"Perils from False Brethren"II Cor X1,26
Renewers of the Novus Ordo renewal
December 1, 1997
Dear Friends and Benefactors,
When a storm blew up in the Seminary here last May, and only a few paragraphs were devoted to it in the letter of June, some of you remained curious as to what it was all about. Since then a few more defections have taken place and the bleeding may not yet have stopped, so it is a reasonable guess that some more of you are asking questions like those that follow below.
The purpose of giving answers is to explain once more what the Society of St. Pius X is doing, and how. "There must be also heresies", says St. Paul (I Cor Xl, 19), meaning that so long as men are men, there are bound to be errors and divisions springing up from within the Catholic Church. Wisdom's part is to make them serve to show the true spirit of the Church which they leave behind them:
Q: What happened in the Seminary last Spring?
A: A talented but proud young Argentinian priest who had been a Seminary professor at Winona for three and a half years, decided that the moment had come to break with the Society of St. Pius X and form his own society, starting with one fellow professor and two seminarians who walked out with him.
Q: But did this priest walk out, or was he told to leave?
A: As soon as it became clear that he had for some time, from within the Seminary, been secretly planning his own society, he was told to report in short order to the Superior General in Switzerland. When he refused, he was told within 24 hours to leave the Seminary which he had been subverting from within by his intention — ingenuously disavowed — to take with him as many Society priests and seminarians as possible.
Q: What project did he have in mind for himself and his followers?
A: Let us call them Carlitists, from their Pied Piper's first name. In theory the Carlitists want something more intellectual and medieval than the Society of St. Pius X has to offer. The Society has bravely resisted Vatican II, but they say it shares in such errors of the last few centuries as Jansenistic down-grading of nature, Jesuitical forcing of the will and individualistic devotions. So to renew "Catholic spiritual life", visionary young minds must group together in a vibrant new "Society of St. John" (Apostle of Charity!) to restore on a medieval and patristic model "theology, liturgy, piety, philosophy, political action, history, arts" (quote from their drafted "Proposal SSJ"). No less.
Q: That is quite a program! What does it mean in practice?
A: In practice it means that a group of seven former Society members are now back in the Novus Ordo, i.e. the Newchurch: four priests, two deacons and one seminarian. They are reported to be living with St. Peter's Fraternity in the Diocese of Scranton, PA, with Bishop Timliri’s oral and as yet unofficial approval of their Church reform.
Q: But how can they go back to the Newchurch? Against everything they believed in when they were in the Society?
A: They are not the first to have lost their grip on the Truth. St. Peter's Fraternity began in 1988 when more than a dozen Society priests judged in Europe that Archbishop Lefebvre had gone too far by consecrating four bishops without Rome's permission. They returned to the Newchurch. Also at that time the Traditional Benedictine, Dom Gerard, led most of his monastery and countless followers back into the Newchurch. Like the Carlitists, he loved the Middle Ages and scorned the Counter-Reformation.
Q: What is wrong with loving the Catholic Middle Ages?
A: Nothing, but not to the point of scorning the Catholic Counter-Reformation which was the Church's self-defense when Protestantism broke up those Middle Ages. You do not dismantle defenses when the same enemy (neo-modernist Protestantism) is attacking stronger than ever!
Q: What did Archbishop Lefebvre think of Dom Gerard at that time?
A: Dom Gerard's defection from Tradition made him weep. He said that had Dom Gerard not betrayed, Rome would have been forced to do something right.
Q: What did the Archbishop think of St. Peter's Fraternity?
A: All those who had received the grace to belong to Tradition and then rejoined the Newchurch, he called traitors.
Q: Is that not rather a strong word?
A: The Archbishop was not playing games. He saw that the survival of the Catholic faith was at stake.
Q: Do not the Carlitists say that it is normal for new societies to begin from within old societies?
A: Yes, but not starting in subversion nor finishing in a personal dream. Father Vallet correctly and officially resigned from the Society of Jesus before founding several years later, again officially, his own little Congregation to preach the 5-day Exercises we know. Archbishop Lefebvre officially and correctly resigned from being Superior of the Holy Ghost Fathers two years before he founded the Society of St. Pius X to defend the Church's real priesthood.
Q: What are the Carlitists now doing?
A: We are told that they have registered at Scranton University in order to acquire further qualifications. This fits their criticism of the Society that its priests have too many Mass circuits and too few university degrees.
Q: And do Society priests have too many Mass circuits?
A: As souls cry for help, so our priests can be stretched very thin to reach as many of them as possible, but here in the U.S.A. (and elsewhere), they are no longer stretched as thin as they once were. They can and do get vacations, and District Superiors keep an eye open for any dangerous fatigue over and above that not unhappy weariness which is normal for a priest who does his duty. At the Seminary, the Carlitists objected to going on Seminary circuits. Martyrdom is romantic, but not the dry martyrdom of the Mass circuits!
Q: Are the Carlitists looking after souls?
A: By their ideals, they are elitists rather than pastors, which is another reason to call them Carlitists, but we hear that at least two of their (so far) four priests are offering Mass in or near centers where they operated as Society priests.
Q: Then is some cooperation not possible? Is it not the same Mass, the same "good fight"?
A: No way. They have quit the Society and gone over to the enemy, the Newchurch. They may pretend still to honor the Society, but to justify their quitting it, they are bound to attack it. The split must be clean, or there will be on-going confusion. If they really wanted to work with the Society, all they had to do was not leave it! Actions speak louder than words.
Q: What about Society priests being under-educated?
A: It is true that relatively few have university degrees, but then did Our Lord Himself choose to make his Apostles out of Pharisees or out of fishermen? Our Lord needs from His young men faith, docility and common sense more than He needs frisbee-shaped certificates from Mickey Mouse university degree-courses!
Q: Did any of these strange ideas surface at the Seminary before last spring?
A: A little, and they were not encouraged. However, in general the Argentinian priest was trusted to be devoting his considerable talents to the service of the Seminary. In fact he was all the time pursuing what he told one seminarian was, literally, a dream of his going back ten years, and which he is now trying to make real in Scranton. But all this was well concealed from most priests and seminarians for as long as he was teaching at the Seminary.
Q: But did not this priest to a large extent have the Rector's support for his ideas while he was teaching at the Seminary?
A: Only insofar as it seemed that these ideas were serving, or would serve, the Society.
Q: We are told that the Rector in Winona was bitter and furious when he discovered how he had been deceived. Is this true?
A: Untrue. Anyone belonging to the Society of St. Pius X since the early 1970's has known many such defections. They have always happened in the Catholic Church, and they always will, so long as Our Lord does not take away men's free will when He makes them His priests. He had a traitor amongst His own Apostles.
Q: Then was the Rector indifferent to the whole affair?
A: Not either. He was sorry for his comrades who quit, and for any more who may quit, but in war, bullets fly and shells land and comrades go down. There is half a minute for a handkerchief, then the war goes on.
Q: How many seminarians were lost altogether in this affair?
A: In and around this affair, over a dozen, of whom two may find their way back. The name of the game is "survival of the fittest".
Q: And how is the Seminary now?
A: Peaceful. Nine new seminarians entered this last September, two new priests should be ordained on Saturday, June 20, 1998, God willing. There is much to be thankful for, including the fact that this was the first group defection from the Society's North American Seminary since 1983.
Q: How many priests were lost to the Society in this affair?
A: So far (December 1), two from the Seminary and two from the U. S. District. A few more names are being quoted as possible departures.
Q: Does this mean another split within the Society in the U.S.A.?
A: Carlitism looks like a minor split right now, but even if there was a major split tomorrow, what matters is still the purity of the Truth, not the numbers that stay with it. A collapse of numbers would oblige the Society to pull back and regroup, but that is all.
Q: Does the Society need to do that right now?
A: That is a day-to-day question for the District Superior to answer!
Q: But can the Society afford to lose any priests at all?
A: Quite honestly, if they have never understood, or have ceased to understand, what the Society is all about, yes, the Society can afford to lose them. This is because the Society cannot serve the Church by thinking one half, one quarter, or even one eighth like the Novus Ordo. For any and all mixtures of whisky and water to be possible, someone has to be producing neat whisky. For all degrees of Catholic compromise with the world not to collapse, somebody has to be generating pure Catholicism. Right now, as a worldwide organization, that somebody is principally — not exclusively — the Society of St. Pius X.
Q: But how can you be so sure that the Society is right, virtually against all the world?
A: Because its Catholicism is clear, classical, and free of internal contradiction. On the contrary, take the most honorable of Newchurchmen, say, Cardinal Ratzinger - the more honorable he is, the more he contradicts his own liberal principles. How can Our Lord contradict Himself?
Q: But did the Society lose so many priests when Archbishop Lefebvre was Superior General?
A: It certainly did. Of the 400 priests he ordained in and for the Society, some 100 had defected before he died, evenly split between those who thought he was too hard and those who thought he was too soft! But as Scripture says the Lord commanded Joshua (Josh I, 7), the Archbishop deviated neither to right nor to left.
Q: What do you mean?
A: Not to the left: in 1975, in one of a series of shakedowns at the Society's central Seminary in Ecône, Switzerland, a number of professors were quitting because the Society had just been "dissolved" by Rome. A seminarian went to the Archbishop to express his concern. The Archbishop's quiet reply: "Well, if all the professors leave, the seminarians will just have to teach themselves"! In other words, seminarians may come and professors may go, but a Seminary's business is to teach a truth that cannot change.
Not to the right: in 1983, in the United States, when nine out of eleven Society priests in the Seminary (then in CT) and the Northeastern District laid down to the Archbishop the terms on which they would allow that Seminary and District to operate, he again quietly said, "Look, you go your way, we go ours, and if you are more successful than we are at saving souls, then may God be with you, but here we part company". In other words, Seminary and/or District might collapse with only two priests out of eleven (and perhaps no properties!), but the Society's business was to continue a Church whose structure is not to be altered by men.
Q: What you are saying is that the Society of St. Pius X is not a question of numbers.
A: Exactly. Numbers make democratism, but not Catholicism - "But yet the Son of Man, when He cometh, shall He find, think you, faith on earth?" (Lk XVIII, 8). In the Old Testament, when Gideon gathered an army of 32,000 men to fight the Philistines, the Lord God told him they were too many. "Send home all those who for any reason do not want to fight". Still 10,000 men were ready to fight. "Still too many", said the Lord God. "Take them to a river to drink: separate the men who stoop right down from those who lift the water to their mouths with their hands". Only 300 did not stoop down. The Lord God ordered Gideon to send home the 9,700! And of course, because Gideon obeyed, the 300 were enough, with God's help, to rout the Philistines! Faith, and docility.
Q: What about the New Testament?
A: Same lesson. When Our Lord taught the Jews in the Synagogue at Capharnaum (Jn VI) that they would need to eat His flesh and drink His blood to have life in them, then "many of His disciples went back and walked no more with Him", in other words they walked out on Him. Did Our Lord stop them, call them back and modify His teaching to make it more acceptable? No, He let the numbers go. And by next asking His twelve apostles if they also would leave Him, He almost seemed ready for the truth to be followed by nobody. But Simon Peter responded on their behalf, "Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life", and with this faith and docility of a handful of men, Jesus Christ proceeded to build His world-saving Church.
Q: But why is it so easy for priests to quit the Society?
A: Because the split at the top of the Church between truth and authority since Vatican II means that untruths and many untruthful priests, formerly condemned by Church authority, are now protected by it. Formerly an unfaithful priest had nowhere to go. Now he can go in a variety of directions without being condemned.
Q: But why are such priests not defrocked?
A: Because the Church authorities have in this crisis so lost their grip on the Catholic Faith that they punish the faithful priests instead of the unfaithful ones.
Q: How many more priests is the Society about to lose?
A: Only God knows, but that is not, for reasons given above, the important question. You should pray for the largest possible number to keep the Catholic Faith.
Q: But can they not keep the Faith by working with St. Peter's Fraternity or with the Institute of Christ the King or with the Indult Mass or with the Traditional Mass under Bishop Timlin of Scranton?
A: No. All these enterprises, and the new society if it is ever publicly approved within the Newchurch, are crippled in their preaching of the Truth by the fact that they cannot criticize the principles of Vatican II, deadly to Catholicism, on which the Newchurch is built: religious liberty, ecumenism, the independent dignity of the human person, etc. In order to tell the truth, such priests must offend the Newchurch. In order to be accepted (or stay) in the Newchurch, they must water down the Truth. Dilution is not Our Lord's way.
Q: When are there going to be no more cliques within the Society?
A: When Our Lord takes away His priests' free-will! In other words, never. Pray not only for new vocations, but also for the faithfulness of old vocations.
Q: Is the Society being infiltrated?
A: It is quite possible. One reason why Our Lord included Judas Iscariot amongst His 12 Apostles was to teach His Church that this could always happen. Of course Our Lord was not deceived by Judas as merely human Superiors can always be deceived, but He wanted to teach His Church that it will work not on an absence of infiltration but on the presence of charity.
Q: Are there spies within the Society?
A: Maybe. Certainly Superiors must keep their eyes open, and, for the common good, expel such enemies as soon as they are recognized. However, too much suspicion kills charity, the engine-oil of Catholic institutions, so an excess of spy-hunting would kill the Society.
Q: Was the Argentinian priest a plant from the Newchurch, Opus Dei, for instance?
A: That is like asking whether Paul VI was a Freemason. Maybe he was, possibly he had been one, in any case he did not need to be one because he certainly in large part thought like one. Whether or not the Argentinian priest always belonged to the Newchurch, in any case he finished up thinking like it, which is what matters.
Q: Why do American priests not yet hold key positions in the American District and Seminary?
A: Emphasize the "not yet". Because Americans have in their bloodstream the Revolution of 1776, whose liberal principles are essentially anti-Catholic, a fact readily recognized, even boasted of, by American non-Catholics, denied only by American "Catholics" who do not understand the Revolution. An example was the Bunker Hill referred to above, staged in the East in 1983 by nine Society priests out of eleven. For a long time afterwards none of the Catholics who stayed with the Society asked the question you just asked. Now it may arise again. But truth must come before patriotism, whatever country we come from.
Q: Is that mini-Revolution of 1983 the reason why the Society seems comparatively light in the Northeastern U.S.A.?
A: No doubt. Mark you, the Society has to quite an extent rebuilt in the East, but it remains true that the revolutionary priests took with them out of the Society many properties and most of the people there at that time, inflicting numerical and material wounds still not entirely healed.
Q: But if priests are short in numbers, why do so many American priests get sent abroad? We need them at home!
A: On that reckoning, why should any non-American Society priests be, or ever have been, here? And where would the Society in the U.S.A. now be without those "foreigners"? The Catholic Church is above nations! Vocations come from wherever God calls them, and they go wherever He sends them. Be proud of your American priests abroad. Wherever they carry the true Faith, they are the true glory of the United States!
Q: Still, why does France, a small country compared with ours, have nearly 100 more priests than we do?
A: Because France has proportionally many more vocations and traditional Catholics than does the United States. It also has sent abroad numerically and proportionally many more Society priests than any other country. These are the glory of France.
Q: So what hope do we have for the Society in the United States?
A: Much, and in every way. Think firstly of the extraordinary rescue operation for souls that the Lord God has with it mounted in these almost impossible conditions for the last 25 years. It is wise to see in every true Mass celebrated (within a framework of the integral Catholic Faith) a triumph over the Devil. Then consider that with the Society you are guaranteed a roller coaster ride for nothing, all you have to do is hang on! Then again consider that in this crisis of neo-modernism Mother Church is carrying a heavy cross. Why should we not have to carry our part of it? Which is preferable, to belong to the Church and help carry her cross, or have no such cross to carry by not belonging to her?
Q: No doubt it is better to belong to the Church.
A: Then stay with the Society which continues to grow despite all setbacks. And remember Our Lord's words: "If any man will follow Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me" (Mk VIII, 34).
Dear readers, very many thanks for seeing the Seminary through another calendar year. We live by your generosity for which we as rarely need to ask as we are always grateful. If you get out of Wall Street with profits before it crashes, remember who kept telling you that we are on the brink of the crack of doom!
But remember mainly the divine gifts brought to all of us by one shivering Child in one poverty-stricken manger. With no financing, no lobbying, no advertising, He transformed the world!
Wishing you all a blessed Advent and a happy Christmastide, sincerely yours in Christ,
Showing posts with label 1997. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1997. Show all posts
Monday
The problem with The Sound of Music
November 7, 1997
Dear Friends and Benefactors,
As the Christmas season comes round again, no doubt many Catholic households, especially but not only in the U.S.A., will be preparing to watch, on public television or on video-tape, The Sound of Music. This Hollywood film has repeatedly been the object of critical remarks in this letter. If readers have wondered why, let it now for the season be explained at length.
The problem with The Sound of Music is that it is not just the innocent entertainment that it seems to be, as will be shown. Nor is Hollywood alone to blame. For the 1965 film was the cinema version of the 1959 Broadway (New York) stage musical. Now Hollywood and Broadway, like all entertainers, are responsible for what they do to elevate or debase their public, but they cannot be primarily to praise or blame for the state in which that public comes to them.
Interestingly, in the years of grace immediately following World War II (it did teach some people some sense), the valiant Catholic magazine Integrity called in question the whole modern expectation of "entertainment", just as between the wars Fr. Vincent McNabb, O.P., preacher in London, England, had called in question the whole of modern city-life because of the pressure it exerts on married couples to use artificial means of birth control. Obviously few souls paid much attention to Integrity or to Fr. McNabb, which is why we are now in the situation where few Catholics can see any problem with The Sound of Music. Let us then be aware that the problem runs deep, but let us here concentrate on its immediate manifestation in this one film.
Its story is based on a real-life incident which happened in Catholic Austria just before World War II. The wife of an Austrian naval captain dies, leaving him with a number of children to look after. The captain appoints as governess for them a young unmarried woman who has just left the convent where she was trying her vocation. Fortune smiles as the captain and governess fall in love, but fortune frowns as the Nazis take over Austria in the Anschluss of 1938. To avoid serving the Third Reich, the captain manages to flee Austria with his new wife and children.
It would be interesting to read the original book by the real-life governess, Maria von Trapp, to see just how far Hollywood departed from reality in the film starring Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer. However, we need not know the original to see what Hollywood has done!
Firstly, Julie Andrews is nice (of course), but she is too high-spirited to be a nun (of course), for instance she dances over the Austrian mountain meadows, in springtime (of course), waving her arms around and singing (presumably to the grass) that "The hills are alive with the sound of music". The hills seem unmoved but they do look beautiful, as does Julie Andrews (of course. We know she would wear perfume and make-up to go jogging).
Fortunately the Mother Superior is also nice (of course, at least in 1965. Today she would be a child abuser), so she and the other nuns are very understanding and let Julie Andrews go, to try out being governess of a tyrannical widower's unruly children who have (of course) chased away several governesses before her. What shall she do? Have no fear! The Power of Positive Thinking (of course) - she sings a gutsy little number along the lines, "...I have confidence in sunshine, I have confidence in rain... besides which you see, I have confidence in me". Bravo.
Sure enough, once inside the door she gives a dazzling demonstration of the superiority of liberty and equality over stuffy old Austrian ways! Immediately undermining - in front of the children - the Captain's tyrannical discipline over them, she proceeds to win their hearts (of course) by a combination of being their friend, taking their side, making them sing and have fun, all this without a trace of motherliness and all the time looking as cute as a kitten. She even looks cute when she prays, in fact who would not pray when it makes you look so specially cute?
Of course the stern Captain is soon won over by his domain being turned into a gigantic play-pen, so he breaks out in that favourite Austrian number Edelweiss, whereupon they all burst into song because the family has been re-built on the liberty-equality model. By now Julie Andrews is looking goofy around the Captain (of course), so there is a ball, and they dance (of course), and dancing reveals more of her charms (of course), whereupon the Captain also looks goofy around her (of course).
But enter now the villains! Firstly a glamorous Baroness previously engaged to be married to the Captain, who schemes to get Julie Andrews out of the way, back to the Convent (but didn't you know, "The path of true love never did run smooth"?). Secondly, villain of villains, a - a - a NAZI! (Original sin? - never heard of it! Isn't all sin Nazi sin?)
Pan back to the Convent for a heart-warming feminine dialogue: Mother: "You're unhappy". J.A.: "I'm confused". Mother: "Are you in love?" J.A.: "Oh, I don't know." Mother: "Go back to him". Him is of course delighted when she returns, so there is a duet of swooning, spooning and crooning by - guess what! - moonlight! "But will the children approve of our marrying?" Of course! Shiny white wedding dress (of course), wedding bells all over the place and a lovely ceremony (of course), to be spoiled only by the brutal re-appearance of the nasty Nazi - the Captain must report for duty to the Third Reich!
The family tries to sneak away. The nasty Nazi spots them, so now they all break out into singing Edelweiss. The nasty Nazi is foiled when the family escape to the convent (where else?), but drama rolls as the nasty Nazis close in on the convent. (But didn't you know, "Life is not just a bed of roses"?) The Captain is heroic (of course), but the dastardly villains are only foiled for good when their car is incapacitated by the nuns turned into mechanics (of course), and the last shots show the "family" climbing a mountain path to get out of the Third Reich, amidst hills which are once more - go on, don't tell me you couldn't guess! -- "alive with the sound of music". How truly heart - warming.
Dear friends, please excuse this long excursion into the audio-visual scenery of an average modern Christmas, but no less maybe necessary to rub noses in the falsity of this soul-rotting slush. Clean family edification? Nothing of the kind!
As for cleanness, many films may be worse than the Sound of Music, but stop and think - are youth, physical attractiveness and being in love the essence of marriage? Can you imagine this Julie Andrews staying with the Captain if "the romance went out of their marriage"? Would she not divorce him and grab his children from him to be her toys? Such romance is not actually pornographic but it is virtually so, in other words all the elements of pornography are there, just waiting to break out. One remembers the media sensation when a few years later Julie Andrews appeared topless in another film. That was no sensation, just a natural development for one rolling canine female.
As for being a family film, by glorifying that romance which is essentially self-centred, The Sound of Music puts selfishness in the place of selflessness between husband and wife, and by putting friendliness and fun in the place of authority and rules, it invites disorder between parents and children. This is a new model family which in short order will be no family at all, its liberated members flying off in all different directions.
Finally as for edification, in The Sound of Music the Lord God is mere decoration. True, His Austrian mountains are beautiful (beautiful decoration), but His nuns are valued only for their sweetness towards the world and their understanding of its ways, while His ex-nun is wholly oriented towards the world.
Dear friends, any supposed Catholicism in The Sound of Music is a Hollywood fraud corresponding to the real-life fraud of that "Catholicism" of the 1950's and 1960's, all appearance and no substance, which was just waiting to break out into Vatican II and the Newchurch. Right here is the mentality of sweet compassion for homosexuals and of bitter grief for Princess Di, of sympathy for priests quitting the SSPX for the Novus Ordo. Everything is man-centered and meant to feel good, the apostasy of our times.
But, somebody may object, The Sound of Music is only entertainment. Reply, is the world in a mess, or not? Now, has the world got to where it is by people listening to sermons in church? They do less and less of that. Then what do they drink into their hearts and souls and minds? Is it not their "entertainment", The Sound of Music in season and countless films more or less like it out of season? Then if the world around us is corrupt, it sure fits these films being corrupt, whereas if someone can see no problem with The Sound of Music (1965), how can he see a problem with Vatican II (1962-1965)? The simultaneity in time is no coincidence.
Dear friends, "entertainment" requires serious attention. Then what is to be proposed in place of The Sound of Music? For family time, amongst live human beings, better in general live games, talk or reading than mechanical TV or VCR, even good video-tapes, let alone video-tapes as false as The Sound of Music. Make your children (and your wife!) a Christmas present of your personal time, attention and guidance. That is more valuable to them than anything that comes in glitzy store-bought wrappings!
The Seminary is nevertheless providing, as per the enclosed flyer, a wide variety of VCR tapes. Contradiction? Not quite. These tapes are instructional rather than entertaining, and well used they should make accessible a wealth of Catholic truth and beauty. However, note the new address at which to order either audio - or video-tapes. This is because, to get the material out, we have brought in professional help, only not resident in Winona. Note in particular the offer of a free 30-minute video-tape. Anything (honest) to get real Catholicism back into circulation!
Sincerely yours in Christ,
Dear Friends and Benefactors,
As the Christmas season comes round again, no doubt many Catholic households, especially but not only in the U.S.A., will be preparing to watch, on public television or on video-tape, The Sound of Music. This Hollywood film has repeatedly been the object of critical remarks in this letter. If readers have wondered why, let it now for the season be explained at length.
The problem with The Sound of Music is that it is not just the innocent entertainment that it seems to be, as will be shown. Nor is Hollywood alone to blame. For the 1965 film was the cinema version of the 1959 Broadway (New York) stage musical. Now Hollywood and Broadway, like all entertainers, are responsible for what they do to elevate or debase their public, but they cannot be primarily to praise or blame for the state in which that public comes to them.
Interestingly, in the years of grace immediately following World War II (it did teach some people some sense), the valiant Catholic magazine Integrity called in question the whole modern expectation of "entertainment", just as between the wars Fr. Vincent McNabb, O.P., preacher in London, England, had called in question the whole of modern city-life because of the pressure it exerts on married couples to use artificial means of birth control. Obviously few souls paid much attention to Integrity or to Fr. McNabb, which is why we are now in the situation where few Catholics can see any problem with The Sound of Music. Let us then be aware that the problem runs deep, but let us here concentrate on its immediate manifestation in this one film.
Its story is based on a real-life incident which happened in Catholic Austria just before World War II. The wife of an Austrian naval captain dies, leaving him with a number of children to look after. The captain appoints as governess for them a young unmarried woman who has just left the convent where she was trying her vocation. Fortune smiles as the captain and governess fall in love, but fortune frowns as the Nazis take over Austria in the Anschluss of 1938. To avoid serving the Third Reich, the captain manages to flee Austria with his new wife and children.
It would be interesting to read the original book by the real-life governess, Maria von Trapp, to see just how far Hollywood departed from reality in the film starring Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer. However, we need not know the original to see what Hollywood has done!
Firstly, Julie Andrews is nice (of course), but she is too high-spirited to be a nun (of course), for instance she dances over the Austrian mountain meadows, in springtime (of course), waving her arms around and singing (presumably to the grass) that "The hills are alive with the sound of music". The hills seem unmoved but they do look beautiful, as does Julie Andrews (of course. We know she would wear perfume and make-up to go jogging).
Fortunately the Mother Superior is also nice (of course, at least in 1965. Today she would be a child abuser), so she and the other nuns are very understanding and let Julie Andrews go, to try out being governess of a tyrannical widower's unruly children who have (of course) chased away several governesses before her. What shall she do? Have no fear! The Power of Positive Thinking (of course) - she sings a gutsy little number along the lines, "...I have confidence in sunshine, I have confidence in rain... besides which you see, I have confidence in me". Bravo.
Sure enough, once inside the door she gives a dazzling demonstration of the superiority of liberty and equality over stuffy old Austrian ways! Immediately undermining - in front of the children - the Captain's tyrannical discipline over them, she proceeds to win their hearts (of course) by a combination of being their friend, taking their side, making them sing and have fun, all this without a trace of motherliness and all the time looking as cute as a kitten. She even looks cute when she prays, in fact who would not pray when it makes you look so specially cute?
Of course the stern Captain is soon won over by his domain being turned into a gigantic play-pen, so he breaks out in that favourite Austrian number Edelweiss, whereupon they all burst into song because the family has been re-built on the liberty-equality model. By now Julie Andrews is looking goofy around the Captain (of course), so there is a ball, and they dance (of course), and dancing reveals more of her charms (of course), whereupon the Captain also looks goofy around her (of course).
But enter now the villains! Firstly a glamorous Baroness previously engaged to be married to the Captain, who schemes to get Julie Andrews out of the way, back to the Convent (but didn't you know, "The path of true love never did run smooth"?). Secondly, villain of villains, a - a - a NAZI! (Original sin? - never heard of it! Isn't all sin Nazi sin?)
Pan back to the Convent for a heart-warming feminine dialogue: Mother: "You're unhappy". J.A.: "I'm confused". Mother: "Are you in love?" J.A.: "Oh, I don't know." Mother: "Go back to him". Him is of course delighted when she returns, so there is a duet of swooning, spooning and crooning by - guess what! - moonlight! "But will the children approve of our marrying?" Of course! Shiny white wedding dress (of course), wedding bells all over the place and a lovely ceremony (of course), to be spoiled only by the brutal re-appearance of the nasty Nazi - the Captain must report for duty to the Third Reich!
The family tries to sneak away. The nasty Nazi spots them, so now they all break out into singing Edelweiss. The nasty Nazi is foiled when the family escape to the convent (where else?), but drama rolls as the nasty Nazis close in on the convent. (But didn't you know, "Life is not just a bed of roses"?) The Captain is heroic (of course), but the dastardly villains are only foiled for good when their car is incapacitated by the nuns turned into mechanics (of course), and the last shots show the "family" climbing a mountain path to get out of the Third Reich, amidst hills which are once more - go on, don't tell me you couldn't guess! -- "alive with the sound of music". How truly heart - warming.
Dear friends, please excuse this long excursion into the audio-visual scenery of an average modern Christmas, but no less maybe necessary to rub noses in the falsity of this soul-rotting slush. Clean family edification? Nothing of the kind!
As for cleanness, many films may be worse than the Sound of Music, but stop and think - are youth, physical attractiveness and being in love the essence of marriage? Can you imagine this Julie Andrews staying with the Captain if "the romance went out of their marriage"? Would she not divorce him and grab his children from him to be her toys? Such romance is not actually pornographic but it is virtually so, in other words all the elements of pornography are there, just waiting to break out. One remembers the media sensation when a few years later Julie Andrews appeared topless in another film. That was no sensation, just a natural development for one rolling canine female.
As for being a family film, by glorifying that romance which is essentially self-centred, The Sound of Music puts selfishness in the place of selflessness between husband and wife, and by putting friendliness and fun in the place of authority and rules, it invites disorder between parents and children. This is a new model family which in short order will be no family at all, its liberated members flying off in all different directions.
Finally as for edification, in The Sound of Music the Lord God is mere decoration. True, His Austrian mountains are beautiful (beautiful decoration), but His nuns are valued only for their sweetness towards the world and their understanding of its ways, while His ex-nun is wholly oriented towards the world.
Dear friends, any supposed Catholicism in The Sound of Music is a Hollywood fraud corresponding to the real-life fraud of that "Catholicism" of the 1950's and 1960's, all appearance and no substance, which was just waiting to break out into Vatican II and the Newchurch. Right here is the mentality of sweet compassion for homosexuals and of bitter grief for Princess Di, of sympathy for priests quitting the SSPX for the Novus Ordo. Everything is man-centered and meant to feel good, the apostasy of our times.
But, somebody may object, The Sound of Music is only entertainment. Reply, is the world in a mess, or not? Now, has the world got to where it is by people listening to sermons in church? They do less and less of that. Then what do they drink into their hearts and souls and minds? Is it not their "entertainment", The Sound of Music in season and countless films more or less like it out of season? Then if the world around us is corrupt, it sure fits these films being corrupt, whereas if someone can see no problem with The Sound of Music (1965), how can he see a problem with Vatican II (1962-1965)? The simultaneity in time is no coincidence.
Dear friends, "entertainment" requires serious attention. Then what is to be proposed in place of The Sound of Music? For family time, amongst live human beings, better in general live games, talk or reading than mechanical TV or VCR, even good video-tapes, let alone video-tapes as false as The Sound of Music. Make your children (and your wife!) a Christmas present of your personal time, attention and guidance. That is more valuable to them than anything that comes in glitzy store-bought wrappings!
The Seminary is nevertheless providing, as per the enclosed flyer, a wide variety of VCR tapes. Contradiction? Not quite. These tapes are instructional rather than entertaining, and well used they should make accessible a wealth of Catholic truth and beauty. However, note the new address at which to order either audio - or video-tapes. This is because, to get the material out, we have brought in professional help, only not resident in Winona. Note in particular the offer of a free 30-minute video-tape. Anything (honest) to get real Catholicism back into circulation!
Sincerely yours in Christ,
Regarding: "Pastoral Message to Parents of Homosexual Children"
October 8, 1997
Dear Friends and Benefactors,
The Catholic bishops of the U.S.A., more precisely their Committee on Marriage and Family, have just come out with a "Pastoral Message to Parents of Homosexual Children", which is a lamentable piece of work. Since this Pastoral Message is liable to make people, already confused, even more confused, let us re-state some Catholic principles, because the question bears directly on Faith and Morals, and on people getting to heaven or falling into hell.
Homosexuality means the misuse between man and man or between woman and woman of those functions and parts of the human body which God designed for use exclusively between a man and a woman within a lawful marriage, for the primary purpose of the reproduction of the human race. The Law of God governing use of the reproductive functions can be broken in a variety of ways even between man and woman, but these sins, e.g. fornication or adultery, are at least natural to the extent that they observe the basic duality of man and woman. On the contrary sins of homosexuality violate even this basic natural structure of the reproductive function, rendering it necessarily and utterly sterile, void of its intrinsic purpose. That is why homosexuality is sometimes called "the sin against nature".
In fact the sin is so unnatural that Mother Church ranks it alongside murder, defrauding the worker of his just wage, and oppression of the widow or orphan, as one of the four sins "crying to Heaven for vengeance". However, God did not wait for the founding of the Catholic Church to instill in men the horror of this sin, but he implanted in the human nature of all of us, unless or until we corrupt it, an instinct of violent repugnance for this particular sin, comparable to our instinctive repugnance for other misuses of our human frame, such as coprophagy.
That is why St. Paul in the famous passage on homosexuality in the first chapter of his Epistle to the Romans, verses 24 to 27, lambastes the Gentiles for practising this sin even though they had no revealed religion, and he does so in terms chosen to re-awaken that natural repugnance, e.g. verse 27: "And, in like manner, the men also, leaving the natural use of the women, have burned in their lusts one towards another, men with men working that which is filthy, and receiving in themselves the recompense which was due to their error".
Therefore to speak of homosexuality as an "alternate life-style" is as perverse as equating the violation of nature with its observance. It is as foully corrupt as to make no difference between recognizing God the author of nature, and defying Him.
Therefore what is "innate", or in-born, in human nature concerning homosexuality is a violent repugnance. Therefore to speak of homosexuality, or even just an inclination to it, as being "innate" in certain human beings, of course to excuse them, is to accuse God at least of contradiction, if not also of planting in men the cause of sin, which is implicit if not explicit blasphemy.
The very most that can be innate in a man of, for instance, homosexuality, is the raw material for his temperament which may be sensitive in one man, rough in another, but whether that sensitivity or roughness is molded into the compassion of a saint or the vice of a homosexual depends on a series of good or evil choices made by each individual. Homosexuality is a vice, or sinful habit, created by nothing other than a series of sinful acts, for each of which the individual was responsible. Homosexuality is a moral problem, which is why, fascinatingly, St. Paul in the same passage derives it from idolatry! (No space to quote, look it up!)
"Oh, but Our Lord had chawity, (unlike thumwun we know who wath tho nathty to Pwintheth Di!). Our Lord loved thinnerth, and faggotth, and tho thould we!!" So runs the objection!
Yes indeed Our Lord loved sinners, but not in their sirs, rather despite their sin, which he hated. When Our Lord protected the unrighteous Mary Magdalene against the righteous Pharisees in a way which can bring tears to our eyes each time we read Luke, Chapter 7, he was protecting not her sin but her repentance. God will, as He has told us in the Gospel, go to almost any lengths to help the sinner who is trying to get out of his sin, but He abominates the sinner who wallows in it, and upon these modern cities that flaunt their perversity in annual homosexual parades, He is preparing such fire and brimstone as may make what fell upon Sodom and Gomorrah look like a fall of dew, because at least those cities never knew the Gospel (cf. Mt. XI, 20-24).
Woe then to the sinner who instead of casting away his sin, hugs it to his bosom, as do a mass of today's homosexuals, and as the Bishops' Pastoral virtually encourages them to do. God's patience is long, but if the sinner insists upon welding his sin to his soul, then one day God's patience runs out, and He hates sinners with sin, crying out to both, "Depart from me, ye accursed, into everlasting fire"(Mt.XXV,41). Therefore real charity, which wishes everlasting salvation to homosexuals, will, with all due prudence, not put a cushion under their sin, but paint it to them in its true colours to help them to get out of it.
But what does our American Bishops' Committee on Marriage and Family do? They dangerously down-grade the sin and dangerously up-grade the sinner, putting in effect a cushion beneath the sin.
As for the sin, they do still - to their credit - say that homosexual activity is intrinsically wrong. However, in at least two ways they diminish the wrongness. Firstly, they suggest homosexuality can be innate when they quote a Newchurch document from Rome to the effect that some homosexuals are "definitely such because of some kind of innate instinct", and when they say that "Generally, homosexual orientation is experienced as a given, not as something freely chosen", because "a common opinion of experts is that there are multiple factors - genetic, hormonal, psychological - that may give rise to homosexuality". Of course whatever is innate is not sinful.
Secondly, they make a true but in this respect dangerous distinction between the habit ("orientation") of homosexuality and the act ("activity"), saying there is nothing wrong with the orientation as long as it does not turn into activity. True, only the act and not the habit is a sin, but since when did habits (especially in this domain) not incline to acts? There may be even much virtue in resisting a bad habit, but am I helped to resist it by being told the habit is not bad? If the orientation is not so bad, why should the activity be so bad?
As for up-grading the sinner, watch how close the Committee come to saying that God loves the sinner with his sin (which is blasphemy). I quote: "... God loves every person as a unique individual. Sexual indentity helps to define the unique persons we are. One component of our sexual indentity is sexual orientation ….Human beings see the appearance, but the Lord looks into the heart (I Sam XVI,7)." How is this quotation to be interpreted other than as saying that God loves the homosexual in and with his orientation to homosexuality?
And if God loves the sinner with his sins how must men love him! From start to finish the Pastoral Message drips with honeyed words to prescribe how we must behave towards homosexuals. Let me reconstruct the general idea: (my own words in the quotation marks)
"With supportive love we must accept the homosexual persons challenged by the hurtful humour and offensive discrimination directed against their kind. We must reach out with honesty and commitment to help in the overcoming of their painful tensions. We must not be exclusive or judgmental but by significant communication as caring persons we must enable them to take a fresh and healing look at their dignity as human persons so they can learn to cope with their feelings. Sensitive to their authentic needs, and unconditionally supportive of their tender self-awareness, we must reach out and embrace them in intimate community" - oops! - it's dangerous to get in the honeyed groove!
And this stuff goes on for eight pages uninterruptedly! What other purpose or effect can such words have than to dismantle the individual's and society's instinctive defence mechanism against a sin stinking to high Heaven that wrecks them both? And all this in the name of the Catholic Church??
Such a false love blurring sin and sinner has nothing to do with Catholicism! As St. Paul traced homosexuality back to idolatry, i. e. the breaking of the First Commandment, so the true remedy of the sin is for those practising it to return to the true worship and love of the true God. But what chance do they have of being led back to it by churchmen who virtually promote such corruption as in this Pastoral Message? Almost none.
"Pray", said Padre Pio, who died in 1968, "there is nothing else left". But prayer, said the Cure of Ars, "is the powerlessness of the All-powerful, the all-powerfulness of the powerless".
November will be the month to enlist the prayerful aid of the Holy Souls in Purgatory. A card is enclosed for you to return if you wish by November 1st to the Seminary, where it will go on the altar once a month for a sung Requiem Mass for all souls inscribed. But please send any stipends for Masses separately from the cards.
And please be supportive and compassionate towards the sensitive feelings of the Seminary's cash-box, presently hurt by a painful sense of rejection and emptiness, always in need of fulfillment! So do let yourselves be challenged to nurture it and fill it full with a healing flow of greenbacks, and it will not stop thanking you for your co-operation.
Dear readers, forgive me, the Bishops' Committee's language is getting to me! On the contrary, may the Lord God sustain every one of us in the real religion!
Most sincerely yours in the month of the Holy Rosary,
Dear Friends and Benefactors,
The Catholic bishops of the U.S.A., more precisely their Committee on Marriage and Family, have just come out with a "Pastoral Message to Parents of Homosexual Children", which is a lamentable piece of work. Since this Pastoral Message is liable to make people, already confused, even more confused, let us re-state some Catholic principles, because the question bears directly on Faith and Morals, and on people getting to heaven or falling into hell.
Homosexuality means the misuse between man and man or between woman and woman of those functions and parts of the human body which God designed for use exclusively between a man and a woman within a lawful marriage, for the primary purpose of the reproduction of the human race. The Law of God governing use of the reproductive functions can be broken in a variety of ways even between man and woman, but these sins, e.g. fornication or adultery, are at least natural to the extent that they observe the basic duality of man and woman. On the contrary sins of homosexuality violate even this basic natural structure of the reproductive function, rendering it necessarily and utterly sterile, void of its intrinsic purpose. That is why homosexuality is sometimes called "the sin against nature".
In fact the sin is so unnatural that Mother Church ranks it alongside murder, defrauding the worker of his just wage, and oppression of the widow or orphan, as one of the four sins "crying to Heaven for vengeance". However, God did not wait for the founding of the Catholic Church to instill in men the horror of this sin, but he implanted in the human nature of all of us, unless or until we corrupt it, an instinct of violent repugnance for this particular sin, comparable to our instinctive repugnance for other misuses of our human frame, such as coprophagy.
That is why St. Paul in the famous passage on homosexuality in the first chapter of his Epistle to the Romans, verses 24 to 27, lambastes the Gentiles for practising this sin even though they had no revealed religion, and he does so in terms chosen to re-awaken that natural repugnance, e.g. verse 27: "And, in like manner, the men also, leaving the natural use of the women, have burned in their lusts one towards another, men with men working that which is filthy, and receiving in themselves the recompense which was due to their error".
Therefore to speak of homosexuality as an "alternate life-style" is as perverse as equating the violation of nature with its observance. It is as foully corrupt as to make no difference between recognizing God the author of nature, and defying Him.
Therefore what is "innate", or in-born, in human nature concerning homosexuality is a violent repugnance. Therefore to speak of homosexuality, or even just an inclination to it, as being "innate" in certain human beings, of course to excuse them, is to accuse God at least of contradiction, if not also of planting in men the cause of sin, which is implicit if not explicit blasphemy.
The very most that can be innate in a man of, for instance, homosexuality, is the raw material for his temperament which may be sensitive in one man, rough in another, but whether that sensitivity or roughness is molded into the compassion of a saint or the vice of a homosexual depends on a series of good or evil choices made by each individual. Homosexuality is a vice, or sinful habit, created by nothing other than a series of sinful acts, for each of which the individual was responsible. Homosexuality is a moral problem, which is why, fascinatingly, St. Paul in the same passage derives it from idolatry! (No space to quote, look it up!)
"Oh, but Our Lord had chawity, (unlike thumwun we know who wath tho nathty to Pwintheth Di!). Our Lord loved thinnerth, and faggotth, and tho thould we!!" So runs the objection!
Yes indeed Our Lord loved sinners, but not in their sirs, rather despite their sin, which he hated. When Our Lord protected the unrighteous Mary Magdalene against the righteous Pharisees in a way which can bring tears to our eyes each time we read Luke, Chapter 7, he was protecting not her sin but her repentance. God will, as He has told us in the Gospel, go to almost any lengths to help the sinner who is trying to get out of his sin, but He abominates the sinner who wallows in it, and upon these modern cities that flaunt their perversity in annual homosexual parades, He is preparing such fire and brimstone as may make what fell upon Sodom and Gomorrah look like a fall of dew, because at least those cities never knew the Gospel (cf. Mt. XI, 20-24).
Woe then to the sinner who instead of casting away his sin, hugs it to his bosom, as do a mass of today's homosexuals, and as the Bishops' Pastoral virtually encourages them to do. God's patience is long, but if the sinner insists upon welding his sin to his soul, then one day God's patience runs out, and He hates sinners with sin, crying out to both, "Depart from me, ye accursed, into everlasting fire"(Mt.XXV,41). Therefore real charity, which wishes everlasting salvation to homosexuals, will, with all due prudence, not put a cushion under their sin, but paint it to them in its true colours to help them to get out of it.
But what does our American Bishops' Committee on Marriage and Family do? They dangerously down-grade the sin and dangerously up-grade the sinner, putting in effect a cushion beneath the sin.
As for the sin, they do still - to their credit - say that homosexual activity is intrinsically wrong. However, in at least two ways they diminish the wrongness. Firstly, they suggest homosexuality can be innate when they quote a Newchurch document from Rome to the effect that some homosexuals are "definitely such because of some kind of innate instinct", and when they say that "Generally, homosexual orientation is experienced as a given, not as something freely chosen", because "a common opinion of experts is that there are multiple factors - genetic, hormonal, psychological - that may give rise to homosexuality". Of course whatever is innate is not sinful.
Secondly, they make a true but in this respect dangerous distinction between the habit ("orientation") of homosexuality and the act ("activity"), saying there is nothing wrong with the orientation as long as it does not turn into activity. True, only the act and not the habit is a sin, but since when did habits (especially in this domain) not incline to acts? There may be even much virtue in resisting a bad habit, but am I helped to resist it by being told the habit is not bad? If the orientation is not so bad, why should the activity be so bad?
As for up-grading the sinner, watch how close the Committee come to saying that God loves the sinner with his sin (which is blasphemy). I quote: "... God loves every person as a unique individual. Sexual indentity helps to define the unique persons we are. One component of our sexual indentity is sexual orientation ….Human beings see the appearance, but the Lord looks into the heart (I Sam XVI,7)." How is this quotation to be interpreted other than as saying that God loves the homosexual in and with his orientation to homosexuality?
And if God loves the sinner with his sins how must men love him! From start to finish the Pastoral Message drips with honeyed words to prescribe how we must behave towards homosexuals. Let me reconstruct the general idea: (my own words in the quotation marks)
"With supportive love we must accept the homosexual persons challenged by the hurtful humour and offensive discrimination directed against their kind. We must reach out with honesty and commitment to help in the overcoming of their painful tensions. We must not be exclusive or judgmental but by significant communication as caring persons we must enable them to take a fresh and healing look at their dignity as human persons so they can learn to cope with their feelings. Sensitive to their authentic needs, and unconditionally supportive of their tender self-awareness, we must reach out and embrace them in intimate community" - oops! - it's dangerous to get in the honeyed groove!
And this stuff goes on for eight pages uninterruptedly! What other purpose or effect can such words have than to dismantle the individual's and society's instinctive defence mechanism against a sin stinking to high Heaven that wrecks them both? And all this in the name of the Catholic Church??
Such a false love blurring sin and sinner has nothing to do with Catholicism! As St. Paul traced homosexuality back to idolatry, i. e. the breaking of the First Commandment, so the true remedy of the sin is for those practising it to return to the true worship and love of the true God. But what chance do they have of being led back to it by churchmen who virtually promote such corruption as in this Pastoral Message? Almost none.
"Pray", said Padre Pio, who died in 1968, "there is nothing else left". But prayer, said the Cure of Ars, "is the powerlessness of the All-powerful, the all-powerfulness of the powerless".
November will be the month to enlist the prayerful aid of the Holy Souls in Purgatory. A card is enclosed for you to return if you wish by November 1st to the Seminary, where it will go on the altar once a month for a sung Requiem Mass for all souls inscribed. But please send any stipends for Masses separately from the cards.
And please be supportive and compassionate towards the sensitive feelings of the Seminary's cash-box, presently hurt by a painful sense of rejection and emptiness, always in need of fulfillment! So do let yourselves be challenged to nurture it and fill it full with a healing flow of greenbacks, and it will not stop thanking you for your co-operation.
Dear readers, forgive me, the Bishops' Committee's language is getting to me! On the contrary, may the Lord God sustain every one of us in the real religion!
Most sincerely yours in the month of the Holy Rosary,
Devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary
August 5 , 1997
Our Lady of the Snows
Dear Friends and Benefactors,
On the 21st and 22nd days of this month, the Society of St Pius X will be making an official pilgrimage to Fatima in Portugal, to honour the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary, and to obtain through her intercession all possible graces for the Church, for the world, for the Society and for ourselves.
It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance today of the Devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary's Immaculate Heart. Why devotions? Why the Blessed Virgin Mary? Why her Immaculate Heart?
New devotions have always arisen down the twenty centuries of Catholic Church history, but these devotions have never been entirely new, nor could they be, because neither God nor the Catholic religion can change. However, the world changes, the times they are always a-changing, and so men in a variety of different historical circumstances may need a variety of religious practices, or devotions, to help them to reach the same God. Within the Catholic Church it is God Himself, the Holy Ghost, who inspires these various devotions down the ages according to the differing needs of men (Jn.XVI, 12, 13).
For instance, the one and only Catholic Mass by which Christ's bloody sacrifice on the Cross is made unbloodily present again, cannot change in its essentials, but at the height of the Middle Ages God knew that the following centuries would need not to forget that Our Lord really is present beneath the appearances of bread and wine when consecrated, so He inspired and raised up in His Church the Devotion to the Blessed Sacrament. Thus Catholics could be ready 300 years later for the Protestant onslaught on the Real Presence.
Similarly when Protestantism had nevertheless taken firm root in half of Christendom, and risked in the other half too withering the Faith by its bitter-cold doctrines, then Our Lord made to a soul in the late 17th century the private revelation of the fire of His love for men burning within His breast, which gave rise of course, as He meant, to the great public Devotion to His Sacred Heart. Thus Catholics were spiritually forearmed, or forewarmed, against the icy blasts of rising scientism (idolatry of the material sciences), so that the growing cold of charity was then again seriously delayed.
Nevertheless the Christian nations continued to apostatize from Christ, especially by the French Revolution, whose liberalism poisoned the entire world. By this liberalism men were becoming too sick to take any strong medicine, and so for modern times, as St. Louis Grignon de Montfort had foretold in the early 18th century, Our Lord, to sugar the pill as it were, put forward His Mother, and Devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary, in many forms, became more prominent than ever in the Catholic Church.
Thus in the middle of the 19th century, the Catholic Pope chose the Mother of God to drive a stake through the heart of liberalism by his definition in 1854 of the dogma of her Immaculate Conception - no, men are not all nice people born without sin and longing to follow the truth and do good the moment they know it - they are born in sin and borne to do evil by a mysterious curse brought down upon men by men, from which curse, alone amongst children of a human father, the Blessed Virgin Mary was protected by the privilege of her immaculate conception in the womb of St. Anne.
Objection: "Ah, but that extraordinary privilege cannot have been earned by the Blessed Virgin because she could not exist before she received it.” True, but corresponding to the unearned privilege of her beginnings, the Catholic Pope in the middle of the 20th century defined the fully earned privilege of her bodily Assumption into Heaven at the end of her time upon earth. By her complete and unwavering fidelity to God and then to her divine Son, in every moment of her life, but especially at the foot of the Cross when fidelity to the will of God inflicted upon her motherly heart an overwhelming sorrow, she deserved, she fully deserved, at the end of her days to be taken by God not only with her soul but also with her body, into Heaven.
This is the mother whom God Himself has through His one Church put before modern mankind, a by now near terminally ill patient, as its only hope of healing. And how should she be this fount of healing other than through the heart by which a mother loves her sick child, bends over him, tends him, cares for him, and then turns to whoever can help to beg, beg, beg, for the means of a cure? As mothering is the essence of womanhood, so the motherly Heart is the essence of the Blessed Virgin.
By now we see all three elements of the Devotion to the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary, and how suitable that devotion is to our times. It is like a summing up of all devotions to the Blessed Virgin, because it tells of the purity of her being (Immaculate), of her love in action (Heart), and of her love in suffering (Sorrowful). Just how important this Devotion now is, Our Lord Himself tells. As the Second World War was beginning its slaughter, He said to a privileged soul, on July 2, 1940: "It is hearts that must be changed. This will be accomplished only by the Devotion to the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of My Mother being proclaimed, explained, preached, and recommended everywhere. Recourse to My Mother under this title which I wish for her universally, is the last help I shall give before the end of time."
In similar fashion we have been told by Our Lady that the present downfall of Church and world, which is endangering the salvation of all our souls, will only be turned around when Russia is consecrated by the Pope and bishops of all the world to her Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart. From then on how could Our Lord (who is omnipotent) allow any other means to save Church and world, without - perish the thought! - making His Mother into a liar? Therefore the devotion to the Immaculate Heart is, by the will of God, not a matter of choice for mankind, but an absolute necessity.
Enclosed is a copy of the prayer which all friends and members of the Society of St Pius X present in Fatima will be praying together, God willing, on August 22, the Feast of the Immaculate Heart, in this 80th anniversary year of her apparitions in Fatima. If you cannot be there that day, by all means join us in spirit by reciting the prayer at home.
Meanwhile thank you always for your support of the Seminary, both material (which we always need) and moral. Particular thanks to several friends who sent letters of sympathy for the Seminary's problems in May. But do not worry. We spent only a little time in weeping for fallen comrades. The war goes on.
Pray for vocations to the priesthood such as will understand and serve the Immaculate Heart of Mary, which unquestionably shares in the rejoicing of her Son:- "I confess to thee, 0 Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because thou hast hidden things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them to little ones. Yea, Father, for so it hath seemed good in thy sight" (Lk. X, 21).
Not. by mere human devising or intelligence, but by God's own means may he continue to be your servant; in Christ, who professes himself.
Sincerely yours,
+Richard Williamson
Our Lady of the Snows
Dear Friends and Benefactors,
On the 21st and 22nd days of this month, the Society of St Pius X will be making an official pilgrimage to Fatima in Portugal, to honour the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary, and to obtain through her intercession all possible graces for the Church, for the world, for the Society and for ourselves.
It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance today of the Devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary's Immaculate Heart. Why devotions? Why the Blessed Virgin Mary? Why her Immaculate Heart?
New devotions have always arisen down the twenty centuries of Catholic Church history, but these devotions have never been entirely new, nor could they be, because neither God nor the Catholic religion can change. However, the world changes, the times they are always a-changing, and so men in a variety of different historical circumstances may need a variety of religious practices, or devotions, to help them to reach the same God. Within the Catholic Church it is God Himself, the Holy Ghost, who inspires these various devotions down the ages according to the differing needs of men (Jn.XVI, 12, 13).
For instance, the one and only Catholic Mass by which Christ's bloody sacrifice on the Cross is made unbloodily present again, cannot change in its essentials, but at the height of the Middle Ages God knew that the following centuries would need not to forget that Our Lord really is present beneath the appearances of bread and wine when consecrated, so He inspired and raised up in His Church the Devotion to the Blessed Sacrament. Thus Catholics could be ready 300 years later for the Protestant onslaught on the Real Presence.
Similarly when Protestantism had nevertheless taken firm root in half of Christendom, and risked in the other half too withering the Faith by its bitter-cold doctrines, then Our Lord made to a soul in the late 17th century the private revelation of the fire of His love for men burning within His breast, which gave rise of course, as He meant, to the great public Devotion to His Sacred Heart. Thus Catholics were spiritually forearmed, or forewarmed, against the icy blasts of rising scientism (idolatry of the material sciences), so that the growing cold of charity was then again seriously delayed.
Nevertheless the Christian nations continued to apostatize from Christ, especially by the French Revolution, whose liberalism poisoned the entire world. By this liberalism men were becoming too sick to take any strong medicine, and so for modern times, as St. Louis Grignon de Montfort had foretold in the early 18th century, Our Lord, to sugar the pill as it were, put forward His Mother, and Devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary, in many forms, became more prominent than ever in the Catholic Church.
Thus in the middle of the 19th century, the Catholic Pope chose the Mother of God to drive a stake through the heart of liberalism by his definition in 1854 of the dogma of her Immaculate Conception - no, men are not all nice people born without sin and longing to follow the truth and do good the moment they know it - they are born in sin and borne to do evil by a mysterious curse brought down upon men by men, from which curse, alone amongst children of a human father, the Blessed Virgin Mary was protected by the privilege of her immaculate conception in the womb of St. Anne.
Objection: "Ah, but that extraordinary privilege cannot have been earned by the Blessed Virgin because she could not exist before she received it.” True, but corresponding to the unearned privilege of her beginnings, the Catholic Pope in the middle of the 20th century defined the fully earned privilege of her bodily Assumption into Heaven at the end of her time upon earth. By her complete and unwavering fidelity to God and then to her divine Son, in every moment of her life, but especially at the foot of the Cross when fidelity to the will of God inflicted upon her motherly heart an overwhelming sorrow, she deserved, she fully deserved, at the end of her days to be taken by God not only with her soul but also with her body, into Heaven.
This is the mother whom God Himself has through His one Church put before modern mankind, a by now near terminally ill patient, as its only hope of healing. And how should she be this fount of healing other than through the heart by which a mother loves her sick child, bends over him, tends him, cares for him, and then turns to whoever can help to beg, beg, beg, for the means of a cure? As mothering is the essence of womanhood, so the motherly Heart is the essence of the Blessed Virgin.
By now we see all three elements of the Devotion to the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary, and how suitable that devotion is to our times. It is like a summing up of all devotions to the Blessed Virgin, because it tells of the purity of her being (Immaculate), of her love in action (Heart), and of her love in suffering (Sorrowful). Just how important this Devotion now is, Our Lord Himself tells. As the Second World War was beginning its slaughter, He said to a privileged soul, on July 2, 1940: "It is hearts that must be changed. This will be accomplished only by the Devotion to the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of My Mother being proclaimed, explained, preached, and recommended everywhere. Recourse to My Mother under this title which I wish for her universally, is the last help I shall give before the end of time."
In similar fashion we have been told by Our Lady that the present downfall of Church and world, which is endangering the salvation of all our souls, will only be turned around when Russia is consecrated by the Pope and bishops of all the world to her Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart. From then on how could Our Lord (who is omnipotent) allow any other means to save Church and world, without - perish the thought! - making His Mother into a liar? Therefore the devotion to the Immaculate Heart is, by the will of God, not a matter of choice for mankind, but an absolute necessity.
Enclosed is a copy of the prayer which all friends and members of the Society of St Pius X present in Fatima will be praying together, God willing, on August 22, the Feast of the Immaculate Heart, in this 80th anniversary year of her apparitions in Fatima. If you cannot be there that day, by all means join us in spirit by reciting the prayer at home.
Meanwhile thank you always for your support of the Seminary, both material (which we always need) and moral. Particular thanks to several friends who sent letters of sympathy for the Seminary's problems in May. But do not worry. We spent only a little time in weeping for fallen comrades. The war goes on.
Pray for vocations to the priesthood such as will understand and serve the Immaculate Heart of Mary, which unquestionably shares in the rejoicing of her Son:- "I confess to thee, 0 Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because thou hast hidden things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them to little ones. Yea, Father, for so it hath seemed good in thy sight" (Lk. X, 21).
Not. by mere human devising or intelligence, but by God's own means may he continue to be your servant; in Christ, who professes himself.
Sincerely yours,
+Richard Williamson
Hamlet and the solutions of Jesus Christ to modern problems
July 1, 1997
Dear Friends and Benefactors,
In the middle of April a number of seminarians and seminary professors took the opportunity to see a local production of Shakespeare's famous play Hamlet, done (quite well) by the college at the foot of the hill. It was a grand reminder that the solutions of Our Lord Jesus Christ are organic to modern problems, neither mere band-aids to be stuck on the surface, nor optional extras we can do without. From when He came into the world, real problems have no other solution.
But why should any Catholic be interested in Hamlet? What does Our Lord have to do with the theatre, or with literature? Indeed he appears to be irrelevant, because modern "literature" has pushed him to one side. But in fact nobody is more relevant, because that very pushing aside is what governs what we call "literature". Let Hamlet serve here to show how work on Monday to Friday, culture (or Literature) on Saturday and religion on Sunday is not a workable way of life!
Two recent films of Hamlet with Mel Gibson and then Kenneth Branagh in the leading role remind us how any male actor of standing wishes at least once in his career to play the part. The famous British actor, Sir Lawrence Olivier, played the part five times and on his deathbed expressed the wish to play it again. This is because the play speaks in a special way to modern man.
Yet there are almost as many different interpretations of the play and of its central character as there are different producers or actors. How can this be? Firstly, Hamlet is the broadest character that Shakespeare ever portrayed, uniting in himself so many diverse elements (philosopher, "courtier, soldier, scholar", cynic, poet, clown, etc.) that whoever plays the Prince of Denmark must choose which elements to leave out, because he cannot fit them all in. Corresponding to this elusive central character, the play as a whole expresses some conflict so deep that it can surface in a variety of different ways. Shallow conflict, only one issue. Deep conflict, many possible issues. Hamlet is in fact riddled with conflict, or contradiction.
For illustration, let us take Shakespeare's famous heroines. In Julius Caesar, Brutus turns aside from his loving wife Portia, and comes to grief - no contradiction. Othello tramples on his innocent Desdemona and comes to grief - no contradiction. King Lear spurns his only true daughter, Cordelia, and falls into madness - no contradiction. On the other hand Macbeth follows the promptings of the wicked Lady Macbeth, and comes to grief - still no contradiction. But Hamlet? The Prince tramples on his sweetheart, the undeserving Ophelia, and it is she that goes mad while he strides forward to an avenging triumph! Hamlet contradicts the other tragedies! Or does it? After all, Hamlet still ends in a slug-fest and a blood-bath, as they do. So the Prince did come to grief? Hamlet contradicts itself!
Similarly with Shakespeare's tempters. Cassius who starts Brutus towards murdering Caesar, Iago who ruins Othello and the Witches who overthrow Macbeth's virtue are all clearly evil. But who can call the much suffering Ghost of Hamlet's father evil, when he urges his son to avenge his murder? Does he make Hamlet fall, or rise to a noble self-sacrifice? Contradiction!
Now this contradiction inside Hamlet, and the special character of Hamlet amongst the Shakespearean tragedies, might be analyzed as follows: All these tragedies, including Hamlet, have a basic pattern of natural law, inherited from the medieval morality play, whereby the individual soul is confronted with a choice between good and evil; if it chooses love, it will create harmony and order in and all around itself, but if it gives way to the temptation to turn its back on love, then all hell breaks loose, both for the hero and for his society.
In Hamlet however, and in Hamlet alone, this natural pattern which we time-tag as medieval is heavily overlaid with what we might time-tag as the modern or Hollywood pattern, whereby all problems are the fault of society, so every hero is a rebel, every heroine should join him, and most villains are figures in authority - poor Bonnie Ophelia, what she should have done was help Prince Clyde kill her father! (Compare Bonnie and Clyde, Natural Born Killers, etc., etc.) Seen in this light, Hamlet is the four century-old trail-blazer of Hollywood, one reason for the play's enduring appeal.
However, the medieval pattern is still there in Hamlet, which means contradiction. For in the modern pattern society is at fault, whereas in the old pattern, the central fault lies inside the individual. To make one and the same play simultaneously fit two such contradictory patterns required from Shakespeare a prodigious feat of theatrical counterpoint which the inside of the enclosed flyer means to disentangle for anyone who knows the play: in the three columns from left to right are the plot presented neutrally, then its medieval spin and its modern spin. Such an analysis does explain the many possible interpretations of the play, anywhere on the high tension grid between its contradictory poles.
But such tension is not humanly bearable, and must resolve one way or the other. This is what makes some distinguished critics even call Hamlet an unsatisfactory play. In any case the modern world obviously resolved the tension more and more in favour of the modern pattern, while Shakespeare himself reverted to the medieval pattern. In his very next play, "Measure for Measure", he has the priest-like Duke of Vienna intervene to circuit-break the tragic process, and never again does Shakespeare seem to have been so nearly rocked off his medieval hinges.
Of course England's then apostatising from the Catholic Faith was enough to rock many a good man then and since off his medieval hinges. See the flyer's inner panel where precisely in Hamlet Shakespeare began bending the old theology in order to set the modern pattern. But in his own career it does seem to have been only a momentary departure, because hints scattered through the rest of his plays suggest that he was Catholic, only forced on the Elizabethan stage to keep his Catholicism under wraps. Which would explain many things -
Firstly, his popularity even with non-Christians but who respect the natural law which Our Lord came to defend and restore - Shakespeare's plays are constantly presenting nature as an order which one violates at one's peril. Secondly, the popularity of Hamlet in particular for rebels and all idealists dreaming of an escape from that order - many a romantic would rather enjoy his problem than have it solved, especially by resort to a God! Thirdly, Shakespeare's popularity with centuries of post-Catholic Christians or post-Christian liberals who can enjoy in his plays the natural order as defended by Christ, without having to submit to the Catholic Faith as commanded by Christ. Fourthly, however, since all such tasting fruits without feeding roots is doomed in the long run, then Shakespeare's present unpopularity is explained in the universities and schools where antichristian liberals reign supreme who reject all order of nature, let alone of supernature.
Yet Shakespeare can still be popular in the cinema because it is difficult to abolish that nature which, thanks to the Christendom that went before him, he understood so well! Hence the two recent films of Hamlet, and a Romeo and Juliet set amidst filling-stations in Vero Beach, Florida, in which the ancient verse can pop quite naturally out of the mouths of leather-jacket hoodlums!
Thus Shakespeare is true to life and his plays contain an enduring wisdom because his medieval heritage coming from Our Lord Jesus Christ gave him a clear grasp of human nature on the brink of modern confusion. Under severe pressure from the apostasy of England launching that corruption of the structure of society which makes many a rebel cut the figure of an avenging angel, Shakespeare in Hamlet teetered into that confusion, and gave us a glimpse of his nightmare future, our Hollywood present, in which the unnatural is become natural and the normal abnormal. But he himself drew back from the brink and went on to create a series of further plays on the medieval pattern, as reposing to a sane mind as they are disconcerting to minds of today which feel driven to "deconstruct" them.
For of course the world after Shakespeare went ahead with the confusion and undermining of the natural order. Anything tagged as medieval it has repudiated. The result is the emptiness, ugliness and death of theatre, literature, music, art, as we have known them. For there is no way in which culture can replace religion. It cracks under the strain when press-ganged by liberals into doing so. Shakespeare, literature, etc., are an after-glow of the Faith, and they live by projecting its wisdom, but they die with its disappearance, because apostasy from Jesus Christ creates an environment so hostile to sane nature that less than ever can it survive without the help of Christ's grace, or supernature.
In conclusion, there is nothing - nothing - more organic to the problems of modern man than the solutions of Jesus Christ. Those problems are as complex as the Prince of Denmark, as deep as the questioning of God's natural order, as profound as rebellion against God. No mere band-aids will do for such a gangrene.
Nor can there be any other doctor than Jesus Christ, because He alone with the Father and the Holy Ghost is the one God that is being offended, and only the party offended, not the party offending, can lay down the terms for forgiving the offence. So only that Church which is His can have means efficacious to heal. So Our Lord Jesus Christ and His Catholic Church are not an optional extra.
Dear friends, pray for the priests who bring to you Our Lord Jesus Christ. Literature, culture, the world cannot survive if souls are not being saved through priests. We had one more priest from Winona ordained on June 21, as scheduled. It was a beautiful day, and how many souls went home spiritually refreshed by Mother Church's great ceremonies! This priest now leaves Winona to help look after your souls. Several seminarians stay in Winona for a few weeks to help provide you with Spiritual Exercises and a Doctrinal Session. If only Hamlet had done a Retreat!
May God bless you and keep you through the summer,
Dear Friends and Benefactors,
In the middle of April a number of seminarians and seminary professors took the opportunity to see a local production of Shakespeare's famous play Hamlet, done (quite well) by the college at the foot of the hill. It was a grand reminder that the solutions of Our Lord Jesus Christ are organic to modern problems, neither mere band-aids to be stuck on the surface, nor optional extras we can do without. From when He came into the world, real problems have no other solution.
But why should any Catholic be interested in Hamlet? What does Our Lord have to do with the theatre, or with literature? Indeed he appears to be irrelevant, because modern "literature" has pushed him to one side. But in fact nobody is more relevant, because that very pushing aside is what governs what we call "literature". Let Hamlet serve here to show how work on Monday to Friday, culture (or Literature) on Saturday and religion on Sunday is not a workable way of life!
Two recent films of Hamlet with Mel Gibson and then Kenneth Branagh in the leading role remind us how any male actor of standing wishes at least once in his career to play the part. The famous British actor, Sir Lawrence Olivier, played the part five times and on his deathbed expressed the wish to play it again. This is because the play speaks in a special way to modern man.
Yet there are almost as many different interpretations of the play and of its central character as there are different producers or actors. How can this be? Firstly, Hamlet is the broadest character that Shakespeare ever portrayed, uniting in himself so many diverse elements (philosopher, "courtier, soldier, scholar", cynic, poet, clown, etc.) that whoever plays the Prince of Denmark must choose which elements to leave out, because he cannot fit them all in. Corresponding to this elusive central character, the play as a whole expresses some conflict so deep that it can surface in a variety of different ways. Shallow conflict, only one issue. Deep conflict, many possible issues. Hamlet is in fact riddled with conflict, or contradiction.
For illustration, let us take Shakespeare's famous heroines. In Julius Caesar, Brutus turns aside from his loving wife Portia, and comes to grief - no contradiction. Othello tramples on his innocent Desdemona and comes to grief - no contradiction. King Lear spurns his only true daughter, Cordelia, and falls into madness - no contradiction. On the other hand Macbeth follows the promptings of the wicked Lady Macbeth, and comes to grief - still no contradiction. But Hamlet? The Prince tramples on his sweetheart, the undeserving Ophelia, and it is she that goes mad while he strides forward to an avenging triumph! Hamlet contradicts the other tragedies! Or does it? After all, Hamlet still ends in a slug-fest and a blood-bath, as they do. So the Prince did come to grief? Hamlet contradicts itself!
Similarly with Shakespeare's tempters. Cassius who starts Brutus towards murdering Caesar, Iago who ruins Othello and the Witches who overthrow Macbeth's virtue are all clearly evil. But who can call the much suffering Ghost of Hamlet's father evil, when he urges his son to avenge his murder? Does he make Hamlet fall, or rise to a noble self-sacrifice? Contradiction!
Now this contradiction inside Hamlet, and the special character of Hamlet amongst the Shakespearean tragedies, might be analyzed as follows: All these tragedies, including Hamlet, have a basic pattern of natural law, inherited from the medieval morality play, whereby the individual soul is confronted with a choice between good and evil; if it chooses love, it will create harmony and order in and all around itself, but if it gives way to the temptation to turn its back on love, then all hell breaks loose, both for the hero and for his society.
In Hamlet however, and in Hamlet alone, this natural pattern which we time-tag as medieval is heavily overlaid with what we might time-tag as the modern or Hollywood pattern, whereby all problems are the fault of society, so every hero is a rebel, every heroine should join him, and most villains are figures in authority - poor Bonnie Ophelia, what she should have done was help Prince Clyde kill her father! (Compare Bonnie and Clyde, Natural Born Killers, etc., etc.) Seen in this light, Hamlet is the four century-old trail-blazer of Hollywood, one reason for the play's enduring appeal.
However, the medieval pattern is still there in Hamlet, which means contradiction. For in the modern pattern society is at fault, whereas in the old pattern, the central fault lies inside the individual. To make one and the same play simultaneously fit two such contradictory patterns required from Shakespeare a prodigious feat of theatrical counterpoint which the inside of the enclosed flyer means to disentangle for anyone who knows the play: in the three columns from left to right are the plot presented neutrally, then its medieval spin and its modern spin. Such an analysis does explain the many possible interpretations of the play, anywhere on the high tension grid between its contradictory poles.
But such tension is not humanly bearable, and must resolve one way or the other. This is what makes some distinguished critics even call Hamlet an unsatisfactory play. In any case the modern world obviously resolved the tension more and more in favour of the modern pattern, while Shakespeare himself reverted to the medieval pattern. In his very next play, "Measure for Measure", he has the priest-like Duke of Vienna intervene to circuit-break the tragic process, and never again does Shakespeare seem to have been so nearly rocked off his medieval hinges.
Of course England's then apostatising from the Catholic Faith was enough to rock many a good man then and since off his medieval hinges. See the flyer's inner panel where precisely in Hamlet Shakespeare began bending the old theology in order to set the modern pattern. But in his own career it does seem to have been only a momentary departure, because hints scattered through the rest of his plays suggest that he was Catholic, only forced on the Elizabethan stage to keep his Catholicism under wraps. Which would explain many things -
Firstly, his popularity even with non-Christians but who respect the natural law which Our Lord came to defend and restore - Shakespeare's plays are constantly presenting nature as an order which one violates at one's peril. Secondly, the popularity of Hamlet in particular for rebels and all idealists dreaming of an escape from that order - many a romantic would rather enjoy his problem than have it solved, especially by resort to a God! Thirdly, Shakespeare's popularity with centuries of post-Catholic Christians or post-Christian liberals who can enjoy in his plays the natural order as defended by Christ, without having to submit to the Catholic Faith as commanded by Christ. Fourthly, however, since all such tasting fruits without feeding roots is doomed in the long run, then Shakespeare's present unpopularity is explained in the universities and schools where antichristian liberals reign supreme who reject all order of nature, let alone of supernature.
Yet Shakespeare can still be popular in the cinema because it is difficult to abolish that nature which, thanks to the Christendom that went before him, he understood so well! Hence the two recent films of Hamlet, and a Romeo and Juliet set amidst filling-stations in Vero Beach, Florida, in which the ancient verse can pop quite naturally out of the mouths of leather-jacket hoodlums!
Thus Shakespeare is true to life and his plays contain an enduring wisdom because his medieval heritage coming from Our Lord Jesus Christ gave him a clear grasp of human nature on the brink of modern confusion. Under severe pressure from the apostasy of England launching that corruption of the structure of society which makes many a rebel cut the figure of an avenging angel, Shakespeare in Hamlet teetered into that confusion, and gave us a glimpse of his nightmare future, our Hollywood present, in which the unnatural is become natural and the normal abnormal. But he himself drew back from the brink and went on to create a series of further plays on the medieval pattern, as reposing to a sane mind as they are disconcerting to minds of today which feel driven to "deconstruct" them.
For of course the world after Shakespeare went ahead with the confusion and undermining of the natural order. Anything tagged as medieval it has repudiated. The result is the emptiness, ugliness and death of theatre, literature, music, art, as we have known them. For there is no way in which culture can replace religion. It cracks under the strain when press-ganged by liberals into doing so. Shakespeare, literature, etc., are an after-glow of the Faith, and they live by projecting its wisdom, but they die with its disappearance, because apostasy from Jesus Christ creates an environment so hostile to sane nature that less than ever can it survive without the help of Christ's grace, or supernature.
In conclusion, there is nothing - nothing - more organic to the problems of modern man than the solutions of Jesus Christ. Those problems are as complex as the Prince of Denmark, as deep as the questioning of God's natural order, as profound as rebellion against God. No mere band-aids will do for such a gangrene.
Nor can there be any other doctor than Jesus Christ, because He alone with the Father and the Holy Ghost is the one God that is being offended, and only the party offended, not the party offending, can lay down the terms for forgiving the offence. So only that Church which is His can have means efficacious to heal. So Our Lord Jesus Christ and His Catholic Church are not an optional extra.
Dear friends, pray for the priests who bring to you Our Lord Jesus Christ. Literature, culture, the world cannot survive if souls are not being saved through priests. We had one more priest from Winona ordained on June 21, as scheduled. It was a beautiful day, and how many souls went home spiritually refreshed by Mother Church's great ceremonies! This priest now leaves Winona to help look after your souls. Several seminarians stay in Winona for a few weeks to help provide you with Spiritual Exercises and a Doctrinal Session. If only Hamlet had done a Retreat!
May God bless you and keep you through the summer,
Why computers will not take over the human race
June 5, 1997
Dear Friends and Benefactors,
It is astonishing what nonsense even supposedly intelligent people can write about computers so as to credit them with quasi-human qualities. This is mainly because they have such a low view of human beings. Materialists who believe only in matter, and their kissing cousins, evolutionists, have almost no idea what a human being is.
Let me give for instance the argument of an article written last month by a nationally renowned columnist here in the U.S.A. It concerns the recent one-game victory by chess computer Deep Blue in its six-game re-match played one month ago in Philadelphia against world chess champion, Gary Kasparov. The article is called "Be Afraid", and it concludes that mankind must fear an evolution of computers from victory over Kasparov to victory over the human race! Here are the bare bones of the article, in four propositions –
1. In the second game of the second match, "Deep Blue" played in a way (apparently) more human and less mechanical than ever before, thus not only defeating but also unnerving Kasparov.
2. This is because the computer was stronger than Kasparov in chess strategy, where normally humans are stronger. Thus Deep Blue seemed to have risen from mere calculating to real thinking, from mere quantity to quality, from mere brain to mind.
3. Similarly Deep Blue looked as though it was breaking free of mechanical determinism insofar as its makers could not tell what move it would make in any one situation, because its 32 computer nodes each with 16 co-processors could talk to one another in such different orders that it would give unpredictably different results: said one of the makers, "We can never know why Deep Blue did what it did."
4. Thus Deep Blue demonstrated in early May that computers have moved up the first stage on the evolutionary ladder from merely mechanical determinism to non-determined action, and, given that integrated circuits have only been around for 40 years and microprocessors for the last 30, then we can reasonably expect that computers will soon make, as human beings did, the second step, from non-determined thinking to fully intelligent freedom! Mankind, move over!
Now our columnist might not like his argument to be so cruelly shrunk, but he could not deny that here are its bare bones. Let us take each of the four propositions in turn -
Firstly, however much Deep Blue may have "appeared" (sic...) to be moving humanly instead of merely mechanically, it remains obvious that the computer was still only doing what it had been programmed by its designers to do. Outside that programme it absolutely could not move. Kasparov won the first match because he discovered a weakness in the computer's programming (pawn structure), and being human was free to adapt his own play accordingly. On the contrary the computer could not be adapted until after the first match was over, when no doubt its human designers freely corrected it, to Kasparov's grief in the re-match. Brute force of millions of lightning calculations is still the computer's only internal strength. To defeat a Kasparov still requires external manipulation of that brute force by other humans.
Secondly, however much Deep Blue may have "seemed" (sic...) to have risen from brute calculation to real thinking, from quantity to quality, etc., in reality any such rise is only an illusion, or, such a violation of common sense as only evolutionists are capable of. Since when, if I buy 20, 50 or even 50,000 cans of beans at the store, do they turn into a joint of beef by the time I get home? Since when, if I add oceans to oceans of water, do they make one piece of land? Since when if I pile up billions of unthinking apes, do they make one thinking man? As though quantity if only big enough will jump into a change of quality or of substance! As though mechanical circuits, if only I connect up enough zillions of them, will make an unmechanical thought! Idiocy! But then evolutionists, like our columnist, are (witting or unwitting) idiots. For them, apples slide into oranges all the time!
Thirdly, however much Deep Blue "looked as though" (sic... are you beginning to feel sea-sic?) it was breaking free of determinism, of course it was doing no such thing. To conclude from the designers' no longer being able to observe their machine's determinedness to the machine being indetermined in itself is as idiotic as to say the moon has no other side because I can never see it! Any randomness of Deep Blue's complications is only relative, or apparent. If in one and the same situation it can give different results, that is only because it is designed to be able to do so. Its determinedness is only relatively unobservable, absolutely Deep Blue remains determined.
Fourthly, to add to the fancy of Deep Blue's having risen to - sorry, having seemed to rise to - undeterminedness, the fancy of its rising from undeterminedness to full intelligence, is to double the stupidity. But then our columnist's wits are addled by his belief in just such an evolution on the part of man himself. After all, if man evolved from mineral to vegetable to animal to humanoid, why can't the mineral machine do the same? Poor columnist! He may ape all the mindless fools in creation, but he is still going to answer at God's judgment seat for the misuse he has made of his God-given intelligence!
The human being ranks high in God's graded creation, because of all material creatures man alone is also spiritual. Amongst spiritual creatures he ranks low insofar as he alone is also material. Above him are the purely spiritual angels. Beneath him are the purely material creatures of the animal, vegetable and mineral categories, in that order.
Now through all these grades of creation, rank is by more or less spirituality climbing out of matter. Lowest minerals have no semblance of life, whereas the highest minerals (e.g. amino-acids?) seem close to life. The lowest plants are little more than mineral, the highest (e.g. fly-catchers) seem close to animal. The lowest animals (e.g. starfish?) seem little more than plants, the highest animals are those constantly credited by the media with intelligence. The lowest human beings behave little better (even, worse!) than animals, the highest seem angelic. And the angels again are graded towards God.
However, while the highest of the lower in God's creation thus always touches on the lowest of the higher, still each main category is unmistakably distinct from its neighbours, and no creature can belong to two such categories. Thus every plant has life in itself which no mineral has; every animal has sensation which no plant has; every human being has intelligence which no animal has; no angel has a body which every human being has. Nor is there any scientific evidence whatsoever to prove that any creature has ever moved from one category to another, on the contrary there are masses of evidence for every creature's being fixed in its category.
So Deep Blue is mere mineral, will remain mere mineral, and has not in it a grain of life, let alone of intelligence, nor will it ever have. So with its zillions of electronic circuits it may be able, in a game that suits it like chess does, to overtop the calculating capacity of the strongest of human players, but it is still intrinsically incapable of one truly intelligent or free thought, because it is totally material and all its operations are locked in the determinedness of matter. To be a match for the free Kasparov, Deep Blue had to be programmed and re-programmed by a team of spiritual and free chess and computer experts.
So the machine is and always will be a mere instrument of human beings. The problem remains inescapably the human beings, or, whatever fouls up human beings, which in any serious sense is always sin, which is always human beings fouling up their relations not firstly with one another but firstly with God.
So what we need to be afraid of, dear columnist, is not a take-over of mankind by Deep Blue, but rather the human beings who are liable to misuse the powers of Deep Blue, because, amongst other reasons, columnists completely misrepresent to them their own spiritual nature and the material nature of Deep Blue. There is no way in which men will behave like angels if they are equated with machines!
Nor will they always behave like angels even if they are treated like men! Here at the Seminary we have just had a stormy month of May. A priest who had been a professor here for nearly four years precipitated his own expulsion for combined subversion and disobedience at the beginning of the month, because, it seems, he thought the moment had come when his own project for the apostolate, ripening within his mind for the last ten years, could no longer be advanced from within the Seminary. So instead he manipulated his departure.
The gravity of his condition as an incorrigible dreamer was not immediately apparent when he came to Winona, firstly for three years as a seminarian and then as a professor. On the contrary, his out of the ordinary talents rendered for a while considerable service to the Seminary and to seminarians, as they had been brought here to do. But now it seems that he was driven by his dream all along. Alas, each time he meets with a reality check, he will be sure it is the fault of reality.
But who can help loving Peter Pan? When this 34-year old priest left the Seminary behind him, he took with him one priest and two seminarians, and since then another half dozen seminarians have left, at least for the time being, and some of those who are still here have stardust in their eyes and tears in their hearts. It can be painful to grow up!
Dear friends, pray for these two priests that they come to their senses before they have to be expelled from the Society of St Pius X, and pray to lose no more of your priests to their dream, which they themselves indicate may end up back within the Novus Ordo establishment. Let no more fantasies of the Devil be allowed to distract or divert our seminarians or priests from the seeming treadmill of labour appointed for our sanctification by Our Lord in his vineyard!
Meanwhile the Seminary continues on schedule. There will be ordinations to the priesthood and diaconate here on Saturday, June 21, at 9 AM, by Bishop Tissier de Mallerais. There will follow the series of Retreats as announced, women's July 2 to 5 and 7 to 12, men's June 25 to 28 and July 14 to 19, concluded by the Doctrinal Session of July 22 to 26, which will deal with modern and postmodern errors.
Enclosed is a flyer for the latest series of three audio-tapes made by Bernard Janzen and myself. The flyer advertises their availability from him in Canada, but they will also be available at the same price here from the Seminary. He says he likes them.
This week we shall be consecrating the Seminary to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, at a little shrine we are constructing in a prominent place. The Seminary belongs to Him. May He continue to have mercy on it as He had for the last month! And thank you especially for the help of your prayers over the same time period.
Most sincerely yours in His service,
Dear Friends and Benefactors,
It is astonishing what nonsense even supposedly intelligent people can write about computers so as to credit them with quasi-human qualities. This is mainly because they have such a low view of human beings. Materialists who believe only in matter, and their kissing cousins, evolutionists, have almost no idea what a human being is.
Let me give for instance the argument of an article written last month by a nationally renowned columnist here in the U.S.A. It concerns the recent one-game victory by chess computer Deep Blue in its six-game re-match played one month ago in Philadelphia against world chess champion, Gary Kasparov. The article is called "Be Afraid", and it concludes that mankind must fear an evolution of computers from victory over Kasparov to victory over the human race! Here are the bare bones of the article, in four propositions –
1. In the second game of the second match, "Deep Blue" played in a way (apparently) more human and less mechanical than ever before, thus not only defeating but also unnerving Kasparov.
2. This is because the computer was stronger than Kasparov in chess strategy, where normally humans are stronger. Thus Deep Blue seemed to have risen from mere calculating to real thinking, from mere quantity to quality, from mere brain to mind.
3. Similarly Deep Blue looked as though it was breaking free of mechanical determinism insofar as its makers could not tell what move it would make in any one situation, because its 32 computer nodes each with 16 co-processors could talk to one another in such different orders that it would give unpredictably different results: said one of the makers, "We can never know why Deep Blue did what it did."
4. Thus Deep Blue demonstrated in early May that computers have moved up the first stage on the evolutionary ladder from merely mechanical determinism to non-determined action, and, given that integrated circuits have only been around for 40 years and microprocessors for the last 30, then we can reasonably expect that computers will soon make, as human beings did, the second step, from non-determined thinking to fully intelligent freedom! Mankind, move over!
Now our columnist might not like his argument to be so cruelly shrunk, but he could not deny that here are its bare bones. Let us take each of the four propositions in turn -
Firstly, however much Deep Blue may have "appeared" (sic...) to be moving humanly instead of merely mechanically, it remains obvious that the computer was still only doing what it had been programmed by its designers to do. Outside that programme it absolutely could not move. Kasparov won the first match because he discovered a weakness in the computer's programming (pawn structure), and being human was free to adapt his own play accordingly. On the contrary the computer could not be adapted until after the first match was over, when no doubt its human designers freely corrected it, to Kasparov's grief in the re-match. Brute force of millions of lightning calculations is still the computer's only internal strength. To defeat a Kasparov still requires external manipulation of that brute force by other humans.
Secondly, however much Deep Blue may have "seemed" (sic...) to have risen from brute calculation to real thinking, from quantity to quality, etc., in reality any such rise is only an illusion, or, such a violation of common sense as only evolutionists are capable of. Since when, if I buy 20, 50 or even 50,000 cans of beans at the store, do they turn into a joint of beef by the time I get home? Since when, if I add oceans to oceans of water, do they make one piece of land? Since when if I pile up billions of unthinking apes, do they make one thinking man? As though quantity if only big enough will jump into a change of quality or of substance! As though mechanical circuits, if only I connect up enough zillions of them, will make an unmechanical thought! Idiocy! But then evolutionists, like our columnist, are (witting or unwitting) idiots. For them, apples slide into oranges all the time!
Thirdly, however much Deep Blue "looked as though" (sic... are you beginning to feel sea-sic?) it was breaking free of determinism, of course it was doing no such thing. To conclude from the designers' no longer being able to observe their machine's determinedness to the machine being indetermined in itself is as idiotic as to say the moon has no other side because I can never see it! Any randomness of Deep Blue's complications is only relative, or apparent. If in one and the same situation it can give different results, that is only because it is designed to be able to do so. Its determinedness is only relatively unobservable, absolutely Deep Blue remains determined.
Fourthly, to add to the fancy of Deep Blue's having risen to - sorry, having seemed to rise to - undeterminedness, the fancy of its rising from undeterminedness to full intelligence, is to double the stupidity. But then our columnist's wits are addled by his belief in just such an evolution on the part of man himself. After all, if man evolved from mineral to vegetable to animal to humanoid, why can't the mineral machine do the same? Poor columnist! He may ape all the mindless fools in creation, but he is still going to answer at God's judgment seat for the misuse he has made of his God-given intelligence!
The human being ranks high in God's graded creation, because of all material creatures man alone is also spiritual. Amongst spiritual creatures he ranks low insofar as he alone is also material. Above him are the purely spiritual angels. Beneath him are the purely material creatures of the animal, vegetable and mineral categories, in that order.
Now through all these grades of creation, rank is by more or less spirituality climbing out of matter. Lowest minerals have no semblance of life, whereas the highest minerals (e.g. amino-acids?) seem close to life. The lowest plants are little more than mineral, the highest (e.g. fly-catchers) seem close to animal. The lowest animals (e.g. starfish?) seem little more than plants, the highest animals are those constantly credited by the media with intelligence. The lowest human beings behave little better (even, worse!) than animals, the highest seem angelic. And the angels again are graded towards God.
However, while the highest of the lower in God's creation thus always touches on the lowest of the higher, still each main category is unmistakably distinct from its neighbours, and no creature can belong to two such categories. Thus every plant has life in itself which no mineral has; every animal has sensation which no plant has; every human being has intelligence which no animal has; no angel has a body which every human being has. Nor is there any scientific evidence whatsoever to prove that any creature has ever moved from one category to another, on the contrary there are masses of evidence for every creature's being fixed in its category.
So Deep Blue is mere mineral, will remain mere mineral, and has not in it a grain of life, let alone of intelligence, nor will it ever have. So with its zillions of electronic circuits it may be able, in a game that suits it like chess does, to overtop the calculating capacity of the strongest of human players, but it is still intrinsically incapable of one truly intelligent or free thought, because it is totally material and all its operations are locked in the determinedness of matter. To be a match for the free Kasparov, Deep Blue had to be programmed and re-programmed by a team of spiritual and free chess and computer experts.
So the machine is and always will be a mere instrument of human beings. The problem remains inescapably the human beings, or, whatever fouls up human beings, which in any serious sense is always sin, which is always human beings fouling up their relations not firstly with one another but firstly with God.
So what we need to be afraid of, dear columnist, is not a take-over of mankind by Deep Blue, but rather the human beings who are liable to misuse the powers of Deep Blue, because, amongst other reasons, columnists completely misrepresent to them their own spiritual nature and the material nature of Deep Blue. There is no way in which men will behave like angels if they are equated with machines!
Nor will they always behave like angels even if they are treated like men! Here at the Seminary we have just had a stormy month of May. A priest who had been a professor here for nearly four years precipitated his own expulsion for combined subversion and disobedience at the beginning of the month, because, it seems, he thought the moment had come when his own project for the apostolate, ripening within his mind for the last ten years, could no longer be advanced from within the Seminary. So instead he manipulated his departure.
The gravity of his condition as an incorrigible dreamer was not immediately apparent when he came to Winona, firstly for three years as a seminarian and then as a professor. On the contrary, his out of the ordinary talents rendered for a while considerable service to the Seminary and to seminarians, as they had been brought here to do. But now it seems that he was driven by his dream all along. Alas, each time he meets with a reality check, he will be sure it is the fault of reality.
But who can help loving Peter Pan? When this 34-year old priest left the Seminary behind him, he took with him one priest and two seminarians, and since then another half dozen seminarians have left, at least for the time being, and some of those who are still here have stardust in their eyes and tears in their hearts. It can be painful to grow up!
Dear friends, pray for these two priests that they come to their senses before they have to be expelled from the Society of St Pius X, and pray to lose no more of your priests to their dream, which they themselves indicate may end up back within the Novus Ordo establishment. Let no more fantasies of the Devil be allowed to distract or divert our seminarians or priests from the seeming treadmill of labour appointed for our sanctification by Our Lord in his vineyard!
Meanwhile the Seminary continues on schedule. There will be ordinations to the priesthood and diaconate here on Saturday, June 21, at 9 AM, by Bishop Tissier de Mallerais. There will follow the series of Retreats as announced, women's July 2 to 5 and 7 to 12, men's June 25 to 28 and July 14 to 19, concluded by the Doctrinal Session of July 22 to 26, which will deal with modern and postmodern errors.
Enclosed is a flyer for the latest series of three audio-tapes made by Bernard Janzen and myself. The flyer advertises their availability from him in Canada, but they will also be available at the same price here from the Seminary. He says he likes them.
This week we shall be consecrating the Seminary to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, at a little shrine we are constructing in a prominent place. The Seminary belongs to Him. May He continue to have mercy on it as He had for the last month! And thank you especially for the help of your prayers over the same time period.
Most sincerely yours in His service,
Computers in education cause collapse of ideas, words and thought
May 1, 1997
Dear Friends and Benefactors,
I can see why so many of you related positively to the idea put forward in this letter two months ago, of a concentration camp for young men (even if it was to be at most a one-year experiment) - there is a crying need for old-fashioned education of the kind that the Catholic Church always used to foster.
This is because the public and secret masters of the New World Order are fabricating a new human nature. Man, made in the image of God, they are making over in the image of man, especially through education. The result is that the very thought, let alone the effort, of saving one's soul becomes more and more alien to people, especially youngsters. You rightly wonder how your children and grand-children will get to Heaven.
From a friend of mine working in a prestigious academy in the USA, here is an alarming portrait of how the situation is evolving. From his knowledge of schools he works back to the influence of computers, and he concludes with an assessment of the effects upon people in general. All I have done is give an order to his quotes:
"In the last two years the whole class-room experience has changed. There is a whole new breed of student out there. They are not really students, because they have less and less interest in studying. One or two of my colleagues have taken alarm at the change but most of my colleagues are happy with it because it means they no longer have to teach. Something has happened and adults do not know what it is.
"Young people now react to nothing, they do not connect. I find it increasingly difficult to connect with them, and much of the time they make me uncomfortable, because their reactions are so twisted, so inhuman. They are horrified by nothing. Horror creates in them glee. Less and less sparks from them any human reaction. The three-letter word (s_x) has become so commonplace that only violence can still get the juices running. Violence does interest them.
"It is all very unnerving. It cannot go on. They cannot hold down jobs, so jobs become unreal, and they seek an underground existence. The urges of the human heart (which are still in them), being so misunderstood, will come out in massive mutual suicide in the streets. It's the end.
"I do not blame them. It is not their fault. Where do they see around them anything that anybody would die for? For instance, not one student I know of made one comment on last November's elections in the USA, because they know it is all empty and fraudulent.
"What in fact do they see around them? People not living, but sleep-walking. Zombies, getting into a machine to go to work, working on a machine all day long, recreating with a machine at night. That is not living, and the youngsters know it. Yet such people are consumed with pride and rear up indignantly if anyone points out to them that they are not living.
"I do not blame the machines, because machines are only machines, but I blame the adults who make life out of their machines, especially in recent times out of the computer. The adults are making reality virtual, and the mass mutual suicide in the streets will be a form of that virtual reality. If I live my life watching screens, then the eyeball becomes a screen, and whether I create a world, or zap the world, on screen or in life, it's all the same.
"Let us reflect for moment on the nature of these flashing screens. Cinema is already bad insofar as it is only half human. It manipulates minds by dead images. There is no live exchange between performer and audience, there is nothing real. Television is worse with its 100 channels of junk, after so much promise when it first appeared. But worst of all for human purposes is the computer which is just as mechanical and passive as television, only the passivity is better disguised.
"For instance, by accessing the library, television, video-store, newspaper and magazines, the computer gives me an illusion of omniscience, of knowing everything. But information passively accessed is not the same thing as knowledge actively assimilated. Children are the smartest users of computers, but they do not use them for knowledge.
"Similarly, by empowering people to buy their groceries, do their job, go to school, etc., without moving from their chair, the computer can make them feel omnipotent, all-powerful. But this mechanizing of human contacts isolates people still more from one another. The new language generated by computers seems likewise rather for quasi-ritual initiation than for human communication.
"Of course these machines can serve well if they are kept in their reasonable place. But in real life they seem to undermine that reasonableness of the users which is needed to keep them in their place. Take my colleagues for instance-
"They are losing interest in the subjects they teach, for computer toys. There is a new toy out every two months. I mistrust the computer, but even me it pulls in. You play with it. My colleagues seem chained to their computers so that if the computers go down, they can be seen staggering and wandering down the school corridors like souls in Hades. Then the computers come up again, and the E-mail pours in once more: instant sending, instant receiving, instant reacting, but no time to ponder. No stopping to think. No thinking. Images replace ideas.
"The computers can be seen acting in real life like a narcotic, an addiction, a form of slavery. And - we come back to education - the US President talks of wanting computers in every class-room! The way education is now going, it will create zombies who know nothing except how to push buttons!
"For as the screen creates the child, so the child becomes like a machine. Human beings are turning Into machines, asking to be programmed, all happy to be spouting the same nonsense! It is this willful ignorance of the human heart and of its fundamental needs which is generating the violence. The God who made that heart for Himself is not mocked.
"As for Traditional Catholics, what Faith they have in this God does give them a handle on their own hearts and their children's needs, but to the extent that they do not live wholly by their Faith, to the extent they live like everybody else by their environment of machines and computers, they are not fully living, they are in a state of schizophrenia, torn between Christ and the culture of the Anti-christ. But if they are torn, they are at least still half-alive!
"Dear people! They come to me in our Chapel with some question or other they think I can answer. I build a case to answer their question. They stare at me. Three weeks later they are back with the same question. It is as though brains cannot absorb any more. Ideas seem to have lost any power to effect how people think or live.
"The problem is profound. Something significant has happened to the way the mind works and absorbs information. The flood of images on screens naturally follows the collapse of ideas - and the collapse of words to express them - but I think it also helps to cause that collapse. It is an unparalleled catastrophe, an enormous frustration, but few can see what has happened, or sense its magnitude.
"Ideas being discredited, any integral vision becomes very difficult. We are like into a new world. The crisis is much deeper in the 1990's than in the 1970's, yet most people are unaware of it. We are into a whole new set of problems out there."
Dear friends, the Bill Gates of hell need not prevail. As Archbishop Lefebvre wisely reminded Society priests a little while before he died, the doctrine, sacraments and Church instituted and left to us by Our Lord Jesus Christ cannot go out of date, or lose their efficacy. Upon one condition: that they be the real doctrine, sacraments and Church. The breakdown of the idea started with Protestantism's breakup of the Truth.
In the home there must be the Rosary. If the family prays the Rosary, not only are family members in communion with one another as human beings, but they are also communicating together with God, which is to cater for the deepest needs of their human being. The Rosary is a sure way of accessing the God who is not mocked, but who is also not inaccessible.
A wicked world may be seeking to set up more and more obstacles between Him and ourselves, but God remains the Master. If there is the least good will on our side, nothing can stop His grace from rolling over any road-blocks, and even if there is not good will on our, side, it can still roll over them.
"8. If I ascend into heaven, thou art there: if I descend into hell thou art present. 9. If I take my wings early in the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea: 10. Even there also shall thy hand lead me: and thy right hand shall hold me. 11. And I said: Perhaps darkness shall cover me: and night shall be my light in my pleasures. 12. But darkness shall not be dark to thee, and night shall be light as the day: the darkness thereof, and the light thereof are alike to thee" (Ps.138).
With serious thanks to all of you who continue month by month to support the Seminary,
Sincerely yours in Christ,
Dear Friends and Benefactors,
I can see why so many of you related positively to the idea put forward in this letter two months ago, of a concentration camp for young men (even if it was to be at most a one-year experiment) - there is a crying need for old-fashioned education of the kind that the Catholic Church always used to foster.
This is because the public and secret masters of the New World Order are fabricating a new human nature. Man, made in the image of God, they are making over in the image of man, especially through education. The result is that the very thought, let alone the effort, of saving one's soul becomes more and more alien to people, especially youngsters. You rightly wonder how your children and grand-children will get to Heaven.
From a friend of mine working in a prestigious academy in the USA, here is an alarming portrait of how the situation is evolving. From his knowledge of schools he works back to the influence of computers, and he concludes with an assessment of the effects upon people in general. All I have done is give an order to his quotes:
"In the last two years the whole class-room experience has changed. There is a whole new breed of student out there. They are not really students, because they have less and less interest in studying. One or two of my colleagues have taken alarm at the change but most of my colleagues are happy with it because it means they no longer have to teach. Something has happened and adults do not know what it is.
"Young people now react to nothing, they do not connect. I find it increasingly difficult to connect with them, and much of the time they make me uncomfortable, because their reactions are so twisted, so inhuman. They are horrified by nothing. Horror creates in them glee. Less and less sparks from them any human reaction. The three-letter word (s_x) has become so commonplace that only violence can still get the juices running. Violence does interest them.
"It is all very unnerving. It cannot go on. They cannot hold down jobs, so jobs become unreal, and they seek an underground existence. The urges of the human heart (which are still in them), being so misunderstood, will come out in massive mutual suicide in the streets. It's the end.
"I do not blame them. It is not their fault. Where do they see around them anything that anybody would die for? For instance, not one student I know of made one comment on last November's elections in the USA, because they know it is all empty and fraudulent.
"What in fact do they see around them? People not living, but sleep-walking. Zombies, getting into a machine to go to work, working on a machine all day long, recreating with a machine at night. That is not living, and the youngsters know it. Yet such people are consumed with pride and rear up indignantly if anyone points out to them that they are not living.
"I do not blame the machines, because machines are only machines, but I blame the adults who make life out of their machines, especially in recent times out of the computer. The adults are making reality virtual, and the mass mutual suicide in the streets will be a form of that virtual reality. If I live my life watching screens, then the eyeball becomes a screen, and whether I create a world, or zap the world, on screen or in life, it's all the same.
"Let us reflect for moment on the nature of these flashing screens. Cinema is already bad insofar as it is only half human. It manipulates minds by dead images. There is no live exchange between performer and audience, there is nothing real. Television is worse with its 100 channels of junk, after so much promise when it first appeared. But worst of all for human purposes is the computer which is just as mechanical and passive as television, only the passivity is better disguised.
"For instance, by accessing the library, television, video-store, newspaper and magazines, the computer gives me an illusion of omniscience, of knowing everything. But information passively accessed is not the same thing as knowledge actively assimilated. Children are the smartest users of computers, but they do not use them for knowledge.
"Similarly, by empowering people to buy their groceries, do their job, go to school, etc., without moving from their chair, the computer can make them feel omnipotent, all-powerful. But this mechanizing of human contacts isolates people still more from one another. The new language generated by computers seems likewise rather for quasi-ritual initiation than for human communication.
"Of course these machines can serve well if they are kept in their reasonable place. But in real life they seem to undermine that reasonableness of the users which is needed to keep them in their place. Take my colleagues for instance-
"They are losing interest in the subjects they teach, for computer toys. There is a new toy out every two months. I mistrust the computer, but even me it pulls in. You play with it. My colleagues seem chained to their computers so that if the computers go down, they can be seen staggering and wandering down the school corridors like souls in Hades. Then the computers come up again, and the E-mail pours in once more: instant sending, instant receiving, instant reacting, but no time to ponder. No stopping to think. No thinking. Images replace ideas.
"The computers can be seen acting in real life like a narcotic, an addiction, a form of slavery. And - we come back to education - the US President talks of wanting computers in every class-room! The way education is now going, it will create zombies who know nothing except how to push buttons!
"For as the screen creates the child, so the child becomes like a machine. Human beings are turning Into machines, asking to be programmed, all happy to be spouting the same nonsense! It is this willful ignorance of the human heart and of its fundamental needs which is generating the violence. The God who made that heart for Himself is not mocked.
"As for Traditional Catholics, what Faith they have in this God does give them a handle on their own hearts and their children's needs, but to the extent that they do not live wholly by their Faith, to the extent they live like everybody else by their environment of machines and computers, they are not fully living, they are in a state of schizophrenia, torn between Christ and the culture of the Anti-christ. But if they are torn, they are at least still half-alive!
"Dear people! They come to me in our Chapel with some question or other they think I can answer. I build a case to answer their question. They stare at me. Three weeks later they are back with the same question. It is as though brains cannot absorb any more. Ideas seem to have lost any power to effect how people think or live.
"The problem is profound. Something significant has happened to the way the mind works and absorbs information. The flood of images on screens naturally follows the collapse of ideas - and the collapse of words to express them - but I think it also helps to cause that collapse. It is an unparalleled catastrophe, an enormous frustration, but few can see what has happened, or sense its magnitude.
"Ideas being discredited, any integral vision becomes very difficult. We are like into a new world. The crisis is much deeper in the 1990's than in the 1970's, yet most people are unaware of it. We are into a whole new set of problems out there."
Dear friends, the Bill Gates of hell need not prevail. As Archbishop Lefebvre wisely reminded Society priests a little while before he died, the doctrine, sacraments and Church instituted and left to us by Our Lord Jesus Christ cannot go out of date, or lose their efficacy. Upon one condition: that they be the real doctrine, sacraments and Church. The breakdown of the idea started with Protestantism's breakup of the Truth.
In the home there must be the Rosary. If the family prays the Rosary, not only are family members in communion with one another as human beings, but they are also communicating together with God, which is to cater for the deepest needs of their human being. The Rosary is a sure way of accessing the God who is not mocked, but who is also not inaccessible.
A wicked world may be seeking to set up more and more obstacles between Him and ourselves, but God remains the Master. If there is the least good will on our side, nothing can stop His grace from rolling over any road-blocks, and even if there is not good will on our, side, it can still roll over them.
"8. If I ascend into heaven, thou art there: if I descend into hell thou art present. 9. If I take my wings early in the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea: 10. Even there also shall thy hand lead me: and thy right hand shall hold me. 11. And I said: Perhaps darkness shall cover me: and night shall be my light in my pleasures. 12. But darkness shall not be dark to thee, and night shall be light as the day: the darkness thereof, and the light thereof are alike to thee" (Ps.138).
With serious thanks to all of you who continue month by month to support the Seminary,
Sincerely yours in Christ,
The Resurrection is a truth accessible to reason
April 1, 1997
Dear Friends and Benefactors,
April this year falls wholly in the season of the Resurrection. Let us consider for a moment this foundation-stone of our religion.
That the human material body of Our Lord, having been nailed to the Cross and separated by death from his human soul, and laid in Joseph of Arimathea's tomb - that this very same body rose re-united with his soul, and re-emerged alive from that tomb, is a historical fact - F-A-C-T - as easy to prove now as it was then, to any reasonable mind not blinded by prejudice. Nor does this proof require that somebody should already have the Catholic Faith. On the contrary, this proof is a foundation-stone in anybody's mind on which to rest the Faith.
Thus when St. Peter summoned the Jews of Jerusalem to do penance and be baptised in the name of Jesus Christ (Acts Il), he had not argued that they should believe in Christ in order to believe in the Resurrection, on the contrary he had argued that the evidence for the Resurrection (Acts II, 32) was the strongest argument for Jesus being the Lord and Christ in whom therefore they should believe (Acts II, 36, 38).
Now Peter had appealed in this speech firstly to a knowledge of the Old Testament which most Jews then had but which most Catholics no longer have, and secondly to the living eye-witnesses of the risen Lord, who have long since died. Yet still we can say that the Resurrection is a fact as provable now as it was then, independently of the Faith. All that is required is a minimal recognition of the realities of human nature and human history.
There are two main arguments, one positive from the behaviour of Our Lord's friends, the other negative from the behaviour of Our Lord's enemies. Let us take the positive argument first, from the behaviour of the Apostles.
When Our Lord allows himself to be captured in the Garden of Gethsemane, they do not behave like heroes, they all run away (Mk XIV, 50-52). When Our Lord is crucified, only one of them is, with a group of women, standing by him (Jn. XIX, 25,26). When the Apostles meet together on the evening of the day of the Resurrection, they meet behind closed doors, "for fear of the Jews" (Jn, XX, 19). And doubting Thomas not being with the other ten on that occasion refuses to believe that Jesus appeared live to them, despite their manly testimony (Jn XX, 25).
This is not the picture of a pride of apostolic lions, ready to spring upon the world and conquer it for Christ. On the contrary we see what we would expect, a group of ordinary decent men, dismayed by the capture and brutal death of their beloved Master, and wholly discouraged.
Yet 50 days later we see them, led by Peter, setting out upon that conquest of the civilized world for Christ, launching the 300-year process of the conversion of the Roman Empire, which is a historical fact. That extraordinary process, of lifting a whole corrupt empire to the heights of a sublime but demanding religion, can only have been launched by an original core of deeply convinced men. What turned a draggle of downcast fishermen into such world-conquerors? The conquest is history. What can be the human explanation?
It is not enough to say that unscientific fishermen of 2,000 years ago would have accepted any pious nonsense, whereas we moderns are more hard-headed, etc.. Doubting Thomas demanded, precisely, scientific evidence and f-a-c-t-s that he himself could touch. And he was given them (Jn XX, 27). But just imagine that he really was given them. Is that not exactly the turn-around moment when a dispirited backwoodsman begins turning into a world-conqueror? St. Thomas became the Apostle of India where he was martyred, where his body rests to this day, where the Church he founded lives on in the southern part of the sub-continent.
Given the facts of history and stubborn human nature, could anything less than the repeated, direct and personal appearances, spread over 40 days, of the Lord risen from his terrible death, explain the transformation of these men, which we know must have taken place? And even then the descent of the Holy Ghost upon them at Pentecost was still necessary. But that descent made them, like Peter, irresistible witnesses to the fact of the Resurrection (Acts II.)
But there is a second argument, a negative argument from the behaviour of the Jews. These were then as now, with noble exceptions, implacable enemies of Our Lord. They do Him the honour of hating Him and all His followers, because He takes away their "place and nation" (Jn XI, 48). The world is to be run their way, and God has no business to be interfering with their supremacy. So they had the Gentiles crucify Jesus Christ, and thought thus to have put an end to their problems.
But here comes Peter with his band of Galileans back into their stronghold of Jerusalem, glorious Sion, and based on that absurd business of the body of Jesus getting out of the grave, Peter is stirring up the whole problem all over again. In the heart of Jerusalem! And he is making thousands of converts to the Nazarene, as they call him. This must be stopped (Acts II, III, IV)!
Now, if Peter is basing his argument on the Resurrection, then to stop his nonsense once and for all, would not the best way be to discover Jesus' body and triumphantly produce it in public? ("Sorry, Peter, dear fellow, but...") And is it likely that Annas and Caiphas were any less rich, determined, intelligent, cunning or powerful than their successors are today? In which case, with such a strong motive to find the body of Jesus, can we doubt they would have found it if it was there to be found? In which case, if, as is obviously the case, they failed to stop Peter in his tracks, can there be any other explanation for their failure than that the body was nowhere to be found by human beings because it had been raised from the dead by God?
In brief, whether we think of Our Lord's friends or his enemies, the gigantic success of the Christian religion can be accounted for only by the Resurrection of Our Lord from the dead being a hard, hard fact. To say otherwise is to deny history or to deny human nature.
But then comes a pernicious objection: "Ah, but who needs to ARGUE the basis of our beautiful religion? The Faith is above mere arguments. It is all so lovely, and the more lovely for being believed without reasoning."
The objection is pernicious because it seems to put the Faith high above reason, where it belongs. However, in fact it disconnects the Faith from reason altogether, and makes the Faith a matter of sentiment or feeling. But men naturally know that truth is in the mind, not in the feelings. Therefore on this reckoning the Faith will cease to be true, and the Church will be turned into a mere NIF factory (factory of Nice Internal Feelings).
So the question is not whether the Resurrection makes me feel good or not, because that depends upon whether it is true or not, which is an entirely different question. The whole of Christendom is sick with the notion that religion is a matter of feeling, not truth. Mushy minds never made martyrs. Now Protestantism has long been rotted with "feelings", but the drama is that since Vatican II, countless "Catholics" suffer from the same disconnection of religion from reality. But men will always insist in the long run on living in reality - they have to - so if religion is disconnected from it, it is religion that will go out of the window. The present collapse of the feely-feely "Catholic" Church is right and proper.
So the historical fact of the Resurrection is a truth accessible to reason, working from a knowledge of history and human nature, which all men share. Thus the Catholic religion is not just my personal preference, but it has a grip and a claim on all men's minds, and by their minds, on their lives. "He that believeth not shall be condemned" (Mk XVI, 16). How could this be so if belief were all just a matter of NIFs?
The Doctrinal Session to be held at Winona this year from July 22 (NB, not 21) to 26 inclusive will hammer relentlessly at minds to present the Popes' teaching on liberalism, ecumenism, communism, secularism and neo-modernism, errors all of them descended from feely-feely Protestantism.
One month beforehand priestly ordinations are due to take place at Winona this year on Saturday, June 21, and one month afterwards the Society of St. Pius X is making an 80th anniversary pilgrimage to Fatima (1917-1997) in honour of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. For details of a group going from the U.S.A. between August 20 and 29, telephone (203) 261- 1133. If the Society's 1987 pilgrimage to Fatima helped obtain the grace of the episcopal consecrations in 1988, what grace for the Society and for the Church might God have appointed to be obtained by the 1997 pilgrimage?
May the Mother of God obtain for all of us Catholic minds and Catholic hearts!
Sincerely yours in Christ,
+Richard Williamson
Dear Friends and Benefactors,
April this year falls wholly in the season of the Resurrection. Let us consider for a moment this foundation-stone of our religion.
That the human material body of Our Lord, having been nailed to the Cross and separated by death from his human soul, and laid in Joseph of Arimathea's tomb - that this very same body rose re-united with his soul, and re-emerged alive from that tomb, is a historical fact - F-A-C-T - as easy to prove now as it was then, to any reasonable mind not blinded by prejudice. Nor does this proof require that somebody should already have the Catholic Faith. On the contrary, this proof is a foundation-stone in anybody's mind on which to rest the Faith.
Thus when St. Peter summoned the Jews of Jerusalem to do penance and be baptised in the name of Jesus Christ (Acts Il), he had not argued that they should believe in Christ in order to believe in the Resurrection, on the contrary he had argued that the evidence for the Resurrection (Acts II, 32) was the strongest argument for Jesus being the Lord and Christ in whom therefore they should believe (Acts II, 36, 38).
Now Peter had appealed in this speech firstly to a knowledge of the Old Testament which most Jews then had but which most Catholics no longer have, and secondly to the living eye-witnesses of the risen Lord, who have long since died. Yet still we can say that the Resurrection is a fact as provable now as it was then, independently of the Faith. All that is required is a minimal recognition of the realities of human nature and human history.
There are two main arguments, one positive from the behaviour of Our Lord's friends, the other negative from the behaviour of Our Lord's enemies. Let us take the positive argument first, from the behaviour of the Apostles.
When Our Lord allows himself to be captured in the Garden of Gethsemane, they do not behave like heroes, they all run away (Mk XIV, 50-52). When Our Lord is crucified, only one of them is, with a group of women, standing by him (Jn. XIX, 25,26). When the Apostles meet together on the evening of the day of the Resurrection, they meet behind closed doors, "for fear of the Jews" (Jn, XX, 19). And doubting Thomas not being with the other ten on that occasion refuses to believe that Jesus appeared live to them, despite their manly testimony (Jn XX, 25).
This is not the picture of a pride of apostolic lions, ready to spring upon the world and conquer it for Christ. On the contrary we see what we would expect, a group of ordinary decent men, dismayed by the capture and brutal death of their beloved Master, and wholly discouraged.
Yet 50 days later we see them, led by Peter, setting out upon that conquest of the civilized world for Christ, launching the 300-year process of the conversion of the Roman Empire, which is a historical fact. That extraordinary process, of lifting a whole corrupt empire to the heights of a sublime but demanding religion, can only have been launched by an original core of deeply convinced men. What turned a draggle of downcast fishermen into such world-conquerors? The conquest is history. What can be the human explanation?
It is not enough to say that unscientific fishermen of 2,000 years ago would have accepted any pious nonsense, whereas we moderns are more hard-headed, etc.. Doubting Thomas demanded, precisely, scientific evidence and f-a-c-t-s that he himself could touch. And he was given them (Jn XX, 27). But just imagine that he really was given them. Is that not exactly the turn-around moment when a dispirited backwoodsman begins turning into a world-conqueror? St. Thomas became the Apostle of India where he was martyred, where his body rests to this day, where the Church he founded lives on in the southern part of the sub-continent.
Given the facts of history and stubborn human nature, could anything less than the repeated, direct and personal appearances, spread over 40 days, of the Lord risen from his terrible death, explain the transformation of these men, which we know must have taken place? And even then the descent of the Holy Ghost upon them at Pentecost was still necessary. But that descent made them, like Peter, irresistible witnesses to the fact of the Resurrection (Acts II.)
But there is a second argument, a negative argument from the behaviour of the Jews. These were then as now, with noble exceptions, implacable enemies of Our Lord. They do Him the honour of hating Him and all His followers, because He takes away their "place and nation" (Jn XI, 48). The world is to be run their way, and God has no business to be interfering with their supremacy. So they had the Gentiles crucify Jesus Christ, and thought thus to have put an end to their problems.
But here comes Peter with his band of Galileans back into their stronghold of Jerusalem, glorious Sion, and based on that absurd business of the body of Jesus getting out of the grave, Peter is stirring up the whole problem all over again. In the heart of Jerusalem! And he is making thousands of converts to the Nazarene, as they call him. This must be stopped (Acts II, III, IV)!
Now, if Peter is basing his argument on the Resurrection, then to stop his nonsense once and for all, would not the best way be to discover Jesus' body and triumphantly produce it in public? ("Sorry, Peter, dear fellow, but...") And is it likely that Annas and Caiphas were any less rich, determined, intelligent, cunning or powerful than their successors are today? In which case, with such a strong motive to find the body of Jesus, can we doubt they would have found it if it was there to be found? In which case, if, as is obviously the case, they failed to stop Peter in his tracks, can there be any other explanation for their failure than that the body was nowhere to be found by human beings because it had been raised from the dead by God?
In brief, whether we think of Our Lord's friends or his enemies, the gigantic success of the Christian religion can be accounted for only by the Resurrection of Our Lord from the dead being a hard, hard fact. To say otherwise is to deny history or to deny human nature.
But then comes a pernicious objection: "Ah, but who needs to ARGUE the basis of our beautiful religion? The Faith is above mere arguments. It is all so lovely, and the more lovely for being believed without reasoning."
The objection is pernicious because it seems to put the Faith high above reason, where it belongs. However, in fact it disconnects the Faith from reason altogether, and makes the Faith a matter of sentiment or feeling. But men naturally know that truth is in the mind, not in the feelings. Therefore on this reckoning the Faith will cease to be true, and the Church will be turned into a mere NIF factory (factory of Nice Internal Feelings).
So the question is not whether the Resurrection makes me feel good or not, because that depends upon whether it is true or not, which is an entirely different question. The whole of Christendom is sick with the notion that religion is a matter of feeling, not truth. Mushy minds never made martyrs. Now Protestantism has long been rotted with "feelings", but the drama is that since Vatican II, countless "Catholics" suffer from the same disconnection of religion from reality. But men will always insist in the long run on living in reality - they have to - so if religion is disconnected from it, it is religion that will go out of the window. The present collapse of the feely-feely "Catholic" Church is right and proper.
So the historical fact of the Resurrection is a truth accessible to reason, working from a knowledge of history and human nature, which all men share. Thus the Catholic religion is not just my personal preference, but it has a grip and a claim on all men's minds, and by their minds, on their lives. "He that believeth not shall be condemned" (Mk XVI, 16). How could this be so if belief were all just a matter of NIFs?
The Doctrinal Session to be held at Winona this year from July 22 (NB, not 21) to 26 inclusive will hammer relentlessly at minds to present the Popes' teaching on liberalism, ecumenism, communism, secularism and neo-modernism, errors all of them descended from feely-feely Protestantism.
One month beforehand priestly ordinations are due to take place at Winona this year on Saturday, June 21, and one month afterwards the Society of St. Pius X is making an 80th anniversary pilgrimage to Fatima (1917-1997) in honour of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. For details of a group going from the U.S.A. between August 20 and 29, telephone (203) 261- 1133. If the Society's 1987 pilgrimage to Fatima helped obtain the grace of the episcopal consecrations in 1988, what grace for the Society and for the Church might God have appointed to be obtained by the 1997 pilgrimage?
May the Mother of God obtain for all of us Catholic minds and Catholic hearts!
Sincerely yours in Christ,
+Richard Williamson
Ideas on a "concentration camp" to attack problems of modern youth
March 1, 1997
Alright, your Excellency, if you are so smart at diagnosing the world's problems and the problems of modern youth, what do you propose to do about it?
Dear Friends and Benefactors,
I have a wild idea. An idea for a camp to help young men to concentrate. In other words, a concentration camp. Here it is.
Next to the Seminary building is a convent building originally put up by the Dominicans for Sisters who would help look after the material needs of the Dominican priests and novices. It has eight cells upstairs and all rooms needed for independent living downstairs. On an experimental basis for one school year, either autumn '97 to summer '98 or autumn '98 to summer '99, I am thinking of inviting eight or ten selected young men to spend a school-year in the convent learning English grammar and literature, music, history, Euclidean geometry and Latin.
The young men would be around 18-20 years of age. They would be chosen for their capacity and readiness to learn the best things which an old-fashioned Catholic education used to teach, but which almost no education teaches any longer. Therefore they would have no interest in accreditation or the modern world, or degrees, whether on pieces of paper rectangular or shaped like a frisbee (frisbees are circular pieces of plastic, the throwing of which through the air constitutes one of the major occupations of students at most higher institutes of learning in the U.S.A. today).
These young men would begin the day by attending Mass. Lessons would follow until mid-day. After lunch, there would be two hours of manual labour, preferably in the Seminary fields. Late afternoon another lesson. Evening, supervised study. The young men would be essentially self-motivated and self-disciplined. They would keep elementary house-rules, e.g. no smoking, no television. At the end of each month they would be entirely free to leave the whole thing behind them, but if they chose to stay, they would have to submit to the demands made upon them for the next month.
At year's end they could apply to enter the Seminary if they wished, but there would be no obligation or pressure whatsoever in that direction. Nobody can unwillingly serve God. On the other hand the Seminary would undertake to cover all costs of board and tuition (unless that attracted the wrong young men), because our world will more and more desperately need humanly oriented human beings. The Seminary would calculate that to put even only half a dozen young men into circulation with their heads set for one school-year straight on their shoulders, would be a worthwhile investment. Mother Church is generous. Money would not be wasted, but nor would it be the problem.
"With their heads set straight on their shoulders..." Much could be said about the six subjects chosen above for the concentration camp's curriculum...
Firstly, to learn the grammar of one's native language is the very beginning of learning how to think. Since the New World Order's secret masters want nobody to think but themselves, wisely for their purposes they have eliminated the learning of grammar from all school systems they have taken care to control. Let Our Lord's servants learn this much natural wisdom from His enemies by giving high priority in schools to the mastery of grammar in the native language. Catholics must think.
Close after English grammar comes Latin, the staple diet of boys' schooling yesterday, but despised today when boys are not meant to become human or to think. As to the thinking, Latin is a language of which the venerable age and the complicated but logical structure exercise the mind rather more than do modern languages. So it requires from pupils a higher proportion of thinking to memory work, and from teachers - extra advantage - proportionally less correction work.
However, with Latin the thinking is always linguistic and so human thinking, as opposed to the inhuman thinking called for by the sciences, mathematics or computers. These work in quantity, which militates against quality. Computer education is a contradiction in terms. But Latin at the outset forces a boy to discern for instance subject and predicate, which is a distinction flowing from the very structure of the human mind. Also Latin always works in human terms, e.g. "the slave killed the queen" (pure opera soapae), as opposed to "H2+O = H2O". Then again these human terms work towards access to all-time classics of humankind : Cicero, Ovid, Virgil, Horace, etc.. Finally these Latin classics are at the root of Western civilization. By divine Providence, pagan Rome provided the central launching pad of the Catholic Church. Pagan Romans were the raw material of the first Roman Catholics. So the study of Latin gives access, as no other study can do, to the natural life-blood of our supernatural Faith. Only three languages were nailed to the head of Our Lord’s Cross. Latin was one of them.
The mention of literature brings us to the third component of the projected concentration camp's curriculum: English literature. Once more, the world around us has it all wrong. "Eng. Lit." as it is called in modern universities has become there a monster like the rest of the so-called "humanities", engendering students who chant "Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western culture's got to go". This is understandable, because they are being given no serious reason to value that culture, because the Catholic Faith from which over centuries it came, and the one true God of whose creation it tells, are being rejected by the students' so-called teachers in favour of an all-embracing fantasy coming from hell and leading back to hell via the Antichrist. That is why Catholic parents must be extra careful today in committing their children to "humanities" in modern "universities".
On the contrary in our concentration camp, the centuries of "Western culture" would come flooding back into their own. The history, music and literature of those centuries show to youngsters, as nothing else can, how the Gospel fits in concrete life, because that "culture", for centuries taken for granted, gave in stories, pictures and music all kinds of models for thinking and living in accordance with our God-given nature, which was a good start towards being able to live in His grace.
Now that culture is being taken from us by the masters of the New World Order pushing upon us their substitute stories, pictures and music to seize our imaginations, minds, and souls : cinema, television, newspaper, advertising, MTV, Rock. Human nature cannot do without stories, pictures and music. He who controls the stories, pictures and music controls the men. That is why the concentration camp would be full of Catholic history, Shakespeare and Mozart.
Note, Catholic history, because non-Catholic history deserved to be dismissed as "bunk" by Henry Ford, just as the desiccated horror of deconstructed "Eng. Lit." deserves to be thrown out of all schools. History has been deconstructed by the will to rule out of it Jesus Christ. It has been written back to front to get rid of Him. On the contrary the five-volume "Puritans' Progress" recently published by the Angelus Press is a valiant initiative to re-write American history front to back. "Historia magistra vitae", said the Latins. History rules life. He who writes the history-books writes the future.
As for the importance of music, does any reader of this letter still need persuading? Ideally, concentration camp inmates would perform music rather than just listen to the wealth of good music available on tape and disc, because, again, live music is human whereas tape and disc are mechanical. So inmates would surely be obliged to sing as well as to listen to the great instrumental composers.
Finally Euclidean geometry would teach the young men to think logically. Euclid is almost pure logic, without the technicalities of Major, Minor and Conclusion, but with all the substance, and with clear diagrams as the working matter. Today's schools have succeeded in disconnecting even mathematics and geometry from reality! Whole systems are constructed upon the fantasy that parallel lines meet, or that minus numbers have square roots! Heaven help us!
And so at the end of such a year, the young men might seem unfitted for today's world, but they would be that much better fitted for reality. It is all very well to say that education must go with the times and fit the computer model. Reality says that these times and that model do not fit human beings, so will not work. Human beings are not machines. The world is till run today by men who understand human nature, however horribly they misuse that understanding. Witness that little book of 100 years ago which was a veritable blueprint for our century's horrors, including the disabling of the Catholic Church. The concentration camp would help restore the Church by putting the start of some real Catholics back into circulation.
However, there is a major difficulty. Where do we find a master for the camp? As a colleague said, he must be a combination of Socrates, General Patton and Michael Jackson! Socrates for the ancient wisdom, General Patton for the camp discipline and leadership, Michael Jackson for the ability to get through to young men of today, who can be something of a breed apart. Does anybody know of such a man? In my imagination he is a Catholic widower, ex-military, presently side-lined, withering from frustration at being unable to do any real teaching, who would love to have access to a mini-dozen red-blooded Americans to teach them for the love of Christ a dose of reality, regardless of what he or they would do the year after. To heaven with career, resumes or, since I have Scottish blood, salary!
Can anybody think of such a man for one experimental year? If the Lord God wishes the experiment to take place, a man will be found. If not, the Seminary goes quietly on its way, and relies on others to restore "opera soapae". Man proposes, God disposes.
May He have mercy upon us all, may He protect and guide us, and may His Mother keep us all safe under her mantle.
Sincerely yours in Christ,
Alright, your Excellency, if you are so smart at diagnosing the world's problems and the problems of modern youth, what do you propose to do about it?
Dear Friends and Benefactors,
I have a wild idea. An idea for a camp to help young men to concentrate. In other words, a concentration camp. Here it is.
Next to the Seminary building is a convent building originally put up by the Dominicans for Sisters who would help look after the material needs of the Dominican priests and novices. It has eight cells upstairs and all rooms needed for independent living downstairs. On an experimental basis for one school year, either autumn '97 to summer '98 or autumn '98 to summer '99, I am thinking of inviting eight or ten selected young men to spend a school-year in the convent learning English grammar and literature, music, history, Euclidean geometry and Latin.
The young men would be around 18-20 years of age. They would be chosen for their capacity and readiness to learn the best things which an old-fashioned Catholic education used to teach, but which almost no education teaches any longer. Therefore they would have no interest in accreditation or the modern world, or degrees, whether on pieces of paper rectangular or shaped like a frisbee (frisbees are circular pieces of plastic, the throwing of which through the air constitutes one of the major occupations of students at most higher institutes of learning in the U.S.A. today).
These young men would begin the day by attending Mass. Lessons would follow until mid-day. After lunch, there would be two hours of manual labour, preferably in the Seminary fields. Late afternoon another lesson. Evening, supervised study. The young men would be essentially self-motivated and self-disciplined. They would keep elementary house-rules, e.g. no smoking, no television. At the end of each month they would be entirely free to leave the whole thing behind them, but if they chose to stay, they would have to submit to the demands made upon them for the next month.
At year's end they could apply to enter the Seminary if they wished, but there would be no obligation or pressure whatsoever in that direction. Nobody can unwillingly serve God. On the other hand the Seminary would undertake to cover all costs of board and tuition (unless that attracted the wrong young men), because our world will more and more desperately need humanly oriented human beings. The Seminary would calculate that to put even only half a dozen young men into circulation with their heads set for one school-year straight on their shoulders, would be a worthwhile investment. Mother Church is generous. Money would not be wasted, but nor would it be the problem.
"With their heads set straight on their shoulders..." Much could be said about the six subjects chosen above for the concentration camp's curriculum...
Firstly, to learn the grammar of one's native language is the very beginning of learning how to think. Since the New World Order's secret masters want nobody to think but themselves, wisely for their purposes they have eliminated the learning of grammar from all school systems they have taken care to control. Let Our Lord's servants learn this much natural wisdom from His enemies by giving high priority in schools to the mastery of grammar in the native language. Catholics must think.
Close after English grammar comes Latin, the staple diet of boys' schooling yesterday, but despised today when boys are not meant to become human or to think. As to the thinking, Latin is a language of which the venerable age and the complicated but logical structure exercise the mind rather more than do modern languages. So it requires from pupils a higher proportion of thinking to memory work, and from teachers - extra advantage - proportionally less correction work.
However, with Latin the thinking is always linguistic and so human thinking, as opposed to the inhuman thinking called for by the sciences, mathematics or computers. These work in quantity, which militates against quality. Computer education is a contradiction in terms. But Latin at the outset forces a boy to discern for instance subject and predicate, which is a distinction flowing from the very structure of the human mind. Also Latin always works in human terms, e.g. "the slave killed the queen" (pure opera soapae), as opposed to "H2+O = H2O". Then again these human terms work towards access to all-time classics of humankind : Cicero, Ovid, Virgil, Horace, etc.. Finally these Latin classics are at the root of Western civilization. By divine Providence, pagan Rome provided the central launching pad of the Catholic Church. Pagan Romans were the raw material of the first Roman Catholics. So the study of Latin gives access, as no other study can do, to the natural life-blood of our supernatural Faith. Only three languages were nailed to the head of Our Lord’s Cross. Latin was one of them.
The mention of literature brings us to the third component of the projected concentration camp's curriculum: English literature. Once more, the world around us has it all wrong. "Eng. Lit." as it is called in modern universities has become there a monster like the rest of the so-called "humanities", engendering students who chant "Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western culture's got to go". This is understandable, because they are being given no serious reason to value that culture, because the Catholic Faith from which over centuries it came, and the one true God of whose creation it tells, are being rejected by the students' so-called teachers in favour of an all-embracing fantasy coming from hell and leading back to hell via the Antichrist. That is why Catholic parents must be extra careful today in committing their children to "humanities" in modern "universities".
On the contrary in our concentration camp, the centuries of "Western culture" would come flooding back into their own. The history, music and literature of those centuries show to youngsters, as nothing else can, how the Gospel fits in concrete life, because that "culture", for centuries taken for granted, gave in stories, pictures and music all kinds of models for thinking and living in accordance with our God-given nature, which was a good start towards being able to live in His grace.
Now that culture is being taken from us by the masters of the New World Order pushing upon us their substitute stories, pictures and music to seize our imaginations, minds, and souls : cinema, television, newspaper, advertising, MTV, Rock. Human nature cannot do without stories, pictures and music. He who controls the stories, pictures and music controls the men. That is why the concentration camp would be full of Catholic history, Shakespeare and Mozart.
Note, Catholic history, because non-Catholic history deserved to be dismissed as "bunk" by Henry Ford, just as the desiccated horror of deconstructed "Eng. Lit." deserves to be thrown out of all schools. History has been deconstructed by the will to rule out of it Jesus Christ. It has been written back to front to get rid of Him. On the contrary the five-volume "Puritans' Progress" recently published by the Angelus Press is a valiant initiative to re-write American history front to back. "Historia magistra vitae", said the Latins. History rules life. He who writes the history-books writes the future.
As for the importance of music, does any reader of this letter still need persuading? Ideally, concentration camp inmates would perform music rather than just listen to the wealth of good music available on tape and disc, because, again, live music is human whereas tape and disc are mechanical. So inmates would surely be obliged to sing as well as to listen to the great instrumental composers.
Finally Euclidean geometry would teach the young men to think logically. Euclid is almost pure logic, without the technicalities of Major, Minor and Conclusion, but with all the substance, and with clear diagrams as the working matter. Today's schools have succeeded in disconnecting even mathematics and geometry from reality! Whole systems are constructed upon the fantasy that parallel lines meet, or that minus numbers have square roots! Heaven help us!
And so at the end of such a year, the young men might seem unfitted for today's world, but they would be that much better fitted for reality. It is all very well to say that education must go with the times and fit the computer model. Reality says that these times and that model do not fit human beings, so will not work. Human beings are not machines. The world is till run today by men who understand human nature, however horribly they misuse that understanding. Witness that little book of 100 years ago which was a veritable blueprint for our century's horrors, including the disabling of the Catholic Church. The concentration camp would help restore the Church by putting the start of some real Catholics back into circulation.
However, there is a major difficulty. Where do we find a master for the camp? As a colleague said, he must be a combination of Socrates, General Patton and Michael Jackson! Socrates for the ancient wisdom, General Patton for the camp discipline and leadership, Michael Jackson for the ability to get through to young men of today, who can be something of a breed apart. Does anybody know of such a man? In my imagination he is a Catholic widower, ex-military, presently side-lined, withering from frustration at being unable to do any real teaching, who would love to have access to a mini-dozen red-blooded Americans to teach them for the love of Christ a dose of reality, regardless of what he or they would do the year after. To heaven with career, resumes or, since I have Scottish blood, salary!
Can anybody think of such a man for one experimental year? If the Lord God wishes the experiment to take place, a man will be found. If not, the Seminary goes quietly on its way, and relies on others to restore "opera soapae". Man proposes, God disposes.
May He have mercy upon us all, may He protect and guide us, and may His Mother keep us all safe under her mantle.
Sincerely yours in Christ,
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