They Continue To Caricature Themselves

by Thomas A. Droleskey

The following was written nearly four years ago at a time when I had just published GIRM Warfare but about twelve months before I began to do my study that would lead me in April of 2006 to post articles reflective of my openness to the sedevacantist position. What I wrote in They Caricature Themselves as appropriate now as it was forty-seven months, twelve days ago, as will be demonstrated, if ever so briefly, immediately after these passages from that old article:

Revolutionaries get to a point after a time where they start to caricature themselves. The person, for example, who does the broadest caricature of Fidel Castro is none other than Fidel Castro, shouting revolutionary inanities even as he breaks his leg while falling off of a stage. Old revolutionaries never die. They just keep mimicking themselves.

Such is the case with the liturgical revolutionaries in the Church. My recently published GIRM Warfare book discusses how the General Instruction to the Roman Missal (GIRM) makes of the synthetic concoction known as the Novus Ordo Missae little more than a plaything upon which a "presider" or "liturgy committee" may stamp a particular idiosyncratic style, using the endless variety of options available to turn the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass into a gigantic exercise in community self-congratulations. Although the GIRM states positivistically that the Novus Ordo continues an "unbroken tradition" and actually fulfills the mission of the Council of Trent (!), there is little in its 399 paragraphs that speak of immutable parts that cannot be "mixed and matched" by those who have the duty to engage in the absolute novelty, without any precedent in the nearly 2,000 year history of the Catholic Church, of "planning a liturgy."

To wit, the following dispatch from Zenit on December 6, 2004, reads as follows:

 

WASHINGTON, D.C., DEC. 6, 2004 ( Zenit.org ).- The U.S. celebration of the World Day for Consecrated Life will be held Sunday, Feb. 6, across the nation.

The Vatican-sponsored event is marked on Feb. 2 in Rome. John Paul II instituted this annual event in 1997.

Kits to assist parishes and dioceses in commemorating this event are available for purchase from the National Coalition for Church Vocations in Chicago.

The kit includes a liturgy planning guide, music suggestions, general intercessions, prayer-card master, bulletin announcements and clip art.

Kits are available in English and Spanish for $14 each, plus shipping and handling. Quantities of kits are available for purchase at discounted prices.

Kits may not be duplicated for quantity distribution by a diocese, religious congregation, or other organization without the purchase of a bulk distribution permit from the National Coalition for Church Vocations.

Information is available at www.nccv-vocations.org or via nccv400@aol.com.

 

Here's a suggestion to those of you who might be tempted to purchase these kits so that you can get play while planning your own liturgy replete with your "music suggestions": purchase GIRM Warfare instead. You will be equipped to do battle with revolutionaries who caricature themselves ad infinitum and ad nauseam. Get copies for your relatives, friends, parish priests, bishops, and liturgy planners.

P.S. My wife Sharon has a cogent question: "Does the kit come complete with a decoder ring to see if there was really a valid Mass being offered? On second thought, you might not get your decoder ring unless you send in enough of your Bugnini box tops."

 

Although there are parts of G.I.R.M. Warfare that I would revise, my commentary on the counterfeit church of conciliarism's General Instruction to the Roman Missal contains some withering critiques of Novus Ordo "liturgies" that I attended between 1969 and 2001. I was an eyewitness to some of the most atrocious, bizarre, maddening and irrevent displays imaginable including several that were "presided" over by Karol Wojtyla/John Paul II. "The poor Holy Father," I thought to myself at the time. "He has no control over the celebration of these travesties." Oh, yes, I had a whole lot to learn, wouldn't you say?

Even at the local level, however, the irreverence and sacrilege were such to prompt me to write letter after letter to diocesan officials, especially as I sought to get Inaestimabile Donum, an instruction issued by the then named Sacred Congregation for the Sacraments and Divine Worship, on April 17, 1980, as a follow-up to Wojtyla's Holy Thursday letter to priests in the conciliar structures, Dominicae Cenae, February 24, 1980, enforced. I even carried a copy of Inaestimabile Donum on my person and would seek out an offending priest after a putative "Mass" to show him where he had violated the liturgical norms governing the celebration (simulation) of the Novus Ordo service. One priest said, "Get out of here. Rome can issue whatever it wants. We will do liturgy as we please."

To think of the travesties that I witnessed in the 1970s at a time I was considering a vocation to the priesthood in the conciliar structures while completing my doctorate (granted in 1977) and commencing my teaching career (which began as a teaching assistant in January of 1974) is to give me pause to thank Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ and His Most Blessed Mother for their forbearance with me for not walking out on these travesties and coming to recognize that the Catholic Church could in no way be responsible for them. The situation got no better in the 1980s or in the 1990s.

Time does not permit a recitation of all the travesties I witnessed with my own eyes. However, suffice it for the moment to say that I had to endure a "hard rock" "Mass of Christian Burial" for the relative of a schoolmate of mine in September of 1982, various "youth Masses" with mariachis and bongo drums, the sight of large loaves of bread being "consecrated" and distributed as particles of what I believed at the time to be the Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity made Man in Our Lady's Virginal and Immaculate Womb were scattered all over the floor, "priests" telling jokes at the beginning of "Mass" and interpolating during the readings (including the Gospel), lay women in immodest attire distributing what purported to be Holy Communion, outright denials of articles of the Faith from the pulpit, praise for Martin Luther and other heretics, "folk Masses" with hand pumping and applause, and one "Mass," at the revolutionary hothouse known as Saint Brigid's Church in Westbury, New York, which began when the priest, who was from Nigeria, opening the "liturgy" by saying, "Good afternoon, church." This latter improvisation evoked memories of Edward L. Norton's famous salutation to a golf ball in The Honeymooners: The Golfer (Part 2) (the scene in question begins to be set up at six minutes, forty seconds into the video, reaching its hilarious climax about thirty seconds later).

The Mass, however, is no joking matter. A true offering of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass is the unbloody re-presentation of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ's Sacrifice to the Father in Spirit and in Truth in atonement for our sins. Our Blessed Mother, who stood so valiantly by the foot of her Divine Son's Most Holy Cross as the Fifth Sword of Sorrow pierced her Immaculate Heart, was not waving balloons. She was not clapping her hands. She was not dressed in pants. She was not conversing with Saint Mary Magdalene or Saint John the Evangelist. There were no strobe lights or mariachis or bongo drums or steel guitars. Calvary was solemn. The earth quaked as our sins took their toll on the Sacred Humanity of the God-Man, putting Him to death so that we could have life for all eternity.

Pope Pius XII noted in his first encyclical letter, Summi Pontificatus, October 10, 1939, that there was darkness over the whole earth when Our Lord was Crucified to redeem us:

The Holy Gospel narrates that when Jesus was crucified "there was darkness over the whole earth" (Matthew xxvii. 45); a terrifying symbol of what happened and what still happens spiritually wherever incredulity, blind and proud of itself, has succeeded in excluding Christ from modern life, especially from public life, and has undermined faith in God as well as faith in Christ. The consequence is that the moral values by which in other times public and private conduct was gauged have fallen into disuse; and the much vaunted civilization of society, which has made ever more rapid progress, withdrawing man, the family and the State from the beneficent and regenerating effects of the idea of God and the teaching of the Church, has caused to reappear, in regions in which for many centuries shone the splendors of Christian civilization, in a manner ever clearer, ever more distinct, ever more distressing, the signs of a corrupt and corrupting paganism: "There was darkness when they crucified Jesus" (Roman Breviary, Good Friday, Response Five).

Many perhaps, while abandoning the teaching of Christ, were not fully conscious of being led astray by a mirage of glittering phrases, which proclaimed such estrangement as an escape from the slavery in which they were before held; nor did they then foresee the bitter consequences of bartering the truth that sets free, for error which enslaves. They did not realize that, in renouncing the infinitely wise and paternal laws of God, and the unifying and elevating doctrines of Christ's love, they were resigning themselves to the whim of a poor, fickle human wisdom; they spoke of progress, when they were going back; of being raised, when they groveled; of arriving at man's estate, when they stooped to servility. They did not perceive the inability of all human effort to replace the law of Christ by anything equal to it; "they became vain in their thoughts" (Romans i. 21).

With the weakening of faith in God and in Jesus Christ, and the darkening in men's minds of the light of moral principles, there disappeared the indispensable foundation of the stability and quiet of that internal and external, private and public order, which alone can support and safeguard the prosperity of States.

 

These words, although they were written to describe the situation of the world forty days after the outbreak of World War II, could be applied to the devastation that has been wrought upon the Catholic Faith and within the souls of hundreds of millions of Catholics as a result of the travesties engendered by the abomination that is the Protestant and Masonic Novus Ordo service, known these days most reverentially in conciliar circles as "the ordinary form of the Roman Rite."

Look at that second paragraph quoted above, highlighted in bold lettering. One can apply the language contained therein directly to the spirit of the conciliar revolutionaries as the planned the Novus Ordo. The likes of Annibale Bugnini and Ferdinando Antonelli did seek to use a "mirage of glittering phrases" to estrange Catholics from the true Roman Rite of the Catholic Church, claiming that they were "liberating" the liturgy from an "enslavement" to rites and phrases and even doctrines that had become "anachronistic."

Too harsh?

Consider these words written by the late Michael Davies in an article in The Remnant in October of 2003, as he explained the specifically stated goal of Bugnini to change the Breviary for the Feast of Christ the King and in the Good Friday liturgy to reflect Dignitatis Humanae's rejection of the Social Reign of Christ the King

A number of readings from Quas primas itself were included in the Office, and they explained the traditional teaching on Church and State with great clarity. They have all been removed, showing how blatantly the compilers of the new Breviary went about their task of eliminating liturgical references to the Social Kingship of Our Lord Jesus Christ. The removal of these readings from Quas primas must certainly be seen as an affront to the memory and the teaching of Pope Pius XI, at whose behest the Office had been composed only forty years earlier, with the specific aim of reminding rulers that they are bound to give public honour and obedience to Our Lord. Could this great Pope possibly have imagined that within four decades he would have a successor who would totally mutilate the Office that he had approved so recently, and that this mutilation would have the objective of removing any suggestion that rulers are bound to give honour and obedience to Our Lord? Pope Paul VI stated explicitly to the rulers of the world that the Church asked no more of them than freedom to pursue its mission.

The thoroughness with which Archbishop Bugnini's Consilium expunged every specific expression of Our Lord's Social Kingship from the liturgy can hardly be denied. Its members did not even miss a reference to Our Lord's Social Kingship in the Good Friday liturgy. The first of the Solemn Collects, the one for the Church, read:

Let us pray, dearly beloved, for the holy Church of God: that our God and Lord may be pleased to give it peace, keep its unity and preserve it throughout the world: subjecting to it principalities and powers, and may He grant us, while we live in peace and tranquillity, grace to glorify God the Father almighty.  {my emphasis]

This prayer has been replaced by the following:

Let us pray, dear friends, for the holy Church of God throughout the World,

that God, the almighty Father guide it, and gather it together

 so that we may worship him in peace and tranquillity.

Lest anyone should imagine that an undue significance has been placed upon changes in the Breviary and Missal relating to the doctrine of Christ the King, a comment by Archbishop A. Bugnini, Great Architect of the Liturgical Revolution, should prove very illuminating.

In the ecumenical climate of Vatican II, some expressions in the Orationes sollemnes of the Good Friday service had a bad ring to them. There were urgent requests to tone down some of the wording.  It is always unpleasant to have to alter venerable texts that for centuries have effectively nourished Christian devotion and have about them the spiritual fragrance of the heroic age of the Church's beginnings. Above all, it is difficult to revise literary masterpieces that are unsurpassed for their pithy form. It was nevertheless thought necessary to face up to the task, lest anyone find reason for spiritual discomfort in the prayer of the Church. The revisions, limited to what was absolutely necessary, were prepared by study group l8 bis. In Intercession 1: "For the Church," the phrase subiciens ei principatus et potestates ("subjecting principalities and powers to it [the Church]") was omitted: even though this was inspired by what St. Paul says about the "angelic powers" (Col. 2:15), it could be misinterpreted as referring to a temporal role which the Church did indeed have in other periods of history but which is anachronistic today.

So there we have it.  The social kingship of Christ is an anachronism. (The Reign of Christ the King)

 

It can be added that the Catholic Faith and reverence for sacrificial nature of the Mass and the sacerdotal character of the priesthood instituted by Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ Himself at the Last Supper on Maundy Thursday also are "anachronisms" in the Novus Ordo world, especially in "progressive" parishes and on most college campuses and in "liturgies" offered in the context of "the movements" (Focolare, Cursillo, Communion and Liberation, the "Catholic Charismatic Renewal, the Sant'Egidio Community, the Shalom Catholic Community, the Chemin Neuf Community, the International Community of Faith and Light, the Emmanuel Community, the Seguimi Lay Group of Human-Christian Promotion, or, among many, many others, the recently approved Neocatechumenal Way). Look at the travesty of the "papal" liturgies in the past thirty years, including those "celebrated" by Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI in the United States of America and in Australia during World Youth Day four months ago now.

To look at the travesty that was presided over a few days ago by a protege of Ratzinger/Benedict's, Christoph "Cardinal" Schonborn, the conciliar "archbishop" of Vienna, Austria, is to look at the fruit of the ongoing destruction of the Catholic Faith wrought by the conciliar revolution that has so offended God and harmed the souls for whom He shed every single drop of His Most Precious Blood on the wood of the Holy Cross. Look at this travesty and ask yourself if it has anything whatsoever to do with the Catholic Faith, http://www.gloria.tv/?video=pwxa9jff7gs5kldzpiu7. This brief video clip shows a display of rank paganism that has nothing to do with Catholicism in the slightest, proving yet again that thirty-nine years after the Novus Ordo was implemented on November 30, 1969, the first Sunday in Advent, that the irreverence and sacrilege gets bolder and bolder with time as fewer and fewer Catholics have any understanding at all about the honor and glory and majesty of God or of the solemnity befitting the offering of the august mystery of the Sacrifice of the Cross.

Pope Pius XII wrote of the interior spirit of reverence and aw that must govern a Catholic's participation in this august mystery in his encyclical letter on the Sacred Liturgy, Mediator Dei, November 20, 1947:

The worship rendered by the Church to God must be, in its entirety, interior as well as exterior. It is exterior because the nature of man as a composite of body and soul requires it to be so. Likewise, because divine Providence has disposed that "while we recognize God visibly, we may be drawn by Him to love of things unseen." Every impulse of the human heart, besides, expresses itself naturally through the senses; and the worship of God, being the concern not merely of individuals but of the whole community of mankind, must therefore be social as well. This obviously it cannot be unless religious activity is also organized and manifested outwardly. Exterior worship, finally, reveals and emphasizes the unity of the mystical Body, feeds new fuel to its holy zeal, fortifies its energy, intensifies its action day by day: "for although the ceremonies themselves can claim no perfection or sanctity in their won right, they are, nevertheless, the outward acts of religion, designed to rouse the heart, like signals of a sort, to veneration of the sacred realities, and to raise the mind to meditation on the supernatural. They serve to foster piety, to kindle the flame of charity, to increase our faith and deepen our devotion. They provide instruction for simple folk, decoration for divine worship, continuity of religious practice. They make it possible to tell genuine Christians from their false or heretical counterparts." [Droleskey note: Take a look at that video again and see if you can tell if its images do not indeed correspond to that which is false and heretical.]

But the chief element of divine worship must be interior. For we must always live in Christ and give ourselves to Him completely, so that in Him, with Him and through Him the heavenly Father may be duly glorified. The sacred liturgy requires, however, that both of these elements be intimately linked with each another. This recommendation the liturgy itself is careful to repeat, as often as it prescribes an exterior act of worship. Thus we are urged, when there is question of fasting, for example, "to give interior effect to our outward observance." Otherwise religion clearly amounts to mere formalism, without meaning and without content. You recall, Venerable Brethren, how the divine Master expels from the sacred temple, as unworthily to worship there, people who pretend to honor God with nothing but neat and wellturned phrases, like actors in a theater, and think themselves perfectly capable of working out their eternal salvation without plucking their inveterate vices from their hearts. It is, therefore, the keen desire of the Church that all of the faithful kneel at the feet of the Redeemer to tell Him how much they venerate and love Him. She wants them present in crowds -- like the children whose joyous cries accompanied His entry into Jerusalem -- to sing their hymns and chant their song of praise and thanksgiving to Him who is King of Kings and Source of every blessing. She would have them move their lips in prayer, sometimes in petition, sometimes in joy and gratitude, and in this way experience His merciful aid and power like the apostles at the lakeside of Tiberias, or abandon themselves totally, like Peter on Mount Tabor, to mystic union with the eternal God in contemplation.

It is an error, consequently, and a mistake to think of the sacred liturgy as merely the outward or visible part of divine worship or as an ornamental ceremonial. No less erroneous is the notion that it consists solely in a list of laws and prescriptions according to which the ecclesiastical hierarchy orders the sacred rites to be performed.

It should be clear to all, then, that God cannot be honored worthily unless the mind and heart turn to Him in quest of the perfect life, and that the worship rendered to God by the Church in union with her divine Head is the most efficacious means of achieving sanctity.

 

Behold the theater in which God is mocked (http://www.gloria.tv/?video=pwxa9jff7gs5kldzpiu7) and blasphemed. Then again, God is mocked and blasphemed every time the Novus Ordo is offered, no matter how "reverently" its simulation is attempted. Its basic orientation, reflected in its prayers and gestures, are Protestant and Masonic, not Catholic. The ethos of the Novus Ordo leads to "clown Masses" and "folk Masses" and "gay Masses" and "rock Masses" and "African-American Masses" and "Native American Masses" and liturgies incorporating elements from Hinduism and Buddhism and a thousand other different false currents. God has been and continues to be mocked by the conciliar "pontiffs" as they participate in these wretched "liturgies" and as they esteem with their own priestly hands the symbols of false religions that blaspheme God by their very existence as they give worship to the devil day in and day out

Psalm 95, verse 5 tells that the gods of the Gentiles (the pagans) are devils:

For all the gods of the Gentiles are devils: but the Lord made the heavens. (Psalm 95: 5)

 

Psalm 95 also teaches us that we must worship God with reverently and with due respect for His majesty:

Praise and beauty are before him: holiness and majesty in his sanctuary. Bring ye to the Lord, O ye kindreds of the Gentiles, bring ye to the Lord glory and honour: Bring to the Lord glory unto his name. Bring up sacrifices, and come into his courts: Adore ye the Lord in his holy court. Let all the earth be moved at his presence. Say ye among the Gentiles, the Lord hath reigned. For he hath corrected the world, which shall not be moved: he will judge the people with justice. (Psalm 95: 6-10.)

 

Those who want to see the truth concerning the Novus Ordo will do so. Those who do not want to see the truth will try to dismiss the Christoph Schonborn travesty or try to justify it in the name of "reaching the youth. Those possessed of the sensus Catholicus, however, will recognize that the Novus Ordo is now what it has been from its start: abomination founded on an antipathy to the Catholic Faith in order to please Protestants and others outside of the fold of the true Church, a blasphemous concoction that has been true to the goal of its chief architect, expressed very clearly in L'Osservatore Romano on March 19, 1965, Annibale Bugnini, and by a close friend of the late Giovanni Montini/Paul VI, Jean Guitton:

We must strip from our Catholic prayers and from the Catholic liturgy everything which can be the shadow of a stumbling block for our separated brethren that is for the Protestants." (Annibale Bugnini, L'Osservatore Romano, March 19, 1965.)

"[T]he intention of Pope Paul VI with regard to what is commonly called the Mass, was to reform the Catholic liturgy in such a way that it should coincide with the Protestant liturgy.... [T]here was with Pope Paul VI an ecumenical intention to remove, or at least to correct, or at least to relax, what was too Catholic in the traditional sense, in the Mass, and I, repeat, to get the Catholic Mass closer to the Calvinist mass" (Dec. 19, 1993), Apropos, #17, pp. 8f; quoted in Christian Order, October, 1994. (Jean Guitton, a close friend of Giovanni Montini/Paul VI. The quotation and citations are found in Christopher A. Ferrara and Thomas E. Woods, Jr., The Great Facade, The Remnant Publishing Company, 2002, p. 317.)

 

My wife and daughter and I are very grateful to Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ and to His Most Blessed Mother that we have been led to the Catholic catacombs where we have found refuge with true bishops and true priests who make no concessions to conciliarism or to the nonexistent legitimacy of "shepherds" such as Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, who esteems false religions and praises their nonexistent ability to "contribute" to the betterment of the world, and his proteges, including the likes of Christoph Schonborn, who participate personally in travesties that no Catholic could have imagined possible as late as seventy years ago. Indeed, the Arians themselves would have take up arms to put down such travesties.

Saint Felix of Valois, whose feast we commemorate today, was a co-founder, along with Saint John Matha, of the Order of the Holy Trinity for the Redemption of Captives, also known as the Trinitarian Fathers. We need the intercession of Saint Felix, who was so devoted to the Mother of God, to help ransom our Catholic dioceses and parishes and schools and the Vatican itself from their captivity at the hands of the conciliar revolutionaries who have mocked God in matters of doctrine and the liturgy. Saint Felix of Valois will help us to remain steadfast in the midst of the storms that surround the Church Militant at this time. He will help us to grow in our love for the Mother God as we give unto her Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart many prayers, especially by means of her Most Holy Rosary, and sacrifices and mortifications and penances to be given by her to the Most Holy Trinity.

The Immaculate Heart of Mary will indeed triumph in the end. We must persevere with confidence each day of our lives as we attempt to make reparation for our sins and those of the whole world as we beg Our Lady that our hearts will be always in unison with her Immaculate Heart and the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

Viva Cristo Rey! Vivat Christus Rex!

Our Lady of the Rosary, us.

Saint Joseph, pray for us.

Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.

Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.

Saint John the Evangelist, pray for us.

Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saints Joachim and Anne, pray for us.

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

Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, pray for us.

Saint Gertrude the Great, pray for us.

Saint Felix of Valois, pray for us.

See also: A Litany of Saints

Isn't it time to pray a Rosary now?