ELEISON COMMENTS DCCCXXVI (May 13, 2023) : CONSECRATIONS, INSIGHT
Last week these “Comments” expressed a pious hope that the Society of St Pius X might be once more taking the heroic stand of its Founder in 1988, when for the survival of the Faith he consecrated, against Rome’s explicit prohibition, four of his priests as bishops to defend and protect the Faith. Alas, it is better to stay with reality than with fond illusions. The reality is that on Maundy Thursday of last Holy Week, in the Society’s priestly seminary in Zaitzkofen, South Germany, the episcopal ceremony of Consecrating the Holy Oils was performed by a bishop himself consecrated in accordance with the doubtful rite of the Newchurch, and not with the certainly valid rite of Catholic Tradition.
Now it is an exaggeration to claim that that new rite is automatically invalid, in other words, in all cases invalid. Like all the new sacramental rites imposed on the Church in the 1960’s and 1970’s, in the wake and in the name of Vatican II (1962-1965), it is ambiguous in spirit and in nature. That is to say that it is open both to God’s Tradition and to man’s modernity. For instance Our Lord’s Church is a monarchy, but the bishop portrayed in the new rite is democratic in spirit. So the new rite was designed to include both new and old, and to exclude neither, and this was how it had to be if the Conciliar revolution was to succeed. For if the old and true religion had been too clearly excluded, Catholics would have seen what was going on, and would never have accepted the revolution, whereas if the modernist religion of Conciliarism had not been sufficiently included, the revolution could not have taken place either.
Hence ambiguity was, and still is, the order of the day, in order to corrupt believing Catholics and put them on the slide to losing their belief. Because if any Traditional Catholic says that Bishop Huonder has never been properly Consecrated, the answer is, “Oh no, the new rite is perfectly valid”, whereas if any modern Catholic complains that Bishop Huonder is betraying the Council by behaving like a Traditional bishop, then the answer is, “Oh no, he agreed beforehand with the Pope to be doing what he is doing”. And the “good” Bishop himself no doubt sees no contradiction in serving at one and the same time both the Pope in Rome, and episcopal Tradition in Switzerland. But ambiguity is not of God.
Here is the heart of the problem for millions of Catholics, still today : centuries of modern philosophy and liberalism and religious liberty have steadily washed out of their minds, at least in matters of religion, all sense of any objective Truth corresponding to reality, imposing unity, and excluding contradiction. To the modern mind, any such “truth” is not a liberation from error but a mental tyranny, a deprivation of liberty, a refusal of human dignity, and so on. Here is Thomas Jefferson, hero of a famous Revolution, writing to a friend in 1800, “I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility to every form of tyranny over the mind of man”. The quotation is enshrined inside the Jefferson Monument in his nation’s capital.
Obviously, the problem of Truth being made to serve freedom instead of freedom serving Truth does not date from yesterday or yesteryear. It goes back at least as far as Martin Luther (1483-1546), “the first modern man” (Fichte), who so threw up against the Catholic Truth his volcanic “Me – Man !”, that the Catholic Church needed a whole Council to define its dogmatic truths from God, needing for the first time to be defined because they were being so shaken by the rise of Subjectivity for the “rights of man”.
Here is where our modern world began, which is so deeply engulfed in the defiance of God – “Here I stand, I can do no other”, cried Luther. So maybe a Bishop Huonder can hardly be blamed for seeing no contradiction in what he is doing ? Nor a Pope Bergoglio for commissioning him to act as a Trojan Horse within the SSPX ? Nor the successors of Archbishop Lefebvre at the head of the SSPX for failing to recognise a Trojan Horse ? Maybe… God alone so knows all, that His judgment of subjects is infallible. As for me, I need not judge their Subjectivities, but I am absolutely bound to judge objectively, as best I can, in order myself to die not as a Protestant but as a Catholic, so as to save my soul.
Kyrie eleison.
To judge-condemn, God may, while I may not,
But judge-discern I must, to flee the rot.