Truth Be Told, It's All About Truth

by Thomas A. Droleskey

Many of the recent articles on this site have dealt with the consequences of the heresy of Americanism on the worldview of contemporary Catholics. Americanism's attempt to reconcile the Holy Faith with the false, naturalistic, religiously indifferentist, anti-Incarnational and semi-Pelagian principles of the modern civil state, including that of the government of the United States of America. Conciliarism's own worldview has been shaped in very large measure by Americanism, as Joseph Ratzinger admitted in 2004 when he was the prefect of the counterfeit church of conciliarism's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and as he noted in his December 22, 2005, Christmas address to the members of the conciliar curia in the Vatican.

Pope Leo XIII, writing in Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae, January 22, 1899, recognized that the dangers of living in a pluralistic and religiously indifferentist social environment posed the risk of Catholics coming to view the Church through the eyes of the world rather than viewing the world through the eyes of the true Faith. In other words, Pope Leo XIII saw the risk of Catholics being coopted by the prevailing cultural ethos to such an extent that they would become Protestantized in their view of the Church's proper role in the world, being content with practicing their Faith privately in their parishes while they deny to It any role at all in the larger world around them, especially as it pertains to electoral politics.

Here is a salient passage from Pope Leo XIII's Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae, an Apostolical Letter written to James Cardinal Gibbons, the longtime Americanist Archbishop of Baltimore (1877-1921):

But, beloved son, in this present matter of which we are speaking, there is even a greater danger and a more manifest opposition to Catholic doctrine and discipline in that opinion of the lovers of novelty, according to which they hold such liberty should be allowed in the Church, that her supervision and watchfulness being in some sense lessened, allowance be granted the faithful, each one to follow out more freely the leading of his own mind and the trend of his own proper activity. They are of opinion that such liberty has its counterpart in the newly given civil freedom which is now the right and the foundation of almost every secular state.

In the apostolic letters concerning the constitution of states, addressed by us to the bishops of the whole Church, we discussed this point at length; and there set forth the difference existing between the Church, which is a divine society, and all other social human organizations which depend simply on free will and choice of men.

 

There are several very important elements at work in these passage from Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae.

First, Pope Leo XIII was concerned that the falsities of the novelty of "civil liberty," which was termed an "insanity" by Pope Gregory XVI in Mirari Vos, August 15, 1832, would so infect the minds of Catholics in the United States of America that they would come to view the binding precepts contained in the Deposit of Faith that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ has entrusted exclusively to the Catholic Church for their eternal safekeeping and infallible explication as nothing more than "opinions" that do not bind their consciences. Has this not happened?

Indeed, this has happened. Catholics who support the mystical destruction of Our Lord in the persons of innocent preborn babies in their mothers' wombs believe that the Fifth Commandment's prohibition against willful murder and Holy Mother Church's constant condemnation of the deliberate, willful taking of innocent human life by means of chemical and/or surgical abortions do not bind their consciences at all. They have their "rights," after all, as Americans. No pope or no church is going to tell them what to believe or how to act. That's not the "American way," you see.

Similarly, most Catholics who oppose the taking of innocent preborn human life under cover of law believe that they can retard this grave personal and social evil by merely natural means, trusting in some political ideology (conservatism, libertarianism) and in some particular candidate and/or political party to "come to the rescue," scoffing at the binding nature of the Social Teaching of the Catholic Church. Indeed, the level of overt hostility--or just plain diffidence--to the Social Teaching of the Catholic Church that I have found amongst many the laity in many, although far from all, sedevacantist chapels across the country in the past two years is truly amazing. After all, those who accept the false premises underlying the American constitutional regime have no business being in sedevacantist chapels as they agree completely with the conciliarism's own view of the world. They are truly "una cum" Benedict XVI.

As was the case before the [Second] Vatican Council, however, there is a massive "disconnect" in the minds of many Catholics between how they view the world and what has been taught perennially by Holy Mother Church. It was not for nothing that then Governor of the State of New York Alfred Emmanuel Smith asked in 1927, upon hearing Protestant attorney Charles Marshall criticize Pope Pius XI's Quas Primas, "What [the Hades] is an encyclical?" Many Catholics today are as ignorant of Catholic Social Teaching as was Alfred Smith, and they want to continue to be ignorant, preferring to believe in the "rush" of partisan politics as the means by which the world is "bettered."

Catholics in the United States of America learned long ago to keep their mouths shut about the Faith in the public marketplace" of ideas, hoping that their silence would make it possible for them to "succeed" materially, especially by means of winning elections, a sure sign of "having arrived" and taking "one's place" at the "table," to use the colloquialism in vogue today. This is why so many Catholic immigrants and their first generation children attached themselves to the Democrat Party in the Nineteenth Century, viewing it as the means of upward social mobility at a time when the Republican Party, filled with lots of anti-Catholic nativists, was largely, although not entirely, hostile to them and their interests. Grateful for the benefices made possible by the Democrat Party, many Catholics believed that they had a duty to support candidates of the Democrat Party as it was the party of their fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers. Why not support the statists Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson and George McGovern and Bill Clinton, to say nothing of the pro-aborts from within their own ranks (Edward Moore Kennedy, Joseph Biden, Hugh Carey, Mario Cuomo, Barbara Mikulski, Geraldine Ferraro, George Pataki, Tom Ridge, Rudolph Giuliani, Richard Riordan, Susan Collins, Arnold Schwarzenegger, John Kerry, Thomas Harkin, Richard Durbin, Loretta Sanchez Brixey, Carolyn McCarthy, Rick Lazio, Susan Molinari, Carol Mosely Braun, James Moran, Charles Rangel, Marty Meehan, Christopher Dodd, Kathleen Sebelius, Jennifer Granholm, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Patrick Leahy, Maurice Hinchey, Thomas Foley, Thomas P. O'Neil, Nancy Pelosi, Joseph Kennedy, Patrick Kennedy, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, Jack Reed, George Mitchell, Linda Sanchez, Sherwood Boehlert, Mike Arcuri, Jim Doyle, et al.). These Catholics--and the completely pro-abortion politicians who have received their electoral support--have remained in perfectly good standing in the structures of the counterfeit church of conciliarism.

It is only quite natural (emphasis on the word natural, of course) for pro-life Catholics across the ecclesiastical divide to seek to attach themselves to the false opposite of the "right" to seek to redress the apostasy of pro-death Catholics by means merely natural, spinning their wheels every two or four years to roll that boulder up the hill like Sisyphus of Greek mythology (A World of Sisyphuses). Those who remind these Catholics of the fact that baby-killing under cover of law is but one of many logical consequences of the overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King wrought by the Protestant Revolt and institutionalized by Judeo-Masonry must be pilloried as "unpatriotic" and "unrealistic."

The Protestant and Masonic Novus Ordo service has played a very critical role in reaffirming Catholics in the falsehoods and novelties of Americanism. The Novus Ordo is an enshrinement of the culture in what is supposed to be a refuge from the culture, an offering of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, which is at one and the same the unbloody re-presentation of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ's Sacrifice of Himself to the Father in Spirit and in Truth to atone for human sins and a foretaste of eternal glories. The offering of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass is supposed to reflect the transcendent glory and permanence and immutability of God Himself, reflecting as well the immutability of the truths of the Holy Faith. It was to destroy the concept of the immutability of God and of His Holy Faith that the liturgical revolutionaries accustomed Catholics to various liturgical changes in te 1950s and early 1960s as the prelude to the implementation of an era of ceaseless liturgical changes and innovations to bewilder and browbeat the faithful into believing that that nothing was stable, nothing was certain about the Faith.

Pope Leo XIII explained in Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae how the Americanist spirit sought to do that which the Novus Ordo was designed to accomplish: accommodate Catholics to the spirit of Protestantism and Freemasonry:

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

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

Let it be far from anyone's mind to suppress for any reason any doctrine that has been handed down. Such a policy would tend rather to separate Catholics from the Church than to bring in those who differ. There is nothing closer to our heart than to have those who are separated from the fold of Christ return to it, but in no other way than the way pointed out by Christ.

 

We see here a foreshadowing of Pope Saint Pius X's condemnation of Modernism's heretical view of dogmatic truth that has been held by Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI throughout his priesthood. Those who contend that what Joseph Ratzinger believed prior to his "elevation" on Tuesday, April 19, 2005, is irrelevant to his legitimacy as a Catholic today are most mistaken. The [First] Vatican Council itself anathematized those who believed in the mutability of our understanding of dogmatic truth, which Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI himself expressed in his capacity as the head of the counterfeit church of conciliarism on December 22, 2005:

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 Address to Curia, December 22, 2005.)

 

Just as a little reminder, you see, here is the Vatican Council's anathematizing of this heretical belief:

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.]

 

Generally speaking, having anathematized views which one has never abjured--and indeed reiterates late into one's life--is not conducive to being a member in good standing of the Catholic Church.

Having been accustomed by Americanism to accept a "little bit" of compromise with the world and its novelties, the lion's share of Catholics in the United States of America had no objections to the Novus Ordo as it gave full throat to Americanism's doctrines of egalitarianism (the blurring of distinctions between the priesthood of the ordained priest and the common priesthood of the faithful, the invasion of the laity into the sanctuary during what purports to be Holy Mass to discharge duties that belong to priests, standing for the reception of what is believed to be Holy Communion, the removal of altar rails, the re-design of older churches and the building of newer ones in ways that reflect the "new theology" of conciliarism) and to its embrace of novelty as a normal and natural part of ordinary living.

The passage from Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae above demonstrates also that Pope Leo XIII understood how many, although far from all, Catholics were being convinced by the ethos of Americanism into being silent about certain truths of the Faith in order to "attract" those outside of the One Sheepfold of Christ that is the Catholic Church to her maternal bosom:

Let it be far from anyone's mind to suppress for any reason any doctrine that has been handed down. Such a policy would tend rather to separate Catholics from the Church than to bring in those who differ. There is nothing closer to our heart than to have those who are separated from the fold of Christ return to it, but in no other way than the way pointed out by Christ.

In other words, Pope Leo XIII understood that a false ecumenical spirit of indifference was building up slowly but surely amongst many Catholics, a spirit that would ratified and reaffirmed by conciliarism's embrace and propagation of false ecumenism as the "norm," thereby rejecting what Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI disparaged in his address to "ecumenical leaders" in Cologne, Germany, on August 19, 2005, as "the theology of the return." The Novus Ordo was instituted to water down the Faith in order to "attract" Protestants, as its chief architect, Annibale Bugnini, admitted in L'Osservatore Romano, March 19, 1965:

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." (L'Osservatore Romano, March 19, 1965.)

 

Catholics made many accommodations, both overt and subtle, to the Americanist spirit in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries prior to the commencement of the [Second] Vatican Council. It was thus all-too-natural for many of them to see in the ceaseless changes wrought by the liturgical revolution an open invitation to question almost everything about the Faith and to wince not one little bit when Giovanni Montini/Paul VI gave his "blessing" for the cremation of bodies in 1964 and when Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI extended that permission for the "spreading of the ashes" of cremated bodies, which "ceremony" can now be accompanied by a "Catholic" rite presided over by a conciliar "priest." The pagans of ancient Rome would have found the conciliarists more than willing to burn as many grains of incense as possible to their false gods if only they had been able to live about two millennia or so. The fact that so few Catholics yet attached to the structures of the counterfeit church of conciliarism are outraged over these and other offenses to God and to the souls for whom He shed every single drop of His Most Precious Blood on the wood of the Holy Cross speaks volumes about how their ancestors had become accustomed to the novelties of Modernity, including those that undermined the Faith of Catholics in the United States of America, in the decades leading up to the "Second" Vatican Council.

Thus it is that the teaching of the true popes of the past is simply dismissed as "part of the past," flushed down the Orwellian memory hole. It is pretty easy to dismiss the past when one does not understand the Faith, when one is possessed of the Protestantism's revolutionary spirit of reinventing Divine Revelation to suit the vagaries of fallen human nature and the exigencies of the moment. Americanism accustomed Catholics to believe there was no need to seek to convert the United States of America to the true Faith. Conciliarism helped to extend this lie to Catholics worldwide, making short work of this ringing condemnation of the novelties of Modernity represented by the modern civil state and conciliarism's own reconciliation thereto in Pope Pius IX's Quanta Cura, December 8, 1864:

For you well know, venerable brethren, that at this time men are found not a few who, applying to civil society the impious and absurd principle of "naturalism," as they call it, dare to teach that "the best constitution of public society and (also) civil progress altogether require that human society be conducted and governed without regard being had to religion any more than if it did not exist; or, at least, without any distinction being made between the true religion and false ones." And, against the doctrine of Scripture, of the Church, and of the Holy Fathers, they do not hesitate to assert that "that is the best condition of civil society, in which no duty is recognized, as attached to the civil power, of restraining by enacted penalties, offenders against the Catholic religion, except so far as public peace may require." From which totally false idea of social government they do not fear to foster that erroneous opinion, most fatal in its effects on the Catholic Church and the salvation of souls, called by Our Predecessor, Gregory XVI, an "insanity," viz., that "liberty of conscience and worship is each man's personal right, which ought to be legally proclaimed and asserted in every rightly constituted society; and that a right resides in the citizens to an absolute liberty, which should be restrained by no authority whether ecclesiastical or civil, whereby they may be able openly and publicly to manifest and declare any of their ideas whatever, either by word of mouth, by the press, or in any other way." But, while they rashly affirm this, they do not think and consider that they are preaching "liberty of perdition;" and that "if human arguments are always allowed free room for discussion, there will never be wanting men who will dare to resist truth, and to trust in the flowing speech of human wisdom; whereas we know, from the very teaching of our Lord Jesus Christ, how carefully Christian faith and wisdom should avoid this most injurious babbling."

And, since where religion has been removed from civil society, and the doctrine and authority of divine revelation repudiated, the genuine notion itself of justice and human right is darkened and lost, and the place of true justice and legitimate right is supplied by material force, thence it appears why it is that some, utterly neglecting and disregarding the surest principles of sound reason, dare to proclaim that "the people's will, manifested by what is called public opinion or in some other way, constitutes a supreme law, free from all divine and human control; and that in the political order accomplished facts, from the very circumstance that they are accomplished, have the force of right." But who, does not see and clearly perceive that human society, when set loose from the bonds of religion and true justice, can have, in truth, no other end than the purpose of obtaining and amassing wealth, and that (society under such circumstances) follows no other law in its actions, except the unchastened desire of ministering to its own pleasure and interests?

 

Americanists and conciliarists believe in not one word of this. Indeed, Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI expressed his contempt for "preconciliar" teaching on the state, dismissing it with his condemned Modernist view of truth:

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)

 

Has Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI ever abjured this? Oh, no. He keeps reaffirming this, as he did on December 22, 2005. And Pope Leo XIII, writing in Satis Cognitum, June 29, 1896, did have a little something to say about those who defect culpably (and no sane human being can claim that Joseph Ratzinger does not what the Catholic Church taught and that he does not mean to "reverse" those things he does not "like" by his Hegelian sleight of hand) on even one point of the Holy Faith is no longer a Catholic.

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).

The need of this divinely instituted means for the preservation of unity, about which we speak is urged by St. Paul in his epistle to the Ephesians. In this he first admonishes them to preserve with every care concord of minds: "Solicitous to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace" (Eph. iv., 3, et seq.). And as souls cannot be perfectly united in charity unless minds agree in faith, he wishes all to hold the same faith: "One Lord, one faith," and this so perfectly one as to prevent all danger of error: "that henceforth we be no more children, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine by the wickedness of men, by cunning craftiness, by which they lie in wait to deceive" (Eph. iv., 14): and this he teaches is to be observed, not for a time only - "but until we all meet in the unity of faith...unto the measure of the age of the fullness of Christ" (13). But, in what has Christ placed the primary principle, and the means of preserving this unity? In that - "He gave some Apostles - and other some pastors and doctors, for the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ" (11-12).

 

In other words, if you fall from the Faith in one thing you fall from the Faith in its entirety. Modernists are actually enabled by those who contend that it is possible to remain a Catholic as long as one holds to a "minimal" number of the truths of the Faith, a novelty that is without any foundation in the thought of the Fathers of the Catholic Church and was smashed to smithereens by Pope Leo XIII in Satis Cognitum. Modernists expect that their best friends will be those who project Catholicism in the meaning of their words when they mean to convey a sense utterly at odds with the Catholic Church's authentic patrimony. Truth is thus assaulted, including the truth of the immutable Catholic teaching on the Social Reign of Christ the King.

Indeed, those Catholics in public life who support baby-killing under cover of law whom I listed earlier in this article have expelled themselves from the Catholic Church by means of their having supported abortion. They have violated the Divine Positive Law in a grievous way, committing an excommunicable offense in the process. This is fact of the supernatural order. An actual canonical sanction is merely a formal public declaration of what those who fallen from the Faith by means of violating the Divine Positive Law have done to themselves. The actual fact of their public defection is well known. And it is this precise principle, outlined by Pope Leo XIII in Satis Cognitum, that applies to those who knowingly, culpably adhere to propositions condemned by the Catholic Church. To paraphrase the quotation from Saint Augustine contained in Satis Cognitum, such people are not Catholic. It is that simple.

As both Americanism and conciliarism are mutually-related and inter-connected assaults against Truth Incarnate, Truth Crucified and Resurrected, that are founded in a variety of false premises, both help to convince people that whatever problems exist in their respective spheres (the civil state, the counterfeit church of conciliarism) can be "fixed" by addressing them with the right amount of "action." This is what leads so many very well-meaning people to spin their wheels in the machinery of electoral politics in the most sincere belief that they are "building" for the future, an illusion that I have tried to dispel in several recent articles, especially by quoting from Orestes Brownson's National Greatness in yesterday's article, When Lesser is Greater. Those who do not see that the anti-Incarnational basis of the Modern civil state is the proximate cause of social problems will be seeking ever-new "inventive" ways to "fix" problems that are the direct result of Modernity's overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King. It is, truth to be told here, so very sad to see believing Catholics scoff at, if not openly mock, the simple truth that Catholicism is the one and only foundation of personal and social order, preferring to believe in politics and/or political ideologies as the means to "fix" things, at least on a short-term basis.

Similarly, Catholics in the conciliar structures who see at least a few problems with the Novus Ordo and the conciliar "hierarchy" and the state of catechetics and education in conciliar educational institutions believe that this or that petition drive will help "Rome" to remove this or that bad bishop or to fix this or that problem in their local parish. I am a true expert in this field, my friends. I spent the better part of twenty years of my life involved in such activity, working with some of the top "conservative" luminaries in the process, even having a limited entree into some of the conciliar curial offices in Rome itself. I used to go up to priests and wave copies of various post conciliar documents, such as Inaestimabile Donum, issued on April 3, 1980, in the faces of priests to tell them that they were not doing what the "pope" wanted them to do. What did they care? "Get out here, kid, you bother me" was a not uncommon response. Endless letters to chancery offices to the the Apostolic Nunciature in Washington, D.C., and to Rome were written. Article after article was hammered out to "deal" with the problems. To what rational end? None. None at all.

For although I came to see over the course of time that the Faith could not reconciled with the false premises of the American founding (which is an entirely different matter from the Faith being reconciled with the particular form of government outlined in the Constitution of the United States of America , which might be able to serve the interests of temporal justice and the eternal good of souls if it recognized the authority of the true Church to interpose herself as a Last Resort when the good of souls demanded such motherly intervention), I was ever so slow to see that conciliarism itself was from the adversary and was as bound to produce bad results for souls as Americanism continues to produce for social order, preferring to think that Karol Wojtyla/John Paul II's many aberrations from the Faith and his praise of false religions, which I saw and despised, did not reflect the fact that he had fallen from the Faith a long time before his apparent "elevation" on October 16, 1978.

Karol Wojtyla/John Paul II's altar girl decision in 1994, which I editorialized against in The Wanderer at the time, was my break with the "fixability" of the Novus Ordo service, although I endured that abomination on weekdays for most of the next eight years, taking refuge in Sundays and Holy Days of Obligation in "indult" offerings of the Immemorial Mass of Tradition. Nothing that is from God, I had to recognize ultimately, produces such rotten fruit so consistently and places into question, whether by means of de jure pronouncements in conciliar documents or de facto in the manner of error of that is tolerated in parishes and schools and seminars without, at least for the most part, ever being corrected by conciliar authorities, all to the utter detriment of souls and to give endless offenses to the majesty of the Most Holy Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

Ultimately, however, the errors of Modernity and Modernism are all about blasphemy. Modernity accedes to the heresy of "religious liberty" as matter of principle, thus turning a blind eye and deaf ear to blasphemies committed against God and the Deposit of Faith that He has entrusted exclusively to the Catholic Church for its eternal safekeeping and infallible explication, to say nothing of the blasphemies committed against His Most Blessed Mother and Saint Joseph and others of the angels and the saints. Modernism itself, in its contemporary form of conciliarism, blasphemes God on a regular basis, as Karol Wojtyla/John Paul II did throughout his false "pontificate" and as Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI has done during his own "reign," stooping to a particular low when called Mount Hiei in Japan, upon which sits a temple of the Tendei sect of the false religion known as Buddhism, "sacred."

As I have tried to hammer home in numerous articles in the past few months, God hates false religions. He despises them. Great saints went to great lengths to destroy the temples of the pagans and their idols. To call a a place of "worship" of a false religion as "sacred" is to spit on God.

Most of the voices who used to criticize Karol Wojtyla's offenses against God were muted this time. After all, who really noticed the Mount Hiei comment? Well, let's try God. Perhaps He was offended. Perhaps souls for whom He shed every single drop of His Most Precious Blood on the wood of the Holy Cross were deceived? Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI gets a free pass because he has lured some Catholics into the trap posed by Summorum Pontificum, thus making it more possible for him to blaspheme God with impunity.

Pope Saint Leo the Great, writing in Epistle XIV, To Anastasius, the Bishop of Thessalonica, addressed the matter of those who are silent in the face of blasphemy:

But it is vain for them to adopt the name of catholic, as they do not oppose these blasphemies: they must believe them, if they can listen so patiently to such words. (Pope Saint Leo the Great, Epistle XIV, To Anastasius, Bishop of Thessalonica, St. Leo the Great | Letters 1-59 )

 

Powerful words, wouldn't you say? Words to ponder, I hope you will agree, especially for those of you who remain where I was for so very long, that is, in the conciliar structures, trying to push that boulder up a hill repeatedly. Words to ponder. I hope that the priest in a Motu community who told us nearly a year ago now that he had no "responsibility to oppose error" will look at those words of Pope Saint Leo the Great dispassionately and objectively. I hope that others will do so.

Have we become too used to heresy and blasphemy in both the civil and religious realm? Do these words of Father Frederick Faber of the Oratory of Saint Philip Neri in London, written about 150 years ago now, strike any kind of responsive chord in our souls?

This [hatred of heresy] is particularly offensive to the world. So especially opposed is it to the spirit of the world, that, even in good, believing hearts, every remnant of worldliness rises in arms against this hatred of heresy, embittering the very gentlest of characters and spoiling many a glorious work of grace. In the judgment of the world, and of worldly Christians, this hatred of heresy is exaggerated, bitter, contrary to moderation, indiscreet, unreasonable, aiming at too much, bigoted, intolerant, narrow, stupid, and immoral. What can we say to defend it? Nothing which they can understand. The mild self-opinionatedness of the gentle, undiscerning good will also take the world's view and condemn us; for there is a meek-looking positiveness about the timid goodness which is far from God, and the instincts of whose charity is more toward those who are less for God, while its timidity is daring enough for a harsh judgment. Heresy can only be hated by an undivided heart. (The Dolors of Mary, 1857.)

If we hated sin as we ought to hate it, purely, keenly, manfully, we should do more penance, we should inflict more self-punishment, we should sorrow for our sins more abidingly. Then, again, the crowning disloyalty to God is heresy. It is the sin of sins, the very loathsomest of things which God looks down upon in this malignant world. Yet how little do we understand of its excessive hatefulness! It is the polluting of God’s truth, which is the worst of all impurities.

Yet how light we make of it! We look at it, and are calm. We touch it and do not shudder. We mix with it, and have no fear. We see it touch holy things, and we have no sense of sacrilege. We breathe its odor, and show no signs of detestation or disgust. Some of us affect its friendship; and some even extenuate its guilt. We do not love God enough to be angry for His glory. We do not love men enough to be charitably truthful for their souls.

Having lost the touch, the taste, the sight, and all the senses of heavenly-mindedness, we can dwell amidst this odious plague, in imperturbable tranquility, reconciled to its foulness, not without some boastful professions of liberal admiration, perhaps even with a solicitous show of tolerant sympathies.

Why are we so far below the old saints, and even the modern apostles of these latter times, in the abundance of our conversations? Because we have not the antique sternness? We want the old Church-spirit, the old ecclesiastical genius. Our charity is untruthful, because it is not severe; and it is unpersuasive, because it is untruthful.

We lack devotion to truth as truth, as God’s truth. Our zeal for souls is puny, because we have no zeal for God’s honor. We act as if God were complimented by conversions, instead of trembling souls rescued by a stretch of mercy.

We tell men half the truth, the half that best suits our own pusillanimity and their conceit; and then we wonder that so few are converted, and that of those few so many apostatize.

We are so weak as to be surprised that our half-truth has not succeeded so well as God’s whole truth.

Where there is no hatred of heresy, there is no holiness.

A man, who might be an apostle, becomes a fester in the Church for the want of this righteous indignation. (The Precious Blood, 1860)

 

Truth be told, you see, Modernity, represented so well by Americanism in the United States of America, and Modernism, exemplified so well by the counterfeit church of conciliarism, each is an attack upon the whole notion of truth. One seeks to convince man that he can chart his own course in the civil realm without the direction of the true Church and without her sanctifying offices, that there is no ultimate repository and arbiter of truth. The other seeks to render truth into such an absurdity that it can contradict itself or appear to take a different meaning in one time than other, a thoroughly anathematized proposition. The result in both instances is disorder in souls and in the world.

We must pray very fervently as the consecrated slaves of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary, especially by means of her Most Holy Rosary, that we will our true shepherds in the catacombs who make no concessions to conciliarism or to the nonexistent legitimacy of its wolves in shepherds' clothing, will have the same spirit of courage as the saint we honor today, Saint Antony of the Desert, whose opposition to Arianism was documented by none other than Saint Athanasius himself:

And he was altogether wonderful in faith and religious, for he never held communion with the Meletian schismatics, knowing their wickedness and apostacy from the beginning; nor had he friendly dealings with the Manichaeans or any other heretics; or, if he had, only as far as advice that they should change to piety. For he thought and asserted that intercourse with these was harmful and destructive to the soul. In the same manner also he loathed the heresy of the Arians, and exhorted all neither to approach them nor to bold their erroneous belief. And once when certain Arian madmen came to him, when he had questioned them and learned their impiety, he drove them from the mountain, saying that their words were worse than the poison of serpents.

And once also the Arians having lyingly asserted that Antony's opinions were the same as theirs, he was displeased and wroth against them. Then being summoned by the bishops and all the brethren, he descended from the mountain, and having entered Alexandria , he denounced the Arians, saying that their heresy was the last of all and a forerunner of Antichrist. And he taught the people that the Son of God was not a created being, neither had He come into being from non-existence, but that He was the Eternal Word and Wisdom of the Essence of the Father. And therefore it was impious to say, 'there was a time when He was not,' for the Word was always co-existent with the Father. Wherefore have no fellowship with the most impious Arians. For there is no communion between light and darkness For you are good Christians, but they, when they say that the Son of the Father, the Word of God, is a created being, differ in nought from the heathen, since they worship that which is created, rather than God the creator. But believe ye that the Creation itself is angry with them because they number the Creator, the Lord of all, by whom all things came into being, with those things which were originated.

All the people, therefore, rejoiced when they heard the anti-Christian heresy anathematised by such a man.

 

Saint Antony's vision of the Church in crisis in his own day can be applied to what the conciliarists have wrought in our own day in the past forty-eight years:

Being known to be so great a man, therefore, and having thus given answers to those who visited him, he returned again to the inner mountain, and maintained his wonted discipline. And often when people-came to him, as he was sitting or walking, as it is written in Daniel, he became dumb, and after a season he resumed the thread of what he had been saying before to the brethren who were with him. And his companions perceived that he was seeing a vision. For often when he was on the mountains he saw what was happening in Egypt, and told it to Serapion the bishop, who was indoors with him, and who saw that Antony was wrapped in a vision. Once as he was sitting and working, he fell, as it were, into a trance, and groaned much at what he saw. Then after a time, having turned to the bystanders with groans and trembling, he prayed, and falling on his knees remained so a long time. And having arisen the old man wept. His companions, therefore, trembling and terrified, desired to learn from him what it was. And they troubled him much, until he was forced to speak. And with many groans he spake as follows: 'O, my children, it were better to die before what has appeared in the vision come to pass.' And when again they asked him, having burst into tears, he said, 'Wrath is about to seize the Church, and it is on the point of being given up to men who are like senseless beasts. For I saw the table of the Lord's House, and mules standing around it on all sides in a ring, and kicking the things therein, just like a herd kicks when it leaps in confusion. And you saw,' said he, 'how I groaned, for I heard a voice saying, "My altar shall be defiled."' These things the old man saw, and after two years the present inroad of the Arians and the plunder of the churches took place, when they violently carried off the vessels, and made the heathen carry them; and when they forced the heathen from the prisons to join in their services, and in their presence did upon the Table as they would. Then we all understood that these kicks of the mules signified to Antony what the Arians, senselessly like beasts, are now doing. Saint Athanasius: Life of Antony

 

Saint Athanasius wrote that Saint Antony provided to whom he revealed his vision with the beacon of true hope in the redemptive work of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ that is re-presented in an unbloody manner on altars of Sacrifice by true bishops and true bishops:

 

But when he saw this vision, he comforted those with him, saying, 'Be not downcast, my children; for as the Lord has been angry, so again will He heal us, and the Church shall soon again receive her own order, and shall shine forth as she is wont. And you shall behold the persecuted restored, and wickedness again withdrawn to its own hiding-place, and pious faith speaking boldly in every place with all freedom. Only defile not yourselves with the Arians, for their teaching is not that of the Apostles, but that of demons and their father the devil; yea, rather, it is barren and senseless, and without light understanding, like the senselessness of these mules.' Saint Athanasius: Life of Antony

 

Consoling words for our own day, are they not? We must simply be faithful to everything that Holy Mother Church has taught perennially without one iota of dissent as we endeavor to offer up our own daily prayers and sufferings and mortifications and humiliations to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary. Our patience and perseverance in doing so might just help a few souls to see the world more clearly through the eyes of the true Faith and to recognize and to utterly reject, once and for all, the errors of Modernity and Modernism once and for all.

Truth be told, it's all about Truth Himself, Truth Incarnate, Truth Crucified and Resurrected, the Way, the Truth, and the Life Who is immutable and Who wants us to share with Him and the Father and the Holy Ghost and His Most Blessed Mother and foster-father and all the angels and saints an unending Easter Sunday of glory in Paradise.

Viva Cristo Rey! Vivat Christus Rex!

Our Lady of Prompt Succor, pray for us.

Saint Joseph, pray for us.

Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.

Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.

Saint John the Evangelist, pray for us.

Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saints Joachim and Anne, pray for us.

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

Saint Paul the Abbot, pray for us.

Saint Maurus, pray for us..

See also: A Litany of Saints