Hunkered Down on Mindanao

by Thomas A. Droleskey

Although some believed that the famous case of Hiroo Onoda in 1974 represented the last instance of a Japanese solider holding out in The Philippines as he awaited "official" word from his commanding officer that the Empire of Japan had surrendered to Allied forces to mark the end of World War II, two other soldiers of the Japanese Imperial Army, Yoshio Yamakawa and Tuszuki Nakauchi, emerged just three years ago on the Island of Mindanao in The Philippines to seek repatriation to their country:

 

As young conscripts they pledged never to to surrender. Yesterday as old men they emerged from their hiding place in the Philippines - two Japanese Imperial Army soldiers, asking to go home.

Discovered after a chance encounter with a Philippines businesswoman who had friends in Japan, the men reportedly have documents that show they were attached to the army's 30th Division. Until yesterday they had been listed among Japan's war dead.

Word of the exiles became public yesterday, but the efforts to trace their history date from December when a businesswoman from the Philippines rang a friend in Japan to ask for help in getting the men home.

The men are Yoshio Yamakawa 87, and Tsuzuki Nakauchi, 85.

They made contact with the outside world through a 93-year-old former military doctor, Kyodo News reported.

"I also want to go back to Japan but we are worried about a court martial," the doctor reportedly said.

As Japan prepares to mark the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II, the epic of the lost soldiers is a reminder of 4000 other Japanese military in the Philippines who never accepted surrender and fled to the mountains.

In the years immediately after the war signs posted in many areas warned travellers that Japanese soldiers were still present. They had dug in, ignoring pamphlet drops in 1945 telling them that the war had ended and also eluding American troops and many search parties.

Two years ago Japan authorised a mission to the Philippines to try to find what was thought to be the last five or six soldiers living in exile but it came back empty handed.

Japan's Foreign Minister, Nobutaka Machimura, yesterday said embassy officials from Manila had gone to the island of Mindanao to meet the latest group and that it was almost certain they were Japanese.

"I am glad that they were able to survive for 60 years," said Goichi Ichikawa, 89, who is chairman of a group of army survivors.

The Government has not released information about whether the men had spent the past 60 years in isolation or whether they had set aside their uniforms and taken up lives as ordinary civilians in the Philippines. The men had written their names in Japanese, a Government spokesman said.

News of their possible repatriation to Japan reopens one of the most intriguing mysteries of the postwar years. For the families involved, it is as though these men have returned from the dead.

When another soldier, Shoichi Yokoi, gave himself up in Guam in 1972 after years living in a cave, he said he was the last survivor in a group of three who had stayed together after the war.

At the time he said: "We Japanese soldiers were told to prefer death to the disgrace of getting captured alive," according to the Pacific Wreck Database, which lists rediscovered Japanese soldiers and also records the wrecks of aircraft and other military equipment.

The most celebrated case of a Japanese to be found after the war was Hiroo Onoda, who with a small band of men got into sporadic gun fights with villagers and Philippines soldiers.

He gave himself up in 1974 but had to be persuaded that the war was really over.  Surrender after 60 years: two soldiers ask to go home - World - smh.com.au 

 

These celebrated cases of Japanese Imperial Army holdouts in The Philippines is quite pertinent as one considers the efforts, certainly well-intentioned, of "conservative" Catholics yet attached to the structures of the counterfeit church of conciliarism to "hold out" themselves in various outposts in order to do "battle" for the Faith against some conciliar revolutionary "priest" who has been installed as a pastor by a conciliar "bishop" to undo the work of a validly ordained priest who tried to hold back the floodgates of the revolution as best he could with the equipment that had been given to him. As a now retired--and battle scarred--combatant in these battles, both as an activist and as one engaged in advocacy journalism, I can report that these battles, although stemming from the highest of motives to help Holy Mother Church, are indeed the equivalent of taking pot shots at "enemy targets" from a jungle tree on Mindanao. The "enemy" has won. The war is over. The battles are useless.

Obviously, it should go without saying that it took me a very long time to understand this to be the case. Over three decades, to be quite precise. That's a long time. People pleaded me thirty-two years ago to look at what they called a Judeo-Masonic-Communist conspiracy to infiltrate the Church at the "Second" Vatican Council. I thought that they were crazy. (Please understand that a New Yorker is prone to throw around the term "crazy" rather liberally. The use of the term does not mean that we think a personally is clinically mentally ill. All right, not in all instances, I should add.) Others made an effort to remonstrate with me twenty-two years ago, arguing me in the most strenuous terms in behalf of the sedevacantist argument. I thought that they were crazy. Still others argued with me as recently as ten years ago that the "pope" was not the Pope. The best I could say was, "I'm not there yet."

Thus it was that I waged one pitched battle after another in behalf of what I thought was the cause of the restoration of the Church. I was far from alone, of course. However, I was possessed of the notion that the parishes I now understand to be in the control of a counterfeit church and of rump "priests" still belonged to the Catholic Church and that the "pope" needed "our" help on the ground as we fought for "liturgical reverence" in the Protestant and Masonic Novus Ordo service and against this or that egregious teaching emanating from some diocesan conference or being tolerated, at the very least, by some diocesan"bishop" in one of his schools or colleges or in one of his parishes.

False hope that some "good" was being done in these battles was given by the late Silvio Cardinal Oddi, then the Prefect of the conciliar Congregation for the Clergy in the Vatican, when he intervened in March of 1983 to save the pastorate of a true priest, who will remain unnamed in this particular commentary as I want to focus on general principles and not the specifics of any ongoing controversies, at a time when that priest's conciliar "bishop" was attempting to force him to resign that pastorate. Quite pridefully, I must confess, I considered it nothing less than a miracle that a letter that I had written in behalf of this priest's plight actually got to Cardinal Oddi within fifteen hours of my sending it via an air courier service and that a telegram was sent by His Eminence to the conciliar "bishop" to tell him, the "bishop," to take no action until he came to Rome for his ad limina apostolorum visit a few weeks later. Nearly five hundred other letters were sent to Cardinal Oddi, and the priest in question had his pastorate in the conciliar structures saved, remaining in power for another quarter-century thereafter.

Cardinal Oddi said the following to me when I met with him in his office in Rome in October of 1984, "Your bishop came to see me after you wrote your nice letter. He sat where you are sitting. Same chair. We had a little chat. He changed his mind." Cardinal Oddi smiled broadly as he recounted the story, which gave me hope that the battles in the trenches, as futile, humanly speaking, as they appeared to be in most cases, could be won if enough prayers were said and sacrifices made. That hope was false. It was illusory. Although Cardinal Oddi was a friend of the Faith and was concerned about the plight of older priests who were being scourged by the conciliar "bishops," he was not the pope, and the man who claimed to be the "pope," Karol Wojtyla/John Paul II replaced him in short order when he, Oddi, reached the mandatory retirement age of seventy-five a year later. "It couldn't be, I thought to myself at the time, that these 'bishops' are staying in power because the 'pope' wants them there. He is getting bad advice, right?"

Although I listened to those who argued with me about the futility of fighting battles in a false church, I trod along my merry way as I wrote letter after letter to conciliar officials in the Vatican. Advised that working on the "inside" would be helpful, I gave up a pretty secure government position in September of 1988 to work for a conciliar "bishop" as his ghostwriter and communications director, being aghast at how he tolerated liturgical abuses, which included the invocation of the names of Martin Luther King, Jr., Oscar Romero, among others, in the Litany of the Saints during what purported to be the Easter Vigil Mass in 1989. And I could not fathom how this "conservative" bishop, who was very devoted to Our Lady's Fatima Message, was so hostile to the Immemorial Mass of Tradition, which had just been "liberated," I thought at the time, by the Ecclesia Dei motu proprio to extend the earlier "indult" for the offering of the modernized version of the true Mass that had been granted when I was visiting Rome in 1984.

My association with The Wanderer gave me an opportunity to work in a more formal way with prominent "conservative" priests as battles were fought to keep "gender inclusive" translations from making their way into the texts of the Collects in the Novus Ordo service. There was even a little bit of a victory at the annual meeting of the then named National Conference of Catholic "Bishops" in 1993 as some "conservative" 'bishops" stood their ground against a set of translations that was being foisted upon the entire body of "bishops" by the apparatchiks in the International Committee on English in the Liturgy, whose longtime executive secretary, Dr. John Page, had been interviewed by me just a short time before that 'bishops'" meeting. 

Alas, it was only a scant five months thereafter that the "conservative" "pope" gave us altar girls in the Novus Ordo world, an action that led me to write an editorial an "open letter" to "Pope" John Paul II to ask him why he was rewarding the dissenters. Although I had written an ill-advised defense of the Wojtyla "papacy" in August of 1993 for which I was rightly and roundly criticized, the altar girl business proved to me that the Novus Ordo was irreformable, that it was the problem. Oh, yes, I still went to the abomination during the week until early-2001 as I wanted to go to "Mass," convincing myself that I would keep Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ company as He was scourged once again, this time by the hands of his own "priests." I did seek refuge in the "indult" more and more in the 1990s, however, and started to think about the simple truth that a true offering of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass should not make one angry. Such has never been the history of the Catholic Church.

Slowly, and I do mean very slowly, the scales were lifted from my eyes as I did one news story after another for The Wanderer from 1992 to 2000. These news stories involved outright denials of the Faith and/or persecutions of men who, like the priest whose pastorate was saved by Cardinal Oddi in 1983, were deemed to be too "conservative," if not clinically "mentally ill," for adhering to a "preconciliar" conception of the Faith. Although my principal work in my Wanderer years was the writing of commentaries, I did put together about twenty or so "hard news" stories, including the first news story dealing with the unrepentant corruption of the conciliar "bishop" of Springfield, Illinois, Daniel Leo Ryan, in March of 1997. It had became evident to me by then that "Rome" was the problem, that all I was doing was providing a "permanent record," if you will, of the damage done by the revolutionaries, that nothing would be done to address the root causes of the problem.

Certainly, as is well known, I resisted the conclusion that the conciliar "pontiffs" were deprived of their office as a result of their defections from the Faith. In truth, however, I was a closet sedevacantist in that I almost never referred to those "encyclical" letters issued by the conciliar "pontiffs" that contradicted the teachings of the preconciliar popes. A man in Saint Louis, Missouri, wrote to me at the end of 1996, I believe, to ask me why I quoted from Pope Pius XI's scathing condemnation of the League of Nations in Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, December 23, 1922, but never tried to defend Angelo Roncalli/John XXIII's Pacem in Terris, April 11, 1963. I never wrote back to the gentleman as I had no answer other than I did not believe that the men whose "pontificates" I accepted as legitimate were in possession of the totality of the Catholic Faith, especially, as I viewed it at the time, concerning the Social Reign of Christ the King.

In other words, I had not sought to consider these words of Pope Leo XIII, contained in Satis Cognitum, June 29, 1896:

The Church, founded on these principles and mindful of her office, has done nothing with greater zeal and endeavour than she has displayed in guarding the integrity of the faith. Hence she regarded as rebels and expelled from the ranks of her children all who held beliefs on any point of doctrine different from her own. The Arians, the Montanists, the Novatians, the Quartodecimans, the Eutychians, did not certainly reject all Catholic doctrine: they abandoned only a certain portion of it. Still who does not know that they were declared heretics and banished from the bosom of the Church? In like manner were condemned all authors of heretical tenets who followed them in subsequent ages. "There can be nothing more dangerous than those heretics who admit nearly the whole cycle of doctrine, and yet by one word, as with a drop of poison, infect the real and simple faith taught by our Lord and handed down by Apostolic tradition" (Auctor Tract. de Fide Orthodoxa contra Arianos).

The practice of the Church has always been the same, as is shown by the unanimous teaching of the Fathers, who were wont to hold as outside Catholic communion, and alien to the Church, whoever would recede in the least degree from any point of doctrine proposed by her authoritative Magisterium. Epiphanius, Augustine, Theodore :, drew up a long list of the heresies of their times. St. Augustine notes that other heresies may spring up, to a single one of which, should any one give his assent, he is by the very fact cut off from Catholic unity. "No one who merely disbelieves in all (these heresies) can for that reason regard himself as a Catholic or call himself one. For there may be or may arise some other heresies, which are not set out in this work of ours, and, if any one holds to one single one of these he is not a Catholic" (S. Augustinus, De Haeresibus, n. 88).

 

I always hated false ecumenism. And as I began to be stripped of my own immersion in the Americanist heresy, I began to see much more clearly how the ethos of the Potomac (the religious "liberty" and religious indifferentism of the American Constitution) had flowed directly into the Tiber. Still, to say that the "pope" is not the pope? That was too much for me in the late-1990s. And the best that I could do until the middle of 2005, at which time I began to investigate the claims of the sedevacantists, was to say, very privately, you understand, the following: "The sedevacantists may very well be correct. However, it is going to take some future council to declare this." I had a bit more work to do, shall we say, and what assisted me in this regard was the following admission by the now late Mario Francesco "Cardinal" Pompedda in February of 2005 when Karol Wojtyla/John Paul II was in the final throes of Stage Three Parkinson's disease:

It is true that the canonical doctrine states that the see would be vacant in the case of heresy. ... But in regard to all else, I think what is applicable is what judgment regulates human acts. And the act of will, namely a resignation or capacity to govern or not govern, is a human act. (Cardinal Says Pope Could Govern Even If Unable to Speak, Zenit, February 8, 2005.)

 

Fathers Francisco and Dominic Radecki, CMRI, put the matter this way in this excellent Tumultuous Times:

A legitimate pope cannot contradict or deny what was first taught by Christ to His Church. An essential change in belief constitutes the establishment of a new religion.

The attribute of infallibility was given to the popes in order that the revealed doctrines and teaching of Christ would remain forever intact and unchanged. It is contrary to faith and reason to blindly follow an alleged pope who attempts to destroy the Catholic Faith--for there have been 41 documented antipopes. Papal infallibility means that the Holy Ghost guides and preserves the Catholic Church from error through the succession of legitimate popes who have ruled the Church through the centuries. All Catholics, including Christ's Vicar on earth, the pope, must accept all the doctrinal pronouncements of past popes. These infallible teachings form a vital link between Christ and St. Peter and his successors.

If a pope did not accept and believe this entire body of formulated teachings (the Deposit of Faith), he could not himself be a Catholic. He would cease to belong to Christ's Church. If he no longer belongs to the Catholic Church, he cannot be her Head. (Fathers Francisco and Dominic Radecki, CMRI, Tumultuous Times, p. 274.)

 

Also helpful to me in sorting out the mess created by the conciliar revolutionaries was Father Anthony Cekada's excellent review of the "resist and recognize" errors in a sermon given on July 9, 2006 (The Errors of the Society of St Pius X), His Excellency Bishop Mark A. Pivarunas's lecture delivered at the Fatima Conference at Mount Saint Michael's Academy on October 13, 2006 (Oct. 13 Bishop Pivarunas      “Sedevacantism Part I”,   Part II,  Part III”, Part IV), and, among his many other articles listed at Traditional Mass, the following commentaries by His Excellency Bishop Donald A. Sanborn include Resistance and Indefectibility and The Mountains of Gelboe. This helped to extricate us from the world of independent non-sedevacantist and Society of Saint Pius X chapels in 2006, four years after we had stopped going to the Novus Ordo abomination on weekdays altogether. I had to study and think as to why I refused to go to a purported "Mass" that had been promulgated by a man whose "pontificate" I accepted as legitimate and which was "celebrated" by the then currently reigning "pontiff."

Mind you, each person must examine these matters for himself to see where the truth rests. This is not a matter of "opinion." This is matter of truth. Can the Catholic Church give us a liturgy that is defective in its expression of the Catholic Faith, that incorporates pagan "rituals" into its putative "offerings," that incorporates elements from Protestantism and "table prayers" from the blasphemous Talmud, that leaves many believing Catholics in tears, if not in real anger, day after day and week after week in many conciliar venues? Can anathematized propositions concerning the nature of dogmatic truth be defied and contradiction without the Faith being lost? Do the Catholic Church's condemnations of Modernism and the New Theology still stand? Were the true popes of the Catholic Church wrong to have insisted upon the unconditional return of non-Catholics to the true Faith? Can a putative "pontiff" esteem personally the symbols of false religions with his own priestly hands and remain a member of the Catholic Church without incurring the canonical penalties summarized by Bishop George Hay in The Laws of God Forbidding All Communication in Religion With Those of a False Religion.

Most Catholics do not want to ask these questions. Many of those who care deeply about the Faith and who are aghast at what they see at the "retail" level in their parishes are as reluctant now as I was thirty and twenty and even ten years ago to admit that the problems and "abuses" at the "retail" level in local parishes are the direct, inevitable results of the falsehoods propagated by the "Second" Vatican Council and the ethos engendered thereby and defended with enthusiasm by the conciliar "pontiffs" themselves. To do battle with a "revolutionary" pastor who seeks to undo the work of a "conservative" predecessor is to tilt needlessly at imaginary windmills. The "revolutionary" pastor is only doing what the revolutionary "bishop" wants done. And the revolutionary "bishop" is only doing what the revolutionary "pontiffs" have mandated and continue to celebrate, that is, the ethos of the "Second" Vatican Council and the "renewal" represented by the Protestant and Masonic Novus Ordo service.

These prophetic words of the Venerable Anne Katherine Emmerich have come true right before our very eyes:

I saw a strange church being built against every rule. . . No angels were supervising the building operations. In that church, nothing came from high above. . . There was only division and chaos. It is probably a church of human creation, following the latest fashion, as well as the new heterodox church of Rome, which seems of the same kind. . .

I saw again the strange big church that was being built there (in Rome). There was nothing holy in it. I saw this just as I saw a movement led by Ecclesiastics to which contributed angels, saints and other Christians. But then (in the strange big change) all the work was being done mechanically (i.e. according to set rules and formulae). Everything was being done according to human reason. . .

I saw all sorts of people, things, doctrines, and opinions. There was something proud, presumptuous, and violent about it, and they seemed to be very successful. I did not see a single Angel nor a single saint helping in the work. But far away in the background, I saw the seat of a cruel people armed with spears, and I saw a laughing figure which said: "Do build it as solid as you can; we will put it to the ground" . . . . (as found in Yves Dupont, Catholic Prophecy: The Coming Chastisement, TAN Books and Publishers, 1970, p. 61)

 

Not far from where I was living in East Norwich, New York, in March of 1983 when I was teaching full-time at Nassau Community College and adjuncting in the graduate program at Saint John's University was the then named Saint Pius X Church on the former Woodward estate on Pond Lane in Oyster Bay Cove, New York. Indeed, Saint Pius X Church was very close to where I went to "Mass" at Saint Dominic's Church on Anstice Street in Oyster Bay, New York. I was totally oblivious at the time as I was writing my letter to Cardinal Oddi about the pastor who was being persecuted by his "bishop" that another battle was being fought for the Faith right in my own backyard, so to speak, yes, right in the community where I spent my high school and college years and still consider to be, above any other place on the face of this earth, my native place, Oyster Bay.

That battle, chronicled by Father Anthony Cekada in The Nine vs. Lefebvre: We Resist You to Your Face, was indeed about saving the Faith from a false view of the papacy and papal infallibility. I was only dimly aware of this battle at the time as I was consumed with the aftermath of Cardinal Oddi's intervention to save the pastorate of a true priest (who was able to go on to continue to offend God by offering the Novus Ordo service for another twenty-five years; some act of "helping" the Faith on my part, huh?--oh, yes, I have much for which to make reparation!) who was under siege for being "conservative." The real battle for the Faith, however, was being fought by "the nine." It would take me another twenty-three years from that point to understand this to be the case.

That having been noted, however, I do want to state once again our own deep appreciation for the fidelity to the Faith shown by "the nine." Others had taken their own action beforehand, including the priests of the Congregation of Mary Immaculate Queen and the then Father Robert F. McKenna, O.P., and many others. We have profited immensely from the fidelity of those who came to realize that the Catholic Church cannot be responsible for defective liturgies and novel doctrines that have been anathematized by true popes and true councils of the Catholic Church. And we pray that others who love the Faith and want to be of genuine assistance to the Church will come to see that the "battles" in the trenches of the counterfeit church of conciliarism are akin to the snipers atop jungle trees in Mindanao and akin also to someone in The Ukraine complaining to Joseph Stalin about that terrible butcher in Kiev, Nikita S. Khrushchev in the 1930s. (Stalin appointed Khrushchev as the head of the Communist Party in The Ukraine.)  The "pope" is the problem, not his local "Khrushchevs."

We are so grateful to Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ and His Most Blessed Mother for leading us to the Catholic catacombs where the glories of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass are offered by true bishops and true priests who make no concessions to conciliarism or to the nonexistent legitimacy of the Stalinists who keep appointing the likes of the Khrushchevs to supervise the butchery of the Faith as God is blasphemed and mocked.

Great glory is being given to the Most Blessed Trinity in the Catholic catacombs. We must thank Our Lord and Our Lady every day for the fidelity of our true bishops and our true priests, being conscious also of our obligation to seek to make reparation for our own past sins and blindness and stupidity and willful ignorance by offering up our prayers and sacrifices and humiliations to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus through the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

Every Rosary we pray--and we should pray as many each day as our states-in-life permit--helps to make reparation for our own sins and those of the whole world. We must have confidence in Our Lady's intercessory power to help others as she has helped us, sinners who are no better than anyone else at all (!), to find a way out of the false church of conciliarism and into the glories of the Catholic catacombs where they can find concentrate on their own personal sanctification as the Faith is taught in all of its Holy Integrity.

Immaculate Heart of Mary, triumph soon!

Viva Cristo Rey! Vivat Christus Rex!

Isn't it time to pray a Rosary now?

Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us!

Saint Joseph, Patron of Departing Souls, pray for us.

Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.

Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.

Saint John the Evangelist, pray for us.

Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saints Joachim and Anne, pray for us.

Saints Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar, pray for us.

Saint Gertrude the Great, pray for us.

Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, pray for us.

Saint Albert the Great, pray for us.

Saint Gregory the Wonderworker, pray for us.

Saint Gregory of Tours, pray for us.

Saint Hugh of Lincoln, pray for us.

See also: A Litany of Saints