modern world

“Rigged Video-Game” – II

“Rigged Video-Game” – II on August 25, 2018

The story is told of the great Catholic monarch of Spain, Queen Isabella (1451–1504), that when asked once what she wanted to see in a painting, she replied “a priest saying Mass, a woman giving birth and a criminal being hanged.” In other words, everybody has a part to play in life, and they should play that part and not another. We can only imagine what she would have said about a world in which priests celebrate eucharistic picnics, women freely contraceive and abort, and criminals are sentenced to shorter and shorter sentences in prisons resembling luxury hotels. Today “Nothing is but what is not” (Macbeth, I, 3).

Today many people sense that modern life is false, but few can see why “nothing is but what is not,” or why “Nothing is real, And nothing to get hung about, Strawberry Fields for ever” (Beatles). They observe police oppressing, journalists lying, pharmacy poisoning, lawyers cheating, politicians betraying, women self-sterilising, youth suiciding, teachers corrupting, doctors killing, and so on and so on, and worst of all, priests apostatising. It is not difficult to see around us a disordered world which is the exact opposite of the right order that Queen Isabella had in mind for Spain. But the disorder is so disguised as to resemble in the present the right order of the past, so that few people can work out where the disorder comes from, and many give up the attempt to track it down, settling down instead among the material comforts that it has to offer. For instance many a Rock musician makes good money by screaming at the bad fruits of materialism, but few if any go after its roots, so that most end up as quite comfortable materialists, part and parcel of the falsity that they recognised correctly in their money-making days.

In the words of the old song, “Why, why, why, Delilah?” Because people have so gotten rid of the presence of God in their lives that they have no inkling that His absence is the problem. And if ever they do have an inkling, then for the same reason that they got rid of Him in the first place, they will now look anywhere rather than in His direction for the solution. Yet it was Christ who created, towards world’s end, that Christendom which lifted civilisation to unprecedented heights in the Middle Ages, and of which “Western civilisation” is the Christ-less successor. But, as readers of these “Comments” know, Christ-endom without Christ is “-endom,” better spelt as “end-doom.”

But “end-doom” has to compete with the Middle Ages, otherwise men will want to go back to Christ. Hence the appearances of Christian law, hospitals, parliaments, etc., must be maintained even while the substance is emptied out. Hence over the last 500 years a series of “conservatives” who conserve nothing but the last conquest by the liberals. Hence a long procession of hypocritical politicians outwardly right-wingers but in fact left-wingers, because that is what the peoples want – leaders who will appear to be rendering homage to the remnants of God and of Christ, but who in reality are serving the Devil by making way for ever more freedom from God and from Christ.

Hence the Church’s Second Vatican Council, maintaining the outward appearance of Catholicism even while replacing it with the reality of modernism. Hence the Society of St Pius X’s Chapter of six years ago, pretending to maintain Catholic Tradition even while preparing to subordinate it to Vatican II. Hence the Society’s Chapter of 2018, dethroning the architect of the 2012 Chapter only to reinstate him right next to the throne. Hence a Chapter representing not the reality of the situation of Church or Society, but that which risks turning into another video-game, rigged to tranquillise those resisting the Society’s march towards Conciliar Rome even while protecting that march. Please God, we are wrong.

And so, is there a solution if the whole world is rigging video-games? It is impossible that Heaven could have left us without one. Ever since the Middle Ages Our Lady has given to all of us the Rosary. More recently, She has given us the devotion of the First Saturdays. We neglect Her remedies at our peril.

Kyrie eleison.

Parenting – III

Parenting – III on March 10, 2018

EC 553 (“Parenting – I” Feb 17) has been hitting a nerve. It is not surprising. The Devil has virtually the whole of society in his grasp. The battleground has moved to those families which are not yet in his grasp. Parents, do not despair of God (which is what the Devil wants you to do), but take the measure of the gravity of the situation, and see the logic of the two counter-measures proposed by God through His Mother for this situation. Then do the best you can, and leave your children in Our Lady’s hands.

Several readers have reacted so far to “Parenting – I,” and there are sure to be more. A first reader laments that Fr Delagneau’s analysis fits exactly his own family. On the day after Christmas last year their eldest daughter, just turned 20, turned her back on the family, left the family’s Traditional Catholic way of life “once and for all,” and turned herself over to the world with an imminent marriage into the bargain, for which she is not ready. However, a spark of hope is that the young man in question has no religion, which means that he may find his way with her to God more easily than if he had some religion! Another spark of hope is always that motherhood may bring her back to reality, as it did Marya Shatova in the novel “The Devils” of Dostoevsky (who saw the modern world coming).

A second reader, given the accuracy of Fr Delagneau’s portrait of today’s youngsters, wonders why these “Comments” ever recommend young men today in general to get married. She writes that there are hardly any half-way genuine young men or women left, because “the basic material has changed.” Might it not be time, she asks, to consider the possibility that God wants more men and women to stay single and to suffer from the loneliness, but by the freedom from family engagements to have more time for celibate struggle and sacrifice? In the workplace she says that the rising generation of workers want money, power and time off, that they have no idea even in theory of any work ethos, and almost all are living in sin, with “partners” or second spouses or some perversion or other. “Jesus, have mercy,” she concludes.

A third reader suggests that it is all very well for Fr Delagneau to turn to the parents, but what is the Church now doing to defend families? Whereas the reader himself is old enough to be able to look back fondly to the 1960’s when his own mother was always at home to look after the children, now he says few families can make ends meet without the mother having to go outside of the home to work, and the children have to be turned over to the State to be looked after, because the official Church is on the ropes and Catholic Tradition is stretched far apart. Living conditions for families are determined by the State which does not favour families and has none of the Church’s skill to be able to help with a family’s human problems. This reader concludes that we are enslaved, like the Jews in Egypt. But he does also say that since God has left families in today’s situation, there must be something they can do about it.

Indeed. “Where there is a will, there is a way,” says the proverb. And the Council of Trent quotes St Augustine to the effect that God cannot abandon a soul that has not first abandoned Him. As Solzhenitsyn said, Russia would never have fallen into the Communist Hell if it had not turned its back on God. Almighty God allowed that Hell in order to bring “Holy Russia” back to Him. It took several years, but that return to God is now taking place all over Russia, even if the conversion is not yet Catholic. Patience. The Consecration of Russia to Mary’s Immaculate Heart will see to that. “In suffering is learning.” And now families all over the consumerist West are suffering intensely. Patience.

Parents need above all to grasp the urgency of the need to resort to Our Lady’s two remedies, the Rosary and the Devotion of the First Saturdays to make reparation to her Immaculate Heart. For who can say that either of these remedies is absolutely impossible? Let parents make a real effort with both – five Mysteries with the children, another ten individually if at all possible, and as long a drive as may be necessary for the First Saturdays, and then how could Our lady abandon them? Not possible!

Kyrie eleison.

SSPX, 2018?

SSPX, 2018? on January 6, 2018

As the world plunges downhill, more and more people are opening their eyes and are wondering where it will end. As the Catholic Church is led resolutely downhill by a pope who seems intent only on rubbing out the last traces of the pre-Conciliar Church, more and more Catholics are opening their eyes and are driven to wondering if the Council (1962–1965) was not some kind of problem for the true Catholic Church. Then they look towards the Society of St Pius X, because it was founded in 1970 by Archbishop Lefebvre precisely to ensure the continuation of the pre-Conciliar Church, and what do they find? A group of priests more and more sympathetic to the post-conciliar Church, less and less clear on Vatican II, and sliding into the arms of the Conciliar Romans. Result? Many of these souls looking for the Truth are more confused than ever. So where are the Church and the Society of St Pius X headed in 2018?

Souls looking for the Truth must read (for instance Ralph Wiltgen’s The Rhine flows into the Tiber, or Archbishop Lefebvre’s Letter to Confused Catholics). That is how many Catholics found their way in the 1970’s and 1980’s towards the Traditional movement where they found again the true Church which they knew they had lost after the Council’s “renewal.” And in Archbishop Lefebvre (1905–1991) they found a leader with a clear and Catholic vision of what had happened at the Council – it had taken place under pressure from the modern world to conform to the world, whereas from the beginning of the Church through to the 20th century, it was always the Church that had put the world under pressure to conform itself to God. In this perspective, Vatican II represented an upheaval, a turning upside down, without precedent in all Church history, but the Council Fathers were nearly all more or less beglamoured by the modern world. It is this upheaval which set the course of the official Church from the Council until today. And given that the enemies of God and man were behind the modern world and behind Vatican II, and given that by a just punishment of God they are now deeply entrenched within the offices of the Vatican, then in 2018, short of a miracle or of grave events intervening, the official Church will continue on its downward plunge.

And the Society of St Pius X in 2018? At the beginning of July, in six months’ time, the SSPX holds its elections for those who are to be for the following 12 years its three senior officials, the Superior General and his two Assistants. If the 40 leading priests of the Society who vote in those elections wish to continue the Society’s slide into the arms of Conciliar Rome, i.e. the official Church, then no doubt they will vote for Bishop Fellay to be Superior General so that he can finish the work of replacing the Archbishop’s clear vision of the need to resist Vatican II with his own confused vision of blending Catholic Tradition with Vatican II, which is like blending fire with water. For just as Paul VI (1963–1978) dreamt of saving both Church and modern world by blending them in Vatican II, and almost crushed the life out of the Church by his tyrannical dream, so Bishop Fellay has drained the life out of the Society by clamping upon it his parallel dream of saving both Tradition and Council in a messianic reconciliation of his own making. The vision is quite different from the Archbishop’s. Then how will the 40 priests vote? Upon their vote depends how the Society will develop in 2018, at least from July onwards.

However, there was a reason for Vatican II, and that was the ever widening gulf between God’s true Church and modern man. The strain of holding them together became unbearable, and the Council Fathers snapped. Archbishop Lefebvre stood his Catholic ground and founded the Society, but his successors at its head have in turn snapped under the strain. Today’s godless world surrounds all of us, and its siren charms are highly seductive. Catholics must “watch and pray” – they need to read, and to continue reading, and they must have a strong prayer life by which to cleave to God – 15 Mysteries of the Holy Rosary, every day.

Kyrie eleison.

Culture’s Importance – I

Culture’s Importance – I on December 16, 2017

“When I hear the word ‘culture,’ I reach for my gun,” is a famous quote (often attributed to Reichsmarchall Göring, but coming actually from a Berlin play of 1933), which may be taken to mean that culture is not the ultimate source of the values often attributed to it. Often the word serves as a fig-leaf to cover over the West’s deep-down apostasy by a shameful but long-standing hypocrisy, to which some gun-owners may be instinctively tempted to put a violent end. One American of our own time who realizes that culture depends on religion or its absence is Ron Austin, who has written in December’s issue of the magazine First Things an article on pop culture, arguing that it is neither pop, nor culture.

Austin is a veteran Hollywood writer-producer who spent nearly half a century producing pop culture, mostly for television. He is a member of the American Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, but also a Fellow at the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology in Berkeley, California, which gives him at least a handle on the true dimensions of “culture.” For instance towards the beginning of his article he writes, “The key to understanding modernity and its ultimate failure lies in the many failed efforts to find replacements for religious faith . . . . It was the mass media fostering a “pop culture” that was the most influential and powerful substitute for a meaningful world-view . . . ” Pop culture, says Austin, is an idol . . . as such it is phony . . . it is neither pop nor culture.

Austin defines “pop” as belonging rather to the people than to any elite. He admits that pop culture has considerable popular appeal today, but he says it is synthetic and industrial in nature, deriving as it does from no natural or organic way of life, so it is not truly popular. “Culture” is difficult to define, but he takes it to mean a way of life with shared values and with the means to express it. Culture in this sense can only grow organically like a tree, at nature’s speed which cannot be forced, and it requires a shared memory with a sense of the past, a continuity of meaning, goals and standards. But “pop culture” erases the past. Therefore it is no true culture. Austin recalls the decades of his own life from this point of view.

In the 1950’s and 1960’s he remembers a growing alienation from the past in which the mass media played a crucial part. In the 1970’s a counter-culture of fragmentation and narcissism grew, with more entertainment than ever, and with it an increasing detachment from reality. The medium itself was becoming the message, and morality was based on subjective emotion, which the media packaged as a product for profit. Entertainment replaced thought or analysis. If not fatal, the disease was highly contagious. In the 1980’s the attempt to restore past values failed in the USA, Europe and Russia. In the 1990’s some false hopes came to an end, but the mass of consumers were more fragmented than ever.

However, in the 2010’s the Catholic Faith does give Austin some hope. True culture depends on human beings being human, he says, and humans have for true models Our Lord and Our Lady. True culture will be replanted, and the Light will return.

Austin is on the track of the real problem, even if his treatment of the problem and of its solution is relatively lightweight. It is today’s total environment, or culture, which is so dangerous for souls and their salvation. It has become totally normal either to disbelieve in God, or if one believes in Him, not to take Him seriously. The past has little to tell us (except the Six Million, of course). Immorality is unimportant. There is no such thing as an order of nature to be respected. Technology saves. Freedom is all. And this sickness is highly contagious, because it is so “liberating.” Heaven help us!

Kyrie eleison.

P.S. As a minor resort to the elite culture of yesteryear, in the true sense of the word, a session of Mozart parallel to the “Beethoven Blast” of two years ago will be held here in Broadstairs, from Friday, February 23rd to Sunday, February the 25th, of next year. Details will follow.

Declining Slowly – I

Declining Slowly – I on March 25, 2017

Here follows an abbreviated testimonial from the United States, which hits many a nail on the head:—

The Society of St Pius X has been “rebranded,” and it is not the same as it was. As the original SSPX belonged to the Catholic Church, so the Newsociety belongs to the Newchurch. To those old enough to remember, it seems like Vatican II all over again, only worse, because this time there is no direct doctrinal attack, nor a major Council, instead the revolution is being spread by slow, almost imperceptible social transformation.

For while the appearances of Tradition are being maintained, the Traditionalist Movement is being slowly changed from within. Outwardly and materially things appear to be more successful than ever, with increasing amounts of money and buildings, but inwardly and spiritually there is decay, because the disease of modernism is imperceptibly infecting the ranks. A variety of symptoms indicate that the modernism is the same, for instance the new, young happy-faced Society priests who are just like the “peace priests” of the 60s and 70s, as the great Cardinal Mindszenty called them. But unlike the previous generation of priests they lack masculinity, and so do some of the Newsociety’s leading lay teachers.

Thus the Mass may still be Traditional, but the whole culture around it is Novus Ordo. Traditionalists want to preserve the Old Mass and the Sacraments, and some of the morals from the Catechism, but at the same time they want to have everything else the modern world has to offer. This makes many so-called Traditional Catholics, outside of the Mass and the Sacraments, largely indistinguishable from their counterparts in the rest of the modern world. The statistics are the same when it comes to divorce, annulment, “single mothers,” etc. If Traditionalists want to go with the modern world, they cannot stay with the true religion. It is one or the other.

As it is, the Traditionalist Movement is now opening up to the world, to become socially acceptable and normal. and the process of modernization is underway, slowly but surely. There is a new, young generation in charge and they are changing things. The old, quirky, embarrassing hardliners have been replaced, and Tradition has a new image, a young, happy, friendly face. The mainstream Church had its aggiornamento fifty years ago, the Society is being updated today. The old generation which fought so many battles to preserve things is now being replaced by a new generation which never knew the Novus Ordo, or how it came to be, and has never had to fight for anything. Today’s youngsters are liable to have grown up in a Traditional bubble, and have too little knowledge of yesterday’s war, background of today’s. Before the Council Bella Dodd testified to the Communist infiltration of the Church. Are we so sure that the same thing is not being done now to the Traditionalist Movement?

It was all too predictable. Being neither infallible nor indefectible, the Society is now going through what the Church went through fifty years ago – infiltration, compromise, disintegration and the same process of autodemolition. Archbishop Lefebvre would have noticed the radical change immediately, but a large number of the frogs in the Society pot have not even noticed how the water temperature is rising. The Archbishop”handed down what he received,” but how can the new generation hand down what it is no longer receiving? Therefore we now hear that the “inevitable reconciliation” is at hand. The SSPX will be accepted as part of the Newchurch, and conversely, it will have to accept the Newchurch. It will now be just one of many side-chapels in the Pantheon of the New World Order. And as for “reconciliation,” which side has given in to the other? Has the Conciliar Church become Catholic? Far from it!

See next week further examples from the same witness.

Kyrie eleison.

“Holy Priests”?

“Holy Priests”? on March 4, 2017

By a great grace of God, one reader of these “Comments,” immersed by family and work in today’s world, has nevertheless kept a true sense of what is going on around him – the great drama unfolding every day of the salvation or damnation of the souls which he meets. It is not a comfortable sense. He might wish that he could not see what he sees, but by another great grace of God, he does not want to go back to sleep. He knows what the Society of St Pius X used to represent, and he used to profit greatly by it. Now from a simple layman’s point of view, with no pretention of getting into the higher arguments, he observes that the Society is not what it was, but has joined the sleeping brigade, and he wonders what he is going to do. His words are not to be found on the Internet, but they must be in many a sad Catholic’s heart. Here they are, in italics:—

I have mentioned this before but I keep seeing it at work. Souls are starving and they are withering away under the weight of sin and the pressures of this anti-culture engulfing all of us. Almost all of the former Catholics I have talked to have either been disgusted with all the abuse taking place in the Church (I imagine though that many use this as a big rationalization for their own sins), or they have seen in the priests nothing but selfish men who have not died to self and put on Christ. Their view of the Church is clouded by so much unfaithfulness and so much sin.

No doubt the abuses in the Church serve as an excuse for Catholics to give up the Faith, but what a responsibility of priests who, even without causing grave public scandal, nevertheless by their example cease to inspire and uplift! Priests of the Society – you used to inspire and uplift – where are you now?

Honestly, I would dare say that The Angelus Press (magazine of the SSPX in the USA) no longer has a cutting edge. We need to be jarred from our complacency (I know I certainly do with my fallen human nature!). We need to be jarred from our intellectual sloth. It is all very well to write beautifully about spiritual and doctrinal issues, indeed I do not think anyone can accuse AP of promoting heresy but . . . . and here is the kicker . . .  if none of these ideas are woven into the fabric of daily life or address any of the problems of modernity, then the Church becomes just one “sweet thing” to soothe us from the realities of real life.

Here is the problem. Real priests deal in “the realities of real life.” “Lord, give us holy priests,” prays the SSPX. Alas, is not “holy priests” liable to mean soothing priests? And should priests be soothing souls so as to make them comfortable in this life, or should they not rather be making them uncomfortable in this “valley of tears,” so that all their desires go towards life eternal?

I am becoming more and more indifferent to what the SSPX does because we layfolk have no influence on what they do. So if they want to rush headlong into oblivion and obscurity and irrelevance, which is what I think will happen, then let them go ahead. The unique glory of the SSPX used to be that it was the only organized resistance against Conciliar shenanigans out of a principled rejection not of authority but of anything that was destroying the Faith. Alas, the SSPX is using the same principle of authority – good in itself – to co-opt any opposition to error, whereas authority is meant to be at the service of the truth. So quite honestly, I have no idea what I am going to do, practically speaking. We still attend the SSPX but (at least for myself) the fervor I had with the SSPX has almost been extinguished. Patience. Amidst all of this, Christ is the one who will give victory.

Is the Newsociety indeed not on its way to making itself as irrelevant for life eternal as the Newchurch?

Kyrie eleison.