ELEISON COMMENTS DCCCXXIV (April 29, 2023) : “EXCOMMUNICATIONS” — HINDSIGHT

On March 16 of this year, Fr. Edward MacDonald, virtual head of the Catholic “Resistance” in Australia and New Zealand, wrote an excellent article for his people on the so-called “excommunication” of the four bishops consecrated by Archbishop Lefebvre on June 30 1988 at Econe in Switzerland. The article shows clearly just how the modernists in Rome outwitted the Archbishop’s successors at the head of the SSPX, and in effect crippled the SSPX’s defence of the true Catholic Faith, unless it is willing to return in action and not just in words to the Archbishop’s clear putting of the integral Faith above false “obedience” —

In any SSPX-Rome agreement the crucial question has always been: who appoints henceforth the SSPX bishops ? 1The reason is that the history of the Catholic Church is littered with examples of the struggle between the friends and enemies of God – normally Church and State respectively – for control of the appointment of Catholic bishops, because, the Catholic Church being a monarchy and not a modern “democracy”, then it is the bishops who form the Catholic people and not the people who form the bishops.

Both Archbishop Lefebvre and Cardinal Ratzinger understood this well when they met near Rome in 1988 to negotiate such an agreement. The wily Cardinal nearly wrested control of the appointment of SSPX bishops from the Archbishop in the Protocol (sketch of an agreement) signed by them on May 5, but by God’s grace the Archbishop realized that he was imperilling the Faith, took back his signature on May 6 and, assisted by Bishop de Castro Mayer, consecrated on June 30 four of his priests as bishops in “Operation Survival”. He saidhe was breaking no Church law: “We are convinced that all these accusations or penalties of which we may be the object,are null, absolutely null and void, and we will take no account of them” 2.The SSPX explained why the Archbishop was correct in a brochure:“Neither Schismatic nor Excommunicated”.

However, about 20 years later, Bishop Fellay felt that the null and void “excommunications” should be taken seriously after all, because he felt as though he was outside of theVisibleChurch 3. As for Cardinal Ratzinger, he had never admitted that Archbishop Lefebvre had bested him in 1988, so now as Pope Benedict hewas still determined to control the appointment of SSPX bishops. One pre-condition set for admitting the SSPX into the Visible Church was that Pope Benedict would lift the “excommunications” on the four SSPX bishops. The SSPX prayed that this would happen and rejoiced when the “excommunications” were indeed “lifted” by the Pope. Unwisely, the SSPX expressed gratitude to the Pope for his good will and generosity.

But by 2023 the SSPX has now multiplied its ties with the “Visible Church”. Its bishops are older and the health of some of them has deteriorated. The faithful wonder, why are no new bishops forthcoming? It is because the SSPX have painted themselves into a corner. By asking for the lifting of these null and void “excommunications”, the SSPX implicitly recognised that they were real, and implicitly they promised that they would never again consecrate bishops without Rome’s approval, as the Archbishop had done in 1988. That would show a great “ingratitude” to Pope Benedict, and they would deserve to be re-excommunicated.

Thus during his lifetime Archbishop Lefebvre won the battles with Rome, but his successors, lacking the clarity of his faith and insight into the treachery of modernism, were not the warriors that he was, and did not see how the (objective) deceits of wily Benedict / Ratzinger had wrested control from them of their future bishops, thus, in effect, crippling the SSPX. Here is how Pope Francis or his successor will choose the next SSPX bishop or bishops, and these will form the priests and faithfulof the SSPX, finallyintegrating them into the Conciliar Church. Probably there will be only a whimper of protest, as the SSPX faithful are being all the time more and more sweetly misled into believing in the “renewed” Catholicism of Vatican II.

[Notes: 1 Eleison Comments #116, September 26, 2009. 2 https://sspx.org/en/1988-episcopal-consecrations-sermon. 3 Many “Christian” churches are visible, so that visibility is not a Mark of the one true Church, to distinguish it from false “churches”. Catholics must be where the four Marks are, i.e. One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic. And if any visible “church” does not have all four Marks, it is anathema. We must avoid it.]

Kyrie eleison.

“Good” modernists no longer know the Church.

“Good” Cardinal Ratzinger left us in the lurch.

ELEISON  COMMENTS  DCCCXXII  (15^th April, 2023) : RESURRECTION  REFLECTIONS

“The Resurrection,” says modern man, “oh yes, it’s a lovely idea, it gives comfort to weak souls to think that there may be something after death, especially something nice, like some kind of heaven, but of course it’s not true. Once people die, they don’t come back to life, science knows that that just doesn’t happen. Death is the end. We need to stop dreaming. We need to get on with our lives on earth and live them to the full, for as long as we can, and accept that we will all die, and that’s it. It’s over. Nothing.”

That is how many a man would like to think, because of course it gives him permission, so to speak, to live life just as he likes, without having to worry about anything after death. He need not care about the Ten Commandments, or God, or Heaven or Hell, or eternity or anything like that. He believes in Science, Science says that all that religious twaddle cannot be proved, it is just pious nonsense. Unfortunately for such a man, it is not he who created himself in his mother’s womb, it is not he who built the framework of life on earth into which he was born, it is not he who set the conditions on which he lives and dies.  “Know ye that the Lord, He is God: He made us and not we ourselves. We are His people and the sheep of His pasture” (Ps. IC, 3). (As for “Science”, it cannot make an ant live, let alone a human being.)

And a large part of the conditions on which we live is that we are composed of body and soul, and death consists in the two being separated. Then the body normally decomposes and rots, as we can observe, but,  whether we like it or not, the soul lives on because it is immortal, pure spirit, with no material parts to fall apart and decompose. At that moment of death the soul comes before the divine Judge, as neither we nor Science can observe, but as is certain in many places of the Word of God (e.g. Mt. XXV, 46; Jn.V, 29). If the soul goes to Heaven, it rises for eternal life; if it goes to Purgatory, it rises for purgation of remaining sins until it is fit for Heaven; if it goes to Hell, it rises from death to fall into eternal live punishment. In any case the soul by itself lives on without its body until that body rejoins it at world’s end, for eternity.

“Well,” says our modern friend, “if those are the conditions on which I find myself here, I do not accept them ! When I was conceived in my mother’s womb, I was not consulted as to whether or not I wanted to be born, and if I had been consulted, I would have said NO to living for ever. I protest !  It’s not fair !”

My good friend, firstly, it’s too late to protest. You now exist, your soul exists, and it can never cease to exist, except if God were to annihilate it, which He could do but never does, as His true Church has infallibly told us. And secondly, it’s unfair to protest, because His one and only purpose in giving you life as a sheer gift, without your being consulted, was that you should go to Heaven to enjoy everlasting and unimaginable bliss by seeing Him spiritually in all His dazzling glory. Now the brute animals have a soul,

but it is a purely material soul, incapable of spiritual bliss, so for you to share in His bliss He needed to make you a rational animal with intelligence and free-will.

However, if God did give you free-will, He and you ran the risk of your misusing it, but that would not be His fault. In fact every single soul in Hell remembers, all too clearly, how relatively easily it could have been saved, if only it had wished, and this memory is a large part of its unending torment. In life, God’s help had always been “closer than the door” (Irish saying). It is only the soul that chose not to want it. True, the soul was not consulted before it was given existence with no possibility of not existing for ever. But the possibility of seeing God is so magnificent that it is protesting against it which is unfair.

Therefore, if we have been baptised, we should have risen with Christ from the spiritually dead to a new life, says St Paul. Let Catholics but lead that new life, and their example can save whatever can still be saved in our poor world.

                                                                                                                                                 Kyrie eleison

If Catholics lived by their risen life within,

They could yet save a world drowning in sin.

ELEISON  COMMENTS  DCCCXXI (April 8, 2023) :    C H A R I T Y  !

Dear Readers, you or I may be the greatest of Restradcats (“Resistant” Traditional Catholics), but if we have no true charity towards our fellow-men, then in the words of St Paul, “we may have all faith so as to move mountains”, but without charity we are a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal… we are nothing…” (I Cor. XIII, 1-3) – dear friends, do you by chance come across any gongs or cymbals on the Internet ?

If you do, it is understandable.  “Strike the shepherd that the sheep may be scattered” is a quotation from an Old Testament prophet (Zechariah XIII, 7) applied by Our Lord to His own situation in the Garden of Gethsemane (Mt. XXVI, 31), when He was so being struck by the servants of the Temple that all eleven Apostles remaining, after Judas’ betrayal, were utterly confused, and abandoned their divine Master.  So if today Pope Bergoglio is struck down by the same modernism that struck his five Conciliar predecessors, that makes – 1965 to 2023 – 58 years of deep confusion at the very top of the Church. Then who can be surprised if the Catholic sheep are scattered ?  Or if they turn on one another, and bite ?  Is not our eternal salvation at stake ?  So the temptation to turn on our neighbour and start clanging like a gong or cymbal is clear, but it must be resisted. Let us try for a moment to put ourselves in the place of Almighty God.

From eternity God knew that Adam and Eve would fall, and that mankind would only decline from then on, unless He intervened to have mercy upon them, before and after His greatest intervention of all, which was of course the Incarnation of His own Son and the foundation among men of His one true Church. That Church, He decreed, was to rise for about 500 years, the Ancient World; to triumph for about 1000 years, the Middle Ages; and then to decline over another 500 odd years, the modern world. At the end of these approximately 2000 years He decreed not another triumph of 1000 years but, as His own Son told us, the virtual disappearance of His Church – “When the Son of man comes, will He find the faith on earth ?” (Lk. XVIII 8). (We may not understand this decree of God, but that quote says what it says.)

However, how could His Church virtually disappear if it always had good Popes, bishops and priests ? Especially Popes, because He Himself built His Church on Peter (Mt. XVI, 18; Jn. XXI, 15-17). It would follow that towards the end of the world it would be God Himself who decided from eternity to allow a sequence of half a dozen (objectively) bad Popes, such as we have seen since Vatican II. These six Popes in particular have not been the fault of God but of all the human beings, especially Catholic priests, who down the ages have built up today’s worldwide apostasy, to eject the Creator from His own Creation and to take His place. However, the apostasy could never have happened without His permission.  But it was God Himself who chose to make His Church depend on Peter, in which case He obviously foresaw how His own permission of defective Popes would scatter the Catholic sheep. In that case, how can He not have a special measure of understanding and mercy for them, unless they too want to get rid of Him ?

And even then, does not the Sacred Heart say, “I have compassion on the crowd” (Mk. VIII, 2) ?

In which case, following the divine example, must not “Restradcats” have all the more compassion, especially on our fellow Catholics (Gal. VI, 10) ?  And let us bear in mind that many non-Catholics are being driven by the apparently insoluble problems of today’s world to be thinking of God, so that many of them may easily finish among the last that will be first, while if we ourselves do not practise charity, we could easily count among the first that will be last (Mk. X, 31). Our Lord told His Apostles that they would be recognised as His followers by the charity they would have for one another (Jn. XIII, 35). Are there not a number of Traditional Catholics presently scandalising souls by our lack of charity towards one another ?  We will answer for it before the judgment seat of God, especially after the gifts we have received from Him to be keeping the Faith today.

                                                                                                                                                 Kyrie eleison.

Truth is quite indispensable, supreme !

Yes, but it’s nothing, if love be off our screen.

ELEISON  COMMENTS  DCCCXX  (April 1, 2023) :   PROSPERITY ?   BEWARE !

If godlessness is the great plague from which the world is now suffering, one remedy is to read not only the New Testament of the Bible but also the Old Testament, because one and the same God was the main writer (using the human writers as instruments) of both Testaments, and both together constitute, so to speak, His one autobiography. His enemies try to drive a wedge between the justice of Jehovah in the O.T. and the mercy of Jesus in the N.T., but His friends have no difficulty in showing how one and the same God Incarnate is implicit in the O.T, explicit in the N.T..  Nevertheless, it is surely true to say that Jehovah is in the forefront of the Old Testament while Jesus is in the forefront of the New Testament. If then one can also say that today’s worldwide godlessness consists not so much in the rejection of Christ as in the materialistic denial of the very existence of God (Jehovah), then here lies the interest of knowing the Old Testament, where Jehovah thunders, in a manner of speaking, on every page. Take for instance this passage from Deuteronomy VIII, 11-20 : —

[11]  “Take heed lest you forget the LORD your God, by not keeping his commandments and his ordinances and his statutes, which I command you this day: lest, when you have eaten and are full, and have built goodly houses and live in them, and when your herds and flocks multiply, and your silver and gold is multiplied, and all that you have is multiplied,  then your heart be lifted up, and you forget the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage, who led you through the great and terrible wilderness, with its fiery serpents and scorpions and thirsty ground where there was no water, who brought you water out of the flinty rock, who fed you in the wilderness with manna which your fathers knew not, that he might humble you and test you, to do you good in the end.

[17] Beware lest you say in your heart, `My power and the might of my hand have gotten me this wealth.’  You shall remember the LORD your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth; that he may confirm his covenant which he swore to your fathers, as at this day. And if you forget the LORD your God and go after other gods and serve them and worship them, I solemnly warn you this day that you shall surely perish.  Like the nations that the LORD makes to perish before you, so shall you perish, because you would not obey the voice of the LORD your God.

Almost the whole book of Deuteronomy is taken up with the last instructions of the great man of God that was Moses. He has led the Israelites out of Egypt, through the Red Sea, through 40 years in the desert, and now they are on the brink of entering the Promised Land, which he himself will not enter. As he is 120 years old and about to die, he is giving to the Israelites his very last instructions. Read the whole Book of Deuteronomy to see how his immense preoccupation is to prevent the Israelites from turning away from God, after they had been privileged by God with the special mission of preparing for the coming of the world’s Messiah. Again and again Moses warns them of how they will be punished by God if they are unfaithful, but specially blessed and protected by God if they are faithful. In the passage above, Moses is warning of the particular danger of material prosperity making them forget the Lord their God.

Now apply Moses’ warning to the New Testament. Ever since the death of Our Lord on the Cross, which instituted the New Testament, Catholics know that by faith they are the real People of God, and no longer the Israelites by race. Over Catholics’ 2,000 years of history, have Catholics not been entrusted by God with bringing all peoples of the world to believe in Christ ?  When they were faithful, did they not spread “Christendom” far and wide ?  But from the end of the Middle Ages onwards they began to be unfaithful, culminating in Vatican II, in a process of turning from things spiritual to things material, which did achieve worldwide an unprecedented material prosperity. For never before have so many men been so well fed, so well housed, so well provided with material goods. But where is the Lord their God in their lives ? Virtually nowhere. And instead, where are we ?  On the brink of nuclear Armageddon.  God, have mercy !

                                                                                                                                                Kyrie eleison

Moses is out of date, long gone. Farewell ?

Whoever thinks so, wends his way to Hell !