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Vatican II Architect: Fr. Hans Küng |
Posted by: Stone - 04-06-2021, 02:22 PM - Forum: The Architects of Vatican II
- Replies (7)
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The Angelus - March 1980
Hans Küng
by Father Hector L. Bolduc
THE RECENT condemnation of Hans Küng by the Vatican was welcomed by many. While it is evident that excommunication as a heretic is certainly in order for Küng, who has denied the most basic Catholic dogmas, the fact that it was declared that he cannot be considered a Catholic theologian has far-ranging effects.
What many Catholics fail to grasp by Küng's ouster is that his downfall has shaken the very core of the evil existing within the Church and against which we have waged a tireless battle.
It must be remembered that Küng was the theologian of the Second Vatican Council. He was the theological brain for the German speaking bishops at the Council. Thus he represented the most powerful coalition at the Council, comprised of the bishops of Germany and Austria. Their influence was of such magnitude as to warrant a book, aptly titled The Rhine Flows into the Tiber. Küng also was a personal consultant to many of the most powerful bishops attending Vatican II, including Cardinal Bea, Cardinal Villot, Cardinal Suenens, and was said to have been consulted by a host of American bishops who will certainly blush to have their names associated with their now-deposed hero. Küng was also the advisor for many of the non-Catholic observers, including the Anglicans and a host of Protestant sects. Small wonder that the Anglicans and non-Catholic denominations were the first to come to his defense following his condemnation. Küng was, in fact, the darling of the Liberals, the rising star of the Progressives. The Council was permeated with his thought and saturated with his theological input. Now that Küng's star has been shot down, where does that leave the Council?
It is quite obvious that if the top theologian of the Council, who directed much of its theological content is not Catholic, then the decisions arrived at by that Council are, at the very least, suspect. If Küng cannot be considered a "Catholic" theologian, then can the Council be considered "Catholic"? The obvious answer has to be NO! This is what was wrong with the Council from the very start. Many of those who influenced it were not Catholic. Therefore, much of what came out of the Council was not Catholic. The Vatican, by its denouncement of Kü ng, has admitted this. Whether willingly or unwillingly, the Vatican has now cast doubt upon the instrument which was used to create the greatest single attack on Catholicism, the Second Vatican Council.
The influence of Küng, of course, goes much further than the Council. For years, his books attacking the divinity of Christ, the divine origin of the Church, and papal infallibility, have been the standard texts for Catholic colleges, universities, schools, and seminaries. Many of the priests ordained in recent years cut their teeth on his rubbish. In many Catholic institutions, including the Catholic University of America in Washington, D. C., and especially the Dominican College in that same city, the works of Küng, Chardin, Curran, Schille-beeckx, and Dulles, all either condemned or under investigation by Rome, form the nucleus of courses in the theological department and are standard required reading. These textbooks are not supplements to the course, but the basic texts from which the students are expected to derive the knowledge with which they will minister to the faithful.
It is obvious that if these seminarians are educated with non-Catholic materials (the Vatican says they are not Catholic), then they will, in fact, be un-Catholic in their formation, un-Catholic in their thinking, un-Catholic in the execution of their duties, and most important of all, un-Catholic in what they transmit to the flock from the pulpit and altar. (I would have included the confessional; but the new priest does not bother to hear confessions anymore.)
One would expect that if the American bishops are serious in their claim to recognize the Pope as the sovereign authority within the Church, they, would immediately issue orders that all of Küng's works be removed from Catholic institutions across the country. The exact opposite is, in fact, true. A check shows the works of Küng still on Catholic university reading lists, and still available on the library shelves and in campus bookstores. Moreover, courses based on the works of Küng and his heretical cohorts are prominently listed on university curricula.
When will the bishops decide to back up the Pope? How long will it take the bishops to act to restore the faith of the people? If the bishops claim to be true shepherds and claim to be loyal to the Pope, I challenge them to prove it by taking the following actions:
Quote:1. Publicly acknowledge the errors of Küng, Curran, et al., and publish a warning against them in all Catholic publications.
2. Order the works of Küng, Curran, Chardin, and others removed from all Catholic institutions.
3. Remove Curran, Dulles and all other heretics from their position at Catholic institutions where they are currently using that position and the donations of the faithful to destroy the Church, while leading millions into heresy.
4. Return to the Traditions of the Church which have been approved and recognized by two thousand years of holy popes, martyrs, and saints.
5. Recognize and authorize the return of the Latin Tridentine Mass thus assuring that the supreme Sacrifice, instituted by Christ and purchased by His Precious Blood, will be returned to the altars of the Church and accomplish through its salvific action, the sanctification of the Church and its quick return to normalcy.
When the Holy Mass is restored, and only then, will God restore His blessings to His faithful.
Catholic bishops of America, the challenge has been given. Either prove your loyalty to Rome and your Catholicity by accepting it—or turn in your crosiers and make way for the true Church Militant, whose loyalty is not in question!
[Emphasis mine.]
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The Bugnini File: A Study in Ecclesial Subversion |
Posted by: Stone - 04-06-2021, 01:01 PM - Forum: Vatican II and the Fruits of Modernism
- Replies (1)
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This article has several transcription errors because of it's machine (OCR) conversion from PDF. For example, a capital 'B' may appear as a three, a lowercase 'i' may appear in place of a number one, etc. I have corrected as many as I have noticed using context. Some I cannot correct, such as the correct spelling of some names, etc. But the article is powerful enough even with these imperfections in transcription to understand the full weight of the points being made. - The Catacombs
THE BUGNINI FILE: A STUDY IN ECCLESIAL SUBVERSION
Hannibal Bugninius, magnus architectus novae liturgiae, non solum Novi Ordinis Missae sed etiam Hebdomadae Sanctae “instauratae” anni 1955, ipse iam vivens colendi Magnum Architectum Universi accusatus est. Quamvis evidentia non sit certa, nihilominus gravia argumenta mentem inducunt ad credendum Bugninium massonem fuisse, et conscienter, tamquam agentem inimicorum Ecclesiae, sacram liturgiam diruisse. Evidentiam huius accusationis auctor loannes Weiskittel adducit, simul cum ea praebens historiam coniurationum societatum secretarum quae ut se inter clerum Ecclesiae Catholicae insinuerent iam abhinc ducenti annos sibi proposuerunt.
In April 1976, a book stunned Italian Catholics, and sent shock waves throughout Christendom. The work, printed in Florence and entitled Nel Fumo di Satana. Verso t’ultimo scontro (“In the Smoke of Satan. Towards the Final Clash.”), was a penetrating critique on the state of the Church since the Second Vatican Council.1 Singled out for direct strike was “Archbishop” Annibale Bugnini, C.M. (1912-1982), the Secretary of the Conciliar Congregation for Divine Worship who had presided over the fateful “reform” of the liturgy.
“The reform has been conducted,” charged the book, “by this Bugnini who has been unmasked at last; he is indeed what we long expected: a Freemason.”2 Few allegations made since Vatican II have been more biting — a top Church official accused of being an enemy of the very Church he is sworn to defend. What makes it all the more credible is the author. Tito Casini was no muckraker, but a writer of good reputation, particularly noted for his works on the Mass.3
This revelation did not originate with Casini, however, who was merely reporting an incident from the previous summer, when a priest visited “Pope” Paul VI’s office, plopped on his desk a dossier identifying Bugnini as a Lodge brother, and warned he would go public with the information if action was not taken immediately. Paul appointed Bugnini to the post of Pro – Nuncio of Iran, an assignment as far from scrutiny as was possible, and dissolved the Congregation.
To no ones surprise, this “papal” solution did not rest well with traditionalists, and the threatened disclosures were forthcoming. A month before Casini’s blockbuster, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre declared in his Letter to Friends and Benefactors: “Now, when we hear in Rome that he who was the heart and soul of the liturgical reform is a Freemason, we may think that he is not the only one. The veil covering the greatest deceit ever to have mystified the clergy and baffled the faithful, is doubtless beginning to be torn asunder.”4 In addition, the June 1976 issue of the Italian publication SI, SI, No, No, and four months later, the October edition of the French journal La Contre–reforme catholique, among others, carried the news.5
Meanwhile, Bugnini (pronounced Boo nyee’ nee], who vehemently denied ever having set foot in a lodge, was getting acclimated to life in the Islamic country where he was to remain until shortly before his death.6 The controversy soon abated and was forgotten, but, as he writes in his memoirs, there were some intent on beating a “dead horse”:
Quote:The “bomb” thus fizzled out, but in the ensuing years there was still a desire, especially on the part of the authorities, to conduct a thorough examination of the charges. It was not possible, after all, simply to let doubts, hesitations, and suspicions stand unchallenged; justice and a love of truth [sic] could not accept that. V. Levi’s denial, “Riflessioni di fine settirnana,” L’Osservatore Romano, October 10,1976, elicited further charges in Si, Si, No, No. (The question arises of how such a poisonous, anti-conciliar publication, filled with lies and calumnies, could have prospered, even if directed by a priest, at Grottaferrata, so close to Rome.)7
But last year, a decade after the death of the much-maligned “archbishop,” signs of life have been detected in the old nag, and the bomb is heard ticking again. An Italian-based Conciliar magazine, 30 Days, raised the issue over the summer. A twelve page section, intriguingly entitled “Dossier: Freemasonry and the Application of Liturgical Reform,” promised to answer the controverted question. Did it?
Code Name: “Buan”
“Dear Buan [alleged Masonic code name of Bugnini — JKW] ,” the letter, dated July 14, 1964, began:
Quote:[W]e inform you of the task that the Council of Brothers has established for you in agreement with the Grand Master and the Princes to the throne and we charge you:.,.to spread de—Chrisdanization by confusing rites and languages and to set priests, bishops and cardinals against each other. Linguistic and ritualistic babel means victory for us, since linguistic and ritual unity has been the strength of the Church…Everything must happen within a decade.8
An incriminating document to be sure, perhaps damning. But even more so was the reply allegedly made on July 2, 1967, by Bugnini:
Quote:Peerless Grand Master…the steps towards deconsecration are being taken rapidly. Another Instruction has been issued which went into effect on June 19 last. By now we can claim victory, as die vernacular is sovereign in the whole of the liturgy, even in the most essential parts…There is maximum freedom of choice in the various formularies, allowing for even personal initiative and…chaos…In brief, I believe I have sown the seeds of maximum license with the document, according to your instructions. I had to fight bitterly and make use of every wile to have it approved by the Pope, in the face of my enemies in the Congregation for Rites. Fortunately for us, we won immediate backing from our friends and brothers in the Universa laus, who are loyal. I thank you for the sum sent and in the hope of seeing you soon, I send you my embrace. Your Brother Buan.9
And what does the article’s author, Andrea Tornielli, think of the documents? He at first voices the same uncertainty that many would have in evaluating them:
Quote:Are these documents — highly compromising for the man involved, who always denied any contact with Freemasonry — authentic or forgeries? It is impossible to know since the letters were typewritten, then photocopied by a mysterious “mole” said to have leaked them to certain bishops and cardinals, including the Archbishop of Genoa, Cardinal Giuseppe Siri and the Prefect of the Apostolic Signatura, Dino Staffa. If they are authentic, die letters denote a deliberate attempt to erode Catholic doctrine and liturgy from the inside. But they might also be forgeries, cunningly leaked by someone eager to create rival “factions” within the Curia. There is no doubt that the wording of the two missives seems too crude and blunt. But the outcome of Bugnini’s reforms fully matches the intention expressed in them.10
In the course of the study, however, these ambivalent features are neatly, if obliquely, “resolved” to absolve Bugnini, Paul VI, and company from any wrong doing (mention is made of the “valuable diplomatic work” by Bugnini during his exile in Iran, coincidently the same period of time in which the Shah was overthrown by the Ayatollah Khomeini). In fact, before the article is half over the whole issue seems to be forgotten by the writer. Far more space is devoted to examining how the post—Conciliar liturgy switched from Latin to the vernacular than in exploring the Bugnini affair (Tornielli, having reflected that the “reforms” matched the stated intention of the “Dear Buan” letter, could have gone into this in more depth when talking about the Conciliar liturgy).
Not that the discussion is uninteresting. Quite the contrary, for the material covered includes incidents from Bugnini’s earlier career, as well as his working relationship with Paul VI. Tornielli writes:
Quote:Immediately after the Second World War, Fr. Annibale Bugnini was Secretary of the Liturgical Commission set up by Pius XII to shape the reform of the Holy Week rites. But his reformist bent was of earlier. In 1944 he had asked Msgr. Arrigo Pintonello to translate certain texts on renewal of the liturgy written by German Catholics and Protestants….11
In 1962, Bugnini, who was Secretary of the Pontifical Preparatory Commission on the Liturgy, suffered what he called “my first exile,” when first, the Commission’s head, Cardinal Arcadio Larraona, dismissed him, and then Pope John XXIII “relieved [him| of his post as teacher of Liturgy at the Pontifical Pastoral Institute of the Lateran University.”12 An unidentified “elderly prelate” told 30 Days:
Quote:“They got rid of the secretary because he wanted to change things that were not to be touched and especially because he was not fit tor the task.”13 The “exile” would be brief, however, and Bugnini would later be able to state: “I was a faithful executor of the wishes of Paul VI and of the Council.”14
At times, though, it appeared that Paul VI was the faithful executor of Bugnini’s wishes. Tornielli recalled how in 1967 the pontiff requested (through the Vatican Secretariat of State) that “daily and feastday missals should always contain, if in a smaller font, the Latin text alongside the vernacular translation.”15 This intervention was rejected for “technical reasons.” Why? The answer is supplied by Paul’s loyal innovator, Annibale Bugnini: “The principle, good in itself, ran into enormous difficulties: the excessive size of liturgical books, technical difficulties, especially for certain countries that do not even use Latin characters….”16 In the end, the latter position won out.
This episode is enlightening for a number of reasons. From the standpoint of the “reformers,” the faster Latin was jettisoned, the faster their novel lex orandi could fully replace the real Catholic liturgy. Since an all-vernacular new “Mass” was the ultimate goal, and ancient, venerable Latin prayers were cast aside to make way for modern ones (which had, at best, only a tenuous relationship with former traditional orations), why should these liturgical editors even consider the additional fuss and expense involved with publishing bilingual volumes? If the whole purpose of the “reform” was to dispense with Latin completely, why bother to include it in the new sacramentaries at all? As for Paul Vis reaction, it was the subterfuge typical of Conciliar “popes” in every area of religious life. Despite the fact that he lived for more than a decade after this intervention, Pope Montini did nothing to halt the liturgical revolution. Far from making anything resembling a comeback, Latin was pushed further and further into the background, a policy that John Paul II — his televised Latin Christmas Masses notwithstanding— has done nothing to change.
The 30 Days feature also includes a brief interview with Bugnini’s friend and liturgical collaborator Father Gottardo Pasqualetti, who helped him edit his memoirs and supplied a foreword for them. In response to a question from Andrea Tornielli concerning the details of the Iran exile, he states:
Quote:It was a real tragedy for Bugnini. The most painful thing about it for him was that he was removed without being told the reasons for it. Even when the Pope [sic] gave him an audience no mention was made of it. According to Bugnini the decision was brought about by a conspiracy based on forged documents concerning his alleged Masonic membership.17
Pasqualetti dismisses the suggestion that Paul VI signed the notorious General Instruction to the New Order of the Mass without carefully reading it. While allowing for the possibility “that something slipped the Pope’s attention [such as the heretical Article 7, perhaps?— JKW],” he emphasizes the fact that Bugnini and Paul VI “spent many hours together revising all the texts.”18 Despite such close collaboration, Pasqualetti maintains that part of the reason for Bugnini’s exile had to do with pressure the Vatican was experiencing over the Novus Ordo Missae, and that afterwards a campaign was launched to undo the secretary’s work. “In 1975,” he says, “not only was the former secretary of the Consilium ousted, but every trace of him was obliterated and what he had created was destroyed. Still today, when prelates in the Congregation for Divine Worship speak of the years of the liturgical reform, they avoid mentioning Bugnini.19 And Tornielli concludes his article on a similar note, writing how Bugnini’s departure supposedly signaled a marked contrast from the earlier “glory years” of liturgical “reform”: “Something went irremediably wrong after that period. It was Paul VI, once so trusting of Bugnini, who ousted him in the years after the Council. The reform could be said to have well and truly come to an end.”20
In the final analysis, the 30 Days cover story proves to be less an expose than a tease. Little of the text deals with the provocative topic promised in the title; instead, the reader is furnished with details of the “reform” in light of Vatican II, how missals and breviaries became “delatinized,” and a history of the Consilium, The subject of Freemasonry and its infiltration of the Church receive only a passing glance. What could have been an in-depth examination of the scandal and just how “the outcome of Bugnini’s reforms fully matches the intentions expressed in [the two contested letters],” as well as a valuable contribution to understanding Masonic machinations, ends up as merely an exercise in journalistic sleight of hand that reveals nothing really new about the subject.
The Occupied Church
Unlike the 30 Days spread, the present article will not flinch when confronted with the issue. Although Bugnini’s involvement with, secret societies may be forever shrouded in the darkness associated with those cabals, it is still possible to make educated inferences based upon what is known. It is far too important for Catholics to be able to identify the contours of the shadow army that is waging a relentless war against the Church to dismiss such allegations without a careful consideration of these facts.
So what is to be concluded about Bugnini? While many reputable sources readily believed his guilt, the charges did not go unchallenged. “Was he a Mason, or wasn’t he? (Perhaps only his Grand Master, assuming he had one, knew for sure.) Was he sincere in his denial or merely covering his tracks? Bugnini s secret — if there was one — went with him to the grave. Given the lack of a public confession on his part, and a similar lack of uncontested evidence linking him to the group, the natural conclusion is to declare the issue stalemated, and leave it at that.
It is true that, aside from the disputed dossier, there is no direct proof of Bugnini’s involvement with the Lodge. Still, there are other avenues of investigation that can be made. If his membership cannot be definitively proven, there is substantial indirect evidence to link him with the Lodge or, at least, to demonstrate that what he implemented bears a striking resemblance to the stated goals of the Church’s declared enemies.
In 1975, the French author Jacques Ploncard d’Assac wrote a book with the provocative title, L’Eglise Occupee (The Occupied Church). The thesis of the study is explained by him as follows: “If one succeeds in demonstrating that all the ‘novelties’ which trouble the Church today are nothing but past errors which have repeatedly been condemned by Rome, one will be able to conclude that the Church, at this end of the 20th century, is occupied by a strange sect, exactly as a country is able to be occupied by art enemy army.”21 He begins a chapter entitled “A Secret Society Within The Church?” by stating:
Quote:The idea of infiltrating the Church, in order to sway its doctrine and control its hierarchy, strange as it may seem, has never ceased to obsess the various occult sects. The best—known attempts of accomplishing this end were those of the “Illuminati” of Bavaria in the i8th century, and that of the Alta Vendita in the 19th.
In 1906 there appeared in Paris the French translation of a book by the Italian author Antonio Fogazzaro entitled Il Santo — The Saint. Only mediocre by novelistic standards, the book would undoubtedly have passed into oblivion were it not that it served to propagate the tenets and methods of the modernist sect.
And these were astonishing enough; the plan consisted in nothing less than establishing a secret society within the very bosom of the Church, in view of seizing control of the highest positions in the hierarchy, so as to bring about an evolution of the Church in conformity with the ideas of the modern age.22
It is upon this demonstrable premise (of enemies seeking to burrow into the Church, the better to destroy her) that any consideration of the Bugnini case must begin. Otherwise, critics will readily dismiss talk of a Masonic prelate as simply the paranoid fantasy of traditional Catholics. Regarding the assembling of the following evidence, there are certain points to be kept in mind. First, nothing was used that could reasonably be rejected as fraudulent or questionable. Much of it is taken from pre-Conciliar Vatican sources, or captured secret society documents that the Holy See deemed authentic, and ordered the publication thereof. Second, other documents are cited that, though not ruled on by the Church, are public in nature. These include printed statements by the Masons and their professed allies. In short, what is to be considered is fact, and it is from this fact that some rays of light can be cast on the Bugnini affair.
Planned Subversion by Christ’s Enemies
The modern movement to eradicate the Roman Catholic Church can be traced to the mid-1700s, when a group of fervent and vocal apostates came together during the so-called Enlightenment. While “freethinkers” could be found at that time throughout Europe ridiculing every Church teaching and practice, the foul center from which the attacks emanated was France, particularly in those false intellectuals responsible for writing and editing the infamous Encyclopedie (or, in English, Encyclopedia). The guiding light of the Encyclopaedists was one Francois Marie Arouet, better known to the world by his nom de plume — Voltaire.
Like many of the Encyclopaedists, Voltaire was a Freemason. For fifty years he invariably closed his letters to fellow radicals with the motto, “ecrasons nous I’infame” (“let us crush the wretch” — meaning defeat Christ and His Church). This infernal hatred of Catholicism to which, nevertheless, he nominally adhered, wedded to literary genius, led the celebrated Catholic writer, Jacques Cretineau-Joly to describe him as “the most perfect incarnation of Satan the world ever saw.”23 The following incident involving Voltaire is related by Monsignor George Dillon: “A lieutenant of police once said to him that, notwithstanding all he wrote, he should never be able to destroy Christianity. ‘That is exactly what we shall see’, he replied.”24
The attacks of Voltaire and the Encyclopaedists had a profound effect on the intellectual climate of France, and helped spark the social fomentation that would culminate in the great bloodletting of the 1789 Revolution. Their contribution in so advancing the aims of Freemasonry has not been lost on the Lodge. Father Clarence Kelly, in his study Conspiracy Against God & Man, quotes from an address given at the 1904 Congress of the Grand Orient as follows:
Quote:In the eighteenth century the glorious line of Encyclopaedists formed in our temples a fervent audience which was then alone in invoking the radiant device as yet unknown to the crowd: “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.” The revolutionary seed quickly germinated amid this elite. Our illustrious Freemasons d’Alembert, Diderot, Helevcius, d’Holbach, Voltaire, Condorcet, completed the evolution of minds and prepared the new era. And when the Bastille fell, Freemasonry had the supreme honour of giving to humanity the charter (i.e., the Declaration of the Rights of Man) which it had elaborated with devotion. (Applause.)25
And yet, despite the scarlet sea they helped precipitate, these antichrists never failed to hide behind pious affectations or veiled language when the occasion warranted such duplicity. Monsignor Dillon writes of Voltaire:
Quote:Voltaire, “the most perfect incarnation of Satan the world ever saw. ”
He was also, as the school he left behind has been ever since, a hypocrite. Infidel to the heart’s core, he could, whenever it suited his purpose, both practice, and even feign a zeal for religion. On the expectation of a pension from the King, he wrote M. Argental, a disciple of his, who reproached him with his hypocrisy and contradictions in conduct. “If I had a hundred thousand men I know well what I would do; but as I have not got them I will go to communion at Easter and you may call me a hypocrite as long as you wish.” And Voltaire, on getting his pension, went to communion the year following….26
Following the lead of their mentor, the Encylopaedists were quite skilled in the art of artifice, their impious lies hidden in a forest of ambiguities and code words. Gustave Combes, in his book Revival of Paganism, states that they employed all their ingenuity in veiling their attacks so that the state authorities might not become alarmed or the general reader be on his guard. One of the most illustrious of the compilers, d’Alembert, speaks of “this secret war” which stealthily undermined that it might better destroy. Naigeon and Condorcet speak of “those insinuating articles” where “one tramples religious prejudices under foot without seeming to do so at all,” where “the respected errors” are betrayed systematically by the “weakness of their proofs,” where they are staggered by “the proximity of truths which penetrate to the very roots of their falsity.”27
This all sounds very reminiscent of the Modernists’ methods a century later.28 Although the careful Catholic of today could see through much of the Encyclopedia’s mendacity, it nevertheless deceived many in its era. Combes writes:
Quote:The reader cannot help feeling that atheism taints every line. But on the whole the Encyclopedia is so discreet and good-natured that he feels reluctant to condemn it as subversive unless he reads so attentively that he discovers its true meaning and the savage nature of the attack. Furthermore, this atheism appears in places where the reader would least expect it; for example, under headings that have no bearing on any religious subject. In these scholarly articles, essentially harmless, the Encyclopedia displays its most venomous criticisms of “Christian fanaticism.”
But whether its doctrine is expressed stealthily or openly, whether it takes the form of irony or invective, in any case it has but one purpose: to smite Christianity on every flank, to undermine the foundations of civilization without a thought of mercy, to destroy all authority and every sound principle. To accomplish this purpose, it marshaled ail the forces of irreligion that had been secretly spreading through the world during the previous two centuries, and turned to their own account all the charges that had been made against the Church. The Encyclopedia brought into one place all the arguments and refutations by the anti-religious philosophers, forming a vast summa that set itself up triumphantly against the Summa of St. Thomas; a new gospel sprung from the depths of the human mind, which was intended to supplant that Gospel supposedly revealed by God. It was, in fact, to be the herald of a new era which it would bring to the world.29[
Corrupting the Faithful through Bad Clergy
The point of this rather lengthy digression is to emphasize that with the Enlightenment Satan’s war against Christ moved into a new phase. Through most of the Church’s history, a heretic, when exposed, would then openly commence to assail her. But this changed with Voltaire and his disciples. No longer (with a few notable exceptions) would the enemies of the Church launch into frontal attacks against her; henceforth the plan would be to subtly deride her teachings and authority — and, when possible, to internally subvert her. Instead of rattling off the usual string of vituperations, they would remain like a viper at the bosom of the Church, and, when confronted with their errors, throw up their hands in mock surprise, exclaiming, “Surely, you can’t believe I meant that.” Then, unless thoroughly exposed, they steadfastly (if falsely) professed the orthodoxy of their beliefs and their undying fidelity with Rome. Just a bit more elucidation on this point in order to show its progression up to Vatican II.
This change was manifested almost immediately. During the French Revolution, when most faithful bishops and priests were going underground to save their heads, a new breed of clergy emerged, who had no scruples about trying to tie the Revolutionary — and utterly un-Catholic — slogan “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” with the Church. While these “Constitutional clergy,” as they were called, made the pretense of loyalty to all things Catholic, the ruse did not last very long. Pope Pius VI suspended them, and forbade the faithful to receive the sacraments from them. As early as 1775, with his first encyclical Inscrutabile, the same pontiff had warned about Masonry’s infiltration, not only in the highest levels of civil government, but even into the clerical ranks 30 Nine years before this, Pope Clement XIII, in his antimasonic encyclical, Christianas Reipubliciz.
Salus, strongly suggested the same:
Quote:“The enemy of all Good has sown the evil seed in the field of the Lord and the evil has grown rapidly, to such an extent that it threatens to destroy the harvest. It is time to cut it down.”31
Pius’ immediate successor, Pius VII, seeing the rise of a related secret society, the Carbonari, exposed their duplicity when he wrote:
Quote:“They affect a special obedience and wondrous zeal for the Catholic faith, and for the person and teaching of Our Lord Jesus Christ, whom they sometimes impiously dare to call the ruler of their society, and their great teacher.”32
Nevertheless, despite the Vatican’s crackdown on the “Constitutional clergy” (which was perhaps too mild), a pernicious pattern was set, and the enemies saw no reason to abandon it.
The revolutionary clerics in France were but the outward manifestation of a larger clandestine movement radiating through all of Europe. Their transformation, in fact, mirrors what was also being propagated in Germany. Bavarian police in 1785 seized and published documents of a radical anti-Christian group it had suppressed, the secret Illuminati cult. In those writings, Adam Weishaupt, an apostate ex-university professor, and the leader of the Illuminati, taught a form of “liberation theology” almost two hundred years before it became fashionable in Conciliar circles:
Quote:Let Christians believe that our Lord Jesus Christ was the great inventor of the Masonic trinomial, “liberty, equality, and fraternity,”that this is the doctrine He taught, but that it must be understood with the teachings of the sects. Our doctrine is the very divine doctrine Jesus Christ taught His disciples [sic — JKW] and whose intimate and real meaning belongs to the secret discourses of the lodges….[Here we have the cabala.] This doctrine gives the whole human race the means to attain complete freedom….Nobody has opened ways so safe to freedom as our great Jesus of Nazareth.33
The suppression of the Illuminati, however, did not spell an end to such activities. In 1846 Pope Pius IX authorized the publication of the documents of the Alta Vendita, which had been confiscated by the Pontifical Government. This group, commonly thought to be the governing body of continental Freemasonry at the time, made the following prediction: Quote:“Our ultimate end is that of Voltaire and of the French Revolution — the final destruction of Catholicism, and even of the Christian idea. The work we have undertaken is not the work of a day, nor of a month, nor of a year. It may last many years, a century, perhaps; in our ranks the soldier dies; but the fight goes on….34
What could have stimulated it to have made such a bold long-range forecast? The answer: The commitment to a prolonged infestation of the Church.
This Permanent Instruction, as it was called, made it clear to the initiates that to achieve its goal the Lodge must triumph over and utterly destroy the Holy See, because anything short of this would mean “the Christian idea…, if left standing on the ruins of Rome, would be the resuscitation of Christianity later on.” 35 How did the Alta Vendita think it could accomplish such an objective? A key to the scheme involved initiating behind the scenes what today would be called smear (or disinformation) campaigns against the most ardent defenders of the Faith amongst Church hierarchy. Noting that “a word can sometimes kill a man,” the conspirators suggest that meddlesome clergy be dealt with in the following manner:
Quote:If he is in advance, a declared enemy,…envelope him in all the snares which you can place beneath his feet; create for him one of those reputations which will frighten little children and old women; paint him cruel and sanguinary; recount, regarding him, some traits of cruelty which can easily be engraved in the minds of the people. When foreign journals shall gather for us these recitals [planted, of course, by the Lodge itself—JKW), which they will embellish in their turn (inevitably because of their respect for truth [sic]), show, or rather cause to be shown, by some respectable fool those papers where the names and the excesses of the personages implicated are related. As France and England, so Italy will never he wanting in facile pens which know how to employ themselves in these lies so useful to a good cause. With a newspaper, the language of which they do not understand, but in which they will see the name of dieir delegate or judge, the people have no need of other proofs. They are in the infancy of liberalism; they believe in liberals, as later on, they will believe in us, not knowing very well why.-“36
A Freemasonic Altar
Lest there, be any mistake, “members” of the Alta Vendita were obliged to make every effort to appear as faithful Catholics. In mapping out their plan for the destruction of the Catholic • Church, the secret masters of this dark brotherhood taught:
Quote:[T]o attain more certainly to that result,…we must not pay attention to those braggarts of Frenchmen, those cloudy Germans, those melancholy Englishmen, all of who imagine they can kill Catholicism, now with an impure song, then with an illogical deduction; at another time, with a sarcasm smuggled in like the cottons of Great Britain, Catholicism has a life much more tenacious than that. It has seen the most implacable, most terrible adversaries, and it has often had the malignant pleasure of throwing holy water un the tombs of the most enraged. Let us permit, then, our brethren oj these countries to give themselves up to the sterile intemperance of their anti-Catholic zeal. Let them mock at our Madonnas and our apparent devotion. With this passport u>e can conspire at our ease, and arrive little by little at the end we have in view [italics added].37
Further on, the point is again hammered home:
Quote:“If it pleases you, in order the better to deceive the inquisitorial eye, to go often to confession, you are as by right authorized to preserve the most absolute silence regarding these things. You know tliat the least revelation, that the slightest indicadon escaped from you in the tribunal of penance, or elsewhere, can bring on great calamities and that the sentence of death is already pronounced upon the reveaier, whether voluntary or involuntary.”38
Here, then, are the methods by which the Church’s enemies sought to .bring her to nought: feign devotion, but subtly sow seeds of contempt for those in positions of authority, with the aim of subverting her. There is even more to this devilry, for the Permanent Instruction, all the while emphasizing this mock Catholicism, continues:
Quote:That reputation will open the way for our doctrines to pass to the bosoms of the young clergy, and go even to the depths of convents. In a few years the young clergy will have, by force of events, invaded all the functions. They will form the council of the Sovereign. They will be called upon to choose the Pontiff who will reign; and that Pontiff, like the greater part of his contemporaries, will be necessarily imbued with the Italian and humanitarian principles which we are about to put into circulation….38
But the plot against the Church was, of course, already in full stride. As early as 1806, the Abbe Augustin Barruel, a “papist” priest who was forced to flee France during the Revolution, presented to Pius VII details of the anti-catholic conspiracy’s program, which had been obtained from a former member of the sect. His Holiness not only acknowledged their authenticity, but went so far as to warn the faithful by quoting from them. Relevant to the study in question is the following article derived therefrom:
Quote:4. That, on our Italian soil, they had already recruited as members more than 800 ecclesiastics [italics added — JKW], both secular and regular, among whom there were many parsons, professors, prelates, and some bishops and cardinals; and that, as a result, they did not relinquish having a Pope of their own party.39
Then in 1845, Pope Gregory XVIs Secretary of State, Cardinal Tommaso Pernetti, revealed in a letter the awful reality:
Quote:Our young clergy is already imbued with liberal ideas. …They have abandoned serious studies. Most of the priests who wiil succeed us in the leading positions are a thousand cirnes more plagued by the liberal vice…; most of them do not know the nature of the things that are taking place and let themselves be influenced by suggestions from which spring forth the great crises of the Church. The same spirit of discord is to be found everywhere among the pries ts,…They have broken with the past to become new men. The spirit of the sects replaces the true love of neighbor, and individual pride is growing in the dark.40
And who, objectively examining these remarks (and the spiritual fallout of Vatican II), cannot instantly see a parallel with the following Alta Vendita command:
Quote: “Make men’s hearts vicious and corrupt, and you will no longer have Catholics.
Draw away the priests from the altars, and from the the practice of virtue. Strive to fill their time with other matters…it is the corruption of the masses we have undertaken — the corruption of the people through the clergy, and the clergy by us — the corruption which ought one day to enable us to lay the Church in the tomb….41
The preceding excerpts from the Church and her enemies make it clear that a protracted war was the intent; a conflict that would ultimately lead to the Church’s dissolution. Equally evident is the fact that these infidels would attempt to destroy her from within. And that long before Vatican II they had already made considerable headway in their intrigue.
Setting Their Sights on Rome
How successful have they been? Before going on, a point raised in the previous texts needs to be underscored: The goal of these subversives was to penetrate to the highest levels of the Church, and, if possible, to set up a pseudo-hierarchy of their own choosing. “The Pope,” they maintain, “will never come to the secret societies. It is for the secret societies to corne first to the Church, in the resolve to conquer the two.”42 What they desired was nothing short of a controlling interest in how the Holy See would be ruled, but they did not allow themselves to expect too much:
Quote:We do not mean to win die Popes to our cause, to make them neophytes of our principles, and propagators of our ideals. That would be a ridiculous dream, no matter what manner of events may turn. Should cardinals or prelates, for example, enter, willingly or by surprise, in some manner, into some part of our secrets, it would be by no means a motive to desire their elevation to the See of Peter. That elevation would destroy us….43
What was sought was “a Pope according to our wants” — in other words, a Pope who could be swayed and manipulated to their ends.44 While that subject is worthy of note (and perhaps can be explored in depth on another occasion), its relevance to the current discussion is how it was to be brought about. As shown above, the means of execution would be a generation ot clergy imbued with the poisonous doctrines of the Lodge — a stratagem that was already being implemented a century-and-a-half ago, at a time [shudder] when strong Popes sat upon the Chair of Peter!
The statements of one such priest, an Abbe Roca (1830-1893), are of great importance to an understanding of conspiratorial thinking, as he wrote and spoke openly and at great length about these aims. Read in light of what has occurred since Vatican II, much of what he had to say sounds almost prophetic. He was, to quote worst kind of apostate, and was a member of the most important secret societies, and an element consciously disposed to destroy the Church.”’45
According to Dr. Rudolf Graber, a traditionally-oriented Conciliar bishop in Germany:
Quote:[Roca’s] name is not to be found in either theological and ecclesiastical dictionaries or the Freemason’s Dictionary. He was born in Perpignan in France, where he attended the Carmelite school, was ordained to the priesthood in 1858 and made an honorary canon in 1869. He travelled to Spain, the United States of America, Switzerland and Italy. He was very well—versed in the occult sciences and disseminated extensive propaganda, in particular among the youth. Because of this he came into conflict with Rome. Despite being excommunicated he continued his activities, preached revolution and proclaimed the coming of the “divine synarchy [a term coined by Roca to signify rule by his hoped—for occult “Catholic” church — jfcw]” under a Pope converted to scientific Christianity. He speaks of a new, enlightened Church influenced by the socialism of Jesus and the Apostles….46
Rocas version of Christ had much in common with the later evolutionary pantheism of Teilhard de Chardin; so similar are they that one could easily mistake one for the other. For example, speaking in 1889 in Paris at the International Spiritualist Congress, sponsored by the Grand Orient Masons of France, Roca declared:
Quote:With the world and because He is the world, Christ evolves and becomes transformed. Nobody will ever be able to stop Christ’s whirlwind. Nobody will be able to brake the course of evolution that Christ leads all over the world and [that] will overwhelm everything. The dogmas evolve with it, since they are living things, like the world, like man, like all organic beings. Since they are echoes of the collective conscience, they follow, as it does, the course of history.47
In like manner, he claimed about the Savior’s Person: “An incarnation of the uncreated reason to the created reason, a manifestation of the absolute in the relative, the personal Christ is a central symbol, a sort of physical hieroglyph who always speaks and acts in a peculiar [sic] way. He is the Man-Book mentioned by both the Kabbala and the Apocalypse.”48
The notion of dogmas evolving is, of course, textbook Modernism, as is the premise that Jesus’ life is more important in its subjective symbolism for believers than in its objective reality 49 Such an unexpected harmony of teachings gives all the more reason to leave open the very real possibility of a hidden bond between Masonry and Modernism (the latter, say, being specifically devised in the Synagogue of Satan as a particularly formidable weapon with which to wound the Church). Roca once boasted that a thousand apostate priests like him had remained inside the Church to sow the seeds of her downfall.50 An exaggeration? Perhaps. But before it be too hastily dismissed, other points need to be considered that strengthen its credibility.
First, there are testimonies given by such loyal Catholic clergymen as Cardinal Bernetti and Abbe Barruel of a massive number of priests in the Church who were either conscious infiltrators, or else utterly saturated in their thinking with errors being spread by the Lodges. And second, the extent to which Modernists were found to have proliferated less than twenty years after Roca’s claim must not be forgotten. Saint Pius X, in Pascendi, alludes to a situation which could never have occurred had there not already been a significant penetration of this fifth column into Catholic seminaries. The Modernists, he writes:
Quote:, “are the more mischievous the less they keep in the open,” and include “many…[in] the ranks of the priesthood itself, who, animated by a false zeal for the Church, [are] lacking the solid safeguards of philosophy and theology, nay more, thoroughly imbued with the poisonous doctrines taught by the enemies of the Church [italics added].”51
When many priests are discovered, who not only are deficient in such crucial subjects, but who also sound like Freemasons and the like in their pronouncements, it is hardly rash to question the seminaries. Were it but a handful of such priests identified, they could be considered anomalies that had somehow managed to get themselves ordained. But when it becomes evident that many of them existed, the onus must fall principally on seminaries for having given them a false formation. During Saint Pius1 war against Modernism, he ordered apostolic visitations of every diocese in Italy. Carlo Falconi writes: “many [of these visits] resulted in the closing down of seminaries [italics added], the removal of eminent ecclesiastics, and uncompromising reports on the bishops.”52 Such a process of uprooting the noxious weeds needed to be carried out on a thorough worldwide basis, but this program of purifying the seminaries effectively came to an end with the saint’s death in 1914.
If, for the sake of argument, Pius X had done nothing else of real significance during his years as Pope besides engaging these subversives in combat the way he did, such an heroic effort certainly would be of itself a. strong reason for his canonization, and equally compelling grounds for according him status as one of the greatest defenders of the faith of all time. But his attempt to expose the perpetrators was, alas, a question of too little, too late. Unfortunately, he was trying to fight in little more than a decade, a condition that had a century or more to fester. However valiantly Saint Pius strove to remedy the situation, he was faced with a task that, humanly speaking, was next to impossible. Even with divine aid, the work was arduous, as already he was faced with a sizable part of the hierarchy that viewed the crisis with relative indifference, and others who, in varying degrees, actually supported the calls for change. The Modernists’ triumph finally took place after his death, for not one of his successors exhibited his attentiveness, his fighting spirit, or his profound insights into the truly grave state in which the Church found herself (perhaps they were deluded by the widespread false reports, believed by far too many, that the fight was over — a deceit that, arguably, was the Modernists’ greatest victory}. But these traits were absolutely obligatory for a Vicar of Christ in those crucial years, if the battle was to be won by the forces of good. Sadly, they were largely found wanting in those pontiffs. Whatever praise justly can be given his successors, the fact remains that the utmost degree of vigilance was not maintained, and, consequently, the very cradles of the priesthood had become nurseries of the revolution.
Roca foresaw this to a great extent. The infiltrators, he taught, would soon be strong enough to cause a split within the Church. They were to create a faction to do battle with traditional priests: “By now they [traditional and subversive priests] form a ring, which will break in the middle, and each of its halves will form a new ring. The schism is about to occur whereby there will be a ‘progressivism’ ring and a ‘reactionary’ ring.”53 While no literal schism occurred, there is ample evidence that a virtual one was already forming.54 But only in 1962, with the commencement of Vatican II, would this rupture begin to make itself fully manifest.
Far more telling as far as Bugnini is concerned, Roca, in a book entitled Abbe Gabriel, saw into the future with a truly diabolical foreknowledge:
Quote:I feel that divine worship, as regulated by the liturgy, ceremonies, rites, and rulings of the Roman Church, will suffer a transformation soon, at an ecumenical council [italics added]. It will return the Church to the venerable simplicity of the apostolic golden age, and will harmonize it with the new stage of modern conscience and civilization.”55
Elsewhere, he would declare:
Quote:And we priests, let us pray for, bless, and glorify the wonderful task of bringing about the scientific, economic, and social transfiguration of our religious mysteries, symbols, dogmas, and sacraments [italics added]. Maybe you do not realize our forms are outdated and we are worn out, abandoned by the Spirit and alone; our hands are full of empty shells and dead letters.56
Correspondingly, the agenda presented in Modernist Antonio Fogazzaro’s // Santo includes many clandestine elements of its own. The novel’s conspirators realize that to accomplish their “renewal” of the Church, absolute secrecy is required until sufficient numbers have been won over to the cause. In one passage, a member outlines both the group’s objectives and fears to // Santa’s “hero,” Giovanni Selva:
Quote:We probably all agree that the Catholic Church can be compared to an old temple which, originally of noble simplicity and great religious spirituality, has been disfigured and overloaded with all kinds of ornamentation and stucco-work during the course of the 7th, 8th and 9th centuries….But I cannot believe that we all agree as to the quality and quantity of the remedial measures. And I should therefore hold it to be more appropriate to come to an agreement on the nature of die reforms before preceding to the establishment of this Catholic Freemasonry. Indeed, I wish to go further. I believe that even if your ideas were in complete agreement, I should not advise you to bind yourselves by a tangible bond. My misgivings are of a very delicate nature. You confidently believe that you can swim under water like cautious fish and do not bear in mind that the sharp eye of the exalted Fisherman or one of his representatives can very well detect you and catch you with a well-aimed harpoon….57
Selva responds that strength is to be found in unity:
Quote:Isolated, each of us can be struck down: today, for example, Professor Dane; tomorrow, Dom Fare”; the day after, Dom Clement. But the day when the imaginary harpoon is launched, and upon being drawn back is found to have attached to it not only prominent lay persons, but also priests, monks, some bishops and perhaps even cardinals, who, pray tell, will be the fisherman, great as he may be, that will not out of fright let the harpoon fall back into the water with all that is attached to it?”58
Jacques Plocard d’Assac writes:
Quote:The plan is clear: they must influence enough minds with their ideas that Rome (i.e., the Pope, referred to as the Great Fisherman) will hesitate to condemn. When that day comes, the Church will have been conquered from within, the victim of public opinion — and the modernists know only too well that they are able to forge such public opinion, and that is their task.59
While Fogazzaro places his characters in then-contemporary society, he would almost certainly have known that he was not the first to advance such views. He calls for a prolonged struggle, spelled out so many times before in conspiratorial literature:
Quote:We are only a small group of Catholics, both in Italy and outside of Italy, clergy and laity, who desire a reform in the Church…In order to achieve this, we must CREATE AN OPINION WHICH WILL LEAD THE LEGITIMATE AUTHORITY OF THE CHURCH TO ACT ACCORDING TO OUR VIEWS, be it twenty, thirty, or even fifty years…60
In 1908, Free-masonry was sufficiently confident of realizing its objective that one of its leaders, J.M. Jourdan, could publicly declare: “The goal is no longer the destruction of the Church but rather to make use of it by infiltrating it.”61′ By the end of Vatican II, the Lodge was positively ecstatic. Yves Marsaudon, State Minister of the Supreme Council of Prance (Scottish Rite Masons), would then exalt:
Quote:The sense of universal ism that is rampant in Rome these days is very close to our purpose of existence. Thus, we are unable to ignore the Second Vatican Council and its consequences… With all our hearts we support the “Revolution of John XXIII” …This courageous concept of the Freedom of Thought that lies at the core of our Freemasonic lodges, has spread in a truly magnificent manner right under the Dome of Saint Peters…62
But Marsaudon does not stop with this. Even more incriminating is the following:
Burn in our Masonic Lodges, freedom of expression has now spread over the Dome of St. Peter’s…this is the Revolution of Paul VI. It is clear that Paul VI, not content merely to follow the policy of his predecessor, does in fact go much further… [italics added — JKW]. 63
Treason in the Church
When Archbishop Lefebvre ordained 16 priests at Econe Switzerland in June 1978, an article appeared with this byline in the Italian daily, // Giornale di Bergamo. Entitled “Why We Rebel,” it was a defense of his stand against Conciliar Rome and a rejection of its attacks on him and his Society of Saint Pius X. The article contained some of the Archbishop’s strongest criticisms of Vatican II, including this scathing accusation of betrayal in high places:
Quote:We say in all conscience we are not obliged to submit to the suppression ofEcone because we see behind the way in which the order originated a hand which is not that of the Church, an attitude lacking in all respect far Canon Law which is not the attitude of the Church. We are forced to believe it is the enemy penetrated into the Church which orders this suppression and that the enemy is Freemasonry.
The constant progress of heresy and apostasy farces us to recognize Masonic influence in the Roman Curia and even the presence of a Masonic lodge within the Vatican itself. There is now… a veritable occupation of the Vatican by a counter—Church born of Protestantism and determined to spread all the errors which the popes have condemned for the last 400 years.64
If Archbishop Lefebvre was right in his contention, the foulest plot ever launched against the Church has achieved much of its objective. Surely, considering the substantial destruction of Christian tradition experienced in the last three decades, it would be, in Michael Davies’ words, “stretching coincidence a little too far to insist that the correspondence of what is happening now with what the secret societies have been aiming at is mere chance.”65 Before tying all of this in directly with the Bugnini controversy, two more examples from the twentieth century are in order to demonstrate how the Church has been infiltrated.
The first case is famous, due to the unusual use of a veto from a secular ruler to decide a papal election. In 1903, three years before // Santo was condemned by Rome, a conclave was convoked to elect a successor to Pope Leo XIII. In early balloting, the leading candidate was Cardinal Mariano Rampolla, Leo’s Secretary of State. Although he received enough votes for election, Rampolla never uttered the Accepto required to make him Pope. For, before he was given the opportunity, Poland’s Cardinal Jan Puzyna of Cracow, acting in behalf of Austro—Hungarian Emperor Franz Joseph, rose to invoke a veto, which, all but forgotten, was nevertheless honored.
No explanation for the veto was asked at that time, nor was any given. Some speculated that there were political motives, as Rampolla had used his office to encourage — among other things — friendlier relations between the Holy See and France, and no doubt such considerations factored into the decision to oppose him. Years later, however, an even more significant reason emerged: Franz Joseph, it was said, had discovered that Rampolla was a Mason. There is little, if anything, to show that Cardinal Giuseppe Sarto, who was then elected Pope Saint Pius X, knew of this membership. But it is instructive to consider that one of his very first acts as Pope was to replace Rampolla as Secretary of State with the Spanish prelate, Cardinal Raphael Merry del Val.
Admittedly, nothing can be made of this per se, except that Pius did not accept the claims of the pro-Rampolla camp that he was irreplaceable as a papal diplomat. And yet, the election of Saint Pius and Rampolla’s dismissal, providential acts of the Holy Ghost, assured the condemnation of Modernism. Just as importantly, this, in turn, has proven crucial in giving today’s Catholic resistance the infallible footing upon which to attack the whole Vatican II-engendered religion.
Cardinal Rampolla is not the only cleric with ties to the Holy See who has been accused of being an infiltrator. Approximately half a century after the fateful 1903 conclave an incident took place that, while less celebrated than the Rampolla affair, was far more verifiable. In his book on Communism’s war against Christianity, The Church in Today’s Catacombs, Sergiu Grossu, a Paris-based Rumanian refugee, quotes Pierre de Villemarest (from a study entitled “Soviet Espionage in France”) concerning an all but forgotten — but extremely important — episode in recent Church history. The full text will be given because it not only illuminates a crucial discovery in the pre-Conciliar Church and evidence of a continuation of this subversion after the Council, but also because it demonstrates that enemies of the Church (Communist; Masonic; Modernist) have employed a similar — and, perhaps, interlocking— strategy to destroy her:
In the early fifties NATO Secret Services discovered that, within the usual network of espionage and counter—espionage, the Soviets had set up a department especially for the penetration of churches. In satellite countries the goal had been set in 1945: infiltrate the churches in order to control, if not dissolve, them. In 1949 a second objective was grafted to the first: penetrate the Western, Catholic, and Orthodox churches exactly as other specialists penetrate Moslem, Protestant, and other groups; then on the one hand look for fellow travelers, on the other to recruit agents.
This slow penetration of the churches in order to dissolve them from inside and lead them to revise the foundations of their dogma is a doubly subversive task and depends exclusively on espionage. Agents are, of course, selected with extreme care…
At the beginning of the fifties, a Jesuit priest and professor of theology at the Gregorian University was caught in the act of stealing documents from the vault where the secret records of the Vatican are kept. His name is Alighiero Tondi. He was the secretary ofMsgr. Montini, who was then a direct collaborator of Pius XII and is today no less a figure than Pope [sic] Paul VI.
An investigation has been going on for some time under the direction of a French priest associated with the Vatican who had been an officer of the Second French Bureau in Algiers during the war. For two years each time priests were secretly sent to the Eastern countries to replace those confined, deported, or shot by the regimes, a Communist welcome committee was immediately on the spot to arrest them too, even before they could take office. In addition, certain secret resolutions were obviously leaked once in a while to the Italian Communist Party in matters of managing the assets of the church.
When Alighiero Tondi was caught, he admitted that he became a priest in 1936 under orders of a special division of the Italian Communist Party and that during his training he even took a course at the Lenin University of Moscow, where the chief spies are trained. Since 1944 he had been sending his information directly to Palmiro Togliatti, general secretary of the Italian Communist Party.
The Vatican has its laws. Tondi was simply expelled from the order and its sacred confines. The following year he married Carmen Zanti, a Communist militant. Since then he travels all over Europe: in March 1965 he stayed in East Germany to advise Walter Ulbricht in matters of religious policy. Since Msgr. Montini became Pope, Alighiero Tondi declares, rightly or wrongly, that he has been pardoned because “those in high places” were able to understand that he has always had one goal: to work for peace and the reconciliation of souls [through espionage, betrayal of trust, theft of secret documents, disgracing the priesthood, etc.? — JKW].67
Lest the specifics of Tondi’s crime be unclear, a French semi-traditional priest, Abbe” Georges de Nantes, in an open letter to Paul VI, reports that “he [Tondi] had been accused, in the presence of Pius XII, of having given the Russians the names of priests sent to work behind the Iron Curtain.”68 Elsewhere in the Abbe” de Nantes’ publications is the following statement:
During a dramatic confrontation with Cardinal N., …[Tondi]
An early Freemasonic Apron admitted having given the Soviets [the] names of priests sent clandestinely to the U.S.S.R.; these were all subsequently arrested and killed.
It is known that Tondi was Church marriage by favor of Paul VI after he became Pope [sic]’, he found ‘work’ again in Rome in 1965.69
One last point about Tondi adds insult to injury. In 1984 a study on the Jesuits by German author Manfred Barthel was published in English. Essentially a history, the book devotes its later chapters to up-to-date reporting of the order. Barthel quotes from a 1961 expose” entitled Confessions of an Ex-Jesuit, that “describe the horrors of the author’s novitiate some time during the late 1940s…”70 He says that it was published by an East Berlin publisher, and written \)y…Alighiero Tondi. Whether through design or ignorance, no mention is made of Tondi’s other career, and so many readers would lose the choice irony in Tondi’s recollections (here by way of Barthel’s paraphrase): “Special permission was…required to send a letter or even a postcard;…and incoming as well as outgoing mail was censored.”71
That the methods of the Communists resemble those of the Masons should hardly come as a surprise. In Humanum Genus, Pope Leo XIII points out that both strive to replace Christian civilization with a neo-pagan world order:
Quote:“Yea, this change is deliberately planned and put forward by many associations of Communists and Socialists; and to their undertakings the sect of Freemasons is not hostile, but greatly favors their designs, and holds in common with them their chief opinions.”72
Earlier in the same letter, Leo writes:
Quote: “At this period…, the partisans of evil seem to be combining together, and to be struggling with united vehemence, led on or assisted by that strongly organized and widespread associations called the Freemasons.”73
Joint efforts by these forces in the twentieth century have included the bloody persecution of Catholics in Mexico during the 1920's, and the Spanish Civil War a decade later. More directly germane to the subject at hand, and of profoundest significance even today, Masons and Communists around the world joined in praising the Second Vatican Council. How telling that the two leading anti-Catholic forces in the world, which should have been condemned by the Council, ended up being among its greatest apologists!74
The War Against the Mass
“Justly,” writes Saint Alphonsus de Liguori, “has St. Bonaventure called the Mass a compendium of all God’s love and of all his benefits to men. Hence the devil has always sought to deprive the world of the Mass by means of heretics, constituting them precursors of Antichrist, whose first efforts shall be to abolish the holy sacrifice of the altar, and according to the prophet Daniel, in punishment of the sins of men, his efforts shall be successful: And strength was given him against the continual sacrifice because of sins."75
For many Catholics the prophecy of Daniel was fulfilled in 1969, when Paul VI promulgated the publication of a “new order of the Mass.” There can be no question that with the introduction of the new “Mass” the Conciliar revolution shifted into a higher gear. All of the errors of the Council now more quickly became apparent and spread with greater ease; the Novus Ordo Missae constituting their very embodiment. Whereas the Latin Mass is a sacramental action aimed at giving glory to God, the object of the new “Mass” is a social action centered around the congregation.
The Latin Mass is one thing, and one thing only, the perfect mode of divine worship. For the “reformers,” however, this was precisely the problem with it. Oh, they pushed the idea that the Mass had to be made more “relevant” and “understandable” to the man in the pew, and that a “return to ancient liturgical forms” was the way to accomplish this.76 But, in truth, there was only one real reason for eliminating the Tridentine Mass: Its continued survival constituted a major obstacle to the imposition of a new belief system on Catholics; hence, it had to go. Dr. Rama Coomaraswamy summed this up well, when he wrote:
Quote:One final problem remained. The Reformers feared that “nothing would come out of the Council.” Even though they had managed to insert into the “official” Documents of the Council their false ideas, they knew that this alone was insufficient….Change would occur far too slowly for the impatient innovators. The greater majority of the faithful had never asked for the Council (the Curia had opposed it also), and were perfectly content with the way the Church had always been. Even John XXIII had acknowledged and praised it as being “vibrant with vitality.” For most people things would have gone on much as before. It was absolutely necessary to introduce into the fabric of the everyday life of the Christian, all these new ideas, the “new economy of the Gospel.” How then to achieve this? The answer was obvious. One had to “reform” the liturgy.77
This is in line with the apostate Roca’s thinking, who, along with calling for “the scientific, economic, and social transfiguration of our…sacraments,” writes:
Quote:As long as Christian ideas remained in a state of sacramental incubation, in our hands and under the veil of liturgy, they were unable to exert any efficacious and scientifically decisive social effect upon the organic and public government of human societies.78
The new “Mass,” likewise, would need to reflect the “ecumenical,” “humanistic,” “universalist,” “socially relevant” activism of the Conciliar Church — abominations like the civil rights “Mass,” the farm workers’ “Mass,” the Marxist “Mass,” the feminist “Mass,” the homosexual “Mass,” which removed the focus from God to “special interest groups” required a fitting service for their “social gospel” messages. And they got just that with the “reformed” rite. While these are extreme manifestations, to be sure, they are accepted extremes in the Conciliar religion and serve to underscore the doctrinal gulf that separates the true Catholic faith from the new “Catholic” faith.
The reputation of “Archbishop” Annibale Bugnini ultimately stands or falls with the Novus Ordo Missile. Either the rite for which he is universally regarded as “architect” is orthodox, and hence obliging to all Catholics, or it is an impious “ecumenical” sacrilege, for the Church has never allowed “middle ground” or “gray areas” when the salvation of souls is at stake. Either it is Catholic or it is not — the faithful may not “roll dice” when a fundamental of the Faith is involved.
Bugnini was no “supporting player” in the area of “reform,” but one of the prime movers for a period of nearly thirty years. His singular career in the field began in 1948, when, as a 36 year-old priest, he had gained sufficient support in the Holy See to be named Secretary of the Commission for General Liturgical Restoration, a post he held until 1960. After this, he successively became: Secretary, Pontifical Preparatory Commission on the Liturgy (1960-1961); Peritus, Conciliar Commission on the Liturgy (1962-1964); Secretary, Consilium for the Implementation of the Constitution of the Liturgy (1964-1969); and Secretary, Congregation for Divine Worship (1965-1975). And as mentioned earlier, he had shown interest in Protestant writings on liturgical “reform” as early as 1944. Nowhere is there any clearer example than the Bugnini resume of how the seeds that produced the wicked harvest of Vatican II were being secretly sown in high places many years in advance.
While the question of the new “Mass” has been dealt with at length by many authors, a brief passage on its orations (Collects, Secrets, and Postcommunion) is sufficient to demonstrate its radical departure from Catholic tradition. On the back cover of Father Anthony Cekada’s booklet, The Problems with the Prayers of the New Mass, appears the charge that the Bugnini “Mass” is a “systematically de—Catholicised” rite, and the following examples are given:
Quote:Gone from these [Novus Ordo Missae — JKW] prayers are such Catholic concepts as “sacrifice,” “reparation,” “hell,” “the gravity of sin,” “snares of wickedness,” “the burden of evil,” “adversities,” “enemies,” “evils,” “tribulations,” “afflictions,” “infirmities of soul,” “obstinacy of heart,” “concupiscence of the flesh and the eyes,” “unworthiness,” “temptations,” “wicked thoughts,” “grave offenses,” “loss of heaven,” “everlasting death,” “eternal punishment,” “hidden fruits,” “guilt,” “eternal rest,” “true faith,” “merits,” “intercession,” “heavenly fellowship,” “fires of hell,” etc."79
When these omissions are considered tout ensemble, the mentality that emerges is precisely what Pope Leo stated to be the teaching of the Lodge in Humanum Genus:
Quote:But the…Freemasons, having no faith in those things which we have learned by the revelation of God, deny that our first parents sinned, and consequently think that free will is not at all weakened and inclined to evil. On the contrary, exaggerating rather our natural virtue and excellence and placing therein alone the principle and rule of justice, they cannot even imagine that there is any need at all to overcome the violence and rule ofourfassions.80
Father Cekada’s findings are damning, to say the lease, as are other critiques of the new “Mass,” but Bugnini never wavered from the position that he and his “reform” of the Mass were thoroughly Catholic. In the May 1980 issue of Homiletic and Pastoral Review, a letter of his appeared in which he took to task the writer of a previous letter to the editor. Bugnini stated:
Quote:1) By the grace of God my faith in the Holy Eucharist was and is that of the Holy Catholic Church. I challenge [name of his critic — JKW]…to find a single expression in the liturgical reform that puts in doubt faith in the Holy Eucharist.
2) As for the “liturgical revolution,” which would have alienated “millions” of people from the faith, he makes a gratuitous claim. The author knows very well that the causes of the weakening of faith in our time are many and complex. The liturgical reform not only [has] not deviated from the faith, but has been the most valid factor, has given the faithful a faith more convincing, strong and operative in charity.81
This denial is absurd, to say the least. The “causes of the weakening of the faith” are not “many and complex,” as claimed, but are such as can be directed, quite simply, to one source, and only one — the Second Vatican Council. At no time in Church history have designations such as “pre-Conciliar” and post-Conciliar” had the sort of relevance that they do today. Conciliar “reforms” — liturgical and otherwise — utterly transformed the way Catholics viewed their Church, and did, in fact, alienate millions of them. But, far worse, when the Mass was taken from them, and the mockery substituted in its place, confusion, alienation, and corruption rose exponentially in direct proportion with the spread of that substitution.
By 1980, however, Bugnini could say anything he pleased. The celebrated Ottaviani intervention, eleven years before, which properly attacked the new “Mass” as “teem[ing] with insinuations or manifest errors against the integrity of the Catholic faith,” received nothing in the way of recognition from Paul VI except a cosmetic touching up of the General Instruction of the Order of the New Mass. The revolutionaries had won the battle, and Bugnini’s letter is more on the order of a mopping up operation than anything approximating actual combat.
The arguments that have been repeatedly used to defend the Liturgical “reforms” bear an eerie resemblance to those already rioted of the Mason Roca, who, nearly one hundred years before the fact, called for a “transformation…at an ecumenical council” so that the liturgy would “return the Church to the venerable simplicity of the apostolic golden age, and harmonize it with the new stage of modern conscience and civilization.” The Council justified altering the liturgy so that a “noble simplicity [its term]” could be achieved, or in Bugnini’s words:
“Rediscovery of the spirit, then, and the effort to make the rites speak the language of our time so that the men and women may understand the language of the rites, which is both mysterious and sacred.”82 The zeal of the “reformers” was so pronounced that the Benedictine Dom Cipriano Vagaggini, peritus (“expert”) at Vatican II who helped draft its Constitution on the Liturgy (praised by Bugnini for his “brilliant, clear exposition” of the issues), dares write in his book, The Canon of the Mass and Liturgical Reform:
Quote:“The present Roman [i.e., Tridentine — JKW] canon sins in a number of ways against the requirements of good liturgical composition and sound liturgical sense that were emphasized by the Second Vatican Council.”83
Well worth citing in this discussion are remarks by Pope Pius XII, who is held up by Bugnini as having “put the seal of his authority on this whole movement…"84
While it is true that Pius favored some liturgical reform, never would he have countenanced revolution. In fact, in his 1947 encyclical on the Sacred Liturgy, Mediator Dei, he condemns innovations that some were then introducing into the Church — innovations that both harken back to those proposed by Roca and the Modernists, and point straight ahead to the Novus Ordo Missae. While Pius could have been stronger in denouncing them, his condemnation, nonetheless, places a great burden of proof on those upholding the new “Mass.” For among the novelties His Holiness singles out for censure are:
Quote:[T]hose who make use of the vernacular in the celebration of the august Eucharistic Sacrifice; those who transfer certain feast—days —which have been appointed and established after mature deliberation — to other dates; those…who delete from the prayer-books approved for public use the Sacred texts of the Old Testaments, deeming them little suited and inopportune for modern times.85
Pope Pius also attacks those who argue for “the restoration of all the ancient rites” on the grounds that such ceremonies carry “the savor and aroma of antiquity” and have “significance for latter times and new situations.”86 Finally, he warns against the notion of the laity “concelebrating” Mass with the priest, and against the innovator who would:
Quote:…wish the altar restored to its primitive table-form;…want black excluded as a colour for the liturgical vestments;…forbid the use of sacred images and statues in churches;…order the crucifix so designed that the Divine Redeemer’s Body shows no trace of His cruel sufferings; and lastly,…disdain and reject polyphonic music or singing in parts, even where it conforms to regulations issued by the Holy See….87
When viewed with the luxury of hindsight, it seems as though Paul VI, Bugnini, Vagaggini, and the other “reformers” drew up a list of these proscribed ideas and practices, and proceeded to do all that was possible to work them all into the Novus Ordo Missae and its rubrics. Bugnini used Pope Pius’ commitment to genuine reform as a pretext to advance his own career and to justify his utterly destructive pseudo-Mass. In the end, however, his machinations had already been condemned by the very pontiff he claims had given “the seal of his authority” to said “reforms.”
The Bugnini Verdict: Guilty or Not Guilty?
Before attempting anything resembling a summation of the “Archbishop” Annibale Bugnini case, the evidence must be reviewed. First, stock must be taken of the known aims of the Masons and their allies, as well as the extent to which they fulfilled them. Likewise, Bugnini is entitled to his day in court.
The documentation regarding Masonic goals can be outlined as follows:
• Destruction of the Roman Catholic Church through its infiltration, involving plants who would feign orthodoxy, while promoting revolutionary ideas.
• Corruption of other clergy and the laity.
• Denunciation of truly orthodox clergy (and other faithful Catholics).
• Development of a faction (or bloc) of sympathetic clergy to sway opinion to the “progressive” side.
• Infiltration to reach even unto the Holy See.
• Engagement of said bloc to redirect Catholic teachings and sacraments into “new” directions at an “ecumenical” council.
What about the realization of chose goals? Consider these findings:
• Proof of such internal subversion is manifest; so much so that, over 200 years ago, a pope could explicitly note it in an encyclical, and more than a century-and-a-half ago, evidence was in the hands of the Holy See demonstrating massive infiltration.
• More than a century ago, a papal Secretary of State noted a widespread doctrinal perversion of young clergy, in line with the teachings of the Lodge.
• “Catholic” attacks on Popes and others who promoted orthodoxy.
• Increasing sympathy for “loyal” dissenters.
• Infiltration reaching even unto the Holy See.
• An “ecumenical” council, in which traditional teachings and sacraments were surgically removed, and replaced with “progressive” ones, a move openly applauded by the enemies of the Church.
When the evidence is dispassionately examined, it becomes now clear that there is a close correlation between the sustained infiltration and the Vatican II coup d’etat. It is also obvious that radical alteration of the liturgy was regarded as key to institutionalizing the revolution. This conspiracy that today poses as the Church, the most insidious campaign ever mounted by the forces of hell against the Spotless Bride of Christ, is exposed as un-Catholic by the destruction it has wrought. “By their fruits you shall know them,” declared the Lord.88
Was Bugnini oblivious to all that was going on around him? He lived for more than a decade after the promulgation of the new “Mass,” — his handiwork — and saw both the just criticism it drew, and the ruin it wrought. Yet never for a moment did he acknowledge that the Novus Ordo Missae might be to blame for the harm caused to the Church. The theme of his 900+ page memoirs is hammered home time and again — the “reform” is perfectly “valid,” and any reasons for subsequent weakening of the faith, while “many and complex,” are completely unrelated to the new “Mass.” In truth, however, almost all of the principal elements of the Conciliar service have been shown to be both proscribed by Pope Pius XII and in keeping with Masonic errors about human nature.
Bugnini’s defense is likewise suspect when viewed from the practical order. Anyone who makes an objective study of the modern crisis of faith that has developed in the Church, can trace it first to the Council, and, then, to the promulgation of the new “Mass.” And the progress of this crisis can be seen to accelerate dramatically after the Novus Ordo Missae was imposed throughout the body of the Church. The desecrating of the churches (trashing of altars, chalices, statues, and other sacred accouterments), the trivializing of worship, confession reduced to a counseling session, more empty pews, the decline of vocations (both priestly and religious), the promotion of a false “social gospel,” the open opposition by “Catholics” of essential moral and dogmatic teachings, the falling off of conversions, the rash of pedophile clergy, etc. are the fruits of conciliar “reforms,” including this “valid” revision.
Unfortunately for the “reformers,” some Catholics did not take kindly to the changes. Poor Bugnini caught the brunt of this displeasure. He reports as follows:
Quote:[W]hile attending a meeting of traditionalists in Rome, a woman recognized the secretary of the Consilium [i.e., Bugnini, here using third person as he was wont to do], was filled with a holy anger, and attacked him in St. Peters Square with scorching words and spat in his face. He received many letters, more or less anonymous, that were filled with unquotable insults and, in one case, even threatened him with death.89
While the common reaction is to recoil at the idea of someone spitting in another’s face, the more important question is: Given the circumstances, was she justified — if not in her act, at least in the sentiment behind it? Even a pontiff so mild in nature as Saint Pius X had instructed that the proper greeting of Catholics to Modernists was to beat them with fists. Should an ecclesiastic who subverts his post in line with Masonic goals fare any better?
And yet Bugnini never admitted to any connection with the Lodge; in fact, he strenuously denied it. He records in his memoirs the following passage from a letter written on October 22, 1975 to Paul VI:
Quote:I have never had any interest in Freemasonry; I do not know what it is, what it does, or what its purposes are. I have lived as a religious for fifty years, as a priest for forty; for twenty—six my life has been limited to school, home, and office, and for eleven to my home and office alone. I was born poor and live as a poor man….90
To paraphrase Shakespeare: The prelate doest protest too much methinks! While his refutation may appear reasonable at first glance, its underlying weakness is revealed on closer examination. For how can a man who was ordained in 1936 claim total ignorance of a group that the Church had for nearly two centuries repeatedly condemned as being the principal instrument of Satan inmodern times, and that has as its final goal, in the words of Leo III, “to ruin the Holy Church, so as to succeed, if it is possible, i the complete dispossession of Christian nations of all the gifts icy owe to Our Saviour Jesus Christ”?91 But it is the very duty of a priest to know the enemies that seek to devour his flock the better to protect it. Hence, even were he not lying, Bugnini would still — by is own admission — be guilty of culpable ignorance and willful negligence. In his haste to distance himself from the rumor, he has given all the more reason to doubt him.
In January 1980, he again attempted a defense of himself, in a letter to the editor of Homiletic & Pastoral Review. This time he actually went on the offense. Bugnini talks about how in 1976 polemics on freemasonry spread in the ecclesiastical circles, and at first 2, then 17 and then 114 names were paraded around,” accuses Si, Si, No, No of “calumny and defamation” (though he dismisses talk of a lawsuit as “to give too much importance to people who behave in a shameless way”), and declares “not one of the prelates pointed out by them has ever had anything to do with freemasonry.” 92
Here, again, his apologetic leaves much to be desired. His recalling of the different numbers of Masons that were “paraded round” is very reminiscent of the treatment Senator Joseph McCarthy received from leftist critics of his efforts to expose Communists in the United States Government in the 1950s. The tactic is similar: By ridiculing the discrepancies in counting, the very premise of infiltration is also ridiculed. Given two hundred years of internal subversion that had continued to quietly spread, without much opposition, like a cancer in the Church, are even 114 Masonic prelates all that incredible? 93 In any case, even if the higher number is too great, it still does not make the basic premise flawed, since Masonic infiltration is a historical fact beyond debate. Interesting, as well, is his countercharge of “calumny and defamation.” Was Bugnini’s stated reason for not pursuing a libel suit legitimate, or was there the ulterior motive of putting the potentially explosive controversy behind him?
But the most telling moment of all comes when Bugnini attempts to get the other suspected Masons off the hook (or is it “off the harpoon*.”). Not one of them, he somberly intones, “has ever had anything to do with freemasonry.” Its impossible to know which list it is to which he refers (it cannot be the one with just two names, as he would have worded it “neither” instead of “not one of the prelates]”), but in either case he is making a categorical statement that is asinine on the face of it for at least two reasons:
1) if, as earlier claimed, he knows absolutely nothing about Masonic aims and methods, there would be no way on earth that he would be able to spot the tell—tale signs that might give away the cover of a Masonic operative; and
2) even if he did have knowledge in this area, it would still be impossible to have certitude that each and everyone was innocent, short of an in-depth investigation of their past and 24 hour-a-day surveillance. The cover of the Communist plant “Father” Tondi, for example, was sufficiently good that he was trusted to work in as sensitive an area as the Vatican Archives.
Therefore, given his own admission of ignorance about the Lodge, Bugnini cannot be trusted in this statement either. It is perfectly logical, though, to presume that a Mason would do his best to help his “brothers” maintain their cover.
Against the backdrop of these protestations of innocence are remarks by one of Bugnini’s chief accusers. Vatican correspondent Mary Martinez once challenged Si, Si, No, No’s editor, a retired priest named Father Francesco Putti, about not revealing his sources. He responded:
Quote:No, I don’t. But I can tell you this: every word I print is documented. I publish nothing about which I am not absolutely certain. Take the case of Cardinal [Gabriel — JKW] Garrone, the Frenchman who heads the Sacred Congregation for Catholic Education. If you read my paper you will find I consider him the greatest destroyer of the Church in the world today. He has ruined the whole field of Catholic education, emptied the seminaries in Italy and abroad [perhaps not an entirely bad idea, given what is now being taught in them! — JKW], destroyed the catechism. I write and publish these accusations but I do not say he is a Mason. I have no proof of that. If tomorrow you come to me with convincing proof that Cardinal Garrone is a Mason, I will print it but not before.94
This hardly sounds like the sort of man prone to allow rash judgement to push him into making libelous charges. It is only prudent to preserve the confidentiality of the evidences source, since disclosure could well prove fatal. While defenders of Bugnini would dismiss Father Putti’s comments as simply self-serving, why, it must be asked, have other reputable clergymen, as important as Cardinal Siri, also accepted the authenticity of the “Buan” dossier had they not been privy to knowledge of its source and considered it a reliable one?
In summation, one fact in the Bugnini case can be stated with absolute certainty: A conspiracy has taken place. The question involves which conspiracy theory to believe. Either Annibale Bugnini was a Mason who used his office to tamper with the sacred liturgy or he was the victim of a terribly vicious smear by those bitter over the changes made since Vatican II.
The closest thing to a “smoking gun” in this case are the letters cited near the beginning of this article, 30 Days’ Andrea Tornielli writes “the outcome of Bugnini’s reforms fully matches the intentions expressed in them,” but holds out the possibility of them being “forgeries,” since they seem “too crude and blunt.” As to this latter point, it is instructive to compare these letter samples with the fragments of secret documents found elsewhere in the present article. The rhetoric will be found quite often alike; the Alta Vendita’s Permanent Instruction, for example, is no less “crude and blatant” in its phrasing than the “Buan” letters.
Torniellis “forgeries” argument focuses on the idea that the perpetrator wanted “to created rival ‘factions’ in the Curia.” He does not elaborate on who this might have been, or exactly what the motive was for such a divisive move. As has been shown many times, creating factions within the Church is the Masonic modus operandi. But by the time of the Bugnini disclosures, there was no need for the Lodge to have continued that tactic — it had already achieved its goal, and to proceed as before would have been unnecessary and perhaps even counterproductive. What if, some might argue, the scheme was perpetrated by traditional Catholics? The problem there is that it is difficult to see what they believed they could gain by such a move. A rollback to pre—Vatican II days? Surely, anyone clever enough to have hit upon such an idea as fabricating authentic—looking Masonic papers would not be so naive as to believe that there was any way for a restoration to be accomplished by such means. By the mid-1970s, Curial conservatives were a dwindling few and already without significant influence.
And in the final analysis, as long as Paul VI was in power, there was not the slightest chance of the “reforms” being rescinded; anyone in the Curia who refused to be a Vatican II “team player” would be shown the door. No ethical Catholic, of course, would consider employing such a deceit as fake documents, while no realistic Catholic would believe in the long-range value of such a tactic.
The greatest determinant for settling the Bugnini case boils down to one question: Who is more worthy of trust — Bugnini or his accusers? When considered in this light, the matter becomes much clearer. Bugnini’s defense consisted of answers that are either plainly false (e.g., no souls have been harmed by the reform) or transparent in their evasiveness (e.g., no knowledge of Masonry). In a word, he seemed to be stonewalling as though he had something to hide. It strongly resembles the sort of behavior characteristic of past infiltrators. His accusers, on the other hand, have made Catholic restoration the whole of their lives. They had no other reason to oppose him than the harm he was doing to their beloved Church, and their opposition is buttressed with a substantial amount of historical corroboration. No base motivation has been uncovered concerning them.
While the case against Bugnini is based on circumstantial evidence, thus preventing the final degree of certitude, that evidence is nonetheless compelling, sufficiently so to bring a conditional verdict of guilty. In all likelihood, “Archbishop” Annibale Bugnini, in addition to being the chief “architect” of the new “Mass,” was also its chief Mason, Some, while agreeing with this assessment, would say: “All right, maybe Bugnini was a Mason. But what difference does it make, since the new “Mass” is just as harmful either way?” In the practical order of things, it is true, the difference is negligible, but there is the bigger issue, and that is the plight of the Church. Some have said that we are experiencing the Good Friday of the Church. An apt description, even down to the fact that, like Our Lord, the Church is victim of both betrayal and conspiracy. Catholics cannot expect any restoration to begin in earnest until they are able to clearly identify the enemy. While Conciliar clerics who are conscious subverters may be few overall, it is they, most assuredly, who have the greatest control and who are setting the agenda. Hence, those traditionally oriented Conciliarists who insist on circulating petitions, writing letters to their local “bishop,” and the like will continue in their frustration, because they fail to see that the fort is being occupied by enemy forces who are wearing Catholic uniforms as a ruse. And until the day when they have at last awakened to the truly grim dimensions of the crisis, the cohorts of Annibale Bugnini — from St. Peter’s Basilica down to the most humble mission chapel — will continue their impious drive to de-Catholicize the world. Pope Leo XIII’s statement on Freemasonry takes on a new significance in the midst of this continuing occupation, and ends with a note of resolve that every Catholic must carry in this fight:
Quote:Pope Leo XIII
“There is no denying that in this foolish and criminal plan it is easy to understand the implacable hatred and passion for revenge which animate Satan toward Jesus Christ. We refuse to follow the dictates of such iniquitous masters that bear the names of Satan and of all evil passions [emphasis added].”95
Foot Notes
1 Translation made here and in note seven is courtesy of Mrs. Joseph Cornello.
2 Cited, DAVIES, MICHAEL Pope John’s Council, Volume Two: Liturgical Revolution (Dickinson, TX: Angelus Press 1980, 4th printing), p. 166. In the Italian it reads: “a conclusione di una Riforma—condotta da un Bugnini chc si e infine scoperto per ci6 che si sospettava: massone.” Ibid., p. 319 n. 26.
3 An ironic confirmation of his reputation can be found in Bugnini’s own memoirs: “There were also manifestations of extreme intolerance [against the “reforms”—JKw], The most violent came from a rather well-known Italian writer, Tito Casini, a fervent Catholic who had drawn inspiration from the liturgy for some of his better publications.” Annibale Bugnini, The Reform of the Liturgy: 1948-197;;, trans. Matthew J. O’ConncIl (Collegcville, MN: Liturgical Press 1990), p. 280. pg3
4 Cited, DAVIES, p. 166.
5 Cf. BUGNINI, p. 91 n. 36.
6 It seems fitting-/>ffrf/’c_7’utf/rr-thac a man who contributed so greatly to the Conciliar apostasy would be compelled to spend his final dap in a nation of infidels.
7 BUGNINI, p. 91 n. 36. For the sake of fairness, and since the staff of the cited publication is not present to defend themselves, an anticipated counter-question from them is offered: How is it that a. Freemason is able, not only to remain undetected in the Church for decades, but to ascend to htr highest ranks?
8 Cited, ANDREA TORNTELU, “In Search of Babel,” )0 Days [English language edition], No. 6, I99Z, p. 41.
9′ Cited, ibid., pp. 41-42.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid., pp. 42-43.
13 Cited, ibid., p 43.
14 Cited, ibid., p. 42.
15 Cited, ibid., p. 45.
16 Cited, ibid, A most illuminating passage, particularly given tliat Latin is supposedly the official Language of the Conciliar “Catholic” Church.
17 Dismissed and Deported,” p. 46.
18 Ibid., p. 47. According to Bugnini, Paul VI assured him of “complete confidence” in the “reforms,” to which the latter replied: “Holy Father, the reform will continue as long as Your Holiness retains this confidence. As soon as it lessens, the reform will come to a hah.” Bugnini, op, cit,, p. xxviii.
19 Ibid.
20 p. 49. Would someone fleasf tell the tens of thousands of Conciliar churches around the world that, since liturgical “reform” is now officially over, there is nothing to stop them from dropping the new “Mass” and returning to the Mass of Pope Saint Pius V. The notion that it has ended is preposterous, however, as is evident by more than a quarter of a century of liturgical sabotage, a reality which is clearly corroborated in the text and in a passage by Bugnini cited in footnote 17. Neither Paul VI nor his successors have made the slightest effort to “undo” the new “Mass,” but have ever been ardent promoters of it.
21 (VouilK: Diffusion de la Pensde Franchise 1975), p. 7. I am indebted to Father Joseph Collins for his translation of excerpts from L’tfglise Occupte. (Page listings arc taken from the book, not the translation.)
22 Ibid., pp. 199-100, In April 1906 II Santo was placed on the Index of Forbidden Books by Pope Saint Pius X.12
23 Cited, MONSIGNOR GEORGE F. DILLON, D.D., Gmnd Orient freemasonry Unmasked (London: Britons Publishing Co. 1965 edition), p. 33. Pope Leo XIII had the Italian edition of this work published in Rome at his own expense.
24 Ibid., p. 34.
25 (Boston & Los Angeles: Western Islands 1974), p. 78. While it is true that sometimes a translation can strip a quotation of its original gist, the word “device” seems particularly.appropriate here, as in the definition given by Webster’! New Collegiate Dictionary: “A scheme; often, a scheme to deceive; a stratagem.”
26 Op. fit., p. 56,
27″ trans. Rev. Augustine Stock, O.S.B., (St. Louis & London: B. Herder Book Co. 1950), p, ^^.
28 The similarities were not missed by Sodalitium Pianum, the watchdog group approved by Pope Saint Pius X to monitor Modernist activities. One hostile author, commenting on the organization and its head, Monsignor Umberto Benigni, writes: “As for Bcnigni’s secret police, its methods were infinitely more arbitrary [sic, than those of the Holy See-JKVf]. The brother of a priest who collaborated with him even became a Freemason in order to ascertain whether the lodges had any links with the Modernists.” Carlo Falconi, The Popes of the Twentieth Century: From Pius X to John XXIII, trans. Muriel Grindrod (Boston & Toronto: Little, Brown & Co. 1967), p. 41. Among the parallels pointing to such a nexus are: (l) secrecy and dissimulation; (2) the heresy that all religions are true and equally pleasing to God; (3) the companion heresy that Jesus Christ is not the unique Saviour of mankind and the only begotten Son of God, but merely one in a long line of illustrious religious teachers including Krishna, Buddha,
Mohammed, etc.; (4) the heresy that all religions (including Catholicism) ate subject to fundamental doctrinal and sacramental change—or “evolution”; (5) the hiding of a pernicious agenda behind an innocuous public face; and (6) the goal of internally subverting the Catholic Church. Did Saint Pius also see a Masonic/Modernist connection? Conciliar antimasonic author Paul A. Fisher believes so. In his booklet, Their Codis the Devil: Papal Encyclicals & Freemasonry, Fisher, having already cited Pope Leo XIII on Masonry’s attempts to corrupt priests, writes:
Once again, in Pascmeli Dominici Gregii (On the Modernists), September 8, 1907, a Pope expressed concern about penetration of Masonic philosophy into the Church.
Pius X wrote: “…partisans of error [a term he and his predecessors frequently applied to adherents of Freemasonry — JKW] are to be sought not only among the Church’s open enemies; they lie hid…in her very bosom and heart.” His Holiness went on to say he was referring specifically to Catholic laymen cont’d, and those in “the ranks of the priesthood itself, who…thoroughly imbued with the poisonous doctrines taught by the enemies of the Church…who vaunt themselves as reformers of the Church; and…assail all that is most sacred in the work of Christ, not sparing even the person of the Divine Redeemer, whom, with sacrilegious daring, they reduce to a simple, mere man.” (Baltimore: American Research Foundation 1991), pp. 31-32. Likewise, Saint Pius’ portrayal of Modernism as the “synthesis of all heresies” closely resembles Pope Gregory XVl’s description of Masonry in Mirari Voi (1832) as a cesspool in which “are congregated and intermingled nil the sacrileges, infamy, and blasphemy which are contained in the most abominable heresies.”
29 Of. at., p. 13.
30 “Etiam in sanctuarium insinuant (Even should they penetrate into the sanctuary).” See Monsignor £. Jouin, Papacy dr Freemasonry (Hawthorne, CA: Christian Book Club: n.cl.), p. 10.
31 Cited, ibid., p. 9.
32 Cited, FATHER EDWARD CAHILL, S.J., Freemasonry & the Anti-Christian Movement (Dublin: Gill & Son, 1949, 3rd impression), p. 121.
33 Cited, AJIRIAGA, p. 394. cabala: (variously spelled cabbala, kabala, kabbala, etc. from the Hcb. qabbalah, lit., the received or traditional lore). A collection of writings surfacing in medieval times that contains Jewish ritual magic and “mystical” interpretations of scripture. It has long been a favored text of Rosicrucians, advanced Freemasons, and other occultists — “Christian” and non-Christian alike.
34″ Citcd, CAHU.L, p. 101.
35 Cited, DILLON, pp. 89-90.
36″ Cited, ibid., p. 92. Any similarity between this plan of action and the relentless libeling of such great pontiffs as Popes Pius IX and Saint Pins X by certain Conciliar authors should in no way be regarded as coincidental.
37 Cited, ibid., p, 90, First France had been the center of intrigue, then Germany, and now Italy. But note most carefully that, whatever allowances are made to national temperament and culture, the fundamental conspiratorial elements remain the same no matter the locus: secrecy, false piety, and, above all, the unswerving plan to subvert Christian principles.
38 Cited, ibid., p. 93. For those inclined to scoff at such dire warnings, it is already well established that another secret society that originated in Italy, the Cosa Nostra (or Mafia), has demonstrated that such threats can be — and are — carried out with regularity.
38A Cited, ibid., p. 94.
393 Cited, ARRIAGA, p. 394.
40 Cited, ibid., p. 397. It should be noted that at the time this was written, the term “spirit of the sects,” referred more to Masonry and its kindred than to Protestant churches. Let those who doubt the insidious penetration of the Lodge into the Church ponder over the fact that this was written more than 50 years before Saint Pius X’s condemnation of Modernism, and over 100 years before the destructive culmination of Vatican II.
41 Cited, CAHILL, p. 103.
42 Cited, DILLON, p. 90.
43 Ibid., pp. 90-91.
44 Ibid., p. 91. Perhaps the Lodge got far more than that for which it bargained. On October II, 1991, the Mexican political journal Proccsso interviewed one Carlos Vazqucz Rangel, Grand Commander of the Supreme Council of Masons in Mexico. There he claims: “On the same day [no date given-JKw] in Paris the profane [Masonic jargon for rion-Mason-]Kw] Angelo Roncalli [John XIII] and Giovanni Montini [Paul VI] were initiated into the august mysteries of the Brotherhood [i.e., Freemasonry]. Thus it was that much that was achieved at the Council was based on Masonic principles.” (Documentation via Mary Ball Martmcz, author and former Vatican correspondent.) While skepticism is in order, the frightening thought is that were these alleged memberships proven, the
overwhelming response of traditional Catholics would be (and with good reason) something resembling: “Oh, really? Well, that doesn’t surprise me too much.” Such is the depth of the Conciliar iniquity that even the most grevious outrages hardly seem shocking anymore!
45 Of. at., p. 186.
46 Athanasius drthe Church of Our Time, trails. Susan Johnson (Hawthorne, CA: Christian Book Club of America, n. d.), p. 34.
47 Cited, ARRIAGA, p. 187.
48 Ibid.
49 In Lamcntabili, Pope Saint Pius X condemned (among others) the following propositions of the Modernists: 29. It is permissible to grant that the Christ of history is far inferior to the Christ Who is the object of faith; 36. The Resurrection of the Saviour is not properly a fact of the historical order…; 37. In the beginning, faith in the Resurrection of Christ was not so much in the fact itself of the Resurrection as in the immortal life of Christ with God; 58. Truth is no more immutable than man himself, since it evolved with him, and through him; 59. Christ did not teach a determined body of doctrine applicable to all times and to all men, but rather inaugurated a religious movement adapted or to be adapted to different times and places; 64. Scientific progress demands that the concepts of Christian doctrine concerning God, creation, revelation, the Person of the Incarnate Word, and Redemption be readjusted; and 65. Modern Catholicism can be reconciled with true science only if it is transformed into a non-dogmatic Christianity; that is to say, into a broad and liberal Protestantism. Anne Frcemantle, The Papal Encydicak in Their Historical Context (New York: Mentor Books 1956), pp. 204, 205, 206 &L 207.
50 See GRADER, p. 38.
51 Frecmantle, p. 197.
52 Op. at., p. 40.
53 Ibid., p. 189.
54 Cf., the on-going series in these pages of Father Francesco Ricossa’s study on John XXIII, “The Pope of the Council.”
55 Cited, ARRIAGA, p. 194.
56 Cited, ibid., p. 189. Roca’s compatriot in occultism, Stanislas dc Guaita waxes poetic about a coming “reformation” of the sacraments: “O rites! O dead symbols!
[italics added] Your soul will return to you when Christianity, strengthened again by the sap from its source, will be transfigured; when the eternal religion that manifests itself uttering the restoring wind of its intimate esotcricism (occult doctrine, known only to the initiates) will revive the dead letter through the kiss of the immortal spirit.” Cited, Arriaga, p. 190.
57 Cited, GRUBKR, pp. 44-45.
58 Cited, PLONCARD D’ASSAC, p. 22.1.
59 Ibid.
60 Cited, ibid., p. 200.
61 Cited, GRUBER, pp. 38-39.
62 Cited, RAMA P. COOMARASWAMY, M.D., The Destruction of the Christian Tradition (London: Perennial Books 1981), p. 179 n. 28.
63 Ibid. Defenders of the Council will argue that these quotes mean nothing, since their source cannot be counted on for veracity. Perhaps, but then the following Masonic response to the Holy See needs to be added to place Marsaudon’s remarks in perspective. After Pope Leo XIII issued his antimasonic encyclical of 1884, Humanum Genus, the following response was made by Dumesnil de Gramont, Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of France:
What a terrible text this encyclical contains…and one which our brothers ought to read frequently. Terrible and surprising too, when you consider that its author is still considered as the finest, the most clear-sighted and most liberal of modern popes. One is overwhelmed by its vehement tone, the violent epithets, ihe audacity of the accusations, the perfidy of the appeals to secular repression. All the odious fables, all the absurd grievances which, not so long ago, were circulated in France by antimasonic factions, are implicitly and even explicitly contained in this document which, we are sorry to say, seems rather to resemble the work of a pamphleteer than of a Pontiff. Cited, Vicotme Le’on de Poncins, Freemasonry & the Vatican, trails. Timothy Tindal-Robcrtson (Palmdale, CA: Christian Book Club of America 1968), p. 33.
To sincere Conciliar defenders of the “reforms” the following question is posed: Why should a Masonic attack on Humanum Genus, which the Lodge had every reason to oppose, be accepted as truly expressing the Masonic reaction to it, while Masonic praise of Vatican II, which both parallels, in some ways, Masonic thinking, and which has caused untold harm to souls, be dismissed as false? Do you, it is wondered, even have an answer—or will you resort to mere alibis*. Please God, some who read this will have the scales removed from their eyes, and by grace, seek to separate themselves from that iniquitous body. For it is high time that those remaining in the Conciliar Church, but who evince real devotion to tradition and who take no shame in being called Catholics, renounce this Masonic /MfHdo-Church (in which all dogma ultimately is optional), and return to chutches that still cling to the Deposit of Faith—for the love of Christ!
64 Cited, MARY MARTfNEZ, From Rome Urgently (Rome: Statimari 1979), p. 108. No attempt will be made here to explain the contradiction between statements like this and the late Archbishop’s off-and-on negotiations with what, by his own admission, was a Masonically—infested Vatican. May he rest in peace. Incidentally, the Masonic official quoted in footnote 40 confirms the charge, stating: “[W]ithin the eight city blocks that make up the Vatican State no fewer than four Scottish Rue lodges are functioning. Many of the highest Vatican officials are Masons and in certain countries where the Church is not allowed to operate, it is the lodges that carry on Vatican affairs, clandestinely.” Although doubt is always reasonable when a Mason is the source of information, given the history examined in the present article and the ongoing Conciiiar apostasy, nothing should be ruled out. counter-Church: The expression did not originate with the Archbishop. Monsignor Jouin quotes from a 1902 issue of the Masonic review, L’Acacia, as follows: “FREEMASONRY IS A CHURCH: It is the Counter-Church, Counter—Catholicism: It is the other church-the church of HERESY, of Freetbought; the Catholic Church is considered as the arch-type church, the first church, the church of dogmatism and orthodoxy [original punctuation -JKw].”Of>. cit., p. 8.
65 Op. cit.. p. 168.
67 trans. Janet L. Johnson (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House 1975), pp. 139-140. While Villemarest indicates the infiltration of various denominations, the Communists know who their real enemy is. Grossu cites a 1957 secret directive of the Chinese Communist Party, which, after ordering comrades to “methodically wedge themselves into all sectors of ecclesiastical action [the Legion of Mary is mentioned by name — JKw],” and to base all their subversive work on the revolutionary dictum, “crush the enemy by using the enemy itself,” concluded: “Any comrade occupying a post of command must have thoroughly understood that the Catholic church, enslaved by imperialism, must be cut down and wholly destroyed [italics added throughout — JKW]. Protestantism, which makes the mistake of following a policy of coexistence, must be hindered from making new conquests,…iff can let….die a natural death.” Op cit., p. 137-138. Long before the Tondi scandal, however, Vladimir Lenin had given the order to Communists: “To put an end to religion it is much more important to introduce class war into the bosom of the Church than to attack religion directly,” Cited, Poncins, of. cit., p. 208.
68 Liber Accusationis in Paulum Scxtum (n.p: league of the Catholic Counter Reformation, 1973), p. 6on.
69 Contre-Reforme Catholiquc auXXe sitcle. No. 97, p. ix. Cited, Micliel San Pictro, Saul, why do you persecute Me? (n.p., n.d.), p. 17. Thanks to Gary Giuffrc for his kind sharing of this information.
70 translated and adapted by Mark Howson, The /rsuits: History dr Legend of the Society of Jesus (New York: William Morrow 1984), p. 304.
71 Ibid., One can only wonder how long Tondi was able to slip his Judas messages under the censor’s nose — if that was, in fact, his mode of espionage — before being found out.
72 (Rockford, IL: TAN Books 1978 cd. of the 1884 encyclical), p.i6.
73 Ibid., p. 2.
74 And Conciliar defenders of the Council can take on a revolutionary tone. In his book The Drama, of Vatican 11, Henri Fesquet lists among “Vatican ll’s achievements” an item that could even warm the stone-cold hearts of Voltaire and Weishaupt: “This liberation of Catholic thought, too long imprisoned in the negative tide of the Counter-Reformation, in a way enables the Church to take up the standard of the French Revolution, which made the rounds of the secular world before coming to rest in Catholicism, whence it originated [sic -JKW]. Liberty, equality, fraternity: this glorious mono was the quintessence of Vatican II, as Hans Kiing recently suggested.” trans. Bernard Murchland (New York: Random House 1967), p. 815.
75 Dignity dr Duties of the Priest, ed. Rev. Eugene Grimm (Brooklyn, NY, St. Louis, Toronto: Redcmptorist Fathers 1927), pp. 210—111. Rohurautem datum cst ci contra juge Sacrijtciurn propterpeccata.-DAN. 8: 12.
76 It never has been explained satisfactorily by the “reformers” as to how a return to liturgies that have been out of use for more than a mtllennhim-ana-fi-. /wrought to be more beneficial to twentieth-century Catholics than the rite codified in 1570 by Pope Saint Pius V. But, then, it cannot be explained, for it is mere rhetoric. The prayers of the latter are based on those assembled almost a thousand years before by Pope Saint Gregory the Great, and which the Church has always attributed to Apostolic origins. There arc two major points to be noted from this: l) Conciliar claims to antiquity arc transparently fraudulent, as is also evident by the six Protestant “observers” who helped formulate the new “Mass,” and the grevious deletions of essential Catholic teachings (to be shown in this article); and 2) unlike the Conciliar Church, the Roman Catholic Church has never conformed to “the spirit of the age,” but has shown itself ever to be the Church for all ages, requiring the faithful to comply with its timeless teachings and sacraments. The appeal to a false “antiquity” as an excuse for the introduction of corrupting liturgical changes, employed centuries earlier by Anglican “reformers,” was condemned by Pope Leo XIII in his 1896 letter,
Afostolicae Cume, as follows: “They knew only too well the intimate bond which unites faith with worship, ‘the law of belief with the law of prayer,1 and so, under the pretext of restoring it to its ancient form, they corrupted the order of the liturgy in many respects to adapt it to the errors of the Innovators.”
77 Of. tit., p. 137.
78 Cited, ARRIAGA, of. cit., p. 191. Roca’s use of the past tense may seem odd, since he talks in another place [quoted earlier in this article] about the liturgical transformation he expects to occur as the result of z future ecumenical council. There is no contradiction, however, because he is, in the present context, evidently speaking to other Masons who shared with him knowledge of “transfigured sacraments” that were already being used in the Lodge. His remarks, then, would refer to Masses that he and other Masonic priests had said before they received “enlightenment,” after which they were then able to remove “the veil of liturgy” and concoct socially “meaningful” replacements. Such parodies were being performed in secret societies long before Roca. For example, Pope Pius VII, in his 1821 encyclical EccUsiam, wrote about the Carbonari: “They blasphemously profane and defile the Passion of Jesus Christ by their blasphemous ceremonies. They dishonour the Sacraments of the Church (for which they sacrilegiously substitute others invented by themselves) and even turn into ridicule the very mysteries of the Catholic religion.” Cited, Cahill, of. cit., pp.
79 (Rockford, IL: TAN Books 1991)
80 Of. cit., p. ii.
81 BUGNINI, op. cit., p. 94.
82 Ibid., p. 45. To claim that “the spirit” is lost — in need of “rediscovery” — in the rite promulgated by Pope Saint Pius V is hardly possible to interpret in a Catholic sense.
83 trans. Peter Coughlan (Staten Island, NY: Alba House 1967), p. 90. This book, writes Bugnini, “was the basis for the new Eucharistic Prayers of the Missal.” of. at., p. 450 n. 4. Thanks to Mr. <5i Mrs. William Zeitz for this book.
84 Of. at., p. 6.
85 Frccmantle, op. cit., p. 279. K
86 Ibid., p. 180. ”
87 Ibid.
88 MATT. 7: l6.
89 BUGNINI, op. tit., p. 181 n. 9.
90 “Ibid., p. 92.
91 Cited, JouiN, op. cit. p. 2O. A “dispossession” that largely has been accom-lished, and that has not been challenged by the Conciliar “Catholic” Church. lather, that apostate body seems content coexisting — and sometimes even col-iborating — with the neo-pagan world.
92 Op. cit.. pp. 92, 93.
93 Not to mention the successful subversion of the Modernists
94 Op. fit., p. 109.
95″ Cited, JOUIN, op. tit., p. ^6.
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Archbishop Lefebvre: Preparing the Council 1959-1962 |
Posted by: Stone - 04-06-2021, 10:23 AM - Forum: Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre
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Archbishop Lefebvre: Preparing the Council 1959-1962
Written by Bishop Bernard Tissier de Mallerais and originally published in the French magazine, Fideliter.
The English translation was taken from the May 2002 issue of The Angelus.
On June 5, 1960, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, then Archbishop of Dakar and President of the Episcopal Commission for French-speaking West Africa, was appointed by Pope John XXIII to the Central Preparatory Commission for the Council. His Excellency took part in all the sessions of that commission until June 1962, during which time he was able to assess the seriousness of such preparation. However, he became quickly aware of the formidable struggle of influence between the "Romans" (e.g., those wanting to preserve Tradition) and the Liberals. That struggle intensified and finally broke out in the open at the very beginning of the Council.
Archbishop Lefebvre was not yet aware of the intrigues and behind-the-scene dealings that would rig the Council when he received a letter from Cardinal Tardini dated June 18, 1959. That letter was an inquiry asking bishops around the world questions and suggestions regarding the various topics which should be addressed during the coming Council. On May 17, 1959, Pope John XXIII had announced the establishment of such preparatory commission.
Some episcopal responses deserve to be known. For example, Bishop Carli, from a small diocese in Italy, wished to have the Council pronounce a firm condemnation of the theory on evolution, as well as of the moral relativism already rampant. That bishop’s concerns were added to those of a Brazilian prelate, Bishop Antonio de Castro Mayer, who asked that the coming council "denounce with the strongest words the conspiracy against the City of God." Bishop de Castro Mayer thought and wished that the formation of clerics should result with priests more aware and more combative against what he called "the Anti-Christian Conspiracy."
Cardinal Tardini’s Survey
One of Bishop de Castro Mayer’s compatriots and confreres, Bishop Geraldo de Proenca Sigaud, was no less determined and pugnacious in denouncing "the implacable enemy of both the Church and Catholic society...", i.e. the Revolution, insisting on an "active counter-revolutionary stance," especially against Communism.
The Archbishop of Dakar (Senegal), who was about to form a holy alliance with these prelates was at first preoccupied by the ever-increasing dominance of bishops’ conferences, which he saw as an obstacle to the true authority of diocesan prelates. In his response to Cardinal Tardini, His Excellency did ask for some clarifications pertaining to the laity’s apostolate. He also expressed his concern for sound doctrine by proposing remedies to the deviations that had begun to spread in the seminaries, in particular that doctrine be taught following the Summa of Saint Thomas and with the help of a manual on the Church’s social doctrine. Two aspects of Church doctrine were of particular concern to the Archbishop:
1. The dogma "outside the Church, no salvation," which he insisted needed to be reinforced especially against errors undermining the missionary role of the Church.
2. He also asked for a clear affirmation of the Marian truth that the most holy Virgin Mary, Mother of God is Mediatrix of all graces. Such affirmation, said Archbishop Lefebvre, would undoubtedly confirm the spiritual motherhood of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
These proposals by the Archbishop and the three other bishops mentioned earlier were very touchy and more conspicuous by their demand on doctrinal affirmation than all other suggestions and proposals made by the rest of the world’s Catholic bishops.
First Skirmishes
The question regarding the selection of the Council’s periti (experts) was addressed at the very first plenary session of the Central Commission. Archbishop Lefebvre had received in advance, like his colleagues, the list of the experts chosen by the pope, and was the only one to voice his opposition to such contradiction between theory and practice.
Said the Archbishop:
Quote:As for the quality of the theologians and experts in Canon Law, they must have a true love for the Church and they must adhere completely first in their hearts, with their lips and by their actions to the doctrines of the Roman pontiffs and the documents written by them. This is of paramount importance, since we have been surprised to find the names of theologians whose doctrine is at variance with the necessary qualities demanded in advisors.
At least three of these experts had been censured by the Church hierarchy. "When I mentioned these names," he continued,
Quote:Cardinal Ottaviani did not react. However, after that meeting, during a coffee break, I was approached by His Eminence, who took me by the arm and said: "I understand your concern, but what can we do? The Holy Father, himself, wants things to be this way. He desires to have experts who have made a name for themselves."
By November, 1961, open sessions began for examining and discussing the schemas prepared by the various commissions. The Archbishop agreed, generally speaking, with most of the sessions by giving his placet. The Council was about to proclaim the truth against contemporary errors, in order to eradicate them for good. So thought Archbishop Lefebvre, who later said:
Quote:That would have heralded a new era for the Church, and struck a decisive blow against Protestantism. Had we followed that route, the Council would have become a lighthouse for the world. If only they would have used the pre-Conciliar schemas, which contained a solemn profession of sound doctrine concerning modern problems.
Two Kinds of Documents
On January 20, 1962, after Cardinal Ottaviani had introduced his schema explaining that "the deposit of the Faith must be safeguarded in all its purity," Archbishop Lefebvre, believing that the Church could not keep the deposit of the Faith without combating errors, said: "The Council must tackle the current errors. How are we supposed to defend the Faith if we don’t have principles?"
Then on January 23, His Excellency made another statement suggesting that the Council commission should prepare two sets of documents, the first set to be composed of canons condemning the errors of the day, and the second set of documents comprising a work that would constitute "a synthesis of the whole Catholic Faith, while dispelling in passing the principal errors of the times such as Teilhardism, naturalism, materialism, etc., but presented in a positive fashion."
Archbishop Lefebvre with 2 priests participating in the Council
As the sessions and debates proceeded, it became apparent that there was a split among the Cardinals. When a schema was introduced by the chairman of the sub-commission which had drafted it, a debate ensued led by the cardinals, especially Lienart, Frings, Alfrink, Dopfner, Konig and Leger opposing Ruffini, Siri, Larraona and Brown.
"It was very clear to all the members present," Archbishop Lefebvre explained, "that there was a division within the Church, a division that was not accidental or superficial, but deep; a division that was more pronounced between the cardinals than between archbishops or bishops."
Dramatic Confrontation
On June 19, 1962, on the eve of the last day of preparatory sessions, two schemas opposing each other were presented for discussion. The first document, Chapter 9 of the schema on the Church, prepared by the sub-commission on theology, dealt with "Relations between the Church and State, and religious tolerance." It comprised 9 pages of text along with 14 pages of footnotes referring to pontifical Magisterium going from Pius IX to Pius XII. On the other hand, the second text prepared by the Secretariat for Christian Unity, chaired by Cardinal Bea, was entitled "On Religious Liberty." It comprised 15 pages of text and 5 pages of footnotes, with no references at all to the Church’s perennial Magisterium. Having received the documents ahead of time, the Archbishop wondered:
Quote:The first is Catholic Tradition, but as for the second, how should we label it? Liberalism, another French Revolution, a Declaration of the Rights of Man - this is what they are trying to impose on the Church. Just incredible! Let us wait and see what is going to happen at the session.
And so it came to pass. Cardinal Ottaviani began his presentation by attacking the opposite schema. Said His Eminence:
Quote:In setting forth the doctrine of the relations between a Catholic state and other religions, I believe that the Council must follow the Church’s own doctrine, and not the doctrine that would please non-Catholics or accede to their demands. That is why I believe that it is necessary to eliminate discussion of the constitution proposed by the Secretariat for Christian Unity because it betrays the influence of contacts with non-Catholics.
After illustrating this influence by several examples, he presented his schema, dominated by concern for the preservation and defense of the Catholic Faith, and for safeguarding the temporal common good based on the unity of all the citizens in the true religion.
Then Cardinal Bea stood up to present his own concept of religious liberty, valid for every circumstance and for every man, even "in error about the Faith." Until this moment, the Church had only maintained the right of her own sons; now was she going to demand the same for those who follow cults? Indeed, this was the case, as Cardinal Bea soon explained, underscoring the ecumenical significance of the subject:
Quote:Today this question is of very great interest to non-Catholics, who have repeatedly reproached the Church for being intolerant in those places where her members are in the majority, and of clamoring for religious liberty in those places where they are but a minority. Each and every case where intolerance has been found has been carefully noted and brought up. This objection harms to the utmost all the efforts expended to bring non-Catholics to the Church. While developing this schema in fulfillment of its duty, the Secretariat had this circumstance before its eyes, and wondered what was the Church’s duty concerning religious liberty and how it should be exercised.
In order to justify his assertions in opposition to the prior universal practice of the Catholic world, Cardinal Bea went so far as to advance the proposition that "in current conditions, no nation can properly be said to be Catholic, and none can be considered as alone and separate from the others," which would suggest a common international regime of religious liberty. "Besides," he added, "the state as such does not know the existence and realm of the supernatural order." In fine, the reigning pontiff wanted an aggiornamento, "that is, adaptation to the current conditions of life and not the re-establishment of what had been possible, and even necessary, under other sociological structures."
Tolerance or Religious Liberty
Cardinal Bea concluded: "Our two reports disagree on the fundamental questions set forth in numbers 3 and 8. It belongs to this illustrious assembly to judge." Irritated by the historical relativism which his opponent had just applied to Church law pertaining to public worship, Cardinal Ottaviani thought it good to reply by underscoring the opposition: "Now everyone can see that we do not agree about certain things; indeed, that we disagree on matters of doctrine."
"They were like that, the two of them standing," Archbishop Lefebvre would relate. "The rest of us, seated, watched two eminent cardinals clash over such a fundamental thesis."
The voting ensued, and Archbishop Lefebvre said:
Quote:On religious liberty, non placet… because it is based on false principles solemnly condemned by the sovereign pontiffs, for example, by Pius IX, who called this error "a delirium." On the Church, chapters IX-X, placet. But the presentation of the basic principles could be done more in relation to Christ-King as in the encyclical Quas Primas. The goal of this Council is to preach Christ to all men and to reaffirm that the Catholic Church alone can authentically preach Christ, Christ the salvation and life of individuals, families, professional societies, and other civil organizations.
The Reign of Christ the King
He explained:
Quote:The schema on religious liberty does not preach Christ, therefore it is false. The schema presented by the commission on theology does introduce a sound and authentic doctrine, but reads more like a treatise, and it does not stress enough the only reason behind all such doctrine, which is no less than the social kingship of Christ the King. From the focus of Christ, source of salvation and of life, all the fundamental truths could be set forth in a "pastoral" fashion, as they say, and at the same time the errors of secularism, naturalism, materialism, etc., would be expelled.
That intervention, so unique by its supernatural elevation, which brought the debate back to the highest principle, could not help but make a striking impression on the minds of the commission fathers. For a man filled with the spirit of wisdom had stood up asserting not the rights of man, but the rights of Christ the King.
The Latin Fathers (Italians, Spanish, Latin-American) were supportive of the Ottaviani schema, whereas the Fathers from America, England, Germany, Holland and France sided with Cardinal Bea.
And so the Council, whose goal was to give the Church a new impetus and to manifest her unity, was irreparably divided only a few weeks before the grand opening of that Council. Archbishop Lefebvre explained:
Quote:That division was on one fundamental theme: the social kingship of our Lord Jesus Christ. Should our Lord reign over all nations ? Cardinal Ottaviani said definitely yes, whereas Cardinal Bea was saying, No! I wondered, "If things are this way now, what will come out of this Council?"
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An Interview with Fr. Arturo Vargas |
Posted by: Stone - 04-06-2021, 09:37 AM - Forum: True vs. False Resistance
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Taken from The Recusant - Issue 53 [Autumn 2020]
By way of introducing a Resistance priest whom not many will already know, we are very pleased to present this brief interview which is, we hope, the first of several articles...
An Interview with Fr. Arturo Vargas
The Recusant-Father, please tell us a little bit about yourself, to introduce you to English-speaking readers who may not have heard of you.
Fr. Vargas-I appreciate the opportunity given to me by The Recusant to comment on some of the things asked of me here, everything for the glory of God and honour of Our Most Blessed Mother: may they guide my understanding to be as objective as possible.I am Father Arturo Vargas Meza. I entered the seminary of La Reja, Argentina in the year 1981 at the age of 23. I began my studies with the year of spirituality, then philosophy, then Scholastic Theology, and finally I was chosen to the priestly dignity of which I am most unworthy. On November 30, 1986, the feast of Saint Andrew the Apostle, His Excellency Most Reverend Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre ordained me a priest. Since then I have been 34 years a priest to date. From 1986 to 2012 I belonged to the Priestly Society of Saint Pius X and I left it for doctrinal and faith reasons. Later I will explain these reasons why I left the congregation: I can only assure you that it was very hard for me and it still pains me to have left it, but I would never return to it as long as it keeps contact with Modernist Rome.
The Recusant-How did you come to Tradition? Were you born into it?
Fr. Vargas-I lived for 15 years in the countryside where at that time the reforms in the Church after the Council still had not come in as fully as we see them today. Then I moved for study reasons to the city of Guadalajara and at the age of 18 I left the Modernist mass definitively, for reasons which you will already know (the new doctrine, the new masses etc.). Up to that moment I did not know the Mass of All Time, the Traditional Mass, nor had I attended one, but I had not renounced my Catholic principles handed down to me by my maternal grandfather who had fought in the Cristeros War back in 1926 -he was born in 1905 and was most certainly one of those soldiers of Christ the King.My desire was to be a doctor. I never thought about the priesthood and was about to reach my goal of a career in medicine, but I did not finish it because of the following:
Shortly before embarking on a career in medicine, I felt a very strong call to a religious vocation, but I did not like the idea of entering the diocesan seminary nor any other that smelled of modernism. For that reason I considered the vocation a utopia. Utopia became a reality when I resigned from medical school due to the subject of embryology where I saw the greatness of God in creating us and I passed this subject only with the classes that were given to us without studying for the exam. Again, but with more conviction, the call to the priesthood came to me, but my condition that I would not enter anything with modernism remained stronger than ever as long as I dedicated myself to the only thing that I knew how to pray well, the ROSARY. All this happened in the middle of the year 1980 when I was still 22 years old, not long before I turned 23. For the month of December I heard in the press that the “Rebel Bishop,” as the modernists nicknamed him, was coming to Mexico. December passed and my uncertainty about meeting him grew, but I did not know if he would come to Guadalajara or only to Mexico City and if he did go to Guadalajara I had no idea where the Holy Mass would be celebrated.
Uncertainty invaded my heart already given to God.In mid-January or early February, I can’t remember exactly, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre celebrated Holy Mass in Guadalajara, which, by the grace of God, I attended in the company of a friend who invited me. I was very struck by the person of the Archbishop who was wearing the episcopal vestments: never in my life had I seen an Archbishop dressed like him. The atmosphere that was breathed in the room also drew my attention powerfully and I felt fully identified with everything that took place there although I did not understand anything about the Latin Mass. In the midst of this environment and mediating the grace of God, I made the biggest decision of my life: to enter the congregation founded by this great Archbishop. I entered the seminary that same year, 1981.
The Recusant-Can you please tell us a bit more about what you remember of Archbishop Lefebvre?
Fr. Vargas-How could I go about describing him? I saw in him a man of God, one who loved the TRUTH, faithful and devoted to the Blessed Virgin Mary, and uncompromising when it came to Vatican II. He was, in summary, a faithful defender of the Catholic Church. Listening to him was a true honour, the hours passed quickly when he told us about his comings and goings to Rome, the times they humiliated him and so on. Personally, I had a very special affection for him, which started from the example he gave us seeing him pray in the chapel, in the cloisters of the seminary with his breviary in hand and he was a true father when we spoke personally with him.
We felt very secure in everything because he gave us all the security that is required to be a good seminarian and then, following his example, we also wanted to be good priests because we had a well-finished example that divine providence had entrusted to us. I remember when, shortly before the episcopal consecrations, he unfortunately fell into the deceptions of the Vatican II people by signing something with them -the next day he retracted everything he had signed and raised his battle flag again.
He recognised his error with, I would say, the humility of a saint, and that has comforted me a lot and moved me to imitate him a little in his courageous stand.While he was still living, my priesthood felt secure in the Society, the Archbishop and I had a very good personal affinity. I still remember the last talk we had together, who would have thought that it would be the last of many? At that time he asked me to go to Rome and visit the Vatican in order to soak up the spirit of those glory years of Pius XII, Pius XI, Saint Pius X, among other Popes. I saw his death as a great tragedy, I had never cried for a relative of mine, but with him it was different because we had lost a father, for me a Saint, and I sensed that, with his death, persecutions would come for those priests who were committed with him in his fight against modernism, and also my oath against modernism which I had taken as was commanded by Pope St. Pius X.
The Recusant-If you were talking to someone who is a recent convert to Tradition, or too young to remember, how would you describe the SSPX of those earlier times?
Fr. Vargas-If I were talking to such people, I would tell them that the Society was a safe haven where scholasticism was taught as before, that it breathed an atmosphere very much in accordance with the times of the great Popes before the Second Vatican Council, especially His Holiness Pius XII and the Popes before him. Archbishop Lefebvre was what guaranteed all those things, everything I told you, but I would not necessarily say the same after his death because I got to see how the traitorous satraps delivered the work of the Archbishop into the hands of the these cursed wolves all the way down to the present.
The Recusant-What is your view of the Second Vatican Council? How do you see the situation in the Church in general, and the situation in the world?
Fr. Vargas-I studied very closely the Encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis of his Holiness Saint Pius X in which he says about those who occupy the Church of Our Lord Jesus Christ today:
Quote:“Finally, there is the fact which is all but fatal to the hope of cure that their very doctrines have given such a bent to their minds, that they disdain all authority and brook no restraint; and relying upon a false conscience, they attempt to ascribe to a love of truth that which is in reality the result of pride and obstinacy.”
I think that His Holiness Saint Pius X defines very well what is going on today in modernism and there is no turning back with these people, because they are convinced, they are Free-masons, they collude with the devil and those whom he controls. Humanly I do not see a solution to so many calamities that have arisen within the Church of Jesus Christ and I am fully convinced that only divine intervention will return the river to its channels, and for this I think the Pusilus Grexor small flock is being prepared.
The Recusant- Please tell us a bit about your involvement in the Resistance. Where were you when you became aware of something wrong in the SSPX? How did you find out or learn of it? How did you react?
Fr. Vargas: Before going to Spain, while I was still in Mexico, I had a meeting with the Superior General of the congregation Mgr. Fellay, during which we already talked about those rumours, which had been growing stronger, about a possible agreement with modernist Rome. He replied that he would not go to Rome without authorisation from “us” -obviously he meant not from the low-ranking priests but of the priors, superiors of autonomous houses, district superiors etc. Of course, he did not keep his promise given that in April 2012 he went to Rome like a little lamb at the call of the then Pope Benedict XVI, the same Benedict XVI who had lifted the “excommunication” but of course not that of Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre. When this happened [in April 2012] I was already in Spain as a punishment for not giving in to that lousy business which should never have taken place because it meant beheading the work of our founder and surrendering in the combat of all time, in summary it was another kiss from Judas to Our Lord Jesus Christ which has been given through the centuries. This attitude “outraged” many of us, I use quotation marks because, as the saying goes, empty vessels make the most noise [mucho ruido, y pocas nueces -literally, “lots of noise, few nuts” i.e. plenty of hype and not much substance! -Ed.], clearly almost all my colleagues agreed with it in the depths of their hearts.
Immediately afterwards we were forbidden to talk about it with faithful, nuns and other priests, in our sermons we had to talk about anything but those sordid agreements with Vatican II. They were very difficult moments because of the push and pull within the same community without meaning to, there was a bitter controversy on the subject, and the authorities in turn tried to minimize it, although they lied about it because these authorities did not care at all what the priests thought. At the same time the faithful only wanted to reassure us by talking about the next chapter which was due to be held in late June and early July in Écône, Switzerland. But that did not prevent the pressure in the pot from increasing on such a thorny issue and saddening the hearts of both priests and faithful who were saddened by the situation between Rome and the Society.
My reaction to such a situation was, of course, very much against those Pharisaic agreements, as they reminded me of the attitude of Judas and the Pharisees when they dealt with the betrayal of Our Lord. My opinion did not matter any more, but my emphatic refusal of such an agreement remained, for which I got a black mark against my name and was watched more carefully, but did not care at all because in the end, that was my true position and to this day I do not regret it. Before the chapter, I had a talk with Bishop de Galarreta in which I put to him that Bishop Fellay should at least retract publicly what had been done in April of that same year even if he did not know that he was betraying Archbishop Lefebvre and, ultimately, Our Lord Jesus Christ. Bad news of the chapter came to us before it ended: relations with Rome would continue, Bishop Fellay and his advisers would be re-elected as a reward for their juicy relations with the modernist heretics and Bishop Fellay would not make that act of mea culpa publicly because he was not “forced” to do so.
We lost those who were against the arrangements and a witch's house [i.e. a tempest] would be unleashed on those of us who opposed these spurious arrangements. Thus was our fidelity rewarded. I and the other priests faithful to Our Lord and to Archbishop Lefebvre found ourselves facing the very difficult situation of deciding whether to accommodate ourselves to this treacherous farce or to leave what was no longer the congregation founded by Archbishop Lefebvre. I must admit, the decision was not an easy one, it was one of the most terrible in my life and the most painful, I prayed a lot, I asked for the light of the Holy Ghost and every day it was a nightmare for me to stay in the Society, but I did not want to rush into anything which I would later regret. While I was reaching this decision, I suffered greatly in my heart from the bitter betrayal of the Society’s superiors: it is a suffering which cannot be explained in words, at one point I thought I had gone crazy. At last my prayer was heard and the answer was to leave the Society. This decision was accompanied by a great tranquility in my heart and soul and my uncertainty was turned into joy and happiness. This radical change amazed me. I was already sure of what I should do, just wait for the providential moment to leave the Society, a happy ending so far.
The Recusant-Why, in your opinion, has the Resistance made so little apparent progress in the past seven or eight years? What went wrong? Is it just that honest mistakes have been made, or is the problem somewhat more sinister?
Fr. Vargas-In 2013, we few priests who formed the Resistance had a meeting with Bishop William-son and we asked him, as an authority, to lead the Resistance. In response we were given a resounding “NO!” -not even as a spiritual advisor. That was our first disappointment and it was very painful indeed. So we were left adrift, each on his own, each left to his own luck by a bishop. We were very discouraged by his refusal, everyone present at that meeting, but we were not going to let that be the reason for abandoning the combat of Archbishop Lefebvre, he would know how to lead us from heaven to continue the fight. This was the first huge failure of the incipient Resistance and shows how the devil wanted to annihilate us from the beginning. This error was followed by another serious problem that held back or discouraged those of us who sought to carry on the combat of all time. Bishop Williamson gathered together his select group from which all of us were excluded who did not think like this “group,” which I regard as constituting a “congregation” as can be seen by two sudden blows given by a “traditionalist” bishop against whom we still wanted to continue our fight and who puts into practice the devil’s maxim: “Divide and Conquer.” The one writing this has been slandered and abandoned by these four other bishops [Williamson, Faure, Tomas Aquinas and Zendejas -Ed.]. They are faithfully following Bishop Williamson.
I asked them to prove their defamatory accusations against me and... I am still awaiting their answer. I have come to think of them in this way, and I hope whoever reads this will not be shocked: that they form a ‘fifth column’ inside the Resistance in order to annihilate all vestiges of Tradition in the Church. It is for this reason that we leave them and continue for our part, thinking that it will be more difficult for the enemy to annihilate us and at the same time hoping for divine intervention in these times which are so dire for the Catholic Church . Personally, in no way do I share with the four bishops of the flaccid “resistance” the errors that Bishop Williamson has committed, such as Eucharistic miracles within the modern mass or advising people to attend the new mass, among many others. I have refuted the first error with a study on the miracle based on Saint Thomas Aquinas, but so far I have not had an answer to my refutation. I have pointed out three things on this question [of Bishop Williamson]:
•His not accepting responsibility as leader of the Resistance
•That he formed a very exclusive “congregation” in order to divide us
•His doctrinal errors which he continues to perpetrate.
In these three things, can we see the work of God being done by them? Is this not rather doing the devil’s dirty work? Judge for yourselves. This explains the little progress of the true Resistance, the Resistance which several of us priests throughout the world have stayed with, though distances separate us.
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Free Catholic Audiobooks |
Posted by: Stone - 04-06-2021, 07:19 AM - Forum: Resources Online
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I came across this website that appears to offer free Catholic Audiobooks from pre-Vatican II sources, many (all?) of which are available for personal download: http://www.alleluiaaudiobooks.com/
An example: Catholic Audiobook: The Love of the Sacred Heart Illustrated by St. Mechtilde - Published in 1922 - click here to download.
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O filii et filiæ |
Posted by: Stone - 04-06-2021, 06:33 AM - Forum: Easter
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O filii et filiæ
O filii et filiae is a Catholic hymn celebrating Easter. It was written by Jean Tisserand, O.F.M. (d. 1494).
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Sub tuum praesidium |
Posted by: Stone - 04-06-2021, 06:19 AM - Forum: Marian Hymns
- Replies (1)
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Sub Tuum Praesidium
"Beneath Thy Protection" (Greek: Ὑπὸ τὴν σὴν εὐσπλαγχνίαν; Latin: Sub tuum praesidium) is a Christian hymn.
It is the oldest preserved extant hymn to the Blessed Virgin Mary as Theotokos.
Latin Text
Sub tuum praesidium
confugimus,
Sancta Dei Genetrix.
Nostras deprecationes ne despicias
in necessitatibus nostris,
sed a periculis cunctis
libera nos semper,
Virgo gloriosa et benedicta.
English Translation
We fly to Thy protection,
O Holy Mother of God;
Do not despise our petitions
in our necessities,
but deliver us always
from all dangers,
O Glorious and Blessed Virgin.
Some of the Latin versions have also incorporated the following verses often attributed to Saint Bernard of Clairvaux to the above translation:
Domina nostra, Mediatrix nostra, Advocata nostra (Our Lady, our Mediatrix, Our Advocate)
tuo Filio nos reconcilia (Reconcile us to your Son)
tuo Filio nos recommenda (Recommend us to your Son)
tuo Filio nos representa (Represent us to your Son)
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Hymns Honoring the Blessed Sacrament |
Posted by: Stone - 04-05-2021, 05:56 PM - Forum: Catholic Hymns
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O Sacrum Convivium
Original Latin (punctuation from Liber Usualis)
O sacrum convivium!
in quo Christus sumitur:
recolitur memoria passionis eius:
mens impletur gratia:
et futurae gloriae nobis pignus datur.
Alleluia.
Translation of original Latin
O sacred banquet!
in which Christ is received,
the memory of his Passion is renewed,
the mind is filled with grace,
and a pledge of future glory to us is given.
Alleluia.
O Sacrum Convivium is a Latin prose text honoring the Blessed Sacrament. It was included as an antiphon to Magnificat in the vespers of the liturgical office on the feast of Corpus Christi. The text of the office is attributed with some probability to Saint Thomas Aquinas. Its sentiments express the profound affinity of the Eucharistic celebration, described as a banquet, to the Paschal mystery : "O sacred banquet at which Christ is consumed, the memory of his Passion is recalled, our souls are filled with grace, and the pledge of future glory is given to us."
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Salve Sancta Parens |
Posted by: Stone - 04-05-2021, 05:49 PM - Forum: Marian Hymns
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Latin text
Salve sancta parens enixa puerpera Regem
Qui caelum terramque regit in saecula saeculorum.
A: Virgo Dei Genitrix, quem totus non capit orbis:
In tua se clausit viscera factus homo.
B: Sentiant omnes tuum [ad]iuvamen
Quicunque celebrant tuam commemorationem. [Alleluia]
C: Eructavit cor meum verbum bonum: dico ego opera mea Regi. [Psalm 44:2a]
Gloria Patri
English translation
Hail, Holy Mother, who in childbirth brought forth the King
who rules heaven and earth, world without end.
A: O Virgin Mother of God, He whom the whole world can not contain:
Enclosed Himself in thy womb, and became a man.
B: Let all feel thy help and protection
Whosoever celebrates your memory.
C: My heart hath uttered a good word; I speak my works to the King.
Glory be to the Father …
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Pope Pius IX: The Syllabus of Errors |
Posted by: Stone - 04-05-2021, 05:39 PM - Forum: Encyclicals
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The Syllabus Of Errors
I. PANTHEISM, NATURALISM AND ABSOLUTE RATIONALISM
1. There exists no Supreme, all-wise, all-provident Divine Being, distinct from the universe, and God is identical with the nature of things, and is, therefore, subject to changes. In effect, God is produced in man and in the world, and all things are God and have the very substance of God, and God is one and the same thing with the world, and, therefore, spirit with matter, necessity with liberty, good with evil, justice with injustice. — Allocution “Maxima quidem,” June 9, 1862.
2. All action of God upon man and the world is to be denied. — Ibid.
3. Human reason, without any reference whatsoever to God, is the sole arbiter of truth and falsehood, and of good and evil; it is law to itself, and suffices, by its natural force, to secure the welfare of men and of nations. — Ibid.
4. All the truths of religion proceed from the innate strength of human reason; hence reason is the ultimate standard by which man can and ought to arrive at the knowledge of all truths of every kind. — Ibid. and Encyclical “Qui pluribus,” Nov. 9, 1846, etc.
5. Divine revelation is imperfect, and therefore subject to a continual and indefinite progress, corresponding with the advancement of human reason. — Ibid.
6. The faith of Christ is in opposition to human reason and divine revelation not only is not useful, but is even hurtful to the perfection of man. — Ibid.
7. The prophecies and miracles set forth and recorded in the Sacred Scriptures are the fiction of poets, and the mysteries of the Christian faith the result of philosophical investigations. In the books of the Old and the New Testament there are contained mythical inventions, and Jesus Christ is Himself a myth.
II. MODERATE RATIONALISM
8. As human reason is placed on a level with religion itself, so theological must be treated in the same manner as philosophical sciences. — Allocution “Singulari quadam,” Dec. 9, 1854.
9. All the dogmas of the Christian religion are indiscriminately the object of natural science or philosophy, and human reason, enlightened solely in an historical way, is able, by its own natural strength and principles, to attain to the true science of even the most abstruse dogmas; provided only that such dogmas be proposed to reason itself as its object. — Letters to the Archbishop of Munich, “Gravissimas inter,” Dec. 11, 1862, and “Tuas libenter,” Dec. 21, 1863.
10. As the philosopher is one thing, and philosophy another, so it is the right and duty of the philosopher to subject himself to the authority which he shall have proved to be true; but philosophy neither can nor ought to submit to any such authority. — Ibid., Dec. 11, 1862.
11. The Church not only ought never to pass judgment on philosophy, but ought to tolerate the errors of philosophy, leaving it to correct itself. — Ibid., Dec. 21, 1863.
12. The decrees of the Apostolic See and of the Roman congregations impede the true progress of science. — Ibid.
13. The method and principles by which the old scholastic doctors cultivated theology are no longer suitable to the demands of our times and to the progress of the sciences. — Ibid.
14. Philosophy is to be treated without taking any account of supernatural revelation. — Ibid.
III. INDIFFERENTISM, LATITUDINARIANISM
15. Every man is free to embrace and profess that religion which, guided by the light of reason, he shall consider true. — Allocution “Maxima quidem,” June 9, 1862; Damnatio “Multiplices inter,” June 10, 1851.
16. Man may, in the observance of any religion whatever, find the way of eternal salvation, and arrive at eternal salvation. — Encyclical “Qui pluribus,” Nov. 9, 1846.
17. Good hope at least is to be entertained of the eternal salvation of all those who are not at all in the true Church of Christ. — Encyclical “Quanto conficiamur,” Aug. 10, 1863, etc.
18. Protestantism is nothing more than another form of the same true Christian religion, in which form it is given to please God equally as in the Catholic Church. — Encyclical “Noscitis,” Dec. 8, 1849.
IV. SOCIALISM, COMMUNISM, SECRET SOCIETIES, BIBLICAL SOCIETIES, CLERICO-LIBERAL SOCIETIES
Pests of this kind are frequently reprobated in the severest terms in the Encyclical “Qui pluribus,” Nov. 9, 1846, Allocution “Quibus quantisque,” April 20, 1849, Encyclical “Noscitis et nobiscum,” Dec. 8, 1849, Allocution “Singulari quadam,” Dec. 9, 1854, Encyclical “Quanto conficiamur,” Aug. 10, 1863.
V. ERRORS CONCERNING THE CHURCH AND HER RIGHTS
19. The Church is not a true and perfect society, entirely free- nor is she endowed with proper and perpetual rights of her own, conferred upon her by her Divine Founder; but it appertains to the civil power to define what are the rights of the Church, and the limits within which she may exercise those rights. — Allocution “Singulari quadam,&quuot; Dec. 9, 1854, etc.
20. The ecclesiastical power ought not to exercise its authority without the permission and assent of the civil government. — Allocution “Meminit unusquisque,” Sept. 30, 1861.
21. The Church has not the power of defining dogmatically that the religion of the Catholic Church is the only true religion. — Damnatio “Multiplices inter,” June 10, 1851.
22. The obligation by which Catholic teachers and authors are strictly bound is confined to those things only which are proposed to universal belief as dogmas of faith by the infallible judgment of the Church. — Letter to the Archbishop of Munich, “Tuas libenter,” Dec. 21, 1863.
23. Roman pontiffs and ecumenical councils have wandered outside the limits of their powers, have usurped the rights of princes, and have even erred in defining matters of faith and morals. — Damnatio “Multiplices inter,” June 10, 1851.
24. The Church has not the power of using force, nor has she any temporal power, direct or indirect. — Apostolic Letter “Ad Apostolicae,” Aug. 22, 1851.
25. Besides the power inherent in the episcopate, other temporal power has been attributed to it by the civil authority granted either explicitly or tacitly, which on that account is revocable by the civil authority whenever it thinks fit. — Ibid.
26. The Church has no innate and legitimate right of acquiring and possessing property. — Allocution “Nunquam fore,” Dec. 15, 1856; Encyclical “Incredibili,” Sept. 7, 1863.
27. The sacred ministers of the Church and the Roman pontiff are to be absolutely excluded from every charge and dominion over temporal affairs. — Allocution “Maxima quidem,” June 9, 1862.
28. It is not lawful for bishops to publish even letters Apostolic without the permission of Government. — Allocution “Nunquam fore,” Dec. 15, 1856.
29. Favours granted by the Roman pontiff ought to be considered null, unless they have been sought for through the civil government. — Ibid.
30. The immunity of the Church and of ecclesiastical persons derived its origin from civil law. — Damnatio “Multiplices inter,” June 10, 1851.
31. The ecclesiastical forum or tribunal for the temporal causes, whether civil or criminal, of clerics, ought by all means to be abolished, even without consulting and against the protest of the Holy See. — Allocution “Nunquam fore,” Dec. 15, 1856; Allocution “Acerbissimum,” Sept. 27, 1852.
32. The personal immunity by which clerics are exonerated from military conscription and service in the army may be abolished without violation either of natural right or equity. Its abolition is called for by civil progress, especially in a society framed on the model of a liberal government. — Letter to the Bishop of Monreale “Singularis nobisque,” Sept. 29, 1864.
33. It does not appertain exclusively to the power of ecclesiastical jurisdiction by right, proper and innate, to direct the teaching of theological questions. — Letter to the Archbishop of Munich, “Tuas libenter,” Dec. 21, 1863.
34. The teaching of those who compare the Sovereign Pontiff to a prince, free and acting in the universal Church, is a doctrine which prevailed in the Middle Ages. — Apostolic Letter “Ad Apostolicae,” Aug. 22, 1851.
35. There is nothing to prevent the decree of a general council, or the act of all peoples, from transferring the supreme pontificate from the bishop and city of Rome to another bishop and another city. — Ibid.
36. The definition of a national council does not admit of any subsequent discussion, and the civil authority car assume this principle as the basis of its acts. — Ibid.
37. National churches, withdrawn from the authority of the Roman pontiff and altogether separated, can be established. — Allocution “Multis gravibusque,” Dec. 17, 1860.
38. The Roman pontiffs have, by their too arbitrary conduct, contributed to the division of the Church into Eastern and Western. — Apostolic Letter “Ad Apostolicae,” Aug. 22, 1851.
VI. ERRORS ABOUT CIVIL SOCIETY, CONSIDERED BOTH IN ITSELF AND IN ITS RELATION TO THE CHURCH
39. The State, as being the origin and source of all rights, is endowed with a certain right not circumscribed by any limits. — Allocution “Maxima quidem,” June 9, 1862.
40. The teaching of the Catholic Church is hostile to the well- being and interests of society. — Encyclical “Qui pluribus,” Nov. 9, 1846; Allocution “Quibus quantisque,” April 20, 1849.
41. The civil government, even when in the hands of an infidel sovereign, has a right to an indirect negative power over religious affairs. It therefore possesses not only the right called that of “exsequatur,” but also that of appeal, called “appellatio ab abusu.” — Apostolic Letter “Ad Apostolicae,” Aug. 22, 1851
42. In the case of conflicting laws enacted by the two powers, the civil law prevails. — Ibid.
43. The secular Dower has authority to rescind, declare and render null, solemn conventions, commonly called concordats, entered into with the Apostolic See, regarding the use of rights appertaining to ecclesiastical immunity, without the consent of the Apostolic See, and even in spite of its protest. — Allocution “Multis gravibusque,” Dec. 17, 1860; Allocution “In consistoriali,” Nov. 1, 1850.
44. The civil authority may interfere in matters relating to religion, morality and spiritual government: hence, it can pass judgment on the instructions issued for the guidance of consciences, conformably with their mission, by the pastors of the Church. Further, it has the right to make enactments regarding the administration of the divine sacraments, and the dispositions necessary for receiving them. — Allocutions “In consistoriali,” Nov. 1, 1850, and “Maxima quidem,” June 9, 1862.
45. The entire government of public schools in which the youth- of a Christian state is educated, except (to a certain extent) in the case of episcopal seminaries, may and ought to appertain to the civil power, and belong to it so far that no other authority whatsoever shall be recognized as having any right to interfere in the discipline of the schools, the arrangement of the studies, the conferring of degrees, in the choice or approval of the teachers. — Allocutions “Quibus luctuosissimmis,” Sept. 5, 1851, and “In consistoriali,” Nov. 1, 1850.
46. Moreover, even in ecclesiastical seminaries, the method of studies to be adopted is subject to the civil authority. — Allocution “Nunquam fore,” Dec. 15, 1856.
47. The best theory of civil society requires that popular schools open to children of every class of the people, and, generally, all public institutes intended for instruction in letters and philosophical sciences and for carrying on the education of youth, should be freed from all ecclesiastical authority, control and interference, and should be fully subjected to the civil and political power at the pleasure of the rulers, and according to the standard of the prevalent opinions of the age. — Epistle to the Archbishop of Freiburg, “Cum non sine,” July 14, 1864.
48. Catholics may approve of the system of educating youth unconnected with Catholic faith and the power of the Church, and which regards the knowledge of merely natural things, and only, or at least primarily, the ends of earthly social life. — Ibid.
49. The civil power may prevent the prelates of the Church and the faithful from communicating freely and mutually with the Roman pontiff. — Allocution “Maxima quidem,” June 9, 1862.
50. Lay authority possesses of itself the right of presenting bishops, and may require of them to undertake the administration of the diocese before they receive canonical institution, and the Letters Apostolic from the Holy See. — Allocution “Nunquam fore,” Dec. 15, 1856.
51. And, further, the lay government has the right of deposing bishops from their pastoral functions, and is not bound to obey the Roman pontiff in those things which relate to the institution of bishoprics and the appointment of bishops. — Allocution “Acerbissimum,” Sept. 27, 1852, Damnatio “Multiplices inter,” June 10, 1851.
52. Government can, by its own right, alter the age prescribed by the Church for the religious profession of women and men; and may require of all religious orders to admit no person to take solemn vows without its permission. — Allocution “Nunquam fore,” Dec. 15, 1856.
53. The laws enacted for the protection of religious orders and regarding their rights and duties ought to be abolished; nay, more, civil Government may lend its assistance to all who desire to renounce the obligation which they have undertaken of a religious life, and to break their vows. Government may also suppress the said religious orders, as likewise collegiate churches and simple benefices, even those of advowson and subject their property and revenues to the administration and pleasure of the civil power. — Allocutions “Acerbissimum,” Sept. 27, 1852; “Probe memineritis,” Jan. 22, 1855; “Cum saepe,” July 26, 1855.
54. Kings and princes are not only exempt from the jurisdiction of the Church, but are superior to the Church in deciding questions of jurisdiction. — Damnatio “Multiplices inter,” June 10, 1851.
55. The Church ought to be separated from the State, and the State from the Church. — Allocution “Acerbissimum,” Sept. 27, 1852.
VII. ERRORS CONCERNING NATURAL AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS
56. Moral laws do not stand in need of the divine sanction, and it is not at all necessary that human laws should be made conformable to the laws of nature and receive their power of binding from God. — Allocution “Maxima quidem,” June 9, 1862.
57. The science of philosophical things and morals and also civil laws may and ought to keep aloof from divine and ecclesiastical authority. — Ibid.
58. No other forces are to be recognized except those which reside in matter, and all the rectitude and excellence of morality ought to be placed in the accumulation and increase of riches by every possible means, and the gratification of pleasure. — Ibid.; Encyclical “Quanto conficiamur,” Aug. 10, 1863.
59. Right consists in the material fact. All human duties are an empty word, and all human facts have the force of right. — Allocution “Maxima quidem,” June 9, 1862.
60. Authority is nothing else but numbers and the sum total of material forces. — Ibid.
61. The injustice of an act when successful inflicts no injury on the sanctity of right. — Allocution “Jamdudum cernimus,” March 18, 1861.
62. The principle of non-intervention, as it is called, ought to be proclaimed and observed. — Allocution “Novos et ante,” Sept. 28, 1860.
63. It is lawful to refuse obedience to legitimate princes, and even to rebel against them. — Encyclical “Qui pluribus,” Nov. 9, 1864; Allocution “Quibusque vestrum,” Oct. 4, 1847; “Noscitis et Nobiscum,” Dec. 8, 1849; Apostolic Letter “Cum Catholica.”
64. The violation of any solemn oath, as well as any wicked and flagitious action repugnant to the eternal law, is not only not blamable but is altogether lawful and worthy of the highest praise when done through love of country. — Allocution “Quibus quantisque,” April 20, 1849.
VIII. ERRORS CONCERNING CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE
65. The doctrine that Christ has raised marriage to the dignity of a sacrament cannot be at all tolerated. — Apostolic Letter “Ad Apostolicae,” Aug. 22, 1851.
66. The Sacrament of Marriage is only a something accessory to the contract and separate from it, and the sacrament itself consists in the nuptial benediction alone. — Ibid.
67. By the law of nature, the marriage tie is not indissoluble, and in many cases divorce properly so called may be decreed by the civil authority. — Ibid.; Allocution “Acerbissimum,” Sept. 27, 1852.
68. The Church has not the power of establishing diriment impediments of marriage, but such a power belongs to the civil authority by which existing impediments are to be removed. — Damnatio “Multiplices inter,” June 10, 1851.
69. In the dark ages the Church began to establish diriment impediments, not by her own right, but by using a power borrowed from the State. — Apostolic Letter “Ad Apostolicae,” Aug. 22, 1851.
70. The canons of the Council of Trent, which anathematize those who dare to deny to the Church the right of establishing diriment impediments, either are not dogmatic or must be understood as referring to such borrowed power. — Ibid.
71. The form of solemnizing marriage prescribed by the Council of Trent, under pain of nullity, does not bind in cases where the civil law lays down another form, and declares that when this new form is used the marriage shall be valid.
72. Boniface VIII was the first who declared that the vow of chastity taken at ordination renders marriage void. — Ibid.
73. In force of a merely civil contract there may exist between Christians a real marriage, and it is false to say either that the marriage contract between Christians is always a sacrament, or that there is no contract if the sacrament be excluded. — Ibid.; Letter to the King of Sardinia, Sept. 9, 1852; Allocutions “Acerbissimum,” Sept. 27, 1852, “Multis gravibusque,” Dec. 17, 1860.
74. Matrimonial causes and espousals belong by their nature to civil tribunals. — Encyclical “Qui pluribus,” Nov. 9 1846; Damnatio “Multiplices inter,” June 10, 1851, “Ad Apostolicae,” Aug. 22, 1851; Allocution “Acerbissimum,” Sept. 27, 1852.
IX. ERRORS REGARDING THE CIVIL POWER OF THE SOVEREIGN PONTIFF
75. The children of the Christian and Catholic Church are divided amongst themselves about the compatibility of the temporal with the spiritual power. — “Ad Apostolicae,” Aug. 22, 1851.
76. The abolition of the temporal power of which the Apostolic See is possessed would contribute in the greatest degree to the liberty and prosperity of the Church. — Allocutions “Quibus quantisque,” April 20, 1849, “Si semper antea,” May 20, 1850.
X. ERRORS HAVING REFERENCE TO MODERN LIBERALISM
77. In the present day it is no longer expedient that the Catholic religion should be held as the only religion of the State, to the exclusion of all other forms of worship. — Allocution “Nemo vestrum,” July 26, 1855.
78. Hence it has been wisely decided by law, in some Catholic countries, that persons coming to reside therein shall enjoy the public exercise of their own peculiar worship. — Allocution “Acerbissimum,” Sept. 27, 1852.
79. Moreover, it is false that the civil liberty of every form of worship, and the full power, given to all, of overtly and publicly manifesting any opinions whatsoever and thoughts, conduce more easily to corrupt the morals and minds of the people, and to propagate the pest of indifferentism. — Allocution “Nunquam fore,” Dec. 15, 1856.
80. The Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization.- -Allocution “Jamdudum cernimus,” March 18, 1861.
The faith teaches us and human reason demonstrates that a double order of things exists, and that we must therefore distinguish between the two earthly powers, the one of natural origin which provides for secular affairs and the tranquillity of human society, the other of supernatural origin, which presides over the City of God, that is to say the Church of Christ, which has been divinely instituted for the sake of souls and of eternal salvation…. The duties of this twofold power are most wisely ordered in such a way that to God is given what is God’s (Matt. 22:21), and because of God to Caesar what is Caesar’s, who is great because he is smaller than heaven. Certainly the Church has never disobeyed this divine command, the Church which always and everywhere instructs the faithful to show the respect which they should inviolably have for the supreme authority and its secular rights….
. . . Venerable Brethren, you see clearly enough how sad and full of perils is the condition of Catholics in the regions of Europe which We have mentioned. Nor are things any better or circumstances calmer in America, where some regions are so hostile to Catholics that their governments seem to deny by their actions the Catholic faith they claim to profess. In fact, there, for the last few years, a ferocious war on the Church, its institutions and the rights of the Apostolic See has been raging…. Venerable Brothers, it is surprising that in our time such a great war is being waged against the Catholic Church. But anyone who knows the nature, desires and intentions of the sects, whether they be called masonic or bear another name, and compares them with the nature the systems and the vastness of the obstacles by which the Church has been assailed almost everywhere, cannot doubt that the present misfortune must mainly be imputed to the frauds and machinations of these sects. It is from them that the synagogue of Satan, which gathers its troops against the Church of Christ, takes its strength. In the past Our predecessors, vigilant even from the beginning in Israel, had already denounced them to the kings and the nations, and had condemned them time and time again, and even We have not failed in this duty. If those who would have been able to avert such a deadly scourge had only had more faith in the supreme Pastors of the Church! But this scourge, winding through sinuous caverns, . . . deceiving many with astute frauds, finally has arrived at the point where it comes forth impetuously from its hiding places and triumphs as a powerful master. Since the throng of its propagandists has grown enormously, these wicked groups think that they have already become masters of the world and that they have almost reached their pre-established goal. Having sometimes obtained what they desired, and that is power, in several countries, they boldly turn the help of powers and authorities which they have secured to trying to submit the Church of God to the most cruel servitude, to undermine the foundations on which it rests, to contaminate its splendid qualities; and, moreover, to strike it with frequent blows, to shake it, to overthrow it, and, if possible, to make it disappear completely from the earth. Things being thus, Venerable Brothers, make every effort to defend the faithful which are entrusted to you against the insidious contagion of these sects and to save from perdition those who unfortunately have inscribed themselves in such sects. Make known and attack those who, whether suffering from, or planning, deception, are not afraid to affirm that these shady congregations aim only at the profit of society, at progress and mutual benefit. Explain to them often and impress deeply on their souls the Papal constitutions on this subject and teach, them that the masonic associations are anathematized by them not only in Europe but also in America and wherever they may be in the whole world.
To the Archbishops and Bishops of Prussia concerning the situation of the Catholic Church faced with persecution by that Government….
But although they (the bishops resisting persecution) should be praised rather than pitied, the scorn of episcopal dignity, the violation of the liberty and the rights of the Church, the ill treatment which does not only oppress those dioceses, but also the others of the Kingdom of Prussia, demand that We, owing to the Apostolic office with which God has entrusted us in spite of Our insufficient merit, protest against laws which have produced such great evils and make one fear even greater ones; and as far as we are able to do so with the sacred authority of divine law, We vindicate for the Church the freedom which has been trodden underfoot with sacrilegious violence. That is why by this letter we intend to do Our duty by announcing openly to all those whom this matter concerns and to the whole Catholic world, that these laws are null and void because they are absolutely contrary to the divine constitution of the Church. In fact, with respect to matters which concern the holy ministry, Our Lord did not put the mighty of this century in charge, but Saint Peter, whom he entrusted not only with feeding his sheep, but also the goats; therefore no power in the world, however great it may be, can deprive of the pastoral office those whom the Holy Ghost has made Bishops in order to feed the Church of God.
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Short Catholic Homilies: The Catholic Home |
Posted by: Stone - 04-05-2021, 09:32 AM - Forum: Church Doctrine & Teaching
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An Excerpt from:
Priests of the Congregation of St. Paul. Five Minute Sermons for Low Masses on All Sundays of the Year.
Vol. 2. [S.l.]: Catholic Publication Society, 1886. Print. starts pg 67-69
Short Catholic Homilies: The Catholic Home
(Click on Here to Listen to Audio of the Sermon)
Jesus went down with them and came to Nazareth, and was subject to them. . . . And Jesus advanced in wisdom and age, and grace with God and men. —Luke 2:52
In these few words, my brethren, the sacred writer raises the veil that conceals the mysteries of our Lord’s hidden life, and gives us an insight into the domestic concerns of the Holy Family at Nazareth. Jesus lived with Mary and Joseph. He was obedient and subject to them, and so he advanced in age and wisdom and grace with God and men. The door of the holy house is opened to us, but only for a moment, so that we might get a glimpse of the domestic life of a model family. Joseph, the father, day by day works at his trade to support the family. He rises in the morning ; gives his soul to God in prayer. He toils through the day. He comes home at night to enjoy his rest in the company of Jesus and Mary. He meets with trials, but he is patient; he is tempted, but he sins not; he leads a busy life, but he still finds time to pray. Mary, the mother, tends the household duties, with care and precision, and by her sweet, kind ways diffuses an air of peace and contentment throughout the home. Jesus, the child, is affectionate and submissive to his parents in everything. Here is the model of a true Christian home. Its ground work is the love of God; it is surrounded by an atmosphere of virtue, and to its members it is the holiest and dearest spot on earth. Such should our homes be.
The true Christian home is to society what the sanctuary is to the church of God. The parents are the priests in this sanctuary. It was God who ordained them priests when they stood before the altar with clasped hands and promised that they would be faithful to each other while life lasts. The Blessed Sacrament of this sanctuary is the Sacrament of Matrimony. It is the great treasure-house of supernatural strength to the married couple. The perpetual presence of our Lord in this sanctuary is by his grace, which is never wanting. The altar in this sanctuary is the hearthstone around which the family gathers. The communion-rail in this sanctuary is the family table, from which are dispensed the necessities of life.
There is about the sanctuary in the church of God an atmosphere of piety and reverence. It has a sanctity that no stranger dare violate; it has a privacy which no one but he who has a right dare invade. Such an atmosphere should be about the sanctuary of home. A priest would never allow a heretic or an infidel to sit in the sanctuary of God. He would never allow a corrupt man to stand on the altar of God. Take care, then, Christian parents, how you violate the sanctity of your homes. Take care what heretical or infidel books you allow to pass the gate of that sanctuary. Take care what bad newspapers you allow within its sacred precincts. Take care of the persons whom you allow to stand around your family altar. *Take care of the Movies and entertainments your family watches, that they respect God, his Holy Name, his Church and that they do not destroy the innocence of your children. It is one thing, you-know, to be obliged to meet a man in everyday life; it is a far different thing to invite him to your home, and permit him to violate its sanctity.
It is the duty of a priest on the altar of God, by his good example, to edify his flock; to stand at all times before his people a bright, shining light of Christian virtues. So, too, it is your duty, priests at the family altar, to be a model of all virtues to your children, so that they might learn from you what it is to be a Christian. Would it not be horrible for a man to come in on the altar and utter repeated curses? Would it not be fearful to see him stagger up to the altar of God in the state of intoxication? It happened once while Mass was going on, during the Elevation, while all heads were bowed in humble adoration, a drunken man rushed into the church, and in a loud voice uttered a horrible oath. It made the hearts of the good Catholic people stand still, and their blood ran cold in their veins. Is it any the less horrible for a father to come home intoxicated to the household sanctuary, or a mother, when anything goes wrong in the house, to give vent to her wrath in harsh language and sometimes even cursing?
See to it, then, dear parents ; make your homes holy places—real sanctuaries, where you can do your duty as priests of our All-Holy God. Keep from them all evil influences, so that they might be places where even the Child Jesus would not be ashamed to dwell.
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