APRIL 2006

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“Instaurare omnia in Christo”

The Pope Chart Poster

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

The

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“To publish Catholic journals and place them in
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spread them as far as possible that they may be read by
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demands we should tear away from the poisonous
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—Pope St. Pius X

April 2006
Volume XXIX, Number 4

• Kansas City, Missouri 64109

English-language Editor and Publisher
for the International Society of Saint Pius X
PUBLISHER

Fr. John Fullerton
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A TALK HEARD 'ROUND THE WORLD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
H.E. Bishop Bernard Fellay

THE DISCIPLES OF THE CENACLE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
Velletri, near Rome, Italy

THE BEATIFICATION OF DOM GUERANGER . . . . . . . . . 31
Includes excerpt on his meditations for Lent.

AURIESVILLE SERMON . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
Fr. Yves Le Roux

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
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ON OUR COVER: Bishop Fellay preaches during the Pontiﬁcal Mass at St.
Isidore the Farmer Catholic Church, Denver, Colorado (Feb. 18, 2006), for the
taking of perpetual vows by Br. Vincent, O.S.B., a benedictine monk of Our Lady of
Guadalupe Monastery, Silver City, New Mexico. The following day Bishop Fellay
gave a conference concerning the relations between the Society of Saint Pius X and
Rome which is reprinted in this issue of The Angelus, pp.2-16, 25-31.

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2

A TALK
HEARD
'ROUND
THE
WORLD

A conference by Bishop Bernard Fellay,
given at St. Isidore’s Catholic Church,
Denver, Colorado (Feb. 18, 2006), on
the occasion of the taking of perpetual
vows by Br. Vincent, a Benedictine
monk of Our Lady of Guadalupe
Monastery, Silver City, New Mexico.

You would probably like to hear something about our
relations with Rome. I will try to give you some knowledge
about this. It is impressive to see the number of rumors and
other things going around. Just this morning, I heard that
there is an agreement between the Society and Rome which is
about to be announced. As proof, “Bishop Fellay apparently
has frequent personal phone conversations with the Pope.”
Well, if someone can give me his phone number, please feel
free.
So many rumors have been spread since the audience
with the Holy Father, which Benedict XVI granted to us on
August 29, 2005. I’ll try to shed some light on this situation.
THE ANGELUS • April 2006 www.angeluspress.org

y,

3

The Principles of Our Activity
I would not like to begin directly with facts,
but rather with principles. This is because we live
by principles; we certainly do not want to be led
merely by facts or happenings. We have an aim, an
end, in mind, and these principles dictate what we
do or do not do. The ﬁrst principle which dictates
these happenings is that we are and we want to stay
Catholics.
If we may say so, the ﬁrst requirement to be a
Catholic is Faith. There is a beautiful Symbol, i.e. a
creed, of St. Athanasius which was, in former times,
prayed every Sunday by each priest since it was in the
Breviary for Prime. Then it was prayed only on the
Feast of the Most Holy Trinity. It is the Symbol which
begins with the word Quicumque. “Whoever wants to
be saved ﬁrst of all must hold the Catholic Faith; and
he who does not keep it, full and integrally, without
any doubt, he will enter eternal damnation.”
It is clear; if you want to be Catholic, you must
stick to the Faith. And the Faith is not something of
today; it is based on what God has taught us about
Himself in Revelation, which was completed with the
death of the last Apostle. Since then, the Church has
had the magniﬁcent duty of transmitting the Faith to
future generations.
The First Vatican Council has a tremendous
description of the role of the Faith and, because of it,
of the reason for the foundation of the Church by Our
Lord Jesus Christ. The documents from the Vatican
Council have only two dogmatic constitutions: One is
about the Roman Pontiff and one is about Faith. The
one about faith explains what faith is, a supernatural
virtue which makes us hold as true the teachings of
God through the Apostles and prophets and His onlybegotten Son, Our Lord Jesus Christ. Supernatural
means it is above any human means, that it comes
from God, and that no one can pretend to have the
Faith if they have not received it from God. Normally,
we receive it in baptism, so little children get it in this
fashion.
When we say faith, we can consider several
aspects. We can consider what God has put in us,
which is a virtue. We can also look at the object “The
Catholic Faith,” by which we mean a certain number
of truths, the object which is presented to this virtue
within us. Then we have the act of faith. If we speak
of vision, when we see, the faculty of seeing is the
eye. The faith which is put in us is like this eye which
enables us to see God, under a veil here on earth, and
then in heaven when this faith will be transformed
into the light of glory. We will see God in the eyes
of God, that is, without any intermediate created
instrument; we will see God as He is and how He sees
Himself.
This is for heaven, but here on earth, the object
of faith is the same: God. Of course, as we are little
human creatures, we must split the immensity of
the simplicity of God into parts because God is

too great for us to comprehend. Because of this
simplicity of God, you must realize that if you try to
take something away from a simple thing, you lose
everything. It’s like trying to take a part of a balloon
away with a knife. I am not saying God is a balloon,
but the Faith is like that. You cannot have merely a
part. You have everything or nothing.
The man who says he believes in the Holy Trinity,
in Our Lord, and in the Blessed Lady, but who
doubts the existence of hell does not have faith. The
same goes for someone who denies the Immaculate
Conception or any other doctrine of the Church.
These persons who allow themselves to discuss any
point of the Faith must know that they do not even
have a part of the Faith; they have nothing. What
remains may look like some kind of faith is but an
illusion. Take Protestants for instance: “But I believe
in the Bible!” Well, the Protestant has nothing of this
reality which we call faith. What they have is only
a human thing which we call a human belief. This
looks like faith under certain aspects but is in no
way Catholic faith, this supernatural virtue given by
God without which it is impossible to please God,
according to Scripture–impossible to receive grace,
impossible to go to heaven. That’s the teaching of the
First Vatican Council.
Hence, on the side of God, because He wanted
this Faith to be transmitted to us through the
instruments of human beings, arises the founding
of the Catholic Church. You know how it works if
you want to transmit a message from one person to
another and to another, etc. There is a children’s game
called Telephone. You whisper something into the
ear of your neighbor who whispers it to his neighbor,
and so on. It is always fantastic to see the capacity
of our imagination and of transmission. But to make
sure that the Faith would be transmitted faithfully,
God had to intervene with a very special intervention.
We call this infallibility. The certainty that the next
generation would receive what He told the Apostles is
not a human characteristic.
Someone may object, “But we have the Bible!”
To which I respond, why then do we have so many
different Protestant denominations? They all have
the same book, but they all read it with a different
eye. And since they claim that they have a direct
relationship with the Holy Ghost, no one can claim
that he has a better interpretation than the other. So
they establish different groups.
The Catholic Church does not work like that.
She says that we have the Bible, but we know that
not everything is in the Bible. Even St. John says that,
although he has written his book, if he were to write
everything that happened, the whole world could not
contain the books that would have to be written ( Jn.
21:25).
So we have what is called Tradition, which is the
non-written transmission of the Faith. During the
ﬁrst years after the death of Jesus, Christians did not
www.angeluspress.org

THE ANGELUS • April 2006

4
have the New Testament. The transmission was oral.
The Apostles St. Matthew and St. Mark wrote their
Gospels around 50 A.D. St. Luke wrote his a little
later, around 60 or 62 A.D. St. John wrote his towards
the end of the century.
So we have something in writing and something
that is oral. But even this is not sufﬁcient. We need
an authority which is constantly able to correctly
explain the understanding and interpretation of the
book. This is why God founded a Church with an
authority which would transmit the Faith necessary
for salvation, as the First Vatican Council teaches.
We all know that while faith is not sufﬁcient, it is
necessary. Our Lord told the Apostles “Whoever shall
be baptized and believe shall be saved.” Therefore
there are two elements: Baptism and belief, neither of
which is sufﬁcient by itself; faith and grace.

Infallibility:
Dilemma or Safeguard?
Thus, we come to the problem of infallibility.
Obviously, we are here because of the Faith, but do
we contest infallibility? No, we don’t. We only see and
know that this privilege has been granted to human
beings, and that a human being has the particularity
of being free, and that God, even when He grants
something like infallibility, does not push someone
into a kind of determinism. Man is free and God
wants us to work out our salvation freely, using our
intelligence and will. This is also true of the Pope.
In other words, the Pope has been promised the
privilege of infallibility, but it is up to him to make
use of it. And if he does not want to, he won’t be
infallible. He must freely make use of it.
Similarly with baptism, if a child is going to die
before reaching the age of reason, the parents must
baptize the child. It must be freely done. It is exactly
the same with infallibility. The Church has explained,
to a certain extent, what the nature of infallibility is.
Not everything is under deﬁnition. When the Pope
speaks ex cathedra, making a solemn declaration, the
Pope is infallible. We also know that there is another
kind of infallibility which is more difﬁcult to explain
and deﬁne because the Church has not yet given
us the deﬁnition. This is what the Church calls the
universal ordinary magisterium.
Universal means it applies to the whole
Church, everywhere. Ordinary is used as opposed
to extraordinary. Magisterium refers to a teaching.
There was much debate during the proclamation
of the doctrine of infallibility. When the Church
ﬁrst taught that we are bound to accept and believe
the extraordinary magisterium and the universal
ordinary magisterium, the Church said she did not
want to speak of the Pope at that time, but of the
whole Church. The Pope is covered in Pastor Aeternus,
another document, where his infallibility is covered.
At that time, they said that the Holy Ghost has not
THE ANGELUS • April 2006 www.angeluspress.org

been promised to St. Peter and his successors in such
a way that through a new illumination, the Pope could
proclaim something new. So the Holy Ghost is not
promised, there is no infallibility, if the Pope says
something new. This is according to the very text of
the Pope’s primacy and infallibility.
The text continues by saying, “But through His
[the Holy Ghost] own intervention, the Pope may
transmit faithfully and conserve saintly the deposit of
the Faith.” This means that the Pope has infallibility,
but under very precise conditions. It must be linked to
Revelation, it must not be something new, and it must
deal with the faithful transmission of the teaching of
Our Lord and Revelation and the holy conservation
of the deposit of Faith. It is very, very important to
understand this teaching and to keep it in mind. The
Pope is not a machine of infallibility. You do not push
a button and get infallible teaching.
One of the best proofs of this reality is the
Second Vatican Council and the novelties that were
introduced afterwards. During the Council, several
times, bishops asked the question whether the
texts they published were infallible. Other bishops
responded that the pastoral nature of some of these
texts were linked to human circumstances and were
less precise, so we should make, simultaneously,
dogmatic texts which deﬁne words and terms. The
response to this latter objection was always no,
because “we don’t want to make a dogmatic Council,
we want a pastoral Council.” It is very important.
At a certain time, from the Council itself, the
question was asked, “So what is infallible in this
Council?” A note, an explanation, from the Secretary
of the Council, Cardinal Felici, said “What is infallible
in the Council is what the Council says is infallible.”
And you ﬁnd nowhere in the Council a statement by
which the Council says “This is infallible.” So what
remains of infallibility in the Council is only what
was already infallible. If, in the Council, you ﬁnd
something about the Holy Trinity being three Persons
in only one God, it’s infallible because it was infallible
before. But there is no speciﬁc act in the Council in
which the Council made use of infallibility. And this
is something very special. It is the ﬁrst time in the
history of the Councils of the Church that we ﬁnd
this situation: a Council which expressly did not want
to make use of infallibility. It’s true; it depends on
free will, so the Church can make use of it where she
wants. At the Council, she chose not to.
If you look at the history of Pope John Paul II,
you see that, ﬁrst, he knew very well what he had
to do when he wanted to make use of infallibility.
On the other hand, he hardly made use of this
infallibility–I would say three times. He used it to
proclaim the impossibility of admitting women to the
priesthood. And in one document, he used it twice:
to condemn abortion and to condemn euthanasia.
In the text condemning the ordination of women, he
uses precisely these conditions which are necessary to
be infallible: he spoke as the head of the Church, the

5
Supreme Pastor. He spoke on faith or morals. He gave
a deﬁnition and provided clear boundaries. Finally, he
expressed his will to oblige and bind the consciences
of all the faithful. These are the four conditions of
infallibility.
Even then, dear faithful, in this precise text where
infallibility is clear, Cardinal Ratzinger said that it was
not the personal infallibility of the Pope, since he was
only repeating what Tradition had already decided.
Thus, Rome itself said that the Pope did not make use
of his personal responsibility in this issue. This shows
you that it’s too simplistic and wrong to pretend that
everything which comes out of the mouth of the Pope
is infallible. It’s simply not true, it never has been, and
it never shall be. When we speak so, we speak merely
in a negative way.

The Reality of
the Mystical Body
So the Faith is necessary. The Church is necessary.
If we want to be saved, there is no other way except
for the Church which Jesus has founded. Between
God and creation, there is an inﬁnite gap. On the side
of man, since Original Sin, there is no way to cross
this inﬁnite abyss except by the bridge imposed and
created by God in His only-begotten Son made ﬂesh,
Our Lord Jesus Christ. There is no other way to go to
heaven except Our Lord Jesus Christ and Our Lord
Jesus Christ wanted to associate with this work of
Redemption the souls who would be united with Him,
in Him, through Baptism, and which constitute the
Mystical Body of Christ, the Catholic Church. What a
tremendous mystery.
This is why the Church is as necessary as Jesus;
because it is the same reality. What is the difference
between Jesus and the Church? The Church is Jesus
extended in space and time in the souls which are one
body with Him, incorporated in Him: the Mystical
Body of Christ. St. Paul dared to use unbelievable
words: We are the bones of His bones, the ﬂesh of His
ﬂesh. It’s very expressive to say how deeply we are
united with Christ in baptism. But that’s the Church!
When you say “the Catholic Church,” you say “Jesus”
plus all these souls who are united to Him.
Because we speak of the Church, I will add a
comment, which has two sides. There is the invisible
union with Christ which happens through grace, a
reality which is real even though we can’t see it, and
the Faith. We are living members of the Church if we
are in the state of grace, through charity. But then,
also, because we are human beings and because we
are not only souls, but also bodies, Our Lord wanted
this union with Himself to be materialized and visible.
Thus, although the most important element of this
union is invisible, and which we call the Soul of the
Mystical Body, the Soul of the Church, there is a
visible part. The three external signs of union are
open profession of faith, open union with the Pope,

and open union in the worship of God. These are the
three visible elements of the Catholic Church.
If you went to a priest and said “I am a Catholic,”
and he asked you to prove it, you would show him
your baptismal certiﬁcate, a visible sign. You can’t
just say to him, “I am united with Christ.” He would
just look at you and say, “Well, me too, but I can’t
know who else.” There must be something from this
earth. That’s why there are two ways to speak about
the Mystical Body of Christ. There is a way where
you speak of the visible side, when you speak of the
necessity of the baptism of water to become part of
the Church.
We know that there are two other baptisms,
that of desire and that of blood. These produce an
invisible but real link with Christ but do not produce
all of the effects which are received in the baptism
of water. For example, with baptism of blood or
desire, you do not receive the character of baptism.
You only receive the grace, which means that those
who die with these baptisms go to heaven–because
they are united with Christ–but they will not have
this wonderful and impressive gift which we call the
character. It’s noteworthy to see that this is the main
reason why certain Fathers of the Church, including
St. John Chrysostom, teach that the Blessed Virgin
was baptized. She did not need baptism because she
did not have Original Sin, but in order to receive
the other sacraments, it makes sense that she would
have received what allows us to receive the other
sacraments: the character of baptism. This is not part
of a deﬁnition about the Blessed Virgin Mary and we
are not bound by the Faith to believe this, but we do
have Fathers of the Church who went so far as to say
that our Lord baptized St. Peter and then the Blessed
Virgin Mary, or that St. Peter baptized our Lady and
the rest of the Apostles.
At any rate, it may be surprising, but it is
important that these things be clear in our mind.
Today, we have so many surprising theories around,
and so we must hold fast to what the Church has
always taught. And the Church has always taught
that you have people who will be in heaven, who are
in the state of grace, who have been saved without
knowing the Catholic Church. We know this. And yet,
how is it possible if you cannot be saved outside the
Catholic Church? It is absolutely true that they will be
saved through the Catholic Church because they will
be united to Christ, to the Mystical Body of Christ,
which is the Catholic Church. It will, however, remain
invisible, because this visible link is impossible
for them. Consider a Hindu in Tibet who has no
knowledge of the Catholic Church. He lives according
to his conscience and to the laws which God has put
into his heart. He can be in the state of grace, and if
he dies in this state of grace, he will go to heaven.
But these things are so invisible, so subjective,
that the Church has hardly spoken about it. We
know the principle, but the Church has never made
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THE ANGELUS • April 2006

6
a practical application of it because it is too sensitive
and delicate. Who can know who is in the state of
grace or not? The Council of Trent teaches that no
one can know it except through a special revelation or
illumination from God.
The Church does give some signs for being in
the state of grace. For example, having a special
devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary, having a great
care of avoiding sin, maintaining friendship with God,
following His laws, etc. Thus, there are certain signs
by which one can determine whether one is in the
state of grace, but to pretend that you can know with
certainty, beware: The Council of Trent says that it is
impossible without a special illumination. That is why
the Church will not speak on this level. The Church
only says that if you want to be saved, you have to be
Catholic. Period. For the others, it is in God’s hands.
It’s very prudent.
With the Second Vatican Council, we see the
opposite approach. The Council essentially says,
“Well, there are lots of good people around. It’s
impossible that all these people will go to hell. So
there must be good.” Which is true. But the next step
is: “The religion which feeds these people is good;
you ﬁnd a lot of good in these religions.” And thus
you enter into ecumenism, which is the wrong way.
An individual may receive these graces, but
deﬁnitely not a false religion. You will ﬁnd elements
of truth in any religion. Deﬁnitely. But they will be
mixed with error and, in fact, that’s the essence of
error: error is always a gap in the good. A deprivation
of a good is something which should be there and
is not. You will never ﬁnd evil by essence. The evil
is always a “bite” in the good, if I may say so. It’s
like the worm in the apple. As long as the worm has
something to eat in this apple, this evil will work.
Once the apple is totally eaten, the worm will die
because there is nothing to eat anymore. This is the
same with evil and error. In every error, you will
always ﬁnd something true. If you could ﬁnd an
absolute error, no one would bite because it would be
obviously wrong to everyone.
When we believe something, we believe it
because we think it is true. At the very moment we
see that it is wrong, we no longer believe it. So, the
most dangerous errors are those which have the
most truth in them because we bite them much more
easily. Thus, I may say that the most dangerous false
religions are those which are closest to the truth,
the most structured, the most logical and coherent,
because they give an impression of authenticity. If
you have a wonderful meal with very appetizing food,
you will enjoy even the look of it. If you put a drop
of poison in a dish that looks attractive and place
it next to a bowl of food which doesn’t even look
good, which will people choose? They will choose
the one that appears good. This is one of the greatest
dangers of error: admixture with the good. You must

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remember the deﬁnition of evil: privatio boni debiti, the
failure of a good which is due.
I used this deﬁnition when I spoke to Cardinal
Castrillon about the Mass. I said to him that the New
Mass is bad, is evil. He did not accept that. He even
gave a conference in Germany where he said, “Bishop
Fellay claims the New Mass is bad, but he is wrong
because it has been promulgated by the Pope, and
hence, it’s good. It is covered by the infallibility of the
Pope.” This is what he said at Munster. Afterwards,
I had the opportunity to speak with him and he said
the following about the Mass: “The Pope and I like
the New Mass. We think that it is more pastoral than
the old Mass. But it is true that there is something
failing and so we have to compensate by and with the
appropriate cathechesis.”
Then I made use of what he had said: “You
say that something is failing in this Mass. That is
the precisely the deﬁnition of evil: the privation of
something which is due. You say that something
which is due is failing. So you say that the New Mass
is bad!”
He had nothing to say, but after the meeting, he
asked two of his secretaries, “Why didn’t you come to
my help when Bishop Fellay attacked me?”
You can see how important it is, then, to have
the right deﬁnition of things. This is also why, when
we speak of the deﬁnition of evil, we must remember
that sin is the great evil. If you look at Scripture, who
can tell what a sin is? How can we say what is sinful?
Sin is a failing; something good which is due that is
failing. And it is in relation with God Who is inﬁnite.
In fact, those who understand the most what sin is
are the ones who understand most clearly Who God
is. Because a sin or an evil will always be something
negative, and to understand something negative, you
must ﬁrst understand what is positive. Otherwise, it is
like trying to explain vision to a blind man. A blind
man by birth will never understand his misfortune.
On the other hand, a man who loses his vision at
some point will understand fully the evil of being
blind. These matters are not so simple.
Remember that the greatest saints always claim
to be the greatest sinners in the world. How can they
dare to say so? They are saints! Many of them said
it, because they understood in a profound sense who
God is. They understood what it was to not give God
what was due to Him, even if it were the slightest
thing.

Keeping Things in Perspective
We maintain that we need the Faith. We maintain
that we need the Church. We run into a problem here,
however. When we say we want to be Catholic, we
say we are Catholic, we say we stick to the Catholic
Faith and the Church, there is a danger. And this
danger is to make our own world; even to make our
own God. Many people make their own God. This is

7

Having made his vows, Br. Vincent shows his fellow monks the document
of profession he has just signed, making them witnesses to the act.
why St. John says, “He who claims to love God and
does not love his neighbor, he is a liar.” It’s so easy to
say that you love God. But, if, at the same time, you
do not do your best to love your neighbor, St. John
says you are a liar, you are wrong.
So it is important, and we must pay attention
to staying in reality about God and the Church. To
claim to wipe out the entire Church by denying the
Pope, hierarchy, and bishops and to act as if you
were then the entire Church–I’m sorry, but such is
not the reality, a reality which is puzzling and hard
because we believe in the Church, which is Holy and
One. And we look for this holiness and unity and
we wonder where it is. Where is the unity in liturgy?
Every church has its own liturgy.
Sometimes you really wonder if there are not
jokers in Rome, especially when you hear someone
like Cardinal Arinze, who is responsible for the
Congregation of the Liturgy, say that the Pope should
not give freedom for the Tridentine Mass because it
would create confusion in the liturgy. You wonder if
he ever went around and noticed the confusion we
already experience now with the New Mass. There
is so much confusion already that I don’t see how
the introduction of the old Mass could bring any
more confusion at the level of the liturgy. On the
contrary, this Tridentine liturgy will restore unity
in the liturgy of the Church, and it will not only
be unity of language. Now you go from church to

church to ﬁnd Masses in different languages. Someone
told me once, after attending a Tridentine Mass,
“We did not understand all the words, but we knew
what was going on.” Now we understand the words,
but we don’t know what is going on! Even Cardinal
Castrillon told me once, that when he was in Africa,
there was a Mass where even he did not know when
the consecration was said. So, when I say that we
must stay with reality, I mean this: We have to stick
to this reality which is called Rome and the Pope.
That’s why we say that we adhere to Rome, that we
are Roman Catholics. Today, many refuse the word
“Roman.” A lot of Catholics today, especially priests,
claim that what is important is what happens in their
own parishes, not in Rome. They call the Pope the
Bishop of Rome. These are not just words in the air;
let me give you an example. Last week, I read the
bulletin of a parish in Switzerland where they are
getting a new bishop. The bulletin thus described the
role of a bishop and they said, “The bishop must be
very balanced because he must take and choose what
comes from Rome so that he is not too close to Rome,
so that he can be close to the faithful.” I’m sorry, but
we do recognize that there is one person on which the
Church has been built: Peter, the Vicar of Christ on
earth, and his successors, who maintain this unity of
the Church.
Is the Pope gone? The Church is gone, which
is why this is not an easy question, and hence you
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THE ANGELUS • April 2006

8
have this crisis in the Church. The famous marks of
Holiness and Unity are a nightmare right now. The
situation of the Church in general is a nightmare. But
that does not mean that everything has disappeared.
That is why we stick to the Pope. That’s why we pray
for the Pope; we recognize that there are still bishops
around, even if we don’t follow them in everything.
We must maintain this, because it is God who wanted
it this way. He wanted to entrust His treasures to
men, and we know that, by doing so, He allowed the
possibility of a certain number of failures. This has
happened throughout history. Most heresies have
begun inside the Church. Until the Church kicked
them out, there were priests, bishops, and deacons
who became heretics. It started inside. What does that
mean?
On the one hand, we are bound to recognize that
there is still someone in Rome who has the authority
granted by God to lead the Church. But on the other
hand, many times, we try to listen and it doesn’t seem
like it’s Jesus Who is speaking through his mouth.
And this is the great drama in which we live. When
we think that John Paul II kissed the Koran, in which
it is stated that to believe in the Divinity of Jesus is a
blasphemy–the Vicar of Christ kisses this book? It is
a heart-breaking drama, a scandal in the very precise
meaning of the term: something which leads people
into sin. The Muslims were obviously happy. But how
will they then become Catholics? How can we tell
them their book is wrong when they can say “Your
boss kissed it!” It is one little example which presents
the great mystery in which we live.
I don’t mean something confusing by saying
“mystery.” I mean a truth which overwhelms us, a
part of our Faith. Each point of our Faith is a mystery.
The Incarnation is a mystery. The Holy Eucharist is a
mystery. In the words of consecration themselves, the
priest says mysterium ﬁdei—the mystery of faith–when
he consecrates. These are truths which are inﬁnitely
higher than what we can understand, yet we must
submit to and accept them. So, we accept that there is
a Pope, even when we see failures.

Obedience Is Easily
Misunderstood
Now, of course, we don’t follow failures. It’s
obvious; it’s strictly forbidden to do any kind of sin or
error. God has given us an intelligence for the truth
and a will for the good. Whenever we do something
wrong, we sin. And when we sin, we engage our
own responsibility, also in obedience. We can never
say, “Because I obeyed, the guilt falls on the one
ordering.” We have our part, because we are free.
When we obey, we make use of our freedom. And if
we obey wrongly, we sin. It’s something which not
everybody understands. I remember a Carmelite
professor of dogma in Rome who told us, “I prefer
to be in error with the Pope.” I beg your pardon?
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“I prefer to be wrong with the Pope.” But if you’re
wrong, you’re no longer with Jesus or God!
Obedience is a very high virtue. You cannot have
a Catholic without obedience. The Catholic must
show his dependence on God, and God wanted this
dependency to be shown to other human beings.
You will always have superiors, in work, in a family,
etc. There is always someone above you, even if you
are the Pope. (It seems that Benedict XVI was not
allowed to have his cats in his apartment for a time,
so he must also obey!) The right understanding of
obedience always means that we submit to God.
Supernatural obedience is always linked to God. We
submit to human beings because they represent God,
His law and His word. Now if it is clear that if what
we are asked to do is against God’s law, you can no
longer speak of obedience. Maybe it is submission to
a human being, but not to God. This is why St. Peter
says to the Sanhedrin, which was the highest religious
authority in the Old Testament: “We ought to obey
God, rather than men.” That was his answer, and
that’s still our answer too.
We’re going to obey the Pope, as long as He
uses Jesus’ word. Our Lord says, “Who listens to
you, listens to Me.” So we are eager to hear from the
mouth of the Pope the voice of Christ. And when we
don’t, we are full of sorrow, we can no longer move.
And when I say “the Pope,” we could say the Council,
the bishop–it counts for the same. And we must have
this clearly in mind, because the great damage caused
to the Church since the Council has been caused
through this wrong understanding of obedience,
or the understanding of the wrong obedience. It’s
striking, when you see, when you look, how they have
introduced the novelties. It’s absolutely unbelievable
how they have behaved. I’ll give you some examples.
One was the introduction of the New Mass in
Italy. You have the ofﬁcial text which comes from
Rome, which says, we’ll give two years to the bishops’
conferences to decide when the New Mass will be
introduced in their countries. And in Italy they
decided to introduce it at the latest possible time, at
the very end of these two years. And then, suddenly,
in L’Osservatore Romano, you have the text without
any signature which said that the New Mass in Italy
will be celebrated immediately. The President of the
Italian Bishops’ Conference, who at the time was
Bishop Carli, said to Archbishop Lefebvre, “I am
going to make a protest to discover who is behind
these texts without any signature!” Here we have a
beautiful example of the abuse of authority.
Another one was the introduction of Communion
in the hand. The text which introduces Communion
in the hand starts by saying that it is no good, that
those who have already allowed Communion in the
hand are disobedient. And then what? And then they
say, “But in these places, they can keep it.” And that
was how Communion in the hand was introduced
into the Church: by stating that it is wrong, but stating

9
that we will let it go. And from then, in each country,
it just spread, from a text which was supposedly
condemning it, but opening a door at the same time.
The text about Indulgences and penance said
penance is very good, so Friday abstinence is very
good and we will let the bishops’ conferences decide
what the faithful will do on Friday. We can change,
and no longer abstain from eating meat. We can
replace that penance with something else. And
the bishops’ conference decided nothing, so now
everybody thinks that there is no binding penance
anymore on Friday. This is absolutely not true! But
you can ﬁnd many things like that! They say these
things are good, but..., and with the “but” they
introduce and open everything.
Take the example of obedience in the religious
orders; the Carmelites in France, for instance. There
was a meeting of all the superiors–the Prioress, the
Sub-prioress or Mistress of Novices—of all the Carmels
in France: about 120 persons, maybe more. And at
that meeting, a Buddhist specialist or expert taught
the nuns that Christian meditation and Buddhism is
all the same. It goes much, much further. The Sisters
will be obliged to get out of their habits, put on a kind
of gymnastics clothing, and put themselves in Yoga
positions, and so on, in the liturgy of this Buddhist
monk. One Sister protested; she was kicked out of the
Order. Then Rome gave her right, but she remains
outside, and she is alone, and all the others have gone
through this craziness. Their religious orders have
been demolished in the name of obedience.
So many times they have introduced psychiatrists,
for example, in the Benedictines—very famous: they
obliged all the monks to go in front of a psychiatrist.
They literally emptied the monasteries. And all this
in the name of obedience! Another Sister, she is now
with us as an oblate, was commanded in the name
of obedience (vow), to watch television. The reason
was, “Well, the whole community is in front of the
TV for recreation. You are the only one who doesn’t,
so you have to join in recreation and come in front
of the TV!” Isn’t that nice? to oblige somebody, a
religious soul, to really look at worldly things... It’s
absolutely not necessary for a religious soul in the
name of holy obedience. By obedience her soul is
put in total obedience to God, who is going to speak
by the superiors. And of course, in such a case when
the superior gives such an order, he’s committing a
wonderful abuse of power. And of course, in such a
case, if you obey, you sin.
We must say no. True obedience in such a case
is to say no. Paul VI already recognized this drama
in the Church. Paul VI spoke of an auto-demolition
of the Church, a self-destruction of the Church. He
said it. He said that somewhere in the temple of God
the smoke of Satan has entered. Strong words! In the
holy Temple, in the holy Catholic Church? Satan?
Yes! What does he tell us?–a diabolical possession.
Do you know what diabolical possession is? You

have someone who has a devil taking possession of
his body, and that makes his body move, no longer
according to the orders of the soul, which is the
real owner of the body, but according to the devil’s
angelic might, which is going to be pretty strong–
that’s a diabolical possession.
If you say that the devil has entered the Church,
in a certain way, you speak of a diabolical possession
of the Church. Strong words. But I tell you, to kick
out the devil from the soul, from the body, costs a lot.
It’s a ﬁght. And now we have to ﬁght, and kick the
devil out of the Church. Do you think this will happen
without a ﬁght? Well, we live this ﬁght every day. But
don’t wonder if you are an object of hatred, if you
feel around you suddenly and unbelievably people
who look at you as at the devil, and who behave
really mean towards you. It’s normal! You’re ﬁghting
the devil, and he does not like you! And he shows it
through certain people around you. It’s a ﬁght.

Our History and
Protective Measures
But this situation in the Church has obliged us to
take protective measures. Well, all of you have been
put in this situation where you have had to say, “I
can no longer go this way. If I go this way, the way
of the ofﬁcial Church, the way in my parish, with my
parish priest, if I go this way with my bishop, I do
wrong!” So you have to say, “No! I have to get out of
it!” Why? “Because I have to protect my faith, I have
to protect my Catholic status!” And that’s the way the
Society started.
You had seminarians who were going to seminary
in Rome, who came to the Archbishop in 1968 and
they said, “Please do something for us because here
in Rome they teach us heresies!” And that’s the way
the Society started. At ﬁrst, the Archbishop did not
want to start anything, because he was already old,
he was retiring from the Holy Ghost Fathers, but he
was so pushed by these seminarians that ﬁnally he
led them to Fribourg, in Switzerland. It seemed they
had already a Catholic University which was more or
less in order, and then the local bishop agreed, and
founded the Society of Saint Pius X in the diocese of
Fribourg, in Switzerland.
And then the Archbishop understood very well,
very quickly, that it would be impossible to send
these seminarians back to their dioceses as priests,
because they would be trapped themselves, this time
as priests. So that’s why he founded this congregation,
which is ours now, the Society, and that’s why we
have schools, again, to protect these children; our
Catechism classes, to protect against the novelties
which are spread around.
As an example, in Denmark, which is a very
Protestant country, you have only one Catholic
school. And there is a Catholic doctor who sends his
daughters there. And they are introducing something
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THE ANGELUS • April 2006

10
like sexual education, so he tried to do something
against it. He followed the hierarchical order, going to
the principal, the pastor, the chaplain, the director of
the school, and the bishop, yet nothing happened. He
went to Rome, and sent a dossier with the whole case,
begging Rome to do something.
After awhile the answer came from Rome,
from the Cardinal who is responsible for the family.
The response said, “Dear Dr. So-and-So, yes, these
documents which are presented to me are absolutely
unacceptable.” So, a clear condemnation of the thing
which is done in that school in Denmark. But then
in the second paragraph he wrote: “But I cannot do
anything against it. So what I am suggesting to you
is that you gather and join other faithful around you,
and you ﬁght the case.”
This doctor told me, it’s like the sheep who goes
to the shepherd and says, “There’s a wolf! There’s
a wolf!” and the shepherd says, “Yes, yes, there is a
wolf. But I cannot do anything. But you, the sheep,
get together, and attack the wolf.”
You can imagine what’s going to happen! What
would happen to this doctor if he were to continue
this ﬁght? Immediately the bishop would say “You
are disobedient, you have to obey, submit” and so on.
And if the case would go again to Rome, they would
say the same thing. We have witnessed it so many
times with priests who would try to say the Tridentine
Mass. The bishop condemns them, they make an
appeal to Rome, and Rome says, “Oh, the bishop
was right!” One of the beautiful cases was the case
of Fr. Somerville in Canada. Fr. Somerville is famous
because he was one of the ofﬁcial translators of the
new liturgy. And so one day he came back, thank
God, and then he became close to us. But then he
was summoned by the Bishop of Toronto and he was
threatened with suspension if he continued to work
with us. He continued, he was suspended. He made
an appeal to Rome, and Cardinal Castrillon answered
by saying, “Well, the bishop has the perfect right to
suspend you!”
The same Cardinal Castrillon told me that the
Pope and himself, and Cardinal Ratzinger, and
Medina, and Sodano, all agree that the old Mass has
never been abrogated, hence, that every priest can
say it. He continued by saying, “But you understand,
the Secretary, and the Under-Secretary, they don’t
agree. So you see, the Pope agrees, the Head agrees,
but the Secretary, and Under-Secretary don’t agree,
so we can’t give it to you.” He said that overtly, in
writing. “Some faithful and some bishops think that
to allow the old Mass would deprive the New Mass of
something and would hurt Paul VI and his Liturgy.”
So, some faithful and some bishops.
I thought that the head of the Church was the
Pope? I didn’t know that it was some faithful and some
bishops. But it shows you with what, and with whom
we have to deal. It’s not easy. And once again, there
is no other way than to take these protective measures
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just to survive. We have been using survival skills for
years; we just try to survive, period. We know that to
stay Catholic we have to stick to all the principles, we
cannot discuss any of these principles. But at the same
time, of course, we are not going to do anything, God
willing, that could hurt this faith! If we hurt our faith,
we condemn ourselves! We destroy ourselves! We cut
the only roots to heaven! We can’t, by any means.

The Work of Tradition
And so you have all these very, very striking,
surprising, admirable works of Tradition, like little
oases in the middle of a deluge, of an enormous
catastrophe of demolition, which is not only surviving
but gaining some strength. This is our story. On one
hand, we are condemned by the ofﬁcial Church; on
the other hand, this ofﬁcial Church in Rome starts to
say and to recognize that we bear good fruits. How
could it be? Words from Cardinal Castrillon: “The
fruits are good, hence, the Holy Ghost is there.” And
so I asked him, where do these good fruits come
from? No answer. Of course; how do you expect
him to answer? So we have different levels in our
perspective and view of what is happening now.
Let’s look at the past, just to show a little bit that
there are principles which we cannot discuss: we want
to be Catholic, we have to stick to it, and there is no
discussion about the Faith or about Doctrine. There is
nothing to compromise. Nothing.
So when we attack the Council, for example, it’s
because of the Faith. We see that at the Council there
were introduced gaps and holes. They made holes
in the boat, and you know what happens when you
make a hole in a boat–it’s going to sink. So when
they say to us, “Oh, you have a nice boat, so we’d
like you to join. But there’s only one condition. Make
a hole.” Do you think we’re going to say yes? By no
means! But that’s the problem. On the one hand,
they recognize that we have a nice boat, and they
would like to make use of it, because they see that
it is a good boat. It’s working, especially when they
compare it with their boat. But at the same time they
say, “Okay, yes, good, but...you have to recognize
the Council. You have to accept the New Mass.” And
these are precisely the holes! Thus we say no! And
that has been the story from the beginning, and that’s
the story which continues today.
If you look at the letters which have been
exchanged, for example, in 1982 and 1983, in the
beginning with Cardinal Ratzinger as head of the
Holy Ofﬁce in Rome–he already dealt with these
matters at that time! The Archbishop said, “Okay”;
the Pope said, “Okay, I want to solve the problem,
but you have to recognize the Council,” and so on.
But Archbishop Lefebvre said, “No, I can’t. But I
would be ready to say that I accept the Council in the
light of Tradition.” But then, of course, it appeared
that it was ambiguous, so the Archbishop then wrote,

11
“I have to make it more precise. When I say, in the
light of Tradition, I mean, it is Tradition which judges
the Council. That means, that what is in harmony
with Tradition, we accept. What is doubtful, where
we don’t understand what it means, then you take the
meaning which you have in Tradition. And when it
is clearly the contrary of Tradition, well then, forget
it. You kick it out.” That’s what the Archbishop wrote
to Cardinal Ratzinger. And Cardinal Ratzinger said,
“Well, the ﬁrst part (accepting the Council in the light
of Tradition), is okay. But the remarks which you
make afterwards, no, by no means, you can’t.” And
this is between 1983 and 1985. We are still there, still
the same.

Recent Developments
Let’s go to the audience, or just before the
audience. Is there any change? Is there anything
which has changed through these stages? There are
several things which, let’s say, have undergone a
certain development. For example, until the year
2000, Rome clearly attacked us. Ofﬁcially, once again,
(since there was individual calmness and friendliness),
the position was: “The Society? Bang.”
But since the year 2000, there has been a move
from Rome which is more positive. We had Rome
come to us and say, “We want to solve the problem.
We have a problem there, so let’s solve it.” It is

something positive. I don’t say totally positive, but
there is a certain good will on the side of Rome. And
we said, at that time, “Listen, we don’t trust you.
You’ve been so mean with us, we are not entering into
any kind of agreement. First, show that you really
want us. And we are not interested in words, we want
deeds. So give proof that we can trust you again.”
And so we proposed two things–we could have done
many more–but two things: give the freedom of the
Mass, and take away this scarecrow, these bad terms
which you use against us, like “excommunication,”
“schismatics,” and so on.
In fact, they have not touched us at all. The
Mass we have, so we don’t need permission. And
excommunication is like water on the feathers of a
duck. That means it makes us neither cold nor warm.
We don’t care, because we very well know that it is
not ﬁtting. And so it’s not for us, these conditions,
or preambles, if you want. We asked for signs to see
whether Rome was ready to do at least that, to show
that they are, in a certain degree, in favor of Tradition.
Because as long as Rome is not in favor of Tradition,
once again, not in words but in deeds, there will be no
agreement. It is impossible because it means suicide.
When we started with this, the answers from
Rome were, concerning the excommunication,
“We’ll lift it when we make an agreement.” About
the Mass, as I said, the Pope agreed, all the heads
of the Congregations, the Cardinals, agreed, but the

Br. Vincent prostrates himself while Bishop
Fellay implores the community to pray for
him, after which he prayed over Brother
asking God to accept his vow to persevere
in that community until death.
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THE ANGELUS • April 2006

12
Secretaries and the Under-Secretaries didn’t agree.
“So we cannot give it to you.” That was in the year
2000. Since then, and John Paul II, there were several
back-and-forth exchanges, but more or less always
with the same topic. That is, we continued to say,
“You are very kind to us, it is very nice for you to
think about giving us something like an apostolic
administration, but ﬁrst, you have to regain our trust.
And to regain our trust is not just to show us a nice
smile, but to show it in the Church, in the life of
the Church, that you really do want to reintroduce
Tradition.”

Problems with the Indult
Now, during these years, the Society of Saint Peter
and Ecclesia Dei had several experiences which are
interesting, and which are more or less the following:
In the beginning, Rome supported these groups
against us, trying to get the faithful and the priests
away from Archbishop Lefebvre. That’s why you
have the Society of Saint Peter, that’s their reason for
existing. And the bishops don’t like them. Many are
hard on them, and give them a hard life. And many
of the faithful who try to be under Ecclesia Dei have it
hard, with difﬁculties getting their Indult Mass. When
they get them, the bishops impose a lot of tremendous
conditions. I remember some years ago here, the
American bishops decided that you could have an
Indult Mass, but there had to be at least two hours
between the New Mass and the Tridentine Mass, with
no other sacraments: no Baptism, no Marriage, no
nothing with the Tridentine Mass. And even now,
more or less, there are very few exceptions. They
continue these kind of rules.
And so Rome was frustrated. I know of a case,
here in the States, where a group of 250 faithful asked
the bishop for the Tridentine Mass, and the bishop
refused, so they wrote Rome. Cardinal Castrillon
wrote ﬁve times to this bishop, saying, “Give them
the Mass.” And the bishop did not care. So you can
imagine how frustrated they feel in Rome. In Rome
they say, “I am the boss.” But the boss is not obeyed.
So around the year 2003, we had the beginning of
this reﬂection in Rome, which went: These traditional
people, even Ecclesia Dei, are good people. They are
Catholic. So it’s not correct to be so mean towards
them. So if the bishops really want to continue this
way, Rome was going to do something for them.
They were going to set up a structure for them. Of
course, the ﬁrst idea came with Campos. But the idea
continued, and last year, from 2004-2005, a Cardinal
studied these questions. His name was Ratzinger.
And the idea was to give to these groups what we
call an “apostolic administration.” So they have been
working now on these projects for several years–at
least two or three years now. It does not deal exactly
or directly with us, but it’s something which is in the
air. And then, in this atmosphere, came the death of
THE ANGELUS • April 2006 www.angeluspress.org

John Paul II and the election of a new Pope, a new
Pope who was known to have criticized the New
Mass, among the very few who did, and who has also
spoken in favor of the old, who has said that he could
not understand how one could prohibit the faithful
and priests from the celebration of the old Mass, that
that would be an abuse of power, and that he would
understand that these people would distrust Rome.

The Audience
So we have a new Pope. There were great
expectations everywhere. People said, with this Pope,
everything will change; we’ll go back to the old. A lot
of rumors went around. When I say “rumor,” watch
out. Let’s distinguish. I use the word “rumor” only by
speaking of things which come from Rome. It comes
from people who work in Rome. I don’t speak of what
is speculated by reporters, or from sedevacantist sides,
or anything else; only what we hear from people who
are working in Rome. So we heard pretty soon after
his election that the new Pope was going to give to
Ecclesia Dei these famous apostolic administrations.
There would be several, depending on countries and
continents, and this should arrive pretty soon, early in
autumn of last year.
We also heard that he would do something for the
Mass. Precisely one week before the end of the Synod,
someone who was working on the project, or very
close to it, was ﬁrmly certain that at the end of the
Synod, a text would be published allowing, at least
partially, the old Mass. And nothing happened.
Well, not exactly nothing. What happened
was a counteraction from the progressivists. And it
was a letter, written and signed by the Prefect and
the Secretary of the Congregation for the Liturgy;
a letter–they call it a note–a secret note. Of this
“secret note” we know that it has seven pages. And
we know that it says to the Pope, “You cannot allow
the freedom of the old Mass, because it has been
abrogated and abolished by the New Mass.” Now
author of this letter, Archbishop Sorrentino, the
Secretary for the Congregation of Divine Worship,
after this letter was kicked out of ofﬁce. He is now the
Archbishop of Assisi. But he is no longer in Rome.
Alas, the same Cardinal, just a few days ago,
again said the same, again attacked the Pope, trying
to prohibit and prevent the Pope from giving any
easiness to the old Mass, in the name of the new. So
we have these different rumors, and you see they
don’t happen. But it goes even further.
We heard that the Pope had entrusted a certain
number of experts in the Vatican to prepare two
liturgical “rites.” One will be named the “Modern
Rite” (“ritus modernus”): it will be the New Mass, with
some cosmetic changes. For example, in this new
Mass, the old Offertory will be “ad libitum”; that is,
the priest will be free to choose between the new
Offertory and the old. Some parts will be obligatory

13
in Latin. Two of the Canons will be suppressed
(numbers two and four). Then there will be the “ritus
Romanus,” the “Roman Rite,” which will be the old
Mass with some, we dare say, cosmetic changes. That
is, no prayers at the foot of the altar, the universal
prayer before the Offertory, no last Gospel, and
perhaps the new lectionary.
So what is this? How far are we bound to believe
this is true? I may say about all these things which
come from Rome as “rumors,” that you should take
them this way: as true ideas, projects, and nothing
more, as if they came from somebody who is thinking,
reﬂecting, having ideas about what to do? “We could
do that, we could do this–let’s try to reﬂect a little
bit on that,” and no more. So if these projects one
day become reality? Wait and see. Don’t believe that
because you hear the rumor in Rome, “this” will
happen tomorrow. Don’t believe that. In part, it’s
absolutely normal that these people in Rome, who are
the authorities, reﬂect on possible projects.
Now, of course, in the process, we have big
problems. And these problems mean that there is a
ﬁght in the Church. You have different tendencies.
You have the progressivists and the conservatives,
and then in Rome you have also other “things” like
lobbies, the Maﬁa, and Freemasons. It’s a whole
combination of various things which make these ideas
or projects run into counterprojects, different in each
city. Things are put into drawers and so on.
Don’t rush after these rumors! Stay on the ground,
and say, “I want to see it before I believe it.” Play St.
Thomas the Apostle. “I will believe it when I touch
it.” And the same for things about the Society. There
are a lot of things going around, a lot of rumors.
When I hear through the newspapers like you do
what Rome is planning, what is true in it? I have
absolutely no idea. And now they speak of “apostolic
administrations” and so on. I will tell you what I know
about it.
There were four individuals during the audience
with the Pope. The Pope, Cardinal Castrillon, Fr.
Schmidberger, and myself. That’s all. No secretaries,
nobody else. And the Pope started by saying, “So,
where do we stand?” And he directly asked Cardinal
Castrillon. You have to understand, it’s not just a
meeting where everybody can speak. It’s really the
Pope who gives the words to you, and that’s it. If
you want to say something, you may try to raise
your hand. And so, we had the Pope asking Cardinal
Castrillon, “Tell us where we stand.” And Cardinal
Castrillon started by saying, “Holy Father, everything
is ﬁne, everything is ready. It’s up to you now to
make the regularization of the Society. Everything is
ﬁne. Perfect. And I have given to you a proposal of
structure for the Society.” Now it was the ﬁrst time
that I heard, for years, that Rome had prepared a
structure for the Society!
Years before, of course, they had proposed
something, but the last time I’d heard about it was in

2003. Now, two years later, I hear the Cardinal has
given a ﬁrm proposal to the Pope about a structure!
I had absolutely no idea about it! And the only
thing I know now about it, is that it is a structure!
And something more, because the Pope answered,
“Yes, I have entrusted this study to the Commission
[those are his words, in fact, it is a council] for the
Interpretation of Legislative Texts, to be sure that
this structure does correspond to the spirit of the law
and of the Church.” Now to use such words means
certainly that it is something new. Maybe analogical,
corresponding to something which already exists,
but if there’s something already existing, the Pope
does not need to make a further study by the experts
in Canon Law to make sure that this idea does
correspond to the spirit of the Church and of the law.
So that means that Rome is thinking about proposing
something to us, a structure, which is supposed to
protect against...whom?
Let’s suppose the bishops. That’s the only thing
I know. And then the Pope turned to me and said,
“You. What do you think?” Well, I had to put on the
brakes! In fact, the Good Lord gave us a tremendous
hint before the audience. A Cardinal told us the way
the Cardinals prepare their audiences. When they go
to meet the Pope, they send him a note a few days
before, about one page, with the main topics that
they are going to speak about. This is so the Pope
can already think about it, and already reﬂect on
solutions. And that’s precisely what we did.
A few days before the audience, we sent a note
to the Pope and we are absolutely certain that the
text went into his hands, and that he read it. This
note had the major points we wanted to discuss with
the Pope. I may say about these points that almost
none of them was spoken about during the audience.
But it doesn’t matter! The thing was brought to the
Pope! In a certain way, I may say, the note was ten
times more important than the audience itself. In the
note, we ﬁrst, quoting the Pope himself, manifested
the enormous, tremendous, dramatic crisis in the
Church. Then we presented the Society, its works,
and presented it as a solution to get out of this crisis.
But then we said, “It’s not possible for the time being
if you do not make changes in the Church.” I used the
words “Catholic Life”–normal, Catholic, traditional
life is made impossible in the ofﬁcial Church. And
so, if you want an agreement, you must ﬁrst make
it possible again. And so then we insisted on the
freedom of the Mass, taking away the hellish halo.
When he asked me, “Where do we stand?” I went
back to this idea that Catholic life is made impossible.
It’s no longer possible to have a simple, Catholic
life today, in the “normal,” ofﬁcial Catholic Church,
because the bishops take care of making it impossible.
And if somebody wants, let’s say, to live a Catholic
life, he is hindered on all sides. If a priest tries to
establish in his parish the good things, after a few
years he is removed, and the next one comes, and,
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THE ANGELUS • April 2006

14

Brother extends his arms in the form of a cross and chants three times:
“Suscipe me Domine secundum eloquium tuum, et vivam; et non confundas me
ab expectatione mea ”–“Receive me Lord, according to thy word, and I shall
live: and let me not be confounded in my expectation” (Ps. 118:116).
bang, demolishes everything. The bishop tries to set
up a seminary, to make it a little bit more normal, but
in between this nightmare, comes the next bishop,
and he smashes this seminary. All of what I tell you
now are examples which I have present in my head.
Really and literally, the Catholic life is made
impossible in the ofﬁcial Church. Some people
sometimes are maybe offended when we tell them
that, but I say, look yourself. Where do you go to
Mass? Can you say that you can go, with blind eyes,
to your parish? The law of the Church tells you that
the normal place where you have to go on Sunday to
your Mass, to fulﬁll your Sunday obligation, should
be the High Mass of your parish. Look at even the
conservatives–I don’t even speak of the Ecclesia Dei
people, just the conservatives, those who want to just
be seriously Catholic. They have to choose! They can
no longer go with blind eyes to their parish church,
because it can be anything: a clown Mass, a children’s
Mass, a jazz Mass, a Coke Mass, I don’t know what,
but everything. Everything. Even then they have to
make choices. Of course, they don’t go far enough;
but that’s as I say: normal Catholic life is made
impossible. And it is a strong argument, because
it’s an enormous reproach to Rome, but that’s the
situation.
So I said, “We can’t say just now that we are sorry
for everything. First, these changes must happen in
the Church. We have to go step by step: reintroduce
THE ANGELUS • April 2006 www.angeluspress.org

the old Mass, take away all these negative attitudes
towards Tradition, and then we will see.”
Then the Pope started to speak, and he said
that he saw see three levels of difﬁculty between the
Society and Rome. And he started with the relation
to the Pope, the submission to the Pope. And he said
this submission to the Pope has to be effective to be
real. And then he immediately switched to the idea
of the “state of necessity.” He said, “You base your
activity on a state of necessity in the Church. But you
are not right. You do not have the right to base your
activity on a so-called ‘state of necessity.’” And then
he gave the reason, and said, “Because I try to solve
the problems.” These are his words. But with these
words you have the wonderful expression, from the
mouth of the Pope himself, that indeed, there is a state
of necessity–because there are problems, if he tries
to solve them! And while he tries, they are not yet
solved. So the problems are real, and they are now,
and they are not yet solved. So while he does tell us
that he tries to solve them, well, we are still stuck in
the process that they are not yet solved.
And guess what? In his own, words, after having
said that, he ﬁnished by saying, “Well, we should see
whether there is or not a state of necessity in France
and Germany.” So he himself opened the possibility
of the reality of this state of necessity in France
and Germany. But now if you compare France and
Germany to the other countries in the world, well

15
really, I don’t see much difference. And so, we have
to thank the Holy Father, because he does recognize
that there is a state of necessity in the Church! Even
if he says we don’t have the right to base our activity
on it, he himself says that it is so. It is interesting,
anyway.
Then he went to the second level. And he said
that the second level is the acceptance of the Council.
He said, “The venerable Archbishop Lefebvre
signed a formula where he said that he recognized
and accepted the Council in the light of Tradition.”
Clearly meaning with this, that we needed to do the
same. Then he continued by saying, “You do not
have the right to attack the Council interpreted in
the light of a reporter, or theologians. No. It must be,
and it’s the only acceptable interpretation, the light
of the living Tradition. What matters is the intention
of the Fathers, the intention of the text.” These are
his words. Now the problem is that what we attack is
not crazy interpretations; of course, they have to be
attacked also, but what we point out is precisely the
text. When the Pope says that’s what matters, that’s
precisely what we attack. When we say, these precise
texts are at the least ambiguous; and we expect from
the Council clear texts, not ambiguous ones, we
expect that these texts do not need interpretation
because they are clear enough.
But when you look, you have something
very interesting in the Council. In the dogmatic
constitution about the Church, Lumen Gentium,
they speak about collegiality. Now, the text of the
Council is so ambiguous that the Pope (Paul VI)
had to write a note that is joined to the texts of the
Council, a note that you are supposed to read before
you read the texts of the Council so that you have a
right understanding of the text. The ofﬁcial name of
this note is “Nota Prævia,” a previous note, a note
you have to read before. That’s already sufﬁcient to
express one point, that’s not the only one, but that’s
the ambiguity of the text!
If the text is ambiguous, whoever would have
read it would have understood it in a certain way.
If the text is clear, well, at least the majority would
have understood it correctly. If it is ambiguous, no,
because you will come on the text and say, what
does it mean? And you will say, maybe it means this,
maybe it means that. And if you have a progressivist’s
heart, an inclination to new things, you will say, “Ah,
it means this!” And you will have another who will
say, “No, it means that!” And you have a ﬁght! So why
make a text which is not clear? It’s a waste! A waste
of time, of energy, of everything. And that’s already, I
may say now, the least objection we have against the
Council. We have much more severe criticisms; that’s
already one level.
And of course, there are some errors. One of
them is what we call Religious Liberty. The Pope
clearly indicated in the words he used during the
audience, that for him, it is impossible to accept

someone in the Church, at least in his, let’s say,
modern way of looking at the Church, who would
not accept the Council. He was very clear. When I
heard these words there, and especially one word
afterwards, for me, the big ﬁght we will have under
this pontiﬁcate will be the ﬁght about the Council.
I do consider that the ﬁght for the Mass is more
or less already won. Even though right now we don’t
yet have it, there are enough elements here to see,
to understand, that we will get it. We will get the old
Mass. It may take some time, maybe some ﬁghting,
but the very point of the ﬁght will be the Council. And
why? Because we have a Pope who is convinced of
the goodness of the rightly interpreted Council. More
than that. His way of thinking is such, that for him,
there is no other alternative than the Council.
In his speech to the Cardinals of the 22nd of
December, he expressed it. I think we can consider
that this address given to the Curia for the New
Year’s greeting is deﬁnitely the most important text
of his whole pontiﬁcate until now, much more so
than his encyclical about God’s charity. There is
no comparison. This text of December 22, 2005,
deals with the Council and the interpretation of the
Council.
In the ﬁrst part, the Pope condemns the
interpretation of the Council which has been done
in the name of the spirit of the Council. He says that
no, that is a wrong interpretation, it cannot justify the
novelties in the name of the spirit of the Council. That
cannot be.
It’s a good point, but it is not enough. Anyway,
you could consider that with this he is condemning
about three quarters of what has been done in the
Church under his predecessors, and maybe it is
correct to say so; I am not absolutely sure. But what
does he really mean? Obviously, he does reject too
modernistic, too progressivistic behaviors in the
Church which pretend to be based on the Council.
That is clear. But then he explains that it was a duty
of the Church to redeﬁne, to explain, to study, a new
relation between the world and the Church, and
that’s the work of the Council. He gives three levels
of new relations between the Church and the world:
1) the relation between modern philosophy and the
faith, or, if you will, science, which is broader than
just philosophy; 2) the relation between the Church
and the modern State, what we call religious liberty;
and the third level will be the relations between
the Church and the other religions, and especially
Judaism.

The Underlying Philosophy
In his speech, he develops to a certain extent
the second point, religious liberty, and to a certain
extent the relations between faith and science, and
not so much the third point, the relations between
the Church and the other religions, but the theory
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THE ANGELUS • April 2006

16
is the following (which is very interesting because it
shows us what kind of philosophy the present Pope
has). He says, that in the 19th century, the world was
very radical against the Church, and so the Church
had to take a very radical position against the world;
hence, the very strong condemnations of the modern
world which you ﬁnd in the 19th century, like the
condemnation of liberalism in Quanta Cura and the
Syllabus; modernism, by St. Pius X; Mirari Vos, etc.
And then he continues by saying: But you see, after
that, there is a change; there is an evolution in this
modern world. The modern world is no longer so
radical against the Church; now the modern State is
much nicer than before, and he gives as an example
the state of the United States—the relation between
the State and religions. He says that before, science
pretended to have all the answers about God and so
on, but now it does recognize that it does not have all
the answers.
What kind of philosophy do we ﬁnd there? In
fact, we see clearly that the present Pope does not
have the philosophical formation which we may call
the classical formation, the formation which was given
in the Church before, which relies on Aristotle and
the Greeks, and on the Middle Ages and St. Thomas,
and which is a very realistic philosophy. At the level
of knowledge classical, Thomist philosophy tells us
that God has made us in such a way that for us to
know something, it has to go through our senses.
Whatever we know comes from the senses. But then
we have in our mind a wonderful capacity which
“reads into” the thing and which discovers the essence
of the thing, and forgets about all the accidents,
that is, the things which are contingent. The mind
leaves these aside and goes straight to the thing. An
example: You show a child a tree, a pine tree. You tell
him, “That’s a tree.” The little child will say, “Tree,”
and then the little child will turn around and he will
see an apple tree. The shape is totally different; that
is, the accidents, the things that come to our senses,
are totally different—the leaves, the shape, the fruits
are different. But the little child turns to this and says
“Tree!” Why? Because his intelligence has gone to the
essence of the thing. That is what is wonderful with
the way God has made our intelligence. It works like
that: we call it abstraction. We abstract from all these
things which fall under the senses, and we go straight
to the essence, to the thing that does not change. All
that falls under the eyes changes: color, shape, ﬂower,
fruit.
Now, our present Pope has another understanding
of knowledge. For him, we are not able to separate
the essential from these contingent things, which
makes it that when we speak of something, we have
to constantly be adapting to the new situation. That is
why what the Church said in the 19th century about
the situation of the world was ﬁne, but for that time.
And now, as today, we are living at a time when the
contingencies are different, so we can no longer apply

what the Church said two centuries ago. We have to
speak in a new way, in the new circumstances, with
the new contingencies. With this, you become crazy.
But you have a very direct application on the
very matter of religious liberty. In an incident
which happened between Archbishop Lefebvre and
Cardinal Ratzinger, Archbishop Lefebvre said, “How
do you expect us to follow this religious liberty, as
it says exactly the opposite of what Pope Pius IX’s
encyclical Quanta Cura said?
And Cardinal Ratzinger answered, “But Your
Excellency, we are no longer at the time of Quanta
Cura.” You see, Quanta Cura was good for the time of
Quanta Cura, but now we are no longer at that time.
And Archbishop Lefebvre answered: “If things
are so, I’ll wait for tomorrow.”
Because tomorrow will no longer be the time of
Vatican II. And in a certain way, that is the argument
that I am already using now. I say, “Vatican II, that’s
the past. It’s 40 years ago, now it’s something new,
something else...so let’s go back to the old.”
But that is dramatic, you know.

Living Tradition
It goes even further. When he speaks of Tradition,
he speaks of living Tradition. Now, what is living
Tradition? That is himself. Living Tradition, that is
the Pope, who says today what he understands from
yesterday. He makes or gives today a re-reading of
the past: that is living Tradition. Can you understand
that with this we are stuck. There we have a big
problem, because when we say “the Council in the
light of Tradition,” we mean that it is the past, what
the Church has always said, the things which do not
change, which have always been like that, that is
going to judge what the Church says today. And we
have a Pope who says, “No, Tradition is the way the
magisterium does explain what the Church has always
believed, but today.” So, once again, it’s him.
I just guess that you understand that we have a
big problem there.
If I may say, the thing is very complex. Why?–
because on the one hand, we have a Pope who
clearly does or would like to see some improvement
in the liturgy, and, who knows, most probably, a
reintroduction of the old Mass. I would summarize it
by saying, that his heart is conservative. He is a man
who is serious about his faith; he is somebody who
has a very Catholic family origin, and who is happy
with it, and who dreams of it. He is a man who likes
discipline, order. He likes religious to have their
religious habit and their religious rule. At the same
time, his mind is modernist and liberal; and there we
have a big problem.

(continued on p.25)
THE ANGELUS • April 2006 www.angeluspress.org

VELLETRI, NEAR ROME, ITALY

J

Traditional
Religious
Orders

DISCIPLES OF
THE CENACLE

17

ust as the Sisters of the Society
of Saint Pius X sprang from a
girl’s desire to do something for
God, the Church, and Catholic
Tradition, so too did the Disciples of
the Cenacle. And just as the Sisters of
the Society have as a mission to assist
the Society priests in their ministry,
so too do the Disciples of the Cenacle
have a part to play in the Society’s
work in Italy...today. But let us start
with ﬁrst things ﬁrst.

18

Spirituality
The Disciples of the
Cenacle form a small
community of Sisters who,
“hid with Christ in God” (Col.
3:3), wish, as far as possible, to
conform their existence to the
teaching of the Redeemer, who
is “the Way, the Truth, and the
Life” ( Jn. 14:6). Putting their
trust in Divine Providence,
they attend ﬁrstly to their own
spiritual formation in order
to increase their interior life
ever more and more so as to
be able to carry out their work
fruitfully. They like to keep
in mind the sublime words of
Jesus:
Fear not little flock, for it
hath pleased your Father to give
you a kingdom. Sell what you
possess....Make to yourselves
bags which grow not old....
Behold the birds of the air...
the lilies of the ﬁeld....For your
Father knoweth that you have
need of these things (Mt. 7:2534).

Community with
Bishop Fellay
Printing SiSiNoNo

Their founder was Fr.
Francesco-Maria Putti, a
Roman priest and beloved
spiritual son of Padre Pio,
who guided and formed them
until his death in 1984 (see
p.24). In a memorandum he
wrote at the time (April 10,
1965) to the Vicar General of
the Archdiocese of Salerno,
the ancient Italian coastal city
south of Naples, Don Putti
himself relates how the ﬁrst
cenacle came to be:
In carrying out my ministry,
I had the opportunity to get
to know and to guide some
high school girls and university
students, as well as some who had
already completed their studies.
Some of them expressed their
desire to be able to consecrate
their lives to the Lord in a life of
prayer and action which could
be of service to the Church.
After much reflection, and
after having sought advice and
having verified the existence
of a common aspiration among
them, a small group of these
young women was formed. The
THE ANGELUS • April 2006 www.angeluspress.org

general purpose of the community is to hasten the advent of the kingdom of God,
the sanctiﬁcation of its members, and that of obtaining, through the communion
of saints, the sanctiﬁcation of the priestly ministry and the conversion of sinners.
The speciﬁc end is the exercise of whatever activity may be of service and at the
same time consonant with a life of prayer, action, and sacriﬁce in a cenacle of
reparation.

19

After a Clothing Ceremony

o

He desired that the Disciples of the Cenacle
sacriﬁce themselves for holy Church,
particularly for priests, under the protection
of the Prince of the Apostles, St. Peter, the
ﬁrst Pope. Don Putti desired for them a
great union with the redeeming passion of
our Lord, like the Blessed Virgin Mary on
Calvary, for only in this manner can their
action be fruitful: “Unless the grain of wheat
falling on the ground die, itself remaineth
alone. But if it die, it bringeth forth much
fruit” ( Jn. 12:24-25).

Newly
Professed
It was Don Putti who chose for them their distinguishing
name: the Disciples of the Cenacle, which is taken from
the Acts of the Apostles (1:14): “All these were persevering
with one mind in prayer with the women, and Mary the
mother of Jesus, and with his brethren.” By choosing this
theologically signiﬁcant designation, he desired to evoke
the essence of Catholicism, the heart of the Church: the
holy sacriﬁce of the Mass was instituted together with the
priesthood in the Cenacle, and it was there that the Holy
Ghost descended upon the Apostles and the Blessed Virgin
Mary, and whence the Apostles emerged fortiﬁed and
conﬁrmed. Don Putti desired that his Sisters, like the holy
women with Mary and the Apostles, meditate upon and love
the mystery of the love of Calvary renewed mystically but
actually on our altars in the celebration of the holy Mass.

A Good Start
In June of 1965, the ﬁrst four Sisters
began their life in common. Soon, the
Archbishop of Salerno, Demetrio Moscato
(1945-68), gave them a big house near
Salerno, and Don Putti drafted a general
statute, which he sent to the archbishop
on November 21, 1966, communicating
to him that, despite numerous difﬁculties,
they already had ten vocations. Thus, at the
very time when the disastrous post-conciliar
period was starting, there began in the
Church a new institute, the Disciples of the
Cenacle.

Peregrinations
Almost all of the ﬁrst young Sisters
taught in public schools. Their teaching
supported the little community, and it
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THE ANGELUS • April 2006

20
was a form of apostolate. Having
left their respective families, they
perfected their consecration to the
Lord by uniting the contemplative
life to an active life. Their families,
in general, could not understand
their sudden resolution, which struck
them as a lark, a leap from a safe
and respectable situation into the
unknown.
During summer vacations and
whenever they could, the Disciples
went to San Giovanni Rotondo in
order to nourish their souls near
Padre Pio. They had permanently
rented a little house near the
monastery. Don Putti wanted the
Disciples to live as long as possible
at San Giovanni Rotondo so that
they could beneﬁt from the example
of Padre Pio’s life, his merits, his
confessional, and his counsels. From
Padre Pio and Don Putti, the Sisters
learned to love the Holy Sacriﬁce of
the altar. Following their founder’s
directives, they remained faithful to
the Latin Mass.
At Salerno, the community’s
life went serenely along, even in its
relations with the archbishop. But
soon, clouds formed....Don Putti
informed the Sisters of the difﬁculties
which had arisen in their relations
with the archbishop. He explained
to them the reasons compelling them
to leave for another region. After
a year at Grottaferrata, a walled
medieval town a short distance south
of Rome famous for St. Nilus Abbey,
and two years at Frascati, also in the
Roman region, the little community
settled on the Via Anagnina near
Grottaferrata in 1971 and remained
there until 1983. But Don Francesco
wanted to acquire a house. A
donation from a monsignor, a very
eminent benefactor, enabled them to
acquire their present house at Velletri,
not far from the SSPX’s priory at
Albano Laziale south of Rome, an
acquisition that was completed on
October 4, 1984, by the purchase of a
neighboring parcel with a little house
which they renovated for use by the
community’s chaplains and guests.

THE ANGELUS • April 2006 www.angeluspress.org

Girls’ Camp
Catechism Class

Don Putti’s Legacy
On December 21st of that same year, having put in order the
temporal and spiritual affairs of his Sisters, Don Putti died. In their
Rule he left the testament of his faith and love and an antidote
against the current deceit of a “false Catholicism, easy and devoid of
sacriﬁces,” whereas “the very essence of sacriﬁce is and will always be
a life centered on the cross.” It alone prepares the life of supernatural
charity without which “the Catholic life, let alone the religious life,
does not exist.”

21

PADRE PIO’S PRAYER
Stay with me, Lord, for it is necessary to have Thee
present so that I do not forget Thee.
Thou knowest how easily I abandon Thee.
Stay with me, Lord, because I am weak and I need Thy
strength, that I may not fall so often.
Stay with me, Lord, for Thou art my life,
and without Thee, I am without fervor.
Stay with me, Lord, for Thou art my light,
and without Thee, I am in darkness.
Stay with me, Lord, to show me Thy will.
Stay with me, Lord, so that I hear Thy voice
and follow Thee.
Stay with me, Lord, for I desire to love Thee very much
and always be in Thy company.
Stay with me, Lord, if Thou wish’st me
to be faithful to Thee.
Stay with me, Lord, for as poor as my soul is, I want it to
be a place of consolation for Thee, a Bethany.
Stay with me, Jesus, for it is getting late and the day
is coming to a close. Life passes; death, judgment,
eternity approach. I fear the dark, temptations,
desolation, crosses, sorrows. How I need Thee,
my Jesus, in this night of exile! Let Eucharistic
Communion be the light that dispels the darkness, the
strength that sustains me, the unique joy of my heart.
Stay with me, Jesus. I do not ask for divine consolations,
because I do not deserve them; but the gift of Thy
Presence, oh yes, this I do ask of Thee!
Stay with me, Lord, for it is Thee alone I seek,
Thy love, Thy grace, Thy will, Thy heart,
Thy spirit, because I love Thee and ask no other
reward than to love Thee more and more. Amen.
(This is the prayer of Padre Pio that Dom Putti
would give to those whom he met for the ﬁrst time.)

Don Putti bequeathed to his Sisters the press
apostolate of SISINONO, a periodical he started in 1975
[an English-language edition has been published by
Angelus Press since 1994–Ed.], by which he sought to
check “the growing desert of the true faith, whether in
those who should be responsible for teaching it, or those
who should learn it.” As stated in the editorial of the
inaugural issue, SISINONO’s mission was “the thankless
task of going against the ﬂow by saying yes to everything

which, according to the Catholic Faith, was
taught by the Apostles, and by saying no without
equivocation or compromise to everything
that seeks to supplant it.” So it was that during
the 1980’s the Sisters began to leave the ﬁeld
of education in order to better help Don Putti
in his SISINONO apostolate. After his death, a
priest of the SSPX became editor-in-chief of
the periodical, which continues to be published
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THE ANGELUS • April 2006

22

Recreation
monthly. Under the direction of the editor-inchief, the Sisters do all the production work for
SISINONO from copy editing and typesetting
to mailing. They currently print 3,500 copies
monthly, but to this number must be added
the circulation of English, French, and Spanish
editions of this unique newspaper which is read
in the Vatican and worldwide.

Religious Life
After Don Putti’s death, the community
was assisted spiritually by the Society of Saint
Pius X and by Msgr. Francesco Spadafora (d.
1997), a renowned exegete and professor at the
Pontiﬁcal Lateran University. The chaplaincy of
the community is still provided by priests of the
Society of Saint Pius X, while authority in the
community is vested in the Mother Superior,
who is responsible for decisions over their daily
life and apostolic works.
The Disciples of the Cenacle are a religious
institute of simple vows. Postulants must be of
age in order to be accepted, although exceptions
may be examined by the Mother Superior
and her council. The Community does not
require a dowry or a speciﬁc trousseau; each
one may bring what she can for her use. Good
health is not necessary; however, persons with
nervous conditions or contagious disease are
not accepted. The postulancy lasts one year
and the novitiate, two, at the end of which the
aspiring religious makes her ﬁrst temporary
vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Vows
are renewed annually; perpetual vows are
made the tenth year. At present, there are nine
professed Sisters in the community, two novices,
and one postulant. While Italian remains the
common language, the Disciples became an
international community when in 1993 a young
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23

DAILY SCHEDULE
6:00 AM

Rise

6:20 AM

Morning offering, Lauds, meditation,
and holy Mass

8:10 AM

Breakfast

12:00 PM Recitation of the Angelus and
a short visit to the Blessed
Sacrament

Englishwoman knocked on the convent’s door.
Subsequently, other vocations have come from
Australia (1), Gabon (2), the Philippines (1), and
Poland (1).

Daily Life
From their morning offering till their nocturnal
visit to the Blessed Sacrament, the day of the
Disciples of the Cenacle is centered round the little
chapel and Jesus present on the altar. Throughout the
day, the Sisters take turns in spending a half an hour
in adoration before the Blessed Sacrament in order
to keep our Lord company. Prayer alternates with
work throughout the day, as the Sisters undertake
the usual tasks associated with the life of a religious
community: sacristy, cleaning, cooking, laundry,
and gardening. In addition, the Sisters are open to
any kind of external work or profession which is
compatible with the consecrated life. Work is carried
out in silence, with a stricter silence being observed
from Compline till after breakfast.

1:00 PM

Dinner and recreation

3:40 PM

Way of the Cross
or second meditation

6:00 PM

Rosary and Vespers

8:00 PM

Supper and recreation

9:00 PM

Compline

The Rule does not exclude any ministry
that Divine Providence might indicate and that
circumstances call for. Currently, the Disciples of
the Cenacle devote themselves especially to the
apostolate of the press, which is focused on defending
orthodoxy in light of Tradition and the Magisterium.
Some Sisters devote themselves to teaching the
traditional catechism; others offer spiritual assistance,
and aid and comfort to the elderly; still others make
traditional liturgical vestments. Several Sisters are
helping the SSPX Italian District at the priory at
Rimini, northeast of Rome on the Adriatic Sea, and
they also help with the SSPX’s annual girls’ summer
camps.
Interested ladies are invited to send their inquiry to:
Reverend Mother Superior Maria della Croce
Le Discepole del Cenacolo
Via Madonna degli Angeli 78
I-00049 Velletri, Roma, Italy
Tel: [39] (06) 963-5568
(Add six hours to EST for deciding when to call.)
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THE ANGELUS • April 2006

DON FRANCESCO PUTTI (1909-84)
24

Founder of the Disciples of the Cenacle and
the anti-modernist newspaper SISINONO
Roman by birth, Don Francesco was
a spiritual son of Padre Pio, who guided
him towards the priesthood. His was a
late vocation. Having worked in business
until the age of 40, he began his studies
for the priesthood and was ordained in
1956. After many vicissitudes with the
ecclesiastical authorities before and after
his ordination, he settled at Avellino,
and devoted himself to the ministry of
confession, of which he was a highly
appreciated apostle.
In 1963, he publicly exposed the
presence of microphones in the places
where Padre Pio heard confessions in
order to deliver the holy stigmatist from
persecution by Rome. The scandal was
enormous, because, on the one hand,
placing microphones in the confessional
was a sacrilege, and on the other because
of the fame of the Capuchin’s holiness.
During this period he founded the
Religious Congregation of the Disciples of
the Cenacle. In 1968, Don Putti became
Roman once again, settling in the Eternal
City.
To counteract the growing inﬂuence
of modernism over the clergy of Rome,
even at the highest levels, he founded, in
1975, the anti-modernist review SISINONO
for the defense of the Catholic Faith. It
was an era of big battles that would upset
more than one Vatican prelate. In 1979,
the Vatican’s newspaper, L’Osservatore
Romano, attacked the periodical’s editor in
a libelous article entitled “Sower of Bad
Seed.” Don Putti defended the reputation
of his review by taking the director of
L’Osservatore Romano to the courts of the
Italian Republic, where he obtained a
judgment against him. It was the ﬁrst
time in the 121 years of its existence that
L’Osservatore Romano was condemned
to publish an excerpt of the judgment
convicting its director of libel.
With his review, which became
increasingly known and read not only at
Rome but also in the major part of the
Catholic world, Don Francesco became,
in the words of Archbishop Lefebvre, a
herald of the Catholic Faith.
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25

(continued from p.16)

The Christian State
In this speech to the Cardinals on the 22nd of
December, he is going to express to the Cardinals
that the Council has assumed one point which is
essential to the modern State, which means the State
is impartial towards religions. It is neutral—no rule
for Christ in the State; the State is neutral for any
religion. He will say that, of course, the State should
respect good values, but what does this mean. Oh,
we go much further. He says that the Church, by
making the State “laicized” or secularized and no
longer confessional, is going back to the Gospel; that
the Church is now in harmony with the Gospel. He
is striking out, he is condemning 1,700 years of the
Catholic Church. The Church for 1, 700 years has
always promoted the Catholic State. When you look
at the Apostles, the missionaries, consider what they
did: they went to the king. They tried to convert the
head, knowing very well that when they converted
the head [of State], the head would issue laws which
would help all their subjects to convert, at least to
behave better, and, who knows, to go to heaven. That
is what they did.
When you have a Catholic State, you mean a
State which binds itself to follow and to apply God’s
law, to respect the law of God, which means that,
at the temporal level, which is the level of human
behavior, the State will organize itself in such a way
that it will help souls to make it to heaven. I come
from a little Swiss canton, the Republic of Valais. It
was a Catholic State—not Switzerland, just the Valais.
I remember that the police would intervene and
separate people who were living together without
beneﬁt of marriage. I remember the time when a
judge overruled the policeman who had ﬁned a
woman for wearing a mini-skirt. Now, when the judge
overruled the policeman’s decision, this created a
great scandal. But you see with these little examples
how a State which respects God’s law can indeed do
a lot, tremendously, to help souls go to heaven. And, of
course, if the State does not care about God’s law, it
is going to make any kind of law and give all kinds of
permissions which will lead people straight to hell.
So when you look at this aspect, it is not difﬁcult
to understand why the Church, during centuries and
centuries, insisted on saying that the State must be–as
far as it is possible, of course–Catholic. If you have a
State where there is a great mixture of religions, and
if by saying that now the only religion which will be
accepted is the Catholic religion and you would start
a civil war, of course you will not do it. Of course, you
have to be sure that the civil order will be respected.
That is what we call tolerance, and the Church has
always taught tolerance. It is perfectly understandable,
but nevertheless, you tend, you try to work for the
ideal, and you don’t give it up. It is very clear: Our
Lord is the King of kings; He is the one who gives
authority to any authority here on earth. Call them
Nero, Stalin, Gorbatchev, Bush—anyone; St. Louis,

king. All of them, Catholic or not, they have received
their authority from God, and the very day they die,
they have to go before their Judge to give an account
of the way they have made use of this authority. And
this Judge is Jesus Christ, their King.
So I really don’t understand how suddenly a
Pope can demolish all this teaching of the Church.
But that is what he does in this speech, on a matter
which was the determining point for Archbishop
Lefebvre about the episcopal consecrations of 1988.
Archbishop Lefebvre asked of heaven signs: Should I
or should I not consecrate bishops. And he said that
he got two signs from heaven: one was [the October,
1986, prayer meeting of religions at] Assisi, and the
other one was the answer to our questions on religious
liberty.
Now, once again, you see here that we are stuck.
We are facing an enormous problem, because it is
clear that for the present Pope this new behavior is
self-evident; and for us, the Christian State is also selfevident. Something which is self-evident is something
which you do not demonstrate, you just accept it as
such. And so here we have a very serious conﬂict.

An Illustration
And you can see, as I have shown you, the
consequences are enormous, absolutely enormous.
I’ll give you another example now. It is a little bit
tricky; I hope that you understand it. Right now,
in the Islamic States, there is a big uproar, because
in Denmark, about ﬁve months ago, a newspaper
produced some offensive drawings insulting to
Mohammed. There has been an enormous uproar,
to such an extent that the Islamic States as State
came together–for example, the Arabic League,
and made an ofﬁcial protest against Denmark and
Europe, saying, that they cannot allow it, that they
must punish the newspaper, the cartoonist, and so on.
In this incident, you have the State intervening in a
religious matter, and bringing to bear all its weight to
protect and defend a religious interest. Of course, in
this case it is clearly abusive. But I use this example
to show you that, if you have a Catholic State, the
Catholic State will stand up to defend the interests of
the Catholic Church.
I’ll give you an example. Right now in Sudan,
there is a persecution by the Moslems against
the Catholics, and they make slaves, hundreds of
thousands of slaves. If there were a true Catholic
State, this Catholic State would stand up and say
to Sudan, “Stop that.” Or in China, there is a
persecution against the Catholics, too. You see, as
there is no Catholic State, nobody will stand up to
defend the Catholics’ interests. And, excuse me, when
you look at the politics that are driven now by the
authorities of the US, you will see that they intervene
on certain topics which are maybe genuine, but they
do not intervene on others, and you wonder why.
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THE ANGELUS • April 2006

26
In the US, you ﬁght for freedom; so why then does
nothing happen about Sudan, which is making slaves.
Curious, isn’t it? And we could go down a long list;
we could take Zimbabwe, the way President Mugabe
is behaving, killing his own people by famine, and
so on—an unbelievable State. So why in this country
does nobody react. I use all these examples to try to
explain to you how deep it can go, and how important
it is to have a State which puts itself under the law of
God.

The Two Powers Distinguished
That does mean, and the Church has always said,
that you have to distinguish between the powers. The
State has to deal with the things of this earth, and the
Church with the things of heaven. So it is not for the
Church to dictate where the roads should go; that is
a matter for the State. But in the things which deal
with human behavior and salvation—for example
marriage—then deﬁnitely the Church has something
to say; on the subject of education, the Church has
something to say.
And here we have a big problem, because the
present Pope is totally modern there.

Back to the Report
on the Papal Audience
So I go back to the audience now. We are still
at the second point of the audience, where he says

that the Society has to accept the Council in the
light of the living Tradition. And we are not going to
accept the Council in the light of the living Tradition.
We are not, because we can’t.
Then he spoke about the third level of problems.
He said that he understands perfectly that the
Society needs a structure which is going to protect
the members. In other words, the Pope understands
that we are not going to mingle or mix with any of
the craziness that is happening all round. In other
words, he understands that he has to give us a state of
exemption, which means that we would not be under
the authority of the bishops. So you would have a
kind of structure of your own.
If you look at the structure Rome is reﬂecting on
giving us, I think it is good. I think I would go so far
as to say that we could not dream of a structure that
would be so good. But that is not the problem; the
problem is not there. The problem is in that they want
us to swallow the poison of Vatican II. The structure
is good, but what help can we ﬁnd if we get a superb
structure, let’s say a Rolls Royce, but if at the same
time we must take in the Rolls Royce and eat rotten
apples. Well, I prefer my two-horse car with good
apples than the poison, because if I take the poison, I
will be killed; and then what about the Rolls Royce?
It doesn’t matter, you see.
The whole thing is about this poison that they
want us to swallow, and we say, “No, we are not going
to swallow it.”
You may say that that was the audience. Then a
few days after, as I saw that we are going to have a big

The Bishop vesting Br. Vincent in his “novum vestimentum” symbolizing his
death to the world. This garment will serve as his burial cloth when he dies.

THE ANGELUS • April 2006 www.angeluspress.org

s
.

27
problem with the Council, I wrote a letter to the Pope.
It was on the 3rd of September, just four days after
the meeting, in which I said that I thanked the Holy
Father for this audience, but I did not see how I could
agree with his vision of the Council. And I added a
comment on the new Catechism which he has just
published, the Compendium of the Catechism. He
was pretty mad... He spoke of arrogance bordering
on sectarianism. Okay. Anyway, we put our points
down, and then Cardinal Castrillon answered that
letter in the name of the Pope, saying, Why did you
write that to the Pope? The Pope receives you kindly;
he points out the problems, and then you throw them
in his face. And I thought, what am I going to tell
him; how shall I answer him. I told him, “Because I
do not want to have the same problems of conscience
that the majority of the priests of the Society of Saint
Peter and three fourths of the Campos priests have.
That’s why I wanted to say clearly that I do not agree
with the Council.” And then, in this same letter, the
Cardinal invited me to a meeting.
This meeting happened on the 15th of November.
That is the only time I have met with Cardinal
Castrillon after the audience, so all the other rumors
are just rubbish. It was about two and a half hours
of discussion, which was for once, I may say, very
interesting. The other times it looked like you would
not discuss. This time, at least, I was able to develop
our positions. Then we had a meal together, again
for another two and a half hours, so the whole lasted
ﬁve hours. What was very important was the two and
a half hours at the beginning. And there I again used
the line, “We cannot trust you.” That was the start.
You propose, you want an agreement. The Pope says
I agree, we have to go by steps but that we should go
speedily. It is very clear that the Pope would like to
solve the problem, regularize our situation.
Why? There are probably different elements. One
of them is that he does recognize that the situation
of the Church is a mess, that it is a catastrophe. He
does recognize that the Society has good fruits, and
he would deﬁnitely like to use the Society to help in
this mess. This side, I think, cannot be questioned.
At the same time, he clearly, deﬁnitely wants us to
swallow the Council. So what we try to tell him is
that we cannot have both. If we have fruits now, it is
precisely because we get rid of the Council; and if we
swallow the Council, we swallow the poison and we
are down to your situation. And so it does not work.
But the problem is that for the time being he has not
yet understood that.
But he is in a hurry. Maybe because of his age,
maybe because he has something on the conscience
from the time of the consecrations (that is a maybe
from me; I’m not sure—I could imagine). Maybe also
because we are bothering them. We are all around
the world; we are very active, and we cause trouble.
We are troublemakers in many countries of the world,
and we are terrorizing the bishops. They retaliate with

the usual measures like excommunication and so on,
and we don’t care, ﬁrst; and then we continue. And
then even worse, what they have just said to condemn
us is publicity for us. So it drives them crazy, and they
complain to Rome. And so you can understand that
Rome says, let’s make a deal with them. If we have
a deal, we will be able to control, at least to a certain
extent, their movements. So you have this part, too.
And I deﬁnitely do not exclude that reﬂection in their
eyes.

No Solution for Now
And that is why we are not ready for a practical
solution. We tell them so, and that is what I told
Cardinal Castrillon: Look now, precisely now we
have faithful, we have religious, we have priests who
join us. They join us because they are facing scandals;
they are facing situations which are unbearable for
them. They come to us; we warn them. We say, “If
you come to us, you will be censured, you will be
excommunicated; you will be labeled with all kinds
of bad words; you will lose your friends; and you
will have a very hard time.” And nevertheless the
faithful, the priests prefer to join us rather than to
stay where they were. How can they expect that
suddenly, through some kind of agreement, they are
brought back to the situation they have just left. It is
impossible. Of course we don’t want it.
And so I told him, you ﬁrst have to make this
Catholic life possible again. And for this you need to
condemn what is wrong at the level of the Faith, of
the teaching of the universities and in the seminaries;
at the level of behavior and discipline; at the level of
the liturgy. At all these levels, you have to take things
in hand: that means to condemn what is wrong, and
to make it known. And then I continue by saying
that even that is not sufﬁcient. You also have to be
positive, favor the traditional life, promote it.
And then I continue by saying, “Now, forget one
instant that we exist. Forget about the Society. You
are still in the same state of catastrophe. So solve your
problem; forget about us. You solve your problem,
and we are no longer a problem, because we are not
the problem. Of course, these are hard words, but
then I continued speaking about the Mass. I said,
“The Tridentine Mass is mighty, it is powerful, and
the Church needs that Mass to re-center the Church
on Christ, on sacriﬁce, on the spirit of the cross. And
that is not happening with the New Mass; you will
never have it.”
Then I went on speaking of the Council. I said,
“Good point, you do recognize that there is a crisis
in the Church. We do, too, but we do not agree
about the cause. We say it is the Council. You say,
it is the world. And at that moment, I gave a letter
from Archbishop Lefebvre, the letter to Cardinal
Ottaviani of 1966, written one year after the Council.
Archbishop Lefebvre describes how with the
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THE ANGELUS • April 2006

28
novelties in the Council, you will have the damage
in the Church which we call the crisis in the Church.
One year after the Council, Archbishop. Lefebvre
described the whole situation which we have now. We
could not have a better proof of the correctness of our
stand.
I made a lot of comments there; it took a lot of
time. I also said that in the Council there are a lot of
ambiguities. I said, some points are erroneous, but
there are also all these ambiguities, all these openings
to error. And, well, I did not say this to the Cardinal,
but I say this to you, to try to help you understand
this point. When they say that the crisis is caused
by the world, of course it is. When you look at the
situation of the world and at the situation of the
Church, you will see that there are many things in
common. And it is true, it is the spirit of the world
which has entered the Church. This is true, and we
are not going to say the contrary. But this is as normal
as opening the doors and the windows when a storm
is coming in. What do you do at home when you see
the storm coming in? You go all around the house and
you close as quickly as possible all the windows and
doors, because you know very well that if you leave
them open, the storm will come and the water will
come in and there will be a beautiful mess. Now, if
you come home and you see this mess, all the carpet
wet and so on, you don’t say that it is the storm that
did it. You say, “Who left the windows open?”
The same example can be given with the hen
house. You come in in the morning and you see so
many hens killed, just feathers here and there. And
you say, it is the fox. Of course it is the fox, but once
again, the farmer does not say it is the fox. He says,
“Who left the gate open?”
And the same holds true with the Council—it
is exactly this. At the beginning of the Council, in
the very ﬁrst speech of John XXIII, he said, that he
wanted to open the windows of the Church to the
world, to have some fresh air from the world. There
is even a comment from Paul VI, who said, we were
expecting fresh air, and the storm came in. There you
have it.
It is so simple You want to stop it? Shut the door.
Close the door to this spirit of the world. That is
precisely what they don’t want to do. And so as long
as they continue this way, the Church will be in a bad
state. That is what we say: Stop it. Stop this; go back
to the normal state of the Church, and don’t let the
spirit of the world go round.
That’s about Rome and the present situation.

The Very Latest News of Rome
And now you have probably heard that last
Monday (Feb. 13) there was a meeting in Rome of the
Pope with the Cardinals speaking about us. I don’t
know more about it than you; the only thing I know
is that, that very morning the secretary of Cardinal
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Castrillon telephoned Menzingen to ask for prayers
for this meeting. That is as much as I know. I know
that Cardinal Arinze did attack us, or attack the Mass.
And that’s all; I don’t know more than you, and I
have nothing to do with it. I am not involved. It is
pure reﬂection from the Vatican. And as things are,
we have to count on probably one day Rome will
come to us with a proposal, and in the package will be
a stipulation that you will have to accept the Council,
and we will say no. And we will be back to the
present state. That is the situation. Probably they will
try to make us the bad guys again, those who don’t
want to agree and so on, but, okay, we will make our
stand. Every day we take it as it comes.

Reason for Continued
Conversation with Rome
Now we could say, but is it worth it to discuss
things with Rome if things are like that? Is it worth
it? Yes and no. If I weigh everything, I come to a yes,
not directly, but indirectly. You see, the Church is in a
bad state, and those who govern the Church are used
to this state of affairs. If nobody is presenting them
other thoughts on this situation, they will be stuck in
it and they will not get out of it. So, we do it; at least
we try to do it. We try to present them another view
on the situation. “Listen, you say that the world is
the cause of this problem, but look around. And if it
is really the world, then why do you keep it? Take it
away!” That is a way to express it.
So we try to work on them, and of course work
on the level of thinking takes an enormous amount of
time. You can never think what these high people in
Rome will say. They will think about it for hours and
hours, if they think about it at all. And maybe one day
they will say, “Okay, let’s try to ﬁnd a way.” It is in
God’s hands. What we see: we see some fruits, not so
high, but on the level of bishops, of priests. There are
several bishops who deﬁnitely do agree with us, even
in Rome, but they don’t dare speak, and they know
that the day they speak, they are out. So it is to their
conscience. There we cannot go any further. We try to
provide them with thoughts, reﬂections, then it is up
to them to act. We can’t take their place.

The SSPX on the
Horizon in France
Another development is a development in France,
which is very interesting. In the last two years, but
even now in the last month, there is a very, very new,
curious development in the behavior, I don’t say of
all the bishops, of course not, but of a certain number
of bishops in France towards us. And what is it? It is
a kind behavior. It is bishops who would like to speak
with us. And when we speak with them, we clearly
see that they still think as before. They don’t agree

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with us, so why do they speak with us? The President
of the Bishops’ Conference said roughly the following:
About ten years ago the French bishops thought that
Tradition would die out as their supporters died off;
that it would be ﬁnished. Now they are obliged to
include the Society in their ecclesiastical horizon. So
to say, we are now part of the picture. In other words,
they can no longer erase us. They already understand
that they are obliged to deal with us. Already we
represent a force which is not yet very mighty, but
which is strong enough so that they cannot just ignore
it; they have to deal with it.
It is true that the situation in France is a bit
special. You have ﬁrst the Church there which is
rapidly going downhill. Then you have the problem
of the Moslems, whose numbers are rapidly
increasing in France. And then you have the problem
of the State, the State which, for the last two years,
has been putting pressure on the bishops, saying, “We
pay for the maintenance of your churches, which are
empty. But this is the taxpayers’ money; this is the
community’s money for your buildings which should
serve for the community, so do something.”
Now the bishops are coming to realize that they
are facing a very big problem, because what are the
community groups which are interested in these
churches? The Moslems. And so, looking at all that,
at least some of them are starting to get close to us.
Even some of them is a start, and we shall see if there
will be a development there, if they start to offer us
churches, if they start to open some churches for
ceremonies, as they have done at Lourdes, where we
now have access to the great basilica for the Mass; at
Lisieux also. But that is only after 20 years of ﬁght.
Every year we had a ﬁght, and now they no longer
ﬁght. They just leave them open to us. It does not
mean that they agree with us. Let us say that they turn
to a more peaceful co-existence. That is the progress I
can see in France. It is an interesting one.
There is another reason for this change in their
attitude, which is also interesting. They realize that
Rome is about to give an apostolic administration
to the Ecclesia Dei people. That means that the
French bishops will lose control over a certain part
of Catholic life in France, precisely that part of this
life which is the most alive. Even if they have not
understood everything, the Ecclesia Dei faithful at least
want some seriousness in their religion, and they still
have some life in comparison with the dying, modern
Church. So now the French bishops realize that,
if Rome is going to impose this, then these people
will be out, exempt from their jurisdiction, and so
they are going to lose a part of this already dying
Church. So what they are trying to do now is to set
up, themselves, something for the Indult, traditionalminded people in such a way as to make what Rome
is planning unusable or unnecessary.

Opening Moves of a
New Era in the Combat
Till now the French bishops have been very
strong against anything traditional. But now, because
of this move of Rome, they are changing tactics in
order not to lose everything there. In other words,
if I may say, speaking of tactics, obviously we are
entering into a new time. Till now, you had a time
of trench warfare, so to speak. You had two positions
which were more or less ﬁxed, we on our side and
Rome on its side, and we would shoot back and forth
at one another. In Rome and in France, where we see
it even more clearly, they are now starting a new way
of war, which is a war of movement. They come to
us; they start to make proposals to us. In France, they
are doing all these types of movements, and we have
to watch out, because this is creating a new situation,
a new situation where we have to do some moves,
too—but, of course, correct moves understood in the
sense of tactics or strategy of combat. We are not in a
peaceful situation; we are in a situation of war. But if
we just stay in our position while the other is making
a move, you may have what you had in France during
the battle of Caesar against Vercingetorix at Alesia.
The Gauls were encamped on a high position. And
what did the Romans do: they encircled it and starved
the Gauls, and the Gauls lost. They lost because they
stayed in their camp without trying to escape.
And so what we have to do now is to reﬂect, to
imagine ways of attacking, if I may say so, the other
in order to counter these maneuvers. You see, the idea
of making an apostolic administration for the Indult
Mass groups is that Rome will try to give them more
weight, more importance, because they will then
have bishops against the Society, making available an
easier traditional life, with bishops and so on, than the
one we have because we are constantly attacked and
so on. The goal is to try to offer the faithful an easy
situation, and to try to draw away from us once again
the faithful and the priests. So we have to see how we
are going to counter that.
There is the good Lord, and He is taking care
of us, but if I describe this to you it is so that you
understand that we are entering a new situation,
which will probably be harder than before, harder
because Rome is getting closer to us, in part with
good intentions and in part with bad intentions. So
we have to be very, very cautious in this situation. But
the problem is that this new situation can easily create
confusion. What we have experienced these last few
months is a very beautiful example of this possibility
of confusion, with rumors ﬂying around: Bishop
Fellay is going to sell out the Society, they are going
to make an agreement, they are going to compromise,
and this and that. What can I say? Keep your feet on
the ground; don’t let your emotions get your heart
going up to 150 beats a minute because you have
heard something from the Internet. Please don’t. We
have a telephone line. We want to be Catholic. It has
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THE ANGELUS • April 2006

30
been 40 years that we have been ﬁghting, and we are
not going to give up now just like that.
But, once again, it is a long ﬁght. In the long run,
we know that we shall win, because God is on our
side. It is so obvious, it is so clear. Every day we see it.
Every day we see all these graces, all these blessings
that are poured out by God on us in all the places. It
is so obvious. Our Lord said that if you want to know
the quality of a tree, you look at the fruits. Now, once
again, even Rome says the fruits are good. We are
not making a self-appraisal. It is always dangerous to
estimate yourself, because easily we could....We don’t
want to put something like that on our heads. No, we
are not going to do so, but we look at objective things.
We know that there is a promise of God: “The gates
of hell shall not prevail,” so one day the Church will
come back to Tradition. What we all have to do is our
best. This day may come and soon.
I say our best, at our place, with sacriﬁces,
prayers, and also by defending the faith with studies.
We try to go on the dogmatic level, bringing to Rome
and to the bishops reﬂections on the present teaching
of the Council, hoping that one day we will see
something better. I don’t think it will be tomorrow,
but it is in God’s hands. God knows how, and He is
the one who leads things. We must remember that.
When we see such a crisis, such a catastrophe, we
forget that there is a God above, a God who cares, a
God who has not lost control. We have the impression

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that everything goes wild, and we see God sleeping
in the boat, peaceful. Yes, He is in peace, because
all these things in comparison and in relation to our
salvation are only superﬁcial in the sense that they
can be dangerous, but as long as we stick to God, God
is going to use them for our salvation. He is going to
turn these things unto good for His glory and for our
merit and our salvation. And so what matters is that
we stick to God at all costs, whatever happens. That
is the thing. All the rest–diplomacy, politics, and so
on–comes after. What matters is that we be saved, that
we go to heaven. That is what matters. And we know
that for that, we have to stick to the principles, and
that is it. So don’t be disturbed if they tell you that
you are schismatics, you are excommunicated, you
are this and that; don’t be disturbed. You do exactly
what your forefathers did, what the saints did to go to
heaven. How could that road be suddenly closed? it is
the way to heaven.
We know also that those who want to be pious
and faithful to our Lord shall suffer persecution. St.
Paul said it; it is a promise of our Lord: You want to
be faithful? You will have to suffer something. Great.
It is a sign, it is a good sign. The day we have no
crosses any more and no problems is the day we shall
have to worry. As long as we have crosses, blessed be
God.
This conference was transcribed by Angelus Press and reviewed by H.E. Bishop
Fellay before publication.

31

On January 20, in the weekly La France Catholique,
Fr. Jacques-Marie Guilmard announced the opening
of the diocesan proceedings for the beatiﬁcation of
the Servant of God, Dom Prosper Guéranger.

THE BEATIFICATION OF
DOM GUÉRANGER
On January 20, 2006, in the weekly La France
Catholique, Fr. Jacques-Marie Guilmard announced
the opening of the diocesan proceedings for the
beatiﬁcation of the Servant of God, Dom Prosper
Guéranger (1805-75) by Msgr. Jacques Faivre, Bishop
of Le Mans, on December 21.
Following a request from the monks of the
Solesmes Congregation about 20 years ago to
undertake preparatory steps towards the opening of
the cause, Dom Jacques de Préville was appointed
postulator in 1999. Last December 21st, the bishop
of Le Mans recognized Fr. de Préville’s request as
“legitimate.” The bishop named Canon Olivier Le
Jariel examining magistrate and Canon Jean Lusseau
promoter of justice, as well as Fr. Camille Moulin
notary, and Fr. Yves Thorin assistant notary. Fr.
Jacques-Marie Guilmard announced that the tribunal
thus formed,
...has the mission of listening to the witnesses called to
speak about Dom Guéranger, man of God, a holy man of
faith, and in particular, speaking of the habitual recourse
they have to the intercession of the Servant of God, and the
eventual favors received....The theological, philosophical,
canonical–with his bishop Msgr. Bouvier–and liturgical
controversies in which Dom Guéranger was involved, are
no longer prevailing, but that takes nothing away from his
greatness in the spiritual realm. On the other hand, we
may well think that it is the future demonstration of his
sanctity which will compel us to rediscover the validity of
his struggles, and to give them back their true doctrinal and
spiritual import....

[T]he mystical life of Dom Guéranger was characterized
by a profound equilibrium, coming to him, no doubt,
from the grace which caused him to refer in all things to
the Incarnation, where Divinity and the most ordinary
humanity meet. It is as a result of this that his vision of the
natural and of the supernatural world was totally balanced,
as were his relationships with others. Dom Guéranger
would make an effortless transition from the most solemn
liturgical prayer to the real problems of the everyday
life of his monastery with a thousand different events of
a community to run.... [Dom Guéranger] received the
devotion to the Sacred Heart at a very early age, through
a particular grace at the Visitation monastery at Le Mans,
[and] a short time after, in the same place, it was faith in the
Immaculate Conception of Our Lady which forced himself
upon him as an evidence.
In all things he wished to serve the Church which he
knew through her history and her liturgy and from intimate
conversation with God: he could speak with depth and
unction of the love of the Church; he knew how to make the
liturgy understood and loved, as the prayer of the Church
with Her Divine Spouse.

Lastly, we must remember that “his patience
was such that his trials were not known even to his
entourage. Was this not the fruit of an heroic virtue?
His health was ruined following cholera which he
contracted in Rome in 1837. Money worries troubled
him right from the beginning to the very end of his
monastic life. Tragic betrayals and desertions. Above
all worries for the universal Church, as much for the
faith as for discipline.”
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The announcement of the opening of the cause for Dom
Gueranger’s beatiﬁcation presents The Angelus with the
oppurtunity to share with its readers the treasures of The
Liturgical Year. His magnum opus may be intimidating due to its
size, but the incomparable riches that can be found within its
pages makes it an invaluable work. We here present a few brief
sections of The Liturgical Year’s section on Lent.

THE HISTORY OF LENT

THE forty days’ fast, which we call
Lent, is the Church’s preparation for
Easter, and was instituted at the very
commencement of Christianity. Our blessed
Lord Himself sanctioned it by fasting forty
days and forty nights in the desert; and
though He would not impose it on the world
by an express commandment (which, in that
case, could not have been open to the power
of dispensation), yet He showed plainly
enough, by His own example, that fasting,
which God had so frequently ordered in
the old Law, was to be also practised by the
children of the new.
The disciples of St. John the Baptist
came, one day, to Jesus, and said to
Him: “Why do we and the pharisees fast
often, but Thy disciples do not fast?” And
Jesus said to them: “Can the children of
the Bridegroom mourn, as long as the
Bridegroom is with them? But the days will
come, when the Bridegroom shall be taken
away from them, and then they shall fast.”
Hence we ﬁnd it mentioned, in the
Acts of the Apostles, how the disciples
of our Lord, after the foundation of the
Church, applied themselves to fasting. In
their Epistles, also, they recommended it
to the faithful. Nor could it be otherwise.
Though the divine mysteries whereby our
Saviour wrought our redemption have been
consummated, yet are we still sinners: and
where there is sin, there must be expiation.
The Apostles, therefore, legislated for
our weakness, by instituting, at the very
commencement of the Christian Church,
that the solemnity of Easter should be
preceded by a universal fast ; and it was
only natural that they should have made
this period of penance to consist of forty
days, seeing that our divine Master had
consecrated that number by His own fast.
St. Jerome, St. Leo the Great, St. Cyril of
Alexandria, St. Isidore of Seville, and others
of the holy fathers, assure us that Lent was
instituted by the Apostles, although, at the
commencement, there was not any uniform
way of observing it.
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The whole subject of Lent has been
so often and so fully treated that we shall
abridge, as much as possible, the history
we are now giving. The nature of our work
forbids us to do more than insert what is
essential for entering into the spirit of each
season. God grant that we may succeed in
showing to the faithful the importance of
the holy institution of Lent! Its inﬂuence on
the spiritual life, and on the very salvation,
of each one among us, can never be overrated.
Lent, then, is a time consecrated in
an especial manner to penance; and this
penance is mainly practised by fasting.
Fasting is an abstinence, which man
voluntarily imposes upon himself as an
expiation for sin, and which, during Lent,
is practised in obedience to the general
law of the Church. According to the actual
discipline of the western Church, the fast
of Lent is not more rigorous than that
prescribed for the vigils of certain feasts,
and for the Ember Days; but it is kept up
for forty successive days, with the single
interruption of the intervening Sundays.
We deem it unnecessary to show the
importance and advantages of fasting. The
sacred Scriptures, both of the old and new
Testament, are ﬁlled with the praises of this
holy practice. The traditions of every nation
of the world testify the universal veneration
in which it has ever been held; for there is
not a people or a religion, how much soever
it may have lost the purity of primitive
traditions, which is not impressed with this
conviction–that man may appease his God
by subjecting his body to penance.
St. Basil, St. John Chrysostom, St.
Jerome, and St. Gregory the Great, make
the remark, that the commandment put
upon our ﬁrst parents in the earthly paradise
was one of abstinence; and that it was by
their not exercising this virtue, that they
brought every kind of evil upon themselves
and upon us their children. The life of
privation, which the king of creation had
thenceforward to lead on the earth (for the
earth was to yield him nothing of its own
natural growth, save thorns and thistles),

33
was the clearest possible exempliﬁcation of the law of
penance imposed by the anger of God on rebellious
man.
During the two thousand and more years, which
preceded the deluge, men had no other food than the
fruits of the earth, and these were obtained only by the
toil of hard labour. But when God, as we have already
observed, mercifully shortened man’s life that so he
might have less time and power for sin, He permitted
him to eat the ﬂesh of animals, as an additional
nourishment in that state of deteriorated strength.
It was then, also, that Noe, guided by a divine
inspiration, extracted the juice of the grape, which thus
formed a second stay for human debility.
Fasting, then, is abstinence from such nourishments as these, which were permitted for the support
of bodily strength. And ﬁrstly, it consists in abstinence
from ﬂesh-meat, because this food was given to man
by God out of condescension to his weakness, and
not as one absolutely essential for the maintenance
of life. Its privation, greater or less according to the
regulations of the Church, is essential to the very
notion of fasting. For many centuries eggs and milkmeats were not allowed, because they come under
the class of animal food; even to this day they are
forbidden in the eastern Churches.
In the early ages of Christianity, fasting included
also abstinence from wine, as we learn from St.
Cyril of Jerusalem, St. Basil, St. John Chrysostom,
Theophilus of Alexandria,1 and others. In the west, this
custom soon fell into disuse. The eastern Christians
kept it up much longer, but even with them it has
ceased to be considered as obligatory.
Lastly, fasting includes the depriving ourselves
of some portion of our ordinary food, inasmuch
as it allows only one meal during the day. Though
the modiﬁcations introduced from age to age in the
discipline of Lent are very numerous, yet the points
we have here mentioned belong to the very essence of
fasting, as is evident from the universal practice of the
Church.
It was the custom with the Jews, in the old Law,
not to take the one meal, allowed on fasting days,
till sunset. The Christian Church adopted the same
custom. It was scrupulously practised, for many
centuries, even in our western countries. But about the
ninth century some relaxation began to be introduced
in the Latin Church.

THE MYSTERY OF LENT

We may be sure that a season so sacred as this of
Lent is rich in mysteries. The Church has made it a
time of recollection and penance, in preparation for
the greatest of all her feasts; she would, therefore,
bring into it everything that could excite the faith of
her children, and encourage them to go through the

arduous work of atonement for their sins. During
Septuagesima, we had the number seventy, which
reminds us of those seventy years of captivity in
Babylon, after which God’s chosen people, being
puriﬁed from idolatry, was to return to Jerusalem and
celebrate the Pasch. It is the number forty that the
Church now brings before us: a number, as St. Jerome
observes, which denotes punishment and afﬂiction.
Let us remember the forty days and forty nights
of the deluge sent by God in His anger, when He
repented that He had made man, and destroyed the
whole human race with the exception of one family.
Let us consider how the Hebrew people, in punishment for their ingratitude, wandered forty years in
the desert, before they were permitted to enter the
promised land. Let us listen to our God commanding
the Prophet Ezechiel to lie forty days on his right side,
as a ﬁgure of the siege which was to bring destruction
on Jerusalem.
There are two persons in the old Testament who
represent the two manifestations of God: Moses, who
typiﬁes the Law; and Elias, who is the ﬁgure of the
Prophets. Both of these are permitted to approach
God: the ﬁrst on Sinai, the second on Horeb; but both
of them have to prepare for the great favour by an
expiatory fast of forty days.
With these mysterious facts before us, we can
understand why it is that the Son of God, having
become Man for our salvation and wishing to subject
Himself to the pain of fasting, chose the number of
forty days. The institution of Lent is thus brought
before us with everything that can impress the mind
with its solemn character, and with its power of
appeasing God and purifying our souls. Let us, therefore, look beyond the little world which surrounds
us, and see how the whole Christian universe is, at
this very time, offering this forty days’ penance as
a sacriﬁce of propitiation to the offended Majesty
of God; and let us hope that, as in the case of the
Ninivites, He will mercifully accept this year’s offering
of our atonement, and pardon us our sins.
The number of our days of Lent is, then, a holy
mystery: let us now learn, from the liturgy, in what
light the Church views her children during these
forty days. She considers them as an immense army,
ﬁghting day and night against their spiritual enemies.
We remember how, on Ash Wednesday, she calls Lent
a Christian warfare. In order that we may have that
newness of life, which will make us worthy to sing
once more our Alleluia, we must conquer our three
enemies: the devil, the ﬂesh, and the world. We are
fellow combatants with our Jesus, for He, too, submits
to the triple temptation, suggested to Him by Satan in
person. Therefore, we must have on our armour, and
watch unceasingly. And whereas it is of the utmost
importance that our hearts be spirited and brave, the
Church gives us a war-song of heaven’s own making,
which can ﬁre even cowards with hope of victory and
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34
conﬁdence in God’s help : it is the ninetieth Psalm. She
inserts the whole of it in the Mass of the ﬁrst Sunday of
Lent, and every day introduces several of its verses into
the ferial Ofﬁce.
In order to keep up the character of mournfulness
and austerity which is so well suited to Lent, the
Church, for many centuries, admitted very few feasts
into this portion of her year, inasmuch as there is
always joy where there is even a spiritual feast. In
the fourth century, we have the Council of Laodicea
forbidding, in its ﬁfty-ﬁrst canon, the keeping of a feast
or commemoration of any saint during Lent, excepting
on the Saturdays or Sundays. The Greek Church rigidly
maintained this point of lenten discipline; nor was it
till many centuries after the Council of Laodicea that
she made an exception for March 25, on which day she
now keeps the feast of our Lady’s Annunciation.
The Church of Rome maintained this same discipline, at least in principle; but she admitted the
feast of the Annunciation at a very early period, and
somewhat later, the feast of the Apostle St. Mathias,
on February 24. During the last few centuries, she has
admitted several other feasts into that portion of her
general calendar which coincides with Lent; still, she
observes a certain restriction, out of respect for the
ancient practice.
The reason why the Church of Rome is less severe
on this point of excluding the saints’ feasts during Lent,
is that the Christians of the west have never looked
upon the celebration of a feast as incompatible with
fasting; the Greeks, on the contrary, believe that the
two are irreconcilable, and as a consequence of this
principle, never observe Saturday as a fasting-day,
because they always keep it as a solemnity, though
they make Holy Saturday an exception, and fast upon
it. For the same reason, they do not fast upon the
Annunciation.

PRACTICE DURING LENT

Having spent the three weeks of Septuagesima in
meditating upon our spiritual inﬁrmities and upon the
wounds caused in us by sin, we should be ready to
enter upon the penitential season which the Church
has now begun. We have now a clearer knowledge of
the justice and holiness of God, and of the dangers
that await an impenitent soul; and, that our repentance
might be earnest and lasting, we have bade farewell
to the vain joys and baubles of the world. Our pride
has been humbled by the prophecy, that these bodies
would soon be like the ashes that wrote the memento
of death upon our foreheads. During these forty days
of penance, which seem so long to our poor nature,
we shall not be deprived of the company of our Jesus.
He seemed to have withdrawn from us during those
weeks of Septuagesima, when everything spoke to us
of His maledictions upon sinful man, but this absence

THE ANGELUS • April 2006 www.angeluspress.org

has done us good. It has taught us how to tremble at
the voice of God’s anger. “The fear of the Lord is the
beginning of wisdom”; we have found it to be so: the
spirit of penance is now active within us, because we
have feared.
Thus does our Saviour go before us on the
holy path of Lent. He has borne all its fatigues and
hardships, that so we, when called upon to tread
the narrow way of our lenten penance, might have
His example wherewith to silence the excuses, and
sophisms, and repugnances, of self-love and pride. The
lesson is here too plainly given not to be understood;
the law of doing penance for sin is here too clearly
shown, and we cannot plead ignorance: let us honestly
accept the teaching and practise it. Jesus leaves the
desert where He has spent the forty days, and begins
His preaching with these words, which He addresses to
all men: “Do penance, for the kingdom of heaven is at
hand.” Let us not harden our hearts to this invitation,
lest there be fulﬁlled in us the terrible threat contained
in those other words of our Redeemer: “Unless you
shall do penance, you shall perish.”
Now, penance consists in contrition of the soul,
and mortiﬁcation of the body; these two parts are
essential to it. The soul has willed the sin; the body has
frequently co-operated in its commission. Moreover,
man is composed of both soul and body; both, then,
should pay homage to their Creator. The body is to
share with the soul either the delights of heaven or
the torments of hell; there cannot, therefore, be any
thorough Christian life, or any earnest penance, where
the body does not take part, in both, with the soul.
But it is the soul which gives reality to penance.
The Gospel teaches this by the examples it holds out
to us of the prodigal son, of Magdalene, of Zaccheus,
and of St. Peter. The soul, then, must be resolved to
give up every sin; she must heartily grieve over those
she has committed; she must hate sin; she must shun
the occasions of sin. The sacred Scriptures have a word
for this inward disposition, which has been adopted by
the Christian world, and which admirably expresses
the state of the soul that has turned away from her
sins: this word is conversion. The Christian should,
therefore, during Lent, study to excite himself to this
repentance of heart, and look upon it as the essential
foundation of all his lenten exercises. Nevertheless, he
must remember that this spiritual penance would be a
mere delusion, were he not to practise mortiﬁcation of
the body. Let him study the example given him by his
Saviour, who grieves, indeed, and weeps over our sins;
but He also expiates them by His bodily sufferings.
Hence it is that the Church, the infallible interpreter
of her divine Master’s will, tells us that the repentance
of our heart will not be accepted by God, unless it be
accompanied by fasting and abstinence.
How great, then, is the illusion of those Christians,
who forget their past sins, or compare themselves with
others whose lives they take to have been worse than

35
their own; and thus satisﬁed with themselves, can see
no harm or danger in the easy life they intend to pass
for the rest of their days! They will tell you that there
can be no need of their thinking of their past sins, for
they have made a good confession! Is not the life they
have led since that time a sufﬁcient proof of their solid
piety? And why should anyone speak to them about
the justice of God and mortiﬁcation? Accordingly, as
soon as Lent approaches, they must get all manner of
dispensations.
The Church sees this frightful decay of supernatural energy; but she cherishes what is still left, by
making her lenten observances easier, year after year.
With the hope of maintaining that little, and of seeing
it strengthen for some better future, she leaves to the
justice of God her children who hearken not to her
when she teaches them how they might, even now,
propitiate His anger. Alas! these her children, of whom
we are speaking, are quite satisﬁed that things should
be as they are, and never think of judging their own
conduct by the examples of Jesus and His saints, or by
the undeviating rules of Christian penance.
It is true, there are exceptions; but how rare they
are, especially in our large towns! Groundless prejudices, idle excuses, bad example, all tend to lead
men from the observance of Lent. Is it not sad to hear
people giving such a reason as this for their not fasting
or abstaining–because they feel them? Surely, they
forget that the very aim of fasting and abstinence is to
make these bodies of sin (Rom. 6:6) suffer and feel.
And what will they answer on the day of judgment,
when our Saviour shall show them how the very Turks,
who were the disciples of a gross and sensual religion,
had the courage to practise, every year, the austerities
of their Ramadan?...
Let, then, the children of the Church courageously
observe the lenten practices of penance. Peace of
conscience is essential to Christian life; and yet it is
promised to none but truly penitent souls. Lost innocence is to be regained by the humble confession of
the sin, when it is accompanied by the absolution of
the priest; but let the faithful be on their guard against
the dangerous error, which would persuade them
that they have nothing to do when once pardoned.
Let them remember the solemn warning given them
by the Holy Ghost in the sacred Scriptures “Be not
without fear about sin forgiven” (Ecclus. 5:5)! Our
conﬁdence of our having been forgiven should be in
proportion to the change or conversion of our heart;
the greater our present detestation of our past sins
and the more earnest our desire to do penance for
them for the rest of our lives, the better founded is
our conﬁdence that they have been pardoned. “Man
knoweth not,” as the same holy Volume assures us,
“whether he be worthy of love or hatred” (Ecclus. 9:1);
but he that keeps up within him the spirit of penance,
has every reason to hope that God loves him....

...The faithful observance of Lent naturally
produces a saving; let that saving be given to Lazarus.
Nothing, surely, could be more opposed to the spirit
of this holy season, than keeping up a table as richly
and delicately provided as at other periods of the
year, when God permits us to use all the comforts
compatible with the means He has given us. But how
thoroughly Christian is it that, during these days of
penance and charity, the life of the poor man should
be made more comfortable, in proportion as that of
the rich shares in the hardships and privations of his
suffering brethren throughout the world! Poor and rich
would then present themselves, with all the beauty of
fraternal love upon them, at the divine Banquet of the
Paschal feast, to which our risen Jesus will invite us
after these forty days are over.
There is one means more whereby we are to
secure to ourselves the great graces of Lent; it is the
spirit of retirement and separation from the world.
Our ordinary life, such as it is during the rest of the
year, should all be made to pay tribute to the holy
season of penance; otherwise, the salutary impression
produced on us by the holy ceremony of Ash
Wednesday will soon be effaced. The Christian ought,
therefore, to forbid himself, during Lent, all the vain
amusements, entertainments, and parties, of the world
he lives in. As regards theatres and balls, which are the
world in the very height of its power to do harm, no
one that calls himself a disciple of Christ should ever
be present at them, unless necessity, or the position
he holds in society, oblige him to it: but if, from
his own free choice, he throws himself amidst such
dangers during the present holy season of penance and
recollection, he offers an insult to his character, and
must needs cease to believe that he has sins to atone
for, and a God to propitiate. The world (we mean that
part of it which is Christian) has thrown off all those
external indications of mourning and penance, which
we read of as being so religiously observed in the ages
of faith....Let us only courageously tread the way of
penance, and the light will gradually beam upon us. If
we are now far off from our God by the sins that are
upon us, this holy season will be to us what the saints
call the purgative life, and will give us that purity
which will enable us to see our Lord in the glory of
His victory over death. If, on the contrary, we are
already living the illuminative life; if, during the three
weeks of Septuagesima, we have bravely sounded the
depth of our miseries, our Lent will give us a clearer
view of Him who is our light; and if we acknowledged
Him as our God when we saw Him as the Babe of
Bethlehem, our soul’s eye will not fail to recognize
Him in the divine Penitent of the desert, or in the
bleeding Victim of Calvary.
Passages excerpted from Dom Guéranger’s The Liturgical Year: Lent, Vol.5,
pp.1-42. (Available from Angelus Press. Price: $219.00.)

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THE ANGELUS • April 2006

36

A

URIESVILLE
SERMON
F r .

Y v e s

It is a great joy and honor for me to be here, in the
very place where your country was baptized. Is not the
blood of martyrs the seed of Christians? Your country,
having received this testimony of blood, ought to
be faithful to it from now on. You have offered
the weariness of this pilgrimage for this intention.
May each one of us be personally faithful to this
consecration, and, through it, be completely faithful
to the grace of our own baptism. You have certainly
prayed and offered the trials of this pilgrimage in
a spirit of penance and reparation, thinking of the
subject proposed for our meditation today: the Second
Vatican Council and its consequences. Why is it
important to consider this Council? Do we not risk
drifting into a systematically negative criticism that is
itself un-Catholic?
Obviously, we cannot deﬁne ourselves as against
the Second Vatican Council. In fact, we have no
need to deﬁne ourselves. It is sufﬁcient for us to be
Catholics, Catholics whose ideal is to ﬁght as soldiers
of Christ to bring about His kingdom, and especially
His social kingdom on earth. But a soldier can only
ﬁght effectively if he is armed and trained to ﬁght, if he
has received an adequate formation so that he knows
his enemy. That is the reason why it is important to
meditate on this fateful Council. It is not our intention
to launch now into deep study of the Council. We
simply want to be on our guard against the danger of
getting used to the current situation in the Church. We
want to show what our reaction ought to be in the face
of this disaster, which Archbishop Lefebvre called “the
Third World War.”
THE ANGELUS • April 2006 www.angeluspress.org

L e

R o u x

We must not fear to say it: the present situation is
a revolution. During the Council, commandos took
over the command posts in the Church and worked
for her destruction from within. Until now, the Church
had to fend off assaults coming from the outside, and
the attackers never succeeded. But then Satan changed
his strategy and attacked Holy Mother Church from
within. He inﬁltrated his henchmen there, spreading
error in seminaries so that the young clergy would be
tainted by it without even knowing it.
The danger for us would be to forget this and
think that the present situation is only a simple crisis
that will pass away by itself. Let us not be deceived:
the enemies of the Church have sworn her destruction
and that of our souls. They will agree to some
compromises and some concessions, hoping that we
will take the bait, but they will never agree to give up
their goal: the complete destruction of Holy Mother
Church.
They already have cried victory. They are
mistaken. Their battle is lost in advance and their
momentary triumph resembles that of the enemies
of Christ on Good Friday. Let’s not fool ourselves:
error will not win. Christ permits this success as a
chastisement to purify his church and to bring her to
His side on the cross. We must look beyond external
appearances, and ﬁnd within our souls the peaceful
certainty that God permits the present humiliation of
His Church in order to assimilate her more completely
to His Son. He will share with her the triumph of
His resurrection. We must wait for that hour, but

37
remaining always vigilant, as the temptation to seek
peace by compromising will be great.
We must also be attentive to see that the error
of liberalism, that error which surrounds us and the
poisons of which we drink daily, though unwittingly,
does not surreptitiously enter into our souls. Let us
remember that of which St. Augustine warned us: By
seeing everything, we end by enduring everything,
and by enduring everything, we are ready to accept
anything. That is to say, that what at the beginning
justly scandalizes us, little by little becomes so habitual
that we take part in it, and thus, unconsciously, we
drink the poison. If we are not on our guard, we will
be so ﬁlled up with this mortal error of liberalism
that, in turn, we will also fall and contribute to the
destruction of the Church.
This is the time to be on our guard. We must pray
and be formed at the source of the true doctrine, so as
that error will not contaminate us. After 40 years of
seeing the application of the decrees of the Council,
we can follow the advice of our Lord and judge the
tree by its fruits. Certain advocates of the Council
challenge this evangelical judgment and try to separate
the Council from its aftermath. But it is not so. The
reforms that followed are, in fact, the natural issue of
the Council. Without the Council, these disastrous
reforms would never have seen the light of day.
The most reprehensible consequence of the
Council has been the destruction of the sense of the
sacred. We see that very clearly in the systematic
destruction of the theological virtues of faith, hope,
and charity. By faith, by the knowledge we have of
Him, we adhere to God directly and enter into His
intimacy. By hope we raise our hearts above all created
things and soar towards God, to adore Him as our
Creator and Redeemer, and, with a holy impatience,
long to possess Him in eternity. By charity, we love
God through our Lord Jesus Christ as He loves
Himself. Faith, hope, and charity establish us in God,
and through these virtues we live in His holy presence.
These virtues ﬁnd their most beautiful expression in
the liturgy when the priest offers the holy Mass and we
unite ourselves to him, giving God the homage that is
due.
Today, the new liturgy shows, sadly but clearly,
that the virtues of faith, hope, and charity are no
longer the holy way towards God. There is no
transcendence, and it is not unusual to hear, in one
way or another, that strange profession of faith of Pope
Paul VI: “We have, more than any other, the cult of
man” [Closing Speech, Fourth Session of the Second
Vatican Council, Dec. 7, 1965–Ed.]. Does this mean
that faith, hope, and charity are now the expression of
the faith of man, of hope placed in him and of charity
reduced to only a vague philanthropy? It is impossible
to think otherwise when we see that the New Theology
teaches that all men are to be saved, and yearns for
a golden age on earth where we will be united to
everyone, beyond our differences, into a universal
brotherhood.

Such ideas are a profanation of the theological
virtues: faith in man, who will save himself as man
because he is mysteriously united to Christ by his
human nature; hope of a universal peace when men
will ﬁnally recognize the inestimable value of their
humanity, which enables them to live in mutual
respect of their irreconcilable differences, a mutual
respect that they dare to call charity; in a word, faith in
man, hope in man, love of man–omnipresent man–
who thus has become the center of a new worship!
We are confronted with a profanation of the mystery
of the Incarnation, which has become no more the
revelation of the love of God for man, but instead the
revelation of the intrinsic value of man himself. There
is no longer anything sacred but man!
What more can we say about this delirium? May
God have pity on us. The children of God ask for
the bread of doctrine, but they have received only
stones for food! How shall we react in face of this
“destruction of the sacred place,” as Pope Pius XII
said? Above all, we must not react in a human way,
because acting in this manner will expose us to great
dangers. We might be even tempted to abandon the
struggle, because humanly speaking no solution seems
possible....A natural weariness can lead us to excessive
and dangerous decisions.
Our reaction ought to be a reaction prompted
by faith, and only by faith. We must not reduce the
mystery of the passion of the Church to an intellectual
problem, or worse, to a sentimental one. It is not for us
to understand this mystery of the identiﬁcation of the
Church with Christ cruciﬁed, but to acknowledge that
it is a providential design of God and then adore Him.
We must follow the advice of St. Vincent of Lerins
and hold fast to what the Church has always and
everywhere taught. That is to say, that our attachment
to tradition is not a question of custom or preference,
but a question of faith and of ﬁdelity to this faith. This
is also why we cannot sign some practical agreement
with “neo-modernist Rome,” because we would be
drawn down a slippery slope of compromise and
would slowly but surely lose the faith.
If our reaction is truly prompted by faith, we will
desire to offer reparation. In ascending to heaven, our
Lord imposed on us the duty of making reparation for
the insults against Him and His holy mother. Is not the
destruction of the faith in the very heart of the Church
an insult against Christ, who left us, as our inheritance,
the deposit of faith to transmit it unchanged? This loss
of faith, apart from being most insulting to Christ, is
the source of the eternal loss of innumerable souls.
Our duty is clear. We cannot let the insult pass
without desiring to make reparation for it. Our
reparation consists in living in a way that renders
homage to God, and not in enjoying the sinful
pleasures that the world proposes. We will make
reparation by loyally fulﬁlling the duties of our
state in life. This ﬁdelity to duty rests on two pillars:
prayer and mortiﬁcation. A soul that desires to offer
reparation is essentially a soul of prayer and sacriﬁce.
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THE ANGELUS • April 2006

38
Our prayer must be, above all, the offering of the
most precious Blood of Christ to His Father during
the Mass, of course, but also during the day, uniting
ourselves in spirit to the Masses being celebrated
throughout the world; and reciting our rosary, through
which we are united to our Lady and to her prayer of
intercession. They must be prayers that go forth before
the throne of God to implore the grace of obtaining
numerous priestly and religious vocations, so that the
glory of God may be manifested and that souls will
not be abandoned, but receive the graces they need;
prayers that simply ask pardon for all those who have
introduced novelties in the Church, prayers that repeat
for them the words of our cruciﬁed Lord: “Father,
forgive them, they know not what they do,” prayers
for those who follow these mercenaries and are lost.
Prayer certainly, but mortiﬁcation is also needed
to raise ourselves above vain and worldly concerns,
and to sustain our prayer with the divine nourishment
of sacriﬁce. Mortiﬁcation consists mainly in doing
faithfully our duty and offering it to God. We want to
stress that an important aspect of this duty of state is to
take great care to raise our children in a true Christian
spirit. That is, not only helping them to put distance
from the temptations of the world, but also preparing
their souls to ﬁght against these temptations, which
will always arise. Do not hesitate, Christian parents,
to undertake all the sacriﬁces required to raise your
children. Their souls have been entrusted to you; they
have cost Christ His most precious Blood. Do not let
that blood go to waste. To educate a child is to accept
the sacriﬁce.
Faced with the disaster of the Second
Vatican Council, we must respond to the call
of Archbishop Lefebvre, a call to a crusade
of parents, so that our families might be
truly blazing hearths of the love of our
Lord, gathered around the priest and
preparing in their bosom the vocations
of tomorrow.
Our times are critical. The
Immaculate Spouse of Christ,
our Holy Mother the Church,
agonizes, insulted and mocked. Her
children no longer know what it is
to be Christians or no longer dare
to afﬁrm it loudly and forcefully.
Vocations are diminishing, and
we fear that tomorrow, deprived
of pastors, men will fall into
idolatry, as a great number
of them already have, alas!
The Second Vatican Council
promised us a new springtime
in the Church, but has left
behind it only the rubble
piling up.
Our times are critical.
It is not, however, a time
THE ANGELUS • April 2006 www.angeluspress.org

for despair. It is the hour of the cross. It is also,
mysteriously, the hour of victory. It is the time when
we need to go to Mary, who stood strong in her
unwavering faith, praying and uniting her sorrows
to the sorrows of her Son. She is our mother and she
will protect us, so that we will keep the faith thanks to
prayer and mortiﬁcation.
Our Lady has vanquished all heresies. She will
overcome modernism; she has promised so at Fatima,
afﬁrming that in the end her Immaculate Heart shall
triumph. Victory belongs to us; we have the certainty
of it. It sufﬁces for us to be her children, to enter
joyously in the school of our Lady and to pray and do
penance as she has so often asked. Do not doubt the
power of prayer, because as our Lady speciﬁcally said
at Pontmain: “Pray, my children, as my Son allows
Himself to be touched by your prayers.”
And if our Lord hears us, who will succeed against
us? Let us pray. We are the youth of God, full of faith,
the faith of our baptism, that of our Mother, the Holy
Church; the faith that cannot change in any way,
the faith that vanquishes the world, the faith through
which we are ready to live and die, in order to defend
the honor of God and thus make reparation for the
offenses done to Him.
Fr. Yves le Roux was ordained for the Society of Saint Pius X in 1990 and is
currently Rector of St. Thomas Aquinas Seminary in Winona, Minnesota. This
sermon was given at the 2005 Auriesville Pilgrimage.

2006

AURIESVILLE
PILGRIMAGE
15th Anniversary
Friday, June 16

6:00pm Stations of The Cross
7:00pm Holy Mass
Bonﬁre
10:30pm -11:30pm Holy Hour

Saturday, June 17

9:00am Rendezvous at Lock 10
(Sermon) March
Lunch (Sermon)
5:30pm Pontiﬁcal Solemn High Mass
celebrated by H.E. Bishop Fellay
8:00pm Irish Festival

Sunday, June 18
8:00am High Mass

For more information contact:
St. Ignatius Retreat House: 203-431-0201
Mr. Richard McCormack: 203-744-4384

39
F R .

p e t e r

Is the crisis in the Church primarily
a question of the Mass or of doctrine?

It is certainly true that the general Catholic in the
pews is apt to be shocked much more by the changes
of the Mass on a day-to-day and week-to-week basis,
than by statements of Vatican II or of modernist
theologians reinterpreting Catholic teachings in a
non-orthodox sense. However, this does not at all
mean that the liturgy comes ﬁrst, or that the crisis is
essentially a crisis of the liturgy of the Mass.
The relationship between the liturgy and Catholic
dogma was magniﬁcently explained by Pope Pius
XII in his 1947 encyclical Mediator Dei, in which he
condemned the excesses of the liturgical movement
and explained the doctrinal basis for a true Catholic
understanding of the liturgy. He there explains that
it is not the Mass that comes ﬁrst, and shows us
what we must believe, but that it is the profession
of Faith that comes ﬁrst and that consequently “the
entire Liturgy…has the Catholic Faith for its content,
inasmuch as it bears public witness to the faith of the
Church” (§47). Hence he condemns “the error and
fallacious reasoning of those who have claimed that
the Sacred Liturgy is a kind of proving ground for the
truths to be held of faith (§46), and deﬁnes (§48):
The sacred Liturgy, consequently, does not decide or
determine independently and of itself what is of Catholic
faith.…But if one desires to differentiate and describe
the relationship between faith and the sacred Liturgy in
absolute and general terms, it is perfectly correct to say:
“Lex credendi legem statuat supplicandi”–let the rule of belief
determine the rule of prayer.

Since Faith comes ﬁrst, and is expressed in the
Mass, so likewise does the modernist destruction
of the Faith come ﬁrst, and the overturning of the
true Mass follow. The historical connection was
particularly apparent after Vatican II. The Council
promoted the modernist principles of adaptation to
the modern world, the evacuation of penance, of the
ﬁnal last ends, of the eternity of the soul, the confusion
of the priesthood of the faithful with the ordained
priesthood, the undermining of the sacredness of the
Mass and the sacraments, and the doctrinal relativism
that opened the door to ecumenism and acceptation
of Protestantism as a legitimate form of Christianity.
The consequence was the New Mass some four years
later, which from 1969 started impressing these false
principles on the minds of Catholics, destroying their
faith.
The crisis in the Church is, consequently,
primarily one of Faith, and only secondarily one of
the Mass. The New Mass is evil because it destroys
the Faith, that is Catholic doctrine. The traditional
Mass is Catholic, and the banner of our resistance
against modernism because it preserves and nourishes
the Faith.

R .

s c o t t

Some have said that the preoccupation shown
by St. Pius X in his condemnation of modernism
at the beginning of the 20th century, and the same
preoccupation showed by his disciples in defending
Catholic doctrine against modernism, is a distraction
from the real issue, that of the Mass, presenting
the doctrinal problem of modernism as a “phantom
menace.” Nothing could be further from the truth. All
the novelties and changes contained in the New Mass
were deliberately engineered by modernists such as
Father Bugnini as a means of pushing their modernist
agenda.
This point is made particularly well by Fr. Didier
Bonneterre in the conclusion to his book The Liturgical
Movement (available from Angelus Press, 2002. Price:
$9.95):
Crushed by St. Pius X, the Modernists understood that
they could not penetrate the Church by theology, that is,
by a clear exposé of their doctrines. They had recourse
to the Marxist notion of praxis, having understood that
the Church could become modernist through action,
especially through the sacred action of the liturgy. (p.93)

Consequently the only resistance possible is a
doctrinal one, and it is the application of the principles
used by St. Pius X in his 1907 condemnation of
modernism in Pascendi Dominici Gregis. A typical
example could be chosen. The turning around of the
altar facing the people is not a haphazard invention,
but an intentional novelty to express the belief that
the Mass is primarily a celebration of the community
rather than the action renewed by the ordained priest.
This in turn comes from the modernist idea that
Christ’s presence in religion is immanent and vital,
continuously evolving and present subjectively in
the community’s awareness, and that this experience
constitutes religion, not objective doctrine. (Cf.
Pascendi, §§35-37). Likewise for the substitution of the
vernacular for the sacred language, and for so many
other changes. The doctrinal crisis in the Church over
the past century is not a phantom, but truly the origin
of the destruction of the liturgy.

Q

Can the rubrical changes of 1955 and 1962
be compared to the new rite of Mass?

A

It is certainly true that liturgists of modernist
tendency, including Fr. Bugnini, had a considerable
inﬂuence in the commission for the reform of the
Liturgy from the time of its foundation in 1948. This
is what Fr. Bonneterre has to say in The Liturgical
Movement [Angelus Press, 2002. Price: $9.95–Ed.]:
Protected from on high by eminent prelates, the new
liturgists took control little by little of the Commission for
Reform of the Liturgy founded by Pius XII, and inﬂuenced
the reforms devised by this Commission at the end of the
pontiﬁcate of Pius XII and at the beginning of that of John
XXIII. (p.94)
www.angeluspress.org

THE ANGELUS • April 2006

40
However, until Vatican II these were incidental
questions, that did not change the liturgy in itself,
such as the suppression of certain vigils and octaves,
the restoration and change of the times of the Holy
Week ceremonies. They did not change the Mass
itself in any way, which remained the Mass of St. Pius
V, published in virtue of Quo Primum, the document
with which every Missal of 1962 begins. Some
changes were beneﬁcial simpliﬁcations, such as the
categorization of liturgical days into four classes and
the removal of overlapping octaves. Others can be
considered regrettable, such as the shortening of the
ceremony for the blessing of Palms on Palm Sunday.
However, Providence and the authority of the Church
prevented them from going beyond any such minor
rubrical changes, such that Pope John XXIII declared
himself dissatisﬁed with the change of rubrics that he
authorized in 1960, wanting a more radical change,
according to new principles, after the impending
Council (Rubricarum Instructum). This was to be the
New Mass.
Consequently, we are duty bound to accept these
minor rubrical changes, as is done in practically every
traditional church and chapel world wide. Whether we
personally like them or not, they are not expressions
of a new, modernist theology, as is the New Mass,
but rather of the same nature as the minor accidental
rubrical changes that many Popes since 1570 have
authorized to the Mass of St. Pius V. The New Mass
of Pope Paul VI is evil because it undermines and
destroys the Faith, and must be rejected. None of these
rubrical changes have any impact on the Mass as a
symbol and profession of faith, and consequently there
is no objective reason to reject them.

The so-called dialogue Mass was nothing other
than the application of this same principle to the
recited Mass, on occasions on which the Mass
could not reasonably be sung (e.g., daily Mass for a
community of religious). However, modernism did
enter into the application of this principle, for the
modernists did not see this form of active participation
simply as an elaboration of the liturgy but as necessary
to it, in virtue of their substitution of the emphasis on
the common priesthood of the faithful in place of the
ordained, sacramental priesthood. Consequently, they
wanted to insist on the people reciting the Mass not
simply as an alternative, but as an obligation.
As with other excesses of the liturgical movement,
the 1947 encyclical of Pope Pius XII, Mediator Dei,
(available from Angelus Press. Price: $2.50), made the
necessary distinctions, condemning the abuses and
promoting the correct Catholic understanding of the
liturgy. After pointing out the primacy of the interior
participation of the faithful uniting themselves with
the Divine Victim on the altar, it also recommends the
outward participation that expresses this union:

Is the Dialogue Mass a “diabolical disorientation,” and
can it be compared to Communion in the hand?

Their chief aim (of these methods of participation in the
Mass) is to foster and promote the people’s piety and
intimate union with Christ and His visible minister and to
arouse those internal sentiments and dispositions which
should make our hearts become like to that of the High
Priest of the New Testament. (§106)

The custom of the faithful making the responses at
Low Mass, and reciting with the celebrant those parts
that they would sing at a High Mass (e.g., Kyrie, Gloria,
Sanctus, Agnus Dei) began in 1922, as an outgrowth of
the liturgical movement founded by Dom Guéranger
and promoted by St. Pius X, to bring about an active
participation of the faithful in the celebration of the
Mass. St. Pius X had requested in 1903, in his motu
proprio on Gregorian chant, the restoration of the active
participation of the faithful in the Mass, outlining this
principle, for the glory of God and the sanctiﬁcation of
souls:
Our keen desire being that the true Christian spirit may
once more ﬂourish, cost what it may, and be maintained
among all the faithful, We deem it necessary to provide
before anything else for the sanctity and dignity of the
temple, in which the faithful assemble for no other object
than that of acquiring this spirit from its primary and
indispensable source, which is the active participation in
the most holy mysteries and the public and solemn prayer
of the Church.
THE ANGELUS • April 2006 www.angeluspress.org

They also are to be commended who strive to make
the Liturgy even in an external way a sacred act in which
all who are present may share. This can be done in more
than one way, when, for instance, the whole congregation
in accordance with the rules of the Liturgy, either answer
the priest in an orderly and ﬁtting manner, or sing hymns
suitable to the different parts of the Mass, or do both, or
ﬁnally in High Masses when they answer the prayers of the
minister of Jesus Christ and also sing the liturgical chant.
(§105)

However, the Pope at the same time refutes the
modernist error of those who make such external
participation an end in itself.

He continues, drawing the logical conclusion:
They [these methods of participation] are by no means
necessary to constitute it (the Mass) a public act or to give
it a social character. And besides, a “dialogue” Mass of this
kind cannot replace the High Mass, which…possesses its
own special dignity due to the impressive character of its
ritual and the magniﬁcence of its ceremonies. (ibid.)

Consequently, one who accepts the teachings
of Popes Pius X and Pius XII cannot question the
legitimacy of the so-called dialogue Mass, provided
that it be done correctly, and that it be regarded as
just a means to a more perfect interior participation;
nor can the dialogue Mass possibly be compared with
such sacrilegious and openly modernist practices as
Communion in the hand, a practical denial of the Real
Presence.

We are now open to take orders over the lunch hour (12:30-1:30PM CST)!
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Double Whammy!
The Mass and the Council
Time Bombs of the Second Vatican Council

Fr. Schmidberger explains the four chief reasons
that Vatican II brought about the current crisis in
the Church: 1) not clearly defining Catholic Truth,
2) failing to definitively reject error, 3) adopting
ambig­uous, contradictory language, 4) establishing
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 Decree on the Church (Lumen Gentium)  Decree
on Non‑Christian Religions (Nostra Aetate)  Hinduism  Buddhism  Islam  The Jews  Spirit of
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Modern World (Gaudium et Spes)  False Solution 
True Solution  “Keep the Faith”–Pray

N EW NG Mary, Mother of Divine Grace
ER I
By. Rev. Joseph Le Rohellec,
O FF

Translated by Fr. Stephen Rigby and Fr. Denis Fahey, C.S.Sp.

In the Litany of Loreto, the Holy Virgin is invoked
under the title of “Mother of Divine Grace.” What is the
theological force of this expression which the Church
puts into her liturgy and upon the lips of all the faithful?
This book is an attempt to answer that question. It does
so in three separate sections entitled: “Mary in the
Acquisition of Grace,” “Mary in the Distribution of Grace,”
and “Mary and the Grace of the Priesthood.” Essentially,
Mary shares in the distribution of heavenly graces: Her
Son has made her the treasury of divine gifts: no truth
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of Grace” because all graces without exception come to us by her Mediation and
because she, without ceasing, brings us forth to supernatural life.
Mary labored together with Our Lord in amassing the treasures of supernatural
life; she works together with Him still in giving to the redeemed, soul by soul,
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158pp, softcover, STK# 8167Q $9.95

Gift of Self to God
Fr. Nicholas Grou

32pp, color softcover, pocket-sized, blank area on
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62 Reasons: Why the Traditional Latin Mass

Sixty-two problems with the new Mass and, for the
same reasons, why we adhere faithfully to the traditional Mass. ABSOLUTELY EXCELLENT.
17x11, double-sided, full color.

NE
OFFERW
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This timely monograph, composed by Jesuit Fr.
Nicholas Grou, contains precious gems of holy wisdom.
They are the fruit of a pastor of souls well acquainted
with the latter day stratagems of an experienced
adversary determined to get the focus of persecuted and
battle-weary Catholics off the straight and narrow course
leading to personal sanctity. Gift of Self to God, which is
the heart of the composition, is an extremely provoking
and healing meditation dealing with the necessity and
salutary advantage of giving our all to God. It is a perfect
compliment to the spirit of St. Louis de Montfort’s True
Devotion to Mary. Not as well known as he should be,
the work of this great doctor of the interior life is reprinted
here, together with two of his other essays, all of which
confirm the virtue of filial trust in God.
70pp, Hardcover, STK# 8163 $9.95

Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile
Joseph Pearce

Even before the “fall of the wall,” one man took on the Communists alone with a series of novels the
Soviets refused to print. Faced with the choice of killing Solzhenitsyn or kicking him out of the USSR, they
exiled him. WHY should a Catholic read the life of a Russian Orthodox man? Why would a great modern
Catholic author write his biography? Why would Solzhenitsyn, very wary of western journalists, open up,
for the first time, to author Joseph Pearce? Simple. Pearce and Solzhenitsyn–Catholics and Solzhenitsyn
share a common world view: anti-materialism. Solzhenitsyn arrived in the US as a hero, but that didn’t last
long as he realized that the US was essentially not much different from the USSR. We have no gulags, but
al
that is not the essence: it is the destruction of spiritual values and the exultation of the material, of comfort.
c
i
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c
m
ncy munis e Solzhenitsyn saw that the more you suffer, the more the soul grows. Materialism and consumerism–
e
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Fre t Com rchas Communist, Capitalist, atheist, whatever-ist– strangle the soul. The Catholic Pearce and Solzhenitsyn are
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From his pro-Communist youth to being a Red Army officer in WWII to his imprisonment in the Gulags
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N EW NG
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Joseph Pearce is best at what matters most about Solzhenitsyn: the centrality of the author’s Christian faith. It is no wonder that Solzhenitsyn
chose to...provide him with fresh information. Newcomers to Solzhenitsyn should start with this biography. They will find here a highly readable
rendition of one of the most sensational lives of the 20th century.–Edward E. Ericson, Jr., author of Solzhenitsyn and the Modern World
Pearce has paid Solzhenitsyn the compliment of taking his moral beliefs and aspirations seriously.–Alexis Klimoff, professor of Russian
Studies, Vassar College

Includes a rare photo gallery, and a focus on the rich religious dimension of this Nobel Prize winner’s life.
334pp, hardcover, dust-jacket, 24 photos, STK 8168Q $24.95

The Pope Chart Poster

TE D
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With the passing of Pope John Paul II and the Papal Election, the
attention of the whole world momentarily focused on the Successor of
St. Peter. One is pleasantly shocked to hear secular news outlets refer
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one available in the Vatican bookstore), features a
biographical sketch and a medallion-sized image
of all 264 Popes. The images are reproductions of
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A Complete Catholic Prayer Book

Frs. Charles J. Callan & John A. McHugh
From the publisher:

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Fine paper, one ribbon, in print from 1925-61. This is an
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The Rosary

The Dominican Fathers of Avrillé

This eight-page fold-out is one of the best for
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www.angeluspress.org l 1-8 00-9 6 6-73 37
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