liberalism

SSPX BETRAYAL

SSPX BETRAYAL on January 18, 2025

Let a maid not meet with wolves. They may be charming,

But such charm is, for a maid, much too disarming!

How can an innocent maiden raw life know?

That’s why the Archbishop himself to Rome would go. 

At https://crowdbunker.com/v/A7bwTo5Ysp on the Internet can be found an interesting video presentation in French entitled “Betrayal of the SSPX, told by priests.” The background picture shows Pope Bergoglio and Fr. David Pagliarani, Superior General of the SSPX (Society of St Pius X) putting their heads together, as though they are the best of friends. The picture may well be a fabrication rather than real, but it is a good fabrication, because it sums up the huge unreality that both of them are pursuing, namely that 2+2=4, and 2+2= 4 or 5 (or 6 or 6 million), can be reconciled in 2+2 = four and a half. But that is exactly the same unreal reconciliation that Pope Benedict and Bishop Fellay were dreaming of in 2009. It is the unreal dream of liberals that things are not necessarily what they objectively are, but anything that I may subjectively like them to be. For instance, if I do not like Ten Commandments, then I make them Ten Options! 

And if for another ten years nothing interrupts the present course of Church affairs, then in in 2035 another Church leader and another SSPX Superior General will be caricatured in the same way because the liberal Church leader will still be posing as a friend of Catholic Tradition, while the dream-Traditional SSPX leader will still be seeking for official Church approval from the real enemies of the Faith. A good cartoonist could enhance the fabrication by portraying Fr Pagliarani as Little Red Riding Hood and the apparent Pope as the Big Bad Wolf: “What lovely teeth you have,” she fawns. “All the better to eat you up with, sweetie pie!” 

However,  “Judge not, that ye be not judged,” says Our Lord in the Sermon on the Mount (Mt. VII, 1–5). Certainly not all priests in the SSPX are traitors well aware that they want to get rid of the last trace of Archbishop Lefebvre. Certainly seminarians in the seminaries which he built are still receiving something inherited from him. But the problem is among their Superiors, liberals firmly entrenched at the controls of the SSPX at Headquarters in Menzingen, Switzerland. They may themselves firmly believe that Catholic doctrine excludes contradiction, as certainly as 2+2=4 excludes contradiction in arithmetic. But how then can they be so intent upon obtaining official Church approval for Catholic Tradition from today’s apostates in Rome? These have modernism firmly in their heads, which means the profound undermining of ancient and obvious truth. Between modern ears there are no longer enough grey cells capable of grasping old truth. 

This is so much so that when a would-be friend of the SSPX proposes it should follow the 1988 example of Archbishop Lefebvre by taking for itself, even without Rome’s approval, the bishops it so needs for its worldwide apostolate, a sadder and wiser friend replies, “That is no longer possible. SSPX HQ has so imposed on Newsociety seminaries a doctrine of obedience to the Roman authorities and of obedience to the Newsociety authorities, that the young priests coming out of these seminaries for the last many years would be in total confusion. Like in the Church of the 1950’s, obedience has taken precedence of Truth. Consequence – “You must do what I say, merely because I say it.” The folly existed in Latin –  “Sic volo, sic jubeo. Stat pro ratione voluntas” (Thus I wish, thus I command, my will takes the place of reason.) 

In the the 1950’s, Catholics had a very real problem: how to bridge the ever widening gap between the real demands of the Faith and the real godlessness of the modern world, rising all the time. Fiftiesism, “Pay, pray and obey,” or, keeping up the appearances of the Faith while emptying out its substance, was not the needed solution. Quite naturally, appearances without the substance meant the collapse of both appearances and substance, and that was the Church of the 1960’s. Vatican II naturally followed on Fiftiesism. Vatican IIB risks gravely following tomorrow on what Menzingen is imposing on its seminarians today. 

Therefore today’s Newsociety, but not all its priests, is leading not away from, but back to, Vatican II of the terrible 1960’s. “Cavete, consules.” Watch out, chiefs. At the very least, cease to inspire photographic cartoonists lampooning you as hobnobbing with your deadly enemy!

Kyrie eleison

RESURRECTION of RUSSIA

RESURRECTION of RUSSIA on March 30, 2024

Are signs of hope around us all extinct? 

No! Signs of God in Russia are quite distinct!

The following page, shortened and adapted from a recent article of Alexander Dugin, a leading thinker in Putin’s Russia, shows how Russia’s battle must now move to the battlefield of hearts and minds, away from the Communist and liberal land of the dead. It will. Our Lady is at work on the Russian people – 

When Communism collapsed in Russia at the end of the 1980’s, it was liberalism that took over as the ruling ideology. Since 1991, virtually all major principles established in education, the humanities, and culture have been laid down on a strictly liberal basis. Liberalism arrived in Russia as the dominance of pro-Western liberal minorities, the ‘reformers.’ This liberal elite, comprising oligarchs, a network of American influence agents, and corrupt late-Soviet senior officials, rules by totalitarian methods. They act in the name of progress and globalisation, and they believe that capitalism is the pinnacle of human development. Today, this includes gender politics and ecology. Only the ‘enlightened/awakened’ (woke) liberal minority knows what is ‘right.’ Progressive minorities must rule. The rest of the population must be kept strictly under control. 

Putin’s rise to power in the early 2000’s changed the situation by introducing the principle of sovereignty with a diversity of sovereignly independent nations, which is altogether denied by liberal dogma. Liberalism calls for sovereign national states to be abolished and integrated into a supranational world government structure. Therefore, with Putin’s arrival, the clash was inevitable, and the most radical liberal minorities opposed him. 

However, many liberals decided to adapt to Putin by outwardly conforming, while inwardly continuing to follow a liberal course as if nothing had changed. So Putin may have signed Decree 809 on traditional values (directly opposed to liberal ideology), he may have added provisions about the normal family to the Constitution, he may have mentioned God as the immutable foundation of Russian history, and banned LGBT movements as extremist. Notwithstanding, the liberal domination in Russia remains. It has penetrated so deeply into our society that it continues to reproduce itself in new generations of managers, officials, scientists, and educators, despite Putin’s sovereign course. 

Therefore, while Putin is our main hope of freedom from liberal domination, the guarantor of victory in the Special Military Operation in Ukraine, and the saviour of true Russia, nevertheless most of Putin’s presently seeming friends are not really on his side. The liberal totalitarian sect is not thinking of surrendering its positions. They are ready to fight for them to the end. They fear neither patriotic forces in politics, nor the people, nor God (they either do not believe in Him or believe in their own, a fallen one). Only Putin restrains them, with whom they dare not collide head-on. 

Therefore Russia needs to focus on victory in the Ukraine. Putin sees this soberly and clearly: no victory in Ukraine, no Russia. But defeating the West outside Russia while preserving the liberals’ totalitarian omnipotence inside Russia is simply impossible. As long as liberalism prevails in hearts and minds, even victory in Ukraine will be more apparent than real. Russia cannot be established as a civilisation whilst permeated with liberalism in its most toxic forms. That is why it is time now to open another front – in the realm of ideology, world-view, and public consciousness. The totalitarian domination of liberals in Russia – primarily in the realms of knowledge, science, education and culture – must come to an end. 

Kyrie eleison 

LIBERALISM in ACTION

LIBERALISM in ACTION 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 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. 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 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.