Society of St. Pius X

Men Lacking

Men Lacking on May 23, 2020

When Authority abandons Truth in the Catholic Church as it has been doing ever since Vatican II, then it is easier said than done to walk the fine line between heresy on the left and schism on the right. So it is not surprising if an unusually sharp remark like that of Archbishop Lefebvre quoted in the last two issues of these “Comments” (“Hoist the ladder . . . ”) arouses interest.

One layman even doubted the authenticity of the remark – could the sweet Archbishop really have said such a thing? Oh yes, he did. The original words are a little less elegant than the polished quotation, but the substance is identical – “With that, all that’s left is to pull up the ladder. There’s nothing to be done with these people (the Conciliar Romans). What have we got in common with them? Nothing! It’s not possible. It’s not possible” (6 Sept. 1990). The 1990 audio tape reference is Audio – Retrec – PASCALE90 or SACERDOTALE90. (However, let anyone wishing to check the quotation for himself beware of “revised” collections of the Archbishop’s tapes, because any words of his strongly opposed, like these to the Conciliarists in Rome, may well have been cut out by “editors” of the pro-Rome Newsociety.)

Another reader who reacted to the quotation is a priest, from the Novus Ordo, but now firmly established in a Newsociety Priory in Switzerland (without having been conditionally re-ordained, as best we know).

He thinks that “things really look different today” because the present generation of officials in Rome are a different breed from those that the Archbishop was reacting to in the 1980’s, and the best of them want a genuine restoration of the Church. He concludes that to adopt the Archbishop’s attitude today leaves only two solutions – either the “Resistance” or sedevacantism.

But, Father, while the present breed of Church leaders may be different men from the traitor-priests of the Archbishop’s time, who did all they could to destroy the true Church, have they understood (or read) Pascendi? And what use are sweet and well-meaning Church authorities to the Faith or to the Church or to the SSPX or to the “Resistance,” if they have not grasped that the problem is rubber minds which cannot even conceive of truth condemning error or of dogma condemning heresy? A rubber mind sympathetic to Tradition is basically no more use to Tradition than a rubber mind condemning Tradition. Nor is it true that things are “really different” from the Archbishop’s time. The sign that a priest has really understood the problem is when – at least figuratively – he wants to go down to Rome with a machine-gun and send all sweetie-pies to meet their Maker, as Putin would say. In brief, the “Resistance” must stay on the road, otherwise the road will be torn up to provide stones to cry out the Truth in place of the silent shepherds and their non-barking dogs (cf. Lk XIX, 40). The “Resistance” must not, may not, give way!

Finally a good priest seeks to console us with the news from a Society Prior that the Newsociety Superior General told a meeting in February of all Newsociety Priors in France that discussions between the SSPX and Rome are at a standstill because the SSPX is still insisting on doctrine first – well done, Fr Pagliarani – while Rome insists on fixing first a practical agreement. But need Rome even be concerned? Need it not merely wait for the ripe fruit to fall into its lap? Bishop Tissier is now so unwell that reportedly a room is being hospitalised inside Écône for him to retire to. Only two SSPX bishops remain to look after its worldwide needs. So either the Superior General must submit to Rome’s terms for the consecration of further bishops, continuing his predecessor’s disastrous conciliating of Church leaders who, however sweet they are, have lost the Faith, as the Archbishop said. Or he must consecrate more bishops without the Pope’s permission, as the Archbishop did. But would the Newsociety still follow in the Archbishop’s heroic line, of defying the (at least) objective traitors in Rome? One may doubt it.

Kyrie eleison.

Hoist Ladder – III

Hoist Ladder – III on May 16, 2020

The last two issues of these “Comments,” # 668 and # 669 of May 2 and 9 respectively, sought to defend the apparent harshness of Archbishop Lefebvre’s parting advice in 1990 to the priests of the Society he founded when he said to them that they should have nothing further to do with the Church’s Conciliar officials in Rome. # 668 underlined the gravity of the subjectivism denounced by the Archbishop as underlying all the Council’s main documents. # 669 recognised that respect and charity are due to the highest officials of Our Lord’s true Church, but repeated yet again that their subjectivism is so grave for the Church’s Faith that the due respect and charity had to be measured by the Faith and not the reverse.

However, the “apparent harshness” may need further defence, and those “Comments” some explanation.

Firstly, a brief reminder of some Society history of those crucial years between 1988 and 2012. In 1988 the Archbishop at the end of a long and outstanding career in the Church’s service apparently performed a grave disservice to the Church by consecrating four bishops against the express will of Pope John-Paul II in order to defend the Faith and the Church from the ravages of the new Conciliar religion being promoted worldwide by the Pope. Of course the Pope did not understand his action, and behaved like a swine in the comparison of Our Lord warning us not to throw pearls in front of swine because they will trample on the pearls and then turn and rend us ourselves. Indeed until 2000 John-Paul II trampled upon the Church’s Tradition as defended by the Archbishop and did his best to “rend” the Society.

However, all over the world there were serious and believing Catholics who fully understood and supported the Archbishop, and who so rallied to his support that the Society arguably enjoyed its golden years in defending the Faith between 1988 and 2000. As a result, not only did the trampling of Rome and the Pope upon the Society not succeed, but it was even counter-productive, attracting more and more customers to buy the Church’s true pearls of Tradition, thanks to the Archbishop and his Society. The official Church’s failure to tread those pearls into the mud became absolutely clear with the success of the Society’s Jubilee Year Pilgrimage to Rome in the spring of 2000. That was when the “swine” of Rome switched their strategy from the stick to the carrot, and began cooing like doves in order to entice the Society to descend from its impregnable fortress of doctrine down to the shifting sands of diplomacy.

And the Archbishop having died in 1991, his charisma and wisdom were no longer there to prevent his relatively young successors from being seduced by the cooing of the apparent doves.

And so the battle-lines in the fight for the Faith seem to have been re-drawn, with the official Society having gone over to the enemy, so that it is now more angry with the lightweight “Resistance” than it is with heavyweight Conciliar Rome. In fairness however, the present Society leaders have not yet signed over the store, and a good number of Society priests are truly opposed to their store being signed over. But any Catholic must wish that the Society never cease to stand for what the Archbishop stood for.

And his “harshness”? Pachamama is merely one very clear example of how right he was to sound the alarm and to take action in the wake of Vatican II. The same “swine” as later had cooed like doves also at the Council (1962–1965) to fool a huge number of Catholic sheep and shepherds at the time, by no means all of whom woke up later or in the next 55 years to date. But the Archbishop had learned to value the good philosophy he had been given at the seminary to fortify his common sense, and so he judged everything in the light of true principles and the Faith. In that light the modern world and its wretched Council are a sorry affair, leaving only an appearance of Christianity while the substance is becoming something completely different. To say, take to the hills and do not look back, is only what God Himself told Lot. It is good advice, however difficult now to apply, for a world being confined in folly.

Kyrie eleison.

Hoist Ladder! – I

Hoist Ladder! – I on May 2, 2020

Many people who should be listening to Archbishop Lefebvre are no longer doing so, as though they know better, or as though at the end of his life, after he had bequeathed four bishops to the Society of St Pius X to ensure its survival, he had nothing more to say or to do of any importance. But in September of 1990 Providence granted him to give in Écône a retreat to his priests in which he could hand on to them – or at least to those that had ears to hear – his guidelines for their future. Let us quote again one of the most important passages, and sigh with sorrow that he was not listened to, or was not understood:—

This fight between the Church and liberal modernists is the same fight as that of Vatican II. It is not that complicated. And the effects are far-reaching. The more one analyses the documents of Vatican II together with the interpretation given them by the authorities of the Church after the Council , and the more one realises that the problem is not just certain errors like ecumenism, religious liberty, collegiality or a form of liberalism, it is a whole perversion of the mind. It is a new philosophy, based on the modern philosophy of modernism. The book which a German theologian Johannes Dörmann has just published, and which I hope can soon be in your hands, is very instructive in this regard. He is commenting on the thinking of Pope John-Paul II, in particular on a retreat which he preached in the Vatican while he was still just a bishop. Dörmann shows that the Pope’s thinking is entirely subjective. And on re-reading his speeches, one realises that that is the case. Despite the appearances, it is not Catholic.

The Pope’s understanding of God, of Our Lord, comes from the depths of man’s consciousness and not from any objective Revelation to which he adheres with his mind. Man constructs his own idea of God. Recently for instance the Pope said that the idea of the Trinity can only have arisen very lately, because man’s inner psychology had to be capable of rising to the Holy Trinity. Therefore the idea of the Trinity came not from any outer revelation but from the inner depths of man’s consciousness. Here is a totally different concept of Revelation, Faith and philosophy, and it is a total perversion. How do we get out of it? I have no idea, but in any case that is the reality. These are no small errors. We are running into a line of philosophy going back to Descartes and Kant, the whole line of modern philosophers who paved the way for the Revolution. ( . . . )

The Archbishop then quotes Pope John-Paul himself saying that the ecumenical movement is his “prime pastoral concern,” as we see put into practice by his constant receiving of delegations from all kinds of sects and religions, and yet, says the Archbishop, all this ecumenism has not made the Church advance one little bit, nor can it do so – all it has done is to confirm non-Catholics in their errors without trying to convert them. Finally the Archbishop quotes the Pope’s Secretary of State, Cardinal Casaroli, in a then recent address to the United Nations Commission for the Rights of Man, quoting in turn the Pope to the effect that religious liberty is like a corner-stone of the building of the rights of man. Man, and every man, is the central preoccupation of the Holy See, as he is undoubtedly also yours, concludes the Cardinal. And the Archbishop concludes, for the Society priests in front of him at the retreat –

All we can do is pull up the ladder (i.e. cut all contact) . There is nothing we can do with these people, because we have nothing in common with them.

This is the correct conclusion whenever one is faced by people who start out from a denial of reality outside the mind, or else of the mind’s ability to know that extra-mental objective reality. They are mentally sick, like swine in front of whom pearls should not be thrown, says Our Lord, “lest they trample them under foot and turn to attack you ” (Mt. VII, 6). For has Conciliar Rome over the last 20 years done anything other than turn to attack the Society in its striving by contacts to obtain official recognition?

Kyrie eleison.

Church’s Entombment – II

Church’s Entombment – II on April 25, 2020

Two weeks ago these “Comments” raised a double question as to how the Catholic Church, in its present distress, comparable to the time spent by Our Lord between His crucifixion and His resurrection, could firstly survive in its “tomb” and secondly rise from it. A first part of the answer was in general, that in what Almighty God can or will do He is not limited to what human beings can think of, in fact He can be expected to do the unexpected. In the fifth joyful Mystery of the Holy Rosary His own Mother was baffled by the apparent indifference to her happiness of her otherwise wholly obedient Son.

Then in particular, these “Comments” suggested that while it is absolutely abnormal for the Church to survive as in a tomb, virtually without the help from above of an orthodox Pope or bishops, without the structure of an official diocese or parish or Congregation, nevertheless where there is the true Faith and a minimum of good sense and charity, the Church can survive even in small and disjointed groups, at least for a while, until Providence restores a normal hierarchy to put an end to the disorder. For instance we can look at the disorder around us today and we can say that it is the end of the Church, but if God has allowed it, it is certain that it is not the end of the Church, which He could never allow (Mt. XXVIII, 20).

There remains the second half of the question raised two weeks ago, namely how the Church is going to be able to get out of its present tomb, or rise from it. The question has a special importance, because the temptation is to see the problem in too human a way and to look for a too human answer. Thus whereas Archbishop Lefebvre used to say that the solution is in God’s hands – and that is the truth, not just an easy way out – his successors at the head of the Society of St Pius X took the position that we cannot wait indefinitely to resolve the Society’s unsatisfactory status within the true Church. Instead we must seek to

obtain as soon as possible the official recognition which is due to the Society’s fidelity, and which will be of immense benefit to the entire Church. And on this basis the Archbishop’s successors at various moments since 2012 have rejoiced at coming within an ace, they have said, of sealing an agreement with Rome which would at last have granted to the Society the official recognition that it deserves.

But these successors had lost the wood for the trees. What is today’s Rome if not wedded and welded to the new religion of Pachamama and Vatican II? And what was the Archbishop’s Society if not a bastion of the true Faith to be defended by the formation of true priests to continue the true Catholic religion as before Vatican II? The confrontation was direct, because the change of religion was radical. Therefore if today’s Rome granted – or grants – anything to the Society, it can only be if the Society drops its guard. Thus the officialising of Society marriages and confessions has done much to disarm Society resistance to official Rome, and through official Rome to its Conciliar religion and to the worldwide apostasy.

What the Archbishop’s successors have not grasped, as the Archbishop very much did, is the supernatural breadth and depth of this apostasy. They are too close to it. They are too close to the modern world out of which it springs. That is why they look for human answers to a problem which can only have a divine solution. The problem is far beyond the calculation, manoeuvring or politics of men, even churchmen.

Like Daniel, men must turn to God, and to turn to God we must go through His Mother, as God made clear at Fatima in 1917, just when the modern problem was arising in all its force, with the Communist Revolution in Russia. In fact God gave us the supernatural solution just as the Devil must have thought he was really winning, and that solution is the Consecration (not secularisation), of Russia (not all the world), to the Immaculate Heart of Mary (not even to the Sacred Heart), by the Pope (not by the authorities of any other than the Catholic religion), in union with all the Catholic bishops of the world (not by the Pope alone). And here is how the Church will climb out of its tomb. And here alone is how, because His Mother has said so. Let the Society urge all its priests and followers to practise intensely the first Saturdays, to contribute to obtaining that Consecration.

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.

Modernism’s Malice – II

Modernism’s Malice – II on March 14, 2020

The malice of modernism is a huge subject, no less than that of a whole world turning against its Creator at the end of a process lasting several centuries, when at the height of the Middle Ages Christendom tipped over from rising to falling instead. The rise had begun in 33AD of course, when Our Incarnate Lord founded God’s one true Church by His sacrifice on the Cross. The Middle Ages might be dated from the Pontificate of Gregory the Great (590–604), lasting nearly a millennium until the outbreak of Protestantism and the onset of the modern age in 1517.

But there was a huge difference, naturally, between mankind’s attitude towards Christ and His Church before and after the Middle Ages: before the Middle Ages Christianity was proving itself steadily more and more to be the best foundation for civilisation, whereas after the Middle Ages it had amply proved itself, so that after the Middle Ages its superiority to all other religions had to be recognised even while it was being in practice refused. This means that all substitutes for Catholicism that have followed the Middle Ages are characterised by a hypocrisy that needed to be steadily more subtle in order to pass itself off as the true replacement for Catholicism.

Thus Luther brutally rejected Catholicism but still pretended that his revolution was a “Reformation,” and after the Catholic Church threw off Luther, the revolutionary Jansenists created in the 16th century a Protestant form of Catholicism. The Jansenists in turn morphed into liberals in the 18th century, pretending to have in their Freemasonry a superiorly enlightened cult to that of Protestants or Catholics, and when the true Church resolutely threw off Freemasonry from the 18th century onwards, then the liberals disguised themselves as liberal Catholics in the 19th century and as “up-dated” or superiorly Catholic liberals in the 20th century. St Pius X rapidly diagnosed and dismissed this Modernism in Pascendi, but by passing itself off still more subtly as an up-dated Catholicism, it swept almost the whole Church with it at Vatican II (1962–1965), and in the 21st century the disguise was so good that even the official Society of St Pius X, founded to resist that Neo-modernism, was essentially swept away also.

Humanly speaking, it is daunting to realise in 2020 how little Catholic resistance is left to this rise of the Devil and of his attacks against the Church, but this is what the all-wise God has chosen to allow, and without question He is still looking after His “little flock,” as Our Lord calls it: “Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s pleasure to give you the kingdom. Sell your possessions and give alms; provide yourselves with purses that do not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that does not fail, where no thief approaches and no moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” (Lk. XII, 32–34). In other words, renounce money and materialism, because Our Lord warns us that we cannot serve two gods at the same time, and if we serve Mammon, we cannot serve God (Mt. VI, 24).

And if we recognise how vulnerable we are to the subtle errors and lies and blasphemies of the Devil which have overwhelmed the world all around us, then by way of antidote let us pray the Rosary of Our Lady, preferably all 15 Mysteries a day, because She and She alone has him under her feet, as any good image of Her, picture or statue, reminds us, and so overwhelming is the evil today that 15 Mysteries are not too many, if they are at all reasonable and possible.

How it is that a humble Jewish maiden is more than a match for Satan with all his “pomps and works” is God’s secret, revealed both by Our Lord – “I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to infants” (MT. XI, 25) – and by St Paul – “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong” (I Cor. 18–30). Next week, a closer look into the hypocrisy of modernism.

Kyrie eleison.