Proudly Lefebvrian

 

I read around that, by some, the adjective “Lefebvrian” is used as an insult. This is new to me; but hey, one lives and learns…

Feel free to insult me in this as much as you wish, on this site and on any other.

This site (and its author) are proudly Lefebvrian.

There are more and more sites like this one. They are, from what I can see, growing.

Insult away, Frankie & Co.

You will just make more people curious.

Mundabor

SSPX: Declaration On The Occasion Of The 25th Anniversary Of The Episcopal Consecrations.

The leader of the Austrian heresy, Helmut Schueller. Unrecognisable as a Catholic. A priest in good standing, then.

The press release that appears below has been published two days ago on the site of the SSPX Press Agency, DICI.

Even by the always elevated standards of the SSPX, the beauty of this declaration is such that I want to put it on my site in its entirety, for everyone to come back to it time and again in difficult hours. I am afraid we will have very many of those in the years to come.

When I compare the text below to the tofu-tasting, politically correct drivel coming from the Vatican – a tofu-tasting drivel which used to be confined to archbishops and cardinals, but of which the Pontiff himself is now the main driving force – I get the entire measure of the wasteland the earthly Jerusalem has been reduced to after 50 years of madness. The vineyard is in a state of complete neglect because husbandry has gone out of fashion, pruning is considered insensitive, and the vines are supposed to be “inclusive” of the weed and open to ” ecumenical dialogue” with the wild plants.

Read the text below, and pray that the punishment of the entire V II movement (including V II itself; and good riddance) may be taken from us soon, or we may be given the grace to suffer it in serenity and without ever losing our faith in Christ and His Church, however disfigured by the bunch of sellouts currently in power.

Good bless the good people of the SSPX. Emphases mine.

Mundabor

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Declaration on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the episcopal consecrations (30th June 1988 – 27th June 2013)

1- On the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the episcopal consecrations the bishops of The Society Saint Pius X are eager to express solemnly their gratitude towards Archbishop Lefevbre and Bishop Antonio de Castro Mayer for the heroic deed they were not afraid of performing on the 30th June 1988. Most especially they would like to express their filial gratitude towards their venerable founder who, after so many years spent serving the Church and the Sovereign Pontiff, so as to safeguard the Faith and the Catholic priesthood, did not hesitate to suffer the unjust accusation of disobedience.

2- In his letter addressed to us before the consecrations, he wrote, “I beseech you to remain attached to the See of Peter, to the Roman Church, Mother and Mistress of all churches, in the integral Catholic Faith, as expressed in the Professions of Faith, in the catechism of the Council of Trent, in conformity with that which you have been taught in the seminary. Remain faithful to the transmission of this Faith so that the reign of Our Lord may come.” It is indeed this phrase which expresses the profound reason for the act which he was going to undertake “so that the reign of Our Lord might come,” adveniat regnum tuum!

3- Following Archbishop Lefebvre, we affirm that the cause of the grave errors which are in the process of demolishing the Church does not reside in a bad interpretation  of the conciliar texts – a “hermeneutic of rupture” which would be opposed to a “hermeneutic of  reform in continuity” – but truly in the texts themselves, by virtue of the unheard of choice made by Vatican II. This choice is manifest in its documents and in its spirit; faced with  “secular and profane humanism,” faced with the “religion (as indeed it is) of man who makes himself God,” the Church as unique custodian of Revelation “of God who became man” has wanted to make known its “new humanism” by saying to the modern world, “we too, we more than any other, have the cult of man.” (Paul VI, closing speech, 7^th December 1965). But this coexistence of the cult of God and the cult of man is radically opposed to the Catholic Faith which teaches us to render the supreme cult and to give the primacy exclusively to the one true God and to only His Son, Jesus Christ, in whom “dwelleth all the fullness of the Divinity corporeally” (Col. 2:9).

4- We are truly obliged to observe that this Council without comparison, which wanted to be merely pastoral and not dogmatic, inaugurated a new type of magisterium, hitherto unheard of in the Church, without roots in Tradition; a magisterium resolved to reconcile Catholic doctrine with liberal ideas; a magisterium imbued with the modernist ideas of subjectivism, of immanentism and of perpetual evolution according to the false concept of a living tradition, vitiating  the nature, the content, the role and the exercise of ecclesiastical magisterium.

5- Henceforth the reign of Christ is no longer the preoccupation of the ecclesiastical authorities, despite the fact that Christ’s words, “all power is given to me on earth and in heaven,” (Mt 28:18) remain an absolute truth and an absolute reality. To deny them in action is tantamount to no longer recognising in practice the divinity of Our Lord. Hence because of the Council, the sovereignty of Christ over human societies is simply ignored, and even combatted, and the Church is imbued with this liberal spirit which manifests itself especially in religious liberty, ecumenism, collegiality and the New Mass.

Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre. Fought for the Church he had received. Died excommunicated, treated as a pariah and a “schismatic”. Not a priest in good standing, then.

6- Religious Liberty, as exposed by Dignitatis humanae and its practical application these last fifty years, logically leads to demanding God-made-Man to renounce His reign over man-who-makes-himself-God, which is equivalent to dissolving Christ. In the place of a conduct which is inspired by a solid faith in the real power of Our Lord Jesus Christ, we see the Church being shamefully guided by human prudence and with such self-doubt that she asks nothing other from the State than that which the Masonic Lodges wish to concede to her: the common law in the midst of, and on the same level as, other religions which she no longer dares call false.

7- In the name of a ubiquitous ecumenism (Unitatis redintegratio) and of a vain inter-religious dialogue (Nostra Aetate), the truth about the one true Church is silenced; also, as a large part of the clergy and the faithful no longer see in Our Lord and the Catholic Church the unique way of salvation, they have renounced to convert the adepts of false religions, leaving them rather in ignorance of the unique Truth. This ecumenism has thus literally killed the missionary spirit through seeking a false unity, too often reducing the mission of the Church to that of delivering a message of a purely terrestrial peace and of a humanitarian role of lessening want in the world, placing it thereby in the wake of international organisations.

8- The weakening of faith in Our Lord’s divinity favours a dissolution of the unity of authority in the Church, by introducing a collegial, egalitarian and democratic spirit, (see Lumen Gentium). Christ is no longer the head from which everything flows, in particular the exercise of authority. The Sovereign Pontiff who no longer exercises effectively the fullness of his authority, and the bishops who – contrary to the teaching of Vatican I – esteem that they can collegially and habitually share the fullness of the supreme power, commit themselves thereby, with the priests, to listen to and to follow ‘the people of God,’ the new sovereign. This represents the destruction of authority and in consequence the ruin of Christian institutions: families, seminaries, religious institutes.

9- The New Mass, promulgated in 1969, diminishes the affirmation of the reign of Christ by the Cross (“regnavit a ligno Deus”). Indeed, the rite itself curtails and obscures the sacrificial and propitiatory nature of the Eucharistic Sacrifice. Underpinning this new rite is the new and false theology of the paschal mystery. Both one and the other destroy Catholic spirituality as founded upon the sacrifice of Our Lord on Calvary. This Mass is penetrated with an ecumenical and Protestant spirit, democratic and humanist, which empties out the sacrifice of the Cross. It illustrates the new concept of ‘the common priesthood of the baptised’ which undermines the sacramental priesthood of the priest.

10- Fifty years on, the causes persist and still engender the same effects. Hence today the consecrations retain their full justification. It was love of the Church which guided Archbishop Lefebvre and which guides his sons. It is the same desire to “pass on the Catholic priesthood in all its doctrinal purity and its missionary charity” (Archbishop Lefebvre, Spiritual Journey) which animates the Society of Saint Pius X at the service of the Church, when it asks with insistence for the Roman authorities to regain the treasure of doctrinal, moral and liturgical Tradition.

11- This love of the Church explains the rule that Archbishop Lefebvre always observed: to follow Providence in all circumstances, without ever allowing oneself to anticipate it. We mean to do the same: either when Rome returns to Tradition and to the Faith of all time – which would re-establish order in the Church; or when she explicitly acknowledges our right to profess integrally the Faith and to reject the errors which oppose it, with the right and the duty for us to oppose publicly the errors and the proponents of these errors, whoever they may be – which would allow the beginning of a re-establishing of order. Meanwhile, faced with this crisis which continues its ravages in the Church, we persevere in the defence of Catholic Tradition and our hope remains entire, as we know by the certitude of Faith that “the gates of hell will not prevail against her.” (Mt 16:18)

12- We mean to follow well the injunction of our dear and venerable Father in the episcopacy: “Dear friends, be my consolation in Christ, remain strong in the Faith, faithful to the true sacrifice of the Mass, to the true and holy Priesthood of Our Lord, for the triumph and the glory of Jesus in heaven and on earth” (Letter to the bishops). May the Holy Trinity, by the intercession of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, grant us the grace of fidelity to the episcopacy which we have received and which we want to exercise for the honour of God, the triumph of the Church and the salvation of souls.

 Ecône, 27^th June 2013, on the feast of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour

(Source : FSSPX/MG – DICI June 27, 2013)

Bishop Bernard Fellay
Bishop Bernard Tissier de Mallerais
Bishop Alfonso de Galarreta

Twenty-Five Years Later, Thank God For The SSPX!

It was in June 1988, twenty-five years ago, that Archbishop Lefebvre decided enough is enough and, together with Bishop Antonio de Castro Mayer, consecrated the now famous four bishops destined to allow the Society to continue its work after his death.

Almost no day passes without yours truly gratefully thinking of the SSPX as the safe port of call for orthodox Catholics who desire to die believing in the same way as their ancestors did. The thought runs to them with almost daily frequency now, because it is now an almost daily occurrence that either the Pope himself – not ex cathedra, of course; purely out of ignorance, desire for popularity, misguided do-goodism and a robust dose of humble arrogance – or some other prelate tries to pickaxe the one or other aspect of Catholicism.

Without thinking much, if I reflect on the last few days we have Cardinal Dolan openly apostatising and Archbishop Mueller trying to rehabilitate Liberation Theology. All in just a few days; events that even during Paul VI’s pontificate would have caused huge uproar, but only scandalise a minority of conscientious and well-instructed Catholics – those who refuse to have Catholicism and themselves dumbed down to less than kindergarten level by our disgraceful clergy, from the Pope down – in these times of universal salvation and multi-truth dialogue.

The SSPX is at this point, for me and for many others, the true measure and safest litmus of what is proper Catholicism, and an important source of Catholic instructions. In times when not even the Pope can be trusted to be orthodox – though of course it is difficult to think he would even have the guts to try to give a dogmatic sanction to the many errors of his thinking – we must be extremely grateful that in the SSPX we have a prestigious, highly ethical, worldwide operating organisation able to be a natural beacon of sound Catholic thinking for all of us.

The time might come – not in our lifetime, I think; though you never know – when a Pope openly dares to plunge the Church into open conflict and to sabotage Catholicism at a dogmatic level, thus placing us in front of the supreme test. If such events were to happen in my lifetime, I would look at the SSPX first to know whether a Sede Vacante situation is now in effect. This is how much I trust them, this is how grateful I am that The Lord gave us this providential beacon in these times of dangerous seafaring.

Please join me in saying today’s rosary – or three eternal rests – for the late Archbishop Lefebvre, a great man of God.

And yes, you are supposed to count.

Mundabor

Merci, Monseigneur…

The Unsung Heroes

Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre

We live, thankfully, in times when Catholicism is giving timid but clear signs of recovery. The Internet was, if you ask me, the starter engine of such movement. The Internet allowed more and more people to understand that they are not alone and that the dumbing down  of Catholicism and its reduction to a bunch of slogans for kindergarten children caused suffering to many others.

The rest came from there; the amount of books available, and of traditional Catholic sources directly on the internet, would have been inconceivable only a few years before. If you were born in Italy or France or Germany a couple of dozen years ago, either you were really angry or the mainstream outlets (the popular book stores, and so on) would not have given you any alternative to the blandness and effeminacy of the Vatican II/Assisi/pacifist/social justice crowd.

The Internet changed all this, and with the increase in conservative Catholicism came a wave of reprints. Fulton Sheen, Ronald Knox and many others  were made available again, and today your kindle (a wonderful invention, Kindle) would allow you to store more Catholic knowledge than most wealthy Catholic would have in their libraries in centuries past, effortless and at low-cost. You can bet your pint the process will continue, and will continue to change the way the common Catholic sees the Church.

Still, it was not always so. Think of what it must have been for a middle-aged person in the Sixties to be surprised by such a tsunami of changes. To them, it must not have seemed a momentary folly. To them – particularly if not robustly educated; probably even in that case – it must have seemed irreversible. The Church itself said to them – in all possible ways – that the Church had changed, and this showed everywhere, not only in the Mass but in the mentality, the demeanour, even the clothes of the priest, the robust wine of salvation now substituted for a bland soft drink smelling, mainly, of sugar.

How difficult it must have been for those who have decided they wouldn’t stand for it. A tiny minority, derided and insulted, considered obsolete dreamers in their dotage, unable to see the luminous new path the Holy Spirit would – obviously changing his mind, but laissons tomber – now show to the renewed Church. 

Romano Amerio

I think here not only of the few religious who had the gut to say “no” to the madness (Archbishop Lefebvre obviously comes to mind; but let us not forget staunchly conservative churchmen like the Abbe’ de Nantes, and the monasteries who simply refused to obey to the diktat of “change”), but particularly of the laymen. Romano Amerio was vilified and mocked for a book now read all over the world, and whilst all around him priests were surrounded by guitars it must have been very bitter to see two thousand years of Christianity almost crumble under a wave of such immense stupidity.

I also think of the many old people who were literally overcome – or I should say: run over – by the tidal wave of “change” of the Sixties and Seventies; old, frail, often poor people for whom their simple faith was the main comfort in their last years, and trying to march toward salvation in the company of accustomed values, and rites. How they must have suffered!

If they were alive today, they would at least know that the counter-charge has now started and will soon be in full swing. They would look into the future and see hope of improvement; nay, they would see improvement is in time unavoidable. But how could they in those dark years, when the “renewal” was imposed on them by the same priests who assured the Holy Ghost was tirelessly working on the destruction of all they held dear!?

Abbe' de Nantes

They are, of course, all gone now. Gone is Archbishop Lefebvre, gone is the Abbe’ de Nantes, gone is Rosario Amerio, gone are all those old people I imagine crying in their kitchen after hearing the guitars at mass. I think of them, and cry. A person can cope with a lot, if he  has faith. Think how many of them had gone with as much serenity as they can – and as much faith as they could muster – through wars and loss of their most beloved ones, even in the hardest moment resting against the wall of their faith.  Picture them now in their Seventies, with their religious system and philosophy of life put upside down, and restless adolescents with long, unwashed hair and jeans strumming their guitars in the church under the approving eye of the young, not-so-manly priest.

It was a huge shock for me the first time I heard guitars in the church, and I was only ten years old. For a seventy years old, it must have been the end of the world as we know it.

The unsung heroes are now being vindicated. The public figures are rising high in the consideration of the posterity after having been derided by their contemporaries. The common people are, at least, pitied in their suffering they were, were probably, not even allowed to utter.

Dear reader, every now and then, please think of for the old couple who was crying in the kitchen; of the war widow informed there would be no vespers anymore as apparently the Holy Ghost doesn’t like that now; of the old woman who lost her boy in the war and was told Mass would now be in English, with a chap talking to the congregation as if he was their pub buddy; and with the guitars, the guitars! Think of the old scholars vilified like Romano Amerio, and the old churchmen belittled or even excommunicated.

When you can, please say a prayer for the unsung heroes.

Mundabor

Distance Between Vatican and SSPX Greatly Reduced?

He would have liked Mgr Pozzo: Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre

Rorate Caeli has a very interesting double post, in which a recent interview of Bishop Fellay is linked to an interview given by Mgr Pozzo of Ecclesia Dei. Both interviews contain what in my eyes are very interesting points.

Looking first at the interview with Pozzo, there is an expression that will probably make some waves (emphasis mine):

Question:
It does not seem conceivable that a call into question of the Second Vatican Council may happen. Therefore, where do these discussions might lead? To a better understanding of this?

Mgr Pozzo’s Answer:
They concern a clarification of points that detail the exact meaning of the teaching of the Council. It is what the Holy Father started to do on December 22, 2005, by interpreting the Council within a hermeneutic of renewal in continuity. Nevertheless, there are certain objections of the Fraternity of Saint Pius X that do make sense, because there has been an interpretation of rupture. The goal is to show that it is necessary to interpret the Council in the continuity of the Tradition of the Church.

Note that Mgr Pozzo says that SSPX and CDF are working together at seeing whether a shared understanding of V II can be achieved. It will not be a dismissal of V II as a cretinous thing to do in itself (shame, ndr), but it might lead to the same thing, that is: the rigorous exam of V II so that every interpretation not in rigorous continuity with the pre-V II Church is clearly and unequivocally rejected. This would lead, in a word, not to a formal dismissal of the V II documents, but to their thorough re-interpretation in light of Catholic orthodoxy. Basically, it means exposing all their shortcomings, misleading formulations and wrong interpretations by still saying that, apart from the shortcomings and the misleading formulations, they were never meant to be interpreted wrongly in the first place.

This seems to me a clear indication that the distances are reducing, as the explicit words of Mgr Pozzo about the SSPX’s objections “making sense” further underscore. In a situation where no word is said casually, I think this is worth noticing.

Even more worth noticing is the interview given some days ago by Bishop Fellay, which Rorate Caeli reports under the same link. Fellay allows himself very interesting words (emphasis mine):

I believe that, at some level, the Good Lord linked us with this crisis, because we work for the restoration of the Church, but this may still last for a decade, maybe two. It is necessary to have lots of courage and perseverance. This can be resolved tomorrow, this may be resolved the day after tomorrow. All is in the hands of the Good Lord.

Unless I am totally mistaken, there are two important points here:

1) Fellay sees something like one or two papacies as the maximum wait before a full reconciliation. He talks like one who can see from the development of the talks that time is on his side. Basically, he seems to imply that there are some toads that have been clearly recognised, but that the Vatican will not be ready to swallow until the Council has been pushed further into a historic (and less emotional) dimension and the generation who has lived it has proceeded to – hopefully – greener pastures.

2) The first point seems to me further stressed by the revealing words that I have emphasised. I do not know about you, but to me these words seem an extremely emphatic assertion that the distance has now become very small, and the Vatican must decide not the if, but merely the when of the formal steps leading to a full reconciliation. At any rate, I can’t imagine Fellay using such words unless he is persuaded that every big obstacle has been removed from the way.

Not for the first time, I get the impression that the only thing now necessary before the SSPX is in full communion again is the death of the generation who has lived the Second Vatican Council, and the possibility to put things straight from a more relaxed, less controversial historical perspective.

Mundabor

“A la droite du Vatican”: France 3 documentary.

Tradidi Quod Et Accepi: Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre

Those of you who understand French will certainly enjoy this hour-long documentary about French Traditional Catholics produced from France 3 and appeared on Gloria TV. The documentary is obviously not without faults, but one must say that the effort to understand French Traditionalism and accurately transmit its values to the viewers is, for a secular sender, remarkable.

There are small parts you won’t like (a stupid reference to alleged “Islamophobia” comes to mind; one also notices that secular people are unable to discuss Traditionalism without mixing it with the private opinions of Bishop Williamson), but in general I think that many lukewarm French Catholics who have seen this documentary have been left with a lot to think about.

Those who do not understand French (no subtitles, unfortunately) will enjoy the period footage of Archbishop Lefebvre and the beautiful music in the first part of the documentary.
He will also enjoy the masses. Both on the impressive footage from the Sixties and on the parts dealing with contemporary traditionalism, one can’t avoid noticing the numerical impact of an organisation numbering 150,000 in a country with around the same inhabitants as the United Kingdom. Since Vatican II France has been disgraced with bishops among the worst on the planet, but it is also the country where the reaction to “Catholicism easy” is strongest and best organised.

You’ll notice (and this is correctly put in evidence in the documentary) the strikingly low average age of the French Traditionalists. In addition, the entire editorial cut of the documentary makes at least an honest effort to portray them in their daily lives and as normal people rather than deluded nutcases, as the BBC or Channel Four would most certainly do.
These are young people, young mothers, families with children; they are listened to in the course of their daily life, in the kitchen, the reception room, at lunch, in a brasserie or bar; they smoke and drink beer, are dressed correctly but like everyone of us and are evidently not living in a parallel, alternative world like a hippy or an extremist biker. These are people with normal jobs and normal lives, whom every lukewarm Catholic could easily have as friends.

I recommend the viewing to the french-speaking readers, but even those who don’t will probably find the initial part – with the period footage and the music – rather interesting.

Mundabor