Society of St. Pius X

Iron Rations

Iron Rations on October 22, 2016

In military affairs, it is normal for generals and soldiers alike to have in mind rather the last war than the one they are now fighting. Who imagined trench warfare before World War I? Yet by World War II the inter-war development of tanks had made trenches obsolete. Similarly in religious affairs. The 21st is no longer the 20th century. Surely Resistant Catholics since 2012 are unwise to be hoping for anything like the establishment and expansion of the Society of St Pius X in the last century. For example, from two admirable Resistants of today come a general and a particular lament, neither perhaps altogether wise . . .

The general lament is that the “Resistance” is falling apart rather than making headway. These “Comments” often put inverted commas around the word “Resistance,” precisely to suggest that the Catholic resistance to the Conciliarisation of the SSPX is not yet any kind of organisation but rather a vague movement with a precise aim, to save the Catholic Faith, but with as yet little structure to help it to do so. However, let Resistants take heart, because while man proposes, God disposes, so that what can look like a human failure may not be a failure from the standpoint of Almighty God.

Thus in the 1970’s Archbishop Lefebvre proposed to rally half a dozen Catholic bishops so as to throw up a real roadblock in the way of the Conciliarists then destroying the Church, but God disposed differently. In this purpose of his the Archbishop would fail, but in trying he would succeed in building a worldwide treasure-house to safeguard the treasures of the Church’s doctrine, Mass and priesthood for better times. Similarly now there are Resistants proposing to build a replacement for the endangered SSPX, and their apparent weakness (at least up till now) may suggest that any such large-scale replacement is not in the plans or dispositions of Almighty God. However, in trying, Resistants are ensuring (at least for now) the survival of the Catholic Faith, which is certainly a disposition of Providence.

The particular lament is that if only the “Resistance” had schools, many SSPX parents would swell the ranks of the “Resistance” as they cannot now do, because their children would immediately be thrown out of the SSPX schools to which there is presently no decent alternative. But again, we are fighting for the Faith in the 21st, not in the 20th century. Back in the 1980’s there were still enough like-minded Catholic parents and teachers and priests to form that triangular frame within which the children almost have to grow up straight. But today? Today one learns of an SSPX boys’ school that has been in serious difficulties because of an outbreak within its walls of that sin against nature which cries to Heaven for vengeance. But what walls can stop adolescents from getting to know of that sin’s glorification among the mass of their country’s male adults, and of a new word invented to condemn the new vice of its condemnation – “homophobia”? And since when are adolescents not to imitate their adults? In fact, how can anyone run a boys’ school since the invention of the Internet, with pocket access to it? Are Catholic institutions still possible?

In today’s religious war, surely the order of the day is iron rations, meaning the soldiers’ strict necessary for survival, here to keep the Faith. This war must be won in the home, or it will be lost. God gives to parents a natural power to form their children that overwhelms by, say, five to two the power of any institution to deform them, but only as long as parents take hold of their power. A small rudder can steer a big ship, but not if the steersman lets go of it. If parents let go of their children, they cannot blame the world for steering them to Hell. And if any parents have wanted SSPX schools to qualify their children for the world rather than for Heaven, may not here be one important reason why the SSPX has slidden?

Kyrie eleison.

Beautiful Cheese

Beautiful Cheese on September 24, 2016

In Australia just one month ago the Superior General of the Society of St Pius X painted a glowing picture of his – as he hopes – imminent subjection of the Society to the officials of Conciliar Rome. From a long discourse here are a few significant remarks he made, summarised or quoted in full (in italics):—

[ . . . ] Rome is offering us a new structure. At its head will be a bishop, chosen by the Pope from a list of three Society members, named by the Society. He will have authority over priests, over any religious wanting to join the new structure and over Catholics belonging to the new structure. These will have an absolute right to receive from Society priests all the sacraments, including marriage. This bishop will be able to set up schools and seminaries, to ordain ( priests ), to establish new religious Congregations. The structure will be like a super-diocese, independent of all local bishops. In other words, for you faithful, there will be no change from what you are already enjoying with the Society. The only difference will be that you will be officially recognized as Catholics.

You can easily imagine that there will be clashes with the local bishops. So we must be prudent, but as things stand you cannot imagine anything better than this offer, which is such that you cannot think it is a trap. It is not a trap , and if anyone makes us such an offer it can only be because he wishes us well . He wants Tradition to prosper and to flourish within the Church. It is impossible that such an offer could come from our enemies. They have many other ways to crush us, but not that way [ . . . ].

The remarks highlighted here in heavy print call for comment:—

* A “new structure” means presumably that Archbishop Lefebvre’s structure for the Society will, essentially, be abandoned. Rome is creating a completely new entity. Good-bye, dear SSPX.

* A “bishop chosen by the Pope” is extremely important. And the head of the “new structure” will presumably go on being chosen by the Pope. Ask the Fraternity of St Peter what that means. It meant in the 1990’s their own choice of Superior General being overridden by Rome, so that Rome’s own choice was forcibly installed (Fr. A. D.), to bring St Peter’s to heel.

* Note also how this bishop will be able “to ordain (priests)” but not bishops. Rome will thus retain the whip-hand over the new entity.

* “There will be no change”? But of course there will! Rome will henceforth be in control.

* “You will be officially recognized” – but what Catholic needs any recognition by such destroyers of the Church as her present neo-modernist officials? Any such recognition can only be a bad sign.

* “Not a trap . . .”? This whole paragraph is truly remarkable. The author of these “Comments” feels obliged to turn to Mickey Mouse and to his beloved partner, Minnie Mouse, for comment:—

Mickey: Darling, can you smell that delicious cheese that I can smell? Oh look, here it is!

Minnie: But Mickey, it’s a mousetrap, set by the owner of the house to get rid of us. Can’t you see that?

Mickey: It cannot be a trap! I tell you, if anyone offers us such good cheese, it can only be because he wishes us well. It’s clear that he wants us mice to prosper and flourish inside his house.

Minnie: (imploringly) Oh darling, can’t you remember how many of our cousins died this way?

Mickey: For the last time, I tell you – and I am never wrong – it is impossible for such delicious cheese to come from our enemies! They could never use that way to crush us.

Minnie: (with a deep sigh) There is no better way to crush us! And how many more of our friends and relatives are going to follow your lead? Oh, masculine pride!

Forgive the frivolity, dear readers – there is reason to fear we are dealing with a real Disneyland!

Kyrie eleison.

Bishop Fellay – III

Bishop Fellay – III on August 20, 2016

Reading the two recent issues of these “Comments” on the mindset which induces the Superior General of the Society of St Pius X to pursue implacably a merely practical agreement with Church authorities in Rome, a good friend reminded me that the ideas driving him were laid out four years ago in his Letter of April 14, 2012, in which he replied to the Society’s three other bishops, who warned him seriously against making any merely practical agreement with Rome. Many readers today of these “Comments” may have forgotten, or never known of, that warning, or Bishop Fellay’s reply. Indeed the exchange of letters tells a great deal that is worth recalling. Here they are, summarised as cruelly as usual, with brief comments:—

The three bishops’ main objection to any practical agreement with Rome being made without a doctrinal agreement was the depth of the doctrinal gulf between Conciliar Rome and the Traditional Catholic Society. Half a year before he died Archbishop Lefebvre said that the more one analyses the documents and aftermath of Vatican II, the more one comes to realise that the problem is less any classic errors in particular, even such as religious liberty, collegiality and ecumenism, than “a total perversion of mind” in general, underlying all the particular errors and proceeding from “a whole new philosophy founded on subjectivism.” To a key argument of Bishop Fellay that the Romans are no longer hostile but benevolent towards the Society, the three bishops replied with another quote from the Archbishop: such benevolence is just a “manoeuvre,” and nothing could be more dangerous for “our people” than to “put ourselves into the hands of Conciliar bishops and modernist Rome.” The three bishops concluded that a merely practical agreement would tear the Society apart, and destroy it.

To this deep objection, as deep as the gulf between subjectivism and objective truth, Bishop Fellay replied (google Bishop Fellay, April 14, 2012):— 1 that the bishops were “too human and fatalistic.” 2 The Church is guided by the Holy Ghost. 3 Behind Rome’s real benevolence towards the SSPX is God’s Providence. 4 To make the Council’s errors amount to a “super-heresy” is an inappropriate exaggeration, 5 which will logically lead Traditionalists into schism. 6 Not all Romans are modernists because fewer and fewer of them believe in Vatican II, 7 to the point that were the Archbishop alive today he would not have hesitated to accept what the SSPX is being offered. 8 In the Church there will always be wheat and chaff, so Conciliar chaff is no reason to back away. 9 How I wish I could have turned to the three of you for advice, but each of you in different ways “strongly and passionately failed to understand me,” and even threatened me in public. 10 To oppose Faith to Authority is “contrary to the priestly spirit.”

And finally, the briefest of comments on each of Bishop Fellay’s arguments:—

1 “Too human”? As the Archbishop said, the great gulf in question is philosophical (natural) rather than theological (supernatural). “Too fatalistic”? The three bishops were rather realistic than fatalistic. 2 Are Conciliar churchmen guided by the Holy Ghost when they destroy the Church? 3 Behind Rome’s real malevolence is its firm resolve to dissolve the SSPX’s resistance to the new Conciliar religion – as of how many Traditional Congregations before it! 4 Only subjectivists themselves cannot see the depth of the gulf between subjectivism and Truth. 5 Objectivist Catholics clinging to Truth are far from schism. 6 Freemasons hold the ring in Rome. Any non-modernists have no power there to speak of. 7 To believe that the Archbishop would have accepted Rome’s present offers is to mistake him completely. The basic problem has got only much worse since his day. 8 Bishop Fellay’s spoon is much too short for him to sup with the Roman devils (objectively speaking). 9 The three bishops understood Bishop Fellay only too well, but he did not want to hear what all three of them separately had to say. Does he take himself to be infallible? 10 St Paul for sure imagined that Authority could oppose Faith – Gal. I, 8–9, and II, 11. Did St Paul lack “priestly spirit”?

Kyrie eleison.

Bishop Fellay – II

Bishop Fellay – II on August 13, 2016

An error is never properly refuted until it is uprooted. In other words truly to overcome an error one needs to show not only that it is an error, but why it is an error. Let us suppose, with last week’s “Comments,” that the June 28 statement of the Superior General of the Society of St Pius X, by looking forward to the Society’s pious priesthood resolving the Church’s crisis of Faith, commits the error of putting the cart of the priesthood before the horse of the Faith. Then let us show that this error has its roots in our age’s almost universal undervaluing of the mind and overvaluing of the will, resulting even unconsciously in a scorn for doctrine (except for the Beatles’ doctrine of “All you need is luv”).

Already towards the beginning of the Statement there occurs a hint of this error when the Statement says that the central principle condemned in Pascendi, Pius X’s great condemnation of modernism, is that of “independence.” No. The principle he constantly condemns as being at the root of modernism is rather agnosticism, the doctrine that the mind can know nothing behind what appears to the senses. Upon that unknowing follows the independence of the mind from its object, followed in turn by the will’s declaration of independence from everything else on which it does not want to depend. It is in the nature of things that the mind must first be suicided before the will can declare its independence. So when the Statement puts independence before agnosticism at the heart of Pascendi, that is a hint that the Statement is a part rather of the Church’s problem than of its solution.

And where does this downgrading of the mind and doctrine in turn come from? Primarily from Luther who called human reason a “prostitute,” and who more than anybody else launched Chistendom on the sentimental path to its self-destruction today. But that took all of 500 years? Yes, because there was natural and Catholic resistance along the way. But Luther was right when he told the Pope that in the end he would destroy him – “Pestis eram vivus, functus tua mors ero, Papa” – A plague to you I was when I had breath, But once I’m dead, O Pope, I’ll be your death.

To this radical and gigantic error of the downgrading of mind and doctrine may be attributed two sub-errors in the case of the author of the June 28 Statement: firstly, his misunderstanding of Archbishop Lefebvre, and secondly his too great understanding of Madame Cornaz (pen-name Rossinière).

Like many of us seminarians in Écône when Archbishop Lefebvre himself presided there, Bernard Fellay was rightly enchanted and bewitched by the outstanding example before our very eyes of what a Catholic priest could and should be. But the backbone of his priesthood and of his heroic fight for the Faith was not his piety – many modernists are “pious” – but his doctrine, doctrine of the eternal priesthood, profoundly allergic to liberalism and modernism. Nor did the Archbishop ever say that his Society would save the Church. Rather its priests were to safeguard the Church’s priceless treasures for better days.

The person who did say that the Society’s priests would save the Church, as Fr Ortiz has reminded us, was Madame Cornaz, a family mother from Lausanne, Switzerland, whose life spanned most of the 20th century, and who between 1928 and 1969 received communications supposedly from Heaven on how married couples should sanctify the priesthood (!). The communications started again in 1995 (!) when she met a Society priest whom she persuaded, and through him Bishop Fellay, that it was the SSPX priests who were destined by Providence to save the Church by propagating her “Homes of Christ the Priest.” With all his authority the Superior General supported her project, but the negative reaction of Society priests made him rapidly renounce it in public. Inwardly however, did her mystical vision of the Society’s exalted future stay with him? It seems quite possible. Like Martin Luther King, the Superior General “has a dream.”

Kyrie eleison.

Bishop Fellay – I

Bishop Fellay – I on August 6, 2016

After the June 26–28 meeting of SSPX Superiors in Switzerland, the Superior General made not only for the general public the Communiqué of June 29, already examined in these “Comments” three weeks ago, but also a Statement on June 28 for the benefit of SSPX members, i.e. primarily SSPX priests. The Statement is in itself cryptic, but once deciphered (with the help of Fr Girouard), it is heavy with significance for the future of Catholic Tradition. Here is the merest outline of the first six paragraphs of the Statement, and the full text of the seventh:—

(1–4) Church and world are in crisis, because instead of turning around the Cross of Christ, they turn around man. The SSPX opposes this “deconstruction” of the Church and human society. (5) God’s own remedy for this disorder was to inspire an Archbishop to found a hierarchical Catholic Congregation turning around the sacrament of Holy Orders – Jesus Christ, his Cross, Kingship, sacrifice and priesthood, source of all order and grace, are what the Society founded by the Archbishop is all about.

(6) So the SSPX is neither Conciliar (it turns around Christ) nor rebellious (it is hierarchical).

(7) “Has the moment come for the general restoration of the Church? God’s Providence does not abandon God’s Church whose head is the Pope, the Vicar of Christ. That is why an indisputable sign of the general restoration will be when the Pope gives a sign of what he wants by granting the means to restore order in the priesthood, Faith and Tradition. This sign will in addition guarantee the Catholic unity necessary to the family of Tradition.”

Clearly the first six paragraphs lead up to the seventh. And it is not unreasonable to take the seventh to mean that when Pope Francis gives official approval to the Society, then that will be the proof that the moment has come at last for the whole of the Catholic Church to get back on its feet, for the Catholic priesthood, Catholic Faith and Catholic Tradition to be restored, and for all Traditionalists to join with the Society of St Pius X behind its Superior General. Bishop Fellay would seem to be repeating here for the benefit of all Society priests his steady vision of the Society’s glorious role, because at the Swiss meeting, as we hear, at least some of their Superiors had just questioned that glory coming in the form of reunion with official Rome. But those Superiors in opposition were right, because Bishop Fellay is here dreaming! It is a noble but deadly dream.

The dream is noble, because it is all to the honour of Our Lord Jesus Christ, of his Church, of his sacrifice, of Archbishop Lefebvre, of the Catholic priesthood and so on. The dream is deadly because it turns rather on the priesthood than on the Faith, and while it credits quite correctly Pope Francis and the Romans with being the holders of Church Authority, it takes no account of how far they are from holding the Catholic Faith. If Archbishop Lefebvre can be said to have saved the Catholic priesthood and Mass, that was for him only as a means of saving the Faith. The Faith is to the priesthood as end to means, and not as means to end. What would the priesthood be without the Faith? Who would believe in the Sacraments? Who would need priests?

And as to that Faith, the present Pope and the Roman officials who hold sway around him have lost their grip on Truth as being one, objective, non-contradictory and exclusive, and therewith they have lost their grip on the true Faith, not to say, lost the true Faith. That means that if Pope Francis did indeed approve officially of the Society, it would by no means be a sign of the Society restoring the Church to sanity, but rather of the official Church absorbing the Society into its insanity.

Kyrie eleison.

Bishops’ Declaration – II

Bishops’ Declaration – II on April 30, 2016

Here is the second and last part of the bishops’ Declaration at Bishop Thomas Aquinas’ consecration in Brazil on March 19, six weeks ago:—

Yet the gravest of all in our 21st century is perhaps the mass of Catholics, both clergy and laity, who are still docilely following the destroyers. As to the churchmen, how can the destroyers amongst them not be aware of what they are doing? It must be by that “diabolical disorientation” mentioned even before the Council by Sister Lucy of Fatima. And as for the laity, how can so many still not see that Catholic Authority only exists to establish Catholic Truth, and once it betrays that Truth it loses its right to be obeyed? It must be by the same “disorientation.” So in what exactly does this disorientation consist? In the loss of Truth, in the progressive loss of all sense of the very existence of objective truth, because men have wanted to break free from the reality of God and his creatures and to replace that reality with their own fantasy, so as to be able to do as they like. It is always false freedom at work.

But God does not abandon his Church, and so in the 1970’s he raised up Archbishop Lefebvre to come to its help. The Archbishop recognized that the Pope and his kindred spirits at the Council were for the sake of being modern leaving behind the Church’s Tradition, and that by so doing they would destroy the Church. By a sort of miracle he managed to set up within the Church a solid resistance to the on-going destruction, in the form of a Priestly Fraternity which he dedicated to St Pius X, a Pope who saw right through the corruption of modern times. But the Roman authorities would not put up with anyone refusing their supposed “renewal” of Vatican II, so they did everything within their power to make the Archbishop’s resistance disappear.

However he stood up to them, and in order to guarantee that his work of immense importance for the defence of Catholic Tradition would survive, in 1988 he proceeded to consecrate four bishops, against the express will of the mistaken Roman authorities, but in line with the implicit will of all Popes since the beginning of the Church, with the exception of the last four, all won over to the Council.

This heroic decision by by Archbishop Lefebvre was amply justified by events, notably the uninterrupted downfall of the Church authorities whose only wish was to bring the Church in line with today’s corrupt world. Of these four bishops, the Spanish-speaker was appointed to settle in South America to look after Catholics wishing to keep the Faith of all time in a whole continent, formerly so Catholic, but where there were now no more bishops that could be relied on to lead souls to Heaven.

Alas, the downfall has gone on ever since, only now it is the Archbishop’s Society of St Pius X that is in turn falling victim to the universal corruption by its General Chapter of 2012, where the Society’s leaders under their Superior General made the Society lurch towards the Council. Instead of insisting on the primacy of the Church’s unchanging doctrine, on Tradition, they opened the door to an agreement with official Rome, given over to the Council. And so since 2012, the same disorientation has been making its way within the Society, whose bishops can at least for the moment no longer be relied on. That is most sad, but altogether normal in the present state of Church and world. Hence once more, a reliable bishop needs to be consecrated to make sure that the unchanging Faith survives, especially where a whole continent of souls needs a true shepherd to save their souls for eternity.

May God be with him! Let us pray to the Blessed Virgin Mary that she keep him faithful under her mantle, faithful unto death.

Bishop Jean-Michel Faure.
Bishop Richard Williamson.