Catholic doctrine, dogma, Deposit of Faith

“Excommunications” Lifted

“Excommunications” Lifted on January 24, 2009

As of course a large number of readers already know, a Decree dated Jan. 21 from the Congregation of Bishops in Rome (not Ecclesia Dei) “remitted” the “excommunicating” Decree of July 1, 1988, so that the four Society of St. Pius X bishops, then declared to be “excommunicated,” are now “re-incommunicated.” In my opinion this latter Decree is a great step forward for the Church without being a betrayal on the part of the SSPX.

It is a great step forward for the Church because if the Church’s problem ever since Vatican II has been a separation of Catholic Authority from Catholic Truth, with this Decree Catholic Authority has taken a decisive step back towards their re-union. Just as after the Motu Proprio of July, 2007, nobody could any longer say that the true rite of Mass was banned by Rome, even if they can still behave as though it is, so too now nobody can any longer say that Catholics holding to Tradition are “outside the Church.” Certainly a number of Conciliarists will go on behaving as though they are, but they clearly no longer have the Pope on their side only. The difference is enormous!

Of course there is still a long way to go before the neo-modernists in Rome, conscious or unconscious, realize – if ever! – how they mistake the Faith, but as the old proverb says, “Rome was not built in a day,” and it will not be repaired in a day. The fact is that “Half a loaf is better than no bread” – ask a hungry man! – so meanwhile let us know how to thank God for this major shift of the rudder of the Conciliar Church. Let us then thank the Blessed Virgin Mary whose intervention will have been decisive, thanks to the nigh on one and three quarter million rosaries offered to her for this intention, by a number of yourselves amongst others. And let us thank and pray for Benedict XVI and all his collaborators who helped to push through this Decree, despite, for instance, a media uproar orchestrated and timed to prevent it.

However, by asking for and accepting such reconciliation with the Conciliar Church, is not the SSPX threatening to lead the way back into Conciliarism? In no way! No doubt some Conciliarists in Rome are hoping that the Decree will serve to draw the SSPX back into the fold of Vatican II, but the Decree itself, as it stands, commits the Society to nothing more than to entering into those discussions to which the Society committed itself in 2000 when it proposed the liberation of the Mass and the ending of the “excommunications” as pre-conditions in the first place.

Then are such discussions without danger? Certainly not! But St. Peter says we should always be “ready to satisfy every one that asks you for a reason of that hope which is in you” (I Pet. III, 15). How can the SSPX not rejoice in the opportunity to lay out in Rome, before the Roman authorities themselves, the profound doctrinal reasons which we believe to be at the root of the Church’s present distress? Woe unto us Catholics of Tradition if we were not ready to give reason for that hope which is in us for the rescue of the Church! So continue to pray the Rosary, dear Catholics, for the possible realization and outcome of such discussions, so that they may serve first, last and foremost, the interests of God, of God, of God.

Kyrie eleison.

Come, Lord!

Come, Lord! on January 10, 2009

If the rolling crash of finance and economics will help to pull families together and even impose some hunger, it will be a blessing, a blessing in disguise maybe, but still a blessing, if one listens to what a family physician practising medicine in the Eastern United States has to say about the current state of his patients. Here are a few of his observations (more may appear in an upcoming issue of the “Angelus”):

“There is a war on fertility taking place. A soft eugenic war, which chooses who lives, is being waged against the American people, according to a Fabian program of gradualism and incrementalism, to get rid of social problems, e.g. poverty and old age, by getting rid of the people! Contaminated food and water serve in this war. Also anti-depressant pills, all of which stop the reproductive function. Sperm counts are way down.

“Our food is no good, and people know it. The more natural diet of poor people is healthier than that of the well-to-do. When deer face a choice between natural corn and manipulated corn, they make straight for the natural corn! Hispanics and blacks still have some common sense, but the disintegration of the family amongst the white people is causing a loneliness, loneliness, loneliness, which is pushing them to eat their unnatural food for comfort. Cases of diabetes have doubled in the last ten years. Recently I had in my office a 14-year old weighing in at 393 lbs! And youngsters like him are more and more common. People are overfed yet undernourished. Children fed in the way they are being fed today will not live. Drugs like Ritalin only calm them down externally because they stimulate them internally. Modern pills are dangerous, liable to upset people’s brain-chemistry for ever, like in the Soviet Gulag. As a patient said to me recently, ‘I just don’t feel right any more’.

“But the genocide is not only physical. People are being deprived of their faith as of their nutrition. The slow, rich, Catholic culture is going, going, gone, to be replaced by a toxic Protestant anti-culture, pushing frenetic parents, for instance, to orchestrate their children’s lives at such a fast pace that they cannot grow normally, and their attention span is destroyed. People are profoundly out-matched by this anti-culture. They do not stand a chance. They cannot listen any more. They can only believe what they see on television. They are despondent, but it is tough for anyone like me to go up against what is supposed to be “science” in the attention-deficit culture.

“The Novus Ordo religion is no help because it is part of the problem! It is saturated in female hormones, and has nothing with which to go up against the anti-culture. I completely understand that to get through to the modern world, Heaven may need to resort to a miraculous world-wide Warning, such as we were told of at Garabandal in the 1960’s. Such a warning fits the condition of my patients like a key fits a lock.” End of doctor’s quote.

Come, crash! Come, Warning! Come, Lord Jesus! (Apoc. XXII, 20)

Kyrie eleison.

Campos Resilient

Campos Resilient on December 20, 2008

Catholics regularly ask, “What has happened to Campos?” They are referring of course to the Brazilian diocese which Bishop de Castro Mayer, lone hero of the post-Conciliar episcopate alongside Archbishop Lefebvre, maintained in Catholic Tradition until his death in 1991, but which his second successor, Bishop Rifan, led back under the Roman authorities ten or so years later. The question then is, how well is Catholic Tradition faring in the Campos now under Roman control?

And the answer is that the 40-plus-year war between Catholicism and Conciliarism is unfolding along the usual lines: the laity who cleave to Tradition are tranquil in their Faith; the best of the priests now under, ultimately, neo-modernist Rome are suffering from split loyalties; their bishop, loyal to the same Rome – or to his own ambition – is manoeuvring all the time to Conciliarise the work of Bishop de Castro Mayer.

Ambition is the only explanation that the most clear-sighted layfolk can find for the defection to neo-modernist Rome of Bishop Rifan. These layfolk say, “If he was wrong to follow Tradition for so long, why should he be right now? The valid books he wrote then, are they invalid now?” The Bishop threatens them with taking away their priests. Reply of one of these layfolk: “Your Excellency, that’s entirely up to you. As for me, at Easter I will bring in a priest from outside, if necessary.” Over such souls the Bishop has lost all influence.

Some of the laity say that nothing has changed in the eleven parishes of Tradition, and they declare that Bishop Rifan can do no wrong. Others notice the beginning of changes, for instance how the priests no longer tell the people to throw out the television set because it is enough to keep it under control. Logically, for a bishop and priests letting go of the complete truth, their preaching is tending to become more authoritarian. However, they are liable to back down where they sense a resistance which would diminish the numbers of their flock.

Typically, the clear-sighted laity, in particular a group of some 180 souls in three chapels of the Traditional parish of Vari Sai, are turning to priests uncompromisingly Traditional to say Mass for them and to maintain their Faith. Long term, their hope is in the Society of St. Pius X, which is the major support system of such priests, and which is showing no signs of being about to fall in with the neo-modernists of Rome. But the struggle must continue. As Our Lord says, “If these days were not shortened . . .”

Kyrie eleison.

Masterly Confusion

Masterly Confusion on November 15, 2008

Ever since Vatican II (1962–1965), a number of intelligent and serious Catholic souls have striven to prove that the changes made to the Latin Church’s sacramental rites by Pope Paul VI in particular render these rites automatically invalid. One might reply, if only it were that simple! But simplicity is no substitute for truth.

Here is how one such soul seeks to prove that the new rite of priestly Ordination is automatically invalid, and his argument is not without value:

Major: Wherever the words of a sacramental Form, essential to the validity of the sacrament, are significantly changed, or wherever the same words are being given in context a significantly different meaning, the Form, and with it the sacrament, can only be invalid.

Minor: Now the words themselves of the new Form of priestly Ordination have not been significantly changed, but in the context of the new rite taken as a whole, the same word of “priest” is being given a significantly different meaning, in accordance with the Council’s total revolutionizing of the Catholic priesthood.

Conclusion: Therefore never can a priest be validly ordained with the new rite.

In this argument, there is no problem with the Major, which is Catholic doctrine. As for the Minor, it is true that the words of the Form have remained essentially intact. It is also true that the whole drift of Vatican II and the post-Conciliar reforms is towards an emptying out of the Catholic priesthood, as of the whole Catholic religion, to replace it with a religion of man. But the argument above, to arrive at its conclusion, would have to prove that Conciliar documents and reforms in themselves positively exclude the Catholic priesthood and religion, because so long as the new rite can be taken not to exclude the true priesthood, it can still be used validly to ordain a true priest.

Alas (for purposes of clarity), the will of Paul VI as seen in all his reforms (and now of Benedict XVI) is so to introduce the new religion of man alongside the Catholic religion of God as to include and not exclude the latter! Now any sane mind cannot stand the idea of 2 and 2 being 5 in such a way as not to exclude their being 4. But Conciliar minds are not sane. They want to apostatize while still remaining Catholic! Thus the new rite of Ordination may omit many features of the Catholic ordination, but it introduces nothing that positively excludes a true ordination. If only it did! Then it could no longer deceive so many souls into thinking that it presents no problem for Catholics. Here is the problem: the drift of the text is to invalidate the true priesthood (2+2=5), but the text may still be used validly (2+2=4)! Sister Lucy of Fatima called it “Diabolical disorientation.”

Kyrie eleison.

Sinister Fashions

Sinister Fashions on November 8, 2008

There reached me today an interesting letter from a German wife and mother in her early 50’s, who was born and bred in Communist Czechoslovakia, but who by motherhood and the grace of God found her way out of the modern scene and back to traditional values, to the Catholic Faith in particular. Now she is planning to help write a book about her experiences and conclusions. Here are two paragraphs from her letter:

“Thanks to my previous career as a photographic model, I came to know what goes on behind the scenes of fashion design. It is shattering to realize how trends in fashion are forced on women with one deliberate end in view – the destruction of their femininity and the stripping away of their dignity as women.

“Every year from Paris and Milan to London, fashion-designers put on display ready-to-wear clothing in which any ‘fashion-conscious’ woman is presented almost exclusively as a male or a woman of the street. One glance at a fashion-magazine like Vogue is enough for one to sense the all-embracing dictatorship of fashion, which brooks no resistance from behind its twisted mask of sensuality and provocation.” Strong words!

The womanliness of woman, tied to her natural destiny as mother, is so deep-seated in human nature that it is one of the last bastions to come under assault by the enemies of mankind. If the good German lady follows up their trail behind the scenes, she will stumble upon that massive plot against God and man which reaches back many centuries, and of which today’s onslaught on womanhood is all the more furious for being, as the plotters sense, one of the last battles they must win to achieve their final victory, as they think.

In this relentless war, one pressing need is to fight on today’s battlefields and not only on yesterday’s. Mother of virgins, Mother of mothers, obtain for the projected book to enable many souls to see how to take some first steps off the road to eternal damnation.

Kyrie eleison.

Youth Pleads

Youth Pleads on October 4, 2008

A 26-year old Buenos Aires student wrote to me one month ago with an earnest plea. Here it is:—

“ . . . I consider that your appreciation of the present situation in all areas is correct, and I agree. I have listened to conferences and read articles of yours, and I understand your pessimism and share it in part. It can hardly be avoided if one takes an overall view of the world in which we live. I have also heard from young folk of the SSPX what you think and say. In all humility, I earnestly beg of you, especially when you are addressing young people, male or female, please give your criticisms a positive slant. Please add to what you say some words of encouragement, hope and perseverance. Yours . . . . Patricio.”

Dear Patrick, I have much sympathy with your entreaty. You belong to a generation that has been gravely misled by a world that has for several centuries been going wrong, and is now on the brink of catastrophe, humanly speaking. With your head you recognize that the situation is as grave as I say it is, but your heart is nevertheless troubled. Here is Our Lord’s own answer:

“Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, do I give unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, nor let it be afraid” (Jn XIV, 27). And several verses earlier: “Let not your heart be troubled. You believe in God, believe also in me” (Jn XIV, 1).

In other words, in the agitation and distress being felt by the Apostles after the Last Supper as the wicked world is closing in on their Divine Master – just like today! – they are not to pretend that the world is not as wicked as they know it is, instead they are to activate their Catholic Faith!

Patrick, with your Faith you know, amongst other things, firstly that the Lord God has everything perfectly under control, and all the devils of Hell (and earth) cannot lift a finger without His permission. Secondly, that He has a master plan to bring an even greater good out of today’s rampant evil. Thirdly, that if today’s godlessness were not producing chaos, that would be a far greater catastrophe than its imminent crash will be, because the tranquil success of godlessness would mean that we human beings were meant to be no more than beasts.

Patrick, believe in God, believe also in Our Lord! And pray His Mother’s Holy Rosary.

Kyrie eleison.