Tag: Vatican II

Vigano Answers

Vigano Answers posted in Eleison Comments on November 21, 2020

In the month of August a journalist with Life Site News wrote to Archbishop Viganò in hiding in Italy an article concerning daily life in today’s world for Catholics wishing to keep the Faith. The title was Questions for Viganò: His Excellency is right about Vatican II. But what does he think Catholics should do now? The Archbishop began his reply of September 1st by assuring Stephen Kokx that he was happy to answer the questions, because they addressed “matters that are very important for the faithful.” The Archbishop’s reply is summarised here below, while at the end of it these “Comments” will highlight one point in particular.

Kokx asked the Archbishop, “Who belongs to the Catholic Church and who is separated from it?” The Archbishop replied, anybody who proposes any of the adulterated doctrines of the Council cannot possibly be Catholic. Nor can anybody be Catholic who accepts any of those doctrines knowing them to be in rupture with unchanging Catholic doctrine. On the other hand if a person is baptised, considers themselves to be a Catholic and recognises the Catholic Hierarchy, that does not necessarily mean that they accept the Conciliar doctrine, or adhere to the Conciliar team, knowing them to be in rupture with Catholic Tradition. Nor then are they necessarily outside the Church. But even office-holders who have authority inside the Church are doubtfully Catholic if they accept Conciliar doctrine knowing it to be contrary to Catholic Tradition. They have Authority in the Church, but they cannot exercise it. Only their Authority entitles Conciliarists to claim that they are Catholics, and not just members of a sect.

Therefore Traditional Catholics belong in the Church, and Modernists do not. Moreover laity faithful to Tradition often may and must seek out priests, communities and institutes that are likewise faithful to Tradition, especially in the celebration of Mass. In this respect the clergy are less free that the laity because they belong to a hierarchy which normally requires obedience, but they have the same right and duty to practise their Faith, that Faith which justifies and requires their use of the old rite of Mass. And if the Church is to rise again from the various horrors of the Newchurch, note that the fidelity of true believers under persecution is needed inside the Church, to defeat Modernism.

It was by staying inside the Church that Archbishop Lefebvre was a model of faithfulness under persecution. His Society of St Pius X was a standing reproach to Modernists, and it was enabled to survive by the episcopal Consecrations of 1988, so that eventually the true Mass could be set free again, and Vatican II could be shown up. Bishop Tissier de Mallerais is right that for the time being there are both the true Church and a false “church” under one roof, but that roof is Catholic, so that it belongs to the true Church while the false Conciliar Church is nothing but an intruder. We must hope and pray that a number of now sleeping shepherds will wake up to see how they have been deceived.

In this necessary fight for Our Lord and His Mother it is a privilege to take part, and by so doing to help to revive honour, fidelity and heroism. By the sacrament of Confirmation, we are soldiers of Christ, and Christians have had to take part in one great battle after another to defend the True, the Good and the Beautiful. Let us resist Modernists with Truth and charity. Those who practise Modernism are at fault, not we who denounce it! Let the laity by all means attend Masses which do not shock, but nourish their Faith. True pastors will be given back to us by God, untrue pastors will die off. Let the laity look after good priests, recreate charity, avoid division and rebellion, offer advice respectfully, calling in question not Church authority but how it is misused. God will not fail to reward our fidelity and to restore His Church, drawing vocations from families which will have kept the Faith. All serious problems are human problems. All human problems have a Catholic solution.

And the point to highlight? Notice how the Archbishop measures everything by Truth and Faith.

Kyrie eleison.

Madiran; the Heresy

Madiran; the Heresy posted in Eleison Comments on November 14, 2020

In his book “The Heresy of the 20th Century” Jean Madiran (1920–2013) has presented the heresy’s gravity (Foreword); its underlying philosophy (Part I) and the bishops responsible for it (II); in Parts III, IV and V he comes to the heresy itself, which he analyses according to its seven Propositions. In Part III he presents the first two on their own because of their importance; in Part IV the first six in a little detail; in Part V the seventh Proposition, also on its own because of its overwhelming importance for Madiran. Part III, subject of this week’s “Comments,” sub-divides into six Chapters.

In Chapter One, Madiran declares that on the eve of Vatican II (1962–1965) the religious atmosphere was already pestilential in general, but the then Bishop of the city of Metz in Eastern France, Msgr. Schmitt, brought the whole vague pestilence into clear focus. Seven Propositions sum up what was in fact the new religion which he backed by all his episcopal authority. The first Proposition declares that today’s changing world imposes a change in the very concept of salvation brought by Jesus Christ. And the second declares that the Church’s idea of the plan of God was up till then not evangelical enough. In brief, (P1) the Church must promote “socialisation,” says the Bishop of Metz, because (P2) the old Church was not collective enough, but too merely personal in its practice of the Gospel. But what the Bishop is in fact promoting is Communism, says Madiran.

For indeed “socialisation,” argues Madiran in Chapter Two, rests upon a Marxist view of history, materialistic and determinist, which shows that the Bishop of Metz has lost the Christian faith, because how can the spiritual goals of Christianity coincide with the materialistic goals of Communism? Communism is a social system to be rejected for religious reasons, because as a social system it pretends to replace the Church’s social system and therewith Christianity.

In Chapter Three Madiran rejects Bishop Schmitt’s claim that men today best of all understand Gospel brotherhood (cf. Proposition II above). Such a down-grading of all the social works and achievements of the pre-Conciliar Church is ridiculous and for Catholics, says Madiran, it is an unseemly narcissism.

Thus by 1967, says Madiran in Chapter Four, it had become clear to the world that Bishop Schmitt was promoting no less than a new religion, or a heresy, vandalising centuries upon centuries of Catholic tradition. The French bishops are vandals without intelligence or character. Henceforth it is up to the laity to defend the Penny Catechism, in other words the very basics of the Faith!

In Chapter 5, against keeping up with the times (Prop. I), Madiran upholds the First Commandment, because it is the unchanging God and not the changing world that must hold first place in our hearts and minds. Nor will the times ever be with the Church, because the Church is with Jesus Christ. It is only worldly Catholics that the world admires. And against the Church not practising the Gospel enough (Prop. II), Madiran says that the Saints never invented anything in order to be “evangelical enough,” on the contrary they always strove to be as faithful as possible to tradition in order to put the Gospel into practice.

In conclusion, Chapter Six, Madiran denies that there is any truth to be salvaged from Propositions I and II, and he declares that Bishop Schmitt’s new religion wants the Church to gain the whole world by losing its own soul. The new religion has neither true authority nor true obedience, and Madiran has a prophetic vision of Catholic Tradition surviving Vatican II, because it makes free men kneel nobly before their God in accordance with a real authority and a real obedience. Such Catholics will never follow the false religion of poor bishops like the Bishop of Metz, just let him wait and see!

Kyrie eleison.

Madiran; the Bishops

Madiran; the Bishops posted in Eleison Comments on October 31, 2020

It will be recalled that in the Prologue of his book The Heresy of the 20th century Jean Madiran placed the blame for that heresy fairly and squarely on the Catholic bishops who led up to and followed straight after the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), notably on the bishops of France whom he best knew. Chapter I of his book showed, following St. Pius X’s great Encyclical Pascendi of 1907, how these bishops’ minds were rendered unfit for reality, let alone for Catholic doctrine, by the subjectivism of Kant’s philosophy, now reigning supreme in the philosophy departments of virtually all “universities.” In Chapter II Madiran tackles the French bishops themselves, in six loosely connected sections.

Firstly, he says that to follow these bishops we would have to throw away a veritable treasure trove of Catholic treasures, such as St. Pius X, Gregorian Chant, Thomism, Canon Law, Our Lady, patriotism, our Greco-Latin heritage, Marian piety and last but not least, the devotion of little old women praying. For our part, he says, we refuse to scorn any of these familiar features of the Catholic family. Behind all of them is the love of Christ, while behind all the talk of “recycling,” “renovations” and “renewal” is hate. And behind all achievements of “Western civilisation” is Christ, neither India nor Africa nor China.

Secondly, to all the world the Newchurch has proclaimed its apostasy: the Newbishops’ policy is no longer to convert anyone. Yet the basics of life and death remain exactly the same. Let the Church teach us how to live and die. We are all too full of the world. Let priests teach us how to get to Heaven!

Thirdly, these bishops say that “the change of civilisation” calls for “a more evangelical concept of salvation,” by which they mean not just “a new form of words,” which is what they say they mean, but a new content of the words, meaning a new religion. Your Excellences, our answer is “NO!” Moreover, as a baptised Catholic I am entitled to demand of you the true Faith, because your “new form of words” in pursuit of a new “concept of salvation” is bound to be heretical, not just clumsy, but a new religion, contradicting the true Faith.

Fourthly, up until 1966 these bishops had not yet defected from the Catholic Faith, but now they are claiming that theirs is at last the authentic Christianity, when in fact their “post-Conciliar mentality” is breaking with the true Faith. The truth is that we are in the middle of a war between two different religions. And actively or passively, all the bishops are supporting the new religion. Some Catholic bishop must speak up, because souls are perishing! Msgr. Lefebvre, are you listening?

We need no bishops to tell us to be modern. We are all too modern. But modern technology and modern philosophy are not the business of Catholic bishops! We know the moderns, and we scorn them. You do not know them and you love them. Marx, Nietzsche, Freud are mere fantasy-merchants. Wake up!

Fifthly, the Newchurch is now ruining all apprenticeship, teaching and education. By wanting to give to the youngsters only what is modern, which they already have, you give them nothing, while making them think they know everything. Thus abandoned, they will become tomorrow’s barbarians, so that you are betraying not only the Faith but all civilisation. Come back to Tradition! God, give us some true bishops!

Sixthly, the bishops’ authority is based only on truth, legitimacy and law. If these bishops were right, the Church of Tradition would no longer exist. But the Truth is primarily their business, so that they have no authority to change the Faith, and if they do so, they have no authority to be obeyed, nor will we leave them in peace. We expect from them the certainty, purity and sanctity of the unchanging Catholic Faith.

(In Section 4 above, Archbishop Lefebvre is not mentioned by name, but he was in Madiran’s mind. Two years later the Archbishop founded the Society of St Pius X, and the rest is history.)

Kyrie eleison.

Madiran’s Philosophy

Madiran's Philosophy posted in Eleison Comments on October 17, 2020

Like Pope Pius X in his great anti-modernist Encyclical of 1907, Pascendi, Jean Madiran in his book “The Heresy of the 20th Century” starts out from philosophy, because both of them see that the problem which makes it so difficult for modern minds really to grasp Catholicism is rather philosophical than theological. Thus the first of six Parts of Madiran’s book has for its title “Philosophical Preamble.”

Surprisingly, Madiran himself tells readers that they can skip the Preamble if they like, but that can only have been to spare many a modern reader who is rightly allergic to the delinquent nonsense which proceeds from the so-called “universities” of today. In fact, the argument of Madiran’s book is as dependent on true philosophy as it is independent of today’s “philosophistry,” or pseudo-philosophy.

But how and why can supernatural Faith be so dependent on philosophy, which is the rational study of all natural reality, the raising of (true) common sense, from an amateur to a professional level, so to speak? Answer, a good wine-maker does not depend on clean and uncracked glass bottles to make good wine, but he cannot run his wine business without such bottles, because if all the bottles are dirty inside, nobody is going to buy his wine, however good it is. The wine-maker presupposes that he will get automatically clean bottles. Compared with the wine, the glass bottle is worth next to nothing when it is empty of wine, but it is absolutely necessary without cracks or dirt for the wine-maker to contain his wine.

Now human reason is like the bottle. It is only a natural faculty but by the time it reaches death it is meant on pain of eternal condemnation to contain the supernatural wine of the Faith (Mk. XVI, 16). The Faith is a supreme gift of God by which a man’s reason is supernaturally elevated to believe , but if that faculty of reason is fouled up by human errors and misbeliefs, then like the dirty bottle it risks fouling up God’s wine of belief, however divine that belief is in itself. Now just a little dirt in the bottle will spoil the wine it contains, but modernism in the mind is such a radical error that it will spoil, or undermine, any Faith poured into that mind. And as wine poured into a dirty bottle cannot help being spoiled, so Catholic Faith poured into a modern mind can hardly help being undermined. So teach Pius X, de Corte, Calderón and Madiran, along with all others who have grasped the full objective malice of a modernist mind.

So how does Madiran in particular prove that the French bishops in the 1960’s were out of their Catholic minds? He starts out from an official declaration of theirs in December of 1966 (p. 40) where they affirm that “for a philosophical mind,” the words “person” and “nature,” crucial for Christology (Catholic theology of Christ) have changed their meaning since the time of Boethius (who hammered out the definition of “person”) and of Aquinas (who did similarly for “nature”). In other words, for the French bishops modern philosophy has left behind the Church’s classic philosophy embedded in unchanging Church doctrine, so that for them, thomism is obsolete “for a philosophical mind,” and to be discarded.

But in a Church whose doctrine always corresponded to what never changes in extra-mental reality, this perspective of the French bishops is absolutely revolutionary. It can only mean, says Madiran (43), that they are accepting the Copernican revolution in philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), who placed “reality”no longer outside but inside the mind. However (45, 46), there is no obligation, except in Kantian philosophy, to accept this internalising of reality. Only on its own premisses must one arrive at its unreal conclusions. By their moral choice of Kant over Aquinas, the French bishops were in fact demonstrating their implicit apostasy (50) and their anti-natural religion. They were declaring their independence from God’s Truth by their rejection of God’s reality, and of the Order which He implanted in Nature (60–63).

Madiran concludes his Part I by saying that whereas Thomism corresponds to the human experience of all times and all places (66), Kantism has cut the French bishops mentally adrift, like the modern age they so seek to please (67).

Kyrie eleison.

Madiran’s Foreword

Madiran's Foreword posted in Eleison Comments on October 3, 2020

In the Foreword to his book on The Heresy of the 20th Century Jean Madiran begins with the direct statement that it is the Catholic bishops who are responsible for the heresy of the 20th century (p.17 in the 2018 re-edition of the book from via.romana@yahoo.fr). Knowing that he will be accused as a mere layman of speaking out of turn, he states defiantly (28) that when the shepherds or bishops have turned into wolves or destroyers of the Faith. he needed as a baptised Catholic neither to ask for, nor to be given, any mandate to defend the Faith

And he makes (26) a crucial distinction which announces the thesis of his whole book. Heresy in the strict sense of the word means the wilful denial of what one knows to be a defined proposition of the Faith, but in the broad sense it means the acceptance of a whole teaching radically alien to the Faith. The heresy he will be attacking is in this broad sense, going far beyond the contradiction of just any one proposition of the Faith. The “20th century heresy” is to be found rather “in the night, in emptiness, in nothingness.”

And how did the French bishops get emptied out? Madiran writes (20) that for 100 years, reaching back then to the middle of the 19th century, they had been out of touch with Rome, at that time the truly Catholic Rome of Pius IX and the Syllabus, because their whole mentality (21) had slipped away from Rome. Theirs was Catholic discipline without conviction, Catholic obedience without understanding of what the obedience was for. In a few words Madiran is hitting on the essence of the pre-conciliar Church: under the influence of the modern world, a progressive loss of Catholic faith had resulted in a Church where the appearances were still standing but the substance behind the appearances was gone. How the true Church needed to resist that new Revolutionary world the anti-liberal Popes did lay out, especially Popes Pius IX, Leo XIII and Pius X in their social teaching, but of their Encyclicals Madiran (23) says that the bishops in the 1950’s knew virtually nothing.

Graver still for Madiran, foreshadowing the whole Part VI of the book to come, the 20th century heresy of these bishops was their all-engulfing faithless mentality, which denies that there is any such thing as the natural law (24). Magnetised by the modern world, infected by its liberalism, they had long been mentally slipping away from Rome and rejecting its social doctrine, but in the 1950’s they were still mouthing certain formulae of the old catechism. However, in their hearts all sense of the natural law was being lost, and this meant that in the years immediately following the Council they were ready to lay hands on dogma and the catechism which they had left up till then outwardly intact. Thus their disagreement with Rome on social doctrine contained implicitly that total uprooting of the Christian religion from which the entire Church suffered in the aftermath of the Council (25).

For if there is no natural law or rational order embedded by God in all of Creation around us, then all reason and faith are shipwrecked, and while the formulae of the Gospel and the dogmatic definitions may for a while be accurately recited and repeated, their substance has been drained out and all religion has been radically subverted. Bishops without natural law have no more access to the Gospel or to dogmatic definitions. They can no longer preserve or hand down anything (26). They are ripe to swing left towards the substitute religion of modernity, which is Communism (26).

And to conclude the Foreword, Madiran appeals to a compatriot who foresaw this decadence in the clergy even before the First World War. Charles Péguy (1873–1914) wrote in 1909 that the clergy (30) were successfully destroying Christianity by wanting it to progress with the times. They were themselves losing the faith (32), accepting its disappearance as something natural.

Kyrie eleison.

Madiran Introduced

Madiran Introduced posted in Eleison Comments on September 19, 2020

As eldest daughter of the Church, France has always had thinkers and writers in the forefront of the defence of the Church, and modern times are no exception. In the confusion and disarray of Catholics arising immediately out of the end of the Second Vatican Council in 1965, an outstanding pioneer of what would come to be “Traditional” thinking was the Frenchman Jean Madiran (1920–2013), creator and editor of the right-wing and nationalist monthly magazine “Itinéraires” (Itineraries) from 1956 to 1996. Already a genuine defender of the Faith before the Council, he made his magazine a centre-piece of that defence after the Council, when it became essential reading for many Catholics trying not to lose their heads or their faith.

In the 1960’s Madiran certainly contributed to maintaining in France the literate public that would provide a basis of support in the 1970’s for Archbishop Lefebvre to be able to lead a “Traditional” movement in France to oppose the destruction of the Church from within by the Conciliar clergy. Madiran and his magazine may also have seriously helped the Archbishop himself to arrive at his momentous decision at the end of the 1960’s to found in French Switzerland the Society of St Pius X, destined to make its decisive contribution to the saving of Catholic Tradition over the next 40 years. The one time that this writer can remember having seen the Archbishop run was when Madiran was once visiting the seminary in Écône, and the Archbishop had to catch him just before he returned to Paris.

Alas, their collaboration came to an end when John-Paul II became Pope in 1978, and Madiran thought that he would rescue the Church, but as far as the Archbishop was concerned, Madiran had had his good influence, and “Tradition” was by now well established. We need today to remember just how unthinkable it was in the 1950’s and 1960’s for Catholics to doubt their clergy. Here is the enormous merit of Madiran: a true faith unshaken by an almost entire Catholic hierarchy gone astray, together with the courage to stand up and write in public against the mass of people either “faithfully” following that hierarchy out of “obedience,” or faithlessly rejoicing in its undermining of the Church by freemasonry. That Madiran let himself be subsequently misled by John-Paul II only testifies to the force of the magnetism of Rome which for a crucial period of time he himself had succeeded in overcoming in the service of Catholic Truth.

That something in him never wavered is suggested by the fact that among all the books that he wrote in a long and productive life, the one in which he himself said that he best said what he essentially wanted to say was the book we are going to look at in these “Eleison Comments” – L’hérésie du vingtième siècle, The Heresy of the 20th Century. It first appeared in 1968, in other words in the thick of the controversy swirling around Vatican II. It contains a Prologue and six Parts, making perhaps seven issues of these “Comments,” because the book is a classic, even if it has not had many – or any – translations.

It is a classic because it takes a thomistic philosopher to take modernism to the cleaners – how does one analyse a fog? – and Madiran was a thomistic philosopher. But not just any thomistic philosopher, because the mass of Vatican II bishops had been drilled at their seminary or Congregation in the principles of the philosophy of St Thomas Aquinas. But they had not learned or understood how those principles apply to reality. This is because it is relatively easy to teach that philosophy like a coherent telephone book. Catholic pupils are docile and they drink it all in, without necessarily grasping that it is the one and only possible account of the one and only reality around us. But who can teach reality to pupils born in central heating and suckled on television? Madiran was of an earlier generation, which helps, but even then, to see modernism as clearly as he did, he needed a special grace of realism, like Pius X de Corte, Calderón and a select few others.

Fasten your seat-belts. Madiran is worth it. Next week perhaps, his Foreword.

Kyrie eleison.