Vatican II

EMERGENCY ADVICE – II

EMERGENCY ADVICE – II on February 24, 2024

The greater the horror of World War Three,

The greater God’s glory – for eyes that see!

No reader of these “Comments” has sent in theoretical questions comparable to the series of practical questions on today’s unprecedented Church crisis sent in last week (see EC 866 of February 17), but it is worth inventing such a series, and offering answers to the theoretical questions, in case just a handful of readers can get a better handle on the confusion let loose by Vatican II, as slippery as it is dangerous.

1 Then what is at the heart of that confusion? Is it what they call “modernism”? What is modernism?

Answer: modernism is the great error of modern times, by which even educated churchmen can come to believe that the Church of the past need no longer lift mankind to spiritual heights which mankind is no longer capable of reaching. Rather, mankind is so different in modern times that in order to reach it in its materialism, the Church must up-date its doctrine, morals, liturgy, everything. If men can no longer rise to the spiritual level of the Church, the Church must come down to the material level of men. Or so they say.

2 But is it not the function of the Church to reach out to men, wherever they are to be found?

Yes, but not on whatever conditions! All firemen want to put out fires, but not any liquid will do. What fireman ever used gasoline instead of water? Water and gasoline each have their unchanging nature, which is independent of the will of men. Water puts out fire (surprise, surprise!), while gasoline makes it blaze (well, whaddaya know?). In a similar way, Gregorian chant and Rock music each have their unchanging and opposed natures, with opposed and unchanging effects. Chant will draw souls to Church, Rock to the dance-hall, but Rock will not draw to Church. Some modernists mean well, but they are foolish if they think music functions differently today from how it functioned yesterday. To be drawn at any rate to God, souls need a music which is calm, not agitating.

3 But all modern life is agitating, compared with life yesterday. So how will any soul today reach God?

You said it! After 6000 years of world history one would think that men had learned by now what things have what natures, effects and consequences, but no. Our own times are, as it were, based on the principle that man can will for natures to have what effects he likes. Everything has become so denatured and so destabilised that life turns into one continual agitation, and the youngsters cannot stand any music that is too calm. But that does not mean that natures have so changed that Rock will bring them back to Church. It will not. It is not in its nature to do so. It was designed by the Devil to create ever more agitation.

4 But if that is true, how will any modern youngster – or modern soul – ever get to Heaven?

Good question! In modern times many a Saint has asked himself that question, but he has never despaired of the answer because he has known that the grace of God is always there for the asking. “Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” is a human way of saying it. “To whoever does what lies in him, God does not refuse His grace” is a more divine way that the Church has of saying it. In any case, when a soul, through no major fault of its own, finds itself in a situation where the odds against its salvation are to all appearances overwhelming, God can always intervene – for example in Genesis 19, the case of Lot.

5 But if God is all-powerful, why does he not eliminate all evil from the Creation which He controls?

Because His purpose in creating was to give the greatest bliss possible to souls freely accepting. Now a bliss in no way deserved by the recipient cannot possibly be as blissful as a bliss at least partly deserved by the soul itself despite all the evil by which it was surrounded in its brief life in this “valley of tears.” It would follow that the more generous God wishes to be with His gift of bliss, the more evil He will allow, but only up to the point where the evil risks swamping the good being freely chosen. That point once came to the whole world in the time of Noah. It is coming again today. God will intervene again soon. If we have the Catholic faith, let us do our part by praying His Mother’s Rosary for the salvation of souls.

Kyrie eleison

EMERGENCY ADVICE – I

EMERGENCY ADVICE – I on February 17, 2024

God asks us not the impossible to do,

But to leave for others the freedom you want for you.

A reader much confused by what is going on inside the Catholic Church sends in a number of practical questions which many Catholic souls must be asking themselves today in connection with the serious duty for any Catholic of attending Mass to fulfil his Sunday obligation. Normally the answers are more or less clear, but circumstances since the 1960s’ revolution of Vatican II inside the Church are no longer normal, and so the answers are no longer so clear. Let us list this reader’s questions in order, going from the general to the particular, to reply with answers offered by these “Comments,” but not imposed.

1 To what extent is the Newchurch of Vatican II Catholic, and to what extent is it counterfeit?

Answer, God alone knows, because He alone knows the secrets of men’s hearts, and the borderline between the true and the false Church often runs through men’s hearts, for instance whether or not they have the Catholic Faith. Since He alone can know for sure, then He does not expect us to know. However, He does give us sufficient means to know what we do need to know, and that is to judge by the fruits (cf. Mt. VII, 15–20). These will infallibly tell the difference, for instance, between true and false shepherds. Real joy and charity will reveal where the true Church still exists, even inside the Newchurch structures.

2 Do we have a Pope?

Answer, if we judge Pope Francis by his fruits, they are disastrous for the true Church, to the point that many serious Catholics argue that he is an anti-pope. God does not require of me to know for sure, one way or the other. Good Catholic theologians can disagree. The wisdom of Archbishop Lefebvre for his priests was that they could have their own opinion in private, but in public they should behave as though the apparent Vatican II popes are true Popes, unless and until the evidence is clear that they are not Popes. Even Pope Francis is still serving the Catholic function of providing the structural Church with a visible head, enabling the Church structures to continue functioning until God cleans out the Augean stables. In His own good time God will put the Pope back on his feet. Meanwhile, I may despair of this or that pope, but I must not despair of the Papacy, or of any other institution from the Tradition of Our Lord Himself.

3 What about the Newchurch sacraments?

Answer, like the Newchurch as a whole of which they are product and part, they are still partly good but essentially rotting, like the rotten apples to which they may be compared, because the Newchurch was cleverly designed from the beginning to rot over tens of years until there would be nothing of the true Church left. This was because by the 1960’s when Vatican II happened, many churchmen at the top of the Church had been thoroughly infected by the thinking of Freemasonry, the secret society created in 1717 in London to infiltrate the Catholic Church until it could be destroyed from within, thus enabling the known enemies of God and man to take over the world. Our Lord’s own Church is the great obstacle in their way.

4 What about the “Eucharistic miracles,” supposedly taking place at Novus Ordo “Masses”?

Answer, down all near 2000 years of Church history so far, God has always by such miracles helped Christians to believe in the stupendous miracle of His Presence beneath mere appearances of bread and wine, and these miracles continue today, because the Sacred Heart will not abandon sheep misled by their shepherds. The difference is that today modern science is available to provide truly scientific evidence to prove that the miracles, if they are genuine, are genuine. See for instance the book “A Cardiologist examines Jesus” by Dr. Franco Serafini, with explanations and photographic illustrations from several recent miracles. It is published by Sophia Institute Press, available from SophiaInstitute.com God bless Traditionalists for clinging to the Traditional Latin Mass, but not for refusing scientific evidence provided by the Sacred Heart for the salvation of souls.

5 And what about receiving hosts supposedly consecrated at Novus Ordo Masses?

Answer, perhaps best avoid them, because they can be invalid, and with time may be more and more so. However, in case of need you can receive such hosts, because they may also be valid.

Kyrie eleison.

Ruinations Causes

Ruinations Causes on March 13, 2021

Two weeks ago in these “Comments” a veteran Traditionalist made some interesting comments on the subject of infiltrators, conscious or unconscious, wrecking the Catholic Church from within. Readers may recall how he strove in vain to restore Catholic Tradition within the Conciliar structure. He found out that it could not be done. When further asked, “But how could the very churchmen commit the Church’s suicide? That makes no sense!,” he had further interesting things to say –

I think all of this comes down to a love of the Truth or a lack of Truth. In my opinion, those who truly love the Truth will find it – or struggle until they do find it, and then act upon it. I think the Faith collapsed in the 1960 and ‘70s because Catholics had become so weak. At the noon Mass at my parish in the 1950s, practically no one went to Communion. Priests come from the people, and the people had become soft. When the changes came, one half of those people gladly accepted those changes since it made living the “Faith” much easier, because non-Catholics were no longer hostile, one faith was as good as another, we could now all smile at each other, and did the clergy ever lead lead the way! Most of the other half either joined Protestant sects or simply gave up religion altogether. A few brave souls, a tiny minority who still possessed that love of the Faith, formed their own chapels. Their greatest inspiration was Archbishop Lefebvre, who alone had the faith to grasp that the hierarchy was in a hopeless state of apostasy.

God alone can judge men’s hearts, but in my opinion there is no excuse for those who abandoned the Faith. Perhaps nearly all who did so will pay with their souls. My generation is the worst because we were born and raised in the Faith and we abandoned it because we thought it would make life easier and far less of a challenge. The following generations, although a bit less guilty because they were denied their Catholic heritage, still had little excuse, as everyone has a duty to live the Truth. Where the faith is soft, Catholics are cowards, particularly when it comes to abortion. The bishops won’t even speak out against it, for fear of losing their tax status or of offending someone. Senator Timothy Kaine who lives in our city is as pro-abort and pro-perversion as one can be, while still claiming that the Catholic Faith is the most important thing in his life. He said it all when he said, “I am a Francis-type Catholic.” To my knowledge, the Bishop of Richmond has never challenged him on abortion, much less denied him what passes for Holy Communion, when he should have excommunicated him long ago.

The veteran above is probing the general collapse of Catholics after Vatican II. Another reader of these “Comments” seeks below the cause of the particular slide of the Society of St Pius X, which had nevertheless been raised by God to resist that general collapse –

I think it’s Pharisaism. It’s the same Pharisaism that killed Our Lord that is now killing the Church and the Society. True humility and charity have been lost. Pharisaism, as of the “whited sepulchres” in the Gospel, leads to spiritual blindness – “Make this people blind, so that seeing they may not see, hearing they may not hear” . . . . The Pharisees had a perfect knowledge of the Scriptures and the Law, yet still they killed their Messiah. Today they are killing the Church, and they simply cannot see it, they are blind . . .

In the Society I do believe there were at least subversive priests, and at the top some leaders suffering from complete blindness, but these would have gotten nowhere if the Society as a whole had not fallen into Pharisaism. Had they humbly followed their saintly Founder, they would not have thought they knew better than he did, nor would they have pushed aside Our Lady’s requests for Rosaries for the Consecration of Russia, thinking they knew better than God Himself. Such an insult could not go unpunished by Him. The punishment was the spiritual blindness as of the Pharisees, a dreadful punishment! God, have mercy upon us!

Kyrie eleison.

White Identity – I

White Identity – I on February 6, 2021

A young white couple that reads these “Comments” wants to come back to the Church, but it has a special difficulty which the 31-year old husband suspects is shared by many of his contemporaries: the present lack of an identity for whites. Both he and his wife have some German in their ancestry, and so in search of identity they have been seriously attracted by Germanic paganism. But they were both born Catholic and they suspect that their Catholic schooling was not all that it should have been. The questions that he asks certainly prove that this was the case, but they also show that he is seeking the truth, so that if he perseveres in his quest he can be sure that God will give him the answers he needs. He asks –

Is Germanic paganism our true identity?

Yes and no. A human being’s true identity is to go to Heaven to be blissfully happy with God for all eternity. That is why so many young people (and older people) are so deeply dissatisfied with their present materialistic way of life – they know that they are meant for something much more, but they do not know what. Now there is much that is noble in Germanic paganism, for instance in the operas of Richard Wagner, but it is wholly incapable of getting a man to Heaven because it has no supernatural grace in it. Grace alone can open God’s Heaven for us. And God’s grace is available to us only through God’s one true religion, which is the Roman Catholic religion. If I refuse it, I am refusing Heaven. This religion, for instance Charlemagne, made Europe, and forged the identity of all the white European nations. Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953) said, “Europe is the (Catholic) Faith and the Faith is Europe.”

But Christianity was invented by the Jews?

The Catholic religion was invented by no human being or beings. It was “invented” from eternity by God alone, and revealed to men through His Divine Son, Jesus Christ, who as a man was a Jew, the son of Mary, and who was helped to found the Catholic Church by a small number of Jews. Hence John IV, 22. But it was also the Jews, leaders and people (Mt.XXVII, 20), who crucified Jesus, and the large majority of Jews have ever since hated Christ and done their best to go on crucifying Him in His Church. So the best of Israelites were incomparable friends of God, but the Talmudists have been His incomparable enemies. It is essential to distinguish between Jews like St Paul, and Jews like Caiaphas. The huge difference is between those who accept Christ and those who reject Him. All turns on Christ.

But is not the New Testament still playing the Old Testament game, so to speak? Are not Christians worshipping Jews, and following the “design” and “rules” of Jews?

Christians are worshipping God, Father, Son and Holy Ghost, the Holy Trinity as revealed by God, Jesus Christ, a revelation far surpassing that of all the rest of the Jews put together. He was and is God. They were and are mere men.

So why was God in the Old Testament so protective of Jews and yet so annoyed by them?

Because He had given them a great part to play, to prepare for the coming on earth of the Messiah, and they were not always faithful to the task. Our vile media and the mere word “anti-semitism” suggest that Jews can never be bad, but they can be very bad indeed. Then they deserve punishment, like anyone else.

But why did God choose the Jews? And why did He choose the Jews in particular?

He had to choose some people to provide the Messiah with a human Mother, family, village, people and religious practice. With Mary, Joseph, Nazareth, the Temple of Jerusalem and the Mosaic religion the Jews did finally provide the Messiah with His earthly framework, only to crucify Him out of their pride.

Why the Jews in particular? God’s mystery. Belloc again: “How odd of God to choose the Jews!”

Kyrie eleison.

Second Flood

Second Flood on January 30, 2021

Repeat, the main player in the worldwide Covid drama unfolding all around us is Almighty God, no less. Of course He plays no part in the multitudinous sins involved, as sins, but it is He who created the universe and who sustains in existence what He created for every moment that it exists, without which it would collapse back into nothingness. And for what purpose did He create it? To populate His heaven with rational creatures, angelic or human, who will have made use of their God-given existence and free-will to choose, on God’s terms, to take up His offer of eternal bliss with Him in His heaven. And with a divine wisdom far above all human understanding, He so manages all life here on earth that every human soul reaching the age of reason has not only trials enough to make sure that it loves Him enough to deserve heaven, but also actual grace enough to make sure that it can get to heaven if it wants.

Therefore it is God who is ultimately directing what we can call this collapse of the West, just as He directed the Flood in the time of Noah, to punish sinful mankind, and to prevent it from populating hell instead of heaven. In fact the punishment was also a great mercy, because all mankind had “corrupted its ways” (Genesis VI, 11–12), so that no doubt a great mass of men were on their way to eternal damnation and succeeding – like today – in taking virtually everybody with them. Such had been the effect of original sin, over the approximately one thousand years since Adam and Eve. But as men progressively realised that the rising waters of the Flood were going to leave them no escape, so a minority of them will have profited by the waters’ slow rise to make an act of contrition sufficient to save their souls for eternity. Ask any of those souls, now in heaven, if the Flood was not a huge act of God’s mercy!

Similarly today. Mankind has corrupted its ways, all over the earth, with Western materialism, and worse than in Noah’s time, because this time the Incarnation has taken place, and after profiting from it for a while, this time men have spurned not only God but even the Incarnate God, visibly crucified for them, to endow them with a Church to help them to save their souls. Yet this time even His own churchmen have virtually spurned Him, ever since Vatican II. We are now 56 years on from the end of Vatican II, and the corruption is galloping forwards. Now, can anyone accuse God of having been in a hurry to strike, in the way He struck in 2020? Hardly. Or can anyone say He started to strike with a heavy hand? Hardly, when one thinks of the misfortunes like complete economic crashes or civil wars or famines announced for the years soon to come? And if and when these do come, by the malice of men and only by the permission of God, who will be able to say they were undeserved?

Yet God is patient with each single one of us, and His mercy endures for ever, only, He must strike and go on striking hard enough until we learn our lesson and even only begin to think again of getting to heaven. For with all too many of us the lesson, however hard, will be arriving too late, and will give rise only to curses, against Him, against our fellow-men, against life, against politicians, against anybody except the one person truly responsible for my own distress, and that will be – myself.

Therefore in everything that is coming I will see the (sinless) hand of God, and I will get on my knees to pray to Him to have mercy upon us poor sinners. Men can no longer clean up their mess, they can only make it worse. With the grace of God I will have compassion on them all, and I will do what I can do, to help them to save their souls, but from God alone will I expect true solutions. And He at least will have the wisdom and power to be directing all for the best, that much I know in advance.

Kyrie eleison.

Madiran – Conclusion

Madiran - Conclusion on January 9, 2021

After seven issues of these “Comments” considering separately the Prologue and six Parts of the 1968 book of Jean Madiran (1920–2013), The Heresy of the 20th Century, it will be worth stitching the Parts together again so as to highlight some of the main lessons for ourselves in the situation of Church and world today, and to arrive at a general conclusion: how did the Church get into its present confusion?

Right from the Prologue Madiran made several key points: the problem was the leading churchmen, the bishops, who had been slipping anchor for at least 100 years previously, in the name of progress, until in the 20th century they were positively subverting Christianity, in a process leading to Communism. The drama started long before Vatican II. At its root is the bishops’ loss of Faith . The end result will be the triumph of Communism. In 2020 the Covid-lie is placing Communism right at our doors.

In Part I Madiran laid bare, as did Pius X in his 1907 Encyclical Pascendi, the philosophical underpinning by the bishops of their implicit apostasy through their adopting of the subjectivism of modern philosophy, by which any truth at all, including Catholic dogma, becomes optional. Forget objective reality. From now on the object answers to my mind, and no longer my mind to the object. I am liberated from reality.These insane principles are at the heart of the craziness of today’s Church and world, in all domains.

In Part II Madiran declared that the newbishops were wanting a newreligion, and this newreligion could only be at war with the Catholic religion. The newbishops had no right whatsoever to be imposing their false religion, and even as a Catholic layman Madiran had every right to be opposing them. In 2021 it is marvellous to see an Archbishop Viganò taking exactly this position, as did Archbishop Lefebvre. There is an objective and unchanging Catholic Truth which entitles Catholics not to follow their erring bishops.

In Parts III, IV and V Madiran lays out the content of the 20th century heresy in seven Propositions, culled from writings of the Bishop of Metz who, says Madiran, best brought that heresy into focus: 1 All is changing today, so that the very concept of salvation by Christ needs today to be changed, 2 towards being more social, because 3 faith today listens to the world, and 4 the socialising of today’s world is a grace. 5 For indeed no age has been so fraternal, 6 nor has so looked forward, i.e. hoped, as our own.Madiran comments that this fraternal and hopeful socialising is tantamount to a newreligion, and the newreligion is Communism. And indeed ever since Vatican II, the churchmen have been turning more and more to the Left, and their religion of man has been their newcrusade, and man has been their newgod. And Jesus Christ, His Blessed Mother, Heaven and Hell are in real life more and more forgotten.

In Part V Madiran presents the seventh Proposition from the Bishop of Metz: 7 Natural law comes from inside man, in other words there is no objective law for man coming from outside or from above him. In other words, says Madiran, there is no nature, no supernature, no ten Commandments, no true charity, no possibility of society, let alone Christian society. Such sheer subversion allows only of Communism. Here is where we are, and much more so in 2021 than in 1968. In this Part Madiran is getting at the very roots of modern man’s disorientation and dislocation, which make a police State into the only society possible.

In Part VI Madiran finished his book soon after living through the student riots in Paris of spring 1968, and they provided him with a resounding conclusion. In Part II on the bishops he had written that the Newchurch by teaching only things modern was turning today’s youth into tomorrow’s barbarians, and here they were, filling the streets of Paris in 1968 (and streets of the USA in 2020) with chaos. Madiran holds the bishops responsible. Communism is a false solution. God alone is the true solution.

Kyrie eleison.