Vaticano II

VATICAN II SHORT – SIGHTED

VATICAN II SHORT – SIGHTED on October 19, 2024

Poor modern man, so drastically short-sighted,

His whole life being, by that short sight, blighted!

If we want to save our souls for eternity, as God wants all of us to do (I Tim. II,4), then the world now surrounding us is a dangerous environment for that purpose because, broadly speaking, for seven centuries mankind has been slowly but surely demoting God in order to take His place. It is a foolish attempt, doomed to fail, but in the meantime it has brought mankind to the brink of nuclear suicide. Now, on that road to ruin, from the Incarnation onwards, the greatest obstacle to the folly of man was God’s own Church instituted by God’s own Son, Our Lord Jesus Christ, to be the continuation of His Incarnation amongst men, as the Light of the World to dispel men’s confusion, and the Salt of the Earth to prevent men’s corruption. Alas, Vatican II in the 1960’s was the summit of men’s attempts to serve the Devil by crippling that Church, so as to send all men’s souls to Hell instead of Heaven. From here came the confusion and corruption all around us.

But Vatican II had to be subtle, because by the 20th century Mother Church had already analysed and refuted the great errors leading up to Vatican II, especially Protestantism (1517) and its progeny, Liberalism (1717) and Communism (1917). Among the host of errors accompanying these three, surely the most dangerous was Modernism (1907), because it was led by priests from inside the Church, wishing to update God’s Church by adapting it to godless modern man. Therefore subtlety was needed to deceive Catholics alerted to Protestantism in all its forms (and for the same reason, even more subtlety will be needed by the Antichrist to fool a mankind alerted by the divine Chastisement occurring between now and then).

When Archbishop Lefebvre died in 1991, one of his hopes was that the Society of priests which he had founded in 1970 would work on the subtle errors of Vatican II to analyse and denounce them. This is precious work for the salvation of souls, and one book is outstanding in this respect, Prometheus, the Religion of Man, by Fr Alvaro Calderon, translated into French and published last May by the Society’s printing-house in France, accessible at www.clovis-diffusion.com The book is not an easy read, but it is highly to be recommended for its masterly thomistic breakdown of Vatican II. Here for instance is, in very brief form, the first major error of Vatican II, denounced by Fr Calderon:

Man must be the centre of religion, because he is, amongst all other material creatures, the only creature that is also spiritual. Therefore he is superior to all of them, he is the main purpose of all of them, and he is the main purpose of all material creation, being the only creature created for himself, all other material creatures having been created only for him. Therefore he must be at the centre of any true religion of that creation.

But all of this argument leaves out the Creator. If we start out from God and not from man, then we know that the one and only ultimate cause of the creation of man must be the essence of God Himself, because the one and only object possible of God’s willing anything at all is His own goodness, because that infinite goodness alone can fulfil His infinite willing. Any creature and everything that He chooses freely to create, He can only will in and through His willing of His own uncreated Self.

Therefore it can only be Himself, and not man, who is the ultimate purpose of creation, and He alone who can be at the centre of any true religion of that creation. All of the arguments in the documents of Vatican II which attempt to put man instead of God at the centre of creation around us, fail, for ignorance, witting or unwitting, wilful or unwilful, of Catholic Tradition’s supreme treasures of philosophy and theology. Thus one of the last and worst of all the Vatican II documents, Gaudium et Spes, is, says Fr Calderon, shot through with the very inadequate modern philosophy of Personalism, by which the human person is at the centre of everything. No, he is not. It is God who is at the centre of everything.

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.