“Instaurare omnia in Christo”

The Importance of the Faith
Legitimate Doctrinal Progress
Face to Face in Darkness
Haec Credimus

September - October 2012

Faith
“This faith, which is the beginning of human salvation, the Catholic Church professes to
be a supernatural virtue, by means of which, with the grace of God inspiring and assisting
us, we believe to be true what He has revealed, not because we perceive its intrinsic truth
by the natural light of reason, but because of the authority of God Himself, who makes the
revelation and can neither deceive nor be deceived.
“Nevertheless, in order that the submission of our faith should be in accordance with
reason, it was God’s will that there should be linked to the internal assistance of the
Holy Spirit external indications of His revelation, that is to say divine acts, and first
and foremost miracles and prophecies, which clearly demonstrating as they do the
omnipotence and infinite knowledge of God, are the most certain signs of revelation and
are suited to the understanding of all.”
Vatican Council I, Sess. 3, Chapter 3
With this issue taking the occasion of the “Year of the Faith” we are happy to present you a
large range of articles on the theological virtue of faith.

Letter
from the
Publisher

“For I am not ashamed of the gospel. For it is the power of God unto salvation to
every one that believeth, to the Jew first, and to the Greek. For the justice of God is
revealed therein, from faith unto faith, as it is written: The just man liveth by faith”
(Romans 1: 16-17).
Saint Paul gives here a summary of the Gospel: “The just man liveth by faith.” He
reminds us in a few words how faith comes from God. It is not a natural belief, coming
from men’s inventions, views, feelings… It is a gift from the power of God that men
must receive and assume.
Faith is for all men; the universality of the revelation is recalled here also. It is for the
Jew and the Gentile: “Outside of the Church there is no salvation.”
But above all, and as a logical consequence, it is by faith in Our Lord Jesus Christ
crucified and resurrected that we must live. Faith, in other words, cannot remain a
dead letter. It must direct our lives, our thinking, and our actions. To possess God we
must believe in Our Lord Jesus Christ and let the Faith animate every aspect of our
lives.
It is so true that an inert faith, a faith without consequences, can even lead us away
from God. It can become an obstacle to our union with God, an excuse for our unfaithfulness. In other words, we are inexcusable if, having received the gift of Faith, we do
not live accordingly by a life of prayer, a life of sacrifice, of virtue, of faithfulness to our
duties of state, and so forth.
Without the Faith there is no God, no holiness, no hope. With Faith comes everything: truth, holiness, hope. What else could we preach?
In Christ the King,
Fr. Arnaud Rostand, Publisher

September-October 2012
Volume XXXVIII, Number 5
Publisher
Fr. Arnaud Rostand
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Contents
Letter from the Publisher

4

Theme: The Importance of Faith
– Legitimate Doctrinal Progress
– Face to Face in Darkness
– Haec Credimus
– Society of St. Pius X: General Chapter Statement
– Book Review: The Young Man of Character

6
10
13
20
24

Faith and Morals
– Doctrine: God Is Unique
– Liturgy: The Devotio Moderna
– Social Doctrine: Re-dimensioning the Catholic Simpleton
– Acts of the Magisterium: Humani Generis

26
30
34
38

Spirituality
– Lives of the Saints: St. Pius X, Our Guide Through the Crisis
– Spirituality: The Spirit of Poverty

44
48

“Instaurare omnia in Christo”

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©2012 by Angelus Press. Official Publication of the
Priestly Society of Saint Pius X for the United States and Canada

Christian Culture
– History: The Orphan Trains of New York’s Sisters of Charity
– Family Life: The Family Meal
– Education: Mother of a Priest

51
56
60

– Questions and Answers
– Church and World
– Courrier de Rome: Magisterium and Faith
– Letters to the Editor
– The Last Word

64
69
74
83
87

Theme The Importance of the Faith

Legitimate
Doctrinal 
Progress
In the Church

by Fr. Dominique Bourmaud, SSPX

The problems raised by the history of dogma
and its development in time are not something
new. The Catholic Church is a living society: She
has a history and so can we say of its doctrine.
The development of dogma was a hotly debated
question at the time of the modernist heresy, and
it allowed the Church to draw the precise laws of
growth of doctrine.
For Tyrrell, the English Modernist, life is a
movement of adaptation to perpetually variable
conditions. This finds ready-made applications to
the Church which must grow from Catholicism
to world religion, as it grew from Judaism to
Catholicism: “This is altogether a liberation and
a spiritual gain, a change from tight clothes to
elastic.” Tyrrell could amplify at will the Church
boundaries because he had also a very elastic
concept of Revelation and dogma. “Revelation
6

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belongs rather to the category of impressions
than to that of expression”: it is not so much
affirmation as experience. Doctrines and dogmas
are to the true Church what a pocket map of
London is to the city itself, “a sufficient guide in
certain matters for certain practical purposes”
(taken from One Hundred Years of Modernism,
Ch. 12). By contrast, we need only quote St. Paul
(Gal. 1:8) who anathematizes whoever spreads
another gospel.
To touch ever so briefly on this matter, we
shall endeavor to define and connect the terms
at hand, to explain how dogma can be both
immutable and yet variable, to distinguish the
various expressions of dogma and those which
are subject to development, and the criteria for
discerning genuine from cancerous growth.

Revelation, Faith, Dogma
and Magisterium
These are terms so closely tied that they
should never be dissociated. Revelation precedes
faith as God precedes the believer. Faith, by
bringing the believer’s mind under divine
Revelation, can ultimately reach God and His
mysteries. Revelation, however, deals with the
formulation of the same mysteries because, when
God speaks to men, He will not use mumbojumbo language, but reveals Himself intelligibly.
This spoken Revelation is the object of
declaration by the Church magisterium. The
Church has been endowed with the privilege
of infallibility for this precise purpose, “to
preserve faithfully and declare infallibly” the
divine Revelation (Vatican I). This magisterium is
expressed in two ways: by common declaration of
doctrine, or by a definitory or dogmatic sentence.
Dogma is a definition of some revealed truth with
the seal of approval of the Church magisterium.

Immutable and Expandable
How can we reconcile the fact that dogma
is definitory, and therefore essentially
unchangeable, with its expansion over the
course of the centuries? Is there no contradiction
between the immutability and the development
of dogma? The answer to the dilemma lies in the
double aspect of the deposit of revelation, which
holds all revealed truths and was ended with
the Apostolic age. We are dealing with a divine
deposit revealed to man.
It is because it is a divinely revealed deposit,
immutable because God is immutable, that
the only possible development is one perfectly
homogenous with what was said before, such
that never has the Church given a definition of
dogma which she has later been called to revise.
The declarations of God are not a philosophical
invention waiting for the final touches of human
genius; it is a divine deposit, confided to the
Spouse of Christ. This unchanging dogma
gives the mark of veracity to the ecclesiastical
magisterium, as Bossuet so eloquently testified:

“God willed that the truth come to us carrier
to carrier and hand to hand without any
appearance of innovation. Thus we are able to
recognize what has always been believed and
consequently what should always be believed. It
is, so to speak, in this always that appears the
force of the truth and of the promise, and we lose
it entirely as soon as we find an interruption at
any point” (One Hundred Years, Ch. 13).
On the other hand, the deposit of the faith is
addressed to man. And precisely because dogma
is given to men and through human teachers,
limited and imperfect minds, men can, over the
course of ages, unfold and elucidate the riches of
this treasure. Said otherwise, Catholic doctrine
is expandable because of its living magisterium.
Living contrasts with ‘posthumous,’ which can
be understood only of the subject, that is the
doctors, but not of the object, i.e. the doctrine. If
there is progress, this is not in the dogma, but in
the understanding of the dogma by the doctors
and their auditors, who are better protected
against the assaults of error. Church doctrine,
however, is not subject to change. If the object of
our faith was itself ‘living’ in the modernist sense
of evolving, it would no longer be the faith. If in
order to live, faith in the Trinity had to grow into
faith in the ‘Quaternity’ of God, this would not
be the same faith! There would be a difference in
kind, as between apples and pears.

Various Expressions of Dogma
Conceding nothing to the modernist everflexible dogma, we can nonetheless observe
that dogma does admit of diverse expressions
adapted to modes of human language.
In the first place, dogmatic facts express
things seen by the Apostles, such as Christ’s
death and Resurrection and Mary’s divine
maternity.
Next, the most general affirmations employ
human images beneath which are hidden the
dogmatic message, easily understood by all. Such
is the case with our Creed, “He sitteth at the
right hand of God the Father,” naturally evoking
>
Christ’s judiciary power.
7

Theme The Importance of the Faith
Finally, certain dogmas employ universal
philosophical notions, such as person, substance,
nature, transubstantiation, consubstantiality.
When definitions, under the infallible seal of the
Holy Ghost, allude to the universal categories of
being, they stretch the human mind to the limit of
its comprehension. Then, the dogmatic formulation
is perfect. These definitions are unchangeable both
in their meaning and in their form.

Dogmatic Truths Subject
to Development
In the deposit of Revelation, which truths are
open to development? To set the doctrinal edifice,
like any building, one needs two phases: firstly
assert the fundamental elements: foundations,
supporting pillars, and roof. Only then may one
add partitions, the motifs, and the finishing
touches.
Hence, some dogmatic truths, because they
are immediately necessary to our salvation, have
always been explicitly set forth from the word
go. Such are the mysteries of the Trinity, of the
Incarnation, of the Redemption, of the life of
the world to come, and of the divine sanctions
for our actions. The only development which
they could have undergone is a precision of their
formulation, and even this was over by the fifth
century.
On the other hand, implicit truths, less directly
connected to the mysteries of salvation, can be
believed simply in general at first, and then more
explicitly. Thus, belief in the Church’s teaching
power contains the faith in the infallibility of the
pope; belief in Mary’s holiness implicitly contains
the belief in the Immaculate Conception.

Sound Dogmatic Development
St. Vincent of Lerins, in his Commonitorium,
offers two criteria for distinguishing Catholic
doctrine from heretical excrescence.
The first is external: Any teaching which is not
entirely at home in the universal Church is to be
discarded. He explains that the Catholic faith is
8

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“what has been believed everywhere, always, and
by all.” Yet Cardinal Newman, in his Essay on the
Development of Christian Doctrine, explains
that this criterion is of delicate use in practice as
these terms cannot realistically be taken in their
total extension.
So, St. Vincent offers a more assertive
criterion. Does this new doctrine represent a
genuine development of revealed principles
present in the early Church and preserved as part
of the apostolic deposit of faith. As in biology, it
consists in checking whether the type itself has
been preserved or not. Do the changes allow the
same essence to continue in existence amidst
changing circumstances or do they turn it into
something else? To quote St. Vincent: “Teach
those same things that you have learned, and
when you put them in a new way, do not say
new things. Therefore, let there be growth…
and all possible progress in understanding,
knowledge and wisdom…but only within proper
limits, that is, in the same doctrine, in the same
meaning, and in the same purport—eodem sensu
eademque sententia.” The application of these
criteria ordinarily receives the approval or veto
of Church magisterium. Yet the legitimacy of a
development can also be readily asserted from an
examination based on our own logical thinking
and historical knowledge.
How does the hermeneutic of continuity in
the reform of Benedict XVI fare in the light of
the criteria of St. Vincent? Unfortunately, it
seems that it has endorsed the lethal modernist
principle of doctrinal relativism. Let not the
term continuity applied to Church magisterium
deceive anyone! It refers primarily to the
subjects, the doctors, leaving aside the object, the
doctrine. This magisterial continuity, meaning
the prolongation of Church teaching, demands
not so much the unity of the truth as contiguity in
time among the teachers. Truth does not convey
unity any longer. Now, unity makes the truth! Is
true what unites and false what divides. Now,
curiously, the only heretic is the schismatic, and
the schismatic is not he who disobeys but he who
does not get along. At that rate, the ecumenical
rabbi is more in the truth than the lonely
Archbishop Lefebvre!

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Theme The Importance of the Faith

Face to Face
in Darkness
by Fr. Jonathan Loop, SSPX

St. Paul was a man of action, and thus he
was often quite blunt in his expressions. When,
therefore, discussing the necessity of Faith he is
most succinct and to the point: “Without Faith it
is impossible to please God.” In this, of course,
he is merely making his own the doctrine of
his master, Our Lord, who before He ascended
to heaven declared to His apostles: “He that
believes and is baptized shall be saved: but he
that believes not shall be condemned” (Mk. 16:16).
At first glance, St. Paul’s declaration appears
to be nothing more than a concise rejection of
the attitude so prevalent in the modern world
by which it is held that a God who disapproves
of men for what they think is not worth taking
seriously. However, if one delves somewhat
deeper into St. Paul’s statement, it becomes
evident that he is asserting much more. He
10

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speaks of “pleasing God.” Since the office of
pleasing other persons belongs most especially to
friends and companions, it is clear that St. Paul
is maintaining that the Faith is the necessary
foundation for any true friendship with God.

Substance of Things
to Be Hoped For
Before then exploring the manner in which
Faith contributes to our friendship with God—
that is, to speak in another fashion, our spiritual
life—it would be good to look briefly at what St.
Paul understands by Faith. Earlier in the same
chapter, he states: “Now, faith is the substance of
things to be hoped for, the evidence of things that
appear not.” In the first place, it is the “substance

of things hoped for”; that is to say, it provides us
with our goal in life and therefore determines
the will to its proper object. It is through faith
that we learn of heaven, of eternal life, of the
good things—which have not entered the heart
of men—which Almighty God has prepared for
them who love Him. In the second place, it is the
“evidence of things which appear not.” By this,
St. Paul wishes to make clear that the Faith is a
description of reality as it stands before God. In
other words, it is not a mere sentiment or a blind
trust in God, but a sure guide to understanding
the universe, part of which is inaccessible to our
mere reason. It is this understanding that the
Faith reveals to us of the true nature of the world
that allows us to be friends with God.
Why should this be so? The answer is simple:
it makes us know the goodness of God. This can
be seen in several ways, among which may be
counted the basic fact that it is through the Faith
that we come to understand and to acknowledge
the purpose of life as God intends it. To better
grasp this point, it may be helpful to consider
briefly its opposite: that is, the belief that there is
no God and that He has established no meaning
to life. St. Paul points out, on a somewhat
mundane level, that were the Faith false, then one
may as well give oneself mindlessly to empty and
transitory pleasures. “And if Christ be not risen
again, then is our preaching vain: and your faith
is also vain...for the dead shall not rise again. And
if the dead rise not again? Let us eat and drink,
for tomorrow we shall die.” (I Cor. 15:14, 32.) In
other words, there would be nothing more to be
done than distract ourselves from the reality of
our impending annihilation.

“Where has God Gone?”
There is perhaps no better expression of the
horror of this point of view than that given by
Friedrich Nietzsche in the person of a madman
in The Gay Science: “ ‘Where has God gone?’ he
cried. ‘I shall tell you. We have killed him—you
and I. We are his murderers. But how have we
done this? How were we able to drink up the sea?
Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire

horizon? What did we do when we unchained the
earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now?
Whither are we moving now? Away from all
suns? Are we not perpetually falling? Backward,
sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any
up or down left? Are we not straying as through
an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of
empty space? Has it not become colder? Is it not
more and more night coming on all the time?’ ”

Faith Helps to Realize
the Truth
Without God, without the Faith, there would be
no reference points—no horizon, no sun, no up or
down—which would allow us to define life or any
of our actions as good or purposeful. Everything
we did would be vain, pointless, and the cause
of pain. (This may be said to be the position of
Buddhists, who claim that man ought to strive
to find “Nirvana,” which is a state of nothing­
ness. In effect, they claim there is no meaning to
reality and that all of man’s desires for happiness
can never be satisfied. Therefore, it is best to
suppress them lest one be tormented by ceaseless
and insatiable longings.) The Faith, however,
makes known to us that there is a God and that
He is good, both in Himself and in His dealings
towards us.
This is especially important for us to keep
in mind when we encounter the trials and
vicissitudes which so often dominate our lives.
Here, in particular, the Faith informs us of God’s
love for us. In the first place, we are given a
vision of a God who is both in utter and complete
control of all events and uses all of those events
only to further our happiness. St. Paul teaches
us that “All things were created by him and in
him. And he is before all: and by him all things
consist” (Col. 1:16-7). He further states that Our
Lord “upholds all things by His power” (Heb. 1:3).
Nothing happens contrary to the will of God.
Nothing. When we suffer therefore, the Faith
helps us to realize the truth of what St. Paul
teaches: “And we know that to them that love God
all things work together unto good” (Rom. 8:28).
Indeed, the Faith teaches us that the crosses
11

Theme The Importance of the Faith
we must bear in our daily lives are special tokens
of affection from God: “For whom the Lord loves
he chastises: and he scourges every son whom he
receives” (Heb. 12:6). Our trials and vicissitudes
are therefore in truth causes of rejoicing and
occasions of gratitude.
St. James goes so far as to say: “My brethren,
count it all joy, when you shall fall into divers
temptations...[for] blessed is the man that
endures temptation. When he has been proved,
he shall receive the crown of life which God has
promised to them that love him” (Jas. 1:2, 12).
Our temptations and our trials prepare us for
eternal life, our ultimate goal. But we may ask:
what is this eternal life? Our Lord Himself tells
us that it is “to know the one true God and Him
whom He sent: Jesus Christ” (Jn. 17:3). Here we
receive new light on the first part of St. Paul’s
definition of the Faith: that it is the “substance of
things hoped for.” The joy of the blessed consists
in the vision of the good God and Our Lord Jesus
Christ. What is important for those of us who live
in this valley of tears to realize is that by Faith
we behold this same God and one identical Lord.
In other words, we already possess in substance
eternal life. When compared with the elect we
are, as it were, new born babes who gaze upon
the same scene as our elders. Though we see
the same shapes and colors as do they, we have
difficulty focusing our eyes and making sense of
the objects which present themselves to our view.
St. Paul expresses this reality as follows: “We see
now through a glass in a dark manner: but then
face to face. Now I know in part: but then I shall
know even as I am known” (I Cor. 13:12). Our
vision may be dull, but it is nonetheless directed
at the same object, God, which crowns the elect
in heaven.

“Face to Face in Darkness”
We may go further and make our own the
phrase of Blessed Elizabeth of the Trinity:
namely, that “Faith is the face to face in
darkness.” In other words, by faith we look at God
as He looks at us. Furthermore, we are thereby
enabled to enter into a profound and intimate
12

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conversation with Him. St. Paul prays that “Christ
may dwell by faith in your hearts.” What does
this mean? Nothing less than that—provided we
are in the state of grace—we bear God with us
wherever we go. As a result, we are never alone.
Any time we wish to speak to the good God,
we may do so. Indeed, it is Our Lord’s delight
to make our soul His dwelling place and to live
with us as a friend would. He speaks thus to His
apostles at the Last Supper: “If any one love me,
he will keep my word. And my Father will love
him and we will come to him and will make our
abode with him” (Jn. 14:23). The foundation of
this companionship is our belief in Him; He can
only dwell in our hearts and enrich us with His
friendly society if we first have faith. “Too late
loved I Thee, O Thou Beauty of ancient days, yet
ever new! too late I loved Thee! And behold, Thou
wert within, and I abroad, and there I searched
for Thee; deformed I, plunging amid those fair
forms which Thou hadst made. Thou wert with
me, but I was not with Thee. Things held me far
from Thee, which, unless they were in Thee, were
not at all” (St. Augustine, Confessions, X, 27).
What matter then is it to us if we are rejected
by the world in which we live and must be, as it
were, ever greater outcasts in this valley of tears?
It is true that we see men who hold the Faith
more publicly and decidedly mocked and derided
in our post-Christian society. We need simply
make our own the cry of St. Paul: “If Christ
be for us, who can be against us?” Indeed the
unbelievers shall have occasion to say of God’s
faithful on the last day: “These are they, whom
we sometime had in derision, and jested upon.
We fools thought their life was very madness, and
their end to be without honor. But lo, how they
are counted among the children of God, and their
portion is among the saints.” In the meantime, let
us go by Faith with Christ outside the camp and
joyfully embrace such trials as endured the saints
of old and described by St. Paul at the end of the
eleventh chapter of his epistle to the Hebrews. If
we are faithful, we shall merit to hear Almighty
God say of us, “Come, the world is not worthy of
you; I judge it no shame to be called your God.”

Haec
Credimus
by Fr. Jean-Michel Gleize, SSPX

1

St. Basil, De Spiritu
Sancto, XXX, 77; PG 32,
213 A; SCh 17 ff., p. 524,
quoted by Benedict XVI in
his Christmas Speech to the
Roman Curia of December
22, 2005.

1. “The raucous shouting of those who through disagreement rise up
against one another, the incomprehensible chatter, the confused din of
uninterrupted clamouring, has now filled almost the whole of the Church,
falsifying through excess or failure the right doctrine of the faith...”1 Quoting
the words of the Bishop of Caesarea, the pope’s Address of December 22,
2005, compares the post-conciliar period with the period following the First
Council of Nicaea. The two situations are not quite the same, and Benedict
takes care not to blacken the tableau of the last fifty years. But, with this
small reservation, in his eyes the comparison is not inappropriate, and it
even appears useful to him for trying to comprehend the underlying reasons
for the persistent malaise in the Church today, long after the close of the
Twenty-first Ecumenical Council. In the pope’s mind, the same causes
produce the same effects: like that of Nicaea, the reception of Vatican II
occurred with some difficulty.
2. As did the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith
before, the reigning Sovereign Pontiff has been attempting to draw lessons
from an all too obvious failure. Before, it was in 1988 in a speech delivered
13

Theme The Importance of the Faith
to the Episcopal Conference of Chile by Cardinal Ratzinger. The 1988
speech, together with The Ratzinger Report: An Exclusive Interview on
the State of the Church, is the primary antecedent of the argumentation
of 2005. The earlier speech was analyzed at the time in the November
1988 issue of Courrier de Rome, the French version of SiSiNoNo, in an
article entitled “Cardinal Ratzinger demonstrates a state of necessity in
the Church.” That newspaper took up the same topic several times in its
November 1989, April 1991, September 1991, and March 1992 issues. Cardinal
Ratzinger’s explanation was that the teachings of Vatican II are consistent
with Church Tradition and do not stand in need of reform; some revision of
their application (or “reception”) would be needful to put an end to simple
abuses. For, thought the future Benedict XVI, “many presentations give the
impression that with Vatican II everything changed, and that what came
before it is no longer of value.” Twenty years later, Cardinal Ratzinger having
become pope still remains convinced that this explanation is the right one.
The December 22, 2005, speech decries the same false presentations and
what he calls “the hermeneutic of rupture.” The solution would be to return
to a hermeneutic of “renewal in continuity,” a continuity which would be that
“of the one subject-Church which the Lord has given to us….remaining the
same, the one subject of the journeying People of God.”
3. Does such an assessment sufficiently account for the facts? For it
is a question of explaining the facts. Facts tend to speak up first and
often more tellingly than all the ensuing speeches. The Council of Nicaea
convened to put an end to a disorder that had already been introduced into
the Church. We can well see how the Arian heresy progressively retreated
and disappeared thanks to the application of the teachings of the First
Ecumenical Council. On the other hand, we are obliged to note that such has
not been the case with Vatican II. It is a widely recognized, established fact
that disorder entered the Church after the Council. For the last fifty years,
disorder has taken hold and become the norm. Is this merely the result of
two conflicting interpretations? There is no alternative but to acknowledge
that there are also two magisteriums: the magisterium of all time and the
new magisterium born of the last Council. The renewal, as Benedict XVI
describes and wishes it, would prove their continuity. But unity cannot
be defined only as unity in time, for the unity of the Church is not merely
chronological. More deeply, it involves unity of faith, the unity of the same
meaning of the same divinely revealed truth.
4. Examination of the texts reveals that this [pre- and post-conciliar]
unity has been seriously undermined since the last council by the very
teachings of Vatican II. As the Courrier de Rome article of November 1988
(page 4) demonstrates, “some texts of the Council express a departure from
Tradition, and can in no wise be reconciled with it. It is not only that, as
Cardinal Ratzinger thinks, ‘many presentations give the impression that with
Vatican II everything changed, and that what came before it is no longer of
value”; no, there are texts of the Council that constitute a change from what
preceded it and that consequently compel us to choose between Vatican
14

The Angelus

September - October 2012

2

Archbishop Marcel
Lefebvre, They Have
Uncrowned Him (1987;
English version: Angelus
Press, 1988), Ch. XXIV, p.
163-4.

3

Cf. ibid., Ch. XXXII, “A
Suicidal Liberalism: The
Post-Conciliar Reforms.”

4

DS 3070 (Dz. 1836).

5

DS 3020 (Dz. 1800).

6

DS 3043 (Dz. 1818).

7

DS 3541 (Dz. 2145).

II and Tradition. Texts like Nostra Aetate on the non-Christian Religions,
Unitatis Redintegratio on ecumenism, and Dignitatis Humanae on
religious freedom effectively lead us reasonably to wonder, as did Cardinal
Ratzinger, ‘if the Church of today is really the same as yesterday’s, or if it
has been replaced by another one without anybody bothering to tell the
Catholics.’” The explication of this rather surprising fact is to be found in the
explicit intention of Pope John XXIII and Paul VI: “Proclaiming this council
to be ‘pastoral’ and not dogmatic, putting the stress on aggiornamento and
ecumenism, these Popes at the outset deprived the council and themselves
of the intervention of the charism of infallibility which would have protected
them from all error.”2 Should the Council be accused or excused? In other
words, did Vatican II fulfill the conditions of a magisterial act beyond doubt
and beneficial for the whole Church?
One must have recourse to the texts to get a serious answer.3 Considering
these texts, we are obliged to say that it would be much too simple to
exculpate Vatican II. And to avoid begging the question, there is no need to
measure Vatican II by our own standard. One need only subject the Council
to the test of its own continuity.
5. The proper object of an act of the magisterium is the revelation
transmitted by the Apostles, that is, the deposit of faith to be guarded
sacredly and faithfully set forth always in the same meaning. Vatican Council
I reiterated this twice: (1) In the dogmatic constitution Pastor Aeternus on
the Church: “The Holy Spirit was not promised to the successors of Peter
that by His revelation they might disclose new doctrine, but that by His help
they might guard sacredly the revelation transmitted through the apostles
and the deposit of faith, and might faithfully set it forth”;4 (2) in the dogmatic
constitution Dei Filius on the Catholic faith: “The doctrine of faith which
God revealed has not been handed down as a philosophic invention to the
human mind to be perfected, but has been entrusted as a divine deposit
to the Spouse of Christ, to be faithfully guarded and infallibly interpreted.
[That is why] that understanding of its sacred dogmas must be perpetually
retained, which Holy Mother Church has once declared; and there must
never be recession from that meaning under the specious name of a deeper
understanding. ‘Therefore…let the understanding, the knowledge, and
wisdom of individuals as of all, of one man as of the whole Church, grow and
progress strongly with the passage of the ages and the centuries; but let it
be solely in its own genus, namely in the same dogma, with the same sense
and the same understanding’ (Instruction of Vincent of Lerin, n. 28).”5 And
so, “If anyone shall have said that it is possible that to the dogmas declared
by the Church a meaning must sometimes be attributed according to the
progress of science, different from that which the Church has understood
and understands: let him be anathema.”6 Pius X’s Anti-Modernist Oath in its
fourth affirmation confirms Vatican I on all these points of doctrine: “I accept
sincerely the doctrine of faith transmitted from the apostles through the
orthodox fathers, always in the same sense and interpretation, even to us; and
so I reject the heretical invention of the evolution of dogmas, passing from
one meaning to another, different from that which the Church first had….”7
15

Theme The Importance of the Faith

“To you I will give the keys of the
kingdom of heaven.” (Mt 16:18)

8

DS 3886 (Dz. 2314).

9

Angelus Press edition, p. 13,
§14.

6. As Pius XII teaches in Humani Generis, the function of the
magisterium is “to illumine and clarify what is contained in the deposits
of faith obscurely and implicitly.”8 Pius XI affirms the same thing in the
Encyclical Mortalium Animos of January 6, 1928, when speaking of
the solemn magisterium of ecumenical councils: “But in the use of this
extraordinary teaching authority no fresh invention is introduced, nothing
new is ever added to the number of those truths which are at least implicitly
contained within the deposit of Revelation divinely committed to the Church;
but truths which to some perhaps may still seem obscure are rendered clear,
or a truth which some may have called into question is declared to be of
faith.”9 Pius XII further explains that in the work of rendering doctrine more
explicit, “it is clear that the method whereby clear things are explained from
the obscure is wholly false; but rather all should follow the opposite order.”
7. Therefore it is hard to grant the hermeneutic of reform (or of renewal in
continuity) proposed by Benedict XVI in his Address of December 22, 2005,10

16

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September - October 2012

10

“The steps the Council took
towards the modern era
which had rather vaguely
been presented as ‘openness
to the world’, belong in
short to the perennial
problem of the relationship
between faith and reason
that is re-emerging in
ever new forms….The
Second Vatican Council,
with its new definition of
the relationship between
the faith of the Church and
certain essential elements
of modern thought, has
reviewed or even corrected
certain historical decisions,
but in this apparent
discontinuity it has actually
preserved and deepened
her inmost nature and true
identity” [emphasis added].
[Text online at the Vatican’s
website, www.vatican.va.]

on the following two points: firstly, when this reform pretends to justify the
introduction of novelties contrary to Tradition, when it says that Vatican II
set itself the task of redefining the relationship of the faith of the Church with
some essential elements of modern thought; and secondly, when this reform
pretends to establish renewal in the continuity of the one subject-Church by
calling in question objective teaching of the magisterium on essential points.
8. In light of the principles indicated above, the right “hermeneutic”
or manner of understanding the texts of Vatican Council II would be to
proceed in accordance with the truth stated by Vatican I, according to which
“that understanding of its sacred dogmas must be perpetually retained,
which Holy Mother Church has once declared.” This truth requires that the
teaching of Vatican II be interpreted in light of truths already taught by
the constant magisterium, such that things contrary to Tradition are to be
rejected, ambiguities are to be interpreted according to Tradition, and things
consistent with Tradition are to be accepted.
9. At least on three points, the doctrinal teaching of the Second Vatican
Council seems to us to be irreconcilable with the doctrine of the Catholic
faith as it has been set forth in previous documents of the Church’s
magisterium and therefore unacceptable. These points are the following:
10. The doctrine on religious freedom as it is expressed in No. 2 of the
Declaration Dignitatis Humanae and in Nos. 2104-2109 of the new 1992
Catechism of the Catholic Church contradicts the teachings of Gregory XVI
in Mirari Vos and of Pius IX in Quanta Cura as also those of Pope Leo
XIII in Immortale Dei and those of Pope Pius XI in Quas Primas. Vatican
II declares that everyone has the right not to be hindered by any authority
whatsoever from exercising the worship of the religion of his choice, true
or false, provided that this exercise not injure the common good of civil
society. The Tradition of the Church proclaims the social kingship of our
Lord Jesus Christ, teaches that civil authorities have a duty to repress or
moderate the external exercise of false religions for the sole reason that this
exercise violates that of the Catholic religion, and condemns the principle
according to which “that is the best condition of civil society, in which no
duty is recognized, as attached to the civil power, of restraining by enacted
penalties, offenders against the Catholic religion, except so far as public
peace may require.”
11. The doctrine on ecumenism and the non-Christian religions as it is
expressed in No. 3 of the Decree Unitatis Redintegratio, as also in No. 819 of
the new Catechism of 1992; in No. 2 of the Declaration Nostra Aetate, as also
in Nos. 839-848 of the new Catechism of 1992; and in No. 8 of the Constitution
Lumen Gentium, as also in No. 816 of the new Catechism of 1992,
contradicts the teachings of Pope Pius IX in Propositions 16 and 17 of the
Syllabus of Errors and those of Pope Pius XI in Mortalium Animos. Vatican
II declares that the communities separated from the Roman Catholic Church
retain elements of truth and sanctification leading to Catholic unity, that
17

Theme The Importance of the Faith
11

Archbishop Marcel
Lefebvre, Letter to Cardinal
Ratzinger, April 17, 1985.

12

“Mgr Lefebvre et le Saint
Office,” Itinéraires, No. 233,
May 1979, pp. 146-7.

13

John Paul II, Apostolic
Constitution Sacrae
Disciplinae Leges, January
25, 1983: “Fundamentalis
illa ratio novitatis, quae, a
traditione legifera Ecclesiae
numquam discedens,
reperitur in Concilio
Vaticano II, praesertim
quod spectat ad eius
ecclesiologicam doctrinam,
efficiat etiam rationem
novitatis in novo Codice.”

they are not without signification in the mystery of salvation, and that the
non-Christian religions possess a ray of the truth that enlightens all men.
The definition of the Church as sacrament also adopted by Vatican II favors
in its very ambiguity an ecumenical and latitudinarian notion of the Church.
The Tradition of the Church teaches that our Lord Jesus Christ instituted
only one visible society in which men are assured of finding salvation, which
is the Roman Catholic Church; unless a man lawfully belongs to the Church
as a full member or else is united to it by at least implicit supernatural desire,
no one can be saved, no one can find any element of truth or sanctification,
no one can receive any light of truth. The non-Catholic religions as such
place an obstacle to the salvific action of Christ and the Holy Spirit.
12. The doctrine on collegiality as expressed in No. 22 of Lumen Gentium,
including No. 4 of the Nota praevia, seriously departs from, so as to cast in
doubt, the teachings of Vatican I in the Constitution Pastor Aeternus on the
oneness [unicity] of the subject of supreme power in the Church. Vatican II
teaches that the College of Bishops united to the pope as to its head is also,
in addition to the pope considered alone, the subject of the primacy. Vatican I
teaches that only St. Peter and his successors are the subject of the primacy.
The definition of the Church as “People of God” and the idea of the common
priesthood of the faithful understood in the true and proper sense of the
term both tend toward a democratic and egalitarian conception whereby the
Church appears much more as a communion than as a hierarchical society.
13. Moreover, the Short Critical Study of the New Order of Mass
addressed on September 3, 1969, to Pope Paul VI by Cardinals Ottaviani
and Bacci, armed with proof, challenged the perfect orthodoxy of the new
rite. The Cardinals wrote: “The Novus Ordo Missae…represents, both as
a whole and in its details, a striking departure from the Catholic theology
of the Mass as it was formulated in Session 22 of the Council of Trent.” The
two Eminences did not fear to express also a prudent reservation as to the
validity of celebrations carried out according to the new rite by priests who
would no longer receive traditional training. The Society of Saint Pius X has
never asserted “that the Novus Ordo Missae celebrated according to the
rite set out in the Roman publication is of itself invalid or heretical.”11 But it
does deem, following Archbishop Lefebvre, that “this rite of itself does not
profess the Catholic faith in as clear a manner as the ancient Ordo Missae
and consequently it can favor heresy.”12
14. Finally, as Pope John Paul II declared in the Apostolic Constitution
Sacrae Disciplinae Leges of January 25, 1983, the teachings of Vatican
Council II present “a new visage of the Church,” which must inspire in its
turn the canonical legislation of the new Code of 1983. In a certain sense, this
new Code of Canon Law constitutes in particular “a great effort to translate
this same doctrine, that is, the conciliar ecclesiology, into canonical
language.”13 The principled reservations that must be held concerning the
teachings of the Council can apply, then, to this new legislation. Recourse
to the 1917 Code of Canon Law should not be considered a practice peculiar

18

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September - October 2012

14

Lefebvre, They Have
Uncrowned Him, Ch.
XXXII, pp. 231-34.

15

Ibid., p. 233.

16

Archbishop Marcel
Lefebvre, Conference at
Ecône, September 29, 1975,
Vu de Haut, No. 13, p. 23.

17

Ibid., January 13, 1977, Vu
de Haut, No. 13, p. 51.

18

Ibid., p. 52.

19

Lefebvre, Conference at
Angers, November 20, 1980,
Vu de Haut, No. 13, p. 53.

20

Lefebvre, Conference at
Ecône, April 10, 1981, Vu de
Haut, No. 13, p. 55.

21

Ibid., p. 56.

22

Letter to Cardinal Ratzinger
dated July 8, 1987; English
version in Archbishop
Lefebvre and the Vatican,
2nd ed. (Angelus Press,
1999), p. 22.

23

Archbishop Lefebvre,
Homily, May 14, 1989 at
Ecône, Vu de Haut, No. 13,
p. 70.

to the Society. It indicates a prudential measure that is objectively valid for
every Catholic faced with the serious issues the new legislation, in itself
questionable, raises.
15. Should we accuse or excuse the Council? We have had recourse to the
texts in order to have a serious answer.14 Considering these texts, we are
well obliged to say that it would be much too simple to exculpate Vatican II.
And to avoid begging the question, there is no need to measure Vatican II by
our own standard. One need only subject the Council to the test of its own
continuity. We can repeat here what Archbishop Lefebvre already wrote15 and
conclude that the thing chiefly responsible for the evils currently besetting
the Church is nothing else than the Council itself, of which the seriously
erroneous or ambiguous texts are the primary source of the great marasmus
observed by the Sovereign Pontiff. To wish to remedy these evils and to
recover from a mortal sickness without addressing their root cause would
be illusory. Mgr. Lefebvre rarely spoke of Vatican II as magisterium. When
he did, the locutions he employed show that this word cannot be applied
to the last Council and the post-conciliar period in its proper and usual
sense. He evoked “a magisterium that destroys the [constant] magisterium
and destroys Tradition”;16 “a new magisterium or a new conception of
the Church’s magisterium, a conception that is modernist besides”;17 “a
progressively ill-defined magisterium”;18 “an unfaithful magisterium, one
that is not faithful to Tradition”;19 “a magisterium that is not faithful to the
magisterium of all time”;20 “a new magisterium.”21 In official correspondence
addressed to the prefect of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of
the Faith, the founder of the SSPX did not hesitate to express the following
judgment in speaking about Vatican II: “A new magisterium without roots in
the past, and all the more if it is opposed to the magisterium of all times, can
only be schismatic and heretical.”22 And toward the end of his life he added:
“Either we are with his predecessors who proclaimed the truth of all time
and who are in agreement with the Church from the Apostles to Pope Pius
XII, or else we are with the Council and we are against the predecessors
of the current popes. You have to choose. There’s a choice to be made. It is
obvious that Tradition lies with the 250 popes who have preceded Pope John
XXIII and Vatican Council II, or else the Church has always been in error.
There is the situation in which we find ourselves. We have to be firm, clear,
resolute, and unhesitating.”23 This is, one might say, the Credo of the Society
of Saint Pius X because it is the Credo of the Church facing the errors of the
modern world. The deep-seated evil of the present time has arisen because,
under cover of Vatican II, these errors have become prevalent within the
Church. And if the Society of St. Pius X desires more than ever an authentic
reform, it is only so that the Church can at last parry the grave deficiencies
that have been paralyzing the exercise of its magisterium since the last
council and recover its perpetual youth.

19

Theme The Importance of the Faith

General
Chapter
Statement
by Society of St. Pius X, Ecône, July 14, 2012

During the interview published at DICI on
July 16, Bishop Bernard Fellay stated that
this document was “the occasion to specify
the (SSPX’s) road map insisting upon the
conservation of the Society’s identity, the only
efficacious means to help the Church to restore
Christendom.” “For,” he said, “doctrinal mutism
is not the answer to this ‘silent apostasy,’ which
even John Paul II denounced already in 2003.”

Statement
At the conclusion of the General Chapter of
the Society of St. Pius X, gathered together at
the tomb of its venerated founder, Archbishop
Marcel Lefebvre, and united with its Superior
General, the participants, bishops, superiors, and
20

The Angelus

September - October 2012

most senior members of the Society elevate to
Heaven our heartfelt thanksgiving, grateful for
the 42 years of marvelous Divine protection over
our work, amidst a Church in crisis and a world
which distances itself farther from God and His
law with each passing day.
We wish to express our gratitude to each and
every member of our Society: priests, brothers,
sisters, third order members; to the religious
communities close to us and also to our dear
faithful, for their constant dedication and for
their fervent prayers on the occasion of this
Chapter, marked by frank exchanges of views
and by a very fruitful common work. Every
sacrifice and pain accepted with generosity
has contributed to overcome the difficulties
which the Society has encountered in recent

times. We have recovered our profound unity
in its essential mission: to preserve and defend
the Catholic Faith, to form good priests, and to
strive towards the restoration of Christendom.
We have determined and approved the
necessary conditions for an eventual canonical
normalization. We have decided that, in that case,
an extraordinary Chapter with deliberative vote
will be convened beforehand.
We must never forget that the sanctification
of souls always starts within ourselves. It is
the fruit of a faith which becomes vivifying and
operating by the work of charity, according to the
words of St. Paul: “For we can do nothing against
the truth: but for the truth” (cf. II Cor. 13:8), and
“as Christ also loved the church and delivered
himself up for it…that it should be holy and
without blemish” (cf. Eph. 5:25 ff.).
The Chapter believes that the paramount duty
of the Society, in the service which it intends to
offer to the Church, is to continue, with God’s
help, to profess the Catholic Faith in all its purity
and integrity, with a determination matching the
intensity of the constant attacks to which this
very Faith is subjected nowadays.
For this reason it seems opportune that we
reaffirm our faith in the Roman Catholic Church,
the unique Church founded by Our Lord Jesus
Christ, outside of which there is no salvation nor
possibility to find the means leading to salvation;
our faith in its monarchical constitution, desired
by Our Lord Himself, by which the supreme
power of government over the universal Church
belongs only to the Pope, Vicar of Christ on earth;
our faith in the universal Kingship of Our Lord
Jesus Christ, Creator of both the natural and the
supernatural orders, to Whom every man and
every society must submit.
The Society continues to uphold the
declarations and the teachings of the constant
Magisterium of the Church in regard to all the
novelties of the Second Vatican Council which
remain tainted with errors, and also in regard
to the reforms issued from it. We find our sure
guide in this uninterrupted Magisterium which,
by its teaching authority, transmits the revealed
Deposit of Faith in perfect harmony with the

truths that the entire Church has professed,
always and everywhere.
The Society finds its guide as well in the
constant Tradition of the Church, which
transmits and will transmit until the end of time
the teachings required to preserve the Faith and
the salvation of souls, while waiting for the day
when an open and serious debate will be possible
which may allow the return to Tradition of the
ecclesiastical authorities.
We wish to unite ourselves to the other
Christians persecuted in different countries of
the world who are now suffering for the Catholic
Faith, some even to the extent of martyrdom.
Their blood, shed in union with the Victim of
our altars, is the pledge for a true renewal of
the Church in capite et membris, according
to the old saying sanguis martyrum semen
christianorum.
“Finally, we turn our eyes to the Blessed
Virgin Mary, who is also jealous of the privileges
of her Divine Son, jealous of His glory, of His
Kingdom on earth as in Heaven. How often has
she intervened for the defense, even the armed
defense, of Christendom against the enemies
of the Kingdom of Our Lord! We entreat her to
intervene today to chase the enemies out from
inside the Church who are trying to destroy it
more radically than its enemies from outside.
May she deign to keep in the integrity of the
Faith, in the love of the Church, in devotion to the
Successor of Peter, all the members of the Society
of St. Pius X and all the priests and faithful who
labor alongside the Society, in order that she may
both keep us from schism and preserve us from
heresy.
“May St. Michael the Archangel inspire us with
his zeal for the glory of God and with his strength
to fight the devil.
“May St. Pius X share with us a part of his
wisdom, of his learning, of his sanctity, to discern
the true from the false and the good from the evil
in these times of confusion and lies.” (Archbishop
Marcel Lefebvre; Albano, October 19, 1983).

21

Basilica of Sant’
Apollinare,
Ravenna

The basilica ends in a
semi-circular apse. Mosaic
decoration covers the apse
and the triumphal arch.
The mosaics of the apse are
dated before the middle of
the 6th century whereas the
mosaics on the arch date
between the 6th and 12th
centuries.

At the top of the jewelled
cross the Greek word for
fish appears, an acrostic
formed by the initials of
five Greek words meaning
“Jesus Christ, Son of God,
the Savior.” The alpha
and omega appear at the
sides–the last letters of
the Greek alphabet, used
symbolically by Christ in
the Apocalypse to signify
that he was the beginning
and the end. Below the
cross are the words Salus
Mundi, Salvation of the
World. Rather than depicting
an event narrated in the
Bible, this mosaic indicates
important theological and
symbolic ideas.

Book Review

The Young Man of Character
by Bishop Tihamer Toth

The enduring failure known as the U.S. education
system has for decades provided countless “experts”
the opportunity to apply varying fixes to something
many people consider unfixable. Most of these attempts are simply a variation on a theme, emphasizing cognitive success (raw intelligence numbers) as
the key predictor of success in life and the validation
of the education children receive. It’s as though the
cold, utilitarian spirit of Dickens’s school master in
Hard Times, Thomas Gradgrind (“A man of facts and
calculations”), is alive and well in the form of hapless
education reformers.
However, recent interdisciplinary research conclusions—inchoate but persuasive—challenge long-held
assumptions about not only what education should
measure, but what factors taught to us in school
actually contribute toward success in life? (See Paul
Tough, How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity and the
Hidden Power of Character [Houghton Mifflin, 2012].)
Is it really the numbers on the Iowa Basics or the SAT
that best predict success in life? Or are there other,
“non-cognitive” factors that are as important as raw
intelligence?
According to this research, intelligence is just one
of several factors that ought to be measured when
assessing the success or failure of an education.
There are a variety of words to describe these qualities—fortitude, perseverance, resilience, self-control,
obedience, self-denial, etc.—but one word sums them
up: Character.
While post-Christians nod thoughtfully, perhaps
even warily, at this idea called character and its relationship to success in school and life, generations of
Catholic parents will not be surprised by the conclusions of this research. Still, ask any adult—teacher
or parent—how difficult it is to instill character, especially in young men, and you will no doubt get a weak
smile in return, the kind of smile that says, “Tell me
about it!”
Thankfully, there is an easy-to-read book ­written
by a man who knew his subject well, a man who spent
decades teaching young men and experiencing the
joys and disappointments of seeing hundreds of
young men with varying degrees of poverty, intellect,

24

The Angelus

September - October 2012

and, most importantly, character succeed—and fail.
The Young Man of Character: A Guide to Fortifying and
Rebuilding the Natural Foundation of Manhood, by
Bishop Tihamer Toth, is exactly the book that should
guide the formation of every young man.
Bishop Toth was a Hungarian priest whose life was
spent in a supporting role forming the characters of
young men. He died young, in his fifty-first year, having written an astounding twenty-two books and numerous sermons which were broadcast on Hungarian
Radio. Rarely do accomplished men maintain such
closeness with the everyday, ordinary goings-on of
young men. But Bishop Toth was special. He knew the
mind and psyche of a boy. He knew his temptations,
his biology, his “study habits,” his love for action, for
doing, for fooling mom with his head buried in a book
pretending to study while his thoughts wandered
carelessly.
There isn’t a young man who can read who won’t
be able to comprehend the gentle, good-natured
reasoning of Bishop Toth. A key theme of the book is
“Catholic [character building] does not demand the
destruction of passions; instead, it wants to make
them your allies” (p. 48). You are impetuous? Control
your rash anger like Caesar and “Count to twenty before answering” (p. 21). You wake up in a bad mood?
Never mind! Force yourself to smile…and to some extent you have already conquered your emotions” (p.
82). Feel tempted to tell a little lie? Never! “No matter
what you do, ask your conscience: Is it right to do so?”
(p. 122).
Anyone can lecture a young man. It takes a special gift to present such difficult truths in a way that he
will want to continue to read, and this is Bishop Toth’s
masterstroke. Sprinkled throughout are anecdotes of
great men who faced hardship, persevered, and ultimately triumphed. The young man (or adult, for that
matter) who reads this book will receive its wit, wisdom, and honesty as if spoken directly to him. Bishop
Toth treats the reader as a young man, not a mere
child, and does not back down from addressing some
pretty serious character flaws that, in his experience,
he has seen lead otherwise gifted students to lives of
ruin. Still, he keeps the message on the level that a

Book Review

young man can understand.
This is the perfect book to read first then discuss
with your son while he’s reading it. Fathers, this book
will make you look like a sage to your young man. Use
examples from your own life to give these examples
of character-building a concrete reality so that your
son does not think these challenges are only for other
people but, in fact, confront everyone to one degree
or another. Once he hears how you or some great
figure in history handled the same challenge, he’ll be
more confident and prepared to make the right decisions, “daring to be Catholic in his whole life too” (p.
29). And making the right decisions, Bishop Toth reminds us, will save us from having a “desolate heart”
and win for us “the happy invitation from Our Lord
Jesus Christ” (p. 175) to join Him in heaven.

A guide to fortifying and rebuilding the natural foundation of manhood,
available at www.angeluspress.org
176pp – Softcover – STK# 8549 – $9.95

Scott Quinn

373pp – Softcover – STK# 8552 – $19.95

New Title: Catechism for
Children
This excellent catechism for children of all ages presents the truths of the
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25

Faith and Morals

God Is
Unique
by Fr. Albert, O.P.

1

2

26

By unity here, as
Cajetan points out in his
commentary, we are not
referring to the inner
cohesion of God but rather
simply to the fact that there
is only one of Him, what we
could call His “uniqueness.”
God is unique.
In fact the same principle
applies to all beings that
have no matter, that is, the
angels, who, like God, are
pure spirits. The nature
of Gabriel (his “form”)
is all there is of Gabriel
because he has no matter.
Consequently, there cannot
be another being that has
Gabrielness because it
would have to be Gabriel
to have it, since Gabriel
is not distinct from his
Gabrielness. Thus all angels
are specifically different: it
is as if there were only one

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Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord! (Deut. 6:4)
In our knowledge of what God is not, there remains one last thing to deny
of Him: multiplicity. St. Thomas gives three proofs of the unity of God.1
Firstly, it follows from His simplicity, the fact that there is no composition
in Him at all. Thus we say that God is His own nature, and so there can be
no difference between Him and the Divinity. He is not like a man, who is
distinguished from his nature and whose nature, therefore, can be found in
other beings. God is Divinity: therefore there cannot be more than one God.2

Infinity of Perfection
Secondly, the unity of God is proven by the infinity of His perfection. If
there were two Gods they would have to differ in some way (otherwise they
wouldn’t be “two”). Therefore something would have to belong to one that
didn’t belong to the other. Now if this “something” was just a privation, then
the one to whom it belonged would not be infinitely perfect, and therefore

September - October 2012

specimen of each species
of animal. In animals there
can be more than one
specimen of each species
because in each animal,
along with their species,
there is matter, and so each
individual animal is not
identified with its species,
but in the angels—and in
God—this is not the case.
3

Thus, as John of St. Thomas
remarks: “That which is
most perfect in the whole
universe, namely the
ordering of things, would be
the product of an accident,
that is, the result of several
causes that by chance come
together to produce one
effect.”

would not be God. But if it was a perfection, then the one to whom it didn’t
belong would be lacking that perfection and so wouldn’t be infinitely perfect
and therefore would not be God. Therefore there can only be one God.
Finally, the oneness of God is shown by the unity of the world, which
requires some cause that is one at least in some way, for otherwise it could
not cause the world to be one. If this cause, however, was only one “in some
way” (that is, in so far as many things came together to produce one effect)
and not in itself, it would be a cause of unity not by itself but by a sort of
chance.3 Furthermore, many are reduced to one order in a more perfect way
by what is one in itself than by what is multiple in itself and one only “in
some way” or accidentally. Now God, who is the ultimate cause of the order
of the universe, is absolutely perfect, as has already been shown previously.
Therefore He causes this order in the most perfect way, that is, as a cause
that is one in itself and not just “in some way.”

God is not a Lowest Common Denominator
The uniqueness of God has very important consequences, especially with
regard to religion. Thus it is absolutely false to say, as is often said today, and
even by the highest officials in the Church, that we have “the same God

The Holy Trinity, 15-century fresco,
Castelletto Cervo (Vercelli, Italy),
St. Peter and St. Paul Church

27

Faith and Morals

28

4

II-II, q. 10, a. 3.

5

“Id quod ipse opinatur non
est Deus,” which literally
translated would be: “That
which he opines is not God.”

6

Being capable of laughter
(being “risiblis”) is
something that belongs
to every man, because
it follows necessarily
from the fact that he has
an intellectual nature
that knows by discursive
reasoning. Thus what is not
capable of laughter cannot
be Socrates.

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as the Muslims” or “the same God as the Jews.” For, to start with the most
basic thing, our God is Triune, whereas the God of the Muslims and the God
of the Jews is not. Now there is only one God: so if He is Triune, then any
God which is not Triune isn’t God. God is not a lowest common denominator
obtained by abstracting from the different Gods of the different religions
everything in which they differ: He is unique. He is what He is and whatever
is not that isn’t Him.
Cajetan seems to have anticipated and refuted in advance this modern
error that claims that all religions have the same God in his commentary on
an article in St. Thomas’s treatise in the Summa on faith.4 The article asks
whether the sin against faith is the greatest of sins. St. Thomas answers
that yes, it is, because it distances man from God more than any other sin,
and he explains: “For thus (that is by his false faith) man does not possess
a true knowledge of God; rather by a false knowledge of Him he does not
approach Him but is distanced from Him. Nor is it possible for one who has a
false opinion of God to know Him in any way at all, because the object of his
opinion is not God.”5
Cajetan comments: “This seems to be false because an infidel, for example
a Jew or a philosopher, who refuses faith in the Incarnation, still knows
something about God: he knows that God is pure act, for example, that He is
above all things, that He is the best of all things, the first cause, etc. And the
being that he thinks has not assumed flesh is God...”
But he responds to his own objection: “It is one thing to speak of the
infidel as such; and another of the infidel man who has other knowledge. For
St. Thomas does not say that the man who is an infidel does not have any
knowledge of God, which is what the objection attacks; rather he says that
God is not known through infidelity, neither simply nor even in some way. Not
simply, because the false knowledge of something is not knowledge of it but
an error about it: and thus it does not approach one to it but rather distances
one from it....Neither even in some way, because a false proposition, as such,
enounces the opposite of its subject....For when it is said : ‘Socrates is not
capable of laughter,’ by this proposition is enounced what is not Socrates; for
what is not capable of laughter implies what is not Socrates.6 And when it is
said: ‘Socrates is running,’ when in fact he is seated, there is enounced what
Socrates is not right now: for there is presented a running Socrates, who is
not to be found. And thus in all matters it is evident that a false proposition,
as such, gives no knowledge about the subject, because it enounces the
opposite of the subject.
“And if it is said that it gives at least the simple knowledge of the terms of
the proposition it must be said that that knowledge does not belong to the
false proposition but is rather presupposed by it. And in our case it does not
regard unbelief. Thus St. Thomas does not say that what is meant by the term
of the proposition is not God: but that what it affirms is not God. For what an
infidel, as such, affirms, is not God, as was said.”
Thus we can respond to the modern error by saying that the God of the
Muslims or the Jews is not God, because even though when they use the
term “God” they mean the God that everyone can know by reason, the
propositions they form about Him are absolutely false and do not give any

September - October 2012

7

Scritti Kolbiani (SK) 1270.
He often comes back to
this theme. He writes, for
example, in an article in
his review: “Truth is one....
It is true, for example, that
in this moment I am writing
these words and you, dear
reader, are reading them.
Against this the contrary
statement cannot be true,
that is, that I did not write
these words, or that you are
not reading them. Indeed,
about this question both
‘yes’ and ‘no’ cannot both be
true. The truth stands either
in “yes” or “no.” Truth, in
fact, is one.
Truth is also powerful.
If someone wanted to lie
and affirm that neither did
I write nor did you read,
the truth would not change,
while he who denied it
would be mistaken, he
would delude himself. And
even if these deniers were
numerous, the force of the
truth would not be affected
in the least. More, even if all
the men on the earth were
to affirm, publish, film, and
swear for their whole lives
that I did not write these
lines and that you did not
read them, all that wouldn’t
be able to take away even
a little crumb from the
granite of the truth, namely,
that I wrote, that you read.
And not even God cancels
nor can He cancel the
truth by a miracle, because
He is essentially Truth
itself.” (SK 1246, Rycerz
Niepokalanej, XIII, 1940)

8

SK 1206, Rycerz
Niepokalanej, April, 1936.

9

SK 357, Aug. 4, 1931, n. 2.

real knowledge of God but rather induce those who believe them into error
about Him. Thus when the Muslims say: “Allah is one and Mohammed is His
prophet!” they are not referring to our God, the true God, but to a false God,
for Mohammed is not the prophet of God. And when the Jews say: “Jesus
Christ is not God” they confess a false God because of the real God it is true
to say that Jesus Christ is He.

The Truth is Unique
The ardent missionary zeal of the saints was founded on this fundamental
truth of the uniqueness of God, and consequently of the uniqueness of the
true religion. This was the case, for example, with St. Maximilian Kolbe, who
had to fight against the modern ecumenical spirit that was present already
at his time. He writes in some private notes: “Write in every issue of The
Knight [the review he published]: the truth is unique....The truth is unique—
also in religion.”7
In his contacts with non-Catholics he was always very charitable and
prudent, but he didn’t hide the truth from them, precisely because of his
charity for them. We see this, for example, in his relations with a certain
Japanese philosopher, Nishida Tenko, who invited Father Kolbe to visit him.
He recounts the story in an article:
“I was received very cordially. On one point, however, we did not manage
to agree because of the fact that I obstinately maintained that the truth
cannot be anything but unique and, consequently, that there can be only one
true religion.…
“Some months ago on the train [I met] one of the collaborators of Nishida
Tenko. We exchanged mutual questions and responses about health, our
activities and so on and at the end we touched again on the question of
religion.
“ ‘You must certainly look down on us, considering us to be inferior beings,’
he said to me.
“ ‘No, absolutely not, I appreciate and respect all those who seek the truth
but…the truth is always and only one.’
“ ‘On the little table of Mr. Nishida Tenko there is always the little statue of
the Immaculate that you sent us.’
“We had by this time arrived at the station where he had to get off, so we
interrupted our conversation and said goodbye.
“Nonetheless, the news that the Immaculate, from Her little statue, turns
Her look upon the founder of that village consoled me very much.”8
The firmness of Father Kolbe—and the intercession of the Immaculate—
bore fruit. In a note, the editor of his writings informs us that Mr. Tenko died
February 29, 1968, at the age of 96 and that before dying he was baptized by a
Conventual Franciscan priest.9

29

Faith and Morals

An Original School of Spirituality:

The Devotio
Moderna
by Fr. Dominique Bourmaud, SSPX

It is not easy to trace the growth and varieties
of the delicate topic called “Spirituality.” This is
both a science and an art which deals with all
things akin to the spiritual life. It aims at that
Christian perfection which Our Lord but formally
commanded to each of us: “Be perfect as your
heavenly Father is perfect.”

Schools of Spirituality
A quick glance at the history of spirituality
reveals that, after rather scanty works produced
on the subject in Patristic times, the Middle Ages
break down the schools of spirituality according
to the various orders (especially Benedictines,
Carthusians, Dominicans, and Franciscans). As
for the Modern era starting from the sixteenth
30

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September - October 2012

century, to the old schools, they add new
congregations—the Jesuits, the Salesians, and
others attached either to a person (the Liguorian
school) or to a location (the seventeenth-century
French school). The Augustinians were also well
represented, but we shall see them quite involved
as we delve into our present topic.
Much could be said about the nuances of
spirituality among these categories. As we focus
on the Devotio Moderna, it will suffice to say
that up to the Middle Ages, and even later in the
old monastic orders, the common method of
prayer for all Christians was called lectio divina,
a practice which involved reading Scripture at
deeper levels of meaning.
Involved in this process are three steps:
1. meditation, the reflecting with the mind upon
the meaning of the sacred texts;

Page of the Imitation of Christ

2. affective prayer, the spontaneous movement of
the will in response to these reflections;
3. contemplation, the two previous mental
prayers in a more quiet state in God’s presence.

The Origins of the
Devotio Moderna
During the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries, wars and the Black Death spread
chaos throughout the land, a chaos which was

also felt among the clergy both physically and
spiritually. The Devotio Moderna (Latin for
modern devotion) arose in the Low Countries
around the year 1400 in an attempt to establish
reform. It spread to Germany, northern France,
Spain, and possibly Italy. Gerhard Groote was
highly dissatisfied with the state of the Church
and what he perceived as the gradual loss of
monastic traditions and the lack of moral values
among the clergy, a sentiment expressed by
the Dominican Henry Suso long before him. To
remedy this, Groote founded the Brethren of the
Common Life; after his death, his disciple Florens
Radewijns established a house of Augustinian
Canons at Windesheim in Holland. These two
communities—the former living in the world, the
latter monastic—became the principal exponents
of Devotio Moderna.
Under Radewijns, who added the vows and
enclosure, the Congregation of Windesheim
grew into a large tree. By the end of the fifteenth
century, it comprised about 100 monasteries
of either sex, although it suffered greatly from
the Protestant depredations of the sixteenth
century. The Windesheimers increased silence
and austerity, focused their spirituality on
inner devotions and frequent short periods of
meditation, especially before each new activity.
Nor did they forsake all apostolic ministry.
Their main outdoor activity was a new way of
preaching, called conference or collatio. The
non-ordained brothers would give the people, in
cemetery or houses, simple exhortations in the
vulgar tongue based on scriptural and patristic
fragments. These conferences were joined
together into collections called rapiaria, which
we shall encounter again.
Thomas à Kempis left us a laudatory portrait
of life in these oases of peace founded by Groote:
“From the highest to the lowest each practiced
humility, which is the first of all virtues; it
turns the earthly dwelling into a paradise, and
transforms mortal men into living stones of God’s
temple. There obedience was flourishing; there
the love of God and of men warmed the hearts.
Those who had come cold left full of joy, warmed
at the sacred word.…There seemed to revive, in
all its freshness, the memory of the Ancient
31

Faith and Morals
Fathers, and the ecclesiastical life was raised, in
conformity with Church traditions, to the highest
degree of perfection” (Mourret, Histoire de
l’Église, V, 129).
The term moderna attached to this system is
in no way derogatory, but simply indicating that
it departs from the Devotio Antiqua. The latter
was more scholastic and speculative, especially
the great German mysticism of the Dominican
school of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries
represented by Master Eckhart, Tauler, and Suso.
Oblivious of descriptive experience of the divine
within the soul, these authors wanted to clarify
how the soul adheres to the divinity, what is God
in His Being, His Life and perfections. There is
no room for the humanity of Christ. For instance,
Blessed Suso’s main work is The Short Book of
the Eternal Wisdom.

The Legacy of the
Devotio Moderna
The Christian world is forever indebted to this
congregation in that it gave it two momentous
gifts: the little book of The Imitation of Christ
and a rigorous method of mental prayer.
If we need to sum up the essence of Groote’s
spirituality, we should say that it was to recall
men to the imitation of Christ. The Imitation of
Christ, this is the title of one the most famous
book of the Devotio Moderna. Most likely,
the four books of the Imitation are rapiaria,
collections of maxims which guided the life
of the Brothers of Common Life. Thomas was
born at Kempen, near Cologne (Germany) and
entered the monastery of Agnetenberg, ruled by
his brother John à Kempis in 1399. He spent most
of his life copying codices, composing spiritual
works and poems, and died an old man at age
92. Chroniclers like to describe his spirit “most
amorous of the Passion of the Lord and admirable
consoler of those tried and desconsoled.” This
goodly portrait tells us of a humble, sentimental,
and tender religious. Among his other known
works, we list Meditationes de Vita et Beneficiis
Salvatoris Iesu, the Soliloquium Animae, and
the De Elevatione Mentis ad Inquirendum
32

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September - October 2012

Summum Bonum. None of his works follows a
logical pattern in treating the themes. However,
The Imitation of Christ is remarkable in that it is
written in a clear and vigorous style without the
florid amplification and repetitions of the other
treatises of Kempis.
Windesheim was from its beginnings a
powerhouse of spirituality. Groote introduced a
structured method in “On Four Kinds of Matter
for Meditation,” including mental imagery. The
concept of immersing and projecting oneself
into a Biblical scene about the life of Jesus was
developed by Ludolph of Saxony in his Vita
Christi in 1374 and became popular among the
Devotio Moderna community. Mombaer, who
reformed some French convents, wrote in 1494
the encyclopedia of spirituality of the Devotio
Moderna, a huge rapiarium, the Rosetum
Exercitiorum Spiritualium et Sacrarum
Meditationum. Here, he compiled all the spiritual
principles, the religious practices, and ascetical
methods used in Windesheim. Among others,
he quotes Gansfort’s ladder of meditation,
which comprises no less than 23 degrees which
go through memory, understanding, to reach
finally the will. It is the paragon of psychological
methodism, turned almost mechanical.

The Main Traits of the
Devotio Moderna
It is generally admitted that the disciples of
Groote compose a spiritual category of their own.
By their forceful Christo-centricity, by stressing
the affection over abstract thought, they are
followers of the Franciscan over the Dominican
spirituality. The line that goes from St. Bernard
to St. Bonaventure continues straight through the
Devotio Moderna, although it does add its proper
nuances, which it will not be useless to spell out
here.
-- Not only is it distinct from the speculative
Devotio Antiqua, it is even anti-speculative
and depreciative of it. “What does it profit you
to dispute of the high things of the Trinity?...
I’d rather feel compunction than know its

definition” (Kempis I, 1). This is why everything
reverts to the practice of the faith: imitate
Christ practically, His humility, His patience,
His obedience, His love of the Cross.
-- To this practical aspect is joined the affective
character, as indicated by the name devotio.
Mombaer prefers feeling to understanding. He
wrote: “Let all our things turn into affection…
and let us reduce all understanding into
captivity.”
-- It tends to an excessive moralism. Even the
concept of Christ seems less real and less
conformed to history because it is made more
abstract and moralizing. Rather than the
person of Christ, they would meditate on His
virtues.
-- Yet the most characteristic of this spirituality
is the methodization of the interior life. In
Windesheim, all the acts of the day were
perfectly regulated, from the moment of rising
and hearing Mass and praying the office, to
the mode of eating, walking, reading, and
sleeping, with the corresponding ejaculatory
prayers and internal acts. No one ever
regulated mental prayer as much as they did.
As an example, the Brothers of Deventer
meditated on Saturday over sins; on Sunday,
over the kingdom of heaven; on Monday, over
death; Tuesday, God’s blessings; Wednesday,
judgment; Thursday, hell; Friday, the Passion.

Need we say that this highly regulated
piety had also its shadows. The Brothers, so
monastically centered, imbued with such an
anti-world spirituality, really shunned the care
of the neighbor, which they saw as a danger for
their own salvation. Also, due to its individualist
bent, the Devotio Moderna gave little importance
to the Mystical Body of the Church and to the
Roman Pontiff as such. Its lack of interest for
feeding the human mind would prove a hollow
barrier against the Protestant heresy, which
attacked dogma and would stress the individual
feeling of the divine. Luther, for one, found the
Imitation more inspired than the Epistle of St.
James. His tragic error was confusion between
scriptural and devotional inspiration.
This being said, during the Renaissance,
someone had to teach hatred of the world to a
worldly Papacy, attachment to Christ to a pagan
revival, and the monastic ideal to a defiled
secular clergy. Also, the ultra-methodical aspect
of meditation has proven a valuable tool to
Christianity as the famous Spiritual Exercises
of St. Ignatius can testify.

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.

33

Faith and Morals

Re-dimensioning

The Catholic
Simpleton
by Christopher Ferrara

1

34

www.youtube.com/
watch?v=6gLa9Te8Blw

The Angelus

During a film presentation at the Democratic National Convention, the
narrator made the following declaration in that folksy American tone that
is supposed to convey unchallengeable practical wisdom: “Government’s
the only thing we all belong to. We’re in different churches, different clubs,
but we’re together as a part of our city, of our county, of our state, and our
nation.”1 Why shucks, isn’t that just the plain ol’ American truth?
Spouting similar folk wisdom, Mitt Romney observed during his
acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention: “We were
Mormons and growing up in Michigan; that might have seemed unusual or
out of place but I really don’t remember it that way. My friends cared more
about what sports teams we followed than what church we went to.” Of
course they did. And isn’t that the American way? What unites us—the Super
Bowl, for example—is so much more important than the minor things that
divide us, such as religion.
Both political parties reflect the final outcome of political modernity: the
reduction of post-Christian Western man to a simpleton, a two-dimensional
being—the citizen-voter and worker-consumer—whose “private” third
dimension, including his religion, has no bearing on his “public” life and is
left behind whenever he exits his home or the religious temple of his choice.

September - October 2012

2

Cavanaugh, Theopolitical
Imagination: Christian
Practices of Space and
Time (London: T & T Clark,
2002), 99.

3

Cavanaugh, Migrations of
the Holy (Grand Rapids,
Michigan: William B.
Erdmans Publishing, 2011),
21.

4

Two Treatises of
Government (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press,
2005), II, 89.

5

William T. Cavanaugh,
The Myth of Religious
Violence (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2009), 162.

6

Cavanaugh, “Beyond
Secular Parodies” in
Radical Orthodoxy: A New
Theology, ed. John Milbank,
Graham Ward, Catherine
Pickstock (London:
Routledge, 1998), 191.
Emphasis mine.

The simpleton of the modern nation-state inhabits what the Catholic
scholar William T. Cavanaugh (citing the Anglican scholar John Milbank)
characterizes as a “simple space,” as compared with the “complex space”
that was Christendom. Cavanaugh describes the transformation thus: “The
rise of the modern nation-state is marked by the triumph of the universal
over the local in the sovereign state’s usurpation of power from the Church,
the nobility, clans, guilds and towns. The universalization of law and rights
would liberate the individual from the whims of local custom, thereby
creating a direct relationship or simple space between the sovereign and the
individual.”2
The simple space of political modernity is precisely what the folksy
narrator means by the proposition that “Government’s the only thing we
all belong to.” The direct relationship between “We the People” and the
federal and state governments that “we” supposedly created in the American
Revolution is precisely “the political space imagined by Locke,” which has
“two poles, the individual and the state,”3 or what Locke described in his
Second Treatise as “one body politic under one supreme government.”4
According to the story that political modernity tells about itself—the story
of what post-Christian man calls Liberty—the “democratic revolutions” of
the 18th and 19th centuries finally brought an end to religious strife and
bloodshed, inaugurating an endless epoch of peace, prosperity and domestic
tranquility in “the spirit of democratic capitalism,” to quote the title of
Michael Novak’s infamous and impudent attack on Catholic social teaching.
But in truth the successful struggle for the subordination of religion by
the state inaugurated an age of violence and civilizational decline without
precedent in Western history, with the two world wars representing only
a fraction of the vast carnage unleashed by the final emancipation of the
nations from the influence of the Catholic Church.
Indeed, as Cavanaugh notes, the so-called wars of religion in the 16th
and 17th centuries were really conflicts waged “by state-building elites
for the purpose of consolidating their power over the church and other
rivals.”5 They were “the birth pangs of the state, in which the overlapping
jurisdictions, allegiances, and customs of the medieval order were flattened
and circumscribed into the new creation of the sovereign state (not always
yet nation-state), a centralizing power with a monopoly on violence within a
defined territory.”6
This flattening and circumscription of social order involves a historically
novel division of society into public and private domains, the latter
consigned to a lower realm below the level of the public. That division
represents a total destruction of the medieval constitution of the State as
a unified moral totality whose complex structure reflects the existence of
the Mystical Body with its many parts ordered to the same eternal end.
In Christendom, wrote the great German historian Otto von Gierke, “the
Church served as a model for a parallel system of temporal groups” existing
together in an organic and hierarchical relation in which authority was
exercised locally wherever appropriate, according to what Pius XI called
“the principle of subsidiary function.” And this perennial arrangement
made for the true liberty of the individual, for as Gierke observed it was
35

Faith and Morals

36

7

Otto von Gierke, Political
Theories of the Middle
Age (Cambridge University
Press: 1900), 21, 34-35.

8

Ibid., 16, 2.

9

Ibid., 100.

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always understood that “[r]ulers are instituted for the sake of Peoples, not
Peoples for the sake of Rulers.” Contrary to the mythology of the Liberty
narrative, “the doctrine of the unconditioned duty of obedience was wholly
foreign to the Middle Age.… [E]very duty of obedience was conditioned by
the rightfulness of the command. That any individual must obey God rather
than any earthly superior appeared as an absolutely indisputable truth.”7 In
this age of Liberty, however, the nations have no king but Caesar, and we
are expected to obey men rather than God. Our mere opinions about Him
and His will are not operative when we enter the public square, where, as
Thomas Jefferson declared in his first Inaugural Address, we must exhibit
“absolute acquiescence in the decisions of the majority, the vital principle of
republics…”
In Christendom, Gierke wrote, “Church and State were two Co-ordinate
Powers” between which there was to be “an inseverable connexion and
an unbroken interaction which must display itself in every part and also
throughout the whole” of society.8 The Church, in short, was the soul of the
body politic. But with the Protestant revolt and the so-called Enlightenment,
the body politic of Christendom was inexorably divested of its soul, and
thus its organizing principle, leaving only the great mass of “sovereign”
individuals and the government their “sovereign will” supposedly created—
the two poles of the simple space we now inhabit. The result, Gierke
concludes, was “[a] combat…in which the Sovereign State and the Sovereign
Individual contended over the delimitation of the provinces assigned to them
by Natural Law, and in the course of that struggle all intermediate groups
were first degraded into the position of the more or less arbitrarily fashioned
creatures of mere Positive Law, and in the end were obliterated.”9
The formerly intermediate groups still exist in one form or another, of
course. There are still churches and associations of various kinds, perhaps
more than ever before. But they no longer exist as autonomous agencies with
a determinative social influence upon the whole—least of all the Catholic
Church, whose overthrow as the conscience of the State was essential to
the building of the New Order of the Ages. That is, the once intermediate
agencies are no longer publicly relevant, which is all that matters in the
modern secular state. This was the diagnosis of Robert Nisbet in his Quest
for Community, an ultimately futile Burkean conservative complaint about
a post-Christian social order whose false principles Nisbet was unwilling to
challenge.
Think of the modern nation-state, then, as a kind of sociopolitical Flatland
whose two-dimensional inhabitants—bodies without legally cognizable
souls—subsist in a condition of direct subjection to “their” government.
Any potential countervailing authority, particularly the Catholic Church,
has been consigned to an invisible third dimension known as the “private
voluntary society.” If the Church is envisioned as a three-dimensional reality,
her appearance in this Flatland can be likened to a physical impossibility.
Today, even Catholic Churchmen, captives of the Zeitgeist and the Second
Vatican Council’s prudentially disastrous embrace of “religious liberty,”
are unable to imagine the Church’s operative presence in the Flatland of
American politics. Hence the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops,

September - October 2012

10

http://www.usccb.org/
issues-and-action/religiousliberty/our-first-mostcherished-liberty.cfm/.

11

Milbank, Theology and
Social Theory (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1993), 9.
Emphasis in original.

expressing its utterly impotent opposition to the contraceptive mandate
of Obamacare, insisted: “This is not a Catholic issue. This is not a Jewish
issue. This is not an Orthodox, Mormon, or Muslim issue. It is an American
issue.”10 Being good citizens of Flatland, the American bishops consent to
the reduction of all social questions, including matters involving the very
foundations of the moral order, to a mere contest for votes in the twodimensional simple space of the American political arena in which members
of the Catholic hierarchy agree to be mere citizen-voters like everyone else.
For after all, in the New Order of the Ages government is the only thing we
all belong to.
How do we escape this absurd predicament before the suicide of the West
is completed? It is useless to speak of “states’ rights” and secession, for
the states are merely subdivided congruent spaces within the vast simple
space of the United States. Thus the last attempt at secession, known
as the Civil War, merely cut the overall simple space in two, with each
resulting half (including its respective states) being governed by the same
Enlightenment-bred principles, expressed in virtually identical constitutions.
(The Confederate States Constitution was borrowed from the United
States Constitution, including a federal supremacy clause and bans on any
establishment of religion, including Christianity, or any religious test for
office.)
What is needed, rather, is an internal secession from simple space,
involving nothing more or less than a re-dimensioning of the Catholic
simpleton into a three-dimensional Catholic man who refuses any longer
to accept a life in that flattened and circumscribed realm known as the
secular. “Once there was no secular,” writes Milbank. “Instead there was the
single community of Christendom with its dual aspects of sacerdotium and
regnum.…The secular as a domain had to be created or imagined, both in
theory and in practice.”11 What this means is that we have always held the key
to our own imaginary jail cell—a prison we ourselves confirm by accepting
the errors of the Enlightenment from which it emerged.
The key to the jail is the Word Incarnate. Without firing a shot, and within
the framework of existing institutions, re-dimensioned Catholics in every
station of life—from the voter to the ruler, and beginning with the hierarchy
of the Church whose divine commission is to make disciples of all nations—
need only speak Truth to power. The results would be astonishing, as we
have seen with formerly communist Hungary’s stunning adoption of a new
Christian constitution only last year.
The “only thing we all belong to” is not a mere civil government, but
rather the Kingdom of Christ, which embraces all men and all nations.
When Catholics shake off their Liberty-induced stupor and act as if they still
believe that Christ is King and Lord of History, the world will begin to change
again, just as it did most miraculously in the days of the Roman catacombs.
The question is not whether but when this social metanoia will occur, and
what will be left of our world by the time it does.

37

Faith and Morals

Humani
Generis
by Pope Pius XII, Concerning false opinions threatening to undermine Catholic Doctrine, Aug. 12, 1950

The encyclical Humani Generis of Pius XII
gave a clear condemnation of neo-Modernism
in the same way that Lamentabili of Pius X had
condemned modernism 40 years earlier. The
basic message is simple: the magisterium is the
guardian and the interpreter of Divine Revelation.
Any attempt to separate oneself from this
magisterium would be to follow in the footsteps
of Luther. But Lutheranism has humanized and
fragmented Christianity, reducing it to a personal
experience. It took only 15 years for the conciliar
Church to undo what defenses Humani Generis
had raised. Never before in the history of the
Church had a dogmatic encyclical been so quickly
and so completely disavowed by the very men
who had fallen under its condemnation! Here we
offer a few excerpts from this pivotal encyclical
touching on faith: the undermining reefs of
modern evolutionism and irenism, the limits
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of theology, the sure foundation of perennial
philosophy.

True and Certain Knowledge
1. Disagreement and error among men on
moral and religious matters have always been a
cause of profound sorrow to all good men, but
above all to the true and loyal sons of the Church,
especially today, when we see the principles of
Christian culture being attacked on all sides.
2. It is not surprising that such discord and
error should always have existed outside the
fold of Christ. For though, absolutely speaking,
human reason by its own natural force and light
can arrive at a true and certain knowledge of
the one personal God, Who by His providence
watches over and governs the world, and also

the natural law, which the Creator has written in
our hearts, still there are not a few obstacles to
prevent reason from making efficient and fruitful
use of its natural ability. The truths that have
to do with God and the relations between God
and men, completely surpass the sensible order
and demand self-surrender and self-abnegation
in order to be put into practice and to influence
practical life. Now the human intellect, in gaining
the knowledge of such truths, is hampered both
by the activity of the senses and the imagination,
and by evil passions arising from original sin.
Hence men easily persuade themselves in such
matters that what they do not wish to believe is
false or at least doubtful.
3. It is for this reason that divine revelation
must be considered morally necessary so that
those religious and moral truths which are not
of their nature beyond the reach of reason in
the present condition of the human race, may be
known by all men readily with a firm certainty
and with freedom from all error.
4. Furthermore the human intelligence
sometimes experiences difficulties in forming
a judgment about the credibility of the Catholic
faith, notwithstanding the many wonderful
external signs God has given, which are
sufficient to prove with certitude by the natural
light of reason alone the divine origin of the
Christian religion. For man can, whether from
prejudice or passion or bad faith, refuse and
resist not only the evidence of the external
proofs that are available, but also the impulses of
actual grace.
5. If anyone examines the state of affairs
outside the Christian fold, he will easily discover
the principal trends that not a few learned
men are following. Some imprudently and
indiscreetly hold that evolution, which has not
been fully proved even in the domain of natural
sciences, explains the origin of all this, and
audaciously support the monistic and pantheistic
opinion that the world is in continual evolution.
Communists gladly subscribed to this opinion so
that, when the souls of men have been deprived
of every idea of a personal God, they may the
more efficaciously defend and propagate their
dialectical materialism.

Imprudent “Eirenism”
11. Another danger is perceived which is all
the more serious because it is more concealed
beneath the mask of virtue. There are many
who, deploring disagreement among men and
intellectual confusion, through an imprudent zeal
for souls, are urged by a great and ardent desire
to do away with the barrier that divides good
and honest men; these advocate an “eirenism”
according to which, by setting aside the
questions which divide men, they aim not only
at joining forces to repel the attacks of atheism,
but also at reconciling things opposed to one
another in the field of dogma. And as in former
times some questioned whether the traditional
apologetics of the Church did not constitute an
obstacle rather than a help to the winning of
souls for Christ, so today some are presumptive
enough to question seriously whether theology
and theological methods, such as with the
approval of ecclesiastical authority are found
in our schools, should not only be perfected,
but also completely reformed, in order to
promote the more efficacious propagation of the
kingdom of Christ everywhere throughout the
world among men of every culture and religious
opinion.
12. Now if these only aimed at adapting
ecclesiastical teaching and methods to modern
conditions and requirements, through the
introduction of some new explanations, there
would be scarcely any reason for alarm. But
some through enthusiasm for an imprudent
“eirenism” seem to consider as an obstacle
to the restoration of fraternal union, things
founded on the laws and principles given by
Christ and likewise on institutions founded by
Him, or which are the defense and support of the
integrity of the faith, and the removal of which
would bring about the union of all, but only to
their destruction.
21. It is also true that theologians must always
return to the sources of divine revelation: for it
belongs to them to point out how the doctrine
of the living Teaching Authority is to be found
either explicitly or implicitly in the Scriptures
and in Tradition. Besides, each source of
39

Faith and Morals
divinely revealed doctrine contains so many rich
treasures of truth, that they can really never be
exhausted. Hence it is that theology through the
study of its sacred sources remains ever fresh;
on the other hand, speculation which neglects
a deeper search into the deposit of faith, proves
sterile, as we know from experience. But for this
reason even positive theology cannot be on a
par with merely historical science. For, together
with the sources of positive theology God has
given to His Church a living Teaching Authority
to elucidate and explain what is contained in the
deposit of faith only obscurely and implicitly.
This deposit of faith our Divine Redeemer has
given for authentic interpretation not to each of
the faithful, not even to theologians, but only to
the Teaching Authority of the Church. But if the
Church does exercise this function of teaching,
as she often has through the centuries, either
in the ordinary or extraordinary way, it is clear
how false is a procedure which would attempt
to explain what is clear by means of what is
obscure. Indeed the very opposite procedure
must be used. Hence Our Predecessor of
immortal memory, Pius IX, teaching that the
most noble office of theology is to show how a
doctrine defined by the Church is contained in
the sources of revelation, added these words, and
with very good reason: “in that sense in which it
has been defined by the Church.”

Properly Trained Reason
29. It is well known how highly the Church
regards human reason, for it falls to reason to
demonstrate with certainty the existence of
God, personal and one; to prove beyond doubt
from divine signs the very foundations of the
Christian faith; to express properly the law
which the Creator has imprinted in the hearts
of men; and finally to attain to some notion,
indeed a very fruitful notion, of mysteries. But
reason can perform these functions safely and
well, only when properly trained, that is, when
imbued with that sound philosophy which has
long been, as it were, a patrimony handed down
by earlier Christian ages, and which moreover
possesses an authority of even higher order, since
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the Teaching Authority of the Church, in the
light of divine revelation itself, has weighed its
fundamental tenets, which have been elaborated
and defined little by little by men of great genius.
For this philosophy, acknowledged and accepted
by the Church, safeguards the genuine validity of
human knowledge, the unshakable metaphysical
principles of sufficient reason, causality, and
finality, and finally the mind’s ability to attain
certain and unchangeable truth.
30. Of course this philosophy deals with much
that neither directly nor indirectly touches faith
or morals, and which consequently the Church
leaves to the free discussion of experts. But this
does not hold for many other things, especially
those principles and fundamental tenets to
which We have just referred. However, even in
these fundamental questions, we may clothe our
philosophy in a more convenient and richer dress,
make it more vigorous with a more effective
terminology, divest it of certain scholastic aids
found less useful, prudently enrich it with the
fruits of progress of the human mind. But never
may we overthrow it, or contaminate it with false
principles, or regard it as a great, but obsolete,
relic. For truth and its philosophic expression
cannot change from day to day, least of all where
there is question of self-evident principles of
the human mind or of those propositions which
are supported by the wisdom of the ages and by
divine revelation. Whatever new truth the sincere
human mind is able to find, certainly cannot be
opposed to truth already acquired, since God,
the highest Truth, has created and guides the
human intellect, not that it may daily oppose new
truths to rightly established ones, but rather that,
having eliminated errors which may have crept
in, it may build truth upon truth in the same order
and structure that exist in reality, the source
of truth. Let no Christian therefore, whether
philosopher or theologian, embrace eagerly and
lightly whatever novelty happens to be thought
up from day to day, but rather let him weigh it
with painstaking care and a balanced judgment,
lest he lose or corrupt the truth he already has,
with grave danger and damage to his faith.

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Einsiedeln Abbey
Saint Meinrad, of the family of the Counts of Hohenzollern, was educated at the abbey
school of Reichenau, an island in Lake Constance, under his kinsmen Abbots Hatto and
Erlebald, where he became a monk and was ordained. After some years at Reichenau,
and the dependent priory of Bollingen, on Lake Zurich, he embraced an eremitical life
and established his hermitage on the slopes of Mt. Etzel, taking with him a wonderworking statue of Our Lady which he had been given by the Abbess Hildegarde of Zurich.
He died in 861 at the hands of robbers who coveted the treasures offered at the shrine
by devout pilgrims, but during the next eighty years the place was never without one
or more hermits emulating Saint Meinrad’s example. One of them, named Eberhard,
previously Provost of Strassburg, erected a monastery and church there, of which he
became first abbot.
The church was miraculously consecrated, so the legend runs, in 948, by Christ Himself
assisted by the Four Evangelists, St. Peter, and St. Gregory the Great. This event was
investigated and confirmed by Pope Leo VIII and subsequently ratified by many of his
successors, the last ratification being by Pope Pius VI in 1793, who confirmed the acts of
all his predecessors.

Spirituality

St. Pius X, Our Guide

Through
the Crisis
by Fr. Emanuel Herkel, SSPX

Pope St. Pius X is praised for many virtues. His
story has been told in many ways. This will be an
intellectual biography, limited to only one idea—
the condemnation of Modernism. The ordinary
history must be omitted, except for a few details.
In 1903 Giuseppe Sarto was elected Pope Pius
X. He died at the beginning of World War I, so he
was a modern man. He understood the modern
world, but he was not a Modernist. The virtue
of faith made him the ideal choice as the patron
of the Society of St. Pius X. This pope clearly
condemned the heresy that is now ravaging the
Church; he identified it and acted against it so
strongly that the heretics did not dare to teach
openly for 50 years. Unfortunately, the heretics
have gained a certain prominence now, and that
is a reason to invoke the patronage of St. Pius X.
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Identifying the Error
Modernism is not an easy heresy to identify
because it is not simply the denial of one or
two truths of faith. Modernism is a different
way of thinking about the faith; at its root it is
a bad philosophy, and it touches every aspect
of the faith. Previous popes had condemned
Modernism, but they condemned only part of the
heresy. It required the clear vision of St. Pius X
to identify the error and condemn it effectively.
This he did, and still today the best explanation
of Modernism is the condemnation by St. Pius
X in the encyclical Pascendi. The principles
found in this encyclical were the guiding light for
Archbishop Lefebvre. They continue to guide the
SSPX in our relations with the heretics of today.

The Modernist as Believer
Let us begin with faith itself. A traditional
definition of faith is “the adherence of the
intellect to the truth revealed by God.” We believe
in a truth that comes from outside, a truth that
exists whether we believe it or not. We believe
because of the authority of God who reveals, and
there is no need to seek elsewhere.
No one has the right to take this faith from
us and replace it by something else. What we
are now seeing in the Church is the revival of a
Modernist definition of faith that was condemned
a hundred years ago by Pius X. According to
this, faith is an internal feeling: there is no need
to seek further than within a man’s heart to find
the explanation of religion. The heretics think of
faith as something purely subjective, a personal
experience of God. They deny that God can be
known by external means. It is everyone for
himself, in his own conscience. This internal
faith shuts us up within our human-ness.
The true Catholic faith does come to us
from the outside, as a revelation from God. But
the Modernists believe that “human reason is
incapable of raising itself up to God, or even
of knowing, from the fact of created beings,
that God exists” (Pascendi). This was directly
condemned by Vatican I (Dei Filius, Dz. 1806).
As any external revelation is impossible for the
Modernist, he will seek within himself to satisfy
the need he feels for the divine, a need rooted in
his subconscious. This need arouses in the soul
a particular feeling which in some way unites us
with God. If there is any reference to revelation
in this heretical idea of faith, it is an immanent
revelation of God created within the soul.

From Immanent Faith
to Ecumenism
When Archbishop Lefebvre went to see Pope
Paul VI in 1976, the Pope reproached him for
making his seminarians swear an oath against
the Pope. The Archbishop found it hard to
conceive where that idea had come from. Then
it dawned on him that someone had maliciously

interpreted in this way the Anti-Modernist Oath
that until recently every priest had to take before
his ordination, and every Church dignitary
when he received his office. Here is what we
find in this oath: “I hold most certainly and I
profess sincerely that faith is not a blind religious
feeling which emerges from the shadows of the
subconscious under the pressure of the heart and
the inclination of the morally informed will. But it
is true assent of the intellect to the truth received
from outside, by which we believe to be true on
God’s authority all that has been said, attested
and revealed by God in person, our Creator and
Lord.”
This Anti-Modernist Oath is no longer required
before becoming a priest or a bishop. It was one
of the great safeguards established by St. Pius X
to keep Modernism out of the Church. But today
the concept of faith has been falsified and many
people are influenced by Modernism. That is why
they are ready to believe that all religions save.
If each man’s faith is according to his conscience
(since it is conscience that produces faith) then
there is no reason to believe that one faith saves
any better than another. We see from this how
Ecumenism is not an isolated problem; it is part
of the Modernist heresy.
The Catholic faith and the Modernist faith
are completely different. The Catholic faith
comes from an external God who came into this
world and taught the Apostles all that we need
to believe. The Modernists tell us that we did
not receive truth; we construct it. The heresy
is subjective to the point where we are told to
tolerate everyone and everything because only
sincerity matters, and we cannot judge other
people’s sincerity.

Enemies inside the Church
How can we defend ourselves against these
perverse doctrines that are ruining religion, all
the more since the heretics are found in teaching
positions within the Church? Thank God, they
were unmasked by St. Pius X in a way that allows
them to be easily recognized. Do not think of this
as an old phenomenon of interest only to Church
historians. Pascendi is a text that could have
45

Spirituality
been written today; it is extraordinarily topical
and depicts the “enemies within” with admirable
vividness.
Here is a description of the Modernists from
St. Pius X’s encyclical: we see them “lacking in
serious philosophy and theology and passing
themselves off, all modesty forgotten, as
restorers of the Church” (Pascendi). These
restorers of the Church are not afraid to change
the traditional wording of prayers, or even of
the Creed. The words, for them, are meaningless
formulas, so they can be changed to other words
that perhaps have more meaning. Continuing in
St. Pius X’s exposition of Modernism, we read:
“These formulas, if they are to be living formulas,
must always be suited to the believer and to
his faith. The day they cease to be so, they will
automatically lose their original content, and
then there will be nothing to do but change them.
Since dogmatic formulas, as the Modernists
conceive them, are of such an unstable and
precarious nature, one understands perfectly
why they have such a slight opinion of them”
(Pascendi). The current phrase for this is the
somewhat ambiguous expression “living faith” or
even “living tradition.” Remember that by those
words the Modernists mean something entirely
subjective.

Forming a Collegial Church
After his personal faith experience, the
believer will share this in a faith encounter. If
the faith comes to be shared by many it is called
“collective”; then the need is felt to combine
together in a society to preserve and develop
the common treasure. This is how a Church is
formed. The Modernist Church is “the fruit of the
collective conscience, in other words, of the sum
of individual consciences, which all derive from
one original believer—who for Catholics is Jesus
Christ” (Pascendi).
The next step for the modernists is to re-write
the history of the Church: At the beginning, when
the Church’s authority was still believed to come
from God, it was conceived as an autocratic
body. “But now the mistake has been realized.
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For just as the Church is a vital emanation of the
collective conscience, so authority in its turn
is a vital product of the Church” (Pascendi).
Power, therefore, must change hands and come
from the bottom. As political consciousness has
created popular government among the nations,
the same thing must happen in the Church: “If
ecclesiastical authority does not wish to provoke
a crisis of conscience, it must bow to democratic
forms” (Pascendi).
Since Vatican II, the Church has been largely
governed through bishops’ conferences. The
Pope is expected to ask the permission of the
bishops, the bishops defer to their priests, and
the priests are told what to do and say by the laity
on the parish council. The post-conciliar crisis
is largely a crisis of authority, called Collegiality,
which ensures that almost no heretics are ever
condemned.

Loose Ends
That is almost enough about the Modernists.
Briefly, here are a few other parts of the system.
For the Modernists, the “sacraments are simply
signs or symbols, although endowed with
efficacy. They compare them to certain words
that have a vogue because of their power of
expressing and disseminating impressive,
inspiring ideas. As much as to say that the
sacraments were only instituted to nourish
faith: a proposition which the Council of Trent
condemned” (Pascendi).
The Bible is also distorted by this heresy.
For the Modernists, the books of the Bible
are a record of faith experiences. God speaks
through these books, but He is the God who
is within us. The books are inspired rather as
one speaks of poetic inspiration; inspiration is
likened to the urgent need felt by the believer
to communicate his faith in writing. Thus, the
Bible is a human work, and because the Bible is
just a record of experiences they “do not hesitate
to affirm that the books in question, especially
the Pentateuch and the first three Gospels, were
gradually formed by additions made to a very
short original narrative: interpolations in the

form of theological or allegorical interpretations,
or simply linking-passages and tackings-on”
(Pascendi). In this way the Modernists feel free
to reject any part of Scripture that does not
correspond to their personal faith experience
by saying that it was not part of the original
experience.
The Modernists have given new definitions
to Catholic terms like faith, the Church, and the
sacraments. Catholics who wonder at the new
language employed in the “Conciliar Church”
will be helped by knowing where it comes from.

But the religion of Christ has not changed and
never will. In this modern age, when the light of
faith seems to be so dark, we need to appreciate
and learn from the saints. St. Pius X is a bright
light that God gave us at the beginning of this
Modernist crisis, and he will guide us safely to
the end.
Fr. Herkel was born in British Columbia, Canada, and
graduated from boarding high school at St. Mary’s, Kansas,
in 1992. He studied for the priesthood at St. Thomas Aquinas
Seminary in Winona, Minnesota, and was ordained in 2001.
Since then he has been stationed in Canada. He is currently
stationed at Immaculate Heart of Mary Priory in Calgary,
Alberta.

47

Spirituality

The Spirit
of Poverty
by Fr. Michael Fortin, SSPX

The virtues and their acquisition is especially
done through the sacred liturgy. Though we could
discuss many such examples, we will here focus
on one: let us venture to better discover and
obtain the rich Christ-like virtue of poverty.
“And Satan said to Jesus: All the kingdoms of
the world and the glory of them will I give thee, if
falling down thou wilt adore me” (Mt. 4:9). Here is
the delusion of pride, to offer to the very Creator
of the planets, galaxies, sun, moon, and stars a
few specks of His own creation! “All things were
made by him: and without him was made nothing
that was made.” What is poverty? It is man
moved to godliness, the spirit which views dust
as dust and longs for heavenly riches, eternal
and incorruptible. What are worldly kingdoms,
palaces and robes compared to the halls of
eternal glory in company with the King of kings
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and countless legions of angels and saints robed
in holiness?
This was the first unspoken sermon of the
Savior: The omnipotent owner of all things chose
to have nothing in order to teach us the virtue
of poverty, the happiness of poverty. For no man
on earth was happier than Christ, possessing at
all times the vision of His Father. And indeed,
no woman was ever happier than the Virgin
Mary, having like her Son nothing, yet always
possessing in her mind and heart the vision and
love of her Son, who is God.
But if we earnestly examine ourselves we
notice a great dissimilitude. Our hearts are set
upon creatures and “where a man sets his heart,
there is his treasure” (Mt. 6:21). Whence does
our stupidity come which justly merits rebuke
from our Master? We inherit this disorder from

our first parents; it is a consequence of the great
sin against the spirit of poverty! We have to
understand that man was made lord over the
creatures of the earth, and they were to be in
perfect subjection to him as long as he remained
subjected to the Supreme Being who made all
things. But he broke this subjection; he preferred
a creature (the fruit of the tree of knowledge
of good and evil) to the will of the Creator. As
a fitting punishment, creatures no longer are
in perfect submission to man; they strive after
mastery over the now weak and disordered man.
Even before original sin, man had the spirit of
poverty, even in the midst of earthly delights with
no wants whatsoever. For he was supernatural
(by grace) and lived a godly life; he was perfectly
ordered, having his mind and heart set and
attached upon his heavenly Father. Did he then
not care for anything or anyone else other than

God? No, precisely because he was so rich with
the Spirit of God, he could have the spirit of
poverty. Genesis tells us that he dressed and kept
the paradise of pleasures; and with the bestowal
of Eve he acclaims in loving admiration that she
“is bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh.” He views
and holds these gifts as sacred realities due to
their Source, due to the One who keeps them in
existence, due to their purpose as helps to his
eternal end of possessing the Beatific Vision.
However, sin blinded his (and therefore our)
vision; God is no longer clearly seen and served in
His temporal gifts; we easily stop at the creature,
making them obstacles to our End.
“And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt
among us, (and we saw his glory, the glory as it
were of the only begotten of the Father,) full of
grace and truth.” Indeed, the new Adam infinitely
rich in grace, virtue, merit, and heavenly power

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Spirituality
comes to restore in us the spirit of the sons and
daughters of God, the spirit of poverty, the spirit
of ordering all to the glory of the Trinitarian
Creator.
“And opening his mouth he taught them saying:
Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the
kingdom of heaven” (Mt. 5:2).
Why “poor in spirit” and not simply “poor”? It
is due to it being essentially a matter of spirit. It
profits a man nothing to have nothing (to be poor)
and yet have not the spirit of poverty. What is
this spirit? No: we must rather ask, whose is this
spirit?
By baptism one is no longer the same person
as he was before. Yes, there is an ontological (on
the level of being) transformation into godliness.
By the infusion of the ineffable grace of the
Holy Triune God, this subject of the sacred rite
becomes an adopted son or daughter of the
Heavenly Father, a mystical (nevertheless very
real) incorporation into the Person of Christ,
therefore producing a god (small “g”). And hence,
a corresponding new spirit is breathed into this
child of the new Adam, the spirit no less than
the Spirit of the Father and the Son, the Spiritus
Sanctus!
What is, or rather Who is this Spirit possessing
us? He is the Spirit of the infinite love between
the Father and Son. “Deus est caritas.”
But how does this all tie in with our present
topic on the religious virtue of poverty? Perhaps
it may best be discovered through use of an
analogical example. John wishes to marry his
own beautiful Sally. Each time he sees her, he
professes to her his unfailing love while they
speak of their future life together. John can’t
get over how lucky his fate is. Sally comes from
a well-to-do family; they have the nicest home
in town, she drives in the seat of the latest
model Audi, her ears and neckline decorated
with diamonds sparkle in his eye, her taste in
dress boldly states that money is no factor. Poor
Johnny! He is madly in love...madly in love, not
with Sally, but with what she has. He sets himself
up for disaster; he may gain the riches of Sally,
but the door to the happiness of love is already
slammed in his face by his own greedy hand!
We need not unfold the apparent comparison
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September - October 2012

with Johnny and us. To love our Lord God with
all our heart, means just that: all our heart. I
have not the right to love anything or anyone
else besides, due to the will of my Father that
I love only Him. The Father loves only the Son,
the Son loves only the Father, this love is only
the Holy Ghost. The Father loves His creations
only through, with, and in His eternal Word (the
Son); the Son reciprocates this eternal love in the
manifestation of the glory of His Father. This is
Their Spirit, this is the exact same Spirit poured
into the sanctified sons of men, the Spirit of one
love for God and His glory, exclusive of all other
loves.
Does this imply that Adam may not love Eve,
or that they may not love the delights of Paradise?
Of course not, but the creations of the Good God
are only to be loved in Him, as He alone is their
existential and essential beginning, preserver
and end. Evil entered the heart of man when he
loved Eve and the delightful fruit outside the will
of God. “Tu solus Sanctus. Tu solus Dominus.
Tu solus Altissimus!”
God has given to some more, that they may
more easily love Him in the poor and in His
Church by their generosity. He has allowed others
to have less that they may more easily love Him
in their benefactors and be more dependent on
their Heavenly Father whose loving providence
extends to our increasing gray hairs—“even if a
mother was to forget her child, I will not forget
you.”
Let us meditate upon this Spirit in us and pray
to live according to His gifts. What a tragedy for
us to live for goods and beauties, and thereby to
forfeit the possession of Goodness and Beauty,
God Himself. “For this is eternal life (happiness),
to love the Lord thy God…” This is the spirit of
poverty.

Fr. Michael Fortin was born in Montreal, Quebec, and raised
in Virginia. After studying aeronautics he worked in various
fields before entering St. Thomas Aquinas Seminary, Winona,
in 2002. Ordained to the Sacred Priesthood in 2009, his first
assignment was to New Zealand for a little less than three years.
He is currently principal of Our Lady of Victories School in
Manila, Philippines.

The Orphan Trains of New York’s

Sisters of
Charity
by Miss Susan Galleo

Dear Sister,
I received your letter and the little box you
sent me, for which I return many thanks. I am
grown so large that you would not know me. I
have been busy all this fall helping Uncle Ned
to get his corn out of the field, and he said I
worked very well. I have only to cut some wood
for the stove, and to play with the baby while
Aunt Fanny sews. I am as happy as a little bird.
I would love to see you. Please come to see me
sometimes. I am learning my catechism, so that
I can make my first Communion. Aunt Mary
says you must pray for her and for Your little
boy,
Harry

This letter is from the New York Foundling
Hospital’s annual report of January 1883.
Hundreds of others like it can be found in the
hospital’s archives. They comprise part of the
little remaining documentation regarding an era
of U.S. history unfamiliar to most Americans—
the era of the Orphan Trains.
The Orphan Trains ran for 75 years, from 1854
to 1929, and were the well-intentioned effort of
several institutions to address the staggering
number of orphaned and abandoned children
on the streets of New York City. In the mid1800’s, the port of New York was flooded with
immigrants, a great number of whom were the
Irish who fled their country’s devastating potato
famine. Other Europeans were lured to America
by advertisements about free land which could
be found along the new railroad routes then
51

Christian Culture
being surveyed. Irish or otherwise, those who survived the journey to New
York arrived to find a city ill prepared to handle their presence. There were
not enough jobs for them, even temporarily. They lived in cramped and dirty
tenement buildings. Thousands succumbed to cholera, typhoid fever, and
tuberculosis, which thrived in such unsanitary conditions. When both of
their parents died and with no extended family on whom to depend, children
were left on their own to survive as well as they could. Often parents would
simply abandon their children out of sheer desperation. Not surprisingly,
these “street Arabs,” as they were derogatorily called, often turned to crime
as a means to support themselves. They were regularly rounded up and flung
into adult prisons. The Chief of Police in 1849 estimated that at the time
there were 10,000 vagrant children on the streets of New York City. Other
agencies’ reports estimated the number to have been around 30,000.

Sister Mary Irene Fitzgibbon founded
the organization, which began taking in
abandoned children in 1869.

Documents being made public by the New
York Foundling Asylum shed new light on
a dark chapter of New York’s history.
During this tumultuous time, Charles Loring Brace was living in New
York City completing his training to become a Methodist minister. Moved by
the plight of these destitute youngsters and supported by the funds of local
businessmen, Brace founded the Children’s Aid Society in 1853 as a means
to help the city’s abandoned children. Brace was convinced that the key to
ensuring these children would grow to be productive and respectable adults
was to get them off the streets of the city and into the fresh air and open,
clean space of the countryside in the expanding Midwest. He believed the
farmers of America’s frontier would welcome these underprivileged children.
Though the lifestyle would be a drastic change for the children, it would
certainly be a vast improvement over their present circumstances. What
better way to transport them, he thought, than by the nation’s railways? Thus
was born the idea of the Orphan Trains.
Brace’s system of the “placing out” of the orphans was quite simple.
Notices were sent ahead of time announcing when and where a group of
children would be arriving. Those interested in caring for one of them need
52

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1

Other orphanages and
institutions besides the
Children’s Aid Society and
the New York Foundling
Asylum placed children on
the trains. Many eastern
cities participated in the
movement. However, the
CAS and the Foundling
Asylum placed the largest
numbers.

only show up at the appointed place, make their selection of a child, and
sign the acceptance papers. Any children not chosen boarded the train again
and proceeded to the next stop. The agreement between the Children’s Aid
Society and the new parents indicated that agents from the Society would
make regular visits to assess the children’s new situations. For the 75 years
that the Orphan Trains ran, approximately 100,000 children were placed in
homes this way by the Children’s Aid Society, an average of just over 1,300
annually.
As is often the case, the Catholic Church takes an idea, either good or
indifferent in itself, and improves it. In the Orphan Trains of Charles Loring
Brace, the Sisters of Charity recognized an opportunity to find homes for the
hundreds of abandoned infants and children at their recently-instituted New
York Founding Asylum.1

The Foundling’s first baby, Sarah Kinsley,
was left with the Sisters on October 12,
1869.

Newborns were routinely abandoned on
the streets, in church entrances, or on the
doorsteps of the wealthy.

2

Gottlieb, Martin. The
Foundling: The Story of
the New York Foundling
Hospital. New York:
Norfleet, 2001. Print. p. 24.

The story of the Founding Asylum begins with the story of its founder,
Sister Mary Irene. Born Catherine Rosamond Fitzgibbon in England in 1823,
she moved to Brooklyn with her family when she was nine years old. It was
during an outbreak of Asiatic cholera in 1849 that Sister Mary Irene had a
vision of what her future would be. She contracted the disease. Her state of
coma during the illness was so deep at one point that her parents believed
her to be dead and had a priest administer last rites. Catherine, however,
was not dead. She could hear the voices of those around her and prayed that
God would spare her life. “And as she did...the talk and the weeping in the
room seemed to quiet, replaced by a vision of a multitude of children, and
the admonition, ‘These are the little ones you must save for Me.’ ”2 Catherine
survived the sickness, and the next year she entered the novitiate of the
Sisters of Charity, by whom she had been educated as a young girl.
Sister Mary Irene was acutely aware of the number of abandoned children,
especially the infants, on New York’s streets. The unwanted babies were left
daily on church doorsteps and on the stoops of houses of the wealthy. In
53

Christian Culture
the worst cases, they were thrown out like refuse into garbage cans or into
the gutters. Many were left on the steps of St. Peter’s Convent where Sister
Mary Irene and the other Sisters cared for them as best they could. Prompted
by the recollection of the vision she had during her illness and by the obvious
need for a better arrangement, Sister Mary Irene proposed to her superior
the idea of an institution devoted to the care of these infants. Mother Mary
Jerome presented the request to Archbishop John McCloskey, who approved
the idea. On Oct. 5, 1869, two Sisters from St. Peter’s were sent to prepare the
rented building at 17 East Twelfth Street. On Oct. 11, Sister Mary Irene joined
them, and they began the Foundling Asylum of the Sisters of Charity. The
Sisters had planned to open the asylum in about three months, after they had
time to ready the building for the reception of the infants. An infant was left
at the door on the first night. By the end of the year, 80 others had arrived.

Notes were attached to many babies left
with the Foundling.

The agency has changed locations several
times over the course of its history.

3

54

Gottlieb, The Foundling, p.
56.

The Angelus

The Orphan Trains had been running for almost 20 years by the time
the Sisters of Charity began their own version in 1873. Opposed to the idea
of sending the children to a destination with no idea into whose care they
would be placed, the Sisters worked with priests throughout the country to
have the children matched with a family before they ever boarded a train.
Priests in Nebraska, Missouri, Louisiana, and other states announced during
their Sunday sermons that there were orphans from the East who needed
stable, Catholic homes. The interested parents signed up. Parish priests knew
their congregations and could recommend suitable families to the Sisters.
Prospective parents could even make requests for particular physical traits
of the child. One such request read: “Your agent has promised me a nice redhaired boy. I have a red-haired wife and five red-headed girls and we want a
boy to match.”3
Also differing from the Brace system was the Sisters’ insistence that the
placing of the children be the end of a process instead of the beginning of
one. Although infants were regularly placed with families, children from the

September - October 2012

4

Andrea Warren, We Rode the
Orphan Trains (Boston:
Houghton, 2001). pp. 51-52.

Foundling Asylum were most often sent on the trains only after having spent
several years in the care of the Sisters and of a closely-monitored network
of foster parents. Children left at the asylum were often sick. Of the 1,377
infants admitted during the first year of operation, 772 died. The babies’ first
months were most often concentrated on their being nursed to health. The
Sisters then placed the infants and toddlers in foster homes so that beds
were available for the other orphans continually arriving. After having spent
time in foster care, the children returned to the Asylum, healthy and adjusted
to spending time in a family environment. The final step was the placement
with a permanent family.
When a group of children had been matched with families, the Sisters
prepared the children for their journey. They were outfitted in the best
clothes the Sisters could find. On the inside of one of each child’s garments
was pinned a slip of paper with a number written on it. Somewhere in
another town or another state, an excited couple held documents with that
same number. The youngsters boarded the train with two Sisters and several
social workers who always accompanied them on the trips. Sister Mary Irene
saw each train off from the station until her death in 1896. Once the group
arrived at their destination, the Sisters assisted with the matching of a child
to his new mother and father. Sister Justina, O.S.F., who rode the Orphan
Trains in 1913, visited the Foundling Hospital in 1969 and read the following
about her first meeting with her father: “Little Edith Peterson, then twentytwo months old, was placed aboard a baby train with fifty other Foundling
Hospital children on their way to new homes. The number forty-one was
pinned to her, the same number given to John and Mary, who came to the
train station on the appointed day to meet their new daughter. When John
Bieganek first spotted her, he commented, ‘I hope she’s number forty-one!’
and seeing that she was, he scooped her into his arms.”4
The arrival of the trains was a local event. Even people who were
not taking children came to the stations to watch the activity. In the
contracts between the parents and the Foundling Asylum were provisions
regarding upbringing, inheritance, and annual visits by the Sisters or their
representatives. The children began their journeys with no family and ended
their journeys with mothers, fathers, and siblings. Over 20,000 children
were placed in homes by the Sisters of Charity during the 50 years they
participated in the Orphan Train movement.
The Orphan Trains stopped running in 1929. Child welfare laws were being
established to address orphans and abandoned children. Both the Children’s
Aid Society and the Foundling Asylum realized that placing children closer to
their original homes better served all involved than sending them states away.
Annual visits could be conducted more easily. Keeping the children closer
to the places of birth proved less traumatic to these young ones who had
experienced enough trauma already. In our modern way of thinking, the idea
of shipping orphans and abandoned children to places unknown and into the
homes of strangers might seem outlandish. However, the Sisters of Charity,
faced with an almost impossible task of caring for such a number of orphans,
made the best out of a bleak situation and sent out on America’s Orphan
Trains the most precious of cargo.
55

Christian Culture

The Family
Meal
by Michael J. Rayes

Kids are messy. That’s why God created paper
towels.
At some point, upon cleaning up after yet
another meal, you may have the feeling that your
children should learn more than simply how to
eat. What about civility and the dignity of living
as an honorable Catholic gentleman or lady?
How do you pass on the greatness of our shared
Catholic patrimony to your children?
The answer could be as simple as eating dinner
together as a family.
The family meal is an opportunity to teach
your children history, social anthropology, family
life, and culture. Dinner is the time to inculcate
your own family’s culture and lineage into your
children. What foods did your grandmother
make? What about her grandmother? Making
time to prepare these same foods will teach
56

The Angelus

September - October 2012

your children a strong element of their ancestral
history. Food is one of the most powerful factors
of culture and ethnic social groupings. Your
children have a right to learn about their own
ethnicity and heritage. They may end up learning
a few foreign-language words and phrases from
you as you explain the dishes and how they are
prepared.
I am not a dietician and not a professional
nutritionist. This is not an article on food or
weight-loss; rather, we’ll explore the Catholic
principle of family life as it pertains to the
preparation and consumption of food. You may
find, however, that a healthy relationship with
food and the practice of Catholic principles
will yield natural benefits for your body and
supernatural benefits to your soul.
Eating together as a family not only teaches

your children civilized behavior, it is an
opportunity to practice a right ordering of family
roles. The father of the family will sit at the head
of the table and lead prayers. The mother could
sit at the father’s side. The rest of the seats may
be entirely pragmatic. Who will fight if they sit in
proximity? Who has long legs to entwine or kick
other legs under the table?
One prays grace before and after every meal.
Properly, the father leads these prayers. At
the end of the meal, all will wait until they are
dismissed. No one may simply walk away from
the table: They must be excused by the father.
This may be a good time to share the events of
everyone’s day, briefly inform the family about
news, or to clarify a house rule.
A focus on comportment at the dinner table
does not necessarily mean that you must have a
quiet, serious atmosphere. Some meals could be
this way, but many other times your family meals
may be light-hearted.

complete with a deacon and subdeacon. Dinner,
too, might be more formal or simple depending
on the occasion.
Food can restore vitality or it could make
a person sick. It may even be fatal due to
grave poisoning. The Eucharist, as well, is a
condemnation for one who dares to receive in
mortal sin. St. Paul is very clear on this point in 1
Cor. 11:27.
Concerning meals, you’ll want to consider the
reality of your family life and adjust accordingly.
Popular culture in America waxes eloquent
about “Sunday dinner” as being a quite formal
affair, but my wife and I discovered years ago
that we usually don’t have the energy to exert on
a Sunday dinner after getting half a dozen small
children ready for church, dealing with catechism
lessons, Mass, and then the drive home. Many
Sunday dinners at our house consist of leftovers
and easy foods the kids prepare themselves.
During the week, we plan more complex
meals for dinner, some of which can get fairly
complicated (and delicious).

Natural and Spiritual Parallels
Dinner should be special as the Mass is
special. We may contemplate both as we ask for
our daily Bread in the Lord’s Prayer. Our Lord
routinely uses the natural to reveal, and even to
effect, the supernatural. Consider the sacraments
as perhaps the best example of this: water, oil,
bread, wine, vocalized words, and imposition
of hands are physical realities that effect
supernatural works. Your family dinner also has,
in its own, lesser way, a spiritual significance
for your family. You and your children may feel
a certain peace of soul when the table is set. It is
edifying to see an orderly, clean table with place
settings and food nicely presented.
Food also tends to pull people together. The
family is a community, a school of faith. There
will be opportunity to reconnect during a main
meal in which the family partakes together.
This doesn’t mean that every instance of
dinner need be extravagant. Using our Mass
comparison, sometimes we may attend a
weekday low Mass which barely lasts 40 minutes,
but occasionally there is a Pontifical High Mass

Meals as a Family
Regardless of formality, however, there
should be certain minimum standards for every
dinner meal. This will be a lot easier when you
delegate chores to your kids. For example, you
may wish to always have a clean tablecloth. A
child less than ten years old can shake out the
old one, put it in the laundry hamper, and spread
out a new tablecloth. Kids should have various
chores to prepare for the meal according to their
temperaments and ages.
You will, no doubt, want your family to be
relaxed and comfortable in your home, but there
should also be cleanliness and order. This is a
balanced approach. Consider the papal household
of St. Pius X. He worked hard at restoring all
things in Christ, but when it came time for dinner,
he did away with the custom of the pope eating
alone. He enjoyed conversations with his meals.
In my own family, my wife is task-oriented
and I am people-oriented. Thus, she prepares the
meals (a lot of fancy, busy work that dazzles
57

Christian Culture
and overwhelms me) while I manage the kids’
chores, and then follow up with making sure the
table is set right. All of these tasks would exhaust
one person, but together, we get it all done.
Children can also contribute to the meal by
picking and rinsing food from your backyard
garden. This garden can be as simple as one
herb plant or you could have a whole working
farm back there. The point is, your children will
learn that food comes from the earth, which is
a manifestation of the created goodness from a
loving God.
There are also books on etiquette that will
help you train your children in proper mealtime
manners. The Joy of Cooking features a section
on proper place settings. Catholic books on
etiquette and the domestic life have been
republished as well.
You may wish to consider having another table
which will give you and your spouse the adult
time you both need. A bistro table or a nicer small
dining table in your bedroom, on the patio, or in
a separate dining room works well for tea, coffee,
desserts, and so on.

A Right Relationship with Food
We could compare the appetite for food
to another human appetite which is properly
satiated in marriage. St. Francis de Sales
used food as an analogy throughout his
Introduction to the Devout Life, so we will
compare the appetites here. One does not go
around constantly and mindlessly satisfying the
amorous appetite. That would be animalistic and
immoral. Neither does one need to constantly
give in to hunger for food or put taste above all
else. Mindless snacking is probably not advisable
to one who struggles controlling the passions.
Children are acutely observant and they model
behavior of those around them. They may learn
the virtue of temperance by your example.
Like many other things, food can be used
for good or abused. The Church has always
recognized this, but the modern world is catching
up. The American Psychiatric Association lists
two major eating disorders that warrant serious
58

The Angelus

September - October 2012

intervention. There are lesser degrees of eating
problems, of course, which pertain more toward
gluttony and spiritual imperfection.
Conversely, a right relationship with food
will help the family follow the Church year. The
foods prepared can help remind each family
member about the liturgical season. For example,
a Lenten dinner on Friday would certainly be
different from a Wednesday dinner during the
weeks after Pentecost.
By making even little changes in your culinary
routine, you can improve your health, draw your
family closer together, and teach your children
valuable lessons about their heritage and their
Catholic Faith.

Michael J. Rayes is a lifelong Catholic, a husband,
and father of seven. He has been published by
Rafka Press, Latin Mass Magazine, and others.

St. Joan of Arc

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which England fell soon after the death of the saint. Don’t miss this stirring presentation on the
life, events, and consequences of St. Joan of Arc.

The Lepanto Lectures
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The Cristeros and the Martyrs
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Amidst the terrors of an anti-Catholic government, an army of faithful Catholic Mexicans arose to defend
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Henry VIII and the Anglican Schism
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Please visit our website to see our entire selection of books and music

Christian Culture

Seven secrets to obtain a vocation in your family

Mother
of a Priest
by Fr. Hervé de la Tour, SSPX

For a Catholic mother to have one of her sons
elevated to the holy priesthood is a great honor.
Father Lharde put these words on the lips of a
mother who one day happens to catch a glimpse
of the possible vocation of her child:
“My little boy would become so great...
Almighty God would be present in his
fingers...
Troubled souls would come to him in order to
find peace...
God would borrow something of my own
flesh in order to continue the mystery of
His Incarna­tion!”
The joys of the priest’s mother are immense:
To attend the Holy Sacrifice celebrated by her
own child and to receive Holy Communion from
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September - October 2012

his hands... To realize that her priest son loves
her with a special tenderness which he is drawing
from the Sacred Heart Himself, since a priest
is “another Christ”... To know that he is praying
and offering Masses for her so that she may
safely reach Heaven where God is waiting for her.
Yes, indeed, mothers of priests are some of the
happiest amongst all mothers.
What can you do as mothers in order to foster
a priestly vocation in your own family? In this
article we would like to give some practical ideas
which have worked very well for other moth­ers.
We also call on those of our readers who already
have the joy of having a priest among their
children. Let them write to The Angelus and give
us, for the benefit of all, the “little secrets” which
have, by the grace of God, been successful for
their own family.

Pray Often
Vocations are a gift from God’s mercy. They
will be obtained only through very many fervent
prayers. Eliza Vaughan’s daily prayer before the
Blessed Sacrament was for God to take not just
one but all her children as priests or nuns. In the
event, even the two boys who kept this grand
old Catholic family from dying out, tried their
vocations in seminaries before getting married.
They had several vocations among their own
children. Of Eliza’s thirteen children, six out of
the boys became priests. All five girls entered the
convent.
This wonderful result was due to a mother’s
persevering prayers for all the years of her
married life. We would like to recommend to our
readers the practice of the “Night Adoration in
the Home,” promoted by Father Mateo, the great
apostle of the Enthronement to the Sacred Heart.
Many families are faithfully doing their monthly
holy Hour, and we are certain that many graces
will be obtained through their prayers. If you
have not yet joined the little company of “Night
Adorers,” would you consider doing it now?

Sacrifice Yourself
Prayer is not enough. You must join penance.
Mrs. Stepinac had a consuming desire to see one
of her eleven children ordained to the priesthood.
She was prepared to win this grace from God by
personal sacrifice. Early in her married life she
had begun the practice of fasting three times
a week. This she continued for 35 years. She
persevered in spite of the discouraging fact that
none of her son manifested a sign of a vocation.
Finally, however, her youngest son, Aloysius,
expressed a desire to study for the priesthood.
World War I broke out and the young man was
drafted. Alas, after the war, all desire of enter­
ing the seminary was gone. A period of five
years passed, and his mother continued to fast.
Aloysius was on the point of getting married
when he suddenly announced to his mother that
he had decided to become a priest. He became
the Archbishop Primate of Croatia who suffered

much at the hands of the Communists after World
War II.
This success was due to the noble heart of his
mother who was willing to fast for 35 years to
win the grace of a vocation. Mothers, make effort
to find little sacrifices which can be offered up to
God for vocations.

Be a Source of Inspiration
In a very interesting study published in an
American periodical for priests in the fifties, we
find the results of a questionnaire given to 2,000
students in 8 seminaries. These young men were
asked to state what influenced them in making
the decision to enter the seminary. Believe it or
not, in 1,593 cases out of the 2,000 (more than 3
out of 4) they admitted that their mother was one
of the determining factors in the shaping of their
vocation. The nursery of vocations is the Catholic
home. If ears are not attuned to the whispers
of God, vocations will never be answered. And
ears are attuned by mothers who tell their little
ones about God and His Love, who make the
supernatural natural to their children because it
is natural to themselves.
Ah, the power of the example of a saintly
woman, like Margherita Sarto, the mother of
St. Pius X! What a great influence on the heart
of her boy! Catholic mothers who are reading
this arti­cle, understand that “God’s will is your
sanctification” (St. Paul). Strive to perfection
without getting discouraged by your own
weakness. Your children will become familiar
with God and talk with Him as easily and as
intimately as they do to one another, if they first
see you acting in this way.

Live the Mass
Our Catholic Faith tells us that during the Holy
Sacrifice, Our Lord offers Himself to His Father
just as He did on the Cross, though there is no
longer a physical immolation but only a sacra­
mental one. Jesus is the perfectly obedient Victim
whose will is completely conformed to the will
61

Christian Culture
of His Father.
We are Christ’s members and so we, too,
have to offer ourselves in union with Him. It
is only when we unite all our work, sufferings,
disappointments, etc., to the Pas­sion of Jesus
renewed on the altar that we are truly living the
Mass. A mother has so many op­portunities of
practicing this spirit of generosity during the day.
All the little unpleasant events of your life can
become precious in the eyes of God if united with
the immolation of the Most Holy Victim of Mass.
A mother will also strive to communicate her love
for the Mass to her own children. We need to help
children to attend Mass.
We remind you that there exist many books
designed to help us to appreciate the Mass. We
cannot love what we do not understand, and we
will not understand the Mass unless we study it,
its ceremonies, its history, the vestments, the
sacred vessels and linens, etc. In the question­
naire referred to earlier, the young men who
listed as their main reason for entering the semi­
nary “I wanted to say Mass” were the largest
group (1,326 out of 2,000). I am certain that these
boys had a mother who truly lived the Mass.

Reverence the Priesthood
Mrs. Olier, the mother of the saintly founder of
the Sulpician Fathers, always strove to instill in
the hearts of her children a great esteem for the
priesthood. Her son declared that from the age
of seven, in his simple childish mind, he believed
them no longer human. When asked the source
of this great esteem he indicated that it was his
mother.
During the French Revolution, another mother
did not hesitate to bring her son to the prison to
visit the courageous priests who were interred
there before their martyrdom. Later, the young
man became a priest and a bishop.
Yes, dear mothers, you should always have
feelings of reverence for your priests. They are
“other Christs.” “O exalted dignity of priests,”
exclaims St. Augustine, “in whose hands, as
in the womb of the Virgin, the son of God is
made flesh.” Without the priesthood you would
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have nei­ther consecration nor absolution. Our
gratitude towards priests must be very great
indeed be­cause of the many graces they obtain
from Heaven for us. They are the bridge (pontifex
= pon­tum faciens) upon which we must walk in
order to reach Heaven.
A truly Catholic family should never forget
to pray for priests in their daily Rosary. Some
families have joined the Apostolate of Prayer for
Priests. This is to be greatly encouraged and will
be a source of vo­cations.
If you are able to invite the priest to your
home (Enthronement, Blessing, sick child)
make the most of his visit. Help your children
to hold Father in great esteem. Never criticize
him in front of them. If you can get your children
to confide in him, to go to him for spiritual
direction, then you can be certain that God’s call
will be heard when the time will come.

Love the Poor
This may seem out of place in giving advice on
how to foster vocations. Yet it is a striking fea­ture
of the story of mothers who obtained vocations
among their children that charity to the poor
was always one of their favorite virtues. Anne
McNabb was the mother of the great Do­minican
theologian Fr. Vincent McNabb. This mother of
eleven had a difficult life since her husband was
a sea captain. But God always came first in her
home and, because of this, the poor were always
welcome. Anne’s charity was boundless. “When
the door bell rang,” wrote her son, “and we heard:
‘There’s a poor man at the door,’ we felt that it
was the poor babe of Bethlehem at the door.” This
charity she instilled into her children can be seen
in the love for the poor which was a prominent
feature of Father Vincent’s character.
You can also read how Eliza Vaughan trained
her children to give some of their best toys to
less well-off little ones. Mothers living in 2012
can certainly teach their children to give alms,
for instance, to the missions in India (and Gabon)
during Lent. Maybe some visits of poor old peo­
ple could be arranged through the Legion of
Mary so that children learn to practice Christian

charity. In the American questionnaire quoted
earlier, 1,306 boys out of 2,000 gave “I wanted to
help others” as their main reason to be attracted
to the priesthood. I am certain that, for most of
these boys, it was in their own homes that they
acquired this desire to offer themselves up for the
salvation of souls, which is the greatest service
we can render our neighbor.

Accept the Will of God
Mrs. Martin’s great desire was to give the
Church a priest who could become a missionary
and thus save many souls. A few days after
the birth of her first son she was saying what a
splendid figure he would present as he celebrated
Mass, and she even began to think about making
him an alb for his ordination. But little Louis
lived for less than six months. The second boy,
Jean Baptiste, died when he was nine months old.
So the dearest wish of Mrs. Martin could not be
realized.
Yet she fully accepted God’s will. Divine
Providence had other plans for this exemplary
Catho­lic mother. She became the mother of St.
Thérèse of the Child Jesus. Through her child,
she was able to help thousands of priests who
learned from the humble Carmelite of Lisieux
how to love God and to suffer for him.
So, dear mothers who are reading these lines,
if in spite of your prayers God does not seem

to grant your desire for a priest in your family,
do not become discouraged. Trust His Infinite
Goodness. Almighty God may have other plans
for you. It may be that some of your children will
have priests in their families. Or God may use
your prayers to give a vocation to a young man
whose mother is not praying for this grace. God’s
ways are very mysterious indeed, and we should
never question the wisdom of His decisions. In
Heaven we will perfectly understand how all the
events of our life were ruled by Providence. “To
them that love God, all things work together unto
good.”
Fr. Hervé de la Tour was ordained in 1981 by Archbishop
Marcel Lefebvre. He has been a seminary professor and was
rector of St. Mary’s Academy and College from 1983 to 1989. He
is now stationed in St. Mary’s where he consults the US District
on educational matters

63

Questions and Answers

by Fr. Peter Scott, SSPX

Are there such things as
purely penal laws?
The question of the existence of purely penal
laws is one that is debated. A distinction is made
between a law which binds in conscience, a moral
law, and a law to the infraction of which a penalty
is attached, a penal law. All agree that the vast
majority of laws are mixed, both moral and penal.
The question here is whether there exist laws that
are purely penal, that we must observe because
there is a penalty attached to breaking them,
which means that we ought prudently to keep
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them if there is any chance of getting caught,
but which we are not obliged in conscience to
observe. This possibility of purely penal laws is
spoken of concerning such civil laws as speeding
laws, seat belt laws, parking rules, customs and
gaming laws and the like. There is a frequent and
common estimation among many people that
such laws do not really bind in conscience and
that, consequently, it is quite permissible to break
them and not sin, but that simply if we are caught
we must pay the penalty, whatever it is. If this
were the case, it certainly would easily calm our

conscience in such cases
St. Thomas Aquinas did not consider purely
penal laws as a possibility. As far as he is
concerned, a law which is a law is by definition
just, and consequently obliges in conscience.
If it does not oblige in conscience, it is because
it is not just, and consequently it is not a law.
This is his teaching in the Summa, Ia IIae, Q.
96, Art. 4, answering the question as to whether
or not human law binds a man in conscience:
“Laws framed by man are either just or unjust.
If they be just, they have the power of binding in
conscience, from the eternal law whence they
are derived.” Note that the power of binding in
conscience does not come from the intention
of the legislator, but from God`s eternal law.
Consequently, even if the legislator does not
intend to impose a moral obligation, and even if
the majority of the people do not perceive a moral
obligation, it does not at all follow that there is
no such obligation. He then considers the two
things necessary for a law to be just, namely that
it is ordained to the common good, and secondly
that the burdens of the law are laid on the
subjects “according to an equality of proportion
and with a view to the common good.” Hence his
conclusion: “Such laws as these, which impose
proportionate burdens, are just and binding in
conscience, and are legal laws.”
However, the more recent (but traditional)
moral theologians all speak at least of the
possibility of purely penal laws. Their argument
is that when the state makes such laws as
customs, gambling laws, speed limits, hunting
laws, laws to protect the environment, copyright
laws and the like, it is not pretending to impose
any moral obligation, but simply to impose a
punishment if one gets caught. However, the
argument is not convincing. Common sense
indicates that if they are just laws, truly for the
common good, then there is at least some kind of
moral obligation to them, and if they are not truly
for the common good, then they are not laws at
all. Moreover, official government propaganda in
every state certainly intends to present such laws
as if they impose a moral obligation, with the
implication that one would be considered a bad
citizen for refusing to abide by them. Further, as

Merkelbach points out (Summa Th. Mor., I, 258),
even if it be maintained that there is a purely
penal law, there will in general be accidentally
or consequentially some fault on account of
the scandal given, or danger of harm to other
individuals and their rights. In practice, it really
always comes down to the same thing as saying
that there are no purely penal laws.
However, even if it be admitted that there are
no purely penal laws, it must nevertheless be
affirmed that the matter involved in such civil
laws, even those that are just, is often very light,
and insignificantly so. For example, speeding but
doing it in a safe way is of miniscule importance.
Frequently also such laws are unjust, since they
are excessive. This would apply to some speed
limits, parking limitations, customs duties for
personal items, etc., in which case there would
be no fault in breaking them. The argument
given in favor of purely penal laws is that this
is the common estimation of the people. This
I dispute. It is the common estimation of the
people that unjust laws need not be observed
(e.g. prohibition of reasonable cutting of trees on
one’s own property), and that laws that are about
very light matters or inconsequential matters
are of no great moral importance. Moreover
an equitable civil authority will allow a certain
amount of tolerance for many such laws, such
as speeding laws. Within the realms of civil
tolerance there is manifestly no fault. However,
laws prohibiting, for example, drunk driving are
manifestly necessary for the common good, and it
is certainly the common estimation of the people
that they bind in conscience.
In conclusion, the concept of purely penal
laws is one which empties out the fundamental
relationship of all human laws to the natural
law and to the Eternal law in God’s plan. A man
of delicate conscience will not readily accept
such a concept, as if it were possible to separate
morality from civic duty, nor will he easily be
influenced by the lax conscience of the common
estimation of the people, which has lost all sense
of the common good and considers as moral what
can be done with impunity. Rather, striving for
integrity in his life as a Catholic, he will unite
his civil and moral life into one, and strive to
65

Questions and Answers
accomplish what is most perfect for the common
good, refusing to give scandal to those who
rightly respect just civil laws.

May one attend the funeral
of a person whose will it
was to be cremated?
Cremation is a practice that was well known in
Roman and Greek pagan antiquity. However, the
Jews always buried their dead, and did not allow
cremation. The early Church firmly maintained
this refusal of cremation, so much so that by
the fifth century the practice of cremation had
entirely ceased within the Roman Empire: “The
Christians never burned their dead, but followed
from earliest days the practice of the Semitic
race and the personal example of their Divine
Founder. It is recorded that in time of persecution
many risked their lives to recover the bodies of
the martyrs for the holy rites of Christian burial.”
(Cath. Encyclopedia, IV, p. 481). Two reasons
are given. Firstly out of faith in the doctrine of
the resurrection of the body, which will take
place at the end of the world—not because God
cannot raise the body from the ashes, but as an
expression of faith in this mystery. Secondly, out
of respect for the body as the temple of the Holy
Ghost: “Know you not that your members are
the temple of the Holy Ghost, who is in you? …
Glorify and bear God in your body” (I Cor. 6:1920). Reverent burial has consequently always
been regarded as an act of religion, which honors
the deceased. “The Church…holds it unseemly
that the human body, once the living temple of
God, the instrument of heavenly virtue, sanctified
so often by the sacraments, should finally be
subjected to a treatment that filial piety, conjugal
and fraternal love, or even mere friendship
seems to revolt against as inhuman” (Cath.
Encyclopedia, s.v. “Cremation”).
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This being said, cremation is not intrinsically
evil, and has always been permitted in cases of
necessity, such as pestilence, in which a quick
disposal of the bodies to prevent the spread of
infection is required. The Church’s laws on burial
date from the early Middle Ages, at which time
they concerned the place of burial rather than the
fact of burial, which was not then disputed. The
present legislation against cremation dates from
the nineteenth century, during the second half of
which Freemasons obtained official recognition
of cremation from various governments as
a part of their materialism and denial of the
resurrection of the body (Bouscaren & Ellis,
Canon Law, p. 608). Consequently we read in
the Catholic Encyclopedia of 1908: “Cremation
in the majority of cases today is knit up with
circumstances that make it a public profession of
irreligion and materialism.”
The traditional law of the Church is
summarized in Canon 1203 of the 1917 Code: “The
bodies of the faithful deceased must be buried;
and their cremation is reprobated.” This is a
clear statement of the obligation to bury, and the
forbidding of cremation. The Canon continues:
“If a person has in any way ordered that his body
be cremated, it is illicit to obey such instructions;
and if such a provision occur in a contract, last
testament, or in any document whatsoever, it
is to be disregarded.” It is consequently strictly
forbidden for a relative or an executor of a Last
Will to allow the cremation to be done. He must
use all his influence to bring about a rapid burial,
regardless of the order given by the deceased, or
the cost involved, or the opinions of other family
members. One must refuse to act as the executor
of a Will of someone who has ordered his body to
be cremated if one does not believe it possible to
overrule this order after his death.
Alas, in 1963 Pope Paul VI permitted
cremation, and the new practice is summarized
in the 1983 Code of Canon Law, Canon 1176,
§3: “The Church strongly recommends that
the pious practice of burying the bodies of the
deceased be maintained. It does not, however,
forbid cremation, unless it be chosen for reasons
contrary to Christian doctrine.” This is typical
of the ambiguity of the post-conciliar church. It

forgets that it was only for reasons contrary to
Catholic doctrine that cremation was introduced
in the first place, in particular as a consequence
of the denial of the resurrection of the body.
The often alleged reason of saving money is but
a manifestation of the lack of reverence for the
body, temple of the Holy Ghost, in comparison
to which the little extra money required for a
burial is insignificant. When people and society
were much poorer than we are now, they always
managed to bury the faithful departed. The
allegation of cost as a reason for cremation is
consequently but a sophism for saying that we
do not care that much about the bodies of the
faithful departed. How different this is from the
attitude of faith that characterized the time of the
martyrs of the first centuries. This new Canon
cannot, therefore, be followed in conscience,
outside of cases of necessity.
The will of the Church in making a law
obligatory is measured by the gravity of the
punishment imposed for the breaking of
the law. In Canon 1240 of the 1917 Code the
punishment prescribed is to be deprived of
ecclesiastical burial. “Those who gave orders
that their body be cremated” are to be counted
amongst those who are to be refused Church
burial services, including the funeral Mass and
graveside ceremonies, along with public sinners,
excommunicated persons, apostates from the
Faith, and those who have committed suicide.
Clearly, this is a very grave punishment, suitable
for a person who has committed a grievous and
scandalous crime against the Church’s discipline.
Note, however, that there is an exception in the
Canon, namely “unless before death they gave
some sign of repentance.” This sign of repentance
could be any sign that might implicitly contain
repentance, such as asking for a priest, kissing
a crucifix, requesting the sacraments. If any
such sign be given, the person can then be given
ecclesiastical burial, even though he may have
previously ordered his body to be cremated
(provided that the cremation does not actually
take place).
The 1983 Code modifies the punishment
for ordering the cremation of one`s body,
listing likewise under those to be deprived of

ecclesiastical burial (unless before death they
gave some signs of repentance) “those who have
chosen cremation of their own body on account
of reasons opposed to the Christian faith” (Can­
on 1184, §1, 2). The same ambiguity exists here.
Few, if any, will request cremation because
they deny the resurrection, and many choose it
simply because it is permitted and cheaper and
has become a custom in our pagan society. In
such a case, the ceremonies of church burial are
permissible according to the new law, and this
despite the fact that ultimately the reasons for
the cremation, although not clearly understood
by the person, are truly reasons opposed to the
Faith.
How is a traditional Catholic to navigate
amongst all the confusion caused by the carte
blanche for cremations given by the postconciliar church? Can he follow the traditional
law in all things? It goes without saying that he
ought not to assist at the Novus Ordo ceremonies
since they greatly undermine the reality of
judgment, the gravity of sin, the sufferings of
Purgatory, and the duty to pray for the repose
of the poor souls who are punished and purified
there. Moreover, with respect to the cremation,
he ought not to assist at any funeral at which
there is a cremation, whether it be in the
presence of the body before the cremation or in
the presence of the ashes after the cremation.
The only exceptions to these will be when it is a
very close relative, and he is forced to be present
by family necessity, in which case he must not
actively participate in the ceremonies in any way.
According to the traditional law (Canon 1240),
if a person ordered his body to be cremated, he
was not to receive ecclesiastical burial at all,
even if the cremation was not done. However,
at the present time, this would be an excessive
reaction. For many persons in ignorance have
ordered their bodies to be cremated because they
have been told that it is now permitted, believing
in good faith that they still have a right to the
ceremonies of ecclesiastical burial. To refuse a
traditional Catholic funeral Mass and burial to
such persons would fail to take into account the
confusion of the present crisis. Consequently,
any traditional Catholic who is the executor
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Questions and Answers

of the Last Will of a Catholic who has ordered
his body to be cremated, must use his authority
to overrule this order and procure both a burial
and the traditional ceremonies of ecclesiastical
burial, including a Requiem Mass.
The contrary can also happen, namely that
a person is cremated without having given
specific orders for this. Can a Requiem Mass be
celebrated for the repose of his soul, and the
ashes buried in a cemetery? The Holy Office
answered this question in 1926: “In all these cases
in which it is forbidden to hold the ecclesiastical
funeral rites for the deceased, it is not even
permitted to honor his ashes with ecclesiastical
burial, nor in any way to preserve them in a
blessed cemetery” (Bouscaren & Ellis, Canon
Law, p. 608). It would certainly be a scandal to
allow a public funeral Mass for such a person in
a traditional church, or the burial in a cemetery
run by a traditional order. However, given that it
has now become common place for ashes from
cremations to be buried in consecrated ground,
it would seem no longer inappropriate to allow
the burial of the ashes in a post-conciliar run

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Catholic cemetery. Moreover, private Requiem
Masses for the repose of the souls of such
persons would seem now possible, since they
could no longer be considered as equivalent to
public sinners.
Finally, the reasons against cremation are of
such a grave nature, and the traditional practice
of burial so sacred, that it is incumbent on
every one of us to insure that we receive the
ecclesiastical burial. It is not enough for this to
be stated in our Last Will, but we must inform our
close relatives in writing in an explicit way that
we refuse cremation, just as we refuse the postconciliar burial service. The best way to be sure
is to make the funeral arrangements ahead of
time. We ought likewise to encourage our parents
and relatives to take care of this in a clear way,
without ambiguity.

Church and World

Constant Decline in Religious Practice by Catholics Worldwide
The number of practicing Catholics in the world
is still decreasing, says the American Catholic
weekly National Catholic Reporter, based on the
latest statistical data gathered by the Vatican.
In 2010 the total number of Catholics worldwide
reached 1.2 billion. There was a 29% increase over
the past 20 years. Europe is the only continent to
register a decrease of 1%. The data concerning
sacramental practice show a much weaker
increase than it ought to have been, taking into
account the growth in the number of Catholics.
The figures concerning First
Communions and Confirmations,
in particular, clearly show a decline
in the practice of Catholicism
throughout the world, especially
in Europe with an 18% decrease in
confirmations over the last 20 years.
The Vatican’s numerical data
come from different sources, but
mainly from the statistical yearbook
of the Church. Enrico Nenna, director
of the Central Office of Church
Statistics at the Vatican, emphasizes
that it is “very difficult to quantify
the practice of the Catholic faith. The
only way to get a precise idea of the matter would
be to take a sampling of a population, to carry
out a census, and to survey that group of persons
regularly over the long term.” In his opinion,
“the statistics that have been gathered illustrate
long-range trends, but many different factors
influence the variations.” He notes for example
that the decline in the number of marriages may
also be due to economic uncertainty. A decrease
in the number of baptisms may be the result of
a reduction in the birthrate in a specific region.
Despite these uncertainties, Enrico Nenna thinks
that the latest recorded data reveal a distinct
weakening in Catholic practice worldwide.
This trend is confirmed by the report drawn
up in preparation for the upcoming World Synod
of Bishops on the new evangelization, which will
take place in Rome in October. The answers to the

questionnaire submitted to 114 bishops throughout
the world contain many remarks about a “decline
in practice” and a “withering of the faith.”
By way of example one can cite the worldwide
Gallup poll cited by the Irish media on August 8,
according to which the proportion of those who
call themselves a “religious person” in the Republic
of Ireland had dropped from 69% to 47% in seven
years. That makes Éire the country with the
second-steepest rate of secularization, just after
Vietnam.

Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin explained
in the daily Irish Independent that these findings
“highlighted the challenges facing the Catholic
faith in a changing Ireland,” underscoring the fact
that the Church cannot presume that the faith
will automatically be passed from generation to
generation. Even for elderly persons, religious
education is necessary in order to prevent their
falling away from the Church.
Comment: It is odd that the Central Office of
Church Statistics and the bishops of the whole
world note the data supporting the fact of this
generalized de-Christianization without for one
moment considering that it could be the effect
of a disastrous pastoral approach promoted by
a council that claimed to be only pastoral and
certainly not doctrinal.
(Source: DICI)

69

Church and World
Scotland and Poland: Different Directions
On July 25, 2012, the Scottish authorities
announced their plan to introduce this year a law
authorizing homosexual “marriage.” Following a
public opinion poll in which 65% of the opinions
expressed (out of a total of 80,000 persons asked)
were in favor of homosexual “marriage,” the
Scottish Deputy First Minister Nicola Sturgeon
asserted that “in a society that aspires to be
egalitarian and tolerant, this legalization is
the right choice [sic].” The Scottish authorities,
however, gave assurances that no Church would
be forced to organize ceremonies for these
“marriages.”
“The [Scottish] Government is embarking on a
dangerous social experiment on a massive scale.
The Church looks much further than the shortterm electoral time-scales of politicians,” was the
reaction of a spokesman of the Catholic Church
in Scotland.
If the law is actually promulgated, Scotland
will become the first province of the United
Kingdom to allow homosexual “marriages.”
Scotland, led by the Scottish National Party that
seeks independence, enjoys a wider autonomy
that allows it to make its own laws in many areas,
except for Defense, Foreign Affairs, and fiscal
and economic policies. The government of the
United Kingdom, led by the “conservative” David
Cameron, for his part has committed himself to
legalizing homosexual “marriage” by 2015.
On August 25, more than 500 Catholic priests
in Scotland read to their parishioners a letter
in protest against the proposed law, the British
news website Mail.online reports. They declared:
“The teaching of the Church about marriage is
unambiguous: it is exclusively the union between
one man and one woman. It is deplorable that
governments, politicians, and parliaments are
seeking to alter or to destroy this reality.”
The Scottish government responded by
restating its intention to legalize “marriage”
for persons of the same sex and to allow these
civil unions to be celebrated also with religious
ceremonies; it reaffirmed, however, that no cleric
would be forced to celebrate such ceremonies.
The primate of the Catholic Church in
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Scotland, Cardinal Keith O’Brien, described
homosexual “marriage” as “the grotesque
subversion of a universally accepted human
right.” He then broke off his discussions with
Alex Salmond, the Scottish First Minister.
On July 25, 2012, the Catholic Church in Poland
saluted Parliament’s rejection of a proposed
law in favor of a “registered partnership” (“civil
union” in the United States) for homosexual
couples. The majority of the deputies thus
defended “the dignity of marriage and the family,”
a pleased president of the Commission on the
Family of the Bishops’ Conference, Bishop
Kazimierz Górny, said in a letter to the Polish
president and the lower house of Parliament.
The previous day, July 24, the Polish
Parliament had refused, by a three-quarters
majority, a proposed law in favor of homosexual
partnership that had been submitted by the leftist
opposition. The parties of the conservativeliberal governing coalition as well as the
conservative opposition argued for this rejection
based on Polish constitutional law. The Palikot
movement and the social democrats wanted a
registered partnership with extended rights for
heterosexual and homosexual couples.
This could only be a postponement, however.
Indeed, the party of Prime Minister Donald Tusk
announced that he was preparing for September
another bill authorizing a registered partnership.
According to the Polish media, this bill aroused
no opposition within his parliamentary group and
thus could receive the approval of a majority of
the deputies. The bill is a little more restrictive
than the one drawn up by the left: it provides
for a right of inheritance, but no tax advantages.
It also foresees a duty of support in case of
separation. This partnership would be open to
heterosexual couples as well as homosexuals.
However, according to a statistical study,
two-thirds of Polish citizens are opposed to a
registered partnership for homosexual couples. It
is said that only 23% support that proposal.
(Source: DICI)

Italy: The Posthumous Interview of Cardinal Martini
The Italian cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, a Jesuit,
former Archbishop of Milan and a representative
figure of 20th-century Catholic progressivism,
died on August 31, 2012, at the age of 85. He had
been afflicted for several years with Parkinson’s
disease. Retired as of 2002, he spent six years in
Jerusalem before being forced to return to Italy
because of the deterioration of his health.
On the day after his death, the Italian daily
newspaper Corriere della Sera published a
posthumous interview with the former Archbishop
of Milan conducted by a Jesuit confrere on
August 8 of this year. In it the prelate described
a “tired” Church that was out of step with the
times and called to “conversion.” “The Church,”
he explained, “must acknowledge its errors and
take the radical path of change, starting with the
pope and the bishops.” In this final interview with
Fr. Georg Sporschill, Cardinal Martini called the
Catholic Church to reconsider in particular its
approach with regard to divorced and remarried
people; he likewise invited the Church to ask itself
whether people were still listening to its advice in
matters of sexuality. And thus he concluded this
final intervention in the form of a testament: “The
Church is 200 years behind the times. Why does
it not wake up? Are we afraid? Do we have fears
instead of having courage?”
A theologian who was audacious to the point
of temerity, Cardinal Martini liked to talk about
the possibilities for the “development” of Catholic
doctrine. Thus, in Autumn 1999, during the
Synod for Europe at the Vatican, he had
asserted that it was necessary to rethink the
primacy of the pope, and he had called for
the creation of an organization allowing the
bishops to resolve together, that is to say
collegially, the problems of the day. In April
2006, in an Italian magazine, the cardinal had
described the condom as “the lesser evil” in
some cases. He had also taken a favorable
view of assisted fertilization and the adoption
of frozen embryos by single women. In
January 2007 he had intervened once again

when the Italian Church declared its opposition to
euthanasia and had just refused a religious funeral
to a man whose death a physician had hastened
at his request. Cardinal Martini had not hesitated
then to call the Church to show “more pastoral
attention” to this question.
Hence one can only be shocked to see the
life of a prelate whose doctrine was so suspect,
praised now in exalted language by the Roman
authorities, without the least misgiving about his
many errors and incessant provocations. Thus
Fr. Federico Lombardi, the spokesman of the
Vatican, did not hesitate to mention “the precious
legacy” of Cardinal Martini, on which one must
“reflect seriously when one looks for the paths of
the ‘new evangelization’.…In his words, his many
writings and his innovative pastoral initiatives, he
was able to witness to the faith and to announce it
effectively to the men and women of our era.”
The French cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran declared
irenically that his Italian confrere “was too
intelligent to be either progressive or conservative”
because “those are reductive categories.” And in a
message read during the funeral in the Cathedral
of Milan on September 3, Benedict XVI saluted
Cardinal Martini’s “great open-mindedness.”
Two days prior to that, in a telegram expressing
condolences, the pope had paid homage to the
generous service rendered to the Gospel and to the
Church by that bishop, whom he described as
“wise.”
(Source: DICI)

71

Church and World
Disappearance of Churches and Official Inauguration of a Mosque
In Germany, de-Christianization is coming
about through architecture, according to the
Catholic news website Kreuz.net quoted by the
Italian newsletter European Correspondence
dated August 31, 2012. We are told that there is
no longer room for churches in the new districts
of German cities. They are no longer planned for
or designed, as if they had been excluded from
the cities. An article by journalist Dankwart
Guratzsch, in Die Welt, gives concrete examples:
In Stuttgart, a district with 12,000 inhabitants
was built without a church; in Hamburg, a new
locale of 12,000 people is also without a church;
moreover 19 churches were closed, probably
because they were an obstacle to the realization
of the new plan for urban development. Suddenly,
churches have disappeared under the pretext that
there was no demand for them.
However, because certain inhabitants
complained nonetheless, a solution was found to
appease them: set up a rough little chapel with
some thirty chairs on the ground floor of a gray
building where there is nothing but offices. In
fact, you can’t tell yourself that this was a simple
case of carelessness; it is obvious that everything

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was carefully arranged with the purpose of
removing all visible signs of the Faith. And this
is done methodically, harshly, and mercilessly,
comments the news agency Correspondance
Européenne.
“To build a church means to build a
community,” writes Dankwart Guratzsch,
“whenever the faithful are deprived of a visible
testimony, public recognition of their values
weakens and loses its efficacy, even in their own
view.” This journalist recalls the era of the GDR
[German Democratic Republic], communist
Germany, when the same thing happened:
churches were demolished in order to demean,
oppose, and isolate religion and inculcate
atheism. With one significant difference: then
it was ideology that governed, the power
was entirely in the hands of the persecutors
of Christians. But today, why are there no
dissenting voices? Where are the voices of the
faithful? where are the voices of our pastors,
so often sensitive to many other questions but
not, apparently, when dealing with the House
of God—Correspondance Européenne wonders
about this silence, and in the same issue supplies
some information which
offers some answers.
In France, on
August 14, 2010, the
Algerian minister of
worship, Bouabdallah
Ghlamallah, had come
to inaugurate the
new mosque in Torcy,
Bourgogne. This was
an official appearance
that shows the growing
importance of the
Algerian community in
this commune of France.
Bouabdallah
Ghlamallah,
accompanied by
Abdelkader Kacimi El
Hassani, the consul
general from Lyons, and

by Abdallah Zekri, the president of the Southwest
regional Federation of the Great Mosque of Paris,
was welcomed by the socialist mayor of Torcy,
Roland Fuchet.
The presence of this Algerian minister in
France was particularly shocking since this
is the same Bouabdallah Ghlamallah who, the
year before, had had ten churches in Algeria

closed and justified himself in the newspaper
L’Expression, saying: “I equate evangelization
with terrorism.” And Correspondance
Européenne concludes: “ ‘Reciprocity’ and
‘tolerance’ do not yet seem to be of current
interest.”
(Source: DICI)

42 first-year seminary entries for the Society of St. Pius X!
LaPorteLatine (the French District) has
reported that for the academic year of 2012-2013
at the SSPX’s seminaries of Winona, Zaitzkofen,
Flavigny, and Albano, there are 42 entries for the
first year (of Spirituality), 16 pre-seminarians
(Humanities) and 8 postulants to study for the
religious brothers. Here break down by seminary
the origin of the new entries.
St. Thomas Aquinas Winona Seminary,
Winona, Minnesota
15 in Spirituality:
-- 14 American
-- 1 Canadian
14 pre-seminarians in Humanities:
-- 12 American
-- 1 Irish
-- 1 Canadian
3 postulants in Brothers’ Novitiate:
-- 2 American
-- 1 Canadian

------

------

Holy Cure d’Ars Seminary, Flavigny, France
17 seminarians:
10 French
2 English
2 Canadian
2 Swiss
1 Italian

3 postulants:
-- 1 French
-- 1 Swiss
-- 1 Canadian
Fraternita San Pio X (pre-seminary at District
Office), Albano, Italy
Pre-seminarian:
-- 1 Italian
Please keep these seminarians and postulants
in your prayers throughout the academic year, that
they may persevere in their vocation.
The new academic class at Flavigny, minus two seminarians

Sacred Heart Seminary, Zaitzkofen, Germany
10 seminarians:
4 German
2 Swiss
2 Polish
1 Russian
1 Argentinean

2 postulants:
-- 1 German
-- 1 Swiss

73

Courrier de Rome

Magisterium
and Faith
By Fr. Jean-Michel Gleize, FSSPX

Prologue
The Church’s end is to bring about the salvation of
souls, notably by ensuring the transmission of the truths
of faith that must be believed and professed for salvation. It is the Church’s end that explains the definition
of the Church: The Church is the hierarchical society in
which men come to the knowledge of the soul-saving
truth. This definition appears in the sources of revelation
in a phrase expressing the purpose of the Church: She
is “the guardian and teacher of the revealed word.” This
phrase is used by Vatican Council I in the Constitution
Dei Filius.1 Pope Leo XIII in the Encyclical Satis Cognitum
of 1896, though not using the same words, expresses
the same idea. And St. Pius X in the Oath against the
Errors of Modernism again took up these hallowed
terms: “I believe that the Church, guardian and mistress
of the revealed word, was instituted proximately and directly by the true and historical Christ…”2
So that the Church might fulfill this role, Christ entrusted her with His own teaching authority. In the
conclusions of the Gospel according to St. Matthew
(28:18-20) and of St. Mark (16:15-16), we see that Christ
established in the Church the power to teach, in the
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name of God, the divinely revealed doctrine necessary
for salvation; the power established by divine authority
is a power duly laying claim to the submission of every
man. This is the Church’s authentic magisterium, or
teaching authority. In the Gospel according to St. John
(20:21, 17:19-20), Christ’s mission consists in teaching
with authority in the name of God these same truths,
and since the apostles and their successors were established by Christ as those who exercise in His name
the mission that He himself received from God the
Father, it follows that the apostles received the function of the authentic magisterium. St. Paul asserts that
preaching the truths of faith is necessary (Rom. 10:13),
that Christ made provision for this need, that the apostles received from Christ responsibility for preaching (1
Cor. 1:17), that this preaching constitutes an exercise
of authority (Rom. 1:5 and 2 Cor. 10:4). The same idea
recurs in the writings of the Fathers of the Church.3
In the etymological meaning of the word, magisterium denotes a function the purpose of which is instruction.4 Furthermore, the meaning of the word must be
distinguished according to two different senses: that of
a “scientific” magisterium and that of an ecclesiastical

magisterium, which is a particular instance of attesting
magisterium. The ecclesiastical magisterium in effect
proposes divinely revealed truths which are obscure and
not evident, and that is why it is incapable of establishing cogent or compelling scientific demonstrations of
the truth of its teaching. The ecclesiastical magisterium
causes not knowledge, but faith. Being unable to provide
demonstrations, it bears witness: it is a witnessing or attesting magisterium. The divinely instituted ecclesiastical magisterium is that which causes faith by means of
its authoritative testimony. And it is the only one able to
fulfill this role: an act of faith regarding an obscure, attested object. Only the magisterium of the Church is
able to speak in the name of God in order to point out to
the faithful the truths to which they must give the adherence of their Catholic faith.
This being said, the expression “to cause faith” may
be understood in quite different ways. The magisterium
causes the act of faith at its level. But the action of divine
grace intervenes also, no less than the activity of the intellect and will of the believers who give their adherence.
Thus it behooves us to form a more precise idea of the
role of the magisterium in the act of faith, all the more so
that this idea has serious ramifications. One of the most
important is undoubtedly the manner in which one will
be inclined to justify the attitude of the Society of Saint
Pius X (and more generally, of all perplexed Catholics)
in the post-conciliar context. Should one wish to explain
this attitude, the pertinent question is whether the mind
of believers is capable of recognizing what in the teachings of Vatican Council II contradicts truths of faith.
1. The Negative Argument
First: Discernment of what is contrary to the object
of faith in light of one’s own individual intellect is characteristic of Protestant freethinking or private judgment. Since only an act of the magisterium is able to
indicate what the objects of faith are, it alone can tell
what is contrary to it, and believers cannot make this
judgment without ceasing to be Catholic and becoming
Protestant.5
Second: Discernment of what is contrary to the object of faith amounts to exercising a certain understanding of the object. Since the supernatural object of faith
revealed by God cannot be evident to the merely natural powers of a created mind, then, firstly, the Church’s
supreme teaching authority can alone put that object
before believers as being revealed by God, and secondly,
the merely natural reasoning power of believers is
incapable by itself of knowing what is an object of faith

and what is not.
Third: Vatican II is the living magisterium such as
it is exercised today. Now, continuity of the teachings
of the magisterium is a necessary presupposition of
any reading, for the proximate rule of faith is the living
magisterium, which gives the correct understanding of
past teachings. When the mind of believers experiences
some difficulty grasping this continuity, they must rely
upon the explanations of the current living magisterium
rather than prefer their own reading of past teaching.
And this leads to the same conclusion as the preceding
argument.
Fourth: The magisterium of Vatican II is not infallible.
Now, discerning what is contrary to the object of faith in
the acts of the non-infallible magisterium jeapordizes
the authority of these acts. Since the chief arguments
we use to support our rejection of Vatican Council II
are acts of the non-infallible magisterium prior to this
council, one cannot discern anything in the teachings
of Vatican II that would be contrary to the object of faith
without begging the question and sawing off the branch
upon which one sits.
2. The Affirmative Argument
Fifth: Discernment of what is contrary to the object
of faith in the acts of Vatican II is possible precisely because this council expressed an intention incompatible
with the exercise of the veritable magisterium. Popes
John XXIII and Paul VI in effect wanted to present the
doctrine of the Church in conformity with the categories of liberal, humanistic modern thought. The minds of
believers can rely on the teachings of the magisterium
prior to Vatican II to judge its questionable teachings owing to the fact that they are of no magisterial worth in the
traditional sense of the term.
Sixthly, discernment of what is contrary to the object
of faith appertains to divine authority. Since all of the
faithful benefit from the light of this authority thanks to
the sense of the faith, they are able to discern what is
contrary to the object of faith.
Seventh, discernment of what is contrary to the object of faith is an attribute of the act of the intellect. Since
faith is an intellectual act, faith can discern what is contrary to its object.
3. Archbishop Lefebvre Has Legitimized This Ap­
proach to the Acts of Vatican Council II
“It is up to every Christian, every Catholic, to judge
what is true. He is taught the truth; he knows the truth—
it is in the catechism. He knows how to read like
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everyone else; he is quite capable of reading the Acts of
the Councils; he is quite capable of understanding and
knowing what the truth is that is taught in the catechism
and in his Bible and to realize that what is now being
preached by his parish priests, or even by the bishop, is
not in conformity with what is said in his old catechism
or with what he was taught. It is up to every Catholic
to defend his faith when it is attacked” (September 11,
1976).
“Whereas for me, for us, I think that to say the conciliar
documents should be judged in light of Tradition
obviously means that what contradicts Tradition should
be rejected, what is ambiguous should be interpreted
in accordance with Tradition, and what is in conformity
with Tradition should be accepted” (December 2, 1982).
The term judge used here must be understood in a
very precise sense. In the act of judging, one can judge
with authority, as a superior judges whether his inferior
is mistaken or not. But one can also judge by exercising
the second operation of the mind, and verify by the light
of right reason enlightened by faith that a statement
of the magisterium is coherent, and that, for example,
what the Catechism of St. Pius X says confirms what is
said in the Catechism of the Council of Trent. Neither
Archbishop Lefebvre nor the SSPX has ever presumed
to claim an undue juridical authority. But no one can
deny anyone the legitimate use of his reason enlightened by faith.
4. Explanation and Response
Every act of the intellect discerns what is contrary
to its object. Now, the act of faith is an intellectual act.
Hence the act of faith discerns what is contrary to its
object.
4.1 Explanation of the First Premise
Every act of the intellect discerns the contrary of its
object. The intellect is measured by reality, for its proper
object is being. Truth is defined rightly as the matching (“adequation”) of the mind and the real by means
of the being of reality. Of course, the human intellect
has a mode, a particular manner of understanding, and
there is an important distinction to be made between
this mode of understanding (thanks to which it arrives
at an idea of things) and the mode of being (by which
the things known by the intellect exist in reality independently of the intellect). The intellect does not attribute
its mode of understanding to the things that it understands.6 “Since it is clear,” says St. Thomas, “that our
intellect understands material things below itself in an
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immaterial manner; not that it understands them to be
immaterial things; but its manner of understanding is
immaterial.” Our human manner of knowing comprises
immateriality, even when our intellect is applied to understanding material things. “Likewise, when it understands simple things above itself, it understands them
according to its own mode, which is in a composite manner; yet not so as to understand them to be composite
things.”7 Composition is linked to the very nature of the
knowing mind and not to the nature of the thing known.
Even if the manner by which the intellect proceeds in order to know things is not the manner in which the things
really are, it remains that the intellect indeed knows
what things really are.
Since the mode proper to intellectual understanding
results in placing the intellect in contact with things as
they are in reality, this mode has to obey the laws that
govern reality. The first of all these laws is the principle
of non-contradiction, an absolutely necessary metaphysical principle, which can be verified in the exercise
of every intellectual act, whatever it may be.8 St. Thomas
discusses it in Lesson 6 of his Commentary of Book IV
of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. This principle is not demonstrable, even if it presupposes a certain element of sensible experience. It is absolutely first and represents the
natural law inscribed in the correct exercise of human
intelligence.9 It is formulated thus: One and the same
thing cannot be at the same time and in the same respect what it is and what it is not. One of the possible applications of this law is that an individual cannot be at the
same time located and not located in the same place.
Peter cannot be at the same time at Paris and elsewhere
than Paris, for example, at Rome. If there happened to
be credible and concordant testimony attesting to the
presence of Peter at Paris and at Rome at the same moment, we should conclude that our senses are the victim
of an illusion, at least at one place, and hold fast to the
principle of non-contradiction.10
The judgments by means of which our intellect knows
and expresses reality obey the principle of non-contradiction. A judgment is an intelligible statement and takes
the form of a logical proposition in which a predicate is attributed to a subject. The metaphysical principle of noncontradiction, because it is universally necessary, has
logical consequences. As St. Thomas explains,11 logical
contradiction is an opposition that takes place between
two propositions one of which affirms and the other denies the same predicate of the same subject. The principle of non-contradiction requires that if this opposition
occurs, both propositions cannot be true at the same

time. For example, there is not a logical contradiction
between stating that “Every human creature has been
redeemed by Christ” and stating that “Some human
creature is conceived without sin,” since the predicate
is not identical. These two propositions can thus be true
at the same time. Logical contradiction would occur between two propositions one of which stated that “Every
human creature is redeemed by Christ” and the other
that “Some human creature has not been redeemed by
Christ.” The dogma of the Immaculate Conception defined by Pius IX does not at all state that “The Mother of
God is not redeemed by Christ”; it even states the exact
contrary: “The Mother of God is redeemed by Christ,”
even if it is in a manner more sublime, “sublimiori modo.”
St. Thomas did not refuse ahead of time the dogma of
the Immaculate Conception as it was to be defined by
the infallible magisterium of the Church. Not seeing how
this conception would not have withdrawn the Mother
of God from Christ’s redemptive act, he refused to affirm a truth that would have contradicted the dogma of
Redemption.12 But he would have admitted without reservation the authority of Pius IX defining a truth of faith
the carefully weighed terms of which implied nothing
contrary to the dogma of Redemption.
In light of these clarifications, it is easy to justify the
first premise: “Every act of the intellect discerns what
is contrary to its object.” Since it obeys the principle
of non-contradiction, from the very fact that it states a
proposition as true, the intellectual judgment affirms implicitly as false the contradictory proposition. Since the
object of the act of the intellect is the truth of a proposition, the negation of this truth is contrary to this object.
By acting in conformity with the principle of non-contradiction, the act of the intellect thus discerns both its object and its contrary.
4.2 Explanation of the Second Premise
The act of faith is an intellectual act. The act of faith
is an act of the intellect having for its proper object as
such (in Scholasticism one speaks more precisely of the
formal object quod) the truth of the mysteries divinely
revealed by God and proposed as such by the magisterium of the Church.13 This act of the intellect is a judgment
that states as true an intelligible proposition, wherein
one predicates something of a subject, because of the
authority of God revealing. Although the link connecting
the predicate to the subject is not obvious by the natural
light of human reason, the mind is certain the link exists
because of God’s authority.

4.3 Explanation of the Conclusion
The act of faith discerns what is contrary to its object.
If the intellect of the faithful judges that a statement
proposed by the Church as revealed by God is true, it
judges by that very fact that the contradictory statement is false since God cannot contradict Himself. The
principle of non-contradiction must hold good in the exercise of an act of faith as it does in any act of the intellect. The object of the act of faith is doubtless obscure
or less than obvious, because in the proposition setting
forth the truth of a revealed mystery the intellect cannot clearly apprehend the link between the predicate
and the subject.14 But the object of the act of faith remains intelligible, as does every object of an act of the
intellect, because the terms that enter in composition in
the proposition stating the truth of the revealed mystery
(the subject and predicate) are intelligible;15 the intellect
can grasp their import up to a point. A proposition denying the same predicate of the same subject would appear as contradicting the object of the act of faith and
hence false. In this way the mind of believers can discern
a contradicter to the act of faith by distinguishing it from
the object of that act.16
The magisterium of the Church enters into this discernment, for it fulfills the role of an indispensable condition in the intellect’s act of faith. It is only one condition, and in this sense the Church is only the minister
that proposes in the name of God the material object of
faith; it indicates what must be believed, but it is not the
formal motive of belief.17 Nevertheless, it is an indispensable condition, and in this sense the objective proposition of the Church is required for the concrete integrity of
the formal object of our faith as it is ordinarily exercised
in the economy willed by God.18 The act of faith bears
upon an attested mystery, and only the magisterium
of the Church can speak in the name of God in order to
point out to the faithful which truths they must believe.
This point is not debatable. Even if the faithful Catholic is
led to give his assent to the teaching of the Church by the
interior virtue of faith, the certitude of this profession of
faith depends formally on criteria by means of which the
party can recognize the proposition of this same teaching authority coming from the Catholic hierarchy. The
crux of the question is to know what these criteria are.
We think that one of the main ones is the objective continuation of the teaching of the magisterium, and that
the intellect can ascertain it by applying the principle of
non-contradiction simultaneously with the act of faith.19
Insofar as it is something already proposed by the continuous and infallible magisterium, the revealed
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de Rome

truth indubitably appears as the necessary object of the
act of faith. And consequently, the statement opposite
to this truth indubitably appears as contrary to the object of the act of faith, were it (by any remote chance20)
set forth in the framework of an act of infallible Church
teaching.
5. Replies to Objections
Reply to Objection 1. The Protestant presumes to discern by the light of his own reason independently of the
magisterium—and even against it—what is contrary to
the object of faith as it is stated in Sacred Scripture.21
The faithful Catholic discerns what is contrary to the
object of faith as stated in the Word of God written and
transmitted, and as such already proposed infallibly
by the ecclesiastical magisterium. The discernment of
faithful Catholics is not autonomous, but is dependent
on the infallible proposition of God and the Church.
Reply to Objection 2. The object of faith is obscure,
but it is intelligible, and that is why the act that attains
to this object is not blind, but intellectual. As every act
of the intellect, the act of faith can ascertain a contradiction between two propositions one of which is infallibly proposed as true by God through the ministry of the
ecclesiastical magisterium. The other, contrary proposition appears then as contradictory to the object of the
act of faith and therefore false.
One might object that it is often difficult to gauge a
contradiction because in order to do so the meanings
of the terms entering into its formulation (subject and
predicate) must be grasped. The contradiction may be
only apparent and may disappear if it is shown that the
meaning of the terms is not the same in both propositions. And in theology, this is not always easy. For example, Peter of Bergamo’s Tabula Aurea enumerated 1,208
apparent contradictions in the works of St. Thomas
Aquinas; and for many of them, it is not easy to establish
that they are merely apparent. The famous question of
“the natural desire to see God” remains emblematic of
this kind of difficulty. At this stage, we would answer that
difficulty does not necessarily mean impossibility. The
pertinent question, to word it precisely, is whether the
intellect of the faithful Catholic in general (and not the
intellect of any one in particular) can always make the
distinction. The answer is yes, even if this discernment
may prove to be more or less easy and in some cases to
be beyond some people not sufficiently trained in theology. Quite often in the Church, those whose intellect is
capable of discerning discern for the rest.22 And we see
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that in the context of Vatican II, it is the pastors and theologians who have preserved the faith of the simple faithful. At the time of the Council, the Council Fathers who
were members of the International Group of Fathers denounced the errors and ambiguities present in the documents, and subsequently some priests were opposed to
their implementation in their parishes. But we also see
that this was not always the case, and that often faithful
Catholics reacted spontaneously in order to contest the
errors the seriousness of which they recognized quite
well on their own. For if there are contradictions that are
hard to establish, others are flagrant. In fact, the three
major difficulties presented to the Catholic conscience
by the last council (religious liberty, collegiality, and ecumenism) flow from flagrant contradictions. And these
contradictions can be so either directly in the documents themselves or indirectly in the practical consequences that result from their implementation. The tree
can be judged by its fruits. Indeed, the fruits of the last
council have been and still are sufficiently eloquent facts
for many among simple Catholics to remain perplexed.23
One might make a new objection to this last point, and
retort that these results are not fruits of the Council, but
abuses. They would have happened because the documents of Vatican Council II were badly understood and
badly applied. We would answer that the abuses are the
effects of bad accidentals and that they are defined as
such in contradistinction to their good, essential effects.
Now, one is obliged to acknowledge that the post-conciliar period has not enjoyed any positive results comparable to those of the post-Tridentine period. Rather the
opposite seems true: dechristianization and religious indifferentism have only gained ground.24 The good essential effects are thus far from being obvious. Moreover,
what is accidental should be exceptional. An exception
is always possible (even the best expert can make a mistake), but if it is an exception, by definition it remains rare
(an expert may make a mistake once in a long while in
an unusual case). Frequent occurrence would establish
the likelihood that one is not dealing with an exception
(someone who is frequently mistaken is probably not an
expert). Now, the baneful consequences of the Council
have not ceased to make themselves felt on a large scale
for nigh on fifty years. And if a few happy initiatives have
succeeded in neutralizing their impact, they proceed
from traditional principles, in what they have contrary to
the teachings of Vatican II.
Reply to Objection 3. An act of the magisterium is
not defined as the exercise of a present magisterium as

distinguished from the exercise of a past magisterium,
and this is precisely why it cannot be said, in speaking
of the magisterium, that the present is the sole judge
of the past. For if the magisterium judges, it is not inasmuch as it is present or current, but it is inasmuch as it
expresses the truth more precisely. The magisterium is
in effect governed by its object, which is the truth of faith
divinely revealed, and its act consists in proposing the
same object while preserving the same meaning even
when it gives a more exact understanding of it by means
of more explicit concepts and verbal expressions. This
object, with the explanation that accompanies it in eodem sensu, is of itself timeless. On the other hand, we do
not deny that the ecclesiastical magisterium is living or
that as such it is the proximate rule of faith in the sense
that it amounts to an act exercised by persons acting as
living and intelligent individuals when they use their authority to safeguard and set forth dogma. But this holds
true for every epoch of history. In this sense, the living
magisterium is not reduced to the present magisterium,
in contradistinction to the past magisterium, which
would be classified as non-living or posthumous.25 If the
present magisterium is living, so was the past magisterium. Both remain the rule of faith. Time has no direct
and immediate influence upon the object or the act of
the magisterium. Time only pertains to the subject who
exercises the act of the magisterium, and in this sense a
distinction can be made between a remote rule of faith
(the past magisterium) and a proximate rule (the present magisterium). The question is to know which point
of view should prevail: that of the subject or that of the
object. Before the last Council theologians did not speak
of the “continuity” of Tradition, but rather of its “constancy.” One speaks exactly of continuity in regard to
a subject that remains identical over the course of time
and change, and this expression indicates the primacy
of subject over object.26 It is not the subject that adapts
itself to the object, but it is the object that is said to be
continuous because the subject teaching it remains the
same. To speak of constancy, on the other hand, is to indicate the priority of object over subject. The necessary
presupposition of every reading is the constancy of the
teaching of the magisterium and not its continuity. For
the magisterium is defined first and foremost, that is to
say, formally and specifically, by its object. This necessary law of objective constancy amounts to the principle
of non-contradiction applied to magisterial teaching. A
statement contradicting the established teaching of the
magisterium is unacceptable, and the Catholic mind,
sufficiently enlightened by the living magisterium of the

Church, has the means to perceive this contradiction,
whether it arises in the past or in the present.
Reply to Objection 4. When a faithful Catholic discerns in the non-infallible acts of the magisterium a
statement contrary to an object of faith, this contradiction can occur in regard to a statement infallibly defined
by either the preceding or the current magisterium. In
both cases, the properly magisterial value of the acts
contradicting the infallible definition is null. But the magisterium as such (and hence the magisterial value of all
its other acts) is not called in question. There is a difference between remarking that an isolated act emanating from the authorities is null and systematically casting doubt on the value of all the acts of the authorities.
Faced with the above-named contradiction, the attitude
of the faithful Catholic is the first, but never the second.
Furthermore, when the faithful Catholic discerns in the
non-infallible acts of the magisterium a statement contrary to the object already proposed by an isolated act of
the non-infallible magisterium, recourse to the authorities is indispensable for resolving one’s doubts. But we
deny that this is the situation in which the faithful find
themselves as regards the teachings of Vatican Council
II, for the non-infallible teachings of the magisterium that
are contradicted by Vatican II, far from being isolated,
benefit from a constancy and unanimity which confer
upon them an authority if not equal to, then at least very
near to that of the ordinary and universal magisterium.
Reply to Objection 5. In order to establish that Vatican
Council II presented its teaching as open to discussion
because it deliberately refrained from engaging a magisterium properly so-called, one should begin with the observation that the statements in which Vatican II teaching is presented as discussable are in contradiction
with all the statements of the preceding magisterium in
which its teaching is presented as not subject to discussion. In other words, everything the magisterium of the
Council can say about itself and its intentions is already
part of its magisterial teaching. To identify the theological note of the teachings of Vatican II, Pope Paul VI said:
“In view of the pastoral nature of the Council, it avoided
any extraordinary statements of dogmas endowed with
the note of infallibility, but it still provided its teaching
with the authority of the Ordinary Magisterium, which
must be accepted with docility according to the mind
of the Council concerning the nature and aims of each
document.”27 That having been said, on the one hand,
even when non-infallible, the ordinary magisterium
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Si Si No No
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retains its authority. On the other hand, in order to know
precisely what is “the mind of the Council concerning
the nature and aims of each document” and to establish
whether this mind is compatible or not with the exercise
of a true magisterium, it is already necessary to judge
the documents of Vatican II and discern what may be
found therein to be contrary to the object of the act of
faith already proposed by the magisterium.
One might object that official statements of intention concerning the theological note of the teachings of
Vatican II are much more forthright than the teachings
of the Council strictly so-called. We would reply that this
does not seem to us to be established. Everyone was
able to ascertain readily that ecumenism and religious
liberty are contrary to what Pius IX and Pius XI said and
to what the Church had done till then. Undoubtedly, the
declarations of Cardinal Ratzinger explaining the intentions of Vatican II in his book Principles of Catholic
Theology are quite clear. But they were made more than
fifteen years after the Council ended, and cannot be
adduced to confirm an already clear analysis. In order
to determine the intention of the Council while it was
still happening, one need only confine oneself to John
XXIII’s declarations about the pastoral character of the
Vatican II (Pope John’s Opening Speech to the Council
on October 11, 1962, and the Allocution to the Sacred
College of December 23, 1962) and to those of Paul VI
(in the Encyclical Ecclesiam Suam of August 6, 1964,
and in the Closing Speech of the Council on December 7,
1965). What did John XXIII mean by the term pastoral?
What did Paul VI mean when he said, “dialogue must
characterize our apostolic charge”? What is meant by
“characterize”? Is this statement meant to define the
magisterium as such, or is it intended as a benevolent
way to approach the unschooled minds of the modern
era? Do terms such as these used in the statements of
these modern popes contradict other statements of
other popes? We do not pretend that it is impossible
to respond to these questions and to make sufficiently
clear the intentions that presided over the elaboration
of the Council documents and their implementation.28
Neither do we deny that these frank intentions have
their importance, and that their incompatibility with
the exercise of Catholic magisterium furnishes a decisive argument. But on the one hand, it seems to us that
clarifying these intentions is not easier, nor less difficult,
than establishing the opposition between religious freedom, collegiality, or ecumenism and the prior teaching
of the magisterium. On the other hand, it seems to us
that in order to clarify these intentions, the mind of the
80

The Angelus

September - October 2012

faithful Catholic must already be up to discerning what
is contrary to the object of his faith in the teachings of
Vatican Council II since these intentions form an integral part of these teachings.
Reply to Objection 6. The sense of the faith is a discernment produced in the faithful’s intellect by the formal motive of the virtue of faith, which is the supernatural authority of God revealing.29 In an act of discernment,
the faithful thus act in dependence on the authority of
God as it has already been manifested to them by means
of the condition of infallible teachings of the ecclesiastical magisterium. If one grants that the faithful can discern what is contrary to the object of faith, that does not
amount to investing the faithful with any authority in relation to the magisterium of the teaching Church.
Reply to Objection 7. We grant the seventh objection,
taking into account all the clarifications given thus far.
Epilogue
By definition, the ecclesiastical magisterium is the
organ of Tradition, and it fulfills the indispensable condition required for the visibility of the object of our faith. It
is signalized by the objective constancy of its teachings.
The mind of the believer can always ascertain this constancy by exercising the operation of judgment in docile dependence on the magisterial teachings. In effect,
Vatican Council I taught: “And, indeed, reason illustrated
by faith, when it zealously, piously, and soberly seeks,
attains with the help of God some understanding of the
mysteries, and that a most profitable one, not only from
the analogy of those things which it knows naturally, but
also from the connection of the mysteries among themselves and with the last end of man.”30
Vatican II represents a singular, unique, unprecedented event. In effect, unlike the others, this council did not
engage the infallibility of the solemn magisterium, and
it manifested a new intention extraneous to the purposes of Catholic teaching authority and openly opposed
on several points the teachings of the earlier Tradition.
These three facts can be readily apparent to the eyes of
faithful Catholics. This is understandable because the
act of faith is a mental act of judgment. The principle of
non-contradiction holds true there as for every act of
intellect.
The faithful Catholic, then, can rely upon the objective constancy of traditional teachings as a legitimate
criterion by which to judge the authenticity of the teachings of Vatican II. While fully recognizing in the pope and
bishops of today as in those of yesterday the subject
of the ecclesiastical magisterium, one can neverthe-

faith is…the true assent of the intellect to the truth received
extrinsically ex auditu, whereby we believe that what has been
said, attested, and revealed by the personal God, our Creator and
Lord, to be true on account of the authority of God the highest
truth.” Vatican Council I, constitution Dei Filius in DS 3008: “…
faith, which is the beginning of human salvation, is a supernatural
virtue by which we, with the aid and inspiration of the grace of
God, believe that the things revealed by Him are true, not because
the intrinsic truth of the revealed things has been perceived
by the natural light of reason, but because of the authority of
God Himself who reveals them, who can neither deceive nor be
deceived.” Vatican Council I, Constitution Dei Filius in DS 3011
(Dz. 1792): “By divine and Catholic faith, all those things must be
believed which are contained in the written word of God and in
tradition, and those which are proposed by the Church, either in a
solemn pronouncement or in her ordinary and universal teaching
power, to be believed as divinely revealed.”

less deem that the exercise of this authority since the
council inclusively does not impose itself indubitably
on the adherence of the faithful, precisely insofar as it
manifests a new pastoral intention and arrays itself in
opposition to the constant teaching of the prior teaching authority.
1

DS 3012 (Dz. 1793).

2

DS 3540 (Dz. 2145).

3

Of St. Clement of Rome in the Letter to the Faithful of the
Corinthian Church; of St. Ignatius of Antioch in his Letter to
the Faithful of the Church of Philadelphia; of St. Irenaeus in the
Adversus Hæreses, Bk. III, Ch. 3, §1, and Bk. IV, Ch. 33, §8; and of
Tertullian in De Præscriptione Hæreticorum, §21.

4

Salaverri, De Ecclesia, Thesis 12, §503.

5

For example, this is the reproach made by Cardinal Garrone,
when during a meeting with Archbishop Lefebvre on March 3,
1975, he challenged the soundness of the Archbishop’s Declaration
of November 21, 1974, in which the founder of the seminary of
Ecône had clearly expressed his rejection of the direction taken
by the Council: “Your manifesto is unacceptable. It teaches
your seminarians to depend on their personal judgment and on
Tradition such as they understand it. This is freethinking, the
worst of all liberal doctrines!” (Tissier de Mallerais, tr. Brian
Sudlow, Marcel Lefebvre [2002; English version—Angelus Press,
2004], p. 480). This reproach also crops up in the review of this
biography by Fr. Serge Bonino, O.P., published in the Revue
Thomiste, Vol. 102 (2002), p. 692. The position of the SSPX is
judged to be “untenable.” According to him, “the subject that
judges the magisterium in the name of Tradition is, finally, an
individual conscience that is not without a somewhat rash selfconfidence in order to assert that it has discovered an obvious
‘discontinuity’ in the teaching of the magisterium.”

6

Summa contra Gentiles, Bk. I, Ch. 36.

7

Summa Theologica, I, Q. 13, Art. 12, ad 3.

8

Garrigou-Lagrange, Dieu, son existence et sa nature
(Beauchesne, 1938), p. 149 ff. (See No. 2 of this article.)

9

St. Thomas, ad locum Nos. 566 and 607 (Marietti edition). At No.
605, St. Thomas shows that each of the two principle operations
of the understanding, simple apprehension and judgment,
presuppose a first principle. Simple apprehension cannot ascend
infinitely in a series of concepts, and their analysis leads by
degrees to a first concept, which is the concept of being. From this
first concept flow, first, judgment, which is said of being qua being:
being cannot at the same time and in the same respect be and not
be.

10

St. Thomas teaches that bilocation is metaphysically impossible
(Supplementum, Q. 83, Art. 3, ad 4). In the lives of saints, there
has never been veritable bilocation, but rather a simple apparition
(produced miraculously by God) of the saint at one place and the
physical presence of the saint elsewhere. The same individual is
thus present at the same time in two different places, but not in
the same respect: there is a physical presence in one place and an
apparent presence, or apparition, in another.

11

In his Commentary on Aristotle’s Peri Hermeneias, Bk. I, Lesson
9, Nos. 116-117.

12

Summa Theologica, III, Q. 27, Art. 2.

13

St. Pius X, motu proprio Sacrorum Antistitum in DS 3542: “…

14

Cf. Vatican Council I, Constitution Dei Filius, in DS 3008, quoted
above in the preceding note.

15

Garrigou-Lagrange, De Revelatione, 3rd ed. (1929), I, 178-180.
Revealed mysteries are intelligible “analogically,” for the terms in
which they are expressed are analogically intelligible.

16

One could even go so far as to say that the contradiction in some
cases is already ascertainable by reason alone, for it suffices to
apply the simple rules of logic: a journalist (even non-Catholic) is
perfectly capable of recognizing whether the pope is innovating by
his contradiction of his predecessors. In a book entitled L’Église:
Questions aux protestants et aux catholiques (Labor et Fides,
1978), pp. 16-17, the Protestant Franz J. Leenhardt, professor at
the College of Geneva, establishes the contradiction between
the traditional dogma “outside the Church, no salvation” and the
ecumenism of Unitatis Redintegratio (the paternity of which
he attributes to the new theology of Yves Congar in his book
Chrétiens désunis). This example is interesting because it is clear
that this man doesn’t have the Catholic faith, yet he retains right
reason, and he can make use of it to ascertain a lack of uniformity
between the two teachings. The difference between him and us
is that we also know that, if it takes place, this contradiction
occurs between the teaching of the past magisterium and the
current one, which though being the magisterium cannot be
magisterial. Even a new explanation cannot contradict what has
already been explained. For example, in vain do they tell us that
Dignitatis Humanae 2 is an explication of the natural law that
has never been made till now; it is a fact duly established by the
infallible tribunal of logic that DH 2 contradicts Quanta Cura. The
obviousness of that fact becomes blinding when they speak to us
about a “counter syllabus.”

17

Cajetan, Commentary on the “SummaTheologica,” II-II, Q. 1, Art.
1, No. 10-11; Garrigou-Lagrange, De Revelatione, I, 510.

18

Cajetan, Commentary on the ST, II-II, Q. 5, Art. 3, No. 1.

19

Garrigou-Lagrange, De Revelatione, I, 442-443. The attestation
of the Church can be compared to the teaching of a professor. At
first this teaching is requisite as the necessary condition enabling
the disciple’s intellect to know its object. But once the object is
known, the disciple’s intellect retains it by itself without further
help from the professor. And if his professor were to fall into error
by denying the teaching given formerly, his old student would be in
a position to correct him by relying on the teaching once given by
the professor himself (and not by his own personal insight). Thus
did St. Paul with regard to St. Peter in the incident at Antioch.

20

It is impossible for the magisterium to be engaged as such in the
proposition of something contrary to a thing to be believed. Were
that to happen, one would have to conclude that the act of this
proposition is bereft of any magisterial value strictly speaking.

21

Quite often the text of Holy Writ calls for an interpretation. Con­

81

Si Si No No
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sequently, before ascertaining a contradiction between the current
magisterium and Scripture, the Protestant is obliged to substitute
himself for the magisterium in order to judge in its place what
the Scripture must mean: and so it is indeed he (and not the past
magisterium) that judges the current magisterium in the measure
that he judges the meaning of Scripture.

82

22

St. Thomas makes a similar distinction, when he speaks of
majores and of minores in regard to the notoriety of the Messias
among the Jews (Summa Theologica, III, Q. 47, Art. 5). The former
had an explicit knowledge, whereas the latter had only an implicit
knowledge, dependent on the explicit knowledge of the majores.

23

As Archbishop Lefebvre pointed out in his book They Have
Uncrowned Him (1986; Angelus Press, 1988), p. xv, it was mainly
by starting with the fruits of the Council that one could trace them
back to the poisoned fount of its teachings.

24

Cf. the lecture of Professor Matteo d’Amico, “From Christian
Humility to the Humiliation of the Church” in the Acts of the
Eighth Theological Congress of ‘Si Si No No’ (January 2-4, 2009),
p. 242: “A recent poll by the Italian Federation of Scouting with
a sampling of 2,500 scouts between the ages of 16 and 21 coming
from 25 European countries (but for the most part Italian),
two-thirds of whom are Catholic, yielded the following results:
90 percent of them approve of premarital sex; 39 percent accept
abortion; 82 percent do not think it is wrong to get drunk; 47
per­cent see nothing wrong with smoking marijuana; a significant
percentage do not disapprove of extramarital affairs (Corriere
della Sera, March 16, 2008). I think that little commentary is called
for here; such are the results of the ‘New Springtime’ of Vatican II:
the destruction of Catholicism.” See also pp. 254-56.

25

Posthumous magisterium can moreover be a present magisterium,
since it is defined as the simple repetition of a past teaching before
the cessation thereof.

26

Pope Benedict XVI’s Address to the Roman Curia of December
22, 2005, in fact speaks, not of “continuity,” but of “renewal in
continuity,” and it is question of “renewal in the continuity of the
one subject-Church….which increases in time and develops, yet
always remaining the same, the one subject of the journeying
People of God.”

27

Allocution during the Audience of January 12, 1966, La
Documentations Catholique, No. 1466, col. 418-420 [English
version in Michael Davies, Pope John’s Council, 2nd ed. (Angelus
Press, 2007), p. 218].

28

It can be prooved that Vatican II set itself the goal of harmonizing
the teaching of the Church with the principles of liberal and
modern thought of the world that came to be after 1789.

29

Garrigou-Lagrange, De Revelatione, 3rd ed. (1929), I, 180.

30

DS 3016.

The Angelus

September - October 2012

Letters to the Editor

Dear Angelus Press,
I was always told it’s best to offer praise and criticism together, so here
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Thank you for your letter. First, to address your “praise,” we greatly
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Regarding the tone of the articles, we appreciate your feedback. Balancing
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there is no doubt that both doctrinal and practical articles are important to
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That alternation will continue as we move forward, and we hope that this
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Angelus Press

83

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The
Last
Word
A year ago, Pope Benedict XVI stood before a huge crowd at St. Peter’s Basilica and announced his plans for a “Year of Faith.” This event started just a few days ago on October 11,
2012, coinciding with the fiftieth anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council
(1962), and with the twentieth anniversary of the promulgation of the new Catechism of the
Catholic Church (1992).
During the initial decades following Vatican II, the Catholic hierarchy in Western countries
exhibited what can only be called a foolhardy optimism. Time went by and their enthusiasm disappeared, for the great revival in the Church never materialized. Instead, the Church
has suffered crisis after crisis, especially a widespread loss of faith in the formerly Catholic
countries of Western Europe. With the opening of the Year of Faith, cardinals and bishops
met at Rome for a synod. The name given to the synod speaks for itself: “Synod on the New
Evangelization.” With a much more sober approach, the synod has identified secularism,
both inside and outside the Church, as the key factor destroying the faith today.
Cardinal Wuerl, with Pope Benedict’s blessing, presented an alarming introductory report
before the new synod. In it, he laments: “The current situation is rooted in the upheavals of
the 1970s and ’80s, decades in which there was manifestly poor catechesis–rather miscatechesis–at so many educational levels.”
Cardinal Wuerl then describes the consequences of this faulty teaching: “Entire generations have become disassociated from the support systems that facilitate the transmission
of the Faith.”
The resulting ignorance, explains the cardinal, has drastically affected private and public
life: “It is as if a tsunami of secular influence has swept across the cultural landscape, taking with it such societal markers as marriage, family, the concept of the common good and
objective right and wrong.”
Cardinal Wuerl then darkly concludes: “Secularization has fashioned two generations of
Catholics who do not know the Church’s fundamental prayers. Many do not see any value in
Mass attendance, they fail to receive the sacrament of Penance, and they have often lost the
sense that mystery or the transcendent have any real or verifiable meaning.”
A great crisis of faith is manifest! Many churchmen, since the closing of Vatican II, have
attributed this crisis to the spirit of the times, or to false interpretations of the conciliar texts.
The SSPX, however, has consistently identified the main cause of this crisis to be the Council
itself (including its problematic teachings). The SSPX still insists that, in order to solve this
dire problem, its true roots must first be exposed and acknowledged.
The declaration of the General Chapter of the Society repeated that its “paramount duty”
is “to profess the Catholic Faith in all its purity and integrity,” and that “the Society continues
to uphold the declarations and the teachings of the constant Magisterium of the Church in
regard to all the novelties of the Second Vatican Council which remain tainted with errors,
and also in regard to the reforms issued from it.”
May this Year of Faith be for us an occasion to redouble our efforts in defending and
spreading God’s unchanging truth.
Sincerely yours in Christ,
Father Jürgen Wegner

The Society of St. Pius X is an international priestly society of common life
without vows, whose purpose is the priesthood and that which pertains to it.
The main goal of the Priestly Society of Saint Pius X is to preserve the Catholic
faith in its fullness and purity, to teach its truths, and to diffuse its virtues.
Authentic spiritual life, the sacraments, and the traditional liturgy are its
primary means of bringing this life of grace to souls.
The Angelus aims at forming the whole man: we aspire to help deepen your
spiritual life, nourish your studies, understand the history of Christendom,
and restore Christian culture in every aspect.

$ 7.00
Return undeliverable Canadian addresses to: The Angelus, 480 McKenzie Street, Winnipeg, MB, R2W 5B9