November 1984 Print

Daniel Neyer

AMERICAN CATHOLICS tend to think that debates between Protestants and Catholics over the concept of grace, and debates between traditional and nontraditional Catholics about the Mass and religious liberty, are useless, divisive topics that have no bearing on contemporary problems like legalized abortion. Nothing could be further from the truth. The failure of American Catholics to realize this is the main reason that despite heroic efforts by a small percentage of Catholic laymen, the pro-life forces have been astonishingly unsuccessful in their attempts to secure protection under the laws of the United States for the child in his mother's womb.

The Protestant idea that has been wedded to American culture from its beginning and never exorcised is the idea of the total depravity of man and the election of a chosen few. After the Fall, the Protestants held, man was totally depraved. God chose a few lucky men and threw a blanket over their depraved bodies, and He pretended not to notice their depravity. The rest He condemned to Hell for all eternity. The blanket thrown over the chosen few was Christ's death on the Cross. Imputed to the elect were the merits of Christ. It is important to note that man does not respond to God's initiative in the Protestant scheme; he is a totally passive recipient of the merits won by Christ. However, since no grace has really been imparted to me, Christ's death on the Cross becomes a magician's conjuring trick. When a magician throws a blanket over a caged tiger and then removes the blanket to reveal a man, nobody really believes the tiger has been transformed into a man. We wonder how the trick was done but we do not really believe the magician has the power to change a tiger into a man. Nor did the Protestants believe that God really had the power to transform depraved creatures into saints. To disbelieve in God's power to sanctify men is really to disbelieve in God. Because if Christ by His death on the Cross does not impart grace to those who respond to His initiative, then one can legitimately ask, "What need have we of Christ?" The Protestant can answer, "We need Christ as our assurance that we are of the elect." Yes, and that is why atheism is more consistent with Protestantism than with belief in Christ. A Catholic, once he believes in Christ, stays at the foot of the Cross, and through the mediation of the Church, seeks to grow in sanctifying grace by continually partaking of the Body and Blood of Our Lord. A Protestant, because he doesn't believe the Holy Eucharist is a continual source of grace, takes a quick glance at the Cross to ascertain whether he is one of the elect, then averts his eyes, and turns his attention to his own subjective feeling of being one of the elect and his parallel feeling of hatred for depraved humanity. Many Protestants, thank God, fail to be consistent Protestants, but nevertheless, at the heart of Protestantism is not a belief in God, but a belief in one's own election and a hatred of creation. I shall come back to this point later in the article.

In contrast to the Protestants, the Catholic Church maintained, and still maintains, that after Adam's fall from grace man was terribly flawed and incapable of doing good on a consistent basis. However, even in his fallen state he retained an element of free will and the capability of knowing God. Christ, by His death and resurrection, gave man the chance to respond to God's initiative, and through the Sacraments of the Church receive sanctifying grace. He could become not a god, but a creature pleasing to God.

All heresies are of course harmful to the Catholic Church, but the Protestant heresy has been particularly harmful, because through the organizing genius of John Calvin it became embodied in the social structures of the Northern European countries. Americans have felt its devastating effects more than any country in Europe because we, unlike England and other Protestant countries, did not have a Catholic tradition before we had a Protestant one that could have softened the effects of Protestantism.

It should now, four hundred and forty-eight years after Calvin published The Institutes be clear to every Catholic just how satanic the Protestant idea is. I would suggest that the reason it is not clear is due to the complicated way human beings react to ideas. For example, simply knowing what constitutes a saint is not enough to make a saint. Nor does believing in a demoniac idea make one a demon. One must put one's whole mind, heart and soul at the service of the saintly idea or the demoniac one before the full effects of either can be seen in one's personality. If a man only partially lives up to the saintly idea, he will still manifest certain very unsaintly traits. If one only partially lives up to the demoniac idea, he will still have some undemoniac traits. It was impossible for Luther, Calvin and their followers to step away from 1,500 years of Catholic Tradition without retaining a good deal of the morality that went with the Catholic Tradition. For this reason the full demoniac effects of Protestantism were not immediately apparent.

The demoniac idea was planted however, and it has been nurtured by successive generations of Protestants until it has come to fruition in our own day in the form of modern liberalism. The atheistic liberal, not the believing Southern Baptist, is the consistent Protestant. Belief in the Christian God is inconsistent with Protestantism. If Christ's death on the Cross is not seen as God's reaching out to man, seeking that area of his will that remains free and hoping for a response, but is seen instead as a trick used to damn most of the human race, then Christ's death on the Cross becomes an unnecessary and meaningless act. And Christianity without the Cross, as Whittaker Chambers reminds us, is liberalism. The liberal eliminates what is incompatible with Protestantism, belief in God, and he retains what is central to it, a hatred of creation, and belief that he is one of the elect. He appropriates for himself the powers of God and takes the Protestant idea to its logical conclusion. Its logical conclusion is legalized abortion on a massive scale. If a modern liberal decides to have a baby, it becomes "chosen" and is given the same rights as its parents who are of course the elect. If the baby is not "chosen" then he becomes a "parasite" in his mother's womb, a totally depraved creature to be thrown on the manure heap. The liberals were being maniacally consistent when they refused burial rights to the aborted babies in California. Why should depraved humanity have any rights at all?

St. Pius V did not have to wait for abortion to be legalized throughout Europe before he could accurately gauge just what the fruits of Protestantism would be. He knew that any idea opposed to the Catholic Faith, once it became embodied in a country's institutions, would inevitably bring forth bitter fruits. For this reason he sought to protect the faithful by erecting a "barrier against heresy." He did this not by creating a new Mass but by codifying the existing one, and then granting the faithful the perpetual right to use the Roman Missal "without any fear of incurring any penalty, judgment or censure . . ."

Once one understands the relationship between Protestantism and legalized abortion, he can see why the practice of legalized abortion has spread throughout the West since the Second Vatican Council. When the "experts" destroyed the Tridentine Mass, they removed the barrier St. Pius V had erected against heresy, and the Protestant cancer was allowed to enter the Church, the one institution in the world capable of preventing the legalization of abortion. It can be said with absolute certainty that if there had been no Second Vatican Council, there would be no legalized abortion in countries like France, Italy, Portugal and Spain. In Protestant countries like England and the United States, legalized abortion might have come without the help of the Council, but if it had, Catholics in those countries would not have been left without the spiritual resources to fight it.

For a complete documentation of all the changes in the Mass I would suggest reading Michael Davies' pamphlet, "The Roman Rite Destroyed," or his book, Pope Paul's New Mass. For the purpose of illustrating the connection between legalized abortion and the Novus Ordo Mass I'll just look at two features of the New Mass that are consistent with the "spirit of the Council." The first feature is the new custom of the priest saying Mass facing the people, and the second feature is the widespread practicing of taking Holy Communion in the hand while standing, instead of taking Communion on the tongue while kneeling.

Both of these practices conceal the fact that it is Our Lord present in the consecrated Hosts in the tabernacle and that it is Our Lord present—Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity—when we take Communion. No Protestant would have any objection to the theology expressed by the priest facing the people or by the practice of Communion in the hand. A man can attend a Mass where the priest is facing the people and he can take Communion in the hand and still believe in transubstantiation. However, he is participating in the concealment of the Catholic Faith. The Novus Ordo Mass—half Protestant and half Catholic—fosters doubt in the sacrificial nature of the Mass and other truths of the Catholic Faith in much the same way as a man who claims his wife is an excellent cook, but always eats his meals while holding his nose, fosters disbelief in his wife's cooking ability.

Many older Catholics will grant that the New Mass is not as Catholic as the Tridentine Mass, but they say, "After all, we still have the Real Presence." Yes, when an older priest ordained before the Council says the Mass, this is probably true. However, it is not just a question of validity. When belief in the Real Presence of Christ declines, as it has among Catholics as a result of the New Mass, then the graces one receives from the Sacrament are drastically reduced. As mentioned earlier, Catholics, unlike Protestants, must respond to God's initiative. One cannot respond to God's initiative in the Sacrament of Holy Communion if he has only some ambiguous notion of Christ's spirit presence during Communion or some conception of the Mass as a community banquet spread out on a large picnic table. The reason so many young Catholics in the charismatic movement are claiming to have born-again Protestant-type experiences is because they have only a nebulous idea of how grace is received through the Sacraments of the Church, and no understanding of the difference between the Protestant and Catholic conception of grace.

Some Catholic bishops have attempted to defend the rights of the unborn child. However, by continually sanctioning the Novus Ordo Mass they undermine their own efforts. Their speeches against abortion fall on deaf ears because the Novus Ordo Mass not only fails to supply the grace to combat abortion, but it actually aids the pro-abortion forces by contributing to the protestantization of the Catholic Church.

In addition, many bishops, when they do speak out against abortion, do so in a very apologetic and secular fashion. I am convinced that by sanctioning the Novus Ordo Mass, they have developed a habit of presenting all the truths of the Catholic Faith in a timid and unconvincing manner. This has proved disastrous for the child in its mother's womb. Because just as one starts to doubt the importance of the sacrificial nature of the Mass when the Church allows Christ's Presence to be concealed, so one begins to doubt the importance of the life of the unborn child when the Church that claims to be against abortion allows the child's death agonies to be concealed by the gaseous verbiage of Cardinal Bernardin's seamless garment speech, and the "I'm personally opposed but . . ." rhetoric of "ethnic" Catholics running for political office. The child in his mother's womb needs the Church to stress his real presence in the womb. The child, like Christ on the altar, is really present in his mother's womb whether his mother believes in his presence or not. But it is of vital importance to the child that his mother believe that he is a creation of God given to her to nurture and protect, or else that his mother live in a society that forces her external behavior to adhere to that belief. Otherwise, the child will be murdered because his mother, whether she can articulate the reason or not, believes, or accepts the beliefs of a society that believes not in Catholicism, but in her absolute right as one of the elect to dispose of depraved humanity in any way she sees fit. It is only the Catholic Church which can counter that type of mentality and build up a true pro-life ethic; but the Church will never be able to mount an effective counter-attack as long as she allows the Protestantism that has spawned legalized abortion to contaminate the Mass. Women attending Novus Ordo Masses who are taking the Pill, or who have an I.U.D., are aborting their babies as they sit in the pews and receive the Sacrament, all this with ecclesiastical sanction. Must we wait until some broad-minded bishop allows abortions to be performed on the altar before we demand the restoration of the Immemorial Mass?

Another Vatican II innovation that has contributed to the spread of legalized abortion is the new teaching on the subject of religious liberty. The pre-Vatican II teaching on this subject was "error has no rights." The new teaching is that error has equal rights. The Catholic Church is still the true Church under the new teaching, but now we must allow people with other ideas and of different faiths equal public expression. In other words, before the Council when Franco refused to allow organizations like Planned Parenthood and the Communist Party into Spain, it meant that he was doing his duty as a Catholic head of state, but when he continued to do the same thing after the Council, he was acting contrary to the teachings of Vatican II. Before the Council, the first article in the Colombian constitution was allowed to read: "The Catholic Religion is the only religion recognized by the Colombian Republic." After the Council, the President was ordered by the Holy See to take the article out of the constitution.

The liberals rejoice that the Church's teaching on Religious Liberty was changed at the Council; the traditionalists lament the fact; another group whom I shall call the CUF-Wanderer group, abbreviated CUFW, claim the Church's traditional teaching on religious liberty was not changed at the Council, it was merely re-worded in order to be more applicable to problems the Church faces in the modern world. Previously, the CUFW people argue, there were enough good Catholics to make the idea of a Catholic State plausible. Now, when there are so few practising Catholics, the new teaching, which is not really a new teaching except in the paranoid minds of a few traditionalists, is that the Church must defend the individual's right to free private and public expression of his beliefs. This is stressed, we are told, to protect the rights of Catholics living as minorities in countries all over the world. What nonsense! It was the scandalous disrespect for Catholic Tradition at the Second Vatican Council, exemplified by the changes in the Mass and the new teaching on Religious Liberty, that made practicing Catholics a minority in countries like Spain and Portugal, and made Catholics in countries like the United States a weak, confused minority rather than a strong, unified one. The traditional doctrine allowed Catholic heads of state to take measure to protect the faithful from Protestant influences in the culture, and it helped to strengthen the resistance of Catholics living as minorities in Protestant countries, by stressing the duty of Catholics to catholicize their culture rather than letting the hostile culture destroy their Catholicism under the guise of assimilation.

The CUFW would maintain that since so many Catholics left the Church after the Council and stopped adhering to Catholic moral standards, this means that the Council merely revealed what was already present but hidden before the Council, namely the sick and decaying corpse of Western Catholicism. The Church is better off leaving it behind so she can turn her attentions to the Third World. This argument reveals a rather Protestant view of the Incarnation and of grace. Since Our Lord took the trouble to take flesh and to set up a visible Church here on earth, He seems to have thought that human beings need to see religious truths embodied before they can grasp their meaning. Therefore, when the head of Christ's Church and his bishops meet in Rome and send out clear signals to the faithful that the shepherds themselves doubt the validity of traditional Catholicism, then I don't think one should find it surprising that there is a subsequent decline in the number of practicing Catholics. Since grace comes to us through the Sacraments of the Church, a diminished respect for and a diminished belief in these Sacraments will result in Catholics who find that it is impossible to live up to even the most minimal teachings of the Catholic Church. Those that keep the Faith despite the weakness of the shepherds will find it very hard to pass their Faith on to their children, because their children will not grow up at a time when the visible symbols of the teaching Church, the Pope and his bishops, preach the truth and condemn error. The Church, before the Council was not Utopia; it consisted of great saints, great sinners, and lukewarm Catholics, but it was a strong and healthy Church showing all the signs of the true Church: unity, holiness, catholicity and apostolicity. One needs a very large magnifying glass indeed to see these signs in the Vatican II Church. The Church was not already sick and decayed before the Council! To make this claim is an attempt to justify the new teaching on Religious Liberty is an ignoble distortion of Church history.

At the heart of the Vatican II teaching on Religious Liberty is a false assumption. The assumption is that other religious bodies will respect the rights of the Catholic, and when shown the error of their ways will convert to Catholicism. This scenario might apply to a few individuals, but Protestantism under the guise of modern liberalism is an evangelical faith. If the Catholic Church will not defend her rights as the One, Holy and Apostolic Church, then the doctrine of "error has equal rights" quickly becomes the doctrine of "the Catholic Church has no rights." This doctrine, the Catholic Church has no rights, is rapidly becoming the law of the land in once Catholic countries like Spain and Portugal, and it is the law of the land in the United States.

Because Catholics have always been a minority in this country, some members of our clergy, even before Vatican II, were reluctant to emphasize the Church's teaching on Religious Liberty. There was a tendency to emphasize the similarities between American democracy and Catholicism. When this was stressed to the point where some clerics claimed that the relationship between the Church and State in America was a model for the rest of the world, it was necessary for Pope Leo XIII to condemn such a view as a heresy. (John Rao recently wrote a brilliant series of articles On the Americanist Heresy for The Remnant.) Since the Second Vatican Council, a cleric can now avoid the Church's traditional teaching on Religious Liberty with a clear conscience; he can totally succumb to the Americanist Heresy and pass himself off as a defender of the Faith. A Catholic politician can claim he is "personally opposed" to abortion but he is duty bound to vote for abortion funding because he must respect the views of other people of different faiths. Catholics who are against abortion are constantly trying to explain to their non-Catholic friends why their Catholicism has nothing to do with their anti-abortion stance, because without a teaching Church to defend them from philosophical, theological and cultural bullies they have accepted the doctrine of "the Catholic Church has no rights." When a judge who happens to be a Catholic rules against the abortionists, his decision is ignored because, again, the Church as no rights. And finally, when our bishops oppose abortion, not because it is against the teaching of Holy Mother the Church, but because it is against the U.S. Constitution, or because it violates human rights, they reveal the suicidal idiocy of the Vatican II version of religious liberty. By attempting to express their objections to abortion in a non-Catholic way so as not to offend Protestants, they have abdicated their teaching authority and conceded that they themselves believe the Catholic Church has no rights.

It has been suggested by the CUFW group that the example of Poland proves that the new teaching on religious liberty works. After all, has not the Church in Poland thrived by stressing the rights of the human person rather than Christ's Kingship over the State? The answer to this is that the Catholic Church in Poland has not benefited by attempting to implement the Vatican II teaching on religious liberty. A thriving Catholic country does not, as Poland does, have an abortion rate greater than the secular United States. Poland has fallen victim like every other country in the West to the defeatism bred by the "error has equal rights" teaching of Vatican II. Until Rome sees fit to reassert the Church's traditional teaching on religious liberty, we can expect no more help from Rome in the anti-abortion fight than we can from a "I'm personally opposed but . . ." politician.

There is one aspect of the pro-life movement that has its roots in traditional Catholicism, and that is the effort of some Catholics to comply with the requests made by Our Lady at Fatima. This is certainly to the good. However, one cannot advocate appeals to the Blessed Mother and just ignore the issue of the Mass and religious liberty. We must remember that it was at the foot of the Cross that Mary was given charge of sinners. If the sacrificial nature of her Son's death is concealed in our Mass, then Mary's special role in our redemption will also be concealed and devotion to Our Lady will die out. It should not surprise us that devotion to Mary has decreased since Vatican II. How could it be otherwise? She is eternally linked with her Son; when His image is blurred, so is His Mother's. The pro-life movement in this country will have very little success until Catholics realize that it is the forces of Protestantism within the Church and from without that has brought us legalized abortion. Any movement not grounded in traditional Catholicism will be ineffectual in its attempt to combat legalized abortion. It is not longer possible to sit on the fence regarding issues like the Tridentine Mass and religious liberty. In the past, the example of one saint has often served to stem the tide of seemingly invincible forces arrayed against the Catholic Church. One bishop has, in what is probably the darkest period in the history of the Church, stood up for the Holy Roman Catholic Church. If we should refuse to stand with Archbishop Lefebvre, then the blood of millions of children will blot out even the memory of the Catholic Faith from what was once called Christendom.