Quote:"It is now theologically possible for Protestants to use the same Mass as Catholics." (1)

• The Publicis Groupe, a leading PR firm, represents major companies within the technology, pharmaceutical and banking industries. These companies, in turn, have various partnerships with the U.S. government and global nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).
  

• Publicis is a partner of the World Economic Forum, which is leading the call for a “reset” of the global economy and a complete overhaul of our way of life. As such, Publicis appears to be playing an important role, coordinating the suppression of information that runs counter to the technocratic narrative.
  

• The role of the free press is to counter industry propaganda. That role has been effectively subverted through advertising. News outlets rarely report on something that might damage their advertisers.
  

• Publicis connects to the drug industry, banking industry, NewsGuard/HealthGuard, educational institutions, Big Tech companies like Google, Microsoft and Bing, the U.S. State Department and Department of Defense, global technocratic institutions like the World Health Organization, national and global NGOs like the CCDH and the World Economic Forum, and dominating health websites like WebMD and Medscape.
  

• These connections, taken together, explain how certain views can be so effectively erased. The answer to this dilemma is transparency. We must expose the machinations that allow this agenda to be pushed forward.
  

Quote:The anonymously funded CCDH also has an office in Washington, D.C. and the defamatory publicity campaign created in December 2020 was designed to not only discredit NVIC’s four-decade public record of working within the U.S. democratic system to secure vaccine safety and informed consent protections in public health policies and laws, but to destroy our small charity.

• Public libraries
  

• Schools
  

• MSN
  

• Bing
  

• Trend Micro and many others
  

Catholic Encyclopedia > The Sacrament of Penance

• that penance is not a mere human invention devised by the Church to secure power over consciences or to relieve the emotional strain of troubled souls; it is the ordinary means appointed by Christ for the remission of sin. Man indeed is free to obey or disobey, but once he has sinned, he must seek pardon not on conditions of his own choosing but on those which God has determined, and these for the Christian are embodied in the Sacrament of Penance.
  

• No Catholic believes that a priest, simply as an individual man, however pious or learned, has power to forgive sins. This power belongs to God alone; but He can and does exercise it through the ministration of men. Since He has seen fit to exercise it by means of this sacrament, it cannot be said that the Church or the priest interferes between the soul and God; on the contrary, penance is the removal of the one obstacle that keeps the soul away from God.
  

• It is not true that for the Catholic the mere "telling of one's sins" suffices to obtain their forgiveness. Without sincere sorrow and purpose of amendment, confession avails nothing, the pronouncement of absolution is of no effect, and the guilt of the sinner is greater than before.
  

• While this sacrament as a dispensation of Divine mercy facilitates the pardoning of sin, it by no means renders sin less hateful or its consequences less dreadful to the Christian mind; much less does it imply permission to commit sin in the future. In paying ordinary debts, as e.g., by monthly settlements, the intention of contracting new debts with the same creditor is perfectly legitimate; a similar intention on the part of him who confesses his sins would not only be wrong in itself but would nullify the sacrament and prevent the forgiveness of sins then and there confessed.
  

• Strangely enough, the opposite charge is often heard, viz., that the confession of sin is intolerable and hard and therefore alien to the spirit of Christianity and the loving kindness of its Founder. But this view, in the first place, overlooks the fact that Christ, though merciful, is also just and exacting. Furthermore, however painful or humiliating confession may be, it is but a light penalty for the violation of God's law. Finally, those who are in earnest about their salvation count no hardship too great whereby they can win back God's friendship.
  

Quote:As a means of regaining grace and justice, penance was at all times necessary for those who had defiled their souls with any mortal sin. . . . Before the coming of Christ, penance was not a sacrament, nor is it since His coming a sacrament for those who are not baptized. But the Lord then principally instituted the Sacrament of Penance, when, being raised from the dead, he breathed upon His disciples saying: 'Receive ye the Holy Ghost. Whose sins you shall forgive, they are forgiven them; and whose sins you shall retain, they are retained' (John 20:22-23). By which action so signal and words so clear the consent of all the Fathers has ever understood that the power of forgiving and retaining sins was communicated to the Apostles and to their lawful successors, for the reconciling of the faithful who have fallen after Baptism. (Sess. XIV, c. i)

• that the "binding" and "loosing" refers not to physical but to spiritual or moral bonds among which sin is certainly included; the more so because
  

• the power here granted is unlimited — "whatsoever you shall bind, . . . whatsoever you shall loose";
  

• the power is judicial, i.e., the Apostles are authorized to bind and to loose;
  

• whether they bind or loose, their action is ratified in heaven. In healing the palsied man Christ declared that "the Son of man has power on earth to forgive sins"; here He promises that what these men, the Apostles, bind or loose on earth, God in heaven will likewise bind or loose. (Cf. also POWER OF THE KEYS.)
  

• Christ here reiterates in the plainest terms — "sins", "forgive", "retain" — what He had previously stated in figurative language, "bind" and "loose", so that this text specifies and distinctly applies to sin the power of loosing and binding.
  

• He prefaces this grant of power by declaring that the mission of the Apostles is similar to that which He had received from the Father and which He had fulfilled: "As the Father hath sent me". Now it is beyond doubt that He came into the world to destroy sin and that on various occasions He explicitly forgave sin (Matthew 9:2-8; Luke 5:20; 7:47; Revelation 1:5), hence the forgiving of sin is to be included in the mission of the Apostles.
  

• Christ not only declared that sins were forgiven, but really and actually forgave them; hence, the Apostles are empowered not merely to announce to the sinner that his sins are forgiven but to grant him forgiveness—"whose sins you shall forgive". If their power were limited to the declaration "God pardons you", they would need a special revelation in each case to make the declaration valid.
  

• The power is twofold — to forgive or to retain, i.e., the Apostles are not told to grant or withhold forgiveness nondiscriminately; they must act judicially, forgiving or retaining according as the sinner deserves.
  

• The exercise of this power in either form (forgiving or retaining) is not restricted: no distinction is made or even suggested between one kind of sin and another, or between one class of sinners and all the rest: Christ simply says "whose sins".
  

• The sentence pronounced by the Apostles (remission or retention) is also God's sentence — "they are forgiven . . . they are retained".
  

• "In the primitive Church there was no concept of the reconciliation of the Christian sinner by the authority of the Church, but the Church by very slow degrees only grew accustomed to this concept. Moreover, even after penance came to be recognized as an institution of the Church, it was not called by the name of sacrament, because it was regarded as an odious sacrament." (46)
  

• "The Lord's words: 'Receive ye the Holy Ghost, whose sins you shall forgive, they are forgiven them, and whose sins you shall retain they are retained' (John 20:22-23), in no way refer to the Sacrament of Penance, whatever the Fathers of Trent may have been pleased to assert." (47)
  

• St. Augustine (d. 430) warns the faithful: "Let us not listen to those who deny that the Church of God has power to forgive all sins" (De agon. Christ., iii).
  

• St. Ambrose (d. 397) rebukes the Novatianists who "professed to show reverence for the Lord by reserving to Him alone the power of forgiving sins. Greater wrong could not be done than what they do in seeking to rescind His commands and fling back the office He bestowed. . . . The Church obeys Him in both respects, by binding sin and by loosing it; for the Lord willed that for both the power should be equal" (On Penance I.2.6).
  

• Again he teaches that this power was to be a function of the priesthood. "It seemed impossible that sins should be forgiven through penance; Christ granted this (power) to the Apostles and from the Apostles it has been transmitted to the office of priests" (On Penance II.2.12).
  

• The power to forgive extends to all sins: "God makes no distinction; He promised mercy to all and to His priests He granted the authority to pardon without any exception" (On Penance I.3.10).
  

• Against the same heretics St. Pacian, Bishop of Barcelona (d. 390), wrote to Sympronianus, one of their leaders: "This (forgiving sins), you say, only God can do. Quite true: but what He does through His priests is the doing of His own power" (Ep. I ad Sympron., 6 in P.L., XIII, 1057).
  

• In the East during the same period we have the testimony of St. Cyril of Alexandria (d. 447): "Men filled with the spirit of God (i.e. priests) forgive sins in two ways, either by admitting to baptism those who are worthy or by pardoning the penitent children of the Church" (In Joan., 1, 12 in P.G., LXXIV, 722).
  

• St. John Chrysostom (d. 407) after declaring that neither angels nor archangels have received such power, and after showing that earthly rulers can bind only the bodies of men, declares that the priest's power of forgiving sins "penetrates to the soul and reaches up to heaven". Wherefore, he concludes, "it were manifest folly to condemn so great a power without which we can neither obtain heaven nor come to the fulfillment of the promises. . . . Not only when they (the priests) regenerate us (baptism), but also after our new birth, they can forgive us our sins" (On the Priesthood III.5 sq.).
  

• St. Athanasius (d. 373): "As the man whom the priest baptizes is enlightened by the grace of the Holy Ghost, so does he who in penance confesses his sins, receive through the priest forgiveness in virtue of the grace of Christ" (Frag. contra Novat. in P.G., XXVI, 1315).
  

• that the Fathers insisted on a manifestation of sin as the necessary means of unburdening the soul and regaining the friendship of God;
  

• that the confession was to be made not to a layman but to priests;
  

• that priests exercise the power of absolving in virtue of a Divine commission, i.e., as representatives of Christ;
  

• that the sinner, if he would be saved, must overcome his shame and repugnance to confession.
  

While this article is about the Fall of the Monastery of Le Barroux (which ended up make a 'deal with Modernist Rome') and not about the Conciliar SSPX, the similarities in the approaches of both Dom Gerard and Bishop Fellay in trying to seek acceptance from their followers for essentially the same 'deal with Rome' are striking.

Taken from The Recusant - Issue 19 [August 2014]

The Recusant - Issue 5 [March 2013]

Quote:“But”, replied Archbishop Lefebvre, “one must take it or leave it. Either this is the end of Catholicism, or we defend truly Our Lord Jesus Christ and the whole Church and the whole Catholic religion … If we begin to cohabit with evil, to discuss endlessly with evil, to make compromises with evil, then we've lost, we've lost!”

Quote:“Catholic liberals have kept on saying that their will for orthodoxy is equivalent of the most hard-line people. The compromise they have sought is not theoretical but practical. … They always come back to this reasoning. They tell us: “You see, we are shepherds. We accept the reality, we are concrete people, we are practical!” But what are practicalities? Practicalities are the implementation of principles with the help of the virtue of prudence, nothing else than that. What are practicalities when principles are missing? … “Yes, yes, yes, we agree, we share the same Credo, etc. Yes, but when we find ourselves in the world, then one must adjust oneself to the level of others, one must live with others, otherwise you will never convert others”. To say this is a total error! … Popes have perceived the danger of those Catholics that are almost elusive because they claim when one wants to corner them: “No, no, I agree”. But afterwards, they come to terms with enemies of the Church … They are traitors … more dreadful than avowed enemies … they divide minds, destroy unity, weaken strengths that instead should be combined all together against the enemy … You will be told that it is you who cause division, but it is not possible to divide when one abides by the truth … those who divide are those who try to diminish the truth in order to find agreement with everyone … Those that have it wrong must convert themselves to the truth and should not try to find common ground between truth and error …” (4)

Quote: “I think that during the next meeting, it will be me who will ask them questions. I will be the one who will interrogate them and I will ask them: ‘What Church are you? Which Church are we dealing with here? I would like to know if I am talking to the Catholic Church or if I am speaking with another Church, with a counter-Church, with a counterfeit Church?’ ...I sincerely believe that we are currently dealing with a counterfeit Church and not with the Catholic Church. Why do I say this? Because they no longer teach the Catholic Faith. They no longer defend the Catholic Faith. They are leading the Church into something other than the Catholic Church. It is no longer the Catholic Church. They sit on the chair of their predecessors, but they are not continuing their predecessors.” 

Quote:“we are not talking about a Church that does not exist materially! We are talking about the Church that exists, really exists, that is in front of us, that has a hierarchy, with a pope. It is not the product of our imagination: the Church is there, the Church truly is there, it is the Roman Catholic Church. We claim and we must confess that this Church is holy, is one, because faith requires us to do so.” (6) 

Quote:“I believe,” he used to say, “that we are in the Church and that we are the true sons of the Church, and that others are not. They are not the true sons of the Church, because liberalism is not a son of the Church. Liberalism is against the Church, liberalism operates to destroy the Church, in that sense they cannot claim that they are sons of the Church … some are prepared to sacrifice the fight for the faith by saying: “Let us first re-enter the Church! Let us first do everything to integrate the official, public structure of the Church. Let us be silent about dogmatic issues. Let us be silent about the malice of the [New] Mass. Let us keep quiet over the issues of religious freedom, Human Rights, ecumenism. And, once we are inside the Church, we will be able to do this, we will be able to achieve that …” That's absolutely false! You don't enter into a structure, under superiors, by claiming that you will overthrow everything as soon as you are inside, whereas they have all the means to suppress us! They have all the authority. What matters to us first and foremost it is to maintain the Catholic Faith. That's what we are fighting for. So the canonical issue, this purely public and exterior issue in the Church, is secondary. What matters, it is to stay within the Church … inside the Church, in other words, in the Catholic Faith of all time, in the true priesthood, in the true Mass, in the true sacraments, and the same catechism, with the same Bible. That's what matters to us. That's what the Church is. Public recognition is a secondary issue. Thus we should not seek what is secondary by losing what is primary, by losing what is the primary goal of our fight! “Once we are recognised,” you say, “we will be able to act from within the Church.” This is completely wrong; it is to totally misunderstand the minds of those in the present hierarchy! To realise this, one need only read that much talked about remark of Cardinal Ratzinger… I'll now read to you the sentence which is essential in his interview: “The problem of the nineteen sixties was to acquire for the Church the best values expressed during two centuries of liberal culture … this objective has been attained”. Yet the principles of two centuries of liberal culture are ecumenism and the declaration of Human Rights, religious liberty! And Cardinal Ratzinger recognizes them. He says: “this has been done!” … That's extremely serious! It condemns everything he says in his interview, because that is the heart of his thoughts, and that is what we have a problem with, it's what we do not want. We cannot place ourselves under an authority whose ideas are liberal and who little by little would condemn us, by the logic of the thing, to accept these liberal ideas and all the consequences of these liberal ideas, which are the new Mass, changes in the liturgy, changes in the Bible, changes in catechism, all these changes … Some say: “but they have fought against the catechism!” … yes, but they simply put the brakes on, because the changes were going so far that they even had to slow it down a bit. The consequences of their own principles scare them. Thus they put on the brakes at times, but they nevertheless continue to want to keep liberal ideas. Changing their liberal ideas is out of the question!”(7)

Quote:“Priests or bishops [and the pope?] are leading souls to hell […] And the Church, even in that state, remains holy, remains capable of sanctifying. If today, dear faithful, we receive sacraments, grace, faith, it is through this Roman Catholic Church, not through its faults, but through this real concrete Church. […] The Church is today capable of transmitting the faith, of communicating grace, the sacraments.”(8)

Quote:“I think you need to be convinced of this: you truly represent the Catholic Church … lately, we are being told that it is necessary that Tradition enters into the visible Church. I think a very, very serious error is committed here. Where is the visible Church ? … Where are the true marks of the Church? … Clearly we are the ones who preserve the Unity of the Faith, which has disappeared from the official Church … we are the ones who have the marks of the visible Church … it is not us but the modernists who leave the Church. And about the expression “to leave the visible Church”, it is an error to equate official Church with visible Church … is it therefore necessary to leave the official Church? To some extent, yes, it is obvious. One is obliged to leave the environment of these bishops, if one does not want to lose one’s soul. But this will not suffice because it is in Rome that heresy has settled. If bishops are heretics, it is not without the influence of Rome.” (9)

Quote:“vast movement of apostasy organized, in all countries, for the establishment of a universal Church.” (11)

Quote: “We have never wanted to belong to that system that calls itself the ‘Conciliar Church’, and which defines itself by the Novus Ordo Missae, ecumenism disengaged from the Catholic cause and the widespread secularisation of all of society.”(13)

The Recusant - Issue 13 [January 2014]

Home > Fathers of the Church > A Sectional Confession of the Faith (St. Gregory Thaumaturgus)