New Mass

Madiran Introduced

Madiran Introduced on September 19, 2020

As eldest daughter of the Church, France has always had thinkers and writers in the forefront of the defence of the Church, and modern times are no exception. In the confusion and disarray of Catholics arising immediately out of the end of the Second Vatican Council in 1965, an outstanding pioneer of what would come to be “Traditional” thinking was the Frenchman Jean Madiran (1920–2013), creator and editor of the right-wing and nationalist monthly magazine “Itinéraires” (Itineraries) from 1956 to 1996. Already a genuine defender of the Faith before the Council, he made his magazine a centre-piece of that defence after the Council, when it became essential reading for many Catholics trying not to lose their heads or their faith.

In the 1960’s Madiran certainly contributed to maintaining in France the literate public that would provide a basis of support in the 1970’s for Archbishop Lefebvre to be able to lead a “Traditional” movement in France to oppose the destruction of the Church from within by the Conciliar clergy. Madiran and his magazine may also have seriously helped the Archbishop himself to arrive at his momentous decision at the end of the 1960’s to found in French Switzerland the Society of St Pius X, destined to make its decisive contribution to the saving of Catholic Tradition over the next 40 years. The one time that this writer can remember having seen the Archbishop run was when Madiran was once visiting the seminary in Écône, and the Archbishop had to catch him just before he returned to Paris.

Alas, their collaboration came to an end when John-Paul II became Pope in 1978, and Madiran thought that he would rescue the Church, but as far as the Archbishop was concerned, Madiran had had his good influence, and “Tradition” was by now well established. We need today to remember just how unthinkable it was in the 1950’s and 1960’s for Catholics to doubt their clergy. Here is the enormous merit of Madiran: a true faith unshaken by an almost entire Catholic hierarchy gone astray, together with the courage to stand up and write in public against the mass of people either “faithfully” following that hierarchy out of “obedience,” or faithlessly rejoicing in its undermining of the Church by freemasonry. That Madiran let himself be subsequently misled by John-Paul II only testifies to the force of the magnetism of Rome which for a crucial period of time he himself had succeeded in overcoming in the service of Catholic Truth.

That something in him never wavered is suggested by the fact that among all the books that he wrote in a long and productive life, the one in which he himself said that he best said what he essentially wanted to say was the book we are going to look at in these “Eleison Comments” – L’hérésie du vingtième siècle, The Heresy of the 20th Century. It first appeared in 1968, in other words in the thick of the controversy swirling around Vatican II. It contains a Prologue and six Parts, making perhaps seven issues of these “Comments,” because the book is a classic, even if it has not had many – or any – translations.

It is a classic because it takes a thomistic philosopher to take modernism to the cleaners – how does one analyse a fog? – and Madiran was a thomistic philosopher. But not just any thomistic philosopher, because the mass of Vatican II bishops had been drilled at their seminary or Congregation in the principles of the philosophy of St Thomas Aquinas. But they had not learned or understood how those principles apply to reality. This is because it is relatively easy to teach that philosophy like a coherent telephone book. Catholic pupils are docile and they drink it all in, without necessarily grasping that it is the one and only possible account of the one and only reality around us. But who can teach reality to pupils born in central heating and suckled on television? Madiran was of an earlier generation, which helps, but even then, to see modernism as clearly as he did, he needed a special grace of realism, like Pius X de Corte, Calderón and a select few others.

Fasten your seat-belts. Madiran is worth it. Next week perhaps, his Foreword.

Kyrie eleison.

Drexel’s Pope

Drexel’s Pope on August 8, 2020

Originally this last of four issues of “Eleison Comments” being drawn from Fr. Drexel’s booklet on Faith is Greater than Obedience was going to argue in favour of the booklet’s position that Pope Paul VI was of good intentions when at the head of the Catholic Church between 1962 and 1965 he presided over the Second Vatican Council and brought about its revolutionary change of the Church. Of course human intentions are the secret of God who alone can know them infallibly, but Our Lord tells us to judge the tree by its fruits, and it is here that Paul VI is found wanting. We are now 55 years on from the end of the Council, and its fruits have proved to be disastrous for Catholicism in any true sense of the word.

Therefore amid the many excellent things contained in Fr Drexel’s Messages from the 1970’s contained in Faith is Greater than Obedience, it is difficult to include his portrait of Paul VI. In brief, here it is –

Paul VI loved the Church – 3-XII-71– He feels pain and sorrow for consecrated souls turning from the Church to the world. 4-VIII-72 – He is abandoned by many who could have supported him with vigour and loyalty. With tears and sweat he wrestles to save the Church, he sorrows for unfaithful priests, he grieves still more for bishops more interested in their comfort than in caring for the faith or for souls. 1 – VIII-75– He is oppressed by false advisers. 7-IV-72 – He becomes more lonely, and those loyal to him are persecuted. 5-VII-74 – He prays, sacrifices and suffers constantly, but many break faith. 7-XI-75 – Never have there been so many sacrileges as since the New Mass, but My visible representative bears no guilt for this. His will is interior participation at the holy sacrifice, in reverence and in love ( . . . ) it is priests who are sinning in this way and act contrary to the word and work of the successor of Peter.

Notice in particular the last of these references, from November of 1975. The categorical statement that the Pope bore no responsibility for the multiple sacrileges that came with the New Mass cannot be true, however good his intentions may have been. “The way to Hell is paved with good intentions,” because men are fallible, they make mistakes and what they intend is not always what they achieve. However, as soon as a good intention has a bad result, then if they really intend the good result, they will change whatever was producing the bad result. But in the 1970’s Pope Paul changed little or nothing from his liberal revolution of the 1960’s, on the contrary he did everything in his power to crush the counter-revolution of Archbishop Lefebvre from inside the Church. Therefore the Pope’s real intention was not “interior participation at the holy sacrifice” but the bringing into line of the Catholic Church with the modern world, a re-aligning to which the Archbishop was an unacceptable obstacle.

As the Archbishop said, Pope Paul was a liberal catholic, in other words a man deeply divided between two irreconcilable loves: his true love of the Church by his Catholic faith, and his false love of the modern world by his liberalism. Inside any one man these two loves must fight to the death. Inside Paul VI the Catholicism would not die, so towards the end of his life he wept for the loss of priestly vocations, but his liberalism ran deeper. It was intellectual, ideological and implacable. Woe to anybody who got, or gets, in its way. Then suddenly the liberal dove brings out its claws, which are those of a hawk. Such was Paul VI. In comparison with his liberalism, his faith was sentimental. Hence his Council and his Mass.

And where does that leave Fr Drexel? When Heaven makes use of a human messenger, it leaves him with his free will and personality. Women and children make the most docile messengers, the most completely faithful to the message being entrusted to them, but men . . . many men have struggled to achieve their views on life, and these may consciously or even unconsciously colour any message of Heaven or earth passing through them. Very possibly Our Lord spoke to Fr Drexel from the 1920’s until his death in 1977. Very possibly Fr Drexel’s own solution to the agonising problem set by Pope Paul was the solution adopted by many a pious Catholic after the Council: the Pope means well, it is the bishops who are the real problem. Alas . . . as today, the bishops were a problem, but so was the Pope.

Kyrie eleison.

NOM Miracles?

NOM Miracles? on December 9, 2017

When these “Comments” claimed last year that in Sokulka, Poland, there had been in 2008 a Eucharistic miracle worked upon a host consecrated at a New Mass (NOM), a number of Catholics in the English-speaking world denied that such a thing was possible. When the same claim was made recently in Paris (https://youtu.be/IgQnQhxmhH4), it was the turn of some French Traditionalists to call in question the apparent scientific evidence of the miracle furnished independently at the time by two Polish laboratories, both of which claimed that the sample submitted to them from the host in question came from the heart muscle of a human being in acute distress.

In the face of such evidence, two opposite lines of argument are possible. Either one can argue from the modernist poison of the NOM to the intrinsic impossibility of God working such a “miracle” within the framework of the NOM, or one can argue from the seriousness of the evidence to the necessary possibility of a new Mass, new priestly Ordinations and new episcopal Consecrations all being valid (because the priest and bishop concerned were ordained and consecrated in 2005 and 1980 respectively). A number of valiant Traditionalists hotly contest all three possibilities within the modernist Newchurch.

What is certain, at least within the Catholic Church, is that such questions must be decided by doctrine and not by emotion. Reason must prevail – for instance, flying by instinct can be fatal for aviators. What Church doctrine says on the validity of a sacrament is that it requires four things: a valid Minister, Form, Matter and sacramental Intention. The NOM may exclude one or all of these, but it excludes automatically none of them. Where all four are present, the New Mass is valid. That is why Archbishop Lefebvre, who knew his theology, never claimed that the NOM was automatically invalid. That is why the NOM celebrated in Sokulka was not necessarily invalid. That is why it seems more reasonable to argue from the evidence to the miracle than from the impossibility of the “miracle” to the falsehood of the evidence. Otherwise one needs a precise reason to question the pathologists’ precise testimony.

The great objection remains: how can Almighty God work miracles in the framework of the NOM, clearly designed by its makers to poison gradually the faith of Catholics and so destroy the Catholic Church? The answer must be that God is not primarily authentifying the NOM, but He is maintaining its possible validity in order not to abandon a mass of Catholic sheep who are still attending it in relative ignorance and innocence of the poison, and therefore by the miracle He is primarily warning both sheep and shepherds to remember that He is Present beneath the appearances of bread and wine. When one remembers the Catholic doctrine by which the NOM can be valid; when one recalls St Paul saying that anyone who partakes unworthily of the Holy Eucharist is “guilty of the Body and Blood of the Lord” (I Cor. XI, 27–39); and when one sees how widespread in the Newchurch is the lack of respect for the Real Presence, then one immediately sees how necessary for the salvation of many souls can be such warnings as the miracle in Sokulka. The parish priest there testifies to how it has raised the level of Catholic faith and practice in the whole region around Sokulka.

But the objector insists – how could God possibly allow such a poisoned rite of Mass ever to be valid? Answer, He does not take away men’s free-will, but He allows us to a great extent to do what we want. In this case the neo-modernists wanted (and still want) a Rite of Mass poisoned enough to kill off the true Church in the long run, but still Catholic enough to deceive in the short run ignorant and innocent Catholics who still trust their pastors telling them, for instance, that the NOM is the Church’s “ordinary rite.” The NOM would never have gained acceptance in the Universal Church had it been obvious from the start that it was automatically invalid.

Kyrie eleison.

Distinguish, Discriminate

Distinguish, Discriminate on December 17, 2016

If the evidence, apparently serious, for Eucharistic miracles taking place within the Novus Ordo Mass (NOM) is to be believed – and such miracles may even be happening frequently, one of the latest seeming to come from Legnica, also in Poland (see here) on Christmas Day of 2013 – then indeed some of us may need to do some rethinking. Here is how one reader put it: “God cannot contradict himself, so his miracles cannot contradict his Church’s teaching. But the NOM does depart from essential Catholic doctrine on the Mass. Therefore either the miracles are false or the NOM is from God, in which case what is the justification for Traditionalists clinging to Tradition? For if the NOM at the heart of the Newchurch is confirmed by miracles, then the Newchurch is also confirmed by God, and the Newpopes, and I have to obey them. I cannot pick and choose, can I?” Yes, you can, and not only you can, but you must, in order to fulfil your absolute duty to keep the Faith.

That is because another name for what you call “picking and choosing” is “distinguishing.” All of us need to distinguish all day long. That is common sense, and that is what St Thomas Aquinas does from beginning to end of his miraculous Summa Theologiae. Let us take a closer look at our friend’s argument.

The basic bone of contention is the NOM. The NOM is a rite of Mass, a book of hundreds if not a thousand pages, containing many things. From a Catholic standpoint the rite as a whole is unquestionably bad, because it radically changes the concept of the Mass from being a propitiatory sacrifice centred on God to being a community meal centred on man. As such, since most Catholics live their religion by attending Mass, then when its concept changes, their religion in effect changes. That is why the NOM is the principal destroyer of the true Church, and the main engine of the Newchurch. That is why the NOM as a whole is not only bad, but very bad indeed.

But that does not mean that all its parts, as parts, are bad. As parts, some are still Catholic because they had to be, in order to deceive the mass of priests when the NOM was introduced in 1969, that it was not essentially different from the Tridentine rite of Mass, especially in the Consecration. Otherwise they would have refused it, and it could not have done its work of destroying the Church. So the NOM is, as to its parts, part good and part bad, while as a whole, it is ambiguous, treacherous, a crooked piece of work.

However, as for men, “to the pure all things are pure” ( Titus I, 15), and so to innocent souls not yet aware of its intrinsic danger for the Faith, it can by its Consecration and good parts, still give grace and spiritual nourishment, especially when these are less strangled by a priest making the ambiguities as Catholic as possible. And as for God, he “writes straight with crooked lines,” says the proverb, and so the bad parts of the NOM need not stop him from working miracles with the Catholic parts to nourish the innocent and to warn the guilty.

Therefore on the one hand the NOM as a whole is very bad, and Traditionalists are absolutely necessary to the Church to witness to its badness, and to make available a true Mass for when souls wake up to the NOM’s badness, as they do at different times and different speeds, so that such souls can keep the Faith and last out the crisis. On the other hand the NOM is in parts still good enough to nourish innocent souls and to enable God to work miracles, also for souls’ nourishment or for their warning. God is not thereby confirming either the NOM as a whole, or the Newchurch as a whole, or the Newpopes as a whole, but he is relying on me to use my brain and the Faith which he gave me to discern good from bad. He wants no mindless robots in his glorious Heaven!

Kyrie eleison.

Against N.O.M.

Against N.O.M. on August 27, 2016

The principle is clear in theory: to follow Our Lord we need, in the immortal words of St Augustine, to “slay the errors but love the erring.” That means that we should never so slay the errors as to slay also the erring (i.e. those who are in error, unless they are dangerous and incorrigible), and we should never so love the erring as to love also their errors. In practice it can be all too easy to slide from slaying the error into slaying the erring, or to slide from loving the erring into loving their error. In different words: “The Church is uncompromising in principle because she believes, she is tolerant in practice because she loves.The enemies of the Church are tolerant in principle because they do not believe, and uncompromising in practice because they do not love.” That is well said.

In case anybody still thinks that the author of these “Comments” slides from compassion for the misled sheep within the Novus Ordo into love of the errors of the New Mass of Paul VI, here are extracts from the letter of an older reader whose own bitter experience has led him to the conclusion that Novus Ordo Catholics do not deserve to be given too much benefit of the doubt. He has obviously run into some of the worst of the Newchurch. By its fruits . . .

I was a typical grade school child in a parish of 2500 families in a neighbourhood that was nearly 60% Catholic.All of us were formed in the old religion, and when the Conciliar Revolution began destroying the Church in the 1970’s we all of us had to sense that something was wrong. All Catholics have a duty to be faithful to Tradition and to find out where it lies, for instance in the reading materials available to everybody. For 50 years I myself have pleaded, begged and prayed for my Catholic friends and family to read the things that I have read, but they simply do not want to.The great majority enjoy the Conciliar religion: divorce and easy annulments, accommodating preachers, feminism, democracy, adultery, homosexuality and LUV hold them fast to the Novus Ordo, just the opposite of a love of truth.

I would say I know the Novus Ordo mentality because for over two years I came into close contact with Novus Ordo judges and priests and laity. I can assure you that it is not love of truth that motivates them. These Church authorities can be trusted to do exactly what nearly all, if not all, Novus Ordo catholics want them to do, which is to ignore their sinful lives. It seems as though the only ‘sinners’ they dare to admonish, instruct or counsel are smokers, polluters, insensitive Tradcats and overpopulators. Remember, more than 90% of married Catholics use birth control and teach their children to do the same.The Novus Ordo has become a global organisation of conscience placation and novelty on a grand scale. Novus Ordo Catholics really do believe that everybody goes to Heaven. To ‘work out their salvation in fear and trembling’ (Phil.II, 12) is not a thought they entertain.

Birth control was in modern times a turning point from the will of God to the will of man. Not to use birth control for those living in a big city can seem almost impossible, but who got it wrong? God, or the modern city? God gave to his Church in 1968 a great chance to stay on track when he inspired a reluctant Paul VI to remain faithful to the Church’ s unchangeable doctrine, but a mass of churchmen were promptly unfaithful to the Pope. And the result was that “organisation of conscience placation” denounced above. And who can deny that the replacement of the true sacrifice of the Mass played from 1969 a huge part in Catholics giving up sacrificial lives to get to Heaven, in order to enjoy the easy life and go to Hell? What a responsibility of the priests!

Kyrie eleison.