We Must NOT Accept Novelties
by
Thomas A. Droleskey
The Modernist mind believes that truth can contradict itself, standing the Aristotlean principle of non-contradiction on its head. Pope Saint Pius X noted in Pascendi Dominici Gregis that Modernism is indeed the synthesis of all heresies, an admixture of truth and error, which is why is is so difficult for the average Catholic to separate Modernism's novelties from the authentic Traditions of the Catholic Church.
Thus, for example, Pope Benedict XVI, whose mind is shaped by Hegelian belief that truth can contradict itself as it contains within itself the seeds of its own opposition, can make the following statement, made in a question and answer session with priests from the Diocese of Rome about the state the liturgy in the postconciliar era:
We must accept novelties but try and see continuity in the Council.
While this statement is similar to the effort made in Paragraph 15 of the General Instruction to the Roman Missal to state that the Novus Ordo Missae is a continuation of Tradition while at the same time it introduces novelties:
The same awareness of the present state of the world also influenced the use of texts from very ancient tradition. It seemed that this cherished treasure would not be harmed if some phrases were changed so that the style of language would be more in accord with the language of modern theology and would faithfully reflect the actual state of the Church's discipline. Thus there have been changes of some expressions bearing on the evaluation and use of the good things of the earth and of allusions to a particular form of outward penance belonging to another age in the history of the Church.
It is a philosophical absurdity to state that one is being "faithful" to Tradition while implementing unprecedented novelties. The Church has always eschewed, not praised, novelties as harmful to the Faith and thus to the eternal and temporal good of the souls for whom Our Lord shed every single drop of His Most Precious Blood.
Pope Saint Pius X noted the Modernist penchant for novelty in Pascendi Dominci Gregis, citing the Second Council of Nicea and the Fourth
Council of Constantinople:
Would that they had but displayed less zeal and energy in propagating it! But such is their activity and such their unwearying labor on behalf of their cause, that one cannot but be pained to see them waste such energy in endeavoring to ruin the Church when they might have been of such service to her had their efforts been better directed. Their artifices to delude men's minds are of two kinds, the first to remove obstacles from their path, the second to devise and apply actively and patiently every resource that can serve their purpose. They recognize that the three chief difficulties which stand in their way are the scholastic method of philosophy, the authority and tradition of the Fathers, and the magisterium of the Church, and on these they wage unrelenting war. Against scholastic philosophy and theology they use the weapons of ridicule and contempt. Whether it is ignorance or fear, or both, that inspires this conduct in them, certain it is that the passion for novelty is always united in them with hatred of scholasticism, and there is no surer sign that a man is tending to Modernism than when he begins to show his dislike for the scholastic method. Let the Modernists and their admirers remember the proposition condemned by Pius IX: "The method and principles which have served the ancient doctors of scholasticism when treating of theology no longer correspond with the exigencies of our time or the progress of science." They exercise all their ingenuity in an effort to weaken the force and falsify the character of tradition, so as to rob it of all its weight and authority. But for Catholics nothing will remove the authority of the second Council of Nicea, where it condemns those "who dare, after the impious fashion of heretics, to deride the ecclesiastical traditions, to invent novelties of some kind...or endeavor by malice or craft to overthrow any one of the legitimate traditions of the Catholic Church"; nor that of the declaration of the fourth Council of Constantinople: "We therefore profess to preserve and guard the rules bequeathed to the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, by the Holy and most illustrious Apostles, by the orthodox Councils, both general and local, and by everyone of those divine interpreters, the Fathers and Doctors of the Church." Wherefore the Roman Pontiffs, Pius IV and Pius IX, ordered the insertion in the profession of faith of the following declaration: "I most firmly admit and embrace the apostolic and ecclesiastical traditions and other observances and constitutions of the Church.''
A canonized pope of the Catholic Church, dissecting the Modernist mind, reminded Modernists and their allies that he Second Council of Nicea (787 A.D.) condemned novelties in the Eighth Century, has did the Fourth Council of Constantinople (869-870 A.D.) a century later.
Pope Saint Agatho, crowned as Successor of Saint Peter in 678 A.D., is believed to be the first pope to swear to the following plain words in Papal Coronation Oath:
I VOW to change nothing of the received tradition, and nothing thereof I have found before me guarded by my God-pleasing predecessors, to encroach, to alter [change], or to permit any innovation therein;
To the contrary; with glowing affection as Her truly faithful student and successor, to reverently safeguard the passed on good, with my whole strength and utmost effort;
To cleanse all that is in contradiction with canonical order that may surface;
To guard the holy canons and decrees of our Popes likewise as Divine Ordinances of Heaven, because I am conscious of Thee, Whose place I take through the grace of God, Whose Vicarship I possess with Thy support, being subject to severest accounting before Thy Divine tribunal over all that I confess.
If I should undertake to act in anything of contrary sense, or should permit that it will be executed, Thou willst not be merciful to me on the dreadful day of Divine Justice.
Accordingly, without exclusion, we subject to severest excommunication anyone-----be it our self or be it another-----who would dare to undertake anything new in contradiction to this constituted evangelic tradition and the purity of the Orthodox Faith and the Christian Religion, or [who] would seek to change anything by his opposing efforts, or [who] would concur with those who undertake such blasphemous venture.
As Father Paul Kramer has noted, this Papal Coronation Oath was taken for a period of 600 years, from Pope Saint Agatho to Pope Boniface VIII, who was crowned in 1294. It is clear that Pope Benedict XVI, who has replaced the Papal Tiara on his Coat of Arms with an episcopal mitre, would blanche if asked to swear to the words that so many of his predecessors in the Throne of Saint Peter spoke without a moment's hesitation.
The irreconcilable nature of novelty with Tradition is part and parcel of the Modernist mind. Pope Saint Pius X noted this very clearly in Pascendi Dominici Gregis:
It is one of the cleverest devices of the Modernists (as they are commonly and rightly called) to present their doctrines without order and systematic arrangement, in a scattered and disjointed manner, so as to make it appear as if their minds were in doubt or hesitation, whereas in reality they are quite fixed and steadfast. For this reason it will be of advantage, Venerable Brethren, to bring their teachings together here into one group, and to point out their interconnection, and thus to pass to an examination of the sources of the errors, and to prescribe remedies for averting the evil results.
Although Modernism was condemned by Pope Saint Pius X in 1907 and the Oath Against Modernism prescribed in 1910, the Modernists never went away. They took refuge in the Liturgical Movement. They repackaged themselves as the exponents of the "New Theology." They claimed to on the cutting edge of "discoveries" in Biblical scholarship. Their advances in these areas troubled Monsignor Eugenio Pacelli, who was crowned as Pope Pius XII in 1939. The Devil's Final Battle quotes the future pontiff as follows:
I am worried by the Blessed Virgin's messages to Lucy of Fatima. The persistence of Mary about the dangers which menace the Church is a divine warning against the suicide of altering the Faith, in Her liturgy, Her theology and Her soul. . . . I hear around me innovators who wish to dismantle the Sacred Chapel, destroy the universal flame of the Church, reject Her ornaments and make Her feel remorse for Her historical past.
A day will come when the civilized world will deny its God, when the Church will doubt as Peter doubted. She will be tempted to believe that man has become God. In our churches, Christians will search in vain for the red lamp where God awaits them. Like Mary Magdalene, weeping before the empty tomb, they will ask, "Where have they taken Him?"
Monsignor Pacelli's prophetic, perhaps even mystical, insights into the future of the Church have great application to the events of the past forty years. Leaving aside for some future commentary Pope Pius XII's failure to prevent this disaster by perfectly fulfilling Our Lady's Fatima request and the abandonment of his own warnings he outlined in Mediator Dei in 1947 about liturgical change, the quotation above has been borne out in the disastrous consequences of the novelties that have been visited upon the Church in her human elements in the wake of the Second Vatican Council.
The novelties, well documented and critiqued in numerous books and articles, continue to multiply. Novelties beget novelties. There are liturgical novelties that are spawned by the very fungible nature of the Novus Ordo Missae that continue to spiral out of control. There are doctrinal novelties that put into question, if not totally denying, almost the entirety of the Deposit of Faith that Our Lord entrusted to His true Church.
One of the chief promoters of theological novelties has been Father Hans Kung, who has remained in canonical "good standing" even though he was declared by the then named Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 1979 to be ineligible to hold a chair of Catholic theology at Tubingen University. Kung, who was invited to speak at Saint Norbert College in DePere, Wisconsin, several years ago without being stopped by the then Bishop of Green Bay, the Most Reverend Robert Banks, denies numerous articles of the Faith. A critique of his heresies can be found in The Devil's Final Battle (p. 59):
As for Hans Kung, this "leading light" of the post-conciliar church period had worked closely at the Council with other radicals such as Congar, Ratzinger, Rahner and Schillebeeckx. In the 1970s, however, because Kung had gone "too far," he was censured by the Vatican for certain heretical view, including the following: rejection of the Church's infallibility; the claim that bishops do not receive their teaching authority from Christ; the suggestion that any baptized layperson has the power to confect the Holy Eucharist; the denial that Christ is "consubstantial" with the Father; the undermining of doctrines (unspecified) concerning the Virgin Mary.
It needs to be pointed out that these are only some of Hans Kung's heretical views, but they were the only ones mentioned within the Vatican's sanctions. Thus, in effect. the Vatican left Kung's other heterodox tenets untouched. For example in one of his most famous books entitled On Being a Christian, Hans Kung:
Kung has never retracted these unorthodox and heretical statements. Moreover, Kung has publicly called for a revision of Church teaching on issues such as papal infallibility, birth control, mandatory celibacy of priests, and women in the priesthood. Despite this blatant rejection of Church teaching, the only penalty that the Vatican ever inflicted against Kung was that he was "not allowed" to be considered a Catholic theologian, and as such, was not allowed to teach theology in a Catholic university. This "penalty" was circumvented when the University of Tubingen, Kung's home campus, retained Kung as a teaching professor and simply restructured part of the university so that Kung, a great celebrity, may continue teaching in that part of the university which is now chartered as a "secular" school.
Meanwhile, the Vatican has never condemned Kung as a heretic, never excommunicated him (as canon law provides), never ordered that his books be removed from libraries in Catholic seminaries and universities (where they are now found in abundance), never prevented him being a guest-lecturer at Catholic institutions, never obstructed him from publishing articles in Concilium or other progressivist "Catholic" publications. Father Hans Kung is not even suspended. Rather, to this day, Kung remains in good standing in the diocese of Basle, with no other canonical penalties leveled against him.
Yes, this is indeed novel, ladies and gentleman. As I noted two days ago in A Compass Pointing Due South, Kung was welcomed to speak at Saint Norbert's College to deform souls, meaning that there are administrators and faculty at Saint Norbert's who agree with his dissent from the Received Teaching of Our Lord. Was this any concern to Bishop Robert Banks when Kung spoke there? Is this any concern to Bishop David Zubik now? Oh, no, they're too busy persecuting and hounding a Catholic priest who subscribes to no novelties, who simply offers the Mass that countless saints offered and countless others heard, the Immemorial Mass of Tradition. There is plenty of room for novel ideas that put into question the Received Teaching of the Divine Redeemer. There is no room for priests who will not accept novelties as being anything but inconsistent with the authentic Tradition of the Catholic Church.
Novel also is the ability of ordained priests to promote the very thing that caused Our Lord to suffer in His Sacred Humanity on the wood of the Holy Cross--sin--and then to remain in good standing as priests, no less go without a word of censure from any ecclesiastical authority whatsoever. Speak about against ecumenism and religious liberty? Ah, you are a disloyal, disobedient, schismatic Catholic worthy of being cast into the flames of Hell, where, it appears, only traditional Catholics who resist the novelties of the past forty years seemed destined to go. This applies to the priests of the Society of Saint Pius X--and to all other priests who are offering the Mass of the ages in "unapproved" chapels. The story of Father Hector Bolduc was recounted two days ago in A Compass Pointing Due South. His story is just one of many. Look at how Father Nicholas Gruner, whose only crime is fidelity to Our Lady's Fatima Message, continues to be hounded by Vatican officials.
Indeed, as I noted in Discovering Discipline: For Believing Catholics Only, even those who think that they can retain some semblance of Catholicity in the Novus Ordo must be dealt with harshly. As the likes of the late Father Hans Urs von Balthasar get praised by the Vicar of Christ and as the likes of Father Hans Kung remain free to deform souls around the world in their quest to form a One World Church, the good people of Saint Mary's by the Sea get expelled by the parish. Such is the thuggery of Bishop Tod Brown of the Diocese of Orange, California, that a list of the expellees had actually been printed in the parish bulletin before lawyers, it appears, advised that copies of the bulletin be thrown away in a dumpster, where they were found by parishioners. No one who shows even a trace of traditional Catholicism can be tolerated by the apostles of tolerance and compassion while those who promote sin and foment dissent are treated with great dignity and are not infrequently elevated to the hierarchy itself.
In this age of novelty, you see, nothing will happen to Father Allan Loftus, S.J., who urged parishioners at the
Jesuit Urban Center at the Boston Church of the Immaculate Conception
to view a motion picture heralding perverted behavior. As reported on LifeSiteNews.com, Father Loftus made the following statement that will earn him the fires of Hell for all eternity if he does not repent:
Rev. Loftus proposed, contrary to Catholic teaching, that sexual sin is not real sin, whereas not giving in to one's desires is sin. “For too many of us, what we think of as ‘our sinfulness,’ our not yet even being the full human beings we are created to become, remains a paltry and cheap catalogue of peccadillos, usually having something to do with sex or not being ‘charitable’ toward each other. Those so-called ‘sins’ are hardly worth setting aside 40 days each year to ponder; those sins of yours or mine are hardly worth mentioning, really.” Loftus continued, “There is something much bigger at stake here than my petty sinfulness, my unkindness, my frustrated sex life, or my infuriating love life. The sin that is before us always is our refusal to grow into the freedom for which we were born.”
Will Cardinal-designate Sean O'Malley, O.F.M., Cap., do or say anything to censure Father Loftus? Not in the novel world of "dialog" and collegiality. Actual wolves in shepherds' clothing can continue to ravage Our Lord's flock as they go about their villainous business with perfect ecclesiastical impunity. Father Loftus is likely to be left in his position of authority to urge people to sin. And it is hardly likely that any censure will be visited upon the Canadian Religious Conference, which represents over 200 congregations of male and female religious in the Modernist stronghold known as Canada, which has just released a statement publicly dissenting from the Received Teaching of Our Lord:
"We regret," says the CRC, "In terms of ethics and bioethics, the holding up of an ideal that leaves little room for advancement and progress; the defence of principles that do not reflect human experience (divorce, contraception, protection against AIDS, alleviation of suffering at the end of life)." (As reported by LifeSiteNews.com)
The timing of these assaults is no accident. This appears to be part of a well-coordinated effort on the part of those masquerading as Catholics to make the push for Father Hans Kung's One World Church, which would certainly be a novelty. However, the One World Church is not a novelty that has gone unnoticed by past popes. Pope Saint Pius X took direct aim at this novelty when he critiqued the errors of the Sillon in Notre Charge Apostolique in 1910:
We fear that worse is to come: the end result of this developing promiscuousness, the beneficiary of this cosmopolitan social action, can only be a Democracy which will be neither Catholic, nor Protestant, nor Jewish. It will be a religion (for Sillonism, so the leaders have said, is a religion) more universal than the Catholic Church, uniting all men become brothers and comrades at last in the "Kingdom of God". - "We do not work for the Church, we work for mankind."
And now, overwhelmed with the deepest sadness, We ask Ourselves, Venerable Brethren, what has become of the Catholicism of the Sillon? Alas! this organization which formerly afforded such promising expectations, this limpid and impetuous stream, has been harnessed in its course by the modern enemies of the Church, and is now no more than a miserable affluent of the great movement of apostasy being organized in every country for the establishment of a One-World Church which shall have neither dogmas, nor hierarchy, neither discipline for the mind, nor curb for the passions, and which, under the pretext of freedom and human dignity, would bring back to the world (if such a Church could overcome) the reign of legalized cunning and force, and the oppression of the weak, and of all those who toil and suffer.
Obviously, the Novus Ordo Missae has been the chief means by which novelty has been foisted upon Catholics. The blitzkrieg of changes that took place in 1969 and thereafter have institutionalized impermanence and instability in the lives of those Catholics who bother to go to Mass, accustoming many of them to believe that doctrine can change just as easily and just as regularly as the liturgy. Lex orendi, lex credendi. The law of praying is the law of believing. If we pray in novel ways then we are going to believe in novel things--and to be more readily disposed to accept novelties as being part of the normal life of the Church, which they are not.
Consider the photographs below from the Rorate Caeli website. These novelties from the Archdiocese of Boston are just part of the rotten fruit of the Novus Ordo Missae and the synthetic religion which spawned it and which is feed by its deficient, novel prayers and its Protestant and Sillonist rubrics and ethos (the captions belongs to the Rorate Caeli website):
Abortion-friendly politicians may choose what to do in Boston. For instance, they may choose to receive communion.
"Gay Catholics" have plenty of choices in Boston. They may choose to go to the Jesuit Urban Center, for instance -- described by Boston Magazine as “best place to meet a mate—gay” -- something which the Jesuits themselves see as quaint.
They may choose to go to a very Traditionally Catholic act of worship: the Healing Service, at the Paulist Center.
If they want dance in the liturgy, no problem! Fr. Bob Ver Eecke, SJ, of the Boston Liturgical Dance Ensemble, can always provide Catholic Bostonians with tons of fun. (Photograph omitted because of frontal immodesty.)
The page on the Rorate Caeli included a letter from Boston Auxiliary Bishop Richard Lennon to a parishioner in the Archdiocese of Boston refusing a request for an "approved" daily offering of the Immemorial Mass of Tradition:
Dear ____________:
First I wish to express my regrets that your 21 August 2005 is being acknowledged in such a tardy manner; however, I only recently have received it from the Office of the Archbishop with a request to respond to it. I note that your letter regards Holy Trinity Parish in Boston and specifically your request that the Archbishop invite either the Fraternity of Saints Peter and Paul or the Institute of Christ the King to come to the Archdiocese of Boston to service the Tridentine Community.
Please know that the Archbishop has received requests similar to yours in the past and has consistently responded that in accord with the request of Ecclesia Dei the Archdiocese of Boston provides the celebration of Mass in the Tridentine Rite and has the qualified priests to celebrate this Mass. It is not the intention of the Archbishop to begin a Tridentine Rite parish, thus at this time he does not envision the necessity nor the advantage of inviting priests from either of the two groups that you mention to the Archdiocese as we can provide for the celebration of the Mass on a weekly basis.
With my best wishes, I am
Sincerely yours in Christ,
Most Reverend Richard G. Lennon
Vicar General and Moderator of the Curia
Yes, according to Pope Benedict XVI, we must accept novelty as the Faith is perverted and distorted with full ecclesiastical approbation. No, we must NOT accept novelty. The novelties of the Second Vatican Council and the Novus Ordo Missae lead to the spectacles pictured above. They are not aberrations that can be "controlled" or "corrected." They are the logical, inexorable results of unprecedented events in the history of the Church that are not of God and lead ultimately to the worship of the devil himself. Too strong? What else can be said when a Roman Catholic priest of the Society of Jesus can urge people to sin? This is of Christ?
Some will protest, as are some people who have been angered by Christopher A. Ferrara's excellent EWTN: A Network Gone Wrong, that everything a pope says or does commands our obedience, which is yet another novelty not consonant with the authentic Tradition of the Catholic Church. Popes can err in their capacity as private theologians. Popes can err when they make statements that have not been taught always and everywhere and believed by everywhere. Popes can err when they tried to implement and/or further institutionalize novelties, such as ecumenism and religious liberty, that contradict the entire patrimony of the Church. Popes can err when they make factual misstatements.
Here is but one example.
Pope John Paul II, who followed the example of his immediate predecessor, Pope John Paul I, refused to be crowned on October 22, 1978. During his installation Mass, the late Holy Father said that Pope Paul VI had left it to his successors to decide whether or not they were to be crowned with the now defunct papal tiara. Pope John Paul II was wrong. Pope Paul VI had specifically stated in 1975 Apostolic Constitution, Romano Pontifici Eligendo, that his successor was to have a coronation, stating:
The new pontiff is to be crowned by the senior cardinal deacon.
Preferring to embrace novelty rather than even to inform himself of a predecessor's specific request to retain the tradition of the Papal Coronation, Pope John Paul II launched his pontificate by continuing the novelty of Pope Paul VI's immediate successor, Pope John Paul I, the former Albino Cardinal Luciani. No, ladies and gentlemen, popes can be wrong on matters of fact. They can be wrong when their statements deviate from the Ordinary Magisterium of the Church. Pope Benedict XVI is wrong when stating that novelty can be reconciled with Tradition. It cannot.
We continue to pray and pray and pray, especially during this season of Lent. We never grow discouraged. We never surrender to despair. Never. We continue to maintain our spiritual equilibrium, offering all of the sufferings of the present moment to the Blessed Trinity through Our Lady's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart as her consecrated slaves. To discuss the realities of the present situation of the Church in her human elements is not to be a negativist or to demonstrate the least bit of antagonism for the person of the Successor of Saint Peter. To discuss the realities of the present moment and to plead with our spiritual father for him to do his duty and to obey Our Lady's Fatima Message in order to restore Tradition in the Church and Christendom in the world is to show our utter dependence upon him to bring about the Triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Only he can do this. Only the Holy Father can usher in the City of Mary Immaculate. Only the Successor of Saint Peter can do as Pope Saint Pius X had urged throughout his pontificate: "To restore all things in Christ."
We continue, therefore, in prayer and fasting and penance to bring an end to novelties and to see once again the restoration of the true shining city set on a hill, the Catholic City.
Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us.
Saint Joseph, pray for us.
Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.
Saint Frances of Rome, pray for us.
The Forty Holy Martyrs of Sebaste, pray for us.
Pope Saint Gregory the Great, pray for us.
Saint John of God, pray for us.
Pope Saint Gregory the Great, pray for us.
Pope Saint Agatho, pray for us.
Pope Saint Pius V, pray for us.
Pope Saint Pius X. pray for us.
Saint Philomena, pray for us.
Blessed Pauline Jaricot, pray for us.
Blessed Jacinta, pray for us.
Blessed Francisco, pray for us.
Sister Lucia, pray for us.
