conciliarism

Emotional Arguing

Emotional Arguing on March 21, 2015

An old-fashioned comparison has the advantage of being very clear: on the back of a mule a heavy pack can be difficult to balance. If it shifts to the left, one must push it to the right. If it tilts to the right, it must be pushed to the left. But such double pushing is not contrary – it has the single purpose of keeping the pack balanced. Similarly, for these “Comments” to argue repeatedly against sedevacantism is not to push towards liberalism, nor is it to suggest that sedevacantism is as bad as liberalism. It is merely to recognize that the outrageous words and deeds of the present occupant of the Holy See are tempting many good Catholics to renounce their reason and to judge of reality by their emotions. That is a common practice today, but it is not Catholic.

For instance sedevacantist arguments are, upon examination, never as strong as they can seem. Let us look at two that have crossed my desk recently, both from devout Catholics, strong in the Faith. Here is the first: Conciliar Popes, especially Francis, have not confirmed their brethren in the Faith. But it is of the essence of a Pope to do that. Therefore the Conciliar Popes are not essentially Popes. In reply one must distinguish a Pope in his being from a Pope in his action. A Pope becomes essentially Pope in his being by his valid election in a Conclave of Cardinals, or by his election, if it was invalid in itself, being convalidated by his subsequent acceptance as Pope by the Universal Church (which may have been the case for more than one Conciliar Pope, God knows). On the contrary, by confirming his brethren in the Faith a Pope is essentially Pope in his action. The two things are different and can be separated. Therefore a Pope can fail in action without necessarily ceasing to be a Pope in his being. That is surely the case of several, if not all, the Conciliar Popes.

And here is the second argument: for the individual and fallible Catholic to set himself up as judge of error by the Church’s infallible Magisterium is ridiculous. Faced then by obvious error (e.g. Conciliarism) by that Magisterium (e.g. the Conciliar Popes), he can only conclude that they have not been true Popes. But, in reply, the Pope is not necessarily the Church’s infallible Magisterium. If he neither engages all four strict conditions of the Extraordinary Magisterium, nor teaches in accordance with the Church’s Ordinary Magisterium, then he is fallible, and if he contradicts that Ordinary Magisterium then he is certainly in error, and can be judged to be such by any Catholic (or non-Catholic!) making the right use of his God-given mind. Otherwise how could Our Lord have warned us to beware of false prophets and of wolves in sheeps’ clothing (Mt. VII, 15–20)?

In fact both arguments can come from an emotional rejection of the Conciliar Popes: “They have so maltreated the Church that I simply cannot accept that they were Popes!” But what if I had been a bystander watching the original Way of the Cross? – “This is such maltreatment of Jesus that I simply cannot accept any longer that he is the Son of God!” Would not my emotional rejection of the maltreatment have been right, and yet my conclusion wrong? There is a mystery involved in the Conciliar Popes which sedevacantism passes by.

Now it may be, when the Church one day comes back to her senses, that the alone competent authority will declare that the Conciliar Popes were not Popes, but between now and then the arguments so far brought forward to prove the See of Rome to be vacant are not as conclusive as they can be made to appear.

Kyrie eleison.

Archbishop Commented – I

Archbishop Commented – I on January 3, 2015

For today’s Church authorities “there is no fixed truth, there is no dogma. Everything is evolving.” So said Archbishop Lefebvre (1905–1991) in 1991 (see last week’s “Eleison Comments”). For at the end of his life the Archbishop saw more clearly than ever what he had been up against in his heroic defence of the Faith. Since then the liberals (unknown to themselves as such?) who took over his Society of St Pius X as soon as he was gone, have still not understood the gravity of the problem as identified by the Archbishop. Therefore let these “Comments” open the New Year by attempting once more to lay open the mortal wound of today’s Church and world.

When Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) erected man’s refusal of God’s reality into a philosophical system, based on his utterly false proclamation that the human mind cannot know the object as it is in itself, then the philosophy department of universities all over the world began to spill craziness into the streets, because people wanted to make freedom their god and Kant offered them the supreme liberation, that of the mind from its object.

Now Catholics not yet contaminated by the Kantian fantasy know that God and his Heaven exist quite outside of, and independently of, their little minds, and so if they want to be happy for eternity their minds had better deal in objective reality and not in subjective fantasy. Therefore for a century and a half a God-given series of anti-liberal Popes stood up to the liberal world going constantly more crazy all around, and these protected the Church from the prestigious and popular subjectivism. But by the 1950’s the Church’s cardinals and bishops were not praying enough to maintain this protection of their minds and hearts from the madness, known within the Church as “modernism,” and so in the conclave of 1958 they elected one of their own, the supposedly “good” John XXIII, a liberal (unknown to himself as such? God knows), who duly launched in 1962 the disastrous Second Vatican Council.

Why disastrous? Because the madness of subjectivism (the refusal of objective reality), instead of being still utterly condemned by the Church’s highest authorities, was now adopted by them and made (consciously or unconsciously? – God knows) into the official basis of Church doctrine and action. The problem could not be graver. The officials of God’s true Church, appointed to proclaim and defend God’s objective truths of salvation, were henceforth filtering these through their subjectivist minds. Imagine having nothing other than filthy bottles in which to store the best of wine. It can only be ruined. Today’s Conciliar Church officials can only ruin God’s truth.

Here is why the Archbishop said in 1991, “We are dealing with people (at the top of the Church) who have a different philosophy from ours, a different way of seeing, who are influenced by all modern subjectivist philosophers. For them, there is no fixed truth, no fixed dogma. Everything is evolving. This is really the Masonic destruction of the Faith. Fortunately we (Traditionalists) have Tradition to lean on.”

But what has happened to Tradition without the Archbishop to guide it? Alas, the authorities at the top of his Society of St Pius X, which for some 40 years spearheaded the defence of the objective Faith, cannot have been praying seriously enough to protect their minds and hearts from being in turn infected by subjectivism. They too have lost the primacy of objective truth, and so they are being played by the Romans like a fish is played by a fisherman. Archbishop Lefebvre, pray for us!

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.

Resistance Policy – II

Resistance Policy – II on April 26, 2014

The Faith must be preserved despite the Shepherd being struck (cf. EC 348). If there was one man given to us by God to show us how to keep the Faith in stricken times, by preserving the true sacrifice of the Mass and the true Catholic priesthood, that man was certainly Archbishop Lefebvre (1905–1991). And since the disaster wrought upon the Church by the Conciliar Shepherds has not essentially changed since his time, then what he said and wrote applies essentially today, and any newcomer to the disaster cannot do better than read and study his words.

However, the disaster has also grown much worse since his death, and any so-called movement of “Resistance” today will do well to learn the lessons that are there to be learned from the threatening fall of that Society of St Pius X which it was the Archbishop’s stupendous achievement to found, within the collapsing mainstream Church, for the preservation of the Faith. Why is the leadership of the SSPX now taking it in a direction different from the Archbishop’s, a direction that must lead to the SSPX’s entirely similar collapse?

Because, in my opinion, the leaders which the SSPX chose for itself after the Archbishop’s death in 1991 at the General Chapters of 1994 and 2006, never took the full measure of the Conciliar disaster, because they were children of the undermined 1950’s or the Revolutionary 1960’s and later still. Having drunk in the Revolution with their mothers’ milk, so to speak, they never understood how it wrecks from within churchmen still seeming Catholic without. In brief, these leaders have either never studied modernism, or never understood what they studied, or have been too “pious” or “supernatural” to think that it could apply to the mainstream churchmen in front of them.

Thus where Archbishop Lefebvre saw clearly that the Conciliar Church, by losing all four marks of the Catholic Church (one, holy, catholic, apostolic), was not the Catholic Church, Bishop Fellay (Superior General since 1994) and Fr Nicholas Pfluger (First Assistant since 2006) insist today that there can only be one Church, and so the Conciliar Church is the Catholic Church. Naturally then, where the Archbishop kept the SSPX at a safe distance from the Conciliar Church, Bishop Fellay and Fr Pfluger want to abolish that distance and bring the SSPX back within that Church which is Conciliar. And neither Bishop Fellay nor Fr Pfluger will feel Catholic until they have achieved that end.

But the Faith is firstly in the mind and not in the feelings. It follows that whoever has, for whatever reason, begun to recognize that the present leadership of the SSPX is on the wrong track, must continue by studying the total problem of the Revolution, of modernism and of Vatican II. That is a tall order, because one can have a text-book knowledge of the Revolution and still not recognize it right under one’s nose. I feel so nice when I feel that everybody else is nice that I lose from view the objective falsity of almost all of us as seen by God. One may say that it requires a special grace from God to see that falsity as he sees it, without losing one’s compassion, but a soul can obtain that grace if it seeks God seriously, especially in prayer.

God is good to those that seek him, says Scripture in many places. Assuming he exists, what could he be other than supremely good to those that seek him?

Kyrie eleison.

Authority Crippled

Authority Crippled on June 1, 2013

A number of good souls wish that a Congregation were founded to replace the Society of St Pius X. But while I share their fear that the SSPX is presently well on its way to disabling its formerly glorious defence of Catholic Faith and life, and while I therefore sympathize with their desire to see another Congregation like it to take its place, I do not believe that that is possible, and I think it is worth explaining why.

When in 1970 Archbishop Lefebvre wrote the charter of principles in line with which the future SSPX would be founded and would function, namely its Statutes, it was for him of great importance to obtain the official approval of them by the bishop of the Catholic diocese in which the original house of the SSPX was situated. As far as he was concerned, obtaining or not obtaining that approval meant all the difference between founding a Congregation of the Catholic Church and launching a private association of his own. He had every interest in founding a Catholic Congregation, far less interest in launching a private institution.

In fact when he went to see Bishop Charrière of the Diocese of Geneva, Lausanne and Fribourg to obtain that approval, he was not hopeful. The Conciliar Revolution was by then well under way, and it was directly contrary to what the Statutes projected. Providentially however, Bishop Charrière gave his approval, perhaps because he knew he was to retire soon afterwards. In any case the Archbishop returned exultant to Écône, and one report even tells of him waving the Statutes triumphantly in the air.

What that meant to him was that from then on, as far as he was concerned, he had the Church’s authority to build a Congregation of the Church, and while a few years later Rome might attempt to take back that authorisation, the attempt was so intrinsically unjust according to Church law that the Archbishop never hesitated to continue exercising inside the SSPX all the authority of a classic Superior of a Congregation. That classic Catholic authority has such power that by harnessing it to lies the Conciliar Popes have been able virtually to destroy the Universal Church, and by its being harnessed to a practical agreement with Conciliar Rome it is now virtually destroying the SSPX. On the other hand, as for authority over priests, nuns and laity outside the SSPX, Archbishop Lefebvre never arrogated to himself any other than that of a father, adviser and friend.

But the days of a Bishop Charrière are long since gone. How many sane bishops are there left in the mainstream Church? And how could any of them today approve of Traditional and anti-Conciliar Statutes? It is as though, just after the Archbishop got out of the Catholic castle with the Catholic Statutes in his hand, the Conciliar portcullis crashed down behind him. “They are mentally sick, but they have the authority,” as one of the four SSPX theologians said about the Roman theologians after the Doctrinal Discussions of 2009–2011. The SSPX is surely the last in line of the classic Congregations to be founded, at least until after the Chastisement. And it has not lasted long.

That is why, in my opinion, “What cannot be cured must be endured.” And that is why, right now, I envisage being little more than father, adviser and friend for any souls calling for a bishop’s leadership and support. Even that is task enough. May God be with us all.

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.