April 2016
Levelling the Faith
THE EDITOR
In the Catholic chain of command, the Sovereign Pontiff assumes his monarchic role under Christ the King, the Heavenly Head and Ruler of Holy Church — at Whose "right Hand," we are further reminded in a Prayer to Royal St. Joseph, recently approved by Bishop Egan of Portsmouth, sits "His mother... Our Immaculate Queen."
In Relations of the Church to Society (1892, rep. Tradibooks 2010), Fr. Edmund O'Reilly, S.J., explains that "The Church, considered in its more extended sense, is a vast spiritual kingdom or empire, distinct in form, constitution, and origin from secular States, and holding a high position on this earth. Bishops are so many princes of this empire. Cardinals are, indeed, specially called princes of the Church, on account of their immediate relations with the Sovereign Pontiff, and their consequent habitual charge of the affairs of the whole Church; but bishops are, nevertheless, truly princes of the Church. Priests occupy an important place as its subordinate rulers. ... All I have just said is true, because the Church is a genuine and a great independent kingdom."
Levelling the Mass
An affront to our hyper-egalitarian age, this aristocratic reality clearly irks our levelling pontiff, too. From day one he has dispensed with symbols and trappings that reflect and befit his high dignity, both institutional and personal. Renowned in his pre-papal life for chronic attention-seeking and false humility (see "An Open Letter to Pope Francis," April 2014), the self-effacement and self-discipline required to humbly accept restraints imposed upon Christ's regal delegate were always beyond him. Hence the signatures of royal authority were immediately ditched, along with the papal apartments: replaced by Bishop of Rome banality, and a garrulous Peoples' Pope parading meekness in a glorified cafe.
For Francis and his Modernist peers, even to allude to a Catholic monarchy or a Christian kingdom (Christendom) is just too ancien régime to countenance: as passé as the immutable Catholic dogmas they deride (for blocking their permanent revolution of endless "change"); as cringeworthy as the Mass they despise (for so clearly reflecting the top-down Catholic structure that protects those irreformable teachings). This is why, despite their longstanding banishment to the margins of Church life, our Modernist pontiff still derides the Old Mass and its advocates. Isolated and barely tolerated, one would think they pose no risk to the revolution he embodies. Not so. As testified anew by his assault on the flourishing Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate, the protestantised Novus Ordo must be protected from its unequivocal Catholic forerunner at all costs. In a review-article penned in the early 1990s, Robert Hickson neatly explained the mentality:
In Florence, Italy, in the late 1960's, a certain papabile ltalian Archbishop told someone from Una Voce International that the Tridentine Mass would never be restored because "it's tied to an outmoded ecclesiology" — a divinely founded, providentially ordered hierarchical communion, that is, instead of something less monarchical, more collegial, and certainly more democratic! A more participatory Peoples' Mass, it was implied, fits better with democracy and a "Congregationalist ecclesiology" (like the Protestants' "free and voluntary association" church).
Modernist dedication to this unchanging, not-so democratic party line would do Mao and Stalin proud. Thus, the publication of Summorum Pontificum effectively sounded the death knell of Benedict's papacy. A tradition-tipped missile with potentially lethal ramifications for egalitarian Liberals, the panic it evoked, in both ecclesial and secular quarters (not least in Jewish circles) was palpable. For its part, appalled by Benedict's ancien liturgical yearnings, especially as they contradicted the nouvelle principles he shared with them (CO passim), the Daneels' 'mafia' finally replaced him with one of their own in March 2013.
A Social Gospel for Socialists
A major player in that conspiratorial clique of St. Galen pope-makers, the late Cardinal Basil Hume exemplified its secular humanistic outlook. He dismissed the idea of re-ordering society under Our Lord's Social Kingship as sentimental nonsense. Typically, in September 1986, while lauding the citizens of the Culture of Death — "the maturity man has reached in this day and age" and the "secular education [that] has enabled him to think and speak and conduct a dialogue with dignity" — Hume declared: "We who have inherited the traditions of a Christian Europe must beware of the temptation to long nostalgically for the restoration of Christendom, even locally."
Nearly thirty years on, Basil Hume's masonic disdain for St. Pius X's royal motto — "To Restore All Things in Christ" — is incarnate in the pontiff his fellow conspirators manoeuvred into the Chair. Ever inclined to tell a 'progressive' audience what they want to hear, during a 1 March private meeting with thirty French Socialist politicians in his Casa Santa Marta drop-in centre, Pope Francis praised France for its secularisation and the secular state. In a summary account of the meeting, as published in French Catholic magazine La Vie on 2 March by its editor-in-chief, Maike Hickson translated the papal capitulations and concessions made throughout this "astonishing audience" (as La Vie hailed it):
“France has been able to establish within democracy the concept of secularisation," said the pope. "That is healthy. In our days, the state has to be secularised, but please do not make public these words!” For him, the secularisation is still incomplete in this country of France: “Your secularisation is incomplete. France has to become a more secularised state. It needs a healthy secularisation.” Francis explains: “A healthy secularisation includes an opening toward all forms of transcendence, according to the different religious and philosophic traditions. By the way, even an atheist can have an interior life.” And he declares that the “search for transcendence is not only a fact, but also a right.” For the pope, the secularisation of France is defective in a certain way, in that it has been too influenced by the [secular] Enlightenment which “considered religions as mere sub-cultures.” In his eyes, “France has not yet overcome this heritage.” [1Peter5.com 8/3/16]
Ingratiating dilettante? Quisling? White-flag surrender monkey? Truly, descriptives fail before the human respect of a pontiff who 'dialogues' with Socialists without even alluding to the Social Kingship of Christ — despite the fact the group were described as "catholiques engagés dans le christianisme social"!
In desperate need of educating and saving, Francis abandoned these clueless souls to syncretic fudge. He lulled them into thinking that a mish-mash of "religious and philosophic traditions" will produce a "healthy secularisation" (whatever that is). A Vicar worthy of Christ would not have reinforced such Enlightenment claptrap. Rather than tighten the straightjacket of secular political discourse with more of the same, he would have dared to loosen it with Catholic social doctrine: broaching instead a 'healthy nationalism' and 'healthy patriotism'; explaining, as does Fr O'Reilly, that "The secular and ecclesiastical powers meet in God, not in the Crown [or the Parliament, Congress, or Assembly]. He is equally the original author of both. He is the Supreme Ruler of the human race, and of every part of it, in every order."
At very least, Francis should have seized the opportunity to remind men who regard themselves (however nominally or fancifully) as "Catholics engaged in social Christianity," that they are at once citizens of a civil society, and members of the Catholic body, the Church, with all the complimentary duties and responsibilities this entails. While they are authorised to govern, direct, protect and assist in the temporal order, they are likewise governed, directed, protected and assisted by clerical officials in the spiritual order — both being authorised and qualified persons within their own competence, as delegates of God.
After all, basic papal catechesis along those lines has never been more urgently needed in the aftermath of the damage done by clerical sexual predators. Their heinous crimes have pushed the secularisation of faith, morals and public life to even greater extremes, with tragic repercussions not only for the credibility and trustworthiness of the Church, but civil authority in general.
Instead, we find the Social Gospel being preached to Socialists! Joseph Ratzinger's desired "reconciliation" with "the new [republican] era inaugurated in 1789" being turbo-charged by his papal successor!
Invoking the Antispirit
When all is said and done, the real sticking point is that the restoration of Christendom under the Kingship of Christ is the sine qua non for converting the world to Catholicism; to forming nations exclusively composed of Catholics, as everynation was intended to be, and ought to be. Alas, too busy saving the planet to bother about sin, Bergoglian Modernists don't do 'saving souls'. Embarrassed by the 'medieval' call to evangelise through the salvific doctrines of our Sovereign King, they democratise instead — through incestuous dialogue with their Sovereign Selves.
Just as Francis exhorts potential converts (such as his late evangelical friend Tony Palmer) not to convert, so too Cardinal Hume, during the same 1986 address in Dublin, stated that "Dialogue is not aimed at conversion to the true faith." The simple reason being that Hume (like his English successors Murphy-Connor and Nichols, as also Jorge Bergoglio and much of the Western hierarchy), lost the objective Catholic plot, taking up a subjective narrative instead. Indeed, portending the pontiff he longed for but did not live to see, Hume added: "We do not, as yet, possess the whole truth — all Christian history is a gradual exploration of it under the inspiration of the Spirit...."
That erroneous statement encapsulates and accounts for the thoroughgoing protestantisation/dissolution of the local Church under Basil Hume. Contrary to his heretical understanding: since possession of the Truth, whole and entire, was consigned to the Church at Pentecost, "Christian history" is not a stumbling, bumbling "gradual exploration" of that Truth but its seamless, organic development under the protection of the same Holy Spirit Who descended upon the Apostles in the upper room. Ergo, as testified by the seismic collapse of faith and morals on their watch, the amorphous 'Spirit' Modernist prelates like to reference as their inspiration and guide is hardly "the Spirit of truth" referenced in John 15:26: the One sent "from the Father" by Christ! It is manifestly the Antispirit of Antichrist.
This is why, for several decades, prelates have acted out their unbelief with impunity (cf. Cardinal Hume's sacramental assault related in A Baptism that Washed Away the Dogma of Faith, CO, Nov. 1999, available online). Behind their smiles, they have swapped their allegiance. Anything less than total commitment to Christ the King and the City of God invariably leads to bowing, more or less consciously, to the Prince of Darkness and the City of Man. Basil Hume embodied the process: belittling Christendom as he eulogised the "dignified" products of "secular education."
"He that is not with me, is against me: and he that gathereth not with me, scattereth" [Matt. 12:30]. Over time, with severely compromised sellouts à la Hume swelling the pool of liberal papabile, we inevitably arrived at a Scattering Pontiff: a blue-ribbon Modernist whose 'Spirit' of choice is not God the Holy Spirit but the mendacious spirit of the prince of this world. Notorious for twisting Sacred Scripture to suit his social gospel ends (CO passim), Francis recently told journalists another whopper on the plane home from Mexico. His false claim that Paul VI taught that African nuns in danger of rape could use contraception was the last straw for many. Australian Father Glen Tattersall, for one, decried his "spirit of audacious and obstinate mendacity" (Newsletter, 6/3/16).
Decentralising heresy
Faithless and faint-hearted, the ecclesial establishment revels in the safe, anti-evangelical 'dialogue' Francis extols as the very essence of his scattergun papacy. It is however 'decentralisation', the second Bergoglian policy plank, that will give freewheeling dialogue even more powerful legs on the ground. Moreover, when we add to this explosive mix the Pope's ongoing subjectivisation of the Faith itself (the recently expanded grounds for nullifying marriage, for instance), his determination to delegate further powers to the bishops of the West is altogether unnerving.
In timeworn liberal fashion, Francis argues that a dangerously centralised and insular Rome must shift substantial powers to the diocesan coalface. As usual, the dichotomy is a false one. Despite perennial Modernist bleating and media caricatures, there is no global institution on earth more decentralised than the Holy Catholic Church. A layered model of subsidiarity, if anything it already leans too far in that collegial direction. Yet Francis is not for turning. He will not stop until the 'process' he launched with his tightly-controlled, not to say deceitfully manipulated Sodomy and Adultery Synods, becomes the accepted pseudo-democratic face of local decision-making (whereby pseudo-pastoral concerns subvert doctrine and morals).
The ultimate goal is the levelling down of his royal and sacred papal office to a respected temporal one; a glorified president who rubber-stamps decisions: first within a remodelled synodal Church, then as a figurehead of syncretic assemblies. A papal evisceration long sought by the Lodge, pushed by ecumenists, and effectively cultivated by the often feeble, loophole-laden ruminations of the post-conciliar popes themselves, we are closing in on this End Time eventuality.
In any event, since our current Hierarchy of Post-Enlightenment Hirelings is steeped in the republican spirit, this push from HQ is happily supported by provincial powers who govern their diocesan fiefdoms more like born-to-rule monarchs than democrats.
"Vatican II correctly taught us that collegiality is a constitutive element in the structure of the Church," Benedict XVI informed journalist Peter Seewald in Salt of the Earth. "That the Pope can only be first together with others and not someone who would make decisions in isolation as an absolute monarch and do everything himself." This is the sort of pastoral nonsense that Vatican II partisans like Benedict would have us believe. In fact, the Pope can always "make decisions" (even dodgy ones) without the college in the manner of an absolute sovereign — since that is what he is: the representative of Christ by Divine appointment; the independent sovereign of the visible kingdom of Christ on earth, whose business is to pronounce, to protest, to insist, to enforce right as far as he may by his supreme spiritual authority.
John Paul II said it himself in his 1998 Apostolic Letter Apostolos Suos (On the Theological and Juridical nature of Episcopal Conferences): "Only the Roman Pontiff, head of the College, can individually exercise supreme power over the Church." Thus, faced with rebellious national hierarchies, Popes like St. Gregory VII (1073-1085) opted to place entire nations under interdict until their bishops saw sense, not expand the decision-making powers of those recalcitrant prelates and their lackeys. Yet Francis would hand their arrogant heirs even greater autonomy to corrupt and wreck; to push the sort of corrosive agendas recently condemned out of hand by Bishop Athanasius Schneider. Asked during a 3 March interview what he thought of "The English & Welsh and German bishops’ conferences [having] called for the traditional rite Good Friday prayer for the Jews to be changed" (that pre-occupying Old Mass again!) he reacted:
I am questioning it, the German and English bishops, they are not the totality of the bishops. ... I know bishops, who do not agree with this. I do not consider this opinion correct, it is invasive. It’s the administrative nomenclature which claims to represent all the bishops of a nation. This method of functioning of the bishops conference is itself very problematic, it is acting against the divine structure of the Church.
At the current rate of calamity, local hierarchies will soon be making such corrosive changes, not merely proposing them. And this will come about because supreme papal power is a force for salvific good only when popes are holy, wise and brave. When they are not, there is hell to pay since they can wield the papal stick whenever it suits their imprudent or ideological designs. Thus, at the end of the 2014 Synod, his levelling agenda having met with stiff resistance, our egalitarian pope switched from consensual to coercive mode: recalling his regal right to judgmentally impose his non-judgmental will. This he duly did soon after; at once subjectivising and delegating marriage annulments by papal fiat.
Clearly, it is all about decentralising Modernism withmenace: not just spreading but enforcing and cementing the "synthesis of all heresies." By 'processing' towards a synodal Church of masonic dreams, Francis wishes to empower the Modernist establishment to finish off its well-advanced secularisation of our Royal Faith.
Polish inspiration
With Western nations having morphed into dictatorships of relativism — anarchic battlefields of all against all — it is even more galling that a reigning pontiff should laud secular republics instead of proposing to them, as the only solution to their sinful dysfunction, the Social Kingship of Christ.
Among putative democracies, only a handful are even approximating a restoration of Catholic social order. After years of oligarchic self-interest masquerading as participative democracy, at least Poland is now standing firm in defense of its national interests, to include its Catholic heritage and culture. The concerted denunciation of this righteous Polish reform by globalist screech owls like Soros & Co. is the familiar sound of masonic revolutionary fury before a Catholic counter-revolt. In which case we do well to keep abreast of recent developments in Poland, since its new government is suffering for its courage and resolve on our behalf. Accordingly, this edition features explanatory and corrective articles about their patriotic stand, so shockingly misrepresented by the media bovver boys of the ever more tyrannical Western elites.
Defamed by Francis for three long years, we know how they feel! Yet we also know his saintly predecessor Pius X insisted "the true friends of the people are neither revolutionaries, nor innovators: they are traditionalist." That's us! Which makes our republican pontiff, calling for a "restless Church" where people "innovate freely," a serious foe of Christ the King.