“Salus animarum supemus lex esto” — ”the salvation of souls must be the supreme law in the Church.” Canon Law 1752
 

Traditional Catholics

 

Why we must stand with Christ ... and not the World


and perhaps  — increasingly — not even Pope Francis

Holy Mother Church — Catholicism — has been around for over 2000 years  and has celebrated the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass with the Altar ad orientem — facing the East — the priest facing God in the Holy Mysteries unfolding before the congregation who hear — no matter where they are, or what their native tongue, the Mass as it has been celebrated for two millennia — in Latin. The priest is intensely focused on God whom he worships — with the people who are oriented exactly as the priest is: to God — and not to each other. The priest has no need to leave the sacred Sanctuary (which, canonically, he must not do **) descend the three steps (if there are any) and go into the aisle and mingle with the people in a Question & Answer format that has little or nothing to do with the Gospel Reading or the Epistles. He is entertaining the congregation and the more laughs he elicits the more popular he is — in entertaining ... which has absolutely nothing to do with latria —  supreme worship accorded to God alone! It is sacred. It is solemn. It is holy. Christ is being crucified before you in that re-presentation of Calvary!

Will you laugh, joke, be entertained? The only ones who laughed and joked and were entertained were the unbelievers: the Romans, the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the mob, all of whom stood at the foot of the Cross and spat on Him, ridiculed Him, who laughed and were entertained by the enormity before them, this spectacle unequaled in the annals of the world!

They laughed!

And now you will ... too?

GO AHEAD ... try it!

If we wish to be entertained our venues are innumerable: concerts, television, radio, cell-phone, night club, the movies, online video, the sports stadium, the arena: our opportunities for entertainment are endless — but our worship is singular: the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. It is in Latin because the Latin is no longer a vernacular language subject to change. Its meaning cannot be modified. You will remember, during the Consecration at Mass the priest, even in Novo Ordo parishes, now says:

“Take this, all of you, and drink from it, for this is the chalice of my Blood, the Blood of the New and Eternal Covenant, which will be poured out for you
and for many for the forgiveness of sins. Do this in memory of me.”

In Latin the priest says:

“Hic est enim Calix Sanguinis Mei, novi et aeterni Testamenti: Mysterium fidei: qui pro vobis et pro multis effundetur in remissionen peccatorum.”

 

The “Pro Multis” Crowd

For nearly 50 years Traditional Catholics had been scorned and ridiculed by Modernists in the Church as “the Pro Multis crowd” — that is to say, a group of stubborn Catholics who (correctly) understood that the words “pro multis” mean “for many” — and only “for many” in Latin — and most definitely not “for all” as the Consecration had been pronounced — in contradiction to Sacred Scripture itself (Saint Matthew 26.28:) for 50 years following Vatican II.  There are serious, very serious — even eternal consequences that follow from the deliberate and ecumenically-driven mistranslation of one word in Latin —  for if the Most Holy Sacrifice of Christ on the Cross is offered “for many” — and not “for all” — then the salvation held out by Christ does not — despite quite nearly everything we hear at Mass — extend to all: there are, indeed, some who will be cast into outer darkness and unending torment in the “Lake of Fire that is the Second Death” against which Christ insistently and urgently warns us.* Indeed, why, otherwise, would Christ tell us: “the road that leads to eternal salvation is narrow and few there are that take it. But the road to eternal destruction is wide and easy and many there are who follow it” (Saint Matthew 7.13)?

Is Christ a liar?

Of course not!

Think of the two corresponding utterances for a moment and tell us who is uttering the truth: a church that has become deeply infected with the heresy of Modernism — or Christ?

We stand with Christ — and His Holy Catholic Church of 2000 years prior to the many heretical ventures and documents of the Second Vatican Council.  There are not two Churches — the Church of Vatican II and the Church of the 2000 years preceding it. There is “One, True, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church” — to which even Modernists defer in their “Profession of Faith” not only in every Novus Ordo parish, but in nearly every Protestant church that utters it in recrimination against itself.

Truth will out, despite our best efforts to suppress it, yes?
 

Christ or the World: Choose!

You can choose Christ, or the world. You cannot have both: they are inimical to each other. And the beautiful voice of the Bride of Christ ... is heard in Latin. It is Her language alone, a unique language of love between God and man — inseparable from Her, who is faithful to Him to Whom She is ever espoused. She does not speak English, German, Czech, Chinese, Russian, French, and Italian — at the same time, estranging each from the other! That is the Tower of Babel. For 2000 years no matter where you came from, no matter your language or culture, if you knelt any place in the world at Mass you would be hearing the same language and responding in the same language of 2000 years: Latin. And you would know precisely where you were in the Mass. You could travel the entire world and hear the Mass in Latin as you heard it at home.

There never were “Traditional Catholics” — until that catastrophic rupture that is known as “Vatican II”. There were only Catholics  — who knew their holy Faith, or in holy simplicity embraced what the Church ever and always taught — what devout, brave, and holy bishops staunchly defended against a hostile and contrary world: bishops who were one with the mind of the Church; who held fast to, and safeguarded the Sacred Deposit of the Faith — bishops that were not seduced by the world and its flattery — still less its abhorrent solicitation of homosexuality and adultery in the life of the Church under the sanctimonious guise of “mercy” and “accompaniment in sin”! Catholics instinctively intuited the sacred: when they stepped over the threshold of the Church door that separated the sacred from the profane they left the City of Man and entered  the City of God! Every sense was touched by the sacred! We were brought to our knees in reverent silence before Christ Himself present in the Holy Eucharist in the High Altar!
 

Quite different, No?

When you entered the Church it was quiet, and an atmosphere of piety and lingering incense permeated it: subdued, but not dark, it was an alternating array of light and shadows, lingering angelic song and immense silence — consonant with the souls of the sinners who sought refuge there. Light filtered in through beautiful, painstakingly made stained glass. Sometimes the sun would highlight your face in a stroke of yellow, red, or blue as it slowly, majestically, moved across the windows with the Mass. Pews and kneelers fell to the floor with a dull thud as each soul entered to pray. Beautifully artistic Stations of the Cross lined each side of the aisles. In front of you, unmistakably is the High Altar and the Crucifix — and Christ is fixed to it.

It is not the stylized (forbidden, but ignored) “Cross of the Resurrection” portraying a welcoming Christ with outstretched hands detached from the Cross — Christ did not Rise from the Cross: He died on it!

Nor is it the bent, malformed, hideous, and almost profane Bent Cross used by the Popes on their Croziers or Ferulas since Vatican II  —  “artistically rendered” by commission from the Vatican in 1963 by Italian Lello Scorzelli:

Note Francis’s New Crozier, bottom right, probably copied from the Pope Paul VI Hall but more frightening still. ¹

Pope Paul VI Meeting Hall

Francis’s new Crozier-without-Christ

 

Modernism, we see, infected not only schizophrenic visual presentations spuriously called “art” throughout the Church, but these very presentations themselves appear to further and foster the doctrines of the Modernists  — and you must remember that Modernism is the “Synthesis of all Heresies” condemned in the Encyclicals Lamentabili Sane, and Paschendi Dominici Gregis by Pope St. Pius X in 1907. ²  Since Vatican II, however, nothing is too ugly or too profane to be called “modern”:  art, theology, liturgy, and nominally Catholic literature. The “Windows and doors were flung open” by Pope John the XXIII when he convened the Second Vatican Council in 1962 and the World rushed in as the Faithful ran out. The result? Priests, nuns, sisters, Religious brothers and sisters, leaving the Church en masse while the seminaries are empty and most Novus Ordo priests are now elderly and retired — and as parishes become priestless, even these retired and infirm priests are brought in to have a Mass at all. Mass attendance, we know, is at a historical low — and dwindling as the aged parishioners die.

Who can argue that a change of monumental proportions occurred following Vatican II, and especially under the present papacy of Francis? Martin Luther has been re-habilitated and heralded by Francis as a much-needed reformer, and the Reformation itself has been both celebrated and commemorated with visits by Francis to commemorate the “Reformation” in Sweden with female Lutheran Archbishop Antje Jackelen:
 

Francis with with female Lutheran Archbishop Antje Jackelen in Sweden Commemorating the Reformation

“With gratitude we acknowledge that the Reformation helped give greater centrality to sacred Scripture in the church’s life,” the pope said in a joint declaration at Lund Cathedral with Bishop Munib A. Younan, the head of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jordan and the Holy Land and the president of the Lutheran World Federation.”  ³

 

The Vatican subsequently issued official Stamps of Martin Luther piously portrayed, together with his statue now in the Vatican itself among the statues of the Saints. Martin Luther is an arch-heresiarch that split the unity of the Holy Catholic Church and has always been considered so in Catholic teaching — until Francis. His split from Rome resulted in a thousand splits of Protestant sects among themselves to this day. Luther, the instigator of this thousand-fold division, however, is now held up to Catholics as a paradigm?

All this, of course, is the fruit of the other heresy of Ecumenism which emerged from the Second Vatican Council. The Holy Catholic Church effectively and continually relinquishes most of what is identifiably Catholic and other religions relinquish ... nothing in return. A sad trade indeed.

Among the most identifiable of Catholic arts is that of the Stained Glass — especially the windows in our Churches. Let us look at a few examples of the transition from beautiful traditional Catholic stained-glass — to that which resulted from changes in churches following the Second Vatican Council:

TRADITIONAL STAINED GLASS:
 

MODERNIST STAINED GLASS:

 

---

This transition from graceful form and beauty to linearly distorted and deeply isolated geometric fragmentation in art is symptomatic of the conflict within the psyche that produced it. The absence of symmetry and harmony — and the startling presence of discontinuity, the deliberate reduction of form to mutation and mutilation, from the visually and intellectuality apprehensible to the indistinct and amorphous is indicative of the fractures occurring deeply within the Church and the discontinuity — the tension and irreconcilability — growing in doctrine and theology. The unity of the Church has been shattered by division and dissension — overwhelmingly in Liberal camps that have laid unrelenting siege to the unity of the Church for 5 decades, determined to reconcile the profane with the sacred, the City of God with the City of Man — and even sin with sanctity. Hence the tension, the dissonance and discontinuity, the malformation we see evidenced even in ecclesiastical art (and architecture!).

Attaining to Critical Mass

The crisis that has continued for some time now — in fact for decades — has attained to critical mass under the papacy of Francis who, despite his illusions or pretensions, is dismantling the Holy Roman Catholic Church as no other pontiff has dared. Indeed with confidence we can assert that no external enemy has come near to achieving the destruction that Francis has wrought on the Body of Christ in 2000 years. Fault lines that were deep within the tectonic foundation of the Church first appeared to audibly rumble in 1963. Increasingly significant fissures developed in the following 6 years. Finally the tectonic shift has become evident and undeniable. The foundation of the Church — which ultimately is Christ Himself — but in terms of liturgy, the Mass, dogma, Sacred Tradition, the timeless teachings of the Church, the unchangeable Sacred Deposit of Faith, and even Sacred Scripture itself the Church has been subverted as in no other time in Church history (with the sole exception, perhaps, under Saint Athanasius and the great Arian Heresy in the 3rd century, when he alone held to the Faith when every other bishop apostatized).  We need only look about us at the detritus of what remains of the once monolithic Holy Catholic Church. The architects of this destruction are many, but none attain to the audacity and arrogance of Francis. His is almost forthright in his ambition to remake the Catholic Church into the “Church of Surprise, Encounter, and Accompaniment” — even unto sin! I stated that he is almost forthright in his ambition, but I will invite you to make the assessment:

“He said the Second Vatican Council, the 1962-65 meetings that brought the church into the modern world, had promised such an opening to people of other faiths and non-believers, but that the church hadn't made progress since then.”
“I have the humility and ambition to do so,” he said.” ⁴

How rarely, if ever, do we hear a humble person ascribe humility to themselves? The truly humble do not have the hubris to do so, nor even so much as to think so. But not Francis. He indeed has the latter, even as he reserves the former for widely publicized photo-ops. Is he suggesting that his predecessors lacked the necessary “humility” — to say nothing of the “ambition” — to embrace the Protestant Reformation? Adultery? Homosexuality? Sacrilege in Holy Communion? Such a deeply self-investing ... and deeply indicting statement, no?

In the face of this determined — and concerted — effort by Francis with the eager complicity of the majority of the College of Cardinals  (the German and American delegations being the most vociferous in their Liberal and counter-Catholic demands) who appear to have forgotten, or simply repudiate the Catholic Faith in a perfidious effort to accommodate a world that will not tolerate it, what is the Catholic layman, the Catholic laywoman, the increasingly rare and genuinely Catholic priest to do? Join the crowd that jeers at Christ on Calvary? Or take a stand — perhaps the last stand — with Christ against the world?

We both know the answer.

The Holy Catholic Church has not ceased to exist despite interlopers and apostates. They have always been in Holy Mother Church as parasitic infections in a self-inflicted wound. They mar the beauty of the Church, stain the veil of the Bride of Christ, but will never bring Her to Her knees. Only before Christ Jesus does She bend them! Not the world.

And neither should we.

We must stand with Christ — and not the World ... and perhaps — increasingly — not even Pope Francis.

Lusting suitors will assail Her, but she is inviolable, for She is faithful to the Groom Who is Christ.

As we must be.
 

Copyright © 2004 - 2019 Boston Catholic Journal. All rights reserved. Unless otherwise stated, permission is granted by the Boston Catholic Journal for the copying and distribution of the articles and audio files under the following conditions:
No additions, deletions, or changes are to be made to the text or audio files in any way, and the copies may not be sold for a profit. In the reproduction, in any format of any image, graphic, text, or audio file, attribution must be given to the Boston Catholic Journal.