Tag: Jesus Christ

Killer Pride

Killer Pride posted in Eleison Comments on August 1, 2009

I love “The Poem of the Man-God” by Maria Valtorta. It is, in the English edition, five Volumes of visions of the life, death and resurrection of Our Lord, mostly the three years of his public ministry, as seen during the last years of the Second World War by a crippled Italian woman, unmarried, nailed to her sick-bed by an injury suffered many years before in her youth. As a visionary she was always scared of being deceived by the Devil. The fruits of the “Poem” in edification and conversions strongly indicate rather that her visions were a true gift from Heaven.

The “Poem” does not appeal to everybody. It has severe critics. Some find it sentimental. I find it full of sentiment, but a sentiment objective and not self-indulgent. Some find it undoctrinal. I find it questionable perhaps in a few details, but generally the doctrine is astonishingly rich and accurate (the foot-notes in the Italian edition help). Some find the “Poem” too earthy. I find it a marvellous presentation of Our Lord as true God and true man Might these last critics be wishing the Incarnation had been less incarnate? Christ took flesh.

Here is one sample amongst thousands of the concrete reminders of the “Poem” on how human nature works, unrecognized today. To overcome the evil impulses that Judas Iscariot recognizes in himself, he has asked the Mother of God if he can stay with her for a while in Nazareth. As “Refuge of Sinners” she asks Our lord if she may render this service to Judas. Our Lord replies that he is not against, only he knows that it will be useless:—

“Judas is like someone drowning who although he feels he is drowning rejects out of pride the rope being thrown to him to pull him to the bank. He lacks the will to reach the bank. Every now and again the terror of drowning makes him seek and call out for help, which he clutches hold of, but then pride takes over again, he drops the help and pushes it away, as he wants to manage by himself, but all the while he is getting heavier with the muddy water that he is swallowing. However, so that nobody can say I left any remedy untried – go ahead, poor Mamma” (“Poor,” because she has no taste for this rescue attempt).

Every soul in Hell – alas, would that it were empty! – has chosen to be there, as the only alternative to submitting to God. Any submission diminishes my sense of my own excellence. Pride is the sin of sins. From our hidden pride, O Lord, deliver us!

Kyrie eleison.

Conciliar Church

Conciliar Church posted in Eleison Comments on July 11, 2009

The expression “Conciliar Church” gives rise to much confusion. For instance, how can the Catholic Church, the spotless Bride of Christ (Eph.V, 27), be stained with the new man-centred religion of Vatican II, i.e. Conciliarism? Yet Our Lord founded only one Church, so if the “Conciliar Church” is not Catholic, there must be two Churches, a Conciliar Church and a Catholic Church? Impossible.

Indeed there are not two Churches. There is only the one Church of Our Lord Jesus Christ, and that is the Catholic Church. But this Catholic Church is embodied in human beings who are necessarily imperfect. Our Lord instituted it to save not angels or animals, but exclusively us poor human beings who tend by ourselves, because of original sin, only to fall further and further away from Heaven and from God.

So the Catholic Church always has two aspects: divine by its origin or beginning (Jesus Christ) and by its end (bringing souls to Heaven), it is, in between, also necessarily human, by its involvement in amongst the human beings it came to save. Therefore as there must be human beings inside the Church, so too there will always be imperfections inside the Church, sometimes very visible, but these imperfections will still be incapable of staining the Bride of Christ, spotless in herself.

Now Conciliarism, as the new religion of Vatican II putting man in the place of God, is error and imperfection, purely human, in no way divine. So the expression “Conciliar Church” means the Catholic Church in its purely human and imperfect aspect, the Church as disfigured by modern man organising Vatican II to put himself in the place of God. Yet the divine Church remains stainless beneath all the disfigurement, as if it were a kingfisher swooping down on a lake to pick up a fish and fly again heavenward, flicking off as it flies any water it momentarily picked up.

Then there are two Churches? No way. There is only the one immaculate Bride of Christ. Then does the expression “Conciliar Church” have no real meaning? Alas, it names an all too real reality. It names all those members and structures of the one true Church as caught up in the toils of the subtle errors of Vatican II, and as tending all the time to be taken out of the true Church by those errors. This is the “Conciliar Church” from which Archbishop Lefebvre did not mind being “excommunicated,” because, as he said, he never belonged to it in the first place.

Kyrie eleison.

Sacred Heart

Sacred Heart posted in Eleison Comments on June 20, 2009

Yesterday was the Feast of the Sacred Heart. Before I became a Catholic the mere expression “Sacred Heart of Jesus” would have made my blood curdle, because it sounded too sweet and sticky for words. This impression would have been confirmed by a number of pictures representing the Sacred Heart, which are so melting that one is surprised not to find, in place of the picture on the wall, a pictorial puddle at the foot of the wall!

However, as one grows older, one may hope one grows a little wiser as well as sadder. Soon after I entered the Church, the Lord God put in my hands a marvellous book on the Sacred Heart, one could say written by the Sacred Heart: “The Way of Divine Love” by Sister Josefa Menendez (1890–1923). She was a little Spanish nun buried away from all publicity in a convent of the Sacred Heart Sisters in Poitiers, France, who during the last three years of her short life acted as messenger for the Sacred Heart of Jesus, to deliver one more urgent message of God’s love to modern souls in ever more danger of falling away from Him.

“I am God” (page 377 of the first edition in English), “but a God of love! I am a Father, but a Father full of compassion and never harsh. My Heart is infinitely holy but also infinitely wise, and knowing human frailty and infirmity stoops to poor sinners with infinite mercy.” This book gave me to understand that just as the special revelations of the Sacred Heart had begun in the 17th century which was growing cold with rationalism and Jansenism, so those revelations became progressively warmer as the world grew colder and colder, until the pictures indeed almost melted off the wall! As though Our Lord were saying to us, it no longer matters if we understand His Justice, or appreciate the fine arts, just so long as we understand His true Mercy.

“I love those who after a first fall come to me for pardon . . . I love them still more when they beg pardon for their second sin, and should this happen again, I do not say a million times but a million million times, I still love them and pardon them, and I will wash in My Blood their last as fully as their first sin. Never shall I weary of repentant sinners, nor cease from hoping for their return, and the greater their distress, the greater My welcome . . .This is what I wish all to know. I will teach sinners that the mercy of my Heart is inexhaustible . . . It is so easy to trust completely in My Heart!”

It is so easy to trust in His Heart. But we modern men are distracted, and we are proud. Sacred Heart of Jesus, have mercy on us.

Kyrie eleison.

Double Virtuality

Double Virtuality posted in Eleison Comments on June 13, 2009

Most, if not all, of you know that in the early hours of June 1 an Air France jetliner with 228 souls on board fell out of the sky on its way from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, and crashed into the Atlantic Ocean. An extraordinary event? Or is not the extraordinary thing rather that not all of these 100- to 150-ton monsters fall out of the sky? Has not man’s technology virtually mastered reality?

The technology of these aerial Leviathans is indeed something to be marvelled at. Every day now thousands of them all over the world defy gravity to climb six miles high and blast hundreds of passengers at a time over mountain ranges, across vast oceans, from continent to continent, mostly in complete safety. The crashes always make headlines in the media, but they are so rare when compared with the total number of flights that the passengers may fear, but never think, that they will crash.

So with confidence they step into the monsters’ bellies at the airport of departure, stepping off earth and its real time-zones into the virtual world of soothing sounds, plastic meals and – virtuality within virtuality – “in-flight entertainment,” meaning, more and more, your own selection of movies in your own seat. Wrapped in this cosy cocoon of all-embracing technology, one has, normally, only the plane’s occasional shudder or change of its engines’ pitch to remind one that there is outside, starting only a few feet away, a potentially deadly reality, not always perfectly tamed . . .

 . . .What must those last moments have been like inside the cabins of Air France # 447? Horrible to imagine! Eleven days later the exact cause of the crash is still not known. Did blocked speed sensors so confuse the fly-by-wire computers as to cause erratic changes of speed, highly dangerous on flying into turbulence? Lucky for the passengers and crew if the plane broke apart on high, so that the instant de-pressurisation will have deprived them of consciousness for the several-minute tumble through darkness down to certain death on impact with the water, which behaves in the circumstances like concrete!

Or were they unlucky? Of the 228 souls on AF 447, how many will have had the need to make a perfect act of contrition before losing consciousness? Of these, how many will have had the necessary faith and presence of mind, not overwhelmed by panic and fear, to do so? In brief, how many were ready to save their souls? Concerning the moment of death, Our Lord tells all of us, “Watch ye therefore, for you know not when the lord of the house cometh . . .lest coming on a sudden, he find you sleeping” (Mk.XIII,38). And concerning apparently random accidents he says, “Except you do penance, you shall all likewise perish” (Lk,XIII,5). Penance enough today is to live by our Faith. Still too much? Anything less is haunted by AF 447.

Kyrie eleison.

Flat Contradiction

Flat Contradiction posted in Eleison Comments on May 9, 2009

Ever since, with the Second Vatican Council, Catholic Authority and Catholic Truth substantially parted company, the Catholics who clung to Authority have had problems with the Truth, and the Catholics who clung to Truth have had problems with Catholic Authority. What could be more logical? Catholics on both sides long for a reunion. Especially amongst decent Conciliar Catholics, this takes the concrete form of the ardent wish that Pope Benedict XVI and the Society of St. Pius X come to an understanding.

Well and good. But there is a problem. Vatican II contradicts Catholic Truth, outside of which Catholic Authority dissolves, is now dissolving, because its Divine Master, Our Lord Jesus Christ, is “the Way, the Truth and the Life” (Jn. XIV,6). For proof of the contradiction, read for instance Michael Davies’ The Second Vatican Council and Religious Liberty, where he shows that while the Catholic Church has always taught that no man has a true right not to be prevented from propagating error, Vatican II (Dignitatis Humanae) taught that every man has a true right not to be prevented from propagating error (save public order – see Davies’ Chapter XXII in particular). The contradiction is direct.

At first sight it may seem unimportant, because what does it matter if a few crazy people more or a few crazy people less spout nonsense in public? But in fact the difference between the right and the non-right to propagate error is all the difference between Hollywood’s candy-on-a-leash deity, and the Lord God of Hosts, whose thunder and lightning struck terror into the hearts of the Israelites even miles distant from his flaming Mount Sinai (Exodus XX, 18–21).

For indeed all human action follows on some thought. But thought is uttered between men, or socialized, mainly with words. Thus the being and action of any human society hangs on exchanges of words. Therefore either truth and error in those exchanges are of no importance to the existence of any society or the direction it is taking, or any society must control public speech in its midst, at least sufficiently to check significant transmission of significant error.

Now the only limit set by Vatican II to public discourse is that it should not disturb “public order.” So for Vatican II, any heresy or blasphemy may be uttered in public so long as the police do not have to be called in, and any deity that may exist must bow down before this “freedom and dignity of the human person”! On the contrary the Lord God of Sinai, the Holy Trinity whose Second Person is Jesus Christ, tells us we will answer for every idle word (Mt. XII, 36), and even for sinful thoughts (Mt.V, 28). So in accordance with God’s Truth (and so long as it will do more good than harm), Catholic society checks the public propagation of error against Faith or morals.

Kyrie eleison.

Good Question

Good Question posted in Eleison Comments on April 25, 2009

On the blog-site of a certain Fr. John Zuhlsdorf appeared this week a number of comments provoked by “Difficult Discussions” appearing here a week ago. Many of these comments were relatively thoughtful – a compliment to Fr Zuhlsdorf. One went straight to the point: “Bishop Williamson is using terms without defining them. I’d really like to know if I am a Neo-modernist.” Joe Pinyan further wanted to know, “in order not to be in league with Baal,” whether he should be worshipping God rather at an SSPX Chapel than at a parish where both the “extraordinary” and “ordinary” forms of Mass are celebrated.

To offer Joe an answer, let me begin by defining Neo-modernism. It is the revival (“Neo-”), let loose within the Catholic Church by Vatican II (1962–1965), of the all-embracing heresy of Modernism. Modernism is the dreadful system of mind-rot, emerging over a century ago within the Church and solemnly condemned by St. Pius X in his Encyclical “Pascendi,” whereby the Catholic Church must be adapted to fit the modern world, as shaped by Protestantism and Liberalism. It is in fact the ultimate form of Liberalism, because by its Kantian principles it pretends to liberate man’s mind (and will) from any truth (or law) whatsoever.

Modernism is an especially hypocritical and dangerous error because it can leave intact the appearances of Catholicism even while emptying out its reality. Thus Jesus Christ is not really God, but I am free to make him God (for me) if I want to. Thus Catholic Truth and Law become whatever I care to make of them. Thus out of the Ten Commandments, I become free to obey none or all ten, because either way I am only obeying me. Neo-modernism is even more dangerous than Modernism, because by it the very highest of churchmen, instead of continuing like St.Pius X utterly to condemn Modernism, adopted it to establish it officially inside the Church!

Thus today Catholics have been made free to attend either the “extraordinary” or the “ordinary” form of Mass, according as they prefer the unchanging real God and his essentially unchanging true Mass, or both of them as suited to today’s world. Now this recent freeing of attendance at the true Mass may have proceeded from the best of intentions of Benedict XVI, but the real God imposes on all of us to worship him as he really is, and not as he has been downsized by modern man. So I hardly expect you to believe me against Rome, Joe, if I tell you to flee the “ordinary” form of Mass, but if you want nothing to do with the worship of Baal, then that is, objectively speaking, what you should do.

However, if you do wish to believe me, you must read! Alas, Pius X’s Pascendi makes for difficult reading. Start here on Dinoscopus with those “Eleison Comments” that treat of religion. Then graduate to the two books, soon to be four, advertised alongside. Then read anything written by Archbishop Lefebvre. Most important to obtain light, pray the Rosary to the Mother of the real God. And may God bless you.

Kyrie eleison.