august 2005

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“Instaurare omnia in Christo”

A Journal of Roman Catholic Tradition

archbishop
marcel lefebvre

“I Have Handed on
What I Have Received.”

N EWI NG The Crucifixion of Jesus
R
E
F
OF

A Forensic Inquiry

Author FREDERICK T. ZUGIBE, PH.D., M.D., was the Chief Medical Examiner of
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The bloody sweat–
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Physical effects
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Crowning with
what kind of thorns?

Nails in hands or
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The physics of
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Testing hypotheses
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History of the Shroud,
a long road

Puncture wound
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Modern 3D image
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Coins over the eyes
date the Shroud

Pollen analysis reveals
history of the Shroud

The Carbon-14
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“Instaurare omnia in Christo—To restore all things in Christ.”
Motto of Pope St. Pius X

The

ngelus
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August 2005
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OPERATIONS AND MARKETING

On the new Biography of Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
John Vennari

PART 2 “EVIDENCE” FOR REINCARNATION

RATHER THAN HELL: REINCARNATION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
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SECRETARIES

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DESIGN AND LAYOUT

THE ANGELUS ENGLISH-LANGUAGE ARTICLE REPRINT

Are the Dead Really Dead When We Remove Their Organs? . . . . . . . . . 17
Reflections on the Responsibility
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Mr. Simon Townshend
SHIPPING AND HANDLING

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Mr. Nick Peterson
PROOFREADING

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TRANSCRIPTIONS

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“BECAUSE GOD DOES NOT CHANGE” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
Interview with Bishop Bernard Fellay

ARCHBISHOP LEVADA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
Fr. Peter Scott

THINKING ABOUT INTERNET
USE AND CHAT ROOMS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
Michael Lepère

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2

“I Have Handed o
What I Ha

On the Biography of M
They literally took me by the scruff of the neck and said:
“Something must be done for these seminarians!” It was useless
my saying that I was sixty-five and retired, or that it was foolish to
begin something that I could not continue if I should die within the
next few years...they wouldn’t have it.1

The year was 1969. Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre was 65
and retired. He had survived the tumultuous battles of the
Second Vatican Council. He had just resigned as Superior
General of Holy Ghost Fathers. He had spent himself for over
40 years in the Lord’s vineyard. He assumed his work was
over. Providence had other plans.
A handful of seminarians at the time were dissatisfied with
the priestly formation they were receiving: a formation both
liberal and lax. Only four years after the close of the Council,
the seminaries were already permeated by the modernist
spirit of Vatican II: weekly liturgical experiments, seminarians
concocting their own liturgies, seminarians going out at night,
bad theology courses, no rule of life, no cassocks, no Latin, no
discipline, contempt for Tradition, total collapse.
The distraught seminarians were advised to seek counsel
from Archbishop Lefebvre, now living quietly in Rome.
The Archbishop counseled the young men to try a House of
Studies at Fribourg, but this turned out to be as unsatisfactory
as anything they already encountered. The Archbishop then
looked into another House of Studies in Switzerland only
to find more disorder, more aggiornamento, more “spirit of
Vatican II.” The seminarians were orphaned. They had no
place to go. They had suffered ridicule for their traditionalist
stand while in the seminaries of the “new springtime.” What
could be done for them?
It was then on June 4, 1969, when Professor Bernard Fay,
Fr. Marie-Dominque, O.P, Dom Bernard Kaul, Fr. d’Hauterive
and Professor Jean-Francois Braillard met with Archbishop
Lefebvre on the dilemma. They took the aging prelate “by the
scruff of the neck” and insisted “something must be done for
these seminarians!” The “something” they had in mind was
that Archbishop Lefebvre establish a seminary.
THE ANGELUS • August 2005

3

d on
Have Received.”
J o h n

V e n n a r i

of Marcel Lefebvre
Archbishop Lefebvre agreed to do what he
could, if he received a sign that it was the Will of
Providence. Two days later, on June 6, 1969, with
the approval of Bishop Charriere in Fribourg,
Archbishop Lefebvre’s seminary was born.
Originally called the St. Pius X Association for
Priestly Training, it welcomed its first 11 students in
October the same year.
One of these students was a young Bernard
Tissier de Mallerais, who would subsequently work
closely with Archbishop Lefebvre, witness firsthand the formative years of Society of St. Pius X, be
ordained in 1975, hold the post of Secretary General
to the Society, be chosen by the Archbishop to
receive Episcopal Consecration in 1988, and write
the most authoritative biography of Archbishop
Marcel Lefebvre to date. [Published by Angelus
Press. Price: $34.95–Ed.]

Start from the Beginning
The Biography of Marcel Lefebvre is divided into
four sections:
Part I: The Heir (from boyhood to African
Missionary);
Part II: The Missionary (Missionary, Bishop,
Apostolic Delegate in Africa);
Part III: The Combatant (return to France,
Vatican II, the Ottaviani Intervention);
Part IV: The Restorer (founding of Society of St.
Pius X through to his death).
The reader’s first temptation when picking up
the book is to open to the center–the section on
Vatican II–and start from there. That is when the
sparks really start to fly, and it is the part of the story
that seemingly pertains most to us.
The reader must resist this temptation and start
at the book’s beginning.

There is no way one can truly understand
Archbishop Lefebvre and the fight he braved for
Tradition if one does not read his early years–his
remarkable life before the Second Vatican Council
and the events that made him who he was. Here
we learn how the man was seemingly sculpted by
Divine Providence to do the exact work of resistance
he shouldered after the Council. Especially, we learn
of his rigorous Thomistic formation which became
the foundation for every priestly action.
His earlier life also contains valuable lessons:
trust and submission to the designs of Providence
even when it conflicts with one’s natural bent,
the importance of solid theological formation,
unswerving anti-liberalism, devotion to the
Immaculate Heart, simplicity, hard work, and
fidelity to Catholic Tradition, come what may.
Marcel Lefebvre was born in 1905, the third of
nine children. His was a pious household blessed
with saintly, hard-working parents. Providence
arranged that he be among the first to benefit from
Pope St. Pius X’s 1910 regulations that lowered the
age of First Communion. A six-year-old Marcel
received his First Communion on Christmas, 1911.
He was a man through whom the history of
the last century could be studied. In one way or
another, his life intersected with the major events
of the 20th century: the First World War (German
armies invaded his town as a boy where he saw the
young people rounded up and taken away), the rise
of neo-modernism in the Church after Pope Pius X’s
pontificate (the Fr. Le Floch episode), the Second
World War (his father died in a concentration
camp in Germany), the decolonization of Africa;
Communism (a number of his Holy Ghost
missionaries murdered by Communists), the Second
Vatican Council, the new anti-anti Modernism of the
THE ANGELUS • August 2005

4
Conciliar hierarchy, and the post-Vatican II counterrevolution of which he was the central figure.
He lived through it all. He could tell personal
stories from it all. Most important, he was on the
side of the Angels at every intersecting point. This
is because he always aligned himself, his outlook
and his actions with the consistent teachings of the
Popes. He always thanked his beloved Fr. Le Floch,
the Rector of the French Seminary in Rome, for this
clear-headed world view.

Marcel Goes to Rome
In 1919, when Marcel announced his intention
to become a priest, his father cautioned him against
studying at his home diocese at Lille. Bishop
Lienart, the local ordinary, displayed a progressivist
frame of mind, and Marcel’s father was uneasy with
the spirit of the diocesan seminary. So at the advice
of the renowned Fr. Collins, Marcel followed his
older brother René into the French Seminary in
Rome. This was a decisive moment in the formation
of Marcel Lefebvre for it was here that he came
under the influence of Fr. Le Floch.
Fr. Henri Le Floch was a teacher under
whom one would give his eye-teeth to be formed.
Thoroughly Catholic, thoroughly committed to
the scholasticism of St. Thomas, thoroughly antiliberal and anti-Modernist, thoroughly imbued
with the Roman school of theology, and with the
competence to convey these truths so they be
central to one’s life, Fr. Le Floch trained his men.
Archbishop Lefebvre readily admitted that were it
not for the solid formation he received from Fr. Le
Floch, he too might have succumbed to the creeping
liberalism of the age.
The Archbishop said at his September 23, 1979,
Jubilee sermon, “I will never thank God enough for
allowing me to know that extraordinary man.” He
said of Fr. Le Floch:
He was the one who taught us what the popes were to
the world and the Church, what they had taught for a
century and a half against liberalism, modernism and
Communism, the whole doctrine of the Church on these
topics. He really made us understand and share in this
battle of the popes to preserve the world and the Church
from these scourges which plague us today. That was a
revelation to me.

Archbishop Lefebvre continued:
I listened to what the older students were talking
about. I listened to their reactions and especially to
what my professors and Superior had taught me. And
I realized that in fact I had quite a few wrong ideas....
I was very pleased to learn the truth, happy to learn
that I had been wrong, that I had to change my way of
thinking about certain things, especially in studying the
encyclicals of the popes, which showed us all the modern
THE ANGELUS • August 2005

errors, those magnificent encyclicals of the popes up to
St. Pius X and Pius XI.
...For me it was a complete revelation. And that was
how the desire was quietly born to conform our judgment
to that of the popes. We used to say to ourselves: how
did the popes judge these events, ideas, men and times?
And Fr. Le Floch showed us clearly what the main
ideas of the various popes were: always the same thing,
exactly the same in their encyclicals. That showed us...
how we should look at history....And consequently it
stayed with us.2

Elsewhere Archbishop said that thanks to Fr. Le
Floch, “We were mobilized against this dreadful
liberalism.”3

“Think with the Church”
Fr. Le Floch inculcated into the students the
key principle, “Sentire cum Ecclesia”–Think with
the Church. Think as the Church thinks, judge as
the popes judged, in light of St. Thomas Aquinas,
“leaving aside all personal ideas in order to embrace
the mind of the Church.”
In this environment, Marcel cut his teeth on the
magnificent teaching of the Popes from the 19th and
early 20th centuries, which condemned the Masonic
modern world born from the French Revolution.
He learned that evil principles, no matter how
seductively dressed, are evil nonetheless. These
principles cause the ruin of souls, the destruction of
society, and rob Our Lord of His rights as King and
Redeemer.
Marcel was privileged to attend the seminary’s
“St. Thomas Lectures.” They were designed to
stimulate the philosophy and theology student’s
tastes for studying contemporary questions (“judge
as the Church judges”) in the light of St. Thomas
Aquinas and the popes.
At one such lecture, in the presence of
Archbishop Chollet of Cambrai, Fr. George Michel
put the Masonic Declaration of the Rights of Man
on trial. After this brilliant presentation, Archbishop
Chollet summarized: “God alone is a pure right...
originally we have nothing but debts: we have rights
precisely to help us pay our debts.” The Biography
comments, “This beautifully expressed the objective
nature of rights and reaffirmed the primacy of the
common good–both of which were ideas ignored by
the liberal individualism of the Revolution.”
The anti-revolutionary training of the
seminarians did not escape the notice of European
governments. A tragic conflict ensued that
devastated young Marcel, and showed him at an
early age the malice of the liberals.

5

The Axe Falls on Fr. Le Floch
The French Seminary produced a formidable
Catholic clergy who defied the liberal spirit of the
age. Many of those trained in the French Seminary
in Rome would become bishops. The last thing
wanted by the Masonic government of France was
an army of bishops and priests tearing the mask off
their liberal pretensions. It could bring down their
whole world. It could ruin everything. Something
had to be done.
Already, France’s government was in uproar
over the French Seminary where “political ideas
which go against the laws of the Republic are
flourishing.” On March 10, 1925, France’s Cardinals
and Bishops issued a declaration on the injustice of
the secular laws and the “steps to be taken against
them.” Then in France’s Chamber of Deputies on
March 20, the bishops’ declaration was denounced
as coming “directly from the French Seminary in
Rome.” With disgust, the French politicians quoted
an extract from Fr. George Michel’s St. Thomas
Lecture: “The State has the duty to recognize the
Catholic religions as the sole true form of divine
worship...and to profess it publicly,” and to protect
it, “if necessary with the armed forces.” This caused
shrieks of horror from those present. Then a talk by
Fr. Lucien Lefebvre4 was quoted with equal loathing:
“The State has no rights over education.” The
politicians were furious. “That is the respect they
have for the secular laws,” one of them said.
Shortly after, the French government pressured
Pope Pius XI to “tone down” the French Seminary’s
counter-revolutionary program. In one of his worst
decisions–along with the suppression of Padre Pio
and the decision that led to the slaughter of the
Mexican Cristeros–Pius XI yielded and dismissed
Fr. Le Floch: despite the fact that he was a model
Rector since 1904; despite the fact that he was
revered by students and former students who were
now eminent Churchmen; despite the fact that
an independent probe showed Fr. Le Floch to be
faithful to Catholic doctrine without crease.5 This
occurred around the same time Pius XI condemned
Action Française, an anti-liberal organization admired
by Pope St. Pius X6 that Pope Pius XII sought
unsuccessfully to resurrect.7
Marcel was not at the seminary for Fr. Le Floch’s
tribulation. Away on mandatory military service,
he learned the details through heartbreaking letters
from fellow students. He returned to the find the
atmosphere of the French Seminary changed. Fr.
Le Floch was gone. No longer were the seminarians
trained for combat with the modern world, but
more in a spirit of detente. It was Marcel’s first taste
of opposition to Catholic principles from within the
Church.

Nonetheless, Providence had arranged that
Marcel study at the French Seminary just in time. He
was trained during the final years of Fr. Le Floch’s
regime. He received solid Catholic principles that
would direct him for the rest of his life, and prepare
him for future battles that, as a young seminarian, he
would hardly dream possible.

“The Missions
Didn’t Appeal to Me”
Before we get to these battles, the Biography takes
us through Marcel’s ordination, his work as a parish
Curate in 1930; his decision to become a Missionary
(a move he had long resisted despite continual
pleadings from his brother René to come to Africa);
his entrance into the Holy Ghost Fathers; and his
appointment to Africa in 1932.
To his surprise, and against his will, he was
assigned as seminary professor as soon as he arrived
in Gabon, Western Africa. Already Providence
was shaping him into one who would spend
his life forming priests. He was also busy in the
field enduring the hardships and privations of a
flourishing missionary apostolate. He taught the
faith and combated paganism. He confronted tribes
engaged in human sacrifice. He took a machete to a
pagan fetish he found in the home of a catechumen.
The African years show Marcel Lefebvre’s green
thumb for growing Catholicism. A pious priest,
zealous missionary, skilled organizer and efficient
worker deeply loved by the people, his work during
this period was one of constant growth for the
Church.
After 12 years as an “African bushman,” Fr.
Lefebvre was sent back to France in 1945 and
appointed rector of the scholasticate of Mortain. He
nourished the seminarians in solid doctrine and antiliberalism, following the training he received from
Fr. Le Floch. He had official Church teaching read
in the seminary refectory, including Leo XIII’s letter
to Cardinal Gibbons on Americanism, St. Pius X’s
encyclical Pascendi against modernism, and Pius X’s
letter on the Sillon condemning social modernism.
He also gave them sound training in the spiritual
life, always rooted in St. Thomas Aquinas. The
seminarians loved him as father.
Then came the surprise phone-call: “Hello,
Father...steady yourself. You have just been named
as the Vicar Apostolic of Dakar.”

Providence at Work
Fr. Lefebvre did not necessarily want to go to
Dakar. Unlike Gabon, it was African territory he did
not know. Worse, it had a population of nine and a
THE ANGELUS • August 2005

19
Re

6

Fr. Le Floch

Marcel (second
row, at left).
At the French
Seminary with
Fr. Le Floch.

half million, of which nine million were Muslim. He
submitted to duty nonetheless.
He was consecrated bishop on September 18,
1947. During the ceremony, in the presence of the
liberal Cardinal Lienart, the newly consecrated
Archbishop Lefebvre publicly thanked Fr. Le Floch
for the sturdy training he received. “I thank him
from the bottom of my heart because he showed us
the path to truth.” Cardinal Lienart was horrified at
the mention of Fr. Le Floch, and ran immediately to
tell the dirty business to the Apostolic Delegate of
France–another progressivist who shuddered at Fr.
Le Floch’s name–Cardinal Angelo Roncalli.7
Already, Marcel Lefebvre was a marked man in
the eyes of the progressivists gaining control of the
Church in Europe.
He arrived at Dakar and set about his work
as bishop. He was then appointed–again, against
his will–as Apostolic Delegate to French Speaking
Africa.
The chapters covering this period, entitled
“Archbishop of Dakar,” “Apostolic Delegate”
and “African Skirmish” are instructive and
edifying. Once again, under Archbishop Lefebvre,
Catholicism in his territory enjoyed remarkable
growth. The number of baptisms and catechumens
steadily rose. He founded new parishes, new
churches, new schools. His pastoral letters from
this period breathe the purity of the Faith and
staunch opposition to contemporary secularism.
He convinced religious orders who had previously
shown no interest in mission work to come to
Africa. He established perhaps the first Carmelite
THE ANGELUS • August 2005

foundation on African soil. The seminary was
his pearl, and he was instrumental in setting up
an indigenous clergy and hierarchy in the area.
His duties of Apostolic Delegate included that of
recommending bishops, for which he always insisted
on men of “doctrinal rigor and solid virtue.”
The Vatican’s Cardinal Tisserant visiting
Lefebvre’s diocese, said he was “amazed” by
what he saw the Archbishop of Dakar do. But the
best tribute came from the lips of Pope Pius XII:
“Archbishop Lefebvre is certainly the most efficient
and qualified of the Apostolic Delegates.”8
What is most interesting about Archbishop
Lefebvre’s steady rise to prominence is that he
ascended the ranks by sheer merit. He did not run
with the career ecclesiastics. He was not trained in
their diplomatic schools. There is no hint that he
ever calculated to advance his career, to set himself
in the limelight, to play politics for promotion.
If anything, every advancement he received was
against his will. When he was stationed in Gabon, he
did not want to return to Europe. Once established
as Rector at Mortain, he did not want to go to
Dakar. Yet in the designs of Providence, each stage
not only blessed the Church of his time, but also
prepared him for his work in the future. He already
knew how to train priests. As a bishop, he could
now ordain them. His duties as Apostolic Delegate
included traveling to Rome to visit the Pope and
the Vatican dicasteries. This gave him an intimate
knowledge of the workings of the Roman Curia.
Thus when it came time to challenge the disastrous
reforms of the Council, Vatican corridors were not

1971: Laying the first stone at Ecône.
Rebuilding at the age of 65, starting with nothing.

7

September 18, 1947: Episcopal consecration in Tourcoing. From left
to right: Bishop Le Hunsec, Cardinal Liénart, Bishops Bonneau, Ancel,
Lefebvre, Fauret and Dutoit and Canon Deconinck.

foreign territory. And though he was respectful, he was not
intimidated by high offices. It appears that Providence had
prepared everything.

A New Kind of Pope

Pope Pius XII with “the best
of [my] apostolic delegates.”

Shortly after the 1958 election of Pope John XXIII–a
new type of Pope whom the progressives believed to favor
their cause9–Archbishop Lefebvre was relieved of his
position as Apostolic Delegate, though he retained his post as
Archbishop of Dakar. In 1961, he was called back to France
and given the small diocese of Tulle.
THE ANGELUS • August 2005

8
Why a small diocese? As one of the most
successful and revered Archbishops of the time, a
former Apostolic Delegate, he should have received
a prestigious archdiocese. He should have been in
line for a Cardinal’s hat.
But, as already noted, he was a marked man.
The French bishops knew him to be fiercely antiliberal. They knew of his support for Jean Ousset’s
counter-revolutionary Cité Catholique. They knew the
Archbishop did not compromise with the modern
world. They knew he had no time for the modernist
New Theology of the Congars, Rahners, De Lubacs
and Ratzingers that was all the rage.
The French bishops would not allow him
any position of power or influence in the French
hierarchy. When they learned Archbishop Lefebvre
was returning to France, they laid down conditions
that John XXIII, to his dishonor, accepted. First,
that Archbishop Lefebvre would not be a member
of the Assembly of Cardinals and Archbishops.
Second, that he would be given only a small diocese,
not an archdiocese.
Archbishop Lefebvre harbored no bitterness.
He knew their enmity was not directed ultimately
at him, but at the perennial Catholic truth he
embodied. No doubt, he remembered Fr. Le Floch,
the most renowned proponent of papal teaching,
denounced and banished as “too anti-liberal.” The
Archbishop had seen the malice of the liberals
before and recognized it for what it was.
Unperturbed, he set about his business. For him,
the care of souls came first. He said,
People see nothing but the career ladder: promotion
after promotion. Those things are just human
considerations. We are not worthy to have responsibility
for a single soul. As St. Francis de Sales says, one soul
alone is a whole diocese. I will have 220,000 souls. That’s
a big diocese.11

He accepted his position at Tulle–where the faith
had grown cold–and immediately began revitalizing
the region. This makes the Chapter entitled “The
Tulle Interlude” one of the most fascinating in the
book. His years in Africa trained him to build from
nothing. He began to breathe life into a dying area.
He visited the priests, many of whom had become
discouraged, and gave them hope. But his time in
Tulle was indeed an interlude. Six months later, he
packed his bags and moved to Rome. He had been
elected Superior General of the Holy Ghost Fathers.

“In the Turmoil of the Council”
Meanwhile, he had been appointed to the
Central Preparatory Committee for the Second
Vatican Council. The Biography details in a way
never before recounted the determined fight of
the International Group of Fathers against the
THE ANGELUS • August 2005

liberal Rhine group of theologians and bishops
who hijacked the Council from day one. The
International Fathers, despite great odds, strove to
keep Vatican II from becoming the catastrophe that
it was.
Archbishop Lefebvre was a key figure and
organizer of this conservative group and the
Biography recounts many behind-the-scenes events
not known before. The Vatican II Chapters are
riveting, and deserve to be read more than once.
The Chapters, as with the rest of the book, do not
merely tell the story of what happened, but give the
reader the Catholic principles of how to judge the
events. In many ways, each Chapter of the Biography
not only tells history, but teaches theology.
Of special interest was Archbishop Lefebvre’s
prediction of the consequences of the Council’s new
teaching on Religious Liberty. He said, “Religious
Liberty is the right to cause scandal” since it
gives civil rights to spread religious error and its
moral consequences. Among these consequences,
Archbishop Lefebvre spotlighted the following:

•

Immorality: “The liberty of all religious communities
in society mentioned in No. 29, cannot be laid down,
without at the same time granting moral liberty to these
communities: morals and religion are very closely linked,
for instance, polygamy and the religion of Islam.”

•

The death of the Catholic States: “A civil society
endowed with Catholic legislation shall not longer
exist.”

• “Doctrinal Relativism and practical indifferent• “The disappearance in the Church of the missionary
spirit for the conversion of souls.”

ism.”

12

The Archbishop spoke prophetically, yet he did
not rely on extraordinary mystical gifts. He simply
incorporated the principles learned under Fr. Le
Floch: “Think with the Church.” “Judge as the popes
judged.” And the Popes of the past had consistently
judged and condemned the liberal principles
enshrined in Dignitatis Humanae.
The consequences that Archbishop Lefebvre
predicted, and worse, have come to pass due to the
Council’s new Religious Liberty program. Cardinal
Ottaviani likewise predicted that the Council’s
Religious Liberty would result in a South America
overrun with Protestantism. He too is proven
correct.
The most damning indictment of the Council’s
Religious Liberty came from the synagogue of Satan
itself. Archbishop Lefebvre noted:
This very year [1965], Yves Marsaudon, the
Freemason, has published the book L’oecumenisme vu
par un franc-maçon de tradition (Ecumenism as Seen by
a Traditional Freemason). In it the author expresses
hope of Freemasons that our Council will solemnly

9
proclaim religious liberty....What more information do
we need?13

The True School
VS. the New School
Archbishop Lefebvre during the Council warned
against the new ecumenism:
There exists a spirit of non-Catholic or rationalist
ecumenism that has become a battering ram for unknown
hands to pervert doctrine. 14

He denounced modern collegiality, the new
doctrine of the dignity of the human person, and the
Council’s new definition of the Church that claimed,
contrary to Catholic truth and to the express
teaching of Pope Pius XII, that the Catholic Church
is somehow bigger than the Catholic Church.
This new heretical teaching was championed
by a modernist Vatican II peritus named Joseph
Ratzinger.15
Here it is instructive to contrast Archbishop
Lefebvre’s comments on the original schemas of
Vatican II with the comments of Fr. Ratzinger. Of
the original schemas on Vatican II, Archbishop
Lefebvre said:
I was nominated a member of the Central Preparatory
Commission by the Pope and I took an assiduous and
enthusiastic part in its two years of work. The Central
Commission had the responsibility of checking and
examining all the preparatory schemas which came from
the specialist commissions....This work was carried out
very conscientiously and meticulously. I still possess the
seventy-two preparatory schemas; in them the Church’s
doctrine is absolutely orthodox. They were adapted in a
certain manner to our times, but with great moderation
and discretion.
Everything was ready for the date announced and
on 11th October, 1962, the Fathers took their places
in the nave of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. But then an
occurrence took place which had not been foreseen by
the Holy See. From the very first days, the Council was
besieged by the progressive forces...fifteen days after the
opening sessions not one of the seventy-two schemas
remained. All had been sent back, rejected, thrown into
the waste-paper basket.16

What Archbishop Lefebvre laments, Fr.
Ratzinger celebrates. In his 1966 book Theological
Highlights of Vatican II, Fr. Ratzinger sneers against
the original Vatican II schema on Divine Revelation:
The text was, if one may use the label, utterly the
product of the “anti-Modernist” mentality that had taken
shape about the turn of the century. The text was written
in a spirit of condemnation and negation, which...had a
frigid and even offensive tone to many of the Fathers.
And this despite the fact that the content of the text was
new to no one. It was exactly like dozens of text-books
familiar to the bishops from their seminary days: and

in some cases, their former professors were actually
responsible for the texts now presented to them.17

Fr. Ratzinger, an adherent of the New Theology
to this day, is appalled at the prospect that the
Council would actually reiterate the consistent
teaching of the Church of all time; appalled that
the Council would have an anti-Modernist tone.
This could not be more contrary to the spirit of Fr.
Le Floch and to the spirit of the popes throughout
the centuries, particularly that of Pope St. Pius X
who issued the Oath Against Modernism. Ratzinger
continues:
The real question behind the discussion can be put this
way: Was the intellectual position of “anti-Modernism”
–the old policy of exclusiveness, condemnation and
defense leading to an almost neurotic denial of all that
was new–to be continued? Or would the Church, after
it had taken all the necessary precautions to defend the
Faith, turn over a new leaf and move on into a new and
positive encounter with its own origins, with its brothers
and with the world today?18

Ratzinger goes on to say that the majority
opted for the second alternative–a kind of antianti-Modernist approach, and rejoiced that this
was a “new beginning.” Archbishop Lefebvre’s
1964 assessment of the Council, recounted in the
Biography, was far more accurate, far more Catholic:
In an inconceivable fashion, the Council promoted
the spreading of liberal errors. The Faith, morality, and
ecclesiastical discipline are shaken to their foundations
as the Popes have predicted. The destruction of the
Church is advancing rapidly.19

The Council closed, chaos ensued, and this
chaos ripped through religious orders. Archbishop
Lefebvre’s Holy Ghost Fathers were no exception.
The diabolic disorientation of aggiornamento took
hold, and Paul VI’s Vatican would not support the
traditional superiors who tried to restore order.
On October 4, 1968, Archbishop Lefebvre met
with Bishop Antonio Mauro from the Vatican’s
Sacred Congregation for Religious. Archbishop
Lefebvre explained that his Order was in revolution,
that he had virtually no authority, even though he
was Superior General.
The answer was not reassuring.
“You understand, after the Council, you have to
understand...” stammered Msgr. Mauro, “I am going to
give you some advice that I have just given to another
Superior General who came to see me about the same
thing.” “Go on,” I said to him, “take a little trip to the
United States. It will do you good. As for the chapter
and even for the congregation’s present business, leave
it to your assistants!20

This vapid response told Archbishop Lefebvre
there would be no help from the Congregation
for Religious. After one last attempt to correct his
wayward order, he resigned as Superior General
on October 28, 1968. The Holy Ghost Fathers, the
THE ANGELUS • August 2005

10
Biography recounts, became even more chaotic after
the Archbishop departed. This is an example of how
the great missionary orders fell.

New Mass, Orphaned Seminarians,
Society of Saint Pius X
The Biography recounts the creation of Bugnini’s
Novus Ordo, and the central role played by
Archbishop Lefebvre in The Ottaviani Intervention,
the “Critical Study” against the New Mass. It is at
this time that we meet the orphaned seminarians
and Archbishop Lefebvre’s counseling of them,
which led to the creation of the Society of St. Pius
X. As Archbishop Lefebvre’s work in Africa trained
him to start from nothing, thus he began again. And
what he now started sent shock waves throughout
the European hierarchy.
The Society was founded with full ecclesiastical
approval, but was unlawfully suppressed because
of its no-compromise adherence to Tradition. The
Chapter entitled “I Adhere to Eternal Rome” is one
of the most riveting sections of the book. It recounts
the mid-1970’s showdown between Archbishop
Lefebvre and Pope Paul VI’s Vatican. We meet again
all the old players including Cardinal Jean Villot,
Archbishop Giovanni Benelli, who were determined
to crush the stronghold of Tradition in Econe.
This, in fact, is where the real battle for the
Society of St. Pius X was fought. Everything that
followed, including the 1988 Consecrations, was
the logical follow-through of the impasse between
Archbishop Lefebvre and Papa Montini. Paul VI
perceived Econe as a threat to his Vatican II reform,
even though the reform was an obvious disaster.
Though it is not contained in the Biography,
the case of Father Linus Popian is instructive, and
sheds light on the diabolic disorientation of Paul
VI’s Vatican. Linus Popian and another seminarian
in Communist Romania, who were members of
the Romanian Orthodox Church, had become
convinced that the Roman Catholic Church was the
one, true Church. If they converted to Catholicism
in Romania, they would have been persecuted and
perhaps sent to Siberia. They thus risked their lives
to escape Communist Romania and made their
perilous way to the Vatican. The two seminarians
told Cardinal Villot and Cardinal Philippe that they
wanted to convert to Catholicism. The Cardinals
were horrified. These prelates had pledged first
allegiance to the ecumenism and Ostpolitik of
Vatican II. They told Linus Popian and his colleague
that they should not flee Communism. They also told
them not to covert to Catholicism, but to remain in
the schismatic Romanian church. The seminarians
converted to Catholicism anyway, but Cardinal
Villot, acting through Archbishop Casaroli, blocked
THE ANGELUS • August 2005

their ordinations. Casaroli said that the ordinations
of these two young men would damage the Vatican’s
relationship with the Communist government of
Romania, and would cause difficulties in ecumenical
dialogue with the Romanian Orthodox. The
seminarians were not ordained until after the death
of Paul VI, in the interim of sedevacante before the
election of John Paul II.21 This episode reveals the
thinking at the highest level of Vatican at the time
when it harassed Archbishop Lefebvre and waged
war against Econe.
Archbishop Lefebvre continued his work,
despite the unlawful sanctions hurled at him. In
doctrine, in liturgy, in the Catholic principles of the
Social Kingship of Jesus Christ, he remained faithful
to the Popes of all time; whereas Pope Paul VI, Pope
John Paul II, and now Pope Benedict XVI chose
to embrace the house built on sand, the modernist
“new beginning” of Vatican II of which Fr. Ratzinger
spoke so glibly.
The Biography covers the post-Vatican II
Archbishop Lefebvre in keen detail. It chronicles
the growth of the Society of St. Pius X, the
extraordinary endowment of the House at Ecône, its
foundations in America, the Archbishop’s reaction
to the 1986 Assisi scandal, the 1988 consecrations,
and much more.
The section on the 1988 negotiations between
the Archbishop and Cardinal Ratzinger deserves
special reading in light of Ratzinger’s elevation to
the papacy. Even today, when Rome appears to
extend an olive branch, the concerned Catholic
must never forget Cardinal Ratzinger’s published
scorn for Traditionalists. In The Principles of Catholic
Theology, Cardinal Ratzinger wrote:
Was the Council a wrong road that we must now retrace
if we are to save the Church? The voices of those who
say that it is are becoming louder and their followers
more numerous. Among the more obvious phenomena of
the last years must be counted the increasing number of
integralist [traditionalist] groups in which the desire for
piety, for the sense of the mystery, is finding satisfaction.
We must be on our guard against minimizing these
movements. Without a doubt, they represent a sectarian
zealotry that is the antithesis of Catholicity. We can not
resist them too firmly22 (emphasis added).

In 1988, Cardinal Ratzinger said likewise:
It is inadmissible; one cannot accept that there be in
the Church groups of Catholics who do not follow the
general way of thinking of the bishops of the world.23

Indeed, let the reader beware!

Those Who Knew Him
The Biography is of unique value as the author
has drawn upon a large reservoir of primary sources
from Europe, which means there is much in the

11
book that English-speaking readers encounter for
the first time.
Of particular charm is the closing chapter that
displays the Archbishop’s kindness and good nature.
There are stories from families and friends, and a
section entitled “As His Drivers Saw Him.” One
anecdote stands out:
He (Archbishop Lefebvre) would readily spend the night
in a hotel so as not to disturb a priory at a late hour or
else to accommodate those traveling with him. And he
did not go to bed before inspecting his driver’s room and
swapping with him if necessary: “You are the driver and
you need a quiet room. Besides, I am deaf.”24

Bishop Tissier de Mallerais is to be commended
for culling a huge amount of research, notes and
documents, including interviews from students and
acquaintances who knew the Archbishop before the
Council. With these and other sources, he presents
the biography in an organized, readable fashion. It
was no easy task, and it was executed with skill.
The book gives the reader a comprehensive
overview of the contemporary crisis of Faith. It
explains the roots of the crisis and the means of
legitimate resistance. This is all presented within the
context of a story, the life and work of Archbishop
Marcel Lefebvre, a remarkable man who stood
virtually alone as an embodiment of immutable
Catholic truth; who refused to budge in the face of
an all-pervasive Modernism. The valuable lessons
contained in the book are innumerable The copious
footnotes and complete Index make the book a
superb reference tool. It deserves to be in every
library and in every home.

The Genuine Coin
Years ago, I had dealings with a United States
Secret Service agent who apprehended printers who
counterfeited money.25 I asked him, “How do you
spot a counterfeit?” He replied, “We get to know
the real thing thoroughly. Once you really know the
genuine dollar, you can easily spot a fake.”
Archbishop Lefebvre is hated because he is the
genuine coin. His life, his work, his teaching is that
of a genuine Catholic bishop. Without even trying
to do so, he reveals those of the post-Conciliar
hierarchy as counterfeit in what they teach and
how they govern. When compared to Archbishop
Lefebvre, even the most “conservative” Novus Ordo
bishop exudes the stench of liberalism.
During the Arian crisis of the fourth century,
when most of the hierarchy fell into this heresy,
Arian bishops went to Constantinople to ask St.
Basil the Great to join them in their cause. They
were perplexed that he was among the only
bishops in the world not to side with them. St. Basil
responded, “Perhaps you have never met a Catholic
bishop before.”

In The Biography of Marcel Lefebvre, Bishop Tissier
de Mallerais introduces us to a true Catholic bishop.
We get to know him intimately. Once we do, we
realize that Archbishop Lefebvre’s no-compromise
stand for Tradition and for the restoration of the
Tridentine Mass is, apart from Our Lady of Fatima,
the main light of hope given by Providence in the
post-Conciliar tempest.
John Vennari is Editor of the monthly newspaper, Catholic Family News.

From The Biography of Marcel Lefebvre (hereafter referred to as BML) by
Bernard Tissier de Mallerais (Kansas City: Angelus Press, 2004) p.411.
2
BML, p.36.
3
Ibid. p.39.
4
Apparently no relation to Marcel Lefebvre.
5
The details, including the subversive maneuvers against Fr. Floch, are in
BML, pp.47-54. Archbishop Lefebvre respectfully lamented of Pope Pius
XI: “Pope Pius XI was a very intelligent man who had a great faith, and
wrote wonderful encyclicals. Unfortunately, however, in the actual practice
of government, he was weak–very weak–and rather tempted to become
somewhat allied with the world. He not only deposed Fr. Le Floch, but
also Cardinal Billot, who was an eminent and extraordinary professor of
the Gregorian University.” The Little Story of My Long Life, Archbishop
Marcel Lefebvre (Brownville: Sisters of the Society of St. Pius X, 2002),
p.30.
6
Pope St. Pius X was urged to condemn Action Française because, though
counter-revolutionary, they were a secular, not a Catholic, organization.
Pius X refused to condemn them. “They are doing too much good,” said
Pius X, “they defend the principle of authority. They defend order.” BML,
p.48.
7
Archbishop Lefebvre said, “Action Française...was not a strictly Catholic
movement [but] was a movement against the disorders which Freemasonry
was bringing into France. It advocated a sound, definitive reaction, a return
to order, to discipline, to a moral code, to Christian morals. So the government, displeased with this movement, insisted that Pope Pius XI condemn
it. Action Française was made up of the best Catholics who were trying to
put France back on track again. And yet Pope Pius XI condemned it. The
best proof that his judgment was unsound is that when he died, his secretary
of state, Pope Pius XII, who succeeded him, lifted the condemnation of
the movement. It was too late! The evil had been done. Action Française
had been ruined. It was frightening and had enormous consequences.” The
Little Story of My Long Life, p.32.
7
This is in contrast to Pope Pius XII. In a 1948 audience, Pius XII asked
Archbishop Lefebvre about his training in Rome. Upon learning, Pius XII
said warmly, “Oh, dear Fr. Le Floch.” BLM, p.163.
8
BML, p.231.
9
Vicomte Leon de Poncins, Freemasonry and the Vatican, p.14
11
BML, p.254.
12
Ibid., p.329.
13
Ibid., p.328.
14
Ibid., p.330.
15
Ibid., p.323.
16
Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, Open Letter to Confused Catholics (Kansas
City: Angelus Press, 1992), p.102. Emphasis added.
17
Fr. Joseph Ratzinger, Theological Highlights of Vatican II (New York:
Paulist Press, 1966), p.20.
18
Ibid., p.22.
19
BLM, p.335.
20
Ibid., p.373.
21
See “Vatican Says, ‘You Must Not Become Catholic,’” John Vennari,
Catholic Family News, December, 2001.
22
Joseph Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology (San Francisco: Ignatius
Press, 1987), p.389. Emphasis added.
23
Fr. François Laisney, Archbishop Lefebvre and the Vatican (Kansas City:
Angelus Press, 1999), p.222. Emphasis added.
24
BLM, p.597.
25
I was looking to purchase one of the printing presses he had confiscated–it
still had green ink on it!
1

THE ANGELUS • August 2005

12

A basic background on reincarnation in Part 1
(The Angelus, July 2005) is followed here by all the
best “evidence” it can put forth to “prove” itself.
d r .

G y u l a

A .

M a g ó

rATHER THAN HELL:

REINCARNATI
REINCARNATI
THE ANGELUS • August 2005

13

ALLAN KARDEC
Allan Kardec (1804-69) was the Father of Spiritism in France. His real name
was Hypolyte Leon Denizard Rivail. His pseudonym originated in mediumistic
communications. Both Allan and Kardec were said to have been his names
in previous incarnations. In his book entitled Heaven and Hell1 (a book that
has been channeled), Allen Kardec advocates a new religion called Spiritism.
He denounces the doctrines of Eternal Punishment and Original Sin, and as
a defense of reincarnation, he confuses human souls and angels as follows
(Emmanuel Swedenborg did the same):
Souls, or spirits, are created simple and ignorant, that is to say, without knowledge and
without the consciousness of good and evil, but with the aptitude of acquiring, in knowledge
and morality, all that they lack, and which they will acquire through effort and labor. It
is thus that, little by little the soul acquires development, effects of its own improvement,
and advances in the spiritual hierarchy, until it has reached the state of fully purified Spirit
or Angel. The angels then are the souls of men who have reached the highest degree of
perfection attainable by created existences.2

And demons, according to Spiritism, are merely somewhat retarded but wellmeaning angels: “They are imperfect spirits who will grow better in the course
of time, they are still at the foot of the ladder, but they will reach the top sooner
or later.”3 Kardecian spiritism (its adherents prefer this term to spiritualism)
spread to Brazil in the 19th century, and it includes reincarnation as one of its
primary tenets.4 The spiritism of Kardec is the environment in which the famous
demonic healers of Brazil are thriving, for example Ze Arigo ( Jose Pedro de
Freitas, died in 1971), who was called “the surgeon of the rusty knife,” and the
more recent “John of God” ( Joao Teixeira de Faria). The latter does not deny
being a medium: he works “in entity” or “when he incorporated the spirit entity.”
“John of God” declares that “his achievements are only the results of the law of
reincarnation and the subsequent use of spirit doctors from the spirit plane.”

EDGAR CAYCE
Our third example is the American psychic Edgar Cayce (1877-1945). Daily
for over 40 years of his adult life, (between 1901 and 1945) Cayce would lie
down on a couch with his hands folded over his stomach and allow himself to
enter a self-induced sleep state. Then, provided with the name and location of
an individual anywhere in the world he would speak in a normal voice and give
answers to any questions about that person that he was asked. These answers,
which came to be called “readings” were written down by a stenographer, who
kept one copy on file and sent another to the person who had requested the
information. Today on file at the Association for Research and Enlightenment,
Inc. (ARE), in Virginia Beach, Virginia, are copies of more than 14,500 of
Edgar Cayce’s readings, totaling over 49,000 pages of text. Sixty-eight percent
of them are concerned with diagnosing and treating physical ailments, but the
rest of them advocate occult subjects including reincarnation. Cayce believed in
reincarnation while thinking himself to be a Protestant.
1

Allen Kardec, Heaven and Hell, or Divine Justice Vindicated in the
Plurality of Existences (Trubner, 1878).
Ibid., p.66.
3
Ibid., p.77.
4
Ian Stevenson, Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation, 2nd ed.
(University Press of Virginia, 1974), p.181.
2

TION
ON
TION
ON

PART 2 OF 3 PARTS

“EVIDENCE” FOR REINCARNATION

THE ANGELUS • August 2005

14
The demons established their control over him in May of 1890, when he was
13 years old. We quote from the only biography Cayce authorized himself, that
written by Thomas Sugrue. He was reading his Bible in the woods near his home,
when

CAYCE

SWEDENBORG

he became aware of the presence of someone else. He looked up. A woman was standing
before him. At first he thought she was his mother, come to bring him home for the chores–the
sun was bright and his eyes did not see well after staring at the book. But when she spoke he
knew it was someone he did not know. Her voice was soft and very clear; it reminded him of
music. “Your prayers have been heard,” she said. “Tell me what you would like most of all,
so that I may give it to you.”
Then he saw that there was something on her back; something that made shadows behind
her that were shaped like wings. He was frightened. She smiled at him, waiting. He opened
his mouth and heard himself saying: “Most of all I would like to be helpful to others, and
especially to children when they are sick.” 5

Next day he had great difficulties with spelling, and again he heard the voice
of the lady he had seen the day before: “If you can sleep a little, we can help
you.” He took a short nap with the spelling book as a pillow, and awoke with a
photographic knowledge of the entire book.
After this he was hooked. He took all kinds of paranormal manifestations
for granted. Two years later, in 1892, an injury made him delirious. He dictated
instructions for a poultice which, he promised, would cure him. Later he awoke
well, without any recollection of his disorder or the instructions he dictated.
In 1900, he lost his voice, but on March 31, 1901, under hypnosis he diagnosed
his own malady, and after ten months of not being able to speak, he woke up with
his voice restored. This started his 22 year career as a medical clairvoyant. For 22
years, the demons were biding their time, and patiently gave medical advice only.
They were using this time to establish their credibility with the clients of Edgar
Cayce. Their ability to give useful medical advice is not surprising since they have
a complete knowledge of the material world.
In 1923, Cayce was exactly at the midpoint of his career (he died 22 years
later), when he gave a reading to Arthur Lammers, a prosperous printer in
Ohio, who was also a Theosophist. Lammers was the first to ask non-medical
questions, questions “about the Cabala, the mystery religions of Egypt and Greece,
the medieval alchemists, the mystics of Tibet, yoga, Madame Blavatsky and
Theosophy, the Great White Brotherhood, the Etheric World.”6 Although Cayce,
while conscious, knew nothing about such things, in trance he answered all the
questions Lammers posed to the satisfaction of occultists. Already in the very first
reading, conducted by Lammers himself, reincarnation played a prominent role.
Lammers was pleased with the outcome, and said to Cayce after the session: “You
say I’ve lived before on this earth. You say this is my third appearance in this
sphere and that I still have some of the inclinations from my last life, when I was a
monk.”7
The oldest son, 16-year-old Hugh Lynn Cayce, had the strongest reservations
about all this.
It was bad enough that his father was a psychic; the boys continually asked him ‘What is
the matter with your dad? What is that stuff he does?’ But now it was worse. They weren’t
even to be Christians any more. They were to be heathens.8
…Hugh Lynn remained skeptical. To him it all smacked of occultism, and occultism was
something he associated with shady fortune-tellers, women who believed in Theosophy, and
Hindus wearing turbans and bending over crystal balls.9

But for Edgar Cayce there was no way back any more. He was committed to
occultism. So for the next 22 years, the demons, with their credibility securely
established, poured out an incredible amount of disinformation through Cayce on
5

Thomas Sugrue, There Is a River: The Story of Edgar Cayce (Henry Holt & Co., 1945), pp.45-46.
Ibid., p.234.
7
Ibid., p.237.
8
Ibid., p.257.
9
Ibid., p.266.
6

THE ANGELUS • August 2005

15
various esoteric subjects, including reincarnation and
Karma, all subversive and destructive to Christianity,
The first question is what or rather who is the
source of all the information spoken of by Cayce?
It is a fact that he knew nothing about them, he
always asked after waking up following a session:
“What did I say?” In some sessions, the questioner
explicitly asks: “Please give us Thine Identity,” but
the answer is refused.10 Only one reading is given
in The Edgar Cayce Companion, in which the demon
identifies himself, and gives his name as “Halaliel.”11
The indirect evidence for the demonic origin of all
the readings (e.g., the ambiguity and deceitfulness
permeating every sentence of the non-health related
text) is overwhelming, and we take this for granted.
Of course, the demons themselves are anxious to
confuse, so another reading states: “The subconscious
mind of Edgar Cayce is in direct communication
with all other subconscious minds...gathering in this
way all knowledge possessed by millions of other
subconscious minds.”12 This “explanation,” of course,
belongs in the realm of sheer fantasy.
The Cayce readings are even more devious than
Kardec or the Theosophists in trying to confuse and
seduce Christians (they have succeeded in confusing
Edgar Cayce himself, who thought of himself as a
good Protestant). In the readings, there is a lot of
Christian-sounding talk about Father, Son, and Holy
Ghost, angels, archangels and guardian angels, and
a feigned reverence for Biblical stories, but all the
details are found wrong when carefully examined.
In particular, most Bible quotes are given an esoteric
interpretation. For example, Jesus Christ was merely
a man,13 He had many incarnations.14 He traveled to
India, Persia and Egypt15; Mary (the Blessed Virgin
Mary) had several children after Jesus,16 etc., etc.
The description of the human soul appears
Gnostic: “An entity, or soul, is a spark–or a portion–
of the Whole, the First Cause: or Purpose.”17 And,
“All souls were created in the beginning and are
finding their way back to whence they came.”18
This esoteric, pantheistic world view has the
greatest difficulty with God, so not surprisingly,
the demons of Cayce turn God into electricity:
“Electricity or vibration is that same energy, same
power, ye call God.”19 This coincides with a general
idea repeatedly occurring in occultism: the Cosmos is
animated by Energy which coincides with the divine
spirit. Which again leads to the confusion between
matter and spirit: “Spirit moving in space becomes
matter.”20

Although 68% of the actual readings were
concerned with health issues, the recent book, The
Edgar Cayce Companion: A Comprehensive Treatise of the
Edgar Cayce Readings devotes 17% to health issues,
obviously considering the New Age type esoteric,
“spiritual” readings more important. A lot of space
is devoted to reincarnation, Karma, pantheism,
astrology, evolution of mind, symbology, vibrations,
and fantasies about higher dimensions, Atlantis,
Lemuria, Arcturus and many other topics so dear to
the heart of New Agers. But reincarnation is perhaps
the best-known element of Cayce’s life-readings,
which describe thousands of past lives ranging from
Atlantis to 19th-century America.
A rather unusual aspect of the Cayce readings is
that in addition to the description of past lives, the
readings also include what (supposedly) happens
between reincarnations under the heading of
“planetary sojourns.” Just as astrology describes
the effect of the planets on human bodies, here
the supposed effects of the planets on discarnate
souls (i.e., pure spirits) is claimed. The supposed
explanation goes like this (citing all the details would
be too tedious): souls are developing to become one
with God, which requires their passage through “all
the planes of the universal forces.”21
According to K. Paul Johnson,22 this idea (really
a fiction) has appeared in ancient Greek and Persian
esoteric sources, but it has not been fully expounded
there. Explicit formulations of this in modern occult
literature were given by Gottfried de Purucker, a
Theosophist, and by Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925),
founder of Anthroposophy. Significantly, both
accounts were published only after the death of Edgar
Cayce. This is a vivid proof that the demons give the
esoteric, occult literature its continuity by providing it
with its main themes.

10

17

Ernest Frejer, The Edgar Cayce Companion: A Comprehensive Treatise of
the Edgar Cayce Readings (A.R.E. Press, 1995), p.10.
11
Ibid., p.6, Reading 507-1.
12
Ibid., Reading 294-1.
13
Ibid., p.171, Reading 900-10.
14
Ibid., p.235, Reading 5749-14.
15
Ibid., p.217, Reading 5749-2.
16
Ibid., p.207, Reading 5749-8.

“JUSTIFICATION”
OF REINCARNATION
If the universe is not completely senseless
and irrational, some explanation is expected
for reincarnation. The religious background is
pantheism, which excludes a personal Creator, and
therefore any explanation must take the form of some
“eternal law.”

Ibid., p.19, Reading 2079-1.
Ibid., p.178, Reading 3744-4.
Ibid., p.28, Reading 2828-4.
20
Ibid., p.174, Reading 873-1.
21
Ibid., p.35, Reading 900-24.
22
K. Paul Johnson, “Afterlife Visions of a Sleeping Prophet,” Gnosis Magazine,
No. 42, Winter 1997.
18
19

THE ANGELUS • August 2005

16
MORAL JUSTIFICATION
IN THE EAST: THE LAW OF KARMA
In Hinduism and Buddhism the explanation and
justification of reincarnation is moral, and it is called
the Law of Karma. We state some of its essentials:
Karma is literally “action, “doing,” “deed.” It is at
once cause and effect, and the law which equilibrates
the two. It is Newton’s third law of motion, that
Action and Reaction are equal and opposite, applied
to the moral and all other realms of sentient life.23
Some fundamental Buddhistic beliefs:
2) The Universe was evolved, not created; and it
functions according to law, not according to the caprice
of any God....
12) The Universe is subject to a natural causation know
as Karma. The merits and demerits of a being in past
existences determine his condition in the present one. Each
man, therefore, has prepared the causes and effects which
he now experiences.
13) The obstacles to the attainment of good Karma may
be removed by the observance of the following precepts,
which are embraced in the moral code of Buddhism:

•
•
•
•
•

Kill not;
Steal not;
Indulge in no forbidden sexual pleasure;
Lie not;
Take no intoxicating or stupefying drug or
liquor.

Five other precepts, which need not here be enumerated,
should be observed by those who would attain more
quickly than the average layman the release from misery
and rebirth.24
Thus every man is the molder and the sole creator of his
life to come, and master of his destiny.25

The statement above, “It is Newton’s third law
of motion, that Action and Reaction are equal and
opposite, applied to the moral and all other realms
of sentient life,” equates physical laws and moral
laws, which is entirely mistaken. Physical law is the
law of the material universe, whereas moral law is
a rule governing the free actions of rational beings.
The physical law is mechanical, for example, in
the case of Newton’s third law, given an action, the
reaction is uniquely determined. The moral law
includes prescriptions for what ought to be done
plus sanctions for not obeying the prescriptions. In
the realm of morality, one cannot speak of a unique
consequence of a moral act, for example a crime
may be justly punished in several different ways.
Paul Siwek sarcastically summarizes this impossible

proposition (of equating physical and moral laws):
“...morality becomes an integral part of physics.”26
In Christianity, there is a personal God, whose
will is the moral law. The same God judges every
man at the end of his one lifetime as to his sins
and virtues. The commandments and sanctions are
clearly stated. And most importantly, the moral
law is not applied mechanically; rather, the whole
context of the moral act (extenuating circumstances,
etc.) is taken into account by the All-Knowing Judge.
For example, cold-blooded murder with the aim of
robbing the victim is treated very differently from
accidental killing whose aim was self-defense. So the
passing of the judgment is by an Infinite Mind, i.e.,
God, and the execution of the sentence, delivering
reward or punishment, is also completely under
divine control.
In Buddhism, there is a moral law (partially
stated above), but the sanctions for violating
the precepts are unknown. Supposedly, the law
of consequences is “unerring.” Supposedly, the
Karma causes every action, every word, even every
thought, to be followed by an effect adequate and
proportionate to it: a good effect follows a good
action, a bad effect, a bad action. But this requires
a Mind, in fact an all-knowing Mind, for which
there is no room in pantheism. Pantheism only
allows a mechanical law. Unfortunately, moral
decisions can become arbitrarily complex by having
to consider all the circumstances, and no fixed
mechanism can foresee all the possible modifications
and qualifications. The universe being finite, any
mechanism contained in it must be finite, therefore
any mechanism implied by pantheism must be finite.
And a finite mechanism (the technical term for it is an
algorithm) cannot possibly pass a just moral judgment
in all possible cases.
Sixty years of Computer Science (which includes
the study of algorithms), and in particular the failure
of Artificial Intelligence27 proves this beyond a
shadow of doubt. Computers (which are mechanical
rule-based systems) did surpass humans in activities
that are strictly mechanical (i.e., can be defined with
a set of rules) such as playing games like chess. But
no computer program can take the place of a human
mind in non-mechanical activities such translating
novels or poetry from one language to another.
Neither can a computer be programmed to foresee
what is accomplished at a typical criminal trial.
Therefore, no mechanical Law of Karma can possibly
exist that could make true moral decisions.
When Helena Blavatsky was questioned about
this, she admitted her ignorance: “If you question
me about the causative intelligence in it (i.e., in
(continued on p.25)

23

26

24

27

Humphreys, Buddhism, p.100.
Ibid., pp.71-73.
25
Ibid., p.101.
THE ANGELUS • August 2005

Siwek, The Enigma of the Hereafter, p.112.
Hubert L. Dreyfus, What Computers Can’t Do: The Limits of Artificial
Intelligence (Harper, 1979).

si si no no
THE ANGELUS ENGLISH-LANGUAGE ARTICLE REPRINT

Let your speech be, “Yes, yes,” “No, no”; whatever is beyond these comes from the evil one. (Mt. 5:37)

●

August 2005

Reprint #65

On May 7, 2005, Mrs. Susan Torres, a 26-year-old vaccine researcher and
parishioner at St. Rita’s Catholic Church in Alexandria, Virginia, collapsed.
She was diagnosed at the Virginia Hospital Center in Arlington with stage
four melanoma, declared brain dead, and without any hope of recovery. She
was 17 weeks pregnant and doctor kept her unborn baby alive until it could
live outside her womb. The baby was born on August 2, 2005.
This incident underscores the timeliness of Professor Becchi’s examination
of the notion of “brain death.” The birth of a healthy baby girl born to this
mother declared “brain dead” three months previously, proves that the notion
of “brain death” as an equivalent of real death needs to be rejected.

Are the Dead
Really Dead
When We Remove
Their Organs?
17

THE ANGELUS ENGLISH-LANGUAGE ARTICLE REPRINT

Today’s pastors have left Catholics in a state of
disinformation. Catholics are encouraged, in the
name of false charity, to favor the donation of even
vital organs. This encouragement is based on a
supposition–the notion of “brain death”–that not only
contradicts common sense and raises grave moral
questions, but is being shown by science itself to be a
rash and unfounded assumption. For this reason we
offer readers the following article by Professor Paolo
Becchi, Associate Professor of Philosophy of Law at
the University of Genoa. [The subtitles inserted at
various points are editorial insertions.–Ed.]
Debate about the time when life begins was
stimulated in Italy by the contested approval of a
law on assisted procreation (Law 40 of 2004). On the
question of the end of life, however, and in particular
on the transplantation of organs from “cadavers,” the
debate seemed exhausted in the period immediately
after the approval, by a large majority, of the new
law on transplants (Law 91 of 2004). Debate on this
latter law focused on the so-called “silence–informed
consent” criterion to be used for the declaration of
intent (Article 4). This criterion is, in my opinion, a
dubious one; even more questionable is the manner
in which the then Minister of Health, Rosy Bindi,
circumvented the law by sending citizens a donor card
that not only was not foreseen by the law, but which
in fact prevented its application in a crucial respect. It
is true that today, five years after the application of the
law, we are still in a “transitory” phase (regulated by
Article 23), although this is euphemistic language. But
this is not my topic in this article.1
My intention here is to raise doubts in another
area, not about the law on transplants itself, but
rather about the presupposition on which it is based:
namely, that at the moment the removal takes place
the donor is already a “cadaver.” Can we be sure of
this? I start from a banal observation that arises from a
comparison of the two laws to which I just referred.

The Redefinition of Death
We have deemed it a duty to protect by law an
entity the size of a drop in a test tube (for example, by
prohibiting the freezing of embryos, and suppressing,
not to say prohibiting, prenatal diagnosis), while it is
permitted to treat a flesh and blood human being with
normal body temperature, a rosy complexion, normal

heartbeat and respiration maintained by life support
devices in the same way as a cadaver.
One might object: this fact is only apparently
disconcerting. Embryos, already at their first
development, are already living beings (and this
explains the great attention devoted to them), while
once brain death has been ascertained, the patient is
no longer living but dead: a cadaver that only seems
alive. This conclusion was presented as a scientific fact
established once and for all at the end of the 1960’s,
when a committee at Harvard Medical School issued a
celebrated report establishing a substantial equivalence
between the diagnosis of irreversible coma (established
by rigorous clinical criteria that were supposed to
establish the permanent loss of brain function) and
brain death, and the equivalence in turn between brain
death and actual death.2

The Motives for Its Development
Thus a new definition of death was established,
a definition that, for various reasons, found wide
acceptance over the following years. In the first place,
scientific knowledge at that time seemed to confirm
that patients in irreversible coma would suffer cardiac
arrest within a short time. Secondly, such a definition
presented the best support for the development of
transplant techniques that were being developed at
just that time (Christian Barnard had performed the
first heart transplant in December, 1967). Thirdly,
this definition seemed to remove the obstacle of
euthanasia: if the patient whose brain had irreversibly
stopped functioning was dead, removing his heart or
interrupting artificial respiration was not equivalent
to killing him. As is apparent, from the outset motives
beyond the therapeutic pushed for a redefinition of
death.
The connection between the new definition of
death and transplants is also apparent from legislation
then introduced. Although this study focuses on Italy,
similar laws were being enacted elsewhere at about the
same time. Already in 1969 a decree by the minister
of health and another the following January, making
use of standards like those in the Harvard report,
introduced the concept of brain death with explicit
reference to the problem of withdrawing organs for
the purpose of transplant. It is significant that soon
thereafter, on February 5, 1970, a decree (No. 78) by
the president of the Republic, as proposed by the
minister of health, for the first time authorized removal
of the heart and its parts. Since then the legislature
has done no more than indicate the diverse criteria

for ascertaining death; the first overall law regarding
transplants (Law 644 of 1975) did not restrict the
previous decrees, even to the extent of defining death.
This was done for the first time in 1993 with Law 578
(and a related ministerial decree that went into effect
the following year), according to which death “is
identified with the irreversible cessation of all brain
function” (Article 1).
The law not only introduces the definition of
total brain death, but further–changing course with
respect to the law of 1975–broadens the criteria for
determining death. These criteria were developed for
subjects affected by encephalic lesions and subject to
attempts at resuscitation; the law applies to all people
who find themselves in that condition, regardless
of whether they are donors or not. Even if formally
separate from the question of transplants, from the
moment it took effect this law modified conditions
for the removal of organs. And the most recent law
on transplants, in effect since 1999, only repeats the
earlier one in this regard. The law on transplants has
actually made it easier to get consent (this change
is in effect already in the “transitory” period); it has
maintained the definition of death and the manner
foreseen for its verification unaltered, as though they
had been definitively established in 1993-4. These
criteria therefore constitute the current basis for the
liceity of the removal of organs.

The Ethical-philosophical
Debate About Brain Death
Thus, in the decade of the 1990’s, Italy, like many
countries, not only accepted the concept of brain
death but actually established its definition by law. At
the same time in the United States of America, where
that definition had first been formulated, the concept
was called into question and re-examined.

Opposition
In fact, from the very beginning, philosophers
had expressed grave perplexity about the new
definition of death. A great philosopher of the 20th
century, Hans Jonas [1903-33, author of The Imperative
of Responsibility amongst other things; his writing is
largely concerned with the philosophical dilemmas
created by technology.–Ed.] was also a protagonist in
the contemporary debate on bioethics. One month
after publication of the Harvard report, he spoke at a
conference on the subject of experiments on human

subjects, expressing his firm opposition. His Leitmotiv
was the following: we do not know with certainty
the line between life and death, and a definition–in
particular one introduced with the manifest intention
of favoring the removal of organs–cannot make up for
this lack of knowledge. When the brain has stopped
functioning irreversibly we can suspend artificial life
support ( Jonas will go on to argue that we are obliged
to, because it would be against human dignity to
maintain a human being in this condition) not because
the patient is already dead, but because it makes
no sense to prolong life in such conditions. Already
in Jonas we find the dilemma, well emphasized by
Jonsen,3 that stands at the beginning of discussion
about brain death: should we stop life support to
permit the patient to die, or are we stopping the
respirator attached to a body that is already dead? The
second answer was chosen, with the implication that,
if we are stopping the respirator of a dead man, why
not keep it going to maintain access for the purpose of
transplants?
Jonas believed that the first path should have been
taken. He repeatedly criticized the new definition
of death. His most famous writing on this subject,
published in 1974 with the significant title Against the
Stream, has become a classic.4 Less well known is the
fact that Jonas, shortly before his death, returned to
the problem in his correspondence with a German
doctor friend. This letter is worth mentioning, if only
in passing.
In October, 1992, a young woman fell into a
coma after a traffic accident. She would never wake
up from this coma; after the necessary tests, she was
declared in a state of brain death. It was decided to
remove the organs, with the permission of her parents,
when doctors determined that she was pregnant.
Obviously, preparations for the removal of organs
were suspended and the doctors decided to carry on
the pregnancy. Discussion arose in Germany on the
concept of brain death, and many wondered how a
“cadaver” could carry on a pregnancy and then–as
actually happened–“decide” to interrupt it with a
spontaneous abortion when the fetus was no longer
alive. In this regard I would like to cite a passage from
Jonas drawn from his correspondence with one of the
doctors involved in the case:
Willingly or not, my dear friend, you or better, all of
you, have, by your well reasoned behavior, contradicted
the current definition of death. You said: by respiration (and
other interventions) we want to stop the body of Marion from
becoming a cadaver so that it can carry on the pregnancy.
Believing it capable of this, or at least wanting to give it this

THE ANGELUS ENGLISH-LANGUAGE ARTICLE REPRINT

possibility, you based your action on the residual life in
her–that is, the life of Marion! In fact, the body is as uniquely
the body of Marion as the brain was the brain of Marion.
The fact that the experiment failed in this case (it seems that
in prior, less extreme cases it has already succeeded) can as
little be used to disprove the fact that this is impermissible
as a spontaneous abortion can be used to establish that
pregnancy in general is impossible. You sincerely believed
in the possibility of its success, which is to say you believed
in the functional capacity of a body subject to brain death
as necessary for this plan and maintained by your ability.
This means that you believed in her LIFE as temporarily
prolonged for the sake of the child. This belief cannot be
refused in other cases of coma for other purposes!5

One might object that, interesting as these
observations are, they demonstrate nothing more
than the coherence of Jonas’s thinking. They are
indeed of great interest for Jonas’s biography, but in
the meantime his “old” position has taken on new
relevance, and has become much less isolated than it
was at the outset. With regard to Jonas, the writings of
Josef Seifert6 and more recently of Robert Spaemann
are noteworthy. These two authors, both of Catholic
inspiration, are at least in some respects in intellectual
accord with Jonas. All these authors have in common
the idea that, in the uncertainty or impossibility of
proving with certainty that a person is dead, he should
be treated as still living.

Second Thoughts
It is striking that, even in a school of thought at the
antipodes from that of Jonas, Seifert and Spaemann, it
is now openly admitted that “brain death” was nothing
but a bold expedient by which human beings were
defined as dead when they were not so in fact. This is
the conclusion reached today by a philosopher well
known for his utilitarian views: Peter Singer.
Here, too, it is worth summarizing the course
of his development. At the beginning of the 1990’s,
Singer, then a professor in Melbourne, was called
to an important hospital of that city to be part of
a committee that was to investigate some ethical
questions relating to the problem of consent; among
these was the question of anencephaly. Newborns
afflicted with this grave defect are not capable of
becoming fully conscious, lacking the “superior” part
of the brain (the cerebral hemispheres, including
the cerebral cortex) and the cranial vault that would
contain them; the “inferior” part, made up of the

encephalic trunk, is often intact, if sometimes little
developed. The anencephalic newborn is thus
capable of breathing spontaneously, since this
activity depends on the trunk, but it has an unhappy
prognosis: generally such children survive for a period
ranging from several days to a few weeks before
suffering cardio-circulatory arrest.
Singer, who in previous years had been a
proponent of “total brain death,” thus found himself
faced with the following problem: why not pass from
that definition of death to a “cortical” one, so as to also
declare anencephalics dead? Some members of the
committee wanted to go in that direction; Singer, to
everyone’s surprise, did not follow. He explained the
reasons for his dissent in his book Rethinking Life &
Death, published in 1994 and soon after translated also
into Italian. At least a passage from this book deserves
to be cited in full:
The panel’s deliberations made me think harder about
brain death. I was beginning to see where the trouble began.
The Harvard Brain Death Committee was faced with two
serious problems. Patients in an utterly hopeless condition
were attached to respirators, and no-one dared to turn them
off. Organs that could be used to save lives were rendered
useless by waiting for the circulation of the blood in potential
donors to stop. The committee tried to solve both these
problems by the bold expedient of classifying as dead those
whose brains had ceased to have any discernible activity.
The consequences of the redefinition of death were so
evidently desirable that it met with scarcely any opposition,
and was accepted almost universally. Nevertheless, it was
unsound from the start. Solving problems by redefinition
rarely works, and this case was no exception.7

Of course, the conclusion that Singer draws from
crises of brain death is, obviously, very different from
that of the philosophers previously cited. For them,
if the “brain dead” are still alive at the time when life
support is removed, that means that it is that action
that ends their life and thus ought not be done; for
Singer, by contrast, it is licit because life is not a sacred
and inviolable good. Also in this case (as in others)
there is a “third way,” as always the most difficult, one
that I have tried to develop on another occasion; but
here I would only like to emphasize a different aspect,
namely that, irrespective of their different ethical
conclusions, all of the cited authors start from the same
criticism of the notion of brain death.
One might ask what pushed Singer to put himself,
on this last point, in the company of Jonas, Seifert
and Spaemann, light years apart from him and of
whose existence he seems unaware. We find at least
an indirect answer in his recent contribution on the
subject, Morte cerebrale ed etica della sacralità della vita

(Brain death and the ethics of the sanctity of life),
where the author publishes his sources. They are, in
fact, scientific sources of the first rank, which together
with others contribute to describing the crisis in which
the new definition of death founded on exclusively
neurological criteria has fallen, not only from a
philosophical point of view but also from a medicalscientific one.

The Medical-scientific
Debate on Brain Death
Although lacking any specific medical expertise,
I will nonetheless permit myself to underline at
least two crucial aspects of this latter point. The first
concerns the possibility of ascertaining total brain
death on the basis of the criteria and tests currently in
use; the second deals with the thesis that brain death
is nevertheless an indication of the death of the whole
organism.

Unascertainability of Brain Death
The first aspect was well analyzed by two
American doctors, Robert Truog and James Fackler,
in an essay published in 1992 with the significant
title: “Rethinking Brain Death.”8 According to the
authors, documented scientific research shows that
patients who meet the current clinical criteria and
neurological tests for brain death do not necessarily
show the irreversible loss of all brain functions. This
would indicate that the complete loss of such functions
could not be diagnosed on the basis of adopted test
standards.
To support their argument the two doctors make
four arguments that can be briefly summarized. First
of all, many patients judged to be in a state of “brain
death” by the test in practice show undiminished
endocrine hypothalamic function. This means that in
some cases of patients declared brain dead, hormonal
activity of the pituitary gland and of the nerve center
(the hypothalamus) that controls it persists, and
thus the regulation of hormonal activity persists. In
second place, in many patients in this condition it
is possible to register with an electroencephalogram
weak electric activity localized in some parts of the
cerebral cortex, destined to stop within 24-48 hours;
in third place, some patients continue unmistakably
to react to external stimuli, as is shown, for example,
by the increase of heart rate and blood pressure after
a surgical incision before the removal of organs (these

revelations apply to the cases of patients declared
brain dead by British criteria, which are purely clinical
and refer to the state of the encephalic trunk). In the
fourth place, many patients defined as brain dead
retain their spinal reflexes, the significance of which
came to be recognized only during and after the years
when brain death was being defined.
On the basis of an attentive analysis of these four
elements, the two authors reached the conclusion that
current clinical means cannot ascertain the stopping
of all functions but only of some of them, and that at
most they diagnose cortical death.

Brain Death Is Not an
Indication of Death with
Respect to the Whole Organism
The second aspect has been examined most
closely by Alan Shewmon, an authoritative American
neurologist who has changed his views in the course
of his career. He has gone from being a convinced
proponent of brain death as a concept to one of its
most implacable critics.
As in the case of the two previous authors,
here also the point of departure was an empirical
revelation: organisms said to be in a state of brain
death survive much longer than could have been
imagined, and this implies that the brain is not as
essential as had been believed for the integrated
function of the organism. Against the prevailing
medical theory, which holds that the brain is the
organ responsible for integration of different parts
of the body and thus constitutes its “critical system,”
Shewmon advances his own thesis: the “critical
system” of the body cannot be localized in a single
organ, however important the brain may be.
According to the neurologist, this hypothesis would
furnish an explanation for the prolonged survival (in
a record case for more than 14 years) of subjects for
whom brain death had been diagnosed. Such subjects,
to a great extent pediatric patients, maintain intact
certain functions that were thought to belong to the
brain, such as the regulation of body temperature,
homeostasis of fluids, reaction to infections, and bodily
growth, all indications of the persistence of some
degree of integrating activity.
Shewmon concludes from this that it is completely
mistaken to maintain that brain death indicates death
of the whole organism. Thus one of the pillars on
which the concept of brain death was based is called
radically into question, namely the premise that the

THE ANGELUS ENGLISH-LANGUAGE ARTICLE REPRINT

brain is “the cerebral integrator of the body.” The
death of the brain does not cause disintegration of the
body. Such a disintegration is rather the consequence
of damage affecting several systems of organs and the
reaching of a critical level, a “point of no return” which
determines the beginning of the process of death and
renders ineffective any medical intervention aimed at
avoiding this inevitable end.
According to Shermon, a pronouncement of
death should not be based on diagnosis of a clinical
condition of brain death. The determination should
rather be made with reference to several parameters,
such as those connected to respiratory, circulatory, and
neurological activity.9 When it is clear that a point of no
return has been reached, the patient would be removed
from the apparatus for assisted breathing and, after
twenty minutes–the time Shermon considers necessary
to be sure of the impossibility of a spontaneous
resumption of the vital functions of the subject–one
could proceed to the declaration of death.

A Big Question Mark
Shewmon reaches the same conclusion as Jonas
by a different route. The larger question that arises is
whether in respecting such criteria transplants would
still be possible. Conditions would surely no longer be
optimal, and the advantages would certainly be more
limited. But here the problem that must be posed is that
if the organs are removed–as recent studies admit–from
donors who are in a nether world between life and
death, then it is the organ removal itself that causes the
definitive transition to the other side.
The legislation that accepts brain death has been
based on the assumption that the death of the patient
has already been verified when organ removal takes
place. If this supposition was debatable from the outset
on a philosophical level, it has at last been shown to
be unfounded also from a scientific point of view. If
the legal requirement for the removal of organs is that
it be done on subjects whose irretrievable loss of all
brain function has been verified, then we must admit
that today many organ removals take place in open
violation of the law. Instead of continuing to operate on
the basis of a fiction, we would like to openly discuss
whether or not it is acceptable to remove organs from
patients in a condition from which they may never
recover, but which is not yet equivalent to death.10
As in the case of assisted pregnancy, so too in
the case of organ transplants: advances in technology
applied to medicine are raising difficult new ethical
questions. The technical possibility of organ transplants
has pushed us to use patients whose fate was in any case
sealed as exchange material for other human beings.
In the same way today the technical possibility of in
vitro fertilization would push us (although the Italian

22

legislature has moved in the other direction) to use socalled supernumerary embryos–by destroying them–for
the cure of some diseases. In the case under review the
question was: “what to do with patients who, subject
to resuscitation, could not revive since their brain has
irreversibly stopped functioning?” We have pretended
to resolve the problem in a simplistic manner by
defining them as dead, even if the organism could
continue to function well with the help of a respirator;
perhaps even better than those few embryo cells in a
test tube which do not yet have a brain.
Translated exclusively for Angelus Press from SiSiNoNo, June 30, 2004.

I have already done so on many other occasions, including: P. Becchi, P. Donadoni
“Informazioni e consenso all’espianto di organi da cadaveri,” Politica del diritto
XXXII (2001), 257-87; P. Becchi, “Tra(i)pianti, Spunti critici intorno alla legge
in materia di donazione degli organe e alla sua applicazion” in Ragion pratica, 18
(2002), 275-88, and P. Becchi, “Information und Einwilligung zur Organspendung:
Das neue italienische Gesetz und seine “ewige” Übergangsphase,” Hirntod und
Organspende, ed. A. Bondolfi, U. Kostka, K. Seelmann (Basal: Schwabe, 2003),
pp.149-61.
2
Cf. “A Definition of Irreversible Coma: Report of the Ad Hoc Committee of the
Harvard Medical School to Examine Brain Death,” Journal of the American Medical Association, 205 (1968), pp.337-40. For critical discussion of this document
see, e.g., M. Giacomini, “A Change of Heart and a Change of Mind? Technology
and the Redefinition of Death in 1968,” Social Science and Medicine, 44 (1997)
1465-82; R.M. Veatch, Transplantation Ethics (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown
U. Press, 2000); G. Belkin, “Brain Death and the Historical Understanding of
Bioethics,” Journal of the History of Medicine, 58 (2003) 325-61.
3
Cf. A.R. Jonsen, The Birth of Bioethics (New York: Oxford U. Press, 1998),
p.240.
4
Jonas’s response came immediately after the Harvard Committee’s report. It dates
to September 1968 and was part of the author’s intervention on experiments on
human subjects. His essay Against the Stream was written in 1970 and published
in 1974; here Jonas discusses the objections made by some members of the Committee with whom he had been in contact in the interim. Two postscripts follow
this essay, from 1976 and 1985, showing Jonas’s continued attention to this subject.
All these works are collected in Jonas, Technik, Medizin und Ethik: Zur Praxis des
Prinzips Verantwortung (1985).
5
Cf. Hans Jonas, “Brief an Hans-Bernhard Würmeling,” Wann ist der Mensch tot?
Organverpflanzung und Hirntodkriterium, ed. J. Hoff and J. in der Schmitten,
Reinbek bei Hamburg, Rowohlt (1994): 21-27.
6
Cf. J. Seifert, Leib und Seele: Ein Beitrag zur philosophischen Anthropologie
(Salzburg, 1973); J. Seifert, Das Leib-Seele Problem und die gegenwärtige philosophische Diskussion: Eine kritisch-systematische Analyse (Darmstadt, 1979);
J. Seifert, What Is Life? On the Originality, Irreducibility, and Value of Life, ed.
H.G. Callaway (Amsterdam, 1997); J. Seifert, “Is “Brain Death” Actually Death?”
Monist, 76 (1993), 175-202.
7
P. Singer, Rethinking Life and Death: The Collapse of Our Traditional Ethics (New
York: St. Martins, 1994), p.51.
8
Cf. R.D. Truog and J.C. Fackler, “Rethinking Brain Death,” Critical Care Medicine,
20 (1992), 1705-1713. Starting from the points discussed in that article, Truog has
returned several times to the question of brain death. In a 1997 article (“Is It Time
to Abandon Brain Death?” Hastings Center Report, 27 [1997], 29-37) instead of
proposing the substitution of cortical death for brain death, as he had done in the
1992 article with Fackler, Truog looks for a return to the traditional cardio-respiratory
standard for declaring death and, at the same time, aims to separate the question of
transplants from the debate on brain death. He maintains that transplantation can
only be practiced by some justification other than that of brain death. Truog’s desire
for an ethical foundation for transplants inspired his article “Organ Transplantation
without Brain Death,” Annals of the New York Academy of Science, 913 (2000),
229-39.
9
Cf. e.g. D.A. Shewmon, “‘Brain Stem Death,’ ‘Brain Death,’ and Death: A Critical
Re-evaluation of the Purported Equivalence,” Issues in Law & Medicine, 14 (1998),
125-45, and more recently “The Brain and Somatic Integration: Insights into the
Standard Biological Rationale for Equating ‘Brain Death’ with Death,” Journal of
Medicine and Philosophy, 26 (2001), 457-78.
10
Cf. S.J. Youngner, R.M. Arnold, “Philosophical Debates about the Definition of
Death: Who Cares?” Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, 26 (2001), 527-37.
1

THE ANGELUS
August 2005

REFLECTIONS
on the

Responsibility

of INDIVIDUALS

at the

PRESENT HOUR
A Subversive Mentality
It is clear that, by rejecting the essential goods
that give meaning to human existence, we humans
automatically revert to a primitive and instinctual
animal existence. All the police in the world will
have great difficulty in preventing or repressing the
consequences of such a transformation. The prisons
are already filling up with the young people we have
put out of balance. We should have understood that
the human being is always tempted by the path of least
resistance and by the satisfaction of his own passions.
These eminently subversive foundations render the
mediations of everyday life unbearable: natural law, the
family, work, the most legitimate institutions come to
be seen as so many useless, constraining and harmful
barriers. Accordingly all manifestations of hostility
towards them are permitted.

Collective Blindness
Every form of egocentric behavior provokes a kind
of mental myopia which, becoming more and more
widespread, degenerates into collective blindness. We
become ridiculous when, despite our smallness in the
immensity of the universe, we confer on ourselves a
patent of absolute sovereignty over matter and spirit,
over the present and the future. We even impose on
the past, in accordance with our interests, the veil of
oblivion or the obligation of memory!
This delirious pretense is not without hypocrisy,
since man plays at imitating the divine without daring
to come to grips with it. He asks only that the divine
not intervene in his own affairs, which is a deceitful
way of denying it. Man thus decides motu proprio that
temporal goods and their immediate use belong to

himself alone, without limits or constraints. The divine
is conceded a paradise that everyone imagines in his
own way, according to his own personal theism; some
are inclined to see this paradise as open to everyone,
others imagine it uninhabited, like hell itself.

A Corrupt and
Corrupting Social Climate
It is a slippery slope from folly to sacrilege. It is
hinted that it would be enough for the irony of the
heavens to simply leave man, the “thinking reed,”
in the power of his raving fancy, since he tends to
bind himself in chains of his own making: anarchy
alternating with totalitarianism, the unscrupulous use of
mass media and technology for the sake of domination,
etc.
The contemporary conjunction of secularism
with erroneous beliefs can lead to nothing else. We
perceive that a social climate of a new kind is gradually
installing itself. This climate combines, in an apparently
inextricable but doubtless intentional manner, countertruths, subversive aims, and alluring prospects for the
future. Each new generation receives its own obligatory
dose of skillful manipulation. The masters of the game
take care to solidify their position by obtaining the
indispensable consent of the majority through the
well-tested means that are habitually employed in this
kind of undertaking: corruption, fear, dissimulated
co-optation. The passivity of the moderates and the
alignment of the ambitious do the rest.

THE ANGELUS ENGLISH-LANGUAGE ARTICLE REPRINT
THE ANGELUS
August 2005

23

THE ANGELUS ENGLISH-LANGUAGE ARTICLE REPRINT

The Role of Individuals in
the Great Dramas of History
History in its broad outlines is made by the
holders of power and by the intermittent outbursts
of the masses. We cannot easily forget the hecatombs
of the last century. But individuals taken in isolation
also have their role to play in this drama of grand
proportions. This means that individuals cannot
be considered entirely innocent. We are so fragile
in difficult situations, where fear makes even the
haughtiest among us cowardly and silent!
Fortunately the concessions of the majority are
redeemed—as a counterpoise—by the often unexpected
heroism of those who, in terrible situations where their
liberty is stifled, find the greatness of soul that enables
them to emerge from desperate circumstances.
We should add, however, that exceptional
suffering requires exceptional assistance. Only divine
grace confers a supernatural and saving power of
unlimited application in time and space.
Our incredulous moderns, often defiled by a
voluntarism which serves as their supreme ideal,
depreciate the attitude of the broken man who has
recourse to God. He is accused of cowardice, and
God Himself is thought vindictive. This accusation
is doubly offensive: offensive to one’s neighbor who
suffers, and offensive to Him who, even from the
cross, pardons “those who know not what they do.” It
is difficult for human excess to “kick against the goad”
and deplore the consequences of its own continuous
collusion with lies, injustice, or error.

A “Tremendous Mystery”
On this higher level we know that the essential
abides whatever tribulations may come. Surrounded
by disbelievers and nowadays rejected by so-called
believers for “lack of fidelity,” we have at our disposal
the infinite treasures of the Redemption. In the midst
of world war our Mother in Heaven, in her apparition
at Fatima on August 13, 1917, encouraged coming to
the aid of souls in danger of being lost. The venerated
Pope Pius XII, the unforgettable pastor angelicus of our
youth, recalled this invitation with auspicious clarity in
his encyclical Mystici Corporis:
A terrible mystery never sufficiently contemplated: the
salvation of many depends on the prayers and voluntary
penitence of the members of the Mystical Body of Christ.

We cannot, therefore, abstract ourselves from this
obligation, nor can we limit its bearing on the whole
of humanity, even if the effects of our intervention
remain for now the secret of God.
There exists between us a very real invisible
solidarity; contemplative souls know it well. We shall
save ourselves more certainly if we contribute to the
salvation of others. On the contrary, he who corrupts
his neighbor runs the greater risk of being lost himself.
24

A Spectacle of Desolation:
the Failures of Authority
Let us think of the firmness that was necessary for
St. Peter in performing his duty of directing his flock
to eternity, according to the express commandment of
the Divine Word that he confirm his brothers in their
faith in the living and true God.
In contradiction of this essential command,
we observe today with dolorous stupefaction the
persistence of an apparent impotence of Authority
[i.e., of Rome–Ed.] to escape from the mire in which
it has been caught for four decades, as though the
monarchical character of its functions had been
dissolved in some unforeseen manner—after 20
centuries of affirming its own identity—into a nearly
uncontrollable collegiality, itself extraneous to divine
law. The principle of authority has been trampled
down, replaced by a sort of pseudo-democratic
imitation founded on the promotion of numbers as the
principle of law.
This abnormality has been erected into a system
since the Council. In the minds of the less diffident it
has raised suspicions—largely borne out in practice—
about the mysterious transfers of responsibility in
ecclesiastical offices under the pretext of avoiding any
return to autocratic practices. We think of the repeated
capitulations of the Holy See and the bishops at the
time when the new liturgy was launched. The result
was an unrestrained emancipation of the clergy and
the faithful in all directions, without any decisive body
which could impose the least sense of peccavi in Deum—
“I have sinned against God”—and coram omnes—“before
all.”
Before such a spectacle of desolation, it is not
surprising that grace seems to be distancing itself from
nature, and even the stones would seem to cry out to
supply the incredible deficiencies of Authority in its
teaching and example. Let us pray all the angels and
saints to come to our aid!
Pyrenaicus
Translated exclusively for Angelus Press from SiSiNoNo (Feb. 15, 2005).

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25

(continued from p.16)

Karma), I must answer you, I do not know.”28 The
demons realized that they had to do some damage
control, so Annie Besant, six years after the death of
Helena Blavatsky, started talking about the “Lords
of Karma,” intelligent beings that make the moral
decisions concerning Karma.29 Since Theosophy
denies the existence of the one true God, the “Lords
of Karma” must be finite spirits, so we are back at the
basic problems of reincarnation. Finite spirits, angels
(fallen or otherwise) have the following limitation:
They do not know the secret thoughts of other rational
creatures....For the same reasons which make it impossible
for a spirit to act directly on the will of any rational creature
we say that the secret thoughts of the heart of man or the
mind of a spirit are hidden. In every thought there is an act
of will, because I think when I will and I think what I will,
but the hiddenness of the will covers my very thoughts.30

With such limitations, they are not able to take
into account the intentions of the person, not able to
consider mitigating circumstances, and consequently
they cannot make completely just moral decisions.
In the framework of pantheism there is no solution,
there cannot possibly be any solution to the problem
of passing a just sentence.
An equally serious problem for the fiction
of reincarnation is that the delivery of judgment
(reward or punishment) is as unpredictable as all
the happenings of a human lifetime. Other human
beings with their free wills modify the supposed
sentence: charitable, kind actions lighten it, sinful,
criminal actions make it more burdensome. So when
Helena Blavatsky is recklessly boasting: “It would be
impossible either to delay or to hasten the Karma in
the fulfillment of justice,”31 she is simply wrong.
But the worst thing is not being able to remember
past lives and past sins. Fr. Arendzen is blunt: “To
mete out dire punishments or luscious rewards to
individuals for things they can know nothing about is
surely an act of Supreme Insanity....”32
The conviction that one’s own suffering is always
the outcome of one’s own sin, and mostly to sin in an
unknown previous existence, is deleterious to any attempt
at improvement, first, because the burden of sins in previous
births is an unknown quantity, and may be immense, this
naturally leads to sullen despair; secondly, because the
character of these sins is unknown and the reborn criminal
does not know in what way to expiate or to prevent their
recurrence; thirdly, because a justifiable resentment arises
in every human breast at being punished for deeds which
one is totally unconscious of having ever committed; lastly,
because the very idea of punishment and reward, the very
idea of the ethically good and evil gets impaired through the
mechanical working of the iron law of retribution.33

Karma would make the universe a soulless
machine, with which one should not interfere:
28

The Key to Theosophy, p.157.
Annie Besant, The Ancient Wisdom (London: Theosophical Publishing
Society, 1897), p.293.
30
Anscar Vonier, The Angels (Neumann Press, 1928), pp.36-37.
31
Blavatsky, The Key to Theosophy, p.137.
32
J. P. Arendzen, Platform Replies (The Newman Bookshop, 1948), p.19.
29

“The conviction that all suffering is the outcome of
personal sin, cannot but act disastrously on human
charity and kindness.”34 Victims of disasters, victims
of illness, victims of criminal violence would deserve
no pity or help because they are only criminals who
are justly suffering for their sins.

JUSTIFICATION IN THE MODERN
WEST: “EVOLUTION OF SPIRITS”
In the East, Karma is fatalism; reincarnation is a
kind of punishment which has a distant resemblance
to purgatory. Getting out of the terror of a neverending series of reincarnations, a deliverance from it,
is the main goal of Eastern religions. In the modern
West, reincarnation has been made more attractive
because Karma lost its connection with morality.
Head and Cranston state it this way:
Theosophists have an approach to the reincarnation
theory that is manifestly different from that commonly
found in the East....In the Orient the great hope has
been to escape as quickly as possible from the wheel
of rebirth, and to attain Moksha or Nirvana. Similarly,
Western religions usually viewed return to earth life as a
penance or as a means of purging oneself of impurities.
The Theosophists, however, regard re-embodiment as
the universal law of evolutionary progress, holding that
in an infinite universe there must be infinite possibilities
for growth and development. Hence one would never
outgrow the need for fresh experience and new cycles of
incarnations, although a long period of rest and assimilation
may separate one life from another, as well as one great
world-period of activity from another.35

The universe is certainly finite rather than
infinite, so the above reasoning is faulty, but we
shall give Theosophy a hearing nevertheless. G.K.
Chesterton detected this divorce from morality, and
lets Father Brown, the hero of many of Chesterton’s
mystery stories, comment on it:
Look here, Doctor; you know I know there are all sorts
in all religions; good men in bad religions and bad men
in good religions. But there is just one little fact I have
learned simply as a practical man, an entirely practical
point that I have picked up by experience....I’ve scarcely
ever met a criminal who philosophized at all, who did
not philosophize along those lines of orientalism and
recurrence and reincarnation, and the wheel of destiny
and the serpent biting its own tail. I have found merely in
practice that there is a curse on the servants of that serpent;
on their belly shall they go and the dust shall they eat; and
there was never a blackguard or a profligate born who could
not talk that sort of spirituality...here in our working world
it is the religion of rascals.36

The shift from the fatalism of Karma to the new
interpretation as the “evolution of spirits” may appear
slight, but in fact it is all-important, and completely
Arendzen, What Becomes of the Dead? pp.237.
Ibid., p.236.
35
Reincarnation, p.62.
36
G. K. Chesterton, “The Dagger with Wings,” The Incredulity of Father
Brown (Penguin, 1975), p.144.
33
34

THE ANGELUS • August 2005

26
subversive of Christianity. It is an all-around effort
to implement the original Satanic temptation in the
Garden of Eden: eat the fruit of knowledge, and then
“you shall be as Gods, knowing good and evil” (Gen.
3:5). Knowledge acquired through occult means
(paranormal or psychic knowledge) will make us like
God. This will take many reincarnations, and the
process has the innocuous name of self-improvement.
The goal is: “you shall be as Gods” (Gen.
3:5). Religion with some kind of binding morality
(including Hinduism and Buddhism) is replaced with
knowledge: hermeticism, Gnosticism, Theosophy, and
false mysticism (including that of Brahmanism and
Buddhism). Man can arrive at the knowledge of God
intuitively, i.e., without having recourse to discursive
reasoning. Manly Hall puts it this way:
The masters of the Mysteries taught secret practices and
disciplines by which the properly qualified disciples could
develop potent abilities latent within the soul, and so, come
into conscious communication with spiritual realities.37

And:
This is at once the primary purpose and the consummate
achievement of the Mysteries: that man shall become
aware and consciously be reunited with the divine source
of himself.38

So “knowledge” is the ultimate goal, the occult
equivalent of salvation, and “ignorance” is the only
sin or evil to be rectified.
At the same time, since we discard the old
morality binding on man, we become masters
in deciding between good and evil, i.e., we
become “free.” How is this to be accomplished?
Reincarnation, in order to appear attractive to
Western man, came to be interpreted as something
divorced from morality. Hinduism and Buddhism do
have a moral law. By contrast, in Theosophy, “morals
were entirely the individual member’s affair.”39 The
divorce from the Eastern, moral interpretation of
Karma was accomplished by changing the meaning
of the words “good” and “evil.” According to
Mrs. Blavatsky, “Good is that which promotes the
development of life; evil is that which harms it,”40 a
substantial reinterpretation of the meaning of these
words. This necessarily means moral relativism: good
and bad now mean utility or harmfulness of actions,
which depends on your “level of development.” The
same thing can be good on one level and bad on
another.
The promoters of reincarnation in the West,
modern Theosophy and New Age, are definitely
anti-Christian, just as Gnosticism has always been.
A proof of this is the fact that the founders and early
leaders of Theosophy–Helena Blavatsky, Annie
Besant, and Alice Bailey–have all been closely

connected with Freemasonry. And the development
of Theosophy happened under demonic inspiration
(e.g., most works of the above three women are results
of channeling), which explains their implacable
hatred of Christianity.
There are attempts to graft the doctrine of
Reincarnation onto a kind of a shadowy, gnostic
Christianity. If words familiar from Christianity are
used, Western man is more likely to get interested
in embracing the new ideas. Helena Blavatsky
articulated this hope:
While the orthodox hasten to make away with the old
hell and sapphire-paved New Jerusalem, the more liberal
accept now under Christian veils and biblical nomenclature
our Doctrine of Karma, Reincarnation, and God as an
abstract Principle. Thus the Church is slowly drifting into
philosophy and pantheism.41

Chesterton’s comment on the “evolution of
spirits”:
A sort of Theosophist said to me, “Good and evil, truth
and falsehood, folly and wisdom are only aspects of the
same upward movement of the universe.” Even at that stage
it occurred to me to ask, “Supposing there is no difference
between good and bad, or between false and true, what is
the difference between up and down?”42

And the great Dominican and Thomist GarrigouLagrange, in his book Life Everlasting, characterizes
the result of the “evolution of spirits” as follows:
What a world separates the true idea of heaven from
heaven conceived by naturalism, by pantheism, a heaven
which would be married to hell beyond good and bad, a
heaven where without renouncing anything men would
find supreme beatitude. This is the heaven defended by the
secret doctrines of the counter-Church which begins with
the Gnostics of old and continues in present-day occult
doctrines that produce universal confusion.43

This fiction of the “evolution of spirits,” by
introducing angel-like creatures who were once
human but later totally transcended the human
condition, is trying to wipe out the distinction
between human souls and angels. Human souls
are created without innate ideas and are united
with human bodies for their existence and proper
operation. They are learners during their one and
only life in the body, and this is the only true spirit
evolution in the realm of nature. Angels, on the other
hand, are purely spiritual substances that do not need
a body either for their existence or for their proper
operation. They were created with all the knowledge
they need, they are not learners, and do not “evolve”
in the realm of nature. Angels without bodies are
differentiated by the different sets of innate ideas that
God implanted in their natures at creation. To avoid
all misunderstandings, we quote Dom Anscar Vonier:

37

41

38

42

The Secret Teaching of All Ages, p.5.
Ibid., p.233.
39
Martindale, Theosophy.
40
Siwek, The Enigma of the Hereafter, p.110.
THE ANGELUS • August 2005

“The Cycle Moveth,” Lucifer, March 1890.
G. K. Chesterton, Autobiography (Sheed & Ward, 1936), p.158.
43
Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, Life Everlasting (Herder, 1952), p.172.

27
The angelic mind starts with fullness of knowledge, and it
is not, like the human mind, subject to gradual development.
In this we have the profoundest difference between spirit
intellect and human intellect. A spirit starts his existence
fully endowed with all knowledge; he is never a learner
in the true sense of the word, as a man is a learner. It may
be said of an angel that he applies his knowledge to new
objects, but does not acquire ideas that were not infused into
him by the Creator in the very making of him.44

Occultism is trying to erase this distinction
between angels and humans so that they could
claim that some kind of “natural evolution” will turn
humans into “gods.” In reality, true “spirit evolution”
comes only from acquiring the (sanctifying) grace of
God, both for angels and for human souls.

“EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE”
FOR REINCARNATION:
REMEMBERING PAST LIVES
There is a telling exchange in the readings of
Edgar Cayce: Question: “What will convince me
of reincarnation?” Answer: “ An experience.”45
The demons here are pushing their wares: they are
experts at giving humans illusions, and they do it
often (God permitting). And many are all too eager to
be taken in by such illusions, believe them to be real
human experiences, and then claim to have some
“experimental evidence” for reincarnation.
For the sake of argument, let us assume that the
doctrine of reincarnation is true, and true according
to the authentic Eastern religions such as Hinduism
or Buddhism rather than according to fraudulent
modern Western adaptations such as Theosophy
or New Age. That means all souls ALWAYS existed
(creation out of nothing is not part of these religions),
therefore all souls must have reincarnated many
times. It is then reasonable to expect that most if not
all people have memories of their past lives. The
stark and irrefutable fact is that the vast majority of
people have absolutely no recollections of this kind.
In this section we examine what is called the
“experimental evidence” for reincarnation: the claim
made by a few people to have recollections of some
past lives. (The number of claimants as percentage of
the population is infinitesimally small.)
A human being is a composite of body and soul,
so when we want to identify him, we usually use
characteristics of his body, such as his fingerprints
or details of the eye. If a person suffered disfiguring
injuries, we may have a difficult time identifying
him. In such cases, we have to rely on the person’s
memory, and would ask him some facts that only he
knows. (That is done today when somebody has to be
identified on the telephone.) And this is what St. Joan
44
45

The Angels, pp.34-35.
Frejer, The Edgar Cayce Companion, p.123, Reading 956-1.

of Arc did to prove to the Dauphin that she was sent
by God: she told the Dauphin some facts that only he
and God knew.
The “experimental evidence” for reincarnation
means trying to provide some proof that two different
bodies have been animated, at different times, by
the same soul. Having to identify a human soul is
inherently more difficult than identifying the human
composite. Not surprisingly, existing efforts by
advocates of reincarnation usually concentrate on
memory. Unfortunately, it is hard to find information
that uniquely identifies a person. Other, less
convincing efforts try to make use of some aspects
of our animal nature such as likes or skills (e.g., in
a story below one lady is said to be a reincarnation
of another one because they both were fond of cats,
and in another story both persons had unusual skills
in sewing). Even more dubious is the argument by
Stevenson that similar birthmarks on two bodies
imply that the same soul animated the two bodies.

“EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE”:
REMINISCENCES FROM
DREAMS AND THE
INFLUENCE OF DRUGS
Completely unworthy of consideration is
“experimental evidence” provided by dreams and
the influence of drugs such as LSD. Siwek devotes a
chapter to dreams as evidence46 and considers them
worthless. Edwards devotes many pages to the effects
of LSD, especially experimentation with LSD as pain
killer for terminal cancer patients.47 LSD distorts the
subject’s perception of the world, makes him lose
any sense of reality; he becomes highly suggestible,
and he generally tries to please the physician. Any
evidence provided under the influence of LSD is
totally without merit.

“EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE”:
REMINISCENCES UNDER
HYPNOSIS
The word “hypnotism” describes the art of lulling
the patient into a trance like state, an artificial sleep,
after which he can be controlled by suggestion.
The hypnotic sleep was originally used in surgical
operations as an anesthetic, to be replaced in 1846
by ether. It is induced in the patient by monotonous
repetition of words and gestures. There are degrees
of it: in slight hypnosis consciousness remains and
actions are remembered, in deep hypnosis the patient
46
47

Siwek, The Enigma of the Hereafter, pp.30-36.
Edwards, Reincarnation, pp.195-222.
THE ANGELUS • August 2005

28
is extremely suggestible, all sorts of suggestions are
acted upon, but actions are forgotten. The effect of
hypnosis is to deprive the patient of independent free
action though he will respond to suggestions. Usually
the most absurd suggestions are accepted by the
patient as rational. Fr. Charles Coppens, S.J., states:
Legal writers and lawyers have serious charges against
hypnotism....They point to the statements of Dr. Luys, a
respectable authority on hypnotism, who says: “A patient
under the influence of hypnotism can be made to swallow
poison, to inhale noxious gases. He can be led to make a
manual gift of property, even to sign a promissory note or
bill, or any kind of contract.”48
From the moral standpoint hypnotism in itself is not
sinful nor opposed to religion as long as there is in it no
superstition and no pantheism. Any sort of spiritualistic
hypnotism would be a grave sin.49

Since undergoing hypnosis means abdicating
one’s reason and will, the Catholic Church condemns
hypnosis if it can lead to moral evil. It is permissible
as medical treatment only if the hypnotizer is skilled
and morally unexceptionable, and trustworthy
witnesses are present throughout the whole
procedure.50
In hypnosis, the mind appears to become
dissociated, split into separate compartments, one
active, others dormant. Ian Stevenson himself
disapproves of the use of hypnosis:
Some of the earliest and most thorough investigators
of the evidence for reincarnation used hypnosis to regress
subjects back in time to supposed “previous lives.”
Unfortunately, the results of these experiments have proved
inconclusive and on the whole disappointing chiefly due
to the difficulty of controlling the subject’s access to the
information embodied in the “previous personality.” The
“personalities” usually evoked during hypnotically-induced
regressions to a “previous life” seem to comprise a mixture
of several ingredients. These may include the subject’s
current personality, his expectations of what he thinks the
hypnotist wants, his fantasies of what he thinks his previous
life ought to have been, and also perhaps elements derived
paranormally.51

channels (i.e., in their present lives rather than in any
“past life”) but are unable to recall them, explains
these “previous life” fantasies produced by hypnosis.
Probably the most famous case of a “previous life
fantasy” manufactured with hypnotic regression is the
Bridey Murphy case in the United States. Our source
is the chapter entitled “The Rise and Fall of Bridey
Murphy” in Paul Edward’s Reincarnation: A Critical
Examination.
Between November 1952 and October 1953,
a Colorado businessman by the name of Morey
Bernstein, an amateur hypnotist and a believer
in reincarnation, conducted six hypnotic sessions
with Virginia Tighe, a 29-year-old housewife. The
sessions were taped and several witnesses, including
Virginia’s husband, Hugh Tighe, attended them.
Virginia was easily put into a deep trance and began
to speak in a soft Irish brogue. During the sessions
she consistently identified herself as Bridey Murphy,
born in 1798 in the Irish town of Cork to a Protestant
barrister, Duncan Murphy, and his wife Kathleen.
She described her conventional schooling and her
marriage at the age of 20 to Sean Brian Joseph
MacCarthy, the son of another Cork barrister. She
had a drab and uneventful life and died in 1864. This
much is the “previous life fantasy.”
The story was first published in the Denver Post’s
Sunday supplement “Empire,” in September 1954.
Then Doubleday contracted Bernstein to write a
book on the case, because they hoped for a national
bestseller. The Search for Bridey Murphy appeared on
January 5, 1956. While Bernstein was writing the
book, Doubleday hired a legal firm in Ireland to
verify the details of the story. Although they came
up empty-handed, the book stayed on the national
bestseller list for many weeks. More than a million
copies sold, and the March 15 issue of Life Magazine
featured an article entitled “Bridey Murphy Puts
Nation in a Hypnotizzy.”
The Bridey Murphy mania reached a tragic climax when
a 19-year-old boy in Shawnee, Oklahoma, shot himself
with a rifle leaving a note that said “I am curious about
the Bridey Murphy story–so I am going to investigate the
theory in person.”53

Stevenson also quotes another researcher called
Zolik:
Zolik elicited “previous life” fantasies in subjects
hypnotized, regressed and instructed to remember a
“previous life.” In later sessions, with subject hypnotized
but not regressed, Zolik traced the origin of some of the
information and some of the personality traits shown in
the “previous life” fantasy to people, books or theatrical
productions which the subject had known....[T]he
personalities evoked in the “previous life” fantasies were
ad hoc constructions produced under the direction of the
hypnotist....52

Cryptomnesia, or source amnesia, in which the
subjects obtain their knowledge through normal
48

Charles Coppens, Moral Principles and Medical Practice (Benziger Brothers, 1897), pp.208-09.
49
S. A. La Rochelle and C. T. Fink, Handbook of Medical Ethics (The Newman
Bookshop, 1944), p.188.
THE ANGELUS • August 2005

The tizzy was quickly ended by a series of articles
that first appeared in the Chicago American in May
and June 1956, and subsequently syndicated in all
the papers of the Hearst chain. The Hearst reporters
discovered that Virginia Tighe spent her childhood
and adolescence in Chicago. They located “the real
Bridey Murphy,” Mrs. Bridie Murphy Corkell, who
had come to America from County Mayo in Ireland,
and who lived across the street from the apartment in

50

Henry Davis, Moral and Pastoral Theology (Sheed and Ward, 1949), II,
17-19.
Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation, pp.2-3.
52
Ibid., pp.340-41.
53
Edwards, Reincarnation: A Critical Examination, p.62.
51

29
which Virginia spent her Chicago years. Virginia had
frequently been to her home.
The Hearst exposé effectively destroyed whatever
credibility the Bridey Murphy story had possessed,
even though later it was found to contain some
inaccuracies. Not only was it impossible to verify
any of the facts of the story in Ireland, but also it was
quite easy to obtain in Chicago a lot of information
about life in Ireland. An important source was the
1893 World’s Colombian Exposition in Chicago,
where one of the prize exhibits was a large Irish
village consisting of 15 cottages. So Bridey Murphy’s
knowledge of Irish history and customs was almost
certainly an instance of cryptomnesia.

“EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE”:
REMINISCENCES OF CHILDREN
Polish Jesuit Paul Siwek54 devotes a chapter
to inventions of children in his book published in
1952. They are as convincing as the sister-in-law of
this writer now living in Minnesota who used to say
when she was a three-year-old girl: “When I was a
bear, I lived in a forest and ate berries.” Innocent,
childish flight of imagination, nobody rushed to
the conclusion that it was a new startling proof
of reincarnation. But Ian Stevenson, a professor
of psychiatry at the University of Virginia, has
changed all that. He started his career with a very
cautiously written book,55 but since has written many
others expressing increasingly strident support for
reincarnation, especially as he began to be hailed as
the “Galileo of reincarnation.” This phenomenon is
usually described as “As long as they are buying, I am
selling!”
Stevenson claims to document case histories
“suggestive of reincarnation,” almost all of them
concerning small children. These children begin
to make statements between the ages two and four
about a past life, and between the ages of seven and
eight all such statements stop, and the whole thing
is forgotten by the child. Stevenson considers cases
only if there is some independent corroboration of
the claims of past life. The corroborations do not
appear very convincing, because there are always
natural ways of obtaining the information that is
used to argue for reincarnation. For example, if B is
supposedly a reincarnation of A, then the families
of A and B live only a few miles from each other.
Stevenson in his published cases argues that such
transfer of information did not take place, but such
arguments are inherently unconvincing. The crucial
links could have been accidentally overlooked, left
unexplored, or deliberately ignored.

It is important to notice that children tell stories
of past lives only in countries and in cultures where
reincarnation is believed, so children are growing
up hearing them. It naturally occupies their minds,
and they feel encouraged to make up stories along
those lines. We describe a few cases as illustrations:
three supposed reincarnations in the Lorenz family in
Brazil described by Ian Stevenson, M.D., in his book
Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation.56 Thirty-five
of 396 pages are devoted to the cases involving the
Lorenz family.
Maria Januaria de Oliveiro (know familiarly as
Sinha or Sinhazinha) was born about 1890 and died
in October of 1917. On August 14, 1918, Ida Lorenz
gave birth to a daughter, Marta Lorenz, the supposed
reincarnation of Sinha. The two families lived 12
miles from each others. Sinha enjoyed the friendship
of Ida Lorenz, wife of F.V. Lorenz, the schoolteacher
of the district. Twice Sinha fell in love with men of
whom her father disapproved. One of these men,
called Florzinho, committed suicide after Sinha’s
father blocked their marriage. Sinha was diagnosed
with tuberculosis and after a few months she died. On
her deathbed she acknowledged to Ida Lorenz that
she wanted to die and had tried to become infected.
She intended and caused her own illness. But she
promised her good friend Ida Lorenz that she would
return again and be born as her daughter.
Marta talked a lot about being Sinha between
the ages of two and half and ten, which is considered
“suggestive of reincarnation” by Ian Stevenson.
After age ten, she began to forget details. To further
complicate matters, Florzinho (the man who
committed suicide) supposedly has returned as a son
of Marta.
Sinha indirectly committed suicide, and Marta
had also often wished to die. “She never actually
attempted suicide, but thought that she might have
killed herself at times if she had a gun with which to
do so.”57
Sinha and Marta both were fond of cats.
Moreover,
both Sinha and Marta were credited with more than average
powers of extrasensory perception. Once her grandmother
gave Marta a book as a gift. Marta ignored it, leaving it in
its wrappings. Her father asked her: “Are you not going
to read it?” Marta replied: “No. The book is about a case
similar to mine.” She then correctly gave the title of the still
wrapped book.58

Emilia Lorenz was the second child and oldest
daughter of F.V. and Ida Lorenz. She was born on
February 4, 1902. She was extremely unhappy during
her short life. She felt constrained as a girl and
some years before her death she told several of her
brothers and sisters, but not her parents, that if there
was such a thing a reincarnation she would return

54

57

55

58

The Enigma of the Hereafter.
Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation.
56
Pp.181-215.

Ibid., p.201.
Ibid., p.192.
THE ANGELUS • August 2005

30
as a man. She made several suicide attempts, and finally she succeeded in
killing herself with cyanide on October 12, 1921. Some time after the death of
Emilia, Ida Lorenz attended some spiritualistic meetings at which she received
communications from a spirit purporting to be Emilia: “Mamma, take me as
your son, I will come as your son.” Ida Lorenz had her last, 13th child, a boy
named Paulo born on February 3, 1923. He never married. Paulo committed
suicide on September 5, 1966. As “proof” of the reincarnation of Emilia in
Paulo, the following are mentioned: both had interest in traveling, both had
unusual competence in sewing, and both had a habit of breaking off corners
of new loaves of bread.
So three supposed reincarnations are described in one family, with six
people involved, out of whom four committed suicide.

“EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE”: SPONTANEOUS
MEMORIES OF THE “INITIATED”
Throughout the ages claims have been made by or on behalf of certain
special, “initiated” individuals that they could recall previous lives. These
memories or ostensible memories differ from hypnotic regressions in that they
occur to the person in his waking life, and furthermore they are not provoked
by artificial stimulus. It is widely believed by Buddhists that yogis have the
power to remember entire past lives, and not only recent ones, but all those in
which they inhabited a human body. The Buddha himself is reported to have
made the following claim:

PYTHAGORAS

I, brethren, according as I desire, can remember my divers former lives, that is today,
one birth, or two, or three, or four, or five births, or ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty births,
or hundred, a thousand, or even a hundred thousand, or even more.59

Moreover, the Buddha remembered that in one of his previous lives he
was an immensely rich and powerful king in
a royal city surrounded by seven ramparts of gold, silver, beryl, crystal, agate, coral and
gems; this surrounded by seven rows of palm trees made of similar precious stones and
metals; his magnificent palace; his 84,000 wives, chief of whom was the Pearl among
Women; his 84,000 dependent cities, his 84,000 elephants.60

John Hick, in his Death and Eternal Life points out that there is no credible
historical evidence that the real Buddha ever made such claims, and he adds
that the details of the past incarnations of Buddha “belong to the rhetoric of
fairy tale rather than to historical reality.”61
The list of others usually includes Pythagoras, the Emperor Julian the
Apostate, Swedenborg, Alexander Dumas Junior, Madame Blavatsky and
Annie Besant. “Pythagoras did believe in reincarnations and he may well
have claimed to recall previous lives, but the only evidence for this are two
paragraphs in Diogenes Laertius, a notoriously unreliable purveyor of gossip
and hearsay.”62 We dismiss the testimony of the Roman Emperor Julian the
Apostate (331-363) since he was possessed. No less authority than the great
Greek Church Father St. Gregory Nazianzen describes how he came to be
possessed:

JULIAN THE
APOSTATE

At Ephesus Julian came under the direct influence of Maximus. He stayed there for
some time and completed a regular course of studies in theurgy. There he must also
have been officially initiated into the theurgic mysteries, an event not recorded for us
by a pagan but by his adversary, Gregory Nazianzen.
Julian descended into a subterranean sanctuary closed to the common people
in the company of a clever conjurer, a theosophist rather than a philosopher. Such
individuals practiced a kind of divination that required darkness and subterranean
59

Edwards, Reincarnation, p.100.
Ibid.
Ibid.
62
Ibid.
60
61

THE ANGELUS • August 2005

31
demons to foretell the future. As Julian advanced farther
and farther, he encountered terrors increasingly numerous
and alarming–strange sounds, revolting exhalations, fiery
apparitions, and other such prodigies. Since he was taking
his first steps in the occult sciences, the strangeness of the
apparitions terrified him. He made the sign of the cross.
The demons were subdued and all the visions disappeared.
Julian regained courage and began to advance. Then the
dread objects started to reappear. The sign of the cross was
repeated and they again disappeared. Julian wavered. The
director of the initiation at his side explained: “We loathe,
but no longer fear them. The weaker cause has conquered!”
Convinced by these words, Julian was led on toward the
abyss of perdition. What he later heard and did only those
know who have undergone such initiations. At any rate,
from that day he was possessed.63

Emmanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), was
a Swedish scientist who later in his life wrote
theological works. Nominally a Protestant (Lutheran),
he claimed that Our Lord Jesus Christ appeared
to him in London in 1745 and initiated him into a
“true understanding” of Scriptures. Swedenborg
misinterpreted the Trinity, believed in “superior
races” existing on planets like Jupiter and Mercury.
No pure spirits exist, angels and devils are former
members of the human race. Death is the casting off
by man of his material body which has no share in
the resurrection. Immediately after death all human
souls enter an intermediate state known as the world
of spirits, where they are instructed and prepared
for their final abodes, heaven or hell. The Last
Judgment already took place in 1757 in the presence
of Swedenborg.64
According to Siwek,65 Swedenborg claimed to
remember his former lives, but according to experts
Siwek cites Swedenborg was “from the psychic point
of view seriously ill; he was suffering from persistent
hallucinations.” His evidence must be suspect
since his confused religious views cannot easily be
reconciled with reincarnation. And Inge Jonsson
writes in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
This is not the place to discuss the difficult problem of
Swedenborg’s mental status....His Theosophy is the result
of a pathological development of a pronouncedly schizoid
personality whose intense desire for synthesis could not
be satisfied within the boundaries of science and normal
experience.66

both of them have been under Satanic influence
most of their lives. Fr. Martindale describes these
two infamous women. Speaking of the youth of
Helena Blavatsky (1831-91) [See “Rather than Hell:
Reincarnation,” The Angelus, July 2005, p.8], he
writes:
She was a somnambulist and very psychic. She was
supposed to be possessed, was “drenched in enough holy
water to have floated a ship” and was exorcised. However,
she still spent hours and days whispering in dark corners
“marvelous tales of travel” and the like, to companions
visible only to herself....In the August of 1851 her diary says
she was in London, and there, during a moonlight ramble
by the Serpentine “I met the Master of my dreams.” 68

About Mrs. Annie Besant (1847-1933) [See
“Rather than Hell: Reincarnation,” The Angelus, July
2005, p.8] Martindale writes:
She takes to Spiritualism, finds its phenomena
“indubitable” and real....One evening a “voice that was
later to become to me the holiest sound on earth” bids her
take courage: light is near. A fortnight passes, and Mr. Stead
offers to her two large volumes to review. They are Helena
Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine.

This was in 1889, four years later “Mrs. Besant
was already practicing witchcraft.”69
Since possession has been mentioned in
connection with historical personages, an explanation
is in order concerning the distinction between partial
and full possession. Partial possession is better known
on account of the spectacular phenomena that usually
accompany it, such as freezing temperatures, stench,
and the partially possessed person not being socially
well-adjusted. That is because part of such a person
is still fighting against the possession, so exorcism
may be attempted with a promise of success. A fully
possessed person, on the other hand, is much harder
to recognize because he is socially well-adjusted and
no easily recognizable indicators of the possession
exist. That is because a fully possessed person has
wholeheartedly embraced his condition, his will is
fully given over to evil, and consequently he cannot
be exorcised. So the fact of perfect possession usually
can only be inferred.
(to be continued)

Alexander Dumas, Jr. (1824-95), son of the more
famous novelist Alexander Dumas, Sr., is best known
for his play La Dame aux camélias which was the basis
for Verdi’s La Traviata. His memories of past lives are
difficult to take seriously since most of his life he was
“ultra-nervous” and for a whole year (1859) he was
literally insane.67
We can easily dismiss Helena Blavatsky and
Annie Besant, leaders of modern Theosophy, since

Dr. Gyula Mago was born in 1938 in Hungary and brought up Catholic. He
lived under Communist rule for 20 years. Dr. Mago obtained his Ph.D. from
Cambridge University, England, in 1970, and was a professor of Computer
Science at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (1970-99). He presently lives in retirement in Durham, North Carolina, and assists at the Latin
Mass at Holy Redeemer Catholic Church in Raleigh, North Carolina. Part 3,
appearing in the September 2005 issue, will thoroughly examine the arguments
against reincarnation.

63

67

64

68

Giuseppe Ricciotti, Julian the Apostate (Bruce, 1959), p.41.
The Catholic Encyclopedia, s.v. “Swedenborgians.”
65
The Enigma of the Hereafter, pp.53-54.
66
S.v. “Emanuel Swedenborg.”

69

Siwek, The Enigma of the Hereafter, p.53.
Martindale, Theosophy.
Ibid., p.5.
THE ANGELUS • August 2005

32

“BECAUSE
GOD DOES
NOT CHANGE”
Three months after the election of Pope Benedict XVI,
Bishop Bernard Fellay, Superior General of the
Society of Saint Pius X, granted an exclusive interview
to DICI, the press agency of the Society of Saint Pius X.

DICI : At the time of the election of Pope
Benedict XVI, you published a communiqué
in which you spoke of a “glimmer of hope.”
What did you mean by those words?

Our hope is based first of all on the promises
of Our Lord Jesus Christ. It is true that all is not
well in the Church: it is a tragedy. But in the face
of this dramatic situation, we have the promise
of Our Lord that “the gates of hell shall not
prevail against the Church.” Our hope is based
on this certitude and its concrete application.
The very simple solution to this crisis could
be a new pope who would put things in order.
From this comes a secret hope, and there are a
number of signs which could encourage it.
For instance, during the Stations of the Cross on
Good Friday, Cardinal Ratzinger sketched a fairly
realistic picture of the Church: “The ship is sinking.”
He is also the man who spoke out most against the
new Mass and pleaded the cause of the old Mass.
Besides, we must acknowledge that Pope Benedict
XVI was elected in a movement of reaction. There
is a certain expectation in the hierarchy in the
face of the disastrous state of the Church. We may
truly believe that he was elected in opposition to
progressivism: at the fourth ballot he gained over
100 votes. The progressivists perceived this election
as their defeat. All this gives us some hope. It is
beyond doubt that Cardinal Ratzinger knows that
the Church is in a terrible state. And let us not
forget that he knows the third secret of Fatima.
THE ANGELUS • August 2005

However, it is not easy to speak about the
future. To consider the future is something very
delicate, given the fact that when we are talking
about a man, we are talking about liberty, about
contingencies. It is only a matter of probabilities.
We cannot go any further than that.
However, our consideration of the future
is also based upon the past. And we know
Cardinal Ratzinger fairly well. Our opinion
of the cardinal may also be applied to Pope
Benedict XVI, especially as far as his Hegelian
position on the evolution of history and its
development is concerned. Nevertheless, we
acknowledge that he has the graces of state
and special help from the Holy Ghost.

DICI : Three months after this election, has
this glimmer of hope increased or faded?

We can not hide the fact that from the outset
there is a problem which threatens to extinguish
this glimmer: Pope Benedict XVI remains attached
to the Council. It is his work, his baby. He came to
the Council as the youngest expert together with the
man who would later become Cardinal Medina.
In 1985, Cardinal Ratzinger took stock
of the Council: according to him, it is a bad
understanding of the Council which has born these
bad fruits. As for us, our position on the Council
is that it contains errors and ambiguities which
open the way to many other errors still worse.
There is in it a spirit which is not Catholic.

33
So Rome is trying to find a formula which
is “palatable”; it is a matter of understanding
the Council in the light of Tradition. But which
Tradition? In 1988, Archbishop Lefebvre was
reproached for having an incomplete notion of
Tradition, an “immobilist” concept: the “past”;
whereas according to Rome, Tradition “is in the
making today,”–an ambiguous expression if ever
there was one. However, everything can be well
summed up in the traditional saying “nihil novi,
nisi quod traditum est–nothing new, nothing that
has not been transmitted.” It is the same story with
the Mass: they tell us to acknowledge that the new
Mass is valid, if it is celebrated with the intention
of offering the sacrifice of Our Lord. But that is not
the main problem with the new Mass. Even when
valid, it is a poison, a slow poison which is killing
the Faith, mainly because it omits the essentials: the
expiatory sacrifice, the Real Presence, and the role
of the priest. Thus, it no longer nourishes the faith
as it should, and above all, by omission, it leads
to error and protestant heresy. Unfortunately, in
spite of all the current problems, which are patently
obvious today, Rome has not managed to extricate
itself from the Council and the conciliar reforms.
More especially, we must acknowledge that
ever since his elevation to the sovereign pontificate,
Benedict XVI has an idea–which will be the key
idea of his pontificate–the reunification with the
Orthodox. It is true that this does narrow down
ecumenism appreciably. But this concept of unity

truth?”–people no longer even ask themselves this
question. They live in the belief that “everybody
is good, everybody is nice.” Modern man lives
without any regard for the truth or for what is good.
Benedict XVI is surrounded by cardinals like
Cardinal Kasper. What will he be able to do?
What will he be willing to do? The appointment
of Archbishop Levada, archbishop of San
Francisco, as the head of the Congregation for
the Doctrine of the Faith is a very bad sign.

DICI : In spite of all this,
do you still retain a glimmer of hope?

If we may make a comparison, before his
elevation to the sovereign pontificate the Church
was in free fall, Pope Benedict XVI will open a
parachute, and there will be a certain slowing down,
a slowing down more or less significant depending
on the size of the parachute. But the orientation
remains the same. May we hope for more than this
deceleration? The promises of Our Lord always
hold true, and the good Lord uses everything
to make His Church go where He wants it to.
Here I will give you my personal opinion:
if Pope Benedict XVI were pushed against
the wall, in a crisis situation, faced with a very
violent reaction from the progressivists or a
political crisis, or persecutions, I think–from
observing how he has acted and reacted up to
now–that he would make the right choice.

T

here are still bishops and
cardinals who are Catholic,
but the evil is so widespread
that Rome no longer dares to take up
the surgeon’s knife.
with the “separated brethren” will be “neither an
absorption, nor a fusion.” What then is this concept
of unity for the Roman authorities? “It will not
be a conglomeration of Churches,” said Cardinal
Kasper, head of the Pontifical Council for Promoting
Christian Unity. In any case, it cannot be both at
the same time without falling into contradiction:
absorption-fusion and conglomeration. Pope John
Paul II used to say that all Christians have the same
faith and Cardinal Kasper affirms that “to have
the same faith, it is not necessary to have the same
creed.” Pontius Pilate’s famous question: “What is

Here are some facts:
With his appointment as Bishop of Munich,
in 1977, whereas he had previously only been a
professor of theology, he entered the sphere of
reality and was obliged to forbid one of his friends
to accept a chair of theology at the university. This
earned him the hostility of his former friends.
In France, in 1983, he reaffirmed that the
catechism in force was the Roman catechism, i.e.,
that of the Council of Trent. And he had to brave
the anger of the bishops of France.

•
•

THE ANGELUS • August 2005

34

•

We know that Cardinal Ratzinger was against
the interreligious meeting of Assisi in 1986 and did
not attend it. The second time, in 2002, though
still opposed to it, he was forced to attend. Several
times he tendered his resignation as head of the
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith because
of disagreements with the Pope, notably over Assisi.
The Charter of Cologne, in 1989, signed by
500 theologians against the Roman magisterium,
gathered together the great majority of the Catholic
intellectual elite of the time. They openly manifested
their hostility to Rome and to the magisterium.
Subsequently the cardinal wrote some documents
on the new theology. In a very perceptive and
realistic description he showed the extent of
the gravity of the situation. Unfortunately the
remedies he proposed did not match up to the
diagnosis, and in fact, were virtually non-existent.
Now that Cardinal Ratzinger is pope, we may
expect that, considering the gravity of the situation,
Rome may turn its eyes towards all those attached
to the old Mass. Two currents are emerging: one
in support of the Society of Saint Pius X, the other
which sets itself to reinforce Ecclesia Dei and cause
the Society to crumble away. It seems that this
latter has prevailed. There will certainly be two
levels of action. We will see a reinforcement giving
more weight to the support of those who want the
old Mass. There will also be a reinforcement at
the level of the Ecclesia Dei groups. But here, we
see that everything works unto our good and that
of Tradition; in the end, the good God uses the
Fraternity of Saint Peter as a trampoline for the
Society of Saint Pius X. In this way, we can but
rejoice over any opening in favor of the old Mass.

•

DICI : If you were received by
the Pope, what would you ask him?

I would ask him for the freedom of the Mass
for everybody and everywhere. As for our personal
situation, there will also be the issue of recanting
the decree of excommunication related to the
consecrations. These are two pre-conditions which
we can not dissociate from any further doctrinal
discussion. We know very well that the issue of the
Mass is not all, but we must begin with something
concrete; we must begin with a beginning. It
would be a deep and efficacious breach in the
progressivist system; this would gradually lead to
a change of atmosphere and spirit in the Church.
A head of a dicastery in Rome, seeing
our processions during the Holy Year 2000,
exclaimed: “But they are Catholic; we are
obliged to do something for them.” There are
still bishops and cardinals who are Catholic,
but the evil is so widespread that Rome no
longer dares to take up the surgeon’s knife.
THE ANGELUS • August 2005

We see clearly that the Church is going
through the same agony as Our Lord on the cross.
I wonder whether the third part of the message of
Fatima does not deal with an apparent death of the
Church. We are living through an unprecedented
situation, but the grace of God is still powerful. We
can live in a Christian manner. We can still show
that the Catholic religion exists, and that we can
still live it. And this living example of Tradition
carries much weight in our relations with Rome.
For Ecône is not against Rome, as the journalists
would have it. We share with Pope Benedict XVI
the same realization
of the dramatic
situation of the
Church. And how
could we not be
in agreement on
this point when
we see the drop in
vocations: in Dublin,
Ireland, last year it
seems there were
not a single young
man who entered
the seminary! A
year or two ago,
there were only
seven Jesuits who
took their final vows in the whole congregation!
But Rome does not go back to the cause of those
effects which everybody sees, because that would
be tantamount to questioning the Council. Rome
must find again its own Tradition. Of course, it is not
we who convert, only God can do that; but we may
bring our little stone to the restoration, we must do
what we can. We must make people understand that
Tradition is not some archeological state of things;
it is the normal state of the Church, even today.
We can also present the ecclesiastical authorities
with theological studies on the Council. This takes
time. Then, there is major work to be done among
the bishops and priests. There are many faithful
who are ready to take up Tradition again, many
more than we think. For the priests, it is more
difficult. Those who are as old as the Council,
those who gave up everything and set out upon
this adventure are no longer capable of going
back. The younger priests are more open.

DICI : You are asking for the freedom
of the traditional Mass: what solution can
this Mass bring to the present crisis?

We are asking for the freedom for the old
Mass and we can but rejoice over any opening
in this direction. Why? Because the old Mass
demands faith, it asks for integral faith and it

W

m
r
t
w

35
gives the whole faith. When you say the old Mass,
you do not want to say the new one again.
This Mass demands all the rest. It is the heart
of the Church. It regenerates the whole Body.
As the heart pumps the blood, the source of life,
through the whole body, likewise in the Mystical
Body, grace, the source of life, is diffused by the
Mass through the channel of the sacraments. If
this pump stops, life ceases. Thus the Church
needs this supernatural pump which is the Mass.
All sense of the Catholic Faith and all Catholic
life go into the Church thanks to the Mass. As a
matter of fact, it is because of that same principle

W

It is quite possible that liberalization for the
Mass may take place during this pontificate. But
there is a strong opposition in the dioceses.

DICI : We sometimes hear this objection:
With freedom for the traditional Mass, the faithful
will go back to their parishes–what then
will become of the Society of Saint Pius X?

Cardinal Ratzinger was working to reinforce
Ecclesia Dei; this may mean today the erection of
structures more or less exempt from the authority
of the bishops. I think that then our situation will be
still more difficult than under
Pope John Paul II, because
many may be deceived.
We are asking for the
Faith in its entirety, all the
sacraments, all the Catholic
discipline, and not a Mass
on probation–the Tridentine
Mass with a conciliar
sermon. Why? There again,
let us look at the facts:
Look at the Fraternity
of Saint Peter. In some places
they are barely allowed to
say Mass at all, in others they
have a little more leeway.
Elsewhere they are forbidden
to give the other sacraments. In Germany, they may
hear confessions for no more than a quarter of an
hour before Mass. In Switzerland, catechism lessons
are forbidden. An American bishop refused to grant
the Mass to a group of 250 faithful even though
they are in perfectly good standing with Rome.
“But look at Campos!” you will tell me. The
truth of the matter is that the Roman authorities
chose Bishop Rifan who was disposed to offer the
new Mass. “I will not say it,” he said in Rome,
“because this would create too much confusion
among my faithful.” For his part, Cardinal Cottier,
the Pope’s theologian, speaking of the status granted
to Bishop Rifan, said: “It is the beginning of a
dynamic which will lead him to the new Mass.”
The Church which, as Cardinal Ratzinger
acknowledged, draws “the waters from all parts,”
needs to turn to its forgotten Tradition, in which we
fully live and rejoice. We are the proof that Tradition
is not outdated, but on the contrary adapted to
the present time, because it is universal, because
it is situated in the uninterrupted line of eternal
principles. Because God does not change.

e are living through an unprecedented
situation, but the grace of God is still
powerful. We can live in a Christian
manner. We can still show that the Catholic
religion exists, and that we can still live it. And
this living example of Tradition carries much
weight in our relations with Rome.
that the new Mass, which is defective, causes so
much damage. The Novus Ordo Mass is like a failing
heart, which sometimes even suffers an attack.
Is this freedom for the traditional Mass
impossible to grant? An example may prove that
it is not. Cardinal Ratzinger and Cardinal Arinze,
head of the Congregation for Divine Worship, went
to see Pope John Paul II to obtain a key position
for a bishop who was convinced that the Church
would not get out of this crisis without a return
to the old Mass, and equally persuaded that the
priest cannot find his identity in the new Mass.
Another fact: Cardinal Castrillon Hoyos,
head of the Congregation for the Clergy and
Commission, declared
president of the
in a conference at Münster: “The new Mass was
acknowledged by the Pope. It is infallible. Therefore
it is good.” Nevertheless he admitted privately: “It
is true that something is missing in this new Mass.”
Now, evil is precisely the privation of good, this
“something” cruelly lacking in the new Mass.
Rome realizes quite well that there is an
injustice in this. They know perfectly well that
this Mass cannot be forbidden. When I say Rome,
I mean the Curia, John Paul II, Benedict XVI.
Cardinal Medina, former head of the Congregation
for Divine Worship acknowledges publicly that
there is no text forbidding the old Mass.

•

•

This interview appeared in DICI, issue 118. The translation is by the
staff of DICI.

THE ANGELUS • August 2005

36
You will have without a doubt heard of the
appointment of Archbishop Joseph Levada as Prefect
of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. This
crucial decision in the appointment of Pope Benedict
XVI’s doctrinal right hand man does not presage
well. Inasmuch as we can judge by past acts, he is a
man who puts on the appearance of conservatism,
but who has not only never given any authorization
for the traditional Latin Mass, but to the contrary has
shown himself to be entirely devoted to ecumenism,
and has excelled by his uncanny gift for opportunistic
compromise, as Philip Lawler of Catholic World News
web site has documented.
During the nine years that he was Archbishop
of Portland (1986-95), he suspended without hearing
the one traditional priest of the diocese, Fr. Eugene

Likewise with pro-abortion politicians. Whilst
affirming that they should not receive Holy
Communion, he effectively refused to deny it to them,
by stating,
You don’t start the path of dialogue by telling people you
are going to refuse them Communion....Can a politician be
guilty of formal cooperation in evil? If the person intends
to promote the killing of innocent life, he would be guilty
of such sinful cooperation. Should every Catholic politician
who has voted for an unjust law favoring abortion be judged
to have this intention? I hope not.

Such a clever, sophistic argument pretends to
exculpate politicians, on the grounds that they do
not intend each abortion. However, voting for a
law permitting abortions makes these abortions
possible. It is giving one’s approval to the perversity

New Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith

ARCHBISHOP

LEVADA
F r .

P e t e r

R .

S c o t t

Heidt, for celebrating the traditional Mass. He turned
a blind eye to the problem of homosexual priests,
and both protected from criminal prosecution and
restored to parish work priests whom he knew to
have molested children. The law suits that have since
caused the diocese to declare bankruptcy are in part a
consequence.
During the following ten years as Archbishop of
San Francisco, his astuteness became clearly evident
in his dealings with the homosexual activists that
control that city. Whilst on the one hand participating
in a public procession against same-sex marriages,
he also refused to deny Holy Communion to the
“Catholic” Mayor (Gavin Newsom), who publicly
rejects the Church’s teaching on stem cell research,
abortion, homosexual marriages and contraception.
THE ANGELUS • August 2005

Archbishop William Levada and
then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger at
a California press conference in 1999.

of abortion. It truly is formal cooperation, and is
not permissible for any reason at all. Such persons
are public sinners, and must be refused Holy
Communion, regardless of the consequences.
Another example of Archbishop Levada’s gift
for compromise with the enemies of the Church
was with respect to the 1996 San Francisco city law
obliging all employers to provide spousal benefits
to homosexual partners, under pain of losing
government funding. Instead of standing up against
the gay rights lobby, and professing the Faith on
marriage as a sacred institution and sacrament, alone
granting spousal rights, he arranged for a compromise
to extend benefits for employees in such a way that
an employee can designate any individual to receive
what had previously been considered as spousal

37

Enrico Risano/Catholic San Francisco

benefits, hiding behind the fact that this arrangement
does not give explicit approval to homosexual
relationships. However, in practice it was nothing
less than a cunning way to allow for the economic
acceptation of homosexual relationships, a horrifying
precedent indeed.
However, the greatest and most concerning
compromise is that of ecumenism, especially in a man
who is supposed to be the Church’s watch dog for
the orthodoxy of the Catholic Faith. Already in 1988,
as Archbishop of Portland, Archbishop Levada led a
joint “concelebrated” worship service with a Lutheran
bishop for a combined congregation of Lutherans
and Catholics. He was the first US bishop to visit
a synagogue, following Pope John Paul II’s lead in
this regard, and has since participated in interfaith
prayer services
at synagogues. In
1999 and again in
2003 he organized
interfaith
conferences with
the leaders of the
world’s religions,
and in 2003
an ecumenical
pilgrimage to
Canterbury, Rome
and Istanbul
along with the
leaders of the
Greek Orthodox
and Episcopalian
churches from
San Francisco.
Furthermore, he
has also given
faculties (i.e.,
permission) for the
openly schismatic
Chinese Patriotic
Association priests
to offer Mass and
to administer the
sacraments in the diocese of San Francisco.
Manifestly, then, Archbishop Levada is just
as much an ecclesiastic of Vatican II as the 1994
Catechism of the Catholic Church that he helped to put
together is a product of Vatican II. It is constantly the
effort to please men, to make arrangements, to help
people to work together on a common human ground,
which is his focus, and not the supernatural work of
the Faith, the salvation of souls. This focus on a purely
human social unity amongst men is immediately the
consequence of the humanism of Vatican II, so aptly
described in the document on the Church and the
modern world: Gaudium et Spes:
The Church, moreover, acknowledges the good to be
found in the social dynamism of today, particularly progress

towards unity, healthy socialization, and civil and economic
cooperation. The encouragement of unity is in harmony
with the deepest nature of the Church’s mission, for it “is in
the nature of a sacrament–a sign and instrument–that is, of
communion with God and of unity among all men” (§42).

Note the reduction of the Church’s essential
mission from that of a supernatural unity to the purely,
natural, human unity among all men, in which it says
that it is in accord with the anti-God humanism of
modern secular society. This is, alas, the spirit to be
found in the new prefect of the Congregation for the
Doctrine of the Faith.
Entirely different is the unity that the Catholic
Church has the duty to promote, as so precisely
described by Pope Leo XIII in his 1896 encyclical
on the Unity of the Church, Satis Cognitum [to be
published by Angelus Press later this month–Ed.].
This is a unity of Faith, of exact same convictions,
engendering the unity of government that is the
manifestation of the obedience and supernatural
charity that characterize the unity of the Church.
Agreement and union of minds is the necessary
foundation of this perfect concord amongst men, from which
concurrence of wills and similarity of action are the natural
results. Wherefore, in His divine wisdom, He ordained in
His Church Unity of Faith; a virtue which is the first of those
bonds which unite man to God, and whence we receive
the name of the faithful–one Lord, one faith, one baptism,
so should all Christians, without exception, have but one
faith….For this reason, as the unity of the faith is of necessity
required for the unity of the Church, inasmuch as it is the
body of the faithful, as also for this same unity, inasmuch
as the Church is a divinely constituted society, unity of
government, which effects and involves unity of communion
is necessary by divine law.…It is consequently the office
of St. Peter to support the Church, and to guard it in all its
strength and indestructible unity. How could he fulfill this
office without the power of commanding, forbidding, and
judging, which is properly called jurisdiction? It is only by
this power of jurisdiction that nations and commonwealths
are held together.

This is the unity that Benedict XVI and
Archbishop Levada have the duty before God to
promote, the extraordinary and holy unity of the
Catholic Church, that has been defiled by so many
compromises. Let us pray for their fidelity and ours:
their fidelity to use their God-given authority to
command, forbid and judge, and our fidelity to the
Popes who have constantly used their authority not
to work out human deals, but to promote the true
unity of the Church by commanding, forbidding and
judging. Let us never lose that amazing supernatural
peace of soul, of total submission, that Christ gives to
us through His Church, promising us that no man will
take that peace from us.
Taken from the Southern Sentinel (No. 29, July 2005), the newsletter of
the Society of St. Pius X’s Holy Cross Seminary, Goulburn, Australia.
Edited from Fr. Scott’s letter-style to article-style by Fr. Kenneth
Novak.

THE ANGELUS • August 2005

32

La Porte Latine

Le site de la Tradition en France

Thinking About In
and Chat Rooms
Many of our friends seem to think that
progress in technology is an assured way to
advance a good cause.
Open to all, the Internet is indeed
a tremendous tool for broadcasting and
communication. But as it is also open to every
kind of influence and under no one’s control, it is
equally liable to be used for ill as well as for good.
Rightly understood, it can be used intelligently in
the combat for the Faith.
Unfortunately, it is a non-hierarchical
network in which everybody poses as master
and authorizes himself to say whatever he likes
without having grasped all the ins and outs of a
question.
Let me make myself clear. It is not question of
underestimating or denigrating the advantages
of a new medium, but of bearing in mind
that its inorganic structure imposes a limit on
its possibilities. Instead of serving a natural
community, its whole thrust is to collapse the
frontiers between men according to a perfectly
individualistic conception of society, with all the
risks that that entails.
In other words, the Internet is excellent for
personal exchanges, but detestable for broader
debate. In the latter case the opportunities for
shifty arguments and manipulation are greater.
For the Internet is really a new phenomenon by
the instantaneity and reach of the information
it can disseminate. For the recipient, there isn’t
sufficient time to reflect on the message. Scarcely
having read one text, the reader’s attention is
solicited by yet another without his even realizing
that a completely different subject is being taken
up.
THE ANGELUS • August 2005

So let us invite faithful Catholics to avoid
forums where everything is discussed and nothing
is sacred, even private matters, as if family
problems should be aired in the public square.
Ideally, there should be a reliable, trustworthy
site for the zealous activists who desire to find out
something or to bring up a doubt. On such a site
they would be able distinguish between true and
false, and seek the information they need. The
Superior [moderator] of such a site would only
intervene on essential points, when circumstances
demand a reply. For “a disdain that is not
expressed has no effect. On the contrary, error
or lies that no one takes the trouble to unmask
acquire little by little the authority of truth”
(Charles Maurras, My Political Ideas).
It is high time to consider whether the use of
the web has advanced truth and unity, or whether
the result has been the opposite.
The results indeed are painful to observe:
unlike what would take place in the great tertulias
[study or discussion clubs] of the Middle Ages,
these Internet discussions do not involve reasoned
argumentation, bringing solid, well-researched
information to bear on a point; analysis of the
facts in order to advance reflection; in short,
seeking in common the Good and the True,
but rather manipulating minds by playing
upon emotions and sensibilities. From this
come the barrage of irrelevant information,
cleverly sustained rumors, bald-faced lies, and,
especially, a complete loss of focus on what is
at stake. Instead of discussing the serious issues,
people harp on petty details and foster thereby
an atmosphere of suspicion and hatred. And all
of this goes on without people realizing it and

33

Internet Use
ms
M i c h A e l

without anyone orchestrating it: it rolls along by
itself. All anyone need do is click on his computer.
In the last century, Willi Munzenberg, the
Komintern’s propaganda specialist, had grasped
the power of emotion in the psychology of the
masses. In this context he perfected the techniques
for manipulating good sentiments: transpose his
methods to the present day and you will see that
nothing has changed. The art of propaganda lies
in creating a drama pitting heroes against bad
guys, the pure thirsting for justice against the
monster abusing his power! Once people have
been conditioned, the reflexes are learned quickly.
Division rules, and the wounds to the body politic
become difficult to dress.
After the war, Pius XII saw clearly, in another
context but with the same climate of passion and
error, the dangers inherent in the modern means
of communication. Unfortunately, he was not
heard. Today we measure the consequences.
So, let us ask a simple question: has the use
of chat room discussion resulted in something
positive for settling minds and resolving
problems? It is easy to reply, without risk of
contradiction, no.
And so we recommend to all our friends that
they not waste their time or energy in frequenting
just any site. The only diversion to be found there
is to discover new specialists, hitherto completely
unknown, in canonical or theological sciences.
Having plunged with the neophyte’s ardor into
works which they would never have opened had
the Cause not required it, these self-proclaimed
experts are quickest to judge with an air of
authority matters about which they only recently

L e p è r e

learned. This is where the spirit of faction leads,
and withal no one is convinced.
A few years ago, in political circles, some
boasted of having won the “battle of the fax.”
With what result? They have disappeared from
the political landscape. Since then, the Internet
has come to dominate and to amplify the impact
of manipulated information on people’s minds.
Even so, that is still not enough to prevail, for the
Truth and the Right always manage to prevail. It’s
merely a matter of time, and without going too far
out on a limb, it is easy to predict that the defeat
of a rebellion of a few and without credible motive
will be as embarrassing as the previous one. If
a doctrinal question had been involved, things
would undoubtedly have been different.
So, let us rally to the only fight that counts, the
fight by faith and works. Let us not forget that our
principal adversary is to be found in occupied
Rome and not in the hierarchy that Providence
has chosen to lead the rude battle against the
enemies of the Church. Let us studiously strive
to avoid vain quarrels and to support legitimate
authorities, remembering that “once the first wave
of enthusiasm has passed, no order can come
to be, save by authority” (Charles Maurras, My
Political Ideas).
Unless, that is, you do not seek the perfection
of all order. But in that case, you cannot claim to
be on the side of Tradition.
Posted as a Letter by Michael Lepère, a reader of La Porte Latine (June
21, 2005), the website of the Society of Saint Pius X’s French District.
Translated exclusively for Angelus Press.

THE ANGELUS • August 2005

40

F R .

p e t e r

Can an apostate from the Catholic Church save his
soul if he dies in the state of unrepented apostasy?

An apostate is a person who once was a Catholic,
and who has now abandoned all practice of religion.
Having received and believed the Catholic Faith, and
known at least something of the supernatural order of
grace, it is not possible for such a person to be in good
faith, as it might conceivably be for a Protestant who
stopped the practice of his false religion. The reason for
this is that good faith presupposes invincible ignorance.
Invincible ignorance is only possible for those who
have no possibility of knowing the truth concerning
divine revelation, and whose ignorance is consequently
not culpable. One who has had the theological virtue
of faith infused at baptism, and has had at least some
instruction in the Catholic Faith cannot possibly be
in invincible ignorance. He may, certainly, be in
ignorance as to the true Church and her teachings, but
if he is, it is his own fault, and his ignorance is vincible.
It seems that the only exceptions to this would be
baptized Catholics who had never been taught anything
of the Faith, nor had any Catholic examples as role
models.
The Catholic Church refuses Christian burial to
all public sinners, including public apostates who are
unrepentant. If they give some sign of repentance
before death, even if it is only a probable sign, such as
the expression of sorrow for their stubbornness or the
desire to see a priest, the Church can have some hope
for their eternal salvation and consequently authorizes
Christian burial. Needless to say, however, only God
can judge the soul, so that it is still permissible to pray
privately and offer Masses privately for such apostates
who have given no sign of repentance.

Q

Must a priest follow certain criteria if
he is to refuse Holy Communion to the faithful?

A priest does not have the right to refuse
Holy Communion arbitrarily. He must follow the
requirements of Canon Law, which prescribes to whom
he must refuse Holy Communion, and to whom he
must administer it. This law is to be found in Canon
855, §1:

A

Catholics who are publicly known to be unworthy
(for example, those who have been excommunicated
or interdicted or who are manifestly of ill repute) must
be refused Holy Communion until their repentance
and amendment have been established, and satisfaction
has been made for the public scandal which they have
given.

The essential part of this law is that a Catholic must
be a public sinner, or publicly unworthy, to be refused
the sacrament of Holy Communion. This is the case,
for example, of a person who has publicly performed
abortions, or voted for legislation in favor of abortion;
or of a father who would have had his children baptized
and raised in an heretical sect; or giving membership
to the Communist party, or public concubinage; or of

THE ANGELUS • August 2005

R .

s c o t t

persons divorced and remarried outside the Church or
convicted of civil crimes such as pedophilia.
However, the Church is very clear that Holy
Communion cannot be refused to a person who is
not a public sinner, that is if his sin is not sufficiently
well known in the community at the present time. For
to refuse Holy Communion to a person who is not
known to many people as one who publicly breaks the
commandments of God would be to defame his good
name and destroy his reputation, which a person has a
right to in justice, even if he is a hidden sinner. It is only
by public sin that he loses this right, for he has lost his
reputation. However, if such a hidden sinner were to
ask the priest in private to receive Holy Communion,
or whether or not he can go to Holy Communion,
the priest would be obliged to forbid him to go to
Holy Communion, and this even though he could not
refuse him Holy Communion if he were to request it
publicly at the communion rail. This is explained in
the second half of Canon 855: “Occult sinners, who
secretly ask for Holy Communion, shall be refused by
the minister if he knows that they have not amended;
if, however, they seek Communion publicly and the
priest cannot pass them by without scandal, he shall not
refuse them.” It is truly sad for a priest to be obliged to
administer a sacrilegious Communion, but if he cannot
convince them privately to abstain from going to Holy
Communion, then he must do so.
The question can sometimes arise, not of hidden
or occult sins, but of public attitudes that persons might
take against the Church, but which are not public
sins. There are some people who lack respect for their
priests, refuse to follow their advice and counsel, who
cause dissension in a parish by gossip and similar
means. In general, they are not to be considered as
public sinners or publicly unworthy, unless they openly
promote teachings that are opposed to Catholic Faith
and morality, or unless they incite other parishioners
to direct disobedience and disrespect towards their
pastors. On occasion, Sedevacantists and Feeneyites
have fallen into this category.
Also, when parents obstinately refuse their very
grave duty of educating their children in the Catholic
Faith, as required by Canon 1113, and instead
educate them in a non-Catholic religion, they must
be refused Holy Communion. Canon 2319 (1917
Code of Canon Law) stated that they are to be treated
as excommunicated, and consequently refused the
sacraments. This does not apply, though, to those
families, as foolish as they often are, who prefer
to educate their children at home, rather than in a
traditional parish school. For as long as they educate
their children in the Catholic Faith they are not sinners,
let alone public sinners. It is question of prudence
rather than sin, unless they initiate a campaign to attack
their Catholic schools or the education received therein,
thus undermining the work of the Church and of their
pastors.

Breaking with the Past:
Catholic Principles
Abandoned at the
Reformation
Abbot Francis Gasquet

N EW I NG
ER
O FF

Four sermons given on the four
Sundays of Advent, 1914, entitled:
The Pope’s Authority, The Holy Mass,
The Priesthood, The Church by Law
Established. Obviously covering four
pillars of the Protestant “reformation,”
today it takes on a STRIKING new
meaning. This IS the Vatican II
revolution! Reading “about it” 40 years
later in sermons given 50 years before
it happened is quite an experience.
Connect the dots.

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The most decisive work in English defending
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years later it took flight coming to rest in
Loreto, Italy, where it has stood until this day.
Approximately 100 saints and blessed have
made pilgrimages to this sanctuary where
countless miracles have occurred. This holy
place has been encompassed now for six
centuries by a magnificent basilica. In this
little cottage “the Word was Made Flesh and
Dwelt Among Us.”

Rev. Fr. F. X. Lasance

N EW I NG
ER
O FF

517pp, hardcover, thorough table of contents and index, high quality thin ivory
paper, 4¼ x 6¼, STK 8130 $22.95

Fr. G. E. Phillips

N EW I NG
ER
O FF

151pp, softcover, STK 8129 $14.95

Two of the best books on matrimony available. Really!
Dear Newlyweds

Christ in the Home

In his time, the world knew Pope Pius XII for his sanctity, his efforts for
world peace, his remarkable gifts of diplomacy, language and letters.
But there was another side to this holy Pope who found time to address
scores of newlyweds who came to seek his blessing on their marriages.
This is the Pius XII who is revealed in Dear Newlyweds.
Dear Newlyweds should be placed in the hands of every newlymarried couple. It is a book to read, ponder, cherish, and be guided
by, all through married life. Newlywed, married, and engaged couples
will be inspired and uplifted by Pius XII’s explanation of Matrimony
and his insight into the practical problems of everyday marriage. Dear
Newlyweds is a book to turn to again and again. It is a sure guide as
new difficulties arise–problems of discipline in the rearing of children,
temptations against fidelity, relationships with elderly parents, and more!
Dear Newlyweds combines the solid doctrine of the Roman
Magisterium with the pastoral touch of the Angelic shepherd himself. It
is Catholic truth digested and perfectly fitted to those who need it most.
It is not a haphazard collection of talks, but forms a complete course on
Catholic married life. Ideal for marriage preparation classes, marriage
counseling, and as an engagement, wedding, or anniversary gift.

Ideal for the engaged, marriage instruction classes, and for those married many
years. This guidebook to finding a happy marriage, keeping a happy marriage,
and raising happy children has been out of print for over 50 years. Loads of
practical and spiritual advice on family life and raising children that will never be
outdated because the principles are as timeless as human nature and virtue.
Dominicana stated in 1951:

Pope Pius XII

269pp, softcover, STK# 6730 $14.95

Rev. Fr. Raoul Plus, SJ

This is a work that fulfills the needs of the marriageable and the married–it not only unveils
Christian Marriage in its majestic supernatural setting, but it is also a solid psychological
guide to a tremendously successful married life. Fr. Plus points out, that “supernatural love,
far from suppressing natural love, makes it more tender, more attentive, more generous; it
intensifies the sentiments of affection, esteem, admiration, gratitude, respect, and devotion
which constitute the essence of true love.”

W

A series N
of Emeditations
I NG grouped under four general sections: Courtship, Marriage,
Rthe
E
the Home,
and
Training of Children. His section on imparting sex knowledge to
F
OFwill be helpful to parents faced with this complex problem and duty.
children
It is sad to know that many young Catholic couples entering marriage today will
never enjoy the happiness of true love because they are tainted with worldly ideas
on marriage culled from the mass media. Fr. Plus strikes at the root of these evils
by presenting Marriage in its true light as a sacrament.
343pp, larger type, softcover, STK 8128 $18.95

Buy both and save over 20% (normally $33.90)

Now $26.9 5 STK# 6690

W
E
N

Pope
Pius
IX
The Man and the Myth
Yves Chiron

Is the 19th century a blank century to you? Let the newest book from Angelus Press
connect the dots from the viewpoint of the longest pontificate in the history of the Church–
Blessed Pius IX.
Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti is one of the most interesting and complex individuals to
ever become Supreme Pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church. He was born in 1792, during
the French Revolution, lived through the Napeolonic conquests of Europe, and witnessed the
unification of both Italy and the Prussian Empire.
His pontificate included the proclamation of the dogmas of the Immaculate Conception
and papal infallibility, the convocation of the First Vatican Council, the publication of the
Syllabus of Errors, the beginnings of Catholic Action, and the development of the foreign
missions.
If you want an insight into the many interesting facets of the relationship between the
Church and the world at the end of the 19th century, this book is for you. If you are interested
in the fight of the Church against the great movements of Modernity: liberalism, Freemasonry,
the Enlightenment, laicism, capitalism and communism, this book is worth reading. If the
mention of Pius IX brings nothing to mind, you need to read this book. Chapters include:
 The First Years  A Difficult Path to the Priesthood  From Tata Giovanni to
Chile  Bishop of Spoleto  Bishop and Cardinal of Imola  Sovereign Pontiff
 From Reform to Revolution  The Pope in Exile  Resistance and Renewal
 The Pope of the Immaculate Conception  Pius IX and Italy  The Pope of the
Syllabus  The Roman Question  The Vatican Council  The “Prisoner of the
Vatican”  Towards the Canonization

The author, Yves Chiron, is a professor of history and a member of the Society of the
Ecclesiastical History of France. He has authored many works in his native French, including
biographies of Padre Pio and Paul VI, and is the author of the Angelus Press title, St. Pius X:
Restorer of the Church.

327pp., softcover, 45 photographs and illustrations,
bibliography, index, STK# 8126 $24.95

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angelus Press
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Kansas City, Missouri 64109

1-800-96ORDER
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