Protestantism

ROSARY POWER

ROSARY POWER on August 11, 2024

The humble Rosary, praised by every Saint –

A surer help to Heaven there simply ain’t.

When these “Comments” concluded last week (# 890, August 3) that praying the Rosary was the solution to the present madness of supposed Church laws being “imposed” upon us by modernist Rome, many readers may have wondered, what connection can there be between the two? How can all the Church’s problems be off-loaded onto the Rosary, so to speak?

Yet before Sister Lucy of Fatima was replaced in the 1960’s by a dummy that would be rather more docile to the modernists, she was able to say that in our times God has given to the Rosary a special power, such that it can solve all problems. This power is something that Catholics (and non-Catholics) need to believe in, for the world’s imminent trials. The key is that the world around us empties out God, leaving a shell of Him at most. The prayer of the Rosary restores the sense of God, little by little, in human souls. Let us begin with the man-made absence of God, and pass on to the power of the Rosary.

Mankind’s emptying out of God began in modern times at the latest in the 1400’s with the decline of Catholic faith in God and with the corresponding rise of esteem for man in the so-called Renaissance, or “Rebirth” of man. The underlying idea was that the Middle Ages had so overvalued God as to undervalue man. This idea paved the way for the explosion of humanism, or the super-valuing of man for man’s sake, by Martin Luther (1483–1548), in the form of Protestantism in the early 1500’s. This fragmentary revolt of subjective man against the unified objective order of the God of Catholicism has dominated the modernity of “Western civilisation” ever since. To Protestantism can be traced back all the most important errors of our times, for instance Naturalism, Rationalism and especially Liberalism in the 1800’s, then Ecumenism, Modernism and especially Communism in the 1900’s. The godlessness has come a long way.

For well over 400 years the Catholic Popes held up the Catholic Faith against Luther, so to speak, but with Vatican II (1962–1965) they gave way, and by 2024 the way was clear for worldwide Games to start with a mockery of the Last Supper. Such blasphemy is virtually the new religion of “Western civilisation.” Fully to grasp just how long-standing and deep is the alienation of modern man from the one true God, it is necessary to read a portrait of Luther like that of the French philosopher Jacques Maritain in his book, “Three Reformers.” Luther’s violent uprising against God was in the very depths of the human soul. And so how can anyone pretend that praying the simple and repetitive Rosary can be a cure?

Physically, the Rosary engages, regulates and tranquillises all the most mobile parts of a human being: the fingers with the beads, the mouth with uttering the prayers, the mind with contemplating the Mysteries, maybe also the feet with walking up and down. This captivating of our fickle frame frees the soul to commune with God, i.e. to pray. My mind goes wool-gathering? The beads bring me back. And spiritually, the Mysteries centre on Our Lord, framed symmetrically within Mysteries of Our Lady (the unsymmetrical “Mysteries of Light,” added by modernists, should be disregarded). She gives Him birth, He dies for our sins, She is rewarded with the Queenship of the Universe.

Now “Rome is not built in a day.” Not even the Rosary may re-open Heaven in a few weeks. But whoever perseveres with the Rosary has every chance of getting back onto the wavelength of Heaven, and steadily more off that of the world. Each Mystery has its own lesson of God, and all fifteen together take me through the entire cycle of the history of our Redemption. Here is why I was ever born, and nowhere else. Here, passed in review in less than an hour, is what makes sense of the whole of Creation. Our lives on earth are not just “nasty, poor, brutish and short,” in the notorious words of an English philosopher. To get us to Heaven, Our Lord alone suffered for us all more than all of us put together could ever suffer. I want to get to Heaven. I will be faithful to the special prayer God gave to His Church to get me there!

Kyrie eleison.

ROMANS X

ROMANS X on July 6, 2024

To Sunday Mass a Catholic must go!

“I just need chocolate in my own breast” – NO!

That the Israelites were, under the Old Testament, the race chosen from among all mankind to provide for the Son of God His means of living on earth a human life so that He would be able to suffer and die for all men as their Saviour and Messiah, and that the Israelites yet refused to recognise Him as their Messiah when finally He came among them, is a great mystery. One may well refer to human nature, to original sin, to human pride for an explanation, but the mystery remains. How could any race on earth have been better prepared over the two thousand years since Abraham for the coming of their Messiah, and yet have refused to recognise Him, turning themselves instead, down the two thousand years that have followed since, into His most skilful and motivated persecutors?

In Romans Chapter IX St Paul began his answer to the question by declaring that the People of God have not failed, only while under the Old Testament it consisted purely of Jews by being born in their race, under the New Testament it now consists of Jews or Gentiles by their faith in Jesus Christ. And if God freely chose to favour with that gift of faith Gentiles over Jews, that was His prerogative, and the Jews had, and still have, only themselves to blame for their refusal of that gift. That refusal serves to highlight His mercy to the Gentiles previously unable to belong to the People of God, now able by the Catholic Faith to belong to the Catholic Church, the true Israel of the spirit, whereas Jews refusing Jesus Christ and clinging to the Mosaic Law for salvation make up a false Israel of the flesh, unable to save their souls.

In Chapter X, St Paul similarly contrasts two “justices,” or states of salvation before God, also called “justifications” (v.1–4). Old Testament justification required that one should fulfil all the works demanded by the Mosaic Law, which was humanly impossible, says St Paul (v.5). On the contrary, New Testament justification requires no such demanding tasks beyond human strength, but merely that Jew or Gentile believe in Jesus inwardly and profess Him outwardly (v.6–13). Now it is true that to believe in Jesus Christ one must know about Him through a preacher (14–17). But not all men choose to believe, even if they know about Christ (16). Thus the Jews have both heard (18) and understood (19) the Gospel of Christ, but they have chosen (and freely choose down the centuries) not to believe in Christ (21).

In this Chapter X of Romans, these verses 6 to 13 are of special importance, because they were used by Luther as one of the key texts from Scripture to found Protestantism, and launch the whole modern world. In context, St Paul is contrasting the simplicity and ease of making a profession of Faith with the inhuman difficulty of fulfilling the works of the Mosaic Law (see Romans VII), but he is not here specifying what else is necessary for that profession of faith to enable a soul to enter the Catholic Church and be saved for eternity. For instance, a man may have a very forgetful son, so if the son is going to use the family car, his father may say to him, “The car needs petrol.” Now in order to run, the car needs also oil and water, but the father does not say to him, “The car needs petrol and oil and water,” because in context, that is not what the son needs to hear, although it is perfectly true and more complete.

But Luther uses the Scripture quotation as though to be saved one needs only an inward and outward profession of faith in Christ, as though the father above was saying “The car only needs petrol,” which is obviously false. To join the New Testament People of God, the Catholic Church, one must also be baptised – “He who believes and is baptised will be saved, but he who does not believe will be condemned” (Mk. XVI, 16). That is not what St Paul needed to add in Romans X, 8–13, but by pretending that St Paul was saying that Christian salvation needs only the subjective profession of faith, as though cars only need petrol, Luther was using the quote to cut out the entire Catholic Church! Subjectivism (man before God) has slowly but surely been taking over Catholicism ever since. Today it is “Wokeism.”

Kyrie eleison

Ruinations Causes

Ruinations Causes on March 13, 2021

Two weeks ago in these “Comments” a veteran Traditionalist made some interesting comments on the subject of infiltrators, conscious or unconscious, wrecking the Catholic Church from within. Readers may recall how he strove in vain to restore Catholic Tradition within the Conciliar structure. He found out that it could not be done. When further asked, “But how could the very churchmen commit the Church’s suicide? That makes no sense!,” he had further interesting things to say –

I think all of this comes down to a love of the Truth or a lack of Truth. In my opinion, those who truly love the Truth will find it – or struggle until they do find it, and then act upon it. I think the Faith collapsed in the 1960 and ‘70s because Catholics had become so weak. At the noon Mass at my parish in the 1950s, practically no one went to Communion. Priests come from the people, and the people had become soft. When the changes came, one half of those people gladly accepted those changes since it made living the “Faith” much easier, because non-Catholics were no longer hostile, one faith was as good as another, we could now all smile at each other, and did the clergy ever lead lead the way! Most of the other half either joined Protestant sects or simply gave up religion altogether. A few brave souls, a tiny minority who still possessed that love of the Faith, formed their own chapels. Their greatest inspiration was Archbishop Lefebvre, who alone had the faith to grasp that the hierarchy was in a hopeless state of apostasy.

God alone can judge men’s hearts, but in my opinion there is no excuse for those who abandoned the Faith. Perhaps nearly all who did so will pay with their souls. My generation is the worst because we were born and raised in the Faith and we abandoned it because we thought it would make life easier and far less of a challenge. The following generations, although a bit less guilty because they were denied their Catholic heritage, still had little excuse, as everyone has a duty to live the Truth. Where the faith is soft, Catholics are cowards, particularly when it comes to abortion. The bishops won’t even speak out against it, for fear of losing their tax status or of offending someone. Senator Timothy Kaine who lives in our city is as pro-abort and pro-perversion as one can be, while still claiming that the Catholic Faith is the most important thing in his life. He said it all when he said, “I am a Francis-type Catholic.” To my knowledge, the Bishop of Richmond has never challenged him on abortion, much less denied him what passes for Holy Communion, when he should have excommunicated him long ago.

The veteran above is probing the general collapse of Catholics after Vatican II. Another reader of these “Comments” seeks below the cause of the particular slide of the Society of St Pius X, which had nevertheless been raised by God to resist that general collapse –

I think it’s Pharisaism. It’s the same Pharisaism that killed Our Lord that is now killing the Church and the Society. True humility and charity have been lost. Pharisaism, as of the “whited sepulchres” in the Gospel, leads to spiritual blindness – “Make this people blind, so that seeing they may not see, hearing they may not hear” . . . . The Pharisees had a perfect knowledge of the Scriptures and the Law, yet still they killed their Messiah. Today they are killing the Church, and they simply cannot see it, they are blind . . .

In the Society I do believe there were at least subversive priests, and at the top some leaders suffering from complete blindness, but these would have gotten nowhere if the Society as a whole had not fallen into Pharisaism. Had they humbly followed their saintly Founder, they would not have thought they knew better than he did, nor would they have pushed aside Our Lady’s requests for Rosaries for the Consecration of Russia, thinking they knew better than God Himself. Such an insult could not go unpunished by Him. The punishment was the spiritual blindness as of the Pharisees, a dreadful punishment! God, have mercy upon us!

Kyrie eleison.

Speak Up!

Speak Up! on December 28, 2019

If there have been great minds from the past, it is because they will have been thinking on great matters, which means, explicitly or implicitly, matters of God, and if they were truly great minds, their thinking will have been not just destructive. One such mind was certainly England’s Shakespeare. As a Catholic he grappled with his country’s apostasy being fulfilled just as he was reaching his prime, around 1600. But that turning of England to Protestantism meant that if he did not want to be hanged, drawn and quartered, he had to disguise his Catholic message, as Clare Asquith proved in her book of 2005, “Shadowplay,” where she took English literature way above English “patriots” and the dwarves of literary criticism.

To take just one example, in the book’s Appendix on Shakespeare’s Sonnet 152, she shows how from start to finish, beneath the obvious application to a woman Shakespeare has known, there is a complete second meaning of far wider application to himself as a writer who has failed to warn his countrymen as he should have done. Here are the 14 lines of the sonnet together with their obvious meaning:—

In loving thee thou know’st I am forsworn
But thou art twice forsworn to me love swearing,
In act thy bed-vow broke and new faith torn,
In vowing new hate after new love bearing.
But why of two oaths’ breach do I accuse thee,
When I break twenty? I am perjured most,
For all my vows are oaths but to misuse thee,
And all my honest faith in thee is lost;
For I have sworn deep oaths of thy deep kindness,
Oaths of thy love, thy truth, thy constancy,
And, to enlighten thee, gave eyes to blindness,
Or made them swear against the thing they see.
    For I have sworn thee fair: more perjured eye,
    To swear against the truth so foul a lie.

You know I break a promise by loving you, but by
swearing you love me, you break two promises: you
forsook your husband’s bed, then returned to him
(“new faith,” “new love”) only to forsake him again.
But why do I accuse you of breaking two oaths when
I break twenty oaths? It is I the greater perjurer, for
To your own harm I have sworn oath upon oath about
your goodness when I well knew you were not good.
Thus I have been swearing that you are very kind,
very loving, very truthful, very constant, and to
put you in a good light, I have made me see what I
Did not see, or, have sworn I saw not what eye saw.
    For I have sworn you were good. What terrible
    Perjury on my part, when that is so untrue!

Interestingly, the sonnet’s text makes more sense in its hidden meaning, referring to faithless England, than in its apparent meaning, referring to Shakespeare’s unfaithful mistress. Thus “Merrie Englande” had been a faithful wife of the Catholic Church for 900 years. By Henry VIII’s Act of Supremacy (1534), (“In Act”) England broke its marriage (“bed-vow”) with the Catholic Church and took Protestantism as its lover. Then it remarried the Catholic Church under Mary Tudor (1553, “new faith,” “new love”), only to fall back into adultery with Protestantism under Elizabeth I (1558, “new faith torn,” “new hate” of the Catholic Church). But Shakespeare (1564–1616) blames himself for much worse infidelity, because down these years he has repeatedly glorified (“to enlighten thee”) England with its unfaithful Tudor rulers, for instance in his History Plays, glorified to England’s harm (“to misuse thee”), because as a Catholic he knew full well that Protestantism would be the ruin of “Merrie Englande.” Sure enough!

And today? The pattern repeats itself: for over 1900 years Catholics were faithfully married to the true Church, but with Vatican II (1962–1965) the mass of them followed bad leaders into more or less of adultery with the modern world (“bed-vow broke”). Then Archbishop Lefebvre (1905–1991) led many back to the truly Catholic Church (“new faith,” “new love,” or renewal of the old faith and the old love), only to see his successors at the head of the Society of St Pius X which he founded in 1970 fall back into an adulterous longing for a reunion with Conciliar Rome, by a “new hate” for the pre-Conciliar truth.

Conclusion? Any Shakespeares amongst us, or any Catholics, must speak up, that Pachamama Rome is, as such, nothing other than an abomination, to be shunned.

Kyrie eleison.

Academia Diagnosed

Academia Diagnosed on July 23, 2016

When your Excellency asked me as a student of history whether I agreed with you that the agnostic phenomenism condemned in Pascendi is the greatest single clue-in to the modern scene, I briefly concurred. Then I asked myself how men, especially learned men, could ever take seriously such nonsense as the mind knowing nothing beyond the phenomena, or appearances. And I recalled how, after sitting in University classrooms for the past 3 1/2 years, and listening carefully to some brilliant professors who seem to have a sense of reality, and to many who do not, I myself had begun to wonder why some have a great sense of reason and others with the same or similar Doctorate Degrees have adopted such wild and unreasonable ideas. Let me give you the answer of this long-time observer of the academic scene . . . .

It dawned on me after a little thought that the professors who were the most logical were Catholics, because they may be conservatives at best, but they have a realistic view of the world. The ideas and concepts they teach are, for the most part, sensible. On the other hand, the instructions of a majority of professors are muddled, confusing, and nonsensical. They profess bizarre and outlandish ideas and back them up with half-truths. They adopt almost any trendy notion, such as Global Warming or Climate Change ( the new “Evolution”), and present it as truth. Their reasoning behind these notions is pure nonsense and cannot stand up to close scrutiny. I began to wonder, how can such learned men be so ignorant? After much thought I came up with what I am sure is the true answer.

Since the professors who are more sensible are men at least striving to be Catholic, it would stand to reason that they possess something that the heathens do not. Before the revolt by Martin Luther, most scholars or learned men were Catholics who used their reason and possessed common sense, so that most taught and believed the same truth. When Luther ravaged the Church, he also ravaged many learned clerics and university professors. In particular, his new religion eliminated the Sacrament of Confirmation by which we know that Catholics receive the seven Gifts of the Holy Ghost, four of which are for the mind: Knowledge, Wisdom, Understanding, and Counsel. All four are now lacking to today’s agnostic professors. These may be well-educated, learned people, but they cannot use their learning in a reasonable way, or apply it to reality. As Pius X says, they develop fantasies and present them as truths, and furthermore convince themselves that they are brilliant, when in fact they are wallowing in ignorance. They are the 2+2=5 cult! And proud of it.

On this theory, today’s destruction of academia would go back to Luther’s abandoning of the Sacrament of Confirmation, and to Europe’s universities becoming less and less Catholic. Eventually thousands of professors were unleashed on the world of academia who were educated beyond their ability to reason. Lacking Wisdom, Understanding, Knowledge, and Counsel in their highest sense as Gifts from God, they developed in universities the panoply of today’s errors, or “isms.” For instance, to claim that Global Warming will destroy man and the world is sheer nonsense, yet it is taught and believed in modern Universities, as if it were 2+2 = 4. And these poisonous ideas are gobbled up by the wide-eyed youth in Universities, like biscuits at High Tea, especially the idea that Truth is merely what each of us believes it to be, and Reason be damned.

So it would follow that when Vatican II chose to follow in Luther’s footsteps by abandoning Tradition and by so “renewing” the sacrament of Confirmation as to threaten its validity, Catholics too imperilled the Gifts of the Holy Ghost, and lost correspondingly the ability to reason, because Newchurch Confirmation is now meant simply to make them “better Christians.”

Kyrie eleison.

Dickens Conference

Dickens Conference on August 16, 2014

The Dickens Conference held two weeks ago at Queen of Martyrs House in Broadstairs, England, went very well, within its modest limits. On the Saturday there was only a little rain, the Sunday was all sunshine, and nearly 30 participants, mostly from England but also from Denmark, France and the USA, much enjoyed the house, one another’s Catholic company, and the three lectures of Dr David White on three novels of Charles Dickens (1812–1870), England’s best loved writer after William Shakespeare.

“Within its modest limits” because outside of the devoutly attended Masses on the Saturday and Sunday, there was little outwardly supernatural about the Conference. Let us say that it was a session of sanity rather than sanctity, but we notice immediately that at least in English the word “sanity” makes up three quarters of the word “sanctity.” Grace builds on nature, and it can hardly build on the insanity and corruption of nature to which the world around us is giving itself over, day by day. Sanity is therefore more important than ever, even for supernatural purposes. If the “Resistance” is presently making so little apparent headway, is it not because there is just not enough sanity still around to recognize and cast out the mind-rot, and the rot of true obedience and sanctity?

In Dr White’s first lecture he spoke of David Copperfield, Dickens’ own favourite amongst his many novels, and specially linked to Broadstairs. This is because on Dickens’ many visits for work or holidays to his beloved seaside town, he came to know an eccentric old lady who lived in a small house still existing on the sea-front. She so impressed him that he built her into David Copperfield as Betsy Trotwood, an eccentric old lady who takes in the orphaned hero of the novel and protects him until he finds his way in life. In her mouth Dickens puts his own hatred of Puritanism and Calvinism, said Dr White. At least once in his life Dickens was told that Catholicism is the one true religion, but he never became a Catholic. However, he had a supreme respect for the Gospel of Christ, and genuinely good-hearted characters tumble over one another in the pages of his novels.

On Saturday afternoon there followed a visit to the sea-front house of “Betsy Trotwood,” now a Dickens Museum; full of Dickensian memorabilia and with a Dickensian curator. Then the second conference was on Bleak House, first novel of Dickens’ second period, when England was growing darker. Bleak House attacks lawyers and the law in particular, but in general, said Dr White, it attacks a System more and more in control of society, demoralizing and crushing the innocent sheep. Politics are becoming meaningless and the aristocracy is losing touch with reality, but an inhuman System is driving forward until it will finally collapse under its faksehood, in the manner of Vatican II, added Dr White.

The third lecture presented on Sunday morning Hard Times, another of the darker novels, about the total lack of real education, 150 years ago! Without education of the heart, Dickens knew that human beings will be cold and inhuman. Dr White drew on his decades of teaching in the USA Naval Academy to back up Dickens’ portrait of the enormous stupidity of the social robots engineered by an “education” spurning history, the arts, music, literature and especially poetry. The result, he said, is the boundless boredom of youngsters today, a reflection of pure nihilism.

However, Conference participants went home feeling neither bored nor nihilistic, but much refreshed. Deo Gratias.

Kyrie eleison.