Catholic Church

Popes Fallible

Popes Fallible on September 13, 2014

Neither liberals nor sedevacantists appreciate being told that they are like heads and tails of the same coin, but it is true. For instance, neither of them can conceive of a third alternative. See for instance in his Letter to Three Bishops of April 14, 2012 , how Bishop Fellay could see no alternative to his liberalism except sedevacantism. Conversely, for many a sedevacantist if one accepts that any of the Conciliar Popes has really been Pope, then one can only be a liberal, and if one criticises sedevacantism, then one is promoting liberalism. But not at all!

Why not? Because both of them are making the same error of exaggerating the Pope’s infallibility. Why? Might it be because both of them are modern men who believe more in persons than in institutions? And why should that be a feature of modern men? Because from more or less Protestantism onwards, fewer and fewer institutions have truly sought the common good, while more and more seek some private interest such as money (my claim on you), which of course diminishes our respect for them. For instance, good men saved for a while the rotten institution of modern banking from having immediately all its evil effects, but the rotten banksters are at last showing what the institutions of fractional reserve banking and central banks were, in themselves, from the beginning. The Devil is in modern structures, thanks to the enemies of God and man.

So it is understandable if modern Catholics have tended to put too much faith in the Pope and too little in the Church, and here is the answer to that reader who asked me why I do not write about infallibility in the same way that the classic Catholic theology manuals do. Those manuals are marvellous in their way, but they were all written before Vatican II, and they tended to attach to the Pope an infallibility which belongs to the Church. For instance, the summit of infallibility is liable to be presented in the manuals as a solemn definition by the Pope, or by Pope with Council, but in any case by the Pope. The liberal-sedevacantist dilemma has been the consequence and, as it were, a punishment of this tendency to overrate the person and underrate the institution, because the Church is no merely human institution.

For, firstly, the Solemn Magisterium’s snow-cap on the Ordinary Magisterium’s mountain is its summit only in a very limited way – it is completely supported by the rock summit beneath the snow. And secondly, by the Church’s most authoritative text on infallibility, the Definition of the truly Catholic Council of Vatican I (1870), we know that the Pope’s infallibility comes from the Church, and not the other way round. When the Pope engages all four conditions necessary for ex cathedra teaching, then, says the Definition, he possesses “that infallibility which the divine Redeemer willed his Church to enjoy in defining doctrine.” But of course! Where else can infallibility come from, except from God? The best of human beings, and some Popes have been very good human beings, may be inerrant, i.e. make no mistakes, but as long as they have original sin they cannot be infallible as God alone can be. If they are infallible, the infallibility must come through, but from outside, their humanity, from God, who chooses to bestow it through the Catholic Church, and that infallibility need only be a momentary gift, for the duration of the Definition.

Therefore outside of a Pope’s ex cathedra moments, nothing stops him from talking nonsense such as the new religion of Vatican II. Therefore neither liberals nor sedevacantists need or should heed that nonsense, because, as Archbishop Lefebvre said, they have 2000 years’ worth of Ordinarily infallible Church teaching by which to judge that it is nonsense.

Kyrie eleison.

“Conciliar Church”?

“Conciliar Church”? on June 7, 2014

The expression “Conciliar church” obviously expresses a reality, something real, namely the mass of people and institutions professing themselves to be Catholic but in fact sliding into the practice of the new humanist religion of the Second Vatican Council. “Sliding,” because Conciliarism, or neo-modernism, is precisely designed to enable Catholics to maintain the appearances of the Faith while they empty out the substance. Catholics in the concrete can make this process as fast or as slow as they wish, they need not even take it all the way to its conclusion, but Conciliarism in the abstract is utterly opposed to Catholicism and, taken to its conclusion, it destroys both Faith and Church, as it was meant to do.

The process is not difficult to observe or to understand, but liberals at the head of the Society of St Pius X, seeking reconciliation with the Conciliarists in Rome, have done their best to confuse the question of the Conciliar church and the Catholic Church. For instance the Catholic Church is visible, they will say, and the Conciliar church is the visible church, so the Conciliar church is the Catholic Church, an argument dismissed years ago by Archbishop Lefebvre as “childish” (many churches are visible that are not Catholic). Equally childish is the argument that there is only one Church, so the Conciliar church and the Catholic Church must be one and the same (there are thousands of false churches).

The truth is not too complicated. The Catholic Church is a living organism, both divine and human, like its Founder, Jesus Christ. As divine, as being his Immaculate Bride, it cannot be corrupt or corrupted, but as being made up of sinful human beings, it can partially rot just like any other living organism. So one useful way to understand how the Conciliar church relates to the Catholic Church is to think of a rotten apple.

On the one hand the rot belongs to the apple. All rot was once apple. The rot is a corruption of the apple, a parasite on the apple, it could not exist without the apple and it remains firmly attached to the apple unless and until the rotten part falls off. Likewise Conciliarism belongs to the Catholic Church insofar as everything Conciliar was once Catholic, it is a corruption of the Catholic Church, a parasite on the Catholic Church, it could not exist without the Catholic Church, and it remains firmly attached to some part of the Catholic Church unless and until it destroys that part, as it was designed to do.

On the other hand the rot does not belong to the apple. No apple was ever meant to go rotten. All rot is a transformation of some apple, a corruption and parasite of apple, transforming it for the worse, resulting in something quite different from apple, something which nobody in his right mind would dream of eating or of saying that it was no different from apple. Likewise Conciliarism does not belong to the Catholic Church, it is a corruption of something Catholic and is a parasite on whatever is Catholic. It transforms (a human part of) the Catholic Church for the worse, resulting in something essentially non-Catholic which no Catholic in his right mind would call Catholic or want to associate with, on pain of losing his faith.

In brief, Conciliarism is rot, and the “Conciliar church” is the one divine-human Church being rotted in one or other of its human aspects. Of course the Catholic Church will last to the end of the world (Mt. XXVIII, 20), while the “Conciliar church” is merely one in a long line of parasite churches down the ages, living on what they rot and rotting what they live on. A plague on all liberals, confused and confusing!

Kyrie eleison.

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.