T. Stanfill Benns | Betrayed Catholics

Meditations on the Passion of the Infant Jesus, Pt. 2

by T. Stanfill Benns | Dec 11, 2024 | New Blog

+Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Patroness of the Americas and the Papacy+

As St. Anselm once said, “If there is anything that calls for correction, I do not refuse the correction.” Journalists are regularly required to run corrections (which differ from retractions) and as a community newspaper reporter, I ran them whenever necessary as I am required to do. So please consider what is written below.

I mistakenly identified the DVDs on Gerry Matatics’ site as a summary and presentation of Fr. Saenz-Arriaga’s book The Plot Against the Church, since Matatics ambiguously uses the same title Fr. Saenz used in his popular work, written in the 1970s. (He has used titles from my own site in the same manner in the past.) The subtitles listed in the description seemed to roughly follow the outlines of that work, and since I had no intention of purchasing Matatics’ DVDs to review them, I based my observations on what little was presented on his website. The series was instead a collection of interviews with a radio personality popular among Traditionalists. The mistake was actually a blessing in disguise, since it helped identify what is most likely the explanation for the “illicit but invalid” stance assumed by Matatics and others praying at home. The revised Matatics article, detailing what is going on behind the scenes, can be viewed HERE. To learn more about why Traditionalist pseudo-clergy must be considered invalid, read HERE.

Excerpts from The Passion of the Infant Christ, by Frances Caryll Houselander, Pt. 2 Chapter 6 — Becoming Like Little Children

“Unless you become like little children, you shall not enter the kingdom of Heaven.” (Matt.18:3)

An ordinary child who has not been warped by ill-treatment or spoiling is, until he is 10 years old, a more complete human being than he will ever be again. He possesses humility and simplicity in the true sense of those much-abused words; he has the capacity for total joy and total surrender. No memory and no experience of the power of time to dull and to heal can take away one drop from his eternal now. His reactions to other people are absolute; his love is without alloy. His trust is without question or doubt. His values are true — he is untouched by the materialism of grown-up people. Just before he leaves his childhood, he has, like a grace, an absorbed love for little things like tiny shells for their own loveliness. Humility, which cannot be separated from real simplicity, is part of young childhood.

Children do not become bitter because they are treated as little and insignificant. They take it for granted that they are so and to them it is as necessary to love and to be loved as it is to eat and drink. If we could all go back to nurseries that are no more and see what is left in them when the children went away, we should find traces of human nature in its essence as convincing as those found in the caves where the earliest known man left their signature of humanity in sanguine on the walls. For the child under 10 is like the caveman an artist and a poet; and made as he is in the image and likeness of God, he has the elements of lover and father and mother within him. To go back to childhood means that we must get back true values instead of those that are based on materialism, public opinion and snobbery; that we must regain simplicity and humility; that we must become makers and poets again; that we must regain the capacity to experience fully whatever we experience at all. And above all we must regain the courage that is partly a boundless zest for living and partly an unquestioning trust in an all-powerful love.

There are adults who do achieve this going back to childhood but they are in the minority because few have this trust and the courage it brings with it. Courage not only to take the necessary steps to return to childhood after we have grown up but courage to grow up in the first place. Those who fail to grow up do not remain children. What happens to them is this: they become fixed in their adolescence. They remain emotionally and mentally incomplete all their lives — perpetual adolescence. Most of the few women who have achieved psychological maturity have at least one old school friend who is fixated in the upper 4th through the lower 5th whose thought and interest and conversation is all concerned with the old days at school; whose emotions are those of a schoolgirl. She suffers more than her mature friend is likely to realize. She is continually grieved because the other has outgrown and is no longer even capable of thrilling to the old excitements and sentimentalities of her adolescence.

She is constantly “hurt” by and jealous of the mature affections and wider interests whose claims her former “greatest friend” puts before her own. She looks back wistfully to the days when notes were exchange under the desk declaring total surrender to the tyranny of almost paranoic friendship including pledges not even to be on speaking terms with potential rivals. But one of the most obvious forms of perpetual adolescence, but pitiful though it is, it is far from being the most fatal. This state is by no means confined to women. On the contrary, there are even more adolescent men; men who are dogged all through their lives by the schoolboy that they used to be.

Sometimes it is a hearty, insensitive schoolboy who thinks an excess of food or drink or any other appetite is amusing. But far more often it is an unhappy, shivering boy who infects the man with the same fear of life that he brought to his first term in his public school. The perpetual adolescent does not grow up because he or she is afraid to do so; afraid of life, afraid of grown up responsibilities, of working for a living, independence, of making decisions, of taking risks, afraid of falling in love, of making a home, of having children. Afraid of sickness, of old age and of dying.

Our Lord’s words are a challenge. To become a child is a challenge to our courage; it demands first of all that we dare to grow up, to give ourselves to life, to accept life as it is and above all to accept ourselves as we are. Many people are permanently humiliated because they cannot accept themselves as they think themselves to be. They are humiliated by a feeling of futility and frustration which has not seemed to fit in with their worldly success. It is not a fanciful feeling; there are people in whom the supernatural life is undeveloped and even unguessed. They feel, and rightly, that there are unrecognized depths within them, possibilities which no one knows and of which they themselves cannot bring into the light. They know instinctively though they would seldom admit it that to be a man without spirituality is hardly to be a man at all. But the materialism of their environment has strangled the capacity for spirituality.

Hardly any man, however proudly carnal he may be, wishes to believe of himself that he has no religion at all. The man who does come nearer to that asserts and reasserts with the overemphasis of the unconvinced that he has his own religion. Humiliated by their own not understood but deeply felt spiritually impotency, men try to compensate by material success. They try to fill up the emptiness within themselves by money, position and flattery. They try to answer and quieten the unappeasable longing to achieve the glory of complete humanity by the achievement of human power, and a humiliated man who manages to grasp power over other human beings is a potential danger to the world far more terrible than an atom bomb or bacteriological warfare. For no man who does not nail his hands with the hands that nail Christ to the cross and does not plunge himself into the magnitude of the littleness of the infant Christ is safe to exercise power.

Ideologies could not come into being without this epidemic humiliation for they depend on a multitude of young men and young women identifying themselves with a human leader. Every member of the group accepts the ideas of the leader. He accepts the leader’s mind and his conscience. He lives not by his own conscience, his own will but the conscience and the will of the leader until the time comes when he has no will but the leader’s. He loses sight of his own lack of mind and of purpose and of his own limitations and littleness and he abandons all personal responsibility for his own thoughts and actions. He is always in fancy dress. He is always acting a part and in time he really believes that he shares the force and genius of the leader. Thus for a time he has a drug to anesthetize the ache of his own humiliation.

Even when a group is passive, group mentality fosters delusion and pride. But when the group is driven or led into action, it simply becomes the most dangerous and most horrible of all things —crowd mentality. Identified with a crowd, possessed by it, a man who is really just and temperate behaves like an irrational creature. He will blaspheme, lynch, murder — all without any sense of his personal responsibility. He is in worse case than a man who is drunk, for he is not only himself out of control but has in him the uncontrolled evil in several hundreds or thousands of other men too. Undoubtedly many who thronged the Way of the Cross hurled curses and insults at Christ only because they were possessed by a crowd. Had they had the strength to be alone, perhaps, like St. Veronica, they would have wiped the spittle of the crowd from the suffering face of Innocence. The only identification which deepens the man’s awareness of his personal responsibilities of human being is identification with Christ. The only solidarity with others which enables an individual to be wholly himself and yet really one with all other men is the mystical body of Christ. This is less an organized than an organic oneness:

“A man’s body is all one though it has a number of different organs and all this multitude of organs goes to make up one body. So it is with Christ. We too, all of us, have been baptized into a single body by the power of a single spirit. Jews and Greeks, slaves and free men alike, we have all been given drink with a single source: the one Spirit. The body, after all, consists not of one organ but of many. If the foot should say, I am not the hand and therefore I do not belong to the body doesn’t belong to the body any less for that. If the ears should say, I’m not the ear and therefore I do not belong to the body, does it belong to the body any less for that? Where would the power of hearing be if the body were all eye, or the power of smell if the body were all ear? As it is, God has given each one of them its own position in the body as he would. If the whole were one single organ, what would become of the body? Instead of that we have a multitude of organs and one body. The eye cannot say to the hand I have no need of thee or the head to the feet I have no need of you. On the contrary, it is those parts of our body which seem most contemptible that are necessary to it” (1 Cor. 12:12-23)

It is not only the spiritually starved who are humiliated and who escaped from the realization of their grown-up responsibilities into perpetual adolescence but also many pious people Catholic and non-Catholic alike. These are countless people among them who will not accept themselves as they are and who work their own natures by dwelling continually in the supposed injustice which has made their destinies mediocre they feel that but for cruel and frustrating circumstances they would have been famous. Had they been wealthier, given a better education, they would have developed their talents and won recognition. Varying the theme, had not their pampered upbringing stifled initiative, had they been pricked on by the spirit of poverty like so many great men, they would have fulfilled their genius. They live with the grievance, refusing to see the talents that they have because no one recognizes the talents they have not.

Others escape from their humiliation into daydreams of personal aggrandizement; a pathetic tendency often seen as if under a microscope in school children who when the dramatization of illness and the telling and retelling of stories that they at last believe fails will most often resort simply to mystery and mystery never fails. I have a secret and the secret is that they have no secret! Grown up people, too, resort to mysteries and wishful fantasies and sometimes they not only dream and talk about them but live them and thereby complicate other people’s lives. There are people whose vanity is such that in times of danger they do not see the people around them objectively but only themselves in the role of heroine at the center of things and only to support this role take unnecessary and unwarrantable risks and compel others to take them with them.

Think, too, of the innumerable people who in order to seem to themselves as well as to others to be richer than they are or socially superior or more successful live lives of petty dishonesty, owing bills often to those who are too poor to be kept waiting for their money, or money to friends who are too delicate to ask for it; living on credit, being underhanded and grasping in business, paying the minimum wages, living extravagantly themselves, while they let their obligations slide shutting their eyes to the real needs of their in unimportant neighbours and of entertaining those from whom something may be gained; exploiting weakness and kindness wherever they find it and desecrating themselves by deliberately childless marriages.

To keep up pretenses, human beings will sacrifice their deepest human needs. What can have so complicated them and made them so ill use themselves? They are complicated because the world is complicated and they are trying to adjust themselves to the standards of the world. All this is the exact opposite to the simplicity of childhood. Simplicity is not — as so many think and alas teach — silliness. Simplicity means not being complicated, not being double in any way, not deluding oneself or anyone else. The first exercise in simplicity is to accept oneself as one is. There are two tremendous results of this. One is humility, the other that it enables other people to accept us as we are, and in this there is real charity.

People whose demand on others is simple and uncomplicated add to the life of the world. One of the main reasons for devitalization, depression and psychological tiredness is that we make complicated demands on one another. Everyone has, so to speak, his individual income of psychological energy, some more, some less. Everyone, in his relations with other people, makes a demand on that energy. There are normal demands which result in fair give and take, and there are abnormal demands which result in a dreadful deprivation. Some people cost us a lot of energy; they are expensive to know. Unless we have abnormally high psychological energy, they exhaust us. Others make only the slightest demands and others actually give.

The expensive people are those who because they are not simple make complicated demands, people to whom we cannot respond spontaneously and simply without anxiety. They need not be abnormal to exact these complicated responses; it is enough that they should be untruthful, or touchy or hypersensitive; or that they have an exaggerated idea of their own importance or that they have a pose, one which may have become second nature but is not what they really are. With all such people we are bound to experience a little hitch in our response. If we are not sure that what they say is true, we are embarrassed. In time our relationship with them becomes unreal. If we have to consider every word or act in their company in case it hurts their feelings or offends their dignity or to act up to them in order to support their pose, we become stained by their society. They are costing us early in psychological energy.

The individual who is simple, who accepts himself as he is, makes only a minimum demand on others in their relations with him. His simplicity not only endows his own personality with unique beauty, it is also an act of real love. This is an example of the truth that whatever sanctifies our own soul does, at the same time, benefit everyone who comes into our life. One immediate result of accepting ourselves as we are, which is becoming simple, is that we stop striving to reach a goal which means becoming something that the world admires but which is not really worthwhile. Instead we realize the things that really do contribute to our happiness and work for those. For example, we cease to want to be rich or successful or popular and want instead the things that satisfy our deeper instincts: to be at home, to make things of real beauty, to work with our hands, to have time to see and wonder at the beauty of the earth, to love and to be loved.

To work for real human happiness implies unworldliness, the kind of unworldliness that is usually characteristic of artists who, in spite of glaring faults, preferred to be poor that they may be able to make things of real beauty as they conceive it, rather than to soothe themselves to the tastes and standards of the world. To accept oneself as one is, to accept life as it is — these are another to do it. What is involved? First of all, the abandoning of all unreality in ourselves. But even granted that we have the courage to face ourselves and to root out every trace of pretense, how shall we then tolerate the emptiness, this insignificance, that we built up our elaborate pretense to cover? The answer is simple. If we are afraid to know ourselves for who we are, it is because we have not the least idea of what that is. It is because we have not the least idea of the miracle of life-giving love that we are. There is no pretense that can approach wonder of the truth about us, no unreality that comes anywhere near the reality. We are other Christs. Our destiny is to live the Christ life, to bring Christ life into the world, to increase Christ’s love in the world, to give Christ’s peace to the world.

Life should make full circle from birth to death, that is rebirth. The ordinary experiences of adult life, offered to the everyone if he will take them, are work, friendship, love, home, children, rest, old age and death. Within these — varying and alternating — poverty and riches, success and failure, forgiving and being forgiven, dependence on one another, illness and recovery, the illness and recovery of those whom we love, and sometimes their deaths. The experience at the core of every other, giving all the other experiences their significance, making them fruitful, is simply love. When we love, even the sufferings that our love makes more acute throw us upon the heart of God and teach us the wisdom of childhood. Poverty, when those whom we love are dependent on us, illness when those whom we love are in danger of death, teach us our own insufficiency our dire need of God.

We learn not from outside but from the depths of our own hearts the meaning of Christ’s words: “Without me you can do nothing.” In our tenderness for those whom we love, above all in our love for children, we know God in His image and likeness in ourselves. Knowing Him thus, we cannot fail to trust His tender pity for us. From coming to know God as our Father through our dependence and as Father and Mother and the Lover through His image in our souls, we learn the simplicity, the humility and trust of children, but only if we dare to love one another — if we accept the loves that come to us in our lives, saying to each one as it comes, “Be it done unto me according to your word,” accepting the love and whatever its cost may be, the responsibility of it and the labor, the splendor of it and the sorrow.

As we grow old we regain our likeness to little children even outwardly. It is in surrendering to this that we make our old age a thing of beauty and peace. We become dependent on others. Our pleasures become fewer and simpler, more and more like those of a child. We let go at last of the struggles of the complicated years that are over. The hopes that are no more the foolish little ambitions, the forgotten griefs. Bereavements cease now to be lost and changed to the anticipation of meeting our living dead again very soon. Our values become true again we distinguish as unerringly as the child between the essential and the inessential. Our memory goes back to dwell again in the morning of our life. Thus when death comes we are able to accept this greatest of all our experiences with the child’s capacity for complete experience and dying we are made new.

There is nothing that is so irksome as the ache of an old wound and it is from countless old wounds, old sores and weals and suppurating sores and gangrenous wounds that the world is bleeding to death. It is old wounds that are poisoning the life stream of humanity. It is no wonder that there has never before been so conscious a longing for a new heaven and a new earth. Men look more wistfully on the first leaf of spring than they have ever done before.

To become a little child is to know with a child’s intuition, to see with the child’s vision. To see everything with the amazement of seeing it for the first time and with the spontaneous giving of the whole heart that is the unique joy of first love. To see human suffering not with an adult’s reasonable despair but with a child’s immediate, unquestioning compassion that admits no obstacle to its response. Within our own lifetime we have witnessed a wonder that of those who are only children and years becoming Christ-children, much more truly children than they were, and these children simply take every small suffering in their lives and offer it to God. They do not question the words of their immolation. God holds the scales; in one side is their littleness and the other they put the love of the Infant Jesus. If anyone becomes a child, that is the Christ child, or if he only recognizes the presence of the Divine Infant in his life, the sense of futility leaves him.

The divine infancy in us is the logical answer to the peculiar sufferings of our age and the only solution to its problems. If the Infant Christ is fostered in us, no life is trivial. No life is impotent before suffering, no suffering is too trifling to heal the world, too little to redeem to be the point at which the world’s healing begins. The way to begin the healing of the wounds of the world is to treasure the Infant Christ in us; to be not the castle but the cradle of Christ and in rocking that cradle to the rhythm of love, to swing the whole world back into the beat of the music of eternal life. It is true that the span of an infant’s arms is absurdly short but if they are the arms of the Divine Child, they are as wide as the reach of the arms on the Cross; they embrace and support the whole world. Their shadow is the noonday shade, for its suffering people; they are the spread wings under which the whole world shall find shelter and rest.

Meditations on the Passion of the Infant Jesus

by T. Stanfill Benns | Dec 4, 2024 | New Blog

Prayer Society Intentions for December, Month of the Nativity

“Eternal Father, I offer to Thy honor and glory, for my eternal salvation and for the salvation of the whole world, the sufferings of Jesus in the manger where He was born, the cold He suffered, the tears He shed and his tender, infant cries.” — The Raccolta

+St. Peter Chyrsologus; Doctor, St. Barbara, Virgin Martyr+

For the season of Advent I wish to share with you these excerpts below from a little work by Frances Caryll Houselander, entitled The Passion of the Infant Christ (1949). It follows the themes often expressed in other articles and blogs here, particularly the love of St. Therese of the Child Jesus for spiritual childhood. May it lead you to the manger on ChristMass Day.

***The Passion of the Infant Christ*, Chapter Five**

Bethlehem is the inscape of Calvary just as the snowflake is the inscape of the universe. As we have seen, the pattern of the universe in a snowflake is not only an accidental likeness but is something essential to its being, entirely in every part of it, interpenetrating it. This pattern is not all visible to the naked eye but some aspects of it are; for example, in the dazzling movement of the snowflakes as they spin around and round to earth, we see the perpetual rotation of the stars and movement is as essentially in the pattern of the universe as symmetry. But there is a design of extraordinary loveliness which cannot even be seen through an ordinary microscope and repetition of the design of the whole snowflake in every minute particle of it, hiding the unity of the whole universe in less than a pinpoint of it.

In the same way the passion of the man Christ on Calvary is at once revealed and hidden in the infant Christ in Bethlehem. Some of this mystery is visible to our eyes but much of it can only be known inwardly, when, after we have knelt in wonder for a long time before that which we can see, Christ chooses to reveal it secretly to us, illuminating the darkness of the spirit with his light, as the star of Bethlehem shone in the dark night of his birth. The gospels are economical, direct, beautiful in their economy and austerity. They tell us the basic facts; that is all. Mary and Joseph came from their home in Nazareth to Bethlehem to be enrolled. On the day of their arrival the birth of Mary’s child was due. They could get no accommodation in Bethlehem — the inns were full. If they could have stayed at an ordinary inn, they would gladly have done so. They tried to get in but they were refused. For that reason they went to a stable and their Jesus Christ was born wrapped in swaddling bands and laid in a manger.

There is no mention of our Lord having been born in a stable but only that there was no room for Him in the inn and that he was laid in a manger. There were shepherds outside Bethlehem probably on the hills that looked down to the little city who were keeping night watches over their flocks. An Angel came to them. He came quite close and stood by them and he told them that a Savior was born. Then suddenly a host of angels, a multitude the gospel says, appeared not as we picture them in the sky but close to the shepherds, with the other who “stood by them.” It is probable and pleasing that since these angels stood close to the shepherds and their flocks, they were allowed to assume the human bodies which by nature they have not got.

When the angels had vanished, the shepherds went in haste to find the Infant, and they found him lying in a manger. After this, wise men came from the East. They came following a star. Wise in astronomy but over-simple in human affairs, for they fell at once to Herod’s craft. He asked them where the Child was to be born and they would have come back to him as he asked them to do and have directed them to where the infant Jesus lay; but they were told in a dream not to do so and consequently they went back to their own country by another road, circumventing Herod. these wise men adored the infant and gave him treasures: gold, frankincense and myrrh. When they had gone, an angel came to Joseph in his sleep and warned him to fly from Herod into Egypt, and he took the Child and his Mother and fled into the darkness of the night. Then Herod slew all the little boys of two and under who were in Bethlehem or its outskirts.

That is the story of the birth of Christ as the gospel tells it but it has become part of the collective consciousness of mankind, invested with light and loveliness which was certainly hidden in the darkness and crudity of Bethlehem, and supplied with details that are dear to the whole world from another source. This other source however originates in the gospel too and is an expression of truth. It is the Christmas crib, which is put up year after year in our churches and our homes. The crib showing the nativity and all the cities and villages and Catholic homes of the world is not only there to commemorate Christ’s first coming to earth, it is there as a symbol of Christ’s birth in us. Christmas does not only mean that God became man and was born as a human infant on a certain night in Bethlehem 2000 years ago. It means that, but equally that because of that, Christ is born in us today. Christ is born in all the cities and villages, all the streets and homes of the world today. He is born in prosperous cities lit up and noisy with pleasure whereas in Bethlehem His crying is not heard. He is born among the ruins of devastated cities, where few would recognize Him without His crown of thorns. He is born in New York, Berlin, Warsaw, Paris, London, everywhere where a single human soul repeats — even perhaps almost doubting it in themselves — Our Lady’s Fiat: “Be it done unto me.”

In an Anglican church in a poor part of London the painted background to the crib shows the actual street in which the church stands, with its narrow little houses, its crooked chimney pots and its public house. It tells the people of that parish where Christ is born today. Christ is not only born at Christmas though it is at Christmas that we keep the feast of the Incarnation. He is born day after day in every infant or adult as they are baptized; in every sinner who is sorry for sin and is absolved; in everyone in whom God’s grace quickens the supernatural life which is the Christ life, for the first or the millionth time. The first crib was given to the faithful by St. Francis of Assisi in the year 1223. It was his sermon for the Feast of the Nativity to the people of the little town of Greccio. The Saint had a real manger and hay brought an an ox and ass led in. Mass was said over the manger assisted by Francis as deacon and all the townsfolk came with lights and the night was filled with their singing.

The eyewitness who tells this lovely incident says men and beasts were filled with joy and again verily in that hour Greccio became a new Bethlehem. We can say the same on any night anywhere in a tenement, prison, hospital, school, church — wherever Christ is born or reborn in a human life — that place becomes a new Bethlehem. Saint Francis could not separate our Lord’s passion from his sensitivity. He made the first crib, he said, so that men should see with their own eyes the hardships he suffered as an infant. A man who was present on that night had a vision; he saw the Infant Jesus lying dead in the manger but when St. Francis came near, He woke to life. Thomas of Celano, who was one of the friars who tells the story, makes a comment on this which could be taken with absolute sincerity as a comment on the world as it is today. This vision was not meaningless, for had not the Child Jesus died the spiritual death of oblivion in many hearts to be wakened to new life and to reign forever in the hearts by God’s grace and the ministrations of St. Francis?

The crib, besides showing the world something of the mystery of the Blessed Trinity, besides giving us the Mother of God and bringing the angels down to the earth, shows that the Incarnation embraces in its limitless tenderness even the humble animals. Just as Adam’s fall involved the whole animal world in suffering — “All things groan together with him”… — the birth of the new Adam brought its blessing to the animals paying fallen man’s enormous amount of pity to beasts of burden; drawing them into the service and even close to the suffering of their creator and Lord. On the night of His birth, when he first gave his body to us, lambs were brought to Christ. On the night before He died, when He gave us His body in the Holy Communion, He kept the ritual of the paschal lamb. The lowly beast came into the stable to stand close to Mary and Joseph and warm them with their great shaggy flanks. The breath of cattle is fragrant with clover; old men and children believe that this is so because the ox was to breathe on the nakedness of the little Lord to warm Him.

At all events, it was the yoke of the ox that Christ used as a symbol of the cross laid on the shoulders of all those who would follow Him through the ages. “Take my yoke upon yourselves and learn from me; I am gentle and humble of heart; and you shall find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light” (Matt.11: 28-30). A donkey stood by the manger and Christ rode on the donkey on the eve of His passion, which we are told is the reason why every donkey has the cross marked out in soft dark fur on his gray back. Long ago the prophet had foreseen the hour of Christ’s birth and Christ’s death in one inseparable vision: “In the midst of two animals thou shalt be made known. When the years shall draw nigh, thou shalt be known. When the time shall come, thou shalt be known” (Habacuc 3: 2-3); Good Friday Mass of the Presanctified, Tract).

On Calvary He is set between two thieves; in Bethlehem He is set between two animals. On Calvary he is poor with the poverty of destitution; in Bethlehem He is poor with the poverty of destitution. He is deprived of his home in Nazareth; the cradle made ready for him is empty. “The foxes have holes and the birds of the air nests but the Son of Man hath nowhere to lay His head” (Luke 9: 58; Matt. 8:20). On Calvary he was naked, stripped of his garments and of all that He had; and He was naked and stripped of all that he had in Bethlehem. On Calvary He was stretched and straightened and fastened down to the cross; in Bethlehem He was stretched out and straightened and fastened in swaddling bands. On Calvary He was lifted up helpless and held up for men to look upon; in Bethlehem He was lifted up helpless to be gazed on: “Lo, if I be lifted up, I will draw all men to me!” On Calvary He was laid upon a wooden cross and in Bethlehem He was laid within a wooden manger. By the cross stood Mary His mother; by the crib knelt Mary, His mother.

He was crucified outside the city wall; He was born outside of his own village and crowded out of Bethlehem: “I am a worm, and no man, the reproach of men and the outcast of the people.” At His birth he was called King of the Jews. At his death he was called King of the Jews. The claim to be king threatened His life in Bethlehem. The claim to be king cost Him His life in Jerusalem. Three times the mysterious title is heavy with doom: at His birth, at His trial and at His death. At His birth there came wise men from the east to Jerusalem saying, “Where is He that is born King of the Jews, for we have seen His star in the east and are come to adore him” (Matt. 2:2). At His trial Jesus stood before the governor and the governor asked Him, saying, “Art thou the King of the Jews? Jesus said to him: thou sayest it” (Matt. 26:27) At His death they put over His head His cause, written: “This is Jesus the King of the Jews” (Matt. 27:37). He was mocked at His birth by Herod; He was mocked at His death by the Roman soldiers. In both cases the derision was a mockery of adoration.

Herod was the pioneer of those hypocrites who for their own pride slayed the Christ Child in the heart of the world: “Go and diligently inquire after the Child and when you have found Him, bring me word again that I also may come and adore Him” (Matt. 2:8). The Roman soldiers were the pioneers of those egoists, too, for passing entertainment and sensation, ridicule and blasphemed the suffering Christ in the heart of man motivated — like so much cruelty today — by group mentality: “Then the soldiers of the governor, taking Jesus into the hall, gathered together unto Him the whole band. And stripping Him, they put a scarlet cloak about Him and platting a crown of thorns, they put it upon His head and a reed in His right hand. And bowing the knee before Him, they mocked Him saying, ‘Hail, king of the Jews. And spitting upon him they took the reed and struck His head” (Matt. 27: 27-30). Two crowns are set side by side — a crown of gold at His birth, a crown of thorns at His death. The crown of gold is too hard and heavy for His infant head: His head bowed and died in the crown of thorns.

Tradition named the wise men with three melodious names: Balthazar, Melchior and Caspar. To children they are three kings who travelled under a solitary store wearing their crowns and their royal robes, bringing scarlet and gold and ermine and blue clouds of incense into the stable. One of the kings is a black man. His offering his myrrh, for he carries the sorrow of the colored people in his humble, adoring heart. At Bethlehem myrrh was brought to Him and myrrh was brought to anoint His body for burial. Each time it was brought by a rich man who came by night — first by the wise king and then by Nicodemus: “And Nicodemus also came, (he who at the first came to Jesus by night) bringing a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about a100 pound weight” (John 19:39). Another king brought incense, frankincense that was poured into a sensor of gold and lit with a flame filling the stable with an aromatic smell mingled with the smell of hay and the ox’s breath of clover. Myrrh and frankincense were poured out for Him in Bethlehem and spikenard and ointment were poured over His body in Bethania for His burial. “And when Jesus was in Bethania, in the House of Simon the leper, there came to him a woman having an alabaster box of precious ointment and poured it on His head as He was at table. And the disciples seeing it had indignation saying, ‘To what purpose is this waste? For this might have been sold for much and given to the poor. And Jesus knowing it said to them: ‘Why do you trouble this woman, for she hath wrought good work upon me. For the poor you have always with you, but me you have not always. For she in pouring this ointment upon my body hath done it for my burial” (Matt. 26: 6- 12).

There in the stable at Bethlehem began the lovely waste that is the extravagance of love that is and will always be scandal to the loveless. Already as a useless crown of gold that the Infant’s head could not support shone at His feet, clouds of incense hung in the rafters of the stable and the air grew fragrant with the smell of myrrh. The box of precious ointment was broken to anoint the beloved for his burial. Already before God the great cathedrals arose going up to him like forests of stone. Jewels from the crowns of kings and queens were set on in chalices of beaten gold. Already contemplatives, drawn by an inner compulsion mysterious as the migration of birds, flocked to God. Carmelites, Carthusians, Trappists, Poor Clares, were received into the Infant’s open hands and their nailed into the man’s hands nailed to the cross. Nailed by the three vows that are the three nails that hold Christ in us, to the cross of suffering and love that redeems the world. To what purpose is this waste for this might have been sold for the much and given to the poor.

At Bethlehem He was wrapped in swaddling bands and laid in the manger. On Calvary He was wrapped in swaddling bands and laid in a tomb. Both the manger and the tomb were borrowed. Both had been made for their owners. They were not made for Christ. All that had been prepared for Him God had set aside. God chose what men should give to His Son and He chose these things so shaped or worn to the givers life that they had become part of them, so warm with the giver’s touch that they could not be given without the giving of self. Christ accepted these offerings in which self was given; not what man had made for Him but what man had made for himself. The gifts were self at the core, involving the surrender of the giver’s will, even in the choice of the gift. So it is today and always. We would like to give God gifts of our own choosing which even if they are in one sense part of our life are yet things added on, on purpose to give, without having to pull up anything of ourselves at the roots. We are often surprised when after we have offered God several litanies a day and a pest of little mortifications, He chooses instead something that is really ourselves; our solitude, for example, or the sweetness of the feel of love, or, as is very frequent now, our home.

It is what God chooses that kindles in the crucible and burns the flame of love. He accepted with both straw and gold — He did not despise the humble animals, or the humility of their giving. He accepted the warm breath of the cattle on His cold hands and feet, the soft touch of the sheep’s wool, the joy that shone from the violet eyes of the little red calves. There was no distinction of color or race or class or education or money in Bethlehem; kings and shepherds, colored men and white men, angels and beasts adored together. The treasure of kings lay at the feet of the foot of the manger with the sheepskin coats the shepherds had taken off to give in their scarlet gourds of milk and wine. In Bethlehem the Mother of Christ gave Christ’s human body to us. She had given her own flesh and blood to Him to be His flesh and blood. Now she gave herself to us and Him. Giving Him to us, she gave His body to cold, to thirst, to light and darkness, to sleep. In Bethlehem began the thirst of Calvary, the terrible thirst of bloodlessness that withers the tongue and the hands and feet and the whole body. In Bethlehem came the infant blindness and blindness came again on Calvary, filling Christ’s eyes with the darkness of dying. In Bethlehem Christ slept his first sleep in his mother’s arms; on Calvary Christ slept his last sleep in his mother’s arms.

In the inscape of Calvary and the passion of the infant Jesus, we beheld His resurrection from the dead. Christ came out of the darkness of the womb. He was the light of the world. He came to give the world life. The life of the whole world burned in the tiny flame of an infant’s life. It began the age-long fight with death in the least and frailest that human nature can be; in the helplessness, the littleness and blindness of an infant, life prevailed. The light of the world shone in darkness. At Bethlehem love and death met in the body of Christ and Love prevailed. Over and over again and every human life love and death meet to face to face. No human power or splendor or strength, no material might or wealth can overcome death — the death of the soul. But if the life in the soul is the tiniest spark of the life of Christ, love prevails and death is overcome in us. Christ came out of the darkness of the tomb. He came back from the helplessness and blindness and silence of death and His feet that walked on earth bore the wounds of death and His hands that touched the flowers and the grass bore the wounds of death. He had overcome the world; He had died all our deaths and overcome death.

All over the world and generation after generation, men rose from the dead all over the world; everywhere there was resurrection and Easter morning in the heart of man. At Bethlehem, angels stood among the flocks and around the stable door; angels stood beside the empty tomb. The message of the Incarnation is peace. On the hills above Bethlehem, the angel song was peace: “Glory be to God in the highest and on earth peace to men of goodwill.” And peace was the word on the tongue of the risen Christ, His greeting to the world: “Peace be unto you.” At the nativity it was to shepherds that the angels brought the message of peace and shepherds who came first to the Divine Child. On the night before He suffered, Christ keeping the Feast of the Paschal Lamb, gave His peace — the peace of the Lamb of God. “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you” (John 14:27).

When the season of the risen Christ had come, warm with light and flower and fruit and the abundance of His life, it was to a shepherd that Christ came, entrusting the giving of His life and love and peace to him. He came to Peter, the shepherd of His own flock, the shepherd for all time of his shearlings and his sheep. “Simon, son of John, lovest thou me more than these?” Yea Lord, thou knowest that I love thee. “Feed my lambs. Simon, son of John, lovest thou me?” Yea, Lord, thou knowest that I love thee. “Feed my lambs. Simon, son of John, lovest thou me?” Lord thou knowest all things; thou knowest that I love thee. “Feed my sheep.”

LibTrad pseudo-clergy: We declare you ANATHEMA!

by T. Stanfill Benns | Nov 18, 2024 | New Blog

+Dedication of the Basilicas of Sts. Peter and Paul+

In an effort to be as concise as possible, a more complete canonical evaluation of the invalidity issue is presented below. We stated in the last blog regarding the validity of LibTrad orders that both Lefebvre and Thuc were guilty of communicatio in sacris under Can. 2314 § 3, first for joining the Novus Ordo sect and participating in Vatican 2 and secondly for founding their own traditionalist sects. Over time, the invalidities piled up, as more research was done and Church teaching was better understood. This preponderance of evidence renders these men and any other “bishops at large” as schismatic non-Catholics unable to receive or convey Orders validly, and as Pope Pius IX and Pope Pius XII have officially proclaimed, this pertains to the Oriental rites as well. The following is the final proof needed to decide this issue.

Infamy of law invalidates acts

The first article documenting this invalidity appeared on my website in 2009. Canon 2314 §3 declares that by the commission of heresy, apostasy or schism the offender also incurs infamy of law ipso facto. The canonists Revs. Woywod-Smith explain the effects of infamy of law under Can. 2294 §1: “The person who has incurred… an infamy of law… cannot validly obtain ecclesiastical benefices, pensions, offices and dignities, nor can he validly exercise the rights connected with the same, nor perform a valid, legal ecclesiastical act” (all emph. within quotes in this article is the author’s). When imposed in the form of a penalty attached to law, this sentence takes place immediately. And only the pope can dispense from this vindicative penalty (Can. 2294 §3).

The canonist Rev. Charles Augustine writes under Can. 2294 § 1: “Legal infamy involves irregularity according to Can. 984 n. 5 and therefore no layman affected by it can receive the tonsure or any other order without an Apostolic dispensation… Legal infamy entails disability or disqualification for any ecclesiastical benefits, pension, office, dignity and if conferred the act is invalid (Can. 2391)… An infamous person must be prevented from cooperating in sacred functions…” (Not surprisingly, Peter Cardinal Gasparri notes in his Fontes that Cum ex… is the parent law of Can. 2294 §1). By Apostolic dispensation is meant dispensation by the pope. Abp. Amleto Cicognani, in his work Canon Law (1935), teaches:

“An inhabilitating law renders a person incapable of performing a valid act. Properly speaking, it is a species of invalidating law for the effect is the same, with this difference only, that an inhabilitating law is not issued directly against a certain act but rather against a certain person, e.g., canons 2294 [on infamy], 2390 §2, 2394 §1and 2395, etcetera.” Canon 2394 §1 reads: “If a person by his own authority takes possession of an ecclesiastical benefice, office, or dignity… before he has received the necessary letters of confirmation, or institution, he incurs the following penalties: (1) he becomes automatically disqualified for the benefice, office or dignity. The canonists Revs. Woywod-Smith, in their commentary, reference the Holy Office’s decision on Can. 147 and the ipso facto excommunications for violating it under Can. 2394. Cardinal Gasparri lists Charitas and Etsi multa as the sources for Can. 2394.

“Those who have been assigned to the divine ministry at least by the first tonsure are called clerics… (Can. 108). “Only clerics can obtain the power of either orders or ecclesiastical jurisdiction…” (Can. 118). Here we see that all those exiting the Novus Ordo and joining traditionalist sects, then later entering SSPX or Thucite “seminaries,” could not receive tonsure validly without the papal dispensation, far less have become priests or bishops at the hands of Lefebvre or Thuc. Not only were the candidates barred from receiving this sacramental, but no valid acts could proceed from Lefebvre, Thuc or any others suffering infamy of law. There is also the invalidity infallibly proclaimed in Pope Pius XII’s Vacantis Apostolicae Sedis and Pius VI’s Charitas. These traditionalists are NOT Catholic and cannot be successors of the Apostles. Can. 2314 §3 also imposes the deposition of Can. 188 §4, even including degradation, and as Cardinal Gasparri notes in his Fontes, Cum ex… is the parent law or old law from which both these canons originate (see Canon 6 §1-6 on what canons are contained in the Code).

Incapable of valid acts as vitandus

And then there is the matter of the consideration of these men as vitandus, by Pope Pius IX (Etsi multa), Pope St. Pius X (condemnation of Arnold Harris Mathew, Acta Apostolicae Sedis, year III, vol. III, no. 2, February 15, 1911) and, by implication, Pope Pius XII in the official interpretation of Can. 147. A reference is noted beneath Can. 147 directing readers to the condemnation of a Czechoslovakian priest named John Dechet as a vitandus for reception of the office of Administrator from lay authority. Given by the Sacred Consistorial Congregation this condemnation reads: “The Sacred Congregation therefore reminds clerics and the faithful that they must treat the aforesaid priest according to the norm of Can. 2261 §3 of the Code of Canon Law (AAS 42-195).” Beneath this declaration is a reference to the “New Penalty for Occupying or Retaining Office; see C. 147.”

Can. 2261 §3 reads: “From a minister who is an excommunicatus vitandus, or who has been excommunicated by a condemnatory or declaratory sentence, the faithful may ask for sacramental absolution only in danger of death.” Although a declaration from the Holy See is required to determine someone a vitandus, this is now impossible. Because there is a doubt of law about whether Lefebvre and Thuc, also any other bishops exercising orders after Pius XII’s death are to be considered vitandus, the Code refers us to Canon 18 which states: “The ecclesiastical laws are to be interpreted according to the proper meaning of the terms of the law considered in their context. If the meaning of the terms remains doubtful or obscure one must have recourse to parallel passages of the Code (if there are any) or to the purpose of the law and its circumstances and the intention of the legislator.”

We have presented above the intended mind of the lawgiver on who must be considered a vitandus. Lefebvre, Thuc and any others acting after Oct. 9, 1958 — all violated the law enacted by the Council of Trent which states that, “In the ordination of bishops, priests and other orders… those who by their own temerity take these offices upon themselves are not ministers of the Church…[but] thieves and robbers…(DZ 960). “If anyone says that those who have been neither rightly ordained nor sent by ecclesiastical and canonical authority but come from a different source are lawful ministers of the word and of the Sacraments, let him be anathema [cf. 960]” (DZ 967). LibTrads immediately seize on the word lawful and say this does not mean invalid, but they entirely ignore the context of the condemnation. It is anathema to believe they can function as Catholic clergy. As later papal definitions prove, the Church clearly wishes them to be considered as vitandus and for the faithful to avoid them.

Can. 2261 §3, however, renders invalid the acts of not only vitandus, but those under a declaratory sentence. In his 1947 A Manual of Canon Law, Rev. Matthew Ramstein, S.T. Mag., J.U.D., OFM, writes: “A penalty latae sententiae (of a sentence already pronounced) is a determinate penalty which is so attached to the superior’s precept, that it is incurred immediately upon the commission of the offense, as if the sentence were already passed…The sentence which imposes a ferendae sententiae penalty established by the law is called a condemnatory sentence; that which imposes a penalty latae sententiae established by the law is called a declaratory sentence… But unless the delinquency is notorious, i. e., not only public but inexcusable from the point of imputability in the eyes of the public, [he] need not observe the penalty in the external forum” (p. 679-80). So either way, these men, even if validly ordained and consecrated, (which they definitely were not) could act only in danger of death.

Invalid and incapacitated according to notoriety of law

How can one possibly deny that what Marcel Lefebvre and Peter Martin Ngo Dinh Thuc did publicly was a reckless and deliberate violation of Canon Law? Lefebvre and Thuc were bound to KNOW the law. They both celebrated the Novus Ordo Missae and signed Vatican 2 documents. They later were both publicly known and recognized universally as renegade bishops. Proofs of Lefebvre’s ordination and consecration by a Freemason as well as his involvement in Freemasonry himself, also Thuc’s mental incompetency, have been available for decades. Whether we classify them as acting in obedience to the usurpers as valid popes or as purportedly validly consecrated before Oct. 9, 1958, both suppositions end in excommunication. VAS absolutely invalidates their acts. And even Paul 6 and John Paul 2 excommunicated them for their consecrations. A notorious act must be known as criminal or morally imputable, impossible to conceal and “not to be excused by any excuse admitted in law” (Can. 2197). The constant flux from traditionalist sects and the controversy surrounding them shows that their pseudo-clergy were recognized as doubtful. Lefebvre, Thuc et al never credibly denounced the usurpers or called for a papal election. They were undeniably notorious.

No declaratory sentence required

But LibTrads contend that for lack of a declaratory sentence — a hearing in the case regarding their excommunication for heresy and communicatio in sacris and for acting without the papal mandate — there is doubt about both their heresy and their excommunications. This error was condemned as follows by Pope Pius VI in Auctorem fidei: “The proposition which teaches that it is necessary according to the natural and divine law, for either excommunication or for suspension, that a personal examination should proceed and that therefore sentences called ipso facto have no other force than that of a serious threat without any actual effect” (DZ 1547). Of course the canons themselves, VAS and Pope St. Pius X’s election laws removed all doubt. But even aside from that, the very fact of their notoriety removes any need for a declaratory sentence. We read from Abp. Cicognani, quoting the theologian Chelodi, that according to Can. 2232 §1:”The notoriety of an offence is held equivalent to a declaratory sentence” (page 703-704). Commenting on Can. 2232, Rev. Charles Augustine writes:

“It is left to the discretion of the superior to declare a penance has been incurred, that is to issue a declaratory sentence. However this sentence must be issued if the interested party insists or if the public welfare demands it, in the case of a corrupter or briber or a dangerous heretic.” We are then directed to Can. 1935, under the heading “Criminal Trials,” which states: “The faithful may, at all times denounce the offense of another for the purpose of demanding satisfaction or out of zeal for justice to repair some scandal or evil… Even an obligation to denounce an offender exists whenever one is obliged to do so either by LAW or by special legitimate precept or by the natural law in view of the danger to faith or religion or other imminent public evil.” Canon 2223 states it is as a rule left to the discretion of the superior to declare a penalty latae sententiae but he must issue the declaratory sentence if an interested party demands it or if the public welfare requires it.”

From a minister who is an excommunicatus vitandus, or who has been excommunicated by a condemnatory or declaratory sentence, the faithful may ask for sacramental absolution only in danger of death” (Can 2261 §3). There is also Can. 2265, §1 and §2, which states: §1, “Every excommunicated person whatsoever… (1) is forbidden to make use of the right of election, presentation or nomination; (2) is incapable of acquiring dignities, offices, benefices, ecclesiastical pensions, or any position in the Church and (3) cannot be promoted to orders. §2 Acts exercised in violation of the prohibitions in (1) and (2) are not invalid unless they were done by an excommunicatus vitandus or by a person excommunicated by a declaratory or condemnatory sentence.” So not only did Lefebvre and Thuc correspond to the definition of a vitandus, they also were to be considered as excommunicated by a declaratory (latae sententiae) sentence and were deemed by Canon Law as incapable of acting validly, as insisted upon by this author and others for years.

The faithful would be violating Can. 1325 and become heretics themselves for their silence if they failed to admit the violation of these canon laws and denounce the actions of Lefebvre, Thuc, any other bishops — and all whom they invalidly ordained and consecrated — as heretics and schismatics incapable of performing a valid act. Moreover, failure to do so is a denial of the condemnation by Pope Pius VI of the following proposition: “That the Church does not have authority to demand obedience to its decrees otherwise than by means which depend on persuasion, insofar as it intends that the Church has not conferred on it by God the power not only of directing by counsel and persuasion but also of ordering by laws and of constraining and forcing the inconstant and stubborn by exterior judgment and salutary punishments” — (leading toward a system condemned elsewhere as heretical; Auctorem fidei, 1794, DZ 1511). Not only must we defend the faith, but we must also obey the Sacred Canons.

Canon 104: Error invalidates acts

Canon 104 reads: “Error annuls an action, when the error concerns the substance of the action or amounts to a conditio sine qua non — that is to say, if the action would not have been done except for the error; otherwise the action is valid, unless the law states otherwise…” The canonists T. Lincoln Bouscaren and Adam Ellis comment: “Substantial error invalidates an act according to Canon 104. Error means a false judgment of the mind. Ignorance and inadvertence, though not identical with error, have the same juridical effect… Error is of law if it concerns existence or meaning of the law; of fact if it concerns any other fact. Error of law or a fact, if it is substantial, renders an act null and void.” And certainly the error of invalidity and illiciety is substantial; the acts of Trad pseudo-clergy null and void.

Rev. Charles Augustine states under Can. 104: “Whether deceit is committed by hiding the truth or telling a lie or by some machinations employing both words and deeds is immaterial. But it is important to ascertain whether the deceit practiced is the cause of one’s acting in such a way… Deceit generally causes error and therefore the canon speaks of error. Error is a state of mind in which one approves falsehood for truth. It differs from ignorance which is a lack of due knowledge” (A Commentary on Canon Law, 1931). The deceit practiced — hiding the true teachings of the popes and Canon Law to make it appear that they possessed orders and epikeia could replace jurisdiction; that they could represent the Church without the pope — this subterfuge definitely caused those involved in traditionalist sects to act as they did. But now that they know better, Catholics must do better.

Conclusion

As stated here repeatedly, to refute the teachings of the above Canons and prove only illiciety, while maintaining validity, LibTrads would need to disprove the most recent decisions of the Holy Office, the Code itself, VAS, and many other binding papal documents. In truth this cannot be done because the Church does not contradict Herself. They had the answer to what should be done in the absence of the Pope in Vacantis Apostolicae Sedis — elect a true pope according to the Sacred Canons. But all the cardinals, all the bishops failed to act. Cardinals lost the right to elect in voting in Roncalli, known to be a suspected heretic; the silence and inaction of the bishops on whom the election devolved ended any hope of ever again being able to elect a true pope.

In the latter days of his papacy, Pope Pius XII granted the faithful the following commission, in a document entered into the AAS: “Especially in countries where contacts with the hierarchy are difficult or practically impossible Christians…MUST, with God’s grace, assume all their responsibilities. Even so nothing can be undertaken against the explicit and implicit will of the Church or contrary in any way to the rules of faith or morals or ecclesiastical discipline.” It would be AGAINST the rules of faith and morals, of ecclesiastical discipline were the faithful NOT to invoke their right to publicly declare these imposters INVALID, NULL and VOID under Can. 1935. And that is why it matters that those praying at home acknowledge LibTrads not as just illicit, but undeniably invalid.

So the proofs above are Q.E.D. — quod erat demonstrandum. Or short and sweet, what has just been demonstrated cannot be refuted.

Tares among the wheat: the LibTrad valid orders myth

by T. Stanfill Benns | Nov 10, 2024 | New Blog

+25th Sunday after Pentecost+

Introduction

Readers are still unsure they can obtain certainty regarding the invalidity of Traditionalist orders received following the death of Pope Pius XII. By borrowing proofs from various site articles, I have once again tried to summarize what I think will help dispel the confusion created by Traditionalist “theologians” on this topic. These men make it appear that orders are superior to jurisdiction, when in fact the two are inseparable; BOTH are now required for validity. As one reader, M.L., commented:

“I’ve been reflecting on the subtle but crucial distinction between Traditionalists and true Catholics. It seems that while some Trads acknowledge the concept of validity versus liceity, their approach often stops at legality, missing the true spirit of faithfulness. They have become adept at navigating the technicalities of validity BUT SEEM TO LACK THE DEEPER SUBMISSION TO DIVINE LAW THAT TRANSCENDS MERE RUBRICS. Many simply echo their predecessors in a way that places the appearance of sanctity above its essence. These clerics, in their outward mastery of tradition, even Latin, create an enticing façade but in reality wield influence over the faithful more as a spectacle than as true shepherds.

“This has led me to conclude that genuine holiness now requires a prudent separation from such influences, lest we too fall into their error. God’s faithful remnant must remain vigilant, preserving their distance so as to avoid contracting the same spiritual malaise. Yet, we should never cease to share the truth in charity; some, by the grace of God, may yet receive it. And so, we walk the fine line of standing apart from this corruption while remaining a light for those still capable of seeking God sincerely.”

Amen to that. And please forgive me if I sometimes underestimate the damage that years of indoctrination by Trad pseudo-clergy has truly wrought and appear to have little sympathy for readers “not quite there yet.” The urgency of abandoning error sometimes overrides the patience required in the workings of grace. We begin below by addressing the means used for decades to deceive Catholics regarding the core issues of invalidity and liceity.

Tools of deception

First, we begin with the over-emphasis on Orders versus jurisdiction, when both are necessary to Apostolic succession; of the need of Mass and Sacraments as opposed to the dogma that that a true pope must be canonically elected. This shift of emphasis was a tool used by the Modernists even before Pius XII’s death. It is described in an article by Rev. Albert F. Kaiser, in The American Ecclesiastical Review, December-January, 1953-54 (“The Historical Backgrounds and Theology of Mediator Dei”) as “heretical exclusivism,” the minimizing and edging out of one dogma by emphasizing another. Orders was falsely portrayed as the all-important “gold key” in the keys of orders and Divinely instituted jurisdiction, sidestepping that of the Supreme Pontiff. The necessity of the Mass and Sacraments (the Anglican chant that “It is the Mass that matters,”) was stressed outside the papal direction required to assure the faithful that only valid and licit clergy would celebrate it. Traditionalists insisted that the Mass and Sacraments were the primary, almost exclusive means of grace, discounting prayer and good works.

Canon 196 reads: “The Catholic Church possesses by divine institution the power of jurisdiction or government. This power is twofold: that of the external forum and that of the internal forum.” Traditionalists NEVER explained to their followers that to become a true successor of the Apostles, one must possess both Orders AND jurisdiction, which they brazenly tried to explain away by invoking the non-applicable, meta-juristic principle of epikeia (see HERE). Nor did they explain it is a dogma that the faithful are bound to follow only lawful pastors, possessing jurisdiction (DZ 967, 968). The pseudo-priest Anthony Cekada wrote in 2003:

“Now, if a person has seriously and duly used the proper matter and form for performing or administering a sacrament, he is by that very fact presumed to have intended to do what the Church does.” (Pope Leo XIII, Apostolicae Curae, 13 September 1896; on Anglican orders.) The theologian Bernard Leeming S.J. cites this teaching as a confirmation of previous theologians who “all agreed that the outward, decorous performance of the rites sets up a presumption that the right intention exists…. The minister of a sacrament is presumed to intend what the rite means… This principle is affirmed as certain theological doctrine, taught by the Church, to deny which would be at least theologically rash.” (Principles of Sacramental Theology, Westminster MD: Newman 1956; pgs. 476, 482.)

Cekada, however, neglects to include a crucial quote from Leeming, who further notes: “In the case of bishops or priests who fall into heresy, the presumption stands that they intend to do what Christ wills unless the nature of their heresy gives ground to suspect that they are so convinced that Christ does not will a particular effect of Sacraments that they absolutely exclude this from their intention.” The effect of the Sacrament of Orders they deny is obedience to a canonically elected Roman Pontiff as head bishop to rule them, clearly stated in the rite of episcopal consecration — a necessary means of salvation for all the faithful.

Some might say, “Well the Orthodox held this intention and they are still considered valid.” Yes, but the Orthodox are not presenting as the true Catholic Church of all time; they present as exactly what they are -— a schismatic sect, recognized as such for centuries. LibTrads are actually attempting to alter the very nature of the Church’s Divine constitution and convince those believing themselves to be Catholic that the Church can exist and function without a canonically elected pope, which is a heresy (DZ 570c, 570d, 653, 674, 675). Cekada’s cherry-picked observations also presume the performance of many prerequisites necessary for both liceity and validity, primarily intention. This is contrary to the teaching and practice of the Church, as summarized below.

Church teaching on validity of Orders

The Catholic Encyclopedia on Anglican orders

“When persons or classes of persons who wish to minister at the Church’s altars have undergone ceremonies of ordination outside its fold, the Holy See is chary of doctrinal decisions but applies a common-sense rule that can give practical security. Where it judges that the previous orders were certainly valid it permits their use, SUPPOSING THE CANDIDATE TO BE ACCEPTABLE; where it judges the previous orders to be certainly invalid it disregards them altogether, and enjoins a re-ordination according to its own rite; where it judges that the validity of the previous orders is doubtful, EVEN THOUGH THE DOUBT BE SLIGHT, it forbids their use until a conditional ceremony of re-ordination has first been undergone.” Conditional ordination and re-ordination are necessary to obtain the required jurisdiction. And this only if the Church determines the candidate is fit.

One must first be properly called, investigated, qualified and validly tonsured by a bishop possessing an office — who is in communion with the Roman Pontiff — to be undoubtedly validly ordained a priest. For one must be a certainly valid priest to become a bishop, as St. Thomas Aquinas teaches. As seen above, even slight doubt forbids any use of purported orders. Determination of validity, hence the right and ability to receive jurisdiction, rests with the pope.

Pope Paul IV’s Cum ex Apostolatus Officio

This 1559 bull sets the stage for disqualification from offices and promotions. “All and sundry BISHOPS, Archbishops, Patriarchs, Primates, Cardinals, Legates… inciting or committing schism or who, in the future, shall stray or fall into heresy… being less excusable than others in such matters… are also automatically and without any recourse to law or action, completely and entirely, forever deprived of, and furthermore disqualified from and incapacitated for their rank… (para. 3). “Further, if ever at any time it becomes CLEAR that any BISHOP…[etc.]; or likewise any Roman Pontiff, before his promotion or elevation as a Cardinal or Roman Pontiff, (has strayed from the Catholic Faith, fallen into some heresy, or has incurred schism), then his promotion or elevation shall be null, invalid and void… The persons themselves so promoted and elevated shall, ipso facto and WITHOUT NEED FOR ANY FURTHER DECLARATION, be deprived of any dignity, position, honor, title, AUTHORITY, OFFICE AND POWER…” Because there is doubt and confusion regarding this matter, under Can. 6 §4 this law is now the prevailing law. Cum ex… is retained in numerous places as a footnote throughout the Code.

This may be confusing to some, so we will attempt to explain it. The important point here is that only Marcel Lefebvre and Pierre Martin Ngo Dinh Thuc, also a few others ordaining or consecrating post-1958, were validly consecrated bishops under Pope Pius XII, (although Lefebvre ‘s consecration is doubtfully valid). Cum ex… must not be applied to those calling themselves bishops today who were ordained and/or consecrated by these pre-1958 consecrated bishops. Cum ex… states in paragraph 3 of the bull that any bishop inciting or committing schism and/or falling into heresy loses forever his office as bishop. Can. 188 §4, with paragraphs 3 and 6 of Cum ex… annotated, is listed as one of this canon’s sources, (Peter Card. Gasparri’s 1917 Code in Latin with the Fontes, 1957).

The canon reads: “All offices shall be vacant ipso facto by tacit resignation in the following cases: … (4) If a cleric has publicly lapsed from the Catholic faith” (Woywod-Smith). This is how we know that both paragraphs refer to loss of office. Lefebvre, Thuc, et al publicly accepted the Novus Ordo, signed Vatican 2 documents and celebrated the Novus Ordo Missae. They were public heretics. They also incited schism by establishing their own Traditionalists sects. They lost their offices as bishops and basically were reduced to the priesthood as regards their powers. Heretical and schismatic bishops can ordain and consecrate, but the value of these orders must be officially determined by the Church before they can be declared valid. (This will be treated below.)

Thomas William Allies/Pope Pius IX

In 1865, Thomas William Allies M.A., a convert from Anglicanism, issued the third edition of a little work called The See of St. Peter. It was translated and circulated by the express order of Pope Pius IX. In this work, Allies refers to the Anglican bishops later declared invalid by Pope Leo XIII: “On the supposition that they were true bishops, they had power to administer the Sacraments, but in no particular place, nor to any particular persons. They were bishops, but they had no subjects; all acts of jurisdiction performed by them under these circumstances would be null: acts of their Order, irregular. Supposing them to be true bishops, nay, to have been consecrated by the Supreme Pontiff himself and under no canonical disabilities, THEY COULD NOT CONFER ORDERS WHICH SHOULD BE VALID IN RESPECT OF EXECUTION; as they had no jurisdiction themselves, they could confirm none… Acts flowing from Order, although done wrongly and illicitly, are yet, when done, valid; but acts flowing from jurisdiction, if done upon those over whom the doer has no jurisdiction, are absolutely invalid and null…”

Is this making sense now? Only the Roman Pontiff can provide a bishop with subjects by approving his appointment as bishop, thereby assigning him a diocese. Lefebvre, Thuc and any others abandoned the dioceses assigned them by Pope Pius XII to accept dioceses from Roncalli and Montini. They tacitly resigned their offices by accepting the usurpers, committing heresy and schism, from which they were never absolved. Their acts were null and void because they were forbidden to exercise their orders, being schismatic pseudo-bishops, and they had no subjects over which to validly exercise them. Bishops call priestly candidates from the population of their dioceses; over them they have jurisdiction. These alone they may validly ordain. This only repeats the teachings of the Council of Trent (DZ 967, 968) on those priests and bishops not “rightly sent.”

Allies continues: “All this doctrine may be summed up thus: all spiritual power of the sacerdotal character is given together with a certain consecration, and therefore the keys are given with the order; but the USE of the keys requires its proper MATTER, which is a people made subject by jurisdiction, and therefore one, before he has jurisdiction, has the keys, but has not the ACT of using them. A consequence of this is that while in all schismatics, heretics, excommunicated, suspended or degraded persons, the power of the keys remains as to its essence, yet THE USE OF THE KEYS IS BARRED THROUGH DEFECT OF MATTER… Whence, as the Church deprives heretics, schismatics, and such like, by withdrawing their subjects, either simply or partially, so far as they are deprived, they cannot have the use of the keys.” All know a sacrament is not valid if matter, form or intention is lacking.

Canon 2245, April 1951, AAS 43-217

“A decree of the Holy Office concerning the consecration of a Bishop without canonical provision is as follows: A Bishop OF WHATSOEVER RITE OR DIGNITY who consecrates to the episcopacy anyone who is neither appointed nor expressly confirmed by the Holy See and the person who receives the consecration, even though they were coerced by great fear, (Can 2229 §3, no. 3), incur ipso facto an excommunication most specially reserved to the Holy See.” Per the above, and according to the unanimous opinion of theologians, there can be NO presumption of validity until the matter is resolved by the Roman Pontiff, and only the Roman Pontiff. And notice that he states, “OF WHATSOEVER RITE OR DIGNITY,” including here all the Uniates and the Orthodox, as his supreme jurisdiction allows.

Pope St. Leo I

The Catholic Encyclopedia says of Pope St. Leo I: “[Pope St. Leo I, the Great] died 10 November, 461. Leo’s pontificate, next to that of St. Gregory I, is the most significant and important in Christian antiquity.” Pope St. Leo the Great and the author quoting him notes that other popes, not just Pope St. Leo I, taught as he did, and as Pope Pius VI would later teach in Charitas. “To Anastasius of Thessalonica, apostolic vicar in Illyria, the pontiff Saint Leo the Great told him: “Let no bishop be ordained in those churches without your approval: in this way he will take care, to make the choice with maturity, knowing that they have to pass your examination. The metropolitan who, disregarding our mandates, will be ordained without your notice, let him know that WE WILL NOT CONSIDER HIS ORDINATION AS VALID; and he will be responsible before us for the USURPATION HE PRESUMED TO MAKE OF THE HOLY MINISTRY.” (The balance between the two powers: that is, The rights of the Church vindicated against the attacks of Dr. D.F. de P.G. Vigil by Reverend Fray Pedro Gual, Vol.3, p. 202).

Szal’s Canon Law dissertation

In Rev. Ignatius Szal’s Communication of Catholics With Schismatics, (1948), Szal notes that in the late 12th century, when the antipopes Victor IV and Paschal III reigned: “These schismatics had ordained many of their adherents to the episcopate…The Third Lateran Council took action by declaring that the ordinations performed by these schismatic popes were null and void, as also the ordinations conferred by those who had been consecrated by them… The Canon used the word “irritas” in reference to the ordinations conferred by the schismatics. However the term was to be understood in reference to the execution or the EXERCISE of these orders, rather than to their validity.” In other words, they made no decision on whether they validly possessed these orders. For whether they possessed them or not, they were forbidden, under pain of invalidity, to exercise them over those not their subjects.

Pope Pius VI, Can. 147

This constitution is listed as a footnote to Can. 2370 regarding the necessity of the papal mandate for consecration: “For the right of ordaining bishops belongs only to the Apostolic See, as the Council of Trent declares; it cannot be assumed by any bishop or metropolitan without obliging Us to declare as schismatic both those who ordain and those who are ordained thus INVALIDATING their future ACTIONS…. “ Pius VI further warns they are not to function in any way, regardless of “any pretext of necessity whatsoever.” And Can. 147 states: “An ecclesiastical office is not validlyobtained without canonical appointment. By canonical appointment is understood the conferring of an ecclesiastical office by the competent ecclesiastical authority in harmony with the sacred canons.” Notice the use of canonical in Can. 2245 above. As the popes, the Council of Trent, the Catholic Encyclopedia and the theologians all teach, there can be no Apostolic succession when both Orders and jurisdiction do not exist together. So why is anyone presuming these men to be valid??

Canon 147 was based on the decree of the Council of Trent regarding orders. In 1950, the Sacred Congregation of the Council provided an official interpretation of Can. 147, citing the following from the Council of Trent: “Those who undertake to exercise these offices merely at the behest of and upon appointment by the people or secular power and authority, and those who assume the same upon their own authority, are all to be regarded not as ministers of the Church, but as ‘thieves and robbers who have entered not by the door’ … “If anyone says that those who are neither duly [rightly, properly] ordained nor sent by ecclesiastical and canonical authority but who come from elsewhere are legitimate ministers of the word and of the Sacraments let him be anathema” (Canon Law Digest, Vol. 3, T. Lincoln Bouscaren, 1954; see also DZ 967, 968).

Pope Pius XII attached ipso facto excommunications specially reserved to the Holy See to the Sacred Congregation of the Council’s interpretation for allowing anyone to be intruded into an ecclesiastical office and this is extended to any who support them. Ordinations by these schismatics and heretics — Lefebvre, Thuc, et al — can scarcely be said to have been done rightly or properly. And such men were stripped of any jurisdiction, so had no power to send anyone. It is interesting to note that directly below this instruction on Can. 147 in Bouscaren’s work, he lists a reference to Can. 2394, where it is declared that those violating this canon are considered VITANDUS. And earlier popes, in condemning such men, made it clear they were to be regarded as vitandi (more on this below).

Holy Office decree

According to a decision from the Holy Office, Nov. 18, 1931: “A lapsed Catholic who receives orders from a schismatic bishop can be received back into the Church only on the understanding that such ordinations, even if valid, will be completely disregarded, Ecclesiam non habere neque unquam habituram esse oratorem tanquam ordinatum cum que propterea nullus obigationibus statui clericali annexis tenneri” (Dr. Leslie Rumble, Homiletic and Pastoral Review: “Are Liberal Catholic Orders Valid,” 1958). One cannot validly receive orders if one is not a Catholic; there must first be abjuration and absolution from heresy. All of us, at one time, including those ordained by Traditionalists, were members of the Novus Ordo or Traditionalist sects and would need to be absolved and abjured from any censures. Membership in any non-Catholic sect qualifies one as a lapsed Catholic.

Invalidation of acts, not orders

And finally we come to Pope Pius XII’s Vacantis Apostolicae Sedis, (VAS), specifically governing an interregnum. “(1) Therefore, We declare INVALID AND VOID any power or jurisdiction pertaining to the Roman Pontiff in his lifetime, which the assembly of Cardinals might decide to exercise (while the Church is without a Pope), (2) The Sacred College of Cardinals shall not have the power to make a determination in any way it pleases concerning the laws of the Apostolic See and of the Roman Church… (3) The laws issued by Roman Pontiffs in no way can be corrected or changed by the assembly of Cardinals of the Roman Church while it is without a Pope, nor can anything be subtracted from them or added or dispensed in any way whatsoever with respect to said laws or any part of them… In truth, if anything adverse to this command should by chance happen to come about or be attempted, We declare it, by Our Supreme Authority, to be null and void.” (see full text HERE).

Lefebvre, Thuc and any others usurped papal jurisdiction by dispensing themselves and proceeding without the mandate. They also usurped papal jurisdiction by erecting seminaries without papal appointment or approval and presumed to proceed without the lifting of their censures for heresy and infamy of law by the pope. Therefore under Charitas and VAS, all that they did was null, void and invalid. This constitution is addressed to cardinals, but if even cardinals do not have such power, schismatic bishops would certainly have none!

Let us here pause to address the objection that null and void does not necessarily mean invalid despite its use in Canon Law and certain papal documents (see Charitas referenced above; also Pope Paul IV’s bull Cum ex Apostolatus Officio). Pope Leo XIII provides an authoritative definition of this term in his constitution Apostolica Curae, addressing the administration of Holy Orders: “To obtain orders nulliter means the same as by an act null and void — that is invalid — as the very meaning of the word and as common parlance requires.” And invalid is the word used interchangeably with null and void in the documents of Pope Paul IV and Pope Pius VI cited above. Leeming also lists invalid as “synonymous with null or void” (p. 266).

It is true that a pope cannot nullify a valid ordination or episcopal consecration, but VAS does not nullify orders received. It only reinforces and confirms all that is presented above, exercising the pope’s supreme jurisdiction to protect the Deposit of Faith in his absence. This should erase all doubt in Catholic minds. The Church is most vulnerable to sabotage and profanation during an interregnum. And Pius XII is clear in his intent. As Msgr. Joseph C. Fenton observes:

“It is, I believe, to be presumed that the Vicar of Christ speaks to the faithful in a way they are able to understand… Our Lord did not teach in any way but authoritatively nor does His Vicar on earth when He teaches in the name and by the authority of his Master. Every doctrine proposed by the Holy Father to the entire Church militant is, by that very fact, imposed upon all the faithful for their firm and sincere acceptance.” Please realize that any papal document, whether infallible or not, binds Catholics (Can. 1812, Pope Leo XIII). Nothing that LibTrad pseudo-clergy pretend to teach can supersede or change that.

One last objection

“But there were consecrations done throughout the centuries without papal approval, consecrations done validly though illicitly…”. This “earlier precedents” business, officially promoted by the CMRI and others, is one of the oldest LibTrad deceptions on the books. This is yet another violation of Canon Law: “A more recent law given by competent authority abrogates a former law if it is directly contrary to the former law… or if it readjusts the entire subject matter of the former law” (Can. 22). Pope Pius XII states in Ad apostolorum principis, addressed to the errant Chinese national bishops:

“Everyone sees that all ecclesiastical discipline is overthrown if it is in any way lawful for one to restore arrangements WHICH ARE NO LONGER VALID because the supreme authority of the Church long ago decreed otherwise. In no sense do they excuse their way of acting by appealing to another custom, and they indisputably prove that they follow this line deliberately in order to escape from the discipline which now prevails and which they ought to be obeying…The faithful are bound by the duty of hierarchical subordination and true obedience not only in matters which pertain to faith and morals, but also in those which concern the discipline and government of the Church.”

And from Mediator Dei, 1947: “Clearly no sincere Catholic can refuse to accept the formulation of Christian doctrine MORE RECENTLY ELABORATED AND PROCLAIMED AS DOGMAS BY THE CHURCH, under the inspiration and guidance of the Holy Spirit with abundant fruit for souls, because it pleases him to hark back to the old formulas. NO MORE CAN ANY CATHOLIC IN HIS RIGHT SENSES REPUDIATE EXISTING LEGISLATION OF THE CHURCH TO REVERT TO PRESCRIPTIONS BASED ON THE EARLIEST SOURCES OF CANON LAW.” This is an actual error condemned by Pope Pius XII in an infallible encyclical as Antiquarianism. We have no choice but to accept it with a firm assent.

Conclusion

I do not see how anyone, weighing the proofs presented here, could still remain in doubt, given the testimony of Wm. Allies, Pope Pius VI, the Holy Office and VAS. This is not a matter of understanding; it is matter of assenting firmly and irrevocably to what the popes teach and what Canon Law legislates. The invalidity of these bishops matters because the truth always matters, and we are always required to believe only the truth. Those holding them to be only illicit can offer NO papal documents proving their validity, proofs they are bound to produce to justify their belief. In a doubt of law one returns to the old law (Can. 6 §4). As seen above, Charitas is the old law governing Can. 2370 demanding the papal mandate, and Charitas teaches that the orders conveyed by these men are invalid; likewise VAS. This resolves everything. Another papal document footnoted to Can. 2370 is Pius IX’s Etsi Multa, which states:

“As even the rudiments of Catholic faith declare, no one can be considered a bishop who is not linked in communion of faith and love with Peter, upon whom is built the Church of Christ; who does not adhere to the supreme Pastor to whom the sheep of Christ are committed to be pastured; and who is not bound to the confirmer of fraternity which is in the world.” Following these words, he condemns the Old Catholic bishop Reinkin as a vitandus, calling him a pseudo-bishop. Pope St. Pius X also condemned as a schismatic, a vitandus, and a pseudo-bishop the Old Roman Catholic Arnold Harris Mathew. Validly consecrated vitandi can only validly forgive sins at the hour of death, as a priest; they certainly cannot validly ordain or consecrate. And on this head, VAS removes all doubt about any validity: their orders are invalid. These are the “precedents” real Catholics use to resolve doubts, those given to us by the Popes and the councils, as reflected in Canon Law.

The “illicit only” crowd which upholds the validity of these pseudo-clerics must understand that they do so only because they are still enmeshed in Traditionalism, whether they pray at home or not. This can be remedied by studying and fully assenting to the teachings of the popes. Don’t feel ashamed for accepting these lies for many years and for that reason be reluctant to choose the popes over the prevailing “wisdom” of LibTrads. If we can possibly help these false clerics and their followers see their errors, we must do as Canon Law directs us to do — gather forces to prevent them from functioning, not fracture into opposing pray-at-home sects. That is the true charity we owe our neighbor.

Christ alone is the truth, and His vicars speak in His name. His vicars are telling us that without the Church’s Christ-instituted head — a canonically elected pope exercising supreme jurisdiction — there can be no Church, no Catholic society, as Pope Pius IX taught. As members of the Apostolic College, bishops cannot rule in the pope’s stead; they must submit to the pope as head bishop. Deny that, and you deny that Christ ever instituted the papacy.

Fielding objections to the Gerry Matatics refute

by T. Stanfill Benns | Nov 1, 2024 | New Blog

+Feast of All Saints+

Prayer Society Intentions for November, Month of the Holy Souls in Purgatory

“O Lord Jesus Christ, King of glory, deliver all the souls of the faithful departed from the pains of hell and the bottomless pit.” (Raccolta)

Introduction

An objection to the article refuting Gerry Matatics was sent to me by email and the topics raised are presented below for those who may be in contact with the person(s) circulating these specious and repetitive objections. My answers to the objections, stated in blue, are listed in the responses below.

On Feeneyism

Objection: Matatics no longer supports Feeneyism. He states this in his videos. It’s no different than you trying to elect a false pope and later recanting your position.

Response: It is not enough to state it, he must PROVE that he no longer supports this position by removing all traces of it as stated publicly on his website! I spent nearly two years condemning the heresies of David Bawden publicly on my website after denouncing him as “pope.” Please pay attention to the sum total of what is posted to Matatics’ website (https://www.gerrymatatics.org/GRIsGerrySede.html) as of 2019, part of which is quoted in my article. He has the obligation to correct it and publish the Church’s true teaching on this dogma as expressed by Pope Pius XII in Suprema haec sacra. I warned him about this long ago, as did others. His website copy now contradicts a truth of faith and favors a man condemned by Pope Pius XII as a heretic, and this is cooperation in heresy:

“I do not necessarily agree with or endorse every detail of every article on these other websites, especially on other matters. Particularly is this true with regard to their various views on the hotly-debated dogma extra ecclesiam nulla salus (“outside the Church no salvation”). Some of these websites take too unacceptably liberal a view of this dogma, HOLDING, FOR EXAMPLE, THAT THOSE WHO DO NOT PROFESS THE CATHOLIC FAITH COULD STILL BE SAVED — despite the clear teaching of the Athanasian Creed and infallible papal pronouncements to the contrary.

“St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Robert Bellarmine, St. Alphonsus de Liguori, and in fact every single doctor of the Church and every catechism and theological manual used by the Church for the last millennium [teaches] the remote possibility of salvation for Catholic catechumens who hold the Catholic Faith and who possess perfect charity and perfect contrition for their sins, and thus might qualify to receive the grace of the sacrament of baptism when they are unable, through no fault of their own, to receive the sacrament itself — especially if these spiritual qualities are evidenced by their martyrdom for the Catholic Faith. Such a rare occurrence would still require the existence of the sacrament of baptism and derive its efficacy from the sacrament, thus arguably not negating John 3:5 and similar papal statements. This would be the classic doctrine — not the modern liberal version thereof — of “baptism by desire” and “baptism by blood,” admittedly never dogmatically defined by any pope or council, but equally admittedly never explicitly condemned by any pope or council either. At best this teaching is a tolerable theological opinion within the parameters of Catholic orthodoxy, certainly not de fide but arguably proximate to faith.”

How can Matatics possibly state it is a tolerable theological opinion when Pope Pius XII excommunicated Feeney and issued Suprema haec sacra, based on numerous decisions of prior popes and councils?! Every aspect of the Feeneyite heresy from the teachings of the Church Herself is exposed HERE. What Matatics states above is NOT the teaching of Pope Pius XII or the Continual Magisterium — it is slightly modified Feeneyism. If Catholics would only read the popes and councils, they would know this. Witness the teachings of Pope Pius IX and Pius XII, as presented below:

***Singulari quadem*, December 9, 1851**

“Certainly we must hold it as of faith that no one can be saved outside the apostolic Roman Church, that this is the only Ark of salvation, and that the one who does not enter it is going to perish in the deluge. But, nevertheless, we must likewise hold it as certain that those who labor in ignorance of the true religion, if that [ignorance] be invincible, will never be charged with any guilt on this account before the eyes of the Lord. Now, who is there who would arrogate to himself the power to indicate the extent of such [invincible] ignorance according to the nature and the variety of peoples, regions, talents, and so many other things? For really when, loosed from these bodily bonds, we see God as He is, we shall certainly understand with what intimate and beautiful a connection the divine mercy and justice are joined together. But, while we live on earth, weighed down by this mortal body that darkens the mind, let us hold most firmly, from Catholic doctrine, that there is one God, one faith, one baptism. IT IS WRONG TO PUSH OUR INQUIRIES FURTHER THAN THIS. “

***Quanta conficiamur moerore*, Aug. 10, 1863**

“And here, Our Beloved Sons and Venerable Brethren, We must mention and reprove a most serious error into which some Catholics have fallen, imagining that men living in errors and apart (alienos) from the true faith and from the Catholic unity can attain to eternal life. This, of course, is completely opposed to Catholic doctrine. It is known to Us and to you that those who labor in invincible ignorance of our most holy religion, and who, carefully observing the natural law and its precepts which God has inscribed in the hearts of all, and who, being ready to obey God, live an honest and upright life, can, through the working of the divine light and grace, attain eternal life, since God, who clearly sees, inspects, and knows the minds, the intentions, the thoughts, and the habits of all, will, by reason of His goodness and kindness, never allow anyone who has not the guilt of willful sin to be punished by eternal sufferings.

“But it is a perfectly well-known Catholic dogma that no one can be saved outside the Catholic Church, and that those who are contumacious against the authority of that same Church, and who are pertinaciously separated from the unity of that Church and from Peter’s successor, the Roman Pontiff, to whom the custody of the vineyard has been entrusted by the Saviour, cannot obtain eternal salvation.”

This may sound a bit confusing but is made more understandable by the following:

Msgr. J. C. Fenton, in his The Catholic Church and Salvation, 1958, writes: “In the Mystici Corporis Christi Pope Pius XII asserts true Catholic doctrine by teaching that a non-member of the Church who is within the Church only in the sense that he has an unconscious or implicit desire of entering it as a member can possess the supernatural life of sanctifying grace. At the same time, however, he brings out a lesson much needed by some of the writers of our generation when he points out the fact that people who are within the Church only by an unconscious desire cannot be secure about the affair of their eternal salvation precisely because they ‘still lack so many and such great heavenly helps and aids that can be enjoyed only in the Catholic Church.’” And here: “…That one may obtain eternal salvation, it is not always required that he be incorporated into the Church ACTUALLY AS A MEMBER, but it is necessary that at least he be united to her by desire and longing,” (“Pope Pius XII and the Theological Treatise on the Church,” (The American Ecclesiastical Review, December 1958).

The American Ecclesiastical Review, “Questions and Answers,” January 1958, Rev. Francis J. Connell: “Those who are not actual members of the Church can be sanctified and saved if they are invincibly ignorant of their obligation to join the Church and are in the state of sanctifying grace, since such persons have an implicit desire of membership in the Church. But they are not to be reckoned as members of the Church — not even invisible members.” (Rev. Connell was Msgr. Fenton’s teacher.)

As you can see, Matatics does NOT hold to the teachings of Pope Pius IX or Pope Pius XII or to all the previous popes and councils. Nowhere does Pope Pius IX or Pope Pius XII limit baptism of desire to catechumens. Catechumens are not invincibly ignorant, nor is their desire unconscious, but conscious. Matatics is a slick operator and his teaching is heretical, because it impugns the supreme authority of the Roman Pontiff to decide such matters. Now read what I quote from Msgr. Fenton in the Feeney section of the Matatics article concerning the necessity of accepting these teachings of the Roman Pontiffs. Pope Pius XII is the only authoritative interpreter of what previous popes and councils meant in their teaching on baptism of blood/desire. And Msgr. Fenton is a highly decorated and approved theologian qualified to comment on this; Matatics is not. The best source to properly understand the Feeney heresy is Msgr. Fenton’s The Catholic Church and Salvation, available for free download at archive.org.

Publishing forbidden works

Objection: You yourself have published works in violation of Canon Law. [This] is strictly forbidden.

Response: It is a rule of Canon Law that the higher law prevails whenever there is a conflict of law. It would be a violation of Can. 1325 NOT to defend the faith. If I thought for one minute that I was violating Canon Law, I would not be writing. See the 2006 revised article on this here: https://www.betrayedcatholics.com/free-content/1-credentials/where-is-your-imprimatur/ Pope Pius XII commanded us to take up all the duties of the hierarchy in their absence. The address containing that command is entered into the Acta Apostolica Sedis and therefore is binding on all the faithful. The command of the popes, beginning with Pope Pius IX, to engage in Catholic Action, is further proof of this. Canon 1385 forbidding us to write is an ecclesiastical law dependent on the bishop, so Pope Pius XII’s command supersedes this law; it is the higher law. Moreover, as the canonists and moral theologians commonly teach and as I have stated here before, Can. 15 excuses one from an ecclesiastical law that is impossible to obey. It is today impossible to submit one’s works to a bishop.

But the law governing debates is a different matter. Permission for these must come directly from the Holy Office unless there is an emergency (Can. 1325), and there is no emergency here that cannot be resolved by resorting to previous approved works in written form. Presuming such permission from the Holy See during an interregnum is usurpation of papal authority as is infallibly stated in Pope Pius XII’s Vacantis Apostolicae Sedis. So these debates are forbidden and in fact, Pius XII says any attempt to do this outside his permission is null, void and invalid.

Written works can much better PROVE that these arguments are drawn out in obedience to the Church’s own teaching and Canon Law; I have no authority of my own. And one cannot do this effectively in videos. If any published work is challenged as contrary tom faith or inaccurate, the challenger is then expected to use the same laws and teachings to show that they are not contradicting truths of faith. This has never been done by LibTrad pseudo-clergy OR Matatics because they cannot answer the arguments. This being the case, Canon Law tells us that authoritative papal documents prove the case and cannot be contradicted (Can. 1814). What I have presented on my site is papal and canon law. Can. 1825 states: “Presumption may be… a presumption of law, which is stated in the law itself.” And the presumption about public ecclesiastical documents being genuine is stated in Can. 1814.

Canon 1827 reads: “He who has a presumption of law in his favor IS FREED FROM THE BURDEN OF PROOF, WHICH IS THUS SHIFTED TO HIS OPPONENT. If the latter cannot prove that the presumption failed in the case, the judge must render sentence in favor of the one on whose side the presumption stands.” If Matatics is such an educated oracle and defender of the faith, as his promoters and followers believe, then why has he not produced written evidence he is indeed teaching the Catholic faith? Why is he ignoring Pope Pius XII’s Vacantis Apostolicae Sedis and siding with Feeneyites?

I did not write The Phantom Church in Rome of my own accord — readers approached me and requested it be written to help them persuade family members and friends to leave the Traditionalist movement. I have emails to prove this. It is primarily a summary of previous writings and articles on my site. Is it reasonable to think that without some sort of explanation people not well educated in the faith would understand the relevance of things written in normal times if not explained in relation to what is happening today? I don’t think this is at all realistic.

Patrick Henry

Objection: He seemed to be off the Recusant bunch… Because he is older, I think he’s very confused about what is going on.

Response: He is not that much older than I am. I have known Henry since the mid-1980s and have had various exchanges with him. He has repeatedly attempted to direct readers away from my site. He may be getting older, but he has employed various people and methods to discredit me. So he doesn’t seem confused to me. Like Matatics and all LibTrads, he rejects the necessity of the papacy in order that bishops may exist, a denial of papal authority and an endorsement of the Gallicanist heresy. It is also the rejection of the teaching in Mystici Corporis Christi and Ad Sinarum Gentum that bishops receive their powers only through the Roman Pontiff, not directly from Christ.

Matatics correction

Objection: Much of the information you mention is only word of mouth, not from him personally. His website is very outdated and no longer functional. He doesn’t know everything that’s going on with the Recusants… This could be construed as slander.

Response: I am in touch with others who assure me he is aware of the sect and is associated with several of them or their children. I would not have said so otherwise. See the article here on why I am not about to approach him. https://www.betrayedcatholics.com/does-gerry-matatics-respect-his-fellow-catholic-writers/ The moral theologians teach we don’t have to attempt fraternal correction if there is good reason to believe it will not do any good. One does not commit slander when revealing a false reputation in order that others may not be deceived. (Revs. McHugh and Callan). And I will not tolerate heresy on the Internet from anyone. I was recently told by one individual that Matatics told him/her if s/he believed anything I wrote, he wanted nothing to do with them. So I seriously doubt anything I say would convince him. If Matatics is not associated with the recusant sect, he has the obligation to say so publicly, since they are clearly not Catholic and he is the one who first invented the inappropriate recusant reference. Matatics must be the one to prove he is not in violation of papal teaching; I long ago proved my case.

Objection: No one should follow just one person’s “take” on the Church; they should be pointed to the actual documents. No one can claim to have a higher moral authority.

Response: I have never claimed to possess a “higher moral authority.” I only point people to the documents of popes, councils, Canon Law and pre-1959 approved sources — they are the authorities. I then demonstrate the interconnections, which the Church Herself allows me to do. There is a proposition against the scholasticism of St. Thomas Aquinas which the Church long ago condemned. It states: “That… from one matter another matter cannot be inferred or concluded, or from the non-existence of one, the non-existence of the other” (DZ 554). I don’t offer people a “take” on the Church: I offer them the testimony of the popes, the councils, Canon Law and approved theologians as the scholastic method teaches. It is against reason to state that by offering this, inferences cannot be drawn from them, as this proposition attests. Traditionalism and Fideism are heresies that teach that the faithful cannot reason out their faith for themselves, and listening to present-day “Traditionalists” is what got us into this mess in the first place.

Conclusion

These are the same arguments that have been leveled in defense of these online LibTrad preachers for years. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Truth today seems to be measured in the number of “likes” you can rack up for your videos and how many followers read and subscribe to them. Of course we should be listening to the popes about how to measure things such as this, since Pope Pius IX condemned the notion that: “Authority is nothing more than numbers and the sum of material strengths” (Syllabus of Errors, DZ 1760); in other words the voice of the “majority” is no measure of truth. But then he lived in a world without Facebook or YouTube, so who is going to believe he has any credence today?

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