December 1, 1996
Dear Friends and Benefactors,
As this calendar year draws to its close, we are only the space of three years from the third Millennium after Christ. Now Christ does not change, but the times they are a-changing, dramatically. The 1990's are no longer the 1970's when the Society of St. Pius X began, still less are they the 1950's which, from before Vatican II, look to us today like another world. What then might the 2,000's be? Here are several certainties and a few guesses, in answer to questions coming mostly from readers:-
Q: Is the crisis in Church and world showing any signs of letting up?
A: No, on the contrary. And grave though the world crisis is, the Church crisis is incomparably worse because the Catholic Church is meant to be the salt of the earth and the light of the world. As that salt loses its savour, so it is trodden underfoot (Mt.V,13), and as the light grows weaker, so the world is plunged in darkness. Towards the end of Prof. Romano Amerio's careful and profound analysis in "Iota Unum", published in 1984, of the errors constituting this crisis of the Church, he wrote that if it is true that the nature of the Catholic Church is now being overthrown from within, "then we are headed for a formless darkness that will make analysis and forecast impossible, and in the face of which there will be no alternative but to keep silence".
Q: Do you agree with this dark judgment on our future?
A: Not entirely. The nature of the Church can be neither changed nor overthrown, nor can truth be at a loss to analyze error, nor will the truth be silenced. But the Professor is well expressing how without precedent the darkness is that is engulfing the Church.
Q: Can you give a few examples, at various levels of the Church?
A: From top to bottom:
- For instance, the Pope has recently re-enforced the key dogma of secular humanism by declaring that evolution is "more than just a hypothesis", or theory. He is wildly wrong. The theory of evolution is today discredited as unproven by more and more real scientists, i.e. scientists who respect reality.
- Next down, inside the Vatican "a very powerful group" of top-level churchmen celebrate Satanist rituals, according to the well-informed Malachi Martin. (For parallel horrors in the Old Testament, see Ezechiel VIII.)
- As for Catholic bishops, as an American exdiocesan priest told me who is speaking from hands-on experience, conservative bishops who are not modernist in their ideas run into head-on trouble if they try to confront the heresy, immorality, irreverence, etc., rampant in their dioceses, so to lead a quiet life they compromise, which eats away their character, making them finally into caricatures of bishops.
- As for young priests who are traditionally minded, according to a conservative American Catholic magazine one year ago, they hold onto the Faith as best they can, feeling as though they are "waiting for the cavalry to come", but then they find themselves stabbed in the back by, for instance, Rome's approval of altar-girls, all of which leaves them to conclude, "There ain't no cavalry".
- So the laity are being prepared by flyers from, for instance, the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, for "Sunday Celebration in the Absence of a Priest", SCAPs in English, ADAPs in French ("Assistance Domininicale en 1'Absence d'un Pretre), and thus the Catholic Church worldwide is being ruined (No Mass, no Church, bragged Luther).
Q: But how can God be allowing His own Church to fall to pieces like this?
A: Because He chooses so to leave to His churchmen their free-will that those who serve the Church well will greatly merit, while out of the evil wrought by the rest of them He has from eternity planned to bring forth a greater good. Out of the present purification of the Church, or end of her 5th Age, will come the Triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, which looks like being the Catholic Church's last and greatest peaceful triumph (6th Age) before her final and most terrible persecution under the Antichrist (7th and last Age).
Q: So we are not today living in the days of the Antichrist?
A: No, but we are living in days very like them, because just as the long-drawn out 5th Age of Apostasy (from Luther to today) is now finally corrupting the long-drawn out 4th Age of Christendom (the 1,000 year Middle Ages), so the swift 7th Age of the Antichrist will corrupt the swift 6th Age of Mary's Triumph. Today we are living through "the end of times", in Greek "kairoi", not "chronoi", i.e. the end of 2,000 years of opportunities for Gentiles to enter the Catholic Church, but after this end of times (5th Age) there is still a way to go to the end of the world (7th Age). If you think this "end of times" is painful, pray not to have to live through the end of the world!
Q: But how much longer will this "end of times" drag on?
A: That is God's secret. Longer, I fear, than we might wish. Some Catholic prophecies speak of a virtual eclipse of the Church, but that seems not to have happened yet. Her structures are still, apparently, standing. The darkness should then be darker yet before dawn.
Q: But can one be sure that there will be a dawn?
A: Absolutely. Back in the 17th century the Sacred Heart told St. Margaret Mary that his enemies will be overthrown just as they think they are on the brink of triumphing. Certainly the Judeo-masons consider they are today very close to total world control. The astonishing thing is how much use Our Lord will make of mere men to overthrow them. It will be a wonder to watch: like St. Joan of Arc, only on a much grander scale. But we must pray more, for God to intervene.
Q: Meanwhile, do you not think the darkness is such as to have taken away our Popes? Is it not logical to think that recent Popes have been so bad that they cannot have been popes at all?
A: I think it is only logical if you exaggerate papal infallibility, as do both liberals and sedevacantists. Both say, popes are infallible and recent popes are liberal. The sedevacantists conclude, therefore these "popes" are not popes. Oscar Wilde said, sentimentality is the bank-holiday of cynicism (prolonged holiday today!). Similarly, sedevacantism is the reverse side of liberalism. Admittedly, this is the Church's worst crisis ever. Nevertheless, Church history indicates how far Our Lord can go in allowing his Vicars to err while he works around their errors to prevent them from destroying the Church. True, the pope leads the Church. But the Church is greater than the pope. Sedevacantists are like liberals in almost reducing the Church to the pope.
Q: But if the SSPX refuses sedevacantism and recognizes that these liberal popes are popes, how can it disobey their orders?
A: Because the Catholic Church is greater than the pope, and so when a pope by word or deed (1) disserves the Church (2) gravely, then for the sake of the Church, i.e. out of a higher obedience to God, Catholics may, and sometimes even must, "disobey" the Pope. But the disservice must be (1) real, i.e. to "disobey" we only have the right if we are right, and (2) it must be grave, i.e. Catholics should not even seem to break Catholic unity unless there is serious cause. Neo-modernism is serious cause.
Q: But if you "disobey" the Pope, how can you still recognize him as Pope?
A: Because the pope can make serious errors without ceasing to be pope. The liberals follow the pope when he is right and still follow him when he is gravely wrong. The sedevacantists refuse to follow him when he is wrong and refuse to follow him (do not recognize him) when he is right. Catholic common sense follows him when he is right and refuses to follow him when he is gravely wrong, but that need not mean not recognizing him as Pope.
Q: But how can the SSPX set itself up to pick and choose when it obeys or "disobeys"? How can mere Catholics sift words and deeds of popes?
A: Because mere Catholics have nearly 2,000 years of Catholic Tradition available to them by which to judge when any Catholic, from pope down to layman, is serving or gravely disserving the Church. The presumption is always in favour of authority, but if an angel from heaven brings me some new doctrine other than that which Catholics have always received, then I must anathematize or reject that angel, teaches St. Paul, word of God (Gal. I,8). And if I may and sometimes must reject an angel from heaven, all the more may I and sometimes must I reject a pope on earth. And how can I tell when I must do so, except by sifting his doctrine in comparison with what the Church has always taught? If I am right, I have the right.
Q: Well, might you believe in the "Jovite" solution, that there has been a secretly and divinely consecrated Pope?
A: No. The Catholic Church has to be visible (How could God oblige on pain of damnation men to adhere to a church they could not see?). The Church might consecrate bishops secretly, for special reasons, for instance of persecution, but in no way could the Pope be appointed secretly on whom the whole Church depends. His appointment must be visible, even if, in the near future, it may in some way need to be miraculous.
Q: Then what do you see concerning the next Conclave to elect a Pope? Malachi Martin is saying that, "short of a miracle", John-Paul II will die or be replaced within a year by someone who will co-operate with the New World Order and with their agenda of control of population and education.
A: Surely the next Conclave will significantly darken the Church. John-Paul II may have such faults as Pope as to at least partly excuse the distress reaction of sedevacantism, but just let sedevacantists see John-Paul's successor! Then they may think John-Paul II was an angel in comparison! They must admit that it is to John-Paul's credit that (as Malachi Martin tells us) the globalist churchmen want him out of the way, pushing him to resign if he will not die. Inadequate though he may have been as Pope, objectively speaking, things are set to be worse without him. It is possible to imagine the See of Rome becoming truly vacant.
Q: Why? Do you think the next conclave to elect a pope will not be valid?
A: Possibly. An invalid election has certainly been made easier by one of the recent changes in the rules for electing a pope. From 1179 until earlier this year a two- thirds majority of the Cardinals voting was required, but now a pope may be elected by a one-vote majority, making his election potentially as dubious as any one of the votes electing him. Did the liberals now in power in Rome make this change to facilitate the election of one of their own men? Or do they envisage undermining the one-man rule of the Church, instituted by Our Lord, because an individual man can always let himself be moved by God's grace to block their plans, whereas some more or less democratic substitute like a Cardinals' Committee will always be subject to control by themselves? Interesting speculation.
Q: But would not such a dissolution of the papacy be the end of the Church?
A: Such an eclipse of the Papacy would surely bring on the virtual eclipse of the Church mentioned earlier. But man proposes, God disposes. Just suppose a globalist pope is dubiously elected at the next conclave, thanks to the unwisely loosened rules. It is easy to imagine a parallel with the introduction of the Novus Ordo missal in 1969. Back then, a Catholic had to love the Mass to take the trouble of examining the legislation supposedly mandating the new missal, but if he did take the trouble, sure enough, he found the legislation was so flawed that the new missal is not in fact mandatory. Similarly tomorrow, it may take a Catholic who loves the papacy to question the new "pope" acclaimed by the vile media and accepted by nearly all "Catholics", but if, thanks to the new rules' looseness, the election will have been a fraud, God will have left enough evidence for souls of good will to see clearly that it was a fraud.
Q: But is that not all sheer speculation?
A: Indeed. However it is certain that the New Mass legislation put Catholics to the test back in 1969, and most were found wanting, and that is a pattern being repeated in this crisis of the Church. The liberals are masters of the appearances, and Catholics who content themselves with appearances are letting themselves be constantly deceived. The Lord God wants substance from us and not just appearances. Only those who really seek the truth will find it.
Q: Are you saying that the mass of Catholics today do not truly love God? How dare you?
A: Look at the fruits. How many "Catholics" today behave - actions speak louder than words - like Catholics behaved 50 years ago? On the contrary, how many "Catholics" today behave just like their Protestant or secular humanist neighbours? For instance, are not abortions statistically as common against Catholics as amongst non-Catholics?
Q: But if Catholics were so good 50 years ago, how are they so bad today?
A: Maybe they were not that good. Here is how an American Catholic wrote to me of Catholicism as she knew it before Vatican II: "In the 1940's and 1950's emotionalism, or devotion, was our religion. It filled our churches for Mass and Novena services. Our Church on Grand Avenue had seven or eight novena services every day and as one service emptied out, the line was backed up in the street to get in for the next service. Yet with all of that we were not practicing our religion. Protestants gave better example than we did, especially in the parking lot after Mass .... I understand now how saccharine all of this was".
Q: Do you think that that is a fair description of pre-Council Catholicism?
A: Judging by the fruits, I am afraid so, to a great extent. How else could the Church so have collapsed in the 1960's? Our Lord quotes "the great commandment in the Law" thus: "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with thy whole mind" (Mt XXII, 37). Catholics cannot afford to be sentimental, like the post-Protestant culture all around them. If they are, the Devil will snatch their minds to mislead their souls.
Q: Do you see a danger of "Fiftiesism" amongst what are called "Traditional Catholics" today?
A: Yes, alas. The same causes produce the same effects. The same modern world that made so many Catholics of the 1950's give the appearances and their sentiments to God while they gave the substance with their minds to the Devil, is with us today, all around us, even more so. After all, ever since Protestantism, to give the appearances to God and the substance to the Devil has been the classic way of resolving the tension between them as they struggle for our souls. Hypocrisy is the hall-mark of the Age of Apostasy -"I know thy works, that thou hast the name of being alive: and thou art dead" (Apoc.III,1). In the 1900's it was modernism. In the 1950's it was Neo-modernism. In the 1990's and 2000's the Devil is sure to be finding new ways of our giving the appearances to "Tradition" while our minds and hearts go dancing with the world. He has no shortage of devices up his sleeve, where the Fraternity of St. Peter and the Indult Mass came from.
Q: Then nobody should attend the Indult Mass?
A: The Indult Mass, like the Fraternity of St. Peter, has the official Church's approval for one purpose only, to keep respectively Mass-goers and vocations away from the Society of St. Pius X, in order thereby to separate them eventually from their Catholic Faith. For a mouse to try nibbling the cheese off a mouse-trap without springing the trap is at best a risky affair.
Q: But what about souls on their way out of the Novus Ordo? May they not attend the Indult Mass?
A: You are right. What neo-modernist Rome designed as half-way houses into the Novus Ordo can serve as half-way houses out of it. Thus for someone in the mud at the bottom of a well, a niche in the wall half-way up is half-way to the sunlight, but for somebody out in the sunlight that same niche is half-way down to the mud. Anybody in the sunlight of the Tridentine Mass untrammelled by neo-modernist Rome needs his head examined if he climbs down to the niche of the Indult Mass, half-way down to the mud of the Novus Ordo.
Q: But does not Michael Davies say that attending the Novus Ordo Mass fulfills one's Sunday duty? And that Archbishop Lefebvre said the same thing?
A: When Michael Davies says it, it is because he claims that the officially promulgated Novus Ordo Mass cannot be intrinsically evil, otherwise the Catholic Church would be defectible. When Archbishop Lefebvre said it, he meant that the Novus Ordo Mass is objectively and intrinsically evil, but Catholics unaware of, or disbelieving in, that evil, because of the rite's official promulgation, may subjectively fulfill their Sunday duty by attending the new Mass. The third Commandment says, thou shalt keep the Sabbath holy, not, thou shalt attend a semi-Protestant Mass.
Q: Then how do you answer Michael Davies' argument that if the Pope had officially promulgated a sacramental rite intrinsically harmful to the Faith, then the Church would have defected, which is impossible, because the Church is indefectible?
A: That is a delicate question, but see nine answers back, concerning the legislation which "enforced" the new rite of Mass: it appeared mandatory but it was not. Now the doctrinal ambiguity and the disciplinary looseness (opening to wide alternatives) intrinsic to the new rite are bad enough to condemn it as intrinsically evil for a sacramental rite, but they are not bad enough to undermine the Church's indefectibility so long as they are not mandatorily imposed upon Catholics. (It is sometimes fortunate that at least in their theory liberals are not given to commanding!)
Q: But Michael Davies says the Society of St. Pius X has no competent theologians.
A: He is quite right that the Society priests (and bishops) have almost no doctorates or licentiates from the official Church in philosophy or theology or canon law. However, they do have, following Archbishop Lefebvre, a sense of the Catholic Faith whereby they grasp the gravity of this crisis in the Church requiring old rules to be applied in new ways beyond most books of theology or law from which those doctors studied whom Michael Davies appreciates. After all, had those doctors grasped the crisis, would it be here? Some of them to this day say there is no crisis! Learned men can be blind!
Q: But should not the Society of St. Pius X at least be in dialogue with Rome?
A: You cannot dialogue with persons who share none of your basic principles. Right up until the spring of 1988 Archbishop Lefebvre charitably assumed that the Roman churchmen wanted to defend the Catholic Faith of souls, and so he engaged for thirteen years in hand-to-hand discussions with them, but when in the summer of 1988 their actions made it clear beyond doubt That the unchanging Faith of souls was not their concern, then he gave up discussing, and took definitive action to guarantee the Faith's interim defense, God willing, until Rome comes to its Catholic senses. The disagreement had finally showed itself to be too basic for dialogue to be continued.
Q: So the Society of St. Pius X wants Rome to return to the old religion, so to speak. What does Rome want of the Society of St. Pius X?
A: Ask them. Our understanding is that they want us to blend into the new religion of the New World Order.
Q: Well, a conservative Catholic magazine here in the USA said that the Society of St. Pius X in ten years will not be so stoutly affirming papal primacy, and that the Society of St. Pius X will probably not then be intact.
A: Time will tell. If the Society of St. Pius X is faithful, the magazine will be wrong on both counts.
Q: The magazine also said that it would take only one of the Society of St. Pius X leaders to break ranks and join Rome for the SSPX-Rome division to come to an end.
A: How little the magazine understands! The division is not personal. The problem is not between leaders personally. In 1988 an outstanding Traditional leader, Dom Gerard of Barroux, went over to Rome. He made Archbishop Lefebvre weep, but the problem was unchanged. If the Pope and the Cardinals were to come back to the fullness of the true Faith tomorrow, the Judeo-masons would simply start all over again to capture the Vatican for globalism the day after. Conversely, if all half dozen or so present Society of St. Pius X leaders were to go over to Rome, like Dom Gerard, the best of the Society of St. Pius X priests and laity might weep but they would refuse to follow. And if all men were, extraordinarily, to abandon the Truth, then Our Lord says the stones in the street would cry out (Lk.XIX,40). The problem is neither leaders, nor politics, nor egos, nor canon law, nor personalities, nor diplomacy, nor misunderstandings, nor lack of dialogue, but the clash between, on the one side, the Way, the Truth and the Life, and on the other side the Father of lies, Satan. Men may shift in that clash from one side to the other, but the clash is eternal and it is not matter for any kind of conciliation.
Q: So be it. But then would not the Society of St. Pius X strengthen its position by gathering together all Traditional priests? Why can't we have unity? Why can't Traditional priests stop fighting one another?
A: Because Catholic unity requires not only the Faith but also authority. As Fr. Calmel said at the onset of the present crisis, any such association "which would profess to be OF the Church but would be neither diocese, nor archdiocese, nor parish nor a religious order .... would be artificial, man-made and foreign to the established and recognized groups within the Church. As with all groupings, it would be faced with the problem of leadership and authority and all the more acutely the larger it was. It wouldn't take long for it to be faced with the question of authority; being artificial (and thus not an association according to nature or grace) it would find the question of authority insoluble. Rival groups would soon arise .... Conflict would become inevitable and between these rival groups there would be no canonical means to put an end to this conflict nor even to conduct it". Traditional Catholics would be wise to be grateful for the remarkable degree of unity given to them world-wide by the Faith they share, and to cease complaining of the lack of unity caused by the lack of authority. Let them pray for the Pope and for the Church's hierarchy, and as for the rest, let them endure what they cannot cure.
Q: Then the situation is hopeless?
A: No, says Fr. Calmel, because we know Our Lord will be with his Church to the end of the world (Mt.XXVIII,20). So even if Church hierarchical authority is steadily being eroded, he says, still each of us at our own level, priest or nun or layman, should exercise what authority he has in order to form bastions of sanctity on however small a scale, which should stay in touch with one another to prepare for the Church's revival when it pleases Our Lord, but which should not seek to form world-wide organizations "which would find the problem of leadership insoluble".
Q: But our struggle is very lonely. Can we not then co-operate with good Protestants, for instance in the fight against abortion or against corruption in politics?
A: Be careful .... Abortion and today's corrupt politics are poisoned fruits but not the poisonous roots of the Great Apostasy, which began with Protestantism. So however good the best of Protestants appear on the surface, deep down they are part of the problem, which is why they are apt to turn to politics as a solution. Sin is the problem. Grace is the solution. The only grace is of Jesus Christ which comes to men essentially through the Catholic Church. No intelligent Catholic will today spend much effort on any action which does not more or less directly rebuild the Catholic Church: "bastions of sanctity (supernatural)", family, mission, chapel, school, parish, such as the Catholic Church has always built. The Church has also built Catholic States, but that supposes a sufficient number of enlightened Catholics, which we do not have today. Now to form such Catholics! That is action worth attempting! Order doctrinal audio or video-tapes from the Seminary to start study groups going. How can men demand action, or look for action, without having first thought out what action is really necessary? For instance to kill abortionists might be tempting as action to take, to remove grave enemies of the State when its competent authorities refuse to remove them. But the disorder of citizens taking the law into their own hands normally disrupts society more than the continued activity of such criminals. Catholic action needs to be well thought out.
Q: Do you mean a Catholic can never resort to force? Not even if the State violates his family, as wicked States are more and more threatening to do?
A: The Church has always taught that a man has the right (and maybe, but not necessarily, the duty) to use proportionate force to repel violence or the threat of violence against the person, honour, property of himself or those for whom he is responsible. If a modern State closes in on a man's family, it is that man's responsibility before God to judge whether his using that right is a lesser evil than not using it. In any case, force is not always wrong, especially not defensive force. Therefore there is nothing wrong in owning weapons to be able eventually to exercise such force.
Q: And supposing homosexuality or divorce break in on the family?
A: Each case is different and must be handled individually, especially today when the general break-down of morals means that people may not be subjectively aware of what they are objectively doing. However, God's law does not change and all men have a God-given conscience, and it is no kindness to souls to put cushions under their bad consciences. To be kind to divorce means being unkind to lawful marriage, which means being unkind, yes, to children, who are the ones who suffer from the breakdown of lawful marriage. Similarly to condone homosexuality, one of the four sins crying to Heaven for vengeance, is, objectively, to mock Heaven or to mock God, and it is to help to undermine society, the survival of which depends, obviously, on the normal exercise of the reproductive function.
Q: But why is society so important? Is it not the individual that matters?
A: Yes, but God made the human individual to live in society so that if society breaks down, all the individuals suffer. In fact the common good overrides the individual good, as men recognize when they sign up to fight and maybe die for their country. But liberalism makes the individual sacrosanct, which is why we have for instance all these absurd "rights" and law-suits turning society into dissociety all around us. There is a common good which I undermine by being kind to guilty divorcees or to unrepentant homosexuals. Catholics get "charity" all wrong if like everyone around them they ignore the common good.
Q: Then Professor Amerio was right after all let us relapse into silence?
A: It is true that our circumstances are very difficult, but God does not ask us to conquer, He asks us to give battle, and then He, as St. Joan of Arc says, gives the victory. If in His inscrutable wisdom He has given to Catholics of the 5th Age to fight a 500-year rearguard action, which may soon be over but is not over yet, then that is what it is appointed for us to do. Had Catholics not fought during that half-millennium, it would have been over much sooner, but they would not have gained Heaven. We need not keep silence until it is forced upon us. Truth carries. So each of us in his own station in life must give witness to that unchanging Truth of Our Lord Jesus Christ which we have received from the Church and which alone can save our souls for eternity. Martyr and witness are in Greek the same word. We should not be surprised if living our lives to give witness to the Truth seems equivalent to a martyrdom "Blessed are ye when they shall revile you, and persecute you, and speak all that is evil against you, untruly, for my sake; Be glad and rejoice, for your reward is very great in heaven. For so they persecuted the prophets that were before you" (Mt.V, 11,12).
Dear friends and benefactors, take plenty of courage, and have a Happy Christmas and New Year. Remember the men's 5-day Exercises here at the Seminary from December 26 to 31, as usual, and remember the Seminary audio and video-tapes for Christmas presents, or presents at any time of year, to get the Church's Truth into circulation.
May God bless you, and Our Lady protect you.
Sincerely yours in Christ,
Showing posts with label 1996. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1996. Show all posts
Monday
Religious Liberty
November 3, 1996
Dear Friends and Benefactors,
There is a can of worms I want to open yet again, because these worms do untold harm to Catholics' innards without their even being aware of it. The can of worms is religious liberty.
To re-open the can may be hurtful, but it is made necessary by, for instance, the recent article of a Catholic writer here in the United States of America knocking down with one hand what she builds up with the other, because even while hating Vatican II she believes in one of its key errors, namely religious liberty. Since this writer Understands Otherwise Catholic doctrine, let us call her U.O. and press on with the arguments.
U.O.'s self-contradiction appeared earlier this year in an article criticising Dr. John Rao's lecture on "Why Catholics Cannot Defend Themselves", an overview of which was sent out with this letter last year. You may remember that Dr. Rao argued that the collapse of the Catholic Church over the last half-century was to be blamed on Catholics having been conquered by pluralism, meaning the wide-spread modern acceptance of freedom for all different religions to coexist in peace (religious liberty). For, once a mind holding a single Truth like Catholicism accepts plural truths, its grip on that single Truth is bound to be loosened until it can lose the Catholic Faith. As Dr. Rao said, this disintegration of Truth by pluralism can be especially seen in the United States of America, where the pluralism originally imported from Europe so flourished that it was re-exported to Rome for the Second Vatican Council, to be spread from there by the Church all over the world.
The objection of U.O. to Dr. Rao's analysis is essentially twofold. Firstly, in general, U.O. distinguishes pluralism in the Church or in the supernatural domain from pluralism in the State or in the natural domain. Now of course, says U.O., to accept a plurality of truths in the supernatural domain is out of the question for Catholics who know there is only one religious Truth; but to accept a plurality of faiths or religions in the natural domain of the State is not only "in the modern systems of democracy an absolute necessity inasmuch as it secures the peaceful co-existence of diverse religious communities", but also it is a positively good thing because, for instance, "a free competition of different Christian religions... has worked well in asserting the absolute superiority of the Roman Catholic Church over all other Christian sects".
Thus, secondly, in answer to Dr. Rao's accusations against pluralism in the United States of America in particular, U.O. replies that "the excellent Christian social order of the U.S. Republic brought forth the most prosperous Christian nation in modern times, simultaneously giving the impetus to the wonderful growth of the Catholic Church in this hemisphere".
On these two points, general and particular, U.O.'s thinking is as common amongst American Catholics as Dr. Rao's thinking is rare. Nevertheless, Dr. Rao is right, and U.O. is in self-contradiction, or, Dr. Rao is Catholic and U.O. is Liberal. Since general governs particular, let us start with her first objection.
To answer Dr. Rao's accusation that pluralism is what paralyses Catholics, she distinguishes Church pluralism, which she admits would indeed undo Catholics, from State pluralism, which she says Catholics should not only accept but also rejoice in. But this distinction rests upon the separation of Church and State, which is a Liberal principle constantly condemned by the true Church. Her distinction wants to place that separation in the mind. Thus in the upper or "supernatural" part of my mind, she wants plurality of truths to be unacceptable, whereas in the lower or "natural" part of my mind, she wants plurality of truths to be acceptable.
But, as Mother Church knows and teaches, that is not how truth works, nor how a truthful mind works. That is only how a divided mind works. Either truth excludes error both in the upper and lower parts of my mind, or it excludes it in neither, but it cannot exclude it in one and not in the other, except in a divided mind. But as the Truth is one, so the mind seeks to be one, so the divided mind is unstable and will seek stability in unity.
Therefore if I refuse Church pluralism but accept State pluralism, one of two things will happen: either by believing firmly that plurality of truths is unacceptable in Church I will arrive at the Catholic position that it is equally unacceptable in the State (although the State will only coerce error if that is both possible and, for the salvation of souls, in the circumstances, prudent); or, being a liberal convinced of the wisdom of pluralism in the State, I will, like so many U. S. Catholics, in effect pay merely lip service to the Catholic Church being the one and only true Church. Of such Catholics (who include too many "'Traditionalists") it can be said that their real religion is not their Catholicism, but that which really holds their minds and their lives together, namely their liberalism or Americanism.
A good illustration of a sane man's natural refusal to split his mind, and hence of the unnaturalness of Liberalism's Church-State split, was to be found in the Angelus article of July, 1995, by Edwin Faust. During his Pennsylvania boyhood in the 1950's, he wrote, "few then considered that God and country might be at enmity", especially as they were both enemies of Communism. "Bred of an ignorance of history and abetted by Americanist sentiment, that habit of the Catholic mind that blinds itself to conflicts between the Faith and the Republic was taking shape in me. Later, when these conflicts became apparent, they gave rise to cynicism. My mind seemed a collection of beliefs like so many pieces of a puzzle that failed to fit together. As is the case with many young people new to the habit of self-reflection, the weight of contradictions bore down on me and I wanted to rid myself of all I had been taught to that point and begin again" (my underlinings).
Along the same lines, to exclude error from the Church but not from the State, as U.O. proposes, is a contradiction that will usually be resolved, given original sin, in favour of error being admissible in both. In vain U.O. hates Vatican II, when the split she proposes between Church and State pluralism contains all Vatican II in a nut-shell!
It also, as Dr. Rao claimed, turns men's minds to mush. Here is how. To be different at all, different religions must contradict one another on some point of doctrine (notably the divinity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, or the divine institution of his one Catholic Church). If then the State is to treat all religions alike, the State will encourage in its citizens' minds contradiction, at least in questions of religion. But if contradiction in religion does not matter, then truth in religion does not matter. But if truth in religion does not matter, how can religion matter? (And if truth in religion does not matter, what truth matters? The mind is mush, sentiment is all.)
The United States' founding President, George Washington, wanted religion, any religion, to back the new nation's morals. But how can a religion of doubtful truth back anything? Men's minds do pot work that way. To give backing, religion must have truth. But the State which is pluralist in religion undermines the truth of all religion.
Thus God's having over the last 40 years been driven out of the U.S.A. public schools is not, as the decent patriots following George Washington claim, despite the First Amendment, but it is, as the indecent but logical liberals claim, because of the First Amendment. Decency is in the long run no match for logic. Principles matter. So if the Founding Fathers bequeathed to the Republic that they founded decent instincts but liberal principles, the contradiction might last for a while, but sure enough, principles in minds eventually prevailed and the Republic is inexorably disintegrating. If Americans now wish to save anything of all that was truly decent in their Republic, they must re-found it on integrally Catholic principles.
That is why, to come to U.O.'s second objection, she is only superficially right when she claims that "the excellent Christian social order of the U.S. Republic" gave "the impetus to the wonderful growth of the Catholic Church in the hemisphere". That "wonderful growth" had a mighty collapse in the 1960's, because Catholic bricks were held together not with Catholic mortar but, as Edwin Faust suggests, with Liberal sand. Then was that "wonderful growth" so wonderful? Or, is Bing Crosby "Sound of Music" Catholicism Catholic?
Objection: the 1960's Church collapsed world-wide, not just in the U.S.A. Reply: true, all nations were rotten with their own rot, but firstly, it is surely more profitable on this side of the Atlantic to tell of the form the rot took on this side of the Atlantic, and secondly, as Dr. Rao (a New Yorker) truly says, the virus of pluralism originally imported from Europe (England) to the Americas was re-exported from the United States to Vatican II. The essential problem is doctrinal, not national, but because the United States happened to be founded on religious liberty, the problem in the USA is accessorily national as well as doctrinal. Hence a local name for the virus is "Americanism".
So U.O. is superficially right in saying that the U.S. social order promoted Church growth, but Dr. Rao is profoundly right when he says that the pluralism underpinning that social order undermined the Catholic Church. U.O. will surely object that Leo XIII in "Longinqua Oceani" praised the U.S. social order, but that paragraph of Leo XIII must be read in context, and taken together with everything else Leo XIII wrote on these questions, notably in his great Encyclical on "Liberty", roundly condemning religious liberty, separation of Church and State, freedom of the press, etc., etc.. (The Encyclical is available for a few dollars from Angelus Press, 2918 Tracy Avenue, Kansas City, MO 64109, USA, and a volume of Leo's Encyclicals can be had from TAN Books, Rockford, Illinois 61105, for $25 including postage.)
Leo's Encyclical on liberty is also presented and explained in the video-tapes of the Winona 1996 Doctrinal Session, together with three other basic Encyclicals to present the Catholic Popes' clinical diagnosis of today's ills. Order with the enclosed flyer. Surely profitable Christmas presents.
And for Christmas cards, the Seminary is laying in a stock of new four-colour cards (original painting by Brother Marcel) which for a small donation you can send to your friends with the promise of their intentions being included in the Novena of Masses celebrated from Christmas Night on the Seminary's main altar. Order as many as you like, for early December.
On that altar now and through November lie the cards you sent in for Holy Souls, and all cards from previous years. May these souls rest in peace.
Most sincerely yours in Christ,
Dear Friends and Benefactors,
There is a can of worms I want to open yet again, because these worms do untold harm to Catholics' innards without their even being aware of it. The can of worms is religious liberty.
To re-open the can may be hurtful, but it is made necessary by, for instance, the recent article of a Catholic writer here in the United States of America knocking down with one hand what she builds up with the other, because even while hating Vatican II she believes in one of its key errors, namely religious liberty. Since this writer Understands Otherwise Catholic doctrine, let us call her U.O. and press on with the arguments.
U.O.'s self-contradiction appeared earlier this year in an article criticising Dr. John Rao's lecture on "Why Catholics Cannot Defend Themselves", an overview of which was sent out with this letter last year. You may remember that Dr. Rao argued that the collapse of the Catholic Church over the last half-century was to be blamed on Catholics having been conquered by pluralism, meaning the wide-spread modern acceptance of freedom for all different religions to coexist in peace (religious liberty). For, once a mind holding a single Truth like Catholicism accepts plural truths, its grip on that single Truth is bound to be loosened until it can lose the Catholic Faith. As Dr. Rao said, this disintegration of Truth by pluralism can be especially seen in the United States of America, where the pluralism originally imported from Europe so flourished that it was re-exported to Rome for the Second Vatican Council, to be spread from there by the Church all over the world.
The objection of U.O. to Dr. Rao's analysis is essentially twofold. Firstly, in general, U.O. distinguishes pluralism in the Church or in the supernatural domain from pluralism in the State or in the natural domain. Now of course, says U.O., to accept a plurality of truths in the supernatural domain is out of the question for Catholics who know there is only one religious Truth; but to accept a plurality of faiths or religions in the natural domain of the State is not only "in the modern systems of democracy an absolute necessity inasmuch as it secures the peaceful co-existence of diverse religious communities", but also it is a positively good thing because, for instance, "a free competition of different Christian religions... has worked well in asserting the absolute superiority of the Roman Catholic Church over all other Christian sects".
Thus, secondly, in answer to Dr. Rao's accusations against pluralism in the United States of America in particular, U.O. replies that "the excellent Christian social order of the U.S. Republic brought forth the most prosperous Christian nation in modern times, simultaneously giving the impetus to the wonderful growth of the Catholic Church in this hemisphere".
On these two points, general and particular, U.O.'s thinking is as common amongst American Catholics as Dr. Rao's thinking is rare. Nevertheless, Dr. Rao is right, and U.O. is in self-contradiction, or, Dr. Rao is Catholic and U.O. is Liberal. Since general governs particular, let us start with her first objection.
To answer Dr. Rao's accusation that pluralism is what paralyses Catholics, she distinguishes Church pluralism, which she admits would indeed undo Catholics, from State pluralism, which she says Catholics should not only accept but also rejoice in. But this distinction rests upon the separation of Church and State, which is a Liberal principle constantly condemned by the true Church. Her distinction wants to place that separation in the mind. Thus in the upper or "supernatural" part of my mind, she wants plurality of truths to be unacceptable, whereas in the lower or "natural" part of my mind, she wants plurality of truths to be acceptable.
But, as Mother Church knows and teaches, that is not how truth works, nor how a truthful mind works. That is only how a divided mind works. Either truth excludes error both in the upper and lower parts of my mind, or it excludes it in neither, but it cannot exclude it in one and not in the other, except in a divided mind. But as the Truth is one, so the mind seeks to be one, so the divided mind is unstable and will seek stability in unity.
Therefore if I refuse Church pluralism but accept State pluralism, one of two things will happen: either by believing firmly that plurality of truths is unacceptable in Church I will arrive at the Catholic position that it is equally unacceptable in the State (although the State will only coerce error if that is both possible and, for the salvation of souls, in the circumstances, prudent); or, being a liberal convinced of the wisdom of pluralism in the State, I will, like so many U. S. Catholics, in effect pay merely lip service to the Catholic Church being the one and only true Church. Of such Catholics (who include too many "'Traditionalists") it can be said that their real religion is not their Catholicism, but that which really holds their minds and their lives together, namely their liberalism or Americanism.
A good illustration of a sane man's natural refusal to split his mind, and hence of the unnaturalness of Liberalism's Church-State split, was to be found in the Angelus article of July, 1995, by Edwin Faust. During his Pennsylvania boyhood in the 1950's, he wrote, "few then considered that God and country might be at enmity", especially as they were both enemies of Communism. "Bred of an ignorance of history and abetted by Americanist sentiment, that habit of the Catholic mind that blinds itself to conflicts between the Faith and the Republic was taking shape in me. Later, when these conflicts became apparent, they gave rise to cynicism. My mind seemed a collection of beliefs like so many pieces of a puzzle that failed to fit together. As is the case with many young people new to the habit of self-reflection, the weight of contradictions bore down on me and I wanted to rid myself of all I had been taught to that point and begin again" (my underlinings).
Along the same lines, to exclude error from the Church but not from the State, as U.O. proposes, is a contradiction that will usually be resolved, given original sin, in favour of error being admissible in both. In vain U.O. hates Vatican II, when the split she proposes between Church and State pluralism contains all Vatican II in a nut-shell!
It also, as Dr. Rao claimed, turns men's minds to mush. Here is how. To be different at all, different religions must contradict one another on some point of doctrine (notably the divinity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, or the divine institution of his one Catholic Church). If then the State is to treat all religions alike, the State will encourage in its citizens' minds contradiction, at least in questions of religion. But if contradiction in religion does not matter, then truth in religion does not matter. But if truth in religion does not matter, how can religion matter? (And if truth in religion does not matter, what truth matters? The mind is mush, sentiment is all.)
The United States' founding President, George Washington, wanted religion, any religion, to back the new nation's morals. But how can a religion of doubtful truth back anything? Men's minds do pot work that way. To give backing, religion must have truth. But the State which is pluralist in religion undermines the truth of all religion.
Thus God's having over the last 40 years been driven out of the U.S.A. public schools is not, as the decent patriots following George Washington claim, despite the First Amendment, but it is, as the indecent but logical liberals claim, because of the First Amendment. Decency is in the long run no match for logic. Principles matter. So if the Founding Fathers bequeathed to the Republic that they founded decent instincts but liberal principles, the contradiction might last for a while, but sure enough, principles in minds eventually prevailed and the Republic is inexorably disintegrating. If Americans now wish to save anything of all that was truly decent in their Republic, they must re-found it on integrally Catholic principles.
That is why, to come to U.O.'s second objection, she is only superficially right when she claims that "the excellent Christian social order of the U.S. Republic" gave "the impetus to the wonderful growth of the Catholic Church in the hemisphere". That "wonderful growth" had a mighty collapse in the 1960's, because Catholic bricks were held together not with Catholic mortar but, as Edwin Faust suggests, with Liberal sand. Then was that "wonderful growth" so wonderful? Or, is Bing Crosby "Sound of Music" Catholicism Catholic?
Objection: the 1960's Church collapsed world-wide, not just in the U.S.A. Reply: true, all nations were rotten with their own rot, but firstly, it is surely more profitable on this side of the Atlantic to tell of the form the rot took on this side of the Atlantic, and secondly, as Dr. Rao (a New Yorker) truly says, the virus of pluralism originally imported from Europe (England) to the Americas was re-exported from the United States to Vatican II. The essential problem is doctrinal, not national, but because the United States happened to be founded on religious liberty, the problem in the USA is accessorily national as well as doctrinal. Hence a local name for the virus is "Americanism".
So U.O. is superficially right in saying that the U.S. social order promoted Church growth, but Dr. Rao is profoundly right when he says that the pluralism underpinning that social order undermined the Catholic Church. U.O. will surely object that Leo XIII in "Longinqua Oceani" praised the U.S. social order, but that paragraph of Leo XIII must be read in context, and taken together with everything else Leo XIII wrote on these questions, notably in his great Encyclical on "Liberty", roundly condemning religious liberty, separation of Church and State, freedom of the press, etc., etc.. (The Encyclical is available for a few dollars from Angelus Press, 2918 Tracy Avenue, Kansas City, MO 64109, USA, and a volume of Leo's Encyclicals can be had from TAN Books, Rockford, Illinois 61105, for $25 including postage.)
Leo's Encyclical on liberty is also presented and explained in the video-tapes of the Winona 1996 Doctrinal Session, together with three other basic Encyclicals to present the Catholic Popes' clinical diagnosis of today's ills. Order with the enclosed flyer. Surely profitable Christmas presents.
And for Christmas cards, the Seminary is laying in a stock of new four-colour cards (original painting by Brother Marcel) which for a small donation you can send to your friends with the promise of their intentions being included in the Novena of Masses celebrated from Christmas Night on the Seminary's main altar. Order as many as you like, for early December.
On that altar now and through November lie the cards you sent in for Holy Souls, and all cards from previous years. May these souls rest in peace.
Most sincerely yours in Christ,
The state of the Catholic Faith and the SSPX in Asia and England
October 4, 1996
Dear Friends and Benefactors,
When the British Empire spanned the globe, the British Navy had a recruiting slogan, "Join the Navy, and see the world." For several years now the Society of St. Plus X has spanned the globe, and this summer I made, at the request of Headquarters, my third trip around the world, to visit Asia and England.
Of course such traveling has been made immensely easier by the enormous (and usually safe) aeroplanes which were unheard of in the hey-day of the British Navy. (How the world is changing) And, unless the machines are destroyed, that change is necessarily in the direction of world unification, which if it does not gather with Christ, is bound to scatter with the Anti-Christ (Lk XI, 23). Scattered, or dispersed, is exactly the word now to describe the souls following Christ (tech. XIII, 7; Mt. XXVI, 31).
Through Asia, relatively few souls as yet have found their way to the old Mass celebrated by priests of the Society in seven different countries. For instance in South Korea and Japan, both countries with order and discipline sufficient to put in the field a mighty modern army, only a hundred or so Catholics profit by the monthly visit of the devout young Society priest, Fr. Onoda, himself from Japan. It is mysterious how God can allow so many souls for so long to live without the Light of the World (Jn VIII, 12). One can only say, men have free-will. For instance, Japan had a famous harvest of Catholic martyrs in Nagasaki, just 400 years ago next year, and Korea had a similar harvest, less famous but more numerous, about 140 years ago. But now of course by the principles of ecumenism, Rome is encouraging Japanese and Koreans to rejoice in their Shintoist and Buddhist cultures respectively. Dare one say it? The heart of Asia's problem lies in Europe. It may be "politically incorrect" to say such a thing, but that has nothing to do with whether it is true. "Politically correct" -- "Politically incorrect" -- stuff and nonsense!
The numbers are more encouraging in the Philippines where several hundred Catholics now attend Mass in our two main centres, in Manila and Iloilo City. But then the Philippines are a Catholic country because it was colonized by Spaniards back in the sixteenth century, as the warlike Koreans and Japanese never were. Then is it so good to be warlike? Is it so bad to be colonized?
Answer: if Heaven exists, then the only true measure of war or of colonization of whatever, is Our Lord Jesus Christ. Conversely, if Heaven does not exist then Our Lord does not matter, and if Our Lord does not matter then only standards of this world apply, and you have an intellectual, moral and spiritual free-for-all. Either Our Lord, or chaos - He leaves us our free-will to choose.
My next stop was Singapore, where a Society priest visits three times a month some 60 souls grouped around a faithful Indonesian family. It cannot be easy to keep the Faith in this unique modern city-state. The population is predominantly Chinese, but following their English-educated leader of many years, Lee Kwan Yew, they are such skilful practitioners of modern materialism that they are, according to some reports, an experimental site for the New World Order, which will try out there devices like kinds of plastic cards that are being planned for the entire world.
So in earthly terms, Singapore is well governed, but as for souls...? Mr. Yew would surely reply, "That is their own affair. We do our part by guaranteeing freedom of religion." And how else will he have in his prestigious English university learned to govern? But meanwhile his countrymen’s souls are: being sucked into the glamorous quicksands of materialism. Asia's problem lies where the materialism came from - Europe.
Similarly in Sri Lanka, my last stop in Asia, the large island-state off the southern tip of India, where just recently the Society of St. Pius X set up a house with two priests to sustain a valiant rearguard action, as Catholicism on the island gives way to a steadily more aggressive Buddhism, for instance on the part the government. But are the Buddhists the problem?
Our two colleagues meet with old missionary priests from Belgium or France who arrived in Ceylon, as it was then called, soon after the Second World War. Apparently, these poor men are completely discouraged. Because of the Buddhist government taking away the fruits of their labours? Not essentially. Rather because the ecumenism of Vatican II has, as Archbishop Lefebvre said it would, cut the heart out of Catholic missionaries' sacrifices and labours by pretending all religions have such value that it hardly seems any longer worth converting anybody to Catholicism! And since this ecumenism comes down from the Pope himself, either these poor men question the Pope or they break their hearts. Mostly they break their hearts. Such was the Catholicism (e.g. "Better in Hell with the Pope than in Heaven without him") they learned in Europe before the Council. The accusing finger points in the same direction.
But what a state Europe finds itself in today! The last stop on my world-tour was my own country, England, where for the first time in many years, I spent nearly two weeks. Most of those two weeks were given over to a seven-stop tour of Confirmations, which afforded me the pleasure of seeing how much in quantity and extension the work of the Society has been built up by our colleagues in England over these years.
But England, oh, England! There is a good priest here in the U.S.A. who regularly rebukes me for being anti-American. Dear Father, ask our District Superior in Britain if I ever blasted America while I was there on this last visit! (What would be the point?) On the other hand, ask him if I did not more than once suggest that Traditional Catholics in England are shadowed by that old English fault of maintaining the prestigious outer forms while neglecting the inner substance.
Dear Father, if this letter keeps attacking Americanism, it is partly because the soft heresy of Liberalism killing souls all over the world has, since Vatican II and its decree on Religious Liberty, been mutating along Americanist lines, partly because this letter is written in America mainly for Americans, the best of whom can understand and do profit by a home presentation of the world-wide error.
Of course there may be souls that pray without too much thinking. May the Lord God hear and bless their prayers, and may they think at least enough to keep on praying, because our world needs prayer more than it needs anything. But the future of Church and world surely belongs to those souls that pray and think as well, because who that does not think can understand what is coming, or imagine how to put it together again afterwards? So may the Lord God doubly bless souls that both pray and think.
There are such souls in the United States, for whom this letter is mainly written. Also in England, only I have no idea how many, as I am not stationed there. But this last visit makes me suspect, if it is any relief to you, Father, to hear it, that as often as over here I attack Americanism, so often if I were stationed over there I would be tempted to attack that deadly English pride which pretended at the Reformation to but the Lord God on an Anglican leash, proceeded to build an Anglican empire that established Liberalism all over the world, and now runs the same risk of putting on a leash, however charming and elegant, the Lord God of Catholic Tradition!
Heavens, dear friends! How we all of us need to be put on a diet of the Old Testament prophets! The Lord God is "a consuming fire", the chalice of His wrath is brimming over, nay, flooding over, and we wish to make sure that He does not exaggerate? We make the angels weep.
Dear friends, somebody once said the Lord God must love beetles, since He created so many varieties of them! Similarly He must love our doing our ordinary daily duty, since there is so much of it. Surely our going to Heaven will depend much more on our ordinary deeds faithfully done, than on any extraordinary deeds. Said Pius X, "Let everyone do his duty, and all will be well". Simple and obvious words? When all is said and done, also profound words.
Let us quietly pray, steadily pray, amongst other intentions for the United States, or England, or whichever is our country, especially for Mother Church, and let us do our daily duty, and that is enough, and it is immense. For the rest, God only requires of us to put our trust in Him.
Enclosed is a flyer on the Spiritual Exercises which are a great help for souls distracted by modern living. Sign up, wherever. And pray through October especially the Holy Rosary.
Most sincerely yours in Christ,
Dear Friends and Benefactors,
When the British Empire spanned the globe, the British Navy had a recruiting slogan, "Join the Navy, and see the world." For several years now the Society of St. Plus X has spanned the globe, and this summer I made, at the request of Headquarters, my third trip around the world, to visit Asia and England.
Of course such traveling has been made immensely easier by the enormous (and usually safe) aeroplanes which were unheard of in the hey-day of the British Navy. (How the world is changing) And, unless the machines are destroyed, that change is necessarily in the direction of world unification, which if it does not gather with Christ, is bound to scatter with the Anti-Christ (Lk XI, 23). Scattered, or dispersed, is exactly the word now to describe the souls following Christ (tech. XIII, 7; Mt. XXVI, 31).
Through Asia, relatively few souls as yet have found their way to the old Mass celebrated by priests of the Society in seven different countries. For instance in South Korea and Japan, both countries with order and discipline sufficient to put in the field a mighty modern army, only a hundred or so Catholics profit by the monthly visit of the devout young Society priest, Fr. Onoda, himself from Japan. It is mysterious how God can allow so many souls for so long to live without the Light of the World (Jn VIII, 12). One can only say, men have free-will. For instance, Japan had a famous harvest of Catholic martyrs in Nagasaki, just 400 years ago next year, and Korea had a similar harvest, less famous but more numerous, about 140 years ago. But now of course by the principles of ecumenism, Rome is encouraging Japanese and Koreans to rejoice in their Shintoist and Buddhist cultures respectively. Dare one say it? The heart of Asia's problem lies in Europe. It may be "politically incorrect" to say such a thing, but that has nothing to do with whether it is true. "Politically correct" -- "Politically incorrect" -- stuff and nonsense!
The numbers are more encouraging in the Philippines where several hundred Catholics now attend Mass in our two main centres, in Manila and Iloilo City. But then the Philippines are a Catholic country because it was colonized by Spaniards back in the sixteenth century, as the warlike Koreans and Japanese never were. Then is it so good to be warlike? Is it so bad to be colonized?
Answer: if Heaven exists, then the only true measure of war or of colonization of whatever, is Our Lord Jesus Christ. Conversely, if Heaven does not exist then Our Lord does not matter, and if Our Lord does not matter then only standards of this world apply, and you have an intellectual, moral and spiritual free-for-all. Either Our Lord, or chaos - He leaves us our free-will to choose.
My next stop was Singapore, where a Society priest visits three times a month some 60 souls grouped around a faithful Indonesian family. It cannot be easy to keep the Faith in this unique modern city-state. The population is predominantly Chinese, but following their English-educated leader of many years, Lee Kwan Yew, they are such skilful practitioners of modern materialism that they are, according to some reports, an experimental site for the New World Order, which will try out there devices like kinds of plastic cards that are being planned for the entire world.
So in earthly terms, Singapore is well governed, but as for souls...? Mr. Yew would surely reply, "That is their own affair. We do our part by guaranteeing freedom of religion." And how else will he have in his prestigious English university learned to govern? But meanwhile his countrymen’s souls are: being sucked into the glamorous quicksands of materialism. Asia's problem lies where the materialism came from - Europe.
Similarly in Sri Lanka, my last stop in Asia, the large island-state off the southern tip of India, where just recently the Society of St. Pius X set up a house with two priests to sustain a valiant rearguard action, as Catholicism on the island gives way to a steadily more aggressive Buddhism, for instance on the part the government. But are the Buddhists the problem?
Our two colleagues meet with old missionary priests from Belgium or France who arrived in Ceylon, as it was then called, soon after the Second World War. Apparently, these poor men are completely discouraged. Because of the Buddhist government taking away the fruits of their labours? Not essentially. Rather because the ecumenism of Vatican II has, as Archbishop Lefebvre said it would, cut the heart out of Catholic missionaries' sacrifices and labours by pretending all religions have such value that it hardly seems any longer worth converting anybody to Catholicism! And since this ecumenism comes down from the Pope himself, either these poor men question the Pope or they break their hearts. Mostly they break their hearts. Such was the Catholicism (e.g. "Better in Hell with the Pope than in Heaven without him") they learned in Europe before the Council. The accusing finger points in the same direction.
But what a state Europe finds itself in today! The last stop on my world-tour was my own country, England, where for the first time in many years, I spent nearly two weeks. Most of those two weeks were given over to a seven-stop tour of Confirmations, which afforded me the pleasure of seeing how much in quantity and extension the work of the Society has been built up by our colleagues in England over these years.
But England, oh, England! There is a good priest here in the U.S.A. who regularly rebukes me for being anti-American. Dear Father, ask our District Superior in Britain if I ever blasted America while I was there on this last visit! (What would be the point?) On the other hand, ask him if I did not more than once suggest that Traditional Catholics in England are shadowed by that old English fault of maintaining the prestigious outer forms while neglecting the inner substance.
Dear Father, if this letter keeps attacking Americanism, it is partly because the soft heresy of Liberalism killing souls all over the world has, since Vatican II and its decree on Religious Liberty, been mutating along Americanist lines, partly because this letter is written in America mainly for Americans, the best of whom can understand and do profit by a home presentation of the world-wide error.
Of course there may be souls that pray without too much thinking. May the Lord God hear and bless their prayers, and may they think at least enough to keep on praying, because our world needs prayer more than it needs anything. But the future of Church and world surely belongs to those souls that pray and think as well, because who that does not think can understand what is coming, or imagine how to put it together again afterwards? So may the Lord God doubly bless souls that both pray and think.
There are such souls in the United States, for whom this letter is mainly written. Also in England, only I have no idea how many, as I am not stationed there. But this last visit makes me suspect, if it is any relief to you, Father, to hear it, that as often as over here I attack Americanism, so often if I were stationed over there I would be tempted to attack that deadly English pride which pretended at the Reformation to but the Lord God on an Anglican leash, proceeded to build an Anglican empire that established Liberalism all over the world, and now runs the same risk of putting on a leash, however charming and elegant, the Lord God of Catholic Tradition!
Heavens, dear friends! How we all of us need to be put on a diet of the Old Testament prophets! The Lord God is "a consuming fire", the chalice of His wrath is brimming over, nay, flooding over, and we wish to make sure that He does not exaggerate? We make the angels weep.
Dear friends, somebody once said the Lord God must love beetles, since He created so many varieties of them! Similarly He must love our doing our ordinary daily duty, since there is so much of it. Surely our going to Heaven will depend much more on our ordinary deeds faithfully done, than on any extraordinary deeds. Said Pius X, "Let everyone do his duty, and all will be well". Simple and obvious words? When all is said and done, also profound words.
Let us quietly pray, steadily pray, amongst other intentions for the United States, or England, or whichever is our country, especially for Mother Church, and let us do our daily duty, and that is enough, and it is immense. For the rest, God only requires of us to put our trust in Him.
Enclosed is a flyer on the Spiritual Exercises which are a great help for souls distracted by modern living. Sign up, wherever. And pray through October especially the Holy Rosary.
Most sincerely yours in Christ,
"Rome will loose the faith" La Salette - observations by Malachi Martin1
1 September 1996
Dear Friends and Benefactors,
This month, September of 1996, September 19th to be precise, is the 150th anniversary of the great Apparition of the Mother of God to two peasant children at La Salette in the mountains of eastern France in 1846. The so-called Secret of La Salette, made public by Mélanie Calvat in 1858, is the greatest single portrait of modern times given to us from Heaven for now and down to the end of the world. That is to say its importance. Here is the apocalyptic back-drop against which each of us today has to play out the salvation or damnation of his soul. By all means read or re-read the Secret on the flyer enclosed.
Of course there are souls that will smile at the mere mention of the Mother of God appearing in modern times. Surely such superstition is disappearing with the peasants it was good for, they say. But Catholics know firstly that as our religion raises us up into a unique familiarity with Heaven, teaching us to say to God "Our Father" as no other religion teaches (Gal. IV,6; Rom. VIII, 15), so it also brings down Heaven familiarly upon earth, especially our Heavenly Mother, who has appeared in all centuries to bring souls to her Son, especially in dangerous times like ours. And secondly Catholics know that despite fierce and continuing opposition, the Apparition and Secret of La Salette have been fully approved by the competent Church authorities, so that we are in no danger if we take them seriously. On the contrary, the danger consists in making light of them, or denying them.
In fact, the message of La Salette was a gigantic corrective, or up-date of Revelation, in the heart of the last century when churchmen especially were in danger of being seduced by modern "progress", or by the liberalism then really getting under way. The fierce opposition, then as now, came from the liberal churchmen preferring to be up-to-date with the world than with the God from whom that world was and is moving away. As Archbishop Lefebvre said, the Church battle in the 19th and 20th centuries is essentially the same.
That is why it is so important for readers to absorb from the Secret of La Salette the mind of Heaven for our own day. For while, for the good of our souls, much in the Secret remains mysterious, nevertheless much is becoming clear, for instance the famous statement that Rome will lose the Faith and become the seat of the Antichrist (column 4). To give flesh and bones to this awful scenario put before us by the Mother of God, let us turn to a modern observer of the Church scene, quite independent of the Society of St. Pius X, Malachi Martin.
Now here is a man that not everybody trusts, for reasons best known to himself, as far as I can tell, and of which God alone is the infallible judge. But if one judges recent sayings and writings of his as they stand (which is how the Holy Office used to bind itself to judge), then surely they can be commended for throwing much light upon our darkling scene. For the set of audio-tapes he issued last year ("The Devastated Vineyard") and the book he published this year ("Windswept House") contain terrible accusations against modern churchmen, but there is no trace of bitterness or anger, hardly even of sadness. The spirit remains Catholic, flowing with "the milk of human kindness".
"The Devastated Vineyard" is a set of three tapes entitled "The Judas Complex", studying the infidelity of the mass of today's bishops; "St. Peter's Successor", examining the question of Pope John-Paul II; and "The Essence of Catholicism", proposing action that ordinary Catholics can take when bishops and Pope are failing to defend their faith.
As for the bishops, Malachi Martin says that with a few praiseworthy exceptions, difficult though it is to admit, a solid block of the Catholic bishops in north America (USA and Canada) no longer believe, they no longer have the Catholic Faith. Otherwise they could not behave as they do. How could they drink back "consecrated" wine like at a cocktail party and forbid people to kneel for Communion, unless they no longer believed in the Real Presence? How could they rejoice in altar-girls, female administrators and female eucharistic ministers unless they had ceased to believe in the male priesthood? How could they fail to resist abortion unless they had come to share the abortionists' view that a foetus is a blob of tissue and not a baby? And so on. The bishops' non-Catholic behaviour is simply explained by their loss of Catholic Faith.
Malachi Martin says this loss of faith goes "way back somewhere". These bishops may even never have had the faith. In any case their access to high office only confirmed their lack of faith. The "Judas complex" is Malachi Martin's name for these bishops' taking sides with the world against Jesus in order to get Jesus to be less demanding and more reasonable. There is now a tight bond between the U. S. Catholic bishops and the U. S. Government, which gives the bishops favours they want. Also the bishops do not want to upset those state officials and officers with whom they go to dinner, play golf, etc. The bishops do not want to be confronted by fellow club members being indignant at, for instance, the pro-lifers calling them baby-murderers, and so on. Also the New World Order has a necessary part for the bishops and Church to play as stabilizers of society, so the bishops are happy to go along with the planned replacement of Christ's priesthood by social worker "priests" who keep people happy, manage the plant and the money and in general make everybody feel good.
So these bishops are far from disappointed, they are delighted by the disappearance of the old out-of-date Church, they persecute true priests and they hate the real Mass with a hatred coming straight from the heart of Satan. When, oh when, asks Malachi Martin, are the "decent conservative Catholics" going to wake up to the fact that the Catholic Church structure is no more, having been snuffed out somewhere between 1965 and 1995?
All of which raises in Malachi Martin's second tape the question of John-Paul II. How can Christ' s own Vicar be happily presiding over such an incredible collapse? Firstly Malachi Martin insists, claiming inside knowledge of John-Paul II's election in 1978, that he really is Pope, and that Catholicism without whoever is Pope is not Catholicism. Nevertheless, John-Paul II' s ecumenism, and disbelief in the necessity of the Catholic Church for eternal salvation, set a very real problem.
Malachi Martin begins by guessing why Christ might have chosen Cardinal Wojtyla for his Vicar. He imagines our Lord saying to himself at the Papal election in 1978, "My Church is rotten. But if I put in Cardinal Siri of Genoa as Pope, he will fight the rot so that it will in fact go on longer, whereas if I let in Cardinal Wojtyla, the rot will go faster and I can start re-building sooner". Not that the rot is a good thing, nor that Christ can will evil, but he can will to permit evil for a greater good, and in the meantime all Catholics are entitled, even obliged, to resist the rot as best they can.
Then Malachi Martin discusses at length three weaknesses of Pope John-Paul II: firstly, he is in philosophy not a thomist who goes by the inner reality of things, but a phenomenologist who goes by their outer appearances or relations. Secondly, he is from Poland and suffers from that excessive tolerance or broad-mindedness which down history has been a weakness of Poles. And thirdly he is a geo-politician who dreams and makes dream-trips around the world, while the reins of the government of the Church in Rome are seized by his enemies, now pressuring him fiercely to resign.
In brief, Catholics can expect to suffer much at the hands of such a Pope who will neither vindicate them nor protect their religion. Under him, they can expect no good to come out of Rome, only misdirection and imperfection. However, that does not prevent them from defending their own faith, in fact Malachi Martin says that a whole underground Church is being set up independently of the official bishops or Rome, and I think he is referring to a network alongside of or in addition to the Society of St. Pius X. Which is normal. Abnormally normal, but normal. There is a God, and lies remain lies.
This dark picture of Pope and bishops and Rome, which we know from our Lady of La Salette to be a feature of the end times, is corroborated, even darkened, in Malachi Martin's recent hook, "Windswept House" (published by Doubleday, 1540 Broadway, New York, NY 10036). To tell harsh truths about the state of the Church in Rome and North America today, he has chosen to write a novel, partly for audience appeal but perhaps mainly for self-protection. If for instance he dared to publish as naked fact all that precise detail of the enthroning of Satan inside the Vatican in 1963 by a double ceremony linking Rome and South Carolina, one wonders how long he might be left to live, and the same might be true for horrendous details of Satanism and the vice against nature he depicts as being rampant among the upper and lower clergy in North America. As it is, he and anybody else can say, "It's only a novel".
But the novel is built around a very real-line straggle for the heart and mind of the "Slavic Pope", between a handful of loyal Catholics on the one side, and on the other side a global conspiracy of Roman prelates and world politicians scheming to incorporate the Catholic Church structure, but not faith, into the New World Order.
There are fascinating pages in the novel on the mentality of these prelates, deciding that if Mother Church can no longer lick the process of History, then they must join it; fascinating debates also between an older priest justifying at all costs the Slavic Pope's failure to defend the Faith, and a younger priest who cannot let the failure pass. Devotion against Doctrine. A debate going on in Malacli Martin' s mind. He has up till now sided with Devotion, whereas the SSPX sides with Doctrine, but in the conclusion of "Wind swept House" is Malachi Martin at last tilting towards Doctrine?
In the third tape of "The Devastated Vineyard", Malachi Martin's solution was still Devotion. After scanning in the first two tapes the collapse of bishops and Pope, he begins his third tape by surveying the collapse of Christian civilization. The nations no longer acknowledge Christ. In no government of the world do Catholics hold sway. The protective walls are broken down. Wild animals prowl and devour. The police, the F.B.I., the military, the State, the big Corporations, now devour the people instead of protecting them. We are lonely, unhappy, and see no light at the end of the tunnel. Wall Street can collapse, the world economy is shaky, all parts of the world are in contention. The ancient civilization is like dead, being replaced by a new way of life which is feckless, rich, dirty, glamorous and self-satisfied.
As for the Catholic Church, it has been undone by the undoing of its devotion, what St. Paul called piety, expressed in devotions. And Malachi Martin has beautiful things to say about those devout practices of Catholics which were the hall-mark of our religion, and which made Heaven and earth so familiar to one another. With their deliberate extinction according to a satanic plan, the Catholic Church and Faith have been extinguished in the people's hearts and minds. For instance, how can a person receive Communion worthily unless he has some devotion to thie Person of Our Lord? Impossible. And that is why, to destroy the Church, a "powerful and dirty alliance" of servants of Satan, inside the Church in Rome and outside, are working together, to silence for instance the Mother of God as she tries to make her voice heard at La Salette, at Fatima, at...
All of which external influences throw an extra obligation upon parents, concludes Malachi Martin, to safeguard their children' s faith. The truth is still out there, and accessible, but to find it, people must want to find it. Parents must search out true priests, the true Mass, the true sacraments. They must believe in that eternity, to prepare for which we have only this life. "This is it!"
Now Catholics who think with the Society of St. Pius X might wish Malachi Martin would draw his conclusions tighter but it takes time for people to realize that the necessary line of defense of the faith is the "extremism" of Archbishop Lefebvre. Meanwhile Malachi Martin must he reaching a range of souls that the Society cannot for the moment reach, and with many truths close to the heart of Our Lady of Salette.
Catholics, beware! The same Devil who sand-trapped so many bishops, priests and laity in mid-19th century, as Our Lady of Salette warned, sand-trapped many more in mid-20th century, along the same lines, and he is prowling about to do the same to ourselves. Bing Crosby Catholicism was deadly for the Faith of tens of millions! We must watch and pray and listen to our Lady, if we wish to save our souls.
Enclosed is a Seminary Continuous Support Fund Card which, if filled out and returned to us, will obtain for you a monthly envelope to facilitate contributions, and will bring you this monthly letter by First class mail. We are always grateful for your support. May God he with you, especially parents and children, through a new school-year.
Sincerely yours in Christ,
+ Richard N. Williamson
Dear Friends and Benefactors,
This month, September of 1996, September 19th to be precise, is the 150th anniversary of the great Apparition of the Mother of God to two peasant children at La Salette in the mountains of eastern France in 1846. The so-called Secret of La Salette, made public by Mélanie Calvat in 1858, is the greatest single portrait of modern times given to us from Heaven for now and down to the end of the world. That is to say its importance. Here is the apocalyptic back-drop against which each of us today has to play out the salvation or damnation of his soul. By all means read or re-read the Secret on the flyer enclosed.
Of course there are souls that will smile at the mere mention of the Mother of God appearing in modern times. Surely such superstition is disappearing with the peasants it was good for, they say. But Catholics know firstly that as our religion raises us up into a unique familiarity with Heaven, teaching us to say to God "Our Father" as no other religion teaches (Gal. IV,6; Rom. VIII, 15), so it also brings down Heaven familiarly upon earth, especially our Heavenly Mother, who has appeared in all centuries to bring souls to her Son, especially in dangerous times like ours. And secondly Catholics know that despite fierce and continuing opposition, the Apparition and Secret of La Salette have been fully approved by the competent Church authorities, so that we are in no danger if we take them seriously. On the contrary, the danger consists in making light of them, or denying them.
In fact, the message of La Salette was a gigantic corrective, or up-date of Revelation, in the heart of the last century when churchmen especially were in danger of being seduced by modern "progress", or by the liberalism then really getting under way. The fierce opposition, then as now, came from the liberal churchmen preferring to be up-to-date with the world than with the God from whom that world was and is moving away. As Archbishop Lefebvre said, the Church battle in the 19th and 20th centuries is essentially the same.
That is why it is so important for readers to absorb from the Secret of La Salette the mind of Heaven for our own day. For while, for the good of our souls, much in the Secret remains mysterious, nevertheless much is becoming clear, for instance the famous statement that Rome will lose the Faith and become the seat of the Antichrist (column 4). To give flesh and bones to this awful scenario put before us by the Mother of God, let us turn to a modern observer of the Church scene, quite independent of the Society of St. Pius X, Malachi Martin.
Now here is a man that not everybody trusts, for reasons best known to himself, as far as I can tell, and of which God alone is the infallible judge. But if one judges recent sayings and writings of his as they stand (which is how the Holy Office used to bind itself to judge), then surely they can be commended for throwing much light upon our darkling scene. For the set of audio-tapes he issued last year ("The Devastated Vineyard") and the book he published this year ("Windswept House") contain terrible accusations against modern churchmen, but there is no trace of bitterness or anger, hardly even of sadness. The spirit remains Catholic, flowing with "the milk of human kindness".
"The Devastated Vineyard" is a set of three tapes entitled "The Judas Complex", studying the infidelity of the mass of today's bishops; "St. Peter's Successor", examining the question of Pope John-Paul II; and "The Essence of Catholicism", proposing action that ordinary Catholics can take when bishops and Pope are failing to defend their faith.
As for the bishops, Malachi Martin says that with a few praiseworthy exceptions, difficult though it is to admit, a solid block of the Catholic bishops in north America (USA and Canada) no longer believe, they no longer have the Catholic Faith. Otherwise they could not behave as they do. How could they drink back "consecrated" wine like at a cocktail party and forbid people to kneel for Communion, unless they no longer believed in the Real Presence? How could they rejoice in altar-girls, female administrators and female eucharistic ministers unless they had ceased to believe in the male priesthood? How could they fail to resist abortion unless they had come to share the abortionists' view that a foetus is a blob of tissue and not a baby? And so on. The bishops' non-Catholic behaviour is simply explained by their loss of Catholic Faith.
Malachi Martin says this loss of faith goes "way back somewhere". These bishops may even never have had the faith. In any case their access to high office only confirmed their lack of faith. The "Judas complex" is Malachi Martin's name for these bishops' taking sides with the world against Jesus in order to get Jesus to be less demanding and more reasonable. There is now a tight bond between the U. S. Catholic bishops and the U. S. Government, which gives the bishops favours they want. Also the bishops do not want to upset those state officials and officers with whom they go to dinner, play golf, etc. The bishops do not want to be confronted by fellow club members being indignant at, for instance, the pro-lifers calling them baby-murderers, and so on. Also the New World Order has a necessary part for the bishops and Church to play as stabilizers of society, so the bishops are happy to go along with the planned replacement of Christ's priesthood by social worker "priests" who keep people happy, manage the plant and the money and in general make everybody feel good.
So these bishops are far from disappointed, they are delighted by the disappearance of the old out-of-date Church, they persecute true priests and they hate the real Mass with a hatred coming straight from the heart of Satan. When, oh when, asks Malachi Martin, are the "decent conservative Catholics" going to wake up to the fact that the Catholic Church structure is no more, having been snuffed out somewhere between 1965 and 1995?
All of which raises in Malachi Martin's second tape the question of John-Paul II. How can Christ' s own Vicar be happily presiding over such an incredible collapse? Firstly Malachi Martin insists, claiming inside knowledge of John-Paul II's election in 1978, that he really is Pope, and that Catholicism without whoever is Pope is not Catholicism. Nevertheless, John-Paul II' s ecumenism, and disbelief in the necessity of the Catholic Church for eternal salvation, set a very real problem.
Malachi Martin begins by guessing why Christ might have chosen Cardinal Wojtyla for his Vicar. He imagines our Lord saying to himself at the Papal election in 1978, "My Church is rotten. But if I put in Cardinal Siri of Genoa as Pope, he will fight the rot so that it will in fact go on longer, whereas if I let in Cardinal Wojtyla, the rot will go faster and I can start re-building sooner". Not that the rot is a good thing, nor that Christ can will evil, but he can will to permit evil for a greater good, and in the meantime all Catholics are entitled, even obliged, to resist the rot as best they can.
Then Malachi Martin discusses at length three weaknesses of Pope John-Paul II: firstly, he is in philosophy not a thomist who goes by the inner reality of things, but a phenomenologist who goes by their outer appearances or relations. Secondly, he is from Poland and suffers from that excessive tolerance or broad-mindedness which down history has been a weakness of Poles. And thirdly he is a geo-politician who dreams and makes dream-trips around the world, while the reins of the government of the Church in Rome are seized by his enemies, now pressuring him fiercely to resign.
In brief, Catholics can expect to suffer much at the hands of such a Pope who will neither vindicate them nor protect their religion. Under him, they can expect no good to come out of Rome, only misdirection and imperfection. However, that does not prevent them from defending their own faith, in fact Malachi Martin says that a whole underground Church is being set up independently of the official bishops or Rome, and I think he is referring to a network alongside of or in addition to the Society of St. Pius X. Which is normal. Abnormally normal, but normal. There is a God, and lies remain lies.
This dark picture of Pope and bishops and Rome, which we know from our Lady of La Salette to be a feature of the end times, is corroborated, even darkened, in Malachi Martin's recent hook, "Windswept House" (published by Doubleday, 1540 Broadway, New York, NY 10036). To tell harsh truths about the state of the Church in Rome and North America today, he has chosen to write a novel, partly for audience appeal but perhaps mainly for self-protection. If for instance he dared to publish as naked fact all that precise detail of the enthroning of Satan inside the Vatican in 1963 by a double ceremony linking Rome and South Carolina, one wonders how long he might be left to live, and the same might be true for horrendous details of Satanism and the vice against nature he depicts as being rampant among the upper and lower clergy in North America. As it is, he and anybody else can say, "It's only a novel".
But the novel is built around a very real-line straggle for the heart and mind of the "Slavic Pope", between a handful of loyal Catholics on the one side, and on the other side a global conspiracy of Roman prelates and world politicians scheming to incorporate the Catholic Church structure, but not faith, into the New World Order.
There are fascinating pages in the novel on the mentality of these prelates, deciding that if Mother Church can no longer lick the process of History, then they must join it; fascinating debates also between an older priest justifying at all costs the Slavic Pope's failure to defend the Faith, and a younger priest who cannot let the failure pass. Devotion against Doctrine. A debate going on in Malacli Martin' s mind. He has up till now sided with Devotion, whereas the SSPX sides with Doctrine, but in the conclusion of "Wind swept House" is Malachi Martin at last tilting towards Doctrine?
In the third tape of "The Devastated Vineyard", Malachi Martin's solution was still Devotion. After scanning in the first two tapes the collapse of bishops and Pope, he begins his third tape by surveying the collapse of Christian civilization. The nations no longer acknowledge Christ. In no government of the world do Catholics hold sway. The protective walls are broken down. Wild animals prowl and devour. The police, the F.B.I., the military, the State, the big Corporations, now devour the people instead of protecting them. We are lonely, unhappy, and see no light at the end of the tunnel. Wall Street can collapse, the world economy is shaky, all parts of the world are in contention. The ancient civilization is like dead, being replaced by a new way of life which is feckless, rich, dirty, glamorous and self-satisfied.
As for the Catholic Church, it has been undone by the undoing of its devotion, what St. Paul called piety, expressed in devotions. And Malachi Martin has beautiful things to say about those devout practices of Catholics which were the hall-mark of our religion, and which made Heaven and earth so familiar to one another. With their deliberate extinction according to a satanic plan, the Catholic Church and Faith have been extinguished in the people's hearts and minds. For instance, how can a person receive Communion worthily unless he has some devotion to thie Person of Our Lord? Impossible. And that is why, to destroy the Church, a "powerful and dirty alliance" of servants of Satan, inside the Church in Rome and outside, are working together, to silence for instance the Mother of God as she tries to make her voice heard at La Salette, at Fatima, at...
All of which external influences throw an extra obligation upon parents, concludes Malachi Martin, to safeguard their children' s faith. The truth is still out there, and accessible, but to find it, people must want to find it. Parents must search out true priests, the true Mass, the true sacraments. They must believe in that eternity, to prepare for which we have only this life. "This is it!"
Now Catholics who think with the Society of St. Pius X might wish Malachi Martin would draw his conclusions tighter but it takes time for people to realize that the necessary line of defense of the faith is the "extremism" of Archbishop Lefebvre. Meanwhile Malachi Martin must he reaching a range of souls that the Society cannot for the moment reach, and with many truths close to the heart of Our Lady of Salette.
Catholics, beware! The same Devil who sand-trapped so many bishops, priests and laity in mid-19th century, as Our Lady of Salette warned, sand-trapped many more in mid-20th century, along the same lines, and he is prowling about to do the same to ourselves. Bing Crosby Catholicism was deadly for the Faith of tens of millions! We must watch and pray and listen to our Lady, if we wish to save our souls.
Enclosed is a Seminary Continuous Support Fund Card which, if filled out and returned to us, will obtain for you a monthly envelope to facilitate contributions, and will bring you this monthly letter by First class mail. We are always grateful for your support. May God he with you, especially parents and children, through a new school-year.
Sincerely yours in Christ,
+ Richard N. Williamson
St. Pius X as an example of real charity
August 3, 1996
Dear Friends and Benefactors,
Concrete examples often convince people better than abstract principles. Last month we argued about the difference between apparent and real charity. Let us this month give a notable example, which teaches many other lessons besides, from the beginning of this century.
A book appeared recently in French (it may or not appear one day in English) entitled, "The conduct of Pius X in the fight against modernism." It contains the French translation of a document from 1950 which served in the Process of the holy Pope's Beatification and Canonization, to examine and clear away "certain objections concerning the conduct of the Servant of God in the victory over modernism".
The objections bore on three main points, but they all come down to the accusation that he lacked charity. The answer, proved by the documents quoted in this book, is that Pius X was full of charity even towards the Liberals that he rebuked and held in check, but to understand this real charity requires, as argued last month, the real Faith (no love without prior knowledge), which is why Liberals, because they do not have the real Faith, neither understood then nor understand now the charity of Pius X.
The first of the three points was Pius X's attitude towards Catholic journalism. Then as now, between the integral Catholics on the one side and worldly Liberals on the other, there were inside the Church all shades of Liberal Catholics, or Catholic Liberals, seeking to soften the antagonism between the Church and the modern world. When it came to the press, the Liberal Catholics encouraged the Catholic press (or part of it) to gain readership and influence amongst Liberals of the world by muffling their Catholic convictions and ideals, and by "tolerating" Liberal errors. No, said Pius X, rejecting this so-called "penetration press": "The truth needs no disguise; our flag must be unfurled; only by being straightforward and open can we do a little good, resisted no doubt by our adversaries, but respected by them, in such a way as to gain their admiration, and little by little to win them over to the good" (Letter of October 20, 1912, to Fr. Ciceri).
This distinction between a truly Catholic press and a semi-liberal press is necessary by way of background to understand the second of the three objections to Pius X's beatification: his conduct in the major controversy that raged in early 1911 in the Church in Northern Italy between Cardinal Ferrari of Milan and Monsignors Gottardo and Andrea Scotton of Breganza, brother priests and editors of a review called "The Rescue".
This review they had founded in 1890 with the encouragement of Pope Leo XIII, who became a regular reader, to alert Catholics to the special dangers then current of scientism (an exaggerated trust in modern science) and hedonism (the unbridled pursuit of pleasure). So when Pius X became Pope and in 1907 issued his great Encyclical letter "Pascendi" against an even greater danger from within the Church, the treacherous heresy of modernism by which churchmen, while preserving all outer appearances of the Faith, sought to transform its inner substance by adapting it to modern godlessness, it was natural for the Scotton brothers to rally to the defense of the Pope's cause. Alas, such clarity and courage were rare in the supposedly Catholic press, which dismayed Pius X by its general lack of understanding and support. So in 1908 the Scotton brothers received from Pius X through his Secretary of State a warm note of encouragement.
Now they may not always have been prudent or measured in the vigor of their attack upon modernism, but they were relying on public facts and inside information when in 1910 they declared that in the Seminary of Milan there was "a seed-bed of modernism". Cardinal Ferrari was indignant: how dare a Catholic journal so impugn the honor and integrity of the Seminary with its Professors and Superiors, and the Diocese with its Cardinal? The "good" Cardinal was convinced that there was no trace of modernism in his seminary or diocese.
However, when he complained about the Scottons to Rome in January of 1911, Cardinal De Lai replied on behalf of Pope Pius X that howsoever it might be in the Milan Seminary, the evidence indicated that there was not a little modernism in the Milan diocese, and even if the Scotton brothers had been excessive in their manner, still the present danger to the Church from modernism and the media was not the moment to come down hard on real defenders of the Faith like the Scotton brothers.
In February the Liberals seized upon this dispute between churchmen to create an uproar in the media, which made Pius X call upon all concerned to stop the polemics. However, towards the end of February, Msgr. Gottarao Scotton gave an interview to the press which made Cardinal Ferrari again complain to Rome, in the hope that Rome would silence the Scottons.
Again Cardinal De Lai replied that the Scottons were no doubt at fault, but could not the good Cardinal of Milan see that what the uproar was really about was not modernism in the Diocese of Milan, but the resistance of the anti-modernists? The Liberal Catholics wanted to smash the Scottons in order to hear no more of world and Church being irreconcilable.
In early March, the two Msgrs. Scotton wrote separately to Rome that they would do anything they were asked to do to repair their fault, while Cardinal Ferrari wrote to Rome amongst other things in defense of the Liberal Catholic paper of Milan, "The Union", which he sensed was being called in question. At the end of March, Pius X himself took up the pen to write to Cardinal Ferrari.
Like Cardinal De Lai, the Pope admitted that the Msgrs Scotton had been excessive in their manner, but he said that they had been provoked, not perhaps by any doctrinal modernism in the diocese of Milan, but certainly by a widespread practical modernism. In other words, good doctrine might be taught, but it was loosely applied. And Pius X gave the example of the Milan clergy fully supporting "The Union", a newspaper which he said left many things to be desired from a truly Catholic point of view, while the same clergy wished to exterminate "The Rescue".
On April 3 Cardinal Ferrari replied to the Pope, more or less justifying the attitude of his diocese towards the Catholic Liberal paper, "The Union", but on April 14 the Cardinal took a further astonishing step: less than three weeks after the Pope had written to him personally with a list of founded complaints against "The Union", the Cardinal gave an address to the theology students in the Milan Seminary in which he vigorously defended "The Union", and said that this was in accordance with the will of the Pope!
When this address came into the hands of Pius X, he was scandalized and so deeply hurt that he said none of the many other hurts of his pontificate could be compared with it: "Imagine a Cardinal who - on Good Friday, with a quiet conscience, deceives so many poor clerics, who tomorrow will go throughout the Diocese spreading their Archbishop's ideas as though they were the will of the Pope; tell me if my grief does not call for compassion, because "I know not which way to turn"', he wrote to his faithful Cardinal De Lai, who passed on the letter to the Cardinal of Milan.
The latter replied with a flood of tears. He is heart-broken to have offended the Pope. He is humiliated. He will be saddened to the end of his days. He begs forgiveness. He never meant to hurt the Pope. He never said a word disrespectful to the Pope, etc., etc.... As for the address to the 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 Diocese. 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 diocese because the Cardinal's defense of "The Union" had been clear and clearly understood. 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. Benigni remarked, Cardinal Ferrari had understood nothing.
Dear readers, I cannot tell if from such a brief summary of the controversy laid out in 60 pages of the book, you have been given enough to understand this verdict of Msgr. Benigni (center of the third objection to Pius X's conduct which it will take another letter to relate). I can only assure you that from the documents themselves Cardinal Ferrari looks like a classic case of the Liberal sickness of our times: a man who is as convinced that he is Catholic and charitable, as he is blind to what the Faith and charity really mean (II Tim. III, 5).
And the disease had reached up to the level of the Cardinals at that time, but Catholic health still came from the Pope. What do you imagine happens when the disease reaches the Pope?
We had the answer a few years ago when the Pope beatified Cardinal Ferrari. Fact.
Dear readers, how can the Lord God get through to our wicked and perverse generation? Surely only by an overwhelming chastisement.
Pray steadily. Pray quietly. Pray the Rosary. Pray unceasingly, says St. Paul. There is only prayer left, said Padre Pio, who died in 1968. And take heart from the enclosed "VERBUM". These nine new priests are an answer to prayer. God will not abandon us if we do not abandon Him.
Most sincerely yours in Christ,
+Richard Williamson
Dear Friends and Benefactors,
Concrete examples often convince people better than abstract principles. Last month we argued about the difference between apparent and real charity. Let us this month give a notable example, which teaches many other lessons besides, from the beginning of this century.
A book appeared recently in French (it may or not appear one day in English) entitled, "The conduct of Pius X in the fight against modernism." It contains the French translation of a document from 1950 which served in the Process of the holy Pope's Beatification and Canonization, to examine and clear away "certain objections concerning the conduct of the Servant of God in the victory over modernism".
The objections bore on three main points, but they all come down to the accusation that he lacked charity. The answer, proved by the documents quoted in this book, is that Pius X was full of charity even towards the Liberals that he rebuked and held in check, but to understand this real charity requires, as argued last month, the real Faith (no love without prior knowledge), which is why Liberals, because they do not have the real Faith, neither understood then nor understand now the charity of Pius X.
The first of the three points was Pius X's attitude towards Catholic journalism. Then as now, between the integral Catholics on the one side and worldly Liberals on the other, there were inside the Church all shades of Liberal Catholics, or Catholic Liberals, seeking to soften the antagonism between the Church and the modern world. When it came to the press, the Liberal Catholics encouraged the Catholic press (or part of it) to gain readership and influence amongst Liberals of the world by muffling their Catholic convictions and ideals, and by "tolerating" Liberal errors. No, said Pius X, rejecting this so-called "penetration press": "The truth needs no disguise; our flag must be unfurled; only by being straightforward and open can we do a little good, resisted no doubt by our adversaries, but respected by them, in such a way as to gain their admiration, and little by little to win them over to the good" (Letter of October 20, 1912, to Fr. Ciceri).
This distinction between a truly Catholic press and a semi-liberal press is necessary by way of background to understand the second of the three objections to Pius X's beatification: his conduct in the major controversy that raged in early 1911 in the Church in Northern Italy between Cardinal Ferrari of Milan and Monsignors Gottardo and Andrea Scotton of Breganza, brother priests and editors of a review called "The Rescue".
This review they had founded in 1890 with the encouragement of Pope Leo XIII, who became a regular reader, to alert Catholics to the special dangers then current of scientism (an exaggerated trust in modern science) and hedonism (the unbridled pursuit of pleasure). So when Pius X became Pope and in 1907 issued his great Encyclical letter "Pascendi" against an even greater danger from within the Church, the treacherous heresy of modernism by which churchmen, while preserving all outer appearances of the Faith, sought to transform its inner substance by adapting it to modern godlessness, it was natural for the Scotton brothers to rally to the defense of the Pope's cause. Alas, such clarity and courage were rare in the supposedly Catholic press, which dismayed Pius X by its general lack of understanding and support. So in 1908 the Scotton brothers received from Pius X through his Secretary of State a warm note of encouragement.
Now they may not always have been prudent or measured in the vigor of their attack upon modernism, but they were relying on public facts and inside information when in 1910 they declared that in the Seminary of Milan there was "a seed-bed of modernism". Cardinal Ferrari was indignant: how dare a Catholic journal so impugn the honor and integrity of the Seminary with its Professors and Superiors, and the Diocese with its Cardinal? The "good" Cardinal was convinced that there was no trace of modernism in his seminary or diocese.
However, when he complained about the Scottons to Rome in January of 1911, Cardinal De Lai replied on behalf of Pope Pius X that howsoever it might be in the Milan Seminary, the evidence indicated that there was not a little modernism in the Milan diocese, and even if the Scotton brothers had been excessive in their manner, still the present danger to the Church from modernism and the media was not the moment to come down hard on real defenders of the Faith like the Scotton brothers.
In February the Liberals seized upon this dispute between churchmen to create an uproar in the media, which made Pius X call upon all concerned to stop the polemics. However, towards the end of February, Msgr. Gottarao Scotton gave an interview to the press which made Cardinal Ferrari again complain to Rome, in the hope that Rome would silence the Scottons.
Again Cardinal De Lai replied that the Scottons were no doubt at fault, but could not the good Cardinal of Milan see that what the uproar was really about was not modernism in the Diocese of Milan, but the resistance of the anti-modernists? The Liberal Catholics wanted to smash the Scottons in order to hear no more of world and Church being irreconcilable.
In early March, the two Msgrs. Scotton wrote separately to Rome that they would do anything they were asked to do to repair their fault, while Cardinal Ferrari wrote to Rome amongst other things in defense of the Liberal Catholic paper of Milan, "The Union", which he sensed was being called in question. At the end of March, Pius X himself took up the pen to write to Cardinal Ferrari.
Like Cardinal De Lai, the Pope admitted that the Msgrs Scotton had been excessive in their manner, but he said that they had been provoked, not perhaps by any doctrinal modernism in the diocese of Milan, but certainly by a widespread practical modernism. In other words, good doctrine might be taught, but it was loosely applied. And Pius X gave the example of the Milan clergy fully supporting "The Union", a newspaper which he said left many things to be desired from a truly Catholic point of view, while the same clergy wished to exterminate "The Rescue".
On April 3 Cardinal Ferrari replied to the Pope, more or less justifying the attitude of his diocese towards the Catholic Liberal paper, "The Union", but on April 14 the Cardinal took a further astonishing step: less than three weeks after the Pope had written to him personally with a list of founded complaints against "The Union", the Cardinal gave an address to the theology students in the Milan Seminary in which he vigorously defended "The Union", and said that this was in accordance with the will of the Pope!
When this address came into the hands of Pius X, he was scandalized and so deeply hurt that he said none of the many other hurts of his pontificate could be compared with it: "Imagine a Cardinal who - on Good Friday, with a quiet conscience, deceives so many poor clerics, who tomorrow will go throughout the Diocese spreading their Archbishop's ideas as though they were the will of the Pope; tell me if my grief does not call for compassion, because "I know not which way to turn"', he wrote to his faithful Cardinal De Lai, who passed on the letter to the Cardinal of Milan.
The latter replied with a flood of tears. He is heart-broken to have offended the Pope. He is humiliated. He will be saddened to the end of his days. He begs forgiveness. He never meant to hurt the Pope. He never said a word disrespectful to the Pope, etc., etc.... As for the address to the 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 Diocese. 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 diocese because the Cardinal's defense of "The Union" had been clear and clearly understood. 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. Benigni remarked, Cardinal Ferrari had understood nothing.
Dear readers, I cannot tell if from such a brief summary of the controversy laid out in 60 pages of the book, you have been given enough to understand this verdict of Msgr. Benigni (center of the third objection to Pius X's conduct which it will take another letter to relate). I can only assure you that from the documents themselves Cardinal Ferrari looks like a classic case of the Liberal sickness of our times: a man who is as convinced that he is Catholic and charitable, as he is blind to what the Faith and charity really mean (II Tim. III, 5).
And the disease had reached up to the level of the Cardinals at that time, but Catholic health still came from the Pope. What do you imagine happens when the disease reaches the Pope?
We had the answer a few years ago when the Pope beatified Cardinal Ferrari. Fact.
Dear readers, how can the Lord God get through to our wicked and perverse generation? Surely only by an overwhelming chastisement.
Pray steadily. Pray quietly. Pray the Rosary. Pray unceasingly, says St. Paul. There is only prayer left, said Padre Pio, who died in 1968. And take heart from the enclosed "VERBUM". These nine new priests are an answer to prayer. God will not abandon us if we do not abandon Him.
Most sincerely yours in Christ,
+Richard Williamson
True charity and apparent charity
July 1, 1996
Dear Friends and Benefactors,
"Charity" is a word both used to name the greatest of virtues, and misused to name a multitude of sins. Where this confusion comes from is worth examining on the occasion of a recent letter from a Catholic in Florida.
He writes: "Please answer rumors that the Society of St. Pius X, its seminaries and its schools, have lost their charity and are so harsh, judgmental and filled with animosity towards the Conciliar Church that they are becoming a cult. Defensive and fearful of the outside world, they are with their spirit of 'Thou shalt not' falling into the opposite extreme from Vatican II."
To this question Our Lord himself gives the immediate and practical answer: judge by the fruits. It is certain that the Society of St. Pius X is at present a major source of priests ensuring the continuance of the Traditional Faith, worship, and sacraments. It must constantly be judged from their actions whether these priests are keeping or losing their Catholic balance. Thus on June 22 here in Winona upwards of a thousand Catholics were blessed with brilliant sunshine for the largest ordination of priests to be held yet at the Society's seminary in the U.S.A., but it is only as these priests begin to circulate in Florida and wherever else they are sent, that Catholics will be able to judge for themselves whether the Society is taking on the spirit of a cult.
However, behind that practical and unfailing answer to the rumours, there hangs a more general question, concerning which there reigns a great deal of confusion in people's minds today: What is true charity? When do people fall into extremism? What does it mean to be judgmental? What is a cult?
The confusion arises ultimately from the clash between two opposite world-views: the ancient Catholic world-view whereby God is God, and the new humanistic (Judeo-Masonic) world-view whereby man is God. By whatever Catholic Faith Catholics still have, they read life according to the first world-view, but from the apostasy of the nations built up all around them over the last few centuries by the Judeo-Masons, they come under a fierce pressure, of which they are often unconscious, to re-read life according to the second world-view. From the mixture of the two contradictory world-views comes the confusion.
For if God is God and men are His creatures, designed by Him to merit in this brief life their eternal happiness with Him in the next, then in order for men to get to Heaven they must be given not what they think they want, but, whenever the two things differ, what they really need, and it is God who will have laid down what men really need. On the contrary, if man is God, then men are the divine measure of anything they need, and all their wants are to be satisfied as divine wants, even if they constantly change. From these two sources come two quite different ideas of charity.
Thus on the one hand, if God is God, then reality is as He made it and not such as men would re-make it. Now in reality all love or desire must follow some knowledge, for nobody can love or desire what he in no way knows. This is common sense. For instance: She: "I want to go shopping." He: "Yes, honey, but for what?" She: "I don't know, but once I get to the shops I will find out!" (He: "Oh, my hard-earned dollars!") She knows, and so can want, the delights of shopping in general, but it seems she cannot desire anything in particular to go shopping for until she knows it by seeing it in the shops. Some knowledge must go ahead of any love.
Now charity is a love, in reality a supernatural love of God, and of neighbour in and for the love of God. "Supernatural" means that in reality charity is above any natural strength or powers of man, in its origin and in its object. As to its origin, it can come to a man from God alone. No man can, by his own merely human efforts, acquire or increase his own charity. As to its object, charity loves God not just as man can love God naturally from the world of nature, but as God is in Himself, infinitely high above all possible realms of mere nature.
It follows that ahead of this love must go such a knowledge. That knowledge (in the broad sense) is supernatural Faith, having for its origin God alone, which no man can give himself by his purely human efforts, and having for its object the supernatural God as He is in Himself, way above the highest idea that man's mind can naturally form for itself of the Maker of the Universe. But how then can man's mind have any such idea of God? Only by God's revealing Himself as He is in Himself, for instance "One in Three and Three in One", a revelation which nothing obliged God to grant to men, but which He did in its fullness bestow on men through His Incarnation, when the Second of the Three Persons took flesh, and for one human lifetime walked as a man amongst men.
Now the essence of what Our Lord Jesus Christ confirmed naturally and revealed supernaturally to men in that lifetime is summed up in the Creeds of His one Church which all lay out, more or less elaborately, the same essential truths. And the above-natural knowledge, or gift of mind, by which a man assents to those truths, is the Catholic faith, which is not just a cozy glow in my breast, but a knowing assent in my mind to a quite determinate set of truths, namely the Faith laid before my mind by that instrument of God which is His one and only Church.
From all of which it follows that if God is God, then only a believer who enjoys that fullness of the knowledge of God which is the Catholic Faith, can possibly have that fullness of love which is true charity. Catholics may, alas, have the Faith and not have charity; non-Catholics may also not have the Faith and yet - above all by an imitation or a heritage of Catholicism - have a semblance of charity, but true charity necessarily requires beforehand assent to the Catholic Faith, at least implicitly.
That is why believing Catholics are remarkably united amongst themselves by their Faith (did not Our Lord say that men would recognize his disciples by their love for one another?). That is why dissension amongst Catholics is so scandalous. That is why the Catholic Faith is so important, and why heresy destroys charity. Heresy matters! That is why Catholics are in duty bound to love non-Catholics towards Catholicism, but cannot love them independently of Catholicism. That is why, if God is God and took flesh as Jesus Christ, the modern churchmen's ecumenism, whereby non-Catholics are to be loved with -- and even for -- their non-Catholicism, is intrinsic nonsense.
On the other hand, if man is God (or if God matters as little as religious liberty would have Him matter), then we have a very different picture of "charity". If I think I know man as man to be the highest being, then I can only love man as man as the highest being. But man as man is full of error, pride, weakness, and sensuality. Therefore the new "charity" will love man with and for the error and vice that are his ruination, because these are what he clings to. What kind of love is that?
At the back end of our poor 20th century, it takes the following form: when all Christendom held the Catholic Faith, the natural effect was a universal love amongst men which made life as relatively cozy as it can be made in this valley of tears, so that in today's after-glow of Christianity, when most men have lost all idea of the Faith, still they remember the cozy effects of all-round love, and so want to enjoy them. Hence modern "charity" - a mushy warmness towards all my fellow human beings, regardless of their beliefs, and with no desire to get them out of their errors or vices. That is the Judeo-Masonic version of love amongst men, coming from the rejection of God and leading to the abjection of men, and which, when it infects churchmen, produces today's "ecumenism".
But notice how, if true charity or love amongst men depended on the true knowledge of God, the cosy effects amongst men cannot long survive the loss of that knowledge of God. That is why today's after-glow of Christianity is fast fading, growing cold, and why today's mushy "charity" is rapidly turning into mutual alienation and hatred amongst men. That is why the most tolerant of liberals yesterday have - incredibly! - swallowed down today the most intolerant expression of "politically incorrect" with which to brand those who disagree with them, and why tomorrow the most "charitable" of men will swallow down the next Satanically clever ticket with which anyone will be discredited who still believes in God.
So, to get back to our original questions, true charity towards men is that love of neighbour proceeding from a Catholic knowledge and love of the true God who created him for Heaven, whereby we wish to our neighbour every good by which he can get to Heaven, for the greater glory of God and for the salvation of his soul and body which will otherwise burn eternally in Hell.
Then "extremism" as a word of blame cannot be applied to anyone who does all he prudently can to save his neighbour's soul. It can only be applied to someone who either so exaggerates one part of the Faith against another as to dislocate the foundation of charity, or mistakes charity by using such means to save his neighbour's soul as serve only to alienate him. Similarly being "judgmental" can only mean making judgments on people which are out of line with the Faith or counter-productive in the saving of souls (but let it be remembered that it is by no means always the apostle's fault if the Gospel is rejected!). Finally, the word "cult" might be used for any worship or practice offending against the Catholic Faith or practice of the Church in the saving of souls, but it cannot be used for the teaching or doing of whatever the Catholic Church has always taught or done.
So, to answer the rumours from which our friend in Florida set out, he must ask, when they pass him by again, in exactly what such and such a Society priest - or any priest - is departing from Catholic Faith and practice. If the departure is real, which he can examine for himself by checking against 2,000 years of Church history, then the harsh words apply. But if the departure is only apparent, or is a calumny, then our friend should reckon he is falling foul of misunderstandings of "charity". If God is God, then there is such a thing as sinners, and they must only be loved despite their sins, not with and for them.
Dear friends, you have seen us through another peaceful and successful school-year here at the Seminary, culminating in the ordination of nine priests, about whom you can read in next month's Verbum. We owe great thanks to God, and many thanks to yourselves. Please continue your support, however little. And please help finish the Society's church in Ridgefield (flyer enclosed).
May God grant us to put our trust in Him, and not in the machinations of men, or their pieces of paper!
Most sincerely yours in Christ,
Dear Friends and Benefactors,
"Charity" is a word both used to name the greatest of virtues, and misused to name a multitude of sins. Where this confusion comes from is worth examining on the occasion of a recent letter from a Catholic in Florida.
He writes: "Please answer rumors that the Society of St. Pius X, its seminaries and its schools, have lost their charity and are so harsh, judgmental and filled with animosity towards the Conciliar Church that they are becoming a cult. Defensive and fearful of the outside world, they are with their spirit of 'Thou shalt not' falling into the opposite extreme from Vatican II."
To this question Our Lord himself gives the immediate and practical answer: judge by the fruits. It is certain that the Society of St. Pius X is at present a major source of priests ensuring the continuance of the Traditional Faith, worship, and sacraments. It must constantly be judged from their actions whether these priests are keeping or losing their Catholic balance. Thus on June 22 here in Winona upwards of a thousand Catholics were blessed with brilliant sunshine for the largest ordination of priests to be held yet at the Society's seminary in the U.S.A., but it is only as these priests begin to circulate in Florida and wherever else they are sent, that Catholics will be able to judge for themselves whether the Society is taking on the spirit of a cult.
However, behind that practical and unfailing answer to the rumours, there hangs a more general question, concerning which there reigns a great deal of confusion in people's minds today: What is true charity? When do people fall into extremism? What does it mean to be judgmental? What is a cult?
The confusion arises ultimately from the clash between two opposite world-views: the ancient Catholic world-view whereby God is God, and the new humanistic (Judeo-Masonic) world-view whereby man is God. By whatever Catholic Faith Catholics still have, they read life according to the first world-view, but from the apostasy of the nations built up all around them over the last few centuries by the Judeo-Masons, they come under a fierce pressure, of which they are often unconscious, to re-read life according to the second world-view. From the mixture of the two contradictory world-views comes the confusion.
For if God is God and men are His creatures, designed by Him to merit in this brief life their eternal happiness with Him in the next, then in order for men to get to Heaven they must be given not what they think they want, but, whenever the two things differ, what they really need, and it is God who will have laid down what men really need. On the contrary, if man is God, then men are the divine measure of anything they need, and all their wants are to be satisfied as divine wants, even if they constantly change. From these two sources come two quite different ideas of charity.
Thus on the one hand, if God is God, then reality is as He made it and not such as men would re-make it. Now in reality all love or desire must follow some knowledge, for nobody can love or desire what he in no way knows. This is common sense. For instance: She: "I want to go shopping." He: "Yes, honey, but for what?" She: "I don't know, but once I get to the shops I will find out!" (He: "Oh, my hard-earned dollars!") She knows, and so can want, the delights of shopping in general, but it seems she cannot desire anything in particular to go shopping for until she knows it by seeing it in the shops. Some knowledge must go ahead of any love.
Now charity is a love, in reality a supernatural love of God, and of neighbour in and for the love of God. "Supernatural" means that in reality charity is above any natural strength or powers of man, in its origin and in its object. As to its origin, it can come to a man from God alone. No man can, by his own merely human efforts, acquire or increase his own charity. As to its object, charity loves God not just as man can love God naturally from the world of nature, but as God is in Himself, infinitely high above all possible realms of mere nature.
It follows that ahead of this love must go such a knowledge. That knowledge (in the broad sense) is supernatural Faith, having for its origin God alone, which no man can give himself by his purely human efforts, and having for its object the supernatural God as He is in Himself, way above the highest idea that man's mind can naturally form for itself of the Maker of the Universe. But how then can man's mind have any such idea of God? Only by God's revealing Himself as He is in Himself, for instance "One in Three and Three in One", a revelation which nothing obliged God to grant to men, but which He did in its fullness bestow on men through His Incarnation, when the Second of the Three Persons took flesh, and for one human lifetime walked as a man amongst men.
Now the essence of what Our Lord Jesus Christ confirmed naturally and revealed supernaturally to men in that lifetime is summed up in the Creeds of His one Church which all lay out, more or less elaborately, the same essential truths. And the above-natural knowledge, or gift of mind, by which a man assents to those truths, is the Catholic faith, which is not just a cozy glow in my breast, but a knowing assent in my mind to a quite determinate set of truths, namely the Faith laid before my mind by that instrument of God which is His one and only Church.
From all of which it follows that if God is God, then only a believer who enjoys that fullness of the knowledge of God which is the Catholic Faith, can possibly have that fullness of love which is true charity. Catholics may, alas, have the Faith and not have charity; non-Catholics may also not have the Faith and yet - above all by an imitation or a heritage of Catholicism - have a semblance of charity, but true charity necessarily requires beforehand assent to the Catholic Faith, at least implicitly.
That is why believing Catholics are remarkably united amongst themselves by their Faith (did not Our Lord say that men would recognize his disciples by their love for one another?). That is why dissension amongst Catholics is so scandalous. That is why the Catholic Faith is so important, and why heresy destroys charity. Heresy matters! That is why Catholics are in duty bound to love non-Catholics towards Catholicism, but cannot love them independently of Catholicism. That is why, if God is God and took flesh as Jesus Christ, the modern churchmen's ecumenism, whereby non-Catholics are to be loved with -- and even for -- their non-Catholicism, is intrinsic nonsense.
On the other hand, if man is God (or if God matters as little as religious liberty would have Him matter), then we have a very different picture of "charity". If I think I know man as man to be the highest being, then I can only love man as man as the highest being. But man as man is full of error, pride, weakness, and sensuality. Therefore the new "charity" will love man with and for the error and vice that are his ruination, because these are what he clings to. What kind of love is that?
At the back end of our poor 20th century, it takes the following form: when all Christendom held the Catholic Faith, the natural effect was a universal love amongst men which made life as relatively cozy as it can be made in this valley of tears, so that in today's after-glow of Christianity, when most men have lost all idea of the Faith, still they remember the cozy effects of all-round love, and so want to enjoy them. Hence modern "charity" - a mushy warmness towards all my fellow human beings, regardless of their beliefs, and with no desire to get them out of their errors or vices. That is the Judeo-Masonic version of love amongst men, coming from the rejection of God and leading to the abjection of men, and which, when it infects churchmen, produces today's "ecumenism".
But notice how, if true charity or love amongst men depended on the true knowledge of God, the cosy effects amongst men cannot long survive the loss of that knowledge of God. That is why today's after-glow of Christianity is fast fading, growing cold, and why today's mushy "charity" is rapidly turning into mutual alienation and hatred amongst men. That is why the most tolerant of liberals yesterday have - incredibly! - swallowed down today the most intolerant expression of "politically incorrect" with which to brand those who disagree with them, and why tomorrow the most "charitable" of men will swallow down the next Satanically clever ticket with which anyone will be discredited who still believes in God.
So, to get back to our original questions, true charity towards men is that love of neighbour proceeding from a Catholic knowledge and love of the true God who created him for Heaven, whereby we wish to our neighbour every good by which he can get to Heaven, for the greater glory of God and for the salvation of his soul and body which will otherwise burn eternally in Hell.
Then "extremism" as a word of blame cannot be applied to anyone who does all he prudently can to save his neighbour's soul. It can only be applied to someone who either so exaggerates one part of the Faith against another as to dislocate the foundation of charity, or mistakes charity by using such means to save his neighbour's soul as serve only to alienate him. Similarly being "judgmental" can only mean making judgments on people which are out of line with the Faith or counter-productive in the saving of souls (but let it be remembered that it is by no means always the apostle's fault if the Gospel is rejected!). Finally, the word "cult" might be used for any worship or practice offending against the Catholic Faith or practice of the Church in the saving of souls, but it cannot be used for the teaching or doing of whatever the Catholic Church has always taught or done.
So, to answer the rumours from which our friend in Florida set out, he must ask, when they pass him by again, in exactly what such and such a Society priest - or any priest - is departing from Catholic Faith and practice. If the departure is real, which he can examine for himself by checking against 2,000 years of Church history, then the harsh words apply. But if the departure is only apparent, or is a calumny, then our friend should reckon he is falling foul of misunderstandings of "charity". If God is God, then there is such a thing as sinners, and they must only be loved despite their sins, not with and for them.
Dear friends, you have seen us through another peaceful and successful school-year here at the Seminary, culminating in the ordination of nine priests, about whom you can read in next month's Verbum. We owe great thanks to God, and many thanks to yourselves. Please continue your support, however little. And please help finish the Society's church in Ridgefield (flyer enclosed).
May God grant us to put our trust in Him, and not in the machinations of men, or their pieces of paper!
Most sincerely yours in Christ,
Bishop Bruskewitz's threatened excommunication of liberals and SSPX
May 7, 1996
Dear Friends and Benefactors,
Poor Rome! It cannot swallow the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) down, nor can it spit it out, as another United States bishop is presently learning. How well God built His Church!
It is now getting on for two months since Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz of the diocese of Lincoln, Nebraska, threatened to excommunicate in mid-May Catholics still belonging to any one of twelve different organizations, ten of them liberal, two of them the SSPX and its local Chapel in Lincoln. Of the liberal groups five are Masonic, two pro-abortion, one pro-euthanasia, and two pro-women priests and a married clergy, etc ....
By daring to remind these liberals that they are worthy of damnation, the good bishop caused quite a flurry in the national media. Non-Catholic liberals in our inclusive world objected to the very idea of excommunication, while Catholic liberals have themselves convinced that even if excommunication is a good idea, it cannot be deserved by themselves. On the other hand many decent Catholics rejoiced that at last a diocesan bishop was taking action to clean out the stables.
However, when the bishop added to his list of ten liberal groups the two so-called Traditional Catholic organizations, then nobody who thinks could take him seriously. So from the beginning his bomb-shell went off like a damp squib.
Cynical Nebraskans say he was only seeking publicity and advancement from Rome in the first place.. Other Nebraskans say he is sincere. Experts in Conciliar tactics might say he was imitating Paul VI by condemning liberals and anti-liberals together, so as to keep the Conciliar balance. But all such speculation as to Bishop Bruskewitz's personality or motivation is only of secondary interest. What matters is the principles involved. The Catholic Church runs on principles, not on personalities, because it is principles that make Catholic personalities, as too few Catholics realize.
Nor then is it a mere question of the SSPX. If Bishop Bruskewitz crippled his own initiative by including in his condemnation the SSPX and its local affiliate, it is not because the Society is of any significance in itself, nor because it consists of saints and wise men (Please do not laugh. Thank you for your co-operation), but because members of your Society, with all their sins and shortcomings, nevertheless are Society members because they profess those principles upon which alone a Catholic excommunication can be based. Hence by including Society members in his threat and so condemning their principles, the bishop was cutting the ground from under his own feet. This is what needs to be proved.
As Bishop Bruskewitz wrote to a friend of ours, he included the SSPX in his condemnation because it is "disobedient" to Rome and to himself, while he, no doubt, is "obedient". But what characterizes this Rome which he "obeys" and which the Society "disobeys"? No doubt the Second Vatican Council, without which the Society would never have risen up to resist. But what is at the heart of this Council making the difference between the Society and Rome? Notably, religious liberty. For if Rome were to return from the Vatican II principle of liberty for false religions to the old principle of toleration for them, with all that that return would entail, the Society would have lost the large part of its reason to exist, whereas if Rome abandoned many other Conciliar ideas, but not religious liberty, then the Society would still have a major reason to exist. Then what is the relationship between religious liberty and excommunication?
The Conciliar principle of religious liberty declares that the State has no right to coerce men in matters of religion. Prior to the Council, the Catholic Church always said that the State may abstain from coercing men in matters of religion, but it always has the right to use its power prudently to protect the Catholic religion and to suppress the public exercise of false religions. The difference between these two positions may seem small, but it is in fact enormous, like the difference between God being God and man being God. Which in turn needs proving.
If God is the Lord of all creation, then He is God also of the State, which is not outside of creation. If God is Lord of the State, then it too must, as State, worship and obey Him, in other words the State authorities must, as State authorities, protect and prudently promote His worship by His one true religion, as part of the duty of all creatures to render to their Creator what is His due. Therefore every State on earth is, as such, bound to use all prudent means, including the force at its disposal, to favour the Catholic religion. God is God, and Catholicism is, since Jesus Christ died on the Cross, His one and only true worship.
On the other hand if, as Vatican II declared, the State is bound to respect the dignity of the human person by leaving men free in the State to practise publicly false religions as they desire, then the State's first duty is to the freedom of man, and only after that comes any duty it may have to the God of the true religion. In other words, that State is no longer under the God of all creation, or, God is no longer the Lord of all creation. If there is a true religion, it no longer imposes itself on men but comes begging as some inferior for their lordly consent, on an equal footing with all false religions. In effect, man is God and "God" becomes some whining wimp.
Now modern man may, born and bred in liberalism, have a special difficulty in grasping that there are the real consequences of that religious liberty on which his nations are virtually founded, because he is dazzled by his own dignity. But in fact there is no comparison between the God of the Old Testament and the "God" of Vatican II, and the God of the New Testament is identical with the former, not with the latter! So this true God who thundered on Mount Sinai, who thrashed the money-changers out of the Temple and who demands that men practise His one religion and that States favour it accordingly, is obviously capable of driving false members out of His true Church. It makes complete sense that this God will excommunicate bad Catholics.
But how can the "God" who out of respect for human dignity makes no demand that the State bring pressure to bear on man's choice of truth or error, suddenly require that His Church bring pressure to bear? It is the same man with the same dignity confronting the same choice between the same truth and error. If the State, and "God" behind the State, must come cap in hand to beg consent to the Truth from such a man, how can this "God" and his "Church" do other than beg, cap in hand'? How can this whining "God" who has no thunderbolts for the State, suddenly have them for his "Church"'?
Deep down, liberals have no sense of the true God nor of the true Church because they have lost grip on Truth. "What is Truth?" asked Pontius Pilate, and put Barabbas alongside Jesus. Similarly Bishop Bruskewitz puts believers in the one Truth amongst Freemasons, abortionists, euthanasians and women-priesters. How can he be surprised if neither intelligent Catholics nor intelligent liberals take him seriously?
For if the Society deserves to be punished for its stand, then there is no Truth and no true God, but only a miserable makeshift, who then can have no thunderbolts for Freemasons, women-priesters or whoever. On the other hand if abortion and euthanasia deserve to be smashed, then there must be a Truth and a true God who on occasion uses thunderbolts, but in that case the Society which, against modern Rome, believes in such a God, cannot deserve to be excommunicated.
In brief, either God is God, or man is God. If man is God, then the Society is wrong, but there can be nothing wrong with activities of man such as euthanasia and abortion, and there can be no basis for condemning them. On the other hand if abortion and Freemasonry are damnable, then there must be such a God as the Society exists to proclaim, in which case it cannot be condemned.
Modern Rome was cleverer (and more crooked) than Bishop Bruskewitz when it singled out Society members as a target for excommunication, instead of crucifying them between thieves, but even when they were singled out, the "excommunication" of July 1988 bounced off, because God lends none of His force to measures condemning His Truth or its (until now, by His grace) faithful spokesmen.
That is why Rome will in a few days most probably hang Bishop Bruskewitz out to dry, which is why he were better to have said nothing in the first place. Dear bishop, try next time condemning the delinquents without the Society! Then you will be a real hero to all real Catholics, and then you will have thrown a real bomb-shell! In the meantime we must pray for Rome, because that is where Bishop Bruskewitz's real problem lies. Pray for the Pope to lead him in consecrating Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. That is what the true God has decreed as the first step necessary to save Church and world.
Meantime, let us thank Him for His gift of the Society of St. Plus X, despite its human deficiencies. And enjoy in the enclosed VERBUM the commemoration in verse of Archbishop Lefebvre's enormous achievement. Objectively, no language could be noble enough to say worthily what he did.
May God bless you through Our Lady's month of May. In Christ her son,
+Richard Williamson
Dear Friends and Benefactors,
Poor Rome! It cannot swallow the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) down, nor can it spit it out, as another United States bishop is presently learning. How well God built His Church!
It is now getting on for two months since Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz of the diocese of Lincoln, Nebraska, threatened to excommunicate in mid-May Catholics still belonging to any one of twelve different organizations, ten of them liberal, two of them the SSPX and its local Chapel in Lincoln. Of the liberal groups five are Masonic, two pro-abortion, one pro-euthanasia, and two pro-women priests and a married clergy, etc ....
By daring to remind these liberals that they are worthy of damnation, the good bishop caused quite a flurry in the national media. Non-Catholic liberals in our inclusive world objected to the very idea of excommunication, while Catholic liberals have themselves convinced that even if excommunication is a good idea, it cannot be deserved by themselves. On the other hand many decent Catholics rejoiced that at last a diocesan bishop was taking action to clean out the stables.
However, when the bishop added to his list of ten liberal groups the two so-called Traditional Catholic organizations, then nobody who thinks could take him seriously. So from the beginning his bomb-shell went off like a damp squib.
Cynical Nebraskans say he was only seeking publicity and advancement from Rome in the first place.. Other Nebraskans say he is sincere. Experts in Conciliar tactics might say he was imitating Paul VI by condemning liberals and anti-liberals together, so as to keep the Conciliar balance. But all such speculation as to Bishop Bruskewitz's personality or motivation is only of secondary interest. What matters is the principles involved. The Catholic Church runs on principles, not on personalities, because it is principles that make Catholic personalities, as too few Catholics realize.
Nor then is it a mere question of the SSPX. If Bishop Bruskewitz crippled his own initiative by including in his condemnation the SSPX and its local affiliate, it is not because the Society is of any significance in itself, nor because it consists of saints and wise men (Please do not laugh. Thank you for your co-operation), but because members of your Society, with all their sins and shortcomings, nevertheless are Society members because they profess those principles upon which alone a Catholic excommunication can be based. Hence by including Society members in his threat and so condemning their principles, the bishop was cutting the ground from under his own feet. This is what needs to be proved.
As Bishop Bruskewitz wrote to a friend of ours, he included the SSPX in his condemnation because it is "disobedient" to Rome and to himself, while he, no doubt, is "obedient". But what characterizes this Rome which he "obeys" and which the Society "disobeys"? No doubt the Second Vatican Council, without which the Society would never have risen up to resist. But what is at the heart of this Council making the difference between the Society and Rome? Notably, religious liberty. For if Rome were to return from the Vatican II principle of liberty for false religions to the old principle of toleration for them, with all that that return would entail, the Society would have lost the large part of its reason to exist, whereas if Rome abandoned many other Conciliar ideas, but not religious liberty, then the Society would still have a major reason to exist. Then what is the relationship between religious liberty and excommunication?
The Conciliar principle of religious liberty declares that the State has no right to coerce men in matters of religion. Prior to the Council, the Catholic Church always said that the State may abstain from coercing men in matters of religion, but it always has the right to use its power prudently to protect the Catholic religion and to suppress the public exercise of false religions. The difference between these two positions may seem small, but it is in fact enormous, like the difference between God being God and man being God. Which in turn needs proving.
If God is the Lord of all creation, then He is God also of the State, which is not outside of creation. If God is Lord of the State, then it too must, as State, worship and obey Him, in other words the State authorities must, as State authorities, protect and prudently promote His worship by His one true religion, as part of the duty of all creatures to render to their Creator what is His due. Therefore every State on earth is, as such, bound to use all prudent means, including the force at its disposal, to favour the Catholic religion. God is God, and Catholicism is, since Jesus Christ died on the Cross, His one and only true worship.
On the other hand if, as Vatican II declared, the State is bound to respect the dignity of the human person by leaving men free in the State to practise publicly false religions as they desire, then the State's first duty is to the freedom of man, and only after that comes any duty it may have to the God of the true religion. In other words, that State is no longer under the God of all creation, or, God is no longer the Lord of all creation. If there is a true religion, it no longer imposes itself on men but comes begging as some inferior for their lordly consent, on an equal footing with all false religions. In effect, man is God and "God" becomes some whining wimp.
Now modern man may, born and bred in liberalism, have a special difficulty in grasping that there are the real consequences of that religious liberty on which his nations are virtually founded, because he is dazzled by his own dignity. But in fact there is no comparison between the God of the Old Testament and the "God" of Vatican II, and the God of the New Testament is identical with the former, not with the latter! So this true God who thundered on Mount Sinai, who thrashed the money-changers out of the Temple and who demands that men practise His one religion and that States favour it accordingly, is obviously capable of driving false members out of His true Church. It makes complete sense that this God will excommunicate bad Catholics.
But how can the "God" who out of respect for human dignity makes no demand that the State bring pressure to bear on man's choice of truth or error, suddenly require that His Church bring pressure to bear? It is the same man with the same dignity confronting the same choice between the same truth and error. If the State, and "God" behind the State, must come cap in hand to beg consent to the Truth from such a man, how can this "God" and his "Church" do other than beg, cap in hand'? How can this whining "God" who has no thunderbolts for the State, suddenly have them for his "Church"'?
Deep down, liberals have no sense of the true God nor of the true Church because they have lost grip on Truth. "What is Truth?" asked Pontius Pilate, and put Barabbas alongside Jesus. Similarly Bishop Bruskewitz puts believers in the one Truth amongst Freemasons, abortionists, euthanasians and women-priesters. How can he be surprised if neither intelligent Catholics nor intelligent liberals take him seriously?
For if the Society deserves to be punished for its stand, then there is no Truth and no true God, but only a miserable makeshift, who then can have no thunderbolts for Freemasons, women-priesters or whoever. On the other hand if abortion and euthanasia deserve to be smashed, then there must be a Truth and a true God who on occasion uses thunderbolts, but in that case the Society which, against modern Rome, believes in such a God, cannot deserve to be excommunicated.
In brief, either God is God, or man is God. If man is God, then the Society is wrong, but there can be nothing wrong with activities of man such as euthanasia and abortion, and there can be no basis for condemning them. On the other hand if abortion and Freemasonry are damnable, then there must be such a God as the Society exists to proclaim, in which case it cannot be condemned.
Modern Rome was cleverer (and more crooked) than Bishop Bruskewitz when it singled out Society members as a target for excommunication, instead of crucifying them between thieves, but even when they were singled out, the "excommunication" of July 1988 bounced off, because God lends none of His force to measures condemning His Truth or its (until now, by His grace) faithful spokesmen.
That is why Rome will in a few days most probably hang Bishop Bruskewitz out to dry, which is why he were better to have said nothing in the first place. Dear bishop, try next time condemning the delinquents without the Society! Then you will be a real hero to all real Catholics, and then you will have thrown a real bomb-shell! In the meantime we must pray for Rome, because that is where Bishop Bruskewitz's real problem lies. Pray for the Pope to lead him in consecrating Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. That is what the true God has decreed as the first step necessary to save Church and world.
Meantime, let us thank Him for His gift of the Society of St. Plus X, despite its human deficiencies. And enjoy in the enclosed VERBUM the commemoration in verse of Archbishop Lefebvre's enormous achievement. Objectively, no language could be noble enough to say worthily what he did.
May God bless you through Our Lady's month of May. In Christ her son,
+Richard Williamson
The derailing of Buchanan's presidential campaign
April 1, 1996
Dear Friends and Benefactors,
What happened a few weeks ago to de-rail Patrick Buchanan's promising campaign to win for sanity the nomination as Republican Party candidate for the Presidential election due to take place here in the United States at the end of this year?
Old-fashioned Catholics were interested, because Buchanan is a Catholic who likes to attend the Tridentine Mass, whose convictions include many Catholic principles, for instance love of his country and an uncompromising refusal of abortion, and who has the courage of his convictions.
Moreover his bid for the Republican nomination began very well. When in the opening races of the campaign he ran a close second in Iowa and then won in New Hampshire in February, then, in U.S. politics long stifled by the two party system ("There's not a dime's worth of difference between the two parties", said Governor Wallace back in 1972, and he was shot for his pains), a lot of Americans, and not only Catholics, felt they had been given a whiff of oxygen, and their long dead interest in politics stirred with a tremor of hope. At last, a real man daring to address real issues.
But two weeks into March and it was virtually over. As soon as Buchanan's chances of winning the nomination became serious, the media swung into action with a truly extraordinary campaign to denounce and discredit Buchanan as an "extremist". The campaign worked. Masses of couch-potatoes dutifully voted as their media told them to vote, and Buchanan has been effectively eliminated.
For himself, this elimination must be a grace in the sense that if he had come much closer to real power, he would also no doubt have been shot, whether wounded like Wallace and Reagan, or killed like Robert and John F. Kennedy. "Democracy" is for couch-potatoes. Our secret masters play hardball.
On the other hand Buchanan's elimination is very grave for the United States. In his candidacy God gave the country a real chance to repudiate abortion amongst other horrors of liberalism, but the country turned the chance down. How many more chances will the United States be given? There comes a time when the only mercy left to God to send down upon a nation is fire and brimstone, because divine terror will bring at least a few souls to their knees, whereas nothing else will save any souls at all. That time is fast approaching for the apostate nations of the West. So let Catholics profit from Buchanan's "failure" to understand at last where the real problem lies.
The real problem lies not in any personal failings of Buchanan, as though, for instance, he could have won through if only he regularly attended Society of St Pius X Masses — he already stood for far too much Tradition. (Similarly with President Nixon. A few readers of this letter two months ago complained of its being too kind personally to that "crook", "liar", etc., but that kindness was meant to highlight that if he was removed from the Presidency in 1974, it was not because he was a crook, but because he was not enough of a crook.) Buchanan's very integrity and manliness make him unacceptable!
Similarly the problem does not lie in any supposed mistake of Buchanan's February-March campaign, as though he could have broken through if only he had, for instance, appealed more strongly to the women voters, or pensioners, or whoever. Give or take this or that issue, friend and foe alike realized what Buchanan means, namely God and country as opposed to godless internationalism, and this is what they voted for or against, the large majority against.
For instance one might have expected Protestants of the "religious right", surely believers in "One nation under God", to support this valiant candidate for God and country, but in the important South Carolina primary of mid-March, the "religious right" battalions were mobilized to swing the election against Buchanan, because he is Catholic. In other words, one nation under God, yes, but only if he is not the Catholic God. That is why the very best of Protestants (I could quote several honourable names) are powerless — powerless — to help the U.S.A..
Nor then does the problem lie in the two-party system, as though the system can be saved if only Buchanan will start a third party, which is what many of his ardent followers hope. This is not because of the two- or three-party system in itself, but because of what it and democracy mean to present-day people, namely that not God, but man, is God. The fault lies, if you will, not in democracy as such, but in today's democrats. Thus democracy could work if all the people recognized a God above them and honoured His Law in all their democratic dealings, but that is emphatically not the case with people today.
For instance at Senate hearings on an abortion question held in Washington, D.C., a few years ago, a Chicago pro-lifer declared that above the U.S. government, above the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, is God and His Law. A young Senator promptly denied this, and the consensus of the other Senators present was behind him! And there must have been countless such incidents throughout Western democracies over recent years.
But this is shocking only at first sight. For in the dear young Senator's mind, who is God and what is religion? Of course, a Sunday morning "Sound of Music" affair! Then of course he is right in saying that the U.S. Government is more important and has priority! Given religious liberty in the "land of the brave and home of the free", in which even Catholic Cardinals have glorified the principle whereby God may say you cannot have false gods but the State says you can, how could the dear young Senator think other than that real religion is the U.S. government?
The young Senator's problem is that so many Catholics he meets are not Catholics, but Sound-of-Musicians, and here is where Buchanan's real problem lies. The country he loves was built on the skids and Catholics have not protested, so it has had nothing to stop it from sliding to perdition ever since. See the enclosed salmon-coloured flyer, which is the key to many a letter from the Seminary. In fact, from the time of Henry VIII, the English-speaking world has been on the skids. Since then brave individuals like Patrick Buchanan (plus or minus Richard Nixon) have attempted to stop the slide, but - and here is the rub EITHER they get out of the mainstream, OR they go down with it. The mainstream is decadent and doomed.
If only it was not so! If only the system was not at war with God, and God with the system! Can I not console myself that it is deep down a wonderful Constitution, the best ever thought up by man, and if only we could get good men back into office, why, the mains could be reversed?
My dear friends, Americanism and Vatican II are great helps to set up that consolation, but the truth of the matter is that even if by a triple miracle Buchanan was nominated today, elected tomorrow, and not shot the day after, still he could not straighten out the United Sates, cause the people are too far gone in, putting man over God, and they would, inter-acting in vileness with their media, never have Buchanan or anyone else putting God back over man. Political solutions are inadequate for religious problems. The people must turn back to God, and the "God" of the Protestants will not do.
If only it was not so! If only I could be on good terms both with God and with the mainstream! How much easier life would be! What a nice picture! A huge speaker on each corner of my party-raft drifting downstream blasts out that the hills are alive with the sound of music — my friends and I smell an increasingly unpleasant stench of sewage in the water, and ahead of us, is that the thunder we hear of a great waterfall? My friends, turn up the speakers! Sprinkle more smell-killer! The party is to go on for ever!
Dear Catholics! The one thing we must not do is let anyone around hear from us, or see from our example, that religion can be pushed into a nice sweet little compartment from where it pours forth its sentimental perfume upon a way of life damned by God and doomed to destruction! To stand up to that way of life may cost us more than blood, sweat, toil, and tears, but such may be the cost of getting to Heaven.
"But your Excellency, being a real Catholic today hurts much, it is difficult!" Yes, I know. Just a few days ago there came here terrible news of a young Novus Ordo priest from an Iowa diocese who had been offering the Tridentine Mass for a group of souls (having nothing to do with the. Society of St Pius X). The more these souls responded, the more the diocese hounded him, for instance took away his car until he could see only one way out. He disappeared from view, until he was f6und a few weeks later in the hottel room where he had taken his own life. Now parents are apparently blaming those Tridentine souls, while the diocesan officials will be saying they were right all along - you see, he was crazy!
God, have mercy upon us all! Catholics, think long, think hard and think clear. Do not thinsk that any problems are serious except those involving heaven and hell, the state of grace and mortal sin, and to those problems do not think that there are any other solutions than those of God, Jesus Christ, and his one and only Catholic Church. If God is allowing the world to get into such a mess, it is only to let it drive us back to Him, not to let it drive us from one form of godlessness to another. See again the enclosed flyer. All He asks of us in this situation is to give witness to the Truth, as did His divine Son, and the harder that may become, the greater will be our reward, which will last for ever. We have no honourable alternative!
Dear friends and benefactors, the Seminary is well, thanks be to God and to your continuing support, which, when I think of these letters, I admire! Eight new American priests should be ordained here at Winona on Saturday, June 22, by your servant. And no fewer than 18 of last autumn's 22 new seminarians are still here in pursuit of the Catholic priesthood. Come to the ordinations to show Our Lord how much you appreciate having seminarians and priests after His Heart, and He will protect all you have, and give you more.
Most sincerely yours in Christ,
+Richard Williamson
Dear Friends and Benefactors,
What happened a few weeks ago to de-rail Patrick Buchanan's promising campaign to win for sanity the nomination as Republican Party candidate for the Presidential election due to take place here in the United States at the end of this year?
Old-fashioned Catholics were interested, because Buchanan is a Catholic who likes to attend the Tridentine Mass, whose convictions include many Catholic principles, for instance love of his country and an uncompromising refusal of abortion, and who has the courage of his convictions.
Moreover his bid for the Republican nomination began very well. When in the opening races of the campaign he ran a close second in Iowa and then won in New Hampshire in February, then, in U.S. politics long stifled by the two party system ("There's not a dime's worth of difference between the two parties", said Governor Wallace back in 1972, and he was shot for his pains), a lot of Americans, and not only Catholics, felt they had been given a whiff of oxygen, and their long dead interest in politics stirred with a tremor of hope. At last, a real man daring to address real issues.
But two weeks into March and it was virtually over. As soon as Buchanan's chances of winning the nomination became serious, the media swung into action with a truly extraordinary campaign to denounce and discredit Buchanan as an "extremist". The campaign worked. Masses of couch-potatoes dutifully voted as their media told them to vote, and Buchanan has been effectively eliminated.
For himself, this elimination must be a grace in the sense that if he had come much closer to real power, he would also no doubt have been shot, whether wounded like Wallace and Reagan, or killed like Robert and John F. Kennedy. "Democracy" is for couch-potatoes. Our secret masters play hardball.
On the other hand Buchanan's elimination is very grave for the United States. In his candidacy God gave the country a real chance to repudiate abortion amongst other horrors of liberalism, but the country turned the chance down. How many more chances will the United States be given? There comes a time when the only mercy left to God to send down upon a nation is fire and brimstone, because divine terror will bring at least a few souls to their knees, whereas nothing else will save any souls at all. That time is fast approaching for the apostate nations of the West. So let Catholics profit from Buchanan's "failure" to understand at last where the real problem lies.
The real problem lies not in any personal failings of Buchanan, as though, for instance, he could have won through if only he regularly attended Society of St Pius X Masses — he already stood for far too much Tradition. (Similarly with President Nixon. A few readers of this letter two months ago complained of its being too kind personally to that "crook", "liar", etc., but that kindness was meant to highlight that if he was removed from the Presidency in 1974, it was not because he was a crook, but because he was not enough of a crook.) Buchanan's very integrity and manliness make him unacceptable!
Similarly the problem does not lie in any supposed mistake of Buchanan's February-March campaign, as though he could have broken through if only he had, for instance, appealed more strongly to the women voters, or pensioners, or whoever. Give or take this or that issue, friend and foe alike realized what Buchanan means, namely God and country as opposed to godless internationalism, and this is what they voted for or against, the large majority against.
For instance one might have expected Protestants of the "religious right", surely believers in "One nation under God", to support this valiant candidate for God and country, but in the important South Carolina primary of mid-March, the "religious right" battalions were mobilized to swing the election against Buchanan, because he is Catholic. In other words, one nation under God, yes, but only if he is not the Catholic God. That is why the very best of Protestants (I could quote several honourable names) are powerless — powerless — to help the U.S.A..
Nor then does the problem lie in the two-party system, as though the system can be saved if only Buchanan will start a third party, which is what many of his ardent followers hope. This is not because of the two- or three-party system in itself, but because of what it and democracy mean to present-day people, namely that not God, but man, is God. The fault lies, if you will, not in democracy as such, but in today's democrats. Thus democracy could work if all the people recognized a God above them and honoured His Law in all their democratic dealings, but that is emphatically not the case with people today.
For instance at Senate hearings on an abortion question held in Washington, D.C., a few years ago, a Chicago pro-lifer declared that above the U.S. government, above the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, is God and His Law. A young Senator promptly denied this, and the consensus of the other Senators present was behind him! And there must have been countless such incidents throughout Western democracies over recent years.
But this is shocking only at first sight. For in the dear young Senator's mind, who is God and what is religion? Of course, a Sunday morning "Sound of Music" affair! Then of course he is right in saying that the U.S. Government is more important and has priority! Given religious liberty in the "land of the brave and home of the free", in which even Catholic Cardinals have glorified the principle whereby God may say you cannot have false gods but the State says you can, how could the dear young Senator think other than that real religion is the U.S. government?
The young Senator's problem is that so many Catholics he meets are not Catholics, but Sound-of-Musicians, and here is where Buchanan's real problem lies. The country he loves was built on the skids and Catholics have not protested, so it has had nothing to stop it from sliding to perdition ever since. See the enclosed salmon-coloured flyer, which is the key to many a letter from the Seminary. In fact, from the time of Henry VIII, the English-speaking world has been on the skids. Since then brave individuals like Patrick Buchanan (plus or minus Richard Nixon) have attempted to stop the slide, but - and here is the rub EITHER they get out of the mainstream, OR they go down with it. The mainstream is decadent and doomed.
If only it was not so! If only the system was not at war with God, and God with the system! Can I not console myself that it is deep down a wonderful Constitution, the best ever thought up by man, and if only we could get good men back into office, why, the mains could be reversed?
My dear friends, Americanism and Vatican II are great helps to set up that consolation, but the truth of the matter is that even if by a triple miracle Buchanan was nominated today, elected tomorrow, and not shot the day after, still he could not straighten out the United Sates, cause the people are too far gone in, putting man over God, and they would, inter-acting in vileness with their media, never have Buchanan or anyone else putting God back over man. Political solutions are inadequate for religious problems. The people must turn back to God, and the "God" of the Protestants will not do.
If only it was not so! If only I could be on good terms both with God and with the mainstream! How much easier life would be! What a nice picture! A huge speaker on each corner of my party-raft drifting downstream blasts out that the hills are alive with the sound of music — my friends and I smell an increasingly unpleasant stench of sewage in the water, and ahead of us, is that the thunder we hear of a great waterfall? My friends, turn up the speakers! Sprinkle more smell-killer! The party is to go on for ever!
Dear Catholics! The one thing we must not do is let anyone around hear from us, or see from our example, that religion can be pushed into a nice sweet little compartment from where it pours forth its sentimental perfume upon a way of life damned by God and doomed to destruction! To stand up to that way of life may cost us more than blood, sweat, toil, and tears, but such may be the cost of getting to Heaven.
"But your Excellency, being a real Catholic today hurts much, it is difficult!" Yes, I know. Just a few days ago there came here terrible news of a young Novus Ordo priest from an Iowa diocese who had been offering the Tridentine Mass for a group of souls (having nothing to do with the. Society of St Pius X). The more these souls responded, the more the diocese hounded him, for instance took away his car until he could see only one way out. He disappeared from view, until he was f6und a few weeks later in the hottel room where he had taken his own life. Now parents are apparently blaming those Tridentine souls, while the diocesan officials will be saying they were right all along - you see, he was crazy!
God, have mercy upon us all! Catholics, think long, think hard and think clear. Do not thinsk that any problems are serious except those involving heaven and hell, the state of grace and mortal sin, and to those problems do not think that there are any other solutions than those of God, Jesus Christ, and his one and only Catholic Church. If God is allowing the world to get into such a mess, it is only to let it drive us back to Him, not to let it drive us from one form of godlessness to another. See again the enclosed flyer. All He asks of us in this situation is to give witness to the Truth, as did His divine Son, and the harder that may become, the greater will be our reward, which will last for ever. We have no honourable alternative!
Dear friends and benefactors, the Seminary is well, thanks be to God and to your continuing support, which, when I think of these letters, I admire! Eight new American priests should be ordained here at Winona on Saturday, June 22, by your servant. And no fewer than 18 of last autumn's 22 new seminarians are still here in pursuit of the Catholic priesthood. Come to the ordinations to show Our Lord how much you appreciate having seminarians and priests after His Heart, and He will protect all you have, and give you more.
Most sincerely yours in Christ,
+Richard Williamson
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