Tag: Novus Ordo

NOM Miracles?

NOM Miracles? posted in Eleison Comments 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 posted in Eleison Comments 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.

NOM Miracles?

NOM Miracles? posted in Eleison Comments on December 3, 2016

In the United Sates last year there arose a serious controversy as to whether God can work miracles within the framework of the Novus Ordo Mass. Now if God does work supernatural miracles, it is obviously for them to be believed in, so that they will strengthen people’s supernatural faith. And if he wants something outside of the natural order to be believed in, he is obviously going to provide enough evidence, like Lazarus walking out of his tomb in front of a large crowd of bystanders. And in this respect the most convincing evidence is of a material and physical sort, such as can in no way be the product of any human mind (however pious), like the fireworks of the sun in Fatima in October, 1917. Then what is the material and physical evidence of a eucharistic miracle having taken place in any Novus Ordo Mass?

One such miracle is alleged to have taken place in the parish church of Sokulka, Eastern Poland. On October 12, 2008, a priest, ordained five years ago by a Polish bishop consecrated in 1980, dropped a Sacred Host on the altar step while distributing Holy Communion. He stopped to pick it up and placed it in the small vessel containing water next to the Tabernacle. After Mass it was locked inside the sacristy safe for the Host to dissolve in the water, so that the Real Presence would no longer be there and the water could be safely discarded. This procedure is altogether normal for such accidents in the Catholic liturgy.

But when on October 19 a parish Sister went to check on the dissolving Host, she saw in its centre some matter intensely red in colour, like a blood clot. She immediately informed the parish priest who came with other priests to observe what looked like a piece of living flesh. All observers were amazed. Next came the local Archbishop, of Bialystok, with several diocesan officials. All of them were deeply moved. By the Archbishop’s instructions, on October 30 the Host was removed from the water, transferred onto a small corporal and placed in the Tabernacle to dry out. To this day it retains the form of a blood clot.

On January 7, 2009, a sample from the Host was taken to be examined by two pathomorphologists, separately, at the nearby Medical University of Bialystok. Their unanimous judgment, but independent of one another, was that “of all the tissues of living organisms, the sample most resembles human myocardial tissue,” from the left ventricle of the heart, typical for a living person in a state of agony. Furthermore both pathologists found, presumably under their microscopes, that the fibres of the myocardial tissue and the structure of the bread were so tightly bonded together that any possibility of a human fabrication was ruled out. On January 29 this material and physical evidence was presented to the Metropolitan Curia in Bialystok, where the Church’s official judgment upon the supernatural origin of the occurrence is patiently awaited. In that wait, said the Archbishop in a sermon of October, 2009, decisive will be the spiritual fruits among Catholics. Already there has been a significant rise in the piety and religious practice of local Catholics, and from abroad there have been hundreds of pilgrimages, with numerous miracles of healing and conversion also taking place.

If the material evidence is to be believed, then in Sokulka God worked one more in a long series down the ages of eucharistic miracles to help souls to believe in something normally difficult enough to believe in, namely that he is Really Present beneath the appearances, once consecrated, of bread and wine. But how is that possible when Traditional Catholics know that the New Mass is the single major cause of the Church’s destruction by loss of faith since Vatican II? An answer may be that the Sacred Heart, knowing that the shepherds were mainly responsible for the ambiguous NOM, refused to abandon his sheep, and continues to feed them with what is still Catholic amidst the ambiguity. And amidst all the Newchurch’s relative carelessness in dealing with the Holy Eucharist, the Sokulka event is also a daunting reminder to shepherds and sheep alike – “Remember whom you are handling – it is I, your God!”

Kyrie eleison.

Sedevacantism Again – II

Sedevacantism Again – II posted in Eleison Comments on October 8, 2016

For any Catholic soul realizing today the gravity of the crisis in the Church and agonizing over it, the simplicity of sedevacantism dismissing as invalid the Church and Popes of Vatican II can become a serious temptation. Worse, the seeming logic of the ecclesiavacantists’ and sedevacantists’ arguments can turn that temptation into a mental trap which can at worst lead a Catholic to lose his faith altogether. That is why these “Comments” will return in more detail to the main argument of the scattershot of arguments laid out in the article by BpS from 1991 mentioned here last week. Here again is that argument:—

Major: the Catholic Church is absolutely indefectible (it has God’s own guarantee that it will last to the end of the world – cf. Mt XXVIII, 20). Minor: But the Conciliar or Novus Ordo Church, overwhelmed by neo-modernism and liberalism, represents an absolute defection. Conclusion: the Novus Ordo Church is absolutely not Catholic and its Popes are absolutely not Popes. In other words the Church is absolutely white while the Newchurch is absolutely black, so Church and Newchurch are absolutely different. To minds which like to think in black and white with nothing in between, this argument has much appeal. But to minds which recognize that in real life things are often grey, or a mixture of black and white (without black ceasing to be black or white ceasing to be white), the argument is too absolute to be true. Thus in the Major there is an exaggeration of the Church’s indefectibility, and in the Minor there is an exaggeration of the Newchurch’s defection. Theory can be absolute, but reality rarely is absolute. Let us look at indefectibility and the Conciliar defection as they are in reality.

As for the Major, sedevacantists frequently exaggerate the Church’s indefectibility, just as they frequently exaggerate the Popes’ infallibility, because that is what they need to support their emotional horror at what has become of the Catholic Church since the Council. But in reality just as that infallibility does not exclude great errors of some Popes in Church history and only applies when the Pope is either, Ordinarily, saying what the Church has always said, or, Extraordinarily, is engaging all four conditions of the 1870 definition, so the Church’s indefectibility does not absolutely exclude some huge defections at given moments of Church history, such as the triumphs of Islam or Protestantism or of the Antichrist (Lk. XVIII, 8), it only excludes absolutely a total defection, or total failure (Mt. XXVIII, 20). Thus indefectibility is not as absolute as BpS pretends.

As for the Minor, it is true that the defection of Conciliarism is considerably more grave than that of either Islam or Protestantism because it strikes at the head and heart of the Church in Rome, which they did not do. Nevertheless even half a century of Conciliarism (1965 to 2016) has not made the Church totally defect, or fail. For instance Archbishop Lefebvre – and he was not alone – held high the Faith from 1970 to 1991, his successors did the same, more or less, from 1991 to 2012, and the embattled “Resistance” upholds his line still, and before the Church humanly collapses in a not too distant future, unquestionably its indefectibility will be divinely saved, just as before world’s end – Mt. XXIV, 21–22. Thus Conciliarism as a defection of the Church is not as absolute as BpS pretends, either.

So his syllogism needs to be recast – Major: the Church’s indefectibility does not exclude huge defections but only a total defection. Minor: Vatican II was a huge but not total defection of the Church (even if Catholics aware of its danger must totally avoid it, for fear of contamination). Conclusion: the Church’s indefectibility does not exclude Vatican II. In brief, God’s own Church is bigger than all the wickedness of Devil or man, even Vatican II. The Conciliar defection may well be of an unprecedented gravity in all Church history, but the Church’s indefectibility and the Popes’ infallibility come from God and not from men. Like liberals, the sedevacantists are thinking humanly, all too humanly.

Kyrie eleison.

Conciliarizing Apace

Conciliarizing Apace posted in Eleison Comments on September 14, 2013

A good article arguing that the June 27 Declaration of three Society of St Pius X bishops is not as faithful to Catholic Tradition as it may seem to be, appeared in the August issue of England’s new Catholic monthly magazine, The Recusant, self-described as “An unofficial SSPX newsletter fighting a guerrilla war for the soul of Tradition.” A brief survey can hardly do justice to the article’s seven dense pages, but the main line of thought deserves to be known. Here it is –

At first sight the June 27 Declaration seems to be Traditional, but, as with the documents of Vatican II A, there is usually a loophole, a fatal flaw, which allows the rest of the document to be undone. Let us take a closer look, paragraph by paragraph:—

#1 “Filial gratitude” is expressed towards Archbishop Lefebvre, but only harmless and soft-sounding quotes of his are included in the Declaration, with nothing from his 1988 Consecrations sermon, and none of his hard-hitting reasons for creating bishops to resist the “antichrists” in Rome. #3 It is admitted that the “cause” of the errors devastating the Catholic Church is in the Conciliar documents, but that is not to admit that the errors are there, since cause and effect cannot be identical. Yet most serious errors are themselves in the Council’s texts, e.g. religious liberty. #4 It is recognized that Vatican II changed and vitiated the Church’s manner of teaching, or teaching authority, but the main problem is not authority, but doctrine – see #8. #5 Only relatively soft language is used to evoke the Conciliar Church’s “non-preoccupation” with the “reign of Christ.” In fact the Conciliar Church denies and contradicts the full and true doctrine of the Social Kingship of Christ the King, battle-flag of the Archbishop and true Catholics today. #6 As in #3, it is admitted that the Council text’s teaching on religious liberty leads to the dissolving of Christ, but the text is that dissolving, or putting of man in the place of God. Vatican II is the fruit not just of human weakness or absent-mindedness, but of a diabolical conspiracy. #7 Similarly ecumenism and interreligious dialogue are not just “silencing the truth about the one true Church,” they are denying and contradicting it. Nor are they just “killing the missionary spirit,” they are killing the missions, and with them millions of souls, all over the world. #8 On the other hand the ruin of the Church’s institutions is blamed on the destruction of authority within the Church by the Council’s collegiality and democratic spirit. But the essential problem (as the paragraph’s opening sentence does weakly say) is the loss of faith. Authority is secondary. #9 While pointing to real faults and serious omissions in the Novus Ordo rite of Mass, no mention is made of the worldwide carnage of souls wrought by its falsifying of their worship of God. The Novus Ordo Mass has been the main engine of the Church’s destruction from 1969 until today. #10 In conclusion, timid and deferential language is used to “ask with insistence” that Rome return to Tradition. But of course, in accordance with the SSPX’s “re-branding,” the Newsociety wants no more fighters or fighting talk. #11 The three bishops “mean . . .to follow Providence,” whether Rome returns to Tradition or not. What can that mean other than the eventual acceptance of a deal that will by-pass doctrine? #12 The Declaration concludes piously, with another dovelike quote from the Archbishop.

And The Recusant arrives at the sad but all too probable conclusion that the Declaration is only an apparent step backwards from the Declarations of April 15 and July 14 of last year, which were two clear steps forward in the conciliarizing of the SSPX. Heaven help it!

Kyrie eleison.

Asian Journey

Asian Journey posted in Eleison Comments on June 15, 2013

A number of readers complained at the “Eleison Comments” of two weeks ago on authority being crippled. From its argument that on this side of the “imminent Chastisement” no further Catholic Congregation can be founded on a normal Catholic basis, they concluded that I believe there is nothing more for a bishop to do than to wait for God to intervene. But in that case why did I just spend two weeks in Asia, and why am I now in Ireland? Likewise they conclude that I will never consecrate another bishop. I say – God willing – just wait.

In fact there is a great deal for a bishop to do to visit and encourage souls striving to keep the Faith when Headquarters of the Society of St Pius X is obviously still intent upon taking it into the arms of Conciliar Rome. On June 17 Bishop Fellay wrote to Benedict XVI, “I do intend to continue to make every effort to pursue this path (of reconciliation with Rome) in order to arrive at the necessary clarifications.” And in the same vein, “Unfortunately, in the present situation of the Society” Rome’s counter-proposal of June 13 to his Doctrinal Declaration of mid-April “will not be accepted.” Then it would have been fortunate if the Society had accepted Rome’s terms?

Against this written evidence (made public by Headquarters) of Bishop Fellay’s on-going determination to sell out the Archbishop’s Society, we have quotes of his to the French District Superior that the “unfortunately” he only wrote “for the sake of the Pope,” and to the Carmelite Mother Superior in Belgium that he “never intended to pursue a practical agreement with Rome.” Alas, Bishop Fellay has such a track-record for adapting his words to his audience that quotes like these by no means disprove his intention to sell out the Archbishop’s Society. His astonishing ability to move the mental furniture around in his mind deserves an “Eleison Comments” all on its own, but in the meantime is it any wonder if what is coming to be called the “Resistance” is rising spontaneously all over the world?

Between May 24 and June 6 I visited with Fr Chazal a good part of his flock of some 400 souls, and I gave over 50 Confirmations in South Korea, the Philippines and Singapore. Fr Chazal is a character. He has brilliant insights and is very funny into the bargain. If ever you meet him, ask him to do his imitation of an Indian politician (he says the Indians are tough, and “can take it”).

In South Korea the Society’s change of direction caused a harsh split, with the result that the donor of the original chapel merely donated another. I had the pleasure of performing the marriage of the donor’s daughter. In the Philippines, just as I arrived, an older priest who fled the Newchurch years ago to work with the Society was fleeing the Newsociety to work with the Resistance. He looks like being entrusted with the beginnings of a seminary which Fr Chazal wants to launch, and he will in addition have his work cut out for him in centres throughout the central Philippines. In Singapore, a show-case in the East of Western-style materialism, still a good Chinese family with their friends have a firm grip on the change from the Society to the Newsociety. Truth will undermine this ExSPX, as Fr Chazal calls it, just as truth is undermining the Newchurch of the Novus Ordo.

Here are many souls to sustain on their way to Heaven. Do I have any candidates offering themselves for consecration as bishops?

Kyrie eleison.