Paul VI

Drexel’s Return

Drexel’s Return on July 18, 2020

The Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) was a huge event in Church history, designed by its movers and shakers to deceive a mass of Catholics, clergy and laity, into replacing the true Catholic Church with their own Newchurch, adapted to modern times. But the agony for believing Catholics from then on was that the betrayal of Catholic Truth had come from the true Church authorities, whom they had learned from their Catholic cradles always to obey and never to criticise. Even Our Lord and Our Lady when they spoke to human beings would, to avoid scandalising Catholic souls, rarely criticise their own priests.

But here was the particular interest of Faith is greater than Obedience. For if these Messages which came through Fr Drexel truly came from Our Lord Himself, as they purported to do, then here was God Himself scathing in His criticism of the bishops, theologians and priests responsible for the Newchurch emerging from the Council, and obviously dispensing Catholics from their normal duty never to criticise priests. Here was God telling Catholics that a mass of their shepherds – not all – had turned into wolves. “I know what agony you faithful souls are suffering,” say the Messages, “but hold on to your faith and do not let these traitors change it. They are wrong, you are right, as time will tell, and great will be your reward if you persevere.”

Such a message was apt to solve one agony of true believers after the Council, but it was apt also to create another agony: what then of the unfaithful Church authorities? In particular, what of the Pope? The popular perception of papal infallibility goes way beyond the reach of its strict definition in 1870 with the four conditions. Then how could John XXIII have convened the Council of wolves, and how could Paul VI have guided it to its conclusion and presided over its being put into practice afterwards? This agony is such that many serious and believing Catholics from the end of the 1970’s, soon after Fr Drexel died, began resorting to sedevacantism for instance, whereby the Conciliar Popes have not been true Popes at all. The solution of Fr Drexel’s Messages is rather that Paul VI was not himself one of the wolves. He is clearly criticised (in at least two of the Messages), but he also had good intentions, he was not aware of all that his subordinates were doing, he agonised over what was happening to the Church.

Yet one must say that Paul VI’s personal responsibility for the Conciliar disaster was huge. Then some followers of Catholic Tradition will draw the conclusion that Fr Drexel’s “Our Lord” was certainly not truly Our Lord, but emerged somehow from Fr Drexel’s own “pious” reflections. In that case we would explain the leniency of the Messages towards Paul VI as being the solution of many “good” bishops and priests at the time to their agony, namely, the Conciliar bishops were terrible but not the Pope himself. On the other hand if the Messages did come from Our Lord Himself, then one might guess that Our Lord was being lenient in them towards Paul VI maybe in order to head off the reaction of Catholics being tempted more or less to despair of Our Lord’s own structural Church – He Himself was saying that he was still behind it, and He needed to say nothing untrue in order to say that.

Deo volente, this issue of these “Comments” is prelude to a second little series drawn from Faith is Greater than Obedience because of the value found by these “Comments” in the Messages given to Fr Drexel in the 1970’s. There should be three issues, on the Church Crisis, the Bishops and Paul VI, all as presented in Faith is greater than Obedience. Whether the Messages did then come from Our Lord Himself or not, readers of these “Comments” should be better able to judge. In any case it is clear that in this Church crisis they must make up their own minds.

Kyrie eleison.

Fatal Humanising

Fatal Humanising on February 22, 2014

Some Catholics who hold that the Apostolic See is vacant protest strongly against recent issues of these “Comments” which seem to put the universal heresy of liberalism on an equal footing with the particular opinion of sedevacantism. But whereas these “Comments” constantly excoriate the plague of liberalism, surely they have recently done no more than argue that nobody is obliged to be a sedevacantist, which, considering what a sterilising trap sedevacantism proves in some cases to be, is surely a very moderate position to take.

However, the “Comments” do hold that sedevacantism, while admirable as an effort to combat liberalism, is at best an inadequate means of doing so, because it shares with liberals one of their basic errors, namely the exaggeration of papal infallibility. In its full depth this error takes us to the heart of today’s unprecedented crisis of the Church, which is why the “Comments” will insist on the question, while begging pardon of any readers unduly bored or offended. The whole Church is at stake, and not just the sensibilities of these or those of its members.

That full depth is mankind’s slow but steady turning away over the last 700 years from God, from his Son and from his Church. At the height of the Middle Ages Catholics had a clear and strong faith, grasping the oneness and exclusivity of the objective God and his non-contradictory Truth. Dante had no problem putting Popes in his Inferno. But as down the centuries man put himself more and more at the centre of things, so God lost his absolute transcendence above all creatures, and truth became more and more relative, no longer to God’s authority but instead to man’s.

Within the Church, take for example the 13th of the 17 “Rules for thinking with the Church” from St Ignatius of Loyola’s famous book of the Spiritual Exercises, praised by countless Popes ever since, and no doubt responsible for helping to save millions of souls. Ignatius writes: “To be right in everything, we ought always to hold that the white which I see, is black, if the Hierarchical Church so decides it.”Such a position might support the churchmen’s authority in the short run, but did it not run a serious risk of detaching it from truth in the long run?

Indeed by the late 19th century liberalism had become so strong that the Church had to support its own authority by the Definition in 1870 of its Magisterium when operating at full power, namely whenever 1) a Pope 2) defines 3) a point of Faith or morals 4) so as to bind the whole Church. But thinking too humanly since then, too many Catholics, instead of relating this Extraordinary Magisterium to God and to the unchanging truth of the Church’s Ordinary Magisterium, have tended to lend to the human person of the Pope an infallibility coming from, and belonging to, God alone. This humanising process generated a creeping infallibility which almost inevitably resulted in the preposterous claim of Paul VI to be able to remould the Church’s Tradition in the name of a “Solemn Ordinary Magisterium.” The great majority of Catholics allowed him to get away with it, and to this day a mass of them are becoming day by day liberals as they follow the Conciliar Popes, while a small minority of Catholics are driven to denying that those responsible for the Conciliar nonsense can be Popes at all.

In brief, I personally have respect for many sedevacantists, insofar as they believe in the Church and are desperate for a solution to an infinitely serious problem of the Church., but in my opinion they need to look higher and deeper – the infinite height and depth of God himself.

Kyrie eleison.

Horrible Fall – II

Horrible Fall – II on June 22, 2013

“Horror” may seem too strong a word for the change of direction within the Society of St Pius X that at last became clear one year ago. However, if Hell is horrible; if one cannot avoid it without the faith; if the Faith came into grave danger in a Church disabled by Vatican II, but a fortress of the true Faith was miraculously established within that disabled Church; and finally if that fortress is now also being disabled, then “horror” may not be too strong a word.

The SSPX has not yet fallen completely, but it has fallen a long way and it may fall all the way. The leadership that has skilfully promoted that fall over the last 15 years is still in power. It followed Archbishop Lefebvre while he lived, but it never understood, or it chose to cease understanding, why he founded the Society in the first place, namely to resist the downfall of Conciliar churchmen seeking to bring the Church into line with the glamorous but corrupt modern world. Once he was no longer there, these leaders were all too soon re-possessed by the glamour.

Right now they are dragging down with them a number of older SSPX priests, and they are deforming the younger ones. As for the older priests, just like after Vatican II, those shaped under the Archbishop can be in torment from the Newsociety’s bending them out of shape, unless and until they make the decision to go with the flow, but thereupon their conscience has to be anaesthetized. As for the younger priests, just like after Vatican II, having been normally mis-shaped in the new direction, only by themselves can they find the old direction, because they are not being taught what the Archbishop was really about. In effect, the SSPX seminaries are slowly being turned into newseminaries. Care must be taken in recommending them for vocations.

And towards the top of the SSPX? Here is the recent thinking of one who is thoroughly familiar with the doctrinal stand of the Archbishop. For a long time he was its defender, but since the Doctrinal Discussions of 2009 to 2011 proved that Rome was persevering in its doctrinal error, now he too, in 2013, approves of the Society’s collapse of principle at the Chapter of 2012 when it renounced a doctrinal agreement and set conditions for a merely practical agreement. Yet he is glad that in practice the collapse bore no fruit! Surely this was only because the Romans did not yet think the collapse was complete enough, yet he looks forward to the SSPX leaders renewing contacts with the new Pope, as though, having half collapsed, they do not risk collapsing completely when they crawl back to Rome in pursuit of canonical recognition for the SSPX.

What has happened to his mind? Just like many good priests under the tyrannical Paul VI after Vatican II, he has loosened it from divine doctrine and is making it go with the human flow. His conscience cannot be easy, but probably his will is getting set upon preferring the apparent good of the SSPX to the real good of the Faith, which is incompatible with submission to its powerful enemies. By pronouncing his solidarity with the Society leaders who want such a submission, he may not lose the faith himself, but by his new softness towards the Roman apostates he risks at the least making it somewhat easier for a number of other souls to begin losing the true faith.

As for the SSPX leaders, they are mired in duplicity because they still have to deceive themselves and others that they are faithful to the old religion of God and of Archbishop Lefebvre, when in reality they are wanting to belong to the mainstream Church dedicated to the new religion of man. The loss of souls and the duplicity are a double horror.

Kyrie eleison.

Horrible Fall – I

Horrible Fall – I on June 8, 2013

The fall of the Society of St Pius X from what it was under Archbishop Lefebvre between 1970 and 1991 to what it has become over the last, say, 15 years, is little short of horrible. In a brief series let us see firstly why the horror is normal in the poor world around us, because to understand is to forgive, and we are all in need of forgiveness; secondly let us face the horror, not in order to be discouraged but on the contrary in order to gird our loins for worse almost certainly to come; and thirdly let us see what we can do to gird our loins, because beneath God’s Heaven he cannot have left us with nothing that we can do (but in this connection it is important not to pour into the sand the little water that we have). Let us begin with three fine Catholic minds taking the measure of our age, to see why horror is today the norm.

In his great Encyclical letter of 1884 on Freemasonry, Pope Leo XIII marks how its evil principles advance from (#13) disregarding to (#14) injuring to (#15) destroying the Catholic Church, and then from (#16) the ruin of all positive religions to (#17) the ruin of all natural religion to (#18) the ruin of great natural truths such as God’s Creation and Providence and the immortality of the soul. In the 21st century we have, logically, gone further still, namely to the ruin of the very notion of truth. Minds have been turned into mush, even the minds of Popes, Cardinals and Bishops.

In his great Encyclical letter of 1907 on Modernism, Pope St Pius X saw clearly the same ruin of all truth and thought by the modernists. It is beneath the dignity of Popes to shout, but in Pascendi Pius X uses the strongest expressions available to him to castigate the mind-rot by which the modernists rot out the Catholic Faith. In so many words he says that modernism is the end of the line. His dramatic warning obtained for the Church a reprieve of half a century, but with Vatican II the Faith-rot that he had flung out of the Church was by John XXIII and Paul VI made official doctrine within the Church! If Popes lose their minds, how should mere Superiors not do so?

A third Catholic mind, measuring the havoc wrought upon Catholic doctrine by Vatican II, was that of Romano Amerio, an Italian layman whose analysis of modern errors, Iota Unum, was highly praised by Archbishop Lefebvre. At one point Amerio says (could somebody find me the reference?) that if things continue on the same path as now, eventually it will become impossible to speak or write any more, all that will remain is to keep silent! This may seem unimaginable, but only recently a very good commentator in the USA, Dr Paul Craig Roberts, almost stopped writing, because it had seemed to him that there was no longer any public able or willing to think.

Truly, in this present dress rehearsal for the Antichrist, if these days were not shortened, as Our Lord says (Mt. XXIV, 22), we could all of us lose our minds and our faith. Then who may still feel inclined to throw the first stone at a Pope or Bishop today losing his mind?

However, while Our Lord forbids us to judge-condemn (Mt. VII, 1), because God alone has that perfect knowledge of all the circumstances which is necessary if one is to judge without error, at the same time Our Lord commands us to judge-discern between true shepherds and mercenaries, or between sheep and wolves in sheeps’ clothing (Mt. VII, 15). Such is our responsibility as Catholics, and that is why we will soon take another look at the horror now taking place within the Society of St Pius X.

Kyrie eleison.

“You Choose”

“You Choose” on March 23, 2013

What confusion reigns in the Church and so in the world! We see one after another the best of men, with perhaps the best of intentions, giving up the struggle and making the decision to resist no longer, to go with the flow, to follow the current, to do what everybody else is doing. Yet that flow remains godless, and it is condemned by God without appeal, because he does not change. No doubt he is right now appealing to the new Pope to do what is right, cost what it may.

Between 1966 and 1975 he seems to have appealed to a woman in France to get a French prelate to put in Paul VI’s own hands a series of divine messages calling for the Pope to lead massive pilgrimages of penance to the famous basilica of Vézelay (and, from 1972, to restore the Tridentine Mass). The messages are given the title of the Lenten Chant, Parce, Domine, Populo Tuo(Spare, O Lord, Thy People), They come with no official authorization but they fit Holy Week. Readers who care to read these brief extracts can judge for themselves if they ring true:—

16-X-65: The world is on the brink of catastrophe. However, do believe that the entreaty in prayer of a few humble souls has great power over My heart.

3-III-68:Tell the Holy Father to sing imploringly the Parce, Domine with his arms held up in the form of a cross, in front of the crowds that he is to gather together in Vézelay.

2-III-70:If My appeal is not heeded, the waters of My wrath will drown everything. What weeping and groaning there will be at that moment, but it will be too late.

13-II-71:Tell the priests to call for prayer and penance amidst collapsing Christendom, and to set the example themselves. Otherwise there will be massacres on French soil. If you refuse to send up to My Father cries of humble repentant prayer, you will perforce send up cries of terror. You choose! 25-III-71:My little children, if you do not want processions of love, you will have processions of hate. These are already starting. What more do you need to believe in My appeal to you?

28-IV-72:If they don’t want to genuflect in front of the Blessed Sacrament, they will genuflect in the salt-mines! 10-VII-72:If the Pope does not do what I have asked for, divine Justice will come down heavily on the world, and you will have to undergo such suffering that if you knew the details now, you would be frozen with terror. 15-VII-72:I appeal to My faithful children. Am I to find only deserters? If you knew, my children, what awaits you, how you would hasten to fulfil My desires. But justice will soon be done. You will cry out to Me in your terror, but it will be too late. 6-XI-72:Were I to show you what awaits you, you would spend entire nights in prayer at My feet, to keep the terrible chastisement away.

13-VII-73: The laity are presently the hope of the Church. Pray for your unfaithful shepherds.

2-V-75:In the evil times coming, Christian families will have to get together and work out how to look after the needs of My faithful priests, who will have to exercise their ministry hidden from public view . . . It is back to the catacombs. There is no other way.

Parce, Domine.

Farewell, Wimbledon

Farewell, Wimbledon on December 15, 2012

So I have moved out of Wimbledon, which at least corresponds to the reality of my supposed “expulsion” from the Society of St Pius X. But the move is not without its sadness, because I spent there nearly four years after my real expulsion from Argentina, and they have been happy years, despite everything. Perhaps the main happiness has been the company of the priests in SSPX headquarters in England, St George’s House. They have been very good company. May God bless each of them.

However one thing I must say. People ask why I left the Society. I did not leave the Society. The Society left me, by abandoning the principles for which I joined it. Once again, the parallel with Vatican II is exact. Just as countless Catholic priests, religious and layfolk were abandoned by the churchmen who opted in the 1960’s for the Council, so a number of faithful priests and laity are being abandoned in the 2010’s by the leaders of the Society as these choose to head for peace with their “new friends in Rome” – quote of the Society’s First Assistant. The blindness is astonishing, for those who can see. It is all too natural for those who cannot see. May God have mercy on them. I do believe that these leaders have never understood what Archbishop Lefebvre was all about. They are children of their age.

The only substantial reason given for their “expelling” me was disobedience. But the only substantial disobedience on my part was the repeated refusal to close down these “Eleison Comments.” Yet when I asked the Superior General on two different occasions to specify which precise numbers of the “Comments” were so problematic, each time he did not give an answer, no doubt because he would have had to admit that the real problem was one of content, namely my resolute opposition to his suicidal approach to Conciliar Rome. Instead he continues to pretend, that the problem is one of discipline, thus diverting attention away from the real problem. And I am not the first priest and I will not be the last that he treats in this way. May God give him light. He risks chasing out many of his true friends in order to please his true enemies, just like Pope Paul VI did with Archbishop Lefebvre. The parallels never end. The Newchurch and the Newsociety are the same malady of our age.

So what now? I borrow a friend’s flat in the vicinity of London for a few weeks at best, for a few months at worst, until I can find suitable property to rent for 6 or 12 months. At this point I still do not believe in making any permanent arrangements. Alas, I shall not be easy to contact because my friend has to be discreet out of care for his neighbours. In any case snail mail will reach me through P.O. Box 423, Deal CT14 4BF, England. (but please don’t send Christmas cards. I send none). From December 13 to January 3 I plan to make an apostolic visit to Canada and the USA, Deo volente, and immediately after that a visit to France for the Feast of the Epiphany.

Also changing will be some aspects of how my spoken and written words are published. The format and method of delivery of “Eleison Comments” may change too, but what I hope will not change is their appearing every Saturday through December and into the New Year. . Thank you for all your contributions to the St Marcel Initiative. In case you were concerned, I can promise you that they have not gone astray. Happy Christmas.

Kyrie eleison.