Vatican II

Madiran’s Philosophy

Madiran's Philosophy 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 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 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.

Viganò to Be Diluted?

Viganò to Be Diluted? on August 29, 2020

In a series of recent statements in public, notably on June 9 the Italian Archbishop Carlo Viganò, still today member of the Church’s official hierarchy, has stood out from the mass of his colleagues in that hierarchy by taking a severe view of Vatican II. Now comes an Italian theologian, Fr. Alfredo Morselli, who seeks to moderate Archbishop Viganò’s severity not exactly by defending the Council, but by arguing for instance that it is not alone responsible for the crisis that has come over the Church in the years following the Council. Let us look at his “Thesis on the Council” which he has made public in nine main points and eight sub-points, here abbreviated:—

1 The present crisis is of unprecedented gravity, essentially neo-modernist, but much graver than the original modernist crisis at the beginning of the 20th century.
2 However, Vatican II is not simply the cause of the present crisis, because:
2.1 The crisis began long before 1960,
2.2 its neo-modernism would never have taken root without the deep corruption of modern man, and
2.3 similarly the pontificate of Pope Francis was prepared long before the 21st century.
3 We must distinguish between the Council itself and the post-Council, or aftermath of the Council:
3.1 The Council cannot be blamed for all errors attributed to it, even if they were done in its name,
3.2 The Holy Spirit was at the Council, so that one cannot say there was no good at all in the Council.
4 The Council texts do include ambiguous formulae, which give the neo-modernists an opening.
5 Almost all these problems have been solved subsequently by official Church Declarations.
6 The problems represent not so much errors as the desire to be inclusive rather than exclusive.
7 A tragic example of that desire is the Council’s refusal to condemn Communism.
8 Calling the Council “pastoral” does not mean that there is nothing dogmatic in its pronouncements.
9 One may only criticize the Council in accordance with Church teaching on the Faith. Hence
9.1 Faith means believing God, i.e. accepting and not choosing what truths one will believe.
9.2 The Catholic Church’s Magisterium is the prime decider of which are those truths to believe.
9.3 That Magisterium is not open to private interpretation. It alone can interpret its own decisions.

And now the briefest of comments on each of these positions of Fr Morselli:—

1 This introductory point lays down how far Fr Morselli agrees with Archbishop Viganò. Bravo!
2 Who would blame an explosion exclusively on the detonator? Of course there must be explosives.
2.1 Indeed Vatican II had a long ancestry, notably the Protestant “Reformation” and 1789’s Revolution.
2.2 Absolutely true. The deep corruption of modern man has been centuries in the making.
2.3 Also true. Five Popes neo-modernist in principle prepared the sixth, merely blatantly so in practice.
3 Beware! – is he who unbolts the stable-door not to be blamed for the horse running away?
3.1 “I never meant for the horse to run away. I only wanted for it to be free to gallop in the sunshine!”
3.2 The Holy Spirit stopped the Council from being even worse, but left the Bishops their free-will . . .
4 The deadly ambiguities were planted by the neo-modernists, allowed to pass by the “Catholics.”
5 These “clarifications” in which Fr Morselli believes usually do not clarify, but maintain the problem.
6 Alas, it is the very desire to be inclusive that makes doors once firmly shut, open again to error.
7 Archbishop Lefebvre said, the refusal to condemn Communism will stigmatise this Council for ever.
8 Dreadful ambiguity: the “pastoral” Council was not dogmatic, but had to be followed like dogma!
9 “The poison is in the tail” – at the end, Fr Morselli falls back on the argument of Authority! –
9.1 Of course we must believe what truly comes from God, and not choose ourselves what to believe.
9.2 And of course, if God demands belief, as He does, He owes us an infallible Magisterium to decide.
9.3 But that Magisterium consists of fallible Church officials with free-will, which God will not take away, and if, exceptionally, they fail in their duty, He expects the sheep to judge them by their fruits.

In brief, Archbishop Viganò’s severity, judging Vatican II by its fruits, surpasses Fr. Morselli’s Authority.

Kyrie eleison.

Drexel’s Pope

Drexel’s Pope on August 8, 2020

Originally this last of four issues of “Eleison Comments” being drawn from Fr. Drexel’s booklet on Faith is Greater than Obedience was going to argue in favour of the booklet’s position that Pope Paul VI was of good intentions when at the head of the Catholic Church between 1962 and 1965 he presided over the Second Vatican Council and brought about its revolutionary change of the Church. Of course human intentions are the secret of God who alone can know them infallibly, but Our Lord tells us to judge the tree by its fruits, and it is here that Paul VI is found wanting. We are now 55 years on from the end of the Council, and its fruits have proved to be disastrous for Catholicism in any true sense of the word.

Therefore amid the many excellent things contained in Fr Drexel’s Messages from the 1970’s contained in Faith is Greater than Obedience, it is difficult to include his portrait of Paul VI. In brief, here it is –

Paul VI loved the Church – 3-XII-71– He feels pain and sorrow for consecrated souls turning from the Church to the world. 4-VIII-72 – He is abandoned by many who could have supported him with vigour and loyalty. With tears and sweat he wrestles to save the Church, he sorrows for unfaithful priests, he grieves still more for bishops more interested in their comfort than in caring for the faith or for souls. 1 – VIII-75– He is oppressed by false advisers. 7-IV-72 – He becomes more lonely, and those loyal to him are persecuted. 5-VII-74 – He prays, sacrifices and suffers constantly, but many break faith. 7-XI-75 – Never have there been so many sacrileges as since the New Mass, but My visible representative bears no guilt for this. His will is interior participation at the holy sacrifice, in reverence and in love ( . . . ) it is priests who are sinning in this way and act contrary to the word and work of the successor of Peter.

Notice in particular the last of these references, from November of 1975. The categorical statement that the Pope bore no responsibility for the multiple sacrileges that came with the New Mass cannot be true, however good his intentions may have been. “The way to Hell is paved with good intentions,” because men are fallible, they make mistakes and what they intend is not always what they achieve. However, as soon as a good intention has a bad result, then if they really intend the good result, they will change whatever was producing the bad result. But in the 1970’s Pope Paul changed little or nothing from his liberal revolution of the 1960’s, on the contrary he did everything in his power to crush the counter-revolution of Archbishop Lefebvre from inside the Church. Therefore the Pope’s real intention was not “interior participation at the holy sacrifice” but the bringing into line of the Catholic Church with the modern world, a re-aligning to which the Archbishop was an unacceptable obstacle.

As the Archbishop said, Pope Paul was a liberal catholic, in other words a man deeply divided between two irreconcilable loves: his true love of the Church by his Catholic faith, and his false love of the modern world by his liberalism. Inside any one man these two loves must fight to the death. Inside Paul VI the Catholicism would not die, so towards the end of his life he wept for the loss of priestly vocations, but his liberalism ran deeper. It was intellectual, ideological and implacable. Woe to anybody who got, or gets, in its way. Then suddenly the liberal dove brings out its claws, which are those of a hawk. Such was Paul VI. In comparison with his liberalism, his faith was sentimental. Hence his Council and his Mass.

And where does that leave Fr Drexel? When Heaven makes use of a human messenger, it leaves him with his free will and personality. Women and children make the most docile messengers, the most completely faithful to the message being entrusted to them, but men . . . many men have struggled to achieve their views on life, and these may consciously or even unconsciously colour any message of Heaven or earth passing through them. Very possibly Our Lord spoke to Fr Drexel from the 1920’s until his death in 1977. Very possibly Fr Drexel’s own solution to the agonising problem set by Pope Paul was the solution adopted by many a pious Catholic after the Council: the Pope means well, it is the bishops who are the real problem. Alas . . . as today, the bishops were a problem, but so was the Pope.

Kyrie eleison.

Drexel’s Bishops

Drexel’s Bishops on August 1, 2020

Having reminded ourselves last week (EC of July 18, 2020) of how well the Messages from the 1970’s of Fr. Drexel’s Faith is greater than Obedience still fit the situation of Catholics in the 2020’s, let us see what view these Messages took of the Church’s pivot between Pope and priests, namely the bishops. These Messages are very severe for the clergy that virtually abandoned their flocks in the wake of Vatican II, especially for the bishops who had handed over their God-given responsibilities to man-made Bishops’ Conferences (see July 5, 1974 below. Two years later Archbishop Lefebvre was “hated and ridiculed”) . . .

December 3, 71 But the greatest pain to My Heart was given by those who should be shepherding the faithful – and these are the bishops, who have become silent, indifferent and cowardly. Not only a few, but many of them, are afraid of men and are far from the fear of God. This is the reason why the wolves were able to break into the flock, bringing such confusion and devastation and destruction upon the Church. Indeed, they try to wreck and smash the rock of My Church, but millions of souls, of immortal souls, are being lost. For these souls, those apostate shepherds and tepid bishops must render an account before My eternal Judgment! Once I wept over Jerusalem and over the people of this city and over their priests and high-priests; and still their sin was not as great as the sin of those who, in the Church of today, instead of being leaders become seducers, instead of shepherds become mercenaries, instead of counsellors become traitors. But there are certainly also true shepherds of souls and vigilant bishops, who stand with firmness and charity alongside the successor of Peter.

August 4, 72 While My son Paul ( . . . ) receives with great sorrow the news about priests who abandon their flocks, their vocation, and their office, and he entreats these fugitives and faint-hearted ones, nevertheless his grief is greater over the many shepherds (bishops) who, by virtue of their office and vocation, are obliged to assist with clearness and firmness the head, leader, and father of all the faithful, and to respect his instructions. But instead they lead a comfortable life, and because of laziness and cowardice, they omit being vigilant in their parishes and omit taking care of the faith with great, rigorous attention for the maintenance of discipline and the preservation of the faith.

December 1, 72 So many of the faithful hunger for a good shepherd. Yes, the bishops have been called and appointed as shepherds. But they become mercenaries and wolves, because they have abandoned the road to loyalty. The souls entrusted to them will one day testify against them at the Judgment.

July 5, 74 The distress of souls cries to Heaven; in the meantime , unasked persons take power in the Church and in meetings, and all this is happening because of the bishops, who do not stop them, and who do not set up boundaries.

November 1, 74 Consider: A great confusion has pierced My one and true Church. Books filled with false statements and heresies are accepted by bishops, who are supposed to be shepherds, while writings that tell the truth are rejected by the Church’s representatives, so great has become the confusion!

February 7, 75 Some of the shepherds and guardians who have been anointed ( . . . ) have abandoned the faith and give freedom to heresies. ( . . . ) Oh, would that all of those shepherds might understand what responsibility they carry and how much this responsibility is increasing upon them, because those who still believe and pray do not find protection any more.

July 2, 76 Why are there not guards, who protect the faith any more, and consequently the faithful people, the youth and the children, from having their souls murdered? But those who stand up against the damaging of the faith are persecuted, and their serious and heavy sorrows are exposed to hate and ridicule.

Kyrie eleison.