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Archbishop Lefebvre
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Fr. Franz Schmidberger

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

The

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March 2006
Volume XXIX, Number 3

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ARCHBISHOP LEFEBVRE, THE PAPACY,
THE COUNCIL, & THE COUNCIL POPES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
Fr. Franz Schmidberger

PRESS CONFERENCE: BISHOP FELLAY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
H.E. Bishop Bernard Fellay

Persons
Principles
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It’s Not About
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THE ANGELUS ENGLISH-LANGUAGE ARTICLE REPRINT

Two Key Points for the Church’s Recovery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
Historical Change of Course in the Liturgical Reform . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
Interview with Fr. Rinaldo Falsini

THE MASS & THE CROSS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre

NOTHING NEW UNDER THE SUN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
Dr. John Rao

THE WOMAN OF TODAY
BEFORE THE WOMAN OF ETERNITY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
Fr. Bernard-Marie de Chivré, O.P.
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THE INTERPRETATION
OF THE SECOND VATICAN COUNCIL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
Priests of the French District of the Society of Saint Pius X

ON OUR COVER: An undated picture [© St. Pius X Seminary, Ecône] previously
published on the back cover of The Angelus (May-June, 1991). Fr. Franz Schmidberger,
serving as a deacon, helps administer Holy Communion with Archbishop Lefebvre.

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2

A the Papacy, L
RCHBISHOP

EF

the Council, &
the Council Popes

The Papacy–An Institution
of Our Lord Jesus Christ

Taken from a conference
given by Fr. Franz
Schmidberger, First
Assistant to the Superior
General of the Society of
Saint Pius X, Bishop
Bernard Fellay. Given at
St. Vincent de Paul
Catholic Church,
Kansas City, Missouri
( Jan. 27, 2006).
THE ANGELUS • March 2006 www.angeluspress.org

Simon, son of Jona, originally from Bethsaida in Galilee,
later lived in Capharnaum at the Lake of Genesareth. One day
his brother Andrew, who was also a ﬁsherman “brought him to
Jesus, who, looking upon him, said: Thou art Simon the son of
Jona, thou shalt be called Cephas, which is interpreted Peter [=
the rock]” ( Jn. 1:42). Now, we know from all sacred history that
when God imposes a special name on someone, He imposes with
it a special mission connected with this name. Our Blessed Lord
has so chosen Peter to be the rock on which He would build His
Church, and while looking on him in this ﬁrst meeting He saw the
whole row of popes throughout the history of Christianity.
In all lists of the Apostles, Simon Peter always holds the
ﬁrst place. Our Lord visited his house in Carpharnaum, where
He healed his mother-in-law from a fever. We read about no
other visit of Jesus to the house of another Apostle. One day He
preached from a ship; it was the ship of Peter. We understand
this ship to be the symbol of the Church; and so does Our Lord
preach the enlightening Faith and saving doctrine in and from the
Church of Peter, and from no other “Church.”
We see later on how Our Lord promised to Peter the apostolic
primacy, to be His vicar on earth. We are in the quarters of
Cesarea Philippi, and Jesus asked His disciples saying:

3

EFEBVRE,

Nowhere in the Holy Scripture do we read that Our
Lord has prayed in such a way for any other of His
twelve Apostles; also, we must have in mind that the
prayer of Our Lord, High Priest, is always efﬁcient.
Already here, Our Lord speaks about a conversion
of Peter, and that he would then have the mission to
conﬁrm the Apostles and the faithful in the Faith.
After His resurrection, Jesus instituted Peter as the
supreme shepherd of His ﬂock ( Jn. 21:15ff.). We see
some of the disciples of Jesus going ﬁshing, and after
a fruitless night, in the morning Our Lord standing
at the shore gave them the order to cast again the
net, which then was ﬁlled with a multitude of big ﬁsh.
After breakfast, Jesus said to Peter:
“Simon, son of John, lovest thou Me more than these?”
He saith to Him: “Yea, Lord, Thou knowest that I love
Thee.” He saith to him: “Feed my lambs.” He saith to him
again: “Simon, son of John, lovest thou Me?” He saith to
Him: “Yea, Lord, Thou knowest that I love Thee.” He saith
to him: “Feed my lambs.” He said to him the third time:
“Simon, son of John, lovest thou Me?” Peter was grieved,
because He had said to him the third time: Lovest thou
Me? And he said to Him: “Lord, Thou knowest all things:
Thou knowest that I love Thee.” He said to him: “Feed
my sheep.”

“Whom do men say that the Son of man is?” But they said:
“Some John the Baptist, and others say Elias, and others
Jeremias, or one of the prophets.” But Jesus saith to them:
“But whom do you say that I am?” Simon Peter answered
and said: “Thou art Christ, the Son of the living God.” And
Jesus answering, said to him: “Blessed art thou, Simon BarJona: because ﬂesh and blood hath not revealed it to thee,
but My Father who is in heaven.”

By divine inspiration, you have said who I am. By my
divine word, I will tell you who you are:
“Thou art Peter; and upon this rock I will build My Church,
and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And I
will give to thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven. And
whatsoever thou shalt bind upon earth, it shall be bound
also in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth,
it shall be loosed in heaven.” (Mt. 16:13-19)

The Church of the Incarnate Word would be built
on Peter, the Rock, and Peter will have the keys of
heaven, that is to say, supreme power in the house of
God.
There is another signiﬁcant event for Peter: Our
Lord prayed in a very special manner for him:
And the Lord said: “Simon, Simon, behold Satan hath
desired to have you, that he may sift you as wheat: But I
have prayed for thee that thy faith fail not: and thou, being
once converted, conﬁrm thy brethren.” (Lk. 22:31)

So here the Divine Redeemer accomplished what
He promised in the quarters of Cesarea Philippi, and
instituted Peter as shepherd of the sheep and supreme
shepherd of the shepherds.
Going through the Gospels we see the faithfulness,
devotion, profound faith, and burning love of this
man for the Divine Master. He is even ready to go to
prison and to death with Him (Lk. 22:33).
But this man also had his weaknesses. Just after
the promise to Peter that later on he would be the
rock of the Church, Jesus foretold His Passion to His
disciples:
From that time, Jesus began to shew to his disciples, that
he must go to Jerusalem, and suffer many things from the
ancients and scribes and chief priests, and be put to death,
and the third day rise again. And Peter taking Him, began
to rebuke Him, saying: “Lord, be it far from Thee, this shall
not be unto Thee.” (Mt. 16:21-22)

So he wanted to hinder the Divine Savior from
fulﬁlling the mission His Father entrusted to Him,
that is to say, to redeem us by His painful Passion on
the cross. Peter expected, as most of the Jews, a more
temporal redeemer, he had not yet understood the
way of Calvary. Jesus corrected him with words very
astonishing for the one to whom He had just promised
the keys of heaven:
“Go behind me, Satan! Thou art a scandal unto Me because
thou savourest not the things that are of God but the things
that are of men.” (Mt. 16:23)

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4
Is it not surprising, even very surprising, that Jesus
calls the ﬁrst pope a Satan?
In the night of the Passion, Peter, having testiﬁed
his faithfulness with words, then denied his Master
three times swearing and cursing that he knew not
the man (Mt. 26:74). During three years he had heard
all the heavenly preaching, had seen all the miracles,
and had been warned several times about this hour
of passion–yet he became weak, very weak; but when
the cock crew and Our Lord’s gaze fell upon him,
he understood his great sin and going forth, he wept
bitterly.
Now, we could say that these weaknesses were
in Peter before the sending of the Holy Ghost, by
which the Apostles were conﬁrmed in sanctifying
grace, conﬁrmed in the apostolic mission. But even
after Pentecost we hear about another weakness of
Peter. There were two sorts of Christians in the early
Church: converted Jews and converted heathens, and
the Apostles had well established that these converted
heathens were not bound to the law of Moses, but
they were of the same dignity as the converted Jews,
faith having puriﬁed their hearts. Peter, living in
Antioch, was in communion with both parts until
some of the converted Jews from Jerusalem came to
Antioch. Then Peter withdrew and separated himself
from the converted pagans for fear of the Jewish
Christians from Jerusalem. St. Paul tells us the story in
the second chapter of the Epistle to the Galatians:
But when Cephas was come to Antioch, I withstood him
to the face, because he was to be blamed. For before that
some came from James [Bishop of Jerusalem], he did eat
with the Gentiles: but when they were come, he withdrew
and separated himself, fearing them who were of the
circumcision. And to his dissimulation the rest of the Jews
consented, so that Barnabas also was led by them into that
dissimulation. But when I saw that they walked not uprightly
unto the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas before them
all: “If thou, being a Jew, livest after the manner of the
Gentiles, and not as the Jews do, how dost thou compel the
Gentiles to live as do the Jews?” (Gal. 2:11-14)

St. Paul, the Apostle of the Gentiles, bishop according
to his rank, withstood Peter, the Pope, publicly to his
face, because he walked not uprightly unto the truth
of the Gospel! What a lesson in the history of the
Church!
And still another event is quite remarkable for our
consideration: We already heard about the miraculous
catch of ﬁsh after the resurrection of Our Lord at
the Lake of Genesareth. When John, who was in the
ship with Peter, realized the miracle, he recognized
immediately the author, comprehending this person
on the shore to be the Lord Himself. Peter did not
draw this conclusion, he did not understand. John is
the bishop, Peter is the pope. It is John who makes
Peter aware: “It is the Lord” ( Jn. 21:7). There might
be situations in the Church when a bishop has to
tell the pope: “It is the Lord.” Buddha is not the true
God, nor is Mohammed the true prophet; neither will
Assisi meetings bring peace to earth; there is only
THE ANGELUS • March 2006 www.angeluspress.org

one true God, the Holy Trinity. There is only one
true mediator between God and man, Our Lord Jesus
Christ, God made man, and there can be no peace on
earth beside Him, Prince of peace. Dominus est–it is
the Lord!
Later on Peter died in Rome as a martyr, being
cruciﬁed with the head downwards, after having
founded the local Church at Antioch and the
Apostolic See at Rome; that is why the ofﬁce of
the supreme shepherd of the Church for all times
will be linked to the Bishop of Rome; the pope can
take his residence for a certain time or even for a
long time outside of Rome, but always and only
the Bishop of Rome will be the Vicar of Christ on
earth. That is why the Roman local Church is the
ﬁrst of all local churches in the whole world, she is
Mater and Magistra, mother and teacher of the others.
This very fact makes us understand the importance
of the Roman Church for our being Catholics. In
fact, Divine Providence, which guides all things,
prepared the Roman Empire with its capital for the
Incarnation of the Son of God and the spreading of
His Gospel. When Our Lord was born in Bethlehem,
Judea was under Roman domination, and the Roman
Empire with all its links of culture and trade covered
practically the whole known world. Roman families,
among them many from nobility, supported the
Apostles, placed their houses at their disposal for the
celebration of the Holy Mass, many of which later on
were converted into churches. Many of them not only
gave their goods for the Church but even their lives.
Archbishop Lefebvre in his Spiritual Journey [available
from Angelus Press. Price: $7.95] has written some
wonderful pages about “the providential choice of
Rome as the See of Peter, and the blessings of this
choice for the growth of the Mystical Body of Our
Lord Jesus Christ”:
I believe I must add some words to draw the attention
of our priests and our seminarians to the indisputable fact
of the Roman inﬂuences on our spirituality, on our liturgy,
and even on our theology.
One cannot deny that this is a providential fact. God,
Who leads all things, has in His inﬁnite wisdom prepared
Rome to become the Seat of Peter and center for the
radiation of the Gospel. Hence the adage: Unde Christo e
Romano.
Dom Guéranger, in his Histoire de sainte Cecile, recounts
the great part which members of great Roman families
played in the foundation of the Church, giving their goods
and their blood for the victory and the reign of Jesus Christ.
Our Roman liturgy is the faithful witness of this.
Romanitas is not a vain word. The Latin language is an
important example. It has brought the expression of the
Faith and of Catholic worship to the ends of the world. And
the converted people were proud to sing their Faith in this
language, a real symbol of the unity of the Catholic Faith.
Schisms and heresies are often begun by a rupture with
Romanitas, a rupture with the Roman liturgy, with Latin,
with the theology of the Latin and Roman Fathers and
theologians.
It is this force of the Catholic Faith rooted in Romanitas
that Freemasonry wished to eliminate by occupying the

5
Pontiﬁcal States and enclosing Catholic Rome in Vatican
City. This occupation of Rome by the Masons permitted
inﬁltration of the Church by Modernism and the destruction of Catholic Rome by Modernist clergy and Popes who
hasten to destroy every vestige of Romanitas: the Latin
language, the Roman liturgy. The Slavic Pope [ John Paul
II] is the most determined to change the little which was
kept by the Lateran Treaty and the Concordat. Rome is no
longer a sacred city. He encourages the establishing of false
religions in Rome itself, accomplishing there scandalous
ecumenical meetings. He everywhere pushes for the inculturation in the liturgy, destroying the last vestiges of the
Roman liturgy. He has modiﬁed in practice the status of the
Vatican State. He has renounced coronation, thus refusing
to be a Head of State. This relentlessness against Romanitas
is an infallible sign of rupture with the Catholic Faith that
he no longer defends.
The Roman pontiﬁcal universities have become chairs
of Modernist pestilence. The coeducation of the Gregorian
is a perpetual scandal.
All must be restored in Christo Domino–in Christ the
Lord, in Rome as elsewhere.
Let us love to see how the ways of Divine Providence
and Wisdom pass by Rome. We will conclude that one
cannot be Catholic without being Roman. This applies
also to Catholics who have neither the Latin language nor
the Roman liturgy. If they remain Catholic, it is because
they remain Roman, like the Maronites, for example, by
their ties to the Catholic and Roman French culture which
formed them.
It is, moreover, an error to speak of Roman culture as
Western. The converts from Judaism brought with them
from the Orient all that was Christian, all that which in the
Old Testament was a preparation and could be a component
of Christianity, all that which Our Lord had assumed and
that the Holy Ghost had inspired the Apostles to adopt.
How many times do the epistles of St. Paul teach us on
this subject!
God willed that Christianity, cast in a certain way in the
Roman mold, receive from it a vigorous and exceptional
expansion. All is grace in the divine plan and our Divine
Savior disposes all as the Romans are said to act, that is,
cum consilio et patientia or suaviter et fortiter–with counsel and
patience, sweetly and mightily” (Wis. 8:1).
Ours is the duty to guard this Roman Tradition desired
by Our Lord, as He wished us to have Mary as our Mother.
(Spiritual Journey, pp.71-73)

Peter had his successors as bishop of Rome:
Linus, Cletus, Clemens…until Benedict XVI in our
days. The ﬁrst 35 popes were all martyrs, men who
offered their lives for the Catholic Faith. But we also
see other wonderful personalities on the Apostolic
See: Leo the Great with his wonderful theological
sermons and the strength with which he drove away
Attila; Gregory the Great, sending St. Augustine and
his monks to the Anglo-Saxons to convert them;
Gregory VII, who withstood to the face the German
emperor Henry IV and fought for the liberty of the
Church; St. Pius V, who appealed for a crusade
against the Turks, the Pope of Lepanto, the Rosary
and our Roman Missal; Bl. Pius IX, the Pope of the
Immaculata and of the ﬁrst Vatican Council; St. Pius
X, the great pope in his ﬁght against modernism
and the enemies of Christianity; Pius XII, with his

wonderful statements concerning all the problems of
the social area. They are all the true heirs of St. Peter.
But we also see popes with astonishing weaknesses,
sometimes in their private life, like Alexander VI;
sometimes in their government like the popes in the
10th century, called the Saeculum Obscurum–the Dark
Century; sometimes even weak in the defense of the
Faith like Pope Liberius, who approved of a synod
which excommunicated the great defender of the
divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ, St. Athanasius. And
what must we say about Pope Honorius, who held the
Apostolic See from 625 to 638 and was condemned
by the third Council of Constantinople and even by
Pope Leo II because he was weak in his defence of
Catholic truth, teaching us that there are two natures
in Our Lord, the divine nature and the human nature
with the true human will? After his death Honorius
was excommunicated by the above-mentioned
Council which Leo II approved, but he was never
declared not to have been the pope. He was not
declared directly a heretic, but rather favoring heresy.
So we see that not only the faithfulness and the
love of Peter for his Divine Master passed on to his
successors, but also some of his weaknesses.

Archbishop Lefebvre
and the Council Popes
After this rather long introduction let us see the
attitude of the Archbishop towards the Popes of the
Council, that is to say John XXIII and Paul VI, and
the faithful executor of the Council decrees, John Paul
II.
Already in 1927, Archbishop Lefebvre had gone
through a trial for his devotion to the Roman Pontiff.
What happened? Pope Pius XI condemned Action
Française, which fought for a certain renewal of the
French nation; but its leader, Charles Maurras, was
at least in this moment not a declared Catholic–more
of an agnostic at the time. The Pope, misguided by
bad information, thought that Fr. Le Floch, Rector of
the French Seminary in Rome, was an adept of Action
Française and insisted that he should be dismissed
from his function. For the young seminarian Lefebvre,
who had a profound devotion for the Pope and at
the same time a profound veneration for Father Le
Floch as a son has for his father, this was a difﬁcult
situation. But this did not change or diminish his spirit
of Romanity.
When John XXIII convoked the Council, the
Archbishop was appointed a member of the central
commission for its preparation. He realized the
danger and tried in this preparatory work, and still
more in the Council itself, to eliminate the liberal
inﬂuences as far as he could. He succeeded in many
points, but the Rhine alliance of liberal Council
Fathers and experts was almost almighty, having
the sympathy of John XXIII and Paul VI. The
Archbishop fought as much as he could against the
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THE ANGELUS • March 2006

6
decrees on Religious Liberty (Dignitatis Humanae)
and the Church in the Modern World (Gaudium et
Spes); he was the motor of the Coetus Internationalis
Patrum, a group of about 250 conservative Council
Fathers. He could not hinder the application of these
documents, but his devotion for the Pope was too
profound to attack him personally. A new situation
came about when in 1969 the new missal, the Novus
Ordo Missae, was published and even imposed. The
Archbishop had accepted some previous reforms,
but would not celebrate this new Mass; he simply
continued with the old one. This same year he
gathered some young people around him in Fribourg,
Switzerland, sending them to the university for their
philosophical and theological studies; the year after
he opened the seminary of Ecône with ecclesiastical
approval. But the battle was pre-programmed: In
1974 two prelates from Rome were ordered to make a
canonical visit to Ecône, making during this visit very
strange statements about eternal truth, the physical
resurrection of Our Lord, celibacy, and others;
the Archbishop was then forced to take a public
stand, which includes, not explicitly but implicitly,
statements against the orientation of Paul VI. This is
his famous declaration of November 21, 1974, which is
still very applicable today and our guideline, with no
restrictions, even in present talks with Rome:
We adhere with our whole heart, and with our whole soul
to Catholic Rome, the Guardian of the Catholic Faith and of
those traditions necessary for the maintenance of that Faith,
to eternal Rome, Mistress of Wisdom and Truth.
Because of this adherence we refuse and have always
refused to follow the Rome of neo-Modernist and
neo-Protestant tendencies, such as were clearly manifested
during the Second Vatican Council, and after the Council
in all the resulting reforms.
All these reforms have, indeed, contributed and still
contribute to the demolition of the Church, to the ruin
of the priesthood, to the destruction of the Holy Sacriﬁce
and the Sacraments, to the disappearance of religious life,
and to naturalistic and Teilhardian teaching in universities,
seminaries, and catechetics, a teaching born of Liberalism
and Protestantism many times condemned by the solemn
magisterium of the Church. No authority, even the very
highest in the hierarchy, can constrain us to abandon or
to diminish our Catholic Faith, such as it has been clearly
expressed and professed by the Church’s magisterium for
19 centuries.
“But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach a
gospel to you besides that which we have preached to you,
let him be anathema” (Gal. 1:8).
Is this not what the Holy Father is repeating to us
today? And if a certain contradiction is apparent in his
words and actions, as well as in the acts of various Roman
Congregations, then we choose what has always been
taught, and we turn a deaf ear to the innovations which are
destroying the Church.
The lex orandi (law of prayer) cannot be profoundly
changed without changing the lex credendi (law of belief).
The New Mass is in line with the new catechism, the
new priesthood, new seminaries, new universities, and
the charismatic or Pentecostal church, all of which are in
opposition to orthodoxy and to the age-old magisterium.
THE ANGELUS • March 2006 www.angeluspress.org

This reform, since it has issued from Liberalism and
from Modernism, is entirely corrupt. It comes from heresy
and results in heresy, even if all its acts are not formally
heretical. It is thus impossible for any faithful Catholic who
is aware of these things to adopt this reform, or to submit
to it in any way at all. To ensure our salvation, the only
attitude of ﬁdelity to the Church and to Catholic doctrine,
is a categorical refusal to accept the reform.
It is for this reason that, without any rebellion, bitterness
or resentment, we pursue our work of the formation of
priests under the star of the age-old magisterium, in the
conviction that we can thus do no greater service to the
holy Catholic Church, to the Sovereign Pontiff, and to
future generations.
For this reason we hold firmly to all that has been
believed and practiced by the Church of all time, in her
faith, morals, worship, catechetical instruction, priestly
formation and her institutions, and codiﬁed in the books
which appeared before the Modernist inﬂuence of the late
Council. Meanwhile, we wait for the true Light of Tradition
to dispel the darkness which obscures the sky of Eternal
Rome.
By acting thus we are sure, with the grace of God, and the
help of the Blessed Virgin Mary, St. Joseph and St. Pius X,
of remaining faithful to the Catholic and Roman Church, to
all the successors of St. Peter, and of being ﬁdeles dispensatores
mysteriorum Domini nostri Jesu Christi in Spiritu Sancto. (Taken
from Archbishop Lefebvre and the Vatican, available from
Angelus Press. Price: $14.95.)

During time there were, here and there, priests
like Father De Nantes in France, and little groups in
Europe and America who declared the Pope to be
an heretic, or who even said that he lost the papacy
or never became the pope. Archbishop Lefebvre
wrote to Father De Nantes, who invited him to break
with Rome, with these remarkable words: “If there
is one bishop who will not break with Rome, I am
this bishop.” Nevertheless the Archbishop asked
himself more and more the question: “How is it
possible that the Vicar of Christ supports the liberal
forces, introducing a protestantizing liturgy? How
is it possible that he works for the laicization of the
Catholic States? Is he really the Pope?” Paul VI died
on the 6th of August in 1978. Archbishop Lefebvre for
one moment doubted the legitimacy of the election
of his successor since the cardinals over 80 years
were excluded from the conclave. But when he saw
that the whole Church, and especially the Roman
Church, including the cardinals excluded, accepted
the election, he no longer had any doubts about the
new Pope John Paul I. Unfortunately, the new Pontiff
did not want a crowning ceremony and also defended
religious liberty, saying that he changed his opinion
on this subject during the Council, and when he was
patriarch in Venice he persecuted priests who said the
traditional Mass. His pontiﬁcate was a very short one:
he died after 33 days. His successor was John Paul II
from Poland, who granted an audience to Archbishop
Lefebvre only one month after his election, on
November 18th.
In this meeting John Paul II brought up three
points: 1) “It is said that you are against the pope.”

7
The Archbishop clariﬁed his position saying that
he accepted fully the ﬁrst Vatican Council with the
Dogmatic Constitution Pastor Aeternus. The Pope
seemed to be satisﬁed. 2) “It is said that you are
against the Council.” The Archbishop answered
that he accepted the Council interpreted in light of
Tradition, as the Pope himself had declared shortly
before. Once again the Pope was satisﬁed. It must be
added, nevertheless, that the Archbishop understood
Tradition as a criterion: What could be conformed
could stand; what was ambiguous had to be clariﬁed,
and what was contrary to Tradition had to be
eliminated. 3) “It is said that you are against the new
liturgy.” The Archbishop explained that in fact he had
maintained the old liturgy, having reservations about
the new one. The Pope said that this was a question of
discipline, and that he should settle this with Cardinal
Šeper, whom he called immediately. Cardinal Šeper
came in with these words: “Holy Father, they make
a banner of the old Mass, we cannot grant what they
ask for like this.” The Pope himself left the meeting
excusing himself by other obligations. Cardinal Šeper
told the Archbishop that he would call him later on
to come to see him in Rome; but the conversations
and exchanges of letters showed no result. In 1981 he
died, and Cardinal Ratzinger, whom the Archbishop
had already met together with other cardinals who
were eager to ﬁnd a solution, took the ofﬁce as the
head of the Congregation of Faith, as successor of
Cardinal Šeper. He was also entrusted with the task of
being the intermediary between the Archbishop and
the Holy See.
So immediately there were letters exchanged
which always touched upon the same subjects: The
Council and the Novus Ordo Missae. If the Archbishop
would accept the ﬁrst one and accept the orthodoxy
of the second one, even celebrating it from time to
time, there could be a possible permission for the
celebration of the Latin Tridentine Mass for everyone.
But all these proposals were unacceptable for the
Archbishop and the Society. In 1983 the new Canon
law was published which is the precise juridical
transcription of the Second Vatican Council and its
spirit. The Archbishop once again manifested his
serious reserves. The same year the Pope visited a
protestant church in Rome. In 1985 the Archbishop
presented the Dubia,1 that is to say, questions
concerning religious liberty, to the Holy See; he
was invited by Cardinal Ratzinger to do so. These
Dubia received a very poor answer which was in
no way satisfactory. The Conciliar Church seemed
to be really rooted in a new doctrine. In 1986 the
Pope visited the Synagogue in Rome and announced
a meeting of all religious leaders of the different
Christian denominations and world religions in
Assisi for October of that year. Archbishop Lefebvre
saw in such a meeting a public attack to the ﬁrst
Article of our Creed and the ﬁrst Commandment of
the Decalogue and so, withstood the Pope publicly

in sermons on Holy Thursday and on Easter in
his pontiﬁcal masses. He had no hope any longer
for a quick return of the Roman Authorities to the
traditional teaching, discipline and liturgy of the
Church.
So then, after the canonical visitation of Cardinal
Gagnon in 1987 and some negotiations in April
and May 1988 he ﬁnally consecrated four auxiliary
bishops on the 30th of June that year, who were to
continue his action in the Society of Saint Pius X,
namely, to give the holy orders to the seminarians
and the sacrament of conﬁrmation to the faithful.
He never had the intention to give to these bishops
a regular jurisdiction or to break with Rome; on the
contrary, by this action he wanted to help the Roman
Authorities to ﬁnd the way back to what they have
left in the Council and after the Council. He acted
out of the state of necessity, not of the Society St. Pius
X, but that of the Church which was in danger of
losing the Catholic priesthood and the true Catholic
Mass. The Roman Authorities declared him to be
excommunicated in spite of the fact that the new
Canon law of 1983 foresees no censors at all or at
least only a minor punishment for those who act
out of necessity, even if they are objectively wrong.
Archbishop Lefebvre died in 1991 without regretting
anything, being convinced that with his heroic action
of June 30, 1988, he had rendered the best service to
the popes, the bishops and the whole Church.

Are the Council
Popes True Popes?
Archbishop Lefebvre, after some questions to
himself on this subject and after some hesitations
when he heard about the Assisi meeting, nevertheless
always considered that the Council Popes were
canonically true popes, even if they had a very liberal
spirit and did and continue to do harm to the Church.
He even expressed the opinion that one day the
Church might gather a tribunal in order to examine
how far these popes have damaged the Church and
could come to a condemnation like the third Council
of Constantinople or Pope Leo II concerning Pope
Honorius. Nevertheless he always prayed for the Pope
publicly and asked his priests to do so.
Now let us give the philosophical and theological
arguments proving that the conciliar popes are true
popes in the canonical sense, even if they are ﬁlled
with false philosophical and theological principles and
have done and do a lot of harm to the Church. There
are eight such arguments:

1)

According to Our Lord’s own words related
in Matthew 16:18, His Church is built on
Peter; so this is a Divine Institution which
nobody can change at any time. In every construction
the foundations are central to the construction itself.
There may be only provisional pillars, holding
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THE ANGELUS • March 2006

8
the construction for a short time; staying with this
analogy, we could say that this is the case after the
death of a pope till the election of a new one; but this
is never a long and stable situation.

2)

For every human society authority, a head,
is essential; it is the causa efﬁciens which holds
it together. This is still more true for the
Church with one billion of members in all parts of the
world. It is in open contradiction to the constitution of
the Church to think that there has been no pope since
1958 or 1965.

3)

The vacancy of the Holy See would be
an extraordinary event and situation in
the Church. Every well-meaning faithful
Catholic would recognize this state of things since the
Church is a visible body. But those who claim that the
Holy See is vacant are far from being in agreement
about the date when this happened. Some say that
after the death of Pius XII there was no longer any
legitimate pope; others say that with the approval
of the Council, Paul VI fell into heresy, and so the
Apostolic See has been vacant since 1965; others say
that the determinant event was the publication of the
Novus Ordo Missae; once again, others say that it was
the Assisi meeting by which the Pope ceased to be
pope. If there is no unity among these sedevacantists
in this important question, it is the best proof that the
event itself never happened, otherwise everybody
would agree that from this or that concrete date, we
have no pope.

4)

If the Pope is not pope, all the bishops he
appointed might be true bishops according
to their orders, but they would not be
legitimate bishops with jurisdiction. Now, there is no
longer any resident bishop in the world who was not
appointed by the conciliar popes, and so there would
be no longer any legitimate bishop in the whole
world, which is absolutely contrary to the constitution
of the Church itself, to her indefectibility promised by
Our Lord Himself: “The gates of hell will not prevail
against her.”

5)

Not only would there no longer be any
legitimate residential bishops, but also all
the cardinals are all now appointed by Paul
VI or John Paul II, so now they would not be true
cardinals. But the cardinals are the electors–and the
only electors–of a new pope. How then can a new
pope be elected at any time? Now, the Church is a
perfect society, which means that it can at any time
reach its aim by its own means. To have a pope as
head is essential for the Church; but if the cardinals
are not cardinals, it cannot reach this aim by its
own means and so this state of things would be in
contradiction with the Divine Constitution of the
Church as a perfect society. For the sedevacantist
THE ANGELUS • March 2006 www.angeluspress.org

groups, only a direct intervention of God would be a
possible exit from the crisis.

6)

It is not up to the faithful nor even to priests
and bishops to judge the pope: Prima Sedes
a nemine judicatur, says Canon 1556 of the
canon law of 1917; but it is up to us to keep the faith
at any cost whether the Pope has a good Catholic
spirit or whether he be a liberal.

7)

What are the fruits of those sedevacantist
groups and persons? They are all divided
amongst themselves, and their main activity
is to criticize those who believe that John Paul II was
and that Benedict XVI is a true pope. Moreover, by
their own logic, some of these groups have elected
their own pope and so we have at this moment about
15 of them: Peter II in France, Gregory XVII in Spain
(who died recently), Linus II in England, Pius XIII in
America, etc. You see how such a position ends in a
terrible sectarian spirit.

8)

The liberal mentality of the Council popes
explains perfectly and sufﬁciently the drama
of the papacy in our days, and we do not
have the right to look for stronger explanations if
those are sufﬁcient to explain the situation. In a very
famous sermon delivered on the occasion of the
priestly ordinations in 1982 at Ecône, Archbishop
Lefebvre compared the Church and the drama of
our days with Our Lord and His Passion. He said the
following:
We see Our Lord humiliated and annihilated to a certain
point and ask ourselves how this is possible for Him, being
true God and true man. Now, one part of the people say
that, since this humiliation to such a point is a reality, He
cannot be true God because for God this is impossible.
These are the Arians, followers of Arius, who denied the
Divinity of Christ. Others say: Since He is true God, His
annihilation cannot be real, His Passion certainly was only
in appearance; He only had taken a body in appearance,
but He was not really man.

And the Archbishop made the application to the
Church.
There are people who see the passion of the Church and the
tragedy of papacy, so they conclude that such a degradation
of the papacy is not possible, and so the Pope can not be
the pope. Others draw the contrary conclusion, saying that
since the Pope is pope, all the reforms coming from Rome
must be good; there is only an appearance of bad. And so
they swallow the poison.

Then Archbishop Lefebvre concluded:
We are certainly in front of a mystery. Nobody in the time
of Pius XII would have believed that the Church one day
would undergo such a passion; it even would be absolutely
impossible for her to go through such a passion. But we have
to face the reality, and so we have to maintain the Divine
Institution of Peter on the one hand, and on the other we
cannot deny that these reforms coming from Rome are
destroying the Church.

9
And that is why we hold with all our hearts to
these words of the Archbishop: “Neither liberal nor
modernist on the one hand, nor schismatic on the
other, but Catholic, Roman Catholic.” We want to
preserve and maintain the Catholic Faith, and by
no means do we want to fall into the conciliar and
postconciliar errors; but on the other hand we want
to stay attached to the Holy See forever. Our way
is like a walk on the top of a high mountain with an
abyss on each side. On the occasion of the episcopal
consecrations Archbishop Lefebvre prophesied that
one day Rome will recognize our attitude and thank
us for our action. This is already becoming reality:
In the audience of August 29, 2005, given by Pope
Benedict XVI to our Superior General, Bishop Fellay,
the Pope spoke about this “venerable Archbishop
Lefebvre, this great man of the universal Church.”
Also, the then Cardinal Ratzinger wrote three years
ago to one of our best friends in Germany that he
thanks him for his articles, books, and conferences.
There is, however, terrible damage done to souls
and Christian institutions like the Catholic family,
parishes, seminaries, monasteries, and Catholic States
by this liberal spirit. But there is also a certain danger
of a schismatic spirit, as we see it clearly among the
sedevacantists who no longer have the spirit of the
Church, the sentire cum Ecclesia. A spirit of separation
from Rome always ends very badly as we see for the
Greeks, the Russians, England under Henry VIII,
or the Old Catholics after 1870. We are seeing here
an old general principle, very easy to understand in
theory but often difﬁcult to apply: We must always
hate sin, but love the sinner. Sometimes we hate the
sin so much that we are also inclined to hate the
sinner; on other occasions, we love the sinner so
much that we tend to excuse the sin.

CONCLUSION:
Our Expectations
The new Pope Benedict XVI will certainly not
be the great reformer of the Church as was Gregory
VII or St. Pius X. He is a man full of the ideas of
the Council to which he contributed as an expert,
and he continues and will continue in this line. His
address to the Roman Curia on December 22 is a
true manifestation of how much he defends religious
liberty and the assimilation of the Church to the
modern world with its errors, always condemned by
the popes, especially since the French Revolution,
until the Second Vatican Council. Secondly, he is not
a strong leader and a man of government, but more a
cultivated man of the arts, a university professor. We
must realize that if he would really like to bring about
a reform, then he would meet a lot of objections and
resistance by the liberal forces in the Church. And,
ﬁnally, if you want to bring about a reform you need
the men who will carry it out in their function, in
their place. But where are these men today? Where

are the saints, and where are the great bishops and
theologians?
What we can expect of the new Pope is some
sympathy for the more conservative forces in
the Church and certain favors for the Traditional
Mass. Moreover he might make one or more good
appointments in the Roman Curia and to the bishops’
seats, even among bad ones like the appointment of
Archbishop Levada [as Prefect of the Congregation
for the Doctrine of the Faith]. Concerning the present
ecumenism, we should ask him to show himself to be
the true successor of St. Peter, who on the ﬁrst feast
of Pentecost told the Jews who asked him what they
would have to do in order to be saved, that there is
a threefold condition: Regret your sins and convert,
believe in Jesus Christ and His Divinity, and be
baptized, otherwise, there is no salvation and no hope
of it. Doing this, the ecumenical meetings would very
soon come to an end.
We must all together pray for the Pope, and
pray a lot. You remember that Peter was imprisoned
by King Herod, who wanted to execute him as he
had done with St. James, the ﬁrst martyr among
the Apostles. We read in the Acts of the Apostles
that the whole Church stayed in constant prayer for
Peter, who was delivered by an angel and so escaped
from the hands of Herod. The Council Popes, even
Benedict XVI, are today in a kind of spiritual prison,
the prison of the Council Ideology. We must pray for
the Holy Father since the Church depends almost
entirely on the Pope. A truly Catholic pope is an
enormous benediction; a liberal one is more like a
punishment for the Church.
Let us neither be discouraged nor be of little
faith, seeing the passion of the Church; but neither
let us have illusions about the state of things. The
overcoming of the crisis of the Church depends much
also on each of us; it must be surmounted in ourselves
ﬁrst. We must persevere in our battle like Gedeon,
who fought a large army with only 300 courageous
men; or like the Machabees, where one father with
his ﬁve sons restored the religious order in Israel; or
like Gregory VII, who died in exile with these words
on his lips: “I have loved justice and I have hated
injustice; that is why I die in exile.” He himself did
not see the results of his courageous action, of his
efforts, labors and prayers, but later on his reform
bore its fruits and granted full freedom to the Church.
Virgo ﬁdelis ora pro nobis–Virgin most faithful, pray
for us.
This conference was given by Fr. Franz Schmidberger, First Assistant to the
Superior General, at various chapels of the Society of St. Pius X during the
month of January, 2006. Angelus Press thanks Fr. Schmidberger for his assistance in editing this written version of his speech.
1

The complete title of this study was “Dubia about the Conciliar Declaration on Religious Liberty.” An English version has been published under
the title Religious Liberty Questioned: Archbishop Lefebvre’s Objections
to Vatican II’s Declaration on Religious Liberty (Kansas City: Angelus
Press, 2002. Price: $12.95).
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THE ANGELUS • March 2006

10

On January 13, 2006, Bishop Bernard Fellay was invited to Paris by the
journalists of the Association of Journalists for Religious Information (AJIR).
Over the course of an hour and a half, he answered the questions of some 20
journalists specialized in religious information for the main European press
agencies. The dispatches and articles, for brevity’s sake, could only report
what was said during the press conference very synthetically. This sometimes
gives rather striking summaries. For instance, APIC collected bits and pieces
of what Bishop Fellay said and presented them as the answers to a three-page
interview, whereas the transcript of the conference is at least 20 pages.
You will ﬁnd here below some of the texts of the journalists alongside the
words of Bishop Fellay, transcribed word for word from the recording of the
conference. The comparison between the two is enlightening: it shows, if this
is still necessary, that information which must of necessity be short does not
do justice to every aspect of a complex situation. We must add that this kind of
exercise does not allow the speaker to develop his thoughts as he would during
a conference given to the faithful. In these days of fast information and swirling
rumors, traditional Catholics must keep these realities in mind.

The Holy Father’s
Speech to the Curia
What the Press wrote:
Concerning the address of the Pope to the Curia
on December 22 [See analysis starting on p.36 in this
issue–Ed.], La Croix, in its January 15, 2006 edition
summarized the answer of the Superior General of the
SSPX in this way:
“It is a capital text,” remarked Bishop Fellay. “We see
clearly that the Holy Father is trying to shed a new light
on the Council. At the same time, he concedes that there
had been a discontinuity, at least in the presentation.” On
the whole, this address “gladdens” the Superior General of
the Society. “Even if I think it does not go far enough,” he
adds.

For its part, France Press Agency wrote:
Bishop Fellay “rejoiced” over the address of the Pope to the
Curia on December 22, 2005. The Pope had acknowledged
that “in vast areas of the Church the Council had been rather
laboriously implemented,” stressing that “before as after the
Council, the Church remained the same Church.”
THE ANGELUS • March 2006 www.angeluspress.org

What Bishop Fellay said:
Concerning Benedict XVI, you are not satisﬁed with the
way in which, in his address to the Curia, he precisely
set in opposition this hermeneutic [interpretation] of
discontinuity; there was a discontinuity between the
thinking as it was before and after the Council. And he
supported the hermeneutic of continuity, saying: we
remain in the same tradition of the Church.

Well, we see very, very clearly in this address an
attempt to shed a new light on the Council. I do not
know whether we should say an attempt to save the
Council–that would be my way of looking at it–but in
any case there is a positive will to set a barrier to stop
an interpretation, an understanding of the Council,
which has now been the usual presentation of the
Council for years. We see very, very clearly that the
Pope, under the cover of delicate words, is distancing
himself from the usual presentation of the Council. So
there is a will to present the Council otherwise, at least
on the level of the principles. I do not know what will
be the end result.

C

11

PRESS
CONFERENCE
Bishop Fellay
You did present it as a rupture, too.

Oh yes, quite so, I surely did! And besides, if you
study this address closely, you will see that the Holy
Father concedes that there nevertheless was a rupture,
maybe not in the contents, but certainly in the way it
was presented and implemented. This is what he says
when he tries to show that there would have been no
discontinuity on the level of the principles, principles
which he claims not to be apparent; so he speaks also
of continuity in discontinuity....I think we will have
there a very, very interesting subject for discussion.

This address, rather, causes you to rejoice or you….

Its clarity, its precision, and also its will to
eliminate a certain number of positions which were
really causing us problems in the Church, all these
cause me to rejoice; but I think it does not go far
enough. But it is always a delicate matter to try to
determine how far a movement is going to go. It is
quite clear that he is opening a new vista. How broad
will this vista be? I do not know.

An Apostolic
Administration?
What the Press wrote:
Regarding a possible Apostolic administration
which would allow a regularization of the canonical
situation of the SSPX, La Croix wrote:
What form would this regularization take? It could be
an autonomous status, for instance a personal Apostolic
administration like that created in 2001 in Campos (Brazil)
for the faithful of Bishop Antonio de Castro Mayer, another
integrist Bishop, co-consecrator at the illicit ordinations of
1988. “I am almost sure they will grant it to us,” conﬁded
Bishop Fellay. “Even if we do not want to be Catholics in
a class of their own: we are not asking the old Mass for
ourselves but for all. But maybe we will have to go through
this transitory stage.”

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THE ANGELUS • March 2006

12

What Bishop Fellay said:
Among the problems still pending, do you still
maintain your claim–forgive me for using this
trade-unionist vocabulary–for a special status
for the Society within the Church?

I think Rome will grant it to us, so in this respect
there is no need to claim it. We ﬁnd ourselves rather
in the reverse situation, that is to say, we keep telling
Rome: “But we want to be normal Catholics, we have
no desire for a marginalized status.” If you will forgive
me the comparison, in a zoo; we do not feel at all like
playing the part of the dinosaur to whom a special
status is granted. Because in the discussions we have
been having with Rome for some time already, we are
always told: “Very well, your special charisma will be
respected.” And we retort: “Now, listen, this Mass we
are requesting, we are not requesting it for ourselves.
We are requesting it for everybody. In the past it was
the Mass for everybody, the Catholic Mass, and we are
asking that it be once again the Mass for everybody
and not just ours.” So, in this respect, we are not asking
for a special status; quite the contrary. Maybe we will
have to go through this stage; yes, it is even probable.

Could it be something along the
lines of a prelature like Opus Dei?

I think it will be somewhat different. We are talking
about an Apostolic administration, which is somewhat
different. What is the difference? The prelature pertains
only to the members, i.e., actually the members of
Opus Dei enjoy some, let us say, privileges, but only the
members enjoy them. You must be a member of Opus
Dei. The Society, the members of the Society, strictly
speaking are priests and religious, that’s all. There
is nothing for the faithful. So we must ﬁnd a way to
include also the faithful, obviously.

So this Apostolic administration could be granted
to you, but outside of the bishops, guardians
of the unity of Catholics in diocesan territories.
I think there would be an exemption.

You are sure?

I said, “I think”; and yes, I am pretty sure.

After the manner of what was done in Campos
for instance, or maybe in a broader way?

That’s it, it is along the lines of Campos. That is to
say that per force, at some point, there still are some
relations; it is not a completely independent status.
The status of the faithful, in such a case, is called a
status of mixed jurisdiction, that is to say, Rome does
not withdraw those faithful from the authority of the
bishops, but it allows them to beneﬁt from the parallel
authority found in an administration.
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The State of Necessity
What the Press wrote:
Concerning the state of necessity which the SSPX
invokes to justify the bishops’ consecrations of 1988
as well as its present apostolate, La Croix and La Libre
Belgique differ. Indeed, the French daily wrote:
We are thus heading still more towards a “regularization”
of the Society, rejoices Bishop Fellay, even if the question of
the lawfulness of the bishops’ consecrations of 1988 remains
pending. For Rome, there was no “state of necessity” that
would have justified these ordinations, deplores Bishop
Fellay.

Whereas the Belgian daily summed up:
The “state of necessity” invoked by the Lefebvrists to
remain on the fringe of the Church would have been implicitly
acknowledged by the Pope, to whom the SSPX attributes the
desire “to shed a new light on the Council Vatican II and to
distance himself from its usual presentation.”

What Bishop Fellay said:
As a matter of fact, Bishop Fellay stated that
Benedict XVI did not admit the argument of the state
of necessity, while conceding some reality to this state
of necessity at least in two countries:
The terms used will be rather words like ‘regularization
of a situation’ because, actually, in this respect, there is the
problem of the consecrations themselves, which are censured
by Rome; on our part, we try to explain that the censure does
not apply because of the circumstances, and, let us say, on
the basis of canon law. Rome will say or has attempted to
say through the Pontiﬁcal Council for the Interpretation of
Laws that our argument, i.e., the argument of necessity, was
not valid in that case. To express things more pointedly, let
us say that there is a canon of the new Code of Canon Law
which says that if someone acts out of necessity, he does
not fall under the law; and another canon says that if this
necessity was purely subjective, i.e., if the necessity did not
exist objectively but the person thought there was a necessity,
well, he should not be punished with the maximum penalty
foreseen by the law. These are the arguments we are using to
say, on the one hand that we believe there is a necessity, and
even an objective state of necessity; but, at least, that even
if Rome does not want to acknowledge this objective state,
there remains the subjective point of view; and consequently
we should not be punished with the maximum penalty.
There was a thesis on this subject, a master in Canon Law
written on this theme, and it was received by the Gregorian
University. Then the Pontiﬁcal Council for the Interpretation
of Laws intervened to say that, in this case, they could not
speak of necessity because otherwise, of course, it introduced
a principle of possible anarchy in the Church.
Nevertheless, and this is very interesting too, during
the private audience with the Pope, the Pope re-used the
argument saying: “You may not justify your activity by
referring to a state of necessity” giving as an explanation: “I
am trying,” he said, “to solve the problems”; such were his
very words. It is at the same time an avowal: it means that
there are problems; if he tries to solve them, it is because

13
the problems still exist. And a few minutes later, in his
explanation, he himself said: “We should see if there is not
a state of necessity in France and in Germany.” This shows
that after all our argument is not so bad. This was just a very
small development to say that.

In what would there be a state of
necessity in France and in Germany?

He did not tell me; he did not say what. First, I
wondered, “Why these two countries?” Now, this is
a purely personal explanation. I think that the Holy
Father, at that point, was referring to the liturgical
problems and the opposition that freedom for the
old Mass can meet in these two countries. I am not
sure this is it, but it is my attempt at an explanation.
Because, if I compare France and Germany with the
other countries in the world, truly I, for my part,
cannot see much difference. It is true that from the
liturgical viewpoint, in the United States, for instance,
there is much more freedom from many more bishops;
there are at least 150 dioceses where the Tridentine
Mass is celebrated, where it is called the Indult Mass,
i.e., the bishop give the permission. But when we speak
of a state of necessity, we consider something else.
There is not only the liturgy, there is all the life of the
Church, there is the teaching of the Faith…

The Future
What the Press wrote:
Concerning the determination to proceed by slow
or rapid stages, in the relations between Rome and
Ecône, La Croix reported:
The integrist leader, who met Cardinal Dario Castrillon
Hoyos, president of the Ecclesia Dei commission on December
15, states that he can even feel from the Vatican a determination
to solve the problem as quickly as possible. “Rome wants to
go fast, but we are not so sure that we want to go that fast,”
nevertheless tempers Bishop Fellay, who considers that “if we
were to sign today, all our faithful would not follow us.”

What Bishop Fellay said:
Did you set a time line with Rome?

We are working on it. I cannot say it already exists.
The only thing I can say precisely is that Rome would
like to go fast, and it seems to us that we cannot go that
fast.

Rome would like to go fast. Does
that mean that they set a time line?

No. At the very beginning, in the year 2000, I met
Cardinal Castrillon on December 29th. At that time, he
said “The Pope would like everything to be settled for
Easter,” so Easter 2001; and see, we are now in 2006.

I think we are making progress, but slow progress.
This is due to several elements. I think that one
of the elements that is slowing things down is the
psychological element. I tried to explained that to
Rome, saying: “Listen, the people who come to us are
persons that have been hurt, scandalized, and who, at
a given time, took a step that cost them a great deal.
That is, they found themselves before a choice, and
the choice was either to carry on with a situation that
was scandalizing them or to join us knowing that they
would ﬁnd themselves under Church censures. And
that is never pleasant to ﬁnd yourself censured by the
Church. Nevertheless, they rather took that step than
remain in the situation they were in. Now, how can
you imagine, how can you think that these faithful
ﬁnd themselves again in their previous situation as if
nothing had happened in between?” That is one thing,
and there is also what I would designate under the
word “mistrust.” In our circles we “do not trust” Rome,
and it takes quite something to overcome this mistrust,
to take stock of the present situation to see what did
move, what changed, in which direction it is heading.
And all this takes time.
Many questions prevented Bishop Fellay from
completing his answer. He was about to add what is
summed up in the following paragraph taken from his
conference of December 11, 2005, at St. Nicolas du
Chardonnet:
With the Roman authorities, I concluded saying: “If you
want to regain our conﬁdence, words will not sufﬁce. It will
require acts. You must regain control. You must condemn
what must be condemned, the heresies, the errors. Whether
they pertain to faith, to morals, to discipline, to the liturgy,
these acts of condemnation must be known. Now, there must
also be positive acts. Catholic life, which is presently made
impossible in the ofﬁcial Church, the normal, traditional life
must be made possible again. And this can be done only by
fostering Tradition.”

At the very beginning of the conversation with the
journalists, Bishop Fellay had already declared:
On Rome’s part, we can feel a desire to settle the problem,
if I may say so, the problem created by the Society, as soon
as possible. This is certainly what the Pope, the Holy Father,
wants. Concretely, what does this mean? It means that Rome
advocates a regularization relatively soon.
On our part, for once, if I may use this term, we somewhat
put on the brakes. This does not mean that we will oppose
a regularization, but we would not like to short-circuit on
important issues which would remain, which would cause
problems later on. It is better to try and solve the problems
before rather than after.

After the conference, to a journalist who privately
asked him if he nevertheless foresaw a date for a
reconciliation with Rome, Bishop Fellay jokingly
answered, “Yes, ten years from now!”
These excerpts from Bishop Fellay’s press conference are taken from DICI (Feb.
4, 2006), the press agency of the Society of Saint Pius X. Angelus Press slightly
edited some of the grammar to make it more accessible to English readers.

www.angeluspress.org

THE ANGELUS • March 2006

14

Persons
Principl

It’s Not About
It’s About

A CATECHISM
OF CATHOLIC
SOCIAL
TEACHING

Part VI
With another installment,
The Angelus continues the
serialization of the book
Catechism of Catholic Social
Teaching by Amintore Fanfani
(translated by Fr. Henry J.
Yannone, The Newman Press,
1960), which will run monthly
until its conclusion. He was
the author of articles and
books on economics, including
Catholicism, Protestantism, and
Capitalism, available from
Angelus Press for $14.95.
THE ANGELUS • March 2006 www.angeluspress.org

HEADING TWO:

THE FAMILY
SOCIETY
CHAPTER 4. The Family Society
the separation of
permissible?
49) Iscouples

For grave reasons, and when all other remedies have
failed, the separation of couples is allowed.
Leo XIII: When, indeed, matters have come to such a pitch
that it seems impossible for them to live together any longer,
then the Church allows them to live apart, and strives at the
same time to soften the evils of this separation by such remedies
and helps as are suited to their condition; yet she never ceases
to endeavor to bring about a reconciliation, and never despairs
of doing so. (Arcanum, §25)

ns;
ples
a true marriage
be dissolved?
50) Can

Since the marriage bond is by its very nature
indissoluble, no authority in the world can dissolve
it, if the marriage is ratiﬁed and consummated. The
annulments, improperly so-called, are veriﬁcations,
based on certain proofs, of the non-existence of the
bond.
Leo XIII: ...that no power can dissolve the bond of
Christian marriage whenever this has been ratiﬁed and
consummated. (Arcanum, §25)

51)

What evil effects
are produced by divorce?

Divorce favors inconsiderate unions, renders marriage unstable, encourages inﬁdelity, weakens
parental authority, perverts morals, brings damage
to the well-being and the rearing of offspring, leads
entire nations to ruin.
Leo XIII: Matrimonial contracts are by it made
variable, mutual kindness is weakened, deplorable
inducements to unfaithfulness are supplied, harm is
done to the education and training of children, occasion
is afforded for the breaking up of homes, the seeds
of dissension are sown among families, the dignity of
womanhood is lessened and brought low, and women
run the risk of being deserted after having ministered
to the pleasures of men. Since, then, nothing has such
power to lay waste families and destroy the mainstay
of kingdoms as the corruption of morals, it is easily
seen that divorces are in the highest degree hostile to
the prosperity of families and states, springing as they

15

A m i n t o r e

F a n f a n i

(1908-99) Former Prime Minister of Italy and a professor of
Economic History at the Catholic University of Milan, Italy.

do from the depraved morals of the people, and, as
experience shows us, opening out a way to every kind
of evil-doing in public as well as in private life. (Arcanum,
§17)
Leo XIII: When the stability which is imparted to it
by religious wedlock is lost, it follows that the power of
the father over his own children, and the duties of the
children toward their parents, must be greatly weakened.
(Quod Apostolici Muneris, §8)

52)

What are the beneﬁts that ﬂow from
the indissolubility of matrimony?

The indissolubility of matrimony confers great
security to the consorts, inﬁdelity is contained,
mutual help enhanced, the care and the education of
children is favored, morals are protected, society is
placed on the path of tranquillity and order.
Pius XI: [Advantages derived from the indissolubility
of marriage are:] First of all, both husband and wife possess a positive guarantee of the endurance of this stability
which assures that generous yielding of their persons and
the intimate fellowship of their hearts.... Besides, a strong
bulwark is set up in defense of a loyal chastity against
incitements to inﬁdelity, should any be encountered
either from within or from without. Any anxious fear
lest in adversity or old age the other spouse would prove
unfaithful is precluded and in its place there reigns a calm
sense of security. Moreover, the dignity of both man and
wife is maintained and mutual aid is most satisfactorily
assured....In the training and education of children...
it plays a great part....For experience has taught that
unassailable stability in matrimony is a fruitful source of
virtuous life and of habits of integrity. Where this order
of things obtains, the happiness and well-being of the
nation is safely guarded. (Casti Connubii, §37)

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THE ANGELUS • March 2006

16

53)

What are the guarantees for
the well-being of the family?

The family will obtain a full measure of well-being
if set up according to Christian principles; it shall
receive all possible aids from religion, shall be
cemented by the love of parents, prudently directed
by the authority of the father, and shall by the free
exercise of its rights attend to the education of
offspring.
Leo XIII: If the family is governed by the rules of
Christian life, each member of it will gradually become
accustomed to cherish religion and piety, to reject with
horror all false and pernicious doctrines, to practice
virtue, to render obedience to the authorities, and to
repress the insatiable egotism which so greatly debases
and enfeebles human nature. (Inscrutabili Dei Consilio,
§15)
Leo XIII: They [husband and wife] are bound, namely
to have such feelings for one another as to cherish
always very great mutual love, to be ever faithful to their
marriage vow, and to give to one another an unfailing
and unselﬁsh help. The husband is the chief of the family,
and the head of the wife...[who] must be subject to her
husband and obey him; not, indeed, as a servant, but as
a companion, so that her obedience shall be wanting in
neither honour nor dignity...both in him who commands
and in her who obeys, a heavenborn love guiding both
in their respective duties. (Arcanum, §8)
Pius XI: The family therefore holds directly from the
Creator the mission and hence the right to educate the
offspring, a right inalienable because inseparably joined
to the strict obligation, a right anterior to any right
whatever of civil society and of the State, and therefore
inviolable on the part of any power on earth. (Divini
Illius Magistri)

54)

To achieve its perfection, does
the family need to be integrated
in civil society or the State?

The inadequacy of the means necessary for the
family to reach its ends, makes the integrating
action by the State useful and sometimes absolutely
indispensable. This action, however, must be
contained within the limits of the well-being of
the family itself and must enhance, rather than
infringe upon, the rights of the family or diminish its
possibilities.
Leo XIII: Wherefore, provided the limits be not transgressed which are prescribed by the very purposes for
which it exists, the family has, at least, equal rights with
the State in the choice and pursuit of those things which
are needful to its preservation and its just liberty. We say,
at least equal rights; for since the domestic household
THE ANGELUS • March 2006 www.angeluspress.org

is anterior both in idea and in fact to the gathering of
men into a commonwealth, the former must necessarily
have rights and duties which are prior to those of the
latter, and which rest more immediately on nature. If
the citizens of a State, if the families, on entering into
association and fellowship, experienced at the hands
of the State hindrance instead of help, and found their
rights attacked instead of being protected, such association were rather to be repudiated than sought after. The
idea, then, that the civil government should, at its own
discretion, penetrate and pervade the family and the
household, is a great and pernicious mistake. True, if a
family ﬁnd itself in great difﬁculty, utterly friendless, and
without prospect of help, it is right that extreme necessity
be met by public aid....In like manner, if within the walls
of the household there occur a grave disturbance of
mutual rights, the public power must intervene to force
each party to give the other what is due....But the rulers
of the State must go no further: nature bids them stop
here. Paternal authority can neither be abolished by the
State nor absorbed. (Rerum Novarum, §§10-11)
Pius XI: Now, since it is no rare thing to ﬁnd that
the peculiar purpose, the generation and formation of
offspring spring...has priority of nature and therefore of
rights over civil society. Nevertheless, the family is an
imperfect society, since it has not in itself all the means
for its own complete development...[but] ﬁnds its own
suitable temporal perfection precisely in civil society.
(Divini Illius Magistri)
Pius XI: Now, since it is no rare thing to ﬁnd that the
perfect observance of God’s commands and conjugal
integrity encounters difﬁculties because husband and
wife are in straitened circumstances, their necessities
must be relieved as far as possible. And so, in the ﬁrst
place, every effort should be made...namely, that in
the state such economic and social methods should be
adopted as will enable every head of a family to earn as
much as, according to his station in life, is necessary for
himself, his wife, and for the rearing of his children....
Care, however, must be taken that the parties themselves, for a considerable time before entering upon
married life, should strive to dispose of, or at least to
diminish, the material obstacles in their way....Provision
must be made also, in the case of those who are not selfsupporting, for joint aid by private or public guilds.
When these means which We have pointed out do
not fulﬁll the needs, particularly of a larger or poorer
family, Christian charity toward our neighbor absolutely
demands that those things which are lacking to the needy
should be provided; hence it is incumbent on the rich
to help the poor, so that, having an abundance of this
world’s goods, they may not expend them fruitlessly or
completely squander them, but employ them for the
support and well-being of those who lack the necessities
of life.
If, however, for this purpose, private resources do not
sufﬁce, it is the duty of the public authority to supply for
the insufﬁcient forces of individual effort....Hence, in
making the laws and in disposing of public funds they
must do their utmost to relieve the needs of the poor....
(Casti Connubii, §§129-126)

si si no no
THE ANGELUS ENGLISH-LANGUAGE ARTICLE REPRINT

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

March 2006

Reprint #68

TWO KEY POINTS
FOR THE CHURCH’S
RECOVERY
It seems to us useful to spell out two points necessary for the
Church’s welfare, the unavoidable paths to follow not only for
a recovery, but for a spiritual renaissance that will be solid and
fruitful. It must not be forgotten that, however dark the situation,
the Church possesses within herself not only the antibodies to
resist attacks internal and external, but also all the resources for
becoming more resplendent than ever. For the Church is not a
human work; she does not have as Founder and Spouse a man,
however rich and powerful he might be. The Church was born
from the pierced Heart of Jesus: it is there that she dwells, that
she is nourished, and whence she receives her whole being. It
is this origin and this vital bond with the divine Spouse which
found the ﬁrm hope of all her true children, and which prevent
pain and sorrow from becoming discouragement and pessimism.

17

THE ANGELUS ENGLISH-LANGUAGE ARTICLE REPRINT

1

Necessity of Returning to the
Traditional Deﬁnition of Truth

“Necessity of Returning to the Traditional
Deﬁnition of Truth”: this is the title of a surprisingly
timely article by Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange.1 Indeed, it
must be realized that the current confusion has not
only affected the faith and the supernatural, but it
has also blighted the natural domain of reason. Since
the act of faith belongs to the faculty of the intellect,2
it is clear that any substantial disorder affecting the
intellect must affect faith.
The proper and essential end of the intellect is
truth, which has been magisterially deﬁned by St.
Thomas Aquinas as “adæquatio rei ad intellectum,”3 the
conformity of thing and intellect. From this adhesion
(or even adherence) of the intellect to the real ﬂow
the immutable laws (principles of non-contradiction,
causality, and ﬁnality) which govern reasoning. The
dynamic of consciousness, clearly analyzed by St.
Thomas Aquinas, originates in this opening of the
mind to external reality, to being:
Illud quod primo intellectus concipit quasi notissimum et in quo
omnes conceptiones resolvit est ens–that which the intellect
ﬁrst conceives as, in a way, the most evident, and to which
it reduces all its concepts, is being.4

On this passage as well as on others treating of this
subject, countless considerations of a philosophical
nature might be made; but what interests us here is
simply to reafﬁrm, in face of the confusion of modern
thought, that it is in the (Aristotelian) wonder at the
veriﬁcation of the existence of a thing that knowledge
or understanding arises, and not in Cartesian doubt.5
Knowledge is an opening to being and its laws, which
the intellect ﬁnds “outside itself” and not by producing
or positing it. The intellect is by nature open and in
relation to being as sight to colors.
To anyone unfamiliar with philosophy, this
discussion can seem to be about matters of little
importance and without any connection to the current
crisis. But in reality, modern thought has gone astray
over this very question: the understanding of the
relation between being and thought. Does the former
determine the latter, or, as the idealists teach, does the
latter found the former? Is it thought which conforms
or, so to speak, obeys reality, or the inverse? This
is the question St. Pius X profoundly elucidated in
his writings against modernism, as Marcel De Corte
insightfully afﬁrmed:
The evil which afﬂicts the individual man...is subjectivism.
The intellect renounces its power to know things as they
are in themselves, independently of the knowing mind. It
deprives itself of the trampoline of reality: why be surprised,
then, that it owns itself incapable of rising to the Origin
of reality? But by exiling itself from reality, the intellect
automatically turns inward upon itself.

18

Nothing will exist for it any longer but what is manifest
within it: no longer the things in themselves, but the ideas
which it makes of things. Thus, it is no longer subject
to reality, nor to the Originator of reality. The intellect
no longer depends upon anything but itself, its power
to produce ideas, inﬁnitely malleable entities which are
henceforth subject to its creative power. The world is what
I think of the world.6

If the ﬁrst action of the intellect is not
acknowledged to be its opening to reality; if the
intellect does not accept having reality for the rule and
norm of its action, then everything is called, at least
potentially, in question:
The truth is the matching of mind and reality. If modernism
divorces reality from the principle of the real, how could
there still be a single eternal and necessary truth in the
domain of faith and of social life?...Forms and categories are
works which the mind has produced and which it dominates,
of which it can, in short, free itself.7

It is more urgent than ever to have clear ideas
about what Hegel called the “beginning” of thought;
without this lucidity, nothing stable can be built.
The supreme authority of the Church, the Sovereign
Pontiff, will sooner or later have to forcefully and
repeatedly reafﬁrm this essential point against those
who undermine dogma and truth in their foundation,
establishing the bases for the accomplishment of the
Satanic project: “eritis sicut Deus–you will be as God”:
Coming from subjectivism, the modernist heresy returns
to subjectivism, dethroning God and placing man in His
place....Since the human consciousness is not linked to
anything beyond itself, it can only reach God within itself.8

In the domain of theology, accepting the
revolution of modern thought means radically
undermining the possibility of understanding Catholic
doctrine eodem sensu eademque, a speciﬁc obligation of
every Catholic. At the end of the article cited above,
Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange, launched a vigorous, speciﬁc
appeal:
What is sure is that it is necessary to return to the
traditional deﬁnition of truth: adæquatio rei et intellectus,
the conformity of judgment with exterior being and its
immutable laws. Dogmas suppose this definition....It is
not by an arbitrary option, but by its very nature that our
intellect adheres to ontological value and to the absolute
necessity of ﬁrst principles as laws of reality. It is only thus
that the traditional deﬁnition of truth which the dogmas
suppose can be maintained.9

This reason, once strong and humble, with all the
consequences which ﬂow from it, is the conditio sine
qua non for building on rock and not on sand, and
there are no worse enemies than those who attempt to
deny or conceal it: this is the ﬁrst necessary point of
departure for a true reform of the Church.

2

Necessity of Returning to
the Foundation of the Faith

The essence of the act of faith is the adhesion of
the intellect to truths revealed by God in virtue of the
THE ANGELUS
March 2006

authority of the One who reveals. One does not
believe because the content of the faith is evident,
nor because it is in agreement with personal or
contemporary aspirations and exigencies; the formal
reason of faith is God who has revealed, and the
respect of the intellect is owed to Him, because He
can neither deceive nor be deceived.
Divine Revelation is transmitted to us and
clearly interpreted by the Church’s Magisterium,
to which is owed humble, ﬁlial assent, whether that
teaching authority is expressed in its extraordinary
form or its ordinary form. It is not possible that the
Church could be mistaken when it teaches a truth
or condemns an error for centuries. By its divine
origin, the faith has a certitude which the most
evident human knowledge cannot have (a certitude,
we repeat, due to the One who reveals, and not to
the intrinsic evidence of what is revealed). And,
because of this divine origin, whoever denies a
single article of faith saps the faith at its base, as St.
Thomas clearly explains:
...whoever does not adhere, as to an infallible and
divine rule, to the teaching of the Church, which proceeds
from the First Truth manifested in Holy Writ, has not the
habit of faith, but holds that which is of faith otherwise
than by faith....Now it is manifest that he who adheres to
the teaching of the Church, as to an infallible rule, assents
to whatever the Church teaches; otherwise, if, of the
things taught by the Church, he holds what he chooses to
hold, and rejects what he chooses to reject, he no longer
adheres to the teaching of the Church as to an infallible
rule, but to his own will.10

Now, it is clear that, by reason of the stable
nature of truth and of the One who reveals, no one,
be he within the Church or without, can arrogate
to himself the power to teach something different
or even opposed to what the Church received from
the Lord and has transmitted over the centuries. To
those who feared that such an afﬁrmation would
prevent any progress in the Church, St. Vincent of
Lerins replied:
But someone will say perhaps: Shall there, then, be
no progress in Christ’s Church? Certainly; all possible
progress....Yet on condition that it be real progress, not
alteration of the faith. For progress requires that the
subject be expanded on. Alteration demands that it be
transformed into something else.11

The second thing necessary for resolving the
current crisis and relaunching the Church on its
apostolic mission is to disencumber it of all the
positions which claim to introduce a change in
relation to all the teachings of the constant ordinary
and extraordinary Magisterium. Dogma in the
Church has undergone great development; but
that is due to its intrinsic potentialities (the external
circumstances, like the danger of heresy, were but
incidental factors). In other words, it was question
of a deeper penetration of the truth revealed and
received, a penetration which, with the aid of
reason, allowed all the logical consequences to be
THE ANGELUS
March 2006

What is sure is that it is necessary
to return to the traditional deﬁnition
of truth: adæquatio rei et intellectus,
the conformity of judgment with
exterior being and its immutable laws.
Dogmas suppose this deﬁnition....
It is not by an arbitrary option, but
by its very nature that our intellect
adheres to ontological value and
to the absolute necessity of ﬁrst
principles as laws of reality. It is only
thus that the traditional deﬁnition of
truth which the dogmas suppose can
be maintained. (“Nécessité de revenir,”
197-98)

FR. GARRIGOU-LAGRANGE
But someone will say perhaps:
Shall there, then, be no progress
in Christ’s Church? Certainly;
all possible progress....Yet
on condition that it be real
progress, not alteration of the
faith. For progress requires that
the subject be expanded on.
Alteration demands that it be
transformed into something else.
(Commonitorium, XXIII [English
translation by the Rev. C. A.
Heurtley, D.D.])

ST. VINCENT OF LERINS
...[W]hoever does not adhere, as to an
infallible and divine rule, to the teaching
of the Church, which proceeds from
the First Truth manifested in Holy Writ,
has not the habit of faith, but holds
that which is of faith otherwise than
by faith....Now it is manifest that he
who adheres to the teaching of the
Church, as to an infallible rule, assents
to whatever the Church teaches;
otherwise, if, of the things taught by
the Church, he holds what he chooses
to hold, and rejects what he chooses
to reject, he no longer adheres to
the teaching of the Church as to an
infallible rule, but to his own will.
(Summa Theologica, II, II, Q.5, Art.3.)

ST. THOMAS AQUINAS
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19

THE ANGELUS ENGLISH-LANGUAGE ARTICLE REPRINT

drawn out. What is happening today, on the contrary–
take for example the question of religious liberty–
constitutes an alteration caused by the acceptance
within the bosom of the Church of the principles of
modern thought (in this example, the principle of the
absolute liberty of conscience), principles condemned
many times by the sovereign Pontiffs. Faced with this,
it is necessary to meditate, word by word, on what St.
Vincent of Lerins expressed with surprising relevance
to the current situation:
On the other hand, if what is new begins to be mingled
with what is old, foreign with domestic, profane with sacred,
the custom will of necessity creep on universally, till at last
the Church will have nothing left untampered with, nothing
unadulterated, nothing sound, nothing pure; but where
formerly there was a sanctuary of chaste and undeﬁled
truth, thenceforward there will be a brothel of impious and
base errors....

This, I say, is what the Catholic Church, roused
by the novelties of heretics, has accomplished by the
decrees of her Councils,–this, and nothing else,–she
has thenceforward consigned to posterity in writing
what she had received from those of olden times only
by tradition, comprising a great amount of matter in
a few words, and often, for the better understanding,
designating an old article of the faith by the characteristic
of a new name.12

Practical Conclusions
It is clear, by the very avowal of the reigning
Pontiff, then Cardinal, that the Vatican Council II
constitutes, in certain of its texts (Dignitatis Humanae,
Gaudium et Spes, Unitatis Redintegratio, to name only
the most controversial), a novelty that contradicts
the past, an opening to the “modern world” to which
the Church had been opposed until Pope Pius XII.
As long as [churchmen] remain attached to these
positions, which can make no claim to a place within
the Church’s prior teaching, a true renaissance of
the Church will not be possible. They might happen
to agree on the condemnation of abuses, on the
miserable condition of the Catholic world at present,
on the disquieting state of the world today, etc., but
on the most important and most urgent point, that is
to say, the remedy, they can only be at the antipodes
of the true solution.
His Holiness knows well that the question of
Tradition cannot be postponed much longer; but the
key point consists in understanding that it does not
just involve the “problem” of the Society of Saint Pius
X. To ofﬁcially welcome the world of Tradition means
recognizing that the solution to all the problems
which afﬂict the Church and the world resides in
unconditional ﬁdelity to all that the Church has
transmitted to us without alteration to the present. It
is only thus, by a humble and conﬁdent surrender to
God, mistrusting all human calculations and forecasts,

20

that they will be able to open the way not only to a
restoration, but also to a true reform of the Church
which will possess all the vigor and dynamism of
which she will undoubtedly stand in need.
They must not be afraid to reafﬁrm all that the
Church has always taught; it matters little if these
principles ring false in ears deformed by the modern
mentality. They must be faithful to the Lord and to
His Church, and not to the world and its expectations.
The only true charity which we can do to the
wayward world is to be faithful to the Tradition of
the Church; to fearlessly teach once again all that has
been handed down to us, relying exclusively upon
God’s help.
Isaias prophesied:
Woe to them that go down to Egypt for help, trusting in
horses, and putting their conﬁdence in chariots, because
they are many: and in horsemen, because they are very
strong: and have not trusted in the Holy One of Israel, and
have not sought after the Lord.
For thus saith the Lord to me: Like as the lion roareth,
and the lion’s whelp upon his prey, and when a multitude
of shepherds shall come against him, he will not fear at their
voice, nor be afraid of their multitude: so shall the Lord of
hosts come down to ﬁght upon mount Sion, and upon the
hill thereof...so will the Lord of hosts protect Jerusalem,
protecting and delivering, passing over and saving.13

It is only by the courage of ﬁdelity to that which
the world considers foolishness, folly, and fanaticism,
but which is, on the contrary, to paraphrase St. Paul,
the wisdom and the power of God, that the Reign
of the Hearts of Jesus and Mary will be inaugurated.
Faced with such terrible dangers and the pitiful reality
which we have before our eyes, there is but one road
to take: “Faith, my brethren, more faith!”14
This act of courageous faith it is that we await
from the sovereign Pontiff, which, alone, will
enable the Church to be reborn more beautiful and
resplendent than ever.
Brunone
Translated by Angelus Press from the French-language edition of SiSiNoNo,
the Courrier de Rome (Sept., 2005).
Fr. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, “Nécessité de revenir à la déﬁnition
traditionelle de la vérité,” Angelicum, 3 (1948), 185-98.
2
Summa Theologica, II II, Q.2, Art.2, “Cum enim credere ad intellectum
pertineat.”
3
I Sent., XIX, Q.5, Art.1. The deﬁnition “adæquatio rei et intellectus” is
equivalent.
4
De Veritate, Q.1, Art.1.
5
[“I think, therefore I am.”–Ed.]
6
Marcel De Corte, La grande hérésie.
7
Ibid.
8
Ibid.
9
Garrigou-Lagrange, “Nécessité de revenir,” 197-98.
10
Summa Theologica, II, II, Q.5, Art.3.
11
Commonitorium, XXIII [English translation by the Rev. C. A. Heurtley,
D.D.]
12
Ibid.
13
Is. 31:1, 4-5.
14
L. Orione, Au nom de la divine Providence (In the name of Divine Providence) (Milan: Piemme, 1994), 30.
1

THE ANGELUS
March 2006

Historic Change of Course
in the Liturgical Reform
Interview with Fr. Rinaldo Falsini

A collection of interviews with Fr. Rinaldo Falsini1
has just arrived in Italian bookstores. The Franciscan
tells about the years of his formation, his debut in the
liturgical movement, his point of view on the conciliar
decree on the liturgy, and his forecasts for the future.
One comes across information and reﬂections that are
worth taking into consideration.
It seems especially opportune to pause over the
aspects which help to evaluate, on one hand, the
distance already covered by the “liturgical reform,”
and on the other, to ﬁll in the contours of what is
“simmering” while waiting to be assimilated and then
put into place without provoking brutal ruptures,
and thus without provoking reactions hostile to the
progressive strategy.

from what existed before. And they afﬁrm this with
competence, because they know well that the reform
that saw the light of day in 1969 was in reality the
fruit of a long work begun in the 1920’s, and which
ripened in the bosom of what was called “the liturgical
movement.” Falsini is thus right when he afﬁrms:

Continuity or “Historic
Change of Course”

In the perspective of the Fathers of an authentically
Catholic liturgical renewal, especially St. Pius X and
Dom Prosper Gueranger, there is one element that
characterizes the physiognomy of Catholic worship: all
the liturgical action is oriented towards the gloriﬁcation
and adoration of God, and thus to the forgetfulness
of self. Consequently, the active participation of the
faithful called for in the ﬁrst instance by Pope St. Pius
X in the motu proprio Tra le Sollecitudini,3 then by
Pope Pius XII in Mediator Dei, consists principally in
entering into the dynamic of Catholic worship, which
is wholly directed towards God; a dynamic in some
sense ecstatic in the literal meaning of the word (to
stand outside oneself). One readily understands that
in the Catholic conception of the Mass, the didactic
and exhortatory ends are subordinate to this ﬁrst
aspect, and, which is even more important, that it takes
shape based upon this orientation. Souls that allow
themselves to be formed by the Catholic liturgical
spirit will adopt the interior conduct designated by
the Lord as the only way of approaching the Father:
adoration in spirit and in truth. They will advance ever
further and better in the permanent adoration which
the Church offers her Spouse, and they will orient their

Scarcely had it been imposed from “above” when
the new rite of Mass provoked disorientation and
general discontent. The “people of God” of whom
one speaks so much found itself constrained to accept
a reform that it had never desired, even though the
liturgists afﬁrmed that they had done everything for
“pastoral” reasons, to deliver the Christian people
oppressed by the tyranny of clericalism and baroque
rubricism.
The “reformers” had to begin to make themselves
an arsenal to defend their position against the
criticisms of the “traditionalists.” The leitmotiv of
these apologies for the new Mass goes along these
lines: no single modiﬁcation of the Missal of St. Pius
V constituted a rupture with the Tridentine Mass;
consequently, the reform did not introduce elements
contrary to the law of belief, the lex credendi, or at
least dangerous to it. They justify, for example, the
expansion of the Liturgy of the Word as a legitimate
emphasis of an element already present in the Missal
of St. Pius V.
The most openly progressive liturgists,
however, give proof of a greater coherence. They
acknowledge that what was born of the liturgical
reform is something new, profoundly different

I believe that very many have not fully understood the
main lines of the Council, its innovative purpose. They
have not understood that it constituted a truly historic
change of course.2

Let us look at the reasons for such an assertion.

The Theocentric
Orientation of Catholic Liturgy

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entire existence towards God, becoming “a sacriﬁce
holy and pleasing to God.”
In January, 1945, in the ﬁrst issue of the journal
La Maison Dieu, one of the pioneers of the liturgical
movement, Dom Lambert Beauduin, wrote an article
amounting to a plan of action which already contained
all the elements of a subversion of the Catholic sense of
liturgy, a subversion erected upon a false ecclesiology,
but which in the space of 20 years was to meet with the
assent of the highest ecclesiastical authorities.
It is clear that this conception of the liturgy is
rooted in an ecclesiology eminently vertical (as it
should be): the perspective of the Church as mystical
Body of Christ, where the fundamental essence of each
baptized soul is to be united to the Head, the Lord
Jesus, and in Him to the Holy Trinity. It is only thanks
to this profound reality, Christocentric and theocentric,
that one can also speak of the horizontal dimension of
the Church.4

The Overthrow of Order
What we have witnessed with the liturgical reform
is above all the overthrow of order: the didactic and
pastoral function of the liturgy was emphasized so
much that it became its ﬁrst end. A simple glance at the
new Mass is enough to show this. We do not say that
the vertical dimension has disappeared, but it has been,
so to speak, dethroned by the pastoral dimension. And
when ends are reversed, the result is not the same.
There is no reason to be surprised that the
Franciscan Rinaldo Falsini, formed in the theologicoliturgical school which led to the new Mass, comes up
with afﬁrmations like this one:
In the celebration, we all seem to be as stiff as statues;
often there is no real possibility of expression, there is not
the least place for that....In some churches the priests...
have provided a space for getting acquainted, after which
everyone reassembles and they proceed to the liturgical
action. But all that happens in the same place, which is
not conceived as “a holy place,” but as a “domus ecclesiæ.”
Entering into the “holy place,” into the “mystical place,”
is of no use; on the contrary, it is alienating.5

Before dismissing Falsini as a radical, and what
he describes as just an abuse of the liturgical reform,
it is appropriate to make a brief philosophical
consideration. When a subject poses an act, he cannot
will at the same time two primary ends; one of the
two necessarily tends to prevail over the other, and
subordinates it. Let us take a concrete example, alas,
only too real. The new theology of Vatican II led to
equalizing the ends of marriage. There is no longer
a primary end (procreation) and a secondary end
(union), but two ends, so they tell us, both of which
are primary. This conception, which is both a moral
absurdity and a violation of the order established by

22

God, has led to the foreseeable consequence of the
denaturing of marriage, and so of its crisis.
The same thing has happened in the liturgy. By
attributing too much weight to the didactic end at the
expense of the theocentric end, a disorder has been
caused which touches the very nature of the liturgy.
The result of this disorder is something that no longer
embodies the Catholic conception of the liturgy; what
results from it is a different reality. But then, once this
passage has been legitimized, what will be the limit of
this process? If they give us a positivist answer: “The
decisions of the authority,” then it must be said that
this is indeed the strategy that Dom Beauduin utilized
at that time, and which led to the liturgical reform:
It will be necessary to proceed hierarchically: not to
take any initiative in practice other than what is at present
legitimate, but to prepare for the future by fostering a
desire and love for all the riches contained in the ancient
liturgy....We must proceed methodically, by circulating
popular but serious works (e.g., on the ofﬁces of Holy
Week, the Easter Vigil, concelebration). We must also
stress the moral and practical aspects, such as frequent
Communion, the Eucharistic fast, the times of Mass: the
Church is not afraid to modify her discipline for the good
of her children.6

In essence: gradually create a new mentality and
then constrain the authority to take action in light of
the situation modiﬁed before its very eyes.
To correctly appreciate the liturgical reform,
it is thus necessary to realize that it did not simply
aim at the introduction of isolated changes, but the
modiﬁcation of the order of ends; a change, therefore,
much more profound and radical, with incalculable
consequences. It is consequently necessary to
acquire an overview of the liturgical reform so that
the direction of each particular modiﬁcation will
be revealed, a direction which, without too much
ambiguity, was declared to us on several occasions by
the precursors and the artisans of the reform itself.

A Non-Catholic
Conception of the Church
Thanks to the assistance of the Holy Spirit, through
the centuries the Church in herself remains pure and
without stain; likewise, the dogmas that she guards and
the liturgy that she celebrates are faithfully transmitted
without alteration, yet at the same time with a
homogeneous development. A consequence of this
truth is that there cannot be leaps nor “historic changes
of course” over the course of time.
The “dogma” of every protagonist of the
liturgical revolution would be unthinkable (and
unacceptable) for Dom Gueranger as for Pope St.
Pius X. This “dogma” was designated by Pope Pius
XII as “archeologism.” It involves the assertion–a
veritable mania, according to Mediator Dei–that, in
order to rediscover the truly Catholic meaning of the
liturgy, it would be necessary to return to the times

THE ANGELUS
March 2006

of the primitive Church. Everything that happened
subsequently would have been, according to this
theory, a departure, if not a betrayal, of the original
liturgical spirit. It does not simply involve a love for
the origins of the Church, nor simple erudition. The
vice of archeologism is, once again, ecclesiological in
nature. The Church, in substance, would have strayed
over the centuries from the authentic meaning of the
liturgy, only to rediscover it today, thanks, of course,
to the work of the “liturgists.” In Falsini’s book there
are representative pages on this topic, consecrated
speciﬁcally to the recital of his rediscovery of the
Fathers of the Church and the (pseudo) realization of
the distance and the divergence between their manner
of understanding the liturgy and that, for example, of
the Council of Trent.
Perhaps not everyone is aware of it, but the soul
of the liturgical reform, that which properly informs
all the modiﬁcations made to the traditional liturgy,
is precisely this false vision of the Church; it is the
presumed necessity of having to painstakingly make
one’s way back through the historical record in order
to be able to reach the pure wellspring of the liturgical
spirit, a spring that would have dried up or become
polluted over the course of time (a presumption in
contempt of the Church’s infallibility).
Faced with the disaster of the new rite of Mass
and a more precise knowledge of the dynamic of
the liturgical reform, certain people admit that
the modality and the intentions of the reform are
objectively in opposition to Catholic principles.
But, they add, intentions are one thing, another is
the result. Now, we ask, if the soul of the reform
is vitiated, as we have seen, how is it possible for
the result obtained not to be spoiled by this tare.
Supposing one were to unite to a body a soul different
from the one to which it had always been united, the
appearance of the ﬁrst man would certainly be kept,
but the profound identity of the individual, which is
imparted by the soul, would be altered. Thus, one
would not have the same person, but rather another
totally and essentially different from the ﬁrst. This
is what happened in the liturgical reform: they
wanted to keep a structure similar to the traditional
liturgy in order to avoid stirring up opposition and
confrontations, but by introducing a different “spirit,”
which diverges frightfully from the Catholic spirit.

The Upsetting of Proportions
We have seen that the modiﬁcation of the order
of ends of the liturgy has produced a different reality;
we have equally seen that the same result is obtained
when the very soul of the liturgy is struck. The
third element to take into consideration in order to
understand the liturgical reform is the upsetting of the
proportions between the parts. Let us take a very clear
example considered by Fr. Falsini himself:

The Council afﬁrms the importance of the Word in
the celebration....It is question of surpassing the Protestant
vision, which places everything on the side of the
absolute Word, but also of the Catholic vision, being given
that it [the Council] stresses the unitary vision which must
unite the Word and liturgy.7

What is Fr. Falsini afﬁrming? That the
modiﬁcations brought to the didactic part of the Mass,
today called the Liturgy of the Word, have introduced
a “surpassing” of the “Catholic conception” of the
Mass. In practice, what we have today is something
non-Catholic in comparison to what existed before.
In everything, indeed, there are proportions, and the
proportions exist for a reason (be it in view of function
or aesthetics); monstrosity results from the upsetting
of this equilibrium. Who would ﬁnd a man with three
heads or one eye or four legs normal? Who would not
be aware of the monstrosity of a man who had, for
example, ears in place of his mouth?
And yet, faced with the upsetting of the parts
of the Mass and their proportions in relation to the
whole, they obstinately assert the legitimacy of the
result obtained. In this Falsini sees much better than
many others: the expansion of the didactic part, the
drastic reduction of the Offertory, the elimination of
the introductory rites, etc., have led, neither more nor
less, to a “surpassing” of the Catholic conception of
the Mass. What has been created is something other
than what the Church has always kept and transmitted
from generation to generation.

Ratzinger, an Enemy
of Future Reform
After this series of reﬂections, which we hope have
spotlighted the structural reversal of Catholic liturgy
that has taken place, one cannot be surprised at the
propositions advanced by Fr. Falsini. He is
convinced that, in the liturgical renewal, an authentic
passage of the Holy Spirit occurred. I am not convinced
that His action has come to an end; I believe, on the
contrary, that it has just begun, despite the natural
temptation to resist this action, not only by a reversion to
the past, but also by frustrating it because of a superﬁcial
understanding and implementation of the Conciliar
decree....The historic change of course has just begun,
and I hope that God will continue to deploy the same
Spirit so that He might further His action. It is to be
desired that He not encounter too many obstacles.8

And for Fr. Falsini, one of these obstacles would
be in fact the currently reigning Pope:
Cardinal Ratzinger is opposed to an “active” notion
of participation: he accepts the constitution on the
liturgy, but he forcefully criticizes the application of
the reform; he only thinks about the past. For him the

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unacceptable), and which shows no indication of
stopping in mid-course.
restoration is just a refurbishing of the façade, and the
liturgy is something non-historical; for him participation
means interior participation, adoration, but not external
participation.9

Falsini, then, well aware of the real scope of the
liturgical reform, opens the way to some new reforms,
which today may still seem to be a little excessive
but which, as history shows–consider, for example,
the case of Communion in the hand–will eventually
become liturgical customs, unless there is a radical
change of course. One signiﬁcant idea Falsini brings
up is the proposal to reform the celebration of the
sacrament of penance:
It is the only sacrament in crisis: the assembly
attentive to listen to the Word is totally missing, while
that is the primary given; so it becomes a purely juridical
event; there is nothing celebratory about it.10

Another confused “pearl”:
The exercise of ministries by women is another false
problem. It sufﬁces to see the question of servers: even
today, what the women do is only a concession, it is not
a right, there is no recognition of their role. It is the sexist
vision of the Church which has prevailed....11

Nor do his comments lack requests asking the
“presidents”–for us Catholics, the priest–not to put
themselves at the center of attention, taking the place
from the “ministeriality” of the lay people; and to
arrange a moment for meeting the community after
the celebration of the Mass, if possible in the same
place where it was celebrated.
To tell the truth, it is not these propositions which
are frightening. What leaves us dumbfounded and
pensive is the failure to grasp what is happening
shown by those who, on the contrary, should
understand the real intentions of the liturgical reform,
a reform which has already essentially subverted
Catholic worship (and which, for this reason, is

Society of Saint Pius X

District of the United States of America

REGINA COELI HOUSE

2918 Tracy Avenue
Kansas City, Missouri 64109
ADDRESS SERVICE REQUESTED

Translated by Angelus Press from the French-language edition of SiSiNoNo,
the Courrier de Rome (Sept., 2005).
Liturgical Reform and Vatican II: An Eyewitness Speaks–Rinaldo Falsini
Talks with G. Monzio Compagnoni (Italian) (Milan: Ancora, 2005).
2
Ibid., pp.74-75.
3
See The Angelus (March 1995).
4
It seems to us useful to remember, in this regard, that it is not by chance
that Pope Pius XII, in order to remedy the spread of these errors, preceded
the encyclical Mediator Dei on the liturgy with the encyclical Mystici
Corporis on the Church.
5
Ibid., p.91.
6
La Maison Dieu, No.1 (Jan., 1945). [English version: Didier Bonneterre,
The Liturgical Movement (Kansas City: Angelus Press, 2002), p.48.]
7
Falsini, Liturgical Reform and Vatican II, p.64.
8
Ibid., p.19.
9
Ibid., pp.71-72. Fr. Falsini does not spare Ratzinger several other jabs : “I
cannot forget the double declaration of Cardinal Ratzinger in 1997 about the
interdiction by Pope Paul VI of usage of the Tridentine Missal–described
as a tragic error, for this book represents the authentic tradition of the faith
and liturgy of the Church; and the judgment of Pope Paul VI’s missal, a
product of specialized erudition and legal competence...[Ratzinger’s judgment was] presumption and incompetence” (p.102).
10
Ibid., p.72.
11
Ibid., p.73.
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25

A r c h b i s h o p
M a r c e l
L e f e b v r e

THE MASS

&

THE CROSS
The great mystery of the love of God for our
souls is the mystery of the Cross. It was for the Cross
that all the churches and the great cathedrals were
built. The Cross dominates the altar. The Cross is set
at the crossroads.
The mystery of our sanctiﬁcation and our
justiﬁcation cannot be explained without the cross
of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Today, they want to get
rid of the cross; they don’t want to look at it or have
it before their eyes. Why? Because it represents

sacriﬁce. And yet henceforth, it is only by the cross,
by sacriﬁce, that the Christian soul can regain
life. Mors mortua tunc est quando mortua vita fuit, the
Liturgy says: Death died when the Author of life
died. The summation of the spiritual life is contained
in this thought: we must die to ourselves in order to
regain life. That is justiﬁcation; holiness is nothing
else. It is contained in these two movements: hatred
of sin and love of God; death to sin in order to live
in God.

www.angeluspress.org

THE ANGELUS • March 2006

26
We must therefore always be hounding sin
in ourselves, and consequently we must make
sacriﬁces, know how to die to ourselves, to mortify
our evil inclinations, our desires to disobey God.
But men no longer wish to sacriﬁce themselves,
and that is why they no longer want the sacriﬁce
of Our Lord and of His cross, nor to see it, nor to
understand it.
Now, where do we ﬁnd the living cross, the cross
that is always ﬁlled with the charity that inspires
us to ﬁght against sin in order to live of the life of
Jesus Christ? At the holy altar, at the holy sacriﬁce
of the Mass. That is the living cross, that is Calvary
renewed.
All the words of the liturgy express precisely this
desire of expiation, of the remission of our sins. It is
one of the principal ends of holy Mass. This is what
the Protestants denied and what priests today have a
tendency to deny.
The Mass is not just a commemoration of the
Last Supper or of the Cross. It is much more than
that. There is an unfathomable mystery in the
sacriﬁce of the Mass: it contains that which the love
of God has done for us, for, if it is a testimony of
the love of God for us, it is Our Lord Jesus Christ
cruciﬁed on the cross. One occasionally comes
across an old cruciﬁx with these few words etched
on it: “Can you say that I did not love you when you
see love carved on this cross.”

Suffer with Jesus Christ:
The Christian Life
The cruciﬁx is “love carved,” living love on the
cross. One can understand the desire of holy souls
to ﬁnd in the cruciﬁx, in the cross, in the sacriﬁce of
the Mass, the source of a spiritual life of compassion
for the sufferings of Our Lord; as Our Lady of
Compassion, the patroness of our (SSPX) Sisters, to
compassionate, but also to make reparation for, all
the insults, sacrileges, and numerous sins. It is also
the desire to complete the Passion of Jesus, as St.
Paul says: “[I] ﬁll up those things that are wanting
of the sufferings of Christ, in my ﬂesh, for His body,
which is the Church” (Col. 1:24).
Oh, it is a desire that will cost us dearly. It
would be too easy to say “Because I am Christian,
God will bless me and exempt me from all suffering
and sacriﬁce.” That would be to misunderstand
the mystery of the Passion of Jesus Christ. If He
has given us the example of redemptive suffering,
then, on the contrary, we must have the desire to
suffer with Him, to sacriﬁce ourselves with Him.
And when the pangs of sorrow afﬂict us, we must
be happy to be associated in the redemption of the
world.
THE ANGELUS • March 2006 www.angeluspress.org

Such is the Christian life, the reality of our
Faith. This is what all the generations of Christians
understood, these generations of holy fathers and
mothers of families who accepted the difﬁculties and
the sufferings with joy, who set a good example for
their children, bearing their sorrows with Our Lord
Jesus Christ. It was these generations of Christian
families that, by the example of suffering united to
Our Lord Jesus Christ, brought forth vocations.
To live with Our Lord, to suffer with Him, to
assist at the holy sacriﬁce of the Mass in this spirit,
with this conviction of oblation, as victim with Jesus
Christ: how beautiful this Christian doctrine is, this
Catholic doctrine! How it completely transforms
life! And it is this that prepares us for eternal life: O
crux, ave, spes unica!–Hail, O Cross, our only hope!
The cross is the way towards glory.
St. Paul had no other teaching: “Jesum, et hunc
cruciﬁxum–Jesus, and Him cruciﬁed” (I Cor. 2:2).
This will also be your teaching. And you will hold
up as the model of this participation in the sacriﬁce
of Jesus Christ the most Blessed Virgin Mary, Our
Lady of Compassion.

Sacrifice Is Made for Loving
The Mass being a sacriﬁce, the whole Catholic
religion is marked by sacriﬁce, by the cross of Jesus
Christ. And that is why we must have the cross of
Jesus Christ everywhere: in our rooms, our houses,
and at the crossroads of our streets, in order to
remind us of what Our Lord Jesus Christ, God
cruciﬁed, is, and the lesson of His sacriﬁce which He
has given us.

Why Sacrifice Self?
Why make the sacriﬁce of self? For love, for
charity. You understand it well: what else do a father
and mother do than sacriﬁce themselves for love
of their family and for each other? There has to be
sacriﬁce, or there is no love. Sacriﬁce is a condition
of love, and Our Lord has shown this to us well, His
arms stretched out on the cross, His hands and His
feet and His heart transpierced. Such is the sacriﬁce
of Our Lord out of love for God His Father and for
His neighbor, for the salvation of souls. Such is His
great lesson of love by sacriﬁce!
This article comprises passages from two different sermons of Archbishop
Lefebvre which were selected by the H.E. Bishop Bernard Tissier de
Mallerais for publication in Fideliter (May-June 2005). The main part is
taken from the homily for the beginning of the academic year given at
the seminary at Ecône (Sept. 14, 1975). The last two paragraphs come
from a homily given on the occasion of a Society priest’s tenth anniversary of
ordination (May 1, 1999).

27

Nothing New
Under the Sun
D
E
N
M
E
D
N
O
C
E
M
O
R
BY
No other forces are to be recognized except those which
reside in matter, and all the
rectitude and excellence of
morality ought to be placed
in the accumulation and
increase of riches by every
possible means, and the gratiﬁcation of pleasure. (Error
No. 58, Pope Pius IX, Syllabus of Errors, 1864)

D r .

J o h n

R a o

A spectre is haunting traditional Catholicism:
the cult of Enlightenment capitalism and its
ideology of the unrestrained free market. I ﬁnd
the inﬂuence of this sect in American Catholic
circles to be historically frustrating, intellectually
offensive, and spiritually devastating. It is
historically frustrating in its blithe indifference
to the dramatic 19th-century battle during which
the basic Catholic complaints against modern
capitalism were ﬁrst cogently expressed and
accepted by the Church. It is intellectually
offensive insofar as it neglects the serious Catholic
anti-capitalist critique, often reducing it to a
purely romantic ﬂirtation with pre-industrial
life. It is spiritually devastating, because worship
of the unrestrained market drives a stake into
the very heart of the Catholic vision, erecting
an impenetrable intellectual barrier to the
transformation of individual and society in
Christ, and turning sincere Catholic believers into
schizophrenic practitioners of a blatant practical
Modernism.
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THE ANGELUS • March 2006

28

Yada, Yada, Yada
Allow me to begin by insisting that this short
article could easily have been called “Been There,
Done That.” This is due to the fact that the entire
contemporary debate concerning the acceptability
and catholicity of the unrestrained market is in
no way a ground-breaking one. It was already
conducted in Catholic circles a century and a half
ago, and with clearly anti-capitalist results. Anyone
looking for the precise details of this old dispute and
the names of the people involved in it can consult
my book, Removing the Blindfold (The Remnant Press,
1999). My goal, here, is a much more modest one;
that of merely opening Catholic eyes to the general
history of this 19th-century dialogue and the issues
which were truly central to it. The sad fact that this
needs to be done at all indicates just how complete
the victory of the anti-traditionalist position in
Roman Catholic circles has been.
Although discussions of the relationship of
capitalism and Catholicism began in the ﬁrst part
of the 1800’s, it really took the Revolutions of 1848,
and especially the Parisian social and economic
uprising called the June Days, to intensify them.
Crucial to this intensiﬁed discussion was the
attempt by certain segments of the liberal capitalist
bourgeoisie to forge an alliance with long-time
Catholic opponents who seemed to be as horriﬁed
as they were by the appearance in June of 1848 of
a socialist threat to property. Creation of a uniﬁed
anti-socialist Party of Order, such liberals argued,
should be the overriding goal of all morally-upright
and far-sighted men.
One troublesome condition for the sealing of
this alliance was demanded, however: obliteration
of much of the intellectual and historical record of
the previous one hundred years. While Catholics
would be permitted by their new friends to pursue
criticisms of those Enlightenment and French
revolutionary principles which produced socialism,
they would be obliged to abandon objections to
any of the very same precepts which had fashioned
liberal capitalism. Obvious “common sense” was
said to dictate a joint liberal-Catholic polemic versus
the socialist evil. Continued Catholic anti-capitalist
attacks would, on the other hand, represent an
inexplicable, pointless, peevish waste of intellectual
energy, and merely aid the destructive advance of
the palpable Red Menace.

Knee Jerks
Now, some of our Catholic ancestors were
only ﬁrst awakened to the problems of modernity
by the disturbances of the “June Days.” Shocked
by the open critiques of property accompanying
this uprising, they did not investigate its deeper
THE ANGELUS • March 2006 www.angeluspress.org

causes and really quite variegated and often even
traditionalist complaints. Instead, many lunged for
the liberal capitalist bait with enthusiasm and joined,
fervently, in the common crusade against socialism.
They obligingly condemned as intransigent
obscurantists and shameless rabble-rousers those
of their fellow believers who refused to jettison the
broader philosophical and historical battle with
Enlightenment liberalism.
But such “intransigents” were unmoved by
the “common sense” onslaught of the Party of
Order. They insisted that any coherent response to
contemporary evils had to emphasize the truth that
liberal capitalism and socialism were actually blood
brothers; that both had exactly the same atomistic,
naturalist Enlightenment roots; that the arguments of
the liberal capitalists had actually given intellectual
birth to the doctrines of the socialists; that capitalist
excesses had provided psychological stimulus to the
desperate spirit of the June Days.

The Church on Steroids
Catholic social doctrine, beginning with the
negative attacks of Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors
(1864) and the positive guidance of Leo XIII’s
(1878-1903) encyclicals, emerged out of this intense,
post-1848 debate. It is true, as critics of this social
doctrine note, that its teaching is in many respects
a sketchy and tolerant one. It does indeed allow for
a kaleidoscope of practical responses to modern
economic conditions, ranging from calls to scrap
the liberal capitalist system entirely to acceptance
of the basic framework which this system has
created and vigorously maintained as a prudential
necessity. Still, there is no doubt whatsoever that
the Church deemed the “intransigents” to be correct
on one absolutely crucial matter: the need to reject
the principle of the unrestrained free market as
a morally reprehensible standard. This rejection
rings loud and clear through every papal statement
on social issues. To paraphrase a certain American
Catholic weekly, the Church decided that no one
could be a sincere Catholic and a supporter of the
unrestrained free market simultaneously.
Germany, Austria, Italy, France, Belgium, the
Netherlands, Switzerland, and even the United
Kingdom were all centers for this 19th-century
debate. As intimated above, the bulk of those
anti-capitalist thinkers whose ideas really had
an inﬂuence on the Syllabus and the Leonine
encyclicals were not at all obsessed with a return
to an idyllic life on a feudal manor ﬁlled with
altruistic barons and voluntarily servile peasants.
All realized that capitalist investment in modern
industry was yielding a greater productivity than
man had ever known before. A number were fully

29
aware of beneﬁts emerging from industrialization,
and convinced that having entered down its
pathway there was no easy, charitable way out of it
either. Nevertheless, personal experiences with the
unrestrained free market and its justiﬁcation (often
obtained in a period of exile in 1848 in Britain or
famished Ireland) convinced them that modern
capitalism was an ideologically revolutionary force
which also had the capacity for causing an enormous
amount of unneeded suffering for mankind.
Let us take the arguments of La Civiltà Cattolica,
the “intransigent” Jesuit journal published in
Rome after 1850, as an example of the critique I
am relating. Its editors, men like Luigi Taparelli
d’Azeglio, Carlo Curci, and Matteo Liberatore,
examined the Enlightenment capitalist system from
many different standpoints and in a massive number
of articles stretching over many decades. One line
of their criticism, jointly philosophical, theological,
historical, sociological, and psychological in
character, ran as follows.

History: The Teacher of Life
Western civilization grew up emphasizing
the existence of an objective order of nature, the
importance of individual freedom within that order,
and the need for individuals to be enlightened as
to the character of nature and freedom through
the guidance of authoritative societies like the
family and the State. Western thinkers argued
that individuals, left to their own devices, simply
could not properly see all that needs to be seen to
understand either the objective order of things or
the essence of human liberty. Individual knowledge
and personal freedom could only be perfected
though life in community. Social beings alone
could become wise and free. Unaided, anti-social
individuals could possess but a fragmented, ﬂawed
science of nature and knowledge of their place
within it. They would thus be condemned to use
their liberty to destroy themselves as well as the
people around them.
Such ideas, already shaped by the ancient
Greeks, really only gained historical clout due to
the Incarnation and Redemption. Christ provided
supernatural teaching and medicine to heal the
weaknesses and ﬂaws of a natural world which
had chosen to mar itself through sin. His message
conﬁrmed an order and purpose to things that even
the best of non-believers were tempted intellectually
to question and practically to contradict. His labors
for the salvation of human persons underlined the
central value of the individual to the plan of God.
His demand for individual submission to Him and
to His Mystical Body placed a supernatural stamp
upon the importance of authoritative communal

guidance of men. Christ taught that it was only
through full membership and participation in
supernatural society, only, in effect, by choosing to
see Creation through God’s eyes, that individuals
and societies could fully understand nature and use
it ﬁttingly. The Incarnation gave men the ability to
use nature to serve the God who had created it to
the utmost degree, raising their consciousness of the
intrinsic value and responsibility of all of nature’s
speciﬁc tools, from its sciences to its temporal
authorities, as it did so. Without the supernatural
grace of God, imparted through a socially powerful
Church, individuals could not suitably understand
and exploit what they seemed to be capable of
knowing and putting to use even on purely natural
grounds alone.
Any economist formed by these inﬂuences
would know that he could not base his knowledge
of the functioning of the market upon his unaided,
atomistic reason and desires alone. He would realize
that his economic reasoning and decisions must be
informed by the deeper wisdom gained by actively
living under the authoritative guidance of family,
fraternal and professional organizations, and the
State; by actively living under the supernatural
moral authority of the Church; by ultimately seeing
economic needs through the eyes provided by all
of nature’s tools and those of nature’s Creator and
Redeemer as well.
Such an economist would enter into his studies
with his eyes wide open. He would be aware that
his discipline is not merely the science of gaining
wealth, but of gaining wealth in union with all other
natural and supernatural requirements. He would
understand that he could not promote behavior
which might, at least in the short run, make men
wealthier, if it would be better for them and for their
neighbors, in the long run, to act differently. Again,
he would recognize that what this “better” meant
would have to be deﬁned by taking stock of a variety
of factors that the collective natural and supernatural
wisdom of the ages deemed to be important: a
balance of agriculture and industry; neighborhood
stability and access to the necessities of life;
stewardship of the environment; defense of deeplyrooted customs and the beautiful achievements of
high cultures; the demands of justice and charity;
the need to transform all things in Christ so as to
aid man’s quest for eternal salvation. The truly wise
economist would teach that men were not free to
gain wealth obtained at the expense of leveling the
Roman Forum to create more parking spaces for
easier shopping at the Wal-Marts of the Eternal City;
of turning patriotic celebrations and sacred festivals
into nothing other than elaborate occasions for
purchase and consumption; of marketing whatever
might satisfy the wishes of revelers participating
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THE ANGELUS • March 2006

30
in Gay Pride Week. Simply put, the truly wise
economist would see that man does not live by
bread alone, nor does it proﬁt him if he gains the
whole world and loses his soul in the process. He
would encourage wise social authorities to use all
their strength to oppose the victory of an economic
materialism, even if this were democratically
supported by 99% of the population.

The Enlightenment
Unenlightening
Enlightenment thought, La Civiltà Cattolica
argued, is ﬂawed because it violates all the above
Western philosophical and Catholic theological
precepts, thereby blinding its proponents to
the truth. Its atomistic freedom reduces men to
precisely that unaided, anti-social condition which
the previous development of our civilization had
condemned as parochial and self-destructive. Its
naturalism compounds the problem by prohibiting
consideration of God’s plan for His Creation
and man’s eternal destiny in secular matters as
unpardonably invasive.
Enlightenment man thus lives and acts in
a world whose every basic daily motions, both
mundane and serious, are cut off from their ﬁnal
purpose. The “sciences” produced by Enlightenment
freedom and naturalism are, therefore, studies
that uncover nothing other than the laws of an
incomplete nature, and a fallen one to boot. These
sciences are then studied for incomplete, fallen
reasons, chieﬂy to gain power over the world as
it is so as to provide some immediate satisfaction
perceived as being good by ﬂawed individuals. Such
“sciences” obstinately refuse to admit the possibility
of learning how to change and heal nature through
reason, revelation, and grace; they dedicate their
practitioners to the encouragement of limitation
and weakness. Ideological and arrogant in their
self-sufﬁcient rationalism, they close themselves
off to all criticism of their errors, responding to
much rational evidence in irrational ways. Hence,
the above-mentioned appeal to the dictates of
an unexamined “common sense.” Hence, their
frequent calls for a consciousness raising which
would transform the unenlightened into creatures
able to distinguish natural data which is acceptable
from that which is strictly forbidden. Hence, also,
the infallible trump card utilized by every sophist
relying on psychological and rhetorical rather than
rational tools to inﬂuence the mob: consideration of
the respective success rates of the enlightened and
the obscurantists in exploiting a world governed by
unrestrained Original Sin.
All Enlightenment atomists and naturalists teach
ﬂawed, iron-clad, materially satisfying “scientiﬁc
THE ANGELUS • March 2006 www.angeluspress.org

laws of nature” to which they demand unquestioning
submission from the Church and Christian believers.
Nevertheless, they differ as to what these laws are,
merrily lambasting their fellow illuminati with as
much rhetorical disdain as they do the retrograde
Catholic community. Prince Otto von Bismarck of
Prussia and Count Camillo Cavour of Sardinia saw
that the rules of Machtpolitik yielded their states an
immediately greater power and wealth than any
nation following the guidelines of a St. Louis IX
or a Pius IX might expect. Therefore, they insisted
that Church doctrine bend to its “natural laws”
and political science. Piety could be no excuse for
neglecting the demands of a Machtpolitik whose
victories might even be presented to believers as
reﬂecting the higher will of God. Sexual libertines
had proof positive that the unrestrained pursuit
of physical satisfaction could result in much more
immediate carnal rewards. Therefore, Church
doctrine had to bend to accept the “science” of
seduction, and perhaps encourage experts to raise
the sexual consciousness of religious critics to make
them, too, act more naturally. Liberal bourgeois
capitalists witnessed the way in which the totally
free market produced vast wealth for clever
entrepreneurs. Voilà, a revelation of the infallible
framework for a naturalist economic science
before which Western philosophy and Catholic
theology must kneel and worship. Regardless of
such differences in emphasis, the “free” individual
operating under the spell of all of these “sciences”
is everywhere the same: a self-limiting, parochial
being; a willful, passionate child who specializes
in learning how to get more toys for himself than
the other kids around him, regardless of whether
he needs or beneﬁts from them. He wants what he
wants when he wants it, and no mommy or daddy is
going to force him to give up his rattle and learn the
meaning of true virtue.
By now, it should be clear that the kinds of
Catholic criticisms represented by journals like La
Civiltà Cattolica have nothing whatsoever to do with
adulating the early morning collection of eggs and
the milking of cows. They are partly the product of
a philosophical, historical, and sociological study.
More importantly still, they are the result of a
Catholic Incarnational vision that battles coherently
versus all Declarations of Independence from God’s
creative and redemptive plan, including those
concerning economic methodology and morality.

Worse Than Schizophrenia
When applied to the current traditionalist
ﬂirtation with capitalism, this 19th-century critique
must suggest a whole battery of soul-wrenching
concerns: the fact that Catholics are separating daily

31
individual choices regarding economic matters
from their impact upon our eternal destiny; that
Catholics are reducing market issues to the realm of
the morally indifferent, and judging right and wrong
on the basis of success in manipulating fallen nature
alone; that Catholics are reading history on the basis
of a Liberation Theology of the Market that sees
the transformation of all things in capitalism as
being inﬁnitely more important, in practice, than
transformation in Christ. This is frightening, because
it is Modernism pure and simple, and in a realm
where everyone has his daily temptations, and most
of us, unfortunately, our price. Allow such a vision
to triumph in Catholic circles and worries about
the morality of Machtpolitik and sexual libertinism
must logically disappear as well. Christian
behavior will eventually mean nothing. Eternal
salvation will be viewed as a reward for a lifetime
of orthodox recitation of a purely intellectual and
inconsequential Creed after our days in a morally
indifferent playground have ended.
Many of the early supporters of erroneous
ideas do not desire the consequences that ﬂow from
them. Martin Luther did not want the principles of
Protestantism to aid radical enthusiasts. America’s
Founders did not plan for the inﬂuence of Karl
Rove. Cavour and Bismarck might have laughed
away the prospect of a Hitler, and sexual libertines
the universal spread of gross pornography. Liberal
bourgeois capitalists of the mid-19th century would,
perhaps, have run headlong from massive shopping
malls destructive to more restrictive forms of village
and city economic life. And, certainly, most recent
traditionalist defenders of the unrestrained market
whom I know do not wish to destroy what remains
of Christian morality and Christendom.
The fact that so many heretics and ideologues
do not wish bad things to happen is a proof of
the continued hold of traditional beliefs and
conservative presuppositions regarding personal
behavior upon them. But it is also a demonstration
of the failure of their logic. Regardless of the will or
the choice of the Founders of any erroneous school
of thought, the ideas that they espouse are what they
are and spread their inevitable subversive poison.
Some men, like the Anabaptists and Unitarians
of Luther and Calvin’s days, accept that logic
straightaway. Nevertheless, the bulk of humanity
requires time to do so; time, the slow dissolution
of the beliefs and behavior which block radicalism,
and the construction of a society which fully shapes
people not on the basis of its Founders’ irrational
conservative scruples, but their corrosive rational
principles.
Enlightenment freedom and naturalism lead,
logically, to the creation of radical, passionate men
who care nothing for long-standing traditions and

objective morality. The logic of Enlightenment
capitalism, as men like Michael Novak exult, is
to create a new kind of man who thinks and acts
differently than citizens of traditional western
Christendom. These new men will ensure that
the pattern of capitalist industrial development in
21st-century Africa and Latin America is different
than that guided by more traditionally-minded
individuals still shaped by the Christian remnants
of 18th-century Britain. These new men will not
deﬁne or practice a “charity” that can correct social
imbalances in the same way as older Catholic
believers could. These new men will adore the antisocial, anti-historical, materialist way of life, and, if
they are Catholic in name, make of the Traditional
Mass and the Traditional Faith an after-hours
parlor sport for those engaged in what really counts
in a democratic, capitalist universe: making big
time bucks and spending them on often useless or
destructive toys.

For a Wrong Vision,
the People Perish
One of the sad realities of life today is that this
new capitalist man seems already to dominate the
global scene through a version of the Enlightenment
revolutionary vision which cannot be altered
without untold dislocation and horror. I believe
that that dislocation will nevertheless come, and
not from the outside, but from the system’s own
implosion. It is understandable that many may ﬁnd
this notion difﬁcult to accept, both because the
system, by its very nature, discourages intellectual
investigation of its problems (See “Why Catholics
Cannot Defend Themselves,” www.romanforum.org),
and because a mere 200 years of Enlightenment
capitalist history may not yet have been enough
time for its full disruptive potential to display itself.
Both Reason and Faith indicate that its judgment
day must come. In the meantime, traditionalist
Catholics can at least be put on warning against
praising a force that barters away their true freedom,
their true knowledge, the true, redeemed order of
nature, and the moral concerns of their true Faith for
a killing on the market. Christ came to save us from
the Fall; not to preach encouragement of Original
Sin as the only sound basis for economic security
and personal liberation.
Dr. John Rao is an Associate Professor of History at St. John’s University in
New York City; D.Phil. from Oxford University (UK); author of Americanism
and the Collapse of the Church and Removing the Blindfold (Remnant Press,
1999). Subtitles added by Fr. Kenneth Novak.

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THE ANGELUS • March 2006

32

Fifteen Minutes

with Fr. de Chivré:

The Woman
of Today before
theWoman
of

Eternity

The soul of a woman!...
The subject we are about to broach is so profound and so vast
that I am bound, by lack of time, to evoke more than to explain,
which will leave me open to objections which are certainly valid
materially, but which do not discourage me from believing that I
am fundamentally correct in founding my reasoning on the soil of
paradise lost, in the light of Calvary.

THE ANGELUS • March 2006 www.angeluspress.org

33
No author, no man of science or of letters,
can claim to rival in profundity or in clarity the
explanation of the problem of man and woman
given by the Spirit of God in the ﬁrst pages of
Genesis. From this account of the creation of the
world ﬂow the relations between man and woman
such as they still stand in our day and age. It falls to
my priesthood, servant of God and repairer of the
human catastrophe, to attempt to show you the path
traced out by God in order for man and woman to
be worthy of the true happiness which is proper to
them and from which they are moving farther and
farther away.
If you permit, let us broach the subject from a
higher point of view: What is a symbol? A symbol
is not an absurdity imposed on reason; it is the
meaning given by reason to different realities
totalized in a single, symbolic reality. Take the
symbol of the ﬂag: deep down, what is a ﬂag? It is
all of the geography of a country, all of its history,
all of the family affections, all of the services
rendered to the homeland: an entire past and future
reality, all symbolized by the ﬂag. A symbol is the sign
of power and spirit in the service of superior realities.
Power and spirit: the privilege of God, realizing
in one and the same creature a great variety of
spiritual riches tied up in a single creative act: the
nature that is the secret of God expressing His
power, such that man becomes the mirror of that
power, a microcosm representing all of creation.
But man, the image of God, lacked what God does
not lack: companionship, and, for God, what a
companionship! That of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of
love.
“Let us make man in Our likeness.” Man’s
mission is to resemble God, enjoying creation,
dominating it, but without seeing himself in it. God
created man at the end of the sixth day. He said:
“Now, look around yourself: see all of creation, the
plants, the animals; govern, name, construct.” Yet,
God knew that this governance of creation, this
role of administrator of creation which man has not
ceased to ﬁll, would not satisfy for him the mystery
of his life. He had power, but that power did not
reveal to him the secrets of his heart. So God said:
“It is not good for man to be alone.” He has in his
nature certain traces of something beyond matter,
extraordinary traces of sentiments which he cannot
ﬁnd in animals or in creation. “Let Us give him a
companion like to himself,” and what I have made
of man by making him a symbol of My power, I
will do also for woman: her nature will be to seek,
in a higher, unseen reality, an entire state of soul, of
heart, of sentiment, of supernatural possibility.

We can understand now that man and woman
are two mirrors, one of which reﬂects the power of
God while the other, upon that power, mirrors and
reﬂects the spirit of God. This is the whole history of
the relations between man and woman throughout
the history of humanity, the whole history of art and
of literature; it is the whole history of human distress
since the Fall, the desire of all of youth through its
passions; it is the whole business that we can neither
pass over nor do without since it is inscribed in the
nature of man, in the nature of woman; it is the
secret of man and of woman: to keep each other
company.
How can two mirrors keep each other company?
Apply the law of physics: for a mirror to keep
another mirror company, it has to be at a certain
distance. This distance is what will allow the light
of the one and the light of the other to penetrate
the heart of each mirror to make it even more of
a mirror. This is the heart of the problem between
man and woman: ﬁnding the exact distance, the
respect, the intimacy through the light. It is the
mystery of the relations, sanctifying or criminal,
between man and woman, understanding their own
nature through one another.
Woman is responsible before God that her
nature be able to introduce everywhere the life
of the spirit which God placed in her soul. Such
is her responsibility. We begin to realize that,
psychologically and socially, woman is the pole
around which turns all the solitary power of man
wandering through creation, always in search of
woman but today, alas, seldom the woman he needs.
For, unfortunately, the two mirrors have been
broken. Broken by the sin of nature, the cracks have
not destroyed the mission of nature. The mission
given to woman by her nature is to re-establish
the proper distance combined with the proper
closeness. Because of sin, this re-establishment
can only happen little by little, in faltering steps.
In faltering steps, with all the extravagances of the
brutality of man excited by the sentimental and
carnal extravagances of woman. Power and spirit
are now in conﬂict, whereas they were created to be
combined. The spiritual mirror of woman no longer
dazzles the power of man to make him respect the
distance necessary for the luminosity that enlightens
their closeness. Rather than reﬂecting each other,
the mirrors are juxtaposed; they are no longer
companions; they are parallels. Side by side in
solitude, which is the worst of all.
Human life has to be restored by the admirable
restoration of the “mirrors of justice”: by giving back
to woman, through the law of grace, her mission
of shining onto the power of man the integrity of
a spirit, without which she betrays her reason for
being.
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THE ANGELUS • March 2006

34
Woman is the depository of the mysterious
secrets of life which have their origin in God. It is
her mission not to compromise that life nor let it be
compromised by masculine power; for the nature of
power consists in wielding the creative intelligence
of the six days, but the nature of spirit is to rise from
the immaterial depths of the intelligence to sow in
the life of man permanent traces of God. Woman,
by her spirit, is the guardian angel of the place to be
reserved to God in the work of the six days conﬁded
to man.
“It is not good for man to be alone”; now, a
person is alone when he has no one near him,
but he can also be alone in a crowd, for number,
instead of chasing away solitude, can multiply it by
forbidding man to express that profundity reserved
only to the conﬁdence of union. Whence the beauty
of Christian marriage, alone worthy of perfectly
setting the two mirrors in a union without which
they would be juxtaposed and not keep one another
company, as the creative will of God designed it.
“It is not good for man to be alone,” and yet he
has fallen back into solitude with a merely carnal
companionship, which seems meant to increase
his solitude by coupling it with the solitude of vice,
whence the excesses of a passion that is never
satisﬁed. The spiritual mirror of woman, tarnished
by the greed of her senses, only reﬂects her own
self-centered spirit, expressing itself in the false
appearances of a spirit painted to look real by
mannerisms and ﬂirtation. Both have returned
to a mutual solitude, whereas the heart of God
had drawn them together interiorly not only by
the passing intimacy of physical love, but by the
intimacy of spiritual currents, of an indestructible
moral and affective fusion.
O, Adam! What have we done? Look: two broken
mirrors. How can we recognize our faces in them, now
that yours, disgusted with mine, and mine, receiving
from yours only the reﬂection of fear, can no longer
unite in the warm caress of the spirit which you will ﬁnd
nowhere in creation outside of me, who have destroyed
it?

Young ladies, young women, who claim the
alibi of social, political, or commercial activities in
order to draw near to man in his temporal power,
you will never bring man’s heart out of the solitude
created by your fault. Perhaps you will even add to
his solitude the weight of the sensible satisfaction of
your presence deprived of the feminine spirit, of the
feminine conscience, of the spiritual reserve which is
of inﬁnitely greater value to man than the degrading
caress of feminine animality. You appeal to the age,
to your media, to your animalized literature which
bury your spirit rather than resurrecting it. You let
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humanity stumble through the shadow of death
because you have not assumed the place of woman
as God decreed it: in the house of gold of her spirit
repaired by the Redemption in making her the coredemptrix of Adam.
Even physically, the modern world lacks the
feminine spirit. We see too many faces of women
whose spiritual mirror no longer exists, neither in
expression nor in word nor in regard; too many
women no longer impose the dazzlement of the
spirit, emanating the charm of a heart pleasing to
God, nor the authority of a presence situated above
the carnal, according to the spirit of love. For love
deprived of the spirit is a broken mirror.
But, you tell me, we cannot reverse the social
evolution of women’s liberation; it is something,
after all… Yes, indeed, at the end of it all, we
certainly have “something”: the reign of organized
things, scientiﬁcally, mechanically organized by
the combination of these two things designed in
the laboratories of democracy: the thing “man”
and the thing “woman.” The Ministry of National
Education [that is, a French agency comparable
to the Federal Department of Education in the
US–Ed.] manufactures the thing “man” and the thing
“woman,” stamping them with diplomas to ensure
their output. You can see them on the highways:
the thing “automobile” driven by a thing “man” and,
next to him, the thing “woman.” And it works just
ﬁne…for plenty of things, but not for the nature of
man and the nature of woman. The mirror of power
has become the thing “man” subject to his business
enterprise and exiled from the great and noble
business: the value of the spirit. The mirror of the
spirit has become the thing “woman,” slave in turn
to the business of man. Two things that are absorbed,
consumed, annihilated in the cult of that divinity,
of that absolute thing: “money.” A divinity spread
everywhere; a divinity which has contributed to
the “liberation” of woman, making her participate
in the exterior combats of man under the pretext
of economic necessity, though in reality enslaving
her to the cult of things at the expense of the place of
the spirit without which woman is a broken mirror:
namely, the home. The cult of money has ejected
your women from your homes and from your hearts.
This said, I hasten to add that the problem is
complex and I have no intention of condemning
those girls and those women who are sometimes
forced to work outside the home to earn their
livelihood and support the family. But I do say
that for as long as they work on the outside in a
renunciation of their nature as a woman, without the
spiritual anxiety of reducing money to a minimum,
in view of spending a maximum of time in the
home, they will not be women. And it is a serious
thing to renounce one’s nature as a woman because

35
it is not only failing in one’s own mission but it
sows chaos in the mission of the man. The woman
is made in such a way that she is the current that
comes down from God: the current of adoration and
of sacriﬁce; the current that counsels and the current
that raises up; the current that draws toward the
summit. If she smothers all respect of this interior
current, she will be swept away instead by the
current of her sensibility, and God knows what she
makes of it.
You want to accompany the man? Accompany
him according to your nature: stay in the home. And
the man will perceive in the darkness a light which
is warm. After his crushing work in which solitude
gnaws at his heart, he sees that light: “Ah! She is
there!” She is there, the cool spring, with all the
tranquility of a spring, with all the joy of bringing
what a spring gives without ceasing: refreshment.
And the man enters the home and ﬁnds himself
with companionship. As in the Bible, he says: “Here
is bone of my bone, ﬂesh of my ﬂesh”; he is in the
company of spirit. At that moment, the woman is
queen, for the spirit gives dominion; the education
of the children gives dominion. And then the man
discovers in his home everything that he lacked on
the outside; he feels like a man, and she feels the
honor of being a woman.
How can you recognize a genuine home? By
two signs. Firstly, the fact that the children do not
desert it; I mean the children who in turn have not
renounced their true nature as children and who
know how to resist the pressures of social life outside
the home. For if the home preserves the children,
the children in turn have the duty to preserve the
home. Secondly, there is something else which
we no longer see today, which proves the kind of
avarice that money develops in each one of us.
Once upon a time, Christian homes were the refuge
of life’s outcasts. The wretched could stop there,
they were nourished, perhaps even given a bed.
We do not have as many poor people now, you
tell me: while that remains to be proven—for the
poor you will always have with you, and you only
have to open your eyes to see them—there are still
life’s outcasts in suit and tie, those who are rich in
worldly goods but outcasts psychologically. Once
upon a time, they accepted the invitation of Mrs.
So-and-So because they knew that in her home they
would have, during the visit, a moment to conﬁde
their worries, to regain hope and courage near to
someone who would give them new reasons to stand
back up, to set out again happier. The joy of the
woman is to feel the honor of welcoming in order to
save, for woman is designed to save life’s outcasts.

“The Value of Human Life in Parallel with
Women’s Liberation”: what a subject for a
philosophy thesis! The major expression of feminine
nature consists in conserving her mystical nobility to
the beneﬁt of the life of society by remaining in the
home, of which she alone knows the social mission
and of which she alone is the queen. Allowing
the woman to remain in the home is the formal
obligation of rulers who would not be governed in
turn by sectarian, inhuman orders, charged with
assuring obligatory disorder by raising over all
things the cult of money, cause of the devaluing of
woman, cause of the paganizing of man, cause of
the destruction of the home, and cause of economic
crises. When that day comes, it will be the return of
Christendom.
If she wished, woman could play a preponderant
role in this restoration. It is the specialty of her spirit
to uphold the cathedral that is the home, by sheer
sacriﬁce and endurance, so that we might visit the
home as we would visit the cathedral of Chartres:
taking off our hat in respect and letting ourselves be
washed over by the ambiance of beauty it emanates,
revealing a spiritual presence that draws the heart to
prayer.
In the mechanical circulation where the “human
things” that many have become are jostled along
without pity—deprived of any means of repose or of
refreshment under the sign of a Home inhabited by
a spirit, source of peace; their heart befuddled by
a confusion of faces without spirit but not without
make-up, encountered at every turn—humanity
throws itself upon a sack of coins, while the animals,
watched over by the Creator Spirit, prove they
know more than we do when it comes to the respect
of their nature. With a great deal of art and science,
humanity is in the process of losing woman, as
a just reversal of things for having been lost by
her. Woman refuses the diadem which God would
place on her brow; all we can do now is bless the
most beautiful of women, she who, virgin, mother,
spouse, widow, will always be queen because she is
wreathed with the most beautiful reﬂection of the
Holy Spirit–Mary.

Published as “La Femme Actuelle devant la Femme Éternelle,” Carnets
Spirituels, No. 1, Le Mariage, pp.3-11. Translated exclusively into English
for Angelus Press. Fr. Bernard-Marie de Chivré, O.P. (say: Sheave-ray´) was
ordained in 1930. He was an ardent Thomist, student of Scripture, retreat
master, and friend of Archbishop Lefebvre. He died in 1984.

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THE ANGELUS • March 2006

36

THE INTERPRETATION
OF THE SECOND
VATICAN COUNCIL
Last December 22, Pope Benedict XVI gave a
crucial speech on the interpretation of Vatican II. At
ﬁrst glance, this text seems to take into account the
objections of traditionalists. But a more thorough
analysis reveals in the current Pope’s thought a strong
attachment to the most serious errors of the Council,
as well as a desire to anchor Vatican II in the Church
as a key element of a “new tradition.”
The speech of December 22, 2005, of capital
importance for understanding the current evolution
of ideas in the Church, was preceded by several
interesting acts.
On November 9, by a motu proprio, the Pope
suppressed the decision taken by Pope Paul VI in
1969 according a large measure of autonomy to
the Franciscans of Assisi. They used this autonomy
to immerse themselves in liturgical and pastoral
innovation. From now on, they must once again defer
to the local bishop and must follow the canonical and
liturgical norms.
On December 1, there was a letter from the
Congregation for Divine Worship that, “in the name
of the Holy Father,” reminded the Neo-Catechumenal
Way, this movement that had the strong support
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of John Paul II, of their obligations. The most
remarkable point was the directive to “not use
Eucharistic Prayer II exclusively, but to use the others
contained in the Missal as well.”
On December 8, the 40th anniversary of the close
of Vatican II, the Pope made a decisive gesture...
he did nothing. In a situation where Pope John Paul
II would have certainly arranged a triumphalist
gathering to celebrate the success of the Council,
Benedict XVI dedicated the main part of his sermon
to the Blessed Virgin, even though he did devote his
introduction to Vatican II.
But these acts, although eliciting much interest
from observers, are far from having the importance of
the speech of December 22.

A “Game-Plan” Speech
The occasion for this speech is a tradition
begun by Pope John Paul II. Every year, just before
Christmas, the Pope receives the Curia to exchange
Christmas wishes, taking advantage of the gathering
to sum up the past year.

37
A little less than half the speech was thus devoted
to reviewing the events of the year 2005: the death of
Pope John Paul II, World Youth Day, the Synod on the
Eucharist and, of course, the election of Pope Benedict
XVI. We can note in this review the severe censure of
the Pope with regard to one of the essential theses of
the promoters of the liturgical reform:
In the period of liturgical reform, Mass and adoration
outside it were often seen as in opposition to one another:
it was thought that the Eucharistic Bread had not been given
to us to be contemplated, but to be eaten, as a widespread
objection claimed at that time. The experience of the prayer
of the Church has already shown how nonsensical this
antithesis was.

Pope Benedict XVI continued his reproach of
this derisive critique of Catholic Eucharistic tradition.
But the “nuclear heart” of the speech was a return
to Vatican II. This text deserves our attention, for
it clariﬁes the thinking of Pope Benedict XVI on a
crucial subject.

A Key Text
The analysis is thorough and the thought
expressed is quite dense. We can sense that the Holy
Father put considerable effort into it and expressed
in it a reﬂection which is close to his heart, one that
represents without doubt a major axis in his thinking
and life.
In comparison with Pope John Paul II’s writing,
which was diffuse and somewhat complicated,
Pope Benedict XVI is enjoyable to read, even if
the precision of the speech requires close attention.
The reproaches often made with regard to German
philosophy of being unreadable because of obscure
neologisms are not too warranted here.
The ideas of the Pope are in the same line as the
book The Ratzinger Report (cf. Fr. Loic Duverger, “Le
Retournement,” Fideliter, No.169). The two major
advantages of the present text are, ﬁrst, a synthetic
character, and above all the fact that it is no longer the
writing of the theologian Ratzinger, but an act of Pope
Benedict XVI.

A Desire to Clarify
The Sovereign Pontiff–and this is what’s
interesting about his intervention–takes head-on the
question of the exact status of the Council, which has
poisoned the Church for 40 years. We sense that he is
hoping, through this effort of clariﬁcation, to clear the
road for the Church. The questions which seem to us
essential for the unraveling of the crisis are dealt with
squarely, and we notice with interest that the Pope is
at least somewhat aware of the objections made by the
traditional movement.
Moreover, we cannot but underscore the
praiseworthy intention of the Pope to identify himself
with Catholic Tradition, to want to follow this path. As

we shall see, he doesn’t really succeed, but the simple
fact of wanting to is already progress.
Also (and this is an established fact), Pope
Benedict XVI has the courage to vigorously condemn
certain errors.
Nevertheless, we must not take this text for
something it is not: the end of the crisis in the
Church. The Pope proceeds like a surgeon coming
to a wounded man. There is blood everywhere, his
clothing is torn, etc. The doctor begins by clearing and
cleaning the wound, so that the real problem can be
seen. Such is the work accomplished by Pope Benedict
XVI in this speech of December 22.
But, at this moment, the wound appears in all its
severity, and now begins the much more long and
complicated stage of healing. In the second part of
his speech, which we highlight in the Appendix [see
sidebar on pp.38-39 of this article–Ed.], Pope Benedict
XVI shows himself to be attached to certain of the
most serious errors of Vatican II.

The Desire to Identify
Vatican II with Tradition
The Pope’s intention in this text is quite clear: to
show that the Council can and must be understood as
being, despite certain appearances to the contrary, in
conformity with Catholic Tradition, in conformity with
all the councils.
To try to thoroughly demonstrate this point,
Pope Benedict XVI takes up a number of connected
themes. Some are somewhat brief: for example, only
a phrase evokes the “relationship between the Church
and the faith of Israel,” which is nevertheless an
important theme of Vatican II and of the thinking of
Pope Benedict XVI.
Others are presented in a more developed
manner: religious liberty and the relationship between
the Church and the world. The heart of his thesis
is a distinction on the way of interpreting the texts
of the Council. This speech of December 22nd is of
such importance and density that it requires several
penetrating theological studies.
Here, we are only going to consider the theme
of the “wrong” interpretation of the Council, which
allows us to grasp the main interest of this attempt by
Pope Benedict XVI to resolve the problem of Vatican
II, but also its limits and incoherence.

A Crisis After the Council
In his analysis, the Pope begins by frankly
admitting the existence of the post-conciliar crisis:
“No one can deny that in vast areas of the Church the
implementation of the Council has been somewhat
difﬁcult.” He returns to this theme several times,
for example when he points out the error of those
who think the opening to the world would eliminate
all difﬁculties. They “had underestimated the inner
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THE ANGELUS • March 2006

38
tensions as well as the contradictions inherent in the
modern epoch,” as well as “the perilous frailty of
human nature.” This in such a way that, even when
the Pope wants to recognize the Council’s good fruit,
he is forced to use circumlocutions and nuances on
top of nuances: “Today, we see that although the good
seed developed slowly, it is nonetheless growing.”

The Two Interpretations
In order to explain this crisis, Pope Benedict XVI
opposes two interpretations (he uses a more scholarly
term, “hermeneutic”) of this event. One, the wrong
interpretation or hermeneutic, “caused confusion.”
The other, the correct one, “bore and is bearing fruit.”
The Pope undertakes a methodical critique of
this “wrong” interpretation, an interpretation of
“discontinuity and rupture.” Supported by “the mass
media, and also one trend of modern theology,”
this interpretation posits that the true Council is not
found in the texts ratiﬁed between 1962-65, but in the

“impulses toward the new that are contained in the
texts.”
This interpretation postulates that we can only be
faithful to the Council in bypassing its letter, which is
the fruit of punctilious compromises and which only
imperfectly reﬂects the reality of the conciliar event.
Pope Benedict XVI concludes sternly: “The
hermeneutic of discontinuity risks ending up in a
break between the pre- and post-conciliar Churches.”

The Essential
Constitution of the Church
At this point in his exposition and critique of the
“wrong” interpretation of Vatican II, the Pope takes
up a new argument, which is quite interesting. This
interpretation, he says, considers the Council “as a
sort of constituent assembly that eliminates an old
constitution and creates a new one.” He objects,
The Fathers had no such mandate and no one had ever
given them one; nor could anyone have given them one

APPENDIX: The Question of
To explain and illustrate his “hermeneutic of reform,” the Pope proposed
several themes. The notion that he developed the most is that of religious liberty or,
as he said, “liberty of religion.”
One can well understand, through this example, how Pope Benedict XVI tried
to directly address several of our objections, while at the same time defending one
of the gravest errors of Vatican II.

The Logic of the Pope

Religious Liberty Questioned. Available
from Angelus Press. Price: $12.95.

His analysis goes as follows. In the 19th century, “freedom of religion was
thought of as an expression of the incapacity of man to ﬁnd the Truth” and as “an
exaltation of relativism,” “raised in an illegitimate way to the level of metaphysics.”
It was the spirit of the “radical phase of the French Revolution.”
Faced with this grave error, which asserts that man is not “capable of knowing
the truth about God,” the Church, under Pope Pius IX, rightly produced “severe
condemnations.”
But then, “the modern era underwent developments,” a maturation occurred
and, from a metaphysical principle, freedom of religion regained its just place as a
social and historical necessity, connected to human coexistence in the context of a
plurality of religions. This is the “model of the American Revolution.”

Principles of Vatican II
Vatican II also, “recognizing and making her own through the Decree on Religious Liberty an essential
principle of the modern state, took up again the most profound patrimony of the Church,” in such a way as to
ﬁnd herself “in full harmony with the teachings of Jesus Himself.” In fact, the Council intended to show that
religious liberty not only ﬂows from a social and political necessity, but is rooted in the “intrinsic reality of the
truth, which cannot be imposed from the outside, but must be adopted by man solely through the mechanism of
conviction.”

“Example” of the Martyrs

To illustrate and support his assertion, the Pope uses “the example” of the martyrs. According to him, the
Roman Empire imposed a state religion. The ﬁrst Christians, adoring only Jesus, logically refused to adore the
pagan gods and thus, “through this, clearly rejected the religion of the state.”
THE ANGELUS
• Macrh 2006
www.angeluspress.org
The martyrs
of the
early Church died for their faith in God who revealed Himself in Jesus Christ and, in so doing, died also for

their liberty of conscience and for their freedom to profess their faith, a profession which cannot be imposed by any state.

39
because the essential constitution of the Church comes from
the Lord.

The argument, we repeat, is striking: a change
in the constitution of the Church by the Council is
impossible, ﬁrstly because the Fathers did not have
any such mandate; secondly, because no one gave it
to them; thirdly, because no one could have given it
to them. In short, in the Church, the Revolution (even
a “conciliar” one) is illicit in principle and without
normative value.

The “Authorized”
Interpretation
To this doctrine of “discontinuity,” to this
revolution “in tiara and cope,” to this “wrong”
interpretation of Vatican II, Pope Benedict XVI
opposes the “true” interpretation, that of “reform.”
According to the Sovereign Pontiff, in the process of
“reform” (whose perfect example is the Council), “the
principles express the permanent aspect [of Tradition],

since they remain as an undercurrent, motivating
decisions from within,” while the “practical forms...the
contingent matters...depend on the historical situation
and are therefore subject to change.”
This “correct interpretation,” intellectually quite
debatable (that’s the least we can say), deserves indepth analyses. We give an example of one such in our
Appendix (see below). But let us try here to deepen our
analysis of the “wrong interpretation.”
The Pope, it is true, does not use the words
“good” or “bad,” “right” or “wrong” to describe
these interpretations. Nevertheless, such words as
these convey his real meaning. But is the distinction
between a “good” and “bad” interpretation the only
one relevant to our topic? Concerning a Council, is
not the pertinent distinction between the “authorized”
and “unauthorized” interpretations? And are not the
“authorized” interpreters of Vatican II the Popes?
Pope Benedict XVI is aware of this objection
because he cites, to support his “good” interpretation, a
speech by Pope John XXIII and one by Pope Paul VI.

of Religious Liberty
Weak Reasoning

Falsiﬁed Debate

The weakness of the current Pope’s reasoning seems
obvious to anyone who has studied the question even a
little, notably through the work by Archbishop Lefebvre,
Religious Liberty Questioned [available from Angelus Press;
price: $12.95].
To assert that the condemnation of religious liberty
in the 19th century was only based on its relativist
foundation and not on its very nature is a countertruth as
much historically as doctrinally.
Speaking only of Pope Pius IX regarding religious
liberty would mean forgetting, before him, Popes Pius
VI, Pius VII or Gregory XVI. It is an even more serious
evasion of numerous teachings on this subject of Popes
Leo XIII, Benedict XV, Pius XI (Quas Primas), and Pius
XII.
To afﬁrm that, from now on, the conception which
prevails is no longer metaphysical relativism but a
simple assertion of necessities in a pluralistic world is to
take refuge in an imaginary world. In reality, the more
secularism spreads, the more this legal desire to put God
out of all social life grows.
It is moreover, quite characteristic, for the Pope, to
refer to an “essential principle of the modern state” in
this regard. If it were only a question of the assertion
of a necessity, he would speak more prosaically of a
“customary practice of the modern state.”
However, concerning the coexistence of diverse
religions in the same country, the doctrine of tolerance,
pushed in its consequences by Pope Pius XII on
December 6, 1953, only 12 years before the Decree on
Religious Liberty, was amply sufﬁcient. If the Council
opted for the “principle of the freedom of religion,” it is
because it wanted to join this “essential principle of the
modern state.”

To speak exclusively, in the question of religious
liberty, of the “knowledge of the truth” is to falsify the
debate. Everyone agrees, and always did, with this
principle of the Code of Canon Law: “No one can be
constrained to embrace the Catholic Faith against his
will.” But in reality, the issue at stake is knowing if
anyone can be prevented from spreading a false religious
doctrine. This is not the same thing: that someone be
prevented from acting never meant that he is forced to act.
To reject in principle any notion of state religion and
to make no allusion to the duty of societies to honor God
comes down to consigning to oblivion a constant teaching
of the Church, including the Decree on Religious
Liberty, which recalls this duty (even if it is somewhat
hypocritical, because it was a last-minute addition by
Pope Paul VI to “break” the persistent opposition to this
text):
[Religious liberty] leaves intact the traditional Catholic doctrine
on the moral duty of societies with regard to the true religion
and the one Church of Christ.

To make no distinction between the true religion and
false ones is to eliminate up front a crucial distinction,
for the rights of truth are essentially different from the
“rights” of error. As Pope Pius XII said:
What does not correspond to the truth and the moral law has no
objective right to existence, to propaganda, nor to action.

Finally, to call to the support of religious liberty i.e.,
to the support of the refusal to recognize the social reign
of Our Lord Jesus Christ, the Christian martyrs who
died precisely for the “Lord Jesus,” is to denature all of
history, all Catholic doctrine, all reality. One cannot, on
such a faulty foundation,
construct a THE
“hermeneutic
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ANGELUS • Marchof
2006
reform” of any value.

40

The Interpretation
of Pope Paul VI
Let’s pass over Pope John XXIII, whose thinking
on Vatican II is not especially clear. The fragment
cited by the current Pope demonstrates this. There
exists, in fact, two versions of this fragment, one in
Italian, which is obviously more progressive, the other
in Latin, which is more traditional. Indeed, on two
different occasions, Pope John XXIII used the two
versions.
On the other hand, for Pope Paul VI, we have
the beneﬁt of an abundance of speeches. Can we
exonerate Pope Paul VI of an interpretation of Vatican
II as a rupture, at least partially, with the Church’s
past?
Pope Benedict XVI sees this difﬁculty. He
says of the closing speech of the Council by Pope
Paul VI, that in it the Pope gives another reason “a
hermeneutic of discontinuity can seem convincing.”
Speaking of the Council, he afﬁrms that, “some kind
of discontinuity might emerge. Indeed, a discontinuity
had been revealed,” in such a way that the continuity
is “easy to miss…at a ﬁrst glance,” an “apparent
discontinuity” being more obvious. Actually, a good
deal more than the current Sovereign Pontiff wants to
admit, Pope Paul VI took the perspective of a certain
discontinuity between the pre- and post-conciliar
Churches. We shall cite three characteristic examples.

A Certain Intention of Rupture
1) We have seen that, according to Pope Benedict
XVI, a council cannot modify the constitution of the
Church. Moreover, we know that the Holy Father
deplores, in the liturgical reform, the rupture which
took place there. But how then should we interpret the
phrase of Pope Paul VI on January 13, 1965, if not in
terms of constitutional and liturgical rupture:
The new religious pedagogy that the present liturgical
renewal wants to establish ﬁts, so as to almost take the place
of a central engine, into the great movement inscribed in the
constitutional principles of the Church, and made easier and
more urgent by the progress of the human culture?

2) Ten years later the “Lefebvre affair” erupted.
There also, on two major occasions, Pope Paul VI was
going to opt for a form of rupture. On June 29, 1975,
writing to Archbishop Lefebvre, Pope Paul VI spoke
these extraordinary and signiﬁcant words:
The Second Vatican Council has no less authority, it is
even in certain aspects more important than that of Nicea.

That a pastoral council would be more important than
the council which deﬁned the dogma of the divinity
of Christ signiﬁes that this Council is, in reality, the
foundation of a new Church.
3) This new form of the Church is going to
be characterized one year later by Bishop Benelli,
THE ANGELUS • Macrh 2006 www.angeluspress.org

Substitute of the Secretariat of State, in a letter where
he notes that for the seminarians of Ecône,
there is nothing desperate in their case: if they are of good
will and seriously prepared for a priestly ministry in true
ﬁdelity to the conciliar Church, we will undertake to ﬁnd the
best solution.

It belongs to Pope Benedict XVI to tell us if this
vision of Vatican II was an authorized interpretation,
or if it was only the wild interpretation of the
theologian Montini. To the distinction “authorizedunauthorized,” we must add another, even more
important: that of “true” and “false” interpretation.

True and False Interpretation
For, after all, an interpretation is not supposed
to be an “imaginative creation”; on the contrary,
it should arise from the text itself in a logical and
spontaneous way. The true interpretation of Vatican
II is that which “springs” from its texts read in their
obvious sense.
Moreover, it is characteristic of the problems
posed by the text of the Council that, 40 years after its
promulgation, a Pope must dedicate such a theological
effort to try and explain its meaning.
In fact, it is enough to cite reliable observers to
realize that the dominant impression of the Council
was that of a rupture. Whether one speaks of Cardinal
Suenens afﬁrming that “Vatican II was 1789 in the
Church,” or of Fr. Congar underscoring that at the
Council “the Church had its October Revolution,” or
of Cardinal Ratzinger confessing that “Vatican II was
an anti-Syllabus,” the list is long of ﬁrst-class witnesses
who perceived it thus. It is necessary that the current
Pope tell us clearly where such a dominant impression
comes from, if not from the texts themselves.

The Real Debate
Is Finally Underway
We must not forget a most fundamental fact: the
objective analysis of the texts of the Council shows,
on certain points, a discontinuity with the constant
teaching of the Church. Nevertheless, the debate is
underway, and it is ﬁtting to thank the Pope for having
started it so clearly. It is necessary however, in this
debate which must be undertaken out of love for the
Church, to boldly confront the real.
Actually, we think that in objective reality, “the
hermeneutic of rupture” is to be found not only in
the media and some of the theologians but is ﬁrst of
all, at least in certain respects, to be found in Vatican
II itself, in the letter of its texts. The debate must
necessarily shed light on this crucial point.
This study by the French District of the Society of Saint Pius X was posted
(Jan. 21, 2006) on the French District’s website, www.laportelatine.org. It was
translated into English for DICI, the press agency of the Society of Saint Pius
X, from where this edition was taken. Angelus Press slightly edited the text
for more accurate expression.

Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile
Joseph Pearce

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Even before the “fall of the wall,” one man took on the Communists alone with a series of novels
the Soviets refused to print. Faced with the choice of killing Solzhenitsyn or kicking him out of the
USSR, they exiled him. WHY should a Catholic read the life of a Russian Orthodox man? Why would
a great modern Catholic author write his biography? Why would Solzhenitsyn, very wary of western
journalists, open up, for the first time, to author Joseph Pearce? Simple. Pearce and Solzhenitsyn–
Catholics and Solzhenitsyn share a common world view: anti-materialism. Solzhenitsyn arrived in the
US as a hero, but that didn’t last long as he realized that the US was essentially not much different
from the USSR. We have no gulags, but that is not the essence: it is the destruction of spiritual
values and the exultation of the material, of comfort. Solzhenitsyn saw that the more you suffer, the
more the soul grows. Materialism and consumerism–Communist, Capitalist, atheist, whatever-ist–
strangle the soul. The Catholic Pearce and Solzhenitsyn are “on the same wavelength.” Dan Rather
won’t cut it here!
From his pro-Communist youth to being a Red Army officer in WWII to his imprisonment in the Gulags to his exile in
America to his triumphant return to Russia; this major biography of one of the leading figures of the 20th century covers it all.

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Joseph Pearce is best at what matters most about Solzhenitsyn: the centrality of the author’s Christian faith. It is no wonder that
Solzhenitsyn chose to...provide him with fresh information. Newcomers to Solzhenitsyn should start with this biography. They will find here
a highly readable rendition of one of the most sensational lives of the 20th century.–Edward E. Ericson, Jr., author of Solzhenitsyn and
the Modern World
Pearce has paid Solzhenitsyn the compliment of taking his moral beliefs and aspirations seriously.–Alexis Klimoff, professor of Russian
Studies, Vassar College

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

“The champion of Thomistic philosophy,
Dr. Peter Chojnowski”–Fr. Cyprian, O.S.B.

Flesh of My Flesh: The Contemporary
Assault on Men and Women
Dr. Peter Chojnowski

This book is an attempt to overcome the negativity of the
Feminist critique of traditional Christian civilization by searching
for the positive sources of masculinity and femininity as can
be found in history. Each article considers one aspect of the
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modern assault on the masculine and the feminine personality,
I
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as traditionally appreciated, while offering insights into those
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personalities with suggestions as to how they can be recovered
in the democratic age in which we live.
We have had enough of facile critiques by those who are nothing but hesitant
liberals. The only way that we can hope for a future in which the masculine and
feminine personalities can develop to their fullest extent is by trying to recover
a full appreciation for the gender differences. If Aristotle is right in showing that
the differentiation of roles between men and women is the most basic element
of advanced human civilization, we had better reject our current world view that
repudiates the reality of these roles. How can men be men and women be women?
Let us think together and we might rediscover that which was a given for men and
women ages past.

99pp, softcover, STK# 8165 $15.00

NT”
L L Erdner,

St. Augustine as Educator: “EX. SCE
Ga
cott PX
S
Fr
S
The Confessions (Vol.1)
Dr. Peter Chojnowski

Dr. John Senior has written in his unpublished
manuscript “The Restoration of Innocence: An Idea of a
School,” that ultimately a true teacher “teaches himself,”
and a true student “studies himself.” Such a characterization
of teaching seems to be an assertion of the most
disoriented subjective teachings of our age: the teacher as
W
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nonconformist exhibitionist and the student as self-absorbed
ER I
pragmatist. Such an evaluation of Senior’s statement is,
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of course, a complete misunderstanding. By saying that a
teacher “teaches himself,” (and here it does not mean that
the teacher “instructs himself,”) is to say that the most significant thing a teacher can
communicate to his students is his own personal and intellectual encounter with the
Created and the Uncreated Order. By instructing the youth in a specific discipline,
the teacher is opening up his own mind and soul. If the teacher is a true seeker of the
truth, his own soul will be a translucent medium between the student and the rational
order that has lent itself to the intellectual vision of the student.

39pp, softcover, STK# 8166 $8.00

A must for every teacher!

We have sold over 39,000 copies of Time Bombs of the Second
Vatican Council. It covers the problems of the Council and people are
giving them away like hotcakes. Since the Mass is also a critical problem, we want to offer these two pamphlets together as a Trad “double
whammy.” They are as cheap as we can offer them. Buy them and
give them away to all those of good will to help them understand
the traditionalist position. This is a very important, inexpensive, and
critical apostolate for every layman.

Double Whammy!
The Mass and the Council

2 pam

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let
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ST
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$0.75

Time Bombs of the Second Vatican Council

Fr. Schmidberger explains the four chief reasons
that Vatican II brought about the current crisis
in the Church: 1) not clearly defining Catholic
Truth, 2) failing to definitively reject error, 3)
adopting ambig­uous, contradictory language,
4) establishing teachings very close to here­sy.
Highlights include:
The Church After 1945  Prophets of Gloom  A
Reform of the Church  Opening Speech of Vatican
II  Two Modern Errors  Decree on Ecumenism
(Unitatis Redintegratio)  No Salvation Outside the
Church  Ecumenical Practices  Who is to Blame?
 Decree on the Church (Lumen Gentium)  Decree
on Non‑Christian Religions (Nostra Aetate) 
Hinduism  Buddhism  Islam  The Jews 
Spirit of Indifferentism  Declaration on Religious
Liberty (Dignitatis ­Humanae)  Decree on the
Church in the Modern World (Gaudium et Spes) 
False Solution  True Solution  “Keep the
Faith”–Pray
32pp, color softcover, pocket-sized, blank area
on back for stamping.

62 Reasons: Why the
Traditional Latin Mass

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

Blessed Be God

A Complete Catholic Prayer Book

Frs. Charles J. Callan & John A. McHugh

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From the publisher:

At 754
m ost pages, the
prayer com plete
book
ever!

In the nearly 25 years that we have been doing work in the
used book business, we have come across hundreds of different
devotional manuals, prayer books, novena books, etc....Now the
book which has been in the greatest demand since we began
our work is...Blessed Be God...probably one of the few Catholic
traditional prayer books that covers most of the bases when it
comes to novenas, pious exercises, prayers, litanies, the Mass,
etc. No prayer book has everything, but this one has much of what
any Catholic may want for his or her daily spiritual life. Includes a
missal, meditations and readings from the Bible & The Imitation
of Christ, all the Epistles and Gospels for Sundays and Holydays,
Sunday Vespers, Matrimonial Ceremony, Prayers for the Dying...
INCREDIBLY COMPREHENSIVE. One buyer gave away all her
other prayer books because this one “has everything”!
Fine paper, one ribbon, in print from 1925-61. This is an exact
reprint of the 1925 edition. Can’t go wrong if you want a prayer
book!

Before this
book was
recently
reprinted, 754pp, index, gold-embossed hardcover, STK# 8164 $32.00
used copies
sold for
$600-$700
each. That’s
how badly
some people
want this
book!

www.angeluspress.org

NEW WEBSITE with ENHANCED FEATURES

unconquered
hearts
The Girls of Camp Olmsted 2005
♦

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1 Let Us Sing Together
2 Banuwa
3 Non Nobis, Domine
In 2005, 55 girls attended one of the many SSPX summer camps that year. But the
4 Pack She Back to She Ma  
girls of Camp Olmsted in Russell, Pennsylvania, accomplished something quite
extraordinary. Their campfire singing was so good they called out a professional
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recorder to the camp and made this EXCELLENT CD of 22 Catholic and folk
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songs with instrumental accompaniment. You will be amazed at the quality of
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the singing and the recording. Proceeds from the sale of this CD go towards
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offsetting the cost of future girls’ camps. Because Angelus Press is buying these 9 Lolly Too-dum
CD's from the Camp, you help offset future camp costs with your purchase from us. 10 Cockles and Mussels
1 CD of 22 songs, STK# 8151 $14.95
11 Coasts of High Barbary

12 On My Journey
13 O Salutaris
14 Rodger Young
15 I Love the Mountains
16 Gypsy Rover
17 This Land Is Your Land
18 John B. Sails
19 Air Falalalo
20 Nine Hundred Miles
21 Pick a Little, Talk a Little
22 Christus Vincit