Newchurch

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

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.

Madiran; the Heresy

Madiran; the Heresy on November 14, 2020

In his book “The Heresy of the 20th Century” Jean Madiran (1920–2013) has presented the heresy’s gravity (Foreword); its underlying philosophy (Part I) and the bishops responsible for it (II); in Parts III, IV and V he comes to the heresy itself, which he analyses according to its seven Propositions. In Part III he presents the first two on their own because of their importance; in Part IV the first six in a little detail; in Part V the seventh Proposition, also on its own because of its overwhelming importance for Madiran. Part III, subject of this week’s “Comments,” sub-divides into six Chapters.

In Chapter One, Madiran declares that on the eve of Vatican II (1962–1965) the religious atmosphere was already pestilential in general, but the then Bishop of the city of Metz in Eastern France, Msgr. Schmitt, brought the whole vague pestilence into clear focus. Seven Propositions sum up what was in fact the new religion which he backed by all his episcopal authority. The first Proposition declares that today’s changing world imposes a change in the very concept of salvation brought by Jesus Christ. And the second declares that the Church’s idea of the plan of God was up till then not evangelical enough. In brief, (P1) the Church must promote “socialisation,” says the Bishop of Metz, because (P2) the old Church was not collective enough, but too merely personal in its practice of the Gospel. But what the Bishop is in fact promoting is Communism, says Madiran.

For indeed “socialisation,” argues Madiran in Chapter Two, rests upon a Marxist view of history, materialistic and determinist, which shows that the Bishop of Metz has lost the Christian faith, because how can the spiritual goals of Christianity coincide with the materialistic goals of Communism? Communism is a social system to be rejected for religious reasons, because as a social system it pretends to replace the Church’s social system and therewith Christianity.

In Chapter Three Madiran rejects Bishop Schmitt’s claim that men today best of all understand Gospel brotherhood (cf. Proposition II above). Such a down-grading of all the social works and achievements of the pre-Conciliar Church is ridiculous and for Catholics, says Madiran, it is an unseemly narcissism.

Thus by 1967, says Madiran in Chapter Four, it had become clear to the world that Bishop Schmitt was promoting no less than a new religion, or a heresy, vandalising centuries upon centuries of Catholic tradition. The French bishops are vandals without intelligence or character. Henceforth it is up to the laity to defend the Penny Catechism, in other words the very basics of the Faith!

In Chapter 5, against keeping up with the times (Prop. I), Madiran upholds the First Commandment, because it is the unchanging God and not the changing world that must hold first place in our hearts and minds. Nor will the times ever be with the Church, because the Church is with Jesus Christ. It is only worldly Catholics that the world admires. And against the Church not practising the Gospel enough (Prop. II), Madiran says that the Saints never invented anything in order to be “evangelical enough,” on the contrary they always strove to be as faithful as possible to tradition in order to put the Gospel into practice.

In conclusion, Chapter Six, Madiran denies that there is any truth to be salvaged from Propositions I and II, and he declares that Bishop Schmitt’s new religion wants the Church to gain the whole world by losing its own soul. The new religion has neither true authority nor true obedience, and Madiran has a prophetic vision of Catholic Tradition surviving Vatican II, because it makes free men kneel nobly before their God in accordance with a real authority and a real obedience. Such Catholics will never follow the false religion of poor bishops like the Bishop of Metz, just let him wait and see!

Kyrie eleison.

Madiran; the Bishops

Madiran; the Bishops on October 31, 2020

It will be recalled that in the Prologue of his book The Heresy of the 20th century Jean Madiran placed the blame for that heresy fairly and squarely on the Catholic bishops who led up to and followed straight after the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), notably on the bishops of France whom he best knew. Chapter I of his book showed, following St. Pius X’s great Encyclical Pascendi of 1907, how these bishops’ minds were rendered unfit for reality, let alone for Catholic doctrine, by the subjectivism of Kant’s philosophy, now reigning supreme in the philosophy departments of virtually all “universities.” In Chapter II Madiran tackles the French bishops themselves, in six loosely connected sections.

Firstly, he says that to follow these bishops we would have to throw away a veritable treasure trove of Catholic treasures, such as St. Pius X, Gregorian Chant, Thomism, Canon Law, Our Lady, patriotism, our Greco-Latin heritage, Marian piety and last but not least, the devotion of little old women praying. For our part, he says, we refuse to scorn any of these familiar features of the Catholic family. Behind all of them is the love of Christ, while behind all the talk of “recycling,” “renovations” and “renewal” is hate. And behind all achievements of “Western civilisation” is Christ, neither India nor Africa nor China.

Secondly, to all the world the Newchurch has proclaimed its apostasy: the Newbishops’ policy is no longer to convert anyone. Yet the basics of life and death remain exactly the same. Let the Church teach us how to live and die. We are all too full of the world. Let priests teach us how to get to Heaven!

Thirdly, these bishops say that “the change of civilisation” calls for “a more evangelical concept of salvation,” by which they mean not just “a new form of words,” which is what they say they mean, but a new content of the words, meaning a new religion. Your Excellences, our answer is “NO!” Moreover, as a baptised Catholic I am entitled to demand of you the true Faith, because your “new form of words” in pursuit of a new “concept of salvation” is bound to be heretical, not just clumsy, but a new religion, contradicting the true Faith.

Fourthly, up until 1966 these bishops had not yet defected from the Catholic Faith, but now they are claiming that theirs is at last the authentic Christianity, when in fact their “post-Conciliar mentality” is breaking with the true Faith. The truth is that we are in the middle of a war between two different religions. And actively or passively, all the bishops are supporting the new religion. Some Catholic bishop must speak up, because souls are perishing! Msgr. Lefebvre, are you listening?

We need no bishops to tell us to be modern. We are all too modern. But modern technology and modern philosophy are not the business of Catholic bishops! We know the moderns, and we scorn them. You do not know them and you love them. Marx, Nietzsche, Freud are mere fantasy-merchants. Wake up!

Fifthly, the Newchurch is now ruining all apprenticeship, teaching and education. By wanting to give to the youngsters only what is modern, which they already have, you give them nothing, while making them think they know everything. Thus abandoned, they will become tomorrow’s barbarians, so that you are betraying not only the Faith but all civilisation. Come back to Tradition! God, give us some true bishops!

Sixthly, the bishops’ authority is based only on truth, legitimacy and law. If these bishops were right, the Church of Tradition would no longer exist. But the Truth is primarily their business, so that they have no authority to change the Faith, and if they do so, they have no authority to be obeyed, nor will we leave them in peace. We expect from them the certainty, purity and sanctity of the unchanging Catholic Faith.

(In Section 4 above, Archbishop Lefebvre is not mentioned by name, but he was in Madiran’s mind. Two years later the Archbishop founded the Society of St Pius X, and the rest is history.)

Kyrie eleison.