Seven Ages of the Church

CONTROLLED CHAOS

CONTROLLED CHAOS on November 23, 2024

God then withdrew, a punishment quite just,

Yet still men are intent on going bust!

If there is one word with which to describe the state of the Catholic Church today, surely that word is “chaos.” The normal structure of the Church is that of a pyramid, with God’s own Authority descending through Pope, cardinals, bishops and priests, all raised up by God to look after His sheep, or laity, at ground level. This hierarchy consists of fallible men, from top to bottom, so that at all levels mistakes can be made. However, if in normal circumstances a Superior in the hierarchy misbehaves, he usually has a Superior of his own to whom I can appeal against his misbehaviour, because any given Superior in the Church will normally make decisions in accordance with Canon Law, and, with a minimum of good will, in accordance with truth and justice. And so, in normal circumstances, from lower down I can appeal all the way up to Rome.

However, what happens when the fallible human being at the top of this pyramid loses his sense of truth and justice, and even his good will? There can only be chaos in the Church from top to bottom, because the Catholic Church was designed by God to be a monarchy in which there is His own divine Authority to protect the great truths of salvation, so that He can populate His Heaven with souls to share His bliss. That Authority is recognised and exercised at all levels of the hierarchy, but supremely by the Pope, who has no human Superior above him, but only God. It follows that if the Pope, or the man in white who is universally accepted as Pope, seems to lose all sense of Truth for which alone he receives his awesome Authority over the Church, dwarfing all merely human authorities, then the Church is in chaos, from top to bottom.

In this respect, the Catholic Church resembles a string doll consisting of multiple pieces of coloured wood, upheld on strings, upheld in turn by the puppeteer above. If for one moment the puppeteer lets go of the strings, the entire doll collapses into a jumbled heap of meaningless pieces of wood. If for one moment Almighty God lets go of His Pope and Cardinals in Rome, His bishops and priests and laity turn worldwide into a jumbled heap of Catholics, disunited and divided among themselves, many of them striving to recreate in their own little corner a semblance of that divine Authority which can come from God alone. What less can they do? Wise Catholics recognise their basic impotency, unless and until God restores a Catholic Pope. Meanwhile Catholics must do what they can to rebuild Catholic corners, and help all other Catholics to do the same, just so long as they have the Catholic Faith (and here let nobody pretend to be infallible!).

And the Pope, or seeming Pope? The correct perspective on the history of mankind is that, because of original sin, each of its Seven Ages is launched by a key figure, followed by a period of decadence until the next key figure is appointed by God to raise mankind up again, until the Antichrist will bring to an end the Seventh Age of the World which was introduced by God Himself with His Incarnation, some 2000 years ago.

This Seventh Age has been by far the longest, because God’s own Incarnation has been the turning-point of human history, the climax of all Seven Ages, because the Incarnation has continued ever since through the Catholic Church, Jesus continuing to live and save souls for eternity among all races and nations.

But God, to honour man, chose to entrust His Church not to angels but to fallible men, without turning them into robots by taking away their free-will. This means that He laid Himself open to the possibility that the human ministers of His Church would eventually so misuse their God-given free-will as to destroy His Church. This is what virtually happened at Vatican II (1962–1965). In 1968, God gave mankind a second chance, when He guided Pope Paul VI to condemn artificial means of birth control in the Encyclical Humanae Vitae. But all mankind, not just the Catholics, rose up in revolt, to condemn the old man dressed in white, living in Rome, supposed to know nothing about marriage.

Almighty God then said, so to speak, “Alright. Have it your own way. You do not want My Church. Have your own, and see how you like it. Good-bye for now. Get back in touch as soon as you want My Church back. Meanwhile, I will keep it going, in distress. I will be waiting to hear from you. I love you still.

Kyrie eleison.

END-TIMES, END-WORLD

END-TIMES, END-WORLD on June 1, 2024

For God’s own view of these two Testaments,

In Romans read how Paul saw the events.

It belongs to the Wisdom of God to leave us human beings ignorant of His exact calendar or programme for the events leading up to the end of the world, but in the most immediate of those events all of us are involved, and it is not forbidden to speculate about them. On the contrary, for the saving of my soul it may be prudent to think about what Almighty God has in mind, in order to avoid certain major errors.

For instance, God may guide us human beings to do what He wants, but He will never take away our free-will for us to do it, and that is why a Golden Age of one thousand years between now and the end of the world is impossible – for it to last, He would have to be constantly nullifying men’s choices. Luther (1483–1546) knew that he was destroying Christendom. It took him 450 years until Vatican II, so to speak (1517–1965), but by the end of that time men had grown steadily more corrupt. There may now be a short Golden Age such as the Triumph of Our Lady’s Immaculate Heart, but it cannot last long. At La Salette in 1846 Our Lady said that just 25 years of good harvests would see sin coming back, i.e. the close of the Golden Age and the beginning of the descent to the Antichrist. Millennarism, a supposed 1000-year Golden Age before the end of the world, is an error condemned by the Church.

Another major error to be avoided is that the Church will come to its end on earth in a blaze of human glory. A single quotation of Our Lord Himself puts paid to that illusion – Lk. XVIII, 8: “When the Son of man comes, will He find faith on earth?” In other words, at world’s end the Church will almost have disappeared from sight, presumably as a result of its persecution by the Antichrist, the most ferocious persecution of all its history. That world which has the Devil for its ruler (Jn. XIV, 29) will see in that persecution a tremendous defeat for the Church, but God will see in it the last drops of sanctity being squeezed from it in the form of some of the greatest martyrs and saints in all of its history, in other words one of its greatest victories. It should be no surprise if the Church’s end most resembles Our Lord’s Cross.

The Church’s universal victory follows immediately in the General, or universal, Judgment.

Another error surely to be avoided is to confuse the end of “times” (see Lk. XXI, 24) with the end of the world. In terms of the Venerable Holzhauser’s commentary on Chapters 2 and 3 of the Book of Revelation, where he divides Church history into Seven Ages, the “end times,” or end of the times for the Gentiles to be entering God’s Church, to replace all the former Chosen Race choosing no longer to be God’s own people (Mt. XXVII, 25), comes at the end of the Fifth Age. On the contrary, world’s end comes at the end of the Seventh Age. For indeed the former Chosen Race will convert back to Our Lord, their own Messiah, at world’s end (Rom. XI, 26), but until then Jewish converts will still be the exception rather than the rule, in other words they will be too few for God’s purpose of populating His Heaven. Hence God’s whole plan for salvation by the two Testaments – see Romans, Chapters IX, X, XI.

Here is why the New Testament had to replace the Old; why the richly natured Chosen Race by race had to give way to the supernaturally gifted Chosen Race by faith; why the Jews have had for so long to give way to the Gentiles; and why they have made war upon them ever since (I Thess. II, 14–16) – especially on the Palestinians. But Catholics must never forget how much we owe to God’s own heroes of old – of the Old Testament. Without them we would have had no Incarnation of Jesus.

Kyrie eleison.

Church’s Entombment – I

Church’s Entombment – I on April 11, 2020

If Our Lady of La Salette and the Venerable Bartholomew Holzhauser are to be believed, then what we are living through today is only the end of the Fifth Age of the world, it is not yet the end of the Seventh and last Age of the world. The Fifth Age is set fair to end in a great Chastisement, prelude to the brief Sixth Age which will be the greatest and most glorious triumph of the Church in all its history, prelude in its turn to the Seventh Age which will see the rise of the Antichrist, the greatest persecution of all Church history and the closing down of the world as we know it, to be mysteriously replaced by “new heavens and a new earth” (II Pet. III, 13). If this is what St Peter, the Ven. Holzhauser and Our Lady of La Salette meant, then certainly the Church will rise again from its present tomb well before it takes off at world’s end for Heaven. The question is, how will it survive in, and get out of, its present tomb?

The essential point to grasp is that the Church belongs to God, that the Church is directed by the Spirit of God, and that the action of this Holy Spirit is comparable to that of the wind which blows where it wills, we know it is there because we can hear it, but we know not where it comes from nor where it goes (John III, 8). Therefore God’s thoughts are going to be way above our thoughts as men, and we need to get used to, for instance, the first being last and the last being first (Mt. XX, 16). Thus from 1970 when the Society of St Pius X was founded, until 2012 when its leaders set conditions for the Society to go back under the Conciliar Romans, the Society was a front-runner in the defence of the Faith, but ever since 2012 it has been officially like a lap-dog of the Romans. The System had swallowed up the Society, and from being one of the first, it began turning into one of the last, because the Devil will not let it stop halfway down.

At this point many Catholics of Tradition wished with all their heart that a post-Society would arise to take the Society’s place. But a post-Society may well not have been the will of God. The 2010’s were no longer the 1970’s or 1980’s when Archbishop Lefebvre had been able to build the worldwide Society. The disintegration of hearts and minds was much further advanced than in the 1970’s, and since 2012 if anything it is speeding up. See how little common sense men have today, less and less all the time. Of course the grace of God can make integral Catholics out of disintegrated human beings, but God will rarely force men’s free-will, and so if men insist on turning their insides into the likes of a muddy marsh, the helicopter of God’s supernatural grace may not even try to land, for fear of disappearing in the mud.

Certainly God will maintain the Church through the 2020’s. By means of a “Resistance” movement with neither structure nor organisation, and with endemic strife between the members resisting one another? If all resistants share at least the same true Faith, their movement may yet be a front-runner in the defence of the Faith, and their lack of structure may even be an advantage if it means that there is no one head whose capture is all too liable to mean the fall of the whole structure, because modern man knows not how to obey or to disobey. And if those resisting have in addition a minimum of good sense and charity, then they may even get on together without having to devour one another. And if the “Resistance” is not a label to be proud of, that is not a bad thing either, because the situation has gone way beyond mere labels.

In any case what is vitally necessary for Catholics wishing to save their souls by keeping the Faith is to see how and why the world around us undermines and corrupts their Catholic Faith. It is not necessarily by lack of good will or of good intentions, on the contrary. Whereas the original Protestants were open and bitter enemies of the Faith, their successors, worldwide liberals, can be sincerely friendly towards Catholics just as long as Catholics share their deep down principle that truth can only be subjective; that there is only one Dogma, according to which all other dogmas are optional; that ideas do not matter; that “All you need is love”; that all religions have the same one God, and so on. This Dogma has become so instinctive that it is no longer even discussed, which is why it is so dangerous. Truth is ruled out of court even before it can set foot in the courtroom. But if there is no truth, how can there be a true God?

Kyrie eleison.

God Enlists

God Enlists on April 29, 2017

Fr Jean-Michel Gleize, Theology Professor at the Écône seminary of the Society of St Pius X, has written on burning problems of today two articles which throw interesting light on their solution. Firstly, can the Pope fall into formal heresy? Answer, maybe, because Popes have not always been held to be so free from error as they have been held to be in the last few centuries. And secondly, does the Papal document Amoris Laetitia show that Pope Francis has fallen into formal heresy? Answer, strictly speaking, no, but in effect, one may say so, because neo-modernism undermines doctrine while pretending to uphold it. This second question will have to wait for another issue of these “Comments,” but if Fr Gleize did not want to be caught between sedevacantism and liberalism, he had to broach the first question first.

In the first and shorter article, he says that from the Protestant “Reformation” onwards, Catholic theologians in general, notably St Robert Bellarmine, have held that the Pope cannot fall into conscious and stubborn denial of Church dogma, i.e. formal heresy. They quote Our Lord telling Peter to confirm his brethren in the Faith (Lk. XXII, 32), which presupposes that Peter cannot lose it. And they argue that never in Church history has a Pope fallen into formal heresy. On the other hand prior to the Protestant revolution, says Fr Gleize, Catholic theologians from the 12th to the 16th century generally judged that a Pope can fall into formal heresy, and this opinion has continued into modern times, albeit less commonly.

Fr Gleize concludes that especially in view of the Conciliar Popes, the later theologians have not proved their point. As for Peter always being protected by Our Lord from formal heresy, faith is an act of the mind pushed by free-will, and God rarely interferes with free-will. And as for Popes in history, Honorius for example was anathematised by his successors for having favoured the Monothelite heresy. This conclusion is for sure disputable and disputed, but if one looks at the question from the historical standpoint of the Seven Ages of the Church, it does make sense.

By three Ages (Apostles 33–70, Martyrs 70–312, and Doctors 312 to about 500 AD), the Church climbed to the Fourth Age, the 1,000 year triumph of Christendom (about 500–1517). But by the late Middle Ages the Devil and original sin were eating into Christendom, and men launched into the Fifth Age of Apostasy (1517-?), whereby degenerating Christians invented one form of hypocrisy after another (Protestantism, Liberalism, Communism amongst others) to pay homage to Christian virtue and civilisation even while “liberating” themselves for the latest vice, e.g. same-sex “marriage.” Now God could have made the Middle Ages go on for ever, but He would have had to interfere with free-will. As it was, He gave to His Church a special crop of Saints to lead the Counter-Reformation, and over the next half-millennium He obtained, to vary the population of His Heaven, a harvest of post-medieval Saints. But to counter-act the corruption of post-medieval man, God chose to re-inforce authority in His Church, so that souls wishing for salvation but no longer enough so by inner virtue, could at least be directed by outer authority towards Heaven. Then of course the Devil set to work especially on churchmen in high positions of authority and after nearly half a millennium it is as though the Lord God said, “If you do not want My Church, then have your own Newchurch,” and that was Vatican II.

So now Church authority is damaged beyond all human repair, and He will use some other means to wring out of our spiritually exhausted world yet another harvest of souls. A Chastisement will ensure the initial brilliance of the Church of the Sixth Age, but the Devil and original sin will have a human nature to work on that has been weakened in depth by the Fifth Age’s liberalism, so that it should not take too long to bring on the Seventh Age of the Antichrist. But that will be an Age of some of the greatest Catholics of all Church history – a crop of especially great Saints.

Kyrie eleison.

Divinity Transcendent

Divinity Transcendent on April 8, 2017

If ever there is a moment of the year when it is specially fitting to contemplate the suffering and death of Our Lord Jesus Christ, that moment is surely today, on the eve of Palm Sunday, just before Holy Week. And that contemplation has become more necessary with each year for the last 50 years, because the suffering of Mother Church which broke out with Vatican II has become more and more scandalous, more and more mysterious. We all need to remind ourselves that God is mysterious, in other words that He goes infinitely above and beyond our little human minds. Otherwise we risk cutting Him down to size in order to fit Him into those little minds. “For my thoughts are not your thoughts: nor your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are exalted above the earth, so are my ways exalted above your ways, and my thoughts above your thoughts” (Is. LV, 8–9).

This great lesson is taught in the fifth Joyful Mystery of the Holy Rosary, when at the age of 12 Our Lord allowed Himself to be lost by His Mother and St Joseph in order to remind them that He had to be about His Father’s business. His Mother could not understand – “Son, why hast thou done so to us?” He had caused three days of intense anxiety to his human parents – “Behold, Thy father and I have sought Thee sorrowing.” Our Lord replied as though they had been anxious for no reason – “How is it that you sought me? Did you not know that I must be about my Father’s business?” Yet so intense had been His parents’ anxiety that humanly this answer made no sense – “And they understood not the word that He spoke unto them.” However, His Mother knew better than to question her Son any further. Instead she “kept all these words in her heart” (Lk. II, 48–51), to see why God was right although she could not understand.

To the future head of the Church, Rock on which it would be built, the same lesson of God’s ways far transcending our own needed to be taught, albeit somewhat more roughly than to Our Lord’s gentle Mother. All too humanly, Peter rebukes Our Lord for daring to tell the Apostles that He is going up to Jerusalem to suffer and to die. Our Lord’s reply is stinging: “Get thee behind me, satan!,” yet the explanation is essentially the same as it was to His Mother, “because thou savourest not the things that are of God, but the things that are of men” (Mt. XVI, 21–23). Peter, just appointed Rock of the Church (Mt. XVI, 18–19), can least of all be allowed to think humanly instead of divinely when it will come to governing the Church.

But of course Our Lord does recognise the problem of human beings thinking too humanly when it comes to the things of God. That is why, soon after the rebuke to Peter, He took him with James and John up Mount Tabor in order by His Transfiguration to let the Godhead’s divinity shine out from within the human nature. Thus the Apostles might soon all of them be shaken to the core by the terrible deicide in Jerusalem, but three of them would be able to give witness to what they had seen with their own eyes (cf. II Peter I, 16–18), before the Passion, of the Godhead blazing from within the man crucified on Calvary.

And in our own day? Catholics know that the life of the Catholic Church is the continuation on earth of the Incarnate life of Christ on earth, so that in principle they know that as Christ’s 33 years ended in His Passion and Death, so the Church may finish its time on earth by bleeding from all wounds until it is virtually extinguished. Nevertheless to see it in practice, happening under one’s eyes, can shake the faith of many a good man – “How is it possible that these Popes, these Cardinals and these Bishops are the carriers of God’s authority in the structure of His one true Church?” Of course they are not in general its faithful carriers, but where else are its structural carriers? Patience. God was still there, being dragged to Calvary, so He is still there, being dragged into the New World Order. But He has not said His last word!

Kyrie eleison.

Billot – III

Billot – III on January 4, 2014

The present leaders of the Society of St Pius X are working steadily and craftily towards inserting it into the framework of the mainstream Church, which is steadily and craftily pushing forward the Revolutionary and Conciliar ideals of liberty (religious liberty), equality (collegiality) and fraternity (ecumenism). Yet these leaders surely take Cardinal Billot seriously. They should meditate on his reflections on our Fifth Age of the Church which follow his exposition of the Seven Ages in the Epilogue to the first volume of his celebrated Treatise on the Church of Christ. Here are some of those reflections, freely translated and adapted from the Latin:—

“Our own age would then be the Fifth Age, Age of defection, apostasy and liberalism, coming between the end of the Holy Roman Empire and what St Paul calls a“resurrection from the dead” (Rom. XI, 15). May it be so! It gives us all amidst our so many and so great tribulations of today(the Cardinal wrote in 1927 – what would he have written in 2013?) hope of a future restoration and – forgive the expression – Counter-revolution. Already today many leading scientists, politicians and economists are recognizing and freely admitting how poisoned are the fruits of the French Revolution of 1789, which proclaimed that the one and only source of all the world’s ills was scorn for the “rights of man.” What frivolity! What silliness! What stupidity!

“The Revolutionaries’ liberty results in tyranny of the strong over the weak; their equality results in a few millionaires lording it ever more over the people(one thinks of Wall Street, 2013!); their fraternity results in internal strife and class hatred. Some people grasp this, while many do not see the essentially satanic character of the Revolution. However those who go beneath the surface see that the religious question underlies all other questions presently agitating mankind: that the plague of political and economic liberalism arises from the atheistic and anti-Christian liberalism laid out above; that the social order can in no way be restored unless the Church’s principles once more direct public life.

“Would that this recognition of the theory might bear practical fruit! With all our heart we call for such a restoration, knowing how the pagan laws under which we are now living may still allow individuals to be Christian(in 2013, how much longer?), but they make a Christian society altogether impossible. Therefore we seek above all the kingdom of God and his justice, without despising the rest that will be added unto us(cf. Mt. VI, 33). As St Paul says of godliness that it is, “profitable to all things,” so too is the Church’s influence, “having promise of the life that now is, and of that which is to come”(cf. I Tim. IV, 8).” It is not difficult to see here how the Cardinal was not one of the many souls he mentions that do not see through the false glamour of the modern world. On the contrary his firm grasp of Catholic doctrine enables him to describe our own times, nearly a century later.

SSPX Headquarters, wake up from your foolish dream of converting the liberals now controlling the Church, and stop pretending with a flow of ambiguous Declarations that you are still defending Tradition. Your actions prove the contrary, and actions speak louder than a series of Declarations! You have the name of being alive, but you are dead. Wake up, and strengthen the things that remain, which are ready to die. Have in mind what you received from the Archbishop, and put it into practice, and do penance. Kyrie eleison.