Scandal
A Moral Primer on Scandal
Reacting to Scandal
The Sin of Scandal as Seen
by Archbishop Lefebvre

May - June 2019

Stained-glass, Church of Saint Severin, Paris, Jesus and Little Children, jorisvo / Shutterstock.com

Letter
from the
Publisher
Dear Reader,
“It is necessary that there be heresies.” These words of St. Paul resonate even in those
among us who turn a blind eye to evils and mask with rose-colored glasses the face of death
around us.
St. Paul’s words evoke his efforts to keep his burgeoning communities together amidst the
schisms dividing Holy Mother the Church. It brings up the spectacle of apostates who, lulled
by the howling of the wind or the latest spiritual fad, are throwing away the precious gift of faith.
In the context of Church history, the 21st-century Catholic Church will no doubt receive the
stigma of scandal, not only of scandal in general, but of the type in the apostle’s words “which
should not even be named among us,” so shameful they are. No doubt, entire walls of our
society are being eroded under human perversions which threaten the survival of things as
basic as the inequality of the sexes and human love. The natural family unit is fast becoming an
endangered species.
The titanic struggle between the Woman with Child and the serpent (Gen. 3:15) has taken a
dramatic turn. The forces of evil are unleashed with a power never before seen against the very
citadel of Christ’s mystical body. The priesthood and the Mass have been under siege for decades now. But we might soon witness a revival of the catacombs, the waves of persecutions in
heretic and or communist countries where priests and bishops are hunted down like wild boars
and a price is set on their head.
It is not our intention to sound the trumpet of defeat and doom in the face of danger. This
review of the various faces of the political, societal, and ecclesiastical crisis must encourage us
to throw ourselves at the feet of Christ our leader and of His powerful Blessed Mother before
throwing ourselves, body and soul, into the struggle for spiritual survival. This is another reason
to be the devoted children of Holy Mother the Church who is going through pain and agony, and
to help souls along the way. Should we not be the proud imitators of those invulnerable saints
who faced the devil and his minions with the simple weapon of faith and the charity of Christ in
their heart?
Long live Christ’s ambassadors on earth who bring us the bread and water of eternal life!
Long live the pope and the Catholic bishops! Long live Christ and His Holy Church!

Fr. Jürgen Wegner
Publisher

May - June 2019
Volume XLII, Number 3
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Contents
Letter from the Publisher

4

Theme: Scandal
––Woe to the World: A Moral Primer on Scandal
––Reacting to Scandal: Dante and the Popes
––Leprosy in the Church of God
––The Subject of Priestly Scandal in the Dialogue
of St. Catherine of Siena
––The Sin of Scandal Committed by Priests:
As Seen by Archbishop Lefebvre

6
11
14
17
22

Spirituality
––The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass: The Epistle
––Darkness or Light from Christ?
––The 75th Anniversary of D-Day: Why Do You Come Back
to Normandy?
––Lisieux: The Basilica of St. Thérèse

26
32
37
42

All payments must be in U.S. funds only.
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back issues 14 months and older. All subscribers to the print
version of the magazine have full access to the online version.

Christian Culture
––Dealing with Clerical Scandal: It Takes a Christendom
––Protecting the Property of Others
––Joyfully Wrong: Some Inspirations from Hugh of St. Victor

50
56
58

“Instaurare omnia in Christo”

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.
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©2019 BY ANGELUS PRESS. OFFICIAL PUBLICATION OF THE
PRIESTLY SOCIETY OF SAINT PIUS X FOR THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA

––Eve: A “Saint” for Our Times
––Book Review: The Disputed Teachings of Vatican II
by Fr. Thomas G. Guarino

60
64

News from Tradition
––Church and World
––Cultural Revolution, Cultural Counter-Revolution
––The Last Word

70
77
87

Theme Scandal

Woe to
the World
A Moral Primer on Scandal

By Fr. Juan-Carlos Iscara

Woe to the world because of scandals. For
it must needs be that scandals come: but
nevertheless woe to that man by whom the
scandal cometh (Mt. 18:7).
Throughout history, many men and women
have committed unspeakable crimes, unspeakable
sins, and—out of malice or ignorance, imprudence
or carelessness—have led others into sin. The
present-day occurrences of those sins are most
likely to have an even greater effect, as their
publicity is immeasurably amplified by our modern
technologies. Indeed, they now cry out to us from
the news headlines. Ubiquitous screens parade
them before our eyes, and, if we are curious
for a better look, a few keystrokes easily bring
them back to us. The media dwells on them in
almost exquisite detail, and, more often than not,
makes a spirited defense of every immorality and
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perversion under the sun—except, of course, a
carefully selected few that, at least for the time
being, are still considered to be beyond the pale.
Even worse, yielding to the “spirit of the times,”
our civil laws condone, allow, and promote the
violation of divine law [As Roberto de Mattei
states: http://www.correspondanceeuropeenne.
eu/2017/04/29/eglise-catholique-le-scandale-denotre-temps/]. The world is full of scandals…
As much as those scandals shock our moral
conscience, and as much as we would prefer
not to see them or talk about them, we cannot
ignore them. Edmund Burke defined a scandal
as an event upon which it is difficult to speak,
and impossible to be silent. In spite of our moral
outrage, spiritual self-preservation and fraternal
charity oblige us to speak up.
But before jumping into the fray and adding our

voice to the denunciation of the myriad of crimes
that are coming to light today, we should clearly
grasp the moral principles that define and describe
the sin of scandal, so as not to add our vague,
imprecise notions to this ever-increasing moral
confusion.
St. Thomas Aquinas, when considering the
virtue of charity, [Cf. Summa Theologica, IIaIIae, q. 43.] lists its external acts: beneficence,
almsgiving, and fraternal correction; and then, as
is his wont, he explains which vices are opposed
to those charitable acts. Among them, scandal is
the sin directly opposed to fraternal correction—
instead of leading our neighbor away from sin by
our warnings and advice, our own sinful actions
lead him into sin…

What is “Scandal?”
Etymologically, scandal (from the Greek
σκάνδαλον, skándalon) is a trap, a stumbling block,
any impediment placed in the way and causing one
to stumble or fall.
In today’s language, a “scandal” is an event—
either a crime or a transgression of accepted
social norms—that provokes indignation or shock
in the observers. Thus, it refers to our subjective
reactions when witnessing that event.
But the precise theological language, building
upon the etymological meaning, defines scandal
as an external act which, posed without
sufficient cause, gives our neighbor the occasion
of spiritual fall, of sin. Thus, it refers to the
objective quality of the action, its capacity of
inducing others to sin.

expressed by our words or gestures, they remain
unknown to our neighbor and thus cannot have
any influence on his conduct—they cannot cause
scandal.
In principle, the act must be reprehensible, evil
in itself. But sometimes, to induce another into sin
it might be sufficient that, due to circumstances
of place, time or person, the act appears to be
sinful to the observer, although it is not such. For
example, someone may be scandalized at seeing a
priest not fasting on Ash Wednesday, when in fact
that priest has been dispensed from that obligation
due to age or illness—the action appears to be
sinful, but it is not.
Indeed, even a good action could be cause
of scandal for someone, on account of the
circumstances in which it is accomplished.
Finally, it must give occasion of sin, or at least
of spiritual damage. It does not exercise physical
violence on another to force him to commit a
sin. It is only a moral cause—it only prompts or
encourages another to sin.
For scandal to exist it is sufficient that the act is
by itself capable of inducing another to sin, even if
the other does not fall into it. There is also scandal
if the act is capable of inducing the neighbor to
commit another sin, a sin that is different from
the bad example received, but which he would not
have otherwise committed without that example.

Different Kinds of Scandal?
Yes. If we consider how it is caused, the scandal
may be active (also called “given”) or passive (also
called “taken” or “accepted”). But if we consider
the intention of he who gives the scandal, it may be
direct or indirect.

Definition
First of all, it must be an external act—i.e.
words, gestures, attitudes which are capable
of leading another into sin. Even the voluntary
omission of an act—one that should have been
done to prevent a sin—may have the malice of
scandal, in that it may induce others to abstain
from doing what is necessary to avoid sin.
Obviously, to be “scandalous,” the act cannot be
purely internal. If our thoughts or desires are not

Active and Passive Scandals?
As in every relationship, there are two sides of
a scandal: that of he who scandalizes and that of
he who is scandalized. Thus, active scandal is the
action, either evil in itself or only apparently evil,
which gives to another the occasion of spiritual
ruin. Passive scandal, on the other hand, is the fall
of someone caused by that action.
7

Theme
Scandals
For example: an active scandal is committed by
he who speaks badly about a person, but he who,
listening to it, thinks badly of this person and
nourishes feelings of hostility or contempt falls
into passive scandal.
Active and passive scandals are usually
associated, but they may also exist separately.
The active scandal may exist without the
passive scandal, for example, if I commit a sin that
is capable of inducing the observer into sin, but he
resists the temptation and does not fall into it.
Conversely, the passive scandal may exist
without the active scandal, for example if I
perform an action that is itself either good
or indifferent, but nonetheless, due to its
appearances or to the mistaken judgment of the
observer, it becomes an occasion of sin for him.

Direct and Indirect Scandals?
The scandal is direct if the agent has the
explicit intention of inducing another into a
similar sin.
But it is indirect if the agent, while not

intending the fall of another, nonetheless foresees
that his action may induce such a fall, even if the
action in itself is not sinful or only apparently so.

What Kind of Sin is Scandal?
St. Alphonsus Liguori explains that direct
scandal is a sin both against charity and against
the virtue that is violated by the one who is
scandalized [Theologia Moralis, lib. III, n. 45].
In confession, this particular must be clearly
stated, that is, one is obliged to confess not only
the fact of having caused scandal, but also the
species of sin induced.

Are Some Scandals More
Serious than Others?
The gravity of this sin is stressed by the harsh
sentence that Our Lord passes on those who give
scandal: He that shall scandalize one of these
little ones that believe in me, it were better for
him that a millstone should be hanged about his

But he that shall scandalize one of
these little ones that believe in me, it were
better for him that a millstone should be
hanged about his neck, and that he were
drowned in the depth of the sea (Mt. 18:6).
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neck, and that he should be drowned in the depth
of the sea (Mt. 18:6).
In practice, the scandal is a mortal sin when it
leads another to sin mortally, even if the original
act was only venial.
But its gravity must be also measured by the
real influence that some factors of the sinful act
may have on the fall of another. For example, it
must be taken into account who is the person who
causes the scandal (parent, priest, teacher, friend,
etc.), or who are the persons scandalized (the
weak, children, those not well instructed to be
able to resist, etc.), or the number of those who fall
due to that bad example…
Thus, a public figure, one continuously exposed
to the eyes of the world, or one constituted in
dignity or entrusted with the guidance of others,
sins more seriously than a simple individual by the
scandal that he gives, because the impression left
is stronger and its effects wider. For example, a
father who, by his actions, inspires in his children
the contempt for religion is guiltier than others
who may give the same bad example, because he
uses for the destruction of the souls entrusted
to him a power that God has given only for their

edification.
Indirect scandal is not a sin when the act is
good or indifferent in itself, or when an honest
end is intended, or when done with proportionate
cause or motive. Nonetheless, if the scandal can
be avoided by giving some explanation to the
observer, it must be given. And if the action is
not obligatory or strictly necessary, it is better to
abstain from it, so as to avoid the risk of giving
scandal.

“Necessary” Scandals?
No, of course not!
Those sins are not part of the divine plan for us.
Holy Scripture makes it abundantly clear that God
is intent on our salvation, not on our damnation:
For God hath not appointed us unto wrath, but
unto the purchasing of salvation by Our Lord
Jesus Christ (I Thess. 5:9).
Consequently, He does not want the evils that
men commit: Let no man, when he is tempted,
say that he is tempted by God. For God is not a
tempter of evils, and He tempteth no man. But

9

Theme Scandal
every man is tempted by his own concupiscence,
being drawn away and allured (Jas. 1:13-14).
What God does desire is our love. But for love
to be true it requires having both the freedom
to make choices and the opportunity to do so.
Therefore, He has created us with a free will. He
will not induce us into sin, but neither will He force
us into virtuous acts. The choice remains ours.

What Does Our Lord Mean?
Thus, when Our Lord says that sins and
scandals are “necessary,” He is simply describing
the nature of things in this fallen world—because
original sin has wounded us, we are capable of
making the wrong choices and, unfortunately, we
do make them...thus, scandals are not only likely
to happen, but they will assuredly happen...
Crime, sin, and scandal are bound to exist, as
St. John Chrysostom says, due to the implacable
malice of Satan, the malignity of the men of the
world, their aversion and enmity to Christ.
God accepts those things, for the trial of the
just, for the discovery of hypocrites, and for the
manifestation of His grace, power, and fidelity in
the preservation of His children.

Reparation for Scandals
In charity, we have the obligation to make
reparation to our neighbor for the bad example
given. The obligation is under pain of mortal sin if
the scandal was given in grave matter.
When the scandal has been given in private,
reparation must be made to those who have been
exposed to it. Most of the time, if they have not
fallen into sin, it would be enough to give them
now a good example that, contradicting our
previous behavior, implies our repudiation of it.
However, the difficulty of making efficacious
reparation increases when the scandal has been
public. In those cases, reparation must be also
publicly made to those who have been exposed to
it. Sometimes it would be enough to give a good
example, but in other cases, an explicit repudiation
of our previous action would be required.
The attempts at repairing the damage caused
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would be unlikely—even at the best of times—to
reach all the people who have been exposed to the
scandal.
But our times are not “the best of times,” due to
the global reach of the internet. Today, if someone
in one small town does something—a crime, a
sin—that captures the attention of the media,
it will be instantly known by millions of people
around the world, it will pop up in every outlet of
the social media upon which we are so dependent.
And, thanks to various internet search engines, we
may be assured that the scandalous example will
never fade away from people’s eyes or memories.
The public scandal we have given will have
acquired a kind of perpetuity and it will continue
luring souls into sin well beyond our own lifetime.
In such conditions, any efficacious reparation
becomes both physically and morally impossible.

A Final Word
Some of our laws and institutions are
scandalous when they declare as good some
actions which, in truth, are intrinsically evil, thus
leading the citizens to commit evil acts. Popular
culture is scandalous when it standardizes, even
encourages, disordered behaviors that soon
everybody will end up considering normal.
The warnings of Our Lord in the Gospel do
not directly address those scandals that come
from the world, but those that may arise in
the community of His disciples—that is, they
are addressed to us. Our Lord calls us to be
exemplary, so as not to be one of those who
scandalize the little ones and the weak. He calls
us to the spiritual combat, to fight unceasingly
against evil, to the acquisition and increase of
virtue, to prayer and penance.
Those who have been perverted by our bad
examples must learn from us to repent of their
sins, as they learned from us how to commit them.
Unfortunately, not all those who followed us in our
deviations will imitate us in our penance—for it is
much easier to find imitators of our defects than
of our virtues, and we will have to cry bitterly over
scandals that we will be never be able to repair
entirely.

Reacting to Scandal

Dante and
the Popes
by Andrew J. Clarendon

In his essay on the development of medieval
literature, the renowned historian Christopher
Dawson notes that although “Dante’s great poem
represents the achievement of a final synthesis
of the literary and religious traditions of the
Middle Ages,” the Divine Comedy, finished in
1321, “also faithfully reflects the crisis of the later
Middle Ages,” a crisis that stems from the fact
that “the papacy itself had become compromised
in his eyes by secularism.” A concrete image of
this compromise was the 1309 move of the papal
residence to Avignon, France—known by some
as the Babylonian Captivity of the popes—which
in turn led to the disastrous Great Western
Schism, an event Dante did not live to see but
would not have surprised him. In short, as the
so-called Renaissance—at once a flowering of
the High Middle Ages and a corruption of that

civilization—was just beginning, the papacy
ceased to be the moral center of Christendom.
Dawson notes that “it is to the [Holy Roman]
Empire rather than to the papacy that [Dante]
looks for the realization of a universal Christian
order,” but a such an Empire was already
unrealizable in his time; later in the Divine
Comedy Dante looks to “an apocalyptic figure,”
begging for Christ the King to set things right.
These wider political and historical issues help
to account for Dante’s rather severe account
of the papacy of his day. In recounting truly
scandalous actions over the course of his epic,
Dante not only shows that like everyone else, the
pope has a soul to save or lose, but also provides
a vision of the balance needed when discussing
the unique position of the Vicar of Christ; of all of
the popes mentioned in the poem, it is Dante’s
11

Theme Scandal
presentation of his contemporary Boniface VIII in
particular that demonstrates such a balance.

Dante’s Rebuke to
Wayward Clerics
Dante certainly does not condemn Boniface
alone; the poet’s criticism occurs over the course
of a general rebuke of those clerics who were
more concerned with material gain than the
salvation of souls. The invective begins early
in the Inferno with some unnamed souls in the
circle of the Greedy: “The ones who have the
bald spot on their heads / were priests and popes
and cardinals, in whom / avarice is most likely to
prevail.” Later, in Purgatory, the Pilgrim meets
Pope Adrian V who says that “only when I became
Shepherd of Rome / did I perceive the falseness of
the world / . . . / until that time I was a wretched
soul, / servant of Avarice.” This denunciation of
popes and other clerics having been seduced by
temporal power and wealth reaches a crescendo
in the third part of the eighth circle of hell, the
bolgia of those damned for simony. Since the
poem is set in the year 1300—during the reign
of Boniface VIII—the Pilgrim speaks to an
earlier pope: Nicholas III, who died in 1280. The
former Vicar of Christ is stuffed upside down—
the inverted man being a symbol of Satan—in
a circular hole that recalls golden coins. In a
parody of baptism, which makes one a member
of the church, Nicholas does not have water on
his head but fire on his feet. Instead of the fire of
the Holy Ghost sanctifying the human element
of the Church in a Pentecostal image, hellfire
burns the soles of the feet. Finally, some critics
interpret line 98 to indicate that the Simonists
have moneybags at their heads within the hole.
As the Pilgrim speaks with Nicholas, the former
pope punningly states that he was “so greedy
to advance [his family members], that wealth / I
pocketed in life, and here myself” and goes on to
say that “Beneath my head are pushed down all
the others / who came, sinning in simony, before
me, / squeezed tightly in the fissure of the rock.”
With the foresight given to the damned to add to
their torment, Nicholas predicts that Boniface
VIII will join him when he dies in 1303 and then
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after him Clement V—the reigning pope when
Dante wrote the Inferno—”a lawless shepherd,
one whose fouler deeds / make him a fitting cover
for us both.” For Dante to put three popes from
his own time in hell can be shocking to certain
sensibilities, but the point is clear: not only is
there no instant and automatic canonization
for popes, but Dante also gives a more specific
warning about those who are more interested in
worldly power than the salvation of souls. These
men “tear asunder” the Church; their “avarice
brings grief upon the world, / crushing the good,
exalting the depraved.” In other words, the action
of these popes is scandalous in the truest sense;
as the Catholic Encyclopedia puts it: “scandal is
a word or action evil in itself, which occasions
another’s spiritual ruin.” In the case of Boniface,
Dante goes on in Inferno 27 to show him actually
inducing another to sin: the pope gives false
absolution to Guido da Montefeltro to help plan
the destruction of some political enemies. The
result is Guido’s damnation, abetted by “the
Prince of the New Pharisees.”

Nuance and Balance in Dante
If Dante had only condemned various
contemporary popes—in particular Boniface
who was instrumental in the poet’s exile from
Florence—there would not be that balance and
nuance in his presentation of the papacy that
makes his poem truly Catholic. It is true that
in the Paradiso, St. Peter himself gets so angry
in contemplating the reign of Boniface that he
turns Heaven red and declares the See to be as
it were morally vacant. Until his death, however,
the pope is still the Vicar of Christ, and he
remains a priest forever. To recall this point, in
Purgatorio 20 Dante has Hugh Capet foretell the
mistreatment of Boniface VIII at the hands of
some of his French and Italian political enemies.
As the historian Warren Carroll recounts, after
breaking into the papal palace at Boniface’s
hometown of Anagni in September 1303, the
men seized the pontiff, probably manhandled
him, and stole some treasure before the people
of Anagni drove them off. The incident was
distressing enough that Boniface died about

a month later. Dante’s reaction is a famous
thundering condemnation: “I see the fleur-delis enter [Anagni] / and in His vicar Christ made
prisoner. / I see the gall and vinegar renewed; /
I see Him being mocked a second time, / killed
once again between the living thieves.” Dorothy
Sayers, with her usual insightful commentary,
draws together the two sides of Dante’s portrayal:
“Nothing in Dante is more paradoxical or more
magnificent than his treatment of Boniface VIII.
Of all his enemies, personal and political, none is
so hateful to him as Boniface...[but] to lay hands
on him is to crucify Christ afresh. This balance
of two equal and opposed indignations, both
blazing, and mutually unmitigated, is a triumph of
the passionate intellect unsurpassed in literature
and scarcely paralleled.” The distinction is clear:
any problems with the human element of the
church—and examples of misguided and sinful
clerics and laymen go back to the beginning
of Christianity—does not destroy the Bride
of Christ, who is forever the unam sanctam
cathólicam et apostólicam Ecclésiam, whose
head is Christ.
It follows that scandals of this sort should
not be regarded as having too little or too much
importance. As Pope Benedict XV notes in his
great encyclical on Dante, that while “a mind
as devoted to the Church as was that of Dante
could not but feel disgust” at clerical or even
papal sins, “never did he fail in respect due to the
Church and reverence for the ‘Supreme Keys.’” In
our time of crisis, serious Catholics should keep
such a balance as Dante’s in mind. Avoiding the
Scylla of positivistic papolatry, along with the
Charybdis of leaving the Church, is just one facet
of today’s crisis. May Christ the King, through the
Immaculate Heart, send worthy “laborers into
His harvest” (Lk. 10:2).

Statue of Dante Alighieri,
piazza dei Signori, Verona,
Italy
13

Theme Scandal

Leprosy
in the Church
of God
By: Fr. Francois-Marie Chautard

“Jerusalem has multiplied her sins; that is why she has become unclean; all who honored her despise
her, for they have seen her nakedness; she moans and turns her face away. (...) ‘Behold, Jehovah, my
misery, because the enemy triumphs!’” (Lam. 1:8).

With a pendular rhythm, the media announces
the unworthy fall of ministers of Jesus Christ,
whose disqualifications legitimately scandalize
believers as well as non-believers. In recent
weeks, unfortunately, there are no longer isolated
cases of pedophilia or homosexuality that have
been revealed, but serial offenses, accompanied
by the denunciation of homosexual networks
ravaging the very heart of the Vatican. The honor
of Jesus Christ, the holiness of the Church,
priestly dignity and even the Christian name are
regarded as tainted. Many disoriented, saddened
or even disgusted faithful ponder these events.
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These few considerations will provide them with a
few insights for themselves and their loved ones.

Most Serious Faults
The sins incriminated are among the most
serious faults. Homosexuality is one of the
four sins that cry to Heaven for vengeance;
as for pedophilia, its odious character is even
more revolting a fortiori when these sins are
committed by priests whose sanctity of state
should elevate them to the summit of perfection.

If they do not perform penance, these men risk
falling into the hands of the “vengeful God.” But
if they repent and strive to repair their evils,
we cannot doubt for a moment that the infinite
mercy of God would be accorded to them. No
human effort can stifle divine goodness. God
demonstrates His converting power in the history
of salvation by which He can instantly soften the
hearts of the “good thieves.”
If these sins and their penance fall mainly
on those who commit them, the prayer and the
atonement must be the lot of all Christians,
especially the priests. Christ, who was innocent,
gave the example by expiating the faults of
sinners. Every scandal in the Church must be an
invitation to her children toward a life of prayer
and penance. Mercy is not only forgiving, but also
takes part in expiation.
Notwithstanding this just indignation and
necessary atonement, the strong publicity given
to these scandals leads one to wonder why the
revelations only target Catholic priests and
not the representatives of other religions, lay
educators, and guilty parents. No doubt it must
be remembered that the fault of a priest is more
serious than that of any other man. But is it
always the suffering of the victims that motivates
the news, or is it the identity of the culprit?

The Shadow of Satan
Behind the all too dark reality and the
indiscreet display that is made of these scandals
stands the shadow of Satan who has a hatred of
priests. He strives to make them fall into sin to
better drag the priests publically through the mud
and with them the honor of the divine master.
If it is right to punish the culprits and make
them known to society, it is just as true to
remember the many holy priests who have
illuminated the Church with their purity and
dedication to the youth. Is it necessary to recall
the names of St. John Bosco, St. John Baptist de
la Salle, St. Michael Garricoits, and Fr. Timon
David? Is it necessary to point out the myriad
of religious and priests who have devoted their
whole lives, often in admirable discretion, to the
education of youth? The betrayal of Judas must

not make us forget the martyrdom of the 11 other
apostles. Let us not be so overwhelmed with
these scandals that we forget that Europe was the
place of the highest civilization precisely because
it was Catholic. One of the Church’s finest titles
of glory is to have raised childhood out of the sad
condition it suffered due to paganism.
If we are rightly scandalized by the physical
abuse of innocent people, we should be even
moreso before the vast majority of modern
childhoods. These souls are unjustly deprived of
God and the supernatural life by a secular and
atheistic education.

At the Origin of These Evils
In the face of these scandals, the nagging
question remains: how did we get here? The
main causes are ecclesial and profane. Firstly,
at the level of the Church, beyond malice and
personal weakness, it is evident that there
were flaws or even mistakes in the appointment
of ecclesiastical superiors, the selection and
training of candidates for the priesthood, and the
absence of sanctions. It is unlikely, for example,
that true homosexual networks have been able to
build and maintain themselves, permitting their
members to co-opt to the highest positions.
For several decades, before and after
the Council, liberalism, progressivism, and
naturalism have produced their deleterious
effects in many consecrated souls. The
disastrous experience of “working priests” was a
blatant illustration of this: the priest should be a
man like all others; he should work at the factory,
no longer wear his ecclesiastical clothing; he
should mingle with others. The result was not
long in coming and most of these unfortunate
priests married and abandoned the priesthood.
In saying that it was no longer necessary to
condemn the world, speak about sin and the
end of life, or to “insist” upon sexual morality
that, on the contrary, it was necessary to show
openness and to magnify the dignity of man
and the human body, what happened? Christian
humility, mortification, asceticism, rules of
prudence, frequent confession, assiduous prayer,
and modesty have been insidiously eclipsed.
The great movement of openness to the
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Theme Scandal
world advocated by Paul VI during the closing
of the Council introduced the spirit of the world
with its vices into the sanctuary of the Church.
St. Paul warned the Romans: the sin of
infidelity is punished by blindness that leads
to sins against nature (Rom. Ch. I). The
phenomenon is tragically confirmed in the
Church of God: the crisis of faith without
precedent is correlatively accompanied by a
disastrous moral crisis. It is striking to note
that the countries most affected by these
evils are those most marked by liberalism and
progressivism.
At the level of society: The media has done a
fine job of revealing the immorality of religious
ministers as if the origin was found solely
in the Catholic Church. The problem is more
complex; the Church is not of the world but her
children live in the world. There is a reciprocal
influence that appears in the current scandals.
Contemporary society is reaching peaks of
immorality: the cinema, internet, television,
theater, advertising on any medium, and “art”
exhibitions. The media as a whole broadcasts an
omnipresent and constant message of lust in its
images, the subjects discussed, and the “models”
presented.
Promoted by the media, lust and its
consequences are institutionalized and legalized
by political power: abortion, promotion of
homosexuality, “sex education” at school, birth
control given to young women, funding of
organized pressure groups, etc.
And not only is lust encouraged—in almost
every form—but those who oppose it are vilified,
ridiculed, or even condemned. How many times is
the Church mocked because within this world of
sin, she advocates authentic consecrated chastity
and true chastity in marriage!
Is it any surprise that in this hedonistic and
pornographic climate where the slightest sexual
innuendo is warmly applauded, men who are
consecrated and living in the world are morally
weakened, and that the proportion of “rotten
fruits” is increased? In our circles of Tradition,
we often find the misdeeds to civil society caused
by the separation of Church and State. Today,
another misdeed is tragically manifested in the
wrong done to the Church by the paganization of
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the world.

Toward a Reform of
the Church?
The situation of the Church is such today that
it does not merely require measures of recovery,
or, even less so, a relaxation of the priestly
requirements, but a real reform.
Without a doubt, it is necessary to change the
number of superiors, to ensure the application
of penalties, the training of seminarians, and
the reinstatement of prudential measures, but
all these measures will be sterile if they are not
based on an in-depth reform, firstly, of priestly
sanctity, secondly, of Christian families from
which the majority of solid vocations emerge.
In the Church of God, every authentic reform
begins with a restoration of theological life i.e.
the virtues of faith, hope, and charity. May it
please God that this corruption of morals is a
providential sign that opens the eyes of many
so that the deep and doctrinal causes of this
crisis in the Church may finally be discerned and
treated. May the life of faith, prayer and penance
of Christians hasten this blessed day!
Translated from the French by Associate Editor Jane Carver.

The Subject
of Priestly
Scandal
in the Dialogue of St. Catherine of Siena

by St. Catherine of Siena

While the scandals some of God’s ministers commit infamous acts that defile the Church of God,
it could be of use to us to reread these extracts from the Dialogue of St. Catherine of Siena. As was
witnessed by Blessed Raymond of Capoue, her confessor, this work is composed of the revelations of
God the Father to the saint, who dictated them in her ecstasies or were heard by her. Their principal
interest for us resides in the supernatural spirit with which these priestly scandals must be judged.

Exigence of Sanctity
“I have made them sacred and have called
them my priests because I have charged them
to give myself to you...angels do not possess
this dignity. I have given it to men whom I have
chosen for my ministers. I have established them
like the angels and they must be terrestrial angels
in this life. I demand purity and chastity from all
souls; I will that they love me and their neighbor,
aid their neighbor as they are able, assist their
neighbor by their prayers and living in union with

them, as I have already told you in the treating of
this subject. But I expect a much greater purity
from my ministers; I demand of them a greater
love for me and their neighbor to whom they must
administer the body and blood of my Son with
ardent charity, thirst for the salvation of souls,
and for the praise and glory of my name.”

The Guiltiness of Priests
“O temples of the demon! I have chosen you to
be angels upon earth, but you are demons; you
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Theme Scandal
do his work! Demons spread their shadows and
become cruel executioners. They strive, using
their best efforts, temptations and attacks, to
destroy grace in souls by making them fall into
mortal sin...these evil, unworthy priests, called
my ministers, are devils incarnate because by
their faults they submit themselves to the will
of the demon and they fulfill his functions.
They distribute me, the true Sun, in the midst
of the shadows of mortal sin and they spread
the shadows of their guilty and disorderly lives
among reasonable creatures who are confided to
them. They trouble and scandalize those that see
them live their lives thus, and often due to their
bad examples and paths of evil and error, they
repel others far from grace and the way of truth.”

Unworthy Priests
“Do not let their vices become a roadblock.
Follow my doctrine alone...I am the good and

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eternal God; I reward all good and punish all evil.
I will not withhold my vengeance. My justice will
not spare them because they have had the honor
of being my ministers. They will on the contrary,
if they do not convert, be punished more severely
than others because they will have received more
of my goodness; the more they miserably offend
me, the more they will be worthy of punishment.
You see that they are indeed demons, rather than
my elect, of whom I have spoken to you of the
angels upon earth who fulfill the functions of the
angels.”

Sodomite Priests
“The fools have darkened the light of their
intelligence; they no longer see the corruption
and the mire in which they are buried. This
sin causes me extreme horror such that, to
punish this, my vengeance swallowed five cities.
My justice cannot withstand this sin which

causes me so much horror...you see, my beloved
daughter, how much this sin is odious to me in
every creature: but imagine that it must irritate
me all the more in those whom I have called to
live a life in continence and above all those whom
I have separated from the world by the religious
or priestly life in order that they may bear fruit in
the mystical body of the Church. You could never
understand how much this sin displeases me
more in those [souls] than in all who live in the
world or those who should live in continence.
“All are guilty; the laity are not excused by the
sins of their pastors, nor the pastors by those of
the laity.”

The Cause
After having pointed out the pride of the
unworthy clerics, the Father names others who
are responsible:
“All of these evils are caused by superiors who

do not watch over those who are confided to
them.”

What Reaction Must We Have
Before All of These Scandals?
“All that I have told you, my daughter, is to
make you weep more bitterly over the blindness
of those who are in this state of damnation,
for you to know my mercy better in order that
you may place all of your confidence in this
mercy, and that you invoke it in presenting these
ministers of the holy Church and the universe
before me. The more that you offer me these
tender and sorrowful desires for them, the more
that you witness the love you have for me. Neither
yourself, nor my ministers can be useful to me,
but you must render me service by this means.”
“Yes, I will let myself be influenced by these
desires, tears and prayers of my servants; I will
give mercy to my Spouse in reforming Her by
holy and good shepherds...I have told you these
things…so that you are more ardent in offering
me your sweet, tender, and beloved desires for
the guilty ones...I do not wish that [their faults]
alter the respect due towards them. I have shown
you the excellence of my holy ministers in whom
shines the precious gem of virtue and justice.”
“Now, my dear daughter, I invite you all, you
and my other servants, to mourn over these dead,
and to stay like faithful sheep in the garden of the
holy Church, nourishing yourselves continually
with holy desires, and offering me the incense of
your continual prayers for them because I want
to show mercy to the world. Do not let yourself
be distracted by anything, neither by hurt, nor by
prosperity. Do not lift up your head by impatience
or by disordered joy, but humbly apply yourself to
procure my honor, the salvation of souls, and the
reform of the holy Church. You thus prove to me
that you love me in truth. You know that I have
shown you this: that I want you to be faithful
sheep who always nourish yourselves in the
garden of the holy Church enduring weariness
and pain until the hour of death.”
Translated from the French by Associate Editor Jane Carver.

19

“We should seek to create within our houses, priories, schools,
and seminaries, an ambiance of sanctity, zeal, fervor, charity,
and generosity. We must follow this ideal by encouraging what
is good and virtuous and chasing away scandal.”
Archbishop Lefebvre with his priests and seminarians in 1957

Theme Scandal

The Sin of
Scandal
Committed by Priests
As Seen by Archbishop Lefebvre

by Bishop Bernard Tissier de Mallerais

“By definition, scandal is an action of lesser consequence that leads
another to sin which is an occasion of spiritual ruin.”—Archbishop Lefebvre
quoting St. Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologica, II. II, q. 40, a. 1-3).
Scandal is a sin against the virtue of charity to our neighbor, “because
charity commands us to watch over the salvation of our neighbor” (ibid).

Scandal or Edification?
“The scandal of secularism is the greatest because it gives the most
detestable example.” An entire society, an entire nation which has become
atheistic by an anti-Christian or atheistic political regime…On the other
hand, the Archbishop liked to say, a nation, a State where the laws and
customs are deeply Christian, and therefore Catholic, saves souls. The good
examples given by Catholic leaders of State give these immensely edifying
examples to a whole nation.
“I remember,” said Archbishop Lefebvre, “having arrived at the seminary
in Rome with fallacious ideas. I was persuaded that it was good that the
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1

Archbishop Lefebvre,
Spiritual Conferences,
Ecône, November 30, 1976;
The Little Story of My Long
Life, p.26.

2

Archbishop Lefebvre,
Spiritual Conferences,
Ecône, May 18-19, 1972,
September 25, 1972.

3

Synthesis of several
spiritual conferences of
Archbishop Lefebvre on the
common life of the clergy.

State was separate from the Church, that the State doesn’t call itself
Christian. It was in listening to the conversations of my older classmates,
but above all my professors and the rector of the seminary, that I understood
that I was liberal! That it was necessary for me to carry out my conversion! I
was, unknowingly, a victim “scandalized” by the ambient secularism which
reigned in France at that time.
It was the encyclicals of Popes Gregory XVI, Pius IX, Leo XIII, St. Pius
X, etc., that helped conform my judgment to the thoughts of the Church. I
understood that I had to judge history, events, and men in the light of Our
Lord Jesus Christ and His reign.”1

Scandal Given by the Priest and its Remedy
“There are also scandals given by priests: lack of piety, negligence in the
church, poor upkeep of altars, of sacred linens, etc. Religion, for the faithful,
is worth what the priests are worth.
There are also imprudent behaviors committed by our priests: undignified
gestures, foul language, or alas, grave sins like alcohol addiction, anger, and
violence, which can destroy a parish after having destroyed the reputation of
the priest.”2
Since the 1970’s, the marriage of this or that priest from a parish
scandalized the faithful, but since the 1980’s, Archbishop Lefebvre heard
the fruits of infamous vices practiced within the Roman clergy itself. After
sharing the topic of the increasing corruption of clerics to his seminarians,
he indicated the remedy to them: the sanctity of the priesthood, the virtue of
chastity, of sobriety, of the prudence of the priest. He saw the rotten fruit of
Vatican II in these disordered priestly works: “They no longer have,” he said,
“they no longer have the grace that is necessary for taking up their celibacy!”

The Common Life of the Clergy—
Remedy for Sacerdotal Disorder
It is here that Archbishop Lefebvre insisted upon the importance of
common life for the clergy. It was a sort of charism that the Archbishop had
in creating what he called “the priory” of the priestly Society of Saint Pius X.
He detailed the advantages and the exigencies:
“It is a common life of habitation, of prayer, of charity, of mutual support,
in which each is responsible for the good example he gives. Each priest
is required to have discreet vigilance over the regular presence of his
confreres in the moments of prayer, above all during the common morning
meditation under the paternal authority of the Prior. It is how I lived in
Gabon, then in Dakar with the Holy Ghost Fathers. Thus, normally all is lived
peacefully. The regulation of common life in the seminary also applies to
the life in a priory. The clergy is trained in the imitation of religious like the
missionary priests of St. Vincent de Paul or the ‘Messieurs of Saint-Sulpice,’
to participate with delight in a life in common at table, at prayer, in the
apostolate. This is a sort of paradise on earth for the priest.”3
23

Theme Scandal
A Personal Testimony
If I may give an example, I would mention a number of priests whom I
knew in my adolescence. I would say that all, without exception, sustained
and nourished my desire to become a priest like them: A priest named Mary
celebrated the Sunday Mass at the church of Saint Sulpice in Paris—dialogue
Mass in Latin and facing God—with an overwhelming piety; a priest named
Leparoux was constantly in the confessional like another Curé of Ars, seated
beside his penitents, young and old; a good priest, Fr. Gillet, preached the
doctrine of Christian virtue in our catechism.
Later, desirous of entering the seminary but not knowing where, I met the
venerable and dear Fr. Louis Coache, in his country parish in Montjavoult.
He told me quite simply about his life of mental prayer: “I spend part of my
time in the church before the tabernacle; I am the guard dog of Our Lord: I
look at Him and He looks at me.”
And my dear high school chaplain! He was all-encouraging with a kind
voice among our distractions and troubles. He nourished our souls once
a week by showing us the apostolic zeal of St. Paul in his travels, storms,
flagellations, imprisonment, fastings, and watchings.
Nothing impure or harmful appeared in the teaching of the evangelical
beatitudes which was the program of our second year of “catechism of
perseverance” after confirmation. Everything encouraged us to live a holy
and missionary life.

The Edification Given by Model Professors
I will finish by giving some memories from my dear seminary of St. Pius
X in Ecône during the years 1971-1977. Archbishop Lefebvre desired that the
Swiss Canon, Fr. Berthod, should be rector. He was a theologian, a previous
student of Fr. Santiago Ramirez, O.P. in Fribourg, a shy and likeable moralist
who was faithful to St. Thomas “durch und durch” [through and through].
There was also Fr. Edward Guillou, a Benedictine religious from Paris
penetrated with liturgical piety, who denounced to us the anti-liturgical
heresy of the modernists.
I had the dear Fr. De la Presle as spiritual director, a gentle Discalced
Carmelite, who introduced me to the exigencies of the love of God according
to St. John of the Cross. And the delightful Dominican Fathers of Fribourg:
the teacher of scripture Ceslas Spicq, who exposed the important points
against the menacing allegorical modernist. And the dogmatician, Thomas
Mehrele, who allowed us to reach the depths of St. Thomas in his Latin text.
He also denounced the heresies of Karl Rahner concerning the mysteries of
the Incarnation and the Redemption: two religious of exemplary piety whom
we would only approach with the greatest respect for their knowledge and
orthodoxy. However, the jokes and holy freedom of expression that these
men made from time to time would never have dared to be expressed from
the pulpit of the University of Fribourg…

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The Example of Our Venerable Founder
4

Archbishop Lefebvre,
Priestly Retreat, Ecône,
September 21, 1979.

5

Archbishop Lefebvre,
Circular Letter, Dakar,
1965, “For a true update,”
Pastoral Letters and
Writings, p. 224.

6

Archbishop Lefebvre,
Circular Letter, with some
precisions from Fr. Gaston
Courtois, “To Succeed with
Children,” p. 42-43; and
Young Priest, Practical
Notes for the priesthood,
1950, p. 146-147.

Above all, our venerable founder edified us by the care of his cassock,
and his impeccably polished shoes, which were reflections of his orderly
and gentle soul, but were also reflections of his firmness, which inspired
abnegation, poverty, and flight from the spirit of the world.
He made order reign everywhere—in the hallways, the dormitories, and
souls. He delivered spiritual conferences in the evenings without an air of
public speaking. The Archbishop showed us the Person of Our Lord Jesus
Christ, His knowledge, wisdom, Cross, renouncement, priesthood, zeal for
souls, and the sacrifice of the Mass; the Archbishop was a constant source of
edification for us.

An Atmosphere of Manly Sanctity and Vigilance
Without a doubt, our venerable Archbishop listed the scandals within
the Church. “Those scandals concerning false doctrines, foremost, since
the Council; those of the sins of imprudence on the part of priests: words
or gestures without self-mastery, those scandals with regard to children or
young women, intemperance at table, flirtation with women, pseudo-dating in
the confessional as opposed to true spiritual direction, etc.”4
But immediately after exposing these scandals, he re-fixed his gaze and
those of the priests upon the Blessed Sacrament.
“We should seek to create within our houses, priories, schools, and
seminaries, an ambiance of sanctity, zeal, fervor, charity, and generosity. We
must follow this ideal by encouraging what is good and virtuous and chasing
away scandal. There will certainly be difficulties, exercises in patience
with charity, perseverance and firmness; one must reprimand and correct,
but never endure tolerance regarding scandalous actions by immediately
removing those that have caused the scandals.”5
He detailed the diverse kinds of scandals to drive out among clerics.
“There are scandals of weakness, imprudence, clumsiness; these are less
grave. One teaches young clerics to be the masters of their affections, to avoid
every gesture, or every word of affection toward children and young women:
a brief glance and a firm handshake shows manly uprightness. Next, there are
scandals from the sins of pride, the spirit of rebellion, a deceptive spirit—one
that does not understand obedience. These scandals cannot be tolerated
long-term without being a grave nuisance to the community. Finally, there are
grave moral faults; if they appear more or less accepted, they go on to provoke
a chain reaction of falls which poison a house, a diocese—one must attend to
these without delay.”6
But our founder never cited scandals without proposing the remedy. Selfmastery, renouncement, priestly virtues, virtue of the holy sacrifice of the
Mass, immolation of the priest with Jesus—priest and victim, the aid of the
other sacraments, spiritual direction, spiritual retreats and of course a tender
and profound devotion to the most Blessed Virgin Mary, mother of priests.
Translated from the French by Associate Editor Jane Carver.

25

Spirituality

The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass:

The Epistle
by Fr. Christopher Danel

In the Mass, the Savior’s entire work of redemption is shown forth and carried out, and the celebration
of the Mass embraces in its several parts the whole operation of the Redeemer. As the Lord exercised
during His mortal life the office of Mediator, thus He continues to exercise it in His Church, and that in
a sacramental manner. There is a profound and interior connection between the teaching of truth and
the mystery of the altar, between the word of God and the Divine Eternal Word, who was made flesh and
who under the Eucharistic veil is again present and dwells among us.
— Monsignor Nicholas Gihr

Introduction
In this article we will examine the Epistle,
presenting the work of Monsignor Nicholas
Gihr in his fundamental liturgical commentary
The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass: Dogmatically,
Liturgically, and Ascetically Explained.
Monsignor Gihr was a priest of Freiburg in
Breisgau whose work of liturgical research
took place during the time frame spanning the
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pontificates of Popes Pius IX to Pius XI, including
that of Pope St. Pius X. The early years of his
work were contemporaneous with the last years
in the work of Dom Prosper Guéranger. (The
English translation of his study appeared in
1902; the original is: Gihr, Nikolaus. Messopfer
dogmatisch, liturgisch und aszetisch erklärt.
Herder: Freiburg im Breisgau, 1877.)

The Teaching of Christ
The first office of the Redeemer consisted in
teaching the truth and the law of God exteriorly
by the words which fell from His lips, and
interiorly by the light which He infused into
hearts. Already the Prophet remarks that in the
days of the Messiah “the earth shall be filled with
the knowledge of the Lord, as the covering waters
of the sea” (Is. 11: 9). Only after the Lord had as
teacher of truth shown the way to Heaven did He
die on the Cross the death of reconciliation, in
order to unite man again in grace and love with
God. Now all this is repeated in the Holy Sacrifice
of the Mass. Before the Savior descends on the
altar at the Consecration as a mystical victim,
He speaks words of eternal life to us, first by His
prophets and apostles, then through Himself. The
Epistle and Gospel come before the sacrificial
action. Thus, the announcement of the truth
precedes the accomplishment of the sacrifice,
for knowledge is the beginning of salvation. The
living word of God is the seed whence proceeds
the imperishable life of faith, which here below
is perfected by grace and in the next life is
transformed into glory.

Sacred Scripture
The Church with predilection and preference
employs in her liturgy Scriptural words,
because they are especially holy and venerable,
efficacious and full of grace: they are, indeed,
the words of God, words that have the Holy
Ghost for their author. In the preceding part of
the Mass we already frequently prayed in God’s
words; but in the readings now following we
have the word of God, by which He speaks to us
and instructs us in all doctrine and truth. “For
what things soever were written, were written
for our instruction: that through patience and the
comfort of the Scriptures, we might have hope”
(Rom. 15:4). In the midst of a world fallen away
from Christianity and hostile to the Church, amid
all the sufferings and persecutions that oppress
us, amid the storms that rage around us, the
imperishable word of God, which does not pass
away, though even Heaven and earth should pass

away, encourages and raises us up, and imparts
life eternal to all who receive it with faith and
docility.

Liturgical History
It is incontestable that from apostolic times the
canonical or holy books have been read aloud at
the assemblies of divine worship, and principally
at the celebration of the eucharistic sacrifice. St.
Justin Martyr (+ 166 or 167), who describes the
order of divine worship among Christians, says
that at the Sunday assemblies the writings of the
apostles (that is, the books of the New Testament)
or the writings of the prophets were read. In the
first four centuries the different books of the
Bible were read serially (lectio continua or in
continua serie), as they are still in the Breviary.
For the highest feasts there were chosen already
from the beginning appropriate passages, that is,
such passages as had reference to the mysteries
celebrated. With the progressive evolution of
the ecclesiastical year the lectio continua was
replaced by a series of biblical extracts arranged
for the various feasts and festal seasons. In this
matter St. Jerome, who by order of Pope Damasus
I (366-384), completed, corrected, and perfected
the traditional arrangement of the biblical
extracts for the Mass, deserves great credit.
According to a general rule that has few
exceptions, every Mass formula has two Biblical
readings, the first of which is called the Epistle
and the other the Gospel. Ember Wednesdays
have two lessons before the Gospel, while on
Ember Saturdays there are six lessons (five from
the Old Testament and one from the New) before
the Gospel. These were formerly read by 12
lectors, each lesson read first in Latin and then
in Greek. In the pope’s high mass the Epistle and
Gospel are still sung both in Latin and Greek.
The first reading may be taken from any part
of the Old and New Testaments; but generally the
Epistle is taken from the writings of the apostles.
Hence it is that the name Epistola, that is, letter,
was used to designate the first lesson, even when
it was not taken from the Epistles of the apostles,
but from some other part of Holy Scripture.
In regard to the superscription Lectio libri
27

Spirituality
Sapientiae, it is to be observed that this heading
is used not merely for extracts from the Book of
Wisdom (Sapientia), but also for portions from
Ecclesiasticus, Ecclesiastes, the Canticle of
Canticles, and Proverbs. All these taken together
are called by the Fathers and in the liturgy Books
of Wisdom (Libri Sapientiales).

The Ceremonies
From the fact that the Epistle was not sung
in former times, but only read, it is introduced
with the title Lectio, that is, lesson. Subsequent
development led to the mode of delivering the
Epistle in a tone between singing and simple
reading, as is still described in the Liber Usualis
(although a more ornate tone is frequently used).
The simple tone is a manner of singing in which
the whole text is delivered in a monotone without
modulation, except at an interrogation the voice
descends half a tone, but in the last syllable
it returns to the dominant tone. The rubrics
designate this as chanting (subdiaconus cantat
Epistolam alta voce). The ancient liturgists
called it choraliter legere, meaning “reading in

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a choral manner.” This way of choral reading
served to distinguish the Epistle from the Gospel,
as the tone of the former is more restrained,
while the singing tone of the Gospel is more
melodious and, therefore, more festive.
A cleric ordained to the minor order of lector
had charge of reading the Epistle perhaps up to
the fifth century; but from that time forward the
solemn reading of the Epistle was assigned to the
subdeacon, who only since the 14th century was
especially empowered thereto by the handing to
him at his ordination of the book of the Epistles,
while it is the office of the deacon to sing the
Gospel. In former times the lectors were even
allowed to read the Gospel. St. Cyprian mentions
this when speaking of the confessors Aurelius
and Celerinus whom he had ordained lectors. In
a sung Mass without the assistance of the deacon
and subdeacon, a lector in surplice may sing the
Epistle (Ritus servandus, VI, 8). [The 1962 Ritus
servandus expanded this role by using the term
ministrante in the cited text.]
In ancient churches, in the space between the
sanctuary and the nave of the church, there stood
the ambo, that is, an immovable tribune or oblong
pulpit, which was ascended by a few steps. The

word ambo is derived from the Greek anabaino
or ambaino (to ascend); it is also called a bema,
which designates a step, tribune, or rostrum. If a
church had two ambos, as seen in some ancient
basilicas, then one served for the reading of the
Gospel and the other for that of the Epistle. If
there was but one ambo, then the Gospel was
read from the highest step and the Epistle from
a lower one. The subdeacon no longer reads the
Epistle to the people from the ambo, as was
formerly done till towards the end of the Middle
Ages, but at the left side of the sanctuary turned
towards the altar. He must, nevertheless, both
before and after reading it make a genuflection in
the middle of the altar, as if he had gone to and
returned from an ambo on the Gospel side.

Epistle Subordinate
to the Gospel
The prominence due to the Gospel over the
Epistle was and is now expressed in various
ways. The ceremonies surrounding the chanting
of the Gospel are very evident, but, as seen in
the preceding paragraphs, this prominence
is also shown by the tone of delivery, by the
person of the reader, and the place of reading.
In addition, the subdeacon receives the blessing
from the celebrant, who represents Christ, only
after he has finished reading, because the Old
Law, symbolized by the Epistle, was fulfilled, or
annulled by Christ (Mt. 5:17-20); the deacon, on
the contrary, is blessed by the celebrant before he
reads the Gospel, because the Gospel is derived
from Christ. Furthermore, from the most ancient
times it is customary to sit with head covered
in choir at the solemn reading of the Epistle,
whilst from the beginning, the Gospel was
listened to standing and with head uncovered.
The subordination of the Epistle to the Gospel
is signified likewise by the position which
both occupy in the rite of the Mass: the Epistle
precedes and makes way for the Gospel.
The Gospel places before our eyes the life of
Jesus Christ, the word and the example of the
Eternal Wisdom made flesh; in it appears the
God-man Himself teaching and acting, suffering
and triumphing while in the Epistles the Holy

Ghost speaks to us, instructs and admonishes
us only by His human messengers and servants.
Hence, it is usually said that the instruction of
the people takes place at first in the Epistle, in
a preparatory and imperfect manner through
the doctrine of the prophets and apostles, but
that the faithful are more perfectly instructed
through the teachings of Christ as contained
in the Gospel (Cf. Summa Theologica III, q. 83,
a. 4). According to the liturgies of the Middle
Ages, the Epistle precedes the Gospel, because
it represents the law and the prophets, or the
efficacy of the Precursor of Christ, or the
preaching of the 72 disciples, who prepared the
way for the Savior. The Epistle, therefore, is read
before the Gospel because it is subordinate to it,
prepares for it, paves the way for it, that is, leads
to the understanding of it.

Deo Gratias
At the conclusion of the Epistle the acolyte, in
the name of the people, answers: Deo gratias!—
Thanks be to God! What is more befitting than
that we should thank the Lord from the bottom of
our heart for the divine instruction which He has
imparted to us by the mouth of His messenger?
In the Epistle, Almighty God, so to speak, sends
a letter, a writing from Heaven, to us miserable
creatures; should we not with faith and reverence
receive His words which are of infinite dignity,
power and depth of meaning, and obey them
with cheerfulness and alacrity? Every word
emanating from the mouth of God is supernatural
and heavenly food for the life of the soul. Holy
Scripture more than any other book is fit “to
instruct us unto salvation, to teach, to reprove,
to correct, to indoctrinate in justice, that the
man of God may be perfect, furnished unto every
good work” (II Tim. 3:15-17). By means of the
biblical readings the minister of God plants and
waters the field of our heart; let us be grateful
for this, and the Lord will then give the increase,
so that the heavenly seed of the living word may
germinate and thrive, blossom and produce fruit
thirty, sixty and a hundredfold.

29

Faithful after a retreat at the chapel of Zapotiltic, Mexico

Spirituality

Darkness or
Light from
Christ?
by Candidus

Editor’s Note: The following article originally appeared in the Italian edition of SiSiNoNo on February
16, 2018.
I have on my desk a letter that deserves
an answer which can be useful to all. The
reader writes: “If all you write about in several
publications and in your books is true, I am
discovering a Catholicism marvelously beautiful
and magnificent. It is not true, then, that the
Church is obscurantist, as the light that emanates
from her message is so abundant that it looks as if
the sun had risen in our history.”

Who is the Obscurantist One?
In the 18th century, the Illuminists—the ones
who thought that with the “light” of human reason
32

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all problems could be solved—started accusing
the Catholic Church of being obscurantist, that
is to willingly hide the true problems from man
and to keep him ignorant, then to enslave man by
requiring obedience to absurdities unacceptable
to human reason. The most Christian centuries,
like those of the Middle Ages, in their opinion had
been dark centuries, gloomy, whereas “the light”
started shining only with the “Renaissance” and
only with the French Revolution we entered the
contemporary age with all its progress.
Catholicism then, according to them, is
obscurantist, is darkness. Reason only is, then,
light and progress that prevails.
But we believers do not bend and “do not

submit.” Rather, we ask a question and, if you
like, as we say nowadays, a challenge: Which is
obscurantist?” Catholicism or Illuminism? The
believer, in love with Christ, or he who refuses
Him and His Church?
Jesus Christ, the Son of God made man, stands
out at the beginning of the last 2,000 years, ready
to face the third millennium and the centuries to
come, more alive than ever, present and operating
in history through His Church. History is full,
overflowing with Him and His works.
He is the master of humanity, a master capable
of astonishing by solving, with His light, any
problem of life and society. He promised it: “He
that follows me, walks not in darkness, but shall
have the light of life” (Jn. 8:12).

Which Ones are Jesus’ Works?
It will suffice to reflect a bit, even only
superficially on history, to discover all that Jesus
has accomplished through His Church.
–– Rome and its empire were horribly corrupted,
despite their power and organization. Slavery
and oppression of the weakest, the most
immoderate vices involved men, women, and
children. The Satyricon by Petronius is the
mirror of this corruption of the society of the
first century, the century of Augustus and
Nero. Well, in that Rome and its empire the
apostles of Jesus arrived, their weapons being
only truth and love. That world, so different
from the Gospel, converted: slavery collapsed,
men, women and youth were so renewed in
their being that they astonished their peers
and became role models for every age and
everywhere: the Christian martyrs and virgins.
–– Italy and all of Europe were swamped by the
“barbarians.” They were people coming from
the East, full of vitality, who crushed the
Roman generals and legions, softened in their
vices. Society was swept and put on fire by the
violence...pontiffs and bishops living during
these centuries announced the Gospel to the
“barbarians” of this devastating march. Jesus
conquered them, transformed them, made them
sons of God and made them brothers to one
another and to Roman society, already partially

Christian. From this sprang out a civilization
which was the origin of Europe.
The miracle of the conversion to Christ, thus,
of a new civilization in His image, took shape
and was repeated in every land in Europe and
beyond Europe, as far as the missionaries
reached: from Germany to England, and to
Iceland, from Asia to the Americas.
For centuries, Jesus has been light, salt,
leaven, good seed that grows, takes hold,
expands, transforms. Thus the time came when
Church, family, society, civic power, work, joys
and sorrows, the school and the public square,
even though among human sins and miseries,
became “one in Christ.” Marvelous cathedrals
arose, and, under their shade (or rather under
their light!) the universities were born. At the
light of Christ the Summa Theologiae of St.
Thomas Aquinas and the Comedy of Dante
were written; the brushes of Cimabue and
of Giotto were at work, the arts, the crafts,
social and political life, culture and commerce
flourished in a marvelous synthesis of man
become “one in Christ.”
Is all this obscurantism? Is all this darkness,
superstition, something to forget, or something
of which to be ashamed? Europe would not
have come into being with all its grandeurs,
the Europe that became teacher of the world,
if Jesus Christ had not been its origin. Is this
obscurantism?
–– When men in the 15th and 16th centuries forgot
about God or started to put only themselves at
the center of attention, paganism came back
with all its vices, its orgies, and its corruption
which had rotted Europe. So it is, that when
man, instead of contemplating Heaven with
God in it, looks at himself, he starts quickly to
roll in the mud, like a well-known animal…who
would deny it?
Here again is the marvel. The Church, torn
by Luther, Calvin, Henry VIII, even if all its
members were tempted by the miseries of
this world, but always in the care of Jesus
Christ and always holy like Him, found a new
vitality, an overflowing vitality. There bloomed
saints, an endless number of saints: Ignatius of
Loyola, John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila,
33

Spirituality
Philip Neri, Aloysius Gonzaga, Pius V, Charles
Borromeo, Joseph Calasanz, Francis de Sales,
Vincent de Paul, John de La Salle, and the list
could go on endlessly; saints who repaired the
fiber of the wounded society by the strength
of truth and love. This is another wonder from
Christ.
Is all this, then, obscurantism?

it does not hold, does not stand.
Immediately, right after these people spoke,
flashes of fire and death appeared. Were they the
Illuminati or “Lucifer’s followers?”
It is man who is dying—because his Christ has
been denied—in the French Revolution (think
about the “terror” and the genocide of the Catholic
Vendée) and in the legislation of the 1800s.
It is man who dies in the world wars of the

Man is Fulfilled in Christ
“Crush the infamous one” proclaimed Voltaire
in the mid-1700s. “The infamous one” to be
crushed was meant to be the Catholic Church.
Then came Marx saying that “religion is the
opium of the people” and proposed a unified
proletariat against States, property owners, and
the Church. Next came Nietszche who said that
“God is dead” and that man must be, by will of
power, a superman. Kant in the 1700s had already
tried to lay the foundations of a morality for the
godless man, where man is law to himself.
In a few words: man is the only protagonist of
society, man builds on his own, because “Either
God is not there, or does not belong there.” This is
the secular culture dominating today’s world, but
34

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May - June 2019

last century, in communist Russia and in its
“satellite” countries, in the China of Mao, in the
extermination camps of Stalin and Hitler.
It is man who dies in Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
and it is still man who dies in the poor and
miserable vision of life of our own days “with no
love and no Christ,” as the secular poet Salvatore
Quasimodo (who won the Nobel Prize for
literature in 1959) also admitted.
It is man who dies, stuffed in affluence,
desperate and suicidal in these terrible years of
ours. It is man who dies of drugs, of sex, of AIDS.
It is man who dies in the “trips” of the discos and
in the massacres of Saturday night, in the families
disintegrated by passing fancies, by “free love,” by

divorce, in the millions of aborted children, killed
before seeing the light.
It is man who dies in the nausea and boredom
which lead to inconsiderate actions, done “just to
do something” as in a game, to experience new
emotions.
Unfortunately—and this is the gravest thing—it
is God who dies and by consequence it is man
who dies in a “theology without Christ,” which

times, that 2,000 years of holy Catholic Tradition
have transmitted, despite all, up to our time.
The work is massive. But in the third
millennium Jesus is the only one left who
guarantees the value of human reason, the
dignity of the person, the sanctity of human
life, who points the way to real civilization, who
announces the eternal destiny of man. Whoever
has authority, but does not speak according to

is taught also by the higher ranks, by those who,
like priests, theologians and bishops, should be
only a beacon of light, of the light of Jesus Christ
in this darkened world. This is the world without
Christ, turned into an enemy of man, which has
penetrated also among churchmen.
Well, then, ladies and gentlemen, who is the
obscurantist?
One who denies God and rejects Jesus Christ
and His Church, what can such a man boast
about? Maybe that he is happier and worthier than
others? Maybe he can brag about the state of ruin
of our days? Please, let us stop kidding ourselves!
Such people need to ask forgiveness: “Lord, have
pity on me!” and then go back to the truth of all

His authority, may tremble and shake, but Jesus
Christ does not tremble, nor waver: He is the
invincible, the eternal.
We must start over with vigor and courage
from Him, because man is fulfilled, is saved only
in Christ, as Ernest Hello (19th-century French
writer of theology, philosophy, and literature)
wrote: “We need Christianity as it is: fiery! Jesus
is passion, fervor, fire and conquest. To convert is
to turn to Jesus who is the devouring fire and the
impetus of joy.”

35

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The 75th Anniversary of D-Day:

Why Do
You Come
Back to
Normandy?
by an American Monk

Editor’s Note: This article was written by an American monk, son of a veteran, after having
discovered this piece of history from the first chaplain parachutist fallen on D-Day, also a monk, the Rev.
Fr. Ignace Maternowski. His body was found near the Pont La Fiere, scene of the celebrated battle, the
bloodiest of the liberation of Normandy. Faced with the fear of the increasing number of wounded, the
monk-chaplain crossed the front lines to ask the commander of the German forces the authorization to
assemble the wounded from both sides in one station of first aid. The authorization obtained, the priest
returned toward the line of the American parachutists, but a German sniper, who ignored the agreement,
shot him in the back. Later, the German authorities asked for pardon.

Why Do You Come
Back to Normandy?
For the reason of the horrors of every
war, what veteran would not wish to just put
everything behind him? To this question, I
propose the following several responses.
Firstly, from a superficial perspective, one

could say that the old combat soldier was
returning to Normandy in order to relive the
glory of the victory, the fight, or to participate
(with great honor) in the military and civilian
celebrations such as the ceremonies and parades
that commemorate the original date of the battles
and which are frequently held around the
37

Spirituality
battle site itself.
In a solemn but cordial climate, one
renews friendships, makes conversation, lays
wreaths down, recollects oneself in silence to
commemorate one’s fallen comrades, etc.
All of these things are done as veterans, but
also as survivors.
There is no need for eloquent words; the
veterans who return to Normandy relive the
sentiments of the end of a great conflict.
It is already a lot to take in.
But all of this only scratches the surface
of the public manifestations organized by
diverse authorities. It is evident that one
makes a great effort in order not to forget the
price of the end of this vast war. To call this a
gesture of commemorative honor is really an
understatement.
Liberty, even though it is explained using
hundreds of definitions, is not something that is
free.
From 1939-1945, France was a country that
was brutally occupied, oppressed, humiliated,
and reduced to a police state. The first American
soldiers to arrive had a difficult time restraining
the French who, in their delirium of liberation,
in seeing the Germans raise their hands as
prisoners of war, were immediately tempted to
indulge in violent reprisals.
To put these first aspects aside, I consider that
other more personal reasons exist for which an
American veteran soldier would return to France.

A Sense of Duty
On June 6, 1944, the American soldier arrived
in Normandy to accomplish his mission, to do his
duty of military service. This combines the wills
of several unified nations in one sole will which
demands that the soldier bind himself there
where he is ordered.
The soldier is mobilized; he obeys; he
advances; he retreats; he lunges toward the
enemy; he plunges himself in chaos; he faces
the fire of combat; he fights both physically and
spiritually (body and soul); he is totally engaged.
All of this is normal. But this “normal” means
that there is also a very small chance that he will
38

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May - June 2019

leave alive. The soldier in combat continually
lives in tension and fear. This combat provokes
conflict from minute to minute, hour to hour,
day to day. The intensity of combat is impossible
to explain, even more so because the duration
is indeterminable. And when this is multiplied
by months and years, one can easily understand
that the war veteran is marked forever: he is
profoundly affected, stigmatized for life. The
wounds are most often those that don’t meet the
eye. Humanly speaking, the soldier asks himself
the question: is this war really “human” …?
The numerous public accounts underline the
fact that the war was not the same for all of
the combatants. One distinguishes with reason
the volunteers from those who were called
“conscripts” [A person drafted for military or
naval service].
Among the volunteers, the parachutists of
J-Day were known and respected by reason of
their grave and total sacrifice. Among the 13,700
men who jumped from planes after midnight,
3,000 were already dead before sunrise.
In contrast to certain selected soldiers, the
conscripts were there on duty, for better or
worse. They were less motivated; they fought to
survive. But, in a less glorious context, heroism
was seen all the same.
War for the combat soldier doesn’t allow him
to have an overall perspective, a bird’s eye view, a
view of the whole conflict like you see in films.
Understand well that war, for the soldier
during combat, is merely the few hundred meters
before him, behind him and at his sides. He
doesn’t see more than that. For him, war is a cold
reality thrown in his face. He only knows his own
horizon.

A World At War
A world war engages several countries; the
whole world is implicated. It is enormous! But the
combat soldier himself knows only a very small
part.
What is more, the soldier doesn’t know
anything about the advances of the war; who
is winning, losing…apart from the incoherent
transmissions of poorly-connected walkie-

talkies. He ignores what is happening on the
other fronts. The veteran who returns here,
desires to better understand what actually
happened. He needs to orient himself amidst the
drama that he endured. He retraces the steps
of his regiment; he rethinks his decisions, good
or bad; he relives the moments of victory or
defeat. He rediscovers the place where his best
friend fell. He looks at the landscape, the roads,
the battle fields where many secrets are buried
which he would prefer to forget. To interpret
these things, the old combatant must be both
historian and student in order to understand the
incomprehensible through which he lived.
The return to these places of war is not a
simple visit to a cemetery or a search for the
tomb of a comrade. I believe that the return of a
veteran to Normandy is a pilgrimage, a spiritual
march in search of serenity and peace deep
within the soul. This is why the soldier returns
here where he faced death and where he saw so
many horrors.
After the struggle of war comes the duty of
silence imposed by military law. In effect, before
his return to civilian life, the soldier swears
to remain silent concerning the [classified]
events that he experienced. This makes it that
much more important for him to return to the
place where he fought. But now that the law of
silence has now been lifted, he can experience
seeing and perceiving the events of those days
more clearly than ever in light of the numerous
historical studies which have been authorized in
our time.
At Omaha Beach, there is a simple reason
for which a cemetery was erected above the

beach. This area was the site of an extreme
concentration of human effort, an extreme
intensity of heroic suffering, an extreme triumph
of hope, and one remembers that the liberation
of Europe began at this very place. The price
of freedom being the lives of hundreds of
thousands of soldiers. This is war; it is also the
price of peace. This war overthrew social order
in all of the countries of Europe. Despite a very
opinionated concurrence of political context,
the soldiers have come here to make an end. The
landing places on the beaches possess therefore
a sacred valor, both historical and spiritual.
Here, blood ran, bullets whizzed, shells burst;
yes, it was here that the war entered into its most
terrible and deadly phase.
The thousands of crosses that cover the
ground and the buried bodies of those who have
made the ultimate sacrifice witness from now on
that peace and liberty also began again here.
Peace and liberty are the most precious goods
of people and individuals; they are the characters
of social order and Christianity. This is, in my
opinion, the most noble cause for which men
accept to confront death.
For a young soldier of 18-19 years old thrown
into the fire of combat, in the rage and intensity
of the conflict, obliged to face the fiercest army
in the world, Normandy will remain a sacred
land forever; one cannot describe it otherwise.
We are united in this return of the veterans to
understand what remains of the war. War is
something of a paradox; it is a mystery.
Thank you for reading this.
Translated from the French by Associate Editor Jane Carver.

39

The present-day cathedral
was built between 1170
and the middle of the
13th century through the
initiative of Bishop Arnulf.
It was the seat of the Bishop
of Lisieux until the Diocese
of Lisieux was abolished
under the Concordat of 1801
and merged into the Diocese
of Bayeux. The edifice is 360
feet tall and is a national
monument.

Christian Culture

Lisieux
The Basilica of St. Thérèse
(1873-1897, Canonized 1925)

by Dr. Marie-France Hilgar

The basilica was begun in 1929. My aunts
remember seeing vast collection baskets made
available to the visitors when it was under
construction and Americans throwing dollars in
them by the handful.

A Magnificent Exterior
The exterior: the bell tower is separate from
the building at the far end of the esplanade. Here
are the dimensions of the basilica: height of the
dome: 312 feet from the level of the esplanade;
length east-west, from the entrance to the apse:
312 feet; width of the aisle, 90 feet; width of the
transept 164 feet high under the dome; the total
area of 48,438 square feet make the Basilica of
Lisieux one of the biggest churches built in the
42

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May - June 2019

20th century. The grand façade is flanked by two
towers and surmounted by a triangular pediment.
In the center, St. Thérèse, hands clasped in prayer,
looks upon the pilgrims who have come to pray.
The pediment divided into two levels, expresses
the great triumph of St. Thérèse: on the upper
level, the angels who welcomed her into Heaven;
the lower level depicts the people who contributed
to the glorification on earth of Thérèse; from left
to right, the builder of the basilica and a group of
pilgrims including children. The words inscribed
horizontally give us the sentence: “O my God, you
have surpassed all my expectations, and I will
sing your mercies forever more,” the antiphon of
the Magnificat: “Blessed be the Lord for He has
so glorified thy name today that your praise will
always be on the lips of men.” Lower down, the
virtues are shown: faith, hope and charity between,

on the left, justice and prudence and on the right
fortitude and temperance.
Between the arch and the gallery, the text gives
the essential idea which runs through all the
iconography: “Whoever exalteth himself shall be
humbled, and whoever humbleth himself shall be
exalted.” Around the arch, the months of the year,
using familiar scenes, teach us that these lessons
are valid in all circumstances. Immediately after
the great west door is shown the classic scene
from the Gospel: Jesus amid His apostles showing
them the child as an example that everyone must
follow if he wishes to enter the kingdom of Heaven.
On each side of the main door, imposing statues
of the Blessed Virgin and St. Joseph, protectors
of the Carmelite Order. The bas-reliefs show, on
the left tower, St. Agnes; on the right, St. Cecilia;
under the arch, on the left, the Annunciation; on
the right, the Presentation of Jesus in the temple.
On the side walls, we note the coat of arms of the
nations in which the devotion to St. Thérèse has
been the greatest. At the summit of the transept
we find the Ark of Noah and St. Peter’s boat. In the
south courtyard is the main sacristy. On each side
of the façade, a cloister runs along the top of the
supporting walls. The south cloisters, on the right,
are a place for meditation for those who wish to
pray in silence. In the north cloister, to the left is a
souvenir shop.
Inside this huge edifice, no part of the
architecture, no columns obstruct the view: the
sanctuary is elevated, 4,000 people can take part
in the ceremonies. If we start with the right aisle,
we see in the southern transept the monumental
ciborium which holds the precious reliquary
offered by Pius XI to the basilica. It contains a
precious relic: two bones from the right arm of
the saint. In the center of the balustrade there
is a small relic that pilgrims particularly like to
venerate. Following the aisle, one comes upon the
sanctuary. The Blessed Sacrament is kept in the
tabernacle on the high altar. On the tabernacle
is a crucifix in bronze. An altar has been added
between the stalls. The basilica holds 18 minor
altars, each offered by a nation in ex-voto to St.
Thérèse and dedicated to its respective patron.
The names of the chapels are: United States,
Portugal, Columbia, Argentina, Great Britain,
Brazil, Scotland, Chile, Germany, Ukraine, Cuba,

Italy, Ireland, Spain, Canada, Mexico, BelgiumNetherlands, and Poland.

The Basilica’s Mosaics
Mosaics are ever-present in the basilica. At
the top of the triumphal arch, God the Father
stretches out His arms in a gesture of creation and
providence. On each side are the Biblical scenes
that relate the numerous divine acts of God’s
mercy toward those who placed their hope in Him:
in ascending order on the north wall, the archangel
Raphael leads Tobias, the angel of God, comforting
Agar and her son Ismael in the desert, Abraham’s
sacrifice, Jesse’s tree. On the south wall: Daniel in
the lion’s den, Elias comforted by the angel, Moses
and his people led by the angel of God toward
the promised land. In the half dome that rises
above the sanctuary, the theme of God’s mercy is
repeated; In the center, Christ is wearing a wide
cloak held open by the Virgin Mary, standing,
and St. Thérèse, kneeling. Christ is calling His
followers, represented by the sheep, to shelter
under His protection. Encompassing this scene,
two architectural motifs make up the composition
of divine love: Bethlehem over which there shines a
star, and Jerusalem presenting the Cross.
We can ascend the dome by steps found on
the right of the main door. The four pillars are in
commemoration of the Evangelists. On the roof
surface is shown the triumph that the heavenly
Father reserves for those who have shown
themselves to be His children within the Blessed
Trinity, the eternal source of love. Christ as King
and Mary as Queen of all Saints welcome and
crown little Thérèse while the choir of angels
surround her with an enormous crown of roses.
Below the windows each of the Beatitudes is
recalled in a text from the Gospels and the image
of a saint whose life illustrated this teaching.
Starting with the picture that is in the center of the
aisles toward the choir, and following on the right:
The beatitude of the poor in spirit: theirs is the
kingdom of Heaven. It is illustrated by St. Francis
of Assisi, talking to the birds and surrounded
by the sheep and the wolf. The beatitude of the
merciful: they will obtain mercy: St. Vincent de
Paul is seen freeing the galley slaves, then with
43

a nun belonging to the order of St. Vincent de
Paul [The Sisters of Charity] looking after some
orphans.
The beatitude of those who suffer persecution
in the name of justice: theirs is the kingdom of
Heaven. It is personified by Joan of Arc at the
stake. A priest holds out the Cross to her. In the
background is shown the old market square of
Rouen. The beatitude of those who weep: they
shall be comforted: St. Mary Magdalen is seen
before Christ’s tomb. The beatitude of those who
hunger and thirst for justice: St. Teresa of Avila
symbolically presenting the rules of the Carmelite
Order that she revised, calms the angel of
destruction who already has his sword raised over
the world. In the background is shown St. John of
the Cross. The beatitude of those who are meek:
they shall inherit the earth. St. Francis de Sales in
the mountains of the Chablais, behind him, St. Jane
de Chantal. The beatitude of the peacemakers: they
will be called children of God: St. Pius X is shown
with on either side the horrors of war and the
superior results of peace. The beatitude of the pure
of heart: they shall see God. St. Cecilia receives a
crown of roses from her husband Valerian; behind
them one can see the executioner. Each of the eight
scenes is 20 feet wide by 14.27 feet high. An elegant
colonnade borders the round gallery. Right up to
her celestial triumph, St. Thérèse demonstrates
her loving generosity. She is never idle. She has
only one idea in mind: To return to earth again
to spread the word of love. This is the reason for
the inscription of her celebrated promise on the
tympanum of the dome: I wish to spend my time in
Heaven doing good on earth. Her promise that she
will cause a shower of roses to fall from Heaven
in transformed in images. On the pendentive
is found her other promise: I will redescend
(angel of goodness), I will help priests (angel of
vocations), the Missionaries (angel of missions),
the whole church (angel of the church). Above the
west gallery, the middle panel shows St. Thérèse
surrounded by four popes who contributed to her
glorification: the panel on the left shows the French
provinces, recalling the fact that St. Thérèse was
proclaimed the second Patroness of France; the
panel on the right reminds us that St. Thérèse is
the Patroness of Missions.
The fatherly attitude of God should inspire one’s

soul to respond as did St. Thérèse by praising and
singing His mercies. This is the theme inscribed
on the great windows in the lateral bays which
give, using the text that is richly illustrated and
varied in its composition, the verses from the
Psalm Benedicite, the Psalm of joy and praise.
The soul should above all respond to the gift of
God by the giving of oneself in return. This is
illustrated in the great stained-glass window in
the southern transept. An effort has been made
here to translate the most significant page from
the book The Story of a Soul: To be your spouse,
O Jesus! To be a Carmelite...but I feel the desire for
other vocations: warrior, priest, apostle, martyr...
my vocation is love...thus I will be everything.”
The main theme in the center shows St. Thérèse
kneeling at the foot of the Cross, receiving the
shining light of Christ’s love and transmitting it to
other souls, thus resembling the fountain of life.
In this way, she carried out all the vocations she
wished to follow and so, there above from left to
right, the virgins (Cecilia and Teresa of Avila), the
warriors (St. Louis and Joan of Arc), the priests
(St. Vincent de Paul and St. Jean Marie Vianney),
the doctors (St. John of the Cross and Francis de
Sales), the martyrs and missionaries (St. Stephen
and St. Agnes, St. Francis Xavier and Theophane
Vénard). Alongside this central scene have been
accentuated the fundamental vocations of the
saint: on the left, her desire to be a missionary (the
scene from the Gospel showing the sending of the
disciples), on the right, her desire for martyrdom
(the massacre of the Innocents). You will have
no difficulty noticing that the choice of people
and scenes followed the known preferences of
the saint. The great stained-glass in the northern
transept contributes a new and important
development to the main theme of God’s paternal
Providence toward man, using the Psalm 23, The
Lord is my shepherd, which is known to have
played a significant role in St. Thérèse’s life. The
chapel windows are devoted to the Stations of the
Cross.

Inside the Crypt
The entrance to the crypt is on the right at
the bottom of the basilica steps. One hundred
45

Christian Culture
sixty-four feet long and ninety-eight feet wide, the
crypt is entirely covered in marble and mosaics.
All the iconography is directed towards expressing
God’s love for man and the love of men for God.
The scriptural texts on the vault and on the floor,
repeat this message repeatedly. The main altar
is dedicated to St. Thérèse. The statue of the
saint shows her eyes and arms raised toward the
assurance of God’s fatherly love. She seems to be
rushing, with her arms outstretched like a child
who runs trustingly into her father’s arms, toward
the divine Person who is beckoning to her. On the
right of the main altar, the altar of the Virgin Mary
is seen the bronze statue of the Virgin of the Smile,

who was so dear to St. Thérèse.
On the left, in the opposite aisle, stands the
altar of the Child Jesus, overlooked by an exact
copy of the statue of the Child Jesus to be found
in the Carmel that the Saint used to decorate with
flowers. Twelve small altars are further dedicated
to St. Joseph, St. Joan of Arc, St. John the
Evangelist, St. Paul, St. Francis de Sales, St. Teresa
of Avila, the Blessed Théophane Vénard, St. John of
the Cross, St. Agnes, St. Cecilia, St. Augustine and
St. Mary Magdalene. In 1958, the decoration of the
crypt was finished with the laying of the five large
mosaics in the tympanum. On the north side, above
the porch, St. Thérèse’s baptism; above the sacristy
door: the miracle of the Virgin of the Smile. On the
south side, above the porch, the First Communion,
the Chapel of the Infant Jesus, St. Thérèse’s
religious profession, St. Thérèse’s death.
On leaving the crypt, pilgrims may want to
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visit the permanent exhibition, “The Carmel as St.
Thérèse knew it,” under the north cloisters on the
left. The film, Vrai visage de Thérèse de Lisieux,
is shown in the hall leading of the square, under
the cloister on the south side of the basilica. Then,
immediately at the back of the basilica are the
Stations of the Cross. An altar, dominated by a
huge Cross, overlooks the scene.

The Town of Lisieux
Lisieux is a town of 27,000 inhabitants,
according to the 2007 census. We recommend
that you visit Les Buissonnets, where St. Thérèse
lived as a child. It is still furnished as it was at the
time. The remarkable unity in the structure of the
Cathedral of Saint-Pierre (12th-13th centuries)
makes of this church one of the most beautiful
examples of the Gothic Norman ogival style.
St. Thérèse attended Mass there daily with her
family. In the northern ambulatory, near the main
entrance, is the chapel where St. Thérèse made
her first confession. The church of St. Jacques, in
the Flamboyant style, was almost destroyed by
bombs in 1944. Since then, it has been restored by
the Department of Historical Buildings. When one
enters the church, on the left, in the first chapel, is
the baptistry.
This is where St. Thérèse was baptized on the
4th of January 1873. The baptismal font is made
of marble, the altar surmounted by a statue of
the saint. A stained-glass window represents
the ceremony. One can see some relics: bones
of the saint and half of her baptismal robe. The
main nave, remarkable for the architecture of its
triforium and its vault, lacks the complement of its
stained-glass windows which are in store and have
not yet been put back in their original place by
the Beaux Arts. The magnificent organ case hides
part of the big stained-glass window belonging to
the same period as the other missing windows.
This is the church where St. Thérèse’s parents
were married. Another place of interest is the Lace
School, guardian of the famous traditional “point
d’Alençon,” with its museum of lace.

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And so, dearly-beloved, let us rejoice with spiritual joy, and let us with gladness
pay God worthy thanks and raise our hearts’ eyes unimpeded to those heights
where Christ is. Minds that have heard the call to be uplifted must not be pressed
down by earthly affections, they that are fore-ordained to things eternal must not
be taken up with the things that perish; they that have entered on the way of truth
must not be entangled in treacherous snares, and the faithful must so take their
course through these temporal things as to remember that they are sojourning in
the vale of this world, in which, even though they meet with some attractions, they
must not sinfully embrace them, but bravely pass through them.
Pope Leo the Great, Sermon 74 on the Ascension
Fresco, Church of St. Servatius, Maastricht, Netherlands

Christian Culture

Dealing with Clerical Scandal:

It Takes a
Christendom
by Dr. John Rao

Clerical mischief has been a constant fact of life in the history of the Church. Although there have
been a fair number of dubious and downright despicable figures on the Throne of St. Peter, the papacy
does not come out of a study of clerical scandal through the ages all that badly. The general run of
the episcopacy and the clergy, secular and religious, do not fare quite as well. But higher or lower in
the hierarchy of scandal that the supreme head or the ordinary members of the clerical state may be,
they are perfectly united in one two-fold aspect: the boring repetitiveness of the kind of sins that they
commit, and their “fraternal” union with the Christian laity in their succumbing to what are their all too
similar trans-vocational temptations.

Surrounded by Wickedness
Clerical scandal in the final analysis does not
display shockingly unique characteristics. It
reflects instead the evils of the lay environment
into which each and every cleric is born in the
first place. The problem of scandal is a general one
that is admittedly more distressing when speaking
about the clergy’s part in it because of the primary
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significance of their consecrated persons and
labors. But dealing effectively with clerical scandal
also requires an assault upon the wickedness of
the outside fallen world, with the attack primarily
aimed at whatever special form this may take in
any given place or time.
In short, it takes a healthy Christendom—even

a tiny modern one as opposed to the grand res
publica Cristiana of the High Middle Ages—to
purge clerical corruption. And when it succeeds
in doing so, it enhances the ability of popes,
bishops, priests, and religious to perform their
higher spiritual mission better, thereby helping the
social order that has done the clergy a good turn
to stay on even keel and transform itself in Christ
still more thoroughly in the future. To state this
purgative truth in a more popular fashion, “one
hand of Christendom washes the other.”

Two Types of Troublemaking
Individual cases of scandalous behavior aside,
let us briefly outline the two basic types of clerical
troublemaking in Church History, the first of which
is the unedifying desertion from the ranks of the
mystical body of Christ of sizeable units of the
first estate, manifested in their encouragement of
or positive response to heretical attacks on the
Catholic message. Such nefarious conduct was
all too visible at the time of the great Trinitarian
and Christological controversies of the 4th - 7th
centuries, and in the days of the Protestant
Revolution some thousand years later. The second
form of priestly and religious troublemaking is
immorality—financial, sexual, and politically
ambitious—plain and simple. Terribly prevalent in
the Western Church in the miserable era following
the collapse of the Carolingian experiment at
restoring a Roman and Catholic order from the
late 9th through the early 11th centuries, this
second plague returned again in a somewhat
analogous fashion from the time of the residence
of the papacy in Avignon down to that of the
Tridentine reform. Immorality has also played a
role in inclining clerics to the first form of scandal,
whether to justify abandonment of their state in
life to further their own vices, or to adopt heresy in
a mistaken attempt to overturn undeniable clerical
evildoing.
Similarly, peculiar problems aside, the manner
in which Catholics historically have successfully
struggled against our two basic types of clerical
naughtiness also can be summarized rather
simply. They merely involve applying the truth
noted above: that “it takes a Christendom” to

clean up Holy Mother the Church; that, just
as individuals can only be saved by becoming
part of a community—the Body of Christ—it is
solely through communal effort in every regard
that each Christian has even a chance of being
kept religiously sane and on the proper path to
sanctification.

The Effort to Purge Scandals
Allow me to explore the history of Catholic
struggles to purge clerical scandals through
emphasis upon the aid of broader communities in
a perhaps oddly “ecumenical” way, by borrowing
Buddhist terminology used to identify its two main
divisions, and a Chinese expression concerning
the way in which different and contrasting forces
can enter into a mutually profitable “dance”
with one another. Let us say that the problem in
question has repeatedly been tackled by an appeal
to a “Lesser and a Greater Vehicle” of impressive,
purgative, communal efficacy, and in a way that
illustrates their yin and yang complementarity.
Employment of the “Lesser Vehicle” has
entailed the mobilization of the Catholic clerical
community in all of its immense variety and
proper hierarchy to fight its internal scandals.
Psychologically and physically, isolation has
always been one of the greatest dangers of clerics,
whether as individuals or as members of religious,
diocesan, or national groups, all of them inevitably
more narrow in their character than the Church
Universal. This isolation leaves them badly
armed for responding properly to the particular
temptations of their all too personal or parochial
environments. Hence, moving from the simplest
to the most complex levels, reform movements
throughout the ages, depending upon the specific
scandals that they have had to liquidate and the
forces targeted, have understood the necessity of
dealing with the weaknesses of the clerical state
by similar communal means: by strengthening
the bonds of the members of a religious house at
risk of internal or external corruption with other
endangered houses of their order, often sending
some of the healthy members of one of these to
cure the sickly colleagues of sister establishments;
by linking parish priests more tightly and
51

Christian Culture
fraternally in orthodox intellectual and spiritual
activities, complemented by participation in
regular diocesan synods guided by reform bishops;
by overcoming the flaws of bad bishops of a given
land in subjecting them to the decisions of national
assemblies dominated by determined and saintly
episcopal confrères; and by the taming of the
sins of proud religious orders and uppity national
episcopacies through appeal to the universal
clerical authority of popes who truly know what
it meant to be successors of St. Peter. If any of
these communal aspects of the “Lesser Vehicle”
are ignored, the isolation of one religious house or
community, one diocesan priest, one bishop, or one
nation will drastically increase the chance for their
particular, local, parochial temptations to triumph,
and heretical or immoral tendencies to worm their
way in and thrive along with them.
Reformers throughout the history of the Church
have understood that the purity of the head of the
clerical estate provides the greatest guarantee for
the members as a whole. This means that if the
papacy falls prey to its own peculiar parochial
temptations, the entirety of the clerical body is,
will remain, or will soon be put at its greatest risk.
This was indeed the case in the pre-Tridentine
period, when a reformer such as Gian Pietro Carafa
(1476-1559), who ended his career as Pope Paul IV
(1555-1559), lambasted the Holy See for thinking
of itself as somehow more than the community
that it served rather than its supreme authority.
He identified “the fundamental cause of the ills
of the Church” as “the immense exaggeration of
the pontifical power occasioned by the refined
adulation of canonists without conscience”
(Carafa in Gennaro Maria Monti, ed., Ricerche
su Papa Paolo IV Carafa, Benevento, 1923, p.
42). This power was then used to coddle heretics,
give dispensations for criminal and immoral
clerics to continue and even expand upon their
nefarious endeavors, and block criticism of its
actions through an assertion of nothing more than
criminal arrogance.

The Need for Christendom
But this brings me to the importance of the
mobilization of the “Greater Vehicle”: Catholic
52

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Christendom in its widest scope. This is indeed the
Greater Vehicle for dealing with clerical scandal,
first of all because a diseased Christendom can
stymie any attempt to improve the situation
of a clergy at risk, even when popes who are
in fine fettle stand behind it. Steeped in sinful
secular concerns, it is most destructive when its
reigning evils are simply taken for granted as a
particular age’s “common sense.” The bad “spirit
of the times”—the zeitgeist—this creates always
has an advantage in a struggle for control over
men’s minds and wills because its erroneous
axioms become part of the very atmosphere that
they breathe from morning until night. It bends
believers to its will by attacking them on two
fronts, encouraging acceptance of the present,
living, erroneous spirit as the obvious dictate
of unquestionably intelligent reasoning, while
redirecting any remaining desire to fight “the
world” against the dead and buried errors of the
zeitgeist of times gone by. Once firmly ensconced
in the clerical mind and soul, it determines, to
its own advantage, the battleground on which
the Church should continue to battle and the
weapons that she may and may not use. Counsel
is thereby given against taking the very measures
most useful in dealing with problems and in favor
of those designed to worsen them. That which is
easy to correct is depicted as being difficult and
even impossible; wise policy intended to eradicate
sinfulness is ridiculed as the handiwork of the
foolish; promotion of evil as “the voice of the Holy
Spirit in our times.”
Submission of Christendom to the dictates of a
sinful, secular, lay zeitgeist, sometimes violent and
sometimes subtle, has regularly brought with it the
corruption of the clergy, often for long stretches
of time, and often even under the rubric of being
loyal to the Catholic message as it goes about its
work of subversion. Some compelling ground for
bending to the “obvious” demands of the world
can always be conjured up by it: the demands of
Sacred Emperors, Sacred Kings or City-States,
Sacred Constitutions, Sacred Power Politics,
Sacred Family Noble Requirements; a Sacred Dow
Jones and its Sacred Profits; a Sacred Proletariat
and its Party Apparatchiks; Sacred Ids, Egos, and
Superegos, Sacred Fulfillment of One’s Personality,
Sacred Passions, Sacred Dialogue—you name it.

St. Catherine before the Pope at Avignon - Paolo di Giovanni

Corruption of monasteries, bishoprics, diocesan
clergies, and Roman Pontiffs throughout the
ages has always had more to do with fending off
outside political, financial, and powerful family
ambitions than the greed and lusts of the clergy
when left to its own devices. But these do draw
out whatever sins existing clerics are indeed
susceptible to committing already, and bring in
new recruits to encourage them, fend off Catholic
efforts to eradicate them, and open the door to
heresy if heretical ideas make their life of scandal
still easier. This downward spiraling clergy will
then never do anything to transform the lay spirit
working hard to pervert it. On the contrary, it
will condemn the work of re-Catholicizing the
diseased Christendom that feeds the vice in which
it now wallows, whether this be a simple cowardly
unwillingness to confront a secular world that
allows it to survive if it keeps its mouth shut or
truly decadent enjoyment of what Christ abhors.
Still, Christendom at large is the “Greater
Vehicle” for dealing with clerical scandal for a
second reason, because, when possessing at

least certain healthy elements, it has, at crucial
moments in Church History, proven to be the
only tool possible for reinvigorating its colleague,
“Lesser” in its overall impact. This has especially
been noticeable when what was most required
was the help of the laity in awakening or shaking
up the Head of the First Estate, a sleeping or
perverse Papacy scandalizing much of the clergy,
which itself begged for its assistance. This is what
happened in the 10th and 11th centuries, where one
sees the reformed monks of Cluny stimulating an
Empire healthier than Rome to come to the Eternal
City to replace deficient pontiffs with proper ones.

An Ongoing Struggle
Clerical scandal may ultimately be boring in its
sinful repetitiveness, but Satan is highly inventive
in his use of tools to bring wave after wave of
it into the life of the Church. Historical reform
movements making great progress in eradicating
clerical evils by means of both the Lesser and
53

Christian Culture
the Greater Vehicle have themselves repeatedly
been undermined through demonic persistence
and the weakness of our nature, which will always
remain badly marred by Original Sin. Services on
behalf of reform carried out by religious orders,
dioceses, national episcopacies, the papacy, and
lay political forces have all at times been brought
to a halt and even twisted into agents of the
corruption that they sought to end, due, especially
to the exaggeration of the parochial pride of each
of these forces. Corruptio optimi pessima! The
“drama of truth” that salvation history places
before our eyes is not a mechanical production
whose actors play predictable roles. Maneuvering
through it is a never-ending dance in which an eye
must be kept on all of those prancing around the
ballroom and taking steps in different directions at
different times to avoid being knocked off course.
Hence the need to nurture the principle of yin
and yang, staying on the lookout for the valuable
use of contrasting complementary forces, Greater
and Lesser Vehicles, clerics and laymen of saintly
mettle, depending upon the circumstances of the
day.
Needless to say, both categories of clerical
scandal outlined above thrive in our own place and
time, with all of the false teaching, persecution of
true believers, self-deception, co-habitation with
concubines, homosexuality, demoralizing display
of a lust for power and riches, and craven flattery
of those already possessing these self-deceptive
earthly treasures that the cultivation of such
failings always tediously guarantees. Moreover,
does any truly believing Catholic doubt that Pope
Paul IV would utter the same judgment regarding
the contemporary papacy and the all too erroneous
cheerleaders of an exaggerated, willful, personal
infallibility aiding heresy and corruption that he
pronounced in the 1500’s were he alive today?
And, worse still, who is the honest observer of
contemporary society who can deny that the sick,
secular, modern zeitgeist, with its adulation of
man’s fallen individual passions and will, and
its readiness to justify any and every vice with
sufficient strength to press its case, has become
the official ideology of most Catholics today,
making all appeal to the authoritative intervention
of the communal authorities of the Lesser and the
Greater Vehicles of Christendom—the only forces
54

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that could work their “magic” to deal with the
unspeakable clerical sins paraded before our eyes
in the daily press—the one unthinkable thought.
What can be done when the salt needed to deal
with the problem has itself lost its savor? Or when
one cannot even imagine using it at all?
Yes, “it takes a Christendom” to deal with
clerical scandal, our Christendom is indeed
diseased, but, quite frankly, it has always been
somewhat sick and will continue to be subject
to illness and infection until the end of time. It
was not completely well by any stretch of the
imagination when its healthier elements raised
their heads in the 10th and 11th century, both yin
and yang, reformed clergy stimulating laity, laity
the papacy, and a purified papacy the resistant
clerical sinners to “clean up their acts.”
Healthy elements are also at work in today’s
seemingly moribund Christendom, in precisely the
way that they should be. New clerical orders and
less organized communities within mainstream
dioceses have emerged to strengthen, through
their fraternal union, the fiber of individual priests
who would otherwise have been isolated on their
own. Militant laity have “voted with their feet”
by abandoning sickly parishes to join with them,
forming Catholic associations of their own to bring
resistant clergy, enslaved to the zeitgeist, back to
their senses. Honest devotion to the Christian life
in communion with others; straightforwardness
in dealing with society on the basis of Catholic
teachings; a break with the “accepted” ways of
“doing business” according to the standards of
the zeitgeist with its call to earthly prudence
will once again show that the explanation of the
clerical scandal and the path for dealing with it
coming out of “The World” is either self-serving
or self-deceptive nonsense—and for the simple
reason that they come not from Christ but from the
devil. What still is needed for success is to wean
the papacy—the head of the clerical estate—away
from its love affair with a sinful zeitgeist. Whence
the final stimulus for that Great Purge will come
remains unclear to me. It has emerged from the
Greater Vehicle, from Christendom at large, from
the Emperor, in the past. But today?

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Christian Culture

Protecting
the Property
of Others
by SSPX Sisters

Who hasn’t witnessed two children quarreling
over a toy? Oh! How the instinct of ownership
is well-rooted in us! It is God who has given it
to us, in order that we will seek to acquire and
conserve what is necessary for life. Otherwise,
who would burden themselves with the care of
saving money to buy a house or pay insurance?
We would be satisfied with living like nomads.
The instinct of ownership is thus not bad in
itself, but our souls are disordered due to the
effects of original sin. Instead of contenting
ourselves with what is necessary and useful, we
are always interested in acquiring more! Let us
look at the following examples.
Monica throws a fit: “Adele isn’t letting me play
with her doll!”
“Don’t you have your own?” replies Mother.
“Why do you want her doll?”
56

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Yes, Monica had her own, but she considered
that the property of another was at the
disposition of her caprice.
From here, this bad inclination could quickly
grow worse in her.
Cecilia Cony, a Brazilian religious who died
in the odor of sanctity (1900-1939), recounted in
her childhood memories how one of her friends
envied her pretty milk glass.
“May I use Cecilia’s glass?” the child asked the
maid. Having been refused, she waited for the
maid to turn her back so she could bump Cecilia’s
arm. The glass fell and broke. The little envious
one didn’t stop there: she ran to the maid and
exclaimed: “Cecilia was so mad that you didn’t let
me use her glass that she threw it on the ground!”
For this, the poor victim was severely
punished.

Envy, anger, and lying, which often end by
inflicting an unjust punishment…just how far can
the disordered love of another’s property lead?
How can this be corrected? A good place to start
would be to cultivate the care of possessions in
children.
At school, everyone knows that Marie is
orderly; her desk remains very tidy; the pages
of books lent by the teacher are not dog-eared;
she doesn’t scribble on the desk…Why? It is
because at home, everyone has their own little
private domain which is more or less extensive
according to their age. The rules are simple: each
child is responsible for maintaining it in order
(the mother inspects it from time to time); the
brothers and sisters must ask the owner their
permission if they wish to borrow something.
As the child grows, the range of objects for
which they have access extends. Many things are
“theirs” without belonging to them, at least in
their own right. Let us profit from daily incidents
(which are inevitable!) in order to inculcate the
sense of justice to our children. To break a glass
by accident while setting the table at home is
a small mistake, which often doesn’t need to
be punished. It would be a shame if the fear of
breaking something would paralyze the child
from being helpful. On one hand, what belongs to
the whole family is not “the property of others.”
On the other hand, what the school gives the
students to use does not belong to them!
Then there are the damages done to what
belongs to those outside of our own home. Peter,
while playing ball, broke the neighbor’s window.
This person, a lady with a heart of gold, forgave
him completely when he came to apologize.
However, Peter’s mother insisted: “He must
reimburse you! If he goes unpunished this time,
what will happen later when he has his driver’s
license?”
If the damage is expensive, it is up to the
parents to judge what restitution will be sufficient
in order to inculcate the child with the proper
sense of justice, but without giving him an
impression of injustice because the punishment
was too severe. The lesson will bring lasting fruit
if it teaches that the property of others ought
to be respected and not only that the window I
broke “cost so much.”

As the child grows, let us be watchful over
his use of the computer. It has become easy to
be unjust towards our neighbor without even
realizing it!
Thomas, a 15 year-old, has lent a CD to his
friend who loved the pieces of music on it. In no
time at all, the CD was in the computer and its
contents burned onto another CD. “What about
the rights of the author?” exclaimed the father of
Thomas when he found out. “This CD is worth
$15. It is the same as if you stole it off the shelf of
the store.” And with a firm hand, his father broke
the CD and threw it into the garbage.
What about borrowed property? If Rose
asked a friend to lend her a pretty jacket for a
wedding, is it legitimate for Rose to keep it once
the occasion has passed? Doesn’t her friend
remain the owner of the jacket? It is necessary
to return it to her as soon as possible, or else one
risks stealing in an “honest” manner. Let us also
make sure to return the objects lent to us in good
condition!
St. Paul wrote: “Do not owe your neighbor
anything, except to love one another.” What a
beautiful program! By respecting the property of
our neighbor, we respect his person, that is to say
we are practicing justice, the essential starting
point for practicing fraternal charity.
Translated from the French by Associate Editor Jane Carver.

57

Christian Culture

Joyfully
Wrong
Some Inspirations from Hugh of St. Victor

by Douglas LeBlanc

Editor’s Note: Hugh of St. Victor was a 12th-century Augustinian monk and scholastic. He is known
for both his brilliance and humility. All quotes in the article below are taken from his work The
Didascalicon.

“I was right all along!”
The savory words often accompany the
confirmation of a belief of ours that had
previously been cast into doubt. It is a good
feeling to be right. Being right means possessing
truth. And, unless we let pride and arrogance
destroy us, how can possessing that which is
right be a bad thing? Additionally, possessing
rightness can be helpful to others when we
share that rightness with genuine humility and
charity. However, while it is good to be right,
discovering that fact seems less beneficial to us
personally than discovering that we were wrong.
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Discovering that we were “right all along” does
not give us anything we did not already have. On
the other hand, discovering that we were wrong
all along is a precious gift. The wise person, says
Hugh of St. Victor, “seeks what he lacks, and he
considers not how much he knows, but of how
much he is ignorant.”

An Unsettling Realization
Yes, at first, it can be unsettling to realize that
we were wrong all along. It can be unnerving.

Humiliating, even. However, this is the wrong
feeling to have. After all, being blissfully,
ignorantly, arrogantly wrong is so much worse
than being painfully, obviously, humiliatingly
wrong. “Why do you blush to be taught, and yet
not blush at your ignorance?” chastises Hugh.
Thinking you understand something when you
really do not ought to offer no consolation. Why,
then, do we often have such a negative reaction
to being wrong? “Many are deceived by the
desire to appear wise before their time,” explains
the Victorine. “They therefore break out into a
certain swollen importance and begin to simulate
what they are not and to be ashamed of what they
are.” In short, pride is the answer; pride causes
the negative reaction in us. Hugh chides us for
this all-too-common inclination: “Seek to be
learned rather than merely to seem so.”
Once we accept that our view of reality is
incomplete—once we accept that we have a
lot to learn—being wrong is no longer a cause
for disturbance or disquietude. Rather, it is a

cause for joy: our grasp of reality is becoming
more complete! Instead of being ashamed at
being wrong, instead of feeling inferior, we
should in fact be proud of being found wrong.
We are that much closer to truth, and that
much less to be mocked for believing a lie. In
this light, being wrong can be looked forward
to—maybe even looked for. Perhaps we ought
to hope that we discover we are wrong once a
day, and be disappointed when a day goes by
where we do not. “You have drunk at the very
fount of philosophy—but would that you thirsted
still!” Hugh of St. Victor’s words here are a call
to humility, a call to embrace being a lifelong
learner.
I hope I’m wrong, but… Ironically, an
expression we only use when we know we are
not. Perhaps we should use this expression more
often, and with more sincerity. I was right all
along! Who cares about that? Being wrong, or
rather realizing we were wrong all along, is much
more interesting and much more meaningful.
59

Christian Culture

Eve: A
“Saint” for
Our Times
Anonymous

Though Eve is generally not called a saint,
nevertheless, she is in Heaven, along with her
husband, Adam. They can be found in the Roman
Martyrology among the many other Old and New
Testament citizens of Heaven. But while most
canonized saints are such because their lives
provide a standard or “canon” for our lives, Eve
helps us by indicating what not to do.

On the First Woman
“Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.”
Nevertheless, I won’t be the first, nor the last
person to offer some reflections on this first
woman. I do believe she can help us better
understand our own lives and the world in which
we currently live.
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In Genesis 2 we read how good Eve was for
Adam. She is a helper to Adam. She comes from
Adam’s very side. She gives joy and consolation to
Adam’s solitude as he rejoices “this now is… flesh
of my flesh.” And Eve is described as so valuable
that the man will actually leave his parents in
order to join himself to her. In chapter two, Eve
is described as all good. She is just like the rest
of God’s all-good creation, but she is even more
special because she is “bone of Adam’s bone.” We
might think this glowing evaluation of Eve was her
own take on the relationship.
When we get to Genesis 3, we get a totally
different picture of Eve. And it’s not all good.
Sometimes, when speaking to spouses, it seems
as if they are not describing the same relationship.
There is the husband’s point of view and then
there is the wife’s point of view. Sometimes it

is hard to believe they are speaking about the
same relationship. Perhaps the picture of Eve, in
Genesis 3, was from Adam’s point of view. For Eve
is blamed by Adam for his fall. She also ends up
speaking a whole lot more than Adam. And she
got into quite a lot of trouble with what she said
to the serpent. I think there is a lesson in here…
something about modesty in speech?

guard and to protect the garden. However, from
what we know of the sacred text, Adam was not
told from what the garden needed protecting. God
had declared in Genesis 1 that His creation was
“all good!” From what, therefore, did the Garden
need protection?

In the Garden
The Subtle Serpent
The third chapter of Genesis opens up with the
serpent. He is described as subtle or crafty. The
Hebrew root for “subtle” is the same Hebrew root
which described the nakedness of Adam and Eve
in the previous verse. In English, this Hebrew root
means, “to be bare.” Therefore, the subtle serpent
is linked to the vulnerable bareness of the first
couple. Furthermore, other creatures were like the
serpent in being subtle, but the serpent was “more
subtle” or more crafty than the other creatures.
Because the serpent differed only in degree, and
not in kind, from some of the other creatures,
this would make it more difficult to differentiate
between the serpent’s subtleness from the
subtleness of the other creatures.
When the serpent enters the conversation
with Eve he begins by asking a question, “Why
has God commanded that you should not eat of
every tree…” By asking this question, traditional
Catholic commentators suspect the serpent
already had knowledge of Eve’s thoughts or
inclinations. Eve resonates with the question and
goes on to believe the serpent’s lies. St. Augustine
believes that in order for Eve to actually believe
the apparent lies of the serpent, she must have
been already inclined to be deceived due to “the
love of her own independent authority and a
certain proud over-confidence in herself.” Perhaps
this self-absorption inhibited her from realizing
that there was an obvious problem with a serpent
that could both reason and speak to her.
Back in Gen. 2:15, God had commanded Adam
to “dress and keep” the “paradise of pleasure.”
Eve certainly would have known of this command
given to Adam. Now the Hebrew behind the
second verb, “keep” means literally to “put a hedge
about.” In other words, Adam was commanded to

“And God saw all the things that he had made,
and they were very good” (Gen. 1:31). There was
no perception of evil in the Garden. God even
saw that “every thing that creeps on the earth”
was good. How easy it must have been to wrongly
trust one of God’s seemingly good creatures like
a creeping serpent. Therefore, faced with the
dilemma of trusting one of God’s good creatures
whom Eve could see, versus trusting God’s
commandment which she did not directly hear,
she did what every sinful creature that was born
from her does: she went with what she could see
with her own eyes instead of what God had spoken
in her mind.
For ancient peoples, the lower bodily part of
man’s nature, his sensuous part, was termed
serpent-like. When things were going well in the
Garden, the higher spiritual nature ruled over the
lower. But when Eve let her sensual nature rule
her judgment, it was the serpent that was speaking
to her.
Eve responded to the serpent’s question for
why God prohibited the eating of every tree, but
she got the reason wrong. She added to God’s
prohibition to eat of the fruit of the tree in the
midst of paradise by saying: “and we should not
(even) touch (it).” We might be tempted to think,
in dealing with God, being more strict is better.
But both Deut. 4:2 and Apoc. 22:18-19 state that
adding (or subtracting) to the Word of God will
result in being removed from the “Book of Life.”
The scrupulous, in their pride think exactly
the same way. They add to what God requires
thinking themselves superior to the subtracting
lax tendencies of everyone else. “Pride goes
before destruction” (Prov. 16:18), and by wrongly
adding these limiting words to what God had
commanded, Eve made herself even more prone to
the craftiness of the serpent. Eve was no longer
61

Christian Culture
on the solid ground of exact truth. She could be
more easily “sifted as wheat” by Satan (Lk. 22:31).

The Temptation of Eve
The serpent is now prepared to lay his hand
bare (pun intended). He contradicts God: “No,
you shall not die the death” if you eat of this tree.
If scrupulous adding to God’s commandments
leads to despair in making their fulfillment
more difficult, as in a one-two punch, the
serpent now introduces the way out of despair
through presumptuous laxity. “Don’t worry… the
consequence of dying that you fear is not real.”
Once the fear of God was removed from Eve’s soul,
her sensuous serpentine nature took over. Eve saw
1) that the tree was “good to eat;” 2) it was “fair to
the eyes;” 3) “delightful to behold.”
Eve “saw”—meaning understood for herself—
the tree was good to eat. Eve was brought to rely
fully upon her own judgment. Thus, original sin
originates not only from man’s un-subordinated
sensual nature, but also from private judgment.
Private judgment is the cornerstone of all heresy,
especially Protestantism and liberalism.
Naturally, then, as Eve was Adam’s helpmate,
she gave the seemingly “good fruit” to her husband
and that was the beginning of the end of this
“paradise of pleasure.” Adam’s disobedience, aided
by Eve, is the essential act that constitutes the
“Original Sin.”

Eve’s Lessons for Us Today
Let us draw two lessons from what “saint” Eve
can teach us today. The first lesson that Eve can
teach us is the constant need that we have to be
vigilant to avoid disobeying God’s commandments.
We can now understand that Adam (and Eve) were
supposed to protect the garden from disobedience.
And so, we need to be on guard always for the
devil prowls around...seeking someone to devour
(I Pet. 5:8). When I get into my car my basic
operating assumption is, all other cars are being
driven either by someone who is having a drug
induced psychosis or is just naturally that way.
Therefore, I do not assume they will obey traffic
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laws and I am always prepared to respond to
something going wrong. While living the moral
life in a similarly cautious way would not be
considered acceptable to many contemporary
persons, nevertheless such cautiousness is
consistent with the fact that “sin is crouching at
the door” much more persistently today than it
ever was for Eve’s son, Cain. And so, if innocent
and properly ordered Eve needed to be on
guard to protect her “paradise of pleasure” from
disobedience, how much more do we need to be
on guard—we who have lost both innocence and a
properly ordered soul.
Another lesson we can learn from Eve is that
she didn’t have the faith down pat, as it was needed
to be known. If she fell, in part, because of her
lack of knowing what God actually said, instead
of what she thought He had said, how much more
do we need to constantly remind ourselves of the
Church’s Faith, especially her doctrine on Original
Sin. Our contemporary world is characterized
by an amnesia of what Adam and Eve did. This
“forgetfulness” was enshrined in the novel theology
of many modern theologians, which preceded and
influenced the documents of Vatican II and its
subsequent magisterial teachings.
Therefore, more so than Eve, we need to
remember that like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz,
we are not in Kansas anymore. But not only are
we not in paradise, but as long as we still have
one foot on this earth (and have not entered the
true paradise in Heaven) we need to regard this
life as thoroughly impacted by the disordering
effects of original sin. Therefore, to avoid going off
the straight and narrow path, we cannot expect
the happiness we ultimately desire to occur in
this life—which will never be again a “paradise
of pleasure.” All this-world utopias are from the
satanic serpent. We must instead be willing to
suffer—to suffer for the true Faith, and for our
sins—both actual and original.

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Book Review

The Disputed
Teachings of
Vatican II
Continuity and Reversal in Catholic Doctrine

by Gabriel Sanchez

In Search of an Apologia
for Vatican II
Will debate over the Second Vatican Council
(otherwise known as “Vatican II”) ever end?
Shall a point be reached where critics and
defenders alike can agree on what was taught,
what it means, and whether or not the Council’s
teachings can be framed as continuous with
prior Catholic teaching? For an ecclesiastical
event that was intended to both clarify doctrine
and make it accessible to contemporary
sensibilities, Vatican II has wrought an arguably
unprecedented amount of confusion and
controversy in the Catholic Church.

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From St. Vincent to Vatican II
One of the latest installments in the cottage
industry of Vatican II apologetics is Fr. Thomas A.
Guarino’s The Disputed Teachings of Vatican II:
Continuity and Reversal in Catholic Doctrine
(Eerdmans, 2018). Guarino, a professor of
systematic theology at Seton Hall University and
a committed ecumenist, has written previously
on the 5th-century theologian St. Vincent of
Lerins, specifically St. Vincent’s contribution to
what Catholics today refer to as “development of
doctrine.” It is St. Vincent that Guarino turns to
again in his latest work, a move that may strike
some as shocking given the perception that St.
Vincent was intransigently conservative in his
doctrinal views, not to mention his conspicuous
absence from Vatican II’s final documents.
St. Vincent is best known for the adage, “We

hold that which has been believed everywhere,
always, and by everyone.” Despite this, Guarino
reads St. Vincent as a more dynamic theologian,
one who was aware even in the relatively early
days of the Catholic Church that doctrine can
mature, grow, and develop in the same way a
child becomes an adult or a seed springs into a
plant. However, not all change can be adjudged
good. For St. Vincent, change can either be
profectus, that is, a legitimate and organic
extension of what has been taught before, or
permutatio, a corruption caused by an alteration
or distortion of what was once held. So what was
Vatican II? Profectus or permutatio?

Analogy Covers All Things
In approaching Vatican II, Guarino insists that
analogical reasoning was central to the Council.
That is, by drawing positive comparisons
between, say, Catholicism and other religions
and Christian confessions rather than focusing
exclusively on differences, Vatican II broke with
prior ecumenical councils by not condemning
errors and issuing anathemas. Doing so
fulfilled the Council’s alleged mandate to bring
the “medicine of mercy” to the modern world
while demonstrating that the Church had a
communal role to play in the world rather than
an antagonistic one. This was all well and good
according to Guarino because this is what Pope
John XXIII and many other conciliar bishops
wanted; never does he stop to ask whether it was
the right way in which to proceed.
As for the application of analogy, Guarino
appears most interested in what it can allegedly
do for ecumenical relations. Instead of the
Church taking a critical and condemnatory
position against other Christian communions,
analogy allowed the Vatican II bishops to speak
of ways in which these non-Catholic churches
participated in the true Church of Christ, that
is the Catholic Church. Without dismissing the
fact that these non-Catholic churches are limited
and imperfect, Guarino holds that Vatican II did
no wrong in furnishing a fresh sense of unity
with these communities while all but ignoring
that such an approach was disruptive to prior

ecclesiastical instruction and praxis. Moreover,
he fails to appreciate the extent to which this
analogical approach contributed less to a sense
of unity among all Christians and more to a
pervasive feeling of indifference toward the sharp
ecclesiastical, theological, and doctrinal issues
that remain at the heart of Christian disunity.
More controversial than Vatican II’s
ecumenical gestures toward non-Catholic
Christians was its declaration on world religions,
Nostra aetate. Here, analogical reasoning was
stretched to its limits as the Council attempted
to bring forth similarities not only between
Christianity and Judaism, but fundamentally
alien religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism.
Interestingly, Guarino highlights Pope-emeritus
Benedict XVI’s skepticism on the over-use
of analogy in Nostra aetate and the hyperecumenical outlook it engendered: “it speaks of
religion solely in a positive way and it disregards
the sick and distorted forms of religion which,
from the historical and theological viewpoints,
are of far-reaching importance” (from the article
“Fu una giornata splendida” published October
11, 2012 in L’Osservatore Romano).
Guarino, unfortunately, is unmoved by these
and other criticisms of misplaced positivity. Sure,
perhaps Vatican II was one-sided in its optimistic
appraisal of non-Christian religions, but so be
it. Taking place in the shadow of World War II,
the Holocaust, and the Cold War, the world was
weary of negativity, or so says Guarino. Because
Vatican II did not go so far as to outright deny
Jesus Christ or wholly relativize the Catholic
Faith, it did nothing wrong. Disregard the
profound sociological upheavals inflicted by the
Council such as the vocational crisis and rampant
apostasy. Analogy covers all things.

Process, Not Permutationes
Although this review cannot cover the myriad
of ways Guarino uses analogy to cover or justify
Vatican II’s apparent deviations from earlier
Catholic teaching and practice, it is worth
noting that Guarino is not blind to all conciliar
contradictions. Right or wrong, there is some
superficial plausibility to Guarino’s thesis that
65

Book Review
the Council could organically develop Church
teaching by clarifying obscurities and addressing
new challenges. Where Guarino recognizes
trouble is with respect to blatant attempts by
Vatican II to overturn earlier ecclesiastical
pronouncements. This is nowhere more apparent
than with respect to Gaudium et Spes, a
conciliar document that Benedict XVI, as Joseph
Ratzinger, called a “countersyllabus” to Blessed
Pope Pius IX’s 1848 encyclical Quanta Cura and
its accompanying Syllabus of Errors.
Guarino recognizes that Gaudium et Spes
takes the exact opposite approach to the modern
world as the Syllabus by both avoiding any
condemnatory language against liberalism
and, more crucially, openly embracing liberal
tenets such as religious liberty and the ideology
of progress. How is this a “development?”
According to Guarino, it isn’t, or at least not
exactly. Obvious reversals of prior teachings
are not developments per se but rather part and
parcel of the so-called “process of development”
on the way to a fully realized teaching. That’s
convenient.
But if Guarino’s “process” thesis is true, then
what magisterial weight does a contradictory
or reversing teaching hold? If those parts of
Gaudium et Spes which seem to overturn the
Syllabus are merely a halfway house along
the road to a completely blossomed truth, then
why do they matter? What if this alleged road
is winding and eventually leads back to the
earlier starting point, for instance the Syllabus’s
rejection of liberalism? Would it not be safer to
“wait and see” under the protective canopy of
Church instructions with a more ancient pedigree
than novel (and contradictory) pronouncements
which even an apologist such as Guarino is
unwilling to imprint the stamp of finality upon?
Sadly, these questions are both unasked and
unanswered.

A Closing Remark on
Religious Liberty
The Disputed Teachings of Vatican II’s
apex is reached in its discussion of Dignitatis
Humane, the conciliar declaration on religious
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liberty which has proven to be Vatican II’s
most contentious document. Here, Guarino
demonstrates commendable care in highlighting
the gulf between the pre- and post-conciliar
teachings, even going so far as to include
extensive quotes from Popes Gregory XVI, Pius
IX, Leo XIII, and St. Pius X on the matter. In
the end, though, Guarino repairs to analogy,
holding that because Vatican II had unveiled the
positive connections of non-Catholic Christian
confessions and even non-Christian religions to
Catholicism, the Church’s earlier condemnations
have lost their force.
Such an explanation will no doubt ring
hollow to traditional Catholics, as will Guarino’s
under-developed idea that certain categories
of “ordinary” papal teachings, such as those
contained in 18th and 19th-century encyclicals,
can be dropped on a whim. Guarino either
ignores or is unaware of ongoing traditional
Catholic arguments for the infallibility of the
condemnations issued in Quanta Cura and the
Syllabus; if those arguments are correct, then
what becomes of Guarino’s apologetics? It would
seem they cannot stand.
Guarino’s book is hardly the last word on
Vatican II. With respect to religious liberty, for
example, the English theologian Thomas Pink
has proposed reading Dignitatis Humanae as
a change in ecclesiastical policy rather than
doctrine. Pink’s thesis continues to be studied
and criticized, just as most discussions of
Vatican II are. While traditional Catholics will be
leery of what Guarino proposes in his text, The
Disputed Teachings of Vatican II does represent
a thoughtful excursion into some of the Council’s
deepest problems and an intelligent, albeit
unsatisfactory, attempt at overcoming them.

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Through thee may we the
Father know, through Thee
th’eternal Son, and Thee the
Spirit of them both, thriceblessed three in One.

News from Tradition
Cardinal Danneels Dead at 85
Godfried Cardinal Danneels, Archbishop
emeritus of Mechlin-Brussels, died on the
morning of March 14, 2019. He had been
president of the Belgian bishops conference
for some 20 years and oversaw the continuing
collapse of the Faith in what was once a vibrant
Catholic country. For many years it was known
that Danneels was an active dissenter from the
perennial faith of the Church even in its Vatican
II form, and yet he was never disciplined for

his heterodoxy by either Pope John Paul II or
Benedict XVI (even when Benedict was head of
the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith as
Cardinal Josef Ratzinger).
In addition to his heterodoxy in doctrinal
matters, he was also an enabler of priests and
bishops who were homosexual abusers of young
teenage males. He is infamously remembered
for telling a young abuse victim (of Roger
Vangheluwe, then-Bishop of Bruges, and a
protegé of Danneels) that he should remain
silent about the abuse he experienced and that
the victim (who was Bishop Vangheluwe’s own

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nephew) was in some way guilty for the abuse
(this was tape recorded).
Cardinal Danneels was also instrumental in
the Conclave of 2013 which elected Pope Francis.
He was such an ardent supporter that when
Francis appeared on the loggia of St. Peter’s
immediately following his election, Danneels
was by his side. By his own admission, he was
a prominent member of the “St. Gallan Mafia”
who lobbied for Cardinal Bergoglio’s election
in the 2005 Conclave
which elected Cardinal
Ratzinger as Benedict
XVI. Though they
failed to elect him
then, the members
of the group were
constant critics of
the “conservative”
Benedict XVI and were
determined to see
their candidate elected
in the 2013 Conclave.
Given Danneels
record on covering
up homosexual
abuse by clergy and
publicly being in
favor of Belgium’s
law legalizing so
called “same sex
marriage,” Pope
Francis appointed him as one of his personal
representatives to the 2014 and 2015 Synod on
the Family. This move by the pope produced a
loud outcry from all quarters within the Church,
but Francis did not back away from the Danneels
appointment.
Pope Francis sent a telegram of condolence
to the current Archbishop of Mechlin-Brussels,
Cardinal Jozef De Kesel, which read: Having
learned with emotion of the death of Cardinal
Godfried Danneels, Archbishop emeritus
of Mechelen-Brussel, I send my deepest
condolences to you and to his family, the

Bishops of Belgium, the clergy, the consecrated
persons and all the faithful affected by this
mourning. This zealous pastor served the
Church with dedication, not only in his
diocese, but also at the national level as
president of the Conference of Bishops of
Belgium, while being a member of various
Roman dicasteries. Attentive to the challenges
of the contemporary Church, Cardinal
Danneels also took an active role in various
Synods of Bishops, including those of 2014
and 2015 on the family. He has been called
to God at this time of purification and of
walking toward the Resurrection of the Lord.
I ask Christ, victor over evil and death, to
welcome him in His peace and joy. As a pledge

of comfort, I offer a special apostolic blessing
to you and to the relatives of the deceased
Cardinal, the pastors, the faithful and all those
who will take part in the funeral.
There is little doubt that Pope Francis’ praise
of Danneels at his death, as well as his desire
to appoint him as his special representative
of the two Synods on the Family, must call
into question how seriously the pope takes the
current scandal of sexual abuse within the
Church. This is particularly evident given Pope
Francis’ role in the Theodore McCarrick affair
attested to by Archbishop Viganó in his written
testimony last year, as well as other equally
disturbing examples of papal coverups which are
becoming almost too numerous to recall.

The Clerical Abuse Scandal, A Principle Sacrificed
and the Seal of the Confessional Under Attack
In the early 2000s, the homosexual abuse
of young men by clerics came to the attention
of the Church in the United States (and indeed
throughout the world) by an exposé published in
the Boston Globe newspaper which uncovered
the malfeasance of the Archbishops of Boston
in allowing predator clerics to remain in active
ministry. Other media outlets then took up
their own investigations and found that this
malfeasance wasn’t limited to the Archdiocese of
Boston, but could be found in many, if not most, of
the Catholic dioceses in the United States.
When the full extent of the malfeasance became
known, there was a very legitimate outcry from
the laity as well as faithful priests for something
to be done. The solution, from the American
bishops, was the so-called Dallas Charter which
gave a protocol for bishops to follow in the event
of a reported case of abuse of a minor by a cleric
(deacon or priest). The protocol was simple
enough: when a report of abuse came to the
diocese, the cleric in question would be suspended
pending the outcome of a review of the complaint
by a board of laity who were “expert” in the

various facets of suspected abuse. If the report
was found to be “credible and substantiated,”
the cleric would be permanently removed from
ministry and the case would be referred to the
Vatican for a Canonical trial and punishment. Also,
at the time the complaint was received, the civil
authorities would be contacted to mount their own
investigation for possible criminal charges to be
brought against the cleric.
Several things should be noted regarding the
Dallas Charter:
Firstly, Canon Law (in both the 1917 and 1983
Codes) indicate procedures to be followed by
bishops (or superiors of religious orders) when a
cleric under their charge commits a crime (sin)
against the 6th or 9th Commandment and the
punishments to be meted out on the guilty party.
The real scandal was that most American bishops
simply chose not to enforce Canon Law, for
whatever reason. Had they done so, there would
have been no scandal in the first place.
Secondly, the Dallas Charter purposefully
omitted mentioning bishops in the procedures
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News from Tradition
to be followed. Thus, a bishop accused of abuse
was not subject to the same protocol that was laid
down for deacons and priests. This should come
as no surprise since the purported author of the
Dallas Charter was none other than Theodore
McCarrick; a bishop who had been a serial abuser
for at least the past 25 years. The sad truth is
that those fully responsible for the scandal (the
bishops) made no attempt to police their own.
Thirdly, and perhaps most significant, was that
an important principle concerning the hierarchical
nature of the Church was sacrificed when the
American bishops adopted the Dallas Charter. The
principle was that clerics (be they deacons, priests
or bishops) can only be judged by their equals (that
is, ecclesiastical courts made up of clerics) and
if they are found guilty in an ecclesiastical court,
they are to be removed from the clerical state
and turned over to the civil authorities for trial
and punishment if their offense was also a crime
under civil law. This was the principle which St.
Thomas Becket endured martyrdom to defend.
As the noted Italian historian Roberto de Mattei
recently pointed out in an interview, The Church
which has its own penal law and tribunals needs
to have the courage to challenge the judgment
of the world’s tribunals, convinced that it is
not the world that judges the Church, but the
Church that judges the world. The Church should
reclaim her sovereignty… I find it extremely
serious that the Church has renounced her
sovereignty. The Church is a sovereign society,
like the State, even if her purpose, unlike the
State, is supernatural…If the Church is a
sovereign society, it has all the instruments to
achieve its own ends of justice. It is not only a
purely ethical organism, which strips itself of its
judicial dimension, allowing the State to decide
everything. The renunciation of sovereignty is a
dangerous development.1
The Dallas Charter effectively turns the judging
of clerics over to the laity (either on the “Lay
Review Boards” or the civil authorities) thus
making the Church answerable to the State. What
has now become de riguer throughout the world,
civil tribunals pass judgment on clerics and then
the Church takes up the case after having been
adjudicated in civil court. The cases of both
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McCarrick congratulating Cardinal Farrell on his elevation to
the College of Cardinals

Cardinal Pell of Australia and Cardinal Barbarin
of France prove the point: they were both found
guilty (questionably so, it should be said) in civil
courts and are now to be tried in ecclesiastical
court.
The Church finds herself in this position since
the bishops of the Church, almost to a man,
have not done their duty. Their malfeasance
has resulted in the sad situation where the civil
authority seems to be the only means whereby
bishops can be dealt with for their sinful and
faithless actions. Sadly, now that the state has
stepped in to identify and root out bishops who
have failed in their duty to punish abusive clerics,
the question must be asked: how much further will
the various governments go in trying to control the
Church herself?
Unfortunately we have already begun to taste
the effects of giving up the Church’s sovereignty
in regard to the seal of the confessional. Last year,

an Australian Royal Commission into child abuse
recommended that clergy be required to report to
the civil authority any act of abuse they become
aware of during the sacrament of penance.
This past February, a bill was introduced in
the California state legislature requiring Catholic
priests and other “Christian ministers” to report
abuse they become aware of through confession.
On March 16th, a member of the New York state
legislature introduced a similar bill to that
legislature. Although neither the California nor
New York bill has yet to come up for a vote in the
legislature, given the current climate, its chances
of passing are rather great. There can now be little
doubt that other states will follow suit.
Although one may rightly ask if laws of this
nature could really be enforced since no one but
the priest and the penitent would know if abuse
has been confessed. As true as this is, is there
really any doubt that civil authorities would begin
running “sting” operations in order to entrap
priests? A police officer posing as a penitent could
enter the confessional and confess to abusing a
child—if the priest doesn’t report it, he is arrested
and charged with failing to report a case of abuse.
We are entering a very dark time for the Church.
It is of the greatest irony, that the Catholic
teaching on the seal of the confessional became
the source of a civil law protecting the priest/
penitent relationship. In his book, A Popular
history of the Archdiocese of New York,
Monsignor Florence Cohalan writes: Although the
old Cathedral is his monument, Fr. Kohlmann’s
[Vicar General of the Diocese of New York]
most important contribution to the welfare
of the Church in New York was his role in a
lawsuit that brought legal protection to the
seal of the confessional in New York and later
throughout the country. In March 1813, acting
on information received in the confessional, he
became the intermediary by whom stolen goods
were returned to their owner. When he refused
to tell the police or the grand jury or the courts
who had given him the goods, his case was
put off for further consideration and and was
settled finally by a friendly lawsuit. The case
was argued on June 8, 1813, before the Court of
General Sessions presided over by Mayor DeWitt
Clinton. The full court decided unanimously

in Fr. Kohlmann’s favor. Later, in 1828, when
Clinton was Governor of New York, he persuaded
the legislature to pass a law not only allowing
but requiring priests and ministers of religion to
withhold confidential information.2 This incident
occurred when the Church vigorously defended
her sovereignty against all civil authority; we
are now living in a period in history when those
who should have been the defenders of the
independence of the Church have sacrificed it on
the altar of expediency and public opinion.
As substantial and dangerous as the sacrificing
the principle is, particularly as we move forward
in history, one cannot ignore another aspect of the
Dallas Charter which is also having far reaching
ramifications to this very day: the presumption
of guilt. At the time an accusation is deemed
“credible” by the Lay Board of Review, the cleric
is removed immediately from active ministry. It
should be noted that a “credible” accusation is
one that is not clearly false on initial review. Thus,
the cleric in question is effectively punished even
before being found guilty of any wrongdoing—
hence the presumption of guilt.
Even if, after further investigation, the cleric
is exonerated, his good name has invariably
been besmirched and, in many cases, beyond
redemption. As Avery Cardinal Dulles wrote
in his critique of the Dallas Charter in 2004:
At the time when accusations are made, it is
often impossible to judge their truth, and this
impossibility may persist indefinitely if the
accusations are denied and probative evidence
is lacking. When dioceses routinely announce
that accused priests have been “removed from
public ministry because of a credible accusation
of sexual abuse of a minor,” such priests are,
in effect, branded as guilty. An accusation
is deemed credible unless it is manifestly
groundless. When priests are treated as guilty,
they suffer the loss of their good name and as
a consequence find it difficult in the future to
function effectively in their God-given vocation,
assuming that they are restored to ministry.3
Some 15 years later the United States bishops have
still not found an effective way to restore the good
name of a wrongfully accused cleric, something
which the 1983 Code of Canon Law insists is the
right (restoration of a good name) of every
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News from Tradition
person wrongfully accused.
Although the bishops have seen fit to ignore the
importance of presumed innocence, some secular
writers have not, particularly in light of the
“#metoo” movement. The concern is not just for
wrongfully accused clerics (who the secular media
seems to care little about), but for anyone accused
given the current climate. An op-ed piece in the
New York Daily News written by two women
attorneys recently appeared. In it, the attorneys
stated the following: This moment [the time
of the #metoo movement] offers an important
opportunity for individuals who are compelled
to share their stories [of abuse] and seek justice.
But the moment is equally dangerous—as it has
the potential to unleash a plethora of unfounded
claims from which there is no recovery. The
accusation alone of child sexual abuse is enough
to forever destroy a person’s reputation, personal
relationships and employability…
Incorrect identifications occur far too often,
and they may be enhanced by the prospect
of implanted and fabricated memories of
emotional childhood events. The presumption
of innocence along with the constitutional
guarantees to legal counsel, the right against
self-incrimination, and fundamental fairness at
a criminal trial sets our democracy apart…
Recognizing that the levers of justice require
periodic realignment, New York State has
significantly lowered the bar for prosecution of
child predators. On Feb. 14, Gov. Cuomo signed
the Child Victim’s Act, which extends the statute
of limitations for the criminal prosecution of a
sexual offense committed against a child, and
shall not begin to run until the child turns 23
years of age. The law also establishes a “lookback window” where victims can file civil
lawsuits up to 18 months after the effective date
of the statute for previously barred claims and
a civil suit can be brought up until the plaintiff
reaches the age of 55 years old…
While this law most certainly smooths
victims’ path to justice, it could also lead to bad
actors posing as victims, extorting funds, suing
needlessly for damages and exacting revenge on
innocent persons. The tragedy of these incidents
is that they not only ruin lives of the wrongfully
accused, but they make life considerably more
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New York Governor Andrew Cuomo

difficult for real survivors who have suffered
unimaginable abuse, and fought long and hard
to be heard.4
Although the bishops’ collective malfeasance
regarding removing offending clerics is wholly to
blame for this very dangerous state of affairs, one
must not forget the role insurance companies are
playing as well when it comes to the presumption
of guilt. In almost all cases, the insurers of
American dioceses and religious orders insist
on settling civil cases without a trial. When this
occurs, the accused cleric has no opportunity to
clear his name in a court of law and because the
diocese or religious order has paid (through their
insurance company) the accuser a settlement, it
appears to the general public that the cleric must
be guilty. This, of course, makes it impossible for
the cleric’s good name to be restored.
The Dallas Charter has thus violated the
important principle of the Church’s sovereignty
as well as the principle of “innocence until proven
guilty” as enshrined in American jurisprudence.
It has never been a more important time for the
faithful to pray for their priests.
1

https://rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2019/03/de-mattei-interview-in-la-veritadear.html#more

2

Cohalan, Florence, A Popular History of the Archdiocese of New
York. Yonkers, N.Y.: United States Catholic Historical Society, 1983.

3

https://www.americamagazine.org/issue/488/article/rights-accused-priests

4

https://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/ny-oped-falsely-accused-sexcrimes-20190321-crvqpph26fc2fcb4mqq3smheuq-story.html

From Cardinal to Mister
In the latter part of 2018, the homosexual
abuse of young men on the part of clerics came
roaring back to the front pages with the report
that, after an investigation by the Archdiocese
of New York, Cardinal Theodore McCarrick
had been credibly accused of molesting a
teenage male in the sacristy of St. Patrick’s
Cathedral some 50 years before. Following
that announcement, many more facts emerged
indicating that this was not an isolated incident
but rather that McCarrick was a serial abuser
of seminarians and young priests who were in
his charge. In response, Pope Francis asked
for McCarrick’s resignation from the College of
Cardinals and effectively suspended him from
exercising any priestly ministry (a suspension “a
divinis”) until an investigation was carried out
under Canon Law.

This investigation was concluded and the
Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith issued
the following statement:

On January 11, 2019, the Congresso of the
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith,
at the conclusion of a penal process, issued
a decree finding Theodore Edgar McCarrick,
archbishop emeritus of Washington, D.C.,
guilty of the following delicts while a cleric:
solicitation in the sacrament of confession,
and sins against the Sixth Commandment
with minors and with adults, with the
aggravating factor of the abuse of power. The
Congresso imposed on him the penalty of
dismissal from the clerical state. On February
13, 2019, the Ordinary Session (Feria IV)
of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the
Faith considered the recourse he presented
against this decision. Having examined the
arguments in the recourse, the Ordinary
Session confirmed the decree of the Congresso.
This decision was
notified to Theodore
McCarrick on
February 15, 2019.
The Holy Father
has recognized the
definitive nature of
this decision made
in accordance with
law, rendering it a
“res iudicata” (i.e.,
admitting of no
further recourse).
With this decree,
McCarrick is no
longer to be referred
to as “bishop” or even
“father” but simply
as “mister.” Although
dismissed from
the “clerical state,”
McCarrick still is, by
virtue of the indelible
character imprinted
on the soul through the sacrament of holy
orders, a priest and bishop, though absolutely
forbidden to exercise the associated powers

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News from Tradition
of their orders except in a case of “danger of
death.”
Although the Vatican and Pope Francis
obviously hoped this decree would have put
an end to the current scandal unleashed upon
the Church, it has had the opposite effect
simply because so many questions remain
unanswered by the Vatican regarding the entire
affair.
Additionally, the day before the publication of
the decree reducing McCarrick to the lay state,
the following announcement was published
by the Vatican: The pope has appointed as
Camerlengo of the Holy Roman Church His
Eminence Cardinal Kevin Joseph Farrell,
prefect of the Dicastery for the Laity, Family

and Life. The Camerlengo is the Cardinal who
effectively organizes the conclave when a pope
dies and runs the day-to-day operations of the
Church during the sede vacante before the
election of the new pope.
It should be recalled that Farrell is a protegé
of McCarrick, served as an Auxiliary Bishop
of the Archdiocese of Washington during
McCarrick’s tenure there and denied any
knowledge of rumors concerning McCarrick’s
predilection for young seminarians and priests.
Thus, Pope Francis has seemingly softened
the blow to McCarrick by naming a protegé
to the important post of Camerlengo. Once
again, Francis has, by his actions rather than
his words, indicated that he does not take the
McCarrick case very seriously.

Archbishop Sheen Finally Going to Peoria?
As has been written of before in this space,
there has been a protracted legal battle between
the Archdiocese of New York and the Diocese
of Peoria (in the person of Archbishop Fulton
Sheen’s niece, Joan Sheen Cunningham) as
to whether Sheen’s mortal remains could
be removed from the crypt of St. Patrick’s
Cathedral in New York and sent to Peoria
in order that his case for beatification could
proceed. It now appears that the courts have
had their final say.
In early March of this year, a New York
Appeals Court handed down a unanimous
ruling in favor of Mrs. Cunningham. The justices
found that Sheen’s desire to be entombed in
St. Patrick’s Cathedral would not have been as
compelling as seeing his cause for beatification
proceed. Although the ruling seems definitive,
the Archdiocese of New York has stated that
its attorneys would be reviewing the ruling to
decide what next steps could be taken.
For some inexplicable reason, Timothy
Cardinal Dolan has adamantly refused to abide
by a promise made by his predecessor in the
New York Archdiocese, Cardinal Edward Egan,
that Sheen’s body could be moved to Peoria.
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Before earlier court rulings the Archdiocese has
said that it will not proceed with Archbishop
Sheen’s cause and would not agree to release his
remains. Although the Archdiocese of New York is
now indicating that it DOES want to erect a shrine
for Sheen in St. Patrick’s and proceed with his
cause, this reversal seems to be nothing more than
a smoke screen as to the real intentions of Dolan
and the Archdiocesan Chancery. One must be
forced to ask the simple question: What possible
reason could the Archdiocese of New York (or
Cardinal Dolan personally) have to want to see
Archbishop Sheen’s cause for beatification move
forward? Too many unanswered questions from
a Cardinal who always speaks of wanting greater
“transparency.”

Cultural
Revolution,
Cultural Counter-Revolution

by Fr. Alain Lorans, SSPX

Editor’s Note: The following is a conference given by Fr. Alain Lorans as part of a summer university
course of The Society of Saint Pius X from August 12-16, 2017 on the subject, “To Serve Christianity
Today.” In order to conserve the proper character of this conference, the oral style has been maintained.

In the course of history, the reaction to revolution
was principally manifested at the political and social
level, but we mustn’t forget that there is an equally
important element of society that revolution wishes
to sabotage—that of culture. “To serve Christianity
today” the topic that we are proposing during this
summer university course, implies that we are striving to defend a culture under attack, the Christian
culture.
The cultural combat is not always well understood in conservative circles and sometimes in our
own [traditional] circles, because one thinks that
the importance rests in politics, social elements or

economics; to most, culture appears “less serious,”
as if it was only an attitude.
The Cultural Revolution of Gramsci
It is important to rid ourselves of this false notion
because if we don’t understand the importance of
culture in the service of civilization, its enemies, who
already understand this very well, will use it to their
advantage. Here are a few examples:
When Mao, in China, wanted to impose the communist regime, he didn’t content himself with using
political or economic weapons. Indeed, he wanted
to establish a regime with Marxist policies and

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economy, but he also wanted to wage a “cultural
revolution.”
For him, it wasn’t sufficient to overthrow political
structures—which is the program of all revolution
and of all kinds of subversions—he demanded an
additional change of spirit in order to introduce a
revolution into the minds of the Chinese.
He knew that subversion wouldn’t be complete
with merely the overthrow of exterior structures.
This external horror must also change the nature of
the people itself at its very depths. What happened
was terrible: a number of persecutions under the
form of “self-criticism” and “re-education” were
aimed especially at the tenants of the culture. Mao
proceeded to strip away the “junk” from China, that
is to say the benchmarks, the chronicles, the roots
of the identity of his country.
Mao’s revolution doesn’t directly concern us
because it doesn’t apply to a culture that rests upon
historically Christian territory, but we must say that
all revolutions want to reach into people’s minds,
because as long as the subversion hasn’t entered
their minds, it is not complete. This, then, defines
cultural revolution.
Closer to us geographically is the Italian thinker
Antonio Gramsci, a Marxist himself, who is at the
origin of the cultural revolution and meta-politics—
taken from the Greek meta: [after] that which goes
above politics, which is culture, precisely.
As with all Marxists, Gramsci’s principles rested
on the idea that society has an economic infrastructure and an ideological superstructure, the
“Bourgeois culture” which is only there to maintain
the Bourgeois order and to make the economic and
political domination of the Bourgeois acceptable to
the proletarians.
He goes further: Culture is in the hands of the
Bourgeois who present this as a system of “natural”
values, which would only, according to him, be values intended to ensure Bourgeois hegemony in the
name of so called “common sense.”
There aren’t, for Gramsci, “values” in themselves. It would therefore be of no avail to destroy
the people’s roots, to work at cutting the people off
from their identity; one must subvert even further,
go to the heart, even into the minds of the people;
one must make them understand that there is no
nature, no essence, no “values” in themselves. One
must break down and eradicate the idea that human

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nature exists independently of economic and social
conditions. We are now staring integral revolution in
the face.
Defiance is important. This was well perceived
when Malraux founded the Houses of Youth and
Culture (MJC) in France. The left claimed the group
as “theirs” immediately, therefore, these MJC have
become the subversive foyers of leftist culture.
Some moderates believe themselves to be conservatives. Really, they give themselves away by their
default attitude which is marked by materialistic
economics. They consider that the moment the
quality of life increases, people are thrilled, satisfied. Surveys indicate the morale of the population
by their purchasing capacity or the recovery of
consumption. But “man liveth not by bread alone,”
he also needs intellectual and, most importantly,
spiritual nourishment.
Cultural revolution is a revolution in the full sense
of the word: it does not content itself with political,
economic and social subversion; it attacks the domain of values as well. That is where it reaches the
heart of Christianity.
The revolutionaries qualify values as “Bourgeois”
in order to disqualify them. They want to remove
all pretention toward universality (for values can’t
be imposed upon all) in the name of a pretend human nature present in every man. In our days, we
aren’t being subjected to a type of Soviet, police or
authoritarian persecution, but there indeed exists a
subversion that searches to depose us of our heritage and further, of our very nature.
And since the revolutionaries acknowledge the
principle that one cannot destroy something without
replacing it, they propose different values to us,
other cultural references and even another type of
humanity.
In his book, La crise de la conscience européenne
(The Crisis of European Conscience), Paul Hazard
says that every period has an ideal model of humanity1 that can be seen, not only on a cultural but also
a spiritual level. This idea is correct; we can examine
this and expound upon it. In the Middle Ages, the
ideal was represented by the knight, the defender of
the widow and the orphan; During the Renaissance,
it was the condottiere [a mercenary soldier or
leader], the humanist; in the 17th century, it is “the
honest man;” in the 18th, the enlightened philosopher; in the 19th, the Bourgeoisie; in the 20th, the

vigorous young elite: hedonist and consumerist;
in the 21st, it is the worldly trans-humanist, above
good and evil.
Every period thus shows what its ideal was. With
La Varende [a French author], in the 20th century,
you have again heroes who had a certain chivalrous
ideal, where honor was paramount, but it is a species on its way to extinction.
React: A Cultural Counter-Revolution?
So, how do we confront this subversion? Resign
ourselves to the inevitable and do nothing?
We find ourselves in a period of decadence. Our
contemporaries aren’t ready to give their lives for
a religious or patriotic cause because there are no
longer any transcendental ideals capable of justifying so great a sacrifice. Truly, “heroes are worn out.”
Let us not say that this applies particularly to
“those on the other side;” we also possess a certain
lassitude. We are not immune to the pseudo-values
that prevail today. We breathe the air of the times;
we are bitten by this century. We are not sheltered
from it; our Christian ideal dulls because we do not
have the character of our ancestors. Already in the
19th century, Cardinal Pie admonished us: “Man no
longer exists, because character no longer exists.”
In order to not let ourselves be contaminated by
this overwhelming majority that smiles with pity
when it sees us, it is indispensable to maintain an
attitude of dissidence. One cannot reclaim Christian
values for himself that are rejected and mocked
today without making some waves. In other words,
we must faithfully follow the Gospel that tells us:
“You are in the world, but you are not of the world”
(cf. Jn. 17: 14-18). We are here because we are physically in the world, but is the world integrally within
us? Have we adopted these pseudo-values with their
false ideal of humanity? Officially no, surreptitiously
perhaps. A true cultural counter-revolution consists
foremost of knowing the difference and of firmly
claiming this dissidence, which is a form of intellectual and spiritual courage.
Within the counter-values of the times that we
find in the television [the “boob tube”] there is nothing enthusiastic, nothing that edifies us. On the contrary, this draws us down in general, into mediocrity
and sometimes worse.
We must not succumb to the sirens’ song and
we must push away this invitation to our concupis-

cence. Is this really a great sacrifice?
There are no police on “Mao Hill” who are coming
to tell us that we have to read the little red book of
president Mao. We aren’t familiar with this type of
ideological persecution. What we have now is more
insidious: we are stripped of our Christian heritage and uprooted from our cultural grounding in
Christianity.
Are we actively trying to reclaim these cultural
values, to make them ours personally? We all, in
short, agree with the spirit of the Crusades, but isn’t
it often pure rhetoric and accompanied by frightening incapacity? If our will is paralyzed, if our spirit of
decision making is frozen, it will serve to nothing.
What are we actually capable of doing? Shouting
loud and proud, “God first served!” But then, when
we must serve God on a daily basis in the family or
at work, no one is willing! It is because we have a
platonic conception of the Christian ideal. We have
placed it among the archetypes, in the world of
super-sensibility which never becomes a reality.
Alternatively, we can live the practice of our religion, and this ideal should manifest itself in the little
things; this sacrifice that we have to make in order
to reclaim our Christian values demonstrated in the
little things, not by fads and trends.
Radical Reaction to a Radical Revolution
Let’s go further. The Marxist revolution is already
a grave subversion, but cultural revolution is still
more dangerous. We are not being directly menaced
by Mao or Gramsci, but by their heirs, who are much
subtler, who require from us a sharper or simply
smarter spirit—certainly not a dull one in any case.
We should see these things for what they are. The
world in which we live smothers us with chloroform;
you are here in a stage of revival, so to speak; you
are not in the hands of anesthesiologists. You are
rebels; you make the difference as a Christian; you
are “the salt of the earth,” “the light of the world.”
You are in the recovery chamber to wake up, not to
sleep.
The world in which we live attempts to anesthetize us with two very simple words: consume and
enjoy. The world tells us: don’t analyze, don’t think,
don’t pray, but rather consume, stuff yourself and
please yourself ad nauseam. Behold the limitless
horizon: consumerism and hedonism. The Christian
alternative is “sacrifice yourself; give.”

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Theological Studies
You understand that it is not a question of culture
as a consumer good delivered to us in the form of
books, CD’s and DVD’s, but under the form of a
cultural combat. The stakes are high, crucial; it is
our soul, those of our families and our country that
are on the line.
Baudelaire gave, it seems to me, the best definition of civilization as understood by Christian culture. Civilization is not found in technical progress
nor in the sects of yesterday and today, “civilization”
he tells us, “is the diminishing of the traces of original sin.”2 A Christian culture which serves civilization, the Christian today, is he who works to diminish
the effects of original sin.
Is that the case with this new genre of literature
that offers comfort in soft sadomasochism? No,
on the contrary, this rancid literature renders the
wounds of original sin more acute, more loathsome;
the wound does not scab over, does not heal, does
not improve; it weakens it a little more, pulls the infection down further, toward animal concupiscence.
It prevents us from accessing the specific difference
we possess from animals which is our reason, a
fortiori, the spiritual life.
The cultural challenge is well understood to be
this: to go against the pseudo-values that literary
and contemporary cinematic productions present as the ideal of humanity. This is not to say that
literature must be cunning or moralistic. It must be
complete in showing the struggle between the “old
man” and “the new man” to show that there is truly
a spiritual combat.
This was clearly manifested in the 17th century in
El Cid by Corneille or in Phèdre by Racine. One sees
here a culture that takes humanity in its entirety, not
a utopian humanity, rather, a sinful humanity, but
which raises itself up, punishes itself, which turns
toward its spiritual ideal, and which is not content to
say, “please yourself and die.”
Today, we have a subversive culture that pulls
us downward, that complacently presents as much
decadence as possible. The prototype being the
“Cannes film festival” [international film festival held
in Cannes, France] or anything that could be inverted
or perverted and then projected on the big screen.
Decadence is complacence in decline. This decline, resulting from the weakness of human nature
since original sin, can be recognized and avoided or
people can submit to it. If recognized, this decline

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May - June 2019

must be followed by a redemptive leap, a sursum
corda. Accommodating the smug abasement of
our societal decline is an unsustainable level of
decadence.
Let’s be more precise concerning Baudelaire’s
definition: what are the “traces of original sin”?
They are concupiscence, unbridled sensuality,
cowardice, spinelessness, sloth, ignorance, malice.
It is what St. John calls the triple concupiscence:3
concupiscence of the body, concupiscence of the
eyes, and the pride of life.
Faced with this, we try to be a little more human,
a little less beast, and we must endow ourselves
with a culture that really cultivates us—that doesn’t
let us be idle, that doesn’t let the weeds grow—a culture that shakes us up as needed, that gathers us,
that returns to us, that converts us and obliges us to
grow so we can elevate ourselves. This is a culture
worthy of its name.
The contrary is barbarism. It is what we call
“savage” today. Today’s society of emasculated
language doesn’t call a “spade a spade” anymore. It
isn’t politically correct to call things by their name;
the blind are the “non-seeing,” the deaf the “hard
of hearing,” and when the “savages” steal, pillage,
rape, we speak of “incivilities.”
In passing, it is very revealing that we are no
longer allowed to use the right word, the exact term.
We dream here about what Bossuet had to say to
his student, the Great Dauphin who, by negligence,
contented himself with a “head-in-the-clouds” attitude: “Today you fool yourself in the placement of
your words; you don’t put the right word in the right
place. Suppose in the case that you govern others,
you don’t put the correct man in the correct place.
Because your head is not in order, your government
shall be disordered.”4
True cultivated culture is not merely a fashion
trend. Subversive culture renders one a little more
beastly, a little more like an animal, a little more barbaric. The definition of Baudelaire is quite correct.
When there is no longer any will “to diminish the
traces of original sin,” when one cultivates concupiscence, exacerbates sloth, renders ignorance and
malice more infectious and corrupt, one creates barbarism, not civilization. One destroys Christianity.
This revolution is neither political, nor economic, nor
institutional; it is an extremely efficacious cultural
revolution.

We are the witnesses and the victims of the omnipresent subculture of the media which is the vehicle
for corrupt ideals. Adultery is promoted by the voice
of posters as organizations spread them along the
walls of the subway. Sensuality is proposed in all of
its forms, in all of its false glory, for its primary message for humanity: “It isn’t wrong to treat yourself
well!” This statement paraphrases Oscar Wilde:
“The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to
it.”
The subversive know that they have an ally deep
within each of us. We have been baptized; we have
the effects of original sin; we have received grace;
we also have the “old man” who draws us downward
in this beastly culture. The slopes are meant to be
slippery so that one cannot climb back up.
The Copernican Revolution
We have seen in depth that subversion consists
in the inversion of the natural order. To be precise:
instead of affirming the primacy of the object, which
is objectivity, one privileges the subject, the subjectivity. A typical thought process might unfold thus:
“First of all, this is what I think, it is my opinion, who
cares what the reality is, it’s what I want, what I think
is what counts…”
Today, one gives passion primacy; it gets placed
above our reason. May of 1968 [a period of countrywide strikes. Considered a cultural, social, and moral
turning point in the history of France] began with the
slogan “Imagination is power.” The imagination is
a sense, an internal sense that we have in common
with animals but it is not the queen of our faculties. Certainly it is “the madman of the house” [St.
Teresa of Avila]. The imagination of ‘68 is the fantasy that receives the power to govern institutions
and manners. We dream about the rosy life with no
responsibilities after the hippie revolution; now it
has become the shameless sensual life without any
clarity and without counter-revolution!
In order to combat this subversion, one must first
identify it. In the military, the worst thing that could
happen would be to failure in identifying the enemy,
his strategy, his tactics. Here we aren’t faced with
a potential or virtual enemy, but a very real enemy
that hides and we have to learn its weaknesses in
order to combat it.
In his great work, L’intelligence en peril de mort
[Intelligence in Danger of Death]5, Marcel De Corte

analyzes this revolution of minds which is the hallmark of the cultural revolution. After the Council
the modernists said: we already changed the texts,
now we have to overthrow the minds. We pass from
words to ideas, from the written word to reason
itself; it is an integral and radical subversion. Marcel
De Corte tells us that what characterizes our period
is that we are no longer in the school of reality. What
we would like is to project our ideas and our fantasies upon reality: reality must bend. It is what Kant
called a “Copernican Revolution.”
The present day culture and its literature is
built on this model: it is not what we truly hear, the
observation of human nature with its strengths
and miseries, but rather the projection of a fantasy,
sometimes even a perversion of reality. They tell us:
“It’s just like that; that’s how I feel.”
The literature of today is subjectivist and selfabsorbed. One exposes and spreads “self.” For Leon
Daudet, it is the rampant and infectious ego trip. The
modern man suffers because of himself; he must
pamper his ego. This subject could go on for many
pages, but it certainly isn’t thus that we can serve
Christianity today.
Marcel De Corte gives us an interesting example,
almost a diagnosable case with Chateaubriand.
At the beginning of his Memoires d’Outre-Tombe
[Memories from Overseas], he exposes the juvenile folly that he came to understand as the “love
fantasy.” He dreams of a woman who isn’t real,
who doesn’t exist. He made her, he un-made her,
changing the color of her eyes, her hair, taken from
ideas from billboards that he saw here and there,
collecting separate memories from women that he
would notice in his entourage. He made therefore,
an imaginary being, with whom he is madly in love,
madly in the psychiatric sense of the word. He is
so enamored with her that, seeing that she clearly
doesn’t exist, and the divorce between his rich and
fulfilling dream and the poor and intolerable reality,
he desired to kill himself and he made the attempt.
The aftermath is unknown since we do not have the
sequel to his already extensive Memoires.
In the opinion of Marcel De Corte, the case of
Chateaubriand has symbolic value because it
represents the contemporary mentality very well.
We bathe in a subjectivist culture which is no longer
in the realm of reality, nor from nature—a nature
that imposes itself because it is created by God.

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Theological Studies
Modern man is a demiurge, a creator who makes his
object; he cannot love what he is, he wants to love
what he created, that which he dreams. He wants to
fabricate his bubble, and make that bubble a reality.
What would the apprentice sorcerers of transhumanism say today who are the makers of “virtual
reality”!
The cultural counter-revolution cannot be—like
Joseph de Maistre announced very justly—a contrary revolution, seeking to counter balance revolution, by becoming the exact opposite of revolution.
It is more than just the will to rebel which we spoke
about at the beginning. It essentially consists of
conversion. The spirit must be converted, turned
towards what is real which, for us Christians, is the
order created by God of which we are constantly
aware.
This attitude which is only the realistic attitude is
deeply counter-revolutionary today. Is being a realist
to be counter-revolutionary? No! Only a perfectly
conscious understanding of revolutionary dangers
can operate a real cultural counter-revolution. We
can attack cultural revolution at its roots by reorienting the spirit towards reality—by submitting to
objective truth. It is the antidote to Mao who said
that he wanted to rid himself of the “junk” and to
Gramsci who wanted to free people from a natural
order which does not depend on us, and all the more
from a supernatural order which imposes itself on
us. When Baudelaire said that in order to do civilized
work, one must work to diminish the effects of original sin, a theologian could add that these effects can
be summarized as a bending, a withdrawal, a stunting of oneself; this is why the effects of original sin
which are concupiscence, cowardice and the rest…
are sterile, sadly unfertile and savagely uneducated.
Integral Return to Reality
Still in L’intelligence en peril de mort, Marcel De
Corte shows where intellectual fecundity is found,
where we must search for a radical cultural counterrevolution. Our intelligence proceeds by concepts
from which it forms judgments through rigorous
reasoning. How is a concept born?
The realist philosopher responds: “In order for
there to be a concept, there must first be conception. The concept is the wedding-fruit of the intelligence and reality. In order for this offspring to be
born, the intelligence must have exchanges with re-

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ality. It is evident that the vigor of a child depends on
the health of the father and the mother, and on the
strength of their union. It is the intensity, the width,
the depth, richness and quality of their relationship
tied together by generative elements which will
mark that which is conceived by their union, communicating to it the imprint of reality.”6
The things of the intellectual life are to be considered with as much simplicity and naturalness as
the things of biological life: the word “concept” goes
back to the idea of conception, therefore of fertility. Intelligence is not fertile; it cannot conceive a
rich and strong idea, unless it is rendered fertile by
reality. It is not intelligence itself that is fertile. Selffertilization may be a “pregnancy,” but it is not real
fertility.
Intelligence is really in danger of death since it
thinks that it is fertile by itself, making ideas by itself
that are no more than idealized fantasies. This gives
way to “love phantoms” as with Chateaubriand. But
these make-believe loves could never engender
anything other than shadows.
The realist cultural counter-revolution, is to admit
that we are fertile by reality. Let us go further: I am
fertile by nature, by the essence of things, by the
nature that God willed by the natural order with
the natural law, the natural morals for, despite
Gramsci and his successors, there is a natural law.
For example, marriage between one man and one
woman—which is not “bourgeois” or “macho,” which
is not ideological, socio-cultural conditioning.
And there is also a supernatural law: we are
wounded, lessened by the effects of original sin; we
know that it is due to concupiscence. This supernatural law is willed by Him who created us and who
more admirably re-created us—mirabilius reformasti—by Christ our Redeemer, who removes from
us the “old man” and who makes the “new man”
live within us. “All of the rest is only literature,” vain
literature, as Peguy proclaimed.
Let us give the last word to Fr. Calmel.
Commenting on the words of Phèdre [queen of
Athens], taken with devastating and incestuous passion for Hippolyta [her stepson], she wishes to cast
away her veils, signs of the dignity of a woman, of
step-mother and queen she says, “Woe, that these
veils weigh upon me!” Fr. Calmel states that it is not
only her veils that weigh upon her, it is the acceptance of human nature, it is the necessity of waging

combat, of domesticating the animal, and of making
sure that rationality and, more importantly, spirituality triumphs.
“Woe, that these vain adornments, these veils
weigh upon me”7 groaned the Racine heroine
[Jean-Baptiste Racine was the author of the tragedy
Phèdre] to the paradox of passion and rage. This
terrible verse raises the question of decency very
precisely. If the human being succumbs, no longer
stands firm, no longer restrains himself…and that
is what happens from one day to another, to the
one who cuts himself off from God: then, inevitably,
the veils become a burden. But if the human being
agrees to be such, with the struggle, the effort, the
tears and the prayers that this consent requires for
his own dignity: then, naturally, the veils are sweet
to him like a sacred burden. They are the sign of his
ever-visible nobility and condition of his ever-possible salvation.”8
Do not deliver yourself from the fight with this
name: resignation. One resigns to the human condition if one does not want to be redeemed anymore, if
one wishes to roll himself up in concupiscence. If the
reason doesn’t want to be mistress anymore, one
wallows in passion.
To serve Christianity today is to proclaim a difference, affirm an urgency. It is to be a rebel. It requires
energy and enthusiasm; we are not made to be mediocre. Do not say that we are fatigued, that we long
to be at rest without having worked, without having
been wounded. To retreat from this conflict would
be the same as retreating from battle. The cultural
counter-revolution involves our whole conception of
humanity, of Christianity. It is a vast battlefield that
opens wide before us.

1

See Paul Hazard, La crise de la conscience européenne, 1680-1715.
3rd part, Ch. 7, Vers un nouveau modèle d’humanité, Paris, 1931.

2

Charles Baudelaire, Mon cœur mis à nu : journal intime (1887),
no. LVIII: “Theory of true civilization. It is not in gas, neither in
vapor, neither in turning tables. It is in the diminishing of the stain
of original sin.”

3

I Jn. 2:16: “Because all that is in the world, the concupiscence
of the body, the concupiscence of the eyes, and the pride of life,
comes not from the Father, but the world.”

4

See Bossuet, Letter to Pope Innocent XI on the education of the
Great Dauphin (March 8, 1679).

5

See Marcel De Corte, L’intelligence en péril de mort, edition
established and edited in the notes by Jean-Claude Absil, L’Homme
Nouveau ed., 2017, pp. 231-234.

6

Marcel De Corte, op. cit., pp. 24-25.

7

Jean Racine, Phèdre, I, 3.

8

R.-Th. Calmel O.P., Ecole chrétienne renouvelée, Ch. XXVIII,
Vigueur et netteté, Téqui, 1990, P. 179.

Translated from the French by Associate Editor Jane Carver.

83

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The
Last
Word
Dear readers,
Sacred Scripture tells us that when Our Blessed Lord announced, “One of you will betray
me,” John rolled over from his reclining seat right onto the Sacred Heart to console Him of
this betrayal. Then to John, “leaning on Jesus’ bosom” and to him alone, not even to Peter,
did Our Lord discreetly identify the traitor.
The world is full of scandals, indeed, and woe to it because of them. But what have we
done and what do we do at the news of these shocking acts? Are we too going to throw the
first stone, we who may think that we are “holier than thou?”
The contrite Augustine knew too well, and with good reason, the meaning of his words
when he said: “There is not a sin that a man cannot commit, that another man has committed, without the help of He who made man.” Or, in the Pauline expression: “Wherefore he that
thinketh himself to stand, let him take heed—caveat!—lest he fall.”
My last word on this issue of scandals is a triple agere contra: they should be for us a lesson in humility, in satisfaction, in missionary charity.
In humility: whatever sad story we hear of someone’s sins, let us remember that we could
fall into the exact same sin, and even into worst ones, without the grace of God. “It is by the
grace of God that I am what I am.” We all remember the firm declaration “I will die for You!”
uttered by a Peter too confident in his own strength. We know what happened after.
A lesson in satisfaction: like John, we too must console the Sacred Heart, “I have sought
for a consoler and have found none…” Someone must make penance for these sins. Many
religious congregations, such as the Capuchins, have that goal. At Fatima, Our Blessed Lady
called on little ones to join in this necessary satisfaction for the sins of poor sinners who
might go to hell without our penances.
A lesson in missionary charity: “Pray for the conversion of sinners!” Who would have ever
thought a Magdalene, a Saul, an Augustine, an Ignatius, a Ratisbonne would have converted
and become such saviors of souls, some of them founders of religious orders, in the hands
of God? “For nothing is impossible with God!” Someone prayed for them. And their prayers
were answered.
Let us pray without ceasing in reparation and for the conversion of poor sinners.
Fr. Daniel Couture

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