objective truth

Modernism’s Malice – V

Modernism’s Malice – V on June 13, 2020

There is at least one more important consideration to be presented before we leave modernism alone (at least for the time being), and it is a prophecy of Fr Frederick Faber (1814–1863), concerning our own times, which has surely appeared already more than once in these “Comments.” He said words to the effect that the end of the world will be characterised by men doing evil while they think they are doing good.

It stands to reason. Even at world’s end men will still have their God-given nature, which as such is good, underlying their original and personal sins, however heavy these are in the last times – II Tim. III, 1–5. By this underlying nature which underlies even their inborn original sin, men have an underlying natural inclination to good. Yet the mass of men under the Antichrist and his predecessors will have gone along with his evil, actual or anticipated. How will this good and this evil have been compatible inside them?

The human will can want nothing that the human mind has not first presented to it. In front of every human desire must go a human thought. The desire of a non-object can only be a non-desire. Therefore the will depends on the mind to have grasped its object for it, and between every will and the object it wants must have come the mind, always assuming that the mind grasps its own object. But now comes Kant who says that the mind cannot grasp its own real object, it can only grasp what it itself fabricates. This means that the will and its real object are no longer properly connected. This means that a good will can will things in reality bad and a bad will can will something in reality good, but given men’s original sin the latter case will be less frequent. And so when Kant unhooks the mind from objective reality, he is making it that much easier for the will to want something bad while it appeared to be good. Thus in today’s whole world of minds unhooked from objective reality, it is that much easier for men still to be of good will even when they are wanting what is in reality not good, because the mind has been radically crippled.

Here is what Fr Faber is prophesying. He is saying that by the end of the world, the problem need not be so much bad hearts or ill-will as good hearts with crippled minds, in other words good hearts with bad principles. What does this mean in practice? It means that today there will be a large number of Catholics who can have the Faith and who mean well, but whose minds are malfunctioning because they follow, consciously but more often unconsciously, the teaching of Kant, so that their good will is correspondingly adrift. Then they can no longer see how the Newchurch is a gangrene upon the true Catholic Church, or how the Archbishop’s Society of St Pius X is being gangrened by his successors. But in many cases the blindness of such souls is not necessarily out of malice or a lack of good will.

It follows that in dealing with such souls in which the subjective has been split from the objective by a whole world crippled by Kant, a Catholic can easily make one of two opposed but connected errors. Either he can say that such souls are so innocent of heart that they cannot be mistaken in mind, so the Newchurch cannot be all that mistaken, and so he should rejoin it, Pachamama and all – thus behave today the Newsociety’s leaders and all those following them. Or he can say that the errors in the mind of the Newchurch and the Newsociety wishing to rejoin it are so grave that they cannot possibly be the true Church or the true Society, and both must be absolutely shunned – thus argue and behave those known as sedevacantists and those who may refuse the label of sedevacantism but take sedevacantist positions.

On the contrary, if I recognise how Kant began the split of subject from object, I will say neither that such souls are of good will and therefore their doctrine is good, nor that their doctrine is so false that they must be of bad will. Instead I will say that subjectively they may be of good will, but in any case they are objectively of such bad doctrine that for my eternal salvation I cannot follow them or keep them company. And with the Holy Rosary I will beg Our Lady to keep my heart and mind balanced in truth.

Kyrie eleison.

Law-Courts Conclude

Law-Courts Conclude on March 23, 2019

On January 31 last, the European Court of Human Rights announced its long-awaited decision to reject the appeal of the author of these “Comments” against his almost unanimous condemnation by seven different courts of law in Germany over several years for the “crime” by German law, of questioning on German soil in November of 2008 whether Six Million people really were gassed under the Third Reich. The two German defence lawyers made an honourable attempt to defend their politically most incorrect client, but they were fighting with one hand tied behind their back, because German law forbade them to take their stand on historical truth. Instead, in Germany as in many countries today, truth is no longer the measure of certain private interests, rather these private interests have become the measure of truth.

But how can truth thus have been dethroned? Like Almighty God Himself, Truth is either Number One, or it is nothing. God Himself can be Number One only, because He is the Creator infinitely superior to His entire Creation. Truth is Number One only, because if we define it as the matching of mind to reality, then any diminution or contradiction of truth, any preferring of a non-truth to that truth which the non-truth denies, means a corresponding loss of grip of my mind on reality, and therewith a lesser or greater slide of my whole self into fantasy and lies. So it is obvious that in the laws and law-courts of any nation, the truth is of paramount importance. Do not witnesses in a normal law-court swear “to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth”?

Here is why great law-givers count as founders of their nations, e.g. Moses of the Israelites, Solon of the Athenians, Lycurgus of the Spartans, because they establish the framework of justice among their people, appointing to each man his due, thus making social relations and societies possible. Even the society of 22 men in a humble game of soccer needs its own administrator of justice, the referee. And he cannot act as referee without the truth. Was that an honest tackle or was it a foul? Now whether in justice it deserved a penalty or not depends on the truth of what actually happened. Thus living in society is possible only with a measure of justice, and justice is only possible with a measure of truth. Blessed is the nation that has law-makers and judges who reward what is truly right and punish what is truly wrong.

Now let us look at laws and courts which punish any questioning of the notorious murder of Six Million victims in World War II. Was it a historical fact, or not? If it was true, then to question it can be bad if the damage done is bad enough, but if the murder never took place, then it is in accordance with truth to call it in question, and not only is it not bad, it is positively good, to call it in question. For if the Six Million are a monstrous myth weighing down on people’s minds as the foundational dogma of what acts as their false religion, am I not a liberator if I help to free their minds from the lie? “The Truth will set you free,” says Our Lord (Jn.VIII, 32). Is it not then as clear as day that if the Six Million never were murdered, then to question that murder deserves a great reward from society, and not a punishment?

Now politicians and their private interests can twist truth to a certain extent, but truth is of such universal force that it cannot be suppressed altogether. Therefore the common judgment of serious historians, based on objective evidence, can still rise up against the most powerful of private interests. Such is the case with the “gassing” of “six million” victims under the Third Reich. Private interests can claim what they like, but they cannot change the objective facts of 75 years ago. And what serious researchers into those facts more and more allege now is that the “gassing” never happened.

Therefore with laws forbidding its denial, any State is building on sand. Let all States beware of passing such laws that put the truth in second place, because at the very least, in this case, historical truth – as opposed to emotional “truth” – is not necessarily on their side.

Kyrie eleison.

True Hero

True Hero on November 10, 2018

On October 21 there died in France one of the few real heroes that our poor modern world could still boast of, Professor Robert Faurisson, in Vichy, France. He was a real hero because in a world of lies he stood with unfailing courage and scrupulous accuracy for truth, on a matter of decisive importance for all mankind. He was repaid with the loss of his job, with the suffering of his family, with ten personal and physical attacks one of which left him for dead, with isolation in his profession and with a relentless series of judicial attacks on the part of his bitter enemies, and yet he maintained towards them a constant courtesy and respect. This way of life he maintained for more than 40 years, never wavering in his service of the truth.

He died on the field of battle, just after returning home from giving one last public conference which was due to be his swansong, in Shepperton, England, the town of his birth nearly ninety years ago. There he spoke with a friend from Italy, who has left us this account of their conversation: “The Professor was as clear-sighted, as balanced and unbowed as ever, but he was tired, very tired, so frail as to seem almost transparent, with the feeling that his task was over. Indeed this super-brave man had achieved everything he was meant to achieve.” And the friend continues, “He leaves behind him an immense contribution to the Revisionist cause [ . . . ] Enemies filled with hate sought to stop him from writing, from living, but he always stood up again, not deflecting by a millimetre from his fearless pursuit of the truth.”

Many readers of these “Comments” know what “Revisionism” is about, and why it is of such importance to all men, including Catholics. As George Orwell said, “The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their understanding of their history.” Revisionists are historians who see people all over the world being destroyed today by an untrue version of their history, especially of the Second World War, so they do what they can to restore the truth of history. For – again Orwell – “Who controls the past controls the future . . .” meaning that whoever writes the history books controls the future, by the influence that history has on people’s minds, “. . . and who controls the present controls the past,” meaning that if the political masters of the moment use their power to control the history books, then they control the future.

Now the people who hold world-wide power today over politics and the media are people who want the godless New World Order, and they fully understand George Orwell. Therefore they have fabricated a hugely false version of World War Two history to go with a complete fabricated religion to replace Christianity. Now if truth did not matter, and if Christianity did not matter, as many people today think, then they should have no problem with the New World Order taking over, but they will in fact suffer a worldwide tyranny as a result, a prelude to the Antichrist. However Solzhenitsyn, enlightened by Russia’s horrendous 72 years of suffering under godless Communism, warned against building a nation, a continent or a world on lies. Likewise Professor Faurisson had a horror of people building on lies, and he gave his life to re-establishing the truth. The persecution that he underwent for tens of years for telling the truth was the proof from his miserable enemies of the importance and efficacy of what he was doing.

Nor did he promise himself any Heavenly reward for his dedication to truth, because he professed himself to be an atheist. Yet he loved children, was glad of blessings and never repudiated them. Now, as a sister of his pointed out, after going in front of a series of unjust judges who have nearly all buckled under to the New World Order, he has gone in front of the Supreme Just Judge, Our divine Lord Himself. How will Our Lord have judged him? Two things are certain: one, nothing in all the rest of his life will have been remotely as important as that judgment, and two, he merited greatly by men, but that is not the same thing as to merit by God. May he at the very last moment have been given a special grace of conversion, not impossible for God. Mt XXI, 28–29 gives us more than the right to hope and to pray for the eternal salvation of his soul.

Kyrie eleison.

Historical Truth – III

Historical Truth – III on September 30, 2017

The dreadful punishment of persistence in lying is that one loses all sense of reality. This punishment is closing in on our Western “civilisation.” People can no longer distinguish between truth and falsehood, between fantasy and reality. Alas, fantasy may be sweeter, but reality always re-asserts itself in the end, and the more obstinately one has clung to fantasy, the more violently reality is liable to return. The two World Wars of the last century were violent returns of reality. We are heading straight for a third, because the preference of fantasy is being raised to an ideology. The following clear example of the turning of lies into an ideology comes from a website striving to uphold truth:—

In 2009 a Polish-born American, Herman Rosenblat, wrote a touching Holocaust memoir for which, even before it could be published as a book, the film rights were sold for $25,000. Angel at the fence tells how Rosenblat, imprisoned during World War II in Buchenwald concentration camp, met through the camp’s outer fence a nine-year old girl who tossed to him apples and bread over the fence. By war’s end they had lost touch with one another, and he emigrated to the United States. Years later in New York he resorted to a matrimonial agency to find a bride, and who should turn up on the blind date but the same girl? She was now an adult, but he recognised her immediately and proposed to her, was accepted, and they have lived happily ever after.

The story is most touching. Rosenblat gave everyone to understand that it had all happened in reality, and it seems that everybody believed him. However, researchers into the story proved from wartime facts, for instance from the impossibility for Buchenwald inmates to approach the camp’s outer fence, that the story was a pure figment of Rosenblat’s imagination. It was one more “fake Holocaust story.” But a regular visitor to the website mentioned above, Seymour Zak, protested vehemently that there is no such thing as a “fake Holocaust story.” What is frightening is his reasoning –

 . . . . What anti-Semites keep insisting are “fake Holocaust stories” need to be seen in a more positive light as “the truth of imagination,” to quote the famous phrase of the poet John Keats. If something is perceived as true by the mind, though strictly speaking it may not have happened, and if that event is subsequently seen as a living truth in the minds of millions of other good people who have been exposed to that same heightened version of reality, then it must on no account be dismissed as a “lie” ( . . . ) All such stories are true in a higher metaphysical sense, and to deny them is a sacrilege ( . . . ) We have a sacred obligation to the six million who died under the tyranny of the evil Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler to remember the dead and dismiss with contempt all attempts to deny the Holocaust by referring to “fake Holocaust stories.” I repeat: there is no such thing as a fake Holocaust story. Every Holocaust story is true, 100 per cent true, whether it happened or not. ( . . . ) In the sublime words of Elie Wiesel: “In literature, certain things are true though they didn’t happen, while others are not true, even if they did happen.”

On Seymour Zak’s reasoning, it is of no importance whether the six million mentioned here really died “under the tyranny, etc.” or not. What matters is whether the Six Million constitute a “heightened version of reality . . . . seen as a living truth in the minds of millions of good people, etc.” and if they do, then to state that they died when in reality they did not die is no longer a lie, but a higher truth! Reality is no longer the measure of truth, especially if that higher truth is quasi-religious, namely a “sacred obligation” which it is “sacrilege” to deny, namely Holocaustianity. In other words, there is historical reality and non-historical reality, and only the second deserves the name of “reality”!

This is utter madness, but it is in society all around us, more and more so, and we human beings are social animals, necessarily influenced by the society around us. Catholics – and non-Catholics – if you want to keep your head above the rising flood of madness, pray 15 Mysteries a day of the Holy Rosary. Our Lady can protect your sanity. These “Comments” have no other remedy to suggest.

Kyrie eleison.

Sarto, Siri?

Sarto, Siri? on September 29, 2012

In a sermon for the Feast of St Pius X I found myself uttering « almost a heresy »: I wondered aloud whether Giuseppe Sarto would have disobeyed Paul VI’s destruction of the Church, if, instead of dying as Pope Pius X in 1914, he had died as a Cardinal in, say, 1974. Within the Society of St Pius X that must sound like a heresy because how can the wisdom of the heavenly patron of the SSPX be in any way flawed? Yet the question is not idle.

In the 1970’s Archbishop Lefebvre made personal visits to a number of the Church’s best cardinals and bishops in the hope of persuading a mere handful of them to offer public resistance to the Vatican II revolution. He used to say that just half a dozen bishops resisting together could have seriously obstructed the Conciliar devastation of the Church. Alas, not even Pius XII’s choice of successor, Cardinal Siri of Genoa, would make a public move against the Church Establishment. Finally Bishop de Castro Mayer stepped forward, but only in the 1980’s, by when the Conciliar Revolution was well ensconced at the top of the Church.

So how could the best of well-trained minds have been so darkened? How could so few of the best churchmen at that time not have seen what the Archbishop was seeing, for instance that the “law” establishing the Novus Ordo Mass was no law at all, because it belongs to the very nature of law to be an ordinance of reason for the common good? How could he have been so relatively alone in not letting such a basic principle of common sense be smothered by respect for authority, when the Church’s very survival was being placed in peril by Vatican II and the New Mass? How can authority have so gained the upper hand on reality and truth?

My own answer is that for seven centuries Christendom has been sliding into apostasy. For 700 years, with noble interruptions like the Counter-Reformation, the reality of Catholicism has been slowly eaten away by the cancerous fantasy of liberalism, which is the freeing of man from God by the freeing of nature from grace, of mind from objective truth and of will from objective right and wrong. For the longest time, 650 years, the Catholic churchmen clung to and defended reality, but finally enough of the engrossing fantasy of glamorous modernity worked its way into their bones for reality to lose its grip on their minds and wills. Lacking grace, as St Thomas More said of the English bishops in his time betraying the Catholic Church, the Conciliar bishops let men’s fantasy take over from God’s reality, and authority take over from truth. There are practical lessons for clergy and laity alike.

Colleagues inside and outside the SSPX, to serve God, let us beware of reacting like Giuseppe Siri when we need to be reacting like Giuseppe Sarto, with his magnificent denunciations of the modern errors in Pascendi, Lamentabiliand the Letter on the Sillon. And to obtain the grace we need in this most tremendous crisis of all Church history, we need tremendously to pray.

Layfolk, if horrors of modern life make you “hunger and thirst after justice,” rejoice if you can that the horrors are keeping you real, and do not doubt that if you persevere in your hunger, you will “have your fill” (Mt.V, 6). Blessed are the poor in spirit, the meek, and they that mourn, says Our Lord, in the same place. As for the surest protection against your minds and hearts being taken over by the fantasy, pray five, better fifteen, Mysteries a day of Our Lady’s Holy Rosary.

Kyrie eleison.

Resistance Undermined

Resistance Undermined on July 21, 2012

The good news from the General Chapter of the Society of St Pius X which closed on Saturday is that the SSPX, led to the brink of suicide, has been given a reprieve by the Chapter. However, if the following words, spoken in an interview broadcast worldwide, are any indication of the mind of the leaders still in place for another six years, prayers must still go up for the reprieve to last. Here are the words (which may or may not still be accessible on the Internet – see Catholic News Service):—

“Many people have an understanding of the Council(Vatican II) which is a wrong understanding, and now we have people in Rome who say it. We may say, in the Discussions(between Rome and the Society of St Pius X, from 2009 to 2011), I think, we see that many things which we(in the SSPX) would have condemned as coming from the Council are in fact not from the Council, but from the common understanding of it.”

To comment, we must go back to Vatican II. Containing both truth and error, its 16 documents are profoundly ambiguous and contradictory. Following Archbishop Lefebvre, the SSPX has never said that the documents contain no truth, but it has always accused them of containing serious errors, for instance the doctrine that the State has no right to repress non-Catholic religions. Conciliar Rome has always defended the documents, for instance by referring to the opposite truths contained in them, such as that every man must in matters religious find out and profess the truth. But the truths have never been the problem. The problem is the error and the contradiction. For instance, if a mass of individuals, such as the State, may be neutral in religion, why should the single individual not be? The contradiction opens the door wide to the liberation of man from God – liberalism.

The Doctrinal Discussions of 2009 to 2011 were set up to examine the doctrinal clash between the Romans’ Conciliar subjectivism and the SSPX’s Catholic objectivism. They showed, of course, that the clash is profound and irreconcilable, not between Conciliar truth and Catholic truth, but between Conciliar error and Catholic truth, in effect between the religion of man and the religion of God.

Now comes the speaker to state that the “people in Rome” are right, and that “we” are wrong, i.e. the SSPX, because “many things” the SSPX has constantly condemned as coming from the Council come only from a “common understanding” of the Council. In other words, the Archbishop and his Society were wrong from the beginning to accuse the Council, and accordingly to resist Conciliar Rome. It follows that the episcopal consecrations of 1988 must have been an unnecessary decision, because Conciliar bishops could have been trusted to look after Catholic Tradition. Yet the Archbishop called those consecrations “Operation Survival,” and he called trusting Conciliar Rome “Operation Suicide.”

Today the speaker – consistently with his words quoted above – is certainly favouring a Rome-SSPX agreement. Moreover he is quoted as suggesting in Austria two months ago that this agreement would entrust Conciliar Rome with choosing the SSPX’s future bishops. Then unless Rome has stopped being Conciliar since the Archbishop’s day, and all the evidence cries out against such an illusion, the Archbishop would have said that the speaker was promoting “Operation Suicide” of the SSPX – unless the speaker has since disowned these words.

Kyrie eleison.