Tradition

Truth First

Truth First on March 1, 2014

There must be many objections to the argument of recent issues of these “Comments” that, divine truth being prior to human teachers, then the fallibility of Popes need not concern us all that much because the true Faith is behind, beyond and above them. But here is a classic objection: the Truth in itself may be above them, but to us human beings it only comes through them – “faith is by hearing” (Rom.X, 17). Thus Our Lord entrusted to Peter (i.e. the Popes) the task of confirming his brethren in the faith (Lk.XXII, 31–32). So to us Catholics the teachers are prior to the Truth which we cannot receive without them. Moreover the Holy Ghost guides them (Jn.XVI, 13), so how can I possibly tell if or when he is not doing so?

Also in Scripture lies the answer. St. Paul writes to a flock which he has instructed in the Faith: “Though we, or an angel from heaven, preach a gospel to you besides that which we have preached to you, let him be anathema.” And the point is so important that St Paul immediately repeats it: “As we said before, so now I say again: If anyone preach to you a gospel, besides that which you have received, let him be anathema” (Gal.I, 8–9)

But, a Galatian might have objected, why should we believe your gospel on your first visit to Galatia and not an eventually different one on your second? St. Paul immediately gives a first reason: “ The gospel which was preached by me is not according to man. For neither did I receive it of man, nor did I learn it, but by the revelation of Jesus Christ” (Gal.I, 11–12). And St Paul confirms this by narrating how little contact he had with those who might have taught him, the other Apostles, before he began preaching (I, 15–19), a fact obviously verifiable by them, and he swears to the Galatians that he is not lying (I, 20). A second reason he gives a little later, which is the miracles and experience of the Holy Spirit (III, 2–5) that the Galatians themselves had witnessed as the direct result of the preaching of Paul’s first visit.

Thus Paul proves that God both taught him, and confirmed for the Galatians, the gospel of that first visit, and the contradiction between it and any different gospel the Galatians would be not only able but also obliged to discern for themselves, if they wished to save their souls. And no matter if (I,8) the preacher of the different gospel were an angel or Paul himself – or a Pope! – the Galatians would still have the absolute duty to stay with Paul’s first gospel. The truth that had been set before them (III,1) the Galatians had recognized and accepted it (III, 3), just as one recognizes that 2 and 2 are 4, so it would have priority over any teacher eventually contradicting it, whatever authority to teach he might appear to have (I,9).

Thus Archbishop Lefebvre used to say that for the 19 centuries between St Paul and Vatican II the Church had preached exactly the same gospel, coming from God and ever and again confirmed by him. That gospel is, as revealed by God, Revelation; as handed down by churchmen, Tradition; as taught with authority by the Church, its Ordinary and Extraordinary Magisterium. Between that gospel and Vatican II the contradiction is obvious, so we must accept and believe Tradition, if we wish to save our souls, whatever the apparent authorities of the Church may say to the contrary. So help us God. How then can the Archbishop’s own Society of St Pius X be officially seeking reconciliation with the authorities of Vatican II?

Kyrie eleison.

Church’s Infallibility – II

Church’s Infallibility – II on February 15, 2014

Much needs to be said about the Church’s infallibility, especially to correct illusions arising (by mistake) from the Definition of Papal infallibility in 1870. Today for instance sedevacantists and liberals think that their positions are wholly opposed, but do they stop for a moment to see how similarly they think?—Major: Popes are infallible. Minor: Conciliar Popes are liberal. Liberal Conclusion: we must become liberal. Sedevacantist Conclusion: they cannot be Popes. The error is neither in the logic, nor in the Minor. It can only be in a misunderstanding on both their parts of infallibility in the Major. Once again, modern men put authority above truth.

Eternal God is Truth itself, absolutely infallible. In created time, through his Incarnate Son, he instituted his Church with a doctrine for the salvation of human souls. Coming from him that doctrine could only be inerrant, but to keep it free from the errors of the human churchmen to whom he would entrust it, his Son promised them the “spirit of truth” to guide them “for ever” (Jn. XIV, 16). For indeed without some such guarantee, how could God require of men, on pain of eternal damnation, to believe in his Son, in his doctrine and in his Church (Mk.XVI, 16)?

Yet even from churchmen God will not take away that free-will to err which he gave them. And he will allow that freedom to go as far as they wish, short of their making his Truth inaccessible to men. That reaches far, and it includes a number of highly defective Popes, but God’s reach is still farther than the wickedness of men (Isaiah LIX, 1,2). At Vatican II for instance, Church error went a long way, without however God’s allowing his Church to be wholly defectible in its presentation to men of the inerrant Truth coming from his own infallibility. Even the Conciliar Popes have told many Catholic truths alongside their Conciliar errors.

But how then can I, a simple soul, tell the difference between their truths and their errors? Firstly, if I am truly looking for God with an upright heart, he will guide me to him, as the Bible says in many places. And secondly, God’s doctrine being as unchangeable as God, it must be the doctrine that I find (nearly) all his churchmen to have taught and handed down in (nearly) all places and at (nearly) all times, best known as Tradition. From the beginning of the Church, that handing down has been the surest test of what Our Lord himself taught. Down the ages inerrant Tradition has been the work of millions of churchmen. It has been that for which God endowed his Church as a whole, and not just the Popes, with the guidance of the infallible Holy Ghost.

Here is, so to speak, the cake of Church infallibility upon which the Popes’ solemn Definitions are merely the icing, precious and necessary, the peak of the Church’s infallibility, but not its mountain bulk. Notice firstly that Definitions by the Popes’ Extraordinary Magisterium existed not only from 1870 but from the beginning of the Church, and they existed not to make Tradition true but merely to make certain what belonged to Tradition and what did not, whenever the erring of men had made that uncertain. Sensing truth, Archbishop Lefebvre rightly preferred inerrant Tradition to gravely erring Popes. Never having understood him, like all modern liberals not sensing truth, his successors are in the process of preferring erring Popes to inerrant Tradition. Underestimating truth and overestimating the Popes, sedevacantists wholly repudiate the erring Popes and can be tempted to quit the Church altogether. Lord, have mercy!

Kyrie eleison.

GREC – IV

GREC – IV on April 27, 2013

A lady having read the first “Eleison Comments” on GREC (EC 294, March 2) wrote to complain that I misrepresented GREC, the Parisian group of Catholics founded in the late 1990’s to bring together Traditionalists and mainstream Catholics so that they could think and talk peacefully with one another for the good of Mother Church. I am happy to correct errors of fact which she pointed out. I have no problem admitting personal faults of mine which she highlighted. However on one major point I must disagree with her.

As for the errors of fact, Mr Gilbert Pérol was French Ambassador to the Italian government, and not to the Vatican. Also he was not a “lay collaborator,” but a personal friend of Fr Michel Lelong, a White Father. Also GREC was launched not “in the salons of Paris,” but in the flat of the Ambassador’s widow, Mrs. Huguette Pérol, who, I was told, takes full responsibility for having founded GREC, purely to help the Church, and with the help of people “competent and concerned to be faithful to the Gospel and to Tradition.”

As for my faults, she wrote that I was “full of myself” and “ignorant,” that I lacked modesty and diplomacy, that I showed insufficient respect for the dead, and that I wrote with a sarcastic tone befitting neither an educated person nor a priest. Madam, how happy I would be if these were the worst faults for which I shall have to answer before God. Do pray for my particular judgment.

However, as to the sarcasm, let me plead that if I mocked the nostalgia of Catholics today for the Catholicism of the 1950’s, I was thinking not of Ambassador Pérol in person, but of the multitudes of present-day Catholics, who, not realizing why God allowed Vatican II to split the mainstream Church from Catholic Tradition in the first place, wish to return to that sentimentalized faith of the previous decade which led directly to Vatican II! Madam, the crucial point has nothing to do with subjective persons, it has everything to do with objective doctrine.

That is why I must disagree with you as to the competence of the people helping Mrs Pérol to found GREC. That a professional diplomat like Ambassador Pérol should have resorted to diplomacy to solve major problems of doctrine is misguided, but understandable. That a Conciliar priest like Fr Lelong should have encouraged such a diplomatic undertaking is graver, but still understandable, given how Vatican II undermined all doctrine by officialising subjectivism within the Church. What is much less easy to accept is the “competence and concern for the Gospel and Tradition” on the part of priests who were trained under Archbishop Lefebvre to understand the doctrinal disaster of Vatican II. Such priests should never have encouraged, let alone taken any active part in, an essentially diplomatic effort to solve an essentially doctrinal disaster, however well-intentioned that effort may have been.

And yet, even in their case the French proverb to some extent applies: “To understand everything means to forgive everything.” The Archbishop was of an earlier and saner generation. They are all children of the world shattered by two World Wars. All credit to them for resorting to his person for their priestly formation, and while he lived he raised us all up. But they never truly absorbed his doctrine, and so once he was dead they began within a few years to fall back. But he was right, and they, and GREC – forgive me, gracious lady – are wrong. Please God they may come right.

Kyrie eleison.

Resistance Rising

Resistance Rising on April 20, 2013

Another three-week journey on the western side of the Atlantic Ocean has just given me to see that the resistance to the collapse of the Society of St Pius X into the embrace of apostate Rome is rising, more in quality than in quantity (but Catholic quantity follows Catholic quality, and not the other way round). Traditionalists have been deliberately kept in the dark as to what is going on between the Society and Rome, but as they find out just how the true Catholic religion is being endangered, so a number of good men are reacting with seriousness and resolution.

I visited first of all Fr Jahir’s community of some dozen religious in northern Brazil, behind the city of Salvador where Fr Jahir was a parish priest for many years. Having fled the Newchurch, he sees the situation of the Newsociety very clearly. He has founded his own community in the true Faith, and it is easy to imagine several of his men becoming in a few years’ time valiant priests who will hold that Faith. I gave to one of them Tonsure and the first two Minor Orders, and then headed south to visit another Brazilian priest becoming famous for his staunch adherence to Tradition, as Archbishop Lefebvre understood it.

The Benedictine Dom Thomas is Prior of the Monastery in the mountains near Nova Friburgo behind Rio de Janeiro. It was founded in the 1980’s by Dom Gérard as an offshoot from the Traditional Benedictine Monastery which Dom Gérard had also founded in France in the 1970’s, with the encouragement and support of Archbishop Lefebvre. However, when the Archbishop consecrated bishops in 1988, Dom Gérard broke with him, took his monastery into the Newchurch, and crossed the ocean to do the same with the Brazilian monastery.

Here he ran into the resistance of Dom Thomas, who was still only a young monk, but who before becoming a monk had learned in depth from a famous Brazilian lay Catholic, Gustavo Corçâo, the wrongness of the Newchurch. With help from good laymen and with the support of Archbishop Lefebvre, Dom Thomas stood up to Dom Gérard and saved the Monastery for Tradition. With such a clash behind him it is not surprising that Dom Thomas also sees very clearly the situation both of the Newchurch and of the Newsociety. In a tent set up outside the small Monastery church for the extra visitors to the Holy Week ceremonies, we celebrated with few priests but with all the essentials the Maundy Thursday Consecration of Holy Oils. These the Monastery can now supply for this year to priests in particular whose supply could be cut off by the Newsociety.

Then I flew north to visit three more centres of the Resistance being launched in the USA by the brave Frs Joseph Pfeiffer and David Hewko. Near Connecticut, in New Jersey and in Minnesota I was able to give Confirmations and conferences to Catholics suspicious of what is going on in the Newsociety. They had good questions, deserving of truthful answers.

Good news for benefactors in Euroland: the St Marcel Initiative has at last a RIB and an IBAN, based in France, to facilitate donations in euros to the St Marcel Initiative. To make a bank transfer from inside France use the following RIB: [write to letters@eleisoncomments.com for the number]; from outside France use the following IBAN: [write to letters@eleisoncomments.com for the number]. The St Marcel Initiative has just been able to give a little serious aid, much needed, to Dom Thomas’ Monastery. He thanks all of you who have contributed to the Initiative.

Kyrie eleison.

Doctrinal Declaration – II

Doctrinal Declaration – II on April 13, 2013

The Doctrinal Declaration of April 15 of last year, drawn up by the Superior General (SG) of the Society of St Pius X as a basis for the Society’s reintegration into the mainstream Church, has emerged nearly one year later into public view. It was designed by the SG to please both the Conciliar Romans and Traditionalists (“It can be read with dark or rose-coloured glasses,” he said in public). It did please the Romans who declared that it represented an “advance” in their direction. It did not please Traditionalists who saw in it (what they knew of it) such ambiguity as to represent a betrayal of Archbishop Lefebvre’s stand for the Catholic Faith, to the point that they considered that the Romans need only have accepted it to destroy his Society.

In fact when the SG met the Romans on June 11 in Rome to receive their decision, he fully expected they would accept it. Numerous observers speculate that if they did not accept it, it was only because the intervening publication of the April 7 Letter of the Three Bishops to the SG warned the Romans that he would not be able to bring the whole Society with him into the bosom of their Conciliar Rome, as he may have given them to understand he would do, and as they wanted him to do. They did and do not want another split to start Tradition all over again.

Be all that as it may, space remains here for nothing but one major argument that the proposal of the Doctrinal Declaration, had it been accepted by Rome, would have destroyed the SSPX. Archbishop Lefebvre declared, and proved, that Vatican II was a break or rupture with previous Church teaching. On that premise arose, and rests, the Traditional Catholic movement. So, confronted by the on-going resistance of that movement to his beloved Vatican II, Benedict XVI proclaimed at the outset of his pontificate in 2005 the “hermeneutic of continuity,” whereby the Council (objectively) contradicting Tradition was to be (subjectively) so interpreted as not to contradict it. Thus there would be no break or rupture between it and Catholic Tradition!

Now see the seventh paragraph (III, 5) of the Doctrinal Declaration. It declares that Vatican II statements difficult to reconcile with all previous Church teaching, (1) “must be understood in the light of Tradition entire and uninterrupted, in line with the truths taught by the Church’s preceding Magisterium, (2) not accepting any interpretation of those statements which can lead Catholic doctrine to be exposed in opposition or rupture with Tradition and that Magisterium.”

The first part here (1) is perfectly true, so long as it means that any Conciliar novelty “difficult to reconcile” will be flatly rejected if it objectively contradicts previous Church teaching. But (1) is directly contradicted by (2) when (2) says that no Conciliar novelty may be “interpreted” as being in rupture with Tradition. It is as though one said that all football teams must wear blue shirts, but football team shirts of any other colour are all to be interpreted as being nothing other than blue! What nonsense! But it is pure “hermeneutic of continuity.”

Now, do the soldiers holding the last fortress of the Faith that is organised worldwide realize what their Commander is thinking? Do they realize that his solemn declaration of SSPX doctrine shows him to be thinking like an enemy leader? Are they happy that they are being led to think like the enemies of the Faith? All ideas must be Catholic, while non-Catholic ideas will be “interpreted” as Catholic. Wake up, comrades! Enemy thinking is in Headquarters.

Kyrie eleison.

GREC – III

GREC – III on April 6, 2013

Wishing to put himself in the place of God, modern man seeks to replace God’s order of the world with his own. But God’s order is real, outside of and independent of man’s mind. So modern man unhooks his mind from that reality, and selects from it only such pieces as he wishes to build into his own fantasy. Now the highest order of God’s Creation is best expressed in his Church’s doctrine. Therefore all churchmen or laymen today undergoing the influence of everything “normal” in the world around them suffer from a deep refusal or ignorance of the nature and necessity of doctrine.

Here is the essential problem of GREC, as presented in two previous issues of “Eleison Comments” (294 and 295). The Groupe de Réflexion Entre Catholiques was founded in 1997 in the salons of Paris to promote friendly meetings and exchanges between Catholics of Tradition and Catholics of the mainstream Church, in order to create a climate of mutual trust and respect which would facilitate a reconciliation between them, and an end to their unnecessary estrangement. Such a purpose gravely overlooks the importance of doctrine, not necessarily with malice aforethought, of which God is judge, but whatever foolish men may think, doctrine can no more be left out of account than can reality.

In Fr. Lelong’s book on GREC, For the Necessary Reconciliation, he tells how two Society of St Pius X priests and its Superior General “made a decisive contribution to the launching and continuance of GREC.” Even before it was launched, Fr. Du Chalard gave to Fr Lelong a friendly reception in his SSPX priory, and “in following years never ceased to support GREC in a discrete and attentive way.” At the launching of GREC, Fr. Lorans, then Rector of the SSPX Institute in Paris and exercising from Paris a decisive influence from then until now on SSPX publications, welcomed the idea of “dialogue between Catholics,” and very soon obtained from the SSPX Superior General in Switzerland approval for his participation in GREC. From then on Fr. Lorans played a leading part in all of its activities.

Those activities began on a small scale and in private. In May of 2000 was held GREC’s first public meeting to which Fr. Lorans contributed, with 150 people attending. Meetings became more and more frequent, with SSPX priests participating. Church authorities at the highest level were regularly consulted and kept informed. Fr. Lorans for his part made possible “a contact of deepening trust” and friendly exchanges with the SSPX Superior General. From 2004 GREC meetings were opened wider still to the public, and in September of that year a “theological working group” was set up with Fr. Lorans participating, and another SSPX priest and a theologian from Rome, both of whom would later be taking part in the Doctrinal Discussions between Rome and the SSPX from 2009 to 2011. GREC may well have seen in these Discussions the realization of its fondest hopes – at last the theologians were meeting in a climate which GREC had done so much to create “for the necessary reconciliation.”

Thanks be to God, the Discussions gave back to doctrine its proper primacy. They demonstrated that between Catholic and Conciliar doctrine is an unbridgeable gulf. But was GREC’s way of thinking then blocked within the SSPX? Far from it! SSPX Headquarters switched overnight from “We pursue no practical agreement without a doctrinal agreement” to “There can be no doctrinal agreement, so we pursue a practical agreement”! Alas, the springtime uprising of protest last year from within the SSPX was smothered and confused again at the General Chapter of July, but SSPX HQ’s continued pursuit of a practical agreement has hardly been smothered.

“Our help is in the name of the Lord,” in particular in the Consecration of Russia. Nowhere else.

Kyrie eleison.