modern world

Five Hundred

Five Hundred on February 11, 2017

This issue of “Eleison Comments” for the Feast of Our Lady of Lourdes, 2017, is the 500th issue from the first which appeared on July 6, 2007. For nine and a half years the “Comments” have appeared on the Internet once a week, usually on Saturdays unless there is some delay or other, and every week during that time with few exceptions. Also on Saturdays it goes out on an electronic mailing-list to thousands of subscribers. In English, French, German, Italian and Spanish it is accessible on stmarcelinitiative.com, and let it here be said that if anybody ceases to receive the “Comments” by e-mail when he has wished to continue receiving them, it will never be because he has been struck off by the mailing-list’s administrators. Usually it will be by some electronic misfortune, for instance when somebody’s computer switches the “Comments” to Spam. On other sites the “Comments” appear each week in Czech, Japanese, Korean and Portuguese.

The “Comments” are never long, although occasionally they have a Supplement. In English they rarely exceed 700 words, containing about as much material as can be made to fit on an A4 page in size 12 lettering. This brevity has the advantage of assuring readers with little time to spare that reading them will never take more than a few minutes each week. On the other hand the brevity has the disadvantage that the “Comments” will rarely go into a subject in any great depth. Occasionally a few issues will appear in a row on the same subject to examine it in a little more detail, but even then the contents are hardly scholarly, nor do they pretend to be. Scholars are liable to use rather more than 700 words to prove a point, and many readers today have little time for much more than 700 words.

What the “Comments” do attempt to do is to argue from the reality of the modern world around us to establish some reasonable and coherent connection between on the one hand the Catholic faith without which we cannot be saved (Heb. XI, 6), and on the other hand the ever darkening scene of world and Church which we all know. Whether the “Comments” achieve that purpose, readers must judge for themselves. They are certainly not infallible, coming as they do from a Catholic bishop cut loose from any official structure and twice declared “excommunicated” (1988 and 2015) by official Rome (which might, alas, be more of an honour than a dishonour – God knows). But if he himself had to go over all back issues he might find judgments that he would change in the light of subsequent events. He can bend over backwards to be kind to the churchmen responsible for Vatican II and its aftermath, but as Don Putti, the founder of Sisi Nono, once said to him, “Sono tutti delinquenti” – objectively, they are all delinquents.

Thus while many readers may find the “Comments” to be rather dark and too pessimistic, their author may suspect that if he erred, it was where he was a little too optimistic. Paradoxically, the supposed arch-conservative of the SSPX and arch-critic of the Newchurch can seem to go quite easy on the practitioners of the Novus Ordo religion. He would say he was following St Augustine: “Slay the errors, but love those erring.” Others might be less kind and say that underneath he has been a flaming liberal all along – such are the delights of our modern age. In any case he does not expect the “Comments” to reach their thousandth issue. He fully expects the electronics on which they depend to be in a near future either knocked out of the sky by war, or crippled on the ground by agents of the New World Order, to the lies of which the Internet has done so much harm, despite the Internet’s manifold miseries.

Meanwhile all honour and thanks go to Almighty God and to Our Lady of Lourdes for every little way in which the first 500 issues may have helped souls, and may souls pray that more light and warmth come from as many more issues of the “Comments” as Providence will provide for.

Kyrie eleison.

Prayer Urgent

Prayer Urgent on January 14, 2017

When the Titanic began sinking in 1912, it is well-known that the first lifeboats to be launched were not filled to capacity because not yet enough passengers took seriously the stricken ship’s doomed condition. But as the full truth became widely known, so the rest of the lifeboats each of them had more than enough people wanting to get on board. Now, the sinking of the Titanic was a mirror of God held up to the modern world, but by no means all people alive today believe that, and so the lifeboats of Catholic Tradition are being emptied rather than filled. Nothing like enough souls are yet grasping the full truth of our doomed condition to be doing what they need to be doing – praying urgently.

Here is how a friend from Switzerland puts it: “In our country as elsewhere, every last trace of Catholicism is disappearing, and the (once very Catholic canton of the) Valais is no exception. Everything needs to start all over again, while the enemies of Truth are more numerous every day.” Can anyone say that this description does not fit his own part of the world? Certainly it fits England! In a poll of 1595 English adults taken on December 18 and 19, only 28% believe in God while 38% are positive atheists. A little under two years ago those figures were 32% for the believers, 33% for the atheists. It is clear that the disbelievers are pulling significantly ahead. Poor England!

But why is belief in God so important? St Thomas Aquinas explains in his Treatise on the Angels: just as all Creation proceeds by an overflow of goodness from God, so this goodness in creatures seeks to make its way back to the Supreme Goodness of the Creator, each in its own way: vegetable and mineral by a natural inclination, animals by a sense inclination, most perfectly men and angels by an intellective inclination of mind and free-will (1a, 59, 1). Thus human beings come from God to go back to Him, by the right use of their mind, the mind being “inexcusable,” says St Paul, if it pretends that it cannot recognise God in His Creation (Rom. I, 20), and by the right use of their free-will, to choose Him rather than refuse Him. Alas, sense attractions draw most men away from God (1a, 63, 9 ad 1).

However, to be drawn away from Him is not what God meant men for. Every single human being that He created, He meant for Heaven (I Tim. II, 4), and to all men He gives grace sufficient for them to know Him and love Him and so get to Heaven. Heaven is therefore what every man is for, whether or not he accepts the fact, and if he refuses it, he is blinding himself and can have no understanding of what life is all about. It would follow that all such men who are leaders in any domain are ultimately the blind leading the blind, while all such followers are the blind following the blind. “I am the Light of the World,” says Our Lord Jesus Christ, “he that followeth me walketh not in darkness” (Jn. VIII, 12).

Then he who refuses to follow God, let alone Jesus Christ and his Catholic Church, walks in darkness, and the obstinate preference today of global “Westerners” for more and more darkness is preparing a terrible Chastisement, comparable only to the Flood in the time of Noah. As then men had so “corrupted their ways” (Gen. VI, 12) that God had to intervene with the Flood to prevent absolutely all men from choosing to go to Hell, so too today the corruption is so terrible that God alone can interrupt it.

But men can always pray, and prayer still works like nothing else still works. For it is easy to imagine, amidst millions and millions of souls turning to Mammon and away from God, how He positively watches out for, and listens to, the fewer and fewer souls that turn to Him. The hour is to prayer, through his Mother, the prayer of the Holy Rosary, fifteen Mysteries a day, if that is at all reasonably possible.

Kyrie eleison.

Catholics’ Distress

Catholics’ Distress on October 15, 2016

A world wanting less and less of God constantly wears down Catholics. Here is another reader’s cry:—

I ask myself, how is it possible to keep the Faith in the general situation of the Church today with its absolute lack of shepherds? For a few months we were with the Society of St Pius X, months which taught us the value of Tradition. We looked into the story of Archbishop Lefebvre’s struggle, and we saw how he is being betrayed. We followed the “Resistance” through the website of Non Possumus. For a few months we were deceived by Fr. C., who calls it “Desistence.” We were undeceived and left his group. Now we can no longer go to the Society because they insist that we join in certain activities, meetings of altar-boys and so on. They require information about us, and to find it out send our way married couples heavily committed to the Society. Much of the time we spend trying not to say things that would prevent us from receiving Holy Communion, as happens to some people because they are against Pope Francis, or for the “Resistance.” Right now we are going to the Catholic Maronite Church where at least the Consecration is valid. But we are disappointed to observe that they accept Vatican II in general, and they asked me to allow my girls to serve on the altar. When I refused, they said “We are all children of God,” and so on, to prevent discrimination against females serving on the altar.

I have nobody I can go to Confession to. I have a continual struggle at work where I never stop speaking of God and of current events, despite the school being secular and secularist, so that the personnel are all employees of the State. Following your advice to withdraw into the shadows to prepare for the descent into the catacombs I am wary of social contacts, but it is difficult to fight on your own. We are now in contact with prople of T.F.P. (Tradition, Family, Property). I am not sure what their doctrine is. But what can we do? The struggle is weighing down heavily upon me. In one school where I work one professor is to my knowledge a Freemason. Despite its being a State school, its whole orientation is religious, but in a deistic way, i.e. without Christ. What can I do? In this country there is nothing left, and we are at our wits’ end.

Amongst other things I wrote back to him that when the Church is being taken along the Way of the Cross to be crucified, as is happening today, then the only way not to have to carry a splinter of that Cross is not to be a Catholic. Obviously this reader wants to remain Catholic in order to get himself and his family to Heaven. So he should not be surprised to find himself suffering from splinters of Our Lord’s Cross. When he should be really worrying is when he would find himself at ease in this world around him.

As for his workplace, there is not much he can do about it. Social contacts should be maintained with prayer, charity and example, because we human beings are social animals, but let our limited energy and resources not be exhausted in throwing pearls before swine. Our Lord tells us not to condemn if we do not want to be condemned, but he also tells us to discern between wolves and true shepherds (Mt.VII, 15). So a Catholic is bound to exercise his best judgment on the variety of priests and layfolk that he meets with in the chaos of today’s Church. And in any case a family father must today lead his own family in the five-Mystery family Rosary every night (or better, morning). That will ensure that Our Lady will protect his family as only she can do through whatever grave events lie ahead of us.

Kyrie eleison.

Dickens Conference

Dickens Conference on August 16, 2014

The Dickens Conference held two weeks ago at Queen of Martyrs House in Broadstairs, England, went very well, within its modest limits. On the Saturday there was only a little rain, the Sunday was all sunshine, and nearly 30 participants, mostly from England but also from Denmark, France and the USA, much enjoyed the house, one another’s Catholic company, and the three lectures of Dr David White on three novels of Charles Dickens (1812–1870), England’s best loved writer after William Shakespeare.

“Within its modest limits” because outside of the devoutly attended Masses on the Saturday and Sunday, there was little outwardly supernatural about the Conference. Let us say that it was a session of sanity rather than sanctity, but we notice immediately that at least in English the word “sanity” makes up three quarters of the word “sanctity.” Grace builds on nature, and it can hardly build on the insanity and corruption of nature to which the world around us is giving itself over, day by day. Sanity is therefore more important than ever, even for supernatural purposes. If the “Resistance” is presently making so little apparent headway, is it not because there is just not enough sanity still around to recognize and cast out the mind-rot, and the rot of true obedience and sanctity?

In Dr White’s first lecture he spoke of David Copperfield, Dickens’ own favourite amongst his many novels, and specially linked to Broadstairs. This is because on Dickens’ many visits for work or holidays to his beloved seaside town, he came to know an eccentric old lady who lived in a small house still existing on the sea-front. She so impressed him that he built her into David Copperfield as Betsy Trotwood, an eccentric old lady who takes in the orphaned hero of the novel and protects him until he finds his way in life. In her mouth Dickens puts his own hatred of Puritanism and Calvinism, said Dr White. At least once in his life Dickens was told that Catholicism is the one true religion, but he never became a Catholic. However, he had a supreme respect for the Gospel of Christ, and genuinely good-hearted characters tumble over one another in the pages of his novels.

On Saturday afternoon there followed a visit to the sea-front house of “Betsy Trotwood,” now a Dickens Museum; full of Dickensian memorabilia and with a Dickensian curator. Then the second conference was on Bleak House, first novel of Dickens’ second period, when England was growing darker. Bleak House attacks lawyers and the law in particular, but in general, said Dr White, it attacks a System more and more in control of society, demoralizing and crushing the innocent sheep. Politics are becoming meaningless and the aristocracy is losing touch with reality, but an inhuman System is driving forward until it will finally collapse under its faksehood, in the manner of Vatican II, added Dr White.

The third lecture presented on Sunday morning Hard Times, another of the darker novels, about the total lack of real education, 150 years ago! Without education of the heart, Dickens knew that human beings will be cold and inhuman. Dr White drew on his decades of teaching in the USA Naval Academy to back up Dickens’ portrait of the enormous stupidity of the social robots engineered by an “education” spurning history, the arts, music, literature and especially poetry. The result, he said, is the boundless boredom of youngsters today, a reflection of pure nihilism.

However, Conference participants went home feeling neither bored nor nihilistic, but much refreshed. Deo Gratias.

Kyrie eleison.

Vatican II-B

Vatican II-B on July 7, 2012

The parallels between Vatican II and the recent happenings within the Society of St Pius X are so striking that these happenings could be called Vatican IIB. It stands to reason. Exactly the same seduction and pressure of the modern world that made the mainstream churchmen collapse in the 1960’s have swayed a number of SSPX members in the 2000’s, bringing the SSPX to near collapse. I recently imagined I heard a mother telling her child a bed-time story:—

“Once upon a time there was a flourishing Catholic Church, but it was surrounded by a naughty modern world. So the Church condemned the modern principles on which that world was based. But that world did not like being condemned, so it did all it could to infiltrate the Church and stop its condemnations. However, events like two dreadful World Wars were proving the Church to be right, and so souls were joining the Church in large numbers because it was providing true solutions to the world’s problems.

“But then disaster struck! Just when so many souls were surrendering to the sweet yoke of Christ, the leading churchmen decided that the modern world was right after all, and so at a great four-year meeting in Rome they changed the Church’s principles to fit the modern world. They made friends with all the Church’s former enemies, and were very cruel towards the Church’s true friends that wanted nothing to do with the modernization. These true friends were only a small minority of Catholics, because over several centuries Catholics had come to put so much trust in their leaders that even when these were betraying the Church, still the Catholics put their trust in them. However God in his mercy at last gave his true friends a leader of their own, a truly Catholic Archbishop, and then they began to rally, and a truly Catholic movement of resistance began to flourish.

“However, the movement was surrounded by the naughty Newchurch whose Newchurchmen did not like being condemned as modernists by the movement. So they did all in their power to shut it down. But events such as the emptying out and shutting down of one Newchurch institution after another were proving the movement to be right, and so more and more Catholic souls were making their way towards the movement because of its true solutions to the problems otherwise insoluble, both of the modern world and of the Newchurch which had gone over to that world.

“But then disaster struck! Just when the movement was gaining more and more souls from the collapsing Newchurch, the leaders of the movement began to say that the ills of the modern world can be exaggerated, so the four-year meeting was not so bad after all. These leaders then began to make friends with the Newchurchmen, and they showed great harshness towards any members of the movement who might insist on condemning the Newchurch and its false principles. Worse, these leaders were not without followers inside the movement, because Catholics are so used to thinking they are disloyal if they do not trust their leaders.”

“Ooh, Mummy, did the story end happily ever after?”

“Darling, I can’t tell you. It’s not yet over. Now go to sleep.”

Kyrie eleison.

Deadly Angelism

Deadly Angelism on February 11, 2012

Discerning what made T.S.Eliot (1888–1965) “indisputably the greatest poet writing in English in the 20th century,” a conservative English writer of our own day, Roger Scruton, has some interesting things to suggest to Catholics hanging on to their Faith by their fingertips in these early years of the 21st century – briefly, in the pain is the solution! If we are being crucified by the world around us, that is the Cross we are meant to be carrying.

Eliot was in poetry an arch-modernist. As Scruton says, “He overthrew the 19th century in literature and inaugurated the age of free verse, alienation and experiment.” One may well question whether Eliot’s final combination of high culture and Anglicanism is a sufficient solution to the problems he was tackling, but who can deny that with his famous poem, the “Waste Land” of 1922, he blazed the trail for contemporary English poetry? The enormous influence of his poems demonstrated at least that Eliot had his finger on the pulse of the times. He is a modern man, and he tackled head on the problem of modern times, summed up by Scruton as “fragmentation, heresy and unbelief.”

However, the “Waste Land” could not be the masterpiece that it is if it did not make some sense out of the chaos. It is in fact a brilliant portrait in a mere 434 lines of the shattered European “civilisation” that emerged from the ruins of World War I (1914 -1918). And how did Eliot manage to do that? Because as Scruton says, Eliot the arch-modernist was also an arch-conservative. Eliot had soaked himself in the great poets of the past, notably Dante and Shakespeare, but also in more modern masters such as Baudelaire and Wagner, and it is clear from the “Waste Land” that it is Eliot’s grasp of the order of the past that enabled him to get a handle on the disorder of the present.

Scruton comments that if then Eliot blew away the great romantic tradition of 19th century English poetry, it is because that romanticism no longer corresponded to the reality of his age. “He believed that his contemporaries’ use of worn-out poetic diction and lilting rhythms betrayed a serious moral weakness: a failure to observe life as it really is, a failure to feel what must be felt towards the experience that is inescapably ours. And this failure is not confined, Eliot believed, to literature, but runs through the whole of modern life.” The search for a new literary idiom on Eliot’s part was therefore part of a larger search – “for the reality of modern experience.”

Now have we not seen, and do we not see, the same “serious moral weakness” inside the Church? One may call “Fiftiesism” that weakness of the Church of the 1950’s which was the direct father of the disaster of Vatican II in the 1960’s. What was it if not a refusal to look squarely at the modern world for what it is? A pretence that everything was nice, and everybody was nice? A pretence that if I just wrap myself up in an angelist sentimentality, then the problems of the Church in the Revolutionary world will just float away? And what is now the pretence that Rome really wants Catholic Tradition if not the same essential refusal of modern reality? As Eliot taught us that sentimentality is the death of true poetry, so Archbishop Lefebvre showed us that it is the death of true Catholicism. The arch-conservative Archbishop was the truest of modern Catholics.

Catholics, today’s reality may be crucifying us in any one of its many corrupt ways, but rejoice, again, says St Paul, rejoice, because in our own acceptance of our modern Cross today is our only salvation, and the only future for Catholicism

Kyrie eleison.