Tag: modernism

SSPX Re-Orientation

SSPX Re-Orientation posted in Eleison Comments 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 posted in Eleison Comments 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 posted in Eleison Comments 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.

Madiran – Betrayal.

Madiran - Betrayal. posted in Eleison Comments on December 26, 2020

In Paris in May of 1968 there occurred student riots so radical and long-lasting as to get attention from media all over the world. For theoretical subversion and practical destruction of everything that had till then made up the Western way of life, they were comparable to the riots that ravaged many cities of the United States last summer (of 2020). In fact the Paris riots inspired the sixth and last Part of Jean Madiran’s book, The Heresy of the 20th century, because they were a picture-book illustration of what his whole book had been trying to say: Catholic civilisation is turning Communist, and it is a great betrayal, and the Catholic bishops are the traitors. Hence the three Chapters of Part Six of the book: 1) May ‘68 is the bishops’ final betrayal, 2) They repudiate the true Catholics, 3) They betray real Christianity.

In Chapter One Madiran tells how when in Paris in the springtime of 1968 the revolting students, like the summer rioters in the USA, threatened to tear down Western civilisation, the French bishops’ official comment was, “It is a wide-ranging movement calling for a new society,” and they were ready to welcome it in the name of Vatican II. In their official declaration one month later they declared: “The 1968 Revolution divides the people for and against, but we bishops are for.” In fact, says Madiran, for those revolting the end justifies the means, so they made such use of force, lies and trickery to get their way that they provoked an even more “wide-ranging” counter-movement, but what do modern bishops care about the radical subversion of all natural law and Christian civilisation? None of them believe that Communism is a betrayal. But it is a movement of reform? That is just a lie and a trap, says Madiran.

In the second Chapter he tells how to ingratiate themselves with the Revolutionaries on the left, the bishops had to bring to them on a platter the heads of the most faithful Catholics on the right, otherwise known as the “integrists,” or followers of integral Catholicism. (Here exactly is why in the 1970’s Pope Paul VI made such strenuous efforts to cripple Archbishop Lefebvre, but God had other ideas. However, just a few more years, and what had been his Society was longing for the approval of modernised Rome.) Back in the 1960’s the French bishops set out on a long course of talking out of both sides of their mouth.

To the left they would say, “Oh, please don’t take us for conservatives or integrists, we’re revolutionaries just like you,” while to the right they would say, “Oh please don’t think we’re changing anything.” And ever since these bishops have been trying to go in two directions at once – a recipe for paralysis. But they always avoid taking on “integrists” in straight argument – they have given up the high ground of truth.

In the last Chapter of his entire book, Madiran finalises his condemnation of the paltry French bishops. The modern world is not good, running on lies in all domains: Evolution, Six Million, Nine-Eleven, Covid, and those are just a few of the outstanding falsehoods. But what had gone wrong? The students hardly knew because they had mostly been told that the modern world is wonderful. But if that is true, then instinctively they want to tear it down. However, the Catholic Church, while it also disbelieves in modernity, knows exactly what went wrong, and in 1864 published a major list of 80 of the errors – Pope Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors. Here is the doctrine that the bishops should have been teaching the students, because had these learnt it well, they could have been rebuilding all “Western civilisation” ever since the 1960’s. As it was, at Vatican II the world’s bishops preferred to join the Communists instead of fighting them, and the students were turned into barbarians, and all Christian civilisation was betrayed.

Referring to the bishops, Madiran adds one final word to his book – “Wretches!”

The analysis of The Heresy of the 20th century is clear. The lessons in the 2020’s for the USA in particular are plentiful. Perhaps only full-scale disaster will enable mankind to learn them. Yet, as Bishop Butler said in the 18th century, “Things are what they are. Their consequences will be what they will be. Why then should we seek to deceive ourselves?”

Kyrie eleison.

Covid’s Logic

Covid's Logic posted in Eleison Comments on December 19, 2020

“Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof,” says Our Lord in the Sermon on the Mount (Mt. VI, 34). We are never to worry excessively about what may happen tomorrow, amongst other reasons because it may never happen. Therefore the Canadian government’s blueprint for the future of Covid-19, already briefly presented in one paragraph of these “Comments” six weeks ago, may not be so much of interest for the details and timing which it announces, both of which can change, because on Lenin’s instructions the Revolution is to remain supremely adaptable. What is of real value to souls is to discern the logic in the elements of the Revolution so as not to be completely confused by how events risk soon unfolding.

In today’s world crisis the Revolution harnessed firstly (tertiary) economics in the autumn of 2019 when America’s Federal Reserve began to rescue the more and more tottering USA economy by more and more huge injections of funny money, enslaving the benefices beneath mountains of debt. Then in the spring of 2020 the revolutionaries began enslaving the (secondary) politics of the entire world in the chains of the huge Covid lie, namely that the Corona virus ranks alongside the bubonic plague as a danger to men. This cleverly chosen excuse of public health disguised also the enslaving of (primary) public religion, a bonus for the revolutionaries whose primary aim is war on God, and the damnation of souls. That the Catholic churchmen themselves even anticipated the State authorities in closing the Church doors testified to how weak the Catholic Church had become since Vatican II. And so they raise hardly a squeak of protest against the falsehood of the “pandemic” of Covid-19, which we were and still are being told by the “scientists” and politicians will kill millions and millions of people.

What an abject lie! By now nearly ten months of statistics prove that the corona-virus is little if at all worse than an average winter-flu virus, it is only our scientific, medical and political “authorities” that have conspired to create and maintain a state of panic among the people so as to manipulate them (fear is a famous manipulator). The Revolution comes from Satan, and Satan is “a liar and the father of lies” (Jn. VIII, 44). And so the abject lie continued in November with a second lock-down, due to be completed at the turn of the year, and by a third, Covid 21, later in the New Year, when these authorities are capable of letting loose for their purposes a much more serious virus than Covid-19.

Early next summer Canada is due to resort again to economics for the next feature of this Revolution, a “Universal Basic Income Programme” to enable the government to control every individual’s income, making all money digital and as equal as possible, equality being a major part of the Revolution’s anti-natural dream of eliminating all the variety and hierarchy that God planted in His Creation. The background should be a worldwide economic breakdown, engineered to force citizens to enter into the “World Debt Reset Programme,” by which Mammon’s International Monetary Fund will provide all the funny money needed to pay off every citizen’s personal debts (mortgages, loans, credit cards, etc.), in exchange for his forfeiting ownership of any and all property and assets for ever, and secondly for his accepting a double vaccination to “protect” him from Covid-19 and Covid-21. In the ending of private property readers may recognise both a major aim of the Protocols of the Sages of Sion, and that which some people call the essence of Communism. In the vaccinations they may recall a quote of Henry Kissinger from tens of years back: “When the people accept to be vaccinated, it is game over,” meaning that the Revolution will have triumphed once and for all. Revolutionaries deeply mistake God.

But so convinced are they of their ultimate victory that Canadians who refuse to enter into this new order of things will be detained indefinitely in new “isolation facilities” being hurriedly built now, until they accept, because of course by refusing vaccinations they will be a “public health menace” – always the same basic lie, that the authorities are concerned about our health. But “Fear not little flock” of those who truly love God. He has planned to give us His Kingdom (Lk. XII, 32), and not all the various Sages of the world, or of Sion, can stop Him.

Kyrie eleison.

Madiran – Proposition VII

Madiran - Proposition VII posted in Eleison Comments on December 12, 2020

Part V is not the easiest of the six Parts of the 1968 book of Jean Madiran (1920–2013) on The Heresy of the 20th century, because it deals with the Natural Law, which is a difficult concept for modern minds to grasp. And this is because God the Creator is both the writer of the Natural Law and He Who implants it in all His various creatures, and the Great and Good God is a closed mystery for a large majority of modern minds. However, it is for Madiran so important as a means of getting at the 20th century heresy that he makes it the centre of the last of the seven Propositions which he culled from the writings of Bishop Schmitt of Metz in France to give some form to an otherwise formless heresy. Here it is –

7 Natural law is the expression of the collective consciousness of mankind. From which it follows that there is no moral objective natural law promulgated by God and inscribed in the heart of man.

Bishop Schmitt’s reason for denying the existence of any such divine law in men would seem to have been that it made man’s social life too mechanical, as though the solutions to all of men’s social problems could be read off it as from a manufacturer’s hand-book. But the hand-book of God for man fully allows for human liberty even in society, whereas the denial of natural law, says Madiran, founds right and wrong no longer on objective divine law but on subjective human conscience, ultimately no law at all. Man is free and responsible, but he is not free to make his own laws. And the Church’s social teaching certainly starts out from God’s natural law, but to be applied to the immense variety of new concrete situations as in our own time, it needs a great deal of work, such as Pius XII accomplished in his time.

Moreover, with no natural law or order in man, how can there be anything supernatural any more? (What nature is there to be above?). There can be no more 10 Commandments (which express the natural law); no more charity, (which is the beginning and end of the ten Commandments); no more natural religion (constituted by the natural law); no more social life (which presupposes natural justice); nor Christian life (which presupposes natural virtues); and so on and so on. In fact if there is no natural law, all notion of a Christian society becomes impossible, either as society or as Christian.

Objection: All good law is clear and certain. But if natural law requires such elaboration then it cannot be clear or certain. Therefore it is not good law. Reply: In its absolute basics – “Do good, shun evil,” natural law is clear and unshakeable. In everything deriving from those basics it is not so clear for us human beings, and it can be shaken or contested, but it is clear in itself, as when for instance a good judge digs justice out of a confusing court-case. Natural law is known to us from inside us by reason, and from outside us by revelation, for instance the revelation of the 10 Commandments to all men by Moses.

In the third and last Chapter of Part V of his book, Madiran presents the spiritual consequences of the denial of natural law which he has attributed above in P7 to the 20th century heresy. The result in the individual Catholic is that he strays far from a true understanding both of the Christian life and of how far his own life is from it. He no longer has any idea of the absolute necessity of supernatural grace to live a Christian life. He thinks that by his own strength he leads a decent life, yet from that life the Commandments 1 to 4 have vanished, 5 and 7 may still be alive, but 8 is weakened and 6,9,10 have often also vanished. Yet by a sentimental love of neighbour, disciplined by no objective law, he thinks he is fulfilling Christ’s command to love one another as Christ loved us, so he is satisfied with himself. In which state, says Madiran, he cannot be saved. No wonder such a man calls for “a change in the very concept of salvation brought by Christ” – and we have come full circle, back to the first of the seven Propositions in which Madiran summed up the 20th century heresy.

Kyrie eleison.