Displaced Anger

by Thomas A. Droleskey

The human capacity to find scapegoats for the actions of their idols is infinite. Most of former President William Jefferson Blythe Clinton’s defenders throughout his public life, especially in 1998 during L’Affaire Lewinsky, pointed fingers at Clinton’s critics, refusing to accept the facts that were being presented. Then First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton was wont to speak of a “vast right wing conspiracy.” Longtime Clinton flacks James Carville and Paul Begala and Mandy Gruenwald blasted the critics. Damaging personal information about U.S. Representative Henry Hyde (Republican, Illinois), then the Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, which held impeachment hearings against Clinton, was revealed to the press. Similar information was dug up on Clinton critics Reps. Bob Barr (Republican, Georgia), Dan Burton (Republican, Indiana) and Robert Livingston (Republican, Louisiana), the latter of which was scheduled to replace outgoing Speaker of the House of Representatives New Gingrich, whose own offenses against the Sixth Commandment were about to be revealed at the time. The Clinton flacks stopped at nothing to blame the messengers for Clinton’s own self-made problems.

True, Clinton was not the first president to have his defenders display righteous indignation at his critics. Indeed, President George W. Bush has his own share of reflexive defenders who attempt lambaste his critics as unpatriotic, if not supportive of terrorism. Richard Nixon sent out Vice President Spiro Agnew to talk about “nattering nabobs of negativism.” And there are still those who contend that Nixon, who sent a special message to Congress on “population control” on July 18, 1969, which began this country’s funding of international “family planning” programs, thereby helping to assassinate untold millions of innocent preborn babies, was ousted in a “coup d’etat” in 1974, oblivious to the amorality that characterized Nixon’s approach to public policy. Oh, yes, blaming critics has been a feature of American public life for quite a long time.

Sadly, the “blame game” is how many Catholics who reject the underlying doctrinal principles supporting the sedevacantist thesis treat sedevacantist critics of Benedict XVI and the Second Vatican Council. All rationality is cast aside in an effort to demonize those who raise the possibility, no less embrace as a legitimate theological conclusion, that Benedict is an apostate, an enemy of the souls for whom Our Lord shed every single drop of His Most Precious Blood in that he does not believe that the Catholic Church has a Divinely-instituted mission to seek with urgency the conversion of all people at all times to her maternal bosom. No, the problem cannot be with Benedict. It must be with the critics, especially those who recognize that it is the doctrine of the Catholic Church that a heretic cannot hold any ecclesiastical office, including the papacy.

I have on more than one occasion in the past year referred to the statement made by the late Mario Francesco Cardinal Pompedda, the former head of Newchurch’s Apostolic Signatura, attesting to the fact that sedevacantism is indeed a canonical doctrine of the Catholic Church. Pompedda, who was no friend of Tradition whatsoever, said the following in a Zenit report, on February 8, 2005, which dealt with Pompedda’s views of John Paul II’s ability to govern as he neared death:

“It is true that the canonical doctrine states that the see would be vacant in the case of heresy.”

No, the frequent repetition of this quote has done nothing to deter defenders of Benedict from saying that sedevacantism is an impossibility and to alternate between condescension (“We’re very worried about you”) and scorn (“You are evil”) when dealing with those of us who point out that this conciliarist emperor is a Modernist who hates the Faith of our fathers.

For all of the displaced anger, however, defenders of Benedict must recognize that it was not a sedevacantist who embraced the Patriarch of Constantinople and referred to him as a “fellow pastor in the Church of Christ,” meaning that one can deny Papal primacy and reject the Filioque and Purgatory and be a member of the “Church of Christ,” which is wider than the Catholic Church. It was Benedict XVI who did this.

It was not a sedevacantist who walked into a mosque in Turkey and took off his shoes, signifying a belief that the mosque was a “holy” place, and turned in the direction of Mecca, thereby committing a Mortal Sin against the First Commandment and scandalizing scores of martyrs in the Church Triumphant who gave up their lives rather than to do anything that could be interpreted as giving credence to a false religion. It was Benedict XVI who did this.

It is not a sedevacantist who knowingly appointed a Communist collaborator to be the Newchurch archbishop of Warsaw, Poland. It was Benedict XVI, who enrolled in the Hitler Youth organization because “everyone” did it, who did this.

It is not a sedevacantist who talks about the importance of arriving at a “critical synthesis of faith,” signifying a rejection of this dogmatic statement issued by the Vatican Council, 1869-1870:

“Wherefore, by divine and catholic faith all those things are to be believed which are contained in the word of God as found in scripture and tradition, and which are proposed by the church as matters to be believed as divinely revealed, whether by her solemn judgment or in her ordinary and universal magisterium. . . .

“For the doctrine of the faith which God has revealed is put forward not as some philosophical discovery capable of being perfected by human intelligence, but as a divine deposit committed to the spouse of Christ to be faithfully protected and infallibly promulgated. Hence, too, that meaning of the sacred dogmas is ever to be maintained which has once been declared by Holy Mother Church, and there must never be any abandonment of this sense under the pretext or in the name of a more profound understanding.”

 

It is Benedict XVI who rejects this clear dogma of the Catholic Church. It is Benedict XVI who lambasted media critics recently, stating that they appeared to “to weaken our capacity to make a critical synthesis.” The Catholic Faith is not a “synthesis” of anything. It is, as the Vatican Council stated, a “divine deposit.”

It was not a sedevacantist who gave permission for the world premiere of The Nativity Story, which portrays Our Lady as a sulky, disobedient teenager, thus attacking directly the doctrine of her Immaculate Conception, to take place in the Paul VI Audience Hall in the Vatican. It was Benedict XVI who gave permission for this. It was another conciliarist, Archbishop John Foley, who praised the blasphemous motion picture at its "world premiere" on November 26, 2006. No sedevacantist did this. No sedevacantist would do this.

It is not a sedevacantist who constantly extols the “virtues” of religious liberty” as a “novelty” that was started by Our Lord Himself, thereby destroying the whole meaning of the Church’s infallibility by the simple fact that this “novelty” was not only not taught until the “Second” Vatican Council but was condemned by pope after pope prior to 1958. Benedict XVI has been chief among this notorious error’s aggressive apologists.

It is not a sedevacantist who embraces the separation of Church and State, condemned as follows by Pope Saint Pius X in Vehementer Nos, February 11, 1906:

“That the State must be separated from the Church is a thesis absolutely false, a most pernicious error. Based, as it is, on the principle that the State must not recognize any religious cult, it is in the first place guilty of a great injustice to God; for the Creator of man is also the Founder of human societies, and preserves their existence as He preserves our own. We owe Him, therefore, not only a private cult, but a public and social worship to honor Him. Besides, this thesis is an obvious negation of the supernatural order. It limits the action of the State to the pursuit of public prosperity during this life only, which is but the proximate object of political societies; and it occupies itself in no fashion (on the plea that this is foreign to it) with their ultimate object which is man's eternal happiness after this short life shall have run its course. But as the present order of things is temporary and subordinated to the conquest of man's supreme and absolute welfare, it follows that the civil power must not only place no obstacle in the way of this conquest, but must aid us in effecting it. The same thesis also upsets the order providentially established by God in the world, which demands a harmonious agreement between the two societies. Both of them, the civil and the religious society, although each exercises in its own sphere its authority over them. It follows necessarily that there are many things belonging to them in common in which both societies must have relations with one another. Remove the agreement between Church and State, and the result will be that from these common matters will spring the seeds of disputes which will become acute on both sides; it will become more difficult to see where the truth lies, and great confusion is certain to arise. Finally, this thesis inflicts great injury on society itself, for it cannot either prosper or last long when due place is not left for religion, which is the supreme rule and the sovereign mistress in all questions touching the rights and the duties of men. Hence the Roman Pontiffs have never ceased, as circumstances required, to refute and condemn the doctrine of the separation of Church and State. Our illustrious predecessor, Leo XIII, especially, has frequently and magnificently expounded Catholic teaching on the relations which should subsist between the two societies. "Between them," he says, "there must necessarily be a suitable union, which may not improperly be compared with that existing between body and soul.”

Benedict XVI embraces the separation of Church and State. Something that is absolutely false in 1906 cannot be absolutely true in 2007.

This could go on and on. Suffice it to say, however, that those who are angry at sedevacantists for (a) stating that sedevacantism is a canonical doctrine of the Catholic Church and that (b) Benedict’s apostasies more than satisfy that canonical doctrine in our circumstances ought to consider the wreckage of souls that has been produced by conciliarism and its apologists, including the former Joseph Ratzinger. It’s easy to vent against and to demonize others in a “chat room” because they discuss the simple realities of our situation. It is far more difficult to face facts honestly and to recognize that millions upon millions of Catholics worldwide know nothing of the Faith–and are thus lost in the midst of daily life, unable to deal with the crosses they encounter and liable to fall into total unbelief or into the clutches of evangelical Protestants–because they are the victims of the spiritual abortion of souls wrought by the apostasies of conciliarism.

The late Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre put things this way in 1986:

Now these recent acts of the Pope [John Paul II] and the bishops, with Protestants, animists and Jews, are they not an active participation in non-Catholic worship as explained by Canon Naz on Canon 1258:1? In which case, I cannot see how it is possible to say that the Pope is not suspect of heresy, and if he continues, he is a heretic, a public heretic. This is the teaching of the Church.

Now I don't know if the time has come to say that the Pope is a heretic; I don't know if it is the time to say that. You know, for some time many people, the sedevacantists, "there is no more Pope," but I think that for me it was not yet the time to say that, because it was not sure, it was not evident, it was very difficult to say that the Pope is a heretic, the Pope is apostate. But I recognize that slowly, very slowly, by the deeds and acts of the Pope himself we begin to be very anxious.

I am not inventing this situation; I do not want it. I would gladly give my life to bring it to an end, but this is the situation we face, unfolding before our eyes like a film in the cinema. I don't think it has ever happened in the history of the Church, the man seated in the chair of Peter partaking in the worship of false gods. [The Angelus, July 1986.]

 

Yes, granted, Archbishop Lefebvre never embraced sedevacantism. He did, however, publicly ruminate that he had been pondering the matter. He did not invent the situation that prompted him merely to ponder sedevacantism. I am not inventing the situation that has caused me to accept sedevacantism as the canonical doctrine of the Church and that it applies to the conciliar popes. It would be wonderful to spend my life as a political science professor teaching students who came to college equipped with a thorough grasp of the Catholic Faith rather than to have to travel hither and yon across the nation in a motor home without a regular source of reliable income. No one in his right mind is happy about the fact that our situation is what it is. And if you don't think it's really all that bad, just walk on a college campus and look at the faces of all of the lost souls who are bored to tears despite indulging themselves in every imaginable vice without any ounce of remorse or desire to amend their lives. Souls are at stake here, ladies and gentlemen. And souls have been betrayed by wolves posing as shepherds in the structures of the conciliar church.

How sad it is, therefore, that some of the chief judges and executioners of sedevacantists are members of chapels administered by the Society of Saint Pius X, whose very founder understood how people could come to the sedevacantist conclusion even though he never did so himself. Some of the fiercest attacks that have come our way in the last year since I began writing articles raising questions about the "new theology" of Benedict and conciliarism have come from such otherwise good and wonderful people. These attacks have bordered on the irrational, including a refusal to accept any information contrary to what they believe is true, dismissing any effort to rebut arguments made as propaganda. It is sort of difficult to have a rational discussion when one dismisses all counter-arguments as propaganda. None of the sedevacantist bishops or priests or laity we have met in the past year is happy that our situation is what it is. And not one of them believes that they are one whit better than anyone else. There is no need for anyone to be angry with Catholics who dissent from not one whit of anything contained in the Deposit of Faith but who recognize that it is without precedent that one can recognize a pope but refuse submission to him on matters of faith and worship for nearly four decades.

 

Obviously, we must offer our forgiveness to those who hate and calumniate us, those who caricature and demonize us for taking a position that is in perfect consonance with Catholic doctrine. We must recognize that sharing in the humiliation that our sins imposed upon Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ and on His Most Blessed Mother during His own fearful Passion and Death is the path by which we can pay back some of the debt we owe Him for our own sins. Nothing we endure in this mortal vale of tears is the equal of what one of our least venial sins caused Our Lord to suffer during His Passion and Death. We must forgive promptly and without holding grudges, hoping for a happy reunion in Heaven, please God it is His Holy Will for us to die in states of Sanctifying Grace.

Rash judgments there will be until Our Lord comes in glory to judge the living and the dead on the Last Day. It is my hope, however, that those who are running off at the keyboard and at the mouth with bitter invectives against those of us who have come to the recognition that the Catholic Church cannot be the author of the errors of the past forty-eight years will focus their outrage at Benedict and his conciliarist cronies.

Those of us who are pointing out the offenses to God and the harm to souls that continues to be done by Benedict and his band of conciliar prelates are not the problem facing the Catholic Church. The apostasies that leave billions of non-Catholics self-assured in their false religions until death–and that leave millions of Catholics in the fog of conciliarist ambiguity, paradox and contradiction–are the problems facing us today. It is time for those who defend these apostasies to look honestly at the wreckage of souls and to see that the emperor clothed in conciliar garments in Rome carries a very large share of the blame for this, not those of us who are pointing out his defections from the Catholic Faith.

May we offer up the trials and difficulties of the present moment to the Blessed Trinity through Our Lady’s Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart, trusting that she will use everything we experience, both good and bad, for His honor and glory and for the good of souls, including our own. May she help us to plant the seeds for the triumph of that some Immaculate Heart, which will effect the Restoration of Tradition in the Church and Christendom in the world. May our daily Rosaries, especially our family Rosary, and our time before the Blessed Sacrament in prayer purify our own intentions and help us to seek only the honor and glory of God and the good of the souls for whom He shed His Most Precious Blood in all things at all times.

Vivat Christus Rex!

Our Lady of Prompt Succor, pray for us.

Saint Joseph, pray for us.

Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.

Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.

Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Felix, pray for us.

Saint Hilary, pray for us.

Saint Paul, pray for us.

Saint Maurus, pray for us.

Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini, pray for us.

Saint Thomas the Apostle, pray for us.

Saint Stephen the Protomartyr, pray for us.

Saint John the Beloved, pray for us.

The Holy Innocents, pray for us.

Saint Thomas a Becket, pray for us.

Pope Saint Sylvester I, pray for us.

Saint Lucy, pray for us.

Saint Agatha, pray for us.

Saint Philomena, pray for us.

Saint Agnes, pray for us.

Saint Cecilia, pray for us.

Saint John Mary Vianney, pray for us.

Saint Vincent de Paul, pray for us.

Saint Vincent Ferrer, pray for us.

Saint Athanasius, pray for us.

Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque, pray for us.

Saint Isaac Jogues, pray for us.

Saint Rene Goupil, pray for us.

Saint John Lalonde, pray for us.

Saint Gregory Lalamont, pray for us.

Saint Noel Chabanel, pray for us.

Saint Charles Garnier, pray for us.

Saint Anthony Daniel, pray for us.

Saint John DeBrebeuf, pray for us.

Saint Alphonsus de Liguori, pray for us.

Saint Dominic, pray for us.

Saint Basil, pray for us.

Saint Augustine, pray for us.

Saint Thomas Aquinas, pray for us.

Saint Vincent Ferrer, pray for us.

Saint Sebastian, pray for us.

Saint Tarcisius, pray for us.

Saint Bridget of Sweden, pray for us.

Saint Gerard Majella, pray for us.

Saint John of the Cross, pray for us.

Saint John Bosco, pray for us.

Saint Teresa of Avila, pray for us.

Saint Bernadette Soubirous, pray for us.

Pope Saint Pius X, pray for us

Pope Saint Pius V, pray for us.

Venerable Anne Catherine Emmerich, pray for us.

Venerable Pauline Jaricot, pray for us.

Father Miguel Augustin Pro, pray for us.

Francisco Marto, pray for us.

Jacinta Marto, pray for us.

Juan Diego, pray for us.

 

The Longer Version of the Saint Michael the Archangel Prayer, composed by Pope Leo XIII, 1888

O glorious Archangel Saint Michael, Prince of the heavenly host, be our defense in the terrible warfare which we carry on against principalities and powers, against the rulers of this world of darkness, spirits of evil.  Come to the aid of man, whom God created immortal, made in His own image and likeness, and redeemed at a great price from the tyranny of the devil.  Fight this day the battle of our Lord, together with  the holy angels, as already thou hast fought the leader of the proud angels, Lucifer, and his apostate host, who were powerless to resist thee, nor was there place for them any longer in heaven.  That cruel, that ancient serpent, who is called the devil or Satan who seduces the whole world, was cast into the abyss with his angels.  Behold this primeval enemy and slayer of men has taken courage.  Transformed into an angel of light, he wanders about with all the multitude of wicked spirits, invading the earth in order to blot out the Name of God and of His Christ, to seize upon, slay, and cast into eternal perdition, souls destined for the crown of eternal glory.  That wicked dragon pours out. as a most impure flood, the venom of his malice on men of depraved mind and corrupt heart, the spirit of lying, of impiety, of blasphemy, and the pestilent breath of impurity, and of every vice and iniquity.  These most crafty enemies have filled and inebriated with gall and bitterness the Church, the spouse of the Immaculate Lamb, and have laid impious hands on Her most sacred possessions. In the Holy Place itself, where has been set up the See of the most holy Peter and the Chair of Truth for the light of the world, they have raised the throne of their abominable impiety with the iniquitous design that when the Pastor has been struck the sheep may be scattered.  Arise then, O invincible Prince, bring help against the attacks of the lost spirits to the people of God, and give them the victory.  They venerate thee as their protector and patron; in thee holy Church glories as her defense against the malicious powers of hell; to thee has God entrusted the souls of men to be established in heavenly beatitude.  Oh, pray to the God of peace that He may put Satan under our feet, so far conquered that he may no longer be able to hold men in captivity and harm the Church.  Offer our prayers in the sight of the Most High, so that they may quickly conciliate the mercies of the Lord; and beating down the dragon, the ancient serpent, who is the devil and Satan, do thou again make him captive in the abyss, that he may no longer seduce the nations.  Amen.

Verse: Behold the Cross of the Lord; be scattered ye hostile powers.

Response: The Lion of the Tribe of Juda has conquered the root of David.

Verse: Let Thy mercies be upon us, O Lord.

Response: As we have hoped in Thee.

Verse: O Lord hear my prayer.

Response: And let my cry come unto Thee.

Verse: Let us pray.  O God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, we call upon Thy holy Name, and as suppliants, we implore Thy clemency, that by the intercession of Mary, ever Virgin, immaculate and our Mother, and of the glorious Archangel Saint Michael, Thou wouldst deign to help us against Satan and all other unclean spirits, who wander about the world for the injury of the human race and the ruin of our souls. 

Response:  Amen.