The Recusant #57 - Editorial [adapted - emphasis mine]:
Dear Reader,
“Those who follow novelties,” says Archbishop Lefebvre, “who attach themselves to new principles contrary to those taught us
by Tradition, by all the Popes, by all the Councils, they are the ones who have chosen the way of disobedience.”
Does this statement not fit the modern SSPX like a glove? Does it not also fit Bishop Williamson and the Fake Resistance like a glove, too? Should you be in any doubt, please give your careful consideration to our article “
Where Do They Stand?” on p.20 - it should leave you in no doubt that Bishop Williamson is as bad as the modern, self-centred, compromised SSPX, and in some ways worse. The novelties may vary, but they are still novelties. Archbishop Lefebvre offers us sound advice: we cannot afford to attach ourselves to novelties, whatever form they take or wherever they come from. It is precisely because we are obedient to the Church, to Eternal Rome and to Tradition that we refuse all novelty. “Divine Mercy” devotions? No thanks. Luminous Mysteries? You can keep those. Novus Ordo priest to perform the marriage ceremony? No way! Maria Valtorta? Absolutely not! Conciliar Church = “Mainstream Church”..? You can keep those ideas too. You can also keep all the talk about seminaries being “somehow outdated” - that may be your opinion, but we’ll just stick with the opinion of the Council of Trent, thanks. The list goes on:
we continue to reject novelty and stay loyal to the Church and to Tradition because the corollary is true: if we were to accept such novelties, we would be betraying the Church, betraying Tradition and ultimately betraying Our Lord.
Obviously the same goes for the bizarre modern idea that when it comes to the Mass, any Mass, no matter the ritual, the circumstances or how pleasing (or displeasing) it is to God, if it is valid then it must give grace.
“Valid = Grace-giving” is not and never was Catholic teaching; it is a totally novel idea, one not found anywhere in the entire history of the Church.
Even amongst Traditional Catholics, it really only started to appear in the Fake Resistance in 2015. This in turn appears to have spawned (or at any rate, greatly encouraged) that other
erroneous idea which flows from it, namely that when it comes to the Mass, any Mass is better than no Mass. The Church has always taught that the Mass at which we assist must be one offered by the Church, in the Church and in the manner prescribed by the Church. If the parish priest makes up his own ritual and uses it to say Mass, we stay away, even if the new made-up rite is surely a valid one and he is still (as far as we know) a Catholic priest in good standing. If the priest uses a Catholic rite, but leaves the Church by, say, joining the schismatic Orthodox or the Anglicans, then we stay away.
If there is some other reason which means that it involves compromise on a doctrinal level or that it is not pleasing to God (think of the “Pax priests” behind the Iron Curtain, for example, or the “church papists” in 16th century England), then - you’ve guessed it! - we stay away.
In his sermon which we reproduce on p.5, Archbishop Lefebvre first of all makes clear that he does not believe all the New Masses are always invalid. And yet, valid though they may be, he goes on to describe them as “a mere symbol” from which “grace is absent”. That is still our position and belief today, almost 45 years later. The Ecclesia Dei/Indultists cannot say the same, the SSPX cannot say that, and nor can Bishop Williamson’s followers. Clearly either Archbishop Lefebvre was wrong then, or they are all wrong today, and there is no grace in the New Mass. If there is no grace in the New Mass, even when it is valid, then it is because there are more important things than mere validity.
Instead of asking “Is it valid,” we should perhaps ask: “Is it pleasing to God?” “Is my presence here pleasing to God?”
Many people out there seem unable to grasp this:
if it involves compromise on a doctrinal level, it isn’t pleasing to God, and if it isn’t pleasing to God, we don’t go. Why? Because doctrine means the Faith, so doctrinal compromise means compromising the Faith. Once pointed out to you, isn’t hard to understand; the scandal is that so many “Traditional” priests and faithful neither teach not live it. And yet,
in adopting this attitude we are obeying the Church, we are obeying Tradition and we are obeying God. And as the SSPX in the old days used often to remind people, we ought to obey God rather than men (Acts 5:29), even if the men in question are delinquent bishops and priests who ought to know better. If we do otherwise, if we so much as nod the head towards novelties of any kind, then our obedience to Tradition, to the Church and to God is not real and we risk losing everything. Don’t tell me about this priest who “seems” fairly good or that Mass which is convenient and regular: anything which isn’t founded on solid, timeless Catholic principles and virtues, such as those enunciated by Archbishop Lefebvre above, is going nowhere and is doomed to fail.
The other reason that no good will come of making frequency of sacraments the main priority is that it is an opportunist approach and essentially selfish. I want to have my Mass as often as possible because it pleases me. Never mind that, what does Almighty God want of us? If He doesn’t want you to compromise and the only frequent Mass nearby is one involving compromise, then clearly He doesn’t want you to go there and He plans for you to get to heaven without frequent Mass. That may be hard to accept, but if we’re serious about getting to heaven then we need to confront some hard truths.
There are Saints who went to heaven without frequent sacraments, just as there are souls in hell who went to Mass many times. Nothing lasting can be built up with a selfish attitude, any more than it can be built on a compromise with novelties. The Sacraments are important; but fidelity to God is even more important.
As always, we can be thankful that Archbishop Lefebvre was so clear and that he showed us the route to restoring Tradition. He was God’s instrument in saving it and will surely be recognised one day as God’s instrument in restoring His Church. It is our choice whether we also want to play a small part in that by following the path laid out by Archbishop Lefebvre.
The beauty of it is that it really is not “his” path, he didn’t invent anything new: he simply passed on Tradition, and did what the Church has always done, and obeyed the Church and God and Tradition. And in so doing, he had nothing whatever to do with novelty and resisted any temptation to go down a path of his own. I ask everyone to consider seriously whether that is what Bishop Williamson and his followers are doing; whether that is what the modern SSPX is doing; whether that is even what the various sedevacantist groups are doing.
A Curious Coincidence
Here is something a little amusing. One of the first articles to go into this issue was the sermon by Archbishop Lefebvre. Having now almost finished the whole issue, I have just noticed that the very same sermon was reproduced in
Ite Missa Est for Jan-Feb 2022. Ah well. It was bound to happen sooner or later. How curious it is that different people can read the same sermon and yet not see the same thing in it. Am I the only one who finds something a little, I don’t know, incongruous? Let’s see... In the 1970s and 1980s Archbishop Lefebvre was entirely justified in openly defying the entire hierarchy including even the Pope himself, in breaking every rule in the book, setting up “illegal” Mass centres, performing illegal episcopal consecrations and all the rest; and not only justified - he was quite right to do so and thank God that he did, too. But
less than ten years ago, in 2012, any SSPX priest who warned his faithful or his superiors of the danger of the SSPX striking a deal with the modernists in Rome and placing itself under the authority of the local bishop (which is, you will recall, what the Superior General at the time openly admitted he intended to do!) was cast into outer darkness without hesitation or the possibility of recourse or appeal. And that, too, despite the fact that we have been assured incessantly since then that there was never going to be any deal anyway! So you punished them for warning you not to do something which there was never any danger of you doing in the first place..? How does that make any sense? And how is it not an outrageous double-standard?
Often the punishment was severe in the extreme. Fr. Frank Sauer, for instance, was thrown into the street by the German District, without a penny to his name, no roof over his head, no pension, no medical insurance, nothing, and despite being already in his mid 70s at the time. Priests who have raped children are treated better than that! Some of those priests didn’t even say anything directly concerning Rome or their superiors: Fr. David Hewko’s crime was to preach about the betrayal of the Cristeros, while Fr. Patrick Girouard was punished for reading aloud some passages from a book published by Angelus Press and on sale at the back of the chapel! Some priests, such as Fr. Joseph Pfeiffer and Fr. Francois Chazal, went out
with more of a bang, God bless them, whilst others managed to dodge the proverbial bullet by “only” being gagged, demoted, humiliated, moved to an out-of-the-way posting and so forth. Fr. Michel Koller comes to mind, as do Fr. Stephen Fox and Fr. Paul Kimball. And we could of course name many more, but the point remains. In all cases what these priests had been accused of by their superiors was - you’ve guessed it! - “disobedience.”
Perhaps Fr. Robert Brucciani might like to dedicate his next editorial to explaining the following very perplexing question.
How was the “disobedience” of priests such as Fr. Sauer, Fr. Girouard, Fr. Hewko, Fr. Chazal, Fr. Pfeiffer et al. “real” whilst the SSPX’s disobedience to Rome is only “apparent”..? It seems to me that if Archbishop Lefebvre was right to regard his own punishments as null and void back then, because he was acting in good faith and for the Faith, then a fortiori the same must apply to the priests of the Society which he founded, priests who were punished for saying, essentially, nothing more or less than what Archbishop Lefebvre himself had said at the end of his life. But perhaps I’m missing something.
Here is a follow-up question. If - just for the sake of argument and in a purely theoretical situation, you understand - the SSPX had been infiltrated and taken over from the inside by liberals who were trying to change its course away from that of its founder, Archbishop Lefebvre, and if those same liberals had decided to punish as “disobedient” any priest who spoke up against the new direction which they were trying to bring about… how would things look any different to what actually happened?
Here is my answer. To paraphrase Archbishop Lefebvre, Fr. Brucciani and his superiors know perfectly well that
we are in the right because we cannot be outside of truth when we simply continue to do what has been done by the SSPX for more than for fifty years. This is not possible.
Ten Years Ago
Here is a timely reminder of something that many people out there would rather forget. The start of 2022 marks ten years since the veil began to be lifted on what, many suspected, had been going on for a little while between the SSPX leadership and Rome. There are many would-be defenders of the SSPX against the lies and rumours of the wicked, evil Resistance out there. What do they all have in common? They haven’t actually taken the trouble to read any of the material which emerged. All of it has been in the public domain for a decade now, and a good deal of it was sent to all priests at the time in the internal bulletin for SSPX priests,
Cor Unum, so there really is no excuse. “Did Bishop Fellay really say that?” Yes, he did. Read it for yourself. On pages 44-48 therefore, the reader will find the first part in a series of reprints of those famous documents. Those of us who did take the trouble to find out for ourselves at the time, who have read it all before - even we will occasionally forget just how damning the evidence really is. Our booklet “Primary Sources for Studying the Crisis in the SSPX 2012” contains all this and more besides, and can be found online via the website “St. Mary’s Ks SSPX MC” at the following address:
www.stmaryskssspxmc.com/wp -content/uploads/2016/01/primary_sources_for_studying_the_crisis_in_the_sspx_2012.pdf - please download, forward, print, and spread to as many people as you see fit.
Fr. Hewko Fundraiser
Fr. Hewko is too modest to continually ask you, so let me remind you on his behalf. There are approximately two months left to contribute to the fundraiser to purchase a property. Donations may be made via paypal marked “fundraiser” or “property.” Please visit:
https://sspxmc.com/fundraiser/
Finally, permit me to wish a holy and fruitful Lent to all our readers, friend and foe alike.
- The Editor
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