Tag: Truth

Fourth Bishop

Fourth Bishop posted in Eleison Comments on March 11, 2017

Ever since the summer of 2012 when the Society of St Pius X decided officially to change course and abandon the doctrine-first stand taken 40 years previously by Archbishop Lefebvre, it has been interesting to watch Providence in action to ensure the Church’s defence. One might have expected a widespread uprising in defence of God’s Truth. Resistance from inside the Society? Existent, but at least up till now, largely silent. And from outside? Existent, but only a scattering of layfolk and a handful of priests, riven by divisions for lack of a recognised authority. Catholics need authority. And that need is so great that even while Truth is draining out of the man-centred Newchurch and the Rome-centred Newsociety, still souls cling to each because of the remains of Papal authority in the former, and of Catholic authority bequeathed to the latter by the Archbishop.

But Truth remains the purpose of Authority and Authority is not the purpose of Truth. Given fallen human nature, Authority is the indispensable defender and guarantee of Truth, but it comes after Truth and not before. Take for example one of Our Lord’s last instructions to Peter before He will leave Peter behind to govern the Church (Lk.XXII, 31–32): “Simon, Simon, behold Satan hath desired to have you (plural), that he may sift you as wheat. But I have prayed for thee (singular) that thy faith fail not (Truth); and thou, being once converted (Truth), confirm thy brethren (Authority).” And when on Palm Sunday a few days beforehand the Pharisees had attempted to rebuke Our Lord for the joyful noise being made by His disciples, so necessary is the adoration of God in Truth that Our Lord replied (Lk.XIX, 40): “I say to you that if these shall hold their peace, the stones will cry out.”

In today’s Newchurch, Authority is mixing Conciliar error with Catholic Truth in the engine of the Church, which is like mixing water with gasoline (petrol) in the engine of a motor car – the car is crippled, the Church is crippled. And whereas Archbishop Lefebvre defied that crippling, not least of all but rather above all, by his consecrating of four bishops to maintain a Catholic authority that would protect God’s Truth, his successors at the head of what was once his Society are doing their utmost to submit his protection of Truth to the crippled and crippling Authority of Rome! If these successors seriously think that once they are “inside the official Church” they will be in a position to convert the neo-modernists, they are excessively naive. Already they are holding their fire on Vatican II. Just when do they imagine they will be able to open fire again?

In these quite exceptional circumstances, there must be disciples of Our Lord who tell the Truth – so as to spare the stones the effort! These disciples may not be united as they would be beneath true Authority (always allowing for human weakness). They may be “straitened and cast down,” they may suffer “tribulation and persecution” (cf. II Cor. IV, 8–9), but they must be there for as long as Truth is held in captivity. Will that be a long time? God knows. Many of us expected Him to intervene long ago, but God has a very long fuse. However, intervene He will, if anything at all is still to be saved. Patience.

Meanwhile these disciples need a handful of bishops to ensure a minimal continuation in Truth of episcopal teaching and of the sacraments of Confirmation and Holy Orders. In 1988 the Archbishop consecrated four of them for the same reason, two for Europe, and one each for North and South America. As of now the “Resistance” has two in Europe and one in South America. There remains a gap in North America. God willing, this coming May 11 Fr. Gerardo Zendejas will be consecrated bishop in the Traditional parish of Fr Ronald Ringrose in Vienna, Virginia, USA. Please pray for the blessing of Almighty God upon the ceremony – and for good weather!

Kyrie eleison.

Bishops’ Declaration – II

Bishops’ Declaration – II posted in Eleison Comments 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.

Tradition

Tradition posted in Eleison Comments on July 19, 2014

The word “Magisterium,” coming from the Latin for “master” (“magister”), means in the Church either the Church’s authoritative teaching or its authorised teachers. Now as teacher is superior to taught, so the Magisterium teaching is superior to the Catholic people being taught. But the Catholic Masters have free-will, and God leaves them free to err. Then if they err gravely, may the people stand up to them and tell them, however respectfully, that they are wrong? The question is answered by truth. It is only when most people have lost the truth, as today, that the question can become confused.

On the one hand it is certain that Our Lord endowed his Church with a teaching authority, to teach us fallible human beings that Truth which alone can get us to Heaven – “Peter, confirm they brethren.” On the other hand Peter was only to confirm them in that faith which Our Lord had taught him – “I have prayed that thy faith fail not, and thou being converted, confirm thy brethren” (Lk. XXII, 32). In other words that faith governs Peter which it is his function only to guard and expound faithfully, such as it was deposited with him, the Deposit of Faith, to be handed down for ever as Tradition. Tradition teaches Peter, who teaches the people.

Vatican I (1870) says the same thing. Catholics must believe “all truths contained in the word of God or handed down by Tradition” and which the Church puts forward as divinely revealed, by its Extraordinary or Ordinary Universal Magisterium (one recalls that without Tradition in its broadest sense, there would have been no “word of God,” or Bible). Vatican I says moreover that this Magisterium is gifted with the Church’s infallibility, but this infallibility excludes any novelty being taught. Then Tradition in its broadest sense governs what the Magisterium can say it is, and while the Magisterium has authority to teach inside Tradition, it has no authority to teach the people anything outside of Tradition.

Yet souls do need a living Magisterium to teach them the truths of salvation inside Catholic Tradition. These truths do not change any more than God or his Church change, but the circumstances of the world in which the Church has to operate are changing all the time, and so according to the variety of these circumstances the Church needs living Masters to vary all the time the presentation and explanation of the unvarying truths. Therefore no Catholic in his right mind disputes the need for the Church’s living Masters.

But what if these Masters claim that something is inside Tradition which is not there? On the one hand they are learned men, authorised by the Church to teach the people, and the people are relatively ignorant. On the other hand there is for instance the famous case of the Council of Ephesus (428), where the people rose up in Constantinople to defend the divine Motherhood of the Blessed Virgin Mary against the heretical Patriarch Nestor.

The answer is that objective truth is above Masters and people alike, so that if the people have the truth on their side, they are superior to their Masters if the Masters do not have the truth. On the other hand if the people do not have the truth, thay have no right to rise up against the Masters. In brief, if they are right, they have the right. If they are not right, they have no right. And what tells if they are right or not? Neither Masters (necessarily), nor people (still less necessarily), but reality, even if Masters or people, or both, conspire to smother it.

Kyrie eleison.

Church Infallibility – V

Church Infallibility – V posted in Eleison Comments on May 31, 2014

Liberalism is war on God, and it is the dissolution of truth. Within today’s Church crippled by liberalism, sedevacantism is an understandable reaction, but it still credits authority with too much power over truth. The modern world has lost natural truth, let alone supernatural truth, and here is the heart of the problem.

For our purposes we might divide all papal teaching into three parts. Firstly, if the Pope teaches as Pope, on Faith or morals, definitively and so as to bind all Catholics, then we have his Extraordinary Magisterium (EM for short), necessarily infallible. Secondly, if he does not engage all four conditions but teaches in line with what the Church has always and everywhere taught and imposed on Catholics to believe, then he is partaking in what is called the Church’s “Ordinary Universal Magisterium” (OUM for short), also infallible. Thirdly we have the rest of his teaching, which, if it is out of line with Tradition, is not only fallible but also false.

By now it should be clear that the EM is to the OUM as snow-cap is to mountain. The snow-cap does not make the summit of the mountain, it merely makes it more visible. EM is to OUM as servant to master. It exists to serve the OUM by making clear once and for all what does or does not belong to the OUM. But what makes the rest of the mountain visible, so to speak, is its being traceable back to Our Lord and his Apostles, in other words, Tradition. That is why every EM definition is at pains to show that what is being defined was always previously part of Tradition. It was mountain before it was covered in snow.

By now it should also be clear that Tradition tells the Popes what to teach, and not the other way round. This is the basis on which Archbishop Lefebvre founded the Traditional movement, yet it is this same basis which, with all due respect, liberals and sedevacantists fail to grasp. Just see in the Gospel of St John how often Our Lord himself, as man, declares that what he is teaching comes not from himself but from his Father, for instance: “My doctrine is not mine but his that sent me” (VII, 16), or, “I have not spoken from out of myself; but the Father who sent me, he gave me commandment, what I should say, and what I should speak” (XII, 49). Of course nobody on earth is more authorized than the Pope to tell Church and world what is in Tradition, but he cannot tell Church or world that there is in Tradition what is not in it. What is in it is objective, now 2,000 years old, it is above the Pope and it sets limits to what a Pope can teach , just as the Father’s commandment set limits to what Christ as man would teach.

Then how can liberals and sedevacantists alike claim, in effect, that the Pope is infallible even outside of both EM and OUM? Because both overrate authority in relation to truth, and so they see Church authority no longer as the servant but as the master of truth. And why is that? Because they are both children of the modern world where Protestantism defied the Truth and liberalism ever since the French Revolution has been dissolving objective truth. And if there is no longer any objective truth, then of course authority can say whatever it can get away with, which is what we observe all around us, and there is nothing left to stop a Paul VI or a Bishop Fellay from becoming more and more arbitrary and tyrannical in the process.

Mother of God, obtain for me to love, discern and defend that Truth and order coming from the Father, both supernatural and natural, to which your own Son was as man subject, “unto death, even to the death of the Cross.”

Kyrie eleison.

Canonisations Unreal

Canonisations Unreal posted in Eleison Comments on April 5, 2014

The “canonisation”of two Conciliar Popes, John XXIII and John-Paul II, is scheduled for the last Sunday of this month, and many believing Catholics are scared stiff. They know that the Conciliar Popes have been (objective) destroyers of the Church. They know that the Church holds canonisations to be infallible. Are they going to be forced to believe that John XXIII and John-Paul II are Saints? It boggles the mind. But it need not do so.

In August of last year these “Comments” stated the fact that Newchurch “canonisations” are such a different reality from pre-Conciliar canonisations that no Catholic need believe that the post-conciliar canonisations are infallible. I was not wrong, but while I stated the fact that this is so, I did not give the reason why, which is a superior way of knowing something. On the contrary in a retreat conference, perhaps of 1989, Archbishop Lefebvre gave the deep-down reason why. This reason – modernist mind-rot – is crucial to understand correctly the whole Conciliar Revolution.

The Archbishop said that like a mass of modern men, the Conciliar Popes do not believe in any truth being stable. For instance John-Paul II’s formation was based on truth evolving, moving with the times, progressing with the advance of science, etc. Truth never being fixed is the reason why in 1988 John-Paul II condemned the SSPX’s Episcopal Consecrations, because they sprang from a fixed and not living or moving idea of Catholic Tradition. For indeed Catholics hold, for example, every word in the Credo to be unchangeable, because the words have been hammered out over the ages to express as perfectly as possible the unchanging truths of the Faith, and these words have been infallibly defined by the Church’s Popes and Councils.

True canonisations are another example: (1) the Pope pronounces as Pope, (2) such and such a person to be a model of faith and morals, (3) once and for all (nobody used to get uncanonised), (4) for all the Church to accept as such a model. As such, canonisations used to fulfil the four conditions of infallible Church teaching, and they were held to be infallible. But this Catholic idea of an unchangeable truth is inconceivable for fluid modern minds like those of the Conciliar Popes. For them, truth is life, a life developing, evolving, growing towards perfection. How then can a Conciliar Pope perform, let alone impose, an infallible canonisation?

The Archbishop imagines how a Conciliar Pope might react to the idea of his having done any such thing: “Oh no! If ever in the future it turns out that the person I canonised did not have all the qualities required, well, some successor of mine may well declare that I made a declaration on that person’s virtue but not a once and for all definition of their sanctity.” Meanwhile the “canonising” Pope’s “declaration” has made the President of the local Republic and the local Christians happy, and he has given them all an excuse to have a party to celebrate.

If one thinks about it, this explanation of the Archbishop applies to the Newchurch across the board. What we have in Vatican II is the demanding beauty of God’s unchangeable Truth, which leads to Heaven, being replaced by the undemanding ugliness of man’s fluid fantasy, which may lead to Hell but enables man, as he thinks, to take the place of God. The key step in this process is the unhooking of the mind from reality. When the process is applied today to the Church as modernism, the results are so totally unlike what went before that the new realities absolutely call for new names: Newchurch, Newcanonisations, Newsaints, etc. After all, are not the Conciliarists proud of making everything new?

Kyrie eleison.

Resistance Policy – I

Resistance Policy – I posted in Eleison Comments on March 15, 2014

In today’s disastrous state of Church and world there are, amongst others, two central principles in play, the one permanent and primary, the other temporary and secondary, but both are central. Their interplay should be decisive to guide our actions.

The permanent principle is that “Without faith it is impossible to please God” (Heb. XI, 6). This is because all men come from God endowed with a free-will which they are meant so to use as to be able to go to God when they die, and enjoy the beatific vision of God for eternity. These obligatory terms of our earthly existence constitute an extremely generous offer on God’s part, given how relatively little is required on our part (Is. LXIV, 4), but the very least that we can do, a bare beginning, is to recognize his existence. Given the goodness of his Creation all around us, it is “inexcusable” not to recognize it (Rom. I, 20), and therefore without the most elementary faith in him it is impossible to please him.

The temporary principle is that the Shepherd is struck and the sheep are scattered (Zach.XIII, 7), text quoted by Our Lord in the Garden of Gethsemane (Mt. XXVI, 31). After 4,000 years of man’s repeated decadence, God took a human nature to found a Church to enable men to save their souls for the last 2,000 years of men’s existence on this earth. For the first thousand of those years the decadence was seriously interrupted, but after a few more centuries it picked up again to the point that with Vatican II the very leaders of God’s own Church, the Popes on whom it was designed to depend, became seriously infected by the decadence. Thereupon it became much more difficult for men to see how God meant them to save their souls.

Therefore on the one hand, objectively speaking, the permanent truths of salvation have not been changed one little bit by the fall of the Conciliar Popes, and these truths must be maintained if any souls at all are still to be saved. It was Archbishop Lefebvre’s glory to uphold those truths against the fallen churchmen and world, while it is his successors’ disgrace to be compromising them for the sake of rejoining those churchmen and their world.

On the other hand, subjectively speaking, that disgrace is mitigated by the temporary eclipse of those great truths, due to the fall of the Popes. It is not easy even for bishops to see straight when the Bishop of Rome is seeing crooked. It follows that those who by the grace of God – and by nothing else – see straight, must have a 360-degree compassion for souls caught in a confusion not entirely their own fault. Therefore, it seems to me, if James is convinced that to save his soul he must stay in the Newchurch, I need not hammer him to get out of it. If Clare is persuaded that there is no grave problem within the Society of St Pius X, I need not ram down her throat why there is. And if John can see no way to keep the Faith without believing that the See of Rome is vacant, I need urge upon him no more than that that belief is not obligatory.

Yet in all this scattering of the sheep, somebody must maintain and make available to them the objective Truth if the poor stones are not to have to do it (Lk. XIX, 40), because upon at least the seeking of that Truth depends the saving of our souls. However, let Catholics seek it with all due regard for the blindness of their fellow-sheep, for at least as long as the Shepherd remains struck.

Kyrie eleison.