modernism

Science Doubted

Science Doubted on March 6, 2021

Few people today still call in question the priority of science when it comes to providing us men with a happy world and the good life. Replace religion with science and materialism, said the Protocols of the Sages of Sion (EC 699), as though science and materialism solve all problems of life. The famous Greek philosopher Aristotle (384–322 B.C.) needed four causes to analyse reality: purpose, maker, form and material, but modern man has effectively rubbed out the final cause or purpose and the efficient cause or maker, no doubt because both of these lead in reality to God, who is not thus needed for a thing’s intrinsic form or matter. And from Galileo (1564–1642) onwards, “science” has been more and more godless.

However, the wisdom of Shakespeare (1564–1616) recognised that there was more in Heaven and earth than there was in Horatio’s philosophy (Hamlet I), and Germany’s greatest writer, Goethe (1749–1832), knew that there was a superior knowledge of Nature to that of science, a knowledge which seized Nature’s inner spirit. Another contemporary, the English poet William Wordsworth (1770–1850), was also aware at the turn from the 18th to the 19th centuries that mankind was taking with the industrial revolution and the promotion of the physical sciences, a direction which in some respects was not progressing but regressing: as the mastery of matter was advancing, so the mastery of spirit was receding. One of Wordsworth’s disciples was the famous Catholic convert and writer of popular spiritual books, Fr. William Faber (1814–1863). Wordsworth never converted himself, but he bore Catholic fruit. Here is a famous sonnet of his on the anti-spiritual modern world:—

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; Modern shopping!

Little we see in Nature that is ours; What do suburbanites know of Nature?

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon; Wordsworth himself spent a very happy

The winds that will be howling at all hours, childhood amid the delights of Nature in

And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers; the Lake District in North England.

For this, for everything, we are out of tune;

It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be He cries out that he would rather be a

A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn; pre-Christian than a post-Christian, for at

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, least his belief in pagan gods would give

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; him some sense of union with the glorious

Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; spectacle of Nature in front of him.

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn. As it is, he feels only “forlorn” – burnt out.

As a rule, suburbanites do not like poetry and their vile media will write it out like prose if they can. To say what they have to say, poets as such take the extra trouble to say it with rhyme and rhythm, and that mere fact is enough to suggest that there is more to life than just materialistic suburbs. But most suburbanites are content with their materialism and prefer not to be reminded of its deficiency. And so love of Nature turns into skiing and speedboats, while poetry is discredited, discounted, waiting to be revived by a revaluing of things spiritual. That will come, but it depends on the Catholic Church. Man is enough to pull Nature and himself down, but only God can lift either of them back up. Fr. Faber showed the way. He at least did not end up forlorn.

Kyrie eleison.

White Identity – III

White Identity - III on February 20, 2021

That identity today should be such a problem for many people (see the two previous issues of these “Comments”) is an artificial state of affairs. Something is out of true. When people are leading normal lives, they have a natural identity corresponding to who they are, and they may never even think about it. But today white people are being twisted out of true, by somebody else but they have only themselves to blame, and the result is that they have all kinds of problems which they do not need. To get to the heart of the matter may take a few more questions:

You said last week that everything turns on Christ and that returning to Him would solve all identity questions. But billions of non-Christians have no identity problem. Billions of non-Christians lead normal and decent lives without Christ. Why should He have to be brought into it?

Christianity obviously began in the Holy Land, but with the Apostles it spread rapidly all over the known world: with St Thomas to India, St John and St Phillip in Asia Minor, Nathanael in Armenia, Matthew in Africa, Thaddeus in Persia, and so on. Now in any of these regions the new religion could have caught on as it did in Europe with Peter, Paul, Andrew and James the Greater, but it is to the continent of Europe that God gave special gifts of nature, and graces of conversion, to make of Europeans the missionaries of the world. Thus whereas after 600 years the Middle East largely forsook Christianity to adopt Islam, on the contrary Europe was gifted and famed for its orthodoxy, Rome especially soon (Rom.I, 8), and God had before prepared the whole of Europe to support the Catholic destiny of Rome by the Roman Empire. One might dare to say that in the mind of God Europe and the Faith are closely identified with one another, which suggests that Christ is an essential part of European or white identity in particular.

And what part did the Jews play in all of this?

You are right to ask the question, because for good or ill they are always special in the mind of God. In fact they fought against the Church, tooth and nail, from the very beginning, as we read in the Epistles of St Paul, e.g. I Thess. II, 14–16. And it is they who for instance persuaded the Roman Emperor Claudius (41–54 A.D.) to persecute the Christians. And if they see in the white race the people most responsible in the past for the success over many centuries of the religion of Jesus Christ, it can come as no surprise if they use all of the power they have built up today in politics, the media and films and academia to blacken the whites to the point of making them ashamed of being white. Hence the lack of identity for the whites.

But why do the whites not defend themselves if they are God’s champions? Why does God abandon them?

The answer to both questions is because they have abandoned Him. Who can deny that the great mass of whites today either no longer believe in God at all, or at least no longer take Him seriously ? And you think He does not notice? Think again! There is an old pagan proverb which nevertheless corresponds to the natural law: “Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad.” Whites today are blind, and going suicidally mad, and all peoples following are being led to madness. And if they are being scourged by the Jews accordingly, it is absolutely their own fault for having abandoned God, Who cares for His children too much to let them roll down to Hell without having serious problems beforehand.

So what is the answer, finally?

Forget about identity! Think about Our Lord Jesus Christ. Think about the tremendous death He suffered for you and me. Turn to His Mother to plead with Him for you. Pick up Her Holy Rosary and pray at least five Mysteries a day. And beg Her to obtain Russia’s Consecration to Her Immaculate Heart, which alone will unlock the salvation of mankind, which is at the moment more problematic and locked up by the day. She will prevail. And God bless you.

Kyrie eleison.

Second Flood

Second Flood on January 30, 2021

Repeat, the main player in the worldwide Covid drama unfolding all around us is Almighty God, no less. Of course He plays no part in the multitudinous sins involved, as sins, but it is He who created the universe and who sustains in existence what He created for every moment that it exists, without which it would collapse back into nothingness. And for what purpose did He create it? To populate His heaven with rational creatures, angelic or human, who will have made use of their God-given existence and free-will to choose, on God’s terms, to take up His offer of eternal bliss with Him in His heaven. And with a divine wisdom far above all human understanding, He so manages all life here on earth that every human soul reaching the age of reason has not only trials enough to make sure that it loves Him enough to deserve heaven, but also actual grace enough to make sure that it can get to heaven if it wants.

Therefore it is God who is ultimately directing what we can call this collapse of the West, just as He directed the Flood in the time of Noah, to punish sinful mankind, and to prevent it from populating hell instead of heaven. In fact the punishment was also a great mercy, because all mankind had “corrupted its ways” (Genesis VI, 11–12), so that no doubt a great mass of men were on their way to eternal damnation and succeeding – like today – in taking virtually everybody with them. Such had been the effect of original sin, over the approximately one thousand years since Adam and Eve. But as men progressively realised that the rising waters of the Flood were going to leave them no escape, so a minority of them will have profited by the waters’ slow rise to make an act of contrition sufficient to save their souls for eternity. Ask any of those souls, now in heaven, if the Flood was not a huge act of God’s mercy!

Similarly today. Mankind has corrupted its ways, all over the earth, with Western materialism, and worse than in Noah’s time, because this time the Incarnation has taken place, and after profiting from it for a while, this time men have spurned not only God but even the Incarnate God, visibly crucified for them, to endow them with a Church to help them to save their souls. Yet this time even His own churchmen have virtually spurned Him, ever since Vatican II. We are now 56 years on from the end of Vatican II, and the corruption is galloping forwards. Now, can anyone accuse God of having been in a hurry to strike, in the way He struck in 2020? Hardly. Or can anyone say He started to strike with a heavy hand? Hardly, when one thinks of the misfortunes like complete economic crashes or civil wars or famines announced for the years soon to come? And if and when these do come, by the malice of men and only by the permission of God, who will be able to say they were undeserved?

Yet God is patient with each single one of us, and His mercy endures for ever, only, He must strike and go on striking hard enough until we learn our lesson and even only begin to think again of getting to heaven. For with all too many of us the lesson, however hard, will be arriving too late, and will give rise only to curses, against Him, against our fellow-men, against life, against politicians, against anybody except the one person truly responsible for my own distress, and that will be – myself.

Therefore in everything that is coming I will see the (sinless) hand of God, and I will get on my knees to pray to Him to have mercy upon us poor sinners. Men can no longer clean up their mess, they can only make it worse. With the grace of God I will have compassion on them all, and I will do what I can do, to help them to save their souls, but from God alone will I expect true solutions. And He at least will have the wisdom and power to be directing all for the best, that much I know in advance.

Kyrie eleison.

SSPX Re-Orientation

SSPX Re-Orientation on January 23, 2021

Last November Fr Pagliarani, SSPX Superior General, wrote a letter to commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the founding of the Society. Fr. Edward MacDonald, “Resistance” priest in Australia, wrote a valuable commentary on that letter, summarised here below –

1. Fr. Pagliarani asks: “Is the flame (‘that of a fearless charity’) received from our Founder still alive? Exposed to a crisis indefinitely prolonged in Church and world, is this precious torch not in danger of faltering and weakening?” – However, in his letter Fr. Pagliarani does not answer his own question.

2. In his entire letter Fr. Pagliarini barely mentions the Second Vatican Council. Yet, if there had been no Vatican II, there would have been no need for the SSPX. Rome is the source of all the errors of faith, doctrine and morals that the SSPX fought against. The post-Conciliar Popes implemented the teachings of the Council. The apostasy is centred and headquartered in the Vatican. Fr. Pagliarani mentions nothing about the errors of Vatican II. Why not? For him that fight is over. The SSPX is now with Vatican II and the Conciliar Church, against the “Resistance” movement. 

3. Fr. Pagliarani reduces the fight to “the spiritual life.” For Archbishop Lefebvre the reign of Our Lord Jesus Christ came first, and bringing spiritual life to souls was a necessary by-product of that primary aim. But Fr. Pagliarani makes the spiritual life primary, saying: “Our combat is to allow Our Lord Jesus Christ to be the axis of our spiritual life, the source of all our thoughts, all our words and all our actions.” 

4. According to Fr. Pagliarani, everything has been said. There is no doctrinal battle left to wage. The SSPX will just continue to speak, presumably repeating old arguments, against the errors of Vatican II. In fact, the SSPX is not speaking against the errors of Vatican II. There is much new to say as the Pope continues to draw new errors out of the documents of Vatican II. Is the response to Amoris Laetitiae complete? If the SSPX has nothing new to say, it is because it has ceased to combat Vatican errors. 

5. Archbishop Viganò is finding plenty of new things to say about the errors of the Conciliar Church. The SSPX cannot say these things because it has capitulated and been silenced. It can no longer defend the rights of Our Lord Jesus Christ. In November 2020, Fr. Daniel Themann, SSPX District Superior of Australia, forbade members to make a public protest against some very public worship of Satan in Queensland. They made reparation quietly in their chapel. 

6. Weariness is a recurring theme in Fr. Pagliarani’s letter – this is not the case with the saints. They never weary, never grow tired of the battle. Archbishop Lefebvre never wearied of the fight, He was already retired when he realised that he had to take up arms in a new battle against the Conciliar Church. The SSPX has grown weary and fatigued and laid down its arms. It has “nothing new to say.” 

7. For the last fifteen or more years the seminaries of the SSPX have not been giving the seminarians the doctrinal formation to combat the modern errors. Modernism and liberalism have been promoted in the seminaries. The ordinands are willing to compromise on the truth, and eagerly work with and submit to the modernist diocesan bishops. Fr. Wegner, former US District Superior, once boasted that he had made deals with forty US bishops, all of whom were modernist Conciliar liberals.  

8. Every priest that has remained in the SSPX after its capitulation has decided explicitly, or at least tacitly, to accept this new orientation of the SSPX. They are no longer militant Catholics. The Church is indefectible. The SSPX was not. It has defected. 

9. There is no further important organisation to stand against the onslaught of the forces of evil in the form of the atheistic communist conquest of society. The sterilisation of the SSPX stopped the last great source of grace and blessings for the world. The few pockets of resistance remaining are incapable of stopping, or even just hindering, the communist enslavement of the world.

Kyrie eleison.

SSPX Questions

SSPX Questions on January 16, 2021

A reader of these “Comments,” no doubt anxious from what he sees or hears about the Society of St Pius X being less faithful than it used to be or should be, has in mind a few possible explanations. The author of these “Comments” offered some considerations by way of reply to a few of his questions:—

1. There have been rumours of infiltration of the SSPX. Some of these rumours suggest that there was a plot to infiltrate the Society from the beginning, others argue that it took time for the Society to be infiltrated.

No doubt the classic enemies of the Church, who closely watched Our Lord in His time, discerned rapidly what a threat to their scheming was represented by Archbishop Lefebvre with his priestly Society of St Pius X and its new generation of faithful priests. However, I for one cannot say I ever recognised any clear and conscious enemy infiltrators. But what I could recognise was priestly sons of the Archbishop, formed under his care, but who ceased to recognise what they once recognised, namely the necessity of obeying only selectively orders coming down from the Conciliar Church authorities in Rome and in the dioceses. These priests have gone a long way not exactly to infiltrate but rather to change the SSPX from within. If today it was still defending the Faith as the Archbishop did, it could be doing a power of good to a mass of Catholics now waking up to the Vatican II betrayal, by helping them to see how and where the true Church is surviving. Instead, the loyalty of the SSPX leaders now seems to have gone over to the officials of Vatican II in Rome, and many souls that it could have converted, it now rather confuses than converts.

2. So has the SSPX been infiltrated, and if so, by whom?

Properly speaking, by formal infiltration, perhaps not. But loosely speaking, by an often unconscious abandoning of the Archbishop’s understanding of Vatican II and its officials, yes. The problem has been a gradual going with the flow of today’s universal fantasy, and a corresponding loss of grip on reality, more on the part of the SSPX leaders in HQ than on the part of the humble priests on the ground. The problem of these leaders has been less in their Catholic doctrine than in their application of that teaching to the 21st century, where they have failed to grasp the full evil of the modern world. They are too “nice.”

 3. Some blogs have pointed to an Austrian-Jewish family by the name of “Von Gutmann” who were originally given a financial “leg up” by the Rothschilds. This family has, according to Maximillian Krah, given money to the SSPX via a Foundation. Who is this family and why are they giving money to the SSPX?

It is a Jewish family from Austria, but, as best I recall, the Mrs. Von Gutmann that you name was a bona fide convert, and she left a great deal of money to the SSPX in Austria to help Catholic Tradition to thrive there. 

4. It is rumoured on the internet that Archbishop Lefebvre was a sedevacantist? Is this true?

The Archbishop had, from Paul VI onwards, always a certain sympathy with sedevacantism as a possible solution to the immensely serious theological problem of Vicars of Christ destroying the Church. Twice he entertained in public the possibility – in 1976, and in 1985 – that the apparent Popes in Rome were not real Popes. But he never decided for that solution, and frequently he considered it only to reject it. He considered that it raised more problems than it solves.

5. Why won’t the current SSPX leadership reconcile with Rome? What are your thoughts?

I think that too many of its best priests still think too like the Archbishop about today’s Rome and Romans for the SSPX leaders to be able to slide into the Romans’ arms. But these priests had better watch out!

Kyrie eleison.

Madiran – Conclusion

Madiran - Conclusion on January 9, 2021

After seven issues of these “Comments” considering separately the Prologue and six Parts of the 1968 book of Jean Madiran (1920–2013), The Heresy of the 20th Century, it will be worth stitching the Parts together again so as to highlight some of the main lessons for ourselves in the situation of Church and world today, and to arrive at a general conclusion: how did the Church get into its present confusion?

Right from the Prologue Madiran made several key points: the problem was the leading churchmen, the bishops, who had been slipping anchor for at least 100 years previously, in the name of progress, until in the 20th century they were positively subverting Christianity, in a process leading to Communism. The drama started long before Vatican II. At its root is the bishops’ loss of Faith . The end result will be the triumph of Communism. In 2020 the Covid-lie is placing Communism right at our doors.

In Part I Madiran laid bare, as did Pius X in his 1907 Encyclical Pascendi, the philosophical underpinning by the bishops of their implicit apostasy through their adopting of the subjectivism of modern philosophy, by which any truth at all, including Catholic dogma, becomes optional. Forget objective reality. From now on the object answers to my mind, and no longer my mind to the object. I am liberated from reality.These insane principles are at the heart of the craziness of today’s Church and world, in all domains.

In Part II Madiran declared that the newbishops were wanting a newreligion, and this newreligion could only be at war with the Catholic religion. The newbishops had no right whatsoever to be imposing their false religion, and even as a Catholic layman Madiran had every right to be opposing them. In 2021 it is marvellous to see an Archbishop Viganò taking exactly this position, as did Archbishop Lefebvre. There is an objective and unchanging Catholic Truth which entitles Catholics not to follow their erring bishops.

In Parts III, IV and V Madiran lays out the content of the 20th century heresy in seven Propositions, culled from writings of the Bishop of Metz who, says Madiran, best brought that heresy into focus: 1 All is changing today, so that the very concept of salvation by Christ needs today to be changed, 2 towards being more social, because 3 faith today listens to the world, and 4 the socialising of today’s world is a grace. 5 For indeed no age has been so fraternal, 6 nor has so looked forward, i.e. hoped, as our own.Madiran comments that this fraternal and hopeful socialising is tantamount to a newreligion, and the newreligion is Communism. And indeed ever since Vatican II, the churchmen have been turning more and more to the Left, and their religion of man has been their newcrusade, and man has been their newgod. And Jesus Christ, His Blessed Mother, Heaven and Hell are in real life more and more forgotten.

In Part V Madiran presents the seventh Proposition from the Bishop of Metz: 7 Natural law comes from inside man, in other words there is no objective law for man coming from outside or from above him. In other words, says Madiran, there is no nature, no supernature, no ten Commandments, no true charity, no possibility of society, let alone Christian society. Such sheer subversion allows only of Communism. Here is where we are, and much more so in 2021 than in 1968. In this Part Madiran is getting at the very roots of modern man’s disorientation and dislocation, which make a police State into the only society possible.

In Part VI Madiran finished his book soon after living through the student riots in Paris of spring 1968, and they provided him with a resounding conclusion. In Part II on the bishops he had written that the Newchurch by teaching only things modern was turning today’s youth into tomorrow’s barbarians, and here they were, filling the streets of Paris in 1968 (and streets of the USA in 2020) with chaos. Madiran holds the bishops responsible. Communism is a false solution. God alone is the true solution.

Kyrie eleison.