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| Archbishop Chaput Defends Traditionis Custodes |
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Posted by: Stone - 11-10-2022, 08:56 AM - Forum: Vatican II and the Fruits of Modernism
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Archbishop Chaput Defends Traditionis Custodes
gloria.tv [adapted] | November 9, 2022
Many Roman Rite Catholics reject many parts of [failed, ambiguous, and disasterous] Vatican II, lamented former Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput, 78, during the Eucharistic Symposium in Arlington Cathedral (October 22, see original link for video).
"You don’t have to scratch them very hard before they bleed anti-Council thoughts and sentiments,” he manipulated. Arlington diocese in particular experienced one of the world's worst crackdowns on the Roman Mass. Thirteen Masses were shut down.
According to Chaput, Francis published Traditionis Custodes out of fear that the numbers of “those anti-Council folks were [suddenly?] beginning to increase, especially among young seminarians and young priests, and he wanted to make sure that the direction the Church headed at the time of the Council would be followed into the future.”
He believes "personally" that Francis’ way was "harsh and imprudent," but he "understands" why Francis felt he had to act at the present time.
***
Posted in the comments section of the above post:
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| Vermont Passes Constitutional Amendment Legalizing Killing Babies in Abortions Up to Birth |
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Posted by: Stone - 11-09-2022, 11:43 AM - Forum: Abortion
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Vermont Passes Constitutional Amendment Legalizing Killing Babies in Abortions Up to Birth
LifeNews | Nov 9, 2022
Montpelier, Vermont
Aborting viable, late-term unborn babies for any reason is now a “right” in the Vermont Constitution.
On Tuesday, state voters approved Proposal 5, a pro-abortion constitutional amendment, on the ballot by a massive margin, with 72 percent in favor, the VT Digger reports. According to election results, 22 percent voted against the amendment and 6 percent did not vote.
Most expected the amendment to pass in the deeply Democratic state. Abortions already are legal for basically any reason up to birth in Vermont, but the amendment will stop the state legislature from enacting any limits in the future.
“We knew it was an uphill battle to actually be able to successfully share the truth of what the ramifications of this amendment would be,” said Rep. Anne Donahue, R-Northfield, who opposed the amendment. “I still believe that if Vermonters really understood the implications, they would not have supported it.”
Polls consistently show that a strong majority of Americans oppose late-term abortions, but the amendment did not make it clear to voters that it will allow late-term abortion on demand.
It states, “That an individual’s right to personal reproductive autonomy is central to the liberty and dignity to determine one’s own life course and shall not be denied or infringed unless justified by a compelling State interest achieved by the least restrictive means.”
Disturbingly, state Democrat leaders “roared and whooped” for joy late Tuesday after learning that Vermont will continue to allow abortions up to birth.
Here’s more from the report:
Quote:The amendment had the full-throated support of the Vermont Democratic Party and its most high-profile officeholders and candidates, who, like their national counterparts, sought to make abortion a top issue in this election. At the party’s election night party at Hula in Burlington, the room roared and whooped after party chair Anne Lezak announced the amendment’s passage minutes after 9 p.m.
“So many of you stepped up and knocked on doors and went to rallies and contributed and talked to your neighbors and made sure that people were not bamboozled by the ridiculous falsehoods we heard,” Lezak said. “And this just makes me very, very proud of all of us.”
The Vermont Right to Life Committee and state Catholic leaders spent months warning voters about how extreme the amendment will be, according to the Catholic News Agency.
This amendment “promises to enshrine unlimited, unregulated abortion throughout all nine months of pregnancy in our state’s founding document” and “would permanently block any attempt to protect the unborn — even those who can survive outside the womb,” the Diocese of Burlington wrote in a bulletin published just prior to the vote.
But pro-abortion groups spent a lot of money to flood voters with advertisements promoting the amendment and received a lot of friendly news coverage. Those fighting to pass the amendment included the ACLU of Vermont, the League of Women Voters of Vermont, Alliance for a Better Vermont and Planned Parenthood Vermont Action Fund, according to VT Digger.
California and Michigan voters also passed pro-abortion amendments to their state constitutions Tuesday.
In June, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the infamous Roe v. Wade ruling in the case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health and returned the abortion issue to voters. Now, more than a dozen states are enforcing laws that protect unborn babies from abortion and more are fighting in court to do so. New research estimates up to 10,000 unborn babies already have been saved from abortion as a result.
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| Catholic Church in England 'returns' relic of Catholic St. Chad to Anglican Cathedral |
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Posted by: Stone - 11-09-2022, 10:38 AM - Forum: General Commentary
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Saint’s relic returns to cathedral 500 years on
![[Image: 943560d38a104d5025538cda3e32c91cb033a3cb.jpg]](https://archive.ph/J8Slo/943560d38a104d5025538cda3e32c91cb033a3cb.jpg)
The Dean of Lichfield at the new shrine of St Chad, which contains a relic of the monk saved from Henry VIII’s men and passed from priest to priest for centuries
November 07 2022 The Times
Almost 500 years after the Reformation, a shrine to St Chad has been rebuilt in [the now-Anglican] Lichfield Cathedral thanks to a gift of a relic by the Catholic Church.
The donation, a piece of bone belonging to the seventh-century Anglo-Saxon monk, is to be returned to the Staffordshire cathedral, where the saint’s remains lay for almost 800 years. The relic was disturbed in the 16th century when Henry VIII began plundering the Church’s wealth.
It is hoped that the shrine, to be opened to mark the 1,350th anniversary of Chad’s death, will bring pilgrims to pray at the [Anglican] cathedral.
Chad was born in Northumbria about 634 and died in Lichfield in 672. He was the abbot of several monasteries and served as a bishop in Northumbria and Mercia. The Venerable Bede, an early historian, wrote extensively about him ... .
On his death, he was buried in Lichfield. His remains were moved in 700 to the site where Lichfield Cathedral now stands, with his body kept in a “little wooden house”, according to Bede.
The Dean of Lichfield, the Very Rev Adrian Dorber, said that in the Middle Ages his remains were placed in “a gorgeous mediaeval tomb chest” as part of a lavish new shrine.
When Henry VIII’s men came in 1538, Arthur Dudley, a canon, rescued the saint’s bones. They were passed from priest to priest for centuries.
About 200 years ago, Chad’s remains were divided between a site in France and St Chad’s Cathedral, a Catholic basilica in Birmingham. Relics are venerated more commonly in the Catholic tradition than in Anglican churches.
The relic has been given to Lichfield Cathedral as a gift from the Catholic Archdiocese of Birmingham as “a token of the growing friendship and quest for Christian unity between churches that have been divided since the 16th century”.
It will be brought to Lichfield today by Monsignor Timothy Menezes, the Dean of St Chad’s Cathedral. It will be taken in a silver reliquary to the Church of St Chad, a parish church in Lichfield.
The small fragment of bone can be seen through a glass panel in the cross-shaped reliquary.
It will then be moved to Lichfield Cathedral and installed tomorrow in the Lady Chapel in a new shrine.
Dorber said: “The cathedral was built as a pilgrimage church, a shrine church. In 1972, a memorial stone was placed where the shrine was [and] they commissioned a very beautiful icon of Chad in the 1980s which was placed where we thought the shrine was and it very quickly became a natural place for prayer and veneration.
“Given that the bones were moved from that very place, people began to think: ‘Would it not be nice or proper for some of [his remains] to be repatriated to Lichfield as part of our historical continuity?’ And there’s the fact that we’ve got a patron saint who was perhaps one of the most approachable, humble and delightful people in the whole communion of saints, according to the Venerable Bede.”
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| Dutch bishop leaves ‘vile’ Synod on Synodality: ‘The Holy Spirit has absolutely nothing to do with i |
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Posted by: Stone - 11-09-2022, 08:05 AM - Forum: Vatican II and the Fruits of Modernism
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Surprise, surprise...
Dutch bishop leaves ‘vile’ Synod on Synodality: ‘The Holy Spirit has absolutely nothing to do with it’
'Among the protagonists of this process are to me a little too many defenders of gay marriage, folks who don't really think abortion is a problem
and never really show themselves defenders of the Church's rich creed, wanting above all to be liked by their secular surroundings.'
![[Image: Bishop-Robert-Mutsaerts-4-810x500.jpg]](https://www.lifesitenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Bishop-Robert-Mutsaerts-4-810x500.jpg)
Bishop Robert Mutsaerts
Rorate Caeli
Nov 8, 2022
(LifeSiteNews) – Bishop Robert Mutsaerts, the auxiliary bishop of the Diocese of ’s-Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands, has published a statement on his blog, commenting on the Synod on Synodality, especially its October 27 new working document “For a synodal Church: communio, participatio, mission,” which is calling for a female diaconate and uses the language of the LGBT agenda. He announced that he has left the synodal process.
In his statement (see full translation below, as kindly provided to LifeSite by Fr. Cor Mennen), Bishop Mutsaerts called this synodal process “vile.”
He states “God is out of the picture in this vile synodal process,” adding that “the Holy Spirit has absolutely nothing to do with it.” He went on to say:
Quote:Among the protagonists of this process are to me a few too many defenders of gay marriage, folks who don’t really think abortion is a problem and never really show themselves defenders of the Church’s rich creed, wanting above all to be liked by their secular surroundings.
Bishop Mutsaerts is not the only one to reject the happenings surrounding this synodal process that is to last until 2024. Cardinal Gerhard Müller called it a “hostile takeover of the Church of Jesus Christ” and invited Catholics to resist, comparing the current Church crisis with that of the 4th-century Arian crisis. He even said that, in light of the spreading of the LGBT agenda in the Church, “one does not have to obey an obviously heretical bishop just for reasons of formal fidelity.” Blind obedience such as this, he continued, “would be cadaveric obedience, which not only contradicts reason but also faith.”
Bishop Athanasius Schneider, auxiliary bishop of Astana, Kazakhstan, recently agreed with the German cardinal, pointing out that the process itself is steered and influenced by a certain agenda, calling it “manipulation” by churchmen “who push their own ideological agenda.”
Both Cardinal Mario Grech and Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich, who have been called by Pope Francis to play leading roles in this synodal process, are promoters of the LGBT agenda – for example the approval of homosexuality – within the Catholic Church.
In response to these heterodox positions that are being aired and promoted during the synodal process, Bishop Mutsaerts remarks: “How unpastoral, how unloving. People want sincere answers. They don’t want to go home with more questions. You’re keeping people away from salvation.”
“I have since dropped out of the synodal process,” he concluded.
RELATED: Swiss bishop condemns the Synod on Synodality as a ‘marketing campaign’ for heresy
Please see here Bishop Robert Mutsaerts’ statement on the Synod of Synodality:
Synodal process as an instrument to change the Church?
On Thursday, Oct. 27, the Secretariat of the Synod of Bishops in Rome presented the working document for the Continental Phase of the Synod “For a synodal Church: communio, participatio, mission”. This took place at a press conference chaired by Cardinal Grech held at the Holy See press center in Rome. The document was entitled “Increase the space in your tent” (Isaiah 54:2). Based on all the final documents of the meetings in the various continents, the Secretariat of the Synod of Bishops then compiles the Instrumentum Laboris, the working document for the 2023 and 2024 Synod meetings.
The mantra of the process is: listen. To whom? To everyone. The working document contains a goodly number of quotes. “These quotations were chosen because they express in a particularly powerful, beautiful or precise way feelings that are expressed more generally in many reports. The synodal experience can be read as an avenue of recognition for those who do not feel adequately recognized in the Church.” The contours of the synodal process are becoming increasingly clear. It provides a megaphone for non-Church views. The document indicates what the synodal path should ultimately lead to: “This means a Church that learns by listening how to renew its evangelizing mission in light of the signs of the times, in order to continue to offer humanity a way of being and living in which all can feel included as protagonists.”
Who are those who feel excluded? Par. 39: “Among those who call for a more meaningful dialogue and a more welcoming space, we also find those who, for various reasons, feel a tension between belonging to the Church and their own loving relationships, such as: remarried divorced people, single parents, people living in polygamous marriages, LGBTQ people, etc.” In short, those who do not agree with the teachings of the Catholic Church. What the working document seems to suggest is that we compile a list of complaints and then debate them. The mission of the Church is a different one. Which is not: examine all opinions and then let’s come to an agreement. Jesus commanded us something else: proclaim the truth; it is the truth that will make you free. Particularly curious is the comment that the Church pays no attention to polygamy. For that matter, the document does not pay any attention to traditionalists. Those also feel excluded. Indeed, they are literally so by Pope Francis (Traditionis custodes). Apparently, there is no empathy for this group.
To date, the synodal process is more like a sociological experiment and has little to do with the Holy Spirit supposedly sounding through all. That could almost be called blasphemous. What is becoming increasingly clear is that the synodal process is going to be used to change a number of Church positions, with the Holy Spirit then also being thrown into the fray as an advocate, even though the Holy Spirit has really breathed something counterintuitive throughout the centuries. Above all, what can be gleaned from the listening sessions is an evaporated faith, no longer practiced, and not accepting the Church’s positions. People complain that the Church does not accept their views. This is not entirely true, by the way. The Flemish and German bishops go a long way with them, which is actually much more tragic. They no longer want to call sin, sin. Hence conversion and repentance are no longer discussed.
Predictable is the call for the admission of women to the priesthood: “the active role of women in the governing structures of church bodies, the possibility for women with adequate training to preach in parishes, and a female diaconate and priesthood.” A futile exercise given that the last three pontificates have explicitly stated that this is an impossibility. In politics, everything is open to discussion and debate. In the Church it is not. We have such a thing as Church doctrine that is not subject to time and place. But the working document really seems to question everything. For example, in par. 60 we read, “The call to the conversion of ecclesial culture, for the salvation of the world, is concretely linked to the possibility of establishing a new culture, with new practices and structures.” And then this: “The bishops are asked to find appropriate ways to carry out their task of validating and approving the final document and ensuring that it is the fruit of an authentic synodal journey, respectful of the process that has taken place and faithful to the different voices of the People of God in each continent.” Apparently, the office of bishop is reduced to simply implementing what is ultimately the greatest common denominator as the outcome of a raffle of opinions. The final closing stage of the synodal process cannot but turn out to be a Babel-like confusion. Predictably, all those who do not get it their way will say they are being excluded. In advance, this is a recipe for disaster. If everyone gets their way – which is not actually possible – the disaster is complete. Then the Church will have denied itself and squandered its identity.
At the presentation of the working document, Cardinal Grech was going much too far in stating that the Church’s task is to act as an amplifier of every sound coming from within the Church, even if it is contrary to what the Church has always proclaimed. That was once different. At the time of the Counter Reformation, the Church was crystal-clear about what its views were. You convince people by standing for the Catholic faith with reasoned and full conviction. You convince no one by merely listening and leaving it at that. The annoying thing is that the bishops were instructed to listen and then to document what was said. These reports were then collected at the Church province level and then forwarded to Rome. Reports that included the necessary heresies with the signature of the bishops’ conference. We could not do otherwise, but I am by no means happy about it. Several cardinals, by the way, also aired this in Rome, asking once again what synodality actually is. There was no clear answer.
Jesus took a different approach. He listened to the two disappointed disciples who were on their way to Emmaus. But at one point He took the floor and made it clear to them that they were going astray. That led them to turn around and return to Jerusalem. If we don’t turn around we end up in Emmaus and are even further from home than we already are.
One thing is clear to me. God is out of the picture in this vile synodal process. The Holy Spirit has absolutely nothing to do with it. Among the protagonists of this process are to me a few too many defenders of gay marriage, folks who don’t really think abortion is a problem and never really show themselves defenders of the Church’s rich creed, wanting above all to be liked by their secular surroundings. How unpastoral, how unloving. People want sincere answers. They don’t want to go home with more questions. You’re keeping people away from salvation. I have since dropped out of the synodal process.
+Rob Mutsaerts
Translation kindly provided by Father Cor Mennen
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| Is the Resistance Justified? |
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Posted by: Stone - 11-08-2022, 11:04 AM - Forum: The New-Conciliar SSPX
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Taken from The Recusant #59, pp.42-55 [slightly adapted]
Is the Resistance Justified?
[Every once in a while an otherwise well-meaning if misguided soul in the SSPX will attempt to defend Bishop Fellay and his 2012 Doctrinal Declaration. Here is one recent such attempt. The gentleman who wrote this document entitled it “Bishop Fellay Annotated” and the first part is simply the text of the Doctrinal Declaration with his own comments inserted (here in Italics, slightly indented) into that text. Since he had sent it to me inviting me to reply with my own thoughts, I inserted my own response into the text too (here, in bold italics, further indented). The second part, which he has entitled ‘The Case for the Resistance’ consists of him responding to a number of arguments which he imagines someone in the Resistance would make. Again, my own response is inserted throughout. We will refrain from further comment and allow the reader to make up his own mind. Enjoy. – Editor]
Bishop Fellay’s Doctrinal Declaration
Presented to Rome
15th April, 2012
I
“We promise to be always faithful to the Catholic Church and to the Roman Pontiff, the Supreme Pastor, Vicar of Christ, Successor of Peter, and head of the body of bishops.”
May 5th protocol: (We) promise always to be faithful to the Catholic Church and the Roman Pontiff, its Supreme Pastor, Vicar of Christ, Successor of Blessed Peter in his primacy as head of the body of bishops.
[Although the two documents differ more, the further into the text one goes, the May 5th Protocol is, in its opening paragraphs, very similar to the Doctrinal Declaration. Correct me if I am mistaken: you seem to think that both are fine; I think they’re both bad. And yet, despite what you say elsewhere, Archbishop Lefebvre did in fact repudiate the May 5th Protocol. He even went on to blame himself for ever having signed it, saying that he had gone too far. So it would seem that he would not agree with you on this. ]
II
“We declare that we accept the teachings of the Magisterium of the Church in the substance of Faith and Morals, adhering to each doctrinal affirmation in the required degree, according to the doctrine contained in No.25 of the dogmatic constitution Lumen Gentium of the Second Vatican Council.”
May 5th Protocol: We declare our acceptance of the doctrine contained in §25 of the Dogmatic Constitution Lumen gentium of Vatican Council II on the ecclesiastical Magisterium and the adherence which is due to it.
[I notice that your version of the 2012 text is missing footnotes. That is a pity. Footnote 1, which appears at this point, makes it clear exactly what Bishop Fellay has in mind when he says this, i.e. what it is that is being accepted here. It refers to Cardinal Ratzinger’s 1989 ‘Profession of Faith and the Oath of Fidelity’ which Archbishop Lefebvre found so appalling that he dedicated an entire section of a conference to attacking it when it when it first appeared. You should read what he says in that conference, it’s quite good. He shows just what this Cardinal Ratzinger ‘Oath of Fidelity’ really means: in practice it means that you have to accept not only whatever the current Pope thinks or says but also whatever the local modernist bishop happens to think or say “with religious submission of the mind and will” even if it differs from what the bishop of a neighbouring diocese says or even what his own predecessor said. With the addition of that one footnote, this paragraph alone would have sunk the SSPX in practice and has rendered it unfaithful in principle.]
“1. We declare that we accept the doctrine regarding the Roman Pontiff and regarding the college of bishops, with the Pope as its head, which is taught by the dogmatic constitution Pastor Aeternus of Vatican I and by the Dogmatic Constitution Lumen Gentium of Vatican II, chapter 3 (de constitutione hierarchica Ecclesiae et in specie de episcopatu), explained and interpreted by the nota explicativa praevia in this same chapter.”
May 5th Protocol: Regarding certain points taught by Vatican Council II or concerning later reforms of the liturgy and law, and which do not appear to us easily reconcilable with Tradition, we pledge that we will have a positive attitude of study and communication with the Apostolic See, avoiding all polemics.
[You will notice that the May 5th Protocol says nothing about accepting Vatican II’s teaching “regarding the college of bishops” – i.e. collegiality. We declare that we accept collegiality which is taught in Lumen Gentium (not surprisingly, ‘Pastor Aeternus’ has nothing to say about a fabled “college of bishops”). Nor does the May 5th Protocol begin this paragraph with the words “We declare that we accept…” It merely says that we will “have a positive attitude,” whatever that means, and avoid polemics. Which, I agree, is bad enough, even if it is rather vague-sounding. But this 2012 version is noticeably much worse and far more explicit.]
“2. We recognise the authority of the Magisterium to which alone is given the task of authentically interpreting the word of God, in written form or handed down in fidelity to Tradition, recalling that ‘the Holy Ghost was not promised to the successors of Peter in order for them to make known, through revelation, a new doctrine, but so that with His assistance they may keep in a holy and expressly faithful manner the revelation transmitted by the Apostles, that is to say, the Faith.’ ”
[I notice you have skipped over this paragraph entirely. Well, fair enough. There’s not a lot one can say, except to wonder exactly what is meant by the modernists when they talk of “the authority of the Magisterium” and to note that Cardinal Ratzinger made it very clear to Archbishop Lefebvre in 1988 that what he considers it to mean is, in reality, the whim of whatever the current Pope and modernist Curia happen to want. So this paragraph is dangerous in that sense, even if it is perhaps one of the least explicit, least offensive sections of this document.]
“3. Tradition is the living transmission of revelation ‘usque as nos’ and the Church in its doctrine, in its life and in its liturgy perpetuates and transmits to all generations what this is and what She believes. Tradition progresses in the Church with the assistance of the Holy Ghost, not as a contrary novelty, but through a better understanding of the Deposit of the Faith.”
[Footnote 8, which again you haven’t included, makes clear that the phrase “Tradition progresses in the Church” is lifted directly from Vatican II’s Dei Verbum. Look it up and read it in its context. Dei Verbum says that this “progression” involves the laity coming to a better understanding through “contemplation and study” and through “the spiritual realities which they experience,” whatever that means. It is straight-up modernism.]
“4. The entire tradition of Catholic Faith must be the criterion and guide in understanding the teaching of the Second Vatican Council, which, in turn, enlightens - in other words deepens and subsequently makes explicit - certain aspects of the life and doctrine of the Church implicitly present within itself or not yet conceptually formulated.”
[I am more than a little surprised to see that you have nothing to say about this clause. Tradition is how you understand Vatican II… and Vatican II is how you understand Tradition! Can you see a potential problem with this? I think I can… To say that Vatican II “enlightens and deepens” Tradition or the Faith or Catholic teaching, or indeed anything at all for that matter, is just unacceptable. Anyone who declares this needs to stop calling himself a Traditionalist. If there were no other problem in this whole document and every paragraph were fine except this one, that would still mean that the entire document needs to be thrown in the bin and the men who composed it severely disciplined.]
“5. The affirmations of the Second Vatican Council and of the later Pontifical Magisterium relating to the relationship between the Church and the non-Catholic Christian confessions, as well as the social duty of religion and the right to religious liberty, whose formulation is with difficulty reconcilable with prior doctrinal affirmations from the Magisterium, must be understood in the light of the whole, uninterrupted Tradition, in a manner coherent with the truths previously taught by the Magisterium of the Church, without accepting any interpretation of these affirmations whatsoever that would expose Catholic doctrine to opposition or rupture with Tradition and with this Magisterium.”
Only a person of ill-will would interpret the above clauses as ‘acceptance’ of Vatican II. In any case it is clarified by the next clause:
[You just skipped over the previous clause (III,4) entirely and yet you talk about ill will! Good will or ill will has nothing to do with it. And we’ll get to the next clause in a moment. Nor does anyone need to ‘interpret’ this paragraph: just read what it says. It very clearly is an acceptance of Vatican II. It says that religious liberty, ecumenism and all the rest have to be understood as being in line with everything that came before – “in a manner coherent with the truths previously taught” – in other words, you aren’t allowed to say that Religious Liberty isn’t in line with Tradition. It goes on to say that you aren’t allowed to see Religious Liberty (and the other stuff) as being in “opposition or rupture with Tradition”. This is no different to Benedict XVI’s own ‘hermeneutic of continuity’.]
“6. That is why it is legitimate to promote through legitimate discussion the study and theological explanations of the expressions and formulations of Vatican II and of the Magisterium which followed it, in the case where they don't appear reconcilable with the previous Magisterium of the Church.” This was the clause which Rome absolutely rejected. They were behaving as though Vatican II was infallible and not to be questioned.
[This clause talks about the need for “study and explanations” of Vatican II and the “Magisterium which followed it” i.e. the teachings of the conciliar Popes. So according to this clause, whenever you come across a teaching of Vatican II or one of the conciliar Popes, and you think it sounds wrong, and you can’t see how it can possibly be in line with what the Church taught prior to Vatican II… the answer is “discussion.” It might as well say “dialogue.” You will also notice that it is presented as being only a question of appearances: “in the case where they don’t appear reconcilable…” – so if you can’t see how the teaching of ‘Dignitatis Humanae’ can be squared with the teaching of ‘Quanta Cura’ and the Syllabus, then that’s just your fault for not seeing things right! What you need is even more “explanations” and “study” and “discussions”! Modern Rome will dialogue you into submission!]
“7. We declare that we recognise the validity of the sacrifice of the Mass and the Sacraments celebrated with the intention to do what the Church does according to the rites indicated in the typical editions of the Roman Missal and the Sacramentary Rituals legitimately promulgated by Popes Paul VI and John-Paul II.”
May 5th Protocol: Moreover, we declare that we recognize the validity of the Sacrifice of the Mass and the Sacraments celebrated with the intention of doing what the Church does, and according to the rites indicated in the typical editions of the Roman Missal and the Rituals of the Sacraments promulgated by Popes Paul VI and John Paul II.
NB: Both statements merely mean that the Society recognizes that Paul VI and John Paul II had the right to promulgate liturgical rites. Hence, it is not a judgment on the Novus Ordo itself. To claim that Bishop Fellay said that the Novus Ordo was legitimate amounts to calumny.
[N.B. – What is the difference between the two statements? The May 5th protocol talks about the “Roman Missal…promulgated by Pope Paul VI” whereas this new and-improved 2012 version talks about the “Roman Missal…legitimately promulgated by Pope Paul VI.” Other than that both statements are word for word the same. The only difference is that one word. Do you think that one little word “legitimately” might be significant? Archbishop Lefebvre called it an illegitimate (or ‘bastard’) Mass. Here the SSPX declares that it is something which was “legitimately promulgated”.
As for your claim that this means nothing more than that Paul VI had the right to promulgate it, that is plainly not what the text says. It describes the new rites, all of them, as “legitimately promulgated.” Note the past participle, i.e. it’s something that’s already been done. If I were to describe you as “legitimately married” to your wife, that doesn’t merely mean that you could have got married had you so wished! If the New Mass has been “legitimately promulgated” then its promulgation was legitimate. Hence this paragraph amounts to the SSPX declaring that the New Mass is legitimate and every honest person can see that.]
“8. In following the guidelines laid out above , as well as Canon 21 of the Code of Canon Law, we promise to respect the common discipline of the Church and the ecclesiastical laws, especially those which are contained in the Code of Canon Law promulgated by John-Paul II (1983) and in the Code of Canon Law of the Oriental Churches promulgated by the same pontiff (1990), without prejudice to the discipline of the Society of Saint Pius X, by a special law.”
May 5th Protocol: Finally, we promise to respect the common discipline of the Church and the ecclesiastical laws, especially those contained in the Code of Canon Law promulgated by Pope John Paul II, without prejudice to the special discipline granted to the Society by particular law.
[Both versions of this clause are no good, but arguably the 2012 version is worse being a more detailed and explicit acceptance of something bad. “The guidelines laid out above” seems to refer to paragraphs 5 and 6, namely that one has to see Vatican II as being in continuity and not rupture with what came before and that where a rupture is apparent, the answer is “discussion” as a means of arriving at “explanations”.
Summary:
Archbishop Lefebvre condemned his own signing of the May 5th Protocol. This document is noticeably worse in a number of ways. The May 5th Protocol does not “declare that we accept” Collegiality; it says nothing about Tradition “progressing in the Church” per Dei Verbum, nor does it declare that Vatican II “enlightens and deepens” Catholic teaching; it makes no suggestion about Vatican II’s teaching being “coherent with the truths previously taught” or that seeing conciliar teaching as a “rupture” is unacceptable. It does not sign anyone up to “discussions,” “study,” “explanations” and “formulations” as a means of explaining away every instance where Vatican II doesn’t “appear” to be “coherent” with Catholic teaching. It describes the New Mass and the other modernist rites as “promulgated by” and not “legitimately promulgated by” the modernist Popes.
The May 5th Protocol does not accept Cardinal Ratzinger’s Declaration of Faith and Oath of Fidelity, which only appeared one year later, the same Declaration of Faith and Oath of Fidelity which Archbishop Lefebvre explicitly condemned in the very strongest terms that same year, given which its inclusion in this Doctrinal Declaration is egregious. Finally, there is much in a name. The May 5th Protocol was a protocol. The Doctrinal Declaration is a declaration. Its purpose is to declare doctrine, according to the document’s own title. The doctrine that it declares is an acceptance of Benedict XVI’s so-called ‘hermeneutic of continuity’ and thereby a wholesale acceptance of Vatican II, not to mention the legitimacy of the New Mass.]
* * * * *
The Case for the Resistance
“Archbishop Lefebvre disowned the protocol and withdrew it. It is obvious that the doctrinal declaration is in substance the same as the May 5th Protocol and the Archbishop wasn’t happy with its clauses.”
This is not true, all the Archbishop did was to attempt to add a further clause committing Rome to agree to the consecration of a Bishop for the Society. This was his attempt to test Rome’s goodwill.
This is how the Archbishop described the Protocol afterwards: “Good in itself, it is acceptable. If it were not, I would not have even signed it in the first place, that is sure.”
And even on the evening before the episcopal consecrations, he said that he would have postponed the consecrations until the date selected by Rome if permission for a consecration had arrived that day. (cf. Archbishop Lefebvre and the Vatican )
It is therefore logical that if the Archbishop had no problem with the May 5th Protocol then the Doctrinal Declaration cannot be criticised unless it is asserted that the Archbishop too was somehow straying from tradition.
[I would be very interested to see the source for that Archbishop Lefebvre quote of yours, and in particular, when he said it. In the meantime, nobody should have any difficulty in criticizing Archbishop Lefebvre for signing the May 5th Protocol because, after all, Archbishop Lefebvre would later criticize Archbishop Lefebvre for signing it. And whereas there were priests at the time who voiced their opinion about the May 5th Protocol and his signing of it, I don’t recall Archbishop Lefebvre throwing a single one of them into the street without a penny to his name. Furthermore, as we have shown above, the Doctrinal Declaration is significantly worse in a number of ways.]
“The Archbishop said that it was a pre-condition for talks with Rome that Rome should convert. Bishop Fellay has ignored this stricture and has accepted Modernism.”
This is admittedly true but his words must be seen in context. He was saying something which he, and many others believed to be true. It was not in any sense a ‘pre-condition’, a lawyer might term this opinion as ‘obiter dicta’. Besides, if Rome converted there would be no need for an agreement with the Society.
• July 14, 1987 Archbishop Lefebvre to Cardinal Ratzinger: “eminence, even if you give us everything—a bishop, some autonomy from the bishops, the 1962 liturgy, allow us to continue our seminaries—we cannot work together because we are going in different directions. you are working to dechristianise society and the church, and we are working to christianise them.”
• Do not forget that he called the Vatican authorities antichrists before negotiating and signing the Protocol.
[…and then what happened? You seem to be missing a few extra bullet points here - reading your words, one might be forgiven for thinking that Archbishop Lefebvre suddenly dropped dead on 6th May 1988! As for his words about Rome needing to convert being ‘obiter dicta,’ if that is so then surely his entire sermon on 30th June 1988 must be regarded as obiter dicta, as also his actions on that historic day. As indeed his words and actions from that moment until his death three years later. Absurd.]
“Bishop Fellay knew that the contents of the doctrinal agreement of 2012 were ‘dodgy’ which is why he kept it secret.” But he had no reason to keep it secret apart from the usual one: no sensible religious or secular leader ever releases the contents of an agreement which has failed. To do so would cause divisions and over-speculation. This has been borne out by subsequent events.
[How interesting. The title of the document is “Doctrinal Declaration”. I am still trying to wrap my mind around this concept that one can declare something in secret. Or for that matter, that one can keep one’s doctrine a secret. “No sensible religious or secular leader” - if by “sensible” you mean conniving and dishonest, then I agree with you; and by “religious or secular leader” you perhaps mean Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak, Justin Welby…? That is the standard which we can now expect of the SSPX? I see. Also, you don’t appear to have noticed the irony in your own words: you say that Bishop Fellay kept his “Doctrinal Declaration” a secret for a year because otherwise it would have caused “divisions and overspeculation.” I seem to remember quite a bit of division and speculation during that time, so clearly this “sensible” tactic didn’t work, did it? It’s almost as though one ought instead to be open and honest about one’s doctrine and confess Christ publicly…]
“But the other 3 Bishops severely reprimanded Bishop Fellay in a letter to him which was leaked to the Internet.”
The Bishops were objecting to matters of procedure and tactics. They were certainly not objecting to doctrinal concessions. In any case they resolved their difficulties except for Bishop Williamson. Many things are said in private, good, questionable and downright bad. It is not for us to make assumptions on the basis of a private letter which lacks any context.
[“They certainly were not objecting to doctrinal concessions?” Are you saying that there were in fact doctrinal concessions? Or are you saying that they didn’t object to doctrinal concessions because there weren’t any to object to? In any case, their letter existed prior to the Doctrinal Declaration, so arguably there wasn’t any concrete evidence of doctrinal concession for them to object to yet at that stage. What they very much did object to was the Superior General disobeying the one SSPX authority higher than him, namely the clear decision of the most recent General Chapter (2006), which I notice you seem to have forgotten about. And it wasn’t really a private letter: its contents dealt with the common good directly affecting every priest and faithful of the Society concerning matters which were being played out in public. Has it occurred to you, by the way, that there could have been no such letter had those three bishops been treated properly and at least kept in the loop? People don’t as a general rule go writing joint letters of protest to their superiors unless the feel that there is no other recourse. And I don’t know what you mean by saying that the letter “lacks context”. The context is as plain as the nose on your face.]
“Bishop Fellay dealt too harshly with dissenting priests and a bishop who tried to openly criticise the Doctrinal Declaration.”
We have only anecdotal evidence for this but in a few cases some of these priests had a history of ‘doing their own thing’ and defying those put in authority over them. Fr Joseph Pfieffer, for example, ran his own private fiefdom in India and completely disregarded the authority of the district superior. The same was certainly true in the case of Bishop Williamson, who started all this trouble in the first place. It is quite obvious to anyone who knows the Bishop that his personal animosity for Bishop Fellay is plain to see. SSPX is no different to any other religious order in the Church and it requires obedience from its members. The exception, of course, is if the authorities were demanding sinful actions of their subordinates, patently not the case here. How could Bishop Fellay realistically hang on to Williamson when the latter was holding anti-Fellay seminars in St Saviours, Bristol? It is on Youtube! As is commonly recognised: ‘if you want to criticise the government you do it from the back benches.’
[I am no fan of Bishop Williamson, as I think you know, but you are being unfair to him here. I attended most if not all of those seminars and they weren’t all “antiFellay.” At the last one, the one which took place in 2012 and which I also attended - I think that is the one on youtube to which you refer - yes, the subject came up right from the start and was dealt with quite extensively. There was no way it wasn’t going to come up, everyone in the District seemed to be talking about it as were the secular media. Bishop Fellay by his words and actions had already ensured that.
The other seminars I attended were, I seem to recall, in 2011 and 2010. Possibly even 2009, I forget now. I attended them and yet - you might also recall - I was regularly publicly defending Bishop Fellay on ‘Ignis Ardens’ and elsewhere roughly until a little way into 2012. In fact I felt then that some more solid evidence of his alleged betrayal was needed and that, like everyone, he deserved to be treated as innocent until proven guilty. That evidence first appeared in the March 2012 Cor Unum and kept appearing all the way through April, May and June 2012, in public interviews with the press, public sermons and the like. Given which, these “antiFellay” seminars must have been remarkably ineffectual. Whereas, in fact, they were seminars discussing all sorts of other topics. The misconception is not your fault: not having attended them yourself, you can’t be expected to have been aware of that.
So much for Bishop Williamson, with whom, as I say, I have very little in common. When it comes to the other priests who were thrown out, their treatment and the supposed “crimes” which led to it, were often a fact made public before the whole world. To take just one example, Fr. Hewko’s offending sermon is still on youtube.
Listen in vain for any reference to Bishop Fellay, Benedict XVI, Rome or an agreement. He never mentioned it once. He also submitted the sermon to his superiors beforehand and obtained their explicit permission to preach it. But that still didn’t stop them from treating him little better than a child molester afterwards. To take another example, Fr. Patrick Girouard was punished for reading out loud some passages from the book “Catechism of the Crisis in the Church” by Fr. Gaudron, which was then on sale in the repository and on the Angelus website. Again, the offending sermon was recorded and put on the internet by the SSPX itself. With relatively little time and a little patience you could verify for yourself that what I say is true, instead of attempting to dismiss it in all as “anecdotal”. You then proceed immediately to talk about these priests having “a history” of “doing their own thing” whatever that means, as though that isn’t anecdotal at all! They had it coming, your honour. I heard it from someone who heard it from someone that Fr. Pfeiffer had a little bit too much apostolic initiative and that he didn’t always get on with the District Superior. So there!]
“Bishop Fellay always wanted an agreement with Rome at any price.”
Then why did he send three of the most outspoken and hard-line theologians to carry out the doctrinal negotiations?
[This is a curious defence. The interesting thing about the doctrinal discussions is that they were subsequently ignored: Bishop Fellay proceeded immediately with the intention of reaching a formal, signed agreement with Rome in the spring of 2012, despite the result of the doctrinal discussions at the end of 2011 being a clear and unbridgeable gulf between Rome and the SSPX. That is what one District Superior, Fr. Paul Morgan, reported in the district newsletter before he was slapped down by Menzingen for talking out of turn and revealing too much information to the plebs.
Bishop Fellay’s only justification for why he had gone ahead despite the failure of the doctrinal discussions was to say that although he personally “would have liked to wait,” “the Holy Father wants it to happen now.” Hence, given the way in which the doctrinal discussions were totally ignored in the aftermath and appear to have had no bearing whatever on the attempt to turn the SSPX into the latest iteration of the FSSP, I think it hardly matters which theologians were appointed. As for whether Bishop Fellay “always” wanted to do this, I honestly don’t know and I’ll leave speculating about that to you. What matters is that by the start of 2012 he very much wanted it.]
“The doctrinal declaration says that Bishop Fellay accepts all the errors of Vatican II such as religious liberty, ecumenism and collegiality.”
This is an outlandish and uncharitable statement which I have often heard. It is not only at odds with everything the bishop said during the negotiations it also contradicts clause 6 of the declaration which insists that the Society should be free to openly criticise Vatican II and the New Mass. A demand which was rejected out of hand by the Vatican.
[No, it may appear outlandish to some, but it is not in the least uncharitable and furthermore it is most certainly true.
“It is at odds with everything the bishop said during the negotiations…”
– See below for a very, very limited list of some of the things the bishop said during the negotiations. Very limited.
“…it also contradicts clause 6 of the declaration which insists that the Society should be free to openly criticise Vatican II and the New Mass.”
– I think you need to go back and re-read this clause: it doesn’t say what you think it says or want it to say. The words “free,” “openly” or “criticize” do not appear anywhere, nor do their synonyms. What it does talk about is discussions, appearances, formulations, and explanations. And in the same breath it mentions Vatican II and “the Magisterium which followed it” together with “the previous Magisterium” as though the two were of equivalent value or consistent with one another. Which is surely the whole point of that clause.]
“Aha! What about the visit of Bishop Egan to St Michael’s school? Doesn’t that show that SSPX is embracing modernism?”
The Bishop asked for a visit and came in for a lot of hostile press coverage afterwards. I ask you, is having tea with the priests and joining the children for rosary really so evil? Again we cannot judge motives and are obliged to be generous.
[“They seek to ingratiate themselves with the local bishops, praising them for the least sign of Catholic spirit and keeping quiet on their modernist deviations (unless perhaps it is a question of a diocese where they have no hopes of starting up), even though by doing so they end up encouraging them along their wrong path.” – (‘What are we to think of the Fraternity of St. Peter,’ http://archives.sspx.org/SSPX_FAQs/q13_f..._peter.htm ]
“And what about the ‘concessions’ to SSPX regarding marriages and confessions?”
Much is made of the SSPX accepting permissions from Rome to hear confessions and perform marriages in conjunction with the local diocese. Other permissions may be in the pipeline – who knows?
Suppose a resistance fighter is languishing in a Gestapo cell and starving to death. One day a guard passes by and chucks a morsel of bread through the bars. When the prisoner gobbles up the bread, does that make him a Nazi sympathiser?
It is easy to point the finger at SSPX and perhaps mistakes have been made in the past. Rome has 2000 years of diplomatic expertise which it can use to further the interests of Holy Church. When such resources are now used to destroy the Church everybody must take care and try to see the bigger picture. The permissions granted by Rome regarding confessions and marriages were designed purely to make mischief and sow division in the ranks of the SSPX faithful. In that they were successful. SSPX never asked for these socalled concessions and it is only people of ill will who point the finger and accuse SSPX of doing a deal with Rome. As Bishop Fellay said; “if you can’t get permission from the local Bishop for a wedding, adopt plan B.”
[“As Bishop Fellay said; ‘if you can’t get permission from the local Bishop for a wedding, adopt plan B.’ ”
– Yes. I think that what a lot of people - rightly - have a problem with is the very idea of seeking permission in the first place: “getting permission” to be a Traditionalist, “getting permission” to use the Rites which have always been in use by Holy Mother Church and which are the birth right of all Catholics; worse than that, “getting permission” from the very people who are busily destroying the Church, who regularly profess all kinds of heresies and who can usually be found giving their “permission” for LGBT drag queen story time Mass or other such horrors.
To answer your question about the Resistance fighter, no, that doesn’t make him a Nazi sympathiser. However, your analogy is flawed. The SSPX surely is not in any kind of metaphorical prison, nor is modern Rome the jailer of the SSPX. Is the SSPX really at the mercy of modernist Rome in the way that your Resistance fighter is totally at the mercy of the jailer? What’s more, for your Resistance fighter to find himself in jail in the first place, he presumably would have to have been captured at some point. Which means that either he surrendered, or one of his superiors surrendered on his behalf. Is that really where we want to go with this analogy, that the SSPX was surrendered to modern Rome and has been captured by it? I would
say that that is true now. Whether it was already true back in 2011 or 2012, I’m not so sure, I think I’d have to answer ‘no’. A more apt analogy might perhaps be to ask whether every single soldier in General Franco’s army, for the duration of the Spanish Civil War, had to ask permission of the Republican government before every action: permission to draw their pay; permission to wear the nationalist uniform; permission to sing the Marcha Real; permission to open fire on the enemy. It’s absurd. Are we at war with the modernists or are we not? Are they the enemy that we are trying to overcome, or are they not?
“It is easy to point the finger at the SSPX and perhaps mistakes have been made in the past…etc.”
– My sentiments exactly. Nobody’s perfect. Indeed, if anything, the historical mistakes made by the SSPX are what help to show that its growth was the work of the Holy Ghost, precisely because that growth happened in spite of the all-too common human stupidity present in any organisation.
“The permissions granted by Rome regarding confessions and marriages were designed purely to make mischief and sow division in the ranks of the SSPX
faithful.”
– No doubt you are right, though the SSPX itself doesn’t seem to agree with you there. Perhaps the SSPX shouldn’t have welcomed these bogus “permissions” with quite such warm-hearted enthusiasm?
“The SSPX never asked for these so-called concessions…”
– As far as we know! But if it were to one day come out that they had asked for them… would you be so very surprised? If it turned out that the SSPX had, in fact, been the ones to ask for these things and had been keeping that fact a secret, would it not be another example of the “sensible approach” of “every religious and secular leader” which you mention above? And to return to your own analogy, I find it difficult to imagine the Nazis unilaterally granting concessions to a still hostile, still-armed-and-dangerous French Resistance.
“…It is only people of ill will who point the finger and accuse SSPX of doing a deal with Rome.”
– Speculation about whether this person or that is “of ill will” I will leave to you. What I, together with many others, accuse the SSPX of having done is something far worse than a mere “deal.” The danger was always that practical agreement would lead inevitably to doctrinal agreement. What the SSPX has, er, accomplished is doctrinal agreement without first settling the practical details of what you call a “deal.”]
* * * * *
CONCLUSIONS
1) The members of the Resistance take it as an objective truth that the Society of St Pius X has embraced modernism. This is why they cling to one or two Priests whom, they claim, are the only ones in the whole world who are truly Catholic. In this way they miss out on the sacraments including Holy Mass for weeks on end. If the SSPX was in heresy then the resistance members would be entirely justified. However they cannot prove this and have
not, to my knowledge, attempted to.
So we are left with the doctrinal declaration of 2012 which, they claim, is now the official policy of the Society. They have confused principle with prudence. On no occasion did Bishop Fellay compromise on principles but only an apology and a recantation will satisfy the resistance now.
2) Knowing full well that an apology is neither necessary nor realistic they have battened down the hatches and are content to live in isolation, relying on each other for comfort and support. In doing so they are effectively a cult which feeds on its own circular arguments and thrives on anti-SSPX stories which are deliberately and laughably exaggerated for their delectation. I know from having met some of the members of the resistance that they loathe the Society of St Pius X and this is the real reason why they will never listen to reason and be humble enough to reconsider their position.
3) Membership of the resistance is completely self-serving and does nothing to alleviate the crisis in the Church. It represents a bomb shelter and, being a cult, cannot spread outside the ‘cognoscenti’ and certainly cannot be carried on by future generations. Nothing puts children off religion more than infrequent masses, few catholic friends, home -schooled teenagers and disrespectful comments about Catholic clergy. Children hate
isolation.
- JHCB Holy Week 2022
[CONCLUSIONS
1) Despite introducing the question of “heresy” right at the very end of this document, in the conclusion – this is the first time that word has appeared, it doesn’t even get a mention up to that point – the question is not, nor has it ever been, whether the SSPX can be convicted of straight-up formal heresy.
The clear implication being made here is that in order for the Resistance faithful to be justified in avoiding the SSPX, the SSPX needs to be “in heresy.” Anything less than that simply won’t cut it. But in fact, that is raising the bar very high, suspiciously high some might even say, conveniently high! Far higher than the Church has ever required historically. The 1917 Code of Canon Law (Canons 2315 & 2316) regards even those who are suspect of heresy as being off-limits, to give just one example. And even that is not where the matter ends. In practice, the Church has always told her children to avoid compromise or even the mere appearance of compromise, when it comes to matters of doctrine, even at the expense of more
frequent access to the sacraments.
If the Resistance have not attempted to prove that the SSPX is “in heresy” then that is perhaps because none of us regard it as necessary to do so. The old SSPX used to tell people to avoid the sacraments of the FSSP and other Indult / Ecclesia Dei priests, not primarily due to doubts surrounding the validity of their holy orders, or because of questions about the mixing of Novus Ordo hosts in the tabernacle, but because these priests were guilty of compromise in accepting the orthodoxy of Vatican II and the legitimacy of the New Mass:
“…Attending their Mass is:
• accepting the compromise on which they are based,
• accepting the direction taken by the Conciliar Church and the consequent destruction of the Catholic Faith and practices, and
• accepting, in particular, the lawfulness and doctrinal soundness of the Novus Ordo Missae and Vatican II.
That is why a Catholic ought not to attend their Masses.” (http://archives.sspx.org/SSPX_FAQs/q13_f..._peter.htm)
Without wearing Bishop Fellay’s famous “pink spectacles,” anyone who reads the Doctrinal Declaration cannot help but see that same compromise made in the name of and on behalf of the post-2012 SSPX.
It is not necessary that the SSPX be “in heresy,” only that it have compromised on a doctrinal level with the modernists. The Doctrinal Declaration provides irrefutable evidence of this many times over. The continuing rapprochement between the SSPX and modern Rome, at a time when Rome, under the reign of Pope Francis, is far more modernist that it ever was in Archbishop Lefebvre’s day, does nothing to dispel this.
“So we are left with the doctrinal declaration of 2012 which, they claim, is now the official policy of the Society.”
- Thus far, nobody but the author of the quoted words has managed to conflate doctrine with policy. Policy is what you do, doctrine is what you believe and profess. A Society of priests and religious can survive changes in policy, even if it involves particularly bad policy. What it can never survive is the slightest change in doctrine.
“On no occasion did Bishop Fellay compromise on principles.”
– That is most reassuring to hear! But then, if it wasn’t Bishop Fellay, perhaps you can tell me who it was that said the following?
• “Many people have an understanding of the Council which is a wrong understanding. And now we have Authorities in Rome who say it. We, I may say in
the discussions, I think we see that many things which we would have condemned as being from the Council are in fact not from the Council but the
common understanding of it.”
• “Religious Liberty is used in so many ways and looking closer, I really have the impression that not many know what really the Council said about it. The Council is presenting a Religious Liberty which is in fact a very, very limited one. Very limited.”
• “The question is not the Society vs Rome, I think if you see the whole thing like that it is a wrong understanding. I definitely don’t look at it this way.”
• “ ‘I would hope so,’ he said, when asked if Vatican II itself belongs to Catholic tradition.”
• “ ‘The pope says that the Council must be put within the great tradition of the church, must be understood in accordance with it. These are statements we fully agree with, totally, absolutely,’ the bishop said.”
• “It is still true - since it is Church law - that in order to open a new chapel or to found a work, it would be necessary to have the permission of the local ordinary. We have quite obviously reported to Rome how difficult our present situation was in the dioceses, and Rome is still working on it. Here or there, this difficulty will be real, but since when is life without difficulties?”
• Question: If there is a canonical recognition, will you give some cardinals in the Curia or some bishops the opportunity to visit our chapels, to celebrate Mass, to administer Confirmation, perhaps even to ordain priests at your seminaries?
“The bishops who are in favour of Tradition and the conservative cardinals will come closer. … There is no doubt that people will come to visit us, but as for a more precise collaboration, such as the celebration of Mass or ordinations, that will depend on the circumstances.”
• “It is true that our enemies may plan to use this offer as a trap, but the pope, who really wants this canonical recognition, is not proposing it to us as a trap.”
• “To His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI. Most Holy Father, … I must admit to no longer knowing what to think. I had believed that you were disposed to leave till a later date the resolution of outstanding disagreements over certain points of the Council and liturgical reform…and I committed myself in this perspective despite the fairly strong opposition in the ranks of the Society and at the price of substantial disruption.”
We could go on, but I’m sure you get the idea. And perhaps it would be best to try to keep this list very, very limited. Very limited.
2) How dare they rely on each other for support! And really, “a cult”..? Surely any fair-minded reader of this exchange will have had more than ample evidence by now to determine for himself which side “feeds on its own circular arguments” and likewise, which of the two sides: “will never listen to reason and be humble enough to reconsider their position.”
3) So to summarise: according to the author of these words, to claim that the Doctrinal Declaration accepts the teaching and fruits of Vatican II is “uncharitable,” but accusing your fellow Catholics of being “a cult” on the flimsiest anecdotal evidence is just fine. Got it. As to whether the Resistance will be “carried on by future generations” – time will surely tell!
- GJXT October 2022 ]
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| Chronology of a New Religion |
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Posted by: Stone - 11-08-2022, 07:33 AM - Forum: Vatican II and the Fruits of Modernism
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“What could be clearer? We must henceforth obey and be faithful to the Conciliar Church, no longer to the Catholic Church. Right there is our whole problem: we are suspended a divinis by the Conciliar Church, the Conciliar Church, to which we have no wish to belong! That Conciliar Church is a schismatic church because it breaks with the Catholic Church that has always been. It has its new dogmas, its new priesthood, its new institutions, its new worship… The Church that affirms such errors is at once schismatic and heretical. This Conciliar Church is, therefore, not Catholic. To whatever extent Pope, Bishops, priests, or the faithful adhere to this new church, they separate themselves from the Catholic Church.” (Archbishop Lefebvre, Reflections on his suspension a divinis, July 29, 1976)
Source: Screenshot taken from here.
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| SSPX Archives: Is the New Mass Legit? |
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Posted by: Stone - 11-07-2022, 01:53 PM - Forum: New Rite Sacraments
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Taken from the extract reprinted in The Recusant #59, pages 22-26
This article, from the archive of the old SSPX US District website, originally appeared in 2011. Its opening words, which speak of Benedict XVI’s “liberation of the Mass of All Time” and bemoan how disobedient the bishops’ conferences had been to poor old Pope Benedict in the intervening four years, have not aged well. But since all that is a distraction, amusing though it may be, from the main point of the article, we have cut them out. Source: http://archives.sspx.org/news/is_new_mas..._legit.htm
Is the New Mass Legit?
[…] Archbishop Lefebvre always contested the legitimacy of the liturgical revolution of 1969. We will show this in three ways, of increasing importance: the legal aspect, the historical context, and the dogmatic context.
A. The legality of the New Mass
A law is legitimate only when it is duly promulgated by the lawfully constituted authority. But to this condition must be added another of supreme importance and essential to make it a law: it must be for the common good.[1] And precisely on this score, the Novus Ordo Missae is most defective as was attested at the time of its promulgation by no less than Cardinals Ottaviani and Bacci:
Quote:“It is clear that the Novus Ordo no longer intends to present the Faith as taught by the Council of Trent… It represents, both as a whole and in its details, a striking departure from the Catholic theology of the Mass as it was formulated in Session 22 of the Council of Trent. The “canons” of the rite definitively fixed at that time erected an insurmountable barrier against any heresy which might attack the integrity of the mystery.”[2]
The legal aspect here does not address so much the question of the suppression of the Old Mass, since its continuous existence was supported not only by the general norms of the new Code, (can. 20) but was openly admitted by Benedict XVI’s Summorum Pontificum. Rather, the legal question we wish to study deals with the juridical validity of the promulgation of the NOM. Here, we are largely indebted to Itinéraires, the magazine of Jean Madiran, which was the French voice of Tradition years before the liturgical changes.
We need to look at the Apostolic Constitution Missale Romanum (April 3, 1969) which allegedly promulgated the Novus Ordo Missae.[3] Most of the document describes the novelties and the final part never declares clearly what the Pope commands, forbids, or concedes. As to the final Nonobstant”, it is too generic to pretend to abrogate the perfectly clear legislative act of St. Pius V who promulgated the Mass of All Time. It appears that Paul VI never wanted to render his missal mandatory, with a truly juridical obligation. Why?
• Itinéraires could say as early as 1970 that the future was already present: a constant process of mutation. Changed were the “original” edition of the Institutio Generalis (see below regarding the theological aspect), and the editio typica [typical edition.] of the Novus Ordo rite within months. The Apostolic Constitution in its second Latin edition was enriched with a new paragraph drawn from the French/Italian version, as we are to explain presently.[4]
• The original Constitution concluded rather innocently with: “From all that has been said so far regarding the New Roman Missal, in the end, we are now pleased to draw a conclusion.”[5] But, sensing that something was missing, the French and Italian translators (not to speak of other versions) boldly modified the text making it say: “We want (placet!) to give force of law (cogere et efficere!) to everything (quiddam!) which we have exposed above regarding the new Roman Missal.”
• The same translators also completed the authentic Latin text of the Apostolic Constitution, adding: “We order that the prescriptions of this Constitution become effective on November 30th of this year, the First Sunday of Advent.”[6] Both these modifications and additions objectively constitute a forgery. This alone manifests the essential problem of a Constitution which some wish to be mandatory, but which, in its authentic tenure, is not.
• The question remains why Pope Paul VI seemed to substitute in fact another law to one which he did not abrogate by right. Worse is the other stunning question: why did he not say clearly that he did not want to abrogate the other? Why leave the minds of confused priests and laymen in the agonizing doubt that everything was taking place then as if the authors (which ones?) were imposing an obligation while letting you free to believe the opposite?
B. The Historical Context
Cardinal Gut, the Prefect who presided over the liturgical reform, gave a revealing insight into the pressure which led the Pope to promote the New Mass:
Quote:“We hope that, now, with the new dispositions, contained in the documents, this sickness of experimentation will come to a stop. Until now, the bishops had the right to authorize experiments but, sometimes, such limits have been trespassed and many priests simply did what they wanted. Then, what happened is that, sometimes, they imposed themselves. One could not, very often, stop these initiatives taken without authorization because they had gone too far. In his great goodness and in his wisdom the Holy Father yielded, often against his will.”[7]
As any decent legislator would do, Paul VI, in establishing his liturgical reform, elucidated the motives of such drastic changes. Here they are[8] :
• The reform is an act of fidelity to the “demands” of Vatican II.
• It is meant to revive the languid and awaken the sleepy.
• It wishes to supplant the “opaque glass” of the old Mass by another which will be a “transparent crystal” for “the children, the youth, the workers, and businessmen.”
• It wishes to be “a resolute gymnastic of Christian sociology.”
What about the “ecumenical” motive? As strange as it appears, Paul VI never invoked this motive. This omission rightly raised the eyebrows of Protestants and Catholics alike who, unanimously, recognized it on every page of the Ordo. Said an intimate friend of the Pope, Jean Guitton:
Quote:“There was with Pope Paul VI an ecumenical intention to remove, or at least to correct, or at least to relax, what was too Catholic, in the traditional sense, in the Mass and, I repeat, to get the Catholic Mass closer to the Calvinist service…”[9]
As to the motives given by the Holy Father, the most important would be the first, stating, in a democratic fashion, that this was the will of the conciliar bishops. He directs us to #50 of [Vatican II’s] liturgical decree Sacrosanctum Concilium. But was it really so? The said paragraph recommends indeed in generic terms a certain revision of the Mass. Yet, when these 2,000 bishops signed this paragraph, did they wish the suppression of the Offertory? Did they wish the addition of ad libitum new Canons to compete with the Roman Canon from the 3rd century? Did they want such ambiguous Ordinary texts of the Mass that these would immediately seem agreeable to men who have no faith in transubstantiation, the sacrificial oblation, and the Catholic priesthood? No! Certainly, the Council never wanted such a revolution.*
In the same context of the end of that fatal year, 1969, we need to add a letter addressed to the Pope, utterly unnoticed by the press, signed by 6,000 Spanish priests.[10]
Quote:“…We shall not speak of the doctrinal Catholic reasons; we could not expose them better than the document A Brief Critical Study of the New Order of Mass, which Your Holiness has recently received, accompanied by a letter signed by Cardinals Ottaviani and Bacci, and which one would need to refute in details according to the doctrine of the Council of Trent if one wished to prove the orthodoxy of the Novus Ordo.
We shall not speak of this, but we shall bring up the Protestant reasons. Mr. Max Thurian affirms in La Croix of May 30, 1969 that, with the Novus Ordo. “non Catholic communities will be able to celebrate the Last Supper with the same prayers as the Catholic Church. Theologically this is possible.” Thus, if the celebration by a Protestant is theologically possible, this means that the Novus Ordo expresses no dogma with which the Protestants are in disagreement.
But the first of these dogmas is the Real Presence, essence and centre of the Mass of St. Pius V. Could a Protestant pastor celebrate the Novus Ordo if he was to perform the consecration in the intention used by the Catholic Church? “Lex orandi, lex credendi”: the liturgy is the highest expression of our faith. Where shall we go if, in the best of cases, the Mass silences the Catholic truths? If the good people, with no knowledge and against their will, are thrown into heresy, as long as they preserve the Christian morals (unfortunately, they do not), they will save their soul. But this will not be the case of those who will have pushed them into it. Most Holy Father, we do not want to endure this responsibility. This is why we boldly address this letter to you, after we begged of you in a previous one (November 5, 1969) to allow the universal Church to preserve the Mass of St. Pius V together with that of the Novus Ordo.”
In the name of the Pope, some Roman authority (which one?) demanded total submission and blind obedience from all these most devoted priests. The strangest thing is that none of them reacted and nothing was heard anymore of this tyrannical act.** Moreover, an Italian committee was gathering signatures to petition Paul VI to abrogate the New Mass. Behold the judgment proffered by Vatican Radio: “Do you wish to be sure of disobeying the Pope: sign!”[11] Hence, whoever dares to make a petition to the Pope is in the state of disobedience! This idiotic idolatry to the goddess of false obedience, unheard of during twenty centuries of the Church, raised no protest.
* This rhetorical point has been made by several people down the years, including the late Michael Davies in more than one of his booklets. And whilst it is tempting to point to all the conservative passages in Sacrosanctum Concilium and claim that the new Mass is not sanctioned by Vatican II, the truth of the matter, alas, is that it very much is. Likewise, although many of the Council Fathers doubtless never intended to give birth to anything approaching Paul VI’s New Mass, there were surely others who very much did. A careful reading of Sacrosanctum Concilium is very revealing on this point. The many “conservative-” or “Catholic-sounding” passages serve no other purpose than to deceive the more “conservative” Council Fathers into letting the document pass. Each of these passages is effectively nullified by another which is far more radical and which would later be exploited to bring about the liturgical revolution known to us today as the New Mass. A thorough yet easy-to-read expose of this very point can be found in “The Great Façade” by Ferrara & Woods (The Remnant Press, 2002). - Editor
** “The strangest thing” indeed! Catholics faithful to Abp. Lefebvre’s fight, who oppose the SSPX betrayal, may not find it so strange. How many priests must have sent letters of protest to Menzingen in 2012? And yet today, what has become of them all? As a rule, people find it easier to be brave when they think that they are part of a group of like-minded comrades-in-arms; nobody likes the thought of finding himself all alone on the battlefield. Priests, being human, are no exception to this rule. History is made by the tiny number of heroic individuals who are brave enough to stand-out alone for what is right; the vast majority, who swim with the stream, are forgotten.
This cowardly servility reigns almost universally: it is the sentiment of most cardinals who dare neither speak to the Pope nor ask anything from him, not even to beg: they would be tagged disobedient to the Pope, and they accept this slavish tyranny. Is it not true that where truth and justice cease to be upheld, arbitrary despotism reigns, with no basis and no limits?
Does not the statement of Louis Veuillot express aptly the mindset of many churchman: “there is no one more sectarian than a liberal.”
C. The Theological Context
We have already alluded to the underlying dogmatic truths which the New Mass has silenced or covered in ambiguous terms, so as to please heretical communities. These half-truths (and half-errors) were markedly expressed in what can only be called the definition of the New Mass:
Quote:“The Lord’s Supper, or Mass, is a sacred synaxis, or assembly of the people of God gathered together under the presidency of the priest to celebrate the memorial of the Lord.”[12]
This text was found so offensive and raised such a worldwide uproar that Rome had to come up with something less heterodox. They revised the definition into something less heretical, but did not touch anything in the rite itself, the perfect expression of the early definition. Yet, this definition and this rite omits or denies the three doctrines which are at very heart of the Mass: the priest who, by his sacerdotal character, is alone capable of consecrating the Eucharist; the propitiatory sacrifice of the Mass; and the real and substantial presence of the Victim of Calvary through transubstantiation.
The SSPX has presented a book to the attention of Rome, The Problem of the Liturgical Reform. It explains how the new Mass is the plain expression of underlying principles drawn from the theology of the Paschal Mystery [NB: this refers to the false interpretation of the Paschal Mystery as found in the New Mass, as opposed to the correct one expressed in all of the traditional liturgical rites - sspx.org]. Here are the book’s conclusions:[13]
• The propitiatory aspect of the Mass has been effaced from the new missal because the Paschal Mystery holds that there is no debt to be paid in order to satisfy divine justice offended by sin. But, by refusing to see that the Redemption includes the act by which Christ paid to God the entire debt of pain incurred by our sins (the doctrine of vicarious satisfaction), the theology of the Paschal Mystery sets itself in opposition to a truth of the Catholic Faith.
• The structure of the new missal is that of a memorial meal that celebrates and proclaims the divine Covenant and not that of a Sacrifice. But, by considering the Mass as a sacrifice only insofar as it is a memorial which contains “in mysterio” the sacrifice of the Cross, the theology of the Paschal Mystery weakens the visibility of the sacrifice as taught by the Church, and can no longer “vere et proprie”- truly and properly - designate the Mass as a sacrifice. This cannot do justice to a truth of Faith, and seems thereby to incur the condemnation pronounced by the Council of Trent as regards the “Nuda commemoratio” - mere commemoration.
• The New Mass has displaced Christ the Priest and Victim, and replaced it with the Kyrios who communicates Himself to the assembly, making the Eucharist no longer a visible sacrifice but rather a mysterious symbol of Christ’s death and resurrection.
Insofar as it rests upon philosophies of the symbolic type, this notion of sacrament cannot be reconciled with the Church’s doctrine on the sacraments. Because this notion corrupts the branches of theology where it is introduced, it is dangerous for the Faith. Now, even if one wanted to contest the heretical elements of the New Mass, the sole refusal to profess Catholic dogmas quintessential to the Mass renders the new liturgy deficient. It is like a captain who refuses to provide his shipmen with a proper diet. They soon become sick with scurvy due, not so much to direct poison, as from vitamin deficiency. Such is the new Mass. At best, it provides a deficient spiritual diet to the faithful. The correct definition of evil - lack of a due good – clearly shows that the New Mass is evil in and of itself regardless of the circumstances. It is not evil by positive profession of heresy. It is evil by lacking what Catholic dogma should profess: the True Sacrifice, the Real Presence, the ministerial priesthood. This deficiency had already been denounced by Cardinals Ottaviani and Bacci months before the New Mass was promulgated:
Quote:“The recent reforms have amply demonstrated that new changes in the liturgy could not be made without leading to complete bewilderment of the faithful, who already show an indubitable lessening of their faith. Among the best of the clergy, the result is an agonizing crisis of conscience, numberless instances of which come to our notice daily.”[14]
Footnotes
1 Michiels, Normae generales Juris Canonici (1929), p. 486, and in The Problem of the Liturgical Reform, Angelus Press (2001), p. 106.
2 The Ottaviani Intervention, p. 28, TAN Books (1992); cf. the PDF.
3 Itinéraires, #140, pp.39-2, February 1970.
4 Ibidem, p. 45.
5 “Ad extremum, ex iis quae hactenus de novo Missali Romano exposuimus, QUIDDAM nunc COGERE et EFFICERE placet.”
6 Our version for the French, published from La salle de Presse du Saint Siège (sic, in Documentation Catholique, n. 1541, June 1, 1969, col. 1 initio).
7 Documentation Catholique n.1551, Nov. 16 1969, p.1048. col. 2.
8 L'Osservatore Romano (Italian Ed.) of November 20-27.
9 December 19, 1993 in Apropos (17), p. 8ff. In Most Asked Questions About the Society of St. Pius X [online version here], Angelus Press (2011), p. 39.
10 December 11, 1969, Priestly Association of St. Anthony Mary Claret; see Itinéraires, #140, pp.32 ff.
11 La Croix, Jan 6, 1969, quoted by J. Mardiran in Itinéraires, #141, p. 9.
12 Institutio Generalis, §7, 1969 version.
13 The Problem of the Liturgical Reform, Angelus Press (2001), pp.80-98 passim.
14 The Ottaviani Intervention, p. 28, Tan Books (1992).
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| The Recusant #59: What About SSPX Masses today? |
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Posted by: Stone - 11-07-2022, 11:23 AM - Forum: The New-Conciliar SSPX
- Replies (6)
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The following article is taken from The Recusant #59, pages 18-21. It follows a reprint of Fr. Marc Van Es's Angelus article: The Attendance at Today's Masses.
...to anyone who has read the previous article carefully and understood it, one fairly obvious question suggests itself:
What About SSPX Masses today?
The old SSPX expressed, with great clarity, why one should not go to Indult Masses. What about the present day SSPX, ought we to go to Mass there? Not surprisingly, there does not exist an article by the SSPX explaining why one should avoid the SSPX. Instead therefore, let us try to apply what the old SSPX and Archbishop Lefebvre used to say and see how it applies to the SSPX in our time.
“To attend the ‘indult’ Mass is at least to approve implicitly and to encourage the work of the destruction of Catholic Tradition undertaken by the official hierarchy.” (Fr. Van Es)
Likewise, to attend the modern SSPX Mass is at least to approve implicitly and to encourage the betrayal of Catholic Tradition and the slide into liberalism and compromise undertaken by the SSPX hierarchy.
It is also means, at least implicitly, approving the work of the modern conciliar hierarchy with whom the SSPX have been working ever more closely and whom they no longer condemn.
“[The Indult Mass is a] means and bait to attract the traditional Catholics now considered as schismatics because they are no longer considered as “being in communion” with the present-day Rome, of liberal and modernist tendency.” (Fr. Van Es)
In our own time, the modernist infiltrators who are destroying the Church no longer consider the compromised SSPX as being “schismatic” or off-limits. Even the arch-modernist Pope Francis has decided to announce that he now provides jurisdiction for their confessions; their ordinations are also done with the approval of modernist Rome. Even SSPX marriages are performed by modernist Novus Ordo priests. SSPX leaders, for their part have said all sorts of flattering and obsequious things regarding the modernist authorities against whom the SSPX used to be fighting. To all intents and purposes, they can now be considered as being “in communion” once again by the present-day Rome of liberal and modernist tendencies, albeit still in a somewhat “canonically irregular” situation. That is how the modernist Romans consider them, and it is also how the outside world seems to see things. Small wonder then that they no longer talk about “neo-modernist” or “neo-Protestant” Rome or the “conciliar church” but rather speak about it as though it were one and the same as eternal Rome.
By the contrast, the Catholics who today are still considered as being “not in communion,” “schismatic,” “rebellious” and are the targets all the other epithets which used to be hurled at the SSPX, are undoubtedly those of what is called the Resistance. In our day, these are the Traditional Catholics who must not let themselves be baited or tempted with either Indult Masses or those of the SSPX.
“[The Indult Mass] constitutes a danger for the faith of the faithful, a danger which comes from the priests themselves who are celebrating it. Because to obtain this indult from the official hierarchy, these priests must fulfil the following conditions: ‘That it should be very clear that these priests have nothing to do with those who place in doubt... the doctrinal soundness of the Roman Missal promulgated by Pope Paul VI, in 1970 and that their position should be without any ambiguity and publicly known.’ ” (Fr. Van Es)
In our day, the SSPX Mass too constitutes a danger for the faith of the faithful, for the same reason. The SSPX’s change of position, from rejecting the legitimacy of the New Mass to accepting it, is a real one. It may not be as “clear and unambiguous” as the acceptance required by the Indult and one might still encounter an SSPX priest who didn’t get the memo or who is playing a game of pretending that he is still living in the year 2011. But the official corporate acceptance (“We declare that we accept…”) of the New Mass as “legitimately promulgated” by Paul VI, can be found in the April 2012 Doctrinal Declaration. It was signed, sealed and handed over to modernist Rome and can be found in the March 2013 issue of the SSPX’s
own internal bulletin, Cor Unum. What cannot be found anywhere is a corresponding repudiation, retraction, denial or rephrasing of that acceptance by a Superior General on behalf of the whole SSPX. Therefore, as the official position of the SSPX, it stands.
“In the hands of the official hierarchy, the Tridentine Mass serves therefore as a temporary means and bait to attract the traditional priests and people and to destroy at the same time the work of Catholic restoration, started by Archbishop Lefebvre, Bishop de Castro Mayer and their priests.” (Fr. Van Es)
In our own time, has not the compromised conciliar SSPX made great use of the Tridentine Mass to try to lure people away from the Resistance? How else does one explain the egregious articles and videos, noted in these pages and elsewhere, which play on the emotions of their audience, exhorting them to be grateful for their regular Tridentine Masses, etc.? Does not the unwillingness of the modern SSPX to spread itself thin, in the manner of the old SSPX, also play into this?
“Hundreds of priests, seminarians and faithful have been lured with the Tridentine Rite and now are made to forcibly return to the ranks and the spirit of the Council.” (Fr. Van Es)
With priests, some far less subtle means have been employed to stop them leaving the SSPX and joining the Resistance: threats, transfers, isolation, psychological torture, expulsion, destitution as well as the constant playing on their anxiety towards the perceived material discomfort. What is clear to any impartial observer is that all, priests, seminarians and faithful are being made “to return to the spirit of the Council.” That the SSPX can give its priests and faithful permission to take experimental “covid” injections or promote a Darwin-friendly cosmology which requires a wholly modernist interpretation of Sacred Scripture are two recent signs of this slide. That there is so little outcry or pushback visible from any SSPX priests or faithful in response to such things is itself another sign.
“This work of destruction continues by the approval of Indult Masses close to our important Mass centres... A good method to empty the latter or at least to prevent them from developing.” (Fr. Van Es)
Since this article first appeared in English in 1994, the SSPX around the world has seen many chapels close and even one of its seminaries (Goulburn, Australia). And yet in recent years it has not been the modernist Romans who are responsible for this “work of destruction” but the SSPX authorities themselves. With the approval of the General House, the British District has lost perhaps 40% of its Mass centres since the late-1990s. The SSPX priests, including the District Superior, tell the faithful of those closed chapels that they should go to the Indult Mass instead. To the modern SSPX it didn’t make sense for them to have a chapel in Portsmouth when the faithful could be sent instead to the Indult Mass said by the Franciscans in Gosport.
So the SSPX Masses and the Indult Masses are no longer the bitter rivals in competition with one another in the way they were when the Fr. Van Es article appeared; rather the SSPX see themselves as complementary, almost as another indult option to be added to the Fraternity of St. Peter, the Institute of Christ the King and all the rest. The very small number of priests available to the Catholic Resistance prevents it from having anything like the impact that the SSPX used to have, and yet there is quite a bit of evidence that wherever the Resistance gains a foothold, both conciliar diocese and the SSPX react accordingly. Here is one example. When Resistance priests began making regular visits to a small group of faithful deep in rural Suffolk in 2016, the SSPX decided that after all they would be able to send a priest on regular trips up to that out-of-the-way part of the world, despite never having done so before, and despite the fact that it was not anywhere near any of their Mass circuits and the fact that they had just shut down their only Mass centre in the whole of East Anglia, in neighbouring Norfolk. As the years went by, the diocese likewise took more of an interest in the Traditional Mass and after a little while, the once-a-month Indult Mass was transformed into a dedicated Indult priory with daily Traditional Mass and two Masses on Sunday, located in a privately owned chapel in Suffolk. Coincidentally this very same chapel had not seen the Tridentine Mass once in all the years since the Council until the Resistance started using it in 2016. Rumour has it that the SSPX District Superior declined any interest in setting up a regular SSPX Mass there because it had already become “too closely associated with the Resistance.” Who knows if that is true, but if so it would be both very amusing and quite telling.
“To attempt to restore the Traditional Mass without considering the historical context of the crisis of the Faith is to become a blind instrument in the hands of the conciliar hierarchy.” (Fr. Van Es)
Is this not the point upon which the priests and faithful of the Resistance have been insisting since the Resistance began? Our fight is not merely about the Traditional Mass. It is about the whole crisis in the Church, it is about the Faith, and to place the Mass above the crisis of Faith
in order of importance is tantamount to betrayal. Many faithful were given the grace of understanding the crisis in the Church and the SSPX’s fight against modernism. Many faithful were given the grace of perceiving the gravity of the SSPX’s betrayal of that fight in 2012 and 2013.
And yet a significant number of those faithful, alas, chose not to openly oppose the SSPX.
Their motive for acting thus, in most cases it seems, was access to the Traditional Mass. Correspondingly, many priests who could see what had happened, but who chose not to openly oppose their superiors, seem to have had as their motive access to the chapel and the faithful who attend it. To paraphrase Fr. Van Es one last time, have they not, in effect, become blind instruments in the hands of the conciliar church?
What Conclusion Can We Draw From All This?
That the precept of attending Sunday Mass is obligatory for all Catholics who have reached the age of reason but that some may be excused particularly those who are only near Masses “of Pope Paul VI” or traditional Masses said under the “Indult” or the Masses of the present-day SSPX. Why? Firstly, because of the danger for the faith coming from the priests who celebrate or from the faithful who attend them; secondly, legitimisation is given to the new liturgy and finally an approval more or less implicit of the work of destruction of the One, Holy, Catholic, Apostolic and Roman Tradition.
“When they affirm that they have not given up anything, it is false. They have given up the possibility of contradicting Rome. They cannot say anything now. They must remain silent because of the favours they have received, and it is now impossible for them to denounce the errors of the conciliar church. Very slowly they accept... From the point of view of ideas, they turn very gently and end up admitting the false ideas of the Second Vatican Council, because Rome has granted them some favours for Tradition. This is a very dangerous situation.” - Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre
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| Archbp Viganò: Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI is wrong to praise the diabolical revolution of Vatican II |
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Posted by: Stone - 11-07-2022, 10:23 AM - Forum: Archbishop Viganò
- Replies (1)
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Archbp. Viganò: Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI is wrong to praise the diabolical revolution of Vatican II
It appears that in recent decades the model of the Church which has inspired the proponents of Vatican II is that of the 'civitas diaboli,' judging by the support that the Holy See offers to globalist ideology, to the neo-Malthusian delusions of the ‘green economy,’ to transhumanism, and to the entire gender and LGBT repertoire.
![[Image: GettyImages-457486164-810x500.jpg]](https://www.lifesitenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/GettyImages-457486164-810x500.jpg)
Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, flanked by Prefect of the Pontifical House and his former personal secretary Georg Ganswein ® arrives at the Holy Mass for the closing of Extraordinary Synod held by Pope Francis at St. Peter's Square on October 19, 2014, in the Vatican City
Photo by Franco Origlia/Getty Images
Nov 7, 2022
Editor’s note: Below follows the full text of Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò’s latest essay, “DE HOC MUNDO: The ‘secularization’ of authority as a premise for religious freedom and ecumenical dialogue theorized by Vatican II.”
“Regnum meum non est de hoc mundo.” (My kingdom is not of this world) – Jn. 18:36
(LifeSiteNews) — The wound inflicted by the Second Vatican Council on the ecclesial body and – consequently – on the entire social body is anything but healed after sixty years, and indeed continues to become gangrenous with very serious damage before the eyes of all.
The enthusiastic and self-congratulatory tones with which the Bergoglian Sanhedrin praises the Council cannot cancel the ruin it has brought to the Church and to souls.
In my previous essay on the self-referentiality of the “conciliar church,” I highlighted some crucial aspects of this identity crisis, to which an element that I consider fundamental in understanding the subversive nature of the Council has recently been added. I am referring to the letter that Benedict XVI sent to the rector of the Franciscan University of Steubenville on October 7.
I have wanted to address this theme in greater depth: examining Ratzinger’s thesis is indispensable in order to identify the ideological premises and the methods of practical fulfillment of the revolution inaugurated by Vatican II on the doctrinal, moral, liturgical, and disciplinary fronts within the Catholic Church.
The permanent revolution
I have used the expression “revolution inaugurated by Vatican II” because it now seems clear to me that the intolerable excesses that Jorge Mario Bergoglio has indulged in for almost ten years are simply the coherent application in the ecclesial sphere of the principle of “permanent revolution” theorized in the social sphere by Marx, Engels, and Trotsky. The idea of “permanent revolution” arises from the observation of the ideologues of Bolshevism that the proletariat was not so enthusiastic about communist methods and that, if they wanted to spread class struggle throughout the world, it was necessary to force it by means of authority and make it irreversible: because only in the revolution does the χάος (chaos) occur that drives the subversive action against the social order.
A similar way of proceeding has been adopted by the Bergoglian church: since the conciliar revolution has not been welcomed with enthusiasm by the “Catholic proletariat,” the Central Committee of Santa Marta resorts to what Lenin called the “transcription of the revolution,” extending the mentality of Vatican II also into those doctrinal areas which initially none of its proponents would have dared to touch.
This is why the Synod on Synodality is necessary, that is, the establishment of a sort of “permanent Council,” or rather a “permanent aggiornamento” which makes itself the promoter of supposed instances of the base – the ecclesial version of the proletariat – such as the female diaconate and the “radical inclusion” of couples who are divorced and remarried, cohabiting couples, polygamists, and homosexual couples with adopted children who adhere to the LGBT movement.
It will be noted that these requests, which are all completely inadmissible from a doctrinal and moral point of view that is faithful to the Magisterium, do not constitute a faithful and spontaneous picture of what the clergy and faithful are demanding from the Supreme Authority of the Church, but rather the fraudulent fiction of Bergoglian propaganda, along the lines of the manipulations that have already been experienced earlier at the Synod on the Family that gave birth to the heretical monstrum called Amoris Lætitia.
And also in this case, reality is distorted by the revolution in order to adapt it by force to its own dystopian thought, with the presumptuous idea of having a solution that is better than that which the two-thousand-year-old wisdom of the Church or the will of its Founder intended to arrange. We are dealing with mass manipulation applied in the ecclesial field, using the techniques of the worst totalitarian regimes that today are adopted both by the globalist elite with the pandemic farce and the ecological transition, and also by the Bergoglian sect that is an ally and supporter of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Agenda 2030.
The Ratzingerian synthesis of the people of God and the Mystical Body
Benedict XVI’s letter of October 7, 2022, lays out what he had already stated in his speech to the German Parliament on September 22, 2011. His first formulation of his criticism of medieval Augustinianism,1 however, occurred in his dissertation “People and House of God in Augustine’s Doctrine of the Church,” presented in Paris long ago, on the occasion of the 1954 Augustinian Congress.
Recalling an idea developed by the Harnack school, Ratzinger stated:
Quote:The two Civitates did not mean any corporate bodies, but rather the representation of the two basic forces of belief and unbelief in history… The Civitas Dei is not simply identical with the institution of the Church. In this respect, the medieval Augustine was indeed a fatal error, which today, fortunately, has been finally overcome.
The theme addressed by the dissertation and briefly touched on by the letter is the ecclesiological doctrine of the Mystical Body, which, according to the author, ended with Pius XII’s Encyclical Mystici Corporis. In the last years of the 1950s, as Pius XII was ill, there was a resurgence of the rerum novarum cupiditas2 of the progressive theologians, for whom the supernatural dimension of the Church was too spiritual and therefore had to be replaced with the more seductive Augustinian phrase of “people of God,” easily interpretable both in an ecumenical key for its inclusion of the Jewish people of the Old Law and also in a democratic key for possible sociological and political developments. Obviously, this ideological definition reveals its modernist background perfectly coherent with the thought of Harnack and his pupil.
It will not escape notice that this theme of the 25-year-old Ratzinger would also be addressed by the Council, and therefore there is no surprise in the pride with which the Pope Emeritus refers precisely to the themes that were decisive in his theological formation and in his ecclesiastical career and which are now put into practice by his successor.
The philosophical approach of Joseph Ratzinger is essentially Hegelian, and therefore it is imbued with “absolute idealism,”3 following the scheme of “thesis-antithesis-thesis.” In this case, between the Catholic thesis of the Mystical Body and the progressivist antithesis of the people of God, Vatican II and the post-council supposedly ended by accepting the exact synthesis that he had theorized in his 1954 dissertation: “the Church is the people of God existing as body of Christ,” in which Christ gives himself to the believer as Body and transforms him into his own Body.
A bold thesis, on closer inspection, that risks confusing the substantial difference between the Body of Christ truly present in His entirety in the Eucharistic species and the Body of Christ realized mystically by the union of the living members of the Church with her divine Head. This confusion would have then permitted not a few progressive or completely heretical theologians to wink at Protestants thanks to the imprecise formulation of “Body of Christ.” It would equally have given Francis the opportunity to appropriate the daring pauper-eucharistic metaphors of Raniero Cantalamessa, who defines the poor as the “true Body of Christ,” whose “real presence” is supposedly realized among those who by welcoming them welcome Him.
Civitas Dei and civitas diaboli
The problem that arises is complex and developed: it consists of two aspects, one ad intra, relative to what the “conciliar church” is and wants to be; the other ad extra, relative to its role in the world and relations with other religions.
The ad intra aspect touches the nature of the institution, seeking to deconstruct it in a democratic and synodal key under the false pretext of a rediscovered “wider spiritual dimension” to the detriment of dogma; the ad extra aspect implies an “ecumenical” approach to the world, dialogue with sects and false religions, and the renunciation of the evangelization of peoples, replacing it with an ecological and philanthropic message that has neither dogmas nor morality.
The error of the “medieval Augustine,” according to Benedict XVI, supposedly consisted in having wanted to identify the Civitas Dei with the visible Church, while it is evident that that is valid as a model for the Christianitas: that is, the transnational society in which the laws and regulations achieve the Psalmist’s hopes: “Beatus populus, cuius Dominus Deus eius” (Blessed are the people whose God is the Lord – Ps. 143:15).
Doctrine teaches us that precisely because of her earthly dimension, the Church Militant is at the same time holy like the heavenly Jerusalem and sinful in her members, infallible in her Magisterium and fallible in her ministers. Nor is it true that St. Augustine or his medieval commentators pointed to the State as the civitas diaboli; on the contrary, they recognized its providential role in the economy of salvation and the need for civil authority to conform not only to the natural law but also to the Catholic Magisterium.
If there is a civitas diaboli recognizable by its ontological evil, it must be identified in the New World Order and in all those equally transnational organizations that work for the establishment of the globalist synarchy. The Bergoglian sect is no exception, which not by chance is an ally and supporter of these subversive criminals.
The Ratzingerian critique of medieval Augustinianism
Another very serious theological error that adulterates the true nature of the Church lies in the essentially secularist foundations of conciliar ecclesiology, which seeks to adapt the objective reality to its own ideological scheme that is in continual mutation.
I use the term “secularist” (laicista) because it seems clear to me that this vision is totally devoid of a supernatural gaze: that all-encompassing gaze that knows how to see earthly realities sub specie æternitatis (under the form of eternity) not for mere intellectual speculation but because it is animated by the theological virtues. In the nonsense of these intellectuals there emerges a disconsolate lack of passion, of guts, of blood: it is all theoretical, all established in order to aseptically frustrate (Christ’s) redemption and cancel the ordo christianus (Christian order), appropriating the Orwellian methods of cancel culture.
This error, insinuated in the texts of Vatican II and in particular in Dignitatis Humanæ concerning religious freedom and in Nostra Aetate concerning the relation of the Church with non-Christian religions and Judaism, places the “conciliar church” in deliberate discontinuity with the Catholic Church, “for the first time,” according to the words of Benedict XVI. He states:
Quote:It addressed the freedom to choose and to practice religion, as well as the freedom to change it, as fundamental rights of the liberty of man. Precisely by virtue of its most profound reasons, such a conception could not be extraneous to the Christian faith, which had entered the world with the claim that the State could not decide on the truth and could not demand any type of worship. The Christian faith claimed freedom for religious conviction and for its practice in worship, without thereby violating the right of the State in its own order: Christians prayed for the emperor but did not worship him. From this point of view, it can be said that Christianity, with its birth, brought the world the principle of freedom of religion.4
The misunderstanding is based on the double meaning that is attributed to the term “freedom of religion.” In the Catholic sense it indicates the freedom of the baptized person to publicly profess the true Faith without obstacles on the part of the state. In the modernist sense it refers to the abstract liberty of anyone with a belief to have the same right and the same liberty recognized on the part of the state.
Another misunderstanding arises when the state that recognizes particular rights and privileges for the Church is considered indifferently in comparison with the state that professes a false religion or declares itself “secular” and forbids the profession of the true religion or equates it with any other cult. The Church has always sought, over the centuries, to prudently reconcile her rights with the diverse situations of the nations in which Catholicism was not tolerated or was persecuted: provoking anti-Catholic rulers to persecute their Catholic subjects would be a reckless or imprudent act. Nevertheless, the fact that the Church can ask for tolerance for herself and for her faithful in situations of numerical minority does not imply that equal rights apply to other situations in which the Church sees her institutional role recognized by a state that officially professes to be Catholic.
And yet, in the name of the “freedom of religion” theorized by Vatican II, it was the hierarchy itself that asked nations like Spain or Italy to renounce recognizing it as the state religion, modifying the Concordats and abrogating the privileges that centuries of Catholicism had legally recognized. From this point of view, it is therefore improper to affirm that “Christianity, with its birth, brought to the world the principle of freedom of religion,” indeed, because of its diversity it had face the persecution and martyrdom of its own faithful. The first Christians did not ask to have the Most Holy Trinity admitted to the Pantheon, but rather to be left free to practice their own monotheism that so amazed the Romans. And they claimed this “freedom of religion” for themselves, certainly not for the pagans, whom they sought (successfully) to convert to the true Faith.
It seems that it is being forgotten that the Church is the holder of rights that derive directly from God, and that it is up to the state to recognize them and protect them, not merely as a quantitative matter, but because the Catholic religion is objectively true and socially indispensable to the pursuit of the common good. In this regard, it is worth quoting Leo XIII:
If there is a remedy for the evils of the world, this can happen in no other way than a return to Christian life and customs. This is a solemn Quote:principle, that in order to reform a society in decadence, it is necessary to bring it back to the principles that have given it being, the perfection of every society is placed in the effort to reach its purpose: in such a way that the generating principle of the motions and social actions may be the same that generated the association. Therefore to deviate from the primitive purpose is corruption; returning to it is salvation.5
The fact that the state may deny the recognition of these rights is accidental, and the Church can also decide not to impose herself; but it is not up to her to claim rights for those who spread error, with the sole purpose of ingratiating herself with them or giving proof of an ecumenical zeal that is totally extraneous to her mission.
The falsification of reality to make a false idea seem true
On closer inspection, traditional thought is much more attentive to the role of persons who hold institutional positions – popes, kings, prelates and rulers, faithful and subjects – than to the abstract concept of the institution: because the Lord died to save our souls, not legal entities; and because the Church has the task of converting all peoples, including the rulers of nations, in such a way that even the role they play may be enlivened by grace and may contribute to the greater good of the people they govern.
This mythical “medieval Augustine” did not commit any error: neither in pointing out the supernatural paradigm to which the earthly authorities – both spiritual and temporal – must conform, nor in theorizing the subordination of civil power to religious power, with both together subject to the power of God.
The fatal error was committed rather on the strongly ideologized front of ecclesiastical neo-modernism and political progressivism, whose followers seek, without any foundation, to attribute to “political Augustiniansm” a doctrinal formulation that according to them does not correspond to the message of the first centuries. St. Augustine never claimed that the authority of the state is in some way detached from true religion. Instead, the Bishop of Hippo declared:
Quote:We say that [Christian emperors] are happy if they rule justly; if they are not lifted up amid the praises of those who pay them sublime honors, and the obsequiousness of those who salute them with an excessive humility, but remember that they are men; if they make their power the handmaid of His majesty by using it for the greatest possible extension of His worship; if they fear, love, and honor God; if more than their own they love that kingdom in which they are not afraid to have rivals; if they are slow to punish and ready to pardon; if they apply punishment only as necessary to govern and defend the state and not to gratify their own enmity; if they grant pardon, not that the violation of the law iniquity may go unpunished but with the hope that the transgressor may amend his ways; if they compensate the severe decisions that they are often constrained to make with the mildness of compassion and with munificence; if their luxury is as much restrained as it might have been uncontrolled; if they prefer to govern depraved passions rather than many nations, and if they conduct themselves this way not out of longing for a futile glory but for love of eternal felicity; if they do not neglect to offer to the true God the sacrifice of humility, clemency and prayer for their own sins. We say that Christian emperors endowed with such qualities that they are happy in the present age through hope, and in the age that follows they will be happy in the enjoyment of the reality itself, when the object of our waiting will have come true.6
In fact, it is not possible that a society composed of individual persons who each have the moral duty to recognize Divine Revelation and obey the Commandments of God and the authority of the Church may evade the same duty. Just as it is not true that the presence of other religions, numerically relevant regardless of the aberrations of doctrine that they teach, can legitimize an attitude of resigned acknowledgment of the marginalization of the one true religion, above all when this loss of consent and of support from the state and society is mainly due to the abdication of the Catholic hierarchy on the basis of conciliar deviations.
The sacrality of authority against totalitarian drifts
The formulation of St. Augustine – which is not exhausted in the “De Civitate Dei” but finds ample orthodox clarification in the entire corpus of his writings – should be read in coherence with Sacred Scripture and the Catholic Magisterium, which moreover are heirs of the vicarious vision of civil authority that belonged to the people of Israel itself, whose kings were representatives of the authority of God, as also were the Christian monarchs, beginning with Byzantium.
The sacrality of civil authority, inherited from Greco-Roman civilization, was so deeply rooted in the Christian world that it even assumed ceremonial connotations proper to Holy Orders: we may think of the anointing of the monarch with Chrism, or the liturgical vestments of the eastern emperor and the czars of Russia, the coronation ritual of the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire and the prelate-like ceremonies of the doge of Venice. But also in the Comuni of Italy, apparently presented as more “secular” with respect to the monarchies, the concept of the well-ordered res publica was developed in the Middle Ages in coherence with the Faith and exemplified by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in the frescoes of the “Allegory of Good Government” in the Palazzo Publico of Siena.
Artificially separating the harmony and hierarchical complementarity between spiritual authority and temporal authority was an unfortunate operation that created the premise, whenever it was realized, for either tyranny or anarchy. The reason is all too obvious: Christ is king of both the Church and of nations, because “all authority comes from God” (Rom. 13:1). Denying that rulers have the duty to submit to the Lordship of Christ is a very serious error, because without the moral law the state can impose its own will, regardless of the will of God, and therefore subverting the divine κόσμος (order) of the Civitas Dei in order to replace it with arbitrary free will and the infernal χάος (chaos) of the civitas diaboli.
And here we understand how both the one and the other civitas constitute a model to strive for and not an actuated reality, without either abstruse “spiritualizations” or coarse “realisms.” We also understand how behind these merely intellectual speculations lies the idealist approach of a Hegelian matrix, which arises from the desire to create a fictitious reality to be opposed to the reality willed by God, indeed to impose a Promethean alternative to the Passion of the Savior, which scandalizes precisely because of the redeeming cross and the fact that, in the economy of redemption, the cross is a royal throne: regnavit a ligno Deus (God reigned from the tree).
To believe that the world is able to not be Christian and can do without God by surviving on its own is a hellish and blasphemous chimera.
The secularization of ecclesiastical authority
On the other hand, those who wanted to give a theological patina to the secular nature of the State – as a necessary consequence of the “freedom of religion” that was theorized for individuals – necessarily had to deny the doctrinal premises of Scripture, the Fathers, and the Magisterium, appealing to an alleged corruption of the true Christian message in the work of the medieval thinkers. As can be seen, doctrinal deviation is always based on lies, historical falsification, and the ignorance of the interlocutors on whom they want to impose their errors.
The consequences are devastating and visible for all to see: if a societas perfecta is not required to recognize the Lord as its sovereign, this must necessarily also apply to the earthly Church, whose hierarchy can therefore decide to exercise its authority simply for the purpose of maintaining power and not within the well-defined boundaries established by Her divine Founder.
It is no coincidence that the post-conciliar period did everything to cancel the doctrine of the Kingship of Christ, tampering with the liturgical texts of the feast instituted by Pius XI in 1925 with the Encyclical Quas Primas.
Ratzinger speaks of “my ecclesiology,” affirming that the Church can neither call herself Civitas Dei nor can she presume to consider still current the doctrine that Pius XII defined in his 1943 Encyclical Mystici Corporis. The Pope Emeritus writes:
Quote:“But the complete spiritualization of the concept of the Church, for its part, misses the realism of faith and its institutions in the world. Thus, in Vatican II the question of the Church in the world finally became the real central problem.”
So central as to modify Catholic doctrine in order to appear à la page, dialoguing, inclusive, philanthropic. But it was precisely the loss of its role as Domina gentium (Lady, or mistress, of the gentiles) which led the “conciliar church” to a renounced, marginal position of social irrelevance: it is the pretium sanguinis (blood price) with which it stained itself, betraying the mandate of Christ and allowing itself to be polluted by the ideas of the world. And if the Church up until Pius XII had the Civitas Dei as a model and considered herself the Mystical Body of Christ, despite the weakness of her members, it appears that in recent decades the model which has inspired the proponents of Vatican II is rather that of the civitas diaboli, judging by the support that the Holy See offers to globalist ideology, to the neo-Malthusian delusions of the “green economy,” to transhumanism, and to the entire gender and LGBT repertoire.
30 October 2022
Domini Nostri Jesu Christi Regis
Footnotes
[1] The term medieval Augustinianism means the development of Augustinian thought, in particular relative to the political and social implications of the doctrine about the Civitas Dei and the civitas diaboli, which according to the innovators distorted the original thought of Saint Augustine, exasperating for example the theocratic vision of power, both civil as well as ecclesiastical. It goes without saying that this criticism is specious and is based on real historical falsifications: the idea that all power originated from God was already very clear to the Bishop of Hippo and its explanation in medieval political Augustinianism is perfectly coherent with Tradition.
[2] Sallust, Bellum Catilinæ, 48 Rerum novarum cupiditas Catilinæ animum incendebat. Catiline burned with desire for a revolution [literally: with the desire for novelty].
[3] Hegelian idealism marks the abandonment of Aristotelian logic (also called the logic of non-contradiction), in favor of a new so-called substantial logic. Being is no longer statically opposed to non-being, but is made to coincide with the latter by passing into becoming. Hegelian idealism, which resolves all the contradictions of reality in absolute Reason, will have an immanentistic outcome, recognizing in itself, and no longer in a transcendent principle, the goal and ultimate aim of Philosophy.
[4] Joseph Ratzinger, Opera omnia, volume VII/1, Gli insegnamenti del Concilio Vaticano II, Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2016, Prefazione (Castel Gandolfo, 2 Agosto 2012).
[5] Encyclical Letter Rerum Novarum, 27 (15 May 1891).
[6] De Civitate Dei, V, 24.
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| Women managers have improved Vatican more than men, pope says |
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Posted by: Stone - 11-07-2022, 09:05 AM - Forum: Pope Francis
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Pope says women's rights fight is 'continuous struggle', condemns mutilation
ABOARD THE PAPAL PLANE, Nov 6 (Reuters) - Pope Francis said on Sunday the fight for women's rights was a "continuous struggle", and condemned male chauvinism as deadly for humanity and female genital mutilation as a crime that must be stopped.
Speaking to reporters on the plane returning from a four-day trip to predominantly Muslim Bahrain, he also praised women he has appointed to managerial jobs in the Vatican, saying they had improved things there.
He made no mention of campaigns to let women move on beyond that and become clergy - the pope and his predecessors have said the question of women
Francis was responding to a question about women protesting in Iran but turned to the topic of women's rights in general.
"We have to tell the truth. The struggle for women's rights is a continuing struggle," he said, listing historic struggles such as the fight for the right to vote.
"We have to continue struggling for this because women are a gift. God did not create man and then give him a lapdog to play with. He created both equal, man and woman," he said.
"A society that is not capable of (allowing women to have greater roles) does not move forward," he added.
Francis denounced male chauvinism, acknowledging there was still too much of it around the world, including in his native Argentina. "This chauvinism kills humanity," he said.
He also condemned as a "criminal act" female genital mutilation (FGM), repeating a major call he made in February on the U.N. International Day of Zero Tolerance for Female Genital Mutilation.
According to the United Nations, FGM is concentrated in about 30 countries in Africa and the Middle East but is also practiced by immigrant populations elsewhere. More than four million girls are at risk of undergoing FGM this year, the U.N. says.
He spoke of women he has appointed to managerial roles in the Vatican, mentioning by name Sister Raffaella Petrini, a nun who as the deputy governor of Vatican City is effectively the most powerful woman there.
"I have noticed that every time a woman is given a position (of responsibility) in the Vatican, things improve," he said.
He also cited the impact of five women he appointed to a department that oversees Vatican finances.
"This is a revolution (in the Vatican) because women know how the find the right way to go forward," he said.
Francis also has appointed women as deputy foreign minister, director of the Vatican Museums, deputy head of the Vatican Press Office, as well as four women as councillors to the Synod of Bishops, which prepares major meetings.
The Church teaches that only men can become priests because Jesus chose men as his apostles.
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| What Are Those Mysterious New Towers Looming Over New York’s Sidewalks? |
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Posted by: Stone - 11-06-2022, 05:50 PM - Forum: General Commentary
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What Are Those Mysterious New Towers Looming Over New York’s Sidewalks?
As the city upgrades to 5G wireless, the streetscape is changing. Not everyone is impressed.
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A tall 5G tower at an intersection in Manhattan’s Chinatown.A new 5G tower on Mulberry Street in Manhattan’s Chinatown.Credit...Amir Hamja for The New York Times
NYT | November 5, 2022
A curiously futuristic tower recently appeared on the corner of Putnam and Bedford Avenues in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. A gray column topped by a perforated casing, at a whopping 32 feet tall, it reaches higher than the three-story brick building behind it.
Sixty-year-old Marion Little, who owns Stripper Stain & Supplies, the hardware store that has operated on that corner for 17 years, said that he and his neighbors had received no warning. One day there were workers outside; then the tower materialized.
“We were shocked because we had no idea what it was,” Mr. Little said. Since it’s right outside his store, people keep asking him about it. “They’ve been emailing me, calling me weekends, Facebooking me, like, ‘Yo, what’s that?’ and I’m sitting there like, ‘I have no clue.’”
The object in question is a new 5G antenna tower erected by LinkNYC, the latest hardware in New York’s sweeping technological upgrade.
New York City has an agreement with CityBridge, the team behind LinkNYC, that involves installing 2,000 5G towers over the next several years, an effort to help eliminate the city’s “internet deserts.” Ninety percent will be in underserved areas of the city — neighborhoods in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island and above 96th Street in Manhattan.
Once the towers are activated, residents will have access to free digital calling and free high-speed Wi-Fi as well as 5G service. Many of the locations were previously home to pay phones.
According to officials in the city’s Office of Technology and Innovation, 40 percent of New York City households lack the combination of home and mobile broadband, including 18 percent of residents — more than 1.5 million people — who lack both.
The 5G towers, as well as fiber cables underground, will make up an infrastructure that carriers like AT&T and Verizon can use to provide better service to customers. Most of the towers, including the one on Mr. Little’s corner, have not yet been activated.
But as is often the case when something new appears on the New York City streetscape, people seem startled by the large structures — and some have expressed unfounded fears about 5G. They’re concerned about the towers’ sheer size and, in some cases, the wrecked views from third-floor windows. Mr. Little also questioned the practicality of placing the tower on his corner at the B26 bus stop: “The buses turn here,” he said. “It’s going to be easy to miscalculate and hit the thing.”
Another 5G tower popped up in Fort Greene, on the corner of Vanderbilt and Myrtle Avenues, again, by a bus stop — the B69. It looms alongside a three-story residential building with a ground-level liquor store.
Mark Malecki, 26, who moved to New York City in mid-October from Richmond, Va., has an intimate view framed by his third-floor bedroom window. “I wasn’t even quite sure what it was,” he said.
![[Image: 62f42ee792caa00ea8138bdfbd3d680f7275e552.webp]](https://archive.ph/jmc0C/62f42ee792caa00ea8138bdfbd3d680f7275e552.webp)
A 5G tower in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn is 32 feet tall.
The new tower at the corner of at Bedford and Putnam Avenues in Bedford-Stuyvesant caught residents by surprise.Credit...Amir Hamja for The New York Times
Just down the street lives Renee Collymore, a 50-year-old Brooklynite who said her family is “four generations deep in this neighborhood” and who serves as the Democratic liaison for the 57th Assembly District in Fort Greene. She has been wary of the tower since it appeared this summer.
As the head of the Vanderbilt Avenue Block Association, Ms. Collymore said, “Never have I heard one mention of residents asking for a tower to be placed where we live.” She plans to hold a meeting about it.
“Before this tower came, I had fine service,” Ms. Collymore continued. “What, a call dropped every now and then? So what. You keep going.”
In Manhattan’s Chinatown, where a tower cropped up on the corner of Mulberry and Bayard Streets, one resident of a nearby building declared it a “monstrosity.”
“Who wants to look at something like that?” she asked.
The towers are not the only 5G antennas being installed in New York City. Others are going up on city property, like traffic lights and streetlamps.
At the end of September, jackhammering could be heard outside of the six-story brick building on the Upper East Side where Chelsea Formica, 32, lives with her husband, Joe, and their infant son.
Ms. Formica was in New Jersey visiting her mother when Joe called. “He was like, ‘Hey, you know, they put something up outside of our window. I’m just laying here on the couch and it’s pretty big.’” Then Ms. Formica got home. “I was like, ‘Oh, my God,’ freaking out. It’s huge. It’s so big.”
Workers for the telecommunications company ExteNet had installed a cylindrical object roughly the size of a human being: a 5G antenna that is 63 inches tall and 21 inches in diameter, according to the company. It is accompanied by a box that is 38 inches high, 16 inches wide and 14 inches deep — about the size of a filing cabinet or a night stand.
The imposing antenna is mounted on top of a slender pole, three stories high — more than 30 feet in the air — and right in front of Ms. Formica’s living-room window. It’s also just steps away from where their 5-month-old baby sleeps, which makes Ms. Formica uncomfortable.
“People say that it is safe; the F.C.C. says it’s safe and everything,” she said. “We’re just worried that it’s so close to my son’s bedroom.”
Alex Wyglinski, the associate dean of graduate studies and a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, said residents need not worry. He noted that 5G is non-ionizing radiation, on the opposite end of the spectrum from ionizing rays that people need protection from, like UV rays and X-rays.
In addition, Dr. Wyglinski said, the tower “cannot just blast energy everywhere. It’s going to be hyper-focused points of energy going directly to your cellphone.”
And while the towers are tall, “you’ll get used to it,” he said. Just like streetlights and traffic lights, he added, “this will get integrated into the cityscape.”
Ms. Formica and her next-door neighbor Virginie Glaenzer, whose window view is also dominated by the antenna, took a measuring tape to the sidewalk and discovered that the newly installed pole is slightly less than 10 feet away from the building, a distance that typically triggers a community notification process, according to the agreement between New York City and ExteNet.
Ms. Glaenzer and Ms. Formica contacted their local representatives and handed out fliers urging their neighbors to do the same. They would like to see the antenna removed — or at least moved across the street, alongside the Asphalt Green turf field and not next to a residential building.
Julie Menin, the New York City Council member who represents Ms. Formica, Ms. Glaenzer and the rest of District 5, said that she has, on behalf of her constituents, asked the city to hire a third party to conduct emissions tests on the antennas to ensure that they comply with federal regulations, and the city’s Office of Technology and Innovation has agreed to do so.
The city also asked ExteNet to move the antenna, but ExteNet said it had no plans to do so. Ms. Formica said she wouldn’t feel comfortable living next to it once it is turned on. She isn’t sure she would move out, she said, but she would consider her options. “I think I would look into a lawyer.”
As for Ms. Glaenzer, she laughed as she pointed to some crystals she’d placed in a bowl on the windowsill in front of the antenna. “They’re supposed to remove the radiation,” she said, shrugging. “You’re just holding on to whatever you have.”
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| Pope Francis preaches ‘fraternity’ divorced from Catholicism at interfaith meetings in Bahrain |
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Posted by: Stone - 11-06-2022, 05:15 PM - Forum: Pope Francis
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As mentioned several times on this forum, these errors of Pope Francis do not originate with him. He 'simply' regurgitates Vatican II Ecclesiology. In this case,
Quote:The Vatican II Council document "Unitatis Redintegratio" heretically teaches that "…the Holy Spirit does not refuse to make use of other religions as a means of salvation."
John Paul II's document "Catechesi Tradendae" repeats the same heresy.
This is not mentioned to excuse him only to point out that these errors have been repeated by all the Conciliar popes, not just Pope Francis.
Pope Francis preaches ‘fraternity’ divorced from Catholicism at interfaith meetings in Bahrain
Pope Francis used his speeches during the historic trip to promote his type of 'fraternity' and 'unity in diversity.' He did not promote the Catholic faith.
![[Image: pope-grand-imam-810x500.jpg]](https://www.lifesitenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/pope-grand-imam-810x500.jpg)
Screenshot/Twitter
Nov 5, 2022
BAHRAIN (LifeSiteNews) – During the course of his short visit to the predominantly Muslim country of Bahrain, Pope Francis has promoted irreligious “fraternity,” echoing controversial writings described as “blasphemous” and dangerous to the Catholic faith.
On Friday, Pope Francis took part in a number of events as part of his Apostolic Journey to Bahrain, including the closing ceremony of the Bahrain Forum for Human Coexistence; a private meeting with the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar (now the pope’s regular supporter at such events); a meeting with the Muslim Council of Elders; and an Ecumenical Meeting for Peace.
At all of his public meetings, Pope Francis made repeated calls for “fraternity, dialogue, and peace,” adding to this a call for “unity in diversity.”
The 85-year-old Pontiff did not mention his belief in Jesus Christ during the interfaith addresses, speaking of the Savior only during a meeting with other Christians.
While the transcript of his numerous addresses contain limited quotations from Scripture – selectively used and truncated in order to promote the theme of “unity” – Francis’ various speeches chiefly drew from the 2019 Abu Dhabi document on Human Fraternity which he drew up with the Grand Imam, along with other ecumenical texts.
‘Religious freedom’ must underline society
Repeatedly quoting from the Abu Dhabi document in his address at the Bahrain Forum, Francis depicted the document as the key to resolving “the stormy sea of conflicts.” He stated that the document called for more “prayer” which must be rooted in “religious freedom.”
Francis echoed the theme of his September address at an ecumenical meeting in Kazakhstan – where he denounced “proselytism and indoctrination” – saying that “it is not enough to grant permits and recognize freedom of worship; it is necessary to achieve true freedom of religion.”
Quote:Not only every society, but also every creed is called to self-examination in this regard. It is called to question whether it coerces God’s creatures from without, or liberates them from within; whether it helps people to reject rigidity, narrow-mindedness and violence; whether it helps believers to grow in authentic freedom, which is not doing what we want, but directing ourselves to the good for which we were created.
He also re-iterated his calls for an end to the death penalty, speaking of the “right to life, of the need to guarantee that right always, including for those being punished, whose lives should not be taken.” As the Church, albeit in recent decades with stringent qualifications, has always upheld the legitimacy of the death penalty for murder, this is a rupture with Catholic doctrine.
READ: Swiss bishop condemns the Synod on Synodality as a ‘marketing campaign’ for heresy
Calls for ‘future of fraternity’ at Muslim council
Following a private meeting with the Grand Imam, Francis addressed the assembled Muslim Council of Elders, praising them for seeing “in extremism a danger that corrodes genuine religion” and promoting “respect, tolerance and moderation.” “As-salamu alaikum (Peace be upon you)!” said the Pope in his greeting at the mosque of the Sakhir Royal Palace.
Francis referenced the inter-religious document he signed only weeks ago in Kazakhstan, which originally stated that “pluralism and differences in religion…are expressions of the wisdom of God’s will in creation.”
He warned the Muslim leaders that “social, international, economic and individual evils, as well as the dramatic environmental crisis of our time on which we have reflected here today, ultimately derive from estrangement from God and our neighbor.”
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Pope Francis and the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, Sheikh Ahmad Al-Tayyeb at the Muslim Council of Elders
Here, the Pope also issued one of strongest calls for “fraternity” which he made during the weekend, confusingly urging his audience to place “openness to heaven ahead of differences of earth.”
Quote:I believe that increasingly we need to encounter one another, to get to know and to esteem one another, to put reality ahead of ideas and people ahead of opinions, openness to heaven ahead of differences on earth. We need to put a future of fraternity ahead of a past of antagonism, overcoming historical prejudices and misunderstandings in the name of the One who is the source of peace.
“We are called to proclaim with the wisdom of our elders and fathers, that God and neighbor come before all else, that transcendence and fraternity alone will save us,” he stated, addressing the Elders as “brothers in Abraham.”
Pope Francis notably avoided promoting a Catholic understanding of God as Trinity, instead employing language such as “One who loves humanity, the One whose name is peace” or “the Creator.”
Ecumenical prayer meeting promoting ‘unity in diversity’
Shortly after, Pope Francis took part in an ecumenical Christian prayer meeting held in the cathedral of Our Lady of Arabia, in Awali.
Here he told the ecumenical leaders, “By our divisions, we have wounded the Lord’s holy body, yet the Holy Spirit, who joins all the members together, is greater than our divisions according to the flesh.”
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Pope Francis addressing the ecumenical prayer meeting
“Consequently it is right to say that what unites us far exceeds what divides us,” he continued, “and that, the more we journey according to the Spirit, the more we will be led to desire and, with the help of God, restore full unity among us.”
Francis referred to Pentecost, the day on which the Holy Spirit descended upon the Apostles who then preached and converted thousands to the Catholic faith. Here Francis focused on the event to praise “unity in diversity,” with a heavy emphasis on diversity.
“Let us remember, though, that the unity to which we are journeying is a unity in diversity,” he said.
When he then mentioned the Apostles’ preaching mission on Pentecost, Francis again avoided promoting the Catholic faith, and instead asked, “Are we truly people of peace?”
Catholic teaching on evangelization
Pope Francis’ exhortations of a “fraternity” and a “unity” divorced from the Catholic faith are controversial.
Pope Leo XIII condemned such arguments in his 1888 encyclical Libertas. Referring to the Church’s relationship with other religions, Leo wrote that the Catholic Church tolerates
Quote:certain modern liberties, not because she prefers them in themselves but because she judges it expedient to permit them, she would in happier times exercise her own liberty; and, by persuasion, exhortation, and entreaty would endeavor, as she is bound, to fulfill the duty assigned to her by God of providing for the eternal salvation of mankind.
Leo noted that “one thing, however, remains always true — that the liberty which is claimed for all to do all things is not, as We have often said, of itself desirable, inasmuch as it is contrary to reason that error and truth should have equal rights.”
While much of Francis’ Bahrain visit has been rooted in the Abu Dhabi document and the kind of “fraternity” promoted by his encyclical Fratelli tutti, both these texts are problematic for Catholics.
The Abu Dhabi text has been described as seeming to “overturn the doctrine of the Gospel” due to its promotion of equality of religions in a form of “fraternity.”
According to Church historian Roberto de Mattei, when “fraternity” is divorced from Christian charity, “far from constituting an element of cohesion in society,” it “becomes the source of its disintegration.” He argued that “if men, in the name of fraternity, are forced to live together without an end that gives meaning to their sense of belonging, the ‘ark’ becomes a prison.”
“Fratelli tuttiF” has also been similarly condemned by former Papal Nuncio to the U.S., Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, as promoting a “blasphemous” form of brotherhood without God as well as “religious indifferentism.”
Viganò added that “religious indifferentism, implicitly promoted in the text Fratelli tutti, which defines as ‘a good for our societies’ the presence of any religion – instead of ‘the liberty and exaltation of Holy Mother Church’ – denies in fact the sovereign rights of Jesus Christ, King and Lord of individuals, of the societies and of nations.”
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| The Judgement of Nations Series |
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Posted by: Stone - 11-05-2022, 06:32 AM - Forum: Catholic Prophecy
- Replies (7)
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A series of short articles reviewing various approved Church mystics and prophecies. A reminder that:
Quote:When the Church approves private revelations, she declares only that there is nothing in them contrary faith or good morals, and that they may be read without danger or even with profit; no obligation is thereby imposed on the faithful to believe them. Speaking of such revelations as (e.g.) those of St. Hildegard (approved in part by Eugenius III), St. Bridget (by Boniface IX), and St. Catherine of Siena (by Gregory XI) Benedict XIV says: "It is not obligatory nor even possible to give them the assent of Catholic faith, but only of human faith, in conformity with the dictates of prudence, which presents them to us as probable and worthy of pius belief)" (De canon., III, liii, xxii, II). [Taken from the 1912 Catholic Encyclopedia]
The Judgment of Nations - I
The Latter Times & the Judgment of Nations
TIA / Margaret C. Galitzin [adapted]| May 13, 2021
Recently I came across a small book titled The Latter Times [Los Ultimos Tiempos] by a Spanish Doctor of Sacred Scripture, Fr. Benjamin Sanchez, born in 1905. (1) This short work, which examines public and private prophecies about the Latter Times, is quite interesting and significant for our days. This is particularly so because many Catholics, overwhelmed by the apostasy and sin of our days, are wrongly thinking that we are in the End Times that will immediately precede the Last Judgment.
Based on Scripture and prophecies that agree with it, Fr. Sanchez correctly situates our disastrous days in History. The results of his study confirm the prophecies of Fatima and Quito, as well as those of the great Marian prophet St. Louis Marie Grignion de Montfort, which speak of a great chastisement to be followed by a long period of peace, the Reign of Christ through Mary [...].
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Detail of the Last Judgment – Cathedral of Orvieto
In general, the Scriptures and private prophecies that Fr. Sanchez sets out warn us of a great chastisement that will come over all humanity – a Judgment of Nations – to be followed by a long period of peace and universal well-being. When he uses the expression Latter Times, he emphasizes that it does not refer to the end of the world created by God. In the great universal catastrophe that is coming, the world will not be completely annihilated.
Rather, the remnant of mankind that survives the chastisement will be changed and purified. With a zeal for the glory of Our Lord and Our Lady, they will build a better world. Many of the prophecies speak of a great leader, a man sent by God, a prophetic figure beloved by Our Lady, an Eliatic figure, who will lead this restoration.
In the era that will follow, Fr. Sanchez notes, “Christ will reign from one end of the world to the other, and all His enemies will fall at his feet (1 Cor 15:25) to render Him their vassalage. His Church will be gloriously triumphant throughout the earth. (2)
The End Times or Final Judgment, will take place only after that period of God’s triumph on earth. The great chastisement and purification of the world should not be confused with the Final Judgment, Fr. Sanchez emphasizes, for Scriptures tells us that not even the Angels of Heaven know the day or the time of the latter.
What is announced in Scripture and prophecies, which will be presented in this series of articles, is not the end of the world, but rather what he calls the Judgment of Nations that will take place during a Great Chastisement that will come upon a world that has lost the faith and grievously transgressed all the laws of God. It is a Chastisement that will take place in our times foretold by Scriptures and more clearly described in various approved prophecies.
Let us begin this series with a look at just several of the quotes from Scripture (3) that confirm a Chastisement or Judgment of Nations, to be followed by a time when a purified remnant will fear and glorify the Lord.
Scripture on a Great Chastisement & Purified Remnant
Isaiah prophesizes a Latter Times when the earth, profaned by its inhabitants, will be devastated and only a few of the faithful will remain:
Isaiah the Prophet, Congonhas do Campo, Brazil
“Behold the Lord shall lay waste the earth, and shall strip it, and shall afflict the face thereof, and scatter abroad the inhabitants thereof. And it shall be as with the people, so with the priest: and as with the servant, so with his master: as with the handmaid, so with her mistress: as with the buyer, so with the seller: as with the lender, so with the borrower: as with him that calleth for his money, so with him that oweth.
“With desolation shall the earth be laid waste, and it shall be utterly spoiled: for the Lord hath spoken this word. The earth mourned, and faded away, and is weakened: the world faded away, the height of the people of the earth is weakened. And the earth is infected by the inhabitants thereof: because they have transgressed the laws, they have changed the ordinance, they have broken the everlasting covenant.
“Therefore shall a curse devour the earth, and the inhabitants thereof shall sin: and therefore they that dwell therein shall be mad, and few men shall be left.” (24:1-6)
The small number of survivors of this great chastisement is foretold in the imagery of the few olives that still cling to the tree after it has been shaken:
“It shall be thus in the midst of the earth, in the midst of the people, as if a few olives, that remain, should be shaken out of the olive tree: or grapes, when the vintage is ended.” (Is 14:13)
What is important to note is that some inhabitants, albeit few, will remain after the Great Chastisement, which is a definitive sign that it is not the end of the world.
The Judgment of Nations
The Day of the Lord announced in Sophonias will be the Judgment of the Nations, where each will receive just punishment and the remaining faithful will be led by a “chosen (pure) lip” so that all might serve and give glory to the Lord:
The destruction of Babylon, above, became the archetype of all divine chastisements
“The great day of the Lord is … near and exceeding swift … That day is a day of wrath, a day of tribulation and distress, a day of calamity and misery, a day of darkness and obscurity, a day of clouds and whirlwinds … And I will distress men, and they shall walk like blind men, because they have sinned against the Lord: and their blood shall be poured out as earth, and their bodies as dung. …
“For my judgment is to assemble the Gentiles, and to gather the Kingdoms: and to pour upon them my indignation, all my fierce anger: for with the fire of my jealousy shall all the earth be devoured. Because then I will restore to the people a chosen lip, that all may call upon the name of the Lord, and may serve Him with one shoulder.” (1: 14-17, 3: 8-9)
A Renewed World, Not the Latter Times
A Great Chastisement will come over the earth, Zacharias foresees, where only a third part will be left. These, however, will be tried and purified and will call on the name of the Lord:
“And there shall be in all the earth, saith the Lord, two parts in it shall be scattered and shall perish: but the third part shall be left therein.
“And I will bring the third part through the fire, and will refine them as silver is refined: and I will try them as gold is tried. They shall call on my name, and I will hear them. I will say: Thou art my people: and they shall say: The Lord is my God.” (13:8-9)
This should suffice to demonstrate that the universal Judgment of Nation, which will be something all will see and experience, is not the Final Judgment, which will be at the end of the world.
Continued
1. Rector of the Seminary of Zamora and Canon of the Cathedral of Zamora, he was a prolific writer on Scriptures, the Four Last things, Communism, and promoter of devotion to Our Lady and praying the Rosary.
2. Rev. Benjamín Martin Sánchez, The Last Times: Public and Private Prophecies, English Trans. by André Marie Bonzaález, TOP, 1st ed., Imprimatur: Bishop Eduardus Zamorensis, 1968, p. 9.
3. Other Scriptural references cited by Fr. Sanchez include the following: On the remnant who will convert after the chastisement: Is 6: 11-13, Is 66: Is 66: 15-16,19,21, 2 Pet 3:10-13); On the conversion of the remaining Jews in Latter Times: Osee 3:5, Mach2:7, Deut 4:30, Is 4:3, Soph 3:13; On the Judgment of Nation: Soph 1:8-9, 13.
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