+ St. Simeon, Bishop and Martyr +

As we prepare for the Lenten season, may those honoring Our Lady daily increase their devotion to her, Mother of Sorrows, whose Divine Son in the Blessed Trinity is the source of all truth. Another article has been completed further exposing the fallacies promoted by Traditionalists to shore up their false claims to validity and liceity. This piece addresses the longstanding work of Anthony Cekada, Canon Law and Common Sense, which can still be found circulating on the Internet. It explains how Traditionalists dismissed Canon Law as solely the product of  human law to justify their use of epikeia and necessity in order to promote their agenda. You may read it here.

Peering into the future

The train carrying the Novus Ordo and various Traditionalist sects is slowly leaving the station, bound for who knows where. Same train, different cars. Whether Rome anathematizes the “Latin Tridentine Mass” (so many believe it is identical to the John 23 Missal, which tells us how much they know about their faith) is scarcely the issue. It is only thesymbol of a romanticized Church that once existed long ago. The true Mass was the fulfillment of Christ’s request to commemorate His Passion and death on the Cross, the actual re-enactment of that Holy Sacrifice. But it could onlyBE that actual re-enactment if offered by valid and licit priests and bishops in communion with a canonically elected Roman Pontiff, and that ended with the death of Pope Pius XII. For as Henry Cardinal Manning taught in his The Vatican Decrees and Their Bearing on Civil Allegiance: “The doctrine of the Church does not determine the doctrine of the Primacy, but the doctrine of the Primacy does precisely determine the doctrine of the Church.”

The Traditionalist train is leaving the station because they have never possessed the true faith to begin with, and now it is becoming increasingly clear. They have embraced political ideologies and heretical propositions condemned by the Church. They have made a travesty of Catholicism because they have touted the Mass, rather than the papacy, as the source of unity and belief. And if it is taken from them, they lose nothing, because they never had it in the first place. But many of them could easily lose their way, because this is the sole focus of their identity as Catholics. It is the one thing separating them from Novus Ordo believers and other non-Catholics, (although some would say that they could never accept Francis as a true pope, and of course this is correct). Yet they fail to even consider, far less understand, that this all began with John 23^rd, not Francis. And we have the material-formal proponents to thank for that. So where will they go and what will they do once their make-believe mass disappears?

I think we all know a time is soon coming when we will either be persecuted for our faith or lose our lives defending it. Or we will die in one of the many staged events we see playing out across this country today, events that will only become more prevalent and more deadly with the passage of time. It seems likely that we may see an actual Communist takeover, and/or experience a financial disaster that will change forever the way we have lived for over a century. Traditionalist preppers think they are ready for this, but I have news for them. They may have gathered together many of the necessities for physical survival but they know little of what it will take to survive spiritually. That requires a very disciplined approach, and years of training. It involves trial and error, swift repentance, solitude, study, prayer and sacrifice — a separation from everything worldly and an entering into self, to purge and learn to be vigilant.

The great betrayal

This has been stated many times before, but it needs to be emphasized here: Traditionalist pseudo-clergy have betrayed their people. They kept them in diapers and made sure they had their pacifiers in place when they needed to be training the spiritual equivalent of Green Berets and Navy Seals. They told them fairy tales instead of delivering hard truths and gave them stones for bread. They kept them immersed in a fantasy world and never attempted to bring them to the knowledge of the truth. They failed to teach them how to develop the interior life because of course they could not, having never developed it themselves. And yet the means to do this were out there, had been out there for many years. The work that needed to be done was made clear even before Vatican 2, but none of the clergy possessed the humility, the courage — the unfailing faith — to implement it.

In a previous blog we quoted Solange Hertz, writing for The Wanderer in the 1980s, who penned the following: “Fr. François Dufay, who witnessed the battle at close quarters in China [in the 1940s], says to lose no time in preparing the Church of the Catacombs: “Take as principle that normal exterior life – liturgy, teaching, apostolate – should continue as far as possible [but only when certainly valid clergy are available — Ed.]. But, at the same time, prepare Christians to preserve their essential religious life in the absence of priests, worship and Sacraments… Prepare memory aids on the dogmas of necessary means, marriage without clergy, perfect contrition, assistance to the dying, Baptism, child education, etc., and place these leaflets in safe places…”

“It would be good if trustworthy priests of high caliber were to set themselves to living the life of the people. They need profound dogmatic and spiritual formation, especially on the theology of the Church, the meaning and value of persecution and suffering, and should be steeped in the remembrance of the great saints and martyrs of the past. Thus armed, the Christian faith will use its bad times for growth in charity,” making the most of the service Communism will render it by purifying and detaching it from all that is not God here below. And again, “Actually it’s solitaries who must be found and trained, in other words, Christians capable of living their faith all alone, amid the strongest pressures, the most painful happenings and the most forbidding of deserts.”

And no one has trained them.

Hirelings, not pastors

This is what I would love to be able to earnestly impress on those who may soon be left without any spiritual compass, when the going gets tough: If these men truly loved the faith; if they had been validly ordained priests, they would never have lived this charade and involved those emotionally attached to the Mass and other religious externals to be used as props in their infernal plots. “By their fruits you shall know them,” our Lord said, and He warned us to be wary of the hirelings and false christs. Isn’t it clear that no one has nourished the flock, that there are no fruits? Pope St. Pius X taught that the primary duty of bishops and priests before conveying the sacraments was first to teach, just as our Lord instructed: “Going therefore, teach ye all nations; [then] baptizing them…” (Matt. 28: 19-20). In Acerbo nimis, Pope St. Pius X wrote:

“’I will give you,’ God promises by the mouth of the Prophet Jeremias, ‘pastors according to my own heart, and they shall feed you with knowledge and doctrine’ (a). And so the Apostle said: ‘Christ sent me not to baptize, but to preach the Gospel’ (b), indicating thus that THE FIRST OFFICE of those who are set up in any way for the government of the Church is to instruct the faithful in sacred doctrine.” Please tell me, how can any of these men pretend to teach the doctrines of Christ when they refuse to acknowledge His Vicars?  Pietro Parente, Antonio Piolanti, and Salvatore Garofalo write in their Dictionary of Dogmatic Theology (May 1, 1951, p. 170-171):

“According to Catholic doctrine therefore, Holy Scripture and Tradition are only the remote rule of faith, while the proximate rule is the living magisterium of the Church, which resides in the Roman Pontiff and in the bishops, inasmuch as they are subject to and united with him. The Vatican Council (sess. 4, c. 4, DB, 1832) has sealed this truth by defining that the primacy of Peter and his successors is included in the supreme power of teaching, which is veritatis et fidei numquam deficientis charisma (“the chrism of never-failing truth and faith”).”  

In other words, those who pass themselves off as pastors and teachers are not and cannot be such if not in communion with and subject to the pope. Because we have no pope today and no hope of electing one, anyone attempting to present sacred doctrine for belief must at least be united to the Roman Pontiffs by desire and willing to strictly obey all the Continual Magisterium ever taught. Catechetical centers, not Mass centers, is what should have been established. Much could have been accomplished if those of good will had not committed schism by jpoining the Traditionalist movement. But Traditionalist pseudo-bishops did not possess the necessary office, hence jurisdiction, to ever become teachers. They were B-movie actors at best; amateur philosophers, perhaps, but they never were and never could be teachers commissioned by Christ as successors to the Apostles; the “pastors according to my own heart” spoken of by the prophet Jeremias.

Liturgy junkies and neo-Modernists

Some people say they get tired of the Traditionalist clergy beat-up. Well I am tired too; tired of sad, discouraged and frustrated Catholics trying to save their souls, going from group to group, being battered with political sermons and bored with talk of the bishop’s cats, weathering scandal after scandal, but never receiving the soul-saving doctrinal food they deserve. Or even worse, they hear sermons and instructions that contain false doctrine; or pieces of the truth but not the integral truth necessary to increase faith; or in some cases the standard sermon one would have heard pre-1959, when so much more than the average doctrinal fare is required today. Catholics deserve the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, and that comes only from God’s mouth, through His Son, to Christ’s Vicars enlightened by the Holy Ghost and bishops commissioned by Him. If bishops had fulfilled their teaching duties instead of obsessing over liturgical renewal, bishops who later brought us Vatican 2, we wouldn’t be here today.

Traditionalists are no less liturgy junkies than their Novus Ordo counterparts; they simply chose a different “liturgy.” Neither the John 23 “mass” or a mass simulated by those never ordained is any more “worship” than the Novus Ordo Missae purports to be. In all cases it is a matter of pandering to the emotions and the senses.; entertainers, actors parodying the mass in Latin and officiating at “sacraments” with all due pomp and splendor. This to produce optical wonders and effect magical graces. Pope St. Pius X, in his encyclical Pascendi dominici gregis, notes how Modernistsuse sentiment and emotion to “hijack the intelligence.” What he says about this is very revealing, for he explains that faith is to be reduced to a “religious sentiment” and dogmatic formulas “sanctioned by the heart.” Sacraments are only “symbols and signs, although not devoid of a certain efficacy… [They are] the result of a double need, for everything in their system is to be explained by,” INNER IMPULSES OR NECESSITIES.”  And after all, isn’t necessity one of the main tenets of Traditionalism?

This sainted pope continues: “Since God is the object of religion, we must conclude that faith, which is the basis and the foundation of all religion, consists in a sentiment which originates from a need of the divine. This need of the divine replaces intellectual knowledge of God with a “a certain special sentiment” (which the pope identifies as Fideism, condemned by the Church). Modernism finds in this sentiment not faith only “but with faith, as they understand it, revelation… This makes God both the object and the cause of faith, this revelation being the same time of God and from God; that is God is both revealer and revealed.” And according to Pope Pius X, this leads to indifferentism and naturalism — “…It is  religious consciousness given as the universal rule, to be put on an equal footing with revelation. And all things must be made subject, even the supreme authority of the Church,” to this pernicious Modernist doctrine. (Taken from Rev. J.B Lemius, A Catechsim of Modernism).

Here we see the beloved symbolism, the emotional need, the “necessity” which bypasses the intelligence to create a religion of the emotions. And we ought to begin to see, then, who was behind the engineering of this false Traditionalist church. Pope St. Pius X explains the dual personality of a Modernist, describing such a heretic as “…proclaiming publicly his profound respect for authority, while continuing to follow his own bent.” This is how Traditionalists dismiss the papacy and is followed by a contempt for dogma and discipline, which the pope also notes. St. Pius X further condemns Modernists for their contempt for the scholastic method of philosophy and theology, the authority of the ecumenical councils and the Fathers, and the authority of the Supreme Magisterium itself. He concludes: “They propose to remove the ecclesiastical magisterium itself by sacrilegiously falsifying its origin, character and rights and by freely repeating the calumnies of its adversaries.” What better description of what has happened to the Church without her Supreme Head could one possibly hope for?

We have fully documented and repeatedly demonstrated on this site Traditionalists’ contempt for the scholastic method, the ecumenical councils, especially Trent and the Vatican Council, their revival of the Gallicanist heresy, their rejection of Canon Law and all ecclesiastical discipline, and finally their rejection of the papacy itself by pretending bishops alone can rule the Church. Ah yes, they profess to respect and even quote papal documents when it suits them, all the while “continuing to follow [their] own bent.” But they do not obey them, and they refuse to teach their followers the integral truths they contain. So shall we simply call them neo-Modernists?

When reality sets in

What happens then when reality sets in, and what today IS that reality? Some would say that Traditionalist followers had to be coddled and shielded from the unvarnished truth; that many would have either lost their faith or given way to despair. But that remains to be seen. Without the right support and guidance, some probably would have suffered in this way; but with the truth comes peace, and power. Truth alone, Scripture tells us, will set us free.  For “Whoever sincerely seeks the truth is already by that fact armed with a terrible force.” (Theodor Dostoyevsky). Traditionalists could have offered that support, been those guides, warned of the dangers awaiting us. Because it is quite clear now, although it wasn’t in the beginning, that wherever we are in time, whatever lies ahead, only a miracle, one we don’t deserve, will save us from utter disaster.

And we needed to know, to prepare. Because it is quite possible we could see the Second Coming, and who is really spiritually capable of even comprehending this? What situations might we face, how have Catholics coped in the past, what moral teachings bind us in the event of persecution, even torture, what devotions are most profitable, what spiritual helps most beneficial and how are we to keep oil for our lamps — that we not fall asleep before the Bridegroom cometh, but continue to watch?

For those just now realizing the deceits of Traditionalism, the safest refuge is Our Lady of Sorrows, mercifully waiting to hide in her garments those who are distressed and confused, unable to sufficiently prepare themselves spiritually. We are reliving Christ’s Passion on earth, and She alone best understands our sufferings. As Lent approaches, let us ponder these things, and remember how even the Apostles did not expect Christ’s death on the Cross. Let us gather, not scatter, as they did that night in Gesthemane.