APRIL 2011 $4.45 “Instaurare omnia in Christo” A JOURNAL OF ROMAN CATHOLIC TRADITION MORAL THEOLOGY AND ABORTION ABORTION AND EXCOMMUNICATION WHAT ST. PADRE PIO HAD TO SAY ABOUT ABORTION 2011 ANGELUS PRESS CONFERENCE THE KINGSHIP OF CHRIST ◆ Bishop Bernard Tissier de Mallerais ◆ Fr. Gerard Beck ◆ Fr. Juan-Carlos Iscara ◆ Fr. Albert, OP ◆ Fr. Daniel Themann ◆ Dr. John Rao ◆ Dr. Brian McCall ◆ Mr. Andrew Clarendon ◆ Mr. Christopher Check October 7-9, 2011 Airport Hilton, Kansas City, MO More information to be announced soon! A comprehensive handbook explaining the positions of the Society of Saint Pius X on the Pope, the New Mass, and the new (1983) Code of Canon Law. Includes a complete history of the Society of Saint Pius X. In 1970, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre gained approval from Rome to create a new religious society—the Society of Saint Pius X. Its mission was to preserve and propagate the traditional Catholic priesthood and the Tridentine Mass. Forty years later, the Society remains the object of great controversy. The questions surrounding the SSPX demand answers. 200 pp. Softcover. Indexed. STK# 6712✱ $11.95 New, Updated Edition! Includes: History of the SSPX (1970-2011) A COLLECTION OF EIGHT INDEPENDENT STUDIES Neither Schismatic Nor Excommunicated Tradition, the Council, and Traditional Catholics The Case of the Imaginary Schism Declaration of Bishop Antonio de Castro Mayer Schism and Archbishop Lefebvre The Episcopal Consecrations The Disposition of Law in Case of Necessity Within the Church Letter of St. Athanasius to His Flock YOUR QUESTIONS? ANSWERED. ✠ ✠ ✠ ✠ ✠ ✠ ✠ ✠ ✠ ✠ ✠ ✠ Who was Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre? What is the Society of Saint Pius X? Wasn’t the Society of Saint Pius X lawfully suppressed? Wasn’t Archbishop Lefebvre suspended from performing all sacred functions, along with all the priests he ordained? What are Catholics to think of Vatican II? Do traditional priests have jurisdiction to hear confessions and perform marriages? May we attend Masses offered under Summorum Pontificum? Wasn’t Archbishop Lefebvre excommunicated for consecrating bishops unlawfully? Isn’t the Society of Saint Pius X schismatic? What are we to think of the Fraternity of Saint Peter? What are we to think of the new Catechism of the Catholic Church? What of the sedevacantists? Is Tradition Excommunicated? Compiled by Angelus Press A collection of eight independent studies explaining what "excommunication" and "schism" mean. Covers the legal status of the Latin Mass, traditional sacraments, and those who frequent them. Includes the 1988 declaration of Bishop de Castro Mayer, and a timeless letter of St. Athanasius, who found himself in a situation that looks very familiar to traditional Catholics! 116 pp. Softcover. Indexed. STK# 1018✱ $8.95 The “Instaurare omnia in Christo — To restore all things in Christ.” ngelus Volume XXXIV, Number 4 APriL 2011 English-language Editor and Publisher for the International Society of Saint Pius X PubLiSHer Fr. Arnaud Rostand editor Fr. Markus Heggenberger ASSiStAnt editor Mr. James Vogel oPerAtionS mAnAGer Mr. Michael Sestak editoriAL ASSiStAnt Miss Anne Stinnett deSiGn And LAYout Mr. Simon Townshend comPtroLLer Motto of Pope St. Pius X Contents 2 LETTER FROM THE EDITOR Fr. Markus Heggenberger, FSSPX 3 I ACCUSE THE COUNCIL Fr. Scott Gardner, FSSPX 8 ABORTION Iesus Christus 8 Abortion and Excommunication by Fr. Richard R. Olmedo 14 Moral Theology and Abortion by Fr. Fernando Altamira 20 What Padre Pio Had to Say about Abortion Mr. Robert Wiemann, CPA cuStomer SerVice Mr. John Rydholm Miss Rebecca Heatwole Anti-abortion march in France. SHiPPinG And HAndLinG Mr. Jon Rydholm “To publish Catholic journals and place them in the hands of honest men is not enough. It is necessary to spread them as far as possible that they may be read by all, and especially by those whom Christian charity demands we should tear away from the poisonous sources of evil literature.” –Pope St. Pius X 22 THE CHURCH’S CULPABLE SILENCE Some thoughts from Dr. Xavier Dor 26 FR. ESCHER COMES TO TRADITION DICI Fr. Yannick Escher SUBSCRIPTION RATES US Foreign Countries (inc. Canada & Mexico) 1 year 2 years 3 years $35.00 $65.00 $100.00 $55.00 $105.00 $160.00 All payments must be in uS funds only. ONLINE SUBSCRIPTIONS $15.00/year (the online edition is available around the 10th of the preceding month). To subscribe visit: www.angelusonline.org. Register for free to access back issues 14 months and older plus many other site features. The Angelus (ISSN 10735003) is published monthly under the patronage of St. Pius X and Mary, Queen of Angels. Publication office is located at 2915 Forest Ave., Kansas City, MO 64109. PH (816) 7533150; FAX (816) 753-3557. Periodicals Postage Rates paid at Kansas City, MO. ©2011 by Angelus Press. Manuscripts will be used at the discretion of the editors. Postmaster sends address changes to the address above. 29 THE IMPORTANCE OF LANGUAGE PART 2 Dr. David Allen White 32 INTERVIEW WITH FR. GREGORY POST, FSSPX 35 ST. MAXIMILIAN KOLBE: HIS VERY OWN WORDS PART 3 St. Maximilian Kolbe, O.F.M., Conv. 39 CHURCH AND WORLD 41 QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS Fr. Peter Scott, FSSPX 43 THE LAST WORD Fr. Régis de Cacqueray, FSSPX 2 Letter from the T Editor here is an astonishing affinity between two major problems in Western society: the crisis of natural law and the crisis in the Catholic Church. By “crisis of natural law” I mean to point out exactly what the “right to life” is about. It is reflected in the divine commandment “Thou shalt not kill” applied to any human being, as opposed to the claim of “my body belongs to me” or the “right” to abortion. To many it may seem a bold assertion to make a connection between these two kinds of crises. How does the crisis in the Church have anything to do with abortion? The crisis of the Church is a crisis of corruption: moral corruption. It is not so difficult to understand this after being bombarded for years now with the news pointing out the corruption of the Catholic hierarchy. Corruption, so readily supported and declared as “natural” and a part of “human rights,” is finally used as an argument against the Church. Surely not everything that has been reported is true, but there is sufficient truth in it to make a reform (not “reformation,” because the Catholic Faith must not be touched), one of the first obligations of any leader of the Church. The nature of this corruption varies according to circumstances. But it is very clear that unjustifiable things happened, and not only on lower levels. It is also clear that the tendency of trying to justify facts by changing and adapting Catholic doctrine has reached the ranks of the bishops. Most of them do not have the THE ANGELUS • April 2011 www.angeluspress.org courage (and perhaps not the possibility) to clean up their dioceses. If these premises are true, then it would be more than astonishing–in fact, impossible–that members of the hierarchy are not involved in the kind of moral corruption which is called “abortion,” but is more accurately called the “killing of an innocent.” Certainly, the principles about abortion which are explained in this issue have not been written firstly for the clergy. If you seriously have to explain the sacredness of life to them (perhaps even without being understood and accepted), this is only a greater proof for the very urgent necessity of a moral reform in the whole Church, a reform like that undertaken by St. Charles Borromeo, one of the first bishops after the “Reformation” to visit every parish in his diocese and to straighten out what was twisted. Do you seriously think it is rash judgment to suppose moral corruption in the Church? It is no longer possible to hide things which have been hidden for such a long time, taking advantage of the good faith of pious souls. It’s the tip of an iceberg, which will demand skillful handling of the ship in order to avoid sinking. You might easily face a situation like the Titanic, where certain people did not want to accept the fact that a serious danger was approaching. They will yell at those who try to evacuate the ship. They will listen to the orchestra playing until it is too late for their own rescue… St. Pius X said: take away the Faith from a society and after some time they will adore the animals. This can literally be verified by considering various abhorrent cults which are making a comeback in our “enlightened” post-conciliar time. Many good souls say: “But the Catholic Church is our only resort and protection against the dissolution of society.” This is true. A functioning Catholic Church would be exactly that, and we believe that she has been founded by our Lord for the purpose of being a “light on the candlestick.” But what fruits can a corrupt Church have? Will she not rather be punished according to the wisdom and providence of God? It is true that the Church does not have the goal of dealing with the material welfare of a society. But when it comes to something like abortion, we are not dealing only with material welfare, but with the eternal salvation of souls. It is said that the Church adopted a new style and would no longer condemn. But not condemning abortion means indirectly supporting it. Who wants to bear responsibility for such a crime? “Not condemning” can sometimes be a shallow excuse for not taking a position against evil. May God protect us from this type of false peace and compromise, a prayer which comes from the Lord’s Prayer: “deliver us from evil.” Instaurare Omnia in Christo, Fr. Markus Heggenberger 3 THE DEFENSE OF TRADITION I Accuse the Council Fr. Scott Gardner, FSSPX This is an edited transcript of a lecture given on October 16 at the SSPX’s 40th Anniversary Conference in Kansas City. I t is a great and joyous occasion to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Society of St. Pius X. On such an occasion, we partake a little bit in a foretaste of the beatitude we are all destined for. The Mass was at least available to all of us this morning, so we partake a little bit in the union with God in the beatific vision which is to be ours. We participate also in a foretaste of that second part of beatitude St. Thomas tells us of: the company of the elect. Happiness is not complete without friends. So this is a great occasion for all of us to come together, renew old friendships, and forge new ones in anticipation of the great reunion we hope to come to in the Kingdom of Heaven. And if we come there, it will be because of the Catholic Faith. None of us—not one of us—qualifies for Limbo. It is our great grace to have received the Faith through the legacy of Archbishop Lefebvre and his fidelity during what has been arguably the craziest time in the history of the Church. It is a bit daunting for me to stand before you all today. I am probably the only speaker who never even met the Archbishop. The Society was founded right before I was born. I was but an infant of ten months when the Archbishop made his decision. I did not have the great grace of being raised in Tradition or even in Catholicism. By the time I came around, in the mid-90’s, the Archbishop, sadly, was gone. You have all borne the burden of the day’s heat while I am, more or less, a laborer of the ninth hour. I discovered the Archbishop in a conciliar Benedictine library in the mid-90’s when I was toying with the notion that I might have a vocation to be a Benedictine monk. In this library I found a copy of Apologia Pro Marcel Lefebvre by Michael Davies. It had been checked out once—the year it was published. Yet I stayed up reading it all night. It was a great www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • April 2011 4 2010 conference revelation to me, not only to see that Tradition was still alive, but that it was due to the fidelity and continuity which the Archbishop showed to the world. Later on, once I was living in Kansas City, I found a book in a used bookstore called The Council Datebook, a synopsis of every intervention made by the Fathers at the Council. By this time I knew a little bit more about the Archbishop, so I simply turned to the index and looked for Archbishop Lefebvre and Bishop de Castro Mayer. As I read their interventions, I was consoled, edified, and encouraged to see that they were saying the same things then as they would say later on. In fact, this tenacity and consistency is quite remarkable. It is something to be wondered at. How easy it would be to say “Oh, well, it was just sour grapes because he never got a Cardinal’s hat.” Or, “perhaps he was getting senile.” But when you look at the evidence, you simply see a great fidelity and insistence on clinging to and passing down the Faith. When you see his epitaph, his simple tomb at Ecône, you simply see the great quotation of St. Paul: Tradidi quod et accepi. I have handed on what I have received. Nothing truer was ever said, at least in these times, about a churchman. We are all the beneficiaries of this; we must give thanks for him and we must thank him. The Archbishop maintained the same course with no deviation to the right or to the left. Perhaps he was tempted to both sides at various points, but he never succumbed. Despite the naysayers on both sides, despite the powerful enemies on the side of the official churchmen, the Society he founded has carried on in his footsteps. We can say about the Society that, if we have enemies on both sides trying to divert us, we can take comfort in Our Lord’s dictum THE ANGELUS • April 2011 www.angeluspress.org to the Apostles: “If they have done this to me, why will they not do this to you?” We see the great storms that raged around the Archbishop. We can scarcely be surprised that storms rage around us also. If we are faithful to the line he has set, it will be for the same reason: continuity. Dr. David Allen White once said that, if the Archbishop ever became a Doctor of the Church, they would give him a nickname like they sometimes do to Doctors. (Think of St. Thomas as the “Universal Doctor” or St. Bonaventure as the “Seraphic Doctor.”) Dr. White said that Archbishop Lefebvre would be the “Doctor of the Obvious.” I think, rather, he would be called “The Tenacious Doctor.” He held on, amongst the storms and shipwrecks on all sides, by doing exactly what he had always done. The Church is the Mystical Body of Christ. If St. Paul says that “Jesus Christ is the same, yesterday, today, and forever,” it follows that the Catholic Church must be the same yesterday, today, and forever, in her essential teachings. Many of you probably know the quote of St. Vincent of Lerins, one of the greatest apologists of the early Church: “What is Catholic is what has been believed everywhere, always, and by all.” The deposit of faith has been delivered to us. Bishop Williamson used to draw an analogy: a dump truck comes and drops off the deposit of the Faith when St. John dies. Everything is there. No other delivery will come. We may have to sort through the pile and dust some things off. The Church may have to make explicit some truths which were formerly implicit, but no new truths will come and no old truths will be discarded. The essence of the deposit is never changed. This has been the problem ever since the Second Vatican Council: The idea that changes and devia- tions since the Council are simply new developments of the truth. The “hermeneutic of continuity” is simply another name for what has been going on. The reaction is that if one says there is no rupture or contradiction, then there is no rupture or contradiction. And yet, there are some things which are certainly contradictions from the consistent teaching of the Magisterium of the Church from before the Second Vatican Council to the Council itself and afterward. We mainly speak about the “big three” problems of the Council: religious liberty, ecumenism, and the collegiality of the bishops. The factor underlying these deviations is a problem with immutable truth, a liberalism which, if it doesn’t deny immutable truth, at the very least doesn’t respect it and undermines it by this lack of respect. We must adhere to the deposit of faith as it has been given to us, without any deviation to the right or to the left. We must not be afraid to say that there are contradictions or, at the very least, to say that there are ambiguities there which have been resolved in favor of contradiction. When we see a contradiction, the “handing on” has been in some way compromised. Archbishop Lefebvre very famously said, “The Church is Tradition.” The faith which unites us first and foremost to Jesus Christ, which comes to us by hearing those who have been sent, is compromised by contradiction. The Society of St. Pius X is not the Church. We are certainly convinced that we are a part of the Church, even one that has a providential role to play at this moment. I say this not to put a feather in our own cap, but we exist to ensure the Faith continues to be passed down, uninterrupted. When God’s will finally brings it about, the papacy will finally come back to the handing on of the integral Tradition and 2010 conference 5 “Later on, once I was living in Kansas City, I found a book in a used bookstore called The Council Datebook, a synopsis of every intervention made by the Fathers at the Council. By this time I knew a little bit more about the Archbishop, so I simply turned to the Index and looked for Archbishop Lefebvre and Bishop de Castro Mayer. As I read their interventions, I was consoled, edified, and encouraged to see that they were saying the same things then as they would say later on.” try to undo some of the damage done by deviation and contradiction. Archbishop Lefebvre was antimodernist and anti-liberal. Sometimes we tend to put all our eggs in one basket by laying all the problems of the Church at the feet of modernism. Liberalism was a problem even before modernism. Liberalism admits we can know things but seeks to “liberate” our minds from the “slavery” of reality and our wills from the “slavery” of the good. Liberalism wants to give everybody a big hug and to set aside real differences and dangers to souls. It forgets that our wills have a real ordination to what is truly good. The liberal Catholics of the 19th century tried to bring together these two incompatible things: the Church of reality, and a desire to liberate ourselves from reality and make our own reality. Liberal Catholics argued that, of course the Faith is true and God has claims on us, but in the modern world, which is so bad and so revolutionary, it simply isn’t possible for everything to be as God wants it to be. So let us concede the ideal and go along with the world in order to get along. For instance, they believed we must go along with secular States and other religions. The big push to recognize Anglican orders as valid in the 19th century, stopped by Pope Leo XIII, was not being done by the priests formed, for instance, by Cardinal Pie, the great anti-liberal bishop. The push came from the lib- eral Catholics who wanted to put aside as many differences as possible with the “Anglo-Catholics.” Liberalism undermines and puts at risk immutable truth because it respects persons more than it respects truth. Charity tells us that we tell people who are wrong that they are wrong. Charity wants the good of souls, which means charity wants the truth to be told. Charity demands that we tell someone if they are about to fall off a cliff to their temporal and maybe eternal ruin. Real charity corrects error. Liberal Catholicism, as the saying goes, is really neither Catholic nor liberal: it’s not liberal enough for the real liberals, and not Catholic enough for real Catholics. Nevertheless, it wormed its way into the Church through liberal Catholics in seminaries, religious orders, pulpits, and publishing houses. Archbishop Lefebvre, in Against the Heresies, is very clear that underlying the Second Vatican Council is Sillonist thinking. If you haven’t read the encyclical of St. Pius X, Our Apostolic Charge, on the Sillon, a liberal Catholic movement in France, I encourage you to do so. You will see the echo of modern problems there. Archbishop Lefebvre says that the Second Vatican Council is, in some sense, the triumph of Marc Sangnier, the founder of the Sillon. Religious liberty has destroyed Catholic States and it effectively prevents new ones. Archbishop Lefebvre warned everyone who would listen that this would be the case. The reply was either that he was being too pessimistic or, “Yes, isn’t it good that it will destroy Catholic States? We don’t want to impose our opinions on other people.” This is the contribution of Fr. John Courtney Murray, the most influential American at the Council. He argued that, since religious liberty worked so well in America, a Protestant country, it should be instituted everywhere. Yet only truth has rights. Error cannot impose itself on us. To put truth and error on the same level is to deny truth and to say that the State cannot tell one way or another. The State must thus be agnostic. It has destroyed Catholic States. Archbishop Lefebvre talks about a meeting with the nuncio in Switzerland who told him that they had just disestablished the Church in Valais, the Catholic canton in which Ecône lies. The nuncio thought it was wonderful since he now was invited to all the religious and secular events in the area. After the Second Vatican Council, we find the Church, in her official organs, getting rid of Catholic States. Colombia is a good example of this. The president of the country stood up for the rights of the Faith when the churchmen would not. Religious liberty wrecked the beneficial relationship which should exist between the Church and the State. What do we see? Mass attendance has fallen, birth rates have plummeted, immigration has skyrocketed among groups that will www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • April 2011 6 2010 conference completely change the religious makeup of the country. Even Pope Benedict XVI has had to institute a new vehicle for evangelizing formerly Catholic countries. Archbishop Lefebvre was not content to wring his hands, cry, or simply regret what was going on. He wrote some famous questions to the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith which set out the consistent teaching of the Magisterium on the question of religious liberty and asked particular questions about the deviations of the Council on this question. (Angelus Press published this collection as Religious Liberty Questioned.) The Archbishop asks how Vatican II can be reconciled with previous magisterial teaching. The disappointing response he received from Rome simply lauded religious liberty and looked forward to a day when everyone has it. Not one of his questions was responded to in detail. His questions still stand. They have not been dismissed. I don’t think they can be refuted. This is a great testament to us. It exists as a great resource for our own study. We need to ensure that we ourselves are not “hidden liberals” as the Archbishop himself said when he arrived at Santa Chiara in the 1920’s. If he could admit it, we must admit that we ourselves might not know as much about these questions as we ought. The Archbishop preached and wrote about these questions. The Society still presses these points. It is one of the topics covered in the doctrinal discussions with Rome. Ecumenism is, in a sense, the result of religious liberty. If everyone is free to believe what he wants and worship how he likes, then all the religions should get together. Pressed to its logical conclusion, it means all religions are equally wrong. We must simply decide which degree of wrongness we want to accept. THE ANGELUS • April 2011 www.angeluspress.org Of course, ecumenism was bitterly denounced by the Church ever since the foundation of the World Council of Churches. This putting aside of differences is the opposite of the true conception of ecumenism. The Catholic Church wants everyone to come together in the fullness of the truth, which is Jesus Christ. Ecumenism was bitterly denounced in Mortalium Animos and continued to be condemned until these documents were jettisoned by the Second Vatican Council and the New Mass. You must read. I recommend The Liturgical Movement by Fr. Bonneterre. This is a history from Dom Gueranger all the way down to Vatican II and the New Mass. You will see the ecumenical experiments, especially from Dom Beauduin, which are the basis of the New Mass. Catholics agreed to be ecumenical to such a degree that, as Bugnini said, we would remove anything that proved to be a stumbling block to our separated brethren. If they have wrecked the Mass, they wrecked it so that they could make it a vehicle for ecumenism. In itself, the traditional Mass is one of our strongest bulwarks against ecumenism. It professes the Catholic Faith clearly, intelligibly, and unapologetically. Some call this triumphalism; that’s fine. The truth should triumph. Archbishop Lefebvre’s greatest ire, and perhaps his greatest temptation, was brought about by the prayer meeting at Assisi in 1986, when Pope John Paul II called together the world religions, including animists. He excused this by saying we weren’t praying together—we were simply praying at the same time. The mental exertions required for liberalism are greater than those required for studying the truth. During that disastrous papacy, perhaps nothing scandalized Catholics around the world as much as this event. Archbishop Lefebvre and Bishop de Castro Mayer stood up valiantly against that. This was what caused the Archbishop to start considering “Operation Survival.” He started realizing he might need to ensure, not merely the passing down of the Mass and the Faith, but the episcopacy and the priesthood as well. This would eventually lead to the consecrations of 1988. In the early 2000’s, several priests of the Society wrote From Ecumenism to Silent Apostasy, which was received with great indignation from people on the other side precisely because it points out the logical connection between the two. John Paul II was always looking for signs of the New Springtime he so eagerly awaited. Towards the end of his life he realized a real drop-off in the practice of the Faith in Europe. The phrase “silent apostasy” actually comes from him. Following the lines of the Archbishop, the Society prepared this simple study outlining the cause: ecumenism. It was quite a shock to Rome. Again, it’s another topic raised during the discussions with Rome. Archbishop Lefebvre said something very pertinent about this topic in Against the Heresies: “Respect for false creeds hinders conversions.” Obviously we must respect people, but not their errors. Finally, there is the question of collegiality. If the undermining of immutable truth, the liberating of our minds and wills from the true and the good, and the setting aside of real and substantial differences for the sake of getting along are horrible things for the Church, collegiality is almost worse. It keeps the problem from being corrected. It’s like the HIV virus of the Church which has shut down the immune system. If the Pope thinks he is merely the first among equals, it’s a very bad thing. We haven’t yet had a Pope who went so far, although 2010 conference John Paul II came close in his relations with the Orthodox. The idea that the Pope does not himself have full and universal jurisdiction over every man on earth, but must somehow rule at all times through the bishops, and the corresponding idea that every bishop must rule his individual diocese collegially with the other bishops of his country, keeps the problem from being corrected. Once the episcopal sees were filled with devotees of the Second Vatican Council, only the biological solution will help us. As Fr. Schmidberger once said: we must simply wait for them to die. Once the episcopal sees are fi lled with people who think this way, and once we have Popes who are unwilling to act “outside the College,” it becomes much harder to fix the problem. Even if a Pope wanted to make changes in the right direction, it would be very difficult for him. Collegiality has been an incredible wound to the Church. One cardinal even said once that collegiality made the Church ungovernable. But I think this was precisely the goal of the enemies; this and to destroy their old enemy, the Roman Curia. Collegiality is, of course, another topic of the Roman theological discussions. This shows you just a bit of the line which Archbishop Lefebvre gave to us. He held this line resolutely after the Council. We have continued in this line. We crave and need your prayers that we continue, not as reactionaries or single-issue fighters, but that we might follow the line traced out by our founder. We must all be encouraged at the great and wonderful perseverance of the Society. The eventual I found a copy of Apologia Pro Marcel Lefebvre by Michael Davies. It had been checked out once—the year it was published. yet I stayed up reading it all night. It was a great revelation to me, not only to see that tradition was still alive, but that it was due to the fidelity and continuity which the Archbishop showed to the world.–Fr. Scott Gardner 7 success is God’s problem, not ours. Archbishop Lefebvre was not called by God to succeed, but to hand on. And this is what we are called to also. We must bear witness to the truth wherever we must witness to it, whether in Rome, our own pulpits, or our daily lives. We must do this, cost what it may. By God’s grace we can pass on what we’ve received from God and His instrument, the Archbishop. In this manner, the deviations which have so harmed souls may cease and the integral Faith can once again flourish, leading to the salvation of souls, including our own. Rev. Fr. Scott Gardner, ordained for the Society of Saint Pius X in 2003, is currently assigned to St. Mary’s Assumption priory in St. Louis, Missouri, where he coordinates the work of the St. Raymond of Peñafort Canonical Commission. He is also the United States District Chaplain for the Third Order of Saint Pius X, and he serves the Society’s Chicago mission, Our Lady Immaculate, on weekends and holy days. Apologia Pro Marcel Lefebvre Volume I This book is certainly one of great historical value. Portrays the dramatic conflict relating to the grievances between Archbishop Lefebvre and the Vatican under Pope Paul VI. Depicts the role of one who had the foresight to recognize that he could not defend orthodoxy and at the same time accept reforms “themselves oriented towards the cult of man.” Completely documented. 461 pp. Softcover. STK# 3051✱ $9.95 Apologia Pro Marcel Lefebvre Volume II This volume covers the story of Archbishop Lefebvre’s relations with the Vatican up to the end of 1979. The negotiations between the Archbishop and the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith form the principal feature of the book. 393 pp. Softcover. STK# 3053✱ $9.95 Apologia Pro Marcel Lefebvre Volume III Covers 1979-1982, the beginning of the pontificate of John Paul II. Davies records many of the Holy Father’s directives, how they were opposed by the Bishops, and why it was necessary for Archbishop Lefebvre and the SSPX to avoid all compromise in preserving Catholic Truth. Completes the series by considering Abp. Lefebvre within the broader perspective of the crisis in the Church. 461 pp. Softcover. STK# 3040✱ $16.95 www.angeluspress.org 3-volume APOLOGIA set, STK# 3050✱ $32.95 THE ANGELUS • April 2011 8 Abortion And excommunicAtion Fr. Ricardo F. Olmedo its mother. It was said to be A preliminary medical division introDuction : from “immature” or “non-viable” when it speaks of procured and spontanehad not reached seven (others spoke ous abortion. The former is desired what is of six) complete months from the and deliberate, no matter by what beginning of gestation, consider- means, and is always objectively a abortion? ing it “viable” or “mature” starting mortal sin. It is also called criminal 3 The 1983 Code of Canon Law does not specify what should be understood by abortion nor does the 1917 Code.1 Classic medical moral handbooks and manuals of moral theology 2 used in seminaries refer to abortion in brief definitions as “the ejection of a live, immature or non-viable fetus from the mother’s womb,” alluding to the conceived fetus that still had not reached sufficient development to live separated THE ANGELUS • April 2011 www.angeluspress.org at that moment. From then on, any ejection procured to eliminate the fetus was not considered an “abortion” but rather homicide or “acceleration of the birth.”4 Having limited the term, it is now important to clarify the existing kinds of “abortion” to determine when there is moral guilt (sin), when there isn’t, and then to see what consequences the former entails according to the Canon Law of the Church. abortion. In the latter, the will has not intervened, as opposed to the former. It can happen due to an absolutely unwanted accident or can be the work of nature. Then there is no moral guilt; there is no sin. “Therapeutic” is said of an abortion indicated for medical reasons to save a mother whose life is at risk because of a pregnancy. The therapeutic indication is, without a doubt, the one that causes the greatest perplexity in its discernment from the aborTIon moral viewpoint. It is the one most used in abortion campaigns, and it formerly roused disputes among moralists. Nevertheless, there is no doubt at all in asserting that it is morally condemnable, since it simply deals with the above-mentioned procured abortion: a good end does not make an intrinsically evil act good, which is the case in the murder of an innocent being. Pope Pius XII said regarding this, “to save the life of the mother is a very noble act; but the direct killing of the child as a means to such an end is illicit.”5 And explaining the divine commandment, “Thou shalt not kill,” he pointed out: This principle is as valid for the life of the child as for the mother’s. Never and in no case has the Church taught that the life of the child must be preferred to that of the mother. It is erroneous to put the question with this alternative: either the life of the child or that of the mother. No, neither the life of the mother nor that of the child can be subjected to an act of direct suppression. In the one case as in the other, there can be but one obligation: to make every effort to save the lives of both, of the mother and of the child.6 To end the matter concerning this point, let us remember what was 9 tic abortion, by implying the direct destruction of a human life, is contrary to all the rules and traditions of good medical practice. From the very beginning, this approach to the problem is anti-scientific.7 “To save the life of the mother is a very noble act; but the direct killing of the child as a means to such an end is illicit.”–Pope Pius XII, october 29, 1951 said more than half a century ago in the medical sphere itself: Anyone who performs a therapeutic abortion is either ignorant of modern methods of treating the complications of pregnancy or is unwilling to use them....Therapeu- The final division of interest is “direct” and “indirect” abortion. “Direct” abortion is sought in itself, and so it enters the first assessment of procured abortion (mortal sin). “Indirect” abortion, however, is not directly desired, but rather rejected in itself. But it is brought about as a consequence of another desired act that is good in itself or indifferent, which has a good end. It is permitted to do this according to the general principle of actions with a “double effect” or of “indirectly voluntary actions.” Fr. Royo Marin explains it like this: With a serious proportionate reason it is licit to cooperate indirectly in the death of the innocent, that is, to do or to omit something of itself good or indifferent, from which, unintentionally, ensues the death of the innocent. [This] is a simple application of the law of indirectly voluntary actions. Accordingly, when two effects follow an action that is licit in itself, a good effect—the most immediate one— and an evil effect—the most remote one, or at least simultaneous to the good effect—it is licit to attempt the good effect and permit the evil one The 1917 Code, Canon 2350, says: “§1. Those who procure an abortion, including the mother, incur latæ sententiæ excommunication reserved to the Ordinary if the abortion is performed; and if they are clergy, they should be removed besides.” The 1983 Code, Canon 1398, says: “A person who procures a completed abortion incurs a latae sententiae excommunication.” 2 See Compendium of Pastoral Medicine by Dr. Albert Niedermeyer Herder, 1961), p. 230; Prümmer, Manuale Theologiæ Moralis (Herder, 1961), II, 137; H. Noldin, Summa Theologiæ Moralis (Herder, 1951), II, 342, etc. 3 Modern definitions shorten the term to 22 weeks and thus assert that abortion is “the death of the product of conception before the 22nd week of life in the maternal uterus.” Modern techniques have shortened the terms of non-viability (that is, the impossibility of surviving outside the mother’s womb) more and more. In Orlando, Florida, the case is registered of a girl who was born [and survived] at 21 weeks (four and a half months) after being conceived. Nowadays, viability depends greatly on the doctors’ and nurses’ ability and on having adequate technical support. It is said that perhaps in a short time, survival will be achieved in infants born after only ten to twelve weeks of gestation in the mother’s womb. 4 It is licit for a proportioned just cause. The Holy Office said so in 1898: “Acceleration of the birth is not in itself illicit, as long as it is done for right reasons and at such a time and in such a manner that the life of both the mother and the fetus is provided for according to ordinary contingencies.” (Dz. 1890b). 5 Allocution addressed to the Conference of Catholic Obstetricians on October 29, 1951. 6 Allocution to the “Congress of Large Families,” November 28, 1951. 7 As expressed by Dr. Roy J. Heffernan at the 1951 American College of Surgeons meeting (quoted by Fr. Domingo Basso in his work “Nacer y Morir con Dignidad—Bioética,” [Being Born and Dying with Dignity—Bioethics], Ed. CAC and Depalma, 1993, p. 378.) 8 Complete Works, No. 562 9 Allocution to the “Congress of Large Families,” November 28, 1951 10 That is, automatically, or what is imposed after canonical judicial proceedings. 11 Fr. Juan B. Ferreres, S.J., Instituciones Canónicas (Subirana, 1932), p. 448. 1 www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • April 2011 10 aborTIon if there is a serious proportionate reason, that is, if the immediate good effect more than compensates for the remote evil effect. In the concrete case concerning us, the greater good that immediately follows the licit action would be the proportionate reason and not through the death of the innocent being.8 Pope Pius XII himself would say in this regard: If...the saving of the life of the future mother, independently of her pregnant condition, should urgently require a surgical act...which would have as an accessory consequence, in no way desired nor intended, but inevitable, the death of the fetus, such an act could no longer be called a direct attempt on an innocent life, [and] the operation can be lawful, ...granted always that a good of high worth is concerned, such as life, and that it is not possible to postpone the operation until after the birth of the child, nor to have recourse to other efficacious remedies.9 a necessary observation The definition we have given of “abortion” corresponds to what nature demonstrates and teaches. It can be said that it is true and without error. Thus, can it be modified? This subject acquires importance with regard to the moral and canonical responsibilities proceeding from this act. And such a modification has occurred de facto and de jure since the Second Vatican Council. In the Church’s punitive sphere, “at least regarding latæ sententiæ or ferendæ sententiæ penalties,10 the ecclesiastical offense does not exist if there is no grave sin,”11 and the “quality” or kind of offense is estab- “Procured abortion is the deliberate and direct killing, by whatever means it is carried out, of a human being in the initial phase of his or her existence, extending from conception to birth.”– Pope John Paul II, encyclical Evangelium Vitae, March 25, 1995 lished depending on the purpose of the law that is violated12 analogously to how sins are specified according to moral doctrine.13 This means that in the Church’s sphere, offenses are established by type according to the type of moral good the particular law protects.14 In the case concerning us, the offense of “abortion” is formed as such depending on the protected good: the life of an unborn child, incapable of surviving as a result of its non-viability or the insuffi- cient organization of its body. Its direct and voluntary elimination was defined as abortion and that was the specific offense penalized. But if it dealt with the elimination of a viable unborn baby, that is to say one that had sufficient organic organization to survive, there was no offense of abortion. However, some years after the new Code of 1983 was sanctioned, there was a consultation about the reach of the term “abortion” dealt with in Canon 1398. The Pontifical Commission for Authentic interpretation of the Code of Canon Law then also extended the concept to “the voluntarily obtained death of the fetus itself in any way and at any time from the moment of conception.” In 1995, John Paul II himself15 would say more explicitly: “Procured abortion is the deliberate and direct killing, by whatever means it is carried out, of a human being in the initial phase of his or her existence, extending from conception to birth.” As can be observed, there has been an “amplification” of the concept of abortion, which now includes the expulsion and death of the child at any time in its gestation, from conception until birth, and also therefore the actions comprising the crime of abortion. In the legislative order, the Church has the authority to determine the object constituting a criminal figure, because she has that power in the government of the Church, and the right to punish conduct that she deems should be punished in the moral order such as in the present case. On the other hand, it doesn’t seem like excessive verbosity but rather an error to amplify Canon 2196. In the sphere of Canon Law, “the quality of the offense is equivalent to the designation of the moral kind of act,” P. M. Conte a Coronata, Institutiones Iuris Canonici (Editorial Marietti, 1948), Vol. IV, No. 1643, page 12, note 2. 14 Eduardo Regatillo in Institutiones Iuris Canonici (Ed. Sal terrae, 1949), No. 874, p. 360. 15 Encyclical Evangelium Vitae by Pope John Paul II, No. 58. 12 13 THE ANGELUS • April 2011 www.angeluspress.org aborTIon 1917 Code of Canon Law 11 1983 Code of Canon Law and post- conciliar Magisterium Desired, direct expulsion of a non-viable fetus Desired, direct expulsion of a viable fetus Desired, direct expulsion of an unborn fetus, whether or not viable Legislated Yes No Sin committed Abortion Homicide Yes Not morally speaking for a viable fetus Delict/Crime committed Abortion ––––– Abortion Excommunication ––––– At least doubtful for the viable fetus Notion Punishment the concept in this way, by including in the offense of “abortion” what by nature and definition it is not. In the moral order the distinction among acts or sins exists depending on how their objects are formally different. It is known that objects are distinguished in the moral order, in their “esse moralis,” by reason of their particular repugnance to the eternal law or to right reason. In the case concerning us, this distinction is essential and is given in the difference already pointed out under the concept of “immature,” which is applied to whoever cannot subsist alone, and the concept of “mature,” to whoever can do so. In the first case, he will necessarily die. In the second, he can live since his body is sufficiently organized to do so (without detriment to the care that an infant of that age obviously requires). This points out a different responsibility and moral guilt (although both are certainly very grave) and it seems that they cannot 16 be identified under the sole figure of “abortion.” The first case is a kind of homicide different from the second one... Therefore, our criticism is not of “being non-verbose/lacking in detail,” but of error in this modification, causing confusion and conflict, as seen in the chart above. the pain of excommunication for those who abort Accepting, then, the extent of the concept of the crime of abortion to what has been pointed out and for the reasons shown, let us see the consequences in the ecclesiastical punitive sphere. Since the first century, the Church has affirmed the moral maliciousness of all procured abor- tions. This teaching certainly has not changed, and remains invariable. Direct abortion—that is, when desired as an end or a means—is gravely contrary to the moral law. “Thou shalt not kill the embryo by abortion, thou shalt not kill the new born” (cf. Didache or Teaching of the Apostles 2:2; Epistle of Barnabas 19:5; Epistle to Diognetus 5,5; Tertullian, Apol. 9). The Fathers of the Church, for example, St. Epiphanius, St. Basil, St. Augustine, St. Jerome, and many others as well, have always held it as simply murder. In 1580, Sixtus V, in the Constitution known as Effranatam, imposed the pain of excommunication for procured abortion at whatever time it was done and dispensing with whether theoretically the embryo was supposedly alive or not, or whether it was procured under the medical excuse of the mother’s health. In 1679 Innocence XI again condemned procured abortion. In Ecclesiastical Law, a “crime” is “the external and morally imputable violation of a law to which at least an indeterminate canonical sanction is attached,” and canonists add that “all crime is a sin, but not all sin is crime.” www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • April 2011 12 aborTIon In other words, besides always considering it a mortal sin, it was held to be a crime 16 that carried with it the pain of “latæ sententiæ” excommunication. That is, whoever carried out a voluntary abortion was excluded from the Church and from the communion of the faithful automatically and for the mere fact of carrying it out and without the necessity of any ecclesiastical authority’s intervention or official or private declaration from anyone.17 In order for it to be a crime of abortion, Canon Law requires besides that the murderous act be consummated, or as is said in canonical language, “effecto secuto.” That is to say, that the abortion was really done; its attempt is not sufficient. What conditions are needed to incur in this pain of “latæ sententiæ excommunication”? According to the rules in force, the configuration of the criminal action of “abortion” is as follows: a) 17 It must be a procured abortion. Therefore natural, spon- taneous or involuntary abortion is excluded. b) It must also be an abortion directly caused, with deceit; that is, an action wanted as an end or a means to an end and not a mere guilty action through omission of correct carefulness. c) What the “serious” reasons are that bring one to do such an act do not matter, whether economic, eugenic, social, or loss of a good reputation. d) It does not matter how it is done, that is, by techniques of surgical, mechanical, pharmaceutical intervention, etc.18 e) “It makes no difference how long the length of gestation is” (from conception to birth); that is, from the very second when the egg has been fertilized, even though embedding of the embryo has still not taken place, and until the very instant of birth. This means that even if during childbirth elimination of the baby was intended, an abortion would be committed, bringing canonical infringement on one’s self. In order to incur the pain of latæ sententiæ, individuals are required to: a) be of adult age19 (18 years old); however, criminal responsibility begins at 16 years old, 20 so that from that age till 18, although excluded from the pain of latæ sententiæ, 21 the pain of ferendæ sententiæ and even of excommunication could be imposed; b) have carried out the act with full knowledge (on the part of the intelligence) and with full awareness (on the part of the will) that it deals with a serious sin and that there is a canonical punishment. Also, all those incur the same pain of latæ sententiæ excommunication who in one way or another have been the efficient cause of the abortion. Either they procured it as perpetrators, co-perpetrators, or they cooperated in procuring it (for example: the mother herself, Excommunication is a censure by which someone is excluded from the communion of the faithful and has, according to the old Code, the following effects: For priests, and in regard to the acts of power through Holy Orders: l He cannot perform or administer the sacraments or sacramentals if he is not needed (canon 2261, § 1). l He cannot be advanced in orders (canon 2265, § 1, No. 3). For everyone (priests and lay people): l He cannot receive the sacraments (canon 2260, § 1). l He cannot attend divine offices, but can attend divine preaching (canon 2259, § 1). l He is deprived of indulgences, suffrage, public prayers (canon 2262, § 1). As far as rights, privileges, and acts in the Church’s sphere: l He cannot fill an office or use privileges (canon 2263). l He cannot carry out legitimate acts (canon 2263). He elects, presents and names illicitly (canon 2265, § 1, No. 1). l He cannot obtain offices or pensions (canon 2265, § 1, No. 2). l He can be denied the right to act (canon 1628, § 3). In the New Code, the effects are foreseen in canon 1331: “1. An excommunicated person is forbidden: 1. to have any ministerial participation in celebrating the Sacrifice of the Eucharist or any other ceremonies of worship whatsoever; 2. to celebrate the sacraments and sacramentals and to receive the sacraments; 3. to exercise any ecclesiastical offices, ministries, or functions whatsoever or to place acts of governance. §2. If the excommunication has been imposed or declared, the offender: 1. who wishes to act against the prescript of § 1, n. 1, must be prevented from doing so or the liturgical action must be stopped unless a grave cause precludes this; 2. invalidly places acts of governance which are illicit according to the norm § 1, n. 3; 3. is forbidden to benefit from privileges previously granted; 4. cannot acquire validly a dignity, office or other function in the Church; 5. does not appropriate the benefits of a dignity, office, or any function, or pension which the offender has in the Church.” THE ANGELUS • April 2011 www.angeluspress.org aborTIon husband, doctors, midwife, advisers, etc.), or have acted indirectly as necessary accomplices (those without whose help the crime could not have been committed),22 physical, and simply moral accomplices, the person who ordered it, etc. A person not subject to the pain of latæ sententiæ for this crime includes: a) b) c) 13 Sixtus V (1585-90), in his constitution Effranatam, imposed the pain of excommunication on procured abortion. a person who acted coerced by violence or through grave fear, a person who without negligence was ignorant of the penalty against abortion, a person who lacked the use of reason. l If any of the mitigating circumstances from Canon 1324 23 are applicable, they are a justification in this case (Canon 1323, §3). Lifting the pain of excommunication is not reserved to the Holy See, therefore it can be done by: the ordinary Bishop of that place (for his subjects and those l l l l who are present in his territory) (Canon 1355, §2), any Bishop in the sacrament of confession (Canon 1355, §2), the canon penitentiary or other priest delegated by the Bishop where there is no prison confessor (Canon 508, §§1 and 2), a chaplain in hospitals, prisons and on sea journeys (Canon 566, §2), any priest in case of danger of death (Canon 976). In urgent cases where it is burdensome for the penitent to remain in the state of grave sin (Canon 1357, §1), a confessor can, in the internal sacramental forum, remit the punishment, with the obligation imposed on the penitent of making recourse within a month to the competent superior and the obligation of obeying his mandates (Canon 1357, §2). Therefore, not only surgical operations are included, but also any type of means (homemade or otherwise) that are used with the purpose of suppressing the conceived life, any action by the mother or third parties (for example: horseback riding, pressure or blows on the womb, etc.) carried out with that intention, craneotomy, “suction” of the unborn baby, sodium chloride (salt) injections, poisoning with a poison of any origin whatsoever (plant, animal, chemical, etc.), the so-called D & X abortion by “dilation and extraction,” hysterotomy and cutting the umbilical cord, the application of medicines such as “prostaglandin,” etc. Anti-conception pills and/or the so-called “morning after pill,” which are abortive, imply particular difficulty because of the need to know of the pregnancy that the person who carries out such actions should have. We cannot solve this question at this time. 19 In the Catholic Church according to the new code, an adult is a person who has completed the eighteenth year of age (Canon 97, §1). 20 Canon 1323, n. 1. 21 Canon 1324, § 3. 22 For example, the owners or directors of an abortion clinic or of a hospital that lends its facilities with full awareness of what they authorize. 23 Canon 1324: § 1. The perpetrator of a violation is not exempted from penalty, but the penalty prescribed in the law or precept must be diminished, or a penance substituted in its place, if the offense was committed: l 1. by a person who had only the imperfect use of reason; l 2. by a person who lacked the use of reason because of drunkenness or another similar culpable disturbance of mind; l 3. from grave heat of passion which did not precede and hinder all deliberation of mind and consent of the will, and provided that the passion itself had not been stimulated or fostered voluntarily; l 4. by a minor who has completed the sixteenth year of age; l 5. by a person who was coerced by grave fear, even if only relatively grave, or due to necessity or grave inconvenience if the derelict is intrinsically evil or tends to the harm of souls; l 6. by a person who acted without due moderation against an unjust aggressor for the sake of legitimate self-defense or defense of another; l 7. against someone who gravely and unjustly provokes the person; l 8. by a person who thought in culpable error that one of the circumstances mentioned in Canon 1323, nn. 4 or 5 was present; l 9. by a person who without negligence did not know that a penalty was attached to a law or precept; l 10. by a person who acted without full imputability provided that the imputability was grave. 18 § 2. A judge can act in the same manner if another circumstance is present which diminishes the gravity of a delict. § 3. In the circumstances mentioned in § 1, the offender is not bound by a latæ sententiæ penalty. www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • April 2011 14 aborTIon MorAL theoLogy AnD ABortIon Fr. Fernando Altamira Abortion is an aberration. Death “caused” to the baby in his mother’s womb! It is another case of the “death of the innocent,” and in fact the most innocent and undefended ones of all. It is well to consider some points of moral theology on this question. Human behavior, our miseries, original sin and the tendencies toward evil remaining in us often push us. So we consent and do evil actions. It is this whole working of the law of the flesh that militates against the Law of the Spirit. Some sins mark the person and leave wounds that are difficult to heal. God’s daughter, in her misery, can come to consent to and carry out the death of the child in her womb. Maternity is a gigantic gift from God; every daughter of God is so dedicated to being a mother, so dedicated to her child, that it is hard to understand how she can manage to commit abortion. Nevertheless, it happens. God in His mercy never fails to forgive any sin. As a priest, as His instrument, one finds himself in the situation of hearing about the committing of this sin in confession. A most grave deed, without a doubt, but God’s forgiveness has no limits. One gives absolution. This gives peace to the soul who did it, This article... ...is mainly based on a Spanish theologian, a good priest, the late Fr. Antonio Royo Marin, O.P., in his Moral Theology for Laymen, (B.A.C. Ed., 1957). This was undoubtedly a great book. After the Second Vatican Council (which ended in 1965), Father Royo made modifications to this work, partially changing and adapting his original text according to the theological “aggiornamento” that followed. Then, leaving aside some points of the Catholic teaching of all time, he made several changes and additions (viz. referring to Limbo). There are suspicions, and some people have even said it, that he did these things obligated by his superiors and against his personal will. THE ANGELUS • April 2011 www.angeluspress.org aborTIon but “there are sins that mark consciences.” Often, years after this fall, souls in this situation approach the confessional and manifest the need to beg God’s forgiveness again for that sin. They tell the priest that they know that God has already forgiven them, and we also tell them so. But they tell us that they still have something inside that will not heal: “So strong is the maternal instinct God has given them.” 15 It’s because there is damage, there are sins that do not allow the possibility of reparation. The dead child does not come back. Once someone told us, “When I see my other two children, when I see the youngest who is eight years old, I CONCEPTUALIZATION OF SOME TERMS l l l l l l The pregnancy is “normal” when it is established in the uterus or womb, in the endometrium. If established in another place (namely in the Fallopian tubes, abdomen, or next to the ovaries) it is called an extrauterine or ectopic pregnancy. The baby in the mother’s womb is considered mature or “viable” if it can already live separated from the mother; that is, after the seventh complete month, although there are cases when development has been possible in the incubator from the sixth month. “Abortion” is the ejection of the fetus from the mother’s womb. It can be “spontaneous” (due to natural failure, without the mother’s or any other person’s will), or else “provoked” if voluntarily caused. Others distinguish the ejection of an already mature baby as “acceleration of the birth.” “Embryotomy” or “craniotomy” is an abortive operation in which the baby is destroyed in the mother’s womb and is extracted in pieces. There are many other abortion techniques. “Cesarean section” consists of opening the mother’s womb to extract the baby. “Symphysiotomy” is the section of the symphysis pubis, that is, the interarticular cartilage that joins both pubis bones together, to extract the baby when natural birth is impossible due to the narrowness of the pelvis. “The church teaches that children who die without baptism cannot go to Heaven, but go to Limbo.” www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • April 2011 16 aborTIon think that the other one should be home with his brother, playing with his brother and that he would be six already. Then I despair, and anguish enters my heart.” In the case of abortion, we priests usually advise “in inappropriate and imperfect reparation,” that they participate in the fight for the protection of the unborn, becoming bitter enemies of abortion and everything related to it (anti-conception) and great defenders of the large family, helping (if they can) institutions that strive for children’s welfare, orphanages, children’s hospitals, poor families with children, schools, etc. But now we must return to the work at hand: “Moral Theology and Abortion.” The subject of this article will be limited to study and reflection. This includes not only the main topic, but also other very delicate connected issues, such as ectopic pregnancy and certain problems with tumors in pregnancy. “THE UNBORN CHILD” A ll babies conceived in the mother’s womb have the right to be born, and in correlation their birth is not to be prevented. This, of course, is a natural right and no State or person has the power to act against it. The precise moment is under debate when the body receives its soul, its life or its “form.” The most common opinion is that the soul is infused by God at the very moment of conception or fertilization. That is, when the masculine gamete unites to the feminine gamete. To this end let us recall that Jean Rostand, Nobel Prize in Medicine, among others, taught that life begins at conception. Aristotle, St. Thomas, and the majority of medieval theologians sustained that at the beginning of cellular reproduction, the human embryo possessed only a vegetative form or soul, that this vegetative soul was successively replaced (while growing in cellular development) by an animal form, and finally by a rational soul infused by God at the moment when the embryo was fit to unite substantially to it. The Church has not decided anything dogmatically, but after what we have described above, she teaches the following in the 1917 Code of Canon Law: “Care should be taken that aborted fetuses, at whatever time they are born, if they are certainly alive, be baptized absolutely; if there is doubt, under condition after [being born]” (Canon 747). The same clear terms are not used in the corresponding 1983 Code, nor with the same forcefulness: “If aborted fetuses are alive, they are to be baptized insofar as possible” (Canon 871). Although there can be arguments about the precise moment when the soul is infused, which moreover is impossible to measure, being spiritual, it is an indisputable fact that a human person is dealt with here, in fact or in the near making. He therefore possesses all his natural inherent rights. Among these the right to life occupies first place, or the right to be born. If the supernatural order is added to what was said in the above paragraph, something even more important is considered, the right to be baptized to reach and be able to go to heaven. The Church teaches us that children who die without baptism cannot go to heaven, but will go to Limbo. Due to these considerations, it is concluded that unborn babies are the most defenseless, most innocent human beings and the most worthy of protection. For, because of their condition, not only their natural life is in play, but also their supernatural life. THE ANGELUS • April 2011 www.angeluspress.org aborTIon 17 MORAL PRINCIPLE: ANY ABORTIVE ACTION OR OPERATION, THAT IS, ANY ACTION DIRECTLY KILLING THE UNBORN CHILD, IS ALWAYS A VERY SERIOUS SIN AND CAN NEVER BE JUSTIFIED UNDER ANY PRETEXT. The reason is quite clear, for it deals with killing a completely innocent and defenseless human being. The direct action that seeks to kill the innocent is never licit: the innocent being is to be protected, not killed, even if saving the mother, a nation or the whole world depends on it. A direct, “qualified,” “aggravated” homicide would be committed. The seriousness of this true murder is greater against the natural law for its abuse of strength and immense cowardliness in dealing with a defenseless being. It is an immense injustice—based on evidence—against an innocent being, the most innocent of all. Seriousness is also greater against the supernatural law for dealing with a baby who dies without Baptism and is deprived of Eternal Life. FALSE ARGUMENTS ATTEMPTING TO JUSTIFY THIS SIN AND CRIME (I) The life of the mother should be preferred. This is a case of the false doctrine of the possibility of choosing the lesser evil. “In the case of two evils, the lesser one must be chosen. However, there are cases when, if an abortion is not done, the mother and the child will die irretrievably. Therefore the death of the child is preferable to save the mother by performing the abortion.” ANSWER: It is ridiculous to think of an innocent child as an unjust aggressor, since through no fault of his own, he is limited to staying where nature wanted to place him. Besides, the child is in the greater need, since he can lose not only his temporal but also his eternal life (ut supra dictum). (III) The life of the mother should be preferred. “The life of the mother is more necessary because of the need to care for the other children that have already been born. It can be supposed that the unborn child cedes his right for the good of his AN SWER: A crime against the siblings and his parents’ happiness.” child can never be committed. One of the most basic, elemental and evident moral principles underlies this: “Non faciamus mala propter bona.” Do not do evil (killing the child) that good (saving the mother) may come from it. Saving the lives of both must be attempted, even if their subsequent death should be regretted. (II) The life of the mother should be preferred. “If the child puts the mother in danger of death or in extreme necessity, he can be considered an unjust aggressor, against whom one can react in legitimate defense, even killing him through abortion.” AN SWER: This is a sentimental reason as false as it is foolish. It is a sophism. For one thing, neither the unborn child, nor anyone, can renounce his own life, since God alone is the lord of human life. Otherwise anyone could kill himself without sinning (suicide) or could kill anyone else who requested it (euthanasia). Besides, what makes this more absurd is that the child cannot even make an act of the will (affirmative or negative) in his state of life. (IV) The life of the mother should be preferred. “If the abortion is not carried out, the child will die anyway (without baptism), and the mother too.” AN SWE R: Everything possible should be done to save them both. A cesarean section can be done if the state of the child allows him to live in an incubator, or some other solution could be sought which is moral. On the other hand, the administration of baptism should always be endeavored, according to what Holy Church has established. And if the baby should die without it—or if both should die—it would absolutely be a misfortune, a very sad one as well, but not a sin. Nor would it be a crime, as in the case of provoking an abortion. Therefore, it is never licit to kill the child, not even to save the life of the mother, even when it is certain that if not done, the mother will die together with him. The lives of both should be attended to, even if everything has an unfortunate outcome. For, one thing is the inculpable death of both in spite of the attempts carried out to save them. And another thing is murder, even if it kills only one of them. That always deserves God’s condemnation. www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • April 2011 18 aborTIon MORAL PRINCIPLE: DIRECTLY INTENDED OR PROVOKED ABORTION IS NEVER LICIT, NOT EVEN IN CASES OF ECTOPIC PREGNANCIES OR EXTRAUTERINE GESTATION. The reason is still the same: an innocent being can never be killed, no matter what cause is cited. Here are some practical applications: It is never licit to provoke an abortion, even if it is to save the life of the mother. For the same reason, the socalled “therapeutic abortion” which the doctor intends against the child for putting the mother’s health at risk and the “eugenic abortion” (the name given to the abortion of a child detected as having malformations already in the mother’s uterus) are absolutely and always immoral (mortal sins).3 The doctor can practice any operation directed towards saving the life of the mother or of the child (for example, when the Fallopian tube ruptures in an ectopic pregnancy located there), but never any action whatsoever whose aim is to end the life of the child. A doctor requested to carry out such direct abortions, or any other kind, should always refuse. The voluntary sin of abortion is punished by ipso facto excommunication: “A person who procures a completed abortion, incurs a latæ sententiæ excommunication” (Canon 1398). “Necessary” accomplices or assistants incur the same penalty (Canon 1329). IMPORTANT MORAL CASES Ectopic or Extrauterine Pregnancy or Gestation This happens about 3 percent of the time. It can be tubal, ovarian or abdominal. The majority do not reach complete gestation, although some possibility exists in ovarian and abdominal pregnancies. Let us begin by pointing out that it is not licit under any pretext to kill the child gestating under these conditions. The only licit, moral action before God is: a) “Wallace’s Operation,” if the doctor’s expertise permits hope for the same good results for the life of the child as for the mother. This operation consists of transferring the child who has implanted in the incorrect place (ectopic pregnancy) to the normal place in the endometrium of the uterus or womb to reach full development there. In modern times, this operation has begun to be practiced successfully, attending very well to both the life of the mother and of the child. THE ANGELUS • April 2011 www.angeluspress.org b) Indirect abortion: This should be undertaken most preferably in a clinic or hospital where surgical intervention can be practiced at once after the outcome and the appropriate means can be used. “Indirect abortion” consists of the doctor’s immediate intervention once the “fetal sack” ruptures. At this moment the child in gestation separates from his vital connections and becomes detached. The hemorrhaging produced puts the life of the mother in danger. In this state one can intervene and extract the already detached child and should endeavor to baptize him immediately to achieve his eternal salvation. Regarding the time when the “outcome” occurs, for example in cases of ectopic pregnancy located in one of the tubes, rupture takes place during the first weeks of pregnancy, for tubal diameter is quite small, perhaps comparable to a little finger, and does not allow much more time. c) Laparotomy: This can be practiced once the fetus is already viable (which would continue develop- ment in the incubator) and when there is grave danger to the mother if gestation continues to the end. It is simply an acceleration of the birth, which is licit for good reasons. The Holy Office, speaking on this subject, responded as follows in 1902: With respect to time, the orator is reminded...that no acceleration of the birth is licit unless it be performed at the time and according to the methods by which, in the ordinary course of events, the life of the mother and that of the fetus are considered. (Dz. 1890 c) Direct action against the child in ectopic gestation would only be licit and moral before God when there is full certainty that his death has already occurred within the maternal womb, since then it is clearly not a case of killing him. What should be done in the case of tumors during pregnancy? Of course, it is necessary to wait as long as possible to let the fetus become viable, if possible. In this aborTIon case acceleration of the birth can be proceeded to licitly. If this is not possible, it is licit to surgically remove a tumor or cyst that is mortal for the mother, even if the gestating baby is included or enveloped in it. Nevertheless, baptism should be endeavored immediately after extraction from the tumor. What if there is any doubt whether it is a malignant tumor or an ectopic gestation? Theologians are divided when in doubt whether it is a tumor or a child in ectopic gestation, if waiting any longer is impossible without risk to the mother. For some moralists confronting doubt, it is licit to extirpate it as a malignant tumor even though later it is verified to be a child in gestation. The action on him would be indirect; there would be no intention of causing his death, but rather of acting against the supposed tumor. It would be the application of an indirect voluntary act. However, obviously, his baptism must be attempted immediately in case it is a child. Other theologians consider, not without grounds, that the operation cannot be performed because a) one 19 cannot act while having a practical doubt about the licitness of the act; and b) because it is not licit to proceed, even indirectly, against the life of a probable child in gestation. Such a life is at a disadvantage compared to the mother due to the fact that he is not baptized and risks his eternal life. Therefore, the proportionality that the indirect voluntary act requires would not be given: “a serious reason proportionate to the evil that can indirectly occur.” What is said here can have more applications. MORAL PRINCIPLE: FOR SERIOUS PROPORTIONATE REASONS IT IS LICIT TO TOLERATE AN ABORTION TO OCCUR INDIRECTLY WHEN CARRYING OUT AN ACTION THAT IS “GOOD IN ITSELF OR INDIFFERENT.” For example: to cure a mother’s serious illness which puts her life at risk, a medicine can be given or a surgical operation can be performed that tends toward curing that illness, although involuntarily causing the death or unintended ejection of the child. Let us remember the conditions that make it licit: a) No other solution remains, nor can be attempted, to save the mother. b) The act, medicine or surgery is directly aimed at curing the mother’s illness and not at carrying out any type of abortion or direct action harmful to the child. c) The intention is directed solely toward healing and not toward abortion. d) Proportionality of reasons: There is a serious proportionate reason which justifies tolerating the evil that will be caused indirectly (or can be caused) by the action that is going to be done. Note that for the indirect voluntary act to be licit, the action carried out should be good or indifferent, but obviously, never evil. In this case: to take a remedy or perform an operation to save the life of the mother. e) Baptism is diligently seen to immediately after extraction. This is the moral, theological subject matter that we wanted to put forward. Perhaps it could be studied more in depth. The reality of abortion has been described and some experiences from pastoral theology were given at the beginning by way of introduction. This is the way today’s world is. God says, “I want many large families. I want many children in the home. The primary and main end of Matrimony is procreation.” And man says, “I want Matrimony only for enjoyment. Children are a nuisance and a problem. We’ll have only two at the most and then...” ...And then sin to prevent children, fostering anti-conception or “family planning” as they say in some places. From anti-conception to abortion there is but one step, and even if there wasn’t, planning is already in itself an absolutely reprehensible act, a mortal sin that impairs sanctity and the purpose of Matrimony. Finally, may God let these words serve to defend the unborn child! May God make these words serve as a support and stimulus so that in our country and everywhere there will be very many large families with many, many children. God gave me the grace to begin my priesthood in a place saturated by large families, which was the rule, with many sacrifices for those families. Still, it was the rule, to the point that someone jokingly said, “Father, I am one of those people here who has few children. I have only eight.” There were several families with ten children, several had eleven, one had thirteen. So many children! What a beautiful thing! www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • April 2011 20 aborTIon thIs Is whAt st. PADre PIo oF PIetreLCInA hAD to sAy “ABORTION IS NOT ONLY HOMICIDE, BUT ALSO SUICIDE” Many people, confronted with the sin of abortion, confuse the law of the Nation—that permits and assists the interruption of pregnancy—with the law of God, where provoked abortion is always a sin against the Fifth Commandment. “Thou shalt not kill” (Exodus 20:13; Matthew 5:21-22) defends life independently of the human being’s age in years, months or days. The interruption of pregnancy always creates trauma, a drama. It cannot be denied that what the woman lives through—who unfortunately doesn’t really want to be a mother—also concerns all those close to her, whose strong emotive reaction tends to justify such a great error. Confessors know those influences well, although they can never justify the suppression of a life. PADRE PIO’S TESTIMONY Padre Pellegrino asked St. Padre Pio one day, “Padre, this morning you denied absolution to a lady who confessed to an abortion. Why were you so rigorous with this poor unfortunate woman?” Padre Pio answered, “The day people, frightened by the economic THE ANGELUS • April 2011 www.angeluspress.org boom, physical damages or financial sacrifices, lose the horror of abortion will be the most terrible day for humanity. For, precisely on that day, they will have to show that they detest it.” Then he took hold of his interlocutor’s habit with his right hand and put his left hand over his heart, as if he wanted to grab his heart, and said in an urgent tone, “Abortion is not only homicide but also suicide. And to these people we see on the point of committing two crimes...do we want to show our faith? Do we want to save them or not?” “Why suicide?” asked Padre Pellegrino. Full of holy anger, compensated by much sweetness and goodness, Padre Pio explained, “You would understand this suicide of the human race if with the eye of reason you could see the ‘beauty and joy’ of the earth populated by old men and depopulated by children, burnt as a desert. If you thought it over, then you would understand that abortion is even more serious. Abortion also mutilates the life of the parents. I would like to cover those parents with the ashes of their destroyed fetuses, to nail them with their responsibilities and stop the possibility of recurring to ignorance. The remains of a provoked abortion are not buried by false religiousness. It would be an abominable hypocrisy. Those ashes should be thrown at the murderous parents’ elegant faces. If I thought they were of good faith, I would not feel implicated in their crimes. You see, I am not a saint, but I never feel so close to sainthood as when I pronounce these words, undoubtedly a bit virulent, but just and useful, against those who commit this crime. I am certain that God approves of my rigor since, after those sorrowful struggles against evil, He always gives me—or rather let us say He imposes on me—moments of marvelous tranquility.” Padre Pio observed to Padre Pellegrino that “if erroneous ideas are not eradicated from the minds of those who provoke abortions, it is useless to punish them with the rigors of the Church.” He argued, “By defending the arrival of children into the world, my rigor is always an act of faith and hope in our encounters with God on earth. Unfortunately, as time goes by, the battle gets tougher than we are. But we must fight anyway, because in spite of the certainty of a defeat on the map, our battle has the guarantee of a true victory: that of the new earth and the new heavens.” Confronted with such considerations, what reasons could there be to justify such a great sin? It would also be a serious misdeed for the Church to cooperate with an abortion. “GO AWAY, ANIMAL! GO AWAY!” In the sacristy, in front of the confessional where Padre Pio received penitents, Mario Tentori waited for his turn seated on a bench. As he was examining his conscience, he heard Padre Pio shout, “Go away, animal, go away!” The Saint’s words were addressed to a man who had knelt at his feet to make his confession and who left the confessional humiliated, very moved and confused. The next day Mario got the train in Foggia to return to Milan. He sat in a compartment where there was only one other traveler, who began to look at him, visibly showing a desire to start a conversation. Finally he got the courage and asked him, “Weren’t you in the sacristy yesterday at San aborTIon Giovanni Rotondo to go to confession to Padre Pio?” “Yes, I was!” answered Tentori. The other man continued, “We were seated on the same bench. My turn was just before yours. I am the one who Padre Pio threw out calling me an ‘animal.’ Do you remember that?” “Yes,” Mario stated. The traveling companion continued, “Being outside of the confessional, perhaps none of you heard the words that motivated the Padre’s reaction. Well, Padre Pio told me, and I quote, ‘Go away, animal, go away, because you have had abortions three times in agreement with your wife.’ Do you understand? Padre Pio told me, ‘You have aborted!’ He addressed me, because the initiative to abort always came from me.” And he broke into sobbing, expressing his sorrow that way, as he himself asserted, and the will not to sin again with the firm determination to return and meet with Padre Pio to receive absolution and change his way of life. Padre Pio’s rigor had saved the life of a father who, after denying life to three infants, was in danger of losing his own soul for all eternity. RESPECT FOR THE PURPOSE OF MATRIMONY What contributes to depopulating the earth, as our Saint says, which is “burnt like a desert” since children’s smiles are no longer seen there, is the decrease in the birth rate, chosen too often for selfish reasons or objective financial problems. Medical concerns also contribute to cause aging in the earth’s population. 21 One of Padre Pio’s spiritual children confessed to us, “During the second confession I made to him— he had sent me away the first time— after telling him my sins, the Padre asked me, “Anything else?” I said no. And looking me in the eye he asked me, “And in holy matrimony, have you done things right with your wife?” “No, Father,” I answered, “because doctors forbid us to have more children.” And he responded, “And what do doctors have to do with this?” “They said we could procreate a monster,” I answered him. “You would have deserved it!” shouted the Saint. And he kicked me out of the confessional again. Taken from the Swiss District magazine Le Rocher, No. 53. Birth rate per 1000 persons (2009 List by the CIA world Factbook) Rank 1 21 25 32 47 49 54 61 82 95 102 105 111 135 138 143 145 149 172 177 189 191 192 Country niger Madagascar gaza strip gabon haiti saudi Arabia Pakistan Philippines India Mexico turkey Argentina Iran Ireland United states France Australia China spain switzerland Austria Italy Japan Birth rate per 1000 51.60 38.14 36.93 35.57 29.10 28.55 27.62 27.62 21.76 19.71 18.66 17.94 17.17 14.23 13.82 12.57 12.47 11.18 9.72 9.59 8.65 8.18 7.64 www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • April 2011 22 THE CHURCH’S CULPABLE SILENCE some thoughts From Dr. Xavier Dor, Founder, sos tout-Petits D r. Xavier Dor (b. 1929), is one of France’s leading pro-life activists. In 1986 he founded sos toutPetits, which initially adopted tactics patterned on operation rescue. till 1995, he participated in several dozen raids on abortion clinics, where the activists would gain entrance and pray until the arrival of the authorities. he was found guilty several times for his actions, especially after a law adopted in 1993 criminalized such activity, and for organizing demonstrations without the proper permits. he was jailed briefly in 1997 and spent a month in prison in January 1998. Dr. Dor has authored one book, Le Crime contre Dieu (Paris, 1998) and contributed a chapter, “Contraception, Abortion, and Ideology,” to The Black Book of Abortion in France by the group 30 ans, ça suffit (Paris: téqui, 2006). this year Dr. Dor’s organization will celebrate its 25th anniversary. the French District conducted an interview with this leading Catholic activist last november. The church’s Silence The priests do not talk about life, and they don’t want to talk about it because they have been told not to THE ANGELUS • April 2011 www.angeluspress.org talk about it. I’m afraid that there are Freemasons among the bishops and cardinals…and homosexuals, and all that–the wretches. We must pray for them. I am unable to tell you who is who, and even if I knew, I would not tell you. But the fact seems pretty certain, because things are going too far. The silence of the Church is more than suspect… I’m going to tell you something terrible. I am not making anything up. I could not make up something like that. It was in 1995. We were outside the Georges Clemenceau Hospital in Caen. The anti-life demonstrators were pouring in; there were just 40 or 50 of us. They were throwing eggs at us, shouting, all of that, you can well imagine. The remarkable thing is that there were priests against us. That is certain. They had circulated a manifesto, a manifesto signed by 28 priests–not just two or three, but by 28 priests. They were all from the region of Caen. The 28 priests had signed a manifesto in alphabetical order to the effect that they would oppose any retraction of women’s rights! I know the name of the second on InTerVIew the list–I won’t tell it. He is in prison now for pedophilia, the poor wretch. How we must pray for them. How we must pray for the bishops. The great problem is the silence of the Church, and even of traditionalists. The latter do not say much about abortion; nothing is ever said about contraception even though it is more deadly and death-dealing. But it is a duty to talk about it. If I had to get down on my knees and ask, I would. Once a bishop received me, not too willingly. He is dead now, so I can talk about him. I could see that he was thin and that he was sick. I knew or else I found out later that he had colon cancer. And I told myself, He’s not got much longer to live. And I prayed for him. Without even greeting me, he told me, “Sir, you condemn women.” I knelt down and said, “Monsignor, the thought never occurred to me.” He did not believe me. He said that we were awful chaps, that we condemned women, that we were a bit fascist–that’s what the Left thinks, obviously–that we were people who fought against liberty and against the dignity of women. I’m not sure exactly what he thought, but that we were in disrepute, even and especially among the bishops. We were spoil-sports, counterproductive intruders, and what have you. We’re guilty of all the sins. But, the unfortunates, the unfortunates. Why don’t they speak up about it? It is the worst of silences. In the final analysis, the sin is not so much the Left’s as the Right’s, isn’t it? I would say that the Left obeys itself, but the Right should in principle obey an order, recognize an order of things. The Left, that’s Rousseau, the cult of self, and the Rights of Man and all that. But the Right recognizes an order of things. If there is an order, they ought to follow it, but they do not. So, I would say that the sin of the Right, of Catholics, is graver than that of the Left because they acknowledge the moral order and they do not uphold it. Thus, I would say that it is graver because on the one side there is an aversion– that’s the Left. And on the other side, there is betrayal, which is worse. Betrayal is worse than aversion. Ah, poor, wretched Judas, what did he do? So, I think that the Right and the Church must repent and do penance. on the Pope’s recent Statement The Pope spoke recently about the use of condoms–he shouldn’t have. I do like this Pope, I do admire this Pope, who has said wonderful things about Western civilization and on the search for God–querere Deum; it’s marvelous. The basis of Western culture is the search for God. This is exactly what needed to be said. But about condoms, he is mistaken. What’s more, there is a moral deviation: the use of condoms separates sexuality and fecundity, and that goes against the divine law. If God made sexuality, it was for the sake of fecundity. I do not say that there is no love. But the condom is an encouragement to promiscu- 23 ity, thus it is an encouragement to debauchery and even murder. That’s what is happening. And the unfortunate thing is that the faith has no part in all that. Neither has reason. You know that bacteria and sperm are on the order of three to five microns, that is to say, a millionth of a meter. The AIDS virus must be about 100 to 150 nanometers. A nanometer is a billionth of a meter. That is very, very small. The AIDS virus is about 30 times smaller than sperm, so it gets through. I, who love the Pope, follow him as much as I can, but sometimes I cannot follow him completely. In this, I think he is encouraging condom use, even if he does not mean to. He said that it was not good, but even so he said that people could use it, and that, at least for a homosexual, it is a lesser evil. But the lesser evil is worse. It is going to help spread AIDS. I have a grandson in South Africa, and I can tell you a very interesting testimony. The sister of my grandson’s father lives near Durban. With her husband she bought a hotel with twelve personnel. Well, in two and a half years, ten of them were dead, all from AIDS. Her little Zulu maid, a very charming Zulu girl, died of AIDS. The lady mourns her. She was the only European at her funeral. Nobody wanted to talk about AIDS because for them, it is shameful. There is a dreadful epidemic. So, absolutely no condoms! Abstinence, absolutely! You know that Uganda is the only African country to have lowered the incidence of AIDS by 60 to 70 percent. The president; the churches; the Pope was there; the Protestant churches–everybody joined in to advocate abstinence, chastity, self-control! When we go out on Fridays to distribute our tracts to 15-yearold boys and girls, and sometimes older, we tell them: nothing before www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • April 2011 24 InTerVIew marriage! We give them miraculous medals. In parentheses, the miraculous medal is accepted more readily than the tract. LPL: Tell us about yourself It is always difficult to talk about oneself, but I will tell you my age: I’m 81 years old. I was a doctor, and I practised as a pediatrician. I liked my work very much, first in Africa, on the Ivory Coast for six years. It was very, very busy. We received patients from everywhere and sometimes in very extreme conditions. Sometimes we’d hear cries in the stairwell–we were on the second floor of the clinic–and we could tell the child was dying or nearly dead. Sometimes, they were dead on arrival. Which is all to say that the pathologies were often extreme. But it was very interesting and attaching work. We had black nurses whom we liked very much. And then there was a wonderful European nun, Sister Leone. I cannot forget Sister Leone, a quite remarkable woman: reserved, gentle, kind, attentive–she had all the qualities. At this time, it was 1962-68, the political atmosphere was quiet. I could even cross Africa on foot. I was the only European at Darfur. It was still the post-colonial era, and things were quiet. Africa was quite inhabitable. THE ANGELUS • April 2011 www.angeluspress.org “In the history of humanity, never have so many been killed, and all the victims are innocent. Communism caused hundreds of millions of deaths, but here there are billions of deaths; it numbers in the billions.” When I was in Nigeria, I saw a man, a handsome man of the northern type; he was a beggar, about 25 years old. He had a kind of water bottle like you use for warming the bed over his hands, which were wrapped in rags. I removed the cloths and the water bottle, and what did I see, or rather what did I smell: a horrid odor. He had terrible, putrid sores over a large part of his hands and fingers missing. They were oozing. It was frightful. I must say because it’s true, I saw this in ex-English Africa. Once a young man of 17 or 18 shook my hand. He was missing fingers, but his leprosy was dry, so to speak; it was no longer contagious, it was no longer evolving. For if [in French-speaking Africa] we had the great endemics, what was remarkable was the network of trucks and dispensaries and infirmaries scattered all over, with nurses and doctors. Leprosy was being managed, like the other major endemics: tuberculosis, yellow fever, sleeping sickness… I must tell you I was proud of France, and the nurses were, too. They would say, “We regret Independence.” I recall their saying that. I have a very high opinion of French colonization. There was also the religion and language, and that’s considerable. I don’t know if it still remains. I had a job as project head under Christian Cabrol. He was well known at the time: He was the first person to do a heart transplant in France. So he was very well known, and he mentored me. Thanks to him I was a project head. At that time I was no longer working as a pediatrician, but I worked in research. I spent nearly 25 years at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, where I worked [in the field of cardiac embryology], studying cardiac malformation in the embryos of chickens. It was very interesting work. We could take the egg a few days after an intervention; an electron microscope was used. We could see exactly what was happening, and could follow the deformation. I have very good memories of this period. I left the Salpêtrière in 1995. I was 66 years old. I would have stayed on willingly for a few more years, and they would have kept me on, but my eyesight was failing. So, I was working at the Pitié, and opposite there was a gynecoobstetrics clinic where abortions were done. I may be mistaken, but smoke came out of a big chimney. I would think, that is where they put the poor aborted babies… How InTerVIew many times I wondered: of what use is it to them to kill these children? I believe that I can answer that question at last. People have answered it long ago. I wondered, of what use is it to amass all these crimes, for, you know, never have so many been killed. In the history of humanity, never have so many been killed, and all the victims are innocent. Communism caused hundreds of millions of deaths, but here there are billions of deaths; it numbers in the billions. There are the official numbers put out by the UNFPA [United Nations Population Fund]; they declared in the year 2000 that there were 50 million abortions annually in the world. I believe that it is far higher because they do not count all those killed by contraception. This is something that I did not understand right away, I must tell you. Many of my colleagues were more perceptive than I on this subject. But one may say that everything began, legally, in 1967, and not in 1975 with the horrible law of Mme Veil. Everything began in 1967 under De Gaulle, signed by De Gaulle. This needs to be said. He perhaps did not fully realize what he was doing. It is worth noting that it was on December 28, the feast of the Holy Innocents, that the 1967 Neuwirth law was signed. Neuwirth was a hard-core Freemason. You know that the Masons’ politics aims at killing God, as it were. They wanted to kill God through the deaths of children. They wanted to kill the Creator through His creation. It puts one in mind of ritual killing. That is to say that Satan–it is satanic, naturally– offers the sacrifice of innocents to the devil himself. Never in the history of the human race has the evil been so immense, because the innocent are dying by millions. In France, the death penalty was abolished. I don’t know if you remember last Saturday [during the public recitation of the Rosary at Place St. Michel in Paris], there was a big billboard showing the terrible results of an abortion at ten weeks. It showed the remains of a child that had been aspirated at this moment of its gestation. You could see a foot attached to a leg, a hand vaguely, an arm…these are obviously horrible images. Beside it was written: “The death penalty has been abolished,” and just below: “Never have so many been killed.” They have “medicalized” crime, that’s what they’ve done. That is to say, if you have an evil, it is necessary to fight this evil efficiently. You have to choose a marksman, so to speak, to aim well. To commit the crime, you are going to choose a telescopic rifle; you are going to do things right. That way, there are no blunders. So it is a crime, a perfect crime, an assisted crime. And that is how they have wrecked the medical profession. Now, doctor means killer, hired killer. The doctor has become a hired killer. They have even recently increased his wages, as Sarkozy wished, who closes his eyes and who probably has not seen anything; or else, rather, he does not wish to see anything, he and his Minister of Health. People have disconnected sexuality and fecundity. This came about through a change in the definition of contraception. In the beginning, when you opened up the Larousse dictionary in 1981–I have one–you found contraception defined as “a reversible procedure for avoiding fertilization.” Now you open the 2003 or 2002 edition of the Vidal [a physician’s desk reference] and it gives this definition of contraception: “a procedure for avoiding pregnancy.” There is a difference between fertilization and pregnancy. If you act before fertilization, obviously there is not a human life, but if you act after fertilization, there is an egg, there is a pregnancy, there is a human life. 25 Never, never have so many been killed as by abortion. But contraception, or what they call contraception, kills two or three times as many more. I say two or three times, but it may be four or five times as many. Nobody knows. Why? because the pill taken 20 days a month, especially in a minidose, atrophies the intrauterine viscosity so that it does not always prevent fertilization….It is true that the pill can prevent fertilization, but if fertilization occurs, it impedes implantation, because when the egg arrives in the womb, its lining is not prepared to receive it. Implantation normally occurs about the fifth, sixth, or seventh day, but in unfavorable conditions the egg is eliminated. The woman notices nothing. However, it is actually an early abortion. The woman does not know whether she eliminated an ovum or an egg, but if it is an egg, then there is a crime obviously because it involves a human life. Since the abortion is very early, they can tell her that it is contraception, that she is regular, that everything is fine, and that she has not committed murder. Nobody knows the exact figures for early abortions since the woman herself does not know what has happened. There are intrauterine devices: these are always abortifacient every time. How many women use one? More than a million women wear an IUD in France. It causes an abortion every time. There are officially 220,000 abortions in France every year. This is without counting the number due to contraception, which is more and more often abortifacient. The numbers are countless, and no one will ever know, except perhaps in the hereafter. There is no more effective way to reduce [raid] a population than by contraception. The filmed interview was conducted by Jean-Paul and Jacques Buffet for La Porte Latine, the SSPX’s French District Web site. The transcription of the interview was kindly reviewed and edited by SOS-Tout-Petits. Translated with permission from La Porte Latine. www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • April 2011 26 fr. eScHer coMeS To TradITIon Fr. yannick escher, a swiss priest, discovered tradition through the society of st. Pius X. he draws up an alarming report on the situation of the clergy after the second Vatican Council. The Priest Today Is a Victim Imagine a priest, Fr. N., who arrives in a parish; quite often he feels alone amid the ruins. Now, you may say that this is exaggerated, a caricature, but we must once again face reality. What is happening? Few people at catechism classes, graying congregations, church buildings in not so good condition (depending on the region and the country), and then an excess of work, of Masses, of ministry. The priest leads the life of an official, always preparing something, running from one place to another, and it seems that he has few results to show for it. And then finally a great solitude there in the middle of it all. And therefore the priest is a victim of what was set in place during the years after the Council, when the whole parochial fabric was destroyed. And people often make the mistake of saying that the world is what changed. “It wasn’t us! It is the world’s fault!” Now, that is too easy an explanation to always blame others, saying that it is the world, that it is the people’s mentality, that people are no longer Christians. It wasn’t the world that THE ANGELUS • April 2011 www.angeluspress.org caused Catholic schools and hospitals to close, that disbanded parish associations; it wasn’t the world! It was the priests who decided to close them, to change. I will quote what was said by Fr. Duccarroz, who is the provost of St. Nicholas Cathedral in Fribourg, in a moment of great lucidity and great honesty. He is a priest who was ordained right at the end of the Council, and he said this on the radio: “They told us, when I was ordained, to get rid of the cassock, to shut down Catholic works of charity since the civil communities have them too, and to approach the people, to be open! That’s what everyone did, and our churches emptied, our seminaries were vacated; maybe they were wrong after all.” An extraordinary moment of lucidity! Well, then, the young priest arrives with an ideal, full of good will, and he finds himself facing ruins. And alone facing ruins. Here he is the victim of this state of affairs; he is not the agent responsible for it. The Priest Is Poorly formed On paper you have to satisfy Rome, which determines the academic curriculum. But after that you have to look at the quality of the academic curriculum. The philosophy they teach us, for example, is often a bit of history of philosophy. But when Rome says “philosophy,” this implies what the Church has always taught: the philosophy of St. Thomas, which teaches you to understand theology. Nowadays they offer some history of philosophy or some modern philosophy. Therefore there are no longer any conceptual tools. Then, as for dogma, you get essentially some history of dogma with a bit of speculative theology. And then, at any rate, what I have been able to see at the University of Fribourg, the emphasis is on pastoral themes, man and ethics, religious education, which don’t have very much to do with the priestly formation. That can be learned on the ground or at the end of the course of studies. But the major subjects at seminary are taught in a diffused manner and are no longer the backbone of theology and for- InTerVIew mation. And so the priest today has ideas, vague notions, but ultimately the men who come out of the seminaries are no longer theologians as such. And then, since the level of formation has dropped, the requirements are lowered just a little. It was striking: our class on Church history, at the university level, was actually a course that could have been taught to high school seniors. And when you looked at the students who had courses in secular history, or modern history, they had real history courses with academic, scientific demands. But not in Church history! It was a sort of panorama sketched in broad strokes. And there was nothing but that sort of stuff. You got the impression of puttering around academically. And therefore there are no tools. And therefore, of course, history, Tradition, everything starts with the pre-conciliar period or with the Council. Now this just might be called one of the guiding principles. But although this generation of priests does not know what there was before, the elderly priests whom they have met have criticized what there was before, telling them, “Ah, it’s not like before; before, they used to do things differently.” I personally experienced a typical example of a pastoral course at the University of Fribourg when I was a student. The priest came in with a poster he showed us, and told us, “Before, the Church was like that!” He showed us this poster on which there was a pyramid drawn. And he turned it over and then said, “The Church is like this.” It was a circle. At the university, this was the second or third year, to make us understand what the Church is. This was in pastoral theology. So it is always in comparison, in opposition. Somehow, people don’t understand well. And before? Well, no, there’s nothing to it! Or else that depends on history or is based on anecdote. For example, in the liturgy there ought to be a certain continuity. To quote the Holy Father, a “hermeneutic of continuity.” Now, here is an example of what my professor in Fribourg used to say: “The liturgy was perverted after Constantine and rediscovered its wonderful, primitive sources with the Liturgical Renewal and especially since the conciliar constitution Sacrosantcum Concilium and its implementation with the Mass of Paul VI.” There you have it! I dare say that is quite clear. And then, only as a parenthetical remark within a historical digression, there was the Tridentine reform. The Priest Is a Prisoner The priest who has experienced the Tradition of the Church, what the Church has always done, ends up feeling like a prisoner because he is held hostage among his confreres, the faithful, the lay pastoral assistants, and his bishop. I recall a young priest who said that he was obliged to give collective absolution during a penance service, which is still forbidden by the Church today. In some dioceses it is done openly, with the discreet blessing of the bishops, and everyone knows about it. He was obliged to do it and right afterward he went to confess to another priest. He had been obliged to do it and still he repented of it! That is tragic! Therefore he is like a prisoner because he has to do such things, but he knows that it is not right. What if he cited the documents of the Supreme Pontiff, which are all clear enough, like John Paul II’s motu proprio on confession? There is a series of documents that are very clear on all the liturgical questions. Similarly there are documents even on the role of lay people in the Church. Well, if the priest quotes them, they tell him, “Fortunately, there are mountains between Rome and us.” Or else, “This document is very nice, but it is not suited to our ecclesial situation.” So he is a prisoner because he sees there is a problem. Here’s another example of a parish priest who told me quite 27 recently that the director of his church choir is divorced and is living openly with someone who is not his wife. Everyone knows it, yet he is obliged to give him Communion. He did try to discuss the matter with him, but the person didn’t want to hear about it. This priest told me: “If I don’t give him Communion, I have no more church choir and he will complain. What should I do?” Another priest tells me that he was appointed to a parish, but the catechisms were already distributed by the lay people before he arrived. He cannot do any sacramental preparation, neither for First Communion, nor for Confirmation, because the lay people are involved in that. And he doesn’t even have the right to train Mass servers because, again, a layman is in charge of that! So he confided to me: “I can’t do anything. I’m good for nothing but to say Mass and hear the confessions of the few people who still go to confession. And that’s all.” In that sense, the priest is a prisoner. And yet he quite often has the best intentions in the world! The Priest Must obey This is the big weapon. Everything has been sold at bargain prices, but there is still one weapon: obedience. The bishops are popes in their dioceses. One day someone appealed to obedience in my hearing, and I replied to him, “If you ask obedience of your clergy, Your Excellency, you yourself must set an example by obeying the Supreme Pontiff. If not, you cannot demand obedience from your priests!” The discussion ended there, incidentally. But this is very important because there is a terrible insistence on obedience. This sort of thing gives the priest a complex; he tells himself, “I am disobedient. I am a bad priest. It doesn’t work, so it is better to be wrong while obeying than to disobey and do what is right.” The distorted Priest I think that there is really an intention to stop having sacramenwww.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • April 2011 28 InTerVIew tal pastoral ministry the way the Church has always done it: Confession and Holy Mass. Today, you have to go meet the people where they are—which is fine! All missionaries in the Church have done that. But now we try to awaken in people’s consciousness the desire for Christ. We try to stir up a “transcendent experience of the spiritual” so that the faithful discover Christ themselves that way. And so we must not be dogmatic, we must not impose formulas, etc. This, among other things, is what we call in Switzerland the “pastoral approach of engendering” or “occasioning.” This pastoral approach changes every year, or else every five years you have a new pastoral approach. People write, people hold symposiums, and after a few years, when they see it doesn’t work, they change and adapt. Whom are they mocking? I have worked with a lot of young people and they have a thirst for the truth. And the truth has a name, a face; it is not a theory. It is a person, Jesus Christ. We have to give them Our Lord Jesus Christ. Of course, with a lot of tact and sensitivity, you have to make the truth inviting. You can’t hit them over the head with the catechism. Of course we agree with that! But we are not there simply to be facilitators of a spiritual club. There is no point to that! We are there to be the ambassadors of Christ, as St. Paul says. Now, I find it hard to see anyone considering the priest as the ambassador of Christ. General deterioration I myself did not experience these incidents. I was a student and other persons who were in the seminaries experienced them. This is just to illustrate the theme. It is to show the general deterioration found in priestly formation and what people try to impose on seminarians: Slow recorded music during adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, a crescent moon placed at the foot of the altar in a tree stump to symbolize the humility of Our Lord, etc. The point THE ANGELUS • April 2011 www.angeluspress.org is not to generalize; these are very specific things, but ultimately they are signs of a loss of direction. Vatican II, the Golden calf It is the Golden Calf, an idol! No one ever reads it! I would be curious to know who has read it from start to finish and written a commentary with annotations. If they at least had the courage, the audacity, to read the Council, you could discuss it. But, no! They have never read it completely. They take slogans from it: “the spirit of the Council.” It is an event. The school of Bologna, in Italy, which is very liberal, which has studied the Council and published a five or six volume history of the Council in different languages, demonstrates this very well. It is not so much the text; it is a happening, the Council which continues and follows its course in time. It is a spirit! And that is how they answer us. If you try, in the case of the Constitution on the Liturgy, to cite the Council, to say for example that Latin remains the language of the Church, that Gregorian Chant remains the chant of the Latin Church: “Ah, yes, but no! We have gone beyond that! There is a spirit of the Council, an opening, a renewal!” Therefore it is really their idol, which they always invoke and which destroys things from within. Because there is nothing outside of all that. And from the idol proceeds the ideology. And the ideology is always, always totalitarian. It excludes everything else and it destroys everything else. The distinctive characteristic of the idol and of the ideology is that it destroys those who profess it and blinds them completely. That is why there is a problem: there is blindness. I don’t think that there is really bad will, but rather a form of blindness. How can anyone say that with five percent of Catholics practicing their faith, we are going to find solutions that are purely human? Merge parishes? But where has that got us? Eventually you have to sit down, look at the situation and say: it’s not working. They go so far as to justify pastoral failures by saying: “But this is in the image of Our Lord, who humbled himself. The Church is experiencing that. She is becoming humble and poor.” And they fall into a sort of ideology of being miserable which is completely false. But they justify this too by the Council. The “Sin” of Tradition I think that it is the biggest sin. They can forgive a lot of things that you do in the Church. They will forgive you for having an affair. They will forgive you for not saying Mass every day, for abandoning your Breviary, for ridiculing time-tested devotional formulas, for making heterodox statements (to say the least) from the pulpit. They will forgive you because they are very charitable. But there is one thing they will not forgive you for: The supreme sin is to look to Tradition and, even worse, to look to the Society of St. Pius X. They will let you go to Protestant worship services and even allow priests to go to Communion at Protestant worship services, which has happened! Or to conduct interreligious dialogue with the Buddhists, and to go make Zen retreats. They will find that you are the most open, marvelous person in the world; they will hold you up as an example! But when you celebrate Mass in Latin, even if it is not the Mass of St. Pius V, when you wear a cassock: that is suspect. When you pray the Rosary, when you hear confessions in a confessional, you are suspected of fundamentalism. Then, as you can very well imagine, when you start to talk gratefully, very lovingly, and amicably about Archbishop Lefebvre, for example, and about his work, well, that is unforgivable. Once again, they forgive you anything but that. Transcribed from a video interview conducted by DICI. 29 THE IMPORTANCE OF LANGUAGE Part 2 Dr. David Allen White Introducing evelyn waugh’s Brideshead Revisited to the seminarians at st. thomas Aquinas seminary (March 9-11, 2001), Dr. white discusses in this conference all the implications of the image (tV, cinema, computers) replacing the word (books) . a rival to the Godhead If the movies and TV, through flickering images, mimic a kind of “raising the dead,” they are sporting an omnipotence that rivals our Lord’s. Only those allowed to do so by God may raise the dead and the film media claim a kind of omnipotence. Television is omnipresent; it’s everywhere. Try to find a restaurant, a place to have a shot and a beer without 14 screens surrounding you—CNN, ESPN, CNBC, MSNBC—with the volume up so loud that you couldn’t talk if you wanted to. So everybody just sits and stares at those screens which are everywhere—airports, bars, restaurants, every home, even classrooms. Then, of course, comes the omniscience of the computer. All knowledge is now at our fingertips. Combine these attributes of omnipotence, omnipresence, and omniscience and we have made for ourselves a false god. These images are a false god, and we worship it. We love our movies, we couldn’t be without our television, and we behave as though our computer can tell us everything. www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • April 2011 30 LITeraTUre Last spring, I was covering Shakespeare’s sonnets in an English honors class. I got a paper from a bright kid saying Shakespeare wrote Sonnet No. 27 to “Marguerite.” I’ve studied Shakespeare for 35 years and had never heard this. Then it dawned on me to try something. I sat at the computer and typed in “Shakespeare’s Sonnets.” Up came a list of the persons to whom Shakespeare wrote every sonnet. Sure enough, “No. 27: Marguerite of Valois.” I said to myself, “What is this?” and clicked back to “Introduction to Shakespeare.” I clicked back again, “Shakespeare: The Man, the Playwright.” Another click and I found it was a Sir Francis Bacon website put together by some lunatic claiming that Sir Francis Bacon wrote all the works of Shakespeare. Ludicrous! Sir Francis Bacon lived in France before the sonnets were written and knew Marguerite of Valois and so it is obvious that he wrote Sonnet No. 27 to her. Go figure!? For all that, it is an impressively attractive website, for sure, but it’s purpose is to deconstruct. The poor student clicked on it and up came its lies. The computer is a medium for lies that we honor as truth because we are habituated to think, “It’s right there on the screen; it can’t be wrong; the computer knows everything.” We can find everything on the Internet, yes, except the ability to rationally distinguish truth from a lie. That we cannot find on the Internet. In order to have and preserve the ability to reason, we must thoroughly know language. Those born and bred on the Internet suffer a lack of reasoning power and gradually become incapable of distinguishing. When we follow the Word, we are led to the Ultimate Reality of absolute Truth. Contrarily, however, the image too easily falsely represents reality, deceiving us that it gives us absolute reality while it only captures an image of a reality which is not real. The image itself—especially the screen image— does not endure. It cannot last. The image changes as quickly as time destroys the very object being repTHE ANGELUS • April 2011 www.angeluspress.org resented. The reality on the screen is totally unreal; it is not reality. On the contrary, the words of the Sacrament are real. A Shakespeare sonnet represents a reality of beauty, of a higher beauty that can lead one to the Ultimate Reality. When we ask of someone, “Please go to the store and buy me a lemon,” we convey actual and true information to someone and create a bond with another human being in the most simple, practical, and day-to-day way. But those very bonds are being broken when the oral and written traditions vanish. a Good Story Is Good for Us Let me make a comparison. The word is to the image as the story is to visceral thrill or excitement. Let me explain. We know that our Lord, the Word, came to us, and when He did He did not give us more commandments. They were there, of course, and they tell us what to do and not do. But when the Word taught us He taught in parables. When questions were asked, when He wanted to convey information, He taught in stories. And these stories fill the Gospels. They are profound and brilliant and by them we can in the here-and-now know what the Word taught. Our Lord knew that those parables would be handed down because men had memories and language mattered. Our Lord explained significant events using stories, intending them to be remembered and passed on. Would the Creator teach us by this means and fail to create in us a proclivity to listen to stories? It’s the reason why my little niece climbed up on my lap today and said, “Read me a story.” It’s built in. It’s there in children. Deep down, it’s still there in all of us. We have a little free time, we want a story, “Tell me a good story”; “Let’s go see a story”; “Maybe (if I can read) I’ll read a book.” But it’s becoming more and more a “maybe.” Why do we like stories? Because they’re ordered; they’re easy to remember. In Aristotle’s Poetics, he defines tragedy as the imitation of an action which is complete in itself and has a beginning, a middle, and an end. My students laugh, “I could have written that,” and I say, “No you couldn’t,” because it is a profound idea. A story is the shaping of experience that lets us know there is movement in time from an initial starting point, through a development, to a place where it stops. Every story is a pilgrimage, just as every human life is a pilgrimage—coming from somewhere, moving somewhere, ending somewhere. A good story, properly shaped, will be ordered; it will be shaped along those lines, which is not an easy thing. Story is to literature what melody is to music and what line is to painting. It is that which defines the work of art, and it is the reason why plot is the most essential thing in literature. It is like carpentry. You’ve got to take the materials and assemble them piece by piece until your project is completed. On account of its complexity, it takes thought, discipline, art, shaping, craft, and wordsmithing to write a good story. We respond to a good story, which means it will be well told, makes sense, and of course, approach a truth. But now, even narrative is being destroyed. Narrative is versatile. It can be as simple as Jack and the Beanstalk, “Once upon a time, there was a boy named Jack and his mother told him to take the cow to town and sell it,” or it can be as complex as a Dostoyevsky. At the insistence of some of my students, I watched the movie Gladiator. It wasn’t just that I loathed it, that I was bored to distraction, because I’d figured out the entire plot 20 minutes into the thing and there was another two hours to go. It was that it dawned on me how movies are made. For years I had been joking, “All you do in a successful modern movie is blow something up, then throw two people in a bedroom, then blow something up, kill somebody, go back into a bedroom, then stage a car chase at the end where everything blows up.” But as I watched Gladiator, I became LITeraTUre aware of why this is so. The reason is made plain by the fact that modern society has come to use digital clocks rather than analog timepieces. We have been habituated to looking at individual points in time disconnected from the flow and sweep of the big picture. On an analog clock face, you will see the big hand going round, the small hand going around, and the second hand going around which turns the minute hand. There is the sense of flow. The analog clock is an illustration of good narrative because it shows time as movement from someplace to somewhere. A digital readout displays isolated moments of time that don’t connect—8:21am, 8:22am, 9:04am. It is, if you will, the fast-food experience—Hungry, Eat, Big Mac, Buy, Swallow—as opposed to, “It’s dinner time, David. We’ll have the soup I made from scratch with last night’s chicken. And we’ll have salad if you wash out that Romaine from the garden. I bought the thickest roast from the Jones brothers—wait until you see it!—and I’ve baked the last of this year’s potatoes....Remember how difficult the crop was? Then, I’ve got your favorite for desert, including the brandy. And, while we’re eating tonight, I have this great question that came up today when I was over at the Jones Farm.” But feeding ourselves is now an animal activity like a seal barking for fish. Movies are now working in the same way: I go in, I sit down, I want a thrill. If something hasn’t blown up in the first ten minutes, I’m out of there. That is why a movie like Gladiator opens with this gigantic war scene. I didn’t know who was fighting whom, why, what had gone on, but they were slicing and dicing. Blood was squirting and I was asking myself, “Who are these people? Do I know any of these people? Do I care about these people? Is there a reason for all this?” In the background was some deep-voiced mumbo-jumbo. But the overall experience had no substantive relation to history; it had no relation to art; it had no relation to humanity. The only relation was between an image on a screen producing a visceral thrill in the one watching. What I’m getting is excitement, a blood-rush if you will. The movie maker is thinking, “We’ve got to keep the audience excited, so every ten minutes we’ve got to have an explosion, or impurity, a car chase, a murder...something to keep them excited.” Decades of this pattern have resulted in my students’ failure to respond to narrative. In order to have a narrative you’ve got to have a proper exposition at the beginning of the book. You have to set up characters, places, time, background; we have a history, certain threads need to come together so they can be woven into a tapestry. My students have no patience for this. They can’t remember from one chapter to the next. The great books are closed to them because their ability to respond has been taken away from them. A colleague of mine who teaches Victorian literature said to me, “I went in to teach David Copperfield, but they can’t read it. I read Copperfield in ninth grade. I wasn’t particularly bright, but it changed my life.” My friend meant they couldn’t remember who the characters were or lock on to a sequence of events. They say, “Nobody’s blown up. Nothing’s happening. This is boring.” Of course, the vocabulary of the great books is now beyond them, too. That ability to respond to a carefully crafted story is dead. They can only respond viscerally. They have been made Pavlov’s dogs. Ring a bell, they’ll salivate. Lop off a head, they’ll get excited: “Oh, it’s a great movie. I loved it!” Simultaneously, there is no way a parable can touch them. The vehicle of a parable is language, not images. And, at the most profound level, if there was ever a great narrative, a hugely Important Story, it’s the one that begins before the beginning, progresses through centuries, and as we know will have a definitive end on earth (though continue for eternity). The works of God form the greatest story ever told, but it is lengthy narrative and they cannot grasp it, nor do they want to grasp it. 31 I can no longer go to the movies. I cannot follow what is going on. That world is as closed to me as my world of Shakespeare and Dickens and the Scriptures is closed to them. Speechless Those things that they know— like Gladiator and The Matrix—will not be much use for teaching them what you need to tell them, what they need to hear. Faith comes by hearing, but they are going to have trouble understanding, because they are not used to serious language. The problem the soldier of Christ is facing has increased a hundredfold. We are facing a very formidable task. I wish I could offer a quick and easy solution, but I can’t. However, God will not abandon His people, and you must establish a prayer life. You must hold to what is true. You need to be prepared to be reviled, discounted, and attacked when you say those movies stink, to get rid of the TV, and that the computer is loaded with filth and lies. Try to engage the simplicity of our Lord’s parables which are tiny, simple narratives. Repeat the same buzz-phrases until they stick inside young skulls. Most importantly, trust in our Lady who loves all her children and will be there for them. We know she is going to crush the serpent’s head. It will end this world of images that he has set up that holds us all enthralled. In the meantime, you must win the mental universe of as many souls as possible. You need all of God’s strength, all of your seminary training, a devout life, a recognition of what has happened in the world and who is prince over it, absolute faith in God, a willingness to suffer and die for the truth, and total devotion to the Blessed Mother whose Immaculate Heart will triumph. Dr. David Allen White taught World Literature at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, for the better part of three decades. He gave many seminars at St. Thomas Aquinas Seminary in Winona, Minnesota, including one on which this article is based. He is the author of The Mouth of the Lion and The Horn of the Unicorn. www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • April 2011 32 InTerVIew Fr. Gregory Post In celebration of the Society’s 40th anniversary, what could be more natural than to interview one of the Society’s elders? Fideliter met with Fr. Gregory Post, currently assigned to the Syracuse priory and an eyewitness of the first days of the Society. Father, among the priests who are members of the Society and were ordained in the Society, you are the one to be first ordained and yet you are not the senior member. Can you explain this paradox for us? Indeed, some members of the Society that were ordained in the Society, like Fr. Jean-Yves Cottard or Bishop Tissier de Mallerais, are my seniors–they made their engagement in the Society before me–and yet they were ordained after me because the years spent in the seminary were shortened for me. When I entered the Society, I had already received a certain formation. Where did you receive it? In three places: in a major seminary, a university, and a religious order. THE ANGELUS • April 2011 www.angeluspress.org Where are you from? philosophy studies at UC Berkley and then at San Francisco State University. I learned some things, but the philosophy was very secular. Still, I earned the diplomas that would allow me to teach Spanish and Latin. So you were from a Catholic family and you received atholic schooling? You mentioned a moment ago that there were three places you had received a formation in philosophy: the major seminary, the university–that makes two… I’m from Minneapolis, Minnesota. Mine was a Catholic family. There were three children. My brother died of an illness in 1996, and I have a sister still living, thanks be to God. Right, in San Francisco. Since I wanted to be a priest, I entered the minor seminary of San Francisco when I was 13. That was in 1953. I was there six years. I have good memories of it. And naturally, after minor seminary you attended the major? Quite naturally. Yet I only stayed there four months. In the month of January, I thought that I wasn’t in the right path, so I left the seminary and began Spanish and The third was in a religious order, as I was saying. On Easter 1964, I experienced a rather strong desire to enter the religious life. The desire persisted, so I spoke to my pastor about it. Following his advice, I wrote to seven orders or congregations. The Discalced Carmelites invited me to spend a weekend with them at Oakville. InTerVIew I was favorably impressed. I was allowed to enter. It was the 25th of August. Right in the middle of the final years of the Second Vatican Council? Exactly. And yet the philosophical formation I received was very close to St. Thomas. The philosophy students were grouped at Oakville; those studying theology, in Washington, D.C. I then went to Washington. There were five of us in my year. A religious order means vows… I made my temporary vows in 1965. Three years later I received the tonsure and minor orders. But things weren’t going well. The religious wanted to change all the traditions of the order. The theology classes were imbued with modernism, especially moral theology. The Brothers gave up the habit. And then, even though times for mental prayer, obligatory according to the rule, were scheduled, the superiors started telling us: do your mental prayer by yourselves. We could also go into town freely with money in our pockets. We no longer looked out for one another. Many vocations were lost. How did you react? I had a good model: my family, which, besides, did not like the New Mass. They had just moved from San Francisco to Post Falls in order to find some mutual support among other families attached to Tradition. There were some priests there who said the traditional Mass, and the Society did not yet exist. I requested permission to take time off for a year; I was having some stomach trouble anyway. 33 “...In August 1972, Msgr. Lefebvre ordained me warded the letter. The Archbishop answered me in December 1970, priest at Powers Lake advising me that he was planning (North Dakota)....In the a trip to the United States. month of October I left Tell us about your first for Fribourg, where I meeting with Archbishop Lefebvre. In March 1971 I met him in continued my studies. Pittsburgh, at a house of the Holy Ghost Fathers. I arrived about 7 Then came my first o’clock in the morning. He was assignments: Detroit, saying his Mass. He didn’t have a Ecône, Los Gatos. Then server, so I served. After thanksgiving and breakfast, someone drove I traveled a lot: Phoenix, the Archbishop, and I accompanied them. During the journey, he Dickinson, St. Louis, told me about Ecône, the formaHawaii, Syracuse…” tion, and had me agree to write to the seminary rector, at the time Fr. Jacques Masson. Did your superiors agree? No. Besides, they did not appreciate my “too conservative” side. The differences appeared in broad daylight, for example, during a meeting of the community. Picture to yourself: there were 30 of us in the house (seminarians, priests and Brothers), including the provincial superior. He put to a vote whether we should continue reading at table (and other things, too). Of the thirty, I was the only one to vote in favor of the reading. These tensions must have made common life difficult… Yes. I prayed, sought advice, and then I said to myself: you’ve got to stay put until Providence clearly shows you another path, if it should so will. Now, my mother was in correspondence with an English professor at Rome, Mr. Robin Anderson. This man knew Archbishop Lefebvre. My mother told him that her son was looking for a traditional seminary. So Mr. Anderson suggested that I write to Archbishop Lefebvre and he for- What was your impression during this meeting? In fact, five months later I saw the Archbishop again, and it was this time that I got to know him better. It was in August 1971, at Powers Lake, North Dakota. Three thousand people were there, and the Archbishop personally blessed 75 with the monstrance. We were able to speak with him for an hour. I was impressed by his wisdom and his calm. He was always very tranquil. He understood the real situation in the Church well. All his thoughts and his life were centered on God, religion, the Mass, the sacraments, dogma–I dare say, holiness of life. So you entered the seminary just after the Society was founded. That was 40 years ago… Yes. I arrived at Ecône on October 6 during lunch. I was shown my room and right away I went on a spiritual retreat, like all the seminarians of my class. But the Archbishop told me: you have www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • April 2011 34 InTerVIew already followed several courses of philosophy, so I’m sending you to the University of Fribourg. There I joined Jean-Yves Cottard, Christian Datessen, and Georges Salleron. The superior was Fr. Gerard Traucessec. Soon we were joined by Terence Kelly and Anthony Ward. We spent two years there. Unlike at the Carmelite order, which experienced the conciliar turbulence, at 50 Route de la Vignettaz, there was genuine, regular religious life. I believe that the Council was the worst thing in the history of the Church. After formation, orders? I was ordained subdeacon in 1972, then deacon. Then, in August 1972, Msgr. Lefebvre ordained me priest at Powers Lake. I was the Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre ordains Fr. Gregory Post at Sacred Heart Chapel, Powers Lake, North Dakota. Fr. Post was the first American priest ordained for the Society of St. Pius X. only one to receive the priesthood in Sacred Heart Chapel there. In the month of October I left for Fribourg, where I continued my studies. Then came my first assignments: Detroit, Ecône, Los Gatos. Then I traveled a lot: Phoenix, Dickinson, St. Louis, Hawaii, Syracuse… Looking back, one might wonder why some priests left the Society so readily. The Archbishop was too good to think that those to whom he did good could then be unfair to him, or lie to him, or quit the straight path. For example, in 1982, he divided the U.S. district into two districts, one confided to one priest and one to another. The following year, one of these two priests left us. Why?–a mystery… Yes, Archbishop Lefebvre was sometimes too trusting. Do you attribute these departures to doctrinal reasons, or difficulties with common life? From the angle of common life, no doubt many left because of a spirit of independence, some difficulty with submitting to a superior. Doctrine explains other departures. Even at Ecône, some had sedevacantist tendencies, especially among the Americans. They didn’t want us to have any relations with Rome, as we still have at present. But if it is true humanly speaking that there are reasons for pessimism about the results of our discussions, divine intervention can fix things; it is useful to have the discussions. By the way, do you, who have known it from the start, find that the general make-up of our Society has changed in 40 years? The Society, in my opinion, is stronger. The priests are more numerous, stationed at closer distances to one another, more organized. I find us more united. And we are paying more attention to the seminarians’ training than before. Father, what advice would you give souls for keeping their commitments in a time like ours, especially within the Society? To put things in order, I would say: first comes the spiritual life–the liturgy and personal prayer; then comes obedience to the rule (a daily schedule…) and to one’s superiors, and, correlatively, humility. Then, continue to read, to study the teachings of the popes and truly Catholic authors. Translated from Fideliter, No. 198, NovemberDecember 2010. Fideliter is the district magazine of the SSPX in France. THE ANGELUS • April 2011 www.angeluspress.org 35 Part 3 InTrodUcTIon M any good books have been written about the life and the doctrine of Fr. Kolbe but unfortunately access to his very own words is not easy for Anglophones who do not know Italian or Polish. This is a great shame because these words have a profound simplicity and power about them that only the Holy Ghost can give. What is more, we have a large volume of his personal writings and conferences from very sure sources which provide texts that are furnished with all the guarantees of authenticity that even the most severe critic could require, especially in what concerns his writings. The monumental Scritti Kolbiani of Fr. Cristoforo Zambelli provide an excellent Italian translation of the entire corpus of Fr. Kolbe’s writings, including all his articles and letters and even the journals he kept and personal notes of his retreats and other matters.1 There exists also in Polish a collection of notes taken by his Brothers of spiritual conferences that he gave to them in Poland and also in Japan.2 It is in order to enable English speakers to have immediate access to some of this immense treasure that this little selection of his words has been compiled. –A Dominican Friar Scritti di Massimiliano Kolbe, Editrice Nazionale M.I., Rome, 1997. References to this work will be made by the initials SK followed by a number corresponding to the number used in this edition to identify all the various writings of Fr. Kolbe. 2 Konferencje Swietego Maksymiliana Marii Kolbego, Wydwnictwo OO. Franciszkanów, Niepokalanów, 1990. References will be made to this work by the simple initial K followed by the number of the conference. Critics generally question the absolute reliability of these notes, but even though it is certain that they are not always complete and perhaps sometimes not precisely accurate, they were obviously prepared with great effort and a scrupulous care not to attribute to him things he did not say. They remain an invaluable source of his doctrine that must not be neglected, for they are a precious witness of his personal teaching to his closest disciples. 1 fr. Maximilian Kolbe o.f.M. conv. His Very Own Words THe wILL Let us not forget that the essence and the perfection of our consecration are neither the sentiment nor the memory but the will. Therefore, in the case where one doesn’t experience at all the sweetness of intimate familiarity with Her (although commonly it is the opposite) and one is incapable of remembering Her and thinking for a long time about Her for whatever reason, if his will remains beside Her, if he does not revoke his consecration, but on the contrary, as far as he can renews it, then let him be at peace, because She reigns in his heart. And the will, we can control it easily. Let us be careful only to conform it always more perfectly to Her will and accomplish this will of Hers always more perfectly. This is everything. (SK 605 Nov. 10, 1934) It is a matter of the approaching of the will, the fusion of our will and the will of the Immaculate, just as Her Will is united most perfectly to the Will of God. Besides this, nothing else is necessary. (SK 1212, Dec. 7, 1936) Let us try hard all day to accomplish Her will. Let us offer the key of the bastion of our will to Her so that She might conquer it to Herself as quickly as possible and then, through us, She will conquer others. (K 37, n. 5, June 26, 1936) It is certain that the more our will approaches Her, the more we also approach Her. If we are united to Her will we can tell ourselves that we belong to her very much. (K 284, Oct. 19, 1940) At any rate, the Immaculate knows everything and directs everything, on the condition that we let ourselves be guided perfectly by Her. (SK 698, Dec. 29, 1936) www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • April 2011 36 fr. MaXIMILIan KoLbe Since we have given ourselves to Her without limits, therefore She, for Her part, leads us. (SK 339, April 29, 1931) In PracTIce We give to Her as Her property everything, whatever we do. We give Her as Her property all that we are and all that we do. Then She gives it to Our Lord Jesus as Her own. These are very deep things, but we learn them in humble prayer. THIS IS oUr IdeaL But how must we see this in practice? During all our actions must we remember our consecration, that everything that we do is for the Mother of God? No, it suffices that if we have once made this act of offering and if we have never consciously retracted it, then it exists, even though we may not think about it. A practical example: a carpenter makes a table on order (for someone). Even though he doesn’t constantly think about the fact that he is making the table for the one who ordered it, nevertheless he is making this particular table for him. When we have once given ourselves to the Immaculate as Her property, this offering will always be valid, even if we don’t always think about it. (K 36, June 23, 1936) If the examination of conscience and meditation are very difficult, but not through our fault, that means that if, in spite of everything, we strive to do them well, everyTHE ANGELUS • April 2011 www.angeluspress.org thing is in order. The Immaculate often, to increase our merit, veils the horizon to us with clouds of discouragement, doubt, worry, etc. If the will does not give itself to these thoughts, even if they last a long time, then we approach closer to the Immaculate. Everything depends on this, that at every instant, in every circumstance we let Her lead us. The test of this is obedience.… We must be careful that there be no conflict between Her will and ours. We have offered Her everything—therefore whatever is ours is Her property and Her affairs are ours. Her virtues, her merits are ours. Everything depends on this: how we will. Extraordinary prayers and mortifications aren’t necessary, but just: let oneself be led. (K 41, July 5, 1936) Often we forget about the practical offering of ourselves to the Immaculate. What does this practical offering consist in? In the accomplishment of Her Will. In the union of our will to Her Will, as Her Will is immersed in God’s Will. We know that the Will of God is made known to us in supernatural obedience. This is, as spiritual writers say, a sort of mystery of the faith. (K 167, May 1, 1938) We can consecrate ourselves to Mary using whatever expression we want as long as we renounce our own will in order to adhere to Her commands, which are presented to us in the commandments of God and the Church, in the duties of our state and in interior inspirations. (SK 1220 Rycerz Niepokalanej, December 1937) We must let ourselves be led by Her. The closer our union with Her will be, the better will be the fruits. So let us strive for this one thing, that we be Hers more and more. It isn’t a matter here of strength of will, or fortitude, it is a matter of this, that She reign in us more and more, more and more delicately, so that we do not want to know why something is thus and not otherwise, so that for us are sufficient the words: She wills it. A priest was telling me how, during a retreat of the Province, the superior, in sending him to another friary, explained to him the motives for doing so (this priest was already an old man) in order to lessen the sadness occasioned by the move. This priest, however, stopped him, in order not to lose the merit of obedience. The soul who loves the Immaculate doesn’t want to know reasons. It is enough for it that the Immaculate wills it so through the superiors.…It is a matter of this, that She reign within us. We must pray for this supernatural love of Her. (K 286, Oct. 22, 1940) YoU are HerS Let yourself be led by the Immaculate: all that doesn’t depend on your will, surely She permits it for your good, even if it comes from the bad will of others. It is She who wills that it happen to you.… Don’t forget that sanctity consists, not in extraordinary actions, but in accomplishing well your duties towards God, yourself and others. fr. MaXIMILIan KoLbe Nothing, not even the most holy state of life, assures the sanctification of your soul if you neglect the duties that derive from that state. Try to see in your duties the certain will of the Immaculate, the accomplishment of which demonstrates your love for Her and, in Her and through Her, for Jesus and the Father. Even prayer, penance and works that are good in themselves are not pleasing to Her if they are an obstacle to accomplishing well your duties. Precisely in them, in fact, is found Her will. (SK 1334, Aug. 5-20, 1940) Devotion to the Immaculate is a secret that many don’t know yet, or rather they know it but they practise it only superficially, when in reality it is, by the will of God, the substance of all sanctity. (SK 687, Nov. 11, 1936) Our ideal is to present to the Immaculate at every instant the offering of our life. (K 247, June 16, 1940) dIScoUraGeMenT Most beloved sons, do not ever accept such a feeling. When you feel yourself to be at fault, even if it is a sin that is fully conscious, grave and repeated many, many, many times, do not let yourselves be fooled by the devil into consenting to discouragement. But when you feel yourself to be at fault, offer your whole fault, without analyzing it and examining it, to the Immaculate as Her property, pronouncing the sole name “Mary,” as I just did a moment ago, and worry yourselves about pleasing Her with the action that immediately follows, as I am doing in this moment adding for you, most dear Sons, these few words. Dearly beloved, every fall, even if it be very grave and repeated, serves us always and only as a little step towards a higher perfection. For this alone, in fact, the Immaculate permits a fall, in order to heal us of our self-love, our pride, in order to lead us to humility and render us in this way more docile to divine graces. The devil, on the contrary, tries to inject despair and interior despondency, which are nothing else but a new sign of pride. If we knew well our wretchedness, we would not wonder at all at our falls, but rather we would wonder and give thanks, after the fall, for not having fallen still lower and more often. There does not exist, in fact, a sin so grave into which we cannot fall, if divine grace, that is, the merciful hand of the Immaculate, does not sustain us. We don’t want either to feel continually the sweetness of the devotion to the Immaculate, because this would be spiritual greediness. Let us permit Her to lead us as it pleases Her, not as it pleases us. It is not always the time for sweet tendernesses, even if they are very holy. We also need trials, aridity, abandonments and so on. Let 37 us, then, permit Her to use with full liberty the means of our sanctification. One thing alone must always be present and be deepened always: let ourselves be led by Her, conform ourselves always more perfectly to Her Will, obedience to Her Will in holy Obedience. (SK 504, April 9, 1933) Dear Brother! After a long silence your letter made me rejoice. You must not worry at all about me being very busy, but freely write as soon as you feel the need.…With regard to our personal weaknesses, they must not discourage us at all, but, on the contrary, the more an instrument is wretched, so much more is it fit to manifest the goodness and power of the Immaculate.…Discouragement would grieve the Immaculate…. Can someone be sad who is the property of the Immaculate? Which doesn’t mean never to stumble, but if we happen to fall, we must conduct ourselves as true knights of the Immaculate and not get discouraged.… Dear son, don’t be sad, don’t be troubled. The Immaculate knows and directs everything. Let us only let ourselves be led by Her always more perfectly and She Herself in us and through us will do the maximum possible for the salvation of souls, to conquer them to Herself and, through Her, to the Heart of Jesus. With the help of the Immaculate we can do everything. (SK 609, Dec. 28, 1934) But someone will say: I don’t have the strength for this, to progress in this way, others can do it but not me. That is precisely what it is all about, that we don’t have the strength. And if someone feels this way, it is thanks to the Most Holy www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • April 2011 38 fr. MaXIMILIan KoLbe Mother. If someone feels he has the strength, then let him pray the Mother of God not to feel he has the strength because if someone relies on himself, then he truly is in danger of falling. Your whole point of support must be the Immaculate. We must never have confidence in ourselves. We must simply say to the Immaculate: if You abandon me, then I will drag also others along to hell with me; there is no sin of which I am not capable, nothing so criminal that I could not commit it. If, however, You extend me Your hand, then I will bring the whole world to You and I will become a saint, a great saint. This is true humility, for we don’t trust in ourselves but completely in the Immaculate. But someone will say: I can’t manage to do such things. This is pride, because it attributes to oneself that one can still do the small things but not what is greater. You, by yourself, can do nothing if you rely on your own strength. If we rely on the Lord God, we can do everything. Is the Lord God limited? Can He do little things but not great things? As soon as we rely on the Lord God we are giants. We can be sanctified! We can conquer our soul and the whole world to the Immaculate, but with Her help, obviously. (K 29, July 1933) THE ANGELUS • April 2011 www.angeluspress.org What does that mean, conversion and sanctification through the Immaculate? That means that through the Immaculate come the graces necessary for conversion and sanctification. And indeed, although a sinner or a soul desiring to sanctify itself doesn’t think about it, what matters is that they know and recognize this mystery, that the soul truly turns directly to the Mother of God. When a soul does this, it will certainly receive the grace of conversion and sanctification; I underline: “certainly.” Ordinarily, if the sinful soul turns to the Lord God, it will receive the grace of conversion, but it can happen that the soul will not merit the grace of God because, on the contrary, it is fitting that the justice of God prevail. However, if the soul, even though it be I don’t know how sinful, turns to the Immaculate, it will certainly receive grace. St. Bernard says that the Lord God kept for Himself justice, but gave mercy to the Mother of God. I don’t deny that the Immaculate receives the mercy from the Lord God, but She is the personification of this divine mercy and that is why a soul is converted and sanctified if it turns to Her. Therefore we know this truth, that through the Immaculate we can become great saints and this in an easy way. In order to sincerely proclaim this truth with conviction, it is first necessary to experience it oneself. Then it will be very easy to speak of it to others. A soul that has already given up and says: “I can’t go on, it is too much for me,” let her try and put into practice for itself this truth and she will be convinced that she can do all things through the Immaculate. There is no heroism of which the soul is not capable with the help of the Immaculate. (K 75, n. 3, May 6, 1937) So m e t i m e s w e h a v e doubts: so often it happens that we have not been faithful to grace, with the result that we are no longer worthy of the help of God. But that is precisely why God has given us the heavenly Mother to whom He has confided the entire order of His mercy, so that He might, as it were, hide us from His justice. Therefore we have a way to go, through which we can always obtain the grace of God. We can never say that now it is no longer possible to obtain the grace of God. Without regard for whatever sins we have on our conscience, we can rise up from them, if only we will turn to the Immaculate. If someone falls, let him turn to Her with full confidence. (K 183, Aug. 2, 1938) Let us also (like Saint Thérèse of the Child Jesus) be little flowers of the Immaculate and She will teach us an unlimited confidence in the merciful love of God, of which She is the personification. (SK 1263, July 1932) In the case of a fall, offer yourself immediately to Her together with the whole affair of your fall and ask for pardon: “Dear little Mother, p a r d o n m e a n d obta in pardon from Jesus.” Seek to accomplish your next action in order to procure the greatest possible pleasure to Her and to Jesus and be certain that this act of love will completely annul that fault. In your first confession you will accuse yourself of this fall, but She, Jesus and the Father will have already long forgotten it. (SK 1334, Aug. 5-20, 1940) Church and World california Priest concelebrates with Presbyterian Minister On February 13, at St. Norbert’s parish, Father Escobar concelebrated Mass with Steve Whitney of Trinity Presbyterian Church in West Sacramento, who received Holy Communion and distributed Holy Communion during the Mass.1 Concelebrating Mass with ministers of ecclesial communities that do not have apostolic succession is an “exceptionally serious” crime against the sacraments, according to present canonical norms and could result in dismissal from the clerical state without an ecclesiastical trial (see Can. 908 & 1365). The diocesan authorities were warned by an angry e-mail from a parishioner mentioning that “our missals inform the non- Catholics that they are not allowed to receive the Eucharist.” It added that Fr. Escobar is “unrepentant,” and yelled at his wife when she spoke to him about what had happened after Mass. Fr. Escobar told her that “she isn’t a true Christian because Jesus would love everyone.”2 Ryan Lilyengren, a spokesman for the Diocese of Orange explained: “We do a lot of interfaith activities and have several Ecumenical services… Allowing ministers of other faiths to take part in a traditional Mass is called concelebrating, a somewhat serious offense.”3 Bishop Tod Brown of Orange reacted and put the suspect priest on leave before launching a formal investigation. This piece of news brings out clearly the problems of the new Church legislation: The forceful ecumenical movement (does it spell ecumaniacal?) was originally launched with hardly any guard rails. The more daring and provok- ing the better based on the motto familiar to the 1960’s: “God loves everyone.” A decade or two ago, Fr. Escobar would have been applauded by a large mediatic group of avant-garde theologians, and would have been given a place in the postconciliar sun. We can still thank the Lord for the few guardrails set against the suicidal slips of ecumania, and yet, the same (new) Code is still allowing by and large the “Eucharistic hospitality” as long as the non-Catholic has the true faith in the Eucharist (Can. 844 §§3-4). In other words, the same book which condemns “communicating in sacred rites” from Pastors allows the same “communication in sacred rites” from the non-Catholic laymen. This is treading on thin ice, and one may question whether God understands the rationale for such weird distinctions! Then as usual, the Catholic faith is upheld from the roots up: a lay person whose wife was hurt sends vibes to the bishop, who finally reacts, and happily so. Time will tell whether he will have the strength to apply the stern measures mentioned by Canon Law. And the diocesan spokesman has the unfortunate diplomatic non-committal discourse to calm down the situation and allow the venom to proliferate, which can only profit the guilty priest and his party. But more deeply, what is at stake here is that souls will learn in practice the lesson of indifferentism and syncretism: since my priest allows non-Catholic ministers and lay people to receive communion and sacred rites, loyalty to the Catholic Church and its faith is of no practical importance: Outside the Church, Salvation! http://www.catholicculture.org/news/headlines/index.cfm?storyid=9267. 2 http://www.calcatholic.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?id=3d529b67-e5ea-4e77-8a0f1 3 aa4c371da5d1. http://www.ocregister.com/news/mass288577-lilyengren-priest.html. dr. bernard nathanson remembered for His Profound Prolife conversion After the recent death of abortionist turned pro-life advocate Dr. Bernard Nathanson, his close friend Fr. C. John McCloskey said that the doctor’s conversion to the faith was “one of the great Catholic moments of the 20th century in the United States.” The 84-year-old doctor, who was responsible for close to 75,000 abortions during his career as an obstetrician before undergoing a profound change of heart, died from cancer on February 21. In a February 22 interview with CNA, Fr. McCloskey remembered the late doctor as “a great, very intelligent man” who had made “a big sacrifice personally in order to change his opinion on a very important issue.” The two met in the early 1980s and bonded over a love of great literature soon after Nathanson had abandoned the abortion industry. During the course of their friendship, the repentant abortionist would make the second great decision of his life–to be baptized into the Catholic Church. In 1996, he was baptized and confirmed on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception in the crypt of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City by then Cardinal John O’Connor. He noted that although Nathanson knew that “he was completely forgiven of his sin by the waters of Baptism,” the doctor “realized the great evil that he was www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • April 2011 Church and World involved in” and worked to rectify his mistakes “over the course of several decades.” A successful gynecologist who followed his father’s career path, Nathanson eventually worked to co-found the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws in 1969. Now known as NARAL ProChoice America, the organization would become one of the strongest advocates of legal abortion in the nation. By the mid-1970s, however, Nathanson began to undergo a drastic interior change and eventually declared himself to be pro-life in 1979. “The more and more he went into the question of abortion the more he realized he was killing human beings,” Fr. McCloskey said, “and so he publicly came out and said I’m going to the other side–the light side away from the dark side.” Nathanson soon after produced the 1985 film The Silent Scream, which shows sonogram images of a child in the womb attempting to move away from an abortionist’s instruments. Although Nathanson was “vilified by the secular press” after the release of the film, Fr. McCloskey said the movie “had an enormous impact on the country.” Although critics of Nathanson’s conversion were perplexed as to how a former atheist Jew became one of the most prominent Catholic pro-life advocates, Fr. McCloskey– who has aided in numerous conversions–said he wasn’t surprised. “My experience in dealing with Jewish people, whom I love dearly, is that the great majority of them, if they want to become Christian, they become Catholic.” Fr. McCloskey added: “I think his conversion from atheism to Catholicism will be seen as a real turning point in our history.” (Source: Catholic News Agency) THE ANGELUS • April 2011 www.angeluspress.org Germany: a new community friend of the Society of Saint Pius X O n February 17, the German District of Society of St. Pius X announced that the religious community of the Reparative Sisters of the Holy Spirit, located at Niedaltdorf, Saarland, in the south of Germany has joined the many congregations of friends of the work founded by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre . These Sisters, who run a home of 60 beds for the elderly, sent a letter of thanks to Bishop Bernard Fellay which contains the following sentiments: With all our heart we want to thank you and to express our gratitude to God for having so kindly brought us to an association with the Society of Saint Pius X. Since our foundation, the goal of the Reparative Sisters of the Holy Spirit has been to do penance and to sacrifice for the Holy Catholic Church through the worthy celebration of the Tridentine Mass, through prayer and the service of fraternal charity, and through the care of the elderly and bedridden, as expressed by the Child Jesus in an appearance to our venerated founder. As you know, our Foundation [May 4, 1946, in Czechoslovakia–Editor’s note] by Sr. Maria Cornelia Holewik and Fr. Alois Schwammel led us through the period of Communist persecution from 1945 to 1966. At that time in Czechoslovakia, our sisters suffered not only physically, but most of all spiritually. By fidelity to the true Catholic faith, they had to separate from the motherhouse and work in a factory for six years, lacking most necessary things, until they were able, after a long and difficult struggle, to come to West Germany. As we had to close our house in Mainz, all the sisters have been reunited since 2000 in our community at Niedaltdorf. Likewise in present times, our Congregation must continue to fight the good fight. Over the years we have prayed for divine guidance. Now divine Providence has shown us the way to you. We are very grateful to the Heavenly Father and to you for our “incorporation” into the SSPX, in which the true Catholic faith is still preached and lived, and we willingly reiterate our gratitude. We keep you, Excellency, and all the members of the SSPX in our daily prayers so that you will be able to continue to carry out the will of God in service of the Holy Church. Sühneschwestern vom Heiligen Geist–St. Antoniushaus, Neunkircher Straße 71, D–66780 Niedaltdorf; Tel: 0 68 33 / 2 26; Fax: 068 33/89 40 01; Email: St.Antoniushaus-Niedaltdorf@t-online.de. (Source: DICI) QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 41 Fr. Peter R. Scott, FSSPX May Catholics practice yoga? Yoga is a complex routine of physical positions, borrowed from the Eastern religions of Buddhism and Hinduism, directed towards meditative practices also learned from these religions. In former times there would have been no question of Catholics practicing a discipline learned from the false Eastern religions. However, an intense propaganda has presented yoga as a simple technique of relaxation, not necessarily related to any spirituality, but very helpful in obtaining harmony of mind and body. Furthermore, the development of ecumenism in the post-conciliar Church over the past 50 years has led to an effort to incorporate certain non-Catholic practices into Catholic spirituality, amongst which is yoga. The question, then, arises as to whether this is a licit enrichment of spirituality or in fact a syncretism, uniting of different religions into one, clearly opposed to the Catholic Faith. In order to recognize that yoga is not just a physical exercise of bodily relaxation, but truly a spiritual activity, it suffices to look at the efforts of Catholics to reconciled the two, as on the website of the Archdiocese of Chicago (www.holynamecathedral.org). There you will find an entire page entitled “Catholic Yoga,” which begins in this way: Drawing from multiple faith traditions, yoga has evolved across the ages as a means of tuning the body for better communion with God through prayer and meditation. Join us as we explore the multiple spiritual and physical benefits of yoga practice while explicitly integrating prayers and spiritual themes of our Catholic Faith. Typical sessions will include an opening prayer, inspired movement & strengthening, and contemplative prayer to close. Statue of Lord Shiva in Bangalore, India, performing yogic meditation in the Padmasana posture. The statements of “Catholic” yogis such as Holy Name Cathedral’s instructor Ali Niederkorn belie the myth that yoga is a physical exercise, for she “offers faithbased yoga classes encouraging yoga practice as a form of prayer and meditation.” The legitimacy of Catholics' practicing yoga is consequently not that of a physical exercise, but of a spiritual practice. Yoga is not one single practice, theory or philosophy, but for none of its practitioners is it a purely physical exercise. It forms an integral part of the meditative practices of three different religions: Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism, each religion giving its own, and different, explanation of the value of yogic meditation. The practice of yoga in the West consequently shows no more coherency than in the East, but in every case it is heir to a pagan spirituality, claiming to bring some kind of communion with the divine. It is consequently an integral part of the New Age movement, which pretends to build up a post-Christian spirituality, according to which man achieves the divine by some communion with nature. Rome has spoken out against the use of yoga by Catholics in two little-known documents. The first, from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, entitled Orationis Formas, or Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on Some Aspects of Christian Meditation, was dated October 15, 1989. It highlights the differences and the incompatibilities between Christian meditation and the styles of meditation used in the Eastern religions, including yoga, warning of the “dangers of attempting to mix Christian meditation with eastern approaches since that could be both confusing and misleading, and may result in the loss of the essential Christocentric nature of Christian meditation”. What an understatement! It points out the radical opposition, Eastern meditation being a technique of concentration on oneself, a self-absorption, whereas Christian prayer is a flight from the self, a conversion from self to God. Similar warnings were contained in a 2003 booklet, a report issued as the fruit of the reflections of a working group composed of members of the Pontifi cal Councils for Culture and for Interreligious Dialogue, the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples, and the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, entitled Jesus Christ, the Bearer of the Water of Life: A Christian Reflection on the New Age, as a response to requests for clarification concerning New Age phenomena, such as yoga (www. vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_councils). Amongst the many critiques of the New Age, what interests us here is the teaching that www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • April 2011 42 New Age practices are not compatible with Christian prayer: New Age practices are not really prayer, in that they are generally a question of introspection or fusion with cosmic energy, as opposed to Christian prayer, which involves introspection, but is essentially a meeting with God. It reiterates the fundamental Catholic teaching that Jesus Christ, the one foundation of the Church, must be at the heart of every Christian action, which is clearly not the case with New Age. It also points out New Age spirituality deliberately blurs the fundamental distinctions between Creator and creation, religion and psychology, subjective and objective reality. This is a much more profound perversion than the modern confusion between nature and grace, for it destroys the whole sense of reality and man's place in God’s creation and leads to pantheism. Yet the practice of yoga by Catholics continues to be on the increase. Certainly it is partly a consequence of the spiritual vacuum created by the loss of true spirituality after Vatican II. Certainly it is also because these reports never became translated into authoritative moral teachings with canonical punishments for those who infringe them. However, it is also because the ecumenical movement with non-Catholics forbids any condemnation of false anti-Christian spirituality. It is for these reasons that we can find, incongruously, clearer statements from some Protestants than from Catholic bishops. Dr. Al- THE ANGELUS • April 2011 www.angeluspress.org bert Mohler, for example, President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, has made a study of the question of yoga, analyzing the recently published book by Stefanie Syman, a 15-year devotee of yoga, entitled The Subtle Body: The Story of Yoga in America. Here are some of his observations: Syman describes yoga as a varied practice, but she makes clear that yoga cannot be fully extricated from its spiritual roots in Hinduism and Buddhism. She is also straightforward in explaining the role of sexual energy in virtually all forms of yoga, and of ritualized sex in some yoga traditions.… Most (American Christians) seem unaware that yoga cannot be neatly separated into physical and spiritual dimensions. The physical is the spiritual in yoga, and the exercises and disciplines of yoga are meant to connect with the divine… …When Christians practice yoga, they must either deny the reality of what yoga represents or fail to see the contradictions between their Christian commitments and their embrace of yoga. The contradictions are not few, nor are they peripheral. The bare fact is that yoga is a spiritual discipline by which the adherent is trained to use the body as a vehicle for achieving consciousness of the divine… (www.albertmohler.com ) What exactly are these contradictions? There is certainly a different attitude to the body, which for the Catholic is an instrument for our sanctification only on the condition that it be mortified, spiritually put to death, so that the inclinations of fallen human nature are not followed, whereas for the yoga practitioner it is a means of contact, or consciousness of the divine that is in man, overcoming, they say, the duality between the Creator and the creature. Dr. Mohler has this to say, quoting Prof. Doug Groothuis: The goal of yoga is not the purification of the body or the beautification of the physique; the point of yoga is a change in consciousness, a transformation of the consciousness wherein one fi nds oneself at one with the ultimate reality which in Hinduism is Brahman…the biggest impact on the West is the Vadantic or the non-dualistic school which says that ultimately everything is one, that’s non-dual and everything is divine. So instead of the biblical view that there is a creator-creature relationship, this is a monistic or non-dualistic view that all that exists is Brahma…and Brahma is beyond words and beyond thought. (Ibid.) In conclusion, it cannot be denied that the practice of yoga is an implicit denial of the Catholic Faith in the divinity of Christ, true God and true man, and of a true Christcentered spirituality. Any practice of it must be included under the grave sin against the Faith called indifferentism. Persons who attend such instructions place their Faith in grave danger, and those who practice it must be suspect of heresy, implicitly promoting a world view that is directly and explicitly anti-Christian. Fr. Peter Scott was ordained by Archbishop Lefebvre in 1988. After assignments as seminary professor, US District Superior, and Rector of Holy Cross Seminary in Goulburn, Australia, he is presently Headmaster of Our Lady of Mount Carmel Academy in Wilmot, Ontario, Canada. TheLasTWord 43 Fr. Régis de Cacqueray, FSSPX Why Keep on Fighting? W hy, oh why, does the Society of St. Pius X persist in staying on the fringes of the Church? Why does it refuse such a generously offered accord that would require of it no concessions? Why does it deprive itself of the missionary influence that official recognition would impart? These are not the seventies! Things have changed. The Mass has been rehabilitated, the excommunications lifted. We have all heard this kind of talk more than once, and often coming from well-meaning people, friends of the Society of St. Pius X who desire its own good but who have a hard time understanding its position in the current crisis. We ought, therefore, to try to answer these questions first by granting what’s right and reasonable in them. In point of fact, we are no longer in the seventies. Some of the more egregious fads of that decade are no longer the fashion. Yet just last July 3, Msgr. Nourrichard, Bishop of Evreux, in liturgical array participated in a would-be priestly ordination (obviously invalid and scandalous) of Anglican women at Salisbury. And this sorry deed is far from being unique: the integrity of the faith is attacked daily. It is true that the Motu Proprio of 2007 proclaimed, after 40 years of denial, that the traditional Mass had never been forbidden and could not be. But it is equally true that this Motu Proprio put the traditional liturgy on the same level as the conciliar liturgy, and even beneath it, even though the conciliar liturgy is answerable for very grave theological criticisms. In January 2009, a Roman document did remit the decree of excommunication of the auxiliary bishops of the Society of St. Pius X. But in the same stroke, Pope Benedict XVI reasserted that in his eyes the priests of the Society “do not exercise legitimate ministries in the Church.” So we do not deny that the glass may seem half full: the actions of the Society of St. Pius X and of Bishop Fellay are supported by an attentive and prudent consideration of the realities of the current situation and its evolution. But nor can we or should we forget that the glass is still more than half empty: the grave errors we have been decrying for 40 years and which are the object of the doctrinal discussions are still very present at the heart of the Church. If there were any danger of our forgetting it, the thunderclap of the baneful Assisi III project would be there to remind us. No doubt, the announcement surprised us: it was public knowledge that Cardinal Ratzinger had scarcely appreciated John Paul II’s initiative in 1986. Yet this announcement, if somewhat unexpected, is in no wise illogical. For the principles underlying Assisi are those of Vatican II, the heart of Benedict XVI’s thought. If the Cardinal was reti- Fr. Régis de Cacqueray cent in the past, it was perhaps as regards the form, but not the substance: Benedict XVI has said over and over that he wants to promote interreligious dialogue, and “Assisi III” will be one of its stages. Such is the fundamental reason for keeping our position: the crisis of the Church is far from over. Official recognition of its errors will still take time. While praying that God will come and save His Church (without our ever pretending that it is we who, by our own strength, could do it), let us then faithfully continue to do what Providence in His mercy has called us to do: to bear witness to the Tradition of the Church against all comers. Fr. Régis de Cacqueray Superior of the French District www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • April 2011 “Viva Christo Rey!” Prepare yourself for one of the greatest catholic war stories of all time. The average American’s understanding of Mexican history is incomplete. American Catholics, however, should know Mexican history, because unlike our own history, much of Mexican history is Catholic history. In the early part of the 20th Century, Masonic, Marxist revolutionaries, who were nothing less than the enemies of Jesus Christ, seized control of the government of Mexico and attempted to destroy the Church. They very nearly succeeded. In the midst of the terror, courageous priests clandestinely made their way through the countryside dispensing the sacraments and ministering to the Mexican faithful. Many received the crown of martyrdom; the most famous is Blessed Miguel Pro. As these holy priests fulfilled the duties of their divine vocations, an army of laymen rose up and challenged the godless government. They were the Cristeros. Their battle cry was “Viva Cristo Rey!” Their tale is one of the great Catholic war stories of all time. 1 CD. 44 minutes. STK# 8499✱ $9.95 Christopher Check graduated from Rice University with a degree in Literature before serving for seven years as a Marine Corps officer in expeditions in the Far East and the Persian Gulf. He is the executive Vice President of the Rockford Institute in Rockford, Illinois. The Holy Rosary Praying your family Rosary does not have to be an arduous experience. The Rosary is less strenuous when one focuses on the mysteries with the aid of religious art—pictures which accurately recount the Joyful, Sorrowful, and Glorious Mysteries. Give yourself—and your children—the chance to pray with less distraction. Once you see it, you will want to own this beautifully remastered, full-color rosary book. Useful for both children and adults, The Holy Rosary features detailed imagery and short meditations that will inspire readers of all ages. 150 Hail Mary’s—150 Color Pictures—150 Meditations. The Holy Rosary is your tool to a better, more focused Rosary. End your distractions once and for all with The Holy Rosary—in pictures. 60pp. 9"x12". Full-color throughout. Softcover. STK# 8403✱ $19.95 “I just received my order of the Rosary Book and it is absolutely beautiful! This is what I've been wanting all my life to make meditating on the mysteries of the Rosary easier. I anticipate receiving many extra graces thanks to using this book.” www.angeluspress.org ● 1-8 00-9 6 6-73 37 Please visit our website to see our entire selection of books and music. s e s . s y e rs Bo LetteAltar Boy oy T to an his is a book of letters for all altar boys who, from the smallest one up, are the most important people in their parishes. God’s Minutemen is what the author affectionately calls them, for he knows that they are always ready for duty as altar boys, no matter what the personal cost. The author writes this book with the hope that in these letters all acolytes may find encouragement to continue being loyal and faithful in their service of our Lord. Father Rosage shows them that while serving Mass is the greatest honor and the biggest job in the parish, it does demand sacrifice. He knows that being on call for duty isn’t always easy, and he aims at convincing the boys who have to get up on cold winter mornings to serve early Mass of the great privilege that is theirs. 120 pp. Softcover. Color photographs. STK# 8497 ✱ $15.95 Written in an easy flowing style intelligible to even the very young boys, the book is full of helpful pointers about the correct manner of serving, the necessity of being on time, and many other details on which a boy may slip. It offers inspiration and high motivation for living up to the ideals that a Mass server is committed to follow. 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The text facing the picture explains the Church’s teaching on the matter and then explains the applicable symbolism of the picture. An excellent way to pass the Faith on to your children who will find the pictures very engaging. Children can look at the picture as you point out how the lesson is pictorially presented. Includes an index to the pictures and a topical index. 125 pp. 14½" x 10". Hardcover. 66 full-color pictures. Ribbon. STK# 8483. $25.00 RING! NEW OlpFFtoEsu pport the Proceeds he int Pius X in India a Society of S SHIPPING & HANDLING 5-10 days 2-4 days USA For eign Up to $50.00 $50.01 to $100.00 Over $100.00 $4.00 $6.00 FREE 25% of subtotal Up to $50.00 $50.01 to $100.00 Over $100.00 $8.00 $10.00 $8.00 FLAT FEE! ($10.00 minimum) 48 Contiguous States only. UPS cannot ship to PO Boxes. angelus Press 2915 Forest Avenue Kansas City, Missouri 64109 www.angeluspress.org ● 1-8 00-9 6 6-73 37 Please visit our website to see our entire selection of books and music.