Tag: Rome

Archbishop’s Sense – II

Archbishop’s Sense – II posted in Eleison Comments on December 27, 2014

Twelve weeks ago (Oct. 5) “Eleison Comments” presented a first series of extracts from the last public interview of Archbishop Lefebvre, given to Fideliter magazine in early 1991. Here follows a second and last series of extracts, slightly edited but only for the sake of brevity and clarity:—

Q: What conclusions can we draw from the Society of St Pius X after 20 years of its existence?

A: The Good Lord wanted Catholic Tradition. I am deeply convinced that the Society is the means that God wanted to keep and maintain the Faith, the truth of the Church. We must continue faithfully to keep the treasures of the Church, hoping that one day they may resume the place which they should never have lost in Rome.

Q: You often say that, more than the liturgy, it is now the Faith which opposes us to modern Rome.

A: Certainly the question of the liturgy and the sacraments is very important, but the most important is the question of the Faith. This is not a question for us. We have the Faith of all time, of the Council of Trent, of the Catechism of St. Pius X, of all the Councils and all the Popes before Vatican II. For years they have tried in Rome to show that everything in the Council was fully consistent with this Tradition. Now they are showing their true colours by saying there is no longer any Tradition or Deposit to be transmitted. Tradition in the Church is whatever the Pope is saying today. You must submit to what the Pope and the bishops say today. Here is their famous ‘Living Tradition,’ which was the only basis for our condemnation in 1988.

Now they have given up trying to prove that what they say is consistent with what Pius IX wrote or with what the Council of Trent promulgated. No, all of that is over; it’s outdated, as Cardinal Ratzinger said. It is clear, and they might have said so earlier. There was no point in our talking, in our discussing with them. Now we suffer from the tyranny of authority, because there are no longer any rules from the past.

They are showing more and more that we are right. We are dealing with people who have a different philosophy from ours, a different way of seeing, who are influenced by all modern subjectivist philosophers. For them there is no fixed truth, there is no dogma. Everything is evolving. This is really the Masonic destruction of the Faith. Fortunately, we have Tradition to lean on!

Q: You have emphasized that you are sure that the Society is blessed by God, because at several points it could have disappeared.

A: Indeed. It has kept coming under very difficult attacks. That is very painful, but we must nonetheless believe that the line of Faith and Tradition that we are following, is imperishable, because God cannot allow his Church to perish.

Q; What can you say to those of the faithful who still hope in the possibility of an agreement with Rome?

A: Our true faithful, those who have understood the problem and who have precisely helped us to continue along the straight and firm path of Tradition and the Faith, told me that the approaches I was making towards Rome were dangerous and that I was wasting my time. Yet I hoped until the last minute that in Rome we would witness a little bit of loyalty, so I cannot be blamed for not having done the maximum. So now too, to those who say to me, “You’ve got to reach an agreement with Rome,” I think I can say that I then went even further than I should have.

Kyrie eleison.

Archbishop’s Sense – I

Archbishop’s Sense – I posted in Eleison Comments on October 4, 2014

In last month’s issue of The Recusant (www.The Recusant.com) is a translation into English of Archbishop Lefebvre’s last interview, published in French ( Fideliter #79) shortly before his death in March of 1991. He is always refreshing to read. He is clear, because he thinks from basic Catholic principles. He is transparent, because he has nothing to hide. He is unambiguous, because he is not trying to compromise Our Lord’s Church with Satan’s Vatican II. But notice how the interviewer’s questions indicate that the readership of Fideliter was naturally inclining to take the direction which the Society of St Pius X would begin to take a few years after the Archbishop’s death. Here is a selection of the questions and answers, somewhat abbreviated:—

Q: Why can you not make one last approach to Rome? We hear the Pope is “ready to receive you.” A: That is absolutely impossible, because the principles which now guide the Conciliar church are more and more openly contrary to Catholic doctrine. For instance Cardinal Ratzinger recently said that the Popes’ great anti-modernist documents of the 19 th and 20 th centuries rendered a great service in their day, but are now outdated. And John-Paul II is more ecumenical than ever (1990). “It is absolutely inconceivable that we can agree to work with such a hierarchy.”

Q; Has the situation in Rome deteriorated even since the negotiations of 1988?

A: Oh yes! “We will have to wait some time before considering the prospect of making an agreement. For my part I believe that God alone can save the situation, as humanly we see no possibility of Rome straightening things out.”

Q: But there are Traditionalists who have made an agreement with Rome while conceding nothing. A: That is false. They have given up their ability to oppose Rome. They must remain silent, given the favours they have been granted. Then they begin to slide ever so slowly, until they end up admitting the errors of Vatican II. “It’s a very dangerous situation.” Such concessions by Rome are meant only to get Traditionalists to break with the SSPX and submit to Rome.

Q: You say that such Traditionalists have “betrayed.” Isn’t that a bit harsh?

A: Not at all! For instance Dom Gérard made use of me, of the SSPX and its chapels and benefactors, and now they suddenly abandon us and join with the destroyers of the Faith. They have abandoned the fight for the Faith. They can no longer attack Rome. They have understood nothing of the doctrinal question. It is awful to think of the youngsters who joined them for the sake of Tradition and are now following them to Conciliar Rome.

Q: Is there a danger in remaining friends with Traditionalists who have gone over to Rome, and in attending their Masses?

A: Yes, because at Mass there is not only the Mass but there is also the sermon, the atmosphere, the surroundings, the conversations before and after Mass, and so on. All of these things make you little by little change your ideas. There is a climate of ambiguity. One is in an atmosphere submissive to the Vatican, subject ultimately to the Council, so one ends up by becoming ecumenical.

Q; John-Paul II is very popular. He wants to unite all Christians.

A: But in what unity? No longer in the Faith which a soul must accept, and which calls for conversion. The Church has been distorted, from being a hierarchical society into being a “communion.” Communion in what? Not in the Faith. No wonder one hears that Catholics are leaving the Faith in droves. (to be continued)

Kyrie eleison.

“Resistance” Failing?

“Resistance” Failing? posted in Eleison Comments on August 23, 2014

Some readers of these Comments no doubt objected to the reference made last week (EC 370) to the “Resistance” presently making “little apparent headway.” They might have preferred a valiant call to arms. But we must stay real. For instance, when the Traditional diocese of Campos in Brazil fell back into the arms of Newrome back in 2001, did not several of us say that out of some 25 priests formed in Bishop de Castro Mayer’s school, at least a few would break ranks? Yet not one of them has gone independent since then to continue defending Tradition as Campos had always defended it, and so all of them are more or less on the neo-modernist slide. However, if we do stay real, there is not nothing to be said.

First of all, God is God, and he is conducting this crisis his way and not ours. “My thoughts are not your thoughts, your ways are not my ways, says the Lord” (Is. LV, 8). We dream of the clear-sighted priests and laity banding together to stand up to his enemies, but God does not need anybody’s “Resistance” to look after his sheep or save his Church. Forty years ago when Archbishop Lefebvre hoped for and looked for a handful of fellow-bishops to stand beside him in public and throw up a real road-block in the way of the Conciliar steam-roller, surely he might have found them, but he never did. In fact when God intervenes to save the situation, as he certainly will, it will be obvious that the rescue was his doing, through his Mother.

Secondly, more than five centuries of rampant humanism have made man so ignorant of God, the Lord God of Hosts, that mankind has to be taught a lesson which it will not learn except the hard way. The ninth of St Ignatius’ 14 Rules for the Discernment of Spirits (first week) gives three main reasons for a soul’s spiritual desolation, which can be applied to the Church’s present desolation:‍—

1. God punishes us for our spiritual lukewarmness and negligence. God alone knows today just what a worldwide chastisement is deserved by our worldwide apostasy and plunge into materialism and hedonism.

2. God puts us to the trial to show us what is really inside us, and how we depend on him. Does not modern man seriously think that he can do a better job of running the universe than Almighty God? And might it be that the truth will not sink in until all of his own little efforts have failed?

3. God humbles us with desolation to cut short our pride and vainglory. Coming from the chief ministers of the one true religion of the one true God, was not Vatican II an unprecedented outburst of human vainglory, preferring man’s modern world to God’s unchanging Church? And the little Society of St Pius X thought that it could save the Church? Unless the “Resistance” remains duly modest in its claims and ambitions, it is doomed in advance.

Then what should those ambitions be? First and foremost, to keep the Faith, without which it is impossible to please God (Heb. XI, 6), and which is expressed in doctrine, in the Catholic Creed. Secondly, to give witness to that Faith, especially by example, if necessary unto martyrdom (“martyr” is the Greek word for “witness”). So howsoever the “Resistance” is or is not organized, it must devote its resources, however meagre, to whatever will help souls to keep the Faith. Then, since its stand for the Truth is bound to be recognizable as such, merely by existing it will not be failing, because it will be giving witness.

Kyrie eleison.

GREC – IV

GREC – IV posted in Eleison Comments on April 27, 2013

A lady having read the first “Eleison Comments” on GREC (EC 294, March 2) wrote to complain that I misrepresented GREC, the Parisian group of Catholics founded in the late 1990’s to bring together Traditionalists and mainstream Catholics so that they could think and talk peacefully with one another for the good of Mother Church. I am happy to correct errors of fact which she pointed out. I have no problem admitting personal faults of mine which she highlighted. However on one major point I must disagree with her.

As for the errors of fact, Mr Gilbert Pérol was French Ambassador to the Italian government, and not to the Vatican. Also he was not a “lay collaborator,” but a personal friend of Fr Michel Lelong, a White Father. Also GREC was launched not “in the salons of Paris,” but in the flat of the Ambassador’s widow, Mrs. Huguette Pérol, who, I was told, takes full responsibility for having founded GREC, purely to help the Church, and with the help of people “competent and concerned to be faithful to the Gospel and to Tradition.”

As for my faults, she wrote that I was “full of myself” and “ignorant,” that I lacked modesty and diplomacy, that I showed insufficient respect for the dead, and that I wrote with a sarcastic tone befitting neither an educated person nor a priest. Madam, how happy I would be if these were the worst faults for which I shall have to answer before God. Do pray for my particular judgment.

However, as to the sarcasm, let me plead that if I mocked the nostalgia of Catholics today for the Catholicism of the 1950’s, I was thinking not of Ambassador Pérol in person, but of the multitudes of present-day Catholics, who, not realizing why God allowed Vatican II to split the mainstream Church from Catholic Tradition in the first place, wish to return to that sentimentalized faith of the previous decade which led directly to Vatican II! Madam, the crucial point has nothing to do with subjective persons, it has everything to do with objective doctrine.

That is why I must disagree with you as to the competence of the people helping Mrs Pérol to found GREC. That a professional diplomat like Ambassador Pérol should have resorted to diplomacy to solve major problems of doctrine is misguided, but understandable. That a Conciliar priest like Fr Lelong should have encouraged such a diplomatic undertaking is graver, but still understandable, given how Vatican II undermined all doctrine by officialising subjectivism within the Church. What is much less easy to accept is the “competence and concern for the Gospel and Tradition” on the part of priests who were trained under Archbishop Lefebvre to understand the doctrinal disaster of Vatican II. Such priests should never have encouraged, let alone taken any active part in, an essentially diplomatic effort to solve an essentially doctrinal disaster, however well-intentioned that effort may have been.

And yet, even in their case the French proverb to some extent applies: “To understand everything means to forgive everything.” The Archbishop was of an earlier and saner generation. They are all children of the world shattered by two World Wars. All credit to them for resorting to his person for their priestly formation, and while he lived he raised us all up. But they never truly absorbed his doctrine, and so once he was dead they began within a few years to fall back. But he was right, and they, and GREC – forgive me, gracious lady – are wrong. Please God they may come right.

Kyrie eleison.

Resistance Rising

Resistance Rising posted in Eleison Comments on April 20, 2013

Another three-week journey on the western side of the Atlantic Ocean has just given me to see that the resistance to the collapse of the Society of St Pius X into the embrace of apostate Rome is rising, more in quality than in quantity (but Catholic quantity follows Catholic quality, and not the other way round). Traditionalists have been deliberately kept in the dark as to what is going on between the Society and Rome, but as they find out just how the true Catholic religion is being endangered, so a number of good men are reacting with seriousness and resolution.

I visited first of all Fr Jahir’s community of some dozen religious in northern Brazil, behind the city of Salvador where Fr Jahir was a parish priest for many years. Having fled the Newchurch, he sees the situation of the Newsociety very clearly. He has founded his own community in the true Faith, and it is easy to imagine several of his men becoming in a few years’ time valiant priests who will hold that Faith. I gave to one of them Tonsure and the first two Minor Orders, and then headed south to visit another Brazilian priest becoming famous for his staunch adherence to Tradition, as Archbishop Lefebvre understood it.

The Benedictine Dom Thomas is Prior of the Monastery in the mountains near Nova Friburgo behind Rio de Janeiro. It was founded in the 1980’s by Dom Gérard as an offshoot from the Traditional Benedictine Monastery which Dom Gérard had also founded in France in the 1970’s, with the encouragement and support of Archbishop Lefebvre. However, when the Archbishop consecrated bishops in 1988, Dom Gérard broke with him, took his monastery into the Newchurch, and crossed the ocean to do the same with the Brazilian monastery.

Here he ran into the resistance of Dom Thomas, who was still only a young monk, but who before becoming a monk had learned in depth from a famous Brazilian lay Catholic, Gustavo Corçâo, the wrongness of the Newchurch. With help from good laymen and with the support of Archbishop Lefebvre, Dom Thomas stood up to Dom Gérard and saved the Monastery for Tradition. With such a clash behind him it is not surprising that Dom Thomas also sees very clearly the situation both of the Newchurch and of the Newsociety. In a tent set up outside the small Monastery church for the extra visitors to the Holy Week ceremonies, we celebrated with few priests but with all the essentials the Maundy Thursday Consecration of Holy Oils. These the Monastery can now supply for this year to priests in particular whose supply could be cut off by the Newsociety.

Then I flew north to visit three more centres of the Resistance being launched in the USA by the brave Frs Joseph Pfeiffer and David Hewko. Near Connecticut, in New Jersey and in Minnesota I was able to give Confirmations and conferences to Catholics suspicious of what is going on in the Newsociety. They had good questions, deserving of truthful answers.

Good news for benefactors in Euroland: the St Marcel Initiative has at last a RIB and an IBAN, based in France, to facilitate donations in euros to the St Marcel Initiative. To make a bank transfer from inside France use the following RIB: [write to letters@eleisoncomments.com for the number]; from outside France use the following IBAN: [write to letters@eleisoncomments.com for the number]. The St Marcel Initiative has just been able to give a little serious aid, much needed, to Dom Thomas’ Monastery. He thanks all of you who have contributed to the Initiative.

Kyrie eleison.

Doctrinal Declaration – II

Doctrinal Declaration – II posted in Eleison Comments on April 13, 2013

The Doctrinal Declaration of April 15 of last year, drawn up by the Superior General (SG) of the Society of St Pius X as a basis for the Society’s reintegration into the mainstream Church, has emerged nearly one year later into public view. It was designed by the SG to please both the Conciliar Romans and Traditionalists (“It can be read with dark or rose-coloured glasses,” he said in public). It did please the Romans who declared that it represented an “advance” in their direction. It did not please Traditionalists who saw in it (what they knew of it) such ambiguity as to represent a betrayal of Archbishop Lefebvre’s stand for the Catholic Faith, to the point that they considered that the Romans need only have accepted it to destroy his Society.

In fact when the SG met the Romans on June 11 in Rome to receive their decision, he fully expected they would accept it. Numerous observers speculate that if they did not accept it, it was only because the intervening publication of the April 7 Letter of the Three Bishops to the SG warned the Romans that he would not be able to bring the whole Society with him into the bosom of their Conciliar Rome, as he may have given them to understand he would do, and as they wanted him to do. They did and do not want another split to start Tradition all over again.

Be all that as it may, space remains here for nothing but one major argument that the proposal of the Doctrinal Declaration, had it been accepted by Rome, would have destroyed the SSPX. Archbishop Lefebvre declared, and proved, that Vatican II was a break or rupture with previous Church teaching. On that premise arose, and rests, the Traditional Catholic movement. So, confronted by the on-going resistance of that movement to his beloved Vatican II, Benedict XVI proclaimed at the outset of his pontificate in 2005 the “hermeneutic of continuity,” whereby the Council (objectively) contradicting Tradition was to be (subjectively) so interpreted as not to contradict it. Thus there would be no break or rupture between it and Catholic Tradition!

Now see the seventh paragraph (III, 5) of the Doctrinal Declaration. It declares that Vatican II statements difficult to reconcile with all previous Church teaching, (1) “must be understood in the light of Tradition entire and uninterrupted, in line with the truths taught by the Church’s preceding Magisterium, (2) not accepting any interpretation of those statements which can lead Catholic doctrine to be exposed in opposition or rupture with Tradition and that Magisterium.”

The first part here (1) is perfectly true, so long as it means that any Conciliar novelty “difficult to reconcile” will be flatly rejected if it objectively contradicts previous Church teaching. But (1) is directly contradicted by (2) when (2) says that no Conciliar novelty may be “interpreted” as being in rupture with Tradition. It is as though one said that all football teams must wear blue shirts, but football team shirts of any other colour are all to be interpreted as being nothing other than blue! What nonsense! But it is pure “hermeneutic of continuity.”

Now, do the soldiers holding the last fortress of the Faith that is organised worldwide realize what their Commander is thinking? Do they realize that his solemn declaration of SSPX doctrine shows him to be thinking like an enemy leader? Are they happy that they are being led to think like the enemies of the Faith? All ideas must be Catholic, while non-Catholic ideas will be “interpreted” as Catholic. Wake up, comrades! Enemy thinking is in Headquarters.

Kyrie eleison.