Does the conciliar Church exist?
IS THERE A CONCILIAR CHURCH, a society distinct from the Catholic Church, differing from it if not in its members then at least in its goals? And if so, what is its relationship with the Catholic Church?
These are pertinent questions posed by Bishop Tissier de Mallerais, to which he responds with his customary precision.
These answers are useful to know at a time when, after forty years of quiet unanimity among the representatives of Tradition, a new opinion has suddenly arisen and is becoming increasingly mandatory. Conferences, articles, and sessions are multiplying, while Le Sel de la Terre and the Letter of the Dominicans of Avrillé, faithful to the old opinion, are banned from sale and distribution.
Read the "banned" article by Bishop Tissier de Mallerais: Is there a conciliar Church? by Bishop Tissier
IS THERE A CONCILIAR CHURCH, a society constituted and distinct from the Catholic Church, differing from it if not in its members at least in its goals? And if so, what is its relationship with the Catholic Church? These are questions that have been on the Catholic conscience since June 25, 1976, the day when the substitute for the Secretariat of State of Pope Paul VI, Bishop Giovanni Benelli [1], used this expression in a letter written on behalf of the Pope to Archbishop Lefebvre:
[If the seminarians of Écône] are of good will and seriously prepared for priestly ministry in true fidelity to the conciliar Church, we will then take it upon ourselves to find the best solution for them.
Several studies on the subject have appeared in Le Sel de la terre [2] since then. Let us formulate a new statement of the question in order to answer it.
Let us first try to define the two Churches in question, using Aristotle's four causes. A society is a moral being, belonging to the category of relation, which links its members together. We can distinguish:
— The material cause: these are the people united in society. We will say that, in the case of the Catholic Church as in that of the conciliar Church, these are the baptized.
— The efficient cause is the head of society: for the Catholic Church, Our Lord Jesus Christ, its founder, and the popes who are his vicars; and for the conciliar Church, the popes of the Council, therefore the same popes; so that the same hierarchy seems to govern both Churches.
— The final cause, which is the cause of causes, is the common good sought by the members: in the case of the Catholic Church, this sought-after good is eternal salvation; in the case of the conciliar Church, it is more or less mainly the unity of the human race: "The Church," says the Council, "is in Christ like a sacrament or, if you will, the sign and means of intimate union with God and of the unity of all mankind [3]."
— The formal cause is the union of the minds and wills of the members in the pursuit of the common good. In the Catholic Church, this is achieved through the profession of the same Catholic faith, the practice of the same divine worship, and submission to the same pastors and therefore to the laws they make, namely canon law. In the conciliar Church, it is through the acceptance of the teaching of the Council and the magisterium that claims to follow it, and through the practice of the new liturgy and obedience to the new canon law.
From these approximate data we can deduce the approximate definitions of the two Churches: the Catholic Church is the society of the baptized who want to save their souls by professing the Catholic faith, practicing the same Catholic worship, and following the same pastors, successors of the Apostles. The conciliar Church, on the other hand, is the society of the baptized who follow the directives of the current popes and bishops, more or less consciously embracing the intention of achieving the unity of the human race, and who in practice accept the decisions of the Council, practice the new liturgy, and submit to the new canon law.
If this is the case, we have two Churches that have the same leaders and most of the same members, but which have diametrically opposed forms and ends: on the one hand, eternal salvation assisted by the social reign of Christ, King of nations; on the other hand, the unity of the human race through liberal ecumenism, that is, extended to all religions, heir to the conciliar decisions Unitatis redintegratio, Nostra ætate, and Dignitatis humanæ, which is the spirit of Assisi and the antithesis of the social reign of Jesus Christ. This may be a bit of an oversimplification, but what follows will shed light on the accuracy of this opposition.
That the Catholic hierarchy should govern both the Catholic Church and a society that looks like a counterfeit Church seems to contradict the assistance promised by Christ to Peter and his successors, guaranteeing the inerrancy of the magisterium and the indefectibility of the Church (Mt 16:17-19; 28:20). If the pope heads another Church, he is an apostate, he is no longer pope, and the sedevacantist hypothesis is verified. – It suffices to respond that “Prima sedes a nemine judicatur” and that, consequently, no authority can pronounce obstinacy, declare the pertinacity of a sovereign pontiff in error or deviance; and that, on the other hand, in case of doubt, the Church would at least supplement the executive power of the apparent pontiff (can. 209 of the CIC of 1917) [4]. As for the magisterium, it is assisted only if it intends to transmit the deposit of faith and not profane novelties [5]. And as for the indefectibility of the Church, it does not prevent the Church from being reduced, following a great apostasy such as that announced by St. Paul (2 Thessalonians 2:3), to a very modest number of true Catholics. Consequently, none of the difficulties raised against the existence of a true society called the conciliar Church and led by the pope and the Catholic hierarchy is decisive.
It is nevertheless preferable to avoid these extreme responses. One can then endeavor to deny the existence of the conciliar Church as a society organized and directed by the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, or to exhaust [6] the membership of the members of this conciliar Church.
First, we could say that the conciliar Church is only a liberal and modernist “spirit” that penetrated the Church during the Council, as Archbishop Lefebvre replied to Cardinal Seper when he asked him:
Your Excellency, in a preliminary note [8] to a letter addressed to the Holy Father, you wrote: “Let there be no mistake, this is not a dispute between Archbishop Lefebvre and Pope Paul VI; it is a matter of the radical incompatibility between the Catholic Church and the conciliar Church, the Mass of Paul VI representing the program of the conciliar Church.” This idea is explained in the homily delivered on June 29 during the ordination Mass in Écône: “This new Mass is a symbol, an expression, an image of a new faith, a modernist faith […]. Now, it is obvious that this new rite is underpinned, if I may say so, by another conception of the Catholic faith, another religion... Should we conclude from these statements that, in your opinion, the pope, by promulgating and imposing the new Ordo Missæ, and all the bishops who received it, have visibly established and gathered around them a new “conciliar” Church that is radically incompatible with the Catholic Church [9]?
Minimizing the significance of his words, the archbishop replies:
First of all, I would like to point out that the expression “conciliar Church” is not mine, but that of His Excellency Bishop Benelli, who, in an official letter, asked that our priests and seminarians submit to the “conciliar Church.” I consider that a spirit of modernist and Protestant tendencies is evident in the conception of the new Mass and, indeed, in the entire liturgical reform [10].
We believe that the strategic retreat of the prelate of Écône is perfectly justified by the circumstances, namely a trial brought against him by the Holy Office that could lead to his condemnation. Furthermore, the explanations he would have had to provide in support of his idea of the existence of a parallel and organized society called the conciliar Church would have required too many documents and facts to cite and organize dialectically within the limits of brief answers to be given in an interrogation. We cannot argue from his evasive answer that Archbishop Lefebvre really reduced the conciliar Church to a "spirit."
But, one might say, did not Archbishop Lefebvre refer several times to a simple debility affecting the body of the Church, a kind of “spiritual AIDS,” as he put it, which weakens the Church’s ability to resist contamination? We respond that one does not preclude the other. The effects of the conciliar Church on the Catholic Church are indeed first and foremost a poisoning, a paralysis, and therefore a weakening of the Catholic Church in the face of its enemies. This is what Archbishop Lefebvre explains to the same Cardinal Seper in a letter preceding his interrogation:
There are forces in this world that are enemies of Our Lord and His reign. Satan and all of Satan's auxiliaries, conscious or unconscious, reject this reign, this path of salvation, and militate for the destruction of the Church. Thus, the Church is engaged by its divine Founder in a gigantic battle. All means have been and are being used by Satan to triumph. One of his latest and most effective stratagems is to ruin the Church's fighting spirit by persuading her that there are no more enemies, that she must therefore lay down her arms and enter into a dialogue of peace and understanding. This fallacious truce will allow the enemy to penetrate everywhere and corrupt the opposing forces. This truce is liberal ecumenism, a diabolical instrument of the Church's self-destruction. This liberal ecumenism will require the neutralization of the weapons that are the liturgy with the Sacrifice of the Mass, the sacraments, the breviary, the liturgical feasts, the neutralization and closure of seminaries...
It is obvious that the weakness or "AIDS" of the Church in the face of her enemies is not a simple pathological decline in the spirit of combat, but is only the result of stratagems hatched by influential members of the Church, relayed by part of the hierarchy and supported by the popes themselves, victims of their liberalism, but conscious and willing participants in this liberal ecumenism, an ecumenism welcomed by a large part of Catholics seduced by the facilities offered by this kind of new religion. All of this together is precisely what we have defined as the conciliar Church.
But if we still insist on attributing a pure disease to the Church, then the image of cancer would be more realistic: is not the conciliar disease the parasitization and colonization of the healthy tissues of the Church by a virus that causes its anarchic proliferation? We would then have to ask ourselves about the existence and nature of the viral agent.
On the other hand, if we accept the image of a society that is a counterfeit of the Church, while wanting to avoid affirming its existence, we could reduce the membership of most of its members to a purely material affiliation, since the majority follow the movement out of conformism, without knowing or sharing the goals of the conciliar Church, which would be almost devoid of real members and reduced to a ghost in terms of membership and a skeleton in terms of hierarchy. The truly skeletal state of the conciliar Church would confirm this hypothesis. Furthermore, membership in the latter should be further minimized by considering that the bond that unites its members has nothing of the solidity of the theological virtue of the Catholic faith, which is entirely supernatural in its object, motive, and end: it makes one "believe in God, believe God, and believe in God." For while many conciliarists approve of the attempt to reconcile the religion of God made man with the religion of man alone, on the common basis of the dignity of the human person, they do not perceive the ambiguity of the principle of this reconciliation set forth by the Council in Gaudium et spes: "Believers and non-believers generally agree on this point: everything on earth must be ordered to man as its center and summit [12]." The Catholic Church specifies, in fact, with St. Ignatius of Loyola: "And the things that are on earth are created for man, to help him achieve his salvation," which is a completely different end! Compared to the communion of saints, the fruit of Catholic faith and theological charity, what communion can the mixture of such diametrically opposed principles establish among the conciliarists? We will call it, with Anne Catherine Emmerich, the communion of the profane or the communion of the anti-saints [13].
Moreover, to the equivocation of its form, the conciliar Church adds the ambiguity of its end: "the unity of the human race," essentially earthly and natural, "in Christ," instrumentalizing Our Lord in the service of a Platonic idea: tomorrow, with a wave of a magic wand, without effort, without conversion of the world, "the Church will be the human race"! The Church no longer needs to be missionary; it suffices for her to present herself to the world, to be media-savvy. The incessant publicity trips of John Paul II illustrate the reality of what Father Julio Meinvielle already described in 1970 as “the Church of publicity”:
This Church of publicity, magnified in propaganda, with publicized bishops, priests, and theologians, can be won over to the enemy and change from the Catholic Church to a Gnostic Church, [opposed to] the other, the Church of Silence, with a pope faithful to Jesus Christ in his teaching and with a few priests, bishops, and faithful attached to him, scattered like the pusillus grex throughout the earth [14].
Alas, the faithful pope has so far failed to provide this pusillus grex! The post-conciliar popes, elected popes of the Catholic Church, have been above all popes of the Church of publicity!
From all that we have just considered, it appears that the conciliar Church is not only a disease, nor a theory, but that it is an association of Catholic hierarchs who, inspired by liberal and modernist thinkers, want, for globalist purposes, to create a new type of Church, with many priests and Catholic faithful who are more or less won over by this ideal. It is not merely an association of victims. Formally speaking, the conciliar Church is a sect that occupies the Catholic Church. It has its promoters and organized actors, just as modernism condemned by St. Pius X had, which must be quoted:
The architects of error are not to be found today among declared enemies; they hide themselves, and this is a source of apprehension and very keen anxiety within the very bosom and heart of the Church. They are enemies who are all the more formidable because they are less openly so. We are speaking, Venerable Brothers, of a large number of lay Catholics and, what is even more deplorable, of priests who, under the guise of love for the Church, are completely lacking in serious philosophy and theology, but are instead imbued to the core with a venom of error drawn from the adversaries of the Catholic faith, and who, in defiance of all modesty, as renovators of the Church; who, in tight phalanxes, boldly assault all that is most sacred in the work of Jesus Christ, without respect for his own person, whom they lower, with sacrilegious temerity, to simple and pure humanity. [...] The danger today is almost at the very heart and veins of the Church; their blows are all the more sure because they know better where to strike. Add to this that it is not the branches or the shoots that they have cut down, but the very root, that is, the faith and its deepest fibers. Then, once this root of immortal life has been cut off, they set themselves the task of spreading the virus throughout the tree. […] What will they not do to create new followers! They seize the chairs in seminaries and universities and turn them into chairs of pestilence [15]...
Fifty years will pass; despite Pascendi by St. Pius X in 1907 and Humani generis by Pius XII in 1950, the sect of modernists will rise up to attack positions of influence in the Church and, on the occasion of the Second Vatican Council, will impose on the Church and present to the world the new type of Church that we have described in its form and purpose, and this sect will, through the magisterium and the reforms of the popes claiming to follow the Council, implement this new system of Church. The roles of Paul VI, the liberal and contradictory pope, and that of John Paul II, the philosopher and ecumenical pope, are undeniable in the establishment of what is the conciliar Church, with its hierarchy which, with very rare exceptions, is exactly that of the Catholic Church.
Let us take a look back some 130 years before the Council; such a retrospective will help us understand that the establishment of the conciliar Church is the result of a plan hatched by Freemasonry, which did not even dare to believe that its designs would be fulfilled. Let us quote excerpts from the internal correspondence of the Carbonari, Italian Freemasons of the19thcentury, published by Popes Gregory XVI and Pius IX:
What we must ask for, what we must seek and wait for as the Jews wait for the Messiah, is a pope according to our needs. [...] You want to establish that the clergy march under your banners while believing they are marching under the apostolic banners. [...] You will have preached a revolution in tiara and cope, marching with the cross and the banner, a revolution that will only need a little prodding to set the four corners of the world on fire.
Here is another excerpt from a letter from Nubius to Volpe (names coded to maintain the secrecy that is the rule in Freemasonry), dated April 3, 1824:
A heavy burden has been placed on your shoulders, dear Volpe. We must carry out the immoral education of the Church and, by small, well-graduated means, achieve the triumph of the revolutionary idea through a pope. In this project, which has always seemed to me to be a superhuman calculation, we are still groping our way forward.
The triumph of the revolutionary idea through a pope is truly the supreme attack, as Archbishop Lefebvre says, quoting these documents in his book Ils l'ont découronné [They Have Dethroned Him] [16] and commenting on them as follows:
Superhuman calculation, says Nubius; he means diabolical calculation! For it is to calculate the subversion of the Church by its own head, what Archbishop Delassus calls the supreme attack, because one cannot imagine anything more subversive for the Church than a pope won over to liberal ideas, than a pope using the power of the keys of St. Peter in the service of the Counter-Church! But isn't this what we are currently experiencing, since Vatican II, since the new Canon Law? With this false ecumenism and this false religious freedom promulgated at Vatican II and applied by the popes with cold perseverance despite the ruins it causes.
Archbishop Lefebvre also said:
What Church are we dealing with? Am I dealing with the Catholic Church, or am I dealing with another Church, a Counter-Church [17], a counterfeit Church? Now, I sincerely believe that we are dealing with a counterfeit Church and not with the Catholic Church. They no longer teach the Catholic faith. They teach something else; they are leading the Church into something other than the Catholic Church. It is no longer the Catholic Church. They sit on the seats of their predecessors... but they are not continuing their predecessors. They no longer have the same faith, the same doctrine, or the same morals as their predecessors. So it is no longer possible. And mainly, their great error is ecumenism. They teach an ecumenism that is contrary to the Catholic faith. [...] The Church is occupied by this Counter-Church that we know well and that the popes know perfectly well, and that the popes have condemned throughout the centuries: for almost four centuries now, the Church has not ceased to condemn this Counter-Church, which was born mainly with Protestantism, which developed with Protestantism, and which is at the origin of all modern errors, which has destroyed all philosophy, and which has led us into all the errors that we know, which the popes have condemned: liberalism, socialism, communism, modernism, Sillonism [19]. We are dying because of it. The popes have done everything to condemn this, and now those who sit in the seats of those who condemned it agree with this liberalism and ecumenism. So we cannot accept this. And the more things become clear, the more we realize that this program, [...] all these errors were developed in Masonic lodges [20].
In what we call the conciliar Church, it is not necessary for the pope (the pope of the Catholic Church) to be the leader; he could be merely an executor of directives coming, if not from an occult power, at least from a ruling core or pressure groups of collaborators or theologians under Masonic influence. Let us remember Annibal Bugnini and his mysterious influence on Pope Paul VI in the liturgical reform. This Annibal seems to have been a Freemason. It is well known that Masonic lodges operated among the members of the Curia of the Holy See during the pontificates of Paul VI and John Paul II.
The conciliar popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI actively participated in the Council, the former as a Council Father, the latter as a Council expert, and steered it in the direction of the new theology, that of universal redemption and an evolving faith. And as popes, they applied these errors. But while they applied this conciliar program, there is no proof that they were the ones who conceived it, and there is nothing to prevent them from having merely applied, consciously or unconsciously, a policy that came from elsewhere. The leaders of the High Vendetta, who were preparing for the advent of a pope according to their plan, had made it clear that they did not want this pope to be a member of their sect [21].
Whatever the manner in which the Masonic sect exercises its influence on the conciliar Church, this influence is undeniable.
The influence of the Masonic spirit, or at least the penetration of the liberal, naturalist, ecumenical, and globalist spirit among the members of the conciliar Church, is obviously not the same for everyone. Among the clergy and religious, most bishops, religious superiors, seminary and university professors, as well as elderly priests, formally adhere, that is, consciously and willingly, to the aforementioned ends, while a minority of young priests or religious and seminarians want nothing to do with the Council or pay no attention to it and desire a return to the theology of St. Thomas, the traditional Mass, classical discipline, and Christian virtues. The latter do not belong to the conciliar Church in their hearts. Between these two extremes lies the mass of Catholics who are conciliar out of habit, conformism, or convenience, as mentioned above, and who have a rather purely material affiliation with the conciliar Church. The blurred boundaries between these categories do not help to clearly delineate the two Churches.
From the above, two conclusions should be drawn concerning the relationship between the two Churches.
First, the conciliar Church is not materially separate from the Catholic Church. It does not exist independently of the Catholic Church. There is certainly a distinction between them, a formal distinction, but no absolute material separation. The hierarchy of the conciliar Church coincides almost exactly with the hierarchy of the Catholic Church; the members of the conciliar Church are all members, at least materially, of the Catholic Church. Just as one could say (with a grain of salt) that liberalism is a Catholic heresy, in the sense that it arises only within the Catholic Church and exists and develops only at the expense of the Catholic Church, so too can it be said that the conciliar Church arises from the corruption of the Catholic Church and can only live off this corruption, like a parasite that lives only at the expense of the parasitized organism, pumping the substance of its host to build its own substance. There is a kind of transfer of substance, if I may say so, from one to the other, in a metaphorical and not a philosophical sense, of course. To become conciliar, there is no need to separate oneself from the Catholic Church; it is enough to allow oneself to be corrupted by the conciliar poison and to let one's substance be absorbed by the conciliar parasite. It is enough to practice the Mass of the new religion and to adhere, formally or materially, to the liberal ecumenism that is its form.
On the other hand, the conciliar Church does not necessarily coincide with the Catholic Church, either in its leaders or in its members. The leaders of one are not always the leaders of the other. The members of the former may, through heresy, have ceased to be members of the latter, but this is not necessary. The Catholic Church is the only true Church, the only Church founded by Our Lord Jesus Christ. But this does not prevent the conciliar Church from being a social reality: not just a party, but a counterfeit Church, led by a sect of leaders, a sect with its own system or ideology, which is the form of this conciliar Church, and which manipulates it for its own ends, with its relays and its executors, and which groups together a large part of the hierarchy and Catholic faithful who are more or less aware of and consent to the diametric shift it is operating. It is in this sense that Father Calmel was able to speak of "the Church of pirates"; this metaphor says it all.
In 1971, more than five years before Bishop Benelli's “conciliar Church,” the same Father Calmel denounced, in the magazine Itinéraires, the “new Church that Vatican II tried to show,” “the new post-Vatican Church,” and explained:
The false Church that has been showing itself among us since the curious Second Vatican Council is moving further and further away, year after year, from the Church founded by Jesus Christ. The false post-conciliar Church increasingly contradicts the Holy Church that has been saving souls for twenty centuries (and, moreover, enlightening and supporting the city). The pseudo-Church under construction increasingly contradicts the true Church, the only Church of Christ, through the strangest innovations in both its hierarchical constitution and its teaching and morals [22].
The expressions "false Church" and "pseudo-Church" are very strong. And the verb "to contradict itself" indicates a formal mutation of a part of the Church, a part that is breaking away from the Catholic movement to formally wander outside of it. Father Calmel was truly a prophet. It was only five and a half years later, after receiving the famous letter from Bishop Benelli and being struck by Paul VI with a suspension a divinis, that Archbishop Lefebvre affirmed even more forcefully to his friends the existence of this “conciliar Church,” calling it “schismatic”:
What could be clearer! From now on, it is the conciliar Church that must be obeyed and remained faithful to, and no longer the Catholic Church. That is precisely our whole problem. We are suspended a divinis by the conciliar Church and for the conciliar Church, of which we do not want to be a part. This conciliar Church is a schismatic Church, because it breaks with the Catholic Church of all time. It has its new dogmas, its new priesthood, its new institutions, its new worship, already condemned by the Church in many official and definitive documents. This is why the founders of the conciliar Church insist so much on obedience to the Church of today, disregarding the Church of yesterday, as if it no longer existed. […] The Church that affirms such errors is both schismatic and heretical. This conciliar Church is therefore not Catholic. To the extent that the pope, bishops, priests, or faithful adhere to this new Church, they separate themselves from the Catholic Church. The Church of today is the true Church only to the extent that it continues and is one with the Church of yesterday and of all time. The norm of the Catholic faith is Tradition [27].
Archbishop Lefebvre seems to admit the transmutation of the Catholic Church into the conciliar Church. What becomes of the Catholic Church? Archbishop Lefebvre replies that it is to the extent that, according to the degree to which the leaders and the baptized adhere to the new type of Church, they constitute a new Church, characterized by its earthly, humanistic, naturalistic, socialist, ecumenical, and globalist goals, such that this new Church conceives of itself as vaster and more universal than the Catholic Church. It is necessary to add the distinction between the exclusive adherence of sectarian leaders to these profane ends on the one hand, and the search for a compromise between these ends and the Catholic end on the other, a compromise that is well expressed in the conciliar text of Lumen Gentium (§ 1): “The Church is in Christ like a sacrament or as a special sign and instrument both of a perfect union with God and of the unity of the whole human race.” This ambivalence greatly complicates the problem of distinguishing between the two Churches. Monsignor Lefebvre's text must be understood with this precision: it is to the extent that the conciliar fathers adhere exclusively to the aforementioned profane goals that they leave the Catholic Church. And we are not the judges of this extent. Despite its polemical style, with these clarifications, Monsignor Lefebvre's text is irreproachable. His last sentence must be understood with the same precision: “The Church of today is the true Church only insofar as she continues exclusively and is exclusively one with the Church of yesterday and of all time. " A Church that covets both an earthly and globalist goal and the supernatural goal of the eternal salvation of souls is no longer Catholic; it is the conciliar Church in its attenuated and vulgar viral state [28].
And alongside this vulgar conciliar Church, what remains of the Catholic Church? We answer that, even reduced to the modest number of the healthy part of its faithful and perhaps to a single faithful bishop, as may be the case, according to Father Emmanuel, for the Church of the end times, the Catholic Church remains the Catholic Church.
Six more years would pass, and John Paul II's promulgation of a new code of canon law would justify the archbishop's views on this conciliar Church. In his apostolic constitution, the pope clearly states that he is imposing "a new ecclesiology" on the Church:
[This] code […] has put into effect the spirit of the Council, whose documents present the Church, "the universal sacrament of salvation," as the people of God, and where its hierarchical constitution appears to be based on the college of bishops united with its head. […] In a certain sense, one could even see in this code a great effort to translate into canonical language this very doctrine of conciliar ecclesiology. […] It follows that what constitutes the essential novelty of the Second Vatican Council, in continuity with the legislative tradition of the Church, especially with regard to ecclesiology, also constitutes the novelty of the new code. Among the elements that characterize the real and authentic image [29] of the Church, we must emphasize the following in particular: the doctrine according to which the Church presents itself as the people of God (Lumen gentium 2) and hierarchical authority as service (Lumen gentium 3); the doctrine that shows the Church as a communion and therefore indicates what kinds of relationships should exist between the particular Churches and the universal Church and between collegiality and primacy; the doctrine that all members of the people of God, each in their own way, participate in the threefold function of Christ: priestly, prophetic, and kingly. Related to this doctrine is that concerning the duties and rights of the faithful, and in particular of the laity; and finally, the Church's commitment to ecumenism [30].
This picture of the conciliar Church shows the ruin it is wrought upon the personal exercise of authority received from God, the lowering of the hierarchy in favor of the base; the deliberate omission of the necessity of belonging to the Catholic Church in order to be saved; the reduction of the priesthood and priestly identity, drowned in the common priesthood of the baptized; the aspiration to a universal unity greater than that of the Catholic Church. This is what we called the form of that society which is the conciliar Church. Rather than society, it should be called dissociety, that is, the ruin resulting from the dissolution of that divine and human society which is the Catholic Church, or better still, if one may say so, the disintegration erected as the principle of a new congregation. Is this not reminiscent of the slogan of the revolution, “Solve, coagula”: first dissolve what exists, then reunite the pieces under another leader, according to a new principle? And this dissociated entity that is the conciliar Church exists; the pope, almost the entire Catholic hierarchy, and the conscious or unconscious mass of baptized Catholics are its members, whether formal or material.
However, this dissociated entity, doomed to self-destruction, is "held together" by the force of its agents. In the coagula, there is a pact among the instigators of this dissociated entity: everyone must be required to adhere to the Council and the conciliar reforms, so that those who do not accept them are “outside communion” or “outside full communion” with the conciliar Church. This conciliar Church therefore maintains itself through fear and violence; the Catholic Church, on the other hand, maintains itself through faith and charity.
Doomed to self-destruction, the conciliar Church nevertheless survives vigorously. What is the source of its tenacity? It is that its hierarchy uses all the power of the Catholic hierarchy that it occupies, holds, and misuses.
Since the introduction of the Mass of Paul VI, it has continually persecuted priests faithful to the true Mass, the true catechism, and true sacramental discipline, as well as religious faithful to their rule and vows. Many priests have died of grief at having to adopt the new rites and customs, out of obedience, as they believed. Many others have died in ostracism, canonical and psychological relegation, but happy to bear unyielding witness to the Catholic rite, to the integrity of the faith, to Christ the King. Threats, fear, censorship, and other punishments did not shake them. But alas, how many gave in to these methods of violence, to the blackmail of "disobedience" and dismissal exercised on them by their superiors. This is where we see the liberal malice of these leaders: is it not rightly said that there is no one more sectarian than a liberal? Having no principles to maintain order, they impose a regime of submission through terror.
The malice of the conciliar hierarchy is completed by its use of lies and equivocation. Thus, Pope Benedict XVI's motu proprio declaring that the traditional Mass was never suppressed and that its celebration is free, attaches conditions to this freedom that are contrary to it, and goes so far as to describe the authentic Mass and its modernist counterfeit as "extraordinary and ordinary forms of the same Roman rite."
The lie continues in the so-called "lifting" of the excommunications supposedly incurred by the four bishops consecrated by His Excellency Archbishop Lefebvre in 1988, as if they had actually been incurred.
But, in a surprising contrast, the conciliar hierarchy has never been able to enforce God's fifth commandment, "Thou shalt not kill," which was hardly preached by the bishops: the countries that were once Catholic are those where abortion is most prevalent; and Pope Paul VI's encyclical Humanæ vitæ was hardly relayed by the bishops, so that the contraceptive pill is in common use among most young girls and women in the Catholic Church. The filthy morals of today's world are nothing more than the overflowing of vice, which the conciliar hierarchy has been unable to oppose. This conciliar Church attracts into its pseudo-communion a mass of Christians who in reality live in sin and practical paganism.
Blessed are those who are not part of this "communion of the profane," who are providentially excluded from it or threatened with exclusion! Happy relegation or dereliction! The vocation of the Priestly Society of Saint Pius X, since its establishment by the Catholic Church in 1970 and the decree of praise that honored it in 1971, has never been to receive the blessings and recognition of this conciliar Church! It was undoubtedly necessary that this priestly society, together with the whole family of Tradition, should be like a burning torch, not hidden under the conciliar bushel, but placed on the candlestick of the pillory, so that it might enlighten all those who are in the house of God. It was probably preferable, according to the ways of Providence, that this healthy part of the Church, which had become, like the divine Master, a stumbling block, a stone rejected by the builders of the conciliar ecclesial dissociation, should become the cornerstone and keystone [31] of the indestructible Catholic cathedral. Our unyielding witness to the true Church of Jesus Christ, to the priesthood and kingship of Christ the priest and king, undoubtedly requires, on the part of the conciliar Church, the exclusion and ostracism pronounced against us and what we represent. But just as St. Joseph in his exile in Egypt carried the Child Jesus and his divine Mother, who were the seed of the Church, so too, in its exile, the family of Tradition carries the Church within itself, without undoubtedly having the exclusive right to this glorious function, but having its marrow and heart, its integrity and incorruption. It therefore carries within it the Roman Pontiff, in whom the successor of Peter will one day free himself from a long captivity and emerge from the sleep of his great illusions, to proclaim as the first pope once did in Caesarea Philippi to his Master: "Tu es Christus, Filius Dei vivi!"
From then on, if we are complicated, we will regret being deprived of conciliar communion or its appearance of ecclesial communion, and we will be unhappy and anxious, constantly searching for a solution. If, on the other hand, we have the faith and simplicity of a child, we will simply seek what witness to give to the Catholic faith. And we will find it: it is first and foremost the witness of our existence, our permanence, our stability, together with our profession of the integral Catholic faith and our rejection of conciliar errors and reforms. A testimony is absolute. If I bear witness to the Catholic Mass, to Christ the King, I must abstain from conciliar Masses and doctrines. It is like the grain of incense to idols: it is either a single grain or nothing at all. So it is "nothing at all [33]." And then this witness also means persecution, which is normal on the part of the enemies of this faith, who want to reduce our diametric opposition to the new religion, and as long as it pleases God, they will persevere in their perverse designs. Is it not God Himself who sets this enmity between the brood of the devil and the sons of Mary? Inimicitias ponam [34]!
So, as soon as, in the recollection of prayer, we have perceived this vocation that is ours, adapted by God to the current crisis, we accept it with perfect righteousness and great peace: righteousness incapable of any complicity with the enemy, peace without bitterness. We run to it, we leap to it, and we cry out like St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus, "In the Church, my Mother, I have found my vocation! " And we ask the magnanimous saint: "Obtain for me the grace to have in the Church and for the Church a soul of a martyr or at least of a confessor of the faith!"
[1] — Appointed Archbishop of Florence and created Cardinal in 1977.
[2] — See in particular Le Sel de la terre 1, pp. 25–38 (Brother Pierre-Marie, “Ecclésiologie comparée”), pp. 114–118; Le Sel de la terre 34, p. 248; Le Sel de la terre 45, pp. 36-41; Le Sel de la terre 59 (Winter 2006-2007), editorial: "Une hiérarchie pour deux Églises" ("One hierarchy for two Churches").
[3] — Second Vatican Council, Lumen gentium, 1.
[4] — The new code of 1983 limits substitution to that of executive power.
[5] — In Gaudium et spes (11, 2), the Second Vatican Council declares its primary intention to introduce and assimilate liberal values into Catholic doctrine; this operation cannot benefit from the assistance of the Holy Spirit and is contrary to the purpose of the magisterium, which is to "safeguard and faithfully expound" the deposit of faith.
[6] — Exhaust in the original sense of reducing to the extreme.
[7] — Response of Archbishop Lefebvre to Cardinal Seper questioning him about his letter denouncing the conciliar Church.
[8] — Note dated July 12, 1976.
[9] — Interrogation of Archbishop Lefebvre by Cardinal Seper, Prefect of the SCDF, January 11, 1979, in Archbishop Lefebvre and the Holy Office, Itinéraires magazine, no. 233, May 1979, pp. 144–145.
[10] — Ibid.
[11] — St. Thomas Aquinas, II-II, q. 2, a. 2.
[12] — Second Vatican Council, Gaudium et spes, 12, 1.
[13] — In her visions of the last days of the Church, she sees on one side the destroyers of St. Peter's Basilica, who are removing the stones, and on the other side the rebuilders. In the end, the destroyers cease their work of destruction, and reconciliation comes.
[14] — P. J. Meinvielle, De la Cabala al progressismo,2nded., Buenos Aires, 1994, pp. 363-364.
[15] — Saint Pius X, Encyclical Pascendi, September 8, 1907, in initio. See also: "No bishop is unaware, We believe, that a very pernicious race of men, the modernists, even after the encyclical Pascendi dominici gregis (September 8, 1907) had lifted the mask they wore, have not abandoned their designs to disturb the peace of the Church. They have not ceased, in fact, to seek out and gather new followers into a secret association, and to inoculate them with the poison of their opinions, through the publication of books and pamphlets whose authors they conceal or keep silent about. Motu proprio Sacrorum antistitum of September1, 1910, Éditions de la Documentation Catholique, Paris, vol. 5, p. 141.
[16] — Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, Ils l’ont découronné,2nded., Escurolles, Fideliter, 1987, p. 148.
[17] — By Counter-Church, we do not mean the conciliar Church itself, but the Masonic sect and all the sects that preceded it in the same Gnostic and antichrist spirit; as well as the modernist sect, whose doctrine is also a gnosis: a naturalistic reinterpretation of the Catholic faith.
[18] — The popes who saw clearly.
[19] — Marc Sangnier's movement in France at the beginning of the20thcentury, which sought to make the Church the driving force behind democracy, and which St. Pius X condemned in his encyclical Our Apostolic Duty.
[20] — Spiritual conference, Écône, June 21, 1978; see Le Sel de la terre 50, p. 244.
[21] — "It would be a ridiculous dream, and however events may turn out, that cardinals or prelates, for example, should have entered willingly or by surprise into some of our secrets; this is not at all a reason to desire their elevation to the See of Peter. Such an elevation would ruin us. Ambition alone would have led them to apostasy, and the needs of power would force them to sacrifice us. What we must ask for, what we must seek and wait for, as the Jews wait for the Messiah, is a pope according to our needs..." (Instruction from the High Court dating from 1819).
[22] — P. Roger-Thomas Calmel, O.P., "Authority and Holiness in the Church," Itinéraires 149 (January 1971), pp. 13-19; reproduced in Le Sel de la terre 40, pp. 77 and 85-87.
[23] — The dignity of the human person.
[24] — The common priesthood of the baptized.
[25] — Collegial institutions: episcopal synod, episcopal council, parish council...
[26] — The new Mass, which no longer appears as the sacrament of Christ's Passion.
[27] — Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, handwritten and photocopied letter of July 29, 1976, to his friends; reproduced in Le Sel de la terre 36, p. 10.
[28] — Note that in practice, teachings concerning the supernatural goal of eternal salvation of souls (e.g., Paul VI’s Creed or his encyclical Humanæ vitæ) remain dead letters because of the liberalism of the bishops and the pope’s unwillingness to apply Catholic doctrine.
[29] — Note the new code's claim to present the Church's "real image" (sic), which it had undoubtedly ignored or concealed until then, an "image," a model of the Church that is, moreover, "an essential novelty"! Inconsistency vies with audacity.
[30] — John Paul II, Apostolic Constitution Sacræ disciplinæ leges, January 25, 1983.
[31] — See 1 Peter 2:6-8.
[32] — “And behold, an angel of the Lord appeared, and a light shone in the room; and the angel touched Peter on the side and woke him, saying, ‘Get up quickly (Surge velociter). And the chains fell from his hands’” Acts 12:7.
[33] — Cf. P. Roger-Thomas Calmel, O.P., Holy Week Retreat 1974 preached to the seminarians of Écône, April 7, 1974, 6 p.m., according to the notes of a retreatant.
[34] — "I will put enmity between you and the woman, between your offspring and hers. She will crush your head, and you will try to bite her heel" (Genesis 3:15).