Resistance and Fidelity to the Church in times of crisis

With thanks to Rorate Caeli

Prof. Roberto de Mattei

1.The infallibility and indefectibility of the Church

The Church has been through the gravest crises in the course of Her history: external persecutions like those which characterized the first three centuries of Her life and since then have always accompanied Her; internal crises, such as Arianism in the fourth century and the Great Western Schism. However, the process of the Church’s “self-demolition” “struck by those who belong to Her” which Paul VI spoke of as far back as 1968[1], appears to be a crisis without precedent because of the extent and depth of it.

We say this in a spirit of deep love for the Papacy, rejecting every form of anti-infallibility, Gallicanism and conciliarism; in a word, every error that would diminish the role and mission of the Papacy. We profess with the entire Church, that there is no higher authority on earth than that of the Pope, since there is no mission or office more elevated than his. Jesus Christ, in the person of Peter and his successors conferred to the Roman Pontiff, the mission to be the visible head of the Church and His Vicar[2]. The dogmatic constitution Pastor aeternus of the First Vatican Council defined the dogmas of the Roman Primacy and papal infallibility[3]. The first asserts that the Pope has supreme power of jurisdiction, both ordinary and immediate, over individual Churches, individual pastors and all the faithful. The second dogma teaches that the Pope is infallible when he speaks “ex cathedra”, which is to say when in his function as Supreme Pastor, he defines that a doctrine in matters of faith or morals must be held by the entire Church.

The authority of the Pope has precise limits however, which cannot be ignored. Javier Hervada in his well-known manual on Constitutional Canon Law, writes: “The power of the pope is not unlimited: it is circumscribed within determined limits. The limits may regard the validity or lawfulness in his exercise of power. The limits regarding validity are given as: a) of the natural law: b) of the positive Divine law; c) of the nature and the ends of the Church”[4].

 

If the Pope oversteps these limits he deviates from the Catholic Faith. It is common doctrine that the Pope as a private doctor, may deviate from the Catholic Faith, falling into heresy[5]. The hypothesis of a heretic Pope is treated as [a]“scholion” in all theological treatises[6].

It should be emphasized that the expression “private doctor” does not refer to the Supreme Pontiff’s acts of a private nature, but to his “public” function as supreme Pastor of the Church[7]”. In his final relatio on the dogma of infallibility at the First Vatican Council, Monsignor Vincenzo Gasser (1809-1879), representative of the Deputation of the Faith, stated precisely that as a “public person” it must be understood that the Pope is speaking ex cathedra, with the intention of binding the Church to his teaching[8]. The theological hypothesis of a heretical Pope does not contradict the dogma of infallibility, since the infallibility concerns the person of the Pope only when he acts ex cathedra. Further, also those who deny that the Pope can fall into heresy admit the possibility that he can express himself in an erroneous, misleading or scandalous manner. Furthermore, if the problem of a heretic Pope poses the problem of the loss of the Pontificate, the presence of a Pope fautor haeresim[9] poses equally grave theological problems.

In order to better clarify this question, we must remember that alongside the dogma of the Roman Primacy and Papal infallibility, a third exists, not yet defined by the solemn Magisterium, but, in a certain sense, it is the origin of the previous two: the dogma of the indefectibility of the Church.

Indefectibility is the supernatural property of the Church, and thanks to this She will never disappear, but will arrive at the end of time identical to Herself, with no change in Her permanent essence, that is, Her dogmas, Rites (the Mass and the Sacraments), and the Apostolic succession of Her hierarchy. The Augustinian theologian Martin Jugie (1858-1954), in the Catholic Encyclopaedia entry dedicated to indefectibility, writes that this is a truth of the faith clearly contained in Holy Scripture and taught by the Ordinary Magisterium[10]. Modernism opposed the indefectibility of the Church, and had, and still has, theological, philosophical evolutionism as its basis[11].

Indefectibility includes not only the infallibility of the Pope, but of the entire Church. The Pope is, under certain conditions, infallible, but not indefectible. The Church, which includes the Pope, bishops and ordinary lay-people, is infallible and indefectible. Theology differentiates between essential or absolute infallibility and shared or relative infallibility: the first is God “qui nec falli nec fallere potest”[12] ; the second is the charisma from God bestowed on His Church.

From the First Vatican Council onwards the infallibility of the Pope has been discussed a lot, both affirming or denying it. Little to nothing has been said about the indefectibility and the infallibility of the Church. Yet, the combination of papal infallibility and the infallibility of the Church, notes Monsignor Brunero Gherardini, is conformable to Tradition and was confirmed by Vatican I: “Definimus Romanum Pontificem… ea infallibilitate pollere, qua divinus Redemptor Ecclesiam suam… instructam esse voluit”[13].

“Two infallibilities which are added or subtracted from each other are not at stake here, – specifies the Roman theologian – ; but [it is] the one and the same charisma, which has, in the Church, in the Pope and in the bishops, collegially considered in communion with the Pope, its lawful authority. This charisma is expressed in a positive form, prior to and perhaps more than a negative form. It is at work when the Magisterium in announcing the Christian truth or settling eventual controversies, remains faithful to the ‘depositum fidei’ (I Tim. 6, 20; 2 Tim. 1,4) or discovers new implications up until that moment unexplored”[14].

Theologians refer to the infallibility of the Church when they speak of an infallibility in docendo and an infallibility in credendo. The Church, in fact, is made up of a teaching part (docens) and a taught part (discens). It is only for the Church docens to teach revealed truth infallibly, whereas the Church docens receives and conserves this truth. However, alongside the infallibility in teaching, there is also the infallibility in believing, since neither the corpus docendi, invested with the power of teaching the entire Church, nor the universality of the faithful in believing, can fall into error. If, in fact, the flock of the faithful, as a whole, could fall into error, believing something to be of Revelation which is not, the promise of Divine assistance to the Church would be frustrated. St. Thomas Aquinas refers to the infallibility of the Church as a whole, when he affirms: “it is impossible that the judgment of the universal Church is wrong in that which is referred to the faith[15]”.

The ‘Church learning’ in so far as it believes, belongs not only to the faithful, but also to priests, Bishops and the Pope themselves, since everyone is required to believe the truths revealed by God – superiors no less than inferiors. In the Church, there is however, only one infallibility of which all Her members share in an organic and different way: each one according to their ecclesial office. Individual Christians can err in matters of faith, even when they hold the highest ecclesiastical offices, but not the Church as such – She is always immaculate in Her doctrine.

This infallibility is expressed in the so-called “sensus fidelium”[16], of which the entire people of God enjoy infallibility not only by reflex, but also pro-actively, as often they anticipate Church definitions, or contribute in making them clearer: for example, this occurred before the Council of Ephesus proclaimed the Virgin Mary as Mother of God. St. Cyril[17] and St. Celestine[18] attest that the Christian populace already acknowledged belief in the Divine Maternity as “the faith that the Universal Church professes”[19]. In the history of the Church, devotion to the Blessed Virgin was the field whereby the influence of the Holy Spirit on the faithful was manifested with force majeure.

 

2. The sensus fidei in the history of the Church

The first author who uses the term “sensus fidei” seems to be Vincent of Lerins (who died around 445 AD). In his Commonitorium he proposes as normative, the Faith observed everywhere always and by all, (quod ubique, quod semper, quodo ab omnibus creditum est)[20]. The first historical manifestation of the sensus fidei however, may be regarded as the Arian Crisis in which, according to the careful reconstruction by Blessed John Henry Newman[21] (1801-1890), the ‘Church teaching’ appeared often uncertain and lost, but the sensus fidelium preserved the integrity of the Faith, so much so that St. Hilary was able to say: “Sanctiores sunt aures fideles populi labiis sacerdotum”[22]. Card. Newman writes: “There was a temporary suspense of the function of the Ecclesia docens. The body of Bishops failed in their confession of the faith. They spoke variously, once against another; there was nothing, after Nicaea, of firm, unvarying, consistent testimony, for nearly sixty years”. During this period, he adds, “the Divine tradition committed to the infallible Church was proclaimed and maintained far more by the faithful than by the Episcopate”[23].

All of the great modern councils have referred to the sensus fidei. The Council of Trent made appeal repeatedly to the judgment of the entire Church in defending articles in contrast to the Catholic Faith. Its decree on the Sacrament of the Eucharist (1551), for example, invokes specifically “the general consensus of the Church” (universum Ecclesiae sensum) [24]. The Dominican Melchior Cano (1509-1560), who took part in the Council of Trent, in his treatise De locis theologicis, for the first time treated the sensus fidelium extensively, defending, against the Protestants, the values Catholics recognize regarding the power of Tradition in theological argument[25].

Also the Dogmatic Constitution Pastor aeternus of the First Vatican Council, which defined the Pope’s infallible Magisterium, presupposed the sensus fidei fidelium. The original project of the Constitution Supremi pastoris, which served as the base for Pastor aeternus, had a chapter on the infallibility of the Church (c. IX)[26]. Nonetheless, when the agenda for the day was discussed with the aim of addressing the question of pontifical infallibility, the discussion of this principle was adjourned and never taken up again. In his final relatio, Monsignor Gasser, cites the example of the Immaculate Conception to show that the Pope deemed consultation with the Church necessary, before reaching the definition of the dogma. The research of Father Giovanni Perrone (1794-1876), on the patristic conception of the sensus fidelium had a strong influence on Pope Pius IX’s decision to proceed with the definition of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception[27]. In the apostolic constitution which contains the definition Ineffabilis Deus (1854), Pius IX uses the language of Perrone to describe the concordant testimony of the bishops and the faithful[28].

Like Pius IX, also Pope Pius XII, before defining the dogma of the bodily Assumption of Mary Most Holy, wanted to consult the bishops of the entire world, who, besides voicing their opinion, had to testify to the devotion of their faithful[29]. In those years, the sensus fidei, was the object of some important studies, in particular, those by Franciscan Father Carlo Balić and the Redemptorist Clement Dillenschneider, the Dominican Claudio Garcia Extremeno and the Servite Tommaso Maria Bartolomei[30].

Also the Second Vatican Council dealt with the sensus fidei or communis fidelium sensus. In particular, Chapter 12 of Lumen Gentium, asserts in fact: “The entire body of the faithful, anointed as they are by the Holy One, cannot err in matters of belief. They manifest this special property by means of the whole peoples’ supernatural discernment in matters of faith when ‘from the Bishops down to the last of the lay faithful’ they show universal agreement in matters of faith and morals. That discernment in matters of faith is aroused and sustained by the Spirit of truth. It is exercised under the guidance of the sacred teaching authority, in faithful and respectful obedience to which the people of God accepts that which is not just the word of men but truly the word of God (cf. 1 Ts. 2, 13). Through it, the people of God adheres unwaveringly to the faith given once and for all to the saints (cf. Gdc. 3), penetrates it more deeply with right thinking, and applies it more fully to life”.

The fact that at times, the progressives have used this passage to contest the ecclesiastical authorities, doesn’t mean that it is false and that it cannot be understood, like many other passages from the Council, in conformity with Tradition. It should be noted, moreover, that in the modern age the doctrine of the sensus fidei, has been explored mainly by great theologians of the Roman School, such as Father Giovanni Perrone (1794-1876) and Father Matthias Joseph Scheeben (1836-1888) Cardinals Baptiste Franzelin (1816-1886) and Louis Billot[31] (1846-1931). Cardinal Franzelin in particular, underlines the role of the Holy Spirit in forming and maintaining the conscientia fidei communis of the Christian people, and like Melchior Cano, judges the sensus fidelium, as one of the organs of Tradition, to which it is a faithful echo[32]. I am reminded of Monsignor Gherardini, the latest brilliant exponent of the Roman School, who gave me a gift in the ‘Eighties of a study dedicated to the sensus fidei, entitled Infalibilidad del Pueblo de Dios, by Don Jesús Sancho Bielsa, published by the Faculty of Theology at the University of Navarra[33]. There are other authors belonging to the same Opus Dei school who have given ample space to the sensus fidei, like the theologians Fernando Ocàriz and Antonio Blanco[34].

Nonetheless, throughout history, the sensus fidei has been made manifest in the minds and hearts of ordinary lay-people before being written by theologians, as Benedict XVI recalled with these words[35]: “Important theologians like Duns Scotus enriched what the People of God already spontaneously believed about the Blessed Virgin and expressed in acts of devotion, in the arts and in Christian life in general with the specific contribution of their thought. […] This is all thanks to that supernatural sensus fidei, namely, that capacity infused by the Holy Spirit that qualifies us to embrace the reality of the faith with humility of heart and mind.[…] May theologians always be ready to listen to this source of faith and retain the humility and simplicity of children! I mentioned this a few months ago[36] saying: There have been great scholars, great experts, great theologians, teachers of faith who have taught us many things. They have gone into the details of Sacred Scripture, of the history of salvation but have been unable to see the mystery itself, its central nucleus. […] The essential has remained hidden! On the other hand, in our time there have also been ‘little ones’ who have understood this mystery. Let us think of St Bernadette Soubirous; of St Thérèse of Lisieux, with her new interpretation of the Bible that is ‘non-scientific’ but goes to the heart of Sacred Scripture”.

 

3.The nature of the sensus fidei according to the teaching of theologians

In 2014, the International Theological Commission, presided by Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller, Prefect of the Congregation for the Faith, published a study, entitled The sensus fidei in the life of the Church, interesting, most of all for its references to St. Thomas Aquinas[37]. In these pages it is made clear, that unlike theology, which can be described as a scientia fidei, the sensus fidei is not a reflexive, conceptual knowledge of the mysteries of the Faith, but a spontaneous intuition, with which the believer adheres to the true Faith or refuses what opposes it[38]. It therefore derives from the Faith and is a property[39] thereof. It is compared to an instinct since it is a type of spontaneous intuition which comes from the innateness (connaturality) the virtue of faith establishes between the believer subject and the object of the authentic Faith. The theologians Ocàriz and Blanco define it as the: “capacity of the believer, not only to believe what is presented to him by the Church as truth of the Faith, but also and above all the facility of discerning, as if by instinct, what is in agreement with the Faith from what is not, and also the facility of drawing greater in-depth conclusions from the truths taught by the Magisterium, not by way of theological reasoning, but spontaneously, through a sort of innate (connatural) knowledge. The virtue of faith (habitus fidei) produces in fact an innateness (connaturality) of the human spirit with revealed mysteries, so that the supernatural truth attracts the intellect”[40].

The doctrine of knowledge per quandam connaturalitatem is a form of interior intelligence that springs from the faith as instinctus or lumen fidei: St. Thomas Aquinas explains it in the Summa Theologiae, when he asserts that the “rectitude of judgment is twofold: first, on account of perfect use of reason, secondly, on account of a certain connaturality with the matter about which one has to judge. Thus, about matters of chastity, a man after inquiring with his reason forms a right judgement, if he has learnt the science of morals, while he who has the habit of chastity judges of such matters by a kind of connaturality”[41].

The reason is that the virtuous man has a stable disposition (habitus) in exercising a certain type of behaviour. The chaste man loves instinctively what is pure and in a likewise immediate manner experiences a repugnance for what is turbid and impure. This “spiritual instinct” allows him to discern how to behave in the most difficult situations and thus resolve in practice, problems which for moralists can remain abstract. “The habitus of faith – explains the Angelic Doctor – possesses a capacity whereby, thanks to it, the believer is prevented from giving assent to what is contrary to the faith, just as chastity gives protection with regard to whatever is contrary to chastity[42]”. Thus, in agreement with the connaturality that comes to him from this habit (habitus), “man adheres to the truths of the faith and not to the contrary errors, through the light of the faith infused in him by God”[43].

The supernatural capacity that the believer has in perceiving, penetrating and applying to his life the revealed truth that comes from the Holy Spirit. St. Thomas takes as a starting point the fact that the universal Church is governed by the Holy Spirit, Who, as Jesus Christ promised “will teach (Her) the entire truth” (John 16, 13)[44]. “Showing the truth –says the Angelic Doctor – is a property of the Holy Spirit, because it is love which brings about the revelations of secrets”[45].

This sense of the faith exists in all believers, including sinners, even if he who is in a state of Grace has a deeper and more intense insight of the dogmas of faith than he who is in sin; and among those who are in a state of Grace the insight is proportionate to the level of sanctity. Such insight in fact is an illumination that comes from the grace of the faith and the gifts of the Holy Spirit in the soul, especially those of intellect, knowledge and wisdom[46].

This Christian sense has nothing whatever to do with the religious sentiment of the modernist type, condemned in the encyclical Pascendi by St. Pius X and even less so with that facultas appetendi et affectandi which the encyclical Humani generis by Pius XII[47] makes mention of. The sensus fidei, in fact, is not a product of the sensibilities, but of the faith, grace and the gifts of the Holy Spirit which enlighten the intellect and move the will[48].

The Holy Spirit Who dwells in the faithful does not remain inactive. He lives in the soul, like the sun, to illuminate it. The inspirations of the Holy Spirit are a reality which can accompany the ordinary life of every Christian, faithful to the action of Grace. The Divine inspiration of the Holy Spirit, as Father Arnaldo Maria Lanz S.J. explains, must not be confused with interior revelations and locutions, which communicate new ideas through an extraordinary influence, but it is a Divine “instinct” which helps us know and act better under the influence of God[49]. “Now – writes Father Balić – this Spirit of the Seven Gifts Who dwells in us, not as in the midst of ruins, but as in a temple (1 Cor. 3, 16-17; 6, 19) is the Spirit of Pentecost; He is the Spirit of Truth (John 14, 17) whose special mission consists in revealing to the world the full substance of Christ and all the wonders the Son of God had kept hidden or had not completely and clearly revealed”[50]. Thanks to the sensus fidei the believer perceives the truths preserved in the revealed deposit [of the faith]. Like this, the promise of St. John is fulfilled: “The unction from the Holy One: that is grace and wisdom from the Holy Ghost” (1 John 2, 20).

4. Sensus fidei, Magisterium and Tradition

Father Balić also calls the sensus fidei “Catholic common sense” or “Christian sense” (sensus christianus)[51]. In philosophy, ordinary common sense is the intelligence and natural light which men are normally endowed with: a quality which permits the understanding of the notions of good and evil, true and false, beauty and ugliness[52].

“Catholic common sense”, is the supernatural light which the Christian receives at Baptism and Confirmation. These sacraments infuse us with the capacity to adhere to the truths of the faith through supernatural instinct, even before that of theological reasoning.

In the same way that common sense is measured by the objectivity of the real, the sensus fidei is measured by the objective rule of the truths of the faith contained in the Church’s Tradition. The proximate rule of the Faith is the infallible Magisterium of the Church, which is the task only of those, by Christ’s will, who have the right and the office to teach: the Apostles and their successors. The mass of the faithful have no part in this official teaching, and is limited to receiving it. “They would err, however, – writes Father Balić – those who think that this mass is in a merely passive and mechanical state in regard to this doctrine. And in fact the faith of the laity, like the doctrine of the shepherds, is sustained by the influence of the Holy Spirit, and the faithful by their Christian sense and profession of Faith, contribute to the exposition, publication, manifestation and testimony of the Christian truth”[53].

The faithful, although they have no mission to teach, have the function of preserving and propagating their faith. The theologians Ocàriz and Blanco write, citing Cardinal Franzelin: “The infallibility of the ‘sensus fidei’, manifested by the ‘consensus fidelium’ exists even when it refers to a truth not yet infallibly taught by the Magisterium. In this case the ‘consensus fidelium’ is certain criteria of truth since it is criterion ‘divinae traditionis’”[54], sub ductu magisterii, under the control of the Magisterium. The Magisterium nevertheless is not the source of Revelation, as opposed to Scripture and Tradition which constitute the “remote rule” of the faith and of which the Magisterium is nourished. In this sense Cardinal Franzelin, citing St. Irenaeus, defines Tradition as “immutable rule of truth”, since it is nothing other than the Church’s integral doctrine which comes to us from the successors of the Apostles with the assistance of the Holy Spirit[55].

Cardinal Franzelin cites St. Athanasius, St. Epiphanius and St. Hilary in support of his thesis. The latter speaks of the “conscience of the common faith”, opposed to the “impious intelligence” of the heretics[56]. Also St. Augustine defines “the rule of faith” that “faith of which we have been nourished”[57] and designates it as an objective truth which is found in the Church, where we have received it[58]. Cardinal Billot defines Tradition as “the rule of faith anterior to all the others”, a rule of faith not only remote, but also close and immediate, depending on the point of view which is being proposed to us[59]. Monsignor Brunero Gherardini offers this definition: “Tradition is the official transmission on the part of the Church and Her organs which are divinely instituted, and infallibly assisted by the Holy Spirit, of Divine Revelation in [the] spatial-temporal dimension”[60].

It should be remembered that the Church is the Mystical Body of which Christ is the Head, the Holy Ghost the Soul, and all the faithful, from the Pope down to the last baptized person, are the members. The Church, however, as a whole should not be confused with the Churchmen that form Her. The Church is impeccable, infallible, indefectible. The Churchmen, individually taken, are not, with the exception of the person of the Pope, or a Council gathered under his name to define solemnly a question of faith and whose task, under the proper conditions, has the privilege of infallibility. In the absence of the required conditions, the Pope or a Council can err and those who consider them always infallible, fall into the error of papolatry (or councilatry) which leads to wrongfully attributing to the Papacy, or the Church, per se, the responsibility of many failures, scandals and errors by some popes that have governed Her[61].

The Vatican Theological Commission stated that: “Alerted by their sensus fidei, individual believers may deny assent even to the teaching of legitimate pastors if they do not recognise in that teaching the voice of Christ, the Good Shepherd[62]”. In fact as the Apostle John recalls “and the sheep follow him (the Good Shepherd) because they know his voice. But a stranger they follow not, but fly from him, because they know not the voice of strangers” (John 10, 4-5).

For St. Thomas Aquinas, even if a believer lacks theological competence, he can and actually must resist in virtue of his sensus fidei his bishop, if the latter is preaching heterodox things[63]. Again St. Thomas teaches that in extreme cases it is licit and actually right and proper to resist publically even a papal decision, as St. Paul resisted St. Peter to his face “Hence Paul, who was Peter’s subject, rebuked him in public, on account of the imminent danger of scandal concerning the faith, and, as the gloss of Augustine says, ‘Peter gave an example to superiors, that if at any time they should happen to stray from the straight path, they should not disdain to be reproved by their subjects’ (Gal. 2, 14)”[64].

The sensus fidei can induce the faithful, in some cases, to refuse their assent to some ecclesiastical documents and place themselves, before the supreme authority, in a situation of resistance and apparent disobedience. The disobedience is only apparent since in these cases of legitimate resistance the evangelical principle that one must obey God rather than men prevails (Acts 5, 29)[65].

Legitimate “disobedience” to an order unjust in itself, in nature of faith and morals, can be induced – in particular cases – even to publically resisting the Supreme Pontiff. Arnaldo Xavier da Silveira, in a study dedicated to the Public Resistance to the Decisions of the Ecclesiastical Authority[66], demonstrated this very well, by citing quotations from the saints, doctors of the Church, illustrious theologians and canon lawyers.

The Code of Canon Law actually in vigour, from canon 208 to canon 223, under the title De omnium christifidelium obligationibus et iuribus outlines the common status to all the faithful and ascribes to the laity the responsibility of intervening in the problems of the Church. In canon 212 it says that the faithful “According to the knowledge, competence, and prestige which they possess, they have the right and even at times the duty to manifest to the sacred pastors their opinion on matters which pertain to the good of the Church and to make their opinion known to the rest of the Christian faithful, without prejudice to the integrity of faith and morals, with reverence toward their pastors, and attentive to common advantage and the dignity of persons”.

5. Rules to discern and foster the sensus fidei

What is the criteria to discern and foster the authentic sensus fidei? We have said many times that the sensus fidei is in no way a subjective sentiment, it is not the free examination of the Protestants, it is not a charismatic experience. It is a supernatural instinct rooted in the objective faith of the Church expressed by Her Magisterium and Tradition.

The Magisterium can be understood in two senses: as an act of the ecclesiastical authority which teaches a truth (subjective Magisterium) or as an object believed, a set of truths which are taught (objective Magisterium). In the first case the Magisterium is a function exercised by the ecclesiastical authority to teach revealed Truths, in the second case it is an objective deposit of truth which coincides with Tradition.

The sensus fidei plays a decisive role during times of crisis in which an evident contradiction between the subjective Magisterium and the objective one is created, between the authorities that teach and the truths of the faith they must guard and transmit. The sensus fidei induces the believer to reject any ambiguity and falsification of the truth, leaning on the immutable Tradition of the Church, which does not oppose the Magisterium, but includes it.

The ultimate rule of the faith is not the contemporary ‘living’ Magisterium, in what it contains as non-defining, but Tradition, or rather the objective and perennial Magisterium, which constitutes, along with Holy Scripture, one of the two sources of the Word of God. Ordinarily the Magisterium is the proximate rule of faith, inasmuch as it transmits and applies infallible truths contained in the deposit of Revelation, but in the case of a contrast between the novelties proposed by the subjective or “living” Magisterium and Tradition, the primacy can only be given to Tradition, for one simple motive: Tradition, which is the “living” Magisterium in its universality and continuity, is in itself infallible, whereas the so-called “living” Magisterium, meant as the current predication by the ecclesiastical hierarchy, is only so in determinate conditions. Tradition, in fact is always divinely assisted; the Magisterium is so only when it is expressed in an extraordinary way, or when, in ordinary form, it teaches with continuity over time, a truth of faith and morals. The fact that the ordinary Magisterium cannot constantly teach a truth contrary to the faith, does not exclude that this same Magisterium may fall per accidens into error, when the teaching is circumscribed in space and time and is not expressed in an extraordinary manner[67].

This does not mean in any way that the dogmatic truth must be the result of the sentiment of lay-people and that nothing can be defined without first hearing the opinion of the universal Church, as if the Magisterium was simply a revealer of the faith of the people, quasi-regulated by them in its magisterial function[68]. It means, however, as Padre Garcia Extremeno asserts, that the Magisterium cannot propose anything infallibly to the Church, if it is not contained in Tradition, which is the supreme regula fidei of the Church[69].

Tradition is maintained and transmitted by the Church, not only through the Magisterium, but through all the faithful, “from the bishops down to the laity”[70], as the famous formula by St. Augustine, cited in Lumen Gentium no. 12 expresses. The doctor from Hippo makes an appeal in particular to “the people of the faith”[71], who do not exercise a Magisterium, but on the basis of their sensus fidei guarantee the continuity of the transmission of a truth.

It is evident from what we have said that the sensus fidei, like the act of faith for that matter, has a rational foundation. When the sensus fidei points out a contrast between some expressions of the living Magisterium and the Tradition of the Church, its foundation is not the theological competence of the believer, but the good use of logic, illuminated by grace. In this sense, the principle of non-contradiction constitutes a fundamental criteria of verification of the act of faith as is the case in every intellectual act[72]. Everything that appears irrational and contradictory repels the sensus fidei. The faith is based on reason since the act of faith, by its very nature, is an act of the intellectual faculties. “The noblest act of the intellect that a man can make in this mortal life, is most certainly the act of faith”, observes Padre Christian Pesch[73] (1835-1925), who explains that the act of faith cannot be freed from the intellect, by replacing the essence of the faith with an irrational abandonment to God, in the Lutheran manner. He who denies the evidence of reason falls into Fideism, which has nothing whatever to do with the true faith.

Also the adhesion of the conscience to the principles of faith or morals is always rational. The conscience is in fact the judgement of the practical intellect which, grounded in the light of the prime rational principles, evaluates the morality of our acts in their concrete singularity[74]. Our conscience does not have its objective rule in the person of the Pope or bishops, but in the Divine and natural law, which the supreme authorities of the Church have the task of transmitting and defending. Therefore, as Cardinal Newman says “conscience is the first among all the vicars of Christ”[75]. Faced with a proposition that contradicts faith or morals we have the moral duty to follow our conscience which opposes it. Nobody can be obliged to adhere to a principle he retains false, nor commit an act that in conscience he retains unjust.

            The faith, which is illuminated by grace, nurtures moreover the interior life of the believer. Without an interior life one does not obtain the help that comes from grace, which has its only source in Jesus Christ. The Pope, the Vicar of Christ, but not His successor, is not in himself a source of divine grace. Regarding this Father Roger Calmel writes: “It is necessary that our interior life be directed not to the Pope, but to Jesus Christ. Our interior life, which evidently includes the truths of Revelation about the Pope, must be directed purely to the High Priest, Our God and Saviour Jesus Christ in order to triumph over the scandals that come to the Church from the Pope”[76].

God acts in history as exemplary cause of the universe, in His own attribute of Divine Wisdom. The sensus fidei is nurtured also in this exemplarity, by imitating the models the history of the Church has offered us. The first and most excellent imitation is Jesus Christ, Wisdom Incarnate, above all in the Agony in Gethsemane; imitation afterwards, of the Blessed Virgin, above all on Holy Saturday, when Her faith summed up that of the Church: “apostolis fugientibus, in Passione Domini fides Ecclesiae in beatissima Virgine sola remansit”[77]; the imitation of the Saints like St. Athanasius, St. Bruno of Segni, St. Peter Damien, St. Brigit, St Catherine, St. Louis Maria Grignion de Monfort, who were illuminated by the Holy Spirit during dramatic times in Church history The Saints, writes St. Bernard of Clairvaux, appear on earth to be [our] models and are taken to heaven to be our patrons[78]. And today more than ever we need models and patrons.

The sensus fidei in the end, has to be transformed into that confidence which, as Father de Saint-Laurent, citing St. Thomas, states, represents the summit of the two theological virtues of faith and hope[79]. The problems we are faced with, like the presence of heresies in pontifical documents and the hypothesis of a heretic Pope, are of enormous importance. We do not claim to resolve them at a conference, in an article, in a book or a conversation. But neither can we recoil from the evidence of the facts. The questions of a heretic Pope and heretical magisterial documents can give rise to distress of a psychological more than a theological order, when it passes from the abstract level to the concrete one. At times we are terrified when faced with the consequences that can open up in the life of the Church as well as each one of us, at the idea of a Pope a fide devius. But denying the evidence for fear of the consequences, would be a lack of confidence in Divine Providence which will allow us to resolve these problems one moment at a time, by abandoning ourselves to the action of the Holy Spirit in our souls.

Sufficit diei malitia sua: sufficient for the day is the evil thereof (Mt 6, 34). We needn’t expect to resolve tomorrow’s problems today without the grace that tomorrow brings. All of the Saints lived in this spirit of abandonment, fulfilling the Divine Will in the way it was made manifest [to them] moment by moment, without allowing themselves to worry about the future. “Their secret – writes Father Garrigou-Lagrange – was living moment by moment what the Divine action wanted to make of them”[80].

It will be the Blessed Virgin Mary, the destroyer of all heresies, Who will show us the way to continue professing the true faith and resist evil actively in ways that the situation will impose [on us]. We are not infallible and the Pope is, only under determined conditions. But the Divine Promise is infallible: “Ego vobiscum sum omnibus diebus usque ad consummationem saeculi” (Mt 28, 20). “Behold I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world”. This is the source of our unshakeable confidence.

[Translation: Rorate Contributor Francesca Romana]

 

 

[1] Paul VI, Discourse to Lombard Seminary in Rome, December 7th 1968, in Insegnamenti, vol. VI (1968), pp. 1188-1189.

[2] Cf. my synthesis Il Vicario di Cristo. Il Papato tra normalità ed eccezione, Fede e Cultura, Verona 2012.

[3] Vatican Council I, Sess. IV, Denz-H, nn. 3059-3075.

[4] Javier Hervada, Diritto costituzionale canonico, Giuffré, Rome 1989, p. 273.

[5] See the recent studies of Arnaldo Xavier Vidigal da Silveira, Ipotesi teologica di un Papa eretico, Solfanelli, Chieti 2016; Robert Siscoe-John Salza, True or False Pope? Refusing Sedevcantism and Other Modern Errors, Stas Editions, Winona (Minnesota) 2015.

[6] Cf. for example Card. charles journet, L’Eglise du Verbe incarné, Desclée de Brouwer, Paris 1941, I, p 626 and II, pp. 839-841.

[7] Umberto Betti, The Dogmatic Constitution Pastor Aeternus of the First Vatican Council Pastor Aeternus, Pontificio Ateneo Antoniano, Rome 1961, pp. 644-646.

[8] “Pontifex dicitur infallibilis cum loquitur ex cathedra…scilicet quando.,. primo non tanquam doctor privatus…aliquid decernit, sed docet supremi omnium christianorum pastori set doctoris munere fungens” (Giovanni Domenico Mansi, Sacrorum conciliorum nova et amplissima Collectio, by Louis Petit e Jean-Baptiste Martin, Paris-Arnhem-Leipzig 1901-1927 (53 voll.), vol. 52, col. 1225 C.) The words we will find again in the dogmatic definition: “cum ex cathedra loquitur, id est cum omnium christianorum pastoris et doctoris munere fungens”.

[9] On the notes of doctrinal censure inferior to heresy, cf. S Antonio Piolanti, Pietro Parente, Dizionario di teologia dogmatica, Studium, Rome 1943, pp. 45-46; Lucien Choupin, Valeurs des décisions doctrinales et disciplinaires du Saint-Siège, Beauchesne, Paris 1913; H. Quilliet, Censures doctrinales, in Dictionnaire de Théologie Catholique, II, coll. 2101-2113; Marino Mosconi, Magistero autentico non infallibile e protezione penale, Edizioni Glossa, Milan-Rome 1996.

[10] Martin Jugie a.a., Indefettibilità, in Enciclopedia Cattolica, Città del Vaticano 1951, vol. VI, coll. 1792-1794. Father Jugie records that the First Vatican Council had prepared a definition schema regarding this.

[11] “The decree Lamentabilis explicitly condemns it in proposition n. 53 Constitutio organica Eccle siae non est immutabilis; sed societas christiana perpetuae evolutioni, aeque societas humana, est obnoxia”, Denz-H, n. 3453.

[12] Conc. Vatic. I, Sess. III Constit. Dogm. Dei Filius, Denz-H, n. 3008.

[13] Conc. Vatic. I, Sess. IV, Constit. Dogm. Pastor aeternus, cap. IV, Denz-H, n. 3074.

[14] Mons. Brunero Gherardini on Canonization and Infallibilty, in http://chiesaepostconcilio glogspot.it/2012/02/mons-brunero-gherardini-su.html.

[15] “Certum est quod iudicium Ecclesiae universalis errare in his quae ad fidem pertinent, impossibile est” (St. Thomas Aquinas, Quodlibet, 9, q. 8 a 1).

[16] Theology differentiates between sensus fidei fidelis to make reference to the personal attitude of the believer and that sensus fidei fidelium to make reference to the instinct of faith of the Church Herself.

[17] St. Cyril, Epist. IV to Nestorius in PG, 77, coll. 47-50; Epist. II ad Celestinum, in PG, 77, col. 84.

[18] St. Celestine, Epist. XII ad Cyrillum, in PG, 77, coll. 92-99.

[19] Ivi, coll. 92-93.

[20] Vincent of Lerins, Commonitorium, II, 5, PL 64, 149.

[21] John Henry Newman, The Arians of the IV Century, Italian tr. Gli Ariani del IV secolo, Jaca Book-Morcelliana, Milan 1981.

[22] St. Hilary of Poitiers, Contra Arianos, vel auxentium, n. 6, in PL, n. 10, col. 613.

[23] John Henry Newman, On consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine, Geoffrey Chapman, London 1961, pp. 75 and 77.

[24] Conc. Trid., Sessio XIII, 11 October 1551, Decretum de ss. Eucharestia, Denz –H, n. 1637.

[25] Melchior Cano, De locis theologicis, edited by juan belda plans, Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, Madrid 2006, Book IV, c. 3.

[26] Mansi, Sacrorum Conciliorum Nova et amplissima collectio, III (51), coll. 542-543.

[27] Giovanni Perrone, De Immaculato B. V. Maria Conceptu. An dogmatico decreto definiri possit, disquisitio theologica, Marini, Rome 1847, pp. 139, 143-145.

[28] Cf. Pius IX, Epist. apost. Infallibilis Deus, of December 8^th, 1854, in Pii IX Acta, 1 (1854), col. 597; Pius XII, Apostolic Costitution Munificentissimus Deus of November 1^st, 1950, in AAS, 42 (1950), pp. 753-754.

[29] Cf. Pius XII’s Letter Deiparae Virginis of May 1^st, 1946, in AAS 42 (1950), pp. 728 and foll.

[30] Cf. Carlo Balić o.f.m., Il senso cristiano e il progresso del dogma, in “Gregorianum”, XXXIII, 1 (1952), pp. 106-134; Clément Dillenschneider, Le sens de la foi et le progrès dogmatique du mystère marial, Pontificia Academia Mariana Internationalis, Rome 1954; T. M. Bartolomei, L’influsso del “Senso della Fede” nell’esplicitazione del Dogma dell’Immacolata Concezione della Beata Vergine degna Madre di Dio, in “Marianum”, 25 (1963), pp. 297 and foll.; Claudio García Extremeño o.p., El sentido de la fe criterio de tradición, in “La Ciencia Tomista”, 87 (1960), p. 603 (pp. 569-605).

[31] Walter Kasper, Die Lehre von der Tradition in der Römischen Schule, Herder, Friburg 1962, above all pp. 94-102.

[32] Cf. Card. Jean-Baptiste Franzelin, De divina Traditione et Scriptura (1870), tr. fr. annotated by Abbé J.-M. Gleize, La Tradition, Courrier de Rome, Condé sur Noireau (France) 2009, theses XI and XII, pp. 131-196.

[33] Jesús Sancho Bielsa, Infalibilidad del pueblo de Dios. “Sensus fidei” e infalibilidad orgánica de la Iglesia en la constitución “Lumen Gentium” del Concilio Vaticano II, Universidad de Navarra, Pamplona 1979. Dario Vitali, Sensus fidelium. Una funzione ecclesiale di intelligenza della fede (an ecclesial function of intelligence of the faith), Morcelliana, Brescia 1993; Christoph Ohly, Sensus fidei fidelium, EOS Verlag, St. Ottilien 1999; Gerardo Albano, Il sensus fidelium. La partecipazione del popolo di Dio alla funzione profetica della Chiesa, Pontificia Facoltà Teologica dell’Italia Meridionale, Extract from his doctorate dissertation, Naples 2008.

[34] Fernando Ocáriz-Antonio Blanco, Rivelazione, fede e credibilità. Corso di teologia fondamentale, Edizioni Università della Santa Croce, Rome 2001.

[35] Benedict XVI, Audience of July 7th 2010, in Insegnamenti, Libreria Editrice Vatican, Vatican City, vol. VI (2010), pp 30-31.

[36] Benedict XVI, Homily for the Holy Mass with members of the International Theological Commission, December 1^st 2009, in Insegnamenti, vol. V, 2 (2009), p. 634.

[37] the international theological commission The sensus fidei in the life of the Church, Libreria Editrice Vaticana, Vatican City, 2014.

[38] Ivi, n. 54.

[39] Ivi, n. 49.

[40] F. Ocáriz – A. Blanco, Revelation, Faith and Credibilty, p. 84.

[41] St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, II-IIae, q. 45, a. 2. See also: José Miguel Pero-Sanz, El conocimiento por connaturalidad, Eunsa, Pamplona 1964.

[42] St. Thomas aquinas, Quaestiones disputatae de veritate, q. 14, a. 10 ad 10.

[43] Id., Summa theologiae, II-IIae, q. 2, a. 3 ad 2.

[44] Id., Summa Theologiae, II-IIae, q. 1, a. 9.

[45] Id., Expositio super Ioannis Evangelium, c. 14, lectio 4.

[46] Tommaso M. Bartolomei, Natura, realtà, genesi e valore del “Sensus fidei”, p. 270.

[47] Pius XII, Enc. Humani Generis of August 12^th, 1950, in AAS 42 (1950), pp. 574-575.

[48] C. Balić, Il senso cristiano, pp. 113-114.

[49] Arnaldo Maria Lanz, Ispirazione divina, in Enciclopedia Cattolica, vol. VII, coll. 326-327.

[50] Ivi, p. 110.

[51] C. Balić, Il senso cristiano, pp. 112-113.

[52] Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange o. p., Le sens commun: la philosophie de l’être et les formules dogmatiques, Nouvelle Librairie Nationale, Paris 1922 ; mons. Antonio Livi, Filosofoia del senso commune. Logica della scienza e della fede, Edizioni Leonardo da Vinci, Rome 2010.

[53] C. Balić, Il senso cristiano, pp. 125-126.

[54] F. Ocáriz – A. Blanco, op. cit., p. 85.

[55] Card. Jean-Baptiste Franzelin, La Tradition, annotated translation of the latin text of 1870 by abbé Jean-Michel Gleize FSPX, “Courrier de Rome”, n. 184, p. 134.

[56] Ivi, n. 188, p. 136.

[57] St. Augustine, Commentary on the Gospel of St. John, Treatise 18 n. 1, in PL, vol. 35, col. 1536.

[58] J. B. Franzelin, La Tradition, n. 192, p. 138.

[59] Card. Louis Billot s.j., De Immutabilitate traditionis (1907), french tr. with footnotes of abbé J.-M. Gleize, Tradition et modernisme. De l’immuable tradition, contre la nouvelle hérésie de l’évolutionnisme, Courrier de Rome, Villegenon 2007, pp. 32, 37.

[60] B. Gherardini, Quaecumque dixero vobis, Lindau, Turin 2011, p. 170.

[61] See P. Enrico Zoffoli, La vera Chiesa di Cristo, Pro manuscripto, Roma 1990; Id., Chiesa e uomini di Chiesa. Apologetica a rovescio, Edizioni Segno, Udine 1994; Id., Potere e obbedienza nella Chiesa, Maurizio Minchella Editore, Rome 1996.

[62] The International theological commission, The sensus fidei in the life of the Church, n. 63.

[63] St. Thomas Aquinus, Sup. III Sententiarum, d. 25, q. 2, a. 1, sol. 2, ad 3.

[64] Id., Summa Theologiae, II-III, q. 33, a. 4, ad 2.

[65] See, for example, Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira’s manifesto, A política de distensão do Vaticano com os governos comunistas. Para a TFP: ometir-se ou resistir (in “Catolicismo”, n. 280 (April 1974), pp. 4-5, published in 57 newspapers of 11 countries; and the letter sent on 21 November 1983 by Mons. Marcel Lefebvre and Antonio de Castro Mayer to Pope John Paul II regarding some errors in the New Code of Canon Law and the ceremonies performed on occasion of the five hundredth anniversary of Luther (Bernard Tissier de Mallerais, Marcel Lefebvre. Une vie, Clovis, Etampes 2002, pp. 559-560).

[66] A. Xavier da Silveira, Resistenza pubblica a delle decisioni dell’autorità ecclesiastica, in Ipotesi teologica di un Papa eretico, cit., pp.141-156. Cf. also Id., Can Documents of the Magisterium of the Church contain errors?, The American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property, Spring Grove, Penn. 2015.

[67] R. de Mattei Apologia della Tradizione, Lindau, Turin 2011, pp. 146-147.

[68] The decree Lamentabili n. 6 condemns the modernist proposition according to which “In definiendis veritatibus ita collqborant discens et docens Ecclesiae, ut docenti Ecclesiae nihil supersit, nisi communes discentis opinationes sancire” (Denz-H, n. 3406) (“in defining the truth the ‘Church learning’ and the ‘Church teaching’ collaborate in such a way in defining truths that it only remains for the ‘Church teaching’ to sanction the opinions of the ‘Church learning’”).

[69] C. García Extremeño o.p., El sentido de la fe criterio de fradicio, p. 602.

[70] St. Augustine, De Praedestinatione sanctorum, 14, 27, in PL, 44, col. 980.

[71] Id., Contra secundam Iuliani responsionem imperfectum opus, tr. it. Polemica con Giuliano, II/1, Città Nuova, Rome 1993, pp. 203-205.

[72] J.-M. Gleize, Magistère et foi, in “Courrier de Rome”, n. 344 (2011), p. 3.

[73] P. Cristiano Pesch s.j., Il dovere della fede, F. Pustet, Rome 1910, p. 41.

[74] Ramon Garcia de Haro, La Vita cristiana. Corso di teologia morale fondamentale, Ares, Milan 1995, pp. 377-378.

[75] J.-H. Newman, Letter to the Duke of Norfolk, italian tr. Paoline, Milan 1999, p. 219.

[76] R. T. Calmel o.p., Breve apologia della Chiesa di sempre, italian tr. Edizioni Ichthys, Albano Laziale (Rome) 2007, p. 121.

[77] Carolus Binder, Thesis, in Passione Domini Fidem Ecclesiae in Beatissima Virgine sola remansisse, iuxta doctrinam Medi Aevii et recentioris aetate, in Maria et Ecclesia. Acta Congressus Mariologici Lourdes, vol. III, Academia Mariana Internationalis, Rome 1959, pp. 389-487.

[78] St. Bernard of Chiaravalle, In Natalis S. Victoris, s. 2, 1 in PL, 183, col. 174, quoted by mons. Antonio Piolanti, Il mistero della comunione dei santi nella rivelazione e nella teologia, Descléé, Rome 1957, p. 786.

[79] St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II-IIae, q. 129, art. 6 ad 3. Cf. Thomas de Saint Laurent , Il libro della fiducia, Ed. Fiducia, Rome 1991.

[80] Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange o.p., La Providence et la confiance en Dieu, Les Editions Militia, Montréal 1953, p. 256.

Socci: Is the “God” of “Avvenire” and Communion and Liberation now Allah?

Yesterday ‘Avvenire’ published an editorial (an editorial expresses the official line of a newspaper) and at the heart of this editorial is such rubbish, undeniably extraneous to the Catholic faith.

Unfortunately, this editorial bears the signature of a friend of mine from Communion and Liberation, but we need to be friends first and foremost of the truth, thus – with regret – I must point out that if the Bishop’s Conference newspaper proposes such an idea in its editorial, we are a step away from the abyss (and also the ridiculous). Here are the sentences upon which ‘Avvenire’ builds all its Bergoglian theorem:

‘In fact, for those who believe – Christian or Muslim or Jew – God is one, great, omnipotent, merciful. The difference, if any, regards the ‘I’.’

As you can now see ‘the Bergoglio effect’ is running wild. We are now at “parole in libertà”* Reading the CEI’s newspaper editorial, in fact, the faith of Catholics and Muslims would seem to be the same and their conception of God would seem to be identical.

Has the director of ‘Avvenire’ Tarquinio, a onetime Ratzingerian, ever heard of the Most Holy Trinity which is the heart of the Christian Faith and which Muslims consider to be the worst kind of blasphemy?

In the Dome of the Rock, built by Muslims over the Jewish holy place, replacing the Old Temple of Jerusalem, an inscription which precisely denies the Trinity stands out. Islam proclaims in that inscription: “God has no son.”

Islam was born precisely in negating the Divinity of Jesus Christ and the Triune God. It is the most radical and violent attack at the heart of the Christian Faith that has ever been seen.
Can we then say that there is no difference in the conception of God between Christians and Muslims? It is St. John the Apostle who clarifies that those who do not acknowledge the Son, do not possess the Father either:

“Who is a liar, but he who denieth that Jesus is the Christ? This is Antichrist, who denieth the Father, and the Son. Whosoever denieth the Son, the same hath not the Father. He that confesseth the Son, hath the Father also”. ( 1 John 2 vv 22-23).

It seems very clear to me. Further, it’s obvious that the abysmal difference in the conception of the ‘I’ (of the person), between Islam and Christianity, comes exactly from the abysmal difference in their conception of God.

“Avvenire” however, ignores all this. I know for sure that the editorialist has at least heard of the Most Holy Trinity and of the Trinitarian credo of Christians. Nevertheless, the times – in the Church and in Communion and Liberation – are such that the Truth of the Faith is now happily dumped in the trash, to give voice to the most utterly absurd nonsense.

It appears to me, seeing what is happening in the Church (and also in the pitiable ‘Meeting 2016’**, it can be said that many “are ashamed of Christ”, as Don Giussani *** bitterly complained about in his last interview. Today this tendency has become dominant both inside C.L. and the Church.

Simply as a memorandum I’ll report here below some passages from DOMINUS JESUS which should remind everyone what the faith of Catholics consists of:

“The Church’s constant missionary proclamation is endangered today by relativistic theories which seek to justify religious pluralism, not only de facto but also de iure (or in principle).

As a consequence, it is held that certain truths have been superseded; for example, the definitive and complete character of the revelation of Jesus Christ, the nature of Christian faith as compared with that of belief in other religions, the inspired nature of the books of Sacred Scripture, the personal unity between the Eternal Word and Jesus of Nazareth, the unity of the economy of the Incarnate Word and the Holy Spirit, the unicity and salvific universality of the mystery of Jesus Christ, the universal salvific mediation of the Church, the inseparability — while recognizing the distinction — of the kingdom of God, the kingdom of Christ, and the Church, and the subsistence of the one Church of Christ in the Catholic Church.

As a remedy for this relativistic mentality, which is becoming ever more common, it is necessary above all to reassert the definitive and complete character of the revelation of Jesus Christ
In fact, it must be firmly believed that, in the mystery of Jesus Christ, the Incarnate Son of God, who is “the way, the truth, and the life” (Jn 14:6), the full revelation of divine truth is given: “No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son wishes to reveal him” (Mt 11:27); “No one has ever seen God; God the only Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, has revealed him” (Jn 1:18); “For in Christ the whole fullness of divinity dwells in bodily form” (Col 2:9-10).

Faithful to God’s word, the Second Vatican Council teaches: “By this revelation then, the deepest truth about God and the salvation of man shines forth in Christ, who is at the same time the mediator and the fullness of all revelation.

Furthermore, “Jesus Christ, therefore, the Word made flesh, sent ‘as a man to men’, ‘speaks the words of God’ (Jn 3:34), and completes the work of salvation which his Father gave him to do (cf. Jn 5:36; 17:4). To see Jesus is to see his Father (cf. Jn 14:9). For this reason, Jesus perfected revelation by fulfilling it through his whole work of making himself present and manifesting himself: through his words and deeds, his signs and wonders, but especially through his death and glorious resurrection from the dead and finally with the sending of the Spirit of truth, he completed and perfected revelation and confirmed it with divine testimony… The Christian dispensation, therefore, as the new and definitive covenant, will never pass away, and we now await no further new public revelation before the glorious manifestation of our Lord Jesus Christ (cf. 1 Tim 6:14 and Tit 2:13)”.

Thus, the Encyclical Redemptoris missio calls the Church once again to the task of announcing the Gospel as the fullness of truth: “In this definitive Word of his revelation, God has made himself known in the fullest possible way. He has revealed to mankind who he is. This definitive self-revelation of God is the fundamental reason why the Church is missionary by her very nature. She cannot do other than proclaim the Gospel, that is, the fullness of the truth which God has enabled us to know about himself”. Only the revelation of Jesus Christ, therefore, “introduces into our history a universal and ultimate truth which stirs the human mind to ceaseless effort.”

* Parole in libertà – Words in Freedom – from the Futuristic art and literary movement (1912-1919)– in this case refers to– ‘a rejection of intellectual and academic jargon’ and free association. Founder:Filippo Tommaso Marinetti
**Communion and Liberation in Rimini
***The founder of C.L

Translation: Contributor Francesca Romana

Published by Rorate Caeli 20th August 2016

The Modernist Ruse Behind the Bergoglian Pontificate

by Christopher A. Ferrara
July 15, 2016

The very essence of Modernism is to deny what the Modernist appears to be affirming.  Doubletalk is the language of Modernist theology.

A classic example of this Modernist deception is a recent article by Thomas Rausch, SJ which appeared in Civiltà Cattolica, the supposedly authoritative pontifical Jesuit magazine whose contents are vetted by the Vatican. The title alone alerts the attentive reader that another Modernist con job is in the offing: “Doctrine at the service of the pastoral mission of the Church.”

Of course, the pastoral mission of the Church is at the service of doctrine, not the other way around, for it is doctrine — that is, the Truth — that makes us free.  The pastoral mission launched for all time by Christ Himself with the divine commission is precisely to free the lost soul from the darkness of error by preaching the truth — Catholic doctrine and dogma — not to accommodate those in darkness or, to allude to the preposterous theme of Chapter 8 of Amoris Laetitia, “integrate weakness” in the Church.

In typical Modernist fashion, Rausch affirms a Catholic truth in order to deny it throughout the rest of the article.  He quotes Saint Vincent of Lerins for the fundamental Catholic truth that legitimate development of Catholic doctrine leaves intact “the same doctrine, the same meaning and the same import­” (or more accurately, “the same doctrine, the same sense, and the same understanding”) — precisely as the First Vatican Council affirmed — and that in the course of its legitimate development, meaning only its fuller expression, doctrine “becom[es] firmer over the years, more ample in the course of time, more exalted as it advances in age.” That is, there is no change in doctrine, either in content or understanding, but only strengthening and growth of expression. Hence St. Vincent’s famous formula: “We hold that faith which has been believed everywhere, always, by all [quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est].”  There is no “God of surprises” in the thought of St. Vincent nor in the tradition of the Church.

Having affirmed this truth, however, Rausch promptly denies it, quoting his fellow Modernist Jesuit, Fr. Spadaro, for the following proposition:

St. Vincent of Lèrins makes a comparison between the biological development of man and the transmission from one era to another of the depositum fidei [deposit of faith], which grows and is strengthened with time. Here, human self-understanding changes with time and, so too is human consciousness deepened. In this regard we could think of the time when slavery was considered acceptable, or the death penalty was applied without question. So, too, this is how we grow in the understanding of the truth. Exegetes and theologians help the Church to mature in her own judgment. The other sciences and their development also help the Church in its growth in understanding. There are secondary ecclesiastical rules and precepts that at one time were effective, but now they have lost their value and meaning. The view that the Church’s teaching is a monolith to defend without nuance or different understandings is wrong.

Note the stealthy non-sequitur smuggled in via the italicized phrases:  from St. Vincent’s biological analogy regarding the growth and development of the same, unchanging doctrine in the Church, Rausch (citing only his fellow Modernist for authority) leaps to the conclusion that just as “human self-understanding changes with time” so the Church’s teaching is subject over time to “different understandings.”  Of course, that is exactly the opposite of what Rausch affirmed only a few lines earlier: i.e., St. Vincent’s insistence on “the same doctrine, the same sense, and the same understanding” down through the ages.  God does not change His understanding of the truth, and neither does the Church change her understanding of faith and morals.

The references to slavery and the death penalty are red herrings.  The Church has always condemned chattel slavery (the purported ownership of another human being and control over his natural right to marry and have children) while tolerating certain forms of bonded servitude in practice, without any “change” in the “understanding” of doctrine.

As for the death penalty, the Church has never changed her teaching on its moral legitimacy in appropriate cases.  As even the new Catechism states concerning the Fifth Commandment:  “Assuming that the guilty party’s identity and responsibility have been fully determined, the traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude recourse to the death penalty, if this is the only possible way of effectively defending human lives against the unjust aggressor.”

No matter what Francis thinks to the contrary, he cannot alter (to quote St. Vincent) what in the Church has “been believed everywhere, always, by all” regarding capital punishment; he cannot now simply declare, contrary to all of Tradition, that capital punishment violates the Fifth Commandment.  He may pronounce those words, as he has in fact done, but they cannot change a constant teaching based on Revelation itself.  The words spoken are merely the errant opinion of one Pope; and this is not the first time an outlier Pope has expressed an errant opinion.

The Catechism’s further statement that the cases in which the death penalty would be appropriate “are very rare, if not practically nonexistent” is not a constant teaching of the Church or a change in doctrine but merely a factual contention based on an opinion concerning current penal conditions: “Today, in fact, as a consequence of the possibilities which the state has for effectively preventing crime,” etc.  The Church’s doctrine does not involve surveys of worldwide penal conditions and “possibilities… for effectively preventing crime,” as to which the Magisterium has no competence.

Thus, having begun by appearing to affirm, quoting St. Vincent, that doctrine and dogma do not change, Rausch ends by affirming exactly the opposite: “The rule of faith in its essence does not change, but the expressions of the doctrine and its spontaneous understanding marked by the culture do change, and for this reason the magisterium and the councils must ensure the correct formulation of the faith.”

That “the spontaneous understanding” of doctrine as “marked by the culture” changes over time, and must be “corrected” by “the magisterium and the councils” over time to reflect these supposed changes in understanding, is pure Modernism.  With this notion, to quote Saint Pius X in his landmark encyclical on the errors of the Modernists, “the way is open to the intrinsic evolution of dogma. An immense collection of sophisms this, that ruins and destroys all religion.”

But, no matter what Francis’ subjective intentions may be, the ruination and destruction of all religion appears to be precisely the program of this pontificate, with its constant demagogic attacks on “rigorism” and “monolithic” doctrine and its relentless attempt to loosen the Church’s teaching and pastoral practice concerning sexual immorality.  As Francis declared in an address quoted by Rausch: “Christian doctrine is not a closed system, incapable of raising questions, doubts, inquiries, but is living, is able to unsettle, is able to enliven. It has a face that is supple, a body that moves and develops, flesh that is tender: Christian doctrine is called Jesus Christ.”

Actually, no.  Christian doctrine is not the literal flesh of Christ, which grew and changed as the Christ child became a man, suffered and died and then rose from the dead, but rather the Word Incarnate, which never changes and has existed from all eternity, even before it became Incarnate in the human nature the Son assumed: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God (John 1:2).”

But here, sad to say, we have more Modernist doubletalk from another Jesuit, the one who sits on the Chair of Peter.  The one who has surrounded himself with the likes of Rausch and Spadaro. The one who has, incredibly enough, commenced “the final battle between the Lord and the kingdom of Satan,” the battle against marriage and family of which Sister Lucia warned us and which is now being carried forward under the upside down slogan of “Doctrine at the service of the pastoral mission of the Church.”

May God defend His Holy Church against this onslaught, the likes of which she has not witnessed in 2,000 years.

A Historic Indictment

A Review of Antonio Socci’s La Profezia Finale

by Christopher A. Ferrara

www.cfnews.org

Introduction

Again and again the Italian Catholic and public intellectual Antonio Socci has shocked the Catholic “mainstream” with explosive exposés that confirm the diagnosis of the current crisis in the Church in “traditionalist” and “Fatimite” circles. Unlike so many of his colleagues in the Catholic commentariat, Socci will not refrain from publishing what intellectual honesty demands respecting our situation. Hence his Fourth Secret of Fatima, which placed the massive evidence of the Vatican’s failure to disclose the entire Third Secret squarely before the public eye, where it will simply not go away. Likewise, his Non é Francesco (It’s Not Francis, a play on the title of an Italian pop song) fearlessly confronted the disaster of the current pontificate, even if one demurs from Socci’s dubious arguments against the validity of Cardinal Bergoglio’s election (as Socci himself has apparently since done).
Now comes La Profezia Finale (The Final Prophecy), which consists principally of an open letter to Francis following an introductory review of approved Marian apparitions and other prophecies, especially the Message of Fatima and the integral Third Secret, which converge on each other and “indicate our time as the time of an almost apocalyptic turning point.”
As this book has thus far appeared only in Italian, and may never see an English edition—the translations herein are mine—what seems appropriate here is a book review that is more a tour of the text than a mere summary description. What elevates the work to the status of an historical document is the open letter to Francis. Here we encounter a text beneath which simmers barely concealed but entirely justified fury over the baneful effects of what Socci has dubbed “Bergoglianism”—a mixture of popular piety, leftist ideology, disdain for strict adherence to the traditional doctrines and disciplines of the Church, and a personality cult fomented and sustained by a mass media delighted with a Pope who, as Socci writes, seems to have “set about attacking the Church” rather than defending her against attackers.
The title of the open letter, “A terrible responsibility before God,” sets the tone for what is a scathing indictment of the entire pontificate, which, precisely on account of its perceived hostility to Tradition, enjoys “the unbearable general adulation of the media, above all the laicists and enemies of Christ, who propagate with regard to you a veritable cult of personality” (p. 92).
Francis, says Socci, is promoting the error of a “pure” Christianity (quoting Andreas Hoffer), “a sort of ‘superchristianity’ that purports to be “more good than even Jesus Christ himself” because it holds that “it is no longer enough to love the sinner… It is necessary even to love the sin (98).” Not without reason has the ironically entitled “Synod on the Family” been widely disparaged as “the Sin-Nod” and “the Synod Against the Family.” Indeed, as I write this piece the Catholic world awaits with dread a 200-page “Apostolic Exhortation” that may accomplish what the Synod failed to approve despite its blatant manipulation by Francis and his fiery denunciations of the “rigorists” and “Pharisees” among the Synod Fathers: the admission of public adulterers in second or even third “marriages” to Holy Communion and a greater “acceptance” of those involved in cohabitation and even “homosexual unions.”
In sum, Socci alleges, Francis has engaged in the “abolition of the external enemy and the fabrication of an internal enemy”—not the Modernists, but the defenders of the Faith in all its integrity, whom Francis habitually mocks and derides as “rigorists and fundamentalists (p. 99).” Socci charges that in the midst of the “dictatorship of relativism” lamented by Benedict XVI, which “is now consolidated in the West,” the Catholics who oppose it are “beaten with a cane and emarginated from the highest summit of the Church: by you [emphasis added, here and throughout].”
Yet, with the Church facing an apocalyptic turn of events in the realm of the spiritual, Francis has published an encyclical on ecology, addressing “the separation of waste and the abuse of plastic bottles and air conditioners.” Socci asks: “Are you sure that this is the response a Vicar of Christ should give to a truly apocalyptic spiritual crisis…?”
Socci provides a bill of particulars for his indictment under a series of headings that represent various aspects of the Bergoglian program.

Bergoglian Confusion

Under the heading “Confusion” Socci remarks the unprecedented nature of the “Jubilee of Mercy,” the first Jubilee in Church history that “does not involve the memory of the earthly life of Jesus…. [and] celebrates only an ecclesial event: the fifty years since the Second Vatican Council (p. 108).”
Mercy, Socci writes, “was not invented in 2013,” but this event—with its thousands of “mercy doors” and no clear requirements for obtaining a plenary indulgence, seems to suggest (quoting Sandro Magister) “the total cancellation of sin, no longer with any hint of the remission of the consequent penalty. The word ‘penalty’ is another of the words that have vanished (p. 113).” Even the call for repentance and conversion is “set aside because you—as you have said publicly—do not wish to convert anyone and consider proselytism to be nonsense.”
Socci cites Francis’s homily of December 8, 2015 wherein he declares how wrong it is affirm of God “that sinners are punished by His judgment, without preferring instead that they are pardoned by His mercy.” The impression is that God “has pardoned everything ‘a priori’ and that it is not even necessary to amend one’s life.” Socci notes that Our Lord Himself lamented this “terrible self-deception” in an interior locution recorded by Saint Bridget of Sweden, wherein He tells her that the Church’s foundation in the Faith has been undermined “because everyone believes in me and preaches mercy, but no one preaches and believes that I am the just judge… I will not leave unpunished the least sin, nor without a reward the least good.”
Socci asks: “But why has your pontificate taken this turn?” The rest of the open letter presents the evidence for what he believes to be the answer to that question, and the answer could not be more explosive:

“… [I]nstead of combatting errors (and certain of the erring) you have set yourself to combatting the Church…. I would remind you that the Church is the bride of Christ for which He was crucified, and the servant who has received from the King the task of defending pro tempore His bride cannot humiliate her in the public square, treating her like a naughty child…. It is necessary to kneel before the Lord, not the newspapers” (pp. 119-120).

Synod of Subversion

Under the heading “Bewilderment,” Socci trains his sights on the tempestuous Synod, which he rightly describes as “a deadly attack on the family and on the sacrament of the Eucharist that was systematically… carried forward by the Vatican summit,” “assisted for two years in the overturning of the perennial Magisterium of the Church” and was “promoted by the one who should be the custodian and defender of that teaching (p. 126).”
Socci quotes Cardinal Pell’s observation that the Synod was a “theological war” in which the indissolubility of marriage was like a flag to be captured in the “battle between what remains of Christianity in Europe and an aggressive neopaganism. All the adversaries of Christianity want the Church to capitulate on this point.”
But, writes Socci, while Francis “should have headed the resistance to the forces that wanted the Church’s capitulation, instead everyone—with ever-greater evidence and force—saw you heading the revolutionary faction (pp. 126-127).” Thus Ross Douthat of the New York Times was able to write: “in this moment the first conspirator is the Pope himself.” No wonder, Socci notes with disgust, even Newsweek magazine ran a cover story entitled “Is the Pope Catholic?”—a question that “was never posed as to your predecessors and no Catholic would ever have posed, but with you we find ourselves before a Pope who, as reported by a noted laicist daily [La Repubblica], declared literally ‘A Catholic God does not exist.’” In the same vein, The American Spectator depicted Francis “sitting atop a wrecking ball that was reducing a building [a church steeple] to dust” (p. 124).

A Meteorological Pope?

Under the heading “Climate Obsession,” Socci contrasts the apocalyptic decline in faith and morals throughout the West with this Pope’s inexplicable obsession with a supposed “climatological apocalypse.” Socci’s question is devastating: “Does the Church really have need of a climatological and meteorological Pope? (p. 131).” Noting that there is “no scientific certainty which proves indisputably that today there is a catastrophic change in climate and that this is imputable to human activity,” Socci declares to Francis:

“Yet you, Holy Father, who are always cold and detached regarding the dogma of the Church, have uncritically wed yourself to absurd ecological dogmas … making a granitic profession of faith in that absurd climatist ideology… [I]t is improper and ridiculous that a Pope makes the climate and the environment (to which he dedicated the first encyclical he penned) the heart of his preaching… The Lord did not say: ‘Convert and believe in global warming,’ but rather: “Convert and believe in the Gospel.” And He never commanded: ‘Separate your refuse’ but rather ‘Go and baptize all peoples'” (p. 134).

Socci’s scalding conclusion (quoting an editorial by Riccardo Cascioli) is that “One has the impression that the fundamental message of the Church has changed: ‘From the savior of men to the savior of the planet.’”

Lions and Tigers and Bears

Under the heading “Disturbing Show,” Socci denounces the preposterous and scandalous ecological light show projected onto the façade of Saint Peter’s on no less than the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. Entitled Fiat Lux (Let there be Light), the show was “a mocking challenge and a parody of the Gospel in which the expression indicates the act of the Creator and then identifies the Light that is Christ who has come to illuminate the darkness.”
Replete with pictures of animals but devoid of even a hint of Christian symbolism, this spectacle represents a complete reversal of the message of the Gospel: “the world projects its light on the Church immersed in darkness. And in that show the Church receives the light of the world (p. 138).” And as the world’s imagery was cast onto the basilica that stands at the heart of the Church, the light on the crèche in Saint Peter’s Square was extinguished because “the light of the Baby Jesus must never disturb the staging of the new ecological religion (p. 139).”
Here Socci points to a stunningly appropriate passage in Scripture, from the Epistle to the Romans: “For professing themselves to be wise, they became fools. And they changed the glory of the incorruptible God into the likeness of the image of a corruptible man, and of birds, and of four-footed beasts, and of creeping things (Rom. 1:22-23).” And here yet another devastating assessment thrown at the feet of Francis:

“But above all, Father Bergoglio [a reference to the Pope’s penchant for introducing himself thus], how is it possible that you do not notice and do not indicate other emergencies than those of the climate, or at least with equal insistence? The apostasy of entire peoples from the faith of the true God is not a drama that merits your most ardent appeals? The war against the family and against life? The neglect of Christ and the massacre of Christian communities? It seems that only the environment and other themes of the religion of political correctness merit your passion.

“A great French intellectual, Alain Finkielkraut, has described you as “Supreme Pontiff of the world journalistic ideology.” Is he wrong? Does he exaggerate?

“In effect, in ‘your’ Church it seems that the themes of separating refuse and recycling take precedence over the tragedy of entire peoples who, in the turn of a few years, have abandoned the faith. You sound the alarm over “global warming” while the Church for two millennia has sounded it concerning the fire of Hell” (p. 142).

From here, Socci launches into a discussion of the Message of Fatima and precisely its warnings about the loss of souls in Hell for all eternity. The Madonna of Fatima, he writes, “did not present the calculations of environmentalists on the climate of the planet, but caused the little children to see the eternal fire of Hell, and told them, sadly: ‘You have seen Hell, where the souls of poor sinners go. To save them, God wishes to establish in the world devotion to my Immaculate Heart. Many souls go to Hell because they have no one to pray and make sacrifices for them.”
This, Socci continues, “is the real tragedy, Holy Father, the eternal perdition of multitudes. Not—if you will permit me—the loss of biodiversity, or at least not for us Christians. Yet you never speak of it. Rather, sometimes you almost induce the belief that everyone will be saved because ‘God does not condemn. (p. 142-143).’”
Summing up his unconcealed contempt for the Pope’s preoccupation with global warming rather than the eternal fire of which Our Lady came to warn the world at Fatima, Socci writes:

“Before the spiritual catastrophe of the eternal perdition of multitudes, which induced the mother of God to come earnestly to Earth, I find it frankly incomprehensible that you preoccupy yourself for the most part—as you did in your encyclical Laudato si —with biodiversity, the fate of worms and little reptiles, the lakes, and the abuse of plastic bottles and air-conditioning” (p. 148).

A Pope Who Doesn’t Like Catholics?

Socci’s indictment next proceeds to the heading “Attack on the Faith,” a reference to enemies within the Church since Vatican II, whose subversion has been lamented (too little and too late) by every Pope since the Council, including Benedict XVI. It was Benedict who (during the Mass for the opening of the conclave that elected him) declared that today having “a clear and certain faith” is denounced as “fundamentalism.” Citing that testimony, Socci throws a series of gauntlets Francis’s feet:

“I invite you, Father Bergoglio, to reread attentively these words because they describe dramatically what is occurring during your pontificate. In fact, it is precisely you personally, Holy Father, who accuse of ‘fundamentalism’ those who have a clear and certain faith and bear witness to their fidelity to Catholic doctrine….

“You, curiously, are convinced that the danger for the Church of today is Christians fervent in their faith and those pastors who defend the Catholic creed. In your Evangelii gaudium you attack “some who dream of a monolithic doctrine” and those who “use a language completely orthodox.”

“Should we then prefer those who are carried here and there by every ideology and use heretical language? Evidently yes, seeing that they are never attacked by you.

“If one chooses any day, one will almost always find that you, in your discourse, attack those you call ‘rigorists,’ ‘rigid,’ that is, men with fervent faith, whom you identify with ‘Scribes and Pharisees'” (p. 153-155).

Socci does not mince words in addressing Francis’s well-known constant resort to a false antithesis between mercy and doctrinal rigor, citing one of the innumerable discourses in which Francis declares that so-called “doctors of the law,” who know doctrine well, are estranged from the mercy of God. “But you, Holy Father,” writes Socci:

“should overcome your personal resentment toward those who have studied; you should know that, in the Christian horizon, it is completely absurd to oppose mercy to Truth, because both are incarnated in the same Jesus Christ. Thus it is false to oppose doctrine to the pastoral, because that would be to oppose the Logos (doctrine) to the Good Shepherd (the Truth made flesh): Jesus is the Logos (the Truth made flesh) and, at the same time, the Good Shepherd” (p. 159).

Socci also focuses on Francis’s justly infamous speech attacking his conservative opposition at the close of Synod 2016, wherein he blasted the prelates who had resisted having the pre-written, heterodox Instrumentum laboris shoved down their throats as “the Synod’s” final report. As Francis declared in that harangue, his opponents had:

“… closed hearts that often hide even behind the teaching of the Church, or behind good intentions, to sit in the chair of Moses and judge, sometimes with superficiality and superiority, to judge difficult cases and wounded families….

“The true defenders of doctrine are not those who defend the letter but the spirit; not the idea but the man; not the formula, but the gratuitous love of God and of his pardon.”

Here we see the umpteenth example of Francis’ penchant for the false antithesis: the letter versus the “spirit” of doctrine; the idea versus the man; the “formula” versus the love of God and his pardon. But there is no opposition at all between these concepts; in fact, they are inseparable.
Socci has had quite enough of the past three years of this sort of Modernist sophistry, and he fires with both barrels:

“So doing, do you not think that you have disqualified your predecessors and all the Magisterium of the Church, in order to affirm your strictly personal concept of mercy different from the doctrine of the Church?…

“Evidently, even Jesus would have been, according to you, doctrinaire, a rigorist, one who defends the idea instead of the man.

“In effect—applying your criterion—we would have to say that Jesus would not have been accepted to a seminary during your pontificate because he was the most fundamentalist of all; in fact, not only was he certain of the truth, but he proclaimed himself the Truth made flesh (‘I am the way, the truth, and the life.’ Jn 14,6).”

Catholic Divorce?

Next in the dock, under the heading “Nullity,” is Francis’s surprise attack on the process for determining matrimonial nullity, which Francis “streamlined” with new canons devised in semi-secrecy and without consulting any competent Vatican dicastery. The net effect of the two motu proprios introducing these “reforms,” Mitis Iudex Jesus (for the western Church) and Mitis et Misericors (for the eastern Church) is, Socci writes, “a total overturning of perspective: no longer the defense of the sacrament above all (for the salvation of souls), but rather the ease and speed of obtaining an annulment (p. 168).”
Socci notes Francis’s curious insistence on the notion of “marital failure” in the sense of a breakdown in relations, which he seems to equate with grounds for nullity (original nonexistence) of the marriage. But, as Socci rightly observes, “there are many failed marriages that are perfectly valid” while, on the other hand, “there are many ‘null’ marriages (that is, they have never been such from the beginning) that are not failed” in terms of personal relations (p. 169). What Francis has done with his “reforms,” says Socci, is to authorize “imposition of a sentence of nullity as therapy for couples in crisis,” producing what many commentators have termed “Catholic divorce.”
The net result, Socci concludes, is “a true revolution in the history of the Church.” And the supreme irony of this revolution is that not even Cardinal Kasper called for it, but rather, in his intervention at the Consistory of February 2014, rejected precisely “the hypothesis of a generous broadening of the procedure for matrimonial nullity” because “it would create the dangerous impression that the Church is proceeding in a dishonest way to concede what are in reality divorces (p. 171).”
Incredibly, then, Francis has outdone even Kasper in his attack on the foundations of the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony. As I have noted elsewhere, Francis admits in his own motu proprio the danger of what he has done: “It did not however escape me that a shortened procedure may endanger the principle of the indissolubility of marriage…”
Returning once again to the theme of Fatima, Socci reminds us that Sister Lucia warned Cardinal Caffarra in a letter to the prelate that “The final conflict between the Lord and the reign of Satan will be over marriage and the family.” Socci here pleads with Francis to undo his improvident reform: “I fervently hope that you will withdraw everything. As soon as possible (p. 173).”

The Consequences of Liberalization

Reaching the climax of his long indictment, Socci, under the heading “A Catastrophic Balance,” drops one bomb after another in assessing the claim that Francis is merely attempting to attract souls by mitigating the Church’s supposed rigor. It suffices merely to recite Socci’s explosive remarks:

• “No one has ever held that in order to draw people to the Gospel it is necessary to disown or overturn the Gospel.”

• “Of the many saints and great Popes who have evangelized peoples and entire continents, no one has ever done it by watering down and adulterating the doctrine of the Faith.”

• “We must be the salt of the earth and the salt burns wounds. Like the truth. We must choose: either with Him or against Him. Either salvation or perdition.”

• “[W]henever a religious confession lowers the bar to accommodate worldly customs or to attract adherents it decrees its own suicide.” pp. 177-179.

Socci cites the study of a renowned sociologist whose data confirm that Christian religious confessions that liberalize begin immediately to decline, while those that maintain or return to their traditions thrive, and that this is precisely what has happened in the liberalized Catholic Church of the post-Vatican II epoch.
In this connection, Socci presents Francis with “heavily negative data regarding you personally,” showing that the vaunted “Francis effect” has really meant a steady decline in attendance at papal audiences, despite “the always more powerful planetary propaganda machine that daily hails and exalts your smallest gesture, mythologizing it more than any star.” In fact, he notes, despite the myth that Benedict was “a cold German professor, from whom the people felt distant, in reality the people were much more attracted by Benedict XVI,” whose audience addresses were far better attended. And even though, in contrast to Francis, the media were uniformly hostile to Benedict, “evidently the Christian people, even when bombarded by the media, recognized the authentic accent that its heart expected (p. 180-181). ”
In sum, Socci concludes:

“Evidently your message not only does not attract the distant, but even causes those near to run away… You speak instead to the elite, who have acclaimed you, feeling themselves confirmed in their laicist convictions. Your personal popularity has grown to excess. They call it the ‘Bergoglio effect,’ believing that the interested applause of unbelievers and the adulation of the media will fill the churches again.

“Instead, data in hand, we can say that for the Church the Bergoglio effect has been the contrary. The contents of your magisterium have distanced the people from religious practice rather than attracting them to it” (pp. 181-182).

The Franciscan Friars Affair

Socci next treats of the case of Francis’s brutal persecution of the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate (FFI), dismembered and destroyed by his personally appointed “apostolic commissioner” without any concrete reason ever having been given to the victims. Here Socci recalls the astounding remarks by Francis during a meeting with some members of the already-shattered FFI, wherein, at one and the same, he admits that he approved the FFI’s destruction but that the FFI has suffered persecution by “the demon” on account of its devotion to Mary! To which demon is Francis referring? Socci protests to Francis that

“their [the FFI’s] true ‘crime’ is that of being true Christians, fervent in the Faith, those you harshly describe as ‘fundamentalists’ and who are in reality only living the authentic Gospel. Dear Father, reverse a decision for which one day God could ask you to account…. You have many who adulate you, but few among your fans pray for you; surely very few pray for you as much as the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate “(p. 186).

A Love Affair with Lutherans

After noting that Francis evinces no concern over the internal enemies of the Church who, as Saint Pius X warned, work to undermine the foundations of the faith, Socci next discusses how, on the contrary, Francis seems to have little regard for the doctrinal differences between Catholicism and the various forms of Protestantism.
Under the heading “In the House of Luther,” Socci recalls Francis’s scandalous appearance at a Lutheran church in Rome to participate in a Sunday service during which he rambled on for some ten minutes in answer to a woman’s question about why a Lutheran cannot receive Holy Communion. In the process he characterized the Catholic dogma on transubstantiation as a mere “interpretation” differing from the Lutheran view, ultimately rather coyly suggesting that the woman to “talk to the Lord” about whether she should receive Communion from a Catholic priest—an act of sacrilege. “I dare not say more,” said Francis, having already said quite enough.
Noting Luther’s venomous hatred of the Mass, Socci asks Francis: “how is it possible not to be disturbed? (p. 193).” Dialogue with Lutherans, he writes, must involve “reciprocal clarity, not tossing into the thorn bush the heart of the Catholic faith (p. 194).” Here Socci quotes what may be the single most outrageous remark Francis has ever made. Said Francis to the Lutherans on that occasion:

“The final choice will be definitive. And what will be the questions that the Lord will ask us that day: ‘Did you go to Mass? Did you have a good catechesis?’ No, the questions will be on the poor, because poverty is at the center of the Gospel.”

Socci reminds Francis of what any well-formed child would understand: the infinite value of the Eucharist, Eucharistic adoration, and its worthy reception as compared to even a mountain of good works for the poor:

“But instead you, Father Bergoglio, seem to affirm that what counts are humanitarian merits that we acquire ourselves with our activism, with our ‘service’ to the poor.”

“This would seem to be a Pelagian idea. But—I repeat—the most amazing thing is that you contrapose [yet another false antitheses] “serving the poor” to the Mass, which almost reduces it to something superfluous (along with catechesis)” (p. 197).

Quoting the famous saying of Padre Pio that “It would be better for the world to be without the sun than without Holy Mass,” Socci confronts Francis with the implications of his own words and deeds over the past three years, including his curious refusal to kneel before the Blessed Sacrament:

“Permit me to confide to you, Father Bergoglio, that—from the entirety of your words and gestures—one gets the impression that you have some problem with the Holy Eucharist, and that you do not really comprehend its value and its reality.

“There are so many facts and actions that raise this doubt. The most evident… is your decision not to kneel before the Sacrament during the Consecration at Mass, nor in front of the tabernacle, nor during Eucharistic adoration (moreover you do not participate in the Corpus Christi procession in which your predecessors, kneeling, always participated) (p. 200).

And yet, Socci notes, Francis had no problem kneeling when, as Archbishop of Buenos Aires, he knelt to receive “the laying on of hands at the convention of Pentecostals in the Luna Park Stadium… Suffice it to say that your intermittent pain in the knees, which seems to arise only when before the Most Blessed Sacrament, beyond seeming rather bizarre, would not appear to be an acceptable explanation (p. 201).”

An Unconscious Joachimist?

This strange attitude toward the Holy Eucharist leads Socci to pose this challenge to Francis regarding his apparent affection for Protestantism:

“… one has the impression that behind your particular opening to the Protestant world and behind your hostility to the structure of the Church—that is, to the visible Church and her doctrine, which they would surpass by listening to the Holy Spirit—flickers a sort of “Church of the spirit,” longed-for in certain affirmations you made in the meeting with Pentecostals at Caserta, on July 28, 2014… As if the Catholic Church, with its doctrinal structure and hierarchy, would in some way supersede itself in the same way the Old passed to the New Covenant (and he who “lingers” to defend doctrine would be… like the ancient Scribes and Pharisees)” (p. 204-205).

Here Socci levels the stunning accusation that Francis exhibits a “sort of unconscious mitigated Joachimism”—a reference to Joachim of Fiore, the deluded 12th century “visionary” who imagined a coming new age of the Holy Spirit that would supersede even the New Testament.

Another Honorius?

Socci’s indictment (p. 207) reaches it climax with the suggestion that Francis, being a Pope who “promotes his own ideas,” may go the way of another Pope who did the same: Honorius (r. 625-628), who was posthumously anathematized by an ecumenical council—a sentence confirmed his own successor, Leo II—for aiding and abetting the spread of the “monothelite” heresy (denying any human will in Christ). Socci levels against Francis the same condemnation Leo II leveled against Honorius: “Those who aroused contention against the purity of apostolic tradition, at their death certainly received eternal condemnation, [including] Honorius who, rather than extinguishing the flame of heresy, as befits apostolic authority, fed it by his neglect.”

Paying Homage to Dictators

Socci nears the end of his indictment with a positively scalding account of Francis’s visit to Cuba, where he said nothing about the tyranny under which it suffers while he condemned the “god of money” in capitalist countries. Unlike John Paul II and Benedict XVI, who demanded the release of prisoners and met Fidel Castro on neutral ground (John Paul) or received him at the apostolic nunciature in Havana (Benedict), Francis made no demands on the Castro regime, either of Fidel or his brother Raul, and conducted a veritable pilgrimage to Fidel’s home, where the bloody dictator received the Pope in audience.
Socci expresses entirely appropriate disgust at Francis’s acceptance from Raul of the gift of a crucifix supposedly made from the oars of “refugee” rowboats in the Mediterranean—no rowboats were involved. Yet Francis ignored the 100,000 refugees who have drowned attempting to escape the Castro brothers’ communist prison state. Socci concludes: “These are the tyrants you to whom you have paid homage and who have given you the gift of your ‘migrants’ (p. 214).”

The Folly of “Open Borders”

The indictment proceeds to the heading “Walls,” wherein Socci dismantles Francis’s demagogic insistence on “an indiscriminate opening of the frontier that would destabilize peoples, states and systems.”
Socci points out that not only Saint Thomas but the Bible itself defends the use of “walls” to protect the integrity of nations and peoples from invasion and malign influences—the Vatican walls themselves being an example of this—and that the modern national frontier is not a “wall” to be denounced as unchristian.
Socci asks Francis: “Is it possible that you do not perceive a phenomenon as macroscopic as the failure of assimilation? And can you not see the unresolved problem that Islam has with violence, as Benedict XVI explained at Regensburg? (p. 217).”

The Summation

The indictment concludes under the heading “the Poor,” wherein Socci, son of a miner, protests Francis’s constant talk of the poor as “unacceptable: because it is in a mode that is ideological, demagogic and sociological…. But the Church does not dream of instrumentalizing the poor, making of them an ideological-theological category like that Argentine theology of liberation from which it emerges…”
Summing up his whole indictment, Socci writes:

“the first poverty of peoples is not to know Christ… This is the problem, Holy Father. It is necessary to announce to men the only one who can save them, because this is what really counts, as Jesus tirelessly warns: “What profit a man if gains the whole world but loses his soul?…”

“So, you should reverse the entire orientation of your papacy: Thus, instead of occupying yourself with separating refuse, you will defend sound Catholic doctrine against attacks by the world and by Modernism; instead of obsessively sounding the alarm about the climate, you will warn humanity about the overhanging threat of eternal damnation; instead of an encyclical on the fate of worms and little reptiles, you will write one on the persecuted Christians and the world’s hatred of the Savior….

“As Vito Messori said to then Cardinal Ratzinger: ‘Without a vision of the mystery of the Church that is also supernatural and not only sociological, Christology itself loses its reference to God: a purely human structure ends by corresponding to a human project. The Gospel becomes the Jesus Project, the social liberation project, or other historical projects… which seem religious only in appearance, but are atheistic in substance… ‘”(p. 224).

The closing words of this truly historic document are Socci’s personal plea to Francis to change his course before it is too late:

“Do not be afraid of disappointing the world, which until now has enthusiastically applauded you… The only fear to have is that of disappointing God….

“Dear Pope Francis, be one of our true pastors on the way of Christ, with Pope Benedict who assists you with prayer and advice: also assist the Church, today bewildered and confused, to recover the way of its Savior and thus reignite the light that will enable humanity not to lose itself in an abyss of violence. All of the saints of heaven pray for this….”

Francis Applies the Butter

Shortly after publication of La Profezia Finale, Socci received a handwritten letter from none other than Francis himself. Addressed to “dear brother,” the letter was not unlike the telephone call Francis made to Mario Palmaro, late co-author of another searing critique of the pontificate bluntly entitled “We Do Not Like This Pope.” The gist of the letter and the phone call alike was the same: I appreciate your criticism of me.
One can be forgiven for thinking that so clever an ecclesial politician as Francis might have in mind a bit of buttering up of his most effective and widely read critics. But the letter to Socci (as well as the phone call to Palmaro) puts to rest any suggestion that “traditionalists” offend the Faith when they publish strong criticism of this Pope. Francis himself explodes that contention.
In any case, Socci, while not unmoved by this personal attention from the Supreme Pontiff, has not backed even one step away from his indictment. His most recent column (as of this writing) laments the enormous damage “the ‘new Church’ of Bergoglio” is causing to “the Church of all time,” threatening to be “more devastating than Luther.”
In closing one must ask: Where are the prelates who, undoubtedly seeing what Socci sees, will come forward to stand with him—and with concerned laity around the world—in opposition to the rushing tide of “Bergoglianism,” a phenomenon unlike anything seen before in the annals of the papacy.
Whether or not you read Italian, buy this book.* You will be the owner of a piece of history. And may God bless and protect its courageous author.

* Book also available on Kindle (Italian only)

The Real Umberto Eco: How a deeply Catholic young man became an Apostle of Anti-Catholicism

Umberto Eco: the sad parable of a nominalist

Roberto de Mattei

Corrispondenza Romana

February 24, 2016 (Courtesy of Rorate Caeli)

On February 23rd 2016, the writer Umberto Eco, who passed way on February 19th at the age of 84, had his “non-religious” funeral. Eco was one of the worst products of 20th century Italian/ Turin culture. His Turin origins need to be emphasized as Piedmont was a mine of great saints in the 19th century and of secularist, anti-Catholic intellectuals in the 20th century.

The “Turin School”, described well by Augusto Del Noce, passed from idealism to Illuminist-Marxism, maintaining its anti-Catholic, immanentist essence, thanks to the influence of Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) and Piero Gobetti (1901-1925). After the Second World War, this cultural line exercised such a strong influence which quite a few Catholics were attracted to.

Umberto Eco, born in Alessandria in 1932, a diocesan leader at the age of 16 in Catholic Action, was, as he himself reveals, not only an activist, but a “daily communicant”. He took part in the 1948 electoral campaign by putting up posters and distributing anti-Communist flyers. He subsequently collaborated with the presidency of Catholic Action in Rome, while studying at the University of Turin, where he graduated in 1954 with a thesis on the aesthetics of St. Thomas Aquinas, afterwards published in the only book of his worth reading (The Aesthetic Problem in St. Thomas, 1956). It was also in 1954 that he abandoned the Catholic faith.

How did his apostasy come about? Certainly it was reasoned, convinced and definitive. Eco said with derision, that he had lost the faith while reading Thomas Aquinas. However, you don’t lose the faith, you reject it and at the origin of his estrangement from the truth is not St. Thomas but philosophical Nominalism, a decadent and deformed interpretation of Thomist doctrine.

Eco was right to the very end, a radical nominalist, for whom there are no universal truths, but only names, signs and conventions. The father of Nominalism, William of Ockham, is portrayed in William of Basekerville, the protagonist of his most famous novel, The Name of the Rose (1940), which closes with a nominalist motto: «Stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus». The essence of the rose (as in everything) is reduced to a name [a word]; we have but names, appearances, illusions, no truth and no certainty. Another character in the novel, Adso, states: «Gott ist ein lautes Nichts», “God is pure nothing”. Everything is, in the final analysis, a game, a dance, about nothing. The concept is the same in another philosophical novel of his, Foucault’s Pendulum (1989). Behind the metaphor of the pendulum there is a God who is merged with the void, evil and absolute darkness.

The true pendulum of Eco’s thought, was, in reality, his vacillation between the absolute rationalism of the Enlightment and the irrationality of occultism: the Kabbalah, gnosis, which he fought against but was nevertheless morbidly attracted to. If Nominalism empties reality of any meaning, the inevitable outcome is indeed a fall into irrationality. In order get out of this, all that’s left is absolute skepticism. If Norberto Bobbio (1909-2004) is the neo-Kantian version of Turin Enlightenment in the 20th century, Umberto Eco incarnates its neo-libertine version.

One of his last novels, The Prague Cemetery (2010) is an implicit apologia of the moral cynicism which necessarily follows the absence of what is true and good. In the more than five hundred pages of the book, there isn’t a single passionate ideal, nor a figure moved by love or idealism. “Hate is the true primordial passion. It is love that is an abnormal situation” Eco has Rachkovskij, one of the protagonists, say. In any case, with all the despicable characters and criminal activities the book is stuffed with, his pages lack that tragic note, which is the only thing that makes for a great literary work. The tone is sarcastic of the type of comedy where the author mocks everything and everyone, seeing that the only thing he really believes in are filets de barbue sauce hollandaise eaten at Laperouse al quais des Grands-Augustin, le écrevisses bordelaises or le mousses de Volailles at Café Anglais in rue Gramont and the filets de poularde piqués aux truffes at Rocher du Cancale in rue Montorgueil. Food is the only thing that emerges triumphant from the novel, and is continually celebrated by the protagonist, who confesses: “Food has always satisfied me more than sex. Perhaps an imprint left on me by the priests.” It is not by chance, that in 1992, Eco was taken to hospital and given to be almost dead as a result of colossal indigestion.

Eco was technically a great juggler, given that he made a mockery of everyone: his readers, his critics and most of all the Catholics who invited him to their conferences like he was some kind of oracle. At the time of the referendum for divorce in 1974, he spoke in jest to the supporters of divorce from the columns of “Espresso” * by appealing for intelligent planning in their propagandistic campaign, with the following words: “The referendum campaign will have to be free from supposed theories, unscrupulous, immediate and steered to have effect in a short period of time. Targeted especially at a public which is easy prey to emotive solicitations, it will have to sell a positive image of divorce which exactly overturns the emotive appeals of the opposing side […]. The themes of this “sales” campaign should be: divorce is good for the family, divorce is good for women, divorce is good for children […]. For years Italian advertisers have been experiencing a crisis of identity: well-educated and informed, they know they are the object of sociological criticism, which shows them as faithful servants of consumerist power […]. They attempt free -publicity campaigns in defense of the environment and for the donation of blood. Yet, they feel excluded from the great problems of their time and are condemned to the selling of soap. The battle for the referendum will be the proof of the sincerity of many, oft-declared, civic aspirations. All that’s needed is for a group of expert, dynamic, unscrupulous, democratic agencies to co-ordinate and auto-finance support of this type of campaign. All that’s needed is a round of telephone-calls, two meetings and a month of intense work. The destruction of a taboo in a few short months is a challenge that should make the mouth water of any advertising agent who loves his job […].

The taboo to destroy was the family, which for a relativist like him, had no reason at all to exist. Since 1974, the destruction of the family has continued in successive stages. Eco happily went along with it, leaving the scene [right] on the eve of the approval of homosexual unions – the final outcome of the introduction of divorce some forty years ago. The natural family has been substituted by an unnatural one. Relativism celebrates its apparent victory.

Umberto Eco contributed significantly to the work of desecrating the natural, Christian order of things, yet what he will have to answer for is not so much the evil he did, as much as the good he could have done if he hadn’t rejected the Truth. What’s the use of forty honoris causa degrees and the sale of thirty million copies of one single book (The Name of the Rose) if you don’t gain eternal life? The young, Catholic Action activist could have been a St. Francis Xavier in this mission land which is the Europe of today. Yet he didn’t accept the words that St. Ignatius said to St. Francis Xavier and that God has echoing in every Christian heart: “What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world, but suffers the loss of his own soul?”
[*Espresso –weekly magazine of the daily newspaper “La Repubblica” | Translation: Contributor Francesca Romana.]

Take Courage and Prepare for Battle

POST-SYNOD CHURCH & UNBELIEVERS IN THE HIERARCHY

Rorate Caeli: In the recent Synod, we will not know the legal impact it will have on the Church for some time, as it’s up to Pope Francis to move next. Regardless of the eventual outcome, for all intent and purposes, is there already a schism in the Church? And, if so, what does it mean practically speaking? How will it manifest itself for typical Catholics in the pews?

H.E. Schneider: Schism means according to the definition of the Code of Canon Law, can. 751: The refusal of submission to the Supreme Pontiff or of communion with those members of the Church who are submitted to the Supreme Pontiff. One has to distinguish the defect in belief or heresy from schism. The defect in belief or heresy is indeed a greater sin than schism, as Saint Thomas Aquinas said: “Unbelief is a sin committed against God Himself, according as He is Himself the First Truth, on which faith is founded; whereas schism is opposed to ecclesiastical unity, which is a lesser good than God Himself. Wherefore the sin of unbelief is generically more grievous than the sin of schism” (II-II, q. 39, a. 2 c).

The very crisis of the Church in our days consists in the ever growing phenomenon that those who don’t fully believe and profess the integrity of the Catholic faith frequently occupy strategic positions in the life of the Church, such as professors of theology, educators in seminaries, religious superiors, parish priests and even bishops and cardinals. And these people with their defective faith profess themselves as being submitted to the Pope.

The height of confusion and absurdity manifests itself when such semi-heretical clerics accuse those who defend the purity and integrity of the Catholic faith as being against the Pope – as being according to their opinion in some way schismatics. For simple Catholics in the pews, such a situation of confusion is a real challenge of their faith, in the indestructibility of the Church. They have to keep strong the integrity of their faith according to the immutable Catholic truths, which were handed over by our fore-fathers, and which we find in in the Traditional catechisms and in the works of the Fathers and of the Doctors of the Church.

Rorate Caeli: Speaking of typical Catholics, what will the typical parish priest face now that he didn’t face before the Synod began? What pressures, such as the washing of women’s feet on Maundy Thursday after the example of Francis, will burden the parish priest even more than he is burdened today?

H.E. Schneider: A typical Catholic parish priest should know well the perennial sense of the Catholic faith, the perennial sense as well of the laws of the Catholic liturgy and, knowing this, he should have an interior sureness and firmness. He should always remember the Catholic principle of discernment: “Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus”, i.e. “What has been always, everywhere and from all” believed and practiced.

The categories “always, everywhere, all” are not to be understood in an arithmetical, but in a moral sense. A concrete criterion for discernment is this: “Does this change in a doctrinal affirmation, in a pastoral or in a liturgical practice constitute a rupture with the centuries-old, or even with the millennial past? And does this innovation really make the faith shine clearer and brighter? Does this liturgical innovation bring to us closer the sanctity of God, or manifest deeper and more beautiful the Divine mysteries? Does this disciplinary innovation really increase a greater zeal for the holiness of life?”

As concretely to the innovation of washing the feet of women during the Holy Mass of the Last Supper on Holy Thursday: This Holy Mass celebrates the commemoration of the institution of the sacraments of the Eucharist and the Priesthood. Therefore, the foot washing of women along with the men not only distracts from the main focus on Eucharist and on Priesthood, but generates confusion regarding the historical symbolism of the “twelve” and of the apostles being of male sex. The universal tradition of the Church never allowed the foot washing during the Holy Mass, but instead outside of Mass, in a special ceremony.

By the way: the public washing and usually also kissing of the feet of women on the part of a man, in our case, of a priest or a bishop, is considered by every person of common sense in all cultures as being improper and even indecent. Thanks be to God no priest or bishop is obliged to wash publicly the feet of women on Holy Thursday, for there is no binding norm for it, and the foot washing itself is only facultative.

PRIESTLY FRATERNITY OF ST. PIUS X (SSPX)

Rorate Caeli: A non-typical situation in the church is the Priestly Society of St. Pius X (SSPX). Why does Your Excellency think that so many Catholics are afraid of the SSPX or anxious about any association with it? From what Your Excellency has seen, what gifts do you think the SSPX can bring to the mainstream Church?

H.E. Schneider: When someone or something is unimportant and weak, nobody has fear of it. Those who have fear of the Priestly Society of St. Pius X ultimately have fear of the perennial Catholic truths and of its demands in the moral and the liturgical domain.

When the SSPX tries to believe, to worship and to live morally the way our fore-fathers and the best-known Saints did during a millennial period, then one has to consider the life and the work of these Catholic priests and faithful of the SSPX as a gift for the Church in our days – even as one of the several instruments which the Divine Providence uses to remedy the enormity of the current general crisis of the faith, of the morals and of the liturgy inside the Church.

In some sectors of the SSPX there are, however, as it is the case in every human society some eccentric personalities. They have a method and a mindset which lack justice and charity and consequently the true “sentire cum ecclesia,” and there is the danger of an ecclesial autocephaly and to be the last judicial instance in the Church. However, to my knowledge, the healthier part corresponds to the major part of the SSPX and I consider their General Superior, His Excellency Monsignor Bernard Fellay, as an exemplarily and true Catholic bishop. There is some hope for a canonical recognition of the SPPX.

THE SYNOD AND PAPALOTRY

Rorate Caeli: Back on the Synod, while focusing on tradition, does Your Excellency believe that the changes in the Roman liturgy post-Vatican II contributed to the current crisis in the Church, the crisis of marriage, the family and societal morality in general??

H.E. Schneider: I wouldn’t affirm this in such a way. Indeed the very source of the current crisis in the Church, the crisis of marriage, of the family and of the morality in general is not the liturgical reform, but the defects in faith, the doctrinal relativism, from which flows the moral and liturgical relativism. For, if I believe in a defective manner, I will live a defective moral life and I will worship in a defective, indifferent manner. It is necessary first to restore the clearness and firmness of the doctrine of faith and of morals in all levels and, from there, start to improve the liturgy. The integrity and the beauty of the faith demands the integrity and the beauty of one’s moral life and this demands the integrity and the beauty of the public worship.

Rorate Caeli: Still on the Synod, it is clear to those with eyes to see that Pope Francis caused confusion instead of clarity in the Synod process, and encouraged a turn toward rupture by elevating the role of Cardinals Kaspar and Danneels, Archbishop Cupich, etc. What is the proper attitude a Catholic should have towards the pope in these troubled times? Are Catholics obliged to make their views known and “resist” as Cardinal Burke said in an interview last year with us, even when their views are critical of the pope?

H.E. Schneider: For several past generations until our days there reigns in the life of the Church a kind of “pope-centrism” or a kind of “papolatria” which is undoubtedly excessive compared with the moderate and supernatural vision of the person of the Pope and his due veneration in the past times. Such an excessive attitude towards the person of the Pope generates in the practice an excessive and wrong theological meaning regarding the dogma of the Papal infallibility.

If the Pope would tell the entire church to do something, which would directly damage an unchangeable Divine truth or a Divine commandment, every Catholic would have the right to correct him in a due respectful form, moved out of reverence and love for the sacred office, and person of the Pope. The Church is not the private property of the Pope. The Pope can’t say “I am the Church,” as it did the French king Louis XIV, who said: “L’État c’est moi.” The Pope is only the Vicar, not the successor of Christ.

The concerns about the purity of the faith is ultimately a matter of all members of the Church, which is one, and a unique living body. In the ancient times before entrusting to someone the office of a priest and of a bishop, the faithful were asked if they can guarantee that the candidate had the right faith, and a high moral conduct. The old Pontificale Romanum says: “The captain of a ship and its passengers alike have reason to feel safe or else in danger on a voyage, therefore they ought to be of one mind in their common interests.” It was the Second Vatican Council, which very much encouraged the lay faithful to contribute to the authentic good of the Church, in strengthening the faith.

I think in a time in which a great part of the holders of the office of the Magisterium are negligent in their sacred duty, the Holy Spirit calls today, namely the faithful, to step into the breach and defend courageously with an authentic “sentire cum ecclesia” the Catholic faith.

TRADITION AND ITS ENEMIES FROM WITHIN

Rorate Caeli: Is the pope the measure of tradition, or is he measured by tradition? And should faithful Catholics pray for a traditional pope to arrive soon?

H.E. Schneider: The Pope is surely not the measure of tradition, but on the contrary. We must always bear in mind the following dogmatic teaching of the First Vatican Council: The office of the successors of Peter does not consist in making known some new doctrine, but in guarding and faithfully expounding the deposit of faith transmitted by the apostles (cf. Constitutio dogmatica Pastor aeternus, cap. 4).

In fulfilling one of his most important tasks, the Pope has to strive so that “the whole flock of Christ might be kept away from the poisonous food of error” (First Vatican Council, ibd.). The following expression which was in use since the first centuries of the Church, is one of the most striking definitions of the Papal office, and has to be in some sense a second nature of every Pope: “Faithfully adhering to the tradition received from the beginning of the Christian faith” (First Vatican Council, ibd.).

We must always pray that God provides His Church with traditional-minded Popes. However, we have to believe in these words: “It is not for you to have knowledge of the time and the order of events which the Father has kept in his control” (Acts 1: 7).

Rorate Caeli: We know there are many bishops and cardinals – possibly the majority – who want to change the Church’s doctrinal language and long-standing discipline, under the excuses of “development of doctrine” and “pastoral compassion.” What is wrong with their argument?

H.E. Schneider: Expressions like “development of doctrine” and “pastoral compassion” are in fact usually a pretext to change the teaching of Christ, and against its perennial sense and integrity, as the Apostles had transmitted it to the whole Church, and it was faithfully preserved through the Fathers of the Church, the dogmatic teachings of the Ecumenical Councils and of the Popes.

Ultimately, those clerics want another Church, and even another religion: A naturalistic religion, which is adapted to the spirit of the time. Such clerics are really wolves in sheep’s clothing, often flirting with the world. Not courageous shepherds – but rather cowardly rabbits.

ROLE OF WOMEN IN THE CHURCH

Rorate Caeli: We hear a lot about the role of women in the Church today – the so-called “feminine genius.” Women obviously have played a critical role in the Church since the beginning, starting with the Blessed Virgin Mary. But liturgically, Christ made His position crystal clear, as have pre-Conciliar popes. Does Your Excellency believe that female involvement in the liturgy, whether it’s women taking part in the Novus Ordo Mass or girl altar boys, has played a positive or negative role in the Church the last four decades?

H.E. Schneider: There is no doubt about the fact that the female involvement in the liturgical services at the altar (reading the lecture, serving at the altar, distributing Holy Communion) represents a radical rupture with the entire and universal tradition of the Church. Therefore, such a practice is against the Apostolic tradition.

Such a practice gave to the liturgy of the Holy Mass a clear Protestant shape and a characteristic of an informal prayer meeting or of a catechetical event. This practice is surely contrary to the intentions of the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council and there is not in the least an indication for it in the Constitution on Sacred Liturgy.

THE TRADITIONAL LATIN MASS

Rorate Caeli: Your Excellency is well known for celebrating the traditional Latin Mass in many places around the world. What does Your Excellency find to be the deepest lessons learned from saying the Latin Mass, as a priest and as a bishop, that other priests and bishops may hope to gain by saying the traditional Mass themselves?

H.E. Schneider: The deepest lessons I learned from celebrating the traditional form of the Mass is this: I am only a poor instrument of a supernatural and utmost sacred action, whose principal celebrant is Christ, the Eternal High Priest. I feel that during the celebration of the Mass I lost in some sense my individual freedom, for the words and the gesture are prescribed even in their smallest details, and I am not able to dispose of them. I feel most deeply in my heart that I am only a servant and a minister who yet with free will, with faith and love, fulfill not my will, but the will of Another.

The traditional and more than millennial-old rite of the Holy Mass, which not even the Council of Trent changed, because the Ordo Missae before and after that Council was almost identical, proclaims and powerfully evangelizes the Incarnation and the Epiphany of the ineffably saintly and immense God, who in the liturgy as “God with us,” as “Emmanuel,” becomes so little and so close to us. The traditional rite of the Mass is a highly artfully and, at the same time, a powerful proclamation of the Gospel, realizing the work of our salvation.

Rorate Caeli: If Pope Benedict is correct in saying that the Roman Rite currently (if strangely) exists in two forms rather than one, why has it not yet happened that all seminarians are required to study and learn the traditional Latin Mass, as part of their seminary training? How can a parish priest of the Roman Church not know both forms of the one rite of his Church? And how can so many Catholics still be denied the traditional Mass and sacraments if it is an equal form?

H.E. Schneider: According to the intention of Pope Benedict XVI, and the clear norms of the Instruction “Universae Ecclesiae,” all Catholic seminarians have to know the traditional form of the Mass and be able to celebrate it. The same document says that this form of Mass is a treasure for the entire Church – thus it is for all of the faithful.

Pope John Paul II made an urgent appeal to all bishops to accommodate generously the wish of the faithful regarding the celebration of the traditional form of the Mass. When clerics and bishops obstruct or restrict the celebration of the traditional Mass, they don’t obey what the Holy Spirit says to the Church, and they are acting in a very anti-pastoral way. They behave as the possessors of the treasure of the liturgy, which does not belong to them, for they are only administrators.

In denying the celebration of the traditional Mass or in obstructing and discriminating against it, they behave like an unfaithful and capricious administrator who – contrary to the instructions of the house-father – keeps the pantry under lock or like a wicked stepmother who gives the children a meager fare. Perhaps such clerics have fear of the great power of the truth irradiating from the celebration of the traditional Mass. One can compare the traditional Mass with a lion: Let him free, and he will defend himself.

RUSSIA NOT YET EXPLICITLY CONSECRATED

Rorate Caeli: There are many Russian Orthodox where Your Excellency lives. Has Alexander of Astana or anyone else in the Moscow Patriarchate asked Your Excellency about the recent Synod or about what is happening to the Church under Francis? Do they even care at this point?

H.E. Schneider: Those Orthodox Prelates, with whom I have contact, generally are not well informed about the internal current disputes in the Catholic Church, or at least they had never spoken with me about such issues. Even though they don’t recognize the jurisdictional primacy of the Pope, they nevertheless look on the Pope as the first hierarchical office in the Church, from a point of view of the order of protocol.

Rorate Caeli: We are just a year away from the 100th anniversary of Fatima. Russia was arguably not consecrated to the Immaculate Heart of Mary and certainly not converted. The Church, while ever spotless, is in complete disarray – maybe worse than during the Arian Heresy. Will things get even worse before they get better and how should truly faithful Catholics prepare for what is coming?

H.E. Schneider: We have to believe firmly: The Church is not ours, nor the Pope’s. The Church is Christ’s and He alone holds and leads her indefectibly even through the darkest periods of crisis, as our current situation indeed is.

This is a demonstration of the Divine character of the Church. The Church is essentially a mystery, a supernatural mystery, and we cannot approach her as we approach a political party or a pure human society. At the same time, the Church is human and on her human level she is nowadays enduring a sorrowful passion, participating in the Passion of Christ.

One can think that the Church in our days is being flagellated as our Lord, is being denuded as was Our Lord, on the tenth Cross station. The Church, our mother, is being bound in cords not only by the enemies of Christ but also by some of their collaborators in the rank of the clergy, even sometimes of the high clergy.

All good children of Mother Church as courageous soldiers we have to try to free this mother – with the spiritual weapons of defending and proclaiming the truth, promoting the traditional liturgy, Eucharistic adoration, the crusade of the Holy Rosary, the battle against the sin in one’s private life and striving for holiness.

We have to pray that the Pope may soon consecrate explicitly Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, then She will win, as the Church prayed since the old times: “Rejoice O Virgin Mary, for thou alone have destroyed all heresies in the whole world” (Gaude, Maria Virgo, cunctas haereses sola interemisti in universo mundo).

Originally published by Rorate Caeli

Apocalypse Now? Another Great Sign Rises in the Heavens

This is an article that was written for the Remnant Newspaper.

On September 23, 2017, we will see the constellation Virgo with the sun rise directly behind it (the woman clothed with the sun). These events transpire during the 100th anniversary of the apparitions of “the woman clothed in the sun,” Our Lady at Fatima in 1917. What does it mean?

[Editorial Note: In the following article, I intend to present a series of facts and observations from which I draw no definitive conclusion. Yet, these facts and observations are of such a nature, for no other reason than their observation and reporting, that lend themselves to misinterpretation. So let me be clear, in the following article, I predict nothing. I am offering my observations on some upcoming phenomena, both heavenly and man-made, potentially of great import, that people might find interesting and of which people should be aware.]

* * *
The Great Sign in Heaven

What if God gave us a sign, would we even notice it? What if God, like He has done before, gave us a heavenly sign, a portent of great and terrible events? Would we even take notice? Are we, like so many that have come before us, so busy in our day-to-day lives that we never bother to even look up anymore? What if God gave us a heavenly sign today, would we notice? And if we did notice, would we care or just ignore it as some superstitious nonsense?

What if I told you that there is a forthcoming astronomical event that closely mirrors a sign from the Book of Revelation, stunning in its precision, context, and timing? Would you look up?

Revelation 12:1-5

“And a great sign appeared in heaven: A woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars:

And being with child, she cried travailing in birth, and was in pain to be delivered.

And there was seen another sign in heaven: and behold a great red dragon, having seven heads, and ten horns: and on his head seven diadems:

And his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven, and cast them to the earth: and the dragon stood before the woman who was ready to be delivered; that, when she should be delivered, he might devour her son.

And she brought forth a man child, who was to rule all nations with an iron rod: and her son was taken up to God, and to his throne. “

The Star of Bethlehem

Before I begin, I think it is important to establish some sense of context. We take it as an established and undeniable part of our faith that, 2,000 years ago, God used an astronomical event to communicate with man, the Star of Bethlehem. Many people, when picturing the Star of Bethlehem, if they picture it at all, think of this massive bright star over Bethlehem that was so obvious to everyone that it sent the Magi on a long trek to find the promised king.

We know that version of events is in error, for when the Magi arrived in Jerusalem, just 8 kilometers from Bethlehem, they had to explain what it was they saw and why they interpreted it the way they did. King Herod, his court, and the rest of Jerusalem were largely ignorant of the events of the Star of Bethlehem. The people of Jerusalem, like us today, were busy providing for their families and going about their daily duties. Even though this great sign announcing the birth of the Savior, the very Son of God, was going on above their heads, they neither noticed it, nor cared about it.

In order to understand the proper context of the potential Revelation 12 sign, it is helpful to further examine the Star of Bethlehem. What was the Star of Bethlehem and how did the Magi see it when everybody else missed it? Short answer, they were paying attention.

I think that there is a compelling case that the Star of Bethlehem was a series of regular astronomical events involving rare conjunctions that symbolically indicated the birth of a king. It is important to note that this is emphatically not astrology. The Encyclopedia Britannica defines astrology as:

“…type of divination that involves the forecasting of earthly and human events through the observation and interpretation of the fixed stars, the Sun, the Moon, and the planets. Devotees believe that an understanding of the influence of the planets and stars on earthly affairs allows them to both predict and affect the destinies of individuals, groups, and nations.”

The Catholic Church explicitly condemns astrology, as it does all forms of divination (CCC 2116). But signs like the Star of Bethlehem are not divination of fates ordered by the stars, but regular astronomy and symbology with the idea that the God of the universe sometimes uses His creation to communicate with man. The bible is replete with instances that make this case. Psalm 19 states:

1 …The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. 2 Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge. 3 There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard. 4 Their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world…

— PSALM 19:1-4

Paul directly quotes this Psalm in Romans when making the case that the Jews had knowledge that the Messiah had come.

17 Consequently, faith comes from hearing the message, and the message is heard through the word of Christ. 18 But I ask: Did they [the Jews] not hear? Of course they did: “Their voice has gone out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world.”

— ROMANS 10:17-18

Paul is clearly making the case that the Jews had knowledge of the Messiah because the heavens told them so. Obviously Paul is not endorsing astrology, but indicating that God can and does sometimes use the heavens to announce His plans. There is much more that can be said on the differences between astrology and understanding heavenly signs, but suffice it for now to say that looking to the heavens for confirmation and announcement of God’s plans is legitimate within the proper context and application.

So what was the Star of Bethlehem? As mentioned, I think there is a compelling case that the Star of Bethlehem was a series of astronomical events with significant symbolism. More detail can be seen at BethlehemStar.net, but I will attempt a brief summary.

In 3/2 B.C., there occurred a rare triple conjunction of Jupiter (the king planet, through its retrograde motion) and Regulus (the king star). The Magi likely interpreted this rare triple conjunction as a giant neon sign in the heavens blinking KING-KING-KING. This all began at the Jewish New year and all within the constellation of Leo (the lion, a symbol of the tribe of Judah). So it heavily symbolized Jewish King from the tribe of Judah, a clear indication for those familiar with the Messiah. Further, rising right behind Leo was the constellation Virgo, with the sun and the moon at her feet.

After this incredible triple conjunction, Jupiter began moving westward in the sky, eventually coming into conjunction with Venus, a planet long symbolically associated with motherhood. The conjunction of the king planet and the motherhood planet was so close, that no man alive had ever seen anything like it and together it formed the brightest object in the sky.

All this symbolism of a Jewish king from Judah and a Virgin was enough to get the well-versed Magi moving to Jerusalem, but you can understand why the average citizen of Jerusalem missed it.

Jupiter continued its western movement in the sky until it finally stopped. When it stopped (as seen from Jerusalem), it stopped directly south, directly over the small village of Bethlehem, on December 25 of 2 B.C.

This may be easily seen with modern star programs that can show you the night sky on any date in history from any perspective. It is the advent of such computer programs that now allows us to not only look at the past, but to look at the skies of the future.

Given the context of all I just described, it is when we turn our gaze to the heavens of the future that once again we are treated to heavenly signs of great symbolism.

Let us revisit the opening verses of Revelation 12.

“And a great sign appeared in heaven: A woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars: And being with child, she cried travailing in birth, and was in pain to be delivered.”

The author of Revelation clearly indicates that this vision is one of a sign in heaven or in the sky. What do we see in the sky of the near future?

On November 20, 2016, an astronomical event begins that will last nine and a half months, culminating in startling concurrence with the vision of Revelation 12. While I am not an astronomer, all my research indicates that this astronomical event, in all its particulars, is unique in the history of man.

On November 20, 2016, Jupiter (the King planet) enters into the body (womb) of the constellation Virgo (the virgin). Jupiter, due its retrograde motion, will spend the next 9 ½ months within the womb of Virgo. This length of time corresponds with gestation period of a normal late-term baby.

After 9 ½ months, Jupiter exits out of the womb of Virgo. Upon Jupiter’s exit (birth), on September 23, 2017, we see the constellation Virgo with the sun rise directly behind it (the woman clothed with the sun). At the feet of Virgo, we find the moon. And upon her head we find a crown of twelve stars, formed by the usual nine stars of the constellation Leo with the addition of the planets Mercury, Venus, and Mars.

That is a truly remarkable and, as far as I can determine, unique series of event with a startling degree of concurrence with the vision of Revelation 12.

So what does it mean, if anything? The obvious and truthful answer is that we simply do not know. That said, we are not entirely without possible context.

It just so happens that these events transpire during the 100th anniversary of the apparitions of “the woman clothed in the sun,” Our Lady at Fatima in 1917. The culmination of these astronomical events occurs just 3 weeks before the 100th anniversary of the great miracle of Fatima, in which the sun “danced” (another heavenly sign), an event that was witnessed by many thousands.

In the almost century that has followed that great event, we have seen Our Lady’s warnings come true with startling precision. People did not cease offending God and we have seen terrible wars, nations annihilated, and Russia spread her errors throughout the world and, if we are honest, even into the Church itself. And yet, we still await the fulfillment of her promises, the triumph of Her Immaculate Heart, and a period of peace to be granted to the world.

But what you may not know is that within the Fatima story itself, there are indications that a 100-year period might be significant. In August 1931, Sister Lucy was staying with a friend at Rianjo, Spain. There, Our Lord appeared to Sr. Lucy and He complained the requests of His mother had not been heeded saying, “Make it known to My ministers, given that they follow the example of the King of France in delaying the execution of My command, they will follow him into misfortune. It is never too late to have recourse to Jesus and Mary.”

And again in another text, Sr. Lucy quoted Our Lord as saying, “They did not wish to heed My request! … Like the King of France, they will repent of it, and they will do it, but it will be late. Russia will have already spread its errors in the world, provoking wars and persecutions against the Church. The Holy Father will have much to suffer.”

Those references to the King of France are very interesting for our discussion as this is an explicit reference to the requests of the Sacred Heart given through Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque on June 17, 1689 to the King of France. King Louis XIV and his successors failed to heed Our Lord’s request to publicly consecrate France to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. As a result, on June 17, 1789, one hundred years to the day after the request, the National Assembly of the French Revolution rose up and declared itself the government of France and stripped the king of his power. Later, the king lost his head to the revolution.

Now it is not possible to know the relevance of this 100-year allusion or to know if and when the clock may have started ticking, but it is certainly interesting and relevant in this context.

And of course, many are familiar with the vision of Pope Leo XIII in which he allegedly heard Satan granted one hundred years to try and destroy the Church. Immediately after this vision, Pope Leo XIII composed the prayer to St. Michael pleading with the Archangel to defend us in battle and be our defense against the wickedness and snares of the Devil. Pope Leo XIII then added the Leonine prayers to the end of the mass, later suppressed during Vatican II.

As we live through these tumultuous times in the Church, in which the very foundations of faith, even the very words and commands of Our Savior are diminished and ignored, it is impossible not to recall Pope Leo’s vision.

Speaking of our current crisis, in this era of false mercy, I must also note that the date the astronomical event begins, November 20, 2016, is the very day that Pope Francis’ declared “Year of Mercy” comes to an end. The very same day is the Feast of Christ the King.

In conclusion, I must stress that I make no specific claim of the significance, if any, of the astronomical event I described. Further, I make no claim to know the future or of any forthcoming events relating to the fulfillment of the promises of Fatima. I only relate this to you now as I find myself in a similar situation as those Magi 2,000 years ago. I look to the sky and say, “Alright Lord, you have my attention.”

Patrick Archbold

The Spirit of the Synod: A Plague on Both Your Houses!

Why the novusordoist “good guys” aren’t ever going to save the Church

October 24, 2015 – So, everyone is talking about what we come away with from the last three astounding weeks at the Synod. We are seeing the first of the wrap-up editorials. What are we to make of it all? The difficulty we are facing in trying to make sense of it all, however, is that we are not starting from true premises. We’ve got our facts wrong from the get-go, which as Aristotle helpfully told us, will not only make it impossible to come to a true conclusion, it will create larger and larger errors as we go along.The narrative so far has been that the Synod, and the conflicts in the Church in general, have been between the JP2/B16 “conservative” bishops, and the Francis/Kasperite (Kung, Mahoney, Bernardin, etc) “liberal” crowd. This has been adopted and reinforced by the mainstream secular and Catholic media. Well intentioned believing Catholics have had it drilled into their brains since the pontificate of John Paul II that we can understand the Church as being divided between “good conservative bishops” and “bad liberal bishops.” Added to this has been a mythology that the pope and “the Vatican” is on the conservative side of this.

This has recently been altered slightly by the narrative from the “liberal” faction, backed up by the secular media, that Francis represents a profound change in this last rule, and that he and his “reform-minded” pals have been at war from day one with the “conservative” Vatican curia, mostly appointed by John Paul II and Benedict, the “conservative” popes.

This new narrative has been loudly and desperately denied by what we must now call the “mainstream Catholic” media, who were once considered organs of the “conservative” party. News outlets like the National Catholic Register and EWTN are still widely regarded as being in this “conservative” camp, having come into prominence during the JPII/Benedict Long Interval. This appellation has stuck, and has been used to create such an oversimplified picture of the Church as to be, essentially, completely false. Since then, we have made slight adjustments as we have gone along. This or that bishop, whom we had thought was on “our” side turns out, shock! to be really a closeted liberal. But the whole basic “liberal vs. conservative” paradigm has been our working model. Trouble is, it’s completely wrong.

We have used this basic, completely wrong framework to build an assessment of what is going on in Rome with the Synod and other key PR operations like the Pope’s visits and “off the cuff” speeches and whatnot. This is where we get the concept of “the narrative”. The other day John Allen wrote about the possible narrative take-homes of the Synod, he listed the most obvious stuff: “Synod’s rigged” … “new era of inclusive listening”… [insert unimaginative journalistic thing here] blah blah blabbity-blah…Which one is the true one? G’head. Guess…

The trouble is that the Synod has demonstrated before all the world that the entire framework is false. We have expended all our effort in the last 50 years trying to find and concretize this distinction between “good conservatives” and “bad liberals,” and it has been demonstrated this month that it is all a mirage.

In reality, the arguments and outrages of the Synod aren’t over doctrine or dogmas per se. The battle is over first principles. And what the Synod has demonstrated is that the distinctions between the “good” and “bad” bishops we have been making are essentially false ones. They really aren’t different because they basically all accept the same first principles, or general premises: “The Church was bad, but thanks to Vatican II, we are now mature, and can face the modern world as part of it, with our heads held high at places like the UN, equal players in the international fields.”

All the Bishops essentially agree on this. All. Of. Them.

This is because in order to become a bishop in the last 50 years, this has been the only litmus test that counts. Their agreement on the positive developments in the Church since the Great and Glorious Council to End All Councils, is what makes them company men.

This basic agreement on the Everything’s Awesomeness of Vaticantwoism is the qualifying trait for the modern episcopate. This is why they all stuck it out to the end no matter how outrageous it all became. No matter that cardinals and bishops blasphemed and cursed the Lord for His idea of mercy being different from theirs. No matter that the Pope threatened and insulted them.

Their disputes among themselves are about doctrine, which is regarded as simply a matter of debatable talking points to modern churchmen – this is why we had all those reports from the Synod Aula about how wonderfully they were all getting on, and how while they can disagree on this or that doctrine or pastoral practice, it was all one big happy club of old boys. We heard a great deal about the “unity” and the “gentlemen’s agreement”. They are on the same page on general principles.

This is why Cardinals Pell and Napier were at such pains to assure the faithful that they would never dream of opposing the Pope! It is why our hearts sank when Archbishop Chaput told us that “warring camps” simply don’t exist” among the bishops. They’re just telling the exact truth.

And yes, that goes for every single bishop (and every wannabe) you can name who is supposed to be one of the “good guys.” Which is why we have a Napier and a Chaput and a Pell, quite honestly, telling us that all the “concerns”of the 13 signatories had been adequately addressed. It was true. While cardinals and bishops blasphemed and denied the Faith, their “concerns” had been mainly procedural. As Pell himself said, “That’s all we want, for whatever the Synod says, whether it’s good, bad, or indifferent, to be represented.”

“That’s in the long-term interest of everyone, because no matter how it might turn out, people want to feel that the bishops got to that situation fairly.” Not the salvation of souls. Not the correction of 50 years of rampant neomodernist heresy. Not the ongoing slaughter of millions of innocents. But that the bishops were “represented” “fairly.”

“The mood among the Synod fathers has been far friendlier than any commentators seem to imagine,” Chaput continued. “There are no ‘revolutionaries’ or ‘reactionaries’ in the Synod hall – only bishops sincerely trying to face sensitive issues and chart the right course for the Church in the light of the Gospel.” I’m sure he meant this to be comforting.

It wasn’t a betrayal to talk this way because they had never been the heroes of the traditional Catholic Faith the rather desperate American neo-conservative mainstream Catholic press and bloggers had wanted them to be.

Today we’re getting the first of the waves of editorials, mostly based on the accepted “lib vs. con” narrative, and they’re all going to miss the point. (Well, except maybe Steve’s.) The conclusion is going to be some variation on “The Synod has exposeddeep divisions in the Church,” and that’s true as far as it goes, but most of them will fail to correctly identify it. John-Henry Westen at LifeSite says that it’s the pope’s fault for allowing “heresy to be aired” at the Synod, without perhaps stopping to wonder how it was that these heretics had managed to rise so high in the first place. Others are no doubt going to blame the group of die-hard “conservatives” like Pell and the other 13 signatories for trying to derail the precious “Synodal process.” Certainly, that was what we’ve already heard from Cardinal Wuerl and his girls.

We now get to enjoy the tedium of watching news services compete to come up with something that all the other ones aren’t also saying. From CNS we have Cindy Wooden earnestly telling us that she’s got it: “The Deeper Synod question: How should Church relate to the wider world.” Very deep, yes, thanks Cindy.

A colleague of mine at What’s Up with the Synod wrote: “I believe I may have just developed a form of Tourette’s where, instead of cursing at inopportune times, I randomly yell ‘PASCENDI!’ at odd moments.”

Today we will no doubt have the bishops giving interviews after their vote, and I guarantee that the only thing we will hear from them is all about how wonderful it all was, how their disagreements were handled like gentlemen and were a valuable part of the Synodal process… how much they are all looking forward to the Pope’s speech and (should he choose to produce one) his summation document… la la la la… we can’t heeeaaar yoooooo!

This all sounds like rot to me and you because … well…because it is. 1300 amendment recommendations to a final document, drafted — without benefit of actually waiting to hear what the bishops said — by the same group of manifest shysters and heretics who have been giving us the Synod’s documents for the last two years. If the bishops spent five minutes considering each amendment, that clocks out at 108 hours. Then we have the Synod Fathers falling all over themselves expressing their “deep appreciation and admiration for the drafting committee’s work in incorporating the work of the past three weeks into the working document…” And of course, the inevitable, shouts of “Yay! good guys won! “ See? We told you everything was going to be fine! Trust the process! The bishops got this!”

But the reality is already being laid out for all the world to see. This Synod is intended as the beginning of a whole new Church. In fact, one of the bishops at a press conference in the last day or so said it pretty much right out loud.

“The final document is important, but even more important, the Pope has himself seen the Synodal experience, so he really knows what’s happening, and can do something with all that.” [Anyone who now continues to claim that Francis can’t know what’s being said and done in his name can be tarred and feathered without fear of sin.] Because the whole thing, from the first questionnaire, to the last preening, self congratulatory handshake in front of the cameras, has all been nothing more than Kabuki theatre.

The Traditionalist position is closely related to that old warning Aristotle made: start with one small error at the beginning and you will do nothing as you progress other than multiply, compound and enlarge that error. Well, that error at the beginning is as big as the Apenninerange.

Our gripe with the bishops at the Synod, both the “good” and the “bad,” is precisely on the level of first principles. It is Vaticantwoism –including the Novus Ordo Missae — that has to be jettisoned before any correction can be made. Yes, the Church has to go back. If you have taken the wrong path at a fork in the road, the solution is not to keep going while vaguely hoping that the two paths might converge again some day.

The refusal to face up to this one underlying principle, and the consequent failure to understand the real nature of the problem, is what is creating all the painful confusion among good believing neocatholics when a “good” bishop does something “bad.”

When a Chaput tells a pro-life organization that he is completely in favour of giving rape victims the abortifacient “Morning after pill” in Catholic hospitals, the cries of shock and betrayal can be heard the world over. “Wah! We thought he was on our side!”

This, if nothing else, is what I hope and pray the Synod has taught many people: while we can generally agree with the “good” bishops on some of the Church’s doctrines — mainly those relating to sex — our gripe with them is precisely on the level of first principles. And on those, ultimately, these “good conservatives” are of necessity on exactly the same page as the mad progressives. And, it must be said, against us, the faithful.

Taking this clarification of the paradigm, we can start to understand why so many of the “good conservatives” so obviously loathe the Traditionalists. They sense our fundamental opposition to where they stand on some very large ecclesiological and dogmatic issues.

So, I’m going to sum it up for all the editorialists out there trying to figure out why a Synod full of “good guys” who “rejected” the Kasper Programme in their “vote” on the final document, is STILL GOING TO GO FORWARD VERY BADLY. Even if the final document is a paragon of (what passes for) orthodoxy (in the post conciliar age).

Until now, we have all fallen into the habit of thinking of the episcopate as falling into two camps, and for what it’s worth, this has more or less been a useful model while examining the Novusordoist regime. The confusion comes in when we realise that this distinction fails to include the fact that they are all in the wrong camp together, and that being in that camp definitively precludes them from being any use at all in fighting the fight we are all in. They will continue to reject the only solution possible: restoration.

I have said it for many years now: Novusordoism. Is. Not. Catholicism.

Trads know this.

Now the rest of the world does too.

Hilary White

APOSTASY – by Father Pietro Leone

Watchman, what of the Night? (Is. 21.11)

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen

Here in Italy the summer has reached its height: the sun beats down on the city and on the countryside by day, and by night the elderly sit outside and watch the people passing by.
To the eyes of the Faith, by contrast, the whole of mankind is plunged in the most profound darkness, for both the Church and the World are in the throes of the gravest and most profound crisis in the history of their existence. The crisis is one of Apostasy, not so much in the formal sense of the explicit rejection of the Catholic Faith, but rather in the general sense of the falling away from God.
To help us understand the nature of this apostasy we shall make a brief meditation on the first chapter of the Epistle to the Romans (vv. 17-32), in which St. Paul refers to this same phenomenon in his own epoch. Holy Scripture is widely applicable to the events of human history: we shall see how the passage in question may usefully be applied to the circumstances of our contemporary world.
The elements which we propose to consider in this essay are the following:
I) The suppression of the Truth about God;
II) The refusal to honour God;
III) Foolishness;
IV) Idolatry;
V) Depravity.
PART 1.

I The Suppression of the Truth about God

St. Paul writes (v.18) of ‘those men that detain the truth about God in injustice’. ‘Detain’ (detinere in the Latin, catechein in the Greek) signifies the suppression of that which moves the agent to the good; ‘in injustice’ signifies that this suppression is in opposition to the order that God has established; ‘the truth’, as the context shows and as we proceed to explain, is both the supernatural knowledge of God, namely the Faith, and the natural knowledge of God which is acquired by the use of reason.
The Truth about God which is suppressed in the contemporary world belongs, like the Truth of which St. Paul treats, both to the supernatural and the natural orders.

A. The Suppression of the Supernatural Truth about God

We see that St. Paul, when he speaks of the ‘Suppression of the Truth’, refers (at least in part) to the Faith, since he speaks in verse 16 of the Gospel as ‘a power of God unto salvation to every-one that believeth’, and in verse 17 mentions the word ‘Faith’ three times and states that ‘the just man liveth by Faith’.
In this section we shall therefore speak of the suppression of articles of the Faith in the contemporary Church.
Now clearly the Faith may be suppressed in one of two ways: either by denying it explicitly by formal heresy such as in the ‘39 Articles’ of Martin Luther, or by obscuring it. As we attempted to set forth in our essay on Modernism, it is principally by obscurantism that the Faith is attacked in the present age. As we further explained in the same essay, this obscurantism may take one of two forms: the passing over of a doctrine in silence, and equivocation. We return to this theme now in virtue of its relevance to apostasy.

1. Silence

Here we limit ourselves briefly to the obscuring of one of the two core articles of the Catholic Faith, namely the existence of the Most Blessed Trinity. We observe that recent Popes refer but rarely to this dogma, preferring to speak simply of ‘God’ – as though as a gesture towards paganism and heresy.
As we have explained in detail in our short work: ‘The Destruction of the Roman Rite’, the prayers of Adoration of the Triune God have been almost entirely abolished from the Novus Ordo. The Doxology Gloria Patri… which appeared thrice in the Old Rite has been entirely removed; the Trinitarian formula per Dominum Nostrum Jesum Christum… which concluded many of the prayers in the Old Rite has been removed in all cases except one; the prayer at the Offertory Suscipe Sancta Trinitas and the prayer at the end of the Mass Placeat Tibi Sancta Trinitas have been excised; the Preface of the Holy Trinity which was used in the former rite almost every Sunday of the year now appears only once, that is on the respective Feast-day.
Furthermore the invocation of the Most Blessed Trinity (Pater de caelis Deus…) at the beginning of the public litanies was officially eliminated by Pope Paul VI in Lent 1969. Similarly one observes that the Trinitarian doxology has been removed from the hymn Veni Creator Spiritus (at least in the Italian version), thereby incidentally reducing the number of verses from the symbolic 7 to 6.

2. Equivocation

Equivocation on the part of the Magisterium typically takes the form of an ambiguous statement favouring heresy. In the article ‘How to Regard the Second Vatican Council’ we gave as an example the statement: ‘The Church of Christ subsists in the Catholic Church’. This statement is ambiguous in that it could mean that the Church of Christ is either greater than, or identical to, the Catholic Church. It favours heresy inasmuch as it suggests the former sense. Otherwise why not simply re-state the dogma that the two are identical?
a) Changes to Catholic Doctrine
Such equivocal statements not only favour heresy but also represent (putative) changes to Catholic doctrine: The Church of Christ is no longer identical to the Catholic Church: it subsists in the Catholic Church.
However, any-one with even a minimal theological formation knows that Tradition has a binding force. All Catholic dogmas and doctrines belong to Tradition, and none of them can change over time. The Second Vatican Council, however, declared new doctrines, doctrines which did not belong to Tradition: doctrines which represent changes to traditional teachings.
As is explained in the same article, Catholic doctrine cannot change except in the depth or clarity of its expression. The changes in the Council were not, however, of this type, but rather were substantial changes: changes in substance.
Apart from the example just cited, there are many other examples, such as the assertion that there are elements of Truth and Sanctity outside the Catholic Church, that the Pope shares jurisdiction over the entire Catholic Church with the Bishops (‘collegiality’); that the Mass is ‘the Paschal Mystery’, and so on. Such assertions represent changes to Catholic dogma, which is, however, immutable. The Church teaches immutably and infallibly that outside the Church there is no salvation, that the Pope possesses absolute jurisdictional primacy, that the Mass is in its essence the Holy Sacrifice of Calvary.

b) Contradictions of Catholic Doctrine

Now the change to a statement purporting to express a truth constitutes a contradiction of that statement. The equivocations that we have cited therefore represent not only changes, but also contradictions, of traditional teachings.
It is true that they are not formal contradictions, formally denying the Catholic dogma by saying, for example: ‘The Church of Christ is not identical to the Catholic Church – otherwise they would have been tantamount to formal heresy, and would not have been accepted by the majority of the Council-members. Rather they are effective and veiled contradictions: that is to say contradictions for all intents and purposes, and contradictions veiled in obscurity, as we were at pains to explain in the article on Modernism.
Such contradictions are manifest when we compare the modern doctrines with doctrines taught by the Magisterium previously as we have just done, but also when we compare amongst themselves Council texts or contemporary teachings (whether on the Magisterial, Episcopal, or parochial level). In the latter cases we may speak of ‘doctrinal syncretism’.
c) Doctrinal Syncretism
Since the Second Vatican Council does not wholly consist of new, but also of traditional, doctrines, it follows that contradictions may be found within the Council texts themselves. In the text Presbyterorum Ordinis one reads for instance (§ 2) that the priest ‘in virtue of his sacred ordination has the power to offer the Sacrifice and forgive sins’ (the Catholic doctrine), and in another place (§ 4) that ‘the priest’s first duty is to announce God’s Gospel to all’ (the Protestant doctrine).
In the period subsequent to the Council, the Church, or more precisely the men of the Church, have continued to teach a mixture of Catholic and non-Catholic doctrine: Truth and Falsehood: paragraphs, sentences, words, and letters all jumbled up meaninglessly together as it were: nonsense, senseless sounds, flatus vocis, a morass, quicksands in which a man can lose his life.
The syncretism has entered into the Magisterium – and continues to flourish there to the present day; into all the Pontifical Universities – the Lateran, the Gregorian, the Angelicum and so on – as well as into all the diocesan seminaries in the entire world. No Institute is uncontaminated, except for those few ‘Traditionalist’ ones, with their Traditional teachings and the Old Mass.
This syncretism has filtered down to the parish level, so that it is not surprising to hear one and the same parish priest announce at one moment that death is followed by Heaven, Hell, or Purgatory, and at another moment (at a funeral Mass for a non-believer for example) that every-one goes immediately to Heaven. This mixture of True and False has found its ultimate expression in ‘Ecumenism’, where the true Christian confession makes common cause with the false confessions, and the true Faith with the false ‘Faiths’.
Meanwhile the Hierarchy has not sanctioned either group, and by allowing the two rites of Mass, one of which expresses the Catholic Faith, and the other heresy, as we attempted to explain in the essay on the Roman rite, it has in effect given equal rights to both Truth and Falsehood.
We could sum it up like this: the Church is not using its three offices of teaching, ruling, and sanctifying in favour of the Faith: she promotes both Truth and Falsehood doctrinally; she tolerates both juridically; she celebrates both liturgically. She is no longer interested in the Truth.
What is She interested in? What was She interested in ‘the Council’ and subsequently? The answer cannot be other than a peaceable co-existence with the World. But for the Church this is a work of self-destruction. Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant. Rome… creates a desert and calls it peace.’ (Tacitus, De Agricola)

B. The Suppression of the Natural Truth about God

1. Atheism in General

We noted above that St. Paul’s words concerning the ‘Suppression of Truth’ refer not only to supernatural, but also to natural, truth. This is clear from verses 19-20 where the Apostle proceeds to speak of the knowledge of God which may be obtained by contemplating the creation: ‘…Because that which is known of God is manifest of them. For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made. His eternal power also and divinity: so that they are inexcusable.’
The suppression of the natural truth about God is atheism: the denial that God exists (‘positive atheism’) or the denial that His existence may be proved (‘negative atheism’ or ‘agnosticism’). If we look at man’s passage across the centuries we witness a tendency on his part to emancipate himself from God, his Master. Under the Old Dispensation we observe the infidelities of the people of Israel culminating in the crucifixion of the Messiah; under the New Dispensation a turning away initially from the God of the Faith and then from the God of reason as well.
The roots of modern atheism may be sought as early as the Middle Ages in the anthropocentrism of the Rhineland Mystics. We see its face more clearly in the humanism of the Renaissance and later in the figure of Martin Luther, whom the renowned 16th century Dominican, Fr. Tommaso Campanella in his work Atheismus Triumphatus, identifies as one of its principal causes.
The principal root of atheism in the last 500 years is certainly that of subjectivism: first the theological subjectivism of Martin Luther, then the philosophical subjectivism of René Descartes and the modern philosophers. Within this philosophical trend we may specify two particular theories which colour modern atheism: Materialism and Idealism. Materialism favours positive atheism: the thesis that God does not exist; Idealism favours negative atheism(- agnosticism): the thesis that we cannot know whether God exists.
Atheism has of course always been a position of individual persons or philosophical schools or élites, but in the present day it has taken on a well-nigh universal dimension, and become what one might call a mass product. It is of course an attitude typical of the World, but in recent years it has entered the Church as well, that is to say within the current of Modernism, as an immanent, pantheist system of thought (cf. St. Pius X’s Encyclical Pascendi § 39). It follows that the suppression of the truth about God within the contemporary Church is a suppression of the truth not only about the God of the Faith but also about the God of reason.

2. The Irrationality of Atheism

Verses 19-20 of St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans quoted above constitute one of the principal scriptural sources for the Catholic dogma of the natural knowledge of God. In accordance with this text, the First Vatican Council declares infallibly that God may be known ‘with certainty by the natural light of human reason’, and the Anti-modernist Oath, repeating and amplifying this declaration, adds that the existence of God may ‘…thus also be proved’.
As the latter document states, the proof proceeds from the created world to the existence of the Creator by means of the principle of causality. This proof, which has five distinct modes, is set forth formally by St. Thomas Aquinas in his ‘Five Ways’- the Five Ways which are notable for their depth and subtlety, as also for the concision and the clarity of their expression.
Since the existence of God may conclusively be proved, atheism is not a logically tenable position. It follows that, strictly speaking, there is no such thing as theoretical Atheism, but only practical Atheism. In other words, one may live as though God does not exist, but there are no logical grounds for so doing.

3. The Immorality of Atheism

In becoming a mass product, atheism has gained a certain acceptance and respect in the common consciousness. Indeed the title ‘atheist’ has become well-nigh self-justifying: it is enough to present oneself as atheist, and usually no questions will be asked.
This does not however correspond to the vision of the Church. Father Tomas Tyn O.P. says: “Some-one will tell me ‘he is an atheist, but very nice’. I reply: ‘He may be very nice, but not as an atheist.’” Indeed since God’s existence, in the words of St. Paul, is ‘manifest’ and ‘clearly seen’, the atheist is not only irrational but also ‘inexcusable’.
The reason for atheism is sin. ‘The fool said in his heart: There is no God.’ Such is the unequivocal first verse of both Psalm 13 and Psalm 52. The word ‘fool’ in the original Hebrew signifies coarseness, both intellectual and moral, and implies that the fool denies God in order to justify himself in his sin. Our Blessed Lord Himself speaks of those who rejected Him because they preferred darkness to light: so that their sin should not become manifest; and St. Augustine in the same vein says that the atheist always has good reasons for being an atheist. In scholastic terms, we are talking about ignorantia affectata, the ignorance which does not diminish, but rather increases, the culpability of the agent. It is the ignorance of those responsible for the death of Our Lord, who were possessed of an ill will.
Because atheism is both a palliative and a mass phenomenon it may accurately be described it as ‘The Opium of the People.’

PART 2.

II The Refusal to Honour God

In verse 21 St Paul writes: ‘…when they knew God, they have not glorified him as God or given thanks’. Here he mentions the two religious duties that man owes to God in virtue of His infinite glory and goodness, respectively. In turning away from God, man has in effect refused to fulfill these duties.
This is particularly obvious in the domain of the Holy Mass where the Church’s new liturgy reflects Her new doctrine. The offering of the Holy Mass of course is in itself the highest and most perfect means to glorify God and to give Him thanks – indeed the most common synonym for the Holy Mass is ‘The Eucharist’, which means thanksgiving.
The Old Rite enables man to offer glory to God and give Him thanks in the most adequate and sublime manner possible. The Novus Ordo Missae, by contrast, is signally defective in this regard. Apart from the suppression of the mention of the Most Holy Trinity (as stated above) – the very object of the glory offered by the Mass, the prayer ‘Gloria in Excelsis Deo’ as we noted in the same essay, has been removed from the majority of the Masses offered in the course of the liturgical year. In the same spirit the vast majority of acts of Adoration which the rubrics of the Old Rite had safeguarded, have been eliminated from the modern Mass, such as the bows, the signs of the Cross, the genuflections, the silence, together with all the reverent demeanour on the part of the celebrant and the assisting faithful.
We invite any-one who claims that the two rites are of equal value to reflect upon these changes. How can a rite, for example, which prescribes Communion on the tongue to the kneeling faithful be of equal value to one that permits and indeed fosters Communion in the hand to the standing faithful?
In fact each Mass in itself always gives equal value to God, but the manner in which any given Mass is offered is not of equal value to the manner in which any other Mass is offered. If one takes two identical precious stones and mounts one in a precious setting and on a precious ring which entirely suit the stone, and the other in a cheap and vulgar setting and ring, then clearly the former object will have a greater value than the latter.
*
In turning away from God, man rejects the True and the Good in their ultimate sense, that is to say as they exist in God Himself. In the next section we consider the former phenomenon; in the following section the latter. In later sections we shall be concerned to expose the irrationality and evil of contemporary society.

III Foolishness

St. Paul continues (vv.21-3) that men, not glorifying God or giving Him thanks, ‘became vain in their thinking. And their foolish heart was darkened. For professing themselves to be wise, they became fools…’
In commentary on the phrase ‘their foolish heart was darkened’ it may be said that this foolishness consists in the rejection of God, and that this rejection darkens the intellect and will, represented, in Jewish imagery, by the heart.
God is the True: Objective Truth, Being, Objective Reality in the ultimate sense of the term. Atheism, in rejecting God, has rejected truth: it has substituted truth for falsehood (as St. Paul states in v. 25); and since knowledge is knowledge of the Truth and philosophy is the knowledge of Truth in the ultimate sense of the term, atheism has effectively excluded a priori both the possibility of knowledge and philosophy.
The atheist modern philosophers are fantasy-spinners. It would have been better for them to have become science-fiction writers. At least they would then have revealed themselves for what they were and earned their keep honestly. What is reality? What is the basis of morality? What am I? One of them excogitates a theory and another refutes it. The questions become unanswerable, and, at the end of the day, entirely otiose.
Within the Church, the Modernists, by now of a certain age, are spinning similar fantasies. We would not wish to pass over in silence the recent denial on the part of Bishops of the Real Presence of Our Blessed Lord, or of the sublime privileges of the Most Blessed and Glorious Virgin Mary, nor of the long-standing promotion of abortion by the German Bishops’ Conference: Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland.
These various fantasies, when set alongside true Church doctrines, create the syncretistic amalgam of Truth and Falsehood that we have delineated above.
One of the most effective ways in which Modernism has entered the hearts of the clergy and of the faithful is, however, by means of the Novus Ordo Missae, for according to the principle of lex orandi, lex credendi they have by their celebration of, and assistance at, this rite, imbibed the falsehood of the new and false theology, and their heart has been darkened and closed to the Truth. Who in the Novus Ordo clergy and hierarchy, or even among those who are biritual, has retained a clear and unsullied vision of Absolute, Supernatural Truth?
Herumstolzierend, the modern philosophers and thinkers make ungainly incursions into the field of practical ethics such as sexuality and unborn life. Acclaimed and even knighted in their latter years for their intellectual achievements, they profess, like the Modernists, ‘to be wise’: ‘… with that vainglory that allows them to regard themselves as the sole possessors of knowledge, and makes them say, elated and inflated with presumption: We are not like other men’ (Pascendi § 40).
We reply to the Modernist and the modern philosopher in the words of Shakespeare (Henry IV Pt. I, Act 5 Scene 5): ‘I know thee not old man. Fall to thy prayers. How ill white hairs become a fool…’

IV Idolatry

‘And they changed the glory of the incorruptible God into the likeness of a corruptible man and of birds, and of four-footed beasts and of creeping things…’
Rejecting God from the heart, that is from the intellect and the will, they reject the proper object of these faculties, which is God under the aspect of Infinite Truth and Infinite Good respectively: for the intellect has been created to know God under the aspect of the True, and to love Him under the aspect of the Good.
Once God has been rejected from the heart, once the heart has lost its orientation to its proper object, it is darkened and falls onto surrogate objects: onto finite, created things, onto idols: devils, men, animals, or graven images. In short the men who reject God, in falling away from Him, ‘worship(ped) and serve(d) the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen.’ (v.25).
The Book of Wisdom (ch. 12 ff.) which serves as a background for St. Paul’s account of Apostasy, specifies graven images as the object of men’s worship; St. Paul, by contrast, specifies animals and man. The modern apostate society, by contrast, has clearly elected man as the object of his worship.
Modern philosophy, in denying or doubting of God’s existence, has placed man in the centre of the Universe. It has developed two distinct systems of ethics for his conduct: hedonism and humanism. It will not now be necessary to expound the shallowness of hedonism, of which we shall offer an egregious example below, instead we shall here confine ourselves to a brief comment on humanism.
He who believes in God, recognizes that the dignity and perfection of man reside in his love of God, and that his moral conduct must be determined by God’s will, particularly as expressed in the natural law. The atheist humanist, by contrast, is incapable of appreciating the dignity of man or the natural law that should govern his every action; in rejecting God, he has in effect rejected any adequate foundation for man’s dignity and morality. Indeed he has rejected objective reality itself and has thus rendered himself incapable of understanding man or his morality except by reference to the subjective order, by reference to man’s happiness and fulfillment.
Undeniably this same humanism has entered into contemporary Catholic moral teaching, even if Catholic doctrine is by its very nature divine. As St. Paul explicitly states (Gal.1. 11): ‘For I give you to understand, brethren, that the gospel that was preached by me, is not according to man’.
The new doctrinal and moral stance of the Church, by contrast, from the Second Vatican Council onwards, with its advocation of the principle of Mercy over the condemnation of error, its love for the entire world qua world, its promotion of the freedom of speech, the freedom of the press, the abolition of the Index, the purported expansion of the Church beyond the bounds of the Catholic Church, the promotion of a heady and euphoric Ecumenism are so many instances of a new, all-pervasive spirit of love which is no longer that of Charity.
Charity is the supernatural love of God and the neighbour in God in the state of Grace, which ‘rejoices in the Truth’, which consists in fulfilling the commandments, and which is perfected in sanctity. The new spirit of love, by contrast, is the love of the senses: feelings, sentimentality, conformity to the feelings of others. It is a subjective form of love. In the shift from the former to the latter we have witnessed a shift from the objective to the subjective, from the supernatural virtue of love to the passion of love; we have witnessed a pale and effeminate simulacrum disguising itself as true love and deceiving the masses. The deception continues to the present day and, as we have attempted to show in the book on the family, is particularly evident in Magisterial Personalism and Theology of the Body.
Man is placed at the centre of the world in contemporary Church doctrine, then, as well as in Her liturgy, where as we argued in detail in the book on the New Mass, Our Lord Jesus Christ has been ousted from His due position of honour and substituted by man.

V Depravity

‘Wherefore God gave them up to the desires of their heart, unto uncleanness: to dishonour their own bodies among themselves… ’ (v.24).

We first observe that the phrase ‘God gave them up’ (which thrice appears in the section under consideration) refers to God’s withholding Grace from sinners in response to the gravity of their sin.

1. Impurity in General

The two most remarkable features of impurity, as with atheism, are its irrationality and its immense contemporary diffusion. We shall look at each in turn.

a) Irrationality

The sexual faculty is for procreation as the eye is for sight. When children are born they need a stable home in order to grow up as happy and well-balanced young people. For this purpose a father and mother are necessary – to love both them and one another. In this way we can see that human nature itself entails the necessity of marriage: in other words, marriage is an institution of the Natural Law. To defy marriage is therefore to defy the Natural Law, and Reason itself which it expresses.

b) Diffusion

Sins against purity have always been rife on account of the weakness of Fallen Nature, but such sins to-day enjoy enormous diffusion. The reason should be sought in the enormous diffusion of atheism, for if God and the Objective Good are no longer the guiding principles of morality, their place will be usurped by man and his subjective good. But if man and his feelings have gained the moral ascendency, then it is clear that sexuality will be given free rein on all sides.
Just as with atheism, it has always been the case that given intellectuals have attempted to justify sins against impurity, but to-day we are no longer speaking about the attitudes or the sins of individuals, but of the masses. Successive extramarital alliances of shorter or longer duration involving overt cohabitation, also in the form of civil ‘marriages’ combined with divorces, have by now become almost as conventional as marriage in the proper sense of the word.
The moral stigma attached to such evils has been largely effaced. The sense of shame has much diminished; modesty in comportment, dress, and speech is no longer practised; obscenity is found even in the mouths of children.
Fallen Nature forces itself on the attention from a billion posters and screens. It cries out in the streets and public places in an untiring and incessant stream of tainted music, telling of its joys and unquenchable loves and sorrows. It finds its ultimate expression and celebration in the ‘pop-concert’ with its screaming and howling fanatics, its Dionysian licentiousness and obscenity,

‘full of sound and fury, signifying nothing’ (Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 5).

The family disintegrates into ‘one-parent families’ or ragged and amorphous pseudo-families consisting of whole generations of persons related to each other as quasi-in-laws: fragments of broken homes clinging to fragments of other broken homes, like flotsam and jetsam drifting across the vast ocean of human misery.
Society itself, with the disintegration of its constitutive cell which is the family, itself disintegrates, like some vast glacier splitting, cracking, and decomposing into the self-same polluted and all-encompassing ocean.

C’est un univers morne à l’horizon plombé
où nagent dans la nuit l’horreur et le blasphème (Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal).

The reason for the particular decadence and degradation of Western society is its former glory. For Catholic society is the highest form of society that exists, and the corruption of that which is the best is the worst: corruptio optimi pessima est. In this connection it should not surprise us that even Italy, the very heart-land of Catholicism, is also contemplating passing a law to introduce the infamous ‘Gender Ideology’ into its schools.

2. Unnatural Impurity

‘… they… worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator…For this cause God delivered them up to shameful affections. For their women have changed the natural use into the use which is against nature. And in like manner, the men also, leaving the natural use of the women, have burned in their lusts, one towards another: man with man, working that which is filthy and receiving in themselves the recompense which was due to their error’ (v. 25-7).

a) Unnatural Impurity in General

If fornication is itself contrary to nature and reason, this form of it is egregiously so. Not only are these acts performed outside their proper context which is that of marriage, but they are also deprived of sexual complementarity and are lacking by their nature in the very possibility of procreation.
A glance at empirical psychology shows us that this form of fornication is not only irrational in regard to the finality of the sexual act, but also in regard to the human psyche. According to a well and widely respected theory, the homosexual condition derives from a child’s arrested psychological development. Take a boy for example whose father (whether by his absence or his unattractive character) does not provide the necessary model for his psychological masculinity and/or whose mother, for instance by her domineering or possessive character, does not allow it to develop. This boy, as he grows to adulthood and beyond, will be prey to the desire to appropriate to himself the masculinity of those of his own sex who realise for him the ideal of manhood, which he feels to exist in him only in a potential form. Clearly to engage in sexual activity with such mirage-like figures will do nothing to satisfy this desire. Rather, therapy is indicated, the purification of the emotional love and its sublimation into a life and activities consonant with the dignity of the human person.
We observe with regret that the break-down of the family tends to augment the homosexual condition, inasmuch as a) fathers are increasingly absent to their sons; and b) with the lessening of the spirit of self-sacrifice guaranteed by a well-functioning family, the fathers are increasingly less attractive as models for them, and the mothers less altruistic.
Although we must be compassionate towards those who suffer, we must never condone evil. With homosexual acts we are talking about sins of extreme gravity, that ‘cry to Heaven for vengeance’ and in the face of which, according to St. Pier Damiani, ‘even the devils withdraw.’ They abhor such crimes because they have retained something of the perfection of the angelic nature, so that crimes against nature of this enormity are repugnant to them.

b) Unnatural ‘Marriage’

A recent development in this shadowy domain is that of alliances between persons of the same sex being proposed as ‘marriage’ by the state authorities, with sanctions being proposed for the future on those who might be so bold as to object to them.
What we are witnessing is the public acceptance and approval, at least on the civil level, of that which is obscene and intrinsically perverted; and the purported elevation of the respective way of life to the dignity of a sacrament, in other words to that of a state willed by God and a source of holiness.
The irrationality of this way of life is manifest even in the name with it has been dubbed: ‘marriage’. The word derives from the Latin ‘matrimonium’, which, as the Catechism of Trent explains, signifies ‘matris munus’: the office of motherhood, which, when applied to two members of the same sex, is clearly a contradiction in terms. We as rational beings, and above all as Catholics, should refuse to call such alliances ‘marriage’ and should clearly instruct our children that they are not so.
Even if such alliances are not, and, on account of their perversion, will never be, widely diffused, we observe that one head-of-state after another is yielding to the pressure of approving them, under the influence of a small, if virulent, band of reprobates. These heads-of-state, when they are not simply evil, are weak. They lack courage and substance: they are like great white jelly-fish, invertebrate and poisonous, floating with the tide, and bringing death to all those whom they encounter.
It cannot have been easy for the promoters of such grotesque and bizarre abominations to find a pejorative term to describe the position of their opponents. They came up with ‘Homophobia’, literally ‘same-fear’, or by extension ‘same-hate’, suggesting that their opponents harbour fear or hatred towards them, which of course would be weakness and inhuman. In reply it should be said that the Church does not fear or hate any-one; but such actions and ways of life it condemns.
Even if such endeavours are rooted in the World’s defiance of God and the Church, we have, in the Synod on the Family in 2014, witnessed Bishops engaging with such worldly thinking, infandum! for example looking into ‘what may be good’ in these civil consortia. In this regard we limit ourselves to remarking that it is a waste of time, energy, and Church finances for a Synod Bishop to enquire into what may be good in that which is intrinsically evil.
c) ‘Gender’
Not content to degrade the human person and society in this manner, the same perverted band has now succeeded in introducing into a considerable number of European schools educational programmes promoting that which they are pleased to label as the ‘Gender Ideology’. These programmes are aimed at children from birth to adulthood. They elect the emotions and feelings as the guide of sexual conduct; they excite and promote them in the minds of the children. The programmes tend towards contraception, abortion, homosexuality, paedophilia, the further destruction of the family, population control, and in fine, or so it seems, a totalitarian ‘One-World-Order’.
Apart from its singular depravity, this enterprise is characterised by what we can only describe as stupidity to a heroic degree. Has any-one ever seriously suggested in any field that a man should be guided solely by his emotions or feelings? Man is not an animal: he possesses reason and a will. Indeed, as we have noted above, these are the two principal faculties of his immortal soul, the use of which will determine his eternal life.
How can it be, then, that heads of schools and teachers have accepted these proposals? Have they done so in order to obey the new civil law? In this case they should know that an unjust law is not a law but a negation of the law. Or have they done so in order not to lose their jobs? But that is a sin, for such courses constitute an objective moral evil, and it is never licit to do what is evil as a means for what is good. If they want to stay at the school, why do they not stay there and show the Gender course up for what it is? Will God abandon those who refuse to offend him by sin?
Perhaps we may be surprised that it is but a small group of persons that puts pressure on the heads-of-state and on society to effect that which is contrary to nature, to logic, to good sense, to the conscience, and therefore also to the majority (although it is of course presented in the name of democracy). But, there again, we have seen similar phenomena in the Third Reich, in the Reformation, in the Doctrinal and the Liturgical Revolutions (that is, respectively, the Second Vatican Council and the fabrication and implementation of the Novus Ordo Missae), and in all other Revolutions. A small group instigates the evil and only a small group actively resists. The rest go along, floating with the tide. In German one says that only dead fish go with the tide.
One of the more patent errors of the ‘Gender Ideology’ is the principle that natures can change: a man can become a woman for example, and a woman a man. The truth, by contrast, is that the notion of ‘nature’ or ‘essence’ pertains to the notion of ‘substance’ which is a first principle of thought: a principle without which it is impossible to think. Essences and natures do not change, unless of course God directly intervenes. A man remains a man whatever he does to himself, and a woman a woman. After a ‘transgender operation’ a man does not become a woman, but an ‘Attis’, a self-mutilating, female impersonator.
As Romanio Amerio states at various points in his magisterial work ‘Iota Unum’, the root of modern error is this very denial, or ‘loss’, of essences. The denial of essences is a consequence of radical subjectivism, which is the idolatry of the present age: the substitution of God for man which we have treated above. If I deny that things have essences, objective essences, then they assume for me the essences which I myself ascribe to them, that is according to my feelings or attitudes, essences which may therefore change, as my feelings and attitudes themselves change.

3. Iniquity in General

‘And as they liked not to have God in their knowledge, God delivered them up to a reprobate sense, to do those things which are not convenient. Being filled with all iniquity, malice, fornication, avarice, wickedness, full of envy, murder, contention, deceit, malignity, whisperers, detractors, hateful to God, contumelious, proud, haughty, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, foolish, dissolute, without affection, without fidelity, without mercy’ (vv. 28-31).
The Book of Wisdom, the background text to St. Paul’s account of Apostasy, furnishes us with a similar list of evils, deriving them from the same source: ‘And all things are mingled together, blood, murder, theft and dissimulation, corruption and unfaithfulness, tumults and perjury, disquieting of the good, forgetfulness of God, defiling of souls, changing of nature, disorder in marriage, and the irregularity of adultery and uncleanness. For the worship of abominable idols is the cause, and the beginning and end, of all evil’ (Wisdom 14 vv. 25-7).
In the previous section St. Paul, referring to unnatural impurity, spoke of the ‘recompense due to their error’ which we may readily apply to the ‘a.i.d.s.’ epidemic. Leaving the reader to reflect on how the two following passages may relate to our present age, we now turn briefly to consider the consequences of this apostasy for contemporary man, first in regard to his soul, then in regard to the destruction to which it tends.

PART 3.

Consequences

1. The Soul of Man

At the root of the apostasy that we have described above is pride. Pride has seduced man’s will, which in its turn has detached itself from his reason. Detaching itself from reason it has detached itself from Faith and from God. The apostasy has been so violent that it has shaken man to his deepest being: it has clouded his intellect, weakened his will, detached his emotions, at least in part, from their dominion, and has intensified them.
The impurity in which this apostasy partly consists has exercised a particular force in the process of destruction. As St. Thomas shows in his treatment of the ‘Daughters of Lust’ (Summa II II 153 a. 5): ‘the effect of this vice is that the lower appetite, namely the concupiscible, is most forcibly intent upon its object, that is the object of pleasure, on account of the vehemence of the pleasure. Consequently, the higher powers, namely the reason and the will are most grievously disordered…’
In all these aspects, the apostasy of to-day imitates Original Sin itself, it has strengthened the hold of this Sin on fallen nature and brought this same nature to its finest and final flowering.
We shall proceed to look more closely at the intellect and will of modern man.

a) The Intellect

i) Professor Plinio Correia de Oliviera in his book ‘Revolution and Counter-Revolution’ explains how in the course of time man grows increasingly audacious in his rebellion against God. First he denies the Faith, then the existence of God, and subsequently the Natural Law. We have seen how this process culminates in the denial of essences. The rebellion has taken on national dimensions with the imposition of atheism, of one-child families, of the ‘Gender ideology’ on entire nations.
And yet this whole process is already contained in germ in man’s initial rejection of God. For God as the proper object of the intellect is Truth and Objective Reality, so that in rejecting God, he has not only rejected Truth, as we noted above, but also Objective Reality itself. As a result he has become blind to God’s Will as manifest in the natural law, and even to the very nature and essences of things. Instead, he has embraced subjective reality, which is nothing other than madness. We shall give an example in the following section.
ii) By not acting according to reason, he has descended to the level of the animals, or rather he has descended lower, because animals follow the Natural Law by their very being; whereas man has defied it, and so is acting like a perverted animal;
iii) His will, by rejecting reason, has risen up against it. He has become divided in himself: divided and schizophrenic;
iv) By becoming divided in himself he has entered into his definitive decline. Our Blessed Lord Himself said: ‘A Kingdom divided amongst itself cannot stand’. He is in a state of self-destruction: moral in his relation with others, physical in relation to his aborted children, and spiritual in relation to his immortal soul.

b) The Will

i) Man has rejected the proper object of his will which is God. In so doing he has refused to love Him, he has rendered himself incapable of fulfilling this the sole purpose of his existence;
ii) His rejection of God has led him into impurity, drawing him away from marriage, from the most intimate and lasting of all human loves. He has thus shown himself incapable of those two forms of love which make the greatest demands on man, which demand self-sacrifice to the highest degree: Divine love and spousal love. To this extent he has become like his father, the devil, ‘the one who cannot love’ in the words of St. Theresa of Avila.
iii) Instead, he has fallen into impurity: not true love: love as a virtue, but love as a passion, a surrogate object called ‘love’ only by analogy with true love. We have spoken about these two types of love above, indicating how the Church Herself has shifted Her interest from the virtue of love to the passion of love. To understand the heinousness of impurity in its present-day form, let us compare it briefly with marriage.
The latter exists between a man and a woman for the purpose of the procreation and education of children; the former exists between two persons regardless of sex or age for the purpose of pleasure. Procreation is avoided where possible by contraception or abortion. The children who, despite all these dangers, succeed in being born, are sent to school, no longer to be educated but to be perverted. Man has been enveloped by a world devised by the Devil, the imitator of God, a grotesque distortion and perversion of the real world. It is not the objective world, it is a subjective world, subjective reality. How can we not describe living in this world as madness?

2. Destruction

The sin of the Sodomites cries out to Heaven for vengeance, as does the plight of the orphan. Who is more an orphan than the being created and dying in a test-tube, or, if surviving, put in a rented womb, and consigned at birth to two people of the same sex living out some miserable parody of marriage? The cries of the sins of the Sodomites and of the orphans mingle with the cries of the billions of unborn children murdered daily by (abortifacient) ‘contraceptives’ or other methods, their ‘silent screams’ witnessed in all their desperate pathos on ultrasound film. The cries, inaudible to the majority, split the air of the spirit at every moment of the day ‘and the cry of them has entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth’ (St. James 5.4).
‘And if they should enter the stream of life and pass out of it,’ says the apostate, ‘if all around us should perish, what is that to us? We alone exist, we are from ourselves: as we decree, so shall it be done.’
And the dead reply: ‘How long, O Lord, Holy and True, dost Thou not judge and revenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth?’ (Apoc. 6.10). But the cup of the wrath of God is overflowing, the troops of the enemy are amassing against the Church, and the blood-shed has already begun.
Why, we might ask ourselves, does moral evil tend to destruction? To answer this question it will help us to consider it in relation to moral good. Moral good, and the virtue of love which effects it, tends to the increase and perfection of being: to the external glory of God, and the good of the neighbour and of the self. Moral evil, by contrast, tends to the diminution of being. This is evident when we recall that evil is essentially a privation of being, so that to promote evil is to promote the privation, the diminution of being.
By Faith we know that God’s purpose (or finis operis) in creation is that creation should glorify Him by its likeness to Him. Man glorifies Him, man promotes His external glory and at the same time his own good, by his sanctity and holiness. To this end it is necessary that man be united to God by Grace: by Baptism, Faith, and by Charity which increases with each of a man’s good works performed in the state of Grace.
The Devil, by contrast, has no purpose (finis operis) in a positive sense, which is why his machinations are essentially without sense or meaning. He only has a purpose in a negative sense. This purpose is defined by its negation of God’s purpose, that is as the frustration of God’s glory: the diminution of that being which consists in God’s glory and the sanctity of man, ideally by its utter annihilation. To this end he employs all his efforts to prevent man’s access to Grace: to Baptism and Faith, and then to prevent his growth in Grace, that is his perfection in Charity, by acts of virtue. This he does by obstructing man and by tempting him into sin.
Guided by God, men live their earthly life to the full in peace and happiness; guided by the Devil their life is empty, meaningless, chaotic, harmful and destructive: ‘their feet are swift to shed blood. Destruction and unhappiness in their ways’ (Ps.13). Our words about impurity above may serve as an illustration of this truth; those who engage in it are like the heretics whom St. Jude (vv.12-3) compares to the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah: ‘…clouds without water, which are carried about by winds, trees of the autumn, unfruitful, twice dead, plucked up by the roots, raging waves of the sea, foaming out their own confusion; wandering stars, to whom the storm of darkness is reserved forever.’
At life’s end in Heaven man attains to perfection of being, to fullness of life, and the happiness which flows from it, in the vision of God; in Hell, by contrast, there is only the negation of being and life: living annihilation and living death.
What we have said about individual men clearly applies equally to the family and to society itself, of which, as we noted above, the family is the constitutive cell. This we can see with particular clarity in relation to the destruction inflicted by abortion: What future can a society have that destroys its own children?
But are we witnessing the destruction not only of individual societies, but of society and of civilisation as a whole? Is the sun really ‘setting on mankind’ as Benedict XVI has stated?
There are reasons for thinking so. We refer to the words of Monsignor Gaume in the Traité du Saint-Esprit (Vol.I ch.18) about three deluges: that of Noah, by water; that of the pagan world, by blood; and that of modern society by fire: ‘… the ruin of the apostate world of Christendom by the deluge of fire which will bring to an end the existence of the human race on the globe. Trampling underfoot the merits of Calvary and the benefits of the Cenacle, the world of the last days will set itself up in full revolt against the Spirit of Good. More than ever enslaved to the Spirit of Evil, it will consign itself with a hitherto unknown cynicism to all form of iniquities. Such will be the number of deserters that the City of Good will be almost entirely abandoned and the city of Evil will assume colossal proportions…’
The learned and enlightened prelate notes that all three deluges are deluges where ‘man becomes flesh’. He quotes Genesis (6.3): ‘My spirit shall not remain in man for ever, because he is flesh’ together with the comment of St. Ambrose: ‘Diluvium carnis peperit diluvium aquae’. The same is clearly true of the second deluge as also of our present society. We add that amongst the various sins of the flesh, unnatural impurity plays a significant part in all three cases: with Sodom and Gomorrah in the first case; in the last days of Rome in the account of the City of God by St. Augustine in the second case; and of course in the present world in the third case.

Aspiration

Although the World and large sections of the Church may to-day lie in darkness, we are not, and shall not, be engulfed in it. ‘The light shineth in the darkness: and the darkness did not comprehend it’ (Jn. 1.5). As St. Paul writes (I Thess. 5. 4-8): ‘But you, brethren, are not in darkness, that that day should overtake you as a thief. For all you are the children of light and children of the day: we are not of the night nor of darkness. Therefore let us not sleep, as others do: but let us watch, and be sober. For they that sleep, sleep in the night; and they that are drunk, are drunk in the night. But let us, who are of the day, be sober, having on the breast-plate of faith and charity, and, for a helmet, the hope of salvation.’
We shall not be engulfed in the darkness of the World, no, but we will occupy ourselves with the business of our salvation. In so doing we shall also be the light of the world to those around us, as Our Blessed Lord commands us, and as St. Paul states (Phil. 2.15): ‘That you may be blameless and sincere children of God, without reproof, in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation: among whom you shine as lights in the world’.

We conclude this essay with a quotation from perhaps the most profound book on the Roman Rite: ‘The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass’ by the Revd. Dr. Nikolaus Gihr, Herder 1938, (Bk.1 ch.3 a.3, s.2, p.226), a quotation which should inspire in us the self-same Christian sentiments:

‘No pen is able to describe the ardent zeal, the generosity, the energy, the purity of heart and greatness of soul, the magnanimity and meekness, the patience and self-denial – in short, the spirit and love of sacrifice which have flowed forth from the altar for more than eighteen centuries, and made of millions of the children of the Church living holy sacrifices, pleasing unto God (Rom. 12,1).

We too should aspire to be of the number of these her good children, who constitute her crown and joy (Phil. 4,1); we should make ourselves a sacrifice unto God and for our fellow-men by leading a life pure and chaste, active and patient, devout and charitable – a life of sacrifice. Can the life of the true children of God and of the Church in an anti-Christian age and in a world estranged from God be anything than a life of continual sacrifice? ‘All that will live godly in Christ, shall suffer persecution’ (2. Tim. 3,12).

Only in the glow of fire does incense exhale its sweet odours, only in the crucible does gold acquire its purity and lustre; thus also must we be tested, purified and proved in the crucible of suffering and tribulation, that the fruitful seeds of virtue may blossom in us, and that we may attain eternal joy and glory.

In the Name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Don Pietro Leone

With thanks to Rorate Caeli

The joyful death of Catholic Ireland

James Matthew Wilson

Do you remember the joke about the Irish brewery worker who drowned in a vat of suds? “Poor Sean,” the new widow said upon learning her husband’s fate, “He didn’t stand a chance.” “Oh, I wouldn’t say that, Mrs. Reilly,” replies the foreman. “He did crawl out three times to use the bathroom.”

The Republic of Ireland has just voted, by a commanding and unprecedented popular vote, to establish “gay marriage” in its territory. The world, and the Irish themselves, who generally look at themselves from the viewpoint of the foreigner in a sad kind of “double consciousness,” will not fail to read the message: “Catholic Ireland’s dead and gone, it’s with De Valera in the grave.”

The coverage of the vote holds it up as an occasion of joy, of national pride, of a new era in an old country. I am sure there are some who use these expressions sincerely. Modern westerners usually think of life in this world in therapeutic terms. Matters of what is sometimes called “private” morality are decided entirely in terms of the question, “How will this make me feel?” while matters of “public” morality are submitted to a utilitarian calculus the numbers of which are usually undefined or unsatisfactory, boiling down to something like, “How will such-and-such a measure affect public health?” These are the only questions one can ask, if one inhabits an impoverished world where goodness and truth, happiness and justice, are taken for mere “subjective” projections onto the wandering atoms of the universe. But this diagnosis is not my interest today, because it cannot wholly explain the queer elation in Dublin.

What I want to consider is the specific conditions in Ireland that led up to this moment. My account will be somewhat hobbled; though for a number of years I resided in Dublin regularly, I have not visited the country since 2007, and so learned of some of the more recent and traumatic events in Irish life only from the newspapers.

My days in Ireland began just after the peak of the so-called Celtic Tiger. The economy was expanding, the “ribbon effect,” or suburban sprawl was spreading out around Dublin and Galway, and the restaurants, bars, and hotels were staffed by immigrant workers, most of them from Eastern Europe.

My interest in Irish culture was incidental to begin with. I had fallen in love with the modern Irish poets, from Yeats to Mahon, for their formal dexterity. But I also loved God above all things, and viewed the love of country as little less sacred than the love of one’s father and mother. The Irish narrative of faith and fatherland, fought and died for, resonated with me and, I thought, provided an occasion to deepen my understanding of those loves. To study Irish literature, it seemed to me then, was to study the work of authors who lived and died for the sacred.

What I found in the Ireland of 2001 provided little occasion for dwelling on any of that “rubbish.” In the previous decade, the hierarchy of the Irish Church had been wracked with scandal. Its prestige had come to be viewed as hypocrisy and arrogance, its power as conceit and corruption. Regular Mass attendance had dropped from nearly 90 percent a few years prior to around 60 percent, and it continued to plunge in the years of my visits. If practice of the faith was plunging then, it has plummeted since. The churches were full on Sunday, then, now they sit empty, as if Dublin were Paris or New York.

I saw few signs of genuine piety, and the demeanors of the pious seemed passive and weary. The Irish saw well that prosperity had at last come to their land; it seemed to entail a giving up of both Irish folkways and the ancestral religion, and that was a bargain they were willing to make.

The political elite in Ireland had long since come to have more in common with their counterparts in other western European nations than with the supposedly backward sensibilities of the people they ruled. They clearly saw the embarrassment of the Church as something to be capitalized on to advance the secularization of the country—its normalization, you might say, within the post-Christian mainstream. A prime minister brought his concubine to dinner with the Archbishop; it created a sensation rather than a scandal. Where Nelson’s Pillar had once stood—blown up in a symbolic act of nationalism by the IRA in 1966—the Irish government had erected a “millennium spike.” It is just as bad and stupid as it sounds. I wrote about it thus in my first book of poems, one inspired by the Belfast poet Louis MacNeice:

Where Nelson’s Pisgah pillar pruned, then plumed,
They’ve propped a sterile spike up like an altar
To pious E.U. secularity.

Irish society never fully recovered from the Civil War that humiliated it in 1922-23. The internecine conflict was, as Thomas MacGreevy once wrote, a last humiliation by the British Empire, disillusioning Irish nationalism just at the moment when it had achieved something like victory—a modest independence called “home rule.” In the subsequent decades, Irish politics was marked by a persistence of nationalist ambition to make Ireland in actuality what it has long been regarded as being: a distinctively Catholic republic that would stand outside the main tendencies of western Europe toward secularization, economic liberalization, and, later, the welfare state.

In this ambition, they succeeded. The Church enjoyed a central place in Irish public life; its charitable institutions served as a non-state agent to educate, heal, and care for the Irish people in lieu of public schools, hospitals, and other social services. The long-reigning Eamonn De Valera attempted a third-way economy—one founded on agriculture and autarchy, especially in regards to its powerful neighbor. This last was not a great achievement, though it was more successful than it would have been had the ranks of Ireland’s lower classes not already been emigrating in a continuous flow for most of the previous century.

The persistence of these nationalist ambitions should not surprise us, given the tremendous symbolic power generated in the decades before independence. Nonetheless, it was a waning influence from the beginning. In the 1950s, the Irish economy was liberalized and increasingly opened to the European market. That was sufficient to make most Irish conclude that their country was nothing special; it should rightly assume its place as a marginal junior player in the global economy. Economic liberalization led to secularization, or might have, were it not for a string of public controversies, including votes on abortion and divorce, that reminded many Irish of their distinctive self-image as a Catholic nation—much to the anguish of liberals, including the literati, who sought to show that the only thing distinctive about Ireland was that it was much worse than other countries.

It was the expansion of the Irish economy and the sex scandals in the Church in the 1990s that brought this long developing contempt for Irish exceptionalism to a head. It seemed to vindicate every accusation of Ireland as a backward backwater of hypocrisy. But this contempt for the past was softened by the unprecedented prosperity of the Celtic Tiger. The young were too busy earning money and spending it to have children much less to attend to the dissolution of Ireland’s Catholic culture.

When the global economy collapsed in 2008, Ireland was among the handful of worst-hit small countries. Emigration increased to highs not seen for decades. The time had come for reprisals. Their hopes for prosperity dashed, the Irish had few political options, and a future of bailouts and austerity imposed from abroad. Enda Kenny was elected Prime Minister on a European liberal economic platform, but it soon became clear that his power could only be enhanced by taking Irish society in a leftward direction. Every confrontation he staged with the Church, he won. He was called brave for taking on such a venerable but hidebound institution in the name of truth and progress; but, indeed, how much bravery could it require to fight a battle he could not lose? The disappointments of Irish society were increasingly expressed as contempt for the Church.

Year by year, government inquiries into sexual abuse within Church-run institutions, the physical abuses of those in the care of nuns and priests, and finally the supposed unearthing of mass graves of children on the properties of homes for unwed mothers. The stories themselves were increasingly distorted in the press, but nobody cared; the outrage and contempt only increased. To present oneself as a faithful Catholic in contemporary Ireland would require far more bravery than, say, to present oneself as a practitioner of sodomy.

For more than a century, the Irish had been told, had told themselves, that they were something distinctive in the history of Christendom. A Catholic nation that had persisted in the faith despite domination by a Protestant foreign power, the service of country and of God seemed almost as one. But, for just under a century, a nagging doubt had haunted such convictions. Ireland was insignificant: its dream of itself consequently stood in the way of its simply getting on as one more country on a continent that had long since lost its faith but had embraced the mundane contentment afforded by a liberalized economy, the welfare state, and a far more immanent horizon of beliefs.

Some scholars tell us that the gothic genre of story-telling grew up as a response to the Catholic Irish. A society that saw itself as enlightened, rational, secular, and modern suddenly found itself haunted by some frightful other, a ghoul, a return of the repressed: an avatar of superstitious, atavistic, arcane Catholicism. The Irish and Catholic response to such tales of Whiggery was easy: Catholicism “returns” not as the ravenous claw of the past reaching up from the grave to strangle the present, but as the truth, which never goes anywhere. Truth always asserts its inescapable claim on every person.

But what is one to do when that claw represents not simply the past, but also the future, the Catholic nation that Ireland was meant to become, but never quite did? What is one to do when the gothic monster is not something intruding from the depths beneath one’s society, but is, if anything, the institution that seemed to represent the most distinctive virtues of that society? Kill it, of course. Kill it, and take joy in the sport.

The joy with which the “gay marriage” referendum is being greeted not only in the streets of urban Dublin but across the whole country must surely be a complex emotion. Insofar as the Irish are just like most of us westerners, they are celebrating a new freedom of the will to assert itself without any moral prohibition. But the therapeutic triumphed long ago, and didn’t need Ireland to cement its victory.

The reason the Irish—as Irish—are celebrating is that they have with this referendum delivered a decisive and final blow to their venerable image as a Catholic nation. They have taken their vengeance on the Church. They must relish the unshackling; they must love the taste of blood. But, finally, they take joy in becoming what, it seems, they were always meant to become. An unexceptional country floating somewhere in the waters off a continent that has long since entered into cultural decline, demographic winter, and the petty and perpetual discontents that come free of charge to every people that lives for nothing much in particular.

James Matthew Wilson is Associate Professor of Religion and Literature in the Department of Humanities and Augustinian Traditions at Villanova University. He is the author of a chapbook of poems, Four Verse Letters (Steubenville, 2010) and of Timothy Steele: A Critical Introduction (Story Line, 2012), and a new collection of poems entitled The Violent and the Fallen (Finishing Line Press). A scholar of philosophical theology and literature, Wilson has lectured widely on topics ranging from modern American poetry to ancient Greek philosophy.

Published originally in Crisis Magazine