One in Ten, Three Out of Ten

by Thomas A. Droleskey

The wreckage of souls wrought by the conciliar doctrinal and liturgical revolutions manifests itself in so many terrible, heartbreaking ways.

Families that should be united are divided as a spouse who wants to practice the Holy Faith is opposed within his own household by those who want to immerse themselves in the world. Those who come to embrace any expression of Tradition, no matter where they land across the vast expanse of the ecclesiastical divide, are persecuted rather fiercely by their own relatives.

Children are "taught" falsehoods about the Faith in many, although not all, conciliar institutions of education, starting in Kindergarten and proceeding from there all the way to graduate and professional and seminary programs. Malformed souls, many of which leave the Faith and work actively against It, are commonplace.

Cultural attitudes of Catholics are indistinguishable from those of non-Catholics. Fed a steady dose of relativism from the world, into which so many are immersed most uncritically, and fed a steady dose of false ecumenism and outright lies about the Faith by those in "authority" in the counterfeit church of conciliarism, most Catholics believe in some form of religious indifferentism, which leads to a laissez-faire approach to the seeking of the eternal good of those whom God's Holy Providence places in their paths each day, no less their own flesh and blood family members.

Naturalism and conciliarism have teamed up to produce quite a sordid mess in the souls of ordinary Catholics, thus preventing them from serving as the leaven of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ in the midst of a world that denies His Social Kingship over men and their nations, a world gone mad by the insanity of "civil liberty" and "religious liberty" and the "separation of Church and State." Catholics thus believe in every manner of naturalistic falsehood as possessing the "means" by which social "problems" may be resolved, considering it to be their solemn duty never to confess the Holy Name of the Divine Redeemer in public, no less to pray and to work for the restoration of His Social Reign over men as His Blessed Mother, Mary our Immaculate Queen, is honored publicly with Rosary processions and pilgrimages to her shrines.

The rotten fruit of the Protestant Revolt and the rise of Judeo-Masonry has produced a world where it is considered to be "extreme" and "odd" to to seek to flee from the world and to take refuge in the contemporary Catholic catacombs where no concessions are made to conciliarism or to the nonexistent "legitimacy" of its false shepherds. Even many traditionally-minded Catholics in these very catacombs, infected by the heresy of Americanism without their being aware of it, have accepted the basic premises of Modernity and Modernism without realizing that by doing so they have contradicted the very essential premises upon which their chapels in the catacombs exist.

A new poll taken by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life reveals that three out of every ten baptized Catholics leave the Faith, no longer identifying themselves as Catholics. This is simply one of many empirical proofs extant about the horrors wrought by conciliarism upon the interior lives of its victims, horrors that have harmed society-at-large as social order is completely and entirely dependent upon order within the soul. Three out of ten. This means, according to the poll taken by the Pew Form on Religion and Public Life, that one in ten Americans is a fallen away Catholic. This is an astounding figure.

Here is a brief excerpt from an article in The New York Times on this particular poll:

The report shows, for example, that every religion is losing and gaining members, but that the Roman Catholic Church “has experienced the greatest net losses as a result of affiliation changes.” The survey also indicates that the group that had the greatest net gain was the unaffiliated. More than 16 percent of American adults say they are not part of any organized faith, which makes the unaffiliated the country’s fourth largest “religious group". . . .

The percentage of Catholics in the American population has held steady for decades at about 25 percent. But that masks a precipitous decline in native-born Catholics. The proportion has been bolstered by the large influx of Catholic immigrants, mostly from Latin America, the survey found.

The Catholic Church has lost more adherents than any other group: about one-third of respondents raised Catholic said they no longer identified as such. Based on the data, the survey showed, “this means that roughly 10 percent of all Americans are former Catholics.” Americans Change Faiths at Rising Rate, Report Finds

 

These are sobering facts. There is no "springtime of the Church" taking place, my friends. And it should be pointed out that the poll conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life does not even take into account that most of those who "identify" themselves as Catholics support at least some form of surgical baby killing and are almost entirely supportive of the evil that is contraception, which kills babies in most instances and is a denial of the Sovereignty of God over the sanctity and fecundity of marriage in each and every instance, and do not consider it important to attend what purports to be the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass in our parishes that are under conciliar captivity at the present moment. Only about twenty-five to thirty percent of those who identify themselves as Catholics bother to show up at the Protestant and Masonic Novus Ordo service, which demonstrates that all of the efforts to "reach" "modern" man with a "relevant" liturgy have failed just as surely as have efforts to attract Protestants into the conciliar structures by means of offering them a "liturgy" almost identical in many respects to their own.

Belief in the Real Presence of Our Lord in the Most Blessed Sacrament has held steady at around thirty percent in the United States of America in the last twenty years. Mind you, this is not a statement about the invalidity of the consecrations taking place in the Novus Ordo. This is a rejection of belief in the Catholic teaching that Our Lord is truly present in the Most Blessed Sacrament and that the Mass is the unbloody re-presentation of the Son's one Sacrifice to the Father in Spirit and in Truth on the wood of the Holy Cross.

The Novus Ordo is an exercise in community self-congratulations, something that it conveys from the very moment its "presider" walks out with his lay lectors and extraordinary ministers and is reinforced by the abolition of the altar rail, standing for the reception of what purports to be Holy Communion, and the license to improvise (contained with the text of the General Instruction to the Roman Missal) on the part of the "performers," a sense of improvisation that destroys the sense of the sacred and communicates that God has nothing stable, nothing fixed, nothing transcendent to offer His rational creatures. This is Heaven, you see, and we ought to make the most of it, huh? that is what the Novus Ordo has communicated in the past nearly four decades. The Novus Ordo is an enshrinement of the spirit of the world, not a refuge from the devil's playground that is the world of Modernity, that world where it is considered "good" that Church and State are separated and that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ no longer reigns over men and their nations.

The social consequences of conciliarism are vast to consider, a theme that I explored in a talk given in 1996 on the connection between liturgical reverence and social order at, of all places, the Franciscan University of Steubenville. (a very devout and orthodox faculty member invited me to give the annual Orestes Brownson lecture that year). The situation is even worse now than it was twelve years ago. The United States of America is populated by hordes of "young toughs," white male Catholics who have fallen into utter and unrepentant depravity, considering it to be of no account to use the most vile, vulgar, profane and obscene language in the presence of children in public places. Young Catholic women mutilate their bodies by tattoos and body piercing, dressing like men and acting like sailors as they descend into the most foul coarseness imaginable. And nobody corrects them, not priests, not consecrated religious, not even their parents! Anything goes except the true Faith, which is considered just too "crazy" for anyone to accept and to live by on a daily basis.

As I have done in several recent articles, I would like to draw upon the wisdom of the late Father Frederick Faber, a priest of the Brompton Oratory of Saint Philip Neri in London England, 150 years ago, to explain how completely the Faith must shape our lives and how we must not have any attachments to a world that is in the grip of the devil, who means to drag us down into Hell with him for all eternity. Father Faber's lengthy discourse on the Third Dolor of Mary, contained in what is now titled The Foot of the Cross, provides us with a healthy antidote to the lies told to us by the anti-Incarnational, naturalistic, semi-Pelagian and religiously indifferentist world of Modernity and by the lords of conciliarism who have made their diabolical "reconciliations" with that very same world of Modernity:

Here are a few of Father Faber's reflections, interspersed with a bit of commentary here and there, on the pain that Our Blessed Mother felt in losing her Divine Son whilst He was in the Temple in Jerusalem answering questions that were being posed to him by the doctors of the law:

Although this dolor for the most part keeps up among the high hills, which do not belong to us, it is nevertheless so full of lessons for ourselves, that it is difficult to select from them. It teaches us, first of all, that the loss of Jesus, however brief, is the greatest of all evils. It was this which was almost unbearable even to our Lady, and Jesus is not more needful to us than to her, because to all creatures He is absolutely needful; only to us He is a more pressing necessity, because of our weakness and our sin. The greatness of Mary's sorrow is to us a visible measure of the magnitude of the evil. Yet alas! how little we feel it! How happy can men be, who yet have lost Jesus, often unconscious almost of their loss, more often indifferent to it when they know it! We should have thought the loss of Jesus was in itself so fearful an evil, that nothing could have aggravated it; and yet our want of perception of the greatness of our loss is a token of still deeper misery. It is sad indeed when the voice of the world is more musical in our ears than the voice of our Lord. It is just the very wretchedness, the very hatefulness of the world, that it has no Jesus. He does not belong to it. He refused to pray for it. He pronounced its friendship to be on our part a simple declaration of war upon Himself. It makes our hearts sink to look out upon the world, and to know that it has no part in Him. It is like gazing upon a cheerless and disconsolate view of barren moors or dreary swamp. No sunshine can gild it. It is dismal on the brightest day. Nay, it is ugliest when the sun shines upon it. So it is with the world, because it has no Jesus. So does it become with us in proportion as we are friends with the world, or even at peace in the world. He and it are incompatible. Are we not afraid? Pleasure, gayery, fashion, expense,--dare we, even in our thoughts, put these things into the Heart of Jesus? Would He smile when worldly things were said? Would He wish to please people round Him, who are taking no pains whatever to please His Father? Would He seek to be popular in society, to stand will with those who have not at heart the only one interest which He has at His, to keep out of sight His principles, not simply through silence and reserve, but lest they should ruffle others and, interfere with that soothness of social intercourse which takes the place of charity? (Father Frederick Faber, The Foot of the Cross, published originally in England in 1857 under the title The Dolors of Mary, republished by TAN Books and Publishers, pp. 188-189.)

 

Echoing the voice of the true popes of the Nineteenth Century, echoing the entire patrimony of the Faith, Father Faber, who died in 1863 when he was only forty-nine years of age, tells us very simply that we cannot belong to the world. How many Catholics are there today who have access to the media but who refuse, as in steadfastly refuse, to seek the restoration of the Social Reign of Christ the King and strive to embrace such things as libertarianism, which endorses the "civil right" of citizens to blaspheme and publish heresies and to engage in all manner of grievous sins without any "interference" on the part of the civil state, and liberalism and all forms of socialism and conservatism, among so many other variations on the naturalistic theme, as they "keep out of sight His principles, not simply through silence and reserve, but lest they should ruffle others, and interfere with that soothness of social intercourse which takes the place of charity?" In other words, it is more important to be "heard" and to "make money" than it is to be a faithful witness to Christ the King and to Mary our Immaculate Queen. This helps to reaffirm Catholics in the ways of naturalism, into which they are already so steeped by means of the world-at-large and the efforts of conciliarism itself.

Father Faber's powerful reflection continues:

Alas! sin is bad; excess of pleasure is bad; giving God the second place is ad; worshipping the rich is bad; hardening our Christian feeling to become accustomed to worldly frivolities and very slightly uncharitable conversation is bad. But these at least are evils which wear no masks. We know what we are about. We give up Jesus with the full understanding of the sacrifice we are making. We are taking our side, choosing our lot, and we know it. But wishing to please!--this is the danger to a spiritual person. Total separation from Christ is already implied in the very idea. What is it we wish to please? The world, which is the enemy of Jesus. Whom do we wish to please? Those whoa re not caring to please God, and in whom Jesus takes no pleasure. Wherein do we wish to please? In things, conversations, and pursuits, which have no reference to God, no savor of Christ, no tendency toward religion. When do we wish to please? At times when we are doing least for Christ, when prayer and faith and hope and love and abiding sorrow for sin would be the most unseasonable. Where do we wish to please? In haunts where there is less evidence of God than elsewhere, where every circumstance, every appurtenance, flashes the world's image back upon us from a lustre. Yet we see no evil. We want smoothness, polish, inoffensiveness, discreet keeping back of God. He said that He and Mammon would not dwell together. But to some extent we will force Him so to dwell. He shall at least keep the peace with the world, and learn to revolve alongside  of it in His own sphere, without encroaching, without jarring. Dreadful! Is there not hell already in the mere attempt? Yet how little men suspect it! It is like something noxious getting into the air, and not at first affecting the lungs. But the lights burn dim, then one by one they go out, and we are left in the darkness, unable to escape, because lethargy and suffocation have already begun within ourselves. In other words, high principles gently lower themselves, or are kept for state occasions, such as Lent, or a priest's company. Then we begin to be keenly alive to the annoyance which comes to us from the conversation of uncompromising Christians, and we pronounce them indiscreet, and by that ceremony they are disposed of to our great comfort, and we praise them more than ever, because by that reserve we have got rid of what fidgeted us in them, and we lull to rest the remaining uneasiness of conscience by this great promptitude of a praise which we have first made valueless by counterweighting it. Then it dawns upon us that it is a duty to keep will with the world even for God's sake. Then keeping well edges on to being friends with the world. Then there begin to be symptoms of two distinct lives going to be lived by us; but we do not see these symptoms ourselves. Then uncomfortable feelings rise in us, taking away our relish for certain persons, certain thins, certain books, certain conversations. We rouse ourselves, and take a view, an intellectual view of the rightness of being smooth, and not offending, and getting on well with the world. The view comforts us, and we are all right again. Then God's blessings, His spiritual blessings, very gradually and almost imperceptibly, begin to evaporate from us, from ourselves, our children, our homes, our hearts, and every thing around us. But the sun of prosperity shines so clearly that we do not see the mist of the evaporation rising up from the earth and withdrawing itself into heaven. Perhaps we shall never awake to the truth again. Trying to please is a slumberous thing. So we drift on, never suspecting how far the current is carrying us away from God. We may die without knowing it. We shall know it after that, the instant afterward. (Father Frederick Faber, The Foot of the Cross, published originally in England in 1857 under the title The Dolors of Mary, republished by TAN Books and Publishers, pp. 189-191.)

 

Got all that? How many of you are considered odd by your own relatives for your refusal to "get on" with the world, for your being uncompromising about the Faith, desirous of talking about it at all times? Our relatives know us to be what we are, sinners who have done and said terrible things possibly. Why should they disturb their peace to listen to people who are no better than they are, to "fools" who have forsaken the world and its riches and honors in order to try to make reparation for their sins as the consecrated slaves of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of His Most Blessed Mother? What have we ever accomplished insofar as worldly honors and riches are concerned? We are to be humored and then stabbed in the back soon thereafter. This is good. Our sins caused Our Lord to suffer unspeakable horrors during His Passion and Death. Our sins caused Our Lady to have those Seven Swords of Sorrow plunged through and through her Immaculate Heart, including during her Third Dolor being described in such graphic and eloquent terms for us by Father Faber. Humiliation and rejection and calumny help us to pay back part of the debt that we owe for our many sins, helping us also to be more and more detached from the world and from any desire at all to be recognized or even understood by others!

Father Faber went on to explain in his reflection on the Third Dolor of Our Lady:

Thus we may lose Jesus in three ways. We may abruptly break from Him by sin. We may quietly and gracefully withdraw from Him, confessing the attractions of the world to be greater than His. We may retire from Him slowly and by imperceptible degrees, always with our face toward Him, as we withdraw from royalty, and all because He is not a fixed principle with us, and the desire to please is so. But if we have lost Him in any one of these three ways,--sin, worldliness, and the love of pleasing--and He rouses us by His grace, what are we to do? This third dolor teaches us. It must be a dolor to us. We must search for Him whom we have lost. He may not allow us to find Him all at once. He will probably not. But we must put off every thing else, in order to prosecute our search. Other things must be subordinate to it. They must wait, or they must give way. But we must not be precipitate in our search. We must not run; we must walk. We shall miss Him if we run. We must not do violent things, not even to ourselves, although we richly deserve them. It is not a time for taking up new penances. The loss of Jesus is penance enough, now that we have found it out. We must be gentle, and sorrow will give us gentleness. Hence, our search must be also a sorrowful one, as Mary's was. We must seek Jesus with tears, with tears, but not with cries,--with a broken heart, but a quiet heart also. We must seek Him, also, in the right place,--in Jerusalem, in the temple; that is, in the Church, and in sacraments and in prayer. He is never among our kinsfolk. He never hides in the blameless softness of a kind home. This is a hard saying; ut this dolor says it. All these are the conditions of a successful search. It was so Mary sought Him; it was so she found Him. We must be of good cheer. Every thing has its remedy. Even worldliness is curable, and it is by far the nearest to incurable of any diseases. If our whole life has been but a desire to please, if every thought, word, action, look and omission has got that poison at the bottom of it, we must not be cast down. To change the habit is too difficult. We will change the object. It shall be Jesus instead of the world. Who ever knew people more thoroughly all for God than some who were once notably all for the world? nay, it would seem the more notably for the world, the more thoroughly for Him.

(Father Frederick Faber, The Foot of the Cross, published originally in England in 1857 under the title The Dolors of Mary, republished by TAN Books and Publishers, pp. 191-192.)

 

The conciliarists have taken Our Lord away from us, have they not? He is not be found in every Catholic church these days. We must search for Him. We must beg Our Lady to help us to find Him in the catacombs, where serves calumniated bishops and priests who dissent from not one whit of anything contained in the Deposit of Faith and who offer the same Mass to God in all of its essential components that was offered by countless canonized saints during the First Millennium and into the Second Millennium, right up to the dawning of the age of conciliarism fifty years ago this very year. We can be cured of the desire not be called a "schismatic" or a "heretic" or a 'divider" or a "fool." We can be cured of a fear of offending our relatives and friends and acquaintances and colleagues. We can find Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ even though His Mystical Body on earth, the Church Militant, has undergone its Mystical Passion, Death and Burial as a result of apostasies and betrayals of the counterfeit church of conciliarism. We can help our families to maintain the Faith at a time when so many Catholics are losing the Faith, thereby losing Our Lord Himself, and so many others continue to lose the sensus Catholicus that has been pounded out of them by the Novus Ordo service.

Father Faber explains that we must not grow complacent or at all self-satisfied when we do indeed find Our Lord:

We must, however,--so also this dolor teaches us,--be on our guard against a temptation which is likely to assail us in our search. We soon lose the feeling of guilt in the feeling of beginning to be good again. It is part of the shallowness of our nature. We shall not have gone far on our road in search of Jesus before we shall be drawn down to attribute the loss of Him, not so much to our own fault as to some mysterious supernatural trial which God is sending us, and the coming of which is itself an index of our goodness. We fell our hearts sorrowfully burning after our Lord. They cannot surely be the same hearts which we thought but a while ago were living contentedly without Him. The change of feeling has not been sudden or marked, therefore it cannot be new. So we argue. Alas! the truth is, our own changeableness is so great that it is incredible even to ourselves, except at the moment of the turn, when we see it with our eyes. Let us not take any grand views of supernatural chastisements. They are rare, and they are not for such as we are. Simply we have sinned, and we are being punished for it. It is our punishment to have to search for Him, who once dwelt with us, and only left us reluctantly. Let us be sure that every thing about us is very commonplace. We have lost Jesus, not in a mystical darkness of soul, but in the weakness of a worldly heart; we shall find Him not in a vision or in any masterful interior operation of grace, but in the resumption of our old prayers, in the frequentation of the old sacraments. It is here the Evil One deludes many. They look out for a more striking appearance of our Lord than they had before. So they come up to Him, do not know Him, and go past Him. It is not often men turn back upon a search. But if these souls do not do so, cannot every one see that they have wilderness before them, in which they may die, but which they will assuredly never cross? Mary might have thought her loss of Jesus a supernatural trail, and she would have thought truly. But she thought it was her own fault, and so she reached a far higher truthfulness.  (Father Frederick Faber, The Foot of the Cross, published originally in England in 1857 under the title The Dolors of Mary, republished by TAN Books and Publishers, pp. 192-193.)

 

Yes, the "resumption of our old prayers," "the frequentation of the old sacraments." This is what we need to do to find Our Lord, Who is not to be found in the world and Who is not to be found in a "church" that mocks Him by sponsoring "inter-religious prayer services" and that dares to state that those who dissent from articles He placed in the Deposit of Faith are "in communion" with His Catholic Church, who subjects His Holy Name to an abomination of a liturgy that was designed by a Freemason and assisted in its construction by adherents of the falsehood known as Protestantism. The resumption of our old prayers, the frequentation of the old sacraments. Indeed, Father Faber. Indeed.

One final passage from Father Faber's reflections on the Third Dolor of Mary:

It is true, there is a loss of Jesus which is not altogether our fault, which is half trial, as well as half punishment. It is not so much a loss of Him as a veiling of His Face. We only think we have lost Him because we do not see Him. this happens to us gain and again in our spiritual life; and if we wach attentively, we shall be sure to detect the action of some law in these disappearances. We shall come to know the circumstances under which they happen, which regulate their duration, and which accompany His reappearance. For He does nothing, except in order, weight, and measure,--more so, if it were possible, in the world of souls than in the world of matter. God has His own way which each one of us, and it is of consequences we should know His way with ourselves. But, with all, His way is a system. It has its laws and its periods, and is just as regular in its deflections, and as punctual in its catastrophes, as it is in its peace, its sequence, its uniformity. There is, perhaps, no infallible way of knowing when this disappearance of Jesus is our own fault. Perhaps it is always in some measure, our own fault. If it were only a trial, it would cease to be a very efficacious one, were we sure it was but a trial, and no fault of ours. Even then we must not be passive,--even then we must sorrow,--even then we must search. We must not wait from Him to come back to us; we must go and find out where He is. But, till we find Him, do not let us seek for consolation either from our guides or from ourselves, least of all from the sympathy of creatures or the comforts of earth: He is our only true consolation. It would be the saddest of things if we were consoled by any thing but the finding of Him! All this the third dolor teaches us; for it mirrors on its surface, without being disturbed by the deep things under it, all the relations of the soul with its Saviour and its Lord. (Father Frederick Faber, The Foot of the Cross, published originally in England in 1857 under the title The Dolors of Mary, republished by TAN Books and Publishers, pp. 193-194.)

 

Each of us has lost Our Lord on occasions in our lives by means of sin. Even Venial Sin is a turning away from God and can choke off our love for Him as He has revealed Himself to us exclusively through His Catholic Church as we plunge headlong into the world that is firmly in the grip of Satan himself. There is joy in finding Him, joy in knowing that He is indeed our only consolation, joy in knowing that His Most Blessed Mother will help us to find Him where He is truly present and to intercede for us that we never turn back once we have found Him!

So many Catholics today are lost in the world that they worship because they have been robbed of the chance to ever possess Our Lord truly by the wickedness of the doctrinal and liturgical revolutions wrought by the conciliarists. We must pray many Rosaries this Lent that our fellow Catholics who are lost in the sea of unhappiness that is the world of Modernity and Modernism will find their way to the true Faith in the catacombs in order to be fortified with true sacraments offered by true bishops and priests who make no compromises with the falsehoods of the moment and who are champions of Christ the King and of Mary our Immaculate Queen.

Trusting in the two Hearts of matchless love that beat as one, the Immaculate Heart of Mary and the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, may we pray and make many sacrifices for the day when there will be no need for public opinion polls to prove that every Catholic, sinner though he may be, is grateful for being a Catholic, understanding that the Catholic Faith is the one and only path to possess the joys of Heaven that are foreshadowed every time the Immemorial Mass of Tradition is offered by a true priest.

Isn't it time to pray a Rosary now?

Vivat Christus Rex! Viva Cristo Rey!

Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us.

Saint Joseph, 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.

See also: A Litany of Saints