$4.45 june 2009 “Instaurare omnia in Christo” A Journal of Roman Catholic Tradition inside Bishop Fellay: Letter to Friends and Benefactors america still calvinistic? Dr. White on Solzhenitsyn Book Reviews: Love in the Ruins; Christ in Dachau Pope Pius Xii and the Catholic Church During World War ii: part 2 parents’ conference–Fr. Doran “In the end, My Immaculate Heart will triumph” the best of Questions and Answers from is necessary for the validity of the sacraments, how can we Q Ifeverintention the Church take donations from be sure that the sacraments we receive are valid? Q Can companies or individuals whose profit is derived from immoral activities? Q Does the bull Quo Primum enjoy infallibility? did the Catholic Church the consecration of Russia to Q How get its name? Q What is a stipend for a Mass? Q Has the Immaculate Heart requested by Our Lady been accomplished? Q Why do Catholics not eat meat on Fridays? Q Didn’t the early Church have “deaconesses”? are the poor in spirit” Q “Blessed Q Why light votive candles before the tabernacle or a picture or statue? (Matt. 5:3): What does it mean? Q Is it wrong to be an organ donor? Q Does chewing gum break the ecclesiastical fast? Q Why does God allow some to suffer mentally and physically more than others? Is this fair? it permissible to go to confession Q Is it accurate to say that Our Lord was a Jew? Q Isduring Sunday Mass? a “born-again” Protestant strikes up a conversation does the Confessor determine the penance Q When Q How by asking “Who is Jesus?” and “Do you have a personal to give to his penitent in the confessional? relationship with Him?” what is a good way to reply? Q What is holiness? Q Is it morally obligatory to vote? Q What is the authority of Canon Law? The book our readers wanted. The best questions and the best answers of 30 years of The Angelus are printed in this hardback edition. This will be a family’s heirloom reference book for everyday Catholic living to match the Catholic Faith we believe and the Latin Mass we attend. Over 300 answers classified under 30 subtitles, authored by Frs. Pulvermacher, Laisney, Doran, Boyle, and Scott: Marriage, Parenting, Family Life and Rearing Children Science and Medical Matters Lives After Death Catholic Citizenship Catholic Vocabulary Church Practices and Customs Canon Law The Papacy and the Church Teachings Bible and Biblical Matters Trinity, Jesus Christ, Virgin Mary, Angels, and Saints Mass and the Liturgy SSPX and the Crisis Religious Orders and Lives •• • •• • • • •• • • 344pp. Hardcover. STK# 8343✱ $23.95 www.angeluspress.org l 1-8 00-9 6 6-73 37 Please visit our website to see our entire selection of books and music. “Instaurare omnia in Christo—To restore all things in Christ.” Motto of Pope St. Pius X The ngelus A Journal of Roman Catholic Tradition 2915 Forest Avenue “To publish Catholic journals and place them in the hands of honest men is not enough. It is necessary to spread them as far as possible that they may be read by all, and especially by those whom Christian charity demands we should tear away from the poisonous sources of evil literature.” —Pope St. Pius X June 2009 Volume XXXII, Number 6 • Kansas City, Missouri 64109 English-language Editor and Publisher for the International Society of Saint Pius X Letter from the editor. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Fr. Markus Heggenberger PublisheR Fr. Arnaud Rostand Editor Fr. Markus Heggenberger books and marketing Fr. Kenneth Novak Assistant Editor Mr. James Vogel operations manager Mr. Michael Sestak Editorial assistant Miss Anne Stinnett Design and Layout Mr. Simon Townshend comptroller Mr. Robert Wiemann, CPA customer service Mrs. MaryAnne Hall Mr. John Rydholm Miss Rebecca Heatwole Shipping and Handling Mr. Jon Rydholm Part 1 An introduction to solzhenitsyn . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Dr. David Allen White Letter #74 to friends and benefactors . . . . . . . . . . 8 Bishop Bernard Fellay book reviews: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Love in the Ruins edited by Anne M. Larson Fr. Christopher Brandler, SSPX Christ in Dachau by John M. Lenz Anne Barbeau Gardiner america still calvinistic? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Claude Polin dominican teaching sisters of the holy name of jesus and the immaculate heart of mary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 Brignoles, France pius XII AND THE ATTITUDE OF THE cATHOLIC Part 2 cHURCH DURING WORLD WAR ii . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 Fr. Peter Gumpel, S.J. Part 24 33 catechism of the crisis in the church . . . . . . . . . . . . Fr. Matthias Gaudron church and world . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 parents’ conference. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 Fr. James Doran, SSPX Questions and answers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 Fr. Peter Scott The Angelus (ISSN 10735003) is published monthly under the patronage of St. Pius X and Mary, Queen of Angels. Publication office is located at 2915 Forest Ave., Kansas City, MO 64109. PH (816) 753-3150; FAX (816) 753-3557. Periodicals Postage Rates paid at Kansas City, MO. ©2009 by Angelus Press. Manuscripts will be used at the discretion of the editors. Postmaster sends address changes to the address above. The Angelus Subscription Rates 1 year 2 years 3 years US $35.00 Foreign Countries (inc. Canada & Mexico) $55.00 $65.00 $105.00 $100.00 $160.00 All payments must be in US funds only. Online subscriptions: $15.00/year (the online edition is available around the 10th of the preceding month). To subscribe visit: www.angelusonline.org. Register for free to access back issues 14 months and older plus many other site features. 2 Letter from the Editor The consecration of Russia and the conversion of Russia are from a human perspective not to be expected, though this is exactly what traditionalminded Catholics are praying for in a huge common effort, following the wish of Bishop Bernard Fellay, the Superior General of the SSPX. Why? First, the consecration of Russia is clearly a supernatural means to fight the present crisis of the Church. One of the problems seems to be that a natural thinking and a recourse to natural means has become prevalent in the Catholic Church. An underlying naturalism seems to be at the root of many evils. For example, as a remedy for educational problems, what is mainly proposed is the intellectual improvement of the institution in question–without paying attention to questions of the soul and of faith. Political moves to appease the enemies of the Church are proposed as a solution to political problems–with the consequence of a long-term involvement in false ideologies. The famous “Ostpolitik” of the Vatican–the policy of appeasement with Communist Russia after Vatican II–is a good example. The naturalistic reasoning is: “We will work for peace by calming down the Russian Bear.” The consequence was an infiltration of the Catholic Church by false ideologies like “Liberation Theology” (which has a Communist inspiration). Second, the Rosary is, in its consequence, a means without compromising principles. This is to say: those who pray the Rosary are committed to a Catholic lifestyle independently from circumstances like whether they please their neighbors, whether they can afford the newest car or whether they spend their vacations in Florida. All these things are not bad in themselves, but they are only secondary; God and His Gospel and Commandments are first, which we confess through the Rosary. This is not to say that anyone who prays the Rosary should consider themselves better than others–after all, humility is a Christian virtue–but it is to say that praying the Rosary indicates a serious effort to lead a Christian life in spite of human weakness. These are only two essentials that bring the Rosary in sharp contrast to what we could call mainstream Catholicism. This is a kind of Catholicism that finds all kinds of excuses for adapting to modern anti-Catholic teaching or moral behavior. One of the examples THE ANGELUS • June 2009 www.angeluspress.org of this might be found in a commentary of Thomas Fleming from May 18th on the Chronicles website: …On the other hand, I do not know why anyone without some connection–as student, professor, or alumnus–to Notre Dame went there to protest. Protests are, for the most part, a complete waste of time. Neither the president of Notre Dame nor the President of the United States has a moral conscience to appeal to, and the well-fed post Christian families who attended the event and applauded the politician who hates the Church are immune to reason and deaf to Christian charity. Then what to do? You might start by not aborting any babies or countenancing those who do. You can refuse to support any infanticidal politician and cancel your subscription to publications advocating abortion rights. That is just for starters. What about an abortion-free lifestyle? No NPR, no Hollywood movies, no commercial TV. What, a life without Time magazine or CNN or FOX? Isn’t it easier to wave a sign or violate good laws against trespassing? Yes, easier, but is it effective, much less Christian? I understand why Christians, Catholics in particular, want to express their opposition, but why don’t they start in their own parishes and schools, where liberation theology is often the most nearly wholesome moral teaching being promulgated? Obama, like a latterday Rodney King, wonders why we all can’t just get along. I wonder why we cannot just get way–from him and 70 million baby-eating zombies who voted for him. The problem that is addressed here is not so much a President who is not a Catholic but the way Catholics and Catholic institutions behave: a perfect example for a changed religion. This change works in three stages. The first stage: Everyone calls for a mitigation of the “outrageously inflexible” Catholic principles. The second stage: Catholics have a “bad conscience” and think that they have to embrace the world. The third stage: A progressive inconsistency of the Catholic Church becomes visible. The world is using the abuses and inconsistencies that become visible as a lever to fight against the principles of faith. The fourth stage: The Church either fights for the Catholic Faith or abolishes itself. And one way to fight is to pray the Rosary. Instaurare Omnia in Christo, Fr. Markus Heggenberger D r . D a v i d A l l e n 3 W h i t e An introduction to Alexander Solzhenitsyn PART 1: Fatima and Russia The 20th century was not a century of great men. If anything, it was a century of pygmies and pipsqueaks, cowards and liars and frauds. The collapse of the modern world would not have been possible if it had been a century of great and heroic men. Sadly, we have to admit that their number is few. But God, in His great goodness and grace, gave us, as he always does in every age, certain great men that we can look to, be inspired by, and learn lessons from. You would not be reading this right now if it were not for the heroic actions of one such great man who was moved by God’s grace. It seems to me there is little doubt that the good Archbishop Lefebvre is perhaps the giant of the century in terms of what his actions have meant for the salvation of souls. The man I am writing about here, however, was not a Catholic. He was an Orthodox Christian from Russia, and he provided a different kind of lesson to us, a lesson which we again need while everyone else is forgetting the basics. Just as the good Archbishop looms in the Church as a lesson of faith and perseverance, so Alexander Solzhenitsyn looms above the rest of literary men in the 20th century as an example of what literature should be and how it can be used for a great good. But beyond the literary aspects, beyond an example simply as a man, he gave us very important lessons which we all need to remember. Let me make a connection and explain why, in some sense, it is appropriate for Catholics to learn about this man. Although he was not a Catholic, the fact that he was a believer at all is astonishing once you hear his story. But there is an overwhelming important fact that we Catholics know about. He was a Russian. There is little doubt that the history of what happened in the 20th century in terms of what went on in the world—and also what went on in the Church—is connected with that country for some mysterious reason. We cannot say for certain why God chose Russia in the 20th century to assume such incredible importance in terms of the salvation of souls, the situation in the Church, and most www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • June 2009 4 particularly, the future of mankind. But we know it to be a fact. We know it from the very simple reason that God sent His Blessed Mother to give us this message. It is very clear that many of the great problems of the 20th century are connected with the world’s refusal to listen carefully to what God had to say through His Blessed Mother about the country of Russia. What do we know? One, we have been told by this most reliable of sources that Russia would spread Her errors throughout the world—words spoken at Fatima in 1917 before the Russian Revolution. That Revolution took place in October; the warning was given beforehand. It’s very clear that, at the time, anyone clear-sighted who heard that message could have looked at what happened and would have known, without any question, that the message was accurate. The trouble started immediately. There has been much speculation about what those errors to be spread about the world were. I would state it very simply: When the Communists took control in Mother Russia, they introduced and forced on the population the two principal ideas connected with the communist system. The first idea is atheism, for the communist system is not possible without a denial of God. The Communist-Marxist system sees man simply as a creature of economics; man exists in the world as a worker, and his principal concerns are economic ones. If he works, is fed by the State, and has his basic needs provided for, this system would create paradise on earth—since there is no other Paradise according to the communist system. Therefore it is essential that any steps necessary to ensure that Paradise is achieved here in this world be taken. To them, this is all there is. Of course, that is a great lie. We know for a fact that man is not an economic creature. He is a creature with a soul; this is what makes all the difference! The first important fact is Communism’s insistence on atheism. And this error has been spread throughout the world. The 20th century was a century in which faith was lost. It was lost, to a greater or lesser degree, along the lines of, “If you improve social conditions in the world, you will make for happier human beings.” The 20th century proved that thesis false. All you have to do to see what really happens to human beings is to see what happened when Russia became the Soviet Union. It is a great lie, it is a huge error— and we were told that. But that error now is everywhere. Every time a voice is raised which says, “No, no, you must feed them first,” “You must improve their housing,” “It is most important that social conditions are improved; then we shall worry about their souls,” you are hearing that error spread again. It is an error that clearly comes from Communism, which we were told. Of course, bad thinking was everywhere. But what did we get from the Soviet Union? We had before us a model that showed not simply how wrong that idea was, but how demonic it is when put into THE ANGELUS • June 2009 www.angeluspress.org practice. And the world ignored it. The world didn’t care. To this day, in spite of the fact that after 80-90 years of experiment with this absurd idea, which fails everywhere it is tried, it is still the principle idea put forward in many American and European universities. The idea, the error, will not go away...yet. The second error: If you believe that man is simply an economic creature, that his well-being has to do with comfort in this world, by extension you will certainly be a materialist. If atheism is the first error, materialism is the second. This second error again begins with a false understanding of man which suggests we are simply organisms living in an environment, that we are simply the accidental result of a bunch of chemicals–glop in a pond, struck by lightning–which created a living thing that crawled out of the pond, and suddenly: tangerines and string quartets. This is an absolutely absurd notion. Nevertheless, this is what is believed. But it is an error that has been spread throughout the world as the Blessed Mother warned it would be. If you begin with a misunderstanding, a false impression, of what man is, it obviously is extended to the world in which man lives and how man lives in this world. Then you are back to the error: “What do I need to live in this world? Some food, shelter, etc. Then I will be happy.” This is a ridiculous and absurd idea. We have also seen what happens when, unlike the Soviet Union (a materialistic state in which there was no material because the economic system was so absurd), we live in an economic state where, for some peculiar reason, having to do with some measure of economic freedom but also an insane Puritanical work ethic and an insane capacity for greed and overproduction–and probably a whole lot of support from the devil himself–there is so much material we are awash in it. Acquiring the simple basics—food, shelter, etc.–just wasn’t enough: “I needed to have an addition on my home.” “I needed a car to get to work.” “I needed a second car for the wife.” “I needed a third car for the kids.” Then a fourth, fifth and sixth. Then, “I needed a car for the dog.” And suddenly: “I needed that TV set.” Then, “I needed a TV set for the bedroom too so I can go to sleep watching it.” Then, “I needed a TV set downstairs for when I am working downstairs.” “I need a TV set in the bathroom.” And then you have a house full of TV sets. And then the VCR came along: “Great! I can tape shows on different sets.” Then you need a computer, then two computers, a DVD player, etc. It is an insane explosion. The one thing we know, from this overabundance of material is that materialism does not produce happiness. It’s the oldest cliché in the world, but I will utter it again because one can’t say it too often: Those who are very rich are not more happy. In fact, some of the most miserable people on earth are the ones who are rolling in wealth. Why should that be? 5 Because materialism and the idea of materialism being our end in this world is an error. If indeed we were simply here for material comfort and happiness, everyone in America today should be as happy as a clam. There should be such happiness that there should be daily festivals of people simply jumping up and down, exclaiming, “Goodie, goodie! Look how happy we are! We have everything anyone could ever want!” I don’t see much of this going on. As “the market” goes higher and higher and people acquire more and more “money,” they assume they will have more and more money as time goes on: I’ve seen surveys that show most college graduates believe they will be millionaires by the time they are 30. This is an error. Even if they are—even if it were 100%–they are not going to be content. Man is not a material creature, not simply an organism in an environment. We cannot be satisfied thus. These are the two huge errors. I could chronicle countless others that come from it. But what is Communism? It is atheistic materialism. These are the errors the world has bought into. Our Blessed Mother said at Fatima that Russia would spread them. And they are everywhere now. The second thing is that we know very well, because again the message was very clear and came from God through the Blessed Mother, that Russia must be consecrated to Her Immaculate Heart. It seems like an arbitrary request. Why not Romania? Or Paraguay? Why not Korea? Well, on occasion, God gives arbitrary commands. And these arbitrary orders are often to see whether mankind will be obedient: Why can’t we eat the fruit from that tree? Why not another tree? Why not a different tree in the Garden? But the command was very direct: “You shall not eat of the fruit of that tree.” In the same way, last century, the command came: “You will consecrate Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary.” Just as the first command was ignored, we know that the other imperative command has been ignored. We also have been told that the consecration will be done—though it will be late. Russia will be converted; her Immaculate Heart will triumph; and a period of peace will be granted to mankind. We have been told this. We know it will happen. Russia dominates the 20th century. In a sense, because it is playing that special role in God’s plan, Russia should have our special attention. God prepared the world for this special attention by granting certain special gifts to certain Russians over the last at least two centuries, because in this timeframe, at least in literary terms, Russia has been the place “where it’s happening, man.” Consider the sudden emergence of Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, etc. There has been an explosion of literary talent in this one area of the world. It has grabbed the attention of many people. Some of them have been saying quite extraordinary things, especially Dostoevsky. Consider his book The Brothers Karamazov. The book and its message have to do with the soul, with what happens when you deny God, that love is more important and final, ultimately, than certain intellectual falsehoods. Finally, it has to do with the importance of suffering: “The world is soaked, from the crust to the core, with the tears of mankind.” An extraordinary statement. You won’t hear this in many other places. Out of this tradition, in our time, I believe God sent a special voice on a special mission which I don’t believe is completed yet. Here he is; he looms over the 20th century; he was a great man. His name is Alexander Solzhenitsyn. He was born in 1918: an interesting year for him to come into the world, one year after Fatima and the Russian Revolution. What happens to this child? He is born in the Caucasus, between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. His father, an artillery officer in the Russian military who served honorably in the First World War, was killed in an accident six months before his birth. He thus came into the world a year after the Revolution and fatherless. There is no man there to guide him. If you consider only these two circumstances, one has a sense that nothing was possible there. His mother was a good woman who supported herself and her son as a typist. She worked hard and loved her son very much. Of course, there were few choices in the matter. When he was sent off to school, he was sent to Communist school. What was he taught? Atheistic materialism. It was hammered into his head the same way that nonsense is hammered into students in American public schools today. The point of the modern school is not education but the hammering of nonsense into a young person’s head. It happened to him. And he became a good, upstanding member of the Party. This was all he knew; it was what he taught. And he believed it along with most people around him. Since it was met with a kind of greatness of soul that would show itself later, he bought into it with some measure of passion and devotion: it had be true. He had an interest in being a writer from an early age. He made some small experiments, trying creative writing, but it became clear, as it is clear most places in the world now, that it is very difficult to make a living as a writer—unless you write junk. If you write junk, you can be very successful, especially if you’re one of the lucky ones whose junk will be promoted; therefore you become one of those very wealthy sorts. But if your junk isn’t promoted, you become one of those writers who simply writes junk and makes no money. And then you have to do something else. In any case, there was no money in it. He himself said that, as a practical step, he graduated from Rostov University in 1941. He was there for just a few years prior. By training, he was a mathematician and a physicist. As he himself said, it was the Providence of God at work. If he pursued writing from the beginning, he would have www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • June 2009 6 earned some attention as such. If he hadn’t had the mathematical background—which he was very good at—he would not, during the years he was in the Gulag, have been sent to a very special, cushy camp with other scientists and mathematicians because they knew he was smart and wanted his brain to be put to use. Thus, he had to be kept alive. As he said, “Had I been just another writer, I would have been just another corpse in the Gulag. God, in His providential wisdom, got me to the university and trained me as a mathematician.” This eventually saved his life. He made it through the camps. He did, however, take a correspondence course in literature from Moscow University. Nothing came of this; when he graduated in 1941, the war was on. He was a healthy young man so he was off to the army to follow his father’s footsteps. As his father had been an artillery officer in the First World War, Solzhenitsyn became an artillery officer in the Second World War. He rose to the level of Captain. He was married at the time and had to leave his wife behind during the War. He was very successful militarily; he received two decorations, was put in charge of a company of men, and was well-liked by both his men and the other officers. But then one day it hit. He had written a letter to a close friend in which he criticized Joseph Stalin They had heard a speech of his on the radio the night before. Solzhenitsyn had a disagreement with something Stalin had said and mentioned it. When friends of Papa Joe are reading your mail, and you dare to criticize the Big Cheese, you’re in trouble. He found himself with an eight-year prison sentence slapped on him. He was arrested, tried, and sentenced. Remember, to this point he was an absolutely devoted Party member. He had never questioned anything. So these events came as a complete shock. It also came as a kind of wake-up call that something unusual was going on, for he realized the punishment far outweighed the “crime.” You must understand that, during these years, sentences were handed out in the most unusual manner. Let me give you a vignette of the astonishing story of another arrest from Volume I of The Gulag Archipelago by Solzhenitsyn: A district Party conference was underway in Moscow Province. It was presided over by a new secretary of the District Party Committee, replacing one recently arrested. At the conclusion of the conference, a tribute to Comrade Stalin was called for. Of course, everyone stood up (just as everyone had leaped to his feet during the conference at every mention of his name). The small hall echoed with “stormy applause, rising to an ovation.” For three minutes, four minutes, five minutes, the “stormy applause, rising to an ovation,” continued. But palms were getting sore and raised arms were already aching. And the older people were panting from exhaustion. It was becoming insufferably silly even to those who really adored Stalin. However, who would be the first to stop? The secretary of the District Party Committee could have done it. He was standing on the platform, and it was he who had called for the ovation. THE ANGELUS • June 2009 www.angeluspress.org But he was a newcomer. He had taken the place of a man who’d been arrested. He was afraid! After all, NKVD [an earlier version of the KGB] men were standing in the hall applauding and watching to see who quit first. And in that obscure, small hall, unknown to the Leader, the applause went on–six, seven, eight minutes! They were done for! Their goose was cooked! They couldn’t stop now till they collapsed with heart attacks! At the rear of the hall, which was crowded, they could of course cheat a bit, clap less frequently, less vigorously, not so eagerly–but up there with the presidium where everyone could see them? The director of the local paper factory, an independent and strong-minded man, stood with the presidium. Aware of all the falsity and all the impossibility of the situation, he still kept on applauding! Nine minutes! Ten! In anguish he watched the secretary of the District Party Committee, but the latter dared not stop. Insanity! To the last man! With make-believe enthusiasm on their faces, looking at each other with faint hope, the district leaders were just going to go on and on applauding till they fell where they stood, till they were carried out of the hall on stretchers! And even then those who were left would not falter... Then, after eleven minutes, the director of the paper factory assumed a business-like expression and sat down in his seat. And, oh, a miracle took place! Where had the universal, uninhibited, indescribable enthusiasm gone? To a man, everyone else stopped dead and sat down. They had been saved! The squirrel had been smart enough to jump off his revolving wheel. That, however, was how they discovered who the independent people were. And that was how they went about eliminating them. That same night the factory director was arrested. They easily pasted ten years on him on the pretext of something quite different. But after he had signed the Form 206, the final document of the interrogation, his interrogator reminded him: “Don’t ever be the first to stop applauding!”1 It’s almost as if Solzhenitsyn got more justice—at least he criticized the Leader. Needless to say, to be arrested for open criticism of Stalin in a letter makes some sense. But if we’re talking about arrests, here is a quick summary of some other reasons for arrest, to give you a sense of what those years were like: A tailor, laying aside his needle, stuck it into a newspaper on the wall so it wouldn’t get lost. He happened to stick it in the eye of Kaganovich, one of the leaders. A customer observed it. Article 58, 10 years for terrorism. A saleswoman accepting merchandise from a forwarder, noted down on a sheet of newspaper—there was no other paper around—a number of pieces of soap happened to fall on the forehead of Comrade Stalin: Article 58, 10 years. A tractor driver of the Znamenka machinery and tractor station, lined his thin shoes for warmth with a pamphlet about the candidate for elections to the Supreme Soviet, but a charwoman noticed it was missing and found it: KRA (Counter-Revolutionary Agitation), 10 years. The village club manager went with his watchman to buy a bust of Comrade Stalin. They bought it; it was large and heavy. They ought to have carried it in a hand-barrow, both of them together, but the manager’s status did not allow it. They tried to carry it themselves but couldn’t arrange a feasible way to do so. Eventually, the watchman took off his belt, tied a noose around Stalin’s neck and carried it over his back through the village. There was nothing to argue about here, an open-and-shut case: terrorism, 10 years. 7 A sailor sold an Englishman a Katyusha cigarette lighter, a wick and a piece of pipe with a striking wheel, as a souvenir, for one pound sterling: Subversion of the Motherland’s Dignity, Article 58, 10 years. A shepherd, in a fit of anger, swore at one of his cows for not obeying him, “You collective farm slut!” Article 58 and a term. A deaf and dumb carpenter got a term for KRA. He was laying floors in a club. Everything had been removed from the big hall; there was neither a nail nor a hook anywhere. While he was working, he hung his jacket and his service cap on a bust of Lenin. Someone came in and saw it. Article 58, 10 years. Some children in a collective farm club got out of hand and had a fight. They accidentally knocked a poster off the wall with their backs. The two eldest were sentenced under Article 58 on the basis of the Decree of 1935: Children from the age of 12 had full criminal responsibility for all crimes. The parents were also sentenced for having allegedly told them to do so and having sent the children to do it. A 16-year-old Chuvash schoolboy made a mistake in Russian in a slogan in a wall newspaper. It was not his native language. Article 58, 5 years. In a state-farm bookkeeping office, there was a slogan hung on the wall: “Life has become better. Life has become more happy.–Stalin.” Someone added a letter in red pencil to Stalin’s name, making it read: “Life has become more happy for Stalin.” They didn’t look for the guilty party; they sentenced the whole bookkeeping office. Nonsensical? Fantastical? Senseless? It is not at all meaningless, for that is exactly what terror as a means of persuasion is. There’s an old proverb: Beat the crow and beat the raven and in the end, you’ll get the white swan. In other words, keep on beating one after another for eventually you will hit what you need. The primary meaning of mass terror lies precisely in this: even the strong and well-hidden who could never be simply ferreted out, will be caught and perish. The stories are simply unbelievable. In any case, he was sentenced and found himself in a world he had never dreamed of. He entered the Gulag Archipelago, as he himself named it. “Gulag” is simply an acronym in Russian. In English, it is “The Soviet Union Labor Prison System.” It referred to the system of hundreds and hundreds of slave labor camps which were built throughout Siberia. Solzhenitsyn used the acronym and came up with the image of them like an archipelago which is a string of islands that go on forever. So the image is of the slave labor camps stretching across Siberia like a group of tiny islands, one after another. Hence the title The Gulag Archipelago. He hadn’t known it existed. There had been rumors. People came to hear about it; they knew people were disappearing by the hundreds, by the thousands, by the tens of thousands, by the hundreds of thousands—and not coming back. They had to go somewhere. But now he saw it first-hand. Curiously, one bright idea that the Soviet officials came up with in order to prevent rebellion in the camps ended up backfiring on them because of Solzhenitsyn. The idea was this: They would not leave one prisoner in one camp for their full term. They were continually shuffling prisoners. It was a clever idea. It meant the prisoners never had a chance to organize fully and rebel. You would be with a group of people for a while, but then some would leave and new ones would come—and then you would be sent somewhere else. What this meant, however, was that Solzhenitsyn, during his years in the Gulag, going from camp to camp, spoke to more and more people, learning their stories. How did they get there? What were their lives like? What did they go through? He remembered everything. Another great blessing that God gave him was a phenomenal memory. It was unbelievable. As an example, he decided early on that in order to maintain his sanity while he was in the Gulag, he would write an epic poem. It was called Prussian Nights. He would compose in his head 10-25 lines every day and memorize it. It was never written down. The next day he would compose another 10-25 lines and add it to the lines of the previous day. When he was finally released from the Gulag, he wrote the poem down. It is thousands of lines long. He had simply memorized it, not writing it down until his prison term was over. Only a phenomenal memory can do that. That memory also served to grab hold of all the details and stories he heard. He began to realize that everything he had been told and taught about his native country– its history, its beliefs, how people should be treated, the ideals, high vision and glories of those in charge and the leadership—was nothing but a pack of lies. His eyes were opened. He began to understand that what was really happening in his country was one of the most horrendous, abominable attacks on a body of civilians in the history of the world. His country was not the place he had hoped or come to believe it was (a great nation with an idealistic vision), but it was simply barbaric. He refers to the whole century as “the Caveman’s Century.” This is an appropriate designation. He came to understand the 20th century by his years in the Gulag. But here’s the curiosity: along the way, as he looked at the people he met and learned how they survived, he became a believer. He lost his disbelief. He lost his strong atheistic faith. He came to believe not only that there was a God in heaven but that the story he learned from those in the camps—of the Incarnation of Christ, His suffering, sacrifice, and Resurrection—was true. Talk originally given at St. Thomas Aquinas Seminary. Audio tapes are available at www.stasaudio.org. To be continued in a future issue of The Angelus. 1 Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, tr. Thomas P. Whitney (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), I, 69-70. www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • June 2009 8 Letter #74 h . e . B i s h o p B e r n a r d f e l l a y Letter #74 to Friends and Benefactors from Bishop Bernard Fellay, Superior General of the Society of Saint Pius X Dear Friends and Benefactors, When we launched a new Rosary crusade during our pilgrimage to Lourdes last October, we were certainly not expecting such a quick answer from Heaven to our petition! Indeed, as happened with our first petition, which our good Mother in heaven answered so effectively through the intermediary of the Vicar of Christ and his motu proprio on the traditional Mass, the Blessed Virgin was pleased to grant us a second grace even quicker: during the same visit to Rome in the month of January when I presented the bouquet of 1,703,000 rosaries for the Sovereign Pontiff’s intentions, I received from the hands of Cardinal Castrillon Hoyos the decree remitting the “excommunications.” We had asked for that back in 2001 as a sign of the Vatican’s good will towards the traditional movement. For ever since the Council anything that is or aspires to be traditional in the holy Church has been subjected to continual bullying and even exclusion. This treatment has obviously partially, and even totally, destroyed our confidence in the Roman authorities. So long as this trust is not partially re-established, I said then, our relations will be minimal. Trust is not only a good sentiment, it is the fruit that results naturally when we recognize in these authorities pastors who have the good of what we call Tradition at heart. And our preliminary requests were formulated with this in mind. In point of fact, our position and our attitude toward the Holy See cannot be understood unless the perception of the state of crisis in which the Church finds itself is taken into account. It is not a question of a superficial THE ANGELUS • June 2009 www.angeluspress.org event or a personal outlook. It is a question of a reality that exists independently of our perception, is acknowledged from time to time by these same authorities, and is verified time and time again by the events. This crisis displays complex and changeable aspects, which are at times profound and sometimes circumstantial; nonetheless we all suffer from it. The faithful are especially afflicted by the ceremonies of the new liturgy—alas! quite often scandalous, by ordinary preaching which takes moral stances in complete opposition with the Church’s centuries-old teaching and the example of the saints. Parents have very often had the profound sorrow to see their children lose the faith after having been confided to institutions of Catholic education, or to deplore their nearly total ignorance of Catholic doctrine for want of serious catechetical instruction. An incalculable number of religious have shown a loss of the evangelical spirit, especially that of renunciation, poverty, and sacrifice, after the revision of their constitutions and their post-conciliar re-education, which had as an almost immediate consequence such a drop in vocations that several orders and congregations have been closing their convents one after another when they have not simply disappeared altogether. The situation of many dioceses is equally dramatic. All of this forms a coherent whole and has not happened by chance, but came in the wake of a council which meant to reform and bring the Church up to date. We are accused either of seeing a crisis where none exists or of falsely attributing to the Council the undeniably disastrous and extremely serious results everyone can see, or else of taking 9 advantage of the situation to justify a wrong attitude of rebellion or independence. Yet whether we take the writings of the Fathers of the Church, or of the Magisterium, or the liturgy, or theology through the ages, we find a unity to which we adhere with our whole heart. And this doctrinal unity is flagrantly contradicted, offended, and lessened in practice by current lines of conduct. We did not invent a rupture; it unfortunately exists, and one has only to see how some episcopates treat us even after the withdrawal of the excommunications to ascertain how deeply the moderns reject everything that savors of Tradition, to such a degree that it is impossible not to call this rejection a rupture with the past. Truly, we were as surprised by the violence of the reaction of the progressivists and of the Left in general toward us as we were by the publication of the decree of January 21. It is true that they found a golden opportunity in the unfortunate words of Bishop Williamson, which enabled them by an unjust amalgamation to illuse our Society, considered as a scapegoat. In fact, we were instrumentalized in a much more important battle: that of the Church, which rightly bears the name militant, against the wicked spirits in the high places, as St. Paul says. And we do not hesitate to inscribe our own short history into the great history of the Church, the history of this titanic wrestling for the salvation of souls announced in Genesis and described so strikingly in St. John’s Apocalypse. This contest often remains on the spiritual plane, but from time to time it descends from the level of spirits and souls to the corporeal plane and becomes visible, as in times of open persecutions. In what has happened over the last few months, we must discern a more intense period in this battle. It is quite clear that the one who is ultimately being targeted is the Vicar of Christ in his effort to begin a certain restoration in the Church. People fear to see the head of the Church drawing nearer our movement; they are afraid of losing what was gained by Vatican II, and they are doing their best to neutralize this. What does the pope really think? Where does he stand? The Jews and the progressivists demand of him to choose between Vatican II and us..., so much so that to reassure them the Secretariat of State found nothing better than to set as a necessary condition of our canonical existence that we fully accept what we consider the principal source of the current problems and to which we have always been opposed....Nevertheless, they, like us, are bound by the anti-modernist oath and all of the Church’s condemnations. And so we do not agree to discuss Vatican II except in light of these solemn declarations (profession of faith, the anti-modernist oath) made before God and the Church. And if they seem incompatible, then obviously the novelties are wrong. We are relying upon the announced doctrinal discussions to bring about as much light as possible about these issues. Taking advantage of the new situation after the decree on the excommunication, which did not change the Society’s canonical status, many bishops have tried to make us square the circle by requiring us to obey Canon Law to the letter in every particular as if our situation were perfectly in order, while at the same time they were denying our canonical existence. A German bishop has already announced that before the end of the year the Society would once again be outside the Church....What a rosy future to look forward to! The only viable solution, which is also what we had asked for, is an intermediary situation, which is perforce incomplete and canonically imperfect, but would be accepted as such without our being constantly accused of disobedience or rebellion, without our being subjected to untenable prohibitions. For, all things considered, the abnormal state of the Church, which we call a state of necessity, is proven yet again by the attitude and speech of certain bishops with respect to the pope and Tradition. How things will unfold, we have not the least idea. We maintain our proposal to accept our present imperfect situation as temporary while beginning at last the announced doctrinal discussions in the hope that they will bear good fruit. ...to this end, we desire to offer her between now and March 25, 2010, a bouquet of 12 million rosaries... But on this difficult path, and confronted with such violent opposition, we ask you, dear faithful, once again to have recourse to prayer. It seems to us that the time has come to launch a broad offensive, deeply anchored in the message of Our Lady of Fatima, to which she promised a happy outcome since she announced that in the end her Immaculate Heart will triumph. We ask her for this triumph by the means she herself requested: the consecration of Russia to her Immaculate Heart by the Supreme Pastor and all the bishops of the Catholic world, and the propagation of the devotion to her Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart. That is why, to this end, we desire to offer her between now and March 25, 2010, a bouquet of 12 million [five-decade] rosaries as a crown of as many stars round her person, accompanied by an equivalently important number of daily sacrifices, which we will take good care to look for first of all in the faithful accomplishment of our duty of state, and with the promise to propagate devotion to her www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • June 2009 10 Immaculate Heart. She herself presented this as the purpose of her apparitions at Fatima. We are deeply convinced that if we carefully carry out what she asks of us, we shall obtain very much more than all we could ever dare to hope, and especially that our salvation shall be ensured if we profit from the graces she has promised us. Consequently, we also ask from our priests a particular effort to facilitate this devotion for the faithful by emphasizing not only the Communion of reparation on the first Saturdays of the month, but by encouraging the faithful to live in close intimacy with our Lady through the consecration to her Immaculate Heart. It would also be good to make better known and to delve into the spirituality of the great herald of the Immaculata, Fr. Maximilian Kolbe. Our Society was consecrated to the Immaculate Heart twenty-five years ago. We wish to renew this happy initiative of Fr. Schmidberger by putting into it all our soul and fostering this spirit in our hearts. It stands to reason that we have no intention of commanding Divine Providence what to do, but we have learned from the examples of saints and Holy Scripture itself that great desires can hasten quite strikingly the designs of the good Lord. Thus we make bold to lay this intention before the Immaculate Heart of Mary, asking her to take you all under her maternal protection. May God bless you abundantly! On the feast of the glorious Resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, + Bernard Fellay Winona, Easter 2009 T he Second Secret of Fatima The second secret included Mary's instructions on how to save souls from hell and convert the world to the Catholic faith, written in 1917: You have seen hell where the souls of poor sinners go. To save them, God wishes to establish in the world devotion to my Immaculate Heart. If what I say to you is done, many souls will be saved and there will be peace. The war is going to end: but if people do not cease offending God, a worse one will break out during the Pontificate of Pius XI. When you see a night illuminated by an unknown light, know that this is the great sign given you by God that he is about to punish the world for its crimes, by means of war, famine, and persecutions of the Church and of the Holy Father. To prevent this, I shall come to ask for the consecration of Russia to my Immaculate Heart, and the Communion of reparation on the First Saturdays. If my requests are heeded, Russia will be converted, and there will be peace; if not, she will spread her errors throughout the world, causing wars and persecutions of the Church. The good will be martyred; the Holy Father will have much to suffer; various nations will be annihilated. In the end, my Immaculate Heart will triumph. The Holy Father will consecrate Russia to me, and she shall be converted, and a period of peace will be granted to the world.–Fatima In Lucia’s Own Words (The Ravengate Press, 1995), p.104. THE ANGELUS • June 2009 www.angeluspress.org BOOK 11 Review TITLE: Love in the Ruins author: Edited by Anne Larson Publisher: Angelus Press. Price: $14.95 Reviewer: Fr. Christopher Brandler SUMMARY: 14 essays of contemporary Catholics. “The narratives are written by Roman Catholics who have discovered or rediscovered the riches of the ancient liturgy and traditions of Holy Mother Church, powerful antidotes to the ecclesiastic and liturgical crises of our day.”—From the Preface Love in the Ruins is a collection of 14 testimonies in support of the Tridentine Latin Mass, with its unfailing power to nourish souls and thus transform society, forming over time a profoundly Catholic culture. These 14 eye-witness accounts, each of them a page-turner, are brought together in one volume so that others might follow their example and proclaim their allegiance to the Mass of all times. These authors, men and women, refuse to hide the lamp of their Catholic faith under a bushel (Mt. 5:15) or to keep their talent for prose and poetry laid up in a napkin (Lk. 19:20). Hence we will not expect to find this eloquent defense of truly Catholic worship on the New York Times bestseller list. Our authors do not appeal to the court of public opinion. Rather, they sing the praises of the Traditional Latin Mass, “the most beautiful thing this side of heaven,” to quote Father Faber. We speak of only 14 authors for now, whose voices are echoed by hundreds of families and thousands of devout souls who have found the bulwark of their Catholic faith in the one and only Catholic Tradition, which is very much alive today, backed by 2000 years of solid teaching and spirituality. The Tridentine Mass is here to stay, and it was never legally forbidden, as Pope Benedict XVI reminded the whole Church on July 7, 2007, in his Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum. Love in the Ruins is well-named, recounting as it does the trauma of the cultural revolution of the 1960’s and of the liturgical demolition following Vatican II, alongside the slow and quiet working of God’s grace within families and society in order to resist the force and stem the tide of that widespread upheaval. These are stories of men and women who have found the pearl of great price, the treasure hidden in a field (Mt. 13:44-45), and for whom it became increasingly clear that no price is too high, that the search for truth is top priority. Once they have found that truth for the first or second time, then they must be ready to live out that truth, to foster it, and to defend it, whatever the cost. These narratives make no mistake about the suffering which Christ promised His disciples, notwithstanding the unspeakable joy into which the promised tribulations will turn ( Jn. 16:20) in God’s good time. Love in the Ruins is true to life. It contains details of spiritual quests with which any of us can readily identify: extended periods of the dark night of the soul, the painful recognition of the emptiness and barrenness of the materialist culture which engulfs us from all sides, the joy of hard-won victories thanks to our acceptance of God’s grace and its consequences for our family and social life, the hard fact that destruction is our own doing, while our help is only in www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • June 2009 12 God (Osee 13:9). This is our story. We can thus plumb the depths of these encouraging words which we might have heard on retreat: “Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future. Remember that.” In this regard we are reminded of Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre’s Golden Jubilee Sermon of September 23, 1979 (cf. Michael Davies, Apologia pro Marcel Lefebvre, Vol. II), where His Lordship bore witness publicly to the fruits of the Traditional Mass realized during his missionary years in pagan Africa: I saw [what the grace of the Holy Mass can do] in those pagan souls transformed by assistance at Holy Mass, and by the Holy Eucharist. These souls understood the mystery of the Sacrifice of the Cross and united themselves to Our Lord Jesus Christ in the sufferings of His Cross, offering their sacrifices and their sufferings with Our Lord Jesus Christ and living as Christians….I was able to see these pagan villages become Christian– being transformed not only, I would say, spiritually and supernaturally, but also being transformed physically, socially, economically, and politically: because these people, pagans which they were, became cognizant of the necessity of fulfilling their duties, in spite of the trials, in spite of the sacrifices; of maintaining their commitments, and particularly their commitment in marriage. Then the village began to be transformed, little by little, under the influence of grace…. Thus Archbishop Lefebvre concluded by preaching a crusade, especially of Catholic families and Catholic education, in order to restore our culture, while accepting the fact that the economic and political fruits of this crusade require a very long time. Several generations of hemorrhaging and destruction can only be undone by several generations of healing and reconstruction. The project will last a lifetime, but the rewards are for eternity. This is the message of Love in the Ruins. Given our limited space, we can hardly do justice to the 14 authors in this priceless collection, but we leave the reader with a few highlights and page numbers. Blessed Henry Suso, O.P., spoke to the modern world in this brief paraphrase: “If you do not accept the simplicity of God’s will, then you can only expect to be enmeshed in the endless complications of your own designs.” Our 14 authors provide us with specific examples of modern confusion and futile selfseeking: the charismatic personality of a Protestant preacher, who thrives on ambiguity and finds himself powerless to transform souls interiorly (pp.14-15), a New Age guru whose pretended spirituality leads to ruthless self-absorption (pp.120-23), a secular college education whose end result is moral relativism and blindness to the truth (p.74), a once Catholic culture paralyzed by pluralism and Enlightenment naturalism (pp.107-8). Short of God’s grace, these phenomena could drive one to despair. But happily God’s grace will not remain without fruit (I Cor. 15:10). It all comes back to the Mass. THE ANGELUS • June 2009 www.angeluspress.org There are numerous Catholic guides to authentic spirituality, available to all, and whose centuries-old wisdom can work in troubled souls even today: St. Augustine, Confessions (pp.53-68–a fine selection of quotes); St. John of the Cross, Ascent of Mount Carmel (pp.123-4). Moreover, we have the prolific writers of Catholic apologetics and theology from the 19th and 20th centuries: Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953), who in The Path to Rome unfolds before our eyes the sacredness and sublimity of the Mass (pp.5-9), Fr. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P. (1877-1964), whose Thomistic theology helps us to appreciate the infinite value of the Mass, and vice versa, and who foresaw the poisoned fruits of the “new theology” of the 1940’s (p.49). But these precious writings can only do so much. We need above all the living example of older and wiser priests from our own time, these unsung heroes who left everything in order to follow Our Lord (Mt. 4:20,22), who were unknown and yet well known (II Cor. 6:8), such as Fr. Harry Marchosky (1923-2007), Fr. Urban Snyder (1912-95), among other names we could mention. It all comes back to the Mass. We can likewise benefit from the example of the pro-life pioneers, who performed multiple rescues from abortion clinics (pp.33-4), and who intervened in order to save the endangered lives of unborn children (pp.92-3), suffering mistreatment and imprisonment for the sake of these innocent and defenseless children. Theirs is a story seldom told. Without the grace of Our Lord flowing from the sacrifice of the Mass, how could souls such as these receive light and strength to go beyond the call of duty, to suffer for those whom they love, just as Our Lord did for us on the Cross? Once again, it all comes back to the Mass. The Tridentine Mass is one, holy, catholic, and apostolic, bearing all four marks of the one true Church, whereas the New Mass is found wanting on all four points (pp. 78-80). To be fair, let us admit that there are individual Novus Ordo priests who say the New Mass piously and reverently, because in their heart of hearts they try their best to make their celebration resemble the Old Mass. Granted. But in that case the credit must go to the Old Mass, which provides the atmosphere of profound respect for the divine majesty. The Tridentine Mass carries the trophy. The 14 authors of Love in the Ruins show forth the sublime character of the Mass of all times by inviting the reader to meditate on various prayers taken from the Mass. Our authors have all been pruned by the Divine Gardener, and are ready to be pruned still further, that they may bear more fruit ( Jn. 15:2). Hence we conclude with the words of the angel to St. Augustine in the garden: “Tolle, lege. Take up and read.” Fr. Christopher Brandler is a priest of the Society of Saint Pius X. He was ordained in Ridgefield, CT in 1985. For nine years he taught philosophy and apologetics in the Society’s seminaries in Ecône, Switzerland, and Zaitzkofen, Germany. Since 1996 he has been stationed in the US, and is currently staioned at St. Thomas Becket Priory in Veneta, OR. 13 BOOK Review TITLE: Christ in Dachau author: John M. Lenz Publisher: Roman Catholic Books. Price: $22.95 Reviewer: Anne Barbeau Gardiner. SUMMARY: The true story of a priest who spent five years in a concentration camp during World War II. This book tells the relatively unknown story of the thousands of Catholic priests who labored for souls within the camps. First published in German in the mid-1950’s, is a deeply moving account by Fr. John Lenz of the five years he spent in a concentration camp in Bavaria from 1940-45. Perhaps the most striking aspect of his account is that it reveals how atheists of all stripes–criminals, socialists, commu­nists, and SS agents–joined forces in Dachau to persecute Catholic priests. At the root of the misery of the concentration camps, Fr. Lenz re­marks, was a Europe that had “turned away from Christ” and to­ward “a totalitarian system based solely on power.” The same godless­ness that led to the Third Reich now reigned in the camps, especially in the form of the active hostility of the atheist prisoners against the prisoner priests. Today the media never stops its ridiculous campaign against Pope Pius XII for his alleged “silence” about the suffering in those camps, but it never reports on the complic­ity of left-wing atheists with the Na­zis to inflict suffering inside the camps. According to Fr. Lenz, “The camp SS and the tough communist and atheist prisoners conspired to make our life a Hell.” Yes, conspired, just as Pilate and Herod did in afflict­ing Our Lord. The atheists’ hatred of Catholic priests was so intense there that Fr. Otto Neurerer, among other martyrs, ended up hanging upside down for 36 hours until he died, only because a fellow prisoner pretended to want religious instruction and then betrayed him. In another case, the SS in Dachau, along with com­munist prisoners, subjected Polish Bishop Michael Kozal to intolerable indignities before he died. Yes, com­munist prisoners serving as SS henchmen! When do we ever hear about that? The subtitle of Fr. Lenz’s book is “Christ Victo­ rious” because the 2,400 Catholic priests interned in Dachau remained spiritually undefeated to the end, even though about a thou­sand of them died in what Fr. Lenz calls “the greatest martyrdom of priests in the history of the Church.” They were offered their freedom if they would resign their priestly “of­fice,” but only two accepted and were released. Christ won a great victory in Dachau. The horrors were only half the story; those who embraced the cross, Fr. Lenz declares, wit­nessed Our Lord’s triumph over the “powers of Hell.” In 1938, right after the Nazi march into Austria, Fr. Lenz spoke to a farmer in his parish about the “godlessness of the new regime”–and was denounced. Under interro­gation he admitted to having said that the Nazi teachings were “athe­ist” and “anti-Christian.” That was enough. He was imprisoned in Vienna for 17 months and ended up in Dachau in August 1940. There he found roughly 300 of Austria’s Catholic leaders who had been incarcerated since the “rape” of Austria. Every priest coming to Dachau–many from Austria, most from Poland–was immediately sent www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • June 2009 14 to the “punishment squad” with Jews and gypsies, because priests were also regarded by the Nazis as the “scum” of humanity. After a week, Fr. Lenz was sent with others in sealed cattle trucks first to Mauthausen, then to Gusen, a hard-labor camp where criminals were “bosses.” From the start, Fr. Lenz noticed that the dauntless Poles–who were treated worse than others, especially if they were priests, doctors, or teachers–had turned Gusen into a camp of prayer: “It was above all the Poles and their gallant priests who inspired this spirit of prayer.” He was touched by the way they prayed together in their work-columns until an SS guard or capo came near, when they would lapse into silence. They would also pray together on Sunday around their 150 priests who “lived and suf­fered and died” with them. Through­out his ordeal at Gusen, Fr. Lenz says, “I never ceased to thank God for my suffering, and this more than anything helped me to bear the Cross.” For the first time he grasped the meaning of St. Paul’s words, “I overflow with joy in every tribula­tion” (II Cor. 7:4), for he realized that “this time of suffering, terrible though it was, was immensely prof­itable.” He had spent three years in a Jesuit novitiate, but those three months in Gusen were worth “far more,” for they made him discover “the sort of prayer which pierces the soul like a sword,” the prayer of “un­conditional surrender” to God’s will. Sadly, the atheist prisoners in Gusen and Dachau were unable to make spiritual use of their suffer­ ings: “As for the godless among us, camp life with all it entailed only served to make them more disillu­ sioned, hard and bitter.” Since they could not pray “in the apparent hopelessness and senselessness of our camp,” these men would lose their self-respect and make their own lives as “tolerable as possible” at the expense of others. Their fellow pris­oners had to use their clothes as pil­lows to prevent jackets and caps from disappearing in the night. Fr. Lenz concedes that not all the atheist pris­oners were corrupt or hardened cases, but the “warm-hearted” among them were the exception to the general rule. In what he says about the “godless” in the concentration camp, Fr. Lenz offers the perfect reply to Chris­topher Hitchens’s boast in God Is Not Great [reviewed by this writer in the Dec. 2007 New Oxford Review–Ed.], that “if a proper statistical inquiry” were made, atheists would be found to be “more moral than Christians.” When atheists became the “real masters” of the concentration camps–“Judas souls” who wore a yellow armband and were “willing tools of the SS”– they made life a living hell for their fellow prisoners. For the sake of a few privileges and better food, there was “no limit to which they [the capos] would not go in their godless, self-seeking practices.” They were often more bestial and sadistic than the SS themselves in acting out their hostility toward the priests. Such a capo kicked Fr. Lenz all the way uphill as he carried a wheelbar­row full of gravel while the SS stood around THE ANGELUS • June 2009 www.angeluspress.org “goading, abusing and jeer­ing.” Such a capo in charge of the infirmary boasted that no priest ad­mitted there ever came out alive. And when a chapel was being pre­pared in Dachau, such a capo, an “atheist with an unspeakable con­tempt for us priests,” was “cursing and swearing” as he bellowed out di­rections. In December 1940, as a result of prolonged negotiations between German bishops and the Gestapo, the commandants at Gusen and other camps received orders from Berlin to send all priests back to Dachau. The bishops had failed to win the priests’ release, but they had secured for them breviaries, a chapel, regular Masses, and a separate priests’ block in Dachau. Fr. Lenz returned to Dachau on December 8, 1940, and settled into the cramped quarters of the priests’ block, which now became “the largest and at the same time the most rigorous en­closed order in the world.” The Catholic priests there, hailing from 136 dioceses and 24 nations, formed a great religious community in the middle of “Hell itself.” Two-thirds of these priests were over 50, a quarter were over 60, and one was an octoge­narian, the Lithuanian Fr. Stanislas Pujdo. There were also two bishops: Dr. Kozal from Poland and Bishop Piguet from France. Mass was first offered in the new chapel on January 22, 1941, the red crosses on the chapel’s green windows testifying that “Christ’s Cross had triumphed in the hell cre­ated by the Nazi swastika!” Even though the priests were still half-­starved and full of lice, they joyfully sang Christus vincit! and basked in the “realization that Christ Himself was here with us in the Blessed Sac­rament. Christ Himself, our Lord, our God was with us there in Dachau, fellowprisoner with us behind barbed wire.” From that day on, Christ remained in Dachau; His presence in the Blessed Sacrament became “the perpetual source of our spiritual and intellectual life.” The priests were united each day in the Mass like the early Christians in the catacombs, and though the chapel was strictly forbidden to all except priests, they managed to let a few trusted lay prisoners enter the chapel, though there was always the danger of being “betrayed by spies.” From this point on they also man­aged to send the Eucharist to others in the camp, especially to those who were near death. It was “a miracle of Christ in Dachau.” Fr. Lenz then founded a Rosary confraternity in Dachau, so that the priests would not only say the Ro­sary privately, but also communally. In May 1941 they received permis­sion to have devotions to Our Lady in the chapel and hymns in choir, a victory Fr. Lenz sums up as: “Through Mary to Christ–in Dachau.” Eventually, they obtained a fine statue of “Our Lady of Dachau.” Predictably, the new chapel and worship vastly increased the hatred and envy of the atheists in the camp. At times, the SS would burst in dur­ing the Mass and order all the priests at gunpoint to clear out, saying, “That’s enough hocus-pocus for to­day!” And 15 yet, amazingly, “their godless hands never opened the taber­nacle in all those four years.” Like­wise, the left-wing atheists were bit­ter about the new chapel, and as “a counter-measure” wanted to set up a “political instruction” center in the camp but they were refused. En­raged, they kept watch over the priests “like vultures to seize upon the slightest peccadillo, the most trivial remark, a chance slip.” All this time the priests were “not spared” from hard labor. They still had the “exclusive” chore of car­rying 500 metal buckets full of food, each holding around 50 liters and weighing around 160 pounds when full, from the kitchen to the various huts. Despite their overwhelming hunger and weakness, they also had to work on the 160-acre plantation in all weather. In 1941 one hundred priests starved to death, and in 1942 four hundred died that way. Why? Because the capos would steal from the priests’ food so that there was never enough to go around, and be­sides that would fish up whatever meat was in a food-pail, leaving only potato-and-turnip soup, and not much of that either. Regarding the missing food, Fr. Lenz says, “Our Block Capo and his communist cro­nies certainly knew where it had gone,” but it was useless to protest, for they would merely laugh. “They were communists and atheists,” af­ter all, and it was part of their “sa­cred duty, as it were, to take it out of us in every way they could.” But with the arrival of a new commandant in midAugust 1942, life improved for a year, for this one did not take “a bestial pleasure in punishment.” Trucks now carried food to the huts, parcels from family and friends were allowed, and, to counter the pervasive corruption, priests began to occupy some “key positions in the camp.” For example, a priest was for the first time put in charge of the chapel: “Our commu­ nist comrades were thus deprived of any further interference in our af­fairs.” But when the priests began to receive parcels from their families, friends, and sisters in religion at the end of 1942, “The rage and envy of our godless comrades knew no bounds. They threatened and bullied, but they still could not stop the flow of food parcels.” Then all hell broke loose when the priests started dis­ tributing the contents of these par­cels to the destitute in the camp. At that point, the “malice of our god­less comrades” made them stir up the SS to punish both the priests and the destitute together: “The commu­nists were only too ready to talk of our clothing and food action as ‘proselytizing,’ and on at least one occasion they succeeded in setting the armed SS guards on the crowd of poorer prisoners which had gathered in front of the priests’ block in the hope of assistance.” So for a time, the priests were “forbidden to distribute clothing and food” or even visit the sick, thanks to the complicity of left-wing atheists with Nazis. Unfortunately, the new com­mandant stayed only one year, and in the spring of 1944, the priests were removed from the “better” posts because one of them was found to have smuggled out an account of the sufferings in Dachau. Fr. Lenz’s own writings were seized, and he was punished with 12 days in the “standing bunker,” a prison cell shaped like a chimney. In the last years of the war, the camp was hit with epidemics of typhus, a disease carried by lice. At first, the infirmary was run by athe­ist orderlies who would steal the contents of parcels that patients re­ceived from families and friends. But as the typhus epidemic progressed, some of these died, while other or­derlies fled for their lives, along with the SS guards, so that eventually the care of the dying was left to the priests. Meanwhile, the dauntless Polish priests “had achieved the seemingly impossible and obtained permission from the SS authorities to work among the dying in the ty­phus isolation block.” Fr. Lenz vol­unteered to join them at a point when 100 prisoners were dying daily from typhus. Nearly all these patients were Catholics, whether from France, Italy, Yugosla­via, or Czechoslovakia. When he could not speak a dying man’s lan­guage, Fr. Lenz would use a small crucifix as his interpreter. Only one man ever refused his ministrations, and only three of the nursing priests died of typhus. It is worth noting that there were only 141 nonCatholic clergy­men in Dachau, as opposed to 2,400 Catholic priests (not to mention a few hundred seminarians and broth­ers). This suggests that the Nazi re­gime saw the Catholic Church as its chief enemy. Fr. Lenz points out that “two-thirds of Germany was Protes­tant when Hitler came to power” in 1933, yet in 1945 there were only 17 German Protestant ministers in­terned in Dachau (and 33 of other na­tionalities), while the Catholic third of Germany alone was represented by 190 Catholic priests. These figures are revealing especially when the Catholic Church in the person of Pope Pius XII is unjustly made to bear responsibility for the sufferings of World War II. The arrests and im­prisonment of priests before and dur­ ing the war was only a prelude, Fr. Lenz declares, to the Nazis’ plan. They went as far as they dared at the time, but hoped eventually for a “great purge” of the Catholic Church after Hitler won his victory. For Hit­ ler had boasted, “I shall crush the Catholic Church like a toad.” After the war, Fr. Lenz notes, many used to ask him how God “could permit such injustice” as the suffering of His priests at Dachau. He would reply, “One glance at the Cross of Our Lord and Redeemer surely provides us all with the only true answer.” Christ in Dachau is to be highly recommended at this hour, when Christopher Hitchens boasts in his bestselling book that the moral­ity of believers, as opposed to that of atheists, is “well below the human average,” when militant atheism is marching in lockstep again, and when Europe is far more godless than in the 1930’s. Anne Barbeau Gardiner is a Contrib­uting Editor of the New Oxford Review, & Professor Emerita of English at John Jay Col­lege of the City University of New York. She has published on Dryden, Milton, and Swift, as well as on Catholics of the 17th century. www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • June 2009 16 America: C l a u d e P o l i n Still Calvinistic? The logic of Calvinism, as was explained in a previous article, “Politics According to Calvin” (published in the October 2008 issue of The Angelus), inhibits proselytizing, except accidentally, for the very simple reason that it is not a sinner’s place to convert sinners. Hence it is not the spirit of conquest, but rather of isolationism that comes naturally to Calvinists–though they might be willing to define broadly the boundaries of the community within which it is legitimate to extend a Calvinist order. It is one thing for the pioneer to set out, Bible in one hand and rifle in the other, for the conquest of reputedly empty contiguous territories (unfortunately for the Indians), but for him to meddle in European affairs is another thing entirely, and quite blameworthy, as Monroe proclaimed. We should not forget that only decades ago the American people twice had to be propagandized to be drawn into world wars. Thus it is to other causes that the American expansionism of the 20th century and its current drive for global domination must be ascribed. Three things, I think, were necessary. Jeffersonianism vs. Jacobinism The first cause of 20th-century American expansionism is a confusion of the spirit of American democracy with that of Jacobin democracy. One cannot pin on Calvin the idea the men should be sovereign (recall that Jefferson had only contempt for “the multitude of swine” manipulated by “swindlers” who were, according to him, the leaders of the French Revolution). But at the same time, the same (Calvinist) logic requires that men obey no man (but God alone) and demands the consent of all to the institution of a human authority, preventing the exportation of the American Revolution by force (every people must be able to take care of itself). The Jacobin ideology, on the contrary, upheld that there were not two sorts of sovereignty, only democracy being legitimate: quite logically did the French Revolution, not content to guillotine its own, undertake to convert Europe by means of Gribeaunal canons and massive assaults. Thus it was necessary to inject a dose of imperialist democracy, lethal for the original American republic, into the essentially provincial City solely occupied with its own business, as was the city of Calvin, in order to convert it to the crusades of Democracy against Tyranny. Capitalism Secondly, I do not see Calvinism as the source of the economic expansionism supported by the United States but rather big industrial capitalism (which developed after the death of the hypocrite Lincoln, with the controlled reconstruction of the South and the building of the transcontinental railroads) and, especially after a certain degree of development of the industrial monopolies, the quintessentially 17 international banking and finance capitalism which, beginning in the 20th century, was to fill the coffers, if not of crusaders, then at least of their leaders—the Wilsons, Roosevelts, and other Cheneys—by giving them the means for their propaganda, their elections, their action, and, finally, their business. (Need it be reiterated that the Federal Reserve bank was baptized by Alexander Hamilton, himself an American of very recent importation, and which was fought until 1830 by the final inheritors of the properly Calvinist spirit, the Coopers and the Jacksons.) The New Israel To these causes must be added, thirdly, that America has increasingly become the policeman of the world inasmuch as it has resolved to be no longer solely a model people, but the new chosen people, the avatar of the ancient one enlarged to the dimensions of the New World and naturally vowed to its protection, as Mr. Bush recently declared to the Knesset: “Israel is not a nation of 7 million inhabitants; but when it goes up against terrorism and evil, Israel is 307 million strong.” The desire to control the sources of oil does not explain US Middle East policy. (Saddam Hussein had never refused to sell them any.) But obviously neither does Calvinism. Implementation and Execution As everyone knows, the Americans have become an economic world power and, following Max Weber, nothing should be more understandable since Calvinism is supposed to lead to capitalism. There’s nothing more Calvinistic, surely, than to want to transform the world, or at least to want to remodel the world of men, a world imbued with sin and which must be rebuilt to the glory of God. But if there is something profoundly Calvinistic about this temporal ambition, still it should be understood that it was implemented in a strikingly un-Calvinistic way. I believe that it is appropriate to distinguish two periods in the history of this country divided by the War of Secession. Before the War of Secession. There was an American society vowed from the outset to the economy for which Calvinism was directly responsible; it is the society that existed from its origin to the end of the War of Secession. What made for the strength of this original America was incontestably its Calvinist virtues: a certain selfconfidence, self-reliance and thus application to work; the propensity to trade as the sole relation entirely natural to men completely independent of one another; being loath to complain or to ask for help; a good conscience in possessing his holdings. These were the virtues extolled to metaphysical heights by the Madisons and Jeffersons, the Emersons, Coopers, and Jacksons, not to mention the celebrated Thoreau. All of them are nourished by the Calvinist conviction that no sinner can ever completely trust another sinner, and that the individual has no better friend than himself, a conviction which made of the United States almost from its inception a nation of producers, merchants, financiers, and engineers. But with this decisive reservation: that all this activity be carried out without anything truly escaping the eye of the master. From Calvinism, one can deduce a nation of small and medium enterprises of every kind; a society of inventive, industrious, efficient citizens; a nation of pioneers always heading out farther West so that everyone can carve out a domain of which he can be the lord and master; but not a nation of gigantic industrial trusts dominated by financial groups. Big capital, salaried employees, and the unbridled quest for profit out of proportion with the desire for self-autonomy are as many signs of the exhaustion of the Calvinist social model. And that is why the triumph of Calvinism over the civilization of the South was not only a cultural catastrophe, but the occasion of the decline of Calvinism itself. Too big a field had opened up to appetites that the law no longer condemned in principle. Reconstruction and Westward Expansion worked hand in hand to take away from Calvinism its architectonic role in the structure of society. The capitalist America of today only professes a veneer of Calvinism, until such time as a new wave of massive immigration with no belief in the meltingpot will achieve its complete extinction as a principle of legislation. Traces in the Constitution. That being the case, there remains the US Constitution itself. In effect, the Calvinist inspiration at its origin cannot be denied: its fundamental dispositions (separation of powers, consent of the governed, etc.) proceed from a Calvinist pessimism, from the conviction that, short of being able to cure men of their vices, if one is to enable them to live in society, things must be arranged such that no one, and especially not the masses so easily swayed by passions, dispose of any power against which there is not arrayed a countervailing power. Yet, it must be recognized that the democratic practice has naturally bent the direction of institutions presupposing that more virtuous and intelligent men govern those who are less so. In considering the competition of particular interests as the element in which the public life is played, and, consequently, by guaranteeing in some way their existence, Calvinism has involuntarily encouraged the ambitious to apply themselves to all the practices that enable their factions to prevail over others: cynicism and brutality (why wouldn’t everyone defend his own interest?) and hypocrisy www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • June 2009 18 (make the special interest pass for the common good) have spurred the appearance of techniques of campaigning, that is to say electoral machines, whose nerve can only be money and the goal of which is to lay hold on as much power as possible. It is to be feared that today in the US, the private has triumphed over the public; that the res publica, the common weal, has become more and more a profitable business passing from one acquirer to another; that the chains with which Calvinism intended to bind human passions have been broken, and that thus even Calvinism itself has been consumed. Traces in national habits. What remains of Calvinism in contemporary America? In the last analysis, it seems to me, there remain some mental habits, some acquired reflexes. Calvinism, at the beginning the religion of a minority of immigrants endowed by their religion with an uncommon energy, finished by imparting to the national character some of its most marked traits. It goes without saying that the past does not judge a future encumbered by the trend of a socializing multiculturalism and the homogenizing effects of finance and technology. But at the time these lines are written, one can ascribe to a Calvinism become largely unconscious at least two fundamental traits of the American personality. Everyone Alone before God Tocqueville, it seems to me, was mistaken, a victim of his French experience: it is not equality, but the protection of their individual independence that obsesses the Americans, and it is to this intemperate individualism, to this taste for personal selfsufficiency that should undoubtedly be attributed the failure among them of socialist ideas, to which they manifestly prefer the First and Second Amendments. The Americans nonetheless join to this individualism bordering on anarchy a sense of discipline touching on conformism. I find it difficult not to see in this curious contradiction the sociological expression of that twofold Calvinist conviction that no man is better than another, but that, after all, everyman is alone before God. The well-brought-up man is submissive to God but chooses the church or the sect in which he will give Him thanks; the sinner needs discipline and rules, but there is no king who is not a tyrant and no nobility that does not oppress the people; the police officer is respected because he embodies the law but also because he is elected; there is no one more disciplined than an American on a freeway, but let no one presume to ask him without a warrant why he has a machine-gun on his back seat; Americans live in society, but their crowd is composed of solitary individuals. Thus everything happens as if beneath THE ANGELUS • June 2009 www.angeluspress.org the liberty they adore, they see the devil that tempts them. But it is not (as Tocqueville believed, good Christian Democrat that he was) that the spirit of religion sets limits to the spirit of freedom; it is rather, in a quite different way, that their religion even condemns them to a liberty without any other light than that of a few prohibitions, a liberty without any principle of interior moderation, which is like their destiny but which they cannot not perceive as fundamentally flawed. The contradiction has entered into their morals, where it has taken root and even survived the weakening of the religious sentiment— but at the price of a certain mental [dis]equilibrium or a certain sentiment of guilt. The success of psychoanalysis in the US is not by chance. Moralizing A second and final example of the survival of Calvinism: the propensity to moralize and impart lessons, or else a vague religiosity proceeding from the more or less conscious certitude of constituting the ultimate term of human progress, a progress willed by God. An American academic under Reagan even maintained the idea that the American liberal society represented the final stage of human history, that with it history had ended. The Americans have a natural propensity to thank God for being American (“How can you live in Paris?” a cultivated lady exclaimed to me). Expansion Whence their disarming naiveté of good will, borne of a confidence in an exceptional and quasimessianic destiny. Already in 1628, the man who would become Governor Winthrop, leading the first great wave of immigrants comprising Puritans for the most part, exhorted the future colonists about to disembark in Massachusetts to be mindful that they were called to found “a city on a hill,” to fulfill a providential mission. This attitude has remained though the modalities have changed. For if in the past the American people asserted its vocation to constitute a model people, the model was made to be freely admired and its imitation left to the discretion of sinners able or not to see the light. What has happened is that the good American conscience of the beginning has invested an expansionism “originating elsewhere,” thus perpetuating the feeling of a right which, in the beginning, was not that of invading peoples supposedly endowed by nature with the right of selfdetermination. Translated from Fideliter, July-August 2008. Claude Polin has been a professor of political philosophy at the University of Paris–Sorbonne since 1966. Brignoles, France Traditional Religious Orders Dominican Teaching Sisters of the Holy Name of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary 19 repare young girls to become Catholic women, to fulfill their feminine vocation, to be “the leaven of the Gospel” in the world, whatever be the contradictions or trials–such is the ideal of the schools of the Dominican Teaching Sisters of the Holy Name of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary. The Congregation, whose Motherhouse is at La Celle, on the outskirts of Brignoles in the south of France, has fulfilled this vocation for over 200 years. Origin of the Congregation In 1800, after the ravages caused by the French Revolution, M. Vincens, a holy priest from Toulouse, founded a small diocesan Community, the Society of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary, in order to re-establish Christian education for young girls. The spirit and aim of this new 20 religious Order may be summed up in his own words: “Engrave the Holy Name of Jesus in the hearts of the young.” The Congregation was affiliated with the Order of Saint Dominic in 1885. The Sisters were given the habit, the scapular, and the rosary by the future Master General of the Order, Blessed Fr. HyacinthMarie Cormier, on the feast of the Immaculate Conception. They thus became the Dominican Sisters of the Holy Name of Jesus. This affiliation re-enforced the deep affinities that already existed between the spirit of the Dominican Order and that of the Congregation and gave it a renewed fervor. The Sisters found in the Order the doctrinal rigor and apostolic zeal which would enable them to continue arming young girls with Truth and Light to help them remain steadfast in the Faith in a society that was becoming increasingly materialistic and liberal. When the French government ordered the expulsion of religious Congregations at the beginning of the 20th century, many Orders sought refuge in nearby countries. Mother Hélène Daguzan, Superior of the Dominican Sisters of the Holy Name of Jesus, followed the counsel of Pope Saint Pius X: “The souls of the young children of France are worth all the heroic sacrifices accepted on their behalf.” Rather than abandon their schools in France, the Sisters courageously sacrificed the religious habit, forbidden by anti-clerical laws. In order to carry on their task, they dressed in black lay clothing and continued to live according to their vows. Their boarding schools were thus maintained and new schools opened. Mother Hélène Jamet In 1948, Mother Hélène Jamet was elected Mother General of the Congregation. At that very time, Pope Pius XII was urging Superiors of teaching orders to adapt their religious life in a more realistic way to the needs of the young living in the modern THE ANGELUS • June 2009 www.angeluspress.org (Left) Fr. Roger-Thomas Calmel, O.P. (Below) Mother Hélène Jamet 21 Cours Notre-Dame des Victoires Rue du Château F-02120 Le Hérie-la-Viéville [33] 323.61.00.83 Cours Saint Thomas d’Aquin Le Mullerhof F-67280 Urinatt [33] 388.47.31.41 FRANCE Cours Saint Dominique Rue de Velard F-21320 Pouilly-en-Auxois [33] 380.90.83.34 Cours Notre-Dame de France 4, village d’Escolles F-03110 Broût-Vernet [33] 470.58.20.10 Cours Saint Dominique Saint-Pré F-83170 La Celle [33] 494.69.12.24 Motherhouse and Novitiate Reverend Mother General Saint-Pré du Coeur Immaculé F-83170 La Celle France [33] 494.59.17.08 ARGENTINA Schools of the Dominican Teaching Sisters of the Holy Name of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary Escuela del Corazon Inmaculado de Maria Ruta 5 Esquina Bosque Alegre RA-5189 Anisacate (Córdoba) [54] 935.1505.0362 www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • June 2009 22 world. He gave specific recommendations in an allocution given at the first International Congress of Teaching Sisters held at Rome on September 14, 1951. Mother Hélène Jamet received this urgent appeal from the Pope with filial docility. She found in the Reverend Fr. Calmel, O.P., the help she needed to revise the Constitutions. Having been assigned to Toulouse in 1946, this eminent Dominican priest and theologian had been ministering to the spiritual needs of the Sisters. He saw very clearly the necessity of unifying their religious and teaching lives. In retreats and in his works, he exhorted the Sisters: If, in the religious state, you have entered a teaching Order, you will not sanctify yourself by any other means.… Thus, in the work of personal sanctification, you must neither neglect nor consider as unimportant the education you have committed yourself to giving to young Catholic THE ANGELUS • June 2009 www.angeluspress.org girls.…You must not be saints and subsequently holy teachers….You must be holy teaching Sisters, that is to say, you must love God and pray to Him, being before Him what He has desired you to be, accomplishing whatsoever His Will requires of you. On the other hand, you must teach and form the children, taking care that it be for Him and in Him. (R.-Th. Calmel, O.P., École et sainteté, pp.46-47) The revised Constitutions, providentially approved by Rome on September 5, 1953, defined more clearly the vocation of teaching and educating children proper to the Congregation and adapted the formation, obligations, and observances of religious life to this apostolate. Fidelity to Tradition Ten years later, when the modernists unleashed their fury at Vatican Council II, they were not be 23 able to use the pretext of a necessary reform in order to introduce their revolutionary spirit into the Congregation–the reform had already been accomplished; the Sisters could hold fast against the enemies of the Church. Pressure during this period came not only from modernist prelates and diocesan authorities, but from the State as well, since the Congregation benefited from federal funding. However, State programs and increasing intervention jeopardized the liberty of the Sisters to dispense Catholic doctrine and culture. Because of new modernist catechisms, the new Mass, and State contracts, it became necessary to take radical steps to protect the Faith and assure the freedom of authentic Catholic teaching. In short, it was essential to abandon the contracts with the government and break off relations with the diocesan administration for Catholic schools. However, such a step was the beginning of a rupture at the very heart of the Congregation, torn in different directions. At the end of June 1974, with the authorization of the Superior General, 26 Sisters from different schools of the Congregation grouped themselves together around Mother Hélène to open a new school at Saint‑Pré, near Brignoles. All of them “desired to remain faithful, whatever the opposition, to the traditional Mass and liturgy, to Catholic doctrine, to Dominican religious life, and the Thomistic conception of education.” Thus was founded a new branch of the Congregation which would www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • June 2009 24 take the name of the Dominican Teaching Sisters of the Holy Name of Jesus and of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Fr. Calmel, O.P., encouraged this decision; Archbishop Lefebvre also gave his approval. Today, the Congregation has five boarding schools in France, all of which accept girls from kindergarten to senior high school. In 2000 the Dominicans founded a school abroad, at Anisacate in Argentina. Novitiate and Religious Life The Motherhouse and Novitiate of the Congregation are at Saint‑Pré. In the prayerful silence of the Novitiate, young ladies called to the religious state receive the formation necessary to prepare them for a life of teaching as Dominican Sisters, under the direction of the Novice Mistress. “Come, follow Me” The young woman who has heard these words echo in her heart and desires to consecrate herself THE ANGELUS • June 2009 www.angeluspress.org totally to God by teaching answers this call by entering the Novitiate as a Postulant for one year. Postulants partake in the life and the work of the Sisters. This first step towards religious life gives them a glimpse of the work of the Congregation and permits them to better understand the Dominican spirit and to test their vocation. At the end of this period, the Postulant, if she is firm in her desire, will receive the religious habit and begin two years of formation as a Novice. The Novitiate is a school of sanctity and formation as well as a long retreat, in which Postulants and Novices together deepen their spiritual life, practice Christian virtue, reflect on the designs of God upon them, study, and are initiated into the apostolic work of the Congregation. Contemplare et contemplate aliis tradere. St. Thomas Aquinas summed up in this maxim the distinctive character of the Dominican vocation: “Contemplate and give to others the fruit of one’s contemplation.” To communicate the Truth–“the Truth of God and the God of Truth,” in the words of Mother Hélène 25 daily Schedule As a general rule, the Novice’s day includes: l Holy Mass l Divine Office: Matins, Lauds, Vespers, Compline l Prayer and meditation (½ hour each morning and each afternoon) l Meditation of Holy Scriptures (½ hour) l Recitation of the Rosary l Spiritual reading (½ hour) l Gregorian chant or Pedagogy (½ hour) l Courses (Theology, Liturgy, Constitutions, Spirituality) l Personal study of Catholic doctrine (1 hour) l Teaching (1 hour of class, under the guidance of the Novice Mistress and experienced Sisters) meditation on and study of Sacred Scriptures and of the Liturgy as well as initiation into Dominican spirituality and Gregorian chant. While learning to put it into practice little by little, the Rule and observances of the Order and of religious life in general are explained to the future daughters of Saint Dominic. Since the specific character of the Dominican Order is the love of Truth and the desire to communicate it to souls, courses in Theology, Philosophy. and general culture, as is suitable to future teachers, are followed during the three years of Novitiate. Postulants and Novices are initiated by the Novice Mistress into religious life as it is lived in the Congregation and truly prepared for their life and mission as Dominican teaching Sisters. Jamet–is a truly divine work. While such a vocation requires a minimum of intellectual capacities, it is not solely nor first of all a matter of intelligence. In order to teach children as religious, one must strive day after day to draw closer to God, the Living Truth, who alone enlightens souls. Postulants and Novices follow the same general program of studies and formation. These include “Behold the handmaid of the Lord” At the end of the three years of Novitiate, Novices pronounce temporary vows for one year. They renew these vows each year for four years, at the end of which they give themselves to God usque ad mortem when they pronounce perpetual vows. www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • June 2009 26 The young professed Sisters continue their studies and religious formation, guided by the Mistress of Studies and other experienced Sisters. They will henceforth devote themselves, in the footsteps of Saint Dominic, to opening minds and souls to the truth, to the good, and to the beautiful. Serving Jesus in the souls of children Over the years the Dominican Sister acquires a deeper understanding and love of her beautiful vocation. She will perceive through prayer and experience what it means to partake in spiritual motherhood as Spouses of Jesus Christ. As Fr. Calmel wrote: Souls belong to Jesus Christ more profoundly than we can imagine….May you be attentive to the supplication that Jesus Christ addresses to you in your children’s souls. May you have not only sufficient affection and imagination but, above all, enough faith to understand what your children expect of you, in the Name of Jesus Christ, in a prayer that is nearly always silent and which they would not know how to put into words. In truth, you will be able to serve God in their souls only if you can hear this entreaty which is unspoken but which could be formulated in this way: “We want to know who we are and why we were created; we want to understand this world we live in, and whether we should follow its maxims or oppose them and what example we are called upon to give. We want to know what struggles we will have to sustain tomorrow and to be appropriately armed to confront them. We want to know if it is true that THE ANGELUS • June 2009 www.angeluspress.org women have a special mission, ordained by God Himself, and whether it is worth sacrificing ourselves in order to be faithful to it.” (École et sainteté, pp.55-56) Where will the Dominican Sister draw the tenderness and purity of heart, the joyful gift of self and the supernatural force to fulfill her mission, if not in the Immaculate Heart of the most holy Virgin of virgins? May the Blessed Virgin Mary, for whom Saint Dominic had such a deep and tender devotion, continue to protect “Her” Order, lead to perfection his sons and daughters in the Church, and inspire numerous and fervent vocations. Sit Nomen Domini benedictum: ex hoc nunc et usque in saeculum. For information: Reverend Mother General Saint-Pré du Cœur Immaculé F-83170 La Celle France Tel. [33] 494.59.17.08 Fr. Roger-Thomas Calmel, O.P., was the first priest to openly refuse to celebrate Holy Mass in a rite that was ambiguous and favored Protestantism. His Déclaration, written in early December, 1969, and published in the French revue Itinéraires, is known throughout the world and encouraged both priests and laity to remain faithful to the Catholic Mass and Tradition in peace of mind. 2 In the Dominican breviary, December 22 is the Feast of the Patronage of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The tokens of Our Lady’s maternal protection have never been wanting in the history of the Order; in a vision to St. Dominic, Mary showed his children gathered under Her mantle. 1 27 Pope Pius XII and the Attitude of PART 2 the Catholic Church During World War II This is the continuation of the interview with Fr. Peter Gumpel, S.J., the relator of the cause of Pope Pius XII. He continues sharing his research of Pope Pius XII’s pontificate and actions during World War II. I’d like to go to a different subject now. We know that during the war here in Rome, there were maybe up to 9,000 Jews during the Nazi occupation. Could you tell us, based on your personal knowledge, exactly what happened on October 15-16, 1943, when the Nazis began arresting the Roman Jews and how the Church and the Pope reacted to this? First of all, you are mentioning rightly that this happened in the night between the 15th and 16th in October, 1943. Of course, it must be pointed out that in this period, Rome, northern Italy, and part of central Italy were occupied by the Germans. Mussolini had been deposed and the Germans had invaded Italy and occupied Rome. Now, in Rome there were, as you said, several thousand Jews. It is very difficult to determine the exact data; at least 6,000 to 7,000 permanent residents. But many Jews from other parts of Italy had flocked to Rome and also people from abroad because they felt Rome was a safe place, safer than any other place in Italy or elsewhere. Secondly, many people came to Rome because they knew the Pope was making every possible effort to facilitate their immigration in neutral countries–especially in the US–if at all possible through France, Portugal, etc. So there were more than the usual Jewish residents in Rome. The exact number is very difficult to ascertain because the people who illegally came to Rome from other countries anonymously did not, of course, announce www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • June 2009 28 it to the police. They were very careful not to announce their presence. Having stated this, what really happened? Well, Himmler, the person most violently opposed to the Jews, had sent down a detachment of 365 SS men led by a certain Captain Dannecker. That’s the name of the man who was supposed to arrest all of the Jews living in Rome. Of course, 365 people is very little. So he made an appeal to the general commander in Italy (in the South Front, as it was called), Field Marshall Kesselring, who refused point blank to give even one single soldier. This was because his troops were still doing much fighting south of Rome against the Americans, the Allies, the English, etc. So, he said no. The military commander of Rome went further. He told his staff, “I won’t have anything to do with this swinish business.” This military commander was an Austrian, an officer of the old school, a Christian, although not a Roman Catholic: but a so-called Old Catholic (people who had broken away, a schismatic sect which had broken away from the Roman Catholic Church in 1870), but a very honest person. This is the background. Previously, through the 15th of October, the SS in Rome had taken another step. They called the heads of the Jewish community. They knew who they were. They had both been Fascists, therefore they felt safe. They called them and they said, “In a very short period if you do not produce 50kg [110 lbs.] of gold, 200 Jews will be deported to Germany.” Now the Jews did their best to bring this amount in a very short period. They succeeded in getting 35kg [77 lbs.], but not 50. At that moment, the chief rabbi of Rome, Israel Zolli, went to the Vatican. He met with one of the heads of the financial department of the Vatican, a certain Dr. Nogara, and explained the situation. He said, “Can you possibly loan us the 15kg of gold?” He said, “Well, I can’t give you permission like that.” But he went directly to the Pope, and the Pope said, “Of course. If necessary, we will melt down gold chalices. Ask whether they will perhaps accept payment in dollars or equivalent. However, we will do what we can.” As on a loan basis, with no period fixed for repayment, no interest, absolutely nothing. The intention was, really, that he didn’t want to humiliate them because Zolli had said of course they were going to repay it. So it was to be given under these favorable conditions. However, it turned out that the help of the Vatican was not necessary. It seems the difference of 15kg of gold was made up by Roman Catholics in Rome. There is no definitive proof, but where did the gold come from? Not from the Jews, because they had given whatever they had. However, this is incidental. When this happened, Isaac Zolli, the chief rabbi, had told the lay people in charge of the Jewish THE ANGELUS • June 2009 www.angeluspress.org community, “Look, let’s close down the temple. Let’s remove the names” (because they had a full list of all the Jewish people living in Rome). “Let’s give a period of vacancy or holiday, and pay all the employees we have.” Now they laughed at him and said, “Your alarm is for nothing! Nothing is going to happen to us. We have lived here in Italy for so long, there is no problem.” So they didn’t do anything. So when, falling short on the promise to leave the Jews in peace when they had paid to go on, breaking that promise, the Nazis invaded the temple and took hold of everything: the money, all the names and addresses, etc. So they knew exactly where to go. Of course, there was a lot of noise when this happened. About 1,000 people were arrested–not all of them–because a detachment of 365 was simply not sufficient. This caused a lot of noise, and a lady was looking out her window and saw what was going to happen: these people were carted off in lorries [trucks]. She called her friend, Princess Pignatelli Cortez Aaragon, a person with whom I had, years ago, several long interviews and talks because I wanted to find out directly from her what happened. She called—she was in a sense very curious–a member of the German embassy, a certain Wollenweber. And he with his diplomatic German pass took her right into the Vatican. She was a courageous woman, a very tiny little person, but a courageous woman. She knew where the Pope was celebrating Mass in his private apartment. She entered, spoke to the Pope, and the Pope in her presence called the secretary of state, ordering him to call immediately the German ambassador to make a very strong protest. And in fact, the meeting took place. The German ambassador, Ernst von Weizäcker immediately went to see Cardinal Maglione, the Secretary of State. And the cardinal made it perfectly clear that the Pope was outraged by this, that in his own diocese, practically under his windows as was later said, these things happened. Weizäcker said, “For heaven’s sake, don’t make a public protest! You know what Hitler is like! Leave it to me, I’m going to take care of the matter.” And they left it at that. But the Pope didn’t trust that. In fact, Weizäcker didn’t do a thing. Nothing...until the next day, when everything was over. In the meantime, however, a combined effort was made by an Austrian bishop, an otherwise rather disreputable person, and a German diplomat who was hostile to Hitler. They prepared a letter, and the letter had no effect whatsoever. But now another actor comes in: one of the most confidential collaborators of the Pope who did a lot to help Jews and other persecuted people. He was a Bavarian and he knew this German commander, Brigadier General Stahl. He went to him and insisted that the Pope wanted something 29 effective to be done, something to stop it once and for all. Stahl listened and sent his assistant to the ambassador, requesting he take immediate action. The ambassador said he could do nothing. What was the name of the Austrian who was a close collaborator of the Pope? It was Fr. Pankratius Pfeiffer, the general of the Salvatorians, who lived close by. So when Stahl’s appeal, which he made by request of Pius XII, had no success with the German ambassador, he took the matter into his own hands. Now, what I’m going to tell you now is not very publicly known, but it may be useful that you know it. I got in touch with General Dietrich Beelitz, who was the liaison officer between headquarters of Field Marshall Kesselring and the headquarters of Hitler himself. As a liaison officer he listened to every single communication that went on between these two headquarters. And, of course, he knew Stahl. After some difficult negotiations, I got in touch with Beelitz and we had several long telephone conversations. I said, “General, you must know exactly what Stahl did. I know that he telephoned Himmler, but I don’t know anything about what he said. Do you know about that?” He said, “I do.” He never gave this information to journalists, but he gave me permission to use it for the process of Pius XII and I printed it. He told me the following: Stahl took it upon himself to phone Heinrich Himmler, the chief of the SS, directly and threatened him. Of course, humanitarian reasons with a man like that were absolutely useless. So he used military reasons. He said, “Herr Himmler, if you continue to do what you are doing now, you will make it impossible for me to provide our troops which are still fighting far to the south of Rome with the material they need, which is one of my chief tasks here. If you continue, I am afraid there will be an uprising in Rome, there will be an uprising south of Rome, and it will not be possible for me to provision our fighting troops–we can write them off. Right away. If you want to do it, go ahead. I won’t.” He threatened him like that. He said, “Look, during the day, the Allies have absolute dominion in the air. They are strafing our trains, our lorries, etc., so that’s very difficult. During the night, we have to deal with the partisans. This difficult situation is already very critical. You continue, and it is hopeless.” Now Hitler, who was not a military man, listening to a highly decorated general was so impressed that immediately he ordered him to stop the deportation of the Jews. This telephone conversation took place about noon on the 16th, and two hours later at 2pm, Hitler gave the order to stop everything immediately. Unfortunately, nothing could be done for the 1,000 people who had been arrested and were here in the College Romano. The Pope sent a member of the Secretariat of State to see what could be done about them but the man wasn’t admitted, so nothing could be done. That was the true situation. Here again, you see that the intervention of the Pope was instrumental and providential in saving Jews. He regretted very much that he could do nothing for these 1,000 people who were miserably, brutally, criminally killed in Auschwitz. www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • June 2009 30 What is the common theory of the Roman Jewish community today concerning the reason that the arrests were stopped? The details that I just told you are not commonly known, but they should have known that the Pope gave an order to open all 155 ecclesiastical houses in Rome. This is well known; they know it. Also, there is the fact that, for example, in 1946, there was the first general assembly of all the Jewish communities in Italy. And in Via Tasso, the famous prison and headquarters of the SS and Gestapo in Rome, they put up a huge marble slab on which, in a very moving way, they thanked Pius XII for all that he had done for the Jews in Rome during this terrible period. Unfortunately, the slab is no longer there, but I photographed it. It was published in certain publications, but rarely. Recently the slab disappeared. I made an inquiry. I said, “What’s happening?” They said, “Well, we restructured the whole thing and the slab broke, etc.” Maybe or maybe not. You must take into account the attitude of many Jewish people. They are not the people who lived under those conditions. They have fallen victim to mystification. They seem to have forgotten or they do not dare to speak out about it. That is the question: we have tried with certain people years ago, and there are still people alive who were sheltered in Roman houses. At times they were put in cassocks so that in case there was an invasion, they would be mistaken as priests. The women were clad as nuns. They were taught to say the Our Father and the Hail Mary–typical Catholic prayers. If there were any neighbors close by, they were assembled in the chapel reciting these aloud, giving the impression that they were Roman Catholic priests and nuns. And then, of course, they had to be provided with food and everything because they had nothing–they had no ration cards, etc. There was real hunger in Italy. So to provide them with food was another serious problem for the Pope–to provide thousands of people extra food without rations. This brings me to another point. There has always been a notion–in fact at Yad Vashem the placard states that it was because of the Pope’s silence–that all the individual European bishops and priests were left to act independently from the apostolic household and universally sheltered as many Jews as possible during the war. Would you comment on this? If you allow me to use a very frank term, it is simply nonsense. For example, before all these problems started, before the German occupation of Rome: in the Palatine Guard, the noble guard, there were about 200 to 300 people. At the end of 1943 there were nearly 4,000 people in there, of THE ANGELUS • June 2009 www.angeluspress.org which 400 were demonstrably Jewish. Two hundred lived permanently in the Vatican; the other 200 lived outside the Vatican because there were no accommodations. The Vatican is very small. But they had official documents that they were in service to the Vatican and therefore came under international protection. Nobody can say that this could have been done without the Pope. And it is well known that many Jewish people besides these 400 took refuge in the Vatican. The other thing is this: We know the names of those people who went around and alerted all the heads of the Roman houses in Rome. I’m speaking of churches, parishes, ecclesiastical convents, student houses, universities, etc., and alerted them that it was the formal will of the Pope to help these persecuted Jewish people as much as possible. For example, a Monsignor O’Flaherty, Fr. Pankratius Pfeiffer, and Fr. Weber of the Pallotine Fathers. There is plenty of evidence. How can they say a thing like that? All these people have spoken up. Of course, a Jewish scholar, Dr. Susan Zuccotti, said the Pope didn’t do anything about it. The reason? There is no written document of it. Now this argument–excuse me–is downright stupid to argue because there is no written document signed by Hitler ordering the Holocaust. And this was the reason why a holocaust-denier like David Irving claimed the holocaust never took place. He said this could never have taken place without a written order of Hitler, and there is no written order, therefore the holocaust didn’t take place. This foolish argument has been refuted first of all–and rightly so–by Jewish sources. Why is there no written document? Well, anybody who has lived under that period–even as a boy I knew this and had to be careful not to put anything in writing—knew that if there would have been a written document, it could have been spread all over. Any person on the street could at any moment have been stopped by the SS if it was known he had come from the Vatican. The Vatican was surrounded by troops or, at least, paratroopers. And if he was stopped, if they had found that paper on him, what would happen to the Church? If it would have been found in a convent, there was always the very great possibility that these convents would be invaded, and in certain instances it happened. It happened at St. Paul’s, it happened at the Oriental College–they invaded it, found certain Jews, and arrested them. And people were punished for that, because harboring a Jew and sheltering a Jew was punishable by death. A number of people in Germany and Rome who sheltered Jews were killed for that very reason. This is one of the things that Sir Martin Gilbert, a famous Jewish scholar, has pointed out. He said, “I personally am not absolutely sure that I would 31 have opened my door.” And these are decisions that people nowadays consider to be very easy: “If I had lived at that time, I would have done this, that, etc.” But this did happen to me, and I always look at these people and say, “I have neither the right nor the intention to question what you are saying. But please remember that you have not yet looked into death as I did under the Nazi regime. It is only at those moments that you can demonstrate what you are saying, and I hope for you that you will never be placed in such a situation.” And then they become a little more reflective. There’s some information I discovered that I would like to ask you about. Sister Pasqualina was the nun in charge of the papal household. I was told—and maybe you could verify this– that she was actually running a group of little trucks. Before discussing and answering your question directly, it may be useful to tell you how I came to know Sister Pasqualina and what kind of relationship I had with her. We became through the years very close. This will substantiate what I’m going to say and the truthfulness of what I’m going to say. In high school, I jumped two grades. I took the final examination when I was barely 17. From there I went immediately to university, and at the age of 20 I was a doctor of philosophy. So I joined the Jesuits only then, at the end of the war, because during the war it would have been too dangerous for them–not for me–to join them. After the two-year novitiate, I was sent as a teacher to a Dutch Jesuit college in Amsterdam, the College of St. Ignatius. Suddenly a telegram to the rector arrived that I should immediately within three days be in Rome to take the place of a 45-year-old philosophy teacher who became so ill at the beginning of the academic year that it was obvious he could never resume this activity. It was very unusual that such a young person was ever called to Rome. We had no passports. All the passports issued in Germany before the end of the war had been declared invalid. So nobody could come from Germany, Austria, etc. I was living in Holland, and in Holland there was a diplomatic representation of the Holy See, an apostolic nuncio, which in Germany simply did not exist in 1947. So I got a Vatican passport, was sent to Rome, and took up my task there. I was also acting at the same time as secretary of the director of this pontifical college. And it was in that capacity that I got an internal phone call to go down to the parlor to see what a Sister wanted. Now this was normal–many people came in to ask for food or other things, so I usually was in charge of that. I met this Sister, and she presented herself as being Sister Pasqualina, the housekeeper of Pope Pius XII, and she came in that capacity. She said, “The Pope has sent me here. I wanted to speak to the rector.” She bluntly said, “You seem to be extremely young.” I thought, “Well, this person is very direct to say a thing like that to your face...” She said, “I really come to ask whether in your library you have a certain book.” She gave me the title. I said, “I’m very new here; I have to go up and see. What do you want with it?” “The Pope wants it.” She told me that the Pope had a fabulous memory which I later would see for myself: When he was apostolic nuncio in Germany he remembered he had read a book which he now wanted, a book which he wanted to quote in one of his speeches. He had a habit never to quote anything unless he had seen the original text in front of him–never from second or third sources. She told me, “He even remembers the exact page of this book. Have you got it? If so, could you lend it to the Pope?” I said, “Of course, if we have it.” So I went up, and we found it. That started a whole friendship. Not every week, not even every month, but quite frequently. And that’s how I met her–we became well acquainted. When I had finished my task for the two-year period in the Pontifical German College, I studied for four years in England, then two years in Spain, and then returned again to the college, but this time in a much higher capacity as Acting Prefect of Studies. And we resumed our friendship, although this time she did not only ask books which were in our library–which was a very rich library–but rather whether I could obtain through my personal relations from national libraries in Germany certain books which were extremely rare. I asked her, “The Pope has an apostolic nuncio in Germany. Isn’t it simpler to do that?” She said, “No, he doesn’t want to draw attention to the fact, and he doesn’t want to use his nuncios to come begging for things like that. So he prefers a private channel. He knows your family, he knows that you are capable of doing it. Can you do it?” I said, “Well, I’ll try,” and I did. This became much more frequent. This is the beginning of the friendship. Occasionally we had a little chat beyond these things. She was always in a hurry, but I asked her several things. Our friendship became extremely frequent after the death of the Pope. Something happened that should never have happened but did happen and not in this case alone. I’ve observed now personally several times that as long as a secretary of a Pope is acting, his master and lord is alive, people cater to him: this is normal. www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • June 2009 32 It happens in other administrations, and although it shouldn’t happen in the Church, it does. Therefore, if they want to get something, they are polite, cordial, even at times servile. I’ve seen it myself. But when the lord and master dies, the attitude changes. Then they are practically persecuted. This happened to the private secretary of John XXIII, it happened to the private secretary of Paul VI, and it happened to Sister Pasqualina. She had a very difficult time. It was Cardinal Spellman who saved her by putting her in charge of the household of the Pontifical North American College nearby. But, of course, since we had met so frequently, she very frequently came to see me, and I consoled her because she was highly sensitive about this poor treatment that certain people gave her. Then she had time and I gave her time, and I learned many things. I asked her most specifically because I was interested what exactly she had experienced during the German occupation of Rome, being a German. She told me, among other things, and this is the exact answer to your question, that she herself drove around Rome with a little truck so as to provide foodstuffs, clothing, shoes, other things, necessities, soap, even toilet paper–God knows what–everything these people needed because they had nothing. The communities in which they were living had to live on spare food and rations. Everything was rationed–even in 1947 when I came here that was the case. She told me that herself, without any pretense. She considered that to be the most normal thing in the world. She was also put in charge by the Pope of the papal warehouse. You see, the papacy, the Vatican, was neutral, and they got plenty of stuff from South America: meat from Argentina, train loads full of material came in from Spain, from Portugal, etc. This could reach the Vatican, and the Vatican didn’t use it for their own purposes. The Pope was extremely sober in eating–he liked only a cup of coffee in the morning. But since the Romans couldn’t have coffee and there were tons of coffee in the warehouses, he renounced having any coffee at all. He didn’t want any heating because the Roman people didn’t have it. He didn’t take any holidays because they couldn’t afford it. So it was not for himself that all these foodstuffs came into the Vatican; it was to help the people who were starving, and to a larger extent it went to the people who were persecuted, who were in hiding, who had nothing and who could not be sufficiently fed, clad, etc., by the people who sheltered them. She was instrumental; she was head of the warehouse. So this absolutely shows that the Pope at the time was directly involved? Yes, I think so. What else could you expect? I mean, this could have not happened in the Vatican THE ANGELUS • June 2009 www.angeluspress.org without the Pope’s knowledge, without his will. She explained to me that she never meddled in Church politics, and the Pope would never have tolerated that. Nor would she have ever dared to do this, because the Pope on this was extremely sensitive. And this never happened. But, as far as the helping of people was concerned, she was put in charge of the warehouse, and not all of the monsignors liked it. Before she was appointed, many things disappeared from the warehouse. Understandably, people had families in town and they were suffering from hunger–I’m not criticizing, I’m just stating the fact. But once she took over nothing disappeared because she was severe and precise—the typical German-Bavarian precision, if you wish. People didn’t like it, and that made many enemies for her. Later, she had to pay for it. I was told that the summer palace of the Holy Father, Castel Gandolfo, also had Jews sheltered there. Do you have any knowledge of this? Yes, I have investigated that. Especially here, as a trained historian, I don’t want to put in documents or investigate things that are not demonstrated. I had read in several Catholic publications that 3,000 Jews were sheltered at Castel Gandolfo. I was a little bit hesitant to believe that. So I got in touch with the director at Castel Gandolfo at the time and asked, “Can you confirm this?” And he said no. And he gave me the real story. What really happened began with some refugees at Castel Gandolfo, but not to the extent above. But it so happened that when the Allied troops– American and English–were threatening to encircle Rome and were beginning to occupy the Albanian hills, the German military command, not wanting to get these civilians implicated on a battlefield, ordered them to leave their villages within three hours. Now where were these people supposed to go? Many of them decided to take refuge in Castel Gandolfo. There was an iron gate there, but they forced it open, throwing it down, pushing against it, until 3,000 people entered. Of course, nobody thought about driving them out. And a number of them perished because, although this was a Papal domain, it was bombed twice with serious casualties. Now, can it be said that all these people were Jews? Definitely not. There may have been and plausibly were some Jews among them, but nobody could tell me how many. So that is an honest answer. We should not use arguments that are not correct and not demonstrated. (To be continued.) This is an edited transcript of a video interview of Fr. Gumpel with Pave the Way Foundation, which owns the copyright to this material. PART 24 33 F r . M a t t h i a s G a u d r o n After examining the nature of the sacraments in the last installment, the Catechism looks at modern abuses of the Sacrament of Penance and the origin of "baptism in the Spirit." Catechism Of the Crisis In the Church 86) Are the sacraments community celebrations? Certainly, Christianity has a communitarian character. The Christians, members of the Mystical Body of Christ, are for this reason intimately united with one another. From the fact that the sacraments graft us into the Body of Christ and unite us ever more intimately with it, they also maintain communion among Christians. But the principal effect is firstly union with Christ, from which flows the union of Christians. This order is often inverted nowadays. The sacraments are considered first of all as community celebrations that, as communitarian, favor the union of men with God. They will say, for instance, that the principal effect of baptism is the reception of the baptized into the parish community, which is false. l Are these new theories very widespread? We read these surprising words from the pen of Cardinal Ratzinger: “The concept of sacraments as the means of a grace that I receive like a supernatural medicine in order, as it were, to ensure only my own private eternal health is the supreme misunderstanding of what a sacrament truly is.”1 l In what is this sentence of [then] Cardinal Ratzinger surprising? This sentence is surprising because the sacraments are well and good supernatural remedies destined for our healing and spiritual health, even if it is not under this caricaturized form. But mockery is always the easiest way to present something in a bad light when solid arguments are lacking. l Has Cardinal Ratzinger a false concept of the sacraments? Cardinal Ratzinger has an erroneous idea of the communitarian character of the sacraments, as the following quotations show: But union with him [God] is, accordingly, inseparable from and a consequence of our own unity....Grace is always the beginning of union. As a liturgical event, a sacrament is always the work of a community; it is, as it were, the Christian way of celebrating, the warranty of a joy that issues from the community and from the fullness of power that is vested in it.2 l What is the error underlying these passages? The accent is falsely displaced, for the result is made the main element. The union of Christians with one another and the joy of faith and salvation, etc., are the consequences and not the essence of the grace that unites souls to God. www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • June 2009 34 87) May the Church suppress or add sacraments? The seven sacraments were instituted by Jesus Christ Himself. The Church thus has no power either to suppress any of the seven or to add new ones. It is bound by the order of Christ. l Were sacraments suppressed or added after Vatican II? Without having been explicitly suppressed, one might say that the sacrament of confession is, in practice, moribund in many parts of the Church. Also, without presenting it explicitly as a sacrament, some people introduced into the Church the Pentecostal rite of the effusion of the Spirit (or the “baptism in the Spirit”), which is given by imposition of hands and strangely resembles an eighth sacrament. l Isn’t the sacrament of penance today administered in the form of penance services? The penance service which, in many places, pretends to replace confession is not identical to the sacrament. This ceremony does not have the power to remit sins, in particular mortal sins. l Why can’t the collective absolutions given during penance services remit mortal sins? The Council of Trent solemnly defined that it is necessary to avow in detail mortal sins committed after baptism to be able to receive absolution for them, and that this obligation comes from God Himself (the Church thus cannot change it): If anyone says that in the sacrament of penance it is not necessary by divine law for the remission of sins to confess each and all mortal sins...let him be anathema.3 l Can’t absolution ever be given collectively (without individual confession)? Collective absolution is only possible in cases of grave necessity. Those who receive it only receive the remission of their sins insofar as they would be ready and willing to confess their sins to a priest individually if they could (and, for this reason, they remain bound to do so should they escape the danger that justified the collective absolution). l What are the cases of grave necessity justifying collective absolution? The cases of grave necessity justifying collective absolution mainly involve imminent danger of death (onboard a sinking ship, for example, or on a battlefield). During World War II, taking into account the upheavals of the time (deportation or prisoners without access to priests), the Sacred Penitentiary allowed the giving of collective absolution to crowds who, without it being their fault, risked otherwise going for a long time (and hence dying) without the sacraments.4 THE ANGELUS • June 2009 www.angeluspress.org l Aren’t present-day penance services simply an extension of this permission given in 1944? Collective absolutions can only be valid in the case of grave and urgent necessity in which individual confession is really impossible. Only necessity can, in effect, dispense a divine commandment. It is glaringly obvious that contemporary penance services do not come under the state of necessity. In the note of March 25, 1944, mentioned above, the Sacred Penitentiary moreover recalled the teaching already given by Innocent XI in 1679: even a great crowd of faithful (during a feast, for example) is not sufficient cause for giving absolution to penitents who had not confessed individually, nor even to those half of whom had confessed.5 l Whence comes this necessity of confessing one’s sins to obtain their pardon? To prevent men from treating sin lightly and to enable them to receive appropriate counsel, our Lord Jesus Christ established priests as judges and physicians of souls ( Jn. 20:22-23). To obtain absolution, it is necessary to come and manifest to them the state of one’s soul.6 l Aren’t the penance services at least able to forgive venial sins, while those who have committed mortal sins could be invited to confess them individually to a priest? Such an invitation to confess especially serious sins in private would necessarily have a discouraging effect. After such an announcement, who would still have the courage to go and kneel in a confessional, thereby displaying in the eyes of everyone that he had committed particularly heavy faults? l What are the consequences of these new penance services? One may well fear that numerous Catholics stay in a state of mortal sin and run the risk of being eternally lost. l Whence comes this general disaffection for confession? The general disaffection for confession comes in large part from the fact that today Catholics no longer have a sense of sin. l Why do Catholics not have a sense of sin any more? Catholics no longer have a sense of sin because quite often their priests and bishops no longer have it themselves. Instead of denouncing the gravity of offenses against God, preaching penance, and encouraging flight from dangerous occasions, they reduce everything to a human level (only offenses against human dignity count), neglect Divine justice, minimize the consequences of sin, and forget the necessity of making reparation. 35 l Can you give an example of the way in which some priests and bishops destroy the sense of sin? During a meeting of the Deanery Council at Wangen, in the Allgäu (October 17, 1983), Canon Hubert Bour gave a conference on the theme “Sin and Forgiveness.” He asserted notably: The notion of mortal sin has been greatly abused; mere bagatelles have been made into mortal sins. Mortal sin is not the normal case. To a question about the frequency of mortal sin, a well-known theologian answered that perhaps one a day was committed in Paris and one from time to time in our diocese. l Is the sacrament of penance expressly attacked? In the same conference, Canon Bour declared that the call to penance and conversion did not play a “central role” in Jesus’ teaching; that Jesus did not “expressly institute the sacrament of penance, even if two passages of the New Testament led to that belief”; that the passage of St. John’s Gospel traditionally understood as instituting the sacrament of penance (“Whose sins you shall forgive they are forgiven them...” Jn. 20:23) referred rather to baptism. l What is the Church’s teaching on these points? Here are the condemnations levied by the Council of Trent: Can. 1. If anyone says that in the Catholic Church penance is not truly and properly a sacrament instituted by Christ our Lord to reconcile the faithful, as often as they fall into sin after baptism: let him be anathema. Can. 2. If anyone, confusing the sacraments, says that baptism itself is the sacrament of penance, as though these two sacraments are not distinct, and that therefore penance is not rightly called “a second plank after shipwreck”: let him be anathema. Can. 3. If anyone says that those words of the Lord Savior: “Receive ye the Holy Ghost; whose sins you shall forgive, they are forgiven them; and whose sins ye shall retain, they are retained” [ Jn. 20:22 ff.], are not to be understood of the power of remitting and retaining sins in the sacrament of penance...: let him be anathema. l What is the rite known as “the baptism in the Spirit”? The rite of “baptism in the Spirit”7 was originally the distinctive mark of a Protestant sect called the Pentecostalists. It is a laying on of hands for the purpose of giving a palpable experience of the Holy Spirit and a participation of the charismatic gifts of the first Christians, especially speaking in tongues. l What is the origin of this Pentecostal rite? Pentecostalism was born during the night of December 31, 1900, to January 1, 1901, in Topeka, Kansas.8 In the hope of regaining the charisms of the Apostles (especially speaking in tongues), the Methodist pastor Charles Parham (1873-1929) laid hands on a girl named Agnes Ozman.9 She immediately began to speak an unknown language, which a Czech recognized the next day as his mother tongue. The experience continued on the following days, and Pastor Parham set out to preach his discovery. Arrested later on a morals charge (he was accused of sodomy), Pastor Parham was eclipsed by some of his disciples, like William Seymour (1873-1929).10 l How did the new Pentecostal rite spread? The “Pentecostalists” were at first rejected even by the Protestants (they were called “shakers” because of their contortions or “rollers” because some of them rolled on the ground during their services). They established their own chapels and organized themselves in very restricted groups. It was only during the 1930s in Europe, and in the 1950s in the United States, that their rite was taken outside of strictly Pentecostal churches to penetrate all Christian denominations. Pastor David du Plessis (1905-87) was the main architect of this “ecumenical” propagation of “the baptism in the Spirit.” At the end of the 20th century, there were about 100 million Pentecostalists worldwide. Translated exclusively for Angelus Press from Katholischer Katechismus zur kirchlichen Kriese by Fr. Matthias Gaudron, professor at the Herz Jesu Seminary of the Society of St. Pius X in Zaitzkofen, Germany. The original was published in 1997 by Rex Regum Press, with a preface by the District Superior of Germany, Fr. Franz Schmidberger. This translation is from the second edition (Schloß Jaidhof, Austria: Rex Regum Verlag, 1999) as translated, revised, and edited by the Dominican Fathers of Avrillé in collaboration with the author, with their added subdivisions. Joseph Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology (1982; Ignatius Press, 1987), p.49. 2 Ibid., pp.49-50, 51. 3 Council of Trent, Session 14, Canon 7, DS 1707. 4 Note of the Sacred Penitentiary of March 25, 1944, AAS, 1944, p.156. 5 Decree of March 2, 1679, DS 2159. 6 St. Thomas Aquinas, Supple. Q.6, Art. 1. 7 The Pentecostalists cite the words of John the Baptist: “I have baptized you with water; but he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost” (Mk. 1:8). But in reality St. John the Baptist was speaking here of the sacrament of baptism that our Lord was going to institute and which, as distinct from St. John’s baptism—a baptism of repentance—was to give the Holy Spirit. The difference between these two baptisms is clearly stated in the Acts of the Apostles (19:3-6). 8 It was also in the United States that spiritualism was born, in 1847, when the Fox family girls in the village of Hyderville (in New York State) tried to make contact with the poltergeist that haunted their house. Ten years later, spiritualism counted more than ten million adepts. 9 Agnes Ozman had requested this laying on of hands herself based on the Acts of the Apostles (8:17-19; 9:17; 19:6). 10 Bothered by the personality of Charles Parham, who was a member of the Ku Klux Klan, some Pentecostalists today prefer to trace their movement to Seymour’s preaching in Los Angeles, April 9, 1906. That evening, the audience received the “baptism in the Spirit” and began to speak in tongues, to laugh, to cry, to sing, to clap their hands and stamp their feet so vehemently that the old house where they were meeting collapsed. Another Pentecostal illumination (analogous to the first, but independent) occurred in Great Britain in 1904 and considerably influenced French Protestantism. But “Catholic” charismatism, even in France, is linked to American Pentecostalism. See A. De Lassus, Le Renouveau charismatique aujourd’hui, Supplement to Action Familiale et Scolaire, No. 162, pp. 48, 61-65, 135. 1 www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • June 2009 36 Church a The Apostolic Voyage of the Pope in Africa (March 17-23, 2009); the Press Conference in the Airplane The press published only this carefully isolated statement from the Pope’s answer to a French journalist’s question about AIDS: “The problem cannot be overcome by the distribution of condoms: on the contrary, they increase it.” Here is the complete transcription of the question and the answer: Philippe Visseyrias from France 2: “Your Holiness, among the many ills that beset Africa, one of the most pressing is the spread of Aids. The position of the Catholic Church on the way to fight it is often considered unrealistic and ineffective. Will you address this theme during the journey?” Benedict XVI: “I would say the opposite. I think that the most efficient, most truly present player in the fight against Aids is the Catholic Church herself, with her movements and her various organizations. I think of the Sant’Egidio community that does so much, visibly and also behind the scenes, in the struggle against Aids, I think of the Camillians, and so much more besides, I think of all the Sisters who take care of the sick. I would say that this problem of Aids cannot be overcome merely with money, necessary though it is. If there is no human dimension, if Africans do not help [by responsible behaviour], the problem cannot be overcome by the distribution of prophylactics: on the contrary, they increase it. The solution must have two elements: firstly, bringing out the human dimension of sexuality, that is to say a spiritual and human renewal that would bring with it a new way of behaving THE ANGELUS • June 2009 www.angeluspress.org The Media Lynch Mob towards others, and secondly, true friendship offered above all to those who are suffering, a willingness to make sacrifices and to practice selfdenial, to be alongside the suffering. And so these are the factors that help and that lead to real progress: our twofold effort to renew humanity inwardly, to give spiritual and human strength for proper conduct towards our bodies and those of others, and this capacity to suffer with those who are suffering, to remain present in situations of trial. It seems to me that this is the proper response, and the Church does this, thereby offering an enormous and important contribution. We thank all who do so.” In its official transcription, the Vatican press bureau nuanced the Pope’s words: “I would say that this problem of Aids cannot be overcome merely with advertising slogans. If there is no human dimension, if Africans do not help [by responsible behaviour], the problem cannot be overcome by the distribution of prophylactics: on the contrary, they increase it.” (DICI 4/11) At Paris, Berlin, London, and Brussels, there was but one and the same virulent outcry. “France expresses her deep concern over the consequences of these statements of Benedict XVI,” the spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Eric Chevallier, declared to the press. “While it is not up to us to pass judgment on the doctrine of the Church, we consider that these statements endanger public health policies and the imperative to protect human life,” he said. German political figures also spoke out. Ulla Schmidt, the federal minister of health and social security, and Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul, the federal minster of economic cooperation and development, contradicted the Pope’s words without naming him expressly: “Cooperation in modern development ought to give the poorest of the poor access to family-planning methods, and, in this context, the use of condoms. Anything else would be irresponsible,” they declared. Other politicians, like the leader of the European Greens group in the European elections, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, or the former French Minster Alain Juppé (UMP), deplored the Pope’s position. Juppé opined on the airwaves of France Culture: “This Pope is getting to be a real problem” since he lives in “a totally autistic state.” In the United Kingdom, Judith Melby, a specialist on Africa for the organization Christian Aid, a joint work of some forty Protestant denominations in England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, thought that “the pope’s comments are not very helpful. It’s sending a confusing message to Africa, in those countries where the Catholic church is very important.” In Belgium, the Minister for International Cooperation and nd World Development, Charles Michel, of the Reform movement, characterized the Pope’s words as “hallucinatory, scandalous, and even irresponsible.” On April 2, the Chamber of Deputies adopted a resolution (95 votes for, 18 against, and 7 abstentions) “demanding that the Belgian government condemn the unacceptable words spoken by the Pope during his voyage in Africa and lodge an official protest with the Holy See,” according to the Belga press bureau. Even if the deputies declined to demand the temporary recall of the Belgian ambassador to the Vatican and the convocation of the Apostolic Nuncio to Brussels, Belgium became “the first country to lodge an official protest,” boasted Denis Ducarme, the liberal deputy who instigated this resolution. The next day, the Belgian bishops timidly “regretted” the Belgian Parliament’s statement: “We take notice of the vote by the Chamber of Representatives declaring the Pope’s declarations concerning the fight against Aids as ‘unacceptable.’ We respect the democratic character of this decision, but we regret its tenor.” This resolution, which asked the Belgian government to lodge a protest by official, diplomatic channel with the Vatican, does not take into account what Benedict XVI really intended to express: without an education in sexual responsibility, the other means of prevention will remain deficient, they asserted in their communiqué, which is everything but an energetic protest. In France, “irresponsible” was the word echoed, on March 20, by three Masonic obediences: the Grand Orient of France, the Women’s Grand Lodge of France, and the Federation for Human Rights, expressing “their stupefaction and indignation at the irresponsible remarks of Pope Benedict XVI” against the usage of the condom as a means of preventing AIDS. They wondered about “the present state of mind of the current Vatican hierarchy” after the affairs of the holocaust-denying integrist bishop and the excommunication of the mother and doctors of the Brazilian girl who had an abortion. “Such a denial of scientific evidence in the name of the doctrine of the Church becomes intolerable when the consequence is the jeopardizing of people’s lives, and the signatory obediences ally themselves with the protests filed by the French government on this subject,” they added, not without mentioning their “inviolable attachment to the principle of the lay State guaranteeing full freedom of conscience for all citizens.” As is now usual, a poll was taken to assess the effects of this media campaign on public opinion. So it was that an Ifop poll for the Journal du Dimanche showed 43% of French Catholics to be in favor of Benedict XVI’s departure [from the papacy], with 54% against, and 3% having no opinion. The proportion of French Catholics in favor of Benedict XVI’s departure increased to 47% among non-practicing Catholics, but dropped to 31% among practicing Catholics. After such an onslaught, the contrary would have been surprising. Moreover, when asked whether the Catholic Church ought to “modify its teaching and its positions to take into consideration the changes that have occurred in society and mores,” a very large majority of French Catholics responded affirmatively, especially as regards contraception. In keeping with the journalists, politicians, and Masonic obediences, the British medical journal Lancet reproached the Pope for his ignorance on the subject of the debates about prophylactics. Benedict XVI “publicly distorted scientific evidence to promote Catholic doctrine on this issue,” declared 37 a journalist of the BBC on March 27, quoting The Lancet, for which the use of condoms constitutes the single, most effective way to limit the sexual transmission of AIDS. According to the BBC, the medical journal is calling upon the Vatican to retract its statement: “When any influential person, be it a religious or political figure, makes a false scientific statement that could be devastating to the health of millions of people, they should retract or correct the public record.” Such is not the opinion of an American scientist, Edward C. Green, director of the AIDS Prevention Research Project at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, quoted by National Review, who bluntly stated: “We have found no consistent associations between condom use and lower HIV-infection rates, which, 25 years into the pandemic, we should be seeing if this intervention was working.” He stressed that “The pope is correct, or, put it a better way, the best evidence we have supports the pope’s comments. Condoms have been proven to not be effective at the level of population.” (DICI 4/11) The African Situation First Hand Msgr. Hugh Slattery, the bishop of Tzaneen, in South Africa, produced a film documentary called Sowing in Tears in collaboration with the producer Norman Servais, about the AIDS epidemic in his country. The film won the Grand Prix at the 22nd International Catholic Film and Multimedia Festival held in Niepokalanow, Poland, in 2007. He explained that “despite the promotion of condoms in schools, there is a high rate of pregnancy among schoolgirls, sometimes as high as www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • June 2009 38 20%.” He revealed that the economic advantages of such a situation are real, since the manufacture of condoms is a multimillion-dollar business. “South Africa and the neighboring countries of Botswana and Swaziland have the highest rate of HIV/ AIDS infection in the world and also the highest rate of condom distribution. The conclusion is inescapable that more condoms mean more cases of AIDS and more deaths. It is, of course, ‘politically incorrect’ both here and in the Western world to even hint at the possibility that condoms may in fact be fueling the spread of this deadly disease rather than curbing it.” The Church’s goal in the country is “to lift the veil of secrecy and denial around HIV/ AIDS and get people to talk about it openly….People are totally brainwashed into believing that in fact there is no real crisis. They see that a lot of the younger generation are dying but are told that people get AIDS because they don’t use the condom correctly to have ‘safe sex.’ Behind this is the widespread belief that people who die of AIDS have been bewitched.” “Uganda was the first country to really take a strong stand against the AIDS pandemic from the early ’90’s. The strong and clear leadership of President Museveni was the decisive element in bringing down the spread of HIV/AIDS from over 25% to 6% by 2002. He preached ‘common sense’ and not ‘condom sense’ as he mobilized his country in promoting abstinence before marriage and fidelity in marriage as cultural values.” (DICI 4/11) Support for the Pope Interviewed by the French television network KTO and I.Media THE ANGELUS • June 2009 www.angeluspress.org Church a on March 18, several African prelates expressed their approval of Benedict XVI’s statements in the airplane that took him to Yaoundé. “I call upon Westerners not to impose their unique way of seeing things on us,” Senegalese Cardinal Theodore-Adrien Sarr, Archbishop of Dakar, declared. “In countries like ours,” he explained, “abstinence and fidelity are still values that we live by, and by promoting them we contribute to the prevention of AIDS.” “We cannot advocate the use of condoms,” he insisted, “but we can teach the moral values that are still in honor with us, in order to help our populations protect themselves against AIDS: abstinence and fidelity.” These values are “realities” for Africans, “and no one should be telling us that we should not be preaching these values.” In the same vein, Msgr. Simon Ntamwana, Archbishop of Gitega in Burundi, denounced the West’s “change of mind” and its “sexual hedonism, which is perceived as inescapable.” “It isn’t the condom,” he asserted, “that is going to reduce the number of cases of AIDS, but rather the discipline that everyone must impose upon himself in order to change his attitude, an attitude that will help him to escape his uncontrollable hedonism.” “You are abdicating your will and your responsibility, and I don’t know where you are headed,” the Burundi bishop said for the benefit of Westerners. On the front-page of L’Osservatore Romano’s March 22 edition, an editorialist supported Benedict XVI’s statements on the fight against AIDS. The condom is defended [by politicians and the Western media–Ed.],” the writer explained, “because it allows modern society to continue to believe in itself and its principles, and because it seems to re-establish control of the situation without changing anything.” “The Cardinal Theodore-Adrien Sarr Pope’s words were so keenly criticized because they struck a nerve, an ideological lie.” In France, while the Bishop of Gap, Msgr. Jean-Michel di Falco, acknowledged in Le Parisien having recommended the use of condoms against AIDS, Msgr. Marc Aillet, Bishop of Bayonne, declared on March 25: “The journalists, some of whom belong to the so-called Catholic press, have once again hit upon a line, and the politicians, often slaves of opinion, have unthinkingly taken it a step further and denounced the ‘unacceptable remarks’ of the Holy Father and the ‘irresponsible teaching of the Church.’ Sons and daughters of the Church, we can hold our heads high because the Pope’s statements have been confirmed by the African bishops and by the heads of state of those countries ravaged by AIDS, denouncing the ‘latent racism’ of the Westerners who would like to impose their deadly remedies in the name of their sacrosanct sexual license or their mercantilist materialism, from which we clearly see who profits. His speech was not contrary to the facts: according to the statistics of the WHO, in the African countries nd World where the rate of condom distribution is highest, the advance of AIDS is highest; and where the Catholics are most numerous, and abstinence and fidelity are preached as the first remedy, even by government programs, and the condom as a last resort, AIDS is markedly reduced, as in Burundi and Angola.” On Sunday, March 29, 2009, in St. Peter’s Square, the African students of Rome convened a demonstration of solidarity with the Pope during the Angelus. In a press release, they declared that the purpose of the manifestation was “to cry out” their opposition to “the speculations over Africa,” “to the political distortion of the Pope’s message for Africa,” and “to those who want to make Africa one of the main markets and outlets of condoms.” They equally intended to show their support for “effective care for AIDS in Africa” and “education,” and to thank the Pope for his “lucid and detailed social, cultural, spiritual, environmental and economic diagnosis” of the African continent, and for “the different solutions and paths” he pointed out so that “Africans themselves might be the artificers and protagonists of their own development.” The fact that France had particularly distinguished itself in the media lynching of Benedict XVI did not escape the notice of Avvenire, the newspaper of the Italian bishops. Thus we read in its columns of March 26th: “In Paris, they continue to cultivate the ambition of giving lessons to the Pope, to this Pope who, in the name of Christ and with the arguments of reason, dared to speak to the populations of Cameroon and Angola, and through them to all Africans, as adult populations that must know how to raise their heads and their voices.” The Pope “warned that AIDS cannot be limited by nor vanquished with prophylactics, but with humanly responsible lifestyles and with effective medicines made available to the poor free of charge,” the Catholic daily commented. “It was this assertion that seemed scandalous, especially on French soil, to the ears of the ministers and governmental spokespersons,” they observed. “They thunder in the newspapers, the microphones and radios, before the TV cameras,” and “they consult the experts of pharmaceutical companies and these benefactors of humanity who are the condom manufacturers.” For those who are “on the other side of the Alps (and the Rhine, and the Channel, and the Ocean), the affirmation of a fantastic principle seems to prevail first and foremost: the condom is the liberator and savior,” ironically concluded Avvenire. The Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India released a communiqué on March 24 in which it considered “as most irresponsible and irreverent” these kinds of statements against the head of the Catholic Church. The bishops defended the Pope, “the most loved and respected spiritual leader of the Catholics all over the world.” In fact, the Indian media asserted that the Pope “was entirely on the side of the real world” in the fight against AIDS, and for the most part criticized their foreign counterparts, in particular the American review Foreign Policy, which had ranked the Pope second on its list of “the thirteen worst people on the planet,” between the Austrian Josef Fritzl, who imprisoned and raped his daughter for 24 years, and the American Bernard Madoff, the perpetrator of a huge financial swindle. For their part, the bishops of Cameroon declared: “The Western media have clearly forgotten other essential aspects of the Holy Father’s African message on poverty, reconciliation, justice and 39 peace.” In a communiqué quoted by Radio Vatican on March 25, they judged as very serious the attitude of some of the mass media. “If the Western media have not understood the import of Benedict XVI’s voyage in Africa, Cameroonians have understood it very well” and “they welcomed the Pope with joy and enthusiasm.” (DICI 4/11) France: By Their Own Admission... On the blog of La Croix (a French Roman Catholic daily newspaper of liberal tendency) on March 12, Nicolas Senèze returned to Bishop Fellay’s Press Release of March 12, and made a sizeable admission: “‘The Church is going through a major crisis which can be resolved only by an integral return to the purity of the Faith,’ Bishop Fellay stated in the Press Release which followed the publication of the letter by Benedict XVI. It could not be said more clearly that the Society of St. Pius X still does not intend to accept fully the teaching of the Council.”—It could not be pointed out more clearly that the full acceptance of the teaching of the Council is, in the eyes of the journalist of La Croix , hardly compatible with an integral return to the purity of the faith. (Dici 27/3/2009) Italian Archbishop Suspends Communion in the Hand to Avoid Abuses of the Eucharist Rome, Italy, May 11, 2009 / 11:45pm ( CNA )–The Archbishop www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • June 2009 40 of Bologna, Cardinal Carlo Caffarra, has prohibited the reception of Communion in the hand in three parishes of his archdiocese and has asked priests to be on the watch for those who may be abusing the Eucharist. The archdiocesan press office released a statement with the new guidelines established by the cardinal. It pointed out that in 1989, “the resolution of the Italian Bishops’ Conference came into effect, authorizing, with the approval of the Holy See, the distribution of Holy Communion in the hand.” However, the statement noted, recently there have been reports that this privilege has been gravely abused. Consequently, Cardinal Caffarra has decided that at the Cathedral of St. Peter, at the Basilica of St. Petronius, and at the Shrine of the Virgin of St. Luke, “Communion shall be distributed to the faithful only on the tongue.” According to a letter by the vicar general of Bologna, Msgr. Gabriele Cavina, “grave abuses” have taken place, as “some have taken the Sacred Species as ‘souvenirs’,” “put it up for sale,” or worse, “have taken it to be profaned in satanic rites.” The priest explained that numerous cases of profanation of the Eucharist have been perpetrated by individuals who have taken advantage of the option to receive Communion in the hand, especially during large celebrations or at churches attended by large numbers of the faithful. “For this reason, it is best to control the moment of the reception of Holy Communion by following the common norms which are well known.” Cardinal Caffarra said that during Mass, ushers should ensure that each person who approaches the altar to receive Communion “consumes the host immediately and that no one be allowed to walk THE ANGELUS • June 2009 www.angeluspress.org Archbishop Robert Zollitsch away with the Eucharist in their hands or to place it in their pockets.” (Catholic News Agency) Mass Booklets Available DICI has made available a number of booklets in PDF format for following the traditional Mass. They consist of the ordinary of the Mass and are available in several languages, including English. See www.dici.org for details. Archbishop Zollitsch Proclaims a Doctrinal Error; SSPX Calls for an Official Retraction On Holy Saturday, the Chairman of the German Bishops‘ Conference, Robert Zollitsch, denied the expiatory death of Christ on the TV show Horizonte (April 11, 2009). For him, Christ had simply expressed “solidarity” with the suffering of the people even to death. His statement prompted the interviewer’s question: “You would now no longer describe it in such a way that God gave His own Son because we humans were so sinful? You would no longer describe it like this?” Archbishop Zollitsch confirmed with a clear no: God gave “His own son in solidarity with us unto this last death agony” to show us that “you are worth so much to me that I go with you, and I am totally with you in every situation.” The Archbishop of Freiburg also said that one’s own sins were the reason why Christ “became so involved with me.” “He has become involved with me out of solidarity–from free will.” Against this shallow view that transforms the expiatory sacrifice of Christ into a psychological act of support, there is plenty of evidence in Holy Scripture. Here are some of them: Rom. 5:10: “For if, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son; much more, being reconciled, shall we be saved by his life.” I Pet. 2:24: “Who his own self bore our sins in his body upon the tree: that we, being dead to sins, should live to justice: by whose stripes you were healed.” Is. 53:6: “All we like sheep have gone astray, every one hath turned aside into his own way: and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.” Mt. 26:28: “For this is my blood of the new testament, which shall be shed for many unto remission of sins.” (Homepage of the German SSPX District, 4/28/2009) 41 F r . E J a m e s ducation is meant to prepare children to perceive reality: God and the world He has created. The matters of reading and writing, and all the other subjects of study, are only so many means to this end. Education begins within the family and originates in the union of father and mother; the more stable the union of the parents the better the education of the children. The education of children thus begins in the fidelity of the parents, and how they themselves perceive and react to God and the world around them. It is not so much what we say or do that educates; what really educates is who we are. This is a classic idea, but one which bears recalling. Little can be done to educate if we identify it merely with “study.” This is of course the easier route, as it would place the responsibility of education primarily on the teachers, exonerating the parents. Children follow and imitate; this is, after all, the meaning of “educating,” “leading” the little ones out of their immaturity and ignorance. In order to do this, however, one must be mature D o r a n , S S P X and well formed. The first objective of education is to form the character of the child. And what is “character”? A solid character is formed from a receptive natural temperament, self-discipline, and virtue. Temperament is the foundation, and is Godgiven. Character is the sum total development of familial circumstances and learning built onto this temperament. Temperament is the basic way that a person continually asserts itself. It is primarily composed of response and reaction: is the response rapid or slow? Is the reaction of short or long duration? Being aware of these things helps in communicating with the child, and communication is the key to a proper education. Cholerics resist being molded and formed. Melancholics regularly expect the worst and then brood on it. Sanguines are not serious enough and bounce from subject to subject. Phlegmatics are lethargic and difficult to motivate. The correction of the difficulties of any temperament is the work of a lifetime. We must battle against our own defects and then those of our Parents’ Conference www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • June 2009 42 children, but unfortunately we would rather excuse and even enshrine our defects: “I am intense and agitated because I am a choleric,” as an example. We clearly see the faults of others, but to our own we are usually blind. It is often the case that parents are blind also to the fundamental faults of their own children. As children are an extension of our own being, we are often just as sensitive to their correction as we are to our own. Any temperament left in the raw, unworked by education, results necessarily in a lack of character. The foundation is left on its own to rot, and so the whole educational edifice shakes and risks collapse. Fortunately for us Catholics, there really is no such thing as a completely raw character; with the grace of Baptism in the soul, and later by the graces derived from the Sacrament of Penance, we are given a steady impulse towards better things. It is the task of the parents, and teachers, to clear obscurities and transform innate tendencies towards that which is better. Self-discipline must be shown by example, and virtue must be so inculcated that it becomes the individual’s own possession. It must be recognized from the beginning that the work is slow. It is often a shock to parents to see how long the process of maturation may be. It is more than simply insisting on one’s authority, “putting one’s foot down”; lacking maturity, the children do not react as we might wish. Maturation is seeing and doing. Criticism, correction, and punishment must be used only as a last resort (necessitated when example and direction are insufficient, for whatever reason) and must be administered with “infinite care.” To educationally correct and guide is an art all in itself. St. Gregory referred to the direction of other human beings as the art of arts, and the education of a child is nothing else if not the direction of another human being. This art of education requires a great deal of discipline on the part of the educator, and for this reason it is often done poorly. The beauty of educating is that both receive: the child is brought to maturity, overcoming his faults and defects; and the parent or educator, recognizing his own defects and shortcomings in this process, is forced out beyond his own selfish concerns, maturing along the way. Education is the art of managing wills so that characters might be formed. Without the good will of the child it becomes practically impossible to lead him anywhere, educationally speaking. Leading is not forcing, and forming is not jamming. At present, modern parents are overly permissive and afraid of their children; they dare not discipline. Nevertheless, the response to this is not authoritarianism. This will not work either. Permissiveness allows defects and faults to gain the upper hand, but an authoritarian attitude, while achieving an outward conformity, may discover later that there is little inner development. While permissive parents foist selfish, anti-social, and barbaric individuals upon society, an excessively rigid THE ANGELUS • June 2009 www.angeluspress.org formation can result in “good” non-entities: they are “good” only because they are not bad. If we wish to rear strong characters, saints and heroes, we must first strive for excellence ourselves. Goodness can develop only from the inside; it cannot be forced from without. Inner development can occur only when the person being formed desires it himself. The children, our charges, simply will not desire the good we wish for them if they do not see it first in us. No one can be educated only by maxim and precept, commanded to mature. Children must see life lived, and the things presented to them as things first loved by their educators. They acquire ideals because they see them believed and modeled by us. We must believe and care deeply for the things we teach them, which means that we must teach fundamentally by example. In the end, education is training in purity. We must ask consider this: do we live purely? Purity is not so much what we see, hear, or touch, but a disposition of heart. What do we love? What do we treasure? Purity is clear and fresh artlessness. It is the innocence that we often associate with early childhood. It is selflessness in relating to the world. Purity is the purpose of education: that our charges be open to reality, that they embrace God and all that He has created. Sobriety belongs to the essence of purity. Purity turns the person toward reality; this is the goal of education. Its opposite, lust, turns everything to selfish consumption by the individual, esteeming and judging everything only according to his own pleasure. Perfect purity is the unreserved openness of one’s whole being to the Will of God, as portrayed so beautifully in the response of the Blessed Virgin in Nazareth. Openness of one’s entire being, turned toward the Good, alone can answer: “Behold the handmaid of the Lord” (Lk. 1:38). Purity is not only the fruit of good education, it is the disposition allowing one to be further educated in the paths of God. Education, therefore, ultimately disposes the child to receive what is true and accept with readiness God’s providence. I earlier spoke of the desire to form saints and heroes, and this may have seemed perhaps slightly exaggerated to some, but truly this must be our goal. This is the only way that we can develop within the children a brave openness and trusting heart, one which desires to know God, love Him intently, and see Him for all eternity. “Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God” (Mt. 5:8). Fr. James Doran was ordained for the Society of Saint Pius X in 1988 and is currently the prior of St. Francis de Sales Priory in Geneva, Switzerland. He is the former vice-rector of St. Thomas Aquinas Seminary (Winona, Minnesota) and editor emeritus of Angelus Press. The conference was given in Onex, Switzerland, March 10, 2009. F R . p e t e r Ought my daughter to receive the HPV vaccine? The latest vaccination craze is against HPV. The human papilloma virus (HPV) is a sexually transmitted disease that has been identified as a cause of cervical cancer in women and genital warts in men. It is a common virus, usually overcome by the body’s immune system. However, on occasion it can become a chronic infection that has been associated with cervical cancer in middle-aged women who have had high exposure to this virus. Hence the approval of an expensive vaccine by the name of Gardasil in an attempt to give immunity against this virus and the effort by secular and godless governments to give widespread immunity by imposing vaccination on young girls before they arrive at the teenage years, at which promiscuity is, disgusting to say, presumed. Bishop Fred Henry of Calgary and two Catholic school boards in Alberta are to be commended for standing up against the Alberta Health Minister, Mr. Ron Liepert, and refusing to make the HPV vaccination available in their schools, as reported in The Catholic Register of October 12, 2008. However, Mr. Howard May of Alberta Health and Wellness has fought back by distributing, with the bishop’s permission, a package to all parents that they might make their own decision: Now we are going to look at other options to explore how we can ensure that Grade 5 girls all across the province, regardless of what school district they are in, get equal access to the vaccination. In fact, health regions across Alberta have started to hold a free vaccination campaign in schools for fifthgrade girls that began in September. The same has existed in Ontario for eighth-grade girls for some time. One must commend Bishop Henry for expressing his worry that authorizing “the HPV vaccine might have the appearance of condoning sexual activity,” and also that “a school-based approach to vaccination sends a message that early sexual intercourse is allowed, as long as one uses ‘protection.’” It is the least that one could say about a vaccination that has as its only purpose to protect ten-year-old girls against venereal disease. It is the pit of iniquity when a society should admit that this is the only effective way it has to protect them and a sign of the real perversion of youth, especially given that this vaccination is only really effective for five years, and boosters are required to maintain immunity. Much more could be said about the perversion of the medical profession in administering this vaccine to such young girls. To start with, it only offers 70% protection against the virus, protecting against infection from only 4 of nearly 100 strains of the virus (although 2 of them presently cause 70% of the infections). The other 30% of infections are produced by virus strains not covered by the vaccine. Serious side effects have also been reported from the vaccine, including deaths, autoimmune disorders, juvenile arthritis, blood clots, R . s c o t t 43 birth defects in pregnant women, (cf. Justice Watch) and this for a temporary (5-10 year) protection against a simply possible future disease. Furthermore, studies on long-term complications will not be available for a decade or two. What insanity to go to such means to prevent a disease that the faithful observance of the Sixth Commandment is perfectly capable of preventing! Do not allow your daughters to have a false security that will protect them from neither the fires of hell nor the infections with which God has punished immorality. The only possible justification for this vaccine would be in a woman, married or about to be married, who knows that her husband is a carrier or potential carrier of this virus due to past indiscretions. What is to be done if a priest suddenly falls sick or dies and is unable to complete his Mass? The answer to this question is given in the section of the Rubrics of the Missal that treats of the defects that can occur during the celebration of Mass (X,3). The important distinction is whether or not the priest has said the words of consecration. If not, and the priest cannot continue, then the Mass is to be left incomplete. However, if the priest has completed the words of the consecration of the Sacred Body, or both the Body and the Precious Blood, and he cannot continue, then the Mass must be completed by another priest. In the case in which only the Body of Christ is consecrated, then the Blood must be consecrated also that there be a true sacrifice. In the case where both species are already consecrated, then another priest must complete the Mass for the sake of the integrity of the sacrifice, starting where the incapacitated priest left off. In such a case, the priest who completes the Mass will receive Holy Communion under both kinds. However, if it is possible for the priest who fell sick to receive Holy Communion, then he should divide the large host and give half of it to the sick priest who performed the consecration. The rubrics do not foresee the situation in which there is no other priest to complete the Mass. Consequently, it is a situation that is to be avoided, inasmuch as it is possible. A priest who is alone ought not to attempt to celebrate Mass when he doubts that he may be able to complete it. If it still happens that a priest recites the words of consecration of at least one species and then becomes incapacitated or dies, then the Mass ought still to be completed, even if it is after an interval of time, either by the sick priest when he recovers sufficiently or by another priest who is asked to come specifically for that purpose. In the meantime, the sacred species should either be left safely on the altar or carefully placed in the tabernacle until the Mass can be completed. Fr. Peter Scott was ordained by Archbishop Lefebvre in 1988. After assignments as seminary professor, US District Superior, and Rector of Holy Cross Seminary in Goulburn, Australia, he is presently Headmaster of Our Lady of Mount Carmel Academy in Wilmot, Ontario, Canada. Those wishing answers may please send their questions to Q & A in care of Angelus Press, 2915 Forest Ave., Kansas City, MO 64109. www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • June 2009 The Greatest Catholic President The story of Gabriel Garcia Moreno, the brave Catholic statesman who re-established Christendom in a small corner of the world during the 19th century. His exemplary role is so significant that the Blessed Virgin Mary foretold his presidency two centuries before his birth. 40pp. Softcover. STK# 8342✱ $5.95 The Mystery of Jesus Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre Originally transcribed from a series of spiritual conferences delivered by the Archbishop to his seminarians in Ecône, Switzerland, from 1977 to 1979. In these 29 meditations, Archbishop Lefebvre expounds upon the life of the Redeemer, His mind and will, His love for the Father and His intense desire for our salvation. 176pp. Softcover. STK# 5046✱ $10.95 Duties of the Catholic State Cardinal Ottaviani Cardinal Ottaviani, in a 1953 lecture, explains why the Church teaches that the State has the duty of professing the Catholic religion and why the rulers are to ensure that the moral principles of the true religion inspire the social activity and the laws of the State. 35pp. Softcover. STK# 1029✱ $5.00 10 STK# 16D STK# 1016A STK# 1016B STK# 1016 C The famous tell-it-all SSPX pamphlets are back, updated with better content and graphics. Fr. Rostand wants every family to have a generous share of all. Answers all the questions family, friends, and acquaintances have. Available for 50¢ each or 10-pack (of any one) for $4.00. January 2, 1861 My dearest Father, Sister, and Brothers, St. Théophane Vénard 1829 - 1861 I write to you at the beginning of this year, which will be my last on earth. I hope you got the little note which I wrote announcing my capture on the Feast of St. Andrew. God permitted me to be betrayed by a traitor, but I owe him no grudge. From that village I sent you a few lines of farewell before I had the criminal’s chain fastened on my feet and neck. I have kissed that chain, a true link which binds me to Jesus and Mary, and which I would not exchange for its weight in gold. The mandarin had the kindness to have a light one made for me, and treated me, during my stay in his prefecture, with every possible consideration. His brother came at least ten times and tried to persuade me to trample the Cross under foot. He did not want to see me die so young....” From His Eminence Cardinal Farley: I am very grateful to you for making me acquainted with A Modern Martyr. I think it is the most fascinating book I have read in a long time. I can hardly put it out of my hands and have finished reading half of it already. I have instructed the President of our Cathedral College to place a copy in the hands of each of our petits seminaristes and I feel convinced that no better book could be given to them for their spiritual reading. From Bishop Casartelli: When I was a boy of ten, I was taken by a good Belgian priest to visit the Missions Étrangères and the Salle des Martyrs. I shall never forget the impression of the latter, especially the sight of a young candidate kneeling at a priedieu and praying earnestly, probably for the grace of martyrdom. But I really knew nothing about foreign missions till 1870, when, on the day I received tonsure and minor orders, my mother gave me Lady Herbert’s Théophane Vénard, still one of the treasures of my library. It is one of the few books I have wept over in reading.... From Father Elliott, C.S.P., of the Apostolic Mission House: It is a most delightful book and very touching indeed. It filled me with envy for the high privilege of Vénard to die for the faith of Christ. I wish that every priest and every aspirant to the priesthood could read that book. From the Very Rev. F. Henry of Mill Hill College, England: Thanks many times over, for Théophane Vénard, not only for the copy of the book itself, but above all for writing, publishing, and spreading it. It is bound to do an immense amount of good for the Cause which we have both have so much at heart....Before leaving Mill Hill, I gave the book to the Rector with instructions to have it read in the refectory. A Modern Martyr The inspiring and little-known life of St. Theophane is recounted through his own letter-writing from deep within the savagery of Vietnam where the young priest was cruelly butchered. The favorite priest of St. Therese. Softcover. STK# 8341✱ $16.95 www.angeluspress.org l 1-8 00-9 6 6-73 37 Please visit our website to see our entire selection of books and music. #1056 Conversion stories Every Catholic who has found refuge in the traditions of the Church has a story. Now they have a voice. One doesn’t end up at the Latin Mass by accident...The narratives are written by Roman Catholics who have discovered or rediscovered the riches of the ancient liturgy and traditions of Holy Mother Church, powerful antidotes to the ecclesiastic and liturgical crises of our day. They are accounts of conversion, “reversion,” and simple fidelity to the Faith throughout the religious and cultural upheaval that followed in the wake of Vatican II. Many of the contributors to this book suffered for years from theological dissent and liturgical abuse in their parishes, parochial schools, and Catholic universities; some grew up in tradition but refused to participate in the post-conciliar revolution; some, like me, were converts to the Faith; and all were inexplicably drawn to the beauty and mystery, the truth and holiness of the centuries-old sacrifice of the Mass. Perhaps most importantly, these are stories of what Evelyn Waugh has called the “operation of Grace…the unmerited and unilateral act of love by which God continually calls souls to Himself.”–from the Preface 192pp. Softcover. STK# 8340✱ $14.95 Shipping & Handling 5-10 days 2-4 days USA Foreign Up to $50.00 $50.01 to $100.00 Over $100.00 $4.00 $6.00 Free 25% of subtotal Up to $50.00 $50.01 to $100.00 Over $100.00 $8.00 $10.00 $8.00 Flat fee! ($10.00 minimum) 48 Contiguous States only. UPS cannot ship to PO Boxes. angelus Press 2915 Forest Avenue Kansas City, Missouri 64109 www.angeluspress.org l 1-8 00-9 6 6-73 37 Please visit our website to see our entire selection of books and music.