Tag: Pius XII

Sarto, Siri?

Sarto, Siri? posted in Eleison Comments on September 29, 2012

In a sermon for the Feast of St Pius X I found myself uttering « almost a heresy »: I wondered aloud whether Giuseppe Sarto would have disobeyed Paul VI’s destruction of the Church, if, instead of dying as Pope Pius X in 1914, he had died as a Cardinal in, say, 1974. Within the Society of St Pius X that must sound like a heresy because how can the wisdom of the heavenly patron of the SSPX be in any way flawed? Yet the question is not idle.

In the 1970’s Archbishop Lefebvre made personal visits to a number of the Church’s best cardinals and bishops in the hope of persuading a mere handful of them to offer public resistance to the Vatican II revolution. He used to say that just half a dozen bishops resisting together could have seriously obstructed the Conciliar devastation of the Church. Alas, not even Pius XII’s choice of successor, Cardinal Siri of Genoa, would make a public move against the Church Establishment. Finally Bishop de Castro Mayer stepped forward, but only in the 1980’s, by when the Conciliar Revolution was well ensconced at the top of the Church.

So how could the best of well-trained minds have been so darkened? How could so few of the best churchmen at that time not have seen what the Archbishop was seeing, for instance that the “law” establishing the Novus Ordo Mass was no law at all, because it belongs to the very nature of law to be an ordinance of reason for the common good? How could he have been so relatively alone in not letting such a basic principle of common sense be smothered by respect for authority, when the Church’s very survival was being placed in peril by Vatican II and the New Mass? How can authority have so gained the upper hand on reality and truth?

My own answer is that for seven centuries Christendom has been sliding into apostasy. For 700 years, with noble interruptions like the Counter-Reformation, the reality of Catholicism has been slowly eaten away by the cancerous fantasy of liberalism, which is the freeing of man from God by the freeing of nature from grace, of mind from objective truth and of will from objective right and wrong. For the longest time, 650 years, the Catholic churchmen clung to and defended reality, but finally enough of the engrossing fantasy of glamorous modernity worked its way into their bones for reality to lose its grip on their minds and wills. Lacking grace, as St Thomas More said of the English bishops in his time betraying the Catholic Church, the Conciliar bishops let men’s fantasy take over from God’s reality, and authority take over from truth. There are practical lessons for clergy and laity alike.

Colleagues inside and outside the SSPX, to serve God, let us beware of reacting like Giuseppe Siri when we need to be reacting like Giuseppe Sarto, with his magnificent denunciations of the modern errors in Pascendi, Lamentabiliand the Letter on the Sillon. And to obtain the grace we need in this most tremendous crisis of all Church history, we need tremendously to pray.

Layfolk, if horrors of modern life make you “hunger and thirst after justice,” rejoice if you can that the horrors are keeping you real, and do not doubt that if you persevere in your hunger, you will “have your fill” (Mt.V, 6). Blessed are the poor in spirit, the meek, and they that mourn, says Our Lord, in the same place. As for the surest protection against your minds and hearts being taken over by the fantasy, pray five, better fifteen, Mysteries a day of Our Lady’s Holy Rosary.

Kyrie eleison.

Cassocks Weighed

Cassocks Weighed posted in Eleison Comments on March 12, 2011

To affirm, as did last week’s “Eleison Comments” (190, March 5), that whoever possesses the fullness of Catholic Truth is in the driving-seat of the Catholic Church, may seem a statement at best risky, at worst untrue. After all, 1/ who is in the driving-seat of the Church if not the drivers – the Church authorities – put there by Our Lord? 2/ Since when did Our Lord design his Church to be led by any claimant to the Truth? 3/ Is not the direction of the Church being entrusted to any claimant of Truth a recipe for chaos in the Church?

The best answer is in Scripture. When St Paul preached the true Gospel of Jesus Christ to the peoples of Galatia (think of today’s Turkey), they accepted the Gospel with rejoicing and great fruit (Gal. II, 14–15; III, 5). But soon after he left them to preach elsewhere, enemies of God came amongst them to preach salvation not by faith in Jesus Christ but by the works of the Old Law, notably circumcision (V, 2, 11). By falling for this perversion of the true Gospel (I, 6; III,1), the Galatians provoked from St Paul the glorious Epistle to the Galatians.Here are some key verses from Chapter I:—

“(verse 6) I wonder that you are so soon removed from him that called you into the grace of Christ, unto another gospel. (v.7) Which is not another, only there are some that trouble you, and would pervert the Gospel of Christ. (v.8) But though we, or an angel from Heaven, preach a gospel to you besides that which we have preached to you, let him be anathema. (v.9) As we said before, so now I say again: if anyone preach to you a gospel, besides that which you have received, let him be anathema.” (“Anathema” means, utterly condemned and excommunicated.)

Now it is obvious that any angel appearing to the Galatians would appear with all the authority of a true messenger from Heaven. And if St. Paul himself were to return amongst them, he would appear with all the authority of his prior evangelizing amongst them as Doctor of the Gentiles. In either case the appearances of authority could hardly be stronger. Yet St. Paul says, and repeats, that the Galatians would have to put, as one might say, content before cassock, so that if he were ever to change the content of his preaching, they were not to believe a word of it, whatever the colour of his cassock upon his return!

In answer therefore to the three objections laid out at the start, let us say: 1/ Our Lord puts, ultimately, Truth-tellers and not cassocks in the driving-seat of the Church. 2/ These drivers will be Truth-tellers and not just Truth-claimants. Claims do not make the Truth, but Truth makes its telling (this is what few modern people can grasp). 3/ The Truth being one, then all Truth-tellers will be united in the Truth, and the only chaos will come from souls that reject or pervert that Truth.

The greatness of Archbishop Lefebvre lay in his discerning that Vatican II was sliding into “another” gospel than that of Jesus Christ or St. Paul, a gospel of justification by the works of modern man, and that even white cassocks were not to be followed if they preached it. Is today’s white cassock any different?

Kyrie eleison.

Wasteland Remedies – I

Wasteland Remedies – I posted in Eleison Comments on August 7, 2010

“Alright, your Excellency,” I can hear parents saying, “so the ‘universities’ are a wasteland. But on that reckoning of yours you must admit that just about everywhere else is a wasteland as well. Then what are we to do with our children? God’s law forbids us to use unlawful means to prevent their arriving. They arrive. And then?”

The swift answer is that in a world worse than ever, souls that want to get to Heaven will have to be more heroic than ever, but their reward will be correspondingly greater than ever.

Pius XII said that the world was worse in his day than in the time of Sodom and Gomorrah, and he died in 1958! What would he say today? Facing the same problem, the Popes who followed him “moved the goal-posts” at Vatican II in order not to have to go on condemning, condemning, condemning. But that was the easy way out. To switch off the alarms is not the same thing as to extinguish the fire. Church and world are blazing merrily, and the first thing parents must do is to face the problem: extreme danger for their children’s eternal salvation.

If once they grasp that danger, their Catholic Faith will tell them that they cannot take the Conciliar low road, nor any other low road, they must take the heroic high road. “We will not get to Heaven on feather-beds,” said St Thomas More. Our Lord said, “He who would be my disciple, let him take up his cross, and follow me” (Mt.XVI, 24), and “He that shall persevere to the end, he shall be saved” (Mt. XXIV, 13). Parents must make up their minds that if to save their children’s souls they need to be heroes, then heroes they will be. At that point, as the proverb says, “Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” so once parental love has the will, it will find a way, inside and outside the home.

For outside the home, see next week’s “Eleison Comments” for alternatives to the ‘university’ For inside the home, any priest worth his salt will tell them to start by firmly establishing the family Rosary in the home, and to continue by throwing out that television set which is a tabernacle of the world, the flesh and the Devil. From the youngest age, let children’s hearts and minds be filled in the home with live interchange and lively discussion of everything under the sun. This is because by the time children are of an age to go to ‘university,’ the die is usually cast, for good or ill, so that if a boy has grown up in a real live home, lifted towards Heaven by prayer, the worst of ‘universities’ may not do him too much harm, whereas if he has been raised as a televidiot, the best university may not help him too much towards Heaven.

Notice that EC 158 did not tell parents never to pay for a boy of theirs to go to ‘university’. It said to think hard before doing so. If parents think hard while their boy is still young, their Faith should tell them how life at home needs to be changed, without too much delay. As St. Paul says (I Cor. II, 9), quoting Isaiah (LXIV, 4), Heaven is infinitely well worth every effort, infinitely surpassing even the wildest human imagination.

Kyrie eleison.

Providence’s 2009

Providence’s 2009 posted in Eleison Comments on December 27, 2008

In mid-November last year “Eleison Comments” recommended “fastening seat-belts” for the year 2008, because a couple of private revelations and above all “pressure building towards a third World War” together constituted “at least an orange alert.” Was the alert justified? What about 2009?

As for the alert, WW III has still been postponed, but it is surely not cancelled. “The justice of God grinds slow,” says the old proverb, “but it grinds exceeding small.” In other words, the Lord God may take his time – “He dealeth patiently for your sake” says St. Peter, “not willing that any should perish, but that all should return to penance” (II Pet.III,9) – yet God does not miss the least little detail. The year 2008 has seen only the stepping up of the offences against him – indifference, blasphemy, immorality, etc, etc. At a given moment he is going to say, “Enough!” In 2009?

Possibly. In any case it is worth recalling that in 1917, under Pope Benedict XV, Our Lady said at Fatima that if Russia were not consecrated to her Immaculate Heart in the way she would come to ask, then another more terrible war than WW I, then raging, would break out “under the reign of the next pope.” This would be Pius XI. Yet Pius XI died in February of 1939, whereas WW II was declared by England and France only in September of that year, under Pius XII. Had Our Lady made a mistake?

That is not likely. What happened was that in January of 1938, while Pius XI was still pope, exactly when the unusual red light foretold by Our Lady to be the warning sign of “the more terrible war” was seen all over Europe’s night-sky, Stalin was being told in Russia how, by making an alliance with Hitler (the subsequent Ribbentrop Pact), he would enable Hitler to launch an exhausting war to the West (declared ten days after the Pact!) which would open the way for Russia to take over all Europe from the East. In other words, WW II broke out in public under Pius XII only because it had been previously planned and decided in private under Pius XI. So Our Lady was not mistaken. And God knows how for well over a century his enemies have been planning WW III.

So as for the coming year, let souls still asleep in economics or politics wake up to how it is God’s justice that is closing in, and let souls awake but who may be discouraged or frightened by what they see around them, take heart! Shortly before dying of a horribly painful tuberculosis, St Therese of Lisieux said, “I am more convinced than ever that Providence watches over the least little detail of our lives.” How could it be otherwise?

Kyrie eleison.

John XXIII Missal

John XXIII Missal posted in Eleison Comments on October 25, 2008

The Society of St. Pius X gets attacked, but so long as it is attacked about equally from modernist left and from sedevacantizing right, it need not worry too much – it is probably doing something right. However, equality here is not to be measured by quantity alone – attacks from the right make up in venom for what they lack in numbers! Presently the SSPX is again being attacked for its use of the Tridentine Missal of 1962, as opposed to that of 1955, or 1945, or 1905 – you name it! Three comments:

Firstly, as Archbishop always used to explain, the “Missal of John XXIII,” so called because it was promulgated under his reign in 1962, was actually fully prepared before 1958, under Pope Pius XII, no darling of modernists. Moreover the Archbishop personally knew the Benedictine liturgist who did the preparing, and the Archbishop testified that the Benedictine he knew was no modernist either.

Secondly, as always needs to be repeated, if the Archbishop chose the 1962 Missal for his Society of St. Pius X, it was because on the one hand that Missal contains nothing against the Faith, whereas the Novus Ordo Missal of 1969 is heavily protestantized and the 1967 missal was already being de-catholicized; on the other hand the Pope is master of the liturgy in the Catholic Church, which is why the 1962 missal was the last fully orthodox rite of Mass to have been also lawfully promulgated by a reigning pope, and as such the Archbishop chose it, by a reasoned judgment and not by personal taste. Previous rites were superseded. Following rites were not Catholic.

Thirdly, the difference between, let us say, the “John XXIII” and the Pius X missals lies in the former’s omission of many a detail from the latter, but in essence the two missals are the same – otherwise how could it be so easy to celebrate a “John XXIII” Mass from a Pius X missal? Now in no situation can I overestimate the importance of detail without underestimating that of essentials. If then by my furious refusal of the “John XXIII Missal” I declare that in the details omitted by “John XXXII” the essence of the Tridentine Missal has been betrayed, I am in actions, not words, albeit unawares, so downgrading the essence of the Tridentine missal, for instance the unchanged Canon and Consecration, that by my exaggeration of the relative importance of details, I am, funnily enough, paving the way for souls to lose sight of the absolute importance of essentials, and I am helping souls to quit the Tridentine Mass altogether! It will not have been the first time that unbalanced exaggerations on the right have driven souls to the left!

Divine Lord, please bring soon your lawful Vicar back to his fully Catholic senses!

Kyrie eleison.