One Year to the Millenium
Quo Vadimus? - Where are We Headed?
December 1, 1998
Dear Friends and Benefactors,
With only 12 months to go before we enter into the third millennium, it is reasonable to wonder where we are going. Since the beginning of John-Paul II's pontificate in 1978, he has not ceased to present the year 2,000 AD as being about to usher in a great new age for Church and world. He may be right, but certainly not in the way he thinks.
Q: Why may he be right?
A: Because by this end of the 20th century, Western liberalism has broken down, as it was bound to do, because of the disintegration built into its principles. Whatever new integration follows will have to be so different that anyone will call it a new age.
Q: Where do you see the break-down?
A: At ground level, a friend wrote two years ago from New York City, "The people in the streets are misled and show their hatred and arrogance. One of them said to my wife, 'It is nothing personal, but we'll have a battle in the streets. There'll be bloodshed'. New York City seems to be a powder-keg waiting for someone to light the fuse". Another friend from the Eastern United States has noticed for years that the anger is coiled up inside people like a snake ready to strike. They have for years been taught, and have accepted, to live for material goods which leave their nevertheless spiritual souls deeply unsatisfied, and now they look like losing even their material goods.
Q: How is that possible? The New York stock market dipped in the summer but soared again in the autumn!
A: As much as an engine depends upon oil circulating, an economy depends on money circulating. But modern money has two serious problems. Firstly, it consists merely in paper or book-entries or electronic blips which can only serve for money as long as people have confidence in them. With backing by gold deliberately discredited, that confidence could easily evaporate. And secondly, modern money is brought into existence as debt with interest on it, which can only be paid back by ever increasing debt, which must come to a halt when people or nations are "maxed out" in debt. That point is being reached. This autumn the US Federal Reserve saved public confidence by drastic interest rate cuts putting more funny money into circulation, but this has merely delayed the day of reckoning which, the longer it is delayed, the worse it will be. Insiders know that the system is on the brink of seizing up, like an engine without oil.
Q: But cannot the politicians rescue the economic system?
A: It is the immorality of the politicians and of the peoples voting for them so as to get a free lunch, which produced this doomed economic system in the first place. There is no such thing as a free lunch. Only dishonesty can pretend there is. But the American people today so rejoice in dishonesty that they reelected as President and now refuse to impeach, a man whom they all know to be a liar, an adulterer and a perjurer, and many hold that those are not the worst of his crimes. What do the people care, so long as he seems to be delivering the material goods? And if the people get disgusted with their own politicians, who do they turn to? Here in Minnesota, they just elected a former professional wrestler as governor! Maybe he will do better than the professional politicians!
Q: But what does this break-down of economics and politics have to do with religion?
A: Everything. As politics govern economics, so religion governs politics. The turning away from God generates the dishonesty (no Ten Commandments) and the materialism (what else is there to live for?). That is why the same media that trashed Presidents Nixon and Reagan for comparatively minor misdemeanors now shield and protect a President for major crimes, an incredible contradiction until one recalls that the former two put brakes (or half-brakes) on the destruction of Christendom, while the latter has his foot hard down on the accelerator. It is the City of God, in however broken-down a form, against the City of Man. Only this religious perspective can explain many contradictions, for instance why, similarly, the feminists loved the “molested” Anita Hill whose lies denounced a conservative, whereas they abandoned the molested Paula Jones whose truth-telling denounces this President. For liberals, the end justifies the means. All contradictions are justified in the war on God.
Q: Where does this break-down of sanity and morals end?
A: If God does not intervene, then like in the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, good men will finally not be able to live in peace even within their own homes, but bad men will be breaking down their doors, etc. (Gen. XIX, 4-10). And just as the ancient Roman Empire succeeded in pinning on Christians the blame for its own misdeeds and misfortunes, so the liberals and their media are now beginning to blame the "religious right" for the consequences of their own criminal folly, and the corrupt people will rejoice in having such a scapegoat.
Q: Please, can we have some good news?
A: Actually, the good news is that the news is so bad!
Q: What on earth do you mean?
A: If wallowing in mud worked for modern man and made him happy, that would suggest he is a pig. If it does not work but makes him unhappy, that suggests that man is not meant to live like a pig. Thank goodness the modern world does not work!
Q: I suppose you will say that Vatican II was modern man "pigging out" inside the Catholic Church?
A: That is right. This autumn one of the major American media (PBS) broadcast a nearly two-hour program on the Second Vatican Council. Cardinals, bishops, priests and large numbers of laymen and laywomen were interviewed, one after another, mostly of course to tell how wonderful the Council was. They were pathetic. Practically none of them mentioned or seemed to think of God! They have lost their Faith and lost their way.
Q: But did not something like Vatican II have to happen inside the catholic Church in mid-20th century? Had not the Church become for instance too clericalist and legalist, too centered on priests and too bound up with laws?
A: That is a good question. There was a real problem which called for a real solution. It was given a false solution by Vatican II.
Q: How?
A: By the 1950's, the substance of Catholicism had been for a long time draining out behind the appearances of the Church. The true solution would have been to put back the substance - easier said than done! The solution of Vatican II - easily said and done - was to pull down whatever appearances were standing, and that process is still going on. However, to be fair to Vatican II, the problem of Catholic appearances without Catholic substance had been building up over a long time, so that something like it had to happen. It is no use pretending that Vatican II was just an unhappy accident which we can get over by rebuilding the Catholicism of the 1950's.
Q: How far back does the problem go?
A: Plus or minus, 700 years. The Middle Ages (500 1,500 AD) had their moments of darkness which the Church's enemies seize on to be able to dismiss those ages as "Dark Ages", but that was nevertheless the time when the Church most filled the world with the light of Christ. As the Middle Ages declined, so the rebellion of Protestantism broke out and the Catholic Church began her magnificent rearguard action with the Counter-Reformation, but Vatican II was like the breakdown of the Counter-Reformation. That is why John Paul II is quite right that the Church must move into a new age, but he is quite wrong in thinking that the new Catholic age will be built on the principles of Vatican II, which are intrinsically godless.
Q: How can you say that the Counter-Reformation has broken down? How can the Catholic Church break down?
A: Of course the Catholic Church is in her essence unchanging and imperishable, but at various times in history, the living Church adopts various modes. The Counter-Reformation mode presupposed, and relied upon, a heritage of faith and morals left over from the Middle Ages, a heritage steadily eroded down the following centuries and now virtually exhausted. To this extent the believers in Vatican II are right: Church and world are now so out of joint that the Church must enter a new age. Only, it will never be the New Age of the modernists' globalist and godless dreams, to be entered into and baptised by the Catholic Church changing essentially and beyond all recognition. "Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away", says Our Lord (Lk. XXI, 33).
Q: So the followers of Vatican II are wrong in wanting to change the Church's essence, whereas the followers of Catholic Tradition would be wrong if they did not want her to change even her mode?
A: Correct. All grave heresies derive their power from some truth, for instance the oneness of Christ's person is the force behind the great heresy that He has only one nature. The truth that serious change had to come in the sclerosed Church of the later 201 century is the force behind Vatican II and behind the terrible errors of, for instance, Cardinal Ratzinger and John-Paul II.
Q: How dare you speak of terrible errors of the reigning Pope and of his Prefect for the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith?
A: By reading what they write! As for Cardinal Ratzinger, the English translation just appeared in the U.S. of "Milestones", his memories of the first 50 years of his life. He shows himself there to be a highly intelligent, "pious" and "nice" man, but at the same time he shows that modern errors have such a grip on his thinking that he has no idea what Catholicism is about! The heart may be "sweet", but the head is rotten. Piously one may hope God will judge him on his heart, but meanwhile with his head he is quite unable to defend the Faith, which is his official function!
Q: And what, pray, is your evidence of the Pope's "terrible errors"?
A: Also just appeared recently in English translation (Angelus Press) is the third volume of Prof. Johannes Dormannn on John-Paul II's Theological Way to Assisi. It analyzes the Pope's 1981 Encyclical "Dives in Misericordia", on God the Father. Did you know that the prodigal son's conversion consists in his realization, thanks to his father's welcoming him back, that he has been a good fellow, full of human dignity, all along? Sin? Forget it! Repentance? Forget it! All men are good and will go to Heaven, whether they know it or not, whether they want to or not! Conversion is just the becoming aware of one's inalienable human dignity.
In German has also recently appeared Prof. Dörmann's fourth volume in the same series, on the Pope's Encyclical of 1987 on the Holy Ghost, "Dominum et Vivificantem". It is equally hair-raising (there is no other word). Not only does the Holy Ghost not proceed from the Son (Photian heresy), but also the Son proceeds in a way from the Holy Ghost. What for? No doubt, so that the religion of the Son (Catholicism) will be merely one amongst a variety of lawful religions all proceeding, in a way, from the Holy Ghost! That is what Vatican II virtually taught (Decree on ecumenism), and what this Pope actually put into practice, notably at Assisi.
Q: Is Prof. Dörmann arguing that this Pope is in his encyclicals transforming the three persons of the Holy Trinity?
A: Yes, and the best proof that Prof. Dörmann is correct is the actions of John-Paul II, eg. the series of interreligious meetings which merely started with the Assisi event of October, 1986.
Q: Does this Pope know what he is doing?
A: Some people think he must do, because he is an educated man and thoroughly knew true Catholic doctrine before Vatican II. However, other people say that he was not educated but miseducated before Vatican II, having plunged, like Cardinal Ratzinger, into modern philosophy which bent both their minds clean out of shape and falsified all their subsequent studies of doctrine. Before all these neo-modernists flew into the cloud, they could see, and when they flew into the cloud their guardian angels must have been flashing red lights and sounding alarms in their cockpits, but, once they were inside the cloud, they became blind and were flying blind from then on.
Q: Are you saying then that this Pope is not to blame for now flying blind?
A: No, because not only must his guardian angel have warned him before he flew into neo-modernism, but also now God must, logically, be offering all kinds of graces to His one and only Vicar to fly His Church out of the cloud, and that Vicar must be spurning those graces in order to be so obstinately flying onwards in the same cloud as he is doing.
Q: But can nobody tell the Pope what he is doing?
A: Archbishop Lefebvre tried to tell both Pope Paul VI and Pope John-Paul II that they were going seriously wrong, but neither would listen. After all, of all the Cardinals and thousands of other Bishops, half tell John Paul II that he is horribly conservative, the other half tell him he is wonderfully conservative. How could he take seriously the lone voice, or with Bishop de Castro Mayer, lone voices, telling him that in his principles he is not conservative at all? Pope John-Paul II and Cardinal Ratzinger must more or less politely laugh any time anyone suggests they are not Catholic - "But we are the heads of the Church!" Our best information is that John-Paul II completely ignores the Traditional movement. It has for him no significance at all. He is wholly occupied with preparing, so to speak, the Assisi Millennium.
Q. But won’t the series of earthquakes virtually devastating Assisi in 1997 have told John-Paul II anything?
A: The "loving God" of John-Paul II is not any God who would use natural disasters to warn or punish men.
Q: Then how can the Lord God get through to him?
A: Either by an overwhelming grace which Catholics could obtain by their prayers if there were enough of them to mourn for the stricken Church and to hunger and thirst for righteousness. Or, if too many Catholics will prefer their inalienable dignity and guaranteed salvation to mourning and hungering and thirsting, then by a major Chastisement, of which Our Lady is meant to have warned us many times in this century, and which makes a great deal of sense, even if the Church has so far abstained from approving all these warnings.
Q: But why does a major Chastisement make so much sense?
A: Precisely because the mass of Catholic churchmen are so sunk into neo-modernism that, short of a miraculous turn-around on their part, nothing less can save the Church. Also, in today's state of mankind, nothing could bring so many souls to their knees as a major Chastisement.
Q: Still, why did the Lord God allow His churchmen to get into such a mess in the first place?
A: Because He so respects our human dignity, in the real sense, that He insists upon allowing us to make free use or misuse of our free-will, and that includes His own churchmen. He will never allow them to go so far as to destroy His Church, but He can certainly make use of them to purge His Church, which is what is now happening.
Q: So in the end, the Immaculate Heart of Mary will triumph, as she promised at Fatima in 1917?
A: Yes, but not sentimentally. Rather, following on a major Chastisement, as said, insofar as it is hard to see what else could clear the way, and followed by the arrival of the Antichrist.
Q: Now having said what this new age of Church will not be like, can you say what it will be like?
A: Some prophecies say it will be the greatest triumph of the Catholic Church in all her history, proportional to the greatest distress ever in which we see her today. If we can reasonably imagine a large part of mankind perishing in the Chastisement, we can also imagine how deeply the survivors will have re-learned the fear of God, almost forgotten today even amongst the best of men. From that salutary fear will spring up in men's hearts a true love of God which will soar above the false dilemma, dead Tradition or live heresy. Everything these survivors do will naturally be both faithful to Tradition and full of life, in modes we will then instantly recognize to be Catholic but on a scale we can hardly now imagine.
Q: But if this new age of the Church will be so glorious, how will the Anti-Christ arrive?
A: At La Salette in 1846 Our Lady said that 25 years of plentiful harvests would make men forget the ravages of sin. At that point it will take very little time to rebuild all the distracting gadgets of today's materialism because they will not need to be re-invented but only remembered.
Q: Have you a time-table for these events?
A: No way. The Lord God is enormously patient, but when He strikes, it could be swift. At a sheer guess, the reign of the Anti-Christ might be in about 60 years' time, but that date is only to provoke thought. The real date is God's secret.
Q: And where does the Society of St. Pius X fit into this cosmic drama?
A: As the Counter-Reformation systems of the Catholic Church are, in a manner of speaking, shutting down in the crisis merely precipitated by Vatican II, so Catholics are enveloped in darkness and cold. The SSPX is like an emergency power system designed to provide minimal light and warmth for Catholic souls until the main power is turned on again. Or, the SSPX is like the pilot-light in a stove. It can do no cooking to speak of, but its function is to stay lit to enable cooking to be done when the gas is turned on again. Or, the SSPX is like the guardian of a sacred deposit entrusted to it for safe keeping: the Catholic Mass and priesthood threatened all around with destruction for a mysterious period of time. Or, as the only world-wide Catholic organisation of priests keeping the integral Catholic faith, the SSPX may prove to be the back-bone of the hyphen joining the pre-Chastisement to the post-Chastisement Church. Or, the SSPX is like the ugly fat man anchoring the end of a tug-of-war line - nobody tugging on his side loves him but they all need him. Or...
Q: Enough images! Does the SSPX claim there is no salvation outside the SSPX?
A: No, because God has allowed it to stay too small in numbers to reach directly more than relatively few souls. Rather, He wishes it to give witness to Catholic Tradition, by which it indirectly serves an enormous number of souls. So what the SSPX does claim is that there is no salvation outside of that Tradition to which it presently gives witness.
Q: But aren't many SSPX priests (and bishops) somewhat young?
A: As modest as the SSPX must be concerning the persons who compose it and their talents, so uncompromising must it be concerning the Truth which they serve. As Our Lord said (Jn. VII, 16), the Society's doctrine is not the Society's doctrine. It is the Father's doctrine.
Q: But we keep hearing that the SSPX is infiltrated, that this or that prominent member is a Freemason.
A: Such rumours need not to be heeded until there is serious evidence of an infiltration, as opposed to groundless suspicion, which is forbidden by Catholic charity. The presence of Judas Iscariot among the Apostles teaches us there may always be infiltrators. The problem is not so much to identify them, which God alone can unfailingly do. The problem is rather to have an organisation healthy enough to carry them so that they will not do too much harm before being discovered.
Q: And what can layfolk do to help the Church in this her hour of need?
A: Duty of state, duty of state, duty of state. There is no substitute for duty of state. If every man would do his duty, said Pope St. Pius X, the world would not be in its present trouble. Catholics are liable to look for things glamorous or difficult to do, but glamour is deceptive and there is difficulty enough in keeping God's Commandments in daily life today. Daily duty is humble and humbling, always there, and in plentiful supply. Done with a supernatural intention and in the state of grace, it unfailingly merits in proportion to the love of God with which it is done. Here is how the Church will be rebuilt, one person or one day at a time, and, of course, by quiet steady unceasing prayer.
Q: Nevertheless, did Archbishop Lefebvre have any particular recommendations for the rebuilding of the Church?
A: When his successor as SSPX Superior General, Fr. Franz Schmidberger, asked him a year or two before he died how the SSPX could reach souls today, the Archbishop replied, by schools and by the Spiritual Exercises. Notice how both these apostolates are hard work, reliable means of long-term sanctification, reaching into the soul. The Archbishop did not mention sensational actions, or publicity campaigns.
Q: And how much should we concern ourselves with the future or with the Millennium?
A: Up to a certain point and not beyond. For instance a family father must provide for his family as best as he can foresee, but nobody can foresee all that is going to happen in the next few years. For whatever we cannot foresee, God requires of us to trust Him, and not to worry. It insults a father when his children do not have confidence in him. On the contrary, when children show the right kind of trust in their father, he has the utmost difficulty in letting them down. Our Heavenly Father is omnipotent. No difficulty can make Him disappoint souls that trust in Him. As far as the future is concerned, the end of the Ambrosian Hymn is the last word:
"Have mercy upon us, O Lord, have mercy upon us.
May Thy mercy, O Lord, be upon us, according as we have placed our hope in Thee.
In Thee, O Lord, have I placed my hope, let me never be put to confusion".
Dear Friends and Benefactors, the seminary has successfully completed another calendar year, with your support. We have at present 36 seminarians including six who entered the seminary this last September, and two who should be ordained priests this coming June 26. We are always grateful for your support. To express that gratitude is the purpose of this letter, even if it does not always say so.
Enclosed is a repeat flyer of Seminary tapes, audio and video. They contain solid doctrine of great value to understand the depth the Catholic Church's resistance to modern errors, for instance the stand taken by the Society of St. Pius X against Vatican II. These tapes must make substantial and lasting Christmas presents!
Professors and seminarians will be praying for you to have a Happy Christmas and Happy New Year.
Sincerely yours in Christ,
+Richard Williamson
Showing posts with label 1998. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1998. Show all posts
Monday
Address of Pope John Paul II to the Fraternity of St. Peter: 1998
November 1, 1998
Dear Friends and Benefactors,
Why must so-called Traditional Catholics take their stand against today's Rome? Why, when traditionalists with their "strong faith" have "so much to offer the Church", do they insist on "cutting themselves off"? Why can they not, like conservative Catholics, make the best of both worlds by using Rome's 1984 Indult allowing (within strict limits) the Tridentine Mass?
The answer to these questions emerges yet again, clearly, from an address of Pope John Paul II to a leading group of conservative Catholics who were down in Rome last week-end because they believe in co-operating with Rome.
The occasion was the gathering in the Eternal City from Friday Oct. 23 to Monday Oct. 26 of members of the Fraternity of St. Peter to celebrate the tenth anniversary of their Congregation, founded in 1988 by priests leaving the Society of St. Pius X in protest against Archbishop Lefebvre's consecrating four bishops that summer without Rome's permission. It will be remembered that the Archbishop said at that time that the Catholic Church's leaders had shown themselves by, for instance, the Assisi event of October 1986, to be incapable of defending the true Faith, so Tradition had to be given interim bishops of its own. On the contrary, said the handful of his priests who broke away to form St. Peter's Fraternity, the Church's present leaders are good Catholics under whom the Traditional Faith can perfectly well be continued. So these conservative priests put themselves back under the direct control of Rome through the "Ecclesia Dei" Commission, named after the document of July 1988 in which Rome condemned the consecration of the four "Traditional" bishops.
To avoid the accusation of making unfair omissions, the following text of the Pope's address to members of St. Peter's Fraternity in Rome on October 26, 1998, is given in full. His words are in italics, commentary is in normal print.
"I bid you cordially welcome, dear pilgrims wishing to be in Rome for the 10th anniversary of the Motu Proprio `Ecclesia Dei', to strengthen and renew your faith In Christ and your fidelity to the Church. Dear friends, your being in the presence of `the successor of Peter who more than anyone else has to watch over the unity of the Church' (Vatican I, `Pastor Aeternus) is particularly significant"
From the outset, the Pope emphasizes unity, and himself as the center of Catholic unity. For 17 years, the only answer of Popes Paul VI and John Paul II to Archbishop Lefebvre's accusations based on truth was this argument of unity...
"To safeguard the treasure entrusted to the Church by Jesus while remaining steadfastly turned towards the future, the Church must be constantly reflecting on her link with Tradition coming to us from the Lord through the Apostles, such as it has been established down the centuries".
The Pope does now evoke the Deposit of faith (as a "treasure") and Tradition, but neither as being absolute truth, rather he hints they are caught up in time ("towards the future", "down the centuries"). Does truth move with the times?
"According to the spirit of conversion in the Apostolic Letter 'Tertio Millennio Adveniente' (# 14, 32, 34, 50), I encourage all Catholics to take steps towards unity and to renew their attachment to the Church so that all legitimate differences and varying sensibilities worthy of respect may not be separated from each other, but may be an incentive to proclaim the Gospel together; thus, under the impulse of the Spirit uniting the various charisms, all will be able to glorify the Lord, and salvation will be proclaimed to all nations".
Conservatives must admit that John Paul II is here treating their attachment to the Tridentine Mass, etc., as no more than a legitimate "sensibility' varying from the -- one must suppose - equally legitimate, actually much more legitimate, sensibility of modernists to the Mass of Paul VI. Traditionalists on the contrary say that the Paul VI Mass is a betrayal of the Catholic Faith, undermining the Real Presence, the Present Sacrifice, the Sacrificing Priesthood. Do conservatives agree with John Paul II in reducing these dogmas to a matter of "sensibility'?
"I wish all members of the Church to remain heirs of the faith received from the Apostles, worthily and faithfully celebrated in the holy mysteries, with fervour and beauty, so that they may receive ever more grace (cf Trent s. VII, Decree on Sacraments) and live in a relation of close intimacy with the Holy Trinity".
The sentiments are impeccable, but can John Paul II not see that the humanism intrinsic to the man-centered Mass of Paul VI necessarily militates against "worthy and faithful celebration"? No, in truth, he cannot see it (partly, no doubt, because his own priesthood began and grew up with the Tridentine Mass, which is no longer the case for young priests now).
"While confirming that the liturgical reform desired by Vatican II and carried out by Paul VI was justified, the Church does also give a sign of comprehension for people 'attached to certain previous liturgical and disciplinary forms' (Motu Proprio Ecclesia Dei' #5). This is the standpoint from which the Motu Proprio `Ecclesia Dei' is to be understood and applied; I wish it all to be lived in the spirit of Vatican II, in full harmony with Tradition, aiming at unity in charity and fidelity to the Truth".
This is the central paragraph of John Paul II's address to the conservative priests of St. Peter's. Notice the firm affirmation that the Paul VI liturgical reform was good, the corresponding reduction to mere "attachment to previous forms" of any protests against that reform, and the serene conclusion that Tradition is nothing that can be out of harmony with "the spirit of Vatican II". Do conservatives accept this understanding of "Tradition" as being perfectly compatible with the "spirit of Vatican II"? So Tradition and Truth do change with the times?
But now comes the practical clincher. Back in 1988, the new St. Peter's Fraternity obtained from Rome the Tridentine Mass and approval by Rome, but they did not obtain the bishop of their own that they had asked for. Since then, they have had to depend on diocesan or Novus Ordo bishops who thus retain essential control of the whole St. Peter's operation. Alas for St. Peter's, reports come from all over the world of how those bishops block their operation. St. Peter's Fraternity is liable to appeal in vain over their heads to the Pope. The Pope habitually refers them back to the same bishops! Now judge whether or not the blocking by those bishops is the will of the Pope:
"Led by 'the activity of the Holy Ghost, whereby the whole flock of Christ is preserved and progresses in unity of Faith' (Vatican II, `Lumen Gentium' # 25), the Successor of Peter and the bishops successors of the Apostles, teach the Christian mystery; in a quite particular way the bishops, gathered together in ecumenical Councils with Peter and beneath Peter, confirm and strengthen the doctrine of the Church, which is the faithful heir of Tradition existing now for nearly 20 centuries as a living and progressing reality, giving new impulse to the whole Church community. The three last ecumenical Councils, Trent, Vatican I and Vatican II, have been particularly concerned to throw light on the mystery of the Faith, and have undertaken reforms necessary for the good of the Church while ensuring continuity with apostolic Tradition, already gathered together by Saint Hyppolitus".
Note in passing the dangerous definition of "Tradition" as "a living and progressing reality, giving new impulse to the whole Church community'. Also the incredible ranking of the anti-dogmatic Vatican II alongside the super-dogmatic Trent and Vatican I. But this paragraph has served mainly to prepare the "coup de grace", or finishing blow:
"So it is the task of the bishops, first and foremost, in communion with the successor of Peter, to lead the flock with firmness and charity, so that the Catholic Faith may be everywhere safeguarded (cf. Paul VI, Apostolic Exhortation `Quinque lam Anni'; New Code of Canon Law, can. 386) and worthily celebrated. For indeed, as Saint Ignatius of Antioch stated, `Where the bishop is, there too the Church is' (Letter to the Smyrnians, VIII, 2). I extend also a fraternal invitation to the bishops to show understanding and renewed pastoral concern for Catholics attached to the old rite of Mass, and, on the threshold of the third millennium, to help all Catholics to experience the celebration of the holy mysteries with a devotion truly nourishing their spiritual life and bringing them peace".
In other words, St. Peter's Fraternity need only obey the diocesan bishops in order to be sure of their Faith being safeguarded and of their liturgy being worthily celebrated! Is that their experience? As for the "understanding and renewed pastoral concern" to be shown to Catholics with a St. Peter's Fraternity "sensibility", well, of course, what that means was explained above - the Pope wants it "all to be lived in the spirit of Vatican II". He concludes:
"Entrusting you to the intercession of the Virgin Mary, perfect model for the following of Christ, and Mother of the Church, dear brothers and sisters, I grant you the Apostolic blessing, and to all those dear to you".
According to the "Wanderer" report of the "Ecclesia Dei" week-end, Cardinal Ratzinger assured the conservative Catholics that their problem is the diocesan bishops. In other words, like Pope John Paul II he is convinced that the replacement of the old liturgy is fine, that at most that replacement is being misapplied.
No, Your Holiness. No, Your Eminence. Nice conservatives may let themselves be persuaded that Vatican II and the Novus Ordo Mass are good texts, just being badly applied, but nasty "Traditionalists" know that they are bad texts. Not just the new practice, but the new principles are wrong. And the greatest service "Traditionalists" can render to both of you, and to conservatives, is to take this stand "against" you until you too see it. Then you will thank us for having "cut ourselves off".
So the Society of St. Pius X goes its way. The solemn blessing of the new Church of Ecône Seminary in Switzerland on October 10 was a great success. Lovely weather, many people, a beautiful Pontifical High Mass celebrated by the Superior General, Bishop Bernard Fellay. It recalled the re-dedication of the Temple in Jerusalem amidst the Macchabean Wars (I Macch. IV)...
Pray to and for the Holy Souls in the month of November, and please do not forget the Seminary in your generosity.
Most sincerely yours in the Sacred Heart of Jesus,
Dear Friends and Benefactors,
Why must so-called Traditional Catholics take their stand against today's Rome? Why, when traditionalists with their "strong faith" have "so much to offer the Church", do they insist on "cutting themselves off"? Why can they not, like conservative Catholics, make the best of both worlds by using Rome's 1984 Indult allowing (within strict limits) the Tridentine Mass?
The answer to these questions emerges yet again, clearly, from an address of Pope John Paul II to a leading group of conservative Catholics who were down in Rome last week-end because they believe in co-operating with Rome.
The occasion was the gathering in the Eternal City from Friday Oct. 23 to Monday Oct. 26 of members of the Fraternity of St. Peter to celebrate the tenth anniversary of their Congregation, founded in 1988 by priests leaving the Society of St. Pius X in protest against Archbishop Lefebvre's consecrating four bishops that summer without Rome's permission. It will be remembered that the Archbishop said at that time that the Catholic Church's leaders had shown themselves by, for instance, the Assisi event of October 1986, to be incapable of defending the true Faith, so Tradition had to be given interim bishops of its own. On the contrary, said the handful of his priests who broke away to form St. Peter's Fraternity, the Church's present leaders are good Catholics under whom the Traditional Faith can perfectly well be continued. So these conservative priests put themselves back under the direct control of Rome through the "Ecclesia Dei" Commission, named after the document of July 1988 in which Rome condemned the consecration of the four "Traditional" bishops.
To avoid the accusation of making unfair omissions, the following text of the Pope's address to members of St. Peter's Fraternity in Rome on October 26, 1998, is given in full. His words are in italics, commentary is in normal print.
"I bid you cordially welcome, dear pilgrims wishing to be in Rome for the 10th anniversary of the Motu Proprio `Ecclesia Dei', to strengthen and renew your faith In Christ and your fidelity to the Church. Dear friends, your being in the presence of `the successor of Peter who more than anyone else has to watch over the unity of the Church' (Vatican I, `Pastor Aeternus) is particularly significant"
From the outset, the Pope emphasizes unity, and himself as the center of Catholic unity. For 17 years, the only answer of Popes Paul VI and John Paul II to Archbishop Lefebvre's accusations based on truth was this argument of unity...
"To safeguard the treasure entrusted to the Church by Jesus while remaining steadfastly turned towards the future, the Church must be constantly reflecting on her link with Tradition coming to us from the Lord through the Apostles, such as it has been established down the centuries".
The Pope does now evoke the Deposit of faith (as a "treasure") and Tradition, but neither as being absolute truth, rather he hints they are caught up in time ("towards the future", "down the centuries"). Does truth move with the times?
"According to the spirit of conversion in the Apostolic Letter 'Tertio Millennio Adveniente' (# 14, 32, 34, 50), I encourage all Catholics to take steps towards unity and to renew their attachment to the Church so that all legitimate differences and varying sensibilities worthy of respect may not be separated from each other, but may be an incentive to proclaim the Gospel together; thus, under the impulse of the Spirit uniting the various charisms, all will be able to glorify the Lord, and salvation will be proclaimed to all nations".
Conservatives must admit that John Paul II is here treating their attachment to the Tridentine Mass, etc., as no more than a legitimate "sensibility' varying from the -- one must suppose - equally legitimate, actually much more legitimate, sensibility of modernists to the Mass of Paul VI. Traditionalists on the contrary say that the Paul VI Mass is a betrayal of the Catholic Faith, undermining the Real Presence, the Present Sacrifice, the Sacrificing Priesthood. Do conservatives agree with John Paul II in reducing these dogmas to a matter of "sensibility'?
"I wish all members of the Church to remain heirs of the faith received from the Apostles, worthily and faithfully celebrated in the holy mysteries, with fervour and beauty, so that they may receive ever more grace (cf Trent s. VII, Decree on Sacraments) and live in a relation of close intimacy with the Holy Trinity".
The sentiments are impeccable, but can John Paul II not see that the humanism intrinsic to the man-centered Mass of Paul VI necessarily militates against "worthy and faithful celebration"? No, in truth, he cannot see it (partly, no doubt, because his own priesthood began and grew up with the Tridentine Mass, which is no longer the case for young priests now).
"While confirming that the liturgical reform desired by Vatican II and carried out by Paul VI was justified, the Church does also give a sign of comprehension for people 'attached to certain previous liturgical and disciplinary forms' (Motu Proprio Ecclesia Dei' #5). This is the standpoint from which the Motu Proprio `Ecclesia Dei' is to be understood and applied; I wish it all to be lived in the spirit of Vatican II, in full harmony with Tradition, aiming at unity in charity and fidelity to the Truth".
This is the central paragraph of John Paul II's address to the conservative priests of St. Peter's. Notice the firm affirmation that the Paul VI liturgical reform was good, the corresponding reduction to mere "attachment to previous forms" of any protests against that reform, and the serene conclusion that Tradition is nothing that can be out of harmony with "the spirit of Vatican II". Do conservatives accept this understanding of "Tradition" as being perfectly compatible with the "spirit of Vatican II"? So Tradition and Truth do change with the times?
But now comes the practical clincher. Back in 1988, the new St. Peter's Fraternity obtained from Rome the Tridentine Mass and approval by Rome, but they did not obtain the bishop of their own that they had asked for. Since then, they have had to depend on diocesan or Novus Ordo bishops who thus retain essential control of the whole St. Peter's operation. Alas for St. Peter's, reports come from all over the world of how those bishops block their operation. St. Peter's Fraternity is liable to appeal in vain over their heads to the Pope. The Pope habitually refers them back to the same bishops! Now judge whether or not the blocking by those bishops is the will of the Pope:
"Led by 'the activity of the Holy Ghost, whereby the whole flock of Christ is preserved and progresses in unity of Faith' (Vatican II, `Lumen Gentium' # 25), the Successor of Peter and the bishops successors of the Apostles, teach the Christian mystery; in a quite particular way the bishops, gathered together in ecumenical Councils with Peter and beneath Peter, confirm and strengthen the doctrine of the Church, which is the faithful heir of Tradition existing now for nearly 20 centuries as a living and progressing reality, giving new impulse to the whole Church community. The three last ecumenical Councils, Trent, Vatican I and Vatican II, have been particularly concerned to throw light on the mystery of the Faith, and have undertaken reforms necessary for the good of the Church while ensuring continuity with apostolic Tradition, already gathered together by Saint Hyppolitus".
Note in passing the dangerous definition of "Tradition" as "a living and progressing reality, giving new impulse to the whole Church community'. Also the incredible ranking of the anti-dogmatic Vatican II alongside the super-dogmatic Trent and Vatican I. But this paragraph has served mainly to prepare the "coup de grace", or finishing blow:
"So it is the task of the bishops, first and foremost, in communion with the successor of Peter, to lead the flock with firmness and charity, so that the Catholic Faith may be everywhere safeguarded (cf. Paul VI, Apostolic Exhortation `Quinque lam Anni'; New Code of Canon Law, can. 386) and worthily celebrated. For indeed, as Saint Ignatius of Antioch stated, `Where the bishop is, there too the Church is' (Letter to the Smyrnians, VIII, 2). I extend also a fraternal invitation to the bishops to show understanding and renewed pastoral concern for Catholics attached to the old rite of Mass, and, on the threshold of the third millennium, to help all Catholics to experience the celebration of the holy mysteries with a devotion truly nourishing their spiritual life and bringing them peace".
In other words, St. Peter's Fraternity need only obey the diocesan bishops in order to be sure of their Faith being safeguarded and of their liturgy being worthily celebrated! Is that their experience? As for the "understanding and renewed pastoral concern" to be shown to Catholics with a St. Peter's Fraternity "sensibility", well, of course, what that means was explained above - the Pope wants it "all to be lived in the spirit of Vatican II". He concludes:
"Entrusting you to the intercession of the Virgin Mary, perfect model for the following of Christ, and Mother of the Church, dear brothers and sisters, I grant you the Apostolic blessing, and to all those dear to you".
According to the "Wanderer" report of the "Ecclesia Dei" week-end, Cardinal Ratzinger assured the conservative Catholics that their problem is the diocesan bishops. In other words, like Pope John Paul II he is convinced that the replacement of the old liturgy is fine, that at most that replacement is being misapplied.
No, Your Holiness. No, Your Eminence. Nice conservatives may let themselves be persuaded that Vatican II and the Novus Ordo Mass are good texts, just being badly applied, but nasty "Traditionalists" know that they are bad texts. Not just the new practice, but the new principles are wrong. And the greatest service "Traditionalists" can render to both of you, and to conservatives, is to take this stand "against" you until you too see it. Then you will thank us for having "cut ourselves off".
So the Society of St. Pius X goes its way. The solemn blessing of the new Church of Ecône Seminary in Switzerland on October 10 was a great success. Lovely weather, many people, a beautiful Pontifical High Mass celebrated by the Superior General, Bishop Bernard Fellay. It recalled the re-dedication of the Temple in Jerusalem amidst the Macchabean Wars (I Macch. IV)...
Pray to and for the Holy Souls in the month of November, and please do not forget the Seminary in your generosity.
Most sincerely yours in the Sacred Heart of Jesus,
Co-education and the 4 great false principles of the modern world.
October 1, 1998
Dear Friends and Benefactors,
Co-education, educating boys and girls together, has always been condemned by the Catholic Church. For instance, Pope Pius XI on 1929 called it a "pernicious error, which, to the immense harm of youth" is "spreading far and wide among Christian peoples". Why then can many "Catholics" today not see what is wrong with it? Because it naturally follows from four great false principles of the modern world, universally held to be true.
The first and most radical of these false principles is religious liberty. If the State cannot decide which religion is true, then religious ideas are not that important, so we don't need no education (unless it's material), we don't need no thought-control, "truth" is just opinions, strawberry fields for ever, and school-time has no reason to be anything other than one long parry for boys and girls together.
Now when this way of thinking is laid out so crudely, no self-respecting Catholic can think he is affected by it. However, just how seriously do our "Catholics" take education that is not material or technological? Judge by their pocket-books, or wallets, not by their words. Which in fact comes first? That expensive car, or that expensive Catholic tuition for the child? Things spiritual like old-fashioned Catholic education get lip-service, but things material get the real service. So, the drive of boys towards girls and of girls towards boys being an unalterable given of human nature, then to deny its easy gratifications to one's youngsters requires a higher motivation, otherwise the lower drive will take over. Co-education betrays a lack of such motivation, a lack of belief in the seriousness of life. Had I anything really serious that I wished to teach these boys or girls, then the first thing I would do, if I could, would be to separate them. The army and navy are no longer serious, so now they are mixed. American football is still serious, so who ever heard of mixed American football training camps?
Second great modern principle: relations between the sexes are not a social matter with which, for instance, schools should concern themselves, they are purely a private matter for the individuals concerned. Therefore education has no business to be getting in between the sexes, and liberty requires that they be free to mix with no interference from school.
It is an enormous error of our age that relations between the sexes are a purely individual affair. True, by the pleasures attached, insofar as the individuals alone concerned can enjoy them, those relations resemble eating and drinking, but as to the purpose governing these pleasures, those relations are wholly different. Whereas eating and drinking are ordered to the survival of the individual, those relations with their whole range of material arid spiritual pleasures are ordered to the survival of the species, or mankind. Therefore they are a matter of society's survival, and of its legitimate concern. The society that refuses to interfere in the individuals' use or misuse of those relations and what goes with them is a society like our own, committing suicide.
Again, the problem lies rather in the disappearance of higher belief and motivation than in the constant reappearance of lower drives. Just as the jagged rocks on the sea-floor of a tidal harbour are no problem at high tide when the ships float freely above them, but at low tide, without their having moved an inch, they paralyze shipping, so if men are spiritually motivated they can sail above their lower instincts, but if that motivation ebbs away, they fall foul of those instincts which have not changed. Modern co-education betrays modern society's lack of spiritual or intellectual motivation, or faith.
Third great modern error behind co-education: the denial of original sin. "Boys and girls are just friends". "The more they are mixed together, the less they notice one another". "Separation is artificial". "Mixing is necessary to teach and test virtue". "Amongst Catholics everything should be fine". And, of course, "MY children are angels".
Well, as the saying goes, if you believe that, you can believe anything. Yet it is astonishing how many "Catholic" parents do believe it! They have all learned about original sin in their catechism, but of course the catechism is only a book and their children are of course the exception! I can remember how, when the mother of a teen-age girl wanting to hang around seminarians tried to re-assure the suspicious Seminary Rector that her daughter was "not like that", he snorted. "Oh," she pouted at him, "I do wish you wouldn't be like that!" He snorted again.
In what world do these parents live? Answer, in a foolish world which all around them affirms the innate goodness of man. ("Ah, but America is different" - I suppose you are talking about Bill Clinton?) What grasp then does the Catholic catechism have upon the minds and hearts of such "Catholic" parents? Poor things. Not much. But then, as everybody knows, religion is only for Sundays mornings. Alas! Catholics immersed in a Protestant culture, as in English-speaking countries, must exert themselves constantly not to become Protestants who merely go to Mass on Sundays, even if it is the true Mass!
Original sin is for real! Since when has throwing young men and women together been anything other than like tossing lit matches on a heap of dry straw? Since modern times when mankind is so advanced? Oh yeah? Ask the U.S. Navy, since it began a few years ago sending scads of young sailoresses to sea together with the young sailors to port turned into love-boats, and half the ratings have to be dismissed for pregnancy!
"Oh, bishop, I do wish you wouldn't be like that!" Pleeeeeeease! Where has the common sense gone? Since when, if you wish to keep two magnets apart, do you put them close by one another? In truth, co-educators do not want the young magnets to stay apart, they are quite happy to see them clinching. After all, "Mixing is necessary to learn to inter-act normally", and "They will mix all their lives so they might as well start now", and "To condemn casual mixing is just being hyperreactive", and after all, "Catholics must not be too different from the world around them". Oh no? Alas, the denial of original sin is so embedded in the proud modern world that not all the mockery in China will prise it out again. "The facts can go to blazes! Our dream is so much nicer! We are now God!"
However, almost as catastrophic as the denial of original sin is the fourth hidden principle of co-educators, namely that between the two sexes - let the crudity of the expression awaken to the shocking stupidity of the error - there are only minor differences of plumbing! In our enlightened age, so runs the argument, girls are no longer inferior to boys but are interchangeable with them, so it is against equality to educate them separately or train them for different functions, especially when the rising divorce rate may require either to perform what used to be regarded as the other's functions.
But if the divorce rate is so rising, is not one of the main reasons precisely this scorn for the God-given distinction and complementarity of the two sexes? Children especially need a manly man to be their father and a womanly woman to be their mother, but of course the modern world thinks it knows better. There are volumes to be written on this subject, so often addressed in these letters, but space is running out. Here is how Pius XI summed up the error in his 1929 Encyclical on the Christian Education of Youth, quoted above:
"Co-education... is founded... upon a deplorable confusion of ideas that mistakes a leveling mixity and equality for the lawful association of the sexes. The Creator has ordained and disposed perfect union of the sexes only in marriage, and, with varying degrees of contact, in the family and in society. Besides, there is in nature itself, which fashions the two sexes' quite different organisms, temperaments and abilities, nothing to suggest that there can be or that there ought to be mixity, and much less equality, in the training of the two sexes. These, in keeping with the wonderful designs of the Creator, are destined to complement each other in the family and in society, precisely because of their differences, which therefore ought to be maintained and encouraged during the years of formation, with the necessary distinction and corresponding separation, according to age and circumstances. These principles, with due regard to time and place, must, in accordance with Christian prudence, be applied to all schools, particularly in the most delicate and decisive period of formation, that namely of adolescence ...."
Of course, Traditional Catholic schools today, especially when they are starting out, must make do and mend, and they may not have the means to establish immediately all separation desirable of the sexes. But let Catholics at least not approve in principle of any mixity they may be obliged to put up with for the time being in practice. Nor let them say that Pius XI was speaking for 1929 but not for 1999 (what makes the difference? - Vatican II??), or that he was speaking for Europe but not for America (did the Freemasons change human nature?).
In sum, education of youth is much too serious to allow for fooling around with mixity. Co-education is not just a matter of individuals' free choice, it is an issue for society and its schools. Co-education is a massive occasion of sin, given the weakness of human nature due to original sin. And co-education massively disrespects God's design in the natural distinction and complementarity of the sexes. On this last point read also the texts enclosed of the wonderful end-of-school-year speech given in 1997 by Schwester Michaela, headmistress of the Society's secondary school for girls in Germany.
Also enclosed is a Seminary Continuous Support Fund form, enabling you to receive this letter first class each month, and facilitating monthly contributions to the Seminary. We are always grateful to benefactors, especially to those of you who have faithfully helped us now for years on end. The other card, inviting you to list names of departed souls, will, if you return it, be placed once a month on the Seminary altar for a Requiem Mass offered for all such souls. These cards have genuinely accumulated also for years on end. Only with the millennium will they be replaced!
Finally a few dates for next summer. June 26, priestly ordinations. July 1-4, women's retreat. July 5-10, men's doctrinal session on the family. July 12-17, men's retreat. July 19-30, priests', seminarians' and lay-teachers' literature session (Dr. David White).
With all good wishes arid blessings, in Christ,
Dear Friends and Benefactors,
Co-education, educating boys and girls together, has always been condemned by the Catholic Church. For instance, Pope Pius XI on 1929 called it a "pernicious error, which, to the immense harm of youth" is "spreading far and wide among Christian peoples". Why then can many "Catholics" today not see what is wrong with it? Because it naturally follows from four great false principles of the modern world, universally held to be true.
The first and most radical of these false principles is religious liberty. If the State cannot decide which religion is true, then religious ideas are not that important, so we don't need no education (unless it's material), we don't need no thought-control, "truth" is just opinions, strawberry fields for ever, and school-time has no reason to be anything other than one long parry for boys and girls together.
Now when this way of thinking is laid out so crudely, no self-respecting Catholic can think he is affected by it. However, just how seriously do our "Catholics" take education that is not material or technological? Judge by their pocket-books, or wallets, not by their words. Which in fact comes first? That expensive car, or that expensive Catholic tuition for the child? Things spiritual like old-fashioned Catholic education get lip-service, but things material get the real service. So, the drive of boys towards girls and of girls towards boys being an unalterable given of human nature, then to deny its easy gratifications to one's youngsters requires a higher motivation, otherwise the lower drive will take over. Co-education betrays a lack of such motivation, a lack of belief in the seriousness of life. Had I anything really serious that I wished to teach these boys or girls, then the first thing I would do, if I could, would be to separate them. The army and navy are no longer serious, so now they are mixed. American football is still serious, so who ever heard of mixed American football training camps?
Second great modern principle: relations between the sexes are not a social matter with which, for instance, schools should concern themselves, they are purely a private matter for the individuals concerned. Therefore education has no business to be getting in between the sexes, and liberty requires that they be free to mix with no interference from school.
It is an enormous error of our age that relations between the sexes are a purely individual affair. True, by the pleasures attached, insofar as the individuals alone concerned can enjoy them, those relations resemble eating and drinking, but as to the purpose governing these pleasures, those relations are wholly different. Whereas eating and drinking are ordered to the survival of the individual, those relations with their whole range of material arid spiritual pleasures are ordered to the survival of the species, or mankind. Therefore they are a matter of society's survival, and of its legitimate concern. The society that refuses to interfere in the individuals' use or misuse of those relations and what goes with them is a society like our own, committing suicide.
Again, the problem lies rather in the disappearance of higher belief and motivation than in the constant reappearance of lower drives. Just as the jagged rocks on the sea-floor of a tidal harbour are no problem at high tide when the ships float freely above them, but at low tide, without their having moved an inch, they paralyze shipping, so if men are spiritually motivated they can sail above their lower instincts, but if that motivation ebbs away, they fall foul of those instincts which have not changed. Modern co-education betrays modern society's lack of spiritual or intellectual motivation, or faith.
Third great modern error behind co-education: the denial of original sin. "Boys and girls are just friends". "The more they are mixed together, the less they notice one another". "Separation is artificial". "Mixing is necessary to teach and test virtue". "Amongst Catholics everything should be fine". And, of course, "MY children are angels".
Well, as the saying goes, if you believe that, you can believe anything. Yet it is astonishing how many "Catholic" parents do believe it! They have all learned about original sin in their catechism, but of course the catechism is only a book and their children are of course the exception! I can remember how, when the mother of a teen-age girl wanting to hang around seminarians tried to re-assure the suspicious Seminary Rector that her daughter was "not like that", he snorted. "Oh," she pouted at him, "I do wish you wouldn't be like that!" He snorted again.
In what world do these parents live? Answer, in a foolish world which all around them affirms the innate goodness of man. ("Ah, but America is different" - I suppose you are talking about Bill Clinton?) What grasp then does the Catholic catechism have upon the minds and hearts of such "Catholic" parents? Poor things. Not much. But then, as everybody knows, religion is only for Sundays mornings. Alas! Catholics immersed in a Protestant culture, as in English-speaking countries, must exert themselves constantly not to become Protestants who merely go to Mass on Sundays, even if it is the true Mass!
Original sin is for real! Since when has throwing young men and women together been anything other than like tossing lit matches on a heap of dry straw? Since modern times when mankind is so advanced? Oh yeah? Ask the U.S. Navy, since it began a few years ago sending scads of young sailoresses to sea together with the young sailors to port turned into love-boats, and half the ratings have to be dismissed for pregnancy!
"Oh, bishop, I do wish you wouldn't be like that!" Pleeeeeeease! Where has the common sense gone? Since when, if you wish to keep two magnets apart, do you put them close by one another? In truth, co-educators do not want the young magnets to stay apart, they are quite happy to see them clinching. After all, "Mixing is necessary to learn to inter-act normally", and "They will mix all their lives so they might as well start now", and "To condemn casual mixing is just being hyperreactive", and after all, "Catholics must not be too different from the world around them". Oh no? Alas, the denial of original sin is so embedded in the proud modern world that not all the mockery in China will prise it out again. "The facts can go to blazes! Our dream is so much nicer! We are now God!"
However, almost as catastrophic as the denial of original sin is the fourth hidden principle of co-educators, namely that between the two sexes - let the crudity of the expression awaken to the shocking stupidity of the error - there are only minor differences of plumbing! In our enlightened age, so runs the argument, girls are no longer inferior to boys but are interchangeable with them, so it is against equality to educate them separately or train them for different functions, especially when the rising divorce rate may require either to perform what used to be regarded as the other's functions.
But if the divorce rate is so rising, is not one of the main reasons precisely this scorn for the God-given distinction and complementarity of the two sexes? Children especially need a manly man to be their father and a womanly woman to be their mother, but of course the modern world thinks it knows better. There are volumes to be written on this subject, so often addressed in these letters, but space is running out. Here is how Pius XI summed up the error in his 1929 Encyclical on the Christian Education of Youth, quoted above:
"Co-education... is founded... upon a deplorable confusion of ideas that mistakes a leveling mixity and equality for the lawful association of the sexes. The Creator has ordained and disposed perfect union of the sexes only in marriage, and, with varying degrees of contact, in the family and in society. Besides, there is in nature itself, which fashions the two sexes' quite different organisms, temperaments and abilities, nothing to suggest that there can be or that there ought to be mixity, and much less equality, in the training of the two sexes. These, in keeping with the wonderful designs of the Creator, are destined to complement each other in the family and in society, precisely because of their differences, which therefore ought to be maintained and encouraged during the years of formation, with the necessary distinction and corresponding separation, according to age and circumstances. These principles, with due regard to time and place, must, in accordance with Christian prudence, be applied to all schools, particularly in the most delicate and decisive period of formation, that namely of adolescence ...."
Of course, Traditional Catholic schools today, especially when they are starting out, must make do and mend, and they may not have the means to establish immediately all separation desirable of the sexes. But let Catholics at least not approve in principle of any mixity they may be obliged to put up with for the time being in practice. Nor let them say that Pius XI was speaking for 1929 but not for 1999 (what makes the difference? - Vatican II??), or that he was speaking for Europe but not for America (did the Freemasons change human nature?).
In sum, education of youth is much too serious to allow for fooling around with mixity. Co-education is not just a matter of individuals' free choice, it is an issue for society and its schools. Co-education is a massive occasion of sin, given the weakness of human nature due to original sin. And co-education massively disrespects God's design in the natural distinction and complementarity of the sexes. On this last point read also the texts enclosed of the wonderful end-of-school-year speech given in 1997 by Schwester Michaela, headmistress of the Society's secondary school for girls in Germany.
Also enclosed is a Seminary Continuous Support Fund form, enabling you to receive this letter first class each month, and facilitating monthly contributions to the Seminary. We are always grateful to benefactors, especially to those of you who have faithfully helped us now for years on end. The other card, inviting you to list names of departed souls, will, if you return it, be placed once a month on the Seminary altar for a Requiem Mass offered for all such souls. These cards have genuinely accumulated also for years on end. Only with the millennium will they be replaced!
Finally a few dates for next summer. June 26, priestly ordinations. July 1-4, women's retreat. July 5-10, men's doctrinal session on the family. July 12-17, men's retreat. July 19-30, priests', seminarians' and lay-teachers' literature session (Dr. David White).
With all good wishes arid blessings, in Christ,
The "diabolical disorientation" of Catholic churchmen today
September 1, 1998
Dear Friends and Benefactors,
The minds of most Catholic churchmen today are in a state of what Sister Lucy of Fatima called "diabolical disorientation". These churchmen are on the road to eternal perdition and they are taking millions of souls with them. How can that be? It is a mystery of iniquity. However, a little article which somebody sent to me recently throws - without meaning to! - much light thereon.
It is an article by a Fr. Richard Hogan, in a recent pro-life newsletter, on "The Theology of John-Paul II". It praises the Pope for providing the Catholic Church with a new way, acceptable to modern man, of presenting the Church's Faith and moral teaching. Little can Fr. Hogan realize that his article's clear presentation of the Pope's basic thinking makes clear not how this Pope helps to save babies, but how he helps to slaughter them! And yet no doubt the Pope, and Fr. Hogan, have the best of intentions! "Diabolical disorientation"!
In a nutshell, the Pope centers all on man. So, little human babies should be of supreme value. But, if the biological father and mother are also of supreme value, then why should they not get rid of the little fetus invading their supreme lives? The fight against abortion is no doubt a good cause, but no good cause is to be defended with bad arguments.
The problem with abortion is, first, last, and foremost, that it breaks the law of God. To try to fight abortion without bringing in God - to try to solve any of the modern world's real problems without bringing in God - is a fight lost in advance. Yet that is, basically, what Fr. Hogan praises the Pope for doing. No wonder this Pope, with - apparently - the best of intentions, is destroying the Church. Let us look at the article more in detail. It is not long.
The reason why the Pope's thinking is so valuable to modern Catholics, says Fr. Hogan, is because of his unique success in combining the modern philosophy he studied in Cracow with the Catholic theology he afterwards studied in Rome. By this combination modern minds with their new way of thinking can once more be reached with Catholic truth which was closed to them as long as it was cast, or expressed, in the age-old way of thinking. For whereas the old thinking was objective (based on the outward object, identically real or true for everybody) and deductive (concluding downwards from universal principles), on the contrary modern thinking is subjective (based on inward realizations, valid maybe only for the individual having them) and inductive (concluding upwards from a series of individual experiences, like democracy, says Fr. Hogan).
The gulf between these two ways of thinking is so deep that for as long as Catholic truth was only cast in the old way, it was inaccessible to modern minds thinking only in the new way. What Karol Wojtyla did as far back as 1958 with his philosophy of "personalism", as Fr. Hogan calls it, was to bridge this gulf between object and subject by putting the human person in the center, for in the human person objective and subjective meet and are no longer opposed to one another.
How? On the one hand, by being created as an object in the image and likeness of God, the human person reflects the ultimate, objective, universal Reality from whom all else is deduced. On the other hand by being created as a subject individual and inward to himself, the human person has subjectively valid experiences from which he mounts inductively upwards, e.g. to God.
Fr. Hogan concludes by rejoicing that Karol Wojtyla's re-thinking of Catholic Revelation transforms all Catholic theology! The fusing of objective and subjective in the human person gives us brand new notions of creation, the human body, the human family, the human person, the person of Christ; of the Church, the sacraments, grace, sin, death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell! Fr. Hogan apparently loves these new notions, and ends by begging readers to study the Pope's "personalism".
However, has the good Father Hogan stopped to think? The Pope's version of Hell is indeed new. The Pope promoted to cardinal the Swiss "theologian" Hans Urs von Balthasar who said that Hell is empty. A charming thought. But if nobody goes to Hell, why should any abortionist stop aborting? Because of "the dignity of the human person"? Don't make me laugh! As a Scottish convert to Catholicism once noteworthily said, "A Kerk (=church) without a Hell isn't werth (=worth) a damn!" Exactly. The Newchurch, emptying out hell, is not "werth a damn"!
Where then, in Fr. Hogan's version, did Karol Wojtyla go wrong? (No doubt Fr. Hogan has rather simplified the issues, but his simplification is essentially just.)
Firstly, Fr. Hogan bases the achievement of Karol Wojtyla's "personalism" on its overcoming of the split between object and subject, between objective thinking and subjective thinking. But this split is false. For while objective reality and subjective man are indeed different, they do not exclude one another, as Fr. Hogan suggests. For indeed what is objective, the vast real framework of the universe, includes what is subjective, human beings and their inner realizations. That is why ancient thinking took full account of everything subjective within the framework of objective reality. Only modern thinking gives such importance to the subject as to shut out objective reality. Thus ancient thinking fires on all four engines, modern thinking only on two. There is no need to respect modern thought or modern ways of thinking! Hopping on one leg may be amusing, but as a means of movement it cannot compare with walking on two legs!
Therefore, secondly, not only is there no need to re-cast the Catholic Faith from an objective into a subjective way of thinking, but also there is a positive need not to do so! It is the sheerest common sense that the truths of the Catholic Faith have nothing whatsoever to do with my inward realizations, or my sacred subjectivity! I may or may not have a beautiful inward realization, a NIF (nice internal feeling), of the Immaculate Conception, but all the NIFs in the world have nothing to do with whether a particular Jewish maiden was, or was not, miraculously protected by God from the stain of original sin at that moment in history when she was conceived in the womb of St. Anne! Alas, common sense is not modern man's strong suit!
But democracy is. Notice how Fr. Hogan slipped it into the modern way of thinking. Listen to modern catechism teachers: "Children, what do you all, democratically, feel, about the Immaculate Conception, inside yourselves? Jane, you feel it's true? Then it's true for you! John, you don't? Then it's false for you! But let's take a vote, in order to all induce together!" Ridiculous!
Hence, thirdly, as for Pope John-Paul's "personalism" as presented by Fr. Hogan, it is true that the human being is created in the image and likeness of God, and so reflects to a tiny extent the objective truth and goodness of God. And it is true that this human subject can have all kinds of thoughts or feelings, upwards or downwards, especially since God gives him free-will. But whether these subjective thoughts are true or not, valid or not, depends not upon whether they are subjectively held (they cannot not be if they are thoughts or feelings), but upon whether they match objective reality.
In other words, the real value of the human person lies not in his merely being a human person, regardless of whether he is full of truth or falsehood, which is what this Pope basically thinks. The real value of the human person lies in the use he makes of his free-will to subjectively recognize and love the ultimate objective reality, i.e. God.
If the human person refuses to align his human subjectivity upon the objective Divinity, that is not just a regrettable failure leaving his "human dignity" untouched as he goes to Heaven whether he wants to or not. It is a damnable sin and offence against the goodness of God, cause of eternal damnation in the objective fires of Hell. Who do modern "theologians" think they are to be extinguishing those fires? Benefactors of mankind? On the contrary!
This Pope is the leader of a dream. His Newchurch is a dream. Into that dream he is helping to pull thousands upon thousands of priests like Fr. Hogan, and millions upon millions of unsuspecting Catholics. Unsuspecting? God knows. In any case they - and all of us - are due for a harsh awakening with tomorrow's reality check. How soon does it arrive? God knows. But that is one check that will not bounce! So we must pray for this poor Pope that he may wake up to reality before it is too late for him to save his soul. And we must pray for Fr. Richard Hogan that he put his fight against abortion on solid foundations, namely the existence of God, His Fifth Commandment, and the existence of Hell for grave disobedience to any of God's Ten Commandments.
The Pope and Fr. Hogan may reply that God, Commandments and Hell are objective notions which no longer have any grip on subjective modern man. The answer is that a strong conviction will still put them over to many men, and if those many reduce themselves to a handful, like in Noah's time, then the rest must be left to the Flood. As Dr. Samuel Johnson said, "The prospect of imminent execution wonderfully concentrates the mind"!
In any case it is useless to fight sin with man-centered arguments, because sin is man-centeredness. The sinner has won before the fight starts! That is why the Newchurch is so weak. To reach out to modern man on modern man's terms means that, heads he wins, tails God loses. Fr. Hogan, think again!
On the 1st of October, Deo volente, I shall be in Econe for the blessing of the handsome new stone church at the mother-seminary of the Society of St. Pius X in Switzerland. Pray for the occasion, and for the dear Society, which is still reaching out to modern man on God's terms. It will have the success that God grants.
Most sincerely yours in the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
Dear Friends and Benefactors,
The minds of most Catholic churchmen today are in a state of what Sister Lucy of Fatima called "diabolical disorientation". These churchmen are on the road to eternal perdition and they are taking millions of souls with them. How can that be? It is a mystery of iniquity. However, a little article which somebody sent to me recently throws - without meaning to! - much light thereon.
It is an article by a Fr. Richard Hogan, in a recent pro-life newsletter, on "The Theology of John-Paul II". It praises the Pope for providing the Catholic Church with a new way, acceptable to modern man, of presenting the Church's Faith and moral teaching. Little can Fr. Hogan realize that his article's clear presentation of the Pope's basic thinking makes clear not how this Pope helps to save babies, but how he helps to slaughter them! And yet no doubt the Pope, and Fr. Hogan, have the best of intentions! "Diabolical disorientation"!
In a nutshell, the Pope centers all on man. So, little human babies should be of supreme value. But, if the biological father and mother are also of supreme value, then why should they not get rid of the little fetus invading their supreme lives? The fight against abortion is no doubt a good cause, but no good cause is to be defended with bad arguments.
The problem with abortion is, first, last, and foremost, that it breaks the law of God. To try to fight abortion without bringing in God - to try to solve any of the modern world's real problems without bringing in God - is a fight lost in advance. Yet that is, basically, what Fr. Hogan praises the Pope for doing. No wonder this Pope, with - apparently - the best of intentions, is destroying the Church. Let us look at the article more in detail. It is not long.
The reason why the Pope's thinking is so valuable to modern Catholics, says Fr. Hogan, is because of his unique success in combining the modern philosophy he studied in Cracow with the Catholic theology he afterwards studied in Rome. By this combination modern minds with their new way of thinking can once more be reached with Catholic truth which was closed to them as long as it was cast, or expressed, in the age-old way of thinking. For whereas the old thinking was objective (based on the outward object, identically real or true for everybody) and deductive (concluding downwards from universal principles), on the contrary modern thinking is subjective (based on inward realizations, valid maybe only for the individual having them) and inductive (concluding upwards from a series of individual experiences, like democracy, says Fr. Hogan).
The gulf between these two ways of thinking is so deep that for as long as Catholic truth was only cast in the old way, it was inaccessible to modern minds thinking only in the new way. What Karol Wojtyla did as far back as 1958 with his philosophy of "personalism", as Fr. Hogan calls it, was to bridge this gulf between object and subject by putting the human person in the center, for in the human person objective and subjective meet and are no longer opposed to one another.
How? On the one hand, by being created as an object in the image and likeness of God, the human person reflects the ultimate, objective, universal Reality from whom all else is deduced. On the other hand by being created as a subject individual and inward to himself, the human person has subjectively valid experiences from which he mounts inductively upwards, e.g. to God.
Fr. Hogan concludes by rejoicing that Karol Wojtyla's re-thinking of Catholic Revelation transforms all Catholic theology! The fusing of objective and subjective in the human person gives us brand new notions of creation, the human body, the human family, the human person, the person of Christ; of the Church, the sacraments, grace, sin, death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell! Fr. Hogan apparently loves these new notions, and ends by begging readers to study the Pope's "personalism".
However, has the good Father Hogan stopped to think? The Pope's version of Hell is indeed new. The Pope promoted to cardinal the Swiss "theologian" Hans Urs von Balthasar who said that Hell is empty. A charming thought. But if nobody goes to Hell, why should any abortionist stop aborting? Because of "the dignity of the human person"? Don't make me laugh! As a Scottish convert to Catholicism once noteworthily said, "A Kerk (=church) without a Hell isn't werth (=worth) a damn!" Exactly. The Newchurch, emptying out hell, is not "werth a damn"!
Where then, in Fr. Hogan's version, did Karol Wojtyla go wrong? (No doubt Fr. Hogan has rather simplified the issues, but his simplification is essentially just.)
Firstly, Fr. Hogan bases the achievement of Karol Wojtyla's "personalism" on its overcoming of the split between object and subject, between objective thinking and subjective thinking. But this split is false. For while objective reality and subjective man are indeed different, they do not exclude one another, as Fr. Hogan suggests. For indeed what is objective, the vast real framework of the universe, includes what is subjective, human beings and their inner realizations. That is why ancient thinking took full account of everything subjective within the framework of objective reality. Only modern thinking gives such importance to the subject as to shut out objective reality. Thus ancient thinking fires on all four engines, modern thinking only on two. There is no need to respect modern thought or modern ways of thinking! Hopping on one leg may be amusing, but as a means of movement it cannot compare with walking on two legs!
Therefore, secondly, not only is there no need to re-cast the Catholic Faith from an objective into a subjective way of thinking, but also there is a positive need not to do so! It is the sheerest common sense that the truths of the Catholic Faith have nothing whatsoever to do with my inward realizations, or my sacred subjectivity! I may or may not have a beautiful inward realization, a NIF (nice internal feeling), of the Immaculate Conception, but all the NIFs in the world have nothing to do with whether a particular Jewish maiden was, or was not, miraculously protected by God from the stain of original sin at that moment in history when she was conceived in the womb of St. Anne! Alas, common sense is not modern man's strong suit!
But democracy is. Notice how Fr. Hogan slipped it into the modern way of thinking. Listen to modern catechism teachers: "Children, what do you all, democratically, feel, about the Immaculate Conception, inside yourselves? Jane, you feel it's true? Then it's true for you! John, you don't? Then it's false for you! But let's take a vote, in order to all induce together!" Ridiculous!
Hence, thirdly, as for Pope John-Paul's "personalism" as presented by Fr. Hogan, it is true that the human being is created in the image and likeness of God, and so reflects to a tiny extent the objective truth and goodness of God. And it is true that this human subject can have all kinds of thoughts or feelings, upwards or downwards, especially since God gives him free-will. But whether these subjective thoughts are true or not, valid or not, depends not upon whether they are subjectively held (they cannot not be if they are thoughts or feelings), but upon whether they match objective reality.
In other words, the real value of the human person lies not in his merely being a human person, regardless of whether he is full of truth or falsehood, which is what this Pope basically thinks. The real value of the human person lies in the use he makes of his free-will to subjectively recognize and love the ultimate objective reality, i.e. God.
If the human person refuses to align his human subjectivity upon the objective Divinity, that is not just a regrettable failure leaving his "human dignity" untouched as he goes to Heaven whether he wants to or not. It is a damnable sin and offence against the goodness of God, cause of eternal damnation in the objective fires of Hell. Who do modern "theologians" think they are to be extinguishing those fires? Benefactors of mankind? On the contrary!
This Pope is the leader of a dream. His Newchurch is a dream. Into that dream he is helping to pull thousands upon thousands of priests like Fr. Hogan, and millions upon millions of unsuspecting Catholics. Unsuspecting? God knows. In any case they - and all of us - are due for a harsh awakening with tomorrow's reality check. How soon does it arrive? God knows. But that is one check that will not bounce! So we must pray for this poor Pope that he may wake up to reality before it is too late for him to save his soul. And we must pray for Fr. Richard Hogan that he put his fight against abortion on solid foundations, namely the existence of God, His Fifth Commandment, and the existence of Hell for grave disobedience to any of God's Ten Commandments.
The Pope and Fr. Hogan may reply that God, Commandments and Hell are objective notions which no longer have any grip on subjective modern man. The answer is that a strong conviction will still put them over to many men, and if those many reduce themselves to a handful, like in Noah's time, then the rest must be left to the Flood. As Dr. Samuel Johnson said, "The prospect of imminent execution wonderfully concentrates the mind"!
In any case it is useless to fight sin with man-centered arguments, because sin is man-centeredness. The sinner has won before the fight starts! That is why the Newchurch is so weak. To reach out to modern man on modern man's terms means that, heads he wins, tails God loses. Fr. Hogan, think again!
On the 1st of October, Deo volente, I shall be in Econe for the blessing of the handsome new stone church at the mother-seminary of the Society of St. Pius X in Switzerland. Pray for the occasion, and for the dear Society, which is still reaching out to modern man on God's terms. It will have the success that God grants.
Most sincerely yours in the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
Fiftiesism as compared to pre-Reformation England
August 3, 1998
Dear Friends and Benefactors,
Following on the mention of "Fiftiesism" in last month's letter, a reader reasonably asked what it is, and if there is anywhere he can read up on it. Since Fiftiesism is a serious threat to "Traditional" Catholics, and since little has to my knowledge been written about it as such, let us examine it here.
"Fiftiesism" is a name for the kind of Catholicism that was generally practised in the 1950's, between World War II and Vatican II. To many Catholics who can look back that far, the 1950's seem like a golden age for the Church, because all kinds of Catholic systems were still up and running that crashed a few years later. On the other hand, precisely because so many Catholic systems crashed in the 1960's and 1970's, not all can have been well with the Church in those 1950's. There must have been "something rotten in the State of Denmark".
For instance the magnificent building now housing the Seminary in Winona was put up by the Dominicans, sparing no expense, in the early 1950's, only to be abandoned by them in 1970, and sold for a song. And this Novitiate for their central United States Province was merely one Catholic institute amongst thousands all over the world that followed this path from riches to rags. Can the 1950's really have been such a golden age as they seem?
Fiftiesism is then the name for what was wrong alongside - or inside - all that was right in the practice of Catholicism in the 1950's. Church structures stood tall but termites were burrowing away within, so that with one strong push from Vatican II, the structures were all ready to fall over. Traditional Catholics today must take thought to avoid re-building a Church of the 1950's all ready to fall over again!
To illustrate what was good as well as bad in the Catholicism of the 1950's, let us think of English Catholicism in the 1520's, just before the Reformation in England of the 1530's and 1540's.
On the good side, England looked in the 1520's like a completely Catholic nation. It had been Catholic for nearly 1,000 years, with the result that for an Englishman then to be Catholic was the most normal and simple thing in the world. Young King Henry VIII was so Catholic that he was awarded by Rome the title of "Defender of the Faith" for his refutation of Luther's errors! As for the English people, a scholarly book was written a few years ago to prove how Catholic they still were, as though the Reformation was none of their fault.
Alas, on the bad side, what were the fruits of this 1520's Catholicism? By the end of the 1550's Catholics were being persecuted, and Queen Elizabeth I was skillfully and ruthlessly maneuvering England into national apostasy, wherein to remain Catholic was a glorious but highly dangerous avocation. Catholic priests were hunted down by her secret police, hanged, drawn and quartered as traitors, so that while an English priest in the 1560's had to have the same Catholic Faith and priesthood as a priest in the 1520's, nevertheless in the transformed circumstances he was called upon to be a quite new kind of priest. Hence the Jesuit Order, "old and new".
What had happened? The Catholicism of English Catholics in the 1520's had been tried by the Lord God and found wanting. As events of the 1530's and 1540's proved, their Catholicism, which we might call "Twentiesism", had been too much of a shell-game. The clergy had "lacked grace" (Thomas More). As for the people, they had resisted, for instance in the Pilgrimage of Grace, but not enough. So God punished English Twentiesism by letting it turn into the permanent shell-game of Anglicanism (known in the U.S.A. as Episcopalianism), founded on Elizabeth's Anglican Establishment.
Now imagine a Jesuit priest in England of the 1560's saying to the small congregations of his faithful remnant, "My dear people, all is changed, changed utterly, a terrible beauty is born. No more Twentiesism!", and you can see why a Traditional priest would say to Traditionalists in the 1990's, "No more Fiftiesism!"
In fairness to English Catholics of the 1520's, the problem of their shell-game had been building up over many generations before them, and it did not mean that every English Catholic was losing or would lose the Faith, because of course there was a glorious first harvest of martyrs under Henry VIII, and a second under Elizabeth I.
In fairness likewise to the Fiftiesism of our own time, the pre-Vatican II shell-game was the end-product of 150 years of Liberal Catholicism blending Church and world, attempting to combine the values of the Faith with those of the Revolution, and not every Catholic of the 1950's proved to be deep-down in love with the world, because, as in Reformation England, a by the grace of God faithful remnant pulled through Vatican II to constitute the bedraggled but glorious remains of the Tridentine Church known to us as "Tradition", or the Traditionalists"!
At the heart then of Fiftiesism in our own time is that while outwardly the Faith in the 1950's seemed to be lived, practised and defended, and the Mass was the Mass of all time, nevertheless inwardly too many Catholics' hearts were going with the world. Thence it was simply a matter of time before all those strict priests celebrating the ancient liturgy with every detail in place, would throw away their birettas and loosen up with eucharistic picnics improvised from one moment to the next. Americans old enough remember how suddenly this change could take place, almost overnight. The inside was rotten. Many Catholics pretended to love God, but really they loved the world. God spat them out at Vatican II.
But why in the 1950's were so many Catholics inwardly loving the world? Because the modern world, industrialized and suburbanized, is too much with us, all-glamorous, all-powerful, all-seductive. For even if a man and his family are intent upon remaining Catholic, still man remains a three-layered creature, not only individual and familial but also social, and all three layers are connected. Hence society exerts an enormous anti-Catholic pressure upon Catholics when it has been, like ours, largely in the grip of Masonic Revolutions for the last 200 years.
To illustrate Fiftiesism here in the U.S.A. (since most readers of this letter are Americans, but of course Fiftiesism was worldwide, as was Vatican II), let us quote three anti-Catholic principles firmly believed in by many American Catholics of the 1950's (and 1990's?), one social, one familial, one individual, amongst many others.
False social principle: separation of Church and State. This deadly error means that Jesus Christ is no longer King over society, He is only King of the sacristy. Society can supposedly do as it likes, and Our Lord has nothing to say! On the contrary read in the Bible the history of the People of God from Abraham and Moses through David, Solomon and Ezra to see if God's religion tells peoples what as peoples they must do!
False familial principle: co-education. Boys are designed by God quite differently from girls because He has quite different parts for them to play in life. So the Catholic Church has always known and taught that from as early an age as possible, let us say no later than seven or eight, they should be taught differently and separately. Yet how many "Catholics" in the U.S.A. were accustomed to coeducation in the 1950's and still see no problem with it in the 1990's? Not even in the most primitive tribes will you find coeducation! They have too much sense!
False individual principle: the split between "religion" and real life. To how many "Catholics" in the 1950's was "religion" what one did on Sunday morning while in real life the world was being saved, for instance from Communism, by the American Constitution, free enterprise, etc. etc.? No doubt the Faith was believed in, every article of it, but how many "Catholics" let that Faith form their character and define their view of the world? How many "Traditionalists" to this day really put their trust in Our Lord Jesus Christ to solve problems of home, family, politics, education, economics, the arts, etc., etc.? How many on the contrary seek to "enjoy" the world as much as they can, to have all possible "fun", while keeping just short of mortal sin? That is pure Fiftiesism, and it will have the same disastrous results.
What is the solution to Fiftiesism, then and now? It is not complicated. The problem lies in pretending to put God first but not really doing so. The solution lies in obeying the First Commandment first, in loving the Lord God - Jesus Christ - with all our heart, with all our soul, with all our strength and with all our mind, and in putting no other gods or solutions before Him. Nor is it impossible to do so. The world, the flesh and the Devil may dominate our environment as never before in all history, but God remains God and we remain children of His Mother.
A powerful and practical means she obtained from her Son to help us put the First Commandment back in place is the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. These were given only twice at the Seminary this year, but they brought forth a bouquet of testimonials from which we shall quote next month to encourage you to make use of one of the Society's three retreat houses in the U.S.A.. Go to the retreats where you hear they really knock down, drag out the retreatants! Those are where the action is!
And may Our Lord pull all of us back from the world, the flesh and the Devil, lest His Chastisement catch us still in Fiftiesism, ready for Hell!
Sincerely yours in His Sacred Heart,
Dear Friends and Benefactors,
Following on the mention of "Fiftiesism" in last month's letter, a reader reasonably asked what it is, and if there is anywhere he can read up on it. Since Fiftiesism is a serious threat to "Traditional" Catholics, and since little has to my knowledge been written about it as such, let us examine it here.
"Fiftiesism" is a name for the kind of Catholicism that was generally practised in the 1950's, between World War II and Vatican II. To many Catholics who can look back that far, the 1950's seem like a golden age for the Church, because all kinds of Catholic systems were still up and running that crashed a few years later. On the other hand, precisely because so many Catholic systems crashed in the 1960's and 1970's, not all can have been well with the Church in those 1950's. There must have been "something rotten in the State of Denmark".
For instance the magnificent building now housing the Seminary in Winona was put up by the Dominicans, sparing no expense, in the early 1950's, only to be abandoned by them in 1970, and sold for a song. And this Novitiate for their central United States Province was merely one Catholic institute amongst thousands all over the world that followed this path from riches to rags. Can the 1950's really have been such a golden age as they seem?
Fiftiesism is then the name for what was wrong alongside - or inside - all that was right in the practice of Catholicism in the 1950's. Church structures stood tall but termites were burrowing away within, so that with one strong push from Vatican II, the structures were all ready to fall over. Traditional Catholics today must take thought to avoid re-building a Church of the 1950's all ready to fall over again!
To illustrate what was good as well as bad in the Catholicism of the 1950's, let us think of English Catholicism in the 1520's, just before the Reformation in England of the 1530's and 1540's.
On the good side, England looked in the 1520's like a completely Catholic nation. It had been Catholic for nearly 1,000 years, with the result that for an Englishman then to be Catholic was the most normal and simple thing in the world. Young King Henry VIII was so Catholic that he was awarded by Rome the title of "Defender of the Faith" for his refutation of Luther's errors! As for the English people, a scholarly book was written a few years ago to prove how Catholic they still were, as though the Reformation was none of their fault.
Alas, on the bad side, what were the fruits of this 1520's Catholicism? By the end of the 1550's Catholics were being persecuted, and Queen Elizabeth I was skillfully and ruthlessly maneuvering England into national apostasy, wherein to remain Catholic was a glorious but highly dangerous avocation. Catholic priests were hunted down by her secret police, hanged, drawn and quartered as traitors, so that while an English priest in the 1560's had to have the same Catholic Faith and priesthood as a priest in the 1520's, nevertheless in the transformed circumstances he was called upon to be a quite new kind of priest. Hence the Jesuit Order, "old and new".
What had happened? The Catholicism of English Catholics in the 1520's had been tried by the Lord God and found wanting. As events of the 1530's and 1540's proved, their Catholicism, which we might call "Twentiesism", had been too much of a shell-game. The clergy had "lacked grace" (Thomas More). As for the people, they had resisted, for instance in the Pilgrimage of Grace, but not enough. So God punished English Twentiesism by letting it turn into the permanent shell-game of Anglicanism (known in the U.S.A. as Episcopalianism), founded on Elizabeth's Anglican Establishment.
Now imagine a Jesuit priest in England of the 1560's saying to the small congregations of his faithful remnant, "My dear people, all is changed, changed utterly, a terrible beauty is born. No more Twentiesism!", and you can see why a Traditional priest would say to Traditionalists in the 1990's, "No more Fiftiesism!"
In fairness to English Catholics of the 1520's, the problem of their shell-game had been building up over many generations before them, and it did not mean that every English Catholic was losing or would lose the Faith, because of course there was a glorious first harvest of martyrs under Henry VIII, and a second under Elizabeth I.
In fairness likewise to the Fiftiesism of our own time, the pre-Vatican II shell-game was the end-product of 150 years of Liberal Catholicism blending Church and world, attempting to combine the values of the Faith with those of the Revolution, and not every Catholic of the 1950's proved to be deep-down in love with the world, because, as in Reformation England, a by the grace of God faithful remnant pulled through Vatican II to constitute the bedraggled but glorious remains of the Tridentine Church known to us as "Tradition", or the Traditionalists"!
At the heart then of Fiftiesism in our own time is that while outwardly the Faith in the 1950's seemed to be lived, practised and defended, and the Mass was the Mass of all time, nevertheless inwardly too many Catholics' hearts were going with the world. Thence it was simply a matter of time before all those strict priests celebrating the ancient liturgy with every detail in place, would throw away their birettas and loosen up with eucharistic picnics improvised from one moment to the next. Americans old enough remember how suddenly this change could take place, almost overnight. The inside was rotten. Many Catholics pretended to love God, but really they loved the world. God spat them out at Vatican II.
But why in the 1950's were so many Catholics inwardly loving the world? Because the modern world, industrialized and suburbanized, is too much with us, all-glamorous, all-powerful, all-seductive. For even if a man and his family are intent upon remaining Catholic, still man remains a three-layered creature, not only individual and familial but also social, and all three layers are connected. Hence society exerts an enormous anti-Catholic pressure upon Catholics when it has been, like ours, largely in the grip of Masonic Revolutions for the last 200 years.
To illustrate Fiftiesism here in the U.S.A. (since most readers of this letter are Americans, but of course Fiftiesism was worldwide, as was Vatican II), let us quote three anti-Catholic principles firmly believed in by many American Catholics of the 1950's (and 1990's?), one social, one familial, one individual, amongst many others.
False social principle: separation of Church and State. This deadly error means that Jesus Christ is no longer King over society, He is only King of the sacristy. Society can supposedly do as it likes, and Our Lord has nothing to say! On the contrary read in the Bible the history of the People of God from Abraham and Moses through David, Solomon and Ezra to see if God's religion tells peoples what as peoples they must do!
False familial principle: co-education. Boys are designed by God quite differently from girls because He has quite different parts for them to play in life. So the Catholic Church has always known and taught that from as early an age as possible, let us say no later than seven or eight, they should be taught differently and separately. Yet how many "Catholics" in the U.S.A. were accustomed to coeducation in the 1950's and still see no problem with it in the 1990's? Not even in the most primitive tribes will you find coeducation! They have too much sense!
False individual principle: the split between "religion" and real life. To how many "Catholics" in the 1950's was "religion" what one did on Sunday morning while in real life the world was being saved, for instance from Communism, by the American Constitution, free enterprise, etc. etc.? No doubt the Faith was believed in, every article of it, but how many "Catholics" let that Faith form their character and define their view of the world? How many "Traditionalists" to this day really put their trust in Our Lord Jesus Christ to solve problems of home, family, politics, education, economics, the arts, etc., etc.? How many on the contrary seek to "enjoy" the world as much as they can, to have all possible "fun", while keeping just short of mortal sin? That is pure Fiftiesism, and it will have the same disastrous results.
What is the solution to Fiftiesism, then and now? It is not complicated. The problem lies in pretending to put God first but not really doing so. The solution lies in obeying the First Commandment first, in loving the Lord God - Jesus Christ - with all our heart, with all our soul, with all our strength and with all our mind, and in putting no other gods or solutions before Him. Nor is it impossible to do so. The world, the flesh and the Devil may dominate our environment as never before in all history, but God remains God and we remain children of His Mother.
A powerful and practical means she obtained from her Son to help us put the First Commandment back in place is the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. These were given only twice at the Seminary this year, but they brought forth a bouquet of testimonials from which we shall quote next month to encourage you to make use of one of the Society's three retreat houses in the U.S.A.. Go to the retreats where you hear they really knock down, drag out the retreatants! Those are where the action is!
And may Our Lord pull all of us back from the world, the flesh and the Devil, lest His Chastisement catch us still in Fiftiesism, ready for Hell!
Sincerely yours in His Sacred Heart,
Can Society Catholics withstand Catholicism without the Cross?
July 1, 1998
Dear Friends and Benefactors,
Having last month looked at the long past leading up to the ten-year anniversary of the Episcopal Consecrations in Ecône of June, 1998, let us this month frame some storm-clouds of the future between some sunny skies of the present.
The sunshine to begin with is that the four bishops of the Society of St Pius X, consecrated mainly to give the sacraments of Confirmation and Holy Orders to the souls brought by the grace of God towards the Society, as you could read last month Archbishop Lefebvre himself telling them ten years ago, have quietly been doing just that.
For the last ten summers, including this one, I have been, at the U.S. District Superiors' request, making a tour of Confirmations amongst mainly the Society's American churches and chapels and missions. This year I was in three out of four corners of the U.S.A., Florida, California and Washington State, and in another ten or so States in between them.
Each year, I would have to say, it has been an encouraging experience. In easily most of these locations I have been more than once. This year I noticed many new faces, although in no chapel did numbers seem to have notably increased. This confirms a long-standing observation that the Society's action is rather a holding action than a glorious advance. However, a holding action in today's extra difficult circumstances is glorious enough. On this last Confirmations tour in the U.S.A., I may have confirmed some 400 adults and children. I often tap hard (as the rubrics do not forbid!) in order to warn confirmands how they will have to fight to live as Catholics, but in general the holding action does seem to be holding.
However, those extra difficult circumstances are not becoming any easier. Chaos in people's hearts and minds swirls all around us. Sister Lucy of Fatima called it "diabolical disorientation", and the Archbishop's dear little Society of St. Pius X is going to need a miraculous protection if its faith is not also to perish in the universal storm, still rising. The old-fashioned barometer, reading lower and lower, is beginning to sway on the wall!
Let me take one case of this chaos, featured in many a Confirmation sermon this year, to try to help Catholics to grasp what a gigantic drama is playing out around them, because even most Catholics seem to think (or wish) themselves to be still living in the world of "The Sound of Music"! That world is gone, gone forever, as it deserved!
The case was apparently all over the media here in the U.S.A. several months ago. My knowledge of it is essentially confined to one long newspaper article sent to me by a friend, but the main outlines are clear. A 34-year-old schoolmistress from Washington State, married with four children between the ages of 4 and 13, entered into a relationship with a boy in her sixth grade class (age 11 or 12?), by whom she then had a baby girl. Tried and convicted for the offence against a minor, she was sentenced to jail for eight years, but the sentence was suspended because her "sweet and bubbly" personality must have seemed to everybody to be out of place in the "slammer". However, no sooner was she out than she made herself pregnant by the same boy for the second time, whereupon her judge threw her back into jail to serve the rest of her sentence!
The article prints an attractive colour picture of her in court at the moment of her original sentencing: her pretty little chin perched on her folded hands, looking no older than a teenager herself, she looks wistfully across the courtroom, as though to say, "Why cannot these people understand true love?" For indeed, one of the quotations attributed to her by the article runs, "I have found true love at last." Can anyone doubt she has watched "The Sound of Music" 20 or 50 times? Not I.
"Oh, come on your Excellency! Get off movies, and leave that movie alone!" Dear friends, gladly, if only movies would get off Catholics and Catholics would leave that movie alone! But I have here under my hand a glossy "1998 Catholic Family and School Videos" catalogue, from a reputable conservative Catholic organization out of Colorado, which advertises one smiling, glamorous, sentimental, "uplifting" movie after another, page after page. Where is the blood? Where is the Cross? Where is the sacrifice?
Movies are unreal. Catholicism is for real. Catholic movies, unless they are strict documentaries, are virtually a contradiction in terms. Yet movies occupy the front, center, and back of most Catholics' hearts and minds, at least here in the U.S.A.! This is the drama of our poor schoolmistress who - you guessed - is one of seven children from a strongly conservative Catholic home! She was born in 1962. What did her home lack in those supposedly wonderful days, that she is now completely detached from reality? Catholics must ask themselves!
Listen to two more quotes of hers: "Some day we (she and the school boy!) will marry. We will all live happily together and my two families will be one, and everything will be just perfect!" (She means, she and her middle-aged husband and their four children and the schoolboy and their two children, will all live happily ever after, together? She is mad!) Again: "I couldn't be happier. I have a new life inside me. It's a sign, a sign that God wants us to be together, to be one!" She is using what remains of her Catholic Faith to justify her adultery and betrayal of a minor entrusted to her professional care! And she is watched and listened to with avid sympathy by media all over the country!!
Of course, she was herself betrayed: by all those (which means everybody) who encourage middle-aged women to look and behave like teenagers; by a coeducational school system which puts pretty women to teach adolescing boys; by her family-values, anti-feminist father who himself rocked his family by a scandalous adultery; she was, one might say, betrayed by our whole crazy society (without that being an excuse!). Yet the problem is not just that she is completely detached from reality. The problem is that there are millions and millions, even of Catholics, living in the same unreal dream.
Question: can the Society withstand this tornado-force dream? Can Society Catholics, especially priests, withstand the mighty suction of Fiftiesism, that glossy version of Catholicism without the Cross, all the outer trappings of Tradition, but with none of the substance (cf. II Timothy Ill, 5)? The glamorous modern world which seduced so many priests and bishops into Vatican II is more glamorous and modern than ever - what guarantees that the Society will not in turn go the way of all conciliar flesh? For instance, all over the U.S.A., it seems, from within the Society, the excellent and feminine! - Dominican teaching nuns in Idaho are being accused of feminism because they are standing up, God bless them, for the proper Catholic way to teach girls! That accusation is as false as it is clever! - the appearance of Catholicism with none of the substance.
Listen to a Society priest now working in the U.S.A.: "Here, either a priest fights like a hero, or he slips into Fiftiesism without even realizing it. It's strange, but that's how it is. A priest must have unusual strength of character and rock-solid convictions to stand fast, or he will slide the way the whole modern environment encourages him to slide. So a polarisation is inevitable in all our parishes. That was not so yesterday, when a comfortable conservatism was still possible, but the days of those good conservative priests are gone. Today it's all or nothing. This or that priest may vigorously deny they are liberal, but if they are incapable of serious, steady, almost heroic action, they will give way in practice. You may even not be liberal, but if you do not do what you should do, you will still act like a liberal."
I have long asked myself whether the Society will last until the Chastisement. If it does, God will have given it a special protection. Time will tell if that is His will.
Meanwhile, another of the four bishops of ten years ago, Bishop Alfonso de Galarreta, performed the ordinations at Winona this year in bright sunshine. Lovely weather for the morning itself, and for the following day of the first Masses of the two new priests; a crowd of maybe 650 people; much Catholic happiness and many graces, as usual. God is good. He is still granting to the Society to bear good fruit. May He grant that we not become, following the Conciliar shell without substance, a Traditional shell without substance!
Let us also ask for good weather for the women's and men's retreats soon to take place here. The seminary grounds can be lovely at this time of year, when of a sunny evening all the green is bathed in a soft warm light, with no farm-machine chattering, and with the occasional bird singing away the day. But man's cooperation is needed to mow God's creation, otherwise there are dandelions everywhere!
Enclosed is a flyer for the seminary's Christmas vacation course for men on the Catholic family. Audio and video tapes are available of the valuable similar course of the last Christmas vacation. To re-make Catholic men! It can be done!
Dear Friends and Benefactors,
Having last month looked at the long past leading up to the ten-year anniversary of the Episcopal Consecrations in Ecône of June, 1998, let us this month frame some storm-clouds of the future between some sunny skies of the present.
The sunshine to begin with is that the four bishops of the Society of St Pius X, consecrated mainly to give the sacraments of Confirmation and Holy Orders to the souls brought by the grace of God towards the Society, as you could read last month Archbishop Lefebvre himself telling them ten years ago, have quietly been doing just that.
For the last ten summers, including this one, I have been, at the U.S. District Superiors' request, making a tour of Confirmations amongst mainly the Society's American churches and chapels and missions. This year I was in three out of four corners of the U.S.A., Florida, California and Washington State, and in another ten or so States in between them.
Each year, I would have to say, it has been an encouraging experience. In easily most of these locations I have been more than once. This year I noticed many new faces, although in no chapel did numbers seem to have notably increased. This confirms a long-standing observation that the Society's action is rather a holding action than a glorious advance. However, a holding action in today's extra difficult circumstances is glorious enough. On this last Confirmations tour in the U.S.A., I may have confirmed some 400 adults and children. I often tap hard (as the rubrics do not forbid!) in order to warn confirmands how they will have to fight to live as Catholics, but in general the holding action does seem to be holding.
However, those extra difficult circumstances are not becoming any easier. Chaos in people's hearts and minds swirls all around us. Sister Lucy of Fatima called it "diabolical disorientation", and the Archbishop's dear little Society of St. Pius X is going to need a miraculous protection if its faith is not also to perish in the universal storm, still rising. The old-fashioned barometer, reading lower and lower, is beginning to sway on the wall!
Let me take one case of this chaos, featured in many a Confirmation sermon this year, to try to help Catholics to grasp what a gigantic drama is playing out around them, because even most Catholics seem to think (or wish) themselves to be still living in the world of "The Sound of Music"! That world is gone, gone forever, as it deserved!
The case was apparently all over the media here in the U.S.A. several months ago. My knowledge of it is essentially confined to one long newspaper article sent to me by a friend, but the main outlines are clear. A 34-year-old schoolmistress from Washington State, married with four children between the ages of 4 and 13, entered into a relationship with a boy in her sixth grade class (age 11 or 12?), by whom she then had a baby girl. Tried and convicted for the offence against a minor, she was sentenced to jail for eight years, but the sentence was suspended because her "sweet and bubbly" personality must have seemed to everybody to be out of place in the "slammer". However, no sooner was she out than she made herself pregnant by the same boy for the second time, whereupon her judge threw her back into jail to serve the rest of her sentence!
The article prints an attractive colour picture of her in court at the moment of her original sentencing: her pretty little chin perched on her folded hands, looking no older than a teenager herself, she looks wistfully across the courtroom, as though to say, "Why cannot these people understand true love?" For indeed, one of the quotations attributed to her by the article runs, "I have found true love at last." Can anyone doubt she has watched "The Sound of Music" 20 or 50 times? Not I.
"Oh, come on your Excellency! Get off movies, and leave that movie alone!" Dear friends, gladly, if only movies would get off Catholics and Catholics would leave that movie alone! But I have here under my hand a glossy "1998 Catholic Family and School Videos" catalogue, from a reputable conservative Catholic organization out of Colorado, which advertises one smiling, glamorous, sentimental, "uplifting" movie after another, page after page. Where is the blood? Where is the Cross? Where is the sacrifice?
Movies are unreal. Catholicism is for real. Catholic movies, unless they are strict documentaries, are virtually a contradiction in terms. Yet movies occupy the front, center, and back of most Catholics' hearts and minds, at least here in the U.S.A.! This is the drama of our poor schoolmistress who - you guessed - is one of seven children from a strongly conservative Catholic home! She was born in 1962. What did her home lack in those supposedly wonderful days, that she is now completely detached from reality? Catholics must ask themselves!
Listen to two more quotes of hers: "Some day we (she and the school boy!) will marry. We will all live happily together and my two families will be one, and everything will be just perfect!" (She means, she and her middle-aged husband and their four children and the schoolboy and their two children, will all live happily ever after, together? She is mad!) Again: "I couldn't be happier. I have a new life inside me. It's a sign, a sign that God wants us to be together, to be one!" She is using what remains of her Catholic Faith to justify her adultery and betrayal of a minor entrusted to her professional care! And she is watched and listened to with avid sympathy by media all over the country!!
Of course, she was herself betrayed: by all those (which means everybody) who encourage middle-aged women to look and behave like teenagers; by a coeducational school system which puts pretty women to teach adolescing boys; by her family-values, anti-feminist father who himself rocked his family by a scandalous adultery; she was, one might say, betrayed by our whole crazy society (without that being an excuse!). Yet the problem is not just that she is completely detached from reality. The problem is that there are millions and millions, even of Catholics, living in the same unreal dream.
Question: can the Society withstand this tornado-force dream? Can Society Catholics, especially priests, withstand the mighty suction of Fiftiesism, that glossy version of Catholicism without the Cross, all the outer trappings of Tradition, but with none of the substance (cf. II Timothy Ill, 5)? The glamorous modern world which seduced so many priests and bishops into Vatican II is more glamorous and modern than ever - what guarantees that the Society will not in turn go the way of all conciliar flesh? For instance, all over the U.S.A., it seems, from within the Society, the excellent and feminine! - Dominican teaching nuns in Idaho are being accused of feminism because they are standing up, God bless them, for the proper Catholic way to teach girls! That accusation is as false as it is clever! - the appearance of Catholicism with none of the substance.
Listen to a Society priest now working in the U.S.A.: "Here, either a priest fights like a hero, or he slips into Fiftiesism without even realizing it. It's strange, but that's how it is. A priest must have unusual strength of character and rock-solid convictions to stand fast, or he will slide the way the whole modern environment encourages him to slide. So a polarisation is inevitable in all our parishes. That was not so yesterday, when a comfortable conservatism was still possible, but the days of those good conservative priests are gone. Today it's all or nothing. This or that priest may vigorously deny they are liberal, but if they are incapable of serious, steady, almost heroic action, they will give way in practice. You may even not be liberal, but if you do not do what you should do, you will still act like a liberal."
I have long asked myself whether the Society will last until the Chastisement. If it does, God will have given it a special protection. Time will tell if that is His will.
Meanwhile, another of the four bishops of ten years ago, Bishop Alfonso de Galarreta, performed the ordinations at Winona this year in bright sunshine. Lovely weather for the morning itself, and for the following day of the first Masses of the two new priests; a crowd of maybe 650 people; much Catholic happiness and many graces, as usual. God is good. He is still granting to the Society to bear good fruit. May He grant that we not become, following the Conciliar shell without substance, a Traditional shell without substance!
Let us also ask for good weather for the women's and men's retreats soon to take place here. The seminary grounds can be lovely at this time of year, when of a sunny evening all the green is bathed in a soft warm light, with no farm-machine chattering, and with the occasional bird singing away the day. But man's cooperation is needed to mow God's creation, otherwise there are dandelions everywhere!
Enclosed is a flyer for the seminary's Christmas vacation course for men on the Catholic family. Audio and video tapes are available of the valuable similar course of the last Christmas vacation. To re-make Catholic men! It can be done!
Tenth anniversary of the episcopal consecrations
June 1, 1998
Dear Friends and Benefactors,
The last day of this month will be the tenth anniversary of the famous episcopal consecrations performed by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre and Bishop Antonio de Castro Mayer in Ecône, Switzerland, on June 30,1988. How does that heroic event look ten years later? More heroic than ever! Let us recall its place in history.
Once upon a time, in the so-called Dark Ages, the Catholic Church reigned supreme as the undisputed mistress of civilization, and all Christendom was Catholic. Then at the end of the Middle Ages, the modern world began in earnest with the break-up of Christendom by Martin Luther. Half Europe turned Protestant, but the other half pulled its Catholic self together in the so-called Counterreformation, and the Church leapt across oceans to make many new Catholic peoples to replace those fallen away.
But of course the Devil would not leave the old or new Catholic nations in peace. Out of the juxtaposition of Catholic truth and Protestant error he developed a virulent new error, liberalism (What is truth? Who knows? What does it matter?), with which he infected the politics in Catholic and Protestant nations alike, generating a series of Revolutions from the end of the 18th century which smashed Catholic altars and pulled down Catholic thrones. Mother Church reeled, but again she pulled her faith and her energy together, and made even of the liberal 19th century one of the greatest missionary centuries ever.
By now the Devil was resolved to break into the Church itself, but of course he could only do so by deceit. So he invented another error, as old as the hills but seeming new, a re-run of Protestantism and liberalism, whereby all the Catholic appearances would be maintained, but the substance would be changed or up-dated to get more in line with the modern world - hence the error's name of modernism. It caught several priests who wished to continue to appear Catholic while turning worldly, which is to sinful man an attractive combination!
However, just before modernism could strike Mother Church a mortal blow, the God-given Pope St. Pius X intervened in the early years of this century to denounce so clearly its perfidy and to smash it with such force that it was driven underground so as to even seem to many Catholics hardly to have existed. Basking then in the reprieve of 50 years (1907-1958) earned for Mother Church by the clear-sightedness and strength of the saintly Pope, the vast majority of Catholics had no idea of the storm being prepared for them.
Thus when Pope Pius XII died in 1958, too many churchmen were tired of resisting the modern world with its Protestantism, liberalism and modernism, so instead of electing another clear-sighted and strong Pope, the Cardinals chose John XXIII, a "Catholic" liberal who launched an Ecumenical Council to "up-date" the Church. At last the moment had come for the condemned modernists lurking in the shadows to step forward and grab power in the Church - John XXIII was on their side.
With his help they hijacked the Second Vatican Council from the beginning, and now the Church was in a desperate plight. When Protestants fell, the Catholic nations had stood. When politics in those nations fell, the Church had stood. When priests in the Church were all ready to fall, the Pope had stood. But now the Pope had virtually fallen - who was left to stand?
At the beginning of the Second Vatican Council in 1962, the good bishops were unorganized and the neo-modernists' onslaught took them completely by surprise. By the end of the Council, however, in 1965, some 450 truly Catholic bishops had grouped together to defend the Faith, and when they went home, they were resolved to continue working together to save the Church. Alas, they had reckoned without the structure of the Church, and Pope Paul VI.
By the structure of the Catholic Church, it is the Pope who commands, and Pope Paul VI was a liberal. These Catholic bishops, he sacked. Those, he waited until they died. Others, he put under such pressure that they cracked, and resigned. He was resolved to break the back of their Catholic resistance, and by fair means or foul, he did just that. No doubt he was convinced he was acting for the good of the Church, but the Church was devastated just the same.
Then had Our Lord's promise failed, that the gates of hell would not prevail against His Church? No. Out of the 450 resistant bishops there was one who could not be sacked (he had already resigned), who would not crack under the pressure (despite Rome's best efforts), and who did not die until he had built a shelter to protect the Church's essential treasures for the duration of the storm - Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre.
What a man! Alone now, against Protestantism, against liberalism, against the Popes, against his fellow bishops, he was alone, alone, alone, except for a handful of scattered priests, and a handful of dear youngsters that he began to draw around him as seminarians. And with a few old priests and these youngsters he constructed that shelter, the Society of St. Pius X.
But under what pressure! In 1975 Rome pretends to "dissolve" the new-born Society. In 1976 it pretends to "suspend" the Archbishop from his priestly functions because his Society, which has refused to die, is just producing its first class of a dozen priests. The Archbishop and his youngsters continue ("Archbishop, do you realize what mistakes your young priests make?" "What do you expect me to do? The old priests won't stay with me!"). He hopes against hope that a few bishops will stand by him to help defend the Faith, but Providence so disposes that only in the early 1980's does Bishop de Castro Mayer from an obscure little Brazilian diocese at last step forward to associate himself with the stand taken by the Archbishop.
Meanwhile Rome is all the time resolutely transforming the Catholic Church into the Newchurch to be the religious spearhead of the New World Order. Pope John Paul II's Assisi event of October, 1986, placing Catholic truth on an equal footing alongside a dozen sectarian, heretical, Judaic and pagan errors, is a decisive alarm-signal for the Archbishop, by now 80 years old and feeling his end approaching. For the longest possible time he has negotiated with Rome and stayed within official structures to avoid even the appearance of breaking with the Roman Church, but soon he must choose. To ensure the continuance of ordinations for his priestly Society and of Confirmations for his now worldwide flock, either he must trust the Roman wolf to look after his Traditional sheep, or he must consecrate bishops of his own to look after them, at the risk of being condemned by Rome and even "excommunicated".
Hence the fateful decision of May 6, and the glorious action of June 30, 1998. But what a decision to have to take, and that he still had to take on his own! See the enclosed flyer for the thinking of his mind, now made up, in the middle of June. (These texts are published here for the first time). What calm! What clarity! What a man! And he died, as he had guessed, a few years later.
And of his heritage we have all received, and continue to receive, against the entire modern world, against bishops, cardinals and Popes, against hell and high water, but with the Truth, with the Faith, and with God.
Your Grace, you can only be very high in Heaven. Thank you, thank you, thank you! Pray for us and intercede for us here below, that we may never abandon the Faith or Church which you defended, rather that with each passing ten years the anniversary of your glorious act may be more and more glorious!
Priestly ordinations take place here in Winona on Saturday morning, June 20 (celebrated by Bishop de Galarreta, not by Bishop Fellay as announced). There should be two new deacons and two new priests. That is not a large number, but it is worth a large number if they remain faithful. The crisis of modernism is about the Faith, not about numbers. All visitors welcome.
Remember also the Spiritual Exercises being given as usual at Winona in the summer, the men's retreat from July 6 to 11 still having places. And may you spend a pleasant summer, taking a vacation from worries but never a vacation from God!
Sincerely yours in Christ,
+ Richard Williamson
Dear Friends and Benefactors,
The last day of this month will be the tenth anniversary of the famous episcopal consecrations performed by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre and Bishop Antonio de Castro Mayer in Ecône, Switzerland, on June 30,1988. How does that heroic event look ten years later? More heroic than ever! Let us recall its place in history.
Once upon a time, in the so-called Dark Ages, the Catholic Church reigned supreme as the undisputed mistress of civilization, and all Christendom was Catholic. Then at the end of the Middle Ages, the modern world began in earnest with the break-up of Christendom by Martin Luther. Half Europe turned Protestant, but the other half pulled its Catholic self together in the so-called Counterreformation, and the Church leapt across oceans to make many new Catholic peoples to replace those fallen away.
But of course the Devil would not leave the old or new Catholic nations in peace. Out of the juxtaposition of Catholic truth and Protestant error he developed a virulent new error, liberalism (What is truth? Who knows? What does it matter?), with which he infected the politics in Catholic and Protestant nations alike, generating a series of Revolutions from the end of the 18th century which smashed Catholic altars and pulled down Catholic thrones. Mother Church reeled, but again she pulled her faith and her energy together, and made even of the liberal 19th century one of the greatest missionary centuries ever.
By now the Devil was resolved to break into the Church itself, but of course he could only do so by deceit. So he invented another error, as old as the hills but seeming new, a re-run of Protestantism and liberalism, whereby all the Catholic appearances would be maintained, but the substance would be changed or up-dated to get more in line with the modern world - hence the error's name of modernism. It caught several priests who wished to continue to appear Catholic while turning worldly, which is to sinful man an attractive combination!
However, just before modernism could strike Mother Church a mortal blow, the God-given Pope St. Pius X intervened in the early years of this century to denounce so clearly its perfidy and to smash it with such force that it was driven underground so as to even seem to many Catholics hardly to have existed. Basking then in the reprieve of 50 years (1907-1958) earned for Mother Church by the clear-sightedness and strength of the saintly Pope, the vast majority of Catholics had no idea of the storm being prepared for them.
Thus when Pope Pius XII died in 1958, too many churchmen were tired of resisting the modern world with its Protestantism, liberalism and modernism, so instead of electing another clear-sighted and strong Pope, the Cardinals chose John XXIII, a "Catholic" liberal who launched an Ecumenical Council to "up-date" the Church. At last the moment had come for the condemned modernists lurking in the shadows to step forward and grab power in the Church - John XXIII was on their side.
With his help they hijacked the Second Vatican Council from the beginning, and now the Church was in a desperate plight. When Protestants fell, the Catholic nations had stood. When politics in those nations fell, the Church had stood. When priests in the Church were all ready to fall, the Pope had stood. But now the Pope had virtually fallen - who was left to stand?
At the beginning of the Second Vatican Council in 1962, the good bishops were unorganized and the neo-modernists' onslaught took them completely by surprise. By the end of the Council, however, in 1965, some 450 truly Catholic bishops had grouped together to defend the Faith, and when they went home, they were resolved to continue working together to save the Church. Alas, they had reckoned without the structure of the Church, and Pope Paul VI.
By the structure of the Catholic Church, it is the Pope who commands, and Pope Paul VI was a liberal. These Catholic bishops, he sacked. Those, he waited until they died. Others, he put under such pressure that they cracked, and resigned. He was resolved to break the back of their Catholic resistance, and by fair means or foul, he did just that. No doubt he was convinced he was acting for the good of the Church, but the Church was devastated just the same.
Then had Our Lord's promise failed, that the gates of hell would not prevail against His Church? No. Out of the 450 resistant bishops there was one who could not be sacked (he had already resigned), who would not crack under the pressure (despite Rome's best efforts), and who did not die until he had built a shelter to protect the Church's essential treasures for the duration of the storm - Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre.
What a man! Alone now, against Protestantism, against liberalism, against the Popes, against his fellow bishops, he was alone, alone, alone, except for a handful of scattered priests, and a handful of dear youngsters that he began to draw around him as seminarians. And with a few old priests and these youngsters he constructed that shelter, the Society of St. Pius X.
But under what pressure! In 1975 Rome pretends to "dissolve" the new-born Society. In 1976 it pretends to "suspend" the Archbishop from his priestly functions because his Society, which has refused to die, is just producing its first class of a dozen priests. The Archbishop and his youngsters continue ("Archbishop, do you realize what mistakes your young priests make?" "What do you expect me to do? The old priests won't stay with me!"). He hopes against hope that a few bishops will stand by him to help defend the Faith, but Providence so disposes that only in the early 1980's does Bishop de Castro Mayer from an obscure little Brazilian diocese at last step forward to associate himself with the stand taken by the Archbishop.
Meanwhile Rome is all the time resolutely transforming the Catholic Church into the Newchurch to be the religious spearhead of the New World Order. Pope John Paul II's Assisi event of October, 1986, placing Catholic truth on an equal footing alongside a dozen sectarian, heretical, Judaic and pagan errors, is a decisive alarm-signal for the Archbishop, by now 80 years old and feeling his end approaching. For the longest possible time he has negotiated with Rome and stayed within official structures to avoid even the appearance of breaking with the Roman Church, but soon he must choose. To ensure the continuance of ordinations for his priestly Society and of Confirmations for his now worldwide flock, either he must trust the Roman wolf to look after his Traditional sheep, or he must consecrate bishops of his own to look after them, at the risk of being condemned by Rome and even "excommunicated".
Hence the fateful decision of May 6, and the glorious action of June 30, 1998. But what a decision to have to take, and that he still had to take on his own! See the enclosed flyer for the thinking of his mind, now made up, in the middle of June. (These texts are published here for the first time). What calm! What clarity! What a man! And he died, as he had guessed, a few years later.
And of his heritage we have all received, and continue to receive, against the entire modern world, against bishops, cardinals and Popes, against hell and high water, but with the Truth, with the Faith, and with God.
Your Grace, you can only be very high in Heaven. Thank you, thank you, thank you! Pray for us and intercede for us here below, that we may never abandon the Faith or Church which you defended, rather that with each passing ten years the anniversary of your glorious act may be more and more glorious!
Priestly ordinations take place here in Winona on Saturday morning, June 20 (celebrated by Bishop de Galarreta, not by Bishop Fellay as announced). There should be two new deacons and two new priests. That is not a large number, but it is worth a large number if they remain faithful. The crisis of modernism is about the Faith, not about numbers. All visitors welcome.
Remember also the Spiritual Exercises being given as usual at Winona in the summer, the men's retreat from July 6 to 11 still having places. And may you spend a pleasant summer, taking a vacation from worries but never a vacation from God!
Sincerely yours in Christ,
+ Richard Williamson
The Titanic and self-fulfilment as a substitute religion
May 1, 1998
Dear Friends and Benefactors,
A few months ago there was released in the United States of America a film which has proved to be the biggest box-office success of all time: "Titanic". The film itself may be uninteresting, but its success must be a sign of the times. What times? Times that reverse the sign-posts of God to make them point in exactly the opposite direction!
The film's central interest is a fictitious love-story set against the real life drama of the sinking of the famous ship Titanic on its maiden voyage in 1912 from Europe to New York. The story is well-known. Racing amidst icebergs in North Atlantic waters on the calm but dark spring night of April 14 to 15, this greatest and most luxurious of transatlantic liners yet to have been built, labelled "unsinkable", at 11.40 pm struck an iceberg, and at 2.20 am sank.
What a lesson of life! One moment the Titanic was the pride of Western technology and the glory of the British Empire's shipyards, the next moment it was plunging in pitch darkness 2 miles to the ocean floor! One moment the first class passengers on board representing the flower of Anglo-Saxon high society and of Jewish finance were the lords of creation, the next moment they were like everybody else, helplessly awaiting their fate in mid-ocean with small chance of avoiding an icy cold death.
For of the 2207 souls on board when the Titanic set out across the sea, only 705 survived the sinking, to be picked up in their life-boats at dawn. Life-jackets saved many hundreds more from death by drowning, but they could not long survive floating in the below freezing ocean.
And why had there not been enough life-boats for all souls on board? Precisely because the floating palace was universally considered to be unsinkable. Its huge double-bottomed steel hull was divided into 16 compartments, each of which could be sealed off from the others by watertight bulkheads, so that even if several were flooded, still the liner could float. "God Himself could not sink this ship", was one deck-hand's typical boast.
God did not need to sink it. It was men who designed the ship and built it; men who sent it through northern waters littered with icebergs because that route is, as for the aeroplanes, the shortest between Europe and New York; men who raced the Titanic amidst the icebergs to show what she could do; men who saw the fatal iceberg only in time to swing the bow to port enough for the glancing iceberg to open beneath the water-line, like a tin-opener, a fatal front five of the 16 compartments. Had the liner crashed straight into the iceberg, it might not have sunk. Had only the front four compartments been punctured, it might still have floated. But as soon as the front five were flooded, the ship tilted far enough down in the bows for the water in the fifth compartment to slosh over the top of the bulkhead into the sixth, and so on, until the ship was bound to sink.
However, since no more than five compartments were originally breached by the iceberg, then the process of sinking took time. Hence an incomparable - real life - drama, which has held the world's imagination captive ever since: 2207 souls trapped on the stricken liner, with only a minority having any serious hope of escape from a cruel death which they could watch approaching for two hours, as the great ship's bows tilted inexorably lower and lower in the water. Finally as the entire stern lifted out of the water, the unprecedented strain tore the ship in two. The front two thirds of the ship immediately sank, the stern third crashed back for a moment level on the water, only to flood rapidly, tilt forward until it was vertical, and slide in its turn beneath the waves. All that remained visible of the supposed pride and glory of Western industry was, besides assorted flotsam, a scatter of shivering lifeboats, and hundreds of bobbing life-jackets, crying out at first, but muted as cold and death closed in!
What a scene! What a sign-post of God! What a reminder that "Man proposes and God disposes"! In 1912, after a century of "peace" and "progress”, in the glow of the Edwardian age, men thought, especially Anglo-Saxons, that with their liberal principles they had the world under control. The Great War breaking out in 1914 would prove how wrong they were. Then surely the sinking of the Titanic was God's advance warning to the whole 20th century that modern man is not the master of his fate as he pretends. But does he want to learn this lesson?
All that the 1997 Hollywood film seems to want from the legendary sinking is a dramatic back-drop to highlight a romance of liberation. The film "Titanic" takes no interest in any of those grand lessons of life which are surely responsible for the disaster's having attained its legendary status. In the film, the ship's fate is merely of technical interest - who was to blame? Answer, the foolish owners and officers of the ship, who are part of a whole society setup and establishment from which individuals, especially youngsters, must free themselves in order to lead their own lives and - be masters of their fate! Thus is the real lesson faded out and replaced by an unreal fantasy.
The film's hero, Jack, is a free soul, a young artist from backwoods Wisconsin with no strings and no affections, gambling his way at the last moment onboard the Titanic's lowest class accommodation, taking life and people as they come. The heroine Rose on the contrary is a high society girl feeling utterly trapped in her engagement to a domineering upper-class young plutocrat who is bringing her back across the ocean to marry her in her home-town of Philadelphia.
The hero and heroine meet onboard when Rose in desperation is about to throw herself into the ocean. Jack cleverly and courageously saves her from doing so, for which he gets little recognition or recompense from her upper-class companions. However, by continually defying the undemocratic class distinctions imposed by them and by the ship's structure, he leads her to free herself progressively from the restrictions of her society, her family, her God, as she sheds, in order, her engagement, her mother and, mere hours before the ship hits the iceberg, her clothing, in scenes filmed with only enough restraint to avoid that "R" rating which might have been bad for the box-office. Finally, as the ship is going down, she rescues him from a villainous imprisonment by her companions, while, once in the water, Jack rescues Rose upon a floating door with room only for one.
Jack has breath enough to preach to her one last time the gospel of self-fulfilment (old Tennyson's "To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield”), before he freezes dead and slips into the icy depths. But Rose will not forget this saviour who has sacrificed himself for her. The film shows her having led the rest of her life in accordance with Jack's message of liberation. It has been a fulfilled life, and as she looks back in old age, she is given to declare solemnly that Jack saved her, "in every way that a person can be saved"!
Blasphemy! Conscious or unconscious on the part of the film's makers? God knows. Certainly Our Lord is nowhere in the film, except perhaps in the person of a Catholic priest shown ineffectively praying on deck in the ship's last moments while Jack is effectively striving to save Rose. Thus secular self-fulfilment is elevated to the status of a substitute religion. All the human heart's need for love, for sacrificial love, satisfied; its need for a knight to gallop to the rescue of a damsel in distress, and the knight raised to the rank of a religious saviour, while all ten Commandments may be safely ignored - is this the key to the film's success?
Poor youth, flocking to see the film! In it is no inkling, not the least inkling, that the same human heart was made by the love of God for nothing less than to love God, mainly through the observance of those Commandments, defiance of which will fulfill not self but only sin and damnation. Who will give our youth the Catholic Faith, sole foundation of the true love of the true God, which is the sole fulfillment of every human heart?
Not liberalism, which is massively diluting and contaminating the Faith today by its systematic affirmation of man's independence from any truth or law to which he himself has not consented. Archbishop Lefebvre always used to say that one great antidote to liberalism is the circular letters written to the Catholic bishops of the world by the Popes from about 1800 to 1958. The Angelus Press has just published a Study Set of ten of these Papal Encyclicals, chosen by the Archbishop himself to teach anti-liberalism to his seminarians. The green flyer enclosed advertises both the set of Encyclicals and the Archbishop's teaching based upon them.
On the other side of the flyer the Angelus Press advertises the publication, no doubt for the first time in English, of a favorite book of Archbishop Lefebvre on the same subject, Fr. A. Roussel's "Liberalism and Catholicism". Leaning much on the same papal Encyclicals, Fr. Roussel teaches firstly the definition, origins and development of liberalism, and secondly the variety, subtlety and perversity of combinations of liberalism with Catholicism. The two absolutely do not mix, yet men mix them, Archbishop Lefebvre used to say, "in 36 different ways"! Nobody can pretend that this Encyclicals Study Set or Fr. Roussel's book make for easy reading. However, for anyone who has the Faith and ability to master such material, it is an incomparable fortification of their Catholic immune system against what Archbishop Lefebvre used to call the AIDS of neo-modernism, which is making the bows of the Church dip deeper and deeper under water. The Popes saw the liberal icebergs coming, they warned, they were not listened to...
For an easier introduction to these same Encyclicals, allow me to remind you of the existence of audio- and videotapes of the Winona Doctrinal Sessions of the summers of 1996 and 1997. These have been now freshly and professionally packaged, and have not been designed to make money, in fact the Seminary tapes program is seriously in the red. But this doctrine must get out to Catholics, if all of us are not to go to the bottom of an ocean of eternal fire! Write P.O. Box 9625, Shawnee Mission, ICS 66201-1865 for details.
The second flyer is an appeal for help to purchase an expensive but valuable piece of property next to the Society’s Church and Priory in Manila, capital of the Philippines. Undoubtedly the purchase will only be possible if God moves a few major benefactors to help the Church in this way. However, maybe the quantity and quality of widows' mites is what God has appointed to persuade Him to move those benefactors.
Dear Friends and Benefactors, remember the 5-day Ignatian Retreats at Winona, women's June 29 to July 4, men's July 6 to 11. The ocean is icy all around us, and there may be only minutes to jump, but remember the baker on board the Titanic who paddled happily through the night, and was picked out of the water alive in the morning because in his last moments on board he consoled himself plentifully with a bottle of whisky! Drink down deep your Catholic Faith, and then you too will start heating up the ocean with your charity!
Most sincerely yours in Christ,
Dear Friends and Benefactors,
A few months ago there was released in the United States of America a film which has proved to be the biggest box-office success of all time: "Titanic". The film itself may be uninteresting, but its success must be a sign of the times. What times? Times that reverse the sign-posts of God to make them point in exactly the opposite direction!
The film's central interest is a fictitious love-story set against the real life drama of the sinking of the famous ship Titanic on its maiden voyage in 1912 from Europe to New York. The story is well-known. Racing amidst icebergs in North Atlantic waters on the calm but dark spring night of April 14 to 15, this greatest and most luxurious of transatlantic liners yet to have been built, labelled "unsinkable", at 11.40 pm struck an iceberg, and at 2.20 am sank.
What a lesson of life! One moment the Titanic was the pride of Western technology and the glory of the British Empire's shipyards, the next moment it was plunging in pitch darkness 2 miles to the ocean floor! One moment the first class passengers on board representing the flower of Anglo-Saxon high society and of Jewish finance were the lords of creation, the next moment they were like everybody else, helplessly awaiting their fate in mid-ocean with small chance of avoiding an icy cold death.
For of the 2207 souls on board when the Titanic set out across the sea, only 705 survived the sinking, to be picked up in their life-boats at dawn. Life-jackets saved many hundreds more from death by drowning, but they could not long survive floating in the below freezing ocean.
And why had there not been enough life-boats for all souls on board? Precisely because the floating palace was universally considered to be unsinkable. Its huge double-bottomed steel hull was divided into 16 compartments, each of which could be sealed off from the others by watertight bulkheads, so that even if several were flooded, still the liner could float. "God Himself could not sink this ship", was one deck-hand's typical boast.
God did not need to sink it. It was men who designed the ship and built it; men who sent it through northern waters littered with icebergs because that route is, as for the aeroplanes, the shortest between Europe and New York; men who raced the Titanic amidst the icebergs to show what she could do; men who saw the fatal iceberg only in time to swing the bow to port enough for the glancing iceberg to open beneath the water-line, like a tin-opener, a fatal front five of the 16 compartments. Had the liner crashed straight into the iceberg, it might not have sunk. Had only the front four compartments been punctured, it might still have floated. But as soon as the front five were flooded, the ship tilted far enough down in the bows for the water in the fifth compartment to slosh over the top of the bulkhead into the sixth, and so on, until the ship was bound to sink.
However, since no more than five compartments were originally breached by the iceberg, then the process of sinking took time. Hence an incomparable - real life - drama, which has held the world's imagination captive ever since: 2207 souls trapped on the stricken liner, with only a minority having any serious hope of escape from a cruel death which they could watch approaching for two hours, as the great ship's bows tilted inexorably lower and lower in the water. Finally as the entire stern lifted out of the water, the unprecedented strain tore the ship in two. The front two thirds of the ship immediately sank, the stern third crashed back for a moment level on the water, only to flood rapidly, tilt forward until it was vertical, and slide in its turn beneath the waves. All that remained visible of the supposed pride and glory of Western industry was, besides assorted flotsam, a scatter of shivering lifeboats, and hundreds of bobbing life-jackets, crying out at first, but muted as cold and death closed in!
What a scene! What a sign-post of God! What a reminder that "Man proposes and God disposes"! In 1912, after a century of "peace" and "progress”, in the glow of the Edwardian age, men thought, especially Anglo-Saxons, that with their liberal principles they had the world under control. The Great War breaking out in 1914 would prove how wrong they were. Then surely the sinking of the Titanic was God's advance warning to the whole 20th century that modern man is not the master of his fate as he pretends. But does he want to learn this lesson?
All that the 1997 Hollywood film seems to want from the legendary sinking is a dramatic back-drop to highlight a romance of liberation. The film "Titanic" takes no interest in any of those grand lessons of life which are surely responsible for the disaster's having attained its legendary status. In the film, the ship's fate is merely of technical interest - who was to blame? Answer, the foolish owners and officers of the ship, who are part of a whole society setup and establishment from which individuals, especially youngsters, must free themselves in order to lead their own lives and - be masters of their fate! Thus is the real lesson faded out and replaced by an unreal fantasy.
The film's hero, Jack, is a free soul, a young artist from backwoods Wisconsin with no strings and no affections, gambling his way at the last moment onboard the Titanic's lowest class accommodation, taking life and people as they come. The heroine Rose on the contrary is a high society girl feeling utterly trapped in her engagement to a domineering upper-class young plutocrat who is bringing her back across the ocean to marry her in her home-town of Philadelphia.
The hero and heroine meet onboard when Rose in desperation is about to throw herself into the ocean. Jack cleverly and courageously saves her from doing so, for which he gets little recognition or recompense from her upper-class companions. However, by continually defying the undemocratic class distinctions imposed by them and by the ship's structure, he leads her to free herself progressively from the restrictions of her society, her family, her God, as she sheds, in order, her engagement, her mother and, mere hours before the ship hits the iceberg, her clothing, in scenes filmed with only enough restraint to avoid that "R" rating which might have been bad for the box-office. Finally, as the ship is going down, she rescues him from a villainous imprisonment by her companions, while, once in the water, Jack rescues Rose upon a floating door with room only for one.
Jack has breath enough to preach to her one last time the gospel of self-fulfilment (old Tennyson's "To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield”), before he freezes dead and slips into the icy depths. But Rose will not forget this saviour who has sacrificed himself for her. The film shows her having led the rest of her life in accordance with Jack's message of liberation. It has been a fulfilled life, and as she looks back in old age, she is given to declare solemnly that Jack saved her, "in every way that a person can be saved"!
Blasphemy! Conscious or unconscious on the part of the film's makers? God knows. Certainly Our Lord is nowhere in the film, except perhaps in the person of a Catholic priest shown ineffectively praying on deck in the ship's last moments while Jack is effectively striving to save Rose. Thus secular self-fulfilment is elevated to the status of a substitute religion. All the human heart's need for love, for sacrificial love, satisfied; its need for a knight to gallop to the rescue of a damsel in distress, and the knight raised to the rank of a religious saviour, while all ten Commandments may be safely ignored - is this the key to the film's success?
Poor youth, flocking to see the film! In it is no inkling, not the least inkling, that the same human heart was made by the love of God for nothing less than to love God, mainly through the observance of those Commandments, defiance of which will fulfill not self but only sin and damnation. Who will give our youth the Catholic Faith, sole foundation of the true love of the true God, which is the sole fulfillment of every human heart?
Not liberalism, which is massively diluting and contaminating the Faith today by its systematic affirmation of man's independence from any truth or law to which he himself has not consented. Archbishop Lefebvre always used to say that one great antidote to liberalism is the circular letters written to the Catholic bishops of the world by the Popes from about 1800 to 1958. The Angelus Press has just published a Study Set of ten of these Papal Encyclicals, chosen by the Archbishop himself to teach anti-liberalism to his seminarians. The green flyer enclosed advertises both the set of Encyclicals and the Archbishop's teaching based upon them.
On the other side of the flyer the Angelus Press advertises the publication, no doubt for the first time in English, of a favorite book of Archbishop Lefebvre on the same subject, Fr. A. Roussel's "Liberalism and Catholicism". Leaning much on the same papal Encyclicals, Fr. Roussel teaches firstly the definition, origins and development of liberalism, and secondly the variety, subtlety and perversity of combinations of liberalism with Catholicism. The two absolutely do not mix, yet men mix them, Archbishop Lefebvre used to say, "in 36 different ways"! Nobody can pretend that this Encyclicals Study Set or Fr. Roussel's book make for easy reading. However, for anyone who has the Faith and ability to master such material, it is an incomparable fortification of their Catholic immune system against what Archbishop Lefebvre used to call the AIDS of neo-modernism, which is making the bows of the Church dip deeper and deeper under water. The Popes saw the liberal icebergs coming, they warned, they were not listened to...
For an easier introduction to these same Encyclicals, allow me to remind you of the existence of audio- and videotapes of the Winona Doctrinal Sessions of the summers of 1996 and 1997. These have been now freshly and professionally packaged, and have not been designed to make money, in fact the Seminary tapes program is seriously in the red. But this doctrine must get out to Catholics, if all of us are not to go to the bottom of an ocean of eternal fire! Write P.O. Box 9625, Shawnee Mission, ICS 66201-1865 for details.
The second flyer is an appeal for help to purchase an expensive but valuable piece of property next to the Society’s Church and Priory in Manila, capital of the Philippines. Undoubtedly the purchase will only be possible if God moves a few major benefactors to help the Church in this way. However, maybe the quantity and quality of widows' mites is what God has appointed to persuade Him to move those benefactors.
Dear Friends and Benefactors, remember the 5-day Ignatian Retreats at Winona, women's June 29 to July 4, men's July 6 to 11. The ocean is icy all around us, and there may be only minutes to jump, but remember the baker on board the Titanic who paddled happily through the night, and was picked out of the water alive in the morning because in his last moments on board he consoled himself plentifully with a bottle of whisky! Drink down deep your Catholic Faith, and then you too will start heating up the ocean with your charity!
Most sincerely yours in Christ,
The necessity of "shocking" newsletters
April 2, 1998
Dear Friends and Benefactors,
This letter does sometimes shock. I think it is necessary. Let me explain why with a story from German literature which I studied in school 40 years ago, but whose full meaning only came home to me several decades later: "Peter Schlernihl" by Adalbert Chamisso (1781-1838).
Peter Schlemihl is a bright young man who wants to get on in the world. So when a stranger in a grey frockcoat offers him all the gold he wants in exchange for his shadow, Peter accepts. After all, what use is his shadow? However, he then discovers that all the gold in the world cannot make up for the scorn he meets from everyone around him because he has no shadow. He is in despair when the man in the grey frock-coat sidles up to him again to offer him a second deal - for Peter to get his shadow back all he need do is sign away his soul. The story ends with some compromise I have forgotten: Peter does not lose his soul, but there is still some price to pay for his original foolishness.
The story is charming, as I recall, and beautifully written. The stranger in the grey frock-coat is of course the Devil. Peter is Western man who has mutilated himself and placed his soul in peril for the sake of material prosperity and well-being. But what interests us first is the Devil's technique, as grasped by Chamisso. It is simple enough when one thinks about it, but it has enormous applications to the world around us.
The Devil traps Peter Schlemihl by stages. Firstly, gold in exchange for his shadow. Secondly, his shadow in exchange for his soul. Obviously the Devil could not care less about Peter's shadow except as a snare to catch Peter's soul. As it looks to Peter, having gotten into a serious mess by trading his shadow for gold, how strong the second temptation must be to get back his shadow and keep the gold by trading away his soul! The gold may have turned to dust, but he knows by now how valuable his shadow is. What does he know about the value of his soul?
Thus the devil has got Peter into the frying-pan, and from the frying-pan tempts him into the fire. Peter has fallen for the first temptation which is relatively minor, but the consequences are still grave enough to make him want to put them right by falling for an absolutely major temptation. He has got a minor but obvious thing wrong, his shadow. How tempting to put it right by getting a not obvious but major thing wrong, his soul.
Now "Peter Schlemihl" may be only a fairy-tale, but fairy-tales can tell a lot more truth than newspapers or television. "Peter Schlemihl" may help to explain why this letter has seemed to approve horrors like the Unabomber or films of Oliver Stone, while it certainly disapproves of sweet dreams of Catholicism and supposedly lovely films like "The Sound of Music". Things are not what they appear.
Western man is like Peter Schlemihl. By the end of the Middle Ages he was getting a lot of little things wrong. So the Devil proposed a deal to Christians to put the little things right if only it would get the big things wrong. Christians split. Those who refused the deal stayed Catholic and kept the Faith. Those who accepted the deal became Protestants. They were rewarded by the Devil with prosperity and the repair of outward correctness, but they lost the Faith and lost their soul.
Thus the hallmark of the Protestant culture that emerged in England, Northern Germany where Chamisso wrote, and the United States, is prosperity and outward correctness, but inward wrongness. Outwardly everything looks fine and attractive, but inwardly there are deep and insoluble problems, insoluble because they are not recognized, because they are hidden from view by the attractive surface. To deal with these problems, Protestantism mutated into Liberalism, or the adoration of Liberty, which is in turn mutating into global tyranny, but while the surface is more brilliant than ever ("overcoming" of disease, hunger, distance), the deep-down problems are in fact worse than ever (intellectual, moral and spiritual chaos - just think of modern art). For centuries now we have been buying from the Devil minor solutions in exchange for major problems, a prettier surface in exchange for uglier depths.
As for the Catholic countries that refused the Protestantism, alas, they then let themselves be infected by the liberalism until they were swept away by neo-modernism, which was the disaster of Vatican II. When at this point the Catholic churchmen themselves lost their grip on the solution, the puzzling of men's wills by the intangible loss of soul beneath an abundance of tangible gold and worldly goods became a worldwide problem.
This is my diagnosis of the Unabomber. You may say what you like about him as a criminal terrorist, etc., etc., and much of it is true. But the man, as is clear from his Manifesto (which is well worth reading), was at least trying to tacky, and publicize, serious and deep problems of man in a machine society. He has a Polish name. I wager his grandparents had the Catholic Faith, which he himself either never had, or has lost. But he still has a remotely Catholic sense of how technology brutalizes man. How Catholic on the contrary do all those technophiles deserve to be called who have - gladly - given up all such sense in order to wallow at ease in their computers? Give me the Unabomber's seriousness over their shallowness, any day of the week.
Similarly with Oliver Stone. I do not care for anything I know of the man, on the surface he is horrible, as are his films, but I can name five of them (including "Nixon", "JFK") which each from a different angle tackle one serious problem: what happened to the United States in the 60's? Outwardly, these films have nothing to do with the Faith, they are totally unsuitable for "family viewing", even for viewing by many adults (as I said at the time), but inwardly I again wager that the Catholic ancestry of Stone's French mother has much to do with his deep unease and preoccupation with the 1960's. Give me, again, any day of the week, the ogre who is serious about serious problems over the sweetie-pies who willfully deceive themselves, or are deceived, for instance, that the American Way has nothing deep-down wrong with it. The Constitution of 1787 is, for anybody who thinks it is a significant part of the solution, a significant part of the problem, and woe to any Catholic who thinks otherwise!
But even if we grant that, for instance, the horrible film "Natural Born Killers" has something serious to say about modern society beneath its ugly surface, was Oliver Stone bound to make the surface so ugly?
Unfortunately, one may say, yes, because if he made the surface nice, most of his audience would look no deeper. Their minds would happily click back into their normal Hollywood or "Sound of Music" mode. The world is sweet, all men are nice (except Nazis), life is a game, nobody goes to Hell. Serious Western artists have for the last 200 years been making their work uglier and uglier, partly to reflect Western reality, partly to shock Westerners into realizing what that reality is - the soul is more and more lost.
We are reminded of St. Augustine's famous prayer: "...Lord, if you prepare to strike, we make all kinds of promises, but if you hang back, we do not keep them... If then you strike, we cry for mercy, but if you show mercy, by again sinning we force you to strike...". As God cannot win with His sinful people, so the man with any serious message cannot win with a modern audience. If he broadcasts on their wavelength, there is no way he can say what they need to hear. If he broadcasts on his own wavelength, they tune him out. Heads they win, tails he loses. Ours is a situation in which the Lord God soon tells Mr. and Mrs. Lot to walk away, and woe betide them if they look back.
Thus if the Seminary letter uses nice language to say nice things, readers feel really good about themselves and pay no attention. If it says nasty things but in a nice way, readers can escape from the nastiness by taking refuge in the niceness of the way, and still they are not disturbed as they should be. So there is why the letter must sometimes say nasty things in a nasty way, because even if a majority of readers were to turn away in disgust, still if a minority of readers were provoked into thinking seriously about real problems, it might be worth it. There is no hope for the "American Way", now being followed world-wide, from Catholics who believe in it. Its only hope is Catholics who will tackle its deep and serious problems, going back to Protestantism.
Peter Schlemihl may get back his shadow, but what use is it if he loses his soul? The modern world may get a lot of little things right, but what use is it if, almost in proportion, it gets the big things wrong? The Unabomber, Oliver Stone and apparent nastiness may get a lot of little things wrong, but how much does that matter compared with their trying to get some of the big things right?
Dear readers, pray the Rosary. Do not believe in Wall street. Do not believe in Washington, D.C., nor in the Houses of Parliament in London. Do not believe in the dollar. Do not believe in pension funds. Do not believe in democracy, nor in the Constitution, nor in the British Monarchy. Do not believe in any of the works of modern man. He is a poor and accursed creature, by his own choice. He has built on sand, and his sand-castles are on the brink of collapsing.
Believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, His only-begotten Son, who promised us that whosoever builds on His Gospel is building on rock. The winds and rain of the next few years are going to beat on that building, but it will not fall down. And if suffering comes our way, let us even be thankful, because it is the hall-mark of real Catholicism, the surest sign that we are following in the footsteps of Jesus Christ on the way to Heaven.
Happy Eastertide. May God have mercy upon us all.
Sincerely yours in Christ,
Dear Friends and Benefactors,
This letter does sometimes shock. I think it is necessary. Let me explain why with a story from German literature which I studied in school 40 years ago, but whose full meaning only came home to me several decades later: "Peter Schlernihl" by Adalbert Chamisso (1781-1838).
Peter Schlemihl is a bright young man who wants to get on in the world. So when a stranger in a grey frockcoat offers him all the gold he wants in exchange for his shadow, Peter accepts. After all, what use is his shadow? However, he then discovers that all the gold in the world cannot make up for the scorn he meets from everyone around him because he has no shadow. He is in despair when the man in the grey frock-coat sidles up to him again to offer him a second deal - for Peter to get his shadow back all he need do is sign away his soul. The story ends with some compromise I have forgotten: Peter does not lose his soul, but there is still some price to pay for his original foolishness.
The story is charming, as I recall, and beautifully written. The stranger in the grey frock-coat is of course the Devil. Peter is Western man who has mutilated himself and placed his soul in peril for the sake of material prosperity and well-being. But what interests us first is the Devil's technique, as grasped by Chamisso. It is simple enough when one thinks about it, but it has enormous applications to the world around us.
The Devil traps Peter Schlemihl by stages. Firstly, gold in exchange for his shadow. Secondly, his shadow in exchange for his soul. Obviously the Devil could not care less about Peter's shadow except as a snare to catch Peter's soul. As it looks to Peter, having gotten into a serious mess by trading his shadow for gold, how strong the second temptation must be to get back his shadow and keep the gold by trading away his soul! The gold may have turned to dust, but he knows by now how valuable his shadow is. What does he know about the value of his soul?
Thus the devil has got Peter into the frying-pan, and from the frying-pan tempts him into the fire. Peter has fallen for the first temptation which is relatively minor, but the consequences are still grave enough to make him want to put them right by falling for an absolutely major temptation. He has got a minor but obvious thing wrong, his shadow. How tempting to put it right by getting a not obvious but major thing wrong, his soul.
Now "Peter Schlemihl" may be only a fairy-tale, but fairy-tales can tell a lot more truth than newspapers or television. "Peter Schlemihl" may help to explain why this letter has seemed to approve horrors like the Unabomber or films of Oliver Stone, while it certainly disapproves of sweet dreams of Catholicism and supposedly lovely films like "The Sound of Music". Things are not what they appear.
Western man is like Peter Schlemihl. By the end of the Middle Ages he was getting a lot of little things wrong. So the Devil proposed a deal to Christians to put the little things right if only it would get the big things wrong. Christians split. Those who refused the deal stayed Catholic and kept the Faith. Those who accepted the deal became Protestants. They were rewarded by the Devil with prosperity and the repair of outward correctness, but they lost the Faith and lost their soul.
Thus the hallmark of the Protestant culture that emerged in England, Northern Germany where Chamisso wrote, and the United States, is prosperity and outward correctness, but inward wrongness. Outwardly everything looks fine and attractive, but inwardly there are deep and insoluble problems, insoluble because they are not recognized, because they are hidden from view by the attractive surface. To deal with these problems, Protestantism mutated into Liberalism, or the adoration of Liberty, which is in turn mutating into global tyranny, but while the surface is more brilliant than ever ("overcoming" of disease, hunger, distance), the deep-down problems are in fact worse than ever (intellectual, moral and spiritual chaos - just think of modern art). For centuries now we have been buying from the Devil minor solutions in exchange for major problems, a prettier surface in exchange for uglier depths.
As for the Catholic countries that refused the Protestantism, alas, they then let themselves be infected by the liberalism until they were swept away by neo-modernism, which was the disaster of Vatican II. When at this point the Catholic churchmen themselves lost their grip on the solution, the puzzling of men's wills by the intangible loss of soul beneath an abundance of tangible gold and worldly goods became a worldwide problem.
This is my diagnosis of the Unabomber. You may say what you like about him as a criminal terrorist, etc., etc., and much of it is true. But the man, as is clear from his Manifesto (which is well worth reading), was at least trying to tacky, and publicize, serious and deep problems of man in a machine society. He has a Polish name. I wager his grandparents had the Catholic Faith, which he himself either never had, or has lost. But he still has a remotely Catholic sense of how technology brutalizes man. How Catholic on the contrary do all those technophiles deserve to be called who have - gladly - given up all such sense in order to wallow at ease in their computers? Give me the Unabomber's seriousness over their shallowness, any day of the week.
Similarly with Oliver Stone. I do not care for anything I know of the man, on the surface he is horrible, as are his films, but I can name five of them (including "Nixon", "JFK") which each from a different angle tackle one serious problem: what happened to the United States in the 60's? Outwardly, these films have nothing to do with the Faith, they are totally unsuitable for "family viewing", even for viewing by many adults (as I said at the time), but inwardly I again wager that the Catholic ancestry of Stone's French mother has much to do with his deep unease and preoccupation with the 1960's. Give me, again, any day of the week, the ogre who is serious about serious problems over the sweetie-pies who willfully deceive themselves, or are deceived, for instance, that the American Way has nothing deep-down wrong with it. The Constitution of 1787 is, for anybody who thinks it is a significant part of the solution, a significant part of the problem, and woe to any Catholic who thinks otherwise!
But even if we grant that, for instance, the horrible film "Natural Born Killers" has something serious to say about modern society beneath its ugly surface, was Oliver Stone bound to make the surface so ugly?
Unfortunately, one may say, yes, because if he made the surface nice, most of his audience would look no deeper. Their minds would happily click back into their normal Hollywood or "Sound of Music" mode. The world is sweet, all men are nice (except Nazis), life is a game, nobody goes to Hell. Serious Western artists have for the last 200 years been making their work uglier and uglier, partly to reflect Western reality, partly to shock Westerners into realizing what that reality is - the soul is more and more lost.
We are reminded of St. Augustine's famous prayer: "...Lord, if you prepare to strike, we make all kinds of promises, but if you hang back, we do not keep them... If then you strike, we cry for mercy, but if you show mercy, by again sinning we force you to strike...". As God cannot win with His sinful people, so the man with any serious message cannot win with a modern audience. If he broadcasts on their wavelength, there is no way he can say what they need to hear. If he broadcasts on his own wavelength, they tune him out. Heads they win, tails he loses. Ours is a situation in which the Lord God soon tells Mr. and Mrs. Lot to walk away, and woe betide them if they look back.
Thus if the Seminary letter uses nice language to say nice things, readers feel really good about themselves and pay no attention. If it says nasty things but in a nice way, readers can escape from the nastiness by taking refuge in the niceness of the way, and still they are not disturbed as they should be. So there is why the letter must sometimes say nasty things in a nasty way, because even if a majority of readers were to turn away in disgust, still if a minority of readers were provoked into thinking seriously about real problems, it might be worth it. There is no hope for the "American Way", now being followed world-wide, from Catholics who believe in it. Its only hope is Catholics who will tackle its deep and serious problems, going back to Protestantism.
Peter Schlemihl may get back his shadow, but what use is it if he loses his soul? The modern world may get a lot of little things right, but what use is it if, almost in proportion, it gets the big things wrong? The Unabomber, Oliver Stone and apparent nastiness may get a lot of little things wrong, but how much does that matter compared with their trying to get some of the big things right?
Dear readers, pray the Rosary. Do not believe in Wall street. Do not believe in Washington, D.C., nor in the Houses of Parliament in London. Do not believe in the dollar. Do not believe in pension funds. Do not believe in democracy, nor in the Constitution, nor in the British Monarchy. Do not believe in any of the works of modern man. He is a poor and accursed creature, by his own choice. He has built on sand, and his sand-castles are on the brink of collapsing.
Believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, His only-begotten Son, who promised us that whosoever builds on His Gospel is building on rock. The winds and rain of the next few years are going to beat on that building, but it will not fall down. And if suffering comes our way, let us even be thankful, because it is the hall-mark of real Catholicism, the surest sign that we are following in the footsteps of Jesus Christ on the way to Heaven.
Happy Eastertide. May God have mercy upon us all.
Sincerely yours in Christ,
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