10-06-2022, 05:27 PM
I had forgotten about that neo-Screwtape editorial. Thank you for re-posting it here. Personally I think it is well on its way to standing the test of time, subsequent events have done nothing to prove it mistaken, but perhaps even more time will tell...
I was thinking about this question again, just the other day. The enemy tactics are diabolically clever and very effective. I am no fisherman and have never been fishing once in my life, but I understand that when you get something big on the end of your rod, you can't just haul it straight in, there has to be a certain amount of back-and-forth... is that right? Well, if so, then that is perhaps an apt analogy.
Total refusal to ordain any priests or consecrate any bishops at all would by now have united more or less all the Resistance priests against Bishop Williamson, they'd all be admitting that something is seriously wrong with him and they'd all be very wary of any attempt by him to sway them in one direction or another. The same is surely true of the faithful. But Bishop Williamson hasn't totally refused outright to do any ordinations or episcopal consecrations, has he? He's done *some* ordinations, although it's always slightly strange, peculiar ones, seminarians who lived in the house of one solitary priest and taught themselves out of textbooks, for instance. HE ordains them to be vagabond priests, condemned to float around for the rest of their lives without a structure to belong to, and in fact very often they will end up saying Mass wherever they end up living and nowhere else. The same is true of his episcopal consecrations: there's something not quite right a out them. He first consecrated Fr. Jean-Michel Faure, a man who is all of one year younger than him (!). Then he consecrated another man, Dom Tomas Aquinas, who is a few years younger but still fairly elderly and who is in not very good health. He then finally consecrated a man who from day one had refused to say why he left the SSPX or what he stood for and whose every sermon, newsletter, whose very preaching and doctrine are kept top secret. And, of course, he made absolutely sure that each of them was willing to bend to his every unofficial whim and fancy, to obey the authority he so vocally claims not to have and to compromise doctrinally on important questions such as the New Mass. Episcopal consecrations like that are arguably worse than no episcopal consecrations at all.
This seems to me to be very similar to the "give a little" tactic of modernist Rome. They hated the Traditional Mass and in the 1970s they tried to stamp it out completely and make it totally forbidden. That was effective at the very start, but by the time a decade had gone by there was a fairly solid opposition to them in the form of priests saying "illegal" Tridentine Masses, and faithful assisting at those Masses, almost all of whom were to a greater or lesser degree supporters of Archbishop Lefebvre. Then in the 1980s, the modernist Romans realised that if they allowed there to be a limited number of slightly-not-quite-right, doctrinally compromised Traditional Masses, it would help split Archbishop Lefebvre's Resistance to Vatican II into fragments. So they gave a little.
How many priests and faithful fell for the token gestures from Rome in the 80's and 90's? All because they wanted to have their own little pretend 1950s parish, their own little token corner of the Traditional liturgy. And today, aren't we witnessing the same thing? How many supposedly Resistance priests, many of whom started off good, have slid into doctrinal compromise by reacting to Bishop Williamson's promotions of the New Mass with *at best* silence, and in many cases actually defending him? And all because they hope to be able to gain some sacramental favour from Bishop Williamson, to have a seminarian ordained, or their faithful confirmed... or even in the vain hope that they will be the next one to be made a bishop. Shameful.
But it is very effective. Look how well it has worked.
I was thinking about this question again, just the other day. The enemy tactics are diabolically clever and very effective. I am no fisherman and have never been fishing once in my life, but I understand that when you get something big on the end of your rod, you can't just haul it straight in, there has to be a certain amount of back-and-forth... is that right? Well, if so, then that is perhaps an apt analogy.
Total refusal to ordain any priests or consecrate any bishops at all would by now have united more or less all the Resistance priests against Bishop Williamson, they'd all be admitting that something is seriously wrong with him and they'd all be very wary of any attempt by him to sway them in one direction or another. The same is surely true of the faithful. But Bishop Williamson hasn't totally refused outright to do any ordinations or episcopal consecrations, has he? He's done *some* ordinations, although it's always slightly strange, peculiar ones, seminarians who lived in the house of one solitary priest and taught themselves out of textbooks, for instance. HE ordains them to be vagabond priests, condemned to float around for the rest of their lives without a structure to belong to, and in fact very often they will end up saying Mass wherever they end up living and nowhere else. The same is true of his episcopal consecrations: there's something not quite right a out them. He first consecrated Fr. Jean-Michel Faure, a man who is all of one year younger than him (!). Then he consecrated another man, Dom Tomas Aquinas, who is a few years younger but still fairly elderly and who is in not very good health. He then finally consecrated a man who from day one had refused to say why he left the SSPX or what he stood for and whose every sermon, newsletter, whose very preaching and doctrine are kept top secret. And, of course, he made absolutely sure that each of them was willing to bend to his every unofficial whim and fancy, to obey the authority he so vocally claims not to have and to compromise doctrinally on important questions such as the New Mass. Episcopal consecrations like that are arguably worse than no episcopal consecrations at all.
This seems to me to be very similar to the "give a little" tactic of modernist Rome. They hated the Traditional Mass and in the 1970s they tried to stamp it out completely and make it totally forbidden. That was effective at the very start, but by the time a decade had gone by there was a fairly solid opposition to them in the form of priests saying "illegal" Tridentine Masses, and faithful assisting at those Masses, almost all of whom were to a greater or lesser degree supporters of Archbishop Lefebvre. Then in the 1980s, the modernist Romans realised that if they allowed there to be a limited number of slightly-not-quite-right, doctrinally compromised Traditional Masses, it would help split Archbishop Lefebvre's Resistance to Vatican II into fragments. So they gave a little.
How many priests and faithful fell for the token gestures from Rome in the 80's and 90's? All because they wanted to have their own little pretend 1950s parish, their own little token corner of the Traditional liturgy. And today, aren't we witnessing the same thing? How many supposedly Resistance priests, many of whom started off good, have slid into doctrinal compromise by reacting to Bishop Williamson's promotions of the New Mass with *at best* silence, and in many cases actually defending him? And all because they hope to be able to gain some sacramental favour from Bishop Williamson, to have a seminarian ordained, or their faithful confirmed... or even in the vain hope that they will be the next one to be made a bishop. Shameful.
But it is very effective. Look how well it has worked.
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