<![CDATA[The Catacombs - Fr. Roger Calmel]]> https://thecatacombs.org/ Thu, 07 May 2026 13:28:47 +0000 MyBB <![CDATA[Fr. Roger Calmel: The Immaculate Heart of Mary and World Peace]]> https://thecatacombs.org/showthread.php?tid=335 Tue, 08 Dec 2020 10:32:17 +0000 Stone]]> https://thecatacombs.org/showthread.php?tid=335 The Angelus - March 2010

The Immaculate Heart of Mary and World Peace
Fr. Roger Calmel, O.P.

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A reflection on the message of Fatima, the importance of devotion to our Lady, and the necessity of conversion.

We shall reflect on the words of the Blessed Virgin at Fatima. When it comes to commenting on the words of Our Lord, every Christian who is careful about what he says or writes cannot help feeling a certain reverential fear. Might not what he will say miss the divine truth? Or will he be able to penetrate however slightly into a pre-eminently mysterious word? This apprehension also seizes him when it comes to commenting on the words of Our Lady. Yet it is also as normal to comment on the divine word as to reflect and meditate upon it. While the silence of love may be the most worthy homage (awaiting the eternal morning of vision), it is impossible not to speak, not to employ our discursive faculty before divine truth. Such an attitude has always been encouraged by the Church, who is as profoundly a theologian as she is a mystic. So let confidence outweigh fear, and may our reflection attempt to penetrate into the message the Queen of the Rosary confided to her humble privileged souls: Jacinta and Francesco, and especially Lucy.


Peace: A Gift of God

One of the first ideas that occur to us upon reading this message is that world peace, political peace, is a gift of God and of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. “Say [the rosary] with the intention of obtaining the end of the war.”1 Peace is thus suspended from the intercession of Our Lady and the omnipotence of Him whom we hail in Christmas Matins as Princeps Pacis. There is no doubt that this is true of supernatural peace, the peace that abides within the secret of the heart, which proceeds from the love of God, within the holy Church, which is the Beata Pacis visio. For how could peace of this order, of its nature heavenly, a peace of this quality, properly divine and supernatural, not be a gift of God and a fruit of the intercession of the Virgin redemptrix? On the other hand, a certain political naturalism would lead us to think that the peace “of all nations and tribes and peoples and tongues,” since it is a reality of a natural, perishable order, lies within the scope of nature abandoned to itself. There is no doubt but that some Christians have slipped on this slope. It is a slope of error. And this for two reasons: first of all, by virtue of the quite general principle that no good thing begins, continues, and comes to completion without the benevolence of the Almighty and unless God grants it His blessing; and secondly, for a very specific reason having to do with the essence of political peace.

It is, in effect, a fruit of justice–opus justitiae pax; now, there is no solid, integral justice without conversion of heart and thus without supernatural grace, that is, without a divine favor. Peace is the tranquility of a just order; but this just order cannot happen without the will of men. If the leaders and the people ordinarily abandon themselves to injustice, how can the tranquility of order be obtained? One may say perhaps: but isn’t it enough to have just institutions to be preserved from injustice, whatever form this may take: as, for example, to fail to recognize or to oppose the authority of the Church; to develop an unbridled economic imperialism; to oppress weaker nations? Certainly, appropriate institutions can and should remedy these crimes. But good institutions, while helping people to be good, are first of all created and supported by the justice of individuals. Now, this justice is quite weak and short-lived without God’s grace, in such a way that, without grace, the best of institutions are not enough to ensure peace.

To be sure, it would be grotesque to interpret the message of Fatima in the sense of a supernaturalism and to fail to recognize that world peace is a political effect partly linked to political causes. On the other hand, it is normal to interpret the message of Fatima as a reminder of the fundamental truth that politics is not enough, for the resulting political order is dependent on fallen and redeemed human beings. If individuals do not let themselves be healed by divine grace, the desired political effects will not follow. It is because the Church is deeply aware of this that she counts on the Lord first and foremost to obtain peace. Let us think rather of the commentary on the “Libera nos a malo” that the liturgy develops at the end of the Pater Noster before Communion; let us also think of the Good Friday prayers and the Exsultet of the Paschal Vigil. Peace is always presented to us as a gift of divine mercy. This lesson from the liturgy is also the first lesson of Fatima.

The second lesson is complementary: world peace is impossible without the conversion of Christians. This gift of God is not automatic, not only because it requires and fosters just politics, but at the same time because God cannot grant this gift without the conversion of wills:
Quote:“Do penance,” said the Blessed Virgin. “If my requests are granted, Russia will be converted and there will be peace in the world.”

Let us not be unrealistic. Let us not imagine that peace among nations and within nations will be obtained if all the Christians are not in the state of grace. But let us also understand that peace cannot be established if Christian people persist in lukewarmness: in other words, if they continue to make the comforts of technological progress the be all and end all of their lives.

The conversion called for by the Blessed Virgin and the peace of which she speaks are not ahistorical. They are specific to an era, to a precise period of human history, the time of the Communist Revolution in Russia and the worldwide expansion of Communist propaganda. World peace is not to be achieved in the state in which the world lay at the time of the Roman Emperors, when the nations as such had not been baptized and when the State had no notion of legislation enlightened by the Church or that took into account the coming on earth of the very Son of God and of His work of Redemption. The peace in question concerns a world in which a certain number of nations were baptized, and so it is of paramount importance that their subjects conduct their lives as baptized persons. Nor can peace in the modern world be achieved in the conditions prevailing at the time of the 16th century, when, in spite of the heretics and free-thinkers, no one envisaged that the State should be organized on the basis of materialism (and not just a doctrinal materialism to be preached, but dialectical materialism in the revolutionary activity that the State is compelled to adopt by means of perfidious cunning or under the pressure of terror!)

The conjuncture in which Our Lady called for conversion is assuredly very particular. It was at the time when Communism was spreading in one great land at one extremity of Europe that she appeared at the other extremity of the continent to urge our conversion. The war threatening the world was not a war like others, firstly because the methods of destruction have achieved incredible progress, but especially because dialectical materialism had insinuated its poison into the social fabric of the Russian State and was threatening to corrupt other States.
Quote:“If my demands are not met,” our Lady told us, “Russia will spread its errors throughout the world, provoking wars and persecution against the Church.”

It would be easy to capitulate at once and say, for example: “After all, does it really matter so much if a part of humanity is destroyed by nuclear weapons? The victims will not find themselves because of that in an absolute impossibility of saving their souls. Should we really fear worldwide domination by communism and the abolition of Christian nations so much? After all, the grace of God has no need of anything nor anyone, and those who desire it will still be able to save their souls.” Alas, these statements are not a fictitious objection that I’m addressing. This language of pre-emptive capitulation, which inspires indignation in every noble heart, has unfortunately been made by some Christians.

These are abject proposals that the instinct of natural generosity as well as the instinct of faith reject out of hand. This spontaneous refusal of the Christian heart which precedes its articulate justification might be explained this way: It is true that grace is strong enough and powerful enough to draw good from evil, to bring forth the holiness of the martyrs from the iniquity of tyrants and the cruelty of executioners. It remains that we ought not to do evil so that good may come of it and to do so is an abominable sin. It remains that we ought not to cooperate in evil by our complicity. We know that even during the apostasy and the general iniquity of the last times the power of God is still strong enough to save men. But we should do what we can to prevent injustice.

In some respects, it is true that Christian nations are not indispensable to the life of the Church. But since they exist we would be criminal to work towards their disappearance or to cooperate in their disappearance in any way. We ought not commit this injustice. It is very easy to say that the Church has no need of Christian civilization. This proposition is not understood correctly unless it is considered in light of the two following propositions: from the fact that she is a stranger on earth, the Church cannot avoid having an influence on terrestrial things that are in relation with the Faith; she cannot avoid affecting private and public morals and consequently she tends to form a Christian civilization.

The second truth is that Christian civilization constitutes for the Church a normal aid and support. We know the limits of Christian nations and how much they constantly need to be uplifted, corrected, and returned to the right path and that they are of another order than the Church. But to conclude from this that because these two orders are distinct they must therefore be separate is to fail, under pretext of purity, to take account of the fact that the Church develops on this earth.

The Church cannot be indifferent to the social conditions that foster respect for law, that is, a Christian social order. And it is such an order that God desires as support for His Church. When Christians commit the great injustice of allowing the abolition of this order, they know not what they are doing nor with what scandals they burden their consciences–for example, when, without any resistance, they allow private schools to be closed or allow state control of the economy. Although God can save souls through the worst of scandals, and even when the scandal has been codified and institutionalized, the Christians who favor or who at least do not prevent the scandal when they might have, are gravely culpable. Likewise, when Christians fancy that a Christian civilization can continue to exist without their conversion, they no longer understand what a Christian civilization is and the wrong they do to it.

To enable the Mystical Body of Jesus Christ to achieve its full stature and the number of the elect to be filled up, the social order is of no small importance. First, it is necessary for children to come into the world and for the human race not to be destroyed too soon; then it is necessary for men to be able to grow up in a society that accepts the Church at least partially, or, at any rate, accepts it enough so as not to become a perpetual and institutionalized incitement to apostasy, materialism, and the rejection of God.

Thus the spiritual kingdom posits a minimum of Christian social order; it helps such an order to be established, to endure, and to be renewed, but at the same time calls for it as a normal support.

If we consider the Incarnation from the angle where this mystery concerns the social order, we see immediately that the Blessed Virgin holds a unique and unequaled place. Whether it regards the coming of the Word of God in a passible and mortal flesh, or His birth at Bethlehem, or His preservation during the exile in Egypt, the education at Nazareth or the first miracle at the wedding feast of Cana, the Blessed Virgin was involved in the temporal aspects of the Incarnation as only the Mother of the Word Incarnate could be. One begins to comprehend that she now continues to watch over the social order of mankind in the measure that it is in relation with the Mystical Body of her Son Jesus Christ. One comprehends that she intervenes for the sake of a Christian social order; there is a profound affinity between her current role in the life of the Church2 and the role she played in the accomplishment and the unfolding of the Mystery of the Incarnation.

To be sure, it is foretold that the social order will culminate in the abomination of widespread apostasy,3 but until that time, and even at that time, the Blessed Virgin will be maternally watching to insure that the Church has that part of mankind and Christian civilization without which it could no longer exist on earth.

This explains why the heavenly Father wanted the apparition of the Blessed Virgin at Fatima to occur in 1917. While for the first time the nations of the world had just unleashed a war of total extermination, while a totally new revolution was developing that aimed less at regime change than at spreading throughout the world atheistic institutions and morals; in short, while Christian civilization, as imperfect as it may have been, was undergoing the most formidable assaults within and without, it was fitting that the heavenly Father should send to the world, for the purpose of helping it recover a Christian social order, the Immaculate Virgin whose consent had allowed the Incarnation of the Son of God and His temporal life. Now we can understand why the major apparitions of the Blessed Virgin, apparitions of global significance, only began after the unprecedented attack against Christian civilization by the great Revolution, and after the first organized attempt at integral secularism. From that moment the role of the Blessed Virgin for the salvation and renewal of a Christian social order became more urgent and appeared more clearly.

By our Lady’s intervention at Fatima to preserve us from communism, if we at least desire to be converted, she showed clearly that the peace she desires for us cannot have anything in common with communist peace, which is the tranquility of disorder maintained by means of technologically organized terror and a propaganda machine that does not shrink from any lie nor any violation of conscience. True peace is the tranquility of an order based on justice both public and personal, a justice moreover that cannot exist without love.

Communism speaks a great deal about peace, just as it speaks a great deal about freedom, liberation, and social justice. But since it has categorically and in principle rejected God and His Church, and since it reduces man to being nothing more than a certain variety of matter, its peace can only be a grimacing counterfeit. A peace that fundamentally contradicts the nature of man and society may indeed present an exterior of tranquility, but it is the tranquility of convicts condemned to the galley: they cannot leave their bench, and they work together because they live under the empire of terror and the whip. In the Communist galley the convicts still have the questionable privilege over the galley slaves of old of being able to listen to State radio broadcasts exalting the pleasures of their lot and the amenity of their guards while a hail of blows rains down without intermission on their skeletal carcasses.

There can be no communist peace, no more than there can be peace based on a comfortable, natural religion blessed by technological progress,4 or soft materialism, or revolutionary dialectical materialism, though the latter would otherwise be consistent and tyrannical.

The temptation to gain the whole world without fear of losing their souls threatens poor men more than ever. Technological progress offers them ever increasing opportunities to spend their lives without regard for eternity; to spend their lives without prayer, sacrifice, or love of God; to yield themselves without resistance to the plethora of anesthetics discovered daily by modern science. In the 17th century Racine bemoaned the vain pursuits of worldly people; his lamentation has become even more justified in our day than it was in the age of the stagecoach, the sailing ship, and strolling players. That is why the Blessed Virgin is urging Christians to be converted, that is to say, to awaken from the false peace of tranquil materialism under pain of becoming a prey to dialectical materialism and its intrinsically perverse order.

At Fatima the Blessed Virgin did not simply say that in the end she would triumph. She said:
Quote:“In the end my Immaculate Heart will triumph.”

So saying, she wanted to remind us that her intervention in our unhappy history would be an additional proof of her love. Just as we need not look for any other cause than the love of the Mother of God in her Fiat mihi that allowed the Incarnation, or the silent offering of her co-redemptive Compassion, or her ardent prayer in the Cenacle that obtained the irrevocable effusion of the Holy Spirit, so also her unceasing, unseen supplication in heaven and her manifest intervention at certain desperate hours of the history of the Church and Christian civilization proceed uniquely from her love.

We have seen some Christians sneer when listening to talk about the Sacred Heart and the Immaculate Heart; they justify their discreet mockery by theological reasons. It is enough to speak of Jesus and our Lady without making an explicit mention of their hearts, they explain; moreover, contemporary imagery, far from nourishing faith, encourages a suspect sentimentality. Whatever may be the case as regards often questionable imagery, the infallible Church officially promotes devotion to the Sacred Heart and to the Immaculate Heart, and in the apparitions of Fatima it is question not only of Our Lady or Queen of the Rosary, but also of the Immaculate Heart. If Christians who find fault with these expressions have really loved their parents or their friends, their spouse or their children, if they have not defiled the language of love, they know full well that there’s no speaking of love without speaking of the heart. Ever since there have been human beings who experience affection they invariably adopt the terms and phrases that remain no less valid for having often been profaned: “I give you my heart. I keep you in my heart.” Well then, since Mary loves us and since she has no other reason to take care of us than her ineffable love as Co-Redemptrix Mother of God, it is not surprising that she speaks to us of her heart.

Nor is it surprising that she adds, my Immaculate Heart. By that, she means us to understand how much she loves us purely, how much her love is attuned to the holiness of God; and it is impossible for her, the Immaculate Mother of her only Son, to desire for us anything else than the accomplishment of God’s will. Doubtless, neither can our brothers in heaven, the angels and saints, love us except in all purity nor in desiring for us anything but what God wants. But they do not have with God this absolutely unique bond, both physical and spiritual, which is the property of the Mother of God; consequently, in regard to God and in regard to us they lack the perfection and quality of love that belong to the Mother of God. The love of the angels and saints is certainly pure, but the love of the Immaculate Mother of God outstrips it extraordinarily in purity.

Knowing this, we understand better that she speaks to us of conversion and she makes peace contingent on conversion, that is, on fidelity to her Son and conformity to His Gospel. She cannot, in effect, desire peace for her children, namely, the first of all temporal goods, if it would make them forget conversion, if it would make them shirk the first of spiritual goods, namely, conformity to Jesus Christ by conversion, awaiting conformity to Jesus Christ by the blessed resurrection. Because the Blessed Virgin carries us in her Immaculate Heart, because she loves us with the love of an Immaculate Heart, she cannot obtain for us peace on earth without asking us for the conversion of our souls.

Similarly, she cannot obtain for us an earthly peace that would be tantamount to paradise on earth, one that would exempt us from having to suffer from the evil within us and around us, from having to fight against the devil and against all those who, for a time or for their whole life and with a more or less imperfect docility, do the devil’s work and play his game.

The peace that the Immaculate Heart wants to obtain for us does not fulfill the impure aspirations of political messianism: the messianism, abhorred by the true Messias, that refuses to take account of either the cross or the devil, or participation in the sacrifice of Jesus, or the unleashed malice of Satan. Since the human condition is marked by the Fall and Redemption, earthly peace cannot comprise the absolute suppression of every injustice because sin continues, and therefore peace cannot avoid being precarious and threatened. A word of the Blessed Virgin at Fatima gently reminds us of this truth without possibility of illusion: “…a time of peace will be given to the world,” she says. This restriction wrings our hearts: the peace will not be perpetual. And we may add: it will not be the unqualified triumph of perfect justice.

One might be inclined to be disappointed or to bewail our fate or to become angry. However, what is in conformity with the best aspirations of our nature as well as the divine inclinations of grace is to understand that this good, however imperfect it may be, is nonetheless of inestimable value; it means that we should continue working for peace on earth, everyone at his post and according to his talents, being vigilant especially as regards the conversion of our own heart; in short, working for peace with the Christian dispositions the Blessed Virgin came to remind us of.

The hatred, fury, and vigilant malice of Satan against the Church, of the Dragon against the Spouse, will perdure until the glorious return of the Lamb. The revelation of the Apocalypse does not leave us in any doubt about it. Likewise, the Apocalypse teaches us that the assaults of Hell will redouble with violence the closer the end draws near. The counter-Church will perfect its methods, the counter-Church which the Apocalypse reveals to us as nothing else than the political power, temporal society inasmuch as it sets itself up as an absolute power, becoming an idol and demanding everything from men, and by that very fact working unceasingly for the Church’s destruction.

For whoever reads the Apocalypse attentively, it seems that history does not repeat itself and that there is a development of the Two Cities. How then should we imagine the progress of the City of Evil? It seems to us to consist in this: progressively the devil will get hold of the fundamental conditions needed by the human will for acting rightly. To be sure, the devil has no direct power over our wills. But as human history develops, he works relentlessly to pervert the basic elements necessary for us to use our will correctly, such as the family, our profession, the work place, civil society, legislation, and morals both public and private. The devil deploys all his rage and cunning so that those things that should help us in doing good become for us a source of scandal, and not just in passing or occasionally, but permanently.

It is a first right of human nature to be helped to go to God by a decent family, an education in truth, an economy organized in accord with justice, and a society in conformity with the natural law. As history progresses, the devil shows himself increasingly stronger and more skillful at violating the true rights of man and arranging for him a life in which apostasy happens almost naturally. A society based on dialectical materialism represents an incontestable progress in his methods. Such a society is possessed by the devil since its institutions as a whole are organized in violation of natural law: it is institutionalized sin.


Conversion and the Rosary

At Fatima, even more than at Lourdes, the Blessed Virgin recommended saying the Rosary; she even gave herself the title, Our Lady of the Rosary. Is there a profound link between true conversion of heart, the conversion she asks of us, and this form of prayer that too often remains routine and superficial? The answer is affirmative, and we shall show why. However, at the very least this prayer must be a genuine prayer, that is, it must be made in spirit and in truth instead of being mechanically mumbled. The indignation expressed by Pascal in his ninth Provinciale and St. Louis de Montfort in Chapter 3 of his True Devotion over false devotees of our Lady still deserve our consideration, and after Fatima at least as much as in the 17th century.

For if the Blessed Virgin calls herself Our Lady of the Rosary and if she urges us to make use of our beads, it is not to authorize inattention, and still less Pharisaism, in prayer. This being said, it seems that the great advantage of the Rosary when it is said “in spirit and in truth,” is that it obliges us more than any other devotion (we are not speaking of the liturgy, which is of a different order) to become aware of the entire mystery of our Redemption: the life, passion, and glory of Christ the Savior. This prolonged awareness should obviously lead us to conform our sentiments and our morals to the subject of our meditation. The Rosary is a contemplative prayer; it makes us contemplate the Gospel, and this in the presence and with the aid of her who has penetrated furthest into the heart of the Gospel; how could it fail to be a wonderful source of evangelical life? How then can the Rosary fail to incite us to change our lives and to be converted? This is all the more true in that, if it is said as it should be said, the Rosary should lead us to a better frequentation of the Eucharist, the “mystery of Faith” and the great Eucharistic prayer, which are the privileged means of our transformation in Christ.

The Rosary well-said makes us enter mystically into the Mystery of Christ and makes us desire to participate in this mystery sacramentally so that our mystical participation becomes more continuous and profound. The efficacy of the Rosary for our conversion is better understood if we think of the vital link between the recitation of the mysteries and the sacramental frequentation of the Eucharistic mystery.

No less than being a contemplation, the Rosary is a petition, and a petition assuredly very pleasing in God’s eyes and very presentable to His infinite holiness since the suppliant, the poor sinner who implores, hides and loses himself in the prayer of her who prays perfectly, for she addresses the Father perfectly, praying in the name of her Son Jesus and in the Holy Spirit; it is with an accent of ineffable purity that she pronounces the “per Dominum nostrum Jesum Christum,” being the Immaculate Mother of this Dominus.

These few reflections undoubtedly suffice to explain why the Blessed Virgin, not to mention the ordinary teaching of the Church, attaches such an importance to the Rosary. It is because the Rosary, to tell the truth, far from being a closed circle and dispensing with all the rest, is a very sure path to greater goods; far from exempting us from conversion, it prepares it; far from forgetting the liturgy and the sacraments, it leads to them and prolongs them. The poor usage that might be made of the Rosary does not prove anything against its worth any more than too often poor religious art proves something against the splendor of Christ and the Virgin.

It is especially when the fervor of the Christian people wanes, when scandal and sin abound, or when Christian civilization is on the brink of ruin; it is especially in these hours of extreme peril either for the Church or Christian nations that the popes adjure us to have recourse to the Rosary. Let us recall, for example, St. Pius V at the time of the Turkish invasion; of Pius XI during the Spanish revolution and on the eve of the Second World War; and finally of Pius XII while a third of the Church had become the Church of Silence. This confidence placed by the popes and Holy Mother Church in the Rosary for the Church’s triumph over the forces of hell in the hours of their most furious attacks can be explained naturally because the Rosary, being a holy meditation, sets us on the path of conversion; being a supplication through the intermediary of the Immaculate, it is a pure petition; finally, if it implores salvation and the renewal of a Christian social order, it implores it in the sense that God wants, since it is addressed to the Virgin of the Annunciation and of Calvary, who knows perfectly the worth and importance of the temporal order.


Three Classes of Christians

“Perpetual peace and especially perfect justice are not for here below; persecution will resume at the end of time, and even on the eve of the Second Coming the forces of Satan will be stronger than ever. Let’s confine ourselves to prayer and leave to their fate the deceitful things of civilization and Caesar.” Thus speak the Christians who take refuge in supernaturalism. They are wrong, of course. Even if they are dedicated to contemplation and devote their time to prayer, their prayer should not be indifferent to the justice or injustice of the things of Caesar; rather, it should imitate the great liturgical prayer that admirably translates the contemplation of the Spouse of Jesus Christ and never ceases to implore justice and peace in the kingdoms of this world. But if the Christians stricken with supernaturalism do not live in the cloister, if they are more or less involved in the things of Caesar, then their attitude of ostensible detachment becomes a kind of hypocrisy because they benefit from the temporal while they make a profession of taking no further interest in it.

“Let us organize the planet in a radically new way. Let us change not only the basic institutions of natural law, but even human nature itself, to see if we can establish perfect happiness and faultless justice here below.” Thus speak the fanatical prophets who reject God and let themselves be possessed by the devils of earthly messianism. By virtue of this proclamation, they apply themselves to “creative destruction,” and when they have yielded to the seduction of dialectical materialism, they make the corruption of consciences, the perversion of minds, and the overthrow of institutions go hand in hand.

True Christians, however, recognize the imperfection and frailty of the social order, even when it has been baptized; they also do not doubt that a just social order and a peace worthy of the name are God’s will. Above all, they know that man is made for God, and that peace and holiness are to be found in God alone in the bosom of Christ’s Church. They try to abide in God. Because of this indwelling in Him who desires justice they find the courage not to be resigned to injustice. Whether in their mental prayer, if they dwell in a monastery, or in their mental prayer and action if they are engaged in active life, they work for justice and for the establishment and renewal of a Christian social order without illusion as without discouragement for the simple reason that God wills it. This attitude, the only balanced one, presupposes that the soul is fixed in God, or at least that it sincerely aspires to this union of love that constitutes true conversion.

This is the attitude that the apparition of the Blessed Virgin at Fatima and consecration to her Immaculate Heart ought to inspire in us. Her Immaculate Heart, in effect, desires to obtain for us both a Christian peace and the conversion of our lives; but, she warns us, a Christian peace will not be granted unless we are resolved to amend our lives.



Fr. Roger-Thomas Calmel, O.P. (1914-75), was a prominent French Dominican and Thomist philosopher, who made an immense contribution to the fight for Catholic Tradition through his writings and conferences, notably as a regular contributor for 17 years to Jean Madiran’s Itinéraires. His most enduring influence is through the traditional Dominican Teaching Sisters of Fanjeaux and Brignole in France who operate 12 girls’ schools in France and the US.

1 Chanoine C. Barthas and Fr. G. Da Fonseca, S.J., Our Lady of Light (Dublin: Clonmore & Reynolds, Ltd., 1947), p. 28.

2 For what concerns the relation of Mary’s regency with civilization, cf. the articles of Fr. M.-J. Nicolas, O.P., on the Virgin Queen, Revue Thomiste, 1939, pp. 1-29, 207-231.

3 See Fr. M.-E. Boismard, O.P., Apocalypse (Paris: Cerf, 1953); see also Fr. Ernest-Bernard Allo, O.P., St. John: Apocalypse (Paris: Gabalda, 1921).

4 On the theme of the philosophy of technology, see the Christmas Message of Pius XII, “On Modern Technology and Peace” published by the National Catholic Welfare Conference (Washington, D.C., 1953).

[Emphasis - The Catacombs]]]> The Angelus - March 2010

The Immaculate Heart of Mary and World Peace
Fr. Roger Calmel, O.P.

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A reflection on the message of Fatima, the importance of devotion to our Lady, and the necessity of conversion.

We shall reflect on the words of the Blessed Virgin at Fatima. When it comes to commenting on the words of Our Lord, every Christian who is careful about what he says or writes cannot help feeling a certain reverential fear. Might not what he will say miss the divine truth? Or will he be able to penetrate however slightly into a pre-eminently mysterious word? This apprehension also seizes him when it comes to commenting on the words of Our Lady. Yet it is also as normal to comment on the divine word as to reflect and meditate upon it. While the silence of love may be the most worthy homage (awaiting the eternal morning of vision), it is impossible not to speak, not to employ our discursive faculty before divine truth. Such an attitude has always been encouraged by the Church, who is as profoundly a theologian as she is a mystic. So let confidence outweigh fear, and may our reflection attempt to penetrate into the message the Queen of the Rosary confided to her humble privileged souls: Jacinta and Francesco, and especially Lucy.


Peace: A Gift of God

One of the first ideas that occur to us upon reading this message is that world peace, political peace, is a gift of God and of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. “Say [the rosary] with the intention of obtaining the end of the war.”1 Peace is thus suspended from the intercession of Our Lady and the omnipotence of Him whom we hail in Christmas Matins as Princeps Pacis. There is no doubt that this is true of supernatural peace, the peace that abides within the secret of the heart, which proceeds from the love of God, within the holy Church, which is the Beata Pacis visio. For how could peace of this order, of its nature heavenly, a peace of this quality, properly divine and supernatural, not be a gift of God and a fruit of the intercession of the Virgin redemptrix? On the other hand, a certain political naturalism would lead us to think that the peace “of all nations and tribes and peoples and tongues,” since it is a reality of a natural, perishable order, lies within the scope of nature abandoned to itself. There is no doubt but that some Christians have slipped on this slope. It is a slope of error. And this for two reasons: first of all, by virtue of the quite general principle that no good thing begins, continues, and comes to completion without the benevolence of the Almighty and unless God grants it His blessing; and secondly, for a very specific reason having to do with the essence of political peace.

It is, in effect, a fruit of justice–opus justitiae pax; now, there is no solid, integral justice without conversion of heart and thus without supernatural grace, that is, without a divine favor. Peace is the tranquility of a just order; but this just order cannot happen without the will of men. If the leaders and the people ordinarily abandon themselves to injustice, how can the tranquility of order be obtained? One may say perhaps: but isn’t it enough to have just institutions to be preserved from injustice, whatever form this may take: as, for example, to fail to recognize or to oppose the authority of the Church; to develop an unbridled economic imperialism; to oppress weaker nations? Certainly, appropriate institutions can and should remedy these crimes. But good institutions, while helping people to be good, are first of all created and supported by the justice of individuals. Now, this justice is quite weak and short-lived without God’s grace, in such a way that, without grace, the best of institutions are not enough to ensure peace.

To be sure, it would be grotesque to interpret the message of Fatima in the sense of a supernaturalism and to fail to recognize that world peace is a political effect partly linked to political causes. On the other hand, it is normal to interpret the message of Fatima as a reminder of the fundamental truth that politics is not enough, for the resulting political order is dependent on fallen and redeemed human beings. If individuals do not let themselves be healed by divine grace, the desired political effects will not follow. It is because the Church is deeply aware of this that she counts on the Lord first and foremost to obtain peace. Let us think rather of the commentary on the “Libera nos a malo” that the liturgy develops at the end of the Pater Noster before Communion; let us also think of the Good Friday prayers and the Exsultet of the Paschal Vigil. Peace is always presented to us as a gift of divine mercy. This lesson from the liturgy is also the first lesson of Fatima.

The second lesson is complementary: world peace is impossible without the conversion of Christians. This gift of God is not automatic, not only because it requires and fosters just politics, but at the same time because God cannot grant this gift without the conversion of wills:
Quote:“Do penance,” said the Blessed Virgin. “If my requests are granted, Russia will be converted and there will be peace in the world.”

Let us not be unrealistic. Let us not imagine that peace among nations and within nations will be obtained if all the Christians are not in the state of grace. But let us also understand that peace cannot be established if Christian people persist in lukewarmness: in other words, if they continue to make the comforts of technological progress the be all and end all of their lives.

The conversion called for by the Blessed Virgin and the peace of which she speaks are not ahistorical. They are specific to an era, to a precise period of human history, the time of the Communist Revolution in Russia and the worldwide expansion of Communist propaganda. World peace is not to be achieved in the state in which the world lay at the time of the Roman Emperors, when the nations as such had not been baptized and when the State had no notion of legislation enlightened by the Church or that took into account the coming on earth of the very Son of God and of His work of Redemption. The peace in question concerns a world in which a certain number of nations were baptized, and so it is of paramount importance that their subjects conduct their lives as baptized persons. Nor can peace in the modern world be achieved in the conditions prevailing at the time of the 16th century, when, in spite of the heretics and free-thinkers, no one envisaged that the State should be organized on the basis of materialism (and not just a doctrinal materialism to be preached, but dialectical materialism in the revolutionary activity that the State is compelled to adopt by means of perfidious cunning or under the pressure of terror!)

The conjuncture in which Our Lady called for conversion is assuredly very particular. It was at the time when Communism was spreading in one great land at one extremity of Europe that she appeared at the other extremity of the continent to urge our conversion. The war threatening the world was not a war like others, firstly because the methods of destruction have achieved incredible progress, but especially because dialectical materialism had insinuated its poison into the social fabric of the Russian State and was threatening to corrupt other States.
Quote:“If my demands are not met,” our Lady told us, “Russia will spread its errors throughout the world, provoking wars and persecution against the Church.”

It would be easy to capitulate at once and say, for example: “After all, does it really matter so much if a part of humanity is destroyed by nuclear weapons? The victims will not find themselves because of that in an absolute impossibility of saving their souls. Should we really fear worldwide domination by communism and the abolition of Christian nations so much? After all, the grace of God has no need of anything nor anyone, and those who desire it will still be able to save their souls.” Alas, these statements are not a fictitious objection that I’m addressing. This language of pre-emptive capitulation, which inspires indignation in every noble heart, has unfortunately been made by some Christians.

These are abject proposals that the instinct of natural generosity as well as the instinct of faith reject out of hand. This spontaneous refusal of the Christian heart which precedes its articulate justification might be explained this way: It is true that grace is strong enough and powerful enough to draw good from evil, to bring forth the holiness of the martyrs from the iniquity of tyrants and the cruelty of executioners. It remains that we ought not to do evil so that good may come of it and to do so is an abominable sin. It remains that we ought not to cooperate in evil by our complicity. We know that even during the apostasy and the general iniquity of the last times the power of God is still strong enough to save men. But we should do what we can to prevent injustice.

In some respects, it is true that Christian nations are not indispensable to the life of the Church. But since they exist we would be criminal to work towards their disappearance or to cooperate in their disappearance in any way. We ought not commit this injustice. It is very easy to say that the Church has no need of Christian civilization. This proposition is not understood correctly unless it is considered in light of the two following propositions: from the fact that she is a stranger on earth, the Church cannot avoid having an influence on terrestrial things that are in relation with the Faith; she cannot avoid affecting private and public morals and consequently she tends to form a Christian civilization.

The second truth is that Christian civilization constitutes for the Church a normal aid and support. We know the limits of Christian nations and how much they constantly need to be uplifted, corrected, and returned to the right path and that they are of another order than the Church. But to conclude from this that because these two orders are distinct they must therefore be separate is to fail, under pretext of purity, to take account of the fact that the Church develops on this earth.

The Church cannot be indifferent to the social conditions that foster respect for law, that is, a Christian social order. And it is such an order that God desires as support for His Church. When Christians commit the great injustice of allowing the abolition of this order, they know not what they are doing nor with what scandals they burden their consciences–for example, when, without any resistance, they allow private schools to be closed or allow state control of the economy. Although God can save souls through the worst of scandals, and even when the scandal has been codified and institutionalized, the Christians who favor or who at least do not prevent the scandal when they might have, are gravely culpable. Likewise, when Christians fancy that a Christian civilization can continue to exist without their conversion, they no longer understand what a Christian civilization is and the wrong they do to it.

To enable the Mystical Body of Jesus Christ to achieve its full stature and the number of the elect to be filled up, the social order is of no small importance. First, it is necessary for children to come into the world and for the human race not to be destroyed too soon; then it is necessary for men to be able to grow up in a society that accepts the Church at least partially, or, at any rate, accepts it enough so as not to become a perpetual and institutionalized incitement to apostasy, materialism, and the rejection of God.

Thus the spiritual kingdom posits a minimum of Christian social order; it helps such an order to be established, to endure, and to be renewed, but at the same time calls for it as a normal support.

If we consider the Incarnation from the angle where this mystery concerns the social order, we see immediately that the Blessed Virgin holds a unique and unequaled place. Whether it regards the coming of the Word of God in a passible and mortal flesh, or His birth at Bethlehem, or His preservation during the exile in Egypt, the education at Nazareth or the first miracle at the wedding feast of Cana, the Blessed Virgin was involved in the temporal aspects of the Incarnation as only the Mother of the Word Incarnate could be. One begins to comprehend that she now continues to watch over the social order of mankind in the measure that it is in relation with the Mystical Body of her Son Jesus Christ. One comprehends that she intervenes for the sake of a Christian social order; there is a profound affinity between her current role in the life of the Church2 and the role she played in the accomplishment and the unfolding of the Mystery of the Incarnation.

To be sure, it is foretold that the social order will culminate in the abomination of widespread apostasy,3 but until that time, and even at that time, the Blessed Virgin will be maternally watching to insure that the Church has that part of mankind and Christian civilization without which it could no longer exist on earth.

This explains why the heavenly Father wanted the apparition of the Blessed Virgin at Fatima to occur in 1917. While for the first time the nations of the world had just unleashed a war of total extermination, while a totally new revolution was developing that aimed less at regime change than at spreading throughout the world atheistic institutions and morals; in short, while Christian civilization, as imperfect as it may have been, was undergoing the most formidable assaults within and without, it was fitting that the heavenly Father should send to the world, for the purpose of helping it recover a Christian social order, the Immaculate Virgin whose consent had allowed the Incarnation of the Son of God and His temporal life. Now we can understand why the major apparitions of the Blessed Virgin, apparitions of global significance, only began after the unprecedented attack against Christian civilization by the great Revolution, and after the first organized attempt at integral secularism. From that moment the role of the Blessed Virgin for the salvation and renewal of a Christian social order became more urgent and appeared more clearly.

By our Lady’s intervention at Fatima to preserve us from communism, if we at least desire to be converted, she showed clearly that the peace she desires for us cannot have anything in common with communist peace, which is the tranquility of disorder maintained by means of technologically organized terror and a propaganda machine that does not shrink from any lie nor any violation of conscience. True peace is the tranquility of an order based on justice both public and personal, a justice moreover that cannot exist without love.

Communism speaks a great deal about peace, just as it speaks a great deal about freedom, liberation, and social justice. But since it has categorically and in principle rejected God and His Church, and since it reduces man to being nothing more than a certain variety of matter, its peace can only be a grimacing counterfeit. A peace that fundamentally contradicts the nature of man and society may indeed present an exterior of tranquility, but it is the tranquility of convicts condemned to the galley: they cannot leave their bench, and they work together because they live under the empire of terror and the whip. In the Communist galley the convicts still have the questionable privilege over the galley slaves of old of being able to listen to State radio broadcasts exalting the pleasures of their lot and the amenity of their guards while a hail of blows rains down without intermission on their skeletal carcasses.

There can be no communist peace, no more than there can be peace based on a comfortable, natural religion blessed by technological progress,4 or soft materialism, or revolutionary dialectical materialism, though the latter would otherwise be consistent and tyrannical.

The temptation to gain the whole world without fear of losing their souls threatens poor men more than ever. Technological progress offers them ever increasing opportunities to spend their lives without regard for eternity; to spend their lives without prayer, sacrifice, or love of God; to yield themselves without resistance to the plethora of anesthetics discovered daily by modern science. In the 17th century Racine bemoaned the vain pursuits of worldly people; his lamentation has become even more justified in our day than it was in the age of the stagecoach, the sailing ship, and strolling players. That is why the Blessed Virgin is urging Christians to be converted, that is to say, to awaken from the false peace of tranquil materialism under pain of becoming a prey to dialectical materialism and its intrinsically perverse order.

At Fatima the Blessed Virgin did not simply say that in the end she would triumph. She said:
Quote:“In the end my Immaculate Heart will triumph.”

So saying, she wanted to remind us that her intervention in our unhappy history would be an additional proof of her love. Just as we need not look for any other cause than the love of the Mother of God in her Fiat mihi that allowed the Incarnation, or the silent offering of her co-redemptive Compassion, or her ardent prayer in the Cenacle that obtained the irrevocable effusion of the Holy Spirit, so also her unceasing, unseen supplication in heaven and her manifest intervention at certain desperate hours of the history of the Church and Christian civilization proceed uniquely from her love.

We have seen some Christians sneer when listening to talk about the Sacred Heart and the Immaculate Heart; they justify their discreet mockery by theological reasons. It is enough to speak of Jesus and our Lady without making an explicit mention of their hearts, they explain; moreover, contemporary imagery, far from nourishing faith, encourages a suspect sentimentality. Whatever may be the case as regards often questionable imagery, the infallible Church officially promotes devotion to the Sacred Heart and to the Immaculate Heart, and in the apparitions of Fatima it is question not only of Our Lady or Queen of the Rosary, but also of the Immaculate Heart. If Christians who find fault with these expressions have really loved their parents or their friends, their spouse or their children, if they have not defiled the language of love, they know full well that there’s no speaking of love without speaking of the heart. Ever since there have been human beings who experience affection they invariably adopt the terms and phrases that remain no less valid for having often been profaned: “I give you my heart. I keep you in my heart.” Well then, since Mary loves us and since she has no other reason to take care of us than her ineffable love as Co-Redemptrix Mother of God, it is not surprising that she speaks to us of her heart.

Nor is it surprising that she adds, my Immaculate Heart. By that, she means us to understand how much she loves us purely, how much her love is attuned to the holiness of God; and it is impossible for her, the Immaculate Mother of her only Son, to desire for us anything else than the accomplishment of God’s will. Doubtless, neither can our brothers in heaven, the angels and saints, love us except in all purity nor in desiring for us anything but what God wants. But they do not have with God this absolutely unique bond, both physical and spiritual, which is the property of the Mother of God; consequently, in regard to God and in regard to us they lack the perfection and quality of love that belong to the Mother of God. The love of the angels and saints is certainly pure, but the love of the Immaculate Mother of God outstrips it extraordinarily in purity.

Knowing this, we understand better that she speaks to us of conversion and she makes peace contingent on conversion, that is, on fidelity to her Son and conformity to His Gospel. She cannot, in effect, desire peace for her children, namely, the first of all temporal goods, if it would make them forget conversion, if it would make them shirk the first of spiritual goods, namely, conformity to Jesus Christ by conversion, awaiting conformity to Jesus Christ by the blessed resurrection. Because the Blessed Virgin carries us in her Immaculate Heart, because she loves us with the love of an Immaculate Heart, she cannot obtain for us peace on earth without asking us for the conversion of our souls.

Similarly, she cannot obtain for us an earthly peace that would be tantamount to paradise on earth, one that would exempt us from having to suffer from the evil within us and around us, from having to fight against the devil and against all those who, for a time or for their whole life and with a more or less imperfect docility, do the devil’s work and play his game.

The peace that the Immaculate Heart wants to obtain for us does not fulfill the impure aspirations of political messianism: the messianism, abhorred by the true Messias, that refuses to take account of either the cross or the devil, or participation in the sacrifice of Jesus, or the unleashed malice of Satan. Since the human condition is marked by the Fall and Redemption, earthly peace cannot comprise the absolute suppression of every injustice because sin continues, and therefore peace cannot avoid being precarious and threatened. A word of the Blessed Virgin at Fatima gently reminds us of this truth without possibility of illusion: “…a time of peace will be given to the world,” she says. This restriction wrings our hearts: the peace will not be perpetual. And we may add: it will not be the unqualified triumph of perfect justice.

One might be inclined to be disappointed or to bewail our fate or to become angry. However, what is in conformity with the best aspirations of our nature as well as the divine inclinations of grace is to understand that this good, however imperfect it may be, is nonetheless of inestimable value; it means that we should continue working for peace on earth, everyone at his post and according to his talents, being vigilant especially as regards the conversion of our own heart; in short, working for peace with the Christian dispositions the Blessed Virgin came to remind us of.

The hatred, fury, and vigilant malice of Satan against the Church, of the Dragon against the Spouse, will perdure until the glorious return of the Lamb. The revelation of the Apocalypse does not leave us in any doubt about it. Likewise, the Apocalypse teaches us that the assaults of Hell will redouble with violence the closer the end draws near. The counter-Church will perfect its methods, the counter-Church which the Apocalypse reveals to us as nothing else than the political power, temporal society inasmuch as it sets itself up as an absolute power, becoming an idol and demanding everything from men, and by that very fact working unceasingly for the Church’s destruction.

For whoever reads the Apocalypse attentively, it seems that history does not repeat itself and that there is a development of the Two Cities. How then should we imagine the progress of the City of Evil? It seems to us to consist in this: progressively the devil will get hold of the fundamental conditions needed by the human will for acting rightly. To be sure, the devil has no direct power over our wills. But as human history develops, he works relentlessly to pervert the basic elements necessary for us to use our will correctly, such as the family, our profession, the work place, civil society, legislation, and morals both public and private. The devil deploys all his rage and cunning so that those things that should help us in doing good become for us a source of scandal, and not just in passing or occasionally, but permanently.

It is a first right of human nature to be helped to go to God by a decent family, an education in truth, an economy organized in accord with justice, and a society in conformity with the natural law. As history progresses, the devil shows himself increasingly stronger and more skillful at violating the true rights of man and arranging for him a life in which apostasy happens almost naturally. A society based on dialectical materialism represents an incontestable progress in his methods. Such a society is possessed by the devil since its institutions as a whole are organized in violation of natural law: it is institutionalized sin.


Conversion and the Rosary

At Fatima, even more than at Lourdes, the Blessed Virgin recommended saying the Rosary; she even gave herself the title, Our Lady of the Rosary. Is there a profound link between true conversion of heart, the conversion she asks of us, and this form of prayer that too often remains routine and superficial? The answer is affirmative, and we shall show why. However, at the very least this prayer must be a genuine prayer, that is, it must be made in spirit and in truth instead of being mechanically mumbled. The indignation expressed by Pascal in his ninth Provinciale and St. Louis de Montfort in Chapter 3 of his True Devotion over false devotees of our Lady still deserve our consideration, and after Fatima at least as much as in the 17th century.

For if the Blessed Virgin calls herself Our Lady of the Rosary and if she urges us to make use of our beads, it is not to authorize inattention, and still less Pharisaism, in prayer. This being said, it seems that the great advantage of the Rosary when it is said “in spirit and in truth,” is that it obliges us more than any other devotion (we are not speaking of the liturgy, which is of a different order) to become aware of the entire mystery of our Redemption: the life, passion, and glory of Christ the Savior. This prolonged awareness should obviously lead us to conform our sentiments and our morals to the subject of our meditation. The Rosary is a contemplative prayer; it makes us contemplate the Gospel, and this in the presence and with the aid of her who has penetrated furthest into the heart of the Gospel; how could it fail to be a wonderful source of evangelical life? How then can the Rosary fail to incite us to change our lives and to be converted? This is all the more true in that, if it is said as it should be said, the Rosary should lead us to a better frequentation of the Eucharist, the “mystery of Faith” and the great Eucharistic prayer, which are the privileged means of our transformation in Christ.

The Rosary well-said makes us enter mystically into the Mystery of Christ and makes us desire to participate in this mystery sacramentally so that our mystical participation becomes more continuous and profound. The efficacy of the Rosary for our conversion is better understood if we think of the vital link between the recitation of the mysteries and the sacramental frequentation of the Eucharistic mystery.

No less than being a contemplation, the Rosary is a petition, and a petition assuredly very pleasing in God’s eyes and very presentable to His infinite holiness since the suppliant, the poor sinner who implores, hides and loses himself in the prayer of her who prays perfectly, for she addresses the Father perfectly, praying in the name of her Son Jesus and in the Holy Spirit; it is with an accent of ineffable purity that she pronounces the “per Dominum nostrum Jesum Christum,” being the Immaculate Mother of this Dominus.

These few reflections undoubtedly suffice to explain why the Blessed Virgin, not to mention the ordinary teaching of the Church, attaches such an importance to the Rosary. It is because the Rosary, to tell the truth, far from being a closed circle and dispensing with all the rest, is a very sure path to greater goods; far from exempting us from conversion, it prepares it; far from forgetting the liturgy and the sacraments, it leads to them and prolongs them. The poor usage that might be made of the Rosary does not prove anything against its worth any more than too often poor religious art proves something against the splendor of Christ and the Virgin.

It is especially when the fervor of the Christian people wanes, when scandal and sin abound, or when Christian civilization is on the brink of ruin; it is especially in these hours of extreme peril either for the Church or Christian nations that the popes adjure us to have recourse to the Rosary. Let us recall, for example, St. Pius V at the time of the Turkish invasion; of Pius XI during the Spanish revolution and on the eve of the Second World War; and finally of Pius XII while a third of the Church had become the Church of Silence. This confidence placed by the popes and Holy Mother Church in the Rosary for the Church’s triumph over the forces of hell in the hours of their most furious attacks can be explained naturally because the Rosary, being a holy meditation, sets us on the path of conversion; being a supplication through the intermediary of the Immaculate, it is a pure petition; finally, if it implores salvation and the renewal of a Christian social order, it implores it in the sense that God wants, since it is addressed to the Virgin of the Annunciation and of Calvary, who knows perfectly the worth and importance of the temporal order.


Three Classes of Christians

“Perpetual peace and especially perfect justice are not for here below; persecution will resume at the end of time, and even on the eve of the Second Coming the forces of Satan will be stronger than ever. Let’s confine ourselves to prayer and leave to their fate the deceitful things of civilization and Caesar.” Thus speak the Christians who take refuge in supernaturalism. They are wrong, of course. Even if they are dedicated to contemplation and devote their time to prayer, their prayer should not be indifferent to the justice or injustice of the things of Caesar; rather, it should imitate the great liturgical prayer that admirably translates the contemplation of the Spouse of Jesus Christ and never ceases to implore justice and peace in the kingdoms of this world. But if the Christians stricken with supernaturalism do not live in the cloister, if they are more or less involved in the things of Caesar, then their attitude of ostensible detachment becomes a kind of hypocrisy because they benefit from the temporal while they make a profession of taking no further interest in it.

“Let us organize the planet in a radically new way. Let us change not only the basic institutions of natural law, but even human nature itself, to see if we can establish perfect happiness and faultless justice here below.” Thus speak the fanatical prophets who reject God and let themselves be possessed by the devils of earthly messianism. By virtue of this proclamation, they apply themselves to “creative destruction,” and when they have yielded to the seduction of dialectical materialism, they make the corruption of consciences, the perversion of minds, and the overthrow of institutions go hand in hand.

True Christians, however, recognize the imperfection and frailty of the social order, even when it has been baptized; they also do not doubt that a just social order and a peace worthy of the name are God’s will. Above all, they know that man is made for God, and that peace and holiness are to be found in God alone in the bosom of Christ’s Church. They try to abide in God. Because of this indwelling in Him who desires justice they find the courage not to be resigned to injustice. Whether in their mental prayer, if they dwell in a monastery, or in their mental prayer and action if they are engaged in active life, they work for justice and for the establishment and renewal of a Christian social order without illusion as without discouragement for the simple reason that God wills it. This attitude, the only balanced one, presupposes that the soul is fixed in God, or at least that it sincerely aspires to this union of love that constitutes true conversion.

This is the attitude that the apparition of the Blessed Virgin at Fatima and consecration to her Immaculate Heart ought to inspire in us. Her Immaculate Heart, in effect, desires to obtain for us both a Christian peace and the conversion of our lives; but, she warns us, a Christian peace will not be granted unless we are resolved to amend our lives.



Fr. Roger-Thomas Calmel, O.P. (1914-75), was a prominent French Dominican and Thomist philosopher, who made an immense contribution to the fight for Catholic Tradition through his writings and conferences, notably as a regular contributor for 17 years to Jean Madiran’s Itinéraires. His most enduring influence is through the traditional Dominican Teaching Sisters of Fanjeaux and Brignole in France who operate 12 girls’ schools in France and the US.

1 Chanoine C. Barthas and Fr. G. Da Fonseca, S.J., Our Lady of Light (Dublin: Clonmore & Reynolds, Ltd., 1947), p. 28.

2 For what concerns the relation of Mary’s regency with civilization, cf. the articles of Fr. M.-J. Nicolas, O.P., on the Virgin Queen, Revue Thomiste, 1939, pp. 1-29, 207-231.

3 See Fr. M.-E. Boismard, O.P., Apocalypse (Paris: Cerf, 1953); see also Fr. Ernest-Bernard Allo, O.P., St. John: Apocalypse (Paris: Gabalda, 1921).

4 On the theme of the philosophy of technology, see the Christmas Message of Pius XII, “On Modern Technology and Peace” published by the National Catholic Welfare Conference (Washington, D.C., 1953).

[Emphasis - The Catacombs]]]> <![CDATA[Fr. Calmel - Of the Church and the Pope]]> https://thecatacombs.org/showthread.php?tid=103 Sat, 21 Nov 2020 10:17:25 +0000 Stone]]> https://thecatacombs.org/showthread.php?tid=103 Of the Church and the Pope
by Fr. Roger Calmel, O.P.

This essay by Fr. Roger Calmel, O.P. (1914-75) helps us in these difficult times to preserve our love of the Church. More than 30 years after its first publication, this article retains all its relevance, so much so that it even seems to have been written for our time, in which the crisis in the Church deepens at an unprecedented pace. This essay will help the reader to think clearly, keep the Faith, and maintain serenity in the troubled times we are navigating.


[Image: calmel.jpg]
Fr. Roger Calmel

“My country has hurt me,”wrote a young poet in 1944 during the purge1when the head of state [Charles De Gaulle] implacably pursued the sinister job that had been in the works for more than four years. My country hurt me: this is not a truth that one shouts from the rooftop. It is rather a secret one whispers to oneself, with great sorrow, while trying nonetheless to keep hope. When I was in Spain during the 1950’s, I remember the extreme reserve with which friends, regardless of their political allegiance, would let escape certain details about “our war.” Their country was still hurting them. But when it is no longer a question of one’s temporal motherland, when it is a question, not of the Church considered in herself, for from this perspective she is holy and indefectible, but of the visible head of the Church; when it is question of the current holder2of the Roman primacy, how shall we come to grips with it, and what is the right tone to adopt as we acknowledge to ourselves in a low voice: Ah! Rome has hurt me!

Undoubtedly, the publications of the “good” Catholic press will not fail to inform us that, in the last 2,000 years, the Lord’s Church has never known such a splendid pontificate! But who takes these pronouncements of the establishment’s hallelujah choir seriously? When we see what is being taught and practiced throughout the Church under today’s pontificate, or rather when we observe what has ceased to be taught and practiced, and how an apparent Church, which passes itself off as the real Church, no longer knows how to baptize children, bury the dead, worthily celebrate holy Mass, absolve sins in confession; when we apprehensively watch the spread of Protestantizing influences swelling like a contaminated tide without the holder of supreme power energetically giving the order to lock the sluice gate; in a word, when we face up to what is happening, we are obliged to say: Ah! Rome has hurt me.

And we all know that it involves something other than the iniquities, in a sense private, which the holders of the Roman primacy were too often wont to commit during the course of history. In those cases the victims, more or less maltreated, could recover from it relatively easily by being more vigilant over their personal sanctification. We must always watch over our sanctification. Only, and this is what was never seen in the past to such a degree, the iniquity allowed to happen by the one who today occupies the throne of Peter consists in his abandoning the very means of sanctification to the maneuvers of the innovators and the negators. He allows sound doctrine, the sacraments, the Mass, to be systematically undermined. This throws us into a great danger. If sanctification has not been rendered all together impossible, it is much more difficult. It is also much more urgent.

At such a perilous juncture, is it still possible for the simple faithful, the little sheep of the immense flock of Jesus Christ and His vicar not to lose heart, not to become the prey of an immense apparatus which progressively reduces them to changing their faith, worship, religious habit, and religious life-in a word, to changing their religion?

Ah! Rome has hurt me! It would be truly meet and just to repeat gently to oneself the words of truth, the simple words of supernatural doctrine learned in catechism, so as not to add to the harm, but rather to let oneself be profoundly persuaded by the teaching of Revelation, that one day Rome will be healed; that the impostor Church will soon be officially unmasked. Suddenly it will crumple into dust, because its principal strength comes from the fact that its intrinsic lie passes for truth, since it has never been effectively disavowed from above. In the midst of such great distress, one would like to speak in words that are not out of phase with the mysterious, wordless discourse that the Holy Ghost murmurs to the heart of the Church.

But where shall I begin? Doubtlessly, by recalling the first truth touching the dominion of Jesus Christ over His Church. He wanted a Church having at its head the Bishop of Rome, who is His visible vicar and at the same time the Bishop of the bishops and of the entire flock. He conferred upon him the prerogative of the rock so that the edifice might never collapse. He prayed that he at least, among all the bishops, not make shipwreck of the faith, so that, having converted after the failures from which he would not necessarily be preserved, he confirm his brethren in the faith; or, if it is not himself in person who confirms his brethren, that it be one of his closest successors.

Such is undoubtedly the first consoling thought that the Holy Ghost suggests to our hearts in these desolate days in which Rome has been at least partially invaded by darkness: there is no Church without the infallible vicar of Christ endowed with the primacy. Moreover, whatever the miseries, even in the religious domain, of this visible and temporary vicar of Jesus Christ, it is still Jesus Himself who governs His Church, and who governs His vicar in the government of the Church; who governs in such wise that His vicar cannot engage his supreme authority in the upheavals or betrayals that would change the religion. For, by virtue of His sovereignly efficacious Passion, the divine power of Christ’s regency in heaven reaches that far. He conducts His Church both from within and from without, and He has dominion over the antagonistic world.


Modernist Strategy

The strategy of modernism has been elaborated in two stages: firstly, to get heretical parallel authorities whose strings they pull to be mixed with the regular hierarchy; then, engage in a self-styled pastoral activity for universal renewal which either omits or systematically falsifies doctrinal truth, which refuses the sacraments, or which makes the rites doubtful. The great cunning of the modernists is to use this pastoral approach from Hell, both to transmute the holy doctrine confided by the Word of God to His hierarchical Church, and then to alter or even annul the sacred signs, givers of grace, of which the Church is the faithful dispenser.

Indeed, there is a head of the Church who is always infallible, always impeccable, always holy, with no interruption or halt in his work of sanctification. And that head is the one head, for all the others, even the highest, merely hold their authority by him and for him. Now, this head, holy and without stain, absolutely separated from sinners and elevated above the heavens, is not the Pope; it is he of whom the Epistle to the Hebrews speaks so magnificently; it is the Sovereign High Priest, Jesus Christ.


Papal Authority

Before ascending into heaven and becoming invisible to our eyes, Jesus, our Redeemer by the Cross, wanted to establish for His Church, above and beyond numerous particular ministers, a unique universal minister, a visible vicar, who alone holds supreme jurisdiction. He heaped him with prerogatives:

Thou art Peter; and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it (Mt. 16:18-19).

Yea, Lord, thou knowest that I love thee. He saith to him: Feed my lambs....Feed my sheep (Jn. 21:16-18).

But I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not: and thou, being once converted, confirm thy brethren (Lk.22:32).

Now, if the Pope is the visible vicar of Jesus, who has ascended into the invisible heavens, he is nothing more than vicar: vices gerens, he holds the place but he remains another. The grace that gives life to the mystical Body does not derive from the Pope. Grace, for the Pope as for us, derives from the one Lord Jesus Christ. The same holds for the light of Revelation. He has a singular role as the guardian of the means of grace, of the seven sacraments as well as of revealed truth. He is specially assisted to be the guardian and faithful servant. Yet, for his authority to receive a privileged assistance in its exercise, it must not fail to be exerted. Besides, if he is preserved from error when he engages his authority in such a way that it is infallible, he can err in other cases. But should he do wrong in matters that do not engage papal infallibility, that does not prevent the unique head of the Church, the invisible High Priest, from continuing the governance of His Church; it changes neither the efficacy of His grace nor the truth of His law. It cannot make Him powerless to limit the failings of His visible vicar nor to procure, without too much delay, a new and worthy Pope, to repair what his predecessor allowed to be spoiled or destroyed, for the duration of the insufficiencies, weaknesses, and even partial betrayals of a Pope do not exceed the duration of his mortal existence.

Since He has returned to heaven, Jesus has chosen and procured 263 Popes. Some, just a small number, have been such faithful vicars that we invoke them as friends of God and holy intercessors. A still smaller number have fallen into very serious breaches. Yet the great number have been suitable. None of them, while still Pope, has betrayed nor could betray to the point of explicitly teaching heresy with the fullness of his authority. This being the situation of each Pope and of the succession of Popes in relation to the head of the Church who reigns in heaven, the weaknesses of one Pope must not make us forget in the least the solidity and the sanctity of our Savior’s dominion, nor prevent us from seeing the power of Jesus and His wisdom, who holds in His hand even the inadequate Popes, and who contains their inadequacy within strict bounds.

But to have this confidence in the sovereign, invisible head of the Church without straining to deny the serious failings from which, despite his prerogatives, the visible vicar, the Bishop of Rome, the key-bearer of the kingdom of heaven, is not necessarily exempt; in order to place in Jesus this realistic trust which does not evade the mystery of the successor of Peter with his heaven-guaranteed privileges and his human fallibility; so that this overwhelming distress caused by the occupant of the papacy might be subsumed in the theological virtue of hope we place in the Sovereign Priest, obviously our interior life must be centered on Jesus Christ, and not the Pope. It goes without saying that our interior life, while taking into account the Pope and the hierarchy, must be established, not in the hierarchy and in the Pope, but in the Divine Pontiff, in the priest which is the Word Incarnate, Redeemer, on whom the visible, supreme vicar depends even more than the other priests: More than the others, for he is in the hand of Jesus Christ in view of a function without equivalent among the others. More than any other, and in a more eminent and unique way, he cannot leave off confirming his brethren in the faith-he or his successor.

The Church is not the mystical body of the Pope; the Church with the Pope is the mystical Body of Christ. When the interior life of Christians is more and more focused on Jesus Christ, they do not despair, even when they suffer an agony over the failings of a Pope, be it an Honorius I or the rival Popes of the Middle Ages, or be it, at the extreme limit, a Pope who fails according to the new possibilities of failing offered by modernism. When Jesus Christ is the principle and soul of the interior life of Christians, they do not feel the need to lie to themselves about the failures of a Pope in order to remain assured of his prerogatives; they know that these failures will never reach such a degree that Jesus would cease to govern His Church because He would have been effectively prevented by His vicar. He would yet hold such an erring Pope in His hand, preventing him from ever engaging his authority for the perversion of the faith which he received from above.


True Obedience

An interior life centered as it should be on Jesus Christ and not on the Pope would not exclude the Pope, or else it would cease to be a Christian interior life. An interior life focused as it should be on the Lord Jesus thus includes the vicar of Jesus Christ and obedience to this vicar, but God served first; that is to say, that this obedience, far from being unconditional, is always practiced in the light of theological faith and the natural law.


We live by and for Jesus Christ, thanks to His Church, which is governed by the Pope, whom we obey in all that is of his purview. We do not live by and for the Pope as if he had acquired for us eternal redemption; that is why Christian obedience can not always nor in everything identify the Pope with Jesus Christ. What ordinarily happens is that the vicar of Christ governs sufficiently in conformity with the Apostolic tradition so as not to provoke major conflicts in the consciences of docile Catholics. But occasionally it can be otherwise. And exceptionally things can be such as to cause the faithful to legitimately wonder how they can hold fast to tradition if they follow the directives of this Pope?

The interior life of a son of the Church who would set aside the articles of Faith concerning the Pope, obedience to his legitimate orders, and prayer for him would have ceased to be Catholic. On the other hand, an interior life which includes yielding to the Pope unconditionally, that is to say, blindly in everything and always, is an interior life which is necessarily subject to human respect, which is not free with regard to creatures, which is exposed to many occasions of compromise. In his interior life, the true son of the Church having received with his whole heart the articles of the faith with regard to the vicar of Christ prays for him faithfully and obeys him willingly, but only in the light, that is to say, only while the Apostolic tradition and, of course, the natural law are preserved whole and entire.


Holy Church, Sinful Churchmen

Let us remember the great prayer at the beginning of the Roman Canon, in which the priest, having earnestly implored the most clement Father by His Son Jesus Christ, to sanctify the spotless sacrifice offered in first place for Ecclesia tua sancta catholica, continues thus: “...una cumfamulo tuo Papa nostro...et Antistite nostro....” The Church has never envisaged him saying: “una cum SANCTO famulo tu Papa nostro et SANCTO Antistite nostro,’“ while she does have him say, “for Thy HOLY Church.” The Pope, unlike the Church, is not necessarily holy. The Church is holy with sinful members, among whom are we ourselves; sinful members who, alas! do not pursue or no longer pursue holiness. It can even happen that the Pope himself figures in this category. God knows. In any case, the condition of the head of the holy Church being what it is, that is to say not necessarily that of a saint, we should not let ourselves be scandalized if trials, sometimes very cruel trials, befall the Church because of her visible head in person. We must not let ourselves be scandalized from the fact that, subjects of the Pope, we cannot, after all, follow him blindly, unconditionally, always and in all.


Layman's Right

The Lord, by the Pope and the hierarchy-by the hierarchy subject to the Pope-governs His Church in such a way that it is always secure in the possession and understanding of its tradition. On the truths of the catechism, on the celebration of the Holy Sacrifice and on the sacraments, on the fundamental structure of the hierarchy, on the states of life and the call to perfect love, let us say on all the major points of tradition, the Church is assisted in such way that any baptized Catholic having the faith clearly knows what he must hold. Thus the simple Christian who, consulting tradition on a major point known to all, would refuse to follow a priest, a bishop, an episcopal conference, or even a Pope who would ruin tradition on this point, would not, as some charge, be showing signs characteristic of private judgment or pride; for it is not pride or insubordination to discern what the tradition is on major points, or to refuse to betray them. Whatever may be the collegiality of bishops, for example, or the secretary of the Roman Congregation who uses subterfuge to arrange things so that Catholic priests end up celebrating the Mass without giving any mark of adoration, no exterior sign of faith in the sacred mysteries, every faithful Catholic knows that it is inadmissible to celebrate Mass making this display of non-faith. One who would refuse to go to such a Mass is not exercising private judgment; he is not a rebel. He is a faithful Catholic established in a tradition that comes from the Apostles and which no one in the Church can change. For no one in the Church, whatever his hierarchical rank, be it ever so high, no one has the power to change the Church or the Apostolic tradition.

On all the major points, the Apostolic tradition is quite clear. There is no need to scrutinize it through a magnifying glass, nor to be a cardinal or a prefect of some Roman dicastery to know what is against it. It is enough to have been instructed by the catechism and the liturgy prior to the modernist corruption.

Too often, when it is a question of not cutting oneself off from Rome, the faithful and priests have been formed in the sense of a partly worldly fear in such a way that they feel panic-stricken, that they are shaken in their consciences and they no longer examine anything once the first passer-by accuses them of not being with Rome. A truly Christian formation, on the contrary, teaches us to be careful to be in union with Rome not in fear or without discernment, but in light and peace according to a filial fear in the Faith.

For it must be said, first of all, that on the major points the tradition of the Church is established, certain, irreformable; then, that every Christian instructed in the rudiments of the Faith, knows them without hesitation; thirdly, that it is faith and not private interpretation which makes us discern them, just as it is obedience, piety and love, and not insubordination, which make us uphold this tradition; fourthly, that the attempts of the hierarchy or the weaknesses of the Pope which would tend to upset this tradition or let this tradition be upset will one day be overturned, while Tradition will triumph.


Tradition Will Triumph

We are at peace on this point. Whatever may be the hypocritical arms placed by modernism in the hands of the episcopal collegialities and even of the vicar of Christ, tradition will indeed triumph: solemn baptism, for example, which includes the anathemas against the accursed devil will not be excluded for long; the tradition of not absolving sins except after individual confession will not be excluded for long; the tradition of the traditional Catholic Mass, Latin and Gregorian, with the language, Canon, and gestures in conformity with the Roman Missal of St. Pius V, will soon be restored to honor; the tradition of the Catechism of Trent, or of a manual exactly in conformity with it, will be restored without delay.

On the major points of dogma, morals, the sacraments, the states of life, the perfection to which we are called, the tradition of the Church is known by the members of the Church whatever their rank. They hold fast to it without a bad conscience, even if the hierarchical guardians of this tradition try to intimidate them or throw them into confusion; even if they persecute them with the bitter refinements of modernist inquisitors. They are very assured that by keeping the tradition they do not cut themselves off from the visible vicar of Christ. For the visible vicar of Christ is governed by Christ in such wise that he cannot transmute the tradition of the Church, nor make it fall into oblivion. If by misfortune he should try to do it, either he or his immediate successors will be obliged to proclaim from on high what remains forever living in the Church’s memory: the Apostolic tradition. The Spouse of Christ stands no chance of losing her memory.


“Quod Ubique, Quod Semper...”

As for those who say that tradition is a synonym of sclerosis, or that progress occurs by opposing tradition, in short, those who conjure up the mirages of an absurd philosophy of becoming, I recommend the reading of St. Vincent of Lerins3 in his Commonitorium and the careful studying of Church history: dogma, sacraments, fundamental constitution, spiritual life, in order to descry the essential difference which exists between “going forward” and “going astray”; between having “advanced ideas” and “advancing according to right ideas”; in short, distinguishing between profectus (development) and permutatio (change).

Even more so than in times of peace, it has become useful and salutary to us to meditate on the Church’s trials by the light of faith. We might be tempted to reduce these trials to persecutions and attacks coming from the outside. But enemies from within are, after all, even more to be feared: they know better the weak points; they can wound or poison where or when it is least expected; the scandal they provoke is much more difficult to overcome. Thus, in a parish, an anti-religious institution will never succeed, whatever it does, in ruining the faithful as much as a high-living, modernist priest. Equally, the defrocking of a simple priest, though more sensational, has consequences far less baneful than the negligence or treason of the bishop.


Ultimate Scandal

Be that as it may, it is certain that if the bishop betrays the Catholic faith, even without abandoning it, he imposes on the Church a much heavier trial than the simple priest who takes a wife and ceases to offer holy Mass. What then can be said of the kind of trials that the Church of Jesus Christ would suffer were it to come by the Pope, by the vicar of Jesus Christ in person? Merely raising this question is enough to make some hide their faces in their hands and push them to the brink of crying blasphemy. The mere thought torments them. They refuse to face up to a trial of this gravity.

I understand their feeling. I am not unaware that a sort of vertigo can grip the soul when it is placed in the presence of some iniquities. “Sinite usque hue-Suffer ye thus far,”3 Jesus in agony said to the three Apostles when the rabble of the high priest came to arrest Him, drag Him before the tribunal and to death, Him who is the eternal High Priest. Sinite usque hue. It is as if the Lord were saying: “The scandal can indeed go that far, but let it go, and follow my recommendation: Watch and pray, for the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” Sinite ad hue: “By my consent to drink the chalice, I have merited for you every grace while you were sleeping and left me all alone. I obtained for you in particular the grace of a supernatural strength that is up to every trial, even the trial that can come upon the Church by the Pope’s own doing. I have made you able to escape even that vertigo.”

On the subject of this extraordinary trial there is what Church history says and what Revelation about the Church does not say. For nowhere does Revelation about the Church say that the Popes will never sin by negligence, cowardice, or worldliness in the keeping and defense of the Apostolic tradition. We know that they will never sin by making the faithful believe in another religion: that is the sin from which they are preserved by the nature of their mandate. And when they engage their authority in such a way as to invoke their infallibility, it is Christ Himself who speaks to us and instructs us: that is the privilege with which they are robed as soon as they become successors of Peter. But if Revelation instructs us in the prerogatives of the papacy, nowhere does it say that when he exercises his authority below the threshold of infallibility, a Pope will never become Satan’s pawn and favor heresy up to a certain point. Likewise, it is not written in sacred Scripture that, though he cannot formally teach another religion, a Pope will never go so far as to sabotage the conditions indispensable to the defense of the true religion. The possibility of such a defection is even considerably favored by modernism.

Thus, Revelation about the Pope nowhere guarantees that the vicar of Christ will never inflict on the Church the trial of some major scandals; I speak of serious scandals, not just in the domain of private morals, but rather in the religious sphere properly so-called, and, so to speak, in the ecclesiastical domain of faith and morals. In fact, the Church’s history teaches us that this sort of trial inflicted by the Pope has not been spared the Church, although it has been rare and not prolonged to an acute stage. It is the contrary that would be astonishing, when we consider the small number of canonized Popes since the time of Gregory VII who are invoked and venerated as the friends and saints of God. And it is more astonishing still that the Popes who suffered very cruel torments, like Pius VI or Pius VII, were never prayed to as saints, neither by the Vox Ecclesiae, nor by the Vox populi. If these Pontiffs, who nonetheless had to suffer so much as Popes, did not bear their pain with such a degree of charity as to be canonized saints, how can we be astonished that other Popes, who looked upon their position from a worldly point of view, would commit serious breaches or inflict on the Church of Christ an especially fearful and harrowing trial. When they are reduced to the extremity of having such Popes, the faithful, priests and bishops who want to live the life of the Church take great care not only to pray for the Supreme Pontiff who is the subject of great affliction for the Church, but first and foremost they cleave to the Apostolic tradition, the tradition concerning dogma, the missal and the ritual, the tradition on the interior life and on the universal call to perfect charity in Christ.


St. Vincent Ferrer

In such a juncture, the mission of the Friar Preacher who, undoubtedly among all the saints worked the most directly for the papacy, that son of St. Dominic, Vincent Ferrer (1350?-1419), is particularly enlightening. Angel of Judgment, Legate a latere Christi (from the side of Christ), causing the deposition of a Pope after exercising towards him infinite patience, Vincent Ferrer is also, and from the same inspiration, the intrepid missionary full of benignity, abounding in prodigies and miracles, who announces the Gospel to the immense multitude of the Christian people. He carries in his heart of an apostle not only the Supreme Pontiff, so enigmatic, obstinate and hard, but also the whole flock of Christ, the multitude of the hapless, humble folk, the “turba magna ex omnibus tribubus et populis et linguis-the great multitude...of all...tribes, and peoples, and tongues” (Apoc. 7:9). Vincent understood that the major concern of the vicar of Christ was not, indeed was far from, faithfully serving the holy Church. The Pope was placing the satisfaction of his own obscure will to power ahead of everything. But if, at least among the faithful, the sense of the life of the Church could be reawakened, the concern to live in conformity with the dogmas and the sacraments received in the Apostolic tradition, if a pure and mighty wind of prayer and conversion were to unfurl upon this languishing and desolate Christendom, then doubtlessly there would come a vicar of Christ who would be truly humble, who would have a Christian conscience about his super-eminent charge, who would preoccupy himself with exercising it to the best of his ability in the spirit of the Sovereign High Priest. If the Christian people could rediscover a life in accord with the Apostolic tradition, then it would become impossible for the vicar of Jesus Christ, when it comes to upholding and defending this tradition, to fall into certain derelictions, to abandon himself to lying compromises. It would be necessary that, without delay, a good Pope, and even a holy Pope, succeed the bad or misguided one.


Worthy Flock, Worthy Shepherd

But too many of the laity, priests and bishops in these days of great evil, when trial overtakes the Church by the Pope, would like order to be restored with their having to do nothing, or almost nothing. At most will they agree to mutter a few prayers. They even balk at the daily Rosary: five decades offered daily to our Lady in honor of the hidden life, the Passion, and the glory of Jesus. In this vein, they have very little interest in deepening their understanding of that part of the Apostolic tradition that applies directly to them in a spirit of fidelity to that tradition: dogmas, missal and ritual, interior life (for progress in the interior life obviously is a part of the Apostolic tradition). Each in his station of life having consented to lukewarmness, they take scandal at the fact that neither is the Pope, in his place as Pope, very fervent when it comes to upholding for the entire Church the Apostolic tradition, that is to say, to faithfully fulfilling the unique mission confided to him. This view of things is unjust. The more we need a holy Pope, the more we ourselves must begin by putting our own lives, by the grace of God and holding fast to tradition, in the path of the saints. Then the Lord Jesus will finally give to His flock the visible shepherd of whom it will have striven to make itself worthy.

This was the lesson of St. Vincent Ferrer at an apocalyptic time of major failings by the Roman Pontiff. But with modernism we are in the midst of experiencing even greater trials, reasons all the more compelling for us to live even more purely, and on all points, the Apostolic tradition; on all points, including a real tending towards perfect charity. And yet, in the moral doctrine revealed by the Lord and handed down by the Apostles, it is said that we must tend to perfect love, since the law of growth in Christ is part and parcel of the grace and charity which unite us in Christ.


A Fundamental Mystery

There is indeed both transcendence and obscurity in the Church’s dogma relative to the Pope: a supreme pontiff who is the universal vicar of Jesus Christ, yet who nonetheless is not sheltered from failings, even serious ones, which can be quite dangerous for his subjects. But the dogma of the Roman Pontiff is but one of the aspects of the fundamental mystery of the Church. Two great propositions introduce us to this mystery: firstly, that the Church, whose members are recruited from among sinners, which we all are, is nonetheless the infallible dispenser of light and grace, dispenser by means of a hierarchical organization, dispenser governed from heaven above by its head and Savior, Jesus Christ, and assisted by the Spirit of Jesus. On the other hand, on earth, the Savior offers by His Church the perfect sacrifice and nourishes it by His own substance. Secondly, the Church, holy Spouse of the Lord Jesus, must have a share in the Cross, including the cross of betrayal by her own; but for all that she does not cease to be sufficiently assisted in her hierarchical structure, beginning with the Pope, and to be on fire enough with charity; in a word, she remains at all times holy and pure enough to be able to share in the trials of her Spouse, including betrayal by certain members of the hierarchy, while keeping intact her self-mastery and supernatural strength. Never will the Church be subject to vertigo.

If, in our spiritual life, the Christian truth concerning the Pope is rightly situated within the Christian truth about the Church, by that light shall we overcome the scandal of all the lies, not excluding those that can befall the Church by the vicar of Christ or by the successors of the Apostles.

When we think of the Pope now and of the prevailing modernism, of the Apostolic tradition and perseverance in this tradition, we are more and more reduced to considering these questions only in prayer, only in an unceasing petition for the entire Church and for him who, in our days, holds in his hands the keys of the kingdom of heaven. He holds them in his hands, but he does not use them, so to speak. He leaves the gate of the sheepfold open at the approach of thieves; he does not close these protective doors which his predecessors had invariably kept shut with unbreakable locks and bolts. Sometimes, as is the case with post-conciliar ecumenism, he even pretends to open what will forever be kept shut. We are reduced to the necessity of never thinking of the Church except to pray for her and for the Pope. It is a blessing. Nevertheless, thinking of our Mother, the Spouse of Christ, in this piteous condition does not diminish in the least our resolve to think clearly. At least, let this indispensable lucidity, lucidity without which all courage would flag, be penetrated with as much humility and gentleness as the vehemence with which we assail the Sovereign Priest, that He make haste to help us. Deus in adjutorium meum intende. Domine, ad adjuvandum me festina. May it please Him to charge His most holy Mother, Mary Immaculate, with bringing us as soon as possible the effective remedy.



Translated exclusively for Angelus Press and abridged by Miss Anne Stinnett from the French-language version of SiSiNoNo (Courrier de Rome, Nov. 2005, pp. 1-5). The original text was first published in the review Itineraires in 1973 and included in the anthology A Short Apologia for the Church of All Time (1987).

Fr. Roger-Thomas Calmel, O.P. (1914-75), was a prominent French Dominican and Thomist philosopher, who made an immense contribution to the fight for Catholic Tradition through his writings and conferences, notably as a regular contributor for 17 years to Jean Madiran’s Itineraires. His most enduring influ­ence is through the traditional Dominican Teaching Sisters of Fanjeaux and Brignole in France who operate 12 girls’ schools in France and the US.


1. Translator’s note: The epuration, a purge of “German collaborators” occurred after the Normandy invasion and the end of the war, resulting in the killing of a 100,000 Frenchmen. For example, acclaimed poet Robert Brasillach was executed on this charge (Cf. Sisley Huddleston, France: The Tragic Years, an Eyewitness Account of War, Occupation and Liberation [Devin-Adair Co., 1955]).

2. This was written in 1973-Ed. (1987 ed.).

3. Translator’s note: A monk and ecclesiastical writer of southern Gaul (d. c. 450), famous for the practical rule he enunciated, by which the faithful can steer clear of heresy in troubled times: “Magnopere curandum est ut id teneatur quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est-What all men have at all times and everywhere believed must be regarded as true.”

4. Translator note: Douay-Rheims translation. Alternate: “Let them have their way in this” (Msgr. Ronald Knox version).

Si Si No No Articles]]> Of the Church and the Pope
by Fr. Roger Calmel, O.P.

This essay by Fr. Roger Calmel, O.P. (1914-75) helps us in these difficult times to preserve our love of the Church. More than 30 years after its first publication, this article retains all its relevance, so much so that it even seems to have been written for our time, in which the crisis in the Church deepens at an unprecedented pace. This essay will help the reader to think clearly, keep the Faith, and maintain serenity in the troubled times we are navigating.


[Image: calmel.jpg]
Fr. Roger Calmel

“My country has hurt me,”wrote a young poet in 1944 during the purge1when the head of state [Charles De Gaulle] implacably pursued the sinister job that had been in the works for more than four years. My country hurt me: this is not a truth that one shouts from the rooftop. It is rather a secret one whispers to oneself, with great sorrow, while trying nonetheless to keep hope. When I was in Spain during the 1950’s, I remember the extreme reserve with which friends, regardless of their political allegiance, would let escape certain details about “our war.” Their country was still hurting them. But when it is no longer a question of one’s temporal motherland, when it is a question, not of the Church considered in herself, for from this perspective she is holy and indefectible, but of the visible head of the Church; when it is question of the current holder2of the Roman primacy, how shall we come to grips with it, and what is the right tone to adopt as we acknowledge to ourselves in a low voice: Ah! Rome has hurt me!

Undoubtedly, the publications of the “good” Catholic press will not fail to inform us that, in the last 2,000 years, the Lord’s Church has never known such a splendid pontificate! But who takes these pronouncements of the establishment’s hallelujah choir seriously? When we see what is being taught and practiced throughout the Church under today’s pontificate, or rather when we observe what has ceased to be taught and practiced, and how an apparent Church, which passes itself off as the real Church, no longer knows how to baptize children, bury the dead, worthily celebrate holy Mass, absolve sins in confession; when we apprehensively watch the spread of Protestantizing influences swelling like a contaminated tide without the holder of supreme power energetically giving the order to lock the sluice gate; in a word, when we face up to what is happening, we are obliged to say: Ah! Rome has hurt me.

And we all know that it involves something other than the iniquities, in a sense private, which the holders of the Roman primacy were too often wont to commit during the course of history. In those cases the victims, more or less maltreated, could recover from it relatively easily by being more vigilant over their personal sanctification. We must always watch over our sanctification. Only, and this is what was never seen in the past to such a degree, the iniquity allowed to happen by the one who today occupies the throne of Peter consists in his abandoning the very means of sanctification to the maneuvers of the innovators and the negators. He allows sound doctrine, the sacraments, the Mass, to be systematically undermined. This throws us into a great danger. If sanctification has not been rendered all together impossible, it is much more difficult. It is also much more urgent.

At such a perilous juncture, is it still possible for the simple faithful, the little sheep of the immense flock of Jesus Christ and His vicar not to lose heart, not to become the prey of an immense apparatus which progressively reduces them to changing their faith, worship, religious habit, and religious life-in a word, to changing their religion?

Ah! Rome has hurt me! It would be truly meet and just to repeat gently to oneself the words of truth, the simple words of supernatural doctrine learned in catechism, so as not to add to the harm, but rather to let oneself be profoundly persuaded by the teaching of Revelation, that one day Rome will be healed; that the impostor Church will soon be officially unmasked. Suddenly it will crumple into dust, because its principal strength comes from the fact that its intrinsic lie passes for truth, since it has never been effectively disavowed from above. In the midst of such great distress, one would like to speak in words that are not out of phase with the mysterious, wordless discourse that the Holy Ghost murmurs to the heart of the Church.

But where shall I begin? Doubtlessly, by recalling the first truth touching the dominion of Jesus Christ over His Church. He wanted a Church having at its head the Bishop of Rome, who is His visible vicar and at the same time the Bishop of the bishops and of the entire flock. He conferred upon him the prerogative of the rock so that the edifice might never collapse. He prayed that he at least, among all the bishops, not make shipwreck of the faith, so that, having converted after the failures from which he would not necessarily be preserved, he confirm his brethren in the faith; or, if it is not himself in person who confirms his brethren, that it be one of his closest successors.

Such is undoubtedly the first consoling thought that the Holy Ghost suggests to our hearts in these desolate days in which Rome has been at least partially invaded by darkness: there is no Church without the infallible vicar of Christ endowed with the primacy. Moreover, whatever the miseries, even in the religious domain, of this visible and temporary vicar of Jesus Christ, it is still Jesus Himself who governs His Church, and who governs His vicar in the government of the Church; who governs in such wise that His vicar cannot engage his supreme authority in the upheavals or betrayals that would change the religion. For, by virtue of His sovereignly efficacious Passion, the divine power of Christ’s regency in heaven reaches that far. He conducts His Church both from within and from without, and He has dominion over the antagonistic world.


Modernist Strategy

The strategy of modernism has been elaborated in two stages: firstly, to get heretical parallel authorities whose strings they pull to be mixed with the regular hierarchy; then, engage in a self-styled pastoral activity for universal renewal which either omits or systematically falsifies doctrinal truth, which refuses the sacraments, or which makes the rites doubtful. The great cunning of the modernists is to use this pastoral approach from Hell, both to transmute the holy doctrine confided by the Word of God to His hierarchical Church, and then to alter or even annul the sacred signs, givers of grace, of which the Church is the faithful dispenser.

Indeed, there is a head of the Church who is always infallible, always impeccable, always holy, with no interruption or halt in his work of sanctification. And that head is the one head, for all the others, even the highest, merely hold their authority by him and for him. Now, this head, holy and without stain, absolutely separated from sinners and elevated above the heavens, is not the Pope; it is he of whom the Epistle to the Hebrews speaks so magnificently; it is the Sovereign High Priest, Jesus Christ.


Papal Authority

Before ascending into heaven and becoming invisible to our eyes, Jesus, our Redeemer by the Cross, wanted to establish for His Church, above and beyond numerous particular ministers, a unique universal minister, a visible vicar, who alone holds supreme jurisdiction. He heaped him with prerogatives:

Thou art Peter; and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it (Mt. 16:18-19).

Yea, Lord, thou knowest that I love thee. He saith to him: Feed my lambs....Feed my sheep (Jn. 21:16-18).

But I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not: and thou, being once converted, confirm thy brethren (Lk.22:32).

Now, if the Pope is the visible vicar of Jesus, who has ascended into the invisible heavens, he is nothing more than vicar: vices gerens, he holds the place but he remains another. The grace that gives life to the mystical Body does not derive from the Pope. Grace, for the Pope as for us, derives from the one Lord Jesus Christ. The same holds for the light of Revelation. He has a singular role as the guardian of the means of grace, of the seven sacraments as well as of revealed truth. He is specially assisted to be the guardian and faithful servant. Yet, for his authority to receive a privileged assistance in its exercise, it must not fail to be exerted. Besides, if he is preserved from error when he engages his authority in such a way that it is infallible, he can err in other cases. But should he do wrong in matters that do not engage papal infallibility, that does not prevent the unique head of the Church, the invisible High Priest, from continuing the governance of His Church; it changes neither the efficacy of His grace nor the truth of His law. It cannot make Him powerless to limit the failings of His visible vicar nor to procure, without too much delay, a new and worthy Pope, to repair what his predecessor allowed to be spoiled or destroyed, for the duration of the insufficiencies, weaknesses, and even partial betrayals of a Pope do not exceed the duration of his mortal existence.

Since He has returned to heaven, Jesus has chosen and procured 263 Popes. Some, just a small number, have been such faithful vicars that we invoke them as friends of God and holy intercessors. A still smaller number have fallen into very serious breaches. Yet the great number have been suitable. None of them, while still Pope, has betrayed nor could betray to the point of explicitly teaching heresy with the fullness of his authority. This being the situation of each Pope and of the succession of Popes in relation to the head of the Church who reigns in heaven, the weaknesses of one Pope must not make us forget in the least the solidity and the sanctity of our Savior’s dominion, nor prevent us from seeing the power of Jesus and His wisdom, who holds in His hand even the inadequate Popes, and who contains their inadequacy within strict bounds.

But to have this confidence in the sovereign, invisible head of the Church without straining to deny the serious failings from which, despite his prerogatives, the visible vicar, the Bishop of Rome, the key-bearer of the kingdom of heaven, is not necessarily exempt; in order to place in Jesus this realistic trust which does not evade the mystery of the successor of Peter with his heaven-guaranteed privileges and his human fallibility; so that this overwhelming distress caused by the occupant of the papacy might be subsumed in the theological virtue of hope we place in the Sovereign Priest, obviously our interior life must be centered on Jesus Christ, and not the Pope. It goes without saying that our interior life, while taking into account the Pope and the hierarchy, must be established, not in the hierarchy and in the Pope, but in the Divine Pontiff, in the priest which is the Word Incarnate, Redeemer, on whom the visible, supreme vicar depends even more than the other priests: More than the others, for he is in the hand of Jesus Christ in view of a function without equivalent among the others. More than any other, and in a more eminent and unique way, he cannot leave off confirming his brethren in the faith-he or his successor.

The Church is not the mystical body of the Pope; the Church with the Pope is the mystical Body of Christ. When the interior life of Christians is more and more focused on Jesus Christ, they do not despair, even when they suffer an agony over the failings of a Pope, be it an Honorius I or the rival Popes of the Middle Ages, or be it, at the extreme limit, a Pope who fails according to the new possibilities of failing offered by modernism. When Jesus Christ is the principle and soul of the interior life of Christians, they do not feel the need to lie to themselves about the failures of a Pope in order to remain assured of his prerogatives; they know that these failures will never reach such a degree that Jesus would cease to govern His Church because He would have been effectively prevented by His vicar. He would yet hold such an erring Pope in His hand, preventing him from ever engaging his authority for the perversion of the faith which he received from above.


True Obedience

An interior life centered as it should be on Jesus Christ and not on the Pope would not exclude the Pope, or else it would cease to be a Christian interior life. An interior life focused as it should be on the Lord Jesus thus includes the vicar of Jesus Christ and obedience to this vicar, but God served first; that is to say, that this obedience, far from being unconditional, is always practiced in the light of theological faith and the natural law.


We live by and for Jesus Christ, thanks to His Church, which is governed by the Pope, whom we obey in all that is of his purview. We do not live by and for the Pope as if he had acquired for us eternal redemption; that is why Christian obedience can not always nor in everything identify the Pope with Jesus Christ. What ordinarily happens is that the vicar of Christ governs sufficiently in conformity with the Apostolic tradition so as not to provoke major conflicts in the consciences of docile Catholics. But occasionally it can be otherwise. And exceptionally things can be such as to cause the faithful to legitimately wonder how they can hold fast to tradition if they follow the directives of this Pope?

The interior life of a son of the Church who would set aside the articles of Faith concerning the Pope, obedience to his legitimate orders, and prayer for him would have ceased to be Catholic. On the other hand, an interior life which includes yielding to the Pope unconditionally, that is to say, blindly in everything and always, is an interior life which is necessarily subject to human respect, which is not free with regard to creatures, which is exposed to many occasions of compromise. In his interior life, the true son of the Church having received with his whole heart the articles of the faith with regard to the vicar of Christ prays for him faithfully and obeys him willingly, but only in the light, that is to say, only while the Apostolic tradition and, of course, the natural law are preserved whole and entire.


Holy Church, Sinful Churchmen

Let us remember the great prayer at the beginning of the Roman Canon, in which the priest, having earnestly implored the most clement Father by His Son Jesus Christ, to sanctify the spotless sacrifice offered in first place for Ecclesia tua sancta catholica, continues thus: “...una cumfamulo tuo Papa nostro...et Antistite nostro....” The Church has never envisaged him saying: “una cum SANCTO famulo tu Papa nostro et SANCTO Antistite nostro,’“ while she does have him say, “for Thy HOLY Church.” The Pope, unlike the Church, is not necessarily holy. The Church is holy with sinful members, among whom are we ourselves; sinful members who, alas! do not pursue or no longer pursue holiness. It can even happen that the Pope himself figures in this category. God knows. In any case, the condition of the head of the holy Church being what it is, that is to say not necessarily that of a saint, we should not let ourselves be scandalized if trials, sometimes very cruel trials, befall the Church because of her visible head in person. We must not let ourselves be scandalized from the fact that, subjects of the Pope, we cannot, after all, follow him blindly, unconditionally, always and in all.


Layman's Right

The Lord, by the Pope and the hierarchy-by the hierarchy subject to the Pope-governs His Church in such a way that it is always secure in the possession and understanding of its tradition. On the truths of the catechism, on the celebration of the Holy Sacrifice and on the sacraments, on the fundamental structure of the hierarchy, on the states of life and the call to perfect love, let us say on all the major points of tradition, the Church is assisted in such way that any baptized Catholic having the faith clearly knows what he must hold. Thus the simple Christian who, consulting tradition on a major point known to all, would refuse to follow a priest, a bishop, an episcopal conference, or even a Pope who would ruin tradition on this point, would not, as some charge, be showing signs characteristic of private judgment or pride; for it is not pride or insubordination to discern what the tradition is on major points, or to refuse to betray them. Whatever may be the collegiality of bishops, for example, or the secretary of the Roman Congregation who uses subterfuge to arrange things so that Catholic priests end up celebrating the Mass without giving any mark of adoration, no exterior sign of faith in the sacred mysteries, every faithful Catholic knows that it is inadmissible to celebrate Mass making this display of non-faith. One who would refuse to go to such a Mass is not exercising private judgment; he is not a rebel. He is a faithful Catholic established in a tradition that comes from the Apostles and which no one in the Church can change. For no one in the Church, whatever his hierarchical rank, be it ever so high, no one has the power to change the Church or the Apostolic tradition.

On all the major points, the Apostolic tradition is quite clear. There is no need to scrutinize it through a magnifying glass, nor to be a cardinal or a prefect of some Roman dicastery to know what is against it. It is enough to have been instructed by the catechism and the liturgy prior to the modernist corruption.

Too often, when it is a question of not cutting oneself off from Rome, the faithful and priests have been formed in the sense of a partly worldly fear in such a way that they feel panic-stricken, that they are shaken in their consciences and they no longer examine anything once the first passer-by accuses them of not being with Rome. A truly Christian formation, on the contrary, teaches us to be careful to be in union with Rome not in fear or without discernment, but in light and peace according to a filial fear in the Faith.

For it must be said, first of all, that on the major points the tradition of the Church is established, certain, irreformable; then, that every Christian instructed in the rudiments of the Faith, knows them without hesitation; thirdly, that it is faith and not private interpretation which makes us discern them, just as it is obedience, piety and love, and not insubordination, which make us uphold this tradition; fourthly, that the attempts of the hierarchy or the weaknesses of the Pope which would tend to upset this tradition or let this tradition be upset will one day be overturned, while Tradition will triumph.


Tradition Will Triumph

We are at peace on this point. Whatever may be the hypocritical arms placed by modernism in the hands of the episcopal collegialities and even of the vicar of Christ, tradition will indeed triumph: solemn baptism, for example, which includes the anathemas against the accursed devil will not be excluded for long; the tradition of not absolving sins except after individual confession will not be excluded for long; the tradition of the traditional Catholic Mass, Latin and Gregorian, with the language, Canon, and gestures in conformity with the Roman Missal of St. Pius V, will soon be restored to honor; the tradition of the Catechism of Trent, or of a manual exactly in conformity with it, will be restored without delay.

On the major points of dogma, morals, the sacraments, the states of life, the perfection to which we are called, the tradition of the Church is known by the members of the Church whatever their rank. They hold fast to it without a bad conscience, even if the hierarchical guardians of this tradition try to intimidate them or throw them into confusion; even if they persecute them with the bitter refinements of modernist inquisitors. They are very assured that by keeping the tradition they do not cut themselves off from the visible vicar of Christ. For the visible vicar of Christ is governed by Christ in such wise that he cannot transmute the tradition of the Church, nor make it fall into oblivion. If by misfortune he should try to do it, either he or his immediate successors will be obliged to proclaim from on high what remains forever living in the Church’s memory: the Apostolic tradition. The Spouse of Christ stands no chance of losing her memory.


“Quod Ubique, Quod Semper...”

As for those who say that tradition is a synonym of sclerosis, or that progress occurs by opposing tradition, in short, those who conjure up the mirages of an absurd philosophy of becoming, I recommend the reading of St. Vincent of Lerins3 in his Commonitorium and the careful studying of Church history: dogma, sacraments, fundamental constitution, spiritual life, in order to descry the essential difference which exists between “going forward” and “going astray”; between having “advanced ideas” and “advancing according to right ideas”; in short, distinguishing between profectus (development) and permutatio (change).

Even more so than in times of peace, it has become useful and salutary to us to meditate on the Church’s trials by the light of faith. We might be tempted to reduce these trials to persecutions and attacks coming from the outside. But enemies from within are, after all, even more to be feared: they know better the weak points; they can wound or poison where or when it is least expected; the scandal they provoke is much more difficult to overcome. Thus, in a parish, an anti-religious institution will never succeed, whatever it does, in ruining the faithful as much as a high-living, modernist priest. Equally, the defrocking of a simple priest, though more sensational, has consequences far less baneful than the negligence or treason of the bishop.


Ultimate Scandal

Be that as it may, it is certain that if the bishop betrays the Catholic faith, even without abandoning it, he imposes on the Church a much heavier trial than the simple priest who takes a wife and ceases to offer holy Mass. What then can be said of the kind of trials that the Church of Jesus Christ would suffer were it to come by the Pope, by the vicar of Jesus Christ in person? Merely raising this question is enough to make some hide their faces in their hands and push them to the brink of crying blasphemy. The mere thought torments them. They refuse to face up to a trial of this gravity.

I understand their feeling. I am not unaware that a sort of vertigo can grip the soul when it is placed in the presence of some iniquities. “Sinite usque hue-Suffer ye thus far,”3 Jesus in agony said to the three Apostles when the rabble of the high priest came to arrest Him, drag Him before the tribunal and to death, Him who is the eternal High Priest. Sinite usque hue. It is as if the Lord were saying: “The scandal can indeed go that far, but let it go, and follow my recommendation: Watch and pray, for the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” Sinite ad hue: “By my consent to drink the chalice, I have merited for you every grace while you were sleeping and left me all alone. I obtained for you in particular the grace of a supernatural strength that is up to every trial, even the trial that can come upon the Church by the Pope’s own doing. I have made you able to escape even that vertigo.”

On the subject of this extraordinary trial there is what Church history says and what Revelation about the Church does not say. For nowhere does Revelation about the Church say that the Popes will never sin by negligence, cowardice, or worldliness in the keeping and defense of the Apostolic tradition. We know that they will never sin by making the faithful believe in another religion: that is the sin from which they are preserved by the nature of their mandate. And when they engage their authority in such a way as to invoke their infallibility, it is Christ Himself who speaks to us and instructs us: that is the privilege with which they are robed as soon as they become successors of Peter. But if Revelation instructs us in the prerogatives of the papacy, nowhere does it say that when he exercises his authority below the threshold of infallibility, a Pope will never become Satan’s pawn and favor heresy up to a certain point. Likewise, it is not written in sacred Scripture that, though he cannot formally teach another religion, a Pope will never go so far as to sabotage the conditions indispensable to the defense of the true religion. The possibility of such a defection is even considerably favored by modernism.

Thus, Revelation about the Pope nowhere guarantees that the vicar of Christ will never inflict on the Church the trial of some major scandals; I speak of serious scandals, not just in the domain of private morals, but rather in the religious sphere properly so-called, and, so to speak, in the ecclesiastical domain of faith and morals. In fact, the Church’s history teaches us that this sort of trial inflicted by the Pope has not been spared the Church, although it has been rare and not prolonged to an acute stage. It is the contrary that would be astonishing, when we consider the small number of canonized Popes since the time of Gregory VII who are invoked and venerated as the friends and saints of God. And it is more astonishing still that the Popes who suffered very cruel torments, like Pius VI or Pius VII, were never prayed to as saints, neither by the Vox Ecclesiae, nor by the Vox populi. If these Pontiffs, who nonetheless had to suffer so much as Popes, did not bear their pain with such a degree of charity as to be canonized saints, how can we be astonished that other Popes, who looked upon their position from a worldly point of view, would commit serious breaches or inflict on the Church of Christ an especially fearful and harrowing trial. When they are reduced to the extremity of having such Popes, the faithful, priests and bishops who want to live the life of the Church take great care not only to pray for the Supreme Pontiff who is the subject of great affliction for the Church, but first and foremost they cleave to the Apostolic tradition, the tradition concerning dogma, the missal and the ritual, the tradition on the interior life and on the universal call to perfect charity in Christ.


St. Vincent Ferrer

In such a juncture, the mission of the Friar Preacher who, undoubtedly among all the saints worked the most directly for the papacy, that son of St. Dominic, Vincent Ferrer (1350?-1419), is particularly enlightening. Angel of Judgment, Legate a latere Christi (from the side of Christ), causing the deposition of a Pope after exercising towards him infinite patience, Vincent Ferrer is also, and from the same inspiration, the intrepid missionary full of benignity, abounding in prodigies and miracles, who announces the Gospel to the immense multitude of the Christian people. He carries in his heart of an apostle not only the Supreme Pontiff, so enigmatic, obstinate and hard, but also the whole flock of Christ, the multitude of the hapless, humble folk, the “turba magna ex omnibus tribubus et populis et linguis-the great multitude...of all...tribes, and peoples, and tongues” (Apoc. 7:9). Vincent understood that the major concern of the vicar of Christ was not, indeed was far from, faithfully serving the holy Church. The Pope was placing the satisfaction of his own obscure will to power ahead of everything. But if, at least among the faithful, the sense of the life of the Church could be reawakened, the concern to live in conformity with the dogmas and the sacraments received in the Apostolic tradition, if a pure and mighty wind of prayer and conversion were to unfurl upon this languishing and desolate Christendom, then doubtlessly there would come a vicar of Christ who would be truly humble, who would have a Christian conscience about his super-eminent charge, who would preoccupy himself with exercising it to the best of his ability in the spirit of the Sovereign High Priest. If the Christian people could rediscover a life in accord with the Apostolic tradition, then it would become impossible for the vicar of Jesus Christ, when it comes to upholding and defending this tradition, to fall into certain derelictions, to abandon himself to lying compromises. It would be necessary that, without delay, a good Pope, and even a holy Pope, succeed the bad or misguided one.


Worthy Flock, Worthy Shepherd

But too many of the laity, priests and bishops in these days of great evil, when trial overtakes the Church by the Pope, would like order to be restored with their having to do nothing, or almost nothing. At most will they agree to mutter a few prayers. They even balk at the daily Rosary: five decades offered daily to our Lady in honor of the hidden life, the Passion, and the glory of Jesus. In this vein, they have very little interest in deepening their understanding of that part of the Apostolic tradition that applies directly to them in a spirit of fidelity to that tradition: dogmas, missal and ritual, interior life (for progress in the interior life obviously is a part of the Apostolic tradition). Each in his station of life having consented to lukewarmness, they take scandal at the fact that neither is the Pope, in his place as Pope, very fervent when it comes to upholding for the entire Church the Apostolic tradition, that is to say, to faithfully fulfilling the unique mission confided to him. This view of things is unjust. The more we need a holy Pope, the more we ourselves must begin by putting our own lives, by the grace of God and holding fast to tradition, in the path of the saints. Then the Lord Jesus will finally give to His flock the visible shepherd of whom it will have striven to make itself worthy.

This was the lesson of St. Vincent Ferrer at an apocalyptic time of major failings by the Roman Pontiff. But with modernism we are in the midst of experiencing even greater trials, reasons all the more compelling for us to live even more purely, and on all points, the Apostolic tradition; on all points, including a real tending towards perfect charity. And yet, in the moral doctrine revealed by the Lord and handed down by the Apostles, it is said that we must tend to perfect love, since the law of growth in Christ is part and parcel of the grace and charity which unite us in Christ.


A Fundamental Mystery

There is indeed both transcendence and obscurity in the Church’s dogma relative to the Pope: a supreme pontiff who is the universal vicar of Jesus Christ, yet who nonetheless is not sheltered from failings, even serious ones, which can be quite dangerous for his subjects. But the dogma of the Roman Pontiff is but one of the aspects of the fundamental mystery of the Church. Two great propositions introduce us to this mystery: firstly, that the Church, whose members are recruited from among sinners, which we all are, is nonetheless the infallible dispenser of light and grace, dispenser by means of a hierarchical organization, dispenser governed from heaven above by its head and Savior, Jesus Christ, and assisted by the Spirit of Jesus. On the other hand, on earth, the Savior offers by His Church the perfect sacrifice and nourishes it by His own substance. Secondly, the Church, holy Spouse of the Lord Jesus, must have a share in the Cross, including the cross of betrayal by her own; but for all that she does not cease to be sufficiently assisted in her hierarchical structure, beginning with the Pope, and to be on fire enough with charity; in a word, she remains at all times holy and pure enough to be able to share in the trials of her Spouse, including betrayal by certain members of the hierarchy, while keeping intact her self-mastery and supernatural strength. Never will the Church be subject to vertigo.

If, in our spiritual life, the Christian truth concerning the Pope is rightly situated within the Christian truth about the Church, by that light shall we overcome the scandal of all the lies, not excluding those that can befall the Church by the vicar of Christ or by the successors of the Apostles.

When we think of the Pope now and of the prevailing modernism, of the Apostolic tradition and perseverance in this tradition, we are more and more reduced to considering these questions only in prayer, only in an unceasing petition for the entire Church and for him who, in our days, holds in his hands the keys of the kingdom of heaven. He holds them in his hands, but he does not use them, so to speak. He leaves the gate of the sheepfold open at the approach of thieves; he does not close these protective doors which his predecessors had invariably kept shut with unbreakable locks and bolts. Sometimes, as is the case with post-conciliar ecumenism, he even pretends to open what will forever be kept shut. We are reduced to the necessity of never thinking of the Church except to pray for her and for the Pope. It is a blessing. Nevertheless, thinking of our Mother, the Spouse of Christ, in this piteous condition does not diminish in the least our resolve to think clearly. At least, let this indispensable lucidity, lucidity without which all courage would flag, be penetrated with as much humility and gentleness as the vehemence with which we assail the Sovereign Priest, that He make haste to help us. Deus in adjutorium meum intende. Domine, ad adjuvandum me festina. May it please Him to charge His most holy Mother, Mary Immaculate, with bringing us as soon as possible the effective remedy.



Translated exclusively for Angelus Press and abridged by Miss Anne Stinnett from the French-language version of SiSiNoNo (Courrier de Rome, Nov. 2005, pp. 1-5). The original text was first published in the review Itineraires in 1973 and included in the anthology A Short Apologia for the Church of All Time (1987).

Fr. Roger-Thomas Calmel, O.P. (1914-75), was a prominent French Dominican and Thomist philosopher, who made an immense contribution to the fight for Catholic Tradition through his writings and conferences, notably as a regular contributor for 17 years to Jean Madiran’s Itineraires. His most enduring influ­ence is through the traditional Dominican Teaching Sisters of Fanjeaux and Brignole in France who operate 12 girls’ schools in France and the US.


1. Translator’s note: The epuration, a purge of “German collaborators” occurred after the Normandy invasion and the end of the war, resulting in the killing of a 100,000 Frenchmen. For example, acclaimed poet Robert Brasillach was executed on this charge (Cf. Sisley Huddleston, France: The Tragic Years, an Eyewitness Account of War, Occupation and Liberation [Devin-Adair Co., 1955]).

2. This was written in 1973-Ed. (1987 ed.).

3. Translator’s note: A monk and ecclesiastical writer of southern Gaul (d. c. 450), famous for the practical rule he enunciated, by which the faithful can steer clear of heresy in troubled times: “Magnopere curandum est ut id teneatur quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est-What all men have at all times and everywhere believed must be regarded as true.”

4. Translator note: Douay-Rheims translation. Alternate: “Let them have their way in this” (Msgr. Ronald Knox version).

Si Si No No Articles]]> <![CDATA[Fr. Calmel - No one is exempt from the Fight!]]> https://thecatacombs.org/showthread.php?tid=102 Sat, 21 Nov 2020 10:13:11 +0000 Stone]]> https://thecatacombs.org/showthread.php?tid=102 No one is exempt from the Fight!
by Fr Calmel O.P.
[Image: ?u=https%3A%2F%2Ftse1.mm.bing.net%2Fth%3...%3DApi&f=1]

Christian spiritual combat, peace amid the struggle, joy in destitution when everything is broken and taken away: These images are too warlike, some say to us, and in any case, they only apply to bygone ages or reactionary people.

But we, in our turn, tell them, how long must you wait before you see, that in the Church militant, everyone, without exception, participates in the battle?

“I am sending you out like sheep among wolves… I have come to bring a sword… In this world you will have persecutions… Know that the world will hate you.”

Since when do these words of the Master not apply equally to each of the faithful:

— to the cloistered sister, as they do to the missionary;

— to the monk in his monastery, as they do to the parish priest in his parish;

— to the Christian laden down with temporal duties, as they do to the old man lying on his death bed.

We just need to say that the combat training and methods used are not the same for, say, missionaries as they are for enclosed religious. It would be absurd, even disastrous, to think they might be interchangeable:

* Thus it is that the missionary must spend enough time looking at Our Lord to then be able to uncompromisingly preach His word, in that way giving up his life for his flock.

* An enclosed nun’s duty, on the other hand, is to keep her eyes solely on Our Lord, without being occupied with holy preaching, leaving the Lord to place on her shoulders whatever burden He pleases, and for reasons known to Him alone; that’s the way a religious gives her life for the flock. But she does still give up her life. No one is exempt.

The troops are different yet again, and their method of combat is different, but they are nevertheless combat troops and the orders are always the same. “Do not surrender the position that has been entrusted to you by the King.”

Hermit or preaching friar, mother of a family, or virgin consecrated to God living out in the world, each has been given a position to guard, and for each the primary duty is to die at his or her post, rather than surrender the position entrusted to them by the King of Kings.


Source: www.dominicansavrille.us/no-one-is-exempt-excused-from-the-fight/]]> No one is exempt from the Fight!
by Fr Calmel O.P.
[Image: ?u=https%3A%2F%2Ftse1.mm.bing.net%2Fth%3...%3DApi&f=1]

Christian spiritual combat, peace amid the struggle, joy in destitution when everything is broken and taken away: These images are too warlike, some say to us, and in any case, they only apply to bygone ages or reactionary people.

But we, in our turn, tell them, how long must you wait before you see, that in the Church militant, everyone, without exception, participates in the battle?

“I am sending you out like sheep among wolves… I have come to bring a sword… In this world you will have persecutions… Know that the world will hate you.”

Since when do these words of the Master not apply equally to each of the faithful:

— to the cloistered sister, as they do to the missionary;

— to the monk in his monastery, as they do to the parish priest in his parish;

— to the Christian laden down with temporal duties, as they do to the old man lying on his death bed.

We just need to say that the combat training and methods used are not the same for, say, missionaries as they are for enclosed religious. It would be absurd, even disastrous, to think they might be interchangeable:

* Thus it is that the missionary must spend enough time looking at Our Lord to then be able to uncompromisingly preach His word, in that way giving up his life for his flock.

* An enclosed nun’s duty, on the other hand, is to keep her eyes solely on Our Lord, without being occupied with holy preaching, leaving the Lord to place on her shoulders whatever burden He pleases, and for reasons known to Him alone; that’s the way a religious gives her life for the flock. But she does still give up her life. No one is exempt.

The troops are different yet again, and their method of combat is different, but they are nevertheless combat troops and the orders are always the same. “Do not surrender the position that has been entrusted to you by the King.”

Hermit or preaching friar, mother of a family, or virgin consecrated to God living out in the world, each has been given a position to guard, and for each the primary duty is to die at his or her post, rather than surrender the position entrusted to them by the King of Kings.


Source: www.dominicansavrille.us/no-one-is-exempt-excused-from-the-fight/]]>