fashion

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.

Reply to Open Letter of Mgr. Nicola Bux

Reply to Open Letter of Mgr. Nicola Bux on March 24, 2012

London, 22 March, 2012.

Monseigneur,

In an Open Letter of March 19, addressed to Bishop Fellay and to all priests of the Society of St Pius X, you appealed to us to accept the sincere and warm-hearted offer of reconciliation that Pope Benedict XVI is making to the SSPX for the healing of the long-standing rift between Rome and the SSPX. Let me as one of the SSPX priests that you addressed take upon myself to give you my opinion as to what might have been the answer of that “great churchman,” Archbishop Lefebvre.

Your letter begins with an appeal for “every sacrifice in the name of unity.” But there can be no true Catholic unity that is not grounded in the true Catholic Faith. The great Archbishop made every sacrifice for unity in the true doctrine of the Faith. Alas, the Doctrinal Discussions of 2009–2011 proved that the doctrinal rift between the Rome of Vatican II and the SSPX is as wide as ever.

To this rift you referred on March 19 as no more than “remaining perplexities, points to be deepened or detailed,” but on March 16 Cardinal Levada was categoric that the position taken by Bishop Fellay on January 12 is “insufficient to overcome the doctrinal problems.” Bishop Fellay once observed how the churchmen of Rome can differ among themselves, but be their unity what it may, in any case Faith sacrificed for unity would be a faithless unity.

Of course, as you remind us, the Church is an institution both divine and human. Of course the divine element cannot fail, so of course the Church cannot ultimately fail, and the sun will rise again. But one may beg to differ when you say that the dawn is close at hand, because that true Faith which the SSPX upheld in the Discussions is not shining out from the Rome of Vatican II, where accordingly the SSPX could not be in safety. Nor could it bring light if itself it adopted the Conciliar darkness.

The sincerity of the Pope’s wish to welcome back the SSPX into “full ecclesial communion,” as shown in a series of gestures of real good will, is not in doubt, but “ a common profession of faith” between the SSPX and believers in Vatican II is not possible, unless the SSPX were to desert that Faith which it defended in the Discussions. And when the SSPX cries “God forbid!” to any such desertion, far from its voice being stifled, it is heard all over the world, and it bears for the Church Catholic fruits which today are the exception rather than the rule.

Certainly, “this is the appropriate moment,” certainly “the favourable time is come” for a solution to the agonizing problems of Church and world . However, it is that solution which the Heavenly Mother has long been calling for, and which depends upon the Holy Father alone. In fact when Our Lord put it in his Mother’s hands, she said that no other solution would work, so that He could not let any other solution work without making his Mother into a liar! Inconceivable!

The solution has been known of for a long time, for how could Heaven possibly have left the world in such distress as that of the last 100 years without providing a remedy like that provided by the prophet Elisha for the leprosy of the Syrian General Naaman? Humanly speaking, bathing in the River Jordan seemed ridiculous, but nobody could say that it was not possible. It required merely some faith and humility. The pagan General gathered together enough faith and trust in the man of God to do what Heaven asked for, and of course he was cured instantaneously.

Let the Holy Father but gather together enough faith and trust in the promise of the Heavenly Mother! Let him but seize this “appropriate moment” before the entire global economy collapses in ruins, and before madmen succeed in launching the Third World War in the Middle East! Let him, we beg of him, we entreat him, save Church and world by merely doing what the Heavenly Mother asked for. It is not impossible. She would overcome all obstacles in his way. By doing what she asks for, he alone can now save us from unimaginable – and unnecessary – suffering.

And if he wishes for any support in prayer or action with which the humble SSPX could help him to consecrate Russia to her Immaculate Heart in union with all the bishops of the world, whom the Heavenly Mother would rally, he knows that he could count first and foremost on the support of Bishop Fellay and the other three bishops of the SSPX, least among whom is

Your devoted servant in Christ, +Richard Williamson.

More Cheerful

More Cheerful on January 28, 2012

Your Excellency, please tell us something more cheerful!

God exists. He is all-powerful, all-knowing, all-just, but his mercy is also boundless. He is in perfect control of all that is happening in the world. Neither the Devil nor his human servants, including the criminals now running the world, can lift a finger without his permission. He knows every detail of their diabolical plans and is using every single one of them to fulfil his own Providential design.

But how then can he be allowing so much evil in our world? Because while he never wants evil, he wants to allow it, so as to bring out of it a greater good. Many prophecies indicate that out of today’s global corruption will arise tomorrow the greatest triumph ever of the Catholic Church, e.g. Our Lady of Fatima; “In the end my Immaculate Heart will triumph.” What is happening right now is that Our Lord is using his enemies to purify his Church.

But could he not have found a less unpleasant way of purifying his Church than for us to have us go through today’s unbelievable corruption? If it depended only on him, undoubtedly he could have found other ways of purifying his Church, but if you and I knew all that he knows – foolish thought! – and if above all you and I wanted, as he does, to respect the free-will that he gives to all human beings, then there is every likelihood that you and I would see that the way he is choosing to do things is the best.

And just what does man’s free-will have to do with it?

God does not want robots or merely irrational animals to share with him in his bliss. Now even he cannot give to his creatures a deserved happiness which they have done nothing to deserve, because that is contradictory and his power is over all being, not over non-being such as things contradictory. But if creatures are at least in part to deserve his bliss, then he must give them free-will, which if it is to be for real, must be able to choose the opposite of what he wants for it, and if it is really able to choose evil, then that is what will happen, more or less often.

But you say that the true Church follows Our Lord in teaching that narrow is the path to Heaven and few there be that find it (Mt.VII, 14). How can it be worth God’s while to have created, just today for instance, a mass of human beings, if only relatively few reach Heaven? How can so many falling into the horrors of Hell not be too high a price to pay for the relatively few reaching Heaven? Because God works in quality, not in quantity. That a mere ten men could have saved from his wrath the whole city of Sodom (Gen. XVIII, 32) proves how precious to God is one single soul responding to his love, over a large number that by their own free choice do not want his love. “I would have gone through the whole Passion just for you,” said Our Lord once to a soul. He would say it to any soul.

Do you mean that if, when the world worries and torments me, I merely stick all the more closely to God, then he takes account of it, for me and for those around me? I might almost want the world to be still worse! Now you are getting the idea!

Kyrie eleison.

Rector’s Letters – II

Rector’s Letters – II on April 23, 2011

Several readers of “Eleison Comments” may not be familiar with the “Letters from the Rector” referred to here a little while back (EC 190, March 5). Written between 1983 and 2003 as monthly newsletters from St. Thomas Aquinas Seminary where priests are trained in the USA for the Society of St Pius X, the Letters have been brought together in four paperback volumes, available through the Internet at truerestorationpress.com/4volsletters. A Scottish convert of 18 years back read them recently. Here are some of her comments. They are interesting:—

“These Letters have both astounded and astonished me . . . I was a New Age “dippy hippy” that ran from the New Age Devil into the Catholic Church, only to discover that he was right there in her sanctuaries . . . It is not just that the cardinals, bishops and priests of the Conciliar Church are lily-livered and mealy-mouthed in their defence of Catholicism. There are many who seem to take a positive and malicious delight in tearing her traditions and beliefs to pieces.”

On the contrary, “These Letters are wonderfully and gloriously Catholic . . . They explain the folly of the Conservative and Ecclesia Dei Catholics attempting to solve the crisis of the Church without criticizing the Council. Are not such Catholics considering the appearances of the Conciliar reforms, e.g. in liturgy and discipline, while ignoring their essence, the fundamental internal shift in thinking on Church doctrine that has taken place, as demonstrated by the Council’s documents on Religious Liberty and Ecumenism?

“The Rector’s Letters on Pluralism and on the Liberal view of human dignity wonderfully explain the nature of this shift. As they repeatedly demonstrate, it is impossible to understand the modern world and the situation of the Church within it if one does not understand this radical shift in the thinking of modern Rome. And if the Ecclesia Dei people object that any such radical criticism of the Council amounts to saying that we have no valid Pope, the Letters provide arguments amply demonstrating the wisdom of the position of the SSPX, veering neither to the left with the Liberals, nor to the right with the “Sedevacantists.”

“As for reaching out to the modern world, the men of the Conciliar Church have little useful to say. They are too wrapped up in their revolutionary dream to be capable of addressing its wretched consequences. They could never write Letters like those of the Rector on Pink Floyd, the Unabomber, Oliver Stone or the Children in the Forest, because the mainstream Church, instead of being deeply dissatisfied with today’s materialistic world, always seems to be going along with it. The Letters should be read for the historical record alone, but maybe their true worth will not be apparent until later, perhaps only when the 6th Age of the Church has dawned with the Triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary.”

And here is the feminine clincher: “What’s more, and I never thought I would say this, the Letters on Slacks have encouraged me to consider re-thinking my ‘wardrobe solutions’.” When women stop wearing trousers, truly the Church will rise again!

Kyrie eleison.

Shifting Perspectives

Shifting Perspectives on August 29, 2009

A remarkable yet possible plan of Heaven for today’s world can be guessed at, if Orthodox Christianity is reviving within Russia in the manner described to me a few days ago in London by a Russian. His description corresponds to the impression brought away from Russia by an American friend visiting St Petersburg a few years ago – the average Russian has distinctly more spiritual substance in him then has the average spiritually wasted Westerner. Does this connect with Our Lady of Fatima . . .?

The Russian in London told me that the Orthodox Church in Russia is following rather than leading a revival of Orthodoxy amongst the people. Attendance at the Orthodox liturgy has increased by half over the last two years, and now 80% of Russians are at least calling themselves “Orthodox,” i.e. believers. New parishes are springing up everywhere. Bibles are snatched up as soon as they come on sale. Religious literature is flourishing, whilst atheistic propaganda is dying. “Holy Russia” is rising from the grave in which Communism from 1917 to 1989 strove to bury it.

For when the Communist structures of the Soviet “empire of evil” (Pres. Reagan) collapsed in 1989, the Russians turned for an ideology to replace Communism not to Western Liberalism but to their national and religious roots in Russian Orthodoxy. What indeed had the decadent West had to offer to Russia’s new needs in the 1990’s? In economics, the plundering of their wealth by capitalist vultures; in politics, the still on-going encirclement of their frontiers to ensure the United States’ permanent global hegemony by the construction of a ring of military bases which are one, if not the real, reason for the disastrous occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan never to come to an end; in religion, the attempted push eastwards into their land of Conciliar ecumenism, with which apparently the Russian churchmen want nothing to do – on the contrary, they are aware of the Traditional Catholic movement, and support it.

However, let us be under no illusion: Russian Orthodoxy welds together religion and patriotism in a not wholly godly mixture, and Orthodoxy is still schismatic by refusing the Papal Supremacy, and heretical by refusing a number of dogmas, so Russians do need to be converted to the truly Universal or Catholic Church. But if Our Lady of Fatima has singled out their country for the Consecration to her Heart, may the reason not be, not that the Russians are still wicked Communists but that the Russian people’s huge sufferings from their 70 Babylonian years of Communist captivity are calling forth from the always religious depths of “Holy Russia” an upsurge of spiritual vitality? And could this not save the true Church, presently wilting in the West, where the mainstream Church may still have large numbers but has little Faith whilst the Traditional remnant has the true Faith but negligible numbers? God knows how the Western Church also needs conversion!

May it then be Russia’s smashing of the encirclement in a Third World War leading to an occupation of Europe, which will at last drive the Latin Pope to consecrate Russia to Our Lady’s Heart, as she has so long been asking for in vain? Will at that moment the Russians’ renewed religious vigor save our languishing Catholic Tradition, whilst our Tradition will cleanse their errors? If so, then God will once again have “concluded all in unbelief, that He may have mercy on all . . .How incomprehensible are His judgments, and how unsearchable His ways . . . To Him be glory for ever” (Rom. XI, 32 . . .36).

Catholics, mainstream and of Tradition, pray your hearts out for the Consecration of Russia to the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of the Mother of God, or “Theotokos” as she is known in the Eastern Church.

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.