Society of St. Pius X

SOME ANSWERS

SOME ANSWERS on November 16, 2024

The chaos of today is serving to purge

Mankind. Bad men will undergo the scourge.

60 years ago this writer was given by God a real sense of civilisation disintegrating. From there it was merely a matter of time (and grace) before the pursuit of Truth led him to the Catholic Church. The same pursuit of Truth led him at the end of 1972 to Archbishop Lefebvre and to his Seminary in Econe, Switzerland. At the same time he entered the Society of St Pius X which had been founded as a framework of the Church to surround and support the priests that the Archbishop would soon be ordaining. He foresaw difficulties with the official Church in a few years’ time. He was right.

If he was right, how could he envisage defying the official Church? Because the Faith is greater than obedience. Alas, even the successors of Archbishop Lefebvre at the head of the Society that he founded, failed, like the churchmen of Vatican II, to have his grasp of the necessity to “disobey” when the Faith is at stake. Better to obey God than men, says St Peter (Acts IV, 19). The drama of our poor age is that the mass of men have lost their grip on objective truth. As man is taken to be above God, so the subject is supposedly above the object (Emmanuel Kant). This error “liberates” from any objective truth or faith.

What about the Priestly Union of Marcel Lefebvre? It became defunct and was dissolved soon after its founding in 2013, because of serious dissension among its first members. Since then the so-called “Resistance” has not been structured in any way. It is merely a loose association of priests who all over the world see the crisis of the Church in the same way, namely that neither the Newchurch of Vatican II, nor the “sedevacantists” against Vatican II (at least the dogmatic ones), nor the Newsociety following a different orientation from that of its Founder, Archbishop Lefebvre, have the right answer to the Church’s crisis. However, only the true Church’s proper Authority can impose what is God’s own answer, so the loose association of resistant priests waits for Almighty God to restore His stricken Papacy. Meanwhile, “The Shepherd is struck and the sheep are scattered.” Because this “Resistance” is not structured or even organised, it is difficult to tell just how many priests might claim that they belong to it.

As for the Newchurch, “renewed” by Vatican II in the 1960’s, it is surely much further down the path of total destruction than it was in the 1970’s or 80’s. The downhill slide is inexorable, until the churchmen abandon these disastrous principles of the French Revolution and of the modern world which were designed from the beginning by Judeo-masonry to do away with God, with Jesus Christ and with His Catholic Church. It looks very much as though only a severe Chastisement from God will bring the Conciliar churchmen to their Catholic senses. Alas, numbers of churchmen still refuse to understand that the Faith is greater than obedience, because Catholic obedience is only for the Faith. Authority exists in the Church only to protect the Truth from human beings, who all suffer from original sin. “Obedience is not the servant of obedience” – Spanish proverb. Obedience is the servant of Truth, and not its master.

True Catholic obedience presupposes a truly Catholic Pope at the top of the pyramid of the Church’s hierarchy. For such a Pope, God wants us to wait and to pray. We will have him, in God’s good time. If Catholics do see at last the need to return to Tradition, it is understandable if they wish to go further back than the liturgical reform of 1962, but it is not essential. Patience. The liturgy will be properly restored.

Catholics who in the 2020’s realise that they risk losing the Faith if they obey their Conciliar clergy need to do two things. Firstly, pray every day all 15 Mysteries of the Holy Rosary, and not just five. Secondly, to make sure of saving their souls for eternity, they need to find out all about the Five First Saturdays of Our Lady of Fatima, and do them. She will then look after them and protect them from the world, the flesh and the Devil, as only She can. And they will help towards the Consecration of Russia, essential for the restoration of the Catholic Church.

Kyrie eleison.

VIGILANT BISHOP

VIGILANT BISHOP on November 9, 2024

A bishop guards his flock by truth they learn.

That doctrine into fibs the modernists turn.

Just over one month ago one of the four bishops consecrated in 1988 by Archbishop Lefebvre without the Pope’s permission, died. It was from a fracture of the skull from falling down on a stone staircase in the Seminary of Econe, Switzerland, where he had been living for the past several years. His Excellency Bishop Tissier de Mallerais was 79 years old, and had in a long life rendered considerable service to the Archbishop’s Society of St Pius X. To commemorate his leaving this “vale of tears” let these “Comments” recall here at least three of those occasions, with the gratitude of all of us to him, and with our prayers for the repose of his soul.

Firstly, at the end of the 1960’s when the Archbishop had launched the first year of a projected Seminary, at the end of that year so many of the first seminarians left him that he was on the point of giving up his project as though it had no future. It was two of those young seminarians who persuaded him not to give up, but to try again for the next school-year. One was Paul Aulagnier, virtual founder of the Society’s anchor District in France. The other was Bernard Tissier de Mallerais, future bishop of the Society. Where would the Catholic Church – and the world – be today, had the two of them not persuaded the Archbishop to persevere in what would become the spearhead of upholding Catholic Tradition in a Church and world going mad?

Secondly, in the 1980’s the Archbishop was locked in a deadly struggle to the death with the Freemasonic enemies of the Church, who were firmly holding onto the levers of power in the Church handed over to them by Vatican II as a just punishment from God for mankind’s worldwide apostasy. The main problem was doctrinal – the joint errors of religious liberty and false ecumenism, both of them profoundly undermining all Catholic dogma. It was Fr. Tissier on whom the Archbishop largely relied to spell out the true doctrine of the Church in order to make clear why Catholic Tradition, being betrayed by the modernists, had to be defended at all costs. The inspiration came from the Archbishop, but Fr Tissier was his executive instrument.

And thirdly, in 2006, Bishop Tissier gave a serious interview to Stephen Heiner, then writing for The Remnant, American Catholic magazine which surely has the full text available in its archives. When Heiner thought that he had finished the interview, the Bishop objected – no, Heiner had left out the essential – once again doctrine, the horrific doctrinal errors of Pope Benedict XVI. It is clear from the last part of the interview that the Bishop had taken the trouble to read himself what Fr Ratzinger actually wrote earlier in his career as a “theologian.” How many of us have actually taken that trouble? In justice the Bishop tells Heiner that he does not know if Pope Ratzinger has renounced his sentimental foolishness, but Tissier does also say that by 2006 Ratzinger had not yet retracted his errors. Here is a quote from pages 232 to 233, translated from the German of Ratzinger’s book, Introduction to Christianity, appearing in 1968 –

“. . . some texts of devotion seem to suggest that the Christian faith in the Cross understands God as a God whose inexorable justice required a human sacrifice, the sacrifice of his own Son. And we flee with horror from a justice, the dark anger of which removes any credibility from the message of love.”

In other words the Cross was too horrible to be true, because God the Father cannot have required such a cruel sacrifice from His beloved Son, because such cruelty contradicts the new Conciliar religion of “luv.” Here is modernism, pure and simple. Contrast how St Ignatius devotes the whole First Week of the Catholic Exercises to making retreatants grasp just how serious their sins have been. Fr. Ratzinger was turning the Faith to mush. Bishop Tissier was guarding the Faith. See the whole Tissier-Heiner interview.

Thank you, Your Excellency. May you be resting in peace.

Kyrie eleison.

VATICAN II SHORT – SIGHTED

VATICAN II SHORT – SIGHTED on October 19, 2024

Poor modern man, so drastically short-sighted,

His whole life being, by that short sight, blighted!

If we want to save our souls for eternity, as God wants all of us to do (I Tim. II,4), then the world now surrounding us is a dangerous environment for that purpose because, broadly speaking, for seven centuries mankind has been slowly but surely demoting God in order to take His place. It is a foolish attempt, doomed to fail, but in the meantime it has brought mankind to the brink of nuclear suicide. Now, on that road to ruin, from the Incarnation onwards, the greatest obstacle to the folly of man was God’s own Church instituted by God’s own Son, Our Lord Jesus Christ, to be the continuation of His Incarnation amongst men, as the Light of the World to dispel men’s confusion, and the Salt of the Earth to prevent men’s corruption. Alas, Vatican II in the 1960’s was the summit of men’s attempts to serve the Devil by crippling that Church, so as to send all men’s souls to Hell instead of Heaven. From here came the confusion and corruption all around us.

But Vatican II had to be subtle, because by the 20th century Mother Church had already analysed and refuted the great errors leading up to Vatican II, especially Protestantism (1517) and its progeny, Liberalism (1717) and Communism (1917). Among the host of errors accompanying these three, surely the most dangerous was Modernism (1907), because it was led by priests from inside the Church, wishing to update God’s Church by adapting it to godless modern man. Therefore subtlety was needed to deceive Catholics alerted to Protestantism in all its forms (and for the same reason, even more subtlety will be needed by the Antichrist to fool a mankind alerted by the divine Chastisement occurring between now and then).

When Archbishop Lefebvre died in 1991, one of his hopes was that the Society of priests which he had founded in 1970 would work on the subtle errors of Vatican II to analyse and denounce them. This is precious work for the salvation of souls, and one book is outstanding in this respect, Prometheus, the Religion of Man, by Fr Alvaro Calderon, translated into French and published last May by the Society’s printing-house in France, accessible at www.clovis-diffusion.com The book is not an easy read, but it is highly to be recommended for its masterly thomistic breakdown of Vatican II. Here for instance is, in very brief form, the first major error of Vatican II, denounced by Fr Calderon:

Man must be the centre of religion, because he is, amongst all other material creatures, the only creature that is also spiritual. Therefore he is superior to all of them, he is the main purpose of all of them, and he is the main purpose of all material creation, being the only creature created for himself, all other material creatures having been created only for him. Therefore he must be at the centre of any true religion of that creation.

But all of this argument leaves out the Creator. If we start out from God and not from man, then we know that the one and only ultimate cause of the creation of man must be the essence of God Himself, because the one and only object possible of God’s willing anything at all is His own goodness, because that infinite goodness alone can fulfil His infinite willing. Any creature and everything that He chooses freely to create, He can only will in and through His willing of His own uncreated Self.

Therefore it can only be Himself, and not man, who is the ultimate purpose of creation, and He alone who can be at the centre of any true religion of that creation. All of the arguments in the documents of Vatican II which attempt to put man instead of God at the centre of creation around us, fail, for ignorance, witting or unwitting, wilful or unwilful, of Catholic Tradition’s supreme treasures of philosophy and theology. Thus one of the last and worst of all the Vatican II documents, Gaudium et Spes, is, says Fr Calderon, shot through with the very inadequate modern philosophy of Personalism, by which the human person is at the centre of everything. No, he is not. It is God who is at the centre of everything.

Kyrie eleison

LAW DEFINED

LAW DEFINED on August 3, 2024

And if I don’t see the monstrosity, I must pray,

As often urged, full fifteen Mysteries a day!

The desperate attempts of Pope Francis to use all of his papal Authority to crush the Tridentine rite of Mass and eliminate it from the Catholic Church once and for all, are rightly gaining less and less traction from among Catholics. Just how Almighty God can have allowed His own Authority that He entrusts to His Vicar on earth to be so misused, remains a mystery, because of course He gives it into the hands of men to build up His Church and not to pull it down. Many Catholics are so agonised by the problem that they are resorting to the simple solution of sedevacantism, because by that theory of there having been no valid Pope since John XXIII (1958–1963), all six Popes since Vatican II (1962–1965) have not been Popes at all. But that theory, which seems to solve the problem of the Conciliar Popes with such ease, takes many contradictory forms, and can lead to Catholics abandoning the Faith altogether, on the grounds that there can be no valid priesthood left at all, so they might as well stay at home rather than go to Mass. Thus sedevacantism can raise rather more problems than it seems to solve.

Such fruits suggest that sedevacantism may well not be the right solution to the serious problem set by all six Conciliar Popes, one after another, and culminating in the special horrors of Pope Francis. It may be a good moment to remember the fruitful solution of Archbishop Lefebvre (1905–1991), Traditionalism, of which he was the outstanding pioneer in its opposition today to the modernism of Vatican II.

Tradition is Catholicism, he said, and Catholicism is Tradition. “Jesus is the same, yesterday, today and for ever” (Heb. XIII, 8). Centuries of Protestantism and Liberalism have created a modern world which is so glamorous and seductive that in the end even the Vicars of Christ on earth have allowed themselves to be persuaded that Jesus needs to adapt himself to modern man, and not the other way round. But Jesus and His Church need no modernisation, all they need is to be presented as Catholic Tradition always used to do in times past. And the astonishing success of the Archbishop’s Society of St Pius X all over the world, at least until he died in 1991, proved that the Traditional version of Jesus and His Church can still flourish, despite modernity.

Then what did the Archbishop say about modernist Catholic Authority? He said that even Catholic Popes remain by themselves fallible men, unless they engage their infallible Authority, which they can only do on the four strict conditions clearly laid down in the solemn Definition of infallibility of 1870. If all four of those conditions are not present – and the Conciliar Popes never presented all four in their promotion of the Conciliar novelties – then Popes are as capable as any normal human being of making mistakes. And so all the modernist novelties of Vatican II in no way come under the protection of papal infallibility, which is highly restricted in its practical application.

But what about the Pope’s papal commands to abandon the Traditional rite of the Latin Mass? Are we not bound to obey him? No, we are not bound to obey him because it is not a lawful command, as Archbishop Lefebvre always said, and as the Catholic Church has always said. The Pope has no power from God to command just anything that comes into his head. The definition of law is that it is a command of reason for the common good made by those who are responsible for the common good. So if it is not for the common good, like any law pretending to legalise abortion, then it is no law at all.

Therefore when it comes to the sacrifice of the Mass, of which Padre Pio said that our planet earth can sooner do without the light of the sun than without that sacrifice, to replace its most venerable and dignified rite in Latin, centred on God, with a new rite in modern languages, doctrinally doubtful, without dignity, invented to centre on man, is so clearly opposed to the true common good of the Catholic Church that it cannot possibly be the object of a true law of the Church. Therefore no such pretended law need be obeyed, however many times Pope Paul VI or Pope Francis or their successors may try to impose any such monstrosity.

Kyrie eleison.

BISHOPS DYING OUT ?

BISHOPS DYING OUT ? on April 13, 2024

Today, it seems, such points exaggerate? 

Tomorrow they might be looking out of date!

Last autumn I received the following letter, only slightly shortened below, from a former colleague, still a priest of the SSPX (perhaps because he may be more of a threat to them from outside than he is from inside the Newsociety, so long as he continues to respect their authority). May God be with Bishop Huonder, who died before the lines below were published. One may think he was less cunning than the villains who instrumentalised him. 

The Priestly Society of St Pius X, from what it was for 21 years under Archbishop Lefebve (1970–1991) has become very liberal, and from the top downwards has in fact since 2012 abandoned the course that he set. To call it today the „Newsociety”is to bring the name in line with the reality. Alas. And I think all the problems of this „Newsociety”have for a moment come to a head with Bishop Huonder. 

1. He was ordained priest and bishop with the new rites of Ordination and Consecration respectively. This fact is no longer seen as a problem in the Newsociety. An appeal that he should let himself be conditionally reordained and reconsecrated unfortunately had no effect. The Newsociety has abandoned the Church’s classic principle of „tutiorism“, namely taking the certainly valid course whenever there is the least serious doubt as to the validity of sacraments being received, as there is with Newchurch bishops’ Consecrations, if not also priests’ Ordinations. 

2. Bishop Huonder does criticise – half-heartedly – Pope Francis, Vatican II and the New Mass. And this is enough for a large proportion of our Newsociety layfolk to be calling him „Our man, our bishop“. But in fact he has never clearly condemned either Vatican II (Revolution in the Catholic Church) or the New Mass (the Luther Mass). Bishop Huonder told one person that he celebrates the New Mass with dignity, that he sees it as an altogether worthy form of Mass. This shows clearly how he means to reconcile the old Mass with the Newchurch, wholly in the spirit of Pope Benedict XVI, but in absolute contrast to the late Archbishop Lefebvre. 

3. In his lectures Bishop Huonder openly admits that he still has the task of bringing the Newsociety under Rome. He is therefore an infiltrated agent of Pope Francis. Just as Pope Francis by legitimising Newsociety Confessions, then Marriages, then Ordinations, used salami tactics over three successive years (2015–2017) to draw the Newsociety into the Moloch Newchurch, so Bishop Huonder is setting himself exactly the same task. And just as the Newsociety Superiors at the official legitimising of their Confessions and Ordinations and Marriages cried out towards Rome, „Oh, Holy Father, we thank you!“, so too our Superiors are now being inspired by Bishop Huonder, and are rejoicing that a Newchurch bishop has found his way to the Newsociety, and by living in one of our houses is openly joining the Newsociety, like a submarine. How blind our Superiors have become. 

4. Bishop Huonder wrote his Doctoral thesis on a Jewish problem of the Middle Ages. Bishop Huonder introduced into the Swiss Church a Day for Jews. Not one member of the Newsociety seems to have asked if the bishop’s relationship to the Jews corresponds to the Catholic Church’s traditional view of them. 

5. A colleague wrote to me that if the new rite of bishops’ Consecration turned out to be invalid, it would have dire consequences. From the beginning of the 1970’s there would have been no more valid priests or bishops. That would mean that all Tradional-rite Congregations officially recognised within the Newchurch, like St Peter’s or Christ the King, would have no valid priests either. That would mean that only in the Newsociety would the Church of Christ still be existing. Neither Pope Benedict XVI nor Archbishop Vigano would have been valid bishops. These conclusions, of a certain logic, must be taken into account. 

The Newsociety Superior General, Fr. Pagliarani, raised this question at his Conference in Econe on September 8 last year, but if the Newsociety absolutely wants to be loved and recognised by freemasonic and modernist Rome, then such a question simply cannot be raised. Which is why he took a clear position – the new-rite Consecrations are valid. Could such an immensely serious conclusion possibly be true? We are constantly hearing that Bergoglio means to reform the New Mass, that in the reform of the reform there will be no more words of Consecration said over the bread or the wine, which would mean the complete extinction of the Mass. Moreover, in my opinion something like two out of every three New Masses are already invalid, because the priests no longer believe in the Real Presence of Christ. But if the total extinction of the Mass is an eventual possibility, why not also the total extinction of bishops being truly Consecrated? 

Kyrie eleison. 

GERMANY STRICKEN

GERMANY STRICKEN on April 6, 2024

Can godless modern man return to God?

If not, then there remains only the rod.

We are currently reading in the (unreliable) mass media various reports of a grave state of affairs in Germany, enough to make us think that something is going seriously wrong there. Indeed there is. Quoted below is the large part of a private letter received recently from a “Resistant” Catholic who has been working as an engineer in England and Germany for the last 20 or so years. He sees trouble ahead in Germany, and that is especially troubling, because ever since the “Wirtschaftswunder” or economic miracle of the 1950’s by which German hard work and talent pulled their country out of its post-war ruins, Germany has been the economic power-house of all Europe. If Germany’s economy is in serious trouble, then so is Europe’s. Read on, in italics – 

From everything I observe going on here in Germany, be it in the SSPX or in general, I think I should relocate to England. Germany is sinking in every sense. England and all the other countries of Europe are probably not very much better, but what we might call the Anglo-American economic way is still there, and that at least helps to keep people’s feet on the ground, by doing all it can to create and sustain jobs, which in Germany will fail more and more as time passes. A lot of companies are leaving Germany because of high energy costs ever since the Nord Stream pipeline was blown up and all atomic power stations were shut down. Germany is not able to provide enough substitute energy from solar and wind sources to compensate for the lost Russian gas, hence energy prices will go on rising, and in the mean time Germany is dependent upon the kindness of other European countries to import power, which is hardly a long-term arrangement. 

In brief, Germany is heading for the rocks. Hundreds of thousands of Germans have left Germany already and are still doing so, as soon as they can spot a chance. The automobile industry is going down slowly, but faster as time progresses. It looks as though Germany will evaporate in a couple of years’ time, unless people go back to living in caves with minimum sustinence. All this may sound too pessimistic, but I have eyes to see and to read what is happening here. For instance, once certain industries are shut down, they are gone for good and never return, as far as one can foresee, because of the lack of experienced labour and the excessive effort required to rebuild, and so on. 

I have the impression that what is happening on the spiritual level is similar or parallel to these things happening on the material level, also with the FSSPX: the faith is disappearing, and once it disappears it will not come back. In general, less than half the people in Germany now profess any Christian faith. Very enlightening was the remark of “Arsenius” in the “Eleison Comments” of March 2 (868), where he makes it clear that, humanly speaking, he does not see the SSPX finding its way back to being the Church’s spearhead of the Faith, as it was from 1970 to 2012. That fall I would call the course of nature. I must admit that I followed it myself, but I never realised just how serious are its consequences . . . 

These interesting observations show God at work. Somehow He must stop the mass of Europeans from throwing themselves into Hell, but thanks to their materialistic prosperity, that is where they are headed right now. See Deuteronomy, all of Chapter VIII. Prosperous modern man is convinced he has no need of God. But the chickens are coming home to roost. Count on it – the mere loss of a double pipeline will not be nearly enough to bring the mass of men back to their senses. 

Kyrie eleison