The Wailing Popes

 

And it came to pass the current, and very unhappily reigning Pope stopped and prayed at the Wailing Wall, as his two predecessors also did. 

We are not told whether Francis wailed. But it is to be supposed he was, at the very least, suitably sad in that humble, very photogenic way of his.  

But let us stop one moment here: why was he sad? More to the point: what on earth has a Christian to wail at the Wailing Wall? 

I was always led to believe that the destruction of the Temple was at the same time fitting punishment for the Deicide and brutal demonstration that the New Covenant had substituted for the Old, and Judaism had no justified ground for its continued existence. When Our Lord dies on the Cross and the intervening earthquake rends the “Veil” in two,  this symbolises the end of one religion and the beginning of another one, or better its continuation under a new form. 

At that point, the Temple is doomed already. It will have to go to show the world that Judaism is no more. 

How can it be that Francis, and his predecessors, do and did not get that? What has Francis – and what had his two predecessors – to wail for? Is he, and were they, pray, Jews, that they had to feel the need for such an exercise? 

The answer lies, I think, in the television. 

It just looks good that the Pope would appear at the Wailing Wall. The stupid masses see it, and think it cool, in exactly the same way as they think the nun singing on the Italian TV agitating like she is on cocaine  “cool”. 

What things mean, or if they mean anything at all, is nowadays perfectly irrelevant. 

How they look, and how they make people feel, is all that counts. This was so, in a much milder form, with the other two; and it is most certainly so in the most virulent form with the current man. 

Can’t wait for the Pope praying in the direction of the Mecca in the Mosque, or performing the Rain Dance with some Redskin chieftain, or sacrificing to some Hindu deity, as a sign of “dialogue”. 

The masses would be delighted. 

Mundabor

 

FFI: Damned If You Do, Dead If You Don’t

Meanwhile, in the Vatican…

The news that the Franciscans Sisters of the Immaculate are going to go the same way of their male counterpart is now everywhere. As Pat Archbold rightly points outs, the continued persecution might have the aim of driving some of them into the (perfectly Catholic) arms of the Society. At this point, the great “I told you they were bad” moment of Volpi & Co. would have arrived.

On the other hand, doing nothing leads simply to destruction. The FFI will simply be, at some point, disbanded and his members dispersed among other orders, probably ill or dying, but where they would be a tiny minority to be “re educated” in the failing ways of V II.

Damned if you do, dead if you don’t.

The Great Man…

How to get out of the quandary?

One understands the thinking that to accept persecution in the short term is for the greater glory of the Church in the longer term, and if the FFI meekly accepts the persecution their sacrifice will be remembered one day as a luminous example of obedience in times of madness. One understands that one might reason in this way.

Still, I am not persuaded.

If this thinking had been applied by the Great Man, today we would very probably – nay; let’s call it “certainly” – have no Traditional Mass. All those, therefore, who advocate the meek acceptance of the scaffold for the FFI members should, in order to be coherent, consider offering themselves the very same meek submission they think the Great Man should have offered, and radically avoid attendance at TLM masses, be they the SSPX, the old Indult or the new SP ones; it being very clear that without the SSPX there would be no Indult and no SP masses for as long as the V II madness endures.

I am a supporter of the SSPX. I think that they represent not a sign of rebellion, but a sign of obedience. I can, therefore, not see why the obedience to a higher Power than the Pope then showed by the Great Man should not find application in this situation, which is a kind of replay on a much smaller scale of what happened then.

Either this higher loyalty exists, or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, Traditionalism in any form whatsoever should not exist – actually, the very word should not exist – in the first place. If it does exist, then it is if not necessarily mandatory, at least always legitimate to decide that, when this higher loyalty cannot be preserved without great detriment to the Truth, disobedience to wrong orders should be the choice. As the smart Italian soldiers used to say, gli ordini sbagliati non si eseguono, “the wrong orders are not carried out”.

Add to this that whilst Volpi & Co. would have a short-term argument to persuade those who do not need persuading anyway, a robust defection of FFI male and female members would be a permanent thorn in the side of NuChurch, and expose the failure of such attempts to purge orthodoxy from the Church and get away with it. On the contrary, a robust defection would show that Modernism will not be allowed to make itself comfortable within the Church without resistance, and every action will cause a reaction.

Again, it is a matter of higher Loyalty. Or is there anyone of you who thinks Athanasius should have been obedient to Liberius, and meekly accept the massacre of Catholicism in the serene confidence God will, at some point, set things right?

God sets things right by motivating brave men and women to set them right, not by sending Angels on earth to clean the mess in the kitchen, whilst the cooks look and do nothing.

At some point, resistance must be legitimate. Common sense and love for the Church say that it must be so.

I hope that, if this scandal does not end, a sizeable minority of FFI friars and sisters will leave the FFI and FSI and will ask to be affiliated to the SSPX.

Let Volpi & Co.  scream as much as they like. They will only persuade those who are already sold to their Modernist ideology.

Mundabor