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  Biden’s Climate Requirements: Cut 90% of Red Meat From Diet; Americans Can Only Eat One Burger/Month
Posted by: Stone - 04-24-2021, 06:08 AM - Forum: Socialism & Communism - Replies (2)

Biden’s Climate Requirements: Cut 90% of Red Meat From Diet; Americans Can Only Eat One Burger Per Month


Gateway Pundit | April 23, 2021 

Joe Biden on Friday pledged to cut the US’s carbon emissions at least 50% by 2030.

Some of the climate requirements are going to mean big changes for Americans.

Biden’s ambitious plan could mean Americans will be forced to cut 90% of red meat from their diets which equates to about one average-sized hamburger per month.

Americans may also be forced to purchase a $55,000 electric vehicle under Biden’s Marxist climate plan.

The Daily Mail reported:

Quote:Americans may have to cut their red meat consumption by a whopping 90 percent and cut their consumption of other animal based foods in half.

Gradually making those changes by 2030 could see diet-related greenhouse gas emissions reduced by 50 percent, according to a study by Michigan University’s Center for Sustainable Systems.

To do that, it would require Americans to only consume about four pounds of red meat per year, or 0.18 ounces per day.

It equates to consuming roughly one average sized burger per month.

More than half of new cars bought in the United States would need to be electric within the next decade, studies show.

The University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy estimated that cleaning up transportation would count towards about a quarter of Biden’s goal.

It would mean more than 65 percent of new cars and SUV sales and 10 percent of new truck sales would need to be electric.

Currently, electric cars make up about 2 percent of new passenger vehicle sales.

The average cost of a new electric vehicle is about $55,000.

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  Priest who spoke out against flying ‘pride’ flag outside Catholic schools expelled from diocese
Posted by: Stone - 04-24-2021, 05:58 AM - Forum: Pandemic 2020 [Spiritual] - No Replies

Priest who spoke out against flying ‘pride’ flag outside Catholic schools expelled from diocese
A Polish priest in the Diocese of Hamilton, Ontario said his ouster was not for defending Catholic teaching 
against LGBT backers but for his approach to the pandemic.


BURLINGTON, Ontario, April 21, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) — A priest who argued that the LGBT “pride” flag does not reflect the Catholic faith has been asked to leave his diocese. But it was his approach to the pandemic, not his bishop’s support for the flag, that sparked his removal.

“The issue of the flag is not the reason for my expulsion, but the difference between (Bishop Douglas Crosby and me) in the pastoral approach towards the pandemic,” Father Janusz Roginski told LifeSiteNews by email.

“(This) made the Bishop lose trust in my capacity to be a pastor in his diocese.”

The priest did not say what these differences are alleged to have been.

Roginski, 49, has been the pastor of St. Gabriel’s Catholic Church in Burlington, Ontario since 2018 and has served the Diocese of Hamilton since 2006. A native of Poland, Roginski impressed Catholics throughout his chosen home when he gave a presentation before the Halton District Catholic School Board (HDCSB) on Tuesday, arguing against a proposal to fly the “Pride” flag outside their schools.

“Most of the Catholics passing by the school and seeing this flag in the school would think that we accept the homosexual lifestyle and what it represents,” Roginski testified.

“We cannot do that. We would be a cause of scandal and (would be) misleading people rather than leading them to heaven.”

He suggested that instead of flying the homosexual flag in June, the schools dedicate the month to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and teach their students about the love of Jesus Christ, which is “all-inclusive.”

Roginski’s witness was in contrast with the Diocese of Hamilton’s support for the pride flag proposal, which manifested both as a document commissioned by the Episcopal Vicar for Education for the Catholic Partners of the Diocese of Hamilton and as a memo from the Chancellor forbidding priests from mentioning the proposal in either their homilies or the announcements. A pro-LGBT Catholic school trustee in nearby Toronto, Maria Rizzo, congratulated Bishop Crosby, 71, for his support over Twitter.


The HDCSB meeting was Tuesday, and when the Hamilton Diocese 2021 clergy appointments were published Thursday, Roginski’s parishioners were aghast to see that he was leaving, not only St. Gabriel’s but the diocese. Word spread that it was because of the priest’s presentation of Catholic doctrine at the Catholic school board meeting.

However, Roginski has been assuring those who ask him that this was not the case. He told LifeSiteNews that the Diocese of Hamilton told him of their decision about a month ago. Meanwhile, the priest is happy that he has been accepted by the Diocese of St. Catharines. He is also grateful that he has received so much support for his presentation to the Halton Catholic school board.

“I am happy to see an overwhelming positive response from lay Catholics and from priests of our diocese through emails, messages and phone calls,” he said.

“From these communications (I see) that the lay Catholics feel abandoned by their shepherds, bishops and priests in their fight for the teachings of the Catholic Church,” he continued.

“Some of them pointed out that at school discussions the representatives of the Hamilton diocese often sided with those who were against established Catholic teachings regarding the issues of abortion, euthanasia and LGBTQ. This is very disturbing and disappointing.”

Roginski believes that many people are confused by what the LGBT rainbow flag really means. He said that proponents of the flag presented the Halton Catholic school board trustees with positive meanings (like inclusiveness, diversity, love, and the dignity of every person). However, the flag also stands for homosexual pride parades, which are “very offensive to any Catholic with their immodest display of sexuality that borderlines on pornography,” he said. 

In addition, the flag represents physical homosexual acts, the redefinition of marriage, and the adoption of children by homosexual couples, the priest noted.

“All these issues are contrary to the teachings of Jesus and His Church, which calls for holiness, virtue and chastity,” Roginski said.

The pastor posited that the Catholics who don’t pay attention to this aspect of the rainbow flag honestly believe that it is a symbol that could make schools a safe environment for children struggling with their sexual and gender identities. But in reality it is something completely different.

“This symbol (…) fails to signify the values they have in mind,” Roginski said. 

“Instead, it becomes a sign of division, controversy, and a scandal to many Catholics who see in this flag a sign of opposition to the well-established Roman Catholic teachings,” he said.

“It becomes a sign of promotion of sin. As such it can never be used in any Catholic context. It would be a betrayal of the Gospel, of the teachings of holy Roman Catholic Church and of Jesus Christ himself. We cannot allow it.”

One of Roginski’s parishioners wrote to LifeSiteNews to state her belief that the real reason her pastor is being replaced is because he is “conservative.”

“St. Gabriel's has been a good parish for conservative Catholics, but it appears that Bishop Crosby wants to turn it into a liberal parish,” she wrote.

“It appears that Bishop Crosby doesn't want these conservative priests and conservative faithful in his diocese.”

LifeSiteNews reached out to Bishop Crosby and Rizzo and is awaiting their replies.

To support Fr. Roginski’s witness against LGBT ideological symbols and values in Halton District Catholic schools, please contact the following HCDSB school trustees:

Patrick Murphy
905-630-1591
murphyp@hcdsb.org

Brenda Agnew
agnewb@hcdsb.org

Marvin Duarte
416-559-9327
duartem@hcdsb.org

Peter DeRosa
905-638-2529
derosap@hcdsb.org

Nancy Guzzo
guzzon@hcdsb.org

Vincent Iantomasi
905-536-4100
iantomasiv@hcdsb.org

Helena Karabela
289-230-1423
karabelah@hcdsb.org

Tim O’Brien
905-632-2954
o’brient@hcdsb.org

Janet O’Hearn-Czarnota
905-630-3581
o’hearn-czarnotaj@hcdsb.org

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  Scientists successfully create embryo from both human and monkey cells
Posted by: Stone - 04-24-2021, 05:52 AM - Forum: General Commentary - No Replies

Scientists successfully create embryo from both human and monkey cells


April 23, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) — In an alarming new development in biological experimentation, scientists have created a hybrid embryo comprised of human and monkey cells.

“Interspecies chimera formation with human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs) represents a necessary alternative to evaluate hPSC pluripotency in vivo and might constitute a promising strategy for various regenerative medicine applications, including the generation of organs and tissues for transplantation,” reads the summary of the paper, published in the journal Cell. “We demonstrated that hPSCs survived, proliferated, and generated several peri- and early post-implantation cell lineages inside monkey embryos.”

“Using hPSCs to generate human-animal chimeric embryos provides an experimental paradigm for studying early human development and holds great potential for diverse applications in regenerative medicine as well as for producing human tissues and organs for replacement therapies,” the researchers argue.

Defenders of the research argue that it’s necessary to learn how to grow viable human organs to save the thousands who die annually on waiting lists for organ transplants, and growing them inside pig and sheep embryos has thus far been ineffective. But NPR quotes several scientists who still have ethical qualms.

“My first question is: Why?” said Kirstin Matthews of Rice University’s Baker Institute. “I think the public is going to be concerned, and I am as well, that we’re just kind of pushing forward with science without having a proper conversation about what we should or should not do.”

“Should it be regulated as human because it has a significant proportion of human cells in it?” she continued. “Or should it be regulated just as an animal? Or something else? At what point are you taking something and using it for organs when it actually is starting to think and have logic?”

Stanford bioethicist Hank Greely, meanwhile, wrote that he found this particular study acceptable, but recognized another potential danger that could follow: the creation of animals with human reproductive cells.
 [...]

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  Amount of aluminum in infant vaccines ‘akin to a lottery,’ researchers say
Posted by: Stone - 04-24-2021, 05:47 AM - Forum: Against the Children - No Replies

Amount of aluminum in infant vaccines ‘akin to a lottery,’ researchers say
A new study led by Christopher Exley, Ph.D. found the aluminum content in infant vaccines is largely unmonitored and sometimes exceeds the amount listed on the product insert. Exley’s team also released a study showing a strong link between aluminum exposure and a type of Alzheimer’s disease.


April 23, 2021 (Children’s Health Defense) – The Defender recently wrote about Keele University’s decision to cut off the primary funding stream — charitable donations — for the world-famous UK-based aluminum research group, led by bioinorganic chemistry professor Christopher Exley, Ph.D.

As the direct result of Keele’s actions, the Exley lab will close Aug. 31, ending three decades of independent, cutting-edge research elucidating aluminum’s effects on health across the human lifespan.

Even in the face of their lab’s imminent closure, the Exley group continues to publish and add to its already impressive roster of approximately 200 publications.

The researchers’ two latest studies — one focusing on the largely unmonitored aluminum content of infant vaccines, the other on the strong association of aluminum in familial Alzheimer’s disease — underscore why independent research is so important, and so threatening to the status quo.


Aluminum in infant vaccines — ‘akin to a lottery’

One of the studies, published in the Journal of Trace Elements in Medicine and Biology, found the amount of aluminum an infant receives in a vaccine, far from being predictable or controlled, seems to be “akin to a lottery.”

The group analyzed the aluminum content of 13 infant vaccines manufactured by GlaxoSmithKline, Merck, Sanofi Pasteur and Pfizer. In 10 of 13 vaccines, the measured quantity of aluminum failed to match up to the amount of aluminum reported by manufacturers in patient information leaflets. Analysis across vaccines and vaccine lots revealed the following:

Six of the vaccines (about half), including Pfizer’s Prevnar 13, contained a statistically significant greater quantity of aluminum compared with manufacturer data.

Four of the vaccines contained significantly less.

For each single vaccine brand, the range of aluminum content “varied considerably.”

Neither the European Medicines Agency nor the U.S. Food and Drug Administration could confirm they independently or routinely measure the aluminum content of infant vaccines, instead indicating that they rely upon manufacturers’ (flawed) data.

These “not reassuring” findings suggest, according to the researchers, “that vaccine manufacturers have limited control over the aluminium content of their vaccines” and the aluminum content “of individual vaccines within vaccine lots vary significantly.”

Given aluminum’s known neurotoxicity, the researchers also emphasized we “cannot afford to be complacent about its injection into infants” — a position the Exley group has repeatedly emphasized, and which is shared by other experts.


Aluminum in familial Alzheimer’s disease

The second study, published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease Reports, builds on the Exley group’s extensive body of work linking aluminum to Alzheimer’s disease. The new study focuses on cases of familial Alzheimer’s disease, which is driven by predispositions that run in families.

The Mayo Clinic defines young- or early-onset Alzheimer’s as cases that affect individuals under age 65. The new Exley study examines human brain tissue from three Colombian familial donors with early-onset Alzheimer’s (ages 45, 57 and 60).

In all three cases, the researchers observed “neuronal cells loaded with aluminum” and noted the aluminum’s “unequivocal” co-location with neurofibrillary tangles across multiple brain regions. Neurofibrillary tangles (formed by misfolded tau protein inside the brain cells) are an important feature of and biomarker for Alzheimer’s.

The Exley group’s conclusion, which dovetails with their other studies of brain tissue and neurodegeneration — including findings showing extraordinarily high levels of aluminum in autism brain tissue — is that “these data support the intricate associations of aluminum in the neuropathology of fAD [familial Alzheimer’s disease].”


Young and old at risk

In recent years, the American insurance industry has reported a 200% increase in diagnosed dementia and Alzheimer’s among younger adults. UK researchers who looked at 20-year dementia trends in the U.S. and other western nations reported in a 2015 study in Surgical Neurology that dementias are starting “a decade earlier than they used to.”

Recognizing that roughly nine in 10 cases of young-onset Alzheimer’s have no genetic explanation, Exley has suggested in prior work that aluminum may act as a catalyst for early-onset Alzheimer’s in individuals “without concomitant predispositions, genetic or otherwise.” He proposes viewing Alzheimer’s as “an acute response to chronic intoxication by aluminum.”

As the Exley group points out in its new paper on infant vaccines, the aluminum adjuvants in the vaccines start the clock ticking on a lifetime body burden of aluminum.

Are we seeing some of the effects of this body burden in the younger adults in their 30s and 40s who now represent 15% of those diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and dementia?

The Exley group also asks, what are the implications for children’s longer-term health when babies receive significantly more aluminum in their vaccines than the amounts that manufacturers and regulators (without convincing data) proclaim “safe”?

If universities continue to choke off funding for vital research, it may become increasingly difficult to answer these all-important questions.

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  No Jab for Me
Posted by: Deus Vult - 04-23-2021, 11:54 AM - Forum: COVID Vaccines - No Replies

A comprehensive website with up to date information.
Very helpful as it has so much information in one place.
https://nojabforme.info/

no jab for me

Statements in this site are substantiated with facts that can be argued
in a court of law. Click on the hyperlinked sections to direct you to primary
sources such as CDC, WHO, FDA documents.

Anyone trying to take down this site will be named as codefendant in
Nuremberg 2.0 for being an accomplice to crimes against humanity. That
includes social media. Lawyers are standing by.

video at Rumble: Link

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  Out-flu-Enza
Posted by: SAguide - 04-23-2021, 09:56 AM - Forum: Pandemic 2020 [Secular] - No Replies

So, the flu went on vacation the past 15 months.
The annual flu is a virus.  Covid-19 is a virus too, but it was given a name and made famous.
For all our lives every year some people got the flu.  No one got tested.  You just had the flu, no big deal.
The "experts" last year named the flu, making it famous and calling it a virus without saying the flu is a virus.
Without isolation of Covid-19 all the PCR tests are inaccurate.  See: Isolate Truth Fund
Who had the flu, who had the "virus" and is there any difference?

[Image: cmrEUv7A?format=png&name=900x900]
Note: Figures reflect weekly totals of positive flu tests, from public and clinical laboratories.·Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

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  REPORT: Pfizer Vaccine Confirmed To Cause Neurodegenerative Diseases
Posted by: Stone - 04-23-2021, 07:54 AM - Forum: COVID Vaccines - No Replies

REPORT: Pfizer Vaccine Confirmed To Cause Neurodegenerative Diseases
A new report has determined the Pfizer vaccine can cause Alzheimer's and other conditions

National File [slightly adapted] |  April 22, 2021


In a shocking new report on the COVID-19 vaccines, it has been discovered that the Pfizer coronavirus vaccine has long term health effects not previously disclosed, including “ALS, Alzheimer’s, and other neurological degenerative diseases.”

“The current RNA based SARSCoV-2 vaccines were approved in the US using an emergency order without extensive long term safety testing,” the report declares. “In this paper the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine was evaluated for the potential to induce prion-based disease in vaccine recipients.” Prion-based diseases [such as mad cow disease - The Catacombs] are, according to the CDC, a form of neurodegenerative diseases, meaning that the Pfizer vaccine is likely to cause long term damage and negative health effects with regards to the brain.

[Image: Capture.png]

This is especially concerning since the Pfizer vaccine is an mRNA vaccine, an untested type of vaccine which creates new proteins and can actually integrate into the human genome, according to a report from the National Library of Medicine. In other words, degenerative brain conditions may appear at any time in your life after receiving the vaccine.

“The RNA sequence of the vaccine as well as the spike protein target interaction were analyzed for the potential to convert intracellular RNA binding proteins TAR DNA binding protein (TDP-43) and Fused in Sarcoma (FUS) into their pathologic prion conformations,” explains the report. TDP-43 is a protein known to cause dementia, ALS and even Alzheimer’s, according to Alzpedia. Similarly, the FUS protein is known to cause ALS and Hereditary Essential Tremors, according to the Human Genome Database.

The experiment done for the report was to determine whether or not these two harmful proteins embed themselves into our DNA, as an mRNA vaccine is expected to do. The report determined that “the vaccine RNA has specific sequences that may induce TDP-43 and FUS to fold into their pathologic prion confirmations,” meaning that both proteins have the potential to embed themselves into our DNA and cause harmful neurological diseases.

The report’s abstract summary concludes that “The enclosed finding as well as additional potential risks leads the author to believe that regulatory approval of the RNA based vaccines for SARS-CoV-2 was premature and that the vaccine may cause much more harm than benefit.” The report itself ends with this warning: “The vaccine could be a bioweapon and even more dangerous than the original infection.”

National File actually reached out to the CDC to inquire as to why the Pfizer vaccine is still being distributed despite these credible allegations. No response was received prior to publication.

[Emphasis and screenshot mine.]

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  Revolution and Counter-Revolution: The Fall and Rise of the Roman Rite
Posted by: Stone - 04-23-2021, 07:21 AM - Forum: Vatican II and the Fruits of Modernism - No Replies

Revolution and Counter-Revolution: The Fall and Rise of the Roman Rite
Written by Michael Davies, RIP
[All emphasis mine.]

The Remnant | February 2004

DURING THE FIRST session of the Second Vatican Council, in the debate on the Liturgy Constitution, Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani asked: “Are these Fathers planning a revolution?” The Cardinal was old and partly blind. He spoke from the heart about a subject that moved him deeply:
Quote:Are we seeking to stir up wonder, or perhaps scandal among the Christian people, by introducing changes in so venerable a rite that has been approved for so many centuries and is now so familiar? The rite of Holy Mass should not be treated as if it were a piece of cloth to be refashioned according to the whim of each generation.

So concerned was he at the revolutionary potential of the Constitution, and having no prepared text, due to his very poor sight, the elderly Cardinal exceeded the ten minute time limit for speeches. At a signal from Cardinal Alfrink, who was presiding at the session, a technician switched off the microphone and Cardinal Ottaviani stumbled back to his seat in humiliation.1 The Council Fathers clapped with glee. While men laugh they do not think, and, had these men not been laughing, at least some of them may have wondered whether, perhaps, the Cardinal might have had a point.

He did indeed. The answer to his question as to whether the Council Fathers were planning a revolution is that the majority of the 3,000 bishops present in Rome most were not, but that some of the influential periti, the experts who advised the bishops, most definitely were, and the Council’s Liturgy Constitution Sacrosanctum Concilium was the instrument by which it was to be achieved.

The schema, or draft document, of the Liturgy Constitution, which the bishops would use as the basis for their discussions, was primarily the work of Father Annibale Bugnini, Secretary to the Preparatory Commission for the Liturgy,2 so much so that it was known as "the Bugnini draft."3 Bugnini had long been in contact with the more radical members of the Liturgical Movement who had deviated from the sound principles set out by St. Pius X and Dom Prosper Guéranger. He had been present at a gathering of radical liturgists at Thieulin near Chartres in the late forties. Father Duployé, one of those present writes:
Quote:The Father [Bugnini] listened very attentively, without saying a word, for four days. During our return journey to Paris, as the train was passing along the Swiss Lake at Versailles, he said to me: "I admire what you are doing, but the greatest service I can render you is never to say a word in Rome about all that I have just heard."4

Bugnini was appointed Secretary to Pope Pius XII’s Commission for Liturgical Reform in 1948, and in 1957 as Professor of Liturgy in the Lateran University. In 1960, he was appointed to a position which enabled him to exert a decisive influence upon the history of the Church—Secretary to the Preparatory Commission for the Liturgy of the Second Vatican Council.

Within days of the Preparatory Commission endorsing his draft, Bugnini was dismissed from his chair at the Lateran University and from the secretaryship of the Conciliar Liturgical Commission which was to oversee the schema during the conciliar debates. The reasons which prompted Pope John to take this step have not been divulged, but they must have been of a most serious nature.

The dismissal of Father Bugnini was very much a case of locking the stable door after the horse had bolted. His allies on the Conciliar Liturgy Constitution, who had worked with him on preparing the schema, now had the task of securing its acceptance by the bishops without any substantial alterations. They did so with a degree of success that certainly exceeded their wildest expectations. It received the almost unanimous approval of the Council Fathers on 7 December 1962.

In his book, The Reform of the Roman Liturgy, Mgr. Klaus Gamber writes:
Quote:“One statement we can make with certainty is that the new Ordo of the Mass that has now emerged would not have been endorsed by the majority of the Council Fathers.”5

Why, then, did these bishops endorse a document that was a blueprint for revolution? The answer is that they saw it as a blueprint for renewal. They were reassured by clauses which gave the impression that there was no possibility of any radical liturgical reform. Article 4 states that:
Quote:"This most sacred Council declares that holy Church holds all lawfully acknowledged rites to be of equal authority and dignity: that she wishes to preserve them in the future and to foster them in every way."

The Latin language was to be preserved in the Latin rites (Article 36), and steps were to be taken to ensure that the faithful could sing or say together in Latin those parts of the Mass that pertain to them (Article 54). The treasury of sacred music was to be preserved and fostered with great care (Article 114), and Gregorian chant was to be given pride of place in liturgical services (Article 116), and, most important of all, there were to be no innovations unless the good of the Church genuinely and certainly required them, and care was to be taken that any new forms adopted should grow in some way organically from forms already existing (Article 23).

It is an instructive exercise to go, step by step, through the changes which have been made in the Mass, beginning with the abolition of the Judica me and ending with the abolition of the Last Gospel, or even the Prayers for Russia, and to consider carefully why the good of the Church genuinely and certainly required that each particular change must be made. Has the good of the Church really been enhanced because the faithful have been forbidden to kneel at the Incarnatus est during the Creed? Did the good of the Church genuinely, certainly, require that, following the example of Martin Luther, the doctrinally rich Offertory prayers should be abolished?

Luther condemned the offertory as an abomination that stinks of oblation and should therefore be cast aside. Has any Catholic anywhere in the world become more fervent in his faith as a result of its absence in the 1970 Missal? In my opinion not one change made to the Ordinary of the Classic Mass of the Roman rite was genuinely and certainly required for the good of the Church. I would challenge anyone to cite an example which conforms to these criteria. [Read here Archbishop Lefebvre's Comparison of the New Mass and the 'Mass' of Luther. - The Catacombs]

In addition to these superficially reassuring clauses, the Constitution contained others which opened the way to radical or even revolutionary change. These were "time bombs" inserted into the text, ambiguous passages which the liberal periti or experts intended to use after the Council when, as they were sure would be the case, they gained control of the Commission established to interpret and implement the Constitution. Is this simply a wild accusation made by a layman with conspiracy mania? By no means. In his book A Crown of Thorns, Cardinal John Heenan of Westminster wrote:

The subject most fully debated was liturgical reform. It might be more accurate to say that the bishops were under the impression that the liturgy had been fully discussed. In retrospect it is clear that they were given the opportunity of discussing only general principles. Subsequent changes were more radical than those intended by Pope John and the bishops who passed the decree on the liturgy. His sermon at the end of the first session shows that Pope John did not suspect what was being planned by the liturgical experts.6

What could be clearer than this? One of the most active and erudite Council Fathers stated that the liturgical experts who drafted the Constitution phrased it in such a way that they could use it after the Council in a manner not foreseen by the Pope and the Bishops. To put it plainly, the Cardinal states that there was a conspiracy. This was evident even to an American Protestant Observer, Robert McAfee Brown, who remarked:
Quote:“The Council documents themselves often implied more in the way of change than the Council Fathers were necessarily aware of when they voted.”7

He made particular mention of the Liturgy Constitution in this respect:
Quote:The Constitution opens many doors that can later be pushed even wider, and does bind the Church to a new liturgical rigidity.”8

The column space available in this issue [...] will enable me to discuss only a few of the time bombs that would destroy the Roman Rite

Article 4 of the Constitution has already been cited stating that all lawfully acknowledged rites must be preserved in the future and fostered in every way. But these reassuring words are qualified by the statement that:
Quote:"Where necessary the rites be carefully and thoroughly revised in the light of sound tradition, and that they be given new vigor to meet the circumstances of modern times."

No explanation is given as to how it is possible both to preserve and foster these rites and at the same time to revise them to meet certain unspecified circumstances and certain unspecified needs of modern times. Nor is it explained how such a revision could be carried out in the light of sound tradition when it had been the sound and invariable tradition of the Roman rite never to undertake any drastic revision of its rites, a tradition of well over 1,000 years standing which had been breached only during the Protestant Reformation, when every heretical sect devised new rites to correspond with its heretical teachings. In their defense of Pope Leo XIII’s Bull Apostolicae Curae, the Catholic Bishops of the Province of Westminster in England insisted that:
Quote:In adhering rigidly to the rite handed down to us we can always feel secure . . . And this sound method is that which the Catholic Church has always followed... to subtract prayers and ceremonies in previous use, and even to remodel the existing rites in the most drastic manner, is a proposition for which we know of no historical foundation, and which appears to us absolutely incredible. 9

It is intrinsic to the nature of time to become more modern with the passing of each second, and if the Church had always adapted the liturgy to keep up with the constant succession of modern times and new circumstances there would never have been liturgical stability. When do times become modern? What are the criteria by which modernity is assessed? When does one modernity cease and another modernity come into being? The complete fallacy of the adaptation-to-modernity thesis was certainly not lost upon some of the Council Fathers. Bishop (later Cardinal) Dino Staffa pointed out the theological consequences of an "adapted liturgy" on 24 October 1962. He told 2,337 assembled Fathers:
Quote:It is said that the Sacred Liturgy must be adapted to times and circumstances which have changed. Here also we ought to look at the consequences. For customs, even the very face of society, change fast and will change even faster. What seems agreeable to the wishes of the multitude today will appear incongruous after thirty or fifty years. We must conclude then that after thirty or fifty years all, or almost all of the liturgy would have to be changed again. This seems to be logical according to the premises, this seems logical to me, but hardly fitting (decorum) for the Sacred Liturgy, hardly useful for the dignity of the Church, hardly safe for the integrity and unity of the faith, hardly favoring the unity of discipline... Are we of the Latin Church going to break the admirable liturgical unity and divide into nations, regions, even provinces?10

The answer, of course, is that this is precisely what the Latin Church was going to do and did; with the consequences for the integrity and unity both of faith and discipline which Bishop Staffa had foreseen.

Article 14 states that the active participation of the faithful is the primary criterion to be observed in the celebration of Mass. This has resulted in the congregation (rather than the divine Victim) becoming the focus of attention. It is now the coming together of the community which matters most, not the reason they come together; and this is in harmony with the most obvious tendency within the post-conciliar Church—to replace the cult of God with the cult of man. Cardinal Ratzinger remarked with great perceptiveness in 1997:
Quote:I am convinced that the crisis in the Church that we are experiencing is to a large extent due to the disintegration of the liturgy...when the community of faith, the worldwide unity of the Church and her history, and the mystery of the living Christ are no longer visible in the liturgy, where else, then, is the Church to become visible in her spiritual essence? Then the community is celebrating only itself, an activity that is utterly fruitless.”11

Once active participation of the congregation is accepted as the prime consideration in the celebration of Mass, there can be no restraint upon the self-appointed experts intent upon its total desacralisation. Despite the requirement in Article 36 that the Latin language was to be preserved in the Latin rites and Gregorian chant was to be given pride of place in liturgical services, it was argued that Latin and plainchant were obstacles to active participation. Both, then, had almost completely vanished within a few years of the conclusion of the Council. Commenting with the benefit of hindsight in 1973, Archbishop R. J. Dwyer of Portland, Oregon, remarked sadly:
Quote:Who dreamed on that day that within a few years, far less than a decade, the Latin past of the Church would be all but expunged, that it would be reduced to a memory fading into the middle distance? The thought of it would have horrified us, but it seemed so far beyond the realm of the possible as to be ridiculous. So we laughed it off.12

While the Latin language remained the norm there could, in fact, be no revolution. In his Liturgical Institutes, Dom Guéranger makes clear that the Latin language had always been a principal target of those he termed “liturgical-heretics”. He writes:
Quote:Hatred for the Latin language is inborn in the heart of all the enemies of Rome. They recognize it as the bond of Catholics throughout the universe, as the arsenal of orthodoxy against all the subtleties of the sectarian spirit... We must admit it is a master blow of Protestantism to have declared war on the sacred language. If it should ever succeed in destroying it, it would be well on the way to victory.

Prophetic words indeed!

It is important to stress here that at no time during the reform have the wishes of the laity ever been taken into consideration. When, as early as March 1964, members of the laity in England were making it quite clear that they neither liked nor wanted the liturgical changes being imposed upon them, one of England's most fanatical proponents of liturgical innovation, Dom Gregory Murray, OSB, put them in their place in the clearest possible terms:
Quote:"The plea that the laity as a body do not want liturgical change, whether in rite or in language, is, I submit, quite beside the point...It is not a question of what people want; it is a question of what is good for them.”13

The self-appointed liturgical experts treat not only the laity with complete contempt, but also the parish clergy whose bishops insist that they submit to the diktat of these experts. Monsignor Richard J. Schuler, an experienced parish priest in St. Paul, Minnesota, explained the predicament of the parish clergy very clearly in an article written in 1978 in which he made the very poignant comment that all that the experts require parish priests and the faithful to do is to raise the money to pay for their own destruction. He laments the fact that:
Quote:Then came the post-conciliar interpreters and implementers who invented the "Spirit of the Council." They introduced practices never dreamed of by the Council Fathers; they did away with Catholic traditions and customs never intended to be disturbed; they changed for the sake of change; they upset the sheep and terrified the shepherds. The parish priest, who is for most Catholics the shepherd to whom they look for help along the path to salvation, fell upon hard times after the pastoral council. He is the pastor, but he found himself superseded by commissions, committees, experts, consultants, coordinators, facilitators, and bureaucrats of every description. A mere parish priest can no longer qualify. He is told that if he was educated prior to 1963, then he is ignorant of needed professional knowledge, he must be updated, retread and indoctrinated by attending meetings, seminars, workshops, retreats, conferences and other brainwashing sessions. But down deep, he really knows that what he is needed for is only to collect the money to support the ever-growing bureaucracy that every diocese has sprouted to "serve the "pastoral needs" of the people. While the parishes struggle, the taxation imposed on them all but crushes them. The anomaly of having to pay for one's own destruction becomes the plight of a pastor and his sheep who struggle to adapt to the "freedom" and the options given by the council.

The requirement of Article 14 that active participation by all the people must take priority in every celebration of Mass has resulted in what can only be described as a “dumbing down” of the liturgy, and it must be dumbed down because the experts consider that, as a body, the laity are dumb, incapable of relating to the ethereal beauty of plainchant or the magnificent ceremonial of a solemn Mass. Dietrich von Hildebrand has correctly defined the issue at stake:
Quote:The basic error of most of the innovators is to imagine that the new liturgy brings the holy sacrifice of the Mass nearer to the faithful; that, shorn of its old rituals, the Mass now enters into the substance of our lives. For the question is whether we better meet Christ in the Mass by soaring up to Him, or by dragging Him down into our own pedestrian, workaday world. The innovators would replace holy intimacy with Christ by an unbecoming familiarity. The new liturgy actually threatens to frustrate the confrontation with Christ, for it discourages reverence in the face of mystery, precludes awe, and all but extinguishes a sense of sacredness. What really matters, surely, is not whether the faithful feel at home at Mass, but whether they are drawn out of their ordinary lives into the world of Christ—whether their attitude is the response of ultimate reverence: whether they are imbued with the reality of Christ.14

Professor von Hildebrand denounced the contempt of liturgists for the ordinary faithful in very severe terms:
Quote:They seem to be unaware of the elementary importance of sacredness in religion. Thus, they dull the sense of the sacred and thereby undermine true religion. Their "democratic" approach makes them overlook the fact that in all men who have a longing for God there is also a longing for the sacred and a sense of difference between the sacred and the profane. The worker or peasant has this sense as much as any intellectual. If he is a Catholic, he will desire to find a sacred atmosphere in the church, and this remains true whether the world is urban, industrial or not.... Many priests believe that replacing the sacred atmosphere that reigns, for example, in the marvelous churches of the Middle Ages or the baroque epoch, and in which the Latin Mass was celebrated, with a profane, functionalist, neutral, humdrum atmosphere will enable the Church to encounter the simple man in charity. But this is a fundamental error. It will not fulfill his deepest longing; it will merely offer him stones for bread. Instead of combating the irreverence so widespread today these priests are actually helping to propagate this irreverence.15

Article 21 states that elements which are subject to change "not only may but ought to be changed with the passing of time if features have by chance crept in which are less harmonious with the intimate nature of the liturgy, or if existing elements have grown less functional." These norms are so vague that the scope for interpreting them is virtually limitless. No indication is given of which aspects of the liturgy are referred to here; no indication is given of the meaning of "less functional" (how much less is "less"?), or whether "functional" refers to the original function or a new one which may have been acquired. Under the terms of Article 21, the Lavabo, the washing of the priest’s hands, could be abolished as its original purpose was to cleanse them after he had received the gifts of the people in the offertory procession, but it now has a beautiful symbolic purpose, symbolising the cleansing of the soul of the priest who is about to offer sacrifice in the person of Christ and to take the Body of Christ into his very hands. The entire liturgical tradition of the Roman rite contradicts Article 21. "
What we may call the 'archaisms' of the Missal," writes Dom Cabrol, a "father" of the liturgical movement, "are the expressions of the faith of our fathers which it is our duty to watch over and hand on to posterity."16

Article 21, together with such Articles as 1, 23, 50, 62, and 88, provides a mandate for the supreme goal of the liturgical revolutionaries—that of a permanently evolving liturgy. In September 1968 the bulletin of the Archbishopric of Paris, Présence et Dialogue, called for a permanent revolution in these words: "It is no longer possible, in a period when the world is developing so rapidly, to consider rites as definitively fixed once and for all. They need to be regularly revised." Once the logic of Article 21 is accepted there can be no alternative to a permanently evolving liturgy.

Writing in Concilium in 1969, Fr. H. Rennings, Dean of Studies of the Liturgical Institute of Trier, stated:
Quote:When the Constitution states that one of the aims is "to adapt more suitably to the needs of our own times those institutions which are subject to change" (Art. 1; see also Arts. 21, 23, 62, 88) it clearly expresses the dynamic elements in the Council's idea of the liturgy. The "needs of our time" can always be better understood and therefore demand other solutions; the needs of the next generation can again lead to other consequences for the way worship should operate and be fitted into the overall activity of the Church. The basic principle of the Constitution may be summarized as applying the principle of a Church which is constantly in a state of reform (ecclesia semper reformanda.) to the liturgy which is always in the state of reform (Liturgia semper reformanda). 17

This could hardly be more explicit. Father Joseph Gelineau was described by Archbishop Bugnini as one of the "great masters of the international liturgical world".18 In his book Demain la liturgie, he informs us that:
Quote:It would be false to identify this liturgical renewal with the reform of rites decided on by Vatican II. This reform goes back much further and goes forward far beyond the conciliar prescriptions (elle va bien au-del). The liturgy is a permanent workshop (la liturgie est un chantier permanent).19

This concept of a permanently evolving liturgy—liturgy as a permanent workshop—is of crucial importance. St. Pius V's ideal of liturgical uniformity within the Roman rite has now been cast aside to be replaced by one of pluriformity, in which the liturgy must be kept in a state of constant flux, resulting inevitably in what Cardinal Ratzinger described with perfect accuracy as “the disintegration of the liturgy.” In 2002 the Bishops Conference of the United States decreed that the faithful must stand for the reception of Holy Communion. This decision is not binding on individual bishops, but even a conservative such as Charles Chaput of Denver kow-towed to the conference and informed his flock that “This will be new for many of the faithful, because the formal act of reverence was not widely promoted in the past.” What utter nonsense! Standing has never been considered an act of reverence within the Roman Rite. Does the Archbishop truly imagine that the laity are so dumb that they do not know this? He continues:
Quote:While the act of reverence will be new for some, it may be "different" for others. In the past, we may have made a sign of the cross, a profound bow (one from the waist), genuflected or simply knelt as our act of adoration. The Church now asks us to submit our personal preference to her wisdom.20

I repeat, standing is not an act of reverence, it has never been an act of reverence, and its imposition has nothing to do with the wisdom of the Church—it is antithetical to that wisdom. It is simply the latest step in the imposition of a permanently evolving liturgy by liturgical commissars, destitute of what Von Hildebrand describes as a sensus Catholicus, a true Catholic instinct.

Article 34 states that the reformed liturgy must be "distinguished by a noble simplicity." There is, needless to say, no attempt to explain precisely what constitutes "a noble simplicity". It must be “short”—how short? It must be "unencumbered by useless repetitions," without explaining when a repetition becomes useless. Does saying Kyrie eleison six times and Christe eleison three times constitute useless repetition?

Article 38 constitutes a time-bomb with a capacity for destruction almost equivalent to that of the principle of permanent liturgical evolution:
Quote:"Provided that the substantial unity of the Roman rite is maintained, the revision of liturgical books should allow for legitimate variations and adaptations to different groups, regions, and peoples, especially in mission lands."

The mention of mission lands here is highly significant as most Fathers would presume that this was where these adaptations would take place. However, the carefully worded text does not say "only" but "especially" in mission lands. Article 38 does indeed state that "the substantial unity of the Roman rite" is to be maintained—but what "substantial unity" means is not indicated. It would be for the Consilium to decide, and for the members of the Consilium (like Humpty Dumpty) words mean whatever they want them to mean.21 Once this principle of adaptation has been accepted there is no part of the Mass which can be considered exempt from change.

Without giving the least idea of what is meant by "legitimate variations and adaptations," the Constitution goes on in Article 40 to state that in "some places and circumstances, however, an even more radical adaptation of the liturgy is needed." Without explaining what is meant by a "radical adaptation" the need for "an even more radical adaptation" is postulated! More radical than what? Once this bomb has exploded the devastation it unleashes cannot be controlled. The Council Fathers, like Count Frankenstein, had given life to a creature which had a will of its own and over which they had no power.

The Liturgy Constitution contained no more than general guidelines, and to achieve total victory, Bugnini and his cohorts needed to obtain control of the post-conciliar commission established to interpret and implement it. Cardinal Heenan, of Westminster, England, had warned the bishops of the danger if the Council periti were given the power to interpret the Council to the world. "God forbid that this should happen!" he exclaimed, but happen it did.22 The members of these commissions were "chosen with the Pope's approval, for the most part, from the ranks of the Council periti.”23 The initial membership of the Commission, known as the Consilium, consisted mainly of members of the Commission that had drafted the Constitution. Father Bugnini was appointed to the position of secretary on 29 February 1964. What prompted Pope Paul VI to appoint Bugnini to this crucially important position after he had been prevented by Pope John XXIII from becoming Secretary of the Conciliar Commission is probably something that we shall never know. The weapon that he had forged for the destruction of the Roman Rite was now firmly within his grasp.

In May 1969 the Consilium was incorporated into the Sacred Congregation for Divine Worship and Bugnini was appointed secretary, becoming more powerful than ever. It is no exaggeration to claim that the Consilium, in other words Father Bugnini, had taken over the Sacred Congregation for Divine Worship. He was now in the most influential position possible to consolidate and extend the revolution behind which he had been the moving spirit and principle of continuity. Nominal heads of commissions, congregations, and the Consilium came and went—Cardinal Lercaro, Cardinal Gut, Cardinal Tabera, Cardinal Knox—but Father Bugnini remained. He attributed this to the Divine will:
Quote:The Lord willed that from those early years a whole series of providential circumstances should thrust me fully, and indeed in a privileged way, in medias res, and that I should remain there in charge of the secretariat.”24

Father Bugnini was rewarded for his part in the reform with an Archbishop's mitre. In 1975, at the very moment when his power had reached its zenith, he was summarily dismissed to the dismay of liberal Catholics throughout the world. Not only was he dismissed, but his entire Congregation was dissolved and merged with the Congregation for the Sacraments. Bugnini himself was exiled to Iran. Once again it was a question of locking the stable door after the horse had bolted. In 1974 he had boasted:
Quote:"The liturgical reform is a major conquest of the Catholic Church.”25

It is indeed, and Msgr. Gamber sums up the true effect of this conquest in one devastating sentence:
Quote:At this critical juncture, the traditional Roman rite, more than one thousand years old, has been destroyed.”26

Is he exaggerating? Not at all. His claim is endorsed from the opposite end of the liturgical spectrum by that “great master of the international liturgical world”, Father Joseph Gelineau, who remarks with commendable honesty and no sign of regret:
Quote:Let those who like myself have known and sung a Latin-Gregorian High Mass remember it if they can. Let them compare it with the Mass that we now have. Not only the words, the melodies, and some of the gestures are different. To tell the truth it is a different liturgy of the Mass. This needs to be said without ambiguity: the Roman Rite as we knew it no longer exists (le rite romain tel que nous l'avons connu n'existe plus). It has been destroyed (il est détruit).27

The Constitution required that all lawfully acknowledged rites were to be “preserved in the future and fostered in every way." How you preserve and foster something by destroying it is something that even Archbishop Bugnini might have found difficult to explain.

In his Encyclical Letter Ecclesia De Eucharistia of 17 April 2003, Pope John Paul II has provided an admirable explanation of the sacrificial nature of the Mass which is phrased in terms that are reminiscent of the teaching of the Council of Trent. After his excellent doctrinal exposition, the Pope insists, as he has done on previous occasions, that Vatican II has been followed by a liturgical renewal rather than a revolution, good fruits rather than bad fruits.

The Magisterium's commitment to proclaiming the Eucharistic mystery has been matched by interior growth within the Christian community. Certainly the liturgical reform inaugurated by the Council has greatly contributed to a more conscious, active and fruitful participation in the Holy Sacrifice of the Altar on the part of the faithful.

With all due respect to the Holy Father, one must insist that this is simply not true. If there has indeed been an “interior growth within the Christian community” it is certainly not reflected in the catastrophic collapse of Catholic life throughout First World countries which can be documented beyond any possible dispute.

In what seems to be a complete volte face, the Holy Father goes on to provide a list of liturgical deviations and abuses concerning which traditional Catholics have been protesting since the first changes were imposed upon the faithful. These abuses take place, he tells us, alongside the lights, but he nowhere tells us where these lights are shining:
Quote:Unfortunately, alongside these lights, there are also shadows. In some places the practice of Eucharistic adoration has been almost completely abandoned. In various parts of the Church abuses have occurred, leading to confusion with regard to sound faith and Catholic doctrine concerning this wonderful sacrament. At times one encounters an extremely reductive understanding of the Eucharistic mystery. Stripped of its sacrificial meaning, it is celebrated as if it were simply a fraternal banquet. Furthermore, the necessity of the ministerial priesthood, grounded in apostolic succession, is at times obscured and the sacramental nature of the Eucharist is reduced to its mere effectiveness as a form of proclamation. This has led here and there to ecumenical initiatives which, albeit well-intentioned, indulge in Eucharistic practices contrary to the discipline by which the Church expresses her faith. How can we not express profound grief at all this? The Eucharist is too great a gift to tolerate ambiguity and depreciation. It is my hope that the present Encyclical Letter will effectively help to banish the dark clouds of unacceptable doctrine and practice, so that the Eucharist will continue to shine forth in all its radiant mystery.

These deplorable abuses did not exist before the Vatican II reform, and it can hardly be denied that they are indeed its true fruits. We must indeed pray that this encyclical will help “to banish the dark clouds of unacceptable doctrine and practice,” but, alas, these unacceptable practices have now become so ingrained in parish life that, short of a miracle, they will not be eradicated. The well-entrenched liturgical bureaucracy throughout the First World completely ignores any admonitions from Rome which conflict with its agenda, and I am certain that it will continue to do so.

Mgr. Gamber describes the present state of the liturgy in scathing but realistic terms:
Quote:The liturgical reform, welcomed with so much idealism and hope by many priests and lay people alike has turned out to be a liturgical destruction of startling proportions—a débâcle worsening with each passing year. Instead of the hoped-for renewal of the Church and of Catholic life, we are now witnessing a dismantling of the traditional values and piety on which our faith rests. Instead of the fruitful renewal of the liturgy, what we see is a destruction of the forms of the Mass which had developed organically during the course of many centuries.28

The Holy Father is evidently hoping for a reform of the reform, but, alas, this will not take place. It is, I fear, the mother of all lost causes. This is why we agree fully with Mgr. Gamber when he writes:
Quote:In the future the traditional rite of Mass must be retained in the Roman Catholic Church ... as the primary liturgical form for the celebration of Mass. It must become once more the norm of our faith and the symbol of Catholic unity throughout the world, a rock of stability in a period of upheaval and never-ending change.29

In the early days, when traditional Catholics worked for the restoration of the Traditional Mass, this objective was certainly considered to be the mother of all lost causes, but now the traditional Mass movement is spreading throughout the world. The time will certainly come when Rome implements the unanimous conclusion of the 1986 Commission of Cardinals that every priest of the Roman Rite, when celebrating in Latin, is entitled to choose between the Missals of 1962 and 1970. 

[This was done in the 2007 Summorum Pontificum of then Pope Benedict XVI. But as we know, one cannot serve two masters. The traditional liturgy must be restored, not retained, as Msgr. Gamber and Mr. Davies advocate.  The Conciliar Popes who have granted 'Indults' for the Tridentine Latin Mass - first Pope John Paul II in 1984 and then Pope Benedict in 2007 - all stipulate that the venerable Tridentine Mass can be said only if the New Mass is accepted. See here Archbishop Lefebvre's words of warning on the granting of these Indult Masses. - The Catacombs]

In seeking to extend the restoration of tradition, rather than reform the reform, traditionalist Catholics are not being negative but realistic. We shall not criticise those who wish to reform the reform, but we will not devote our time, our money, and our energy to what is a hopeless cause. In working for the restoration of tradition we are rendering the Church a service. Dietrich von Hildebrand rightly termed the post-conciliar Church “the devastated vineyard”. In opposition to this devastation we are engaged in a fruitful renewal.

The essence of a true liturgical reform is that it contains no drastic revision of the liturgical traditions that have been handed down. Its most evident characteristic is fidelity to these traditions. This means that the liturgical reform that followed the Second Vatican Council should, like that of the Protestant Reformation, be termed a revolution. It is not necessary for the Catholic position to be expressly contradicted for a rite to become suspect; the suppression of prayers which had given liturgical expression to the doctrine behind the rite is more than sufficient to give cause for concern. The suppression in the Novus Ordo Missae, the New Mass, of so many prayers from the traditional Mass is a cause not simply for concern but for scandal. In almost every case they are the same prayers suppressed by Luther and by Thomas Cranmer. The suppression of these prayers which had given liturgical expression to the doctrine behind Traditional Mass is more than sufficient to give cause for concern to all those faithful who, like the martyrs of England and Wales, possess a true sensus Catholicus.

The fact that the Mass of Pope Paul VI as it is celebrated in so many parishes today constitutes a breach with authentic liturgical development has been confirmed by Cardinal Ratzinger:
Quote:A. Jungmann, one of the truly great liturgists of our time, defined the liturgy of his day, such as it could be understood in the light of historical research, as a “liturgy which is the fruit of development”...What happened after the Council was something else entirely: in the place of the liturgy as the fruit of development came fabricated liturgy. We abandoned the organic, living process of growth and development over centuries, and replaced it, as in a manufacturing process, with a fabrication, a banal on-the-spot product.32

We are engaged in a war with the same objectives as the martyrs of Elizabethan England, and when we bear in mind the sacrifices that they made because the Mass truly mattered to them, we should be prepared to make the sacrifices needed to restore the Mass of St. Pius, V, sacrifices involving time, money, travel, bearing the disapproval or even ridicule of fellow Catholics, clerical and lay. If this means that we are rebels then I for one am happy to be one. Those of us who fight for our Latin liturgical heritage may be termed reactionary, ignorant, or even schismatic, but in reality we are in the direct tradition of the Maccabees of the Old Testament. The commentary upon the Mass for the twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost in the St. Andrew Daily Missal states:

One of the most outstanding lessons which may be drawn from the books of Maccabees...is the reverence due to the things of God. What is generally called the rebellion of the Maccabees was in reality a magnificent example of fidelity to God, to his law, and to the covenants and promises that he had made to his people These were threatened with oblivion and it was to uphold them that the Maccabees rebelled.

The Mass of St Pius V is the epitomization of the faith of our fathers, it is the liturgy celebrated in secret by the martyr priests of England and Wales, it is the liturgy that was celebrated at the Mass rocks of Ireland, it is the liturgy celebrated by the North American martyrs who died deaths that are too horrific to describe, it is the Mass described by the Father Frederick Faber, (1814-1863), Superior of the London Oratory, as “the most beautiful thing this side of heaven”.




Footnotes

1M. Davies, Pope John’s Council (PJC) (Angelus Press, 1977), p. 93 www.angeluspress.org

2Biographical details of Archbishop Bugnini are provided in Notitiae, No 70, February 1972, pp. 33-34.

3C. Falconi, Pope John and his Council (London, 1964), p. 244.

4Didier Bonneterre, The Liturgical Movement (Angelus Press, 2002), p. 52.

5K. Gamber, The Reform of the Roman Liturgy (RRL), (Harrison, N.Y., 1993), p. 61.

6J. Heenan, A Crown of Thorns (London, 1974), p. 367.

7R. McAfee Brown, The Ecumenical Revolution (New York, 1969), p. 210.

8R. McAfee Brown, Observer in Rome (London, 1964), p. 226.

9A Vindication of the Bull "Apostolicae Curae" (London, 1898), pp. 42-3.

10 R. Kaiser, Inside the Council (London, 1963), p. 30.

11Joseph Ratzinger, Milestones (Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 1998), pp. 148-149.

12Twin Circle, 26 October 1973.

13The Tablet, 14 March 1964, p. 303.

14Triumph, October 1966.

15D. von Hildebrand, Trojan Horse in the City of God (Franciscan Herald Press, Chicago, 1969), p. 135.

16Introduction to the Cabrol edition of The Roman Missal.

17Concilium, February 1971, p. 64.

18Annibale Bugnini, The Reform of the Liturgy 1948-1975 (The Liturgical Press, Collegeville, Minnesota, 1990), p. 221.

19J. Gelineau, Demain la liturgie (Paris, 1976), pp. 9-10.

20Denver Catholic Register, 5 February 2003.

21“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.” Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, Chapter VI.

22RFT, p. 210.

23The Tablet, 22 January 1966, p. 114.

024Bugnini, p. xxiii..

25Notitiae, No 92, April 1974, p. 126.

26K. Gamber, The Reform of the Roman Liturgy (RRL), ( Harrison, N.Y.,1993), p. , p. 99.

27J. Gelineau, Demain la liturgie (Paris, 1976), pp. 9-10.

28Gamber, p. 9.

29Gamber, p. 114.

32Preface to the French edition of The Reform of the Roman Liturgy by Msgr. Klaus Gamber.

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  Audiobook: The Explanation of the Apocalypse - by the Venerable Bede
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The Explanation of the Apocalypse 
by the Venerable Bede

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  Catholic Patriot: Andreas Hofer
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Andreas Hofer

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A patriot and soldier, born at St. Leonhard in Passeyrthale, Tyrol, 22 Nov., 1767; executed at Mantua, 20 Feb., 1810. His father was known as the "Sandwirth" (i.e., landlord of the inn on the sandy spit of land formed by the Passeyr. The inn had been in the family for over one hundred years). Hofer's education was very limited. As a youth, he was engaged in the wine and horse trade, but he went farther afield, learned to know men of every class, and even acquired a knowledge of Italian that stood him in good stead later. After his marriage with Anna Ladurner, he took over his father's business, which, however, did not flourish in his hands. Gifted, though not a genius, a dashing but upright young man, loyal to his God and his sovereign, he made many friends by his straightforward character; his stately figure and flowing beard contributing in no small degree to his attractiveness. When the Tyrol was handed over to Bavaria at the Peace of Presburg, the "Sandwirth" was among the delegates who escorted the departing Archduke John. Thenceforth he attended quietly to his own affairs until, in 1806, he was called to Vienna with others, and was informed of the proposed uprising in the Tyrol. At the outset of the rebellion he was by no means its chief, but acquired fame as a leader mainly by his capture of a Bavarian detachment in the marsh of Sterzing. Hofer was not engaged in the first capture of Innsbruck, being then an officer on the southern frontier with the title of "Imperial Royal Commandant". When the French broke victoriously into the Tyrol and occupied Innsbruck, he issued a general summons to the people, which roused many patriots and drew them to his standard. The fact that the enemy, underestimating the strength of the popular party, left only a small garrison of troops, favoured their cause. After various skirmishes Hofer's men broke into Innsbruck on 30 May. The real battle came off at Berg Isel. The "Sandwirth" took no part in the conflict; nevertheless he directed it with skill and success.

The Tyrol was now free from invasion for two months; indeed, a few bands of insurgents ventured into Bavarian and Italian territory. Under these conditions Hofer thought he could return to his home and leave the government in the hands of the Intendant Hormayr, who had been sent from Vienna. But when, in spite of positive assurances from the emperor, the Tyrol was abandoned at the armistice of Znaim, and Marshal Lefebvre advanced to subdue the country, the people determined to risk their lives for faith and freedom. Again the written order of the "Sandwirth" flew round the valleys. Haspinger and Speckbacher organized the people, and on 13 and 14 August occurred the second battle of Berg Isel. Haspinger decided the result of the day; but Hofer stood for some time in the very heat of the battle, and by bis energetic efforts induced the already weakening ranks to renew their efforts. Henceforth, the Intendant having fled, Hofer took the government into his own hands, moved into the Hofburg, and ruled his admiring countrymen in a patriarchal manner. Francis II bestowed on him a golden medal, but this proved fatal to Hofer, who was thereby strengthened in his delusion that the emperor would never abandon his faithful Tyrolese. Thus it happened that he even disregarded a letter from the Archduke John, as though it were a Bavarian or French proclamation, and on 1 November lost the third battle of Berg Isel against a superior force of the enemy.

The renewed success of the French general and the Bavarian crown prince (afterwards Ludwig I) now determined Hofer to surrender; trusting however, to his friends and to false rumours, he changed his mind and decided to fight to the last. The mighty columns of the allies soon crushed all resistance, and the leaders of the peasant army saw that nothing remained but flight; Hofer alone remained and went into hiding. A covetous countryman, greedy for the reward offered for his capture, betrayed him. He was surprised in his hiding place, dragged to Mantua amid insults and outrages, and haled before a court. Without awaiting its sentence a peremptory order from Napoleon ordered him to be shot forthwith. He took his death-sentence with Christian calmness, and died with the courage of a hero. The prophecy he uttered in the presence of his confessor shortly before he died: "The Tyrol will be Austrian again" was fulfilled three years later. His remains were disinterred in 1823 and laid to rest in the court chapel at Innsbruck, where his life-size statue now stands. The emperor ennobled the Hofer family. The youth of Germany has been inspired by his heroic figure, and German poets like Mosen, Schenkendorf, Immermann, etc. have sung of his deeds and sufferings. Even the French pay a wondering homage to his sincere piety, his self-sacrificing patriotism, and his noble sense of honour (Denis in "Hist. gén."; Corréard in "Précis d'histoire moderne": a text-book for the pupils of the military school of St. Cyr).


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  Father Pro of Mexico
Posted by: Stone - 04-22-2021, 08:36 AM - Forum: Uncompromising Fighters for the Faith - Replies (1)

The Angelus - July 1981

Father Pro of Mexico
by Mary E. Gentges

Part I of II


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On the evening of the men's retreat, I stepped into the street about 9:30, as red as a tomato from the lecture I had just delivered. I spotted two strangers awaiting me on the street corner. Detectives! "This time, my boy," I said to myself, "good-bye to your skin!" Then, remembering the old adage that he who takes the first move also takes the second, I sauntered up to them and asked for a match.

"You can get them in the shop!" they snapped.

With an insulted air I walked away. They followed. I turned a corner. So did they. Surely it wasn't coincidence! I hailed a taxi. They caught one too. "The jig's up this time, "I thought.

Luckily for me my driver was a Catholic and understood the fix I was in. "Look, son," I told him, "slow down at the next corner while I jump out. Then you keep going." I stuffed my cap in my pocket, opened my jacket so my white shirt would show up . . . and jumped.

I fell hard, but sprang to my feet and stood leaning against a tree. My bloodhounds passed a second later. They saw me all right, but it never dawned on them who I was. I left the place quickly, thinking as I limped homeward, "Clever, my boy, you are free until the next time."

+ + +

The letter1 on which these lines are based was written by a Jesuit priest in Mexico in 1927. His name was Michael Pro, and he is sometimes called "The Edmund Campion of Mexico." Like his sixteenth-century counterpart, Miguel was forced to leave his homeland to study for the priesthood. Like the Jesuit Campion, he returned during a bloody persecution and ministered to his people in secret. Both men were witty types who went about in disguise just ahead of the priest hunters. Both were captured after a short ministry and condemned to execution on false charges.

Edmund Campion has been canonized. Hopefully Father Pro's turn is coming. Word last year from the vice-postulator of his cause in Mexico was that he might be beatified in 1981. May it be so. This is his story.


Early Years

Miguel Agustin Pro was born to Josefa Juarez and Miguel Pro on January 13, 1891, at Guadalupe in the heart of Mexico. He was the third child of eleven, four of whom died in infancy or childhood.

It appeared that death would also claim Miguel at an early age when the little tot consumed an enormous quantity of native fruit that seems to have poisoned him. For a year he lingered in a strange stupor, unable to speak, with hanging head and vacant stare. Doctors said he would certainly be mentally retarded. When he went into convulsions, his anguished father could bear it no longer. Holding the little boy up before an image of Our Lady of Guadalupe he cried out, "Madre Mia, give me back my son!" With a shudder the child coughed up a large volume of blood, and from that moment speedily recovered. His first words were, "Mama, I want cocol," a favorite bread. Years later the hunted priest would sign his letters with the nickname, "Cocol."

The good-natured little boy was once again the life of the house. Although he told his mother offhandedly that he would love to die a martyr, he showed no early indications of great piety. Instead, his biographers fill pages with anecdotes of his merry mischief.

His quick wit manifested itself early. For example, little Miguel was riding a donkey—boasting of his horsemanship, but not paying attention to his mount. The animal lowered its head, and off he slid with a thump. Everyone was amused when Miguel, as unruffled as though he had done it on purpose, snatched up a clump of grass, "I just wanted to cut some fodder for my burro!"

He grew up at Concepcion del Oro, where his father was an overseer in the mines. The boy Miguel loved to go down into the earth and visit the miners, sharing his candies with them. His parents set a beautiful example of Christian charity and he would never forget how his mother expended herself helping the poor and the sick. His favorites were always the working people and the poor. Seeing a gang of workmen going home at the end of the day, the priest Miguel would say, "Those are the souls that I love."

The boy Miguel could hardly have been called sanctimonious, but he seriously fulfilled his religious duties along with the family. The Pros enjoyed a close-knit family life, praying the Rosary nightly and whiling away happy evenings together. The children often serenaded their parents with their own small orchestra; and Miguel, the natural mimic, amused them all with his recitations. He might play all the parts in a skit, changing his voice from bass to a shrill treble.

His pranks were legion. One of the best-known occurred when he was out with his older sister Concepcion and they came upon an outdoor auction. Imitating Concepcion's voice, Miguel made the winning bid on a flea-bitten donkey ... and disappeared. She had a hard time convincing the auctioneer that she hadn't said a word, and had no intentions of buying the donkey!

Despite his pranks, Miguel's strong suit was always obedience. One evening he and his sister were coming home along the railroad tracks and saw a load of molten ore from the furnaces approaching them. Remembering their father's orders that they should never stay near one of these red-hot conveyances, they had moved well away from the footpath when the firey load tipped over right on the spot where they had been. The sleepy driver climbed down, slipped into the pool of flame and was killed instantly. The gruesome incident made a deep impression on Miguel, who frequently cited it to show the necessity of perfect obedience. In all his pranks he was never disobedient, and if he carried a joke too far he was always contrite.

He also always loved Our Lady. Once he slipped and caught his foot in the railroad track. He could hear a train coming, but could not free himself, and already felt the hot breath of Purgatory. Promising works of sacrifice, he called on the Blessed Virgin. His boot separated and he was free! He told his family, "I have since made a pact with the Blessed Virgin that she will never let me go to Purgatory, and I will ever be her faithful servant."

For a time the teen-ager Miguel was inexplicably moody, and less pious than usual. Unknown to his family he had a non-Catholic girlfriend. The episode ended in typical Pro-fashion when he went off to a nearby parish mission and his peace of soul returned. While there he wrote letters to his mother and the girlfriend ... and then accidentally switched them in the mailing envelopes! His mother was grieved. Miguel spent a night weeping and praying on his knees because he had hurt his dear mother. And the girl? She jilted him!

For lack of good schools Miguel received most of his schooling at home. Meanwhile he was a great help to his father in the mine office where he was a whiz at typing and complicated record-keeping. His future was still unsettled when his two older sisters entered the religious life.

Sensing that the divine calling was to be his also, Miguel resisted for a while, struggling within himself. But at last, convinced that God called him to sanctity he entered the Jesuit novitiate at El Llano. It was August 15, 1911, and Miguel was twenty years old.


The Novitiate

In formal pictures Miguel's long face and large well-shaped mouth are always serious, his dark eyes solemn. But his companions assert that he could laugh out of one side of his mobile face and cry out of the other at the same time. He was soon a sought-after companion among the novices, always in demand at recreation and entertainments. His friend Father Pulido remarked that he "had never seen such an exquisite wit, never coarse, always sparkling." His friends noticed too that he was always unassuming and very charitable, and could cheerfully slip pious thoughts into a conversation without boring anyone.

Father Pulido noted that there were really two Pros in one: the playful Pro and the prayerful Pro. He was always faithful to his religious exercises, and during retreats spent more time in chapel than anyone. He never lost his joyous spirit; grace only mellowed it and made it more flexible.

The wise novice master shaped him in humility at every opportunity. Once at recreation the irrepressible Pro climbed a pole and delivered a witty "sermon" to his fellow novices. They were all in stitches when the novice master came along and ordered Miguel to repeat the performance for him. Red-faced, the novice complied, but somehow it wasn't so funny the second time around!

On August 15, 1913, Miguel made his first vows as a Jesuit. But events in the outside world would soon shatter the peace of El Llano.


Background to Terror

When Mexico gained her independence from Spain in 1821, she was unable to form a stable government. Instead, for the next century her history would be one of short-lived rulers and cunning would-be rulers. The spirit of the French Revolution, aided by Freemasonry imported from north of the Rio Grande, caused the Revolutionists to turn with hatred on the very Church that had given Mexico a high level of literacy, proportionately more schools than Great Britain, and universities that were advanced beyond those of other nations. Catholic institutions were destroyed, schools and hospitals closed, monasteries deserted, members of religious orders exiled—and this in a nation 95% Catholic! Mexico has never recovered.

In 1877 Porfirio Diaz, "the benevolent dictator," seized power and held it for thirty-four years. Miguel Pro grew up during this peaceful time when the anti-Catholic laws were largely ignored and the Church could breathe again.

When Diaz fell from power in 1911, adventurers sprung up on all sides. Venustiano Carranza, with the aid of fortune-seeking generals and the bandit Villa, pillaged the country amid unspeakable barbarity and sacrilege, looting and murdering, and finally taking Mexico City. Churches were turned into stables; horses paraded in the Church's priceless vestments. And no Church official from the bishops down to the youngest novice was safe from harm.

Meanwhile at El Llano news came that Senora Pro and the children had fled to Guadalajara, and that Senor Pro had been forced to go into hiding, his whereabouts unknown. In addition to this, the only professor in the house broke down, and Miguel was appointed to keep the students busy. Under this strain he began to develop stomach ulcers. Bothering no one, he concealed his own troubles from all, cheering up the others when he himself felt more than depressed.

In August of 1914 the seminary was attacked and partially sacked. To continue was impossible. On the feast of the Assumption, wearing lay clothing, the seminarians made their exodus.

Miguel's little group made their way slowly to Guadalajara, and along the way helped some priests who were in hiding. Miguel was convincing in his disguise as an Indian peasant and servant of the rest, and his presence of mind repeatedly saved the group from soldiers and bandits who infested the roads.

He found his mother and the four younger children living in one miserable room. She was reduced to doing manual labor to support them. All she had managed to save from their comfortable home was a large picture of the Sacred Heart. She said heroically, "I am content to have left everything for the cause of Christ. Now nothing is left to me but this image of the Sacred Heart which will bless my house and children."

Though wracked with headaches and stomach pain Miguel enlivened the family's spirits with his songs and clever impersonations.

The seminarians met for Mass in secret places, and once, with one of their priests, dared to enter the wrecked cathedral for a clandestine Mass. Miguel's great priestly heart had already been formed. Hearing of an abandoned old woman who was dying, he spent an entire night assisting her in her last agony.

When transportation was somewhat restored, the young Jesuits received orders to set off for the United States. It hurt Miguel to leave his mother in such circumstances, yet she would have had it no other way. His first parting from her had been a sore trial; now as she accompanied him to the train station they both held back the tears. He looked upon her aged face for the last good-bye. It was the last time on earth he would see his dear mother.

Passing scenes of destruction and desolation, they finally reached the Jesuit house at Los Gatos, California. Miguel, now twenty-three, maintained his jovial exterior, and enjoyed picking up American slang. Later in Europe he would greet a hospitalized American Jesuit, "You poor sap!"

Able to make friends with anyone, he sought out poor children and taught them catechism in broken English. He was always a superb catechist who could attract young and old and adapt his teaching to all levels of understanding.

In the summer of 1915, Miguel and his fifteen companions sailed for sunny Spain.


Spain

Who would have guessed when the seminarians arrived at Granada that the lively Pro had been chosen by God and was being formed by Him to die a martyr for Christ the King. Indeed, one of the priests asked him if his jokes weren't a reflection on the level of education in Mexico! Brother Pro assured him that his jokes weren't exactly a Mexican type, but a "Pro type."

They soon discovered that he covered the depth of his soul and many exquisite acts of virtue under a cloak of humor. Like St. Philip Neri he humbly hid his growing holiness by making himself look ridiculous.

One day he decided to treat his fellow Mexicans to a picnic, and told them to make preparations. When the food was ready the only thing lacking was permission! Brother Pro approached the rector and asked if he would do them the honor of joining them. He replied that he was too busy, and added, "Besides, do you have permission?"

"No, Father, but we thought we wouldn't need it if you came with us."

The rector smiled at Brother Pro's ingenuity and let them go.

But Miguel's merriment never deprived him of inward reflection; he was a man of prayer, spending many hours with his dark eyes riveted on the tabernacle. Also, he was always ready to forfeit his own free time to help or console someone else.

Though the news from home often broke his heart it never disturbed the serenity of his soul. At such times Miguel had to work hard to be joyful, and his companions always knew when the news was especially bad because then he displayed more gaiety than usual.

He had advanced to a high degree of self-control, so that only occasionally would a sudden gesture betray his excruciating stomach pain. And the more he suffered, the more sensitive he became to the sufferings of others.

He visited the home for the aged poor and did the humblest tasks for them; sought out hardened sinners and drew them back to the Faith; rounded up the men loafing in the market place and ushered them into Mass.

In 1920 he was sent to Nicaragua, Central America, to spend two years teaching before beginning his theology. Though he never lost his cheer, it was a difficult time for him in the steaming jungle climate, dealing with undisciplined boys, and finding that many people around him did not appreciate his humor. He was thirty-one when he returned to Spain to begin his theology.


Ordination

Miguel Pro had many natural abilities; his verses and clever caricatures were treasured by all. But he had difficulties with some of his studies, lacking a natural bent for metaphysical subjects. While he did not shine as a student, his superiors valued his common sense and special gift for knowing how to deal with souls. Convinced that he had a natural ability with workmen, they sent him, the year before his ordination, to the Jesuit house at Enghein, Belgium, to study Catholic labor organizations there.

At this time Brother Pro could no longer hide his worsening physical torture, for sometimes he could not eat or sleep. His companions wondered how he could look so refreshed after a sleepless night, and he replied, "One is never alone." He had reached a high degree of union with God, and lived in the presence of God.

Early in 1925, he was tortured with anguishing doubts, fearing his ordination would be put off due to his poor health. However, he was ordained as planned on August 31, 1925.

He wrote, "How can I explain to you the sweet grace of the Holy Ghost, which invades my poor miner's soul with such heavenly joys? I could not keep back tears on the day of my ordination, above all at the moment when I pronounced, together with the bishop, the words of the Consecration.

"After the ceremony the new priests gave their first blessing to their parents. I went to my room, laid out all the photographs of my family on the table, and then blessed them from the bottom of my heart."

The following day he said his first Mass at Enghein. "At the beginning I felt rather embarrassed, but after the Consecration I felt nothing but heavenly peace and joy. The only petition I made to Our Blessed Lord was that of being useful to souls." His zeal for souls now leapt forth as a devouring flame.

The young Father Pro was once again "El Barretero" (the miner) when he descended into the earth to visit the coal miners at Charleroi. Some of them were Socialists, and likely to sneer at the cassock. Father Pro climbed into a train compartment at the end of the day and the workers inside informed him that they were all Socialists. "So am I!" he exclaimed, getting their attention. "I find just one difficulty; when we get all the money away from the rich people how are we going to keep it?" Then he explained some facts of Socialism to these deluded souls.

Next they told him they were also Communists. "Good!" said Father Pro, "So am I, and since I am very hungry I am going to have a banquet with the meal you are carrying." They laughed, and wanted to know if he wasn't afraid of them. "Afraid? Why should I be? I'm always well-armed." They were a little tense as he rummaged in his pockets for his "arms," but came out with a small Crucifix. Some of them removed their hats as Father Pro explained the love of Christ for the working man. At the end of the ride they shoved a bag of chocolates into his hands.


Suffering

Three months after his ordination his health broke. The ulcers had become so acute that surgery was ordered. He endured three operations, and his sufferings were agonizing. The nursing sisters marveled at his patience and courage. He kept them convulsed with laughter, laughing first at himself, and never referring to his pitiful condition except in a humorous way. Prayer was the source of his courage: "I pray almost all day and during most of the nights. After this I find myself refreshed."

In the midst of his physical sufferings he received word of the death of his mother. Crucifix in hand, he wept during the night. Though he accepted the will of God, and believed her to be in heaven watching over him, he called it "the hardest trial of my poor heart." His dream of giving Holy Communion to his mother had faded away.

Hoping it would improve his heath, Father Pro's superiors sent him to a Franciscan convalescent home in southern France. He insisted on being allowed to say the first Mass each morning so that the other priests might rest longer. "As I can't sleep anyway, it is no sacrifice for me." Then he would serve the next Mass. Told that he was doing too much, he replied, "I only wish I were able to serve all the Masses that are celebrated."

He helped anyone he could, and read souls like an open book. The Mother Superior said that at prayer he gave her the impression of not living in this world. He told her, "I must get better so I can go back to Mexico where I shall die as a martyr."

During this period he wrote beautiful passages on the priesthood. To a friend soon to be ordained: "I am in the habit of joking, but today I wish to speak to you in all sincerity. For nearly a year I have had the happiness of going up to the altar—a happiness which has nothing of the earth, but is spiritual and divine. You are going to undergo a complete transformation. The Holy Ghost will come down on you in a very special way on your ordination day. Trust the experience of this poor miner; you will no longer be tomorrow what you are today. There is something in me which I have never felt before. It is nothing personal or human. It comes from the priestly character the Holy Ghost stamps on our souls. It is a more intimate participation in the divine life." He tells some of the good he has been able to work as a priest, but adds humbly that it is not because of himself, but because of the grace of his priesthood.


Home to Mexico

In the summer of 1926, Father Pro's health had not improved. It seems that as a last resort his superiors decided to send him home to his native climate. He asked permission and the necessary alms for a quick trip to Lourdes. He said Mass in the Basilica, and spent the day at the Grotto, calling it one of the happiest days of his life.

"The Blessed Virgin inundated my soul with immense happiness and intense consolation. How did I manage to kneel there such a long time, when usually I can only bear a few minutes on my knees? I really don't know. I was not the same miserable being as other days.

"My voyage will not be as hard as I thought it would be, for the Virgin has told me so. I was finding it hard to go back to Mexico: my health gone, my country destroyed by this government, and once there, not meeting my mother again. However, Our Lady of Lourdes has given me courage."

After a pleasant voyage, he landed at Vera Cruz on July 8, 1926. "It was by a special dispensation of God that I re-entered my country. I do not know how I did it. No one looked at my passports; they did not even examine my luggage." Father Pro had stepped onto the stage where would be enacted the great drama of his life; the other characters were already present.

In 1918 Carranza had eased up on the persecution of Catholics ... and swiftly met his end. The next "president," Obregon, harassed the Church in a more insidious manner. Then, since the President could not succeed himself, Obregon and his friend Calles arranged the next "election" to fall to Calles, and planned to juggle the presidency back and forth between them.

Plutarco Elias Calles had ridden to the top on the coat-tails of the Revolution. His weakness for cruelty was blood-chilling. One example will suffice: When an old man offended him, he had him hanged with barbed wire.

As president he waged a fierce persecution of Catholics, claiming uncounted hundreds of martyrs—among them 150 priests—from 1926 to 1929. He vigorously enforced the anti-religious Mexican Constitution, and amplified it with thirty-three new laws, which he had tacked up on the church doors. By these laws all Church property was confiscated by the State; all public worship was restricted to the interior of churches and put under State control; religious orders were dissolved and all education laicized (actually made atheistic); priests were forbidden to criticize the government and could not wear clerical garb in public.

The Lodges congratulated him; but the Church could not recognize such infamy as legal. With the approval of the Pope, the bishops of Mexico agreed that the Church, rather than submit, would go underground. The laws were to go into effect on July 31, only three weeks after Father Pro's arrival.

He was reunited with his family and then plunged into parish work. The people turned out frantically for the last public spiritual exercises. Father Pro heard confessions eleven hours a day. "My confessional was a jubilee," he wrote, "having just left the clinic's smooth pillows, my annoying constitution was unaccustomed to the hard bench of the confessional. Twice I fainted and had to be carried out."

On the 31st of July, feast of St. Ignatius Loyola, Father Pro celebrated his last public Mass. The churches were closed, and the priests commenced their "underground" ministry. A few lines from a poem composed by Father Pro pathetically describe the situation:

O Lord, Thy empty tabernacles mourn
While we alone upon our Calvary,
As orphans, ask Thee, Jesus to return
And dwell again within Thy sanctuary.
Since Thou hast left Thy earthly door ajar,
Our lovely temples bare and dismal stand;
No chant of choir, no bells resound afar;
Dread silence hovers o'er our native land.
By the bitter tears of those who mourn their dead,
By our martyrs' blood for Thee shed joyfully,
By the crimson stream with which Thy Heart bled,
Return in haste to Thy dear sanctuary.


To be continued ...


Footnote
1. Sources of reference for Father Pro's letters used in this article will be given in a bibliography at the conclusion of Part II, which will appear in next month's issue.

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  For Altar and Hearth: The Flemish Peasants’ War
Posted by: Stone - 04-22-2021, 08:16 AM - Forum: Uncompromising Fighters for the Faith - No Replies

The Angelus - February 2009

For Altar and Hearth: The Flemish Peasants’ War
by Mr. Herwig van Moerenland

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The year 2008 saw the 220th anniversary of the Flemish Peasants’ War. In 1798 the best of the Flemish people took up their weapons to defend the Catholic Faith against a new religion and social order that were forced upon them by a foreign occupier. This alone is reason enough to commemorate and bring to attention the heroic courage of the Flemish farmers.

From 1789 on, a bloody revolution raged in France against all the abuses of the “old regime.” From a religious viewpoint there was a schismatic movement, separated from Rome, moving towards a national church. But very soon the anger of the people turned against the priests; the Faith was blamed for exploitation and oppression. Rationalism, which had found its spokesman in the Encyclopedias for over ten years, and in the sarcasm of Voltaire, which had snapped at everything holy, taught that no truth forced from the outside could be accepted. Thus, in a “return to reason,” divine revelation was rejected. Under the slogan “freedom,” intolerance grew; a hatred and confusion not found in another era spread. On January 23, 1793, the French king ascended the scaffold. A year earlier, 1792, the armies from the south came to Flanders for the first time; in 1794 they definitively conquered the Flemish people from Austria. Flanders would experience the French “freedom.” Museums, churches, monasteries, libraries, stables, private safes, barns and fields: all plundered with an unusual anger. The Flemish people began to organize opposition. In 1794 and 1795, thousands of Flemish men, women, and children starved to death. In the soul of the Flemings a dogged anger arose against the new Republic.


The Persecution Breaks Out

Explicit persecution of religion had not yet happened. In 1795 the anti-religious storm calmed down a bit in France, during the establishment of the new rule named le Directoire. The regime of the guillotine, which, in 1793-94 with Robespierre, raged so severely against priests and nobles, was replaced with the (in theory unacceptable but practically milder) separation of Church and state. The tempering did not last. On September 4, 1797, the Directoire fell into the hands of extremists, who thought they noticed a revival of royalism. The next day, the laws of terror came into force again, and a few days later they demanded that every priest and civil servant swear hatred against the monarchy. This rule was not just a formality: In October 1797 the Flemish clergy was summoned to take the oath of loyalty. Almost 90 percent of the priests said “No!” The persecution ensued.

The churches were set ablaze or shut down, ceremonies stopped, and the clergy were hunted down like wild animals. Those who were captured were thrown into dungeons or banished to the Rhé or Oleron Islands near the French coast or deported to the hell of Guyana. The Flemish people, however, did not let their clergy get captured or starve to death without a fight: Of the 9,000 priests who were blacklisted, fewer than 1,000 fell, over a period of three years, into the hands of the tyrants. They hid in the woods, in chimneys, in barns, in attics. They disguised themselves as street-traders and craftsmen. What appeared to be a stable became a church; and a mug, a chalice. Mass was offered at night, quietly, but…it went on. “I have baptized all the little children,” wrote a priest of Tielt. In Tielt, French thieves broke into a farm at the end of the “Hoogstreet.” “Where is the priest hiding himself?” “Jan,” says the landlady, “these men need your help.” Jan was peeling potatoes. He laid down his knife and stood up. The French rats began their search for the priest under the guidance of…the priest!

In the year 1797 the rebellion of the people started to grow. The old combatants of the Brabant rebellion–when they had kicked Austria out of Flanders for a short time in 1789–started to feel their fists itching for battle. The old slogan began to turn around in their heads: pro aris et focis–For Altar and Hearth! But resistance would be difficult: To organize resistance from region to region in an occupied country without traffic would be a hard, almost superhuman task. Was there even a chance of success without foreign help? Austria had definitively handed Flanders to the young Napoleon at the peace treaty in Campo Formio, in October 1797. Would Germany help? England? Months dragged on with no response. The decision was made to fight by themselves.

In September 1798, an order suddenly came from Paris: all Flemings from the ages of 20-25 were to become soldiers for the Republic! The first batch: 200,000 men, in a land that did not know military service under the occupation of Austria. Fight, fight and fall for the godless Republic! They would fight indeed—but against the Republic, not for it. The boys did what their priests had done at first: hid. But then the bell rang: thousands of Flemings went to arms. England promised help. In the middle of October, 1798, the alarm bell rang, the flag with the cross flapped in the wind, and the horns blew: the battle broke loose.

The Peasants’ War was carried out by about 40,000 improvised soldiers. They had no cannons; only scythes, pickaxes, a few guns and a little money from England. The uprising spread as fast as a flame over Waas and Westland, Flemish Ardennen, Klein-Brabant, Hageland and the Kempen. The war took about 15,000 lives; “Not even one Fleming ducked for the bullet.” It lasted only about two months among the storms of the late autumn and in the biting cold of the hard winter. As an organized force, the Peasants’ War ended in bloodshed in Hasselt on December 5, 1798.

What was the Peasants’ War? It was the cultural battle of a small people for its highest values: its freedom, its Catholic family life, its religion. It was a defeat, but a defeat in which future generations at least saw and felt a victory of the spirit! For altar and hearth! No page of Flemish history is so full of love and suffering, grief and victory. This was 1798.


The Persecution of the Church in Flanders

When the French troops penetrated the southern part of the Netherlands in 1794, they showed clearly with what kind of ideals the revolutionaries were inspired. A few churches and abbeys were burned to the ground, and crucifixes as well as images of saints were shot at on purpose. That was just the beginning of what the pious people of Flanders would come to expect. The southern part of the Netherlands stood on the brink of a true persecution of the Church.

Once conquered, Flanders was incorporated in 1795 and considered a part of France. All new laws of France counted for the new territory. The government was at first reluctant to introduce all anti-clerical laws. They did not want to turn the Flemish people against them, especially not when the French had not full power and control in every region. Nevertheless, at the end of 1794, the first churches were claimed and transformed into “temples of Reason.” Different houses of God were violated by acts of desecration.


“The Church Has to Disappear from Society”

From September 1796 onwards, abbeys and monasteries were disbanded, their goods taken into custody. Only female monastic orders dealing with education and the care of the sick were left untouched. The main goal of the revolutionaries was to banish the Church from society: all external signs of religion should be exiled from public life. Processions were forbidden: no more religious ceremonies outside the doors of the church. The French even tried to prevent the pious Flemings in Brugge from kneeling down before the chapel at the yearly ceremony of the Holy Blood, but the Catholics did not allow themselves to be chased away. The bells could not call the believers to religious services anymore; statues of saints and crucifixes, which decorated uncountable street corners and house fronts, were removed. In Brugge, a Marian city, the old statue of Our Lady at the corner of the city hall was destroyed. The resistance against all these measures grew: the people went on pilgrimage ostentatiously.

In 1797 the clergy was forced to swear an oath of hate against the monarchy and to swear an oath of loyalty to the Republic. The clergy of Flanders refused this unanimously. Now the aggressor showed its real face. The “Beloken Tijd” started: All goods of the parishes as well as the property of the Church were confiscated. Even secular associations and seminaries were abolished. In most regions, the churches were all shut down. Only in the department of the Leie (the present province of West-Flanders), most churches were simultaneously re-opened and they would not be closed anymore. Only sworn (or “juring”) priests could lead the ceremonies.

The persecution of the clergy and the closure of churches was the prelude of a real demonic work. The remaining golden and silver consecrated goods were sent to the “Money factory” in Paris; paintings and statues of tremendous artistic value–untouched by previous plundering–were transported to French museums. Expensive books and writings were scattered here and there. The furniture was destroyed; remarkable woodcuttings sold as firewood; marble pillars and communion rails destroyed and sold like clods of stones. Nothing remained safe from the desecration of iconoclastic fury.


Revival of the Era of Catacombs

The refusal of the majority of the clergy to swear the oath in this region led to schism; a small number of sworn priests, loyal to the Republic, stood against the priests loyal to the Church of all times. Those who refused to swear the oath awaited arrest and deportation. The Flemish clergy went into hiding. They did not intend to let themselves be captured, and they could not abandon their loyal flock. The era of the catacombs was thus born again. Priests were outlaws, hunted down by the French. Real round-ups and raids followed one after the other–but this was without taking into account the people. In almost every village and town, priests could find a good and safe shelter. The population went to extremes to keep their priests out of the claws of the French. This was not, however, without any risk. The republicans tried to choke out religious life, but normal services went on. Priests walked disguised down the streets to hand out the sacraments.


The Hidden Priests

Tirelessly the priests stayed faithful to their vocation. One of the many confessors of faith at this time was Fr. Charles Nerickx. Fr. Nerickx founded first a shelter in Ninove and from 1798 onwards, a hospital in Dendermonde, where his aunt was a nun. (Nuns in hospitals were “of public use” and therefore not hunted down.) He was a priest first, everywhere and always. At 2:00am daily he offered the Holy Mass for the nuns. He studied and prayed frequently. When the French searched the hospital–which happened several times—he would disappear into a small shelter in the attic. Even in the garden he had a good hiding place: in the chicken coop.

During the Peasants’ War, some prisoners were brought to the hospital to await their execution. Fr. Nerickx devised a way to help them; the nuns would inform the prisoners of his plan. When they went to their execution, they walked under a specific window. Fr. Nerickx instructed them to raise their arm if they were contrite and wished to receive absolution. Fr. Nerickx would later be sent to America where he founded the Sisters of Loretto.


Islands of Peace

The situation was not tense and dangerous everywhere. Here and there were some small islands of a little peace and rest. The deep-rooted loyalty of the believers to the faith of their ancestors was unshakable. To spread discord, the government allowed a limited number of “sworn” priests to celebrate in a few churches. But this had an opposite effect: A sworn priest wanted to remove something from the tabernacle at St. Salvator in Brugge to prevent the believers from worshipping the Most Holy Sacrament. He was prevented from doing so, however–by the bell ringer and a milk woman. Once on the street he was attacked by the people. Women shouted: “Beat the schismatic priest dead.”

In a Catholic school in Brugge a Sister refused to follow with her students the Mass said by a sworn priest; together with other Sisters she left the monastery and started their own school. In the still open churches in Brugge the people gathered and prayed the Rosary and the Litany of Our Lady very loudly. Step by step, some para-liturgical services arose. On the altars, candles were lit, the organ was played, and the normal hymns of the Mass were sung. A clearer refutation of the sworn clergy was not thinkable.


The Church of the Concordat

In the meantime, Napoleon was committing his revolt in 1799. He made a concordat with the Holy See in 1801. Pope Pius VII hoped to see a new dawn of peace as churches were opened again and the persecution seemed to have stopped. But Bonaparte added a huge number of conditions to the concordat, the 77 Organic Articles. For many, these were unacceptable. For everything, the approval of the state was needed. Even holy days were dictated by the concordat. Many priests and believers who had risked their lives during the persecution for the true faith took up their weapons again. The Church of the Concordat was for them the Church of Napoleon, not the Church of Rome. Resistance arose mostly in Brabant and West-Flanders. The persecution in Flanders was a time of heroism and love, the time of the new catacombs and martyrs, a time of battle to keep the Catholic Faith. This era is untaught in schools today. Even the Church no longer speaks of it because of political correctness and ecumenism.

Translator: Lucas Feliers, Fleming and member of the Third Order of St. Pius X. Note: Out of respect for the Flemish people, the names of the Flemish towns, cities, and of the people have been kept in their original language. Information in the biographies came from the Catholic Encyclopedia, Wikipedia, and other sources. Angelus Press thanks Fr. Eric Jacqmin, SSPX, for his invaluable help with this article.


Flemish Missionaries

Fr. Constant Lievens

The Apostle of Chota Nagpur was born on April 11, 1856, in Moorslede. A Jesuit priest, he was a missionary among the tribal peoples of central India. Born into a large rural family, he had a desire to enter the Jesuits from a young age. He was ordained in India at the age of 26. Central India was then opening up to missionary work and Lievens was sent to the area in 1885. By 1888, there were 15,000 baptized and some 40,000 catechumens. Suffering from tuberculosis, he was sent by the doctors to the mountains of Darjeeling in 1891, but the urgency of the work–and disquieting news of apostasies–brought him hurriedly back to the Chota Nagpur where he again spent himself without counting. In a few months he baptized some 12,000 people. A serious relapse forced him to stop definitively. Lievens died in Leuven on November 7, 1893.


Fr. Damien (Joseph de Veuster)

Born at Tremeloo on January 3, 1840. He entered the novitiate of the Fathers of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and was admitted to the religious profession at the age of 20. Three years later, he was sent to the mission of the Hawaiian Islands, where he was ordained at Honolulu. On 10 May, 1873, Fr. Damien arrived at the leper settlement at Molokai as its resident priest. There were then 600 lepers. He not only administered the consolations of religion, but also rendered them such little medical service and bodily comforts as were within his power. He dressed their ulcers, helped them erect their cottages, and went so far as to dig their graves and make their coffins. After twelve years of this heroic service he discovered in himself the first symptoms of the disease. He died at Molokai, Hawaii, on April 15, 1889. He will be canonized in 2009 by Pope Benedict XVI.


Fr. Charles Nerinckx

Born in Herffelingen, Oct. 2, 1761. He was the eldest of fourteen children and was noted for his zeal among the working classes. He wrote several theological treatises. The French Directoire resented his activity and ordered his arrest, but he eluded them and and for four years was in hiding at the Hospital of Dendermonde, where he continued his ministry amid continual dangers. He came to America in 1804, Bishop Carroll assigning him to Kentucky–a district of over two hundred miles in length. He lived in the saddle; every year of his apostolate was marked by the organization of a new congregation or the building of a church. Of all the missionaries none deserves so well the title of “Apostle of Kentucky.” He founded the Congregation of the Sisters of Loretto in 1812. He went to Missouri in 1824, intending to consecrate the last years of his life to the Indians, but death overtook him at Ste. Genevieve, Missouri, August 12, 1824.


Fr. Pedro de Gante

Fray Pedro de Gante or Pedro de Mura was a Franciscan missionary in 16th-century Mexico. He was born in Geraardsbergen around 1480. Pedro de Gante was a relative of King Charles V; he was allowed to travel to the colonies of New Spain as one of a group of Franciscan monks, the first Christian missionaries in the New World. In Mexico he spent his life as a missionary, educating the indigenous population in Christian catechism and dogma. He learned Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, and composed a catechism. One of his most significant contributions to Mexico was the creation of the School of San Jose de los Naturales. This was the first school set up by Europeans in the Americas. He died in 1572 in Mexico City. In 1988 he was beatified by Pope John Paul II.


Fr. Ferdinand Verbiest

Born at Pitthem, October 9, 1623. He entered the Society of Jesus at the age of 17. In 1658 he was called to China to assist, and eventually to replace, Fr. Adam Schall in his astronomical labors. He was among those imprisoned during the persecution of 1664. In 1668 the young emperor commanded a public test, which allowed the priest to prove beyond dispute the merits of European astronomy compared with the ancient astronomy of China. The results of the test, which the emperor, ministers, and nobles established in person, were a triumph for the missionaries. Fr. Verbiest was immediately placed at the head of the Bureau of Mathematics, and, out of consideration for him, his exiled brethren were authorized to return to their missions. He died in Peking in 1688 after being appointed superior for the Jesuit missions in all of China.


Fr. Pierre-Jean De Smet

Famous missionary among the North American Indians. Born at Termonde January 30, 1801. He emigrated to the United States in 1821 through a desire for missionary labors and entered the Jesuit novitiate at Whitemarsh, Maryland. In 1823, however, at the suggestion of the United States Government a new Jesuit establishment was determined on and located at Florissant near St. Louis, Missouri, for work among the Indians. De Smet was among the pioneers and thus became one of the founders of the Missouri Province of the Society of Jesus. He worked with and was revered by almost every Indian tribe west of the Mississippi. Even Protestants considered him the greatest friend of the Indians; his influence was so great that he was able to encourage Sitting Bull to agree to a treaty. He died in St. Louis, Missouri on May 23, 1873, at the age of 72.

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  Modernism Condemned - Defending Pope St. Pius X's Sanctity
Posted by: Stone - 04-22-2021, 08:12 AM - Forum: Articles by Catholic authors - No Replies

The Angelus  - November 2002

95 YEARS AGO: Modernism Condemned - Defending Pope St. Pius X's Sanctity
by Don Dario Composta

[Image: Pope-Pius-X.jpg]



Historical Sketch of Modernism

In August and September of 1907 Pope Pius X made the difficult and courageous decision to publish the irrevocable condemnations of modernism in two important documents, Lamentabili Sane and Pascendi Gregis. The former condemns 65 erroneous propositions taken from the writings of the modernist Fathers Loisy and Tyrrell; the latter draws a huge picture of the origins and nature of the creeping, insidious, and deadly error. Modernism, taught the Pope, was an error, invading all sectors of the Catholic Faith, that became a kind of agnosticism and immanentism in religious matters containing all the heresies of the past. The holy Pontiff had waited patiently before pronouncing this condemnation, hoping that the partisans of the "new Christianity" might be converted, but the situation became such that any further delay would have been fatal.

This decision dealt a destructive blow which cut the pretensions of the innovators at their roots. In the years 1920-40, new generations of seminarians and theology teachers did not realize that the multi-headed serpent hid itself in the folds of certain seats of error, ready to rise up again. However, the future Pope Pius XII, as a young priest himself, was aware of the modernist enemy and of its continued clandestine maneuvers. With his encyclical Humani Generis (1950) he tried to suppress all attempts for the renaissance of modernism, but once again the condemnation did not suffice to eradicate the error totally. In July 1963, Pope Paul VI addressed the Catholic Church in his first encyclical Summi Pontificatus, openly alluding to "modernism," this error, which, in the midst of the Second Vatican Council, increased in vigor and arrogance. The time was ripe for the hidden modernists to utilize certain reformist requirements of the Council by transforming them into vehicles for the old error. Forty years after the Council not only can we see, in effect, that modernism has poisoned Catholic theology and morals again, but also that it is rehabilitating as "heroes" (Frs. Loisy and Tyrell) those whom Pope Pius X had excommunicated. Moreover, the old seats of error have boldly manipulated ecclesiastical history to calumniate St. Pius X himself.

Today we can understand why, in 1949, on the eve of the beatification of Pope Pius X, the counselors of what was then the Sacred Congregation of Rites proposed a supplement of historical research which, along with the textual proof of past investigative processes (of 1923-26; 1943-46), would dispel any doubt regarding the honesty and the even heroic conduct of Pope Pius X in the face of the insurrection of the insidious sect. This supplement was titled Disquisitio circa Quasdam Obiectiones Modum Agendi Servi Dei Respicientes in Modernismi Debellatione una cum Summario Additionali (The Servant of God's Manner of Acting in the Vanquishing of Modernism Together with an Additional Summary).

The fears of 50 years ago were not unfounded. Among today's historians of the pontificate of St. Pius X, several are self-declared adversaries of this holy Pontiff. During the fourth session of Vatican II, in the middle of the conciliar chamber, Cardinal Pellegrino of Turin gave an indirect invitation to this controversy when he declared that the obscure period [of Pope Pius X's reign] over the Church must never be repeated. In the historiographic domain, others would echo him in the years that followed. One, an Italian, Lorenzo Bedeschi, has founded a Center for the History of Modernism at the University of Urbino. In 1995 he published the essay "Italian Modernism: Voices and Faces." In his opinion, Pope Pius X stifled the Church by his primitive positions on the liturgy, encouraged Catholic piety to the detriment of liberty of mind, locked the door to opinions which today are considered conquests for the Church, such as "historico-criticism," the free examination of Holy Scripture, contrary discussion on the clerical celibacy, mixed sexual education, re-evaluation of Marian veneration, etc.


New Documents from the Reign of Pope Pius X

We cannot remain silent when confronted with these "historical" initiatives. Can we trust for an objective evaluation of Pope Pius X's conduct by relying on the analyses of the "new historians" or, rather, on the documentation of the acts of the process for his canonization (1949-50)? To answer, we refer to the Summarium Additionale, that is, the collection of the statements made under oath about the heroic virtues of the great Pope collected by the Sacred Congregation of Rites.

Certain consultors on the Congregation–foreseeing perhaps sad times to come–had requested and obtained that a historical Commission be named by the dicastery to illustrate the spotless and holy conduct of Pius X by further documentation. A reporter, Rev. Fr. P. F. Antonelli, a Franciscan, has presented the problem in the following terms: It is not the condemnation of modernism which is questioned, but rather the methods, the means, and the persons which were used to attempt to eradicate it. To his surprise, in 1949, he discovered, in the archives of the "Congregation of the Consistory," a shelf full of documents that had not been used in the first two canonical processes! The dossier came by the name of the Summarium Additionale. He saw that by these it would have been possible to answer the doubts of the "devil's advocate," Msgr. Salvatore Natucci, and those of some consultors who justly raised the doubt as to whether or not a certain "vehemence" against the modernists was to be deplored, and whether Pope Pius X had exceeded the limits of prudence and justice by promoting groups of imprudent persons without censuring secret institutions or organizations for "intransigent policies." The documents found by Fr. Antonelli divided into two categories.

The first classification was that of documents which would have corrected or clarified statements of the processes already judged, e.g., those of Cardinal Gasparri which were very severe regarding the Sodalitium Pianum, the organization directed by Msgr. Benigni functioning to uncover secret information on closet modernists throughout Europe. Cardinal Gasparri had referred to a dubious study, however, and the newly-recovered archives of the Congregation of the Consistory proved that certain statements of Cardinal Gasparri were unfactual.

The second category contained absolutely new documents, classed into six sections:

1) Milan: Documentation of the accusations of modernism made to the Seminary of Milan by the weekly paper La Riscossa, an Italian periodical published by two brothers in Holy Orders, Msgrs. Andrea and Gottardo Scotton, whose object was to attack modernism on every front.

2) Milan-Pisa: Political modernism, with references made to Cardinal Maffi.

3) Rome: The Piana Association or "The League of St. Pius V." (This is the Sodalitium Pianum to which we have already referred.)

4) Rome: Modernism, newspapers, persons, organizations, etc.

5) Genoa: Records of the liberal and modernist milieu with abundant material on the Italian government's refusal of the "Exsequatur" for Msgr. Caron, named Archbishop of Genoa. This file also concerns Fr. Semeria and "semerianism."

6) Perugia: The modernists.

From these documents and from other writings of Pope Pius X, Fr. Antonelli was able to construct the Summarium Additionale, a new documentation which did not enter the process. Nevertheless, it is of extreme interest and value–for that time, to demolish the objections and the accusations proposed by the "devil's advocate" in the canonization process, and today, to destroy the bizarre modernist pseudo-historical reconstruction of the pontificate of Pope Pius X especially in what concerns his conduct towards modernism.


Revelations of the Summarium Additionale

This article does not allow here for even a summary of the copious material found in the archives and presented in such an organized manner by Fr. Antonelli. May it suffice to refer to the points given below, taking as hermeneutical principle the motto which Msgr. Sarto chose while he was still bishop of Mantua, and which he kept during his Pontificate as well: Instaurare omnia in Christo. For Pius X each decision was enlightened by a very elevated sentiment of faith.

In coming to the second part of the documents and its six sections, we address the first point by examining the conduct of Pope Pius X towards the Seminary of Milan, directed until 1894 by Cardinal Ferrari. He became Archbishop of Milan in 1893, the same year that Msgr. Sarto was elected Patriarch of Venice. In Milan the roots of modernism were deeper than the Cardinal thought. Cardinal Sarto had been obliged to expel Fr. Gazzola, a Barnabite priest, from one of the city's parishes. In Milan, a group of modernists had been founded and started publishing a daily paper, Il Rinnovamento [The Renewal], which, in spite of being denounced by Rome in 1907, continued appearing until 1909. The leaders of European Modernism often met in Milan, including Fr. Loisy. The daily periodical, L'Unione, which was favorable towards modernism, was founded in 1908.

When Rome became concerned about the progress of modernism in Milan, Cardinal Ferrari made it appear as though there were not even a shadow of modernism there. Then, in the years following 1907, the Scotton brothers' paper, La Riscossa, intervened. The sarcastic interference of this paper was directed against the Seminary of Milan and indirectly against Cardinal Ferrari, Archbishop of Milan, who complained of it several times to Cardinal De Lai, Prefect of the Congregation of the Consistory. With polemics lasting nearly three years, Rome finally imposed silence on the Scotton brothers. During the summer of 1911, Cardinal Ferrari went to Rome to visit Pope Pius X, who welcomed him amiably. But the pious Cardinal returned to Milan troubled and manifested his bitterness to the Pope, who replied to him:
Quote:Your sufferings truly pain me, it is as though I did not know how much esteem the arch-diocese of Milan merits, or appreciate Your Eminency's zeal. For charity's sake, do not listen to those who speak in the Pope's name as though they were speaking words spoken by him, according to their desires and their imaginations. (Summarium Additionale, p. 218)

Where in this can we see the imprudence of St. Pius X? Should we not admire, rather, the patience of the Pope, who, although he knew that Milan was infested with modernism, did not lose confidence in the Archbishop? Where is this "vehemence" against the partisans of modernism?

We continue to the second point regarding Milan-Pisa and Cardinal Maffi.

This affair is about the anti-modernist daily printed in Florence, Unità Cattolica. Cardinal De Lai approved it in accord with Pope Pius X. This periodical was opposed to modernist Catholic journalism, a kind of "underground press" centered in Milan. Its consequences were harmful, however, because, notwithstanding the intention to instill a Catholic spirit in the liberal press, it provoked a confusion of ideas amongst Catholics. Pope Pius X was in favor of a strictly Catholic journalism, including La Riscossa of the Scotton brothers and the Unità Cattolica, La Liguria Cattolica, Verona Fedele, II Berico, and ten other weekly periodicals of Turin and Naples. But Cardinal Maffi supported a more open press, less of a "sacristy type" periodical, still faithful to Catholic principles. Cardinal De Lai did not share this opinion, because, aside from his financial deficit, this "underground press" created a fluid atmosphere which was favorable to anti-Catholic ideas. The Pope himself shared this conviction, taking into account its fruits.

In Rome the prototype model of the popular press was set up–Il Coniere d'ltalia–in opposition to papal directives. Pope Pius X wrote to the Provost of Casalpusterlengo, complaining that behind the sensational presentation and typesetting, these papers praised the errors propagated in books of doubtful morality and venerated the idols of the times. He wrote:
Quote:It is utopic to believe that we can convert our adversaries to Catholic convictions by yielding on capital points of faith and morals, and it entails serious damage to souls and to the Church. It is very serious that priests and prelates should support these strategies: the Catholic is loyal with his enemies, but does not hide his faith. (Ibid, p. 25)

This is not to imply that Pope Pius X shared in all the excesses of the "intransigent" press. He warned Cardinal Mistrangelo of Florence, requesting him to supervise Unità Cattolica so that it would neither publish news of hypocritical adversaries (ibid. p. 134) nor attack respectable persons, nor be silent on the subject of eminent persons. As to the Scotton brothers, we saw that in the subsequent controversy with Cardinal Ferrari, they were silenced (ibid. p. 199). In conclusion, Pope Pius X encouraged the Catholic press, but he corrected its excesses, and deplored the "underground press" as being even more injurious.

The Sodalitium Pianum is the third point of Fr. Antonelli's Summarium Additionale. The Sodalitium Pianum is always associated with the person and reputation of Msgr. Benigni (1862-1934). This is the favorite target for the arrows of the pseudo-historians.

Torrents of ink have been poured out over Msgr. Benigni's image and his work. He was the coordinator of information on persons suspected of or recognized as culpable of modernism during two periods: from 1900-14 (the year of Pope Pius X died) and from 1914-21 (the year when the Sodalitium Pianum was suppressed). After having been in the Vatican Library under Pope Leo XIII, Msgr. Benigni lived in Berlin while completing his studies in ecclesiastical history there.

Returning from Berlin, he became a professor of ecclesiastical history at three highly esteemed institutions. This permitted him to know many persons involved in the Church. In 1906, he entered the Secretariat of State in the Congregation of Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs and was sent to the Vatican until 1911. As he was managing the press service, he became alarmed by the progress of socialism in Europe and that of modernism, which he already long surmised was "modernizing Catholicism" and constituted not only a new theology but also a new vision of the world in the social, political, literary, and artistic domains. His aversion towards these two movements made him known to Pope Pius X. It is said that the encyclicals Lamentabili Sane and Pascendi Dominici Gregis were edited by him. This cannot be proven, but it is sure he participated in the thought and composition of these two works.

This is certain. On May 23, 1907, before the pontifical condemnations of modernism, he founded the weekly periodical Corrispondenza Romana, otherwise known by the abbreviation "SP," otherwise known as Sodalitium Pianum, a sort of international information agency on the dangers of modernism. SP became an instrument which supported Pope Pius X's actions, allocutions, and interventions. In France, SP began to frighten the Masonic politicians so much that its dissolution was requested of Rome by Aristide Briand. Instead, Cardinal Gasparri had a misunderstanding with Msgr. Benigni, and in March 1911 he appointed Msgr. Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pius XII, to replace him. Benigni, freed from his commitments in the curia, consecrated himself totally to his activities as informer, which he intensified. Notwithstanding the censures which rained down on the Sodalitium Pianum from Bavaria, the Pope sent a letter of praise to Benigni. This encouraged Msgr. Benigni to put a more effective instrument into action–the Agenzia Internationale Romana (AIR). Another letter from the Pope was sent to the prelate in 1912; a third and last letter of praise was sent in 1914. In 1921 a file of the Sodalitium Pianum was discovered in Gand, Belgium, which caused violent polemics to arise, but Benigni continued and completed his Social History of the Church. In that year, however, the Sodalitium Pianum was suppressed.

The Sodalitium was composed of a director, a committee, and a secretariat. It was responsible for performing ordinary and extraordinary services in Rome and in its centers spread throughout Europe, between which a code was used for communicating.

In order to cast judgment on the Sodalitium, it must be observed that it obtained general approbation from the Holy See and that Cardinal De Lai had recommended it in a letter to Pope Pius X. This, by the way, explains the three letters of praise for the Sodalitium from the Pope. Any occasional imprudences or intemperance of language are not imputable to Cardinal De Lai and even less so to the Pope. Until 1914, the SP maintained its combative, sometimes even violent, tone, in self-defense against diverse enemies in all of Europe. After 1914, the activities of the Sodalitium diminished, partly because of World War I. Its revival in 1918 was only ephemeral and it was finally dissolved in 1921. We concede that subsequent to 1914 Msgr. Benigni had allowed himself to fall into unpleasant expressions and invectives sometimes. Moreover, the Sodalitium, in spite of various initiatives of Msgr. Benigni, never obtained the approval of its Statutes, but only a general declaration of satisfaction for the work accomplished between 1907 and 1911.Therefore, we cannot equate the activity of the Sodalitium with the Pope's government of the Church, even less so because Cardinal Gasparri, Secretary of State, had removed Msgr. Benigni from his responsibility.

The fourth point deals with Pope Pius X's attitude towards modernism in general and, in particular, modernist priests.

Pope Pius X was always vigilant towards priests who had enlisted in modernism or were tempted by it. In 1908, when he received the Bishop of Chalons, France, in the Vatican, he recommended that he treat Loisy with benevolence. By this time, Loisy had himself rejected his priesthood and returned to the lay state. He had lost the Faith over 20 years before, in 1887.

Fifthly, Pope Pius X himself was patient with Fr. Semeria, but the superiors in Genoa, Italy, acted against the celebrated Barnabite and obliged him to read a public declaration of adhesion to the encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis. Years later in 1930, Fr. Semeria himself recognized his errors and acknowledged the providential work of Pope Pius X in the combat against modernism (ibid., p. 30).

The sixth part of the Summarium Additionale contains documentation on the modernism in Perugia centered around Fr. Genocchi, Superior of the Sacred Heart Missionaries. Fr. Genocchi was well-known as a philo-modernist. He welcomed celebrated modernists into his library at his Institute in the Via della Sapienza. Moreover, he maintained contact with Loisy and Sabatier. Pope Pius X was informed of all this, but he did not use the "virga ferrea" (iron rod) against Fr. Genocchi. On December 28, 1907, in answer to Fr. Gennochi's Christmas wishes for that year, the Pope recommended that he not fail in his duties as Superior and as priest and assured him of his affection. This long-suffering of Pius X towards the disobedient is shown in many other cases throughout the Summarium Additionale. Our brief acquaintance with it suffices to give a glimpse of the measure of charity and prudence of this great Pope. The so-called "vehemence" with which he dealt with the Church's adversaries should be instead attributed to the pseudo-historians themselves.


Conclusion

The historian must be guided by reason and not by sentiment. Modernist historians must not resort to making scaremongering shock-phrases about "integrisms" in the prudence, wisdom, patience and charity of a truly great Pope. The whole of the historical period of which we have drawn up some major points must be treated with the absolute objectivity which appears in the available documentation. What we have cited of the Summarium Additionale reveals a historical source of a primary and essential importance. We cannot apply the posthumous rancor of the pseudo-historians of his pontificate to the over-zealousness of some of the anti-modernists who support Pope St. Pius X. The defiance of the pseudo-historians is to renew the modernism they love even though it has been clearly condemned by the Church, which hates it.



(Translated by G. Stannus from Instaurare, Jan.-June, 1997, exclusively for Angelus Press.) Edited heavily by Fr. Kenneth Novak.

N.B.: The Summarium Additionale has been translated into French (324 pp.) with the title, Disquisitio, taken from the first word of the original Latin title. It can be purchased from Courrier de Rome, BP 156, F-78001 Versailles, France, for about $25.00.


[Emphasis - The Catacombs]

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  The Isolate Truth Fund: 1M Euros to Any Virologist Who Can Offer Proof of Isolation of Covid 19
Posted by: Stone - 04-22-2021, 06:47 AM - Forum: Pandemic 2020 [Secular] - No Replies

[Image: truth_isolate_fund_0421-768x417.jpg]
Taken from here.


WE HAVE FOUND...
All virologists, not only those shown, have deceived themselves and the public when they claim the existence of disease-causing viruses such as SARS-CoV-2.

Virologists inadvertently kill cells in the test tube, believing that this is evidence of the presence and isolation of a virus. Virologists only mentally construct a gene sequence from fragments of dying cells and present it as a fact. The test procedures are therefore not meaningful or meaningful. Typical structures of dying cells under the electron microscope are reported as viruses. Such structures could never be detected or recognized in a person before!



OUR GOAL
These misguided developments have distanced medicine far from the reality and understanding of true health. We would like to contribute to a comprehensive understanding of disease and health for all people.



WE GUARANTEE:
€ 1 million for a virologist who provides scientific evidence of the existence of a corona virus, including documented control attempts of all steps taken to provide evidence.

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  Viganò on Vatican ‘health’ conference with Fauci: Holy See is ‘making itself the servant of the NWO'
Posted by: Stone - 04-21-2021, 01:29 PM - Forum: Archbishop Viganò - No Replies

Viganò on Vatican ‘health’ conference with Fauci: Holy See is ‘making itself the servant of the New World Order’
The result is the super-imposition over the true Church of a sect of heretical and depraved Modernists who are intent on legitimizing adultery, sodomy, abortion, euthanasia, idolatry, and any perversion of the intellect and will. The true Church is now eclipsed, denied and discredited by her very Pastors, betrayed even by the one who occupies the highest Throne.

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April 20, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) – From May 6-8, 2021, the fifth International Vatican Conference will take place, entitled Exploring the Mind, Body & Soul. Unite to Prevent & Unite to Cure. A Global Health Care Initiative: How Innovation and Novel Delivery Systems Improve Human Health. The event is being hosted by the Pontifical Council for Culture, the Cura Foundation, the Science and Faith Foundation, and Stem for Life.

Michael Haynes of LifeSiteNews has reported (here) on the topics to be addressed and the participants, including the infamous Anthony Fauci, whose scandalous conflicts of interest did not prevent him from taking over the management of the pandemic in the United States; Chelsea Clinton, a follower of the Church of Satan and a staunch abortion advocate; the New Age guru Deepak Chopra; Dame Jane Goodall, environmentalist and chimpanzee expert; the CEOs of Pfizer and Moderna; representatives of Big Tech; and a whole slew of abortionists, Malthusians, and globalists known to the general public. The conference has recruited five prominent journalists to be moderators, who are exclusively from left-wing media outlets such as CNN, MSNBC, CBS and Forbes.

This Conference – along with the Council for Inclusive Capitalism of Lynn Forester de Rothschild, the Global Compact on Education, and the inter-religious Pantheon to be held in June in Astana, Kazakhstan – is the umpteenth scandalous confirmation of a disturbing departure of the current Hierarchy, and in particular its highest Roman members, from Catholic orthodoxy. The Holy See has deliberately renounced the supernatural mission of the Church, making itself the servant of the New World Order and Masonic globalism in an antichristic counter-magisterium. The same Roman Dicasteries, occupied by people ideologically aligned with Jorge Mario Bergoglio and protected and promoted by him, now continue unrestrained in their implacable work of demolishing Faith, Morals, ecclesiastical discipline, and monastic and religious life, in an effort as vain as it is unprecedented to transform the Bride of Christ into a philanthropic association enslaved to the Strong Powers. The result is the super-imposition over the true Church of a sect of heretical and depraved Modernists who are intent on legitimizing adultery, sodomy, abortion, euthanasia, idolatry, and any perversion of the intellect and will. The true Church is now eclipsed, denied and discredited by her very Pastors, betrayed even by the one who occupies the highest Throne.

The fact that the deep church has managed to elect its own member so as to carry out this infernal plan in agreement with the deep state is no longer a mere suspicion, but a phenomenon which it is now essential to ask questions about and shed light on. The submission of the Cathedra veritatis to the interests of the Masonic elite is manifesting itself in all its evidence, in the deafening silence of the Sacred Pastors and in the bewilderment of the People of God, who have been abandoned to themselves.

Further demonstration of this degenerate libido serviendi of the Vatican towards the globalist ideology is the choice of speakers to give testimonials and lectures: supporters of abortion, of the use of fetal material in research, of demographic decline, of the pan-sexual LGBT agenda, and last but not least, of the narrative of Covid and the so-called vaccines. Cardinal Ravasi, the President of the Pontifical Council for Culture, is certainly one of the leading representatives of the deep church and Modernist progressivism, as well as an advocate of dialogue with the infamous Masonic sect and a promoter of the famous Courtyard of the Gentiles. It is therefore not surprising that included among the organizers of the event is the Stem for Life Foundation, which proudly defines itself as “a nonsectarian, nonpartisan, tax-exempt organization focused on creating a movement to accelerate development of cell therapies.”

On closer inspection, the sectarianism and partisanship of the Vatican Conference are made evident by the topic it addresses, the conclusions it seeks to draw, its participants, and its sponsors. Even the image chosen to promote the Conference is extremely eloquent: a close-up of Michelangelo’s fresco of Creation on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, in which the hand of God the Father reaches out towards the hand of Adam, but with both hands covered by disposable surgical gloves, recalling the regulations of the new “health liturgy” and implying that even the Lord Himself might spread the virus.

In this sacrilegious representation, the order of Creation is subverted into therapeutic anti-creation, in which man saves himself and becomes the mad author of his own health “redemption.” Instead of the purifying laver of Baptism, the Covid religion proposes the vaccine, the bearer of disabilities and death, as the only means of salvation. Instead of Faith in the Revelation of God, we find superstition and the irrational assent to precepts that have nothing scientific about them, with rites and liturgies that mimic true Religion in a sacrilegious parody.

This choice of imagery has an aberrant and blasphemous ring to it, because it uses a well-known and evocative image to insinuate and promote a false and tendentious narrative that says that in the presence of a seasonal flu, whose virus has still not been isolated according to Koch’s postulates (here) and that can be effectively cured using existing treatments, it is necessary to administer vaccines that are admitted to be ineffective and that are still in the experimentation phase, with unknown side-effects, and whose producers have obtained a criminal shield of immunity for their distribution. The victims immolated on the altar of the health Moloch, from children dismembered in the third month of pregnancy in order to produce the gene serum to the thousands of people who have been killed or maimed, do not stop the infernal machine of Big Pharma, and it is to be feared that there will be a resurgence of the phenomenon over the next few months.

One wonders if Bergoglio’s zeal for the dissemination of the gene serum is not also motivated by base economic reasons, as compensation for the losses suffered by the Vatican and the Dioceses following the lockdown and the collapse of attendance by the faithful at Mass and the Sacraments. On the other hand, if Rome’s silence about the violation of human and religious rights in China has been paid for by the Beijing dictatorship with substantial prebends, nothing prevents the replication of this scheme on a large scale in exchange for the Vatican’s promotion of the vaccines.

The Conference will obviously take great care not to mention even indirectly the perennial teaching of the Magisterium on moral and doctrinal questions of the greatest importance. Conversely, the sycophantic praise of the worldly mentality and the prevailing ideology will be the only voice, along with the amorphous ecumenical repertoire inspired by the New Age.

I note that in 2003 the same Pontifical Council for Culture condemned yoga meditation and, more generally, New Age thought as being incompatible with the Catholic faith. According to the Vatican document, New Age thought “shares with a number of internationally influential groups the goal of superseding or transcending particular religions in order to create space for a universal religion which could unite humanity. Closely related to this is a very concerted effort on the part of many institutions to invent a Global Ethic, an ethical framework which would reflect the global nature of contemporary culture, economics and politics. Further, the politicization of ecological questions certainly colors the whole question of the Gaia hypothesis or worship of mother earth” (2.5). It goes without saying that the pagan ceremonies with which Saint Peter’s Basilica was profaned in honor of the pachamama idol fit perfectly into that “politicization of ecological questions” denounced by the 2003 Vatican document, and which today is instead promoted sine glossa by the so-called Bergoglian magisterium, beginning with Laudato Sì and Fratelli Tutti.

At La Salette, Our Lady warned us: “Rome will lose the Faith and become the seat of the Antichrist.” It will not be the Holy Church, indefectible by the promises of Christ, that will lose the Faith: it will be the sect that occupies the See of Most Blessed Peter and which today we see propagating the anti-gospel of the New World Order. It is no longer possible to remain silent, because today our silence would make us accomplices of the enemies of God and of the human race. Millions of faithful are disgusted by the countless scandals of the Pastors, by the betrayal of their mission, by the desertion of those who by Holy Orders are called to bear witness to the Holy Gospel and not to support the establishment of the kingdom of the Antichrist.

I beg my Brothers in the Episcopate, priests, religious, and in a particular way the faithful laity who see themselves being betrayed by the Hierarchy, to raise their voices so as to express with a spirit of true obedience to Our Lord, Head of the Mystical Body, a firm and courageous denunciation of this apostasy and its authors. I invite everyone to pray that the Divine Majesty may be moved to compassion and intervene in our aid. May the Most Holy Virgin, terribilis ut castrorum acies ordinata, intercede before the Throne of God, compensating with Her merits for the unworthiness of Her children who invoke Her with the glorious title of Auxilium Christianorum.

+ Carlo Maria Viganò, Archbishop

20 April 2021
Feria Tertia infra Hebdomadam II
post Octavam Paschae

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