MAY 2011 $4.45 “Instaurare omnia in Christo” A JOURNAL OF ROMAN CATHOLIC TRADITION Doubts of the Society of St. Pius X About Beatifying POPE JOHN PAUL II Angelus Press is pleased to announce its 2011 conference on Bishop Bernard Tissier de Mallerais 1) Archbishop Lefebvre: A Life for Christ the King 2) Catholic Action: Whose Job is It? Fr. Gerard Beck, FSSPX A Call for Today’s Crusade Fr. Juan-Carlos Iscara, FSSPX The Social Kingship of Christ according to Cardinal Pie Fr. Albert, OP The Queenship of Our Lady Fr. Daniel Themann, FSSPX Quas Primas — Pius XI on Christ the King John Rao, Ph.D. The Errors of the Modern World Brian McCall, J.D. The Relationship of Church and State Andrew Clarendon, M.A. The Rosary and the Battle of Lepanto Christopher Check The Cristeros and the Martyrs of the Mexican Revolution OCTOBER 7 - 9, 2011 Hilton Kansas City Airport Kansas City, Missouri (816) 753-3150 Registration opens May 30, 2011 www.angeluspress.org/conference The “Instaurare omnia in Christo — To restore all things in Christ.” ngelus Volume XXXIV, Number 5 MAY 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 Mr. Robert Wiemann, CPA CUSTOMER SERVICE Mr. John Rydholm Miss Rebecca Heatwole SHIPPING AND HANDLING Mr. Jon Rydholm Motto of Pope St. Pius X Contents 2 LETTER FROM THE EDITOR Fr. Markus Heggenberger, FSSPX 3 FORTY YEARS OF THE SOCIETY OF ST. PIUS X Bishop Bernard Fellay, FSSPX 16 THE BEATIFICATION OF POPE JOHN PAUL II Fr. Dominique Bourmaud, FSSPX 23 THE IMPORTANCE OF LANGUAGE PART 3 Dr. David Allen White 31 ST. MAXIMILIAN KOLBE: HIS VERY OWN WORDS PART 4 St. Maximilian Kolbe, O.F.M., Conv. 34 VISITATION OF THE RELICS OF ST. THERESE TO SOUTH AFRICA Fr. David Thomas, FSSPX 36 CHURCH AND WORLD “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 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. 39 QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS Fr. Peter Scott, FSSPX 43 THE LAST WORD Le Sel de la Terre NEW ROSARY CRUSADE Bishop Fellay calls for a new Rosary Crusade of prayer and penance in his Letter to Friends and Benefactors, #78. “Starting on Easter of this year until Pentecost of 2012, we invite you to join all your efforts, all your strength, so as to make a new spiritual bouquet, a new garland of these roses that are so pleasing to Our Lady, to beg her to intercede on behalf of her children with her divine Son and the Almighty Father....We are counting on your generosity to collect once more a bouquet of at least twelve million Rosaries for the intention that the Church may be delivered from the evils that oppress her or threaten her in the near future, that Russia may be consecrated and that the Triumph of the Immaculata may come soon.“ Some important points: • The crusade is a campaign of prayer and penance. • The crusade will last from Easter 2011 to Pentecost 2012. • Monthly sheets for counting are available in the priories and chapels or on www.sspx.org. • Find the Letter to Friends and Benefactors in the June Angelus or on www.sspx.org. ON OUR COVER: Statue of Pope John Paul II, Wawel, Krakow, Lesser Poland. Photo used under Creative Commons license from Chris Brown. 2 Letter from the O Editor ne of the most prevalent religious questions today is that of ecumenism. We can approach the question in different ways. There always seem to be two different positions: 1) Religion is important in itself. The principles of a particular religion are given by a higher authority (God) and therefore religion is “the last word” which cannot be changed or improved. 2) Religion is a means to achieve some important end in this world, like peace, harmony, or progress. Religion has to serve a purpose in this world, admittedly not a bad one, but religion is finally subject to an earthly purpose, even if it is good. It is not difficult to connect different ideologies to one of the two positions. The Catholic Church, throughout its history, although this often caused persecutions, held the first position. Dictators and non-Christian movements did not like having to deal with an independent institution (the Catholic Church) which they could not influence. Certain emperors and kings of the Middle Ages were in that matter no different from Napoleon, the Communists, or the Mexican government during the times of the Cristeros. This automatically means that all those who want to be independent from Catholic doctrine and morals will naturally be in the camp of ecumenism. We are actually in a similar period to the rise of Protestantism. The reason why the new religion gained many supporters was precisely because it took over the function of “independence” towards the Church. In many cases the reason for that was simply money and political independence. For example, certain princes could appropriate the possesTHE ANGELUS • May 2011 www.angeluspress.org sions of the “rich” Church and make them their own. Also, they could have their own morals, aptly illustrated by the example of King Henry VIII of England. This is not a judgment about the good or bad will of individuals. We know that bad examples in the Church called for a reform of the Church in the early 16th century. And it came finally about, only late. It is true, however, that the divided situation in Christianity was another strong support for the movement which is today called ecumenism. The question for many was: Should we not have to pay a price for the unity of Christendom, even a high one like doctrinal concessions? That question is certainly the one that has driven the movement for many years. Is not Unity more important than Truth? This is a question of peace. And meanwhile there is another and even broader question: Should we not care first for the peace of this world and take care of doctrinal questions later? If we show that the Catholic Church is in favor of peace in this world, wouldn’t the spirit of religious controversy and antagonism melt like ice in the sun? We do not think so for several reasons. l As long as you sell out your principles of faith, you might be popular. Everybody likes presents. But you will never be able to talk about a law that would oblige anyone outside the Catholic Church. Once you admit the idea of ecumenism, everybody will find a good reason to excuse himself from the divine commandments. Certainly, those who are outside of the Catholic Church are not held in the same way by the commandments as those who are Catholics. Saint Paul has much to say about that topic in his letter to the Romans. The modern tendency, however, is not only to excuse pagans from the Natural Law, but to excuse Catholics from any law, even if it has been clearly taught by the Church. l There is an obvious shifting from the commandments of God to “commandments of this world.” For a Catholic something can be done if it is moral; for others it needs simply to be legal. There is a big difference between these two things. Something can be legal but nevertheless immoral, like abortion. God sees and knows everything in this world and is the final judge. Here the question is whether you act for God (alone) or for worldly judges and your own interest. l It is easy to forget that God’s commandments are not so much an obstacle in our course of life but rather a guideline: “The justices of the Lord are right, rejoicing hearts: the commandment of the Lord is lightsome, enlightening the eyes” (Ps. 18:9). l There is a fatal affinity between ecumenism and “the easiest way.” This might be the reason that the movement of ecumenism is so popular. We are at the point meanwhile where most bishops no longer dare to insist that their flock obey Catholic laws. They widely accept abuses like abortion, concubinage, worldly lifestyles, and bad examples among the clergy of every kind, thus admitting a direct denial of Catholic doctrine. And if they do not accept it openly, they close their eyes and say nothing. Ecumenism: is it not mainly a license to do whatever you please? Instaurare Omnia in Christo, Fr. Markus Heggenberger 3 The DefenSe of TrADITIon Forty Years of the Society of St. Pius X Bishop Bernard Fellay, FSSPX This is an edited transcript of a lecture given on october 16 at the SSPX’s 40th Anniversary Conference in Kansas City. The Ignorance of Jesus Christ W e are here to celebrate 40 years of fidelity. I do not think we can understand this period of history unless we see the crisis of Vatican II and the emblematic figure of our venerated founder, Archbishop Lefebvre. So I would first like to look at certain principles of this crisis because, if we want to heal and protect ourselves, we need to know the evil and its cause. I would thus like to say some words about two sentences from Archbishop Lefebvre which are certainly strong and surpris- ing. Then we will look at the solution given by the Archbishop to the crisis. By looking at this, we will see if and how far we are faithful. We hope we have been faithful to the line given by the Archbishop. At the same time, we will understand that there is a challenge for the future. Finally, we will consider a more historical part with theological objections and try to see how far we are in the present developments. The two sentences of Archbishop Lefebvre that I want to quote are both taken from a very precious Spiritual Journey is currently out of stock. A new edition will be available in early June 2011. www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • May 2011 4 2010 conference treasure, Spiritual Journey. There is something about this book. When our founder presented this book to us, it was at a priestly retreat. Why did he present this little book to us? He said “Now I have finished my work. God can call me.” It was not a joke; it was very serious. He presented his Spiritual Journey as his testament to us. If you want to learn the soul of Archbishop Lefebvre, what animated him, read that book. Don’t read it like a novel; read it phrase by phrase. More than reading, meditate on it. He wanted to transmit a treasure to us with this book. The first quote is taken from the very first words of the Preface, dealing directly with the Council. “The evil of the Council is the ignorance of Jesus Christ and of His Kingdom. It is the evil of the bad angels, the evil which is the way to Hell.” You may say this is strong. The second quote which is closely connected to this one is: “It is because the reign of Our Lord is no longer the center of attention and of activity for our prelates that they lose the sense of God and of the Catholic priesthood, and that we can no longer follow them.” This also may seem like a strong statement at first. But in addition to being strong, they are deep. I would like to reflect on them. Here we touch one of the brilliant insights into the crux of the matter. When you look at the Council as a Catholic, somewhere you don’t feel good. You feel that there is a disease, that there is something wrong. And this is difficult to describe because the obvious error is very rare. All the time you find the right expressions, true and genuine Catholic expressions in the Council. But, then, nearby, you will find something which almost says the contrary or is ambiguous. If you wear rose-colored glasses, you will see a rose text. If you wear red, you see red; if you wear green, you see THE ANGELUS • May 2011 www.angeluspress.org green. If you read it with liberal eyes, you see a perfectly good text. If you come as a Catholic, as Archbishop Lefebvre did, you would try to read it in a Catholic way. But as he said, the only way to do this was to filter it through the criteria of Tradition. This very clearly means that we accept what is Catholic. We have always said that. What is ambiguous, we try to understand in a Catholic way: this is the only option for a Catholic. You have to look at previous Catholic teaching and understand curious phrases in the way the Church has always understood them. We reject whatever does not make it through this filter. It is painful. Here, we remember: the evil of the Council is the ignorance of Jesus Christ. So we are dealing with the Faith. Behind, or in the background of the Council and the crisis, there is a matter of faith. So from the start there is a big problem with this Council. And it touches the Faith. It is not only one problem or question; it is the whole Faith which is at stake and the principle of faith itself: God. There is a problem with God. You will not find this directly expressed in the words of the Council. It is in the background. But to understand the Council, you have to look at the background. We may call it modernism or liberalism. In both of these, there is a problem with God. Whichever perspective you choose, God is not in the right place. From there, you see that we try to rebuild everything. It starts with God. Look at the way they behave; look how, for 40 years, the leaders and bishops, the priests and faithful, deal with God. At least they still believe there is a God. But He is seen as a nice grandfather, very good, who doesn’t condemn people. But what about offenses to God? What about sin? Sin today: what is it? Maybe there is still sin when you hurt your neighbor. But with God? Look at the first table of the Commandments. These commandments which deal directly with God are gone. The first three commandments are no longer of any concern. Sin is always a lack of goodness. There should be something good and it isn’t there. It is a privation of goodness. So, to understand evil in itself, it is not a thing; it is a lack of something. Sin, in some sense, is the contrary of God. If you don’t know God, you can’t know what sin is. If there is so much sin today, it is because they have forgotten God. If people remembered even a little bit about God, many sins would cease, if only because of the chastisement sinners prepare for themselves by offending God, the most terrible of which is hell. Now, even the Holy Father, who thanks God for 40 years of not even using the word hell, says that we see, as a reality, some people where you find no inclination towards God or goodness. This is in his encyclical on hope. Of course, beyond these very evil men, he says that this would be hell. So maybe there is a hell for some of these people who are so bad that there are no good inclinations in them. Then he continues by saying there are some people in history whose inclinations are so inclined towards God or goodness; and this would be Heaven. But where are the majority of people who are in-between? They all have to pass before our Lord and go through purgatory. So this is how the Pope himself describes hell. His great friend, Hans Urs von Balthasar, said one year before dying: if there is a hell, nobody is there. Recently a bishop passed away in Switzerland; one month before his death, he said the devil does not exist. I think now he probably has a different opinion about that. But we have gone so far. Let me give you one more example so 2010 conference 5 St. Ambrose you can see how far this crisis goes. It concerns this understanding of sin. We are discussing something very important and interesting. You can only properly understand sin if you properly understand God. If your conception of God is damaged, your idea of sin is affected. Consider the problem of AIDS and how it is propagated. There are several cardinals and bishops’ conferences, including the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, who have dealt with the problem of condoms and its use in stopping the spread of AIDS. A now common statement in the Church is that, when we have two evil choices, we must advise and choose the lesser evil. What are the two evils? One is sin, the very use of condoms. The other evil is a sickness, the transmission of AIDS. We even have cardinals, such as Danneels and Vingt-Trois, in addition to many bishops’ conferences, who see human life as a lesser evil than sin. I am sorry, but this is wrong. Obviously they have lost the understanding of sin. They no longer know who God is. If they knew, they would not talk like this. It is scary to see such error and heresy spread on such a large scale. It is everywhere. These may seem like obvious questions: “Of course we have to protect human life!” But what about God’s glory? What about His honor? One sin, the sin of our first parents, opened death to all mankind. One sin! A little apple meant death for all mankind. All the suffering of every human being is a consequence of the first sin. And they say life is the lesser evil? They have really lost this understanding. I do not say they have totally lost the Faith, but they are not far from it because if you know no longer know who God is, where is the Faith? The evil of the Council is the ignorance of Jesus Christ. They no longer know who Jesus is. The following text about St. Ambrose (338-397) depicts a famous and worthy Catholic Bishop (taken from St. Augustine by Rev. John Baillie, 1859) A youthful Roman, of singular capacity, and of even more singular rectitude, at that time ruled the province. The youngest son of the emperor’s lieutenant in France, he had, on his father’s decease, repaired, with his Pierre Subleyras, St. Ambrose, mother and two brothers and an only sister, Bishop, Confessor and Doctor of the Church; St. Ambrose (left) to Rome, where he quickly rose, at the bar, and Theodosius. to such distinction, as to be chosen by the Christian Prefect of Italy to be a member of his Privy Council, and, not long afterwards, governor of Milan. Ambrose had a sister, Marcellina, whose heart had been touched by the love of Christ; and to her he owed a fixed prepossession in favor of “living godliness.” “Go,” the Prefect had said to him, on setting out for his own province, “and govern more like a bishop than a judge.” And, for five years, he had held the reins of office, loved rather as a father, than feared as a bearer of the sword. The bishops were now assembled in conclave; and day after day passed without any result,–the opposing factions–the Arians and the orthodox–dividing the city, and each urging the claims of their favorite candidate. At length, one morning, as a vast multitude had gathered into the church, bent on open violence, Ambrose hearing of the uproar, hastened to the spot. His presence, and a few calming words, sufficed to quell the storm; but scarcely had he sat down, when, amidst the dead silence, an “infant voice” whispered, “Ambrose is bishop.” At once, the whole assembly, “catching the word, as if a voice from heaven,” shouted, “Ambrose shall be the man!”The sound of faction was hushed; and, “by universal consent, he who had come, as the governor, simply to keep the peace, found himself suddenly summoned to feed and to govern Christ’s flock.” After much hesitation, he yielded, and entered on his new function. Not unworthily did he “fulfill his ministry.” Devoting many hours daily to the study of the Scriptures and to prayer, he would come forth among his fellows with a certain heavenly halo about him, which seemed to say that he had been on the mount with God. With great plainness he rebuked the evils of the day, not shrinking from the most unsparing denunciations of the prevailing “fashionable sins.” The poor were his “stewards and treasurers;” and the humblest and the meanest found him easy of access. “I confess,” said he, unfolding the secret of his rare sympathy and lowliness, “my debts were greater than those of the penitent woman, and more was forgiven me, who was called into the ministry from the noise of the forum and from the terror of judicial administration.Yet, if we cannot equal her, the Lord Jesus knows how to support the weak, and to bring with Himself the fountain of living water. He came to the grave Himself. O that Thou wouldst come, Lord Jesus, to this my sepulcher of corruption, and wash me with Thy tears! It shall be said, “Behold, a man, taken from the midst of secular vanity, remains Thy minister, not by his own strength, but by the grace of Christ. Preserve, Lord, Thy gift.” www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • May 2011 6 2010 conference In theory, they may still attribute to Him the Godhead, divinity. In practice, they refuse to draw the conclusions. One of these is His Kingship. He is the Lord. For them, He is no longer the Lord; look at the way they handle the question of society and the State. They say that now we have a plurality of religions so we can no longer request States to recognize the Catholic Church as the only true religion. We must deal with this very pragmatically now. And that’s the end of it. The very popes themselves believe this. Archbishop Lefebvre was told by the nuncio in Switzerland, in the presence of Pope John Paul II, that Pius XI would no longer write his encyclical on the kingship of Christ today. Now,times are different; the State is different. The Holy Father agreed with him! The Kingship of Christ is gone. They may keep our Lord, but His power is gone. It’s worse than the Queen of England, or other monarchs who have no power. The King of Kings, Lord of Lords: they don’t want Him. They have become so pragmatic that they refuse His Kingship to Him. When you speak of religious liberty, when you claim the State must recognize all religions, you are asking our Lord to step down. You are treating Him as one among equals. You find the same thing in ecumenism. In Assisi II, they invited many religions. They admitted that some practices from Assisi I, like the Buddha on the tabernacle, were too strong. So, at Assisi II, they gave every religion a different and separate room and asked what they needed. The Zoroastrians needed to have a fire for their religious ceremony so they needed a room with a window. The Muslims needed a room oriented towards Mecca. The Jews needed a room that had never been blessed; how they found that room in Assisi, I don’t know! But in the whole building, there was someTHE ANGELUS • May 2011 www.angeluspress.org thing noticeable: all the crucifixes were taken down. To build a certain kind of unity, you don’t need much. But you do need to remove something: the crucifix. Then, everything goes better. But if there is no crucifix, there is nothing. He is our God, our everything, the beginning and the end. He is our all. And they made the crucifixes disappear for that occasion. Where is their faith? There is no sin, no hell, no false religions. False religion was a technical term used to speak of other religions all the way down through Pius XII. I challenge you to find this term in any official text since the Council. Are they or aren’t they false? If they are, why don’t we say it? Recently, in Dominus Jesus, there has been an attempt to make things better. In this document, we find that there is only one religion which has the whole truth: the Catholic Church. What about the others? Are they false or not? Let us suppose the Assisi meeting was an airport and every religion is an airplane. Which airplanes work and which ones don’t? Only one plane can fly: the Catholic airplane. Those who come closest are the Orthodox; the plane itself has everything it needs to fly, but it has no pilot. They refuse a pilot. If you’re sitting in a plane that has everything but a pilot, you wouldn’t stay on that plane. If you look at the Protestant plane, there is a problem with the engine. The sacraments have been so reduced that it can’t even fly. Some planes have no wings, or are missing a tail. The Buddhist plane is only on paper. Only one plane can fly! Only one has all the elements strictly necessary for flying. This is why we call one true and the others false. They pretend to be something they are not. A religion claims to bring you to your final destination: Heaven. And only one has the means for that: our dear Catholic religion. The others simply don’t. We are living in a time where we like to dream. So we say that the other religions have much good in them, even if they don’t have full communion. What does partial communion mean? Nothing! It is like saying 2+2=3 and 3 is almost 4! It doesn’t matter if you have the answer “almost right.” Nevertheless, when discussing the most important things, matters of salvation, they truly lead people into error. It is terrible. And this is common. Everywhere you have the same problem: God is no longer in the right place. There is a loss of faith somewhere. And this loss of faith is centered on the divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ. This is why so many priests no longer believe in the Real Presence. How many priests no longer believe in this physical and real presence in the Eucharist after the consecration? Some years ago I dared to say 40 percent, but a Novus Ordo priest then told me I had it backward: it was 60 percent! In 2010, in Germany, a Mother Superior of a religious congregation was talking with the chancellor of the diocese of Trier. The chancellor told her 80 percent of the priests in the diocese of Trier no longer believed in the Real Presence. The Mother Superior was horrified and said we must do something. The poor chancellor said there was nothing to be done. You see the drama. Modernism can be even trickier though. There was a bishop who wrote a book about the Creed who recently became a cardinal. In this book he explained that we believe Jesus is God. He says the apostles believed in the divinity only at the time of the Resurrection. And he continues by saying that, in the first few centuries, Christian communities started believing in His divinity from the time of His Baptism. And, then, later on, as philosophy developed and the understanding of the person 2010 conference deepened, the Church believed that Jesus was God from the beginning. I am sorry, but such a person does not have the Faith. Our Faith teaches us that our Lord Jesus Christ is the Second Person of the Most Holy Trinity and that, “in the fullness of time,” as Scripture says, he assumed human nature. But He is God from the start. It is not the Church which came to this conclusion after much reflection. This is pure modernism! This faith is not real. It is not reality. It is something which men invented. It is the god of the modernists. When you read modern texts about the Jews, for example, you read that the Christian communities of the first few centuries invented our Lord’s words of condemnation against the Pharisees. What is this? What happened to Holy Scripture? These are official texts. So they are inventing a faith that has nothing to do with our religion. It is modernism. This is the background in which we see the crisis in the Church develop. It is not only the Mass which is at stake. It goes down to the roots. And this surprising phrase, “the evil of the Council is the ignorance of Jesus Christ and of His Kingdom” is perfectly correct. It is the exact problem. They ignore Jesus. They no longer know who He is. These people are lost in themselves. They are merely inventing. It is the problem of modern philosophy. Real philosophy is objective, but the moderns are subjective. They have closed up reality into their thinking, which leads them to believe they can create reality. One day I had a surprising ques- 7 tion asked of me by a student after a conference: “But, finally, did God create man or did man create God?” It’s a very good question to describe modernism; it cannot be both. At the root of modernism is an invention of God. They make a god who corresponds to their needs. They don’t want to hear about the real God; they think He doesn’t exist. This is why the other religions are all more or less equal. They are all fruits of the invention of man. Thus, you have to accept all of them. This is modernism. Of course, not everyone is a modernist, but it is still the background which explains the crisis in which we find ourselves. Certain day-to-day behavior can only be explained by this. The Center of Priestly Activity L et us now take a look at the second, very interesting quote from Archbishop Lefebvre: “It is because the reign of Our Lord is no longer the center of attention and activity for our prelates that they lose the sense of God.” The first quote dealt with knowledge, with the Faith. In this second quote, our dear Archbishop talks about more than just the Faith considered speculatively. This time he is speaking about activity. Here, we are discussing the will. It is not only the Faith, but the Faith with charity, with action. This is something very striking; a profound psychological analysis. There is a gap in their action which means they lose the sense of God and of the Catholic priesthood. By acting badly, they finally think badly. It is one of the tricks of the Communists to have them do something against their principles. They knew, for instance, in better times, that if they said something against the Church to a Catholic, they would provoke a reaction. So, instead, they would invite Catholics to do something with them that involved going against their principles. That was the start: by action. It is interesting and important to understanding the interaction between the Faith and action. Everyone has a conscience. You cannot act all the time against your conscience. At a certain time, either you correct your actions or you make your conscience follow your actions. You can try to justify yourself. But the conscience is too strong to constantly do something against it. You either have to stop doing something or you twist your conscience. Our Lord is no longer the center of their preoccupation. Look at the bishops today! Simply ask: Is our Lord the center of their preoccupation? Look what they say and do. It is very clear: He is no longer the center of their preoccupation. I remember the cardinal of Naples saying there were three problems in Naples. I don’t remember the third, but two were the traffic and the garbage. What about sin? What about religion? What about Catholic education? Apparently these weren’t problems. What is the center of their preoccupation? One day I gave a conference where a priest told me it was the first time he heard a bishop talk about the salvation of souls. At first glance, the statement of the Archbishop was very strong. But the more we reflect on it, the more accurate it appears. You don’t hear www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • May 2011 8 2010 conference such sentences every day. But they are so true. Of course, it already indicates for us where we have to go if we want to get out of this crisis. This crisis is a crisis of the Faith. If we see a problem in the liturgy, it is only because liturgy is linked to the Faith. Liturgy is an action by which we honor God. Obviously, whenever we deal with God, the Faith is implied somewhere. The liturgy has to express the Faith. In theology we learn that the liturgy is one of the sources, one of the references, for theology. We look at what the Church does in the liturgy as a valid expression of the Faith. It is a proof of what the Church believes. That’s why, when we go to the traditional liturgy, it nourishes us in our faith. It perfectly fits the Catholic Faith. And this is why we are so opposed to the New Mass; it is no longer fitting. It does not express the Faith. It can express a lot of things, but not the Faith. This is why most of the faithful are hurt and come to a point of reflection through the liturgy. It’s the point where they encounter the Faith, and when it isn’t working right, they have to confront questions which demand solutions. During the audience with the Pope in 2005, it started like this: the Holy Father, Cardinal Hoyos, myself, and Fr. Schmidberger were all together. The Pope started by asking, “Where do we stand? What is the relation between Rome and the Society?” Cardinal Hoyos said: “Holy Father, today is the day you can recognize the Society. Everything is fine. I have presented to you a model for their organization which you can grant them.” The Pope answered: “Yes, I received it, and I entrusted it to the Pontifical Council for the Interpretation of Legislative Texts to see if this proposal is in agreement with the rite and spirit of the Church.” Which means what has been proposed for THE ANGELUS • May 2011 www.angeluspress.org us is new or there would be no need to check. This was the first time I had heard about that. I haven’t heard much more since then. After that, the Pope turned to me and said, “What do you think?” I said, “Holy Father, the situation in the Church today is such that the normal traditional Catholic life has been made impossible. Things need to be improved before anything else can be done. Every day priests, religious, Sisters, Brothers, faithful, come to us and prefer to be sanctioned and punished rather than to stay in the situations in which they find themselves obliged to act against their consciences.” And this is still the situation. It is unbelievable, but true. So what will be the solution presented by someone who has such an understanding of the situation? We can find it in these lines from the very beginning of Spiritual Journey: If the Holy Ghost permits me to put in writing the spiritual thoughts which follow, before entering—if it please God—into the bosom of the Holy Trinity, I will be allowed to realize the dream of which He gave me a glimpse one day in the Cathedral of Dakar. The dream was to transmit, before the progressive degradation of the priestly ideal, in all of its doctrinal purity and in all of its missionary charity, the Catholic Priesthood of Our Lord Jesus Christ, just as He conferred it on His Apostles, just as the Roman Church always transmitted it until the middle of the twentieth century. It is a peculiar way of writing. Let’s try to understand what is being said by reading on: What appeared then as the only solution of renewal of the Church and Christendom was the necessity, not only to transmit the authentic priesthood, not only healthy doctrine approved by the Church, but the deep and immutable spirit of the Catholic priesthood and of the Christian spirit, essentially bound to the great prayer of our Lord Jesus Christ, eternally expressed in the sacrifice of the Cross. What is necessary to get out of this crisis? Not only the Faith. Not only the priesthood. Something more is needed. Our dear founder calls it a spirit, a deep and immutable spirit. It is the spirit of the Catholic priesthood and the Christian spirit, which is the same spirit. What we need to notice in his quote is the meaning of his phrase, “the great prayer of Our Lord Jesus Christ.” It is unusual but it has a meaning. He continues by saying “the priestly truth is in total dependency on this prayer.” Of course he is speaking of the Mass. He says here that the truth about the priesthood and the meaning of the priest is found in the Cross. He goes on, “That is why I have always been haunted by the desire to describe the ways of the true sanctification of the priest, following the fundamental principles of Catholic doctrine and of the sanctification of the Christian and the priest.” We touch here on the crux of the matter. We must pay attention since we live in a world which is superficial. Too often we content ourselves with superficial things. You might say that, if you have the Society, the Faith, the priesthood, you have everything. In some ways this is true. But it’s only true under one condition: that we find this spirit. If this spirit described by the Archbishop isn’t there, we only have a beautiful, empty castle. The castle of the Society needs to be inhabited. There must be something inside. The exterior is absolutely necessary but insufficient. Look at the 1950’s and ’60’s: we had the Faith and priests. The Church was glorious just before the Council. Several bishops had so many priests they didn’t know what to do with them. I remember our parish priest in the Valais, telling me his bishop didn’t know what 2010 conference 9 Ordination to the priesthood. St.Thomas Aquinas Seminary, Winona, Minnesota. to do with all the priests. Fifty years later, you need a microscope to find priests in some places. So despite many priests, and even the old Mass and the Faith, the crisis still came upon the Church. How can it be? Granted, there is a mystery. It is always so in the Church. Nevertheless, something was fading and already going. Obviously, Archbishop Lefebvre perceived this and said “That’s it.” He knew a certain spirit was necessary for a restoration. There is only one way to find this spirit: at the foot of the Cross. A very simple way to express this is that the virtues, supernaturally speaking, need a form. Technically, we say they are “informed” by charity. Someone can have the Faith, but his faith is dead if he is in the state of sin. But he can still make acts of faith. The Council of Trent and Vatican I both say that when such a person makes an act of faith, the Holy Ghost switches on the light. This faith remains without fruit, though. Charity and sanctifying grace are lacking. What I want to insist on is that the remedy to the crisis is definitely in transmitting the true Faith, in having good priests, but the truth and goodness of the priest need this spirit. Look at the book The Soul of the Apostolate by Dom Chautard. The soul of the apostolate is prayer, and the only way to get it is contemplation. The great danger of the modern world is activism. We are always “doing” something. It is like driving a car but never filling the gas tank. And the only way to fill the tank is to stay in front of our Lord and the Cross, meditate and contemplate, developing the spirit of prayer. It is the only way. If we want the Society to continue and to do truly good things for the Church, this is needed. God does not bring good things to the Church any other way except holiness. Every time, God finishes a crisis by sending saints. What we hear and read here so delicately expressed is a real call for holiness. It is not only for priests; it is also for the faithful. You find holiness when you first look at Jesus on the Cross. Why did the Church put crucifixes everywhere for centuries? Any Catholic country has crucifixes not only in homes and in churches, but on roads and in public. This was to keep in the minds of Catholics the remembrance of the sacrifice of our Lord, so we could unite ourselves to it. The liturgy gets all its sense there. Archbishop Lefebvre, in Spiritual Journey, says that the liturgy is the source and most sublime expression of mental prayer. If we want to pray in the silence of our hearts to God, what should we say to God? Where will we find ideas and words? In the liturgy! The Mass is the end of our prayer, the accomplishment of it. At that moment, we are no longer alone; our Lord Himself takes our hearts, our beings, our sufferings, offerings, and sacrifices— everything. He makes them His. Then these words become true: “No longer I live, but Jesus lives in me.” Do we realize that, although we all have trials and contradictions, pains and sorrows, it is the way that Jesus wants to continue His Passion? We are His! In baptism, we are one body with Him. Even though He is in heaven, He wants the Church to continue His mission of salvation through His cross. So He assumes and takes what we give Him. This is why Christian sufferings are so precious. What I am going to say is totally against modern thinking. When we are reduced to nothing, when we think we are useless, it is then we can do the most. Then it is not we who are doing something but Him, our Lord, through us and in us. This is why those who suffer are so mighty in the heart of God. It is why St. Paul says, “When I am weak, I am strong!” These are hard words. It is painful to have these words enter us. It goes so against our understanding and the world in which we live. It even goes against human reason. We deal here with divine wisdom, which is considered foolishness and scandal by human reason. If we want the restoration of the Church, there are not a hundred ways to do this. We need to unite with God, and this union with God can be fostered only in His precious time called prayer. There is another www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • May 2011 10 2010 conference excerpt from our dear Archbishop from the same book where he talks about the virtue of religion and its link with holiness. There, he shows and explains that we ought to be constantly united with God. “This spirit, if we would miss it one instant, the spirit of God would have abandoned us.” This means not only during prayer. It is a modern tendency to divide one’s time between one’s daily prayers and everything else. But this is not Catholic life. God dwells in us! In those who are in the state of grace, He lives in us. He is completely there, the whole Trinity, all Three Persons, dwelling in us. He is our guest. Imagine having a guest in your home whom you ignore all day besides saying “Hello” in the morning and “Good night” in the evening. Is that how we treat our guests? Is this Christian life? Definitely not. If we have a guest, we take care of him. Well, we have a divine guest who wants to share with us His treasures. He will be our eternity. What are we doing with our lives here on earth? You see how far it goes. There is much to do if we really want the Church to be restored, to exit this crisis. The crisis is deep. That means the remedy must be mighty. It must not be a homeopathic remedy, where the medicine is so diluted that it can’t be detected. If we are here, it is because God loves us. God wants us to be His instruments in the work of restoration. There is no doubt about this. So let’s not go halfway. Distraction from the Essential T here are so many ways to be distracted from the essential. I may say that, because of this distraction, we have Vatican II. We no longer put God in His right place and were distracted by the world. God is all; He is our Creator. There is nothing good in us that does not come from Him. We can’t even have a good thought without a push from Him. We can’t have one good desire. This shows how dependent we are on God. When we say we are totally dependent, it is total. This requires some reflection. We have the impression that, since God made us free and, to some extent, autonomous, we can do many things without God. But this is not so. We can’t even move a finger if God doesn’t give us the strength to do it. If God would not, we would be like a car without an engine; we would not move. Neither for activity, nor for existence can we stand without God. It shows our dependency on Him. We need to put this first. In Spiritual Journey, you see it is the start of his reflection. He says when we put ourselves in front of God and reflect on how He is everything and we are nothing, we put ourselves in our place and reach humility. In this, we find stability. THE ANGELUS • May 2011 www.angeluspress.org We are superficial and are subject to many things. If something hurts us, our whole heart is thrown into jeopardy with so many emotions. But this is all on the surface. We must go deeper within ourselves where we will find the eternal God, who is always at peace. In this peace of God we can remain even if, at the surface, there are storms. We can be in storms but at peace this way. When you make good prayer, you lose track of time. You don’t realize it. The closer you are to God, the closer you are to eternity. If you make time for God, you lose reference to time. It is challenging and demanding, but do we want salvation? Do we want the restoration of the Church? Then we must take the right means. We have a blessed person to tell us the means: Archbishop Lefebvre. He tells us the way and what to do. Let me tell two little stories before moving on. I met an Italian nuncio in Austria, who was then in Vienna. He was the blessed successor of Archbishop Lefebvre in Dakar. He said, “Archbishop Lefebvre was totally different from any other bishop. Not only was he a great bishop, wherever I would go, I saw what he had done. We have to rehabilitate this man, at least for the first part of his life.” This is someone with an official function in the Church who recognized his extraordinary work, at least during the first part of his life. And I say the second part is even more extraordinary. Another one who expressed his thoughts on the Archbishop is Pope Benedict XVI. Twice during our audience, he mentioned our dear founder. The first time he referred to the “venerated Archbishop Lefebvre.” The second time he said “Archbishop Lefebvre, this great man of the universal Church.” You can imagine what I thought at that moment. How is it that such a work, by such a founder, turns into the most controversial thing in the recent history of the Church? How can it be? Isn’t it amazing? It is an interesting point. We are in the midst, not of a contradiction, but of being attacked by two sides. These two sides see 2010 conference what we do as bad. One side is the modern Church, including a certain number of the Ecclesia Dei people. On the other hand, we have the sedevacantists. What is interesting is what inspires them. It proceeds from the same principle: when we try to understand something, we reason. Usually this reasoning goes from two premises to a conclusion. The first premise in logic is called a major premise. The second is called a minor premise. The major premise for both sides is “Everything the Pope says is true.” They both agree with this principle. But they have different minor premises based on their analysis of the reality of the situation. Both will say something true about this reality but, with this, they come to absolutely opposite conclusions. The sedevacantists say “But everything that this Pope says is not true.” And this is right. When you see a Pope kissing the Koran, it cannot be true or good. So they conclude that it isn’t the Pope doing it. For the Ecclesia Dei groups or the modern Church, their minor premise is that everything since Vatican II has been done by the Pope. And this is true also. So, if everything the Pope says is true, and the Popes have done these things, Vatican II and what has followed must be true. Isn’t it amazing? The same principle, in addition to two true observations, with two radically different conclusions. One side says there is no Pope; the other say we must follow the Pope in everything. If you look closely, there is a link between the major and minor premises, a word found in both: “true.” The question of truth is the basis of their analysis. For the sedevacantists, the focus is on the object of the truth, the Faith. For the Ecclesia Dei groups, they are looking at the Pope who speaks the truth. It is more subjective. 11 Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, Los Angeles, California If we look at things only like this, the sedevacantists would be closer to reality. But if both start from the same premise, but come to such radically different positions, there must be something wrong somewhere. Thus, the problem is with the major premise. Many of these errors come from a lack of distinction. We must distinguish. The major premise is not always true. Everything the Pope says is true when all the conditions for infallibility are met. If they are not there, he can easily be not infallible. And if he can be not infallible, he can say wrong things. So we must distinguish the major premise and thus distinguish the conclusion. In such a way, the problem is solved. Too many people take the major premise through ignorance or easiness. By this way, they fall into error. It is a big problem today. Granted, it is tricky. So many people think that whatever the Pope does or says is infallible. But this isn’t the teaching of the Church! If you look at the very definition of infallibility in the texts of Vatican I, just a few lines before the definition says that the Holy Spirit was not promised to the successors of St. Peter so that, by a new illumination, they may teach something new. There is no infallibility in such cases. Vatican I says He has been promised so that, by His help, the Pope may conserve and transmit faithfully the deposit of the Faith. There is no promise of infallibility to do something new. We are not bound to believe the Pope outside the conditions where God’s help has been promised. God’s help has been promised to help give this treasure to future generations of the faithful. It is the same with the question of obedience, which is linked to the same problem. Ingrained deeply in Catholic hearts is the notion that we are bound by obedience. And this is true, my dear brethren! When we say Catholic, we say obedience. There is no doubt about this. In the very understanding of a Catholic, there is the idea of obedience. God wanted to use instruments for our salvation, which we better go through: Jesus, His Church, the bishops, the Pope, priests, etc. It is the way God wants it to be. So obedience is absolutely necessary. www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • May 2011 12 2010 conference Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, Los Angeles, California But we must have the right understanding. Obedience is not absolute. Those vested with authority are human beings, instruments entrusted with this power by our Lord who will answer to Him. They are not free to make any kind of use of it. There is a frame in which their authority may be used. This is a universal law; any organization or society has the same pattern. This means any time there are people organized, there is a head, boss, or leader, who gives orders. It is of the nature of any organization. The same is true for the Church. God gave the Church a head. The purpose of the head is to unite the will of the members to get to the end of the society. Every organization has a purpose, and the purpose dictates the way in which commands and obedience are ruled. This means that obedience and power are strictly conditioned by the purpose and the nature of the organization. Thus, if someone in leadership misuses authority by missing the point, there is no obligation to follow. In fact, it would be wrong and perhaps even sinful to follow. This is the case even in the Catholic Church. The problem is that we are so used to holy people in command that, when something is wrong, we no longer know what to do. Fr. Le Floch once said that the great heresy of the 20th century would be the exaggeration of the infallibility of the Pope. There you have it. It is in Crisis in the Church L et me say some words about our current relations with Rome. We must be very precise. We have a tendency of making a schema which simplifies things too much. By going to the principles, we abstract things, but they are no longer fully the reality. Something is THE ANGELUS • May 2011 www.angeluspress.org missing. When we deal, for instance, with our relations with Rome, we must not be abstract, but realistic. In this crisis, we have people like Paul VI, John Paul II, and even our present pope. All of them acknowledge a certain crisis in the Church. On the one hand, they the name of obedience that all the errors of Vatican II have been put into action. Even the new Code of Canon Law speaks about this. The very last Canon says the highest law, the one which dictates all others, is the salvation of souls. This means that, if there is, by misfortune, any law in the Church, by itself or by circumstance, that goes against the salvation of souls, we cannot follow. If we follow we may harm ourselves and even lose our salvation. This is the new Code. There are so many examples of bishops and priests who give orders harmful to souls. When bishops choose the lesser of two evils, and choose sin over sickness, they push souls into hell. It is the same with the New Mass. It is the same with Communion in the hand. We could go on and on. Priests invite people to live together before marriage to make sure they get along: this is pushing people into sin! I am aware of several dioceses who have invented rituals to bless people who cannot marry. They give them a special “blessing” which is blessing sin! The Valais in Switzerland is one of these examples. Usually they hide these things since they’re controversial. They have truly invented a new religion. It is no longer the Catholic Church. The problem is that there is a real mixing of both. 2010 conference cause or allow it; on the other hand, they see the crisis. Paul VI spoke of the “auto-demolition of the Church” and that “by some crack, the smoke of Satan has entered the temple of God.” On another occasion, he said the Church was self-destructing. John Paul II said that within the Church, heresy was spread with full hands. Of course, what did they do against these things? On the contrary, we saw Assisi and kissing the Koran. This is all part of the same reality. We must keep all this in mind even if they don’t all fit together. It is a mixture. When we deal with the Society, there is something similar. There is not only condemnation although there is much of that. At the same time, there is something on the contrary. There is some admiration and happiness for the Society. They are forced to admit that there is something there. We met Cardinal Hoyos for the first time after the pilgrimage in Rome in 2000. He invited us to meet him, but Bishop de Galaretta had already left. The three other bishops met with him. On that occasion, he said that the fruits of the Society were good. Hence, the Holy Ghost is there. Not bad for a condemned and legally non-existing organization! But how can it be both bad and good? Are we evil or is the Holy Ghost with us? I asked him where these fruits came from but he never answered. During all of this time of the condemnation, the excommunications, and even after, there are official documents saying we do not exist, and that our sacraments are invalid, etc. But at the same time, in Rome, in practice, things are different. They deal with us as if we are totally Catholic. It complicates things. For example, Rome deals with priests who leave us in a particular way. There is a principle of action in the Catholic Church that if a Catholic is ordained, whether to the diaconate or the priesthood, in a schismatic movement (for instance, the Orthodox or anyone else with valid orders), when he returns to the Catholic Church, he can never exercise the powers he stole outside the Church. It is a general principle applied until now. Now, when we were supposedly schismatics, when priests received orders in the Society but went to Rome, if we were really schismatic, they would have had to prohibit the exercise of their powers. But the fact that they allow them to return as priests proves they do not see us as schismatics. This has continually been the policy of Rome. In one case, someone had been ordained by Bishop Rangel, who had been consecrated a bishop by Bishops Tissier, Williamson, and de Galaretta. In Rome, when this priest came, they realized that he 13 had been ordained by a bishop consecrated by “schismatic” bishops. They sent the case to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The answer they received was that he was to be treated as the others. So, again, practically, there is no schism. Another painful but real situation is the case of people who commit certain grave sins. These sins involve censures, and even excommunications. Some are reserved even to the Pope, which mean only he can forgive them. For example, sacrilege against the Eucharist is one of these. And sometimes it happens that a priest has to handle such cases. What do they do? In the confessional they give absolution but, according to the current policy of the Church, we have one month to send the case to Rome to the Penitentiary. Guess what? Every time—absolutely every time this has happened—we have received the answer that the priest did well, that things were in order, and that it was licit and valid. Finally, there would be a note saying that the penance was sufficient or needed something added to it. So why do they officially say our confessions are invalid while they deal with us differently in serious matters? We see this kind of contradiction all the time. It is not easy but we must deal with it. If you look at the crisis, you see that, at least before 2000, certain people in authority dislike what has happened. There is something but not much. In 2000, there was clearly already a change of attitude towards us. It was not much, but we were allowed to enter the basilicas, even if we weren’t allowed to say Mass. At least we were able to preach and pray. At the end of our pilgrimage, at St. Peter’s, a priest of the Fraternity of St. Peter came to me and said “I congratulate you. You did better than we did; we were forbidden to enter as a group this same year!” www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • May 2011 14 2010 conference Number in formation 1965 2000 Decline Jesuits 3,559 389 89% Franciscans 2,551 60 97% 912 7 99% Benedictines 1,541 109 93% Redemptorists 1,128 24 98% Dominicans 343 38 89% Maryknoll 919 15 98% Oblates of Mary Immaculate 914 13 99% Vincentians 700 18 97% OFM Conventual 511 49 90% Passionists 574 5 99% Holy Cross Fathers 434 132 70% Christian Brothers Augustinians 483 14 97% Capuchins 440 39 91% Precious Blood Fathers 521 27 95% La Salette Fathers 552 1 100% Carmelites 545 46 92% Holy Ghost Fathers 159 9 94% In 2003, something almost unnoticed happened. In May, a certain number of more conservative cardinals met to discuss the crisis which was accelerating. They all agreed that something had to be done in favor of Tradition. They saw how the bishops dealt, not only with us, but any Ecclesia Dei group. Many modern bishops simply crush them. They may use them politically against us. So the cardinals raised the idea of something like an apostolic administration for Tradition. There were two positions: one sought to make the Society the spine of the new organization and place the other groups around us. The other position was to forget about the Society since we would never accept an agreement and to simply work with the others. One of the people who worked the most on this project was, at the time, Cardinal Ratzinger. Two years later he was pope. Almost immediately he tried to put into practice what was prepared. You can verify THE ANGELUS • May 2011 www.angeluspress.org all of this by yourself. In France, in the spring of 2006, during the meeting of the bishops’ conference, there was a public declaration from the president of the conference absolutely denouncing the idea of a special jurisdiction for those who wanted the Tridentine Mass in France. Of course, it would be outside of the control of the French bishops. The project was rejected through the French bishops. There are a certain number of people who are not happy with what is happening in the Church and who at least partially see something good in Tradition. You very well know about the motu proprio on the Mass, which was very important, even if up to now there is not much fruit since the bishops block it openly. Talk about obedience! A priest in Italy told me that his bishop told him that the day the Pope says the Tridentine Mass is the day he leaves the Church. Be certain that this Italian bishop is not alone. This might be the reason we have The table illustrates the present levels of vocations in the Catholic Church across different religious orders. What seems evident to many readers might not be evident to the unconditional supporters of Vatican II.They would say that nevertheless the Catholic Church is in a movement of regaining strength. In other words:They will find some twisted way to interpret the obvious crisis of vocations as a “positive sign.” Chart from Kenneth Jones’ Index of Leading Catholic Indicators. not yet seen the Pope say the old Mass. We know the Pope dislikes the New Mass and prefers the old Mass. We know that even, from time to time, he says the old Mass privately although no one can know it. There is already a big problem which came to light strongly when the excommunications were “lifted.” The Pope said, in the very last sentence that “all the effects of the previous decree are taken away.” This means it refers not just to the four SSPX bishops, but all six. They don’t have the courage to name the names, so they only mention it in passing. No one is excommunicated anymore. This decree is a landmark in our story. It is a very interesting point. The devil knows it as well as the enemies of the Church. It was not by chance that such an enormous storm was launched at the time. One newspaper article sums it up, published the very day when I received the decree in my hands. It announced a broadcast of a Swedish television interview with one of our bishops. The title of Der Spiegel was “The Pope is Going to Have Trouble.” He was their target. Of course, we were also, but primarily the Pope. We were only the banana peel on the ground. Why attack the Pope? Because they see that he wants to reverse and change things. At the same time, he does new things; he is totally in favor of ecumenism and religious liberty. But he doesn’t want many of the consequences. Granted, it is a mixture and contradiction, but it is the fact. The fact that he wants 2010 conference to make some reforms are sufficient to provoke a storm. It is very interesting. So how does it work between them and us? I am constantly facing contradictions. I constantly need to read between the lines. What do they want or not want? What do they say or not say? As an example, during the storm against the Pope, there was a decree from the Secretary of State. This decree said that the Society does not exist, so it’s not Catholic. And, in order to be Catholic, the Society must recognize absolutely everything: all of the Council and everything promulgated after it by all the popes. It was very clear. Nothing would happen with the Society unless we bowed down and accepted everything. This was an official statement. Two weeks before Easter, I received an intervention from Rome. I was about to do the ordinations to the subdiaconate. The German bishops wanted to excommunicate us again and prohibited us from doing so. They put pressure on the Pope, so pressure was put on me not to do these ordinations. So we made a gesture to the Pope since we know that the relationship between the German bishops and him is not great: we decided to do the ordinations in Ecône on the same day, instead of Germany. So I received three interventions in one week asking me to stop this. The last one came on Thursday evening before the Saturday morning ordinations. The cardinals told me I was acting against the Pope and that I must stop. But they gave me some advice: ask for permission from the Pope. They guaranteed that almost immediately I would receive permission and that the Society would be recognized until Easter. So I was taken aback in light of the recent note from the Secretary of State saying there was no recognition until we recog- nized the Council. And I pointed out that they knew what we thought about the Council. The answer was that the note from the Secretary of State was merely political and that it wasn’t even signed by the Secretary—and, by the way, it’s not the Pope’s opinion. So whom should I believe? I am stuck. Should I believe an unsigned official text or the voice of a friendly cardinal? You see the contradictions we face. Concerning the doctrinal discussions, officially the hope is that we will accept Vatican II. I hear that they expected great things for the Church from these discussions. I don’t think the condemnation of the Society would be a good thing for the Church. We do what we can. What is interesting is that these discussions have already borne fruits, even if they are indirect. Don’t expect immediate fruits. The situation in the Church is too difficult. The Pope has too much opposition. There are too many bishops against him. Even if he would like to, even if he would be strong, he is blocked. The opposition is enormous. As an example, there was a letter which said the translation “for all” in the Mass was wrong. The letter, from November 2007, said we must return to “for many.” Recently, in 2010, the conference of the German bishops said that “for all” would be retained since it has been used for so long, it has become tradition! So the Pope faces whole conferences of bishops, including those who oppose the old Mass. The bishops persecute priests who wish to say it. It is rare to see a bishop who really follows the orders of the Pope on the Mass. They create real obstacles. Finally, in all these things, we really have the impression that the progressivists think the Pope is on our side! Not that we are on the side of the Pope, but the opposite. 15 Recently someone was nominated to be the head of the Congregation of the Clergy. As far as I know, he only says the New Mass. But he is a conservative. And he is labeled an “ultra-conservative”! He has been chosen by the Pope against tremendous opposition in the Vatican. We must pray that the good side of the Pope may triumph in himself, in the Vatican, and in the Church. For us, there is only one way: to continue. We speak of fidelity. A line has been given which is clear. Our dear founder, Archbishop Lefebvre, was given a special grace to see what was going on and how to get out of it. He has given us all the lines and means necessary to stay faithful. We are not to be independent, or do something for ourselves; we do this for the Church. We must keep our hearts as big as possible. The mission given by our Lord to the Church remains true for every Catholic. We must desire the salvation of everyone on earth. The more we do, the more souls will be saved. It is absolutely certain. If we don’t do what we have to do, we lose souls entrusted to us by the good Lord. Let us have then a burning spirit, a missionary spirit. We must have it and must not fear tremendous crises. God is above–as well as the Blessed Virgin Mary. What of our crusade? As usual, I brought it and tried to make sure the Pope got the message. I am humanly certain that he did, but I never got an answer. Of course, I never received an answer. We are too controversial. Those who come too close to us are burned. It is a mystery but a glory. It is a glory to be able to carry in us the sign of contradiction of Jesus. It belongs to the blessing our Lord gave, a special beatitude, to those who suffer because of His Name. I am sure that we are on that side. Thank you. www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • May 2011 16 BeATIfIcATIon Doubts of the Society of St. Pius x About Beatifying Pope john Paul II Fr. Dominique Bourmaud, FSSPX M ay Day is a traditional day of rest to celebrate the feast of work, especially in Rome, where everybody, Communist or not, knows that San Giuseppe was born in Italy. There, many souls will flock to the Piazza San Pietro for another ceremony which was announced Urbi et Orbi, to celebrate another great worker, John Paul II. Although rumored in Roman circles, it has come as a surprise that Benedict XVI would proceed with the beatification of his predecessor on May 1st. The conciliar Church will gather all its most passionate adherents, with trumpets and organs, to put another halo around the head of their hero: “J. P. II, we love you!” “John Paul THE ANGELUS • May 2011 www.angeluspress.org the Great,” “Santo subito,” canonize right now the “Sportsman of God”! Silence Is consent Yet, that day, some groups will be noted by their absence in Rome. Most traditionalist groups, who have agonized enough over the crisis in the Church, will not toast or taste the champagne! We consider it our duty to enlighten modernist Rome, however misguided it may be, with our views and rational arguments against such gestures. We think it our right, nay our duty, to show the Church authorities why we disagree profoundly with a celebration which is ruinous and destructive of the most sacred values, so much the more ruinous as it is touches on some of the most sacred religious beliefs: virtues, sanctity, Christian doctrine, and the papacy. This is why, for the glory of God and the salvation of souls, Fr. de La Rocque has written a book of complaints, duly argumented, which was given to Rome before May Day. Now, both liberals and sedevacantists may well laugh at our endeavor. The former will scoff at the detailed analysis of endless quotes, at the judgment of intention we will raise against a Pope simply ahead of his time. The latter, who think there is hardly anything left of the Catholic Church, simply consider that the present leaders are ‘cadaveric’ authorities emptied out of their substance. No doubt, they will be happy that our little work of PoPe john PAUl II of ‘fraternal correction’ is in fact bringing more grist to the sedevacantist mill. Yet, this is a necessary gesture of sanity in an insane environment, an act of sobriety in the company of drunkards. For those who have not bowed to Baal, for souls in search of truth, as a testimony for future generations, at least someone must speak his mind and say with the child of the fable: “The emperor has no clothes!” canonization and Beatification: Infallible? Before we get to the meat of the critiques against a beatification of the late Pope, it is worth our while to clarify a few debated questions. Both liberals and sedevacantists would likely agree that canonizations (and in some lesser way beatifications) involve papal infallibility. The liberals conclude from this that this seals the infallibility of all things taught by the late Pontiff and whoever opposes it, opposes Catholic Truth, God, and His Church. The sedevacantists argue quite distinctly. Given that the teachings of John Paul II are modernist and utterly heretical, and given that these receive the seal of infallible approval from Benedict XVI, it follows that neither of them acts as real and legitimate Pope. Such extreme positions may necessitate an examination of the initial thesis of their argument: the infallibility of canonizations. The Angel of Theology, Saint Thomas, explains that a particular canonization is between general truths (dogmas) and judgments of particular cases because the Church could err based on false witnesses. “Since the honor given to the saints is a certain profession of faith by which we believe in the glory of the saints, we need to believe piously that in this also, the judgment of the Church cannot err.”1 So, although his judgment is favorable, it is hardly a plain and simple yes. By the time of St. Thomas, the process of canonization had become both centralized and complex, involving a triple judgment of the Roman court: the orthodoxy of the writings (both private and public); the heroism of the virtues, and the authenticity of the miracles. Yet, this process is as enigmatic as it is enlightening: since the divine origin of the ‘miracle’ is virtually impossible to assert (save rare exceptions since the devil can capably ape God), its authenticity depends on the heroism of the virtues. But to judge of the heroism of virtues can prove also very difficult as we judge them only by their exterior acts as betraying their inner intention, something easily fallible, and so, such judgment refers us to the first one: doctrinal orthodoxy. Hence, all sainthood ultimately hinges on the sound doctrine of the candidate, which, for once, is easy to determine. This is why, when theologians would speak of “infallible canonizations,” they meant precisely that canonizations rely firstly on the doctrinal test.2 This being said, it is not difficult to find how far the present status of “canonization” differs from former times, which makes us very suspicious of their infallible character.3 Moreover, speaking of John Paul II, the method of attributing the miracle is raising some controversy as the person “cured” was never clearly diagnosed, and received medical treatment, blurring hopelessly the “divine” origin of the cure. Ulterior Motives? Questions need to be raised as to why Benedict XVI is so concerned about speeding up the process of canonization of John Paul II, who governed the Church from 1978 till 2005. After the same John Paul II had beatified the Pope who had convoked Vatican II, we behold that of the one who has incarnated the Vatican II principles for a quarter of a century and has left a huge legacy of conciliar interpretation and practice. If he is beatified, for the average Catholic this implies that all the principles of the Council are written in stone. This is exactly the mindset of Benedict XVI: 17 I think my essential and personal mission is not to promulgate new and numerous new documents but to bring it about that these documents [of John Paul II] be assimilated, because they constitute quite a rich treasure. They are the authentic interpretation of Vatican II. We know that the Pope was the man of the Council, that he had assimilated the spirit and the letter of the Council and, by these texts, he gave us to understand what the Council wanted and did not want.4 There remains the question of the speed of beatifying someone only six years after his death. It is obvious that Benedict XVI wishes, on the whole, to pursue the direction and the momentum given by both Vatican II and John Paul II. Although he is more conscious of the crisis and liturgically conservative, he is a firm believer in the Council. The present Pontiff may consider that his days are numbered and that, perhaps, time would run against the fame of John Paul II. Does he try to propel John Paul II to the heavenly skies so as to give again to a disintegrating papacy some credibility and reputation in the public eye? Is this his last trump card to play to salvage Vatican II in the landscape of a crumbling Conciliar Church? The Argument of Doubts about a Beatification After these preambles, we need to plunge into a summary and analysis of an important book, John Paul II: Doubts about a Beatification. This is, without the shadow of a doubt, a provocative gesture to the whole Catholic hierarchy, the Pope and his Curia in particular. It is to be feared that, unless we act, no one will speak up, and that silence would be taken as a sign of consent. So, we proclaim loud and clear our “Non possumus.” We want to rock the boat. We need to splash the smooth surface of the Conciliar pond, stagnant with its impermeable modernistic waters. The book is divided into four uneven parts, dealing with the theological virtues of Faith, Hope, Charity, and the cardinal virtue www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • May 2011 18 BeATIfIcATIon of Prudence. Uniform in its general approach, the argument raises the question of the heroic nature of the virtues. Especially in his papal duty, the heroic virtues of John Paul II need to have complied with what Our Lord requested of Peter, to “confirm your brethren in the faith.” 5 Regarding the virtues of faith, hope, charity, and prudence, we need to evaluate how much Pope Wojtyla, not as a mere individual, but invested with his Petrine ministry, has fulfilled the command of Christ, so that “the Church of Christ, guardian and protector of the dogmas She has received in deposit, change nothing to them, take away nothing from them.”6 In other words, a Pope can be no ordinary saint. If he is no saintly Pope, he is no saint at all. His sainthood consists in that he acted saintly in his papal ministry, and this to the point of heroism, regardless of the strained and difficult circumstances. This critical study of the late Pope is obviously looking at his teaching documents and practice because this is the only yardstick by which to appraise his work. The underlying argument is that, if John Paul II has denatured the essence of these virtues, he will have necessarily erred in their Christian practice, and in no way can be seen as a good Catholic, let alone a saint or saintly Pope. To do justice to this inquiry, leaving for more studious minds the pleasure—and merit—of stomaching/enduring/browsing through the endless 441 references, we must at least survey each section in a general fashion. To give a taste of the book’s format, we shall quote the most salient papal texts and compare them to traditional Church doctrine which might, incidentally, tarnish the utopian attempt of Benedict XVI to reconcile Vatican II and Tradition. The Pope’s faith is man-centered: “Christmas is the feast of man. This message is addressed to each man, precisely as man, to his humanity.”7 This anthropocentric theology remained unchanged throughout the decades, simply manifesting THE ANGELUS • May 2011 www.angeluspress.org itself more clearly in the last years of his reign. Assisi saw the “hope” of John Paul II of building the civilization of love which would unite the entire human family. But that would mean that Rome had finally succumbed to the old temptations of the idolaters, graciously offering a niche for Christ in the Pantheon of all religions or, as G. K. Chesterton explains it: “Nobody understands the nature of the Church… who does not realise that the whole world once very nearly died of broadmindedness and the brotherhood of all religions.”8 The Pope’s charity to travel the world over was, unfortunately, not the zeal of St. Paul to offer himself as a sacrifice for the conversion of his own nation to Christ, but simply a pact of friendship and love towards all religions, especially Judaism. The last aspect of the inquiry discusses the prudence of the last papacy, with the assumption and conclusion that it put the Catholics to shame and is a scandal to all. faith in Man, fundamental Dimension for the church John Paul II ascended the pontifical throne with the alarming tone of the loss of faith in the Church: Ideas contradicting the revealed truths and always taught have spread abundantly; real heresies have been propagated in the dogmatic and moral domain, creating doubts, confusions, rebellions; even the liturgy has been manipulated. Plunged into the intellectual and moral relativism until everything is allowed, Christians are tempted by atheism, agnosticism, a vaguely moralist illuminism, a sociological Christianism with no defined dogmas and no objective morality.9 Someone fully aware of the stakes and the dangers against the Faith would expect to see the Pope, in the heroic practice of the theological virtue of faith, recall in season and out of season the perpetual teaching and to safeguard the deposit entrusted to Peter. On the contrary, evidence suggests that he led the barque of Peter and all Catholics onto novel roads all too perilous for the Faith. What this first section clearly reveals is a doctrinal perversion typical of the modernists of the early 20th century: the fog around the formerly essential distinctions between nature and the supernatural, between the atheist and the faithful, between divine mercy and justice. The supernatural is redefined on the basis of personal consciousness and dragged down, in the encyclical Redemptor Hominis, to the level of the natural, setting the tone of his pontificate. Divine Revelation is simply man revealed to man; Christ’s Redemption has justified all men by making them aware of their dignity; sin is but an incoherence within the conscience. These are clear witnesses to his “anthropological inversion”: “For, by his Incarnation, he, the son of God, in a certain way united himself with each man.” Thus God sent a Redeemer who “fully reveals man to himself,” inviting him to encounter Christ who, by His redemptive act, has united every man to himself for all time.10 The book stresses that, in his teaching, Pope Wojtyla has disseminated theses incompatible with Catholic doctrine. Here is the list of aspects of the Pope’s views, far from being exhaustive, which are mentioned: l On the matter of Redemption: salvation is universal in that it is applied: a) to each and everyone; b) in a perpetual and inamissible way; c) from conception, whichever be the lot of everyone. l On the matter of baptism: sanctifying grace is the indissoluble bond between all baptized; it is present in all of them, regardless of their disposition at the moment of baptism; it is not destroyed by sin. l On the matter of sin and satisfaction of sin by Christ: sin does not offend divine justice; Christ in His Passion did not satisfy truly and properly the divine justice; strictly speaking, at the of PoPe john PAUl II 19 Blessed is the man who has not walked in the counsel of the ungodly.–Ps. 1 General Judgment, God does not condemn the damned, and no one is sure whether there is anyone in hell. hope of Unifying the human family We are dealing with a Pope who endeavored to raise mankind to high hopes at the turn of the third millennium, who called himself “the messenger of hope,”11 a Pope who entitled his first best seller Crossing the Threshold of Hope. If hope is the ringing note of the late papacy, it is no wonder why about half our book is spent dissecting the identity of this papal hope. Doubts about a Beatification lays out clearly the humanistic aspect of Redemption given in the programmatic encyclical of John Paul II, hoping to fulfill “the expectation of a world more human, rooted in the universal acknowledgment of the transcendental dimension of man.”12 After this naturalistic and horizontal definition of the virtue of hope, our study lays out in steady succession the purpose of this hope, its means, and its profound motive. The purpose of John Paul II’s new hope is mostly temporal. His “dream” is to promote the coming of a “civilization of love,” an answer to the “imperious need of the nations to dream of a future of peace and prosperity for all.”13 According to him, the dream started to become reality at Assisi: The dream of the human family: I made mine this dream when, in October 1986, I invited to Assisi my Christian brethren and the leaders of the great religions of the world to pray for peace….I had before my eyes a great vision: all the nations of the world as pilgrims, from different place of earth, to gather together near the Only God as in one single family.…All can realize how, in this spirit, the peace among nations is not a remote utopia.14 He had it in mind “to build the civilization of love, founded on the universal values of peace, solidarity, justice and liberty.”15 In order to achieve such an outlandish goal, the Pope explained that prayer (humanistic and social, respectful of the rights of all) and the diverse religions were the means of salvation and the means of bringing humanity together, since all religions are means of reaching the divinity, “even when they belong to different cultures and traditions.”16 They become messengers of peace: “I have always considered that the religious leaders played a vital role to feed the hope of peace and justice without which there is no hope for mankind.”17 This is the “spirit of Assisi” which subjects all religions, starting with the Catholic one, as servants for the “dream” of John Paul II. Indeed, interreligious meetings “beget a humanism, that is to say a new mode of looking at each other, of understanding each other, of thinking about the world and of working for peace.”18 From this comes the imperative command that both Church and State promote religious liberty as an inalienable right of each person. From this, it follows that the State is utterly incompetent in religious matters. The Pope, based on his anthropological—humanistic—theology, finds two motives of hope. The first is that God dwells in the heart of each man,19 from the very fact that as a person, man is made to the image and resemblance of God. The second reason is that God wants the unity of all men, both supernatural and natural, the former being the salvation of all, and the latter being the unity and peace of mankind. “Mankind is called by God to form a single family.…God loves all men and all women on earth and He gives them the hope of a new era, an era of peace.”20 charity of the Truth or Philanthropic love? Among the requisite signs of heroic charity are the common ones which involve the practice of the works of mercy, including the correction of those who err to bring them back in the way of salvation. Heroic charity will have the charity of truth towards infidels even in the midst of strenuous circumstances, following the example of Christ who “If he was good for the strayed and the sinners, did not respect their erroneous convictions, however sincere they might have seemed.” 21 This book concentrates on the relations of John Paul II with the Jewish religion because he had specifically and extensively dealt with them, and this sets an example of his relations with all major religions. The critique launches its attack on four points. The Pope has shown an improper respect for the Jewish religion, speaking of the “spiritual treasures of the Jewish people,” 22 the “religious testimony of our people.”23 This false respect explains www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • May 2011 BeATIfIcATIon 20 why he never called the Jews to convert to Christ, avoiding “the shadow and the suspicion of proselytism.”24 He has carefully avoided the affirmation that Jesus Christ is the real fulfillment of the Sacred Scriptures.25 Moreover, placed under the bushel is the question of Jewish infidelity and the crime of deicide (not the individual but the collective responsibility of Judaism, as was the constant teaching of the Church Fathers): “To the Jews as a people one cannot impute any ancestral or collective fault for what has been accomplished during the Passion of Christ.”26 Is the Faith of John Paul II… On another score, the Pope made scriptural allusions which are plain delusions. Old Testament terminology is used which suggests that present-day Judaism is still the offspring of Abraham, the father of all believers27; that the Jews are still “the people of the Testament,28 the People of God of the old Testament, … the Faith of the Catholic Church? Universal Redemption: “Dives and Lazarus are both human beings, both were created to the image and resemblance of God; both are similarly redeemed by Christ.”i The Gospel places Lazarus in the bosom of Abraham and Dives in hell, which all Church Fathers have understood as the real hell. “Each one is included in the mystery of Redemption and Jesus Christ united Himself for ever through this mystery.”ii Christ in glory will come at the Last Judgment and “will separate” (Mt. 25:32) the good from the evil, who will be cursed and condemned to eternal hell. Baptism “Although invisible, the still imperfect communion of our communities is in truth firmly joined by the full communion of saints, that is, of those who, at the end of an existence faithful to grace, are in the communion of the glorious Christ.”iii To say that all Christians join in the communion of sanctifying grace is against the Gospel and Tradition, as if grievous sin, especially of heresy and schism, did not destroy sanctifying grace. “We are all held under the grace of Our Lord Jesus Christ.”iv “You are co-citizens of the saints and members of God’s family.”v I Cor. 11:29 teaches that a sacrament may be received unworthily, for one’s condemnation. Sin and Redemption “The revelation of the merciful love of a Father…hurrying to embrace him, to pardon him, by wiping out all the consequences of sin.…”vi “If anyone says that the entire punishment is always remitted by God at the same time as the fault…let him be anathema.”vii If it is clear that “damnation remains a real possibility, we are not able to know, without a special revelation, if human beings, and which ones, are truly concerned.”viii “Depart from me, ye cursed, and go into everlasting fire…” (Mt. 25:41); “Vessels of wrath, fitted for destruction” (Rom. 9:22). “Only the one who would have refused salvation, offered by God with an inexhaustible mercy, will be condemned, because he will condemn himself.”ix To reduce the general judgment to an auto-condemnation is opposed to the faith (Rom. 2:5-6). God “will render to each one according to his works.” Homily 10/02/1979 in New York. Redemptor Hominis, n.13. iii Ut Unum Sint, 84. 12/11/1983, to the Lutheran community of Rome. 01/10/1982, General audience. vi 04/15/1992, General Audience i iv vii ii v viii THE ANGELUS • May 2011 www.angeluspress.org ix Council of Trent, Session 14, can. 12. 07/28/1999, General Audience. 07/07/1999, General Audience. of PoPe john PAUl II Testament which has never been denounced,” 29 “Through your [of Abraham] descendants all nations of the earth will be blessed because you have obeyed me,” 30 giving a proper and perpetual value”31 to the Old Testament. To foment fruitful relations with the Jewish faith, the Pope requests that exegetes avoid the sorrowful New Testament texts which reflect past events which are better left aside. The late Pope concludes by saying that Judaism is an integral part of the Church, since every Jew is unconsciously a Christian and our older brother: “We, Christians, acknowledge that the Judaic religious heritage is intrinsic to our own faith. ‘You are our older brothers.’”32 Hence, at the Assisi meeting of 1986, the Rabbi Toaff was placed on the right of the Pope among the leaders of the Christian religions whereas the non-Christian religions were on his left. From complacent, the friendly gaze has become complicitous. The Pope’s attitude reflects the stern warning of St. Augustine, that the truth of love did not respect the love of truth and thus love itself has turned untrue. Prudence of the flesh and Spiritual Scandal For the last section, the book reviews some gestures of the late Quodlibet. IX last article. Jean Bois, “Canonisation dans l’Eglise romaine,” D.T.C., Vol. II, col. 1647. Any doctrinal suspicion would bury the process forever. Cf. Benedict XIV, De servorum Dei beatif. et beator. canoniz., l. II, c. xxv-xxxv, LII, t. IV, pp. 3-68, 204-210. 3 See Frs. Lorber & Gleize, “On canon. of John Paul II,” The Angelus, January 2007; Fr. Calderón, “Infallibilité des canonisations et lois universelles,” Sel de la Terre, No. 72, Spring 2010. 1 2 4 Benedict XVI, speaking to the Polish television, 10/16/2005. Lk. 22:32. Pius IX, Ineffabilis Deus. 7 Message of 12/25/1978. 8 The Everlasting Man (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1925), p. 214. 9 Speech of 02/06/1981. 10 Redemptor Hominis, §8, italics in the original. 5 6 Pope which constitute what St. Thomas defined as a theological scandal, that is, “a less proper word or action which gives an occasion of fall.”33 Here is the list again, far from exhaustive, which speaks for itself: l Far from warning souls, the Pope often promoted the respect of other religions incurring the risk of promoting their errors too. l The Pope has often participated in the false worships given to false gods. l He has several times discouraged the conversion to the true faith. l By his repeated acts of begging pardon, he has devaluated the image of the Church in the public eye. l By his example, he has invited the Catholics to despise ecclesiastical law, especially on participating in false worship and in eccentric papal Masses. Of course, the late Pope tried to dissipate by his words the misunderstandings created by his actions and the liturgical aberrations. But he has left the image of a Church which, by his revolutionary attitude, has redefined its place in a pluralistic society as a mere option. In this again, he has seriously sinned against the virtue of prudence. Homily, 01/25/1998. Christmas message, 12/25/1978. 13 Letter to Card. Etchegaray, 09/05/2003. 14 Letter to Card. Etchegaray, 08/28/2001. 15 Message of 11/12/1986 to the Eucharistic Congress of Nicaragua. 16 Letter to Card. Arinze, 10/15/1996. 17 Discourse of 10/28/1999 to the Interreligious Assembly. 18 Letter to Card. Kasper, 09/03/2004. 19 “Every authentic prayer is the fruit of the Holy Spirit who is mysteriously present in the heart of each man.” Discourse of 12/22/1986. 20 12/08/1999. 21 St. Pius X, Notre Charge Apostolique. 22 Discourse of 09/11/1987. 23 Discourse of 10/09/1998. 24 Discourse of 11/06/1986. 25 Discourse of 05/22/2003. 26 Discourse of 04/13/1986, at the Synagogue of Rome. 11 12 21 Which Sainthood? After Assisi, the Masonic lodges were jubilant: Our interconfessionalism earned us the excommunication issued by Clement XI in 1738. However, the Church was certainly in error if it is true that, October 27, 1986, the present Pontiff united at Assisi men of all religious confessions to pray together for peace.34 What are we to conclude as to the sanctity of the late Pope? This is the churchman who sang the glory of man rather than “Jesus Christ and Him Crucified.” This is the Assisi leader whom the lodges vindicate as one of them. No doubt, Blessed Karol Wojtyla will find a place in his encompassing ecumenical martyrologium open to new martyrs and saints. He will be glorified as a hero together with those whose praises he sang, like Luther, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King. Is he your man? Well and good for you! As for me—as the French say—he is no saint of my parish! Fr. Dominique Bourmaud has spent the past 26 years teaching at the Society seminaries in America, Argentina, and Australia. He is presently stationed at St. Vincent’s Priory, Kansas City, where he is in charge of the priests’ training program. Discourse of 03/12/2000 at the Yad Vashem Memorial. 28 Universal prayer, 03/12/2000 begging for pardon. 29 Discourse of 11/17/1980 to the Mayence Jewish community. 30 Discourse of 09/11/1987 to the U.S. Jewish community, misquoting Gen. 22:18, which was referring to “your seed” in the singular, meaning Christ. 31 Discourse of 11/17/1980 to the Mayence Jewish community. 32 Discourse of 03/23/2000 to the Great Rabbis of Israel. 33 Summa Theologica, IIa IIae, Q. 43, art. 1. 34 Armando Corona, Grand-Master of the Great Lodge of the Equinox and of the Springtime, Hiram, April 1987, in One Hundred Years of Modernism, p. 317, (Kansas City: Angelus Press, 2006). 27 www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • May 2011 22 BeATIfIcATIon Is the Hope of John Paul II… … the Hope of the Catholic Church? A humanistic Gospel “In reality, the name for that deep amazement at man’s worth and dignity is the Gospel, that is to say: the Good News.”i “Apostle of Jesus Christ to lead the elect of God in the hope of eternal life promised before all ages by the God who does not lie.” (Tit. 1:1-2). He hopes to fulfill “the expectation of a world more human, rooted in the universal acknowledgment of the transcendental dimension of man.”ii The Gospel, through the parable of the guests at the wedding feast, names unworthy those who did not correspond to the divine call (Mt. 22:8); and the evil man is worthy of the Gehenna (Mt. 23:15). Those opposed to atheistic humanism are the “believers” and have the faith whose highest function is “to warrant equally to all citizens the right to live in agreement with their conscience and not to contradict the norms of the natural moral order recognized by reason.”iii “Those who declare natural the faith by which we believe in God conclude that they are faithful in a certain way those who are strangers to the Church of Christ.”iv Building the utopian civilization of love “To build the civilization of love, founded on the universal values of peace, solidarity, justice and liberty.”v St. Pius X warned against a religious melting pot: “a purely verbal and chimerical construction, where shine pêle-mêle in a seductive confusion the words of liberty, justice, fraternity and love, equality and human exaltation, based on a human dignity poorly understood.”vi “Religious liberty therefore constitutes the very heart of human rights. It is so inviolable as to demand that others recognize the freedom to change religions if one’s conscience requires it.”vii Religious liberty favors the neutral state, the indifferent laicism and the primacy of liberty of conscience over the Truth. It undermines the natural foundations of society and authority (Rom. 13:1). Assisi, the symbol of united mankind “How beautiful on the mountain of Assisi the feet of those who seek God, united in their common will to be the witnesses of peace and friends of Him who dwells in the heavens.”viii Parody of Is. 52:7 speaking of the feet of the Apostles of Christ. It is an insult to God to pretend that the Holy Ghost could have inspired the false religions spreading error and evil. The need for the infinite in a human person is the proof of his interior union with God. “God dwells in the heart of each man.”ix “The task of the apostle…is to make Him known to his brethren by showing that He is already there, hidden in the midst of the nations, at the heart of all cultures.”x Vital immanence was condemned by St. Pius X: “the need of the divine raises a particular sentiment in the soul open to religion. This sentiment is proper in that it envelops God both as object and as cause, and unites in some way man with God.”xi Redemptor Hominis, §10 (Washington, D.C.: United States Catholic Conference, 1979). ii Christmas message, 12/25/1978. iii Discourse of 10/11/1988 to the European Parliament. iv II Council of Orange, can 5. i THE ANGELUS • May 2011 www.angeluspress.org Message of 11/12/1986 to the Eucharistic Congress of Nicaragua. vi Notre Charge Apostolique, 08/25/1910. vii January 1, 1999, supplement to Osservatore Romano, December 16, 1998. viii Letter to Card. Cassidy, 09/07/1994. v “Every authentic prayer is the fruit of the Holy Spirit who is mysteriously present in the heart of each man.” Discourse of 12/22/1986. x Discourse to Bishops of North Africa,11/23/1991. xi Pascendi, 09/08/1907, §7. Denzinger, No.2074. ix Brideshead Revisited The life of eVelYn WAUGh Part 3 Dr. David Allen White Dr. White introduces Brideshead Revisited by giving some insights into the life of its author, evelyn Waugh. B efore examining the novel itself, I would like to say a few words about Evelyn Waugh the man. This will not be a complete biographical sketch by any means. But I want to look at the background of Waugh the man that caused this magnificent novel to emerge. Works of art do not, as Athena, spring full-blown from the brain of Zeus; they come from somewhere. This novel has a background. This book was very close to Waugh in many ways. He adds an author’s note at the beginning disclaiming that it is an autobiographical novel. We must respect his words as he would not have said so if it was not true. Nevertheless, the novel draws on certain very significant aspects of his life. In order to understand the novel and Waugh’s intentions in writing it, I think it is important that you know certain things about his background with an eye towards the production of this masterpiece. Let me begin with a quotation from Waugh himself that will give us the two sides of the man and the problem we have in analyzing any of his remarkable work: “I was driven into writing because it was the only way a lazy and ill-educated www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • May 2011 24 lITerATUre man could make a decent living.” Here is the wonderful superb wit but a real sense of self-criticism. He believed these words. At one point, a London newspaper was running a series on the seven deadly sins. They asked Waugh which one he might be interested in discussing in essay form. He chose “sloth” as he claimed to know it the best of them all. He found himself impossibly lazy, although he fought this tendency his whole life. In his interesting essay, which can be found in his collected essays and articles, he makes an important point: Sloth is not just laziness. It is an inability to act for your own spiritual good: knowing what is necessary for the good of your own soul but not being able or willing to take the necessary action. This man would become a Catholic apologist, but he never became a man proud in his Catholic faith. He was always aware of his own failings. He was constantly working to perfect his own character in the same way that he was always working to perfect his style. Waugh made the point that there is no end to the writer’s craft, no point where one can ever say “I am now a writer.” It was an ongoing process, trying to learn more and more about language and how to craft it effectively and beautifully. His style did change from the beginning of his career to the end because of his hard work. In the same way, he was very hard on his own character. He had a famously vicious tongue and could be incredibly pompous, rude, and insulting. After one such occasion, when he had been at a dinner party and excoriated everyone in sight, a woman came up to him and said, “Mr. Waugh, I thought you were supposed to be a Catholic.” He responded, “My dear woman, I am a Catholic. You can not imagine, were I not a Catholic, what a beast I would be.” His point was that what THE ANGELUS • May 2011 www.angeluspress.org the woman had seen was as good an Evelyn Waugh as he could be at that moment, even with the Catholic Faith. I think he was quite sincere in that. He was constantly fighting certain aspects of his character. He also believed he was an illeducated man. Of course, that recognition should extend to anyone born in the past century. None of us can possibly be well-educated. Good education is one of many treasures that have been discarded by the modern world. Waugh was being honest in saying that he was driven into writing. He went to Oxford but did not do particularly well there. His Oxford years are chronicled in Brideshead. He is drawing on his own experience in those pages. You will notice that study is granted perhaps one paragraph in all those pages set at Oxford. By the time he left Oxford, he had no sense whatsoever of what he was going to do with his life. He had hoped at first to become an artist. That is one of the links between the author and Charles Ryder. Waugh’s dream was to be an artist. He made money for a short time designing book jackets. Then he wrote some pieces on painting and art theory. He became a schoolmaster for a while. Then he undertook an apprenticeship to become a printer. He applied to the BBC to become an announcer. He had a brief stint as a newspaper reporter. He studied cabinet-making for a while. Indeed, his own mother said that one of the great tragedies of her son’s life was that he decided to become a writer when he could have become such a fine cabinet-maker. He learned much from cabinet-making. He always spoke of writing as a craft. A writer must plan, construct, and build in the same way a good cabinet-maker would do. Finally, he gave up and became a writer. Almost immediately, he had huge success. He came from a family involved with letters. Arthur Waugh, his father, came from gentlefolk, as did his mother. The family heritage included doctors, lawyers, soldiers, and clergymen in the Church of England. His father, Arthur, had written a life of Tennyson which was published in 1892. His father had been a journalist for a while. Thus there was a literary background in the family. His father went to work for one of the major British publishing houses, Kegan Paul. He then became the Managing Director at Chapman and Hall, which at that time published the works of Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, etc. It was a major British publishing firm. Curiously enough, Chapman and Hall would publish all the Waugh novels. His father published the very successful novels of his son, though he felt very uneasy about this at the time. Others in the firm encouraged him; the books became a gold mine for Chapman and Hall. He had one older brother, Alec. Alec had some success as a literary man and had a few novels published, but he was in no way in the same league as his younger brother, Evelyn. Evelyn himself began his writing career at the age of six when he wrote a short story which we still possess called “The Curse of the Horse Race.” The story is what you would expect from a six year old (although I am very fond of the title). He went off to a school called Lancing. While there, he came under the influence of two different men. They were not teachers at the school, but they lived nearby. He had made their acquaintance and they agreed to help him in his artistic designs. At that point, Waugh still wanted to be an artist. In these two early mentors, we see the two sides of the Waugh character that remained until the end of his life. The first was a man named Francis Crease. He taught Waugh calligraphy and manuscript illumination. By all accounts, Crease was a very shy, thoughtful, and quiet gentleman lITerATUre who was hugely talented. He lived a life removed and was not at all interested in success, company, or society. He was a private man with something of a mystical nature. How far that goes cannot be determined, but he was a man content to rest in his own thoughts. His other instructor was a man named J. F. Roxburgh. He had a very different kind of personality. He was forceful, articulate, elegant, and had a great deal of panache. He was a public figure who could not be ignored. He taught Waugh a good bit about writing. Later, Waugh claimed that what Roxburgh taught him was precision of grammar and contempt of the cliché. He honored both of these men the rest of his life. But you see the kind of double-vision it fostered. On the one hand, the quiet, removed, shy, and unsocial (not anti-social) man and on the other hand, the man of great panache, the public and elegant figure who puts himself forward to make the world take notice. Waugh learned much from both of them. Eventually he would go to Oxford for his undergraduate studies. He did not care for many of his tutors there, particularly a man named Cruttwell, whom he detested. Here again is Waugh at his nastiest: If you read the first five novels, you will notice that every one contains an absolutely obnoxious minor character named Cruttwell. He appears in book after book. It was Waugh’s way of getting revenge on this man he could not stand. The tutor was absolutely horrified by what Waugh was doing, but Cruttwell is now immortalized in those early books. During his undergraduate years, as a young man, he fell into the circle of aesthetes. He knew the figures he writes about in Brideshead. Those were his companions. This means he did not take advantage of his university years for education–indeed, he did little growing up or matura- 25 I felt very awkward. More in your line than mine.” tion–but he did learn a great deal about the world, probably more than a young man should know. In a letter to Thomas Merton, Waugh wrote that maturation is best when it proceeds slowly. I think there is some wisdom in that. In this country we see the folly of young people forced to grow up too soon. They merely mimic adults or gain adult knowledge at a time when they are too young to absorb such knowledge in any way, or, perhaps even disturbing, children mimicking adult corruption in the midst of a kind of innocence. You get the horror of eight-, nine-, and ten-year-olds, children, dressing and behaving like corrupt rock stars. Waugh wrote to Merton: “Most souls are of slow growth.” This idea is one of the major themes of Brideshead. Charles takes a long time to get the most important ideas into his skull. It is a fairly lengthy novel and Charles does not arrive at his final spiritual destination for a long time, although we know such a conversion is coming. The reader is told about it almost immediately at the end of the Prologue. After the army arrives at Brideshead, Hooper says: “ B r i g a d e He a d q u a r t e r s a r e coming there next week. Great barrack of a place. I’ve just had a snoop round. Very ornate, I’d call it. And a queer thing, there’s a sort of R.C. Church attached. I looked in and there was a kind of service going on–just a padre and one old man. Thus Hooper speaks to Charles, but really Waugh is telling us in the beginning about the end. Then we follow Charles’ slow maturation. Waugh felt he himself had matured slowly. He became successful— finally–when he began writing. The successive failures of Oxford and the other occupations all occurred in the 1920’s. In this country they were called the “Roaring Twenties.” And they were. It was a time of high living, corruption in society from top to bottom, and disorientation. Waugh became the chronicler of a whole set of youth whom he referred to as “bright young people.” These were the fairly well-to-do who had little responsibility. They lived life solely for pleasure. They amused themselves by being witty, corrupt, and high-spirited. They were insubstantial. Waugh traveled in this set for a long while and came to know them very well. Needing to support himself, he turned for a while to a teaching career, but after teaching for five pounds a week in a state school at Notting Hill, he abandoned the teaching profession. Waugh presents an uproariously funny and ghastly vision of this in his first novel, Decline and Fall. In it, the hero, Paul Pennyfeather, goes off to Wales to teach in an abominable school. At one point in the novel, Paul sets a task for his students to write the longest essay possible–quite apart from merit. This is so he can get away from teaching them! This is Waugh’s description of the school at Notting Hill. He describes it as quite awful: All the masters drop their ‘H’s and spit in the fire and scratch their genitals. The boys pick their noses and scream at each other in a Cockney accent. Such was his vision of the school in which he found himself teaching. Needless to say, he got out of there at once and devoted himself to runwww.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • May 2011 26 lITerATUre ning with the smart set. He led a life of sheer caprice and personal enjoyment. This led to his marriage in June 1928 to Evelyn Gardner. They were known to their friends as “HeEvelyn” and “She-Evelyn” as they shared a common first name. The marriage was based on whimsy, lacking substance. Clearly, neither had maturity, much less an understanding of the spiritual basis of the vocation of marriage. They simply married on a whim. This is hinted at in his second novel, Vile Bodies, in which the hero and heroine are constantly debating whether or not to get married. And this occurs in completely shallow and insubstantial conversations. Throughout the book, every few pages, these “bright young people” are getting engaged, and then breaking it off, over and over again. As he ran with the smart set, however, he began to realize there was something seriously missing. It was in these circumstances that he sat down and wrote his first novel, Decline and Fall. At this time Waugh had no thoughts of a conversion, but it was a significant moment for he looked at the world and found it wanting. He looked at the people around him and found them shallow. He looked at himself and realized that there was emptiness inside him, out of which came Paul Pennyfeather, the insubstantial hero. The first novel was published in 1928 and was very successful both critically and popularly. The novel with its depiction of the younger generation made him some money. In 1929, in an essay called “The War [World War I] and the Younger Generation,” he says: Unfortunately, a great number of schoolmasters came with their own faith shaken in those very standards which avowedly they had fought to preserve. They returned with a jolly tolerance of everything modern. Every effort was made to encourage the children at the public schools to THE ANGELUS • May 2011 www.angeluspress.org “think for themselves.” When they should have been whipped and taught Greek paradigms, they were set arguing about birth control and nationalization. Their crude little opinions were treated with respect. It is hardly surprising that they were Bolshevik at 18 and bored at 20. It is a brilliant passage chronicling the collapse of education–a collapse that continues. Most students need serious and consistent discipline, the “whipping,” and difficult and challenging tasks, the “Greek paradigms.” I myself should have had both; I got neither. Almost all of the writing manuals I receive or books of essays intended to provoke “classroom discussion” are nothing more than shallow overviews of “controversial” modern issues: gay “rights,” abortion, women’s liberation, economic justice. The issues are simply presented as issues for debate, minus any moral framework. The classroom debates are pointless and without direction, a total waste of words and time. Such chatter pretends to be “education.” The students having been taught nothing, know nothing. What passes for education in the humanities is the merely rehashing of superficial editorial debates found in any liberal newspaper or journal. Waugh saw through this fraud may decades ago. The students are not being taught to write a sentence, to read a play by Shakespeare (much less to scan a line of poetry), or to grasp the necessity of a concept of moral order that must frame any serious discussion. The difference now is that they are not Bolsheviks at 18; they no longer care enough even to be revolutionaries for a few years. They are bored at 12 and stay bored. This boredom permeates the early novels, including Decline and Fall and especially Vile Bodies. In the summer of 1929, just one year after the marriage, SheEvelyn ran off with one of Waugh’s good friends. He had no idea it was coming. He was completely unpre- pared for such a shock and was devastated. He fell into a profound despair. As he wrote in a letter to a friend, “I did not know it was possible to be so miserable and live.” But if he had come to suspect that there was something lacking in the world he saw around him, he now came to see that there was something seriously lacking in the marriage he had made. As a result, he recognized that there was something very much lacking in himself. He became profoundly self-critical. Waugh was writing Vile Bodies at the time. He took a brief hiatus but then completed it. He began to pursue seriously the question of what was of lasting value in the world. The world he had lived in and what he saw around him had proven to be empty. Yet he believed that there had to be something of value. By 1930, he was seen as a popular novelist, a well-known public figure who was one of the “bright young people.” In September 1930 he converted to the Church of Rome. It came as a surprise to everyone. His father called it “his son’s perversion to Rome.” His parents never came to terms with the fact and remained upset with their son’s decision. lITerATUre He felt that everything in the world was designed to undermine the most serious questions of life– those having to do with religion and the state of the human soul: Psychology? There isn’t such a thing as psychology. Like the word slenderizing. There isn’t such a word. The whole thing’s a fraud. Such speculative systems undermine belief in the soul, will, and divine purpose. In this statement, he separates himself in a major way from all the popular ideas of the day. It is an astonishing thing for a modern writer to say. At the beginning of World War II, Waugh was forced to undergo a psychiatric exam. He was going into the Army and it was a standard procedure. But since he was “peculiar,” the interrogator probably had a few extra questions for him. The psychologist asked him countless questions about his childhood, his upbringing, how he was reared, and how his parents had treated him. Finally Waugh stopped the man and asked: “Why haven’t you asked me about the most important thing in a man’s life—his religion?” The psychologist, of course, had nothing to say. It was not part of his system. For Waugh, religious belief was the defining element of any human being. If you know that, you know what makes the man tick. If you ask a man and he says he has no religion, you realize the man can’t tick. The whole mechanism has been shut down–or never started. In 1946, he wrote to a friend of his, John Betjeman: “People are going mad and talking balls to psychiatrists not because of accidents to the chamber-pot in the nursery but because there is no logical structure to their beliefs.” Everything gets reduced to one’s past, early childhood, traumatic experiences, and so forth. Waugh calls this nonsense; the real problem is the lack of a logical structure. Modern men are stumbling around with no idea who they are, where they come from, why they are here, what they are supposed to do, or what their end is supposed to be. Waugh voices a criticism of all modernist thought, thought so fragmented that it can give no logical structure to anything. He himself described the beginning of his religious experience in the following way: he began with a youthful period of shallow piety in the Church of England, a kind of youthful attraction that may be sweet but, if the attraction is to a false system, cannot last. I remember visiting my boyhood home and going through a box of odds and ends that my mother had saved from when I was young. I came upon a little diary I had kept for a couple weeks during a Protestant summer church camp in southern Wisconsin. A well-meaning soul had encouraged me to do so. I came across a short embarrassing but very funny entry that I had written in a little outburst of such youthful piety. We had been to a little chapel service. I was later walking by a beautiful lake as the sun was setting. I wrote that “Last night, as I was walking by the lake, I realized I am going to be a minister.” I could be in a Congregationalist pulpit right now, encouraging my faithful to write impassioned liberally-minded letters to Washington! But it was an absolutely shallow sentiment on my part. It was empty “religious” sentimentality. The young have such feelings, but they must be grounded in something real. I am not mocking youthful sentiments, but unless they are connected to something real, they will wither away instantly. Waugh said that his youthful period of shallow piety was followed by adolescent atheism. It is the same path I myself followed. At 17, I went off to college and, after six months, any lingering faith was knocked out of me. I became one of the arrogant young things boasting that God does not exist and that life has no mean- 27 ing. Waugh says his adolescent atheism was followed by a dissipated young manhood. He ripped out of his diary the pages chronicling those years and burned them. Then, coming to recognize that there was only one chance for meaning and hope in the world, he found the Catholic Church: Those who have read my works will perhaps understand the character of the world into which I exuberantly launched myself. Ten years of that world sufficed to show me that life there, or anywhere, was unintelligible and unendurable without God....It only remained to examine the historical and philosophic grounds for supposing the Christian revelation to be genuine. I was fortunate enough to be introduced to a brilliant and holy priest [Fr. Martin D’Arcy] who undertook to prove this to me, and so on firm intellectual conviction but with little emotion I was admitted into the Church. For Waugh, it was an intellectual proposition. There is a moment in Brideshead when Charles is speaking about his own youthful faith and how he had rejected any notion of the “Christian myth” being true. He says, “I had not yet then come to understand that this faith represented a coherent, philosophical system that made intransigent historical claims.” On these two ideas we have the basis of Waugh’s conversion: it was a coherent philosophical system that made complete sense in itself and it made intransigent historical claims. I defy anyone to find a contradictory item in the entire elaborate structure of Catholic theology. Or go back 2,000 years and try to disprove its presence in the world and the influence it has had. Anyone with eyes can see what has happened to the world since the shattering of the Church at the time of the protestant revolt. We now have thousands of denominations and the slow erosion and the final collapse of civilized order. www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • May 2011 28 lITerATUre Fr. D’Arcy, speaking of Waugh, said that he had never himself met a convert who so strongly based his assent on truth. He also said it was a special pleasure to make contact with so able a brain. My point is that no emotional pull brought Waugh to the faith, even though he fully understood and responded to the beauties embodied in the Catholic Church. The attraction was the intellectual truth that could be studied and known; to this he assented. He entered the Church. There are a number of Waugh biographies available, but I recommend one that is far and away the best of them: The Life of Evelyn Waugh by Douglas Lane Patey. I am very impressed with it and recommend it highly. I don’t know if Professor Patey is Catholic, but I do know that he could not have written this book without having a sensus Catholicus. Patey says, summarizing what Waugh believes, that “the modern world is living on dwindling cultural capital, on inherited institutions deformed by having been cut off from the living faith that was the source of their authority. Without authoritative institutions, anarchy takes over.” In the early novels, we get anarchy. There is no authority. Everything is collapsing. The very first page of his first novel, Decline and Fall, describes a group of hooligans who get together at Oxford to have raucous drinking parties. They entertain themselves by smashing everything at hand while the school officials in charge hide in their rooms in the dark hoping for a huge amount of damage so that the subsequent fines can buy them some good port. But this is where Waugh starts: the hooligans have taken over, anarchy has set in, and those in charge are doing absolutely nothing. I recommend the early novels; they are riotously funny. Many people, however, had trouble with them for a very simple reason. In THE ANGELUS • May 2011 www.angeluspress.org the fi rst fi ve novels, Waugh takes a totally objective stance: he is not giving any kind of commentary on the world he is presenting. He is simply presenting it objectively. Here is the world and what is going on out there. He makes us judge for ourselves how far it has fallen. Often the narrative voice becomes ironic. As an example, in Decline and Fall Waugh presents the same loutish Bollinger Club fondly remembering the last time they had assembled, when a fox was brought into their midst in a cage and stoned to death with champagne bottles: “What a night that had been!” It is absolutely gruesome but the narrative voice is touched with irony. These novels are thick with irony, that gap between what is being said and what we as readers know as the real intention. But many people reading the novels think Waugh is sympathetic; they are missing the tone. This problem—and it is a kind of problem—got him into serious trouble with his third novel. Published in 1932, the novel is called Black Mischief. The book was printed when Waugh was off doing research for one of his travel books. He returned to England to learn that he was in “heavy Catholic trouble.” It was the first novel pub- lished since he had converted. As a result, many readers, especially Catholics, assumed he would now be writing sweet, pious books in which everyone is lovely, and the nuns sing together, and we all go to Mass, then to a big family dinner where we say grace as grandma sheds a tear, and as the sun comes up the next morning, the children brush their teeth before going to Catholic school where the nuns inspect their teeth, finding them all clean and shining. What he wrote instead is a novel that is so outrageous that I cannot in public describe what happens at the end. It reaches points of the gruesome that are unimaginable but raucously funny at the same time. It is quite horrifying, but not nearly as horrifying as life in the modern world would soon actually become. The novel is set in Africa and is about the British imperialists there. Whatever problems Waugh presents in this mythical African country, run by the black emperor Seth (educated at Oxford), pale in comparison with the problems of the British who are coming to civilize them. Because of the title and because of the use of the “n-word,” the novel was one of the last Waugh novels to be reprinted (I once found the novel placed in the “Black Studies” section of a local bookstore!). The leading Catholic periodical at the time, The Tablet, published an absolutely scathing review of the book. The author was a man named Ernest Oldmeadow. This magazine was under the close supervision of Cardinal Bourne of London. It was clear that the disapproval was coming from the highest reaches of the Church; they were absolutely appalled and did not understand Waugh’s intentions or his artistry. To give you a sense of how Catholic the book really is, a letter of support for the attack came from Marie Stopes, one of the leading proponents of birth control at the time. She wrote a letter praising the review lITerATUre and the attack on Waugh: “I am glad that a Roman Catholic should be dealt with by Roman Catholics in the trenchant fashion you have done.” Marie Stopes appears in the novel. As Seth is modernizing his country, he renames everything after liberal British heroes. There is a plaza named for “Marie Stopes.” And Seth arranges a birth control pageant and parade through the main city during which the women carry banners reading “Through Sterility to Culture” and “The Women of Tomorrow Demand an Empty Cradle.” It is not funny anymore; it hurts. In 1932, Waugh saw it all coming. This madness is all imposed by the liberals and their “progressive” ideas in the novel. They are passing out contraceptives to the natives, who refer to the unfamiliar objects as “magic jujus.” The natives believe if you take the magic jujus into your house, you have many children! Of course, the emperor is discombobulated. The novel is riotously funny. It is great comic satire. Of course, the response was similar to that which greeted the most horrifying piece of satire in English, Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal, in which he recommended the Irish eat their own children as a remedy for famine. Waugh is a satirist on the level of Swift. Sometimes satire needs to be pointed. Waugh’s fourth novel is called A Handful of Dust, based on the collapse of a modern marriage. It is a chronicle of what he himself had been through. Waugh stated that in the novel he had said all that he had to say about the world of humanism without God. It is a bleak book, but funny in its own way. But the serious side of the author is gaining ground. The writing is still objective and distanced, but the pain is increasing. Then, I suspect in an attempt to mollify the Catholic hierarchy and the Catholic community who did not understand him, Waugh in 1935 wrote a life of St. Edmund Campion. It is an astonishing book, one of the best saints’ lives ever written. The work begins with the grisly death of Elizabeth I and ends with the martyrdom of the saint. We have, with the beginning and the end, a vision of two different ways of dying: one, apostate, cut off, facing the horror of emptiness and meaninglessness; and the other as a martyr going to death with full confidence and full faith, and as a result converting many bystanders. What we have in Edmund Campion is an appreciation by Waugh of what is called the ars moriendi, the art of dying well. This is something that becomes more and more important 29 to him and will structure Brideshead. The entire narrative builds towards the moment of the good death which comes at the end of the novel, pulling all plot threads together and resolving all conflicts and tensions in the book. What is very interesting is that the ending was severely criticized as a cop-out on Waugh’s part. I’ll quote one critic in a volume called Evelyn Waugh and the Problem of Evil: “Lord Marchmain’s conversion violates a fundamental law in classical literal theory: it winds up a plot with a simple change of mind of one of the principal characters.” You can see how it is possible to read the whole book without understanding it. Lord Marchmain does not simply change his mind; because of an infusion of grace he saves his soul. A man who has been a reprobate and an apostate has his soul saved at the last instant. The notion of dying well is in Waugh from the time of Edmund Campion. It is a thoroughly Catholic idea. The last of the five early satirical novels is Scoop, in 1938. It concerns journalists in Africa. It is very funny and is the gentlest of them, probably because he had happily remarried. The annulment for his first marriage was years in the making. His wife was named Laura Herbert, and she was a devout Catholic. They married in 1937 after Waugh’s first marriage was annulled by Rome in 1936. World War II did not surprise Waugh; he had seen it coming. He volunteered to serve and deliberately chose branches of the service where he would be exposed to extreme hazard. He was absolutely fearless and could put up with immense amounts of pain. On three different occasions he saw action. These are chronicled in his brilliant war trilogy, Sword of Honour. He even survived a plane crash in Croatia where half of the people on board were killed. He walked away from it. www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • May 2011 30 lITerATUre But he was not a good soldier. He could not bear pomposity. We see that in the opening scene of Brideshead. He would go out of his way to puncture pomposity wherever he saw it. When he thought people or situations had become too pompous, he would do something outrageous. My favorite story is that once when the brass was gathered and having a very serious meeting. Waugh interrupted and asked whether it was true that, in the Roumanian army, no one below the rank of major was allowed to wear lipstick. His superiors were distrustful of him, and those below him did not like him at all. They thought him pompous and arrogant and realized that he had no time at all for the “common man” in the “era of the common man.” On one of the occasions when the forces were going into combat, the other officers had a serious debate about whether or not to let Evelyn participate. One of the officers said Evelyn would probably get shot. Another officer replied that it was a chance they would have to take. The first officer responded: “I don’t mean by the enemy!” THE ANGELUS • May 2011 www.angeluspress.org In January 1944 he was in training to become a parachutist. In a parachute jump, he badly injured his leg. It became clear that the leg would take some time to heal. He requested of his commander and the Secretary of War that he be given leave as an idea for a novel had come into his head. He stated quite simply that one of the mysteries of the artist is that, when something appears in your head, you have to write it down at once. His request was granted. But he did not go home. He went to a small isolated hotel from February to June 1944, when he wrote Brideshead Revisited. He based it on personal experiences, people he had known. He had been present when a man named Herbert Duggin had had a deathbed reconciliation with the Church. He had seen it happen. Also, about the time he published Black Mischief, he had fallen in love with an entire family named the Lygons. He loved deeply everyone in the family. The father had been disgraced by personal actions and had been hounded into exile in Venice. Despite these two central influences, Waugh insisted that the novel was not autobiographical. We need to believe him. Waugh wrote a number of travel books. He traveled extensively. They are not well-known but they are fascinating. Let me close by citing a passage from one of these travel books called Robbery Under Law. He had traveled to Mexico. In the midst of this travel book he includes what he calls his “conservative manifesto.” I think it is a magnificent piece of writing: Let me then warn the reader that I was a conservative when I went to Mexico. Everything that I saw there strengthened my opinions. I believe that man is, by nature, an exile and will never be self-sufficient or complete on this earth, that his chances of happiness and virtue here remain more or less constant through the centuries, and, generally speaking, are not much affected by the political and economic conditions in which he lives, that the balance of good and ill tends to revert to a norm, that sudden changes of physical condition are usually ill, and are advocated by the wrong people for the wrong reasons, that the intellectual Communists of today have personal irrelevant grounds for their antagonism to society, which they are trying to exploit. I believe in government, that men cannot live together without rules, but that these should be kept at a bare minimum of safety. That there is no form of government ordained from God as being better than any other, that the anarchic elements in society are so strong that it is a whole time task to keep the peace. I believe that inequalities of wealth and position are inevitable and that it is therefore meaningless to discuss the advantages of their elimination. Men naturally arrange themselves in a system of classes and that such a system is necessary for any form of cooperative work, more particularly the work of keeping a nation together. I believe in nationality, not in terms of race or divine commissions for world conquest, but simply this: Mankind inevitably organizes itself into communities according to its geographical distribution. These communities, by sharing a common history, develop common characteristics and inspire a local loyalty... Everything Waugh wrote after his conversion is Catholic in thought or principle, even if the style or manner is often surprising. At the time of Brideshead, a friend wrote to him, asking him what the new book was about. His response: “The book is about God.” 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. 31 Part 4 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 PeAce AnD confIDence Let us let ourselves be led, then; let us be peaceful, peaceful; let us not attempt to do more than that which She wills or more quickly. Let us let ourselves be carried by Her, she will think of everything and take care of all our needs, of the soul and of the body. Let us give every difficulty, every sorrow to Her, and have confidence that She will take care of it better than we could. Peace, then, peace, much peace in an unlimited confidence in Her. The whole M.I., it is not we who made it and neither do we know it nor can we lead it forward. If it is something of Our Lady, the obstacles will make it stronger; if it isn’t, then let if fail: why should it get in the way? If also the (Blessed) Mother didn’t want the M.I. to continue any longer, and was satisfied with what has been done up to now, it is She who is our Lady; let us do what seems best to Her. (SK 56, Jan. 26, 1921) Above all, never let yourselves be troubled, never be frightened, never fear anything. The Immaculate, in fact, is She perhaps not aware of everything? If this were case, it would really be a problem. No one can do us any harm if God does not permit it, that is if She doesn’t consent to it. Everything, then, is in Her maternal hands. Consequently, let us only let ourselves be led by Her more every day, more every instant. This is all our philosophy. (SK 755, Nov. 4, 1937) And what should we do when we don’t have the strength for the execution of what obedience commands? Prayer, then, fervent, heartfelt prayer to the Most Holy Mother, even if it just be by the short invocation “Mary,” and She will understand what we want to say, She will give strength to carry out (what is commanded); we must have recourse to Her like a child to his mother. When we fall, let us turn to the Immaculate, and She will lift us up, She will give us strength for the combat to come. Let us have complete confidence in Her, dear Brothers, let us let ourselves be led by Her and She will surely lead us to the happiness of heaven. (K 8, May 29, 1932) www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • May 2011 32 fr. MAxIMIlIAn KolBe In reason of the present financial difficulties certain Brothers, as one can remark, have declined spiritually. “What will happen?” (they ask themselves). It is certain that such thoughts can come and that it is difficult to chase them away so that they don’t come. What was it like in the beginning (of the M.I.)? At one time there was nothing to print [The Knight ] with, everything was still done with the printing press of the tertiaries at Cracow. Then there came to me different thoughts. But then I thought: “Why are you tormenting yourself, since (the M.I.) isn’t yours? If it’s the Immaculate’s, and She wants it to fail, let it fail. It’s not ours. It’s Hers. As the Immaculate wants: (if She wants) it to develop, let it develop. If She wants there to be persecutions, let it be so.” What are we speaking of here? From the beginning, She is the Owner. And we don’t want anything else, this alone: what She wants, as She pleases. This is certainly what is more perfect and will lead to the conquest of the whole world. We must understand well who the owner is of Niepokalanów, of the printing press, and of ourselves. For our part we must collaborate, do everything we can, but let us not lose our peace. She is directing this. We must turn to Her in difTHE ANGELUS • May 2011 www.angeluspress.org ficulties and find our calm again. (K 105, Oct. 2,1937) He who has a pure intention will never lose interior peace. And although exteriorly there will be great activity, great sacrifices, and all around us storms and hurricanes will rage—nevertheless in the depth of our soul there will reign an unalterable silence, a deep peace… If we want to know whether we have this intention, let us ask ourselves whether we are striving to fulfill the will of the Immaculate, or rather do we want to content ourselves. Here the fundamental thing is to seek nothing else but only Her will, and therefore fulfill it as She Herself desires. (K 109, Nov. 6, 1937) He who loves the Immaculate will gain a sure victory in the interior combat. (SK 742, Sept. 1937) We can exert ourselves, make efforts, write, pray, but without ever losing our peace in the complete gift of ourselves to Her. (SK 738, Sept. 13, 1937) When the soul reflects on the fact that it has given itself to the Immaculate, (and) that whatever happens to it occurs by Her will, it is filled with a very great peace. (K 99, Sept. 1, 1937) MaMusia Let us endeavour, like a little child, to recognize our total dependence on Her and, consequently, cling to Her like sons to their mother. (SK 605, Nov. 10, 1934) It is not a matter here of kneeling down a long time and praying, but of this relationship of a child to his mother. A loving glance at her statue, the frequent repetition of the name “Mary,” even if it be just in our hearts. Different prayers and formulas are good and beautiful, but the essential thing…is the simple relationship of a child to his mother, this sense of our need for this mother, the conviction that without her we can do nothing. (K 31, Aug. 28, 1933) If there be difficulties, in spite of them go on and approach even closer to the Immaculate—babble to Her like a little child. Give everything over to Her will—whether she wants to give us sweets or nourish us with dryness—be close to Her by our will, in Her arms. The way of the Immaculate, even though it be strewn at times with crosses and suffering, is not, nevertheless, all that burdensome and obscure. We always feel this maternal affection. (K 41, 2, July 5, 1936) You ask (me) for a weekly program of the “Son of the Immaculate.” Ask a weak little baby for the weekly program of his relations with his mother. (SK 605, after Nov. 10, 1934) The Immaculate is taking care of me tenderly, really, very tenderly. She offers all the nourishment indispensable to the soul at the time and in the quantity necessary, but sometimes also sweetly embraces me. (SK 503, April 9, 1933) In the mouth of others this expression “Mamusia”1 seemed strange, but in him it was so natural and sincere that one saw that it sprung from his deepest experience. (Positio Super Virtutibus, Vol. II, p. 109) At times, we will taste the joyful serenity of the little child who, aban- fr. MAxIMIlIAn KolBe doning himself without any reserve in the hands of his own mother, worries about nothing, fears nothing, confident in the wisdom, goodness, and power of his good mother. At times the storm will rage around us, thunderbolts will fall, but we, consecrated without limits to the Immaculate, will be sure that nothing will happen as long as our good little Mother doesn’t permit it, and we will rest peacefully, working and suffering for the salvation of souls. (SK 1248, Nov. 15, 1919) Now in all of this what is the role of the Most Holy Mother? Through whom did Jesus come into the world? Who brought Him up? To whom was He obedient? The Most Holy Mother brought Him up, with Her own breast She nourished Him. He was obedient to Her even during the three years of His apostolic life, and many times He emphasized the fact that He was fulfilling the will of His Father. Our Lord Jesus was born of the Most Holy Mother, He needed Her help. She nourished Him, brought Him up, and wore Herself out for Him. What (lesson) is left for us here?2 To let ourselves be brought up by the Most Holy Mother according to the example of our Lord Jesus. We see, then, that the role of the Most Holy Mother is clear.… What is sanctification? Sanctification is the reception of many great graces from God and the proper response to these graces. In order, then, that this work be done successfully in us, let us go to the Most Holy Mother. What happens here must be similar to what happens in an earthly family. In families we see that it is true that the father works and earns the bread and life’s necessities, but who feeds the children if it isn’t the mother? The mother, distributing the food, gives to each one their portion and the kind of food that is most fitting for each. But what kind of a child would it be who would say that he didn’t want a mother? It is the same in the supernatural family. These are echoes… echoes…according to which we must make parallels. The Most Holy Mother does the same thing. She distributes all graces, and gives when and what to whom and how as is most fitting. He who would disavow3 her would be most ungrateful. (K 25, June 13, 1933) We will never offer Her the love She merits, that with which She loves us. (SK 461, Oct. 27, 1932) It is not enough to always hoe and weed. One must sow the flowers so that they might grow and blossom. For the development of the flower sun and dew are needed. If there is no sun or dew the little flower will not grow.… In the soul it’s the same. So that it might grow spiritually, the sun must warm it, and it must have the dew of grace. But this sun and this dew are nothing else but the Immaculate and Her alone, for She is the Mediatrix of all graces.… 33 In order that flowers blossom in the soul, they must receive the warmth of the light of the Immaculate. Just as a child understands and feels instinctively that he will develop by being with his mother, that he must suck his nourishment from her breast so that he might live, so also the soul does not develop in any other way but by being with the Mother of God. And we feel this ourselves in practice, that when our relation to the Immaculate grows cold, we go down spiritually. The devil knows this well, which is why he strives by every means to take us away from devotion to the Mother of God. He will propose other very holy devotions as long as they aren’t to Her, because then it will be easier for him to succeed. Let us, however, offer ourselves without limits to the Immaculate; let us not put any limit to our love for Her, and then will be verified what is written in Holy Scripture: “She shall crush your head, but you will lie in wait for her heel.” The devil can only lie in wait for us, but the final result will always be: “She shall crush.” I exhort all of you, then, very much to this devotion. (K 71, April 25, 1937) A very strong term of endearment, being a diminutive of Matka (Mother): it might be translated by “mommy.” 2 Nam cóz tu pozostaje? 3 “Zaparl.” 1 www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • May 2011 34 SAInTS ViSiTATion of The ReliCS of ST. TheReSe To SouTh AfRiCA Fr. David Thomas, FSSPX W atching the FIFA 2010 Soccer World Cup in distant South Africa, in your astonishment that such a colossal world event could be so successfully mounted here, you certainly cannot possibly have guessed that the Archbishop of Johannesburg, Joseph Buti Thlagale, OMI, was doing something far more significant sub specie aeternitatis. He had the marvelous apostolic idea of arranging for the visit to our country of the major relics of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, Patron of the Missions, to coincide with this great national occasion. When we heard this surprising news, I said in passing to Fr. Bedel: “Imagine if the relics came to our priory!” But of course we had no intenTHE ANGELUS • May 2011 www.angeluspress.org tion of approaching the archbishop for such a blessing. So when the relics were being venerated locally, we tried to visit her twice, but in vain: this was not meant to be. But Providence willed otherwise. Two of our faithful, visiting the relics in a nearby church, afterwards found themselves near the approachable archbishop, and one lady asked him simply: “Your Grace, can the Society of St. Pius X in Roodepoort have the relics? After all, St. Theresa is their saint as well.” His immediate reply “Yes, it’s my pleasure” was so positive that the dear lady thought that he must have misunderstood her. “But it’s the Lefebvrist church I am talking about!” To which he replied as promptly: “Of course. I know. It’s my pleasure. It’s my pleasure. Just tell them to speak to Fr. Shaun.” (Fr. Shaun Mary von Lillienfeld, Administrator of his cathedral). Nothing daunted, she phoned Fr. Shaun and told him of her conversation with the archbishop, excusing herself by adding: “All our parishioners are running around to other parishes to honour the relics.” Says Fr. Shaun, “Yes, I know. I have seen them here at the cathedral... What I want you to do is phone Fr. Thomas. Tell him what you have done, and tell him that I am sorry but there is not even half an hour left on the visitation schedule.” As soon as she had done so, I phoned Fr. Shaun to thank him for even considering us, and for his wonderful achievement bringing the relics to our country. After a short, pleasant conversation, he said: “Let SAInTS me look again and see if we can arrange something for your parish.” I then enlisted a small army “to pray for a very special intention”– including especially our first communicants, “Ask Jesus to give Fr. Thomas what he is asking Him.” Two weeks later I received this text message from Fr. Shaun: “Saturday 18th September from 10:00am to 2:30pm? Would this be too soon for the relics?” I replied directly that nothing was too soon for such a privilege. Two hours later Fr. Shaun decided that we needed more time to prepare. Instead he offered us Monday, October 4th, from 10:00am to 2:30pm. We could only accept with joy. But to crown our joys this was also the first day of our annual priests’ retreat. No surprise that it was a Theresian retreat, preached by Fr. Thierry Gaudray immediately after he had led a pilgrimage to Lisieux on her feast day, Sunday 3rd October. The joy of our people was evident in the enthusiastic turnout everyday for the Novena in preparation for 4th October–Holy Mass at 7:15am followed by a sermon on the life of St. Thérèse, and Rosary and Benediction. The day arrived and we gave St. Thérèse a wonderful welcome. We met her at the main gate with full liturgical solemnity (Fr. Anthony Esposito, priest, Fr. Damian Carlile, Deacon, and Fr. Carlo Magno Saa, Subdeacon) and everyone fell spontaneously to their knees as we took her to the Grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes where we sang the Litany of the Saints in her honour–in the blazing African sun. There followed a few moments of awful reverence as we all waited for the little girls of our school to take their place before the reliquary to scatter rose petals on her way. Six strong men then carried the reliquary (295 lbs.) in solemn procession into the church for the Rosary and Solemn High Mass. Just before Mass, heeding the words of Our Lord: “Unless you become as little children, you shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven,” our children laid at the foot of the rel- ics all the petitions of the parishioners, present and absent, and all our friends and benefactors of the priory and school. Everyone had time to venerate the relics before the beginning of the Solemn High Mass. It was a rousing Mass of high devotion, not least because we all sang the Missa de Angelis in honour of her special devotion to the angels. I was fortunate to be assisted at the altar by Fr. Denis Bedel (Deacon) and Fr. Benôit Martin de Clausonne (Subdeacon). After the sermon we all knelt as I solemnly declared St. Thérèse of Lisieux, second patron of Our Lady of Sorrows Priory and of St. John the Baptist School. After a brief four-hour stay, the relics had to return to Lisieux. We were the last station on her apostolic journey here in South Africa and our faithful were affected to tears by our singing the Salve Regina as she left us. She left us–but it is as if she never left us, for she is somehow still among us, scattering roses. We have experienced in a big way what she promised when she said that she would spend her Heaven doing good on earth. Some in our midst are convinced that God is using one of His greatest missionaries to restore the Church. And in fact the visible effects and grateful comments of so many present made it clear that this was the beautiful classical liturgy of the Roman Rite which produced countless saints down the ages, not least of all our Patron of the Missions. And I feel that I am only able to sum up the majesty of these historic ten days by turning to the words of our great founder, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre: One of the most beautiful things that the liturgy of the ages teaches is respect, because the respect of the sacred is respect for God, God present in the liturgy, God present in persons and things. This is what is meant by the sacred. The desacralization and the vulgarity encountered in the modern rites destroy respect. There is no more respect for the Blessed Sacrament, 35 or for persons, or for the hierarchy. The flower of Christian courtesy is respect. Every Christian respects God, God present in persons, in things, God present in the reality of the sacraments. All the magnificent ceremonies that govern the liturgy are endowed with the signs of respect for God, by genuflections, inclinations, but also by the gestures of respect shown to the objects that are used in the course of our offices, the sacred vessels, for example, or by the kissing of the stole by the priest before he puts it on, and so on. And as the practical, pastoral priest that he was, the Archbishop continues immediately in the very next paragraph: We must also respect our neighbor, we must respect one another. There is nothing more unpleasant than the widespread vulgarity by which men mutually treat each other without any signs of respect, and which would make of men a kind of herd without any sense of feeling. Our souls are temples of the Holy Ghost. Thus there is something eminently holy in us, in our persons, in our souls, that others should respect in us as we must respect it and them. Vulgarity in our relations with others must be banished, for we should not conduct ourselves towards those around us as if there were nothing sacred in them. (Against the Heresies, p. 73) I can do no better in closing than tell you of a very interesting coincidence. The first Mass before the relics of St. Thérèse after her arrival in our country happened to be one of the weekly evening Masses of the traditional rite in the Cathedral of Christ the King. Afterwards someone remarked: “At least St. Thérèse would have recognised this Mass.” Providence willed that the last Mass was also in the traditional rite in our priory, and curiously enough, someone else recognised the same thing saying: “At least St. Thérèse would have recognised this Mass.” Fr. David Thomas was ordained in Winona in 2004 and has been stationed in South Africa ever since. He is currently Prior of Our Lady of Sorrows Priory in Roodeport and is director of St. John the Baptist School in Johannesburg. www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • May 2011 36 Church an egypt: The Interreligious Dream and the Islamic reality O n January 31, Vaticanist Sandro Magister published on his website chiesa.espressonline. it the call launched by 23 Egyptian Muslims in favor of a more authentic Islam, more respectful of the rights of all; as a commentary, fi gures the analysis of the Egyptian Jesuit Fr. Samir Khalil Samir, who compares this call to some of Benedict XVI’s declarations. The text, entitled “Document for the Renewal of Religious Discourse,” was published and made available online on January 24 by the Egyptian paper Yawm al-Sâbi (The Seventh Day), and passed on by many Arab websites at the very moment the crisis that would obtain the departure of President Hosni Mubarak was beginning. Fr. Samir translated and made available to the non-Arab world, on the website of the Pontifical Institute of Foreign Missions’ press agency Asia News, this document made up of 22 points, the basis of a reform program for Islam in order to pass “from a superficial and exterior practice of this religion to a more authentic and more essential practice,” followed by developments. Fr. Samir considers Point 8 to be important: it proposes a separation of religion from politics. In the development of this point by the Muslim intellectuals is the word “almaniyyah,” secularism, a word which, in Arab countries, is generally understood as meaning atheism and is therefore condemned by principle. The authors of the document write in their commentary that secularism should not be considered as an enemy of religion, but rather as a protection against the political or commercial use of religion. “In this context,” they write, “secularism is in harmony with Islam and is therefore legally acceptable.” But it is not THE ANGELUS • May 2011 www.angeluspress.org so if it is transformed into a control exercised by the State over Muslim activities. “This point,” underlines Fr. Samir, “even if it has been the object of many debates, is the proof of the fact that the concept of a civil society that does not immediately coincide with the Muslim community is being born in Egypt.” He also indicates Point 6 concerning holy war. The authors of the document would allow it only if it is defensive and only on Muslim land. It is never permitted to kill unarmed people, women, old people, children, priests, monks. It is never permitted to attack places of prayer. The authors underline that this doctrine has been that of Islam for 1,400 years and that those who violate it commit a grave transgression. According to Fr. Samir, if we examine what Benedict XVI said– the same year as his discourse in Ratisbonne and his trip to Turkey– concerning Islam’s future, this document from Cairo constitutes a little step in the direction hoped for by the Pope. Benedict XVI had claimed before the Roman Curia on December 22, 2006: The Muslim world today is finding itself faced with an urgent task. This task is very similar to the one that has been imposed upon Christians since the Enlightenment, and to which the Second Vatican Council, as the fruit of long and difficult research, found real solutions for the Catholic Church. On the one hand, one must counter a dictatorship of positivist reason that excludes God from the life of community and from public organizations, thereby depriving man of his specific criteria of judgment. On the other, one must welcome the true conquests of the Enlightenment, human rights and especially the freedom of faith and its practice, and recognize these also as being essential elements for the authenticity of religion. As in the Christian community, where there has been a long search to find the correct position of faith in relation to such beliefs–a search that will certainly never be concluded once and for all, so also the Islamic world with its own tradition faces the immense task of finding the appropriate solutions in this regard. coMMenTArY Such is the hope that guides the interreligious dialogue with Islam: the apparition of disciples of Mohammed rallied to the ideas of the Enlightenment and human rights, as the Roman authorities have been ever since Vatican II. Not to mention the doctrinal difficulties that such a project does not fail to raise up and that are of no little stature, let us evoke a simply practical problem: could Islam, which has no clergy, convoke a council for a “Muslim Vatican II” that would impose itself upon all Muslims no matter their school of thought (Shiite, Sunni, etc.) and no matter the antagonism between these schools of thought? In the end, what do these Egyptian Muslim intellectuals who wrote up this document really represent? Sure, we have seen at Tahrir Square in Cairo Muslims and Coptic Christians united against the regime in power; but at the same time, an investigation led by Washington’s Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life in seven countries where Muslims are the majority–including Egypt–quoted by chiesa.espressonline, reveals that the “democratic” aspirations of the Egyptian population (59%) coexist with the defense of the principles of Islam, for example, the death penalty for those who abandon Islam (84%), the influence of the Islamic religion on politics (85%)… To go from a dream to reality, the only solution is to wake up. (Source: DICI) and World 37 SWITZerlAnD: Between 25,000 and 30,000 “leave” the catholic church in 2010 Between 25,000 and 30,000 people left the Catholic Church in 2010 in Switzerland according to estimates published by the press agency Apic. The Secretary General of the Roman Catholic Central Conference (RKZ), Daniel Kosch, interviewed upon the publication of these figures on February 11 last, stated that “people primarily want to turn their backs on the Church as an institution,” because “they no longer have any living links with it and they no longer live in a milieu with people for whom it retains great significance.” It seems, however, that the numbers of the faithful of the Catholic Church in Switzerland have not fallen and in some cantons have even increased thanks to immigration. But, as the head of the association of cantonal ecclesiastical organizations pointed out, “this should not be taken as a consolation.” Daniel Kosch hopes that “all those who influence and form the Church—and not only the bishops, priests, and other pastoral agents—but all of us” try to make the Church “a place of experience where a community lives, where one can experiment with meaning and confront the pertinent questions, where hope can be found and where misery decreases.” Meaning, pertinent questions, more hope and less misery–for all that a priest is not necessarily needed; social assistance and psychological support are quite enough. And so the vocations crisis is resolved. Through emptiness. (Source: DICI) World Youth Day catechism Suggests endorsement of “contraceptive Methods” A n e w Va t i c a n sponsored catechism intended for youth suggests that Christian couples “can and should” use “contraceptive methods” when deciding on how many children to have. The revelation comes two days before the eve of the official launch of the so-called “YouCat,” produced specially for the Church’s World Youth Day event, to be held in Madrid this coming August. The Vatican’s spokesman, Fr. Federico Lombardi, S.J., told CNA April 11, “I have not yet seen the text of YouCat and am therefore unable to comment further.” The Vatican has scheduled a press conference for April 13 to officially release the text. Organizers of World Youth Day have already ordered 700,000 copies of YouCat to give to young pilgrims along with a sleeping bag, map, and other accessories. The catechism is laid out in a question and answer fashion. Question 420 in the Italian language edition states: “Q. Puo una coppia christiana fare ricorso ai metodi anticoncezionali?” (Can a Christian couple have recourse to contraceptive methods?) “A. Si, una coppia cristiana puo e deve essere responsabile nella sua facolta di poter donare la vita.” (Yes, a Christian couple can and should be responsible in its faculty of being able to give life.) Vatican sources who spoke to CNA April 11 on the condition of anonymity speculated that the problem was in the original German text, a fact that was later confirmed by CNA. “YouCat” is to be published in 12 additional languages.The English edition, published by Ignatius Press, does not contain the problematic language. It is not yet known if other language ver- sions also contain the same controversial statement on contraception. The Catholic Church has always opposed the use of contraception. In the official Catechism of the Catholic Church, its use is described as “intrinsically evil.” The creation of the 300-pageYouCat was overseen by Cardinal Christoph Schonborn, Archbishop of Vienna. It was given the doctrinal seal of approval by the Bishops of Austria in March 2010. Cardinal Schonborn was also the editor of the universal Catechism of the Catholic Church, published in 1992. He is slated to be in attendance at the launch press conference on Wednesday. Also slated to be present are Cardinal Stanislaw Rylko, president of the Pontifical Council for the Laity and Archbishop Rino Fisichella, president of the Pontifical Council for the Promotion of New Evangelization. (Source: Catholic News Agency) www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • May 2011 38 Church and World hiGh uP, leT DoWn BY PoPe BeneDiCT They are some of the leading traditionalist thinkers. They had wagered on him, and now they feel betrayed. The latest disappointments: the Courtyard of the Gentiles and the encounter in Assisi. The accusation that they make against Ratzinger is the same that they make against the Council: having replaced condemnation with dialogue... Most recently, in the traditionalist Catholic camp, the criticisms against Pope Ratzinger have not diminished, but have grown in intensity. And they reflect a growing disappointment with respect to the expectations initially invested in the restorative action of the current pontificate. The criticisms of some traditionalists are focused in particular on how Benedict XVI interprets Vatican Council II and the postconciliar period. The pope errs–in their view– when he limits his criticism to the deterioration of the postcouncil. Vatican II, in fact–again, in their view–was not only poorly interpreted and applied: it was itself a source of errors, the first of which was the renunciation of the Church’s authority to exercise, when necessary, a magisterium of definition and condemnation; the renunciation, that is, of the anathema, in exchange for dialogue... On the historical level, this idea tends to be supported by the volume recently published by Professor Roberto de Mattei: Il Concilio Vaticano II: Una storia mai scritta (Vatican Council II: A history never written). According to De Mattei, the conciliar documents cannot be viewed in isolation from the men and events that produced them: from those men and those maneuvers whose deliberate intention–abundantly successful–was to break with the traditional doctrine of the Catholic Church on several essential points. On the theological level, one authoritative traditionalist critic of Benedict XVI is Brunero Gherardini, a vigorous 85 years old, canon of the Basilica of Saint Peter, professor emeritus of the Pontifical Lateran University, and director of the Thomistic journal of theology Divinitas. In 2009, Gherardini published a volume entitled Concilio Vaticano II: Un discorso da fare (The Ecumenical Vatican Council II: A Much Needed Discussion), which concluded with an “Appeal to the Holy Father,” whom he asked to submit the documents of the Council for re-examination, and to clarify in definite and definitive form “if, in what sense, and to what extent” Vatican II was or was not in continuity with the previous magisterium of the Church. Now, at a distance of two years from that book, Gherardini has come out with another book entitled: Concilio Vaticano II: Il discorso mancato (Vatican Council II: The missing discussion), in which he laments the silence with which Church authorities reacted to his previous foray. And pushes his criticism even deeper... (Source: Sandro Magister, www. chiesa.espressonline, “High Up, Let Down by Pope Benedict”) Italy: Participation in catholic religious Instruction Declining Although still quite high, the participation in Catholic religious instruction in the academic milieu is slightly declining in Italy. Six million children and adolescents took religion classes in 2010, indicates the department of the Bishops’ Conference responsible for the question on February 27, 2011. This represents 90% of the students in public schools, whereas THE ANGELUS • May 2011 www.angeluspress.org in 2008, it was 91%, and in 1994-1995, it was 94%, according to the Italian Bishops’ Conference’s National Service for Instruction in the Catholic Religion. Even if the grades in religion are taken into account in the general evaluation of the students, participation in religious instruction is optional in Italy. (Source: DICI) QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 39 Fr. Peter R. Scott, FSSPX Does the Church have any teaching concerning organ harvesting? The frequency of organ transplantation in recent years has brought to a head the debate which Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI have been unable to resolve, despite several discourses on the question. The debate does not concern the morality of organ transplantation in itself. This question was in fact resolved by Pope Pius XII, when he spoke on the question of the transplantation of the cornea of the eye, which can be taken from the cadaver of a deceased person. He had this to say in his discourse to specialists of eye surgery on May 14, 1956: The cadaver is not, in the proper sense of the word, a subject of rights, for it is deprived of the personality that can alone make it the subject of rights. The extirpation is no longer the removal of a good; the visual organs have, in effect, no longer the character of good in the cadaver, for they no longer serve it, and have no relationship to an end. Hence the conclusion he draws: The deceased person from whom the cornea is taken is not harmed in any of the goods to which he has a right, nor in his right to these goods. (Quoted in Courrier de Rome, No. 312, June 2008) The same principles can be applied to the transplantation of organs necessary for life, morally permissible provided that they are taken from a cadaver. John Paul II confirmed this very clear teaching in a discourse to the 18th International Medical Congress on Transplantation on August 24, 2000: Individual vital organs in a body can only be removed after death. This requirement is obvious, since to act differently would mean to intentionally bring about the death of the donor by removing his organs. Brain Death and Real Death However, the debate concerns the determination of the moment of death, necessary to morally remove organs for organ transplantation. The difficulty lies in the fact that the moment of death, the separation of body and soul, is not an event that is always obvious to empirical investigation. Furthermore, it is clear that, as both Pius XII and John Paul II admit, the determination of this moment is not a question for theology or for the Church’s Magisterium, but is a technical one for which the medical profession is responsible. Before 1968, the determination of the moment of death was done by the cessation of respiratory and cardiac functions, entirely necessary to maintain the unity of a living being. However, it was in 1968 that the Harvard criteria were first proposed and accepted, namely that brain death could be used to determine the fact of death. Professor Seifert, a specialist on the question, had this to say to LifesiteNews of February 24, 2009: We look in vain for any argument for this unheard of change of determining death...except for two pragmatic reasons for introducing it, which have nothing to do at all with the question of whether a patient is dead but only deal with why it is practically useful to consider or define him to be dead…the wish to obtain organs for implantation www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • May 2011 40 and to have a criterion for switching off ventilators in ICUs. It is the identification between brain death and real death that has become the moral basis of all transplantation of organs necessary for life since 1968, for it allows organs to be taken from a person considered juridically dead (consequently not really a person, and no longer considered as having either human dignity or rights, except as determined in a previous last will), but in all appearance biologically alive, given that his cardiac and respiratory functions are being artificially maintained. Encouragement was given to this opinion by Pope John Paul II when, in the above-mentioned discourse of August 2000 he declared: We can say that the recently established criterion to establish death with certitude, namely the complete and irreversible cessation of all cerebral activity, if rigorously applied, does not seem to be in conflict with the essential elements of a serious anthropology….This moral certitude is considered as the necessary and sufficient basis for acting in an ethically correct fashion. This opinion was further confirmed by a 2006 statement from the Holy See, entitled “Why the Concept of Brain Death Is Valid as a Definition of Death” and signed by Cardinal Georges Cottier, then theologian to the papal household; Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo, at the time president of the Pontifical Council for the Family; Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, the former Archbishop of Milan; and Bishop Elio Sgreccia, the then president of the Pontifical Academy for Life. THE ANGELUS • May 2011 www.angeluspress.org QUESTIONS AN However, John Paul II’s statement was certainly not definitive, and like Pius XII, he accepted the principle that when in doubt a person was presumed to be alive and not dead at all: Moreover, we recognize the moral principle according to which even the simple suspicion of being in the presence of a living person brings with it the obligation of full respect for him and of abstaining from any action that aims at bringing about death. (March 20, 2004; Discourse to a congress of Catholic physicians) His acceptation of doubt on this question was shown by his approval of the decision of the Pontifical Academy for Life to convoke a meeting of specialists in February 2005 “on the determination of the precise moment of death,” which would have had no purpose if the neurological criteria were the final word on the question. Benedict XVI has continued the same rather ambiguous attitude, on the one hand being in favor of organ transplantation as an act of charity (being himself a card-carrying organ donor until elected Pope), but on the other hand insisting that it is actual death that is required to legitimize organ transplantation. Professor E. Christian Brugger, Senior Fellow of Ethics at the Culture of Life Foundation, points out that in his November 2009 address to a conference on organ transplantation organized in part by the Pontifical Academy of Life, Benedict XVI warned that the principle of moral certainty in determining death must be the highest priority of doctors. In its roster of speakers, that confer- ence…did not address the moral issue that is at the heart of the controversy over organ transplants. (LifeSiteNews, February 4, 2011) While such traditionally-minded ethicists are hoping that opinion in the Vatican may swing back around to condemning brain death as a criterion of real death, we must ask ourselves the question as to why there is such timidity on such an important question. Why is it that the obvious common sense observation that brain death does not bring about dissolution of the organism, nor of its unity, nor of its vital activities, is not clearly admitted by the modernist theologians? There can be only one explanation: the influence of situation ethics, namely that the morality of each particular act depends essentially on the circumstances rather than on the act itself, with the consequent hesitation to condemn acts as intrinsically evil. This combined with the focus on a more secular ethics, concentrating on the value of man’s physical existence, rather than the sovereign importance of his soul and of his eternal salvation, has led to the confusion. If only we had the clarity of Pope Pius XII, who in his discourse on the problems of resuscitation had this to say: “Human life continues for as long as its vital functions–which is not the same thing as the simple life of the organs–continue to manifest themselves spontaneously or with the help of artificial procedures” (in Courrier de Rome, op. cit.). Dead Donor Rule False A very interesting contribution to the whole consideration of 41 AND ANSWERS the morality of the removal of organs from persons said to be brain dead has come from an unexpected source. It is the New England Journal of Medicine that published, on August 14, 2008, Vol. 359 (7), p. 674-675, an article that demonstrates beyond all serious doubt that the harvesting of organs is done from persons that truly are living, and that in point of fact it is the harvesting of the organs necessary for life, such as lungs, heart, two kidneys, complete liver and pancreas, that is actually the cause of death. The title of the article is “The Dead Donor Rule and Organ Transplantation,” and it was written by Dr. Truong and Professor Miller. (See excerpt on p. 42.) The authors do not conclude that organ transplantation ought not therefore to be done, but to the contrary justify it on the purely utilitarian non-principle that the person was going to die in any case. This we cannot accept, as the Church has constantly taught, for the end does not justify the means, and you cannot kill a person on account of the good that can come to another person. Nevertheless, the passage attached as a note below illustrates the principle that the donor of the organs is indeed a living person, and hence that act of taking the organs is the deliberate termination of life, and that transplantation of organs necessary for life can only be justified as the taking of one life to save or prolong another life–that is by playing God. The authors are entirely in favor of such immorality, but at least they avoid the hypocrisy of attempting to justify it by pretending that the brain dead person is actually a dead non-person, point- ing out that he retains many vital functions, and can live for years in such a state. In their own words: The uncomfortable conclusion to be drawn from this literature is that although it may be perfectly ethical to remove vital organs for transplantation from patients who satisfy the diagnostic criteria of brain death, the reason it is ethical cannot be that we are convinced they are really dead. They do not even hesitate to question the motives of the medical profession changing from the definition of death by cessation of cardiac function to that of brain death, purely and simply to obtain organs for transplantation: At worst, this ongoing reliance suggests that the medical profession has been gerrymandering the definition of death to carefully conform with conditions that are most favorable for transplantation. At best, the rule has provided misleading ethical cover that cannot withstand careful scrutiny. This leaves us with the acute moral problem of patients who are dying, and whose only hope for physical survival lies in heart, lung, or liver transplants. Surely if it is up to the medical profession to determine the moment of death, it is also up to the Church to state loud and clear that brain death is not actual death, and cannot be used as a justification for organ transplantation. These organs can only be usefully obtained from a body which still has all its vital functions, and which is still intact–that is biologically alive. The fact that the person is brain dead changes nothing to this. Such persons have no alternative but to accept their terminal illness and to prepare for a holy death. To accept the donation of organs is to accept the termination of another person’s life for one’s own good. However, a clear distinction must be made from those persons who could receive a donation of an organ from a living person, without the removal of the organ causing his death. This is the case of the transplantation of one kidney, a part of a liver or pancreas (either from a person in good health or one who is going to die), a cornea, or such harmless procedures as bone marrow transplantations. To the contrary, such transplantations, which require a sacrifice on the part of the donor but not the loss of life, are strongly to be encouraged whenever such means are a proportional and appropriate medical treatment. Finally, Catholics ought to be reminded that they ought not to grant a general permission for organ transplantation from their own body, as is frequently requested, and that they should not allow such a permission to be included on their driver’s license. This would effectively be to grant permission for the immoral removal of their organs and for their own murder, should they become brain dead, and it would take away from their Catholic relatives the power to stop the medical profession from taking these measures. Fr. Peter Scott was ordained by Archbishop Lefebvre in 1988. After assignments as seminary professor, U.S. 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. www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • May 2011 42 QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS The Dead Donor Rule and Organ Transplantation (excerpt) Since its inception, organ transplantation has been guided by the overarching ethical requirement known as the dead donor rule, which simply states that patients must be declared dead before the removal of any vital organs for transplantation. Before the development of modern critical care, the diagnosis of death was relatively straightforward: patients were dead when they were cold, blue, and stiff. Unfortunately, organs from these traditional cadavers cannot be used for transplantation. Forty years ago, an ad hoc committee at Harvard Medical School, chaired by Henry Beecher, suggested revising the definition of death in a way that would make some patients with devastating neurologic injury suitable for organ transplantation under the dead donor rule. The concept of brain death has served us well and has been the ethical and legal justification for thousands of lifesaving donations and transplantations. Even so, there have been persistent questions about whether patients with massive brain injury, apnea, and loss of brain-stem reflexes are really dead. After all, when the injury is entirely intracranial, these patients look very much alive: they are warm and pink; they digest and metabolize food, excrete waste, undergo sexual maturation, and can even reproduce. To a casual observer, they look just like patients who are receiving long-term artificial ventilation and are asleep. The arguments about why these patients should be considered dead have never been fully convincing. The definition of brain death requires the complete absence of all functions of the entire brain, yet many of these patients retain essential neurologic function, such as the regulated secretion of hypothalamic hormones. Some have argued that these patients are dead because they are permanently unconscious (which is true), but if this is the justification, then patients in a permanent vegetative state, who breathe spontaneously, should also be diagnosed as dead, a characterization that most regard as implausible. Others have claimed that “brain-dead” patients are dead because their brain damage has led to the “permanent cessation of functioning of the organism as a whole.” Yet evidence shows that if these patients are supported beyond the acute phase of their illness (which is rarely done), they can survive for many years. The uncomfortable conclusion to be drawn from this literature is that although it may be perfectly ethical to remove vital organs for transplantation from patients who satisfy the diagnostic criteria of brain death, the reason it is ethical cannot be that we are convinced they are really dead. THE ANGELUS • May 2011 www.angeluspress.org Over the past few years, our reliance on the dead donor rule has again been challenged, this time by the emergence of donation after cardiac death as a pathway for organ donation. Under protocols for this type of donation, patients who are not brain-dead but who are undergoing an orchestrated withdrawal of life support are monitored for the onset of cardiac arrest. In typical protocols, patients are pronounced dead 2 to 5 minutes after the onset of asystole (on the basis of cardiac criteria), and their organs are expeditiously removed for transplantation. Although everyone agrees that many patients could be resuscitated after an interval of 2 to 5 minutes, advocates of this approach to donation say that these patients can be regarded as dead because a decision has been made not to attempt resuscitation. This understanding of death is problematic at several levels. The cardiac definition of death requires the irreversible cessation of cardiac function. Whereas the common understanding of “irreversible” is “impossible to reverse,” in this context irreversibility is interpreted as the result of a choice not to reverse. This interpretation creates the paradox that the hearts of patients who have been declared dead on the basis of the irreversible loss of cardiac function have in fact been transplanted and have successfully functioned in the chest of another. Again, although it may be ethical to remove vital organs from these patients, we believe that the reason it is ethical cannot convincingly be that the donors are dead. At the dawn of organ transplantation, the dead donor rule was accepted as an ethical premise that did not require reflection or justification, presumably because it appeared to be necessary as a safeguard against the unethical removal of vital organs from vulnerable patients. In retrospect, however, it appears that reliance on the dead donor rule has greater potential to undermine trust in the transplantation enterprise than to preserve it. At worst, this ongoing reliance suggests that the medical profession has been gerrymandering the definition of death to carefully conform with conditions that are most favorable for transplantation. At best, the rule has provided misleading ethical cover that cannot withstand careful scrutiny. A better approach to procuring vital organs while protecting vulnerable patients against abuse would be to emphasize the importance of obtaining valid informed consent for organ donation from patients or surrogates before the withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment in situations of devastating and irreversible neurologic injury… Dr. Truong & Professor Miller, New England Journal of Medicine, August 14, 2008, No. 359 (7), pp. 674-675. TheLasTWord 43 Le Sel de la Terre Pope John Paul II and Tradition T he announcement of the impending beatification of John Paul II (scheduled for May 1st of this year) is the occasion to remind our readers that we have already published an article by Fr. Hervé Gresland on this subject: “Some Reasons for Not Beatifying John Paul II.” Let us briefly summarize the arguments of the article: John Paul II was the Pope of Vatican II, the council that introduced a break with the Church’s past for the first time in its history. He developed, according to the analysis of Fr. Johannes Dörmann,2 the strange theology that propagates the idea of universal salvation (and thus of an empty hell). He presented all religions as means of pleasing God, notably by spectacular ecumenical gestures such as the one at Assisi in 1986. He was the first pope to visit a synagogue and a mosque: Not only did he not preach Jesus Christ there, but he let it be believed that these religions that explicitly deny the mediation of our Lord Jesus Christ can be pleasing to God. Moreover, he publicly kissed the Koran, manifesting his respect for a book that denies the divinity of Jesus Christ and presents a man ankylosed with vices as a messenger of God; and he slipped a message of repentance into the Wailing Wall at Jerusalem, as if it were Isaac who had persecuted Ismael and not the reverse.3 Again he manifested his repentance in the year 2000 for all of the Church’s glorious past, especially the Crusades. It would also be necessary to cite his excesses in inculturation–he agreed to participate in pagan cults and mingled them with Catholic worship; his off-centered morality, based upon the dignity of man and no longer on divine law; his propagation of a superficial Catholicism, especially during the World Youth Days; the inflated number of trips, of beatifications and of canonizations (he canonized more saints than all his predecessors combined); his liberal governance, allowing the propagation of dubious or scandalous movements (for example, he had a great admiration for Fr. Marcial Maciel, founder of the Legionnaries of Christ4); and so forth. Henceforth everyone can see for himself the fruits of this pontificate: the apostasy of Christian nations and the autodemolition of the Church. If the origin of all these errors is sought, it is readily to be found in the abandonment of Tradition in favor of a neo-modernist “new theology,” which has been amply analyzed in these columns. As a matter of fact, John Paul II will go down in the history of the Church as the Pope who excommunicated Archbishop Lefebvre and through him the Church’s bimillennary Tradition. This spot [upon his reputation] is indelible. And if, God forbid, the beatification and canonization of John Paul II go through, it would become necessary to pray that God curtail the passion of the Church and that He raise up a true pastor who will annul this scandalous act and restore Tradition to its place of honor. Meanwhile, within the measure of our means and in the footsteps of Msgr. Lefebvre, let us defend holy Tradition. This is what all the saints, all the doctors, all the good shepherds, and all the great ecclesiastical writers have done, as this quotation from the famous Origen (A.D. 185253) testifies: …seeing there are many who think they hold the opinions of Christ, and yet some of these think differently from their predecessors, yet as the teaching of the Church, transmitted in orderly succession from the apostles and remaining in the Churches to the present day is still preserved, that alone is to be accepted as truth which differs in no respect from ecclesiastical and apostolic tradition.5 Editorial, Sel de la Terre (Spring 2011) Sel de la Terre, No. 55, Winter 2005-2006, pp. 252-60. 2 John Paul II’s Theological Journey to the Prayer Meeting of Religions at Assisi, 4 vol. Kansas City: Angelus Press. 3 For an explanation of this allegory, see Gal. 4:21-31. 4 In 1998, a complaint was lodged by eight members of the Legion of Christ with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (then directed by Cardinal Ratzinger), accusing Marcial Maciel of sexual abuse. On March 26, 2010, in a communiqué, those in charge of the Legion of Christ acknowledged that their founder had committed “acts of sexual abuse on minor seminarians.” 5 “Cum multi sint, qui se putant sentire quae Christi sunt, et nonnulli eorum diversa a prioribus sentiant, servetur vero ecclesiastica praedicatio per successionis ordinem ab apostolis tradita et usque ad praesens in ecclesiis permanents, illa sola credenda est veritas, quae in nullo ab ecclesiastica et apostolica traditione discordat.” Origen, De Principiis, Preface, 2 (online at New Advent.org/Fathers). For other authors having written in favor of Tradition, one might cite: St. Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses, I, 9, 4; I, 10, 1; III, 2, 2; Tertullian, De la Prescriptione, XIII; Apologetics, XLVII, 10; Of the Veil of Virgins, I, 3; Against Praxeas, II, 2; Clement of Alexandria, Stromates, VII, 16, 94-95; VII, 17, 107. Lastly, one might also cite Origen’s Commentary on St. John, XIII, 16, 98. See Fr. C. Hanson, Tradition in the Early Church (London, 1962). 1 www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • May 2011 A Year with the Church Fathers Mike Aquilina Times change, but human nature does not. Neither do the daily struggles that all Christians experience in their walk with the Lord. Today as two thousand years ago we fight anger, pride, lust, spiritual sloth. Now as then we strive to be more diligent in prayer, more faithful to the commandments, more patient and charitable toward others. In A Year with the Church Fathers, popular Patristics expert Mike Aquilina gathers the wisest, most practical teachings and exhortations from the Fathers of the Church, and presents them in a format perfect for daily meditation and inspiration. The Fathers were the immediate inheritors of the riches of the Apostolic Age, and their intimacy with the revelation of Jesus Christ is beautifully evident throughout their theological and pastoral writings: a profound patrimony that is ours to read and cherish and profit from. Learn to humbly accept correction from St. Clement of Rome. Let Tertullian teach you how to clear your mind before prayer. Read St. Gregory the Great and deepen your love for the Eucharist. Do you suffer from pain or illness? St. John Chrysostom's counsels will refresh you. Do you have trouble curbing your appetite for food and other fleshly things? St. John Cassian will teach you the true way to moderation and self-control. A Year with the Church Fathers is different from a study guide and more than a collection of pious passages. It is a year-long retreat that in just a few minutes every day will lead you on a cycle of contemplation, prayer, resolution, and spiritual growth that is guaranteed to bring you closer to God and His truth. From the Church Fathers we should expect nothing less. Beautiful gift edition, with two-tone ultra soft cover, ribbon marker, and designed interior pages. rs Boy LetteAltar oy T 365 pp. Two-tone imitation leather ultra soft cover. STK# 8487 ✱ $44.95 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. Six Our Lady s Boy th of e Altar use you d of you beca really prou she sees you mother is happy when I’ll bet your er spot e her very won a warm boy. You mak . You have are an altar Deep t at Holy Mass altar boy. an pries are the assisting because you use you are er’s heart y also beca in your moth you are happ you. heart I’ll bet so proud of and y down in your an altar happ mother so use you are making your Lady loves you beca er Our . moth ly even more If your earth en loves you her in heav boys. boy, your Mot much? g for altar loves you so special likin ed Mother And has a very why our Bless divine Son. her know you loves Do ne who Lord. Of she loves anyo boy loves our First of all, in the every altar tell me that to get up early you need not he is willing responses, . That is why learns the Latin course he does makes and , and why he ings, Mass serve rs’ meet morning to e. fully to serve comes so faith boy must mak and why he which an altar r sacrifices the many othe FIVE Don’ t Say It The other day I had a little experience which did my heart a lot of good. As I was going around the back of the church on my way to the garage, I heard the closing sentences of an argume nt. Joe was telling two of his companions what he thought about the languag e they were using. Joe is quite a boy— one of the biggest and the strongest we have among the Knights of the Altar. “It isn’t cool, and it’s not right for an altar boy to be talking like that,” Joe was telling his friends. His two friends looked at Joe to see whether or not he was serious. But the look on his face soon convinced them, and they didn’t have much to say in reply, for all the boys respect Joe very much. It seems that almost every boy runs into a period in his life when he thinks he is showing his manhood by using 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. An extremely practical book, it leaves not one phase of the altar boy’s life untouched. . . 120 pp. Softcover. Color photographs. STK# 8497 ✱ $15.95 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 J S T f o l r t s 1 THE MASS OF SAINT PIUS V: Spiritual and Theological Commentaries Bernard-Marie de Chivré, O.P. Fr. Bernard-Marie de Chivré was a 20th-century Dominican priest who spent time as a prior, spiritual director, and military chaplain. A friend of Archbishop Lefebvre, he preached retreats at Ecône in the early days of the battle for Tradition. This book is a collection of his conferences given between 1968 and 1970 on the traditional Latin Mass. The writings of Fr. de Chivré are so profound that portions were used in our Roman Catholic Daily Missal. These profound and beautiful meditations will help you assist at Mass more fruitfully. Essential reading for priests, seminarians, and all those within the religious life. 281 pp. Hardcover. Dust jacket. STK# 8498 $25.00 Communion in the Hand: Documents and History Most Rev. Juan Rodolfo Laise All that has been elaborated on permits us to realize that the reintroduction of Communion in the hand is nothing other than the triumph of disobedience. It is most serious because it implies the open resistance to an explicit and solidly founded directive of the pope, and because those who did not obey were not only priests, but in many cases bishops and entire episcopal conferences. 108 pp. Color Hardcover. STK# 8503 $14.00 “Since Memoriale Domini was the only legislation in force, how was it that everyone adopted the practice of Communion in the hand as if it were merely an option proposed, and even recommended, by the Church? Seeking an answer to this question and to defend my decision–which was very controversial with some ecclesiastical sectors that spoke out in the media–I encouraged a deeper investigation of the history of this usage. And the results of this investigation are found in this work.”–from the Introduction to Communion in the Hand THE L ITURGICAL A LTAR Geoffrey Webb Covers the historical development, form, symbolism, and vesting of the altar. Demonstrates how to construct a proper altar that conforms to the Church’s prescriptions and ideals without exhausting the parish coffers. It will be of great general interest to any Catholic, particularly church architects, liturgical artists, sacristans, those involved in liturgical functions, altar and rosary sodalities, florists, altar vesture manufacturers, as well as religion teachers for all ages. 1947 edition. 120 pp. Softcover. Illustrated. STK# 8490. $15.00 St. Joseph José Alberto Rodrigues St. Joseph of Nazareth has been hailed as the Light of Patriarchs, the Terror of Demons, and Protector of Holy Mother Church. He comes from a long line of kings and prophets, carrying the entire patriarchy of the Old Testament on his shoulders.This book gives us a second look into who this man is and what his place is in salvation history. His role in the lives of Jesus and Mary, and his position within the Church today are discussed, enriched with Scriptural verses and the treasured sayings of the Pontiffs and Saints through the ages. 162 pp. Softcover. STK# 8488. $19.99 Liber Cover High quality, handmade, imitation soft-leather covers made specifically to fit our Liber Usualis. Protect your costly investment and ensure your Liber lasts a lifetime. Excellent quality and extremely durable. Soft Leather Cover STK# 8501 $40.00 “Viva Cristo Rey!” Prepare yourself for one of the greatest catholic war stories of all time. The Cristeros and the Martrys of the Mexican Revolution Christopher Check 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 Lepanto: The Battle That Saved the West Christopher Check On October 7, 1571, the most important sea battle in history was fought near the mouth of what is today called the Gulf of Patras, then the Gulf of Lepanto. On one side were the war galleys of the Holy League and on the other, those of the Ottoman Turks, rowed by tens of thousands of Christian galley slaves. Although the battle decided the future of Europe, few Europeans, and even fewer European Americans, know the story, much less how close Western Europe came to suffering an Islamic conquest. G. K. Chesterton honored the battle with what is perhaps the greatest ballad of the 20th century. He wrote this extraordinary poem while the postman impatiently waited for the copy. It was instantly popular and remained so for years. The ballad is no less inspiring today and is more timely than ever, as the West faces the growing threat of Islam. In the brand new CD Set Lepanto: The Battle That Saved the West, Christopher Check tells the exhilarating story of Lepanto, first in his own words and then through the poem of G. K. Chesterton. SHIPPING & HANDLING 3 Compact Disc Set. STK# 8458. $27.95 5-10 days 2-4 days 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. 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. 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