December 3, 2000
Dear Friends and Benefactors,
The season of Advent which started today means the season of preparation of our hearts and minds for the coming of Our Lord. But in what real environment will he find these on December 25, 2000? At least surrounded, if not more or less tainted, by the sentimentalization and commercialization of everything "Christmassy"?
This primacy of feelings and money is basically to be blamed on Protestantism, but through the environment it has created, Protestantism gets to all of us in ways we think not of. A year and a half ago, this letter accused the suburban environment of being the immediate cause of the notorious school shooting in Colorado. Yet most "Traditional Catholics" come from suburbs. For the penitential season of Advent, let us reflect further on the modern suburban way of life.
Preliminarily, we must recall that environment is only environment. No soul is determined to salvation or damnation by its environment. Some souls have become great saints by rising above the worst of environments, and the best of environments have not prevented other souls from becoming the worst of sinners. The inner governs the outer. It is, ultimately, souls that determine environments rather than environments that determine souls. Salvation and damnation are by grace and free will, neither of which are determined by surroundings.
Nevertheless, for human beings supernatural grace has to come in to land within their natural surroundings, within which their free will also has to be exercised. Man is by nature a social animal, always reaching out to the human beings who surround him. Therefore a man's surroundings play a large part in his life on earth and in his eternal destiny. St. Paul quoted from a Greek poet that "Evil communications corrupt good manners" (I Cor XV, 33). And in 1989 Archbishop Lefebvre told a congregation of 20,000 Catholics celebrating his 60th priestly anniversary to "go back to the country". Suburban surroundings are something relatively new in history. Catholics need to think about them.
"Suburbs" are defined (by Webster) as "city environs". A suburb is "an outlying district of a city or town". Now did not cities always have their outlying districts, or suburbs? So what is new? What is new is that as long as men travelled on foot or on horseback or in horse-drawn carriages, they would, if they left the city, find themselves soon in the country. See maps of Philadelphia or Boston in George Washington's time. On the contrary modern suburbs are apt to sprawl for dozens of miles around city-centres.
Modern suburbs were created over the last 200 years firstly by the rise of industrialization, and secondly by industrialized means of transportation. Beginning in England in the 18th century, the Industrial Revolution, by its invention of new machines to create heavy and light industry, also created a new kind of city. Multitudes of workers had to be herded together off the land around the new factories where the crowding, smoke, grime and noise often created an environment which by all previous standards was disagreeable and inhuman. The middle classes with some money began to look for somewhere else to live, but still close to the factories or populated centers where the money was to be made. Thus began the suburbs, and with them the custom of separating all day long the father from his family, with unhappy consequences for both.
However, the under-powered means of transportation available at that time strictly limited how far those suburbs could reach out from any city or center, which is why the late 19th century saw a tremendous push to invent new machines of transportation, of which some failed like the steam-bus, some succeeded for a while like the trolley-bus, some succeeded well like the motor-bus, and one succeeded sensationally —— the motor-car.
Winston Churchill once wondered if the invention of the internal combustion engine had really been a blessing for mankind. In any case, from being the tail wagged by the dog, the motor-car rapidly became the dog wagging the tail. From being created by modern man's need for transportation, the motor-car became the virtual creator of modern man's way of life: his horizons, his work, his leisure, his holidays, the relations between his muscles and his nerves, his morals, his countryside and his cities are all revolutionized by his motor-car. And when, thanks to what most men call "progress", nearly every man owns a motor-car, then, necessarily, it becomes next to impossible to live in his new suburban surroundings without a motor-car. At which point, although few people (outside the despairing rock musicians) seem to stop to think about what has happened, we are into a new world.
We are into a new world! Given how important a part man's surroundings play in his life, and given the decisive part a man's earthly life plays in his eternal destiny, how can so apparently few Catholics be thinking about our revolutionized environment?
We are into a new world. The old-fashioned city and the old-fashioned country are both virtually gone. In the place of agriculture is agri-business. In the place of country farms are ever larger corporations exploiting by machines and chemicals enormous tracts of land to generate the quantities of cheap food demanded by the democratic multitudes now cut off from the land. In the place of towns or small cities focused around — as it often used to be — a church or cathedral, there are now dozens upon dozens of square miles of drive-in banks, drive-in cinemas, drive-in eateries, etc., etc., focused around — mega-shopping malls! What community life do the youngsters — or oldsters — here have? Doing the "wave" at a sports stadium, and drifting around the shopping-mall! Look and see! How on earth does anyone expect vocations out of these new heavens and new earth?
The contrast between the pre-suburban and post-suburban worlds is most striking in a historic country like France, where the network of motorways with their attendant liens has been slapped down upon the ancient landscape of farms and villages like a machine stamp on a medieval manuscript. How can anyone make it boring to drive through France? By constructing a motorway. But democracy and the motor-car are in command. Too many people want the motorized way of life for the construction of motorways to be about to slow down.
For what does the motorized and suburban way of life give people? Independence and comfort. In other words, pride and sensuality. No wonder the new world has such an apparently irreversible grip on the fallen sons of Adam! But nature (let alone the Lord God) has not spoken her last word. Nature is speaking through the young who are not "grown up" enough to "fit in" — through the children who have to be dosed with Prozac and Ritalin to stop them breaking down their so-called homes and schools, through the adolescents screaming in rock music at the meaningless adult life that lies ahead of them. As for the adults, the independence of their motor-car and the sensuality of their suburbs have, as it were, reconciled most of them to any lingering sufferings of their higher nature. They are in a comfortable stupor and do not want to be woken up.
But by their nature men need to belong to a family and to a community of families. The tightness of modern city street-gangs under their leader shows how boys (and girls) need brothers and a father. The mindless fanaticism for this or that sports-team shows how adults need to feel part of a larger association. Alas, the suburban way of life undoes the family by undoing father and mother, and it undoes community by making all associations unreal.
The suburbs undo the father by taking the virility out of bread-winning. No longer is his manhood at a premium by his muscles handling the horses to plough the fields, which mother's muscles could never do. Instead it is at a discount by his working-week being spent in an overheated office pushing papers at underdressed secretaries. As for mother, the suburbs take the integrity out of her home-making. Washing for the family yesteryear at the village-well, she could talk with other real wives about real husbands and children, but now the isolation of her luxurious home and the leisure provided by her washing-machine drive her, if she stays in her man-less home, to fulfill her need for family interest by watching the notoriously popular and improper soap-operas on television. As for suburban associations, reality has been emptied out of them by industry and electronics. The chemical food and synthetic clothing arrive by the ton at the local shopping-mall in massive motorized trucks, while the entertainment is disgorged trouble-free in the home on a series of magic lanterns, each more unclean than the last. If no real need associates men together, how can their associations still be real? Needs cannot be artificially fabricated to be real.
Therefore the suburban way of life may suit original sin, but it goes against nature, and it will not last. And since the suburbs are now interlocked on a global scale, the ending risks being dramatic.
"Fear not, little flock", says Our Lord, "for it hath pleased your Father to give you a kingdom" (Lk XII, 32). The Catholic Church, however reduced, will survive all upheavals. The Second Vatican Council, wrought, precisely, by suburban popes and bishops, was a tremendous upheaval, but the Church is still here. Like a cork on a storm-tormented ocean, it may seem to have disappeared, but when the storm dies away, it will re-appear, serenely floating on the water.
Probably most readers of this letter live in suburbs and many cannot "go back to the country" even if they wanted to. Nor would a merely physical move into the country make much difference if they took their suburban way of thinking with them. But, wherever a Catholic finds himself, he must "watch and pray". I must stop and think. Can I deny that in my way of life, men are unmanned and women are unwomanned? Can I deny that this is, with the rest of the suburbs' undoing of reality, a major cause of the lack of vocations? Is this also stopping salvations? Is it going to stop salvation?
Dear readers, no human obstacle can stop Our Lord coming to the soul that seeks Him. The Vespers Antiphons of Advent are beautiful, drawn mostly from the Old Testament prophets. Here are three: "Behold the Lord will come, and all His Saints with him: and on that day there will be a great light, allelujah" (Zach XIV, 15). "Behold our Lord will come with power, and illuminate the eyes of His servants, allelujah" (Is. XL, 10). "Sound the trumpet in Sion, because the day of the Lord is close: behold, he will come to save us, allelujah, allelujah" (Joel 11, 1).
May Our Lord find a real landing-place in our hearts and minds this Advent and Christmas.
Sincerely yours in Christ,
Showing posts with label 2000. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 2000. Show all posts
Monday
Death, from the eyes of St. Paul and John Keats
November 1, 2000
Dear Friends and Benefactors,
In a spare day after the Society's official pilgrimage to Rome in August, I made a personal pilgrimage to two sites in Rome, the first of which probably and the second of which almost certainly no other of our pilgrims visited: the grave of the English poet John Keats in the Protestant Cemetery, and the church of San Paolo alla Regola in the Arenula. Keats they will hardly have visited because he is not a Catholic poet, San Paolo alla Regola because it is closed to the public for repairs, but the two sites fit together like lock and key!
John Keats (1796-1821) is a famous figure in English Literature. A handful of his best-known poems are to be found in almost any collection of poetry in the English language: "On first looking into Chapman's Homer", "When I have fears that I may cease to be", "La Belle Dame Sans Merci", "Ode to the Nightingale", "Ode to Autumn", etc.. He belongs to the Romantic period of English literature, so much so that more than anyone else he incarnates what the word "poet" has come to mean to most of us: an imaginative young man, not altogether masculine, finding beautiful language with which to put on paper his sensitive dreams.
Such poetry is in our times on the one hand so despised that if newspapers quote it, they will print it out as though it is prose for fear of alienating readers by anything so effete as "poetry". On the other hand such "poets" reign supreme in the world of greeting cards which get sent on all sentimental occasions. As Oscar Wilde said, "Sentimentality is the bank-holiday of cynicism".
Keats contributed towards this disintegration of modern man. He came to Rome with a friend in November of 1820 in the hope that the warm climate would alleviate the tuberculosis ravaging his lungs. It was too late. After four months of distant exile and severe pain, he died in March of 1821 at the early age of 25, in rooms overlooking the Piazza di Spagna which have also become a pilgrimage center for lovers of English literature.
He was buried in the Protestant Cemetery just inside Rome's old city walls, in the shadow of the pyramid of Caius Cestius. He lies in the far corner of a welt-kept lawn scattered with the gravestones of other distinguished or famous non-Catholics who died in Rome. Amidst shady trees in the warmth of a sunlit August morning one would have thought anybody there could lie in peace, but then one comes to the gravestone of the famous poet. The inscription concludes with the one sentence Keats himself had wanted to be engraved there: "Here lies one whose name was writ in water"!
What had happened? In fact, the great Romantic had lived in virtual despair for many months before he died. At some point after he left school and had become a medical student in London and, showing promise as a poet, had begun to mix in a group of the capital city's artistic intellectuals, he picked up liberal ideas and turned his back resolutely on Christianity. During his last illness he admired and envied the Christian faith enabling his artistic friend Severn to watch over him faithfully, but Keats could not or would not believe in like manner.
In his short life, he had come to stake everything on human feelings of beauty. In a letter to a friend in 1819 he wrote the charter of Romantics: "I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart's affections and the truth of imagination - what the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth". To his brothers: "O for a life of sensations rather than of thoughts". His "Ode to a Grecian Urn" concludes with the famous lines: -
Beauty is truth, truth beauty. That is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
So when the full ugliness of slow death by tuberculosis struck, Keats had none of what worldly people called "the consolations of religion", he had only feelings, the darkest of feelings, left to him.
In fact Keats had envisaged literature as a kind of substitute religion, with poets like himself serving as substitute priests to bring happiness to mankind. And it is surely because his best poetry expresses the quasi-religious longings of the human heart without religion that he is like the incarnate poet for our apostate age. Here is a famous sonnet of Keats, meditating on death (it goes well on retreats!): -
When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain,
Before high-piled books in charact'ry
Hold like rich garners the full-ripened grain;
When I behold, upon the night's starred face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love! - then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think,
Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.
The first eight lines present the tension between human Fame and Death: will the young poet live to unlock all the treasures in his heart? And given the beauty of his words, we need not doubt the treasures were there. In the next four lines is the tension between human Love and Death: the brief glimpse of a "fair creature" makes his heart resonate with the love that might be. But then - last two lines - what do all of Fame and Love mean when they can be cut down by Death? The heart says there must be a meaning - but there is none in sight. The heart lifts - and falls back. The heart longs with a longing as deep as the sea - but it is left with its longing.
The truth in Romanticism is the lift and the longing. The falsehood is the lack of corresponding object. Like Keats, not finding the answer or else refusing it, his many followers lifted and longed less and less, until the post-Romantics had nothing better to do than wallow in the mud and finally blow their brains out. Severn had had to persuade Keats several months before his death not to take his own life by a drug overdose, in those days, of laudanum.
From Rome's Protestant Cemetery to the unknown Church of San Paolo alla Regola is a brief taxi-ride into what used to be the Jewish Quarter of Rome by the bend in the river Tiber where it turns south-east. Rome's Synagogue is still near-by. The church, going back to the earliest times, was built on the very spot where St. Paul spent his first imprisonment in Rome, from perhaps 61 to 63 AD (Acts XXVIII, 30,31). From here it was that for at least two years under house arrest, by example and by instruction of Rome's Catholics, he helped Peter to build the vital new church at the heart of the great empire. Here it was that he wrote what are known as the four Epistles of the Captivity, in each of which he refers to his imprisonment: Ephesians (III,1), Philippians (I, 13,14), Colossians (IV,3), Philemon (1). Are there any other books of the Bible of which we know the exact location where they were written?
In any other city than Rome such a place would be an outstanding shrine, but in Rome and in Roman guidebooks it is overshadowed by dozens of shrines and sanctuaries more outstanding still. The result is that the church of San Paolo alla Regola fell into disuse and material decay, which the State is now slowly paying to restore (materially). I could only gain entrance by ringing at a side-door through which a Peruvian Brother of a small congregation kindly let me in. The main church is chock-full of builders' rubbish and materials. The side chapel on the exact site of St. Paul's house - captivity is choked with scaffolding and planks and builders' dust!
To think that from this place of ruination flashed forth a Prince of the Apostles, and Epistles of his which have built the Roman Catholic Church ever since! Here was penned the answer to poor John Keats: -
St. Paul has all the lift of Keats: "Mind the things that are above, not the things that are upon the earth", but the lift is not adrift with feelings, it is anchored in Christ, "for you are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God" (Col. III. 2-4). There is all the longing of Keats: "To live is Christ, to die is again... and what I shall choose I know not", but St. Paul's yearning to live is anchored in serving Christians, his yearning to die is anchored in Christ, "having a desire to be dissolved and to be with Christ, a thing by far the better" (Phil. I, 21-23).
In St. Paul there is any amount of the "heart's affections" and their "holiness": "For the rest, brethren, whatsoever things are true ...just... holy... lovely ...think on these things", yet all these things that are not Christ St. Paul would let go "for the excellent knowledge of Jesus Christ my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them but dung, that I may gain Christ" (Phil. IV, 8; III, 8).
So Fame and Love are nothing to St. Paul, except in Christ, but Christ he can reach once and for all only through Death, therefore Death is no longer the problem that cuts down all Fame and Love, as for Keats, on the contrary, it is the only gateway to true life and infinite love. Christ Himself: "Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is thy victory? O death, where is thy sting? (I Cor. XV, 54, 55).
Keats staked all on the human heart's affections, But all they told him at the end was that his name was writ in water. St. Paul staked all on Christ, and at the end of his life he knew on the contrary that the just Lord would render him a crown of justice, however, "not only to me, but to them also that love his coming" (II Tim. IV, 8).
Should then Catholics renounce literature and the arts, and all their pomps and all their works? Not at all. Firstly, if pagan or non-Catholic artists or poets are famous, it is because of gifts of imagination, or affection, or expression, all of which come from God and all of which by being rightfully imitated can be made to serve Him - St. Jerome, translator of the Latin Bible, was soaked in Cicero. For, secondly, a stairway built downwards can always be climbed upwards. If the audio-tapes on not necessarily Catholic literature of, for instance, a Dr. David White, are so popular with traditional Catholics, is it not because they use even non-Catholic materials to build a firm bridge from our non-Catholic world back to the Faith? For these tapes (wonderful Christmas presents) call (816) 531-2448.
Remember still the men's Catholic Family Conference being held here from December 26 to 31, which promises to be interesting - a Catholic line on social problems. And the Seminary has available as usual Christmas cards (same as last year) which for a token donation to the Seminary can be sent to friends with the promise that their intentions will be included in a Novena of Masses to be said at the Seminary for nine days starting on Christmas Day.
And let us pray in what remains of November for all the souls in Purgatory, poor by their suffering yet rich in salvation and in power to pray for ourselves.
Sincerely yours in Christ,
+ Richard Williamson
Dear Friends and Benefactors,
In a spare day after the Society's official pilgrimage to Rome in August, I made a personal pilgrimage to two sites in Rome, the first of which probably and the second of which almost certainly no other of our pilgrims visited: the grave of the English poet John Keats in the Protestant Cemetery, and the church of San Paolo alla Regola in the Arenula. Keats they will hardly have visited because he is not a Catholic poet, San Paolo alla Regola because it is closed to the public for repairs, but the two sites fit together like lock and key!
John Keats (1796-1821) is a famous figure in English Literature. A handful of his best-known poems are to be found in almost any collection of poetry in the English language: "On first looking into Chapman's Homer", "When I have fears that I may cease to be", "La Belle Dame Sans Merci", "Ode to the Nightingale", "Ode to Autumn", etc.. He belongs to the Romantic period of English literature, so much so that more than anyone else he incarnates what the word "poet" has come to mean to most of us: an imaginative young man, not altogether masculine, finding beautiful language with which to put on paper his sensitive dreams.
Such poetry is in our times on the one hand so despised that if newspapers quote it, they will print it out as though it is prose for fear of alienating readers by anything so effete as "poetry". On the other hand such "poets" reign supreme in the world of greeting cards which get sent on all sentimental occasions. As Oscar Wilde said, "Sentimentality is the bank-holiday of cynicism".
Keats contributed towards this disintegration of modern man. He came to Rome with a friend in November of 1820 in the hope that the warm climate would alleviate the tuberculosis ravaging his lungs. It was too late. After four months of distant exile and severe pain, he died in March of 1821 at the early age of 25, in rooms overlooking the Piazza di Spagna which have also become a pilgrimage center for lovers of English literature.
He was buried in the Protestant Cemetery just inside Rome's old city walls, in the shadow of the pyramid of Caius Cestius. He lies in the far corner of a welt-kept lawn scattered with the gravestones of other distinguished or famous non-Catholics who died in Rome. Amidst shady trees in the warmth of a sunlit August morning one would have thought anybody there could lie in peace, but then one comes to the gravestone of the famous poet. The inscription concludes with the one sentence Keats himself had wanted to be engraved there: "Here lies one whose name was writ in water"!
What had happened? In fact, the great Romantic had lived in virtual despair for many months before he died. At some point after he left school and had become a medical student in London and, showing promise as a poet, had begun to mix in a group of the capital city's artistic intellectuals, he picked up liberal ideas and turned his back resolutely on Christianity. During his last illness he admired and envied the Christian faith enabling his artistic friend Severn to watch over him faithfully, but Keats could not or would not believe in like manner.
In his short life, he had come to stake everything on human feelings of beauty. In a letter to a friend in 1819 he wrote the charter of Romantics: "I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart's affections and the truth of imagination - what the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth". To his brothers: "O for a life of sensations rather than of thoughts". His "Ode to a Grecian Urn" concludes with the famous lines: -
Beauty is truth, truth beauty. That is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
So when the full ugliness of slow death by tuberculosis struck, Keats had none of what worldly people called "the consolations of religion", he had only feelings, the darkest of feelings, left to him.
In fact Keats had envisaged literature as a kind of substitute religion, with poets like himself serving as substitute priests to bring happiness to mankind. And it is surely because his best poetry expresses the quasi-religious longings of the human heart without religion that he is like the incarnate poet for our apostate age. Here is a famous sonnet of Keats, meditating on death (it goes well on retreats!): -
When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain,
Before high-piled books in charact'ry
Hold like rich garners the full-ripened grain;
When I behold, upon the night's starred face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love! - then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think,
Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.
The first eight lines present the tension between human Fame and Death: will the young poet live to unlock all the treasures in his heart? And given the beauty of his words, we need not doubt the treasures were there. In the next four lines is the tension between human Love and Death: the brief glimpse of a "fair creature" makes his heart resonate with the love that might be. But then - last two lines - what do all of Fame and Love mean when they can be cut down by Death? The heart says there must be a meaning - but there is none in sight. The heart lifts - and falls back. The heart longs with a longing as deep as the sea - but it is left with its longing.
The truth in Romanticism is the lift and the longing. The falsehood is the lack of corresponding object. Like Keats, not finding the answer or else refusing it, his many followers lifted and longed less and less, until the post-Romantics had nothing better to do than wallow in the mud and finally blow their brains out. Severn had had to persuade Keats several months before his death not to take his own life by a drug overdose, in those days, of laudanum.
From Rome's Protestant Cemetery to the unknown Church of San Paolo alla Regola is a brief taxi-ride into what used to be the Jewish Quarter of Rome by the bend in the river Tiber where it turns south-east. Rome's Synagogue is still near-by. The church, going back to the earliest times, was built on the very spot where St. Paul spent his first imprisonment in Rome, from perhaps 61 to 63 AD (Acts XXVIII, 30,31). From here it was that for at least two years under house arrest, by example and by instruction of Rome's Catholics, he helped Peter to build the vital new church at the heart of the great empire. Here it was that he wrote what are known as the four Epistles of the Captivity, in each of which he refers to his imprisonment: Ephesians (III,1), Philippians (I, 13,14), Colossians (IV,3), Philemon (1). Are there any other books of the Bible of which we know the exact location where they were written?
In any other city than Rome such a place would be an outstanding shrine, but in Rome and in Roman guidebooks it is overshadowed by dozens of shrines and sanctuaries more outstanding still. The result is that the church of San Paolo alla Regola fell into disuse and material decay, which the State is now slowly paying to restore (materially). I could only gain entrance by ringing at a side-door through which a Peruvian Brother of a small congregation kindly let me in. The main church is chock-full of builders' rubbish and materials. The side chapel on the exact site of St. Paul's house - captivity is choked with scaffolding and planks and builders' dust!
To think that from this place of ruination flashed forth a Prince of the Apostles, and Epistles of his which have built the Roman Catholic Church ever since! Here was penned the answer to poor John Keats: -
St. Paul has all the lift of Keats: "Mind the things that are above, not the things that are upon the earth", but the lift is not adrift with feelings, it is anchored in Christ, "for you are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God" (Col. III. 2-4). There is all the longing of Keats: "To live is Christ, to die is again... and what I shall choose I know not", but St. Paul's yearning to live is anchored in serving Christians, his yearning to die is anchored in Christ, "having a desire to be dissolved and to be with Christ, a thing by far the better" (Phil. I, 21-23).
In St. Paul there is any amount of the "heart's affections" and their "holiness": "For the rest, brethren, whatsoever things are true ...just... holy... lovely ...think on these things", yet all these things that are not Christ St. Paul would let go "for the excellent knowledge of Jesus Christ my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them but dung, that I may gain Christ" (Phil. IV, 8; III, 8).
So Fame and Love are nothing to St. Paul, except in Christ, but Christ he can reach once and for all only through Death, therefore Death is no longer the problem that cuts down all Fame and Love, as for Keats, on the contrary, it is the only gateway to true life and infinite love. Christ Himself: "Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is thy victory? O death, where is thy sting? (I Cor. XV, 54, 55).
Keats staked all on the human heart's affections, But all they told him at the end was that his name was writ in water. St. Paul staked all on Christ, and at the end of his life he knew on the contrary that the just Lord would render him a crown of justice, however, "not only to me, but to them also that love his coming" (II Tim. IV, 8).
Should then Catholics renounce literature and the arts, and all their pomps and all their works? Not at all. Firstly, if pagan or non-Catholic artists or poets are famous, it is because of gifts of imagination, or affection, or expression, all of which come from God and all of which by being rightfully imitated can be made to serve Him - St. Jerome, translator of the Latin Bible, was soaked in Cicero. For, secondly, a stairway built downwards can always be climbed upwards. If the audio-tapes on not necessarily Catholic literature of, for instance, a Dr. David White, are so popular with traditional Catholics, is it not because they use even non-Catholic materials to build a firm bridge from our non-Catholic world back to the Faith? For these tapes (wonderful Christmas presents) call (816) 531-2448.
Remember still the men's Catholic Family Conference being held here from December 26 to 31, which promises to be interesting - a Catholic line on social problems. And the Seminary has available as usual Christmas cards (same as last year) which for a token donation to the Seminary can be sent to friends with the promise that their intentions will be included in a Novena of Masses to be said at the Seminary for nine days starting on Christmas Day.
And let us pray in what remains of November for all the souls in Purgatory, poor by their suffering yet rich in salvation and in power to pray for ourselves.
Sincerely yours in Christ,
+ Richard Williamson
Bishops' meeting with Cardinal Hoyos
October 3, 2000
Dear Friends and Benefactors,
I have been thinking about the August 14 meeting between Cardinal Castrillón Hoyos and three of us bishops of the Society of St. Pius X. How could he be so ruthless with the Fraternity of St. Peter (FSP) and then so charming with ourselves? And I came to a broad conclusion: the minds of these hard Church leaders of the world's soft apostasy are so messed up with contradiction that they can no longer see a contradiction when it stares them in the face. The prince of their faculties, their mind, is gone, and the rest follows.
This is approximately what I said when I described briefly in September's letter the lunch-date in the Cardinal's apartment in Rome, where he so warmly welcomed and embraced three of us SSPX bishops, who are after all, from his point of view, much worse enemies of his Rome than the Fraternity of St. Peter leaders that he had so firmly called to heel a few weeks before. However, the subject merits a longer analysis because here once more is the whole vast problem of these "nice" men wrecking the Catholic Church. Several Seminary Letters have considered this problem, but the niceness of these Church-wreckers can be so misleading to Catholics that it is well worth another letter to go over it again in the light of this "eyeball to eyeball" meeting with one of the leading wreckers. Too many Catholics follow our sentimental world in thinking that wherever there is niceness, there is truth. So at the risk of going over ground gone over many times before (but there are always new readers), let us start with the clear proof that the Cardinal is a wrecker.
In April of this year the 71-year old prelate from Colombia, South America, was appointed by Pope John Paul II to be President of the "Ecclesia Dei" Commission, set up by the Pope in 1988 at the time of the SSPX episcopal consecrations to prevent Traditionally-minded Catholics from following Archbishop Lefebvre and his four ugly ducklings into "schism". The Commission would offer to such Catholics all they could desire from Tradition but under, and with the approval of, Rome. This the Commission mainly but not exclusively pretended to do by the founding of the Fraternity of St. Peter with a dozen or so priests who were leaving the SSPX because of those consecrations.
Now -and here is the key to all that follows -Vatican II Rome contradicts Catholic Tradition, and Catholic Tradition contradicts Vatican II Rome. That is why, from the beginning, the SSPX warned that sooner or later neo-modernist Rome would clamp down on the FSP. However for ten years Rome cunningly allowed them a certain expansion and prosperity. After all, Rome wanted to catch as many mice as possible with one trap! In this appearance of prosperity the FSP exulted at their 10th anniversary celebration held in Rome in the autumn of 1998.
But Rome was only waiting, and in the summer of 1999, Rome struck. By supporting a band inside the FSP of pro-Rome priests rebelling against the "Lefebvrist" tendency of the FSP leadership, Rome let loose through the remainder of last year a series of disputes, divisions, actions, reactions within the FSP, until in February of this year the FSP leadership managed to restore a measure of calm and unity. But then Rome struck again.
At the FSP General Chapter held in Rome this July, a devastating letter was read out coming from the authorities in Rome in which they imposed on the FSP three decisions: firstly, by a ruling upon the FSP Constitutions, they stopped the Chapter from re-electing Fr. Josef Bisig, the FSP Superior General who had more or less held the FSP together on its more or less Traditional course up till then. Secondly, in the name of preventing dissension, Rome in this letter imposed on the FSP its own choice of successor to Fr. Bisig as Superior General, a priest who will certainly be more amenable to Rome's anti-Traditional directives. Thirdly, it imposed new rectors: upon the two FSP seminaries, is South Germany and the USA. The letter did not name these rectors, but it traced their portrait: they will "eradicate a spirit of rebellion against the current Church", and they will have "a caring and love of the Church and its supreme Pastor".
In conclusion the letter warned against giving too much importance to the Tridentine rite of Mass. The FSP must "forget no more that the reformed rite of Paul VI is the common rite of the Church", and the FSP must stop saying that the new rite is not as good as the old. The letter recalls that Rome founded the FSP (merely; "to help Catholics who have an attachment to the old rite, to better find themselves in the Church". Clearly, Tradition is to be integrated into the Newchurch on the Newchurch's terms, in other words Rome decrees that Tradition is to be crippled inside the FSP. And who signed this June 29 letter? Why, the new President of "Ecclesia Dei", Cardinal Dario Castrillón Hoyos.
Now actions speak louder than words, and this letter is action - crippling action! By this letter the Cardinal is a clear enemy of Catholic Tradition. How then could he on June 1 have written a letter to the four SSPX bishops beginning "My dear Brother", and warmly inviting them to visit him at his home or office in Rome at any time? And how could he on August 14 welcome three of them to lunch in his home, embrace them on their departure, and repeat the invitation? There is a problem here!
Let us begin by eliminating certain solutions that jump to mind, like the explanations of KGB agent, drugs, or a dummy Pope jump, or used to jump, to many Catholics' minds in the entirely parallel problem of recent Popes, Paul VI in particular.
Immediately, one might think that Cardinal Castrillón Hoyos was being insincere with us on August 14, that he was putting on a sweet front to lure the SSPX into a trap. But as one judges men, "eyeball to eyeball" as Americans say, I do not think that was the case. I think he really wishes us well. He really wishes we were "inside" the Church instead of "outside". The next explanation is, that if the Cardinal wants us "inside the Church", then he is not intelligent enough to understand the clash between Rome and Tradition. He certainly did seem to be ignorant of the issues at stake on August 14. But see above. His June 29 letter to the FSP General Chapter showed a clear grasp both of how Tradition is working inside the FSP against his Rome, and how his Rome must act in order to cripple that Tradition. It is not the letter of a man ignorant of the clash!
Well then, third explanation, that letter may be the letter of a puppet. Sinister forces inside the Vatican composed that letter, and the "dear old man" (quotation from last month's letter) merely signed it, not worrying too much about what he signed. Meanwhile his "dearness" might serve to draw the disarmed SSPX bishops within the range of the sinister forces' guns... I still give a little credit to this explanation, because I do believe that behind the Cardinal, as I said last month, there are villains at work, either Judeo-masons or prelates working for Judeo-masonry, who are far more sinister than this Cardinal is. These villains, I do believe, are using front-men like the Cardinal for as long as he is useful to their Revolution. He is, in Lenin's phrase, "a useful idiot", who will be cast aside the moment he no longer serves their forward march to the One-World-Religion. The Revolution is famous for eating its own children.
However, "useful idiots" are the more useful for being less idiotic. On reflection, I doubt that the Cardinal merely signed like a puppet his June 29 letter. For instance, as he began his June 1 letter sweet-talking the SSPX bishops by "My dear Brother", so he began his June 29 savaging of the FSP by "My very dear Friends"! And, surely, as he savaged Tradition inside the FSP to stop the FSP sliding out of what he considers to be Church unity, so he sweet-talked the SSPX bishops to begin restoring them to that unity.
It is surely this notion he has of Church unity that explains not only the oneness of the Cardinal's contradictory behaviour, but also the contradictions flowing out of the one man. This is because his Vatican II notion of the Church mixes love of God with love of that modern world which is opposed to God. So his notion of Church unity, like that of Vatican II prelates from the Pope downwards, contains contradiction in itself, and continually spills contradictions.
In a recent "Remnant" article (August 31, page 13) there was a long list of Pope John Paul's permanent contradictions. On September 3 there was the joint beatification of Popes Pius IX and John XXIII, whose pontificates mix like oil and water. Most recently there was Cardinal Ratzinger's "Dominus Jesus" which said that the Catholic Church is the one true Church, but that other churches also subsist in the true Church! Contradictions spill out of Rome like muddy waters out of a muddy fountain. For how can minds force-fed on contradiction think straight? These minds are no longer the royal servants of Truth, but the dethroned followers of their owners' wills, which willfully choose contradiction in the hope of enjoying both God and this world. Such wills are correspondingly degraded, which is why, thirdly, sentiments become so important, and why sentimentality so easily takes over. Instead of the Way, the Truth and the Life, we have "luv, luv, luv". Hence the Cardinal's August 14 luv, luv, luv, for the SSPX bishops!
The problem then with this Pope, with the dear (?) Cardinal and all followers of Vatican II like them, is not a lack of nice sentiments, nor even of good will, except insofar as they will to love the modern world in its modernity. The problem is that their minds are self-disabled. They could not recognize the Antichrist if he hit them in the face!
What to do, dear readers. Firstly, pray with mind and will for the grace of love of the Truth. Secondly, apply the mind to discovering the Truth, the whole Truth, and nothing but the Truth. Thirdly, apply the will to living by that Truth, because if God sees us not profiting by His grace, He will take it away again. On the other hand, if He sees us doing all we can, however poorly, to put the Truth into action, He will give us grace upon grace, unto life everlasting.
Remember, dear readers, the third Catholic Family Conference being held at the Seminary here from Tuesday evening, Dec. 26, to Sunday mid-day, Dec. 31. The first two were well attended. Sign up soon.
With all blessings, sincerely yours in Our Lord,
+ Richard Williamson
Dear Friends and Benefactors,
I have been thinking about the August 14 meeting between Cardinal Castrillón Hoyos and three of us bishops of the Society of St. Pius X. How could he be so ruthless with the Fraternity of St. Peter (FSP) and then so charming with ourselves? And I came to a broad conclusion: the minds of these hard Church leaders of the world's soft apostasy are so messed up with contradiction that they can no longer see a contradiction when it stares them in the face. The prince of their faculties, their mind, is gone, and the rest follows.
This is approximately what I said when I described briefly in September's letter the lunch-date in the Cardinal's apartment in Rome, where he so warmly welcomed and embraced three of us SSPX bishops, who are after all, from his point of view, much worse enemies of his Rome than the Fraternity of St. Peter leaders that he had so firmly called to heel a few weeks before. However, the subject merits a longer analysis because here once more is the whole vast problem of these "nice" men wrecking the Catholic Church. Several Seminary Letters have considered this problem, but the niceness of these Church-wreckers can be so misleading to Catholics that it is well worth another letter to go over it again in the light of this "eyeball to eyeball" meeting with one of the leading wreckers. Too many Catholics follow our sentimental world in thinking that wherever there is niceness, there is truth. So at the risk of going over ground gone over many times before (but there are always new readers), let us start with the clear proof that the Cardinal is a wrecker.
In April of this year the 71-year old prelate from Colombia, South America, was appointed by Pope John Paul II to be President of the "Ecclesia Dei" Commission, set up by the Pope in 1988 at the time of the SSPX episcopal consecrations to prevent Traditionally-minded Catholics from following Archbishop Lefebvre and his four ugly ducklings into "schism". The Commission would offer to such Catholics all they could desire from Tradition but under, and with the approval of, Rome. This the Commission mainly but not exclusively pretended to do by the founding of the Fraternity of St. Peter with a dozen or so priests who were leaving the SSPX because of those consecrations.
Now -and here is the key to all that follows -Vatican II Rome contradicts Catholic Tradition, and Catholic Tradition contradicts Vatican II Rome. That is why, from the beginning, the SSPX warned that sooner or later neo-modernist Rome would clamp down on the FSP. However for ten years Rome cunningly allowed them a certain expansion and prosperity. After all, Rome wanted to catch as many mice as possible with one trap! In this appearance of prosperity the FSP exulted at their 10th anniversary celebration held in Rome in the autumn of 1998.
But Rome was only waiting, and in the summer of 1999, Rome struck. By supporting a band inside the FSP of pro-Rome priests rebelling against the "Lefebvrist" tendency of the FSP leadership, Rome let loose through the remainder of last year a series of disputes, divisions, actions, reactions within the FSP, until in February of this year the FSP leadership managed to restore a measure of calm and unity. But then Rome struck again.
At the FSP General Chapter held in Rome this July, a devastating letter was read out coming from the authorities in Rome in which they imposed on the FSP three decisions: firstly, by a ruling upon the FSP Constitutions, they stopped the Chapter from re-electing Fr. Josef Bisig, the FSP Superior General who had more or less held the FSP together on its more or less Traditional course up till then. Secondly, in the name of preventing dissension, Rome in this letter imposed on the FSP its own choice of successor to Fr. Bisig as Superior General, a priest who will certainly be more amenable to Rome's anti-Traditional directives. Thirdly, it imposed new rectors: upon the two FSP seminaries, is South Germany and the USA. The letter did not name these rectors, but it traced their portrait: they will "eradicate a spirit of rebellion against the current Church", and they will have "a caring and love of the Church and its supreme Pastor".
In conclusion the letter warned against giving too much importance to the Tridentine rite of Mass. The FSP must "forget no more that the reformed rite of Paul VI is the common rite of the Church", and the FSP must stop saying that the new rite is not as good as the old. The letter recalls that Rome founded the FSP (merely; "to help Catholics who have an attachment to the old rite, to better find themselves in the Church". Clearly, Tradition is to be integrated into the Newchurch on the Newchurch's terms, in other words Rome decrees that Tradition is to be crippled inside the FSP. And who signed this June 29 letter? Why, the new President of "Ecclesia Dei", Cardinal Dario Castrillón Hoyos.
Now actions speak louder than words, and this letter is action - crippling action! By this letter the Cardinal is a clear enemy of Catholic Tradition. How then could he on June 1 have written a letter to the four SSPX bishops beginning "My dear Brother", and warmly inviting them to visit him at his home or office in Rome at any time? And how could he on August 14 welcome three of them to lunch in his home, embrace them on their departure, and repeat the invitation? There is a problem here!
Let us begin by eliminating certain solutions that jump to mind, like the explanations of KGB agent, drugs, or a dummy Pope jump, or used to jump, to many Catholics' minds in the entirely parallel problem of recent Popes, Paul VI in particular.
Immediately, one might think that Cardinal Castrillón Hoyos was being insincere with us on August 14, that he was putting on a sweet front to lure the SSPX into a trap. But as one judges men, "eyeball to eyeball" as Americans say, I do not think that was the case. I think he really wishes us well. He really wishes we were "inside" the Church instead of "outside". The next explanation is, that if the Cardinal wants us "inside the Church", then he is not intelligent enough to understand the clash between Rome and Tradition. He certainly did seem to be ignorant of the issues at stake on August 14. But see above. His June 29 letter to the FSP General Chapter showed a clear grasp both of how Tradition is working inside the FSP against his Rome, and how his Rome must act in order to cripple that Tradition. It is not the letter of a man ignorant of the clash!
Well then, third explanation, that letter may be the letter of a puppet. Sinister forces inside the Vatican composed that letter, and the "dear old man" (quotation from last month's letter) merely signed it, not worrying too much about what he signed. Meanwhile his "dearness" might serve to draw the disarmed SSPX bishops within the range of the sinister forces' guns... I still give a little credit to this explanation, because I do believe that behind the Cardinal, as I said last month, there are villains at work, either Judeo-masons or prelates working for Judeo-masonry, who are far more sinister than this Cardinal is. These villains, I do believe, are using front-men like the Cardinal for as long as he is useful to their Revolution. He is, in Lenin's phrase, "a useful idiot", who will be cast aside the moment he no longer serves their forward march to the One-World-Religion. The Revolution is famous for eating its own children.
However, "useful idiots" are the more useful for being less idiotic. On reflection, I doubt that the Cardinal merely signed like a puppet his June 29 letter. For instance, as he began his June 1 letter sweet-talking the SSPX bishops by "My dear Brother", so he began his June 29 savaging of the FSP by "My very dear Friends"! And, surely, as he savaged Tradition inside the FSP to stop the FSP sliding out of what he considers to be Church unity, so he sweet-talked the SSPX bishops to begin restoring them to that unity.
It is surely this notion he has of Church unity that explains not only the oneness of the Cardinal's contradictory behaviour, but also the contradictions flowing out of the one man. This is because his Vatican II notion of the Church mixes love of God with love of that modern world which is opposed to God. So his notion of Church unity, like that of Vatican II prelates from the Pope downwards, contains contradiction in itself, and continually spills contradictions.
In a recent "Remnant" article (August 31, page 13) there was a long list of Pope John Paul's permanent contradictions. On September 3 there was the joint beatification of Popes Pius IX and John XXIII, whose pontificates mix like oil and water. Most recently there was Cardinal Ratzinger's "Dominus Jesus" which said that the Catholic Church is the one true Church, but that other churches also subsist in the true Church! Contradictions spill out of Rome like muddy waters out of a muddy fountain. For how can minds force-fed on contradiction think straight? These minds are no longer the royal servants of Truth, but the dethroned followers of their owners' wills, which willfully choose contradiction in the hope of enjoying both God and this world. Such wills are correspondingly degraded, which is why, thirdly, sentiments become so important, and why sentimentality so easily takes over. Instead of the Way, the Truth and the Life, we have "luv, luv, luv". Hence the Cardinal's August 14 luv, luv, luv, for the SSPX bishops!
The problem then with this Pope, with the dear (?) Cardinal and all followers of Vatican II like them, is not a lack of nice sentiments, nor even of good will, except insofar as they will to love the modern world in its modernity. The problem is that their minds are self-disabled. They could not recognize the Antichrist if he hit them in the face!
What to do, dear readers. Firstly, pray with mind and will for the grace of love of the Truth. Secondly, apply the mind to discovering the Truth, the whole Truth, and nothing but the Truth. Thirdly, apply the will to living by that Truth, because if God sees us not profiting by His grace, He will take it away again. On the other hand, if He sees us doing all we can, however poorly, to put the Truth into action, He will give us grace upon grace, unto life everlasting.
Remember, dear readers, the third Catholic Family Conference being held at the Seminary here from Tuesday evening, Dec. 26, to Sunday mid-day, Dec. 31. The first two were well attended. Sign up soon.
With all blessings, sincerely yours in Our Lord,
+ Richard Williamson
Jubilee year pilgimage
September 6, 2000
Dear Friends and Benefactors,
Many of you have heard by now of the triumphant Jubilee Year pilgrimage by the Society of St. Plus X to Rome last month, but let none of you think that such a triumph means that Rome is reconciling itself to Tradition. Alas, events before and after the pilgrimage showed how little this is the case . . .
SSPX JUBILEE YEAR PILGRIMAGE
The pilgrimage itself took place from Tuesday to Thursday, August 8, 9 and 10, Some 3,500 Society of St. Plus X pilgrims from literally all over the world gathered together in blazing sunshine outside the great Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls on the Tuesday morning. There the pattern was established of some 250 priests, seminarians and nuns leading the pilgrims, grouped by the main languages present, solemnly through the Jubilee Door into each Basilica. This procession would last a prolonged five mysteries of the Rosary and would fill the Basilicas, Santa Maria Maggiore twice. Once inside, there would be a meditation on the Basilica, prayers, chants, a brief sermon, the whole lasting from 20 to 30 minutes. Then the pilgrims would leave, in an equally solemn and impressive procession.
A high point of the pilgrimage was, of course, the Tuesday afternoon visit to St. Peter's, the central and most famous Basilica of all. In sunshine still more blazing, some 4,500 pilgrims lined up in the street leading to St. Peter's, the Via delta Conciliazione, and for a good hour the Society of St. Plus X occupied, in peace, the Basilica! Bishop Fellay preached a five-minute sermon, wisely evoking from Scripture the need to pray for Peter.
As a no doubt villainous but not stupid Italian journalist remarked, it was the first time in 2,000 years of Church history that thousands of "excommunicated" Catholics had come to St. Peter's to pray for the Pope! For, of course, the SSPX pilgrims did again and again pray for the Pope.
On the Wednesday, the pilgrimage was to the two other leading Basilicas of Rome, St. John Lateran and St. Mary Major. The high point here was no doubt the procession up the Via Merulana joining these Basilicas which are not far apart. Until the day itself, the Italian police had said they could do nothing to assist the movement of the now 5,100 pilgrims through the streets concerned, but at the last moment, within 10 minutes, they had the route perfectly sealed off (ah, these Italians!). Imagine a whole street of Rome filled from top to bottom with our people marching 10 or 12 abreast, and chanting "Laude Sion, Salvatorem"! It was a sight for sore eyes, and a joy for sore hearts! For a few moments, Rome was back in Rome, or, Catholic Rome was back in geographical Rome.
The official pilgrimage concluded on the Wednesday afternoon with a Pontifical Mass celebrated by Bishop Fellay on an improvised altar in the open air, on the site of what was once Emperor Nero's palace on the Oppian Hill. The Coliseum clearly visible not far off, was a poignant reminder to the SSPX pilgrims, forbidden to celebrate Mass in any of the Basilicas, that the persecution of Catholics did not begin with Vatican II! Rome might have eased the Society's passage through the Basilicas, but emphasize the word "through"! It was easy to imagine, going up from the Coliseum as from a modern sports stadium, the howl of the crowds baying not for a home team goal but for the Christians' blood . . . The equivalent happened as recently as 1848 . . .
However, as pilgrims left the Oppian Hill Mass in procession, a few from each SSPX group in nine different countries of Asia carried a succession of national banners. Now Asia is the least Catholic of continents. Rarer still are the Catholics there keeping to Tradition. Yet a few representatives of the tiny remnant of this slim minority had wanted to be there, and to show they were there! They were applauded (ah, these French!), as another inspiration to all!
The SSPX's Jubilee visit to Rome continued unofficially on the Thursday with the classic pilgrimage to the seven Basilicas. Over 1,000 of our pilgrims in groups of 50 made the 14-mile walk, still in the blazing sunshine of Rome in August! A light sunstroke from Tuesday kept me out of it personally, but all the Winona seminarians present at this climax of their six-week visit to Europe made the round. They were totally uplifted by the pilgrimage and they thank you all who helped to make their European trip possible. As an English priest quoted a pilgrim saying, "Our pilgrimage must have been a Jubilee Year present of Our Lord to Himself"!
All of which is much sunshine, but every event around the pilgrimage was there to remind us that we are still under the reign of the enemies of Our Lord. The first such event took place at the end of the week preceding the pilgrimage.
"SI SI, NO NO" CONGRESS IN ROME
From August 3 to 5 some 100 priests and laity, mainly of the SSPX, participated in the bi-annual Congress of the twice-monthly anti-liberal Italian periodical "Si Si, No No," known to many of you from its extracts and articles published in the "Angelus." The Congress consisted of some dozen speakers analyzing in depth problems raised by the Second Vatican Council. Such analysis is valuable, as preparing for the day when the Catholic Church will have to clean up the whole present mess.
In effect, one speaker after another made clear that the problem of Vatican II is not only in the aftermath of the Council, but it is in the Council itself. The Council's documents themselves are loaded with a mind-rotting doublethink of a kind to enable (or cause) Catholics to dance with the Devil while still pretending to serve God. Two contradictory religions, once centered on God and the other on man, are blended there with a diabolical skill. Eventually the Catholic Church will be obliged to trash the entire documents and start all over again, because they intertwine truth and lies inextricably.
For instance the Council document on the priesthood ("Presbyterorum ordinis") passes for being one of the more acceptable Council documents, yet Bishop Fellay in the closing lecture of the Congress had no difficulty in showing that in that document the seeds of the destruction of the Eternal Priesthood of Christ are well and truly planted.
MEETING OF SSPX SUPERIORS IN ALBANO
Immediately after the pilgrimage took place the next event to bring pilgrims down to earth. Some 30 SSPX superiors of Seminaries, Districts and independent Priories met in the SSPX house in Albano, 40 minutes out of Rome, to deliberate on current problems. Two questions stood out in the deliberations: vocations and the Internet.
The lack of vocations - which is making itself felt all over the world - seems a real puzzle. For 30 years now the SSPX has been up and running with a number of boys' high schools, and for several years now SSPX priests and laity have been called on to pray for vocations, yet still they are scarce. I said that the whole of modern life takes its toll, because godlessness is built into the very fabric of industrialized suburbia, and I quoted Archbishop Lefebvre telling the 20,000 faithful attending his 50th Priestly Jubilee Mass in Paris in 1987, to "go back to the country."
Of course nobody pretends that such a return to the country is always possible or easy, but unless the virtues of the old-fashioned country way of life are recreated, be it in city, suburbs or country, there will simply not be, except by miracle, the human material out of which to fashion priests. Already in the 1970's, Archbishop Lefebvre used to say that any vocation was a miracle. (Take heart, dear Americans. We have what looks like a dozen miracles entering Winona this month!)
To the Superiors' debate whether priests should have E-mail or the Internet in their houses, I made a similar contribution to the effect that technology and the machine way of life take their toll. Pope Gregory XVI was opposed to the railways being laid in his pontificate. Absurdly behind the times? But who can deny that these marvels of transportation destabilize a way of life? Who can deny that the motor-car is a major facilitator of individualism and rootlessness? Similarly E-mail and the Internet may facilitate communications and access to information, but who can say that either promotes real thought? Both change the very notion of "thinking." Who can claim, for the better?
However, the consensus of my colleagues seemed to be that priests should make use of these tools while establishing safeguards to protect against their dangers. Which I can understand. But I am not sure that either E-mail or Internet has any place in a Seminary where future priests must fill their minds and souls with old truths, not their in-trays with novelties. Dinosaurs too have rights!
At this meeting Society Superiors were reminded of the distress of the Newchurch clergy by the Society's First Assistant, Fr. Franz Schmidberger, describing his recent out-reach to all the Catholic priests in Austria. He told how in the space of one year he had visited personally 170 priests likely to be at least sympathetic to Tradition. Amongst these he found eight saying the old Mass, 20 saying both Masses, perhaps 60 ready to work with the Society, but in general the priests he visited would not discuss the real issues and they lacked direction and authority. A few were leading truly heroic priestly lives, but the overall picture was of a clergy in dissolution, neither lead nor leading, sheep-dogs astray between the struck shepherd and scattered sheep. Kyrie, eleison!
Altogether, the mood amongst the SSPX Superiors present in Albano seemed tranquil and united. In all the circumstances that is surely a remarkable grace of God, even a miracle. If we are thankful for the Society's existence, let us be mindful how much we have to be thankful for.
WOODSTOCK IN ROME
If, leaving Albano, Society Superiors came back through Rome, another event reminded them of the official Church's distress: the World Youth Day organized by the Vatican for the Feast of the Assumption, when 300,000 youngsters gathered in St. Peter's Square to be toured by the Popemobile, while another 200,000 gathered outside St. John Lateran. Any disagreeable taste left in the Vatican's mouth by the Society's pilgrimage must have been more than washed away by this huge demonstration for the media: masses of youngsters walking for days around Rome, often hand-in-hand, singing or clapping together, sweet, innocent, nice boys and girls, dressed often immodestly, but what does that matter? Here was the new religion.
Here was what Rome has worked for: a sweet, innocent - innocent?-dream of everyone living happily ever after - ever after? How many of these youngsters believe in eternity? How many of them believe in the Creed? How many even have any notion of the Creed? How many of them are being taught that Catholic Faith without which they cannot save their souls?
SSPX BISHOPS LUNCH WITH CARDINAL
Alas, the problem comes from high up. The Vatican had done its best to keep the SSPX pilgrimage as quiet as possible. So the recently appointed President of the "Ecclesia Dei" Commission, set up by the Pope in 1988 to stop Catholics from following Archbishop Lefebvre into "schism," 71-year old Columbian Cardinal Castrillon Hoyos, knew nothing (he says) of our passage until he saw news of it on television. Now two months previously, desiring to meet the four SSPX bishops, he had written a letter to us (beginning "My dear Brother"), in which he invited us to come and see him at any time. Seizing the opportunity of our presence in Rome, he invited us to lunch with him there and then!
Three of us accepted the invitation. He was most hospitable and kind, welcoming us in and, after an ample two-hour luncheon, embracing us on our way out. "Come and see me at any time," he said. Yet this was the same Cardinal who only a few weeks previously had taken firm action to cripple Tradition inside the Fraternity of St. Peter by replacing four of their own choice of leaders by four of their number chosen by Rome! He smashes what he invites, he invites what he smashes. "Go figure," say Americans!
Was he insincere? Humanly judging, I did not think so. I think he simply belongs to the new religion. "We have the same Holy Trinity, the same Incarnation, the same Holy Eucharist," he said, and he surely does believe in the Real Presence because he said that when the experts begin disputing about it, he tunes out. "I'm nice, you're nice," he seemed to say, "so where's the problem? Why not join in the happy-ever-after religion?" Concerning St. Peter's Fraternity, he did admit that he had acted unpleasantly now, but it was only in order to avoid having to act more unpleasantly later. In other words, St. Peter's had had to be stopped, from getting away from happily-ever-afterness, while we were to be drawn towards it by the attraction of all niceness possible. Were we not back to the sweet, innocent religion of the zillions of nice youngsters holding hands and singing in the streets? And since this is the religion of the Holy Father (whom the Cardinal venerates and often sees) and of the Holy Eucharist, then what else can there be in "Tradition." for "Traditionalists" to be making such a fuss about? I think the Cardinal really cannot see.
For this reason I would be (humanly) sure that Cardinal Castrillon Hoyos is not one of the real villains in Rome who for their part can see, and who know exactly what they are doing - getting rid of the Catholic Church to replace it with the Satanic One-World-Religion. There need not be many such real villains, but dear old men who still believe in the Real Presence are mere instruments in their hands. If the Cardinal really is nice, one day he will have to be nasty, either to his handlers or to us. War is war.
SUMMING UP BY BISHOP FELLAY
As accurate view of this war is how the SSPX Superior General concluded the Superiors' Meeting in Albano:
"Firmness pays off. It is Rome which is wrong. We have no reason to back down. We must continue as we have done. Has Rome changed? See what they told St. Peter's: `Traditionalists must recognize that there is only one rite of Mass in the Church, and that rite is the new rite.' So Rome is hardening its position. Under pressure it may make a few exceptions for the old Mass, but its principles are unchanged.
"However, little by little Rome is growing weaker, by its loss of authority over its own bishops." Cardinal Ratzinger said recently in France that authority within the Church is becoming by consent only. So we must stand firmer, not less firm. We must say to Rome, `If Tradition no longer works, why was our pilgrimage such a success? And if Tradition works, why destroy it?' Yet Rome knows where it is going, and it means to go there. It set up St. Peter's Fraternity against us, and now it is destroying that Fraternity with a cynicism that is stunning. We are at war!
"The same can be said for the mainstream bishops and episcopal conferences. Paris is as solidly anti-Tradition as Rome. A bishop here or there may sympathize with us, but that does not mean much. Their conversion is in Providence's hands, not ours. Until then, let us pray for them, and give them a hard time!
"It is with mainstream priests that we have better hopes of fruitful action, long-term. The Vatican II generation of priests is passing. The younger priests are more open. They have had a bad formation, but a number of them still have the Faith. In France, Austria and the Argentine we know of possibilities.....it is slow work for ourselves, but not to be neglected. The SSPX has been blackened in their eyes. That is why it is so important to make ourselves known. It is our actions which speak, and make people think.
"As for the Church, it is still there, even if only just. It is relatively easy to sift in it Catholic words from non-Catholic words. It is not so easy to sift the persons. Have they all left the Church? It is dangerous to say so. For the moment, we are lucky to be `cut off' from Rome which only wants us to compromise, either on the Mass or on the Council or both. However, we should not therefore refuse all personal contact with them, but let us be under no illusion! The Cardinals are hanging lock-tight together!
"What is the degree of guilt of any one of them, taken singly? Much more difficult to say. But word for word they stick together, to the party-line coming from the Secretariat of State. The machinery is well-oiled! The dicasteries form a network. For example, for the last two years we were asking Rome for permission to make this Jubilee pilgrimage in the Basilicas, and we know that our request went the rounds, from one Cardinal to another, from the Congregation for the Clergy to the Secretariat of State, to Ecclesia Dei to the Secretariat of State, etc., etc. It was a trial of strength. They were caught in a double dilemma. Firstly, their open-to-all ecumenism-how could it be closed to us? Secondly, the scandal we risked causing if with 5,000 pilgrims we had run into closed doors. So they let us in and out as smoothly as possible, and their charm was all part of their technique!"
ROME OF THE MARTYRS
Such wise words remind us how far the Church crisis is from being over. Just a few days later Rome went ahead with the supremely confusing joint beatification of a Saint, Pius IX, and no saint at all but the Founder of the Newchurch, Newsaint John XXIII. How can poor Catholics think straight when they are thus told that 2 and 2 make 4, and at the same time they make 5? Repeat, at the same time! Heads can no longer think! Words no longer have meaning!
What will it take to give words back their meaning, to enable heads once more to think, to re-establish the Truth? We pilgrims in Rome were reminded of the answer, by the multiple churches and shrines there of glorious Martyrs. It took a sea of blood to float the Catholic Church. She has run aground. It will take another sea of blood to float the Church off again... the signs of the next bloody persecution are showing.
Meanwhile, dear Friends, do pray for the Seminary as we pray for you, and please continue to support us. We do have vocations for the run-up to martyrdom!
God bless you. In Christ,
Keeping our Catholic Faith and sharing it around us
August 1, 2000
Dear Friends and Benefactors,
Things are getting bad, but it is good to think about them, not in order to get depressed, but in order - as Americans say - to get real. In the days of sailing-ships, when a storm approached at sea, the captain and sailors watched the weather like hawks, in order to pull down the sails, batten down hatches and take all measures for survival.
Let me quote the testimony of two men and a woman leading ordinary lives in today's world, but reading it with Catholic eyes. Firstly, a family father with growing children, who having had to take a job in a large department store, sees afresh what others may no longer see, because they have grown used to it. Here is the working world of many men:-
"In this nation-wide department store, for the employees, it is survival of the fittest. The company is going through a major re-structuring, and therefore many people are being laid off. Only money matters. The severance packages are made as small as possible. The large organization allows for no human relations. In the work environment everything centers on self. There is no room for the supernatural. Christ is driven out everywhere. The frantic pace allows no time to look upwards.
"Inside the company it is a strange world, a strange reality to explain. It is an abstract world, based on profit, working a great deal from computers. It is an artificial system with no reference to nature, let alone to grace. For the sake of some fantastical profit, it rests on unreal speculations and debt, not on real production. It recalls the nightmare world of Big Brother in George Orwell's "1984".
"Because of the divorce from reality, even natural reality, there is a process at work of decay, decomposition and death, but death does not come so quickly. One senses inside people their loss and frustration. They are giving up any hope of truth or happiness, they are learning just to survive. Their only hope is the weekend, the vacation and their electronic toys. It is amazing that this world continues. It is a tinder-box waiting to explode, but it goes on and on.
"If I think about our Society of Saint Pius X parish and watch our parishioners, it seems to me that a number of them passively accept this Dilbertian world. I am even afraid that some of them are more comfortable in it! Attendance at Mass is a duty and an obligation, but some parishioners are putting in an appearance rather than the reality of Catholic life. Parish activity is to that extent somewhat of a facade. Of course I am not speaking of all parishioners, but a number of them have grown numb from learning to survive out in the world, and also from being accepted by it. The material comforts and the glittering technology act like opiates to dull the inner sense, and to counter-act any uneasy feeling that something is really wrong……”
End of the first testimony. The second is from a mother of growing children who is watching and describing women of her own generation between 35 and 55 years old. Of course she too is not describing everybody, but she does discern a common trend of women under pressure throwing away some key principle of womanly sanity:-
"We children of the sixties or seventies are now approaching our change of life. I thought years ago that we would go over the edge, and now I see it happening. My generation knows the problem, but is ceasing to deal with it. I would say three-quarters of these women are going on some Prozac-style drug because life becomes so stressful that they just can't handle it, whereas if you go on drugs it doesn't matter. They reject common sense and good advice, they have thrown up their hands and are refusing the pain. But these drugs have terrible side-effects. I see women beginning to treat pet animals like children...
"One friend could not sleep or think. She went on Prozac, she dumped her husband, she is filing for divorce. Another friend--or ex-friend--was a Novus Ordo Catholic who did not want children, she had only one, later in life. Recently, she was coming closer to the Truth but then threw it all away, went back to war with her husband and divorced him, so her daughter is now on Prozac, and nature is coming back to haunt her unabsolved past sins against womanly nature.
“A third friend has four children aged between 6 and 10 who are growing up like animals. She ignores their needs and now has taken a new job. Her home is in uproar. Her 10-year old attempted (or pretended) suicide. "I don't care, the job is what I want", she says, and she won't listen to anybody. She and this daughter are now on Prozac! And a fourth friend is a good-hearted but impulsive mother, intelligent and highly cultivated, but rejecting what she knows is good advice and setting her lovely children at risk for the sake of a crazy affair.
"These poor women are turning ugly. Two cut me off just before they went over the edge. It is frightening. I am a product of the same world. I have pulled up the drawbridge at home for this summer, and I am only letting in the influences that I can deal with. The force out there is getting stronger. It used to be some ways away, but now it's closing in, all around. The children of these women I know are going to be WILD!!"
End of the second testimony, concerning women and children. The third concerns old age and death, which a Catholic friend has been running into in his home environment. He says:-
"This summer I have had three encounters with today's world of the dying. Firstly, the aging of a beloved old aunt obliged me to make a tour of the local hospices and old folks' homes. Tragic! The old people are simply shunted aside. Nobody seems to even consider keeping grandma' at home. Partly because there is nobody at home! So to day-care for infants at the beginning of life correspond hospices for the aged at the end. But where are the true family homes?
"Secondly a good friend, only in his fifties, has been told he has cancer and has only six months to live. He was born Presbyterian so he quit religion as soon as he grew up. He became a worshipper of science and materialism, and he married a like-minded woman. They aborted their only child. Now she is bitter, as well as being confined to a wheelchair. He does love music, but that initial Protestantism has left him with an insidious pride. I have given him a Rosary, but if I tried to talk religion in front of her, no doubt she would roll at me, tooth and claw!
"Thirdly, I have long known a Protestant man who was patient and kind all his life, but who as he approaches death is now angry every day, lashing out in terror. The Protestantism was an easy religion to live with. You go to Church when you want, and when you go, you are told how wonderful you are. Lies, lies! But the lies take a grip, and when it comes to dying, you cannot go back on them. The great questions of life should have been tackled when one was young and strong, but because of the comfort, they were left alone. Then the body gets worn out, the spirit gets lazy, and it is too late. Television always served to cut out nature, and with old age television is turned on more and more, to keep out the questions.
"Yet so many of these older Protestants are decent people, sweet people! But they are terrified of death. In truth, it is their generation that let the United States go down the drain. They took no care of the country they received, nor of their own souls that God gave them. Yet they are decent. With my Faith, I know I can give them all they need, but they do not want it. As the tree has stood, so it will fall, and as it falls, so for eternity it will lie. Protestantism damns souls. Now with the Second Vatican Council even the Catholics have turned Protestant!"
Dear readers, all we need do is keep our undefiled Catholic Faith, and share it around us in St. Paul's "patience, benignity, goodness, longanimity, mildness, faith, modesty" (Gal. V, 22, 23). And do our Catholic duty, keeping God's ten Commandments, especially perhaps the worship and love of the one true God, the honour of parents and care for children, and the telling of the truth (1,4,8). The Lord God may today be asking of us a great deal, but He is not asking of us the impossible, and He offers us all the means we have need of to do what He wants. May His Name be blessed for ever!
Enclosed is a flyer advertising a set of three tapes that Bernard Janzen and I made towards the end of last year. In it we discuss the principles and forces at work in the war between today's Rome and Catholic Tradition. Since then several more battles have taken place in that war, especially on the battle-field of the Fraternity of St. Peter, but the principles and forces have not changed. The analysis remains timely, and even kindly towards the petrified oysters! Order the tapes from Canada.
Dear readers, may God bless each of you with supernatural light and courage to stay on the road to Heaven when so many people and things would pull us down to Hell!
Most sincerely yours in Christ,
Dear Friends and Benefactors,
Things are getting bad, but it is good to think about them, not in order to get depressed, but in order - as Americans say - to get real. In the days of sailing-ships, when a storm approached at sea, the captain and sailors watched the weather like hawks, in order to pull down the sails, batten down hatches and take all measures for survival.
Let me quote the testimony of two men and a woman leading ordinary lives in today's world, but reading it with Catholic eyes. Firstly, a family father with growing children, who having had to take a job in a large department store, sees afresh what others may no longer see, because they have grown used to it. Here is the working world of many men:-
"In this nation-wide department store, for the employees, it is survival of the fittest. The company is going through a major re-structuring, and therefore many people are being laid off. Only money matters. The severance packages are made as small as possible. The large organization allows for no human relations. In the work environment everything centers on self. There is no room for the supernatural. Christ is driven out everywhere. The frantic pace allows no time to look upwards.
"Inside the company it is a strange world, a strange reality to explain. It is an abstract world, based on profit, working a great deal from computers. It is an artificial system with no reference to nature, let alone to grace. For the sake of some fantastical profit, it rests on unreal speculations and debt, not on real production. It recalls the nightmare world of Big Brother in George Orwell's "1984".
"Because of the divorce from reality, even natural reality, there is a process at work of decay, decomposition and death, but death does not come so quickly. One senses inside people their loss and frustration. They are giving up any hope of truth or happiness, they are learning just to survive. Their only hope is the weekend, the vacation and their electronic toys. It is amazing that this world continues. It is a tinder-box waiting to explode, but it goes on and on.
"If I think about our Society of Saint Pius X parish and watch our parishioners, it seems to me that a number of them passively accept this Dilbertian world. I am even afraid that some of them are more comfortable in it! Attendance at Mass is a duty and an obligation, but some parishioners are putting in an appearance rather than the reality of Catholic life. Parish activity is to that extent somewhat of a facade. Of course I am not speaking of all parishioners, but a number of them have grown numb from learning to survive out in the world, and also from being accepted by it. The material comforts and the glittering technology act like opiates to dull the inner sense, and to counter-act any uneasy feeling that something is really wrong……”
End of the first testimony. The second is from a mother of growing children who is watching and describing women of her own generation between 35 and 55 years old. Of course she too is not describing everybody, but she does discern a common trend of women under pressure throwing away some key principle of womanly sanity:-
"We children of the sixties or seventies are now approaching our change of life. I thought years ago that we would go over the edge, and now I see it happening. My generation knows the problem, but is ceasing to deal with it. I would say three-quarters of these women are going on some Prozac-style drug because life becomes so stressful that they just can't handle it, whereas if you go on drugs it doesn't matter. They reject common sense and good advice, they have thrown up their hands and are refusing the pain. But these drugs have terrible side-effects. I see women beginning to treat pet animals like children...
"One friend could not sleep or think. She went on Prozac, she dumped her husband, she is filing for divorce. Another friend--or ex-friend--was a Novus Ordo Catholic who did not want children, she had only one, later in life. Recently, she was coming closer to the Truth but then threw it all away, went back to war with her husband and divorced him, so her daughter is now on Prozac, and nature is coming back to haunt her unabsolved past sins against womanly nature.
“A third friend has four children aged between 6 and 10 who are growing up like animals. She ignores their needs and now has taken a new job. Her home is in uproar. Her 10-year old attempted (or pretended) suicide. "I don't care, the job is what I want", she says, and she won't listen to anybody. She and this daughter are now on Prozac! And a fourth friend is a good-hearted but impulsive mother, intelligent and highly cultivated, but rejecting what she knows is good advice and setting her lovely children at risk for the sake of a crazy affair.
"These poor women are turning ugly. Two cut me off just before they went over the edge. It is frightening. I am a product of the same world. I have pulled up the drawbridge at home for this summer, and I am only letting in the influences that I can deal with. The force out there is getting stronger. It used to be some ways away, but now it's closing in, all around. The children of these women I know are going to be WILD!!"
End of the second testimony, concerning women and children. The third concerns old age and death, which a Catholic friend has been running into in his home environment. He says:-
"This summer I have had three encounters with today's world of the dying. Firstly, the aging of a beloved old aunt obliged me to make a tour of the local hospices and old folks' homes. Tragic! The old people are simply shunted aside. Nobody seems to even consider keeping grandma' at home. Partly because there is nobody at home! So to day-care for infants at the beginning of life correspond hospices for the aged at the end. But where are the true family homes?
"Secondly a good friend, only in his fifties, has been told he has cancer and has only six months to live. He was born Presbyterian so he quit religion as soon as he grew up. He became a worshipper of science and materialism, and he married a like-minded woman. They aborted their only child. Now she is bitter, as well as being confined to a wheelchair. He does love music, but that initial Protestantism has left him with an insidious pride. I have given him a Rosary, but if I tried to talk religion in front of her, no doubt she would roll at me, tooth and claw!
"Thirdly, I have long known a Protestant man who was patient and kind all his life, but who as he approaches death is now angry every day, lashing out in terror. The Protestantism was an easy religion to live with. You go to Church when you want, and when you go, you are told how wonderful you are. Lies, lies! But the lies take a grip, and when it comes to dying, you cannot go back on them. The great questions of life should have been tackled when one was young and strong, but because of the comfort, they were left alone. Then the body gets worn out, the spirit gets lazy, and it is too late. Television always served to cut out nature, and with old age television is turned on more and more, to keep out the questions.
"Yet so many of these older Protestants are decent people, sweet people! But they are terrified of death. In truth, it is their generation that let the United States go down the drain. They took no care of the country they received, nor of their own souls that God gave them. Yet they are decent. With my Faith, I know I can give them all they need, but they do not want it. As the tree has stood, so it will fall, and as it falls, so for eternity it will lie. Protestantism damns souls. Now with the Second Vatican Council even the Catholics have turned Protestant!"
Dear readers, all we need do is keep our undefiled Catholic Faith, and share it around us in St. Paul's "patience, benignity, goodness, longanimity, mildness, faith, modesty" (Gal. V, 22, 23). And do our Catholic duty, keeping God's ten Commandments, especially perhaps the worship and love of the one true God, the honour of parents and care for children, and the telling of the truth (1,4,8). The Lord God may today be asking of us a great deal, but He is not asking of us the impossible, and He offers us all the means we have need of to do what He wants. May His Name be blessed for ever!
Enclosed is a flyer advertising a set of three tapes that Bernard Janzen and I made towards the end of last year. In it we discuss the principles and forces at work in the war between today's Rome and Catholic Tradition. Since then several more battles have taken place in that war, especially on the battle-field of the Fraternity of St. Peter, but the principles and forces have not changed. The analysis remains timely, and even kindly towards the petrified oysters! Order the tapes from Canada.
Dear readers, may God bless each of you with supernatural light and courage to stay on the road to Heaven when so many people and things would pull us down to Hell!
Most sincerely yours in Christ,
Third Secret of Fatima
July 4, 2000
Dear Friends and Benefactors,
So the Third Secret of Fatima was made public after all, by the Vatican, one week ago. Or was it? Amidst all the confusion generated by the Vatican's distraction maneuver of June 26, we will need experts on Fatima (of which I am not one) to disentangle the Truth. And the Society of St. Pius X will before long give its best judgment on the matter, which I do not mean here to pre-empt. However, it seems to me that a few essential guidelines can be laid down already, especially if one knows the third volume of Brother Michael of the Holy Trinity's excellent work "The Whole Truth about Fatima" (Immaculate Heart Publications, 1986, Box 1028, Buffalo, NY 14205, USA).
First and foremost, it seems to me that there is one very clear and simple proof that what the Vatican released on June 26 as being the text of "the Third Secret" is not at all that text of the Third Secret which was sealed in an envelope by Sister Lucy in 1944, was opened by Pope John XXIII in 1959, was eagerly awaited by Catholics all over the world in 1960, but was kept disappointingly hidden by the Vatican at that time and ever since. Here is that proof:
The Third Secret as sealed in an envelope by Sister Lucy and handed over by her to the Church authorities on June 17, 1944, was written on a single sheet of paper. Sister Lucy, who wrote it, said so. Msgr. Venancio, who carried it, said so. Cardinal Ottaviani, who read it, said so (W.T.F., III pp. 481 and 651). On the contrary the June 26 text, as reprinted by the Vatican in Lucy's own handwriting, spreads over four pages.
Therefore the text which on June 26 the Vatican did all it could to make us think is the text of the Third Secret, is at any rate not the text of the crucial Third Secret which Lucy sealed in an envelope and which all true Catholics are waiting for. The real Third Secret is still hidden. What else was to be expected from this Vatican?
Then what is the June 26 text? Let the Fatima experts decide. If it was written down by Sister Lucy on four pages of a notebook handed over with the sealed envelope on June 17, 1944 (W.T.F., III, p. 49), then maybe it can be called part of the Third Secret in a broad sense, but that is certainly not what people usually mean by the expression " the Third Secret", which here also we will use exclusively for the one-page text sealed in the envelope.
Having then clarified our terms, let us give further reasons why the June 26 text is not only different from, but also, at least apparently and for now, rather less interesting than the Third Secret.
Firstly, we know that when Sister Lucy made known in 1942 the first two parts of the Secret, she held back what she called the third part because she said she had not received permission to reveal it (W.T.F., III, p. 35). Even after her diocesan bishop ordered her to write it down, she could not put pen to paper for two months because of something like a diabolical interference. It took an apparition of Our Lady to overcome all the obstacles (pp. 45-48). But what comparable difficulty could Lucy have had in penning the June 26 text of multiple martyrdoms?
Secondly, we know that the Third Secret was framed between two sentences revealed by Lucy in her fourth version of the Second Secret: first comes "In Portugal will be kept always the dogma of the Faith...", then comes the Third Secret, then comes "... in the end my Immaculate Heart will triumph". This means that the Third Secret consists in a prophecy uttered by the Mother of God. But the June 26 text consists, like the first part of the Secret, in a vision revealed by Lucy.
Thirdly, the Third Secret sealed in an envelope by Lucy in 1944 and opened only by Pope John XXIII in 1959, was, as everybody knew, to be made public at the latest in 1960. This was at the request of the Mother of God (W.T.F., III, pp. 469-479) because, said Lucy, by 1960 the prophecy would be clearer. Yet the Vatican authorities, from Pope John XXIII onwards, have kept the text a close secret. But what ever in the June 26 text needed to be so closely hidden for the last 40 years?
Fourthly, over the same 40 years a certain number of high-up churchmen like Cardinals Ottaviani and Ratzinger have notwithstanding been allowed to read the Third Secret. When questioned about it afterwards, their guarded words all nevertheless pointed in the same direction, namely, the Third Secret concerns the Faith. Which makes sense. For how could Lucy have had no problem penning the second part of the Secret with its threat as grave as that of Russia spreading its errors throughout the world, and yet almost have been broken by the penning of the third part of Secret, unless the Third Secret were much graver still? And how could it be that much graver unless, instead of concerning Russia and the world, it concerned the Faith and the Church? But the June 26 text does not concern the Faith. It concerns only an Angel, penance, climbing a hill, martyrdoms, etc..
On the other hand if the Third Secret contains a prophecy of Our Lady that the Catholic churchmen around 1960 will gravely endanger the Faith, does that not perfectly explain, firstly why the pious Sister Lucy could hardly bring herself to write it down, secondly why it fits in between, on the contrary, Portugal keeping the dogma of the Faith and the Immaculate heart in the end triumphing, thirdly why the Vatican churchmen especially in 1960 sought to silence the Third Secret directly condemning the revolutionary Council they were on the brink of launching, and fourthly why the Third Secret directly concerns the Faith?
Thus what we know for certain about the hidden Third Secret does correspond to a dramatic warning from Our Lady to the Conciliar churchmen and their followers, it does not correspond to the June 26 text. It certainly looks as though on June 26, once again, the Vatican authorities kept hidden, as they have done for the last 40 years, the message of Our Lady directly condemning the One World religion of their man-centred Newchurch. Is it wishful thinking to hope that this June 26 evasive action or distraction maneuver will serve merely to rouse Catholics to demand even more the release of the Third Secret? The Mother of God is far mightier than the Devil, but she does need our prayers with which to go before her Son to obtain such a grace.
Meanwhile here are two other versions of the hidden Third Secret, neither of them authoritative but both of them interesting. The first is the reconstruction of the Third Secret's contents by Brother Michael of the Holy Trinity, at the end of his third volume's patient detective work on all the available clues and evidence (W.T.F., III, p. 841):
"While in Portugal the dogma of the Faith will still be kept, in many nations, perhaps throughout the world, the Faith will be lost. The Church's shepherds will fail gravely in their duties of state. Through their fault, consecrated souls will in large numbers let themselves be seduced by pernicious errors spread everywhere. The time will have come for the decisive battle between the Virgin and the Devil. A wave of diabolical disorientation will sweep over the world. Satan will reach up to the topmost height of the Church. He will blind the shepherds' minds and harden their hearts, because God will have left them to their own devices as a punishment for their refusal to obey the requests of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. It will be the great apostasy announced for "the last times", the "False lamb", the "False Prophet" handing the Church over to "the Beast", according to the prophecy of the Apocalypse".
And here is another version of the Third Secret, as supposedly heard by a French priest in Germany in 1994, in the middle of listening to a CD of religious music. At one point the music faded into the background, and he heard a normal (not inner) voice say quite clearly, " The Church will bleed from all her wounds." Then he heard the following:
"A wicked Council will be planned and prepared which will change the face of the Church. Many souls will lose the Faith, confusion will reign everywhere. The sheep will seek in vain for their shepherds. A schism will rend my Son's tunic. It will be the end of the times, announced in Scripture and recalled by me in many places. The abomination of abominations will reach its peak and call down the chastisement announced at La Salette. The arm of my Son that I can no longer hold back, will come down on this world which will have to expiate its crimes. All that one will hear of is wars and revolutions. The elements of nature will be shaken and will strike anguish into the best (most courageous) of men. The Church will bleed from all her wounds. Blessed those who persevere and seek refuge in my Heart, for in the end my Immaculate Heart will triumph..."
After which, all that the priest heard was, "That is the Third Secret of Fatima". The identity of this priest is known, but he prefers to remain unnamed. He is apparently Traditional, without belonging to the Society of St. Pius X or the Fraternity of St. Peter. He is always in a cassock. He is not sedevacantist. He passes for being worthy of belief.
Of course what he says that he heard carries with it no proof that it is the authentic text of the Third Secret. Note however that it corresponds in full to Lucy's anguish, to the Second Secret frame, to the Vatican churchmen's silence and to the centrality of the Faith, as listed above. Note also that it is a text perfectly clear, like the first and second parts of the Fatima Secret, but unlike the text of June 26. Finally, this priest's version of the Third Secret corresponds fully with the real situation of Church and world around us for the last 40 years.
Dear friends, let us pray and do penance. As Our Lady prophetically told the three children of Fatima, our duty of state is, today, penance enough. Just to live like a Catholic maintaining the state of grace in a world decomposing around us becomes daily more heroic. In patience we shall possess our souls, and if we persevere to the end, we shall be saved. Make if at all possible the five first Saturdays---in reparation to the Immaculate Heart of Mary.
Most sincerely yours in Christ,
Dear Friends and Benefactors,
So the Third Secret of Fatima was made public after all, by the Vatican, one week ago. Or was it? Amidst all the confusion generated by the Vatican's distraction maneuver of June 26, we will need experts on Fatima (of which I am not one) to disentangle the Truth. And the Society of St. Pius X will before long give its best judgment on the matter, which I do not mean here to pre-empt. However, it seems to me that a few essential guidelines can be laid down already, especially if one knows the third volume of Brother Michael of the Holy Trinity's excellent work "The Whole Truth about Fatima" (Immaculate Heart Publications, 1986, Box 1028, Buffalo, NY 14205, USA).
First and foremost, it seems to me that there is one very clear and simple proof that what the Vatican released on June 26 as being the text of "the Third Secret" is not at all that text of the Third Secret which was sealed in an envelope by Sister Lucy in 1944, was opened by Pope John XXIII in 1959, was eagerly awaited by Catholics all over the world in 1960, but was kept disappointingly hidden by the Vatican at that time and ever since. Here is that proof:
The Third Secret as sealed in an envelope by Sister Lucy and handed over by her to the Church authorities on June 17, 1944, was written on a single sheet of paper. Sister Lucy, who wrote it, said so. Msgr. Venancio, who carried it, said so. Cardinal Ottaviani, who read it, said so (W.T.F., III pp. 481 and 651). On the contrary the June 26 text, as reprinted by the Vatican in Lucy's own handwriting, spreads over four pages.
Therefore the text which on June 26 the Vatican did all it could to make us think is the text of the Third Secret, is at any rate not the text of the crucial Third Secret which Lucy sealed in an envelope and which all true Catholics are waiting for. The real Third Secret is still hidden. What else was to be expected from this Vatican?
Then what is the June 26 text? Let the Fatima experts decide. If it was written down by Sister Lucy on four pages of a notebook handed over with the sealed envelope on June 17, 1944 (W.T.F., III, p. 49), then maybe it can be called part of the Third Secret in a broad sense, but that is certainly not what people usually mean by the expression " the Third Secret", which here also we will use exclusively for the one-page text sealed in the envelope.
Having then clarified our terms, let us give further reasons why the June 26 text is not only different from, but also, at least apparently and for now, rather less interesting than the Third Secret.
Firstly, we know that when Sister Lucy made known in 1942 the first two parts of the Secret, she held back what she called the third part because she said she had not received permission to reveal it (W.T.F., III, p. 35). Even after her diocesan bishop ordered her to write it down, she could not put pen to paper for two months because of something like a diabolical interference. It took an apparition of Our Lady to overcome all the obstacles (pp. 45-48). But what comparable difficulty could Lucy have had in penning the June 26 text of multiple martyrdoms?
Secondly, we know that the Third Secret was framed between two sentences revealed by Lucy in her fourth version of the Second Secret: first comes "In Portugal will be kept always the dogma of the Faith...", then comes the Third Secret, then comes "... in the end my Immaculate Heart will triumph". This means that the Third Secret consists in a prophecy uttered by the Mother of God. But the June 26 text consists, like the first part of the Secret, in a vision revealed by Lucy.
Thirdly, the Third Secret sealed in an envelope by Lucy in 1944 and opened only by Pope John XXIII in 1959, was, as everybody knew, to be made public at the latest in 1960. This was at the request of the Mother of God (W.T.F., III, pp. 469-479) because, said Lucy, by 1960 the prophecy would be clearer. Yet the Vatican authorities, from Pope John XXIII onwards, have kept the text a close secret. But what ever in the June 26 text needed to be so closely hidden for the last 40 years?
Fourthly, over the same 40 years a certain number of high-up churchmen like Cardinals Ottaviani and Ratzinger have notwithstanding been allowed to read the Third Secret. When questioned about it afterwards, their guarded words all nevertheless pointed in the same direction, namely, the Third Secret concerns the Faith. Which makes sense. For how could Lucy have had no problem penning the second part of the Secret with its threat as grave as that of Russia spreading its errors throughout the world, and yet almost have been broken by the penning of the third part of Secret, unless the Third Secret were much graver still? And how could it be that much graver unless, instead of concerning Russia and the world, it concerned the Faith and the Church? But the June 26 text does not concern the Faith. It concerns only an Angel, penance, climbing a hill, martyrdoms, etc..
On the other hand if the Third Secret contains a prophecy of Our Lady that the Catholic churchmen around 1960 will gravely endanger the Faith, does that not perfectly explain, firstly why the pious Sister Lucy could hardly bring herself to write it down, secondly why it fits in between, on the contrary, Portugal keeping the dogma of the Faith and the Immaculate heart in the end triumphing, thirdly why the Vatican churchmen especially in 1960 sought to silence the Third Secret directly condemning the revolutionary Council they were on the brink of launching, and fourthly why the Third Secret directly concerns the Faith?
Thus what we know for certain about the hidden Third Secret does correspond to a dramatic warning from Our Lady to the Conciliar churchmen and their followers, it does not correspond to the June 26 text. It certainly looks as though on June 26, once again, the Vatican authorities kept hidden, as they have done for the last 40 years, the message of Our Lady directly condemning the One World religion of their man-centred Newchurch. Is it wishful thinking to hope that this June 26 evasive action or distraction maneuver will serve merely to rouse Catholics to demand even more the release of the Third Secret? The Mother of God is far mightier than the Devil, but she does need our prayers with which to go before her Son to obtain such a grace.
Meanwhile here are two other versions of the hidden Third Secret, neither of them authoritative but both of them interesting. The first is the reconstruction of the Third Secret's contents by Brother Michael of the Holy Trinity, at the end of his third volume's patient detective work on all the available clues and evidence (W.T.F., III, p. 841):
"While in Portugal the dogma of the Faith will still be kept, in many nations, perhaps throughout the world, the Faith will be lost. The Church's shepherds will fail gravely in their duties of state. Through their fault, consecrated souls will in large numbers let themselves be seduced by pernicious errors spread everywhere. The time will have come for the decisive battle between the Virgin and the Devil. A wave of diabolical disorientation will sweep over the world. Satan will reach up to the topmost height of the Church. He will blind the shepherds' minds and harden their hearts, because God will have left them to their own devices as a punishment for their refusal to obey the requests of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. It will be the great apostasy announced for "the last times", the "False lamb", the "False Prophet" handing the Church over to "the Beast", according to the prophecy of the Apocalypse".
And here is another version of the Third Secret, as supposedly heard by a French priest in Germany in 1994, in the middle of listening to a CD of religious music. At one point the music faded into the background, and he heard a normal (not inner) voice say quite clearly, " The Church will bleed from all her wounds." Then he heard the following:
"A wicked Council will be planned and prepared which will change the face of the Church. Many souls will lose the Faith, confusion will reign everywhere. The sheep will seek in vain for their shepherds. A schism will rend my Son's tunic. It will be the end of the times, announced in Scripture and recalled by me in many places. The abomination of abominations will reach its peak and call down the chastisement announced at La Salette. The arm of my Son that I can no longer hold back, will come down on this world which will have to expiate its crimes. All that one will hear of is wars and revolutions. The elements of nature will be shaken and will strike anguish into the best (most courageous) of men. The Church will bleed from all her wounds. Blessed those who persevere and seek refuge in my Heart, for in the end my Immaculate Heart will triumph..."
After which, all that the priest heard was, "That is the Third Secret of Fatima". The identity of this priest is known, but he prefers to remain unnamed. He is apparently Traditional, without belonging to the Society of St. Pius X or the Fraternity of St. Peter. He is always in a cassock. He is not sedevacantist. He passes for being worthy of belief.
Of course what he says that he heard carries with it no proof that it is the authentic text of the Third Secret. Note however that it corresponds in full to Lucy's anguish, to the Second Secret frame, to the Vatican churchmen's silence and to the centrality of the Faith, as listed above. Note also that it is a text perfectly clear, like the first and second parts of the Fatima Secret, but unlike the text of June 26. Finally, this priest's version of the Third Secret corresponds fully with the real situation of Church and world around us for the last 40 years.
Dear friends, let us pray and do penance. As Our Lady prophetically told the three children of Fatima, our duty of state is, today, penance enough. Just to live like a Catholic maintaining the state of grace in a world decomposing around us becomes daily more heroic. In patience we shall possess our souls, and if we persevere to the end, we shall be saved. Make if at all possible the five first Saturdays---in reparation to the Immaculate Heart of Mary.
Most sincerely yours in Christ,
Freemasonry in the Vatican, anticipation of Third Secret of Fatima
June 7, 2000
Dear Friends and Benefactors,
Interesting pieces of information come out of Rome. No doubt many of them are known to you from other sources where they are more fully and accurately reported than in this letter. Let us give here a composite picture of events with the factors at work today which must govern the details also for tomorrow.
Firstly, when I was in Italy for several days after Easter, I came across a book called "Bugle di sangue in Vaticano", or, "Bloody lies in the Vatican". Cast your minds back two years to early May of 1998. You may remember the media at that time reporting the bloody triple killing, in the Pontifical Swiss Guard's quarters inside the Vatican buildings in Rome, of the Commanding Officer of the Swiss Guard, and his wife, and a young vice-corporal of the same Swiss Guard.
The Pope's spokesman or main officer for the Press, Joaquin Navarro-Valls, immediately gave out, and the world's media followed him in declaring, that the young vice-corporal had in a fit of clinical madness or out of personal jealousy (of a kind in accordance with or against nature - we could take our pick) gunned down his commander and wife, and then turned his gun on himself. With this version of the events coming from the Vatican and the media, the world seemed to be content, and so in the great flow of world news the sensational shedding of blood inside the head-quarters of the Catholic Church soon dropped out of view as a nine- or perhaps three-day wonder.
The story told in "Bugle di sangue" is somewhat different. Inside the Vatican the liberal-liberal organization of Freemasonry is all-powerful, and it has since the 1970's established its own police force inside the Vatican, called the "Corpo della Vigilanza" (Vigilance Brigade), to control happenings around the Pope. Now rises in the 1980's "Opus Dei", a conservative-liberal organization favoured by Pope John Paul II, because he can like liberal principles to be applied in a relatively conservative way. To exploit and consolidate its own influence around the Pope, "Opus Dei" set up in the late 90's one of its members to become Commander of the Swiss Guard, so that the Swiss Guard would become the effective police of the Vatican. For months the Freemasons succeeded in delaying this man's nomination as Commander, but at last on May 4, 1998, his appointment was announced. Within nine hours of that official announcement he lay in a pool of blood with his wife, and a "culprit" conveniently dead, on the floor of his apartment.
The Vatican Secretariat of State wanted the Commander and his wife to be buried with all honors, the young vice-corporal to be treated like a suicide. The previous Swiss Guard Commander, called back in haste to fill provisionally the gap left by his successor's untimely death, would have none of it. He had all three victims buried with equal honours. He knew. He does not talk. Nor do a host of people inside the Vatican talk, although they also know, just like in Dallas after the 1963 murder of J. F. Kennedy. People have a funny way of wishing to live. Freemasonry is powerful. And it is ruthless. And it is in command (humanly speaking) inside the Vatican. That is why out of the Vatican in its present state there is nothing to be expected except world-wide lies and bloody murder. As Archbishop Lefebvre used to say, we do not know the small part of the evil reigning inside this Vatican. And of course the media fall in line, being controlled by the same people as control the Vatican.
This Vatican plays with organizations under its control that seek to defend the Catholic Faith, like a cat plays with mice. Apparently Msgr. Wach, head of the Institute of Christ the King, sent the Institute's seminarians home from its seminary in Gricigliano after Easter, with no date fixed for their return - "for financial reasons". Like putting their money on the Traditional Liturgy?
As for St. Peter's Fraternity, it appears that the Superior General, so "generously re-instated" by the Vatican, as we were told, at their crisis meeting in February, wanted to demote a disloyal District Superior (no names), but was prevented from doing so by the Vatican - because the latter was loyal to Rome? Some "re-instatement"! Nor is Rome accepting any longer the "secret" agreement it accepted in February whereby priests of St. Peter's will not celebrate the New Mass at any other time so long as they may concelebrate it with their diocesan bishop on Maundy Thursday - because so few actually did so this last April 20?
But if you let the fox into the hen-house, how do you expect it not to eat the hens? Just how long will all these conservative Catholics go on blaming Archbishop Lefebvre for not letting the Roman fox into his chicken-coops? How much more evidence do they need? One person in the case of the Swiss Guard murders who at least for a while - and maybe still - would not keep her mouth shut, was the mother of the murdered vice-corporal. But then she is a protestant. What Americans might call the "knee-jerk" obedience of "Catholics" was hugely responsible for Vatican II, and still is for these on-going crimes of the Vatican.
It seems that Archbishop Perl, secretary of the Vatican's "Ecclesia Dei" Pontifical Commission which was designed and created in 1988 to bring "Lefebvrists" back into the "Church", was not pleased by any of the four copies he received of a flyer comparing him to Lewis Carroll's Carpenter who with the Walrus ate up all the petrified oysters. Yet he continues to invite those not yet petrified to take that fatal walk with him! Thus numbers of you saw in last months issue of "Inside the Vatican" the article entitled "Rome's new 'Game Plan': Heal the Lefebvre schism". One has to ask: is the journalist who wrote it (no names) an idiot, or is he (like so many of his profession) a prostitute? The article relates how Archbishop Perl appealed with "openness" and a "warm paternal welcome" for Lefebvrists to "unite" their "living forces" with those of the mainstream Church in order to resist the common enemy, triumphant atheism! Some "change of game plan"! The same mouth that is dripping from its meal of petrified oysters appeals for a meal of pious oysters, and it is supposed to have changed? This Perl is a jewel in the crown of world atheism! At least objectively he is another worldwide liar and bloodless murderer of the Catholic Church.
We come to the most important news items of all coming recently from Rome -- the promises to reveal the so called Third Secret of Fatima. Readers will recall that the Mother of God, after giving to the three little shepherd children of Fatima, Portugal, in July 1917, a terrifying vision of Hell (first Secret), and after giving her famous prophecy of Russia spreading its errors all over the world if her requests were not heeded (second Secret), finally gave to Sister Lucy a message which she was to give to her bishop, and which was to be made known as soon as she died, or in 1960 at the latest, if Sister Lucy was then still alive. This message, known as the Third Secret, was taken out of that bishop's possession by the Vatican in 1957, and it was guarded in Rome. When 1960 came, since Sister Lucy was still alive, the Catholic world awaited with bated breath the revelation of the Third Secret by the Vatican. But the Vatican refused to reveal it. It declared that instead of the Third Secret's having to be made known by 1960, it might be made known from 1960 (lie), a decision depending on the Pope (lie), who, then John XXIII, read the Third Secret and declared that it did not concern his pontificate (lie).
This refusal of Rome to publish the Third Secret is merely one amongst several indications that, in the words of Cardinal Oddi to an Italian newspaper in March of 1990, "The Blessed Virgin was alerting us against apostasy in the Church". It stands to reason that neither John XXIII nor his entourage planning in 1960 their revolution of Vatican II wanted to make known that the Blessed Virgin condemned it. That is why the Third Secret has remained smothered in a Vatican drawer and Vatican lies ever since.
Until May 13, one month ago. Then Pope John Paul II visited Fatima to celebrate there the beatification of Francisco and Jacinta, Sister Lucy's two little companions of 1917, who both died within a few years of the original apparitions. At the end of the Mass of Beatification, the Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, gave an address in which he announced that "the Pope has charged the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith with making public the third part of the Secret, after the preparation of an appropriate commentary". What had happened?
It looks as though the Mother of God reached through to Pope John Paul II. It looks as though, moved by grace at beatifying two of the three Fatima children and/or at recalling his own rescue from assassination on May 13, 1981, a rescue which he attributed to Our Lady of Fatima, he made two personal decisions, both opposed by his Secretariat of State. The first was himself to go to Fatima one month ago for the occasion. The second was to reveal on that occasion the Third Secret.
The Secretariat of State tried but failed to prevent his going. It arrived at a compromise with the Pope over the Third Secret's being published, firstly by the Secretary of State and not the Pope being the one to announce the publication, secondly by that publication being delayed for "the preparation of an appropriate commentary". The announcement's being made by Cardinal Sodano enabled him immediately to start the Vatican's "spin doctoring" and "damage control", in case the Third Secret does finally have to appear. As for the delay in publication, it may enable the Vatican's criminals to stifle the Third Secret once more.
For indeed to begin with the world was told by Vatican spokesman... Joaquin Navarro-Valls... that the Secret would be published "within days" of Cardinal Sodano's announcement on May 13. Then the Vatican promised publication for the end of May. Most recently Cardinal Ratzinger wrote in a May 19 Italian newspaper article, which continued the "spin doctoring", that the Third Secret will be published "at the latest" by mid-June. I do not know about you, dear readers, but I for one will not be holding my breath in a few days' time.
Yet all of these human shenanigans will not stop the Mother of God from achieving her purpose in God's good time. She wishes and she works to save the souls even of her bitterest enemies. If the Third Secret is, by a miracle of hers, finally published in its true text, it will make its own way despite the worst that this Vatican can do. It might even mark the beginning of the end of our 40 years in the desert of the neo-modernist revolution in the Church. That is why the Devil is doing all he can to smother it. Let us have patience. God will of course have the last word.
In the late evening of Ascension Day my mother died in England. She did not die in the Catholic Church. She had free-will, and her mind was strong to the end. But I know that many of you prayed for her, and I wish to thank every single one of you. Now she knows. May God have been able to have mercy upon her soul. How wisely He keeps such secrets from us.
Enclosed is a flyer advertising Seminary tapes, some new, many old. I continually recommend the Doctrinal Sessions on the papal Encyclicals, because here is the ever old, ever new, teaching of the Popes against the errors of the apostasy engulfing us. "The truth is mighty, and will prevail".
Most sincerely yours in the Sacred Heart,
Dear Friends and Benefactors,
Interesting pieces of information come out of Rome. No doubt many of them are known to you from other sources where they are more fully and accurately reported than in this letter. Let us give here a composite picture of events with the factors at work today which must govern the details also for tomorrow.
Firstly, when I was in Italy for several days after Easter, I came across a book called "Bugle di sangue in Vaticano", or, "Bloody lies in the Vatican". Cast your minds back two years to early May of 1998. You may remember the media at that time reporting the bloody triple killing, in the Pontifical Swiss Guard's quarters inside the Vatican buildings in Rome, of the Commanding Officer of the Swiss Guard, and his wife, and a young vice-corporal of the same Swiss Guard.
The Pope's spokesman or main officer for the Press, Joaquin Navarro-Valls, immediately gave out, and the world's media followed him in declaring, that the young vice-corporal had in a fit of clinical madness or out of personal jealousy (of a kind in accordance with or against nature - we could take our pick) gunned down his commander and wife, and then turned his gun on himself. With this version of the events coming from the Vatican and the media, the world seemed to be content, and so in the great flow of world news the sensational shedding of blood inside the head-quarters of the Catholic Church soon dropped out of view as a nine- or perhaps three-day wonder.
The story told in "Bugle di sangue" is somewhat different. Inside the Vatican the liberal-liberal organization of Freemasonry is all-powerful, and it has since the 1970's established its own police force inside the Vatican, called the "Corpo della Vigilanza" (Vigilance Brigade), to control happenings around the Pope. Now rises in the 1980's "Opus Dei", a conservative-liberal organization favoured by Pope John Paul II, because he can like liberal principles to be applied in a relatively conservative way. To exploit and consolidate its own influence around the Pope, "Opus Dei" set up in the late 90's one of its members to become Commander of the Swiss Guard, so that the Swiss Guard would become the effective police of the Vatican. For months the Freemasons succeeded in delaying this man's nomination as Commander, but at last on May 4, 1998, his appointment was announced. Within nine hours of that official announcement he lay in a pool of blood with his wife, and a "culprit" conveniently dead, on the floor of his apartment.
The Vatican Secretariat of State wanted the Commander and his wife to be buried with all honors, the young vice-corporal to be treated like a suicide. The previous Swiss Guard Commander, called back in haste to fill provisionally the gap left by his successor's untimely death, would have none of it. He had all three victims buried with equal honours. He knew. He does not talk. Nor do a host of people inside the Vatican talk, although they also know, just like in Dallas after the 1963 murder of J. F. Kennedy. People have a funny way of wishing to live. Freemasonry is powerful. And it is ruthless. And it is in command (humanly speaking) inside the Vatican. That is why out of the Vatican in its present state there is nothing to be expected except world-wide lies and bloody murder. As Archbishop Lefebvre used to say, we do not know the small part of the evil reigning inside this Vatican. And of course the media fall in line, being controlled by the same people as control the Vatican.
This Vatican plays with organizations under its control that seek to defend the Catholic Faith, like a cat plays with mice. Apparently Msgr. Wach, head of the Institute of Christ the King, sent the Institute's seminarians home from its seminary in Gricigliano after Easter, with no date fixed for their return - "for financial reasons". Like putting their money on the Traditional Liturgy?
As for St. Peter's Fraternity, it appears that the Superior General, so "generously re-instated" by the Vatican, as we were told, at their crisis meeting in February, wanted to demote a disloyal District Superior (no names), but was prevented from doing so by the Vatican - because the latter was loyal to Rome? Some "re-instatement"! Nor is Rome accepting any longer the "secret" agreement it accepted in February whereby priests of St. Peter's will not celebrate the New Mass at any other time so long as they may concelebrate it with their diocesan bishop on Maundy Thursday - because so few actually did so this last April 20?
But if you let the fox into the hen-house, how do you expect it not to eat the hens? Just how long will all these conservative Catholics go on blaming Archbishop Lefebvre for not letting the Roman fox into his chicken-coops? How much more evidence do they need? One person in the case of the Swiss Guard murders who at least for a while - and maybe still - would not keep her mouth shut, was the mother of the murdered vice-corporal. But then she is a protestant. What Americans might call the "knee-jerk" obedience of "Catholics" was hugely responsible for Vatican II, and still is for these on-going crimes of the Vatican.
It seems that Archbishop Perl, secretary of the Vatican's "Ecclesia Dei" Pontifical Commission which was designed and created in 1988 to bring "Lefebvrists" back into the "Church", was not pleased by any of the four copies he received of a flyer comparing him to Lewis Carroll's Carpenter who with the Walrus ate up all the petrified oysters. Yet he continues to invite those not yet petrified to take that fatal walk with him! Thus numbers of you saw in last months issue of "Inside the Vatican" the article entitled "Rome's new 'Game Plan': Heal the Lefebvre schism". One has to ask: is the journalist who wrote it (no names) an idiot, or is he (like so many of his profession) a prostitute? The article relates how Archbishop Perl appealed with "openness" and a "warm paternal welcome" for Lefebvrists to "unite" their "living forces" with those of the mainstream Church in order to resist the common enemy, triumphant atheism! Some "change of game plan"! The same mouth that is dripping from its meal of petrified oysters appeals for a meal of pious oysters, and it is supposed to have changed? This Perl is a jewel in the crown of world atheism! At least objectively he is another worldwide liar and bloodless murderer of the Catholic Church.
We come to the most important news items of all coming recently from Rome -- the promises to reveal the so called Third Secret of Fatima. Readers will recall that the Mother of God, after giving to the three little shepherd children of Fatima, Portugal, in July 1917, a terrifying vision of Hell (first Secret), and after giving her famous prophecy of Russia spreading its errors all over the world if her requests were not heeded (second Secret), finally gave to Sister Lucy a message which she was to give to her bishop, and which was to be made known as soon as she died, or in 1960 at the latest, if Sister Lucy was then still alive. This message, known as the Third Secret, was taken out of that bishop's possession by the Vatican in 1957, and it was guarded in Rome. When 1960 came, since Sister Lucy was still alive, the Catholic world awaited with bated breath the revelation of the Third Secret by the Vatican. But the Vatican refused to reveal it. It declared that instead of the Third Secret's having to be made known by 1960, it might be made known from 1960 (lie), a decision depending on the Pope (lie), who, then John XXIII, read the Third Secret and declared that it did not concern his pontificate (lie).
This refusal of Rome to publish the Third Secret is merely one amongst several indications that, in the words of Cardinal Oddi to an Italian newspaper in March of 1990, "The Blessed Virgin was alerting us against apostasy in the Church". It stands to reason that neither John XXIII nor his entourage planning in 1960 their revolution of Vatican II wanted to make known that the Blessed Virgin condemned it. That is why the Third Secret has remained smothered in a Vatican drawer and Vatican lies ever since.
Until May 13, one month ago. Then Pope John Paul II visited Fatima to celebrate there the beatification of Francisco and Jacinta, Sister Lucy's two little companions of 1917, who both died within a few years of the original apparitions. At the end of the Mass of Beatification, the Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, gave an address in which he announced that "the Pope has charged the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith with making public the third part of the Secret, after the preparation of an appropriate commentary". What had happened?
It looks as though the Mother of God reached through to Pope John Paul II. It looks as though, moved by grace at beatifying two of the three Fatima children and/or at recalling his own rescue from assassination on May 13, 1981, a rescue which he attributed to Our Lady of Fatima, he made two personal decisions, both opposed by his Secretariat of State. The first was himself to go to Fatima one month ago for the occasion. The second was to reveal on that occasion the Third Secret.
The Secretariat of State tried but failed to prevent his going. It arrived at a compromise with the Pope over the Third Secret's being published, firstly by the Secretary of State and not the Pope being the one to announce the publication, secondly by that publication being delayed for "the preparation of an appropriate commentary". The announcement's being made by Cardinal Sodano enabled him immediately to start the Vatican's "spin doctoring" and "damage control", in case the Third Secret does finally have to appear. As for the delay in publication, it may enable the Vatican's criminals to stifle the Third Secret once more.
For indeed to begin with the world was told by Vatican spokesman... Joaquin Navarro-Valls... that the Secret would be published "within days" of Cardinal Sodano's announcement on May 13. Then the Vatican promised publication for the end of May. Most recently Cardinal Ratzinger wrote in a May 19 Italian newspaper article, which continued the "spin doctoring", that the Third Secret will be published "at the latest" by mid-June. I do not know about you, dear readers, but I for one will not be holding my breath in a few days' time.
Yet all of these human shenanigans will not stop the Mother of God from achieving her purpose in God's good time. She wishes and she works to save the souls even of her bitterest enemies. If the Third Secret is, by a miracle of hers, finally published in its true text, it will make its own way despite the worst that this Vatican can do. It might even mark the beginning of the end of our 40 years in the desert of the neo-modernist revolution in the Church. That is why the Devil is doing all he can to smother it. Let us have patience. God will of course have the last word.
In the late evening of Ascension Day my mother died in England. She did not die in the Catholic Church. She had free-will, and her mind was strong to the end. But I know that many of you prayed for her, and I wish to thank every single one of you. Now she knows. May God have been able to have mercy upon her soul. How wisely He keeps such secrets from us.
Enclosed is a flyer advertising Seminary tapes, some new, many old. I continually recommend the Doctrinal Sessions on the papal Encyclicals, because here is the ever old, ever new, teaching of the Popes against the errors of the apostasy engulfing us. "The truth is mighty, and will prevail".
Most sincerely yours in the Sacred Heart,
The Pope's millennial apology
THE POPE'S MILLENNIAL APOLOGY
DEEPLY CONFUSED, DEEPLY CONFUSING
April 2, 2000
Dear Friends and Benefactors,
The March 12 ceremony in Rome, known to many of you from the media, when the Pope apologized for all kinds of past sins of the Catholic Church, is so confusing that it will take a long letter to try to sort out the confusion.
This letter divides into three main sections. Firstly, general principles governing how Catholics should or should not apologize. These principles were hardly respected in the ceremony of March 12. Secondly, the confusing way in which John Paul II and those who think like him express themselves, and why they express themselves in this way. Thirdly, the confusing content of their thoughts, because they are trying to make the Church think like the world, instead of making the world think like the Church.
For easier reading, we will use again the question and answer format.
Q. Firstly, may we get straight exactly what happened in Rome on March 12?
Some time ago the Vatican announced that amongst its plans for the Catholic Church's celebration of this Jubilee Year, there would be a new ceremony in which the Pope with high Church officials would pray to God for pardon for various sins of the Church. This ceremony took place on the first Sunday of this Lent within a High Mass concelebrated by Pope and Cardinals in St. Peter's Basilica, Rome.
In his sermon at this Mass, the Pope said, "As Successor of St. Peter I have asked, in this (Jubilee) year of mercy, for the Church ... to kneel down before God and beg pardon for the past and present sins of her children". Next five Cardinals and two archbishops successively introduced seven categories of sins of Catholics for which the Pope then recited a prayer to God asking for pardon. Each time a cantor and the assembly sang a triple Kyrie eleison and a lamp was lit before a Crucifix. The ceremony concluded with a general prayer by the Pope and with his kissing the crucifix. What interests us here is of course the text of those seven prayers for pardon which specified the supposed seven categories of sins.
SECTION ONE: PRINCIPLES OF CATHOLIC APOLOGY
Q. What is wrong with apologizing? Catholics are decent people. Is it not a decent and honourable thing to recognize one's past mistakes, and to admit them in public?
To apologize is an honourable thing to do, but on three conditions. Firstly, for anybody at all, it must be for a genuine and not imaginary error or sin. Now a number of sins apologized for by the churchmen on March 12 are highly fashionable but very unclear, eg. "anti-semitism", "racism", "sexism". To apologize for them promotes the unclarity, i.e. confusion.
Secondly, for anybody in authority, he must not apologize in such a way as to undermine his own authority, because that authority exists not for his own benefit but - when properly exercised - for the benefit of all beneath that authority. When on March 12 Pope John Paul II implicitly condemned many of his predecessors (for instance when he referred indirectly to their approving of the Inquisition), he implicitly undermined the Papacy and himself. If we need not listen to previous Popes, why should we listen to him?
Thirdly, for any Catholic, he may apologize for human sinfulness in the Church (on the two conditions above), but he absolutely may not apologize for anything divine in the Church, because that is implicitly to criticize or condemn God, which is blasphemy. So a Catholic apologizing for sins of Catholics must be extra careful that nobody can take him to be apologizing for any of the many divine things in the Catholic Church, for instance its being guided down the ages by the Holy Ghost. But anybody listening to the apologies of March 12 could easily think that Church principles and practice have been wrong for centuries.
Q. But the Catholic Church is a human institution full of human beings capable of making human errors, surely all of them matter for apology.
True, the Catholic Church is human, it exists only in humans and these humans God chooses to leave capable of sinning. But the Catholic Church, alone amongst human institutions, is also divine.
Q. Why?
Because the Catholic Church is the institution established amongst men by Our Divine Lord to continue his Incarnation amongst men in its work of saving souls down to the end of the world. As Our Lord was prophet, king and priest, so his Church saves souls by teaching (prophet), governing (king) and sanctifying (priest). And as Our Lord was and is true God, so his Church is truly divine by its infallibility in teaching, by its authority in governing, and by its supernatural power in sanctifying, especially by the seven sacraments.
Q. But all human beings err, and churchmen remain human beings. How can any church be infallible?
It stands to reason that God's own Church, the Catholic Church, must be infallible. For if God creates souls with free will and commands them on pain of eternal damnation (Mk XVI, 16) to make the right use of that free will, how can He not provide them with a source of certain or infallible truth as to how to use that free will rightly? Either there is no God commanding any such thing, or, if there is, then somewhere, and clearly recognizable, there must be an accessible and totally reliable source where I can be sure of finding those truths upon which the eternal salvation or damnation of my soul depends.
Q. But everyone knows how churchmen are always into church politics. How can such men have divine authority in governing?
It stands to reason, again, that God's own Church nobody else's must be endowed with full authority to command those actions upon which salvation or damnation depends. The crowds in our Lord's time noticed how he taught them "as one having power, and not as the scribes and pharisees" (Mt. VII, 29). How often (especially in St. John's Gospel) Our Lord told the Jews not just to listen to him as a man, but to believe his miracles and to accept that he was speaking on behalf of his Father in heaven. Similarly the Catholic Church must speak the truth of God and with the authority of God. If it pretends to souls that it is speaking with merely human authority, it is betraying those souls.
Q. Then a divine authority perhaps, but how can the merely human beings who make up the Church possess a divine power to sanctify?
They do not possess it by themselves, because sanctity is of God, so sanctification must come from God. But God gives to His Catholic Church the seven sacraments which the churchmen (in most cases) must administer. In these sacraments is His own sanctifying grace, and in the Holy Eucharist in particular is, mysteriously, God Himself, Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity, truly and really and substantially present. Men administer. God sanctifies, but usually through men.
Q. If the Catholic Church is as divine as you say it is, then how can it also be human?
Just as Our Lord was true God and true man, and to deny either truth leads into great errors, so the Catholic Church is not only divine in its origin, design, institution, mission and endowments as said above, but also it is truly human, and to deny either aspect of the Church is to expose oneself to serious danger of error. The Church is truly human because it consists in a society of men (it is nowhere to be found where there are no men), and these men, even those singled out by God and called to be leaders in his Church, remain sinners with free will and sinful tendencies until the day they die. We think of Peter, the first Pope, whom Our Lord once had to call "Satan" (Mt. XVI, 23), who denied his Master three times (Mt. XXVI, 74), and who had to be, even when Pope, corrected by his brother Paul on a point of major importance for the future of the Church (Gal. II, 1114).
Q But if the Catholic Church is so laden with divine things as you say, how can God have left these in such sinful hands?
It is a mystery, but that is what God chose to do. However, ask yourself: if Our Lord had not been truly human, could he have drawn men to follow him as he did? If the Church was administered by angels and not by men, would men feel that such a Church was for them? God works through and with the good churchmen whom He rewards, He works through and around the bad churchmen who do not escape His punishment.
Q. Divine and human, human and divine, it is all rather confusing!
In the Catholic Church as in Our Lord, the human and the divine are never separate but they are always distinct. And in considering Our Lord or his Church, to separate the divine and the human, or not correctly to distinguish between them, leads likewise into error. If I do not distinguish clearly, either I am liable to credit human error with divine infallibility, like many Catholics at present following blindly the errors of neo-modernist Rome, or I risk dismissing the divine institution together with its human sinfulness, as one may think sedevacantists do who say these liberal popes are too sinful to be popes. Or I can commit both errors at once! (Sedevacantists are closer than they think to liberals!)
Q. How does all of this apply to the March 12 apologizing in Rome?
First and foremost, it is clear as clear can be to anybody who has the Catholic Faith that if I undertake to apologize for past errors of the Church, I cannot possibly apologize for anything which is divine in the Church, I can only be apologizing for what is human and sinful, like St. Peter's mistake, mentioned above, of showing too much respect for the religion of the Synagogue after it had perished with Our Lord's death upon the Cross.
Q. But on March 12 the Pope seemed to be apologizing for Catholics having too little respect for the Jews and their Covenant, i.e. the religion of the Synagogue!
Exactly. Instead of drawing the line between human sinfulness and the divine Catholic Church which condemns all other religions, John Paul II gives the impression of drawing the line between the old "judgmental" Church needing to be apologized for, and the postconciliar Newchurch which tolerates and greets all other religions. Put simply, Catholics always used to say, "Eternal (which we know as old) is good, new is bad". John Paul II's apology seems to say "That old Catholic thing is bad, the new is good". He is turning the Church upside down.
SECTION TWO: THE MODE OF EXPRESSION OF THE APOLOGY
Q. But why do you say John Paul II "gives the impression of drawing the line"? Did not the media quite clearly understand what he meant?
We hit a major problem which is best tackled before we look at the Pope's own words. They are nearly always ambiguous, i.e. capable of meaning two things at once.
Q. Why?
Because John Paul II believes not only in the Newchurch, he ALSO believes in the "old" Church.
Q.But that is impossible! The Newchurch, as you just said, turns everything in the "old" Church upside down! The two contradict one another at every point!
When men want to have their cake and eat it, they have a remarkable way of being able to live in contradiction. When they want to dance with the Devil and be on good terms with God, there are remarkable things they can do with their own minds. Like Paul VI, John Paul II wants to be both modern AND Catholic. He lives in between Catholicism and modernity, so he breathes ambiguity and contradiction, so he by instinct finds ambiguous words to express what he lives and breathes.
Q. That is ridiculous! How can anything ambiguous be Catholic? Does not the Lord God say he hates a double tongue?
Indeed He does (Prov. VIII, 13). But try arguing from the texts we are going to argue from that the Pope is turning the church upside down, and you will find that “conservative” Catholics, for instance, to defend their Pope, will nearly always be able to find a Catholic escape hatch in his words, so that these can be given a Catholic meaning.
Q. Well, a Catholic meaning is certainly not what the media found in his words. These may contain escape-hatches, but the whole drift of their meaning is modern.
John Paul II instinctively and deliberately chooses words both defendable by Conservatives and pleasing to modern liberals. Instinctively, because he himself lives a double life and breathes it. Deliberately, because he wants the whole Church to get modern without breaking with its roots, as he sees it.
Q. What you say is hair-raising! Can you give some examples?
Let us start with John Paul's own words in his sermon of March 12, just preceding the ceremony of apology. He said, for instance, "We beg pardon (1) for the divisions that have arisen amongst Christians, (2) for the resort to violence by some Christians in the service of truth, and (3) for the attitudes of distrust and hostility sometimes shown towards followers of other religions".
(1) When he begs pardon “for divisions”; does he mean, with the mind of the Church, any sins of Catholics contributing to those divisions, or does he mean, with the Newchurch, that all those movements breaking away from the Catholic Church, like Orthodoxy and Protestantism, should never have been condemned? We fear he means the second, arguing but he avoids clearly saying so.
(2) When he mentions "the resort to violence in the Pope is turning the Church upside down, and you service of truth", does he mean, with the mind of the Church, any sins of Christians wrongfully resorting to violence to serve truth, or is he expressing the mind of the Newchurch, namely the liberal principle whereby any and all resort to force in the service of truth is wrong? Everything points to him meaning the second, but putting in the word "some" enables him still to be taken as saying the first.
(3) When he refers to "the attitudes of distrust and hostility sometimes shown towards followers of other religions", does he mean, with the mind of the Church, blameworthy acts of distrust and hostility, or does he mean, with the Newchurch and against all common sense, that centuries-old enemies of the Church are really nice people and are never to be distrusted? We fear he means the second, but the "sometimes" serves as an escape-hatch to allow him still just to be interpreted as meaning the first.
Q. In context, don't these words of John Paul II have to be stretched to be pulled back to a Catholic meaning?
Yes, indeed, the whole drift and push of his words is towards the Newchurch which was likewise implicit in the documents of Vatican II. But try telling these liberals that they are not Catholic, and they can nearly always find that escapehatch in the words to get back to a Catholic meaning, because they put the escapehatches there deliberately.
Q. In plain English that is called duplicity! Do these liberals realize how twofaced they are being?
God knows whether they realize it, but in many cases one may think they do not, because, bathed in the modern world, many of them are sincerely persuaded that Catholicism needs modernizing, only the modernizing must go easy on the old religion which was good in its day and still has something to offer.
Q. But what you call "the old religion" directly contradicts the Newchurch!
That is what liberal Catholics like Paul VI or John Paul II do not see, or, do not want to see. Either way, they are blind.
Q. But could there be anything more destructive of the true Church than Church leaders who mean well by "the old religion", but, because they do not understand it, do all they can to re-mould it?
You are right. Archbishop Lefebvre used to say there can be nothing worse for the Church than a liberal on the Seat of Peter. Had Pilate hated Christ, he would have made him suffer less by condemning him straightaway to be crucified. It was because Pilate was half for Christ and tried half-heartedly to spare him, that in the event he subjected Christ to the extra sufferings of Herod's court, Barabbas, the scourging at the pillar and the crowning with thorns. "Well-meaning" liberals wreak havoc! Yet they do "mean well", and you will get nowhere with many Conciliar Catholics if you deny that John Paul II means well by the old religion. Then, I would rather nobody ever "meant well" by me in that way! Correct. But it was necessary before looking at the text itself of the apologizing to see how it reaches forward to the destruction of the Church even while it can be stretched backward by those denying the destruction.
SECTION THREE: THE CONTENT OF THE APOLOGY
Q. What did the text consist in?
On March 12 in Rome the Pope's sermon was followed by the "Universal Prayer" of "Confession of Sins and Asking for Forgiveness"; in which between a brief introduction and conclusion by the Pope, five Cardinals and two archbishops introduced seven categories of sins for which they and the Pope then prayed for pardon.
Q. What was the first category?
"Sins in general". It was a general prayer for `purification of memory'; meaning presumably that Catholics should clean out of their minds errors of the past, or "disobedience" to God which "contradicts the faith we profess and the Holy Gospel". What disobedience? What Gospel? Not yet specified.
Q. What was the second category?
"Sins committed in the service of truth". The Pope prayed here for the "firm knowledge that truth can prevail only in virtue of truth itself". These words clearly suggest the false liberal principle that force used in the defence of truth is always wrong. On the contrary St. Louis of France, speaking asking, said that in dealing with a heretic, you argue, argue, argue with him but if he remains obstinate, you run him through with a sword. This is because there is only one Heaven and only one Truth by which to get to that Heaven, so heretics who insist on corrupting that Truth are criminals murdering the eternal life of souls, whereas by comparison even serial murderers in this life are merely shortening the brief life of bodies here below. There is no comparison.
If I believe in one Heaven and one Truth, the need for the civil authority sometimes to use force for instance on heretics is easy to understand. But if I have any doubt in one Heaven or one Truth, then this life becomes all, and force serving truth becomes incomprehensible (as does capital punishment. It appears that John Paul II is now lighting up the Coliseum to celebrate each nation renouncing capital punishment! ).
Q. Then does he believe in one Heaven and one Truth?
By his actions, no. This is indicated also by his prayer for pardon for the third category of sins "which have harmed the unity of the Body of Christ". Here he said amongst other things, "Believers have opposed one another, becoming divided and have mutually condemned one another and fought against one another”.
Q. What is wrong with that?
If we consider the Catholic-Orthodox split finalized in 1054, and the CatholicProtestant split of the 16th century and since, it is obvious that the Catholic churchmen on these occasions have shown various human weaknesses in their dealings with those breaking away from the Catholic Church, but there is no comparison - unless one does not believe in Truth - between the Catholics condemning error and the nonCatholics condemning Truth! When the Orthodox deny papal primacy, they are wrong. When Protestants deny the Real Presence, they are wrong. The mutual condemnations are in no way equivalent, as John Paul II's silence on their difference implies. By slurring the Catholics in the way that he does, he also slurs the divine doctrine. Any Catholic apologizing for Catholics' human sins must in no way allow the slur to pass over to the divine doctrine, to Catholic faith and morals.
Q. Does this Pope have an inkling of the absolute ness of Catholic Truth?
That is the question. In the fourth category, "Sins committed against the People of Israel"; he says we are saddened by all those who have caused Jews to suffer, and "we wish to commit ourselves to genuine brotherhood with the people of the Covenant". But firstly, Catholics are the people of the New and Eternal Covenant, which did away with the Old Testament or Covenant made on Mount Sinai between God and the Israelites, as substance replaces shadow (Heb. X, 1). The Jews are no longer the people of a valid Covenant, in fact any religious practice of their dead covenant, because it looks forward to the Messiah coming, has been, ever since the Messiah came, mortal sin, at least objectively.
And secondly, down 2,000 years Jews have repeatedly sought to undermine the Catholic Church and to take Christ out of Christendom (leaving only endom or enddoom!). In praying to commit the Church to "genuine brotherhood" with these people, does the Pope take into account this lesson of two millennia? He makes no mention of it in his prayer for pardon.
Q. Isn't it against all common sense to want to make friends with your enemies?
Yes, unless you are passing over to join the enemy ...
Q. Does this Pope know what he is doing?
One wonders. One may think not. One may think he is, in Sister Lucy of Fatima's description of modern churchmen, "diabolically disoriented". One may think he means to serve the Church but is hopelessly - or willfully - confused as to how to do so. God knows.
Q. After the famous sin of "anti-semitism", what next?
Racism! "Sins committed in actions against love, peace, the rights of peoples, and respect for cultures and religions". Here the Pope said, "Christians have often violated the rights of ethnic groups and peoples, and shown contempt for their cultures and religious traditions". But how did mankind treat, for instance, black Africa before the Catholic missionaries went inland? As a slavepool! Any "racist" sins of Catholics pale in comparison with what Mother Church, i.e. Catholics, have done for Africans and for all races. As for despising ethnic cultures, are we to suppose that before the Spaniards arrived the weaker peoples enjoyed being humansacrificed by the culture of the ethnic Aztecs? Where would John Paul II himself be if Catholic missionaries had never gone into pagan Poland those many years ago and destroyed its idolatry?
Q. And I suppose after "antisemitism" and "racism" he apologises for "sexism"?
How did you guess? The sixth category is "Sins against the Dignity of Women and the Unity of the Human Race". The Pope said here that "At times the equality of your (i.e. God's) sons and daughters has not been acknowledged", because women are "all too often humiliated and pushed to one side". But again, what institution on earth can remotely compare with the Catholic Church for the true (not false) honour and glory it gives to womanhood through, especially, the Blessed Virgin Mary but also through all the women Saints? The Catholic Church alone raised up woman to the level of Mary from the level of Eve to which she otherwise necessarily falls and is today again, according as the Church is despised, falling.
Q. But the Pope no doubt thinks he is promoting women by thus high-lighting the "sexism" of "some" Catholics.
But is he accusing human sins or Church doctrine? He is certainly trying to make Church doctrine fit the crazy modern notions of "gender equality". Of course man and woman are equal before God and eternity, which is all that really matters, but they are not equal in this life where even before Adam and Eve fell, Adam was to be the head and Eve as close as a rib to his heart. Modern man desperately needs to be retaught, not untaught, the difference between the sexes.
Q. What was the Pope's last category of sins to beg pardon for?
"Sins in relation to the fundamental rights of the person". The Pope accuses Christians of having often not recognized Christ in "the hungry, thirsty, naked, persecuted and imprisoned" and in the unborn. But who has taught mankind to look after all these "little ones so dear to God", if not the Catholic Church, i.e. Catholics? The track record of Catholics in creating the very notion of human rights (except insofar as these defy God) is, thanks to the Church, second to none. Instead of thinking like a child of the Church, proud of her incomparable glory, the Pope is seeking to adapt to the mentality of the world which perversely blames the Church for all sorts of fabricated but fashionable sins, like antisemitism, racism, sexism, etc.
Q. What is Catholic doctrine on these questions?
Ever since Eve, God has meant men to lead women (Gen. III, 16). Ever since Noah, the sons of Japhet, as a broad rule leaving ample room for exceptions, are to lead the sons of Cham and to occupy the tents of Sem (Gen. IX, 27). Sons of Sem, Semites, set up the Catholic Church, God bless them eternally, but it is nearly all Gentiles (sons of Japhet) who came in after that beginning and for two thousand years built up the Church all over the world. The problem of today's world is not that white gentile males are leading it, but that they are not leading it in the Catholic Faith as they are meant to be doing, because they have lost their Faith, and as a just punishment for their apostasy they are being scourged by the uprising of the nonwhites, non-Gentiles and nonmales whom they have betrayed.
Q. Do you realize you are not being very "politically correct"?
Political correctness is for imbeciles. For the Catholic churchmen to be trying to make the Church "politically correct" is a disaster of the first magnitude. The world will love them briefly for doing so, but that love will soon turn to contempt. Possibly the Pope is already disappointed with the apparently low turnout for his unprecedented apologizing. The Catholic salt that loses its savour is soon trampled upon.
Q. Does this Pope have the Catholic Faith?
He seems sure that he does. God knows. But Jesus Christ is certainly not for him the Truth that condemns all errors. For him, Jesus Christ's Church is merely the most valid amongst all other more or less valid religions. If the Pope does believe in the Catholic Faith, he does not understand what he believes.
Q. Is he then really Pope?
The scandal of something like his March 12 apologizing is so great that one can be tempted to ask such a question. However, this "apology" is merely unfolding the evil already folded up inside Vatican II 35 years ago. Archbishop Lefebvre knew all about it back then (see his book "I Accuse the Council"), but he never said these recent Popes were not real popes, he always said they were liberals. By his fruits in this crisis, his judgment is the most reliable.
Q. How can I grasp liberalism in depth?
Through the Popes' Encyclicals from the early 1800's through to the 1950's. For an introduction to these Encyclicals, get audio - or video - tapes of this Seminary's Doctrinal Sessions on the Encyclicals, especially the 1996 Session. Telephone (816) 5312448 in the USA for details.
Q. How will Mother Church get out of this incredible problem?
By the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary. What the Church needs is a Pope who will stand up to the modern world and say, as nicely as you like, "You are all of you liars and you are on the way to Hell". "We will kill you for saying so!" "Kill me, but until you change your ways, I can say nothing else". And if only there were enough such Popes, one after another, to let themselves be killed for the Truth, at last the Truth would prevail.
That was how the Catholic Church was built in the first place, by a long series of martyr Popes. That is how it must be rebuilt today, and if anyone reasonably argues that the state of mankind presently makes such a thing impossible, then there remains only a Chastisement to straighten out mankind.
So let us be prepared for hours darker yet before the dawn, and meanwhile, as Our Lord tells us to do, let us "possess our souls in patience" (Lk. XXI, 19). And let us, as Our Lady told the children at Fatima to do, pray for the Pope, and for all the misguided churchmen, in Rome especially.
Dear Readers, spring is coming again, and the prospect of summer. God does not change, and He continues to be good to us.
Most sincerely yours in Our Lord,
DEEPLY CONFUSED, DEEPLY CONFUSING
April 2, 2000
Dear Friends and Benefactors,
The March 12 ceremony in Rome, known to many of you from the media, when the Pope apologized for all kinds of past sins of the Catholic Church, is so confusing that it will take a long letter to try to sort out the confusion.
This letter divides into three main sections. Firstly, general principles governing how Catholics should or should not apologize. These principles were hardly respected in the ceremony of March 12. Secondly, the confusing way in which John Paul II and those who think like him express themselves, and why they express themselves in this way. Thirdly, the confusing content of their thoughts, because they are trying to make the Church think like the world, instead of making the world think like the Church.
For easier reading, we will use again the question and answer format.
Q. Firstly, may we get straight exactly what happened in Rome on March 12?
Some time ago the Vatican announced that amongst its plans for the Catholic Church's celebration of this Jubilee Year, there would be a new ceremony in which the Pope with high Church officials would pray to God for pardon for various sins of the Church. This ceremony took place on the first Sunday of this Lent within a High Mass concelebrated by Pope and Cardinals in St. Peter's Basilica, Rome.
In his sermon at this Mass, the Pope said, "As Successor of St. Peter I have asked, in this (Jubilee) year of mercy, for the Church ... to kneel down before God and beg pardon for the past and present sins of her children". Next five Cardinals and two archbishops successively introduced seven categories of sins of Catholics for which the Pope then recited a prayer to God asking for pardon. Each time a cantor and the assembly sang a triple Kyrie eleison and a lamp was lit before a Crucifix. The ceremony concluded with a general prayer by the Pope and with his kissing the crucifix. What interests us here is of course the text of those seven prayers for pardon which specified the supposed seven categories of sins.
SECTION ONE: PRINCIPLES OF CATHOLIC APOLOGY
Q. What is wrong with apologizing? Catholics are decent people. Is it not a decent and honourable thing to recognize one's past mistakes, and to admit them in public?
To apologize is an honourable thing to do, but on three conditions. Firstly, for anybody at all, it must be for a genuine and not imaginary error or sin. Now a number of sins apologized for by the churchmen on March 12 are highly fashionable but very unclear, eg. "anti-semitism", "racism", "sexism". To apologize for them promotes the unclarity, i.e. confusion.
Secondly, for anybody in authority, he must not apologize in such a way as to undermine his own authority, because that authority exists not for his own benefit but - when properly exercised - for the benefit of all beneath that authority. When on March 12 Pope John Paul II implicitly condemned many of his predecessors (for instance when he referred indirectly to their approving of the Inquisition), he implicitly undermined the Papacy and himself. If we need not listen to previous Popes, why should we listen to him?
Thirdly, for any Catholic, he may apologize for human sinfulness in the Church (on the two conditions above), but he absolutely may not apologize for anything divine in the Church, because that is implicitly to criticize or condemn God, which is blasphemy. So a Catholic apologizing for sins of Catholics must be extra careful that nobody can take him to be apologizing for any of the many divine things in the Catholic Church, for instance its being guided down the ages by the Holy Ghost. But anybody listening to the apologies of March 12 could easily think that Church principles and practice have been wrong for centuries.
Q. But the Catholic Church is a human institution full of human beings capable of making human errors, surely all of them matter for apology.
True, the Catholic Church is human, it exists only in humans and these humans God chooses to leave capable of sinning. But the Catholic Church, alone amongst human institutions, is also divine.
Q. Why?
Because the Catholic Church is the institution established amongst men by Our Divine Lord to continue his Incarnation amongst men in its work of saving souls down to the end of the world. As Our Lord was prophet, king and priest, so his Church saves souls by teaching (prophet), governing (king) and sanctifying (priest). And as Our Lord was and is true God, so his Church is truly divine by its infallibility in teaching, by its authority in governing, and by its supernatural power in sanctifying, especially by the seven sacraments.
Q. But all human beings err, and churchmen remain human beings. How can any church be infallible?
It stands to reason that God's own Church, the Catholic Church, must be infallible. For if God creates souls with free will and commands them on pain of eternal damnation (Mk XVI, 16) to make the right use of that free will, how can He not provide them with a source of certain or infallible truth as to how to use that free will rightly? Either there is no God commanding any such thing, or, if there is, then somewhere, and clearly recognizable, there must be an accessible and totally reliable source where I can be sure of finding those truths upon which the eternal salvation or damnation of my soul depends.
Q. But everyone knows how churchmen are always into church politics. How can such men have divine authority in governing?
It stands to reason, again, that God's own Church nobody else's must be endowed with full authority to command those actions upon which salvation or damnation depends. The crowds in our Lord's time noticed how he taught them "as one having power, and not as the scribes and pharisees" (Mt. VII, 29). How often (especially in St. John's Gospel) Our Lord told the Jews not just to listen to him as a man, but to believe his miracles and to accept that he was speaking on behalf of his Father in heaven. Similarly the Catholic Church must speak the truth of God and with the authority of God. If it pretends to souls that it is speaking with merely human authority, it is betraying those souls.
Q. Then a divine authority perhaps, but how can the merely human beings who make up the Church possess a divine power to sanctify?
They do not possess it by themselves, because sanctity is of God, so sanctification must come from God. But God gives to His Catholic Church the seven sacraments which the churchmen (in most cases) must administer. In these sacraments is His own sanctifying grace, and in the Holy Eucharist in particular is, mysteriously, God Himself, Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity, truly and really and substantially present. Men administer. God sanctifies, but usually through men.
Q. If the Catholic Church is as divine as you say it is, then how can it also be human?
Just as Our Lord was true God and true man, and to deny either truth leads into great errors, so the Catholic Church is not only divine in its origin, design, institution, mission and endowments as said above, but also it is truly human, and to deny either aspect of the Church is to expose oneself to serious danger of error. The Church is truly human because it consists in a society of men (it is nowhere to be found where there are no men), and these men, even those singled out by God and called to be leaders in his Church, remain sinners with free will and sinful tendencies until the day they die. We think of Peter, the first Pope, whom Our Lord once had to call "Satan" (Mt. XVI, 23), who denied his Master three times (Mt. XXVI, 74), and who had to be, even when Pope, corrected by his brother Paul on a point of major importance for the future of the Church (Gal. II, 1114).
Q But if the Catholic Church is so laden with divine things as you say, how can God have left these in such sinful hands?
It is a mystery, but that is what God chose to do. However, ask yourself: if Our Lord had not been truly human, could he have drawn men to follow him as he did? If the Church was administered by angels and not by men, would men feel that such a Church was for them? God works through and with the good churchmen whom He rewards, He works through and around the bad churchmen who do not escape His punishment.
Q. Divine and human, human and divine, it is all rather confusing!
In the Catholic Church as in Our Lord, the human and the divine are never separate but they are always distinct. And in considering Our Lord or his Church, to separate the divine and the human, or not correctly to distinguish between them, leads likewise into error. If I do not distinguish clearly, either I am liable to credit human error with divine infallibility, like many Catholics at present following blindly the errors of neo-modernist Rome, or I risk dismissing the divine institution together with its human sinfulness, as one may think sedevacantists do who say these liberal popes are too sinful to be popes. Or I can commit both errors at once! (Sedevacantists are closer than they think to liberals!)
Q. How does all of this apply to the March 12 apologizing in Rome?
First and foremost, it is clear as clear can be to anybody who has the Catholic Faith that if I undertake to apologize for past errors of the Church, I cannot possibly apologize for anything which is divine in the Church, I can only be apologizing for what is human and sinful, like St. Peter's mistake, mentioned above, of showing too much respect for the religion of the Synagogue after it had perished with Our Lord's death upon the Cross.
Q. But on March 12 the Pope seemed to be apologizing for Catholics having too little respect for the Jews and their Covenant, i.e. the religion of the Synagogue!
Exactly. Instead of drawing the line between human sinfulness and the divine Catholic Church which condemns all other religions, John Paul II gives the impression of drawing the line between the old "judgmental" Church needing to be apologized for, and the postconciliar Newchurch which tolerates and greets all other religions. Put simply, Catholics always used to say, "Eternal (which we know as old) is good, new is bad". John Paul II's apology seems to say "That old Catholic thing is bad, the new is good". He is turning the Church upside down.
SECTION TWO: THE MODE OF EXPRESSION OF THE APOLOGY
Q. But why do you say John Paul II "gives the impression of drawing the line"? Did not the media quite clearly understand what he meant?
We hit a major problem which is best tackled before we look at the Pope's own words. They are nearly always ambiguous, i.e. capable of meaning two things at once.
Q. Why?
Because John Paul II believes not only in the Newchurch, he ALSO believes in the "old" Church.
Q.But that is impossible! The Newchurch, as you just said, turns everything in the "old" Church upside down! The two contradict one another at every point!
When men want to have their cake and eat it, they have a remarkable way of being able to live in contradiction. When they want to dance with the Devil and be on good terms with God, there are remarkable things they can do with their own minds. Like Paul VI, John Paul II wants to be both modern AND Catholic. He lives in between Catholicism and modernity, so he breathes ambiguity and contradiction, so he by instinct finds ambiguous words to express what he lives and breathes.
Q. That is ridiculous! How can anything ambiguous be Catholic? Does not the Lord God say he hates a double tongue?
Indeed He does (Prov. VIII, 13). But try arguing from the texts we are going to argue from that the Pope is turning the church upside down, and you will find that “conservative” Catholics, for instance, to defend their Pope, will nearly always be able to find a Catholic escape hatch in his words, so that these can be given a Catholic meaning.
Q. Well, a Catholic meaning is certainly not what the media found in his words. These may contain escape-hatches, but the whole drift of their meaning is modern.
John Paul II instinctively and deliberately chooses words both defendable by Conservatives and pleasing to modern liberals. Instinctively, because he himself lives a double life and breathes it. Deliberately, because he wants the whole Church to get modern without breaking with its roots, as he sees it.
Q. What you say is hair-raising! Can you give some examples?
Let us start with John Paul's own words in his sermon of March 12, just preceding the ceremony of apology. He said, for instance, "We beg pardon (1) for the divisions that have arisen amongst Christians, (2) for the resort to violence by some Christians in the service of truth, and (3) for the attitudes of distrust and hostility sometimes shown towards followers of other religions".
(1) When he begs pardon “for divisions”; does he mean, with the mind of the Church, any sins of Catholics contributing to those divisions, or does he mean, with the Newchurch, that all those movements breaking away from the Catholic Church, like Orthodoxy and Protestantism, should never have been condemned? We fear he means the second, arguing but he avoids clearly saying so.
(2) When he mentions "the resort to violence in the Pope is turning the Church upside down, and you service of truth", does he mean, with the mind of the Church, any sins of Christians wrongfully resorting to violence to serve truth, or is he expressing the mind of the Newchurch, namely the liberal principle whereby any and all resort to force in the service of truth is wrong? Everything points to him meaning the second, but putting in the word "some" enables him still to be taken as saying the first.
(3) When he refers to "the attitudes of distrust and hostility sometimes shown towards followers of other religions", does he mean, with the mind of the Church, blameworthy acts of distrust and hostility, or does he mean, with the Newchurch and against all common sense, that centuries-old enemies of the Church are really nice people and are never to be distrusted? We fear he means the second, but the "sometimes" serves as an escape-hatch to allow him still just to be interpreted as meaning the first.
Q. In context, don't these words of John Paul II have to be stretched to be pulled back to a Catholic meaning?
Yes, indeed, the whole drift and push of his words is towards the Newchurch which was likewise implicit in the documents of Vatican II. But try telling these liberals that they are not Catholic, and they can nearly always find that escapehatch in the words to get back to a Catholic meaning, because they put the escapehatches there deliberately.
Q. In plain English that is called duplicity! Do these liberals realize how twofaced they are being?
God knows whether they realize it, but in many cases one may think they do not, because, bathed in the modern world, many of them are sincerely persuaded that Catholicism needs modernizing, only the modernizing must go easy on the old religion which was good in its day and still has something to offer.
Q. But what you call "the old religion" directly contradicts the Newchurch!
That is what liberal Catholics like Paul VI or John Paul II do not see, or, do not want to see. Either way, they are blind.
Q. But could there be anything more destructive of the true Church than Church leaders who mean well by "the old religion", but, because they do not understand it, do all they can to re-mould it?
You are right. Archbishop Lefebvre used to say there can be nothing worse for the Church than a liberal on the Seat of Peter. Had Pilate hated Christ, he would have made him suffer less by condemning him straightaway to be crucified. It was because Pilate was half for Christ and tried half-heartedly to spare him, that in the event he subjected Christ to the extra sufferings of Herod's court, Barabbas, the scourging at the pillar and the crowning with thorns. "Well-meaning" liberals wreak havoc! Yet they do "mean well", and you will get nowhere with many Conciliar Catholics if you deny that John Paul II means well by the old religion. Then, I would rather nobody ever "meant well" by me in that way! Correct. But it was necessary before looking at the text itself of the apologizing to see how it reaches forward to the destruction of the Church even while it can be stretched backward by those denying the destruction.
SECTION THREE: THE CONTENT OF THE APOLOGY
Q. What did the text consist in?
On March 12 in Rome the Pope's sermon was followed by the "Universal Prayer" of "Confession of Sins and Asking for Forgiveness"; in which between a brief introduction and conclusion by the Pope, five Cardinals and two archbishops introduced seven categories of sins for which they and the Pope then prayed for pardon.
Q. What was the first category?
"Sins in general". It was a general prayer for `purification of memory'; meaning presumably that Catholics should clean out of their minds errors of the past, or "disobedience" to God which "contradicts the faith we profess and the Holy Gospel". What disobedience? What Gospel? Not yet specified.
Q. What was the second category?
"Sins committed in the service of truth". The Pope prayed here for the "firm knowledge that truth can prevail only in virtue of truth itself". These words clearly suggest the false liberal principle that force used in the defence of truth is always wrong. On the contrary St. Louis of France, speaking asking, said that in dealing with a heretic, you argue, argue, argue with him but if he remains obstinate, you run him through with a sword. This is because there is only one Heaven and only one Truth by which to get to that Heaven, so heretics who insist on corrupting that Truth are criminals murdering the eternal life of souls, whereas by comparison even serial murderers in this life are merely shortening the brief life of bodies here below. There is no comparison.
If I believe in one Heaven and one Truth, the need for the civil authority sometimes to use force for instance on heretics is easy to understand. But if I have any doubt in one Heaven or one Truth, then this life becomes all, and force serving truth becomes incomprehensible (as does capital punishment. It appears that John Paul II is now lighting up the Coliseum to celebrate each nation renouncing capital punishment! ).
Q. Then does he believe in one Heaven and one Truth?
By his actions, no. This is indicated also by his prayer for pardon for the third category of sins "which have harmed the unity of the Body of Christ". Here he said amongst other things, "Believers have opposed one another, becoming divided and have mutually condemned one another and fought against one another”.
Q. What is wrong with that?
If we consider the Catholic-Orthodox split finalized in 1054, and the CatholicProtestant split of the 16th century and since, it is obvious that the Catholic churchmen on these occasions have shown various human weaknesses in their dealings with those breaking away from the Catholic Church, but there is no comparison - unless one does not believe in Truth - between the Catholics condemning error and the nonCatholics condemning Truth! When the Orthodox deny papal primacy, they are wrong. When Protestants deny the Real Presence, they are wrong. The mutual condemnations are in no way equivalent, as John Paul II's silence on their difference implies. By slurring the Catholics in the way that he does, he also slurs the divine doctrine. Any Catholic apologizing for Catholics' human sins must in no way allow the slur to pass over to the divine doctrine, to Catholic faith and morals.
Q. Does this Pope have an inkling of the absolute ness of Catholic Truth?
That is the question. In the fourth category, "Sins committed against the People of Israel"; he says we are saddened by all those who have caused Jews to suffer, and "we wish to commit ourselves to genuine brotherhood with the people of the Covenant". But firstly, Catholics are the people of the New and Eternal Covenant, which did away with the Old Testament or Covenant made on Mount Sinai between God and the Israelites, as substance replaces shadow (Heb. X, 1). The Jews are no longer the people of a valid Covenant, in fact any religious practice of their dead covenant, because it looks forward to the Messiah coming, has been, ever since the Messiah came, mortal sin, at least objectively.
And secondly, down 2,000 years Jews have repeatedly sought to undermine the Catholic Church and to take Christ out of Christendom (leaving only endom or enddoom!). In praying to commit the Church to "genuine brotherhood" with these people, does the Pope take into account this lesson of two millennia? He makes no mention of it in his prayer for pardon.
Q. Isn't it against all common sense to want to make friends with your enemies?
Yes, unless you are passing over to join the enemy ...
Q. Does this Pope know what he is doing?
One wonders. One may think not. One may think he is, in Sister Lucy of Fatima's description of modern churchmen, "diabolically disoriented". One may think he means to serve the Church but is hopelessly - or willfully - confused as to how to do so. God knows.
Q. After the famous sin of "anti-semitism", what next?
Racism! "Sins committed in actions against love, peace, the rights of peoples, and respect for cultures and religions". Here the Pope said, "Christians have often violated the rights of ethnic groups and peoples, and shown contempt for their cultures and religious traditions". But how did mankind treat, for instance, black Africa before the Catholic missionaries went inland? As a slavepool! Any "racist" sins of Catholics pale in comparison with what Mother Church, i.e. Catholics, have done for Africans and for all races. As for despising ethnic cultures, are we to suppose that before the Spaniards arrived the weaker peoples enjoyed being humansacrificed by the culture of the ethnic Aztecs? Where would John Paul II himself be if Catholic missionaries had never gone into pagan Poland those many years ago and destroyed its idolatry?
Q. And I suppose after "antisemitism" and "racism" he apologises for "sexism"?
How did you guess? The sixth category is "Sins against the Dignity of Women and the Unity of the Human Race". The Pope said here that "At times the equality of your (i.e. God's) sons and daughters has not been acknowledged", because women are "all too often humiliated and pushed to one side". But again, what institution on earth can remotely compare with the Catholic Church for the true (not false) honour and glory it gives to womanhood through, especially, the Blessed Virgin Mary but also through all the women Saints? The Catholic Church alone raised up woman to the level of Mary from the level of Eve to which she otherwise necessarily falls and is today again, according as the Church is despised, falling.
Q. But the Pope no doubt thinks he is promoting women by thus high-lighting the "sexism" of "some" Catholics.
But is he accusing human sins or Church doctrine? He is certainly trying to make Church doctrine fit the crazy modern notions of "gender equality". Of course man and woman are equal before God and eternity, which is all that really matters, but they are not equal in this life where even before Adam and Eve fell, Adam was to be the head and Eve as close as a rib to his heart. Modern man desperately needs to be retaught, not untaught, the difference between the sexes.
Q. What was the Pope's last category of sins to beg pardon for?
"Sins in relation to the fundamental rights of the person". The Pope accuses Christians of having often not recognized Christ in "the hungry, thirsty, naked, persecuted and imprisoned" and in the unborn. But who has taught mankind to look after all these "little ones so dear to God", if not the Catholic Church, i.e. Catholics? The track record of Catholics in creating the very notion of human rights (except insofar as these defy God) is, thanks to the Church, second to none. Instead of thinking like a child of the Church, proud of her incomparable glory, the Pope is seeking to adapt to the mentality of the world which perversely blames the Church for all sorts of fabricated but fashionable sins, like antisemitism, racism, sexism, etc.
Q. What is Catholic doctrine on these questions?
Ever since Eve, God has meant men to lead women (Gen. III, 16). Ever since Noah, the sons of Japhet, as a broad rule leaving ample room for exceptions, are to lead the sons of Cham and to occupy the tents of Sem (Gen. IX, 27). Sons of Sem, Semites, set up the Catholic Church, God bless them eternally, but it is nearly all Gentiles (sons of Japhet) who came in after that beginning and for two thousand years built up the Church all over the world. The problem of today's world is not that white gentile males are leading it, but that they are not leading it in the Catholic Faith as they are meant to be doing, because they have lost their Faith, and as a just punishment for their apostasy they are being scourged by the uprising of the nonwhites, non-Gentiles and nonmales whom they have betrayed.
Q. Do you realize you are not being very "politically correct"?
Political correctness is for imbeciles. For the Catholic churchmen to be trying to make the Church "politically correct" is a disaster of the first magnitude. The world will love them briefly for doing so, but that love will soon turn to contempt. Possibly the Pope is already disappointed with the apparently low turnout for his unprecedented apologizing. The Catholic salt that loses its savour is soon trampled upon.
Q. Does this Pope have the Catholic Faith?
He seems sure that he does. God knows. But Jesus Christ is certainly not for him the Truth that condemns all errors. For him, Jesus Christ's Church is merely the most valid amongst all other more or less valid religions. If the Pope does believe in the Catholic Faith, he does not understand what he believes.
Q. Is he then really Pope?
The scandal of something like his March 12 apologizing is so great that one can be tempted to ask such a question. However, this "apology" is merely unfolding the evil already folded up inside Vatican II 35 years ago. Archbishop Lefebvre knew all about it back then (see his book "I Accuse the Council"), but he never said these recent Popes were not real popes, he always said they were liberals. By his fruits in this crisis, his judgment is the most reliable.
Q. How can I grasp liberalism in depth?
Through the Popes' Encyclicals from the early 1800's through to the 1950's. For an introduction to these Encyclicals, get audio - or video - tapes of this Seminary's Doctrinal Sessions on the Encyclicals, especially the 1996 Session. Telephone (816) 5312448 in the USA for details.
Q. How will Mother Church get out of this incredible problem?
By the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary. What the Church needs is a Pope who will stand up to the modern world and say, as nicely as you like, "You are all of you liars and you are on the way to Hell". "We will kill you for saying so!" "Kill me, but until you change your ways, I can say nothing else". And if only there were enough such Popes, one after another, to let themselves be killed for the Truth, at last the Truth would prevail.
That was how the Catholic Church was built in the first place, by a long series of martyr Popes. That is how it must be rebuilt today, and if anyone reasonably argues that the state of mankind presently makes such a thing impossible, then there remains only a Chastisement to straighten out mankind.
So let us be prepared for hours darker yet before the dawn, and meanwhile, as Our Lord tells us to do, let us "possess our souls in patience" (Lk. XXI, 19). And let us, as Our Lady told the children at Fatima to do, pray for the Pope, and for all the misguided churchmen, in Rome especially.
Dear Readers, spring is coming again, and the prospect of summer. God does not change, and He continues to be good to us.
Most sincerely yours in Our Lord,
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