Society of St. Pius X

And Now?

And Now? on November 3, 2012

Last week’s news of the expulsion of one of the four bishops of the Society of St Pius X brought in a large number of e-mails of support and encouragement. To every one of you, many thanks. Such a serious division amongst the Society’s bishops is a great shame, but God has his reasons for allowing it to happen, and it is obvious that a number of you understand that the Faith comes before unity. Not division, but loss of Faith is the ultimate evil (I Cor.XI, 19; I Jn.II, 19). As to how the titanic war between the friends and enemies of that Faith will develop, I myself can see at this moment only the broad lines. Let me resort to three favourite quotations of Archbishop Lefebvre, which I think still apply today.

Firstly, “We must follow Providence, and not try to lead it.” If it is true that “Charity hopes all things” (I Cor. XIII, 7), then the Society may be given a little time yet to right itself before it is written off as one more Traditional group gone over to the enemy. That is why I said last week that SSPX priests might lie low for the moment to watch how things develop, while the laity might continue to attend Society Masses, but both must watch out (Mt. XXVI, 41) for contradictions in doctrine, for slackening in morals. The temptation will be to prefer comfort and routine over hardship and upheaval, as did thousands of priests and millions of layfolk after Vatican II, so that they ended up by losing the Faith. We are entitled to wait for Providence to show us which way is the way forward. We are not entitled to lose the Faith.

Secondly, “Time respects nothing done without it.” In other words, it takes time to build something solid. We may be in a hurry. God is not. The Archbishop took his time to build the Society. Vatican II concluded its devilry in 1965. Only 11 years later did the first large batch of priests come out of the Archbishop’s first seminary. Patience. He had not rushed.

Thirdly, “Good is not noisy and noise is not good.” The public domain today is thoroughly poisoned. To try to reach a large audience of modern men is to lay oneself wide open to the risk of the tail wagging the dog, of the audience bending the message, and the messenger, to suit its own corruption. The archbishop rarely went after the media, but they were always after him, because his message was unbending, and that was proof that “Our faith is our victory over the world” (I Jn.V, 4), and not our making noise on the public scene.

In brief, I think that the situation of today’s Catholic Resistance calls for no hurried action, but for a thoughtful measuring of men and events until the will of God becomes more clear. I think – I may be wrong – that he wants a loose network of independent pockets of Resistance, gathered around the Mass, freely contacting one another, but with no structure of false obedience such as served to sink the mainstream Church in the 1960’s, and is now sinking the Society of St Pius X. If you agree, by all means make contributions to the St Marcel Initiative because they will certainly come in useful, maybe sooner than I think. For myself, as soon as my situation stabilizes in England, I am ready to put my bishop’s powers at the disposal of whoever can make wise use of them.

In the USA paper checks can be made out to St Marcel Initiative and mailed to St Marcel Initiative, P.O.Box 764, Carrollton, VA 23314, USA. Contributions by credit card or debit card or direct debit / bank wire may be made at www.stmarcelinitiative.com. For paper check contributions from the U.K. and the Eurozone, details as to where they may be sent will be provided as soon as possible.

Kyrie eleison.

Momentous Decision

Momentous Decision on October 27, 2012

So the exclusion from the Society of St Pius X of one of the four bishops consecrated for its service by Archbishop Lefebvre in 1988 is now official. It is a momentous decision on the part of the SSPX leaders, not for any personal reasons, but because of the removal of what many people took to be the single biggest obstacle within the SSPX to any false reconciliation between Catholic Tradition and Conciliar Rome. Now that he is gone, the SSPX may the more easily continue its slide into comfortable liberalism.

If the problem was merely his person, there might be no serious consequences. He is 72 years old (and “more or less gaga”) with not too many active years left ahead of him. He could be safely ignored, or further discredited if need be, and left to rant and rave in his isolated retirement. But if indeed his exclusion does mean the repudiation of that opposition to Rome which he represented, then the SSPX is in trouble, and far from resolving its interior tensions by having made an example of him, it is liable now to be racked with silent dissension or open contradiction.

This is because Archbishop Lefebvre founded the SSPX to resist the Council’s destruction of the Catholic Faith by its 16 documents, and of the practice of that Faith by the New Mass above all. Resisting the Council was built into the very nature of the Society. Now to undo a thing’s nature is to undo the thing. It would follow that with this exclusion the SSPX of Archbishop Lefebvre is well on its way to being undone, and it will be replaced by something quite different. Actually that transformation has been observable for many years. The exclusion is merely one final blow.

Not that the Archbishop was primarily, or only, against the Council. Primarily he was Catholic, a Catholic bishop, a true pastor of souls, as is clear from his writings prior to the Council. But once that unspeakable disaster for the Church had taken place, he soon saw that the most urgent task in defence of the Faith was to resist the Vatican II Revolution which was taking over millions and millions of Catholic hearts and minds. Hence his founding in 1970 of the SSPX which would use exclusively the Tridentine rite of Mass. Hence his famous Declaration of November, 1974, which was like a charter of the Catholic principles inspiring the SSPX’s resistance. Only the conversion and reversion of the Church authorities to the true Faith can justify the abandoning of those principles. And has such a conversion or reversion taken place? By no means. On the contrary.

And the future? To fill the vacuum left by abandoning the purposes of the Archbishop, probably the mainstream SSPX now hastens into the arms of Rome, especially if Benedict XVI’s conscience is driving him to end the “schism” before he dies. The bishop’s exclusion may or may not have been a pre-condition set by Rome for a Rome-SSPX agreement, but in any case it certainly favours one. SSPX priests who see clear might lie low for the moment and wait for a flock of chickens to begin to come home to roost. SSPX laity might attend SSPX Masses for the time being, but they should watch out for the moment when the transformation mentioned above begins to threaten their faith. As for the excluded bishop, any donations to him or his cause will have to wait a little until the necessary arrangements can be set up. But be sure of one thing: he is not thinking of retiring.

Hang tight, everybody. We are in for one “helluva” ride. Let’s just make that a ride to Heaven!

Kyrie eleison.

More Ammunition

More Ammunition on October 6, 2012

Enjoying the privilege of having a variety of friends shooting at me from all directions, I cannot bear the thought of them running out of ammunition, so here is a collection of bullets and shells gathered from the battlefield. The comments came from priests, layfolk and Sisters, mainly upset by a certain episode in modern history being denied on Swedish TV in November of 2008. (And yet . . . and yet . . .) As Americans say, “Enjoy!”

“That bishop has a strong temperament with much prestige and authority, so he could not bear not being Number One in the Society of St Pius X. Wishing then to make himself a name in the history books, but realizing that at 68 years of age he would have no more chance of being elected Superior General, he detonated on Swedish TV the “Revisionist Bomb” in order to get attention and come out top dog. To gain influence he was willing to risk splitting the SSPX.”

“He decided on all-out provocation by the broadcast in order to throw a monkey-wrench into the Rome-SSPX talks which he disapproved of. But being in a subordinate position, only by such a scandal could he stop the dialogue and the agreement that might have come of it.”

“He loves provoking because he is an infiltrator, a former Anglican who is still basically hostile to the Catholic Church. Any Rome-SSPX agreement he wanted to block, because it would be too favourable to the SSPX, i.e. to the Catholic Church.”

“He is an illuminated supernaturalist, a conspiracy nut, obsessed with the Jewish peril. He sees the Apocalypse coming tomorrow. Neither he nor Revisionism are serious.”

“He has natural qualities that make him worldly and ambitious. He is used to everybody paying him homage. He used to have influence over many people, and he was treated like a little god when he was still travelling. However, because of his personal qualities he is proud and jealous of Bishop Fellay, so out of envy and resentment he let loose on Swedish TV.”

“Actually, long before the Swedish affair he was too political and too independent of the rest of the SSPX, whose spirit he did not entirely share. In 2004 he publicly attacked the leadership of the SSPX for its jansenizing spirit and its supernaturalism. In reality he was merely settling personal accounts, as churchmen are liable to do.”

“His originality goes with a complete lack of sense of responsibility, which is why he rode that anti-semitic hobby-horse of his in public without a thought for the harm he might do to Tradition. In fact he was manipulated by Fascists and Neo-pagans, or at least he was exploited by them. He was not out for personal power on that occasion, but he is unpredictable, and he is not to be trusted.” And all these things are being said about me! I just love the attention!

Kyrie eleison.

Sarto, Siri?

Sarto, Siri? on September 29, 2012

In a sermon for the Feast of St Pius X I found myself uttering « almost a heresy »: I wondered aloud whether Giuseppe Sarto would have disobeyed Paul VI’s destruction of the Church, if, instead of dying as Pope Pius X in 1914, he had died as a Cardinal in, say, 1974. Within the Society of St Pius X that must sound like a heresy because how can the wisdom of the heavenly patron of the SSPX be in any way flawed? Yet the question is not idle.

In the 1970’s Archbishop Lefebvre made personal visits to a number of the Church’s best cardinals and bishops in the hope of persuading a mere handful of them to offer public resistance to the Vatican II revolution. He used to say that just half a dozen bishops resisting together could have seriously obstructed the Conciliar devastation of the Church. Alas, not even Pius XII’s choice of successor, Cardinal Siri of Genoa, would make a public move against the Church Establishment. Finally Bishop de Castro Mayer stepped forward, but only in the 1980’s, by when the Conciliar Revolution was well ensconced at the top of the Church.

So how could the best of well-trained minds have been so darkened? How could so few of the best churchmen at that time not have seen what the Archbishop was seeing, for instance that the “law” establishing the Novus Ordo Mass was no law at all, because it belongs to the very nature of law to be an ordinance of reason for the common good? How could he have been so relatively alone in not letting such a basic principle of common sense be smothered by respect for authority, when the Church’s very survival was being placed in peril by Vatican II and the New Mass? How can authority have so gained the upper hand on reality and truth?

My own answer is that for seven centuries Christendom has been sliding into apostasy. For 700 years, with noble interruptions like the Counter-Reformation, the reality of Catholicism has been slowly eaten away by the cancerous fantasy of liberalism, which is the freeing of man from God by the freeing of nature from grace, of mind from objective truth and of will from objective right and wrong. For the longest time, 650 years, the Catholic churchmen clung to and defended reality, but finally enough of the engrossing fantasy of glamorous modernity worked its way into their bones for reality to lose its grip on their minds and wills. Lacking grace, as St Thomas More said of the English bishops in his time betraying the Catholic Church, the Conciliar bishops let men’s fantasy take over from God’s reality, and authority take over from truth. There are practical lessons for clergy and laity alike.

Colleagues inside and outside the SSPX, to serve God, let us beware of reacting like Giuseppe Siri when we need to be reacting like Giuseppe Sarto, with his magnificent denunciations of the modern errors in Pascendi, Lamentabiliand the Letter on the Sillon. And to obtain the grace we need in this most tremendous crisis of all Church history, we need tremendously to pray.

Layfolk, if horrors of modern life make you “hunger and thirst after justice,” rejoice if you can that the horrors are keeping you real, and do not doubt that if you persevere in your hunger, you will “have your fill” (Mt.V, 6). Blessed are the poor in spirit, the meek, and they that mourn, says Our Lord, in the same place. As for the surest protection against your minds and hearts being taken over by the fantasy, pray five, better fifteen, Mysteries a day of Our Lady’s Holy Rosary.

Kyrie eleison.

Reversible Declaration

Reversible Declaration on September 22, 2012

Not everything about the General Chapter of the Society of St Pius X held in Switzerland in July may have been disastrous, but of its two official fruits, the “Six Conditions” were “alarmingly weak” (cf. EC 268, Sept. 1), and its final “Declaration” leaves much to be desired. Here is the briefest of summaries of its ten paragraphs:—

1 We thank God for 42 years of our Society’s existence. 2 We have rediscovered our unity after the recent crisis(really?), 3 in order to profess our faith 4 in the Church, in the Pope, in Christ the King. 5 We hold to the Church’s constant Magisterium, 6 as also to its constant Tradition. 7 We join with all Catholics now being persecuted. 8 We pray for help to the Blessed Virgin Mary, 9 to St. Michael 10 and to St Pius X. This is a Declaration not lacking in piety, which St Paul says is useful for all purposes (I Tim. IV, 8). However, to his two disciples, Timothy and Titus, he is constantly emphasizing the need for doctrine, which is the foundation of true piety. Alas, the Declaration is rather less strong in doctrine. Instead of blasting the Council’s doctrinal errors which have been devastating the Church for the last 50 years, it has in its most doctrinal paragraphs, 5 and 6, only a timid condemnation of those errors, together with a tribute to the unchanging Magisterium (5) and Tradition (6) of the Church, accurate but constituting an argument all too easily reversible by a Conciliarist. See how:—

Paragraph 5 mentions Vatican II novelties being “stained with errors,” whereas the Church’s constant Magisterium is uninterrupted: “By its act of teaching it transmits the revealed deposit in perfect harmony with everything the universal Church has taught in all times and places.” Which of course implies that Rome should take Vatican II to the cleaners to take out the stains. But see how a Roman can reply: “The Chapter’s expression of the continuity of the Magisterium is wholly admirable! But we Romans are that Magisterium, and we say that Vatican II is not stained!”

Similarly with paragraph 6. The Declaration states, “The constant Tradition of the Church transmits and will transmit to the end of time the collection of teachings necessary to keep the Faith and save one’s soul.” So the Church authorities need to return to Tradition. Roman reply: “ The Chapter’s description of how Tradition hands down the Faith is wholly admirable! But we Romans are the guardians of that Tradition, and we say, by the hermeneutic of continuity, that Vatican II does not interrupt it but continues it. So the Chapter is entirely wrong to suggest that we need to return to it.”

Contrast the force of Archbishop Lefebvre’s irreversible attack on the errors of Vatican II in his famous Declaration of November, 1974. He declares that Conciliar Rome is not Catholic Rome because the Conciliar reform is “naturalist, Teilhardian, liberal and Protestant . . . poisoned through and through . . . coming from heresy and leading to heresy,” etc, etc. His conclusion is a categorical refusal to have anything to do with the Newrome because it is absolutely not the true Rome.

Pull up on the Internet both Declarations, and see which is an unmistakeable trumpet-call for the necessary battle (I Cor.XIV, 8)! One has to wonder how many of the 2012 capitulants have ever studied what the Archbishop said, and why.

Kyrie eleison.

“Rebellious, Divisive”

“Rebellious, Divisive” on September 15, 2012

The seventh chapter of the Gospel of St John has a special lesson for today: who are the real rebels against authority, and who are the merely apparent rebels? Who appears to be dividing the people of God, and who is really dividing them? Things are not always what they appear. It is necessary always to “Judge not according to the appearances, but judge just judgment” (Jn. VII, 24).

John VII is close to the end of Our Lord’s life on earth. The Jews are seeking to kill Jesus (verse 1), but Our Lord nevertheless goes up to Jerusalem and teaches in the Temple (14). The crowd is already divided (12), and so the effect of his teaching is that some people (40) recognize in him the prophet (cf. Deut.XVIII, 15–19), while others (41, 42) refuse him that recognition because he is from Galilee. So there is division and dissension. Now division as such is blameworthy, so who is to blame? Certainly not Our Lord, who is merely preaching the doctrine of his Father in Heaven (16–17). Nor can that part of the crowd be blamed which accepted the divine teaching. Clearly the blame for the dissension lies with the Temple authorities and that part of the crowd that was refusing the Truth.

Similarly in the 1970’s and 1980’s Archbishop Lefebvre divided Catholics by teaching and practising the truth of Catholic Tradition, but what Catholic that now boasts of being Traditional blames him for that division? Clearly the blame for the division of the Church lay neither with the Archbishop nor with those who followed him, but mainly with those Church authorities who were twisting the true religion, like the Temple authorities in Our Lord’s own day. Again and again the Archbishop pleaded with them to “judge just judgment” by confronting the central problem created by their Conciliar adultery with the modern world. To this day they refuse that confrontation. Again and again their only answer has been, “Obedience!,” “Unity!.” Does not their lack of arguments as to the basic questions of truth suggest it is they who are the true rebels and dividers of the Church?

Yet dissension as such is not a good thing, and both Our Lord and Archbishop Lefebvre knew ahead that dissension would follow on their teaching. Why then did they still go ahead? Because souls can be saved with dissension (cf. Lk.XII, 51–53), but they cannot be saved without Truth. If the religious authorities are misleading the people – and the Devil works especially hard on them because of their power to lead many other souls astray – then the Truth must be told to bring people back on the path to Heaven, even if dissension will be the result. In this respect Truth is above authority or unity.

And where is that truth in 2012? Vatican II was a disaster for the Church – true or false? The Church authorities who brought about Assisi III and John-Paul II’s “beatification” are clinging to Vatican II – true or false? And so if the Society of Pius X puts itself under those same authorities, they will use all their prestige, and the power over the SSPX that it will have given them, to dissolve its resistance to Vatican II – true or false? So the SSPX runs a grave risk of losing steadily whatever will it still has to resist that prestige and power – true or false? As Romans say, “Rome can wait”!

Then in the SSPX today, if one “judges not according to the appearance but just judgment,” who is it that is being truly “divisive”? Who are the real “rebels against authority”? Those who criticize such a risk of blending Catholic Truth with Conciliar error, or those who are promoting it?

Kyrie eleison.