ELEISON COMMENTS DCCCIII (December 3, 2022) : QUESTIONS ENSUING – II
To attempt a just judgment upon the record 79 young men entering this year the major seminaries of the Society of St Pius X, as it is known (see the last five issues of these “Comments”), more considerations of today’s Church context may be useful. Let them again be set up by the question in heavy black print –
2 Excellency, why are you so relatively lenient in your criticism of the Newsociety ? Did it not betray its Founder, Archbishop Lefebvre, in 2012 ? Should those responsible not be called out as the traitors that they are ?
Go easy ! In the Catholic Church at Vatican II (1962-1965) the shepherds were struck by the error of modernism, as the Catholic shepherds have never before been struck in all Church history, not even in the Arian crisis of the fourth century, because modernism turns the subjective brain into objective mush – see Pius X’s Pascendi (1907), where he flayed this catastrophic condition of the human mind. But Pius X was able to restore sanity only temporarily in the Church, because the insanity in the world grew only worse after him, so that by 1991 when the Society’s Founder died, the Catholic sheep had become deeply “scattered” (Zech. XIII, 7; Mt. XXVI, 31) all around the Society. It was the Universal Church’s very own shepherds who had betrayed at Vatican II by splitting their own Authority from Catholic Truth.
Now, strictly speaking, all Catholics following their misled leaders ever since Vatican II have been, in the same measure, abandoning Catholic Truth, but, obviously, not all of them meant to be abandoning the Truth, in fact many followed misled Authority only because they still trusted it to tell them the Truth. The proof is that whenever since then the Holy Ghost has, at varying speeds, given light to such souls, many have, like Archbishop Vigano, seen through the false Authority and returned to the Truth of Tradition. To these Catholics of good will, God gave in the 1970’s and 1980’s a great leader of Truth in the person of Archbishop Lefebvre (1905-1991), and the Traditional movement and the true Society of Pius X were born, but once his personal charisma died with him in 1991, then the charisma of Rome and its Authority, universal for Catholics, re-asserted itself, and by 2012 the Archbishop’s Society had turned into the Newsociety, just as by 1965 God’s Catholic Church had turned into the Newchurch, for parallel reasons.
However, just as in 1965 most Catholics did not have the light to see what had happened at the Council, so in 2012 most Traditionalists lacked the light to see immediately what had happened in 2012, when the Society’s leaders set the Society on the path of seeking agreement by stages (Confessions, Marriages, Ordinations) with the apostate Romans, with whom the Archbishop had refused all further contact until they returned to the Truth of the great anti-modernist doctrinal documents from the Catholic Popes of the 19th and 20th centuries. And again, just as most Catholics in 1965 followed misled Authority only because they counted on it for Truth, so most Traditionalists in 2012 only continued to follow the leaders of the Newsociety flirting with apostates because they trusted in it to continue telling them the Truth. Now it is true that in 1990 the Society’s leaders were solemnly warned, on retreat in Econe, that the Romans were apostates. “I repeat,” their Founder emphasized, “they have lost the faith”. Yet nobody can say that the Newsociety has completely betrayed the Archbishop’s Truth, because it still refuses the two main points on which “Rome” insists: the acceptance of Vatican II and acceptance of the New Mass.
In conclusion, we need to pray that the Newsociety never give way on the Council or the Mass, because it can still have much truth to tell many Catholics if it stands firm on Catholic doctrine. But let the pastoral appeal above for charity and humility among Catholics not be taken as any kind of approval of the change of doctrine from true Church to Newchurch in 1965, or from Society to Newsociety in 2012. Both of these were real disasters for Church and world.
Kyrie eleison
Patience we need. All inter-Catholic fights
Will not stop God from setting all to rights.