liberalism

Faith Undermined

Faith Undermined on April 11, 2015

The editorial in a recent Priory bulletin of an honourable colleague of the Society of St Pius X shows one major reason why Society priests are not yet joining the “Resistance” – they do not yet believe that the Faith is at stake. We wonder what it will take to persuade them. We can be sure that the leaders in XSPX headquarters are convinced that they are not themselves changing the Faith, and that they find it that much easier to continue persuading Society priests and laity that they are not changing the Faith. But if they had the true Faith, how could they dream of putting its Lefebvrian defence under the neo-modernists’ control in Rome?

The editorial is entitled “Obeying Fallible Superiors.” It recognizes that resistance to fallible Superiors is legitimate when the Faith is at stake, but the editorial’s emphasis is rather on the limits to be set to such resistance: anarchy and disrespect for authority are never lawful; obedience to lawful Superiors is essential to any society; Superiors have special graces of state; care must be taken in warning sheep that cannot make the necessary distinctions; there is a dangerous spirit of independence abroad today (Benedict XV); name-calling should be avoided, etc. – the principles are impeccable, the problem lies in their application.

For instance, while shunning name-calling the editorial nevertheless recognizes that Pius IX named “liberal Catholics” as being the Church’s “worst enemies.” Indeed in any Church crisis to identify and name the Church’s enemies, e.g. “Protestants” in the Reformation, is a major first step towards being able to fight them. No doubt the editorial’s author would grant as much where the Faith is at stake, only he would deny that there is any crisis of the Faith taking place within the Society. But, Father, do you think that liberal Catholics of the 19th century who came under Pius IX’s condemnation would have denied a single Article of the Faith? On the contrary, they would have vigorously affirmed their belief in every such Article. And yet would they not with equal vigour have condemned Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors? The problem for a modern mind to be Catholic lies not in its accepting or rejecting any one truth of the Faith, but in its instinctive undermining of all truths whatsoever, and this dreadful dissolution of the mind is, without a divine miracle, a virtually insoluble problem for and of the Faith.

And it has reached to the top of the Society. Father, do you recognize that Benedict XVI’s “hermeneutic of continuity” is tantamount to the suspension of the law of non-contradiction? And have you studied paragraph III.5 of Bishop Fellay’s Doctrinal Declaration of April, 2012, a document which he circumstantially “withdrew,” but never substantially retracted? It states that non-Traditional statements of Vatican II must be interpreted as Traditional. Is that not a perfect example of the “hermeneutic of continuity,” of interpretation overtaking reality? Then do you really think that the Society has no problem of the Faith when its Superior joins in Rome’s suspending the law of non-contradiction, and swims in contradictions and in what Churchill graciously named “terminological inexactitudes,” as happily as a fish swims in water?

By the way, you also say that anybody who “doubts that hierarchy can still exist in the early 21st century excludes himself from all Catholic life.” If he doubts it in principle, one might agree with you, but if he is merely relating what he observes in practice, might he not be merely observing the extension one century later of what you quote Benedict XV already observing as “the dangerous spirit of independence abroad” in 1914?

Kyrie eleison.

Newsociety Thinking – III

Newsociety Thinking – III on February 21, 2015

These “Comments” having declared (395) that the Newsociety’s First Assistant lacks doctrine, and (396) that this lack of doctrine is a problem as broad as broad can be, namely the whole of modernity against the whole of Truth, it remains now to show how this universal problem manifests itself in a series of particular errors in the interview that Fr Pfluger gave in Germany towards the end of last year. For brevity we will have to make use of the summary of his thinking (not essentially unfair) given here two weeks ago. Propositions from it are in italics:—

The Catholic Church is much broader than just the Traditional movement.

Yes, but the Traditional movement’s doctrine is no more nor less broad than the Catholic Church’s doctrine, being identical with it, and that doctrine is the heart and soul of the Traditional movement.

We will never make Tradition attractive or convincing if we remain stuck in the 1950’s or 1970’s.

To think of making Tradition “attractive or convincing” is too human a way of conceiving it. Catholic Tradition comes from God, and it has a divine power to convince and attract, so long as it is presented faithfully, without human change or alteration.

Tradition cannot be confined within the 19th and 20th century Church condemnations of liberalism.

True, but the Gospel could not then be defended without those doctrinal condemnations, and since the 21st century is more liberal than ever, Tradition cannot be maintained without them today.

Our time is different, we cannot stand still, much that is modern is not immoral.

Our time is not so very different. It is more liberal than ever (e.g. homosexual “marriages”), so it may not all be immoral, but Catholic doctrine is absolutely needed to sift moral from immoral.

So we must re-position ourselves, which is a practical problem and not a question of Faith.

Any re-positioning that the Church ever does must always be judged in the light of the Faith. The XSPX’s re-positioning since 2012 is clearly leaving behind the Archbishop’s fight for the Faith.

The “Resistance” movement has fabricated its own “faith” by which to condemn the Newsociety.

Whatever the human failings of the “Resistance,” it has, just like the Traditional movement in the 1970’s, arisen spontaneously all over the world in reaction against the Newsociety’s betrayal. The reaction may seem disjointed, but it is held together by the identical Faith held by Resistants.

SSPX HQ never betrayed Tradition in 2012 because its actions were attacked from both sides.

So the Truth is always in the middle, to be measured by human reactions? That is human politics, inadequate to judge of divine Truth, absolutely inadequate to solve today’s crisis of the Church.

The official Newsociety texts of 2012 were not dogmatic.

But the most official XSPX document of all in 2012 was the General Chapter’s six conditions for any future “agreement” with Rome, i.e. the six gravely inadequate conditions for submitting the defence of the Faith to its deadly Conciliar enemies. Is the whole Faith not dogmatic?

Rome was much less aggressive in 2012 to the XSPX than it was in 2006.

Because from 2006, and before, Rome could see the SSPX steadily turning into a paper tiger.

The Newsociety follows the Spirit and draws on Tradition.

The neo-protestant Charismatics “follow the Spirit.” The Indulterers “draw on Tradition.”

It should be clear by now that Fr Pfluger wants to leave behind the doctrinal anti-liberal Society of Archbishop Lefebvre, and to reshape it into a Newsociety that will harmonize with the Newchurch of Vatican II. Nor is it enough to say that no decisive step has yet been taken by the XSPX towards Rome, because unless there is a firm resistance, and soon, from within the Newsociety, its leaders are taking it, slowly but surely, into the arms of Conciliar Rome. Is that what Catholics want?

Kyrie eleison.

Newsociety Thinking – II

Newsociety Thinking – II on February 14, 2015

Some 650 words of a single “Eleison Comments” are by no means enough to make clear the enormous problem posed by the interview given by the Newsociety’s First Assistant to a Newsociety magazine in Germany towards the end of last year (cf. last week’s EC). Fr. Pfluger’s thinking springs from the poisonous modern mentality, so that it is not surprising if Archbishop Lefebvre’s Society of St Pius X (SSPX) is being poisoned from top to bottom and changed into Bishop Fellay’s Newsociety (XSPX). The poison consists in the move from God to man; from the religion of God to the religion of man; from the truths of God to the liberties of man; from the doctrine of Christ (“Going, TEACH all nations” – Mt.XXVIII, 19) to the uniting of mankind.

Like millions upon millions of modern men, thousands upon thousands of churchmen in high office and all too many priests and layfolk of what was once the SSPX, Fr Pfluger does not understand the crucial importance to the Church of Catholic doctrine. “INDOCTRINATE all nations,” Our Lord could have said. Why? Because all men are created by God to go to Heaven (I Tim. II, 4). This they can only do by Jesus Christ (Acts IV, 12), by firstly believing in Jesus Christ (Jn. I, 12), which they can only do by hearing about the Faith (Rom. X, 17), in other words by hearing Catholic DOCTRINE. For someone to be disinterested in Catholic doctrine means that he is not interested in going to Heaven. Good luck to him, wherever he will spend his eternity!

Now from start to finish Fr Pfluger’s German interview betrays his relative disinterest in Catholic doctrine, but as last week’s “Comments” declared, that disinterest is most clearly betrayed by his implicit disparaging (not too strong a word) of the great anti-liberal, anti-Masonic, anti-modernist documents, notably Papal Encyclicals, of the 19th and 20th centuries, let us say from Mirari Vos of 1831 to Humani Generis of 1950. To Fr Pfluger’s way of thinking, probably these “anti” documents seem merely negative, whereas Catholic doctrine is essentially positive. One might as well think that medicine is merely negative, while health is essentially positive. But medicine can be essential to preserving health, for goodness’ sake! However, why are the Encyclicals such necessary medicine for the health of the Church today?

Because man is not made to live alone (Rousseau’s noble savage), he is by nature a social animal (Aristotle) – observe the thousand ways in which men get together. Now the French Revolution of 1789, by spurning Aristotle and following Rousseau, overthrew the natural basis of society and placed it on merely man-made foundations instead, hostile to human nature as designed by God, and therefore hostile to God. Therefore as the Revolutionary ideas advanced, through France, Europe and the world, so the Catholic Church found itself in a more and more hostile social environment, because the profound influence that any society has upon the individuals belonging to it has been working more and more against God and against the salvation of souls.

For a long time the Catholic Popes were not deceived, and they revived the medicine of the Church’s true social doctrine to apply it through their Encyclicals to the sickness of Revolutionary mankind. Thus the Encyclicals teach nothing but the Church’s age-old doctrine on the nature of human society between man and God, that social doctrine which it had not been necessary to repeat for as long as it had gone without saying. Thus the Encyclicals are not an unfortunate accident of unfortunate times in the past. They are central to the defence of the Faith in the present, as Archbishop Lefebvre so well learned from Fr Le Floch. But then came “good” Pope John to declare that modern man is no longer sick, and now comes Fr. Pfluger. More next week.

Kyrie eleison.

Hebdomania

Hebdomania on January 24, 2015

The Charlie Hebdo attack of January 7 in which two muslim gunmen killed a dozen cartoonists and journalists in the Paris office of a satirical French weekly, and the enormous public protest of Jan. 11 against the attack in which leaders of several European nations were photo-opped as taking part, are best understood as one more episode in the war being waged by the enemies of God upon what little remains of Christian civilisation. Let us consider in order the cartoonists, the gunmen, the puppet politicians and peoples pandering to Islam and the puppet-masters behind them all.

The cartoonists lampooned not only Islam and muslims but also, from the world’s one true religion, the Holy Trinity, our divine Saviour and the Blessed Virgin Mary. Now the one true God is extremely patient, but he is not mocked (Gal. VI, 7). As men have a right not to suffer from terrorism, so the true God has a right not to endure the public repetition of obscene and blasphemous cartoons. Then nobody justifies terrorism as such, but given that the French Church and State authorities refuse to censor obscene blasphemy, is it surprising if God allowed muslims to avenge his honour?

The gunmen, two young muslims, must have been acting religiously, because politically it was entirely foreseeable that their action would rouse opinion against Islam. Still, how could they dare to attack? Because across Europe muslims are by their birthrate and immigration getting stronger in numbers all the time, and they make no secret of the fact that, as soon as they are strong enough, by a bloodbath if necessary, they will islamize the once Christian nations of Europe.

So who persuaded these nations to adopt the suicidal policy of almost unrestricted immigration and unbelievable welfare benefits for the in fact unassimilable immigrants, and so on? Who but our bribed or bullied puppet politicians? In a moment of truth a year or so ago, the Chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel, admitted that “multi-culti,” the mixing of contrary cultures, does not work. But a week or so ago in connection with the Hebdo attack, did she not proclaim that “Islam belongs to Germany”? She had been brought to heel. She is a puppet because she is constantly acting against Germany’s true interests. For instance, were there not so many muslims in France, would Charlie Hebdo ever have bothered to ridicule Islam? And who votes for these puppet politicians? Puppet peoples, who allow their thinking to be enslaved by their vile media.

Then who are the puppet-masters? They are enemies of God, intent upon establishing their own godless New World Order, a police State designed to ensure that not one living soul escapes eternal Hell. Let us call them “Globalists.” Then was the Hebdo attack their work, one of their events like 9/11 in the USA and 7/7 in the UK, engineered to move public opinion, this time towards freedom for blasphemers and civil war? Most likely. The event was certainly not what it was made to seem. Famous example: the three-minute film clip showing a gunman shooting in the head point-blank a “muslim policeman” lying on the ground, with no blood, no recoil of the gun, and little movement of the “victim.” The clip may still be found, starting from here – http://youtu.be/gobYWXgzWgY.

And the Good Lord amidst all this madness? “Those whom he wishes to destroy, he first makes mad,” is the old saying. Pray 15 Mysteries a day for the triumph that he will engineer, through his Mother alone. Are the poor Globalists ever going to be taken by surprise!

Kyrie eleison.

Archbishop Commented – I

Archbishop Commented – I on January 3, 2015

For today’s Church authorities “there is no fixed truth, there is no dogma. Everything is evolving.” So said Archbishop Lefebvre (1905–1991) in 1991 (see last week’s “Eleison Comments”). For at the end of his life the Archbishop saw more clearly than ever what he had been up against in his heroic defence of the Faith. Since then the liberals (unknown to themselves as such?) who took over his Society of St Pius X as soon as he was gone, have still not understood the gravity of the problem as identified by the Archbishop. Therefore let these “Comments” open the New Year by attempting once more to lay open the mortal wound of today’s Church and world.

When Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) erected man’s refusal of God’s reality into a philosophical system, based on his utterly false proclamation that the human mind cannot know the object as it is in itself, then the philosophy department of universities all over the world began to spill craziness into the streets, because people wanted to make freedom their god and Kant offered them the supreme liberation, that of the mind from its object.

Now Catholics not yet contaminated by the Kantian fantasy know that God and his Heaven exist quite outside of, and independently of, their little minds, and so if they want to be happy for eternity their minds had better deal in objective reality and not in subjective fantasy. Therefore for a century and a half a God-given series of anti-liberal Popes stood up to the liberal world going constantly more crazy all around, and these protected the Church from the prestigious and popular subjectivism. But by the 1950’s the Church’s cardinals and bishops were not praying enough to maintain this protection of their minds and hearts from the madness, known within the Church as “modernism,” and so in the conclave of 1958 they elected one of their own, the supposedly “good” John XXIII, a liberal (unknown to himself as such? God knows), who duly launched in 1962 the disastrous Second Vatican Council.

Why disastrous? Because the madness of subjectivism (the refusal of objective reality), instead of being still utterly condemned by the Church’s highest authorities, was now adopted by them and made (consciously or unconsciously? – God knows) into the official basis of Church doctrine and action. The problem could not be graver. The officials of God’s true Church, appointed to proclaim and defend God’s objective truths of salvation, were henceforth filtering these through their subjectivist minds. Imagine having nothing other than filthy bottles in which to store the best of wine. It can only be ruined. Today’s Conciliar Church officials can only ruin God’s truth.

Here is why the Archbishop said in 1991, “We are dealing with people (at the top of the Church) who have a different philosophy from ours, a different way of seeing, who are influenced by all modern subjectivist philosophers. For them, there is no fixed truth, no fixed dogma. Everything is evolving. This is really the Masonic destruction of the Faith. Fortunately we (Traditionalists) have Tradition to lean on.”

But what has happened to Tradition without the Archbishop to guide it? Alas, the authorities at the top of his Society of St Pius X, which for some 40 years spearheaded the defence of the objective Faith, cannot have been praying seriously enough to protect their minds and hearts from being in turn infected by subjectivism. They too have lost the primacy of objective truth, and so they are being played by the Romans like a fish is played by a fisherman. Archbishop Lefebvre, pray for us!

Kyrie eleison.

Brave Priests

Brave Priests on June 14, 2014

As a number of you will know, Fr Fernando Altamira is a young Argentinian priest of the Society of St Pius X, working in Bogotá, the capital city of Columbia in South America, who several months ago took a clear and public stand against the betrayal of the Faith and of Archbishop Lefebvre’s Society by Bishop Fellay and his team in Menzingen, Switzerland. Walking out of the Society’s Priory to found an alternative parish nearby, Fr Altamira was followed by the large part of his previous parishioners. As I was able to observe in mid-April, he is a pious, intelligent and hard-working priest, popular with the people. For his pains he is being “excluded” from the SSPX.

He wrote to Bishop Fellay, protesting that his “exclusion” is invalid. He sent a copy of his well-argued protest to a veteran priest of the SSPX who understands too well how the modern world operates to be fooled by Bishop Fellay. Here are Fr Jean-Michel Faure’s wise comments:—

“It is obvious that there is a problem in the Society of St Pius X. Liberals took control, and they want to be integrated into the structure of modernist Rome. And, as Fr Pfluger has said, they want to expel all anti-liberals opposed to their Operation Suicide. One more proof of the on-going Recognition of the SSPX by Rome is the churches that certain bishops of France offer to Bishop Fellay, for the Requiem Mass of Fr Lagneau, for the Jubilee Mass of Fr Marziac, on various occasions the Basilica of Lourdes, the Confirmations in Corsica, and so on.

“Secrecy is the mode of operating worthy of a liberal politician who wants to bring his electors around to a goal directly opposed to what he had promised in order to get elected. By a series of ambiguous statements skilfully graded to advance little by little, the politician brings the great majority of his followers to accept the opposite conclusion to what they were convinced of to begin with. It is Macchiavellian deceit, lying and hypocrisy, pure and simple. For this Superior General the end justifies the means, and to attain that end he does not hesitate to take positions repeatedly condemned by Archbishop Lefebvre. What would the Archbishop say of him and his two Assistants? That they are idiots, childish, naive and disobedient, that they are making the Society commit suicide and that they are betraying the fight for the Faith. And they are going to hand over to the modernists in Rome the fruits of so much generosity and so many sacrifices made by the faithful.

“The modernists in Rome have never backed down on their demands that we accept the Second Vatican Council and the legitimacy of the New Mass. In 1975 the Rector and professors of Écône advised the Archbishop to accept the Council in order to save the Mass, and they ended up rebelling and quitting the Seminary in August of 1977. Today the three ringleaders in Menzingen go so far as to accept the legitimacy of the Lutheran Mass. As the three of them say, the Society’s reluctance to go along makes us very annoying to our “new friends in Rome,” while to wait for the conversion of Rome is unrealistic, as far as they are concerned. For sure and certain God alone can clean up this situation, totally different from the situation of the Church when it was reformed by St Pius V. Like the Captain of the Titanic, Bishop Fellay and his headquarters will bring the Society’s Operation Suicide to a successful conclusion. Blind leaders of the blind. But anyone who is not blind must resist this suicide, and keep the Faith.”

If only the Society had more priests as clear-sighted and courageous as Fr Altamira and Fr Faure!

Kyrie eleison.