“Instaurare omnia in Christo” Make Our Hearts Like unto Thine Devotion to the Immaculate Heart The Consecration of Russia Co-Redemptrix July - August 2013 Make Our Hearts Like unto Thine Although it is not really new, devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary was formally requested by Our Lady at Fatima as the ultimate sign of hope for both societies and souls. She used forceful words that suggest a total change, for the better if heeded, for worse if scorned. How can such a humble gesture of gratitude and love to Our Lady be fraught with such consequences? How can the spiritual realm so affect the material world around us? This is the question addressed in this issue which brings to the forefront the other aspect of Mary’s life— “powerful as an army set in battle array.” Letter from the Publisher St. Louis de Montfort, one of the greatest Marian saints, says the following early in his treatise True Devotion to the Blessed Virgin: “In truth we must still say with the saints: de Maria numquam satis. (Of Mary there is never enough.) We have still not praised, exalted, honored, loved, and served Mary adequately. She is worthy of even more praise, respect, love and service” (§10). It is in this spirit that we have dedicated not only the theme of this issue, but our annual conference in October to her. Perhaps we run a risk of complacency here as we often do in life: we know we should say the daily Rosary, we can recite the story of Fatima, perhaps we have even made the First Saturdays. But do we realize the extent of her power before the Throne of God? Do we take the message of Fatima to heart and really devote our lives to her Immaculate Heart? Do we believe Our Lady has the power to end the crisis whenever her Son wants? It is all too easy to reduce our status as traditional Catholics to one of criticizing the very real problems in the post-conciliar Church. But, in fact, one could say that the essence of the Faith in its fullness is the knowledge, love, and service of God, through the Blessed Virgin, so that we might save our souls. If we are not striving to be saints, it is all for naught. So let us turn to Our Lady, whose solicitude for our souls and for the Church is unparalleled. Let us beg her to return the Church to its former glory and hasten the restoration of all things in her Son. We know it is her desire; it is up to us to do our part. In Christ the King, Fr. Arnaud Rostand, Publisher July-August 2013 Volume XXXVI, Number 4 Publisher Fr. Arnaud Rostand Editor Mr. James Vogel Assistant Editor Mrs. Lesly De Piante Editorial Assistant Miss Anne Stinnett Editorial Team Fr. Jürgen Wegner Fr. Dominique Bourmaud Fr. Leo Boyle Fr. Pierre Duverger Design and Layout credo.creatie (Eindhoven, The Netherlands) Mr. Simon Townshend Miss Mary Werick Director of Marketing and Sales Mr. Mark Riddle U.S. Foreign Countries Subscription Rates 1 year 2 years 3 years $35.00 $65.00 $100.00 $55.00 $105.00 $160.00 Contents Letter from the Publisher 4 Theme: Make Our Hearts Like unto Thine – Devotion to the Immaculate Heart – The Consecration to Russia – Co-Redemptrix: Our Lady as Necessary but Secondary Cause of Redemption – Who Are You, O Immaculate Conception? 6 12 16 22 Faith and Morals – Social Doctrine: The Austrian Miracle of 1955 – Acts of the Magisterium: On Reciting the Rosary 28 34 Spirituality – Sermon of Archbishop Lefebvre: The Name Written on Her Heart 38 – Ashamed of Mary! How Ecumenism Trumped Truth at Vatican II 45 Christian Culture – History: Mary as Malleus Hereticorum 52 (inc. Canada and Mexico) All payments must be in U.S. funds only. “Instaurare omnia in Christo” Online subscriptions: $20.00/year. To subscribe visit: www.angelusonline.org. Register for free to access back issues 14 months and older. All subscribers to the print version of the magazine have full access to the online version. The Angelus (ISSN 10735003) is published bi-monthly under the patronage of St. Pius X and Mary, Queen of Angels. Publication office is located at PO Box 217, St. Marys, KS 66536. PH (816) 753-3150; FAX (816) 753-3557. Periodicals Postage Rates paid at Kansas City, MO. Manuscripts and letters to the editor are welcome and will be used at the discretion of the editors. The authors of the articles presented here are solely responsible for their judgments and opinions. Postmaster sends address changes to the address above. ©2013 by Angelus Press. Official Publication of the Priestly Society of Saint Pius X for the United States and Canada – Lives of the Saints: St. Ignatius of Loyola – Education: The Queen-Mother and Chesterton – Family Life: Loving Your Spouse for a Lifetime – Book Review: The Young Stalin 58 61 66 70 – Questions and Answers – Church and World – Theological Studies – Letters to the Editor – The Last Word 72 80 86 89 91 Theme Make Our Hearts Like unto Thine Devotion to the Immaculate Heart by Fr. Pierre Duverger, SSPX 1 6 The primary source for the writing of this article and the following one is the recent work by Joseph de Belfont: Mysteries and Hidden Truths of the Third Secret of Fatima [French] (Lanore, 2011). The Angelus July - August 2013 Three times in 1916, three little children saw an Angel. The following year, Fatima became famous. Our Lady appeared from May to October on the 13th of the month. She came and spoke to Lucy, the oldest. Jacinta heard the words, but Francisco was only able to see the visions.1 Prayers and sacrifices for sinners, the recitation of the rosary, hell and war, offenses against God and His Mother, secrets to be revealed later, announcement of wars, conversion of Russia and a miracle to come—all these things attracted more than 70,000 people on October 13, 1917. In front of this immense crowd, after a heavy rain which left everyone muddy and tired, the sun danced before everyone, witnesses of this unique miracle, never seen since Joshua. Between 1925 and 1930, Sister Lucy continued to receive instructions to complete and transmit the message and the secrets. The first and second World Wars would start and finish as prophesied by the Queen of Peace. Almost a century later, the Third Secret of Fatima, supposedly revealed by the Vatican in 2000, is still the object of inquiry, and the specific request made to the Pope is still incomplete despite various attempts. July 13, 1917. Memorias e cartas da Irma Lucia [abbreviated hereafter MCIL], (Porto, 1973), p. 401. Alonso, pp. 19-20. Br. Michel de la Sainte Trinité, Toute la vérité sur Fatima [abbreviated hereafter TVF2], Vol. 2 (Edition CRC, 1984), pp. 324-25. In the following pages, we will recall the most important revelation of Fatima: devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary and the famous request of her love, the consecration of Russia. 3 During four communica­ tions: on May 13, June 13, and on July 13 before and after the vision of hell. 4 Through the apparitions of Dec. 10, 1925; Feb. 15, 1926; Dec. 17, 1927; 1929 and 1930. “Jesus wants to use you in order to make me known and loved. He wants to establish in the world the devotion to my Immaculate Heart. To the one who embraces it, I promise salvation. These souls will be loved by God as flowers picked by me to adorn His throne.…My heart will be your refuge and the way which will lead you to God.”2 Devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary appears to be the very core of the revelations at Fatima. In a very specific way Our Lady mentions the divine will about this devotion in the apparitions of 1917.3 Already in the three apparitions of 1916, the Angel had introduced the children to the devotion to the Hearts of Jesus and Mary. When in Pontevedra and then in Tuy, Lucy received information4 on how to practice this devotion and what special requests were expected to be passed on to the Church’s authorities. All the other themes of Fatima—the conversion of sinners by sacrifice and prayer, the rosary, the communion of reparation, and the consecration of Russia—are tied to this central concern: to establish in the world devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. The conversion of sinners by prayer and sacrifice is the first and most known of all the messages. It would be, for Jacinta in particular, the very spring of her perfection until her abandonment in death, heroically accepted for a ten-year-old little saint. This theme has been recalled in almost all the apparitions, including those of the Angel and the subsequent ones in Pontevedra and Tuy. 2 The Immaculate Heart of Mary “I desire very ardently the propagation of the cult and devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, because this Heart is the magnet which draws souls to Me, the fire which makes the rays of My light and My love beam out over the earth, and the inexhaustible well causing the living water of My mercy to gush over the earth.” Communication to Sister Lucy, in Letter to Bp. Gurza May 27, 1943 7 Theme Make Our Hearts Like unto Thine 5 8 The Holy Family, Our Lady of Sorrows, and Our Lady of Mt. Carmel. The Angelus July - August 2013 The first prayer taught by the Angel is for repairing the offenses of sinners; the second is to ask for their conversion. But the Blessed Virgin came to reveal an infallible means to save them from hell: her Immaculate Heart. The daily prayer of the rosary was asked for in each apparition in 1917. During the last one, she called herself Our Lady of the Rosary, offering to the children three visions according to the Joyful, Sorrowful, and Glorious Mysteries.5 It is easy to understand the recitation of the rosary as a special way to honor the Immaculate Heart of Mary. The communion of reparation is a request mentioned by Our Lady on July 13, 1917. The Angel taught the children devotion to the Eucharist by prayer, and he himself gave them Communion in his third apparition. The details of the practice would be later explained to Lucy in the apparitions of Pontevedra in 1925 and of Tuy in 1926. This devotion is dedicated to reparation for the offenses made against the Immaculate Heart of Mary. 6 See the following article in this issue: “The Con­ secration of Russia.” 7 Fr. Coudrin, founder of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, promoted the devotion to the Immaculate Heart on April 1st. The Curé of Ars consecrated his parish to the Immaculate Conception. The consecration of Russia to her Immaculate Heart was asked by Our Lady on June 13, 1929, at Tuy. During the apparitions of Fatima, on July 13, 1917, she had announced that she would come again and ask for it: “I will come to ask the consecration of Russia to my Immaculate Heart…” In 1930 Our Lord reminded Lucy about the request of His Mother. The very consecration of Russia and its resulting conversion were submitted to conditions. One of them, the most important, is the recognition, promulgation, and practice of the devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary.6 Revelation and Apparitions The Church’s teaching is very clear about the apparitions. They are called private to distinguish them from the Revelation made by Our Lord Jesus Christ during His life and as taught by the Apostles who received the mission and special charism to faithfully and integrally transmit it. Apparitions cannot add anything to the deposit of the Faith. They cannot bring anything new. But the study of theologians and the movement of the Holy Ghost in the devotion of the faithful can help the hierarchy to make explicit Revelation in an aspect which appears new to us although it was always contained in the Creed. The revelations at Fatima and subsequent apparitions do not escape this rule. The cult to the Immaculate existed before 1917. Fatima makes it explicit and encourages it, and manifests clearly that God is pleased to be honored this way, especially in our times. This devotion is mainly expressed through the practice of the first Saturdays, daily recitation of the Rosary, and consecration to her Immaculate Heart. Devotion to the Heart of Mary Numerous authors have shown how the Heart of Mary, symbol of her love, was announced in many figures of the Old Testament. It is the whole understanding of the place of Our Lady in the divine plan of the Redemption as the new Eve in the New Testament. The first saints known for explicitly expressing the devotion to the Immaculate Heart are Sts. Mechtilde and Gertrude in the 13th century. In the 17th, two other saints developed and diffused the devotion, united to the Sacred Heart of Jesus: Sts. John Eudes and Louis Marie Grignion de Montfort. Closer to us, the most ardent apostle of the Immaculate Heart is St. Maximilian Kolbe. In the 19th century, Pius VII and Pius IX established the feast of the “Most Pure Heart of Mary.” In 1830, Our Lady appeared to St. Catherine and requested a medal with the two Hearts of Jesus and Mary, known as the Miraculous Medal. In 1836,7 on December 11, Fr. Desgenettes consecrated his parish, Our Lady of Victories, to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. From that day, like Ars, this parish soon became a model of fervor and faith. Finally, Pius IX defined the dogma of the Immaculate Conception in 1858. 9 Theme Make Our Hearts Like unto Thine 8 9 On June 13, 1912, i.e. exactly five years before the apparition of Our Lady at Fatima wherein she showed her Heart with thorns, asking reparation of the children. Letter to Fr. Goncalves, June 12, 1930. MCIL, pp. 409 & 411; TVF2, pp. 166-169 and 33-35. Devotion of the First Saturdays Since the 15th century, the members of the Confraternity of the Rosary used to offer special prayers and to receive the sacraments on Saturday for 15 weeks in a row in honor of the 15 mysteries of the Rosary. Fr. Desgenettes put this practice in the Statutes of his confraternity. In 1889, Leo XIII granted a plenary indulgence to be gained on one of the 15 Saturdays, and in 1892 he allowed this practice to be done on the following Sunday if need be. In 1905, St. Pius X granted a plenary indulgence for those who practiced the twelve first Saturdays. In 19128 he approved the first Saturdays in honor of Mary Immaculate, offered in a spirit of reparation for the blasphemies against her name and her privileges. In 1920, Benedict XV granted a plenary indulgence for those who practice it for eight weeks. Devotion of Reparation: Eucharistic and Marian In December 1925, Our Lady told Sister Lucy the details of the devotion she was asking for: on the first Saturday of five consecutive months, the offering of a Communion, the Rosary, a 15-minute meditation on the mysteries of the Rosary, and confession made eight days before or after in a spirit of reparation for the offenses against the Immaculate Heart of Mary. To those who embrace this devotion, “I promise to assist them at the hour of death with all the graces necessary for the salvation of their soul.” The Child Jesus showed her the heart of His Mother surrounded by thorns and told her: “Have mercy on the Heart of your holy Mother surrounded by thorns with which ungrateful men pierce it at every moment, without anyone to make an act of reparation in order to take them out.” “You at least,” said Our Lady, “try to console me…” Two months later, on February 15, the Child Jesus appeared to Sister Lucy and gave her some specific requests for the devotion of the first Saturdays, namely the possibility of receiving Communion on the following Sunday: “The souls who practice the five first Saturdays with fervor and in order to make reparation to the Heart of your heavenly Mother please me more than those who, lukewarm and indifferent, practice them fifteen times.” In a communication in 1930, Our Lord revealed to Sister Lucy the following: “My daughter, the motive is simple. There are five kinds of offenses and blasphemies uttered against the Immaculate Heart of Mary: Blasphemies against the Immaculate Conception; blasphemies against her perpetual virginity; blasphemies against her Divine Maternity, in refusing at the same time to recognize her as the Mother of men; blasphemies of those who openly seek to foster in the hearts of children indifference or scorn, or even hatred for this Immaculate Mother; the offenses of those who directly outrage her in her holy images. Here, then, My daughter, is the reason why the Immaculate Heart of Mary causes Me to ask for this little act of reparation and by means of it, moves My mercy to forgive those souls who have had the misfortune of offending her. As for you, try without ceasing, with all your prayers and sacrifices, to move Me to mercy toward those poor souls.”9 10 The Angelus July - August 2013 10 11 See the following article: “The Consecration of Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary.” It was at Our Lady of Victories that the Ven. Francis Libermann received his vocation and said his first Mass. Co-founder of the congregation of the Holy Ghost Fathers, he inspired Archbishop Lefebvre in the writing of the Statutes of the Society of St. Pius X, also called the Fraternity of the Apostles of Jesus and Mary. Toward the Consecration of Russia To be thorough regarding the devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, we should mention the consecration to her and in particular the consecration of Russia. It will be found in the following article.10 The salvation of the world, promised to the intercession of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, is a common effort of the whole Church. It depends neither on the sole consecration of Russia made by the Church’s authorities nor on our own sacrifices and prayers. This is why the story of the consecration of a parish to the Immaculate Heart of Mary and its wonderful effects will encourage us to respond to the requests of Fatima as far as it depends on us as well as to give us a glimpse of what will be the conversion of Russia “in the end”! Effects of a Consecration Fr. Pierre Duverger was ordained in 1995 by Bishop de Galarreta. After assignments in France, Chile, and the Argentine, he has been at the U.S. District since 2010 as secretary to the District Superior. He is from a family of 11 which had the honor of being a friend of Archbishop Lefebvre’s since the 1950’s in Africa. Two of his brothers, as well as two nephews, are also priests of the SSPX. Father Desgenettes consecrated his parish in the heart of Paris, Our Lady of Victories,11 to the Immaculate Heart of Mary in 1836. When he was first assigned to this parish of 40,000 souls in 1832, around 40 people used to go to Mass. The French Revolution had not only destroyed lives and countries, but also, and more deeply, souls! Despite all his efforts, prayers, and sacrifices, Father Desgenettes saw no fruit for years and was greatly discouraged. On December 3, 1836, a first Saturday, he heard an interior voice telling him during Mass: Consecrate your parish to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Immediately he wrote the Statutes of the Confraternity of the “Holy and Immaculate Heart of Mary for the conversion of sinners.” The members would commit to assist at Mass on the first Saturday and to pray in particular for the conversion of sinners. On Saturday, December 10, Bishop Quelen approved the new confraternity and authorized the beginning of the devotion the next day, the Third Sunday of Advent. To the ten faithful who were assisting at Mass that day, Father Desgenettes announced that, later that very afternoon, he wished the parish to make an act of devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. From that moment, the miracles at Our Lady of Victories never ceased. After Mass, two fathers of families asked for confession. In the evening, 400 to 500 people assisted at the act of consecration. On the following day, M. Joly, the last minister of Louis XVI, who had refused so far to receive the sacraments, agreed to make his confession to his parish priest. In ten days, 214 souls became members of the confraternity, and in April 1838 Gregory XVI made it an archconfraternity for the whole Church. In 1842, there were more than two million members and nine hundred affiliated parishes. In July 1853, Pius IX crowned the statue of Our Lady of Victories parish.12 On that occasion he said: “The Archconfraternity of the Holy and Immaculate Heart of Mary is God’s work. It is a thought of Heaven realized on earth. It will be the Church’s resource in bad days.” 11 Theme Make Our Hearts Like unto Thine The Consecration of Russia by Fr. Pierre Duverger, SSPX The apparitions of Fatima are all about the devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. It is the will of God that this devotion be recognized and promoted in the Church by the authorities of the Church. Our Lady’s request of consecrating Russia has to be considered in this light. Establish the Devotion to My Immaculate Heart On July 13, 1917, Our Lady appeared to the three seers for the third time. She asked souls again to pray the rosary for peace in the world and the end of war “because only [she] can obtain them.” She announced a miracle to come in October so that “all will be able to see in order to believe.” She taught a short prayer to the children to direct their intentions, especially when offering a sacrifice for sinners. Then, opening her hands, she showed them hell, a frightening vision whose effects can still be seen on the faces of the children in the famous photograph that was taken just after the apparition. She then revealed the will of God: “In order to save them, God wants to establish in the world devotion to my Immaculate Heart.” Then 12 The Angelus July - August 2013 1 MCIL, p. 464. TVF2, pp. 292294 & 345. 2 MCIL, p. 405; TVF2, pp. 170, 294, & 331-332; TVF5, p. 232. 3 TVF4, pp. 419-420. Caillon, p. 30. came a series of announcements as consequences of docility to her will: the conversion of many souls, peace, the end of the war, and a second war as a sign to recognize God’s chastisement by means of famine and persecutions against the Church and the Holy Father. Here comes the first mention of the consecration of Russia. “To prevent this, I shall come to ask for the consecration of Russia to my Immaculate Heart and the communion of reparation of the first Saturdays. If they listen to my requests, Russia will be converted and there will be peace. If not, she will scatter her errors through the world, provoking wars and persecutions of the Church. The good will be martyred, the Holy Father will have much to suffer, various nations will be annihilated. In the end my Immaculate Heart will triumph. The Holy Father will consecrate Russia to me, and it will be converted and a certain period of peace will be granted to the world.” Consecration and Communion From the beginning, Our Lady makes it clear that she requests both acts: consecration and the communion of reparation. Both requests are the conditions for the result: the conversion of Russia. Both are practical expression of the devotion that God wants to establish. One is to be done by the authorities, the other practiced by the faithful in the world. On June 13, 1929, in Tuy, Our Lady, as she had announced, came to ask for the consecration: “The moment has come when God asks the Holy Father to make, in union with all the bishops of the world, the consecration of Russia to my Immaculate Heart, promising to save it by this means.”1 One year later, on May 29, 1930, Our Lord made the request as Sister Lucy reported it: “The good God promises to make an end of the persecution of Russia if the Holy Father deigns to make and orders to be made by all the bishops of the Catholic world, a solemn and public act of reparation and consecration of Russia to the Most Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, His Holiness promising, with the help of the end of this persecution, to approve and recommend the practice of the reparatory devotion.”2 The request was then passed on to Pius XI, and later to Pius XII. As for the union of the bishops with the act of consecration by the Pope, Sister Lucy gave these indications to the Papal Nuncio in Lisbon, Archbishop Sante Portalupi, on March 21, 1982: “The Pope should convoke all the bishops either in Rome or in another place....or he should order the bishops of the whole world to organize, each one in his own cathedral, a public solemn act of reparation and consecration of Russia to the Most Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary.”3 Therefore Our Lady asks for 1. the Pope 2. to order the bishops of the whole world 3. to consecrate with him 4. Russia 5. to the Most Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary 13 Theme Make Our Hearts Like unto Thine See the previous article, “The Immaculate Heart of Mary.” Yes No Yes No No No Yes No Yes No No 1952 July No Yes Yes Yes No No Paul VI 1964 Nov. No No No No No No John Paul II 1981 June No No No No No No Dec. No No No No No No Approbation of the 1st Saturdays devotion No 1942 Reparation Oct. Dec. Pius XII Act of To the Immaculate Heart of Mary 7 June 1981, Dec. 1981, May 1982, and March 1984. Russia 6 Consecration Nov. 21, 1964, on the closing day of Vatican II’s third session, Paul VI made a special prayer to Our Lady. Bishop Proença Sigaud had presented to the Pope a petition signed by almost a third of the Council Fathers requesting the consecration. The pope just said: “To your Immaculate Heart, O Mary, we entrust the human race” [universum genus humanum commendamus]. Bishops of the Whole World 5 6. with a public act of reparation 7. a nd the promise to approve the reparatory devotion of the first Saturdays. Date Oct. 31, 1942; Dec. 8, 1942; and July 1952. Pope 4 1982 May No Yes No No No No 1984 March Yes Yes No No No No Pius XII three times,4 Paul VI once,5 and John Paul II four times6 attempted to respond to the requests of Our Lady. Neither an act of reparation nor the promise to approve the reparatory devotion was ever associated with the act of consecration despite the fact that this reparatory communion is already a traditional devotion recognized in the Church since Leo XIII with indulgences granted by St. Pius X and Benedict XV.7 14 The Angelus July - August 2013 8 The word used on these occasions was “entrust” and not “consecrate.” 9 Shortly after the consecration of the world in 1942, the German armies suffered defeats in the decisive battles of El-Alamein and Stalingrad as well as the U-boats in the Atlantic from January 1943 on. Sister Lucy wrote on Feb. 28, 1943, to Bp. Gurza and on May 4, 1943, to Fr. Goncalves that...God would put an end to WWII because of this act of consecration even though, because it was not complete, it would not cause the conversion of Russia. It is possible to see the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 as some consequences of the consecration of John Paul II in 1984. The attempt by Paul VI in 1964 and the first two by John Paul II in 1981 cannot even be called consecrations.8 John Paul II’s attempts were not made to the Immaculate Heart of Mary or the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Only John Paul II tried to involve the bishops in 1982; Paul VI could have easily ordered all the bishops gathered at Vatican II to unite them to his act, but he didn’t! Only once, by Pius XII in 1952, was Russia explicitly named. In the seven other attempts, Russia was never named, although it was sometimes designated by circumlocutions used in the formula. There Is Still Hope It is heartily painful to see how the consecration of Russia to the Immaculate Heart Mary has not been realized yet as Our Lady requested it. However, the fruits obtained by the partial compliance to her requests should encourage doing so.9 Almost one century after the apparition of Communism with its wars and destruction, atheistic and Marxist dialectics has spread to all minds as well as the eternal damnation of millions of souls because of it. Recourse to the Immaculate Heart of Mary with both consecration and reparatory communion is still offered and prophesied as the solution. Indeed, in the message of Fatima, there is an announcement which is not conditional and which is a source of great hope for us: “In the end, my Immaculate Heart will triumph. The Holy Father will consecrate Russia to me, and she will be converted, and a period of peace will be granted to the world.” 15 Theme Make Our Hearts Like unto Thine CoRedemptrix Our Lady as Necessary but Secondary Cause of Redemption by Fr. Paul Robinson, SSPX A mother has two roles, one by which she nourishes her children and the other by which gives her own being to them. The first role is material, and includes carrying the child in the womb for nine months, feeding it at the breast, and burping it on her shoulder. The second is formal, and demands that she identify herself with her child in the totality of its life: its aspirations, its choices, its goals, its destiny. To accomplish the first role, she sacrifices material resources; to accomplish the second, she sacrifices herself. When it comes to the most perfect of mothers, Our Lady, Protestants limit the scope of her caring of the Divine Child to the first role. She was the material means for Our Lord to come into this world and be taken care of until He reached adulthood. At that point, her work was finished. She had transported Our Lord to the shores of His earthly mission and now could wave goodbye, wishing Him the best for His future life. In a sense, for them, she was at that point no longer His mother, and so she has no direct bearing on man’s salvation. In Protestantism, religion lost the best of mothers, and today’s families are cut to the pattern of its individualistic notion of motherhood. 16 The Angelus July - August 2013 1 2 Cf. Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange, Mother of the Savior (Dublin: Golden Eagle Books, Ltd., 1949), p. 147: “There is a very intimate connection between compassion and motherhood, for the deepest compassion is that of a mother, and Mary would not have been a worthy mother of the Redeemer had she been lacking in conformity of will with His redemptive oblation.” See the chapter entitled “The New Eve” in Frank Duff’s Mary Shall Reign (Glasgow: John Burns & Sons, 1961) for a use of this expression; for a comparison of the elements of the Fall and Redemption, see Fulton Sheen, Old Errors and New Labels (New York: Garden City Books, 1931), p. 138. For Catholics, it is impossible for the Mater Admirabilis to be Mother of Our Lord without participating in every aspect of His life, and most especially the act for which He came upon this earth, the Redemption of mankind.1 It is for this reason that St. Pius X says in his encyclical Ad Diem Illum that “Mary’s community of life and sufferings with her Son was never broken off.” Let us see how this may be shown. The Divine Revenge The third chapter of Genesis narrates intensely dramatic events with shocking rapidity. The human race had a tragic fall. A man, a woman, a tree, and the devil were involved. But God already had a solution in mind, one worthy of the divine Wisdom, and which He pronounced in solemn tones. The serpent had deceived the woman and the woman had scandalized the man by getting him to eat of the tree. God would reverse everything: a woman and her offspring would conquer the devil through a tree. It was to be a Divine Revenge.2 Adam and Eve were the greatest of all human beings, created in the state of Original Justice, the parents of the whole human race. By sin, they became the authors of both physical and spiritual death, communicating them to all their children, who are all born in Original Sin and are doomed to die. Such was the origin of the “culture of death.” After them, in the fullness of time, came greater human beings, one of them being a God-man. These two were the only to be conceived without sin besides our first parents. Our Lord came into this world without a father, like Adam. Our Lady came into this world without spiritual parents, in that Saints Joachim and Anne did not pass on their fallen spiritual traits to her. The First Eve was named “Mother of all the living” because she was source of physical life for all. The Second Eve was to be the Mother of all those living the divine life of her Son. Adam and Eve were two in one flesh, in that Eve’s body was formed from Adam’s, but also in that, by the plan of God, they formed one unit from the beginning of Creation in the institution of marriage. Similarly, the New Adam and the New Eve were of one flesh, in that Our Lord took His body and all of His genetic material completely from Our Lady, while she resembled Him spiritually as closely as was possible for a mere creature by her fullness of Christian grace. In the Fall, Eve played a secondary but necessary role. Without her capitulation to the devil and tempting of Adam, there would be no Original Sin. And while that Sin was transmitted to the entire human race by Adam, to whom pertained the active power of generation, yet that Sin passed through the womb of Eve. They committed the first sin together and they transmitted it together. They were one in their Creation, one in their Fall, and one in the fallen race they engendered. And so, just as Eve united with Adam completely in the drama of humanity’s Fall, so too, by God’s eternal plan, Our Lady united completely with Our Lord in the drama of its redemption. The Sacred and Immaculate Hearts were one physically and spiritually, they were one in the act of 17 Theme Make Our Hearts Like unto Thine 3 18 Cf. St. John Eudes quoted in Daniel Sargent’s Their Hearts be Praised (New York: P. J. Kenedy and Sons, 1949), p. 108: “Even though the Heart of Jesus be different from that of Mary, and that it surpass her Heart infinitely in excellence and sanctity, yet God has united so closely the two Hearts that one can say in truth that they are one Heart, for they have always been animated by a same spirit, and filled with the same sentiments and affections.” 4 Ibid., p. 189. 5 Canon Ildefonso Rodriguez Villar in To Jesus through Mary (Cebu City, Philippines: Sacred Heart School, 1962), p. 181. The Angelus July - August 2013 Redemption, and they are one in begetting of the redeemed human race, that of the elect.3 Just as the devil corrupted the head of the woman Eve with pride, so is his head definitively crushed underfoot by the heel of the humble woman Mary, by her accomplishing the act of Redemption with her Son in a necessary though secondary role. “It can be said,” says St. Pius X, “that with [her Son] she redeemed the human race.” What It Takes to Be Co-Redemptrix Having seen that Our Lady’s role included actual participation in the act of Redemption, we now must consider what that participation involved. How did Our Lady help redeem the human race, beyond bringing Our Lord into this world and nurturing Him? The first thing to be understood is that Redemption involves payment. Etymologically, it is a “buying back,” re-emptio in Latin. Men had committed innumerable crimes that disastrously tipped the scales of justice and demanded satisfaction. This satisfaction had to come in the form of meritorious, supernatural acts, which are the only acts worthy of God. But to make payment, these acts had to be painful. With every payment, there is a cost involved. Our Lord paid by offering Himself; Our Lady paid by offering her Son. Our Lord paid by shedding His Blood; Our Lady paid by presenting that Blood to the Eternal Father. All throughout her life, she was united with her Son by a perfect conformity of will in humility, poverty, and suffering. But she was particularly united to Him in His mission of Redemption and, “when the time came, led Him to the altar of immolation.” Standing at the foot of the Cross and “uniting herself to the Passion and Death of her Son, she suffered almost unto death” (St. Pius X). This suffering of compassion is what earned her the titles of “CoRedemptrix” and “Queen of Martyrs.” It is a truism that those who love most suffer most. Suffering is not possible without love. But Our Lady had a triple love that no other creature could possess: she had the pure love of an undefiled virgin, the natural love of a tender mother, and the innocent love of a sinless creature. For the rest of the human race, only one of these is possible, for she alone is Virgin and Mother, and she alone is the Immaculate Conception. The Immaculate Heart is the most loving heart and so the most suffering heart. Our Lady had to witness the brutal murder of her most innocent Son, receive His dead body into her arms, lay Him in the stone cold tomb, and walk away without Him. “Of old,” says Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange, “an angel had descended to prevent Abraham’s immolation of his son Isaac. But no angel came to prevent the immolation of Jesus.”4 “Remember,” says a spiritual author, “that the Son Mary lost on Calvary was the only one she had on earth, that this onlybegotten Son was the best of all sons, loving His Mother as no other son had ever loved or ever would love his.”5 6 Quoted in Pope Leo XIII’s Rosary encyclical Magnae Dei Matris of September 8, 1892. What was the measure of this satisfactory merit on the part of Our Lady? How much did she pay? Enough for the Redemption of the whole world, though she did not, as her Son did, pay such a price by way of justice (de condigno), but rather by a certain proportion to her finite condition (de congruo). “It is a great thing in any saint,” St. Thomas Aquinas tells us, “to have grace sufficient for the salvation of many souls; but to have enough to suffice for the salvation of everybody in the world is the greatest of all; and this is found in Christ and in the Blessed Virgin.”6 Conclusion Fr. Robinson was ordained in 2006 by Bishop Bernard Fellay and has been a professor at Holy Cross Seminary in Australia since 2009. Earlier this year, he put together an instructional course on St. Louis de Montfort’s True Devotion to Mary, which may be obtained at www.holycrossseminary. com/truedevotion.htm The doctrine of Our Lady Co-Redemptrix flows directly from a clear understanding of God’s plans for our Redemption. It was His intention to reverse the Fall completely by making a woman, as well as a God-man, necessary for its accomplishment. He wanted to provide a new and better mother for the human race, one who not only refuses to give any quarter to the devil, but who also destroys him by her humility and selflessness. Instead of bringing forth death for her children, she brings them eternal life by sacrificing her own Son for their sakes. The context of the Fall, in which both Adam and Eve were involved, called forth from the Eternal Wisdom a New Eve as well as a New Adam for its full remedy. And how wonderfully good God is to provide for us this complete remedy, such that we can truly say, “O happy fault, that gave us such a Redeemer... and such a Redemptrix!” “A Child is born to us...and a Mother is given to us!” Just as Christ, the Mediator between God and man, assumed human nature, blotted the handwriting of the decree that stood against us, and fastened it triumphantly to the cross, so the most holy Virgin, united with him by a most intimate and indissoluble bond, was, with him and through him, eternally at enmity with the evil serpent, and most completely triumphed over him, and thus crushed his head with her immaculate foot. Pope Pius IX, Ineffabilis Deus 19 A Second Eve “It is true, most dearly beloved, that the first man and the first woman did us grievous harm, but—thanks be to God!— by another Man and another Woman all that was lost has been restored to us.…Instead of breaking that which was injured (Matt. 22:20), the Almighty Creator in His infinite wisdom and goodness restored it to its original perfection, yea, made it better than it had been before, forming a new Adam from the ancient and giving us in Mary a second Eve. Christ alone would have been sufficient…but it was not good for us that the Man should be alone (Gen. 2:18). It seemed more congruous that as both sexes contributed to the ruin of our race, so should both have a part in the work of reparation.…[I]t ought to appear evident that the Woman pronounced ‘blessed among women’ (Luke 1:28) is not without her proper function: for her also is found something to do in the work of reconciliation. So great a Mediator is Christ that we have need of another to mediate between Him and us, and for this we can find none so well qualified as Mary. A most cruel mediatrix was our mother Eve, through whom the ‘old serpent’ (Apoc. 12:9) communicated the mortal poison of sin even to the man; but Mary is faithful, Mary offers the remedy of salvation both to men and women. The former became the means of our seduction, the latter co-operated in our reconciliation; the former was made the instrument of temptation, the latter the channel of redemption.” St. Bernard’s Sermon on the Twelve Stars. Translation taken from St. Bernard’s Sermons on the Blessed Virgin Mary (Devon: Augustine Publishing Company, 1984), pp. 206-207. Photo: Crowning of Mary, High Altar, cathedral of Freiburg, Germany Theme Make Our Hearts Like unto Thine Who Are You, O Immaculate Conception? by Fr. Albert, O.P. 1 22 Konferencje Swietego Maksymiliana Marii Kolbego (Niepokalanów: Wydwnictwo OO Francisz­ kanów, 1990), Conference, K 103, Sept. 25, 1937. The Angelus July - August 2013 “In general, it can seem that we already know, that we are already acquainted with who the Mother of God is, but in reality we must confess that we know very little about her. There are a few books about it, but all that isn’t much, they are just little first tries. It is like an unknown world.”1 Thus spoke St. Maximilian Kolbe in a conference to his community in 1937. The mystery of Mary exercised upon him a fascination that lasted his whole life and inspired him to seek constantly to understand it better—and yet we see him here, near the end of his life, confessing that, in fact, in spite of all his efforts she remains “like an unknown world.” This confession of ignorance, however, is a sign of a deep, intimate knowledge. St. John of the Cross, in his Spiritual Canticle, explains this with regard to the knowledge of God, and what he says can be applied also to knowledge of Mary: “Sometimes God favors advanced souls with a sublime knowledge by which they receive an understanding or experience of the height and grandeur of God. Their experience of God in this favor is so lofty that they understand clearly that everything remains to be understood. This understanding and experience that the divinity is so immense as to surpass 2 The Spiritual Canticle, Stanza 7, The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross, translated by Keran Kavanaugh, O.C.D. and Otilio Rodriguez, O.C.D., revised edition (Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications, 1991), p. 502. 3 Scritti di Massimiliano Kolbe (Rome: Editrice Nazionale M.I., 1997), SK 1286, before Jan. 1938. 4 K 71, April 25, 1937. 5 K 103, Sept. 25, 1937. A witness in the process of canonization relates an incident which shows how Fr. Kolbe insisted on this point with his brothers: “Just before his last imprisonment the Servant of God called together some brothers and spoke to us of the relations of the Immaculate with the Holy Trinity. One day the Servant of God asked me, alone: ‘My son, do you understand this?’ I answered that I didn’t. Then the Servant of God knelt down and told me to do the same. We bowed down our heads to the ground, and I repeated, together with the Servant of God, ‘O Maria.’ The servant of God wanted to show me in a practical way the necessity of prayer in order to understand the truths of the faith.” Br. Rufinus Majdan, Maximiliani Mariae Kolbe Positio super virtutibus (Rome, 1966) Vol. II, p. 657. 6 SK 1318. 7 Already when he was a seminarian in Rome Fr. Kolbe had been deeply struck by these words, as can be seen in a letter written to his brother at the time which reveals why his habitual name for Our Lady was “the Immaculate”: “She willed to call herself at Lourdes ‘Immaculate Conception’; therefore, we invoke her often by this name” (SK 21, after Sept. 26, 1918). In a conference much later he insists on this again: “The name ‘Immaculate Conception’ is very important and proves that the Immaculate is all beautiful, without any sin. This is her very first complete understanding is indeed a sublime knowledge.…This understanding is somewhat like that of the Blessed in heaven, where those who understand God more understand more distinctly the infinitude that remains to be understood; those who see less of him do not realize so clearly what remains to be seen.”2 Fr. Kolbe had received, to an eminent degree, this gift with regard to the Immaculate Virgin Mary. At the end of some notes he had written to prepare a conference he gives the fundamental reason for this obscurity: “The cause of the Immaculate is a mystery in the strict sense because she is the Mother of God, and God is infinite while our mind is finite.”3 And thus at the end of another conference on Our Lady he says: “This is a mystery which surpasses our intelligence, therefore we cannot fathom it. We will not learn it in books, but only on our knees.”4 He often speaks of this necessity of prayer in order to obtain this precious knowledge of who the Immaculate is. He concludes the conference we quoted at the beginning saying: “What can we do in order to know, with such great profit, who the Most Holy Mother is? First of all, we must not trust in our own intelligence. The intelligence is too weak to be able to manage on its own. Here it is not sufficient to think for oneself. Reasoning can lead astray. Grace is necessary, supernatural light is necessary, prayer is necessary. Only prayer can obtain this knowledge of who the Most Holy Mother is. This is the efficacious means to arrive at this knowledge. “…Obviously, humble prayer doesn’t exclude thinking about this, reading about it, meditation about it. Read much about the Most Holy Mother, think about her often, meditate about her often. But the foundation, as it were, is prayer, humble prayer. And not only read, but also pray before reading, and in the meditation ask her to enlighten us, because we are not worthy of the grace of knowing who she is.”5 A summary of what Fr. Kolbe was able to learn in this way about the mystery of the Immaculate is found in a text he dictated on the very morning of his arrest by the Gestapo on February 17, 1941.6 This final text, which is often called his “last testament,” can be divided into three parts. Our Lady Is the Immaculate Conception The first part shows why Our Lady at Lourdes could say “I am the Immaculate Conception.”7 “ These words,” he says, “came out of the mouth of the Immaculate herself. They must indicate, then, with the greatest precision and in the most essential manner, who she is.” And he goes on to explain how this name applies uniquely to Our Lady, and contains her essence in the strict scholastic sense of the term, since it gives her genus and species: “Who are you, O Immaculate Conception? “Not God, for he has no beginning; not an angel created without 23 Theme Make Our Hearts Like unto Thine privilege, and that which is first is most dear” (K 92, Aug. 10, 1937). any intermediary from nothing; not Adam formed out of the dust of the earth, not Eve taken out of Adam, neither the Word incarnate, who existed from eternity already and thus is conceived rather than a conception. The children of Eve did not exist before their conception, thus they can be called conceptions, but You are distinguished from them all, because they are conceptions stained with original sin, but You are the one, unique Immaculate Conception.” The Holy Ghost Is Also an Immaculate Conception The second part of the text explains how the name Immaculate Conception can be applied as well, nonetheless, in a certain way, to the Third Person of the Most Holy Trinity, the Holy Ghost. Fr. Kolbe begins by posing 24 The Angelus July - August 2013 8 “Exivi a Patre,” as Our Lord says: “I came out, I exited from the Father” (Jn. 16:28). St. Thomas, in his commentary on this text, refers it to the eternal procession of the Son from the Father. a principle, namely, that everything that exists outside of God has imprinted in it a certain resemblance to its Creator, since everything in it comes from Him. But this Creator, this God that all creatures resemble, is, as our faith teaches us, the Most Holy Trinity. Thus he writes: “All the perfections found in creatures…are nothing but a multi-natured echo, a hymn of praise in multi-colored tones of the first and the most beautiful mystery, the mystery of the Most Holy Trinity.” But if this is true, if all creatures must necessarily resemble their Creator, the Most Holy Trinity, then this must be true as well of the created reality that we call “conception,” for, as Fr. Maximilian writes: “Here, there are no exceptions at all.” So the conceptions of life that we see in the universe—and we must remember that life itself is the highest thing in creation, and that its conception is the most wonderful thing there is about life—these conceptions must be a reflection of the mystery of the Most Holy Trinity. But of what are they a reflection exactly? Of the procession of the Third Person of the Most Holy Trinity, answers Fr. Kolbe, the procession of the Holy Ghost. He explains: “Who is the Holy Ghost ? [He is] the fruit of the love of the Father and the Son. The fruit of created love is a created conception. The fruit, then, of that love that is the prototype of this created love is also nothing else than a Conception. The Holy Ghost, therefore, is an uncreated, eternal conception, and the prototype of all conceptions of life in the universe.…The Holy Ghost is a most holy conception, infinitely holy, immaculate.” The Holy Ghost, then, can also be called Immaculate Conception, this name which, as we saw previously, distinguishes Our Lady from everything else in the universe—everything else but, as we see now, the Holy Ghost. In the third and final part of his meditation Fr. Kolbe explains the intimate union between Our Lady and the Holy Ghost that makes them share this name. The Union between the Holy Ghost and the Immaculate Again he starts by stating a principle: “In the universe we find everywhere an action and a reaction equal to that action but contrary to it, a going out and a coming back, a distancing and a drawing close, a division and a unification. But the division is always for the unification, which is creative. This is nothing but an image of the Most Holy Trinity in the activity of creatures. Unification is love, creative love.” This physical law of action and reaction, then, is just another reflection of the mystery of the Most Holy Trinity. Action reflects the procession of the Son from the Father and reaction the procession of the Holy Ghost that follows this action but in the opposite direction. By the procession of the Son, God, as it were, goes out from Himself,8 and then by the procession of the Holy Ghost He comes back to Himself by the love that unites the Father and the Son. 25 Theme Make Our Hearts Like unto Thine 9 26 In some notes, written a few years earlier, he says: “God said, ‘Fiat,’ and creation existed. A creature, Mary, said, ‘Fiat mihi,’ and God became present in her. Also the creatures repeat, ‘Fiat.’ They accord their will with the will of the Immaculate. Action and reaction of love” (SK 1283 before the end of 1937). The Angelus July - August 2013 He then goes on to say that in a similar way, when God creates the universe there is a sort of action by which He goes out of Himself which is followed by a reaction by which the creatures He has made return to God by trying to perfect themselves and thus become similar to Him.9 “And it is not otherwise that proceeds the activity of God outside of Himself. God creates the world—this is like a separation. The creatures, then, by the natural law given them by God, perfect themselves, they become similar to God, they return to Him, and the rational creatures consciously love and by this love unite themselves more and more to Him, they return to Him.” At the head of this movement of return to God, however, is the most perfect of creatures, the Immaculate Conception, the creature who most resembles God and comes back to Him in the most perfect fashion and leads all the rest of creation back to Him. “But the creature,” he says, “completely full of this love, of the divinity— is the Immaculate, without even the slightest stain of sin, she who never deviated in anything from the will of God, united in an ineffable manner to the Holy Ghost as His Spouse.” The Immaculate Conception is an image, then, of the Holy Ghost; she does in creation what He does in the bosom of the Trinity. The Holy Ghost, the love uniting the Father and the Son, is the reaction in the Most Holy Trinity that responds to the action that is the procession of the Son: Our Lady, the Immaculate Conception, is the reaction of creation, returning by love to its principle by perfecting itself, which corresponds to the action of God by which it was originally created. Thus Fr. Kolbe writes: “In the union of the Holy Ghost with [the Immaculate], not only does love unite these two beings, but one of them is all the love of the Most Holy Trinity and the other is all the love of creation, and thus in their union heaven is united to the earth, all of heaven with all the earth, all Eternal Love with all created love. It is the summit of love.” “This union,” he explains, “is eminently interior: it is the life of love of the Holy Ghost in the soul of the Virgin. He produces in her an image of what He is Himself in the Most Holy Trinity: love. “What is this union like? It is above all interior, it is the union of her being with the being of the Holy Ghost. The Holy Ghost dwells in her, lives in her and does this from the first moment of her existence, always and forever. “In what does this life of His in her consist? He Himself in her is love, the love of the Father and the Son, the love by which God Himself loves Himself, the love of the Whole Blessed Trinity, a fertile love, a conception.…The Eternal Immaculate Conception immaculately conceives in the soul of her who is His Immaculate Conception divine life.” And thus he concludes, saying that all this explains why Our Lady, Spouse of the Holy Ghost, is called “Immaculate Conception”: “If in creatures the spouse receives the name of her spouse because she belongs to him, is united to him, becomes similar to him, and in union with him becomes a creative agent of life, how much more the name of the Holy Ghost, Immaculate Conception, is the name of her in whom He lives by a love that is fertile in the entire supernatural order.” 424 pp. – Softcover – STK# 6713 – $19.95 Consecration to Mary “Oh, how highly we glorify God when, to please Him, we submit ourselves to Mary, after the example of Jesus Christ, our sole Exemplar!” St. Louis de Montfort With a beautifully redesigned cover, this excellent work, Consecration to Mary, is now back in print! Taking St. Louis de Montfort’s plan of consecration as its goal, this book contains everything necessary to prepare for and make that consecration. Includes everything recommended by St. Louis de Montfort, including selections from the Bible, the Imitation of Christ, True Devotion to Mary, as well as other works by St. Louis and other general Marian reflections and writings. More than just a manual for the Consecration, you will use this book for prayers, meditation, and spiritual guidance. www.angeluspress.org — 1-800-966-7337 Please visit our website to see our entire selection of books and music. Faith and Morals What Does It Mean for the Church Today? The Austrian Miracle of 1955 by Christopher Ferrara The catastrophic outcome of the Second Vatican Council is a saga as ironic as it is tragic, for everything that was touched by the conciliar “renewal” promptly fell into ruin. But perhaps the greatest irony of what is flippantly but nonetheless fairly called the Second Vatican Disaster is that the great conciliar “opening to the world,” hailed by the neo-Modernists as the long overdue dismantling of the “fortress Church,” has been followed by a steady retreat of Churchmen precisely into the ever-smaller fortress of “religious liberty.” From behind the narrowing walls of this man-made fortress, resting upon a shaky foundation made of human conventions called “rights” and paper guarantees of rights called “constitutions,” Churchmen of the post-conciliar epoch have been reduced to demanding from the temporal power nothing more than the right to be left alone. The result—irony of ironies—is that never in living memory has the Church been so little engaged with the world, so little inclined to exercise in civil society the immense supernatural power that has always been hers to command. The Church Militant has laid down its spiritual arms and surrendered. Only seven years before the Council commenced, however, the world 28 The Angelus July - August 2013 1 Siegfried Beer, The Soviet Occupation of Austria, 1945-1955: Recent Research and Perspectives, Eurozine, http://www. eurozine.com/pdf/2007-0524-beer-en.pdf. 2 In Charles E. Shaffer, “Expelled by the Rosary,” http://www. americaneedsfatima. org/About-the-Rosaries/ expelled-by-the-rosary.html. 3 Cf. text of the Message of Fatima, www.vatican.va/ roman_curia/congregations/ cfaith/ documents/rc_con_ cfaith_doc_20000626_ message-fatima_en.html. 4 Cf. “Wie man offiziell ‘selig’ wird,” www.franziskaner.at/ index.php/rss/583-wie-manoffiziell-qseligq-wird. 5 Schaffer, “Expelled by the Rosary,” loc. cit. witnessed an astonishing example of the power of the Church Militant. On May 15, 1955, in the month of Our Lady, the Soviets signed the Austrian State Treaty under which they and the Allied Powers ended their post-war occupation of Austria. The last Soviet troops left the occupied eastern sector of Austria on October 26, 1955. A Modern Miracle Concerning this event, the historian Sigfried Beer of Columbia University writes: “The question as to why the Soviets finally decided to abandon their military presence in eastern Austria in the spring of 1955 and to agree to a negotiated withdrawal has preoccupied historians ever since.”1 And well it should, for in human terms the Soviets’ abrupt departure from Austria, leaving behind the treasures of Vienna, is simply inexplicable. Austria was delivered from Soviet tyranny by a miracle obtained through the social action of the Church Militant. In 1946 an obscure Catholic priest, Fr. Petrus Pavlicek, made a pilgrimage to the Marian Basilica in Mariazell, Austria, one of the most visited Marian shrines in Europe. There he experienced an interior locution: “Do as I say and there will be peace.” The voice was apparently that of Our Lady of Fatima, whose prophecy 29 years earlier of the spread of Russia’s errors throughout the world, failing the consecration of “that poor nation” to her Immaculate Heart, was already being fulfilled. Unlike the Vatican bureaucrats who have impeded Russia’s consecration since the Council, Father Pavlicek followed his heavenly orders to the letter. Employing a statue of the Pilgrim Virgin of Fatima provided by the Bishop of Leiria-Fatima, he conducted Marian pilgrimages throughout Austria and promoted a Fatima-oriented program of reparation for sin involving attendance at Mass, Confession, and recitation of the Rosary in public procession. Echoing the teaching of Pius XI in Quas Primas and Ubi Arcano Dei, Father Pavlicek declared: “Peace is a gift of God, not the work of politicians.”2 In fact, Our Lady predicted that the conflagration of the Second World War, which opened the way to Russian domination of Eastern Europe and the spread of Russia’s errors, would erupt “during the reign of Pius XI.” (In a telling indication of the unilateral disarmament of the Church, the Vatican bureaucracy dared to amend the words of the Mother of God to read “the pontificate of Pius XI,”3 so as to avoid the embarrassing impression that the Pope reigns in monarchical fashion as the Vicar of Christ the King.) Father Pavlicek’s “Rosary Atonement Crusade” 4 grew to some half a million Catholics, despite the initial resistance of Austria’s upper hierarchy. The Cardinal Archbishop of Vienna, Theodor Innitzer, ultimately did join the Crusade, as did Austria’s Prime Minister, Leopold Figl, members of his cabinet, and Figl’s successor, Julius Raab. By 1955 “some ten percent of the Austrian population was engaged in the Crusade, which involved daily prayers to Our Lady of Fatima.”5 Tens of thousands of Catholics, both clergy and laity, and even politicians, were seen marching in the streets, praying 29 Faith and Morals 6 Rolf Steininger, Austria, Germany, and the Cold War: From the Anschluss to the State Treaty (Berghahn Books, 2008), p. 128. 7 “Religion: Urbi et Orbi,” Time magazine, December 14, 1953. the Rosary and bearing votive candles for the intention of peace in the world. The Soviets didn’t have a chance against the Blessed Virgin, whose intercessory might had been called down upon them by a lowly Catholic cleric. Hence their patently miraculous relinquishment of the crown jewel of their European conquest. As the historian Rolf Steininger notes, “the West was taken aback” by the communiqué from Moscow announcing its agreement to withdraw its forces, and Sir Geoffrey Arnold Wallinger, Britain’s High Commissioner in occupied Austria, pronounced the result “far too good to be true, to be honest.”6 But it was true. And the Soviet departure from Austria stands today as a modern testament to the Church’s power over the world—if only that power be exercised—contrary to the creation myth of political modernity, which claims that the emancipation of “the modern world” from the Church’s influence is definitive and final. When Joseph Stalin was discussing military strategy with Churchill and Roosevelt at the Teheran Conference in 1943—a prelude to Churchill’s and Roosevelt’s delivery of Eastern Europe into Soviet bondage at Yalta—the subject of the Pope’s views on achieving an end to the war came up. “How many divisions does the Pope of Rome have?” Stalin is reported to have said. In a later meeting with Pius XII, Churchill reported that remark to the Pope, who replied: “Tell my son Joseph he will meet my divisions in heaven.”7 The typical contemporary Churchman, hewing to post-conciliar correctness—the ecclesial equivalent of PC in secular politics—would view Pius XII’s reply as a bygone relic of the time when haughty Popes, wearing royal robes and calling themselves Roman Pontiff and Vicar of Christ, lived in the delusion that they were monarchs of some sort with spiritual and indirect temporal authority that extended, with that of Christ, to the whole world. But Catholics who understand what the Church was before the Council—and what she has in fact never ceased to be, despite the unprecedented malaise that now afflicts her—recognize in the words of Pope Pius the holy condescension of Christ Himself toward His lowly but most beloved subjects. The Legions of Heaven From the eternal perspective of Pius XII, the great and evil Stalin, with all his legions, was nothing more than a diabolically disordered child rebelling against his heavenly Father, who would allow him to wreak havoc for a time in this passing world, while the mighty Soviet Union was nothing more than an ephemeral monument to human folly. “But thou, O Lord, shalt laugh at them: thou shalt bring all the nations to nothing” (Ps. 59:8). This is why, two years after Stalin had his encounter with heaven’s legions, a simple priest, leading a Marian movement in Austria, succeeded in driving the Soviets from the soil of that Catholic nation without firing a shot. What happened in Austria in the spring of 1955 revealed the greatness of the Church as the vehicle of God’s infinite grace, and the ultimate puniness of all human powers before her. Yet today, in a great sign of the diabolical disorientation Sister Lucia of Fatima so often remarked, the Church’s leaders 30 The Angelus July - August 2013 8 Joseph Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology, p. 382. 9 Antonio Socci, The Fourth Secret of Fatima (Loreto Publications, 2006), p. 217. 10 Iota Unum, p. 761. have consented to put on what William Blake decried as the “mind-forged manacles” of emerging contemporary man. Blake wrote at the time of the French Revolution, when the common man had already become powerless before the demands of the new nation-state, and was without help from an increasingly impotent spiritual power represented by a Protestantism whose moral capital, inherited from the Church, had been all but exhausted. Only the Catholic Church continued to stand against the “blood-dimmed tide” whose loosing upon the world William Butler Yeats would so famously remark more than a century later, two years after the apparitions at Fatima and the end of World War I. As none other than Cardinal Ratzinger observed, however, at Vatican II the Church abruptly abandoned her fierce opposition to the errors of political modernity, represented by the Syllabus of Blessed Pius IX, issued a “counter-syllabus” in the form of Gaudium et Spes and Dignitatis Humanae, and thus made “an attempt at an official reconciliation with the new era inaugurated in 1789.”8 The attempt has failed, of course, and failed disastrously. The Same Means Today as Then But, as Our Lord Himself counseled Sister Lucia at Rianjo in 1931, concerning the failure to consecrate Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary: “It is never too late to have recourse to Jesus and Mary.” The life of Fr. Petrus Pavlicek bears witness to the power of an unswerving faith in that promise. (The completed positio for Father Pavlicek’s beatification has been under consideration in Rome since 2001.) When the Pope and the leaders of the Church demonstrate the same faith, and act accordingly by effecting a true and proper consecration of Russia, the world will witness a Marian miracle even greater than that which occurred in eastern Austria a mere 58 years ago. It will be, as Antonio Socci has written, “an extraordinary change in the world, an overthrow of the mentality dominating modernity, probably following dramatic events for humanity.…Thus, a total change in modern history, through the Hearts of Jesus and Mary…”9 Those who lead the Church today need only regain the courage to believe in their own power, as the divinely commissioned ministers of God’s grace, to bring about such an event. As Romano Amerio put it: “Faith in Providence thus proclaims the possibility that the world might rise and be healed by a metanoia which it cannot initiate but which it is capable of accepting once it is offered.”10 At Fatima, the Mother of God instructed the Church on how to present that offer to humanity, promising not only the possibility but the certainty of its acceptance. Let the example of Austria in 1955 remind us that Our Lady of Fatima keeps her promises with spectacular results. ‑ 31 The Mariazell Pilgrimage In 1157, a Benedictine monk named Magnus, taking a small statue of the Madonna and Child, retired into the wilderness, where tradition says the dense trees parted to make way for him. A little chapel was built around a linden tree, the origin of the shrine. Pilgrims as far back as the 15th century attest they have seen the Madonna’s face, eyes and lips moving as if she were alive. Faith and Morals Ingruentium Malorum On Reciting the Rosary Pope Pius XII, September, 15, 1951 4. You know well, Venerable Brethren, the calamitous conditions of our times. Fraternal harmony among nations, shattered for so long a time, has not yet been re-established everywhere. On the contrary, here and there, we see souls upset by hatred and rivalry, while threats of new bloody conflicts still hover over the peoples. To this, one must add the violent storm of persecution, which in many parts of the world, has been unleashed against the Church, depriving it of its liberty, saddening it very cruelly with calumnies and miseries of all kinds, and making the blood of martyrs flow again and again. 5. To what and to how many snares are the souls of so many of Our sons submitted in those areas to make them reject the Faith of their fathers, and to make them break, most wretchedly, the bond of union which links them 34 The Angelus July - August 2013 to this Apostolic See! Nor can We pass over in silence a new crime to which, with utmost sorrow, We want earnestly to draw not only your attention, but the attention of the clergy, of parents, and even of public authorities. We refer to the iniquitous campaign that the impious lead everywhere to harm the shining souls of children. Not even the age of innocence has been spared, for, alas, there are not lacking those who boldly dare to snatch from the mystical garden of the Church even the most beautiful flowers, which constitute the hope of religion and society. Considering this, one cannot be surprised if peoples groan under the weight of the Divine punishment, and live under the fear of even greater calamities. 6. However, consideration of a situation so pregnant with dangers must not depress your souls, Venerable Brethren. Instead, mindful of that Divine teaching: “Ask and it shall be given to you; seek and you shall find; knock, and it shall be opened to you” (Luke 11:9), fly with greater confidence to the Mother of God. There, the Christian people have always sought chief refuge in the hour of danger, because “she has been constituted the cause of salvation for the whole human race” (St. Irenaeus). 7. Therefore, we look forward with joyful expectation and revived hope to the coming month of October, during which the faithful are accustomed to flock in larger numbers to the churches to raise their supplications to Mary by means of the Holy Rosary. 8. O Venerable Brethren, We desire that, this year, this prayer should be offered with such greater fervor of heart as is demanded by the increased urgency of the need. We well know the Rosary’s powerful efficacy to obtain the maternal aid of the Virgin. By no means is there only one way to pray to obtain this aid. However, We consider the Holy Rosary the most convenient and most fruitful means, as is clearly suggested by the very origin of this practice, heavenly rather than human, and by its nature. What prayers are better adapted and more beautiful than the Lord’s prayer and the angelic salutation, which are the flowers with which this mystical crown is formed? With meditation of the Sacred Mysteries added to the vocal prayers, there emerges another very great advantage, so that all, even the most simple and least educated, have in this a prompt and easy way to nourish and preserve their own faith. 9. And truly, from the frequent meditation on the Mysteries, the soul little by little and imperceptibly draws and absorbs the virtues they contain, and is wondrously enkindled with a longing for things immortal, and becomes strongly and easily impelled to follow the path which Christ Himself and His Mother have followed. The recitation of identical formulas repeated so many times, rather than rendering the prayer sterile and boring, has on the contrary the admirable quality of infusing confidence in him who prays and brings to bear a gentle compulsion on the motherly Heart of Mary. 10. Let it be your particular care, O Venerable Brethren, that the faithful, on the occasion of the coming month of October, should use this most fruitful form of prayer with the utmost possible zeal, and that it become always more esteemed and more diligently recited. 11. Through your efforts, the Christian people should be led to understand the dignity, the power, and the excellence of the Rosary. 12. But it is above all in the bosom of the family that We desire the custom of the Holy Rosary to be everywhere adopted, religiously preserved, and ever more intensely practiced. In vain is a remedy sought for the wavering fate of civil life, if the family, the principle and foundation of the human community, is not fashioned after the pattern of the Gospel. 13. To undertake such a difficult duty, We affirm that the custom of the family recitation of the Holy Rosary is a most efficacious means. What a sweet sight—most pleasing to God— when, at eventide, the Christian home resounds with the frequent repetition of praises in honor of the august Queen of Heaven! Then the Rosary, recited in common, assembles before the image of the Virgin, in an admirable union of hearts, the parents and their children, who come back from their daily work. It unites them piously with those absent and those dead. It links all more tightly in a sweet bond of love with the most Holy Virgin, who, like a loving mother in the circle of her children, will be there bestowing upon them an abundance of the gifts of concord and family peace. 14. Then the home of the Christian family, like that of Nazareth, will become an earthly abode of sanctity, and, so to speak, a sacred temple, where the Holy Rosary will not only be the particular prayer which every day rises to heaven in an odor of sweetness, but will also form the most efficacious school of Christian discipline and Christian virtue. This meditation on the Divine Mysteries of the Redemption will teach the adults to live, admiring daily the shining examples of Jesus and Mary, and to draw from these examples comfort in adversity, striving towards those heavenly treasures “where neither thief draws near, nor moth destroys” (Luke 12:33). This 35 Faith and Morals meditation will bring to the knowledge of the little ones the main truths of the Christian Faith, making love for the Redeemer blossom almost spontaneously in their innocent hearts, while, seeing, their parents kneeling before the majesty of God, they will learn from their very early years how great before the throne of God is the value of prayers said in common. 15. We do not hesitate to affirm again publicly that We put great confidence in the Holy Rosary for the healing of evils which afflict our times. Not with force, not with arms, not with human power, but with Divine help obtained through the means of this prayer, strong like David with his sling, the Church undaunted shall be able to confront the infernal enemy, repeating to him the words of the young shepherd: “Thou comest to me with a sword, and a spear, and with a shield; but I come to thee in the name of the Lord of Hosts, the God of armies...and all this assembly shall know that the Lord saveth not with sword and spear, for this is his battle, and he will deliver you into our hands” (I Kings 17:45-47). 16. For this reason, We earnestly desire, Venerable Brethren, that all the faithful, following your example and your exhortation should respond solicitously to Our paternal exhortation, uniting their hearts and their voices with the same ardor of charity. If the evils and the assaults of the wicked increase, so likewise must the piety of all good people increase and become ever more vigorous. Let them strive to obtain from our most loving Mother, especially through this form of prayer, that better times may quickly return for the Church and society. 17. May the very powerful Mother of God, moved by the prayers of so many of her sons, obtain from her only Son—let us all beseech her—that those who have miserably wandered from the path of truth and virtue may, with new fervor, find it again; that hatred and rivalry, which are the sources of discord and every kind of mishap, may be put aside, and that a true, just, and genuine peace may shine again upon individuals, families, peoples, and nations. And, finally, may she obtain that, after the rights of the Church have been secured in accord with justice, its beneficent influence may penetrate without 36 The Angelus July - August 2013 obstacle the hearts of men, the social classes, and the avenues of public life so as to join people among themselves in brotherhood and lead them to that prosperity which regulates, preserves, and co-ordinates the rights and duties of all without harming anyone and which daily makes for greater and greater mutual friendship and collaboration. 18. Venerable Brethren and beloved sons, while you entwine new flowers of supplication by reciting your Rosary, do not forget those who languish miserably in prison camps, jails, and concentration camps. There are among them, as you know, also Bishops dismissed from their Sees solely for having heroically defended the sacred rights of God and the Church. There are sons, fathers and mothers, wrested from their homes and compelled to lead unhappy lives far away in unknown lands and strange climates. 19. Just as We love them with a special charity and embrace them with the love of a father, so must you, with a brotherly love which the Christian religion nourishes and enkindles, join with Us before the altar of the Virgin Mother of God and recommend them to her motherly heart. She doubtlessly will, with exquisite sweetness, revive in their hearts the hope of eternal reward and, We firmly believe, will not fail to hasten the end of so much sorrow. 20. We do not doubt that you, O Venerable Brethren, with your usual burning zeal, will bring to the knowledge of your clergy and people these Our paternal exhortations in a way which will appear most appropriate to you. 262pp – Hardcover with dust jacket – STK# 8228 – $25.55 My Queen and My Mother A master work of devotion! This wonderful book, originally written in 1904, takes each line from the Litany of Loreto and offers meditation for each of our Lady’s unique titles. The meditations are broken into only a few pages at most and are perfect for daily meditation. You will return to this book again and again to increase your devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary. For example, from the meditation on Mystical Rose: Rosa Mystica Our Lady is called “Mystical Rose,” and in her Litany that is the only flower to which she is likened; nor could a more fitting one have been chosen as a symbol of our Queen and our Mother. The rose is not confined to one country, but is found in many lands and climes; it has an almost countless variety of name, form and hue; nor is it exclusively the flower of cultivated gardens, for though it adorns the houses and grounds of the rich and noble, it is equally at home when clambering up the walls and peeping in at the windows of a poor little thatched cottage, and one meets it in profusion on the hedgerows and in country lanes, where the passers-by and the poorest little ragged urchin may take possession of it and claim it as his own. And is it not so with our Lady?… www.angeluspress.org — 1-800-966-7337 Please visit our website to see our entire selection of books and music. Spirituality The Name Written on Her Heart Sermon by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, Feast of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, August 22, 1976 Dear Brethren, The feast of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, whose solemnity we celebrate today, is a com­paratively new feast and an example of what the Church can do and has done in relatively recent times to adapt the spirit and the riches of the Church to the present day. If any feast reminds us of the truths we need, of truths that when meditating we desire to apply to our souls, that of the Immaculate Heart of Mary certainly does. This feast clearly has a special link to the apparitions of Our Lady at Fatima, and it was Pius XII who wished that we honor the Immaculate Heart of Mary on the octave day of the Assumption. Ah, yes, since the 17th century devotion to the Hearts of Jesus and Mary has existed. We just celebrated this week the feast of St. John Eudes, who founded congregations under the patronage of the Hearts of Jesus and Mary. But if our Holy Father Pius XII decided to honor in a special way the Immaculate Heart of Mary, it was because our times had need of the devotion. In these times of hardship, in these times where Christians are deprived of what they formerly had, we need the manifestation of the charity of 38 The Angelus July - August 2013 Our Lord, which was so clearly seen during other Christian centuries. One saw religious houses everywhere. Throughout Christendom monasteries, convents, and hospitals were thickly sown. So many religious houses peopled our villages, our countryside, and our cities, that we had the impression—I imagine that the people who lived in those times had the impression—to be entirely surrounded by the love of our Lord Jesus Christ. For His love was made manifest, as you might say, on every street corner. There were calvaries; there were images of Our Lady; there were hospitals run by religious; there were refuges for the poor, pilgrims, and those in suffering. Everywhere the charity of Our Lord was manifest. But in our times, how harsh our world has become! We no longer find this charity of Our Lord in our cities or our countryside. Oh, there are still, of course, souls devoted to Our Lord, but how many compared to the total population? And how much work there remains to do in those countries that do not yet know of Our Lord’s charity, enormous lands like China, Africa, and many others that are still far from this charity! And so it seems to me that we need the Blessed Virgin Mary in our times. We need the Blessed Virgin to help us keep the faith, to feel the warmth of Our Lord’s love for us. We no longer see His love with our eyes, and as we see it less and less, we need to feel that Our Lady is near us. And I think that is why Our Lady asked at Fatima that we pray to her Immaculate Heart. We need the divine love which fills the Heart of the Blessed Virgin. And we also need her Immaculate Heart: immaculate, that is without stain, without sin. God knows that we no longer have around us the example of lives entirely devoted to our Lord Jesus Christ, who carry out the law of Our Lord, His law of love, for the commandments of God are contained in love of God and love of neighbor. But today, you are witnesses of what goes on in our society, where we murder children, where people commit suicide. Did you know that here in Switzerland, there are more suicides than fatalities due to car accidents? A newspaper recently reported that there were 1800 suicides last year, but only 1600 deaths due to car accidents: 1800 suicides! And mostly of young people. What does that mean? It means that these poor souls no longer felt the love of Our Lord around them; they were disgusted by the life that surrounded them, to the point that they committed suicide. And if what happens in a large number of other countries was made public, we would be horrified. When one thinks about divorce! So many abandoned children who are torn between father and mother. We live painful lives in a harsh society, where charity is no longer practiced. Blessed Virgin Mary as Mother I experienced this personally when I was sent to the African nations, where I worked for 30 years. What struck me the most was the hatred one sensed there. The people were full of hate: one village hated another, one family hated another. The result of this hatred was suicide, poisonings and murders. The love of our Lord Jesus Christ did not reign. 39 Spirituality We do not know how fortunate we are to have our Lord Jesus Christ as our Father and the Blessed Virgin Mary as our Mother. From these examples we must draw our love for God and for our models. For if the Blessed Virgin Mary had a most loving heart, her love was all for our Lord Jesus Christ and for all those “attached” to Him, and to lead all souls to our Lord Jesus Christ, to her Son Jesus. She lived for this love. And because she loved Our Lord she was never able to offend Him; she simply couldn’t. She was conceived immaculate, born immaculate, and she remains immaculate all her life. She is then for us a model of purity of heart, of obedience to the law of our Lord Jesus Christ. And because she loved Our Lord, she wanted to suffer with Him and share His sufferings. Sharing suffering is a sign of love. She saw her Son Jesus suffer and she wished to suffer with Him. When the heart of Jesus was pierced, so was hers, the heart of Mary! These two pierced hearts lived in unity for the glory of God, for the reign of God, for the reign of our Lord Jesus Christ. They fought for that alone. And for this reason we too must be ready to suffer for the reign of our Lord Jesus Christ. He no longer reigns in our societies, nor in our families, nor in our own selves. Yet we need His reign. It is the only reason for the existence of our souls, our bodies, of humanity, and this earth and all of God’s creation: that Jesus Christ may reign; that He may give to souls His life, His salvation, His charity, His glory. It is because we are aware of what has been happening in the Church for over 15 years—a true revolution has occurred, attacking the Kingship of our Lord Jesus Christ, clearly and evidently intending to destroy His reign—that our eyes were opened and that we were able to see this. Our Lord Jesus Christ’s law is no longer followed, and, unfortunately, those who should teach us to follow His law encourage us on the contrary to disobey it. For seeking the secularization of the state brings about the destruction of Christ’s Kingship. When doubt is cast on the reality of the sanctity of marriage and its laws, the love of our Lord Jesus Christ in our homes is destroyed. When we fail to speak, or fail to speak loudly and openly against abortion, we do not build Christ’s reign. Devotion to Christ the King When devotion to Christ the King is torn down, the reign of Christ in souls is destroyed. The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, dear brethren, is nothing other than the proclamation of the reign of Christ the King. How did our Lord Jesus Christ reign? Regnavit a ligno Crucis. He reigned by the wood of the Cross. He defeated the devil and defeated sin with the wood of the Cross. So the renewal on the altar of the Holy Sacrifice of Our Lord at Calvary is a declaration of the royalty of our Lord Jesus Christ. It is a declaration of His divinity. And somehow, by destroying the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, one destroys 40 The Angelus July - August 2013 the affirmation of the Kingship of our Lord Jesus Christ. This is why adoration of the Blessed Sacra­ment has diminished so much in our times. Rather let us say that sacrileges have grown innumerably since the Council. It must be said. It is clear and obvious. Our Lord Jesus Christ in the Holy Eucharist has been sent away from the altar. He is no longer adored. People do not genuflect before the Blessed Sacrament any more. But recognizing the reign of our Lord Jesus Christ means recognizing that He is God. It means recognizing that He is our King. And therefore we must express this love of our Lord Jesus Christ, recognize the existence of His divinity. For proof I need only refer to something that just occurred and is publicly known in the United States. At the Eucharistic Congress in Philadelphia, was a procession with the Blessed Sacrament held? No! There was no procession with the Blessed Sacrament, just like four years ago at the Eucharistic Congress in Melbourne, where I was present. Why no procession with the Blessed Sacra­ment? Because they wanted to make the Euch­a ristic Congress an ecumenical congress. Ecumenical, that means bringing together Protestants and Jews, people who deny the divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ, who are opposed to His reign. How can we pray with people who are opposed to our faith, who reject our faith? The condition set by the non-Catholics invited was, “We will be happy to participate in the Eucharistic Congress as long as there is no procession with the Blessed Sacrament.” In other words, as long as no homage is paid to the One who is our King and our Father, our Creator and our Redeemer, the One who shed His blood for us. People no longer want to honor Him. And this condition was accepted: In order to have Protestants and Jews at the Congress, no procession with the Blessed Sacrament was held. On top of that, a sort of concelebration was held with the Protestant ministers, and it was a Protestant minister who presided over the event! All of this cries out to heaven for vengeance! Our Lord is no longer honored, our Lord is no longer King. He is insulted by events like these. And if one day Communist armies take over our countries, well, we will have richly deserved it for the sacrileges committed that we allowed, that we did not put a stop to, for the honor denied to our Lord Jesus Christ. If we refuse our Lord Jesus Christ as our King, we will have the devil for king. He will come and then we will see what liberty is... Those who desired liberty wanted a liberty that would free man from the commandments of God and of the Church. Liberation! They wanted to free themselves from our Lord… Another prince will come to teach us about liberty! And so we who are fortunate enough to under­stand these things, who are fortunate enough to believe in the divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ, in His Kingship, we must make manifest, we must proclaim His Kingship in our families and wherever we are. We must join forces with those groups of Christians who still believe in the divinity of Christ and in His Kingship and who have love in their hearts, the love that the Blessed Virgin Mary had for her Son Jesus. 41 Spirituality 1 2 42 The year before delivering this sermon, Archbishop Lefebvre was suspended a divinis and commanded to shut down his seminary and the SSPX. These Roman punishments gave the appearance of placing the SSPX outside of the Church’s legal framework, and this appearance troubled some consciences, making them think that fidelity to Tradition was infidelity to the Church. Thus, the Archbishop emphasizes here that, in fact, those who destroy the Church cannot properly be said to belong to her, while those who are faithful to Tradition do properly belong to her. He is speaking of belonging to the Church in a specific sense, i.e. by sharing her ideals and mission. He is clearly not speaking of belonging to the Church through baptism or by being part of its visible hierarchy, as such a sense would falsify his statement. Such verbal ambiguity is part and parcel of the rhetorical context of a sermon, and is in fact needed to emphasize a key point, as the Archbishop does here. In common speech, we do not say that a traitor or a spy within an army belongs to that army, because his intentions are completely contrary to those of the moral body of which he is a part. Similarly here, although certain Modernists are baptized Catholics and really are part of the visible hierarchy, yet they have separated themselves from the Church’s spirit and ideals, and in that sense do not belong to her. Such expressions, as Fr. Gleize points out, take the part for the whole. It is not just those who have the spirit of the Church (part) that make up the Catholic Church (whole), but it can be said in a certain sense that only those who have the spirit of the Church belong to the Church, a point the Archbishop wishes to emphasize here. The Angelus July - August 2013 1789 in the Church And may those who share that love join forces and hold fast, without faltering. Those Christians are the Church. They are the ones, not those who tear down the reign of our Lord. This fact must be proclaimed!1 Cardinal Suenens said: “The Council was 1789 in the Church.” I didn’t make up this definition. Yes, I believe he was right: it was 1789 in the Church. He rejoiced at it; we deplore it. For 1789 in the Church means the reign of the goddess Reason, worshipped by our ancestors of 1789, who worshipped the goddess Reason, who led clergy and religious to the scaffold, who pillaged our cathedrals, destroyed our churches, violated our houses of worship. And is the revolution we are witnessing now not worse than that of 1789? If we review what has happened since the Council in our churches, our homes, our schools, our universities, our seminaries, our religious congregations, the result is worse than in 1789. For at least in 1789 the monks and nuns climbed the scaffold and spilled their blood for our Lord Jesus Christ, and I think that you are ready to give your blood for our Lord Jesus Christ. But today, how shameful it is to see these priests who have abandoned their priesthood, and to see how every month still so many priests send to Rome a request for permission to abandon the vow they made to serve our Lord Jesus Christ so that they can get married. And a mere three weeks later they receive permission to marry. Is that not worse? Would it not be better for these priests to climb the scaffold, declaring their faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, instead of abandoning Him? What has happened since the Council is worse than what happened in the Revolution. It is better to have enemies openly declaring war on the Church and on our Lord Jesus Christ. But that those who ought to honor our Lord Jesus Christ, who ought to adore Him, who ought to make their faith in Him known, that these should teach us to commit sacrilege, to abandon Our Lord, to vilify Him in a way—that, we cannot accept! We are the Catholic Church. They have sepa­rated themselves from the Catholic Church.2 We are not schismatic. We long for the reign of our Lord. We want His Kingship proclaimed. We are ready to follow! If our pastors everywhere said, “We want one God alone, our Lord Jesus Christ. We have only one King, our Lord Jesus Christ,” then we would follow them! But we cannot allow, for instance, the cross to disappear from our altars; we will not allow the cross to disappear from our churches. That we must maintain. We must be firm on these points. And it is because I proclaim all of this that I am called disobedient, that I will soon be called schismatic. But not at all! I am neither disobedient nor schismatic because I obey the Church and our Lord Jesus Christ. “You disobey the pope.”I disobey the pope insofar as the pope identifies with the revolution that took place at the Council and after the Council. For this revolution is the Revolution of 1789, and I cannot obey the Revolution of 1789 in the Church. I cannot obey the goddess of Reason; I will not bow down to the goddess of Reason. And that is what they want us to do. They want us to close this seminary so that all together we may adore the goddess of Reason, Man, and the cult of Man. No. Never! We will not accept. We will obey God, submit ourselves to our Lord Jesus Christ. We will submit ourselves to the extent that those who must transmit to us our Faith submit themselves to the Faith as well. They have no right to sell off the Faith: it is not theirs. The Faith belongs to God, it belongs to our Lord Jesus Christ. And the pope and the bishops exist to transmit it. Insofar as they transmit it, we fall to our knees, we obey; we are ready to obey immediately. Insofar as they destroy our faith, we no longer obey. We cannot allow our faith to be destroyed. Our faith is attached to our hearts until we die. That is what we must say and what we must proclaim. So we are not disobedient; we are obedient to our Lord Jesus Christ. That is what the Church has always asked of the faithful. And when we are told, “You are judgmental; you judge the pope, you judge the bishops,” it is not we who judge the bishops, but our Faith, our Tradition, our pocket catechism! A five-year-old child can correct his bishop. If a bishop were to tell a child, “You have been taught that the Blessed Trinity has three Persons, but that is not true,” the child could refer to his catechism and say, “My catechism teaches me that there are three Persons in the Blessed Trinity. You are wrong, and I am right.” The child would be right. He would be right because he has all of Tradition on his side, all of the Faith on his side. And that is what we have, nothing else. We say, “Tradition condemns you; Tradition condemns what you are currently doing.” We Must Stand Firm We are with two thousand years of the Church, not with twelve years of a new Church, a conciliar Church, as we were told when Msgr. Benelli asked us to submit ourselves to the “conciliar Church.” I do not know this conciliar Church; I only know the Catholic Church. So we must stand firm on our positions. For our Faith, we must accept everything, all the snubs, the scorn, excommunication, blows, persecution. Tomorrow, perhaps, the civil authorities may persecute us as well; that too may come. Why? Because those who are currently destroying the Church are doing the work of Freemasonry. Freemasonry is in control everywhere. So if Freemasonry realizes that we are a force that may threaten their plans, governments will persecute us. Then we will return to the catacombs; we will go anywhere, but we will continue to believe; we will not abandon our Faith. We will be persecuted, but many others were persecuted before us for their Faith. We will not be 43 Spirituality the first. But we will at least honor Our Lord, be faithful to Him, not abandon Him, not betray Him. That is what we must do. We must therefore be strong and ask the most blessed Virgin Mary on this day that we, like her, may have only one love in our hearts: that of our Lord Jesus Christ; only one name written on our hearts: that of our Lord Jesus Christ. He is God! He is the Redeemer. He is the Eternal Priest. He is King of all and He is King in heaven. He is alone King in heaven. There is no other king than our Lord Jesus Christ in heaven. He is the joy of the elect, of the angels, of His Blessed Mother, of St. Joseph. And we too wish to partake of this honor, this glory, this love of our Lord Jesus Christ. We know Him alone and we wish to know Him alone. In the name of the Father… 44 The Angelus July - August 2013 Ashamed of Mary! How Ecumenism Trumped Truth at Vatican II by Fr. Johnathan Loop, SSPX In his speech concluding the third session of Vatican II, His Holiness Paul VI proclaimed the Blessed Virgin Mary to be the Mother of the Church. He said: “In order to promote the glory of the Blessed Virgin and to increase our own consolation we declare Mary to be the Most Holy Mother of the Church, which is to say of the entire Christian people, both faithful and pastors, who call her most beloved mother.” Upon hearing this pronouncement, Fr. Henri de Lubac exclaimed to a fellow theologian by the name of Fr. Henri Denis: “[T]he Council is over. The is no more John XXIII, no more aggorniamento.” His reaction was by no means unique. This title for Our Lady, which had been used as early as Benedict XIV in the mid-1700s, was poorly received by a number of the progressive theologians who had come to wield a large influence on the Council’s proceedings. Furthermore, this episode mirrored the attitude towards Our Lady of many progressives throughout the Council. This treatment of the Mother of God can help us to understand more clearly the true spirit of the Council. The major conflicts about Our Lady which arose at the Council centered principally around the document which was dedicated to her. Initially, the coordinating commission—which was responsible for determining the order of business at the Council—decided to dedicate a separate schema 45 Spirituality 1 For example, Pope Leo XIII, in his Encyclical Octobri Mense (September 22, 1891) wrote: “Nothing is given to us except through Mary, God thus willing it.” 2 Indeed, Fr. GarrigouLagrange, who taught at the Angelicum for half a century, writing in the 1940s argued that the universal mediation of the Blessed Virgin Mary was a truth more easily defined than her glorious Assumption. See Reginald GarrigouLagrange, O.P., The Mother of the Saviour and Our Interior Life (1948; reprint TAN Books, 1993). titled De Beata Maria Virgine, Matre Ecclesiae exclusively to the Mother of God. Although the text was pleasing to the majority of the Council fathers, the progressives found it unacceptable. Meeting at Fulda, Germany, in the summer of 1963, bishops and theologians from predominantly German speaking regions—a group Fr. Ralph Wiltgen designated the “European Alliance”—discussed their strategy for the upcoming session of the Council. They determined to try to have the Council incorporate the text on Our Lady into the constitution of the Church (what became Lumen Gentium). In accordance with this strategy, Cardinal Frings of Cologne took the floor in one of the first general conventions of the second session of the Council in order to propose to the gathered conciliar fathers that the schema on Our Lady be inserted into the schema on the Church. This led to several days of passionate debate, at the end of which the Council fathers narrowly approved (on October 29, 1963) the plan of the “European Alliance,” 1,114 to 1,097. This plan had been devised in part by Fr. Karl Rahner, who believed that this would “be the easiest way to delete from the schema certain theological points which are not sufficiently developed.” Among these points which Fr. Rahner believed “insufficiently developed” was Mary’s role in the distribution of the graces which she had merited in union with her Son on the Cross. Despite the fact that numerous popes had referred to Our Lady as the Mediatrix of all graces1 and that renowned theologians such as Fr. GarrigouLagrange had argued that such a belief could be solemnly defined as a dogma of the Faith,2 Fr. Rahner claimed the doctrine should be “pondered anew” and the title Mediatrix dropped entirely from the schema. Although the German-speaking bishops did not entirely agree with his recommendation to drop the title of Mediatrix, they nonetheless requested that the title “Mediatrix of all graces” be removed on account of the confusion they argued it would cause. This course of action was generally pleasing to French progressives such as Cardinal Liénart, as well as Fr. Yves Congar, O.P., and Fr. René Laurentin, the former of whom had written in 1961: “I need to fight, in the name of the gospel and apostolic faith, against a development, a Mediterranean & Irish proliferation, of a Mariology which does not come from revelation, but which is backed up by pontifical texts” (emphasis added). In other words, Fr. Congar—and to a greater or lesser extent those who shared his vision—wished to overturn the teaching of the Church’s magisterium in the name of a return to the “apostolic Faith,” a tendency which had been denounced by Pope Pius XII as “archaeologism.” In doing such, he and others forgot that is was not for theologians to determine what is or is not definitively part of revelation, but for the magisterium of the Church under the aegis of the Sovereign Pontiff. What was the motive of the progressives desire to diminish the role of Our Lady? Above all else, they believed that any special treatment of Our Lady would impede “ecumenical dialogue with our separated brethren,” to use the language of Cardinal Frings of Cologne. In other words, the central concern was not one of theological certainty, but rather of diplomacy in the service of ecumenism. Fr. Karl Rahner, whose opinion—according to Fr. Ralph 46 The Angelus July - August 2013 Wiltgen—was immensely influential on the German-speaking bishops, stated upon reading the draft approved by the coordinating commission in 1963 that “ [it would produce] unimaginable harm from an ecumenical point of view, in relation to both Orientals and Protestants.” Cardinal Frings, Fr. Rahner, and others of like mind were primarily more concerned with the opinions of such men as “Bishop” Dibelius—a German evangelical who had said that the Church’s doctrine on Our Lady was one of the major impediments to union— than in presenting to the world all the beautiful truths concerning the Mother of God. Furthermore, in the document which the German bishops sent to the Roman commissions in charge of directing the course of the Council and in which they expressed their reservations about the document treating Our Lady, they saw fit to quote several prominent Protestant scholars as saying that any new declarations on the Blessed Virgin at the Council would serve only “to erect a new wall of division” between Protestants and Catholics. They wished to avoid giving honor to the Mother of God in order not to offend the sensibilities of men who did not have the true Faith. As soon as we formulate the issue in this manner, we begin to recognize the grave danger entailed in the “ecumenical” approach. As is painfully evident, it leads Catholics to obfuscate the truths of the Faith. Now, the Faith makes known to us the real nature of the universe, and if some truths which it contains are hidden for fear that some men may not wish to hear them, then it becomes impossible to have a just and accurate understanding of the good God and the world which He has created. In the case of the Blessed Virgin Mary, refusing to proclaim openly the glories of her prerogatives obscures the infinite wisdom and power of God in creating her as well as the immense dignity conferred on the human race; namely, that—as St. Louis de Montfort persuasively argues in the True Devotion—one from among its ranks was given the ineffable privilege to be associated in the most intimate manner with each Person of the Most Holy Trinity. This willingness to downplay the privileges of Our Lady also caused numerous attacks—amply documented by Romano Amerio in his book Iota Unum—on popular devotion to her in the wake of the Council. This attempt to appease Protestants led to a diminution of true devotion to Mary among Catholics. On another level, this desire to hide Our Lady from Protestants and other religions is insulting to her Son, Our Lord Jesus Christ. When Mary presented her newborn Son in the temple in Jerusalem, the holy man Simeon took Him into his arms and declared: “Behold, this one is set for the rise and fall of many in Israel, and a sign which shall be contradicted.” Thus, Our Lord by His very existence will necessarily divide men into two camps: one which receives Him versus one which says to Him, “Non serviamus.” St. Ignatius of Loyola portrays this universal division with great clarity in his Spiritual Exercises and exhorts men of good will to join the ranks of Our Lord with their whole hearts. Now, Simeon did not stop there. After noticing the astonishment of St. Joseph and the Blessed Virgin, he goes on to say to the Mother of God: “And thy own soul a sword shall pierce, that the thoughts of many hearts may be made manifest.” In other words, Almighty God, who spoke that day through the 47 Spirituality 3 Mark 8:38; Luke 9:26. 4 Acts 4:10-12. 4 Romans 1:16. Fr. Jonathan Loop was born and raised an Episcopalian. He attended college at the University of Dallas, where he received the grace to convert through the intermediary of several of his fellow students, some of whom later went on to become religious with the Dominicans of Fanjeaux. After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in political philosophy, he enrolled in St. Thomas Aquinas Seminary, where he was ordained in June 2011. 48 The Angelus July - August 2013 holy old man, intended to associate the mother with the Son as a sign of contradiction. It is for this reason that traditional theologians have seen true devotion to Our Lady as a sign of predestination. What possible good is there then to hide Our Lady and to be silent about her prerogatives? Would this truly bring men back to God? It is as though we were inviting someone to become the friend of a young man by hiding his mother in a closet. What would that young man think? Our Lord Jesus Christ declared that: “Those who are ashamed of me before men, I shall be ashamed of them before my Father in heaven.”3 What are we to think His judgment shall be of those who are ashamed of His Mother? As a whole, the progressive theologians who dominated Vatican Council II did what was in their power to downplay and to minimize the role of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the work of redemption so as to avoid offending Protestants. They successfully sought to deny her the honor of her own schema and to mitigate the importance of titles which had been long assigned to her by numerous popes. In this, we see the true spirit of the Council. For, since the Mother is inextricably linked with her Son, it ought to come as no surprise to us that in the wake of the Council, these theologians and their disciples who were so ready to be quiet about Our Lady in the presence of Protestants should not fail to be quiet about Our Lord Himself in the presence of those who disbelieve in Him. In this light, it is wholly in keeping with the spirit of Vatican II that the reigning pope began his pontificate by sending the following message to Riccardo di Segni, the Chief Rabbi in Rome: “I very much hope to be able to contribute to the progress that relations between Jews and Catholics have experienced since the Second Vatican Council, in a spirit of renewed collaboration and at the service of a world that can be ever more harmonious with the will of the Creator.” This attitude stands in marked contrast to that of the first pope, whose first official greeting to the leaders of the “Jewish community” had a slightly different “flavor”: “Let it be known to you and to the whole house of Israel that in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, whom you crucified and whom God raised from the dead, this man stands before you whole. This is the stone which was rejected by you builders and which has become the chief corner stone; and there is salvation in none other. For there is no other name given to men under heaven by which we may be saved.”4 Who are we to follow? What ought to be our attitude? We must make our own the spirit of St. Paul: “I am not ashamed of the Faith.”5 In this light, part of our work to undo the incalculable devastation that has been wrought by the Second Vatican Council is to preach the truths of faith concerning Our Lady without fear or shame. By defending the prerogatives of the Mother of God, we certainly defend the royal and divine dignity of her Son. Furthermore, by proclaiming to men her glories, we help the Holy Ghost draw souls through her to the Church, thus filling up the ranks of the family of which Our Lady was justly declared to be the mother. Simply the Best Journal of Catholic Tradition Available! “A splendidly serious and deeply Catholic journal.” For over three decades, The Angelus has stood for Catholic truth, goodness, and beauty against a world gone mad. Our goal has always been the same: to show the glories of the Catholic Faith and to bear witness to the constant teaching of the Church in the midst of the modern crisis in which we find ourselves. With a renewed focus and a redesigned layout, our magazine is now better than ever. Each issue contains: -- A unique theme focusing on doctrinal and practical issues that matter to you, the reader -- Regular columns, from History to Family Life, Spirituality and more -- Almost all original content -- Some of the best and brightest Catholic thinkers and writers in the English-speaking world -- An intellectual formation to strengthen your Faith in an increasingly hostile world If you’re tired of wishy-washy Catholicism, confusing presentations of the Faith, or a lack of Catholic fighting spirit in the face of the modern world, then The Angelus is right for you. And the best part is that it only costs $35 to subscribe for a full year! Visit www.angleuspress.org today and help strengthen your Catholic Faith. Subscribe Today Don’t let another year go by without reading the foremost journal of Catholic Tradition, especially when the cost is only $35! print subscriptions Name______________________________________________________________________________________________ Address____________________________________________________________________________________________ City______________________________ State______________ ZIP______________ Country______________________  CHECK  VISA  MASTERCARD  AMEX  DISCOVER  MONEY ORDER Card #_______________________________________________________ Exp. Date_____________________________ Phone # _____________________________________E-mail_________________________________________________ Mail to: Angelus Press, PO Box 217, St. Marys, KS 66536, USA Please check one United States $35.00  1 year  2 years $65.00  3 years $100.00 Foreign Countries (inc. Canada & Mexico)  1 year  2 years  3 years $55.00 $105.00 $160.00 All payments must be in US funds only. Online only subscriptions To subscribe visit: www.angelusonline.org. Register for free to access back issues 14 months and older plus many other site features. Plus, all Magazine Subscribers Now Have Full Access to the Online Version of the Magazine (a $20 Value)! The Ecône Seminary The International Seminary of Saint Pius X is the premier seminary of the Society of Saint Pius X. It is situated at Ecône in the Valais Canton of Switzerland and is one of the six houses for formation of the future priests of the Society of Saint Pius X. The Seminary of Ecône was founded in 1970 by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, and his tomb can be found there. Christian Culture Mary as Malleus Hereticorum A Brief Historical and Scriptural Meditation by John Rao, Ph.D. St. Anthony of Padua was a very public man of many words and vast and inimitable preaching experience. In contrast, only a few rather private words and actions of the Mother of God have been passed down to us. Despite this difference, Tradition has ascribed to both the effective practical orator as well as the gentle and retiring Blessed Virgin Mary the same activist role of “Hammer of Heretics.” Moreover, while unambiguously praising the crucial importance of the work of the holy and loquacious Franciscan friar, the Church has nevertheless always given pride of place to the quiet Mother of God in the public battle against the enemies of Catholic Truth. Why should this be the case? One answer that St. Anthony himself would have appreciated is provided us by a number of those leaders of the great nineteenth-century 52 The Angelus July - August 2013 Church revival movement who were most responsible for Blessed Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors (1864) and the ensuing development of Catholic Social Doctrine. These men longed to pull Christendom out from underneath the rubble left by the revolutions of the late eighteenth century and their subsequent imitators. They recognized that such a task, which must always involve intense political and social activity, was nevertheless first and foremost an internal spiritual and intellectual one. Before all else, it entailed convincing a population deeply befuddled by Enlightenment naturalism that the universe was not an independent entity free to go about its business on its own terms, but the creation of a supernatural God who also had to correct and redeem it due to the evil effects of voluntary human sinfulness. And Marian doctrine and devotion seemed to the Catholic activists in question to be the best lever to lean upon to fight an internal secularism with crippling external effects detrimental to everyone’s search for salvation. In 1851, the Roman Jesuit journal La Civiltà Cattolica published an article dealing with a book by the Count Emiliano Avogadro della Motta (1789-1865) that emphasized the special value of the ancient doctrine of the Immaculate Conception for precisely this kind of internal combat with external consequences. Both della Motta and the Civiltà argued that belief in the Immaculate Conception, rooted in the scriptural accounts of the Annunciation and the lines of the Magnificat, directly attacked the central modernist principle of nature’s independence from God. Belief in Mary’s unique exemption from the consequences of the Fall—and this only through the life, death, and resurrection of her Son—contradicted all revolutionary claims that a just social order and human dignity could and indeed must be protected while rejecting the omnipresent reality of individual sin and the need for supernatural Redemption from its curse. Moreover, it did so not in some abstruse textbook fashion, which only a handful of intellectuals might grasp. It did so in an “incarnate,” flesh-andblood manner, centering the believer’s attention on a gentle woman submissive to a Truth outside herself and deeply in love with her Divine Son— whatever the consequences might be. Any and every human creature of body and soul, the clever and the simple alike, could appreciate and respond to such a tale of devotion to God both on High and on earth. Towards the Immaculate Conception Devotion to the devout Mother of God had stirred nineteenth-century Catholics who would never have been able to talk theologically and philosophically about the problems of naturalism to press for the dogmatic confirmation of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception in greater numbers than ever before in the Church’s history. This inspired the Civiltà to argue that even tepid and totally estranged souls might be moved to abandon secularism and all of the nefarious political and social evils it engendered if a similar devotion to Mary could be stimulated in them. It was with this in mind that the Roman journal claimed that a dogmatic proclamation of the Immaculate Conception could also be used to spell out explicitly and precisely the illusions that the denial of nature’s dependent character, Original Sin, and Redemption engendered—in what amounted to a syllabus of heretical revolutionary errors. In short, a love for the Virgin could lead to a love of what she represented in Salvation History and a turning away from what displeased her. Pius IX was fervently attached to the Virgin, especially the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception, on whose feast day he made many of his most important pronouncements. Stirred by the arguments of the Civiltà, the pope established a commission in May of 1852, headed by Cardinal Raffale Fornari (1787-1854), charging it with a study of the question of a joint definition of the “private” Marian dogma and the “public” condemnation of the revolutionary lies that its teaching very simply but very directly contradicted. Nevertheless, by January of 1853, the project of providing a detailed condemnation of modern naturalist revolutionary heresies was separated from that of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, which was itself finally proclaimed in December of 1854. Separation was due to some dampening responses from the men consulted by the commission. Many pointed to the intricate problems entailed by a unique general condemnation of errors of this kind. Della Motta offered to do his best to help, but expressed doubt regarding the entire enterprise. The intensity, extent, and sophistic nature of modern naturalism, he explained, would make even the largest listing of falsehoods stemming from such an admittedly simple source incomplete. Proponents of these delusions would easily be able to find ways of evading responsibility for each specific point mentioned. Besides, he continued, theological pronouncements of this kind were of little concern to people who thought of theology itself as being utterly absurd. In 53 Christian Culture other words, love for Mary was not a sure-fire recipe for escape from an ideological labyrinth. Still, neither the calls for a syllabus of errors addressing all of the heresies of naturalism nor the conviction that its chief thrust could best be understood in conjunction with Marian devotion and doctrine ever disappeared from nineteenthcentury Catholic activists’ minds. Such a Syllabus finally came to term in 1864, and, fittingly enough, on the Feast Day of the Immaculate 54 The Angelus July - August 2013 Conception. And Blessed Pius IX’s seemingly “negative” attack on the errors of the modern revolutionary world then became the springboard for the future development of a “positive” and substantive Catholic Social Doctrine. Not surprisingly, the practical public teaching of both continued to reflect Marian themes—two of them in particular. The first of these concerns Mary’s sharp theocentric and christocentric focus. Let us remember that faced with an extraordinary and unexpected message from above, the Mother of God responded openly to a higher value than that offered by her personal experience to date. She bent herself to fulfillment of the external Divine Will. When she did once again turn inward we are informed that she did so to treasure all the things that her Son had accomplished, to ponder them in her heart (Luke 2:19), and to pray over them along with the Apostles and the other disciples (Acts 1:14). When the voice of the Christ she accepted was heard, she urged those around her, quite simply, to “do whatever He tells you” (John 2:5). Our Lady Against Naturalism Nothing could better summarize the starting point of the Syllabus of Errors and Catholic Social Doctrine in its fight against the modern revolutionary naturalist heresy. Nature is the creation of a supernatural God. It cannot fully be understood without seeing it through God’s eyes. Hence, the need for everyone to imitate Mary, emerge out of one’s narrow—and in our case in no way immaculate—natural experience, observe and listen to what Christ does and says, and then “do whatever He tells us.” This, the heretic never has been willing to do, and the modern naturalist heretic determinedly so. The Syllabus and Catholic Social Doctrine, following Mary, tell the world in no uncertain terms to look to the Father of Lights for illumination; the heretical naturalist, the anti-Mary, to the dull, parochial, back wall of the modern revolutionary cave, closed to the message of an angel, closed to pondering in his heart what the Incarnate Son of the Father of Lights has to say to him. A second Marian theme is that of motherly defense. Mary is the Mother who wanted to protect her beloved Child and desires still to protect those who become one with her Son in His Mystical Body. Motherly protection involves both a defense against what harms children as well as encouragement of what is good for them and leads them to eternal life with God. It was her concern for defending her Son from the evils of fallen existence that caused her frantic hunt for him when not finding him in the pilgrim throng returning from Jerusalem—although here, too, we are shown that natural concern must be corrected when the “business” of the Father of Lights is in question (Luke 2:48). And so important was her concern that her spiritual children enjoy those good things of nature that urge us to partake of the banquet of heaven that brought her lamentation that the wedding guests at Cana had no wine (John 2:3)—and her Son’s first miracle. It is the Church’s two-sided, motherly, Marian role as defender of the weak against the evils of the fallen “naturally” strong and as the patron of natural goods that can be used to facilitate our transformation in Christ that also motivated the Syllabus of Errors and the growth of Catholic Social Doctrine. Only Christ can provide us the tools to fend off the powerful evils around us. And only Christ can purify and solidify the tottering natural goods that are meant to help us to perfect ourselves as individuals. Modern heresy takes us down an opposing pathway, either giving all the wine to the strong who abuse it or taking it out of the hands of those whose hearts it cheers and opens to God. Mary, the Syllabus, and Catholic Social Doctrine have a defensive and offensive role providing the only recipe for happiness possible in this valley of tears. Public defense of the Faith and creation of a Christian order suitable for leading men to Heaven as opposed to hell require the kind of open Hammer of Heretics represented by St. Anthony of Padua. Without their labors all our dreams of a renewal of Christendom are doomed. But the external work that they do is dependent upon an internal renewal requiring an abandonment of self, an observation of Christ, a pondering in our hearts of what He says and does, and a carrying out of His will as opposed to our own. This internal change is the greatest weapon against heresy, including the most potent of heresies, that many-headed heretical hydra called modern revolutionary naturalism. In this battle for internal and external victory, the model provided by that Hammer of Heretics called Mary is the best of models to cultivate. 55 2013 Angelus Conference What:  Please join us for our Fourth Annual Conference for Catholic Tradition When: October 11 - 13, 2013 Where: Kansas City, Missouri That She Might Reign “We must belong to the Immaculate as servant, son, slave, thing, property, and so on: in a word, belong to her under every aspect. Annihilate oneself and become her. The fundamental element of such a transformation consists in conforming, in fusing, in uniting our will with hers.” —St. Maximilian Kolbe To register or for more information: www. angeluspress.org/conference Featured Speakers Bishop Bernard Fellay — Our Lady of Fatima and the Crisis in the Church Fr. Juan-Carlos Iscara — Our Lady in the Early Church Fr. Albert, O.P. — Who Is Mary? Fr. Daniel Themann — Apologetics: Defending the Marian Dogmas Fr. Gerard Beck — Marian Devotion in the Family Dr. John Rao — Our Lady in History Dr. Peter Chojnowski — Our Lady in Art and Architecture Mr. Andrew Clarendon — Our Lady of Guadalupe Mr. Roberto de Mattei — They Have Uncrowned Her: Our Lady Since the Council Schedule of Conferences Friday, Oct. 11, 2013 8:00 a.m. Mass & Rosary 10:00 a.m. Fr. Rostand: Introduction and Welcome 10:30 a.m. Fr. Albert: Who Is Mary 12:30 p.m. Lunch 2:30 p.m. Dr. Chojnowski: Our Lady in Art and Architecture 4:00 p.m. Fr. Themann: Apologetics: Defending the Marian Dogmas 5:30 p.m. Fr. Beck: Marian Devotion in the Family 7:00 p.m. Cocktail Hour/Hors d'Ouevres accompanied by a string quartet Saturday, Oct. 12, 2013 7:00 a.m. Mass & Rosary 8:00 a.m. Breakfast 9:00 a.m. Fr. Iscara: Our Lady in the Early Church 10:30 a.m. Special Guest: They Have Uncrowned Her; Our Lady Since the Council 12:00 p.m. Lunch 2:00 p.m. Dr. Rao: Our Lady in History 3:30 p.m. Bishop Fellay: Our Lady of Fatima and the Crisis in the Church 6:00 p.m. Dinner After-Dinner Andrew Clarendon: Our Lady of Guadalupe (with slideshow) Sunday, October 13, 2013 9:00 a.m. Pontifical High Mass at St. Vincent's 11:00 a.m. Brunch at St. Vincent's 2:00 p.m. Inaugural Screening of Archbishop Lefebvre: A Documentary or call 1-800-966-7337 Christian Culture St. Ignatius of Loyola The Christian Soldier by Fr. Emanuel Herkel, SSPX “Imagine a king preparing to lead an army into battle. He is completely dedicated to a noble cause; his goal is not worldly riches or power, but the common good. He calls us to join him. But we must be content to eat poor food and wear rough clothing. We must work with him by day and watch with him by night, so that we may share in his victory. What answer do we make to such a king? “Now imagine Christ the King. He summons us all to join in the fight against His enemy—the devil. If we are willing, we must join with Christ in suffering, so that we may share in His glory. What answer do we make to the Eternal King?” Soldier in an Earthly Army Military service filled the mind of Inigo of Loyola. As a young soldier he was an inspirational leader; he was not afraid of overwhelming odds. Chivalry—the loyal and virtuous service to a lord—was his ideal. When the French attacked the Spanish city of Pamplona, in 1521, the Duke left 58 The Angelus July - August 2013 town and the city council surrendered. The little castle on top of the hill should have surrendered too. However, despite being abandoned by King and countrymen, Inigo rallied the troops and convinced them to make a heroic last stand. The resistance lasted about six hours. The French attacked. A cannonball broke both of Inigo’s legs. Then his companions surrendered. War often leads to disfigurement and death, but behind it is a glorious idea of fighting for a good cause. Inigo’s body was weaker than his spirit, and his ideas were only weakly shared by his military companions. The King of Spain was not there to support him. The failure was a result of putting too much confidence in human beings. Inigo was learning this lesson. Healing of Body and Soul The French picked up Inigo’s broken body, gave him some unskilled medical attention and then sent him home to Loyola where he could recuperate. Then it was realized that his legs were crooked; they had to be broken again, reset, and ever after he walked with a limp. While he was recovering, Inigo asked for books of romance and adventure. Fortunately, they were not provided to him. Instead, he was given a Life of Christ and Lives of the saints. Confined to bed, he read them. God gave this invalid the grace to accept the fact that he would never again be a soldier in the army of an earthly lord. He changed his name to Ignatius, in honor of an early martyr, and transferred his affections to Christ the King. When he could walk again, Ignatius went on a pilgrimage to the sanctuary of our Lady at Montserrat. He made a good confession and then spent many months in a nearby cave, at Manresa, doing penance for his sins. During this time he began to write down his meditations, like the one which began this article, in a book—The Spiritual Exercises. A New Way of Life The Exercises are a tool for converting sinners and strengthening the just. Why are we here? What is life’s purpose? God is our goal. Sin is to be rejected. Then the focus shifts to the imitation of Christ. We consider His teachings, His sufferings, and finally the glory of Heaven. Ignatius gave these meditations a structure as a series of meditations to be considered during a month. These Exercises are the basis of the fiveday Ignatian retreats preached by priests of the Society of St. Pius X. Ignatius soon realized that to preach the Exercises properly he needed to be a priest. He wandered much, even making a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, before he entered the University of Paris. There he taught the Exercises to some of his fellow students, including Francis Xavier. He formed a group of friends who encouraged each other in virtue. Together they contemplated Ignatius’s rules for making a correct choice of a way of life: “1. Focus on the love of God. 2. What advice would I give to a stranger? I will do the same. 3 and 4. If I were now dying or at the Day of Judgment, what choice would I wish I had made?” Motivated by such considerations, on the feast of the Assumption 1534, at the church of St. Denis in Paris, they made three vows: poverty, chastity, and to journey to Jerusalem. The part about Jerusalem was probably inspired by Ignatius’s earlier pilgrimage, but it never worked out for the group. Ignatius became sick and had to return to his home in Spain. He agreed to meet with his companions at Venice in 1537; from there they could sail to the Holy Land. But a war with the Turks closed this sea route. For a time they lingered in Venice, helping the poor. Eventually they decided to change their vow: instead of going to Jerusalem, they determined to go to Rome and offer their services to the Pope. 59 Christian Culture The First Jesuits Ignatius had a vision while at prayer. Christ told him that everything would go well in Rome. So it did. The companions were formed into a religious order. They took a name: the Society of Jesus, now commonly called the Jesuits. They took the ordinary vow of obedience, and they took a special vow of obedience to the Pope, promising to do whatever he asked of them. Suddenly they realized that this could be the end of their work. If the Pope sent most of them away on difficult missions, they would have no way to train new members to carry on their work. A rule of life was drawn up and a superior general was chosen—yes, our saint. He refused the first election, so they repeated the vote, but the result was the same. The Society of Jesus was approved by Pope Paul III in 1540. It began with seven members. Sixteen years later, at the time of Ignatius’s death, there were 1,000 Jesuits. Special Duties of the Jesuits The last stage of Ignatius’s life was the busy work of a superior. There was work to do, much work! Martin Luther, King Henry VIII, and other early Protestants had led whole nations out of the Church. A popular misapprehension claims that the Jesuits were founded in order to combat Protestantism. It was not that simple. Ignatius did send missionaries to Protestant countries, but he also sent them to Africa and Asia. He sent his sons wherever they were commanded to go by order of the Pope. The Society of Jesus was a new kind of religious order; in external details they were much looser than medieval monks. Dominicans and Franciscans can be easily recognized by their color-coded habits. Jesuits do not have a special habit; they wear the clothing of ordinary priests. Monasteries have a strict daily rule with set times for prayer, meals, and work throughout the day. The Jesuits vary their rule from house to house. Even the prayer of the divine office is usually said in private. There are no Jesuit nuns; it is for men only. Other orders observe extra days of penance 60 The Angelus July - August 2013 or special ceremonies of devotion. The Jesuits leave such matters to the piety of the individual. How could such an organization hold together? In fact, the Jesuits are known as the best organized of all the religious orders. It was a matter of discipline. The training of a Jesuit lasts unusually long—from ten to twelve years. During that time good habits are developed and the hazard of moral failure is largely eliminated. Perhaps more importantly, only the general is elected; local superiors are appointed or removed at the discretion of the superior general. This is a military method. Ignatius was a good leader, but even he made mistakes. He appointed Rodriguez, one of his early companions, as the superior of the Jesuit province of Portugal. Rodriguez was popular; in twelve years the province grew to over 300 members. Sadly, their spirit of obedience was lacking. Rodriguez was recalled to Rome and over 200 Portuguese Jesuits left the Society. The first disciples of Ignatius had come together as students; many had their doctorates in theology. Education soon became an important work. If a Catholic prince could supply the funds and the school building, the Society of Jesus was ready to send trained teachers. Jesuit teachers formed strong Catholic laymen and, of course, more Jesuit priests. Much of the popular enthusiasm for the new order came from its extraordinary missionary work. In 1540, King John III of Portugal requested missionaries for his colonies. Francis Xavier was sent to the colony in India. Within a month Francis converted more Indians than the Portuguese had so far done in 50 years. Then he was off, travelling to Indonesia and Japan. The good news of these conquests for Christ was sent to Ignatius in Rome and widely published. In 1556, as Ignatius lay dying, he chose Francis Xavier for his successor. But by the time the letter reached India, Francis was also dead. The two first Jesuit saints, Ignatius and Francis, were canonized in the same ceremony in 1622. Fr. Herkel was born in British Columbia, Canada, and graduated from boarding high school at St. Marys, 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. The QueenMother and Chesterton by Patrick Murtha Man has correctly assumed that woman has been destined, by a particular Fiat, to be exalted. But the pedestal is no such means of elevation. A man might put a woman on a pedestal, as the Victorian Man did, when he did not know where else to put her. The Victorian Woman, like Persephone romping about the halls of Hell, had been exiled from her place of grandeur in her world. Some maids were in the garden, some maids were in the kitchen, some maids were in the parlor. The Woman of the House had displaced Woman of the Home. And yet, the Man of the House did not know where the Woman of the House should be; the Woman of the House herself did not know where she ought to be. The only empty place was the pedestal. At least a high-chair for babies keeps the child from slipping away from the kitchen table and lifts the child to the level of the family. The pedestal took the woman from the kitchen and the table and left her alone, sitting pretty in the parlor. While the Victorians rightly believed in the elevation of woman, the Moderns rightly disbelieve in the use of the pedestal. And yet, they made the mistake of chopping down the woman with the pedestal. The proper place for the woman is not a perch, not a pedestal, but a throne. If the man is the king of his own castle, whether that castle be of brick or wood or thatch, every woman is the queen of her husband’s 61 Christian Culture 1 G. K. Chesterton, “A Party Question,” The Queen of Seven Swords (London: Sheed and Ward, 1926). 2 St. Thomas Aquinas, On Kingship, To the King of Cyprus, trans. Gerald Phelan (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1949). 3 Venerable Louis of Granada, The Summa of the Christian Life, trans. Jordan Aumann (Rockford, Il.: TAN, 1979), III, 177. 4 G. K. Chesterton, Ever­l asting Man (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1953), 170. 5 Fulton J. Sheen, The World’s First Love (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1952), 235. 6 Aubrey Thomas de Vere, “Advocata.” castle. For G. K. Chesterton, this is common sense. The woman is not to be pedestaled; woman is to be enthroned, to be elevated to a seat of honor where she might reign, and not merely sit like a plant or stand like the marble Galatea. And so came his vision of the Blessed Virgin, a vision that became flesh in his poetry. She was to him the Blessed Virgin and Our Lady, but most especially a mother and the queen. It might seem obvious why Chesterton should love the Blessed Virgin as queen. For he has been accused of being a medievalist. But he was no medievalist. He loved the Queenship of Mary because he was a medieval. Amidst the shadows of paganism and sin that lingered in the medieval world, he caught a glimpse of Heaven that was eternally bound with the Catholic spirit that exhilarated the medieval hearts. And central to that world was the Queen of Heaven, whose subject-children included the Church Militant. She is found in the Anglo-Saxon writings, she is found in the Old French poems, she is found in Latin hymns. Her name as queen enlivens medieval songs. She would have no pedestal but a throne, thereby revealing the practical-ideal woman. The Mystery of the Queen The mystery of a queen, of the Queen, is the mystery of motherhood, her Motherhood, “Mother of Man; the Mother of the Maker.”1 St. Thomas Aquinas, speaking of the king, compares the monarch, in a certain fashion, to the father, calling him the father of his people.2 If the king is to be a father, the queen must be a mother. And the source to a queen’s motherhood, as also to a mother’s queenship, is her heart; and her fairest and most comforting attribute, mercy. “In the Son they venerate the greatness of divinity,” says Venerable Louis of Granada, “but in the Mother they recognize that she is a woman and that tenderness and mercy are characteristics of women, for grace does not destroy but perfects nature.”3 Chesterton, in The Everlasting Man, echoes these words: “There will always be some savour of religion about the mere picture of a mother and a baby; some hint of mercy and softening about the mere mention of the dread name of God.”4 Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, also speaking of Mary’s Mercy as being an extension of her Queenship and Motherhood, writes, “Not that Mary pardons—for she cannot—but she intercedes as a mother does in the face of the justice of the father. Without justice, mercy would be indifference to wrong; without mercy, justice would be vindictive. Mothers obtain pardon and forgiveness for their sons without ever giving them the feeling of ‘being let off.’”5 It is this vision of Mary, the Queen of Mercy, the Mother of Mercy, that captures the imagination of poets—and dare I say—the jealousy even of Protestants. “Lady most perfect,” writes Mary Lamb, “when thy sinless face / Men look upon, they wish to be / A Catholic, Madonna fair, to worship thee.” To have such a woman standing between the sinner and the terrible throne of Justice, to have such an advocate, whose tenderness and compassion might sway the aweful might of God, to have such a Mother-Queen that “beneath her gracious weight inclined / That Sceptre drooped.”6 Or in the words 62 The Angelus July - August 2013 7 Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance. 8 G. K. Chesterton, The Ballad of the White Horse, ill. Robert Austin (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1993), 184-204. 9 Sheen, World’s First Love, 243-44. of Nathaniel Hawthorne, “I have always envied the Catholics that sweet, sacred, Virgin Mother who stands between them and the Deity, intercepting somewhat His awful splendor but permitting His love to stream on the worshipper more intelligibly to human comprehension through the medium of a woman’s tenderness.”7 The most renowned appearance of Mary in Chesterton’s work lies primarily in The Ballad of the White Horse. “Queen” and “Mother of God” are the first words used to identify her. But the depth of her queenship and motherhood is to be discovered in Chesterton’s description of her as the advocate for men, as man’s patroness. She, appearing to Alfred the King at the last battle with the Danes, re-ignites the hopes and the hearts of her children when all seems bleak and desperate. And when the last arrow Was fitted and was flown, When the broken shield hung on the breast, And the hopeless lance was laid to rest, And the hopeless horn blown, The King looked up, and what he saw Was a great light like death, For Our Lady stood on the standards rent, As lonely and as innocent As when between white walls she went And the lilies of Nazareth. One instant in a still light He saw Our Lady then, Her dress was soft as western sky, And she was a queen most womanly— But she was a queen of men. Over the iron forest He saw Our Lady stand, Her eyes were sad withouten art, And seven swords were in her heart— But one was in her hand.8 Those seven swords within her heart are the seven keys to her mercy. They reveal her tenderness for her Son, for the very pains of her Child become her own particular pains, the suffering of children becomes her own self-same suffering. “As every woman begets a child,” writes Bishop Sheen, “so every child begets a mother. The helplessness of the infant, in language stronger than words, solicits the mother, saying: ‘Be sweet, be selfsacrificing, be merciful.’ A thousand temptations of a mother are crushed in that one radiating though: ‘What of my child?’”9 Chesterton’s use of the seven swords is simply that—the anguish of the Mother-Queen at the anguish her children-subjects. 63 Christian Culture 10 Chesterton, “Lepanto.” 11 Chesterton, “The Arena.” 12 Chesterton, “The Queen of Seven Swords.” In Chesterton’s “The Queen of Seven Swords,” seven knights—Sts. James, Denys, Anthony, Patrick, Andrew, David, and George (all representatives of the great kingdoms of Christendom)—have lost their swords. Dejected, they approach the Queen of Mercy, announcing their failure to win their battles. We have lost out swords in battle; we have broken our hearts in the world Since first we went forth from thy face with the gonfalon’s gold unfurled; Disarmed and distraught and dissundered, thy paladins come From the lands where the gods sit silent. Art thou too dumb? But the Blessed Virgin’s response is not the response of a “cold Queen... looking in the glass.”10 Her reply is that of her “whose names are Seven Sorrows and the Cause of All Our Joys”11 and of her who is “Our Lady of the Victories, / The Mother of the Master of the Masterers of the World” and “Queen of Death and Life undying.” It is the sweet rebuke of a mother towards her child: “Knew ye not, ye that see, where I have hid all things? Strewn far as the last lost battle; your swords have met in my heart.” And it seemed that the swords fell down with a shock as of thunderbolts falling, And the strange knights bent to gather and gird them again for the fight: All blackened; a bugle blew; but all in that flash of blackness, With the clang of the fallen swords, I awoke; and the sun was bright.12 64 The Angelus July - August 2013 In order that, properly speaking, there may be devotion to the Heart of Mary, the attention and the homage of the faithful must be directed to the physical heart itself. However, this in itself is not sufficient; the faithful must read therein all that the human heart of Mary suggests, all of which it is the expressive symbol and the living reminder: Mary’s interior life, her joys and sorrows, her virtues and hidden perfections, and, above all, her virginal love for her God, her maternal love for her Divine Son, and her motherly and compassionate love for her sinful and miserable children here below. Christian Culture Loving Your Spouse for a Lifetime by Michael Rayes You already have a Catholic marriage. A sacrament. Your marriage, of course, is permanent. Catholic husbands and wives can take security and comfort in this fact. Yet, within the permanence of lawful matrimony, it may be a constant challenge to respond to each other in loving ways. Christ commands us to love our neighbors, and there is no closer neighbor than your own spouse, with whom you live and are maintaining a family. The challenge for married Catholics is to love one another not only with charity (as one does with temporary acquaintances, enemies, and colleagues) but in justice and as lifelong friends. How can you love your spouse with a true, deep, Christian love, while at the same time endure and actually enjoy the relationship for a lifetime? 66 The Angelus July - August 2013 St. Paul on Marriage Your Catholic spouse requires your love, friendship, communication, and your affection. These qualities are due as a simple matter of justice. Running a household requires a lot of communication about bills, repairs, and so on. But the marital relationship itself requires a certain psychological sophistication that certainly was not lost on the apostles. Consider the following verse from St. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians (Eph. 5:33): “Nevertheless let every one of you in particular love his wife as himself: and let the wife fear her husband.” St. Paul could have simply written that couples are to love each other. But he didn’t do that. Instead, he zeroed in on the most salient parts of love that men and women need. He wrote that men are to “love” their wives as themselves, and women are to “fear” (respect and honor) their husbands. Men need respect, which makes them feel loved. Women need to be cherished, which makes them feel loved. Consider the original context of the pertinent verbs in this verse. The English phonetization does not render well, especially without accent marks. Nonetheless, the rough exegesis of Greek, to Latin, to English, is the following: agapato = diligat = love (cherish or spiritual love); phobetai (or fovitai) = timeat = fear (respect). The root of agapato is agape, which is spiritual love. There is a spiritual element to marital love, which is shown when Christ elevated it to a sacrament. To show someone spiritual love is to love the person for the sake of the God who created him or her. Cherish your wife, respect your husband, and your marriage will thus be one of lifelong friends. Just as Christ and His one, true Church will not abandon each other, the bride and groom can never entertain the thought of abandoning one another, no matter how many years and tribulations pass. Consolations will eventually come. “Strive to remain patient,” wrote St. Ignatius of Loyola in the 16th century, “a virtue contrary to the troubles that harass you, and remember that you will be consoled.” The Husband’s Role St. Paul laid the philosophical (and practical) groundwork for a lifetime of spousal love in his letter to the Ephesians. St. Peter, as well, exhorted men to fulfill their marital roles: “Ye husbands, likewise dwelling with them according to knowledge, giving honour to the female as to the weaker vessel, and as to the co-heirs of the grace of life: that your prayers be not hindered” (I Pet. 3:7). There is a lot of content in that one passage. First, St. Peter recognizes that men have to live with their wives. Then he exhorts men to give “honor” to their wives because of their “weaker” feminine state. But he immediately points out that they can get to Heaven just as men. The last point, and the most interesting to Catholic spirituality, is that if men do not honor their wives, St. Peter implies that the prayer life of husbands will be hindered. This is a problem unique to the state of married men. You must first make sure your wife is taken care of, and then offer prayers to God with a clear mind. All prayer is efficacious, but your prayers will be hindered to the extent that you are not taking care of your marriage. This isn’t necessarily about money, either. It’s about leadership. Husbands can take pressure off their wives by spending time with the kids and disciplining them as needed. Many women appreciate this and it makes them feel taken care of. Give honor to the weaker vessel! “The man,” wrote St. Francis de Sales in the early 17th century, “who wishes to have a happy married life ought to consider the sanctity and dignity of the Sacrament of Matrimony.” The saint was following up on the practical advice of St. Paul, who wrote that a man who does not take care of his own household “is worse than an infidel” (I Tim. 5:6). Women represent the nurturing, emotionally connected side of matrimony. This is why they have been psychologically perceived throughout history as the “fairer” or “weaker” vessel. An emotional connection is a fragile thing; quiet masculine confidence is not so frail. Your wife needs your strength. She needs you to love her with a spiritual love, “as Christ also loved the Church” (Eph. 5:25). This love will help you look beyond her shortcomings. Remember, you are wedded to this person for the rest of your life in a permanent, sacramental union. Your true role is to get her to Heaven, because she is your “co-heir.” The Wife’s Role Many Catholic families have clearly defined roles, which provides a stable level of comfort and security for everyone in the family. Life, however, is not always so simple. Things happen. Jobs are lost. Families are uprooted. Bills go up. It might seem that the foundation of 67 Christian Culture your lifestyle is cracking beneath you. Perhaps these things happen so God can give you and your spouse a little nudge closer together and thus closer to Him. Is your marriage a material lifestyle or a sacrament? Remember the wisdom of St. Paul: Respect your husband (Eph. 5:33). It’s easy to respect power. It’s a lot harder to respect weakness, but this is when your husband needs your love the most. Look for evidence of your husband’s strength. It’s there, but it may be buried beneath heaps of trivial matters that piled up over years of mundane living. Christ, however, transforms everything from drudgery to joy (cf. John 10:10; II Cor. 5:17). Joy is a fruit of true friendship when the relationship is rooted in Christian charity. St. Therese of Lisieux pointed out the foundation of spiritual love in The Story of a Soul (chapter on “The way of love”). “[T]rue love feeds on sacrifice and becomes more pure and strong the more our natural satisfaction is denied.” Matrimony certainly needs natural affection (remember, you are not a nun), but it needs spiritual love even more. Making your marriage endure as a lifetime of friendship requires spiritual love, rooted in respect for your husband. This respect must be important or St. Paul wouldn’t have urged it in his exhortation on marriage to the Ephesians. He did not simply say to love your spouse with an agapelove. This is what he told men to do. For women, he says to have phobos—fear of offending their husbands. Respect! From this attribute, spiritual love can grow. A couple with spiritual love for each other will certainly have a happy, peaceful household. “The soul who is in love with God,” wrote St. John of the Cross in the 16th century, “is a gentle, humble, and patient soul.” Make the earnest calling of St. Francis of Assisi in the early 13th century your own for your marriage. “We have been called,” the saint said, “to heal wounds, to unite what has fallen apart, and to bring home those who have lost their way.” You can build a strong connection with your husband on a foundation of respect for him. This respect will need to be practiced daily. Examples 68 The Angelus July - August 2013 include holding your tongue, asking his advice, praising him in front of the kids, telling the kids you can’t wait to see him, waiting for his decision before you do anything major, never complaining about him to other women, and practicing submission to him. Apply your respect for him on a daily basis and watch your marriage transform itself over time. As Blessed Margaret d’Youville wrote in the 18th century, “all the wealth in the world cannot be compared with the happiness of living together happily united.” We will let Blessed Theophane Venard summarize these ideas with a closing thought from the 19th century: “Happiness is to be found only in the home where God is loved and honoured, where each one loves, and helps, and cares for the others.” A lifetime of love is thus certainly within your reach. 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. 362pp – Gold-embossed leatherette cover – Sewn binding – Rounded corners – Gilt edges – Ribbon– STK# 8555 – $24.95 Mother Love A complete prayer and devotional book specifically for moms! This “manual for Christian mothers” contains almost everything a mother needs to nurture and grow her spiritual life, so that she may truly be the heart of her Catholic home. Contains prayers to be said each day, various prayers specific to the needs of a wife and mother, as well as a section of instruction for Christian Mothers and instructions on Christian Education. This book is perfect for the mother or grandmother in your life! Contains: -- Morning and Evening Prayers for Mothers -- Devotions for the Holy Rosary -- Points of Doctrine a Christian Mother Should Teach to Her Children -- Prayers at Mass -- The “Ten Commandments” of Christian Education -- Devotions for Confession and Communion -- Devotions for the Poor Souls, and for the Way of the Cross -- Prayers for the Various Special Necessities of a Christian Mother -- Prayers to Some of the Special Patrons of Christian Mothers -- Indulgenced Prayers -- A short book of instructions for Christian Mothers on the Christian Training of Children Visit www.angeluspress.org — 1-800-966-7337 Please visit our website to see our entire selection of books and music. Book Review Young Stalin By Simon Sebag Montefiore Simon Sebag Montefiore’s description of Joseph Stalin’s life from his birth to the Bolshevik Revolution commences with two paragraphs so ingeniously constructed that they merit quotation in full. “At 10:30 a.m. on the sultry morning of Wednesday, 26 June 1907, in the seething central square of Tiflis, a dashing mustachioed cavalry captain in boots and jodhpurs, wielding a big Caucasian saber, performed tricks on horseback, joking with two pretty, well-dressed Georgian girls who twirled gaudy parasols—while fingering Mauser pistols hidden in their dresses. “Raffish young men in bright peasant blouses and wide sailor-style trousers waited on the street corners, cradling secreted revolvers and grenades. At the louche Tilichpuri Tavern on the square, a crew of heavily armed gangsters took over the cellar bar, gaily inviting passers-by to join them for drinks. All of them were waiting to carry out the first exploit by Josef Djugashvili, later known as Stalin, to win the attention of the world.”1 Moments later, masked by a barrage of bombs and gunfire which left more than 40 people dead, Stalin’s crew robbed the State Bank of nearly half a million rubles and transformed the Bolshevik Movement into a power to be reckoned with. For a nonfiction work, Mr. Montefiore’s opening bears surprising similarities to a novel. This is not a work of fiction, however, but rather a meticulously researched historical reconstruction. During more than a decade of research in Russia and Georgia, Mr. Montefiore has tracked down and compared the memoirs of Stalin’s mother, his school friends, fellow seminarians, mistresses, and his many terrorist followers. He has also compared these memoirs against reams of Tsarist secret police documents. Then, he presented to the world nothing less than the pre-history of the Soviet dictatorship. Many traditional Catholics have spent many years believing conspiracy theories and will not wish to be confused by historical truth. Others will be horrified by the gravity of the sins being described. For those of us with strong enough stomachs to withstand 70 The Angelus July - August 2013 his revelations, however, Simon Sebag Montefiore’s research cannot be overestimated. Mr. Montefiore has not only revealed the true brutality of both the Bolsheviks and their Tsarist enemies, he has also issued one of the most potent indictments of Marxism known to this reviewer. The test of any ideology rests in the moral character of its adherents. Therefore, the narcissism, clannishness, and paranoia epitomized by Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky should make anyone think twice about embracing the teachings of Karl Marx. For this reason, traditional Catholics owe their deepest thanks to Simon Sebag Montefiore. Synopsis Josef Djugashvili was born on December 6, 1878, in the village of Gori in the modern Republic of Georgia. His father, an alcoholic known as “Crazy Beso,” routinely abused Josef and his mother. Despite her husband’s obsession with making his son a shoemaker, the future dictator’s mother desired to see Josef educated for the Orthodox priesthood. Unfortunately, Gori possessed very few good examples for a future priest. In Gori, Orthodox feast-days combined religious piety with drunken brawls and gang violence in which even the priests took part. Sins of the flesh were a mark of pride for men of all ages. It is no surprise, therefore, that an increasing number of Georgians were falling away from Christianity altogether. Tragically for millions of innocents, Josef Djugashvili would be among them. After reading Charles Darwin’s, The Origin of Species, a teenaged Josef concluded that God did not exist.2 While attending an Orthodox seminary in Tiflis, he smuggled in forbidden books underneath his cassock and passed them from hand to hand. Despite routine raids on the boys’ lockers and excessive corporal punishment, the seminary priests were helpless to stop Josef. After being expelled, he plunged headfirst into terrorism and murder. Even when they disagree on ideology, terrorist organizations share many traits in common. Among them is the tendency to finance their armed struggle by aping the tactics of organized crime. Lenin’s Bolsheviks were a prime example of this. In the files of the Tsarist secret police, Stalin was described as the Bolshevik Party’s primary financier. His tools for raising money included bank robberies, extortion, piracy, and kidnappings for ransom. Policemen, corporate executives, and Tsarist officials who stood in Stalin’s way were routinely murdered. Despite being one of the most wanted terrorists in the Russian Empire, Stalin also found time to seduce scores of women. All, even those who became pregnant, were ultimately abandoned. For his entire life, Stalin remained married to the cause of Socialist Revolution. As a result, a young Stalin routinely dropped romances, engagement, friendships, and familial ties as soon as they became an obstruction to his revolutionary career. After seizing power, Stalin mercilessly destroyed countless friends and relations whom he suspected of betraying the Revolution. As the book climaxes with a myth-shattering account of the October Revolution, one cannot help but ponder the mixture of brutality and farce which characterized the Bolshevik seizure of power. The tragedy is compounded by how easily Lenin’s coup could have been prevented. Only their foolhardy continuation of the Great War destroyed first the Romanovs and then the Provisional Government, which had vowed to make Russia an American-style Republic. On October 26, 1917, a small army of Bolsheviks surrounded the Winter Palace and prepared to arrest the Provisional Government’s Cabinet, which was meeting inside. As soon as an ultimatum was delivered, the soldiers defending the Palace deserted their posts rather than fight for a government they despised. Furthermore, the Palace’s doors were left unlocked. One memoirist wrote without exaggeration that the Neva River washed the Provisional Government’s power away. After running up and down the corridors, the attackers at last located and entered the room wherein the Ministers were meeting. Upon being asked the reasons for his visit, an incredibly unkempt Bolshevik named Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko replied, “In the name of the Military-Revolutionary Committee, I declare all of you…under arrest.”3 As the Cabinet Ministers were taken to the St. Peter and Paul Fortress for imprisonment, Antonov- Ovseenko lost all control over his men. After locating the former Tsar’s wine cellar, the Bolsheviks launched into a drunken bacchanalia which soon infected the entire city. Meanwhile, Stalin, who had been charged with drafting an appeal to the Russian people, fell asleep at his typewriter. In the same room, Lenin and Trotsky bedded down for the night upon a pile of newspapers. Turning to Trotsky, Lenin sighed, “You know, it makes one’s head spin to pass so quickly from persecutions and living-in-hiding to power.”4 Conclusion At the end of his memoir, Conversations with Stalin, the Yugoslavian ex-Communist Milovan Djilas declared, “Every crime was possible to Stalin, for there was not one he had not committed. Whatever standards we use to take his measure, in any event— let us hope for all time to come—to him will fall the glory of being the greatest criminal in history. For in him were joined the criminal senselessness of a Caligula with the refinement of a Borgia and the brutality of a Tsar Ivan the Terrible.”5 The last word is best left to Russia’s greatest poet, Alexander Pushkin. In a chapter later excised from his adventure novel, The Captain’s Daughter, Pushkin proved that the Soviet State was lying by trying to paint him as a proto-Communist. He wrote, “God save us from seeing a Russian revolt, senseless and merciless. Those who plot impossible upheavals among us, are either young and do not know our people or are hard-hearted men who do not care a straw about their own lives or those of [others].”6 Brendan D. King 1 Simon Sebag Montefiore, Young Stalin (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), p. 3. 2 Ibid., p. 49. 3 Ibid., p. 346. 4 Ibid., p. 349. 5 Milovan Djilas, Conversations with Stalin (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World, Inc., 1962), p. 187. 6 The Poems, Prose, and Plays of Alexander Pushkin, selected, edited, and with an Introduction by Avrahm Yarmolinsky (New York: The Modern Library, 1936), p. 741. 71 Questions and Answers by Fr. Peter Scott, SSPX Is the “morning-after pill” ever licit? It is certainly very strange that a Catholic would feel the need to ask this question, which has already been many times resolved. However, to the shock, astonishment and scandal of faithful Catholics worldwide, the German Bishops’ Conference confirmed in February the approval of Cardinal Meisner, Archbishop of Cologne, for the use of the “morning-after pill” in 72 The Angelus July - August 2013 Catholic hospitals in cases of rape. And to add further to the scandal, the official representative from Rome, Bishop Ignacio Carrasco de Paula, President of the Pontifical Academy for Life, speaking in an interview with Vatican Insider on February 22, gave his full support to the decision of the German Bishops’ Conference in these words: “It is an exemplary law which reiterates what the Catholic Church has been proposing for the past 50 years—but a law that has been misinterpreted.…What Church teaching says in this case is: in cases of rape all possible action must be taken to prevent a pregnancy but not to interrupt it. Whether a given medicine is classed as a contraceptive or abortion-inducing medication is up to doctors and scientists, not the Church.” This issue raises two questions, whose resolution is, however, not as obvious as may seem. The first question is whether the morningafter pill is actually an abortifacient agent or whether it is simply contraceptive in its action, as some scientists maintain. This is also the position of those who maintain that the Obama administration’s contraceptive mandate does not force people to pay for abortion-inducing drugs. If it is abortifacient, then it is manifestly immoral. The second question is whether, given that it is not abortifacient but only a contraceptive agent, it could be considered as moral in extreme cases such as rape. Many moral theologians maintain that this is the case, and this is certainly the position of the German bishops and of the 2013 Pontifical Academy for Life. Is it abortifacient? The “morning-after pill” is a term used to describe hormonal medications that are designed to be administered after “unprotected” sexual intercourse. There are several different brands, such as Plan B One-Step. It does not follow from the fact that they are administered after sexual intercourse that they are necessarily abortifacient. Abortion is the termination of pregnancy by the killing of the fetus. The question as to whether such treatments are to be considered as abortions or not depends on when the fetus is considered to be a living being. Some scientists and obstetricians consider the beginning of the life of the fetus as being the time of implantation in the endometrium of the uterine wall, which is then taken to be the beginning of pregnancy. An equal number of scientists maintain that the beginning of life, and hence of pregnancy, is the moment of fertilization of the ovum, which precedes the implantation in the uterine wall (see the excellent article by James Agresti published on LifeSiteNews.com on March 1, 2013). The consequences of this different of opinion are far reaching. Those who believe that pregnancy only begins at implantation in the uterine wall maintain that drugs that prevent implantation are contraceptive agents, and not abortifacient, whereas those who believe that life begins at conception, that is at the union of the two zygotes, will clearly consider that a drug that prevents implantation is an abortifacient agent. However, a Catholic may not have a difference of opinion on this subject. Although the Church has not defined the moment of conception, which is the beginning of human life, it has always been the protector of that life from the very moment of conception. Since the fertilized ovum is alive and growing, independent, and has in itself all the genetic information from which the adult will grow, it cannot be considered as anything else but a living human being. If it has the organization of a living being, then it has the soul that gives life to that living being. Implantation in the uterine wall is but one stage in the development of the fetus, and to establish this as the moment of conception and the beginning of life and hence of pregnancy is entirely arbitrary. Hence a drug that prevents implantation must be considered as abortifacient. It is the Church’s decision We do not have the right to opt out of this discussion, as Bishop Carrasco de Paula tries to say, by affirming that it is up to doctors and scientists, and not to the Church to determine whether a given medicine is contraceptive or abortion-inducing. No, it is up to the Church to 73 Questions and Answers defend the very beginning of human life and to condemn the use of any medication that prevents the continuation of that life by implantation in the uterine wall as abortifacient, under pain of participation in the crime of abortion. In fact, it was the very Pontifical Academy for Life of which Bishop Carrasco de Paula is now the president that declared this on October 31, 2000, in its Statement on the so-called “morning-after pill.” It had this to say: “The decision to use the term ‘fertilized ovum’ to indicate the earliest phases of embryonic development can in no way lead to an artificial value distinction between different moments in the development of the same human individual. In other words, if it can be useful, for reasons of scientific description, to distinguish with conventional terms (fertilized ovum, embryo, fetus, etc.) different moments in a single growth process, it can never be legitimate to decide arbitrarily that the human individual has greater or lesser value (with the resulting variation in the duty to protect it) according to its stage of development....Moreover, it seems sufficiently clear that those who ask for or offer this pill are seeking the direct termination of a possible pregnancy already in progress, just as in the case of abortion. Pregnancy, in fact, begins with fertilization, and not with the implantation of the blastocyst in the uterine wall” (§2-3). Therefore, the statements frequently made by scientists that blocking the implantation of fertilized eggs does not constitute abortion are quite simply false. It is a termination of a pregnancy that has already begun and is thereby condemned by the Church. How does it work? However, this does not resolve the question, since there is a dispute as to the manner in which morning-after pills work. The principal mechanism is by suppressing ovulation if it 74 The Angelus July - August 2013 has not already occurred by the time that the medication is given. This is a contraceptive action, and is the most frequent way in which these medications work. It must be understood that the spermatozoa can remain alive in the woman’s reproductive tract for five or six days after intercourse and can still be able to fertilize an egg that may be ovulated several days after the “unprotected” intercourse. By preventing ovulation, these medications make this impossible. But this is not the only manner of action of these hormonal medications. They work even though ovulation has taken place before the medication is taken or around the same time. Some scientists maintain that this action is not by preventing implantation of the fertilized egg, but rather by other mechanisms, such as increasing cervical mucus viscosity and thereby preventing the sperm from swimming to the egg. However, this has never been proven, and there is much evidence to support the longstanding opinion that it is in fact implantation that these drugs prevent. It is for this reason that Dr. James Trussell and Dr. Elizabeth Raymond, in an academic review on these “emergency contraceptives,” although maintaining that these drugs’ effectiveness can be fully accounted for by non-abortifacient effects, had this to say: “To make an informed choice, women must know that [emergency contraceptive pills]…prevent pregnancy primarily by delaying or inhibiting ovulation, but may at times inhibit implantation of a fertilized egg in the endometrium” (quoted in LifeSiteNews.com February 22, 2013, by Patrick B. Craine). It is for this reason that the FDA obliges all the manufacturers of these pills to affirm that they may block implantation. James Agresti points this out in the above-mentioned article: “The website for Plan B One-Step states, ‘It is possible that Plan B One-Step may also work by…preventing attachment (implantation) to the uterus (womb).’ And the website for Next Choice states that the drug ‘works by preventing… attachment of the egg (implantation) to the uterus (womb).’ ” Consequently, these drugs are really no different from oral contraceptives, which are known to have an abortifacient effect on a regular basis, whenever ovulation is not suppressed. In such cases pregnancy is terminated by suppressing implantation in the womb. Well-known moral theologian Fr. Peter Damian Fehlner, S.T.D., had this to say in October 2007, commenting on the approval of the Connecticut bishops for the use of Plan B in Catholic hospitals: “The fact is, if we have any doubt about whether a given action would directly risk someone’s life, entail a violation of justice or threaten the salvation of a soul, we may not act on the basis of a scientific probability. That means that if the pill in Plan B is only ‘dubiously’ abortive, we simply may not use it at all” (www.airmaria.com, p. 576). Here we do well to refer again to the Pontifical Academy for Life’s 2000 Statement on the socalled morning-after pill. This statement, only 12 years old, clearly states that this pill “has a predominantly ‘anti-implantation’ function, that is, it prevents a possible fertilized ovum (which is a human embryo), by now in the blastocyst stage of its development (fifth to sixth day after fertilization), from being implanted in the uterine wall by a process of altering the wall itself” (§1). If some scientists might dispute the use of the word ‘predominantly,’ nobody can doubt that this can sometimes be the case. Hence the decision of the Statement still stands: “It is clear, therefore, that the proven ‘anti-implantation’ action of the morning-after pill is really nothing other than a chemically induced abortion. It is neither intellectually consistent nor scientifically justifiable to say that we are not dealing with the same thing” (§3). Since this document was attacked for being out of date, in February 2008 Bishop Sgreccia, then President of the Pontifical Academy for Life, was asked if the decisions were still valid (LifeSiteNews.com of February 29, 2008): “The position of the Church is the same. The morningafter pill is dangerous; it is an abortifacient when there is a conception and so illicit to prescribe by doctors. Thus there is the same position from the beginning of the presentation of this pill. It is not medicine, not a composition for health, so physicians are not obliged to prescribe it. It is forbidden for Catholic doctors to prescribe it and also to be requested by Catholics.” He was then asked the specific question that now concerns us, namely whether there could be an exception in cases or rape. His answer: “No. It is not able to prevent the rape. But it is able to eliminate the embryo.” Confusion amongst Catholics It cannot, therefore, be anything but the most obvious hypocrisy for the present president of the Pontifical Academy for Life to blithely state that the decision of the German bishops “is an exemplary law which reiterates what the Catholic Church has been proposing for the past 50 years.” This is quite simply a lie when put side by side with the decisions of his own Academy for Life of 2000 and 2008, which reiterated the constant teaching of the Church. It is for this reason that the secretary of the Spanish Bishops’ Conference on March 5, 2013, made a public statement refusing the decision of the German Bishops’ Conference and of Bishop Carrasco de Paula. Bishop Juan Antonio Martinez Camino had this to say: “If there is a pill that prevents conception in cases of rape, then it is licit to prevent it. However, we have no knowledge of a morning-after pill without abortifacient effects.…if it did exist, we would be sure to know it.…All morning-after pills have this possible abortive effect. Therefore, its use is illicit” (LifeSiteNew.com, March 5, 2013). Would it be permissible if purely contraceptive? This brings us to the other delicate question. If we were to imagine that these medications were purely contraceptive, with no abortifacient effect, would they then be permissible in cases of rape on account of the violence exerted against the woman. Many Catholic authors, such as Bishop 75 Questions and Answers Martinez Camino, admit that in such extraordinary cases the use of a contraceptive would be permissible since it does not take away human life. They consider the seed of the rapist to be an unjust aggressor and that, consequently, its effect can be prevented by contraception. However, if this were truly the case, then it could hardly be said that contraception is intrinsically evil and against nature. If contraception is permitted in one emergency exception, what is to stop other emergency exceptions, and if so, it could only be considered evil from the circumstances, and not in itself. The truth here can be considered on two levels. The first concerns the morality of contraception itself, and the second the consideration of what means are licit for those women who have suffered the horrifying violence of rape. That the intrinsic evil of contraception excludes its use at any time and for any reason was clearly defined by Pope Pius XI in his 1930 encyclical on Christian Marriage. He does so by declaring that it is against the natural law; namely, that contraception is an unnatural act, which means that it is not just a sin against a commandment of God, but against the nature of man, because it is a perversion of the very act of human procreation. As such, it is always immoral and cannot become permissible for any reason whatsoever: “But no reason whatever, even the gravest, can make what is intrinsically against nature become conformable with nature and morally good. The conjugal act is of its very nature designed for the procreation of offspring: therefore those who in performing it deliberately deprive it of its natural power and efficacy, act against nature and do something which is shameful and intrinsically immoral” (§54). As John Western pointed out in LifeSiteNews.com of October 23, 2007, even John Paul II repeated this doctrine, making this statement on October 10, 1983: “Contraception is to be judged objectively so profoundly unlawful, as never to be, for any reason, justified. To think or to say the contrary is equal to maintaining that in human life, situations may arise in which it is lawful not to recognize God as God.” He also quotes the Pontifical Council for the Family’s statement of 76 The Angelus July - August 2013 March 1, 1997: “The Church has always taught the intrinsic evil of contraception…this teaching is to be held as definitive and irreformable.” It follows from this that even the immoral use of the conjugal act by those who are not married cannot justify the use of the contraception. Rape adds to this immorality an injustice. However, this injustice cannot justify another sin, and this one against nature, in order to protect the woman from the effects of the rape. Consequently, there is no such thing as licit emergency contraception, nor could any emergency justify it. What can be done for victims of rape? The circumstantial response to the particular problem of rape concerns the determination of the means that are licit for a woman to protect herself from the unjust aggression of the rape. For only licit means can be used for a good end. No good end can justify an illicit means. The old theologians did not discuss the question of contraception, but did discuss the question of vaginal washings to eliminate the seed, as if it were an unjust aggressor. St. Alphonsus considered this to be illicit. Merkelbach in his Summa Theologiae Moralis, Vol. II, §1010, refutes the opinion of the 20th-century moral theologians who considered that this is licit, and gives the following reasons: “Man does not have dominion over his seed, and therefore every action which directly concerns the seed is illicit, except that which is intended by nature, namely marital intercourse…because it is a great injury against human generation and the common good to expel the seed from the final place to which it is destined by nature than to expel the seed by procuring pollution [self-abuse]…because it is licit to repel the aggression during the act of intercourse itself, but not afterwards, since then the aggression has ceased and the seed is in its place, to which it is destined by nature… for it is illicit to interrupt the work of nature in human generation.” For us it sounds strange for a theologian to state that man does not have control and power over his own seed, but this is explained in the following way: “Man does not have dominion over his seed, but it belongs to the species; and in the whole process of generation, the individual is to be entirely subordinated to the species.” This gives an understanding of the sanctity of the act of generation in the natural law, which is not lost even when it is used in an immoral way. Father Merkelbach answers the objection that to leave the seed in place is to allow the effect of injustice to remain: “The effect can be removed by licit means, but not by illicit means, as an action that is directly against the seed or the fetus, just as it is illicit to directly kill the innocent in order to protect oneself against an unjust harm” (ibid.). It is true that post-conciliar moral theologians, such as Fr. Peter Damian Fehlner, do not agree with the eminent Dominican, writing in 1935, and consider that a flushing or vaginal washing before conception is permissible (www.airmaria. com, op. cit.) as a licit means. He fails, however, to fully comprehend the full weight of Father Merkelbach’s argument in the natural law, and simply states that such “a flushing before conception has occurred is but an aspect of abstinence from sexual intercourse, a negative action.” This argument is not at all convincing, for it is done after the forced intercourse and, consequently, after the unjust aggression has come to an end; and it is a positive attack on the seed, and not a purely negative action. However, regardless of this dispute, any Catholic moral theologian can understand Father Merkelbach’s principle; we must distinguish between licit and illicit means. Contraception is always illicit because it is intrinsically evil. Consequently, it cannot be allowed even in cases of rape, and the injustice performed against the woman cannot justify another injustice against the natural law concerning the act of human procreation. It is thus a sign of great decadence that so many Catholic authors speak in such a way as to say that if the morning-after pill were purely contraceptive and not abortifacient, then it would be morally permissible. They are directly opposing themselves to the Church’s constant teaching in saying so. 77 Painted ceiling central nave, cathedral of s’Hertogenbosch, Netherlands Church and World Act of Consecration of the Priestly Society of Saint Pius X to Saint Joseph, Patron of the Universal Church, March 19, 2013 O glorious Saint Joseph, Spouse of the Immaculate Virgin, Foster Father of the Son of God, appointed Head of the Holy Family and raised up as Heavenly Patron of the Universal Church; Thou whose faith triumphed over doubt, whose justice was as great as thy chastity, whose obedience was the servant of thy wisdom, whose strength went hand in hand with thy prudence, and whose magnanimity vied with thy humility; Thou model of those devoted to labor, assurance 80 The Angelus July - August 2013 of those in the midst of battle, terror of the demons unleashed against the work of the Redeemer; Thou who didst employ all thy virtues in saving the God-man from grave perils, and who from on high dost protect His Mystical Body, subjected to the everrenewed attacks of its enemies; Cast thine eyes upon this little portion of the flock of Jesus Christ, which an inscrutable plan of God has raised up to safeguard the Catholic priesthood and the Catholic Faith. Conscious of its nothingness and enlivened by a boundless confidence in thy powerful patronage, O Blessed Patriarch Joseph, the Priestly Society of Saint Pius X consecrates itself to thee, with all its members and all its undertakings, in order to magnify thy glories and thy virtues. Deign in return, O most generous Steward of the King of Glory’s bounty, to grant to this little family the same benefits that thy paternity obtains for the entire Church: deign to make it thine own, to keep it faithful to its statutes, to make it live and propagate the Sacrifice of the Altar, to enrich it with spiritual life, to establish its members in the sanctity and chastity proper to their state, to strengthen it in its holy apostolic labors, to lead it in the combat for the Faith, to thwart the traps of the Enemy and to make it serve the interests of the Church. Deign also, O our faithful Intercessor, to make of this humble legion of restorers a firm support for the Roman Pontiff in his mission to confirm his brothers in the clear and entire profession of Faith of St. Peter: Thou art Christ, the Son of the living God. O thou who wast providentially placed at the side of Mary our Queen, grant that we, through thine irresistible intercession with Jesus, Sovereign Priest and King of Eternal Glory, may live and preach in all their most concrete consequences the divinity, the priesthood and the royalty of this same Jesus Christ, Who with the Father and the Holy Ghost liveth and reigneth, God, world without end. Amen. Fatima and Devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary On Monday, May 13, 2013, Cardinal José da Cruz Policarpo, Patriarch of Lisbon, consecrated the pontificate that has just begun to Our Lady of Fatima. This consecration was made during the Mass marking the 96th anniversary of the apparitions of the Virgin Mary, at the explicit request of Pope Francis. “O Blessed Virgin, we are at your feet to carry out the request clearly expressed by Pope Francis to consecrate to you, O Virgin of Fatima, his ministry as Bishop of Rome and universal pastor,” Cardinal Policarpo declared, in the presence of 270,000 pilgrims who gathered at the Portuguese shrine on the occasion of the Feast of Our Lady of Fatima. On October 31, 1942, in the midst of international conflict, Pius XII consecrated the Church and the world to the Immaculate Heart of Mary: “Queen of the Holy Rosary, Help of Christians, Refuge of the human race, Conqueress in God’s battlefields, here we are prostrate before your throne, beseeching you, in the assurance of obtaining mercy and grace and the helps needed in the midst of the present calamities.…To you and to your Immaculate Heart in this tragic hour of human history we entrust and give and consecrate not only Holy Church, the Mystical Body of your Jesus, suffering and bleeding in so many places and tormented in so many ways, but also the whole world, torn by bitter strife and consumed by the fire of hatred, the victim of its own wickedness.” Mary, terrible as an army set in battle array, pray for us! Death of Abbé Dominique Lagneau, Prior of Montgardin and Head Chaplain of Mary’s Militia With profound sorrow, the General House of the Society of Saint Pius X announced the sudden death of Fr. Dominique Lagneau, superior of the house of priestly retreats at Montgardin, on Sunday, May 12, at about 5:30 in the afternoon. He apparently suffered a heart attack while taking some rest at the Marian sanctuary of Notre Dame de Laus. A Frenchman, he was ordained at Ecône on June 29, 1981, by His Excellency Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, founder of the FSSPX. Posted to Unieux, a year later he became its prior and then was named professor successively at the seminaries of Ecône and Flavigny. He was then rector of the seminary at La Reja, Argentina, for thirteen years, prior at Dijon, associate priest at Meylan and Gastines, and finally prior of the house of priestly retreats at Montgardin, near Gap, since its opening in 2011. He was also the head chaplain of the Militia of Mary, which he directed with infectious zeal and enthusiasm. Fr. Lagneau’s funeral was held on Friday, May 17, at 3 o’clock in the church of Saint-André-desCordeliers, Gap. The Most Reverend Bernard Fellay, Superior General of the SSPX, was the celebrant. The wake was held at the Chapel of Maison NotreDame. His mortal remains were laid to rest in the cemetery on the retreat house grounds. 81 Church and World Syria: The Long Calvary of the Christians Bishop Antoine Audo, S.J., Chaldean bishop of Aleppo and president of Caritas Syria, spoke to the news agency Fides on April 10 about the precarious situation of the inhabitants of Aleppo, who can be seen in the streets with plastic bags, searching everywhere for a bit of food. Hundreds of Catholic families have had to leave the Cheikh Maksoud quarter after the arrival of the rebel militias in early April. Many streets are closed, unusable, making visits to the sick and the dying difficult. Most of the doctors were forced with threats to flee, and the fate of two priests, an Armenian Catholic and a Greek Orthodox, kidnapped by armed men two months ago on the road between Aleppo and Damascus, is still unknown, explained Bishop Audo. The Cheikh Maksoud quarter, situated on a hill dominating Aleppo, added Fr. David Fernandez, a missionary of the Institute of the Incarnate Word, is a strategic sector for those who wish to take over the city center where the government buildings are located. Some of the city-center streets are already closed and “no one can travel on them anymore because snipers fire on any moving thing.” In Cheikh Maksoud, Christians used to make up the majority of the population. In the last few years, the Kurdish population became the majority, but there remained many Christian families, grouped around the Armenian-Catholic and Greek Orthodox churches. Archbishop Samir Nassar, Maronite archbishop of Damascus, reported on April 13 the crucifying dilemma of the Syrian Christians, “forced to choose between two bitter chalices: death or exile,” which is “another, [slower] way to die.” In the neighboring countries, where the number of refugees is constantly increasing, 82 The Angelus July - August 2013 the situation is more and more critical. The High Police Precinct for the refugees of the United Nations (HCR) has “sounded the alarm.” The operations to help Syrian refugees are coming to an end for lack of sufficient funds. In the city, there are bombings, trapped cars, starvation, and a lack of medication and care. “Two hundred thirty-three hospitals have been closed and the doctors are fleeing,” explained the Archbishop of Damascus. The parishes have “become a wailing wall to which the Christians turn every day to find protection and help in their attempts to obtain a visa to leave.” “The indifference and silence of the international community before their long, sad calvary” is oppressing for the Syrian Christians, who, “abandoned,” find themselves “condemned to death and unable to flee,” continued the prelate. “The consulates have been closed for a year and a half.” The wealthier have been able to leave, but the poorer Christians do not understand why they must die in a senseless war. “Today, the Church is the only resource for these shipwrecked souls.…But the pastors, too, are confronted with a dilemma: to tell their faithful to stay is to condemn them to death; but helping them leave means emptying the Biblical Land of its last faithful Christians,” concluded Archbishop Nassar. The Syrian Christians proclaimed Saturday, May 11, a day of prayer to “beg God to grant mercy to Syria and to put an end to the violence,” asking all to “limit themselves to local reunions throughout the country, in homes, meeting places, and churches,” because of the high risks of traveling in the combat zones. Fr. David Fernandez, present in Aleppo, explained to the agency Fides that “the population was waiting with anguish for the month of May, to ask Mary for the grace of peace. We celebrate Mass every afternoon with the refugees and those who are able to come and we recite the Holy Rosary for this intention. Everyone sings the litany and the final hymn to the Virgin with great emotion. They ask Mary for the gift of peace, turning to her as the only one who can still help them to keep hope alive in the terrible situation that we are living through.” (Sources: Apic/Fides/afp – DICI, No. 275 May 17, 2013) Toward a Rapid Reform of the Roman Curia? On April 13, 2013, the Secretary of State of the Holy See issued the following communiqué: “Pope Francis, adopting a suggestion made during the General Congregations that preceded the conclave, established a group of cardinals to advise him in the government of the Universal Church and to study a plan for revising the Apostolic Constitution Pastor Bonus [dated June 28, 1988,] on the Roman Curia.” The communiqué stated that this group of cardinals is composed of Giuseppe Bertello, President of the Governatorate of Vatican City State; Francisco Javier Errázuriz Ossa, Archbishop emeritus of Santiago del Cile (Chile); Oswald Gracias, Archbishop of Bombay (India); Reinhard Marx, Archbishop of Munich and Freising (Germany); Laurent Monswengo Pasinya, Archbishop of Kinshasa (Democratic Republic of Congo); Sean Patrick O’Malley, O.F.M. Cap., Archbishop of Boston (U.S.A.); George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney (Australia); Oscar Andrés Rodríguez Maradiaga, S.D.B., Archbishop of Tegucigalpa (Honduras), who will also be in charge of co-ordinating the members. Bishop Marcello Semeraro, Bishop of Albano, was appointed secretary of this group of advisors. It was noted that “the first meeting of the Group will take place October 1-3, 2013.” The pope “however is already in contact with…the abovementioned Cardinals.” The news agency Apic, in a dispatch dated April 13, commented on this communiqué: “By the creation of this informal group—not a Pontifical Council or a Commission, Vatican sources specify— which is tasked with advising him in governing the Church and in preparing a reform of the Curia, the new Supreme Pontiff seems to be trying to respond to the urgent request of many cardinals who met before the last conclave with a view to Curial reform and greater collegiality.…For this group, which is ‘consultative and not decision-making,’ as Vatican spokesman Fr. Federico Lombardi explained, Pope Francis called on only one Italian, the diplomat Giuseppe Bertello. Although he is not a full-fledged member of the Curia, since he heads the Vatican City State, he is the only one who resides in Rome. That being the case, some imagine that he could be appointed Secretary of State in the near future.” Apic made several clarifications: To co-ordinate this group, the pope designated the Honduran Cardinal Oscar Andrés Rodríguez Maradiaga, who is a Salesian, the Archbishop of Tegucigalpa and also the President of Caritas Internationalis. The secretary of the group is the Bishop of Albano—a diocese near Rome in which Castel Gandolfo (the summer residence of the popes) is located—Bishop Semeraro. He already collaborated with Cardinal Bergoglio in 2001, during the Synod of Bishops in which the future pope was special secretary and the Italian prelate was general reporter. On April 13, the Agence France Presse added: “These cardinals will have to revise the Apostolic Constitution Pastor Bonus promulgated by John Paul II in 1988 for the Roman Curia, an organization that Benedict XVI was not able to reform.…The government of the Holy See was affected by the ‘Vatileaks’ affair in which confidential documents of Benedict XVI were leaked. A 300-page report written by three cardinals was delivered to the new pope. But there is also an avalanche of revelations, whether founded or not, concerning sexual and financial scandals that has swept over the Vatican and the Church—above all, revelations about pedophilia scandals involving thousands of priests in the past, which have profoundly shaken the Church. The fact that the collegiality called for by the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) has remained to a great extent a dead letter under Benedict XVI—who used to convene his ‘ministers’ in a very formal manner at most twice a year—had very often been deplored in this regard.” The April 15 issue of Le Figaro provided a similar explanation: “This pope wants to continue the reform of the Curia explicitly carried out by John Paul II from 1985 to 1988, the application of which, however, because of passive internal resistance, was only carried out very incompletely. He hopes, along the same lines, to accomplish what Vatican II had decided on: greater ‘collegiality’ in the government of the Church. An end, therefore, to the ‘papal court’ and ‘Roman centralism’ for the sake of greater involvement of the cardinals and bishops from all 83 Church and World five continents in major decisions.” In fact, on April 15, the secretary of the newly formed group, Bishop Marcello Semeraro, granted an interview to the Corriere della Sera that confirmed the journalists’ analyses. “We cannot rule out the possibility that the Secretariat of State of the Holy See will have fewer powers,” the Bishop of Albano asserted. Whereas Paul VI had increased its powers so that the Secretariat of State could serve as a unifying connection between the pope and the dicasteries, it is necessary to adapt structures with regard to the needs of the Church today, he opined, recalling that Benedict XVI himself, at the time when he announced his resignation, had spoken about the need to confront the rapid changes of today’s world. Bishop Semeraro declared that the heads of dicasteries, and particularly the prefects of Congregations, wished for a return to regular audiences granted by the Supreme Pontiff, for more frequent and direct contact. “In recent years,” he confided, “those in charge of dicasteries had lost their autonomy and the Secretariat of State had closer contact with the pope, too close for some people’s taste.” The Italian prelate answered a question about the precise role of this group by saying that this unprecedented entity would by no means replace the organizations of the Curia and would not be a part of it. He preferred to speak about a “little synod of communion that gathers bishops from all continents,” and he did not hesitate to draw a parallel with the synod of bishops desired by Paul VI. Nevertheless, he announced, the group of cardinals will meet much more often, probably every two or three months. “We will know within the next few days what subjects will be treated in October, at the first meeting.” On April 17, Cardinal Francesco Coccopalmerio, President of the Pontifical Council for the Interpretation of Legislative Texts, declared during a program on the Italian public television channel Rai Storia that a reform of the Curia would be carried out “rapidly.” “This pope is losing no time,” he reassured the listeners. “The reform ought to begin with the Roman Curia, which is the tool in the pope’s hands.” According to the Roman prelate, the pope cannot carry out his activities alone, but should entrust this work to the dicasteries; this 84 The Angelus July - August 2013 implies that the pope must always be acquainted with the work of each dicastery. In his view, the Secretariat of State of the Holy See could remain in place, with its individuality and its functions, but it would be assisted more permanently by a little college of three or four persons, which, however, would be different from the group of cardinals recently appointed by the pope. Cardinal Coccopalmerio, former auxiliary bishop of the very progressive Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini—Archbishop of Milan for more than 15 years and a proponent of greater collegiality in the Church—thus confirmed that the trend started by Pope Francis was headed in the direction of a more collegial papal power. “One of the demands of the conclave that appeared during the General Congregations,” the Roman cardinal asserted, “was to place alongside the pope competent persons from all four corners of the world, who will convey the complaints of the various Christian communities.” However on April 30, in L’Osservatore Romano, the daily Italian edition of the Vatican newspaper, Archbishop Angelo Becciu, substitute of the Secretariat of State, granted an interview that reframed the commentaries by those prelates and journalists over the previous two weeks. To the question: “Concerning the reform of the Curia, many have called for a balance of powers, moderators, co-ordinators, ‘superministers of the economy,’ revo­ lutions…,” Archbishop Becciu replied: “It is rather odd: the pope has not yet met this group of advisors that he selected, and already there is a torrent of advice. Having spoken with the Holy Father, I can say that at the moment it is altogether premature to advance any hypothesis whatsoever concerning the future organization of the Curia. Pope Francis is listening to everybody, but in the first place he will want to listen to those whom he has chosen as advisors. Then a plan for reforming Pastor Bonus will be organized, which obviously will have to run its course.” As for the question about a “rapid” reform, here is Archbishop Becciu’s response: “I cannot tell when it will be done.…All [heads of dicasteries] will continue in office ‘until other arrangements are made’ (donec aliter provideatur). This shows the Holy Father’s intention to take the time necessary for reflection—and for prayer, we should never forget—so as to have an in-depth picture of the situation.” To the objection that this group of advisors could call into question the primacy of the pope, the Roman prelate responded: “We are talking about a consultative body, not a decision-making body, and really I do not see how Pope Francis’ choice could call the primacy into question. On the other hand, it is true that this is a very important gesture, which intends to give a clear signal as to the methods by which the Holy Father will want to carry out his ministry.” He explained: “The function of advisor must be interpreted in a theological sense: from a worldly perspective we would have to say that an advisory panel without deliberative authority is irrelevant, but that would mean equating the Church with a business. Instead, theologically, the act of advising absolutely does have an important function: it helps the superior in his work of discernment, it helps him understand what the Spirit is asking of the Church at a precise historical moment. Without this [theological] reference, moreover, one would not understand either the authentic meaning of the activity of governance in the Church.” On the occasion of this interview, the substitute of the Secretariat of State remarked on the rumor that has made the rounds in the press of a possible suppression of the Institute for Works of Religion (IOR): “The pope was surprised to see attributed to him statements that he never uttered and that misrepresent his thinking. The only time he mentioned this subject was during a brief impromptu homily at the Casa Santa Marta [on April 24], in which he passionately recalled that the essence of the Church consists of a love story between God and humanity, and that the various human structures, among them the IOR, are less important. The allusion was made in a humorous tone, prompted by the presence at the Mass of several employees of the Institute, within the context of a serious invitation never to lose sight of the essential character of the Church.” Commentary: This clarification, which appeared on the front page of L’Osservatore Romano, is explained by the peculiar atmosphere that prevails in Rome at the start of this new pontificate. A Roman observer confided to DICI that several prelates and some Vatican-watchers are eager to attribute to the pope the intentions that they would like to see implemented. They anticipate, hoping that their personal desires will turn into Roman decisions, or else into appointments; and they urgently want this anticipation of theirs to become a news item. In this case, it was a disappointment instead. (Sources: News.va/Osservatore Romano/AFP/ Apic/IMedia/Corriere della sera – DICI, No. 275, May 17, 2013) 85 Theological Studies Two Romes, Two Churches Exclusive Interview with Fr. Jean-Michel Gleize By Angelus Press The Angelus: Father, you recently offered an explanation saying that the expression “Conciliar Church” does not signify an institution distinct from the Catholic Church, but rather a “tendency” within it. (See the February 2013 issue of Courrier de Rome, cited in part by DICI.) Wouldn’t the logical consequence of this theory be then that the Traditionalist movement should rejoin the official structure of the Church, so as to fight, from within, the conciliar “tendency” and thus to bring about the triumph of Tradition? Fr. Gleize: I ask you in turn: what do you mean by “official structure”? Logically, this expression makes a distinction with some other structure that would be non-official: where is it, in your view? For my part, it seems to me that there is the Church and there is her visible structure; and in the Church’s structure there is the good spirit and the bad spirit, the latter having taken hold of the minds of the leaders and wreaking havoc under the pretext of government by the hierarchy. If there is an official structure to which 86 The Angelus July - August 2013 we do not belong and which we should rejoin, then either it is the visible hierarchy of the Catholic Church and we are schismatics, and as such outside the visible Church; or else it is a visible hierarchy other than that of the Catholic Church and we are the Catholic Church inasmuch as it is distinct from the conciliar Church; but then where is our pope? Is our pope the Bishop of Rome, and who is the Bishop of Rome in our Tradition? The Angelus: We often hear the authorities of the Society say that it is necessary to “help the Catholic Church reclaim her Tradition.” Don’t you think that this sort of statement could leave the faithful confused? For the Catholic Church could not exist without her Tradition; she would no longer be the Catholic Church. Fr. Gleize: If you consider the Church figuratively as a person, then your question makes sense. But the Church is not a person like you or me; she is a society, and then things are not that simple. “To help the Church reclaim her Tradition” is an expression in which the whole is taken for the part, that is, those men of the Church who are infected by the bad spirit. This figure of speech is legitimate, and a person of good will does not misinterpret it. In the past, the popes have indeed spoken about “reforming the Church.” Now the Church as such does not need to be reformed. Therefore the popes meant not the Church per se, but certain persons in the Church. The Angelus: But Father, do you really think that we can talk about a “tendency” in order to describe the modernism that is wreaking havoc in the Church, since the liberal and Masonic ideas of Vatican II are, so to speak, institutionalized by the reforms affecting all aspects of the life of the Church: liturgy, catechism, ritual, Bible, ecclesiastical tribunals, higher education, Magisterium, and above all, canon law? Fr. Gleize: You were right to say “so to speak.” This is indeed evidence (at least unconscious) that here again things are not that simple. Do not forget, in any case, that I am not the first to speak about tendencies to describe the current situation of the Church occupied by modernism. Recall the 1974 Declaration, which Archbishop Lefebvre wanted to make the Charter of the Society: Archbishop Lefebvre speaks precisely about a “Rome with a neo-Modernist, neoProtestant tendency, which clearly manifested itself in the Second Vatican Council and after the Council in all the reforms that resulted from it.” Archbishop Lefebvre does not mean that there are two Romes or two Churches diametrically opposed to one another, as two mystical bodies and two societies would be. He means that there is Rome and the Church, the one Mystical Body of Christ, of which the visible head is the pope, Bishop of Rome and Vicar of Christ. But there are also bad tendencies that have been introduced into this Church because of the false ideas that are wreaking havoc in the minds of those who are in power in Rome. Incidentally this is the argument repeated in the recent February issue of Courrier de Rome. Yes, the reforms are bad; but the result of them is to instill these tendencies (which remain at the status of tendency) into the things that are reformed: thus we have a new Mass, new sacraments, a new Magisterium, a new canon law. And therefore a new Church also. But these expressions mean to point out the corruption that is wreaking havoc within the Church, not another distinct, separate Church. For example, in the examination that took place on January 11-12, 1979, in response to the questions posed by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Archbishop Lefebvre spoke about the new Mass as follows: “This rite in itself does not profess the Catholic faith as clearly as the old Ordo missae and consequently it may promote heresy....What is astonishing is that an Ordo missae that smacks of Protestantism and therefore favens haeresim [is promoting heresy] could be promulgated by the Roman Curia.”1 You will note that all his words are carefully weighed: “not...as clearly as”; “may promote”; “smacks of Protestantism”; “favens, promoting.” These are the words of a wise man, the words of a man who pays attention to what he says. Archbishop Lefebvre also said: “I never denied that these Masses said faithfully according to the Novus Ordo were valid; nor did I ever say that they were heretical or blasphemous.”2 Careful, therefore! Let us be firm, but let us not be simplistic. The bad tendencies become more or less encrusted on the life of the Church, yet we cannot say that there are always and everywhere new institutions completely foreign to the Church. In all the examples that you mention, it is a question of innovations devised by men of the Church. But the power that they employed (quite abusively) to impose those novelties is one thing, and the visible hierarchy to which they belong is another. The liberal and Masonic ideas of Vatican II have been “institutionalized,” if you want to use that term, but let us reflect on what we mean by that formula: precisely these are new ideas which are at the outset of new tendencies. Ideas have enormous consequences, but they are subtly inoculated in people’s minds, they are not an institution, as an entire separate Church can be. Because otherwise, everybody would see it and everybody would say it, don’t you think? How can we explain the fact that many people, whom we can certainly suppose are nevertheless somewhat thoughtful and well-meaning, continue to think that the Church remains the Church, even though disorder prevails in it extensively. The Angelus: No doubt, but these tendencies are not Catholic! They cause people to lose the faith and separate them from the Church. We are not the ones who left the Catholic Church; they are, even though they succeeded in taking command of the official structure. We are therefore confronting a structure, an institution different from the Catholic Church. If 87 Theological Studies that were not the case, we would be members of it! Fr. Gleize: If I follow your logic to the end, I must conclude that the conciliar Church exists therefore as a schismatic sect formally different from the Catholic Church. Therefore, all its members are materially at least schismatic, including all those who have rejoined it; they are outside the Church; one cannot give them the sacraments until they have publicly recanted; the conciliar popes are anti-popes; if we are the Catholic Church either we have no pope (and then where is our visible character?), or else we have one (and then who is it and is he the Bishop of Rome?). The Angelus: As for the place of the pope in all this, we certainly must admit that there is a mystery here, a mystery of iniquity. Fr. Gleize: No doubt, but a mystery is a truth that surpasses reason; that the Church should be habitually deprived of her head is an absurdity and contrary to the promises of indefectibility. One of the reasons the founder of the Society of Saint Pius X could rely on to reject the sedevacantist hypothesis was that “the matter of the visibility of the Church is too essential to its existence for God to be able to do without it for decades; the reasoning of those who assert the non-existence of the pope places the Church in an insoluble situation.”3 Actually, your reasoning is more or less equivalent to sedevacantism. This is nothing new; but it is an old error that was already condemned by the founder of the Society of Saint Pius X. Pardon me if I disappoint you, but I will not run the risk of trying to be wiser than Solomon! The 40 years of Archbishop Lefebvre’s episcopate matter, if not in the sight of men, at least in the sight of God. Archbishop Lefebvre was a great man, a great bishop, because he was a man of the Church. The Angelus: Thank you, Father Gleize. 88 1 “Mgr Lefebvre et le Saint-Office,” Itinéraires 233 (May 1979): 146-147. 2 Archbishop Lefebvre, Conferences in Ecône on December 2 and January 10, 1983. 3 Archbishop Lefebvre, Conference in Ecône, October 5, 1978. The Angelus July - August 2013 Letters to the Editor Dear Angelus Press, I’ve noticed over time that some of your articles do not contain very specific direction on how to apply the ideas given in those same articles. In fact, I shared the same question as a previous writer of the letters to the editor, looking for more information on Mr. Rayes’ ideas of how I should go about some of the different family practices he suggests. Is it possible to get more specific information, not only from Mr. Rayes, but on all of your articles? Ideas are nice, but they don’t go far enough. Sincerely, Steven B., California Dear Steven, Thank you for writing. I think your letter hits upon a couple of points that are important to discuss. As you say in your letter, you’d like more specific direction on how to apply certain principles. This is certainly good and praiseworthy, but also very difficult to do, at least on a global scale. Let me explain. The first goal of The Angelus is to give clear, orthodox principles. These principles, by their very nature, must rise above the specific direction you mention. Why? Because every individual finds himself in varying circumstances, which means his application of a principle must, by necessity, vary. Allow me an example. Let’s say you bought a dog. You might then go buy a dog raising book, which will give you certain “principles” of raising a dog. It will tell you that your dog needs daily exercise of a certain amount, regular grooming, clean food and water, etc. Beyond that, the practical “how” is left to you. Whether you walk your dog through the woods, through an open field, or down a city sidewalk will all depend on the very real circumstances in which you find yourself. The same is true of almost all of our articles. While we want to give general direction, even on a practical level, the specifics must be left to the individual reader to work out. So, we will certainly work to make sure there is more direction and more recommendations, but without ever giving overly specific direction. 640pp – Softcover – STK# 8557 – $27.95 The Second Vatican Council: An Unwritten Story Read the internationally acclaimed new book by Roberto de Mattei (who will be speaking at this year’s Angelus Press Conference—details on pages 56-57) Learn the Truth About Vatican II In the past, any critical review or discussion of the actual events which took place at the Council was brushed aside as a discussion untenable for a Catholic to hold. Now, from the discussions of the Society of St. Pius X to the books of Msgr. Gherardini, or the renewed interest in the work of Romano Amerio, this discussion is now happening in a never-before-seen way. In that vein, the renowned Italian historian Roberto de Mattei takes up his pen to answer a question that has still not fully been answered, "What happened at the Council?" Sample chapters contain: - The Pontificate of Pius XII: Triumph or the Start of a Crisis? - The Reactions to Neo-Modernism during the Pontificate of Pius XII - Angelo Roncalli: Conservative or Revolutionary? - Italy “Opens” to the Left - The Break with Council Procedures - “Some Fresh Air in the Church” - The Anti-Roman Party in the Second Session - Why Doesn’t Vatican II Speak of Hell? - The Pacifist Appeal in the Council Hall - 1968: The Revolution in Society - The Secularization of the Liturgy www.angeluspress.org — 1-800-966-7337 Please visit our website to see our entire selection of books and music. The Last Word Dear Readers, Devotions can be defined as external practices of piety, ones which aid in the sanctification of souls. Prominent examples in Roman Catholic tradition are litanies to the saints, novenas, the wearing of blessed medals, vigils, Eucharistic adoration, and, of course, the Rosary. Additionally, one of the essential devotions fostered within the Society of St. Pius X centers on the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Our Lady, appearing regularly to three Portuguese shepherd children during six consecutive months, explained to them that Christ Himself is greatly pleased by devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. On June 13, 1917, the Blessed Virgin noted: “Jesus wants to establish in the world devotion to my Immaculate Heart. To whomever embraces this devotion, I promise salvation. These souls shall be dear to God, as flowers placed by me to adorn His throne.” It seems clear that Providence has prepared this special devotion to the Immaculate Heart for the end times, for our times. The ultimate triumph of Mary’s Heart is thus willed by God, and it is futile to resist or impede this great victory! For these reasons the SSPX earnestly promotes this devotion to the Mother of God. All the faithful who, in response to the request of Our Lady of Fatima, foster and practice this devotion will certainly gain many benefits. They will be granted peace of heart and peace in family life. They will help save many souls from hell. They will appease God and console the Immaculate Heart of Mary. In short, they will receive numerous graces and will do great good. And when, at last, enough souls have responded to Our Lady’s requests, the Pope and the bishops will finally consecrate Russia to her Immaculate Heart...and there will be peace in the world. Unfortunately, we oftentimes do not fulfill our Lady’s request. The present state of the world attests to the fact that most individuals have chosen to ignore the demands of our Lady of Fatima. The Church, therefore, now finds herself in an increasing state of crisis. Let us, full of hope and confidence, devote ourselves to the Immaculate Heart. We will thus hasten Mary’s final triumph! 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