Avenging God?

The latest horrible onslaught let loose against the virtually defenceless Palestinians in Gaza can raise in many people’s minds an obstacle to the true worship of the true God, because it is well known that many of today’s Israelis claim that they have from the Old Testament a God-given right to take all the land occupied by the Palestinians, by force if necessary. A reasonable person might ask two questions: what kind of a God can even remotely be pulled in to ‘justify’ such barbarous cruelty, together with such utter contempt for any world opinion condemning that barbarity? And what kind of a ‘Chosen People’ are these? The answer to both questions turns around Our Lord Jesus Christ, around whom of course all human history turns.

The Old Testament tells the story of mankind before Christ, especially the story of the Israelites, the people that God chose out from the rest of the human race to act as the cradle for the coming down from Heaven of the Incarnate God, Jesus Christ. About a thousand years after Adam, mankind had grown so corrupt that God had to wash it out and start again with the eight souls saved on Noah’s Ark. About another thousand years later, mankind is again so corrupt that God has to pull Abraham out of the degenerate city Ur to be the founder of a race that must stay clear of all surrounding human contamination in order to be clean enough to act as that cradle. Here is the origin of that racial exclusivity observable in Jews ever since. It began with God, but it has fallen into the hands of men.

The Jews were indeed once, for the sake of Jesus Christ, the Chosen People. Thus St Thomas Aquinas has a tremendous article in his Summa Theologiae where he shows how every single detail in the furnishing of the Israelites’ exclusive Temple in Jerusalem pointed forward to Jesus Christ (Ia IIae, 102, 4). However, to clear the Promised Land for the Israelites to take over, there is no question that Almighty God gave them more than once the command to exterminate utterly the pagans occupying the land, and He punished King Saul severely for not observing this command to the letter (I Sam XV). What could justify such a command?

It is the same as what explains God’s exterminating all mankind (except eight souls) in Noah’s time. Firstly men’s sins. God creates men for Heaven, they choose sin that deserves Hell. For indeed sin offends God first of all. So the sense of God and the sense of sin get lost together, as all around us today. A godless generation like ours cannot possibly understand the justice of God. Secondly, God’s mercy, which goes hand in hand with His justice, and is today equally misunderstood. But given the reality of Hell, is it not a mercy of God if he cuts men off so that they can repent before they die, or at least be stopped from sinning so as not to deserve to go any deeper in Hell?

That is how it will have been with the pagan enemies of the Israelites between Abraham and Jesus Christ. To read the Old Testament is to see how often the Israelites were tempted to abandon the true God and to worship devils by the pagans all around them. As the Curé of Ars once said, ‘Get rid of the priest, and within 25 years men will be worshipping beasts.’ It is to the eternal credit of the Israelites that they did succeed in providing the cradle for the Messiah, for instance St Joachim and St Anne, especially their child, the Blessed Virgin Mary, the twelve Apostles and all other good Israelites who helped to launch their Messiah’s Catholic Church. For today’s Israelis see next week.

Kyrie eleison.

© 2011-2014 BRN Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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CARDINAL PIE – I

Cardinal Pie (1815-1880) was a great churchman of 19th century France, one of the great defenders of the Faith against that liberalism which was eating up the world from the French Revolution (1789) onwards. Pope Pius X kept his works by his bedside and read them constantly. No doubt the Cardinal's profound grasp of the key ideas driving the modern world played a major part in enabling Pius X to obtain a 50-year reprieve, say from 1907 to 1958, for the doomed Catholic Church.

Doomed ? But the Catholic Church cannot be doomed ! True, by God's protection it will last to the end of the world (Mt. XXVIII, 20), but at the same time by God's Word we know that by then the Faith will scarcely be found on earth (Lk. XVIII, 8), and that it will have been given to the forces of evil to defeat the Saints (Apoc. XIII, 7). These are two important quotes to bear in mind in 2014, because everything around us today tells us that the followers of Christ must be prepared for one seeming defeat after another, e.g. the fall of the Society of St Pius X. Here is what Cardinal Pie had to say on the matter, some 150 years ago ! --

“Let us fight, hoping against hope itself, which is what I wish to tell faint-hearted Christians, slaves to popularity, worshippers of success and shaken by the least advance of evil. Given how they feel, please God they will be spared the agonies of the world's final trial. Is that trial close or is it still far off ? Nobody knows, and I will not dare to make a guess. But one thing is certain, namely that the closer we come to the end of the world, the more and more it is wicked and deceitful men who will gain the upper hand. The Faith will hardly be found on earth, meaning that it will almost have disappeared from earthly institutions. Believers themselves will hardly dare to profess their belief in public, or in society.

"The splitting, separating and divorcing of States from God which was for St Paul a sign foretelling the end, will advance day by day. The Church, while remaining always a visible society, will be reduced more and more to dimensions of the individual and the home. When she started out she said she was being shut in, and she called for more room to breathe, but as she approaches her end on earth, so she will have to fight a rearguard action every inch of the way, being surrounded and hemmed in on all sides. The more widely she spread out in previous ages, the greater the effort will now be made to cut her down to size. Finally the Church will undergo what looks like a veritable defeat, and the Beast will be given to make war on the Saints and to overwhelm them. The insolence of evil will be at its peak.”

These are prophetic words, coming truer by the day, not at all pleasant to admit, but anchored in Scripture. A wise Anglican Bishop (Butler) said in the 18th century, "Things are what they are. Their consequences will be what they will be. Why then should we seek to deceive ourselves ?" Notice especially how the Cardinal foresees the impossibility of defending the Faith on any larger scale than just the home. Not everybody agrees that we have already reached that point in 2014. I might wish they were right, but I have yet to be persuaded that with disintegrated people one can make an integrated society. Contrast with us democratic citizens of today the Roman centurion in the Gospel who understood a chain of command and recognized naturally the authority of Our Lord (Mt. VIII, 5-18) -- how Our Lord praised him !

Patience. See next week how the Cardinal himself reacted to what he foresaw. He was no defeatist !

Kyrie eleison.


A Cardinal saw how far the Church must shrink
In these end times, yet never will it sink.

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DICKENS' BROADSTAIRS

A number of friends have asked me how I like the house newly purchased for the “Resistance” in Kent, England. I like it. It is spacious and it is being beautifully set up by a fellow-exile from the Society of St Pius X, Fr Stephen Abraham. Only Heaven knows how it intends the house to be used in the near and distant future, but it is meanwhile a delightful refuge, five minutes on foot from the sea which God created, and which the liberals cannot touch.

Several famous English artists and writers from the past have also found refuge in this delightful corner of north-east Kent. Most famous of the artists is J.M.W. TURNER (1775-1751). Born in London where he spent most of his working life, from age 11 he spent several formative years in Margate, some four miles up the coast from Broadstairs. Here he discovered the sea, which with its light effects was a lifelong inspiration for his painting, and to Margate he frequently returned later in life.

Also in Margate the most famous poet in English of the 20th century, T.S. ELIOT (1888-1965), composed in an open-air pavilion still standing on Margate's beach, a substantial section of the third part of his most famous poem, The Wasteland (1922). He had come to the seaside town as a refugee from London where an unhappy marriage had seriously affected his health. He did not stay long, but went on to Lausanne, Switzerland, where thanks to the care of a good doctor he completed his recovery and The Wasteland. But the prospect of the sea at Margate had no doubt helped.

Another famous poet, at least in England, was a frequent visitor to Ramsgate, two miles down the coast from Broadstairs. Samuel Taylor COLERIDGE, one of England's five outstanding Romantic poets, is best-known for his long poem, The Ancient Mariner. He loved bathing in the sea at Ramsgate, perhaps also for health reasons. In any case, the colder the sea, the more he liked it.

Most famous of all, however, was a frequent visitor to Broadstairs itself, the novelist Charles Dickens (1812-1870). He first resorted to Broadstairs in 1837, as a quiet place in which to complete his first novel, The Pickwick Papers, but he so fell in love with the antiquated little seaside town that he often returned with his family to write, or to rest from writing, through the 1840's and into the 1850's. His name and names of his novels, or of characters from his novels, are to be found all over the old town that he knew. It is now surrounded, not to say strangled, by Victorian and modern suburbs, but Broadstairs still celebrates every year its most famous visitor with a Dickens Festival in June.

Dr. David Allen White, a Catholic teacher of literature and music who is well-known to many Catholics striving to keep the Faith all over the English-speaking world, is a great lover of Dickens. Since he is passing through London this summer, he agreed to visit Broadstairs in order to hold on August 2 and 3 a 24-hour weekend seminar on Dickens, open to the public and including three conferences and Sunday Mass, and a visit which he will guide to the Dickens Museum in town, set up in a little old house known to, and visited by, Dickens himself. If you are interested in attending, let us know soon (through info@dinoscopus.org), because if numbers have to be limited, first come will be first served. Meals will be provided in-house, but visitors will have to find their own accommodation outside. Beware, it will be the height of the holiday season.

Dickens was not Catholic, but Dostoevsky called him “a great Christian”. Dickens certainly had a warm and open heart, and a brilliant pen.

Kyrie eleison.


For Dickens, Broadstairs was a great delight.
To find out why, come listen to Dr White.

© 2011-2014 Richard N. Williamson. All Rights Reserved.

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BRAVE PRIESTS

As a number of you will know, Fr Fernando Altamira is a young Argentinian priest of the Society of St Pius X, working in Bogotá, the capital city of Columbia in South America, who several months ago took a clear and public stand against the betrayal of the Faith and of Archbishop Lefebvre’s Society by Bishop Fellay and his team in Menzingen, Switzerland. Walking out of the Society’s Priory to found an alternative parish nearby, Fr Altamira was followed by the large part of his previous parishioners. As I was able to observe in mid-April, he is a pious, intelligent and hard-working priest, popular with the people. For his pains he is being “excluded” from the SSPX.

He wrote to Bishop Fellay, protesting that his “exclusion” is invalid. He sent a copy of his well-argued protest to a veteran priest of the SSPX who understands too well how the modern world operates to be fooled by Bishop Fellay. Here are Fr Jean-Michel Faure's wise comments:-

“It is obvious that there is a problem in the Society of St Pius X. Liberals took control, and they want to be integrated into the structure of modernist Rome. And, as Fr Pfluger has said, they want to expel all anti-liberals opposed to their Operation Suicide. One more proof of the on-going Recognition of the SSPX by Rome is the churches that certain bishops of France offer to Bishop Fellay, for the Requiem Mass of Fr Lagneau, for the Jubilee Mass of Fr Marziac, on various occasions the Basilica of Lourdes, the Confirmations in Corsica, and so on.

“Secrecy is the mode of operating worthy of a liberal politician who wants to bring his electors around to a goal directly opposed to what he had promised in order to get elected. By a series of ambiguous statements skilfully graded to advance little by little, the politician brings the great majority of his followers to accept the opposite conclusion to what they were convinced of to begin with. It is Macchiavellian deceit, lying and hypocrisy, pure and simple. For this Superior General the end justifies the means, and to attain that end he does not hesitate to take positions repeatedly condemned by Archbishop Lefebvre. What would the Archbishop say of him and his two Assistants ? That they are idiots, childish, naive and disobedient, that they are making the Society commit suicide and that they are betraying the fight for the Faith. And they are going to hand over to the modernists in Rome the fruits of so much generosity and so many sacrifices made by the faithful.

“The modernists in Rome have never backed down on their demands that we accept the Second Vatican Council and the legitimacy of the New Mass. In 1975 the Rector and professors of Écône advised the Archbishop to accept the Council in order to save the Mass, and they ended up rebelling and quitting the Seminary in August of 1977. Today the three ringleaders in Menzingen go so far as to accept the legitimacy of the Lutheran Mass. As the three of them say, the Society’s reluctance to go along makes us very annoying to our “new friends in Rome”, while to wait for the conversion of Rome is unrealistic, as far as they are concerned. For sure and certain God alone can clean up this situation, totally different from the situation of the Church when it was reformed by St Pius V. Like the Captain of the Titanic, Bishop Fellay and his headquarters will bring the Society’s Operation Suicide to a successful conclusion. Blind leaders of the blind. But anyone who is not blind must resist this suicide, and keep the Faith.”

If only the Society had more priests as clear-sighted and courageous as Fr Altamira and Fr Faure !

Kyrie eleison.


When liberals destroy,
how much we need Priests clear in mind,
and brave in word and deed !

CHURCH INFALLIBILITY -- V

Liberalism is war on God, and it is the dissolution of truth. Within today’s Church crippled by liberalism, sedevacantism is an understandable reaction, but it still credits authority with too much power over truth. The modern world has lost natural truth, let alone supernatural truth, and here is the heart of the problem.

For our purposes we might divide all papal teaching into three parts. Firstly, if the Pope teaches as Pope, on Faith or morals, definitively and so as to bind all Catholics, then we have his Extraordinary Magisterium (EM for short), necessarily infallible. Secondly, if he does not engage all four conditions but teaches in line with what the Church has always and everywhere taught and imposed on Catholics to believe, then he is partaking in what is called the Church’s “Ordinary Universal Magisterium” (OUM for short), also infallible. Thirdly we have the rest of his teaching, which, if it is out of line with Tradition, is not only fallible but also false.

By now it should be clear that the EM is to the OUM as snow-cap is to mountain. The snow-cap does not make the summit of the mountain, it merely makes it more visible. EM is to OUM as servant to master. It exists to serve the OUM by making clear once and for all what does or does not belong to the OUM. But what makes the rest of the mountain visible, so to speak, is its being traceable back to Our Lord and his Apostles, in other words, Tradition. That is why every EM definition is at pains to show that what is being defined was always previously part of Tradition. It was mountain before it was covered in snow.

By now it should also be clear that Tradition tells the Popes what to teach, and not the other way round. This is the basis on which Archbishop Lefebvre founded the Traditional movement, yet it is this same basis which, with all due respect, liberals and sedevacantists fail to grasp. Just see in the Gospel of St John how often Our Lord himself, as man, declares that what he is teaching comes not from himself but from his Father, for instance: “My doctrine is not mine but his that sent me” (VII, 16), or, “I have not spoken from out of myself; but the Father who sent me, he gave me commandment, what I should say, and what I should speak” (XII, 49). Of course nobody on earth is more authorized than the Pope to tell Church and world what is in Tradition, but he cannot tell Church or world that there is in Tradition what is not in it. What is in it is objective, now 2,000 years old, it is above the Pope and it sets limits to what a Pope can teach, just as the Father’s commandment set limits to what Christ as man would teach.

Then how can liberals and sedevacantists alike claim, in effect, that the Pope is infallible even outside of both EM and OUM ? Because both overrate authority in relation to truth, and so they see Church authority no longer as the servant but as the master of truth. And why is that ? Because they are both children of the modern world where Protestantism defied the Truth and liberalism ever since the French Revolution has been dissolving objective truth. And if there is no longer any objective truth, then of course authority can say whatever it can get away with, which is what we observe all around us, and there is nothing left to stop a Paul VI or a Bishop Fellay from becoming more and more arbitrary and tyrannical in the process.

Mother of God, obtain for me to love, discern and defend that Truth and order coming from the Father, both supernatural and natural, to which your own Son was as man subject, “unto death, even to the death of the Cross”.

Kyrie eleison

The loss of objective truth in depth explains
The Church’s sedevac and liberal pains.

© 2011-2014 Richard N. Williamson. All Rights Reserved.

A non-exclusive license to print out, forward by email, and/or post this article to the Internet is granted to users who wish to do so provided that no changes are made to the content so reproduced or distributed, to include the retention of this notice with any and all reproductions of content as authorized hereby. Aside from this limited, non-exclusive license, no portion of this article may be reproduced in any other form or by any other electronic or mechanical means without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review, or except in cases where rights to content reproduced herein are retained by its original author(s) or other rights holder(s), and further reproduction is subject to permission otherwise granted thereby.

CHURCH INFALLIBILITY -- IV

To Cardinal Newman is attributed a wise comment on the 1870 definition of the Pope’s infallibility: “It left him as it found him.” Indeed that definition will have changed nothing in the Pope’s power to teach infallibly, because it belongs to the unchanging nature of God’s true Church that God will protect it from error, at least when its supreme teaching authority is engaged. All such engagement is now called the Church’s “Extraordinary Magisterium”, but only the name can have been new in 1870, just like the name of the “Ordinary Universal Magisterium”. If Vatican I declared the latter also to be infallible, it must also have been so from the beginning of the Church. To discern the realities behind the two names, let us go back to that beginning.

By the time Our Lord ascended to Heaven, he had with his divine infallibility entrusted to his Apostles a body of doctrine which they were to hand down intact to his Church to the end of the world (Mt. XXVIII, 19-20), doctrine which all souls were to believe on pain of damnation (Mk. XVI, 15-16). This Deposit of the Faith, or public Revelation, God was bound to make recognisable and accessible to souls of good will, because obviously the true God could never condemn eternally a soul for refusing to believe in an untruth. By the death of the last Apostle this Deposit was not only infallible but also complete.

Then from the Apostles onwards would God protect all churchmen from ever teaching error ? By no means. Our Lord warned us to beware of “false prophets” (Mt. VII, 15), and St Paul likewise warned against “ravening wolves” (Acts, XX, 29-30). But how could God permit such a danger to his sheep from erring pastors ? Because he wants for his Heaven neither robot pastors nor robot sheep, but pastors and sheep that will both have used the mind and free-will he gave them to teach or follow the Truth. And if a mass of pastors betray, he can always raise a St Athanasius or an Archbishop Lefebvre, for instance, to ensure that his infallible Truth remains always accessible to souls.

Nevertheless that Deposit will be unceasingly exposed to ravening wolves, adding error to it or subtracting truth from it. So how will God still protect it ? By guaranteeing that whenever a Pope engages all four conditions of his full teaching authority to define what does and does not belong to it, he will be divinely protected from error – what we call today the “Extraordinary Magisterium”. (Note how this Extraordinary Magisterium presupposes the infallible Ordinary Magisterium, and can add to it no truth or infallibility, but only a greater certainty for us human beings.) But if the Pope engages any less than all four conditions, then his teaching will be infallible if it corresponds to the Deposit handed down from Our Lord – today called the “Universal Ordinary Magisterium”, but fallible if it is not within that Deposit handed down, or Tradition. Outside of Tradition, his teaching may be true or false.

Thus there is no vicious circle (see EC 357 of last week) because Our Lord authorised Tradition and Tradition authorises the Magisterium. Indeed it is the function of the Pope to declare with authority what belongs to Tradition, and he will be divinely protected from error if he engages his full authority to do so, but he can make declarations outside of Tradition, in which case he will have no such protection. Now the novelties of Vatican II such as religious liberty and ecumenism are way outside of Church Tradition. So they come under neither the Pope’s Ordinary nor his Extraordinary Magisterium, and all the nonsense of all the Conciliar Popes does not oblige any Catholic to become either a liberal or a sedevacantist.

Kyrie eleison.

Tradition is of Popes the measuring-rod Because it came at first only from God.

CHURCH’S INFALLIBILITY -- III

The crazy words and deeds of Pope Francis are presently driving many believing Catholics towards sedevacantism, which is dangerous. The belief that the Conciliar Popes have not been and are not Popes may begin as an opinion, but all too often one observes that the opinion turns into a dogma and then into a mental steel trap. I think the minds of many sedevacantists shut down because the unprecedented crisis of Vatican II has caused their Catholic minds and hearts an agony which found in sedevacantism a simple solution, and they have no wish to re-open the agony by re-opening the question. So they positively crusade for others to share their simple solution, and in so doing many of them – not all -- end up displaying an arrogance and a bitterness which are no signs or fruits of a true Catholic.

Now these “Comments” have abstained from proclaiming with certainty that the Conciliar Popes have been true Popes, but at the same time they have argued that the usual sedevacantist arguments are neither conclusive nor binding upon Catholics, as some sedevacantists would have us believe. Let us return to one of their most important arguments, which is from Papal infallibility: Popes are infallible. But liberals are fallible, and Conciliar Popes are liberal. Therefore they are not Popes.

To this one may object that a Pope is certainly infallible only when he engages the four conditions of the Church’s Extraordinary Magisterium by teaching 1 as Pope, 2 on Faith or morals, 3 definitively, 4 so as to bind all Catholics. Whereupon sedevacantists and liberals alike reply that it is Church teaching that the Ordinary Universal Magisterium is also infallible, so – and here is the weak point in their argument – whenever the Pope teaches solemnly even outside of his Extraordinary Magisterium, he must also be infallible. Now their liberal Conciliar teaching is solemn. Therefore we must become either liberals or sedevacantists, depending of course on who is wielding the same argument.

But the hallmark of teaching which belongs to the Church’s Ordinary Universal Magisterium is not the solemnity with which the Pope teaches outside of the Extraordinary Magisterium, but whether what he is teaching corresponds, or not, to what Our Lord, his Apostles and virtually all their successors, the bishops of the Universal Church, have taught in all times and in all places, in other words whether it corresponds to Tradition. Now Conciliar teaching (e.g. religious liberty and ecumenism) is in rupture with Tradition. Therefore Catholics today are not in fact bound to become liberals or sedevacantists.

However, both liberals and sedevacantists cling to their misunderstanding of Papal infallibility for reasons that are not without interest, but that is another story. In any case they do not give up easily, so they come back with another objection which deserves to be answered. Both of them will say that to argue that Tradition is the hallmark of the Ordinary Magisterium is to set up a vicious circle. For if the Church’s teaching authority, or Magisterium, exists to tell what is Church doctrine, as it does, then how can the Traditional doctrine at the same time tell what is the Magisterium ? Either the teacher authorises what is taught, or what is taught authorises the teacher, but they cannot both at the same time authorise each other. So to argue that Tradition which is taught authorises the Ordinary Magisterium which is teaching, is wrong, and so the Pope is infallible not only in his Extraordinary teaching, and so we must become either liberals or sedevacantists, they conclude.

Why there is no vicious circle must wait until next week. It is as interesting as why both sedevacantists and liberals fall into the same error on infallibility.

Kyrie eleison.

If four conditions are not all in play. The Popes can err in what they teach or say.

© 2011-2014 Richard N. Williamson. All Rights Reserved.

A non-exclusive license to print out, forward by email, and/or post this article to the Internet is granted to users who wish to do so provided that no changes are made to the content so reproduced or distributed, to include the retention of this notice with any and all reproductions of content as authorized hereby. Aside from this limited, non-exclusive license, no portion of this article may be reproduced in any other form or by any other electronic or mechanical means without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review, or except in cases where rights to content reproduced herein are retained by its original author(s) or other rights holder(s), and further reproduction is subject to permission otherwise granted thereby.