and the Reclamation of
our Holy Catholic Faith
It is
almost inconceivable — and except for history, utterly
unimaginable — and yet it is undeniably true: The visible
and distinguishable Catholic Church virtually no longer
exists in the world. Please be careful to note that I say virtually:
Remnants remain, memories are retained,
and here and there actual Catholic parishes remain intact against
implacable forces that would extinguish the Church altogether. These
are the churches that still faithfully retain the ancient Tridentine
Mass and distinctly Catholic Tradition in the face of the enmity, reproach,
criticism, and mockery not only of the world, but of Modernist Catholics
at large who have been nurtured on the spurious “Spirit of Vatican
II” in the “Faith Communities” that superseded the local “churches”
which followed that tremendous breach in continuity that we call Vatican
II.
Does such a statement appall you? It appalls
me.
A Simulacrum — the Loss
of Identity
Apart from the unchangeable Canon of
the Mass (specifically, the words of Consecration), in nearly every
other respect we have what dangerously verges upon a counterfeit.
The real Roman Catholic Church (with its inviolable Sacraments
and the authentic and indefeasible Deposit of Faith) of
our fathers and of their fathers and their fathers before them — certainly
has not been destroyed, but it has been completely pulled own, totally
vandalized, and a simulacrum erected in its place. The Church for which
the Saints lived and the Martyrs died — which baptized our children
and buried our dead … is, effectively (and I emphasize, effectively),
no more: it has been utterly eclipsed by a semblance-only
that daily grows more diaphanous, threadbare, and meretricious.
Understand this: Vatican II was the end
of Catholic identity as it had been understood, practiced, and
articulated through centuries; indeed, millennia. It was not
the end of the Roman Catholic Church — which will endure until the
Second Coming of Christ. What has resulted from Vatican II was
nothing less than catastrophic for Catholic identity and Catholic
culture. It is a theological iteration of Identity Theft: surreptitious,
inviting trust, and then abusing the credentials — fraudulently acquired
— that do not belong to the thief but serve his own devious ends, leaving
the actual owner a trail of scandal and debt.
With a
few exceptions
Is this to say that we have no more holy
priests, bishops, nuns and Religious in the “modern” Church? Absolutely
not! There are, I am convinced, a few — perhaps a very few —
brave and holy priests and Religious who strive for authentic sanctity
— and the sanctification and salvation of those entrusted to them —
against an overwhelming current that would sweep them aside as so many
artifacts of “a time gone by”, a time “that is no more”. There are priests
and Religious who undoubtedly are so many pariahs to their local ordinaries
and endure much in the way of reproach and indignity because it was
precisely this reproach and indignity brought against Christ!
They have cleaved to their vows, their promises, the Faith of their
Fathers, and to the small flocks they tirelessly shepherd. They are
the real heroes and heroines of the Faith, and often the sole reason
that the faithful remain so. The faithful know that somewhere, in some
uncelebrated corner of obscurity, priests, nuns, and Religious live
as they have always lived throughout the life of the Church: in sanctity
and in utter obedience to Christ and the Church that has always been
— and will always be. By and large they are younger men and women who
have seen beyond the tattered veil of the Bride of Christ to
the beauty deeply within that cannot be marred by time or the vicious
intrigues of men. They are the hope of the Church, and we pray that
God give them holy and final perseverance. They have kept the Faith
when so many have tossed it aside.
Indeed, when Christ asked, “When the Son
of Man comes, will He find faith on earth?” (St. Luke 18.8) —
this was no rhetorical question, but a profound, existential, and ultimately
prophetic utterance — concerning the faithfulness and authenticity of
the Church vis-à-vis post-modernity, its encounter with it, its subsequent
transformation by it — and ultimately its assimilation into it. In a
word it is no longer a competing narrative with the world
zeitgeist but is increasingly indistinguishable from it.
The New Right of New
Rites
The purpose, the focus (salus animarum:
the salvation of souls) the language, the form of worship, the overwhelming
intrusion of women in the sanctuary, priests leaving the sanctuary
to “homilize” in the manner of popular talk-show hosts weaving
in and out of the audience with questions “engaging” the congregation
(and, yes, people silly enough to answer, or too embarrassed not to),
the catechesis, the sermons, the music, the manner of the administration
of all the Sacraments and rites (Holy Eucharist, Baptism, Penance,
Confirmation, Matrimony, Holy Orders, Extreme Unction or Last Rites),
the architecture, the demeanor of the congregation and its scandalous
attire — in a word, the continuity of identity in every
conceivable sense with a 2000 year old Church (no, not “Faith
Community” or “Worship Space” or any other neologism!) is strikingly
absent and no longer bears any credible resemblance to the Roman Catholic
Church circa 33 AD until 1959.
We no longer hear the stentorian voice
of the Apostle, but the lisper of the priest-psychoanalyst eager to
affirm your inflated, albeit contorted self-image, your holiness and
goodness as most certainly the “People of God.”
Gone are the male voices. In their place we find the ascendancy of woman,
which is to say, Feminism. From the troop of women eagerly lining up
to be “Eucharistic Ministers” (“Extraordinary” is never
suffixed to the quasi-sacerdotal title), to the DREs (Directors of Religious
Education), the Music “Ministers”, to the Parish Council (predominantly
feminist women) to the stumbling on any nouns that may suggest
a masculine gender (“Coheirs AND “Coheiresses” as one local priest
insists on interjecting in deference to or in advocacy of, feminism).
What self-respecting unapologetic man — comfortable in his manliness
— would be comfortable with, feel welcome, in such company that considers
men in general “oppressively patriarchal”? This explains
the absence of so many men at Mass, and so few vocations to the priesthood.
It has been said that a single drop of
poison in a bottle of medicine suffices to make it deadly.
1
How many drops of poison have entered the teaching of today’s Catholic
Church! The bottle looks the same but the label is fraudulent. The seal
was broken by Vatican II and the contents tampered with.
I will no longer tolerate the patently
false nonsense about how well the Church is doing Her job — saving
souls is no longer a topic in homiletics (when did you last hear
of it?) and this clear spiritual mandate appears to be far less
pressing than social and environmental issues. Still
less will I tolerate the never-ending drivel that Vatican II was good
for the Church and that the Church needed it and is better for it. None
are true in the least: in fact, they are demonstrably untrue in quantifiable
ways of every measure.
400 Years of Heresy
It must be remembered that the Arian heresy
(which denied the divinity of Christ) ravaged the Church for more than
400 years. 400 years! It was the dominant belief of most
bishops and ecclesiastics even after its condemnation by the First Council
of Nicaea (325 AD) and the First Council of Constantinople (381 AD).
The greatest champion of Catholic orthodoxy and the divinity of Christ
— ever — was Saint Athanasius, Patriarch of Alexandria (d. 373 AD).
Resistance to Saint Athanasius was so widespread within the Church during
that period that the world’s acquaintance with Saint Athanasius is largely
through the phrase “Athanasius contra mundum” (Athanasius against
the world — so widespread and accepted was the heresy against which
he tirelessly fought, and at so great a cost). Indeed, so great was
the hierarchical resistance against him by an overwhelming number of
bishops that he was exiled no less than five times, driven to living
in a dry well and in his own father’s sepulcher when the Arians sought
to kill him. So few bishops, and still fewer priests, held fast to the
Apostolic Faith handed down by Saint Peter.
It was the laity who held the line
and transmitted the one, true Faith when the bishops and priests fell
into heresy. This is nothing short of miraculous.
The Synthesis
of all Heresies
I will not go into the many councils (there
were 19, excluding the possibly spurious Vatican II) to recount the
many heresies to which most of them responded. Vatican II is unique
in that it was not a response to a heresy, but in many ways has resulted
in the instantiation and institution of one. It can be reduced to the
heresy of Modernism condemned by Pope St. Pius X in his encyclical
Pascendi Dominici Gregis on the Doctrines of the Modernists
published 8 September 1907— called the “Synthesis of all Heresies”—and
which has been resoundingly ignored. It begins with this sentence:
“The office divinely committed to Us of
feeding the Lord's flock has especially this duty assigned to it by
Christ, namely, to guard with the greatest vigilance the deposit
of the faith delivered to the saints, rejecting the profane novelties
of words and oppositions of knowledge falsely so called.” (emphasis
added)
And ends with this sentence:
“… we
beseech for you with our whole heart and soul the abundance of heavenly
light, so that in the midst of this great perturbation of men's minds
from the insidious invasions of error from every side, you may see clearly
what you ought to do and may perform the task with all your strength
and courage. May Jesus Christ, the author and finisher of our faith,
be with you by His power; and may the Immaculate Virgin, the destroyer
of all heresies, be with you by her prayers and aid.” (again,
emphasis added)
And in between:
“… the partisans of error are to be sought
not only among the Church's open enemies; they lie hid, a thing
to be deeply deplored and
feared, in her very bosom and
heart, and are the more mischievous, the less conspicuously they
appear. We allude, Venerable
Brethren, to many who belong to
the Catholic laity, nay, and this is far more lamentable, to the
ranks of the priesthood itself, who,
feigning a love for the Church,
lacking the firm protection of philosophy and theology, nay more,
thoroughly imbued with the
poisonous doctrines taught by
the enemies of the Church, and lost to all sense of modesty, vaunt themselves
as reformers of the
Church; and, forming more boldly
into line of attack, assail all that is most sacred in the work of Christ,
not sparing even the
person of the Divine Redeemer, Whom,
with sacrilegious daring, they reduce to a simple, mere man.”
Do the names Father Richard McBrien (Christ
never intended to found a Church, His impeccabilty is dubious as is
Mary's Virginal Conception of Christ and Original Sin, to name just
a few) Daniel C. Maguire (“We listened much too much to the penis when
we should have sought an audience with the clitoris.”
2), Kung ,
Schillebeeckx, Kasper, Thomas Merton (a convert to Zen Buddhism) —
to name just a very few— come to mind? How about Cardinal Marx from
Germany (“We are not a branch of Rome. Each conference of bishops is
responsible for pastoral care in its cultural context and must preach
the Gospel in its own, original way” 3)
, or Cardinal Danneels of Belgium (head of the infamous
“St. Gallen
Club” which actively undermined an insufficiently liberal and progressive
Pope (Benedict XVI) and publicly applauded itself as having machinated
the accession of the liberal Cardinal Bergoglio of Argentina (“their
man” in their own words) to the papacy?
4
Indeed, Pope Francis in an obvious
quid pro quo invited them to a place of honor after his
election (heedless of the flagrant scandal).5
How
many souls have lost their way, even their faith, because of the personal
example and heterodox teachings of these men?
Let us ask some real — indeed vital —
questions concerning the Post-Vatican II Church: Were all Catholics
who preceded this most unfortunate generation worshipping illicitly,
or in ignorance, or in any manner less genuine, less pious, and
with less understanding, than the present generation? Does
our generation alone possess the culmination
of truth about the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, sacred Dogma, and
the Deposit of Faith — while preceding generations worshipped and lived
their holy Catholic vocations either deficiently
or defectively? Are not Saints examples set before
us by the Church? How do our current bishops — including Pope
Francis — together with current day priests and laity measure up to
these examples from “dark and unenlightened times”? It is pitiful indeed.
“Quis est homo qui
non fleret ...?”
6
Quite nearly everything identifiably Catholic
from a historical perspective … has been lost. It is cause for unspeakable
sorrow, inconsolable tears:
|
“The city of Thy sanctuary is become a desert, Sion is made
a desert, Jerusalem is desolate.
The house of our holiness, and of our glory, where our
fathers praised Thee, is burnt with fire, and all our lovely
things are turned into ruins.” (Isaiah 64.10-11)
|
Vatican II was the point of historical
rupture in the continuity of our 2000 year old Church. Mass has become
the venue of emptiness, meaninglessness, foolishness, comedy, and the
worship of man, collectively celebrated as “the People of God” in their
“Faith Communities” and “Prayer Spaces”. Latin in Church is as welcome
as German in a synagogue. The priests are elderly activists and there
are none in line to replace them: that queue now belongs to Woman
Church and Feminists who gladly would fill that sacred void as so
many priestesses at a Wicca assembly. The Church is no longer a sacred
refuge. It is a bland, unadorned space more suitable to the waiting
room of a dental office than a place for worshiping God. Respect for
the sacred is utterly absent. It is the post-apocalypse of the dark
and demonic dreams of Vatican II: a place of sterility, cleansed of
hierarchy, difference, separateness, holiness — all are the same, all
are “equal”, and all are “Ministers of this and that”, ministering
to other “Ministers of this and that”.
Ironically enough, it is Hollywood (which
detests our Catholic Faith) which alone brings out vestiges of what
once was holy and in contention with evil: The Cross, the priesthood,
Nuns in full habits, Holy Water, Censors, priestly collars — all as
distinguishable symbols against evil. Why not use symbols of Judaism?
Islam? Protestant preachers? Think of the horror film genre. It is often
replete with Catholic symbols and thus has unwittingly preserved vestiges
of the very thing it detests. Why? Because they are identifiable
as holy. Or were … such “memes” no longer are.
To what will the post-Vatican II, post-Christian
world appeal as unmistakably holy, as supernatural, as transcending
the insipid culture that inspires only despair, narcosis and death?
With the absence of the Church as identifiably and unmistakably
holy — as much within as without — as distinct and
set apart by God (which is what holiness is: being set apart
— from the world, from the profane, the mundane, and the earthly —
for God!) as the Nouveau Catholic Church continues to
descend into schizophrenic ambivalence and self-loathing? More troubling
still, the clarity of doctrine and the indissolubility of
dogma distinctly and perpetually Catholic, increasingly appears
to be the subject of enigmatic and often deeply controversial interpretation
by our present Pope Francis much to the confusion of Catholics worldwide.
This invites — even encourages — dissent, division and a lack of conviction
that should not emanate — of all places — from the Chair of Peter.
“Render to Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God what is God's.”
(St. Mat. 22.21) We must not conflate the two and pretend that rendering
to the one is also somehow rendering to the other.
No Compromise
There can be no compromise between
the world and the Church. This is the failed rapprochement of Vatican
II through which the sanctity of the Church gradually succumbed
to the banality of the world. We must take sides, and
choosing the one is repudiating the other. There is
the Prince of Peace and the Prince of Darkness — you cannot serve both.
Remember the Second Temptation of Christ which presents to us the clearest
dichotomy between the Church and the world.
|
“And
the devil led him into a high mountain, and showed him all
the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time; And he said
to him: To thee will I give all this power, and the glory
of them; for to me
they are delivered, and to whom I will, I give them.
If thou therefore wilt adore before me, all shall be thine.
And Jesus answering said to him: It is written: Thou shalt
adore the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve.”
(St. Luke 4.5-8)
|
Bastards
The Church is the paradigm
of holiness because it is the Bride of Christ, but she has been mocked,
ridiculed, and denounced … by Her own children. They have torn Her veil,
marred her beauty, and treated Her as a harlot: She — their Mother
who baptized them, sanctified them, and will bury them. In a word,
Her children have behaved like bastards, and only Matricide will
satisfy their perverse lust for shame. Unable to tolerate their own
sins, they have projected them on their Mother and disowned Her in favor
of their father who was a liar and murderer from the beginning.
8
________________________________________
1 Satis Cognitum,
Encyclical of Pope Leo XIII on the Unity of the Church: “There
can be nothing more dangerous than those heretics who admit nearly the
whole cycle of doctrine, and yet by one word, as with a drop of poison,
infect the real and simple faith taught by our Lord and handed down
by Apostolic tradition” (Auctor
Tract. de
Fide Orthodoxa contra Arianos).”
2 (ex-priest)
Daniel Maguire's (Professor of Moral Theological Ethics at Marquette
University, a Catholic, Jesuit Institution) address to
address
to Planned Parenthood Federation of America 2002 Annual Conference Interfaith
Prayer Breakfast, March 21, 2002
3
https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/bishops-conferences-are-not-the-magisterium-vatican-doctrine-chief-reminds-cardinal-marx-70113/
4
and
5
https://www.boston-catholic-journal.com/is-francis-the-great-divider-in-the-post-modern-catholic-church.htm
6
“Quis est homo,
qui non fleret, Christi Matrem si videret ...”
Who is the man who would not weep? (from Jacopone da Todi's famous
Stabat Mater (1230-1306 A.D.)
7
St. John 8.44
Geoffrey K. Mondello
Editor
Boston Catholic Journal
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