Catholic Truth

RIGHTEOUS CAUSE

RIGHTEOUS CAUSE on December 14, 2024

A Russian convert thunders against the West?

Only because he sees God’s foes the best!

Dear readers, beware. Today’s long quote below comes from the former president of Russia from 2008 to 2012 when he was filling in for Vladimir Putin, who was obliged by Russia’s Constitution at that time to step down for four years from the Presidency, even if Putin remained Prime Minister. To this day Dmitri Medvedev (1965- ) remains, upon information and belief, a close colleague of Putin, certainly a believer in what Putin is trying to achieve in the war with Ukraine, as shown by these words of his from December of two years ago. In Medvedev’s highly coloured denunciation of today’s rotten West, one may not agree with every detail, for instance the earliest European empires by which Portugal and Spain built a Rosary of Catholic nations from top to bottom of Central and South America, must have sent to Heaven hundreds of thousands of Catholic souls. However, as for the heart of the matter, Medvedev is absolutely right.

God exists. The Devil exists. Between the two of them is a pitched, and irreconcilable battle for the conquest of souls, by God to populate Heaven, by the Devil to populate Hell. God being the Creator and the Devil being a mere creature, then God could utterly paralyse the Devil at any moment that He wanted to. But He does not want to, because the more men have to struggle in this brief life to save their souls, the higher will be the quality of the souls saved, the more beautiful will be God’s paradise. So God is always giving a measure of liberty to the Devil to tempt and damn souls, but never so much liberty as to force souls to choose damnation. Even in the Garden of Gethsemane, Our Lord still tries to convert Judas Iscariot – “Friend, why are you here?” (Mt. XXVI, 50). All human life plays out against this battle between God and the Devil as its ultimate background, and to pretend one can be neutral is to side with the Devil.

This is what Medvedev sees so clearly in the war between Russia and the Ukraine: the West is rotten, it is the business of Russia to pour out its blood and treasure to clean out the rot. Surely Our Lady of Fatima thinks the same. Medvedev converted to Russian Orthodoxy at the age of 23. Most probably She obtained that grace for him. Here is what he said in 2022 – prepare to be shocked.

Everything against Russia today belongs to a dying world. It is a bunch of mad nazi drug-addicts, of zombies intimidated by them, and a huge pack of barking dogs coming out of the western doghouse. Together with them, a variegated herd of honking pigs and a narrow-minded middle class, originating from the collapse of the empire of the West, with the saliva of degeneracy dripping down their chins. They have neither faith nor ideal, unless it be the obscene morals they have invented and the norms of doublethink they have spread around, negating any of the morality granted to normal people. Here is why, by rising up against them, our fight has taken on a sacred character . . .

But then, you may object, why did you keep quiet for so long? We were weak, laid low by a sorry episode in our history. Whereas now we have fully woken up from that sticky half-sleep and from the mournful fog of these last tens of years in which the death of the Fatherland immersed us. Other countries were waiting for us to wake up, countries violated, enslaved and oppressed by the lords of darkness, who still dream of their monstrous colonial past, while they aspire to maintain their power over the world. Many countries gave up believing in their nonsense long ago, but they are still afraid of the colonial powers. Soon they will have to wake up. And when today’s rotten world order collapses, it will bury beneath the tons and tons of its wreckage all of its arrogant high priests, blood-stained followers, mocking servants and dumb zombies.

So what weapons do we have? They are various. We have the means of consigning all our enemies to a fiery hell, but that is not what we are about. We are listening to the Creator’s words in our hearts, and we are obeying what we hear. These words give us a sacred purpose, which is to stop in his tracks the supreme leader of Hell, whatever name anyone wants to give him . . . because his purpose is death. Our purpose is life. His weapon is one huge lie. Our weapons are the Truth. Here is why our cause is just. Here is why the victory will be ours!

Kyrie eleison.

SILENT MAJOR

SILENT MAJOR on December 7, 2024

In all things modern, Luther led the way?

Then heeding modern man must lead astray.

What on earth is a silent Major? Is it an army officer who does not talk much? Actually, no. It is a way of naming perhaps the most interesting feature of the book written by Archbishop Georg Gänswein, published last year, entitled “Who believes is not alone. My life beside Benedict XVI.” Gänswein was Pope Benedict’s choice to be his private secretary from 2003 to the Pope’s death on the last day of 2022. As secretary to the Pope for all those years, Gänswein was closely involved in affairs of the Catholic Church at the very top, and his book naturally relates interesting details of many of these affairs. However, from the standpoint of Catholic Tradition, what is of greatest interest is the Silent Major.

In logic, “Silent Major” names that essential part of a syllogism when it goes unmentioned, as one way of abbreviating a syllogism expressed in full, because the content of the Silent Major is supposedly too obvious to need mentioning. A syllogism is an argument consisting of three connected propositions, two Premisses, Major and Minor, and the Conclusion which can be deduced from the two Premisses when linked together. The Major might be compared to an expectant mother, the Minor to a mid-wife, and the Conclusion to the baby. Thus the Major implicitly includes the Conclusion, but the Minor is needed to make that Conclusion explicit by showing that is included in the Major.

Thus the most famous syllogism of all runs – Major: “All men are rational,” Minor: “Socrates is a man,” Conclusion: “Therefore Socrates is rational.” With the Silent Major the syllogism might be abbreviated as, “Socrates is a man, so he is bound to be rational,” or shorter still, “Being a man, Socrates is rational.” In daily life we are all the time syllogising, or deducing one thing from another two things, but it is rare for us to lay out the syllogisms in full. Frequently we leave out the Major or the Minor, but more frequently the Major, and then we have a case of the Silent Major. Here are two more examples – “Football is a sport, so it’s a waste of good time.” And “Catholic Tradition does not get through to modern man, it’s a waste of time.” The Silent Majors here are that “All sport is a waste of time,” and “Any religion is useless which does not get through to modern man.”

Thus in his book Gänswein paints a basically sympathetic portrait of life inside the Vatican and especially of Pope Ratzinger himself as a brilliant but humble man, basically an academic who never had any desire to be Pope because he would have preferred to retire somewhere calm where he could read and write books. In fact he wrote 66 of them, and they are no doubt full of many wise and traditional insights, as was his daily life, as Gänswein relates. This why many Traditionalists at that time put their hope and trust in him. Yet ultimately the Pope disappointed them. Why? Because of the Silent Major.

For indeed Ratzinger, like all modernists, was obsessed with getting through to modern man. Therefore for him the unchanging Truth of Catholic Tradition which he knew, always had to be at least expressed anew in a way that would fit modern man. But Luther, said a famous German “philosopher,” Johann Fichte (1762–1814) was “the first modern man.” And read “Three Reformers” of Jacques Maritain to see how today’s world is marinated in the revolt of Luther against the Catholic Church, in fact against God. So how is any modernist going to adapt godly Truth to godless modern man without resorting to ambiguity, on the way to outright heresy, which can also be found in the writings of Joseph Ratzinger?

And what weight can there be behind the best insights of Archbishop, Cardinal or Pope Ratzinger? If he believes in the Silent Major – “Catholicism must get through to modern man” – then at best he can only half believe in Catholic Truth. But Catholic Truth is all or nothing. If I believe in just one heresy, I have lost the Catholic Faith. Archbishop Lefebvre was not exaggerating when he said in 1990 that Rome had lost the Faith. Yet Gänswein portrays apostate Rome and Romans as though they are quite normal. He can only be himself a victim of the Silent Major.

Kyrie eleison.

VIGANO COMMENTARY

VIGANO COMMENTARY on July 20, 2024

Tell not of so much gloom – I cannot cope!

The end of lalaland is one great hope.

Last week these “Comments” (July 13, # 887) gave a summary of Archbishop Vigano’s June 28 long justification of his decision not to respond to a Newchurch summons to appear before one of its courts to defend himself against a charge of schism. The summary took the form of 44 lines, one line for each of the 44 paragraphs of the original text, which gave to readers at least an overview of the entire content of the Archbishop’s text, but it hardly made any comment on what he wrote, except for the final couplet –

With some of the arguments one may not agree,

But here is a Catholic spirit, faithful and free.

In this week’s “Comments,” let us elaborate on last week’s rhyming verdict.

The first thing to notice about the original text is its wealth of arguments, not marshalled in any clearly recognisable sequence, but all bearing on the Archbishop’s central and most valuable message – the so-called “renewal” of Vatican II (1962–1965) wrought such a sea-change in the Catholic Church, that while appearances of the pre-conciliar Church could be maintained to deceive Catholics who were not on their guard, nevertheless the substance of the Catholic Church was so altered that it was no longer the true Church but a clever false church, so radically false that it had to be given a new name for Catholics to be no longer deceived. The Archbishop himself does not call it the Newchurch, but that is what these “Comments” will call it, for brevity and clarity.

Then the Archbishop’s main reason for refusing the summons of Rome is easy to express: between the Newchurch and the true Church there is such a contradiction (13) that while the true Church has such a divine Authority that it can demand from souls obedience on pain of eternal damnation (Mk. XVI, 16), on the contrary the Newchurch has no such authority because by all its false doctrines it has given up that Catholic Truth, the defence and protection of which is the very purpose of divine Catholic Authority. From the moment that Adam and Eve fell, mankind lived in a fallen world where God’s Truth no longer needed only to be presented in order to be accepted.

But by the time that the Word became flesh some 4000 years later, mankind had become so corrupt that to save any significant number of souls, Our Lord had to institute a hierarchy to impose the saving Truth: a Pope (Peter), bishops (Apostles), and disciples (priests). Men might still choose to disobey God’s own hierarchy and Truth, but His hierarchy would still, broadly, uphold it – until Luther let the corruption loose again, culminating in Vatican II, where Our Lord’s own hierarchy, broadly, abandoned God’s Truth. That split between God’s Truth and God’s Authority caused, sure enough, an unprecedented crisis in all Church history, beyond all human repair, where God alone will be able to restore His Papacy. But He will do that, to make possible one final triumph of the Catholic Church before the descent to the Antichrist.

Here is the basic reality of our situation in Church and world today. Archbishop Lefebvre recognised it, and by not underestimating the problem he did what was still possible for men to alleviate it. Archbishop Vigano mentions his example (2), and does what he can to follow it, by refusing, for example, to appear at the summons of apostate Rome, with a wealth of arguments to justify his refusal. One may disagree with some of his arguments, for instance on the vacant See in Rome. But those are details which pale in comparison with his grasp of the overall gravity of the crisis, nullifying the hierarchs’ authority. Here is the true faith of the Church’s martyrs down all the ages. May Archbishop Vigano’s courage and teaching open many more eyes for as long as God gives him life.

Kyrie eleison.