December 2007 Print

^{H.E. Richard Williamson}

An excerpt from the sermon given by Bishop Williamson at the ordination ceremony in Econe, Switzerland (June 29, 2007). The Rector of the Seminary of La Reja (Argentina), analyzes St. Pius X's encyclical against Modernism to show that the present crisis in the Church and in society at large is mainly caused by an "intellect in danger of death."

...This year is also the 100th anniversary of another great light given by God, alongside Fatima, to the 20th century and to our 21st century, the Encyclical Pascendi promulgated by St. Pius X in 1907.¹ If we want to understand why today's crisis is so severe, we can do nothing better than to study Pascendi, which the SSPX has taken, as it were, for its charter. Archbishop Lefebvre chose this pope as patron for his Society, doubtless because of the importance of his pontificate, but especially because of his defense of the Faith. St. Pius X did much for the renewal of Church music, for the access of children to the Eucharist, the revision of Canon law, but what would all that mean without the defense of the Faith?

I would like to speak briefly about this encyclical, which all should know. It is not an easy text, but it gives the key to understanding what is happening today. I will try to show you why.

The encyclical itself consists of three main parts besides the introduction and the conclusion: the modernists' doctrine, the causes of modernism, and the remedies for modernism. The most important part deals with the doctrine, the other two parts being more or less connected to the doctrine.

The first main part devoted to the modernists' doctrine is itself subdivided into various sections: the modernist philosopher, the modernist believer, the modernist theologian, the modernist historian, the modernist critic, the modernist apologist, the modernist reformer and the conclusion is that modernism is the "synthesis of all heresies." No heresy is worse, deeper, or subtler than modernism, and this is why the Church finds herself today in a crisis which is so difficult to understand and to handle.

Agnostic Phenomenalism

Pius X begins with an analysis of the modernist philosopher, and rightly so, because philosophical errors are at the root of the errors of the modernist believer, theologian, historian, critic, and reformer. Again this section on philosophy is subdivided between the principles and the application of the principles. And since the application flows from the principles, the core of the encyclical is made up of only two paragraphs in which the pope expounds the principles of modernism. There are two main principles: agnostic phenomenalism, which is a negative principle, used to clear the ground; and vital immanence used to re-build. But since you cannot build until you have cleared the ground, the negative principle which precedes the positive principle is the most important. The little that St. Pius X said about agnostic phenomenalism is like the acorn containing the whole oak, i.e., the rest of the encyclical. Once we understand the principle of agnostic phenomenalism, we can easily understand the whole encyclical.

For 200 years, agnostic phenomenalism has been affirming that I can know nothing beyond the phenomena, the appearances. The thing in itself remains unknowable, and my intellect cannot reach the reality of things but merely the appearances which are brought in by my senses. My intellect orders the data given by the senses to reconstruct the universe. In other words, the intellect is deprived of its real object.

Scholastic philosophy–the philosophy of the Church, which phrases in technical terms what common sense tells us–teaches that the object is the very act of intellection. Without an object there is no intellection, which proves that what is most important is the object and not its appearances. We can know things; we know what they are beyond the appearances. As a rule, appearances, which are apprehended by our senses, point out the intelligible content which is the essence of the things. We know the essence of things; we know reality; we know objective truth. Objective truth is in the object, it is outside of our subjectivity and we can know it, and knowing it our intelligence can work.

Now, if you say that the intellect cannot reach the object, you deny the act of the intellect, and you free the intellect from the object. That is what they wanted–liberty, the ultimate liberty. We adore liberty, we seek liberty, we love liberty, and the ultimate liberty is to say that this tent above my head is a tent only if I want it to be a tent. But if I want it to be an elephant, it will be an elephant. The appearances are those of a tent, but I reconstruct the sense data of this tent and I say that it is in fact an elephant. There you see the folly of the system. Those who practice this system must apply it selectively in order not to become crazy, and simply in order to be able to live. So, for instance, when they come down for breakfast and find in front of them a white cup with some black liquid in it, they choose to say it's coffee. Because, if they chose to say it is something else, they would run the risk of being thirsty! Then they go to the garage and they start the motor of the car with the ignition key. I mean, with the appearance of a key they start the appearance of a motor in order to drive the appearance of a car, otherwise they would never reach the university where they teach their nonsense.

This is the murder of common sense. And for 200 years, since the end of the 18th century, man has been desiring to replace nature, and things given us by God, by his own fantasies. And for 200 years, as Marcel De Corte has well said, the intellect has been bent on fabricating, not on understanding, but on fabricating with the help of the imagination, a world other than that given to us by God. This selective folly is affecting almost the whole world today, and it is gaining more ground every day. This is why the crisis in the world and in the Church, detached from reality and lost in fantasy, gets worse every day.

If we do not want to lose our bearings, we must do our best to understand agnostic phenomenalism and its application in the world around us. "Fantasy reality" is now called "virtual reality," ever since the advent of electronics. But, as De Corte said, electronics did not create themselves, they were born of man's desire for fantasy. This desire made him replace real reality with virtual reality and create the Internet, television, and all those screens. From a technical viewpoint, this virtual reality is marvelous, but very distracting² with respect to all that pertains to the interests of God.

When Two and Two Are No Longer Four

Let us consider a concrete application. If churchmen are selectively detached from reality, they can very well say that two and two are four, and at the same time say that two and two are five. Now, whoever has a minimum of common sense and understands what arithmetic is, knows that if someone thinks that two and two are four but could at the same time be five, that man is highly dangerous.

Because when I am not attentive, he will catch me unawares and go from one to the other, from four to five. This is why St. Pius X wrote in the encyclical that when you read a modernist's works, one page is perfectly Catholic, and the next thoroughly rationalistic, i.e., man is put in God's place. Hence we must be extremely wary of conservatives in the Church. They are not fully traditionalist, they all want more or less to mix the one absolute, exclusive, objective truth of the Catholic Faith with modernity. And this is not possible. In arithmetic, I understand this, it is clear. Unfortunately it is less clear in matters of the Faith. But if I have the Faith, I understand quite well that the Faith is a truth as much one and as exclusive and immutable as two and two are four; and it is a much more important truth.

So, for instance, the Motu Proprio is something very nice. It is two and two are four: to free the Tridentine Mass is very good. And we can imagine that it will free many souls in the conciliar Church from what has been a prison for them during decades. We welcome those people for whom two and two are four and also five! We rejoice that they are making progress by saying more often that two and two are four, and we pray for them so that they may eventually completely abandon the idea that two and two are five.

But we, who by God's grace, and never without God's grace, have the Faith and understand that in this respect faith is like arithmetic, we are very wary of these good churchmen. I will tell you why we can say they are good and why we nevertheless are wary of them. As a matter of fact, they know not what they do. As soon as they allowed themselves to be in the slightest measure contaminated by the modern and Masonic idea that the truth is open and not exclusive, then we must be very careful whenever we deal with them. On the other hand, they sit in the chair of Moses, we believe that they are men of the Church and your servant always says the name of the pope and of the local bishop in the canon. They have our respect, our affection, our charity, and they also have souls to save. But we do not hide that we are very circumspect when we deal with them about the Faith because two and two are four, and not four point zero one (4.01).

Sincere, Yet Wrong

Obviously, Archbishop Lefebvre had to fight first for the Mass, because it was the first thing to save. But beyond the Mass, there was essentially a very grave problem with the Faith, because the very foundations of the mind were shaken. And here we meet with another complication. Since to deny an objective truth, to deny the exclusivity of the Faith, does not directly go against a dogma of faith, you cannot state clearly that they have lost the Faith. By adhering to this folly on the natural level, they have not necessarily adhered to a negation of a supernatural truth. And this makes matters worse. When they say, like good Protestants, that two and two are exclusively five, then it is clear.

But most of the time we have to deal with people, in the Church or elsewhere, whose mind is floating. So they can easily be sincere and good people. Sincerity is the correspondence between the exterior and the interior. But since the interior is floating, my exterior can very well adhere to one thing today which corresponds to my interior today; but since the interior is detached from the immutable truth, it is changeable. So if the interior changes, the exterior changes together with it, while remaining as sincere tomorrow as it was today, even if it says the very opposite. How many of us know parish priests who one day are in complete agreement with me when I speak of Tradition, and then I learn that the next day a rabid modernist went to see them and they were in complete agreement with the modernist too. These poor people no longer understand the principle of non-contradiction.

How can you reason with such people? How can you deal with matters of the Faith with them? We love them, we want their good, we want them to understand, and even more we want them to convert.

Though, God knows, they may have the Faith. The world is in such a confusion that God alone can figure it out. The world is getting crazy.

Here is another practical application. There are two dangers which can turn me either into a sedevacantist or into a liberal. If I say–and it would be normal to say–"These people are sincere, they are good, so their doctrine is good," I err and I become a liberal. On the other hand, if I say: "These people have a very bad doctrine, so they are neither sincere nor good," I am wrong; because they may be sincere and good. To understand how their doctrine is bad, and yet they can be sincere and good people, we must grasp that the intellect is detached from its object.

We must understand the essence of Pascendi in order to figure out where we now stand. And the more sincere and good these people are, the more dangerous they can be, objectively speaking. Today we must constantly make the distinction between what is objective and what is subjective. God alone can really know men's hearts. As for us, we do the best we can. Objectively, as Asterix would say, these Romans are crazy. But subjectively, they may be good people. Yet they are not necessarily good. There are some leaders who are very bad and know very well what they are doing.

So, we must understand that once the intellect is detached from its object, it can reason rightly but at any time it can also reason wrongly, without the reasoning person ceasing to be sincere and good. In any case, through God's grace, we know that the truth of the Catholic Faith is immutable and exclusive of any error. We must hold fast to what is objective, in order not to be dragged into the subjective delirium which is always attracting more people. Men are plunged into error, and, as St. Paul always says, with error comes sin.

I already mentioned that there is an error on the natural level. The natural intellect is no longer working correctly, yet it is so different from the supernatural, that we can conceive that someone may keep the Faith while adhering to this error in the philosophical domain. As long as the Church has not defined–as She will certainly do when She recovers from this crisis–what the error of agnostic phenomenalism is, for instance, no one is necessarily a heretic because he follows this philosophical system. But, my dear friends, take care of nature for today nature is warped.

Practical Applications

Nature is undermined, subverted, and warped. Obviously, nature as such does not change. Thus, in moral theology we learn that man can shake the secondary principles of morality but not the prime principles. For instance, you cannot take out of any head the principle "Do good and avoid evil." Yet "You must not steal," can be removed from people's heads, if from their very youth you teach them that to steal is good. With God's permission, this falsification of nature can go very far, and it is like a just chastisement for this world which is rejecting Him and prefers the inventions of human reason to the objective truth given by God.

First let us apply this to our life as Catholics. We are all threatened by this lack of realism and of common sense. Maybe, with God's help, we have retained our common sense so far, but it is in danger.

Common sense is something natural, Marcel De Corte would say, that it is the mind's sense of reality. In other words, common sense is like the clutch between the intellect and reality. The intelligence can work, just like a motor, but without any motion being transmitted to the wheels, if the clutch is not engaged. Likewise, common sense is the clutch between the natural–and supernatural–mind and the reality around us. More than ever Catholics need common sense...

Next, subjectivism threatens us all. This is why the abnormal has become normal, and the normal, abnormal. Day after day the normal objectivity of a sane mind becomes more and more abnormal. That is the world around us! Let us make no mistake, we are social animals, and we live in contact with, we have exchange with, we depend upon the society around us, in the office, in the street, in the parish, in our daily life we are surrounded by people who are immersed in fantasy. A few months ago, a Belgian businessman told me: "In the business world today, what matters most is to know how to manage the appearances." We live in a world of appearances.

Yet, we must keep our sense of reality. If we follow the movement of appearances, we are heading for disappointments, which could shake our faith, because we may have believed in a rosy future and this future never comes....Thus we may come to put our faith in question. Yet, the fault does not lie with the Faith, but with us who have allowed ourselves to be contaminated, to some extent, by subjectivism, placing ourselves and our ideas above objective truth, and objective reality...

Let us also beware of authoritarianism. When the intelligence is affected by subjectivism, detached from its object, and is no longer functioning properly, then comes authoritarianism. This was illustrated by churchmen before Vatican II who told the faithful to "Pay, pray, and obey." This does not work any longer today. It cannot work, because priests themselves have undermined authority and continue to do so by immersing themselves in fantasy...

Archbishop Lefebvre restored authority through the truth. I seldom heard him affirm, or push forward his authority. Of course, he had a natural authority which came from the fact that each time we would consult him on a difficult problem, he would, after listening to us, give the solution of common sense. Thus he restored authority. And my dear confreres, in a great measure, our authority depends not only upon our faith, but also upon our common sense. "Common sense always applies!" said Fr. Vallet.

And I would conclude with the hypocrisy of a world of appearances. If we think about it, hypocrisy has been the great temptation for 500 years. Christendom had prevailed for a thousand years, but beginning with Luther, it went on the decline. From then on, people had to pretend to be Christian.

Hence followed a series of hypocritical systems: Protestantism, Jansenism, liberalism, communism, modernism, neo-modernism...and now traditionalism itself might be in danger of becoming hypocritical.

Yes, you my fellow men, my brothers, you and I are all threatened by hypocrisy, that is to say the temptation of establishing a religion, a tradition of appearances rather than a tradition of substance. So let us be careful about reality, about substance, and let us not let ourselves be contaminated by this poor world around us.

Our Lady said to the children of Fatima: "Pray for the poor sinners who fall into hell, because no one prays for them." My dear friends, God has given to you and to me the Faith. So it is our duty to pray for the billions of poor people who live presently in a mental state of extreme confusion. But let us not lose heart! Our Lady holds the devil under her feet and she will not allow herself to be defeated. Let us only have recourse to her, and she will also place the devil under our feet, if only we remain firmly attached to her.

 

Reprinted from Christendom (No.13, Sept.-Oct. 2007). Christendom is a publication of DICI, the press bureau of the Society of Saint Pius X (www.dici.org). Bishop Richard Williamson, a convert from Anglicanism, was ordained by Archbishop Lefebvre in 1976. After serving as a seminary professor, he was appointed rector of St. Thomas Aquinas Seminary, then at Ridgefield, Connecticut. He was consecrated bishop in 1988 by Archbishop Lefebvre and Bishop de Castro Mayer. He is currently rector of the Society's Seminary at La Reja, Argentina. An informative interview with His Excellency was published in the October 2006 issue of The Angelus on the occasion of Bishop Williamson's 30th anniversary of ordination.

 

 

¹ Pascendi Dominici Gregis, Encyclical letter on the errors of modernism, September 8, 1907.

² In the sense Pascal used the word, i.e., turning us away from the essentials.