The "Voodoo Mess" is celebrated every month in Sao Paulo, Brazil, with the full "episcopal approval" of the Archbishop of Sao. Paolo. This mess includes witch doctors of candomble (Brazilian voodoo) and animist (pagan) practices.
We will now add the "Voodoo" Mess to our list of Messes:
Woe to you Novus Ordinarians. Woe to you Indultarians. The handwriting is on the wall. Get out now before the Novus Ordo millstone sinks to the bottom of the sea!
Card. Kasper, widely regarded as an espoused heretic from the Roman Catholic Faith, a newer Hans Kung, if you will, on May 24, the same date the "indult" Mass by Card. Hoyos was going on at Santa Maria Maggiore Basilica, spoke to a group of 900 Anglicans. In it, he denied the doctrine of the Apostolic Succession, definining it in a new, heretical, Novus Ordo way as "not a matter of an individual historical chain, but of collegial membership in a collegium which, as a whole, goes back to the apostles." In other words, Protestant ministers can now be considered part of the Apostolic Succession.
Neat! This is the New Vatican to a hit. Cover both bases, the Modernist and the traditional. No way is the New Vatican or the pope (who personally selected Kaspar to be the head of the Pontifical Council for the Promotion of Christian Unity) committed to Roman Catholicism, except as a little veneer to conceal its Modernism from rosy-glassed indultarians.
It is typical of the New Order that it does not deny the faith outright, but, in the Modernistic fashion, just like Subjectivist philosophy, the Nazis, and the Communists, "nuances" with words traditional Catholic doctrine into something new. When the New Order connived to abandon Latin, this theological tampering became possible. It would not be possible in Latin, as the Latin theological vocabulary had been honed to a sharp precision over 2000 years. As Pope Pius XII warned, the abandonment of Latin would be the abandonment of the Roman Catholic Faith.
Kaspar in his speech overtly laid the groundwork for a "re-evaluation" (read: rejection) of Pope Leo XIII's Apostolic declaration that Anglican orders and services are invalid. This declaration is widely held to be an infallible document because of its contents.
One of the things we pride ourselves upon here at TRADITIO is giving the straight story, not a rehash of newspaper articles from the Vatican and elsewhere that are pure propaganda. We are able to cut through to the heart of the matter as no other site can, through our network of confidential correspondents from the Vatican, the Novus Ordo chancery offices, the SSPX, and other traditional organizations. Here are some updates on our previous Commentaries.
The Propaganda: The Traditional Latin Mass (at least the Modernized Mass of 1962) can once again be celebrated in St. Peter's.
The Real Story. The priest whom the press said was the first to say the 1962 Mass in St. Peter's in many years (actually, he was not; there were others in previous years), one Fr. Southwell, was almost denied the opportunity. It is reported that he was treated in a hostile fashion at St. Peter's, and his papers were thoroughly scrutinized in an effort to find some fault with them. As reported previously, he (as will all future priests who somehow pass through the New Vatican's "eye of the needle") was relegated to a private Mass in the Hungarian subterranean chapel, not in the main body of St. Peter's.
Another priest, in fact, did not pass scrutiny. Surprisingly, this was a Campos priest, one of the formerly traditional priests who sold out to the "indult." His papers were rejected, and the Ecclesia Dei Commission apparently didn't recognize that the Campos "indult" organization is "in communion with Rome"! It appears these days that even if you give up your commitment to the unadulterated Roman Catholic Faith, the New Vatican still won't recognize you!
Let this be a warning to any traditional priests out there who are tempted to sell out to the New Vatican. You won't get your phony "recognition" from the New Vatican anyway. Better to stay where you are, and with St. Paul hold fast to the traditional Roman Catholic Mass, Sacraments, and traditional Faith.
It seems that Card. Roger Mahony, of Los Angeles, whose teachings and practices are even more far out of the Catholic Faith than most of the other Novus Ordo bishops, has thought of a P.R. ploy: the dedication of a chapel on May 25 in that God-forsaken new L.A. cathedral, for which $150,000,000 was fleeced, to "victims of sexual abuse by Catholic presbyters." There is a registry book there, where people can inscribe alleged victims' names.
I have a better idea. Let the Card. dedicate there a chapel to victims of Novus Ordo abuse by presbyters and bishops! Let every Catholic who has been defrauded by the invalid Novus Ordo/Protestant service, victimized by clergy in the Novus Ordo Church of Hate, and embezzled by Modernist doctrine record their names in that registry. I wager there wouldn't be a registry book left to be found in the whole Los Angeles area!
Dear Fr. Moderator:
I believe that even if the New Vatican should issue a "universal indult," it will be entirely a red herring, and traditional Catholics will never have to worry about its implementation. There are three reasons I say this:
The New Vatican knows exactly what it is doing. It knows that it can easily grant a "universal indult" to as a vain attempt put the SSPX and other traditional Catholics on the dime as a propaganda move, but the New Vatican knows that it won't have to worry one iota about anything really happening.
Fr. Moderator Replies.
Isn't it interesting how the New Vatican has stirred up this buzz about a "universal indult" to sidetrack traditional Catholics? Again we are responding to the New Vatican's agenda rather than continuing on our own. No priest needs a phony "indult" to say the Roman Catholic Mass, the Mass of St. Peter, the Mass of Sacred Tradition, the Mass canonized in perpetuity by Pope St. Pius V, acting at the behest of the dogmatic Council of Trent. This Mass is not a "privilege" (that is what an "indult" is). It is a right; no, it is an obligation.
Any priest who is honest with himself should just say the Traditional Latin Mass exclusively and stop all this silly posturing. Whatever happens after that is not his responsibility. Saying the valid, canonized Mass of the Roman Rite is.
I have been bombarded with articles about the "indult" Mass celebrated by Card. Hoyos on May 24 at Santa Maria Maggiore Basilica in Rome. The news articles about this event are filled with errors in their reports: about the nature of the Mass, about "schisms" that have never been admitted by the New Vatican, and so on. You all know the usual litany of misinformation and disinformation from the New Vatican and the press. Remember, these religious columnists are the blind leading the blind.
Let's cut through all the propaganda that is being shoveled out and bring out some of the facts that are hidden in that propaganda. Once again, TRADITIO's predictions were right on the mark, as opposed to the press and the optimists.
According to a report we received from a priest who is frequently at the Vatican, the so-called "universal indult" is a long way away if it ever materializes. (Why does the New Vatican play all these games with "indults" when its own Commission of Nine Cardinals already confirmed that no indult is ever needed for a priest to say the Traditional Latin Mass, the Roman Catholic Mass, with no "episcopal approval"?) If the "universal indult" is ever granted, the French bishops have threatened the pope, as the German bishops did in 1986, that they will place the whole country of France in a state of apostasy from the Novus Ordo Church. The pope fears "chaos among the bishops" above all else and will not dare to oppose them. He didn't stand up to the German bishops in 1986.
While the New Vatican wants to add the Society of St. Pius X as a notch in its gunbelt, it will not agree to an unrestricted "universal indult," which is a non-negotiable SSPX demand. Of course, that is trivial now, forty years after the disastrous consequences of Vatican II in all areas of the Faith and the Church. The Traditional Roman Catholic Movement -- with the SSPX constituting about 20% of the total -- will continue and grow stronger and stronger, while the Novus Ordo continues to sink. And when do you hear the New Vatican ever admitting that the SSPX constitutes only 20% of the Traditional Roman Catholic Movement? Never! It wants to downplay the much larger opposition to the New Order. Even if part of the SSPX goes, four out of five traditional Catholics remain, together with at least 50% of the SSPXers.
The most amusing fact about this put-on was the fact that Boston's discredited Card. Law showed up, and much of the press coverage centered around him and the sex scandals that he was involved in. Was he sent by the curia to cast a blot on the whole ceremony? (This is the kind of thing the Vatican often does to show its real opinion: give with one hand, take away with the other).
What speaks loudest about all this being a tempest in a teapot, a ruse, a counterfeit is the fact that in 25 years of his papacy, this pope has NEVER celebrated a Traditional Latin Mass -- not in public, not in private, never. If the pope had showed up at Santa Maria Maggiore Basilica and celebrated the Traditional Latin Mass there, now that would have been of some significance. Maybe he's forgotten how to!
In sum, it appears that this staged event and all the rumors lately about the "indult" are just another trick to turn traditional Catholics away from their own commitment: to the Traditional Latin Mass and traditional Sacraments and traditional Faith, without compromise of any kind with the New Order apparatus, which wishes to control, then kill it.
Okay, you doubting Thomases out there. This one came directly from the Catholic Voice, official organ of the Diocese of Oakland, California (June 17, 2002, page S-18). Pictured is the Novus Ordo bishop of Oakland elevating what is clearly a cookie. Not only do we have the photograph, but we have the actual "recipe" that the diocese uses for communion "bread," as do many others across the United States. This recipe was published by the St. Joseph Foundation, a Novus Ordo organization that does canon-law work, in its organ, Christifideles:1
Sift 2 1/2 cups white flour
1 cup whole wheat flour
1 tsp. salt
8 tsp. sugar
1 1/2 tsp. baking powder
1/3 cup melted margarine
Mix into above: 1/3 cup honey -- add water to make 1 full cup.
Roll 1/8" thick and cut to size. Bake at 375 for 12 minutes or till bottoms are brown.
In our satirical way, we call this Novus Ordo bishop the Cookie Monster because not only does he pander the invalid Novus Ordo all over the diocese, but he is one of the most Modernist bishops in the United States, a noted proponent of the "Gay Mess," which he celebrates frequently and in person.
Isn't amazing how Card. Ratzinger was able to pull the wool over the eyes of the indultarians? He was their God and Savior for a while -- that is, until he was found out to be a Modernist. At Vatican II he engineered the Indifferentist Plank ("all religions are equal") into Vatican II. Recently he taught in a book from the Pontifical Biblical Institute that the Jews don't have to accept Christ; they should look for a Messias of their own.
Now it appears that Ratzinger is behind another one of these New Order apologies to the Church's enemies. You know the Modernist breast-beating. Instead of being recognized for the civilizing force it has been for 2000 years, the world's leading supporter of science, law, the arts, etc., without which all of Europe would be barbarians, the Novus Ordo apparatus is now apologizing to all those barbarian elements! First, it was the foul-mouthed libertine Luther, who called the Roman Catholic Church "whore-church of the devil," "arch-whore of the devil," and "stench-church of the devil." Now Ratzinger wants to apologize for the Holy Inquisition.
Most of what people think they know about the Inquisition has been proven by historians to be a lie. The Church does not have to apologize for the Papal Inquisition, the most just and benign tribunal of its time, in the opinion of historians. It protected the rights of defendants and established a level of Christian jurisprudence that the far more death-dealing Protestant countries of the time were far from attaining. More false information has been circulated against the Church on the topic of the Papal Inquisition than on any other topic. Many Catholics, including (it seems) the New Vatican, have simply accepted the common misconception and unhistorical myth for purposes of "political correctness."
When the Albigensian heresy arose, with its undermining of the moral basis of human society by subverting oaths, denying the right of the state to punish criminals, forbidding marriage and procreation, and encouraging suicide, especially by starvation, the Papal Inquisition, a system of ecclesiastical courts for trying and punishing heresy, was established in 1230, with jurisdiction over Catholics and fallen-away Catholics only. These courts were commissioned to seek first the reformation of the heretics by warnings or slight penances, which most accepted. Their scrupulous rules of procedures protected the accused with more safeguards than defendants in modern courts receive today.
Even the Spanish Inquisition (as distinguished from the Papal Inquisition) did not proceed against sincere followers of any religion, but only against those Spaniards, Jews, and Moors who, having once been members of the Catholic Faith, pretended to be Catholics, but had actually given up their faith and become involved in treacheries against Spain. Circa 1492, the top Jews in Spain had wormed their way into high positions of Church and State by pretending to be Christians. These false Marrano Jews, as they were called, were working with the Muslims across the strait of Gibraltar to overthrow Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand, and turn a Christian country into a Moslem country. Queen Isabella reacted in time and instituted the Spanish Inquisition, which was constituted to inquire who were the false Marrano Jews were who were working in Church and in State to betray both. The Spanish Inquisition was not a mad rampage where millions were killed indiscriminately, but a careful rooting out of traitors who were about to betray and perhaps destroy Spain first, and then Christian Europe.
In a recent documentary produced by the British Broadcasting Corporation (certainly not a pro-Catholic organization!) called The Myth of the Spanish Inquisition, historians presented their conclusions from the first-time-ever study of the actual cases taken from the archives of the Inquisition itself, from which they are discovering that the common notion of the Spanish Inquisition as some horrible, fanatical, all-encompassing blood-thirsty monster could not be further from the truth. The documentary stresses that the Spanish Inquisition was governed by very strict manuals of procedure, which spelled out what could and could not be done. By contrast to the other (Protestant) tribunals of Europe, they emerge as almost enlightened. Anyone breaking the rules was sacked. The inquisitors were interrogators, but restrained interrogators, skeptical of the usefulness of hardship and torture. The torture chamber was never used in Spain. It was practiced in the Protestant Northern European countries at the time. For example, the register of Bernard Gui (1261-1331), the Inquisitor of Toulouse for six years, who examined more than 600 heretics, shows only one instance where a (mild) torture was used. In the vast majority of cases, those who were found guilty were enjoined to say some prayers, or perhaps recite the Seven Penitential Psalms.
Historian John Tedeschi described the Papal Inquisition as "not a drumhead court, a chamber of horrors, or a judicial labyrinth from which escape was impossible. Capricious and arbitrary decisions, misuse of authority, and wanton abuse of human rights were not tolerated." The Inquisitors were theological experts who followed the rules and instructiones meticulously and were dismissed and punished when they showed too little regard for justice. When, for example, in 1223 Robert of Bourger gleefully announced his aim to burn heretics, not to convert them, he was immediately suspended and imprisoned for life by Pope Gregory IX. (Maycock, The Inquisition, pp. 128-129)
If these are the facts of the Inquisition, how has the myth that many today associate with the Papal Inquisition attained such currency? In fact, the myth is known to have been manufactured. It is known by whom. In the 16th century, a body of writings, termed the "Black Legend," which vilified both Spain and her Catholic faith, emanated from the Protestant countries of Northern Europe, which were in a pitched political battle with Catholic Spain, then the great continental power. Her Protestant enemies were jealous of Spain, and many resorted to the lie of the Black Legend to help bring down Spanish power and control. This Black Legend is known to have been fabricated principally by one Montanus (Renaldo Gonzales Montano), who in 1567 published his Sanctae Inquisitionis Hispanicae Artes Aliqout Detectae ac Palam Traductae [A Discovery and Playne Declaration of Sundry and Subtill Practices of the Holy Inquisition of Spayne], which was soon translated from Latin into all the major languages of Western Europe (English, French, German, and Dutch) and widely circulated. In this work, which one would call "racist" today, Spaniards were described by the Protestant Northern European sources as dark, cruel, greedy, treacherous, ignorant, and narrow. The Papal Inquisition was fiercely attacked with gross exaggeration.
Myth can be destroyed only by fact, and the fact is that between 3000 and 5000 people were killed in the 350 years of the Inquisition, whereas during that same period in Protestant countries 150,000 witches alone were burned for heresy. As Prof. Stephen Haliczer of Northern University of Illinois verifies, the Inquisition never used the method of torture that were common in Protestant countries -- disemboweling and gouging out of the eyes, for example. The Inquisition compared to other tribunals in the Protestant countries has virtually a clean record in respect to torture.
For example, Spain and Spanish America executed during the 350 years of the Inquisition only 40-50 were executed, in comparison to the Protestant English Inquisition, which during just the reigns of Mary and Elizabeth (1553-1603) executed 400 people, and in the anti-Catholic persecutions generally, 72,000 souls. In England, thousands of defendants were being executed for crimes as insignificant as damaging shrubs in public gardens, poaching deer, and stealing a woman's handkerchief. Yet these facts are generally hidden through a very successful campaign by Elizabeth, which historians call the "Mask of Elizabethan Propaganda." Thus, it was a combination of political rivalry, contempt for the Catholic faith, and anti-Spanish nationalism that has created a distorted myth of the Inquisition.
Recently, a study of 61 volumes of the procesos (official trial records) of the Mexican branch (1593-1817) of the Papal Inquisition was conducted by two University of California scholars. Profs. Thomas Brady and Arthur Quinn (California Monthly, April 1997, pp. 18-19) confirmed that, in contrast to the secular criminal procedures of the time, the Papal Inquisition allowed counsel to the defendant, required a formal charge, and gave judges wide discretion in mitigating sentences (most of which were religious in nature, like the recitation of the Seven Penitential Psalms or wearing a cross).
In sum, the scholars concluded that the trials were "remarkably fair and weighted heavily on the side of the accused." They further concluded: "Long-held myths represent and nourish deeply felt needs, but they must be abandoned because they falsify history."
Are you listening to true history, Card. Ratzinger, or have you substituted something spurious, just as you substitute a spurious, Protestantized Novus Ordo service for the true Roman Catholic Mass?
With full episcopal and pastoral approval, priestess Mary Ann Kirk performed a "Picnic Mess" on the "altar" of San Fernando Cathedral on April 29, 2003. San Fernando Cathedral is in San Antonio, Texas, and is one featured on the Mother Angelica's EWTN Charismatic cable channel. The bishop's Director of Liturgy, Presbyter Jake Empereur, organized the service. Officially representing Novus Ordo Bishop Flores at his cathedral was Presbyter Empereur, together with Presbyter David Garcia, pastor of the cathedral.
The "indult" societies and organizations like Una Voce and Coalition in Support of Ecclesia Dei put a great deal of importance on what they call "episcopal approval" for the Traditional Latin Mass, the Mass that already has perpetual Apostolic and Papal approval. Why the indultarians care in the least about what the approval of these crazy Novus Ordo bishops is beyond me, when they willingly and easily approve of "wild messes," let alone the unCatholic and invalid Novus Ordo mess itself, no matter how "conservative." Perhaps these indultarians are now coming to the day when they will realize that the Catholic and Apostolic Mass is not the property of bishops, cardinals, and popes, but of Our Lord Jesus Christ and His Apostles. Sacred Tradition is not to be tampered with by anybody, including the pope. That is Catholic dogma.
How anyone can defend the Novus Ordo and claim that it is "valid" is beyond me. It is developing into just the messes sauvages [wild masses] that Hannibal Bugnini and his Protestant advisors wanted. Some of these services may be more wild than others, but they are all wild when compared to the true, valid, immemorial Mass of the Roman Rite, the Mass of St. Peter, what we now commonly call the Traditional Latin Mass. All Novus Ordo services involve defect of form and/or matter and/or intention.
This is not Fr. Moderator talking. This is the New Vatican itself: in 1979, in 1980, and now again in 2003. Unfortunately, the New Vatican is itself so infused now with the New Order that it doesn't have the capacity to throw the Counterfeit Mass over. The New Vatican is like a junkie. It whines, it cajoles, it pleads. But the drug of the New Order has so taken over its body that it can only shoot itself up with more and more wildness. And, like a junkie, it will eventually have to quit the New Order cold turkey, and at that point its body will be shaken to its very innards in order to throw off the death-dealing habit of decades.
It is amazing how many people have been bamboozled by the press reports of the last weeks, thinking that they indicate some kind of a "traditionalization" of the New Vatican or that the New Vatican is "reconciling" with the Roman Catholic Mass, Sacraments, and Faith. Nothing could be further from the truth!
One of these reports hailed that priests would again be permitted to say the Traditional Latin Mass at side altars in St. Peter's. Now we learn that this report is a half truth at best. The original reports didn't include all the restrictions that were being imposed (just as the Ecclesia Dei indult itself places all kinds of restrictions on the Traditional Latin Mass):
Moreover, a report from an "indult" priest who is at the Vatican regularly confirms that one Fr. Southwell, who recently received all the publicity for allegedly saying the first Traditional Latin Mass in St. Peter's for several decades in fact was not the first. Several other priests previously did, and at the side altars in the main church, not in the catacombs underneath, as Fr. Southwell did. More false P.R. and press errors.
So, the pope has bamboozled the "indultarians" again! He has once again gone back on his words for a "wide and generous application" of even the spurious "indult." All that is permitted is a private, modernized (1962) Mass, said in the catacombs, out of public sight or photography, and only if the priest gets a permission slip from a do-nothing Vatican Commission.
I'm so grateful to JPII, I could cry!
Dear Fr. Moderator:
I am horrified that the pope would give away a Roman church to the Bulgarian schismatics. Can he be really be considered "Roman"? But it is worse -- much worse. The church being given over is the Church of SS. Vincenzo e Anastasio. To the left of the altar is a bronze plaque listing 22 popes who bequeathed their hearts to the church. The tradition was started by Sixtus V, and the later popes who lived in the Quirinal while it was still a Papal palace followed the tradition; the last to do this was Pope Leo XIII. The hearts are kept in marble urns.
On 24 May 2002, Pope John Paul II granted the church to the Bulgarian Orthodox Church for their "liturgical use." This sacrilege was done purportedly to express his gratitude at the warm welcome he received from that Church during his visit to Bulgaria in May 2002. The church is therefore now primarily a schismatic Eastern Orthodox church, under the jurisdiction of Patriarch Maxim of Sofia.
For this crime of the sacrilege of handing over the holy relics of his predecessors to schismatics, this pope opens himself to the penalty imposed upon Pope Formosus for his crimes in the 9th century: he was exhumed by his successor, judged a heretic, his body burned, and his ashes scattered on the Tiber.
Dear Fr. Moderator:
I recently spoke to someone who attended a relative's supposed First Holy Communion in Long Island, New York. She tells me that she was horrified at the Mess that took place: there was a full rock band on the side of the sanctuary, and the presbyter was walking around the "altar" and the "sanctuary" bouncing a basketball while speaking into a wireless microphone.
Even she as a "conservative" Novus Ordinarian has now decided that she will never attend a Novus Ordo service again. I have offered her traditional Catholic alternatives. Were these little children recipients of the Sacrament of Holy Eucharist?
Fr. Moderator Replies.
Anyone who could consider such an event (I cannot even call it a "service," let alone a Mass) sacramental would have to have lost his Roman Catholic Faith. To receive Sacramental Grace, there must be a Sacrament. Obviously, this woodstock fails the most basic criteria. If Pope Leo XIII declared invalid the Anglican service, which was very reverent-looking and had obvious similarities to the Roman Catholic Mass, the Basketball Mess couldn't even qualify!
We will now add the "Basketball" Mess to our list of Messes:
Dear Fr. Moderator:
I wrote an E-mail to Tom Marr, a conservative radio show host on WOR-New York, AM 710, about the desecration of St. Michael's. Mr. Marr wrote back and said that he would get in touch with the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights and report the story on his show tonight. This afternoon I received the following E-mail from Mr. Marr: "I just heard from the Catholic League and have been told that your group has been excommunicated by the pope. Is that right? It was still a terrible incident. They also realize how bad it was, but, understandably, they will not issue a statement."
I am stunned not only by the Catholic League's outright lie about our church, but their refusal to speak out about this atrocity. Little did I realize that my contributions supporting the Catholic League were for the benefit of Novus Ordo Catholics only.
Fr. Moderator Replies.
Now you know. And so do we all. The Novus Ordo is exposed again as the hypocritical counterfeit that it is: not the "Church of Love," as it professes, but the "Church of Hate." The "Catholic" League, which objects to bigotry against its own brand of Novus Ordo Catholicism, is apparently ready to be just as bigoted against traditional Roman Catholicism.
Can you imagine what would happen if the "Catholic" League, in response to the burning of a synagogue, said, "We don't care; that congregation is a bunch of Christ-killers"? They wouldn't dare! The B'nai Brith would squash them like a bug. Yet they apparently have no problem spreading misinformation about a devout group of traditional Roman Catholics. They may as well say: "Smash that altar! Rip out that tabernacle." Even the pope doesn't agree with the Catholic League, as the documents collected in FAQ04 in the TRADITIO Library of Files show.
Well, what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. If the "Catholic" League in its abysmal ignorance wants to circulate misinformation about traditional Catholics, traditional Catholics who have supported the Catholic League in the past should now withdraw that support now. Next time you get one of their ad pieces or a request for membership, write on it, I don't support anti-Catholic bigots; remember Farmingville! And send it back.
When will we traditional Catholics learn that nothing about the New Order -- its bishops, its presbyters, its organizations, its Vatican -- can be trusted without proof, especially after the sex scandals, the wreckovation scandals, and, most of all, the New Order scandal of the last forty years? Each individual must earn our trust by their Catholic words and deeds. Sometimes we traditional Catholics are just are just too gullible, just too much the nice guys.
Today is the feastday of Pope Gregory VII (Hildebrand). Here was a traditional Catholic pope. Mercilessly, he stood for the Faith against the most powerful monarchs. Mercilessly, he cleaned up the clergy scandals of his time (many clergy were fornicating and having bastard children; eventually; even some of the popes were guilty of these crimes). Mercilessly, he righted perversion of the Sacraments. Would that we had a pope now with such a commitment to the unadulterated Roman Catholic Faith!
"The faithful want fidelity at Mass, not novelty," according to the Vatican's top liturgy official, Francis Cardinal Arinze, Novus Ordo Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Sacraments, speaking in Washington, D.C., on May 21, at a shivaree to celebrate the very document (Vatican II's liturgy constitution) that destroyed Catholic fidelity and introduced a novel, phony "Mess."
Duh! These wolves in scarlet clothing just don't get it, do they? They mouthe these platitudes and then do everything they can to undermine the Roman Catholic Sacred Liturgy, the Mass of St. Peter, the canonized Mass, the Mass in perpetuity. Ratzinger does it to sell his books. Hoyos does it to make himself pope.
Undoubtedly, the audience included many Novus Ordo bishops, who destroyed the Mass in their dioceses, and many Novus Ordo presbyters, who destroyed the Mass in their parishes. Undoubtedly, they applauded the clueless cardinal and then went off for more destructions: the Cookie Mess, the Elvis Mess, the Clown Mess.... You know the litany. It has been exposed and documented on TRADITIO and elsewhere with photographs. More Novus Ordo hypocrisy. Who can for an instant place any trust in it?
Dear Fr. Moderator:
So, the pope gives away churches to schismatics. Well, in France, our bishops have long acted so, and with Mohammedans at that. Several years ago, for instance, a church in Asnieres (a Paris suburb) was given away to Mohammedan mullahs by the local Novus Ordo bishop. The Mohammedans accepted it, but could not stand the mere sight of Catholic statues outside the church wall, so they veiled them. Mind you, though there were full reports of this desecration in Le Figaro with comments and colour photographs, but not a single public protest was uttered against it. When the shepherd turns into a wolf, the sheep become blind, deaf, and mute. That is what the New Order has done to Catholic minds.
Dear Fr. Moderator:
If (God forbid) SSPX Chief Bishop Fellay were to enter into some phony agreement with the counterfeit Novus Ordo Church, I would immediately leave the SSPX, and I know that many of us would do the same with lots of our SSPX priests, most probably behind Bishop Williamson. I will pray so that such a disaster does not happen, and my personal hunch is that it won't (God permitting), but if it does, I know exactly what to do.
I'll tell you why I sternly refuse to go back to the Modernists. I am fifty-nine, and though originally a Catholic, I spent thirty years of my life in a total eclipse of the Faith. When I regained the Faith five years ago or so, I went back to the "Church," only to find it occupied by the New Order. The "new mess" rapidly disgusted me beyond any description. So what was left? The most visible refuge was the local SSPX. I am grateful to them for welcoming me, but I mean to be faithful to God's teachings first. Whatever happens, thank you ever so much for your uncompromising watchfulness. The Church will not die because she cannot die.
It pays to be schismatic these days. According to a May 21 release from Associated Press, the pope has decided to give away a Roman Catholic church near Trevi fountain to the Bulgarian schismatics. One wonders whether he has the authority to do this, as it is, in effect, alienation of Church property. Having lost, in its subornation of the sex scandal, any moral authority it might have had left, is the New Vatican now entering the criminal arena?
Fooled you, didn't I? This photograph is of a Masonic Lodge in California. It is absolutely undistinguishable from a Novus Ordo site. It has the usual giant "presider's" chair, in which the presbyter (the Novus Ordo does not admit to having priests, only presbyters, or "elders") sits and does nothing while laypeople run all over the "sanctuary." It has the little wooden table that now serves for an altar. It has candlesticks, not on the altar but beside it.
Can anyone really believe that the Novus Ordo is Catholic, let alone valid? Give it a few more years, and all the Novus Ordo churches will be Masonic lodges. The story is told that when John Paul I came to the Vatican as pope, having been away from Rome for some time and informed how infiltrated the New Vatican was with Masons, determined to rout them out and to restore the Traditional Latin, Mass, Sacraments, and Faith. Is this story true? Although there is some evidence for it, we will probably never know for sure. What we do know is that this pope was dead in thirty days under somewhat questionable circumstances.
What we do know is that Hannibal Bugnini, the chief architect of the "New Mass" was a Mason and received a congratulatory note from the Grand Mason of Rome (who addressed him familiarly as "Buan") for bringing in the New Order Mess. Finally, even Pope Paul VI couldn't tolerate his Masonism and Modernism and his messes sauvage [wild masses] any longer and exiled him to Iran.
Masonism is innocuous? The penalty of excommunication for any Catholic presuming to join the Masons is obsolete? I think not!
TRADITIO has received messages from some readers questioning its analysis of the SSPX's Chief Bishop, the Swiss Bernard Fellay. These people are relying, of course on the propaganda they read in SSPX publications, which is like a White House reporter relying on releases handed out by the President's Press Secretary! What makes TRADITIO's analysis unique is that its information does not come from the public face people but on (read: propaganda), but from correspondents within the organizations, people who know intimately the persons involved, as well as TRADITIO's detailed knowledge of the Traditional Catholic Movement for over forty years.
TRADITIO does not present some hashed-over CWN or RNS story. It provides unique, knowledgeable analysis of the situation from long experience with the people and the organizations involved in the Traditional Roman Catholic Movement. Moreover, TRADITIO's perspective is, and has always been, independent, that is, it is not affiliated or beholden to any particular organization. TRADITIO can, therefore, present direct and honest analysis.
The inside information that TRADITIO has received from several of these sources indicates that the SSPX bishops are currently being subjected to intense pressure by the New Vatican and the New Order. The New Vatican wants to end the increasing embarrassment that they are suffering because of the growing power, numbers, and outspokenness of the Traditional Roman Catholic Movement.
The New Vatican wants to do a dirty deal to wipe the embarrassment off the books. It cares nothing about the Traditional Latin Mass, Sacraments, or Faith. It simply uses these as "political" tools to get power over (read: control) the Traditional Roman Catholic Movement. If parts of the SSPX go over to the New Order (not all parts will; there will unquestionably be a schism within the organization, with a new traditional organization coming out, as the Society of St. Pius V did in 1983), they will rue the day, just like the "indult" organizations suppressed by Protocol 1411 of 1999 and the Campos priests, who are now being sucked into the Novus Ordo.
To the degree that this pope is still compos mentis and is not just a puppet for factions in the New Vatican, he wants to end the personal embarrassment that his "New Advent" is not working. Instead, the Church is falling apart at the seams. The Traditional Roman Catholic Movement is really the only part of the Church left that will call a spade a spade to the pope's face.
Far from being John Paul II the Great, this pope has arguably been the greatest disaster that the Church has known, having deprived greater numbers of the Roman Catholic faithful of the true Mass, Sacraments, and Faith than any other pope in history. Now, if you were JPII, wouldn't you want to bury that reality under a Great Facade of phony "reconciliation," the same way he tried with the Lutherans?
As TRADITIO has written in the past, this is not the time for wearing rose-colored glasses and putting the best face on everything. This is the time for bald-faced reality. We cannot fight the enemy of the New Order if we don't acknowledge the facts, the history, and the personalities as they truly are, not as we would wish them to be.
Archbishop Lefebvre was an experienced member of the hierarchy. He was the head of one of the Church's largest missionary organizations. He knew all the players at the New Vatican; he knew how they operated. Yet even he was almost bamboozled. Why should a Fellay be expected to be less subject to the blandishments of the New Order than the Archbishop?
This isn't common sense, nor is it borne out by personal information about Fellay, who, in addition to his nature to compromise, has also shown himself hostile to the other 81% of the Traditional Roman Catholic Movement that is outside the SSPX. TRADITIO's information indicates that the most staunchly traditional bishop is Williamson and that the weakest link in the chain is Bernard Fellay. Unfortunately, it is Fellay who is in the catbird seat at the moment.
Those of you SSPXers that have so much confidence in Fellay should hedge your bets. You may be relying on a chimera, not the reality. Write Fellay and tell him that you expect him to hang tough and not sell out to the Novus Ordo some part of the 19% of the Traditional Roman Catholic Movement that the SSPX constitutes.
Card. Ratzinger has encapsulated the folly of the New Order Church and the current pope when he admitted in public: "Out of obedience sometimes I do absurd things."
The statement was made at a convocation on May 8-10 at the Lateran University, traditionally known as the pope's university, with an all-star cast of cardinals, ecumenical dignitaries, and journalists offering assessments of John Paul II's legacy.
Is this the true Catholic Faith, which is the most reason-based Faith in the history of the world, having as its philosophical genius the likes of Aristotle, St. Augustine, and St. Thomas Aquinas? What an epitaph:
At the hour of death, the Holy Masses you have heard devoutly will be your greatest consolation. God forgives you all the venial sins that you are determined to avoid. He forgives you all your unknown sins which you never confessed. The power of Satan over you is diminished. Every Mass will go with you to judgment and will plead for pardon for you.
By every Mass you can diminish the temporal punishment due to your sins, more or less, according to your fervor. By devoutly assisting at Holy Mass you render the greatest homage possible to the Sacred Humanity of Our Lord. Through the Holy Sacrifice, Our Lord Jesus Christ supplies for many of your negligences and omissions.
By piously hearing Holy Mass, you afford the souls in Purgatory the greatest possible relief. One Holy Mass heard during your life will be of more benefit to you than many heard for you after your death. Through Holy Mass you are preserved from many dangers and misfortunes that would otherwise have befallen you. You shorten your time in Purgatory by every Mass.
During the Holy Mass you kneel amid a multitude of Holy Angels, who are present at the adorable Sacrifice with reverential awe. Through Holy Mass you are blessed in your temporal goods and affairs. When you hear Holy Mass devoutly, offering it to Almighty God in honor of any particular Saint or Angel, thanking God for the favors bestowed on him, you afford that Saint or Angel a new degree of honor, joy and happiness, and draw his special love and protection on yourself. Every time you assist at Holy Mass, besides other intentions, you should offer it in honor of the Saint of the day.
TRADITIO has spent a number of Commentaries on the SSPX, so, it is only fair to take note that April 27 marks the twentieth anniversary of the day when nine priests of the United States differed with the approach of the SSPX and founded the Society of St. Pius V (SSPV, new web site: www.sspv.net).
In hindsight, the SSPV predictions turned out to be quite accurate. To balance the Commentaries, we publish here excerpts from a reflection of one of the priests who left the SSPX at that time. There is certainly food for thought here as the Traditional Roman Catholic Movement approaches the temptation of "reconciliation" or "re-incommunication," or whatever silly notion the New Vatican has come up with to gut the Traditional Roman Catholic Movement by some bureaucratic "solution" that solves nothing, but leaves intact the Novus Ordo elephant, which the reconciliationists ignore in the middle of the room.
WERE WE RIGHT TO TAKE THIS STAND?
To answer this question, let us look at the progress of the issues.
First, the underlying issue: the ambivalence of Archbishop Lefebvre toward the Novus Ordo. What fruit has it produced? In the first place, it has produced the fruit of utter confusion and inconsistency in the minds of the SSPX faithful and priests. They are a house divided. Some are hardliners; some are soft. Some are closet sedevacantists. Some cannot wait for the day of "reconciliation" with the Vatican, whereas others vow that they will leave the day such a reconciliation goes through. Yet they are all worshipping in the same pews. The SSPX hierarchy cannot make up its mind about the prudence of reconciling. Over the years the flip-flop has continued to the point of making one dizzy. Now the reconciliation is on; now it is off. Now it is good; now it is bad. It will happen; it will not happen. Today it will not happen; tomorrow it will happen. Today John Paul is the antichrist; tomorrow he is the Vicar of Christ; the next day he is not Catholic; the following day he is the Holy Father. Swing to the left; swing to the right.
In the second place, the SSPX faithful are constantly staring at the specter of a reconciliation with the Modernists which will destroy over thirty years of resistance to Modernism. Their churches, schools convents, and seminaries can be yanked from under them in a moment's notice, whenever the confused management of the SSPX thinks that it is the right time. One never knows when Bishop Fellay [the SSPX head bishop] is going to give away the store to the Novus Ordo.
So I say that the nine priests were definitely right in taking their stand, so as to place the traditional movement on a solid and consistent theological basis, and to preserve the churches and other institutions from being despoiled by the Novus Ordo hierarchy.
Let us turn to the question of the John XXIII liturgy. Time showed that the acceptance of these reforms was a condition of reconciliation with the Modernists. This reason alone was sufficient to take a stand against them. But beyond this reason, we were right in preserving the sacred liturgy from the seeds of its own corruption implanted by Bugnini. It is impossible to object to the Novus Ordo, when you have accepted the seeds of the Novus Ordo embedded in the John XXIII liturgy. And so we see that the confused SSPX management is ready to accept the Novus Ordo as a legitimate rite, and to work side by side with it in a diocesan setting. Archbishop Lefebvre even accepted to have a Novus Ordo Mass said in Saint Nicolas du Chardonnet in Paris as one of the concessions to the Modernists in the now famous Protocol of May 5th, 1988. The retention of the pre-1955 liturgy is a firm no to any Modernist liturgical innovation. It refuses any legitimacy to the Bugnini droppings found in the traditional Mass and Holy Week from 1955 and thereafter.
Painful as the separation was, therefore, it was nonetheless a prudent and wise decision that is confirmed by the events of the past twenty years. The nine priests, and other priests in this country and elsewhere in the world who made similar decisions, have placed the traditional movement on a firm theological and liturgical basis.
The SSPX priests and faithful often boast about the size, the international character, and the organizational unity of their group, in contrast to the small numbers and lack of organization among the [others, who number the Traditional Roman Catholic Movement]. The SSPX faithful are like the Titanic passengers, who were enamoured by the beauty and strength of their ship, but oblivious to the fact that their captain had set aside, again and again, reports of deadly pack ice.
They take their grandeur, numbers, and monetary success as a sign of God's blessing. But is it? Is it considered good health to have a great athletic body, but inside to have a growing tumor which will bring death to it in six months? Do we say that someone is blessed by God if he is rich, but his mind is so confused that he cannot make a single coherent statement? Which is more valuable, the fifty carat rhinestone, or the one carat diamond?
The grand house which the SSPX has built is a house of straw which is ready to be blown down by the fuggy breath of the wolf in red, Castrillon-Hoyos. When it collapses and the only house left standing is the house of brick built by the nine priests and others like them, who took their stand against the spirit of compromise, then who will be the heroes?
Some of the legitimate comments above apply more to the current leadership of the SSPX than to Abp. Lefebvre himself, who showed remarkable prescience and courage in the face of overwhelming coercion by the New Vatican. The current leadership of the SSPX certainly doesn't achieve the same high standard that the Archbishop had. Moreover, the Archbishop didn't go along with all of the Joannine modernization of 1960-1962.
He refused to eliminate the Confiteor before the optional Communion of the people, saying that the omission implied that the Communion of the people was an integral part of the Mass (it isn't). He apparently did not go along with the 1956 wreckovation of the Holy Week liturgy, which many priests in Europe at the time simply ignored. It may well have been that, had he lived, he would eventually have backed away completely from the post-1955 "modernization."
Well, well. You've heard all those rumors from the ignorant secular press about the New Vatican liberalizing the "indult," going against the Novus Ordo bishops. TRADITIO was skeptical of all this from the beginning, and now a new report is just in.
The May 24 "traditional" shivaree at Santa Maria Maggiore Basilica starring Card. Hoyos has been scaled down. The New Vatican is now downplaying any notion of a "reconciliation," saying that the soiree is only "to honor Pope John Paul and join in his plans for the Year of the Rosary." The announcement cited in passing the current 1988 "indult," which the New Vatican issued in a panic when Abp. Marcel Lefebvre publicly resisted the New Vatican's Modernism and made the Traditional Latin Mass, Sacraments, and Faith more widely available.
Thank you for all your publicity on the desecration of St. Michael the Archangel Traditional Catholic Church in Farmingville, New York. The photographs vividly depict the sacrilege against our beautiful Church.
I have not heard one word about this outrage from the Long Island political representatives, N.Y. State Senators (Clinton and Schumer), or any additional reports from our regional newspapers. I wrote a letter to Newsday expressing my views on their coverage of the story, but (of course) the letter was not printed. What bigotry! I'll keep you posted for TRADITIO.
Fr. Moderator Replies.
There is no word that any "oecumenical" counterparts have spoken out against this sacrilege -- not the Novus Ordo bishop, the local Protestant minister, the local rabbi, the local imam. Oecumania is again exposed as a counterfeit. Moreover, the Novus Ordo is again exposed as the Church of Hate, not, as it deceitfully calls itself, the "Church of Love." They love only those with whom they agree. When it comes to a devoted traditional Roman Catholic priest and congregation, only a cold silence is the result.
When one looks at the photographs that TRADITIO has published, it is hard to conclude that this incident was the result of a little random vandalism. To pry a tabernacle out of its brick and cement housing and to split a marble altar needs planning, tools, and force, and probably more than one individual. Do TRADITIO readers have any doubt that if this incident had involved a synagogue or a mosque, the secular and political representatives would fall all over themselves about how this was an unacceptable "hate crime"? But because it involves a traditional Catholic church, the oecumaniacs say nothing. To them, we say:
Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites; because you are like to whited sepulchres, which outwardly appear to men beautiful but within are full of dead men's bones and of all filthiness (Matthew 23:27/DRV).
I have been outraged too by the desecration of this traditional Catholic church in New York. Now, it will not surprise you to learn that in France, such things have come to pass as normal. Our traditional churches and chapels, and our Catholic graveyards are frequently and heavily vandalized and/or desecrated too.
To be quite frank, any Christian feature, whether traditional or not, runs the risk of being treated so. And as you may suspect, there are no protests whatsoever, and frequently not even press reports about it. But if a little red or green paint is thrown on the external wall of a mosque, if just one stone is toppled down in a Jewish graveyard, what an instant galactic outcry! We Catholics are in the process of becoming second-class citizens in this God-forlorn Masonic world, and we should prepare for worst, because Satan is definitely on the loose!
Thank you for reminding us that Fr. DePauw publicly upheld the Church's traditional Mass, Sacraments, and Faith from as early as 1964. I am not at all familiar with this priest. Could you tell us more about him?
Fr. Moderator Replies.
It is a travesty that "traditional" Catholic publications never talk about the pioneers of the Traditional Roman Catholic Movement. Wouldn't it be a farce if a publication on the history of science talked only about Einstein, but never mentioned Newton, without whom Einstein's work would not have been possible? Remember, it was Newton himself who said: "If I have done great things, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants."
These publications focus on "semi-traditional" authors of very recent vintage, who, for the most part, are simply rehashing what the pioneers of the movement already pointed out nearly forty years ago. The Great Facade would be an example of a recent book in this vintage.
I challenge one of these "traditional" publications to do a feature article on the beginnings of the Movement in the 1960s. Fr. DePauw was a professor of canon law and vice rector at the United States' premier seminary. In 1964, at the very first tampering with the Traditional Latin Mass after Vatican II, he showed unusual courage.
He left his post, moved to New York, and started celebrating the Traditional Latin Mass very publicly in the Pan American Building. He also founded his Catholic Traditionalist Movement and published a periodical Sounds of Truth and Tradition. For many years, this was the only traditional periodical available, from which many of us at the time drew strength. He also broadcast the Traditional Latin Mass over radio stations across the United States and issued tape recordings of Masses and sermons.
His position was uncompromising. Remember, this was 1964, before most people had the slightest inkling of the poison that would issue from Vatican II. Honestly, I can think of no other person who exhibited as much courage as did Fr. DePauw. He didn't play footsie with anybody, but stood firm for the traditional Roman Catholic Faith. We owe so much to him, and yet most people don't even know his name. All they read about are the "semi-traditionalists," who do want to play footsie with the New Vatican: the Davieses, the Fellays, the "indultarians," etc.
One also thinks of Patrick Omlor, who in 1967, wrote a most devastating condemnation of the pre-Novus Ordo entitled Questioning the Validity of the New, All-English Canon. His arguments are just as devastating today as they were in 1967 -- more so. He wrote several other articles and pamphlets demonstrating the invalidity of the Novus Ordo based on solid Thomistic sacramental theology. Yet how many have even heard of Omlor?
Then there was Fr. James Wathen, whose Great Sacrilege in 1971 demonstrated that the "New Mass" had no legal force, even within the terms of the documents of Vatican II and of Paul VI himself. He proved convincingly that the imposition of an invalid "New Mass" was based not on any Catholic legality, but upon sheer force used by the Modernists in the New Vatican (Bugnini and company).
Dear Fr. Moderator:
I was struck by your statement in a recent Commentary that the SSPX represents only 19% of the Traditional Roman Catholic Movement. Although new to the movement myself, I support all traditional Catholics because of their zeal for the Catholic faith, even those who don't agree with the SSPX.
You personally seem to be a centrality, a pole, an axis of the movement. Why not use your influence to unite the other traditional Catholics in this battle for the Church? Perhaps you are already doing this in a certain way.
Fr. Moderator Replies.
This is a frequent suggestion, but the time is not right, nor would I be so prideful as to think that I would be the one to do such a thing alone. It has been tried before and has done more harm than good. In the past, I've used the image of trying to "herd cats." There are very productive informal channels that traditional priests have established between one another. These are fraternal associations without the burden of an imposed autocracy. It seems that the problem of our age is often the organizations themselves, not the people within them.
Although there are legitimate differences among traditional Catholics on certain practical issues, the Traditional Roman Catholic Movement is united on the important things: the Mass, the Sacraments, and the Faith. The Novus Ordo agrees with itself on nothing, not even the Mass, Sacraments, and Faith.
Trying to impose some artificial "organization" could well do more harm than good. Una Voce thought it could do that, and it blew up in Michael Davies face with Protocol 1411 of 1999. Just look at all the evil the New Vatican "organization" has done. No, better to let these things work themselves out in God's good time. We have the true Roman Catholic Mass, the Sacraments, and the Faith. We can hold with this until Providence sees fit to restore His Church as He sees fit.
In the meantime, TRADITIO will continue, as it has for over eight years now, longer than any other site, to present "an independent, balanced voice of traditional Catholicism; avoiding heresy on the left and schism on the right."
One of the SSPX bishops, who has been by far the most consistently firm in the unadulterated traditional Roman Catholic Faith, has issued a letter on the Feast of Pope St. Pius V, with his comments. I hit here a few of the highlights:
This SSPX bishop is speaking good sense. The moral is that no traditional Catholic can "sell out" to the Novus Ordo, just to achieve some phony feel-good "reconciliation" or "re-incommunication," or whatever silly term the New Vatican has made up for a sell-out. All these rumors and gossip are just another Trojan horse to weaken the resistance of traditional Catholics. Those who would give into it will immediately regret it, just as many of the formerly traditional priests of Campos now do. We haven't fought for the true Faith for forty years just to give into some sneaky Greeks, now in the garb of New Vatican officials!
Let's learn from Rome, shall we? And here are the words of Rome's greatest spokesman, the epic poet who defined for all time what Rome really must be. His famous warning is known to everyone [Aeneid II:49]: QUIDQUID ID EST, TIMEO DANAOS, ET DONA FERENTIS [Whatever it is, I fear Greeks, even when bearing gifts]. In the 1960s a well-known conservative theologian, Dr. Dietrich von Hildebrand, praised by Pope Pius XII as the greatest theologian of the 20th century, issued a challenge to the New Order in his book entitled Trojan Horse in the City of God. Let us traditional Catholics not be like the hapless Trojans, who learned the moral of that story the hard way: they saw not only their religion, but their city and their lives destroyed.
We traditional Catholics must hold firm, whether recent gossip and rumors turn out to have any validity or not. What is clear is that there can be no "deal" that the New Vatican, which is inextricably entwined with the New Order religion and its perverse ends. The New Vatican must be considered like the Protestants. True oecumenism, as Pope Leo XIII and Pope Pius XI among others, defined it, is a return to the Roman Catholic Faith, whole and complete, pure and unadulterated.
And for the New Vatican to embrace the Roman Catholic religion, it must reject the heresy of Modernism, Novus Ordoism, and Conciliarism. If the Anglicans had heeded the pleas of Pope Leo XIII to return to the Roman Catholic Faith, he wouldn't have allowed them to keep their invalid service and sacraments, as an "alternative choice," would he? Just so, the Novus Ordo cannot be tolerated. Period. "God is not mocked" [Galatians 6:7/DRV].
Dear Fr. Moderator:
I am a soldier presently serving with an infantry unit based in southern Iraq. I have a traditional World War II Military Missal, which I use daily. There is a section within the missal containing the Mass in Time of War. The Novus Ordo goes not even address the spiritual needs of a combat soldier. To me, as a traditional Catholic and light infantryman, there is nothing more moving than infantry soldiers, in formation in full combat gear, kneeling before Our Lord. As Field Marshall Foch stated, "The greatest weapon is a soul that is on fire."
The Traditional Latin Mass has met the spiritual needs and provided the focus of the Roman Catholic soldier for 2,000 years, from the Battle of Hastings in 1066 to the Battle of Normandy in 1944. The prayer of the Roman centurion, as contained in the Traditional Latin Mass, bears testimony to the nobility and sacrifice of the profession of us soldiers. The Novus Ordo has no room for the traditional soldier.
Therefore, let us ask for "no quarter, nor give quarter" in our fight against the New Order World Religion and society, especially the traditional enemies of the Church. There is a military maxim that applies to the Novus Ordo service: "A hasty withdrawal is better than a bad stand." The New Modernist Rite of the Novus Ordo Church is definitely a bad stand in face of a deadly enemy, the devil. There are no standards in the New Rite, and it will not stand a chance against a determined enemy, such as the Muslims, since there is no call for personal sacrifice.
By the way, the photo of the "Camouflage Mass" featured on TRADITIO originated from a Baptist Chaplain located at Kuwaiti Naval Base, and the "vestment" was most likely on loan from him. There was only one priest that I know of who said the Traditional Latin Mass here. He was an older British Army Chaplain, and he moved north with the British infantry. In the Novus Ordo here, non-Catholics and Freemasons have given communion. The U.S. Army is composed of 30% to 40% Freemasons.
Keep up the good work, and continue the fight for the one and only True Faith. As General Foch once explained -- by the way, he attended the Traditional Latin Mass daily --, "My center is hard pressed, my right flank no longer exists, my left flank is being turned..., now is the time to attack, to attack, to attack!"
To man, the struggle; to Our Lord Jesus Christ, the glory. May Our Lady of Victory carry us forward!
Fr. Moderator Replies.
It is a privilege to receive your message and your words of encouragement from the front. Yes, the traditional Roman Missal has a Missa in Tempore Belli, in which it is prayed that the forces of right and true faith will overcome. For war is not always wrong or evil; sometimes it is right and just. Certainly, Our Lord Jesus Christ, as represented in the Holy Gospels, was far from the "pacifist," as the Novus Ordo tries to paint Him. Although, of course, it is not politically correct to say so, three significant times in history the Mohammedans have tried to conquer Catholic Europe by force and to impose their cult upon Catholics:
There is indeed a very significant history of soldiers in the Catholic Faith. Many of the early Saints of the Church were Roman soldiers, and no contradiction to the Faith was seen in this role. Perhaps the greatest of these was St. Martin, originally a Roman soldier and eventually Bishop of Tours. In that role he stood for the traditional Roman Catholic Faith against the Arian heretics. It is said that St. Martin was so opposed to the Arians who had sold out the true Catholic Faith that he refused any communication with other bishops who had gone over to the heresy, which number may have included the pope at the time.
Dear Fr. Moderator:
All the indications are that the Archdiocese of Brisbane has its sights set on the "wreckovation" of all traditional Churches still remaining in the archdiocese (and outside it too if they get half a chance). There are "liberal progressive liturgists" still at large in various dioceses trying to force this. Maybe their almost frenetic activity of late arises because they harbour the fear that their activities may be seriously curtailed by John Paul II's encyclical on the Eucharist released on Maundy Thursday last.
Fr. Moderator Replies.
Don't count on it. That Ecclesia de Eucharistia encyclical is just warmed-over Vatican II-ism. There is no specific definition of any problem with the Novus Ordo or of any penalties associated with it. This pope said the same thing about "excesses" in 1979 and 1980, and in the intervening years the problem has just gotten much worse for the Novus Ordo, as documented here on TRADITIO.
You have to understand that the New Vatican is totally in the clutches of the Novus Ordo. The New Vatican is not part of the solution; it is part of the problem. If you want to save your beautiful churches from the wrecker's ball, you'll have to save it through your own action.
You know what really works? Make it more difficult and more embarrassing for the bishop to wreck your churches than to leave them alone. Organize an outspoken group to dun ceaselessly the newspapers, radio, and TV. Call the bishop the "barbarian" that he is. Get a petition drive going for Catholics to pledge never to attend services there or contribute one dime to the diocese. That'll get a response: believe me!
I recall well an episode described in the new biography of Bp. Fulton Sheen. When he became Archbishop of Rochester, New York, after Vatican II and was tainted by that mentality, his first act was to shut down a church and school. The people of the parish were livid. When the archbishop's car was spotted, the parishioners surrounded the car and pounded on the roof, shouting: "You son of a b----. Give us back our church." Sheen opened the church the next day.
We traditional Catholics can't be pusillanimous when our Faith is being wrested from us. Our predecessors in the Faith stood up to false bishops, and even popes, to demand their right to an unadulterated Roman Catholic Faith, Mass, and Sacraments. How can we do any less?
The Romans knew how to deal with barbarians. They sent in the troops and let the fur fly. They didn't try to negotiate with people who were out to destroy them. We timid traditional Catholics still have much to learn from the Romans!
TRADITIO received quite an outpouring of sadness and outrage about the desecration of St. Michael the Archangel Traditional Catholic Church in Farmingville, New York, previously reported here by Margaret, our Farmingville correspondent (May 16). We have still heard not a peep out of the local Novus Ordo bishop, the Protestant minister, the Jewish rabbi, or the Muslim imam decrying this atrocity. It seems that the New Vatican's false oecumenism stops at the door of a traditional Catholic Church.
We are pleased to share two more photographs forwarded to us of the scene that Sunday. With the altar vandalized, the altar stone containing the relics of the Saints broken, the altar crucifix twisted, and the tabernacle stolen from its cement- and brick-reinforced niche, the dedicated congregation and its priest followed the example of our Catholic predecessors, who worshipped in the catacombs in times of persecution. In this case, the Traditional Latin Mass went on -- celebrated in the field outside the desecrated church.
Surely this incident shows us the presence of the Satanic among us. This wasn't just a quick vandalism spree. It would take tools and planning to wrench a tabernacle out of brick and cement, to pry an altar stone about 30 centimetres square from its secured location in the altar.
Is a pattern beginning to emerge here? We've had a possible murder of a traditional pope (John Paul I). We've had a murder of a traditional priest and the attempted murder of another. Is it happenstance that the target of this desecration was a church dedicated to the honor of the Prince of the Heavenly Host, the greatest of the Holy Angels, St. Michael, the one whom God has personally appointed to thrust down into Hell at the end of time? Traditional Catholics never stopped praying after Mass to this greatest of God's greatest creatures. The Novus Ordo long ago abandoned him and so fell into the clutches of Satan, as even Pope Paul VI had to admit, after becoming disillusioned with Vatican II and its "New Mass."
Are we traditional Catholics, who are standing fast in the Faith, even against a feckless pope and unCatholic bishops, becoming too much of an obstacle to the Prince of Darkness? Perhaps this is the truest imprimatur upon the Traditional Catholic Movement -- the enmity of Satan. For surely he cares not a jot or tittle about the Novus Order Counterfeit Church, except, as Pope Paul VI said, to have infused his evil smoke into it.
I draw your attention to the Confraternity of St. Michael here. He has been the heavenly patron of TRADITIO from its inception over eight years ago and has never failed us. There could not be a more appropriate Saint to whom to turn at this critical juncture in the history of the Church, for in doing so, we are following the explicit public (not private) revelation of Almighty God Himself, as recorded in Sacred Scripture.
Dear Fr. Moderator:
The gossip about the New Vatican maybe encouraging wider use of the "Latin Mass" reminds me that a couple of years ago a Msgr. Cox, of the Pontifical Committee Ecclesia Dei, gave a talk which was reported in a conservative (not traditional) periodical. He mentioned that it was wrong to have suppressed the Traditional Latin Mass and that it should have been allowed to coexist alongside the Novus Ordo.
But this is the revealing thing: he also talked negatively about traditional Catholics and implied that this "renegade" group has stolen the Traditional Latin Mass, which rightfully belongs to the Novus Ordo Church! He mentioned the need for the Novus Ordo Church to get control of ("steal") this issue.
This talk, which is not unusual in Novus Ordo circles, exposes the truth coming from the New Vatican Trojan horse's own mouth, that the Counterfeit Church, having failed to suppress the Traditional Latin Mass, is now trying to get control of it to castrate it. The report is nothing but a political ploy that has been in the planning stages for some time now, in hopes of squelching traditional Catholicism by holding the proverbial carrot in front of us. This approach must be resisted totally.
Fr. Moderator Replies.
I think that you've hit the nail on the head. As columnist Patricius Anthony remarked last night, if the New Vatican thinks this is the right thing to do, why wait until December?! Try insincerity. Try hypocrisy.
If any of the gossip becomes true, and if the present pope isn't dead by the end of the year, at best what will happen is yet another call for a "generous application" of the original spurious "indult" of 1984. The pope will not command any bishop to do anything. The pope answers to the bishops in the post-Vatican II world. They command him, and they want the Novus Ordo -- exclusively!
Co-existence? Wasn't that the mantra from the 1960s that the Liberalists wanted between the United States and the Soviet Union? American Republicanism and Communism were supposed to co-exist peacefully, even though they were diametrically opposed. Detente, peristroika, glasnost, whatever it was called at any given point, never worked. Finally, it took a President who called the Soviet Union exactly what it was, an "evil empire," to which he would not kowtow, and the Berlin wall came tumbling down.
True Catholics can have no detente, no peristroika, no glasnost with the Evil Empire of the Novus Ordo. The New Vatican can do nothing except to reject the New Order wholesale as Modernism condemned by the popes and councils. It can do nothing except to reject the Protestant Novus Ordo service, with its phony "cookies." It can do nothing except reject the New Theology that makes Christ a Half-Messias: good enough for the Gentiles, but not good enough for the Jews; the New Theology that makes every religion in practice just as good as the true Faith, worshipping "the same God."
In Rome, Cato never failed to remind the senate that Carthage was an evil empire, bound to destroy Rome, if Rome didn't stand by its traditional values. He ended all of his speeches, on whatever topic, with the unforgettable words: Ceterum censeo: Carthago delenda est. Furthermore I vote: Carthage must be destroyed. And eventually Rome did rise up and destroy Carthage, but only after much travail.
The New Order in the Counterfeit Church is the modern Carthage. Carthage still practiced human sacrifice. The New Order practices "soul sacrifice." It kills the souls of its people. It feeds them not on the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity, of Our Lord Jesus Christ, but phony cookies that deprive the soul of its nourishment.
Eventually, Rome was moved by its traditional values, conquered Carthage, and sowed its fields with salt, so that it might never rise again. Just so, true Catholics must be modern Catos, re-conquer Rome, and drive out the New Order insanity completely, so that it will never again pour out upon the faithful its "smoke of Satan," as Pope Paul VI called it. It is up to us to finish the work that Pope St. Pius X started in driving Modernism from the Church. He showed us the way; we need but follow.
Dear Fr. Moderator:
I wish to make a confession. I have always been skeptical of your coverage of Novus Ordo abuses. Yet now, in my school, the parish presbyter is going to celebrate a "Classroom Mass." "Fr. Chris" is going to take some wonder bread (literally, Wonder Bread from the grocery store!) and grape juice and "consecrate" them in our classroom. This is to complement our course on Vatican II. Serves me right for being a doubting Thomas. I never thought it would actually happen to me!
Fr. Moderator Replies.
I don't have enough imagination to come up with the Novus Ordo monstrosities that are reported here. Several people questioned the "cookies" at the Novus Ordo, even when they saw the pictures. "Where did you get that?," they demanded. Their objections ceased when I directed them to -- the official web site of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops!
Truly, there are evil forces afoot that are dimming the intellects of vast numbers of former "Catholics." These people won't even believe the evidence of their own senses. For the most part, the Novus Ordo makes no bones about what it is: a replacement for the Catholic Faith as it has been known for two millennia. John XXIII started that with his aggiornamento, or modernization, and his successors took up the goosestep.
This pope isn't a "traditionalist." He makes it clear that he is a "hip" guy, perfectly comfortable attending rock concerts, putting on Woodstocks around the world for youth, and praising the New Advent of Vatican II and the Novus Ordo service, even when, under his watch, the Church has been substantially destroyed. If he were the CEO of a company, the Board of Directors would have fired him long ago. Just look at the numbers.
The evidence is obvious to anyone who has eyes to see: churches desecrated, no vocations, no Catholic hospitals, Catholic schools teaching immorality worse than the public schools (Brian here is talking about a "Catholic" school, remember), "Mess" attendance falling in forty years from 80% to less than 17%. This is progress? This is the New Advent? One would have to be demented to believe that.
As has been reported here on TRADITIO before, we seem to be entering a time of rumors about the New Vatican playing around with the "Latin Mass." Certain articles have appeared about various "developments," mostly based on very thin information. Even if any of the rumors turn out to have a scintilla of truth, as the expression goes, "the devil is in the details."
The most important point, however, is that all of this is being stage-managed by the New Vatican, the Newchurch, the New Order, the Great Facade, the Counterfeit Church. There is no talk of Sacred Tradition, Quo Primum, Pope St. Pius V, the dogmatic Council of Trent, or anything else that would show that the "New Mass" is unCatholic and invalid and that the Mass of St. Peter, the Traditional Latin Mass, is the only Mass permitted for the precedential rite of the Church, the Roman rite.
No, the New Vatican speaks in terms of "indults" or of Vatican II. How can the true Roman Catholic Mass and Faith "coexist" alongside the Novus Ordo counterfeit Mass and Faith? The pope might as well bring in the Lutheran service and give it an "indult" too! That would make just as much sense.
Just conceive of the following scenario. Fr. Indult processes in to start the new "Latin Mass" at Blessed John XXIII parish. He skips the prayers at the foot of the altar because they were made optional in 1965. He uses the Novus Ordo triple "readings" instead of the traditional Epistle and Gospel. He gives an impassioned sermon about how Vatican II brought a New Advent to the Church. When communion time comes along, he distributes the extra hosts "consecrated" at the previous day's Novus Ordo service. The "Latin Mass" ends with the blessing. Since the Last Gospel and the Leonine Prayers were "done away with" in 1965, he skips these.
Fr. Indult beats a hasty retreat because the guitarists are already arriving for the "Fiesta Mass" to follow. The players are already hooting it up with one another at the back of the Church in the Rite of Greeting. Before the strains of the traditional organ recessional have ended from the "Latin Mass," the guitarists are already strumming their instruments. Women in pedalpushers are already swarming around the altar doing their Novus Ordo preparations. The song-leader starts tapping frantically at the microphone. "Testing, testing. Kumbaya! Kumbaya!"Those who are trying to make their thanksgiving after the "Latin Mass" give up. They meet up briefly in the vestibule. "This is a Traditional Latin Mass? Next week I'm going to the independent Mass on the other side of town, or the SSPV Mass in the next city. The pope and the bishop can have this mess! We've been had again!"
Moreover, when reading these newspaper rumors, one has to keep things like the following in mind:
If traditional Catholics are bamboozled by such Novus Ordo ploys, much too little and much too late, they deserve what they will get -- which in the end will amount to nothing, just another version of warmed-over Vatican II and the Counterfeit Church. As one French publication put it: "Would all this simply be a show, in order to throw sand into our eyes: 'Look how much we like Tradition'?"
According to the Boston Globe of May 11, "nearly one in five [Novus Ordo] Catholics say they have considered joining a non-Catholic church over the past year, and 39 percent say they would support an American Catholic church that is independent of the Vatican. Majorities say they want the church to embrace more 'modern' attitudes on social issues."
In other words, Novus Ordo "Catholics" aren't Catholic at all. They readily embrace schism and heresy. This is the nature of the New Order. This is why traditional Catholics can have nothing to do with its counterfeit "Mass" and "Sacraments." There is nothing schismatic about traditional Catholicism. It is the Catholicism of 2000 years. What is schismatic is the Novus Ordo!
Dear Fr. Moderator:
I can't help but think of the Carmelites in adoration would be devoted to just a piece of bread and that the pope's recent very traditional encyclical on the Eucharist would be on a "cookie."
Fr. Moderator Replies.
No? Well it was this very pope whose Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith wrote to the U.S. Catholic Bishops on May 11, 1979, telling them that many of their services were invalid because they were using cookies, and that the services would have to be redone or stipends returned. As usual, the bishops ignored the pope and went on with their invalid "messes."
As to the April 17 encyclical Ecclesia de Eucharistia, this document has been analyzed here previously and has been shown to be far from "very traditional," as you state. There is a little "disappointment" expressed that some Novus Ordo services have gone too far, but the pope does not state specifically what can and cannot be done, nor does he indicate any penalty for wrong-doing. It is as if the mayor of a city expressed disappointment over the number of murders, but did not enforce the law against murder or fund the police and the courts to administer it. In any case, it all pertains to the putatively invalid, Protestantized New Order service, not the true Mass of the Roman Catholic Church.
"Very traditional?" Out of close to one hundred citations in footnotes, only one refers to the Dogmatic Council of Trent. Every other doctrinal footnote refers to Vatican II. No surprise here. This pope has always been a strong promoter of the New Order and its Protestantized worship service and the New Advent (whatever that is!).
But, as this pope's predecessors have often said, deception and confusion are characteristic of our times. Pope Paul VI in a truly shocking statement on June 29, 1972, admitted that Vatican II and its aftermath (including the "New Mass") were satanic. I take the pope at his word.
The Catholic Faith is one of objective reality. It doesn't matter what you may personally think or feel. Reality exists outside of you. God exists whether you believe in Him or not. In Catholic theology, you can't say: "I don't believe in God, so he doesn't exist for me." A cookie is a cookie is a cookie. Nothing can confect such matter into the Body and Blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ, no matter how strong a person's belief might be. Only wheaten bread and the fermented juice of grapes is valid matter.
As far as the Carmelites are concerned, they know better. If they have turned their back on the Catholic and Apostolic Deposit of Faith and Sacred Tradition in which they were instructed, they have to bear the responsibility for the consequences. God regarded the Jewish people of the Old Testament as his Chosen People, yet they chose to turn their back on Him and worship the Golden Calf.
The New Order service is our modern Golden Calf. The Carmelites (outside the ones the left the New Order and founded a traditional order with the Traditional Mass, Sacraments, and Faith) have failed the test of true Catholicism. Sad, but no amount of wishing otherwise can change the objective reality.
Dear Fr. Moderator:
Our beloved chapel was desecrated last Sunday. When we got to St. Michael the Archangel in Farmingville, New York, we expected to hear Mass. Instead, we were witness to a most gruesome scene. The tabernacle was ripped from the altar and thrown outside on the lawn. The 120-year-old altar was smashed down the middle. Our priest was praying over the desecrated items. We were not allowed inside the chapel as a crime scene, but we heard that the altar was smashed and the hosts were strewn on the floor. The local TV news was covering the story, and the police were dusting for fingerprints. Nevertheless, we heard Mass outside, kneeling in the dirt.
The story was relegated to the obituary page of the local paper. Hate crimes against other religious organizations get front page headlines -- but not the Catholics.
Fr. Moderator Replies.
I wonder whether the Novus Ordo bishop will speak out as he would if a temple or mosque were desecrated? Will the local rabbi raise his voice? Will the local imam raise his voice? Or is it only anti-Semitism and anti-Mohammedanism that is objectionable? As Philip Jenkins put it, anti-Catholicism is the last acceptable prejudice.
Dear Fr. Moderator:
A Novus Ordo presbyter here in Arizona has started the next wave of the Novus Ordo liturgical revolution. This presbyter had no Novus Ordo cookies left to give out, so he just went to the unconsecrated bag to get some more and gave them out without consecrating them. When the people asked him about it later, he told them it was okay because it was done "by contact." Can you believe this?
Fr. Moderator Replies.
Yes, I can. I can believe any crazy thing about the Novus Ordo. It is happening all over the country, all over the world. Even if the "mess" seems tolerable in some particular place, there is no Catholic and Apostolic consecration, so the Novus Ordo cookies remain cookies. There is no place a Novus Ordinarian can "hide."
The funny thing about evil: it usually starts out innocently, a little peccadillo, then quickly grows into something that is rotten to the core. For example, the Novus Ordinarians first tried against Sacred Tradition to justify the vernacularization, or rather vulgarization, of the Holy Mass. "English isn't so bad," they said. Now their ignorance has brought them a cacophony of languages, invalidating and deliberate mistranslations, and finally a New Religion: the New Order sect, which is no better than a Protestant sect -- and often worse!
Many of them now regret not having stood up with Fr. DePauw at the very first departure from the Roman Catholic Mass. Many of them now are embarrassed to admit that through their "sin of omission," they allowed their Catholic Faith to be taken away from them, and a phony religion, a phony "mess," and phony "sacraments" to be substituted. Even with all of this, there remain those who just can't break their sacrilegious and idolatrous habit of attending the New Order service.
Aren't these the kind of people whom St. Paul describes:
Because that, when they knew God, they have not glorified him as God or given thanks: but became vain in their thoughts. And their foolish heart was darkened. For, professing themselves to be wise, they became fools.... Who changed the truth of God into a lie and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. (Romans 1:21,22,25)
Probably such people, short of a grace from God, will never see their foolishness. Argument is powerless against such inveterate ignorance or cowardice to fight for their Catholic Faith. But Tom's is the best example TRADITIO has seen yet of how the Novus Ordo has gone over the edge. Not only is it not Catholic, it has become a joke! TRADITIO has been getting a number of questions lately about what to say to "enlighten" Novus Ordinarians, particularly family members. On this basis of this report, and many others, perhaps the best approach is: "The Novus Ordo? You can't be serious. It isn't!"
Novus Ordinarians might just as well go to their local grocery store on Sunday morning and buy some Wonder Bread. It would just as valid, and they wouldn't have to put up with all the other Novus Ordo nonsense, like the cheap music and presbyteral prattle!
And, by the way, TRADITIO did not invent the argument of the idolatry and sacramental dissimulation of the Novus Ordo. The Novus Ordinarian clergy know it well, for it appeared several years ago in an article by Fr. Vladimir Kozina in the well-known mainline Novus Ordo clergy periodical, Homiletic and Pastoral Review (November 1996, pp. 31-49).
Dear Fr. Moderator:
I just got a donation request to support the Pope John Paul II Cultural Center in Washington, D.C. This is the first time I ever heard of such a place. I send the donation request back with the comment that they act as if "JPII" was a god. He isn't. The Cultural Center appears to be a temple erected to glorify "JPII," when the emphasis should be on the glory of God.
Fr. Moderator Replies.
One of our columnists, Patricius Anthony, wrote a critique of that operation a few months ago. He identified it as you did: the usual Novus Ordo papolatry (worship of the pope), a monument to a pope who has arguably had more than anyone else to do with the destruction of Roman Catholicism in the 20th century. He could have stopped it, but didn't.
Dear Fr. Moderator:
Could you explain again the difference between Martin Luther, Henry VIII, etc., and the Saints you mention from time to time who have "resisted" the pope, such as St. Paul himself, as well as others?
Fr. Moderator Replies.
There is no comparison at all between the two cases. Luther explicitly rejected the Catholic and Apostolic Deposit of Faith. He rejected the Seven Sacraments. He rejected the Holy Mass. He rejected the holy priesthood. He rejected Sacred Tradition, believing in the Bible only. The Apostolic dogmata on these points are well known to every Catholic. There is no controversy on them. Yet he rejected them.
The Saints mentioned, and many others, who resisted the pope when he fell into error, were rejecting no part of the Catholic Faith, but on the contrary were clearly affirming the Deposit of Faith that every Catholic knows. This is not rocket science, but can be found in any child's catechism. To the Novus Ordo sect members, the Catholic says:
We are what you once were.
We believe what you once believed.
We worship as you once worshipped.
If you were right then, we are right now.
If we are wrong now, you were wrong then.
Consider this. If, despite its blatant departure from the traditions of the Church, the New Order service and the New Theology which that service supports can be justified and approved of, then all the Saints were superstitious simpletons, all the theologians were liars, and all of our Catholic forefathers were duped idiots, including some of the greatest minds in human history: St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Robert Bellarmine, St. Thomas More, St. Catherine of Siena, St. Augustine, St. Ambrose, St. Benedict, St. Louis de Montfort.
These Saints and all previous Catholics were traditional Catholics. They all believed exactly the same thing as traditional Catholics today do. It is not a mere matter of opinion, but a matter of irrefutable fact that the traditional Faith, the traditional Mass, and the traditional Sacraments are Roman Catholic, not the novel teachings of Vatican II, not false oecumenism, and certainly not the New Order/Protestant service, "sacraments," and New Advent theology.
For almost two millennia the Church's precedential Roman Liturgy, the Traditional Latin Mass, as we call it, was substantially unchanged. Then, since Vatican II, the Novus Ordo saw non-ending change. Many Novus Ordinarians assuage themselves with the thought that these changes are ending. Wrong!
Now a Novus Ordo Bishop, Ronald Gilmore, of Dodge City, appointed by the present pope in 1998, has approvingly stated:
When will it stop, this change after change after change in our [Novus Ordo] liturgy? Will it never end? In a word, No. When the Spirit came, a new time began. It was the time of the dispensation of the Mystery, of its communication. It was the time of what the Fathers called the Sacramental Economy. So long as time lasts, this dispensing, this communicating, this deepening, this changing will go on.
With this typical Vatican II-Speak, one never knows what the terms mean. What "Spirit" is he talking about? The "spirit" of Satan? The spirit of heresy? Surely no Catholic bishop could talk about the immemorial Sacred Liturgy in this way. He must be talking about the ever-changing Novus Ordo service, the service which Protestants have no trouble using, the service in which the invalid "cookie" is worshipped as the Old Testament Jews did the Golden Calf.
Traditional Catholics should get down on their knees to thank God Almighty that they have the true Mass and the true Sacraments, and traditional priests to provide them. The poor Novus Ordinarians have nothing but a cookie and a future of never-ending change: ever newer messes, ever newer sacraments, and ever newer doctrines. They are surely to be pitied, because, like the Anglican Liturgy the pope declared invalid, the Novus Ordo just doesn't have it. It never did.
Dear Fr. Moderator:
Since the pope and papacy is so integral to Catholic Faith, how can one justify "resisting the Pope" without calling into question his authority according to the old maxim: "Where Peter is, there is the Church"?
Fr. Moderator Replies.
It is interesting that your quotation about "resisting" an erroneous pope comes to us from St. Robert Bellarmine, Bishop, Confessor, and Doctor of the Church, whose feastday happens to be today. St. Cajetan addresses your question directly when he points out that the famous axiom Ubi Petrus, ibi Ecclesia [Where the Pope is, there is also the Church] holds true only when the Pope acts and behaves as the pope, because Peter "is subject to the duties of the office"; otherwise, "neither is the Church in him, nor is he in the Church.".
St. Cajetan's statement could not more cogently describe the proper Catholic approach to times of bad popes, such as we are in since Vatican II. In their times, when dealing with bad popes, St. Paul upbraided his pope to the face, even though that pope was St. Peter. St. Augustine took a public oath against his pope when that pope diverged from Catholic teaching. St. Gertrude the Great called her pope "worse than a murderer" because his actions were killing souls. St. Catherine publicly called her pope a "coward" for having deserted Rome.
In matters of the highest import -- and there can hardly be matters of higher import than the Holy Mass, Sacraments, and Faith --, if the pope should diverge from the clear teaching and practice of the Catholic and Apostolic Faith, the Father, Doctors, and Saints give us ample authority and example to "resist" -- publicly.
Dear Fr. Moderator:
I believe that the caution you are advocating is entirely necessary because of the lack of any authority in the Novus Ordo apparatus, which has resulted in every kind of abuse, not only of the authorized apparitions, but also the myriads of false and transient apparitions around today. Under these conditions the safest path to travel is the defined path, of which you are reminding the faithful, and not to allow the confusion that misapplied beliefs in apparitions could cause.
Of course, you are not objecting to a proper and balanced private devotion to Our Lady of Fatima, if that is a devotion attractive to a particular Catholic. The real danger is that people are substituting an exaggerated cult of Fatima for their Catholic Faith. Many are doing the exact same thing as regards the Society of St. Pius X, despite this Society's own warnings against it.
Fr. Moderator Replies.
You have hit the nail on the head exactly. I have become more and more convinced that something is really out of whack here, when Our Lady of Fatima is exaggerated out of all balance into some kind of strange caricature. The error of fanaticism (objectively, a sin against the virtue of religion) is especially exposed when such people resist instruction on basic Catholic doctrine of which they are apparently ignorant.
There is no doubt on this point: Fatima is not the center of the Roman Catholic Faith, the Blessed Virgin Mary is not the center of the Roman Catholic Faith. The center of the Roman Catholic Faith is Our Lord Jesus Christ, and Him crucified. Everything else is subordinate to that dogma. If our age were a balanced one in the Catholic Faith, I would not have to repeat this basic dogma, but because our age is so confused and out of balance, it becomes necessary to restore the balance. Any real Catholic would respond, "I knew that." It is only those who have become fanatical and cultish who take a statement of simple Catholic dogma as some kind of fighting-words.
TRADITIO has always encouraged proper devotion to the Blessed Virgin. How many other places talk about the Angelus, one of Our Lady's most traditional devotions, which is generally ignored today? TRADITIO does.
How many other places talk about the Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary, so closely associated with the devotion of the Brown Scapular, which is generally ignored today? TRADITIO does.
How many places talk about Vespers sung in the rich chant of Pope St. Gregory the Great, with its great Canticle, Our Lady's Magnificat, which is generally ignored today? TRADITIO does.
How many other places talk about the beautiful Litany of Loretto, the only approved public litany venerating Our Lady, which is generally ignored today? TRADITIO does.
These devotions are clearly Catholic, having existed for many centuries, even a millennium, approved and indulgenced by too many popes to name. A fixation on private revelation to an excess that goes so far as to relegate Our Lord Jesus Christ to a secondary role is not "Marian." Mary would be the first to be horrified at it and to reject it. It is a caricature of our Faith, in which everything must be in proper balance with the Most Blessed Trinity the focal point to which everything else is subordinate.
It appears in this discussion that TRADITIO's purpose is being well served. Through our satire, we want to educate, to stir up Catholics to think -- not just retreat to an uninformed knee-jerk reaction to platitudes whose Catholic doctrine they do not understand. Our Lord tells us in the Apocalypse that when our Faith becomes lukewarm, He will vomit us out of his mouth. As a result of reviewing traditional Catholic doctrine, many have rethought their understanding of the what the Magisterium of the Church teaches about the subject of revelation, and have now have brought their Faith back into a proper Catholic balance. That was exactly our purpose.
Dear Fr. Moderator:
I recently saw on the Novus Ordo cable channel Mother Angelica stating that the body of John XXIII was found incorrupt upon examination. What do you think about this statement? Is it true, or is she confused?
Fr. Moderator Replies.
That cable channel is getting much less Catholic as the years go by. Originally, it was bad enough as a "conservative" Novus Ordo operation, but in recent years it seems to have fallen into the hands of the quack Charismatics from the Franciscan University of Steubenville.
In any case, that silliness about Pope John was debunked almost immediately after the erroneous report was first circulated. Even the Catholic World News and Zenit religious press agencies fell for that one -- which just goes to show that you have to apply common sense to everything you read, and no news service can be trusted absolutely.
Originally, the New Vatican maintained that the body had not been embalmed and should have corrupted much more noticeably after forty years. But then it was discovered that, although the New Vatican would not admit that a pope had been embalmed, the body had in fact been embalmed. "The technicians of the Institute of Legal Medicine of Rome injected formaldehyde into his body... He was embalmed right away, it was done by doctors, nothing but the best, and he was placed in the perfect place, the Catacombs."
There was also the rumor that the body was found upside down, "turned over in its grave," so to speak, which some attributed to the fact that the pope was being rejected by heaving as having introduced Modernism into the Church. I am unaware of any substantiation of this physical fact either.
The faithful should be aware that there are many false stories circulated about popes. As always, one must be very circumspect about rumors and gossip and focus instead on the Catholic and Apostolic Faith, not sideroads. All the Apostles were very practical men, in practical jobs, with practical experience of life. I can only imagine that they would be howling with laughter about the caricature that passes for Catholicism among so many of the present age.
It seems that Fatima is a very controverted subject. TRADITIO has received a number of messages from readers that expose a basic lack of understanding of Catholic dogma. Once again, the de-fide dogma of the Roman Catholic Church is: public revelation ended with the death of the last Apostle, St. John, around A.D. 100.
Any other revelation is private revelation by definition. It doesn't matter how many people saw suns spinning in the sky or healing waters flowing out of a previously non-existent spring; it is not public revelation by definition. To hold that a private revelation has having the same Catholic and Apostolic authority as Our Lord Jesus Christ's public revelation through Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition is tantamount to heresy.
The error that TRADITIO has previously described as "lay theology" is running rampant these days. Lay Catholics who don't even know the Apostles Creed are pontificating on all kinds of very complicated doctrinal issues with very complicated histories (usually in suspect "translations") on web sites, "chat" groups, and E-mails. The best description of these people is the Biblical one: "the blind leading the blind." To help get some proper Catholic balance back into the topic of Fatima, here are some responses to questions posed by readers on this topic:
Again, the proper course is the balance of the doctrines of the Catholic and Apostolic Faith and everything in its God-ordained relationship, not a man-developed caricature of God's order. And for that each Catholic must take upon himself the duty of learning his Faith accurately and fully, as it has been handed by down us by Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition. Let's start cracking those catechisms!
Here Catholics can be sure that they are in proper balance, solidly founded on the bedrock of the Deposit of Faith. Here we do not here go off into extremist doctrine, but attempt to keep to that proper balance of essential Roman Catholic doctrine, so aptly represented in the Church's Principal Theologian, St. Thomas Aquinas, and the Scholastics.
TRADITIO's straight and narrow path, founded on the bedrock of the Roman Catholic Faith, does not always please everyone, as the nature of our age is to go off on tangents of extremes. There is nothing new about this. Rome in the third century was just the same. It was a period of civic upheaval, bad rulers, and alien invasions, just like our own age. Like those of the present age, the Romans then turned to fortune-tellers, astrologers, and nature paganism. Little has changed in seventeen centuries!
Dear Fr. Moderator:
You state that the events of Fatima are, at best, only Private Revelation. No, Father, they are revelations made by Our Blessed Lady through the three children.
Fr. Moderator Replies.
I'm afraid that you are confused on this point like many Catholics who have forgotten their basic catechism. Public revelation, otherwise known as the Deposit of Faith, that is, Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition, concluded with the death of the last Apostle, St. John, around the year A.D. 100. Public revelation is the teaching of Christ and his Apostles. This is de-fide Catholic dogma.
Any other revelation is known as private revelation. It is binding only upon the person to whom it is directly given (as St. Bernadette in the case of Lourdes). No one else is bound to believe it as a requirement of Faith, and no one who fails to believe it is heretical.
The confusion on this point among many Catholics shows just how far the level of knowledge of the Catholic Faith has fallen today. No one half a decade ago would have been so confused on this point. I have met all too many Catholics who do not even know the Apostles Creed, which is part of the Deposit of Faith. Yet, they know every jot and tittle about every "vision" and "apparition" that comes along. This is not Catholicism; it is a sad caricature of it.
St. John of the Cross, perhaps the Church's greatest mystic, echoing the Magisterium of the Church, warned:
The desire for private revelations deprives faith of its purity, develops a dangerous curiosity that becomes a source of illusions, fills the mind with vain fancies, and often proves the want of humility, and of submission to Our Lord, Who, through His public revelation, has given all that is needed for salvation. We must suspect those apparitions that lack dignity or proper reserve, and above all, those that are ridiculous. This last characteristic is a mark of human or diabolical machination. Stay away from visions, apparitions, and miracles as much as you can. BE CAREFUL OF VISIONS, EVEN WHEN THEY ARE AUTHENTIC."
One has to wonder whether the fanaticism about "visions" and "apparitions" that characterizes all too many Catholics in the last fifty years or so is not redolent of the condemned heresy of Charismaticism and is, in some way, an implicit rejection of Our Lord Jesus Christ, Who has given all that is needed for salvation in His Public Revelation. There is a proper Catholic balance in these matters that is rapidly being lost in an age that is falling into the very errors that St. John of the Cross describes.
Dear Fr. Moderator:
About private apparitions -- most of the recent ones appear to promise salvation in an almost "infallible" manner, like the Five First Saturdays, the nine First Fridays, the Brown Scapular, etc. These make the business of salvation look easier than it really is and divert the soul's attention from the fact that one needs to stay out of mortal sins.
Fr. Moderator Replies.
It is patently absurd, and an offense against the theological virtues of Faith and Hope, to believe that any particular work will "save" a person for all eternity. The Church has been careful to disabuse the faithful of excessive "magical" notions, such as the idea that an unrepentant sinner simply by wearing the Brown Scapular will escape Hell. As anyone who reads his catechism knows, objects like scapulars are sacramentals, not Sacraments. Their merit lies not in the cloth, but in the devotion of the person wearing them, ex opere operantis as the theological principle is. (Many people are even unaware that to be invested in the Brown Scapular they contract certain obligations, one of which is the recitation of the Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary).
Unfortunately, in our confused age, we see a return to the tendency to make religion "magical." There is very little discussion about the Catholic and Apostolic Deposit of Faith, about the teachings of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church, and about the historical and universal Magisterium of the Church as the foundation our Roman Catholic Faith. Instead, once faithful Catholics fall away into Charismaticism (an ancient heresy), Fatimism (making "visions" and "apparitions" equal in authority to the Deposit of Faith), Wicca (natural paganism), and Papolatry (worshipping the person of the pope), etc.
Why shouldn't it surprise us that at the head of this latest perversion of the perverted Novus Ordo service is Card. Mahony, known for his building of the Los Angeles Taj Mahony, a $150,000,000 new cathedral for pagan rites? The cathedral that previously featured nuns dancing around the altar like pagan priestesses is now the site for the "Black Culture" Novus Ordo Mess, complete with profane dances and profane music.
We can add the "Black Culture" Mess to the following varieties of the Novus Ordo service, which have previously been documented in the TRADITIO Commentaries, many with actual photographs. These Novus Ordo messes were all held with the "approval" of Novus Ordo bishops or pastors. If anyone thinks that anything about the Novus Ordo service is valid, even the seemingly less bizzare varieties (all varieties of the Novus Ordo are bizarre from the perspective of the Catholic and Apostolic Church), he needs to have his faith examined. Good grief, are Catholics still deaf, dumb, and blind to forty years of this Vatican II nonsense?Dear Fr. Moderator:
I recently got into an argument on the subject of conducting any business in church other than prayer and adoration to the Blessed Trinity. She sees nothing wrong with conducting plays, having musical concerts, exchanging gifts, or even making a marriage proposal in church after Mass. I keep reverence and silence in church because I am fully aware that I am in the presence of the True God.
Fr. Moderator Replies.
You are right in principle about such "business." There is a standard exception made for concerts of sacred music (of course, the Blessed Sacrament must be reserved in a side altar or chapel during the time of the concert, if the high altar is used).
There are two basic justifications for this exception: (1) the spiritually edifying nature of the event, being sacred music, and (2) the special acoustic quality of certain churches, which were often built in part for sacred music: the chant of the Divine Office or even instrumental music.
In some cases, principle #2 can be extended to include suitable "neutral" classical music. For example, I once heard a wonderful presentation of Antonio Vivaldi's solo violin works, which, as such, are neither sacred nor profane (even though Vivaldi was a priest). Moreover, some churches have magnificent pipe organs, and these can be made available for the presentation of suitable music that is not strictly sacred, for example, that of Johann Sebastian Bach (Preludes and Fugues, etc.), Francois Couperin (Deux Messes), Dietrich Buxtehude, Cesar Frank (organist of Notre Dame de Paris in the second half of the 19th century), or even later composers, such as the twentieth-century organist Jean Langlais.
In no case is a church to be used for strictly profane music, such as popular music, folk music, etc. It is scandal enough that such music is used during Novus Ordo services.
Dear Fr. Moderator:
What is the legacy of John Paul II?
Fr. Moderator Replies.
A Church that is more confused than ever doctrinally, liturgically, and sacramentally. A Church that is sinking fast, with fewer than one out of six Novus Ordinarians attending the Novus Ordo service. A Church that has gone morally haywire, first by its rejection, or at least ambiguation, of the Deposit of Faith and then, consequently, in immoral acts, which the pope allows to occur, even among the highest prelates, without any public correction at all.
It is apparently our loss that Almighty God chose to take John Paul I and instead test us with John Paul II. There is some evidence to indicate that John Paul I was going to restore the Traditional Latin Mass and the traditional Faith, with a restored devotion to the Blessed Virgin, not based upon transient "apparitions" and "visions," but upon the bedrock of traditional devotion and Sacred Tradition.
According to a May 5 (22:15 UTC) Associated Press article, "Vatican Takes Control of Padre Pio Shrine," the New Vatican has taken the unusual move of wresting control of Padre Pio's shrine at San Giovanni Rotondo from the Capuchins to place it under the control of the local Novus Ordo bishop. The Provincial of the Capuchin monks pointed to the hypocrisy of the New Vatican in a scathing denunciation (again, we see none of the "love" that is supposed to characterize the Novus Ordo sect):
"We feel like we're returning to the dark times that Padre Pio knew, with a [New Vatican] decision that seems to us hostile and punitive." --Padre Paolo Cuvino, Provincial of the Capuchin Monks
Padre Pio of Pietrelcina was canonized last year by the New Vatican -- probably one canonization that will hold up as valid under the review of a future truly Catholic pontiff. Most of the current pope's canonizations will need to be subjected to significant scrutiny, as many of them seem to be based on a rushed and flawed investigative process, which St. Thomas Aquinas and other traditional theologians hold can lead to erroneous and invalid canonizations.
Padre Pio was the only saintly person I can think of in the 20th century who truly had a cultus during his lifetime, like some of the earlier Saints. It seemed that no one questioned his holiness, even though he could be quite irascible and critical (which only proves that those qualities can exist in a saintly person; St. Jerome also comes to mind).
When the Mass of 1965 was introduced, bearing the first changes that were the precursors to the Novus Ordo, Padre Pio, without even reading the text, publicly took the position that he did not want to celebrate it. He died before the full-blown Novus Ordo was issued in 1969 (and then recalled for doctrinal flaws), so there is no question that if the introductory changes of 1965 were a problem, he would have most vehemently refused the Service of 1967, in which the very words of consecration were changed, and the full Novus Ordo Service of 1969, in which Roman Catholic Mass was essentially dumped in favor of a Protestantized service fabricated by a Freemason and six Protestant ministers. Padre Pio was also an opponent of Vatican II and prayed for an early end to the Council before it could do any damage.
Surely this traditional priest was an unlikely candidate for the New Vatican to canonize, but his obvious sanctity and cultus could not be ignored, even by the New Vatican. Yet his very canonization was a slap in the face to the New Order, which he detested, so, as with the "indult" Mass, the New Vatican must control any "traditional" elements. And that is the likely explanation for the surprising takeover of San Giovanni Rotondo.
Moreover, so challenging was Padre Pio to the New Order that, it had to fabricate a "cover story," trying to prove that Padre Pio was not in fact hostile to the Novus Ordo. A video of Padre Pio, therefore, was engineered to make the last Mass he said before he died look like a Novus Ordo service facing the people. In fact, Padre Pio was not by that time physically strong enough to walk up to the main altar, so a second portable altar had to be placed on the ground below the main altar for him. The video, by using clever camera angles, made it appear that he was facing the people, as there were people on all sides because of the crowds that attended his Masses.
I sometimes get a rather silly argument in favor of the Novus Ordo, which goes like this: "How can the Novus Ordo service be evil and invalid because Sister Lucia, the seeress of Fatima attends it and does not criticize it?"
First of all, no Catholic is bound to believe in an apparition at Fatima. It is not part of the Deposit of Faith, but only a private revelation at best, and one that is still too recent to judge fully. There has been so much controversy about the apparition that we cannot even be sure that we have an authentic transcription of what was said to the children. Moreover, Sister Lucia is under a kind of house arrest. She is not allowed freely to speak unless the New Vatican gives her permission, and then she is allowed to say only what she is told to say.
Shouldn't those who voluntarily believe in Fatima as a private revelation give the public rejection of the Novus Ordo service and Vatican II by Padre Pio, an acknowledged Saint, the first priest-stigmatist, having a worldwide cultus, far more weight than the word of a nun who has been closeted away under New Vatican control, a nun who has for many years not been able to speak freely. but only as the New Vatican prompts her?
It is an undisputed fact that the New Vatican has consistently hidden and manipulated her "Third Secret," which those prelates who have seen it say confirms the prophecy of La Salette (1846) about Rome, including the pope and leading prelates, "losing the Faith and becoming the seat of the Anti-Christ"? Those who adhere to Fatima must take not just a selected crumb of the "vision," but the whole loaf, which appears to be solidly against the New Order. How could it be otherwise, as any "New Order" is already condemned in Sacred Scripture?
A couple of weeks ago a false article was planted by the New Vatican in a British periodical stating that the SSPX was going over to the New Order "indult." Any knowledgeable person who read the article carefully could tell that it was a ruse; there was absolutely no hard information in it. TRADITIO was the first to point to the possibility of a New Vatican disinformation campaign to destabilize the Traditional Catholic Movement. Sure enough, by the end of the day, all of the SSPX bishops had denied the story, and one practically quoted TRADITIO's suspicions in his denial.
Now another article has appeared in a British periodical that the pope "might" lift the restrictions on the "indult" Mass. TRADITIO puts as little stock in this as the first rumor. First of all, the pope was supposedly going to try this in 1985, with the backing of a commission of nine cardinals in the Vatican, who reached the determination that the Traditional Latin Mass had never been suppressed, and could never be suppressed, and that any priest could say that immemorial Mass of the Roman Rite whenever and wherever he pleased. Reports had it that the pope was going to publish the commission's report, but was threatened by the northern European bishops that if he did so, they would separate from the Vatican. The pope backed down.
Can you imagine the viciousness of the Novus Ordo bishops, who will in practice quash such a move, as they have done in the past? Communion in the hand is illegal, yet they have enslaved the people it. Altar "girls" and lay "ministers" are illegal, yet they have enslaved the people to them. The vernacular is illegal, yet they have enslaved the people to it. And on and on the list goes. It has now been 15 years since the "indult" of 1988, and many dioceses still don't have even a single "indult" Mass.
Card. Hoyos, who is trying to parlay a deception perpetrated on traditional Catholics as his bid to be the new pope, admitted the same thing recently, yet he said that because the Novus Ordo bishops are opposed to the Traditional Latin Mass, the New Vatican would suppress the right of Catholic priests to say the true Roman Catholic Mass -- a right that was guanteed solemnly, even infallibly, by a pope. So much can we trust the word of post-Vatican II popes!
Why, you might ask, are these rumors spring up now all of a sudden? TRADITIO suggests that the New Vatican is panicking. The Traditional Catholic Movement has held fast against the Modernism of the New Vatican now for forty years. It has preserved the Traditional Latin Mass that the New Order wishes to destroy. The Traditional Catholic Movement and is putting the lie to the New Order. It is the only large group of Catholics that is answering to the famous question: "Is the pope Catholic?" NO!, not when he is the stooge and pitch-man for the unCatholic New Order service, "sacraments," and doctrine. One might more aptly ask: "Would you buy a used car from this man?"
Frankly, the New Vatican is terrified of the Traditional Catholic Movement. Its growth is accelerating at the same time that the Novus Ordo is sinking like a millstone. Now only one out of six Novus Ordinarians even bothers to attend their New Order service. The Traditional Catholic Movement, seeing a pope who is gripped in the error of Indifferentism ("all religions are equal") and who suborns fornication by Novus Ordo presbyters and archbishops by his failure to take any punitive action against them, is speaking now with a much stronger voice, even in the media, when it says:
We are what you once were.
We believe what you once believed.
We worship as you once worshipped.
If you were right then, we are right now.
If we are wrong now, you were wrong then.
Even if such a liberalization of the "indult" occurred, it would be counter-productive. Already most of the "indult" Masses are no longer even the "modernized" version of 1962, but the Novus Ordo warmed over with a little Latin, with all of the errors of the New Order still being incorporated within. Many indultarians are forced to eat Novus Ordo "cookies" consecrated from a previous Novus Ordo service. Many are forced to receive communion standing, when to Our Lord Jesus Christ, Scripture tells us "every knee should bend." They are told that the Friday abstinence doesn't apply any more. You know it -- the whole Modernist litany. Those who have sold out to the "indult" or some "apostolic administration" have already regretted their loss of the true Faith, the most recent example being that of Campos.
No matter how important the Traditional Latin Mass is, how can one be "reconciled" with the Novus Ordo sect and its bureaucratic apparatus, which is teaching the theology that Our Lord Jesus Christ is not the Messias for the Jews, that they should look for another. This teaching is so vicious and heretical as to sweep away the very foundation of the Church and denies the teaching of every Apostle writing in the New Testament. That the Cardinal Prefect in charge of protecting the Church's true doctrine is the one who taught it shows just how unCatholic the Novus Ordo sect is.
So, you traditional Catholics, don't hope for a phony "reconciliation" to the New Order, for that is only a reconciliation with the "malice and snares of the Devil." Keep praying; keep patient; keep fighting for the Roman Catholic Faith -- the whole Faith -- not just a bastardized "mass" controlled by the New Order. Call particularly upon the power of the Prince of the Heavenly Host, St. Michael the Archangel, Protector of the church, to "thrust into Hell" those who are working out "ruin of souls" though the substitution of a Counterfeit Church in place of the Roman Catholic Church of two millennia.
The New Order must be -- and will be -- by the power of God, reconciled to traditional Catholicism, for that is the only true Catholicism. Anything else is a cowardly sell-out to the Novus Ordo sect that wishes to destroy the true Church.
TRADITIO follows the ordinance of Christ and does not go chasing for apparitions and visions of "endtimes." Yet, the apparition of La Salette (1846) predicted Rome shall lose the Faith and become the seat of the Antichrist, certainly comes to mind when we read the following:
Camillo Cardinal Ruini was flabbergasted when he saw the first results of a survey on Rome's young people and faith. The idea of commissioning the survey came to him during the Holy Year of 2000 and after the festive show of religiosity demonstrated by the papaboys, the name Italian media gave the pope's tens of thousands of youthful admirers. The data that most alarmed Ruini is evidence that the Christian faith is threatening to go extinct in Catholicism's capital par excellence, the Rome of the popes (Il volto giovane della ricerca di Dio, Piemme, Casale Monferrato, 2003).
There is nothing surprising to the traditional Catholic here. Rome itself, the capital of the New Vatican, has been falling away from the Roman Catholic Faith ever since Vatican II. Wasn't it the current pope who allowed the first Islamic minaret to be built in Rome? His predecessors vetoed the very idea. Moreover, this pope seems to love to be a television star and loves to play up to the youth. In return, the papaboys call him JP2 and idolize him like a rock-star, but, as the cardinal's recent survey proved, they reject every doctrine that he teaches.
This pope should follow the old Roman maxim: Oderint dum metuant [Let them hate, as long as they fear]. We would be far better off with a pope who was hated personally, but whose Catholic doctrine was everywhere respected.
Dear Fr. Moderator:
What do you think about using older men in the priesthood as a solution to the vocation "crisis"?
Fr. Moderator Replies.
Pope John XXIII had a similar thought and established seminary programs for middle-aged and older men. I have long held that such an approach could hold the solution for any vocation "crisis." There is absolutely nothing in canon law or the Tradition of the Church that would prevent single (or widowed) middle-aged and older men from being ordained. As a matter of fact, most of the Apostles were middle-aged; they weren't raw recruits, but men experienced of life, men who worked at secular jobs.
For the most part, the Novus Ordo bypasses this solution because it doesn't want to solve the problem, but to create an artificial "crisis," so that a married presbyterate and presbyteresses can solve it. Unfortunately, many segments of the Traditional Catholic Movement are still biased in this regard. I have heard that one major traditional organization will not accept to its seminary anyone over 35, for example. Why? I suspect that this organization wants fresh recuits, inexperienced and rather naive, so that they can be more readily indoctrinated in the organization's own slant. Fortunately, there are other traditional organization that are welcoming of vocations of all ages.
Dear Fr. Moderator:
The other night that cable Novus Ordo channel had four "apologists" from the Novus Ordo Franciscan University in Steubenville, Ohio, one of the main centers of the unCatholic Charismatic Movement. One of these Novus Ordo "apologists" was Scott Hahn, who equated traditional Catholics with anti-Catholic Protestants. What do you think of Hahn?
Fr. Moderator Replies.
Scott Hahn was a dyed-in-the-wool Protestant. He was a anti-papist, teaching in a fundamentalist seminary. Now he claims to have gone Catholic -- well, not really Catholic, but Novus Ordo. Yet he continues to speak and write just like the Protestant he used to be, with a thin Catholic veneer to fool the ignorant. He personally adheres to the heresy of Charismaticism and is intimately connected with its promotion over the Catholic Faith. Charismaticism is one of the most far-out brands of Protestantism and was consistently condemned by the Church from its early years.
He turned like a viper against his close friend of many years, Gerry Matatics, who also left fundamentalism at the same time as Hahn, because Matatics rejected Hahn's Novus Ordoism and converted to traditional Catholicism. Hahn is quite characteristic of the New Order, which is a fraud. It is not characterized by "love," as it contends, but by hatred of anyone or anything that is truly Catholic. Hahn is a good example of this phenomenon. One day he is a virulent Protestant anti-papist. The next day he is a virulent Novus Ordinarian anti-traditionalist.
TRADITIO does not usually speak of individuals, but in this case Hahn has "gone public" by making money off unsuspecting Catholics through feeding them fanatical Protestantism masked as Catholicism in books, lectures, and television. The Ignatius/Adoremus conglomerate, I see, is promoting his books, which is not surprising, considering that Ignatius is Novus Ordo too while claiming to be "conservative." Organizations that support the heretical Charismaticism of people like Hahn are far from Catholic -- of any stripe.
Let's look behind the glitz of the pope's visit to Spain last weekend to see what the result of Vatican II and its aftermath have been in this once most Catholic of countries.
According to the figures of the State Center of Sociological Research, in 1998 just under 85% of Spaniards said they were Catholic. In 2002 that percentage fell to 80%. Attendance at the Novus Ordo service also declined. In 1998, 23% of Catholics went to the Novus Ordo service on Sunday; last year the level dropped to 18.1%. In the 1996-1997 school year, 75.4% sent their children to Novus Ordo diocesan schools, but in 1999-2000 the level decreased to 70.5%.
Not a pretty picture is it? Pretty much worldwide the statistic is that only about one in six Novus Ordinarians attend the Novus Ordo service regularly. After all the blather about the "vernacular" and "participation," regular attendance at Mass has dropped from four out of five in the 1950s to one out of six in the 2000s.
But what must be terrifying the Novus Ordo establishment is this fact from Spain, which undoubtedly reflects other countries: contributions to the Novus Ordo apparatus went from 45.3% in 1997 to 39.6% in 2000 -- a drop of six percentage points in just three years!
Does the Novus Ordo Church avert to these figures? No. Does the Novus Ordo Church ever wonder where it went wrong? No. Why should it? After all, if its goal is to destroy everything that has heretofore been understood as Catholic, why would the Novus Ordo apparatus think that anything was wrong?
Just as TRADITIO predicted, the Campos sell-out to the Novus Ordo is continuing to fall apart. Yet this is the centerpiece that the New Vatican is trying to use to connive traditional Catholics into giving up their Faith and throwing their lot in with a sugared-up Novus Ordo "indult."
Word of the internal schism in the Society of St. John Vianney between those (including the new bishop) who are oriented toward the Novus Ordo and those who regret ever having given up their fully traditional stance is starting to circulate widely. The Campos administration is now starting to panic and is lashing out against the voices of fact and reality in a cover-up of the impossible situation in which they as indultarians now find themselves. A recent statement included the following:
We are anxious to put the faithful linked with our Apostolic Administration on their guard against certain publications, sent even to non-subscribers, which claim to be Catholic and traditional, but in reality are not Catholic, since they do not respect the most elementary moral rules. These publications have circulated articles on the Administration which are false, they have slandered our Apostolic Administrator, they have questioned some canonisations and have later rejected saints canonised by the Holy Father Pope John Paul II. Some people connected with these publications have driven the faithful into leaving the Administration. They have circulated stories of division among the priests of the Administration, and of some priests wishing to leave it.
The statement cited primarily organs of the Society of St. Pius X. It is ironic that Campos should be worrying about information mailed to "non-subscribers," since the Campos administration has been plastering the United States (and perhaps other countries) with expensive propaganda pieces and even periodicals about how wonderful the "indult" in Campos is, at the same time that the Society of St. John Vianney in Campos is falling apart at the seams since its abandonment of full traditional Catholicism.
Well, we have seen all of this before: lies, deceit, and concealment on the part of the Novus Ordo bishops and the New Vatican. They deny the existence of any problems, while the Novus Ordo Church falls down around them. They virtually ignore the most scandalous goings-on in the dioceses and seminaries. They extol Vatican II as the savior of the Church, while they deny that Our Lord Jesus Christ is the Savior for all men. Remember, that when Campos sold out to the "indult," it had to take the "Vatican II Oath" that comes from the 1984 "Indult" Quattuor abhinc annos, which prescribes:
That it be made publicly clear beyond all ambiguity that such priests and their respective faithful in no way share the positions of those who call into question the legitimacy and doctrine exactitude of the Roman Missal promulgated by Pope Paul VI in 1970.
In other words, in order to be an indultarian, you must accept the legitimacy of the Novus Ordo, which even leading Roman theologians at the time denied was Catholic! Since then the documents questioning the validity of the New Order, which started essentially in 1967 with Patrick Omlor's Questioning the Validity of the New, All-English Canon, have grown in number and persuasion. Yet, the indultarians must play games with their conscience and with the truth so that they can get the crumb of an "indult" Mass.
This whole effort is a train-wreck. There are even rumors (like the false one a couple of weeks ago about the SSPX succumbing to the Novus Ordo) that within a month the Vatican will "loosen" the indult. If such a thing should happen (and I have serious doubts about it), it will simply lead to open warfare between the Novus Ordo bishops against the New Vatican, between local presbyters and their bishops, and so forth. Moreover, nothing will have been "fixed," because an "indult," or even "pseudo-indult," Mass will not fix the error and even apostasy of the Novus Ordo Church, which ranges far beyond the Mass alone to all of the Sacraments and all of Catholic doctrine.
The Pope was distressed that Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre rejected the "reforms" of the 1960s as "Marxist" and "neo-Protestant," and yet history proves the archbishop right and the pope wrong. Recently, the SSPX Chief Bishop put the real issue on the line (we only pray that he has the courage not to deviate from full traditional Catholicism):
The real problem is the practical problem of what foundations the mansion will rest on. On the shifting sands of Vatican II, or on the rock of tradition going back to the Apostles?
The Pope is said to believe that the Traditional Latin Mass "poses neither a threat to the unity of the Church nor to the genuine reforms of the Second Vatican Council." Well, isn't that the heart of the problem? The Novus Ordo should be be completely threatened by the Roman Catholicism of 2000 years, which shows up the New Order as a Great Counterfeit, a mere facade of Catholicism. It is not possible for traditional Catholics to settle for a sugar-coated "indult" Mass. They must stand firm for all of Catholicism: the Catholic Mass, the Catholic Sacraments, and the Catholic Faith, not the Novus Ordo substitutes for them.
Meanwhile, TRADITIO's mailbox is getting fuller and fuller of messages from people saying that they have abandoned the Novus Ordo and even its "indult" for full traditional Catholicism. It has taken forty years, but Catholics are learning that where the Faith is concerned, they're damned if they're going to settle for half a loaf.
Catholic News Service reports that for the first time in five years, the number of students in U.S. Novus Ordo seminary theologates dropped in 2002-03. The number of high school and college seminarians also declined, as did the number participating in permanent diaconate formation programs. The nation's Catholic lay ecclesial ministry formation programs, however, registered an enrollment increase in one year of more than 1,000 (3%), from 34,414 in the 2001-02 school year to 35,448 in the current year. Substantial numbers of these laypeople are hired full time or part time in catechetics, pastoral administration, or other church "ministries."
From these numbers you can see clearly the future of the Novus Ordo. Already having essentially lost its priesthood and replaced it with a Protestant ministry, it will become further Protestantized by laymen, actually mostly laywomen, prancing about the "table." The Novus Ordo, having lost its priesthood, and thereby the Sacrament of the Holy Eucharist, will clearly become -- as if it were not already -- just another Protestant denomination.
There will, however, be moves to make it appear as if the priesthood has not been lost. Such moves will include the push toward a Protestantized married "priesthood" and the implementation of a "priestesshood." Of course, this will all be part of the Great Counterfeit. The Novus Ordo Church that still dares to call itself "Catholic" will actually be selling itself to the Devil.
Florida Today (April 29, 2003) reports that many divorced and remarried excommunicates are taking the Novus Ordo cookie each Sunday. Moreover, the dioceses in the United States wink at the practice, despite the fact that such persons are excommunicate and at one time weren't even allowed to enter a church, let alone receive Communion.
Hand in hand with this situation is the Novus Ordo Annulment Factory, in which annulments are granted like candy. In the early 1960s, there were only a few hundred annulments granted each year for just cause (under the age of consent, too close a consanguineous or affinitous relationship, etc.). Now the Novus Ordo grants several hundred thousand "annulments" each year, for such a trivialities as a spouse being unable to balance a check a book!
Perhaps the most celebrated case in recent history is that of Senator Ted Kennedy, who got the diocese of Boston to "annul" his marriage of some thirty years and his several children, even though he had originally gotten a church dispensation to marry his wife, an Episcopalian. So irate was his wife that she wrote a famous book, excoriating the duplicity and political sycophancy of the Novus Ordo diocese, and refusing to recognizing the putatively phony "annulment" and to consider her children bastards.
This mocking of the law of God on marriage, this sacrilege, this scandal, with all its dire eternal consequences -- and for what purpose? To receive a phony Novus Ordo cookie in one's dirty hand. It's a "Hell" of a cookie, isn't it? If only they knew!
It's hard to imagine, but it is now forty years since the first document of Vatican II, Sacrosanctum Concilium, by which the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass would have been destroyed, had it not been for traditional Catholics who have fought tooth and nail to preserve the Mass.
One well-known presbyter of the "Adoremus" persuasion, Peter Elliot, still has the gall to opine in a recent interview: "The council document was the mandate for post-conciliar liturgical reform and most of the reforms are good, especially better celebrations of the sacraments, concelebration, the reform of the Divine Office, and the wider use of the vernacular."
The propaganda of the Novus Ordo never ends. These people would look at the Sahara Desert and call it a botanical paradise! The "Adoremus" crowed is even more demented. They think that Vatican II was wonderful; it just wasn't implemented correctly. They don't see that the fundamental problem is in the use vulgar tongue in place of the sacred Latin language. A "better translation" is not going to convert the Novus Ordo service into a valid Mass. The traditional Anglicans use a beautiful translation, redolent of Shakespeare, but it's still -- beautifully -- invalid.
Elliot does admit: "There are still widespread problems -- sloppy ceremonial, verbosity, vulgar music, disobedience, and sheer ignorance." Well, Presbyter Elliot, isn't that what you get when you use a vulgar tongue in the Mass and then expect sublimity? I don't think that God's laws of cause and effect have ceased just for the Novus Ordo!
But Presbyter Elliot's best is saved for last: "Unfortunately, when people think of Vatican II they focus on liturgical change because that was the visible effect of the council they experienced in [Novus Ordo] parishes. They should not forget the other great achievements of the council, such as the universal call to holiness, collegiality, ecumenism, the permanent diaconate and a richer theology of marriage."
Now, let's see the fruits of the Vatican II Catastrophe:
Yes indeed. Vatican II has a record to be proud of. Surely Vatican II is the best thing that ever happened to the Catholic Church -- for those who wish to destroy it!
Dear Fr. Moderator:
Sometimes I hear Novus Ordinarians use the following reason for why traditional Catholics are in error. "We need to remember that after the Council of Trent that there were a significant group of people who thought the new Mass of Trent was in error. Those people are no different than those today who cling to the 'Tridentine' Mass." How can I argue against this kind of comment? What is the difference between the Council of Trent's changes and Vatican II's changes?
Fr. Moderator Replies.
Sometimes I can't make up my mind whether such Novus Ordinarians are just plain ignorant or outright liars. There is no basis for such a statement that the "Tridentine" Mass was "new" at the time. You see, there isn't really such a thing as the "Tridentine" Mass. I never use the term. The Mass before and after Trent was the Traditional Latin Mass, or the Mass of the Roman Rite. The Mass of 1570 (post Trent) was not essentially different from the Mass before Trent. Any number of scholars have published articles comparing the two and found no substantial difference.
What Pope St. Pius V did in 1570, in furtherance of the Council's desire, was to canonize the essential Catholic and Apostolic Roman form of the Mass in perpetuity as the precedential rite of the Church (with the exception of a few Eastern rites used by comparatively insignificant numbers of Catholics) and to eliminate regional accretions (non-essential) that had grown up over the centuries in different parts of the world (Gaul, England, etc.)
This is the rite of Mass that has come to us from St. Peter, as St. Isidore of Seville, the last of the Fathers of the Church and a polymath encyclopaedist tells us (Patrologia Latina 83, 752A): Ordo autem missarum, quibus oblata Deo sacrificia consecrantur, primo a sancto Petro est institutus, cuius celebrationem uno eodemque modo universus peragit orbis [Moreover, the order of Mass, by which the sacrificial offerings are consecrated to God, were first instituted by Blessed Peter, the celebration of which in one and the same manner the whole world carries out].
The Novus Ordo is an entirely different beast. A Freemason and six Protestant ministers basically concocted a brand new "mass" (although they preferred to use other terms for it, such as "Lord's Supper" or "memorial" or "synaxis," which is a service without a consecration). This Novus Ordo Missae dumped two-thirds of the canonized Traditional Latin Mass and inserted a new consecration formula (putatively invalid), Jewish blessings, Protestant language, and even newly composed, man-made "Eucharistic prayers."
Note that the Modernist Innovators themselves called this work the New Order of Mass, whereas Pope St. Pius V did not call the 1570 canonized form "new," as it wasn't. It was Catholic and Apostolic. But one of the most influential members of Hannibal Bugnini's Concilium, which made up the "New Mass, Jesuit Fr. Joseph Gelineau, said this at the time about the Novus Ordo service:
Let those who like myself have known and sung a Latin-Gregorian High Mass remember it if they can. Let them compare it with the Mass that we now have. Not only the words, the melodies, and some of the gestures are different. To tell the truth, it is a different liturgy of the Mass. This needs to be said without ambiguity: the Roman Rite as we knew it no longer exists. It has been destroyed. [Le rite romain tel que nous l'avons connu n'existe plus. Il est detruit].
Dear Fr. Moderator:
Is it true, as some allege, that because of indefectibility, a pope could never promulgate invalid Sacraments?
Fr. Moderator Replies.
The problem arises because these people's concept of indefectibility is wrong. He is what Cardinal Turrecremata, Theologian of the Council of Basel/Florence and papally titled "Defender of the Faith," had to say on the subject:
By disobedience, the Pope can separate himself from Christ despite the fact that he is head of the Church, for above all, the unity of the Church is dependent upon its relationship with Christ. The Pope can separate himself from Christ either by disobeying the law of Christ, or by commanding something that is against the divine or natural law. By doing so, the Pope separates himself from the body of the Church because this body is itself linked to Christ by obedience. In this way, the Pope would, without doubt, fall into schism....
He would do that if he did not observe that which the Universal Church observes in basing herself on the Tradition of the Apostles, or if he did not observe that which has been ordained for the whole world by the universal councils or by the authority of the Apostolic See. Especially is this true with regard to the divine liturgy, as, for example, if he did not wish personally to follow the universal customs and rites of the Church....
Thus, the theologian clearly sees the possibility that the pope could disobey the law of Christ by departing from the traditional Catholic and Apostolic liturgy of the Church. Although we perhaps cannot say for certain that he has lost the Chair, we can certainly say that he has departed from the Catholic and Apostolic Church in the Sacred Liturgy and is not to be obeyed in these things.
Then, there is the question whether Pope Paul VI ever even legally attempted to impose the Novus Ordo. Fr. Wathen way back in 1971, in his pioneering book The Great Sacrilege, already pointed out that Pope Paul VI's original 1969 document Missale Romanum does nothing more than publish the Novus Ordo Missae, which in any case was shortly thereafter recalled.
Even now, it is clear that the Novus Ordo is being imposed by local bishops by force, even though the Roman Cardinalatial Commission found unanimously (and Card. Hoyos of the Ecclesia Dei Commission recently confirmed) that the Traditional Latin Mass was never, and could never, be abrogated and that no priest could ever be barred from celebrating it any time, any place.
Why, then, you ask, is the Novus Ordo service so widespread and so many people attend it in error? The answer is that it is not unknown in history that what is done de facto is not what is legal de jure. This is not a perfect world, and even bishops and popes are not infrequently corrupt and unjust; so history undeniably shows.
The essential meaning of indefectibility is that Our Lord Jesus Christ founded His Church to last to the end of time. Even if large parts of it fall into heresy, as they have in the past, as in the time of the Arians and the Protestants, nevertheless, as long as a remnant continues His Church, indefectibility is satisfied. We seem to be seeing this principle carried out now in front of our eyes, since the practice of the Novus Ordo has sunk to a mere 17% of Catholics, and continues to sink, while the practice of traditional, that is, real, Catholicism continues to grow.
Dear Fr. Moderator:
Tom's situation regarding his relationship with his Novus Ordo family is probably typical of most traditional Catholics that I have encountered here in New Zealand, and myself in particular. They simply do not want you to criticise the pope. It doesn't matter how bad he is or how badly he conducts himself, or what scandal he causes; he is beyond reproach with these people. Of course, we know that this is not the case, as history has shown.
The pope and the bishops have been out to destroy the Church here in New Zealand, as elsewhere. And they are doing a pretty good job of it too, as the statistics prove all too well! 16.7% of "Catholics" in this town of 31,000 attend the Novus Ordo service each Sunday. That's a figure probably lower than the United States. [No, the figure for 2002 is exactly the same in the United States. --Fr. Moderator] And the bishop and his presbyters have the gall to describe their parish community as being "vitally alive and thriving."
We have to drive 600 km round trip to attend a Sunday Mass because there is no true Catholic church in this town. We consider ourselves fortunate if we manage to get to four or five Masses each year. We envy those who have weekly Masses on their doorstep.
Fr. Moderator Replies.
Nowadays, none of the bishops, or very few unhappily, are ever to be found leading their flocks to the pasture. What is to be noted is that all of them think only of shearing the sheep. Finding food for the sheep is not what occupies them. It is the wool that they are interested in and not the sheep.
What is this? Another one of Fr. Moderator's colorful descriptions of the corrupt Novus Ordo bishops of our age? No. Although I would be proud to have composed the metaphor, it is not mine. It was written by a fourteenth-century cardinal, Jean Lemoine.
TRADITIO has consistently pointed out that the current situation of the Church cannot be understood without being familiar with history. More often than not, the Church has been led by corrupt, or at least ineffectual, popes, power-hungry cardinals, and venal bishops. More often than not the Church has been racked by heresy, even among the popes, forty of whom (according to dogmatic Vatican I) personally fell into heresy, and one of whom was excommunicated.
The miracle is not that the popes and bishops been particularly holy. Oh, there have been those rare saintly ones, only two in the last 700 years: Pope St. Pius V, who canonized the Roman Mass of Tradition (Traditional Latin Mass), and Pope St. Pius X, who vivified it and restored the rightful place of the chant in it. No, the miracle is that the Church has survived in spite of the popes and the bishops.
And that is the best inductive proof I know of as to the divine founding of the Church. Even the mighty Roman empire, which God gave us as the precursor the Roman Church and which still informs it, lasted only from 753 B.C. to A.D. 476, a span of something over twelve centuries. The Roman Catholic Church has lasted almost two millennia.
Dear Fr. Moderator:
I was introduced to TRADITIO fairly recently. I returned to the traditional Roman Catholic Faith five years ago and thank Our Dear Lord everyday. It was quite upsetting at first to hear some of your comments regarding the SSPX, which I attend, but I also appreciate being made aware. I pray everyday that the SSPX will have the strength to uphold the truth and pray that it may be done in all honesty, charity, and integrity. With the information I have received on your web site, I pray all the harder. I would gladly attend any valid Traditional Latin Mass and am very happy to know that there are twice as many other traditional Catholic priests out there than in just the SSPX.
Fr. Moderator Replies.
Let me first point out that I have the greatest respect for Archbishop Lefebvre. I have read of this man's writings, and I have been impressed with their Catholicism and their balance. This man was a gentleman, whose strongly-held Catholicism nevertheless permitted him to have cordial relations with many groups, even though they did not share his belief. In many ways, he reminded me of the best of the Renaissance prelates, who were well educated, broad-minded, and humanistic in the best sense, and devoted advocates of Roman and Catholic faith and culture.
I have many contacts inside the Society, to its highest places, and I am acquainted with many of its clergy and laity. For most of these, I have a high regard. Unfortunately, since the death of the Archbishop, men of lesser caliber (on the whole, but there are exceptions) have taken over the highest offices in the Society. The Archbishop's plan was not to have bishops rule the Society, but only to administer the necessary Sacraments. Unfortunately, the wise ordinances of the Archbishop have now been ignored in that regard.
I am not affiliated with the Society. Therefore, I can give a uniquely independent perspective of its goings-on, from my inside sources and from my observation of the Church both from before and after Vatican II. In many ways the Society has done some fine work, and all traditional Catholics should be grateful for it. The Angelus Press comes to mind. On the other hand, like all organizations, it has its weak points, and the weakest point I currently see is its new leadership, which in some cases does not bear the dignity and breadth of the Archbishop.
Because the Society leadership attempts (incorrectly) to portray the Society as de facto the "only" traditional organization, it opens itself to criticism when it veers off the traditional path. If TRADITIO is direct in its analysis of the New Papacy and the New Bishops, in all fairness, it can hardly be less direct in its analysis of the Society.
Regrettably, some of the new leadership has become haughty, self-absorbed, and exclusive, sometimes even cultish. This is not the attitude of the vast majority of laypeople and clergy I am acquainted with in the Society. Unfortunately, as in all organizations, there is a fringe of fanatics, who lash out in personal attacks against anyone who says anything that they interpret as being against "their organization." Their nastiness and foul mouths certainly do not reflect well upon the Society that they claim to defend. They are not like you, who listen, analyze, and reach your own conclusions.
Naturally, TRADITIO receives its share from these fanatics, while many of the leaders of the Society, its priests, and laity are avid readers and supporters. Magna veritas et praevalet [Great is truth, and it prevaileth] (1 Esdras 4:41/DRV). One cannot trust the secular press reports about developments, since secular writers are abysmally ignorant of the Catholic Faith. One cannot trust Society press releases, which naturally bear the Society slant. But with its many years of experience, inside sources, and analytical expertise, TRADITIO can provide a thought-provoking view, duly weighing the good and the bad, that leads traditional Catholics to think broadly and contemplate the whole picture, whether they personally agree or not. And that approach is at the heart of Catholicism, as practiced by great men such as St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Bonaventure at the universities.
Recently, one of the worst Society leaders was exiled to Australia, so one might hope for an improvement in the direction of the Society. The Chief Bishop seems to be speaking in a confusingly bifuracated way with respect to the Novus Ordo, as has been covered here in the past. There is some evidence that the other bishops have called him to task for this. One can only hope, with you, that these developments will have a salutary effect, and may even produce a more clearly-committed traditional leadership for the Society. We wish them the best, and support their efforts, as long as they represent the best of traditional Catholicism, as one of many parts of the Traditional Catholic Movement.
Dear Fr. Moderator:
I thought I would pass along an argument that I like to use when anyone tries to claim that the Aramean language does not have a word for many, and that all and many are therefore the same thing. If you apply that principle to other words of Our Lord, no one is in heaven, for He stated, "Many will seek to enter in and shall not be able." If one applies the same argument to that phrase, then no one will be saved, for "All will seek to enter in and will not be able." And again: "Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works? and then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity." If one applies the same argument to that phrase, all will be cast out of heaven. Phony Aramean interpretations are hazardous to one's spiritual health! (Of course, there is no evidence that Christ even used Aramean at this time, and, in any case, Aramean has proven to have separate words for many and all).
Dear Fr. Moderator:
What can be said about the claims of some Novus Ordinarians that Alfredo Cardinal Ottaviani, the Church's chief theologian at the time, "retracted" his statement about the invalidity of the Novus Ordo?
Fr. Moderator Replies.
The proponents of the New Order were devastated to have the Church's highest theological authority at the time and a President of the Vatican II Council publicly question the validity of the so-called "New Mass" and to have had Pope Paul VI admit the validity of Cardinal Ottaviani's charge and recall the Novus Ordo Missae in 1969, just after it was issued.
In an effort to counter the Cardinal's charges of invalidity, which stand true to this day, the New Order cooked up a phony "cover story" that the Cardinal had "retracted" his statement. This story interestingly parallels the deceit that the English bishops had used with St. Joan of Arc, claiming that she had retracted her statements. Of course, both stories are lies.
A purported letter of February 17, 1970, supposedly with the Cardinal's signature, was adduced to prove the story. However, by that date it is known that the Cardinal, then 80, was totally blind and would not have known what he was signing when presented with the purposed letter by his secretary, Msgr. Gilberto Agustoni.
Now it has come to light that this Agustoni was a member of the Consilium that fabricated the "New Mass" and that Arch-Architect of the New Order service Hannibal Bugnini led. At the time Jean Madiran, the editor of the respected French journal "Itineraires," publicly accused Agustoni of obtaining the Cardinal's signature by fraud. As a result, Agustoni was fired as the Cardinal's secretary.
So, it seems that Agustoni insinuated his way into becoming the Cardinal's secretary and in that position created a fraud in an attempt to undermine the Cardinal's public document, which questioned the validity of the New Order service, by a phony "retraction," which Agustoni had himself written with others. In any case, co-author Antonio Cardinal Bacci and the Roman theologians never "retracted," in any manner, shape, or form.
The moral of this story is that the New Order will resort even to fraud and lies to relieve itself of the embarrassment of having its New Order service called what it putatively is -- invalid.
Dear Fr. Moderator:
I have gotten into very hot water discussing the current pope with siblings and friends, all of whom were raised traditionally here in the USA and followed the Novus Ordo shepherds who led us astray in the '60s. I am the sole family member who has returned to the Traditional Latin Mass under the shepherding of the SSPV Fathers, a gift from God, I believe, and one that I have been unable to keep to myself.
After having learned about some of the unusual actions of the pope, specifically kissing the Koran in public, I have pointed out this, as well as some other quite unconscionable acts, to various siblings and friends. I usually get "shut down" and treated as a pariah, that I should "judge" the pope. Am I not merely judging (as I am required to) his actions as the leader of the Catholic Church, since I cannot see into his heart?
Fr. Moderator Replies.
You are correct. We cannot judge the heart, of course, but we have every right to judge external actions of the pope vis a vis the Roman Catholic Faith. Many of the Saints vilified the popes of their time, who corrupted their office: St. Catherine (who called the pope a coward), St. Gertrude (who called the pope a spiritual murderer), St. Augustine (who condemned the pope on oath for heresy in the public square). Because the pope can do more damage than anyone else, he must be criticized more harshly than anyone else. That is the Catholic theology of the matter.
We have every right to judge a pope by his external actions, as the papacy is an external office. The Novus Ordinarians certainly do when they criticize Pope Pius XII for, in their personal opinion, not being as anti-Germany as they think he should have been. Aren't they themselves judging the pope? Hypocrites! When the pope acts like a Protestant in public, or even a pagan, we have not only the right but the duty to censure him. This right is given us in Scripture and in Fathers and Doctors of the Church.
These relatives of yours are obviously ignorant of Church history. They probably don't know that one pope was excommunicated. They probably don't know that 40 popes personally taught heretical doctrine, according to dogmatic Vatican I. Catholics understandably are confused by the recent run of bad popes (Paul VI, John Paul II, some say John XXIII) after a run of good popes (Gregory XVI, Pius IX, Leo XIII, Pope St. Pius X, Benedict XV, Pius XI, Pius XII). However, there were many bad popes in previous centuries.
The touchstone of truth is not the person of the pope, but the Catholic and Apostolic Deposit of Faith, which the pope by his very office is held to. If he departs from it, we as Catholics have the duty to call him on it, so that he does not create scandal and confusion for others. John Paul II ranks with Paul VI as being the most scandalous pope in recent memory. One day he's a Buddhist, the next day an Indian Animist, the next day a Mohammedan.
But from evil, God brings good. This pope's errors are becoming so manifest that even the normally somnolent secular press is beginning to wake up to the fact that there is a large body of traditional Catholics who are opposing his modernistic ideas. The Novus Ordo structure continues to crumble, whereas traditional sites continue to grow. We've even got movie stars now arguing publicly for traditional Catholicism!
And the Novus Ordo bishops and their minions certainly don't withhold judgment from traditional Catholics. But what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. Now, the bishops are getting hit aside the head by even the liberal secular press. The Novus Ordo, including, sad to say, the pope himself, has been exposed as suborning perversion, by silence in many cases and by overt action in others. A pope who refuses to take any punitive action against his archbishop, who fornicates with a young man and then uses church funds to buy his silence, is a pope that has lost the respect of the Church, and the world.
Dear Fr. Moderator:
I was speaking to a Novus Ordo presbyter, who said that pro multis actually translates as for the many, not for many, as I claimed. Then he said that the many could be translated as all. This seems like splitting hairs. Is there a linguistic difference between the many and many in Latin or English?
Fr. Moderator Replies.
This presbyter is abysmally ignorant in both Greek and Latin. Did you know that the Novus Ordo seminaries in the United States reject the command of this pope, as well as that of his predecessors, to a full program of Latin in the seminaries? So much for Novus Ordo "obedience" to the pope!
Any first-year student knows that Latin has no definite article the. Whether you want to conceive of the passage as many or the many, the point is that it is not all. Greek has a definite article (hoi polloi), but it also has a separate expression for all (hoi pantes).
It would be typical of the Novus Ordo to try to equate many with all. Many mushrooms are lethal is a far cry from All mushrooms are lethal, whether in English, Latin, Greek, or Sanskrit. For Pete's sake, you don't have to be a linguistic scholar to see that.
The excellent Roman Catechism (not the Novus Ordo catechism of the 1980s), written after the Council of Trent principally by St. Charles Borromeo, treats the difference and the resultant dogma quite clearly. I refer you to that source for the Church's answer.
My, my. A little biblical reality and a little Latin, and doesn't the "Politically Correct" crowd go ballistic! It seems that Mel Gibson's film, which hasn't even been cut yet, can "fan religious animosity and misunderstanding." Well, it already has, but not against the Jews these PCers are worried about, but against traditional Catholics! The rapiers of these PCers have repeatedly jabbed at poor Mel, an espoused traditional Catholic, and even his father, whose conservative views are being constantly misquoted. Now, if Mel were Jewish, these same PCers would be screaming, "First Amendment! Artistic Freedom!"
According to an April 27 Los Angeles Times article, "[Novus Ordo] Catholics fear that Gibson might use his star power and clout to promote traditionalist [sic] views in his new movie. Jews worry that it might promote anti-Semitic feeling." It's perfectly OK for liberals to promote their perverted agenda, but the First Amendment doesn't apply to a traditional Catholic, even if he is one of Hollywood's most successful actors, directors, and producers with the people.
"Sister" Mary Boys, who teaches at a Protestant seminary in New York, lets slip what the real problem is here: "He can get his views into the media and has far more power in that sense than what the Church has." So, what it comes down to is that Novus Ordo bugaboo POWER! The Novus Ordo wants to control all propaganda. It knows darn well what would happen if a traditional Catholic got a chance at the microphone. And Mel Gibson is just the guy to grab the microphone.
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which would support any liberal cause, has asked for the anathema of "prior restraint." They want to censor the work before it is released. Are these Novus Ordo bishops hypocrites or what? Didn't we just see in Holy Week what such hypocrites did to Christ? They shouted, "Crucify him! Crucify him!" Believe me, Annas and Caiphas are still with us. Today they're just wearing the purple of the Novus Ordo bishops instead of the beehive headdress of the Pharisee priests.
Well, Mel, just tell those Jewish "scholars" and those Novus Ordo "scholars" that they are the bigots and that you are just going to let the movie speak for itself, as the Bible speaks for itself. You're the popular star. You're the popular director. You're the popular producer. Tell them that you had to put up with the likes of the liberalistic blasphemies of Priest, Last Temptation of Christ, Dogma, and the rest of that ilk, which "dump on" Christ, Christianity, the Church, and the holy priesthood. Tell them what hypocrites they are, when they want to censor traditional material, but will defend to the hilt the most prurient liberalistic trash. Controversy will be good for your film.
Oh, I almost forgot, Mel. Tell these bigots that you're going to use your profits from the film to build your traditional Roman Catholic cathedral in the Santa Monica hills. Tell them that you're going to outdo the Taj Mahony!
Dear Fr. Moderator:
It was interesting on the local news this weekend to hear that a predominantly Hispanic church was being merged into a predominantly Polish church here in our city. The Hispanic parish was the one losing "their" church, but they were assured that there would be two Spanish masses said on Sunday. One of the parishioners from the remaining church was complaining that the two Spanish masses were being given the "best" time slots, making it difficult for her to walk to her, now much earlier, mass.
In a sad way, the Novus Ordo hypocrisy make me chuckle. If the mass were the Traditional Latin Mass, it wouldn't matter who went to which one! So the Novus Ordo, vernacular "mass" is actually divisive, discriminatory and bigoted, whereas the Traditional Latin Mass is unifying, all-inclusive, and welcoming of all nations.
Vatican II could not have been that stupid. It must have realized that the vernacular use would never unify, but instead divide. The popes, even the post-conciliar popes, warned of that. The New Order talks about "diversity," but what is more appealing to all together than the language of the Church -- Latin? It seems obvious that, as Paul VI said, the Novus Ordo Church is auto-destructing. It is making way for the next phase, which is the One World Religion. The Novus Ordo was designed merely as a transitional measure to this end.
The New Vatican-planted disinformation that three of the SSPX bishops were going to apostatize to the New Order this month has now been denied by three of the four SSPX bishops and the General Secretary. One of the bishops actually seemed to be quoting directly from TRADITIO's published Commentary on that day, pointing to the possibility of a New Vatican disinformation campaign. TRADITIO was the first to draw attention to that possibility, which we think is not at all unlikely.
The New Vatican is getting desperate to win over traditional Catholics to its New Order. That campaign will fail. Even if some of the SSPX bishops apostatized to the New Order, there would be a schism within the SSPX, since the vast majority of SSPXers are against a phony "reconciliation" (it should be the New Vatican, after all, that "reconciles" itself to the Roman Catholic Faith). So if, let's say, two-thirds of SSPXers refused to go along with a Novus Ordoized SSPX, that two-thirds, plus the two-thirds of the Traditional Catholic Movement that is not associated with the SSPX, would leave about 90% of the Traditional Catholic Movement intact.
Nevertheless, certain weaknesses in the SSPX leadership have been exposed during this episode, particularly in the Chief Bishop. The April 25 interview he gave to Il Giornale should wake up members of the SSPX to the possibility of an anguis in herba.
It is obvious to TRADITIO that the SSPX Chief Bishop (apparently not representing at least two of the other SSPX bishops in this) is soft-pedalling the errors of the Novus Ordo to genuflect to the New Vatican establishment. Hoyos obviously is hankering for the papal white. Is the SSPX Chief Bishop hankering for the scarlet out of this? Are the two of them in league? Or is the Chief Bishop, unlike Abp. Lefebvre, just naive as to the dealings of the New Vatican? Perhaps not, but then again, the past record of the two of them doesn't rule it out of the question.
If the Chief Bishop and the SSPX had real guts, like the Romans who fought for the Church in its early centuries, they would mount a publicity campaign to expose the errors and corruption of the Novus Ordo sect and draw Catholics back to the true Roman Catholic Faith, Mass, and Sacraments instead of pandering to the errors. Think of a full-page expose every week in the New York Times: covering corruption of doctrine, corruption of the Mass, corruption of morality, corruption of once Catholic schools, corruption of once Catholic seminaries. Make the exposes factually undeniable (that would be easy) and boldly educational. TRADITIO still gets messages from people who don't know that there are Traditional Latin Masses all over the country and the world and that there is a Traditional Catholic Movement.
In any case, the very idea of a "reconciliation" between the Roman Catholic Faith and the New Order sect is ridiculous. It can never work. The SSPX sites remaining after the SSPX is broken up by internal schism would be knocking heads with Novus Ordo bishops who want no part of the Traditional Latin Mass, let alone having an SSPX dagger in their very groin. One thing the Novus Ordo bishops know is that they are the Fidel Castros of their own dioceses, and they don't brook any back-talk, even from the pope!
Moreover, the history of the last forty years cannot be overlooked. The SSPX has rightly been an enemy of the New Order dioceses and vice versa. A wave of the Hoyos wand will not change that. The animus would remain. There would be no peace: Novus Ordo bishops, indultarians, SSPXers would all be at one another's throats. This is the history. It's better having a clear line of demarcation: either you're Roman Catholic or you're Novus Ordo. And never the twain shall meet -- until the Novus Ordo converts to true Catholicism again.
Dear Fr. Moderator:
First of all, God bless you and your work. I have never felt closer to my Faith than since I began to understand the subtle aberrations that it has suffered over the years since 1965 as I was being brainwashed by the USA's Novus Ordo bishopric.
This is my question. I normally attend the Traditional Latin Mass offered by the good Fathers of the Society of St. Pius V (SSPV). However, they are unable to minister to our chapel one Sunday out of the month. Some (myself included) tend to miss Mass on that Sunday, sanctifying the day otherwise with a visit to the chapel, a Rosary prayed, and, in my case, I additionally read the Gospel for the day and then the appropriate sermon from The Sermons of St. Alphonsus.
Yesterday, however, I decided to go to the diocesan "indult" Mass nearby. I had been told by a long-standing member of my chapel that it was identical to the Traditional Latin Mass in form and substance, which surprised me. The Mass was a High Mass of "Mercy Sunday." There was no Absolution before Communion of congregation members (the priest proceeded directly to the Ecce Agnus Dei), and there was no Final Blessing. Am I daft, or was this omitted due to new Rubrics?
Fr. Moderator Replies.
You have given a good description of what is called a "pseduo-indult" Mass, which is a form becoming common in the Novus Ordo dioceses. It is not a Traditional Latin Mass and should not be attended because of the sacrilege and scandal involved.
TRADITIO from the beginning has warned about what would happen with the "indult" Mass, and those predictions are coming true. We said that once the "indult" started off not with the fully traditional Mass, but with the already "modernized" 1962 version, the "indult" Mass in various diocesan locales would over time assimilate themselves more and more Novus Ordo features, so that it could no longer be considered a Traditional Latin Mass. This is what you saw at the diocesan site.
First of all, the traditional calendar was spurned. April 27, 2003, was the Octave Day of Easter, known in English-speaking countries as Low Sunday, or in the Roman Missal as Dominica in Albis, because this was the day on which those baptized at the Easter Vigil put aside their white baptismal garments (Alba).
The Octave Day of a feast, particularly of the greatest feast, is a significant day in itself. Your "indult" site made the "Divine Mercy" cult, which was condemned even by Pope John XXIII, the focal point of the Mass, in total contravention of the focus of the traditional liturgy for that day, which is on the Resurrection of Our Lord and faith in His Divinity. No wonder the humanistic Novus Ordo diocese wanted to downplay that teaching! As Dom Gueranger, the noted Benedictine liturgical scholar, commented in his fifteen-volume Liturgical Year: "Such is the solemnity of this Sunday that not only is it of greater double rite, but no feast, however great, can ever be kept upon it." That is the Catholic attitude.
You also mentioned the omission of the Absolution before Communion. While it is true that this absolution was eliminated in 1962 version, theologians have pointed to the insidious implications of this omission. There are only three essential actions required for the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass: Offertory, Consecration, and Communion by the priest. In most eras of the Church, members of the congregation rarely received Communion, and such Communion is not even indicated in the Missale Romanum. They did not take Communion unless they had fully prepared for it; it was not a knee-jerk reaction, as it has become in post-conciliar times.
The Absolution is actually an injection from the rite of Communion Extra Missam. It separates the essential action of the priest's consumption of the Sacred Species from the optional reception by members of the congregation. Thus, it liturgically bespeaks the essential nature of the Catholic priesthood against the Protestant notion that "we're all priests." Again, no wonder the Novus Ordo dioceses wanted to eliminate the Absolution!
As to the omission of the Final Blessing, that again is a Novus Ordo intrusion. The Novus Ordo eliminated the Last Gospel, perhaps the most significant passage of the Holy Gospels, in which Our Lord's Divinity and Incarnation are so cogently expressed. Not satisfied with the elimination of the Last Gospel, the Novus Ordo went back farther, to eliminate even the Final Blessing under some circumstances.
If I were you, I'd consider this one-time attendance at a pseudo-indult Mass a "learning experience," proving to you that what you were already doing is the correct Catholic approach. If you don't have access to the true Mass one Sunday a month, in accordance with the practice of the English Recusants approved by Pope St. Pius V, keep holy the Lord's Day as best you can, and pray that one day you will have the true Mass every Sunday.
For those of you TRADITIO readers who have the true Mass every Sunday, never let a Mass go by without offering a heartfelt thanksgiving to the Lord. For you have the gift of what many around the world are praying night and day for. Not some "pseudo" Protestant service.
Return to Commentaries from the Mailbox.