modernism

EMERGENCY ADVICE – II

EMERGENCY ADVICE – II on February 24, 2024

The greater the horror of World War Three,

The greater God’s glory – for eyes that see!

No reader of these “Comments” has sent in theoretical questions comparable to the series of practical questions on today’s unprecedented Church crisis sent in last week (see EC 866 of February 17), but it is worth inventing such a series, and offering answers to the theoretical questions, in case just a handful of readers can get a better handle on the confusion let loose by Vatican II, as slippery as it is dangerous.

1 Then what is at the heart of that confusion? Is it what they call “modernism”? What is modernism?

Answer: modernism is the great error of modern times, by which even educated churchmen can come to believe that the Church of the past need no longer lift mankind to spiritual heights which mankind is no longer capable of reaching. Rather, mankind is so different in modern times that in order to reach it in its materialism, the Church must up-date its doctrine, morals, liturgy, everything. If men can no longer rise to the spiritual level of the Church, the Church must come down to the material level of men. Or so they say.

2 But is it not the function of the Church to reach out to men, wherever they are to be found?

Yes, but not on whatever conditions! All firemen want to put out fires, but not any liquid will do. What fireman ever used gasoline instead of water? Water and gasoline each have their unchanging nature, which is independent of the will of men. Water puts out fire (surprise, surprise!), while gasoline makes it blaze (well, whaddaya know?). In a similar way, Gregorian chant and Rock music each have their unchanging and opposed natures, with opposed and unchanging effects. Chant will draw souls to Church, Rock to the dance-hall, but Rock will not draw to Church. Some modernists mean well, but they are foolish if they think music functions differently today from how it functioned yesterday. To be drawn at any rate to God, souls need a music which is calm, not agitating.

3 But all modern life is agitating, compared with life yesterday. So how will any soul today reach God?

You said it! After 6000 years of world history one would think that men had learned by now what things have what natures, effects and consequences, but no. Our own times are, as it were, based on the principle that man can will for natures to have what effects he likes. Everything has become so denatured and so destabilised that life turns into one continual agitation, and the youngsters cannot stand any music that is too calm. But that does not mean that natures have so changed that Rock will bring them back to Church. It will not. It is not in its nature to do so. It was designed by the Devil to create ever more agitation.

4 But if that is true, how will any modern youngster – or modern soul – ever get to Heaven?

Good question! In modern times many a Saint has asked himself that question, but he has never despaired of the answer because he has known that the grace of God is always there for the asking. “Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” is a human way of saying it. “To whoever does what lies in him, God does not refuse His grace” is a more divine way that the Church has of saying it. In any case, when a soul, through no major fault of its own, finds itself in a situation where the odds against its salvation are to all appearances overwhelming, God can always intervene – for example in Genesis 19, the case of Lot.

5 But if God is all-powerful, why does he not eliminate all evil from the Creation which He controls?

Because His purpose in creating was to give the greatest bliss possible to souls freely accepting. Now a bliss in no way deserved by the recipient cannot possibly be as blissful as a bliss at least partly deserved by the soul itself despite all the evil by which it was surrounded in its brief life in this “valley of tears.” It would follow that the more generous God wishes to be with His gift of bliss, the more evil He will allow, but only up to the point where the evil risks swamping the good being freely chosen. That point once came to the whole world in the time of Noah. It is coming again today. God will intervene again soon. If we have the Catholic faith, let us do our part by praying His Mother’s Rosary for the salvation of souls.

Kyrie eleison

Pope’s Disintegration – III

Pope's Disintegration - III on May 1, 2021

If these “Comments” of April 17th praised the analysis by the Society of St Pius X’s Superior General, Fr. Davide Pagliarani, for his March 12 analysis of the unthinkable madness of Pope Francis’ “thinking,” then nobody need conclude that this week’s “Comments” are trying to undermine that Society if they go on to make a couple of suggestions to the same Superior General. In all languages there will be some proverbial expression of the distance between words and action. Fr. Pagliarani is talking the right talk. Americans might say that all he now needs is to walk the right walk, in accordance with his talk.

For indeed if the Superior General truly wants the good of the Society of which he is the Superior, he will want to act as the Founder of that Society acted, because to follow a Founder is to serve his foundation, while to contradict him in word or deed will be to help to undo his foundation. Now what distinguished Archbishop Lefebvre from his thousands of fellow bishops at and after Vatican II? He always said that a few hundred came out of the Council still resolved to defend the true Catholic Faith, but that in the 1970’s Pope Paul VI succeeded essentially in breaking their resistance, especially by misuse of his authority. So the bishops put the System above the Truth, while the Archbishop put the Truth above the System.

Now by declaring in your March 12 analysis that Pope Francis is virtually abandoning all Catholic philosophy and theology, honourable Fr Pagliarani, you show that you have a real grip on the Truth and on the dire peril in which it finds itself today. So what did the Archbishop do when in the 1970’s and 1980’s Popes Paul VI and John-Paul II similarly imperilled the Faith? Did he put the System in front of the Truth? Or did he not supremely walk the walk by Consecrating four bishops, even outside the System, to ensure the practical survival of his heroic talk? May I suggest that there are two things you can do, one for the Church and one for the State, to lift your walk to the level of your talk?

For the Church, help it enormously, as did the Archbishop (and as you did yourself with your absolutely clear condemnation in February, 2019 of the Pope’s Joint Declaration with the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar) by not only faithfulness to Catholic doctrine, but also by unequivocally shunning the Church System, presently still mired in Conciliar doctrine, and liable to contaminate any Society priests or leaders who imprudently flirt with such objective instruments of Belial. Towards such gravely mistaken Church officials, courtesy and charity, yes, but friendly contact, by no means! For there can be no greater charity towards such objective traitors, risking a terrible eternity, than to make them understand how they need to convert. And you have a bounden duty to steer your own priests away from them, so dangerous are they!

And for the State, similarly. Virtually all States of the world are presently under the disguised control of the bi-millennial enemies of God and man, whom God is using to scourge apostate mankind. In what is radically a religious war on their part, by the blindness and weakness of the Catholics who should be stopping them, they have gained mastery of our banks, politics, universities, arts, culture, law, medicine, and so on, so that all of these things are the mere anti-Christian shells of what they once were as parts of Christian civilisation. It is the Christians’ fault by their lack of faith, and it has recently entailed the stealing in a once great nation of its national election, with far too little protest against the mass of lies necessarily involved. Now, bearing the stamp of the same anti-Christian warriors is the entire artificial Covid crisis. Father, any Catholic Society is further betraying Christ if it does not discern, and act upon, who and what is at stake. Covid is a problem even more religious than it is political, and the men of God must say so, if the people of God are to get back on their knees. May God be with you.

Kyrie eleison.

P.S. Enough ECs for the moment on the gravity of modernism. Let the next two ECs present for the Easter season the joy of Beethoven (even if it is not directly Christian joy, but rather derived from it.)

Pope’s Disintegration – II

Pope's Disintegration - II on April 24, 2021

The rhyming couplets at the beginning or end of each of the issues of these “Comments” have normally only two lines of ten syllables each to make their point, which means that they can be so compressed that they are difficult to understand. Last week’s was an example. But since what it was saying goes to the heart of the great error ravaging the true Catholic Church ever since Vatican II (1962–1965), let us return to that couplet to explain it in a little more detail. Here it is again –

The Greeks, even bearing gifts, one had to fear?

To modernists those Greeks come nowhere near!

The first of the two lines refers to a famous quote from the second book of Virgil’s Aeneid in Latin, which says translated, “Howsoever it be, I fear the Greeks, even when they bear gifts.” The Trojan war has been going on for ten years, and despite tremendous military efforts the invading army from Greece has so far been unable to capture the city of Troy. The Greeks resort to trickery. Outside the gates of Troy they will leave a hollow wooden horse filled with Greek soldiers as a “gift” for the Trojans. The Trojans are deliberating what to do with this handsome horse – should it be brought inside the gates of the city? A wise old Trojan says no, because whatsoever it be, he cannot trust the Greeks. Alas for Troy, his advice is not taken, the horse is brought in, the soldiers spill out at night, Troy is taken by surprise and the Greeks win the Trojan war, thanks to that trickery for which they were notorious in the ancient world. However, the second line of the couplet above says that even the trickery of the ancient Greeks comes nowhere near the trickery of today’s modernists penetrating into the heart of the Catholic City and destroying it to its very foundations. How can that be?

Let us say, by a progressive loss over the centuries of mankind’s sense of the reality of God and of its own dependence on God. This loss was wilful. To introduce the last age of the world with the largest harvest of souls ever for the bliss of eternal salvation, Almighty God had granted the greatest grace ever, the Incarnation of His own one and only divine Son to die on the Cross to seal in His Blood the New and Eternal Testament between God and man, and to found the Catholic Church to make available to all men by its sacraments the fruits of that death and Redemption. And after one and a half thousand years that Church had indeed succeeded in creating Christian civilisation, incomparably superior to any other.

But after 1500 years man’s pride could take it no longer, and men designed a series of ever more refined hypocrisies to get their liberty out from under God’s truth. Protestantism and Jansenism pretended to be Catholic, Liberalism pretended to be Christian, Communism pretended to be human, and the strain for Catholics of living in a more and more profoundly anti-Catholic world all around them was becoming for Catholics heavier all the time, especially since the modern world, forged by the hypocrisies, was becoming more and more “normal” all the time. Finally the strain, for instance, of having in a big city all the children that God is liable to send, became unbearable, and the supreme hypocrisy of Vatican II, post-Catholics pretending to be Catholic thanks to compliant clergy, took place, and the true Church is in scattered disarray until the moment to be chosen by God for the Augean stables to be cleaned out.

But God has never abandoned His unchanging Church, nor the souls at whatever level that cleave to it, nor need any soul fear being abandoned by God that does not want to abandon it, or God’s reality. However, God may ask of such souls some suffering to help pay for the tidal waves of sin flooding over mankind, and let it not indulge in the variety of hypocrisies by which modern men succeed in deceiving themselves that God does not exist, or that they are not preferring their own reality to His . . .

Kyrie eleison

 Pope’s Disintegration

 Pope's Disintegration on April 17, 2021

In an interview which he released early last month, the Superior General of the Society of St Pius X, Fr Davide Pagliarani, tackled in his own words a subject which is of supreme importance in today’s Church and world, but which is not often tackled because it is so unthinkable, namely the disintegration of thinking. For in attempting to analyse the thinking of Pope Francis, Fr Pagliarani concludes that the Pope, in his desire to reach modern man wherever he is, has abandoned all system of thinking, all Catholic philosophy or theology in the classical sense of those two words. This would mean that to get to modern man, Pope Francis is giving up on Catholic doctrine. Here is the SG’s argument:

Pope Francis is “above” all systems of thinking. Whereas for John-Paul II certain doctrines were untouchable, and whereas Benedict XVI was always concerned to appear faithful to Tradition, on the contrary Pope Francis is demolishing all Catholic bastions from the past. Indeed it was inevitable that as Vatican II (1962–1965) with its religious liberty and ecumenism undermined the Church’s dogma, so with

the passing decades her moral teaching without basis in dogma would also give way. Thus with his Amoris Laetitia of 2016 Pope Francis taught, as solemn Church doctrine, a completely new approach to morality, namely Mother Church must face the modern facts and become a quite different kind of mother. She can no longer impose herself and her laws as she has always done before. Now she must listen to, understand and accompany her children, adapting herself passively to whatever they do. Obviously moral principles are going to change with men’s changing practice in evolving historical circumstances.

Thus Francis misunderstands love – no mother loves her child drowning in a dangerous river by jumping in with him. He misunderstands mercy – it is no mercy to a man to leave him in a state of sin displeasing to God. By such a falsification of God’s true love and mercy, not only does the Church give up on the whole supernatural order, she also leaves him “free” in the natural order, so that no bastion remains, because Mother Church has adapted to the sins of the world, by making no more claims on her children. With Vatican II she adapted to the world. With Pope Francis she goes further, adapting to the sins of the world, leaving her children, deeply wounded by original sin, with no supernatural grace to heal them.

What then does Pope Francis propose instead, as a goal or goals for Church and world? Firstly, the universal imposition of a utopian integral ecology, to look after Mother Earth (Pachamama) in all material respects (Laudato sí, 2015), and secondly a quasi-masonic universal brotherhood for us to look after our fellow-men (Fratelli tutti, 2019). Thus, Mother Church is reduced to a purely natural priesthood, stripped of all supernatural power, at the service of the secular State in all of its superior secular humanism.

The Superior General concludes that the real answer to all modern problems is for Mother Church to preach once more infallible doctrine, namely the supernatural dimension and destiny of man in Heaven eternal, the Fall of man in time with its lasting consequence of Original Sin, and the absolute need of the grace of Christ to overcome sin. The doctrine of Christ the King embodies by itself the eternity of Heaven, the victory of the Redeemer over sin, and the indispensable help of the supernatural grace which He brought as Redeemer to enable men to get to Heaven. And His Mother will play a very special part in what will be the Church’s final victory over the passing triumph of errors so subtle and pernicious.

This analysis by the Superior General of the Pope’s thinking and action presents a coherence and logic for which we should all be grateful. There is certainly some light at the top of the Society of St Pius X. We say sincerely, thanks be to God. But does it mean that the Society is out of danger? That must remain to be seen. The Doctor has not as such the virtues of the Martyr. Please, God . . .

Kyrie eleison

8 of 31 Reasons

8 of 31 Reasons on April 10, 2021

Two weeks ago these “Comments” had pleasure in presenting from an Israeli Rabbi a pile of good sense in the form of 31 reasons why he would not take the anti-Covid “vaccine.” The only problem was that easily most of them had to be shortened for all of them to fit within the A4 of an “Eleison Comments.” So here is a selection of eight of them at full length; –

1. It’s not a vaccine . A vaccine by definition provides immunity to a disease. This does not provide immunity to anything. In a best-case scenario, it merely reduces the chance of getting a severe case of a virus if one catches it. Hence, it is a medical treatment, not a vaccine. I do not want to take a medical treatment for an illness I do not have.

3. The presumed benefits of this medical treatment are minimal and would not last long in any case . The establishment acknowledges this, and is already talking about additional shots and ever-increasing numbers of new “vaccines” that would be required on a regular basis. I refuse to turn myself into a chronic patient who receives injections of new pharmaceutical products on a regular basis simply to reduce my chances of getting a severe case of a virus that these injections do not even prevent.

5. The establishment insists that this medical treatment is safe . They cannot possibly know this because the long-term effects are entirely unknown, and will not be known for many years. They may speculate that it is safe, but it is disingenuous for them to make such a claim that cannot possibly be known. Because they are being disingenuous, I do not trust them, and I want no part of their treatment.

9. The executives and board members at Pfizer are on record that they have not taken their own treatment, despite all the fanfare and assurances . They are claiming that they would consider it unfair to “cut the line.” This is a preposterous excuse, and it takes an unbelievable amount of chutzpah to even say such a thing. Such a “line” is a figment of their own imagination; if they hogged a couple of injections for themselves no one would cry foul. In addition, billionaires with private jets and private islands are not known for waiting in line until hundreds of millions of peasants all over the world go first to receive anything these billionaires want for themselves.

21. The government has sealed their protocol related to the virus and treatments for THIRTY YEARS. This is information that the public has a right to know, and the government has a responsibility to share. What are they covering up? Do they really expect me to believe that everything is kosher about all this, and that they are concerned first and foremost with my health? The last time they did this was with the Yemeni Children Affair. If you’re not familiar with it, look it up. Now they’re pulling the same shtick. They didn’t fool me the first time, and they’re definitely not fooling me now.

26. The horror stories are already coming in at warp speed, but the politicians are not the least bit concerned, the medical establishment is brushing them aside as unrelated or negligible, the media is ignoring them, the drug companies are steaming ahead at full speed, and those who raise a red flag continue to be bullied, censored, and punished . Clearly my life and my well-being are not their primary concern. I will not be the next guinea pig in their laboratory. I will not risk being the next “coincidence.”

30. I see all the lies, corruption, propaganda, manipulation, censorship, bullying, violation of medical ethics, lack of integrity in the scientific process, suppression of inconvenient adverse reactions, dismissal of legitimate concerns, hysteria, cult-like behaviour, ignorance, closed-mindedness, fear, medical and political tyranny, concealment of protocols, lack of true concern for human life, lack of respect for basic human rights and freedoms, perversion of the Torah and common sense, demonization of good people, the greatest medical experiment of all time being conducted by greedy, untrustworthy, godless people, the lack of liability for those who demand I risk everything . . . . I see all this and I have decided they can all have my place in line. I will put my trust in God. I will use the mind He blessed me with and trust my natural instincts. Which leads to the final reason which sums up why I will not get “vaccinated.”

31. The whole thing stinks.

Kyrie Eleison

Solzhenytsin Speaks

Solzhenytsin Speaks on April 3, 2021

Here, for Easter, is Alexander Solzhenytsin’s famous Templeton Address, drastically summarised. 1983.

When I was a child, people said it was forgetting God that led to the Russian Revolution of 1917. Now I am a man in 1983, that one phrase still says it all. It sums up the entire 20th century with all its crimes, starting with World War I, which would not have been possible (e.g. making poison gas into a weapon) without a godless embitterment in the leaders of Europe. Likewise World War II. Europeans are burnt out. Peace depends on stout hearts, not on the nuclear bomb. We have grown all too used to the Apocalypse. Dostoyevsky said that great events have caught us unprepared, and only after the world has been possessed by devils will it be possible to save it again.

Meanwhile the Devil is triumphing, worldwide. By 1917 the faith was extinct in Russia’s leading class, and it was being threatened in the working class. Yet once upon a time Russia was steeped in Orthodox Christianity. Piety, not materialism, moulded people’s thinking and their personalities, and organised their lives. But a schism in the 17th century and the reforms of Peter the Great weakened religion, and the secularism of the 19th century poisoned the leading class, so that by 1917 religion was crippled.

Revolution always starts with atheism, says Dostoyevsky, but never has atheism been so malevolent as it is at the heart of Communism. In the 1920’s there was a veritable cloud of Christian martyrs in Russia, from top to bottom of Church and State, while for instance children were wrenched from their parents and from all religion. Stalin favoured religion only to revive Russian patriotism against Hitler, and Brezhnev pretended to be religious so as to deceive the West, but Krushchev showed how deeply religion is hated by Communism, and by all the unworthy successors of the frenzied Lenin. However, never did any of these maddened persecutors of Christ expect what happened: beneath the Communist steamroller the Russian awareness of God is now acute and profound. Tanks and rockets will never vanquish Christianity.

In the West, religion is more threatened from inside than from outside. In the Middle Ages Secularism arose from within, more dangerous than tanks or rockets. Its ideal flies no higher than life, liberty and the pursuit of my own happiness. Good and evil are objects of mockery. Forget the human heart. Result, evil is all around. The West is slipping all the time, losing its youth. The media blaspheme Jesus and Mary. In that case, what reason do I have to hold back from doing what I like with my liberty? Why not hate my own society, as it teaches me to do? Do not the weaknesses of capitalism correspond to the weaknesses of human nature? For instance the pursuit of money to the capital sin of greed? Capitalism boasts that it establishes equality. But is that not an equality of slaves, destitute of spiritual values? And it makes me more free? But the more “free” I am, does that not mean the more blindly I hate? Salvation can never be by money or by abundance of material goods.

Without love, life and art perish. In the West that happens voluntarily at the hands of men who want to take the place of God. East and West alike have been forgetting God. Yet the key to our whole existence is the daily choice every single human heart has to make between good and evil. The modern theories re-centring everything on society have proved bankrupt, but we have not rejected their lies. Unless we turn back to God we shall never find the way out of our problems. The enemy is within me. It is we who are hanging ourselves.

Human life is merely a stage on the way to God. It is more than just the laws of matter, i.e. the physical sciences. In God we live and move and have our being: He is the “Love moves the sun and the other stars” – Dante, concluding line of the entire “Divine Comedy.” Forget the 19th and 20th centuries. We must reach for God. The so-called Enlightenment was a complete failure.

Kyrie eleison.