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| Fr. Roger Calmel: The Immaculate Heart of Mary and World Peace |
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Posted by: Stone - 12-08-2020, 06:32 AM - Forum: Our Lady
- Replies (1)
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The Angelus - March 2010
The Immaculate Heart of Mary and World Peace
Fr. Roger Calmel, O.P.
A reflection on the message of Fatima, the importance of devotion to our Lady, and the necessity of conversion.
We shall reflect on the words of the Blessed Virgin at Fatima. When it comes to commenting on the words of Our Lord, every Christian who is careful about what he says or writes cannot help feeling a certain reverential fear. Might not what he will say miss the divine truth? Or will he be able to penetrate however slightly into a pre-eminently mysterious word? This apprehension also seizes him when it comes to commenting on the words of Our Lady. Yet it is also as normal to comment on the divine word as to reflect and meditate upon it. While the silence of love may be the most worthy homage (awaiting the eternal morning of vision), it is impossible not to speak, not to employ our discursive faculty before divine truth. Such an attitude has always been encouraged by the Church, who is as profoundly a theologian as she is a mystic. So let confidence outweigh fear, and may our reflection attempt to penetrate into the message the Queen of the Rosary confided to her humble privileged souls: Jacinta and Francesco, and especially Lucy.
Peace: A Gift of God
One of the first ideas that occur to us upon reading this message is that world peace, political peace, is a gift of God and of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. “Say [the rosary] with the intention of obtaining the end of the war.”1 Peace is thus suspended from the intercession of Our Lady and the omnipotence of Him whom we hail in Christmas Matins as Princeps Pacis. There is no doubt that this is true of supernatural peace, the peace that abides within the secret of the heart, which proceeds from the love of God, within the holy Church, which is the Beata Pacis visio. For how could peace of this order, of its nature heavenly, a peace of this quality, properly divine and supernatural, not be a gift of God and a fruit of the intercession of the Virgin redemptrix? On the other hand, a certain political naturalism would lead us to think that the peace “of all nations and tribes and peoples and tongues,” since it is a reality of a natural, perishable order, lies within the scope of nature abandoned to itself. There is no doubt but that some Christians have slipped on this slope. It is a slope of error. And this for two reasons: first of all, by virtue of the quite general principle that no good thing begins, continues, and comes to completion without the benevolence of the Almighty and unless God grants it His blessing; and secondly, for a very specific reason having to do with the essence of political peace.
It is, in effect, a fruit of justice–opus justitiae pax; now, there is no solid, integral justice without conversion of heart and thus without supernatural grace, that is, without a divine favor. Peace is the tranquility of a just order; but this just order cannot happen without the will of men. If the leaders and the people ordinarily abandon themselves to injustice, how can the tranquility of order be obtained? One may say perhaps: but isn’t it enough to have just institutions to be preserved from injustice, whatever form this may take: as, for example, to fail to recognize or to oppose the authority of the Church; to develop an unbridled economic imperialism; to oppress weaker nations? Certainly, appropriate institutions can and should remedy these crimes. But good institutions, while helping people to be good, are first of all created and supported by the justice of individuals. Now, this justice is quite weak and short-lived without God’s grace, in such a way that, without grace, the best of institutions are not enough to ensure peace.
To be sure, it would be grotesque to interpret the message of Fatima in the sense of a supernaturalism and to fail to recognize that world peace is a political effect partly linked to political causes. On the other hand, it is normal to interpret the message of Fatima as a reminder of the fundamental truth that politics is not enough, for the resulting political order is dependent on fallen and redeemed human beings. If individuals do not let themselves be healed by divine grace, the desired political effects will not follow. It is because the Church is deeply aware of this that she counts on the Lord first and foremost to obtain peace. Let us think rather of the commentary on the “Libera nos a malo” that the liturgy develops at the end of the Pater Noster before Communion; let us also think of the Good Friday prayers and the Exsultet of the Paschal Vigil. Peace is always presented to us as a gift of divine mercy. This lesson from the liturgy is also the first lesson of Fatima.
The second lesson is complementary: world peace is impossible without the conversion of Christians. This gift of God is not automatic, not only because it requires and fosters just politics, but at the same time because God cannot grant this gift without the conversion of wills:
Quote:“Do penance,” said the Blessed Virgin. “If my requests are granted, Russia will be converted and there will be peace in the world.”
Let us not be unrealistic. Let us not imagine that peace among nations and within nations will be obtained if all the Christians are not in the state of grace. But let us also understand that peace cannot be established if Christian people persist in lukewarmness: in other words, if they continue to make the comforts of technological progress the be all and end all of their lives.
The conversion called for by the Blessed Virgin and the peace of which she speaks are not ahistorical. They are specific to an era, to a precise period of human history, the time of the Communist Revolution in Russia and the worldwide expansion of Communist propaganda. World peace is not to be achieved in the state in which the world lay at the time of the Roman Emperors, when the nations as such had not been baptized and when the State had no notion of legislation enlightened by the Church or that took into account the coming on earth of the very Son of God and of His work of Redemption. The peace in question concerns a world in which a certain number of nations were baptized, and so it is of paramount importance that their subjects conduct their lives as baptized persons. Nor can peace in the modern world be achieved in the conditions prevailing at the time of the 16th century, when, in spite of the heretics and free-thinkers, no one envisaged that the State should be organized on the basis of materialism (and not just a doctrinal materialism to be preached, but dialectical materialism in the revolutionary activity that the State is compelled to adopt by means of perfidious cunning or under the pressure of terror!)
The conjuncture in which Our Lady called for conversion is assuredly very particular. It was at the time when Communism was spreading in one great land at one extremity of Europe that she appeared at the other extremity of the continent to urge our conversion. The war threatening the world was not a war like others, firstly because the methods of destruction have achieved incredible progress, but especially because dialectical materialism had insinuated its poison into the social fabric of the Russian State and was threatening to corrupt other States.
Quote:“If my demands are not met,” our Lady told us, “Russia will spread its errors throughout the world, provoking wars and persecution against the Church.”
It would be easy to capitulate at once and say, for example: “After all, does it really matter so much if a part of humanity is destroyed by nuclear weapons? The victims will not find themselves because of that in an absolute impossibility of saving their souls. Should we really fear worldwide domination by communism and the abolition of Christian nations so much? After all, the grace of God has no need of anything nor anyone, and those who desire it will still be able to save their souls.” Alas, these statements are not a fictitious objection that I’m addressing. This language of pre-emptive capitulation, which inspires indignation in every noble heart, has unfortunately been made by some Christians.
These are abject proposals that the instinct of natural generosity as well as the instinct of faith reject out of hand. This spontaneous refusal of the Christian heart which precedes its articulate justification might be explained this way: It is true that grace is strong enough and powerful enough to draw good from evil, to bring forth the holiness of the martyrs from the iniquity of tyrants and the cruelty of executioners. It remains that we ought not to do evil so that good may come of it and to do so is an abominable sin. It remains that we ought not to cooperate in evil by our complicity. We know that even during the apostasy and the general iniquity of the last times the power of God is still strong enough to save men. But we should do what we can to prevent injustice.
In some respects, it is true that Christian nations are not indispensable to the life of the Church. But since they exist we would be criminal to work towards their disappearance or to cooperate in their disappearance in any way. We ought not commit this injustice. It is very easy to say that the Church has no need of Christian civilization. This proposition is not understood correctly unless it is considered in light of the two following propositions: from the fact that she is a stranger on earth, the Church cannot avoid having an influence on terrestrial things that are in relation with the Faith; she cannot avoid affecting private and public morals and consequently she tends to form a Christian civilization.
The second truth is that Christian civilization constitutes for the Church a normal aid and support. We know the limits of Christian nations and how much they constantly need to be uplifted, corrected, and returned to the right path and that they are of another order than the Church. But to conclude from this that because these two orders are distinct they must therefore be separate is to fail, under pretext of purity, to take account of the fact that the Church develops on this earth.
The Church cannot be indifferent to the social conditions that foster respect for law, that is, a Christian social order. And it is such an order that God desires as support for His Church. When Christians commit the great injustice of allowing the abolition of this order, they know not what they are doing nor with what scandals they burden their consciences–for example, when, without any resistance, they allow private schools to be closed or allow state control of the economy. Although God can save souls through the worst of scandals, and even when the scandal has been codified and institutionalized, the Christians who favor or who at least do not prevent the scandal when they might have, are gravely culpable. Likewise, when Christians fancy that a Christian civilization can continue to exist without their conversion, they no longer understand what a Christian civilization is and the wrong they do to it.
To enable the Mystical Body of Jesus Christ to achieve its full stature and the number of the elect to be filled up, the social order is of no small importance. First, it is necessary for children to come into the world and for the human race not to be destroyed too soon; then it is necessary for men to be able to grow up in a society that accepts the Church at least partially, or, at any rate, accepts it enough so as not to become a perpetual and institutionalized incitement to apostasy, materialism, and the rejection of God.
Thus the spiritual kingdom posits a minimum of Christian social order; it helps such an order to be established, to endure, and to be renewed, but at the same time calls for it as a normal support.
If we consider the Incarnation from the angle where this mystery concerns the social order, we see immediately that the Blessed Virgin holds a unique and unequaled place. Whether it regards the coming of the Word of God in a passible and mortal flesh, or His birth at Bethlehem, or His preservation during the exile in Egypt, the education at Nazareth or the first miracle at the wedding feast of Cana, the Blessed Virgin was involved in the temporal aspects of the Incarnation as only the Mother of the Word Incarnate could be. One begins to comprehend that she now continues to watch over the social order of mankind in the measure that it is in relation with the Mystical Body of her Son Jesus Christ. One comprehends that she intervenes for the sake of a Christian social order; there is a profound affinity between her current role in the life of the Church2 and the role she played in the accomplishment and the unfolding of the Mystery of the Incarnation.
To be sure, it is foretold that the social order will culminate in the abomination of widespread apostasy,3 but until that time, and even at that time, the Blessed Virgin will be maternally watching to insure that the Church has that part of mankind and Christian civilization without which it could no longer exist on earth.
This explains why the heavenly Father wanted the apparition of the Blessed Virgin at Fatima to occur in 1917. While for the first time the nations of the world had just unleashed a war of total extermination, while a totally new revolution was developing that aimed less at regime change than at spreading throughout the world atheistic institutions and morals; in short, while Christian civilization, as imperfect as it may have been, was undergoing the most formidable assaults within and without, it was fitting that the heavenly Father should send to the world, for the purpose of helping it recover a Christian social order, the Immaculate Virgin whose consent had allowed the Incarnation of the Son of God and His temporal life. Now we can understand why the major apparitions of the Blessed Virgin, apparitions of global significance, only began after the unprecedented attack against Christian civilization by the great Revolution, and after the first organized attempt at integral secularism. From that moment the role of the Blessed Virgin for the salvation and renewal of a Christian social order became more urgent and appeared more clearly.
By our Lady’s intervention at Fatima to preserve us from communism, if we at least desire to be converted, she showed clearly that the peace she desires for us cannot have anything in common with communist peace, which is the tranquility of disorder maintained by means of technologically organized terror and a propaganda machine that does not shrink from any lie nor any violation of conscience. True peace is the tranquility of an order based on justice both public and personal, a justice moreover that cannot exist without love.
Communism speaks a great deal about peace, just as it speaks a great deal about freedom, liberation, and social justice. But since it has categorically and in principle rejected God and His Church, and since it reduces man to being nothing more than a certain variety of matter, its peace can only be a grimacing counterfeit. A peace that fundamentally contradicts the nature of man and society may indeed present an exterior of tranquility, but it is the tranquility of convicts condemned to the galley: they cannot leave their bench, and they work together because they live under the empire of terror and the whip. In the Communist galley the convicts still have the questionable privilege over the galley slaves of old of being able to listen to State radio broadcasts exalting the pleasures of their lot and the amenity of their guards while a hail of blows rains down without intermission on their skeletal carcasses.
There can be no communist peace, no more than there can be peace based on a comfortable, natural religion blessed by technological progress,4 or soft materialism, or revolutionary dialectical materialism, though the latter would otherwise be consistent and tyrannical.
The temptation to gain the whole world without fear of losing their souls threatens poor men more than ever. Technological progress offers them ever increasing opportunities to spend their lives without regard for eternity; to spend their lives without prayer, sacrifice, or love of God; to yield themselves without resistance to the plethora of anesthetics discovered daily by modern science. In the 17th century Racine bemoaned the vain pursuits of worldly people; his lamentation has become even more justified in our day than it was in the age of the stagecoach, the sailing ship, and strolling players. That is why the Blessed Virgin is urging Christians to be converted, that is to say, to awaken from the false peace of tranquil materialism under pain of becoming a prey to dialectical materialism and its intrinsically perverse order.
At Fatima the Blessed Virgin did not simply say that in the end she would triumph. She said:
Quote:“In the end my Immaculate Heart will triumph.”
So saying, she wanted to remind us that her intervention in our unhappy history would be an additional proof of her love. Just as we need not look for any other cause than the love of the Mother of God in her Fiat mihi that allowed the Incarnation, or the silent offering of her co-redemptive Compassion, or her ardent prayer in the Cenacle that obtained the irrevocable effusion of the Holy Spirit, so also her unceasing, unseen supplication in heaven and her manifest intervention at certain desperate hours of the history of the Church and Christian civilization proceed uniquely from her love.
We have seen some Christians sneer when listening to talk about the Sacred Heart and the Immaculate Heart; they justify their discreet mockery by theological reasons. It is enough to speak of Jesus and our Lady without making an explicit mention of their hearts, they explain; moreover, contemporary imagery, far from nourishing faith, encourages a suspect sentimentality. Whatever may be the case as regards often questionable imagery, the infallible Church officially promotes devotion to the Sacred Heart and to the Immaculate Heart, and in the apparitions of Fatima it is question not only of Our Lady or Queen of the Rosary, but also of the Immaculate Heart. If Christians who find fault with these expressions have really loved their parents or their friends, their spouse or their children, if they have not defiled the language of love, they know full well that there’s no speaking of love without speaking of the heart. Ever since there have been human beings who experience affection they invariably adopt the terms and phrases that remain no less valid for having often been profaned: “I give you my heart. I keep you in my heart.” Well then, since Mary loves us and since she has no other reason to take care of us than her ineffable love as Co-Redemptrix Mother of God, it is not surprising that she speaks to us of her heart.
Nor is it surprising that she adds, my Immaculate Heart. By that, she means us to understand how much she loves us purely, how much her love is attuned to the holiness of God; and it is impossible for her, the Immaculate Mother of her only Son, to desire for us anything else than the accomplishment of God’s will. Doubtless, neither can our brothers in heaven, the angels and saints, love us except in all purity nor in desiring for us anything but what God wants. But they do not have with God this absolutely unique bond, both physical and spiritual, which is the property of the Mother of God; consequently, in regard to God and in regard to us they lack the perfection and quality of love that belong to the Mother of God. The love of the angels and saints is certainly pure, but the love of the Immaculate Mother of God outstrips it extraordinarily in purity.
Knowing this, we understand better that she speaks to us of conversion and she makes peace contingent on conversion, that is, on fidelity to her Son and conformity to His Gospel. She cannot, in effect, desire peace for her children, namely, the first of all temporal goods, if it would make them forget conversion, if it would make them shirk the first of spiritual goods, namely, conformity to Jesus Christ by conversion, awaiting conformity to Jesus Christ by the blessed resurrection. Because the Blessed Virgin carries us in her Immaculate Heart, because she loves us with the love of an Immaculate Heart, she cannot obtain for us peace on earth without asking us for the conversion of our souls.
Similarly, she cannot obtain for us an earthly peace that would be tantamount to paradise on earth, one that would exempt us from having to suffer from the evil within us and around us, from having to fight against the devil and against all those who, for a time or for their whole life and with a more or less imperfect docility, do the devil’s work and play his game.
The peace that the Immaculate Heart wants to obtain for us does not fulfill the impure aspirations of political messianism: the messianism, abhorred by the true Messias, that refuses to take account of either the cross or the devil, or participation in the sacrifice of Jesus, or the unleashed malice of Satan. Since the human condition is marked by the Fall and Redemption, earthly peace cannot comprise the absolute suppression of every injustice because sin continues, and therefore peace cannot avoid being precarious and threatened. A word of the Blessed Virgin at Fatima gently reminds us of this truth without possibility of illusion: “…a time of peace will be given to the world,” she says. This restriction wrings our hearts: the peace will not be perpetual. And we may add: it will not be the unqualified triumph of perfect justice.
One might be inclined to be disappointed or to bewail our fate or to become angry. However, what is in conformity with the best aspirations of our nature as well as the divine inclinations of grace is to understand that this good, however imperfect it may be, is nonetheless of inestimable value; it means that we should continue working for peace on earth, everyone at his post and according to his talents, being vigilant especially as regards the conversion of our own heart; in short, working for peace with the Christian dispositions the Blessed Virgin came to remind us of.
The hatred, fury, and vigilant malice of Satan against the Church, of the Dragon against the Spouse, will perdure until the glorious return of the Lamb. The revelation of the Apocalypse does not leave us in any doubt about it. Likewise, the Apocalypse teaches us that the assaults of Hell will redouble with violence the closer the end draws near. The counter-Church will perfect its methods, the counter-Church which the Apocalypse reveals to us as nothing else than the political power, temporal society inasmuch as it sets itself up as an absolute power, becoming an idol and demanding everything from men, and by that very fact working unceasingly for the Church’s destruction.
For whoever reads the Apocalypse attentively, it seems that history does not repeat itself and that there is a development of the Two Cities. How then should we imagine the progress of the City of Evil? It seems to us to consist in this: progressively the devil will get hold of the fundamental conditions needed by the human will for acting rightly. To be sure, the devil has no direct power over our wills. But as human history develops, he works relentlessly to pervert the basic elements necessary for us to use our will correctly, such as the family, our profession, the work place, civil society, legislation, and morals both public and private. The devil deploys all his rage and cunning so that those things that should help us in doing good become for us a source of scandal, and not just in passing or occasionally, but permanently.
It is a first right of human nature to be helped to go to God by a decent family, an education in truth, an economy organized in accord with justice, and a society in conformity with the natural law. As history progresses, the devil shows himself increasingly stronger and more skillful at violating the true rights of man and arranging for him a life in which apostasy happens almost naturally. A society based on dialectical materialism represents an incontestable progress in his methods. Such a society is possessed by the devil since its institutions as a whole are organized in violation of natural law: it is institutionalized sin.
Conversion and the Rosary
At Fatima, even more than at Lourdes, the Blessed Virgin recommended saying the Rosary; she even gave herself the title, Our Lady of the Rosary. Is there a profound link between true conversion of heart, the conversion she asks of us, and this form of prayer that too often remains routine and superficial? The answer is affirmative, and we shall show why. However, at the very least this prayer must be a genuine prayer, that is, it must be made in spirit and in truth instead of being mechanically mumbled. The indignation expressed by Pascal in his ninth Provinciale and St. Louis de Montfort in Chapter 3 of his True Devotion over false devotees of our Lady still deserve our consideration, and after Fatima at least as much as in the 17th century.
For if the Blessed Virgin calls herself Our Lady of the Rosary and if she urges us to make use of our beads, it is not to authorize inattention, and still less Pharisaism, in prayer. This being said, it seems that the great advantage of the Rosary when it is said “in spirit and in truth,” is that it obliges us more than any other devotion (we are not speaking of the liturgy, which is of a different order) to become aware of the entire mystery of our Redemption: the life, passion, and glory of Christ the Savior. This prolonged awareness should obviously lead us to conform our sentiments and our morals to the subject of our meditation. The Rosary is a contemplative prayer; it makes us contemplate the Gospel, and this in the presence and with the aid of her who has penetrated furthest into the heart of the Gospel; how could it fail to be a wonderful source of evangelical life? How then can the Rosary fail to incite us to change our lives and to be converted? This is all the more true in that, if it is said as it should be said, the Rosary should lead us to a better frequentation of the Eucharist, the “mystery of Faith” and the great Eucharistic prayer, which are the privileged means of our transformation in Christ.
The Rosary well-said makes us enter mystically into the Mystery of Christ and makes us desire to participate in this mystery sacramentally so that our mystical participation becomes more continuous and profound. The efficacy of the Rosary for our conversion is better understood if we think of the vital link between the recitation of the mysteries and the sacramental frequentation of the Eucharistic mystery.
No less than being a contemplation, the Rosary is a petition, and a petition assuredly very pleasing in God’s eyes and very presentable to His infinite holiness since the suppliant, the poor sinner who implores, hides and loses himself in the prayer of her who prays perfectly, for she addresses the Father perfectly, praying in the name of her Son Jesus and in the Holy Spirit; it is with an accent of ineffable purity that she pronounces the “per Dominum nostrum Jesum Christum,” being the Immaculate Mother of this Dominus.
These few reflections undoubtedly suffice to explain why the Blessed Virgin, not to mention the ordinary teaching of the Church, attaches such an importance to the Rosary. It is because the Rosary, to tell the truth, far from being a closed circle and dispensing with all the rest, is a very sure path to greater goods; far from exempting us from conversion, it prepares it; far from forgetting the liturgy and the sacraments, it leads to them and prolongs them. The poor usage that might be made of the Rosary does not prove anything against its worth any more than too often poor religious art proves something against the splendor of Christ and the Virgin.
It is especially when the fervor of the Christian people wanes, when scandal and sin abound, or when Christian civilization is on the brink of ruin; it is especially in these hours of extreme peril either for the Church or Christian nations that the popes adjure us to have recourse to the Rosary. Let us recall, for example, St. Pius V at the time of the Turkish invasion; of Pius XI during the Spanish revolution and on the eve of the Second World War; and finally of Pius XII while a third of the Church had become the Church of Silence. This confidence placed by the popes and Holy Mother Church in the Rosary for the Church’s triumph over the forces of hell in the hours of their most furious attacks can be explained naturally because the Rosary, being a holy meditation, sets us on the path of conversion; being a supplication through the intermediary of the Immaculate, it is a pure petition; finally, if it implores salvation and the renewal of a Christian social order, it implores it in the sense that God wants, since it is addressed to the Virgin of the Annunciation and of Calvary, who knows perfectly the worth and importance of the temporal order.
Three Classes of Christians
“Perpetual peace and especially perfect justice are not for here below; persecution will resume at the end of time, and even on the eve of the Second Coming the forces of Satan will be stronger than ever. Let’s confine ourselves to prayer and leave to their fate the deceitful things of civilization and Caesar.” Thus speak the Christians who take refuge in supernaturalism. They are wrong, of course. Even if they are dedicated to contemplation and devote their time to prayer, their prayer should not be indifferent to the justice or injustice of the things of Caesar; rather, it should imitate the great liturgical prayer that admirably translates the contemplation of the Spouse of Jesus Christ and never ceases to implore justice and peace in the kingdoms of this world. But if the Christians stricken with supernaturalism do not live in the cloister, if they are more or less involved in the things of Caesar, then their attitude of ostensible detachment becomes a kind of hypocrisy because they benefit from the temporal while they make a profession of taking no further interest in it.
“Let us organize the planet in a radically new way. Let us change not only the basic institutions of natural law, but even human nature itself, to see if we can establish perfect happiness and faultless justice here below.” Thus speak the fanatical prophets who reject God and let themselves be possessed by the devils of earthly messianism. By virtue of this proclamation, they apply themselves to “creative destruction,” and when they have yielded to the seduction of dialectical materialism, they make the corruption of consciences, the perversion of minds, and the overthrow of institutions go hand in hand.
True Christians, however, recognize the imperfection and frailty of the social order, even when it has been baptized; they also do not doubt that a just social order and a peace worthy of the name are God’s will. Above all, they know that man is made for God, and that peace and holiness are to be found in God alone in the bosom of Christ’s Church. They try to abide in God. Because of this indwelling in Him who desires justice they find the courage not to be resigned to injustice. Whether in their mental prayer, if they dwell in a monastery, or in their mental prayer and action if they are engaged in active life, they work for justice and for the establishment and renewal of a Christian social order without illusion as without discouragement for the simple reason that God wills it. This attitude, the only balanced one, presupposes that the soul is fixed in God, or at least that it sincerely aspires to this union of love that constitutes true conversion.
This is the attitude that the apparition of the Blessed Virgin at Fatima and consecration to her Immaculate Heart ought to inspire in us. Her Immaculate Heart, in effect, desires to obtain for us both a Christian peace and the conversion of our lives; but, she warns us, a Christian peace will not be granted unless we are resolved to amend our lives.
Fr. Roger-Thomas Calmel, O.P. (1914-75), was a prominent French Dominican and Thomist philosopher, who made an immense contribution to the fight for Catholic Tradition through his writings and conferences, notably as a regular contributor for 17 years to Jean Madiran’s Itinéraires. His most enduring influence is through the traditional Dominican Teaching Sisters of Fanjeaux and Brignole in France who operate 12 girls’ schools in France and the US.
1 Chanoine C. Barthas and Fr. G. Da Fonseca, S.J., Our Lady of Light (Dublin: Clonmore & Reynolds, Ltd., 1947), p. 28.
2 For what concerns the relation of Mary’s regency with civilization, cf. the articles of Fr. M.-J. Nicolas, O.P., on the Virgin Queen, Revue Thomiste, 1939, pp. 1-29, 207-231.
3 See Fr. M.-E. Boismard, O.P., Apocalypse (Paris: Cerf, 1953); see also Fr. Ernest-Bernard Allo, O.P., St. John: Apocalypse (Paris: Gabalda, 1921).
4 On the theme of the philosophy of technology, see the Christmas Message of Pius XII, “On Modern Technology and Peace” published by the National Catholic Welfare Conference (Washington, D.C., 1953).
[Emphasis - The Catacombs]
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| Fr. Roger Calmel: The Immaculate Heart of Mary and World Peace |
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Posted by: Stone - 12-08-2020, 06:32 AM - Forum: Fr. Roger Calmel
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The Angelus - March 2010
The Immaculate Heart of Mary and World Peace
Fr. Roger Calmel, O.P.
A reflection on the message of Fatima, the importance of devotion to our Lady, and the necessity of conversion.
We shall reflect on the words of the Blessed Virgin at Fatima. When it comes to commenting on the words of Our Lord, every Christian who is careful about what he says or writes cannot help feeling a certain reverential fear. Might not what he will say miss the divine truth? Or will he be able to penetrate however slightly into a pre-eminently mysterious word? This apprehension also seizes him when it comes to commenting on the words of Our Lady. Yet it is also as normal to comment on the divine word as to reflect and meditate upon it. While the silence of love may be the most worthy homage (awaiting the eternal morning of vision), it is impossible not to speak, not to employ our discursive faculty before divine truth. Such an attitude has always been encouraged by the Church, who is as profoundly a theologian as she is a mystic. So let confidence outweigh fear, and may our reflection attempt to penetrate into the message the Queen of the Rosary confided to her humble privileged souls: Jacinta and Francesco, and especially Lucy.
Peace: A Gift of God
One of the first ideas that occur to us upon reading this message is that world peace, political peace, is a gift of God and of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. “Say [the rosary] with the intention of obtaining the end of the war.”1 Peace is thus suspended from the intercession of Our Lady and the omnipotence of Him whom we hail in Christmas Matins as Princeps Pacis. There is no doubt that this is true of supernatural peace, the peace that abides within the secret of the heart, which proceeds from the love of God, within the holy Church, which is the Beata Pacis visio. For how could peace of this order, of its nature heavenly, a peace of this quality, properly divine and supernatural, not be a gift of God and a fruit of the intercession of the Virgin redemptrix? On the other hand, a certain political naturalism would lead us to think that the peace “of all nations and tribes and peoples and tongues,” since it is a reality of a natural, perishable order, lies within the scope of nature abandoned to itself. There is no doubt but that some Christians have slipped on this slope. It is a slope of error. And this for two reasons: first of all, by virtue of the quite general principle that no good thing begins, continues, and comes to completion without the benevolence of the Almighty and unless God grants it His blessing; and secondly, for a very specific reason having to do with the essence of political peace.
It is, in effect, a fruit of justice–opus justitiae pax; now, there is no solid, integral justice without conversion of heart and thus without supernatural grace, that is, without a divine favor. Peace is the tranquility of a just order; but this just order cannot happen without the will of men. If the leaders and the people ordinarily abandon themselves to injustice, how can the tranquility of order be obtained? One may say perhaps: but isn’t it enough to have just institutions to be preserved from injustice, whatever form this may take: as, for example, to fail to recognize or to oppose the authority of the Church; to develop an unbridled economic imperialism; to oppress weaker nations? Certainly, appropriate institutions can and should remedy these crimes. But good institutions, while helping people to be good, are first of all created and supported by the justice of individuals. Now, this justice is quite weak and short-lived without God’s grace, in such a way that, without grace, the best of institutions are not enough to ensure peace.
To be sure, it would be grotesque to interpret the message of Fatima in the sense of a supernaturalism and to fail to recognize that world peace is a political effect partly linked to political causes. On the other hand, it is normal to interpret the message of Fatima as a reminder of the fundamental truth that politics is not enough, for the resulting political order is dependent on fallen and redeemed human beings. If individuals do not let themselves be healed by divine grace, the desired political effects will not follow. It is because the Church is deeply aware of this that she counts on the Lord first and foremost to obtain peace. Let us think rather of the commentary on the “Libera nos a malo” that the liturgy develops at the end of the Pater Noster before Communion; let us also think of the Good Friday prayers and the Exsultet of the Paschal Vigil. Peace is always presented to us as a gift of divine mercy. This lesson from the liturgy is also the first lesson of Fatima.
The second lesson is complementary: world peace is impossible without the conversion of Christians. This gift of God is not automatic, not only because it requires and fosters just politics, but at the same time because God cannot grant this gift without the conversion of wills:
Quote:“Do penance,” said the Blessed Virgin. “If my requests are granted, Russia will be converted and there will be peace in the world.”
Let us not be unrealistic. Let us not imagine that peace among nations and within nations will be obtained if all the Christians are not in the state of grace. But let us also understand that peace cannot be established if Christian people persist in lukewarmness: in other words, if they continue to make the comforts of technological progress the be all and end all of their lives.
The conversion called for by the Blessed Virgin and the peace of which she speaks are not ahistorical. They are specific to an era, to a precise period of human history, the time of the Communist Revolution in Russia and the worldwide expansion of Communist propaganda. World peace is not to be achieved in the state in which the world lay at the time of the Roman Emperors, when the nations as such had not been baptized and when the State had no notion of legislation enlightened by the Church or that took into account the coming on earth of the very Son of God and of His work of Redemption. The peace in question concerns a world in which a certain number of nations were baptized, and so it is of paramount importance that their subjects conduct their lives as baptized persons. Nor can peace in the modern world be achieved in the conditions prevailing at the time of the 16th century, when, in spite of the heretics and free-thinkers, no one envisaged that the State should be organized on the basis of materialism (and not just a doctrinal materialism to be preached, but dialectical materialism in the revolutionary activity that the State is compelled to adopt by means of perfidious cunning or under the pressure of terror!)
The conjuncture in which Our Lady called for conversion is assuredly very particular. It was at the time when Communism was spreading in one great land at one extremity of Europe that she appeared at the other extremity of the continent to urge our conversion. The war threatening the world was not a war like others, firstly because the methods of destruction have achieved incredible progress, but especially because dialectical materialism had insinuated its poison into the social fabric of the Russian State and was threatening to corrupt other States.
Quote:“If my demands are not met,” our Lady told us, “Russia will spread its errors throughout the world, provoking wars and persecution against the Church.”
It would be easy to capitulate at once and say, for example: “After all, does it really matter so much if a part of humanity is destroyed by nuclear weapons? The victims will not find themselves because of that in an absolute impossibility of saving their souls. Should we really fear worldwide domination by communism and the abolition of Christian nations so much? After all, the grace of God has no need of anything nor anyone, and those who desire it will still be able to save their souls.” Alas, these statements are not a fictitious objection that I’m addressing. This language of pre-emptive capitulation, which inspires indignation in every noble heart, has unfortunately been made by some Christians.
These are abject proposals that the instinct of natural generosity as well as the instinct of faith reject out of hand. This spontaneous refusal of the Christian heart which precedes its articulate justification might be explained this way: It is true that grace is strong enough and powerful enough to draw good from evil, to bring forth the holiness of the martyrs from the iniquity of tyrants and the cruelty of executioners. It remains that we ought not to do evil so that good may come of it and to do so is an abominable sin. It remains that we ought not to cooperate in evil by our complicity. We know that even during the apostasy and the general iniquity of the last times the power of God is still strong enough to save men. But we should do what we can to prevent injustice.
In some respects, it is true that Christian nations are not indispensable to the life of the Church. But since they exist we would be criminal to work towards their disappearance or to cooperate in their disappearance in any way. We ought not commit this injustice. It is very easy to say that the Church has no need of Christian civilization. This proposition is not understood correctly unless it is considered in light of the two following propositions: from the fact that she is a stranger on earth, the Church cannot avoid having an influence on terrestrial things that are in relation with the Faith; she cannot avoid affecting private and public morals and consequently she tends to form a Christian civilization.
The second truth is that Christian civilization constitutes for the Church a normal aid and support. We know the limits of Christian nations and how much they constantly need to be uplifted, corrected, and returned to the right path and that they are of another order than the Church. But to conclude from this that because these two orders are distinct they must therefore be separate is to fail, under pretext of purity, to take account of the fact that the Church develops on this earth.
The Church cannot be indifferent to the social conditions that foster respect for law, that is, a Christian social order. And it is such an order that God desires as support for His Church. When Christians commit the great injustice of allowing the abolition of this order, they know not what they are doing nor with what scandals they burden their consciences–for example, when, without any resistance, they allow private schools to be closed or allow state control of the economy. Although God can save souls through the worst of scandals, and even when the scandal has been codified and institutionalized, the Christians who favor or who at least do not prevent the scandal when they might have, are gravely culpable. Likewise, when Christians fancy that a Christian civilization can continue to exist without their conversion, they no longer understand what a Christian civilization is and the wrong they do to it.
To enable the Mystical Body of Jesus Christ to achieve its full stature and the number of the elect to be filled up, the social order is of no small importance. First, it is necessary for children to come into the world and for the human race not to be destroyed too soon; then it is necessary for men to be able to grow up in a society that accepts the Church at least partially, or, at any rate, accepts it enough so as not to become a perpetual and institutionalized incitement to apostasy, materialism, and the rejection of God.
Thus the spiritual kingdom posits a minimum of Christian social order; it helps such an order to be established, to endure, and to be renewed, but at the same time calls for it as a normal support.
If we consider the Incarnation from the angle where this mystery concerns the social order, we see immediately that the Blessed Virgin holds a unique and unequaled place. Whether it regards the coming of the Word of God in a passible and mortal flesh, or His birth at Bethlehem, or His preservation during the exile in Egypt, the education at Nazareth or the first miracle at the wedding feast of Cana, the Blessed Virgin was involved in the temporal aspects of the Incarnation as only the Mother of the Word Incarnate could be. One begins to comprehend that she now continues to watch over the social order of mankind in the measure that it is in relation with the Mystical Body of her Son Jesus Christ. One comprehends that she intervenes for the sake of a Christian social order; there is a profound affinity between her current role in the life of the Church2 and the role she played in the accomplishment and the unfolding of the Mystery of the Incarnation.
To be sure, it is foretold that the social order will culminate in the abomination of widespread apostasy,3 but until that time, and even at that time, the Blessed Virgin will be maternally watching to insure that the Church has that part of mankind and Christian civilization without which it could no longer exist on earth.
This explains why the heavenly Father wanted the apparition of the Blessed Virgin at Fatima to occur in 1917. While for the first time the nations of the world had just unleashed a war of total extermination, while a totally new revolution was developing that aimed less at regime change than at spreading throughout the world atheistic institutions and morals; in short, while Christian civilization, as imperfect as it may have been, was undergoing the most formidable assaults within and without, it was fitting that the heavenly Father should send to the world, for the purpose of helping it recover a Christian social order, the Immaculate Virgin whose consent had allowed the Incarnation of the Son of God and His temporal life. Now we can understand why the major apparitions of the Blessed Virgin, apparitions of global significance, only began after the unprecedented attack against Christian civilization by the great Revolution, and after the first organized attempt at integral secularism. From that moment the role of the Blessed Virgin for the salvation and renewal of a Christian social order became more urgent and appeared more clearly.
By our Lady’s intervention at Fatima to preserve us from communism, if we at least desire to be converted, she showed clearly that the peace she desires for us cannot have anything in common with communist peace, which is the tranquility of disorder maintained by means of technologically organized terror and a propaganda machine that does not shrink from any lie nor any violation of conscience. True peace is the tranquility of an order based on justice both public and personal, a justice moreover that cannot exist without love.
Communism speaks a great deal about peace, just as it speaks a great deal about freedom, liberation, and social justice. But since it has categorically and in principle rejected God and His Church, and since it reduces man to being nothing more than a certain variety of matter, its peace can only be a grimacing counterfeit. A peace that fundamentally contradicts the nature of man and society may indeed present an exterior of tranquility, but it is the tranquility of convicts condemned to the galley: they cannot leave their bench, and they work together because they live under the empire of terror and the whip. In the Communist galley the convicts still have the questionable privilege over the galley slaves of old of being able to listen to State radio broadcasts exalting the pleasures of their lot and the amenity of their guards while a hail of blows rains down without intermission on their skeletal carcasses.
There can be no communist peace, no more than there can be peace based on a comfortable, natural religion blessed by technological progress,4 or soft materialism, or revolutionary dialectical materialism, though the latter would otherwise be consistent and tyrannical.
The temptation to gain the whole world without fear of losing their souls threatens poor men more than ever. Technological progress offers them ever increasing opportunities to spend their lives without regard for eternity; to spend their lives without prayer, sacrifice, or love of God; to yield themselves without resistance to the plethora of anesthetics discovered daily by modern science. In the 17th century Racine bemoaned the vain pursuits of worldly people; his lamentation has become even more justified in our day than it was in the age of the stagecoach, the sailing ship, and strolling players. That is why the Blessed Virgin is urging Christians to be converted, that is to say, to awaken from the false peace of tranquil materialism under pain of becoming a prey to dialectical materialism and its intrinsically perverse order.
At Fatima the Blessed Virgin did not simply say that in the end she would triumph. She said:
Quote:“In the end my Immaculate Heart will triumph.”
So saying, she wanted to remind us that her intervention in our unhappy history would be an additional proof of her love. Just as we need not look for any other cause than the love of the Mother of God in her Fiat mihi that allowed the Incarnation, or the silent offering of her co-redemptive Compassion, or her ardent prayer in the Cenacle that obtained the irrevocable effusion of the Holy Spirit, so also her unceasing, unseen supplication in heaven and her manifest intervention at certain desperate hours of the history of the Church and Christian civilization proceed uniquely from her love.
We have seen some Christians sneer when listening to talk about the Sacred Heart and the Immaculate Heart; they justify their discreet mockery by theological reasons. It is enough to speak of Jesus and our Lady without making an explicit mention of their hearts, they explain; moreover, contemporary imagery, far from nourishing faith, encourages a suspect sentimentality. Whatever may be the case as regards often questionable imagery, the infallible Church officially promotes devotion to the Sacred Heart and to the Immaculate Heart, and in the apparitions of Fatima it is question not only of Our Lady or Queen of the Rosary, but also of the Immaculate Heart. If Christians who find fault with these expressions have really loved their parents or their friends, their spouse or their children, if they have not defiled the language of love, they know full well that there’s no speaking of love without speaking of the heart. Ever since there have been human beings who experience affection they invariably adopt the terms and phrases that remain no less valid for having often been profaned: “I give you my heart. I keep you in my heart.” Well then, since Mary loves us and since she has no other reason to take care of us than her ineffable love as Co-Redemptrix Mother of God, it is not surprising that she speaks to us of her heart.
Nor is it surprising that she adds, my Immaculate Heart. By that, she means us to understand how much she loves us purely, how much her love is attuned to the holiness of God; and it is impossible for her, the Immaculate Mother of her only Son, to desire for us anything else than the accomplishment of God’s will. Doubtless, neither can our brothers in heaven, the angels and saints, love us except in all purity nor in desiring for us anything but what God wants. But they do not have with God this absolutely unique bond, both physical and spiritual, which is the property of the Mother of God; consequently, in regard to God and in regard to us they lack the perfection and quality of love that belong to the Mother of God. The love of the angels and saints is certainly pure, but the love of the Immaculate Mother of God outstrips it extraordinarily in purity.
Knowing this, we understand better that she speaks to us of conversion and she makes peace contingent on conversion, that is, on fidelity to her Son and conformity to His Gospel. She cannot, in effect, desire peace for her children, namely, the first of all temporal goods, if it would make them forget conversion, if it would make them shirk the first of spiritual goods, namely, conformity to Jesus Christ by conversion, awaiting conformity to Jesus Christ by the blessed resurrection. Because the Blessed Virgin carries us in her Immaculate Heart, because she loves us with the love of an Immaculate Heart, she cannot obtain for us peace on earth without asking us for the conversion of our souls.
Similarly, she cannot obtain for us an earthly peace that would be tantamount to paradise on earth, one that would exempt us from having to suffer from the evil within us and around us, from having to fight against the devil and against all those who, for a time or for their whole life and with a more or less imperfect docility, do the devil’s work and play his game.
The peace that the Immaculate Heart wants to obtain for us does not fulfill the impure aspirations of political messianism: the messianism, abhorred by the true Messias, that refuses to take account of either the cross or the devil, or participation in the sacrifice of Jesus, or the unleashed malice of Satan. Since the human condition is marked by the Fall and Redemption, earthly peace cannot comprise the absolute suppression of every injustice because sin continues, and therefore peace cannot avoid being precarious and threatened. A word of the Blessed Virgin at Fatima gently reminds us of this truth without possibility of illusion: “…a time of peace will be given to the world,” she says. This restriction wrings our hearts: the peace will not be perpetual. And we may add: it will not be the unqualified triumph of perfect justice.
One might be inclined to be disappointed or to bewail our fate or to become angry. However, what is in conformity with the best aspirations of our nature as well as the divine inclinations of grace is to understand that this good, however imperfect it may be, is nonetheless of inestimable value; it means that we should continue working for peace on earth, everyone at his post and according to his talents, being vigilant especially as regards the conversion of our own heart; in short, working for peace with the Christian dispositions the Blessed Virgin came to remind us of.
The hatred, fury, and vigilant malice of Satan against the Church, of the Dragon against the Spouse, will perdure until the glorious return of the Lamb. The revelation of the Apocalypse does not leave us in any doubt about it. Likewise, the Apocalypse teaches us that the assaults of Hell will redouble with violence the closer the end draws near. The counter-Church will perfect its methods, the counter-Church which the Apocalypse reveals to us as nothing else than the political power, temporal society inasmuch as it sets itself up as an absolute power, becoming an idol and demanding everything from men, and by that very fact working unceasingly for the Church’s destruction.
For whoever reads the Apocalypse attentively, it seems that history does not repeat itself and that there is a development of the Two Cities. How then should we imagine the progress of the City of Evil? It seems to us to consist in this: progressively the devil will get hold of the fundamental conditions needed by the human will for acting rightly. To be sure, the devil has no direct power over our wills. But as human history develops, he works relentlessly to pervert the basic elements necessary for us to use our will correctly, such as the family, our profession, the work place, civil society, legislation, and morals both public and private. The devil deploys all his rage and cunning so that those things that should help us in doing good become for us a source of scandal, and not just in passing or occasionally, but permanently.
It is a first right of human nature to be helped to go to God by a decent family, an education in truth, an economy organized in accord with justice, and a society in conformity with the natural law. As history progresses, the devil shows himself increasingly stronger and more skillful at violating the true rights of man and arranging for him a life in which apostasy happens almost naturally. A society based on dialectical materialism represents an incontestable progress in his methods. Such a society is possessed by the devil since its institutions as a whole are organized in violation of natural law: it is institutionalized sin.
Conversion and the Rosary
At Fatima, even more than at Lourdes, the Blessed Virgin recommended saying the Rosary; she even gave herself the title, Our Lady of the Rosary. Is there a profound link between true conversion of heart, the conversion she asks of us, and this form of prayer that too often remains routine and superficial? The answer is affirmative, and we shall show why. However, at the very least this prayer must be a genuine prayer, that is, it must be made in spirit and in truth instead of being mechanically mumbled. The indignation expressed by Pascal in his ninth Provinciale and St. Louis de Montfort in Chapter 3 of his True Devotion over false devotees of our Lady still deserve our consideration, and after Fatima at least as much as in the 17th century.
For if the Blessed Virgin calls herself Our Lady of the Rosary and if she urges us to make use of our beads, it is not to authorize inattention, and still less Pharisaism, in prayer. This being said, it seems that the great advantage of the Rosary when it is said “in spirit and in truth,” is that it obliges us more than any other devotion (we are not speaking of the liturgy, which is of a different order) to become aware of the entire mystery of our Redemption: the life, passion, and glory of Christ the Savior. This prolonged awareness should obviously lead us to conform our sentiments and our morals to the subject of our meditation. The Rosary is a contemplative prayer; it makes us contemplate the Gospel, and this in the presence and with the aid of her who has penetrated furthest into the heart of the Gospel; how could it fail to be a wonderful source of evangelical life? How then can the Rosary fail to incite us to change our lives and to be converted? This is all the more true in that, if it is said as it should be said, the Rosary should lead us to a better frequentation of the Eucharist, the “mystery of Faith” and the great Eucharistic prayer, which are the privileged means of our transformation in Christ.
The Rosary well-said makes us enter mystically into the Mystery of Christ and makes us desire to participate in this mystery sacramentally so that our mystical participation becomes more continuous and profound. The efficacy of the Rosary for our conversion is better understood if we think of the vital link between the recitation of the mysteries and the sacramental frequentation of the Eucharistic mystery.
No less than being a contemplation, the Rosary is a petition, and a petition assuredly very pleasing in God’s eyes and very presentable to His infinite holiness since the suppliant, the poor sinner who implores, hides and loses himself in the prayer of her who prays perfectly, for she addresses the Father perfectly, praying in the name of her Son Jesus and in the Holy Spirit; it is with an accent of ineffable purity that she pronounces the “per Dominum nostrum Jesum Christum,” being the Immaculate Mother of this Dominus.
These few reflections undoubtedly suffice to explain why the Blessed Virgin, not to mention the ordinary teaching of the Church, attaches such an importance to the Rosary. It is because the Rosary, to tell the truth, far from being a closed circle and dispensing with all the rest, is a very sure path to greater goods; far from exempting us from conversion, it prepares it; far from forgetting the liturgy and the sacraments, it leads to them and prolongs them. The poor usage that might be made of the Rosary does not prove anything against its worth any more than too often poor religious art proves something against the splendor of Christ and the Virgin.
It is especially when the fervor of the Christian people wanes, when scandal and sin abound, or when Christian civilization is on the brink of ruin; it is especially in these hours of extreme peril either for the Church or Christian nations that the popes adjure us to have recourse to the Rosary. Let us recall, for example, St. Pius V at the time of the Turkish invasion; of Pius XI during the Spanish revolution and on the eve of the Second World War; and finally of Pius XII while a third of the Church had become the Church of Silence. This confidence placed by the popes and Holy Mother Church in the Rosary for the Church’s triumph over the forces of hell in the hours of their most furious attacks can be explained naturally because the Rosary, being a holy meditation, sets us on the path of conversion; being a supplication through the intermediary of the Immaculate, it is a pure petition; finally, if it implores salvation and the renewal of a Christian social order, it implores it in the sense that God wants, since it is addressed to the Virgin of the Annunciation and of Calvary, who knows perfectly the worth and importance of the temporal order.
Three Classes of Christians
“Perpetual peace and especially perfect justice are not for here below; persecution will resume at the end of time, and even on the eve of the Second Coming the forces of Satan will be stronger than ever. Let’s confine ourselves to prayer and leave to their fate the deceitful things of civilization and Caesar.” Thus speak the Christians who take refuge in supernaturalism. They are wrong, of course. Even if they are dedicated to contemplation and devote their time to prayer, their prayer should not be indifferent to the justice or injustice of the things of Caesar; rather, it should imitate the great liturgical prayer that admirably translates the contemplation of the Spouse of Jesus Christ and never ceases to implore justice and peace in the kingdoms of this world. But if the Christians stricken with supernaturalism do not live in the cloister, if they are more or less involved in the things of Caesar, then their attitude of ostensible detachment becomes a kind of hypocrisy because they benefit from the temporal while they make a profession of taking no further interest in it.
“Let us organize the planet in a radically new way. Let us change not only the basic institutions of natural law, but even human nature itself, to see if we can establish perfect happiness and faultless justice here below.” Thus speak the fanatical prophets who reject God and let themselves be possessed by the devils of earthly messianism. By virtue of this proclamation, they apply themselves to “creative destruction,” and when they have yielded to the seduction of dialectical materialism, they make the corruption of consciences, the perversion of minds, and the overthrow of institutions go hand in hand.
True Christians, however, recognize the imperfection and frailty of the social order, even when it has been baptized; they also do not doubt that a just social order and a peace worthy of the name are God’s will. Above all, they know that man is made for God, and that peace and holiness are to be found in God alone in the bosom of Christ’s Church. They try to abide in God. Because of this indwelling in Him who desires justice they find the courage not to be resigned to injustice. Whether in their mental prayer, if they dwell in a monastery, or in their mental prayer and action if they are engaged in active life, they work for justice and for the establishment and renewal of a Christian social order without illusion as without discouragement for the simple reason that God wills it. This attitude, the only balanced one, presupposes that the soul is fixed in God, or at least that it sincerely aspires to this union of love that constitutes true conversion.
This is the attitude that the apparition of the Blessed Virgin at Fatima and consecration to her Immaculate Heart ought to inspire in us. Her Immaculate Heart, in effect, desires to obtain for us both a Christian peace and the conversion of our lives; but, she warns us, a Christian peace will not be granted unless we are resolved to amend our lives.
Fr. Roger-Thomas Calmel, O.P. (1914-75), was a prominent French Dominican and Thomist philosopher, who made an immense contribution to the fight for Catholic Tradition through his writings and conferences, notably as a regular contributor for 17 years to Jean Madiran’s Itinéraires. His most enduring influence is through the traditional Dominican Teaching Sisters of Fanjeaux and Brignole in France who operate 12 girls’ schools in France and the US.
1 Chanoine C. Barthas and Fr. G. Da Fonseca, S.J., Our Lady of Light (Dublin: Clonmore & Reynolds, Ltd., 1947), p. 28.
2 For what concerns the relation of Mary’s regency with civilization, cf. the articles of Fr. M.-J. Nicolas, O.P., on the Virgin Queen, Revue Thomiste, 1939, pp. 1-29, 207-231.
3 See Fr. M.-E. Boismard, O.P., Apocalypse (Paris: Cerf, 1953); see also Fr. Ernest-Bernard Allo, O.P., St. John: Apocalypse (Paris: Gabalda, 1921).
4 On the theme of the philosophy of technology, see the Christmas Message of Pius XII, “On Modern Technology and Peace” published by the National Catholic Welfare Conference (Washington, D.C., 1953).
[Emphasis - The Catacombs]
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| January 5th - St. Simeon Stylites |
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Posted by: Elizabeth - 12-07-2020, 11:39 PM - Forum: January
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Saint Simeon Stylites
(† 459)
One winter's day, about the year 401, the snow lay thick around Sisan, a little town in Cilicia. A shepherd boy, who could not lead his sheep to the fields on account of the cold, went to the church instead and listened to the eight Beatitudes, which were read that morning. He asked how these blessings were to be obtained, and then, when he was told of the monastic life, a thirst for perfection arose within him. He became the wonder of the world, the great Saint Simeon Stylites, given by God in spectacle to Angels and men.
He was warned that perfection would cost him dear, that it could not be attained without first conquering self. A mere child, he began the monastic life by learning the Psalter by heart, and thereafter passed a dozen years in superhuman austerity. He bound a rope round his waist until the flesh festered. He took food only once in seven days, and, when God led him to a solitary life, kept fasts of forty days. He desired solitude and spent three years as a hermit in a cabin at the base of a mountain. When he became a curiosity for many persons because of his extreme mortifications, he spent thirty-seven years on the top of a very high pillar in Syria, not far from Antioch, exposed to heat and cold, standing in prayer, never seen to lie down, nourished each week by the Holy Eucharist, day and night adoring the majesty of God.
Perfection was all in all to Saint Simeon; the means were nothing, except in so far as God chose them for him. Certain solitaries of the region, hearing of him, were suspicious of a life so new and so strange, and sent some of their number to test him, reproving him for departing from the tested ways of the Fathers and choosing a path so original. They bade Saint Simeon come down from his pillar and return to the common life he had left. In a moment the Saint made ready to descend, but the emissaries were satisfied with this proof of humility; they had been told to revoke the order if he was disposed to obey. Stay, they said, and take courage; your way of life is from God.
Cheerfulness, humility, and obedience thus set their seal upon the inspired austerities of Saint Simeon. He obtained miracles for those who appealed to his prayers, and by his tears and supplications to God averted catastrophes he foresaw in vision. The words which God put into his mouth brought crowds of pagans to Baptism and sinners to penance. At last, in the year 460, those who watched from below noticed that he had been motionless for three whole days. They ascended, and found the old man's body still bent in the attitude of prayer; but his soul was with God.
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| January 4th - St. Angela Foligno and St. Gregory, Bishop of Langres |
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Posted by: Elizabeth - 12-07-2020, 11:35 PM - Forum: January
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Saint Angela of Foligno
Widow
(1249-1309)
Saint Angela was born in Foligno, Italy, and lived most of her life in the small Umbrian town of her birth. There was nothing remarkable about Angela's early years, and there was nothing scandalous about her life. Yet she tells us in her later writings that for over thirty years she led a mortally sinful life. Perhaps she was referring to the pride and comfort of a wealthy and fashionable existence, for she came from a family of great property, married well, and afterwards ruled a large household of children and servants. As she describes her conversion, it reads like the story of many a soul today. Fear of her damnation led her to the confessional one day. But she was afraid to tell her most serious sins, and so made a bad confession, then a sacrilegious Communion. Only greater remorse followed. Tormented in soul, she prayed to Saint Francis of Assisi, and he appeared to her in a vision. The next day she made a complete and sincere confession.
From this point on, her life was completely changed. The thought of her sins gave her a desire for penance, suffering, and reparation. In Foligno and its neighboring town, Assisi, the memory of Saint Francis, who had died in 1226, was still fresh. It is not surprising, then, that Angela was inspired by Franciscan ideals from the time of her conversion until her death in 1309. When one by one her mother, her husband and all her children had died, she became a Franciscan tertiary and later lived as a mendicant, a poor beggar, completely dependent upon the charity of others.
She was a soul whom God chose to fulfill the role of a mystic. Her confessor recorded from her own lips the visions and ecstasies that were granted to her with startling frequency. For Angela the whole world was filled with God, and she was in almost constant communion with Him. Yet we would misunderstand the interior life of this mystic, or any other, for that matter, if we imagine that her life was without pain, without constant suffering. Angela herself tells us that at times she was overcome with grief because she could see nothing but the extraordinary goodness of God and, in contrast, the vanity of earthly things and the ingratitude of creatures. The sight of a crucifix produced in Saint Angela torrents of tears. The intimacy she enjoyed with God was a grace which at one period of her life was entirely withheld from her, that she might like Job, become a model of constancy amid great and prolonged torments.
Of the thousands of tourists who annually visit Assisi and pray at the tombs of Saint Francis and Saint Clare, few travel the short distance to Foligno, where Angela is buried in the Franciscan church. But she, like the Saints of Assisi, has many a lesson for our day. No sinner who would have recourse to her would ever despair.
Saint Gregory
Bishop of Langres
(† 539)
Saint Gregory was the Count of Autun, a Christian administrator whose government was respected and blessed by the citizens of that city. After governing for about forty years, he lost his worthy wife in death, and then, resigning his office, he entered into the clergy. It was not long before he was consecrated, in view of his singular virtues, Bishop of Langres. Saint Gregory of Tours wrote of him that he lived like an anchorite in the midst of the world. During his administration, two monasteries which would later acquire fame were founded in his diocese, that of Saint John de Reome, and an offshoot founded by Saint Seine.
Saint Gregory presided in the see of Langres with admirable prudence and zeal for another thirty-three years, sanctifying his pastoral labors by the most profound humility, assiduous prayer, and extraordinary abstinence and mortification. An incredible number of infidels were converted by him from idolatry, and worldly Christians from their disorders. He died at the beginning of the year 539, a few days after the Epiphany. Out of devotion to Saint Benignus, he desired to be buried near that Saint's tomb at Dijon; that wish was fulfilled by the care of his virtuous son Tetricus, who succeeded him in his see.
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| December 8th - The Immaculate Conception |
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Posted by: Elizabeth - 12-07-2020, 11:32 PM - Forum: December
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The Immaculate Conception
(Declared a dogma December 8, 1854 by Pius IX)
On this day, so dear to every Catholic heart, we celebrate first of all the moment when Almighty God, in a vision telescoping the ages, showed Mary both to our first parents and to the demon, as the Virgin Mother of the future divine Redeemer, the Woman destined to crush the proud head of the serpent. This episode is narrated in the first book of Scripture, Genesis chapter 3. We find Her again in the last canonical prophecy of the Bible, the Apocalypse or Revelation of Saint John the Apostle, as the Woman clothed with the sun, having on Her head a crown of twelve stars. In this beautiful vision She is also identified with the persecuted Apostolic Church, obliged to flee into the desert, and as the Mother of a great Head of that Church, destined to govern the flock of the latter times in the final combat, who like that flock is Her own Child. (chapter 12) Mary, like Her Son, is at the beginning and the end of all God's intentions, an integral part of His designs for the Redemption of the human race.
Since by eternal decree She was exempted from all stain of original sin from the first moment of Her Creation, and was endowed with the richest treasures of grace and sanctity, it is fitting that we honor Her glorious prerogatives by this special feast of the Immaculate Conception. We should join in spirit with the Blessed in heaven and rejoice with our dear Mother, not only for Her own sake, but for ours, Her children, for we are partakers of Her glory and happiness. The treasures of the mother are the heritage of the children, said Saint Thérèse of the Child Jesus.
We celebrate at the same time the ever-memorable day, the 8th of December of 1854, which raised the Immaculate Conception of Our Blessed Lady from a pious belief to the dignity of a dogma of the infallible Church, causing a great and universal joy among the faithful. The Holy See had already permitted the feast day from the time of Sixtus IV, by his papal bull Cum Praecelsa (1477), formally allowing its celebration for all dioceses desiring it. In 1854, the ancient faith of the people in their Mother exulted.
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| Dom Guéranger: Second Week of Advent |
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Posted by: Stone - 12-07-2020, 04:21 PM - Forum: Advent
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Second Week of Advent
MONDAY OF THE SECOND WEEK OF ADVENT
Regem venturum Dominum, venite, adoremus. Come, let us adore the King our Lord, who is to come.
Quote:De Isaia Propheta.
Cap. xiii.
Onus Babylonis, quod vidit Isaias, filius Amos. Super montem caliginosum levate signum : exaltate vocem, levate manum, et ingrediantur portas duces. Ego mandavi sanctificatis meis, et vocavi fortes meos in ira mea, exsultantes in gloria mea. Vox multitudinis in montibus, quasi populorum frequentium; vox sonitus regum, gentium congregatarum. Dominus exercituum praecepit militiae belli, venientibus de terra procul, a summitate caeli; Dominus, et vasa furoris ejus, ut disperdat omnem terram.
Ululate, quia prope est dies Domini; quasi vastitas a Domino veniet. Propter hoc omnes manus dissolventur, et omne cor hominis contabescet, et conteretur. Torsiones et dolores tenebunt; quasi parturiens dolebunt : unusquisque ad proximum suum stupebit, facies combustae vultus eorum. Ecce dies Domini veniet, crudelis, et indignationis plenus, et irae, furorisque, ad ponendam terram in solitudinem, et peccatores ejus conterendos de ea. Quoniam stellae caeli, et splendor earum, non expandent lumen suum; obtenebratus est sol in ortu suo, et luna non splendebit in lumine suo.
Et visitabo super orbis mala, et contra impios iniquitatem eorum; et quiscere faciam superbiam infidelium, et arrogantiam fortium humiliabo.
From the Prophet Isaias.
Ch. xiii.
The burden of Babylon, which Isaias the son of Amos saw. Upon the dark mountain lift ye up a banner, exalt the voice, lift up the hand, and let the rulers go into the gates. I have commanded my sanctified ones, and have called my strong ones in my wrath, them that rejoice in my glory. The noise of a multitude in the mountains, as it were of many people, the noise of the sound of kings, of nations gathered together: the Lord of hosts hath given charge to the troops of war. To them that come from a country afar off, from the end of heaven: the Lord and the instruments of his wrath, to destroy the whole land.
Howl ye, for the day of the Lord is near: it shall come as a destruction from the Lord. Therefore shall all hands be faint, and every heart of man shall melt, And shall be broken. Gripings and pains shall take hold of them, they shall be in pain as a woman in labour. Every one shall be amazed at his neighbour, their countenances shall be as faces burnt. Behold, the day of the Lord shall come, a cruel day, and full of indignation, and of wrath, and fury, to lay the land desolate, and to destroy the sinners thereof out of it. For the stars of heaven, and their brightness shall not display their light: the sun shall be darkened in his rising, and the moon shall not shine with her light.
And I will visit the evils of the world, and against the wicked for their iniquity: and I will make the pride of infidels to cease, and will bring down the arrogancy of the mighty.
The Church puts before us to-day, the terrible spectacle of the last coming of Jesus Christ. The sinful Babylon, of which Isaias speaks, is the world grown old in its crimes; the cruel day, full of indignation and wrath,is that on which the Messias will return to judge the world, with His sign glittering in the clouds. The words used by the prophet to describe the terror of the inhabitants of Babylon are so expressive, that it is difficult to meditate upon them seriously and not tremble. You, then, who, in this second week of preparation for the birth of our Saviour, are still wavering and undecided as to what you intend to do for the day of His coming, reflect upon the connection that there is between the two comings. If you receive your Saviour in the first, you need be in no fear for the second; but if you despise the first, the second will be to your destruction, nor will the cries of your despair save you. The Judge will come on a sudden, at midnight, at the very time when you persuade yourself that He is far from you.
Say not that the end of the world is not yet come, and that the destinies of the human race are not filled up: it is not the world that is here in question, it is you individually. True the day of the Lord will be terrible, when this world shall be broken up as a vessel of clay, and the remnants of creation shall be a prey to devouring flames; but long before that day of universal terror, your own day of judgment will come. The inexorable Judge will come to you, you will stand before His face, you will have none to defend you, and the sentence He will pass will be eternal; and though the nature of that sentence, whether for or against you, will not be known to the rest of the world until the last and general judgment, still is this His coming to you, at your own judgment, terrible above measure. Remember, therefore, that what will make the terrorof the last day so great is, that then will be solemnly and publicly confirmed what was judged irrevocably, though secretly, between your own soul and her judge; just as the favourable sentence, which the good receive at the happy moment of their death, will be repeated before the immense assembly of men and angels on the last day. Is it wise, then, Christians, to put off your conversion, on the plea of the day of the Lord not having to come for ages, when it might be this night that your soul were required of you? (Luke xii,20) The Lord is coming: lose no time; prepare to meet Him; a humble and contrite and converted heart is sure to find acceptance.
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CANTICLE OF THE LAST JUDGMENT
(It is an interpolation of appropriate sentences into the Responsory Libera: it was occasionally so sung in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries)
R. Deliver me, O Lord, from eternal death, on that dread day;
* When heaven and earth are to be moved;
* When thou shalt come to judge the world by fire.
V. The Angels and Archangels shall fear; but the impious, where shall they be?
* When heaven and earth are to be moved.
V. What, therefore, shall I wretched sinner say? or what shall I do? who can take no good before so great a Judge,
* When thou shalt come to judge the world by fire.
V. The just shall scarce be saved: and I a sinner, where shall I appear?
* When heaven and earth are to be moved.
V. O Light eternal, deliver me from darkness, lest I fall into the dismal fire of torment;
* When thou shalt come to judge the world by fire.
V. All the tribes of the earth shall mourn;
* When heaven and earth are to be moved.
V. And then a voice from heaven: Arise ye dead that sleep in your graves, and come to the judgment of Jesus;
* When thou shalt come to judge the world by fire.
V. Praise the Lord, O my soul! I will praise the Lord, while I live; and in the flesh, I shall see God;
* When thou shalt come to judge the world by fire.
V. When God the Son of the Virgin, shall come to judge the world, he will say to the just on his right hand: Come my beloved children, I have prepared a kingdom to be given unto you. O happy word! happy promise! Happy Giver! and happy gift!
* When heaven and earth are to be moved.
V. After this, he will say to them that are on his left: I know you not, ye workers of iniquity: the glory of the world deceived you; go to that deep abyss with the devil and his ministers. O what grief! what sadness! what wailing! what weeping!
* When thou shalt come to judge the world by fire.
V. Even now the King is preparing for his judgment; the day, the terrible beyond all thought, is at hand, and who will be our refuge? The Virgin Mother, the hope of all. May she pray to her Son for us! O Jesus, our King, hear, we beseech thee, our prayers, and we shall be saved;
* When heaven and earth are to be moved.
V. O God, the Creator of all things, who hast formed me from the slime of the earth, and hast wonderfully redeemed me by thine own Blood, and on the day of judgment wilt make this my now corruptible body to rise again from the grave; hear, oh hear me, and mercifully lead my soul into the bosum of they patriarch Abraham;
* When thou shalt come to judge the world by fire.
PRAYER FROM THE AMBROSIAN LITURGY
(In the third week of Advent)
O Jesus, almighty Son of God, mercifully come and save thy people on the day of thy Nativity; and deign, with thy wonted compassion, to deliver us from all the anxieties and fears of this present time. Who livest and reignest for ever and ever. Amen
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| China Using ‘Gene Editing’ to Boost Military |
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Posted by: Stone - 12-07-2020, 01:00 PM - Forum: Socialism & Communism
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Who knew such pernicious manipulation of human beings was being perpetuated!?
DNI John Ratcliffe: China Using ‘Gene Editing’ to Boost Military
Breitbart | 6 Dec 2020
Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe on Sunday warned China was using “gene editing” in an effort to boost its military.
Ratcliffe told Fox News Channel’s “Sunday Morning Futures” that if the Asian superpower becomes the dominant force in the world, which it is attempting to do with its genetic testing, then “individual liberties, freedoms” and “free enterprise are all stake.”
“It’s altering DNA, and it’s one of the things our intelligence shows that China is doing. … The People’s Republic of China has 2 million strong in its military, and it’s trying to make them stronger through, you know, gene editing,” Ratcliffe advised. “That’s just one of the ways that, you know, China is trying to essentially dominate the planet and set the rules in the world order. And why it’s so important and people need to understand is this is an authoritarian regime. It doesn’t care about people’s individual rights. We’ve seen what they’ve done to the Uighurs; we’ve seen what they’ve done in Hong Kong. It’s about putting the state first, and that is the exact opposite of what has always made America great. Individual liberties, freedoms, free enterprise those things are all at stake if China dominates.”
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| [Tradtional] Laws of Fast and Abstinence |
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Posted by: Stone - 12-07-2020, 12:52 PM - Forum: Church Doctrine & Teaching
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Church Laws of Fast and Abstinence
ABSTINENCE
1. Everyone over seven years of age is bound to observe the law of abstinence.
2. Complete abstinence is to be observed on Fridays, Ash Wednesday, Holy Saturday, and the Vigils of the Immaculate Conception and Christmas. On days of complete abstinence, meat and soup or gravy made from meat
may not be used at all.
3. Partial abstinence is to be observed on Ember Wednesdays and Saturdays and on the Vigil of Pentecost. On days of partial abstinence, meat and soup or gravy made from meat may be taken only once a day at the principal meal.
FAST
1. Everyone over 21 and under 59 years of age is also bound to observe the law of fast.
2. The days of fast are the weekdays of Lent, including Holy Saturday, the Ember Days and Vigils of Pentecost, the Immaculate Conception and Christmas.
3. On days of fast, only one full meal is allowed. Two other meatless meals, sufficient to maintain strength, may be taken according to one's needs; but together they should not equal another full meal.
4. Meat may be taken at the principal meal on a day of fast except on Fridays, Ash Wednesday, Holy Saturday, and the Vigils of the Immaculate Conception and Christmas.
5. Eating between meals is not permitted, but liquids, including milk and fruit juces, are allowed.
6. Where health or ability to work would be seriously affected, the law does not oblige. In doubt concerning fast or abstinence, a parish priest or confessor should be consulted.
* There is no obligation for fast or abstinence on a holy day of obligation, even if it falls on a Friday.
The New Eucharistic Fast Laws
(Motu Proprio of Pope Pius XII of March 19, 1957)
1. Priests and faithful before Mass or Holy Communion respectively - whether it is the morning, afternoon, or evening or Midnight Mass - must abstain for three hours from solid foods and alcoholic beverages, and for one hour from non-alcoholic beverages. Water does not break the fast.
2. The infirm, even if not bedridden, may take non-alcoholic beverages and that which is really and properly medicine, either in liquid or solid form, before Mass or Holy Communion without any time limit.
His Holiness, Pope Pius XII, earnestly exhorts priests and faithful who are able to do so to observe the old and venerable form of the Eucharistic Fast (from foods and liquids from midnight) before Holy Communion. All those who will make use of these concessions must compensate for the good received by becoming shining examples of a Christian life and principally with works of penance and charity.
Source
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| Tota Pulchera Es |
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Posted by: Stone - 12-07-2020, 12:28 PM - Forum: Marian Hymns
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Tota pulchra es is an old Catholic prayer, written in the fourth century. It is one of the five antiphons for the psalms of Second Vespers for the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. The title means "You are completely beautiful" (referring to the Virgin Mary). It speaks of her immaculate conception. It takes some text from the book of Judith, and other text from Song of Songs, specifically 4:7.
Tota pulchra es
Tota pulchra es, Maria.
Et macula originalis non est in Te.
Tu gloria Ierusalem.
Tu laetitia Israel.
Tu honorificentia populi nostri.
Tu advocata peccatorum.
O Maria, O Maria.
Virgo prudentissima.
Mater clementissima.
Ora pro nobis.
Intercede pro nobis.
Ad Dominum Iesum Christum.
You are all beautiful, Mary,
and the original stain [spot] (of sin) is not in you.
You are the glory of Jerusalem,
you are the joy of Israel,
you give honour to our people.
You are an advocate of sinners.
O Mary,
Virgin most intelligent,
Mother most merciful.
Pray for us,
Plead for us,
To the Lord Jesus Christ.
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| New Technology Will Dangerously Expand Government Spying On Citizens |
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Posted by: Stone - 12-07-2020, 10:14 AM - Forum: Socialism & Communism
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This New Technology Will Dangerously Expand Government Spying On Citizens
Zero Hedge | 12/05/2020
Authored by Jack Rasmus via Counterpunch.org,
If you’re worried about the capability of government to conduct surveillance of citizens engaged in political assembly and protest, or even just personal activity, then you should be aware the technological capability of government surveillance is about to expand exponentially.
The US Air Force’s Research Lab (yes, it has its own lab) has recently signed a contract to test new software of a company called SignalFrame, a Washington DC wireless tech company. The company’s new software is able to access smartphones, and from your phone jump off to access any other wireless or bluetooth device in the near vicinity. To quote from the article today in the Wall St. Journal, the smartphone is used “as a window onto usage of hundreds of millions of computers,s routers, fitness trackers, modern automobiles and other networked devices, known collectively as the ‘Internet of Things’.”
Your smartphone in effect becomes a government listening device that detects and accesses all nearby wireless or bluetooth devices, or anything that has a MAC address for that matter. How ‘near’ is nearby is not revealed by the company, or the Air Force, both of which refused to comment on the Wall St. Journal story. But with the expansion of 5G wireless, it should be assumed it’s more than just a couple steps from your smartphone.
One can imagine some scary scenarios with this capability in the hands of government snoops:- Not only would the government know your geographical location via the GPS signal to your cellphone. They’d know what you are doing. And with whom.
- A political gathering would allow them to see all the owners of other cellphones in the vicinity of a protest or demonstration. How many are gathering at a particular street or location. The direction they might be heading. Or whether there’s an organization meeting in a hall or room and who (with a cellphone as well) might be attending.
- If you’re driving on a winding coastal or mountain road, it would know, and could possibly access, your car’s various electronic systems to turn them off. It might access your car’s circuit board that governs your power steering when you’re driving in an area of winding roads. Or it might be able to just shut down your car’s electrical system and remotely lock all your doors. The police no longer have to engage in highway chases until capture.
- The new tech would allow the government to access the data on your fitbit device while you’re jogging. Or worse, maybe even interfere with the signal on your heart pacemaker device.
- The technology might be used to access your smartphone, and from there to turn on your home Alexa device to listen in and record conversations without you ever knowing. Or to listen in on your zoom conferencing on your laptop. Or maybe even worse, to shut down or bypass the safety features on your home furnace equipment. Or turn off your home security system.
- And with 5G wireless broadband, the tracking might be extended well beyond the range of a bluetooth device. Add 5G broadband wireless to SignalFrame’s technology, and then wed that to the capability of machine learning and artificial intelligence, and you get instant processing of a massive amount of data on any targeted person or gathering!
This problem of government surveillance on free citizen activity is not new. It took a giant leap after 9-11 with the Patriot Act and acquisition of phone data by Homeland Security and other government agencies. It was supposed to have stopped. But it hasn’t. The snoops have continued to ignore Congressional resolutions and court decisions on privacy invasion of citizens. The latest Air Force lab testing is likely just a recent ‘tip of the iceberg’ revelation. And if the Air Force is doing it, be assured so are the Army, Navy, the NSA, CIA, FBI and all the other government snoops.
Certainly this kind of technology would be used not only by the US government. If the USA has it, you can bet other governments do too–especially China, Russia, Israel, and probably some of the Europeans as well.
Unlike in 2001, in 2020 SignalFrame’s technology takes government surveillance to a new level–given the ubiquity of smartphones, Internet of Things (IOT) devices, digital circuit board dependent autos, and all the many household devices now with MAC wireless access addresses. And now, unlike circa 2001 and the passage of the Patriot Act (and its continuation in annual NDAA legislation), we have AI, machine learning, neural nets everywhere, and massive government data processing power.
In short, Technology is becoming a growing tool and power in the hands of governments, to use to thwart democratic and constitutional rights–as well as to detect, apprehend, and ‘deal with’ those who protest and oppose those governments.
The coming decade in the USA will be not only increasingly difficult economically, increasingly unstable politically, but will prove to be a period in which technology is increasingly threatening basic civil rights as well as the very foundations of Democracy itself.
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| The Great Reset and Klaus Schwab |
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Posted by: Stone - 12-07-2020, 10:07 AM - Forum: Great Reset
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The Great Reset and Klaus Schwab
American Thinker | December 5, 2020
Klaus Schwab, the chief proponent of a global project called the “Great Reset,” may be the most influential “intellectual” in the world today. A former member of the UN Advisory Board on Sustainable Development, he is the founder of the World Economic Forum (WEF) that meets annually in the Swiss resort town of Davos. Business Insider explains, “Each year, business leaders and heads of state give lectures and speak on panels about topics ranging from gender equality and venture capital to mental health and climate change.” And as the WEF website states, “The non-profit organization's aim is to engage the foremost political, business, cultural and other leaders of society to shape global, regional and industry agendas.”
The “Great Reset,” a term coined in a 2011 book by economist Richard Florida and wholeheartedly adopted by Schwab in the context of the United Nation’s Agenda 2030 for sustainable development, proposes to determine “the future state of global relations, the direction of national economies, the priorities of societies, the nature of business models and the management of the global commons.” It presents itself as a humane and compassionate means to inaugurate a beneficial root-and-branch transformation of the social, economic and political structure of the world’s “operating systems”: capitalism, the free market and democracy.
Practical capitalism is to be supplanted by what Schwab calls “stakeholder capitalism” in which the private sector is tightly controlled by government (otherwise known as “fascism”). The free market is considered unfair and skewed to the advantage of a piratical business class exploiting the world’s poor and hungry. Democracy is regarded as an inefficient political arrangement relying on the incapacity of the demos to understand its own best interests or to command the intricacy of integrated governing structures and processes.
Instead, the Great Reset will remake the world -- in Schwab’s words, “to create a more inclusive, resilient and sustainable world going forward,” all the platitudes neatly packed into one sentence. Private property deforms the natural relations between human beings and must be abolished. Private transportation will not be allowed. “Contrary content” in the printing or production of materials will not be permitted, at the cost of access to social media and Internet domains. Fossil fuels will be replaced wholesale by Green technologies. Home gardens will be outlawed. The Christian faith will be gradually suppressed (as is happening today). Vaccines will become mandatory.
Society will become “cashless” and all standard monetary transactions replaced by digital currency and governed by electronic means, which can be cancelled by reigning authority at the slightest provocation. Debts will be forgiven and creditors will face the prospect of bankruptcy. The middle class and small entrepreneurs will be wiped out. Commerce will become progressively “contact-less.”
The United States must be neutralized via social isolation, lockdown-induced poverty, and facemask conformity and passivity. Constant surveillance will be employed to ensure compliance. The human being will be “enhanced” through biosecurity, synthetic biology, implantable microchips, cortical modems, nanobots, genetic editing and designer babies. Everyone will be equal, everyone will be secure from the ravages of competition, risk and chance, and everyone will be happy -- as they are today in the political template for the Great Reset, Communist China and its fascist business model.
So here we are. Schwab is a canny manipulator and knows how to turn a perceived catastrophe to his advantage, in his own words “to break glass in case of an emergency.” He has understood that the most effective enabler of the Great Reset has been the pandemic panic unleashed by COVID-19, which has taken the planet by storm, reduced entire populations to abject terror, led to massive lockdowns and personality disfigurement brought about by mandatory masks, and promoted the reign of political despots, ignorant leaders, hired-gun health officials and left-wing organizations like the W.H.O., The Lancet, and innumerable others. As Prince Philip, a WEF member, mused, “We have a golden opportunity to seize something good from the crisis,” which may “make people more receptive to big visions of change” and reset the global economy toward “sustainability” -- the buzzword du jour.
Indeed, COVID is a more powerful persuader even than “climate change,” since virus panic works immediately but climate panic “can only follow with a time lag.” Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, a committed Marxist and an admirer of Schwab, is also on board. Addressing the United Nations, Trudeau asserted that “This pandemic has provided an opportunity for a reset. This is our chance to accelerate our pre-pandemic efforts to re-imagine economic systems that actually address global challenges like extreme poverty, inequality and climate change.”
As Rex Murphy writes in the National Post, “the word that should trouble us most in all of this is ‘imagine’…. Is it really a good idea to place economies under the servitude of amateur imaginations? You cannot dream an economy (although it is very possible… to kill the one we already have).” Trudeau, with no genuine university education to speak of and the beneficiary of a large family trust fund, is adept at bafflegab and empty abstractions. His mullings originate in The Communist Manifesto and John Lennon’s treacly “Imagine.”
Even the Pope is a passionate believer in the Great Reset, though knowing Francis’s affiliation with Liberation Theology, this comes as no surprise. As the Pope said in a recent interview, “We need change. The pandemic brought our organizational and developmental models into a crisis; it exposed many injustices, the troubling silence and social and health failures, subjecting a great number of our brothers to the processes of social exclusion and degradation.” Typical fare. One recalls the Pope’s 2014 message to Schwab urging “an openness to the transcendent” from which “a new political and business mentality can take shape, one capable of guiding all economic and financial activity within the horizon of an ethical approach which is truly humane… I ask you to ensure that humanity is served by wealth and not ruled by it.”
Of course, attendees of the Davos conference number among the wealthiest people on the planet, including Bill Gates, George Soros, Prince William, Jamie Dimon (JP Morgan Chase CEO), Jack Ma and many others, who fly in by private jet and have no problem with membership fees ranging up to $620,000 per year and chalets that go for up to $140,000 per week. These great benefactors of suffering humanity received the Pope’s “divine blessings on you and the participants of the Forum, as well as on your families and all your work.” That’s a pretty good gig, if you can get it.
The topic for the 2021 Davos conference, which has been postponed from January to the summer, is, naturally, the “Great Reset” and the expedient arrival of the pandemic. So COVID it is.
In his July 2020 book COVID-19: The Great Reset, co-authored with Thierry Malleret, Schwab regards the virus as a providential pretext to remake the world and unleash a “fourth industrial revolution” that, as we have observed, will eliminate private property, restrict travel and establish a surveillance state in which everyone is chipped and monitored. The authors admit that COVID-19 is not “an existential threat” and that it is “one of the least deadly pandemics the world has experienced in the last 2000 years,” but surreptitiously convert it into a pretext for unprecedented social and economic change. The lockdowns are a way of softening up the population to accept a global techno-fascist revolution presided over by a club of billionaires, their political adjutants and chosen “experts,” and UN mandarins. Schwab’s books make this clear.
Accordingly, Schwab takes to task “some rich countries endowed with sophisticated health systems and strong assets in research” that will be perceived to have failed their citizens. He targets their “social fabric and socio-economic system” as the “real” culprit guilty of “failing to guarantee economic and social welfare for the majority of citizens.” This is true, but not in the way Schwab intends, for it is precisely the draconian measures these countries have imposed that have ruined their economies, helped to unravel the social fabric, and caused needless suffering and unnecessary deaths.
Klaus Schwab is a dangerous man. One must admit he deploys the technocratic jargon and terminology -- what I call the “germinology” -- to perfection, and can be quite convincing. But that does not make him right. It makes him sinister and portentous.
[...]
In any case, one must be prepared for what is impending. It’s not a joke and it’s not an unanchored fantasy. It is happening as we speak. The time has come to implement the Great Reject before we experience the Great Regret. It makes sense to consult the tainted oracle and I would suggest looking into one or two of his books, whether the aforementioned COVID-19: The Great Reset, the earlier The Fourth Industrial Revolution, or the most recent The Aftermath of the COVID-19 Pandemic. For all his rhetorical sleight of hand, polished demeanor and public acclaim, Klaus Schwab is nonetheless a wannabe nabob and a rather ridiculous little man, but as we know from history, preposterous people can sway multitudes and cause unprecedented havoc and suffering. They may be the object of justified ridicule, but they must also be taken seriously. Klaus Schwab is no exception.
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| Doctor Lost His Medical License after Publicly Speaking Out Against CV Oppression |
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Posted by: Stone - 12-07-2020, 08:49 AM - Forum: Pandemic 2020 [Secular]
- No Replies
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Doctor Has License Yanked After Saying This About the Coronavirus
Townhall.com | Dec 05, 2020
An Oregon doctor has reportedly lost his medical license after attending a "Stop the Steal" rally and delivering comments about the coronavirus and face masks.
In a video of Dr. Steven LaTulippe's remarks at the Nov. 7 "Stop the Steal Rally," the physician described himself as a retired Air Force officer, an ordained minister, and a practicing physician in The Dalles, Oregon area.
"I want you to know that I never shut down during the entire COVID season, from the time it was declared till now," LaTulippe told the crowd. "I hate to tell you this -- it might scare you -- but I and my staff, none of us once wore a mask in my clinic. And how many problems did we have in our clinic from that? Zero. Absolutely none."
The doctor called the lockdowns a threat to the American people, freedom, and the Constitution, and petitioned those in the crowd to remove their "mask of shame."
While the physician acknowledged the virus was real, LaTulippe said it is "a common cold virus that has been with us forever."
"Please don't be duped. You have an immune system," LaTulippe said.
LaTulippe also said he has treated 75 cases of the coronavirus and every one of his patients got better in a week.
"Don't let them put you in a state of fear," the doctor urged. "That is oppression."
For his heresy, the Oregon Medical Board issued an emergency suspension of LaTulippe's license, finding the doctor engaged in "unprofessional" and "dishonorable" conduct, NBC News reported.
The emergency suspension alleges LaTulippe told a patient in July that asymptomatic people should not be tested and that wearing a face mask does not prevent transmission of the virus. LaTulippe reportedly directed the patient not to self-isolate because, according to the doctor, exposing other people to the virus would help those people build immunities against the disease.
The medical board claims LaTulippe and his staff refused to wear masks and encouraged patients to remove theirs as well. The clinic also failed to implement screening procedures upon entry of the premises, according to medical board investigators.
The medical board deemed LaTulippe "an immediate danger to the public" and said the doctor "presents a serious danger to the public health and safety."
"I'm very interested in sound medical practice, and I'm interested in good science," LaTulippe told NBC News. "And when science and medicine become perverted with corrupt politics, then I'm up for a fight, and that's what made me go to that rally and say what I said."
LaTullipe can no longer practice medicine in the State of Oregon, where the physician has practiced for over 20 years.
A residency colleague of LaTulippe has set up a defense fund.
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| Archbishop Lefebvre: 1985 Sermons - 'Changes in the Sacraments' |
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Posted by: Stone - 12-07-2020, 08:12 AM - Forum: Sermons and Conferences
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The Angelus - May 1985
The Archbishop Speaks
Sermons of His Excellency Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre
During April 1985 at Chicago and Saint Louis
First Sermon - in Chicago
In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.
My dear children, my dear brethren,
It is a great pleasure for me to come here for this ceremony of the Sacrament of Confirmation—for the first time in Chicago! I passed through Chicago one time, but I never celebrated the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass for you. I congratulate the people who have prepared the Altar and this room—so nice, so beautiful—very important for this very important ceremony of the Sacrament of Confirmation and the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.
For you, my dear children, you shall receive the grace of the Sacrament of Confirmation. This is a very great day, very important, because you know the teaching of the Church, the doctrine of the Church: we receive only once the Sacrament of Confirmation. It is not the same as the Sacrament of Holy Eucharist or the Sacrament of Penance. We must receive many times the Sacrament of Penance and the Sacrament of the Holy Eucharist, but the Sacrament of Confirmation is the same as Baptism and Holy Orders for the priests. We shall receive it only once during our life because we receive in our soul a character. Our souls receive this sign of this grace and your angels see this sign of the Sacrament; also the holy souls who are in heaven know that we are baptized and they know that we received the Sacrament of Confirmation.
The grace of the Sacrament of Confirmation is very important—more than ever in these times of confusion in the Church, in this time of crisis of the Church. You know that now, in many dioceses, it is no longer the bishop who gives the Sacrament of Confirmation. He delegates many priests and he, himself, does not give the Sacrament of Confirmation. And they have the same thinking about this Sacrament as the Protestants: "It is not very necessary; it is just a remembrance of the Sacrament of Baptism." I know of a bishop who wrote, in a letter to his diocese, that the Sacrament of Confirmation does not give the Holy Ghost; it is only a remembrance of the Holy Ghost we received in Baptism, and so the Sacrament of Confirmation is no longer a true sacrament if we do not receive the Holy Ghost. And now these same bishops—and there are many bishops who think this way—now they try to have the Holy Ghost by charismatism, pentecostalism, WITHOUT the sacraments, directly from God. They no longer need the true sacraments and this is not the Will of God! Jesus Christ is God and Jesus Christ, Who is very God Himself, instituted these Seven Sacraments, not more—not eight, not six—but Seven Sacraments. He instituted this Sacrament of Confirmation and we know that if we receive this sacrament with good dispositions we receive the Holy Ghost.
You shall see in a few moments, when the Bishop begins the ceremony of the Sacrament of Confirmation, he stands and prays God that He gives you all the gifts of the Holy Ghost, and you answer "Amen! Amen! Amen!" And after this prayer you and your sponsor come forth, and when the Bishop puts his hand on your head and signs your forehead by the Sign of the Cross with the Holy Oil, with true Holy Oil! The Holy Oil I consecrated myself during Holy Week, as I have done all my life of bishop, and as all bishops have done this consecration before the Second Vatican Council. In our days, we do not know what this oil is—it is no longer Holy Oil—they use oil of nuts, I do not know, soya? That is not good and perhaps that is not valid because in all tradition of the Church during twenty centuries, the Popes and the Councils have said we must use olive oil, no other oil. So it is very important to have this thing because by this Sacrament we receive the Holy Ghost. So when the bishop puts his hand on your heard and signs your forehead with the Sign of the Cross with Holy Oil and says the words of the Sacrament of Confirmation, at this time you will receive the gifts of the Holy Ghost.
And you need these gifts of the Holy Ghost, very much! We need to fight—fight against the scandals of the world, fight against all bad spirits, all devils; they are now in the world and they try to put us in mortal sin. Mortal sin, that is the cancer of the world! Now so many things in the world are against the Commandments of God, against the Decalogue; so we must have these gifts of the Holy Ghost to fight against the Devil.
And you must also have the missionary spirit. The Holy Ghost whom you receive gives you this spirit of the missionary. Because you receive this grace and these gifts of the Holy Ghost, not for you only, but also for other people: You know that St. Therese of the Child Jesus was declared by Pius XII as protector and patron of all missions and St. Therese was a Carmelite, a Carmelite nun. She did not go out into the world, in the countries of mission. She remained in her convent and is now protector of all missions because she had this spirit of missionary, and she offered her life—ALL her life to save the souls, for the missionary priests. So she was a great missionary, and you can do the same! Offer your life and your difficulties and your pains to save souls.
After the ceremony you stand and say the Creed, the Our Father and the Hail Mary. These prayers you say before all people present, all people in heaven, to show that you are true Christians, true Catholics.
And so that is the ceremony of the Sacrament of Confirmation. I do not change anything. It is the same Sacrament, the same ceremony, when I received myself the Sacrament of Confirmation; it is the same ceremony that I do for you, it is the same! And your parents, your grandparents, received the same ceremony. I did not change anything. We keep the true tradition of the Catholic Church. When you return home, you can be sure that you received the Holy Ghost with all His gifts which you need to remain true Christians. That is very important.
My dear brethren, I want to say some words on this occasion because you know that we are in a sad situation in the Church after Vatican Council II and the "reforms" in the Church; the effects, the fruits of these reforms are very bad, very bad! Cardinal Ratzinger himself said recently, in an interview with the Italian review Jesu, he gave a description of the situation in the Church today as very tragic, tragic! I met with Cardinal Ratzinger last January, and I spoke with him about that. I said to him: "You made a description of the situation in the Church now that perhaps I do not do because it is so sad, so confused."
He said:"In Europe, in the Church in Europe, many priests and many bishops no longer believe in the Divinity of Jesus Christ!"
That is the basis of our Faith, and they do not believe in the Divinity of Jesus Christ!"In the States, in North America, they no longer have conscience of the Law, no more moral law, no more sin, everyone makes one's own morals, one's own law, and so morality is getting worse and worse. In South America, there is the theology of liberation!"
What is liberation theology? It is the destruction of society; no more authority. It is the spirit of revolution in society, against authority, all authority.
Quote:"In Africa, in India, in Japan, there are Catholics who want 'inculturation'; they want an African Church, an Indian Church, a Japanese Church—that is no longer the Catholic Church!"
That is what Cardinal Ratzinger himself said, he said it! And, so I said to him,
Quote:"What is the source of these bad fruits? For me, it is the Council of aggiornamento; that signifies the Council of the changes. What changes? Changes in the sacraments, changes in catechisms, changes in the Bible, so that we are no longer Catholics [but] are like Protestants. And that comes from the spirit of the Council!"
And he said,
Quote:"No! No, no, no, that does not come from the Council; it comes from bad interpretations of the Council; it comes from abuses of the reforms."
I said,"That is not true. That comes from the new orientation of the Church in the Council, especially by ecumenism."
Ecumenism and Religious Liberty are the same: "All religions are good now!" Before the Council the Popes said: "There is one, only one, true Religion, the Catholic Religion!" Why? Because God Himself instituted this religion! God is our Creator and our Creator said "That is your religion, the Religion of Jesus Christ, the Religion of the Catholic Church. Myself, I form the Catholic Church; Myself I form this Catholic Church; Myself I give you the sacraments; Myself I give you the Church, the Catholic Church: that is the religion for ALL men, all men!" And He is God. There are not two gods, three gods; there is only One God! And there is only one true religion! All Popes, during twenty centuries said that, and that is the motive of the missionary spirit of the Church. Many, many missionaries died, gave their blood, to affirm that only the Catholic Religion is the true religion! All martyrs, they gave their blood.
And so after the Council now, "all religions are good, all religions have the Truth. We look after the truth together. Where is the Catholic Church? It is the same as the Protestants, the same as Buddhists, the same as Moslems." That is impossible! That is ecumenism!
And so they reformed the Mass, [they made] the New Mass, the new sacraments, the new catechisms, the new Bible. All is changed by the spirit of ecumenism, to be closer to the Protestants. And the result is that many Catholics abandon their Faith and many become Protestants, or another religion, or they abandon all religion. We can see in your seminaries, in your convents, in your monasteries—where are the vocations? That is the destruction of the Church!
So we must keep our Catholic Faith. We must remain in the Tradition of the Catholic Church! Doing that, we follow all Popes before the Council until Pope Pius XII. He was a very holy Pope and he remained in the Catholic Faith.
It is very sad to see that Pope Paul VI and even Pope John Paul II are too ecumenical. The presence of our Pope, the Catholic Pope, in a Lutheran church in Rome was a scandal! The presence of the delegate of the Pope to [lay down] the first stone of a big mosque in Rome is a scandal! The Concordat with Italy, the new concordat with Italy by which Italy is no longer a Catholic State, is a lay State—no more religion in Italy, in Rome, the City of the Pope, the Catholic City, is no longer a holy City! And that is the reason for which the Moslems came and said, "Now we shall build a big, big mosque—perhaps larger than St. Peter's." In Rome! Do you think that we can do that in Mecca? Build a Catholic Church in Mecca, in the city of Moslems? And in our Catholic City, Rome, center for all Catholics of the world, now the Moslems build a huge mosque, larger than St. Peter's, and with the approval of the Pope! It is a scandal!
We love the Pope! We love the Pope! But it is like my father: he is always my father, but if my father does something against my Faith, then I refuse. I say, "No! That is impossible. I want to keep my Faith and to remain in my Catholic Faith. You are my father, I know, I love my father and respect my father, but if my father asks me to do something wrong, I refuse!" I want to remain a true Son of God, and they say: "You are a dissident bishop, you are a rebel bishop." I am not dissident, I am not a rebel, no more than a child who refuses to commit a mortal sin for his father, for example. The son is right; he does not commit a mortal sin even is his father says: "You must commit this mortal sin." This father remains the father of his son, and the son always respect his father, but he says: "I respect God more!" That is our situation: We are not rebels, we are not dissidents; we are true sons, true sons of the Pope. The true son says to his father that he is doing wrong. If he is doing well, no problem.
I congratulate you for maintaining your Catholic Faith—for you, for your family, for your children. This is very important for the future of the Church. You are true Catholics, true sons of the Church! I ask the Blessed Virgin Mary to bless you and to be for you an example, an example to maintain our Faith. The Blessed Virgin Mary was very strong. Do you think that the Blessed Virgin Mary could say that Jesus Christ was not God? Her Son? That is impossible! The Blessed Virgin Mary knows that she is the Mother of God. She is very humble, the Blessed Virgin Mary, but she knows that her Son is God, and that there is no other God, no other religion than the religion of her Son, Jesus Christ.
In her heart there is no other name than the Name of Jesus, in the heart of the Blessed Virgin Mary. I hope that in all our hearts there is not another name until our deaths so that we can remain in heaven with the True God—that we have in our hearts the Names of Jesus and Mary.
In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
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Second Sermon - Saint Louis, Missouri
Wednesday, 24 April 1985
In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
My dear brethren:
I am very pleased to be here in St. Louis. I came here and said Mass in this same place a few years ago. I know that after that time, you had some worries in this center. I will speak no more of these worries but, you know, all works of God have their trials and sacrifices and worries. Perhaps it is a sign that the work done by the priests here was a work of God. I am sure that the work Father Hogan is doing for you is a work of God, and the same for Father Laisney. They are true priests; you need these priests; you need true priests, holy priests!
You know that after the Second Vatican Council and the New Code of Canon Law, they do not give the same definition of the Church, the Catholic Church as before. Why? I do not know.
The Catholic Church had its definition for twenty centuries! Why did they change it? They changed it when they say that the Catholic Church is "the People of God," and in this "People of God" there are functions, some ministries for all "people," everyone has his ministry, everyone has his function in the "People of God." That is not true and this is not the true definition of the Catholic Church! The true definition of the Catholic Church is that in the Catholic Church there are two groups of persons: one is the clergy and the other group is the laymen—as in a family! In a family you have the parents and you have the children. God did this; that is the creation of God. It is the same for the Church: God created the Church, it is His Mystical Body; He created the Church. Jesus Christ decided that in the Church there are some persons elected by God, by the Church, to have the power to give the sacraments, to celebrate the Sacrifice of the Mass and to continue the Sacrifice of Calvary of Jesus Christ and to give the Holy Ghost to souls. That is the creation of Jesus Christ Himself! We cannot choose; it is not our creation!
We know, and you know, that now in the Church the priest becomes layman and the layman becomes priest. That is not the Catholic Church! There are some priests now who have no signs that they are priests, they are laymen and say themselves: "We are not different from laymen." This is not true! They have received the grace of the Sacrament of Holy Orders and the layman cannot say the words of the consecration. Words of consecration said by a layman have no effect: God is not come on the altar, in the Host, the Blood of Jesus Christ and the Body of Jesus Christ do not come if a layman says the words of consecration.
On the contrary, a priest, even if this priest is a bad priest, he is a priest, and when he says the words of the Consecration during the Mass, on the Host and on the wine in the chalice, at that moment Jesus Christ comes on the altar with His Body, with His Blood, with His Soul and with His Divinity. That is the teaching of the Church. We must keep this doctrine of the Church! You know this doctrine and you do not like to go to Masses where lay people give in their hands the Body and Blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ! It is not the function of a layman; it is the function of the priest. The bishop consecrates the hands of the priest so that he may touch, in his hands, the Body and the Soul of Jesus Christ and give Jesus Christ to the faithful. The function of the priest is very extraordinary! We, poor sinners, poor creatures, we have the power by the words of consecration to give an order to God that He must come on the altar, continue His work of Redemption, redemption of the souls, and give to the faithful Jesus Christ Himself—give God to the faithful!
That is the privilege of the priest—great privilege, extraordinary privilege!
And if we believe in this true doctrine of the Church we understand why the preparation of the priesthood must be a good one in seminaries where the young men study; where they pray and they receive the ordination in which they become priests, true priests. We do that in our seminaries; we continue this holy Tradition of the Church so when you receive our priests you can know that these priests are true Catholic priests as the Church made priests during twenty centuries.
And so I ask you to pray—to pray every day that we get good vocations—for good vocations for the priesthood, good vocations to the religious life for the brothers and sisters. You know that in some months the Carmelites will be coming—a convent of Carmelites will be coming from Belgium to Philadelphia, and in America you will have a true Carmel, a true Carmel convent! That is very important! The religious—the sisters—they pray, they offer all of their life for the sanctification of souls. It is a very great blessing of God to have a contemplative convent and you must be very happy that now a new convent, with the true spirit of the Carmel, shall be founded near Philadelphia in August.
And from where shall we get vocations? In the schools, in Catholic schools! Where do young men and young girls have the idea of a vocation? In good families and in good schools! If we have not good families, Christian families, Catholic families, and if we have not good Catholic schools, we do not get vocations. And we can see, now everywhere, there are no vocations. Why? Because there are no more true Catholic families. Many progressivist families have no children; they do not want children; they do not want the grace of marriage; many live without the grace of marriage: "free love"! It is impossible in such a society—progressivist society, modernist society—to have many vocations!
The seminaries—in the States, in Canada, everywhere in South America, in Italy, in France, every where—the seminaries are empty! No vocations. They abandon the seminaries. They close the seminaries, the convents, because there are no vocations. And that is because they abandon the true Catholic Faith, they abandon the Tradition of the Church. Sure! When we continue the Tradition of the Church, we have vocations: we have now four seminaries, we have 250 seminarians and this year I shall ordain forty priests. Forty new priests! Where is the bishop who can say, "I ordained forty priests this year!" Because they have no more vocations! I said that the Carmelites will come to Philadelphia—that signifies that they have vocations. After five years they are making their fifth foundation: one foundation in Belgium, one foundation in Germany, one foundation in France, one foundation in Philadelphia and one foundation in Switzerland! That signifies that they have many vocations! They come from everywhere. And we have many vocations for sisters, for the Sisters of our Society, the Sisters who are in St. Mary's. All this is a sign that Tradition bears fruit, good fruit! Without Tradition, no fruit, bad fruit!
Perhaps you ask me, "What is now the situation between you and Rome?" I can say that I have relations with Rome. I am, as I said to the reporters when they ask me this question, I said we are as children in regard to their father: the father asks the children to do something wrong, to commit a mortal sin; what should the children do? The children can say to the father: "We love you, we know that you are our father, but we cannot disobey God, and when you ask us to commit a mortal sin, we cannot obey!" We are in the same situation with Rome: we love the Pope, we love the successor of St. Peter, but we say to him, when he gives us changes, the New Mass, the new catechism, the new Bible, new sacraments that diminish our Faith—we say, "No." The Catholic Faith—that is the way to go to heaven; if I no longer have the Catholic Faith, I will go to hell! So, I keep my Faith, my Catholic Faith of twenty centuries. I am not alone for I have all the saints who are now in heaven, they did the same; all martyrs who gave their blood to keep the Faith! They preferred to die, to go to heaven, to obey God. We are in the same situation. But it is a pity that it is with Rome, with the bishops, but it is a fact. It is the Passion of the Church, the Catholic Church.
You know that when Jesus Christ was crucified on the Cross, who was with Him at the foot of the Cross? No apostles except John, one! Where are the eleven? And nobody, only the Blessed Virgin Mary, His Mother, and some women; all others abandoned Jesus Christ; He was alone. The situation of the Church is the same now: the Catholic Church is crucified! Many, many of the bishops abandon the Church; they go another way. We remain with our beloved Mother the Catholic Church even if it is crucified, as we are sure that the Church is continuing and that the Church cannot die. It is the same as for Jesus Christ: He had His Resurrection; the Catholic Church shall have Her Resurrection. We must have true hope and continue as our parents, grandparents, and all holy Popes and holy saints in the Catholic Church have done for twenty centuries.
We must pray especially for our Mother, the Mother of God, to give us fortitude, this Gift of Fortitude, to renew the grace we received in the Sacrament of Confirmation, to remain very strong against the Devil and to remain true Catholics.
In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
[Emphasis - The Catacombs]
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| Archbishop Lefebvre: 1986 Conference - Twenty Years of Struggle |
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Posted by: Stone - 12-07-2020, 07:49 AM - Forum: Sermons and Conferences
- Replies (1)
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The Angelus - April 1987
Twenty Years of Struggle
A Conference Given by His Excellency Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre during a Priestly Retreat at Ecône
September 1986
Part I
The Society of St. Pius X was founded seventeen years ago. On June 6, 1969, Archbishop Charriere wrote a letter authorizing the foundation of a seminary and on November 1st, 1970, he approved the foundation of the Society of St. Pius X in his diocese of Fribourg. For those who do not know well its history it will be good to record its principal steps, especially at a time and in the present circumstances in which we strive to continue and develop what Divine Providence gave us to do.
If events would bring a change towards a return to Tradition within the Church, of course, our situation would be simplified. We would certainly be welcomed by the hierarchy as we were at our beginning and those problems of our relations with the Bishops and Rome would no longer exist.
However, at the present time we must keep the authenticity of the Society which has been founded during very particular circumstances, but in a way that could have been during normal times. It was occasioned by the degradation of seminaries. But there were similar societies, such as that of St. Vincent de Paul or of St. John Eudes which were founded with a similar goal, which was and still is to give a good priestly formation to future priests, and to enable them to exercise their ministry for a true restoration in the Church.
The Society was founded, first of all, to make good priests and thus to open seminaries. This is in perfect conformity with the Tradition of the Church, to continue the traditional priestly formation for the good of the Church.
We have no other goal nor have we ever innovated except in the sense of tradition, by restoring some elements which were lacking in the formation given to seminarians, especially at the spiritual level. This is the reason why we have added to the studies of philosophy and theology one year of spirituality. This year of spirituality completes the preparation of the seminarians to the priesthood by putting them in a truly spiritual atmosphere. It is certainly not an innovation in the modernist direction but rather in the direction of the tradition of the Church.
Thus our foundation took care to add to the studies a deep spiritual formation by this additional year, which constitutes a kind of novitiate, and which leads to the knowledge of what spirituality is and to the practice of the interior life ‑ purgative, illuminative and mystical life which requires a true conversion of heart.
Our Society has not been founded on the model of a religious congregation. Why? Because in practice it happens too frequently that there are too many difficulties encountered by religious to exercise an apostolate in the world and still respecting truly the strict poverty as it is requested in the religious congregations, where one cannot own anything and cannot use anything without asking the authorization of a Superior. In all things one must depend on the Superior. It was thus preferable not to be bound by such a vow of poverty which could not be put into practice. It was better to found a Society of common life without vows but with engagements.
Thus Divine Providence had decided that our Society would be on the model of the Societies of common life without vows. This has proved to be a good decision. And there is no reason not to continue as such.
THE SOCIETY OFFICIALLY APPROVED BY ROME
It is with this Constitution that the Priestly Society of St. Pius X was approved and erected in his diocese by Monsigneur Charriére, Bishop of Fribourg, and it is with this same Constitution that it has been approved by Rome.
This point is very important and even fundamental, and one must not hesitate to remind those who do not know well the history of our Society. This Roman document is indeed capital, because it is absolutely official. It is dated February 18th, 1971, with the stamp of the Sacred Congregation for the Clergy, and it is signed by its Prefect Cardinal Wright, and sub-signed by Msgr. Palazzini, who was at that time his Secretary, and who is today a Cardinal. This official document coming from a Roman Congregation approving and praising "the wisdom of the rules" of the statutes of the Society, cannot be considered except as "a decree of praise" and thus authorized our Society to be considered as of Pontifical right, with capability to incardinate.
Other official acts made by the Congregation for the Religious with Prefect Cardinal Antoniutti came to complete and confirm this official approbation, since they allowed Father Snyder and another American religious to be duly incardinated into the Society. These were truly official acts of Rome.
These official documents necessarily lead to the following observation: the Congregation for the Clergy considered de facto our Society competent to incardinate regularly and validly.
Personally, however, I did not feel the need to resort to this possibility, until we had been officially but illegally suppressed. Until then I had always taken pains to have Bishops give the incardinations. I turned to Mgr. de Castro Mayer of Brazil, to Mgr. Castan Lacoma in Spain and to Mgr. Guibert in La Reunion. These three Bishops would accept to provide dimissorial letters to priests of our Society who would thereby find themselves incardinated in their respective diocese. As for Father Aulagnier, he was incardinated in his own diocese of Clermont‑Ferrand, by Mgr. de la Chanonie. At that time we were doubly in order. Mgr. Adam told me explicitly: "Why do you not incardinate in your Society?" I answered: "It appears to me that it is only diocesan." I was therefore following the canonical regulations more strictly than necessary.
Indeed, these documents from the Congregation for the Clergy concerning the incardination of these two American clerics into our Society, are even more important than the letter signed by Cardinal Wright. That was incidentally the answer that I gave to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith when I was interrogated about these incardinations. I was told: "You do not have the right to incardinate in your Society." "I do not have the right? In that case the Congregation for the Clergy should be informed that it was mistaken in incardinating in our Society!"
This document from Cardinal Wright, if one studies it closely, is not only a letter but a 'decree of praise,' since it effectively praises the statutes of the Fraternity. It is a thoroughly official document. It is in no way a private letter. In this fashion, and for five years, we enjoyed the total approbation of the diocesan church and of Rome. We were rooted in the Church as a good branch in a tree. This is fundamental to the providential action accomplished by the Fraternity, and reinforces us in our existence and in our activities in general. Being truly of the Church, officially recognized by the Church, we have been persecuted.
WHY ARE WE PERSECUTED?
We are persecuted only because we maintain Tradition and in particular the liturgical Tradition.
In keeping as always the facts in their chronological order it is also of the greatest interest to reread the letter addressed to me by Mgr. Mamie on May 6, 1975, to thoroughly absorb the true reasons which motivated the Bishop of Lausanne, Geneve and Fribourg to withdraw illegally the documents effected by his predecessor and particularly the decree establishing the Fraternity as of the November 1, 1970. This is a testimony of Mgr. Mamie in which he admits, in his own writing, that the Fraternity having a seat at Fribourg was the object of a decree of establishment titled 'Pia Unio' and signed by his predecessor which "approve and confirm the statutes of the said Fraternity."
He did not have the right to act in this manner and to withdraw of his own authority this canonical recognition. It is explicitly contrary to Canon Law (Can. 493).
Now, on two occasions Mgr. Mamie in his letter refers to the liturgy:
Quote:"I reminded you of your refusal with regard to the celebration of Holy Mass according to the rite established by His Holiness Paul VI," and, "As far as we are concerned, we continue to request of the Catholic faithful and of Catholic priests to accept and to apply all of the orientations or decisions of the II Vatican Council, all of the teachings of John XXIII and of Paul V1, all of the directives of the secretariats instituted by the Council including those related to the new liturgy. This we have done, and we will continue to do even in the most difficult of days with the grace of God, because if it is the only path to edify the Church."
Such were the writings of Mgr. Mamie at that time.
Thus twice in his letter he refers to the liturgy. "Because you oppose the liturgy." This then is indeed the principal and essential motive for taking these indescribable and illegal measures against us. It is necessary to remember this fact. The matter of the priestly ordinations was a later development. In reality, the true reason we have been and are persecuted ‑ illegally once again ‑ by Mgr. Mamie, by the cardinals of Rome and the bishops of France, is our attachment to the Immemorial Mass. "Since you continue with this liturgy, you are against the Vatican Council. Since you are against the Council, you are against the Pope. It is inadmissable. Therefore we suppress your Order." The reasoning was simple.
And so they exhibited the Ordo of Mgr. Bugnini and created out of thin air the obligation of the new mass, which was imposed by the services of the Vatican and by the bishops of France. It was unfortunately in this manner that the old Mass was abandoned by communities such as the Abbey of Fontgombault, under the pretext that it was necessary to obey the bishops. All of this was imposed by force, by coercion. We also were to be coerced at all costs into abandoning this liturgy and by the same token to close our seminary.
Confronted with this imposture and the illegality with which all of this was accomplished and above all confronted with the spirit in which this persecution was orchestrated, a modernist, progressivist and masonic spirit, we felt duty bound to continue. One cannot accept something which was done illegally, with a bad spirit, against Tradition and against the Church, and for the destruction of the Church.
WE HAVE ALWAYS REFUSED TO COLLABORATE IN THE DESTRUCTION OF THE CHURCH
This we have always refused to do. Since we refused this, it is obvious that we placed ourselves in opposition to those who appear to be the legal Church. We were the outlaws of the Church and they appeared to respect the law. We believe this appearance to be in exact sense. In fact it is they who have distanced themselves from the legality of the Church and we, on the contrary, who have remained within the legality and validity. Since their actions considered objectively are carried out in a spirit of destruction of the Church, we found ourselves practically speaking under the obligation to act in a manner which appears contrary to the legality of the Church. This is true. It is a strange state of affairs indeed to appear illegal simply by continuing to celebrate the Immemorial Mass and by continuing to ordain priests according to what was the legality up until the Council. And yet this was the reason why I was struck with suspension and why the priests who accepted to be ordained suffered interdiction.
But we did not stop there with our apparently illegal actions with regards to the particulars of the law, such as the hearing of confessions, the blessing of marriages performed in our presence in the dioceses. Many of the things which we have accomplished are of themselves and strictly speaking against the letter of the law, but why did we do these things? Quite simply because we believed that that which was undertaken against us was illegal and that they did not have the right to suppress our Order.
THE FUNDAMENTAL LAW OF THE CHURCH IS THE SALVATION OF SOULS
In view of this, we have acted according to the fundamental laws of the Church to save souls, to save the Priesthood, and to continue the Church. It is effectively these fundamental laws which are at stake. We oppose certain particular laws of the Church in order to save these fundamental laws. By using some of these particular laws against us, the fundamental laws are destroyed. It is contrary to the welfare of souls, contrary to the mission of the Church.
The new Code of Canon Law contains articles which are contrary to the mission of the Church. When it is permitted to give Holy Communion to a Protestant, it cannot be denied that is contrary to the mission of the Church. When the affirmation is made that there are two supreme authorities in the Church, it cannot be denied that this is contrary to the mission of the Church. This definition of the Church as the People of God in which all of the ministries basically can be found and in which there is no longer any distinction between the clergy and the lay people, is contrary to the dogma. All of this is contrary to the mission of the Church. The fundamental principles of the Code of Canon Law are being destroyed! How are we expected to submit and obey?
In order to save the fundamental laws of the Church, we are forced not to observe certain particular laws. In all of this who is right, who is wrong? Clearly right are those who pursue the mission of the Church. The particular laws are made to support the fundamental laws, which is the salvation of souls, for the glory of God, for the continuation of the Church. It is perfectly clear.
We are reminded at every opportunity: Mgr Lefebvre is suspended and his priests are suspended, they are not authorized to accomplish their ministry. This is to invoke in this case the particular laws. But they would do well to remember that they are destroying the Church, not the particular laws but the fundamental laws through this new Code of Canon Law which is thoroughly inspired by this bad spirit of modernism which has been expressed in the Council and after the Council.
What we hope for, of course, is that everything would be normal, that we should find ourselves no longer in this apparently illegal situation. But we cannot be accused of having changed anything in the Church. We must always reflect upon and spiritually situate ourselves in the fact that we are of the Church and that we continue the Church. And why do we continue? Because we pursue the goals of the Church. If we can be accused of failing in the application of certain practical laws, no one can say that the Fraternity does not act according to the goals of the Church. No one can deny this.
Now, even in its particular laws, the Church has had the wisdom to always include an open door for the salvation of souls. The Church has foreseen cases which could be extraordinary. This applies to the question of jurisdiction for confessions. Practically, it is the individual who seeks out the priest in order to receive the Sacrament of Penance who gives the priest the jurisdiction through the intermediary of the Code of Canoe Law. Even if an individual were to seek out an excommunicated priest to hear his confession, this priest would receive the necessary jurisdiction (Canon 2261).
For marriage, Canon Law has provided an exception: those who cannot find a properly delegated priest who would marry them according to the spirit of the Church, as their parents were married ‑ and it is obviously a basic right for young men and women to be married in the same rite as their parents and not in a Rite that is not only often disgusting and in an atmosphere that is far from devotional and fitting for such an important a sacred act as the Sacrament of Matrimony. If the engaged young man and woman do not find a priest for a whole month, then they may marry. They are the ministers of the Sacrament, and in such a case they are exempt from the canonical form (Can. 1098 and 209). They can marry in front of witnesses. If there is a priest, he must be present. This priest would not have a special delegation, but he would be present at their marriage, as Canon Law requires, and he will give the Nuptial Blessing to them.
There is also an exception for the Sacrament of Confirmation. The priest has the right to give Confirmation in certain cases. This is also in the Code of Canon Law. The priest must give the Sacrament to someone who is in danger of death if he has not already received it.
A priest can give Confirmation in other exceptional cases. In the Missions, this possibility was extended to cases relating to marriage. The priests had the right before the marriage, if the couple had not yet received it.
I have never said that all modern confirmations were invalid, but one is entitled to raise questions as to the wording which is employed and certainly as regards the oil which is used. This is important after all. I have received many reports from persons who have formally informed me of the expression used by the bishop. These are invalid expressions. Simply "Receive the Holy Spirit," or, "I send you in mission." This may not be frequent, but it has occurred and it is invalid. In any case, there are numerous bishops who feel that Confirmation is a useless Sacrament, that the Holy Ghost has already been given at Baptism, that it is a supplementary ceremony to recall that which was accomplished at baptism. The former archbishop of Chambery explicitly wrote this in his diocesan magazine: "Confirmation does not give the Holy Spirit which we have received at baptism." I showed this magazine to Cardinal Ratzinger and said: "You object to my giving Confirmations, look at what the bishops think of Confirmation." The archbishop in question is now retired but was at the time seventy‑two, seventy‑three years old and was therefore trained in the old school. He had known the Sacrament of Confirmation as it had been taught previously. No doubt the faith of the bishop has no influence on Confirmation, but is it possible to treat the Sacrament in this fashion? It is the same reasoning as that of the Protestants, and it is legitimate to ask if the intention of these bishops is to do that which the Church wants to do.
If we wish to survive and for the blessings of God to continue to descend on the Fraternity, we must remain faithful to these fundamental laws of the Church.
WITHOUT THE MASS EVERYTHING COLLAPSES
If our priests came to abandon the true liturgy, the true Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, the true sacraments, then it would be no longer worth while to continue. It would be suicide!
When Rome asked: "But surely you can adopt the new liturgy and continue your seminaries, that won't make them disappear," I answered: "Yes, it will make our seminaries disappear. They would not be able to accept the new liturgy, it would amount to introducing the poison of the
Conciliar spirit into the community. If others were unable to hold on, it is because they adopted this new liturgy, all of these reforms and this new spirit. As for us, if we accept the same things, we will have the same results."
This is why we must absolutely maintain our traditional line, in spite of the appearance of disobedience and the persecutions of those who use their authority in an unjust and often illegal manner.
We are driven more and more by continually worsening circumstances. If only things seemed to be improving, if we could see tangible signs of a return to Tradition, then everything would be different. But, unfortunately, the situation is worse. The bishops who replace those who retire or who die, have received less theological training. They are imbued with the spirit of the Council, with this Protestant, modernist spirit and it is increasingly serious. Confronted with this continuous worsening of the situation, are we not obliged to take measures which are obviously extraordinary? Our attitude is justified by all of these events. After all, the progressive priests challenge us whenever they can, saying: "You do not have the jurisdiction, you do not have the right to hear confessions." Soon everything that we do would be invalid according to them. It is almost as if to say that our Mass would not be accused of being invalid. This is the state of mind among those fanatical progressives who oppose and insult us. We must not hesitate in responding that it is necessary to take advantage of the laws of the Church which the Church permits in exceptional circumstances of extreme gravity.
God knows that we are confronted with those circumstances!
[Emphasis - The Catacombs]
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