men can be wicked enough to understand nothing but the lash, be it physical or verbal.

“We think that lifting the excommunications would set in motion an irresistible process of drawing closer, with a view to an agreement between the Holy See and the SSPX, or at least an agreement with a large part of the SSPX priests and faithful.”Comment: indeed the friendly contacts between Rome and the SSPX were setting such a motion in process in January of 2009, and only an outburst from within the SSPX of the most horrible heresy of modern times – “anti-semitism” – stopped that process. But either Catholic reconciliation with Vatican II is no problem, or one has to say that that outburst was providential, because it also stopped, at least for a while, the false reconciliation.

In conclusion, GREC, like millions of modern Catholics, above all else seeks unity, non-polemics, reconciliation, agreement, etc. But where does the God of truth figure amongst all these sweet sentiments? Is he a sugar-daddy who blesses all men’s lies, just so long as they lie in unison?

Kyrie eleison.

Liberals Innocent?

Liberals Innocent? on February 23, 2013

Four weeks ago “Eleison Comments” answered the question whether liberalism is as horrible as it is supposed to be in the affirmative: implicitly, liberalism is war on God. There remained the question whether the many liberals who deny they are liberals are right to deny it. The answer is surely that all of us today are so soaked in liberalism that few of us realize how liberal we are.

Liberalism in its broadest sense is man’s liberating himself from the law of God, which a man does with every sin that he commits. Therefore in its broadest sense every sinner is a liberal, and so whoever admits he is a sinner must admit he is a liberal in this broad sense. However, it is one thing to break God’s law while still admitting that God is God and his law is his law. Such a sinner is merely a practical liberal. It is quite another to break God’s law while denying that God is God or that his law is his law. Such a liberal in principle is the liberalism of modern times.

It burst upon the scene with the French Revolution of 1789. The charter of that Revolution, the Declaration of Human Rights, was in effect a declaration of man’s independence from God. From now on, if any man obeyed God’s law, he was doing so purely by his own choice, and not as under any command or commandment of God. In that apparent obedience he would not be behaving like a liberal in practice, but underneath, in everything he did, he would be a liberal in principle. This is the modern liberalism of which Catholics today often accuse their adversaries. Are these adversaries right, almost as often to deny it? Subjectively, yes. Objectively, no.

Subjectively, yes, because ever since 1789 men have drunk more and more deeply of the false principles of the Revolution, so that if they are accused of liberating themselves from the law of God, they can sincerely reply, “What law? What God? What are you talking about?” To such an extent have God and his law been apparently wiped out. But objectively, no, because God and his law have most certainly not ceased to exist, and deep down inside themselves even modern men know it. It is “inexcusable” to say that he does not exist (Rom. I, 20), and his law is written on all men’s hearts (Rom. II, 15), whatever they may say with their mouths. The “sincerely” just mentioned needs inverted commas – it is worth only what it is worth before God’s judgment seat.

Then may those authorities of the Society of St Pius X presently seeking to blend the Society into the Conciliar Church deny that they are liberals? Subjectively they are no doubt persuaded that they are doing their best for the Church, but objectively they are unrepentedly seeking to put Archbishop Lefebvre’s anti-Revolutionary work under the control of Church officials intent upon making the liberal Revolution triumph once and for all. They say we must rejoin the visible Church because that is the Catholic Church. But the Anglican “church” is still visible, all over England. Does that make it Catholic? And the present SSPX leaders cannot be unaware of how they distort and suppress words of the Archbishop to make him fit their vision of the Church.

The sad truth is that these liberals never really understood what the Archbishop was all about. While he was alive they were spellbound, like so many of us, by his Catholic charisma, but they never grasped that faith. which was to his charisma as root is to fruit. They loved the fruit – all credit to them for that – but not long after he was gone, the fruit without the root began to wilt and die. It was inevitable that unless they understood his faith, they would change his Society into their own. That is what we have seen and are seeing. Heaven help us!

Kyrie eleison.