by T. Stanfill Benns | Jun 24, 2022 | New Blog
+Feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus+
Gossip and insane conspiracy theories regarding the “demonic” nature of Fatima are still abounding on the Internet, especially among those posting on social media. Not content with defaming the Fatima apparitions, and in order to bolster their claims, this emerging heretical sect has lumped popes Leo XIII through Pius XII in with the current usurpers, making Pope Pius IX the last true pope. (The dogmatic impossibility of this ever happening was discussed in our last blog.) These current dissenters are following people once operating “Our Lady’s Resistance” (OLR) and “the empress of the home” (writing under the pseudonym Bernal Diaz). These actors have been called out on this site before for their errors and cowardly anonymity, so inimical to the courage of every saint who ever lived. Their book on Fatima and the “papal heresies,” The Lady of Fatima and the Antichrist, was released in 2018, but when an attempt to access the OLR website is made, it states the website closed that same year and a malware warning comes up on the screen. And these people call themselves Catholics?!!!
The specious objections to Fatima raised by OLR and their miscreant followers can and will eventually be addressed: a work has been underway for several years that will show that Fatima was meant to be taken in a symbolic, not a literal sense. That work should be ready for release when the site work now underway is completed. But the accusation that ALL popes after Pope Pius IX are heretics must be addressed here and now. These trumped-up heresies are stated as Pope Leo XIII ’s denial of the absolute nature of separation of Church and state and his teaching that God is the common Father of all, also that Christ died for all men. This even though “Diaz” has nothing whatsoever on which to base these claims of heresy and has taken papal quotes entirely out of their dogmatic and historical context. We begin below with God as the Father of all, something we learned as small children, which Diaz characterizes as heresy. From the Diaz book:
- Rerum Novarum, May 15, 1891
“All men are children of the same common Father, who is God; …EACH AND ALL are redeemed and made sons of God, by Jesus Christ, “
- Leo XIII’s Humanum Genus, 1884:
“[There is] …liberty, fraternity, and equality of right; not such as the Freemasons absurdly imagine, but such as Jesus Christ obtained for the human race and St. Francis aspired to: the liberty, We mean, of sons of God, through which we may be free from slavery to Satan or to our passions, both of them most wicked masters; the fraternity whose origin is in God, the common Creator and Father of all…”
- Leo XIII in Auspicato Concessum, #13, Sept. 17, 1882:
“Therefore has he [Saint Francis] deserved well of that brotherhood established and perfected by Jesus Christ, which has made of all mankind one only family, under the authority of God, the common Father of all.”
- Pope Pius X to the French Bishops, August 15, 1910, Our Apostolic Mandate:
Catholic doctrine further tells us that love for our neighbor flows from our love for God, Who is Father to all, and goal of the whole human family…”
All of the following teachings of the Church and Councils clearly show that nos. 1-4 above are not heresies, but the teachings of the Catholic Church:
God is the Father of all men and Christ died for all
Ephesians 4: 4-6
“One body and one Spirit: as you are called in one hope of your calling. One Lord, one faith, one baptism. ONE GOD AND FATHER OF ALL, who is above all, and through all, and in us all.”
The Council of Trent, Session 6, Ch. 2:
(Translated by the Rev. J. Waterworth from the official 1564 edition):
“The heavenly Father, the Father of mercies and the God of all comfort, when that blessed fullness of the time was come, sent unto men Jesus Christ His own Son — who hath been both before the law and during the time of the law to many of the holy Fathers announced and promised — that he might both redeem the Jews who were under the law and that the Gentiles who followed not after justice might attain to justice, AND THAT ALL MEN MIGHT RECEIVE THE ADOPTION OF SONS. Him God hath proposed as a perpetuator through faith in His blood for our sins AND NOT FOR OUR SINS ONLY, BUT ALSO FOR THOSE OF THE WHOLE WORLD.”
Errors of Quesnel
“But, since the observing of commandments and therefore of the conditions necessary for salvation is not within the reach of all, it is evident that neither the intention of God to save nor the efficacy of the sufferings of the Saviour extend to all mankind. So “all those whom God wishes to save through Christ are infallibly saved” (prop. 30, Cath. Encyclopedia; DZ 1380. Condemned as proximate to heresy by Clement XI.)
The Vatican Council, Sess. III, Ch. 2, Revelation
“The same Holy Mother Church holds and teaches that God, the beginning and end of all things, can be known with certitude by the natural light of human reason from created things; “for the invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen being understood by the things that are made” (Romans 1:20). Nevertheless it has pleased His wisdom and goodness to reveal Himself and the eternal decrees of His will TO THE HUMAN RACE in another and supernatural way as the apostle says “God who at sundry times and in divers manners, spoke in times past to the fathers by the prophets, last of all in these days has spoken to us by His Son” (Hebrews 1:1).
The Council of Trent, Session 6, Ch. 3:
“BUT THOUGH HE DIED FOR ALL, yet do not all receive the benefit of his death but those only unto whom the merits of His passion is communicated. For as in truth men, if they were not born propagated of the seed of Adam would not be born unjust — seeing that by the propagation they contract through Him when they are conceived in justice as their own so if they were not born again in Christ they never would be justified…”
HOW COULD CHRIST HAVE DIED FOR ALL, ACCORDING TO THE WILL OF HIS HEAVENLY FATHER, IF HIS FATHER LIKEWISE WAS NOT THE FATHER OF ALL?!
Errors of the Jansenists
Innocent X condemned the following five propositions in the Bull “Cum occasione” (31 May, 1653) which were as follows, (from the Catholic Encyclopedia, Jansenism):
• Some of God’s commandments are impossible to just men who wish and strive (to keep them) considering the powers they actually have, the grace by which these precepts may become possible is also wanting;
- In the state of fallen nature no one ever resists interior grace;
To merit, or demerit, in the state of fallen nature we must be free from all external constraint, but not from interior necessity,
- The Semipelagians admitted the necessity of interior preventing grace for all acts, even for the beginning of faith; but they fell into heresy in pretending that this grace is such that man may either follow or resist it;
- To say that Christ died or shed His blood for all men, is Semipelagianism.
“These five propositions were rejected as heretical, the first four absolutely, the fifth if understood in the sense that Christ died only for the predestined. All are implicitly contained in the second, and through it, all are connected with the above-mentioned erroneous conception of the state of innocence and the original fall.”
Christ died for all men, yet all do not receive the benefits of his Passion, as the Council of Trent states above. This is why Christ used the words pro multis (for many) in the Consecration of the wine, words which must be used in the Holy Sacrifice, for only those who have been baptized and have cooperated in His grace can receive His Body and Blood in the Eucharist.
Likewise God the Father made all of us in His image and likeness to know Him, love Him and serve Him in this world that we might be happy with Him in the next. He gave all of us an immortal soul and free will. This is from the basic Communion Catechism. But as with the Redemption, because our will is free, many reject Him. Yet no less may they rightly consider God their Father. To deny God is the Father of all is to deny He could send his Only-Begotten Son to die for all. The Trinity is indivisible; the wills of the Three Persons are one, hence identical.
Civil allegiance, separation of the Church from the State
First, there needs to be a general understanding of what separation of Church and state itself actually entails. There are two types of this separation, “according to the Encyclopedia Britannica: French and American. The French version is: ‘The attempt… not only to restrict the public role of the church but also to work toward its gradual disappearance. The church was to be replaced with a secular ideology’ (This model was later adopted by the Soviet Union and all communist nations under its sphere of influence…) The American form, ‘as implied in the Constitution of the United States, was supported by a tendency to leave to the church, set free from state supervision, a maximum freedom in the realization of its spiritual, moral, and educational tasks’ (https://completechristianity.blog/2020/08/23/a-catholic-understanding-of-the-separation-of-church-and-state/ but of course this is no longer the case, as the blogger points out. Progressives are tending to the French definition, and it is now becoming the norm. (Attribution here is given only for reference purposes. No endorsement of this site is intended.)
In the Diaz book, no background whatever is given for this, only the author’s own lame definition. But the historical background of this doctrine can be found in The Catholic Encyclopedia here: https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03794b.htm
This article quotes Immortale Dei, cited below, at length and explains that the Church’s actual position on the extent of civil power and how it operated had not even been decided until Pope Leo XIII wrote Immortale Dei. In other words, it was a matter that theologians were allowed to discuss freely from both sides of the question until the pope weighed in on one side or the other and decided the matter: THEN the discussion was closed. It was not something the Church had already taught in a manner that the faithful had to adhere to with a firm and irrevocable assent; this is pointed out in the Catholic Encyclopedia article link above. Distinctions of this kind are very important and are constantly ignored by Traditionalists. Cherry picking among these groups is their committed method of operation, and they do it in two ways. First, they cherry-pick the quotes from the popes that support their accusations of heresy, ignoring other documents that better explain the popes’ intent. Then they proceed to interpret what they have cherrypicked to arrive at the desired conclusion when, as pointed out in our last blog, no one is allowed to interpret papal encyclicals or documents. Below are highlighted quotes on the separation of the Church from the State, taken from the Diaz book, which claims to prove Leo XIII a heretic.
5. “Nor can We predict happier times for religion and government from the plans of those who desire vehemently to separate the Church from the state, and to break the mutual concord between temporal authority and the priesthood,” Gregory XVI, Mirari Vos.
6. Pope Pius IX, Syllabus of Errors, Condemned Proposition #55, Dec. 8, 1864, ex cathedra:
“The Church is to be separated from the state, and the state from the Church.” – CONDEMNED
Antipope Leo XIII [teaches]:
7. “Yet, no one doubts that Jesus Christ, the Founder of the Church, willed her sacred power to be distinct from the civil power, and each power to be free and unshackled in its own sphere …” Pope Leo XIII, Arcanum, Feb. 10, 1880
8. “The Church, indeed, deems it unlawful to place the various forms of divine worship on the same footing as the true religion, but does not, on that account, condemn those rulers who, for the sake of securing some great good or of hindering some great evil, allow patiently custom or usage to be a kind of SANCTION for each kind of religion having its place in the State. And, in fact, the Church is wont to take earnest heed that no one shall be forced to embrace the Catholic faith against his will, for, as St. Augustine wisely reminds us, “Man cannot believe otherwise than of his own will” (Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885).
To demonstrate the wickedness of the above allegations regarding the popes and demonstrate the cherry-picking, we present the following:
“Whatever is therefore, in things human is of a sacred character whatever belongs either of its own nature or by reason of the end to which it is referred, to the salvation of souls or to the worship of God, is subject to the power and judgment of the Church. Whatever is to be ranged under the civil and political order is subject to the civil authority. Jesus Christ Himself has given command that what is Caesar’s is to be rendered to Caesar, and that what belongs to God is to be rendered to God.” — Immortale Dei, 1885
“In fact, to wish that the State would separate itself from the Church would be to wish, by a logical sequence, that the Church be reduced to the liberty of living according to the law common to all citizens. It is true that in certain countries this state of affairs exists. It is a condition which, if it have numerous and serious inconveniences, also offers some advantages—above all when, by a fortunate inconsistency, the legislator is inspired by Christian principles—and,though these advantages cannot justify the false principle of separation nor authorize its defense, they nevertheless render worthy of toleration a situation which, practically, might be worse.” — Pope Leo XIII, Au milieu des sollicitudes, 1892
“That the State must be separated from the Church is a thesis absolutely false, a most pernicious error. …— Pope St. Pius X, Vehementer Nos, 1906
Not long before Pope Pius IX died he wrote the following in on March 12, 1877, an allocution on Royal Assent (DZ 1847): “…Very recently we have been forced to declare that the following can be tolerated that; the acts of the canonical institution of certain bishops be shown to a secular power so that as far as we could we might avert certain baneful consequences in which there was no longer question of the possession of temporal goods but of the consciences of the faithful, their peace, the care and salvation of souls which is the supreme law for us and which were called into open risk. But in this which we have done, in order to avoid most serious dangers, we wish it to be known publicly and again that we entirely disapprove and abominate that unjust law which is called royal assent declaring openly that by the divine authority to the church is harmed and its liberty violated.”
So given the above, it is clear that Pope Pius IX was already reluctantly adapting to the unfortunate circumstances in the world before his death. Pope Leo XIII in no. 7 above is also adjusting to these realities, relaxing the Church’s stance in order to keep some kind of peace with civil leaders. Keeping in mind, however, that as the Catholic Encyclopedia article above notes, HOW to deal with these matters was never a settled question! What were the popes supposed to do when the monarchies worldwide were being toppled and they had no control over what went on when anti-Catholic Protestant leaders or monarchs were placed in those positions? How were they supposed to enforce the rights of the Church without the cooperation of those heads of state? It is absolutely ridiculous to think there would have been any way for them to have done this. In his book on The Vatican Council Decrees and Their Bearing on Civil Allegiance (1875) Henry Cardinal Manning explains how all of this works and why it was not able to be enforced the way it should have been. Pope Pius IX and Leo XIII both upheld what the Church will always teach — there should be no separation of Church and state. But what neither pope could do is control what the state did in regards to the rights of the Church.
Henry Cardinal Manning on moral impossibility
Cardinal Manning was one of the most trusted advisors of Pope Pius IX. He made an oath of fealty to him to see the Vatican Council through to its successful conclusion. He wrote his work on Civil Allegiance during Pope Pius IX’s reign so it cannot be said that he was simply falling in line with what Leo XIII did not even write until 10 years later. His comments below reveal that he was well aware of the dilemma that faced the Church in this regard.
(From the Introduction)
“• That the relations of the Catholic Church to the Civil Powers of the world have been immutably fixed from the beginning, inasmuch as they arise out of the Divine Constitution of the Church, and out of the Civil Society of the natural order.
“• That any collisions now existing have been brought on by changes, not on the part of the Catholic Church, much less of the Vatican Council, but on the part of the Civil Powers, and that by reason of a systematic conspiracy against the Holy See.
“• That by these changes and collisions the Civil Powers of Europe are destroying their own stability.
“• That the motive of the Vatican Council in defining the Infallibility of the Roman Pontiff was not any temporal policy, nor was it for any temporal end; but that it defined that truth in the face of all temporal dangers, in order to guard the Divine deposit of Christianity, and to vindicate the divine certainty of faith.
“The command of our Lord to the Apostles: ‘Go ye into the whole world and preach the Gospel to every creature: he that believeth and is baptised shall be saved, but he that believeth not shall be condemned,’ clearly invests the Church with authority to baptise every creature. But the exercise of this right was suspended upon a moral condition. It conveyed no right to baptise any man against his will; nor without an act of faith on his part. But an act of faith is a spontaneous and voluntary act of submission, both of intellect and will, to the truth, and to the teacher who delivers it. The absolute and universal authority therefore of the Church to baptise depends upon the free and voluntary act of those who believe, and, through their own spontaneous submission, are willing to be baptised. The Church so regards the moral conditions on which its acts depend, that as a rule it will not even suffer an infant to be baptised unless at least one of the parents’ consents.
“In like manner the power of absolution, which has no limit of time or of subject, can be exercised only upon those who are willing. Confession and contrition, both voluntary acts of the penitent, are absolutely necessary to the exercise of the power of the Keys. This principle will solve many questions in respect to the Spiritual authority of the Church over the Civil State. First, it shows that, until a Christian world and Christian Rulers existed, there was no subject for the exercise of this spiritual authority of judgment and correction. Those who amuse themselves by asking why St. Peter did not depose Nero, will do well to find out whether people are laughing with them or at them. Such questions are useful. They compendiously show that the questioner does not understand the first principles of his subject. If he will find out why St. Peter neither baptised nor absolved Nero, he will have found out why he did not depose him. Until a Christian world existed there was no apta materia for the supreme judicial power of the Church in temporal things. Therefore St. Paul laid down as a rule of law that he had nothing to do in judging those that were without the unity of the Church.
“But when a Christian world came into existence, the Civil society of man became subject to the Spiritual direction of the Church. So long, however, as individuals only subjected themselves, one by one, to its authority, the conditions necessary for the exercise of its office were not fully present. The Church guided men, one by one, to their eternal end; but as yet the collective society of nations was not subject to its guidance. It is only when nations and kingdoms become socially subject to the supreme doctrinal and judicial authority of the Church that the conditions of its exercise are verified. When the senate and people of the Roman Empire were only half Christian, the Church still refrained from acts which would have affected the whole body of the State. When the whole had become Christian, the whole became subject to the Divine Law, of which the Roman Pontiff was the supreme expositor and executive.
“Pius IX, on July 20, 1871, thus addressed a Literary Society in Rome: ‘In the variety of subjects which will present themselves to you, one appears to me of great importance at this time; and that is, to defeat the endeavours which are now directed to falsify the idea of the Infallibility of the Pope. Among all of her errors, that is malicious above all which would attribute (to the Infallibility of the Pope) the right of deposing sovereigns, and of absolving people from the obligation of allegiance. This right, without doubt, has been exercised by the Supreme Pontiffs from time to time in extreme cases, but it has nothing to do with the Pontifical Infallibility; neither does it flow from the Infallibility, but from the authority of the Pontiff. Moreover, the exercise of this right in those ages of faith which respected in the Pope that which he is, that is to say, the Supreme Judge of Christendom, and recognised the benefit of his tribunal in the great contentions of peoples and of sovereigns, was freely extended (by aid, as was just, of public jurisprudence, and the common consent of nations) to the gravest interests of States and of their rulers.‘
“Now, the Holy Father in these words has abundantly shown two things: first, that they who connect Infallibility with the Deposing Power are talking of what they do not understand; and, secondly, that the moral conditions which justified and demanded the deposition of tyrannical Princes, when the medieval world was both Christian and Catholic, have absolutely ceased to exist, now that the world has ceased to be Catholic, and has ceased to be even Christian. It has withdrawn itself socially as a whole, and in the public life of nations, from the unity and the jurisdiction of the Christian Church. In this it differs altogether from the mediaeval world. And it differs also from the ancient world. For, the ancient world had never yet believed the faith; the modern world has believed, but fallen from its faith. The ancient world was without the unity of the Christian Church de facto et de jure. The modern world is without de facto; and this has changed all the moral conditions of the subject” (and here Manning merely repeats scholastic teaching on this subject, as Revs. McHugh and Callan state in their work on Moral Theology: “
“In cases of physical impossibility (i.e., when the powers requisite for observance are wanting), one is manifestly excused; for law is reasonable, and it is not reasonable to require impossibilities. In cases of moral impossibility (i.e., when a law cannot be kept without the infringement of a higher law or the loss of a higher good), one is also excused; for it is unreasonable to prefer the less to the more important” (#317, a and b).
To resume Cardinal Manning’s comments: “If Catholics were in power tomorrow in England, not a penal law would be proposed, nor the shadow of constraint be put upon the faith of any man. We would that all men fully believed the truth; but a forced faith is a hypocrisy hateful to God and man. If Catholics were in power to-morrow, not only would there be no penal laws of constraint, but no penal laws of privation. If the Ionian Islands had elected, some years ago, to attach themselves to the Sovereignty of Pius IX., the status of the Greek Church separate from Catholic Unity would have been tolerated and respected. Their Churches, their public worship, their Clergy, and their religious rites would have been left free as before. They were found in possession, which was confirmed by the tradition of centuries ; they had acquired Civil rights, which enter into the laws of political justice, and as such would have been protected from all molestation.
“Our older writers, such as Bellarmine and Suarez, when treating of this subject, had before their eyes a generation of men who all had been in the unity of the faith. Their separation therefore was formal and willful. Their separation from the unity of the Church did not release the conscience from its jurisdiction. But if Bellarmine and Suarez were living at this day, they would have to treat of a question differing in all its moral conditions. What I have here laid down is founded upon the principles they taught, applied to our times. Cardinal Tarquini, in treating the same matter, has dealt with it as it has been treated here. —Juris Eccl. Publ., Institutiones, p. 78.” And this is what the Catholic Encyclopedia is referring to in the link above on civil allegiance. Cardinal Manning beat them to the punch.
Conclusion: Helter-Skelter
One reader has aptly summed all of this up in two words: Helter-Skelter. He notes well that the meaning of this word is undue haste, confusion and disorder, all of which describes the actions of those demonizing Fatima and the Roman Pontiffs. For all we are seeing today is the constant fulmination of sect after diabolical sect intent on destroying what remains of the Church. Many also will recognize this as the title of the book on cult leader Charles Manson, published many years ago, and that too is significant, given the history behind the title. To Beatle Paul McCartney, who wrote the song by this same name, it meant the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, the complete demise of society. But Manson took it one step further; to him it represented a subliminal message to rise and kill, to be an active agent of that demise. It might do well to mention here the number 666, which verbally symbolizes divide, divide, divide, a perfect definition of all the schismatic sects down through history and right up to Traditionalism, including the one now under discussion. This is the number of the mystical body of the Devil, as described by St. Thomas Aquinas:
“There are two mystical bodies in this world: The Mystical Body of Christ and the mystical body of the Devil or of the Antichrist. To one or another every man belongs. The Mystical Body of Christ is the Holy Church, His pure and faithful Spouse …. The mystical body of the Devil is the ensemble of impious men. Like an adulterous wet nurse, it nourishes this ensemble. The Devil is its head, and the evil persons are its members …. ‘The body of the Devil,’ says St. Gregory, ‘is composed by all the impious men… Just as Christ, in Himself and through His disciples, always seeks to cut off the members of the Devil and incorporate them to Himself.… so also does the Devil. By his efforts and those of his cohorts, the Devil aims to amputate the members of Christ to unite them to the sordid members of his prostitute …’”
So we know where this attack came from. And no, we are not out to destroy anyone’s reputation; that has already been done by the actors themselves. Their inability to understand the written word, their refusal to conduct proper research, their ignorance of, and even contempt for, the Catholic faith and their malicious — yes malicious — intent to deceive others has made this refutation necessary. It is not personal; it is about the Church and the papacy we love and are bound to defend. Let the heathen rage; God will ever be with His Church unto the consummation of the world. Nothing — and no one — can keep us from the love of Christ.
Addenda
The one defaming Pope Leo XIII also just tweeted:
“The Sacred Heart won’t continue to be mocked by these Workers of Iniquity who mislead others into believing LIES! Stop excusing the inexcusable!!!”
Betrayedcatholics responds:
Stop YOUR lies! From Pope Leo XIII’s Longinqua Oceani, 1895, to the Church in the United States : “It would be very erroneous to draw the conclusion that in America is to be sought the type of the most desirable status of the Church or that it would be universally lawful or expedient for State and Church to be, as in America, dissevered and divorced.” No endorsement of separation of Church and state here!
The one defaming Pope Leo XIII further tweeted:
“This is not Assisi, this was not JP2. THIS NONSENSE IS ALL THE MAKING OF LEO 13!!” (Commenting on an ecumenical gathering attended by Cardinal Gibbons and other U.S. Church officials which she insinuates Pope Leo XIII endorsed.)
Betrayedcatholics responds:
This was later condemned by the pope in his encyclical below, oh clueless one. Where are your hard facts? All you have is tweets and twerps. Provide readers with the WHOLE document like a real Catholic, not your stupid cherry-picked snippets.
https://www.papalencyclicals.net/Leo13/l13teste.htm (Testem Benevolentiae, addressed personally to Cardinal Gibbons!)
Here are just a few of those hard facts for you, excerpted from the link above, since you will not provide them yourself:
“…This letter is not intended, as preceding ones, to repeat the words of praise so often spoken, but rather to call attention to some things to be avoided and corrected… It is intended to suppress certain contentions which have arisen lately among you to the detriment of the peace of many souls.
“The underlying principle of these new opinions is that, in order to more easily attract those who differ from her, the Church should shape her teachings more in accord with the spirit of the age and relax some of her ancient severity and make some concessions to new opinions. Many think that these concessions should be made not only in regard to ways of living, but even in regard to doctrines which belong to the deposit of the faith. They contend that it would be opportune, in order to gain those who differ from us, to omit certain points of her teaching which are of lesser importance, and to tone down the meaning which the Church has always attached to them.
“It does not need many words, beloved son, to prove the falsity of these ideas if the nature and origin of the doctrine which the Church proposes are recalled to mind. Let it be far from anyone’s mind to suppress for any reason any doctrine that has been handed down. Such a policy would tend rather to separate Catholics from the Church than to bring in those who differ. There is nothing closer to our heart than to have those who are separated from the fold of Christ return to it, but in no other way than the way pointed out by Christ.”
POPE LEO XIII IS CONDEMNING ABOVE EXACTLY WHAT YOU ARE ACCUSING HIM OF ENDORSING! Purveyor of error! Enemy of truth!
by T. Stanfill Benns | Jun 21, 2022 | New Blog
St. Aloysius Gonzaga+
Because those posting on social media simply refuse to obey the teachings of the Roman Pontiffs that private apparitions and revelations must not be treated with derision and/or contempt once they have been approved by the Church, we are forced once again to address attacks on Fatima (see https://www.keepandshare.com/doc18/25945/rodriguez-rebuttal-1-pdf-326k?da=y and https://www.keepandshare.com/doc18/25946/rodriguez-rebuttal-2-pdf-539k?da=y). One can choose not to believe such revelations and even to believe they are not of divine origin. But no one can publicly or privately deride them or treat them with contempt. It scarcely needs to be said that if the Church was here to guide us today it is doubtful anyone would be allowed to discuss or debate religious topics on social media, if we were allowed to use it at all! The reasons should be obvious but unfortunately to some they are not. Religious topics are ordinarily off bounds for the majority of the laity, who would need to receive special permission from the bishop to even print. While Pope Pius XII has given the laity permission in the absence of the hierarchy to assume many of their duties, including the defense of the faith, this permission must be interpreted strictly and engaged in with the greatest caution and reverence.
This obsession with Fatima as a “demonic” apparition that supposedly signaled rot in the Church decades prior to Our Lady’s appearance at Fatima has, predictably, escalated to involve the rejection of all popes reigning after Pope Pius IX as false popes. This was necessary for these Fatima deniers in order to justify their errors and escape the accusation that they are not Catholic for refusing to obey the popes in refraining from demonizing — literally — the apparitions. The primary promoter of this base calumny apparently subscribes to the work of one “Bernal Diaz,” (a pseudonym; generally, only cowards and hucksters, not Catholics, write under assumed names), as the basis for the rejection of Fatima and the Roman Pontiffs. The deluded follower of this man and promoter of Fatima as demonic has publicly stated this author (man, woman?) she follows is a Catholic, but offers no proof whatsoever for this. And none can be found anywhere on the Internet. The most disturbing aspect of all this is the repeated insistence — with absolutely nothing to back it besides speculation, far less “proofs” of any kind as the promoter pretends — that demon worship and cooperation with the demonic on the part of the seers was involved. I speak with St. Teresa of Avila, who wrote in her biography:
“I do not understand those terrors which make us cry out, Satan, Satan! when we may say, God, God! and make Satan tremble. Do we not know that he cannot stir without the permission of God? What does it mean? I am really much more afraid of those people who have so great a fear of the devil, than I am of the devil himself. Satan can do me no harm whatever, but they can trouble me very much…”
And to this I say a resounding, “Amen.” Whenever we see something this pernicious that has so violently seized the minds of those who once walked along the straight path, we can quite rightly suspect that such a thing itself is from the devil. As an article on the Fisheaters forum explains, “Sometimes demons, including Satan himself, and the souls of damned humans go beyond merely tempting a person, and wage a more intense assault. This sort of assault can happen to those who give the Devil an “entree” into their lives by willfully engaging in sin, playing with heresy, becoming inordinately interested in the occult (“occult” meaning “hidden” and referring to those things naturally veiled from us)… Certain forms of mental illness can be caused by or attract the demonic. When demons see weakness, they attack, and some of our mentally ill are victims of the diabolical…” And there also exist in those obsessed “…all of the [other] things that go with obsession, such as illnesses, unexplainable pain, what appears to be incessant, incredibly ‘bad luck,’ etc.” https://www.fisheaters.com/praeternaturalworld4.html
The Popes may be judged by no one
Most sorrowful in all of this is the attack on the popes based on maliciously misconstrued and misunderstood quotes taken entirely out of context, and with no historical perspective provided to better understand what is being discussed and why. Diaz and his follower(s) violate a condemned proposition of the Church, that “The judgment of the Apostolic See, whose authority is not surpassed, is to be disclaimed by no one, nor is anyone permitted to pass judgment on its judgment,” (Vatican Council, Dogmatic Constitution Pastor Aeternus, DZ 1830). In his infallible 1559 bull Cum ex Apostolatus Officio, Pope Paul IV teaches: “The Roman Pontiff, who is Vicar of God and of Jesus Christ on earth, holds fullness of power over peoples and. kingdoms, and judges all, but can be judged by no one in this world…” He then goes on to explain exactly how and when such a man can be considered a heretic, and it is NOT when he is in office, but only prior to his election. The Vatican Council forever precluded the possibility that the Roman Pontiff could speak heresy as a validly elected pope, and the only thing that could effectively invalidate a papal election, Pope Paul IV teaches, is the invalid election of one who was an apostate, heretic or schismatic.
This is confirmed by St. Robert Bellarmine here as well as the eminent theologian Rev. Felix Capello, De Curia Romana iuxta Reformationem a Pio X, vol. II: De Curia Romana “Sede Vacante” (Rome: Fridericus Pustet, 1912) as quoted by NovusOrdoWatch (https://novusordowatch.org/tag/felix-cappello/)
- “[Pope] Gelasius in his epistle to the bishops of Dardania says: “The Church throughout the world knows that the holy Roman see has the right to judge all, and that nobody is permitted to pass judgment on its judgment.”
- “[Pope] Nicholas I in his epistle to Michael writes: “It is perfectly clear that the judgment of the Apostolic See, whose authority is excelled by none other, is not to be reviewed by anyone.”
- “[Pope] Gregory [Lib. 9, epist. 39 ad Theotistam.]: “If Blessed Peter, he says, when he was blamed by the faithful, had paid attention to the authority that he had received in holy Church, he could have responded: let the sheep not dare to reprimand their pastor.”
- “[Pope] Boniface VIII [In extrav. Viam sanctam, tit. de maiorit. et obedient.]: “If, he says, an earthly power goes wrong, it is to be judged by the spiritual power. If the spiritual goes wrong, the lesser [is judged] by the greater, but if the supreme [power goes wrong, it is judged] by God alone, for it cannot be judged by man.”
“In light of all this, with good reason we conclude that the opinion that affirms that the Roman Pontiff cannot become a heretic even as a private doctor, is most probable, indeed according to our judgment is entirely certain” (end of Capello quote).
As someone writing about theological issues, I have tried my best to follow the teachings of the Church on these matters. I have used as my guide the rules found here, provided by Msgr. Joseph C. Fenton. “Proper reasoning and the correct and adequate use of sources” is essential to theological procedure, Fenton wrote. “In demonstrations from reason, the thesis of theological propositions must remain as the legitimate and certain conclusion. Too many would-be theologians today become entangled in the web of modern thinking and abandon logic as well as Catholic principles in proving their arguments.” Only Catholic truth assisted by right reason can safely arrive at the desired destination or conclusion. Obedience to the ordinary magisterium must be observed at all times. And these cautions pretty well define all that has plagued those defaming Fatima on social media. Logic and Catholic principles are not being observed, right reason has been abandoned and no one is obeying the magisterium.
Those pretending to conduct research on matters Catholic and publish their “findings” without adhering to these standards are scandalizing and misleading fellow Catholics. They are to be exposed and corrected for the good of the faithful and the Church does not just allow this, She demands it (Canons 1324, 1325, 1935). After the fashion of the worldlings they pander to, the Fatima deniers do not even follow the standards of secular scholarship, far less Catholic scholarship, in what they publish. To borrow material from what will later be posted as a new article on the revised website, these secular standards include failing to obtain the proper training (competence), maintaining objectivity, offering projects for criticism and review, respecting colleagues and treating them fairly, conducting research according to established standards, properly evaluating evidence and available sources, considering counter-evidence, exercising great care in making judgments and refraining from allowing emotions or bias to influence what one is writing/researching. And all these standards are currently available online from several different sources for those who care to write ethically and morally.
Hokum and hysteria
It should seem pretty clear to those who have read the false claims about Fatima by Diaz and his minions that all the principles above, Catholic and secular, have been violated. Research standards demand that as many primary and secondary sources be used as possible. The Fatima bunch has rejected nearly all those sources as tainted by actors unknown working to destroy the Church, their excuse for not resorting to them to establish the proper chronology and background of the apparitions or the seers. No evidence of this is provided. Inaccurate statements made that could be easily checked out are repeated over and over again and never corrected. Any evaluation of contrary evidence is always made in favor of the authors’ opinion that Fatima was satanic in origin and no mention is made of anything true and good that came from the apparitions. No alternative explanations are considered nor is it noted that the younger children died as Our Lady predicted, or that World War II came as predicted on the heels of an unprecedented light display in the skies, also foretold by Our Lady. The Holy Father certainly had a great deal to suffer, and the consecration would be done but it would be “too late;” Russia would spread her errors. And those errors were not just about Communism. No counter-evidence is allowed because the devil himself and the spiritists arranged everything in advance — they all hitched a ride in a UFO and dropped an alien in a mini-skirt on top of the holm oak in the Cova de Iria.
This is hokum and hysteria, not reason and logic. It can be attributed to minds obsessed with the devil, also preoccupied with modern day psychic phenomena married to conspiracy theories on steroids. Shades of Q and other insanities. This speculative and undocumented attack on Fatima is primarily based on anti-Catholic “literature,” false suppositions, and the unofficial notes of a priest of questionable credibility (the seers’ parish priest was accused of possibly cooperating with the Freemasons who kidnapped the children, was known to dislike and distrust the seers and later abandoned his parish). But this is what passes as “research” in works that would be condemned today if we had a true pope. These people are unrelentingly vicious in their insistence that this apparition is “satanic.” They actually seem to relish the outrage they inspire among their fellow Catholics who for years have been devoted to Fatima, faithfully practiced what Our Lady requested there, and have incorporated details of the apparitions and messages into their meditations and prayer life. Worst of all, this scandalous and uncatholic behavior is coming from people pretending to be practicing pray-at-home believers. The most egregious of all is the denouncement of true popes and the violation of the papal prohibitions for casting contempt on apparitions and revelations approved by the Church. Needless to say, no one who dares to disobey the popes could ever count themselves as truly Catholic.
Liberal Catholics parading as ultra-conservatives
What mental aberrations could possibly explain how the mind of anyone identifying as Catholic could become so twisted such a person could actually believe there is a Catholic Church outside of papal obedience? We decry it in Traditionalists, then discover it in our own midst? Where is this noxious plague coming from? Msgr. Joseph C. Fenton explained its source in great detail long ago, and his conclusions may astonish many who believe they can identify religious-wise as “ultra-conservatives.” He traces it to the appearance of liberal Catholicism in the early 1800s and its later evolution as full-blown Modernism in the latter part of that century. His description of the essence of Catholic liberalism is precise and easily understood: religious toleration and indifferentism. But as liberal Catholicism developed, and subsequently was condemned repeatedly by successive popes, it used pretexts to avoid these condemnations in order to more easily embed tendencies among Catholics receptive to their ideas.
As Fenton relates, “This group was practically driven to the adoption of minimism and to the claim that the Catholic Church’s dogmatic teachings changed over the course of the years and acquired new meanings quite different from the interpretations which the teaching Church had originally given. If this group wished to present as teachings acceptable to loyal Catholics some tenets which had obviously forcefully and frequently been repudiated by the popes, they were bound to try to convince their dupes that, within this area at least, people could reject or ignore these papal rejections of liberal Catholicism while still remaining loyal Catholics. There were only two plausible reasons that could be offered: either for some reason or other the papal pronouncements against liberal Catholicism were such that they did not require assent from loyal Catholics or the meaning which the Church attached to these statements had changed with the passing of the years.
“Minimalism was the first alternative; the false theory of the transformistic development of dogma the second. Ultimately theological minimalism was a device employed by liberal Catholics to make the rejection of authoritative papal teaching on any point appear to be good Catholic practice. Sometimes it took the crass form of a claim that Catholics are obligated to accept and to hold only those things which had been defined by the explicit decrees or the Ecumenical Councils or of the Holy See. This attitude unfortunately manifest in a Congress of theologians of which Dollinger [the schismatic Old Catholic bishop from Germany] was the leading spirit. It was condemned by Pope Pius the IX in his letter Tuas Libentur” (“The Components of Liberal Catholicism, The American Ecclesiastical Review, July, 1958). Fenton notes further that a crasser form of minimism was found in the objections to the definitions of papal infallibility, and that the Rambler group in England headed by John Henry Cardinal Newman also promoted it, if only in a more subtle manner. By the time Pope St. Pius X condemned the full development of liberal Catholicism in his Pascendi and Lamentibili, Modernist tendencies had already become firmly entrenched among modern Catholics, especially in the U.S., to emerge as full-blown Modernism and ecumenism in the 1950s-60s.
We are not surprised to find that the premier Old Catholic bishop Dollinger, who rejected the dogma of infallibility, was at the head of this movement. For he and his ilk were supporters of the Gallicanist heresy and Traditionalists are only refashioned Old Catholics with a new and misleading name. They have no pope as their head and have been ignoring and misrepresenting papal documents for decades. In fact they have gone even farther than liberal Catholics by questioning, even fabricating, the documents of the Council of Trent and unquestionably infallible papal encyclicals. Call themselves what they will, Traditionalists — and this includes Sedevacantists — are really liberal Catholics parading as conservative promoters of Catholicism. They may be politically and socially conservative — cultural Catholics only — but dogmatically and in reality they are liberals. Give them another generation and their children will be full-blown Modernists; then Vatican 2 will start looking good. As Perry Mason once said, history doesn’t really repeat itself; people just try to repeat history. And we know who these people are.
Trashing of papal decrees by Traditionalists
In another article, Msgr. Fenton explains exactly how liberal Catholics even in his day attempted to interpret and minimize papal documents and condemns this onerous practice. Traditionalists have learned well from them. He begins by stating that the whole of theologians then existing, in the Church of the 1940s, agreed that all the teachings found in papal encyclicals, “merit at least an internal religious assent from all Catholics.” He then goes on to describe a tendency that had developed among theologians to act as though they are qualified “to distinguish two elements in the content of the various encyclicals. One element would be the deposit of genuine Catholic teaching which of course all Catholics are bound to accept at all times. The other element would be a collection of notions current at the time the encyclicals were written. These notions, which would enter into the practical application of the Catholic teaching, are represented as ideas which Catholics can afford to overlook.
The men who have adopted this mentality imagine they can analyze the content of an individual encyclical or of a group of encyclicals in such a way that they can separate the pronouncements which Catholics are bound to accept from those which would have merely an ephemeral value. Today’s theologians would then tell the Catholic people to receive the Catholic principles and to do as they liked about the other elements. When a private theologian ventures to analyze these statements and claims to find a Catholic principle on which the Holy Father’s utterance is based and some contingent mode according to which the Sovereign Pontiff has applied this Catholic principle in its own pronouncement, the only effective doctrinal authority is that of the private theologian himself… [But] the Holy Father’s authority stands behind his own individual statements precisely as they are found in the encyclicals… The private theologian is obligated and privileged to study these documents to arrive at an understanding of what the Holy Father actually teaches and then to aid in the task of bringing this body of truth to the people. The Holy Father however, not the private theologian, remains the doctrinal authority. The theologian is expected to bring out the content of the Pope’s actual teaching, not to subject that teaching to the type of criticism he would have a right to impose on the writings of another private theologian” (“The Doctrinal Authority of Papal Encyclicals,” The American Ecclesiastical Review, September, 1949).
Msgr. Fenton then points out that this tendency to interpret and critique papal documents can be traced back to Cardinal Newman, a promoter of doctrinal minimism. He warns of its dangers and as always upholds the supreme doctrinal authority and rights of the Roman Pontiff. What we have read above is exactly what we see among Sedevacantists and other Traditionalists vainly attempting to justify their existence minus a Roman Pontiff. Their crude attempts are even more grievous since they are not even properly trained clerics, or clerics at all, far less theologians. But what all of this does is simply highlight the reason why even those professing to keep the faith at home wind up derailing their own spiritual train. They presume to critique the teachings of the Roman Pontiffs and either determine they may ignore those teachings or that in these times, in their situation, they do not apply. Therefore they are no better than the Traditionalists they pretend to condemn or any of the other schismatics who went before them.
Work out your salvation in fear and trembling
It is a sad day when we see those we have worked with side by side and considered fellow Catholics descend to something so low as the public characterization of a Church-approved apparition as satanic. It greatly grieves those who have their best spiritual interests at heart to see them join the very forces raging against the Church, those forces spreading filthy anti-Catholic literature across the Internet. But as Mother Mary Potter wisely wrote, “You have wondered perhaps when you have heard of the falling away from the Church of even the very good. You have sorrowed perhaps over some sad instance — it may be in your own family or community — of some unhappy soul for whom the temptations of the age have been too strong. Yes, we have wondered at it; we are thoughtless and careless. We do not fear for others till we see them fall but we are not wise. Did not our dear Lord “fear” for us? We should be wiser if we did FEAR more and wonder less” (Path of Mary, 1878; emph. Mother Potter’s).
Those liberal Catholics who today ignore the teachings of the Roman Pontiffs would do well to heed the words of Pope Leo XII, quoted from Msgr. Fenton’s article: “[God’s]… judgments are incomprehensible. God who destroys the wisdom of the wise seems to have handed over the men who are enemies of His Church and who despise the supernatural revelation into a reprobate sense and into that mystery of iniquity that is written on the forehead of the shameless woman described by [Saint] John. For what iniquity can there be greater than that of these proud men who not only have fallen away from the true religion but who use every kind of pretext and use words and writings filled with deceit to turn the unwary away from the true religion also. May God rise up and restrain, destroy and bring to nothing this licentious kind of speech, writing and publication” (Ubi primum, 1824).
by T. Stanfill Benns | Jun 16, 2022 | New Blog
+Feast of Corpus Christi+
It will be 18 years ago June 25 since my mother passed away, God rest her dear soul. The year she died, my siblings, my husband and I spent most of that summer emptying out her home of 38 years and doing some minor repairs before it was put up for sale. While cleaning things out, I stumbled across her hope chest in the basement, originally handmade for my grandmother. As a child I knew that she had always kept important things in that chest, things from her childhood – a few toys, childhood knick-knacks, dresses she had worn while dating my father, favorite jewelry from the 1940s, her wedding cake topper and her wedding dress, my father’s WWII uniform and memorabilia. They were all still there, in the order I always remembered. And in the top section there were some trays that held odds and ends.
Programs from sports events and plays, awards she had won, a few pictures. And then at the bottom I found something that startled me — a small white booklet from the parish where I made my First Communion and a larger green booklet with an ugly black and white church splattered across the front of it. I knew what they were. It took me back to one Sunday when I noticed a pile of the green books at the end of the pew in our church and picked one up to look at it. My mother took one too, made a face at the ugly, modern cover, then looked through it. She used it for Mass and tucked one in her purse to take home. The next time we went to church she took out her missal and told me to use my missal, not the green books. I never thought much about it. But knowing she didn’t like that book but kept it in a place she considered important all those years intrigued me.
So I took them home and one day decided to look through them closely to see if anything jumped out at me. They were both dated January 1959. That piqued my interest. They were dialogue Mass books issued after that particular form of Mass was approved shortly before Pope Pius XII died, with responses the laity could recite. I turned to the Canon and coursed through it, then the Consecration. And it was there that I saw what must have prompted my mother to keep those books. On the left was the Latin, and I checked — it read pro multis. On the right I did a double take: the English read “for all men.” I checked the little white booklet and it read exactly the same. It took awhile for the implications to fully sink in, for finally I had proof of what I had always suspected: Roncalli played a much larger role in destroying the Mass than previously known.
I read the Instruction Sacred Music and the Sacred Liturgy issued Sept. 3, 1958 a little more than a month before Pope Pius’ death. It stated that all Pope St. Pius X’s instructions on Gregorian chant still remained in force. It cautioned that only choirs trained to sing Gregorian chant and “more modern sacred music,” should be allowed to sing during the Mass, in keeping with “the dignity, seriousness and sanctity of the liturgy.” Pius was clear in stating that the participation in the Holy Sacrifice could be either interior or exterior, as determined by the individual. He especially emphasized interior devotion and orders that the faithful be instructed by their pastors regarding how to participate in the Mass, according to the Council of Trent. This in order to “achieve the chief purpose of this participation, which is a more complete worship of God and the edification of the faithful.”
But there was nothing in that instruction that referred specifically to the formula used for the Consecration of the wine. In the white booklet above, it is clear that an attempt was made to make it appear that the booklet issued was attributable to Pius XII, which implies approval of the translation “for all men.” It was Roncalli’s job to see to it that the people were desensitized to this false translation long before it was included in the Novus Ordo Missae. It was up to him to see that the “people of God” began to believe what they were praying, so that later they could simply pray what they believed. My mother knew the difference. She had attended Catholic schools until the age of 14 when she quit school to help support her mother and disabled brother. She never attended college, but she knew. I remember Mom talking about her altar society meetings in the late fifties, early sixties and how so many of the women were involved in the liturgical renewal movement; she could never figure out why they thought anything about the Mass should be changed. And when the Mass did change in 1969, she told us the Communists had gotten into the Church somehow and we couldn’t go there anymore.
When the controversy first began about the Novus Ordo Missae, it was about validity. Was the NO mass valid? Were the new ordination and episcopal rites valid? If the fix had not already set in with those who remained in the NO, the answers would have been very simple. And for Traditionalists, if their know-it-all “clergy” had kept their mouths shut, we would have had an easier time making up our own minds. But that is not what happened. Because we didn’t need any of them to tell us how to understand basic truths of faith. No one has the right to change Christ’s very own words, as they stood in our missals for almost 1400 years. NO ONE may touch the Sacraments He Himself instituted, the forms of which were set in stone for well over a millennia. And in the end NO ONE allowing such things may pretend to rule in the stead of the Pope, who Christ placed at the head of the Church to rule in perpetuity. This is basic catechism stuff. When Christ was directly attacked, no one had an excuse NOT to leave.
But having left the Novus Ordo, another trap loomed. Catholics were expected to accept a Church without a pope, something entirely novel in the history of the Church. For the pope was always the distinguishing factor between Protestantism and Catholicism, the Eastern schismatics and the Church in Rome. But now there were these rival bishops, and no mention of ever again having a true pope, even though throughout history, the Church had never been ruled by bishops in a contested papal election; always a rival pope was elected. Why was this never challenged? Because a lot of people didn’t know even their basic catechism. And those who did were confused, because nothing like this had ever happened in the Church before. They had always listened to Father, and simply attended Mass, maybe a few society meetings a month. The idea of Catholic Action, while strongly promoted, left most of them cold. They avoided the more complicated arguments of who was pope, and who was valid, epikeia, necessity and jurisdiction, leaving them to be decided by men they believed to be valid clergy. But were they?
Was it really all that hard to determine if Marcel Lefebvre and Peter Martin Ngo dinh Thuc were truly able to ordain priests and consecrate bishops in this ”emergency”? Even common sense should have told us that they were not exactly what they claimed to be. If Lefebvre was truly divorced from the Novus Ordo, which he must have been in order to avoid their heresies, how is it that he resigned the offices he held under Pope Pius XII, accepted offices from John 23 and set up a seminary under NO auspices in Switzerland? How is it that Bp. Ngo dinh Thuc, in the handwritten copy of his declaration, signed himself as the Bishop of Bulla Regia, a title bestowed upon him by Paul 6? Did all Traditionalists not believe that the Novus Ordo was a non-Catholic Church? If they did not believe this, then why did they leave? And why did they tolerate in their “clergy” an association, however tenuous it was made to appear, with the very false church they had rejected?!
Bp. Peter Martin Ngo dinh Thuc was in his sixties during the Vatican Council (born in 1897). He held degrees in philosophy, theology and Canon Law. Abp. Marcel Lefebvre was an Apostolic Delegate to Africa and a superior of a religious congregation, a doctor of theology. He was in his late 50s during Vatican 2. There is no way either of these men could claim ignorance or confusion; Canon 16 states that no ignorance of invalidating or inhabilitating (disqualifying) laws excuses from their observance. And there are several Canon Laws they violated that declare their actions either invalid and themselves as incapable of positing valid acts. This has been demonstrated repeatedly on this site. But the faithful did not need to know about these Canon Laws to know they were not Catholic.
Both Lefebvre and Thuc celebrated the new mass. Both participated in Vatican 2. Both acknowledged John 23 and Paul 6 as true popes. This information was available to Traditionalists in the 1980s from various sources. Why was it not enough to avoid these schismatics? Because Traditionalist “clergy” who received orders from these two men would have found themselves without any power and any way to ply their trade. And they were their most ardent defenders and supporters. People listened to them as they struggled to explain away every possible doubt about those who “ordained” or “consecrated” them. They had a horse in the race, and it was their job to make sure that horse ran. And that meant even convincing those trying to be Catholic not to listen to the still voice of the Holy Ghost telling them something just wasn’t right.
I guess the point I am trying to make here is that those rejecting Vatican 2 as a false council and the new mass as no mass at all may not realize it, but by their ACTIONS they implicitly rejected John 23 and Paul 6 as usurpers and heretics when they left the Novus Ordo church in the late 1960s, early 1970s. For how could a council teaching heresy, a mass falsifying Christ’s very own words, or changes in the very Sacraments Christ instituted ever issue from a true pope?! Catholic instincts, the Catholic sense yet remaining among the faithful remnant, was dead-on in judging Montini’s acts as those of a man who had abandoned the faith. What else would have prompted these Catholics, many of them the descendants of the faithful who had professed Catholicism for well over a millennia, to abandon the beloved Church of their ancestors? We have been told, over and over again — by various Traditionalist factions, beginning with William Strojie in the 1970s — that Montini’s heresy was not manifest. Hogwash. They deliberately misapplied the word and made it appear that no one could be certain the See was really vacant, advancing various theories but careful to avoid any examination of the possibility that Roncalli or Montini were heretics pre-election, or that Roncalli’s election was invalid. Instead they spent decades laughing at the hapless Conclavists (who at least were championing the papacy), arguing over the material-formal nonsense and playing with the Siri stupidity, because this at least kept them all in business.
According to the teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas, as explained to us by the greatly esteemed theologian Garrigou-Lagrange, “St. Thomas concludes: ‘Heresy is the species of unbelief practiced by those who profess to believe in Christ, but who corrupt His teachings’… Formal heresy is a pertinacious adherence to error that is manifestly contrary to faith… A heretic [is] one who refuses to ‘choose whatever Christ has truly taught’…. The one thing that suffices for formal heresy is an obstinate denial of any truth which has been infallibly proposed by the Church for belief. It is not necessary that the individual believer realizes that the truth in jeopardy has been proposed. If it were necessary, heretics would become few and scarce.” Those exiting the Novus Ordo Church recognized that what Paul 6 was teaching was not what Christ taught; His very words in the Consecration being changed and the Mass abolished. They fled the bathhouse, after the example of St. John. Montini’s heresy alone was only a manifestation of his previously held heretical beliefs, publicly written and spoken. Once the NOM was announced, he could no longer pretend to be Christ’s vicar on earth. The See was officially recognized as vacant by those departing, although in fact it had been so since the death of Pope Pius XII.
If what John 23 and Paul 6 were doing was not manifest heresy, deserving of their absolute abandonment by the faithful, how could Traditionalists ever possibly justify calling themselves the continuation of the Church on earth? The faithful followed the teaching of the apostle St. John: a heretic avoid. It is estimated by various polls that 40-60 percent of Catholics exited the NO after Vatican 2. The only reason they did not ALL publicly and formally conclude that these men were heretics is because they were duped into believing they must listen to men they trusted as true successors of the Apostles. They fled to them in fear, being told that if they did not have Mass and Sacraments, they could not obtain the graces to save their souls. To this day they labor under a delusion based on the suppression/misrepresentation of Church law and teaching regarding the nature of the primacy and indefectibility. Rather than risk denying the dogma of indefectibility, as defined by Traditionalists, they accepted the lie that during an extended interregnum, bishops had the right and the divine assistance necessary to rule the Church and to demand obedience.
Those leaving the Church after the promulgation of the new mass did so under an inspiration of the Holy Ghost. But what happened when they were rounded up by Traditionalists was no inspiration. It would not be generally known for many years that both Lefebvre and Thuc had not only attended the false V2 council but had signed council documents, nor was it known for some time that both men celebrated the Novus Ordo Missae. But when it was known, and known in a manner that left no room for doubt, why didn’t those who first left the Novus Ordo warn their children and grandchildren, still attending these services, to reject those issuing from Lefebvre and Thuc because they were the fruit from the poisonous tree?
The great apostasy of the laity did not occur when Catholics exited the Novus Ordo after the new mass was introduced. That was the scattering of the sheep following the defection of the cardinals and bishops. The great apostasy concluded with the participation of the laity in the schismatic services of Traditionalists who created something that in any other age would have been unthinkable: a “Catholic” Church without the pope. From a Catholic standpoint this can only be described as surviving a plane crash only to be hit by a semi.
On this Feast of Corpus Christi, we remember with fondness the solemn processions and ceremonies which once took place on this day. And we make reparation for those who dishonor Christ by remaining in Traditionalist sects, thinking they receive Him in the Eucharist when they receive only a lifeless wafer that leads to their destruction.
