St. Paul

Wasteland Remedies – I

Wasteland Remedies – I on August 7, 2010

“Alright, your Excellency,” I can hear parents saying, “so the ‘universities’ are a wasteland. But on that reckoning of yours you must admit that just about everywhere else is a wasteland as well. Then what are we to do with our children? God’s law forbids us to use unlawful means to prevent their arriving. They arrive. And then?”

The swift answer is that in a world worse than ever, souls that want to get to Heaven will have to be more heroic than ever, but their reward will be correspondingly greater than ever.

Pius XII said that the world was worse in his day than in the time of Sodom and Gomorrah, and he died in 1958! What would he say today? Facing the same problem, the Popes who followed him “moved the goal-posts” at Vatican II in order not to have to go on condemning, condemning, condemning. But that was the easy way out. To switch off the alarms is not the same thing as to extinguish the fire. Church and world are blazing merrily, and the first thing parents must do is to face the problem: extreme danger for their children’s eternal salvation.

If once they grasp that danger, their Catholic Faith will tell them that they cannot take the Conciliar low road, nor any other low road, they must take the heroic high road. “We will not get to Heaven on feather-beds,” said St Thomas More. Our Lord said, “He who would be my disciple, let him take up his cross, and follow me” (Mt.XVI, 24), and “He that shall persevere to the end, he shall be saved” (Mt. XXIV, 13). Parents must make up their minds that if to save their children’s souls they need to be heroes, then heroes they will be. At that point, as the proverb says, “Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” so once parental love has the will, it will find a way, inside and outside the home.

For outside the home, see next week’s “Eleison Comments” for alternatives to the ‘university’ For inside the home, any priest worth his salt will tell them to start by firmly establishing the family Rosary in the home, and to continue by throwing out that television set which is a tabernacle of the world, the flesh and the Devil. From the youngest age, let children’s hearts and minds be filled in the home with live interchange and lively discussion of everything under the sun. This is because by the time children are of an age to go to ‘university,’ the die is usually cast, for good or ill, so that if a boy has grown up in a real live home, lifted towards Heaven by prayer, the worst of ‘universities’ may not do him too much harm, whereas if he has been raised as a televidiot, the best university may not help him too much towards Heaven.

Notice that EC 158 did not tell parents never to pay for a boy of theirs to go to ‘university’. It said to think hard before doing so. If parents think hard while their boy is still young, their Faith should tell them how life at home needs to be changed, without too much delay. As St. Paul says (I Cor. II, 9), quoting Isaiah (LXIV, 4), Heaven is infinitely well worth every effort, infinitely surpassing even the wildest human imagination.

Kyrie eleison.

Restoring Fatherhood

Restoring Fatherhood on May 22, 2010

It is easy to blame parents today for not knowing how to raise their children. It will be more useful to help all of them wishing to be helped to see where the problem of their estranged children is coming from. The problem is, in a way, as majestic as God, because it comes from the modern world’s wholesale refusal and denial of God.

The human family is a small society, consisting basically of father, mother and children. Now common sense tells us that every human society needs a head to be able to function. If no head directs or commands, the society loses its direction and falls apart. A football team needs a captain, a corporation needs a chief executive officer, a country needs a king or president, a town needs a mayor, a fire brigade needs a chief, an army needs a general, a university needs a rector, a court needs a judge, and so on, and so on.

Above all, a family needs a father, because the human family is not only a human society, it is the most basic and natural of human societies, in fact it is the basic model for all other societies. This is because in no other society can the bonds which tie the members together be so deep or natural as the bonds which tie husband to wife and parents to children. Also in no other society is it so clear how the head must both command and care for the members. If a father commands without caring, the family suffers from his harshness. If he cares without commanding – rather more often the case today – it suffers from his softness. Thus family fatherhood is the model for all human authority. That is why (cf. EC 145) the Fourth Commandment to honour father and mother stands at the head of the seven Commandments governing relations in human society.

Now family fatherhood, like all fatherhood or authority, derives from God the Father. St Paul says, “I bow my knees to the Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ, of whom all fatherhood is named” (Eph. III, 14,15). In other words, says the Word of God, from the fatherhood of God the Father all fatherhood in the human family, all headship in any human society, derives its nature, because the “name,” or word, signifies the nature or thing. Then it stands to reason that in any world which kicks out God the Father, as our world is now doing, the name and nature of fatherhood will be drained out of our minds, and all fatherhood and all authority will be emptied out of our lives.

Family fathers, lead your families to God! Put yourselves under him, and your wives and children will put themselves that much more easily under you. “The head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man; and the head of Christ is God,” says St Paul (I Cor. XI, 3). Give to wife and children the example of a manly piety, as natural as it is “supernatural,” and whatever our mad world may get up to for its part, you at least will be doing the best you can for the family that God has entrusted to you.

Specifics for boys will follow in another “Eleison Comments,” if God wills.

Kyrie eleison.

Just Claims

Just Claims on May 30, 2009

On the assumption that the Second Vatican Council established within the Catholic Church a serious split between Catholic Truth and Catholic Authority, “Eleison Comments” three weeks ago (“Flat Contradiction”) divided today’s Catholics between those who cling to Truth and have problems with Catholic Authority, and those who cling to Catholic Authority and have problems with Catholic Truth or doctrine, for instance on religious liberty.

Setting up such a parallel between “Conciliarists” following Vatican II and “Traditionalists” following the age-old doctrine and liturgy, may well shock numbers of both, for the reasons evoked above, but let us appeal to the realities in the Church around us. Do we not observe that as Traditionalists who wholly reject present Church authorities risk losing their Catholic sense, so too Conciliarists who wholly scorn present Traditionalists (as do most German bishops) risk ceasing to be Catholics for lack of any sense of doctrinal truth?

However, the parallel only goes so far. For while outright “sedevacantism” and outright Neo-modernism are in this logical respect comparable, they are by no means equivalent, because Truth is higher than Authority, which only exists to serve Truth. If all Authority disappeared, Truth would still be there (“My words will not pass away,” says Our Lord – Mk.XXV, 35). But if all Truth were smothered in lies, as is happening today, we would see, as we are seeing, all Authority discredited with it, and being replaced by brute force. Truth and its ensuing Justice are the life-blood of Authority. Authority is merely the servant and protector of Truth and Justice.

This is why Traditionalists clinging to Truth are, as such, repeat, as such, better Catholics than Conciliarists clinging to Authority – judge by the fruits! And while Truth, by its nature of corresponding to the object and not to the subject, cannot bend to Authority, on the contrary the Church authorities, Popes and Cardinals and Bishops, must one day bend back to the Truth, and the sooner the better. Nor is saying so remotely an arrogant claim on the part of Traditionalists, as Cardinal Ratzinger once opined, because Traditionalists never invented Tradition, Tradition was a given, from being merely faithful to which they got their name. Archbishop Lefebvre had engraved on his tombstone St. Paul’s “Tradidi quod et accepi” (I Cor.XI, 23), because he was the very first to maintain that he had done no more than hand on what had been handed down to him.

This fundamental primacy of Truth over Authority applies inside and outside the Catholic Church, inside and outside any part of the Church. But modern souls have lost almost all grip on Truth. Here is the drama.

Kyrie eleison.

A Letter

A Letter on January 31, 2009

Following in the steps of Our Lord (Jn. XVIII, 23) and St. Paul (Acts, XXIII, 5), Archbishop Lefebvre gave his Society the example of never so cleaving to God’s Truth as to abandon respect for the men holding God’s Authority. In the midst of last week’s media uproar, surely aimed rather at the Holy Father than at a relatively insignificant bishop, here is a letter written to Cardinal Castrillón Hoyos on January 28 by that bishop:

To His Eminence Cardinal Castrillón Hoyos

Your Eminence,

Amidst this tremendous media storm stirred up by imprudent remarks of mine on Swedish television, I beg of you to accept, only as is properly respectful, my sincere regrets for having caused to yourself and to the Holy Father so much unnecessary distress and problems.

For me, all that matters is the Truth Incarnate, and the interests of His one true Church, through which alone we can save our souls and give eternal glory, in our little way, to Almighty God. So I have only one comment, from the prophet Jonas, I, 12:

“Take me up and throw me into the sea; then the sea will quiet down for you; for I know it is because of me that this great tempest has come upon you.”

Please also accept, and convey to the Holy Father, my sincere personal thanks for the document signed last Wednesday and made public on Saturday. Most humbly I will offer a Mass for both of you.

Sincerely yours in Christ,

+Richard Williamson

False Anti-Semitism

False Anti-Semitism on March 1, 2008

When “Eleison Comments” last week argued that insofar as Pope Benedict XVI’s Good Friday prayer change worked against the eternal salvation of Jews, he had proved himself – no doubt unintentionally – to be a true anti-semite, ie enemy of Jews purely as Jews, a number of readers apparently agreed. I congratulate them, because they had to be thinking with their Catholic minds instead of merely emoting with their (objectively) vile media. Let us think a little further.

Obviously, the basic principles apply to all men and not just to Jews: to wish them eternal salvation is to love them truly, because it is to wish them the greatest good of all, namely everlasting happiness in Heaven, through and with Our Lord Jesus Christ. To wish them welfare or prosperity merely in this little life on earth is to love them much less, especially if that worldly success would get in the way of their eternal salvation, as it all too easily can do – Mt.XIX, 24.

But fewer and fewer people today believe in life everlasting or in Our Lord, and so naturally the perspective of such people is different. If I urge upon them eternal life, or if I do what I prudently can to obstruct their campaigning against Our Lord, then I will seem to them to be their enemy when I am in fact their best friend. It is all a question of perspective, but it is not a question of opinion: the eternal perspective is true, while the anti-Christian perspective is objectively and absolutely false.

Now ever since the Jews were responsible for the crucifying of Our Lord Jesus Christ – “His blood be upon us and upon our children,” Mt.XXVII,25 – they have as a race and as a religion, always with noble exceptions, continued to reject him down to our day. Thus St. Paul observed that they not only “killed the Lord Jesus and the prophets,” but they also prohibited St. Paul himself from “speaking to the Gentiles so as to save them.” In brief, their behavior was such that “they please not God and are adversaries to men” (I Thess. II, 14–16). Closer to our own time, it is a matter of historical record that the designing and launching of, for instance, Communism, to wrest mankind away from God and to replace his Heaven with a man-made paradise, was largely their achievement.

So they persecuted St. Paul at every turn (see Acts of the Apostles) as being one of their arch-enemies, when in fact nobody loved them more truly or laboured more for their real well-being than did St. Paul (cf. Rom. IX,1–5). Similarly today, they will call an “anti-semite” anybody who gets in the way of any godlessness of theirs, when in fact all people labouring for their salvation, as for the salvation of Gentiles, are their best friends.

St Paul, pray for us!

Kyrie eleison.

Woman’s Gifts

Woman’s Gifts on October 27, 2007

Confronted with the proposition that women should not step forth in public in any such way as to suggest that they have authority over men, a reader of these “Comments” of two weeks ago reasonably asked, alongside what women should not do, what should they do?

The prime principle involved is that creatures of God are created to achieve their perfection by acting in accordance with their nature: Now creatures without reason cannot choose to act otherwise, but human beings have reason, and so they must choose to act in accordance with their nature. The key question then becomes, how do the observably different and complementary natures of man and woman essentially differ?

Scripture, the Word of God, tells us that woman was created to be the helpmate of man (Genesis II,10). Commenting upon this text, St. Thomas Aquinas (Ia, 92, 1) says that she was created to help him in the engendering of children, because in any other work man could be better helped by another man. St. Paul (also the Word of God) similarly says that woman will be saved by childbearing (I Tim. II,16).

Here is the key to woman´s nature as woman: she is designed to be a mother. Do we not observe, and does not St. Thomas Aquinas suggest, that in everything involved in motherhood – which is no less than the future of the human race – she is man´s superior, whereas in everything else she is his inferior?

All kinds of conclusions follow, but in answer to the reader´s question, surely whatever a woman may by today´s circumstances be enabled or obliged to do, she must, if she wishes to be happy by living in accordance with her God-given nature, somehow, intelligently, do it in a motherly way. Teaching within a private domestic framework, or true nursing, present in this respect no problem. On the contrary, making herself into a soldier, lawyer, pilot, politician, etc., etc., presents a serious problem.

Mother of God, we beg of you, inspire and protect womanhood!

Kyrie eleison.