Revising the Faith in Order to be Free of Christ the King

by Thomas A. Droleskey

One of the chief ways in which the sons of the "enlightenment" and the sons of conciliarism are united in a tight bond of Masonic friendship is their mutually held belief in the religiously indifferentist civil state founded on naturalistic premises and a concomitant rejection of an absolute necessity for men and their nations to submit the authority of the Catholic Church on all that pertains to the good of souls as an instrument in the provision of the just social order. Those who are apologists for the founding of the United States of America are thus of one mind and one heart with Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI in rejecting the perennial, immutable truth of the Catholic Faith that each civil government in the world has the obligation to recognize the true religion and to accord her the favor and the protection of laws as it seeks to foster, as far as is humanly possible in this passing, mortal vale of tears, those conditions that will be conducive to the sanctification and salvation of the immortal souls of its citizens.

There is, however, a body of consistent teaching enunciated by the Catholic Church, she who alone is the infallible mater (mother) and magister (teacher) of all men and all nations at all times without any exceptions whatsoever, that contradicts the beliefs of naturalists in the political realm who subscribe to "enlightenment" ideas of "freedom" and "separation of Church and State" and "freedom of the press" and "freedom of speech" and the beliefs of the conciliarists who, despite some criticism now and again of various "enlightenment" authors and concepts, accept Modernity's premises that the "best" arrangement for the civil state is that represented by the Constitution of the United States of America, which enshrines state indifference to religion for the first time in human history as means, it is alleged, to assure the "free participation" of all "religious ideas" in public debate.

I. The Theological Revisionism of the Catholic Church's Social Teaching by Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI

Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, an enthusiastic supporter of the religiously indifferentist modern civil state under the moniker of "healthy secularity," realizes that there is this body of teaching that condemns conciliarism's "reconciliation" with the principles of Modernity that have produced such chaos in the wake of the overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King wrought by the Protestant Revolt and institutionalized as a result of the rise of Judeo-Masonry and all of the inter-related ideas and beliefs of authors who believed that it was possible for men to conduct their lives, both personally and collectively in the institutions of civil governance, without regard to the Deposit of Faith that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ has entrusted exclusively to His true Church for Its eternal safekeeping and infallible explication, and without a firm belief in, regular access to and fervent cooperation with the Sanctifying Graces He won for us on the wood of the Holy Cross and that flow into our hearts and souls through the loving hands of Our Lady, she who is the Mediatrix of All Graces. Ratzinger/Benedict has had to invent a phrase to justify his rejection of the perennial, immutable Social Teaching of the Catholic Church, "the hermeneutic of continuity and discontinuity," which is nothing other than an exercise of rank theological revisionism par excellence:

Secondly, it was necessary to give a new definition to the relationship between the Church and the modern State that would make room impartially for citizens of various religions and ideologies, merely assuming responsibility for an orderly and tolerant coexistence among them and for the freedom to practise their own religion.

Thirdly, linked more generally to this was the problem of religious tolerance - a question that required a new definition of the relationship between the Christian faith and the world religions. In particular, before the recent crimes of the Nazi regime and, in general, with a retrospective look at a long and difficult history, it was necessary to evaluate and define in a new way the relationship between the Church and the faith of Israel.

These are all subjects of great importance - they were the great themes of the second part of the Council - on which it is impossible to reflect more broadly in this context. It is clear that in all these sectors, which all together form a single problem, some kind of discontinuity might emerge. Indeed, a discontinuity had been revealed but in which, after the various distinctions between concrete historical situations and their requirements had been made, the continuity of principles proved not to have been abandoned. It is easy to miss this fact at a first glance.

It is precisely in this combination of continuity and discontinuity at different levels that the very nature of true reform consists. In this process of innovation in continuity we must learn to understand more practically than before that the Church's decisions on contingent matters - for example, certain practical forms of liberalism or a free interpretation of the Bible - should necessarily be contingent themselves, precisely because they refer to a specific reality that is changeable in itself. It was necessary to learn to recognize that in these decisions it is only the principles that express the permanent aspect, since they remain as an undercurrent, motivating decisions from within.

On the other hand, not so permanent are the practical forms that depend on the historical situation and are therefore subject to change. (Christmas greetings to the Members of the Roman Curia and Prelature, December 22, 2005.)

 

As I have noted many times on this site, Ratzinger/Benedict's belief that dogmatic truths can never be expressed adequately as the words used to express them at any one time are the products of the historical circumstances in which they were formulated, which is an act of utter blasphemy against the Third Person, of the Most Blessed Trinity, God the Holy Ghost, under Whose infallible guidance and protection those dogmatic truths were expressed, is an assault against the immutability of truth and is an assault against the very nature of God Himself, Who teaches us with certainly and clarity and without any contradiction at any time for any reason. Ratzinger/Benedict's belief about the nature of dogmatic truth, which he has used to justify the apostasies of the new ecclesiology and false ecumenism and inter-religious dialogue and inter-religious "prayer" services and religious liberty and separation of Church and State, has been condemned by the authority of the Catholic Church and is at the root of how he expelled himself from her maternal bosom when he was a young priest in the 1950s, if not during his seminary days as he subscribed to the condemned precepts of the "new theology:"

Hence, that meaning of the sacred dogmata is ever to be maintained which has once been declared by Holy Mother Church, and there must never be an abandonment of this sense under the pretext or in the name of a more profound understanding.... If anyone says that it is possible that at some given time, given the advancement of knowledge, a sense may be assigned to the dogmata propounded by the Church which is different from that which the Church has always understood and understands: let him be anathema. [Vatican Council, 1870.]

If we pass on from the moral to the intellectual causes of Modernism, the first and the chief which presents itself is ignorance. Yes, these very Modernists who seek to be esteemed as Doctors of the Church, who speak so loftily of modern philosophy and show such contempt for scholasticism, have embraced the one with all its false glamour, precisely because their ignorance of the other has left them without the means of being able to recognize confusion of thought and to refute sophistry. Their whole system, containing as it does errors so many and so great, has been born of the union between faith and false philosophy.

Would that they had but displayed less zeal and energy in propagating it! But such is their activity and such their unwearying labor on behalf of their cause, that one cannot but be pained to see them waste such energy in endeavoring to ruin the Church when they might have been of such service to her had their efforts been better directed. Their artifices to delude men's minds are of two kinds, the first to remove obstacles from their path, the second to devise and apply actively and patiently every resource that can serve their purpose. They recognize that the three chief difficulties which stand in their way are the scholastic method of philosophy, the authority and tradition of the Fathers, and the magisterium of the Church, and on these they wage unrelenting war. Against scholastic philosophy and theology they use the weapons of ridicule and contempt. Whether it is ignorance or fear, or both, that inspires this conduct in them, certain it is that the passion for novelty is always united in them with hatred of scholasticism, and there is no surer sign that a man is tending to Modernism than when he begins to show his dislike for the scholastic method. Let the Modernists and their admirers remember the proposition condemned by Pius IX: "The method and principles which have served the ancient doctors of scholasticism when treating of theology no longer correspond with the exigencies of our time or the progress of science." They exercise all their ingenuity in an effort to weaken the force and falsify the character of tradition, so as to rob it of all its weight and authority. But for Catholics nothing will remove the authority of the second Council of Nicea, where it condemns those "who dare, after the impious fashion of heretics, to deride the ecclesiastical traditions, to invent novelties of some kind...or endeavor by malice or craft to overthrow any one of the legitimate traditions of the Catholic Church"; nor that of the declaration of the fourth Council of Constantinople: "We therefore profess to preserve and guard the rules bequeathed to the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, by the Holy and most illustrious Apostles, by the orthodox Councils, both general and local, and by everyone of those divine interpreters, the Fathers and Doctors of the Church." Wherefore the Roman Pontiffs, Pius IV and Pius IX, ordered the insertion in the profession of faith of the following declaration: "I most firmly admit and embrace the apostolic and ecclesiastical traditions and other observances and constitutions of the Church.'' (Pope Saint Pius X, Pascendi Dominci Gregis, September 8, 1907.)

Hence to neglect, or to reject, or to devalue so many and such great resources which have been conceived, expressed and perfected so often by the age-old work of men endowed with no common talent and holiness, working under the vigilant supervision of the holy magisterium and with the light and leadership of the Holy Ghost in order to state the truths of the faith ever more accurately, to do this so that these things may be replaced by conjectural notions and by some formless and unstable tenets of a new philosophy, tenets which, like the flowers of the field, are in existence today and die tomorrow; this is supreme imprudence and something that would make dogma itself a reed shaken by the wind. The contempt for terms and notions habitually used by scholastic theologians leads of itself to the weakening of what they call speculative theology, a discipline which these men consider devoid of true certitude because it is based on theological reasoning.

Unfortunately these advocates of novelty easily pass from despising scholastic theology to the neglect of and even contempt for the Teaching Authority of the Church itself, which gives such authoritative approval to scholastic theology. This Teaching Authority is represented by them as a hindrance to progress and an obstacle in the way of science. Some non Catholics consider it as an unjust restraint preventing some more qualified theologians from reforming their subject. And although this sacred Office of Teacher in matters of faith and morals must be the proximate and universal criterion of truth for all theologians, since to it has been entrusted by Christ Our Lord the whole deposit of faith -- Sacred Scripture and divine Tradition -- to be preserved, guarded and interpreted, still the duty that is incumbent on the faithful to flee also those errors which more or less approach heresy, and accordingly "to keep also the constitutions and decrees by which such evil opinions are proscribed and forbidden by the Holy See," is sometimes as little known as if it did not exist. What is expounded in the Encyclical Letters of the Roman Pontiffs concerning the nature and constitution of the Church, is deliberately and habitually neglected by some with the idea of giving force to a certain vague notion which they profess to have found in the ancient Fathers, especially the Greeks. The Popes, they assert, do not wish to pass judgment on what is a matter of dispute among theologians, so recourse must be had to the early sources, and the recent constitutions and decrees of the Teaching Church must be explained from the writings of the ancients. (Pope Pius XII, Humani Generis, August 12, 1950.)

 

Among the truths of the Catholic Church's Social Teaching that that the penultimate theological revisionist, Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, rejects are the following:

 

1. The necessity that the civil state must recognize the true religion as it helps to foster the common temporal good in light of man's Last End, expressed so very clearly 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.-'Quaedam intercedat necesse est ordinata colligatio (inter illas) quae quidem conjunctioni non immerito comparatur, per quam anima et corpus in homine copulantur.' He proceeds: 'Human societies cannot, without becoming criminal, act as if God did not exist or refuse to concern themselves with religion, as though it were something foreign to them, or of no purpose to them.... As for the Church, which has God Himself for its author, to exclude her from the active life of the nation, from the laws, the education of the young, the family, is to commit a great and pernicious error. -- 'Civitates non possunt, citra scellus, gerere se tamquam si Deus omnino non esset, aut curam religionis velut alienam nihilque profuturam abjicere.... Ecclesiam vero, quam Deus ipse constituit, ab actione vitae excludere, a legibus, ab institutione adolescentium, a societate domestica, magnus et perniciousus est error.' (Pope Saint Pius X, Vehementer Nos, February 11, 1906.)

 

Please note the simple truths stated by Pope Saint Pius X in his succinct summary of Catholic Social Teaching:

a. The thesis of separation of Church and State is "absolutely false." Something is absolutely false in 1906 cannot become "true" at any subsequent date. To contend otherwise is to make a mockery of truth and to render null and void the infallibility of the Church's Ordinary Magisterium.

b. The civil state has the obligation to aid man in the realization of his Last End, which is the possession of the glory of the Beatific Vision of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost for all eternity. Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI does not believe this. He believes the following, as he said to the late Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, the founder of the Society of Saint Pius X, on July 14, 1987:

Under pressure, Rome gave in. On July 14, Cardinal Ratzinger received Archbishop Lefebvre at the Holy Office.

At first the Cardinal persisted in arguing that "the State is competent in religious matters."

"But the State must have an ultimate and eternal end," replied the Archbishop.

"Your Grace, that is the case for the Church, not the State. By itself the State does not know."

Archbishop Lefebvre was distraught: a Cardinal and Prefect of the Holy Office wanted to show him that the State can have no religion and cannot prevent the spread of error. However, before talking about concessions, the Cardinal made a threat: the consequence of an illicit episcopal consecration would be "schism and excommunication."

"Schism?" retorted the Archbishop. "If there is a schism, it is because of what the Vatican did at Assisi and how you replied to our Dubiae: the Church is breaking with the traditional Magisterium. But the Church against her past and her Tradition is not the Catholic Church; this is why being excommunicated by a liberal, ecumenical, and revolutionary Church is a matter of indifference to us."

As this tirade ended, Joseph Ratzinger gave in: "Let us find a practical solution. Make a moderate declaration on the Council and the new missal a bit like the one that Jean Guitton has suggested to you. Then, we would give you a bishop for ordinations, we could work out an arrangement with the diocesan bishops, and you could continue as you are doing. As for a Cardinal Protector, and make your suggestions."

How did Marcel Lefebvre not jump for joy? Rome was giving in! But his penetrating faith went to the very heart of the Cardinal's rejection of doctrine. He said to himself: "So, must Jesus no longer reign? Is Jesus no longer God? Rome has lost the Faith. Rome is in apostasy. We can no longer trust this lot!" To the Cardinal, he said:

"Eminence, even if you give us everything--a bishop, some autonomy from the bishops, the 1962 liturgy, allow us to continue our seminaries--we cannot work together because we are going in different directions. You are working to dechristianize society and the Church, and we are working to Christianize them.

"For us, our Lord Jesus Christ is everything. He is our life. The Church is our Lord Jesus Christ; the priest is another Christ; the Mass is the triumph of Jesus Christ on the cross; in our seminaries everything tends towards the reign of our Lord Jesus Christ. But you! You are doing the opposite: you have just wanted to prove to me that our Lord Jesus Christ cannot, and must not, reign over society.

Recounting this incident, the Archbishop described the Cardinal's attitude" "Motionless, he looked at me, his eyes expressionless, as if I had just suggested something incomprehensible or unheard of." Then Ratzinger tried to argue that "the Church can still say whatever she wants to the State," while Lefebvre, the intuitive master of Catholic metaphysics, did not lose sight of the true end of human societies: the Reign of Christ." Fr. de Tinguy hit the nail on the head when he said of Marcel Lefebvre: "His faith defies those who love theological quibbles." (His Excellency Bishop Bernard Tissier de Mallerais, The Biography of Marcel Lefebvre, Kansas City, Missouri: Angelus Press, 2004, pp. 547-548.)

 

In other words, Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, as he expressed repeatedly during his recently concluded pilgrimage to Jordan and Israel, believes that it is "good enough" for "religions" to work together for the common ground, which is of the essence of the errors of Modernity that have been spread by Judeo-Masonry.

c. "Hence the Roman Pontiffs have never ceased, as circumstances required, to refute and condemn the doctrine of the separation of Church and State." True popes of the Catholic Church can never contradict each other. They speak with one voice. The true popes of the Catholic Church have, as Pope Saint Pius X noted, condemned the doctrine of the separation of Church and state as circumstances required them to do so.

 

As I have noted in numerous articles on this site, Holy Mother Church does not expect the impossible of her children. She will make accommodations in the practical order of things to the reality of the religiously indifferentist civil state, availing herself of the the particular constitutional and legal arrangements that exist in such states so as to continue her work of teaching and sanctifying her children. She makes these accommodations without ever once forsaking as a matter of principle the obligation of each civil state to recognize her nor does she cease to teach her children her immutable doctrine and to exhort them to pray and to work for the conversion of their fellow citizens and of their nations to her, the true Church, outside of which there is no salvation and without which there can be no true social order.

Holy Mother Church leaves it to the free will of men to determine the specific institutional arrangements by which they are to governed in civil society. She insists only that she be recognized as the true religion of the civil state, which must submit to her teaching authority when, after she has exercised her Indirect Power of teaching and preaching and exhortation, she interposes herself directly--and only rarely and in the most grave circumstances--to correct measures undertaken that threaten the good of souls and thus the whole of social order. This is the consistent teaching of the Catholic Church from which no one may dissent knowingly and remain in good standing" within her maternal bosom.

Pope Leo XIII used his encyclical letter to the Bishops of the United States of America on January 6, 1895, Longiqua Oceani, to demonstrate this spirit of a practical accommodation (demonstrated also by his support for the Third Republic in France and his concordat with Otto von Bismarck, decisions in the practical order that some debate to this day) to the institutional arrangements found in the Constitution of the United States of America while at the same time rejecting its Church-State relationship as the "model" for the rest of the world:

The main factor, no doubt, in bringing things into this happy state were the ordinances and decrees of your synods, especially of those which in more recent times were convened and confirmed by the authority of the Apostolic See. But, moreover (a fact which it gives pleasure to acknowledge), thanks are due to the equity of the laws which obtain in America and to the customs of the well-ordered Republic. For the Church amongst you, unopposed by the Constitution and government of your nation, fettered by no hostile legislation, protected against violence by the common laws and the impartiality of the tribunals, is free to live and act without hindrance. Yet, though all this is true, it would be very erroneous to draw the conclusion that in America is to be sought the type of the most desirable status of the Church, or that it would be universally lawful or expedient for State and Church to be, as in America, dissevered and divorced. The fact that Catholicity with you is in good condition, nay, is even enjoying a prosperous growth, is by all means to be attributed to the fecundity with which God has endowed His Church, in virtue of which unless men or circumstances interfere, she spontaneously expands and propagates herself; but she would bring forth more abundant fruits if, in addition to liberty, she enjoyed the favor of the laws and the patronage of the public authority.

 

Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI believes that the Church-State relationship in the United States of America is the model for the rest of the world, thereby negating Pope Leo XIII's specific and categorical statement that "it would be very erroneous to draw the conclusion that in America is to be sought the most desirable status of the Church, or that it would be universally lawful or expedient for the State and Church to be, as in America, dissevered and divorced." The growth of the Church in the United States of America, Pope Leo was reminding the American bishops, was not the result of the First Amendment but the consequence of the "fecundity with which God has endowed the Church," which means that she will grow unless there is a direct interference with her teaching and sanctifying offices. The most propitious circumstance, Pope Leo was reminding the American bishops, for the life of the Church and her children is for the civil state to live up to its obligation to recognize her as the true religion.

Pope Leo XIII was aware, however, that most of the American bishops were not teaching this truth, which he had reiterated in Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885, Libertas, June 20, 1888, and Sapientiae Christianae, January 10, 1890, and exhorted them once again in Longiqua Oceani to live up to their obligations to catechize the faithful about the Church's immutable Social Teaching:

As regards civil affairs, experience has shown how important it is that the citizens should be upright and virtuous. In a free State, unless justice be generally cultivated, unless the people be repeatedly and diligently urged to observe the precepts and laws of the Gospel, liberty itself may be pernicious. Let those of the clergy, therefore, who are occupied with the instruction of the multitude, treat plainly this topic of the duties of citizens, so that all may understand and feel the necessity, in political life, of conscientiousness, self restraint, and integrity; for that cannot be lawful in public which is unlawful in private affairs. On this whole subject there are to be found, as you know, in the encyclical letters written by Us from time to time in the course of Our pontificate, many things which Catholics should attend to and observe. In these writings and expositions We have treated of human liberty, of the chief Christian duties, of civil government, and of the Christian constitution of States, drawing Our principles as well from the teaching of the Gospels as from reason. They, then, who wish to be good citizens and discharge their duties faithfully may readily learn from Our Letters the ideal of an upright life.

 

As I explained in Cut From the Same Cloth eighteen months ago now, the American bishops did not, at least for the most part, teach these encyclical letters, prompting New York State Governor Alfred Emmanuel Smith, a Catholic, to say the following when a Protestant, Charles Marshall, challenged him in an article in Atlantic Monthly  in 1927 as to whether he considered himself bound by Pope Pius XI's encyclical letter on the Social Reign of Christ the King, Quas Primas, December 11, 1925:

"What the [place of eternal damnation] is an encyclical." (America | The National Catholic Weekly - Vatican II and American Politics, an article that is, of course, very favorable to the Americanist heresy as enshrined in Dignitatis Humanae, December 7, 1965.)

 

Well, Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict does know what the Church has taught, which is why he he sought to use his theological revisionism to excuse his rejection of her condemnation of the separation of Church and State and religious liberty. Joseph "Cardinal" Ratzinger specifically referred to the "obsolete" nature of the "particulars" of the "anti-Modernist" papal declarations on Church-State relations and religious liberty (as well as the decisions of the Pontifical Biblical Commission under Pope Saint Pius X) as follows on June 27, 1990, just fourteen years, nine months and twenty two days before he became the head of the counterfeit church of conciliarism as "Benedict XVI:"

The text [of the document Instruction on the Theologian's Ecclesial Vocation] also presents the various types of bonds that rise from the different degrees of magisterial teaching. It affirms - perhaps for the first time with this clarity - that there are decisions of the magisterium that cannot be the last word on the matter as such, but are, in a substantial fixation of the problem, above all an expression of pastoral prudence, a kind of provisional disposition. The nucleus remains valid, but the particulars, which the circumstances of the times influenced, may need further correction.

In this regard, one may think of the declarations of Popes in the last century [19th century] about religious liberty, as well as the anti-Modernist decisions at the beginning of this century, above all, the decisions of the Biblical Commission of the time [on evolutionism]. As a cry of alarm in the face of hasty and superficial adaptations, they will remain fully justified. A personage such as Johann Baptist Metz said, for example, that the Church's anti-Modernist decisions render the great service of preserving her from falling into the liberal-bourgeois world. But in the details of the determinations they contain, they became obsolete after having fulfilled their pastoral mission at their proper time.

(Joseph Ratzinger, "Instruction on the Theologian's Ecclesial Vocation," published with the title "Rinnovato dialogo fra Magistero e Teologia," in L'Osservatore Romano, June 27, 1990, p. 6, Card. Ratzinger: The teachings of the Popes against Modernism are obsolete.)

 

Pope Saint Pius X prophetically condemned such a profane novelty, unheard of in the history of the Catholic Church, in Pascendi Dominci Gregis, September 8, 1907:

Hence it is quite impossible [the Modernists assert] to maintain that they [dogmatic statements] absolutely contain the truth: for, in so far as they are symbols, they are the images of truth, and so must be adapted to the religious sense in its relation to man; and as instruments, they are the vehicles of truth, and must therefore in their turn be adapted to man in his relation to the religious sense. But the object of the religious sense, as something contained in the absolute, possesses an infinite variety of aspects, of which now one, now another, may present itself. In like manner he who believes can avail himself of varying conditions. Consequently, the formulas which we call dogma must be subject to these vicissitudes, and are, therefore, liable to change. Thus the way is open to the intrinsic evolution of dogma. Here we have an immense structure of sophisms which ruin and wreck all religion.

It is thus, Venerable Brethren, that for the Modernists, whether as authors or propagandists, there is to be nothing stable, nothing immutable in the Church. Nor, indeed, are they without forerunners in their doctrines, for it was of these that Our predecessor Pius IX wrote: "These enemies of divine revelation extol human progress to the skies, and with rash and sacrilegious daring would have it introduced into the Catholic religion as if this religion were not the work of God but of man, or some kind of philosophical discovery susceptible of perfection by human efforts." On the subject of revelation and dogma in particular, the doctrine of the Modernists offers nothing new. We find it condemned in the Syllabus of Pius IX, where it is enunciated in these terms: ''Divine revelation is imperfect, and therefore subject to continual and indefinite progress, corresponding with the progress of human reason"; and condemned still more solemnly in the Vatican Council: ''The doctrine of the faith which God has revealed has not been proposed to human intelligences to be perfected by them as if it were a philosophical system, but as a divine deposit entrusted to the Spouse of Christ to be faithfully guarded and infallibly interpreted. Hence also that sense of the sacred dogmas is to be perpetually retained which our Holy Mother the Church has once declared, nor is this sense ever to be abandoned on plea or pretext of a more profound comprehension of the truth." Nor is the development of our knowledge, even concerning the faith, barred by this pronouncement; on the contrary, it is supported and maintained. For the same Council continues: "Let intelligence and science and wisdom, therefore, increase and progress abundantly and vigorously in individuals, and in the mass, in the believer and in the whole Church, throughout the ages and the centuries -- but only in its own kind, that is, according to the same dogma, the same sense, the same acceptation." (Pope Saint Pius X, Pascendi Dominci Gregis, September 8, 1907.)

 

Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI is a pure Modernist from beginning to end, seeing fit to use his logically absurd and dogmatically condemned "hermeneutic of continuity and discontinuity" to justify his dissent from the perennial, immutable Social Teaching of the Catholic Church. His exaltation of "religious liberty,"
which was termed in no uncertain terms as a "monstrous right" by Pope Pius VI in his Brief Quod aliquantum, March 10, 1791, was on full display during his pilgrimage to Jordan and Israel as he praised the "ability" of the false religions of Mohammedanism and Talmudic Judaism to help "build" the "better world:"

The necessary effect of the constitution decreed by the Assembly is to annihilate the Catholic Religion and, with her, the obedience owed to Kings. With this purpose it establishes as a right of man in society this absolute liberty that not only insures the right to be indifferent to religious opinions, but also grants full license to freely think, speak, write and even print whatever one wishes on religious matters – even the most disordered imaginings. It is a monstrous right, which the Assembly claims, however, results from equality and the natural liberties of all men.

"But what could be more unwise than to establish among men this equality and this uncontrolled liberty, which stifles all reason, the most precious gift nature gave to man, the one that distinguishes him from animals?

"After creating man in a place filled with delectable things, didn’t God threaten him with death should he eat the fruit of the tree of good and evil? And with this first prohibition didn’t He establish limits to his liberty? When, after man disobeyed the command and thereby incurred guilt, didn’t God impose new obligations on him through Moses? And even though he left to man’s free will the choice between good and evil, didn’t God provide him with precepts and commandments that could save him “if he would observe them”? …

"Where then, is this liberty of thinking and acting that the Assembly grants to man in society as an indisputable natural right? Is this invented right not contrary to the right of the Supreme Creator to whom we owe our existence and all that we have? Can we ignore the fact that man was not created for himself alone, but to be helpful to his neighbor? …

"Man should use his reason first of all to recognize his Sovereign Maker, honoring Him and admiring Him, and submitting his entire person to Him. For, from his childhood, he should be submissive to those who are superior to him in age; he should be governed and instructed by their lessons, order his life according to their laws of reason, society and religion. This inflated equality and liberty, therefore, are for him, from the moment he is born, no more than imaginary dreams and senseless words." (Pope Pius VI, Brief Quod aliquantum, March 10, 1791; Religious Liberty, a “Monstrous Right").

 

Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, steeped in the theological relativism wrought by Modernism and its misbegotten progeny, the "New Theology," believes that none of this is true "now." Indeed, he has said that Gaudium et Spes, December 7, 1965, represents the counterfeit church of conciliarism's "official reconciliation with the new era inaugurated in 1789" (Joseph Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology, p. 382). We are thus to believe that the Catholic Church does not have to be recognized by each man and each civil state in the world as the Divinely-established repository and infallible teacher of all that is true, both in the Order of Redemption (Grace) and in the Order of Creation (Nature), as pertains to the right ordering of men's souls in accord with the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law.

The only result of such madness can be (and has been) to make more possible the triumph of the spirit of "liberation" from the Social Reign of Christ the King wrought by the Protestant Revolt in the Sixteenth Century and given a naturalistic thrust by "theoreticians," each with their own particular "insights" and "novelties" that frequently differed from one another quite a bit, to be sure, such as John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Francis Bacon, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, among others, of course. If the Catholic Church is not recognized by all men and all nations as the Divinely-established repository and infallible teacher of all that pertains to the right ordering of men's souls in this life then it will be the case that men will be governed by the brute force of some kind of over dictatorship (autocracy, oligarchy, authoritarianism, totalitarianism) or by the dictatorship of the "will" of the majority.

Catholicism is the one and only foundation of personal and social order.

The rejection of this truth by the likes of Martin Luther and John Calvin and John Wesley and Ulrich Zwingli, et al., and by the scions of Modernity, including the men who had a founding hatred for Christ the King, is why we live in such disorder and chaos at the present time. Civil governments founded on the false, naturalistic, anti-Incarnational, religiously indifferentist and semi-Pelagian principles of Modernity are bound to manifest the perfection of the inherent degeneracy of their founding principles. Violence and disorder and, ultimately, statism must perforce follow in the wake of the breakdown of social order in world where most people do not believe in the Deposit of Faith that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ entrusted exclusively to the Catholic Church for Its eternal safekeeping and infallible explication, a world where most people do not have belief in, access to and a fervent cooperation with Sanctifying Grace so as to live in accord with that Deposit of Faith to be the best citizens here below as a preparation for eternal citizenship in Heaven after having died in a State of Sanctifying Grace as a member of the Catholic Church.

Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI does not believe this, trusting instead in the "ability" of "religions" to overcome the "dictatorship of relativism" and the "ethos of secularism" that was wrought specifically, at least in proximate terms, by the overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King wrought by the Protestant Revolt and then, as Pope Leo XIII noted in Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885, invaded the precincts of philosophy thereafter:

But that harmful and deplorable passion for innovation which was aroused in the sixteenth century threw first of all into confusion the Christian religion, and next, by natural sequence, invaded the precincts of philosophy, whence it spread amongst all classes of society. From this source, as from a fountain-head, burst forth all those later tenets of unbridled license which, in the midst of the terrible upheavals of the last century, were wildly conceived and boldly proclaimed as the principles and foundation of that new conception of law which was not merely previously unknown, but was at variance on many points with not only the Christian, but even the natural law.

Amongst these principles the main one lays down that as all men are alike by race and nature, so in like manner all are equal in the control of their life; that each one is so far his own master as to be in no sense under the rule of any other individual; that each is free to think on every subject just as he may choose, and to do whatever he may like to do; that no man has any right to rule over other men. In a society grounded upon such maxims all government is nothing more nor less than the will of the people, and the people, being under the power of itself alone, is alone its own ruler. It does choose, nevertheless, some to whose charge it may commit itself, but in such wise that it makes over to them not the right so much as the business of governing, to be exercised, however, in its name.

The authority of God is passed over in silence, just as if there were no God; or as if He cared nothing for human society; or as if men, whether in their individual capacity or bound together in social relations, owed nothing to God; or as if there could be a government of which the whole origin and power and authority did not reside in God Himself. Thus, as is evident, a State becomes nothing but a multitude which is its own master and ruler. And since the people is declared to contain within itself the spring-head of all rights and of all power, it follows that the State does not consider itself bound by any kind of duty toward God. Moreover. it believes that it is not obliged to make public profession of any religion; or to inquire which of the very many religions is the only one true; or to prefer one religion to all the rest; or to show to any form of religion special favor; but, on the contrary, is bound to grant equal rights to every creed, so that public order may not be disturbed by any particular form of religious belief.

And it is a part of this theory that all questions that concern religion are to be referred to private judgment; that every one is to be free to follow whatever religion he prefers, or none at all if he disapprove of all. From this the following consequences logically flow: that the judgment of each one's conscience is independent of all law; that the most unrestrained opinions may be openly expressed as to the practice or omission of divine worship; and that every one has unbounded license to think whatever he chooses and to publish abroad whatever he thinks.

Now, when the State rests on foundations like those just named -- and for the time being they are greatly in favor -- it readily appears into what and how unrightful a position the Church is driven. For, when the management of public business is in harmony with doctrines of such a kind, the Catholic religion is allowed a standing in civil society equal only, or inferior, to societies alien from it; no regard is paid to the laws of the Church, and she who, by the order and commission of Jesus Christ, has the duty of teaching all nations, finds herself forbidden to take any part in the instruction of the people. With reference to matters that are of twofold jurisdiction, they who administer the civil power lay down the law at their own will, and in matters that appertain to religion defiantly put aside the most sacred decrees of the Church. They claim jurisdiction over the marriages of Catholics, even over the bond as well as the unity and the indissolubility of matrimony. They lay hands on the goods of the clergy, contending that the Church cannot possess property. Lastly, they treat the Church with such arrogance that, rejecting entirely her title to the nature and rights of a perfect society, they hold that she differs in no respect from other societies in the State, and for this reason possesses no right nor any legal power of action, save that which she holds by the concession and favor of the government. If in any State the Church retains her own agreement publicly entered into by the two powers, men forthwith begin to cry out that matters affecting the Church must be separated from those of the State.

Their object in uttering this cry is to be able to violate unpunished their plighted faith, and in all things to have unchecked control. And as the Church, unable to abandon her chiefest and most sacred duties, cannot patiently put up with this, and asks that the pledge given to her be fully and scrupulously acted up to, contentions frequently arise between the ecclesiastical and the civil power, of which the issue commonly is that the weaker power yields to the one which is stronger in human resources.

Accordingly, it has become the practice and determination under this condition of public polity (now so much admired by many) either to forbid the action of the Church altogether, or to keep her in check and bondage to the State. Public enactments are in great measure framed with this design. The drawing up of laws, the administration of State affairs, the godless education of youth, the spoliation and suppression of religious orders, the overthrow of the temporal power of the Roman Pontiff, all alike aim to this one end -- to paralyze the action of Christian institutions, to cramp to the utmost the freedom of the Catholic Church, and to curtail her ever single prerogative.

Now, natural reason itself proves convincingly that such concepts of the government of a State are wholly at variance with the truth. Nature itself bears witness that all power, of every kind, has its origin from God, who is its chief and most august source.

The sovereignty of the people, however, and this without any reference to God, is held to reside in the multitude; which is doubtless a doctrine exceedingly well calculated to flatter and to inflame many passions, but which lacks all reasonable proof, and all power of insuring public safety and preserving order. Indeed, from the prevalence of this teaching, things have come to such a pass that may hold as an axiom of civil jurisprudence that seditions may be rightfully fostered. For the opinion prevails that princes are nothing more than delegates chosen to carry out the will of the people; whence it necessarily follows that all things are as changeable as the will of the people, so that risk of public disturbance is ever hanging over our heads.

To hold, therefore, that there is no difference in matters of religion between forms that are unlike each other, and even contrary to each other, most clearly leads in the end to the rejection of all religion in both theory and practice. And this is the same thing as atheism, however it may differ from it in name. Men who really believe in the existence of God must, in order to be consistent with themselves and to avoid absurd conclusions, understand that differing modes of divine worship involving dissimilarity and conflict even on most important points cannot all be equally probable, equally good, and equally acceptable to God.

 

This is a statement of simple truth, revealed by God Himself, to which every person on the face of this earth without exception must give his assent. As is the case with anything and everything that is of its nature true, this truth does not depend upon human acceptance for its binding force and validity. This truth binds each human conscience individually and collectively in the institutions of civil governance.

The quintessential theological relativist and revisionist, Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, does not accept this, and this is one of the many ways in which he defects from the Catholic Faith and shows himself to be a true enemy of Christ the King and of the right ordering of men and their nations.

II. The Role of the Society of Saint Pius X in Helping Catholics  to Reject the Social Teaching of the Catholic Church

 

The very foundation of the modern civil state, based upon the falsehoods of Protestantism and the multifaceted, inter-related naturalistic forces of Judeo-Masonry that have flowed forth from the so-called "Enlightenment," is absurd and illogical, contrary to the principles of even right reason, no less, of course, the binding precepts contained in the Deposit of Faith.

One of the principal strengths of the Society of Saint Pius X in the past thirty-nine years, at least up until recently, has been its steadfast proclamation of the Social Reign of Christ the King and the rejection of the anti-Incarnational errors of Modernity. The late Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre was himself a spirited and eloquent defender of the Sacred Rights of Christ the King, and so have been many of his spiritual sons in the priestly fraternity that he founded, including, of course, "The Nine," who were expelled for standing up for the truth that the Catholic Church cannot be responsible for promoting any errors, including the rejection of the Social Reign of Christ the King in favor of the heresies of religious liberty and the separation of Church and State.

Alas, the false ecclesiology promoted by the Society of Saint Pius X convinced many traditional Catholics that it is necessary to "sift" the words and actions of a true pope, that it is possible for a pope to teach error when not speaking ex cathedra in the solemn exercise of Papal Infallibility, that it is possible for the official authority of the Catholic Church to give us defective liturgical rites whose "legitimacy" and "efficacy" must be scrutinized by the theologians of the Society of Saint Pius X to determine which bind the consciences of the faithful and which do not.

The "sifting" of Church teaching not proclaimed solemlny as infallible has been, after all, condemned by Pope Pius IX in The Syllabus of Errors:

22. The obligation by which Catholic teachers and authors are strictly bound is confined to those things only which are proposed to universal belief as dogmas of faith by the infallible judgment of the Church. -- Letter to the Archbishop of Munich, "Tuas libenter," Dec. 21, 1863.

 

In other words, it not possible to sift the teaching of true popes.

Bishop Donald Sanborn, writing in The Mountains of Gelboe, published fifteen years ago now, summarized the false ecclesiology of the Society of Saint Pius very succinctly:

The Society’s fundamental problem is that they are laboring under a false notion of the Church. They look at Wojtyla’s election by a college of Novus Ordo cardinals, and from it conclude that he is a legitimate pontiff.

Because even they see the problem of being in communion with a heretic, they say that John Paul II is the head of two churches, the one, the Conciliar Church, the other, the Catholic Church. Sometimes he speaks or acts as the head of the Conciliar Church; at other times, he speaks and acts as the head of the Catholic Church.

How do we know which is which? By means of Archbishop Lefebvre who has the mission from God to sift the doings and sayings of these modernist popes, and to instruct us as to what to believe, what to do, and what to think. Now that the Archbishop is dead, the sifting authority has been transferred to Fr. Franz Schmidberger.

From this principle one would have to logically draw the conclusion that the infallibility and indefectibility of the Catholic Church, the deposit of Faith, the salvation of all the faithful, are in the hands of Fr. Franz Schmidberger. The Catholic Church, the Catholic Faith, the validity of the sacraments, what we should believe to be saved, all hangs in the balance of the good judgment of Fr. Franz Schmidberger.

This type of ecclesiology, or Church theology, could be compared to “distinctive ring” service on telephone lines. If a fax is coming in you get one ring; if a phone call is coming, you get another. So, by comparison, if Wojtyla says something Catholic, you get a distinctive ring from the Society; if he is saying something modernist, you get a different kind of ring from the Society.

It is needless to say that such a system not only is absurd, but also reduces to ashes the infallibility of the Catholic Church. The authority, in such a system, is no longer the Pope, but the Superior General of the Society of Saint Pius X, for the present Fr. Franz Schmidberger.

Their system fails to understand that it is the possession of papal authority which makes a pope a pope. This authority, protected by the Holy Ghost in matters of faith, morals, liturgy and general discipline, cannot prescribe for the Church false doctrines or evil laws, which it would be necessary for the faithful to reject or resist. If therefore it is necessary to resist their doctrines, morals, liturgy and general discipline, one must conclude that these “popes” are not true popes, since they do not possess papal authority. This is true despite whatever election process by which they have been designated for that office.

To perceive, however, the Novus Ordo “popes” as true Popes — which the Society does — is to identify the Catholic Church with them, for where Peter is, there is the Church. But to identify the Catholic Church with them establishes a type of “gravitational pull” which the Society members have toward John Paul II and his Church. Somehow, some way, the Society has to return to the bosom of Wojtyla. This gravitational pull toward the Novus Ordo, seen as the Church, accounts for the liberalism of the Society priests, and for their many defections to the Novus Ordo, or to the Fraternity of St. Peter.

Their notion of two Churches, one Catholic, one Conciliar, does not conform to reality. The reality is that Wojtyla was elected to be the Catholic Pope, and claims to be the Catholic Pope. He does not claim to be the head of anything else but the Catholic Church. The reality is that he is trying to foist upon the structures of the Catholic Church a new religion, that of modernism. Because he is attempting to replace the Catholic Faith with a new religion, it is impossible that he have the papal authority which we claims to have or appears to have, or which he was designated to have. Why? Because the nature of authority is to bring the community to its proper ends. Since the maintenance of the Catholic Faith is an essential end of the Catholic Church, anyone who would attempt to thwart that end could not possibly retain the authority of the Catholic Church, which is the authority of Christ. It is therefore impossible that these Vatican II popes be true popes, since they intend an essentially disordered end for the structures of the Catholic Church.

The Society looks only at the external structures of the Church, notices their continuity from before the Council to after the Council, and concludes that the Novus Ordo is the Catholic Church. In fact, novus ordite or modernist clergy are in possession of Catholic structures, but that does not mean that they represent the Catholic Church.

Thus the Society has a deadly attraction to the modernist hierarchy in possession of our Catholic buildings. This deadly attraction is devastating, for it makes their battle a battle to obtain recognition from modernists. The “legitimacy” which the modernists can provide is no legitimacy at all, but only a sham appearance of it, at the expense of the purity of the Catholic Faith. Yet the Society is dazzled, hypnotized by this lure of “legitimacy,” something like the deer on the highway, which stops and fixes its stare on the headlights of the oncoming vehicle, and thus meets a tragic end.

Because the modernists are attempting this wicked scheme of filling our Catholic Churches with their heretical abomination, it is the solemn duty of Catholics to denounce them as false authority, thereby making a Catholic stance of preserving the infallibility and indefectibility of the Catholic Church, as represented by her true hierarchy endowed with true authority.

 

This is a matter of Catholic doctrine, nothing more and nothing less. Just as the Modernists have obscured and falsified the doctrines of the Catholic Church by means of conciliarism's warfare against the nature of dogmatic truth and the new ecclesiology and false ecumenism and inter-religious dialogue and inter-religious prayer services and episcopal collegiality and religious liberty and separation of Church and State, the false ecclesiology of the Society of Saint Pius X has obscured and falsified the notion of papal infallibility and the notion of the infallibility of the Holy Mother Church's Ordinary Magisterium, which can never give us errors or defective liturgies of any kind. Holy Mother Church is as spotless as the Blessed Mother, who was conceived without any stain of Original and Actual Sin.

It is unfathomable that the clarity of Pope Gregory XVI's Singular Nos, June 25, 1834, oft-quoted on this site recently, fails to make a dent in the minds of those who have convinced themselves that they can indeed "sift" the teachings of true popes on matters contained in the Deposit of Faith:

As for the rest, We greatly deplore the fact that, where the ravings of human reason extend, there is somebody who studies new things and strives to know more than is necessary, against the advice of the apostle. There you will find someone who is overconfident in seeking the truth outside the Catholic Church, in which it can be found without even a light tarnish of error. Therefore, the Church is called, and is indeed, a pillar and foundation of truth. You correctly understand, venerable brothers, that We speak here also of that erroneous philosophical system which was recently brought in and is clearly to be condemned. This system, which comes from the contemptible and unrestrained desire for innovation, does not seek truth where it stands in the received and holy apostolic inheritance. Rather, other empty doctrines, futile and uncertain doctrines not approved by the Church, are adopted. Only the most conceited men wrongly think that these teachings can sustain and support that truth.

 

That is, we do not look to the evil of Protestantism for theological or philosophical "truth."

We do not look to the evils of any naturalistic ideology or philosophy for "truth."

The totality of Revealed Truth as it pertains to the sanctification and salvation of souls is to be found solely in the Catholic Church and nowhere else.

The Society of Saint Pius X has played its own role, as I noted in Story Time in Econe (which includes important material from Fathers Francisco and Dominic Radecki's Tumultuous Times on Gallicanism and the mythology propagated so many of there having been "heretical popes"), in helping to undermine the teaching authority of the Catholic Church, thus convincing a few of the faithful who have had some exposure to their chapels over the past thirty-six years or so that the Church's "governing magisterium" (a nonentity made up by the Society of Saint Pius X that has no foundation in the writing of any Father of the Catholic Church or in any of her dogmatic councils) can teach us errors, thus unwittingly exposing everything taught by any pope as "fair game" for "revision" and "re-evaluation," especially as regards her Social Teaching that has condemned the separation of Church and State and religious liberty.

It is thus essential for anti-sedevacantist revisionists and libertarians to reject the canonical doctrine of the Catholic Church that heretics cannot hold ecclesiastical office legitimately as a false belief in the ability of true popes to teach error provides them with the "justification" for rejecting her perennial, immutable Social Teaching in favor of "enlightenment" or Americanist or libertarian myths that are contrary to that teaching.

These anti-sedevacantist revisionists and libertarians have received unwitting assistance from the false ecclesiology of the Society of Saint Pius X to "tear apart" those parts of the Church's Social Teaching they do not "like. Some have gone so far as to claim that the Church has no authority to teach in this matter at all and/or that it is necessary to apply the "rigors" of "scientific" and "historical" analysis to her Social Teaching. Such a claim is false and reflective of an ignorance and/or a rejection that every man on the face of this earth must submit to everything taught by the Catholic Church without any exception or reservation whatsoever.

Pope Leo XIII, writing in his Apostolical Letter, Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae, January 22, 1899, to James Cardinal Gibbons, the longtime Americanist Archbishop of Baltimore, made this point very clearly by quoting the [First] Vatican Council against the desires of Americanists to "open" up the Faith to "debate" and "discussion:"

 

The underlying principle of these new [Americanist] opinions is that, in order to more easily attract those who differ from her, the Church should shape her teachings more in accord with the spirit of the age and relax some of her ancient severity and make some concessions to new opinions. Many think that these concessions should be made not only in regard to ways of living, but even in regard to doctrines which belong to the deposit of the faith. They contend that it would be opportune, in order to gain those who differ from us, to omit certain points of her teaching which are of lesser importance, and to tone down the meaning which the Church has always attached to them. It does not need many words, beloved son, to prove the falsity of these ideas if the nature and origin of the doctrine which the Church proposes are recalled to mind. The Vatican Council says concerning this point: "For the doctrine of faith which God has revealed has not been proposed, like a philosophical invention to be perfected by human ingenuity, but has been delivered as a divine deposit to the Spouse of Christ to be faithfully kept and infallibly declared. Hence that meaning of the sacred dogmas is perpetually to be retained which our Holy Mother, the Church, has once declared, nor is that meaning ever to be departed from under the pretense or pretext of a deeper comprehension of them." -Constitutio de Fide Catholica, Chapter iv.

We cannot consider as altogether blameless the silence which purposely leads to the omission or neglect of some of the principles of Christian doctrine, for all the principles come from the same Author and Master, "the Only Begotten Son, Who is in the bosom of the Father."-John i, I8. They are adapted to all times and all nations, as is clearly seen from the words of our Lord to His apostles: "Going, therefore, teach all nations; teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you, and behold, I am with you all days, even to the end of the world."-Matt. xxviii, 19. Concerning this point the Vatican Council says: "All those things are to be believed with divine and catholic faith which are contained in the Word of God, written or handed down, and which the Church, either by a solemn judgment or by her ordinary and universal magisterium, proposes for belief as having been divinely revealed."-Const. de fide, Chapter iii.

 

Popes Pius XI and XII clearly and unequivocally explained the the binding nature of Catholic Social Teaching:

Many believe in or claim that they believe in and hold fast to Catholic doctrine on such questions as social authority, the right of owning private property, on the relations between capital and labor, on the rights of the laboring man, on the relations between Church and State, religion and country, on the relations between the different social classes, on international relations, on the rights of the Holy See and the prerogatives of the Roman Pontiff and the Episcopate, on the social rights of Jesus Christ, Who is the Creator, Redeemer, and Lord not only of individuals but of nations. In spite of these protestations, they speak, write, and, what is more, act as if it were not necessary any longer to follow, or that they did not remain still in full force, the teachings and solemn pronouncements which may be found in so many documents of the Holy See, and particularly in those written by Leo XIII, Pius X, and Benedict XV.

There is a species of moral, legal, and social modernism which We condemn, no less decidedly than We condemn theological modernism.

It is necessary ever to keep in mind these teachings and pronouncements which We have made; it is no less necessary to reawaken that spirit of faith, of supernatural love, and of Christian discipline which alone can bring to these principles correct understanding, and can lead to their observance. This is particularly important in the case of youth, and especially those who aspire to the priesthood, so that in the almost universal confusion in which we live they at least, as the Apostle writes, will not be "tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine by the wickedness of men, by cunning craftiness, by which they lie in wait to deceive." (Ephesians iv, 14) (Pope Pius XI, Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, December 23, 1922; Thomas A. Droleskey note: "It is necessary ever to keep in mind these teachings and pronouncements We have made" has no expiration date!)

Nor must it be thought that what is expounded in Encyclical Letters does not of itself demand consent, since in writing such Letters the Popes do not exercise the supreme power of their Teaching Authority. For these matters are taught with the ordinary teaching authority, of which it is true to say: "He who heareth you, heareth me"; and generally what is expounded and inculcated in Encyclical Letters already for other reasons appertains to Catholic doctrine. But if the Supreme Pontiffs in their official documents purposely pass judgment on a matter up to that time under dispute, it is obvious that that matter, according to the mind and will of the same Pontiffs, cannot be any longer considered a question open to discussion among theologians. (Pope Pius XII, Humani Generis, August 12, 1950.)

Assuming false and unjust premises, they are not afraid to take a position which would confine within a narrow scope the supreme teaching authority of the Church, claiming that there are certain questions -- such as those which concern social and economic matters -- in which Catholics may ignore the teachings and the directives of this Apostolic See.

This opinion -- it seems entirely unnecessary to demonstrate its existence -- is utterly false and full of error because, as We declared a few years ago to a special meeting of Our Venerable Brethren in the episcopacy:

"The power of the Church is in no sense limited to so-called 'strictly religious matters'; but the whole matter of the natural law, its institution, interpretation and application, in so far as the moral aspect is concerned, are within its power.

"By God's appointment the observance of the natural law concerns the way by which man must strive toward his supernatural end. The Church shows the way and is the guide and guardian of men with respect to their supernatural end."

This truth had already been wisely explained by Our Predecessor St. Pius X in his Encyclical Letter Singulari quadam of September 24, 1912, in which he made this statement: "All actions of a Christian man so far as they are morally either good or bad -- that is, so far as they agree with or are contrary to the natural and divine law -- fall under the judgment and jurisdiction of the Church."

Moreover, even when those who arbitrarily set and defend these narrow limits profess a desire to obey the Roman Pontiff with regard to truths to be believed, and to observe what they call ecclesiastical directives, they proceed with such boldness that they refuse to obey the precise and definite prescriptions of the Holy See. They protest that these refer to political affairs because of a hidden meaning by the author, as if these prescriptions took their origin from some secret conspiracy against their own nation. (Pope Pius XII, Ad Apostolorum Principis, June 29, 1958.)

 

What Pope Pius XII wrote about the rejection of the Catholic Church's Social Teaching by the Red Chinese "Patriotic Catholic Association" applies universally, yes, even to those in the United States of America believe that they can "revise" and/or reject the Church's perennial, immutable Social Teaching that does not conform to their "philosophical" or "ideological" predilections, especially the false, unfettered "rights" of "freedom of speech" and "freedom of press" and "freedom of conscience" that were denounced and condemned so eloquently by Pope Gregory XVI in Mirari Vos, August 15, 1832:

This shameful font of indifferentism gives rise to that absurd and erroneous proposition which claims that liberty of conscience must be maintained for everyone. It spreads ruin in sacred and civil affairs, though some repeat over and over again with the greatest impudence that some advantage accrues to religion from it. "But the death of the soul is worse than freedom of error," as Augustine was wont to say.When all restraints are removed by which men are kept on the narrow path of truth, their nature, which is already inclined to evil, propels them to ruin. Then truly "the bottomless pit" is open from which John saw smoke ascending which obscured the sun, and out of which locusts flew forth to devastate the earth. Thence comes transformation of minds, corruption of youths, contempt of sacred things and holy laws -- in other words, a pestilence more deadly to the state than any other. Experience shows, even from earliest times, that cities renowned for wealth, dominion, and glory perished as a result of this single evil, namely immoderate freedom of opinion, license of free speech, and desire for novelty.

Here We must include that harmful and never sufficiently denounced freedom to publish any writings whatever and disseminate them to the people, which some dare to demand and promote with so great a clamor. We are horrified to see what monstrous doctrines and prodigious errors are disseminated far and wide in countless books, pamphlets, and other writings which, though small in weight, are very great in malice. We are in tears at the abuse which proceeds from them over the face of the earth. Some are so carried away that they contentiously assert that the flock of errors arising from them is sufficiently compensated by the publication of some book which defends religion and truth. Every law condemns deliberately doing evil simply because there is some hope that good may result. Is there any sane man who would say poison ought to be distributed, sold publicly, stored, and even drunk because some antidote is available and those who use it may be snatched from death again and again?

 

"But the death of the soul is worse than the freedom of error." Some, echoing Pontius Pilate's refrain ("What is truth"--John 18: 38),  are wont to say, "What is error?" so as to justify their own contention that the Catholic Church has taught "errors" in her Social Teaching. Such a belief, if it is held knowingly and pertinaciously, puts one outside of the Catholic Church as she is incapable of teaching error of any kind.

Fed a steady dose of the false ecclesiology offered by the Society of Saint Pius X, however, at least a few Catholics believe that a critique of the conciliar "pontiffs" can be applied as well to "pre-conciliar" pontiffs, thus making a mockery of the infallibility of the Church's Ordinary Magisterium as "truth" is sought outside of the Church in the "philosophies" and schemes of naturalists, men called "insane" by Pope Pius IX in Quanta Cura, December 8, 1864, and "insane dreamers" and "miscreants" by Pope Saint Pius X in Notre Charge Apostolique, August 15,1910. And although Pope Leo XIII noted in Libertas, June 20, 1888, that the moderate and restrained exercise of speech and press is not objectionable, he took note of the same reality as had his two immediate predecessors, Popes Gregory XVI and Pius IX:

We must now consider briefly liberty of speech, and liberty of the press. It is hardly necessary to say that there can be no such right as this, if it be not used in moderation, and if it pass beyond the bounds and end of all true liberty. For right is a moral power which -- as We have before said and must again and again repeat -- it is absurd to suppose that nature has accorded indifferently to truth and falsehood, to justice and injustice. Men have a right freely and prudently to propagate throughout the State what things soever are true and honorable, so that as many as possible may possess them; but lying opinions, than which no mental plague is greater, and vices which corrupt the heart and moral life should be diligently repressed by public authority, lest they insidiously work the ruin of the State. The excesses of an unbridled intellect, which unfailingly end in the oppression of the untutored multitude, are no less rightly controlled by the authority of the law than are the injuries inflicted by violence upon the weak. And this all the more surely, because by far the greater part of the community is either absolutely unable, or able only with great difficulty, to escape from illusions and deceitful subtleties, especially such as flatter the passions. If unbridled license of speech and of writing be granted to all, nothing will remain sacred and inviolate; even the highest and truest mandates of natures, justly held to be the common and noblest heritage of the human race, will not be spared. Thus, truth being gradually obscured by darkness, pernicious and manifold error, as too often happens, will easily prevail. Thus, too, license will gain what liberty loses; for liberty will ever be more free and secure in proportion as license is kept in fuller restraint. In regard, however, to all matter of opinion which God leaves to man's free discussion, full liberty of thought and of speech is naturally within the right of everyone; for such liberty never leads men to suppress the truth, but often to discover it and make it known.

A like judgment must be passed upon what is called liberty of teaching. There can be no doubt that truth alone should imbue the minds of men, for in it are found the well-being, the end, and the perfection of every intelligent nature; and therefore nothing but truth should be taught both to the ignorant and to the educated, so as to bring knowledge to those who have it not, and to preserve it in those who possess it. For this reason it is plainly the duty of all who teach to banish error from the mind, and by sure safeguards to close the entry to all false convictions. From this it follows, as is evident, that the liberty of which We have been speaking is greatly opposed to reason, and tends absolutely to pervert men's minds, in as much as it claims for itself the right of teaching whatever it pleases -- a liberty which the State cannot grant without failing in its duty. And the more so because the authority of teachers has great weight with their hearers, who can rarely decide for themselves as to the truth or falsehood of the instruction given to them.

Wherefore, this liberty, also, in order that it may deserve the name, must be kept within certain limits, lest the office of teaching be turned with impunity into an instrument of corruption. Now, truth, which should be the only subject matter of those who teach, is of two kinds: natural and supernatural. Of natural truths, such as the principles of nature and whatever is derived from them immediately by our reason, there is a kind of common patrimony in the human race. On this, as on a firm basis, morality, justice, religion, and the very bonds of human society rest: and to allow people to go unharmed who violate or destroy it would be most impious, most foolish, and most inhuman.

But with no less religious care must we preserve that great and sacred treasure of the truths which God Himself has taught us. By many and convincing arguments, often used by defenders of Christianity, certain leading truths have been laid down: namely, that some things have been revealed by God; that the Only begotten Son of God was made flesh, to bear witness to the truth; that a perfect society was founded by Him -- the Church, namely, of which He is the head, and with which He has promised to abide till the end of the world. To this society He entrusted all the truths which He had taught, in order that it might keep and guard them and with lawful authority explain them; and at the same time He commanded all nations to hear the voice of the Church, as if it were His own, threatening those who would not hear it with everlasting perdition. Thus, it is manifest that man's best and surest teacher is God, the Source and Principle of all truth; and the only-begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, the Way, the Truth, and the Life, the true Light which enlightens every man, and to whose teaching all must submit: "And they shall all be taught of God."

 

No one, whether he be Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI or a disciple of "enlightenment" authors or the American founding fathers or theorists such as Murray Rothbard, is free to reject this statement of truth. Error has no rights. No man is morally "free" to propagate error, although, admittedly, the specific ability to limit such propagation depends upon various circumstances and requires a prudential judgment in the practical order of things that must be submitted to the judgment of Holy Mother Church. No one has the "right" to "teach"  that which is contrary to the Deposit of Faith and thus offensive to God and injurious to the souls for whom He shed every single drop of His Most Precious Blood on the wood of the Holy Cross, injurious also and as a direct consequence to the whole of social order.

This is the teaching of the Catholic Church. No one, especially a Catholic, has any moral freedom from God to put this teaching into question, no less reject it outright. And one of the ways in which we can use our Catholic reason to conclude that Joseph Ratzinger expelled himself from the Church early in his priesthood, if not in his seminary days by his rejection of Scholasticism in favor of the "new theology," is that he does not believe that the civil state has any right, in theory or in practice, to curb the propagation of error under any circumstances at all. He is thus of one mind and heart with disciples of "enlightenment" authors and the American founding fathers and theorists such as Murray Rothbard, who exalted "human liberty" without regard to a due submission of human wills to the authority of the Catholic Church on matters of Faith and Morals.

There are indeed at least a few Catholics who have learned from the Society of Saint Pius X to apply its false "resist and recognize" ecclesiology not only to the conciliar "pontiffs," but to any true pope whose reiteration of the Church's perennial, immutable Social Teaching conflicts with their own intellectual demigods.

Given the damage that has been done to the Catholic Church's true ecclesiology, it might be useful once again to reprint Mr. Michael Creighton's excellent syllabus of the Society of Saint Pius X's errors:

To briefly enumerate some of the problems in the SSPX, they are:

1  A rejection of the of the ordinary magisterium (Vatican I; Session III - Dz1792) which must be divinely revealed. For instance Paul VI claimed that the new mass and Vatican II were his “Supreme Ordinary Magisterium” and John Paul II promulgated his catechism which contains heresies and errors in Fide Depositum by his “apostolic authority” as “the sure norm of faith and doctrine” and bound everyone by saying who believes what was contained therein is in “ecclesial communion”, that is in the Church.

2  A rejection of the divinely revealed teaching expressed in Vatican I , Session IV, that the faith of Peter [the Pope] cannot fail. Three ancient councils are quoted to support this claim. (2nd Lyons, 4th Constantinople & Florence). Pope Paul IV’s bull Cum Ex Apostolatus Officio teaches the same in the negative sense of this definition.

3  A distortion of canon law opposed to virtually all the canonists of the Church prior to Vatican II which tell us a heretical pope ipso facto loses his office by the operation of the law itself and without any declaration. This is expressed in Canon 188.4 which deals with the divine law and footnotes Pope Paul IV’s bull, Cum ex Apostolatus Officio. The SSPX pretends that sections of the code on penalties somehow apply to the pope which flatly contradicted by the law itself. The SSPX pretends that jurisdiction remains in force when the code clearly says jurisdiction is lost and only ‘acts’ of jurisdiction are declared valid until the person is found out (canons 2264-2265). This is simply to protect the faithful from invalid sacraments, not to help heretics retain office and destroy the Church. Charisms of the office, unlike indelible sacraments, require real jurisdiction. The SSPX pretends that penalties of the censure of ipso facto excommunication cannot apply to cardinals since it reserved to Holy See (canon 2227). This is another fabrication since the law does not refer to automatic (latae sententiae) penalties but only to penalties in which a competent judge is needed to inflict or declare penalties on offenders. Therefore it only refers to condemnatory and declaratory sentences but not automatic sentences. To say that ipso facto does not mean what it says is also condemned by Pope Pius VI in Auctorem Fidei.

4  The SSPX holds a form of the Gallican heresy that falsely proposes a council can depose a true pope. This was already tried by the Council of Basle and just as history condemned those schismatics, so it will condemn your Lordship. This belief also denies canon 1556 “The First See is Judged by no one.” This of course means in a juridical sense of judgment, not remaining blind to apostasy, heresy and crime which automatically takes effect.

5  The SSPX denies the visible Church must manifest the Catholic faith. They claim that somehow these men who teach heresy can’t know truth. This is notion has been condemned by Vatican I, Session III, Chapter 2. It is also condemned by canon 16 of the 1917 code of canon law. Clearly LaSalette has been fulfilled. Rome is the seat of anti-Christ & the Church is eclipsed. Clearly, our Lords words to Sr. Lucy at Rianjo in 1931 have come to pass. His “Ministers [Popes] have followed the kings of France into misfortune”.

6  The SSPX reject every doctor of the Church and every Church father who are unanimous in stating a heretic ipso facto is outside the Church and therefore cannot possess jurisdiction & pretends that is only their opinion when St. Robert states “... it is proven, with arguments from authority and from reason, that the manifest heretic is ipso facto deposed.” The authority he refers to is the magisterium of the Church, not his own opinion.

7  Pope Pius XII’s Vacantis Apostolicae Sedis is misinterpreted by the SSPX to validly elect a heretic to office against the divine law. A public heretic cannot be a cardinal because he automatically loses his office. This decree only refers to cardinals and hence it does not apply to ex-cardinals who automatically lost their offices because they had publicly defected from the Catholic faith. The cardinals mentioned in this decree who have been excommunicated are still Catholic and still cardinals; hence their excommunication does not cause them to become non-Catholics and lose their offices, as does excommunication for heresy and public defection from the Catholic faith. This is what the Church used to call a minor excommunication. All post 1945 canonists concur that Vacantis Apostolicae Sedis does not remove ipso facto excommunication: Eduardus F. Regatillo (1956), Matthaeus Conte a Coronata (1950), Serapius Iragui (1959), A. Vermeersch - I. Creusen (1949), Udalricus Beste (1946) teach that a pope or cardinal or bishop who becomes a public heretic automatically loses his office and a public heretic cannot legally or validly obtain an office. Even supposing this papal statement could apply to non-Catholics (heretics), Pope Pius XII goes on to say “at other times they [the censures] are to remain in vigor” Does this mean the Pope intends that a notorious heretic will take office and then immediately lose his office? It is an absurd conclusion, hence we must respect the interpretation of the Church in her canonists.

Errors/Heresies typical of an SSPX chapel attendees & priests:

1)  We are free to reject rites promulgated by the Church. [Condemned by Trent Session VII, Canon XIII/Vatican I, Session II]

2)  The Pope can’t be trusted to make judgments on faith and morals. We have to sift what is Catholic. [Condemned by Vatican I, Session IV, Chapter III.]

3) We are free to reject or accept ordinary magisterial teachings from a pope since they can be in error. This rejection may include either the conciliar ‘popes’ when teach heresy or the pre-conciliar popes in order to justify the validity of the conciliar popes jurisdiction, sacraments, etc [Condemned by Vatican I (Dz1792)/Satis Cognitum #15 of Leo XIII]

4)  The Kantian doctrine of unknowability of reality. We can’t know what is heresy, therefore we can’t judge. [Condemned by Vatican I, Session III, Chapter 2: On Revelation, Jn7:24].

5)  The faith of the Pope can fail. Frequently this is expressed as “we work for” or “we pray for the Popes conversion to the Catholic faith”. [condemned by Vatican I and at least 3 earlier councils mentioned above].

6)  Universal salvation, ecumenism, religious liberty, validity of the Old Covenant, etc. can be interpreted in a Catholic sense. [Condemned by every saint, every doctor of the Church and every Pope who comments on such issues; for instance Pope Eugene IV (Cantate Domino – Council of Florence)]

7)  Contraries can be true. [Hegelian doctrine against Thomistic Philosophy]. If these positions appear to be contradictory, they are.

When I point out these positions are against the Faith, frequently the Hegelian doctrine is employed by those in attendance at the SSPX chapel.

 

Some have claimed that sedevacantists are "psychologically" unwilling to "accept" the "truth" that popes can teach error when not speaking ex cathedra. This "truth" is a myth, a falsehood. The actual fact of the matter is that those who persist in a rejection of Holy Mother Church's perennial, immutable Social Teaching are intellectually unwilling to admit that they are wrong, that their "enlightenment" and "libertarian" mentors were wrong, that it is indeed the consistent teaching of the Catholic Church that the civil state has the obligation as a matter of principle, whether or not it can be realized in the concrete circumstances of our times, to recognize her as the true religion and to foster those conditions conducive to the sanctification and salvation of the souls of its citizens.

This intellectual unwillingness to admit a failure to submit one's mind and will wholly and without reservation to the Church's Social Teaching predisposes such people to accept the "legitimacy" of the conciliar "pontiffs" who believe as they do on social questions, leaving them free to reject and to criticize those things that they do not "like" about the words and deeds of those "pontiffs." This is nice work if you get it, but it has nothing to do with being a member of the Catholic Church in good standing. And this is, if you think about it, the exact mentality of many ordinary Catholics in the conciliar structures who believe that they have a "right" to violate the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law as they see fit on various matters (abortion, contraception, perversity). We must obey the Catholic Church in all things that pertain to Faith and Morals, and this includes her Social Teaching.

III. The Very Air We Breathe is Pelagian

Unlike the disciples of "enlightenment" authors and the American founding fathers and libertarian theorists, Father Frederick Faber understood that the anti-Incarnational spirit of Modernity was Pelagian and was making the Faith an irrelevancy in social life, resulting in devastating consequences for men and their nations in his day, the middle of the Nineteenth Century:

All devotions have their characteristics; all of them have their own theological meanings. We must say something, therefore, upon the characteristics of the devotion to the Precious Blood. In reality the whole Treatise has more or less illustrated this matter. But something still remains to be said, and something will bear to be repeated. We will take the last first. Devotion to the Precious Blood is the devotional expression of the prominent and characteristic teaching of St. Paul. St. Paul is the apostle of redeeming grace. A devout study of his epistles would be our deliverance from most of the errors of the day. He is truly the apostle of all ages. To each age doubtless he seems to have a special mission. Certainly his mission to our is very special. The very air we breathe is Pelagian. Our heresies are only novel shapes of an old Pelagianism. The spirit of the world is eminently Pelagian. Hence it comes to pass that wrong theories among us are always constructed round a nuclear of Pelagianism; and Pelagianism is just the heresy which is least able to breathe in the atmosphere of St. Paul. It is the age of the natural as opposed to the supernatural, of the acquired as opposed to the infused, of the active as opposed to the passive. This is what I said in an earlier chapter, and here repeat. Now, this exclusive fondness for the natural is on the whole very captivating. It takes with the young, because it saves thought. It does not explain difficulties; but it lessens the number of difficulties to be explained. It takes with the idle; it dispenses from slowness and research. It takes with the unimaginative, because it withdraws just the very element in religion which teases them. It takes with the worldly, because it subtracts the enthusiasm from piety and the sacrifice from spirituality. It takes with the controversial, because it is a short road and a shallow ford. It forms a school of thought which, while it admits that we have an abundance of grace, intimates that we are not much better for it. It merges privileges in responsibilities, and makes the sovereignty of God odious by representing it as insidious. All this whole spirit, with all its ramifications, perishes in the sweet fires of devotion to the Precious Blood.

The time is also one of libertinage; and a time of libertinage is always, with a kind of practical logic, one of infidelity. Whatever brings out God's side in creation, and magnifies his incessant supernatural operation in it, is the controversy which infidelity can least withstand. Now, the devotion to the Precious Blood does this in a very remarkable way. It shows that the true significance in every thing is to be found in the scheme of redemption, apart from which it is useless to discuss the problems of creation. (Father Frederick Faber, The Precious Blood, written in 1860, republished by TAN Books and Publishers, pp. 258-259.)

 

"God's side in creation" has been entrusted exclusively to the Catholic Church, not to the Modernists, not to the "new theologians," not to John Locke or David Hume or Francis Bacon or Thomas Hobbes or Jean-Jacques Rousseau or Immanuel Kant or Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel or Murray Rothbard, who believed that the "self-ownership" of one's body permitted a woman to kill her preborn child. How can any Catholic look to a pro-abort for "intellectual guidance" on any issue?

Alas, it is the naturalistic, anti-Incarnational, religiously indifferentist and semi-Pelagian world of Modernity that has produced the false opposites of the "left" and the "right" in the Judeo-Masonic fraud that is electoral politics and has given us such intellectual "heavy weights" as George Herbert Walker Bush and Barack Hussein Obama in quick succession to each other as various stripes of "conservatives" and "libertarians" and others bemoan a loss of "liberty" that started the moment that Martin Luther "liberated" half of Germany from the true Church, the Catholic Church, the one and only guardian of true liberty, that won for us on the wood of the Holy Cross by Our Divine Redeemer, the liberty from the power of sin and eternal death.

A world created and sustained by madness will look to everyone and everything except the Catholic Church for direction, which is why the counterfeit church of conciliarism's "reconciliation" with the principles of Modernity and Ratzinger/Benedict's rejection of the confessionally Catholic civil state and his embrace of the heresy of religious liberty in the name of the logically absurd and dogmatically condemned "hermeneutic of continuity and discontinuity" have played major contributing towards imprisoning Catholics in the falsehoods of Modernity as they look to one naturalist after another to "solve" problems that can be ameliorated only by a daily conversion to the true Faith in cooperation with Sanctifying Grace.

IV. We Must Proclaim the Holy Name, Which Is What We Do 153 Times Every Day We Pray All Fifteen Mysteries of Our Lady's Rosary

Today, apart from being the last of our Rogation Days and the Vigil of the Ascension, is the Commemoration of Saint Bernardine of Siena, the great apostle of the Holy Name of Jesus. It of, of course, the Holy Name of Jesus that we proclaim one hundred fifty-three times every day when we pray all fifteen mysteries of Our Lady's Most Holy Rosary.

One of the saddest aspects of Modernity is that most people believe that they have the civil "right" to blaspheme the Holy Name of Our Divine Redeemer, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ or to refuse to bow their heads at the mention of the only Name given to men on earth and in Heaven by which we are to be saved. This sadness is compounded by the willingness of formerly Catholic institutions of higher education, such as Georgetown University, to cover up Saint Ignatius of Loyola's monogram for the Holy Name of Jesus, IHS, to placate the pro-abort statist, Caesar Obamus, when he spoke at Gaston Hall there on Wednesday, April 15, 2009 (see Ashamed of the NAME Above All Names).

The willingness, however, to subordinate the Holy Name of Jesus and the Catholic Faith is not limited to hard-core conciliar revolutionaries, such as Ratzinger/Benedict, who refused to proclaim the Holy Name of Jesus in front of Mohammedans and Jews during his recent pilgrimage to Jordan and Israel, save for one or two gratuitous references, and who treated mosques and and Talmudic places of "prayer" as "sacred' to God, or to those specializing in historical revisionism or who propagate libertarianism and its utter disregard for the binding nature of Catholic Social Teaching.

Even "conservative," "pro-life" Catholics, such as "Father" Frank Pavone of Priests for life, a man who is thoroughly imbued with the inter-related ethos of Americanism and conciliarism, believe that such travesties of Barack Hussein Obama's award by and appearance at the University of Notre Dame should be opposed on the grounds of his, Obama's, failing to fulfill his duties as President of the United States of America, not on the grounds of the Catholic Faith:

We're not here disagreeing with the president because he contradicts Catholic teaching or what it means to be Catholic. The problem is he contradicts what it means to be president.

This is about abortion. And in 2008 there were 37 executions. Just today there will be 37 babies at 21 weeks of gestation or more — the size of a large banana — dismembered, crushed, thrown in the garbage. And the president is not raising his voice, recognizing their right to be protected. That's the problem. (http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,520464,00.html)

No, "Father" Pavone, you are as wrong now as you were back in 1996 when you were telling pro-life voters in the Republican primaries and causes that year that they had to vote for hapless, ever-inarticulate and mercurial thirty-third degree Mason, Robert Joseph Dole, Jr., because he was, to use your term, the "electable" candidate (as opposed to Patrick Joseph Buchanan).

Babies are being killed under cover of law in the United States of America and elsewhere in the world because of the overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King wrought by the Protestant Revolt and enshrined in the Constitution of the United States of America, which does not admit that the Catholic Church has the right, given to her by her Divine Founder and Invisible Head, to interpose herself with civil authorities as a Last Resort, following the exhausting of her Indirect Power of teaching and preaching and exhortation, if they propose to do anything contrary to the good of souls. It is only as Catholics that we must oppose the evils of the day whose enshrinement under cover of law is but the logical consequence of the overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King. And Catholics must state publicly that the abortion of little preborn babies in their mothers' wombs is made more possible when a putative "pontiff" aborts all reverence for the Holy Name of Jesus by violating the First Commandment repeatedly and brazenly to esteem the symbols and places and "values" of one false religion after another.

We must be Catholic in everything we do and say, as Pope Leo XIII made clear in Sapientiae Christianae, January 10, 1890:

The chief elements of this duty consist in professing openly and unflinchingly the Catholic doctrine, and in propagating it to the utmost of our power. For, as is often said, with the greatest truth, there is nothing so hurtful to Christian wisdom as that it should not be known, since it possesses, when loyally received, inherent power to drive away error. So soon as Catholic truth is apprehended by a simple and unprejudiced soul, reason yields assent

 

"Father" Pavone, like any other conciliarist who believes in the "founding principles" that are premised upon the belief that men can know social order without a due submission to the Deposit of Faith and and without a firm reliance upon Sanctifying Grace, is incapable of stating publicly that Catholicism is the one and only foundation of personal and social order, that true patriotism wills the good of one's country, the ultimate expression of which is her conversion to the Catholic Faith.

Pope Leo XIII explained in Sapientiae Christianae that we must love God before we love our country, and that our love of country must be premised on willing her good:

As to what We have called the goods of the soul, which consist chiefly in the practice of the true religion and in the unswerving observance of the Christian precepts, We see them daily losing esteem among men, either by reason of forgetfulness or disregard, in such wise that all that is gained for the well-being of the body seems to be lost for that of the soul. A striking proof of the lessening and weakening of the Christian faith is seen in the insults too often done to the Catholic Church, openly and publicly -- insults, indeed, which an age cherishing religion would not have tolerated. For these reasons, an incredible multitude of men is in danger of not achieving salvation; and even nations and empires themselves cannot long remain unharmed, since, when Christian institutions and morality decline, the main foundation of human society goes together with them. Force alone will remain to preserve public tranquillity and order. But force is very feeble when the bulwark of religion has been removed, and, being more apt to beget slavery than obedience, it bears within itself the germs of ever-increasing troubles. The present century has encountered memorable disasters, and it is not certain that some equally terrible are not impending.

The very times in which we live are warning us to seek remedies there where alone they are to be found -- namely, by re-establishing in the family circle and throughout the whole range of society the doctrines and practices of the Christian religion. In this lies the sole means of freeing us from the ills now weighing us down, of forestalling the dangers now threatening the world. For the accomplishment of this end, venerable brethren, We must bring to bear all the activity and diligence that lie within Our power. Although we have already, under other circumstances, and whenever occasion required, treated of these matters, We deem it expedient in this letter to define more in detail the duties of the Catholics, inasmuch as these would, if strictly observed, wonderfully contribute to the good of the commonwealth. We have fallen upon times when a violent and well-nigh daily battle is being fought about matters of highest moment, a battle in which it is hard not to be sometimes deceived, not to go astray and, for many, not to lose heart. It behooves us, venerable brethren, to warn, instruct, and exhort each of the faithful with an earnestness befitting the occasion: that none may abandon the way of truth.

It cannot be doubted that duties more numerous and of greater moment devolve on Catholics than upon such as are either not sufficiently enlightened in relation to the Catholic faith, or who are entirely unacquainted with its doctrines. Considering that forthwith upon salvation being brought out for mankind, Jesus Christ laid upon His Apostles the injunction to "preach the Gospel to every creature," He imposed, it is evident, upon all men the duty of learning thoroughly and believing what they were taught. This duty is intimately bound up with the gaining of eternal salvation: "He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not, shall be condemned. But the man who has embraced the Christian faith, as in duty bound, is by that very fact a subject of the Church as one of the children born of her, and becomes a member of that greatest and holiest body, which it is the special charge of the Roman Pontiff to rule with supreme power, under its invisible head, Jesus Christ.

Now, if the natural law enjoins us to love devotedly and to defend the country in which we had birth, and in which we were brought up, so that every good citizen hesitates not to face death for his native land, very much more is it the urgent duty of Christians to be ever quickened by like feelings toward the Church. For the Church is the holy City of the living God, born of God Himself, and by Him built up and established. Upon this earth, indeed, she accomplishes her pilgrimage, but by instructing and guiding men she summons them to eternal happiness. We are bound, then, to love dearly the country whence we have received the means of enjoyment this mortal life affords, but we have a much more urgent obligation to love, with ardent love, the Church to which we owe the life of the soul, a life that will endure forever. For fitting it is to prefer the good of the soul to the well-being of the body, inasmuch as duties toward God are of a far more hallowed character than those toward men.

Moreover, if we would judge aright, the supernatural love for the Church and the natural love of our own country proceed from the same eternal principle, since God Himself is their Author and originating Cause. Consequently, it follows that between the duties they respectively enjoin, neither can come into collision with the other. We can, certainly, and should love ourselves, bear ourselves kindly toward our fellow men, nourish affection for the State and the governing powers; but at the same time we can and must cherish toward the Church a feeling of filial piety, and love God with the deepest love of which we are capable. The order of precedence of these duties is, however, at times, either under stress of public calamities, or through the perverse will of men, inverted. For, instances occur where the State seems to require from men as subjects one thing, and religion, from men as Christians, quite another; and this in reality without any other ground, than that the rulers of the State either hold the sacred power of the Church of no account, or endeavor to subject it to their own will. Hence arises a conflict, and an occasion, through such conflict, of virtue being put to the proof. The two powers are confronted and urge their behests in a contrary sense; to obey both is wholly impossible. No man can serve two masters, for to please the one amounts to contemning the other.

As to which should be preferred no one ought to balance for an instant. It is a high crime indeed to withdraw allegiance from God in order to please men, an act of consummate wickedness to break the laws of Jesus Christ, in order to yield obedience to earthly rulers, or, under pretext of keeping the civil law, to ignore the rights of the Church; "we ought to obey God rather than men." This answer, which of old Peter and the other Apostles were used to give the civil authorities who enjoined unrighteous things, we must, in like circumstances, give always and without hesitation. No better citizen is there, whether in time of peace or war, than the Christian who is mindful of his duty; but such a one should be ready to suffer all things, even death itself, rather than abandon the cause of God or of the Church.

 

That the counterfeit church of conciliarism rejects the necessity of restoring the confessionally Catholic civil state and exalts the nonexistent "ability" of false religions, each of which is hated by God, to "contribute" to building of the "better" world is a sign of its apostate nature, its abandonment of the mission that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ gave to the Eleven before He Ascended to His Co-Equal and Co-Eternal Father's right hand in glory on Ascension Thursday to convert all men and all nations to the true Faith without any exception at all.

The words of Saint Servatus, therefore, come to mind yet again:

The declaration which he made before the Council of Cologne in 346 informs us both of his meeting with the celebrated Alexandrian doctor and of his own orthodoxy. This is what he says in reference to the bishop of Cologne, deposed on that occasion: "It is not from hearsay that I know what he has been teaching, but from having myself heard it. Our churches are adjacent; many times I have had occasion to contradict him, when he has denied the divinity of Jesus Christ. It has happened in the presence of Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria. .. . I judge that he can no longer be bishop of Christians; and those do not deserve to be considered Christians who remain in communion with him."

 

We cannot remain in communion with any "bishop" or priest or presbyter who is himself in communion with a man who has defected from the Faith in numerous ways, a man who has given us a most public witness of his willingness to deny the Faith in order to curry favor with the adherents of false religions as he, along with revisionists and libertarians, denies the necessity of restoring Social Reign of Christ the King. We must cleave exclusively to true bishops and true priests who make no concessions to conciliarism or its false "shepherds," making sure to live penitential lives as we pray as many Rosaries each day as our states-in-life permit.

Pope Pius XI, writing in Quas Primas, December 11, 1925, certainly was inspired by the apostle of the Holy Name of Jesus, Saint Bernardine of Siena, when he exhorted us to proclaim the Holy Name of Jesus at all times, yes, even in our public discourse, in our parliaments and our assemblies:

We firmly hope, however, that the feast of the Kingship of Christ, which in future will be yearly observed, may hasten the return of society to our loving Savior. It would be the duty of Catholics to do all they can to bring about this happy result. Many of these, however, have neither the station in society nor the authority which should belong to those who bear the torch of truth. This state of things may perhaps be attributed to a certain slowness and timidity in good people, who are reluctant to engage in conflict or oppose but a weak resistance; thus the enemies of the Church become bolder in their attacks. But if the faithful were generally to understand that it behooves them ever to fight courageously under the banner of Christ their King, then, fired with apostolic zeal, they would strive to win over to their Lord those hearts that are bitter and estranged from him, and would valiantly defend his rights.

Moreover, the annual and universal celebration of the feast of the Kingship of Christ will draw attention to the evils which anticlericalism has brought upon society in drawing men away from Christ, and will also do much to remedy them. While nations insult the beloved name of our Redeemer by suppressing all mention of it in their conferences and parliaments, we must all the more loudly proclaim his kingly dignity and power, all the more universally affirm his rights.

May we pray to Our Lady for the day when street signs such as the one below, located just east of Our Lady of the Rosary Chapel in Sunset, Louisiana, will be found in every community and in every country in the whole world:

Viva Cristo Rey! Vivat Christus Rex!

Immaculate Heart of Mary, triumph soon.

 

Our Lady of Guadalupe, 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 Bernardine of Siena, pray for us.

See also: A Litany of Saints

Isn't time to pray a Rosary now?