Catholic doctrine, dogma, Deposit of Faith

Various “Churches”

Various “Churches” on December 1, 2012

Much confusion reigns today over the identity of Our Lord’s true Church here on earth, and the variety of names by which it can be called. Easily most of the present confusion comes from the Church’s biggest problem of today, which is the diabolical Second Vatican Council (1962–1965). Let us attempt to disentangle some of the confusion.

“Church” derives from the Old English “cirice,” deriving in turn from the Greek word “kuriakon,” meaning “of the Lord.” Thus “Doma kuriakon” meant “house of the Lord,” and from naming the building, “church” came to mean also the people that were regularly to be found in the building.

“Catholic” Church names many a building, but principally the worldwide group of people (“katholos” in Greek means “universal”) who share one Faith, one set of Sacraments and one Hierarchy, all three having been established by the Incarnate God, Our Lord Jesus Christ, in his life on earth two thousand years ago. But from this original group of believers as instituted by Our Lord, other groups have regularly broken away, while still claiming to be Christ’s true Church. How then am I to know which is his true Church?

“Christ’s Church”has four Marks, as they are called. 1 One – above all by oneness of Faith Our Lord meant to unite his Church and not to found many churches (cf. Jn. XVII, 21–23: “That they may be one”). 2 Holy – Our Lord founded his Church to bring men to the All-Holy God and his holy Heaven (cf. Mt. V, 48: “Be you perfect”). 3 Catholic – Our Lord founded his Church for all men of all lands and all ages (cf. Mt. XXVIII, 19: “Going, teach ye all nations”). 4 Apostolic – Our Lord founded his Church as a monarchy, to be ruled by the Apostle Peter and his successors (cf. Mt. XVI, 18: “Thou art Peter and upon this rock (in Greek “petran”) I will found my Church”). Wherever these four Marks are, there is Christ’s true Church. Where they are lacking, there is not Christ’s Church.

“Conciliar Church”means the God-centred Catholic Church as fallen and still falling under the sway of the man-centred Second Vatican Council. Conciliarism (the distilled error of Vatican II) bears the same relation to the true Church of Christ as the rot of a rotten apple bears to the apple which it is rotting. Just as rot occupies the apple, depends on the apple, cannot exist without the apple, yet is quite different from the apple (as uneatable is different from eatable), so man-centred Conciliarism so occupies Christ’s Church that little of the Church is not more or less rotten, yet Conciliarism is so different from Catholicism that one can truly say that the Conciliar Church is not the Catholic Church. But the Catholic Church is visible. Isn’t the Conciliar Church also visible?

“Visible Church” means all the buildings, officials and people of the Church that we can see with our eyes. But to say that the Catholic Church is visible, therefore the visible Church is the Catholic Church, is as foolish as to say that all lions are animals so all animals are lions. That part alone of the visible Church is Catholic which is one, holy, universal and apostolic. The rest is various sorts of rot.

“Official Church”means the Church as led by, and following, its visible officials. Since these today are largely Conciliar, so the “official Church” is largely Conciliar and not Catholic, according to the four Marks. Similarly “Mainstream Church” means today’s official Church as opposed to the “Traditionalist” remnant. However, let nobody say there is nothing one, holy, universal or apostolic left in the mainstream Church, any more than everything in the “Traditionalist” remnant shows forth the four Marks. Wheat and chaff are always mixed in Christ’s Church (cf. Mt. XIII, 24–30).

Kyrie eleison.

“Marcellus Initiative”

“Marcellus Initiative” on November 10, 2012

After last week’s presentation of details of the “Marcellus Initiative” set up to facilitate donations to the cause of an « expelled » bishop, a few readers reasonably asked what the “Initiative” would be for. To begin with, it will cover his personal expenses of moving out of Wimbledon, maybe out of London, and then living elsewhere. Over and above those expenses, the word “Initiative” was chosen deliberately to leave options open. However, it is important that nobody should think that their donations will any time soon go to the setting up of a replacement for the Society of St Pius X or a substitute seminary. There are good reasons for not hurrying to do either.

As for an alternative to the SSPX, we must learn the lessons to be drawn from its present severe crisis. The Catholic Church runs on authority, from the Pope downwards, but our Revolutionary world has today so broken down men’s natural sense of authority that few know how to command, and most men obey either too little or too much. We have, so to speak, run out of that peasant common sense that enabled Catholic authority to function. Thus as God alone could establish Moses’ authority by a sensational chastisement of rebels (cf. Numbers XVI), so in our day surely God alone will be able to restore the Pope’s authority. Will it be by “a rain of fire,” such as Our Lady of Akita forewarned in Japan in 1973? Be that as it may, oases of the Faith remain an immediate and practical possibility, and I will do my best to serve them.

Similar arguments apply to the re-starting of a classical Catholic seminary. One cannot make bricks without straw, says the old proverb. It is more and more difficult to make Catholic priests out of modern young men, say I. Supernatural qualities of faith, good will and piety go a long way, but grace builds on nature, and the natural foundations, such as a solid home and a truly human education, are more and more lacking. Of course there are still good families where the parents have understood what their religion requires of them to put their children on the path to Heaven, and where they are doing their heroic best. But our wicked world is set upon destroying all common sense and natural decency, of gender, family and country. With the best of good will, the children of today’s social environment remain in general more or less severely handicapped when it comes to perceiving or following a call of God.

Does that mean that God has given up on his Church, or that he means to leave us without priests for tomorrow? Of course not. But it does mean that no Catholic organisation set up tomorrow to save souls can be allowed to lose its vision of the soul-destroying nature of the Conciliar Church and the modern world. It does mean that priests can no longer be formed tomorrow to have a perfect knowledge of St Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiaewhile having little to no idea of how it applies in real life today.

By hook or by crook, tomorrow’s Congregations and seminaries must keep their grip on reality, and not get lost in dreams of how “normal” they are, or need to be. Can it be done? With God’s help, yes. But God is God, and for the salvation of souls tomorrow it may be that he will no longer resort to the classical Congregation or seminary of yesterday. For myself, I shall attempt to follow his Providence in the ordaining of priests – or in the consecrating of bishops. God’s will be done.

Kyrie eleison.

And Now?

And Now? on November 3, 2012

Last week’s news of the expulsion of one of the four bishops of the Society of St Pius X brought in a large number of e-mails of support and encouragement. To every one of you, many thanks. Such a serious division amongst the Society’s bishops is a great shame, but God has his reasons for allowing it to happen, and it is obvious that a number of you understand that the Faith comes before unity. Not division, but loss of Faith is the ultimate evil (I Cor.XI, 19; I Jn.II, 19). As to how the titanic war between the friends and enemies of that Faith will develop, I myself can see at this moment only the broad lines. Let me resort to three favourite quotations of Archbishop Lefebvre, which I think still apply today.

Firstly, “We must follow Providence, and not try to lead it.” If it is true that “Charity hopes all things” (I Cor. XIII, 7), then the Society may be given a little time yet to right itself before it is written off as one more Traditional group gone over to the enemy. That is why I said last week that SSPX priests might lie low for the moment to watch how things develop, while the laity might continue to attend Society Masses, but both must watch out (Mt. XXVI, 41) for contradictions in doctrine, for slackening in morals. The temptation will be to prefer comfort and routine over hardship and upheaval, as did thousands of priests and millions of layfolk after Vatican II, so that they ended up by losing the Faith. We are entitled to wait for Providence to show us which way is the way forward. We are not entitled to lose the Faith.

Secondly, “Time respects nothing done without it.” In other words, it takes time to build something solid. We may be in a hurry. God is not. The Archbishop took his time to build the Society. Vatican II concluded its devilry in 1965. Only 11 years later did the first large batch of priests come out of the Archbishop’s first seminary. Patience. He had not rushed.

Thirdly, “Good is not noisy and noise is not good.” The public domain today is thoroughly poisoned. To try to reach a large audience of modern men is to lay oneself wide open to the risk of the tail wagging the dog, of the audience bending the message, and the messenger, to suit its own corruption. The archbishop rarely went after the media, but they were always after him, because his message was unbending, and that was proof that “Our faith is our victory over the world” (I Jn.V, 4), and not our making noise on the public scene.

In brief, I think that the situation of today’s Catholic Resistance calls for no hurried action, but for a thoughtful measuring of men and events until the will of God becomes more clear. I think – I may be wrong – that he wants a loose network of independent pockets of Resistance, gathered around the Mass, freely contacting one another, but with no structure of false obedience such as served to sink the mainstream Church in the 1960’s, and is now sinking the Society of St Pius X. If you agree, by all means make contributions to the St Marcel Initiative because they will certainly come in useful, maybe sooner than I think. For myself, as soon as my situation stabilizes in England, I am ready to put my bishop’s powers at the disposal of whoever can make wise use of them.

In the USA paper checks can be made out to St Marcel Initiative and mailed to St Marcel Initiative, P.O.Box 764, Carrollton, VA 23314, USA. Contributions by credit card or debit card or direct debit / bank wire may be made at www.stmarcelinitiative.com. For paper check contributions from the U.K. and the Eurozone, details as to where they may be sent will be provided as soon as possible.

Kyrie eleison.

Momentous Decision

Momentous Decision on October 27, 2012

So the exclusion from the Society of St Pius X of one of the four bishops consecrated for its service by Archbishop Lefebvre in 1988 is now official. It is a momentous decision on the part of the SSPX leaders, not for any personal reasons, but because of the removal of what many people took to be the single biggest obstacle within the SSPX to any false reconciliation between Catholic Tradition and Conciliar Rome. Now that he is gone, the SSPX may the more easily continue its slide into comfortable liberalism.

If the problem was merely his person, there might be no serious consequences. He is 72 years old (and “more or less gaga”) with not too many active years left ahead of him. He could be safely ignored, or further discredited if need be, and left to rant and rave in his isolated retirement. But if indeed his exclusion does mean the repudiation of that opposition to Rome which he represented, then the SSPX is in trouble, and far from resolving its interior tensions by having made an example of him, it is liable now to be racked with silent dissension or open contradiction.

This is because Archbishop Lefebvre founded the SSPX to resist the Council’s destruction of the Catholic Faith by its 16 documents, and of the practice of that Faith by the New Mass above all. Resisting the Council was built into the very nature of the Society. Now to undo a thing’s nature is to undo the thing. It would follow that with this exclusion the SSPX of Archbishop Lefebvre is well on its way to being undone, and it will be replaced by something quite different. Actually that transformation has been observable for many years. The exclusion is merely one final blow.

Not that the Archbishop was primarily, or only, against the Council. Primarily he was Catholic, a Catholic bishop, a true pastor of souls, as is clear from his writings prior to the Council. But once that unspeakable disaster for the Church had taken place, he soon saw that the most urgent task in defence of the Faith was to resist the Vatican II Revolution which was taking over millions and millions of Catholic hearts and minds. Hence his founding in 1970 of the SSPX which would use exclusively the Tridentine rite of Mass. Hence his famous Declaration of November, 1974, which was like a charter of the Catholic principles inspiring the SSPX’s resistance. Only the conversion and reversion of the Church authorities to the true Faith can justify the abandoning of those principles. And has such a conversion or reversion taken place? By no means. On the contrary.

And the future? To fill the vacuum left by abandoning the purposes of the Archbishop, probably the mainstream SSPX now hastens into the arms of Rome, especially if Benedict XVI’s conscience is driving him to end the “schism” before he dies. The bishop’s exclusion may or may not have been a pre-condition set by Rome for a Rome-SSPX agreement, but in any case it certainly favours one. SSPX priests who see clear might lie low for the moment and wait for a flock of chickens to begin to come home to roost. SSPX laity might attend SSPX Masses for the time being, but they should watch out for the moment when the transformation mentioned above begins to threaten their faith. As for the excluded bishop, any donations to him or his cause will have to wait a little until the necessary arrangements can be set up. But be sure of one thing: he is not thinking of retiring.

Hang tight, everybody. We are in for one “helluva” ride. Let’s just make that a ride to Heaven!

Kyrie eleison.

Home Reading

Home Reading on October 20, 2012

When a while back these “Comments” advised readers to fortify their homes in case public bastions of the Faith might, due to the wickedness of the times, prove to be a thing of the past, a few readers wrote in to ask just how homes might be fortified. In fact various spiritual and material means of defending home and family have been suggested in previous numbers of the “Comments,” notably of course the Holy Rosary, but one fortification has gone unmentioned which I think I would try in place of television if I had a family to defend: reading aloud each night to the children selected chapters from Maria Valtorta’s Poem of the Man-God. And when we had reached the end of the five volumes in English, I imagine us starting again from the beginning, and so on, until all the children had left home!

Yet the Poem has many and eloquent enemies. It consists of episodes from the lives of Our Lord and Our Lady, from her immaculate conception through to her assumption into Heaven, as seen in visions received, believably from Heaven, during the Second World War in northern Italy by Maria Valtorta, an unmarried woman of mature age lying in a sick-bed, permanently crippled from an injury to her back inflicted several years earlier. Notes included in the Italian edition (running to over four thousand pages in ten volumes) show how afraid she was of being deceived by the Devil, and many people are not in fact convinced that the Poem truly came from God. Let us look at three main objections.

Firstly, the Poemwas put on the Church’s Index of forbidden books in the 1950’s, which was before Rome went neo-modernist in the 1960’s. The reason given for the condemnation was the romanticizing and sentimentalizing of the Gospel events. Secondly the Poem is accused of countless doctrinal errors. Thirdly Archbishop Lefebvre objected to the Poem that its giving so many physical details of Our Lord’s daily life makes him too material, and brings us too far down from the spiritual level of the four Gospels.

But firstly, how could the modernists have taken over Rome in the 1960’s, as they did, had they not already been well established within Rome in the 1950’s? The Poem, like the Gospels (e.g. Jn.XI, 35, etc.), is full of sentiment but always proportional to its object. The Poemis for any sane judge, in my opinion, neither sentimental nor romanticized. Secondly, the seeming doctrinal errors are not difficult to explain, one by one, as is done by a competent theologian in the notes to be found in the Italian edition of the Poem. And thirdly, with all due respect to Archbishop Lefebvre, I would argue that modern man needs the material detail for him to believe again in the reality of the Gospels. Has not too much “spirituality” kicked Our Lord upstairs, so to speak, while cinema and television have taken over modern man’s sense of reality on the ground floor? As Our Lord was true man and true God, so the Poem is at every moment both fully spiritual and fully material.

From non-electronic reading of the Poem in the home, I can imagine many benefits, besides the real live contact between parents reading and children listening. Children soak in from their surroundings like sponges soak in water. From the reading of chapters of the Poem selected according to the children’s age, I can imagine almost no end to how much they could learn about Our Lord and Our Lady. And the questions they would ask! And the answers that the parents would have to come up with! I do believe the Poem could greatly fortify a home.

Kyrie eleison.

Sarto, Siri?

Sarto, Siri? on September 29, 2012

In a sermon for the Feast of St Pius X I found myself uttering « almost a heresy »: I wondered aloud whether Giuseppe Sarto would have disobeyed Paul VI’s destruction of the Church, if, instead of dying as Pope Pius X in 1914, he had died as a Cardinal in, say, 1974. Within the Society of St Pius X that must sound like a heresy because how can the wisdom of the heavenly patron of the SSPX be in any way flawed? Yet the question is not idle.

In the 1970’s Archbishop Lefebvre made personal visits to a number of the Church’s best cardinals and bishops in the hope of persuading a mere handful of them to offer public resistance to the Vatican II revolution. He used to say that just half a dozen bishops resisting together could have seriously obstructed the Conciliar devastation of the Church. Alas, not even Pius XII’s choice of successor, Cardinal Siri of Genoa, would make a public move against the Church Establishment. Finally Bishop de Castro Mayer stepped forward, but only in the 1980’s, by when the Conciliar Revolution was well ensconced at the top of the Church.

So how could the best of well-trained minds have been so darkened? How could so few of the best churchmen at that time not have seen what the Archbishop was seeing, for instance that the “law” establishing the Novus Ordo Mass was no law at all, because it belongs to the very nature of law to be an ordinance of reason for the common good? How could he have been so relatively alone in not letting such a basic principle of common sense be smothered by respect for authority, when the Church’s very survival was being placed in peril by Vatican II and the New Mass? How can authority have so gained the upper hand on reality and truth?

My own answer is that for seven centuries Christendom has been sliding into apostasy. For 700 years, with noble interruptions like the Counter-Reformation, the reality of Catholicism has been slowly eaten away by the cancerous fantasy of liberalism, which is the freeing of man from God by the freeing of nature from grace, of mind from objective truth and of will from objective right and wrong. For the longest time, 650 years, the Catholic churchmen clung to and defended reality, but finally enough of the engrossing fantasy of glamorous modernity worked its way into their bones for reality to lose its grip on their minds and wills. Lacking grace, as St Thomas More said of the English bishops in his time betraying the Catholic Church, the Conciliar bishops let men’s fantasy take over from God’s reality, and authority take over from truth. There are practical lessons for clergy and laity alike.

Colleagues inside and outside the SSPX, to serve God, let us beware of reacting like Giuseppe Siri when we need to be reacting like Giuseppe Sarto, with his magnificent denunciations of the modern errors in Pascendi, Lamentabiliand the Letter on the Sillon. And to obtain the grace we need in this most tremendous crisis of all Church history, we need tremendously to pray.

Layfolk, if horrors of modern life make you “hunger and thirst after justice,” rejoice if you can that the horrors are keeping you real, and do not doubt that if you persevere in your hunger, you will “have your fill” (Mt.V, 6). Blessed are the poor in spirit, the meek, and they that mourn, says Our Lord, in the same place. As for the surest protection against your minds and hearts being taken over by the fantasy, pray five, better fifteen, Mysteries a day of Our Lady’s Holy Rosary.

Kyrie eleison.