Dear Readers,
The website rebuild is finished for the most part and the membership site should be fully open for business any day now. Thank you for your patience and please forgive any inconvenience this may have caused. We will continue to build the membership site over the next several months and appreciate any suggestions as to what might be needed or cannot be found elsewhere.
A reader has notified me that she is seeing many of her former Traditionalist friends heading back to the Novus Ordo, and these are not just the SSPX branch that has made the devil’s deal with Rome. There is nothing that would indicate this to be found on the Internet, but do not doubt it is true. Today’s “Catholics” have been trained to conformity in public schools and desensitized to anything sacred. They have no understanding of Divine Tradition, no appreciation of Christ’s will in this matter, no real idea at all of what Pope St. Pius X meant in his oath against Modernism when he taught that Catholics must accept what the Church teaches “always in the same sense and interpretation, even to us.” It is useless to believe that such people, despite seeing the evils intensify in this world dramatically for the last 30 years, could ever accept the idea of a faithless Rome, Antichrist reigning as an antipope, and his system prevailing as the Roman church. This would brand them as certified nut cases amongst friends and family, not to mention society in general, and there they will not go.
Here it is well to quote the words of Fr. Paul Furfey’s “Mystery of Iniquity,” where he condemns Catholic conformism, doctrinal minimalism (eirenicism), and failure to appreciate dogma. “It is too bad that so many Catholics have lost their sense of horror and disgust at dogmatic error,” he said. “Catholics can never make their rightful contribution to social reform until they set a very high price on the dogmatic truths that are theirs…To overlook them, to abandon them even in part or to underemphasize them is to render ourselves ineffective against the mystery of iniquity.” This is putting things mildly, and if Fr. Furfey could see what we see today he would realize that we have lost the war against this iniquitous mystery altogether, at least temporarily. Catholics sold out long before the present generation came on the scene. They were Modernists and materialists at heart decades before Vatican 2, or else there would have been no one left for Rome to rule who could implement and observe Vatican 2 changes and the changes in the liturgy.
It is much with Novus Ordo attendees and Traditionalists as it is with druggies and alcoholics: you cannot help them, you cannot reason with them and you cannot give them the graces necessary to convert; that belongs to God alone. Prayer, patience and making sure that the information is there if they ever ask for it are the only things that can be done. It is painful, depressing and heartbreaking but our efforts are better spent making sure that we do not fall into the same errors and do all we can to prevent others within our sphere of influence from doing the same. Some few of this Trad/NO group will be saved by invincible ignorance, others may repent on their deathbeds. Most will die as they have lived I am afraid, for external religion long ago became the opiate of these people and they are devoid of any real interior life. The social aspect of the Church was all they ever really cared about, and an internalization of the truths of faith and application of those truths was more than they ever wanted to take on.
Their main problem is fear, for surely they know that the times in which we live are evil beyond anything the world has experienced to date. But they are afraid to admit this because it then would require them to actually think, and that is not something they are fond of doing. They do not want to believe that they live in such times, or to consider that at some point God is going to chastise the earth with every plague and punishment outlined in the Apocalypse. They do not believe they deserve this punishment or that God is so merciless He would ever send it. They are in total denial and wish to stay there. They are the ones who were marrying and giving in marriage that the flood carried away in Noe’s time. They have been busy fiddling while Rome burned, and their indifference to the situation could not be plainer. Debating with them, correcting them, plying them with literature is all a waste of our time. We cannot count them as true Catholics, no matter how much we wish that we could. Even the Apostles at some point were forced to dust off their sandals and leave those they had been sent to convert to their own devices because they would not listen.
Doing what we can with the time we have left is the most important thing that we can possibly do. We must prepare ourselves spiritually for things to get much worse, possibly imprisonment, loss of loved ones even martyrdom. Can any of us say we are really ready to face these things? Can we possibly presume to go to the lengths we have to save others when we are not even spiritually equipped to save our own souls? Charity is all about loving God primarily and then ourselves in relation to God before we can properly love our neighbors. If nothing else we can be an example to them, an inspiration to them; the seed of the faith from which new Catholic plants will grow. It has always been so, and it is no different today. We must always be willing to help others, but remain focused on our interior life. This is the charity we owe our own souls. God will hear our prayers, and will deal with those we love and care for according to their merits. But we cannot let our concern for them allow us to question His will or damage our trust in Him in any way.
Blessings,
T. Benns
