liberalism

Ibsen’s Rosmersholm

Ibsen’s <i>Rosmersholm</i> on September 28, 2019

Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906) was a famous Norwegian playwright, often credited with being the worldwide father of modern drama. He was not Catholic, but he told a great truth, and St Augustine once said that all truth belongs to Catholics (because their God is “the Way, the Truth and the Life”). For this reason Catholics can even sometimes appreciate better than non-Catholics the truths that the non-Catholics are telling. The great truth of Ibsen is that even in strait-laced hypocritical Norway of the late 19th century, where life and joy are stifled beneath a weight of dying traditions, still the human spirit rises up in protest, and it prefers even death to an existence entrapped with no apparent freedom or meaning.

Let us illustrate this protest with a group of three later plays of Ibsen in which he has turned rather from the drama of modern society to that of individual persons. Rosmersholm (1886) ends with the hero and his beloved committing joint suicide. The Master Builder (1892) ends with the hero falling to his death from a high tower which it was suicidal for him to have attempted to climb in the first place. John Gabriel Borkman (1896) ends with the hero dying from the cold of a virtually suicidal climb up a freezing mountain slope. But in each case the hero was striving for the freedom of the human spirit against a world stifling that spirit. Let us have a look at Rosmersholm in particular, an adaptation of which was staged in London recently with great success. Ibsen lives!

Every drama needs a dramatic clash, and the clash in Rosmersholm is between the old world of the Rosmer family and home on the one side, distinguished for the last 200 years by its soldiers and parsons who have set an example and given a lead to the whole region, and on the other side the rising new world of emancipation and freedom from all those old values. The central figure in the play is the last scion of the noble family, John Rosmer, formerly a parson but who has lost his Christian faith and is now torn between the two worlds. On the one side is Dr Kroll, a cold-hearted conservative attempting to save Norway from the all-invading liberalism, but whose own wife and children are going liberal. On the other side is the editor of the local radical paper, Mortensgaard, who is at least as disreputable as Kroll in his attempts to pull Rosmer to his side. Rosmer himself has in theory been won over to the new world of joy and freedom by the charming young woman, Rebekka West, his platonic companion for several years.

The drama comes to a head when Rosmer tells Kroll of his loss of faith and his intention to fight in public for the liberals. Kroll moves into action, by fair means or foul, to stop Rosmer from lending his person and prestige to the rot. Under pressure from Kroll, Rebekka realises that in her struggle to liberate Rosmer from his noble but stifling background, it is in fact that background, Rosmersholm, which has overcome herself. In the end, the only way that John and Rebekka can achieve both the new freedom and the old nobility is to throw themselves together into the water-mill of Rosmersholm. In other words, says Ibsen, the old nobility is joyless, the new conservatism is heartless and the new emancipation is no better. There remains only death as a way out, seemingly the only possible affirmation for the trapped couple.

Is that all dark nonsense, unfit for today’s Catholics? No, it is a realistic portrait of our world. When faith goes dead, as with Rosmer and with billions of souls today, then conservatism (Kroll) ultimately conserves nothing, left-wingery (Mortensgaard) is as good as throwing godless gasoline on a godless fire, emancipation (Rebekka) lacks stamina, and the liberal death-wish takes over. If one wishes to have life, and to have it more abundantly (Jn. X, 10), then Rosmer must revive in himself the faith of his truly noble ancestors, which means he must go back beyond even the best of his Protestant ancestors to the Catholics who made Christian Norway. Let Rosmer become truly Catholic, and then Kroll, Mordensgaard and Rebekka will all be able to see the true solution, and the whole region can light up again with the light of Christ.

Kyrie eleison.

People’s Voice – II

People’s Voice – II on August 17, 2019

President Putin’s June interview with the Financial Times, partially summarised and quoted here last week, became notorious because his prophecy that “the liberal idea” has done its time and is out of date, hit a raw nerve with Western politicians and media. They reacted vigorously, like ants whose ant-hill has been struck with a stick. What is the significance of his prophecy, and of the Western reaction to it? We must begin with a summary of the summary, in order to get clear what is at the very heart of his argument. In the original long interview he spoke on many subjects, but what he said on liberalism was indeed the most important subject that he broached.

The President starts out from the practical problem for Western peoples of the mass immigration of inassimilable foreigners into their countries. At ground level, multiculturalism is simply not working, but the liberalism of the elites leading the West makes them treat the immigration not as a problem, but as an enlightened advance, so they do nothing to stop it, and it continues unchecked. But States cannot survive without some basic human rules and moral values, which were formed in the West by the Bible. By the liberal elites’ disregard for these biblical values still held amongst the peoples, the liberals are proving that their liberalism is no longer in touch with reality and has become obsolete. Let anti-liberalism not turn into a tyranny in its turn, but the present stranglehold of liberals on Western politics and media is a true tyranny, and it must come to an end.

In brief, liberal values are opposed to Biblical values. Biblical values built the Western nations. Liberal values are destroying those nations. It is time for liberal values to stop destroying the West. Here Putin is quite right as far as he goes, but since he is a politician and not a theologian, he cannot express the argument in its full force, and he has to rest his case not upon absolutes such as Almighty God and His ten Commandments, but upon the presence still of Biblical values amongst the peoples of the West. Now 70 years of acute suffering under Jewish Communism are bringing the Russian people back to the Christ of Orthodoxy, so that Putin can rest his case on his own people’s return to Biblical values, but is there anything of Christ in the Western people’s resistance to mass immigration? Hardly. And yet there is a decisive participation of the enemies of Christ in the organising and financing of the mass immigration. (Readers of these “Comments” may remember the Jewess in Sweden, Barbara Specter, who boasted that her race was behind the immigration, “necessary to save Europe” – understand, from Christ.)

Thus if Putin rests his case for the Western nations upon their fidelity to Biblical values, who can deny that these are being eroded faster and faster? – “Thank you, Mr President, for wanting to defend us, but in all honesty we do not care for your defence. We love our liberalism because it gives us freedom to sin however we like. You are trying to save us from ourselves, but we worship Mammon (money), and we adore our liberty, equality and fraternity. We choose to go to Hell. Kindly leave us alone. We took centuries to get rid of God, and we do not want Him back.” Such is the reaction of the West, implicitly if not explicitly, to Putin’s political approach. He needs firebrand apostles to state the religious case in its most absolute terms:—

God exists, unchanging from all eternity. He freely chose to create spiritual creatures, angels and men, with a material earth, so as to have beings to share in his infinite bliss. But He does not want robots in His Heaven, so every spiritual creature had or has to use its free-will to choose to spend eternity with Him in Heaven instead of without Him in Hell. Yet a third of the angels and the original human couple chose Hell. He prepared a race to provide a human cradle for His divine Son to take human nature to repair that Fall. That race crucified His Son, and has fought ever since the Church which His Son instituted to continue saving souls until the end of the world. That fight is a cosmic war, the driving force of world history.

Kyrie eleison.

People’s Voice – I

People’s Voice – I on August 10, 2019

See en.​kremlin.​ru/​events/​president/​news/​copy/​60836 for a notorious interview of President Putin from last June, partly summarised here below. See these “Comments” next week for a commentary.

What is happening in the West . . . in Europe as well? The ruling elites have broken away from the people, because of the gap between the interests of the elites and the overwhelming majority of the people . . . . This means that liberalism has outlived its purpose, because, as our Western partners have admitted, liberal ideas such as multiculturalism, have proved to be no longer tenable.

When the flood of migrants into Western Europe brought the migration problem to a head, many people admitted that the policy of multiculturalism is not effective, and that the interests of the core population should be considered . . . . Maybe a wall between Mexico and the United States could be going too far . . . but President Trump was at least looking for a solution. Otherwise, who is doing anything? . . . Ordinary Americans say, Good for him, at least he is working on ideas and looking for solutions.

On the contrary liberals are doing nothing. Sitting in their cosy offices they say that everything is fine, but those who are facing the situation every day down on the streets in Texas or Florida are not happy, because they can see serious problems ahead . . . . Is anyone thinking about the people? The same is happening in Europe. I have discussed this with many of my colleagues, but nobody has the answer. They say that present laws exclude a hard-line policy . . . . Well then, change the law! In Russia we are making immigrants respect the laws, customs and culture of Russia, so in Russia too we have immigration problems, but at least we are doing something about it.

On the contrary liberals assume that nothing needs to be done . . . . The migrants can kill, plunder and rape with impunity because their rights as migrants must be protected. What rights are these? Every crime must have its punishment. In fact, liberalism has become obsolete. It has come into conflict with the interests of the overwhelming majority of the population. In the name of liberalism one may now claim, for instance . . . that children can play five or six gender roles . . . but everyone pursuing life, liberty and happiness as they see it cannot be allowed to overwhelm the culture, traditions and traditional family values of millions of people making up the core population.

As for religion, it cannot be pushed out of this cultural space. We should not abuse anything. Russia is an Orthodox Christian nation, and it is not a Catholic nation, but from Russia we sometimes get the feeling that the same liberalism is at work, using elements and problems of the Church itself to destroy the Roman Catholic Church . . . . I consider this to be incorrect and dangerous. Have we forgotten that all of us live in a world based on Biblical values? Even atheists, living in this world, profit by those values. We may not be daily or public practitioners of our particular religion, but deep down inside there must be some fundamental human rules and moral values. In this sense, traditional values are more stable and more important for millions of people than liberalism, which in my opinion is coming to an end.

Then if liberalism is over, does that mean that tyranny is on its way? Not necessarily. A certain variety of opinions must always have free play. What matters is that the interests of the general public, millions of people living their daily lives, should never be forgotten . . . . Thus even liberals should be treated with a certain respect, but liberals cannot go on dictating to everybody as they have been doing for the last several decades, both in the media and in real life. For instance, how have they put certain subjects out of bounds? Let liberals have their say, but let them no longer absolutely dominate the public arena.

Kyrie eleison.

T.F.P. on Liberalism

T.F.P. on Liberalism on November 3, 2018

Whatever have been from its beginning – and still are – the faults of the organisation known as T.F.P. (Tradition, Family, Property), it is a pleasure to say that it is doing some good work in the United States today. In a regular circular letter (available from tfp@tfp.org) it presents brief essays often on three important points for the understanding of how the Catholic Faith needs to function in today’s demonic world. The essays are not too deep for ordinary readers to understand, but neither are they shallow. They may not be infallible, but they are thoughtful and full of good sense, and they often address important problems in today’s Church and world. Here for example is a summary of Four Characteristics of the Liberal Mind that are Destroying Society, from the American T.F.P. Letter of one month ago:—

The fragmented and polarised state of society today is proof that something has gone terribly wrong. Conservatives often blame the breakdown on liberal activists at work in politics and in the media, but the liberals’ dissolvent activity comes from a whole liberal mindset, spread far and wide. Almost everybody today accepts the principles of classic liberalism, enshrined in the American Constitution but moderated at that time by America’s Christian heritage. With that heritage now being largely repudiated, the full dissolvency of liberal principles is today becoming evident, as it was not evident before. In order to see where our chaos is coming from, let us look at four characteristics of the liberal mindset.

1 The liberal mind is always moving away from objective truth. Wanting to appear more compassionate and kind than the “heartless conservatives,” by means of half-truths they slide into error which they did not at first embrace. For instance liberals may well oppose crime in principle, but they promote it in practice by going soft on criminals, because of supposed injustices that criminals may have suffered.

2 To replace unpleasant and impersonal objective truth, the liberal mind is always looking for pleasing subjective opinions, or personal judgments, to confirm them in their own way of thinking and acting. A classic example comes from a Supreme Court decision of 1992, justifying abortion: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of the meaning of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”

3 The liberal mind is always wrongly defining freedom as the right to do whatever one wants to do. By this definition, sheer whims and fantasy can ultimately take over. Liberals will then call in doubt whatever contradicts their whims, but never what confirms them.

4 The liberal mind is always disliking rules and laws, which it feels as being automatically restrictive. In reality, law consists of reasonable precepts put forward by any society’s competent authority as being essential to that society’s common good. But liberals will resent even rules of clothing or grammar if these are felt to be too restrictive! Thus to replace the real God of Justice and the Ten Commandments, they fabricate their own god, a god above all of compassion, a god of ten Recommendations.

In brief, all four characteristics are centred on the self. According to liberalism, each person determines for himself what are true and false, right and wrong. Here is where society is breaking down.

For indeed liberalism as such cannot create a social order, or a society, but only a social breakdown. If it has survived until now, that is only by the solid Christian order which it inherited, and of which it is the dissolution. Liberals depend on what they destroy, and destroy what they depend on. In 2018 they are pushing ever closer to chaos. Liberalism is intrinsically anti-social. No society can be made out of anti-social members. Liberalism can only make people more and more isolated, lonely and frustrated. It can only make human life turn more and more into a series of clashes between sacrosanct individuals.

Kyrie eleison.

Liberalism = Religion

Liberalism = Religion on December 2, 2017

Not only is liberalism a serious sin that dishonours Our Lord Jesus Christ. It is in fact a religion. We are dying of liberalism and of its consequences. For two centuries it has spread everywhere, in our schools, in our societies. It is a poison that destroys the commandments of God, together with everything that makes the beauty and greatness of a Christian civilization. In his Encyclical Humanum Genus Leo XIII said about Freemasons: “We must tear off their mask and show them as they are, so that we avoid them and their errors.” I believe that liberalism is a fruit of Freemasonry which also needs to be unmasked, until we fully understand its dangers.

Liberalism has its goddess: it is liberty. At the time of the French Revolution, liberals worshipped the goddess of Reason in Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, that is to say, liberty, the liberty of Man, this liberty which has its statue at the entrance of New York harbour, which they celebrated in an incredible way not long ago. Man is free, finally freed from all law, and in particular from the law of God. Liberty is the goddess of the religion of liberalism.

Liberalism has its priesthood, in the person of Freemasons, a secret, organized, extremely efficient priesthood. There are thousands and thousands of Freemasons. The exclusively Jewish sect of B’nai B’rith alone, with its very frequent access to churchmen in Rome, and its presence at the meeting of Assisi, has five hundred thousand members throughout the world. The Grand Orient is also widespread.

Liberalism has its dogmas: they are the Declaration of the Rights of Man. As the Popes have taught, these rights of liberalism are the instruments invented by Freemasonry to use against God, to free man from God. Henceforth man is free to sin, to disobey God . . . liberty of the press . . . is just one of several supposed Rights of Man which have been condemned by the Popes for a century and a half.

Liberalism has its morality which is simply immorality: no brakes on liberty. For twenty years liberals have succeeded in introducing into the legislation of almost every State all those principles which go against Catholic morality, such as abortion, free union, etc. – living in sin is favoured by tax systems.

Liberalism has its politics: notably democracy, the democracy of numbers. It is the people who are – supposedly – in charge. But in fact, “democracy” is about better subjugating them, dominating them, dispossessing them for the benefit of an omnipotent State, of a totalitarian socialism which gradually destroys the right of ownership, which makes the citizen work for a third of the year for the State. Citizens become in effect slaves of the totalitarian State. Liberty so-called is the politics of Liberalism.

Liberalism has its education: education must be atheistic, secular, and one throughout the nation. In France, it was not the bishops who defended the freedom of non-governmental education, but families. If there had not been two million people who went to Paris to defeat the socialist law on education, there would be in France today only government education, and private education would have disappeared.

Liberalism has its economics, directed by international financial associations. To the extent that States apply a liberal morality, a liberal economy, a liberal education, liberal laws, even if they incur enormous debts, they are supported by the International Monetary Fund. On the contrary States resisting liberalism are financially undermined and economically ruined, if possible. The Vatican itself was ruined by International Finance. Freemasons infiltrated the pontifical finances, and transferred the Vatican fortune to Canada, where it disappeared. Immediately the Freemasons and International Finance intervened with the offer of any financial support needed. Here are the pressures that can be exerted on Rome in the appointment of bishops or cardinals, on anything that the Pope does. He is now practically in the service of masonic liberalism. We have to say it like it is.

So said Archbishop Lefebvre (abbreviated) in Barcelona in 1986. Need one word be changed today?

Kyrie eleison.

Consecrations Achieved

Consecrations Achieved on May 20, 2017

Thanks in part, no doubt, to readers’ prayers, the two Consecrations, of Bishop Zendejas and of Russia, took place successfully in Vienna, Virginia, USA, on May 11 and 12 respectively. The weather was not good on May 11, because the rain poured down, but the outdoor tent was watertight and accommodated perfectly a congregation of around 500 people coming from all over the United States, and a few from even further afield. The weather was a little better on May 12 for the new bishop’s first Pontifical Mass with the Consecration of Russia, and with a congregation only a little smaller than on the previous day.

Special thanks went to Fr Ronald Ringrose, Traditional parish priest of Vienna, on whose Rectory grounds the double Consecration took place. He has maintained the parish of St Athanasius as a bastion of Catholic Tradition within easy striking distance of the capital city of the United States for well over 30 years, which is a considerable achievement in these troubled times for the Catholic Church. “Ad multos annos” says Mother Church to her devoted servants – may Fr Ringrose thrive for many years yet.

As for the purpose and scope of the two Consecrations, it is necessary to be both modest and clear. Ever since Vatican II (1962–1965) when the mass of Catholic churchmen surrendered to liberalism (the worship of liberty) and to modernism (the adaptation of God’s Church to the godless modern world), the Church has been in serious trouble. In 1970 Archbishop Lefebvre created the Society of St Pius X to act as an emergency lighting system for the mainstream Church going dark, but his successors at the head of the Society are doing all they can to make the emergency lighting go dark. Let us then compare Bishop Zendejas’ Consecration to a candle being lit, or a match being struck, in the increasing darkness. It has no ambition either to save or to convert either the Newchurch or the Newsociety.

What it should do is contribute to the saving of that Oldtruth, so to speak, which is at the heart of the true Church and the true Society. Working mostly in the USA, but with no territorial jurisdiction of any official kind, Bishop Zendejas will help to look after many souls in the USA that have the true Faith, and want to keep it. Accessible by car or train from anywhere in North America if anything happens to ground the aeroplanes, he is a relatively young bishop with the fullness of certainly valid Holy Orders, able to Confirm or Ordain, with or without condition, and who is by the grace of God, at least for the moment, sensible and sane – in English the word “sanity” is three quarters of the word “sanctity.” Let us lend him our prayers that he may stay sane for many years to come, or at least until a truly Catholic Pope turns on the lighting once more. At that moment Bishop Zendejas puts his episcopacy back in the hands of Catholic Rome, for the Pope to do with as he wishes. Meanwhile may the new bishop be a candle lit in the darkness, a point of reference for any soul seeking the complete and uncontaminated Truth.

As for the Consecration of Russia led by all four bishops present on the eve of the first of Our Lady’s great apparitions in Fatima, there was not the remotest pretence that their Consecration could replace that of the Pope with the bishops of the entire world, which is what Our Lady requested. There was merely the hope that by doing what lay in their power, with the support of all the congregation present, they might help to obtain from Heaven the graces necessary for the Pope to perform at last the Consecration of Russia, exactly as Our Lady requested so long ago. That Consecration will eventually take place because Our Lord said so in 1931, and then begins the Triumph of the Immaculate Heart, so necessary and so long delayed.

Kyrie eleison.