Truth Just Doesn't Go Away
by
Thomas A. Droleskey
Those of you who have been reading this site, which went "live" in February of 2004 to serve as the online replacement for the formerly printed journal, Christ or Chaos, which was published between September of 1996 and June of 2003, know that a recurring theme of mine has been the nature of truth. True pope after true pope explained to us how the nature of truth, both supernatural and natural, was under attack by Protestants and Freemasons and naturalists and rationalists and Modernists in the Eighteenth, Nineteenth, and Twentieth Centuries.
Indeed, at the heart of the Modernist mind of the currently presiding false "pontiff," Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, is the belief that dogmatic truth is so complex and contains so many possibilities of a varied interpretation that it is impossible for the human being to express it adequately by means of the written word at any one time in history. This means that there will be what he considers to be "apparent" contradictions between a dogmatic formulation at one time and another, contradictions that can be "resolved" by understanding that there are "contingent" truths in dogmatic formulae that are not as "stable" as the "core nucleus" of the doctrine itself. This is, of course, absolute madness and insanity even on the natural level. It has been condemned by pope after pope, as I have point out endlessly on this site.
For the sake of my newfound brevity, therefore, let me just cite these two contrasts between Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI's view of the nature of dogmatic truth and the authentic teaching of the Catholic Church:
Benedict XVI: "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.)
The Catholic Church: "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.]
Joseph Ratzinger: "In theses 10-12, the difficult problem of the relationship between language and thought is debated, which in post-conciliar discussions was the immediate departure point of the dispute.
The identity of the Christian substance as such, the Christian 'thing' was not directly ... censured, but it was pointed out that no formula, no matter how valid and indispensable it may have been in its time, can fully express the thought mentioned in it and declare it unequivocally forever, since language is constantly in movement and the content of its meaning changes. (Fr. Ratzinger: Dogmatic formulas must always change.)
The Catholic Church: "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.)
There is no such thing as the philosophically absurd notion of the "hermeneutic of continuity and discontinuity" that Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI said on December 22, 2005, it was necessary to "learn" nearly two millennia after the founding of the Catholic Church by Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ upon the Rock of Peter, the Pope. Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, much like his convoluted mentor, the late Father Hans Urs von Balthasar, believes evidently that God the Holy Ghost can contradict Himself, that He can lead the Fathers of dogmatic councils to use a precise set of words to define a doctrine at one time and then lead others to use different words at another time--or the false "pontiff" believes that God the Holy Ghost was not at work in the guiding of dogmatic councils. Either belief is blasphemous and causes one to fall from being a member in good standing of the Catholic Church.
Ratzinger/Benedict's unremitting attacks on the nature of dogmatic truth extend also to the realm of history as he places into question the Catholic Church's efforts to turn back Mohammedanism and as he serves as an apologist for "rethinking" of the Church's relationship with the "faith of Israel" in light of the "Shoah." As noted a week ago today in
Revealing His Inner Teilhard Yet Again, Ratzinger/Benedict thinks nothing of invoking New Age syncretists such as the late Father Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J., if it suits his purposes as he believes that it is not necessary for a Catholic to hold everything contained in the Deposit of Faith as It has been handed down to us from time immemorial under the infallible direction of God the Holy Ghost in order to be considered a reliable source of reflection upon the issues facing us today.
Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, who rejects the Social Reign of Christ the King as he endorses the religiously "neutral" civil state that provides "religion" with "space" to make its "contribution" in "building" the "better" world, rejects this simple statement of Pope Saint Pius X, contained in Notre Charge Apostolique, August 15, 1910, that Catholicism and Catholicism alone is the one and only foundation of personal and social order:
....
For there is no true civilization without a moral civilization, and no true moral civilization without the true religion: it is a proven truth, a historical fact.
To deny these truths such as this one is to live in a world of fantasy, a world of positivism where what one thinks is true is pronounced or asserted as being true even though it is not in accord with objective truth at all. Most of the people around whom we spend our lives live in this fantasy world of positivism.
Protestants do so as they deny that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ created His true Church upon the Rock of Peter, the Pope, and entrusted to her the entirety of the Deposit Faith, which consists of Sacred Scripture and Apostolic or Sacred Tradition, rejecting the simple truth that the Catholic Church is sole repository and infallible explicator the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law.
Naturalists of all sorts, whether of the false opposites of the "left" or of the "right," do so as they deny the necessity of belief in the Incarnation of the Second Person of the Most Blessed Trinity in Our Lady's Virginal and Immaculate Womb by the power of God the Holy Ghost as the foundation of personal and social order and as they deny that men must submit to the Catholic Church in all that pertains to the good of souls, upon which rests the temporal well-being of men and their nations.
It is no surprise, therefore, that the Modernists' assault against the nature of dogmatic truth has served, no matter the attempts to condemn the "dictatorship of relativism," to advance the agenda of relativists in the realm of civil society. If dogmatic truths are "capable" of being "reformulated" because of the allegedly "imprecise" nature of human language, then who can blame a penultimate statist and Marxist, Barack Hussein Obama, when he attempts to impose his "vision" of "truth" upon the United States of America under cover of law and as he seeks to use his White House website to silence critics of his ObamaCare (which was assessed recently in
Back Alley Butchers Never Change Their Tactics)? If it is possible to "rethink" supernatural truths, then why is it not possible to "rethink" the words of the Constitution of the United States of America? Is the Constitution more sacrosanct than the articles contained in the Deposit of Faith that have been revealed by God for our instruction unto eternal life?
Just as the conciliarists use positivism to assert things contrary to Catholic teaching as being true, so is it the case that statists such as Barack Hussein Obama use positivism to assert things contrary to both supernatural and natural truths as being true as they attempt to intimidate anyone who might dissent from their gratuitous, positivist assertions from pointing out that they, the statist emperors, have no clothing.
This is nothing new, of course.
President John Adams tried to intimidate political opponents by means of the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798. The Sedition Act, enacted on July 14, 1798, made it a crime to publish "false, scandalous, and malicious" writing against the government of the United States of America and its officials. President Abraham Lincoln, a consummate statist, used the full power of the government of the United States of America to silence dissent during the War Between the States. President Thomas Woodrow Wilson did so to such an extent during World War I that Senator Hiram Johnson (R-California) observed "that it is now illegal to criticize the government of the United States at any time for any reason." President Franklin Delano Roosevelt did so during World War II. And it can be argued very plausibly that President George Walker Bush took all of this American "tradition" of intimidation and control to newer and more sophisticated and all-encompassing levels than had ever been seen in the history of the not-so-free United States of America prior to Caesar Obamus, whose White House website wants Obmadroids to "turn in" anyone who dares to criticize the Obama's "truth" about his attempt to nationalize health-care:
There is a lot of disinformation about health insurance reform out there, spanning from control of personal finances to end of life care. These rumors often travel just below the surface via chain emails or through casual conversation. Since we can’t keep track of all of them here at the White House, we’re asking for your help. If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov. (Facts Are Stubborn Things)
As was noted in All Hail! Caesar Obamus nearly four months ago, the current presidential administration has taken sloganeering and disinformation to even greater heights than had the administration of former President George Walker Bush. Lies and half-truths are presented as whole truths from which no one is free to dissent lest he be considered a possible "right wing terrorist" who is intent on "opposing" or "criticizing" the government. This creates great political theater as many naturalists of the "right" who served as apologists for George Walker Bush's positivism to advance the increased size and scope and power of the Federal government of the United States of America now beat their breasts thunderously in protest over Bush's successor's use of positivism to do the exact same thing.
This entire spectacle of farce, however, is the inevitable result of what happens in a world where Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ does not reign as King over men and their nations through His Catholic Church. No amount of people ignoring this fundamental truth makes it go away. It is there no matter how few people see or accept it, and very few people want to see or accept this truth as it is too much "fun" to discuss the consequences of the overthrow Social Reign of Christ the King (statism, positivism, thought control, efforts to shade or to conceal the truth) rather than to think about the fact that these consequences are the direct result of Protestant Revolution against the Divine Plan that God Himself personally instituted to effect man's return to Him through His Catholic Church.
We must suffer to get home to Heaven. We must embrace suffering as this is the path by which we can make reparation for our sins and those of the whole world, including those steeped in the inter-related errors of Modernity and Modernism. There is no escape from the difficulties of the present moment. This is the time from all eternity that God has known that we would be alive. We must trust in the graces that Our Lord won for us on the wood of the Holy Cross and that flow through the loving hands of His Most Blessed Mother, Mary our Immaculate Queen, she who is the Mediatrix of All Grace.
The Venerable Mary of Agreda was given by Our Lord to know the prayer that He offered to His Co-Equal and Co-Eternal Father after the Transfiguration and before He journeyed into Jerusalem:
I wish to raise up the standard of the Cross, beneath which virtue, and all those that put themselves under its protection, are to fight their battles. I wish to satiate my heart with insults and affronts, which are so estimable in thy eyes. I wish to humiliate Myself even to death at the hands of my enemies, in order that our chosen friends may be consoled in their tribulations and that they may be consoled in their tribulations and that they may be honored by high rewards, whenever they choose to humiliate themselves in suffering the same persecutions. O beloved Cross! When shalt thou receive Me in thy arms? O sweet ignominies and affronts! When shalt thou bear Me on to overcome death through the suffering of my entirely guiltless flesh? Ye pains, affronts, ignominies, scourges, thorns, torments, death, come to Me, who wish to embrace you, yield yourself to my welcome, since I will understand your value. If he world abhors you, I long for you. If the world in its ignorance, despises you, I, who am truth and wisdom, love and embrace you. Come then to Me, for in welcoming you as man, I exalt you as the true God and am ready to efface the touch of sin from you and from all that will embrace you. come to Me, ye pains and disappoint Me not; heed not my Omnipotence, for I shall permit you to exert your full force upon my humanity. You shall not be rejected and abhorred by Me as you are by mortals. The deceitful fascination of the children of Adam in vainly judging the poor and the afflicted of this world as unhappy, shall now disappear; for if they see their true God, their Creator, Master and Father, suffering horrible insults, scourging, he ignominious torment and destitution of the Cross, they will understand their error and esteem it as an honor to follow their crucified God. (The Venerable Mary of Agreda, The Mystical City of God, abridged edition, pp. 476-477.)
Men who ignore or abhor the Cross (see a founding hatred for Christ the King will labor under the delusion that they can remake the world in their own warped image as they ignore the truths contained in the Deposit of Faith and refuse to invoke the Mother of God, who stood by the foot of the Holy Cross, through her Most Holy Rosary to help them to lift high the Cross of Christ the King as the only standard of true human liberty. Ignore the Cross, as the founders of of the United States of America did and as the lords of Modernity Modernism do as they extol the ability of one false religion after another to "build" the "better" world, and you will live in the tyranny of sin as it is imposed by paymasters such as Barack Hussein Obama who, much like the founding fathers, believes that the "better" world can be built by men by their own unaided powers and not by means a firm belief in and adherence to the truths of the Catholic Faith.
No amount of denying that the Holy Cross is the only standard of human liberty can change the truth there is no true freedom for men or their nations unless they yoke themselves to the standard of the Holy Cross of Christ the King.
Similarly, no amount of traditionally-minded Catholics ignoring the blasphemies and sacrileges and offenses against Catholic truth that are authored by Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI can make the truth of those blasphemies and sacrileges and offenses go away.
God is not pleased when places of false worship are called "sacred" no matter the decision of self-anointed "gatekeepers" of Tradition to ignore or to play down these offenses so as not to make Ratzinger/Benedict look bad.
God is not pleased when the symbols of false religions are esteemed personally by a false "pontiff" even as those in the "resist and recognize" camp refuse to recognize that God is less offended by Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI committing these offenses as He was when Karol Wojtyla/John Paul II did them.
God is not pleased when false religions are praised by a false "pontiff" for their nonexistent "ability" to "build" the "better" world even though voices that used to be raised against such blasphemous falsehoods are rendered silent because of Summorum Pontificum, July 7, 2007, which is itself based on the false premise that the abominable Protestant and Masonic Novus Ordo service does not represent a break with the Missale Romanum issued by Pope Saint Pius V.
No amount of silence or positivism or spin-doctoring can make the blasphemies and sacrileges and outrages authored by Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI go away or make them appear to be "consistent" with Catholic doctrine and pastoral praxis when these outrages are the antitheses of Catholic doctrine and pastoral praxis. And the belief that one can make these outrages "go away" by ignoring or by downplaying them is even more injurious to the cause of the common temporal good than attacks against truth by the statists in the civil realm as the whole of social order is premised upon a faithful adherence to the articles contained in the Deposit of Faith without any dissent whatsoever:
The more closely the temporal power of a nation aligns itself with the spiritual, and the more it fosters and promotes the latter, by so much the more it contributes to the conservation of the commonwealth. For it is the aim of the ecclesiastical authority by the use of spiritual means, to form good Christians in accordance with its own particular end and object; and in doing this it helps at the same time to form good citizens, and prepares them to meet their obligations as members of a civil society. This follows of necessity because in the City of God, the Holy Roman Catholic Church, a good citizen and an upright man are absolutely one and the same thing. How grave therefore is the error of those who separate things so closely united, and who think that they can produce good citizens by ways and methods other than those which make for the formation of good Christians. For, let human prudence say what it likes and reason as it pleases, it is impossible to produce true temporal peace and tranquillity by things repugnant or opposed to the peace and happiness of eternity. (Silvio Cardinal Antoniano, quoted by Pope Pius XI in Divini Illius Magistri, December 31, 1929.)
Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI and his band of conciliar revolutionaries believe in things that are every bit as repugnant to the peace and happiness of eternity as do Barack Hussein Obama and his band of statists. And no amount of ignoring or denying this truth can make it go away. Truth does not depend upon human acceptance for its binding force or validity.
There is another truth about which we need to be concerned, namely, the truth about ourselves. We are sinners in need of making reparation for our sins on a daily basis. We must be humbled in the sight of Our Creator, Our Redeemer, and Our Sanctifier, which is why it is good, so very good (!), for us to be beaten down and beaten up and calumniated and hated for our defense of truth that those who defect from any point of doctrine taught by the Catholic Church cannot hold ecclesiastical office within her ranks legitimately. This is good because our defense of the truth is not about us or our "insights." It is solely about fidelity to the Deposit of Faith as we attempt, despite our own sins and failings, to defend the honor and majesty and glory of God as He is blasphemed so regularly and so openly and with such utter impunity by Ratzinger/Benedict and his "bishops."
None of our defense of the truth or of the honor and majesty and glory of the Most Holy Trinity matters, however, if we do not have Charity, if we do not will the good of others, the ultimate expression of which is the salvation of their immortal souls, if we punish or seek to reprove those who tell truths about us that we may never hear honestly from anyone else. The truth about us--the good, the bad, and the ugly--is going to be revealed for all to see on the Last Day at the General Judgment of the Living and the Dead, which is why we must be truthful each night as make our nightly Examen of Conscience and as we accuse ourselves before an alter Christus in the Sacred Tribunal of Penance.
None of our defense of the truth will matter if we do not remember to treat others as we would treat Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ Himself, as Saint Paul made clear in his First Epistle to the Corinthians:
If I speak with the tongues of men, and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And if I should have prophecy and should know all mysteries, and all knowledge, and if I should have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing. And if I should distribute all my goods to feed the poor, and if I should deliver my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing. Charity is patient, is kind: charity envieth not, dealeth not perversely; is not puffed up; Is not ambitious, seeketh not her own, is not provoked to anger, thinketh no evil;
Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth with the truth; Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. Charity never falleth away: whether prophecies shall be made void, or tongues shall cease, or knowledge shall be destroyed. For we know in part, and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect is come, that which is in part shall be done away.
When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child. But, when I became a man, I put away the things of a child. We see now through a glass in a dark manner; but then face to face. Now I know in part; but then I shall know even as I am known. And now there remain faith, hope, and charity, these three: but the greatest of these is charity. (1 Cor. 13: 1-13.)
Everything that we do, including all of our verbiage, will turn rancid if we have not Charity in our immortal souls, and we can only have true Charity in our souls if they are in states of Sanctifying Grace, thereby being dwelling places of the very inner life of the Most Blessed Trinity.
It is vital, therefore, to ground our defense of truth in the midst of assaults waged against it by the lords of Modernism and the scions of Modernity in the Charity of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, which was, of course, formed out of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. True Charity does indeed will the good. We must indeed hate heresy (see Father Frederick Faber's discourse on the hatred of heresy for true love of God as contained in his meditation the Sixth Dolor of Mary, Our Mother of Sorrows), doing so, however, because we love God as He has revealed Himself through His true Church and because we want to get to Heaven ourselves by helping others to reject heresy and to embrace the truths of the true Faith, outside of which there is no salvation and without which there can be no true social order, without any dissent whatsoever.
After the fervent assistance at Holy Mass and the meditative time we spend before Our Lord's Real Presence in the Most Blessed Sacrament, the best way to build up Charity in our souls is to pray to the Mother of God, especially by means of her Most Holy Rosary and as we practice True Devotion to Mary as taught by Saint Louis de Montfort. We can find the time in our busy schedules to pray all fifteen decades of her Most Holy Rosary, especially if we turn off the television and the radio and refuse to participate in the hysteria generated by the naturalists of the "left" or of the "right" as both assault supernatural and natural truth day in and day out without fail. They lose when the Triumph of Our Lady's Immaculate Heart is made manifest.
Let's hasten the day of that triumph by praying a Rosary right now so that we will always remember that the truth about the world and the state of the Church Militant on earth and about our own souls does not go away. We must seek to conform ourselves at all times to the Mercies of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary, and this very First Friday is an excellent time to do so.
Vivat Christus Rex! Viva Cristo Rey!
