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Fr. Yves le Roux on

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the consequences of protestantism

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Marcel Lefebvre
H.E. Bishop Bernard Tissier de Mallerais

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2

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the deadly con

given as three conferences
at the Society of Saint Pius X’s
February 2006 Priests’ Meeting

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3

I will not speak to you about Attila except to remind
you that he was a barbarian, that his name Attila means
“Little Father,” and that he was proud of his nickname,
“the Scourge of God.” His famous line about himself was
“Where I step, the grass no longer grows.” Attila is my
metaphor for the deadly consequences of Protestantism.
It is impossible to adequately discuss Protestantism in a brief study. The subject is simply too vast;
but, in fact, the actual subject of this article is the present consequences of Protestantism. Nevertheless,
we will be obliged to consider Protestantism itself in order to discover the main traits of this error. In
this way, we will be able to understand more deeply how our present world is the natural offspring of
Protestantism, and how much this spirit has penetrated us, young and old alike, but particularly our
youth.
If you want to learn more about Protestantism, the best way is by reading The Variations of the
Protestant Churches by Bossuet, or Maritain’s Three Reformers. Le Sel de la Terre has published some very
good articles, too.
If we really want to know something, we must grasp its principle. If we know it, we will be able to
know perfectly all its consequences. But regarding Protestantism, it is very difficult to grasp its principle.
As Bossuet realized, nothing is constant in it. Its belief is always moving, uncertain, variable (we can
find, at least, more than 20,000 Protestant sects in today’s world). Protestantism is constantly subject to
variations. We can summarize the judgment of Bossuet in a short sentence: “You change; what changes is
not the truth.”

consequences of protestantism
It is impossible to bring together all Protestants into one coherent doctrine. They have only one
point in common: their hatred of the Catholic Church. Even their name does not express something
universal. It seems that any kind of doctrine is accepted insofar as it is a protest.
Furthermore, very often we deceive ourselves about the true motives of Protestantism. Of course, we
know that it is not true that the first Protestants truly wanted to react against abuses in the Church. Their
immediate fruits show obviously that it was not the problems or failures in the Church that caused their
reaction, but still we convince ourselves that Protestantism was brought about because of these abuses.
We cannot deny that such abuses had a role in the apparition of Protestantism, but if we look into the


times of St. Bernard or St. Peter Damian, we see
that there were similar abuses and even worse. The
existence of abuses is a constant phenomenon in the
history of the Church.
The abuses of the Renaissance by themselves
are not enough to explain Protestantism; their role is
only secondary. They are more an occasion than the
true cause. We should rather focus on the particular
conditions, on the atmosphere of the Renaissance,
with its deliberate break from the realism of medieval
philosophy. The Renaissance marks the separation of
the intelligence from reality. Its spirit of independence
exploded with Descartes and all modern philosophy,
but it existed already with the nominalism of William
of Ockham (d. 1349), whose teaching influenced
Luther. Since the Renaissance man made himself the
center of everything, the Renaissance itself implies a
true spiritual “Copernican revolution.”
In fact, we can apply to Protestantism the words
of St. Pius X about modernism: the sewer of all
the errors of the Renaissance. Nothing is original
in Protestantism, but it was an instrument for the
acceleration of the process of the destruction of
Christendom. We may say that Protestantism is the
heart of the Renaissance, its religion. Or better, that
it is the Renaissance spirit conveyed into religion;
I mean by that the religion of died-in-the-wool
independence.
However, even this spirit of independence is not
proper to Protestantism. It is the point of departure
of all sects and their reason for rejecting the Faith.
He who separates himself from Rome does it for
this reason. Of course, this spirit of independence
inherent in each error is multiplied by the libertarian
tendency of the Renaissance and has some particular
characteristics, as we will see later in our third point.
Notice that its only originality consists in not
having anything truly original. We are indeed obliged
to study the initiator of this error to be able to grasp
the principle of Protestantism. Thus, a brief study on
the life of the father of Protestantism is mandatory. As
Maritain rightly points out, usually the whole life of a
heresiarch depends on the error he professes. In the
present case, we find the opposite: Luther’s life, and
especially his problems, is the source of his error. This
is why it is important to present, even briefly, his life.
As did Jacques Maritain in his book The Three
Reformers, we could title this section “Luther” or “The
Temptation of the Spirit.”1 In fact, if Luther is known
for his debasement, his true problem is of the spiritual
order.
First of all, he received–as we already saw–a
formation permeated by nominalism. In nominalism,
our knowledge is something purely verbal and
not a true apprehension of reality. Nominalism, or
“terminism” if you prefer, is already idealism and cuts
us from reality. Our intelligence, disconnected from
what is, will withdraw into itself.
THE ANGELUS • July 2006 www.angeluspress.org

Furthermore, we know that, at the
beginning of his religious life as an
Augustinian monk, Luther was very fervent,
but nevertheless was always worried and
agitated. His romantic vocation during a
violent storm already showed a feverish
temperament. And, in fact, Luther forever
looked for emotional consolations. His chief
concern was to feel himself in the state of grace.
He tried to find a false, disincarnated purity,
and remained always unsatisfied, seeking a
personal achievement rather than abandoning
his sanctity to God. He fell into an egocentric
mysticism. Counting only on his own forces,
it is not very surprising therefore to see him
falling into great crises of scruples. He invented
a holiness in which human weakness has no
part. He confused internal tension with attention to
God.
Living intellectually and spiritually in a personal
dream, in both cases cut off from reality, he was not
ready to face any tests. In our life, a test is always a
gift, an occasion for denying ourselves and finding
refuge in God. But tests are also crossroads where we
must choose between God and ourselves. We have
to choose between fleeing from ourselves and fleeing
from God. It is the famous phrase of St. Augustine: “If
you wish to flee from God, flee to God.” Luther did
not follow this advice, but, on the contrary, fled into
activism.
This activism was, in fact, the result of his
internal decay and played the role of an external
compensation. It was a spiritual disaster the source of
which was his despair in the face of grace, or, more
accurately, his conception of grace, which was the
projection of his pride in an idealistic life without
weaknesses, faults, or miseries, a life in which I can
feel that I am perfect. By temperament and formation,
and also by the influence of his times, he was not
prepared to make the required act of humility, which
is to return to reality and to accept our true human
nature with its limitations; difficult perhaps, but real
nevertheless. Also, as his hypersensitivity inclined
him, he reacted by pride and exaggerated reality.
His reasoning was as follows: Something is evil in
me, therefore everything is evil. In fact, I am evil by nature:
it is impossible for me to avoid evil. I must accept it, consent
to be what I am. My being is intrinsically evil; I necessarily
do what is evil, not because I am particularly evil, but
because it is my very nature. And we have his terrible

phrase: “Pecca fortiter et crede firmius!–Sin mightily, but
believe even more mightily!” Usually, we see in these
words an invitation to sin, but it is something else,
more subtle and dangerous. We are confronted with a
perverse inversion of reality.
Keep in mind that Luther was frustrated because
he was not able to be a saint by his own forces.
Also, he affirmed that we are “walking sins” who
can do nothing for our salvation (incapable even of
cooperating with grace), and who must totally despair



Its very principle is a principle of dissolution, and not of life. It is free
examination....Two roads open before us. In the first, man will consider that
he receives his inspiration directly from God and
he will fall into fanaticism....In the second,
he puts all religious truth under the
control of reason and he will fall
into indifferentism. In any
In fact, for him, grace is only a cover, a coat,
nothing
else. We are saved externally; we remain
case, each man becomes
what we are deep within our being: putrefaction.
a sect all to himself.
That is what his second slogan–“Sola Gratia”−means.

of ourselves because our nature has been destroyed!
According to Luther, this act of despair must be
made. It is essential to make it, because it will lead us
to “believe” (meaning “feel”) that the blood of Christ
has saved us. Willing to do anything else would be
blasphemy. It would be claiming that it is possible
to add something to the salvation obtained for us by
Christ!
It is interesting to note the great difference
between the Catholic notion of faith and the
Protestant notion. The first one is a virtue by which
we submit our intellect to a revealed doctrine. The
second one is a movement of the heart, seeking
consolation, as Melanchthon [1497-1560] said, an act
of confidence in the blood of Christ. (In passing, we
may point out the internal contradiction: all our acts
are evil because of our inherent corruption, but this
act of confidence is good.)
Actually, the only sin which is without remission
is the sin against this faith-confidence. And Luther
would go so far as to claim that sinning could be
better than practising virtue! Why? Because it is
an occasion for receiving the Blood of Christ; and
also because when Satan tries to tempt us we must
perform–as he did himself–a “good sin” to overcome
and mock him! In fact the only true sin is the lack
of this sentimental confidence in God. Luther taught
that only faith can save us–not charity. It is his
famous “Sola Fides.” But what kind of faith is it? It
is not faith anymore, but a feeling of consolation
that, even though we remain sinners, makes us one
of the chosen of God! Am I exaggerating? Listen to
Luther in his commentary on Galatians: “Your sins
[believing] are not now yours, but are Christ’s.” It is,
at least, a literary commentary on the famous passage
of St. Paul! And he added: “And you, you become
the beloved child, and everything is fine, and all that
you do is good.” We are truly, as sinners, the chosen
of God…if we believe even more strongly, of course!
In fact, the one truly responsible for our sins is God
Himself! By the laws that He imposes on us, “God
covers the sin which is inherent in marriage” (Luther
in 1538, in a marriage sermon).

Luther totally refused any manner of cooperation.
Everything is evil, especially our works. The “Sola
Fides” doctrine opens the way to the “Solus Deus,”
because any intermediary can be nothing but human,
not only useless but blasphemous! The Church, the
priesthood, the Mass, and so on–everything is evil.
To summarize Luther’s doctrine we must point out
the doctrine of “Sola Scriptura.” Once again, he did
not want to have any intermediary between God and
man. Divine revelation is given directly to men from
God. He refused to accept the Church’s authority
for the determination of the canon of the Scriptures
and for their interpretation. Behind this denial
of any intermediary, we have already the whole
drama of Protestantism, its refusal of true human
nature, a nature that necessarily needs authority and
intermediaries.

Protestantism does not possess any originality,
but this does not mean that it does not have some
distinguishing characteristics.
Luther’s thought led him to deny the true state
of man who, wounded by original sin, must fight
constantly against the false attractions of his passions.
The peace of man on earth is, therefore, the peace of
the armed man, always vigilant, always on his guard.
Luther refused this reality and our true condition of
existence, and tried to obtain peace by his own forces.
Of course, he fell. And–the temptation is classical–in
his disappointment (which is a special form of
despair), he preferred to blame everything else but
himself. Permeated by his nominalist formation,
permeated by the spirit of revolt of his times,
permeated by self-love, Luther looked for a state
of peace which would allow him to find some kind
of peace. His conscience, obviously, bothered him
much, especially if we remember his hypersensibility
and his tendency to scruples. He had to find a system
that soothed him. Instead of finding it, he created it
by these four “soli” which are the pillars of his theory
of justification (a term that teaches that we silence the
warnings of our conscience), pillars of his justification
for him, perhaps, but actually a deformation of the
truth and, therefore, a stream of errors. Behind the
terms used by Luther, which can deceive us, we must
www.angeluspress.org

THE ANGELUS • July 2006


discern the reality and understand that faith, grace,
God, and Holy Scripture do not exist anymore.
In this way we find the first true characteristic
of Protestantism. Its very principle is a principle of
dissolution, and not of life. It is free examination. This
free examination is the Protestant principle in matters
of faith, either referring only to reason or appealing
to direct and private inspirations from Heaven. This
spirit of free examination is constant in Protestantism,
and consists in the substitution of the legitimate
authority by private judgment, or, as it would be more
accurate to say, by private feelings.
This principle reduces religion to a school of
philosophy, because if somebody rebels against
authority he rises up against the principle of the
unity of faith. Actually, by her authority, the Church
defends the Faith and transmits it. In Protestantism
the supernatural no longer exists.
In fact, since free examination gives us the right
to reach our own decisions in religious matters, two
roads open before us: In the first, man believes that
he receives his inspiration directly from God, and we
fall into fanaticism. History proves that Protestantism
flatters the natural disposition of the human mind
to reduce the world to a system that gives man an
answer for everything, but cuts him from reality. In
the second, man puts all religious truth under the
control of reason, and we fall into indifferentism. As
a philosophical system, Protestantism leads to deism
and from deism to atheism because of its principle of
free examination, which essentially means the mind
being independent. Historically also, the expansion of
Protestant sects spreads the poison of indifferentism
throughout Europe.
Protestantism is truly a school of philosophy
based on the principle of free examination.
Nowadays, we must qualify this philosophy. And
this qualification will be our second characteristic of
Protestantism. What is this philosophy? Refusing any
authority other than the authority of each individual,
Protestantism reduces each man to be a sect all by
himself! For the time being, it is enough to point out
the absolute subjectivism of this philosophical school.
As a conclusion to this brief survey of Protestantism,
we may quote Blaise Pascal: “He who wants to act as
an angel, in the end acts as a devil!”

Present
Consequences of
Protestantism

By making man withdraw into himself,
subjectivism cuts him off from any reality other
than himself. Losing the relation to reality, man is
confronted with the impossibility of knowing what
reality is. Therefore, he can no longer reach the truth.
Actually, when the person himself becomes the only
THE ANGELUS • July 2006 www.angeluspress.org

known reality, truth becomes something very
subjective. We will not talk about truth, but about
personal perceptions. It is no longer truth, but
“my truth.” It is obvious that this reduction of
truth is merely its destruction. Truth is reduced
to sincerity, which is by itself very changeable
according to our feelings. Furthermore, the theory
of external justification leads us to live on the
level of appearances. Trying to go deeper would
be considered a sin against “faith” in the power of
the Blood of Christ.
Protestantism fathers a new race of men,
one of men whose sincerity changes greatly
according to the feelings and appearances of
the moment. But it would be a mistake to
consider this new kind of man as hypocritical;
in fact, it is even worse! Hypocrisy is a
conscious and voluntary attitude regarding
truth, in order to give the appearance of loving
and being devoted to it.
This new race of men does not have any
relation with reality and truth. Totally focused
on himself, fascinated by appearances, modern
man lives a lie, but without knowing that he
does so. For him, it is a permanent and “normal”
state of life. Nowadays, man lives superficially in
an absolutely artificial world. How has this come
to happen? By successive destructions, of which
Protestantism is the source.

Destruction of Religion

We saw that Protestantism is merely a philosophy
based on private judgment and no longer a religion.
This is confirmed by the total absence of the
characteristic marks of religion in Protestantism.
Religion, indeed, always possesses an altar, a
priesthood, a sacrifice. Everywhere and at every time,
these three criteria are the constant characteristics
of any kind of religion, independently of its truth or
falseness. They belong to the very essence of religion.
But none of these marks exists in Protestantism.
This absence is clear proof that Protestantism is not
a religion. Nevertheless, since it is something social
and philosophical, we must try to introduce some
qualifications in this political philosophy.
To do that we must go back to the true principle
of Protestantism, which is, as we have seen, free
examination. In fact, this principle proclaims the
absolute superiority of reason to everything, even in
religious matters. Reason can judge all because it is
sovereign and independent. Reason is the source of
order, and not an instrument that gives us the means
for subjecting ourselves to a higher order.
In social matters, this complete independence
of reason has a very precise name: Revolution.
Robespierre even created a cult of Reason! Beyond
tragic or bloody events, whatever the particular
circumstances are, Revolution is always “the hatred


of any order that has not been established by man himself, and in which he is not
king and god at the same time.” This famous definition of Revolution given by Msgr.
Gaume is also the most perfect description of free examination. Protestantism is not
Religion but Revolution.
And, in fact, it is a very dangerous form of Revolution! It is hidden and continual.
It is hidden, because it presents itself under the guise of religion and even under
the name of Christian religion. Only a few people are able to discern behind it a
revolutionary weapon. Satan advances disguised! And we know that Revolution is
really efficient when the blood no longer runs. The bloody period is only an obligatory
stage to destroy something. Revolution can penetrate deeply in the minds of people
only during a time of apparent peace, because everybody relaxes his vigilance,
thinking that the Revolution is over. The Quiet Revolution in Quebec is a very
interesting example. No blood, no terror, nothing violent, at least externally, but,
in fact, a total and radical apostasy of the Province.
Revolution is also continual. The name of Protestantism itself shows that
we must protest, and if the first reformers believed that they would be blindly
obeyed after they cut their ties with Rome, the revolt rose up against them,
led by their own disciples! The process cannot stop. It belongs to the very
essence of Protestantism. Reason should not have to recognize any authority
and must be continually in revolt.
This is why Protestantism cannot have a body of doctrine and a solid
faith. Doctrine and faith are reduced to a feeling of confidence in the Blood
of Christ. What has become important for Protestants is to have a “good
conscience,” in spite of the internal reproaches of their sins. In spite of, and at
the same time, as a result, because for Protestantism, we are unable to avoid
sinning, and the true forgiveness of God does not exist at all. Protestantism
is an awful blasphemy against the mercy of God and a permanent source of
anxiety for its followers. Protestantism is a powerful instrument for the subtle
destruction of religion because, appearing to be a religion for many people, it
makes them slaves of sin and in constant rebellion against the order of God and
particularly the order of His Mercy.

Protestantism
fathers a new
race of men, one
of men whose
sincerity changes
greatly according
to the feelings and
appearances of
the moment. But it
would be a mistake
to consider this
new kind of man
as hypocritical;
in fact, it is even
worse! Hypocrisy
is a conscious and
voluntary attitude
We could say, if we want to absolutely preserve the status of a religion for
regarding truth, in
Protestantism, that it is the religion of the worship of original sin. In fact, original
order to give the
sin seems so powerful that nothing and no one–not even God Himself–can do
appearance of loving
anything against it. Since we have sinned in Adam, nothing is good. Everything
that we do is evil. That is why works are useless, and even evil: because they give
and being devoted to
us a false peace. It is impossible to make a distinction between good and evil, other
it....This new race of
than by law. That is why Luther, talking about marriage, accused God Himself of
men does not have
inciting us to sin. We fall into that legalism where only the law–and not virtue–can
make us good.
any relation with
Notice, in passing, a new contradiction: the principle of free examination
reality and truth.
exempts us from any authority and gives us the absolute power to decide what is
Totally focused on
good and what is evil. This principle should also exempt us from the power of any
law–but, at the same time, it is the law, and only the law, that can make us good!
himself, fascinated
The refusal of any kind of virtue closes the door to happiness. To claim that
by appearances,
nothing is good places an unbearable burden upon the shoulders of men. In fact,
modern man lives
Protestants are not reputed for being joyful, and we can understand why. It is
interesting to point out that, even among us, modern man, not having the desire
a lie, but without
for virtue, does not have the desire for happiness either. Sometimes the desire for
knowing that he
happiness is even considered an evil inclination.
does so. For him,
This pretension that it is possible to be at the same time a sinner and a beloved son
of God is such a great contradiction that it is the ruin of morality. How is it possible to
it is a permanent
reconcile God and imperfection? Protestantism does not teach us morals, but how to
and “normal”
appease our conscience, instead of fighting against our evil tendencies and temptations.
state of life.
About temptations, we already saw that Luther taught that the best way to fight against

Destruction of Morals

the devil is to try to find a great temptation and to propose to do it, in order to show the
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THE ANGELUS • July 2006


devil that we are not worried about sinning. It is
a very strange morality that leads us to follow the
insinuations of the devil in order to fight against him.
Further, since doctrine is nothing, from where
will morals spring? Morality is, in fact, rooted in
doctrine; we can say that morality is the incarnation
of doctrine. Without a previous doctrine, morality is
only moralism. Moralism is the surest destruction of
morals. Morality is not able to justify morals by itself.
Moralism tries to do that. That is why moralism is
so stifling and disgusts even those who are under its
power. This inversion of morals and doctrine is the
true essence of Puritanism. Puritanism belongs to the
very essence of Protestantism. It is not only a horror,
but a true danger, because of this deadly inversion of
order.
Legalism, moralism, the loss of a sense of
happiness–the way towards licentiousness is wide
open. In the end, free examination is by itself a
weapon against morality.

Destruction of Society

“Against the facts, there is no argument.” Man,
living in society, is a fact, a necessity of nature. But
now we know that Protestantism–which is naturalism–
distrusts and despises nature, considering it entirely
putrefaction. Furthermore, Protestantism, according to
its principle of free examination, rejects any authority
and considers it illegitimate.
However, historically speaking, Protestants were
obliged to obtain the support of secular authority
to escape the authority of the Church. They did it
by proposing that the secular authority espouse its
theories in order to help them become emancipated
from the spiritual power. Of course, they received a
favorable reception from the civil authority.
Here, it is impossible not to stop briefly in order
to point out that the principle of free examination is

really a principle of the destruction of order. It allows
man to become radically emancipated from any kind
of authority. Applied at the level of political society,
this principle emancipates the temporal power from
the spiritual power. The civil power no longer has
to be concerned by religion, except to allow all
religions to live peacefully together under its tutelage.
The principle of religious liberty–which is the real
dissolution of a society unable to acknowledge its
God, as every creature must do–is all entirely here.
Let us come back to the political men who
accepted the proposal of Luther to emancipate
themselves from the power of the Church. There
is here a terrible risk, which consists in falling
into a pitiless tyranny. There is no longer over the
secular power another power that prevents it from
overstepping its limits. However, this classical tyranny
cannot manage to last for a long time. Here intervenes
Protestantism, which is essentially a weapon for
revolution. Having undermined all the natural
foundations by its principle of free examination,
Protestantism must find a support, an authority that
will enable it to last. Tyranny is indispensable for the
survival of Protestantism, but this tyranny must be
of the same nature as Protestantism in order to help
it effectively, and since Protestantism is a hidden but
real Revolution, this tyranny must also be hidden but
real. Also, this tyranny will be a soft tyranny; this soft
tyranny is “democratism.” What is this neologism?
It means considering democracy as a religion, a new
messianism that is the universal solution for all evils.
How can I claim that the surrounding
democratism comes from Protestantism? Of course,
I do not deny some other influences, particularly
Freemasonry. We can find a lot of similarities between
modern democracy and Protestantism, so many
affinities that we are justified in thinking that modern
democracy is really the politics of Protestantism, and
its necessary tyranny. In this new regime, we do not

Protestantism allows man to become radically emancipated from any kind of authority.
Applied at the level of political society, this principle emancipates the temporal power
from the spiritual power. The civil power no longer has to be concerned by religion,
except to allow all religions to live peacefully together
under its tutelage. The principle of religious liberty–
which is the real dissolution of a society
unable to acknowledge its God, as every
creature must do–is all entirely here....
Having undermined all the natural
foundations by its principle of free
examination, Protestantism must
find a support, an authority that
will enable it to last. Tyranny is
indispensable for the survival
of Protestantism.


have the union between the spiritual and the temporal
powers, but a confusion of them.
In fact, modern democracy is for society what
original sin is for man. In the Garden of Eden, indeed,
Adam and Eve were deceived by Satan in the name
a pretended jealousy of God regarding His authority:
“Take, eat; you will be as God, having authority to
decide good or evil.” Universal suffrage says the very
same thing: “You can be as God, free–independent
and equal–without any authority over you. It is not
fitting to have over you a transcendent authority.” It
is the famous “neither master nor God,” the modern
translation of the “Non serviam.”
In order to assure the smooth running of affairs,
a representative must be elected, but he will have to
give you an account of his work because you–and
only you, by the simple fact that you are a man–
possess authority on your own. This representative
will be here only to apply the general will, which is
the only thing able to decide what is good and evil.
In fact, universal suffrage is a denial of the
Catholic principle that affirms that all authority comes
from God. On the contrary, it fits perfectly with the
Protestant principle that claims that authority comes
from man and that only man can decide what is good
and evil. Once again, we find the principle of free
examination. And it imposes a subtle tyranny, where
men think they are free when they are in fact slaves–
slaves of other men who use this new principle of
democratic election to lead people to hell in the name
of the general will. Remember that after original sin,
Adam and Eve thought they were also free.
Protestantism does not only reduce men into
slavery by denying the true origin of authority, but it
destroys society itself. Protestantism claims that nature
is completely evil, but society is a natural need of
human nature, therefore society is also evil and must
disappear. We have in mind, of course, this slogan of
Rousseau, himself formed by Protestantism: “Man is
born good; society corrupts him.” But it is impossible
to destroy society physically. Actually, society will
subsist under this form of democratism. But its end
will no longer be the common good. Materially,
society subsists, but it is only a corpse–its formality
no longer exists. Nowadays, the common good
has disappeared and has been replaced by
the search for profit. The essential attitude
of man is to look out for himself–thus, only
the individual counts, and from it arises
individualism. It is exactly the opposite
of what a society must have as its end, the
good of the community.
Society ceases to exist, except on the purely
material level, where there are only different
techniques to help us to make money. Our world, the
child of Protestantism, is as Marcel De Corte rightly
said, a “dis-society”!

Destruction of the Family

If society no longer exists, then what happens to
the family? Once we know how much Protestantism
opposes any kind of authority, we have a family
without fatherhood. The disappearance of the father
and of his role in the family–a real disaster that we see
today–is the result of Protestantism’s hatred of order
and rejection of any authority. A family without a
father is a society without authority. Quite simply, the
family does not exist.
In order to understand that the family does not
exist when it is only an apparent family, I ask you
to look at the problem of the lack of affection in
our families. The family is a microcosm, in which
man learns how to live. Later he will reproduce
what he has received, and what he did not receive
will be almost impossible for him to receive later
unless he comes to belong to a family again, such
as a monastery, seminary, or school (although these
are less of a family). He could also receive it by
undergoing some trial, but even this trial must be
something truly hard, which will oblige him to face
reality. But if it happens, there is a great danger that
he will break down. In fact, to be effective, that trial
must bring him back into a relationship with some
kind of paternity. Nothing, indeed, can replace the
family. In a normal family, the children receive
affection, and through it their souls receive a deep
imprint that gives them balance for their whole life,
giving them the ability to judge reality later. On the
contrary, it is medically proven that a lack of affection
creates some grave psychological problems.
What is truly affection? It is a love of benevolence
by which we want to procure the good of someone
else. This love is not a passion; it belongs to the
virtues, because only the virtues can help us
attain the good. But now we have learned that in
Protestantism the virtues–and the good, of course–do
not exist. Therefore, affection is impossible within
Protestantism.
If we remember that Protestantism reduces
faith and grace to a feeling of consolation, it will
not be too hard to understand that at this particular
level, affection is, in turn, replaced by consolation.
Actually, rather than giving the affection that trains
the children’s souls in the virtues, the parents give
sentimental consolations, which is much more
dangerous insofar as they think, in their sincerity,
that they are giving something good. In fact, they
spoil their children, because they provoke in them an
inexhaustible need. Consolations are at the level of
feelings; we must feel that we are loved. But nothing
is as changing and short-lived as feelings; also,
we always need an external manifestation of love,
external proofs of consideration. In this case, we are
close to falling into sensuality, and far from teaching
true love. Consolations open the door to disaster–
perhaps later, but certain nonetheless.
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THE ANGELUS • July 2006

10

Society ceases to
exist, except on
the purely material
level, where there
are only different
techniques to help
us to make money.
Our world, the child
of Protestantism,
is as Marcel De
Corte rightly said,
a “dis-society.”...
Once we know how
much Protestantism
opposes any kind of
authority, we have
a family without
fatherhood. The
disappearance of the
father and of his role
in the family–a real
disaster that we see
today–is the result
of Protestantism’s
hatred of order and
rejection of any
authority. A family
without a father is
a society without
authority. Quite
simply, the family
does not exist.

By “sensuality” I do not only mean sins of impurity, but our being unable to
fulfill our responsibilities and to face any problems in our life simply because we do
not receive our share of consolations! See how this “sensuality” affects obedience:
we need to be sure that our superior loves us very much and that a new
assignment or task is actually a manifestation of his love for us. Then a superior
has the duty to manifest this. Watch out! I do not say that a superior should
lack humanity or kindness, but, precisely, consolations are not human, but
animal! And they are not an end, because they do not give us anything for our
soul. But, of course, the soul belongs to our internal nature and to the virtues.
In fact, this consolation creates a false atmosphere at home, an artificial
ambiance of happiness, something stereotyped, where we are happy because
we must be–it is mandatory. To correspond to this external mandate, we avoid
tackling any deep subject and we stay at the level of things politically correct. Once
again, also at this level, truth does not matter, the feeling of sincerity replaces it. We
are happy because we must be, because of the consolations. It is totally ridiculous!
But it really happens today–consider the Barney phenomenon! [“Barney” is a purple
dinosaur famous for his jingle, “I love you. You love me. We are a happy family.”–
Ed.]
The family is today destroyed by the spirit of individualism, which is a product
of Protestantism, as we have seen. Do not think that we are free from this kind
of problem. We are members of the present Protestant society and we carry its
wounds. Our families are families of our dissociety, which is the soft revolution of
our time.

Destruction of Man Himself

Dissociety destroys families. What remains? Man. Only man! But what is man
alone?–A monster!
To live in society is a necessity for a man, more than for an animal. We need
to be received into a society, our family, which will give us an education that will
enable us to act as a man. But a man who is only an individual without religion,
without society, and without family is actually less than an animal. An animal can
guide itself by its instincts, but man
does not have the same instincts.
Also, he will be led by his passions
or he will become the ideal prey
of any system, as we can see in the
modern world.
If we use what we said about
the family, we can ask ourselves this
question: what is a man without a
father? A man handicapped for his
whole life! He will remain forever a
teenager, charming perhaps, but a
very unbalanced person, not having
a model for maturing. All his life he
will be subject to his passions and
never happy, never simply a man,
unable to make decisions, unable to
think, because he will be always a
slave of consolations. Modern man is
a beggar for consolations, not an adult.
But we must go further and affirm that moralism
is the destruction of the intelligence, and, therefore,
the very destruction of man. Moralism is a perversion
of order, an intellectual inversion of order, an
institutionalized disorder that puts morals as its
ultimate reason for being. Morals are no longer
rooted in doctrine, as we have seen. Nothing justifies

11
a morality that is justified by itself! In these morals,
we do not have an inclination towards the ultimate
end, we do not have to answer the question “Why?”
The answer is obvious, systematical and fanatical:
“Because it is the law!” But if we do not ask why,
we no longer respect the order of the intelligence,
of which the proper end is to know. We reduce it to
living on the level of the “How?” question. Here is
still an inversion: the “how” question comes after the
“why” question. The intelligence cannot endure this
constant inversion without being damaged. In this
way, it becomes very difficult to use the intelligence
and to know reality truly and deeply. The snare
is that the inversion of the two questions does not
impede us from making money, because we remain
on the practical level, where the “why” question is not
essential. But in this way we reduce man to being a
machine, not a thinking being.
In Protestantism, this death of the intelligence
is not accidental. In fact, it comes from the very
principle of Protestantism: free examination. But this
death of the intelligence is very dangerous, because
we are no longer able to realize that we are suffering
from this constant inversion in the present world and
we become Protestants without even knowing it.
The principle of free examination gives all power
to reason, which is sovereign and omnipotent; nothing
is above it, especially not any kind of authority. In
reality, this principle totally destroys the intelligence
by flattering it with the sirens’ song of independence
and by refusing to consider its frailty and its need to
lean on a superior authority to overcome this fragility.
For Luther, reason is a weapon used by the devil
to deceive men. His anxiety and his pride pushed him
to find a system where he does not have to change
but where, at the same time, he may have a “good
conscience.” This manifest refusal to search for truth
obliges him to deny any value to the intelligence.
Everybody knows his words about reason, the
“whore of the devil.” But we can quote also some
other interesting phrases from him, either about St.
Thomas: “...who never understood one chapter of the
Gospel or of Aristotle,” or about Aristotle himself: “a
child that we must put in a pigsty or in the stable of
donkeys.” Finally, a general judgment about reason:
“Reason is contrary to faith.” Actually, it is enough to
remember that Luther, by his total inversion of things,
already destroyed the intelligence, which cannot act
upside down.
Furthermore, intelligence and will no longer have
an object. Intelligence allows us to discover the truth,
and the will, to attain the good. Nowadays, sincerity
replaces truth, and the good is something created by
our feelings. At least we can say that the intelligence
and will are atrophied.
Man no longer exists. He is an individual without
defense against the modern Moloch, not only because
of this error, which is spread everywhere, but also
because Protestantism, refusing to recognize the value

of the natural order, invented a system in which man
is no longer a reasonable creature endowed with
intellect and will.

A Barbaric State

A system created by an apostate monk to
justify his behavior, Protestantism destroyed, by its
principle of free examination, the whole natural order.
Nowadays, we are facing a field of ruins. Our times
are a return to the state of barbarism, and it is even
worse because our age has apostatized. Protestantism
can be compared to Attila because when it comes
somewhere, nothing remains.

Conclusion

With this introduction, we have become aware
of the extent of the damage and the present state
of the whole world. If we understand the problem
more profoundly, we will be able to understand that
the true remedy is essentially metaphysical: we must
recover the sense of reality, the sense of being. The
true remedy is the study of St. Thomas, master of
reality, of humility. We need to return to the soil,
because the “soil does not lie” and gives us again the
sense of reality and truth.
We must not despair. We know the passage of St.
Thomas about original sin: “Robbed of grace, with
a wounded nature, yet nature remains whole.” It is
sufficient to apply it. Nature subsists, in spite of the
error of Luther. It is, indeed, wounded by our own
faults, but God’s grace can cure us and give us even
more grace, as the Lavabo prayer says.
I think that the liturgy is a very efficacious remedy
for ridding ourselves of the legalistic, Protestant frame
of mind which, unfortunately, has also penetrated
us. The liturgy incorporates us in Christ, Who is the
Way, the Truth, and Life. Yet we must not reduce the
liturgy to another legalism; rather, we must follow the
example of our founder, Archbishop Lefebvre, who
encouraged an active and intelligent participation in
Mass. The liturgy is certainly the most appropriate
remedy for our faithful, particularly for our youth,
and also for ourselves. True contact with Christ in the
liturgy is the best antidote against the pernicious and
widespread error that is Protestantism.
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
presentation was given at the SSPX’s annual Priests’ Meeting held in February
2006 at the Seminary. It was transcribed by Angelus Press with minor editing
by Fr. Kenneth Novak for clarity.

1

This explication of Luther’s doctrine follows Maritain’s analysis in Three
Reformers: Luther, Descartes, Rousseau (New York: Charles Scribner’s
Sons, n.d.), pp.3-50.

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THE ANGELUS • July 2006

12

What is

the Society of Saint Pius X’s
General Chapter?
On July 3, 2006, the Society of Saint Pius X will
open its Third Ordinary General Chapter, during
which, most importantly among all the matters on
the agenda, the Superior General (currently His
Excellency Bishop Bernard Fellay) for the next 12
years will be elected. What is a General Chapter?
What happens during the Chapter? Who participates?
What are the rules for the election of the Superior
General? These are the questions you want answered.
THE ANGELUS • July 2006 www.angeluspress.org

The General Chapter is the supreme and
extraordinary authority of the Society of Saint Pius X.
(The ordinary authority, by the way, is the Superior
General assisted by his council.) Such a meeting is
given different titles among the Church’s other orders;
for example, the Society of Jesus calls theirs the
“General Congregation.” The General Chapter is the
only entity–should there be a need to do so—able to
amend the Statutes. The “ordinary” General Chapter

s

13
meets every 12 years. The Society of Saint Pius X
being founded in 1970, the upcoming Chapter will
be the third to convene in its history. Additionally,
the Superior General is allowed to convene an
“extraordinary” Chapter for exceptional reasons,
though the occasion for one has never yet arisen. The
Superior General may also convene a “consultative”
Chapter to consider particular issues that arise. Such
a gathering would be attended by the superiors
concerned acting in an advisory role only. The first
and essential goal of an ordinary General Chapter
like the one to be held this year is the election of
the Superior General and his assistants. Its second
goal is to examine if the Society of Saint Pius X is
conscientiously applying its statutes worldwide and is
endeavoring to preserve their spirit.
The General Chapter is composed of people
designated by their “office,” that is to say, their
function in the Society’s work. By office they are the
standing Superior General and his two assistants, the
bishops, the former Superior Generals, the Secretary
General and the Treasurer General, the District
Superiors, the Rectors of the Major Seminaries, and
the Superiors of the Autonomous Houses. It also
includes in its number the most senior priests who do
not hold the above mentioned charges or offices in
number equal to one-third of the number of members
by office.
There will be 40 members present at the 2006
General Chapter, 30 of whom will be there because of
their office. The members by seniority are therefore
10 (one-third of 30) constituting numerically a quarter
of the Chapter. These “elders” made their engagement
in the Society of Saint Pius X between 1971 (the two
eldest) and 1974 (the two most recent). They are not
without leadership experience. Among them are three
former District Superiors and one former Seminary
Rector.
While gathering men holding high positions
or with great seniority in the work, the Chapter
nevertheless presents a varied human palette, giving
an assurance of a diverse and wise view of reality.
The most venerable of the Chapter members is
66, the youngest 32. The priest with the greatest
seniority in the priesthood was ordained in 1972
while the youngest was ordained in 2001. Thirtytwo members come from six countries in Europe:
Germany, France, Austria, Spain, Great Britain, and
Switzerland. This Chapter’s eight non-Europeans
include representatives from Australia, South Africa,
Argentina, Canada, and the US. The French comprise
nine of the ten “elders,” testifying to the fact that most
of the Society’s first seminarian recruits came from
France. At this Chapter, the delegation from the US
District of the Society of Saint Pius X will number
four. Eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa do not have
representatives in this Chapter.
Before the proceedings the Chapter must be
prepared. Well in advance, each member-priest of the

Society is invited to submit his suggestions, if any, for
discussion. For their part, the Superior General and
his Council prepare the matters to be presented to the
Chapter as well as a report on the state of the Society
of Saint Pius X during the past 12-year term, including
its global financial status. Meanwhile, in accordance
with the Statutes, the Secretary General draws up the
list of capitularies (attendees at the Chapter), which
is definitively fixed six months before the Chapter
convenes (except for possible deaths). The same
Secretary classifies and gathers in a single document
the suggestions sent by the members to the General
House in Menzingen, Switzerland, the Society’s
international headquarters. The Secretary General
then sends to all of the capitularies the list of the
Chapter members and the Chapter agenda for their
personal study and reflection. During this period,
special prayers to implore the inspiration of the Holy
Ghost over the future Chapter are offered by all the
Society members. Upon their arrival for the Chapter,
in order to dispose themselves to act according to the
Divine Spirit, the capitularies make a spiritual retreat
of three days.
After these spiritual preliminaries, the oath
required by canon law is taken, followed by the
verification of the credentials of the members present
to take part in the Chapter, the report of the outgoing
Superior General, and various preparatory meetings.
Then follows the election of the new Superior General
and his two assistants by secret ballot. The Superior
General must be elected by at least two-thirds of the
ballots. The two assistants must be elected by a simple
majority of the votes. All three positions must be filled
by priests who are at least 30 years old and who are
permanent members of the Society of Saint Pius X.
A Superior General can be re-elected. Archbishop
Lefebvre mentioned this possibility in the first
sentence of the Statutes dealing with the Superior
General: “The Superior General and his two
Assistants are elected by the General Chapter for
twelve years. They may be re-elected.”...[Arguments
in favor of re-election are] experience, continuity, and
a Superior General with publicly known presence....
It will be for the capitularies, enlightened by the Holy
Ghost, to choose the cleric (another or the current
one) who will wisely guide the Society of Saint Pius X
for the next 12 years.
The Chapter does not conclude after the election
of the Superior General; it continues under the
presidency of the new Superior General. The Chapter
studies the questions compiled by the General House
which were submitted by the Society’s members
and those that come up during the Chapter itself. A
simple majority of votes is required for passage of any
resolution which will have force of law for the Society
of Saint Pius X.
The author is a regular contributor to the French District’s bi-monthly magazine Fideliter. This article was translated from Fideliter (May-June, 2006) and
abridged by Fr. Kenneth Novak. The 2006 General Chapter will be held at the
mother seminary of the SSPX in Ecône, Switzerland (pictured).
www.angeluspress.org

THE ANGELUS • July 2006

Pollock

Munzenberg

1

Lukacs

Reich

Fromm

Grünberg

Ma

THE FRANK

cultural revolution

An article recommended for
publication by Fr. Franz Schmidberger,
First Assistant to Superior General
Bishop Bernard Fellay, reporting the
ingenuity and perseverance of the
children of darkness played out against
the frequently gullible children of light.

m

Marcuse

Korsch

Benjamin

1

Horkheimer Adorno

NKFURT SCHOOL

on

A r n a u d

d e

L a s s u s

16
In general terms, one can identify two types of
Revolution. First, there is political revolution: the
gaining of power through violence and the use of
terror. The revolutions of 1789-93 in France and
of 1917 in Russia provide a good illustration of this
type. Second, there is cultural revolution in which
one demolishes from within the basis of civilization
in the country one wants to conquer–its culture,
way of life, beliefs, morality, scale of values, etc. It
is a long-term action undertaken without visible
violence by applying the formula: “Modern forms of
subjection are marked by mildness.”1
Why is it important to study the process of
cultural revolution, which is generally less known
than that of political revolution? Because it shows
itself to be particularly effective in Catholic
countries. Poland gives us a typical example
of this: Here is a country that for 50 years had
resisted Marxist political power and, in spite of
it, had preserved its religion and its morality.
However, within a few years of a cultural revolution
arriving from the West, morality and customs were
penetrated by anti-Christian influences and were
adapted to Western standards, which has made us
fear a rapid de-Christianization of the country.2
Cultural revolution is not a new phenomenon.
Joseph de Maistre, at the beginning of the l9th
century, characterized it as follows:
Until now, nations were killed by conquest, that is
by invasion. But here an important question arises: can
a nation not die on its own soil, without resettlement
or invasion, by allowing the flies of decomposition to
corrupt to the very core those original and constituent
principles which make it what it is?3

The cultural revolution has been systematized
particularly since the 1920’s, following an initiative
of Lenin and the creation of what was called the
Frankfurt School. We propose to produce some basic
information about this initiative and the Frankfurt
School, and to demonstrate how they contributed
powerfully to the counterculture which triumphs
today.

Marx and the
Freemasons

In 1843, some five years before the Communist
Manifesto, Marx wrote to a friend:
Here is what we have to accomplish: ruthless criticism
of all that exists. Ruthless in two ways: the criticism
should neither be afraid of its own conclusions nor of
the conflicts with the powers that be.

Ruthless criticism of all that exists: by this he
meant not only politics, religion, law and family,
but all the elements of Western culture. These ideas
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of Marx corresponded with those brought into play
by the Freemasons at the same time. It will suffice
to quote two texts by members of the Italian Alta
Vendita.4
To propagate light, it is both fit and useful to set
everything which aspires to move in motion. The
essential thing is to isolate men from their families, to
make them lose their morals. [Piccolo Tigre,5 (1822)6]
Catholicism is no more afraid of the sharp dagger than
are monarchies; but these two bases of social order can
collapse by corruption: let us therefore never grow tired
of corrupting. Pervert hearts and you will have no more
Catholics. [Vindice,7 (1838)8]

After the Communist Manifesto of 1848, Marxism
concentrated on political and economic action. Its
attack on Western culture moved on to the second
phase. It was not until the 1920’s that we saw
Marxists methodically taking up again Marx’s ideas
of 1843.

Communist Failures
and the Cultural
Revolution Project

After the October Revolution in Russia, one
of Lenin’s ideas had been to export revolution to
Central and Western Europe in order to save it in
Russia. It was a failure. Revolution almost failed in
Russia, but was saved thanks to American financial
support. It failed in Hungary, too, where Bela Kun
in 1919 was not able to maintain a Communist
regime for more than 133 days. It failed in
Germany, where the Spartacus League, founded in
1916, organized an uprising in Berlin in 1919, which
was fiercely suppressed. It failed in Italy, where
Communist parties and unions were subjected to a
crushing defeat by the ex-Socialist Mussolini.
Reflection on these failures led to conclusions
regarding methodology. First, Marx had predicted
that industrialization would lead to intolerable
conditions for the working classes and the
elimination of the lower middle class. These
predictions were shown to be erroneous. The
increase in productivity improved the quality
of life of all classes. Second, it became clear the
proletariat could never be the tool to overthrow
the industrialized West and allow importation of
revolution there. Third, it was necessary to abandon
any idea of a frontal assault against the bourgeoisie
and capitalism in the developed countries of the
West. Fourth, the West could only be overthrown
after destruction of its living strength through the
treason of intellectuals.
(continued on p.25)

(continued from p.16)

Thus, Communists were led to rediscover those
intuitions that Marx had had before the Manifesto
of 1848 and to begin a cultural revolution of the
Marxist type by exploiting thoroughly all the forms
of dialectic. To give concrete effect to the previous
reflections, a meeting was organized at the end
of 1922 on Lenin’s initiative at the Marx-Engels
Institute in Moscow. It clarified the concept of
cultural revolution and the basis of its organization.
“It was perhaps more harmful to Western
civilization than the Bolshevik Revolution itself,”
writes Ralph de Toledano.9 Participants in the
meeting were Karl Radek, Lenin’s representative;
Felix Dzherzhinsky,10 to ensure that whatever
strategy emerged would be integrated into the Soviet
worldwide network of murder and subversion; Willi
Munzenberg; and Georg Lukacs.
Let us consider the two most influential
members at this meeting: Willi Munzenberg
and Georg Lukacs. Willi Munzenberg played an
important role in the creation of the Comintern.11 He
was a German Communist leader in the inter-war
period who brought a sense of organization to the
proposed cultural revolution. He was later murdered
on the orders of Stalin.12 Georg Lukacs (1885-1971)
was of a Jewish family from Hungary. He was the
People’s Commissar for Culture and Education in
Bela Kun’s Communist government in Hungary.
As a good Marxist theoretician he developed the
subject “Revolution and Eros,” in other words, to
use sex instinct as an instrument of destruction. In
the cultural revolution project, his role was decisive.
He brought his ideas to it and it benefited from his
knowledge of the cultural field and his relations with
German-speaking artists and intellectuals.

The Power of
a Small Number
Munzenberg and Lukacs both knew that societies
and civilizations are not propelled by mass movements.
The Bolshevik Revolution had not been brought about
by mass demonstrations, but by the disintegration of
Czarism, the corruption of the ruling class, and by the
erosion of that class’s faith in itself and its will to hold
to power. Lenin’s theoretical journal, Iskra, which was
instrumental in bringing down the imperial regime, had
a circulation of 3000–and all of them intellectuals.13
The success of a strategy which would bring about
that disintegration, corruption, and erosion in the West,
the cultural revolution could alone produce the preemptive conditions for a Communist revolution. The
obstacle was Western civilization itself and the culture
it engendered.
Western civilization was made up of many mansions–
the morality that derives from religion, the family,

25
respect for the past as a guide to the future, the restraint
of man’s baser instincts, and a social and political
organization which guaranteed freedom without inviting
license. And of these obstacles, the two greatest were an
immanent God and the family.
This was the message of the Marx of 1843, before he
launched into pseudo-scientific economic history. His
call then was for the ruthless criticism of everything
existing, but particularly religion, science, and the
family. Then, with Western man “liberated” of his
humanity and rooting in the mud, the new, politically
correct society would arise.14

How would it be brought about? The first key
idea was to act upon the intellectuals:
We must organize the intellectuals and use them to
make Western civilization stink. Only then, after they
have corrupted all its values and made life impossible,
can we impose the dictatorship of the proletariat.15

The second key idea was to exploit Freud’s ideas
in a Marxist way:
The start of conceptual debasement of man’s sexual
instincts had been begun by Sigmund Freud.…Sex, the
most explosive aspect of the human psyche, was to be
unleashed. An amalgam of neo-Freudianism and neoMarxism were to destroy the fragile defenses of Western
civilization’s immune system.16

The Frankfurt
School’s German
Phase (1923-32)

To incarnate this worldview, an Institute for
Marxism was founded at Frankfurt in 1923. It
quickly took a more neutral label: “The Institute
for Social Research.”17 Frankfurt was not chosen
accidentally. Since the Middle Ages, Frankfurt has
been one of the most important centers of influence
in Germany. Frankfurt was the city of origin of
several financial dynasties. In the 18th century,
Frankfurt was the center of the Bavarian Illuminati,
of that High Masonry which played a key role in
the preparation of the French Revolution. It was
near Frankfurt where, in 1781, a Masonic assembly
decided upon the death of Louis XVI and the King
of Sweden. In the 20th century:
Frankfurt was the German city that had the highest
percentage of Jews in the population of any German
town; the Jewish community residing there was the
best known and, after Berlin, the second largest Jewish
community....It was a city in which the number of middleclass sympathizers with socialism and communism was
unusually high.18

It is therefore logical that it was at Frankfurt that
the research institute for the study of the planning
stage of cultural revolution–the Institute for Social
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THE ANGELUS • July 2006

26
Research, and which after 1960 was to be called the
Frankfurt School–should be set up.

The Institute for
Social Research

From 1923-30, the Institute was directed by
Carl Grünberg, known and respected in academic
circles, of Austrian origin and Marxist convictions.
From 1930-58, it was directed by Max Horkheimer,
a doctor of philosophy and of Marxist orientation.
After having supplied the Institute with a good
number of its basic ideas, it was said of Georg
Lukacs, who left it afterwards, “Whatever the
disagreements that separated them in subsequent
years–and they were serious–the Institute and
Lukacs spoke to similar questions from within a
common tradition.”19
The other important personalities at the Institute
were: Erich Fromm (1900-80); Theodor Adorno
(1903-69), author of the book The Authoritarian
Personality, which we will address below; Karl
Korsch (1886-1961); Wilhem Reich (1897-1957);
Friedrich Pollock (1894-1970); Walter Benjamin
(1892-1940); and Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979),
who was accepted as a member of the Institute in
1932. It is important to note that Herbert Marcuse’s
arrival strengthened the group of those within the
Institute who had adopted “a dialectical rather than
a mechanical understanding of Marxism.”20 This
means that the Marxists of the Institute held ideas
more akin to Trotsky (revolution spread throughout
like a virus) rather than of Stalin’s monolithism.

The Frankfurt
School in the US
When in 1933 Hitler became Chancellor of
Germany, the Institute closed its doors in Frankfurt
and re-organized itself in the US. What follows
is a description by Jeffrey Steinberg in his (as yet
unpublished) study Draft Report on Manchurian
Children21 on the installation of the Institute in the
US and its fields of activity in the years 1932-50.
By the early 1930’s, the Frankfurt School22 abandoned
pre-Hitler Germany, where they had already played
a mighty role in the cultural decadence that fostered
the Nazis, and, after a brief sojourn in Switzerland,
settled in the US. Courtesy of Columbia and Princeton
Universities, the London School of Economics, the
British Fabian Society, education subversive John
Dewey, the Rockefeller family foundations, and others,
leading figures in the Frankfurt School were given
privileged positions in the elite American universities.
THE ANGELUS • July 2006 www.angeluspress.org

Columbia University became the official “American
home” of the Frankfurt School.
At Princeton University, Frankfurt School member
Paul Lazarsfeld headed the Radio Research Project,
an early social engineering and social profiling effort,
bankrolled by the Rockefeller foundations and the U.S.
Army. Frankfurt School leader Theodor Adorno became
the head of the music studies unit under Lazarsfeld, where
he wrote, in the 1930’s and 1940’s, about the prospects
of unleashing atonal and other forms of popular music
as a weapon to destroy society. In his seminal work,
The Theory of Modern Music, Adorno advocated the use
of such degenerate forms of music to promote mental
illness–including necrophilia–on a mass scale. He wrote
elsewhere that the United States could be brought to its
knees via the use of radio and television, to promote a
culture of pessimism, despair, and self-hatred.
In the early 1940’s, the American Jewish Committee
hired Horkheimer and Adorno, along with a majority
of the Frankfurt School refugees, to direct a decadelong Studies in Prejudice, which produced five major
works. The most famous of the Studies, The Authoritarian
Personality,23 trashed American postwar morality, arguing
that, because the vast majority of Americans still
believed in the virtues of God, nation, and family,
America was ripe for a fascist authoritarian takeover. For
the Frankfurt School social revolutionaries, any belief in
a transcendent God was fascist. It was from this struggle
against “prejudices” that “political correctness,” which
triumphs today, was born.
Some leading Frankfurt School personalities, including
Adorno and Max Horkheimer, had, by the late 1930’s,
migrated to Hollywood, where they joined the ranks of
Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, Igor Stravinsky,
and Alexander Korda, in pioneering the use of the new
emerging “mass culture industry” as a vehicle for mass
cultural subversion and the furtherance of their “Cultural
Pessimism” project. Not coincidentally, Korda was a
graduate of the Ministry of Culture and Education of
the Bolshevik Bela Kun government in Hungary, where
he served directly under the Frankfurt School’s founder
and top Comintern spy, Georg Lukacs. Englishmen
Huxley and Isherwood were veterans of British Fabian
psychological warfare projects.24
Simple-minded anti-Communists, oblivious of the
Frankfurt School’s Comintern agenda of “culture war”
spent so much time looking for subliminal revolutionary
messages in the Hollywood cinemas that they failed
to take note of the fact that the movie industry was
increasingly turning out trash films that glorified sex,
murder, and drug abuse. Had they studied the twisted
writings of Horkheimer and Adorno, or their Hollywood
fellow travelers Huxley and Isherwood, they would
have realized, long ago, that the name of the game was
psycho-cultural subversion.
As early as the 1950’s, Adorno was writing, in various
“critical theory” journals, that once the majority of
Americans had been trapped into spending their leisure
time in front of the television set or the movie theater
screen, the process of destroying “bourgeois capitalist
society” would be completed. Aldous Huxley described
this process of brainwashing, enhanced by psychedelic

27
drug use, as a “kind of concentration camp without
tears,” and as the “final revolution.”
At the same time that Hollywood was being invaded
by Frankfurt School members and fellow travelers,
the American educational system, from kindergarten
to postgraduate, was also being assailed by the same
apparatus. The authors of this report provided an indepth account of how the Frankfurt School, in league
with John Dewey and his cohorts at the National
Educational Association, and Kurt Lewin’s National
Training Labs, have subverted the American educational
system (see The Crisis in American Education, 1995, by
Jeffrey Steinberg and Paul Goldstein). The fact is, by
the end of World War II, the transformation of our
public schools from educational institutions dedicated
to preparing young people to function as citizens of
a democratic republic into experimental laboratories
testing murderous theories of mass mind control and
Marxist-Freudian social revolution was well underway.
The University of Chicago, a hotbed of Frankfurt School
and Deweyite subversion, contributed one of the seminal
studies on how to transform American education, edited
by Prof. Benjamin Bloom, called Taxonomy of Educational
Objectives.
Several years later, Lord Bertrand Russell wrote in The
Future of Science, “I think the subject that will be of the
most importance politically is mass psychology....The
social psychologists of the future will have a number of
classes of school children on whom they will try different
methods of producing an unshakable conviction that
snow is black. Various results will soon be arrived at:
first, that influences of the home are obstructive. Second,
that not much can be done unless indoctrination begins
before the age of ten....It is for the future scientist to
make these maxims precise and discover exactly how
much it costs per head to make children believe that
snow is black. When the technique has been perfected,
every government that has been in charge of education
for more than one generation will be able to control
its subjects securely without the need of armies of
policemen.”25

Let us clearly understand what Jeffrey Steinberg
is saying in the preceding text. It is not a question
of attributing the totality of the subversion in the
domains of music, film, television, and school to the
Frankfurt School; it is a question simply of showing
that, in these various domains, the Frankfurt School
had explained in advance what must be done and
then piloted it.
In 1950, three of the main members of the
Frankfurt School, Horkheimer, Adorno, and
Pollock, left the US to resettle in Frankfurt and
to set up a new “Institute for Social Research.”
The Institute pursued its activities until Theodor
Adorno’s death in 1969. A part of the team, which
included Herbert Marcuse, remained in the US.
The principal work of the Frankfurt School
was therefore spread over a period of 46 years–
from 1923-69. By 1969, the movement was well
established and younger men would take charge.

Key Ideas of the
Cultural Revolution

In the previous sections, we outlined the general
concept of cultural revolution as it was conceived
by the Frankfurt School. What follows is a more
systematic explanation drawn from the works of
Herbert Marcuse. Why Herbert Marcuse?–Because
he has clearly explained the main ideas conceived
and put into practice by him and his colleagues at
the Frankfurt School. Marcuse had this to say about
the concept of cultural revolution:
One can rightfully speak of a cultural revolution,
since the protest is directed toward the whole cultural
establishment, including the morality of existing society.
The traditional idea of revolution and the traditional
strategy of revolution have ended. These ideas are old
fashioned...what we must understand is a type of diffused
and dispersed disintegration of the system.26

Regarding the process of cultural revolution,
especially the fact that it is “quiet,” he writes that the
cultural subversion will be wide-spread not through
terrorist processes but slowly, subtly, peacefully.
Hence the idea of a cultural revolution which would
be a “quiet revolution.”27
If classic class struggle is abandoned because the
working class is no longer revolutionary, this will
be to the benefit of a new revolutionary sensibility.
The revolt will have to be developed in two
new areas, those being non-material needs (of selfdetermination, human relations) and the physiological
dimensions of existence (race, sex, etc.). In conformity
with this new revolutionary sensibility, the ideas
of Freud will be exploited from a Marxist rather
than a bourgeois perspective. This system is called
“Cultural Marxism,” the ideological part of which is
known under the name of “Critical Theory.” Let us
recall that the book already cited, The Authoritarian
Personality by Theodor Adorno (1950) can be
considered a sort of manifesto of “Critical Theory.”
We wish to emphasize this point, which
constitutes one of the main basic ideas of the
Frankfurt School. Marcuse summarized Freud’s
theory as follows:
a) The essence of being is “eros,” the search for
pleasure, that is, “pansexualism”;
b) The individual has to accept the cultural
control of his instinctive needs, otherwise there is no
possibility of civilized society;
c) From this arises the conflict between the
principle of pleasure (free satisfaction of instinctive
needs) and the principle of reality (where needs are
controlled).
The Marxist is interested in conflict, in the
dialectic, and all that can incite these. His idea of
civilization is different from that of Freud. In the
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THE ANGELUS • July 2006

28
Freudian scheme of things summarized above, he
will accept a) but not b). Freudian ideas will be
used as a dialectical element to destroy existing
civilization and serve to support “a civilization
developing from libidinous relations and supported
by them.” Pansexualism must be thus developed
methodically with all its destructive effects.
Freud systematized pansexualism, but the origin
of it goes back to the Cabala28 and heathen religions.
It is a rather complex theory, the main elements
of which can be can be summarized this way:
According to the Cabala, God can be considered
in Himself or in His manifestations. In Himself
God is an indefinite being, vaguely called En Sof
(who has no limits) or Ayin (non-being). In His
manifestations, God shows himself by “emanations”
by which he perfects himself, whence comes the
idea of an evolutionary God, and that of pantheism
(the notion of creation being replaced by that of
emanation). These emanations number ten and are
called Sefiroth. Three of them are male, and three
others are female. The Sefiroth Victory (male) and
Sefiroth Glory (female) are concentrated in the
Sefirah Foundation,29 the symbol of which is the
organ of generation. One understands, in these
conditions, that the sexual principle, presented as
an integral part of the divinity, has a tendency to
permeate everything. Because it is rooted in the
Cabala, the pansexualism of the Frankfurt School
and of the cultural revolution to which it contributed
so powerfully has therefore a religious connotation.
[See Angelus Press English Edition of SiSiNoNo, The
Angelus, May 2006, No.69–Ed.]

Exploiting the
Male-Female Dialectic

“Pansexualism”–in other words, the unleashing
of the base passions of man–constitutes the first
exploitation of the difference between the sexes.
Another aspect of the differences between the sexes
will be systematically exploited to bring about the
overthrow of the traditional relationship between
men and women. This is to be accomplished by
attacking the authority of the father, by denying
the specific roles of the father and mother, by
suppressing differences in the education of boys and
girls, by abolishing forms of male superiority (hence
the presence of the women in the armed forces), and
by considering women and children as an oppressed
class and men as the oppressors. In support of
this overthrow, there exists an ideology–radical
feminism.

THE ANGELUS • July 2006 www.angeluspress.org

Using pansexualism and the overthrow of the
relationship between men and women, the founders
of the cultural revolution have two powerful means
by which to destroy the family. The Frankfurt School
knew how to draw in a remarkable way on the
scientific progress of its day–progress in the means
of communication (its action in regard to music and
films), and progress in the psychological sciences. In
the field of psychology, Abraham Maslow, a protégé
of the cultural revolution, played an important role
in perfecting methods of psychological conditioning
known as “group dynamics” and “sensitivity
training.”30

Results in the West

The principles of the Frankfurt School
were embodied in what came to be called
“counterculture,” the “cultural movement”
that especially dominated the highly influential
American left until the late 1960’s, and which has
been described as follows:
Counterculture is the cultural basis of the new left. It
includes the effort to discover new types of communities,
new models of family, new sexual customs, new styles
of life, new aesthetic forms, new personal identities
opposed to power politics, the bourgeois lifestyle, and
the Protestant work ethic.31

This description dates from 1968. But today,
the counterculture characterized by pansexualism,
the destruction of paternal authority, and radical
feminism is not only the cultural basis of the
American left but of almost the whole of society
throughout the entire West.
Let us return to pansexualism. Given its religious
origin, it is undoubtedly the most dangerous
element. It has invaded society at large, accounting
for indecent fashions, for titillating posters and
advertisements, magazines, films, TV and radio
broadcasts, for the degraded behavior of young and
old, for sex education; pansexualism is supported
by the State, and has its effect even in traditional
Catholic circles. To give an example, here is the
recent testimony of a priest exercising his ministry
in the Lebanon:
It is important to look at the evidence: whether they
are Catholic, Orthodox or Moslem, one does not have
the impression that the religious authorities of this
country (Lebanon) realize the galloping degradation
of morals that has taken place, particularly through the
means of language and American and Anglo-Saxon
models.
At the very least, ecclesiastical authorities should
react. But how does one publicly seek the censorship of
squalid publications (for the greater part in English) or
of disgusting television programs, when the pastors have
the custom of remaining silent in their own churches

29
when faced with the glistening of bare flesh offered to
their blasé parishioners, who are not averse to taking in
what is on display?
But what is striking in the Near East, is that this tide of
pornography, these dubious deviances and this display
of vice appear only in “Christian” regions. It is not in
the neighboring countries, with a Moslem majority, that
one would find visa and residence permits granted to the
7,000 prostitutes who come from Eastern Europe and
whose blond hair may lead astray some young (and not
so young) Lebanese.
It is alarming all the same to be told in Damascus by
a very holy monk: “Here, Islam protects Christianity
because it does not allow the importation of moral
corruption.” It would do good to read once more, in
Apocalypse, what Our Lord said to the angel of the
Church of Laodicea (Apoc. 3:14-22), and to concur.32

Cybernetics

What is “cybernetics”?–It is defined as “the
study of communication and control processes in
biological, mechanical, and electronic systems.”
This “science,” developed in the US, rests on
the false hypothesis of the essential similarity of
communication and control (understood in the sense
of command) in machines and human beings.33 It
is presented as a mixture of well-founded scientific
theories (mainly the theory of information) and
of materialist ideology (man is only a sophisticated
machine, and machines will allow us to reproduce
the functioning of the human brain and even to
surpass it).
It was in New York (1942), at a conference
organized by the Josiah Macy Foundation, where the
cybernetics brain-trust group was launched. It would
be known later as the Cybernetics Group. The initial
activity, called the “Man-Machine Project,” had as
its object
to draw together a group of electrical engineers,
biologists, anthropologists, and psychologists to devise
experiments in social control, based on the belief that
the human brain was nothing more than a complex
input-output machine, and that human behavior could,
in effect, be programmed, on both an individual and
societal scale.34

The group’s works took shape after the Second
World War with the support of the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (MIT).35 Ten conferences
organized by the Macy Foundation were held
between 1953 and 1964 and marked its stages.
It is here that one sees the appearance of
members of the Frankfurt School, who had, from
the beginning, grasped the importance of the
cybernetics project for their more general enterprise
of cultural revolution. While directing the groups
of studies on prejudices, Max Horkheimer, director
of the Frankfurt School, collaborated with the

Cybernetics Group. In 1948, he participated at Paris
at the foundation of the World Federation of Mental
Health (WFMH), one of the more harmful projects
stemming from the Cybernetics Group. Kurt Lewin,
a fellow traveler of the Frankfurt School, played
an important role within this same group. He had
founded at MIT the Research Center for Group
Dynamics, then created the National Training
Laboratories, active in the same domain. With Karl
Korsch, another member of the Frankfurt School,
he had set up a foundation to develop artificial
intelligence. Here is how Jeffrey Steinberg presents
the role of the Frankfurt School and the associated
group, the Tavistock Institute,36 in the cybernetics
project:
What Lukacs and his Frankfurt School protégés
despised about Western Christianity was its belief in
the sanctity of the individual soul, the idea that every
individual human being was created by God in his living
image, and that every individual had a divine spark of
creativity that could serve the betterment of all mankind.
Lukacs and company understood, all too well, that no
revolution could succeed in the West for very long until
the principle of “imago viva Dei” (man in the living image
of God) had been destroyed and replaced by a far more
bestialized and pessimistic notion of mankind.
It is here where the “Kulturkampf ” of Lukacs,
Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse directly impacted
upon the postwar technological revolution in mass
communications. The convergence point was a littleknown project, launched in the early 1940’s, by a
virtually unknown tax-exempt foundation, the Josiah
P. Macy Foundation. Macy bankrolled a decade-long
“Man-Machine Project,” which came to be known
among its initiates as the Cybernetics Group.
Although the two most famous individuals associated
with the invention of the term “cybernetics” were
John Von Neumann and Norbert Wiener, several
other individuals were in reality the dominant figures
within the group. The real “pioneers” of the so-called
“information revolution” were Margaret Mead, Gregory
Bateson, Kurt Lewin, Max Horkheimer, and Dr. John
Rawlings Rees–all pivotal figures in the Frankfurt
School, Tavistock, or both.
The Cybernetics Group borrowed a page from Georg
Lukacs’s game plan for social revolution. They argued
that there was nothing divine about man. Indeed,
man-made machines would soon be superior “thinking
machines” to the human mind.37

Cultural
Revolution Today

Almost 40 years after the death of Adorno in
1969, almost 30 years after that of Marcuse in 1979,
the cultural revolution continues by remaining
impregnated with the ideas of the Frankfurt School,
whose key idea was expressed thus by Willi
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30
Since this article was
first published five years
ago, it is necessary to
provide an update of
the current global videogame market. (The author
refers to the phenomenon
on page 30.) In 2005,
the sales of worldwide
video-game software and
hardware brought in $27
billion shared between
the big three homeentertainment-console
producers: Microsoft’s
Xbox versions, Sony’s PlayStation2, and Nintendo’s
GameCube. However, while the market has a large and
dedicated following, it has been unable to entice new
players, especially girls and the elderly. The result
is a video game market which has actually become
stagnant with the US itself stuck at around $12 billion
annually, virtually unchanged in the last five years. All
three manufacturers will be releasing new versions of
their gaming hardware in the next year with an eye to
hyping bigger sales and attracting non-gamers.
The standard video-game controller/joystick is
simply too hard to learn or makes one look too weird
when playing, and this keeps people away. With
its GameCube in last place among the Big Three,
Nintendo is promising to change gaming by making
it easier. Replacing the current controller will be
something approximating a TV remote control, part
laser pointer and part motion sensor. It will know what
you’re aiming at, how fast you move, and how far
it is from the TV screen. Swing the controller to “...
swing a sword,...swat a fly, do squat-thrusts like a
weight lifter, turn a key in the lock, catch a fish, saute
vegetables, balance a broom on [your] outstretched
hand, color in a circle, and fence with a foil...even
dance the hula....[I]nstead of passively playing the
games, with the new controller you physically perform
them. You act them out. It’s almost like theater: the
fourth wall between game and player dissolves. The
scene of immersion–the illusion that you, personally,
are projected into the game world–is powerful.”
The sensors are so sensitive that in playing video-tennis,
you can scoop under the ball to lob it or slice it for
spin. No buttons to press for video-football.
Gesture a hiking motion, and the ball’s in the
quarterback’s hands. To pass the ball, gesture a
throwing motion: hard and fast for bullet passes;
slower, less forcefully to lob it. Sword fight; aim a bow
and shoot an arrow; reel in a feisty virtual fish.
Cutting-edge design has become more important
than cutting-edge technology, that is, what’s
important to gamers is not more power and more
features, but how easy it is to play and how “cool”
you look doing so.–compiled by the Editor
from Time magazine (5/05/2006, pp.36-39).

Munzenberg, “We will make the West so corrupt
that it stinks.”38
We have already addressed at length the subject
of pansexualism, more popular today that ever. We
shall confine ourselves to the cybernetic project
and video games as another element of the current
situation where the legacy from the Frankfurt School
is demonstrated. As indicated above, the Frankfurt
School had greatly inspired the Cybernetics Group
during the 1940’s and 1950’s. In bodies stemming
from this group, one finds the same inspiration.
Here is the example of the Media Lab:
By the 1980’s, MIT had spawned the Media Lab,
another direct outgrowth of the Cybernetics Group of
the 1940’s and 1950’s. Here social engineers worked
hand in glove with the engineers and machine designers
who were developing high-speed computers, computer
graphics, holographics, and the first generation of
computer simulators....According to the initial proposal
the laboratory was to provide for the “intellectual
mix of two rapidly evolving and very different fields:
information technologies and the human sciences”
(Steve Joshua Heims, The Cybernetics Group).39

What was the state of mind of these researchers?
In his book The Cybernetics Group, Steve Joshua
Heims indicates that in the 1980’s, the cybernetics
milieu had created its own religion, a pagan system
in full agreement with what Timothy Leary called
“scientific paganism.” The scientific paganism of the
researchers was one thing, but more serious was that
the results obtained by these researchers allowed
them to develop scientific paganism on a grand scale
and, more generally, the cultural revolution of which
scientific paganism is an element.
The Media Lab of MIT and the Stanford Artificial
Intelligence Lab were two of the magnets for this money
and the research work which fueled both the Pentagon
training-simulation programs and the evolving videogame industry.40

The Frankfurt School, the Cybernetics Group,
Media Lab and other bodies, the video-game
industry: here is one of the relationships that
enabled the technical perfection of one of the most
effective instruments of the cultural revolution
today–the video game. This is not to say, however,
that Media Lab is responsible for the fundamentally
immoral orientation of the greater number of video
games.
The second generation video-game market in
the US is expanding rapidly. According to Jeffrey
Steinberg (“Draft Report,” p.93), “point-and-shoot”
video games bring in 9-11 billion dollars annually.
These games represent the perfecting of role-playing
games which have been developed since the late
1970’s. They allow one to while away hour after
hour in a virtual world where one can be anybody
one wants to be and can act without having to suffer
the consequences of one’s actions. Any person–

31
young or not-so-young–can be habitually divorced
from reality and easily manipulated in the direction
suggested by the game. Even if the orientation of the
game is good, it can still have an ill effect resulting
from the time, often very long, spent in a virtual
world.
But very frequently the orientation of the
game is bad. There is in them violence of various
sorts. There are very realistic shooting simulations
(useful for training soldiers, perhaps, but evidently
dangerous for young people left to themselves),
pornographic aspects (pansexualism is everywhere),
incitement to indulge in magic (the spectator-actor
casts spells which, on the screen, are effective),
Satanism, and in a general way, the excitement of
the lust for power linked to a materialist conception
of life.
Here is an example of how a production
company presents the video game “Gangsters”
(which, according to some, seems harmless):
This gives you the opportunity to be a gangster
in a Chicago-style city of the 1920’s, controlling an
underground organization dealing in extortion, illegal
liquor, prostitution, violence, intimidation, blackmail,
gambling, gang warfare, bribery of officials, permanent
elimination of individuals and a host of money-making
activities.41

This gives a general outline of the game, but
here is what the player must do:
The aim of the game is to build your gang and
business empire to rule the city. To do this you will have
to beat three other gangs operating in the city, and avoid
arrest by the authorities.42

A young person who actively plays in such
a scenario for hours on end will be tempted to
transpose some of his virtual experience into the
real world.43 This is what has happened in the US
recently with the brutal murders of young people
by some of their high school classmates. Inquiries
have shown that the young murderers fired like
professional marksmen and that they had acquired
their mastery in shooting and the desire to put it into
practice through the use of video games containing
that type of simulation.44 We must recognize that
a great number of video games correspond well to
the objectives of the Frankfurt School to spread a
“culture” based on pessimism, depravity, sexual
license, violence, and drugs.

Conclusion

It was in 1923 that the Frankfurt School began
its work. Though it was not exclusively responsible,
the cultural revolution which it inspired starting in
the 1950’s developed in the US and then Europe.
About 20 years later, the cultural revolutions of
1968, under the influence of Marcuse, mark an

important stage. About another 30 years after
1968 would be needed to see the triumph of the
counterculture which began 80 years earlier.
We are dealing with a long-term, brilliantly
conceived operation. The men of thought and action
who devised it had the foresight to understand
what had to be done and to carry it out consistently
by selecting priority sectors–universities, music,
media broadcasting, psychological and educational
action–to put at their service the networks which
were offered to them. They succeeded beyond their
wildest dreams.
How can we explain the fact that this plan met
with the same success in Catholic countries as it
did in Protestant countries? Without doubt this was
because Catholics had another cultural revolution
to face as well as that inspired by the Frankfurt
School: the one which since the 1960’s has raged
inside the Church. It was a general disturbance:
a new revolutionary Mass, a new calendar, the
abandonment of Latin and the religious habit, the
organ and traditional songs replaced by profane
music, transformation of religious art,45 churches
becoming conference rooms rather than temples of
the Lord, and inconsistent catechesis proposing a
formless and undemanding religion. The Catholic
environment dissolved at the very moment when
the faithful needed it most, hence the uprooting of
Catholics from their culture, their abandonment
of religious practice en masse and thus becoming
all the more vulnerable to the cultural revolution
which came from Frankfurt via the US. The parallel
between the two cultural revolutions is remarkable.
They occurred barely within ten years of each other.
Political leaders favored the first whereas religious
leaders supported the second or allowed it to
happen. This begs the question as to whether there
are not a number of connections between them.
What do we do if the mystery of iniquity is so
very powerfully installed? It is necessary, obviously,
to protect in our fields of action our Catholic culture,
to keep alive the rest of Christendom which remains
among us, and not follow the general train of things
under the excuse that it is just the way things are.
All this supposes a certain asceticism. It consists in
suppressing what ought to be suppressed in order
to avoid being contaminated by the counterculture,
just as the Christians of the first centuries refrained
from going to baths and the circus to escape the
corruption of their time.
In conclusion, let us emphasize the usefulness
of knowing–all the better to fight it–the process
of destruction so intelligently implemented by
the Frankfurt School and its followers. We must
not neglect such facts, because, as Abbot Joseph
Lemann remarked:
In history, he who does not take account, not only
of Providence, but also of Hell, will only ever have
www.angeluspress.org

THE ANGELUS • July 2006

32
an inaccurate view and will only provide incomplete
explanations. God and Satan fight for the heart of man:
each of us knows that, but they also battle for the direction
of society, its developments and its stages. The first page
of the Bible reveals it; Christ reminded us regarding
the Church that the gates of Hell will not prevail; and
since then, the history of these eighteen centuries lets
us clearly see, over and above our quarrels over cities,
countries, nations, and races, the spectacle of these two
immense forces in combat: Infernal malice devastating
society, and divine grace repairing, supporting, and
always advancing it.46
This study first appeared in July 2001, published by Action Familiale et Scolaire,
31 rue Rennequin, 75017–Paris, France; the English version was originally
published in Apropos, No. 21, March 2003. Permission to publish it in The
Angelus was granted by the author, Arnaud de Lassus, and the translator, Mr.
Anthony Fraser, Editor of Apropros. The photograph on pp.14-15 shows the
Frankfurt riverfront (the Main River), 2003.

1

A socialist formula from 1968. See further details of this subject, in Pascal
Bernardin’s L’Empire écologique, Chapter V, “Techniques of Non-aversive
Control,” and the commentary on same in “Ecology and Globalism” in the
March 2003 issue of Apropos.
2
See Maciej Giertych’s article “The Political and Economic Situation in
Poland.”
3
Quoted by Philippe Ploncard d’ Assac in Le nationalisme français, p.26.
4
The Alta Vendita was a high-level Masonry which, during the first half of
the 19th century, dominated European Masonry.
5
The pseudonym of an Alta Vendita agent.
6
Letter of January 18, 1822; quoted by Cretineau-Joly, L’eglise romaine en
face de la Revolution, XI, 104.
7
The pseudonym of an Alta Vendita agent.
8
Letter of August 9, 1838; quoted by Cretineau-Joly, op.cit., XI, 128. Cf.
the AFS brochure, Connaissance élémentaire de la franc-maçonnerie,
p.110.
9
Ralph de Toledano, The Frankfurt School, (manuscript, 2000), p.11. This
study shows how the idea of cultural revolution was born and piloted by
the Frankfurt School.
10
The creator of the Soviet Secret Police, the Cheka.
11
Third Communist International, founded in 1919 by Lenin and dissolved
by Stalin in 1943. It was reconstituted at Sofia in 1995.
12
The Marxist Encyclopedia states that he was murdered in 1944.–Ed.,
Apropos.
13
De Toledano, The Frankfurt School, p.23.
14
Ibid., pp.4-15.
15
Willi Munzenberg, quoted by Ralph de Toledano, ibid., p.5.
16
Ibid., p.24. This point will be developed below.
17
Official date of its creation in February 3, 1923, by a decree of the Ministry
of Education (cf. Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of
the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, [University of
California Press, 1996], p.10).
18
Ralf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and
Political Significance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), p.17 (Wiggerhaus
cites this among the reasons for the extremely favorable circumstances at
the outset of the Institute for Social Research).
19
Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p.175.
20
Ibid., p.29.
21
A study on video games and their destructive effect.
22
Called in future the Frankfurt School Institute for Social Research.
23
Published in 1950 by Harper & Brothers, New York. It was written by
Adorno, along with Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson, R. Nevitt
Sanford, in collaboration with Betty Aron, Maria Hertz Levinson, and
William Morrow.
24
The Fabian Society: an English, Socialist movement founded in 1883. It
was the origin of the Labor Party.

THE ANGELUS • July 2006 www.angeluspress.org

25

Jeffrey Steinberg, Michael Steinberg, and Anton Chaitkin, “Draft Report
on Manchurian Children,” (unpublished study, 2001), pp.5-8.
26
Text of H. Marcuse, quoted in The Resister, Summer-Autumn, 1998.
27
At the same time as the work was being carried out by the Frankfurt
School, these ideas were being developed in parallel by the Italian Marxist
theoretician Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), who remained in prison from
1926 until his death.
28
In Jewish thought, one generally associates esoteric and mystical education
with the Cabala. In the widest meaning of a word, this describes the
successive esoteric currents which developed from the end of the period of
the Second Temple and which became the dynamic elements in the history
of Judaism (Encyclopaedic Dictionary of Judaism, s.v. “The Mystical
Jew”).
29
The sefiroth Victory, Glory, and Foundation are in Hebrew called Netzach,
Hod, and Yesod respectively.–Ed., Apropos.
30
Cf. The Resister, Summer–Autumn, 1998, p.54. On group dynamics, see
the Apropos pamphlet “Elementary Knowledge of the New Age,” pp.33-37.
See also the book by Ed. Dieckermann, Jr., Sensitivity Training and the
Cult of Mind Control.
31
Theodore Roszah, “Youth and the Great refusal,” The Nation, on 1968.
Quote by News Weekly, February 10, 2000.
32
“Repens-toi, Laodicée,” Bulletin de l’Association de St Pierre d’ Antioche
et de tout l’ Orient (Les Sablons, 61560 Bazoches-sur-Hoeur), No. 23,
March, 2001. See the article having the same title in Action Familiale et
Scolaire, No. 155 (June, 2001).
33
P. de Latil., La pensée artificielle, quoted by Le Robert.
34
J. Steinberg, Draft Report on Manchurian Children, p.86.
35
Usually indicated by the abbreviation MIT (Massachussetts Institute of
Technology).
36
British Center of the Psychological Group, of which John Rawling-Rees
was Director.
37
J. Steinberg, Draft Report, pp.12-13. This author is not a Catholic. The
above phrase, “Every individual possesses a divine spark of creativity” is
a little ambiguous and should be understood as meaning, “Every individual
can possess divine grace.”
38
Quote by Ralph de Toledano, The Frankfurt School, p.26.
39
J. Steinberg, Draft Report, pp.90-91.
40
Ibid., p.93.
41
Quote by J. Steinberg, ibid., p.55.
42
Ibid.
43
One will find in the oft-quoted study of J. Steinberg other examples of
scenarios of video games.
44
See the study by J. Steinberg, second part “The Killer Children: A
Chronology,” which analyzes ten cases of child murderers of children,
including that at Columbine High School, Littleton, Colorado (April 20,
1999).
45
Cf. the A.F.S. brochure A Sign of the Times: Evry Cathedral.
46
L’Entrée des Israélites dans la société française (The Entrance of the
Israelites into French Society) (p.205). Abbot Joseph Lemann (1836-1915),
a Jew who was converted at the same time as his brother Augustine. He is
the author of remarkable works on the French Revolution.

SOURCES
The first two books are written by authors sympathetic to the Frankfurt
School. The remaining authors, other than Marcuse, have a critical view
of cultural revolution.
Jay, Martin. The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School
and the Institute of Social Research 1923-1950. University of California
Press, 1996.
Wiggershaus, Rolf. The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political
Significance. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1998.
De Toledano, Ralph. The Frankfurt School (Unpublished study, 2000).
Steinberg, Jeffrey. Draft Report on Manchurian Children (Unpublished study,
2001).
Atkinson, Gerard L. “Who Placed American Men in a Psychic Iron Cage”;
Part II “The Thread of Cultural Marxism,” The Resister, Summer–Autumn,
1998.
Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilisation. 1955; French edition: Les Editions
de Minuit, 1997.

si si no no
THE ANGELUS ENGLISH-LANGUAGE ARTICLE REPRINT

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

●

July 2006

Reprint #70

part

St. Pius X
and the Duel
Between 2
Modern
Thought
and Catholic
Theology
P r o f e s s o r

rené descartes
Friedrich nietzsche
gottfried leibniz

M a t t e o

D ’ A m i c o

René Descartes (1596-1650), as is well known,
is considered to be the founder of modern
thought. This is certainly true, but it is true insofar
as we think of Descartes as the first metaphysician
who consciously sought to found science. It was
clear that, even with Galileo, science depreciated
sense experience, but it was not known what kind
of metaphysics would be needed in order to be
in conformity with this idea. Descartes was the

pope St. pius X
St.Thomas aquinas
St. augustine
17

THE ANGELUS ENGLISH-LANGUAGE ARTICLE REPRINT

first to set off on this path, and he was to be followed
by almost all the most important thinkers (or at least
those considered to be such). Let us take the example
of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804): his whole philosophy
is an explicitly declared attempt to found Newton’s
physics. What makes science, this bizarre and abstruse
image of the world, possible on the metaphysical
level?–this is the fundamental question governing the
first Kantian critique.
Thus, the thinkers begin trying to bend
metaphysical discourse in order to make it coherent
or in conformity with the image of the world that
emerged from the magical and then scientificoGalilean tradition. One might say that what began
was a formidable torsion or wrenching of definitions
and categories, with the goal of restating metaphysics
in scientifically homogeneous and coherent terms.
Classical thought was founded, as we have seen, on
the principle according to which to think means to
allow being to appear, to let something else appear
by identifying oneself with the thing, such that the
knowing subject becomes one, in some way, with the
object known; thus there is not a nature of thought per
se separate from the moment in which the mind allows
itself, so to speak, to be filled by the signification of
being. With Descartes, we watch the destruction of
this principle. The idea becomes a simple mental image
interposed between the mind or intellect and reality.
The outcome of such premises can only be
skepticism and the methodological adoption of a
principle which becomes decisive for Descartes,
namely, the principle according to which outside
the mind there might be nothing. This is exactly the
sentence that Descartes writes in his Discourse on the
Method: in a few lines, he puts an end to classical
metaphysics:
Accordingly, seeing that our senses sometimes deceive
us, I was willing to suppose that there existed nothing
really such as they presented to us; and because some
men err in reasoning, and fall into paralogisms, even
on the simplest matters of geometry, I, convinced that I
was as open to error as any other, rejected as false all the
reasonings I had hitherto taken for demonstrations; and
finally, when I considered that the very same thoughts
(presentations) which we experience when awake may
also be experienced when we are asleep, while there is
at that time not one of them true, I supposed that all the
objects (presentations) that had ever entered into my
mind when awake, had in them no more truth than the
illusions of my dreams.1

The expression used by Descartes, “I was willing
to suppose,” is interesting: “I was willing to suppose
that everything that I had believed to be true was not
true, and that beyond my senses, there was nothing
real.” They are only a few lines, but they lay down the

18

foundation for this extraordinary castle–this monstrum
[wonder or portent]–that is Cartesian thought.
Mind you, the sentences we just quoted would
have made a St. Thomas or an Aristotle laugh,
because if they are rigorously examined according
to a classical or Thomistic metaphysics, it is almost
unbelievable that someone would begin from a
skeptical premise of this sort, for we know very well
that every skeptical thesis, as St. Augustine clearly
demonstrated, immediately gives rise to a vicious
circle, so that radical skepticism is in fact impossible.
Skepticism is scarcely more than a grotesque form
of philosophical infantilism, and its depth is only
apparent.
The skeptic should keep quiet, for if he speaks,
he immediately enters into unsolvable contradictions.
For when even the most radical skeptic speaks, he can
not do otherwise than believe in the absolute truth
of his skeptical premise. But Descartes is shameless,
and has no hesitation at beginning from such a
contradiction. I remind you in passing that he had a
sort of disgust and hatred for Scholastic philosophy,
which had been communicated to him during his
years of study, and this detail explains many things.
One sees at work here for the first time the naturalist
presupposition, which is the philosophical expression
which describes what we have just seen placed at the
basis of Cartesian philosophy.
In other words, Descartes founds his mental
strategy on a groundless presupposition, an
undemonstrated and undemonstrable thesis, a
totally unjustified postulate. And what is the essence
of this naturalist presupposition? The naturalist
presupposition says the following: Our mind does
not grasp things, things as such, things in themselves,
as Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas thought, but
it only grasps the psychophysical modifications of
our senses. For Descartes, to have a sensation means
to have a relation, not with the world, but with a
psychophysical modification that is produced within
oneself: such is the Cartesian postulate, the “original
sin” of modern thought, the source of modern
metaphysical immanentism.
The classical postulate is also a postulate, but one
postulate opposed to another postulate is not enough
to refute it. And there is an even more important
difference: the principles with which classical
philosophy began were perfectly coherent and in
continuity with common sense; their credibility was,
so to speak, certified by an implicit and universal
consensus gentium.
Thus, with this major philosopher, we are
confronted with a dogmatic choice, a choice that
is fideist in nature.2 Descartes has confidence in
his postulate. He does not behold reality with the
wonder of which Aristotle spoke; rather, he has

THE ANGELUS
July 2006

unilaterally decided that what is real is the thing in
itself understood as something physical and material,
and that, consequently, I can no longer really know
the exterior world in its essence, because I only
know the psychophysical modifications that the thing
imprints on my senses. From such a standpoint, one
is moreover constrained to renounce the other key
category of Greco-Christian epistemology, namely,
the idea that the intellect, through the senses, reaches
the form or essence of the being in itself such that
the cognitive act is never just sensory, but always
first and foremost intellectual. Since the materialist
presupposition a priori only accords the title of real to
material things, it is evident that it is obliged to banish
from the new metaphysics any idea of essential form,
and thus to renounce every harmonious ontology of
substance.3
In these conditions, man no longer has access to
being, as if he had shut himself up within himself:
such is, ultimately, the discovery, so to speak, of
Descartes’s cogito. If I no longer have access to being,
what is left to me as subject of knowing? I have left
only the ensemble of ideas that nonetheless exist,
because I see [or experience] that I have a mind that
is criss-crossed by a flux of ideas that I govern, but
also by which I am surpassed and possessed (Freud
and Sartre are already waiting behind the door, as
you see!). I only have within myself this stuff of ideas
which is so easily confused with a dream, but I no
longer have any possibility of thinking that my reason
reaches and seizes being as such.
My mind only grasps its own thoughts, so
to speak. The result is the reduction of the act
of thinking to rationalism, subjectivism, and
immanentism. Truth and meaning, if indeed they are
to be found somewhere, do not and can not but come
from man’s own mind. If indeed truth is to spring
from somewhere, it can only spring from thought. It
is no longer being that founds and rules the mind, but
it is the mind that will, by strange gyrations, refound
being and refound God, and place in being all that is.
All will proceed from the cogito enclosed within the
self, forbidden an ontologically fruitful relation with
the world.
Such is Descartes’s fundamental act. If I can only
trust the contents that I find within my cogito, then I
must start from these contents and, by basing myself
upon them, proceed to all the rest: the world, God,
the absolute, the meaning of things; but it is my cogito,
my reason, that constitutes the foundation. Such is the
man-centered turn that, before it struck our poor Karl
Rahner, had already stricken Descartes.4
Man-centeredness, or anthropocentrism, is the
essence of the Renaissance, but it is also, in reality,
the essence of apocryphal, Cabalistic gnosticism, and
it ultimately represents a deification of man, a subject

to which we shall soon be obliged to return. With
Descartes, we are faced with the great act of thought,
the great sacrilege, that stands at the origin of modern
culture and history. Indeed, with Descartes, one
already has the affirmation, albeit implicitly, of this
radical–and fatal–metaphysical distortion: if it is the
cogito that founds being, being is no longer founded
by God, and the mind no longer has a master to heed,
namely, reality. Every modern philosophy is merely a
variation on this theme.
There are other details from Descartes’s history
that are usually left out of accounts: In his history
of the Rosicrucians5 Paul Arnold devotes a dense
and important chapter to the relationship between
Descartes and the Rosicrucians. It is a very interesting
subject, even if certain aspects remain obscure: it is
not known with certitude whether Descartes was a
member of the “Red Cross” or not, or whether he
only sympathized with this mysterious movement. But
it is important to recall that the Rosicrucians had a
major importance in the political and cultural history
of modern Europe, and it is certain that Descartes had
intense relations with the Rosicrucian tradition. The
same observation may be made for Bacon (1561-1626,
another philosopher of the “new science” and of the
“new world”), Comenius (1592-1670), Spinoza (163277), and Leibniz (1646-1716). This observation about
Descartes and the Rosicrucians seems to me to bring
out a constant trait: when someone abandons the
sure paths of Catholic doctrine, sound metaphysics,
and the teaching authority of the Church (the
magisterium), rarely does it fail to result, in one way
or another, in the practice of magic and esotericism.
This is true on every level, even the political: I
am thinking of the relations between the Italian
risorgimento and esotericism, between Nazism and
magic, but also between Marxism-Bolshevism and
Satanism and magic.
Basing ourselves on this understanding of
the reasons for the subjectivist deviation of the
Cartesian cogito, we are ready to look at the thinking
that followed, which is nothing more than a great
variation on this theme. The most immediate
effect of Cartesianism was a kind of agnosticism,
when it did not devolve into outright atheism.
Indeed, Cartesianism–if its presuppositions are
accepted–implies the radical destruction of natural
theology and of the Thomistic ways leading to God,
because, obviously, if knowledge is exclusively of the
relation between my Ego and the stuff of its ideas,
I can no longer, by starting from the world, by the
contemplation of nature, ascend to God.

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THE ANGELUS ENGLISH-LANGUAGE ARTICLE REPRINT

Modern science and Cartesian thought are
based on the elimination of final causes and essential
forms.6 If final causes are eliminated, we know that
enormous difficulties of explanation result. Take,
for example, the crisis of evolution, which refuses
finality of Greco-Christian extraction, but which
finds itself involved in extraordinary contradictions.
By eliminating final causality in the wake of Galileo,
Descartes denies any passage from the world to God,
this passage which is so evident and so necessary that,
even before Christian Revelation, it had carried the
lucid, profound Greek thinkers from the world to
God. This passage is no longer possible. Immanentist
subjectivism (subjectivism because I have only the
subject as metaphysical basis; immanentist because
the true, the absolute, the foundation is located in
the subject) has as a result the reduction of God to
the world, or rather the reduction of God to man.
God and man inevitably end by coinciding, as we
shall soon see, and why this must be so. Either God
is reduced to man and to the world, or God is totally
excluded, which is atheism. Moreover, atheism is
implicit in the refusal to acknowledge the original
meaningfulness of the world, and the transcendence
of truth and beauty in relation to the knowing mind:
such is the veritable hubris that lies at the heart of
modern thought.

The Enlightenment: The Right
to Happiness and Barbarity
Now we must accomplish, even if by brief
allusions, a decisive passage at the theoretical level
to the age of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment
was undoubtedly the daughter of Cartesian-Galilean
rationalism. I shall even say more: The Enlightenment
was the conscious attempt to apply the subjectivist,
rationalist critique of the physical world to every
domain, including religion.
Consequently, if I may be allowed a somewhat
figurative expression, the Enlightenment was the
spilling over of Cartesianism into every sphere of
reality until it reached its logical conclusion in the
theme of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of
1789–the right to happiness. For if indeed it is the
cogito that ultimately establishes truth, and not truth
that determines the cogito, that means that the cogito is
the Absolute, that is to say, in theology, God. But if
man is considered to be God, it is obvious that he can
no longer be subject to duties, but can only possess
rights; and that no limit can be placed, at least in
principle, upon his free will, no longer considered
wounded and inclined to evil because of original sin,
but “good” by nature, as Rousseau maintained. It is
at this historic juncture that the great modern cultural
revolution occurred, which the historian Ellul has

20

carefully reconstructed in his book Metamorphosis of the
Bourgeois.7
Ellul demonstrates that the central idea of the
18th-century Enlightenment, which surely constitutes
one of the most significant ruptures in relation to
the preceding tradition of Christian thought, is the
appearance of the category of the right to happiness.
Such a notion is only possible, as we have seen
earlier, if I have a divinized image of man, because
thinking of a man who has by nature a right to
happiness–or a right to the pursuit of happiness, as
the American Declaration of Independence puts it,
and as it is implicitly affirmed in the Declaration
of the Rights of Man and the Citizen of the French
Revolution–means that I think of man as of God;
I think of man as an absolute, as at the basis of the
very meaning of his life. And this possibility of the
divinization of man is equally the fundamental aspect,
moreover, that unites the modern Revolution and
ancient gnosticism. In both cases, we are faced with
the attempt by man to decide for himself what is good
and what is evil, in a self-sufficiency as absolute as it is
gravely culpable.
What this means is the end of the immemorial
tradition of Christian holiness, and more specifically
Catholic holiness founded on the notions of duty
and sacrifice, self-sacrifice. It is the passage from a
society based upon duty and sacrifice to one laying
claim to rights and happiness. It means the complete
destruction of the very idea of sacrifice, and, as has
been shown by Daniel Mornet in a very interesting
study,8 the birth of the hatred of the Catholic Church
and the Mass, which so clearly bears witness to the
sacrifice of our Lord Jesus Christ as the foundation
of the world, of history, and of life: this idea was
something that had to be destroyed. We know that the
one thing Luther could not stand in Catholicism was
the idea of the unbloody renewal and representation
of Christ’s sacrifice in the holy sacrifice of the
Mass: this is what he desired to destroy, for he was
convinced–and in a certain sense he was right–that
if the Mass were destroyed, then the papacy and
Catholicism would also fall.
Finally, I think that it scarcely needs mentioning
that the members of the circles in which the new
theology developed were very often members of
a veritable spider’s web of Masonic lodges that,
throughout the 18th century, spread all over Europe,
just as were the Jacobins and other groups of radical
revolutionaries who were to seize power in France,
unleashing the furious persecution of the Catholic
Church during which the profanation of tabernacles,
consecrated hosts, and churches was daily fare.
The modern Revolution (a term used in the wider
sense to designate the whole process that began
with the Renaissance and, through the Reformation,

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July 2006

the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and the
succeeding steps, that aimed at the dissolution of
the respublica Christiana9) implies, in a way perfectly
coherent with the metaphysical principles that
have been set forth, the complete destruction of the
Christian order, in particular the social reign of our
Lord, and marches towards a conception of politics in
which sovereignty comes from below, and not from
God. The distortion of the basic principles of GrecoChristian metaphysics ultimately produces very
serious consequences at every level, including the
political domain. Indeed, politics is the arena in which
the new anthropocentric philosophy that characterizes
modernity, in its inhumane and anti-Christian
potentialities, is most manifest.10
We better understand now the sentence with
which Horkheimer and Adorno [see “Cultural
Revolution: The Frankfurt School” on pp.14-16, 25-32
in this issue–Ed.] introduced their book The Dialectic of
Enlightenment, by saying:
The second excursus is concerned with Kant, Sade,
and Nietzsche, who mercilessly elicited the implications
of the Enlightenment. Here we show how the submission
of everything natural to the autocratic subject finally
culminates in the mastery of the blindly objective and
natural.11

Explaining the concept of Enlightenment, they
affirm:
In the most general sense of progressive thought, the
Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating human
beings from fear and establishing their sovereignty. Yet the
fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant.12

Moreover, these authors are the first to clearly
understand that the symbol and the ultimate result of
Enlightenment culture is the totalitarian, pansexual
universe portrayed in the novels of the Marquis de
Sade, in which it appears that the culmination of
reason considered as self-determining is barbarity and
violence, and this also, not to say especially, in the
political sphere:
...the established civil order wholly functionalized
reason, which became a purposeless purposiveness
which might thus be attached to all ends. In this sense,
reason is planning considered solely as planning. The
totalitarian State manipulates the people. Or, as Sade’s
Francavilla puts it: “The government must control the
population, and must possess all the means necessary to
exterminate them when afraid of them, or to increase
their numbers when that seems desirable. There should
never be any counterweight to the justice of government
other than that of the interests or passions of those who
govern, together with the passions and interests of those
who, as we have said, have received from it only so much
power as is requisite to reproduce their own....Take its
god from the people that you wish to subjugate, and
then demoralize it; so long as it worships no other god

than you, and has no other morals than your morals,
you will always be its master...allow it in return the most
extreme criminal license; punish it only when it turns
upon you.”13

Behold the real program of the totalitarianism of
dissoluteness, to use the famous category of Augusto
Del Noce, prefigured by the fervent illuminist and
revolutionary De Sade, which has been in the course
of realization for 200 years.14

Idealism
The discussion to this point reaches a natural
juncture with German idealism. Let us begin by
noting that the German idealists are excellent
specialists of ancient gnosticism: Schelling was a
specialist on Marcion, Hegel was a specialist on
Valentinus.15 Let us not forget either that there
is a very tight link uniting Marcion to Luther by
the intermediary of medieval heresies, then to the
German liberal Protestant theology, a link which
moreover explains a certain number of anti-Semitic
deviations in the Germany of the 20th Century, for
the refusal of the Old Testament and the alteration of
the New inevitably culminate in a form of docetism,
rendering futile the Incarnation, Passion and death of
the Word and the redemption He brought, and that
depreciates the belonging of Jesus Christ as man to
the Jewish people.16
In idealism, God is dead. The first to clearly state
this is Hegel (“The great Pan is dead”). Nietzsche
was not the first to take the death of God for a
certain metaphysical truth and to use it as a point of
departure for a new philosophy, but Hegel, almost
a century before. God is dead, and the Absolute
coincides with the history of culture, with the
incessant succession of historico-cultural and political
moments. But then man, who produces these forms
and their incessant change, is God incarnate; he is
God in history, because either freedom–the Geist,
the Spirit–is held to be created, or it can only be
considered as the immanence of God in history.
God no longer transcends the world, but coincides
ontologically with the world and history, and thus,
once again, God is man. But it is interesting to
observe how, in perfect correspondence with the
Gnostic conception of the original pleroma, man is
conceived of as God: not man taken as an individual,
but man conceived as mankind in general, collectively
dissolved, we might say, in the whole of history and
of culture, then with Marx dissolved in the whole
of social class. In the idealist conception the ancient
Cabalistic idea reappears according to which man, by

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July 2006

21

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attaining the profound knowledge of his I, encounters
God.17 In German Idealism, as in Cabala, God and
the world, God and man do not have a really separate
life.
God needs man to be complete, God–and with
this idea one can understand numerous aspects
of contemporary theological thought–God is man
actualized in history. Today we would say that he
is man who redeems himself in history by bringing
peace, by bringing the rights of man to the whole
world, by destroying capitalism, by destroying
modern science, which only brings evil (obviously
there is a correct understanding of science, a Christian
interpretation, which shows that science in itself is not
an evil, but represents what has historically, starting
from the Middle Ages, given a “superabundance”
to a world seeking first the kingdom of heaven),
by deindustrializing, with a ridiculous ecological
enthusiasm, the Western world.)
But if God is man who actualizes himself in
history, who redeems himself by his own power,
then a humanity redeemed, pacified, and united
would represent the final actualization of God.
With idealism, which is the last really great step in
Western metaphysics, not only are we in the shadow
of a metaphysics that conceives of man as God and
history as the locus where God actualizes himself,
but we are also in a philosophy that, by taking its
inspiration from ancient gnosis and from particular
currents of the Neoplatonic tradition as well as certain
representatives of the Renaissance esotericism,
thinks that nothingness is the essence of God, thinks
of alienation as the essence of God: God is alienated
because he is not complete; he must make himself
world, man, anguish, in order to then become
laboriously himself.18 As in Hegel’s The Science of Logic,
Nothingness precedes and founds Being.
I think that we are now able to understand
in what sense idealism is a complete gnosis: An
alienated God is “inhabited” by evil, by negativity;
history is the locus where man redeems God from
his alienation; man helps God become God, healing
him of his suffering and incomplete character, his
“unhappy consciousness,” his aimless and blind
kenosis.19 No longer is it God who heals me of the
leprosy of original sin, the inclination to evil, and
of concupiscence. I no longer need to be healed;
rather, it is I that must “heal” God, it is even I that am
God, and my cure constitutes the liberation and full
realization of God himself.
If idealism considers mankind to be God, then
the history of mankind is the march of God towards
himself, the becoming of God himself. We are on the
one hand faced with the eternal gnostico-cabalistic
idea according to which, as we have seen, man is
necessary to God; but on the other hand, if there is no

22

longer any ontological difference between man and
God based upon the idea of creation, if there is no
ontological leap between creature and Creator, then
the worth of the individual, the irreducible value of
the individual, his uniqueness, his value as a person
endowed with an interior life founded upon the
Christian primacy of free will, collapses.20 Moreover,
in Hegel’s thinking, there is already an attempt to
establish the primacy of the collective by dissolving
the idea of person.21
In his Phenomenology of Mind, Hegel clearly
affirms that there can be no I outside the totality that
establishes it; what is true [or real] is the totality, but
the individual man, on the contrary, is never true
[or real]. This thesis is the key idea of Hegel, and
even of Rousseau, a thesis that will subsequently be
formalized by Marx, and that today holds sway over a
certain ecclesiastical sensibility. Indeed, sentimental,
participatory Pentecostalism and the Charismatic
movement that dominates and often penetrates
Catholic movements–for the movements being
propagated in Catholic circles arose in a Protestant
milieu–all that is fundamentally a renunciation of
the person, and opens the door to an unprecedented
totalitarian domination of consciences. Eric Voegelin,
one of the greatest political philosophers of the 20th
century, affirms in this regard that with the modern
revolution, because of the gnostic representation of
the totality of individuals as but a single true moment,
we find ourselves confronted with a new passivization
of persons, which is a prelude to new forms of
power.22
People have now assimilated the idea that as
individuals they are nothing, that they are worthless
unless they belong to a totality, even if the whole
be in ruins, or barbarous, or foolish: what matters
is belonging. In such an ideological context, we
see disappearing the very idea that gave birth to
Christianity, namely, the very idea of martyrdom as
an inevitably and irreducibly personal and individual
witness. When Thomas More, for example, heard
his accusers say that all the English bishops had
signed the document acknowledging Henry VIII’s
sovereignty over the Church of England, he answered
that his conscience forbade him from signing it
because it called upon him to remain faithful to
the Church of Rome, and that the Roman Catholic
Church linked him to 1500 years of theological and
ecclesiastical tradition. It is he, a man who, though
alone,23 feels that he must remain faithful, that he
must bear witness to the truth. In all of England the
fall into heresy and Henry VIII’s schism was opposed
by just a handful of persons (scarcely more that a
dozen), plus the martyrs of the Protestant persecution
that ensued (70,000 dead).

THE ANGELUS
July 2006

This has implications for us today, for the
notion of a collectivist, communitarian ecclesiology
dissolves the possibility of witness, which is always
individual.24
This lecture was presented by Prof. D’Amico at the Eleventh Congress of
Catholic Studies held at Rimini, Italy (Oct. 25-26, 2003) on the theme: “The
Modern World in the Light of the Magisterium of St. Pius X.” DICI called this
lecture “a masterly synthesis on the philosophic genesis of modernism.”
The third and final installment of this article will appear in the September
2006 issue of The Angelus with a discussion of Modernism and Pascendi
Dominici Gregis of Pope St. Pius X. This was translated exclusively for
Angelus Press by Miss Anne Stinnett from Courrier de Rome (Dec. 2005
and Jan. 2006), the French edition of SiSiNoNo.

1

René Descartes, Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason
and Seeking Truth in the Sciences (1637), Ch. 4. [English version from the
Gutenberg Project on line at literature.org.]
2
Fideism: fides, faith. A philosophical term meaning a system of philosophy
or an attitude of mind, which, denying the power of unaided human reason
to reach certitude, affirms that the fundamental act of human knowledge
consists in an act of faith, and the supreme criterion of certitude is authority.
3
Now one can more easily understand why the fundamental weakness of
Cartesian metaphysics consists specifically in this enclosing [of thought]
within the unsolvable difficulties that are placed between the res cogitans
and the res extensa, a philosophical problem referred to as metaphysical
dualism. If one rejects the basic principles of classical Greco-Christian
thought, one inevitably slides into either a rigid, indefensible dualism, or
an equally ridiculous and hardly credible monism. Such a presupposition
leads to the inexorable disappearance of the possibility of maintaining
the ingenious Thomistic re-elaboration of the principle of the analogy, or
degrees, of being.
4
Cf. Cornelio Fabro, The Anthropocentric Turn of Karl Rahner (Italian)
(Milan, 1974), in which the author demolishes the false interpretation of St.
Thomas made by German philosophy, profoundly influenced by its master
Martin Heidegger, one of the protagonists of the 20th-century return to
gnosticism.
5
Paul Arnold, History of the Red Cross (Ed. Mercure de France, 1955).
6
It is necessary to remark at this point, if only in passing, that from the
standpoint of the faith, only a realist metaphysics makes sense for, among
others, the following fundamental reason: Since everything is created by
God, one cannot but think that God creates being on the basis of an idea
of it, with a view to some end and of an ontological harmony linking the
whole of creation into a solid unity (the contrary would imply an absurd
“casual creation”: a veritable conradictio in adjecto); being thus embodies the form that God assigns it; that is why the essential form proper to
beings transcends the cognitive act of the man who seizes it by means of his
intellect, since it is a property which ontologically founds the being itself.
Thinking the contrary would signify, even implicitly, thinking of man’s
mind as creator, as a divine spirit: this is exactly the ultimate conclusion
of modern immanentism with idealist thinking.
7
J. Ellul, The Metamorphosis of the Bourgeois (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1967;
Italian ed. Milan, 1972).
8
Translator’s note: The author does not provide a reference to the study,
however, in 1933 Mornet published what has become a classic study of
the epoch, The Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution.
9
In a very rich, profound study, R. de Mattei very deftly shows the “tension
wires” tightly linking the Protestant Reformation, and in particular its
radical, sectarian developments (Anabaptistism, etc.), to the development
of Freemasonry, Jacobinism, and the Communist ideology (Left of Luther
[Italian], Rome, 1999).
10
For the new conception of the relation between Church and State, with particular references to Rousseau, see J. L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian

Democracy; P. Zarcone, The Hidden Face of Democracy: The Totalitarian
Rousseau; and P. Pasqualucci, Politics and Religion: An Essay on the Theology of History. In the last work, the author unhesitatingly locates the heart
of the modern vision of religion in Rousseau’s teaching and in the fundamental thesis underlying all his thought, sometimes explicitly, sometimes
implicitly: Happiness–the veritable great myth of the 18th century (and of
our own era)–can only be attained by man if man is made “one”, beyond
any shade of dualism or opposition between immanence and transcendence,
between secular and religious, and thus between the socio-political sphere
and the personal, private sphere. That means that only a man reduced to the
pure political sphere will be happy, inside a system that we could qualify
as biopolitical totalitarianism, and that revealed religion must be banished
as a normative authority having a foundation in the transcendence of God.
From a Rousseauist perspective, religion must in other words, be relegated
to the internal forum of sentiment and subjective conscience, renounce
any rigorous, rational structure, and adapt itself to the exigencies of the
individual, to his needs and vision of the world, within a sentimental,
aesthetic Christology perfectly described in the discourse of the Savoyard
vicar of the Emile. It is at this level that the relation between Reform and
politics is placed. It was Luther, as is well known, who, before Rousseau,
opened the way to a sentimental and subjectivist tendency, which gave way
to a deist and rationalist (at the age of liberal Protestantism) conception of
Christianity. Religion is no longer based on man’s effort to be open to the
Word and the call that God addresses to him, but it develops “in proportion
to” our conscience, in the immanentist and naturalist sense of the word. The
struggle to heal the fracture between bourgeois and citizen, and to make
of man a “happy” unity, pacified beyond the unhappy Judeo-Christian
conscience, is also the red line, one must not forget, which developed along
the axis Rousseau-Hegel-Marx, and which tightly links the two German
thinkers to their Genevan predecessor. According to this idea, the individual
I, understood in its moral and spiritual existence as unreducible to the class
or society of which it is a part, is always a negative element, and the subject
can only aspire to the truth if he loses himself in the whole, if he accepts
being dissolved into the collective moment.
		 Be that as it may, if, based upon the Social Contract (but the real, conscious
act of giving birth to this notion is older and must be ascribed, at the very
least, to the Leviathan of Thomas Hobbes [1588-1679]), politics claims to
be founded as something completely autonomous and source of its own
sovereignty, then it inevitably follows, and this is Prof. Pasqualucci’s second
thesis, that an absolute ideological war must be joined between the new forms
of democratico-totalitarian power (that is the formula that best conveys the
notion of Jacobinism) and the Catholic Church, irreducible witness of the
metaphysical primacy of Transcendence, that is to say, witness of man and
of a world (even political) that, instead of discovering in themselves their
own meaning and reason for being, acknowledge the primacy of God and
set the eschatological problem of the last things as the center of gravity of
both the public and the private spheres.
11
Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (1944; New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), p.xvi.
12
Ibid., p.3.
13
Marquis de Sade, Histoire de Juliette (Holland, 1797), cited in Dialectic
of Enlightenment, p.89.
14
The quoted passage is interesting among other reasons because it reveals
a certain prophetic anticipation of the “demographic plot” put in place
by the United Nations and by other globalist organizations directly or
indirectly inspired by the Freemasons during the 20th century (on the role
of the U.N. in the great genocides of the post WWII period, cf. F. Adessa,
UN Massacres, Brescia, 1996). The fact that the French Revolution, in the
darkest phases of the Jacobin terror, was animated by deliberately genocidal
acts was proven by Gracchus Babeuf in La guerre de Vendée et le système
de dépeuplement; cf. also R. Secher, Le génocide vendéen. The analogies
between the genocides of the French Revolution and the worst horrors of
the Nazi and Bolshevik regimes are deftly developed in the popular but
well-documented work of Jean Dumont, Les faux mythes de la Révolution
française.
15
On ancient gnosticism, cf. H. Jonas, Gnosticism (Turin, 1991); E. Innocenti,

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Gnostic Influences in the Church Today (Rome, 2000) and Apocryphal
Gnosis, Vols. I and II (Rome, 1993-1999); J. Meinvielle, Influence of Jewish
Gnosticism on the Christian Milieu (Rome, 1995); E. Samek Lodovici,
Metamorphosis of Gnosis (for interesting bibliographical references on
gnosticism and Western philosophy, and in particular for the influences
on Schelling, Heidegger, Marx, and Bloch).
16
On the relationship between Luther, anti-Semitism, and Nazism, cf. A.
Agnoletto, The Tragedy of Christian Europe in the 16th Century: From the
Judeophobia of Luther to the Humanists Jonas and Melanchthon (Milan,
1996), though the text is weak and of modernist orientation in the chapter
devoted to the relationship between Catholicism and Judaism.
17
Curiously, it is permissible to think that a similar idea is to be found at the
basis of Freudian thought. Psychoanalysis is basically a form of gnosticism: “I am liberated by knowledge,” and what matters is to be initiated
into the esoteric path that leads to the knowledge that saves. This gnostic,
Cabalistic matrix also appears on the scientific level: “Freud’s pansexualism
has antecedents in Cabala, as has been shown by David Bakan in Sigmund
Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition. The gnostic heresy of Cabala,
which infiltrated secret societies, envisions God himself as bisexual, Adam
as androgynous, and all of us as dominated by hidden, demonic, or as Freud
would later say, “unconscious” forces. Incidentally, his ‘revolutionary’
theories on infantile sexuality were immediately accepted by one particular
Jewish association, the B’nai B’rith, founded in 1843 by Freemasons and
divided into lodges [it is actually Freemasonry for Jews–Ed.]. The Interpretation of Dreams was also suggested to Freud by Cabalistic texts that
see in the world of dreams nothing but sexual symbols. Bakan goes further,
and sees in Freud’s most famous book ‘a pact with the devil.’ The epigraph
Freud chose was ‘Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo–If I cannot
bend the higher powers, I will move the infernal regions” (that is, hell), a
quote from Virgil’s Aeneid in which Juno speaks in anger (VII, 310-12).
Psychoanalysis proposes an inversion: in the place of logical, conscious
thought it places the unconscious, freighted with obscure sexual complexes,
blasphemous and aggressive. To do this, all means are fair, especially
mystification and falsification.” (C. Gatto Trocchi, “The Restless Soul of
the West,” Certamen, No. 15, 2002).
18
A particularly profound and lucid analysis of Hegelian dialectic, and implicitly the theme of alienation, is furnished for us by E. Berti, in Contradiction
and Dialectic in the Ancients and Moderns (Italian), Palermo, 1988.
19
“A term derived from the discussion as to the real meaning of Phil. 2:6ff.:
‘Who being in the form of God thought it not robbery to be equal with
God, But emptied [ekenosen] himself, taking the form of a servant, being
made in the likeness of men, and in habit found as man.’ ...According to
Catholic theology, the abasement of the Word consists in the assumption
of humanity and the simultaneous occultation of the Divinity” (Catholic
Encyclopedia, s.v. “Kenosis”).
20
On the primacy of free will, cf. A. Dalledonne, “Le primat thomiste de la
volonté libre” in Actes du congrès théologique de SiSiNoNo (Condé sur

Society of Saint Pius X
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Noireau, 1995), pp.56-66.
To investigate the lesser known aspects of Hegel’s life that shed light on
his relations with revolutionary circles and Freemasonry, cf. J. D’Hondt,
Hegel secret: Recherches sur les sources secrètes de la pensée hégélienne
(Milan, 1989; 2003).
22
Cf. Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics (Chicago, 1952).
23
In fact, the bishop John Fisher and a group of Chartreuse monks refused to
swear the oath, but concretely, existentially, his feeling of absolute solitude,
such as is conveyed in his letters from prison, was immense.
24
With this evolution of ideas, we come up against numerous movements, even
Catholic ones, in which membership in the movement counts, or at least
seems to count, more than membership in the Church itself and more than
personal faithfulness to Christ. When the faith reigns, then all personalism,
sensationalism, or cultishness is excluded. The holier someone is, the more
he makes those who approach him feel as if they are approaching Christ.
		 A classic example of the degeneration of religious life due to membership
in a sectarian movement is given by the Neocatechumenal Way, an heretical group that is spreading within the Catholic Church. The proof that we
find ourselves confronted with a sect in this case is given by the ability of
the group to wrest its adepts from participation in parish life by enclosing
them within a parallel universe subject to significant manipulation. For an
introduction to the mind-boggling theological distortions of the Neocatechumens, cf. L. Villa, Heresies in the Neocatechumenal Doctrine (Brescia,
2000).
21

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Angelus Press Edition

NEWS
the Society of Saint PiuS X in

SOUTH AMERICA
Children from the school in the dominican republic.

Fr. Christian
Bouchacourt,
formerly the pastor
of St. Nicholas du
Chardonnet in
Paris and now the
District Superior of
South America, was
interviewed by Fr.
Alain Lorans, director
of the official press
bureau of the Society
of Saint Pius X, DICI.

Frs. martinez, Blanco, and huber in Santo domingo.

Christendom
NEWS
Angelus Press Edition

3

The m

Children at the school of Vina del mar, Chile.

Fr. Lorans: Father, you went straight from St.
Nicolas du Chardonnet, in Paris, to Argentina. How
long ago was it?
Fr. Bouchacourt: It will be three years this coming
August. Yes, three years in the southern hemisphere.
So today you are by the fire and we are basking in the
sun.
Fr. Lorans: What is the current temperature?
Fr. Bouchacourt: Oh, it’s terribly hot. It is summer
time!
Fr. L.: I know you’re in Paris at present, but you
have been all over France. Argentina is a poor country,
and you need to solicit the help of the faithful in
France. Each Sunday, you visit a different priory?
Fr. B.: That’s correct! I have been in France for
a little over three weeks and I have already visited
Nantes, Bordeaux, and Brest. St. Germaine’s Chapel
in Paris was first, of course; we must give honor where
honor is due! Next Sunday I will be in Lyons, and
in ten days I will end with a visit to the chapel in
Versailles. In all, I will have visited six priories.
Fr. L.: What kind of welcome do you receive from
the faithful? What support do they give…you can be
frank!
Fr. B.: I always take my slides in order to introduce
the District of South America, and I am surprised at
how much this interests the faithful, who want to know
how our congregation is missionary–if ever there was
any doubt. Many people come, and I think they leave
quite enthused to see our fellow priests over there
commit themselves so generously to this marvelous
apostolate, which is not always easy. Archbishop
Lefebvre used to say that in the missions you need
twice the effort for half the result. He wasn’t wrong.
The ANgelus • July 2006 www.angeluspress.org

In France, you fish with a net, over there, you use a
fishing rod. But, my goodness, it is a very beautiful and
exciting apostolate.
Fr. L.: Are you discouraged at times?
Fr. B.: No, absolutely not. Especially since the
people over there are very receptive to the Catholic
faith, because they have remained very Catholic, even
if they have been touched by the crisis like everyone
else in the world. I am moved and very grateful to see
the interest French people show in our missions. Of
course, they are not the only ones who help….
Fr. L.: There has been a serious economic crisis in
Argentina. Did the country pull through?
Fr. B.: That was in 2001, and the country did pull
through. But this crisis has really decimated the middle
classes. The very rich survived, the very poor are still
just as poor, but the middle class is impoverished. Our
faithful come from the middle class and from the poor.
Very often they have large families and do all they can
to help us. But they are able to do very little, and are
scarcely able, if at all, to pay school fees.
Fr. L.: As you know, every year in France there
is a pilgrimage to Montmartre which draws crowds of
traditionalist faithful from all over Europe, and indeed,
the world. This year’s pilgrimage is especially devoted
to the missions. There are those who talk about the
missions and those who work in the missions. Could
you tell us exactly what life is like in the mission? You
recalled that the Society is a missionary congregation,
indeed was founded by a missionary, a Holy Ghost
Father, Archbishop Lefebvre. As you are walking in his
footsteps, can you tell us what is the missionary spirit?
Fr. B.: First of all, it’s necessary to define broadly
the mission in South America. South America is

A

THE
BAHAMAS

Miami

Gulf of Mexico

3

CUBA

BELIZE

MEXICO

The Society of
Saint Pius X in
South America

DOMINICAN
REPUBLIC

JAMAICA

HAITI

Puerto
Rico
Santo
Yamasá Domingo (U.S.)

GUATEMALA HONDURAS

Caribbean Sea
EL SALVADOR

NICARAGUA

COSTA RICA
PANAMA

VENEZUELA

Bucaramanga

The mission in the dominican republic.

GUYANA

Bogotá

French Guiana
(FRANCE)

SURINAME

COLOMBIA

ECUADOR

Tartagal

BRAZIL

PERU

Lima
Anápolis

BOLIVIA

Tartagal

The Sacred hearts
of Jesus and mary
Church in Bogota,
Colombia.

Jujuy
Salta

São Paulo

Asunción

Pedro J. Caballero

Tucumán

CHILE

Assado, argentinians’ favorite barbeque.

PARAGUAY

Santiago
del Estero

Santa Maria
Corrientes
Mercedes

Viña del Mar

Curuzú-Cuatiá
Córdoba
Rosario

Santiago

Buenos Aires

URUGUAY
Montevideo

Martinez

ARGENTINA
Tandil
Temuco

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The ANgelus • July 2006

Christendom
NEWS
Angelus Press Edition

3

priests of the district of South america during
their annual priests’ retreat. (Below) The same
priests relax with a meal at retreat’s end.
The South american district house
in Buenos aires, argentina.

considered by many to have remained very Catholic. This
is true, but it is on the verge of becoming completely false,
since this sub-continent has now been taken over by sects,
in Brazil especially, but in other countries, too. And it is
awful because they attract very large numbers of people. It is
alarming: let me give you an example. In Rio de Janeiro there
is a huge (Protestant) church, large enough to accommodate
ten cathedrals the size of Notre Dame de Paris, and it seats
thousands of people. On Sundays, for the morning service,
it is full. But who goes to these services? Catholics. What is
even more astounding is that afterwards, when they leave this
church, they go and touch the statue of Our Lady that stands
in the street.
These are Catholics who have been completely confused
by the conciliar reforms. The clergy took away their simple
devotions, which were genuine. Yes, their faith is simple, but
it must not be despised on that count, because it is profound.
These practices were taken away from them. In return, they
were given an absolutely empty liturgy, with sometimes even
pagan practices introduced into it, which the faithful did not
want. So what happens? Well, they leave the Catholic Church
to join these sects which offer them the old devotions, which
of course have been corrupted, but the faithful feel they’ve
found them again. The Mormons have cleverly used the
familiar tunes of Marian hymns, but with unbelievable texts.
And everyone sings them at the top of their voices without
realizing that they’re losing the Faith. Statistics published this
year reveal that in 1920 there were five million non-Catholics
in the entire South American sub-continent; today there are
60 million.
Now, to answer your question. What is the role of the
SSPX? It is precisely to fill the void, because the conciliar
Church did leave a void. And nature cannot tolerate a void.
Thus when the Church retreats, the sects advance. The last
time I went to a restaurant–yes, it does happen–the owner
The ANgelus • July 2006 www.angeluspress.org

The Church of nuestra Señora de la
Soledad in mendoza, argentina.

The Society of
Saint Pius X in
South America

3

a village of guarani indians in paraguay,
where there had been no priest for 80 years.

came to me and said: “Padre, would you bless my restaurant when you have finished your meal?”
She showed me a doll full of pins someone had left there.
Fr. L.: A voodoo doll? You mean they put a spell on her?
Fr. B.: Yes, exactly. Of course, the role of the SSPX and of Tradition is to continue what the
missionaries had been doing before: to preach the Gospel, to baptize, to care for and sanctify souls.
And I can assure you, this is thrilling. On the occasion of his priestly jubilee in Paris, Archbishop
Lefebvre spoke to us about the palpable transformations which would take place everywhere
where the Catholic Mass was celebrated. For us, SSPX priests, we have not only our founder but
also the present Superior General who give us this missionary sense. I feel that the Mother House
is helping us in a truly wonderful way. It can’t do more because of the lack of priests and so on. But
thanks to its support we manage to open new chapels and to organize communities.
It is long and laborious, but we are gradually seeing things move. Let me give you an example.
We went to visit a community of Guarani Indians on the border between Paraguay and Brazil,
where no priest had been for 80 years. Just six months before us a priest went there, but the
community sent him away because he was in lay clothes: “We don’t want you, we want the men in
black,” they told him. We were the men in black with our cassocks. It was so moving to arrive in a
place where there had been no priest for years. In the cacique’s (village chief) hut, there was a little
statue of our Blessed Lady (with no feet or nose), which they venerated. In the cemetery, there was
a Jesuit cross, which looks something like the Lorraine cross. Where did they get that cross? From
the Jesuits who went there hundreds of years ago. When they saw us coming, they opened their
doors to us, saying, “This is what our forefathers did.” And I can assure you it was overwhelming.
Fr. L.: And the Jesuits, they’re no longer around?
Fr. B.: No, and it is unfortunate, as they were the cavalry of the Church. They did a
tremendous amount of good; now they’ve completely lost it.
Fr. L.: You spoke about the disasters of modern liturgy. But has liberation theology also played
its part in this catastrophe?
Fr. B.: Of course. It has caused resentment among the people: envy. The poor became jealous
of the rich, and the rich who had deserted the Church forgot what their duty was. As Archbishop
Lefebvre very rightly wrote in one of his letters, in the past, the poor man did not feel jealous of
the rich man. He had his little plot of land, he could live. Now liberation theology has infected the
class war with dialectics. It’s Marxism. To be sure, the influence of liberation theology is waning,
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The ANgelus • July 2006

Christendom
NEWS
Angelus Press Edition

lujan, the “lourdes of argentina.”
but its effects remain. Who has the upper hand these
days? The cult of race: American-Indianity. With
some heads of state, like Hugo Chavez [the current
President of Venezuela–Ed.], all pagan practices take
pride of place. After his election, the president of
the Republic of Peru stood on a pyramid wearing a
feather headdress and asked the sun’s blessing on
his mandate; and the recently elected president of
Bolivia, a torch in his hand, went to implore the help
of the god of the Incas–and all this in countries which
are 90% Catholic!
Unfortunately, in the name of religious liberty,
the bishops never open their mouths. Since Vatican
II, and at the request of Paul VI, the heads of Catholic
States have had to write out of their constitution the
Catholic religion as the State religion. And thus we
saw a president of a Republic announce reluctantly
the abdication of the Catholic Church in the presence
of the nuncio who had requested it on behalf of the

3

Holy See. This renunciation of the authority of the
Catholic truth opened the door to sects and paganism.
However, the bishops seem to regain some of
their vigor when it comes to condemning us. Let
me give you an enlightening example: we serve
a tiny chapel with 25 faithful in Corrientes in the
northeast of Argentina. The faithful, very happy,
had an announcement put in the local paper for
Midnight Mass at Christmas. The bishop read it, and
the following day published a half-page article in the
paper condemning us and the 25 faithful. And this
while there are many sects in his diocese about which
he never says a word! People are complaining, they
come and tell us, “Padre...,” but they are afraid of the
bishops, because the bishop still has some influence
over there.
Fr. L.: You say Padre, so Spanish has become your
second language. Are you good enough at it to dream
in Spanish?!
Fr. B.: No! I’m praying for a little personal
Pentecost! I have a hard time learning it and I have
a terrible accent, but I have fellow priests and the
faithful especially who are very indulgent.
Fr. L.: You have an immense district. How many
countries do you serve?
Fr. B.: First, let me tell you its size. It is 6,800
miles north to south and 4,000 miles east to west.
We are a group of 33 priests, 38 if we include the
priests at the seminary, for this area. We go mainly
to Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Brazil, the
Dominican Republic, and Colombia. Of course, we
do not have enough priests and some chapels are
served only once every three months, others once a
month, and the people keep their faith heroically with
no resident priest.
So, if some young men would like to help us the
way young men used to go to the colonies in the
old days, if they’d like to spend six months in the
missions with us, they can send me an e-mail (fsspx.
sudamerica@fibertel.com.ar). Be aware that things are
a little bit different here. The school year begins in
March and ends in December. All men of good will
are very welcome!
Translated by DICI from the March-April issue of Nouvelles de Chrétienté,
the Society’s informative bi-monthly news magazine.
Donations can be sent to the US District Office, Regina Cæli House, 2918 Tracy
Avenue, Kansas City, Missouri 64109-1529 USA. The checks should be made
payable to the Society of St. Pius X, but, please, do not forget to specify “for the
South American Missions.” Also, donations can be sent to the Society of Saint
Pius X’s international headquarters: Haus Mariæ Verkündigung, Schwandegg,
CH-6313 Menzingen, SWITZERLAND. Again, specify that the donation is
intended for the missions in South America.

39

			

The

Ten Minutes

with Fr. de Chivré:

Family
Vacation

The topic of vacations is different from the topic of
“leisure.” The scope we have given to leisure in modern
life, to the point of enshrining its rights and expressions
into law, is a paganism which a profoundly Catholic
life can only condemn. There is a degree of duration
and intensity of leisure which becomes a profanation
of relaxation. The proof is that it becomes too often a
source of demoralization and devaluation of the human
person.
We need instead to adopt a meaning for the
word “vacation” that connotes a certain aspect of
reward for a life honestly tired, entitled to a conscious
reinvigoration in the form of new activities serving as
a diversion from work and labor. Vacations are not
laziness, otherwise they would be a sin. They are an
action made intelligent by the rhythm we impose upon
them in order to foster a relaxation that will leave mind
and confidence in a state of moral well-being.
To take a vacation is to relax; it is not to selfdestruct. Now, to relax is to know the satisfaction of
giving oneself over to activities that are varied no
longer according to duty but according to our tastes,
our preferences, and our qualities. Relaxation therefore
involves a certain pleasure, but which remains under
the command of the conscience and the heart. A lesson
in the theology of pleasure may be what is needed in our
age of frenetic leisure.
The mission of pleasure is to rebuild our wearied
efforts and by so doing to restore psychological and
physical balance, to effect a moral renewal more or less
made difficult by the disproportion of efforts expended
over the course of a year. Pleasure has a mission of
re-creation. It therefore has a mission of assuring a new
recuperation of physical and moral health, to obtain

for our higher faculties a greater ease of expression and
governance. This is where Christian pleasure parts ways
with pagan pleasure.
The role of Christian pleasure is to offer man and
woman new occasions to rebuild a humanity worthy
of God. The role of pagan pleasure too often takes
from man at the expense of his humanity through the
intermediaries of abuse, excess, and vice fostered and
encouraged by laxity. The “pleasure” of “hanging
loose” saps our energy. The “pleasure” of drink takes
away our dignity. The “pleasure” of bad reading
takes away our morality. The “pleasure” of laziness
takes away our reason to live virtuously. [We must add
today that the “pleasure” of TV viewing takes away
our intellect. The “pleasure” of computer usage takes
away Reality.–Ed.] Within pleasure, the higher faculties
must never be dissociated from sensation. If sensation
alone is flattered under pretext of reward, it will never
repose, but feed on the destruction of the conscience,
the heart, the mind, and the will by a moral malaise of
sin, abuse, or excess–all things which never repose. On
the contrary, we must know how to obtain for our mind
voluntary initiatives in accord with the tastes of the
heart, to maintain repose in a state of active elevation,
enthusiasm, energy, admiration, or superior interest.
We must maintain, within our pleasure, a reason for
existing humanly, and not a reason for animalizing
humanity.
I would like to quote a French statesmen who,
crushed under his official duties, said: “Relaxation is at
my fingertips; all I do is shift the work I am doing.” The
mission of vacation is therefore to re-create, that is, to
rebuild by a repose at once governed and relaxed, and
in which there is no abdication of the will. Intentionally
www.angeluspress.org

THE ANGELUS • July 2006

40
delaying one’s hour of rising is not the same thing
as lazily enjoying an immorally prolonged period of
“vegging out.”
Likewise, in a schedule, to recreate does not consist
in abandoning one’s time to the flux of sensations,
foreseen or unforeseen, of a day governed by no
intelligent goal, program, or project. Lost time bears
in itself a threat of weariness and sin. We must always
know what we want and what we are doing, or else
our vacation will spiral into a tailspin of agitation,
constant movement, and deliberate pursuit of doubtful
company, turning it into a source of irritation and
unbalance.
It is vital to understand that repose is far more an
affair of the mind than of the body. The mind must
be engaged in what reinvigorates. The contemplatives
are smarter than we are. Whether it be question of
aesthetic admiration, of adoration, of silence filled with
love, of enthralled observation of a landscape bathed
in calm, of an enthralling reading perfectly harmonized
with our intellectual needs–the mind has greater need
of vacation than does the body, and if modern society
understood the fact, it would cut out its gluttonous
wastage and make phenomenal progress.
There is a kind of “tourist virus” that is a strain of
the materialism of repose; restless motion excludes
and prevents any kind of psychological refreshment.
We need to realize that a vacation holds a middle
ground between work and the animalistic abuse of
relaxation. Just as, sadly, there exists an animalistic and
degrading use of leisure, there is on the other hand an
understanding which chooses the place for a vacation
for its wholesome benefits. That is to say, to choose
a vacation destination for its noble pleasures, not for
ignoble ones. A genuine vacation includes plenty
of time for healthy and calm reflection. It excludes
making oneself a slave to the car or amusement park
schedule.

Husbands and Wives
Throughout the year, husband and wife live in
a communion of cares. During their vacation, they
should strive to find each other again in a communion
of exchanges. Know how to find a little time alone, just
the two of you, to refresh the spiritual vitality of those
first engagements to one another, and this to the benefit
of the problems of the heart relived and rejuvenated in
the light of your experiences together. You are already
growing more perfect if you are working to love each
other better, if you are learning to repose in a renewal
of affection, even one fostered by a common outside
activity.
Vacations are as much a service of the household
as they are in service of matrimony as a sacrament.
That they are oftentimes planned and made separately
by husbands and wives is to destroy their union as
a couple, a union which also is compromised by a
vacation amounting to constant worldliness. A married
THE ANGELUS • July 2006 www.angeluspress.org

couple’s vacations are taken for a more prolonged time
of exchanges worthy of God and the two spouses.

The Moral Sense of Vacation
Morality is much more a source of repose than of
weariness, and by guaranteeing liberty of expression
to the mind, it introduces to the heart a need to sing,
a need to laugh with a frank vigor, a need to enjoy
oneself without remorse, a need to experience a
time of repose full of diversionary–but not frivolous–
animation. For the children, family vacation must
never lose its moral sense by becoming a period of
laxity, messy rooms, late arrivals for meals, of frivolous
company, and of calculated flight from the family.
Parents worthy of their responsibilities ought to
know what their children plan to do on their vacation.
They must know where their children are. They
must know the who their children are relating to and
with whom they are forming relationships. [In other
words, in these days of “traveling the world” via the
Internet, of MySpace, Facebook, and Xanga, parents
are duty-bound to know who’s involved.–Ed.] Under
no pretext are strangers to unhealthily distract from
the children’s vacations. If it has often happened that
families, returning from their vacation, realize that
brothers and sisters, parents and children have grown
apart, the reason being that, instead of a period of rest
and reinvigoration, the vacation was a time of sin (or
introduction to sin) or of psychological dislocation for
an entire family.

God in Our Vacation
True love does not rest otherwise love would not
be love. Love strengthens our ties with those we love.
If God is truly loved, there is no vacation from God.
Between us and God, relaxation is meant to help us
enjoy a greater facility to admire Him in His creation,
to be aware of Him more consciously in prayer, or to
receive Him more frequently in the Eucharist. In short,
there is a spiritual courtesy in not denying God His
share of our vacation by including a share of deeper
encounter with Him.
How beneficial it would be to use our vacation
time to emphasize a given religious feast, either local
or liturgical, to which we might bring our generous
collaboration [i.e., a pilgrimage, an Ordinations Day, a
volleyball tournament, etc.–Ed.]. The man who knows
how to reserve a place for God in his vacation gives to
it a guarantee, not only of perfection, but of happiness
that goes far beyond mere pleasure. Catholic homes
must overcome the tendency to make God a stranger to
their periods of rest and human enjoyment.
Translated exclusively for Angelus Press. Slight accommodations to the text by
Fr. Kenneth Novak for clarity. Published as “Les Vacances,” Carnets Spirituels,
No.3, Association du R. P. de Chivré (Feb. 2005).

PART ONE: WHAT TO BELIEVE
• Religion and the End of Man • The Apostles’ Creed • God the Supreme Being • Perfections of God • Divine Providence • Existence
of God • Divine Revelation • The Bible • Divine Tradition • The Church and Divine Revelation • One God in Three Persons • Unity of
the Blessed Trinity • Creation • Revelation and Science • The Angels • The Devils • Temptation • An Image of God • Adam and Eve:
Our First Parents • Evolution and the Bible • Original Sin • Actual Sin • Mortal Sin • Venial Sin • Occasions and Sources of Sin • Pride
• Covetousness • Lust • Anger • Gluttony • Envy • Sloth • The Promise of the Redeemer • The God-Man • Our Lord Jesus Christ • The
Incarnation • The Nativity • The Hidden Life of Jesus Christ • The Public Life of Jesus Christ • The Passion • Calvary • The Resurrection
• The Ascension • The Holy Ghost • Sanctifying Grace • Actual Grace • The Theological Virtues • Gifts and Fruits of the Holy Ghost. •
Moral Virtues • Humility, Liberality, Chastity • Meekness, Abstinence, Zeal, Brotherly Love • The Eight Beatitudes • Foundation of the
Church • The Apostles: First Bishops of the Church • The Primacy of Peter • Marks of the True Church • The One True Church • The
Catholic Church: Unity and Holiness • The Catholic Church: Catholicity and Apostolicity • The Living Church • The Catholic Eastern
Church Rites • The Bishop of Rome • Powers of the Pope • The Roman Curia • The Hierarchy • Bishops and Priests • The Laity • Catholic
Action • Church and State • Services of the Church to the State • Authority of the Church • Infallibility of the Church • Sphere of Infallibility
• Indefectibility of the Church • Salvation and the Catholic Church • Schism and Heresy • Protestant Churches • The Gates of Hell •
One Body in Christ: Communion of Saints • The Forgiveness of Sins • Death • Particular Judgment • Existence of Purgatory • Souls in
Purgatory • Resurrection of the Body • General judgment • The Torments of Hell • Life Everlasting: Heaven

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PART TWO: WHAT TO DO
• God’s Law; Conscience • The Great Commandments • Love of Ourselves • Love of Our Neighbor • Our Enemies and Our Friends •
Works of Mercy • Obligation of Good Works • The Commandments of God • The First Commandment • Veneration of Saints • Relics
and Images • Sins Against Faith • Religion and Superstition • Sins Against Hope and Charity • The Second Commandment • Oaths
and Vows • The Third Commandment • Unnecessary Servile Work • The Fourth Commandment • Duties of Parents • Duties of Other
Superiors • Civic Duties • The Fifth Commandment • Caring for Our Health and Life • Bad Example and Scandal • The Sixth and Ninth
Commandments • Sinful Desires Against Chastity • The Seventh and Tenth Commandments • Reparation of Damage to Property
• Social Justice • Capital and Labor • The Eighth Commandment • Sins Against Truth • The Commandments of the Church • First
Commandment of the Church • The Ecclesiastical Year • Second Commandment of the Church • 3rd and 4th Commandments of the
Church • 5th Commandment of the Church
PART THREE: MEANS OF GRACE
• The Seven Sacraments • The Sacrament of Baptism • Form Matter, and Ministers of Baptism • Ceremonies and Sponsors in Baptism
• The Sacrament of Confirmation • The Sacrament of the Holy Eucharist • The Real Presence • Nature and History of Sacrifice • The
New Sacrifice • The Mass and Calvary • Ends and Fruits of the Mass • Value of the Mass; Offerings • The Altar • Sacred Vessels
and Altar Linens • Vestments • Liturgical Colors • Manner of Assisting at Mass • The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass • Holy Communion •
Dispositions for Holy Communion • Graces from the Holy Eucharist • The Sacrament of Penance • Examination of Conscience • Sorrow
for Sin • Perfect and Imperfect Contrition • Purpose of Amendment • Sacramental Confession • How To Make a Good Confession
• Satisfaction for Sin • The Seal of Confession • Indulgences • Grant of Indulgences • Gaining an Indulgence • The Sacrament of
Extreme Unction • The Last Sacraments • Christian Burial • The Sacrament of Holy Orders • Major and Minor Orders • Powers and
Duties of Priests • Dignity of Priesthood • The Sacrament of Matrimony • Duties of Married Life • Divorce • Church Laws on Marriage
• Impediments to Matrimony • Dispensations from Matrimonial Impediments • Courtship and Engagement • Preparations for Marriage
• The Marriage Ceremony • Christian Perfection • General Means of Perfection • The Evangelical Counsels • The Religious State •
Religious Communities • Sacramentals • Use and Value of Sacramentals • Blessed Objects of Devotion • Objects and Qualities of
Prayer • For Whom, When, and Where to Pray • The Sign of the Cross • The “Our Father” • Prayers to Mary • The Rosary • Religious
Practices • Devotions to the Blessed Sacrament • Other Practices of Devotion • Processions and Pilgrimages • Religious Associations
• Propagation of the Faith • Church Symbolism • Why I Am a Catholic
Additional features include:
• A list of prominent Catholic scientists • Pontifical decorations • The daily schedule of Pope Pius XII • The chart “The Apostolicity of Catholic Doctrines” • On Papal Elections • A list of Eminent Catholics from various fields • A list of all the Popes and
the last year of their reign • An Appendix that explains the main feasts of the liturgical year • A collection of the most important
prayers • And a very thorough index and Table of Contents.

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(Bookstore discounts remain the same as usual.)

Excellent Marian Trilogy from Fr. Raymond, OCSO
Love Does Such Things (Meditations on the Five Joyful Mysteries)

Fr. Raymond shares his reflections on the beautiful mysteries of the Incarnation. God
Himself calls out to us, greeting us with the gift of His own Son, Jesus, the Saviour of
men. Taking the word S-A-V-I-O-U-R, Fr. Raymond fashions a chapter for each letter, each
representing various mysteries from the Annunciation to Our Lord's Hidden Life, he draws
lessons for daily living that are timely and touching.
136pp, softcover.

God, a Woman, and the Way (Meditations on the Seven Sorrows of Mary)

Father weaves a tapestry of the Church’s teaching on the unity of the members of Christ’s
Mystical Body using profound and picturesque meditations on the seven sorrows of the
Blessed Mother:  The Prophecy of Simeon,  The Flight into Egypt,  The Loss of the
Young Christ,  Mary Meets Jesus on the Road to Calvary,  The Crucifixion,  The
Pieta, and  The Burial of Jesus. His thoughts are enriched by references to original color
etchings of John Andrews. Eminently practical spirituality.
184pp, softcover.

This Is Your Tomorrow...and Today (Meditations on the Five Glorious Mysteries)

“Have you ever tried to talk to one you thought was standing on the brink of the grave? It
is one of the most rewarding experiences of life. For it makes you look at earth, and all the
things on earth, and see them in proper light. It forces you to view time in the only proper
perspective: that of its relation to Eternity.” An unusual book of “Rosary meditations,” Fr.
Raymond writes to his younger brother, a young husband and father dying of lung cancer,
about the glory which is the eternal fruit of grace, the glory we see in the five Glorious
Mysteries.
242pp, softcover.

ALL three books, STK# 6694✱ Regularly $39.85,

NOW $9.95

(Bookstore discounts remain the same as usual.)

Why is this the most
complete missal ever?
 All the Masses of the Liturgical Year according
to the Roman Calendar of 1962—Temporal and
Sanctoral Cycles and accompanying rites (Blessing
of Ashes, Blessing of Palms, Chrism Mass, and the
Blessing of Holy Oils, etc.)  Complete Holy Week
Liturgy of 1962  Supplements containing the additional Masses for the United States and Canada
 Feasts of particular Religious Congregations 
Liturgical Calendar  Table of Moveable Feasts
updated to 2050 AD  Masses for the Dead (including
infants), Complete Burial Service, Prayers for the Dead
 Marriage Service  Special Commemorations
 39 Votive Collects  17 Votive Masses  Common Masses of the Saints and the Blessed Virgin
 Conclusions of Collects  Rite of Baptism
 The Churching of Women  Rite of Confirmation  Rite of Extreme Unction  Various
Blessings  Vespers for Sundays and Feasts
 Compline for Sundays  Office of Tenebrae
 The Itinerary or Office before a Journey  Various
Devotions and Prayers including favorite Litanies, the
Way of the Cross, prayers of the Rosary and others. 
Morning and Evening Prayers  Devotions for Confession  Litany of the Saints  Devotions for Communion
 Anthems to the Blessed Virgin  Hymns in honor of
Our Lord and Our Lady  An explanation of “The Liturgy
or Public Worship of the Catholic and Roman Church” 
A Summary of Christian Doctrine  Kyriale with Tones
for the Most Common sets of Masses (I Lux et Origo,
II Kyrie Fons Bonitatis, IV Cunctipotens Genitor Deus,
VIII De Angelis, IX Cum Jubilo, XI Orbis Factor, XXVII
Sundays of Advent & Lent, XVIII Deus Genitor Alme) 
Tones for Asperges and Vidi Aquam  Tones for three of
the most common Credos—I, III, IV  Te Deum

T

his is the first totally retypeset 1962 Latin-English daily missal
for the laity since Vatican II. It is the most complete missal ever
produced in the English language. We have included everything
and have produced a missal that is affordable while being of the highest
durability. The Roman Catholic Daily Missal will become your life-long
liturgical companion—at Church, at home, and on the road.

 All new typesetting—not a photographic reproduction. Clear and
crisp type.  According to the 1962 juxta typica edition of the Missale
Romanum  1,980 pages  All liturgical texts in Latin and English
(both Propers and Ordinary)  All readings in English (Douay-Rheims)
and Latin  All music in Gregorian notation  Ordinary with rubrics
in red  Gilt edges  5 liturgically-colored ribbons  Smythe Sewn,
rounded back binding with durable, leather-like Skivertex polymer goldembossed flexible cover  Rounded corners on pages and cover
 Reinforced 80 lb. resin-impregnated endsheets for extreme durability
(which will not tear like printed paper endsheets)  Fully and thoroughly Indexed  Printed and bound in the USA  The finest ivory
Bible paper (imported from France–Bolloré Primalux).

20%
f
f
o
1980pp, sewn,
STK# 8043✱ $59.95

NOW
$47.96

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