We are happy to publish here an archive of Bishop Williamson's monthly letter
to friends and benefactors of the Society's Seminary in Winona USA.
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St Thomas Aquinas Seminary
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INDEX
Aug. 9, 2003 - Persevere In The Truth
Jul. 7, 2003 - Liberalism is a Killer
Jun. 4, 2003 - Karl Rahner - Prime Delinquent
May 5, 2003 - Two Rumours - and More to Come?
Apr. 4, 2003 - For Ever...And Ever
Mar. 1, 2003 - Iraqi War - In God We Trust
Feb. 1, 2003 - Nice Rome Not Enough
Jan. 9, 2003 - Is It Just To Attack Iraq?
Dec. 6, 2002 - New Church "Canonizations"
Nov. 2002 - Truth Prevails, Times Five
Oct. 1, 2002 - A Congress on Vatican II
Sep. 1, 2002 - State of the Nations: Three Layers of Lies
Aug. 1, 2002 - SSPX in Distant Lands
July 1, 2002 - Well Done, Young Parents
June1, 2002 - Campos - What went wrong?
May 1, 2002 - The Newchurch against Nature
Apr. 1, 2002 - Resurrection of the Arts
Mar. 1, 2002 - Judas And The Newchurch
Feb. 1, 2002 - Campos is fallen
Jan. 9, 2002 - Death and eternity
Dec. 1, 2001 - Dialogue at the crib
Oct. 1, 2001 - World Trade Center - The Scourge of Sin
Sept. 1, 2001 - Girls at University
Aug. 1, 2001 - Bishop de Galarreta's view on the negotiations with Rome
July 1, 2001 - More books analyzing the disaster of Vatican II
June 5 , 2001 - Negotiations with Rome are not continuing
May 8, 2001 - A look at "The Abolition of Britain" by Peter Hitchens
Apr. 2, 2001 - Contacts with Rome and the Society's depth-charging of the New Mass
Mar. 1, 2001 - Update and history of the SSPX contact with Rome
Feb. 1, 2001- Contact with Rome and how to react to the outcome
Dec. 1, 2000 - The suburban way of life goes against nature
Nov. 1, 2000 - Death, from the eyes of St. Paul and John Keats
Oct. 3, 2000- Bishops' meeting with Cardinal Hoyos
Sept. 6, 2000 - Jubilee year pilgimage
Aug. 1, 2000 - Keeping our Catholic Faith and sharing it around us
July 4, 2000 - Third Secret of Fatima
June 7, 2000 - Freemasonry in the Vatican, anticipation of Third Secret of Fatima
May 1, 2000 - Our Lady of Fatima
April 2, 2000 - The Pope's millennial apology
Mar , 2000 - Vatican II compared to the Agony in the Garden
Feb. 6, 2000 - Jubilee year: indulgences and ecumentical celebrations
Jan. 9, 2000 - In defense of the family
Dec. 1, 1999 - Fraternity of St. Peter
Nov. 3, 1999 - John Paul II's thinking on the meeting of Assisi
Oct. 4, 1999 - Confusion in Newchurch disguises drive towards destruction of faith
Sep. 1, 1999 - Bishop Thomas' response to letter sent out by SSPX in France
July 1, 1999 - What is going wrong with our children?
June 7, 1999 - Drawing strength and peace from our Faith - by Fr. Doran
May 5, 1999 - What is happening in Yugoslavia?
April 2, 1999 - Theological study of the consecration of four bishops in Econe
Mar. 6, 1999 - Clinton's aquittal and the degradation of morals
Feb. 9, 1999 - Can Cardinal Ratzinger be trusted?
Jan. 1, 1999 - Keeping families Catholic in modern society.
Dec. 1, 1998 - The Millennium. A great new age for Church and world?
Nov. 1, 1998 - Address of Pope John Paul II to the Fraternity of St. Peter: 1998
Oct. 1, 1998 - Co-education and the 4 great false principles of the modern world.
Sep. 1, 1998 - The "diabolical disorientation" of Catholic churchmen today
Aug. 1, 1998 - Fiftiesism as compared to pre-Reformation England
July 1, 1998 - Can Society Catholics withstand Catholicism without the Cross?
June 1, 1998 - Tenth anniversary of the episcopal consecrations
May 1, 1998 - The Titanic and self-fulfilment as a substitute religion
Apr. 2, 1998 - The necessity of "shocking" newsletters
Mar. 3, 1998 - Marriage annulments and the Society of St Pius X
Feb. 4, 1998 - Why the Society is neither liberal nor sedevacantist
Jan.2, 1998 - Twelve local children escape sexual abuse in their familes
Dec.1, 1997 - Defections from the Society in May 1997
Nov.7, 1997 - The problem with The Sound of Music
Oct. 8, 1997 - Regarding: "Pastoral Message to Parents of Homosexual Children"
Aug. 5, 1997 - Devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary
July 1, 1997 - Hamlet and the solutions of Jesus Christ to modern problems
Jun. 5, 1997 - Why computers will not take over the human race
May 1, 1997 - Computers in education cause collapse of ideas, words and thought
Apr. 1, 1997 - The Resurrection is a truth accessible to reason
Mar. 1, 1997 - Ideas on a "concentration camp" to attack problems of modern youth
Feb. 1, 1997 - The religious problem behind politics
Jan.1, 1997 - Lyrics of Pink Floyd reveal youths' scream for help
Dec. 1, 1996 - Examining the crisis in the church as we near the third Millenium
Nov. 3, 1996 - Religious Liberty
Oct. 4, 1996 - The state of the Catholic Faith and the SSPX in Asia and England
Sept. 1 1996 - "Rome will loose the faith" La Salette - observations by Malachi Martin
Aug. 3, 1996 - St. Pius X as an example of real charity
July 1, 1996 - True charity and apparent charity
May 7, 1996 - Bishop Bruskewitz's threatened excommunication of liberals and SSPX
Apr. 1, 1996 - The derailing of Buchanan's presidential campaign
Mar. 1, 1996 - Excerpts from the second half of the Society's Congress in Albano, Italy
Feb. 1, 1996 - Nixon's career: the facts, a liberal view and a Catholic view
Jan. 6, 1996 - Excerpts from the first half of the Society's Congress in Albano, Italy
Dec. 6, 1995 - Questions and answes about SSPX and the church today
Oct. 3, 1995 - The major errors of liberalism in education
Sep. 1, 1995 - Pluralism: the major threat to the Faith and salvation of Catholics today
Aug. 3, 1995 - European visit yields foreboding and re-assurance
July 1, 1995 - Religious liberty is a substitute religion
Jun. 1, 1995 - The moral chaos of "sincere sin"
May 5, 1995 - Why is Our Lady weeping tears of blood in so many locations today?
Apr. 5 1995 - Modernism as the cause of Rwanda massacre
Mar. 1 1995 - The necessity of good nuns to nurse, teach and pray
Feb. 1 1995 - A tribute to Fr. Urban Snyder
Jan. 1, 1995 - Quotes from Msgr. Gaume and Cardinal Pie for the New Year
Dec. 1, 1994 - Pope John-Paul II thinking on the prayer meeting of Assisi
Nov. 1, 1994 - Understanding moral liberty and natural liberty
Oct. 1, 1994 - The need to shun religious fellowship even with 'conservative' Catholics
Aug.12, 1994 - Bishop Bernard Fellay, new Superior General of Society; Dominicans
Jul.1, 1994 - Ordinations; will SSPX remain faithful?
Jun. 7, 1994 - The importance of the SSPX General Chapter in July '94
May 1, 1994 - Veritatis Splendor and two notions of human dignity and human liberty
Apr. 2, 1994 - Society of St. Pius X is advancing and consolidating in Latin America
Mar. 1, 1994 - Veritatis Splendor: a dangerous half-truth
Feb. 3, 1994 - The solemn consecration of the Seminary altar and St. Agnes
Jan. 1, 1994 - Parishioners write on women's dress and the father's role in the family
Oct. 1, 1993 - The power of the humble rosary beads
Sep. 1, 1993 - summary of the Si Si No No analysis of three prominent churchmen
Aug. 2, 1993 - Communism is not dead; by Fr. Wolfgang Goettler
Jul. 4, 1993 - The stand-in nature of the Catholic priest, standing in for Jesus Christ
Jun.4, 1993 - Three of the lesser-known architects of neo-modernism
May 4, 1993 - The importance of the family rosary
Apr. 2, 1993 - Fr. Bariele and his influence on the seminarians of Ecône
Mar. 1, 1993 - Voodoo and the infectious nature of insanity
Feb. 3, 1993 - The Founding Fathers and religious liberty
Dec. 1, 1992 - Brahms and the need for God to be a part of everything we do
Nov. 5, 1992 - Argentinian ceremonies, Christopher Columbus, religious liberty
Oct. 6, 1992 - Defending Archbishop Lefebvre against the accusation of schism
Sep. 3, 1992 - The validity of Archbishop Lefebvre's ordination and consecration
Aug. 1, 1992 - The futility of the battle of Verdun, and life, without God
Jul. 1, 1992 - The mystery of the Catholic priesthood by Fr. Pierre Delaplace
Jun. 5, 1992 - Columbus founded America, by integrating Faith and politics
May 8, 1992 - Private revelation and the message of Garabandal
Apr. 1, 1992 - The rise of Archbishop Lefebvre one year after his death
Mar. 5, 1992 - Why the Society of Saint Pius X is not sedevacantist
Feb. 1, 1992 - Visit of Cardinal Oddi to Ecône and the Superior General's reaction
Jan. 1, 1992 - A letter of encouragment the young family fathers and mothers
Dec. 1, 1991 - Rome cannot help keeping watch on the Society of Saint Pius X
Oct. 1, 1991 - Seminarians keep the pilot light of the Society of Saint Pius X lit
Sep. 1, 1991 - Women's trousers are an assault upon woman's womanhood
Aug. 1, 1991 - The episcopal consecration in Brazil of Msgr. Licinio Rangel
Jun. 10, 1991 - Three reasons why all independant priests need not join the Society
May 9, 1991 - Bishop de Castro Mayer, his faithfulness and his death
Apr. 1, 1991 - The life and death of Archbishop Lefebvre
Mar. 1, 1991 - The faithful remnant in Latin America
Feb. 1, 1991 - The Gulf War and the state of the Catholic Church today
Monday
New Church "Canonizations"
December 6, 2002
Dear Friends and Benefactors,
The October 6 "canonization" of Msgr. Escrivá de Balaguer, founder of the "Opus Dei", like the September "beatification" of Pope John XXIII, launcher of Vatican II, re-opens an old and hurtful wound - how can the Catholic Church do such things? And if it is not the Catholic Church that is doing them, what is it?
For indeed it is clear beyond any doubt that the Catholic Church prior to Vatican II, when she was still essentially faithful to Catholic Tradition, would never have beatified the Pope who initiated the Council which devastated that Tradition, nor canonized the founder of "Opus Dei", an organization preparing the way for that Council.
There is an abundance of quotes, proudly published by "Opus Dei" itself, to prove that Msgr. Escrivá shared and promoted key ideas of Vatican II. Here are two: Msgr. Escrivá himself said, "Ours is the first organization which, with the authorization of the Holy See, admits non-Catholics, Christian or non-Christian. I have always defended liberty of conscience" ("Conversaciones con Mons. Escrivá", ed. Rialp, p.296). And his successor at the head of "Opus Dei" said about Msgr. Escriva's book "Camino", "It prepared millions of people to get in tune with, and to accept in depth, some of the most revolutionary teachings which 30 years later would be solemnly promulgated by the Church at Vatican II" ("Estudios sobre 'Camino'", Msgr. Alvaro del Portillo, ed. Rialp, p.58).
Therefore, for Pope John XXIII to have been truly a Blessed, and for Msgr. Escrivá to have been truly a Saint, the Second Vatican Council would have to have been a true Council, or a Council true to Catholic Tradition. Which is ridiculous, as at least regular readers of this Letter know. Yet are not Catholic canonizations meant to be infallible?
Indeed before Vatican II, Catholic theologians agreed that canonizations (not beatifications) of Saints were virtually infallible, for two main reasons. Firstly, the proposing of model Catholics to be venerated and imitated as Saints is so central to Catholics' practice of their faith, that Mother Church could hardly be mistaken in the matter. This being so, secondly, the pre-Vatican II Popes took such care in examining candidates for canonization, and successful candidates they canonized with such solemnity, that their act of canonizing was as close as could be to a pronouncement of the Popes' solemn and infallible magisterium.
But since Vatican II, firstly the models chosen for imitation are liable, like John XXIII and Msgr. Escrivá, to be chosen for their alignment on Vatican II, i.e. on the destruction of Catholic Tradition, and secondly, the formerly strict process of examination of candidates has been so loosened under the Vatican II popes and there has followed such a flood of canonizations under John Paul II, that the whole process of canonizing has lost, together with its solemnity, any likelihood of infallibility. Indeed, how can John Paul II intend to do anything infallible, or therefore do it, when he often acts and talks, for instance about "living tradition", as though Truth can change?
So this or that Saint "canonized" by John Paul II may in fact be in Heaven, even Msgr. Escrivá, God knows, but it is certainly not his "canonization" by this Pope which can make us sure of the fact. Nor need we then feel obliged to venerate any of the post-Vatican II "Saints".
Which leaves us with the problem we began with: the Catholic Church has the divine promise of indefectibility, i.e. it cannot fail ("Behold, I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world" - Mt. XXVII, 20). Then how can canonizations, which are meant through infallibility to partake in that indefectibility, fail, by partaking instead in Vatican II? Are we not obliged to admit either that Vatican II was not so bad after all (as the priests of Campos are now doing), or else that the sedevacantists are right after all in saying that John Paul II is not really pope? Sedevacantism would explain any amount of fallibility on his part!
The Society of St. Pius X, following Archbishop Lefebvre (1905-1991), adopts neither the Conciliar nor the sedevacantist solution. It believes that the Second Vatican Council was amongst the greatest disasters in the history of the Catholic Church, yet it considers that the popes who promoted that Council and its ideas (John XXIII, Paul VI, John Paul I, and John Paul II) were or are true popes. How can that be? How can true popes so act as to destroy the true Church?
Firstly, God creates all of us human beings free, with free will, because He does not want robots in His Heaven. That applies also to the churchmen, to whom He chooses to entrust His Catholic Church. These have therefore an astonishing degree of freedom to build up or to destroy the Church. For instance, when Our Lord asks if he will find the Faith when he comes back on earth (Lk XVIII, 8), we know for certain that by men's (not only churchmen's) fault, the Catholic Church will be very small at the Second Coming.
However Our Lord also promised that the gates of Hell would never prevail against his Church (Mt. XVI, 18), and so we also know for certain that God will never allow the wickedness of men to go so far as to destroy His Church completely. In this certainty that the Church will never completely fail lies her indefectibility, and since the first function of the Church is to teach Our Lord's doctrine of salvation, then upon indefectibility in existing follows infallibility in teaching. For souls of good will, the Catholic Church and her Truth will always be there.
So the Catholic Church to the end of time will never cease, on however small a scale, to make heard amongst men the doctrine of salvation, the Deposit of the Faith. From eternity this doctrine proceeds from God the Father to God the Son, it was faithfully entrusted by the Incarnate God to His Apostles, and it has been handed down as unchanging Tradition through the successors of the Apostles ever since. "Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away", says Our Lord (Lk. XXI, 33). In fact unchangingness is so essential to this doctrine, that conformity with Tradition is the criterion of the Church's infallible ordinary magisterium. In other words if one wants to know what cannot be false in the day-to-day teaching of the Church's teachers, the way to tell is to measure what is being said against what the Church has said down all the centuries. If it corresponds to Tradition, the teaching is infallible, and if it does not, it is not infallible. Moreover, the Church's infallible extraordinary magisterium is the servant of this ordinary magisterium, insofar as it provides a divinely protected guarantee that such and such a doctrine belongs within the Church's true doctrine, i.e. within ordinary Tradition.
Therefore Tradition, or conformity with what the Church has always taught, is the ultimate yardstick or measure of the Church's infallible teaching, ordinary or extraordinary. Therefore anything outside Tradition is fallible, and anything contradicting Tradition is certainly false, for instance the new Vatican II teaching on religious liberty and ecumenism. But John XXIII was beatified, and Msgr. Escrivá was "canonized", for their sympathy with these Conciliar novelties. Therefore such "canonizations" are certainly to some extent contrary to Catholic Tradition, and to that extent they are automatically not infallible, without my having to examine any further. "If an angel from Heaven preach a gospel to you besides that which we have preached to you, let him be anathema" (Gal I, 8).
So if one asks how it can be God's own churchmen who do so much damage to His Church, the answer is that He gives them great freedom, short of letting them completely destroy His Church, and because out of any evil they do he will bring some greater good. For instance, out of dubious canonizations he can bring to "Traditional Catholics" a still better grasp of the primacy of Tradition.
And to the question how canonizations, meant to be infallible, can instead be Conciliar, the answer is that if God allows a pope to believe in Vatican II, He may surely also allow him to take action and to "canonize" in accordance with Vatican II, and to loosen the strict old rules of true canonization which virtually guaranteed the candidate's conformity with Tradition. If Catholics are misled who blindly follow Church authority when it goes astray, that is their own problem, but Catholics who follow Tradition will, on St. Paul's command, with prudence, "anathematize" any clear departure from it.
So we may absolutely refuse Vatican II and all its pomps and all its works and yet not have to become sedevacantists, so long as we understand that Church indefectibility does not mean that large parts of the Church will never be destroyed, only that the Church will never be completely destroyed. Similarly Church infallibility does not mean that the Church's teachers will never teach untruth by, for instance, dubious "canonizations", only that, amongst other truths, the truth of Christian sanctity will never be totally falsified or silenced.
In conclusion, these more or less Conciliar "canonizations" are correspondingly fallible, and are automatically not infallible. Obviously, Padre Pio was an entirely Traditional Saint, and we need not doubt the worthiness of his canonization. However, it might be advisable not to profit by his Newchurch "canonization" to venerate him officially or in public, insofar as that might be liable to give to other Newchurch "canonizations" a credit which is not due to them.
Dear readers, I must warmly thank all of you whose spiritual and material support has carried the seminary through a remarkably happy calendar year. All September's entrants are still with us, in fact two more have come! Very many thanks.
Let the men sign up for the five-day retreat here from December 26 to 31. And let me wish all of you a happy Christmas free of sentimentalism, but forgive me if I again invite you to send me no cards, because I am abroad until early January. Get sentimental about my poor desk!
With all good wishes and blessings, in Christ,
+ Richard Williamson
Dear Friends and Benefactors,
The October 6 "canonization" of Msgr. Escrivá de Balaguer, founder of the "Opus Dei", like the September "beatification" of Pope John XXIII, launcher of Vatican II, re-opens an old and hurtful wound - how can the Catholic Church do such things? And if it is not the Catholic Church that is doing them, what is it?
For indeed it is clear beyond any doubt that the Catholic Church prior to Vatican II, when she was still essentially faithful to Catholic Tradition, would never have beatified the Pope who initiated the Council which devastated that Tradition, nor canonized the founder of "Opus Dei", an organization preparing the way for that Council.
There is an abundance of quotes, proudly published by "Opus Dei" itself, to prove that Msgr. Escrivá shared and promoted key ideas of Vatican II. Here are two: Msgr. Escrivá himself said, "Ours is the first organization which, with the authorization of the Holy See, admits non-Catholics, Christian or non-Christian. I have always defended liberty of conscience" ("Conversaciones con Mons. Escrivá", ed. Rialp, p.296). And his successor at the head of "Opus Dei" said about Msgr. Escriva's book "Camino", "It prepared millions of people to get in tune with, and to accept in depth, some of the most revolutionary teachings which 30 years later would be solemnly promulgated by the Church at Vatican II" ("Estudios sobre 'Camino'", Msgr. Alvaro del Portillo, ed. Rialp, p.58).
Therefore, for Pope John XXIII to have been truly a Blessed, and for Msgr. Escrivá to have been truly a Saint, the Second Vatican Council would have to have been a true Council, or a Council true to Catholic Tradition. Which is ridiculous, as at least regular readers of this Letter know. Yet are not Catholic canonizations meant to be infallible?
Indeed before Vatican II, Catholic theologians agreed that canonizations (not beatifications) of Saints were virtually infallible, for two main reasons. Firstly, the proposing of model Catholics to be venerated and imitated as Saints is so central to Catholics' practice of their faith, that Mother Church could hardly be mistaken in the matter. This being so, secondly, the pre-Vatican II Popes took such care in examining candidates for canonization, and successful candidates they canonized with such solemnity, that their act of canonizing was as close as could be to a pronouncement of the Popes' solemn and infallible magisterium.
But since Vatican II, firstly the models chosen for imitation are liable, like John XXIII and Msgr. Escrivá, to be chosen for their alignment on Vatican II, i.e. on the destruction of Catholic Tradition, and secondly, the formerly strict process of examination of candidates has been so loosened under the Vatican II popes and there has followed such a flood of canonizations under John Paul II, that the whole process of canonizing has lost, together with its solemnity, any likelihood of infallibility. Indeed, how can John Paul II intend to do anything infallible, or therefore do it, when he often acts and talks, for instance about "living tradition", as though Truth can change?
So this or that Saint "canonized" by John Paul II may in fact be in Heaven, even Msgr. Escrivá, God knows, but it is certainly not his "canonization" by this Pope which can make us sure of the fact. Nor need we then feel obliged to venerate any of the post-Vatican II "Saints".
Which leaves us with the problem we began with: the Catholic Church has the divine promise of indefectibility, i.e. it cannot fail ("Behold, I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world" - Mt. XXVII, 20). Then how can canonizations, which are meant through infallibility to partake in that indefectibility, fail, by partaking instead in Vatican II? Are we not obliged to admit either that Vatican II was not so bad after all (as the priests of Campos are now doing), or else that the sedevacantists are right after all in saying that John Paul II is not really pope? Sedevacantism would explain any amount of fallibility on his part!
The Society of St. Pius X, following Archbishop Lefebvre (1905-1991), adopts neither the Conciliar nor the sedevacantist solution. It believes that the Second Vatican Council was amongst the greatest disasters in the history of the Catholic Church, yet it considers that the popes who promoted that Council and its ideas (John XXIII, Paul VI, John Paul I, and John Paul II) were or are true popes. How can that be? How can true popes so act as to destroy the true Church?
Firstly, God creates all of us human beings free, with free will, because He does not want robots in His Heaven. That applies also to the churchmen, to whom He chooses to entrust His Catholic Church. These have therefore an astonishing degree of freedom to build up or to destroy the Church. For instance, when Our Lord asks if he will find the Faith when he comes back on earth (Lk XVIII, 8), we know for certain that by men's (not only churchmen's) fault, the Catholic Church will be very small at the Second Coming.
However Our Lord also promised that the gates of Hell would never prevail against his Church (Mt. XVI, 18), and so we also know for certain that God will never allow the wickedness of men to go so far as to destroy His Church completely. In this certainty that the Church will never completely fail lies her indefectibility, and since the first function of the Church is to teach Our Lord's doctrine of salvation, then upon indefectibility in existing follows infallibility in teaching. For souls of good will, the Catholic Church and her Truth will always be there.
So the Catholic Church to the end of time will never cease, on however small a scale, to make heard amongst men the doctrine of salvation, the Deposit of the Faith. From eternity this doctrine proceeds from God the Father to God the Son, it was faithfully entrusted by the Incarnate God to His Apostles, and it has been handed down as unchanging Tradition through the successors of the Apostles ever since. "Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away", says Our Lord (Lk. XXI, 33). In fact unchangingness is so essential to this doctrine, that conformity with Tradition is the criterion of the Church's infallible ordinary magisterium. In other words if one wants to know what cannot be false in the day-to-day teaching of the Church's teachers, the way to tell is to measure what is being said against what the Church has said down all the centuries. If it corresponds to Tradition, the teaching is infallible, and if it does not, it is not infallible. Moreover, the Church's infallible extraordinary magisterium is the servant of this ordinary magisterium, insofar as it provides a divinely protected guarantee that such and such a doctrine belongs within the Church's true doctrine, i.e. within ordinary Tradition.
Therefore Tradition, or conformity with what the Church has always taught, is the ultimate yardstick or measure of the Church's infallible teaching, ordinary or extraordinary. Therefore anything outside Tradition is fallible, and anything contradicting Tradition is certainly false, for instance the new Vatican II teaching on religious liberty and ecumenism. But John XXIII was beatified, and Msgr. Escrivá was "canonized", for their sympathy with these Conciliar novelties. Therefore such "canonizations" are certainly to some extent contrary to Catholic Tradition, and to that extent they are automatically not infallible, without my having to examine any further. "If an angel from Heaven preach a gospel to you besides that which we have preached to you, let him be anathema" (Gal I, 8).
So if one asks how it can be God's own churchmen who do so much damage to His Church, the answer is that He gives them great freedom, short of letting them completely destroy His Church, and because out of any evil they do he will bring some greater good. For instance, out of dubious canonizations he can bring to "Traditional Catholics" a still better grasp of the primacy of Tradition.
And to the question how canonizations, meant to be infallible, can instead be Conciliar, the answer is that if God allows a pope to believe in Vatican II, He may surely also allow him to take action and to "canonize" in accordance with Vatican II, and to loosen the strict old rules of true canonization which virtually guaranteed the candidate's conformity with Tradition. If Catholics are misled who blindly follow Church authority when it goes astray, that is their own problem, but Catholics who follow Tradition will, on St. Paul's command, with prudence, "anathematize" any clear departure from it.
So we may absolutely refuse Vatican II and all its pomps and all its works and yet not have to become sedevacantists, so long as we understand that Church indefectibility does not mean that large parts of the Church will never be destroyed, only that the Church will never be completely destroyed. Similarly Church infallibility does not mean that the Church's teachers will never teach untruth by, for instance, dubious "canonizations", only that, amongst other truths, the truth of Christian sanctity will never be totally falsified or silenced.
In conclusion, these more or less Conciliar "canonizations" are correspondingly fallible, and are automatically not infallible. Obviously, Padre Pio was an entirely Traditional Saint, and we need not doubt the worthiness of his canonization. However, it might be advisable not to profit by his Newchurch "canonization" to venerate him officially or in public, insofar as that might be liable to give to other Newchurch "canonizations" a credit which is not due to them.
Dear readers, I must warmly thank all of you whose spiritual and material support has carried the seminary through a remarkably happy calendar year. All September's entrants are still with us, in fact two more have come! Very many thanks.
Let the men sign up for the five-day retreat here from December 26 to 31. And let me wish all of you a happy Christmas free of sentimentalism, but forgive me if I again invite you to send me no cards, because I am abroad until early January. Get sentimental about my poor desk!
With all good wishes and blessings, in Christ,
+ Richard Williamson
Truth Prevails, Times Five
Novembers, 2002
Dear Friends and Benefactors,
St. Thomas Aquinas says that it is easier for God to create a new galaxy than to move a human being's free will. Since the Second Vatican Council in particular, churchmen have used their free will almost to destroy the Catholic Church. Surely God is now in the process of allowing souls of good will to learn the hard way that His Church cannot be destroyed. Let us give here a few indications of how the new Conciliar religion is slowly but surely grinding to a halt, while the true religion is slowly regaining strength.
Firstly, the Congress held in Paris one month ago by, mostly, Society of St. Pius X priests and laity, to study the religion coming out of the Second Vatican Council, was an undoubted success. Some 60 priests were in attendance, with some two dozen layfolk, and the large majority contributed a more or less important paper examining some aspect of Vatican II.
It is impossible to pull together in one brief summary the variety of contributions on such a huge subject as, in effect, the wrecking of God's Church by God's own churchmen. What was interesting was the remarkable unity of thinking about Vatican II amongst the variety of contributors. The Society's new French District Superior had been afraid before the Congress that his French priests might all start arguing with one another - where could he have come by such an idea? - but it was the opposite that happened. Everybody agreed that Vatican II was introducing a new humanistic religion, unacceptable to Catholics.
Of course, in a way it was not surprising that priests of that Society which was raised by God in the wake of Vatican II to defend the true Faith, should find themselves all in agreement as to the profound harmfulness of that Council. Nevertheless, the priests' interest and unity in dismantling the Council were reassuring. In particular, the SSPX faithful in France, like, I think, a number of yourselves, were glad to know that their priests were attacking Vatican II, and coming to no soft conclusions about it.
A second indicator of the weakness of the Conciliar churchmen is their on-going interest in talking with the Society of St. Pius X. For decades now they have been pretending that we are "divisive", "disobedient", "schismatic", and, since 1988, "excommunicated", so one would think that our goose had long been cooked, as the expression goes. However, it must be that the Romans still see the goose waddling around, because here is an instance of their coming back to the attack, but with "plausible deniability", i.e. by such channels as will enable them at any time to deny they ever did any such thing. Here is the approach: -
"A crisis is coming in the Church. Things cannot go on like they are now. We want to avoid another long freeze, or war for another 40 years. We want a solution within a very short time. The SSPX has also made its mistakes, but it is in the best situation it has ever been in (!). However, it needs to move a little, from Tradition to transition. Realism requires dialogue, dialogue requires that the two sides meet. Providence will help, if only they do so.
"Pope John Paul II wants a solution. He can make a deal with the SSPX, as his successor will not be able to do. Perhaps Cardinal Castrillon will be the next Pope, but if he becomes Pope he will no longer be able to make the same offer, of a deal which even Archbishop Lefebvre would not have refused.
"Cardinal Castrillon wants to do what is right. He has power, and he has access to Pope John Paul. He can get for the SSPX all it wants, but he cannot change the Newchurch overnight. Let the SSPX visit the new Traditional bishop in Campos, approved by Rome, Bishop Rifan, to see how Tradition can obtain anything it wants from Rome. The offer to the SSPX now is of unconditional approval within weeks".
Now Rome may absolutely - and plausibly - deny that it made any such approach to anyone in the SSPX. However, it seems to me also plausible that such a well-constructed approach is entirely what might have come from Rome. In which case I would reply for my own part to the eminent Cardinal that the one thing which the SSPX wishes for from Rome is the one thing which his channels took care to say he could not provide - an end to the Newchurch cuckoo's occupying the Catholic Church's nest.
Nevertheless, a third indicator suggests that there is perhaps - perhaps - more to this approach by Cardinal Castrillon than meets the eye. It is reported by a Dominican priest from Rome that around the end of last July and the first part of August, the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared some dozen times to Pope John Paul II to warn him that the crisis in the Church is going to grow alarmingly worse. The Pope was hurt. She said nothing about events in the world. All prominent figures in the Curia and the Vatican know about these apparitions, but nobody is saying a word. Apparently the apparitions are a serious affair, and not to be shrugged off lightly.
Again, few things are made to seem so plausibly deniable as apparitions of the Blessed Mother of God, but again, an alarming intensification of the crisis in the Church is, in the present situation, all too likely. If then Cardinal Castrillon's apparent desire to re-open dialogue with the SSPX is at all motivated by any such warning from the Blessed Virgin, then we are no longer dealing merely with Roman politics, but we are hearing a stifled call for help.
To which the reply still remains that the SSPX cannot provide the solution by joining in the problem. If anybody thinks - correctly - that the SSPX has its hands on the solution, that is precisely because it has now for decades, without ceasing to belong to the Church, stood away from the Newchurch. As the Newchurch flounders and drowns in mid-stream of the modern world, the greatest service that the SSPX can render to the many victims which it is sweeping away to perdition is to run alongside them on the bank of Tradition, but in no way to jump off that bank into the perilous waters. With all due respect, Your Eminence, you need to move more than a little, from transition to Tradition.
A fourth indicator of the weakness of Conciliarism, or the danger of Vatican II, is the recently appeared book "Animus Delendi II", by Atila Sinke Guimarâes. This is the fifth volume in his eleven-volume series, "Eli, Eli, Lama Sabachtani", documenting the betrayal of the Catholic Faith by the thinkers, writers and leaders of Vatican II. The first and fourth volumes, "The Murky Waters of Vatican II" and "Animus Delendi I" are the only other volumes of the series so far to have appeared. If Mr. Guimarâes after Volume I jumped to Volumes IV and V, it is because he wished to denounce in public as soon as possible the desire to destroy ("animus delendi" in Latin) which truly animated the master spirits of the Council.
Volumes I and IV were briefly presented in this seminary Letter in July of last year. I would like to come back to Volume V in a future letter, because while charity "rejoiceth not in iniquity", it does "rejoice with the truth" (I Cor. XIII, 6), and Mr. Guimarâes has rendered great service to the truth by piling quotation upon quotation to prove how far from the truth Vatican II was pulled by minds seeking to be modern.
The fifth indicator is more positive, giving us the Catholic answer to the apostasy implicit in the ambiguities of Vatican II. It is the book "Marcel Lefebvre" written in a chaste and noble French by Bishop Tissier de Mallerais, one of the Society's four bishops consecrated by Archbishop Lefebvre in 1988.
Bishop Tissier was an intimate collaborator of the Archbishop from the beginning of the SSPX in the late 1960's through to the Archbishop's death in 1991. It might then be thought that Bishop Tissier was too close to the Archbishop to have been able to write an objective story of his life. However, this monumental book, fruit of ten years' hard labour, seems liable to remain the most complete biography of the Archbishop for some time to come. It certainly presents the Archbishop as I knew him, with those supreme qualities of godliness, selflessness and objectivity which enabled him to stand up to the raging subjectivism of the modernized churchmen. I will certainly return to this noble book, as soon as the English translation appears.
Dear readers, God's Truth will win. Let us only pray that as many free wills as possible allow it to win them over before they are lost for ever.
With all good wishes and blessings, in Christ,
+ Richard Williamson
Dear Friends and Benefactors,
St. Thomas Aquinas says that it is easier for God to create a new galaxy than to move a human being's free will. Since the Second Vatican Council in particular, churchmen have used their free will almost to destroy the Catholic Church. Surely God is now in the process of allowing souls of good will to learn the hard way that His Church cannot be destroyed. Let us give here a few indications of how the new Conciliar religion is slowly but surely grinding to a halt, while the true religion is slowly regaining strength.
Firstly, the Congress held in Paris one month ago by, mostly, Society of St. Pius X priests and laity, to study the religion coming out of the Second Vatican Council, was an undoubted success. Some 60 priests were in attendance, with some two dozen layfolk, and the large majority contributed a more or less important paper examining some aspect of Vatican II.
It is impossible to pull together in one brief summary the variety of contributions on such a huge subject as, in effect, the wrecking of God's Church by God's own churchmen. What was interesting was the remarkable unity of thinking about Vatican II amongst the variety of contributors. The Society's new French District Superior had been afraid before the Congress that his French priests might all start arguing with one another - where could he have come by such an idea? - but it was the opposite that happened. Everybody agreed that Vatican II was introducing a new humanistic religion, unacceptable to Catholics.
Of course, in a way it was not surprising that priests of that Society which was raised by God in the wake of Vatican II to defend the true Faith, should find themselves all in agreement as to the profound harmfulness of that Council. Nevertheless, the priests' interest and unity in dismantling the Council were reassuring. In particular, the SSPX faithful in France, like, I think, a number of yourselves, were glad to know that their priests were attacking Vatican II, and coming to no soft conclusions about it.
A second indicator of the weakness of the Conciliar churchmen is their on-going interest in talking with the Society of St. Pius X. For decades now they have been pretending that we are "divisive", "disobedient", "schismatic", and, since 1988, "excommunicated", so one would think that our goose had long been cooked, as the expression goes. However, it must be that the Romans still see the goose waddling around, because here is an instance of their coming back to the attack, but with "plausible deniability", i.e. by such channels as will enable them at any time to deny they ever did any such thing. Here is the approach: -
"A crisis is coming in the Church. Things cannot go on like they are now. We want to avoid another long freeze, or war for another 40 years. We want a solution within a very short time. The SSPX has also made its mistakes, but it is in the best situation it has ever been in (!). However, it needs to move a little, from Tradition to transition. Realism requires dialogue, dialogue requires that the two sides meet. Providence will help, if only they do so.
"Pope John Paul II wants a solution. He can make a deal with the SSPX, as his successor will not be able to do. Perhaps Cardinal Castrillon will be the next Pope, but if he becomes Pope he will no longer be able to make the same offer, of a deal which even Archbishop Lefebvre would not have refused.
"Cardinal Castrillon wants to do what is right. He has power, and he has access to Pope John Paul. He can get for the SSPX all it wants, but he cannot change the Newchurch overnight. Let the SSPX visit the new Traditional bishop in Campos, approved by Rome, Bishop Rifan, to see how Tradition can obtain anything it wants from Rome. The offer to the SSPX now is of unconditional approval within weeks".
Now Rome may absolutely - and plausibly - deny that it made any such approach to anyone in the SSPX. However, it seems to me also plausible that such a well-constructed approach is entirely what might have come from Rome. In which case I would reply for my own part to the eminent Cardinal that the one thing which the SSPX wishes for from Rome is the one thing which his channels took care to say he could not provide - an end to the Newchurch cuckoo's occupying the Catholic Church's nest.
Nevertheless, a third indicator suggests that there is perhaps - perhaps - more to this approach by Cardinal Castrillon than meets the eye. It is reported by a Dominican priest from Rome that around the end of last July and the first part of August, the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared some dozen times to Pope John Paul II to warn him that the crisis in the Church is going to grow alarmingly worse. The Pope was hurt. She said nothing about events in the world. All prominent figures in the Curia and the Vatican know about these apparitions, but nobody is saying a word. Apparently the apparitions are a serious affair, and not to be shrugged off lightly.
Again, few things are made to seem so plausibly deniable as apparitions of the Blessed Mother of God, but again, an alarming intensification of the crisis in the Church is, in the present situation, all too likely. If then Cardinal Castrillon's apparent desire to re-open dialogue with the SSPX is at all motivated by any such warning from the Blessed Virgin, then we are no longer dealing merely with Roman politics, but we are hearing a stifled call for help.
To which the reply still remains that the SSPX cannot provide the solution by joining in the problem. If anybody thinks - correctly - that the SSPX has its hands on the solution, that is precisely because it has now for decades, without ceasing to belong to the Church, stood away from the Newchurch. As the Newchurch flounders and drowns in mid-stream of the modern world, the greatest service that the SSPX can render to the many victims which it is sweeping away to perdition is to run alongside them on the bank of Tradition, but in no way to jump off that bank into the perilous waters. With all due respect, Your Eminence, you need to move more than a little, from transition to Tradition.
A fourth indicator of the weakness of Conciliarism, or the danger of Vatican II, is the recently appeared book "Animus Delendi II", by Atila Sinke Guimarâes. This is the fifth volume in his eleven-volume series, "Eli, Eli, Lama Sabachtani", documenting the betrayal of the Catholic Faith by the thinkers, writers and leaders of Vatican II. The first and fourth volumes, "The Murky Waters of Vatican II" and "Animus Delendi I" are the only other volumes of the series so far to have appeared. If Mr. Guimarâes after Volume I jumped to Volumes IV and V, it is because he wished to denounce in public as soon as possible the desire to destroy ("animus delendi" in Latin) which truly animated the master spirits of the Council.
Volumes I and IV were briefly presented in this seminary Letter in July of last year. I would like to come back to Volume V in a future letter, because while charity "rejoiceth not in iniquity", it does "rejoice with the truth" (I Cor. XIII, 6), and Mr. Guimarâes has rendered great service to the truth by piling quotation upon quotation to prove how far from the truth Vatican II was pulled by minds seeking to be modern.
The fifth indicator is more positive, giving us the Catholic answer to the apostasy implicit in the ambiguities of Vatican II. It is the book "Marcel Lefebvre" written in a chaste and noble French by Bishop Tissier de Mallerais, one of the Society's four bishops consecrated by Archbishop Lefebvre in 1988.
Bishop Tissier was an intimate collaborator of the Archbishop from the beginning of the SSPX in the late 1960's through to the Archbishop's death in 1991. It might then be thought that Bishop Tissier was too close to the Archbishop to have been able to write an objective story of his life. However, this monumental book, fruit of ten years' hard labour, seems liable to remain the most complete biography of the Archbishop for some time to come. It certainly presents the Archbishop as I knew him, with those supreme qualities of godliness, selflessness and objectivity which enabled him to stand up to the raging subjectivism of the modernized churchmen. I will certainly return to this noble book, as soon as the English translation appears.
Dear readers, God's Truth will win. Let us only pray that as many free wills as possible allow it to win them over before they are lost for ever.
With all good wishes and blessings, in Christ,
+ Richard Williamson
Persevere In The Truth
August 9, 2003
Dear Friends and Benefactors,
Many of you, bless you, have been asking whether on the eve of leaving the United States I plan still to write a monthly letter. If I do, it will certainly not be this letter, which belongs to the Seminary and will therefore go to the new Seminary Rector, to do with as he wishes. Nor should anyone interfere with a successor in a post of command by "hanging around." Nor would any letter written for an Argentinian readership be quite the same. But time may have me pick up the pen again - I could even be driven onto the Internet! But not willingly!
Meanwhile enclosed you have the promised poem of farewell. Brother Marcel did the cartoons. I hope he and it suggest how much I have enjoyed my 21 years in the United States, and I thank all of you for your support and friendship When I get to the Argentine, I shall need a hole-in-the-heart operation – the hole left by all of you! Lest however the light-hearted poem give anyone to think that this time I have really lost my marbles, let me sketch out one last time the serious danger represented by today's Rome.
I can remember Malcolm Muggeridge saying that just when the modern world had proved itself a busted flush in the aftermath of WWII, and just when the Catholic Church could and should have accepted the world's unconditional surrender to her Truth, just then the Catholic churchmen themselves surrendered at the Second Vatican Council, and went over to those modern principles which are the dissolution of Catholicism. Similarly today, Vatican II is proving for steadily more souls of good will to be a busted flush, and the Society of St. Pius X's stand for the Catholic truth is coming closer to being widely recognized as such. This is just not the moment for the Society to lay down its arms and go over to the Conciliar enemy! Yet that is just what the Devil has in mind!
For as in a tug-of-war between two teams of eight men, the anchor-man with the end of the rope wrapped around his midriff is usually big, fat and correspondingly ugly, but he is still the most important man on the rope, so in the tug-of-war between Vatican II's Conciliarism and (Traditional) Catholicism, the SSPX acts as Tradition's anchor-man, so that it may in the eyes of all kinds of people - especially "conservative" Catholics - appear to be fat and "disobedient" and ugly and "schismatic," but the fact remains that those "conservatives" would have no rope on which to pull against Conciliarism unless the SSPX were acting as Tradition's anchor-man.
Which means that the Romans tugging the Church away from Tradition must at all costs undo the SSPX. In 1988 they pretended to use the biggest stick available to them as churchmen: a declaration (false) that the SSPX leadership was "excommunicated." Alas, the SSPX failed to disintegrate, even when its great Founder died in 1991, so Rome resorted to a policy of smothering the Society in silence and neglect. Alas, the SSPX would still not wither away, so when its perseverance generated for the Jubilee Year of 2000 what was surely the largest integrally Catholic pilgrimage to Rome of the whole Jubilee, even the Romans could neglect the Society no longer, so they switched from stick to carrot.
Accordingly, since 2000 the SSPX has been subjected to wave upon wave of what the French call "a charm offensive," or assault by charm. The Big Bad Wolf began to coo like a dove! - "Dear SSPX, we love you, we need you, do come in from the cold!" But the SSPX in its little red riding hood has not budged so far. Why not? To explain this crucial point I have before resorted to a comparison with arithmetic. Let me now extend and expand that comparison. I imagine a dialogue between an up-dated Roman and a true Catholic: -
Catholic:
If I am to follow you in arithmetic, I need to know you are a true arithmetician. Please make a profession of your two-times table, up to 20.
Roman:
2x2=4; 2x3=6; 2x4=9; 2x5=10; 2x6=13; 2x7=14; 2x8=19; 2x9=18; 2x10=20.
Catholic:
I am afraid you have made three mistakes. Kindly repeat.
Roman:
(He corrects all except 2x8=19).
Catholic:
(Respectfully) I fear you have still made a mistake. 2x8 are not 19.
Roman:
(Gently) No, 2x8=19. That is not a mistake.
Catholic:
(Still respectfully) But how can you say such a thing? If 2x8 were 19, they would be more than 2x9!
Roman:
(As if inspired) Ah, but I FEEL that 2x8 are 19. That is my inward EXPERIENCE and my personal NEED!
Catholic:
(Puzzled) But then what makes you say that 2x2=4?
Roman:
(Enthusiastically) Just the same, my inward EXPERIENCE and my personal NEED!
Catholic:
(Shocked) But the two-times table, like every other part of the multiplication table, rests upon objective reality!
Roman:
(A little exasperated) Of course its does, but objective reality must still be assimilated by me, i.e. it must become my personal experience.
Catholic:
(Slowly) So if today you "assimilate" that 2x2 are 4, but tomorrow "assimilated" that they were 5, then tomorrow they would be 5?
Roman:
(Triumphantly) Exactly! What value would any arithmetical table have if it was not assimilated by me in accordance with my present needs?
Catholic:
(Jumping up, and jamming on his baseball-cap sideways!) Get me outa' here! You're CRAZY! (Exit, as fast as his legs can carry him).
Notice three things. Firstly, the comparison between arithmetic and Catholic dogma is apposite, insofar as both are a connected body of objective truths. Thus as the single error that 2x8=19 is enough, if applied enough, to destroy all arithmetic (then 2x8 is greater than 2x9, so 8 is greater than 9, etc., etc.), so the denial of a single Catholic dogma is enough to destroy the entire Catholic Faith (dogmas also interlock), and he who denies a single dogma is a heretic.
Secondly - worse - notice in our comparison how close our Roman seemed to come to objective reality. Had he corrected all three errors and not just two, or had he from the outset recited correctly the whole two-times table, then our Catholic might have thought he was dealing with a Roman Catholic and not with a Roman modernist. Only our Roman's insistence upon 2x8=19 drove our Catholic to discover that our Roman rested his entire multiplication table not upon objective reality but upon his personal inward experience and needs! Similarly today's Rome could come closer and closer to resembling outwardly the true Rome, yet if the very basis upon which it seemed to be the true Rome was, for instance, ecumenical need or modern experience, then the Society would still have to not budge an inch!
But how then will we ever know that the Romans are back to professing the true Faith upon its true basis? Archbishop Lefebvre used to reply: when they subscribe to Pius IX's "Quanta Cura" (against liberalism in politics), to Pius X's Anti-Modernist Oath (against modernism in religion) and to Pius XI's "Quas Primas" (against secularism in society). And the sure sign of the Romans' subscribing sincerely to these papal documents will be when they have no more problem with the SSPX, assuming always that the latter will not have budged. In other words, until the Romans subscribe as above, any Rome-SSPX agreement is impossible, and once they subscribe, it will no longer be necessary! Meanwhile, as the Romans tug towards Conciliar perdition, the one thing that the "schismatic" anchorman must do is not budge one inch from his "schism"!
Notice thirdly from the comparison with arithmetic another tremendous element of deception in our present situation - our Roman as presented above need not be of ill will. He can be a rabid modernist and still a "very nice guy." Of course the ring-leaders of modernism who know exactly what they are doing to detach souls from objective reality, supernatural and natural, are of a diabolical pride and malice, but if our Roman learned from his mother's knee onwards that the multiplication table has an inward basis, how can he think any differently? How can he not be sincere? And if he is sincere, he can be very convincing in defense of his error, as, for instance, Pope John Paul II, Cardinal Ratzinger and Cardinal Castrillon all seem to be (God alone knows for sure what is in the human heart - Jer. XVII, 9, 10).
Now no amount of sincerity or niceness can turn objective error into objective truth. For if a man wants to preserve ice, what does it matter how sincere he is in thinking that the best way to do so is to expose it to warm sunshine? It will still melt. However, while subjective sincerity cannot change objective reality, it can be deceiving, highly deceiving. Thus the more innocent or ignorant - "sincere" - these Romans are in what is objectively their deluded fight against Catholic reality, the more dangerous any contacts or negotiations with them can be. The SSPX, like any other defender of the objective Catholic Faith, must today and tomorrow beware like the plague of "nice guys" in Rome. As St. Theresa of Avila said, "I do not need my confessor to be a Saint, I do need him to know his Catholic doctrine."
Should then the SSPX have no contact at all with the Romans? No. Even if a man's mother is a leper, he stays by her bedside, while taking care not to catch the illness which would put an end to his being able to look after her. In May I said that the Romans, as holding authority over the Church, have huge influence and responsibility for millions of souls, and they are not necessarily impervious to the Truth - while there is life, there is hope. To which one can add that if by the grace of God the SSPX possesses the Truth, it is the SSPX's duty to make that Truth - prudently - available and accessible to the churchmen who so need it. Also, that Truth will have the effect of discerning the spirits in Rome, and of dividing the Romans who are truly in good faith from those who are not. But how can the little stone of Truth bring down the giant of error (Dan. II, 34, 35) if there is no contact?
My dear friends, let us all persevere in the Truth, however much more difficult yet that may become in the next several years. For if we do persevere, our reward in Heaven will go far beyond anything we can imagine. Let us pray for one another. I will not forget the United States. I send you all my blessing as a bishop. Please support my successor in Winona.
Sincerely yours in Christ,
+ Richard Williamson
Dear Friends and Benefactors,
Many of you, bless you, have been asking whether on the eve of leaving the United States I plan still to write a monthly letter. If I do, it will certainly not be this letter, which belongs to the Seminary and will therefore go to the new Seminary Rector, to do with as he wishes. Nor should anyone interfere with a successor in a post of command by "hanging around." Nor would any letter written for an Argentinian readership be quite the same. But time may have me pick up the pen again - I could even be driven onto the Internet! But not willingly!
Meanwhile enclosed you have the promised poem of farewell. Brother Marcel did the cartoons. I hope he and it suggest how much I have enjoyed my 21 years in the United States, and I thank all of you for your support and friendship When I get to the Argentine, I shall need a hole-in-the-heart operation – the hole left by all of you! Lest however the light-hearted poem give anyone to think that this time I have really lost my marbles, let me sketch out one last time the serious danger represented by today's Rome.
I can remember Malcolm Muggeridge saying that just when the modern world had proved itself a busted flush in the aftermath of WWII, and just when the Catholic Church could and should have accepted the world's unconditional surrender to her Truth, just then the Catholic churchmen themselves surrendered at the Second Vatican Council, and went over to those modern principles which are the dissolution of Catholicism. Similarly today, Vatican II is proving for steadily more souls of good will to be a busted flush, and the Society of St. Pius X's stand for the Catholic truth is coming closer to being widely recognized as such. This is just not the moment for the Society to lay down its arms and go over to the Conciliar enemy! Yet that is just what the Devil has in mind!
For as in a tug-of-war between two teams of eight men, the anchor-man with the end of the rope wrapped around his midriff is usually big, fat and correspondingly ugly, but he is still the most important man on the rope, so in the tug-of-war between Vatican II's Conciliarism and (Traditional) Catholicism, the SSPX acts as Tradition's anchor-man, so that it may in the eyes of all kinds of people - especially "conservative" Catholics - appear to be fat and "disobedient" and ugly and "schismatic," but the fact remains that those "conservatives" would have no rope on which to pull against Conciliarism unless the SSPX were acting as Tradition's anchor-man.
Which means that the Romans tugging the Church away from Tradition must at all costs undo the SSPX. In 1988 they pretended to use the biggest stick available to them as churchmen: a declaration (false) that the SSPX leadership was "excommunicated." Alas, the SSPX failed to disintegrate, even when its great Founder died in 1991, so Rome resorted to a policy of smothering the Society in silence and neglect. Alas, the SSPX would still not wither away, so when its perseverance generated for the Jubilee Year of 2000 what was surely the largest integrally Catholic pilgrimage to Rome of the whole Jubilee, even the Romans could neglect the Society no longer, so they switched from stick to carrot.
Accordingly, since 2000 the SSPX has been subjected to wave upon wave of what the French call "a charm offensive," or assault by charm. The Big Bad Wolf began to coo like a dove! - "Dear SSPX, we love you, we need you, do come in from the cold!" But the SSPX in its little red riding hood has not budged so far. Why not? To explain this crucial point I have before resorted to a comparison with arithmetic. Let me now extend and expand that comparison. I imagine a dialogue between an up-dated Roman and a true Catholic: -
Catholic:
If I am to follow you in arithmetic, I need to know you are a true arithmetician. Please make a profession of your two-times table, up to 20.
Roman:
2x2=4; 2x3=6; 2x4=9; 2x5=10; 2x6=13; 2x7=14; 2x8=19; 2x9=18; 2x10=20.
Catholic:
I am afraid you have made three mistakes. Kindly repeat.
Roman:
(He corrects all except 2x8=19).
Catholic:
(Respectfully) I fear you have still made a mistake. 2x8 are not 19.
Roman:
(Gently) No, 2x8=19. That is not a mistake.
Catholic:
(Still respectfully) But how can you say such a thing? If 2x8 were 19, they would be more than 2x9!
Roman:
(As if inspired) Ah, but I FEEL that 2x8 are 19. That is my inward EXPERIENCE and my personal NEED!
Catholic:
(Puzzled) But then what makes you say that 2x2=4?
Roman:
(Enthusiastically) Just the same, my inward EXPERIENCE and my personal NEED!
Catholic:
(Shocked) But the two-times table, like every other part of the multiplication table, rests upon objective reality!
Roman:
(A little exasperated) Of course its does, but objective reality must still be assimilated by me, i.e. it must become my personal experience.
Catholic:
(Slowly) So if today you "assimilate" that 2x2 are 4, but tomorrow "assimilated" that they were 5, then tomorrow they would be 5?
Roman:
(Triumphantly) Exactly! What value would any arithmetical table have if it was not assimilated by me in accordance with my present needs?
Catholic:
(Jumping up, and jamming on his baseball-cap sideways!) Get me outa' here! You're CRAZY! (Exit, as fast as his legs can carry him).
Notice three things. Firstly, the comparison between arithmetic and Catholic dogma is apposite, insofar as both are a connected body of objective truths. Thus as the single error that 2x8=19 is enough, if applied enough, to destroy all arithmetic (then 2x8 is greater than 2x9, so 8 is greater than 9, etc., etc.), so the denial of a single Catholic dogma is enough to destroy the entire Catholic Faith (dogmas also interlock), and he who denies a single dogma is a heretic.
Secondly - worse - notice in our comparison how close our Roman seemed to come to objective reality. Had he corrected all three errors and not just two, or had he from the outset recited correctly the whole two-times table, then our Catholic might have thought he was dealing with a Roman Catholic and not with a Roman modernist. Only our Roman's insistence upon 2x8=19 drove our Catholic to discover that our Roman rested his entire multiplication table not upon objective reality but upon his personal inward experience and needs! Similarly today's Rome could come closer and closer to resembling outwardly the true Rome, yet if the very basis upon which it seemed to be the true Rome was, for instance, ecumenical need or modern experience, then the Society would still have to not budge an inch!
But how then will we ever know that the Romans are back to professing the true Faith upon its true basis? Archbishop Lefebvre used to reply: when they subscribe to Pius IX's "Quanta Cura" (against liberalism in politics), to Pius X's Anti-Modernist Oath (against modernism in religion) and to Pius XI's "Quas Primas" (against secularism in society). And the sure sign of the Romans' subscribing sincerely to these papal documents will be when they have no more problem with the SSPX, assuming always that the latter will not have budged. In other words, until the Romans subscribe as above, any Rome-SSPX agreement is impossible, and once they subscribe, it will no longer be necessary! Meanwhile, as the Romans tug towards Conciliar perdition, the one thing that the "schismatic" anchorman must do is not budge one inch from his "schism"!
Notice thirdly from the comparison with arithmetic another tremendous element of deception in our present situation - our Roman as presented above need not be of ill will. He can be a rabid modernist and still a "very nice guy." Of course the ring-leaders of modernism who know exactly what they are doing to detach souls from objective reality, supernatural and natural, are of a diabolical pride and malice, but if our Roman learned from his mother's knee onwards that the multiplication table has an inward basis, how can he think any differently? How can he not be sincere? And if he is sincere, he can be very convincing in defense of his error, as, for instance, Pope John Paul II, Cardinal Ratzinger and Cardinal Castrillon all seem to be (God alone knows for sure what is in the human heart - Jer. XVII, 9, 10).
Now no amount of sincerity or niceness can turn objective error into objective truth. For if a man wants to preserve ice, what does it matter how sincere he is in thinking that the best way to do so is to expose it to warm sunshine? It will still melt. However, while subjective sincerity cannot change objective reality, it can be deceiving, highly deceiving. Thus the more innocent or ignorant - "sincere" - these Romans are in what is objectively their deluded fight against Catholic reality, the more dangerous any contacts or negotiations with them can be. The SSPX, like any other defender of the objective Catholic Faith, must today and tomorrow beware like the plague of "nice guys" in Rome. As St. Theresa of Avila said, "I do not need my confessor to be a Saint, I do need him to know his Catholic doctrine."
Should then the SSPX have no contact at all with the Romans? No. Even if a man's mother is a leper, he stays by her bedside, while taking care not to catch the illness which would put an end to his being able to look after her. In May I said that the Romans, as holding authority over the Church, have huge influence and responsibility for millions of souls, and they are not necessarily impervious to the Truth - while there is life, there is hope. To which one can add that if by the grace of God the SSPX possesses the Truth, it is the SSPX's duty to make that Truth - prudently - available and accessible to the churchmen who so need it. Also, that Truth will have the effect of discerning the spirits in Rome, and of dividing the Romans who are truly in good faith from those who are not. But how can the little stone of Truth bring down the giant of error (Dan. II, 34, 35) if there is no contact?
My dear friends, let us all persevere in the Truth, however much more difficult yet that may become in the next several years. For if we do persevere, our reward in Heaven will go far beyond anything we can imagine. Let us pray for one another. I will not forget the United States. I send you all my blessing as a bishop. Please support my successor in Winona.
Sincerely yours in Christ,
+ Richard Williamson
Liberalism is a Killer
July 7, 2003
Next month includes (August 4) the 100th anniversary of the election to the Papacy of Cardinal Giuseppe Sarto, i.e. St. Pius X, patron of our Priestly Society. Digging out for a colleague a past Seminary Letter on the true charity of Pius X, I see that in August of 1996 I told briefly the story of his clash with Cardinal Ferrari of Milan, but I did not draw out all the implications. The problem is central to our times. In honour of St. Pius, let me tell the story again, still more briefly, with a secular parallel from the post-war United States.
In 1910, three years after the appearance of Pope Pius X's great anti-modernist Encyclical letter "Pascendi", two loyal Italian Monsignors, The Scotton Brothers, published in their anti-modernist review an article declaring— not without foundation — that the Seminary in Cardinal Ferrari's Archdiocese of Milan was "a seed-bed of modernism", i.e. of that mother of all heresies which preserves the appearances of Catholicism but empties out the substance, in order to adapt the Catholic Church to the modern world.
The Cardinal was indignant. How could a supposedly Catholic journal so attack the honour and integrity of the Seminary Professors and their Superiors, including himself? When Pius X replied through his Cardinal De Lai, amongst other things, that there was not a little modernism in the archdiocese of Milan, the Liberals profited by the controversy to create a media uproar. In early March, both parties appealed to Rome, and Cardinal Ferrari defended the Liberal Catholic paper of Milan, "The Union", because he sensed it was being called in question.
At the end of March, Pius X wrote himself to the Cardinal, saying that the modernism provoking the Scotton brothers in the archdiocese of Milan might not be doctrinal but it was practical, i.e. good doctrine might be taught, but it was not being applied in practice, for instance when so many of the Milan clergy supported "The Union", a newspaper leaving much to be desired from a Catholic point of view. Yet less than three weeks after receiving this letter, the Cardinal vigorously defended "The Union" in front of his Milan seminarians, and said that this defense was in accordance with the Pope's will! When Pius X learned of the Cardinal's reaction, he was scandalized and deeply hurt: here was a Cardinal deceiving his future priests as to the will of the Pope, so that they would soon be spreading Liberal ideas throughout the Archdiocese in the name of the Pope! When in turn the Cardinal learned of the Pope's reaction, he replied with a flood of tears, and now I must quote the August 1996 letter in full:—
"He was broken-hearted to have offended the Pope. He was humiliated. He would be saddened to the end of his days. He begged forgiveness. He never meant to hurt the Pope. He never said a word disrespectful to the Pope, etc., etc... As for what he said to his seminarians, he never meant it to be copied down or published. All he meant to say was that "The Union" should go on improving. There had been no significant scandal in the Archdiocese. He was ready to take back anything he said, and would come to Rome if necessary. When Pius X read this letter, he replied that there had in fact been great scandal in the Milan Archdiocese because the Cardinal's defense of "The Union" had been clear, and clearly understood. So let the Cardinal correct the scandal by conveying the Pope's real thinking to all concerned, but let him not come to Rome.
"This last instruction was intended to calm the agitation, so that the controversy might die a quiet death, but the Liberals turned it into a refusal of the Pope to listen to his Cardinals! Thus when on the death of Pius X Cardinal Ferrari went down to Rome for the conclave to elect his successor, to an Italian senator remarking on the people's emotion and veneration for the deceased Pope, the Cardinal sternly replied: "Yes, but he will have to give an account to God for the way in which he would abandon his bishops in the face of accusations being made against them"! Truly, as Msgr. Begnini said, Cardinal Ferrari had understood nothing."
Now what are the implications that I did not spell out in 1996? Between Pius X and Cardinal Ferrari we have a clash between two worlds: one of Catholic reality, of man serving God; the other of Liberal dreamery, of God serving man. Pius X is concerned with the issues, the Cardinal is concerned with personal feelings. Pius X worries that the good doctrine is not put into practice in Milan; that the Cardinal's defending "The Union" would spread liberal ideas; that the Cardinal should straighten out the scandal of mistaken thinking. On the contrary the Cardinal takes the Scotton accusation as a personal attack upon his subordinates and himself; when the Pope is scandalized by his defense of "The Union", he is overcome with personal feelings ("broken-hearted", "humiliated", "saddened") and fanfares his good intentions: when the Pope does not want to see him, he feels personally betrayed ("abandoned") by his Superior.
There is a famous quotation of the arch-Romantic English poet, John Keats (1795-1821):- "I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart's affections and the truth of imagination" (Letter to Benjamin Bailey). Now when a young poet in a Revolutionary age allows his feelings and imagination to take over, that is, in a manner of speaking, his prerogative. But when an eminent Prince of the Catholic Church allows questions of doctrine to be overtaken in his mind by the conviction of the holiness of his own heart's affections, then we are in trouble! The Revolution is taking over the Church, and the Catholic Faith is being washed out. Sure enough! — the Pius X - Cardinal Ferrari clash was finally resolved in 2001 when Pope John-Paul II beatified Cardinal Ferrari! In effect, he was declaring the Cardinal's affections to be Blessed! A Catholic Saint? A saint of the world of Keats!
The secular parallel from the post-war United States is the clash which took place in Washington , D.C., in the late 1940's between Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss. Whittaker Chambers' book "Witness" is a classic of U.S. history, culture and literature, which should be studied in every American school, but because it refuses the modern dream, it is disappearing down the memory hole. Chambers was not a Catholic, but he had real and deep insight into the soul of modern man.
Born in Philadelphia, PA, in 1901, and reared in a more or less unhappy middle-class home on Long Island, NY, Chambers had a serious and searching mind which led him as a university student in the 1920's to tour Europe's centers of culture in pursuit of an answer to what seemed to him a grave crisis of Western Civilization. But post-WWI Europe had no answer either, which is why in the 1930's, like many another desperate young man, he joined the Communist Party. Within the Communist underground which he served with distinction for several years, he met and befriended an equally brilliant rising D.C. bureaucrat, by name Alger Hiss. The two worked together, until Stalin's Great Purge in 1937 and 1938 opened Chambers' eyes and drove him out of the Communist Party and out of Communism. He went to ground until the Communists no longer risked killing him, and had quietly re-surfaced in the late 1940's as a journalist with "Time" in New York. Meanwhile Alger Hiss had gone on to make a brilliant wartime and post-war career in Washington, partaking for instance at the highest level in the Conference of Yalta and in the constituting of the United Nations.
Chambers and Hiss met again in August of 1948 when Chambers stepped forward out of his obscurity into blazing publicity in D.C. to give witness that Hiss, while in the US Department of State, had helped to transmit confidential government documents to the Russians. Hiss denied that he had ever even met Chambers! But Hiss was finally convicted of perjury in January of 1950, and sentenced to a five-year prison term. He died only a few years ago, still protesting his innocence, remaining no doubt still convinced of the holiness of his heart's affections! Chambers died a sad man in 1961, sure that his cause was doomed to perish.
The Chambers-Hiss clash was again a clash between two worlds, between two Americas. As Pius X represented the centuries-old true Church while Cardinal Ferrari represented in effect the looming Church of Vatican II, so the dumpy little Chambers represented all the decent little folk across the United States while Hiss, darling of the DC and NY Establishment, represented the Liberal-Communist march towards the New World Order. When Chambers quit Communism, without the Catholic Faith, he clearly saw that he was joining the losing side. His agonizing decision to testify against Hiss was a noble but desperate gesture, made in the hope of obtaining for civilization no more than a slight reprieve. In this Chambers succeeded when we think of US anti-communism in the 1950's, but, of course, anti-communism without the Catholic Faith has no long future, so by the 1960's the Liberal-Communist march to the Brave New World was more irreversible than ever.
Insights abound in Chambers' "Witness" but here are two that could come straight out of pre-Vatican II Papal Encyclicals: communism is a religious problem, and all liberals are virtual communists. That is why, regardless of the truth or facts of the case, the DC-NY Establishment of liberals rallied to a man behind Hiss, because they knew that if he was condemned, so were they, and their substitute-religion of liberalism. That is why, to this day, they will maintain that Hiss was innocent, just as Pope John-Paul II innocented Cardinal Ferrari.
Dear readers, the whole world can go the way of Alger Hiss, and nearly all the churchmen can go the way of Cardinal Ferrari, but God remains God and He is neither deceived nor mocked. We may for the moment be like crushed beneath the juggernaut-dream of Alger Hiss and Vatican II, but it will come to an end, whereas God will not come to an end. Patience. Prayer. Tradition is gently stirring again in many a Catholic breast.
Let us pray that the Precious Blood of Jesus descend in July as a laver of regeneration upon more and more souls.
Sincerely yours in Christ,
Richard Williamson
P.S. Watch out for August’s Letter, my last from the Seminary. It will be a poem!
Next month includes (August 4) the 100th anniversary of the election to the Papacy of Cardinal Giuseppe Sarto, i.e. St. Pius X, patron of our Priestly Society. Digging out for a colleague a past Seminary Letter on the true charity of Pius X, I see that in August of 1996 I told briefly the story of his clash with Cardinal Ferrari of Milan, but I did not draw out all the implications. The problem is central to our times. In honour of St. Pius, let me tell the story again, still more briefly, with a secular parallel from the post-war United States.
In 1910, three years after the appearance of Pope Pius X's great anti-modernist Encyclical letter "Pascendi", two loyal Italian Monsignors, The Scotton Brothers, published in their anti-modernist review an article declaring— not without foundation — that the Seminary in Cardinal Ferrari's Archdiocese of Milan was "a seed-bed of modernism", i.e. of that mother of all heresies which preserves the appearances of Catholicism but empties out the substance, in order to adapt the Catholic Church to the modern world.
The Cardinal was indignant. How could a supposedly Catholic journal so attack the honour and integrity of the Seminary Professors and their Superiors, including himself? When Pius X replied through his Cardinal De Lai, amongst other things, that there was not a little modernism in the archdiocese of Milan, the Liberals profited by the controversy to create a media uproar. In early March, both parties appealed to Rome, and Cardinal Ferrari defended the Liberal Catholic paper of Milan, "The Union", because he sensed it was being called in question.
At the end of March, Pius X wrote himself to the Cardinal, saying that the modernism provoking the Scotton brothers in the archdiocese of Milan might not be doctrinal but it was practical, i.e. good doctrine might be taught, but it was not being applied in practice, for instance when so many of the Milan clergy supported "The Union", a newspaper leaving much to be desired from a Catholic point of view. Yet less than three weeks after receiving this letter, the Cardinal vigorously defended "The Union" in front of his Milan seminarians, and said that this defense was in accordance with the Pope's will! When Pius X learned of the Cardinal's reaction, he was scandalized and deeply hurt: here was a Cardinal deceiving his future priests as to the will of the Pope, so that they would soon be spreading Liberal ideas throughout the Archdiocese in the name of the Pope! When in turn the Cardinal learned of the Pope's reaction, he replied with a flood of tears, and now I must quote the August 1996 letter in full:—
"He was broken-hearted to have offended the Pope. He was humiliated. He would be saddened to the end of his days. He begged forgiveness. He never meant to hurt the Pope. He never said a word disrespectful to the Pope, etc., etc... As for what he said to his seminarians, he never meant it to be copied down or published. All he meant to say was that "The Union" should go on improving. There had been no significant scandal in the Archdiocese. He was ready to take back anything he said, and would come to Rome if necessary. When Pius X read this letter, he replied that there had in fact been great scandal in the Milan Archdiocese because the Cardinal's defense of "The Union" had been clear, and clearly understood. So let the Cardinal correct the scandal by conveying the Pope's real thinking to all concerned, but let him not come to Rome.
"This last instruction was intended to calm the agitation, so that the controversy might die a quiet death, but the Liberals turned it into a refusal of the Pope to listen to his Cardinals! Thus when on the death of Pius X Cardinal Ferrari went down to Rome for the conclave to elect his successor, to an Italian senator remarking on the people's emotion and veneration for the deceased Pope, the Cardinal sternly replied: "Yes, but he will have to give an account to God for the way in which he would abandon his bishops in the face of accusations being made against them"! Truly, as Msgr. Begnini said, Cardinal Ferrari had understood nothing."
Now what are the implications that I did not spell out in 1996? Between Pius X and Cardinal Ferrari we have a clash between two worlds: one of Catholic reality, of man serving God; the other of Liberal dreamery, of God serving man. Pius X is concerned with the issues, the Cardinal is concerned with personal feelings. Pius X worries that the good doctrine is not put into practice in Milan; that the Cardinal's defending "The Union" would spread liberal ideas; that the Cardinal should straighten out the scandal of mistaken thinking. On the contrary the Cardinal takes the Scotton accusation as a personal attack upon his subordinates and himself; when the Pope is scandalized by his defense of "The Union", he is overcome with personal feelings ("broken-hearted", "humiliated", "saddened") and fanfares his good intentions: when the Pope does not want to see him, he feels personally betrayed ("abandoned") by his Superior.
There is a famous quotation of the arch-Romantic English poet, John Keats (1795-1821):- "I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart's affections and the truth of imagination" (Letter to Benjamin Bailey). Now when a young poet in a Revolutionary age allows his feelings and imagination to take over, that is, in a manner of speaking, his prerogative. But when an eminent Prince of the Catholic Church allows questions of doctrine to be overtaken in his mind by the conviction of the holiness of his own heart's affections, then we are in trouble! The Revolution is taking over the Church, and the Catholic Faith is being washed out. Sure enough! — the Pius X - Cardinal Ferrari clash was finally resolved in 2001 when Pope John-Paul II beatified Cardinal Ferrari! In effect, he was declaring the Cardinal's affections to be Blessed! A Catholic Saint? A saint of the world of Keats!
The secular parallel from the post-war United States is the clash which took place in Washington , D.C., in the late 1940's between Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss. Whittaker Chambers' book "Witness" is a classic of U.S. history, culture and literature, which should be studied in every American school, but because it refuses the modern dream, it is disappearing down the memory hole. Chambers was not a Catholic, but he had real and deep insight into the soul of modern man.
Born in Philadelphia, PA, in 1901, and reared in a more or less unhappy middle-class home on Long Island, NY, Chambers had a serious and searching mind which led him as a university student in the 1920's to tour Europe's centers of culture in pursuit of an answer to what seemed to him a grave crisis of Western Civilization. But post-WWI Europe had no answer either, which is why in the 1930's, like many another desperate young man, he joined the Communist Party. Within the Communist underground which he served with distinction for several years, he met and befriended an equally brilliant rising D.C. bureaucrat, by name Alger Hiss. The two worked together, until Stalin's Great Purge in 1937 and 1938 opened Chambers' eyes and drove him out of the Communist Party and out of Communism. He went to ground until the Communists no longer risked killing him, and had quietly re-surfaced in the late 1940's as a journalist with "Time" in New York. Meanwhile Alger Hiss had gone on to make a brilliant wartime and post-war career in Washington, partaking for instance at the highest level in the Conference of Yalta and in the constituting of the United Nations.
Chambers and Hiss met again in August of 1948 when Chambers stepped forward out of his obscurity into blazing publicity in D.C. to give witness that Hiss, while in the US Department of State, had helped to transmit confidential government documents to the Russians. Hiss denied that he had ever even met Chambers! But Hiss was finally convicted of perjury in January of 1950, and sentenced to a five-year prison term. He died only a few years ago, still protesting his innocence, remaining no doubt still convinced of the holiness of his heart's affections! Chambers died a sad man in 1961, sure that his cause was doomed to perish.
The Chambers-Hiss clash was again a clash between two worlds, between two Americas. As Pius X represented the centuries-old true Church while Cardinal Ferrari represented in effect the looming Church of Vatican II, so the dumpy little Chambers represented all the decent little folk across the United States while Hiss, darling of the DC and NY Establishment, represented the Liberal-Communist march towards the New World Order. When Chambers quit Communism, without the Catholic Faith, he clearly saw that he was joining the losing side. His agonizing decision to testify against Hiss was a noble but desperate gesture, made in the hope of obtaining for civilization no more than a slight reprieve. In this Chambers succeeded when we think of US anti-communism in the 1950's, but, of course, anti-communism without the Catholic Faith has no long future, so by the 1960's the Liberal-Communist march to the Brave New World was more irreversible than ever.
Insights abound in Chambers' "Witness" but here are two that could come straight out of pre-Vatican II Papal Encyclicals: communism is a religious problem, and all liberals are virtual communists. That is why, regardless of the truth or facts of the case, the DC-NY Establishment of liberals rallied to a man behind Hiss, because they knew that if he was condemned, so were they, and their substitute-religion of liberalism. That is why, to this day, they will maintain that Hiss was innocent, just as Pope John-Paul II innocented Cardinal Ferrari.
Dear readers, the whole world can go the way of Alger Hiss, and nearly all the churchmen can go the way of Cardinal Ferrari, but God remains God and He is neither deceived nor mocked. We may for the moment be like crushed beneath the juggernaut-dream of Alger Hiss and Vatican II, but it will come to an end, whereas God will not come to an end. Patience. Prayer. Tradition is gently stirring again in many a Catholic breast.
Let us pray that the Precious Blood of Jesus descend in July as a laver of regeneration upon more and more souls.
Sincerely yours in Christ,
Richard Williamson
P.S. Watch out for August’s Letter, my last from the Seminary. It will be a poem!
Karl Rahner - Prime Delinquent
June 4, 2003
Dear Friends and Benefactors,
Since this letter is set fair to be one of the last monthly letters from the Seminary that I am like to pen, then let me attempt to give one more overview of the false religion that has been devastating the Catholic Church for the last 40 years in the wake of Vatican II.
For when the Conciliar hurricane struck the Church in the early 1960's, the immediate and pressing need for true Catholics was to protect the true Mass, and the true priesthood that goes with it, from the grave threat of their extinction by the ensuing Novus Ordo Mass (1969). Only when the survival of the Catholic Mass and priesthood was guaranteed some years later were Traditionally-minded Catholics able to look farther, so to speak, and ask themselves where the hurricane came from. They had had to begin by parrying this or that horror of the Novus Ordo. Only now they are starting to fit all the horrors together.
For indeed the diverse horrors of the Conciliar Revolution do fit together. They could never have attained their hurricane-force to almost destroy the Church, had not each horror re-inforced the others, providing a united system of errors to replace Catholicism even while resembling it! The new religion of Vatican II and the Novus Ordo is a masterpiece of the Devil!
Two recent analyses of the Conciliar religion as a whole are to be found in Professor Johannes Dörmann's four-volume series on the theological way of Pope John Paul II to the Assisi meeting of religions in 1986, and in the small but dense book on the problem of the liturgical reform, put out by Society of St. Pius X priests in 2001. These two analyses were made quite independently of one another, but they are remarkably similar in their presentation of Vatican II and the Novus Ordo as the same system of error (both books are available from the Angelus Press in Kansas City, USA).
Now has come another such analysis, this time by an American, "A Critical Examination of the Theology of Karl Rahner, S.J.", by Robert McCarthy. The German Fr. Rahner was one of the very most important "periti" or expert theologians at the Council, on which he had an enormous influence. Mr. McCarthy is a layman from Texas in his late 70's who, according to a biographical note in his book, has been puzzling for years over what made Vatican II tick. His little book on Rahner is remarkably readable, makes perfect sense, and presents an analysis wholly corresponding to the two analyses mentioned above. We have three hunters on the trail of the same beast! The beast should be driven from cover before long!
McCarthy's "Critical Examination" is remarkably readable insofar as the writings of Rahner himself are notoriously obscure. Scholars may then dismiss McCarthy's book on the grounds that McCarthy reads no German, so he has had to base his analysis largely on English translations of summaries of Rahner's thinking by two of his German disciples. However Catholics who love their Church know that Vatican II left it in ruins, so if Rahner was one of those responsible, then either English is a surprisingly poor language, or what Rahner said and did must be discernible and describable in English. The question is not just a matter for scholars or a problem of language - it is a question of all-important Truth! So McCarthy's "Examination" may only be a summary of summaries, but if it fits the facts and responds to the ruins, then it is what we need.
Rahner, says McCarthy, started out from a hatred for that old Church and for that old Faith which descended by Revelation from God down to man. He held them to be wholly unfit for modern man, so he set about rediscovering Church and Faith in such a way as would fit modern man. Instead then of working, as Catholics always do, from God down to man to lift up man to God, Rahner set about working from modern man up to God so as to bring God down in a version of God acceptable to modern man. As a disciple of Rahner says, "Rahner himself has said that theology often gives the impression nowadays of providing mythological or at least unscientific answers... The theologian can only overcome this... by beginning with man and his experiences."
Notice that this principle of turning to man, as it lies at the heart of Rahner's whole system, so too it is the basis of the novelties of Vatican II which put man in the place of God. Modern man feels that he does not get enough credit from God, so with his feelings he will do an end-run around his Catholic faith.
Thus modern man feels himself to be not a bad guy, in fact he feels he is quite a good guy, so he can no longer believe in the old Catholic dogma of original sin, nor can he any longer believe that God's supernature, or supernatural grace, is so far above his own nature. Based on this feeling, or these "experiences", of modern man, Rahner comes up with his doctrine of the "supernatural existential", meaning that instead of original sin existing in man's nature, it is the supernatural, or grace, which exists in, or is built into, man's nature!
Thus Rahner, by starting from modern man's wonderful feeling about himself, has arrived immediately at those two major heresies of which Donoso Cortes said that they lie at the root of nearly all modern heresies: the denial of the supernatural and the denial of original sin. Now as a Catholic priest and theologian, Rahner could not come clean with such an overthrow of basic Catholic truth. Here, says McCarthy, is the explanation of Rahner's almost impenetrable obscurity, and his invention of phrases like "supernatural existential". However, what is obscure in the master is made clear by the disciples. Similarly Vatican II could not come clean with its overthrow of the old religion, because it had to pretend to be still Catholic, but that overthrow which is ambiguous in the Council's 16 documents is clear for all to see in the Council's fruits.
From Rahner's doctrine of the "supernatural existential" whereby grace and not the inclination to sin is built into man's nature, it necessarily follows that every human being, whether he knows it or not, or wants it or not, is in the grace of God! Logically, Rahner concludes that all non-Christians are "anonymous Christians", i.e. Christians without the name!
From which again it follows that if Jesus Christ's Church is the society of all Christians, then Christ's Church includes every human being! Therefore what Catholics always used to call the Catholic Church is for Rahner only a part of Christ's full Church, which is co-terminous with mankind. That is why in "Lumen Gentium" Vatican II decreed that Christ's Church is not identical with the Catholic Church, but merely "subsists in" the Catholic Church, in such a way that Christ's full Church can go way outside the Catholic Church and include, or subsist in, all kinds of other churches - or non-churches - as well! Here is the so-called "ecumenism" which is still ruining true Catholicism. Thus Vatican II followed Rahner in his total revolutionizing of the concept of the Catholic Church.
But if man is so wonderful as to have grace built into his nature, what need does he have of redemption or Redeemer? For Rahner as for modern man, evolution is true, so the wonderfulness of man means that he is always evolving higher, i.e. he is always from within himself rising above and beyond himself. Jesus Christ is simply that person in whom man evolved to the full above himself, i.e. into what men call divinity! And if man had not achieved this total self-transcendence in the person of the carpenter from Galilee, he would have achieved it or would achieve it in some other person at some other point in history! By this doctrine of God no longer coming down into human nature but of man instead evolving up into divine nature, Rahner fits together evolution and his turn to man, but he stands the Incarnation on its head!
Rahner similarly empties out the redemption, or the Cross. If modern man feels he is so wonderful, how can he feel that he sins, or does anything that really offends God? Besides - pardon the blasphemy! - God is a good guy like himself, so would not get upset anyway! Then how can man need to have been rescued from God's wrath by Our Lord dying for him on the Cross? Then what was the Cross for Rahner? McCarthy does not say, but maybe it was what Dörmann says it is for John Paul II (Redemptor Hominis) - a merely back-up demonstration of God's super-luv for man! (See the enclosed flyer for an overview of Dörmann, to be studied at the Doctrinal Session for men in Winona, this July 22 to 26).
Then for Rahner what are the Mass and the Catholic Priesthood? Since man has the "supernatural existential" or the grace of God built into him, then he needs neither atoning sacrifice nor sacrificing priesthood. So priests come, again, not from above but from below; they come not from a divinely instituted anointing or Sacrament of Orders lifting them above their fellow men, but from their fellow-believers around them freely consenting to their position. So for Rahner priests should be ready to hold a worldly job to demonstrate that they are on the level with their fellow-men. Hence the Vatican II priests we know, in lay jobs and in lay clothing. Conciliarism is Protestantism.
As for the Mass, McCarthy presents no specifically Rahnerian doctrine, but it stands to Rahnerian reason that sinners supposedly needing, for forgiveness, to partake in offering, through an anointed priest, a sacrifice to placate the anger of an infinite and offended God, no longer makes any sense to modern man. Rather we shall have good guys gathering in fellowship to share in a meal presided over by one of their own number (man or woman!) to express their caring and sharing - the Novus Ordo eucharistic picnic!
Lord, have mercy upon us! McCarthy's book is available for US$ 9 (postage paid) from Tradition in Action, P.O. Box 23135, Los Angeles CA 90023. Warmly recommended for anyone who wishes to puzzle out today's devastation of the Catholic Church.
This is one of the last Seminary letters your servant will write, because this August he is being appointed to head up the Society's Seminary in the Argentine, South America. Last April he had been for 20 years Rector of the SSPX Seminary in the USA, which is long enough for any priest to stay in one position. From September his successor in Winona, Fr. Yves Le Roux, may or may not continue this series of monthly letters, but you are begged not to interrupt the flow of your generosity which has made possible the Seminary's work for these 20 years: two new priests this June 21, Saturday, and some each year thereafter.
Thank you all, and God bless you.
+ Richard Williamson
The Enclosed Flyer
The Modernistic Thinking of Pope John Paul II
Why is the Catholic Church (in 2003) in confusion? Because the Pope who leads it is in confusion. Why is the Pope who leads it in confusion? Because he is trying to go in two directions at once. Why is the trying to go in two directions at once? Because he is trying to follow both the unchanging Catholic religion of all time, and the changing modem world which is directly opposed to that unchanging Catholic religion. He is trying to reconcile irreconcilables. Hence the confusion of the entire Church.
Father Johannes Dörmann is a retired Catholic University professor from Germany with a distinguished teaching career behind him. He is entirely independent of the Society of St. Pius X, and has almost nothing, or nothing, to do with it. He was puzzled by the Meeting of Religions presided over by Pope John Paul II in Assisi in 1986. He asked himself, how could a Catholic Pope do such a thing?
In order to answer his own question, he set himself to study everything said and written by Pope John Paul II. He found his answer, and put it in four books, available from the Angelus Press in Kansas, translated into English from the original German. These four books will provide the subject-matter of the Doctrinal Session to be held in Winona next month.
Professor Dörmann brings out the modernistic side of a retreat and three major Encyclicals composed by this Pope. Yet many Catholics protest, that the same texts can be interpreted in a perfectly Catholic way. Here lies the confusion which the Doctrinal Session will attempt to make perfectly clear.
Mary, Seat of Wisdom, pray for us.
That Part Of Pope John Paul II’s Thinking Which Dissolves Catholicism
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