April 2022
Plus Ça Change ...
| “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” |
Flicking through the Christian Order archive in recent months I found my esteemed and sorely missed predecessor Father Paul Crane SJ (1910-1997) calling out familiar Modernist and geo-political forces. Whether decrying the clericalist overseers of the liturgical rot within, or the arrogance of the super-powers and their neo-colonial juggernaut, his laments, enriched and enhanced by his stylish prose and priestly authority, are so contemporary. Indeed, since his death, 25 years ago last month, the only marked difference is the intensity of the battles, as the godless trajectory continue onwards and downwards to ever more diabolical depths.
The iron logic of such inexorable pagan regression was not lost on Fr Crane. He not only viewed all human developments in supernatural terms, he endured and fought to his last breath the rampant secularisation within and without the Church, via Christian Order and his associated Claver House apostolate that trained a generation of young Africans in the practical application of Catholic social teaching for the common good of African nations and souls.
Moreover, his own Jesuit brethren led the revolution and he himself suffered at their hands (cf. "The Closure of Claver House: A Third World Backstabbing," CO, March, 1998).
He was acutely aware, therefore, that since Modernism was endemic and the Modernists implacable and vicious, the traditional trenches were being dug for the long haul, as the crisis of Catholic faith and authority assumed the usual forked-paths of resistance and capitulation: along one road, a small band of faithful marching to the sure and certain beat of Catholic morals and doctrine, inspired by rare prelates and priests still open to grace; on the other, prideful hierarchies closed to grace and blinded by the zeitgeist, leading the blind "into the pit" [Matt. 15:14].
German 'shepherds': dogs of war
Like the rest of us, Fr Crane would have been caught unawares by the election of a fellow Jesuit to papally fast-track and cement the full range of Modernist errors in Catholic life and practice already pervasive in his lifetime.
However, that the Germans would lead that "process" (in the same way they led the subversion of Vatican II) he would have taken as much for granted as their ever more prideful posturing. In one foul swoop, the latest outrage by the influential Cardinal Rheinhard Marx, a member of the Pope's Council of Cardinal Advisers, embodied the wholesale capitulation: to the zeitgeist, the pride of life, and the pit.
Having celebrated on 13 March a Mass marking "20 years of queer worship and pastoral care" (offered on a Munich sanctuary bedecked with the sodomitic flag) His Eminence piled scandal upon scandal a few weeks later by announcing to German magazine Stern that "Homosexuality is not a sin."
To underline his option for Sodom (that is, for debilitating/deathly homo-sex), he baldly declared: "I speak of the primacy of love, especially in sexual encounters." And he made sure to add: "Of course I am — like everyone else — a sexual person. I also have a sexuality, even though I am not in a relationship."
Doubtless His Apostate Eminence will let us know when he finally scratches that itch and enters into said "relationship," since he has totally rejected Catholic teaching.
"The catechism is not set in stone," he declared, and people are "allowed to question what’s in there."
At once the personification of the zeitgeist and a poster-child for Modernism, consider these further comments made to Stern by the Cardinal, as reported by the Catholic News Agency, including his casual reduction of Christ's Mystical Body to the level of a secular corporation, and the sharp reaction when his conscience is pricked by talk of sin:
"I’ve felt freer to say what I think in recent years, and I want to move Church teaching forward. The Church is also changing, moving with the times: LGBTQ+ people are part of creation and loved by God, and we are challenged to stand against discrimination. The Church may be slower in some things, but that is a development that is happening everywhere. Most companies just a few years ago would not have accepted openly homosexual board members."
When the interviewer said that no company defined homosexuality as a sin in its statutes, Marx said: “What is it with you and sin all the time? It has to be about the quality of relationships. This issue has not been adequately discussed by some in the Church, you are right.”
“But sin means turning away from God, from the Gospel, and you can’t impute that to all people who live same-sex love and, on top of that, say: away with them.”
True son of St. Ignatius
Never shy of denouncing the physical war in Ukraine, when not actually preaching from the same Modernist sheet as his heretical comrade Rheinhard, Jorge is silent before this devastating spiritual war in Germany. On the contrary, alert to Modernism and its spurious social gospel, personified by Francis, Fr Crane denounced both geo-political and ecclesiastical villains, exhorting all parties within and without to repent and spare the innocent.
He did so by way of his own commentaries, always independent-minded and frank, supported by illuminating articles. The few examples carried herein will stir fond memories in older readers, while providing newer subscribers with a taste of my predecessor's unflinching approach and the earlier content of CO. They also point to his likely response to current events.
Although the upending of biological reality itself might have raised a quizzical Crane eyebrow, that Satan's mockery of God and man has only intensified since his death would not have surprised or unsettled him. The sight of a pontiff warring maniacally against the Church while making common cause with the Culture of Death and its Covid-19 power grab, on the other hand, would have disgusted him; his righteous anger boiling over before the latest rotten fruit of that wicked collaboration: the mandated medical tyranny in Vatican City.
How he would've decried such rank coercion: the crushing of conscientious objection to experimental inoculations and airydisregard for informed consent. Apart from the manifold theological and philosophical ruptures, this shredding of the Nuremberg Code would have instantly recalled the storm clouds that gathered across the Channel in his twenties (the period treated in our ongoing Church and State series).
But just as quickly Father would have sensed a far greater totalitarian threat to faith, life and the liberty of both the Church and sovereign nations: namely, unaccountable technocrats empowered by binding international instruments (such as the WHO's proposed global pandemic treaty), foisting one-size-fits-all lockdowns and mandates on disempowered countries.
A true son of St. Ignatius —a soldier of Christ and the Church Militant who thought in military terms — he would have viewed the orchestrated Covid tyranny as a Dunkirk moment: an epochal emergency requiring the mobilisation of every available vessel of truth, including his little CO dinghy, to rescue a hapless public from a tsunami of mainstream propaganda.
Never one to march in moronic lockstep, he preferred the free, faithful, single-minded stride fostered by his Jesuit training and the stringent demands of his priestly office, both of which informed and secured this faith and freedom: to teach and defend Divine and Natural Law at the service of the Social Kingship of Christ, in season and out.
The importance of his independent apostolate is even more apparent today, with the rise of Covidic trampling over immutable rights and liberties, and the Vatican's scandalous disregard for all law — including those provisions of canon law which would normally call to heel prelates who mock and subjectivise Catholic dogma.
Purification and Resurrection
Like his cherished readership, Fr Crane prayed for the purification of the Church as the only sure means of reform, restoration and renewal of the Faith. In this regard, he sensed that a return to the catacombs and underground Masses of the early Church and the Communist era would be part of this cleansing — our providential lot, barring a miracle.
The heightened polarisation ushered in by Covid and its vaccine apartheid has brought that prospect immeasurably closer. The plandemic has exposed the pathetic state of post-Christian nations which have chased God from the public square. All that remains are isolated individuals with no reference point beyond the Self, at the mercy of man-made laws in the Self-serving hands of the most powerful. As someone neatly observed: "It feels like the modern world has pulverised previous sources of authority or understanding (community, cultural, traditions, religion etc.) and left only atomised individuals and the technocratic state/experts."
All of this speaks to the desperate need for the Church to rise again with Christ! To reassert without delay Her Divine identity, authority and mission.
Instead, we find ourselves embroiled in God's winnowing fan [Jerem. 51:2]: viz., FrancisChurch; the Counterfeit Church of false ecumenism, capitulation and compromise graphically prophesied by Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich.
How much lower the Church will sink before Divine Providence adjudges that this Modernist edifice has served His perfect purpose, we cannot know. Yet we do know that when all is accomplished — when our suffering with Christ in His Mystical Body has run its designated course — the Church willrise again: purified in her members, rejuvenated in her structures, to stand more resplendent before God and man than ever in the annals of Her long and glorious history!
To that end, the ensuing masterly summary analysis of the state of Rome and what is to be done is a hopeful sign; one that would have impressed and delighted Fr. Crane.
Renowned Catholic journalist Edward Pentin, author of The Next Pope: The Leading Cardinal Candidates, has stressed that this memo is "totally authentic and reflects a widespread sense in Rome that the next pontificate will be a corrective one, redressing the problems mentioned in the document and others." He added that:
"It also shows that with each passing day, the pendulum is swinging back to a future pope who will be rooted in orthodoxy and affirm the faithful in the Faith rather than perpetually seek compromise with the world at the expense of authentic Catholicism."
Let us pray always for that eventuality, even as we continue to suffer with Christ at the hands of those consecrated to protect His Church, propagate His Gospel, and strengthen His flock. Just as their wicked patriarch, Judas, played his unwitting part in our Redemption, so too their current treachery is a trial tailored for our salvation. After all, as Christ reminded the women who wept for Him on the road to Calvary, we should not presume that our own path to eternal glory will be any less painful than His.
Yet we suffer but a little while! For, come what may, we live in the abiding hope of the Resurrection, before which the agony of this faithless papacy is rendered not only a bearable suffering but a joyful one: to be united with the agonies of Our Blessed Lord, Who, out of love for each and every soul, including and especially his diabolically disoriented son Jorge, went all the way.
Meanwhile, there's always August 1903 — a compromised conclave; a last-minute veto; a papal miracle. ... Oremus.