by
Thomas A. Droleskey
The heart is perverse above all things, and unsearchable, who can know it? I am the Lord who search the heart and prove the reins: who give to every one according to his way, and according to the fruit of his devices.(Jeremias 17: 9-10)
Each of us is a weak vessel of clay. Some of us are more prone than others to be inconstant in the ways of the Faith and willful in the pursuit of our own desires. Leaving aside my terrible sins, for which I try to make reparation every day of my life and will be revealed for all to see on the Last Day at the General Judgment of the Living and the Dead, I can only look back with horror on the many mistakes I have made by pursuing my own will rashly rather than taking the advice of those more learned and/or experienced than I was when stubbornly doing as I wanted. Some of these mistakes affect me temporally to this very day. Other mistakes have deprived me of any credibility or respect I may have had in the eyes of those who knew me at the time they were made. All I can do, however, is try to learn from those mistakes and to accept the humiliation heaped upon my disordered pride as a just penance for my sins, attempting to bend my will more perfectly to that of the Most Blessed Trinity, pledging my heart as an oblation to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary.
It is with this very much uppermost in mind that I must make commentary on the tragedy of the pending departure of some of the sisters (others are taking a leave of absence) from the Congregation of Mary Immaculate Queen. That is, I, who have made many mistakes, including mistaken judgments concerning the nature of the crisis afflicting us as Catholics and where to assist at the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, am aware most fully that the adversary wants to cloud our minds with deceit and to weaken our hearts by means of sentimentality and emotionalism. None of us is immune from "falling back," shall we say, from remaining steadfast in our opposition to the clever, diabolical deceits of the counterfeit church of conciliarism. Each of us is in need of remembering these words that were written by the first pope, Saint Peter, under the inspiration of the Third Person of the Most Blessed Trinity, the Holy Ghost:
Be you humbled therefore under the mighty hand of God, that he may exalt you in the time of visitation: Casting all your care upon him, for he hath care of you. Be sober and watch: because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, goeth about seeking whom he may devour. Whom resist ye, strong in faith: knowing that the same affliction befalls your brethren who are in the world. But the God of all grace, who hath called us into his eternal glory in Christ Jesus, after you have suffered a little, will himself perfect you, and confirm you, and establish you (1 Pt. 5: 6-10.)
The fact that any person sees the nature of the diabolical deceits facing us at present is the working of the graces won for us on Calvary by the shedding of Our Lord's Most Precious Blood on the wood of the Holy Cross and that flow into our souls through the loving hands of Our Lady, the Mediatrix of All Graces. We live in truly the most extraordinarily perilous time in the history of the Church. Never before, you see, have the very means by which we can save our souls (and to have our intellects enlightened and our wills strengthened), the sacraments, been attacked by Catholics, which is what happened when priests and bishops with true orders began to plot against the sacrificial nature of the Mass of the Roman Rite in the decades leading up to the "Second Vatican Council" and then attacked the fullness of the priesthood, the episcopate, thereby depriving of us of validly ordained priests before attacking the rite of priestly ordination itself so as to guarantee that not even a validly consecrated bishop could ordain any man to the priesthood in the counterfeit church of conciliarism. The only preserve of true bishops and true priests and true sacraments in the conciliar church is in the Uniat Rites, which are, sadly, nevertheless sullied by their attachment to false popes and to the false bishops of the Latin Rite.
This loss of grace in the Latin Rite of the counterfeit church of conciliarism accounts for why so many Catholics are willing to look at the truth of our situation when it is presented to them. Most of these people, as I noted the other day in
Una Cum Apostasy and Corruption and
Near-Sightedness Writ Large, are perfectly content to remain in the Novus Ordo Missae, which centers around community self-congratulations rather than the worship of God. Those who doubt this can simply look at the art and architecture of newly-designed and wreckovated churches in the conciliar world of syncretism and naturalism, including churches built on the outskirts of Rome itself (and I don't mean Rome, New York, Rome, Georgia, or Rome, Texas), to see how the new religion's liturgy enshrines the deification and glorification of man.
Altar rails have been removed. The preserve of the sanctuary has been invaded by a plethora of the laity, a move of sheer egalitarianism to obliterate any remaining distinctions between the "presider" of the liturgical service and the laity, who are encouraged to distribute what purports to be Holy Communion with their unconsecrated hands. High altars have been smashed, something that would have delighted the black hearts of John Calvin and Oliver Cromwell no end. "Tables" have been put in the middle of the stage where the Novus Ordo service is performed, signifying the celebration of a community meal, not the unbloody re-presentation of the propitiatory Sacrifice of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ to His Heavenly Father in Spirit and in Truth in atonement for our sins, something that was warned about quite specifically by Pope Pius XII in Mediator Dei, November 20, 1947:
Assuredly it is a wise and most laudable thing to return in spirit and affection to the sources of the sacred liturgy. For research in this field of study, by tracing it back to its origins, contributes valuable assistance towards a more thorough and careful investigation of the significance of feast-days, and of the meaning of the texts and sacred ceremonies employed on their occasion. But it is neither wise nor laudable to reduce everything to antiquity by every possible device. Thus, to cite some instances, one would be straying from the straight path were he to wish the altar restored to its primitive tableform; were he to want black excluded as a color for the liturgical vestments; were he to forbid the use of sacred images and statues in Churches; were he to order the crucifix so designed that the divine Redeemer's body shows no trace of His cruel sufferings; and lastly were he to disdain and reject polyphonic music or singing in parts, even where it conforms to regulations issued by the Holy See.
The Novus Ordo Missae demonstrates its man-centeredness (anthropocentricity), which is of the very essence of the naturalist spirit of Modernity, at its very outset. Unlike the Immemorial Mass of Tradition, which begins with the priest making the Sign of the Cross, the Sign, that is, of the Most Blessed Trinity, and then addressing God with these words, Introibo ad altare Dei (I will go in to the altar of God.), the Novus Ordo Missae begins with the priest addressing the congregation, not God, after he makes the Sign of the Cross (which is, in many instances, omitted as a de facto violation of the few fixed rubrics contained in the General Instruction to the Roman Missal). The Novus Ordo Missae goes downhill from there, subject to the celebratory "options" that are available to the presider or to the parish liturgy committee that has authority over the "planning" of the "community worship" (such as whether to use the modernized version of the Confiteor as opposed to some other form of what is called the Penitential Rite) and the vicissitudes of the constituency for which the service is being performed, which vicissitudes are justified in the name of the "inculturation of the Gospel."
Thus it is, ladies and gentlemen, that the lack of graces in the Novus Ordo Missae makes it difficult for most Catholics to see their way out of the abomination of the Protestant-Masonic service that purports to be the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass and to reject the apostasies of the new religion of conciliarism, admitting that some make their way out of the adversary's cleverly devised and executed trap by means of the graces they received in Baptism and the Actual Graces sent to them by Our Lady. Most Catholics, however, have made their peace with the novelties and innovations and abominations that were initiated in the past half-century and have metastasized quite aggressively as the years have progressed, all to the dishonor of God and to the utter detriment of the souls for whom He shed every single drop of His Most Blessed Blood on the wood of the Holy Cross.
As one who was in those structures for a long time and tried to fight the abominations without realizing that they were caused by the very thing in which they occurred, the Novus Ordo Missae and the new religion it enshrines, I have firsthand experience dealing with the wreckage of souls produced by conciliarism. Most of the over 9,000 students I taught in the course of thirty years of formal classroom teaching at the college level were Catholics. Most of them knew nothing about the Faith, and the little that they thought they knew was wrong. Special Creation? Original Sin? The Fall from Grace? Our Lady's Immaculate Conception? Our Lord's Incarnation? The nature of His Redemptive Act on the wood of the Holy Cross? His Bodily Resurrection from the dead on Easter Sunday? The birth of the Catholic Church on Pentecost Sunday? The missionary work of the Church to convert all men and nations to her maternal bosom? The doctrine of the Most Holy Trinity? Papal primacy? Papal infallibility? Modesty? Purity? Innocence? Simple virtue?
Believe me, ladies and gentlemen, when I tell you that most of the students I taught knew nothing about any of these matters of the Faith, prompting one student in 1995 to say out loud during a class lecture at the C. W. Post Campus of Long Island University, "Why hasn't anyone taught me this [meaning the purpose of human existence in light of Original Sin and Our Lord's Redemptive Act] before?" "Because, Anthony," I told him, "you have been the victim of Catholic educational fraud, that's why." This young man's experience is typical, not atypical, in the conciliar structures, which are infected with preternatural forces and are no more "redeemable" by means of "working within them" than the organized crime families known as political parties are capable of being redeemed by "working within them."
Without condemning anyone, it is nothing other than a tragedy that those who have a true bishop and true priests and true sacraments and the fullness of Catholic doctrine believe that the very wreckage of souls that gave rise to communities such as the Congregation of Mary Immaculate Queen either does not exist or represents the true Church. To deny the wreckage of souls produced by conciliarism is to ignore reality. Let us examine each option.
Although The Wanderer does not admit that the problems it chronicles in its pages are the result of conciliarism, preferring to believe that it is simply wayward bishops and bad priests and theologians who have misinterpreted the "Second" Vatican Council (forgetting that the "bishops" responsible for various problems are appointed and promoted by the men recognized as "popes," who have been, it must be believed, simply advised poorly about "episcopal" appointments and do not know what is going on), its pages have been replete for decades with a recitation of problems in the conciliar structures. I wrote about twenty or thirty hard news stories, in addition to scores of commentaries, about those problems between 1992 and 2000. Anyone who wants to take refuge in the belief that conciliarism has not offended God and even attacked priests, both those validly ordained and those not, within its structures who have remained as faithful as they can to the Deposit of Faith is refusing to face the facts of our present time honestly.
Those who, on the other hand, believe that conciliarism represents the true Church must face the reality that many of its approved novelties and errors and heresies have been condemned repeatedly and unequivocally by pope after pope prior to 1958. Joseph Ratzinger believes that the nature of dogmatic truth is subject to change, a fundamental tenet of Modernism and a cornerstone of the entire ethos of conciliarism:
The text [of the Second Vatican Council] also presents the various forms 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 a 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. Its nucleus remains valid, but the particulars, which the circumstances of the times have influenced, may need further ramifications.
“In this regard, one may think of the declarations of Popes in the last 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. 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 immersion in the liberal-bourgeois world. But in the details of the determinations they contain, they become obsolete after having fulfilled their pastoral mission at the proper moment.” (L'Osservatore Romano, July 2, 1990)
This Hegelian view of dogmatic truth has been condemned by the [First] Vatican Council:
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.
Ratzinger's conciliarist view of the evolution of dogma was condemned in the Oath Against Modernism, 1910, that he had to take before he was ordained to the subdiaconate, diaconate and priesthood (which priestly ordination took place on June 29, 1951):
Fourthly, I sincerely hold that the doctrine of faith was handed down to us from the apostles through the orthodox Fathers in exactly the same meaning and always in the same purport. Therefore, I entirely reject the heretical' misrepresentation that dogmas evolve and change from one meaning to another different from the one which the Church held previously. . . .
I firmly hold, then, and shall hold to my dying breath the belief of the Fathers in the charism of truth, which certainly is, was, and always will be in the succession of the episcopacy from the apostles. The purpose of this is, then, not that dogma may be tailored according to what seems better and more suited to the culture of each age; rather, that the absolute and immutable truth preached by the apostles from the beginning may never be believed to be different, may never be understood in any other way.
I promise that I shall keep all these articles faithfully, entirely, and sincerely, and guard them inviolate, in no way deviating from them in teaching or in any way in word or in writing. Thus I promise, this I swear, so help me God. . .
Pope Saint Pius X stated quite firmly in Praestantia Scripturae, November 18, 1907, that those who dared to contradict any of the points in his encyclical letter against Modernism, Pascendi Dominci Gregis, September 8, 1907, or who endorsed any of the propositions contained in Lamentabili Sane, July 3, 1907, incurred the penalty of excommunication:
Moreover, in order to check the daily increasing audacity of many modernists who are endeavoring by all kinds of sophistry and devices to detract from the force and efficacy not only of the decree "Lamentabili sane exitu" (the so-called Syllabus), issued by our order by the Holy Roman and Universal Inquisition on July 3 of the present year, but also of our encyclical letters "Pascendi dominici gregis" given on September 8 of this same year, we do by our apostolic authority repeat and confirm both that decree of the Supreme Sacred Congregation and those encyclical letters of ours, adding the penalty of excommunication against their contradictors, and this we declare and decree that should anybody, which may God forbid, be so rash as to defend any one of the propositions, opinions or teachings condemned in these documents he falls, ipso facto, under the censure contained under the chapter "Docentes" of the constitution "Apostolicae Sedis," which is the first among the excommunications latae sententiae, simply reserved to the Roman Pontiff. This excommunication is to be understood as salvis poenis, which may be incurred by those who have violated in any way the said documents, as propagators and defenders of heresies, when their propositions, opinions and teachings are heretical, as has happened more than once in the case of the adversaries of both these documents, especially when they advocate the errors of the modernists that is, the synthesis of all heresies.
Knowing full well the mind of the "new theologians," the very men who helped to train the mind of the young Joseph Ratzinger in seminary, Pope Pius XII, writing in Humani Generis, August 12, 1950, rejected the belief that what is contained in past encyclical letters does not bind Catholics completely:
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.
The rejection of the nature of dogmatic truth, which admits, at least implicitly, that God is mutable and that His doctrine is never understood perfectly as "truth" can be understood only dimly at any given point in time and must, therefore, be subject to certain "corrections" of interpretation as "modern man" adjusts to the "realities" of new situations, is at the foundation of conciliarism's rejection of dogmatic condemnations of religious liberty, ecumenism and the separation of Church and State. The only way to "reconcile" novelties and condemned errors with the perennial teaching of the Catholic Church is to contend that our understanding of truth changes, as Ratzinger noted in his 1990 L'Osservatore Romano interview. The Catholic Church is incapable of admitting any of this as being true. Indeed, this view of truth was condemned by Pope Saint Pius X in Pascendi Dominici Gregis:
Hence it is quite impossible to maintain that they 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."
There is thus no need to belabor other points of conciliar doctrinal novelties that have been critiqued at length on this site in the past thirteen months or so. It is easy to rationalize religious liberty and separation of Church and State (condemned repeatedly by Catholic Church, perhaps most forcefully in Pope Saint Pius X's
Vehementer Nos and ecumenism (which has consigned billions of souls outside of the Catholic Church to empty lives of materialism and hedonism as the conciliarists believe that there is no absolute need to seek with urgency their conversion to the true Faith before they die) and the new ecclesiology, which is premised upon the heresy of the "Church as Communion" and that the mark of Unity does not exist at present because of divisions wrought by the Greek Schism of 1054 and the Protestant Revolt in the Sixteenth Century (see Bishop Donald Sanborn's
Communion: Ratzingers's Ecumenical One-World Church) and Vatican declarations about past dogmatic pronouncements that, in essence, say that dogmatic councils that were protected by God the Holy Ghost with the charism of infallibility were wrong on various points, as is alleged to be the case with the Council of Trent's Decree on Justification (see Bishop Donald Sanborn's
Critical Analysis of the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification). Each of these novelties flies in the face of the perennial teaching of the Catholic Church, which Pope Pius XI reminded us in Mortalium Animos has always been and will always be unspotted by error:
So, Venerable Brethren, it is clear why this Apostolic See has never allowed its subjects to take part in the assemblies of non-Catholics: for the union of Christians can only be promoted by promoting the return to the one true Church of Christ of those who are separated from it, for in the past they have unhappily left it. To the one true Church of Christ, we say, which is visible to all, and which is to remain, according to the will of its Author, exactly the same as He instituted it. During the lapse of centuries, the mystical Spouse of Christ has never been contaminated, nor can she ever in the future be contaminated, as Cyprian bears witness: "The Bride of Christ cannot be made false to her Spouse: she is incorrupt and modest. She knows but one dwelling, she guards the sanctity of the nuptial chamber chastely and modestly." The same holy Martyr with good reason marveled exceedingly that anyone could believe that "this unity in the Church which arises from a divine foundation, and which is knit together by heavenly sacraments, could be rent and torn asunder by the force of contrary wills." For since the mystical body of Christ, in the same manner as His physical body, is one, compacted and fitly joined together, it were foolish and out of place to say that the mystical body is made up of members which are disunited and scattered abroad: whosoever therefore is not united with the body is no member of it, neither is he in communion with Christ its head
The approved novelties and errors and heresies of conciliarism coexist with the de facto toleration of the promotion of officially unapproved novelties and and errors and heresies, which are expressed from pulpits and in conciliar schools and colleges and universities and seminaries without a word of censure from conciliar chancery offices or the conciliarists who currently hold the Vatican captive to their machinations."Priests" and "religious" in the counterfeit church of Conciliarism can deny various doctrines (including the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary and her perpetual virginity, Our Lord's Sacred Divinity and His Bodily Resurrection on Easter Sunday, the historicity of the Gospels, including the miracles of Our Lord, the inadmissibility of women to the priesthood) and promote openly various forms of immorality and irreligion (such as contraception, abortion, perversity and al manner of New Age and occult forms of "spirituality") with perfect impunity. Some of the conciliar "priests" who do one or more of these things can even rise to the ranks of the false episcopate of the counterfeit church of conciliarism. Conservative conciliarists are thus at war a lot of times with what are termed "progressive" conciliarists, forgetting that the unapproved novelties and errors and apostasies each were made possible when the floodgates of conciliarism opened during the false pontificate of Angelo Roncalli. A mockery is thus made of the Catholic Church's Unity, as described by Pope Leo XIII in Satis Cognitum, June 29, 1896:
Agreement and union of minds is the necessary foundation of this perfect concord amongst men, from which concurrence of wills and similarity of action are the natural results. Wherefore, in His divine wisdom, He ordained in His Church Unity of Faith; a virtue which is the first of those bonds which unite man to God, and whence we receive the name of the faithful - "one Lord, one faith, one baptism" (Eph. iv., 5). That is, as there is one Lord and one baptism, so should all Christians, without exception, have but one faith. And so the Apostle St. Paul not merely begs, but entreats and implores Christians to be all of the same mind, and to avoid difference of opinions: "I beseech you, brethren, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you all speak the same thing, and that there be no schisms amongst you, and that you be perfect in the same mind and in the same judgment" (I Cor. i., 10). Such passages certainly need no interpreter; they speak clearly enough for themselves. Besides, all who profess Christianity allow that there can be but one faith. It is of the greatest importance and indeed of absolute necessity, as to which many are deceived, that the nature and character of this unity should be recognized. And, as We have already stated, this is not to be ascertained by conjecture, but by the certain knowledge of what was done; that is by seeking for and ascertaining what kind of unity in faith has been commanded by Jesus Christ.
Once again, anyone who believes that there is "agreement and union of minds" on matters of Faith and morals in the counterfeit church of conciliarism is simply not facing reality honestly, preferring to project into the minds of the conciliarists a Catholic intention that is not there (something that I do for a long time during the false reign of Karol Wojtyla, believe me).
There are two options facing Catholics in the midst of the errors and novelties and heresies of conciliarism: to accept or to reject conciliarism en toto. There is no middle ground, unless, that is, one wants to adopt the "pick and choose" approach of the condemned heresy of Gallicanism and the Jansenist principles of the illegal Synod of Pistoia that were condemned by Pope Pius VI in Auctorem Fidei, August 28, 1794.
Those who believe that conciliarism is from God must, therefore, embrace the Novus Ordo Missae as completely doctrinal sound, rejecting the analysis of its contents done even by "priests" in the conciliar structures, no less the superb analyses done by such scholars as Patrick Henry Omlor and the late Father James Wathen and Bishop Mark Pivarunas on the invalidity of its words of consecration (see
Comments on Mike Duddy’s Article on the Eucharistic Form of Consecration and Response to Mr. Duddy’s Open Letter to Bishop Pivarunas and CMRI Religious and
A Philological Response to Mike Duddy’s Letter by Dr. Alexander Bril, Ph.D). Also to be ignored or dismissed is the analysis of the Novus Ordo Missae offered by the late Bishop of Campos, Brazil, the Most Reverend Antonio de Castro Mayer, the contents of which were included in Near-Sightedness Writ Large on this site.
Those who believe that conciliarism is from God must, therefore, reject the analyses of the invalidity of the 1968 "rite" of "episcopal consecration" and the "rite" of "priestly ordination" that was codified in 1978 (but began to be used in 1970). They must reject the fact that there are a few priests in the conciliar structures who had themselves ordained by unquestionably valid bishops as they entertained real doubts as to the validity of the 1968 "rite" of "episcopal consecration." These include a priest I will call "Father Firenze" in the middle part of the country and a priest I will call "Father Jacobi" somewhat east of the Alleghenies. The former had himself ordained by his retired bishop in the traditional rite of priestly ordination the day before his "ordination" in the new rite by the then (and current) diocesan bishop. The latter had himself ordained conditionally by a bishop of the Society of Saint Pius X so that his offerings of the Immemorial Mass of Tradition according to the terms of the unjust and illicit conciliar indult would be valid. (Thus we have a supreme irony produced by the conciliar attack on the sacraments: true priests offering a false Mass on most days, save for if and when they offer the Mass of Tradition, and false priests attempting to offer the true Mass every day.) To ignore the fact that even priests in the conciliar structures have studied the matter of their ordination and concluded negatively about it is to plunge oneself into the darkness of a world without Sanctifying Grace.
Those who believe that conciliarism is from God must, therefore, believe that the laity are meant to touch what purports to be the Real Presence of Our Lord in the Most Blessed Sacrament on a regular basis.
Those who believe that conciliarism is from God must, therefore, believe that the Catholic Church was wrong for centuries for including saints on her liturgical calendar who are now said to be "legendary," including Saint Christopher.
Those who believe that conciliarism is from God must, therefore, believe that those who believe in false religions have a civil right to propagate their false beliefs openly in society and that those false beliefs can contribute to the betterment of society.
Those who believe that conciliarism is from God must, therefore, believe that the civil state has no positive obligation to recognize the Catholic Church as the true Church and that the civil state has no positive obligation to pursue the administration of temporal justice in light of man's Last End, the possession of the Beatific Vision of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost for all eternity in Heaven.
Those who believe that conciliarism is from God must, therefore, believe that the Catholic Church does not have a mission to seek with urgency the conversion of all men in the world to her maternal bosom, that it is no offense against the First Commandment to enter into a place of false worship, such as a mosque, and to take off one's shoes so as to signify that one is in a "holy" place, no less to turn in the direction of the city (Mecca) honored by the false religion (see Ratzinger, Joseph, November, 2007, Istanbul, Turkey).
Those who believe that conciliarism is from God must, therefore, believe that one can be a "pastor" in the "Church of Christ" without believing in papal primacy or papal infallibility or the Filioque of the dogmatic pronouncements of the Catholic Church about Purgatory and the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary. (See Ratzinger, Joseph, November 30, 2007, Istanbul, Turkey.)
Those who believe that conciliarism is from God must, therefore, turn a blind eye to the corruption of the innocence and purity of the young by means of the sort of explicit classroom instruction in matters pertaining to the Sixth and Ninth Commandments that was forbidden by Pope Pius XI in Divini Illius Magistri, December 31, 1929, and reaffirmed by Pope Pius XII in 1953.
To accept conciliarism is to accept each of these, among many other, false premises condemned repeatedly by the Catholic Church over the centuries.
The Congregation of Mary Immaculate Queen was founded by Francis Schuckhardt in 1967 to promote Our Lady's Fatima Message. As the events unfolded in the aftermath of the "Second" Vatican Council, Schuckhardt and others in the Congregation came to the conclusion that Giovanni Montini/Paul VI had defected from the Faith and could not be recognized as a true pope. Thus the Congregation of Mary Immaculate Queen became committed to the theological conclusion of sedevacantism as a legitimate expression of Catholic doctrine to explain the contradictions between the teaching of the Catholic Church and that of the counterfeit church of conciliarism. Even the late conciliar "cardinal" who headed the Apostolic Signatura of the conciliar church, Mario Francesco "Cardinal" Pompedda, admitted in 2005 that sedevacantism was the canonical doctrine of the Catholic Church, as reported on Zenit, February 8, 2005:
“It is true that the canonical doctrine states that the see would be vacant in the case of heresy.”
Obviously, the conciliarists do not admit that heresy has been committed by any of their "pontiffs." Francis Schuckhardt and the members of the Congregation of Mary Immaculate Queen came to the conclusion that such heresy had been committed, thus making the Congregation of Mary Immaculate Queen officially committed to the sedevacantist thesis. This was no secret in the 1970s or at anytime thereafter. Indeed, it was because I could not bring myself to admit the legitimacy of the sedevacantist thesis that I, quite wrongly, dissuaded people from assisting at Masses offered at the Congregation's chapels, acknowledging, however, my respect for the priestly zeal for souls of its bishop, His Excellency Bishop Mark Pivarunas, and its priests, one of whom, Father Dominic Radecki, was instrumental in effecting my wife's Sharon conversion to the Catholic Faith years before I met her.
Regardless of Francis Schuckhardt's many personal faults, including immoral attacks on others and the abuse of his pastoral authority, he founded the Congregation of Mary Immaculate Queen on right principles and firmly defended the Catholic Faith against all of the heresies of Modernism, including Americanism, and defended Our Lady's Fatima Message with great tenderness and devotion, especially as regards modesty of dress for both men and women. It is, of course, a tragedy that are some, both within and without the Congregation of Mary Immaculate Queen, who cannot make the distinction between the weakness that caused Bishop Schuckhardt to fall prey to the devil's wiles, becoming a veritable cult leader prone to terrible behavior, and his defense of Total Marian Consecration and of the totality of the Catholic Faith. His ouster from the Congregation of Mary Immaculate Queen on June 4, 1984, represented a tragedy of major proportions. Bishop Schuckhardt's ouster, however, also represented the determination of its priests and religious and laity to take decisive action against the abuses in order to protect the Congregation's work in defense of the Catholic Faith and to further promote Our Lady's Fatima Message.
The current internal dissension within the ranks of the Sisters of the Congregation of Mary Immaculate Queen over the issue of sedevacantism is also tragic. The sisters who have evidently decided to leave the Congregation of Mary Immaculate Queen are prayerful and devout, having served the students of Mount Saint Michael's Academy and the faithful of Mount Saint Michael's Church well, in some instances for over three decades. His Excellency Bishop Mark A. Pivarunas has not "micromanaged" the affairs of the Sisters over the years, permitting wide latitude of action in many areas, quite a distinction from the "total control" exercised by Bishop Schuckhardt as his behavior deteriorated more and more over the years. There comes a point, however, when the integrity of a religious community must be defended. As the Congregation of Mary Immaculate Queen exists on the basis of its assertion that the See of Peter is vacant and that it thus has the authority during a papal interregnum to maintain the Faith and to administer the sacraments to the faithful, dissension in the ranks of the Congregation's very raison d'etre confuses the faithful and undermines its justification for existence.
Those who enter the religious life are not "free" to assert themselves publicly contrary to the stated positions of their community. This is a cardinal principle of the consecrated religious life. Disagreements, if any, must be expressed to one's religious superiors. Those dissatisfied with the results must accept what they view as an unfavorable decision as coming from the hand of God or, as a matter of personal integrity, request to be separated from the community. It is not a matter of "cultism" for religious superiors to insist that members of a religious community do nothing publicly to undermine the community's mission. Indeed, it is a profound matter of humble and docile obedience to one's lawful superiors that is of the essence of the religious life.
Those who come to doubt the lawfulness of their superiors and/or the wisdom of the orders they issue cannot continue within that community, especially if they believe that they have a specially ordained right to express themselves publicly, thereby contradicting the community's mission and undermining the authority of their superiors, which is really an application of Modernism's anti-Incarnational heresy of "religious liberty" and of Modernity's error of "freedom of speech" to the religious life. Such a view is to be found in the convents of the conciliar structures, which actually encourage dissent from the Received Teaching of Our Lord in many instances and which is based in a belief that the conciliar "pontiffs" have been too "conservative" and "restrictive." The public expression of such views in the conciliar structures by members of religious communities of both men and women has been well documented over the decades, especially in The Wanderer. We see here that it is the very spirit of conciliarism's embrace of egalitarianism and pluralism, part and parcel of the insidious influence of Americanism on Catholics across the ecclesiastical divide, that has eaten away at the unity that once existed amongst the Sisters of the Congregation of Mary Immaculate Queen.
Bishop Pivarunas has been very patient with the expressions of internal dissent by some of the Sisters in the Congregation of Mary Immaculate Queen over the issue of sedevacantism and the validity of the Novus Ordo Missae and of the doctrinal soundness of the decisions of the "Second" Vatican Council and the conciliar "popes." As confusion on the very purpose of the Congregation's mission is harmful to the souls who trust in its priests for the protection of the Faith and the administration of the Sacraments, Bishop Pivarunas and his priests had no choice but to write a letter to the Sisters of the Congregation of Mary Immaculate Queen to request that those in teaching positions and/or in positions of authority in the congregation who believe that it is their duty to speak publicly about their belief in the validity of the "pontificate" of Joseph Ratzinger separate themselves from the congregation. (See
Letter from Bishop Pivarunas to the CMRI Sisters and Statement of Agreement with the Theological Position of CMRI, the contents of which were explained to the Sisters and to the faithful at Mount Saint Michael's Church in Spokane, Washington, on Trinity Sunday, June 3, 2007.)
This decision will be used quite handily by those who oppose the sedevacantist thesis, both in the world of the Novus Ordo and in the "resist and recognize" camp, to try to discredit Bishop Pivarunas, who is such a humble, tireless servant of souls, driving from Omaha, Nebraska, every other weekend to offer Holy Mass in the Congregation's Kansas and Colorado apostolates, sometimes having to stop alongside the shoulder of highways to get a few hours of sleep. The Congregation of Mary Immaculate Queen simply has no right to exist if there is a legitimate pope. It is acting in a truly schismatic manner to presume to administer the Sacraments and to open institutions of learning without "papal" approval and outside of the authority of the local diocesan "ordinary." Religious Sisters who want to stay in a congregation whose existence is premised on a papal interregnum caused by heresy do not realize that they cannot, as a matter of conscience, remain part of a congregation that is viewed as schismatic by the "pope" and the "bishops" they recognize as being legitimate. Just as various non-sedevacantist and/or anti-sedevacantist lay-run publications have every right to exclude sedevacantists such as me from their pages, so is it even more the case that a community whose existence is premised on the sedevacantist thesis must see to it that there is a public unity within its ranks.
To prove this principle in reverse all one has to do is to point to the fact that Society of Saint Pius X, which acknowledges the "legitimacy" of the "papacy" of Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, has seen some of its priests in some of its chapels expel sedevacantists. Although the timing of this expulsion might be related to some sort of rapprochement with the counterfeit church of conciliarism, it is perfectly sensible for a non-sedevacantist organization (albeit one that exists without the explicit, canonical authorization of the conciliar authorities its bishops claim to recognize) to expel sedevacantists from its chapels. The Society of Saint Pius X rejects sedevacantism as being applicable in our circumstances even though its founder, the late Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, noted in 1986 that he was wondering whether the time for such a declaration was near (but then continued his on-again/off-again negotiations with Joseph Ratzinger, then the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Conciliar Faith). No one should be surprised by the expulsion of sedevacantists from its ranks. This is nothing new. (See the case of "The Nine," 1983.)
No one has any "right" to belong to any religious community. Sedevacantism is either true or it is not. If it is true then there can be no concessions made to the false doctrines of conciliarism or to the "legitimacy" of its false shepherds, none of whom acting as diocesan ordinaries in the Latin Rite are real bishops. Pope Leo XIII stated very clearly in Satis Cognitum, June 29, 1896, that those who fall from one thing in the Faith fall form th Faith in its entirety no matter how many times they seem to be fully Catholic on other matters. The standard of being a Catholic is not reduced to a certain "minimal" number of doctrines that one holds to be true. The standard of being a Catholic is determined by whether one holds to the entirety of Faith without any dissent on any of Its articles. One does not need to try to "declare" anything as binding on the rest of Catholics to fall form the Faith; all one needs to do is believe privately in things that are contrary to the Faith and have been condemned as such by the Church.
These words of Pope Leo XIII in Satis Cognitum are very clear:
The Church, founded on these principles and mindful of her office, has done nothing with greater zeal and endeavour than she has displayed in guarding the integrity of the faith. Hence she regarded as rebels and expelled from the ranks of her children all who held beliefs on any point of doctrine different from her own. The Arians, the Montanists, the Novatians, the Quartodecimans, the Eutychians, did not certainly reject all Catholic doctrine: they abandoned only a certain portion of it. Still who does not know that they were declared heretics and banished from the bosom of the Church? In like manner were condemned all authors of heretical tenets who followed them in subsequent ages. "There can be nothing more dangerous than those heretics who admit nearly the whole cycle of doctrine, and yet by one word, as with a drop of poison, infect the real and simple faith taught by our Lord and handed down by Apostolic tradition" (Auctor Tract. de Fide Orthodoxa contra Arianos).
The practice of the Church has always been the same, as is shown by the unanimous teaching of the Fathers, who were wont to hold as outside Catholic communion, and alien to the Church, whoever would recede in the least degree from any point of doctrine proposed by her authoritative Magisterium. Epiphanius, Augustine, Theodore :, drew up a long list of the heresies of their times. St. Augustine notes that other heresies may spring up, to a single one of which, should any one give his assent, he is by the very fact cut off from Catholic unity. "No one who merely disbelieves in all (these heresies) can for that reason regard himself as a Catholic or call himself one. For there may be or may arise some other heresies, which are not set out in this work of ours, and, if any one holds to one single one of these he is not a Catholic" (S. Augustinus, De Haeresibus, n. 88).
If any one individual's entire life's work is summarized by this section of Satis Cognitum it is Joseph Ratzinger.
The Congregation of Mary Immaculate Queen is blessed to have Bishop Pivarunas, who acts in a consultative manner with his priests, meeting with them at least twice yearly, once in Spokane, Washington, at Mount Saint Michael's Church, and once in Omaha, Nebraska, at Mater Dei Seminary, and its hard-working priests. He has, as noted before, exercised great restraint in the matter that has now come fully into public view. He is to be commended for his wisdom and circumspection in taking his time to assess the situation and to give the dissenting Sisters an opportunity to reaffirm or to reject the principles upon which the Congregation of Mary Immaculate Queen exists and operates to serve the souls who have entrusted themselves to its pastoral care.
Perfection, of course, is to be found nowhere. As is the case in almost every traditional venue we have been to in the past few years, the pull of the culture (the desire to "push the envelope" on popular fashions and fads, an immersion in television and movies and popular "music," the myths of Americanist nationalism) exerts itself very strongly even in sedevacantist chapels, where many people are content simply to have Sunday Mass and are not truly serious about incorporating the Faith into every aspect of their lives despite their own sins and weaknesses, a throwback to the minimalism of the 1950s. Many traditional Catholics across the ecclesiastical divide, including in sedevacantist chapels, have forgotten that the battle we are fighting for involves the conversion of the nation and the world to the Social Reign of Christ the King--and thus to the totality of the Catholic Faith--as the fruit of the Triumph of Our Lady's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart in fulfillment of her Fatima Message, to which the Congregation of Mary Immaculate Queen is entirely dedicated.
That having been noted, however, those of the faithful who want to have the full Faith and to rise to the heights of sanctity can find in Bishop Pivarunas and his priests, as well as the Religious Sisters of the Congregation of Mary Immaculate Queen who have been and will continue to be humbly submissive to them in their own valorous service of souls, wonderful guides to get home to Heaven. We have been so edified by our contact with Bishop Pivarunas and the priests and the religious, both brothers and sisters, of the Congregation of Mary Immaculate Queen in the past year. I am only sorry that my blindness and pride and stupidity kept me from recognizing the Congregation as a haven of the Faith until last year.
Ultimately, however, Charity must prevail in these difficult times. The people to blame for sowing confusion in the hearts and minds of Catholics are not the dissenting Sisters of the Congregation of Mary Immaculate Queen, even though it must be admitted that some of them did their very best to undermine the authority of Bishop Pivarunas and to place into question quite publicly, sometimes in the classrooms of Mount Saint Michael's Academy, His Excellency's theological judgment. The people to blame are not even the men who have acted as "theological guides" to these dissenting Sisters. No, the people to blame for sowing confusion in the hearts and minds of Catholics are the conciliarists, whose diabolical schemes to distort the Catholic Faith by using the Modernist technique of holding fast to certain dogmatic expressions while emptying those expressions of their actual content have obliterated the average Catholic's sensus Catholicus by acclimating him to change and novelty and innovation as natural and normal "signs of progress" in the legitimate "development of doctrine and worship." It is the conciliarists who have set believing Catholics against believing Catholics, thus freeing themselves up to undermine more doctrines (such as Limbo) and introduce more novelties as "normative" in the lives of those Catholics who accept everything about conciliarism uncritically, if not with total enthusiasm.
While one can and must disagree with the conclusions that are reached by others during this time of crisis and betrayal and apostasy, we can never judge the subjective culpability of the souls of those who have been victimized by the conciliarist revolutionaries. We must pray for our fellow Catholics, including the conciliar revolutionaries, spending time before the Blessed Sacrament in prayer and offering our Rosaries and penances and sacrifices and humiliations and loss of friendships to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary as her consecrated slaves. We must be grateful for the times in which we live. God has known from all eternity that we would be living in these troubling times, meaning that there is work for us to do to help restore all things in Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ through His Most Blessed Mother's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart.
Pope Pius XI put it this way in Quas Primas, December 11, 1925:
We may well admire in this the admirable wisdom of the Providence of God, who, ever bringing good out of evil, has from time to time suffered the faith and piety of men to grow weak, and allowed Catholic truth to be attacked by false doctrines, but always with the result that truth has afterwards shone out with greater splendor, and that men's faith, aroused from its lethargy, has shown itself more vigorous than before.
Our Lady will indeed manifest the Triumph of her Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart. This triumph will be glorious beyond all telling. And we will see at the General Judgment of the Living and the Dead, if not before, that the Congregation of Mary Immaculate Queen has served as a major instrument of Our Lady in the defense of her Divine Son's Holy Church and the Sacred Truths He has deposited exclusively to her for her eternal safekeeping and infallible explication until He comes in glory to judge the living and the dead. I ask each of you to pray a Rosary for Bishop Pivarunas and his priests and religious sister and brothers at this time. Remember also those who are leaving, praying that the horrors of what they are about to experience will help to bring them home to that oasis of the Faith named Mount Saint Michael's Church and Academy and the Congregation of Mary Immaculate Queen sooner rather than later.
We can and must pray that those Sisters who are leaving the Congregation of Mary Immaculate Queen will come to realize that these words of Saint Paul, contained in his Second Epistle to Saint Timothy, apply to the conciliarists with whom they are about so tragically to associate:
I charge thee, before God and Jesus Christ, who shall judge the living and the dead, by his coming, and his kingdom: Preach the word: be instant in season, out of season: reprove, entreat, rebuke in all patience and doctrine. For there shall be a time, when they will not endure sound doctrine; but, according to their own desires, they will heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears: And will indeed turn away their hearing from the truth, but will be turned unto fables. But be thou vigilant, labour in all things, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill thy ministry. Be sober. (2 Tim. 4: 1-5)
Viva Cristo Rey!
Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us.
Saint Joseph, pray for us.
Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.
Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.
Saint Boniface, pray for us.
Saint Norbert, pray for us.
Saints Peter, Marcellinus and Erasmus, pray for us.
Saint Joan of Arc, pray for us.
Saint Angela Merici, pray for us.
Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.
Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.
Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.
Saint Philip Neri, pray for us.
Saint Augustine of Canterbury, pray for us.
Saint Athanasius, pray for us.
Saints Monica, pray for us.
Saint Jude, pray for us.
Saint John the Beloved, pray for us.
Saint Francis Solano, pray for us.
Saint John Bosco, pray for us.
Saint Dominic Savio, pray for us.
Saint Scholastica, pray for us.
Saint Benedict, pray for us.
Saint Anthony of Padua, pray for us.
Saint Antony of the Desert, pray for us.
Saint Francis of Assisi, pray for us.
Saint Thomas Aquinas, pray for us.
Saint Bonaventure, pray for us.
Saint Augustine, pray for us.
Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, pray for us.
Saint Francis Xavier, pray for us.
Saint Peter Damian, pray for us.
Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini, pray for us.
Saint Lucy, pray for us.
Saint Monica, pray for us.
Saint Agatha, pray for us.
Saint Philomena, pray for us.
Saint Cecilia, pray for us.
Saint John Mary Vianney, pray for us.
Saint Vincent de Paul, pray for us.
Saint Vincent Ferrer, pray for us.
Saint Athanasius, pray for us.
Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque, pray for us.
Saint Isaac Jogues, pray for us.
Saint Rene Goupil, pray for us.
Saint John Lalonde, pray for us.
Saint Gabriel Lalemont, pray for us.
Saint Noel Chabanel, pray for us.
Saint Charles Garnier, pray for us.
Saint Anthony Daniel, pray for us.
Saint John DeBrebeuf, pray for us.
Saint Alphonsus de Liguori, pray for us.
Saint Dominic, pray for us.
Saint Hyacinth, pray for us.
Saint Basil, pray for us.
Saint Vincent Ferrer, pray for us.
Saint Sebastian, pray for us.
Saint Tarcisius, pray for us.
Saint Bridget of Sweden, pray for us.
Saint Gerard Majella, pray for us.
Saint John of the Cross, pray for us.
Saint Teresa of Avila, pray for us.
Saint Bernadette Soubirous, pray for us.
Saint Genevieve, pray for us.
Saint Vincent de Paul, pray for us.
Pope Saint Pius X, pray for us
Pope Saint Pius V, pray for us.
Saint Rita of Cascia, pray for us.
Saint Louis de Montfort, pray for us.
Venerable Anne Catherine Emmerich, pray for us.
Venerable Pauline Jaricot, pray for us.
Father Miguel Augustin Pro, pray for us.
Francisco Marto, pray for us.
Jacinta Marto, pray for us.
Juan Diego, pray for us.
The Longer Version of the Saint Michael the Archangel Prayer, composed by Pope Leo XIII, 1888
O glorious Archangel Saint Michael, Prince of the heavenly host, be our defense in the terrible warfare which we carry on against principalities and powers, against the rulers of this world of darkness, spirits of evil. Come to the aid of man, whom God created immortal, made in His own image and likeness, and redeemed at a great price from the tyranny of the devil. Fight this day the battle of our Lord, together with the holy angels, as already thou hast fought the leader of the proud angels, Lucifer, and his apostate host, who were powerless to resist thee, nor was there place for them any longer in heaven. That cruel, that ancient serpent, who is called the devil or Satan who seduces the whole world, was cast into the abyss with his angels. Behold this primeval enemy and slayer of men has taken courage. Transformed into an angel of light, he wanders about with all the multitude of wicked spirits, invading the earth in order to blot out the Name of God and of His Christ, to seize upon, slay, and cast into eternal perdition, souls destined for the crown of eternal glory. That wicked dragon pours out. as a most impure flood, the venom of his malice on men of depraved mind and corrupt heart, the spirit of lying, of impiety, of blasphemy, and the pestilent breath of impurity, and of every vice and iniquity. These most crafty enemies have filled and inebriated with gall and bitterness the Church, the spouse of the Immaculate Lamb, and have laid impious hands on Her most sacred possessions. In the Holy Place itself, where has been set up the See of the most holy Peter and the Chair of Truth for the light of the world, they have raised the throne of their abominable impiety with the iniquitous design that when the Pastor has been struck the sheep may be scattered. Arise then, O invincible Prince, bring help against the attacks of the lost spirits to the people of God, and give them the victory. They venerate thee as their protector and patron; in thee holy Church glories as her defense against the malicious powers of hell; to thee has God entrusted the souls of men to be established in heavenly beatitude. Oh, pray to the God of peace that He may put Satan under our feet, so far conquered that he may no longer be able to hold men in captivity and harm the Church. Offer our prayers in the sight of the Most High, so that they may quickly conciliate the mercies of the Lord; and beating down the dragon, the ancient serpent, who is the devil and Satan, do thou again make him captive in the abyss, that he may no longer seduce the nations. Amen.
Verse: Behold the Cross of the Lord; be scattered ye hostile powers.
Response: The Lion of the Tribe of Juda has conquered the root of David.
Verse: Let Thy mercies be upon us, O Lord.
Response: As we have hoped in Thee.
Verse: O Lord hear my prayer.
Response: And let my cry come unto Thee.
Verse: Let us pray. O God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, we call upon Thy holy Name, and as suppliants, we implore Thy clemency, that by the intercession of Mary, ever Virgin, immaculate and our Mother, and of the glorious Archangel Saint Michael, Thou wouldst deign to help us against Satan and all other unclean spirits, who wander about the world for the injury of the human race and the ruin of our souls.
Response: Amen.
