Tag: liberalism

LIBERALISM in ACTION

LIBERALISM in ACTION posted in Eleison Comments on December 2, 2023

A reader sends in a few penetrating questions concerning recent history of the Church, of the Society of St Pius X and of the so-called “Resistance” movement. One day, when Mother Church comes back to her senses – as she is already quietly doing – the shadows and darkness will be dissipated, and the history will be opened wide in truth and charity. Here meanwhile is a sketch of some answers. 

1 How can you be against any structure for the “Resistance”? Can anything Catholic thrive without it? 

The strength of the “Resistance” is, firstly, the Truth, and secondly the very looseness of the connections between the various small groups resisting the revolution of Vatican II. That revolution swiftly overcame the large part of the Catholic Church because Catholics were too obedient to unfaithful authorities above. Likewise the large part of the SSPX was swiftly blunted in 2012 because its priests were too respectful of the authority of their official leaders above them, who wanted to get back in with apostate Rome. They were serving no longer the true Church or the true Faith, like Archbishop Lefebvre, but themselves. On the contrary, to capture one small pocket of Resistants will not necessarily mean capturing even a second pocket. Thus the Faith will survive until God chooses to restore Catholic structure, in His own good time. 

2 Were the SSPX leaders who were deceived by the apostate Roman officials in the mid-1990’s driven by personal ambition? 

It is always possible, but one may think that their problem was rather their lack of faith in the means of God to solve the crisis of the Church, and their excessive trust in merely human Vatican politics to solve it. Not grasping, as did the Archbishop, the divine and pre-apocalyptic dimension of the worldwide crisis, they conceive it in relatively small and worldly terms, missing the mark altogether. Contrast Archbishop Lefebvre, always pondering the full-scale collapse of the Church. Compare Archbishop Vigano, also reflecting constantly on the universal fall of Church and world, brought on by Vatican II. 

3 Was there clear evidence of this insufficiency of SSPX leaders at the General Chapter of 1994? 

Evidence, yes, but clear evidence, not yet. The participants at that General Chapter gave the impression of nice children playing games rather than of grown warriors fighting a gigantic war for the glory of God and for the salvation of souls in a highly dangerous environment. It takes a Saint to believe in evil, said Gustavo Corcao. That Chapter’s dear and pious young priests seemed not up to the gravity of the hour. 

4 When, for you, did the two camps of SSPX Compliants and SSPX Resistants divide from one another? 

Certainly in the 1980’s the elements of the division were already there. I know a priest who in 1982 after professing for five years at Econe, was sent across the Atlantic for more than a quarter of a century, most likely to get him out of the way. Young seminarians needed to be prepared to obey the liberals who already foresaw themselves taking over the SSPX from the ageing Archbishop. He had been wonderful in his day but, for the Compliants, was becoming steadily out of date by his implacable condemnation of the modernists of Rome, who were seen as the true Authority of the Church and as evolving all the time for the better. Nor will these liberal leaders of the SSPX have thought of themselves as liberals, on the contrary. They see themselves infiltrating modernist Rome and converting it to Catholic Tradition. Is that likely? They have little idea of how deep and serious is the crusade of the liberals to destroy the Catholic Church. 

5 Has the Compliants-Resistants clash always been there inside the Society of St Pius X? 

Surely, yes. Archbishop Lefebvre used to tell us that reading Fr. Barbier’s history of liberalism’s clash with Catholicism in the 19th and 20th centuries made him realise that the only difference between the same clash before and after Vatican II was that before, the Catholics were in command, whereas after, it was the liberals. For as long as the Archbishop was alive, his personal magnetism kept the SSPX Catholic, but as soon as he died in 1991, the constant magnetism of Rome for Catholics began to reassert its sway. Let us have patience. God will not be outmanoeuvred, by the Devil or by fallen angels or fallen churchmen. 

Kyrie eleison. 

Men can suppress reality for a while,

But on God’s face, a sad and gentle smile.

Solzhenytsin Speaks

Solzhenytsin Speaks posted in Eleison Comments on April 3, 2021

Here, for Easter, is Alexander Solzhenytsin’s famous Templeton Address, drastically summarised. 1983.

When I was a child, people said it was forgetting God that led to the Russian Revolution of 1917. Now I am a man in 1983, that one phrase still says it all. It sums up the entire 20th century with all its crimes, starting with World War I, which would not have been possible (e.g. making poison gas into a weapon) without a godless embitterment in the leaders of Europe. Likewise World War II. Europeans are burnt out. Peace depends on stout hearts, not on the nuclear bomb. We have grown all too used to the Apocalypse. Dostoyevsky said that great events have caught us unprepared, and only after the world has been possessed by devils will it be possible to save it again.

Meanwhile the Devil is triumphing, worldwide. By 1917 the faith was extinct in Russia’s leading class, and it was being threatened in the working class. Yet once upon a time Russia was steeped in Orthodox Christianity. Piety, not materialism, moulded people’s thinking and their personalities, and organised their lives. But a schism in the 17th century and the reforms of Peter the Great weakened religion, and the secularism of the 19th century poisoned the leading class, so that by 1917 religion was crippled.

Revolution always starts with atheism, says Dostoyevsky, but never has atheism been so malevolent as it is at the heart of Communism. In the 1920’s there was a veritable cloud of Christian martyrs in Russia, from top to bottom of Church and State, while for instance children were wrenched from their parents and from all religion. Stalin favoured religion only to revive Russian patriotism against Hitler, and Brezhnev pretended to be religious so as to deceive the West, but Krushchev showed how deeply religion is hated by Communism, and by all the unworthy successors of the frenzied Lenin. However, never did any of these maddened persecutors of Christ expect what happened: beneath the Communist steamroller the Russian awareness of God is now acute and profound. Tanks and rockets will never vanquish Christianity.

In the West, religion is more threatened from inside than from outside. In the Middle Ages Secularism arose from within, more dangerous than tanks or rockets. Its ideal flies no higher than life, liberty and the pursuit of my own happiness. Good and evil are objects of mockery. Forget the human heart. Result, evil is all around. The West is slipping all the time, losing its youth. The media blaspheme Jesus and Mary. In that case, what reason do I have to hold back from doing what I like with my liberty? Why not hate my own society, as it teaches me to do? Do not the weaknesses of capitalism correspond to the weaknesses of human nature? For instance the pursuit of money to the capital sin of greed? Capitalism boasts that it establishes equality. But is that not an equality of slaves, destitute of spiritual values? And it makes me more free? But the more “free” I am, does that not mean the more blindly I hate? Salvation can never be by money or by abundance of material goods.

Without love, life and art perish. In the West that happens voluntarily at the hands of men who want to take the place of God. East and West alike have been forgetting God. Yet the key to our whole existence is the daily choice every single human heart has to make between good and evil. The modern theories re-centring everything on society have proved bankrupt, but we have not rejected their lies. Unless we turn back to God we shall never find the way out of our problems. The enemy is within me. It is we who are hanging ourselves.

Human life is merely a stage on the way to God. It is more than just the laws of matter, i.e. the physical sciences. In God we live and move and have our being: He is the “Love moves the sun and the other stars” – Dante, concluding line of the entire “Divine Comedy.” Forget the 19th and 20th centuries. We must reach for God. The so-called Enlightenment was a complete failure.

Kyrie eleison.

Madiran – Betrayal.

Madiran - Betrayal. posted in Eleison Comments on December 26, 2020

In Paris in May of 1968 there occurred student riots so radical and long-lasting as to get attention from media all over the world. For theoretical subversion and practical destruction of everything that had till then made up the Western way of life, they were comparable to the riots that ravaged many cities of the United States last summer (of 2020). In fact the Paris riots inspired the sixth and last Part of Jean Madiran’s book, The Heresy of the 20th century, because they were a picture-book illustration of what his whole book had been trying to say: Catholic civilisation is turning Communist, and it is a great betrayal, and the Catholic bishops are the traitors. Hence the three Chapters of Part Six of the book: 1) May ‘68 is the bishops’ final betrayal, 2) They repudiate the true Catholics, 3) They betray real Christianity.

In Chapter One Madiran tells how when in Paris in the springtime of 1968 the revolting students, like the summer rioters in the USA, threatened to tear down Western civilisation, the French bishops’ official comment was, “It is a wide-ranging movement calling for a new society,” and they were ready to welcome it in the name of Vatican II. In their official declaration one month later they declared: “The 1968 Revolution divides the people for and against, but we bishops are for.” In fact, says Madiran, for those revolting the end justifies the means, so they made such use of force, lies and trickery to get their way that they provoked an even more “wide-ranging” counter-movement, but what do modern bishops care about the radical subversion of all natural law and Christian civilisation? None of them believe that Communism is a betrayal. But it is a movement of reform? That is just a lie and a trap, says Madiran.

In the second Chapter he tells how to ingratiate themselves with the Revolutionaries on the left, the bishops had to bring to them on a platter the heads of the most faithful Catholics on the right, otherwise known as the “integrists,” or followers of integral Catholicism. (Here exactly is why in the 1970’s Pope Paul VI made such strenuous efforts to cripple Archbishop Lefebvre, but God had other ideas. However, just a few more years, and what had been his Society was longing for the approval of modernised Rome.) Back in the 1960’s the French bishops set out on a long course of talking out of both sides of their mouth.

To the left they would say, “Oh, please don’t take us for conservatives or integrists, we’re revolutionaries just like you,” while to the right they would say, “Oh please don’t think we’re changing anything.” And ever since these bishops have been trying to go in two directions at once – a recipe for paralysis. But they always avoid taking on “integrists” in straight argument – they have given up the high ground of truth.

In the last Chapter of his entire book, Madiran finalises his condemnation of the paltry French bishops. The modern world is not good, running on lies in all domains: Evolution, Six Million, Nine-Eleven, Covid, and those are just a few of the outstanding falsehoods. But what had gone wrong? The students hardly knew because they had mostly been told that the modern world is wonderful. But if that is true, then instinctively they want to tear it down. However, the Catholic Church, while it also disbelieves in modernity, knows exactly what went wrong, and in 1864 published a major list of 80 of the errors – Pope Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors. Here is the doctrine that the bishops should have been teaching the students, because had these learnt it well, they could have been rebuilding all “Western civilisation” ever since the 1960’s. As it was, at Vatican II the world’s bishops preferred to join the Communists instead of fighting them, and the students were turned into barbarians, and all Christian civilisation was betrayed.

Referring to the bishops, Madiran adds one final word to his book – “Wretches!”

The analysis of The Heresy of the 20th century is clear. The lessons in the 2020’s for the USA in particular are plentiful. Perhaps only full-scale disaster will enable mankind to learn them. Yet, as Bishop Butler said in the 18th century, “Things are what they are. Their consequences will be what they will be. Why then should we seek to deceive ourselves?”

Kyrie eleison.

Madiran – Proposition VII

Madiran - Proposition VII posted in Eleison Comments on December 12, 2020

Part V is not the easiest of the six Parts of the 1968 book of Jean Madiran (1920–2013) on The Heresy of the 20th century, because it deals with the Natural Law, which is a difficult concept for modern minds to grasp. And this is because God the Creator is both the writer of the Natural Law and He Who implants it in all His various creatures, and the Great and Good God is a closed mystery for a large majority of modern minds. However, it is for Madiran so important as a means of getting at the 20th century heresy that he makes it the centre of the last of the seven Propositions which he culled from the writings of Bishop Schmitt of Metz in France to give some form to an otherwise formless heresy. Here it is –

7 Natural law is the expression of the collective consciousness of mankind. From which it follows that there is no moral objective natural law promulgated by God and inscribed in the heart of man.

Bishop Schmitt’s reason for denying the existence of any such divine law in men would seem to have been that it made man’s social life too mechanical, as though the solutions to all of men’s social problems could be read off it as from a manufacturer’s hand-book. But the hand-book of God for man fully allows for human liberty even in society, whereas the denial of natural law, says Madiran, founds right and wrong no longer on objective divine law but on subjective human conscience, ultimately no law at all. Man is free and responsible, but he is not free to make his own laws. And the Church’s social teaching certainly starts out from God’s natural law, but to be applied to the immense variety of new concrete situations as in our own time, it needs a great deal of work, such as Pius XII accomplished in his time.

Moreover, with no natural law or order in man, how can there be anything supernatural any more? (What nature is there to be above?). There can be no more 10 Commandments (which express the natural law); no more charity, (which is the beginning and end of the ten Commandments); no more natural religion (constituted by the natural law); no more social life (which presupposes natural justice); nor Christian life (which presupposes natural virtues); and so on and so on. In fact if there is no natural law, all notion of a Christian society becomes impossible, either as society or as Christian.

Objection: All good law is clear and certain. But if natural law requires such elaboration then it cannot be clear or certain. Therefore it is not good law. Reply: In its absolute basics – “Do good, shun evil,” natural law is clear and unshakeable. In everything deriving from those basics it is not so clear for us human beings, and it can be shaken or contested, but it is clear in itself, as when for instance a good judge digs justice out of a confusing court-case. Natural law is known to us from inside us by reason, and from outside us by revelation, for instance the revelation of the 10 Commandments to all men by Moses.

In the third and last Chapter of Part V of his book, Madiran presents the spiritual consequences of the denial of natural law which he has attributed above in P7 to the 20th century heresy. The result in the individual Catholic is that he strays far from a true understanding both of the Christian life and of how far his own life is from it. He no longer has any idea of the absolute necessity of supernatural grace to live a Christian life. He thinks that by his own strength he leads a decent life, yet from that life the Commandments 1 to 4 have vanished, 5 and 7 may still be alive, but 8 is weakened and 6,9,10 have often also vanished. Yet by a sentimental love of neighbour, disciplined by no objective law, he thinks he is fulfilling Christ’s command to love one another as Christ loved us, so he is satisfied with himself. In which state, says Madiran, he cannot be saved. No wonder such a man calls for “a change in the very concept of salvation brought by Christ” – and we have come full circle, back to the first of the seven Propositions in which Madiran summed up the 20th century heresy.

Kyrie eleison.

Next Covid?

Next Covid? posted in Eleison Comments on November 7, 2020

All over the world ever more people, observing the utter disproportion between on the one hand the huge Covid-propaganda of their vile media and governments, and on the other hand the scarce reality of Covid-deaths anywhere around them, are convinced that there is much more to Covid-19 than meets the eye. They are unquestionably right, but who the criminals are behind Covid, and what they are after is not so clear. Materialistic liberals can hardly imagine that anybody could be so evil, because they need to believe that everybody is nice, whereas believing Catholics have a chance of understanding, through their Faith.

What they understand through their Faith is that human life is a time and opportunity given by God to every human soul that He creates, to choose between eternal bliss in Heaven by serving and loving Him, or unending torments in Hell by spurning and refusing Him. Hosts of angels, created before men, were given the same choice, and perhaps a third of them fell, and were flung into Hell. These all now bitterly envy human beings their possibility of getting to the Heaven which they refused, and they do all they can to pull human souls down to Hell with them. Here is where the evil on this earth originates.

But if God is all-good and all-powerful, as He is, how can He allow any such free play of evil? Because He does not want any kind of robots in His Heaven. He wants with Him there only angels and souls that have been able to make an entirely free choice between Himself and the Devil, and who have chosen Himself against all possible allurements of the world, the flesh and the Devil. And if the Devil succeeds in blinding souls with error and seducing them for instance with his honey-traps, then God will often scourge those souls in this brief life in order for them to think again, to come back to Him and to save themselves for eternal life. “O God, punish me in this life” prayed St Augustine, “just so long as you need not punish me in the next.” And God often uses fallen angels and wicked men to do the scourging that He knows is necessary for the salvation of souls. And here is where much of the suffering of men on earth originates.

And here is why the great Covid-lie is likely to thrive for a while yet, because a mass of souls today are virtually trapped in atheistic materialism, which is the essence of Communism, and it is liable to take great suffering for souls to be shaken out of it. Deeply deceived by a false notion of liberty (freedom to choose between good and evil instead of between good and good – I have no inalienable right to choose evil), they are convinced and crusading liberals who insist on freedom for evil and, as we saw in the riots of this summer, on freedom for the destruction of the police, of all law and order, of their cities, of all feeble remains of Christian civilisation, in brief on freedom to make war against God. It took over 70 years of the full horrors of Communism for “Holy Russia” to begin to come back to God. What will it take to bring an entire apostate world to be ready to beg Our Lady to obtain Russia’s full Consecration?

Therefore expect in the rest of 2020, according to a recent source in Canada, the rolling in of secondary lock-down restrictions, with a new “surge” of Covid-related deaths, and the rushed acquisition or construction of “isolation facilities” throughout the country. Expect by the turn of the year much stricter lock-down measures, and in the New Year the introduction of a universal basic wage program alongside a new virus (Covid-21) due to overwhelm medical facilities. Planned for the Spring are a third lock-down, stricter still, imposition of the basic wage program, large economic disruption, and to offset an international economic collapse, a total debt relief program by which citizens will be offered, by the government, cancellation of all their debts in exchange for giving up for ever all ownership of any and all property and assets, and for accepting Covid-19 and Covid-21 vaccinations. And if any citizens refuse?

“They will be deemed a safety risk and re-located into isolation facilities, with their assets seized.”

We have been warned. God is not mocked (Galatians VI, 7). Let us pray!

Kyrie eleison.

Madiran; the Bishops

Madiran; the Bishops posted in Eleison Comments on October 31, 2020

It will be recalled that in the Prologue of his book The Heresy of the 20th century Jean Madiran placed the blame for that heresy fairly and squarely on the Catholic bishops who led up to and followed straight after the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), notably on the bishops of France whom he best knew. Chapter I of his book showed, following St. Pius X’s great Encyclical Pascendi of 1907, how these bishops’ minds were rendered unfit for reality, let alone for Catholic doctrine, by the subjectivism of Kant’s philosophy, now reigning supreme in the philosophy departments of virtually all “universities.” In Chapter II Madiran tackles the French bishops themselves, in six loosely connected sections.

Firstly, he says that to follow these bishops we would have to throw away a veritable treasure trove of Catholic treasures, such as St. Pius X, Gregorian Chant, Thomism, Canon Law, Our Lady, patriotism, our Greco-Latin heritage, Marian piety and last but not least, the devotion of little old women praying. For our part, he says, we refuse to scorn any of these familiar features of the Catholic family. Behind all of them is the love of Christ, while behind all the talk of “recycling,” “renovations” and “renewal” is hate. And behind all achievements of “Western civilisation” is Christ, neither India nor Africa nor China.

Secondly, to all the world the Newchurch has proclaimed its apostasy: the Newbishops’ policy is no longer to convert anyone. Yet the basics of life and death remain exactly the same. Let the Church teach us how to live and die. We are all too full of the world. Let priests teach us how to get to Heaven!

Thirdly, these bishops say that “the change of civilisation” calls for “a more evangelical concept of salvation,” by which they mean not just “a new form of words,” which is what they say they mean, but a new content of the words, meaning a new religion. Your Excellences, our answer is “NO!” Moreover, as a baptised Catholic I am entitled to demand of you the true Faith, because your “new form of words” in pursuit of a new “concept of salvation” is bound to be heretical, not just clumsy, but a new religion, contradicting the true Faith.

Fourthly, up until 1966 these bishops had not yet defected from the Catholic Faith, but now they are claiming that theirs is at last the authentic Christianity, when in fact their “post-Conciliar mentality” is breaking with the true Faith. The truth is that we are in the middle of a war between two different religions. And actively or passively, all the bishops are supporting the new religion. Some Catholic bishop must speak up, because souls are perishing! Msgr. Lefebvre, are you listening?

We need no bishops to tell us to be modern. We are all too modern. But modern technology and modern philosophy are not the business of Catholic bishops! We know the moderns, and we scorn them. You do not know them and you love them. Marx, Nietzsche, Freud are mere fantasy-merchants. Wake up!

Fifthly, the Newchurch is now ruining all apprenticeship, teaching and education. By wanting to give to the youngsters only what is modern, which they already have, you give them nothing, while making them think they know everything. Thus abandoned, they will become tomorrow’s barbarians, so that you are betraying not only the Faith but all civilisation. Come back to Tradition! God, give us some true bishops!

Sixthly, the bishops’ authority is based only on truth, legitimacy and law. If these bishops were right, the Church of Tradition would no longer exist. But the Truth is primarily their business, so that they have no authority to change the Faith, and if they do so, they have no authority to be obeyed, nor will we leave them in peace. We expect from them the certainty, purity and sanctity of the unchanging Catholic Faith.

(In Section 4 above, Archbishop Lefebvre is not mentioned by name, but he was in Madiran’s mind. Two years later the Archbishop founded the Society of St Pius X, and the rest is history.)

Kyrie eleison.