Gallicanism, Protestantism and immediate jurisdiction

by T. Stanfill Benns | Jul 15, 2022 | New Blog

+St. Henry II+

In treating the recent rash of papal bashing by the anti-Fatima crowd, the seriousness of appreciating what the Roman Pontiffs teach and how these various teachings must not be taken as isolated and disjointed proclamations was once more brought to the forefront. The remedy for this is the practice of integralism as emphasized by Msgr. Fenton, something this author has stressed and attempted to practice. Whether this has always been accomplished remains to be seen, but at least the effort has been made. Gallicanism is a subject that has been treated often on this blogspot. Likewise the actual sort of jurisdiction possessed by bishops, how it is possessed, and how it can and cannot be exercised. Because questions have been raised regarding these topics, their actual interrelation needs to be explained.

What is Gallicanism?

Gallicanism is an error that surfaced at the time of the Western Schism. There were two types of Gallicanism: political (favoring monarchical interests in France) and ecclesiastical. It was confined almost entirely to France when it first made its appearance, but later spread to England and Germany. As M.L. Cozens, in his 1928 A Handbook of Heresies, explains: “The Gallican school held 1) that the Pope’s definitions were not infallible in themselves but only after acceptance by the Universal Church and 2) that a general council’s authority was above that of a Pope. Some French ecclesiastics also claimed that the king had the right to forbid the publication in France of papal bulls that no act done by the king’s agent on his authority could involve excommunication and that the king could prevent any bishops recourse to Rome even if the Pope commanded his presence.”

One of Gallicanism’s most enthusiastic proponents during the Western Schism era, the theologian Jean Gerson taught: “The decision of the Pope alone, in matters which are of faith, does not as such bind (anyone) to believe; Bishops in the primitive Church were of the same power as the Pope; The Roman Church, the head of which is believed to be the Pope …may err, and deceive and be deceived, and be in schism and heresy, and fail to exist.” (Henry Cardinal Manning, The Ecumenical Council and the infallibility of the Roman Pontiff: a Letter to the Clergy, 1869). And here is recognized the very same teachings which the Anglicans and Luther used to justify their separation from Rome at the time of the Protestant Reformation.

This we find also from Cuthbert Butler’s summary of Gallicanist teachings in his work The Vatican Council, Vol. 1, 1930: “As the common father of Christians, the Pope can make new laws and propose them to the Church. But they have not the force of general laws except by the acceptance of his colleagues in the episcopate. The bishops are bishops by divine right; THEY HOLD THEIR POWER IMMEDIATELY FROM JESUS CHRIST and not from the Sovereign Pontiff WHOSE EQUALS THEY ARE except in the primacy which was established by Christ only to show forth unity (Cyprian). They judge with him in matters of faith and of discipline but their jurisdiction is limited by their diocese, whereas that of the Pope has no limits other than those of the Christian world” (pg. 29). So this demonstrates that the Gallicanists did indeed hold the theory of immediate jurisdiction, and because they held all the bishops in council superior to the pope, they even held themselves, AS A BODY, above him.

Gallicanism, the reformers and jurisdiction

During the Protestant Reformation, the ideas promoted by the Gallicanists were put into practice by Protestant ministers, many of them still possessing valid Orders. They declared their independence from Rome and, as St. Francis de Sales explains mediate and immediate mission or jurisdiction in his The Catholic Controversy (Ch. 2-3), a work sent to Catholics deceived by the Calvinists. He writes:

“To be legates and ambassadors… of Christ …they should have been sent; they should have had letters of credit from him whom they boasted of being sent by. Now you cannot be ignorant that they neither had nor have in any way at all this mission. For if our Lord had sent them it would have been either mediately or immediately. We say mission is given mediately when we are sent by one who has from God the power of sending according to the order which he has appointed in his Church… Immediate mission is when God himself commands and gives a charge without the interposition of the ordinary authority which he has placed in the prelates and pastors of the church such as Saint Peter and the apostles were sent receiving, from our Lord’s own mouth this commandment… But neither in the one or in the other way have your ministers any mission. How then have they undertaken to preach, how shall they preach, says the apostle, unless they be sent?“

While Traditionalists and others seem to distinguish mission from jurisdiction, theologians do not. Devivier and Sasa, in the index to their work Christian Apologetics,  lists mission, canonical, which then references the reader to page 589  “on the power of jurisdiction… conferred by canonical institution.” One would think that a Doctor of the Church would be trusted to know what heresy is when he sees it and thendedicates 13 chapters to explaining it, however some question his testimony as insufficient.

The Protestants differed from the Gallicanists only in the fact that they decided to work outside the Church for reform rather than from within. The Gallican articles themselves were not addressed by the popes until 1690, when Alexander VIII declared them null, void and invalid (DZ 1322). Pope Pius VI later declared them rash and scandalous in Auctorem Fidei in 1794. (Manning in his Civil Allegiance states that the definition of infallibility “…by retrospective action makes all Pontifical acts infallible… such as Unam Sanctam, Unigenitus, and the bull Auctorem Fidei and by prospective action will make all similar acts in future binding upon the conscience.”)

To the above errors should be added those of Febronianism, first advocated by the German bishop of Trier, Johann Nickolaus von Hontheim, (using the pseudonym Febronius), in 1763. Hontheim taught that Christ did not give “…the power of the keys to Peter but to the whole Church; that the pope’s power, as head of the whole Church… is of an administrative and unifying character, rather than a power of jurisdiction;” that the appointment of bishops and the establishment of dioceses should be left to provincial synods and metropolitans and even the determination of matters of faith should be left to these same authorities. “Hontheim advanced along the same lines, in spite of many inconsistencies, to a radicalism far outstripping traditional Gallicanism” (Catholic Encyclopedia). In 1786, Pope Pius VI wrote Super Soliditate, condemning Febronianism, Regalism and Josephism:

“All the more must be deplored that blind and rash temerity of the man [Eybel] who was eager to renew in his unfortunate book errors which had been condemned by so many decrees; who has said and insinuated indiscriminately by many ambiguities that every Bishop no less than the Pope was called by God to govern the Church and was endowed with no less power; that Christ gave the same power Himself to all the apostles and that whatever some people believe is obtained and granted only by the pope, that very thing, whether it depends on consecration or ecclesiastical jurisdiction, can be obtained just as well from any bishop …” (DZ 1500). Some of these propositions were condemned as leading to schism and schismatic, also leading to heresy and heretical. Despite the fact that it also was condemned by so many other decrees, as Pope Pius VI notes, it was still being taught as an acceptable opinion because the brief did not condemn everything Eybel taught as heresy. Its propagators then used this as an excuse to escape censure, allowing it to continue to be taught in some form or other.

The Vatican Council and Gallicanism

And so it remained until the mid-1800s and the plans to convene the Vatican Council. During the Council preparations Cardinal Manning, then only an archbishop, worked within a commission comprised of five cardinal presidents, eight bishops, a secretary and dozens of other members of the clergy. This commission drew up a list of reasons why it was opportune to call the council, and enumerated on that list were the following, found in Manning’s The Vatican Council Decrees and their Bearing on Civil Allegiance (1875):

“5. Now, if the next General Council meet and separate without taking any notice of this denial [of infallibility], one of two inferences may perhaps be drawn. It may be said that Gallicanism has obtained its place among tolerated opinions; or, at least, that it may be held with impunity.

“15. Because the full and final declaration of the divine authority of the Head of the Church is needed to exclude from the minds of pastors and faithful the political influences which have generated Gallicanism, Imperialism, Regalism, and Nationalism, the perennial sources of error, contention, and schism.

“For these, and for many more reasons which it is impossible now to detail, many believe that a definition or declaration which would terminate this long and pernicious question would be opportune; and that it might forever be set at rest by the condemnation of the propositions following:

“1. That the decrees of the Roman Pontiffs in matter of faith and morals do not oblige the con- science unless they be made in a General Council, or before they obtain at least the tacit consent of the Church.

“2. That the Roman Pontiff, when he speaks in matters of faith and morals, as the universal Doctor and Teacher of the Church, may err.

And here we see the very errors expressed above by Gerson, who, Manning relates, later “…himself confessed that he was maintaining an opinion which was so much at variance with the Tradition of the Church before the Council of Constance that anyone who held it would be branded as a heretic.” Cardinal Manning then explains in his The Ecumenical Council and the infallibility of the Roman Pontiff, a Letter to the Clergy, 1869, (written shortly before the opening of the Vatican Council):

“English nationalism became the Anglican schism. French nationalism checked itself at the Gallican Articles. The Anglican Reformation has no perils for the Catholic Church; it is external to it, in open heresy and schism. Gallicanism is within its unity and is neither schism nor heresy. It is a very seductive form of national Catholicism, which, without breaking unity, or positively violating faith, soothes the pride to which all great nations are tempted, and encourages the civil power to patronise the local Church by a tutelage fatal to its liberty. It is therefore certain that Gallicanism is more dangerous to Catholics than Anglicanism. The latter is a plague of which we are not susceptible; the former is a disease which may easily be taken.

“Gallicanism has caused a divergence, which Protestants think or pretend to be a contradiction in faith. The combined action of Gallicanism within the Church and of Protestants without it, has given to this erroneous opinion a notoriety in the last two centuries, and especially in France and England, which takes it out of the category of imperfect and innocuous errors which may be left as a vapor to be absorbed. It has inscribed itself in the history of the Church, and will live on until, by the Church, it is finally condemned.” Manning would later remark in his work on Civil Allegiance: “Gallicanism was the only formal interruption of the universal belief of the Church in the Infallibility of its Head. The Vatican Council extinguished this modern error.”

Gallicanism condemned

So as with many other teachings proposed by those appearing to hold a tenable opinion within the Church, prior to its condemnation Gallicanism was condemned only as an error, or so the proponents of this position claimed. But once the Vatican Council concluded, its teachings could only be classified as heresy, which Gerson rightly agrees with above. Manning explains that a century before the Gallican Articles appeared, Gallicanist supporters debated this opinion at the Council of Trent, asking the Council to decide whether bishops receive their powers directly from Our Lord, or rather indirectly, from Christ but only through the Roman Pontiff. The Council refused to take up the question, and this question remained unsettled for over 300 years.  Finally it was answered by the Vatican Council in 1869-70:

“I will give to thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven. And whatsoever thou shalt bind upon earth, it shall be bound also in heaven; and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth, it shall be loosed also in heaven.” And it was upon Simon alone that Jesus, after His resurrection, bestowed the jurisdiction of Chief Pastor and Ruler over all His fold in the words, “Feed My lambs, feed My sheep.” At open variance with this clear doctrine of Holy Scripture, as it has ever been understood by the Catholic Church, are the perverse opinions of those who, while they distort the form of government established by Christ the Lord in His Church, deny that Peter in his simple person preferably to all the other Apostles, whether taken separately or together, was endowed by Christ with a true and proper primacy of jurisdiction; or of those who assert that the same primacy was not bestowed IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY upon Blessed Peter himself, BUT UPON THE CHURCH, and through the Church [clergy and faithful] on Peter as Her minister.

 (Canon) If anyone, therefore, shall say that Blessed Peter the Apostle was not appointed the Prince of the Apostles and the visible head of the whole Church Militant, or that the same directly and immediately received from the same our Lord Jesus Christ a primacy of honour only, and not of true and proper jurisdiction; let him be anathema” (DZ 1822, condemnation of Gallicanism).

As Manning demonstrated above, Protestantism worked hand in hand with Gallicanism, and of the two, Gallicanism was by far the greater worry. The entire thrust of this united effort was to either eliminate the papacy or reduce the popes to mere ministerial heads, with the bishops as equals; the Vatican Council ended that. But then came Liberal Catholicism and Modernism, and as Msgr. Fenton explains, “Liberal Catholicism shares with Jansenism and with Modernism (and this last was preeminently an expression of the liberal Catholic teaching itself) the unhappy distinction of being a movement whose leaders fought to keep active within the Church after its principles had been directly condemned by competent ecclesiastical authority.

“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 of the ecumenical councils or of the Holy See. This attitude…was condemned by Pope Pius IX in his letter Tuas Libenter (DZ 1683). Another crass form of minimalism was the opposition to the Vatican Council definition of papal infallibility. The men who expressed that opposition sometimes claimed to hold the doctrine of papal infallibility as a theological opinion but they showed a furious hostility to the definition which proposed that doctrine as a dogma of divine and Catholic faith” (“The Components of Liberal Catholicism,” The American Ecclesiastical Review, July, 1958).

This is what Pope Pius XII faced during his pontificate. And in order to make certain all the vestiges of Gallicanism, and Liberalism then manifesting as Modernism, were entirely wiped out, he delivered his unwelcome decision on immediate jurisdiction.

Episcopal jurisdiction decision ends Gallicanist contentions

In writing his encyclicals Mystici Corporis Christi in 1943 and Ad Sinarum Gentum in 1954, Pope Pius XII settled the final remaining question not answered by the Council of Trent — the last nail in the coffin of Gallicanism — by teaching what was already held as the common opinion by the theological schools:

“Bishops must be considered as the more illustrious members of the Universal Church, for they are united by a very special bond to the divine Head of the whole Body and so are rightly called ‘principal parts of the members of the Lord’; moreover, as far as his own diocese is concerned, each one as a true Shepherd feeds the flock entrusted to him and rules it in the name of Christ. Yet in exercising this office they are not altogether independent but are subordinate to the lawful authority of the Roman Pontiff, although enjoying the ordinary power of jurisdiction which they receive directly from the same Supreme Pontiff” (Mystici Corporis Christi). And in Ad Sinarum Gentum: “But the power of jurisdiction, which is conferred upon the Supreme Pontiff directly by divine rights, flows to the Bishops by the same right, but only through the Successor of St. Peter, to whom not only the simple faithful, but even all the Bishops must be constantly subject, and to whom they must be bound by obedience and with the bond of unity.”

This should have settled the question, but the minimalists then existing in the Church challenged the fact that infallible statements could be issued in an encyclical. Pope Pius XII answered this question by writing Humani Generis (1950),teaching that anything entered into the Acta Apostolica Sedis is to be considered as issuing from the ordinary magisterium.

“Nor must it be thought that what is expounded in Encyclical Letters does not of itself demand consent, since in writing such Letters the Popes do not exercise the supreme power of their Teaching Authority. For these matters are taught with the ordinary teaching authority, of which it is true to say: “He who hears you Hears Me,”: and generally what is expounded and inculcated in Encyclical Letters already for other reasons appertains to Catholic doctrine. But if the Supreme Pontiffs in their official documents purposely pass judgment on a matter up to that time under dispute, it is obvious that that matter, according to the mind and will of the Pontiffs, cannot be any longer considered a question open to discussion among theologians.”

And this only confirmed what Msgr. Fenton had already written in 1949: “Where a question of grave moment has been disputed among Catholics, and when the Holy Father intervenes to settle this question once and for all, there is clearly a definition, a decision which all Catholics are bound to accept always as true, even though no solemn terminology be employed.” (“The Doctrinal Authority of Papal Encyclicals,” Sept. 1949, AER).

In this same article, Msgr. Fenton also noted: “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.” As Revs. Pohle-Preuss write in The Sacraments, Vol. IV: “It matters not what the private opinions of…theologians [are]. It is not the private opinions of theologians but the official decisions of the Church by which we must be guided.” Yet always, Traditionalists favor the opinions of these theologians even over the clear teaching of the Church.

Minimalism and immediate jurisdiction

A friend recently shared the following quote from Cardinal Billot with me, and while it was not objectionable at the time Billot wrote it, prior to the issuance of Mystici Corporis, it is not something that remains true following Pius XII’s definition on the origin of episcopal jurisdiction.

“Whether episcopal jurisdiction is immediately from God, or immediately from the Roman Pontiff, was bitterly disputed in the Council of Trent, and nothing was defined at that time. In the Vatican Council, the question was not even proposed, chiefly because in practice, it is nearly indifferent, whether one or the other opinion is accepted. For even those theologians who hold that episcopal jurisdiction is derived immediately from God, also say that without a doubt it is conferred by God with a true and full dependency on the Supreme Pontiff.“

Obviously, in the face of Modernist inroads, Pope Pius XII did not think this was a matter “indifferent” in practice, and a survey of his related works on the subject demonstrates this. Cardinal Billot could scarcely know what Pope Pius XII would have to face during his pontificate. He also may have been hoodwinked by Modernists wishing to de-emphasize the importance of this question and leave it unanswered, for we know they only showed their true colors toward the very end. Bishops ruling 30 years later certainly did not reflect what Billot thought these theologians believed, as later proven by the false Vatican 2 council.

And most importantly, despite his comment above, Billot himself seemed to hold the common opinion, cited by Alfredo Cardinal Ottaviani, that the jurisdictional power of bishops comes only through the Pope: “For authority [in the Church] comes directly from God through Christ, and from Christ to his Vicar, and from the Vicar of Christ it descends to the remaining prelates without the intervention of any other physical or moral person” (Louis Cardinal Billot, S.J., Tractatus De Ecclesia Christi (Rome: Aedes Universitatis Gregorianae, 1927), Vol. 1. p. 524). This information is necessary to place his first statement in its proper perspective, for without it one could be led to believe Billot was either undecided or held the opposite opinion.

Cardinal Billot, then, would have considered the matter settled with Pope Pius XII’s definition, and would have adjusted his thinking on its “indifference” accordingly, just as Cardinal Ottaviani did. Humani generis settled the question on encyclicals and papal decisions made within them, forever closing any further discussion of his decision on the true nature of how bishops receive their powers: from Christ, yes, but only through the Roman Pontiff. Msgr. Fenton, in his articles on Doctrinal Authority, also Infallibility states:

“Thus it would seem that some teachings whose main claim to acceptance on the part of Catholics is to be found in the fact that they are stated in papal encyclicals would actually demand an assent higher than that which must be accorded to the content of the Church’s authentic but non-infallible magisterium. Such truths would demand the kind of assent usually designated in theology under the title of FIDES ECCLESIASTICA… (Doctrinal Authority in the Encyclicals, Pt. II, AER, 1949). “If that supreme power is exercised within the field of dogma itself, that is, by declaring that some particular truth has been revealed by God and is to be accepted by all men as a part of revelation,” Fenton continues, “then the assent called for by the definition is that of divine faith itself. If on the other hand, the Holy Father, using his supreme apostolic authority, does not propose his teaching as a dogma, but merely as completely certain, then the faithful are bound to accept his teaching as absolutely certain. They are, in either case, obliged in conscience to give an unconditional and absolutely irrevocable assent to any proposition defined in this way” (“Infallibility in the Encyclicals,” (AER, March 1953). And Ottaviani and Fenton both agree the teaching on the jurisdiction of bishops is certain. Humani Generis closes all discussion on such issues.

Yet, again, some argue it would be only temerarious to question this teaching and would not involve loss of membership in the Church, as would denying an article contrary to ecclesiastical faith. This appears to be minimism of another sort, and one that is very concerning. It presents as a reluctance to accept the full import of this decision and a desire to leave a crack open in this door, however imperceptible it might be, for whatever reason. This then would be a conditional, not an unconditional assent — an incomplete obedience — when such a decision requires irrevocable assent. Theological pygmies all of us are, who even dare venture into these things. Therefore, it seems that it is far more preferrable to prefer the safest course, as we have in praying at home, especially one recommended by a papally approved theologian. This is true especially since we have no one to consult in such matters.

Immediate mission outside the papacy a Protestant heresy

Gallicanism was an error that became even more dangerous than external heresies, as Cardinal Manning explains, because like Modernism it worked from within, not outside, the Church. It was basically a parasite that weakened the authority of the Roman Pontiff in order to placate the state and counteract the effects of Ultramontism. There are definite indications that those advocating it worked in tandem with secret societies to undermine the influence of the Church. It eventually was absorbed by Modernism. Gallicanism promoted the theory of immediate jurisdiction — that episcopal authority came by Divine right directly from Christ, but within the framework of the papacy. Protestants proposed the theory of immediate or extra-ordinary jurisdiction outside the Church, having rejected the papacy. It was their rejection of the papacy that necessitated resorting to Christ as the ultimate source of their authority. For them, this was part and parcel of their heresy.

Immediate mission could be held by bishops within the Church as an opinion, until the decision issued by Pope Pius XII that their jurisdiction was mediate, (through the pope, not immediately from Christ). Any direct appeal to Christ for such jurisdiction after that decision amounts to a denial of the necessity and supremacy of the papacy who alone can exercise it in regard to bishops. No matter how much they protest, or claim to still support the papacy, during an interregnum Traditionalists operate by appealing directly to Christ Himself, and this is the same sort of jurisdiction or mission claimed by Protetstants.

The Vatican Council condemned the tenets of the Gallicanists by defining infallibility. Pope Pius XII ruled that the theory of immediate jurisdiction could no longer be held because all jurisdiction comes from Christ to the Roman Pontiff, then to the bishops, a by-product of the Vatican Council definition. Catholics must hold this teaching with a firm and irrevocable assent. Today we see immediate jurisdiction claimed by Traditionalists. Even if they professed immediate jurisdiction under a pope-elect opposed to Rome, they would be in grave error at the very least. But that is not what they are doing. They are claiming to possess immediate jurisdiction during an interregnum in violation not only of Pope Pius XII’s decision on episcopal jurisdiction, but his infallible papal election law Vacantis Apostolicae Sedis (VAS), written several years after that decision was handed down. For this law teaches that during an interregnum, the acts of anyone attempting to exercise papal jurisdiction or who violate papal law are invalid. As Msgr. Fenton comments at the end of his article on episcopal jurisdiction, “[This decision] signifies that any bishop not in union with the Holy Father has no authority in the Church.”

Exercising jurisdiction reserved only to the pope by consecrating bishops, in defiance of VAS and in violation of a host of papal laws, is the full-blown version of the Protestant heresy of immediate mission or jurisdiction. This sort of mission, authority received directly from Christ, is claimed by Sedevancantists; “Those whom Our Lord has bound by divine law to confer sacraments, then, simultaneously receive from Him the legitimate deputation and the apostolic mission to confer them” (Anthony Cekada, Traditional Priests, Legitimate Sacraments, 2003). Other Traditionalists claim it implicitly by appealing to Can. 2261 §2 providing supplied jurisdiction, which can come only from a true pope. Since they claim it during an interregnum it can be assumed that they appeal then directly to Christ.

Anglicans believe their mission comes directly from God and from the community — mission Dei; this is extraordinary mission. Various Traditionalists also have stated the people have called them and that therefore they are bound to administer the sacraments to them, since technically they have a right to request them. (This is true, however, only when.such a request can be legitimately fulfilled.) This error, related to Gallicanism and Protestantism, was condemned as heretical at the Council of Trent (DZ 960, 967; Can. 147) to combat precisely what St. Francis de Sales was fighting in trying to free those from error who were following the Calvinists. Certainly jurisdiction was very much an issue then, and so it remains.

Conclusion

It is hoped that by providing a brief history of the origins and progression of the Gallicanist error (basically a denial of the full exercise of papal jurisdiction, condemned at the Vatican Council); and its relation to the theory of immediate jurisdiction (a Protestant heresy which has since been revived by Traditionalists), that those confused on this subject will now understand. For those who still feel that this question has not been settled and immediate jurisdiction as it remains today is not a Protestant heresy, it would be interesting to know: What else should we call it in light of the Trent anathema and Pope Pius XII’s decision? Of course the question answers itself, and the answer explains the incredulity of those denying it is a heresy in the first place.

This topic has always been about the papacy. It is at the core of the extended interregnum we have experienced for nearly 64 years. Is it possible for bishops only to rule the Church, can sitting pope err, does the episcopacy minus its head bishop constitute the Church, can bishops without the pope rule as Christ-assigned teachers if they have not received their mission from a true pope (and cannot even be certain of their own ordination and consecration)? The Church long ago answered “no” to all these questions, but liberals, Modernists and Gallicanists that they are, Traditionalists behave as though these condemnations do not exist and can be easily explained away.

Since today they practice immediate jurisdiction without the pope, Traditionalists now join the Protestants, despite all claims to hold extraneous jurisdiction in various forms. They can possess no authority without the pope. Any objection otherwise is only one more denial of the papacy to add to their long and growing list. I don’t feel obligated to apologize for those objecting to the fact that stripped of their immediate mission/jurisdiction garb, Traditionalist emperors now appear in their birthday suits.

Could the attack on Pope Leo XIII be a harbinger of an even greater evil?

by T. Stanfill Benns | Jul 3, 2022 | New Blog

+God Have Mercy on Our Nation+

Prayer Society Intention for July

“Eternal Father, I offer thee the Most Precious Blood of Jesus Christ, the merits, love and sufferings of the Sacred Heart, the tears and Sorrows of His Immaculate Mother, for the return of those now opening Thy Son’s precious wounds anew by evil publications.”

My apologies for a late posting of the Prayer Society Intention. It has already been an incredibly busy month. I also would like to wish everyone a happy Independence Day, understood in the spirit of Pope Leo XIII, so greatly calumniated recently as a false pope, who wrote: “We are bound to love dearly the country whence we have received the means of enjoyment this mortal life affords, but we have a much more urgent obligation to love with ardent soul the Church to which we owe the life of the soul, a life that will endure forever.” Please see Robert Robbins latest at https://catholiceclipsed.com/2022/07/03/thoughts-on-the-fourth-of-july/ for a wonderful commentary on true patriotism today.

It is difficult to address the broad scope of what all the denial of papal supremacy entails, but one thing is certain: it begins with the tendency to question or criticize the actions and decisions of the popes, to favor and tolerate critical accounts of them written in secular works and in the press, to allow doubts to creep in, perhaps even without realizing it, about their legitimacy or orthodoxy, or the belief that one can put limits on what they may or may not say or do in disciplinary matters. If not immediately resolved or rejected, (if one is not able to satisfactorily answer them), they then become doubts of faith in the perpetuity of the Apostolic Succession.

Those accusing Pope Leo and the other popes of heresy committed while in office — an impossibility condemned as heresy at the Vatican Council — have produced nothing even approaching real evidence to prove their miserable case. And it must be remembered: in pointing out the invalidity of Roncalli’s election on this site, he is not being judged AS A POPE. What was being judged was his pre-election disposition — whether or not he was even a Catholic, and thus qualified for election. Public statements and his behavior pre-election prove he was not a Catholic, and as St. Robert Bellarmine teaches — and all Catholics know this to be true — a man not a Catholic could never be validly elected pope. Some of those accusing Pope Leo XIII, Pope St. Pius X et al. now have even turned their venom against Pope Pius IX (oh how they would love to wipe out the Vatican Council). And this was where they were headed all along.

The individuals first beginning the campaign to defame Pope Leo XIII, an (ex?)-Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) couple living in St. Mary’s, Kansas, founded their movement by launching what appeared to be a Catholic website several years back. Some good information, interesting articles and downloads, an appealing design, but hiding beneath all that were various layers of poison. (This website no longer seems to be online although some report it is operating under a different domain name, so beware.) And forgive me if I am somewhat suspicious of the origins of this group, given its location. There could be more here than meets the eye, depending on who these “anonymous” people may be working with and what their real agenda is. They later issued a salacious and defamatory book on Fatima, mentioned in our last blog. This poison has now seeped into the minds of fringe-element Catholics praying at home, who already disbelieved in Fatima and harbored doubts about the legitimacy of various popes.

We must remember that the SSPX itself reported on its own website that its founder, Marcel Lefebvre, was the Grandmaster of the Priory of Sion, whose subtitle is the “Independent and Traditionalist Union.” Is a there yet a connection between this SSPX couple and this ideology? The Priory claims an ancient history and is known for its monarchical restoration aspirations. These aspirations could afford us a sinister reason why those defaming these popes are attempting to deceive the faithful, a reason not even yet considered. These people may be merely advance men, so to speak, sent to test the water to see what floats. The realization of this strategy explains many things and puts us on full alert about what may really be evolving among the Traditionalist sects. It has been developing for awhile, but is now showing itself for what it really is. It may be only a tendency.

A frightening scenario

The Book of Job reminds us that life is a warfare, and it is definitely spiritual warfare which we are waging. It is one thing to have doubts about the validity of the Roman Pontiff, but only IF such doubts are serious and can be sufficiently proven to have existed pre-election. Then and only then can a doubtful pope not be any pope at all. Hard proofs would need to be gathered that show Leo XIII was definitely a heretic prior to his election as pope, because he could NOT have become one if validly elected, which he undoubtedly was; this is the teaching of the Vatican Council, Pope Paul IV in Cum ex Apostolatus Officio, St. Bellarmine and the theologian Capello. No proof of any sort to even suggest Cardinal Pecci was a heretic pre-election has ever been presented nor could be gathered today from anything but anti-papal sources. Has anyone bothered to draw out the logical consequences of what these defamers of Pope Leo XIII, Pope St. Pius X and now Pope Pius IX, are saying? This is not just about presenting all these venerable popes as mere heretics, thus moving forward the beginning of the Great Apostasy; far from it. Here is what we are REALLY being asked to believe:

1. The re-interpretation of the Vatican Council and the redefining of papal supremacy and infallibility, already begun in the last century prior to Pope Pius XII‘s death;
2. Lifting of the bans on Freemasonry, Americanism, definitions of the Christian state
3. Pope St. Pius X ‘s condemnation of the Sillon and Modernism no longer exists.
4. The 1917 Code of Canon Law was never promulgated, leaving the Sacred Canons in the hands of those who would like nothing better than to abolish and reinterpret them.
5. Pope Pius XI’s encyclicals on marriage, Communism, racism and the social order;
6. Pope Pius XII’s much hated infallible decrees such as his election constitution Vacantis Apostolicae Sedis, Mystici Corporis and Ad Sinarum Gentum on the authority of bishops, Mediator Dei, Humani Generis and Ad Apostolorum Principis, not to mention the hated Holy Week changes, would all be non-existent.

Perhaps this Catholic Restoration business is finally starting to make some sense! NOW we know where they are probably going with all of this, if all of them can ever agree on anything. The only way to discredit the claims made on this site is to take the axe to the root of the tree and destroy the sources from which they issue — the Roman Pontiffs. Is this their preliminary attempt to seduce pray-at-home Catholics? We believe it could well be, as we stand in the way of their success. They wish to leave no exits open for those who decide not to go along with their Great Monarch, Holy Pope, restored Gallican Church fantasy.

For this would be a dream come true for (the Independent Union of) Traditionalist and Gallicanist Monarchists wishing to completely refashion and take over the Church in yet another Vatican 2 style coup, forever redefining infallibility to suit their lust for power. This could well be what “uniting the clans” is all about — a pretended attempt to “restore all things in Christ,” while reconstructing the Church according to Gallicanist/Old Catholic plans long in the making. So what are these Pope Leo XIII defamers really up to and who else might they be working for or with? Dupes or send-ins? It may be that the Gallicanists of the 19^th century, frustrated to the max at the definition of infallibility, decided to try and make an end run to establish themselves more securely in France, as they already had in Germany. Through their pre-established “Catholic” secret societies, aligned with the Monarchists, they hoped to gain papal favor and get a leg up in order to establish a more secure base for themselves, to work under the cover of papal approval. But Leo XIII was quite savvy when it came to these societies. He instead supported the Masonic-inspired government of the French Republic and ordered Catholics there to do the same. https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_16021892_au-milieu-des-sollicitudes.html

French history lesson

France had gone through a century of torments, political and religious upheaval, persecution of the faithful, exile of her clergy, the martyrdoms of her monarchs, religious, and Catholic laity, fierce infighting between Catholic factions. The battle had long been waged to restore the monarchy, but Leo could see that there was little hope of doing this, and feared a Gallicanist might even possibly come to power. He didn’t cave-in to liberalism; he merely advised Catholics to make the best of a terrible situation which he could not change or control. And for this he is condemned? How dare common peasants, totally ignorant of not only of history, but of the perspicacity necessary to govern and the inner workings of the Church judge a mere man, not to mention a pope, who was superbly well-educated, skilled in diplomacy, unbelievably intelligent and fervent in his faith, kind-hearted and talented in so many other ways; a man beset by so many difficulties and weighed down with so many responsibilities and spiritual burdens! Read his biographies! They will give the lie to everything written in that disgusting Fatima book. But we will see below exactly why Pope Leo did what he did.

Those supporting the Monarchists questioned his decision and he rebuked them, reminding them that they owed him obedience whether they agreed with him or not, and of course some of them sincerely did, while others who were secret “Catholic Freemasons” did a nod-nod, wink-wink. We have in support of this assessment the following quote:

“These two parties [those supporting the Republic called Rallies and those supporting royalist interests] were poles apart in sentiment, in personal interest, in philosophy of life. They represented two distinct and hostile views of man and society, two mutually antagonistic civilizations. Too often it appeared that religion was employed for political purposes and politicians were more intent upon destroying the Church than upon building up the state. The Catholic side was encumbered by an aristocratic group, royalist and Gallican by conviction as well as by tradition. The Church was their church, as it had been the subservient tool of their ancestors in the old regime. The anticlerical camp was Masonic, Jacobin, Rosseauvian. It exalted it’s omnipotent omni-competent state to absurd heights under any name Republic… They thought only in terms of their own peculiar type of government, of a party state, of a state controlled by gangster methods in the interests of a clique.

“In such circumstances it was difficult for Leo to make his voice heard and the valiant Frenchman who did hear him had to meet discouraging odds in their fight for order, justice and liberty when Leo declared that forms of government were relatively unimportant, Monarchists pointed to the revolutionary origins of the Republic. When he insisted that all Catholics align themselves under the constitution to combat iniquitous laws, they still clung to the phantom of kingship and disdainfully sneered at democracy. Social Catholics might argue the futility of adhering to the fetish of monarchy… There were monarchists who were anti-liberal in both politics and economics. There were now Rallies opposed to economic liberalism and, in obedience to papal instructions, neutral in politics, as well as Rallies whose economic theories were in conflict with needed social legislation; there were Progressists sincerely devoted to the Republic, who hoped to inject the leaven of tolerance into law and administration. There were Christian Democrats more democratic than Christian. There was finally the formless, inert mass of the indifferent, too discouraged and/or too indolent to deserve more than a passing glance of contempt” (The Church in the 19^th Century, Raymond Corrigan, S.J., Ph.D, 1938).

So that’s what Pope Leo XIII had to deal with; a convoluted mess long in the making that even would have defied resolution by the most skilled statesman ever born. Yet his decision that France must support their civil government, to at least attempt to enjoy some kind of political stability, is the very thing these defamers are pointing at to support their claims — that he was a liberal, that he overstepped his bounds, interfered in politics and even favored Freemasons. But no, clever man that he was, and inspired by the Holy Ghost, he decided to deal with the devil he at least knew, rather than admit seven devils worse than the first to the fray. The Gallicanists were up to no good and he knew it. They were the depository of the upper levels of Freemasonry — the Priory — and in the very time period that Pope Leo issued his decision on France, a group we have mentioned before was already moving forward with their plans.

What Pope Leo was trying to do

According to authors Lincoln, Leigh and Baigent, in their work Holy Blood, Holy Grail, The Hieron du Val d’Or admitted the existence of a hidden pope and his entourage, which of course would include bishops, waiting in the wings to act either as a replacement for or an alternative to the current church in Rome: “The Hiéron’s agenda was the creation of a new Habsburg and Catholic Holy Roman Empire with a French temporal and spiritual head in the manner of the Grand Monarch, an association of Europeans bound by common law and dedicated to advancing the mission of Christ the King.” (Here they cite sources linked to the “Catholic” secret society Marcel Lefebvre reportedly belonged to, the Priory of Sion.) “They [the Hieron] claim the existence of a secret parallel Catholic tradition called l’Eglise d’Avignon (Church of Avignon), which they trace to the medieval Papacy installed in Avignon from 1309 to 1378. The claim is that it continued in secret with a Pope who represents the esoteric aspects of the Catholic Church. L’Eglise d’Avignon is said to serve as an intermediary between the Roman Church and the Eastern Orthodox tradition.”

Pope Leo issued his encyclical Au milieu de solicitudes to the French in 1892. Wikipedia states the Hieron organization existed from 1873-1926, when it was doubtless absorbed into other groups. “It was allied to concepts of royalism and was culturally conservative; it sought to erect a Catholic hermetic freemasonry, contrary to the anti-clerical Freemasonry of Grand Orient de France and was particularly devoted to Christ the King.” Among contributors to a publication sponsored by the group was the traditionalist Rene Guenon, later supporting Muslim philosophy and one Le Coeur, author of The Age of Aquarius, promoting New Age beliefs. So Pope Leo was pro-Masonic in not supporting the Royalists who had been infiltrated by this bunch?! Pope Leo’s personal letter of correction to Cardinal Gibbons, addressing his participation in the interfaith conference and condemning Americanism was not enough for these people? In his work The Americanist Heresy in Roman Catholicism, 1895-1900, Thomas T. McAvoy, C.S.C, writes:

“If there was doubt about the meaning of the prohibition of congresses of religion, a chronicle of events in the United States that appeared in the Civilta Cattolica January 4, 1896 was sufficient warning that the triumph of the progressives had been short-lived and that with the shift of [Cardinal] Satolli, the conservatives were beginning to regain lost ground. This chronicle of the year 1895 in the United States claimed that year had ended a period of confusion thanks to the action of Sattoli. The evil tendencies in the United States which the chronicle says were checked by Sattolli was Pelagianism… and this has been checked by two actions: the condemnation of the secret societies and the action against the Congress of Religions. It is the second of these that the chronicle emphasized… Continuing, the chronicle said that a third element in the American scene which had grown up from a wrong interpretation of American political traditions was a kind of Gallicanism, a lack of sympathy for the Pope in his efforts to regain his temporal power. But under the leadership of Sattolli, the American Catholics had clearly demonstrated their loyalty to the pontiff in a series of public demonstrations of loyalty on September 20,1895” (page 84-85).

So Gallicanism was making its rounds in America as well, and eventually this heresy first revealed itself in the Liturgical Movement, which began in Germany. Rev. Albert Kaiser observed in his December 1953 article for The American Ecclesiastical Review: “The Gallican and Febronian pretension of limiting Papal jurisdiction in favor of episcopal equality was more or less a cover-up for an underground movement to nationalize the Church. The ‘Free from Rome’ movement in a sense dove-tailed with the Nazi political movement. As the French Revolution’s disastrous effects helped bring the dissident clergy back to the Pope, so Hitler’s providential defeat contributed to help the Pope reclaim the ‘German nationalists.’” And it is no coincidence that at the same time the Priory of Sion’s existence was revealed, by a professed neo-Nazi, a secret society affiliated with the Priory was founded in the U.S. by a friend of the Priory’s modern-day historian (Pierre Plantard) also reported to be aligned with neo-Nazi factions. Doesn’t this sound suspiciously like the Sedevacantists and other Traditionalists, many of whom are blatantly anti-Semitic and block any effort to restore the papacy?

But the antics of Traditionalists are relevant only insofar as we know their agenda and stay far away from any of their sects. What needs to be addressed here is what caused this unfortunate break with the faith in the first place and how it can be prevented in the future. The answer to this is the absolute prohibition of the Church to read anything on religious topics written by non-Catholics, especially in this day and age. Likewise the use of social media regarding religious topics or discussions and unrestricted Internet surfing for videos and articles that touch on matters of faith. There are certain sites that are relatively safe; I have listed some of these on the articles page. Traditionalists sites are to be avoided as a general rule, although they sometimes contain pertinent information. But they also can be very dangerous; the authors of the anti-Fatima book initially appeared to operate a legitimate Catholic site. Even videos that are primarily about political matters often contain defamatory and erroneous information about the Church and Her role in the worldwide conspiracy.

Because they failed to investigate the information they were being fed and reconcile what was being presented to them with beliefs of faith, they were led astray. This is how many Catholics have succumbed to error, and below an Irish priest, a beloved theologian and catechist in his own country, tells us why.

From Our Greatest Treasure by Rev. John Kearney, 1942

Indiscriminate reading

“Beware of false prophets,” says Christ, “they come to you in sheep’s clothing.” This is a solemn warning. A prophet is a teacher. A book is a teacher. A bad book may be attractive — the charm of the style is the sheep’s clothing. The warning of Christ applies in our days especially to books.

To realize the danger of indiscriminate reading consider the following:

• Your limited knowledge of religion. A medical man has five years professional study. A priest has at least six years professional study.
• The power of a clever barrister to present a bad case to an ignorant juryman. [Lawyers have 4-6 years of study].You are not experts in theology while many of the enemies of the Church are clever and the devil helps them.
• The natural law which binds us to preserve our faith is supported by a law of the Church which forbids the reading of dangerous books.
• Compare the Church’s law with the following: the law limiting the sale of poisons to qualified persons; the appointment of a public analyst to secure pure food and pure water; the locking up in an asylum of all who attempt suicide.

General warning against indiscriminate reading

It is a fact that cannot be denied that very many literary works are prejudicial to the faith. Their tendency is to weaken it imperceptibly. The naturalistic philosophy, irreligious views and materialistic outlook contained in them is so subtle as not to be noticed. It is like a poison that is imbibed in very small doses. But its presence in the mind of the readers are such works which will be detected later on, when a situation arises for them to which they should simply apply the truths of the faith e.g., on the occasion of a tempting offer of worldly gain, through a mixed marriage, a cleverly concealed dishonest financial transaction, an illicit friendship, etc. It will be seen that owing to false teaching assimilated through indiscriminate reading the Pearl of Great Price will be sacrificed for mere temporal advantage. And the result like unto Hymaneus and Alexander of old, they run serious risk of making shipwreck concerning the faith.

The law of the Church and dangers to face from indiscriminate reading

From what has been said it should be obvious to any loyal Catholic that the Church and her restrictive legislation concerning certain books acts as a wise mother. With maternal solicitude She warns her children against two dangerous classes of publications: those that are subversive of faith and those that are opposed to Catholic teaching regarding good morals, which teaching is based upon the faith and upon the law of God. It is a grave duty for every Catholic to obey the laws of the Church forbidding the reading of certain kinds of books (Canons 1384 and 1399). Apart from these enactments of positive law binding on all, it is the bounden duty of every Catholic to avoid all reading that would constitute a danger for the individual in question. Even though a person may feel himself firmly established in the faith it is not lawful to take risks. And such risks are inevitable. The reading, especially when habitual, of books that either by subtle suggestion, ridicule, or positive erroneous pleading advocate principles opposed to the faith cannot failed to saturate the mind so assimilative of ideas with the seeds of unbelief. Our Lord issued a solemn warning against false prophets: “Beware of false prophets” (Matthew 7:15).

Who are they in our days? They are legion in number.  They are to be met with in the cinema, on the stage, on the radio, in factories and workshops, but above all in books and newspapers. These ravening wolves come very often in the clothing of sheep. They do not directly and openly attack the Catholic faith and morals but they do so indirectly in a very effective way…. In this matter of safeguarding our Catholic faith and morals no one should presume to say that his faith is so strong and his morals so firmly established as to be proof against all attack, no matter how subtly or systematically directed. Neither good intentions nor experience in life can render anyone absolutely immune to painful surprises. it may be taken as a practical rule of guidance that indulgence and evil reading will end in spiritual disaster. This is what usually happens owing to the inherent weakness of human nature. Temptations are sure to rise. Moral lapses will follow. Then the false ideas and ideals that have been imperceptibly absorbed in the reading will be appealed to in order to justify or palliate the lapses.

Indiscriminate discussions

A person who wishes to ask you for information on teachings of the Church and honestly desires to know should be answered and you should be able to answer. But you are not required to prove the doctrine from Scripture. A person who wishes to discuss religion simply for the sake of argument or for the purpose of confounding you should not be answered. All these discussions do no good. The code of Church law forbids public discussions without permission [and] you perhaps have not made the studies required for defending your religion. It is one thing to be able to know the teaching of the Church and another to be able to defend it. The danger of discussion for those whose opportunities have not permitted them to make a very profound study of their religion, is due to the fact they may find themselves in the hands of a very clever man who misrepresents things and whose errors their limited knowledge is not able to detect. Look what a clever barrister can do when he has a bad case to defend; how he can put interpretations on the facts, misrepresent their different importances and in the end completely persuade those that are ignorant. The illustrations we have given show clearly the imprudence and the disloyalty to Our Lord manifested by indiscriminate reading and discussion. From this follows the diminution of the actual graces which we need to exercise our faith.

Faults that alienate our hearts and wills

In the second place are the sins which tend to draw the heart, the will, to earth and away from God. The most deadly of these senses is the sin of pride. Pride leads many to the loss of faith. We have spoken of pride as an obstacle to the grace of faith for those outside the Church. We must now show its danger for those who have the faith. It is our will that commands our intellect to believe. We believe because we wish to believe and we wish to believe because we wish to honor God by submitting to His Word. Hence anything that turns our will away from God makes our act of faith more difficult. On the act of faith we believe a doctrine which we do not see and which we cannot prove, simply because God says it is true. This involves humility. We bend down our mind before the authority of God. We pay God the homage of our understanding. We acknowledge we are creatures and that therefore we are limited. We acknowledge that we are children of our Father in Heaven and we wish to please Him. This is humility.

Pride is the obvious opposite of humility. The proud man trusts his own mental powers and in an inordinate way he forgets his own mental limitations. He is inclined to accept only what he can see and what he can prove. He easily shuts his eyes to the evidence that God is speaking through the Church. Hence pride leads easily to the loss of faith. The loss of faith through pride appears especially in those who criticize the Church, who criticize Her laws, who criticize the actions and words of those appointed to speak and act in Her name. Many lose the faith through this sin of criticizing. In this sin they make themselves the judges of the words of the Bride of Christ. Like to the sin of criticism of the Church is the sin committed by marked want of reverence for sacred things. These sins in addition to their own malice generally involve the sin of scandal and scandal of a serious kind. It is easy to see that complacency in our superiority — pride — is at the root of all these sins. The loss of grace through pride follows frequently from positive disregard of the laws of the Church… These sins easily lead to the loss of Faith. In all this it is our will that is wrong. We do not want to submit. Submission means accepting our inferiority or dependence. Our pride resists this.

In the third place, culpable ignorance is a cause of the loss of faith. This is a special kind of disloyalty to God because man’s first duty is to know God. Ignorance evidently impedes the correct judgment of the intelligence especially when our imagination or picture making power is impressed by a difficulty. Ignorance is culpable when it is due to indolence and not acquiring knowledge when we can and should. It shows a want of esteem for the gift of Faith and this is a disloyalty to God who has given us the faith. Hence it leads to a diminution of grace. Culpable ignorance, which may injure our faith, is of various kinds:

• ignorance of the motive of credibility i.e. the proofs that God has testified to the divine authority of the church;
• ignorance which does not distinguish in dogma what one must believe and what one may believe;
• ignorance which confounds what is essential and what is accessory in worship. Prayer is essential; certain prayers are accessory. Devotion is essential; certain devotions are accessory.
• In moral matters, likewise ignorance confounds interior personal reform, which is essential, with certain external works which are only a means unless commanded explicitly.

Faith once lost is seldom regained

The gift of faith may be lost. This is an undoubted fact. It is also a fact that once lost, the gift of faith is seldom regained. God gives it once easily. It is most precious. If we lose it no doubt it may be got again but the dispositions of heart that prepare the soul for this new grace are not easily acquired. Hence it is that faith is seldom regained. Saint Paul puts this very clearly. “It is impossible,” he says, “for those who were once illuminated (the gift of faith) have tasted also the heavenly gift (the most Holy Sacrament) and were made partakers of the Holy Ghost (Confirmation and grace) have moreover tasted the good word of God (instruction) and the powers of the world become (Heaven and Hell), and are fallen away to be renewed again to penance, crucifying again to themselves the Son of God and making Him a mockery” (Heb. 6:4-6). Impossible here means very difficult, morally impossible, impossible without a miracle of grace.

To help us understand better these words of Saint Paul we shall keep it in mind that faith is always a gift of God, but it is a gift that God gives a second time to those only who ask it with humility and perseverance. Here indeed is the difficulty of recovering a lost faith. Humble and persevering petition is not easy for those who have lost the faith. We can say it is almost impossible for them because humble and persevering petition means going back on and reversing their own pride and independence of mind which independence was the cause of the refusal to submit to God and believe His Word. In other words, this new act of faith, this new paying to God the homage of their understanding, means acknowledging that the little Catholic child was right while they were wrong. All this is difficult. It needs an extraordinary grace of childlike humility through which they cast themselves that God meet and recognize their absolute dependence on him for their present life and continued existence” (end of Rev. Kearney quotes).

Conclusion

Fr. Kearney called the faith “Our Pearl of Great Price.” But do we really think every time we reach for our phones or surf the Internet that something just a click away could rob us of this precious jewel? Do we use due discretion in using these communication tools? Or do we fall into the sin of curiosity and read or listen to things that could easily endanger our faith? In the end will we allow the Modernist hype on social media and the Internet to claim our faith after all we have done to preserve it?

Pope Leo XIII was no heretic and Our Lady of Fatima was not an alien

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:

1. 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, “

2. 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…”

3. 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.”

4. 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!

These incorrigible Fatima deniers are workers of iniquity

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).

“For all men” in the Consecration first introduced in 1959

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.