A strong, plain-spoken talk by Rod Pead, the editor of Christian Order, at the Faith of Our Fathers Conference in 2000:
FAITH
OF OUR FATHERS 2000
WESTMINSTER
CENTRAL HALL, SATURDAY 20th MAY
SWORD
OF UNITY
There
Was War In Heaven!
ROD
PEAD
Thus says the Lord: How can you say, 'We are wise, and the law of the Lord is with us'?… because from prophet to priest every one deals falsely. They have the healed the wound of my people lightly, saying, 'Peace, peace,' when there is no peace.
Jeremiah 8:4-11
This divine rebuke
was delivered by the prophet Jeremiah to the hierarchy of the house
of Judah several thousand years ago. Yet how contemporary it sounds.
In fact, if we alter but one word in this passage, tying it in to
the theme of this conference, we surely have here the Lord's judgement
of His smug and increasingly faithless priestly hierarchies in Britain
and Ireland today. As He relives the agony of His Passion in surveying
the dissolute and dying local Churches in these parts, I imagine He
would have his prophet deliver to His priestly Elect an almost identical
message, declaring unto them:
"How can you say,
'We are wise, and the law of the Lord is with us'?… because from prophet
to priest every one deals falsely. They have healed the wound of my
people lightly saying, 'Unity, unity,' when there is NO unity!"
Reverend Fathers and
Sisters, ladies and gentlemen, I am not here to give a find sounding
theological treatise on truth and unity. Nor have I accepted the kind
invitation to address you here today to make a feel-good speech that
warms your hearts and sends you all home feeling…. comfortable. Why
should we feel comfortable and self-satisfied with our puny efforts
when all about us is pride and ignorance; betrayal and anarchy, dissolution
and decay; when Christ is suffering in his Mystical Body as never
before because our Faith is neither hot nor cold but so lukewarm.
No, instead, like Fr Conlon, Daphne and Pat, I am going to do something
completely different. I'm going to tear up the textbook on public
speaking. I'm going to tell you the truth! Because therein lies the
way to unity. I'm going to say the hard things - about the Shepherds,
about the clergy and about ourselves! I'm going to deliver a blunt,
Jeremiah-like address because, as God's own spokesmen, prophets like
Jeremiah revealed to us that, just as there is a time for subtlety
and gentleness and massaging egos, there comes a time when direct,
forceful, personal plain-speaking is all that is left.
Now, since the time
we have is so very short and I have already had to ruthlessly edit
out so much of what I wanted to say, I would ask that if you feel
the urge to clap at any stage, please resist that urge - save your
energy and thereby win me a few precious extra minutes. Because it
is not applause I'm after but a re-think about the attitude and contribution
of faithful Catholics for the fight for what is left of the Faith
in these Isles.
This is the plan of
attack. We'll first undertake a cooks tour of ecclesiastical reality
today; of bishops and clergy as agents of dis-unity. We'll
then very briefly consider two of the chief Modernist weapons employed
to undermine Catholic truth and unity. And finally, consider how the
self-defeating mentality of many faithful Catholics has also helped
reduce Catholicism in the United Kingdom to the same farcical level
as slapstick Anglicanism. Above all, this talk is directed to correcting
that suicidal tendency in our own ranks.
SHEPHERDS OF DISUNITY
But let's get down to business.
As I said, for all the endless babble about UNITY that gushes from
the ecclesiastical establishment: from the bishops via their lay-funded,
interminable conferences and committees, bureaux and bulletins, plans
and pastorals - for all this expensive, time-wasting, self-indulgent
blather about unity - there is NO Unity! For, as the theme of this
conference recalls, there can only be love and charity and unity in
truth - and truth, in this tiny and rapidly disappearing outpost
of the universal Church, if it hasn't been technically forsworn,
has been effectively abandoned by a hierarchy that has broken ranks
with the Holy Father in deciding for itself what to teach in union
with him. We all know about the curse of cafeteria Catholicism, but
the cafeteria-Catholics are simply mimicking their pick-and-choose
prelates.
What are we to say
about a bishop like Ambrose Griffiths who, last year, not long after
John Paul's special call to honour the Sabbath, cancels the Sunday
Mass obligation of his flock - on the First Sunday of Advent - so
that a parish can attend an ecumenical service in a Protestant Church.
What of Archbishop
Bowen's recent refusal to ban public dissidents from holding their
dissenting conference on Church property on the grounds that it might
be "imprudent" and "counter-productive" - even while he acknowledged
its subversive nature and the risk of spiritual damage to his flock.
And what are we to
make of Bishop Vincent Malone's recent lauding of dissent from the
magisterium, which he called "critical loyalty" [echoing Basil
Hume's description of dissent as "loyal opposition"] - in complete
disregard for the Holy Father's constant exhortations that such dissent
is incompatible with the Catholic faith.
Truth? Unity?
Consider the almost
surreal situation of Portsmouth's Bishop Hollis, an enthusiastic supporter
of the bitterly anti-Catholic feminist and teacher of paganism and
witchcraft Mary Gray, who he foisted on the hapless students of his
diocese. If his Portsmouth bureaucracy is not busy training: "lay
people to preside at the Eucharist", they are flying in the
likes of Australian Kevin Treston, a shameless public purveyor of
heresy, to address diocesan religious educators with the Bishop's
blessing. Treston's mentality can be summed up in one simple phrase
in his RE text - a phrase which cuts to the heart of the Modernist
error which this conference has sought to counter: "Religious truth,"
he writes, "is elusive." And so it follows, as the tireless
Daphne McLeod has documented in Christian Order, that Treston calls
into question or denies virtually every tenet of the Catholic Faith.
Just the sort of person you'd want to be instructing the people who'll
be teaching your children the Faith.
Unity, in Truth?
Let us ponder the extraordinary
fact that the egregious Bishop Konstant of Leeds was unable to give
a simple affirmation of Catholic faith when confronted by a series
of fundamental questions posed by the BBC's Today programme last year,
which included: "Do you believe in the literal fact of the Resurrection
of Christ?" "Do you believe there will be a second coming of Christ?"
"Do you believe Adam and Eve literally existed?" "Is there a purgatory?"
"Are all of the Ten Commandments applicable today?" About such basics
of the Catholic faith, the Bishop of Leeds replied: "None of the
questions is capable of a one-word answer, which means that, for most
people, any answer given.. is not merely inadequate, but simply untrue."
This is the man who for some years oversighted Catholic education
in this country; the man responsible for the development of a sex-ed
programme for Catholic children so foul, that the previous Archbishop
of Birmingham condemned it outright and banned it from his archdiocese.
Bishop Konstant, of course, is also the prelate who recently refused
to consecrate a refurbished church until the parish moved the tabernacle
- the earthly dwelling place of our Lord and King - from the centre
of the sanctuary to a side altar, at a cost to the distressed parish
priest and his parishioners of a mere, extra £60,000!
Well might we ask,
as the late Father Paul Crane often did about David Konstant: "How
did that man ever become a bishop?" But then one surely has
to ask the same question about Archbishop Vincent Nichols. The darling
of the dissident feminists on the executive of the National Board
of So-Called Catholic Women - which tells us everything we
need to know about him - Archbishop Nichols is renowned for welcoming
Humanae Vitae dissenter Charles Curran - the doyen of postconciliar
Judases - to Upholland Northern Institute while Rector, there to conduct
consecutive Summer Schools. And yet Paul VI stated in Humanae Vitae
that in order to preserve the unity of the Christian people it is
necessary that all should speak the same language as the Magisterium
of the Church. Therefore, as regards the foundational - pivotal -
matter of contraception he declared that the first task of priests
"is to expound the Church's teaching on marriage without ambiguity."
I guess, like Archbishop Nichols, Archbishop Murphy-O'Connor,
too, has just never got around to reading the encyclical! Since the
new Archbishop of Westminster, picking up where his Humanae Vitae
dissenting predecessor left off, has informed the daily papers that
in respect of contraception people should "make up their own minds."
Is it any wonder that
Father Crane, whose ill-health kept him from attending the first Faith
of Our Fathers, wanted so very dearly to come here and address you
all, to stand on this stage as he often told me he wanted to, and
simply say about the bishops: "Who do they think they are!"
The plain-speaking Cardinal Silvio Oddi said the same thing in another
way during an interview with an American journalist in 1983: "some
bishops have come to believe their own infallibility," he said.
"They are wrong, and far from the teaching of God. They are condemned.
They are condemned most of all before the Church." And I should
add that following this statement, as recorded in my book Death
of A Catholic Parish, the journalist asked His Eminence if the
arguments of the likes of Augustine, Aquinas and Cardinal Newman were
correct, that in the words of Aquinas - "if the Faith be in imminent
peril, prelates ought to be accused by their subjects, even in public,"
the Pope's close friend and colleague answered: "Absolutely. Without
question."
And if any further
proof be required that the Faith is "in imminent peril", we
need only consider that since it is the bishop who forms the clergy,
such prelates as we've just glimpsed have inevitably spawned a generation
of belligerently disobedient and dissenting clergy dividing and dissolving
entire parishes up and down the country. Clerics who, make no mistake,
have developed a real hatred of Catholic truth, like the enraged
Portsmouth priest who derided Catholics who politely but firmly defended
the Faith against error during questions after a talk by a renowned
heretic, calling these orthodox laity "the thought police", demanding
their removal from the building and shouting across the room
at them: "They are the dying embers of a Church I want nothing
to do with!". Or like a parish priest in Essex who recently -
with a nod and wink from his bishop - broke every rule in the Catholic
book by inviting a female Anglican vicar to preach the sermon at his
6pm Mass on the 22nd of January this year and who in response
to a question from a protesting parishioner, a Christian Order reader,
as to whether he would obey a direction from the Vatican to cancel
the lady vicars visit, replied defiantly: "No, that wouldn't make
any difference". And the cost to that parish in souls of such
premeditated priestly disobedience is representative of the Catholic
melt-down we now face: "Until relatively recently," our subscriber
explained in a letter to the Vatican alerting them to the situation,
"our parish had a congregation of about 3,000. That number is now
1,000. About 2,000 have abandoned the Faith."
WEAPONS OF DISUNITY
The bishops, of course, justify
their complicity in all this disobedience and dissent, by regurgitating
the magic mantra - "dialogue". It is "dialogue", you see - rather
than prayer, penance and pronouncement - that is going to save and
unite us all. Well, we would need to devote another conference to
discussing the difference between true dialogue and counterfeit
dialogue. But since I only have minutes rather than days available
to me to treat this subject, let me say just a very few words about
"dialogue," since it is a major-major weapon in the Modernist arsenal
of undermining Catholic truth and unity.
"Dialogue" as presently
understood, of course, means not holding strongly to anything in case
you offend people who don't hold the same position. And it
rests on the new, secular super-virtue embraced by our Shepherds -
"tolerance" (perhaps epitomised in Bishop Malone defining dissent
as "critical loyalty"). Fr. Felix Salvany has observed that "in
time of schism and error, to cloud and distort the proper sense of
words is a fruitful artifice of Satan." And just as the
meaning of "dialogue" has been distorted to serve the ends of Modernism
so too "tolerance". It used to mean simply the act of enduring - tolerating
- some evil or suffering which could not be helped. It now means the
opposite of that - tolerance now means avoiding conflict and getting
along with everyone, no matter what they hold. Whereas Cardinal
Ratzinger stated in May 1998 that: "One cannot entertain a notion
of communion in which the chief pastoral value is that of avoiding
conflicts;" Whereas Belloc understood that "Truth comes
by conflict"; today, "consensus comes from tolerance"
and the truth be damned. Cannabilism? Call it an eating disorder if
you must, but for heaven's sake do not show your intolerance by saying
so in public. Catholicism? Call it "A" path to truth if you must but
for goodness sake don't go upsetting people and embarrassing the bishop
by talking about the one, true Church - by stating that God wants
everybody to be a Catholic and that non-Catholic Christians in good
faith already belong to the Church and that their wish for unity can
only be fulfilled by returning to their true fold.
And so false tolerance
has led to false ecumenism - entailing interminable discussion which
has led to nothing but the capitulation of the Catholic side. We need
only consider the then Bishop Cormac Murphy-O'Connor's capitulation
in the ARCIC discussions with the Anglicans. It is hardly reassuring
to recall that after his years of dialogue with the Protestants, what
the present incumbent of Westminster saw, as a "substantial agreement
on essential points of doctrine", the watchdog of Catholic orthodoxy
in Rome saw as compromising basic tenets of the Faith - like the Mass
as sacrifice; the Real Presence, the nature of the priesthood, primacy
and jurisdiction of the Pope, Infallibility and indefectibility, authority
of General Councils and on and on. This is how Cardinal Ratzinger's
Congregation summarised its lengthy assessment of the ecclesiastical
verbiage that filled the Final Report tabled by ARCIC after years
of dialogue: "Certain formulations in the Report are not explicit
enough to ensure that they exclude interpretations not in harmony
with the Catholic faith..... certain affirmations are inexact and
not acceptable as Catholic doctrine."
Truth? Unity? Through
dialogue?
Archbishop Murphy-O'Connor's
embrace of counterfeit dialogue was only surpassed by his predecessor
Cardinal Hume's embrace of the nefarious Common Ground Initiative
which seeks the impossible reconciliation of Modernist error and Catholic
truth. As someone summarised in the American journal Homiletic
and Pastoral Review this so-called initiative supports, however
insidiously, contraception and abortion, pushes for married and female
priests, fights for homosexual "rights" and same-sex sacramental marriage,
argues for the dissolution of the indissolubility of marriage, opposes
the magisterium at every turn, sometimes publicly and vociferously,
sometimes secretly and furtively. This is the destructive agenda underlying
the Common Ground Initiative - the Modernist dialoguers 'Big Idea'
for healing the divisions they themselves have sown within the Church;
the Initiative that George Cardinal Basil Hume was still promoting
on his deathbed.
So I just want to observe
that this sort of endless, postconciliar, via media "dialogue," beloved
of the episcopate and its clerocracy, bureaucracy and media lackeys
in Britain, is not Catholic. After disciplining and excommunicating
dissenters in his diocese a few years ago, the admirable Bishop Bruskewitz
of Nebraska summed it up when he said: "Whoever heard of the fire-brigade
dialoguing with the fire!" As the renowned Italian philosopher
Romano Amerio states in Iota Unum, his masterful tome on the
roots of the postconciliar crisis: "There is a dialogue that converts,
and a dialogue that perverts - by which one party is detached from
truth led into error." It is this latter, the dialogue of perversion,
which holds sway throughout Britain and Ireland today.
ORTHODOX DISUNITY
So, we've briefly considered
the Shepherds - and the clergy they have formed in their own dissident
image - not for the first time in Church history in these parts, as
agents of schism and dis-unity. And we've quickly looked at
the curse of counterfeit "dialogue" and "tolerance", two major semantic
weapons of deconstruction and disunity.
Now perhaps you're
thinking, at this point, this is all good and well but we live this
horror and scandal daily; we know this……. Do we? If we know this;
if we are really aware of all this; why do we resist tailoring our
prayer life and our thoughts and our actions accordingly. If we consider
ourselves so aware and savvy about this travesty of truth and unity,
then why, as the Jesuit, Father James Schall states, are Catholics
so wimpy? The Professor of Political Philosophy at Georgetown
University in Washington and a renowned champion of orthodoxy, Fr
Schall was reflecting on the present Holy Father's continual references
to the necessity of Catholics to be martyrs for the Faith - the frequency
of which references are unprecedented in the history of the papacy
- and he was setting this papal preoccupation with martyrdom against
the reflections of the renowned philosopher Joseph Pieper about Catholics
who just want to be left alone to live their life in quiet and virtue:
"It is a liberal illusion," wrote Pieper, "to assume that
you can consistently act justly without ever incurring risks: risks
for your immediate well-being, the tranquillity of your daily routine,
your possessions, your good name, your honour - in extreme instances…
liberty, health, and life itself." And having pondered these points,
Fr Schall asks these questions, which seem to me especially pertinent
to the faithful Catholic remnant in contemporary Britain: "Have
we been living this 'liberal illusion' for so long that we no longer
notice that we are not acting justly? That we are not taking risks
because we do not in fact believe?"
Like the old analogy
about the frog which will jump out of a pot of hot water but when
placed in a pot of cold water will sit there happily as the water
temperature is raised imperceptibly one degree each hour until he
boils to death without knowing it, so the polluted air of "dialogue"
and "tolerance" within and without the Church which we passively inhale,
has, indeed, quietly, relentlessly, imperceptibly choked a good deal
of supernatural life out of ostensibly faithful Catholics. This has
happened throughout the Catholic West, but it has taken a particular
toll on the English outpost of the Church Militant which has been
softened up, dumbed-down and disarmed like no other. Why? Because
the normally admirable patience, diffidence and decency of the English
character has led, as Fr Crane put it some years ago, to "the complacent
ignorance of so many English Catholics who live in a world full of
'decent chaps'"; and decent chaps would never intend the Church
any harm.
So, although things
seem less volatile on the surface here, Catholics in this country
are in even deeper trouble than their less acquiescent English-speaking
cousins overseas, because there exists here a crushing preponderance
of orthodox laity and clergy living this liberal illusion that we
can defend Christ and Catholic truth without conflict and the unpleasantness
of raised voices and pointed fingers. Even after thirty years of scandal
and decay involving the loss of over a million practising Catholics,
which continues unabated at the rate of somewhere between 600-1,000
souls per week, not to mention the loss of conversions, these
orthodox who hide their faint-hearts behind a mask of prudence and
civility and piety would still rather tut-tut and decry those prepared
to call a spade a spade; those willing to label disgraceful prelates
a disgrace! In sum, far too many in our ranks, including those
who consider themselves pillars of the orthodox fight, are more worried
about upsetting people than they are about upsetting God.
I was interested this
morning to hear Daphne refer to such types - these false optimists
- as Pollyanna Catholics. Well, within the broad range of Pollyanna
orthodox in England the worst of all are what I call the Jolly Hockey
Sticks - the Establishment Catholics who have undermined the orthodox
fight for far too long. The Jolley Hockey Sticks are the sort of people
who confuse the transience of worldly optimism and stiff upper lip
stoicism with Christian hope rooted in Christ crucified; to whom Englishness,
it seems, is more important than the Faith and souls, and who would
be appalled that the likes of Pat McKeever and myself have been let
loose to speak plainly at a conference like this. In fact, it will
interest you to know that some of their number instituted a whispering
campaign to keep people away from this conference for that very reason.
They, and their supporters, prefer to avert their eyes from stark
reality in order to preserve, as Father Crane said, their illusory,
sanitised English world full "decent chaps" who would never conspire
against the Church.
Well the problem with
closing your eyes to reality is that when you open them again the
reality remains - and more frightful than ever; and the reality is,
as the selection of episcopal horrors I paraded earlier tesitifies,
that there is a certain spirit in the hierarchy of this country that
goes beyond arrogance or cowardice - it is alien, it is organised,
it is purposeful, it is inimical to the Faith. It has constructed
a local Church in which orthodoxy, i.e. truth, is considered extreme
and Modernism i.e. heresy, is considered mainstream; a
Church in which a priest or layman can claim to be a Catholic while
denying with impunity what it is that makes him one; where the de-facto
schismatics who have in substance separated themselves from the Church
claim not to be separate - and this includes the bishops, who as we've
seen earlier, protect, foster and promote such separateness.
This counterfeit local
Church, built on the quicksand of counterfeit dialogue and tolerance,
was erected by Archbishop Derek Worlock and Cardinal Hume and its
oppressive spirit was captured by a faithful senior Westminster priest
who confided a few years ago: "The Church in this country is run
by a clerical tyranny." Indeed, a suffocating liberal clericalism
which allowed Cardinal Hume to rebuke Daphne McLeod, a champion of
orthodoxy, for [quote] "encouraging dissent" [unquote] while
simultaneously praising Modernists, the enemies of orthodoxy, for
their [quote] "loyal opposition" [unquote]. That this tyranny
is institutionalised was confirmed by a comment that a Liverpool parish
priest let slip on Radio Merseyside on 13 May 1996: "Archbishop
Derek did say to me once," said the priest, "that as long as
the bishops stuck together there's no way in which a man of conservative
ilk [i.e. a faithful Catholic priest loyal to Rome] could
be imposed upon any diocese in our country."
It is precisely the
reality of this alien spirit and Modernist dictatorship of the hierarchy,
maintained by its sycophantic media machine, that the Jolly Hockey
Sticks will not confront because they want to be seen to be "respectable"
by the very clergy who are Christ's greatest antagonists; and because
they think that despite the present strife it'll all work out in the
end and in the meantime we should just get along, all be pals together,
even while the Faith is being treated with contempt by the sort of
prelates who, as the Vatican warned last year, have reduced the priesthood
of Jesus Christ to a career option and the good life.
Well, I'm telling you,
if we adopt this attitude; if we opt for life in this Establishment
Catholic comfort zone of perennial appeasement and Quietism; if we
are more interested in retaining an air of respectability than in
confronting, strongly and bluntly, this mysterious darkening of episcopal
hearts and minds for fear of being called 'extremists' and 'zealots'
and 'fanatics'; if we continue living this liberal illusion that we
can act justly without risking our good name, our tranquil life, our
well-being - then we might as well stand around fretting like Peter
and wait for the cock to crow!
PRAYER
But our woes are not all
down to the Establishment Pollyanna's. We are all soaked in
human respect; full to the brim with false charity. I guess
affluence and Catholic faith have never been good bedfellows: food
on the table and a warm bed at night does little to encourage the
vigorous prayer life required to sustain the truly Catholic
mind we need in order to act justly. How else are we to explain the
lack of passion and sense of urgency before the disaster we face.
It is true that while at the moment we find we can't live with the
bishops, we know, too, that by God's design we can't live without
them, and that there is only so much we can do. But have we done even
that much? Have we prayed and fasted and done penance and really begged
God on our knees to convert the hearts and minds of the bishops? Have
we consistently pleaded with Him to take the hirelings who will not
respond to His grace to their early reward, and send us real Catholic
Shepherds in their stead?
We each need to ask
ourselves these questions, because it is hard to believe that God
would not have sent Britain at least some orthodox episcopal
relief if He had been badgered sufficiently - Christ Himself told
us, in the parable of the unjust judge, that we should pray continually
and never be discouraged [Lk 18 1:8]. Just as the unjust judge
was worn down by the persistent visits of the widow seeking
redress against someone who wronged her, Our Lord told the people:
"will not God give redress to his elect, when they are crying out
to him, day and night? Will he not be impatient with their wrongs?
I tell you, he will give them redress with all speed." And then
Christ immediately adds, underlining the point I made earlier, "But
ah, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith left on earth?"
And so I repeat, and I repeat it more for my own benefit than anyone
else's: are we really praying for the conversion of the hirelings
or their replacement by strong, solicitous, Catholic Shepherds
- as if we believe? Given Christ's promise, I can't imagine that enough
of us are.
A CATHOLIC
MIND
And because our prayers are
not what they should be our thoughts are not what they should be.
Only by continual prayer can we put a spiritual disposition on everything
that we do and thus keep the Commandments and live peacefully and
unperturbed, come what may, in God's presence, in union with the Father,
the Son and the Holy Spirit, leaving all and suffering all according
to His providence, including the agonies of our present crisis. This
is all about retaining that increasingly rare commodity in the neo-pagan
West: a Catholic mind, encompassing a truly Catholic view of life.
A view once summarised as that "which sets all earthly values within
the context of the eternal, the view which relates all human problems
- social, political and cultural - to the doctrinal foundations of
the Catholic Faith, the view which sees all things here below in terms
of God's supremacy and earth's transitoriness, in terms of Heaven
and Hell."
It is because our thoughts
are not ordered in this Catholic way that we do not hate the insidious
Modernist heresy as we should; as the polluting of God's truth, which
is the worst of all impurities. "Where there is no hatred for heresy,"
said a famous convert, "there is no holiness." And without
holiness, truth rapidly becomes a dead letter and any prospect of
unity dies with it.
On the other hand,
one who possesses a truly Catholic mind is alarmed by heresy! He sees
that souls are being lost now! And this sense of urgency alerts
him, intuitively, to the deeper implication of Cardinal Manning's
contention that "all conflict is theological". He sees, in
other words, that everything, every debate on whatever issue
returns to Catholic moral and doctrinal realities and, therefore,
that a healthy, unified Catholic Church precedes and gives rise to
a healthy, unified and coherent State. And he sees all about him the
catastrophic consequences for society of the Modernist heresy
destroying the Western Church. Thus, he doesn't put the cart before
the horse; he doesn't fool himself into accepting that a sick Church
can heal a sick world; he knows that we have to heal the Church and
unite ourselves - Catholics of the Latin Rite - before trying to heal
the world and unite divided Christianity.
And so with that broad
appreciation of the importance of a healthy Church - a Church untainted
by the stench of heterodoxy and heresy - the Catholic thinker
is not as easily pleased as the average orthodox layman whose standards,
after years of struggle, have plummeted to desperate levels.
A prelate stands up to condemn sodomy or abortion - the minimum one
might expect of a Catholic bishop - and we go weak at the knees and
lose all sense of proportion in our rush to congratulate him. In our
desperation for something - for someone - to hold on to, we
blithely ignore the standards set by St Paul, who wrote to Titus that
"a bishop must be beyond reproach, since he is the steward of God's
house…", and that the bishop is duty bound to "rebuke
sharply" the "many disobedient, vain talkers and seducers"
who "bring ruin on entire households by false teaching"; false
teachers who, St. Paul concludes: "must be silenced." [Titus
1:7-13].
Australia's redoubtable
Margaret Joughin writes: "We are never immune for very long from the
secularising effects of 'progressive' thinking. Diplomacy, discretion
and détente are in the air, and even good men have been persuaded
to put policy before principles… So we comfort ourselves with the
thought that the Bishop who turns a blind eye to dissent on Tuesday
must be a good fellow after all, because he accepts an invitation
from someone to say the Rosary on Thursday."
Let's face it, we have
been reduced to grasping at morsels of hope fed to us by canny churchmen
who play us like marionettes, who play on our Catholic obedience,
docility and goodwill. And so, right on cue, pro-life leaders urged
their supporters to write and congratulate Cardinal Winning on his
Section 28 stand. Fair enough. I myself had a letter of support for
the Cardinal's stand published in the Scottish secular press. BUT
- have the pro-lifers and other Catholic apostolates taken on board
the facts presented in my booklet Great Defenders….. or
Great Pretenders? (available downstairs at the Christian Order
stall) detailing the sort of shocking negligence and complicity of
the Scottish hierarchy to which Pat referred? Have they ever thought
to use their considerable resources to pressure, and to relentlessly
maintain that pressure on His Eminence and bishops everywhere
to clean up their own backyards? To silence the dissenters; to institute
a zero-tolerance policy on liturgical abuse; to reform their truly
degraded seminaries and teacher training colleges? To do the job St
Paul insists they were consecrated under God to do irreproachably?
Or have the leaders and supporters of the major orthodox movements,
instead, excused our bishops who allow false teaching, because occasionally
they impress - allowing a Latin Mass here; patronising a Marian or
Pro-Life Conference there?
SWORD OF UNITY?
Look, we are kidding ourselves
if we think we do well to commend what looks like duplicity in our
leaders. Episcopal salvation is, to say the very least, problematic.
"Many priests are lost and few bishops are saved," said St.
John Chrysostom, himself a bishop. After his mother congratulated
him on his appointment as Bishop of Mantua, St. Pius X told her: "Mother,
you do not realise what it means to be a bishop. I shall lose my soul
if I neglect my duty." So we have to stop pandering to duplicitous
Shepherds and start fearing - for them, since they appear
to have lost all fear of God themselves, and fearing for our
complicity in their negligence.
And I suggest that
to regain this holy fear, which will spur us to act justly in this
present crisis, we need to grasp the reality, difficult though
it is without the sight of blood on the floor, that, as Pat mentioned,
we really are at war. Yet why should it surprise us: there
was war in heaven! "Fierce war broke out in heaven," writes
St John in Revelation, "where Michael and his angels fought against
the dragon. The dragon and his angels fought on their part, but could
not win the day, or stand their ground in heaven any longer; the great
dragon… was flung down to earth; he whom we call the devil, or Satan,
the whole world's seducer, flung down to earth, and his angels with
him." And this dragon, St. John tells us "went elsewhere to
make WAR… on men who keep God's commandments, and hold fast to the
truth concerning Jesus." And so St. Paul warns us: "…we wrestle
not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers,
against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual
wickedness in the heavenly realms. Therefore put on the armour of
God….take up the shield of faith….make the helmet of salvation your
own, and the sword of the spirit, God's word."
Yes, Christ extends
his arms in charity to embrace all men - but the charity of Christ
is not soft- there is a sword in one hand! A sword, in the classic
tradition of Christian paradox, that at once divides and unifies;
censures and saves. "Do not imagine," declared Jesus, "that
I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring
peace, but a sword" [Matt. 10:34]. "Henceforth in one house
there will be five divided, three against two and two and against
three; they will be divided…" [Lk 12:51]. "A man's enemies
will be the people of his own house…" Significantly, it is at
this point, after stressing the need for division, that Jesus says:
"He who secures his own life [i.e. denies his faith under persecution
or otherwise compromises with the world] will lose it; it is the
man who loses his life for My sake that will secure it" [Matt.
10:34-40].
And so this sword,
which is truth, only divides in order to unite to Christ
those believers who live the Faith and persevere in
the Faith. It is thus the sword of unity - the same sword wielded
by St. Michael to cast out Satan and his proud and rebellious angelic
hordes in order to unite the faithful heavenly hosts. It is the sword
which faithful Catholics and, indeed, Rome itself must wield today
with the same antique severity and holy violence of the angels and
prophets if the Modernist impasse within the closed-ranks of the British
episcopates is ever to be broken and Christ's faithful reunited in
Catholic truth.
If the Church is not
Militant, She cannot thrive and flourish: Her sword of unity becomes
blunt and useless. And if we have thus far not been sufficiently Militant
- if that sword has lost its edge - it is surely because so few in
the orthodox camp have taken Pope Leo XIII at his word when he said
that Catholics were "born for combat": by which he meant that
a Catholic enters a spiritual war zone when he leaves his mother's
womb, that his Baptism enlists him into the ranks of the Church Militant
and that the war is there to be fought daily, for his own soul
and for the life of the Church, until he departs this world in a box!
Tragically, we have
sought to avoid the burden of this stressful, outspoken Militancy,
which is our birthright and our duty, by seeking refuge in a thousand
popular good works and less militant apostolates. And even worse,
we have failed to support or openly sniped along with the Jolly Hockey
Sticks, at those who have worked to expose the rot and refused to
be silent and acquiescent in the sins of our spiritual Fathers in
Christ.
ATTITUDE AND ACTION
In the mid-1980s, shortly
before the publication of his best-selling work The Jesuits:
The Society of Jesus and the Betrayal of the Roman Catholic Church,
the late Father Malachi Martin received some remarkable letters from
his beloved eldest sister in Ireland, Netta, who, fearing there would
be trouble about The Jesuits and out of concern and sisterly
love, entreated him not to publish it. I, for one, can identify
with the sort of familial pressure not to make waves and I'm sure
this will sound familiar to many of you, too. "Dearest," she wrote,
"do you have to have it published? Is it going to do any good or will
it cause trouble and pain?… Bobbie [her nickname for her brother]
there is so much confusion and debunking of Christ's Church… If it
is going to add to the disillusionment and confusion of people about
the clergy, think again…..for heaven's sake Bob, consider the whole
thing again….Sometimes prudence is the better part of valour and the
more difficult…". Malachi thanks his sister for her letter, explains
the substance of the book and the pain and nightmares it caused him
to expose the tragic truths it contains, and responds: "Will it confuse
Catholics? ….. it can only clarify. And encourage. And confirm. And
enlighten. If you people in Ireland had protested in time,
you would not now have the shambles you see all around you. Don't
you see those progressively more extensive shambles every day? And
shouldn't you start screaming? Aren't you allowing confusion
to get more confounded? Will your passing from the scene silent,
have aided or disabled the Church?"
I would ask the same
questions, and pose a few others - like why so many faithful Catholics
have failed to support, morally and financially, Christian Order and
Pro Eccclesia et Pontifice? - who, alone, on their behalf, have consistently
screamed "unbloody murder!" at the ongoing spiritual massacre
of the innocent, especially children, within the Church. And why,
if we are to be brutally honest with ourselves, when silence was
called for in this very hall four years ago, so many of us chose to
applaud the architect of our own demise. On that defining day
of Basil Hume's tenure, between 2.30-3 pm on 4th May 1996
- ironically the Feast of the English Martyrs - I sat up upstairs
and watched a Catholic Cardinal do a consummate impersonation of an
Anglican Archbishop oversighting an Anglican Synod with you
as just one more faction in the broad church he had embraced. And
how my heart sank as you rewarded Cardinal Hume's rebuke of your orthodoxy
and fidelity and obedience with a fulsome round of applause; preferring
human respect and false-charity to the truly charitable, stony silence
that his outrageous performance deserved and which would have said
more than ten thousand letters of protest. I could ask: 'what were
you thinking?' But that is my whole point, you were not
thinking; certainly not with a Catholic mind. Well might the
poet say that the best lack all conviction while the worst are full
of passionate intensity. Or as Jesus Himself said: "What a great pity
that the children of light are not as aggressive in the pursuit of
their goals as are the opposition."
Well, as Malachi wrote
to his sister, it is very late in the day to think we can wield the
sword of unity victoriously by cutting adrift all the dissident carriers
of the spiritual Aids now coursing through and emaciating the Body
of Christ. The time may have passed for fully restoring the
local British Churches to unity in truth. But Our Father in Heaven
doesn't ask that we be successful in our fight, just faithful. And
if we persevere faithfully in doing and saying what has to be said
and done, then as Mother Angelica declared on this stage four years
ago: "Victory IS already ours". But victory implies a battle;
implies holding fast to truth and vigorously resisting the
evil works of the fallen angels in all their ecclesial guises. As
the formidable Italian Cardinal Tettamanzi said at last year's European
Synod: "Catholics must learn to resist in the face of any seduction;
ceasing to live as one of the herd." He was referring to the Culture
War beyond the Church but the point is even more relevant to the Ecclesial
War within the Church.
And so finally, I say,
that if we are to salvage anything from the wreckage of thirty years,
if we really desire to re-establish unity in truth, we too have to
resist the seductions of counterfeit dialogue and tolerance
on the one hand, and Jolley Hockey Stick false optimism and Quietism
on the other, recover our taste for the great Catholic tradition of
bellicosity and polemic in defence of our glorious Faith, and cease
living as "one of the herd." We have to start getting serious
about our Faith!
- We have to recover our hatred for
heresy and learn to love God enough to be angry for His glory;
- we have to love men enough to be
charitably truthful for their souls;
- we have to love the bishops enough
to stop licking their boots - love them enough to tell them the
truth about themselves and what they've become;
- we have to reject the siren voices
of the Pollyanna Catholics and overcome our desire to be seen as
"respectable" by the very men who have brought the Church low;
- we must refuse to take a backward
step in responding to the Holy Father's request that we demand
the rights that are ours by baptism;
- we have to turn our focus from secular
symptoms to ecclesial causes and get behind Christian Order, Catholic
Truth and PEEP and be together, rock solid, united in putting the
health of the Church before everything else by calling the
bishops to account;
- and to do all of that in the year
2000 we have to divest ourselves of our 1970s conservative self-image
and stop apologising for what we're about, for what we are
- and what is that?
We ARE principal protagonists
in a spiritual civil war! We ARE a Catholic RESISTANCE
MOVEMENT! And for the sake of your children and grandchildren, for
the love of Jesus Christ crucified, it's time we started praying and
thinking and acting like one! Acting like worthy successors
and keepers of the FAITH OF OUR FATHERS!
Labels: smoke of satan
