Rorate Caeli veröffentlicht einen Brief, in dem Marcel de Corte 1970 anlässlich der Promulgierung der "Neuen Messe" seiner Empörung ungefiltert Ausdruck verleiht. Marcel de Corte war ein katholischer, belgischer Philosophie-Professor und Neo-Thomist. ( † )
Man wagt kaum, sich vorzustellen, was er über die heutigen Abrissarbeiten an der TLM und den derzeitigen Inhaber des Petrus-Amtes schreiben würde. Hier geht ´s zum Original: klicken
"MARCEL DE CORTES BRIEF VON 1970 AN JEAN MADIRAN "ZUR NEUEN MESSE" - "PAUL VI IST EIN MANN VOLLER WIDERSPRÜCHE"
Der folgende Text wurde in Ausgabe Nr. 140 von Itineraires im Februar 1970 veröffentlicht.
Ich muss Dir gegenüber zugeben, mein lieber Jean Madiran, daß ich mehrmals in Versuchung war, die Katholische Kirche zu verlassen, in die ich geboren wurde. Wenn ich das noch nicht getan habe, ist Gott und dem gesunden Menschenverstand, mit dem er mich gesegnet hat, zu danken. Die Kirche - das murmele ich zur Zeit vor mich hin- ist wie ein Sack Weizen, der von Rüsselkäfern befallen ist. Wie zahlreich die Parasiten auch immer sind- und auf den ersten Blick ausschwärmen - haben sie nicht alles Korn steril gemacht. Einiges bleibt fruchtbar und beginnt, sich zu vermehren und die Rüsselkäfer werden sterben, wenn sie alle anderen gefressen haben. Guten Appetit Gentlemen, Sie essen Ihren eigenen Tod.
Inzwischen leiden wir Hunger, hungern nach dem Übernatürlichen. Die Zahl der Priester, die das Brot der Seelen verteilen, schrumpft besorgniserregend. In der Hierarchie steht die Sache sogar noch schlimmer. und an der Spitze - von wo wir ein bisschen Trost erwarten könnten.- ist sie katastrophal.
Ich beichte, daß ich lange Zeit von Paul VI getäuscht worden bin. Ich dachte, daß er versucht das Wichtige zu bewahren. Immer wieder habe ich mir die Worte Ludwigs XVI an den Dauphin wiederholt: "Ich fürchte nicht, Dir zu sagen, dass je höher die Stellung ist, die man inne hat, desto mehr Dinge kann man nicht sehen, außer man hält sie in der Hand". Weil ich weder Papst noch auch nur Kleriker bin, habe ich mir gesagt, "Wegen seiner Position sieht er, was ich nicht sehen kann. deshalb vertraue ich ihm, sogar wenn die meisten seiner Handlungen, Haltungen und Äußerungen mir nicht gut gefallen, und sein ständiges (anscheinend konstantes) Manövrieren mich schwindelig macht. Armer Mann, man muss ihn bedauern, besonders weil er offensichtlich der Ausgabe nicht gewachsen ist. ...Aber dennoch- mit Gottes Hilfe."
Jedoch - und das gereicht der Menschheit zur Ehre- gibt es in der Geschichte kein Beispiel eines Betrügers, der sich nicht irgendwann selbst entlarvt hätte. Indem man zu sehr versucht zu sein, was man nicht ist, enthüllt man am Ende seine wahre Natur. Zu viel List geht nach hinten los. Die Menschen sind bereit, ein bisschen Trickserei zu tolerieren, besonders wenn sie einen italienischen Touch hat. Aber es gibt eine Grenze, und jenseits dieser hört man auf, ein guter Schauspieler zu sein, und wird zum Gefangenen seiner eigenen Scharade, verstrickt in seinen eigenen Illusionen.
Der Wendepunkt für mich kam mit der Kontroverse um die Heilige Messe. Bis dahin konnte man reinfallen, sich täuschen, und hinters Licht führen lassen. Das war der Preis für die Ehre, die man den etablierten Mächten schuldete. Aber jetzt ist die Zeit vorbei, in der man "mit mir Spielchen spielt“, wie mein alter Lehrer immer sagte. Diesen Ausdruck benutzte er, als wir auf dem Land waren, wo solche Direktheit natürlich ist, und er viel energischer war. Pater Cardonnel, der voller Literatur steckt und sie jedem in den Mund legt, fehlt diese entzückende Spontaneität der Sprache, diese stolze und männliche Behauptung eines Menschen, der es nicht mehr erträgt, auch nur einen Moment lang getäuscht zu werden. "Es ist vorbei. Es ist. V. O. R.B. E.I - VORBEI“, sagte er dann zu dem unvorsichtigen Kerl, der die Dinge zu weit getrieben hatte.
Ich sage das sehr ruhig und nachdenklich, mit der ganzen Zuversicht eines Mannes aus bäuerlicher Herkunft, wo der Katholizismus vom Vater auf den Sohn überliefert wird, wo das Übernatürliche selbst greifbar ist, der von der Bewirtschaftung der Felder wie seine Vorfahren (derer er völlig unwürdig ist) zur Kultivierung des Geistes übergegangen ist, aus dem Gott einen Sohn genommen hat, der sich der Kirche widmet, und der sich von Kopf bis Fuß tief in der Kirche verwurzelt fühlt. Ich sage so entschieden, ohne das geringste Zögern: "NEIN. Ich habe genug. Ich lasse mich nicht verarschen. Ich lasse mich nicht aufs Glatteis führen. Ich werde nicht so tun, als sei Paul VI. ein neuer Heiliger Pius X., tiefgreifend verwandelt, natürlich zum Besseren, wie es unserer fortschrittlichen Ära entspricht.“
Wie kann man es wagen zu verkünden, daß es keine "Neue Messe“ gibt, daß „sich nichts geändert hat“, daß „alles so ist wie vorher“, wenn nichts oder fast nichts von der Messe übrig geblieben ist, die so viele Heilige mit Liebe geschätzt haben? Wenn die "Experten“, die aus Gründen des öffentlichen Nutzens mit diesem Abrissprojekt beauftragt wurden, es immer wieder als eine wahre liturgische "Revolution“ bezeichnet haben? Wenn das einfache Gewissen der einfachen Gläubigen durch diese Umwälzung erschüttert wurde? Wie eine alte Dame ausrief, als sie am ersten Adventssonntag die Kirche verließ, niedergeschlagen vom "Neuen Ritus“ (das Adjektiv stammt von Paul VI., der gerne mit Widersprüchen spielt): "Das! Eine Messe? Man erkennt sie nicht wieder!“ Es war so offensichtlich, daß der Zelebrant, sei es aus Ablenkung oder aus Eile, die Wandlung des Weines ausgelassen hatte! Aber was macht das schon in einer Messe, in der das Konzept des Opfers per Definition fehlt?
Ich werde hier nicht die Argumente gegen diese neue Liturgie wiederholen. Andere, die gut informiert, kompetent und zuverlässig sind, haben dies bereits getan und es gut gemacht. Wenn die Meinungen von Experten mit dem gesunden Menschenverstand eines gewöhnlichen Christen übereinstimmen, besteht keine Notwendigkeit, eigene Kommentare hinzuzufügen. Alles wurde bereits von berühmten Spezialisten, erfahrenen Theologen und Kanonisten, Priestern und frommen Ordensleuten und sogar von jener guten einfachen Frau gesagt, die den tiefsten und herzlichsten Protest der christlichen Massen gegen diese "Transformation“ zum Ausdruck brachte: „Sie erkennen es nicht mehr!“ Das fasst es perfekt zusammen: "Sie erkennen es nicht mehr.“ Die Gläubigen spüren es instinktiv: "Da ist nichts mehr Katholisches mehr dran.“
"Diese Messe stellt sowohl als Ganzes als auch in ihren Einzelheiten eine bemerkenswerte Abkehr von der katholischen Theologie der Heiligen Messe dar, wie sie in der 22. Sitzung des Konzils von Trient formuliert wurde, das durch die endgültige Festlegung der ‚Kanons‘ des Ritus eine unüberwindbare Barriere gegen jede Häresie errichtete, die die Integrität des Mysteriums angreifen könnte.“ Die strengen Worte von Kardinal Ottaviani können von niemandem guten Glaubens bestritten werden, der den neuen Ordo Missæ studiert und alle seine Einzelheiten bedacht hat. Keiner guten Glaubens kann die düstere Realität ignorieren, nachdem er, wie wir es in Belgien nach dem 30. November getan haben, jeden Sonntag und an Weihnachten "die neue Messe“ gehört hat, die von Technokraten des Glaubens vorgefertigt wurde. Eingezwängt zwischen einer pompösen und theatralischen Liturgie des Wortes und einer "selbstbedienenden“ Liturgie des Mahls wird das HEILIGE MESSOPER, also das WESENTLICHE, im Handumdrehen von einem Geistlichen abgehalten, der meiner Erfahrung nach in neun von zehn Fällen nicht einen einzigen Augenblick an das zu glauben scheint, was er tut.
Ich wiederhole: Dies wurde gründlich nachgewiesen, und gegen diese Beweise und Argumente wurde nichts als gewundene Rhetorik und Jeremiaden vorgebracht
Diese "neue Messe“ MUSS mit aller Energie und dem Mut von Pater Roger-Thomas Calmel, O.P. und gemäß den von Jean Madiran aufgestellten Richtlinien ABGELEHNT WERDEN, auch wenn sie bei Bedarf individuell, mit der gebotenen Vorsicht und je nach den Umständen angepasst werden müssen, mit der immer präsenten doppelten Absicht, das Häretische im Amt abzulehnen und nur das Orthodoxe anzunehmen.
Ich für meinen Teil stopfe mir sorgfältig die Ohren mit Wachs zu. Ich verstecke mich hinten in der Kirche hinter einem Vorhang, den ich verdicke, indem ich mich auf den niedrigsten Stuhl setze, den ich finden kann. Ich lese die Heilige Messe im Messbuch, das mir meine heilige Mutter gegeben hat, nachdem das vorherige, das sie mir bereits gegeben hatte, in Fetzen abgenutzt war. Ich lese die Nachfolge Christi auf Latein während des Geschwätzes, das jetzt als Predigt durchgeht. Ich nehme von ganzem Herzen an der Erneuerung des Opfers auf Golgatha teil. Ich zwinge den Priester, der die Kommunion in die Hände der "Schafe“ austeilt, die er zähmen soll, sie mir am Kommuniongitter zu geben, wo ich niederknie. Und während des letzten Lärms gehe ich nach draußen, um zu meditieren und zu beten, dass der Herr mich noch taub für den Lärm der Welt machen möge, sowohl wörtlich als auch im übertragenen Sinn.
Ich muss sagen, dass ich manchmal wütend werde, wenn ich irgendeinen Schwachsinn höre, wie diesen hier, dessen Echtheit ich garantiere: "Lasst uns beten, meine Brüder, dass es unter jungen Männern und Frauen, die sich durch ihre ähnliche Frisur und Kleidung zusammenfinden, keinen Unterschied zwischen den Geschlechtern mehr gibt.“ Aber man kann sich an alles gewöhnen, sogar an den lächerlichsten Unsinn. Wie Léon Bloy richtig sagte, muss man mit seiner Verachtung sparsam umgehen, denn es gibt so viele, die sie verdienen.
Lassen Sie uns die Wahrheit nicht verschleiern. Unsere Ablehnung impliziert ein Urteil über die Taten und Worte von Paul VI. und sogar über seine Person, mit der wir gegen unseren Willen die Tugend der "brüderlichen Zurechtweisung“ praktizieren müssen, die der heilige Thomas von Aquin als Erweiterung der Tugenden des Almosengebens und der Nächstenliebe betrachtete und die man, sagt er, sogar öffentlich gegenüber seinen Vorgesetzten praktizieren muss, nachdem man alle verborgenen Mittel dazu ausgeschöpft hat (II-IIae, q. 33). Man kann davon ausgehen, dass ein Untergebener wie Kardinal Ottaviani, der die päpstliche Autorität so sehr respektierte, seinen Gedenkbrief an Paul VI. nicht öffentlich machte, ohne zuvor alle diplomatische Vorsicht walten zu lassen. "Wenn ein Vorgesetzter tugendhaft ist“, schreibt ein Kommentator der Summa, "wird er dankbar jede Warnung annehmen, die ihm Klarheit verschaffen könnte. Er wird der Erste sein, der zugibt, dass es richtig ist, ihn zu warnen und dass er nicht in jeder Hinsicht unantastbar ist.“ Und er fügt hinzu, in Anlehnung an den heiligen Thomas, dass die Warnung öffentlich erfolgen muss, "wenn zum Beispiel ein Vorgesetzter offenkundige Häresien öffentlich erklärt oder einen großen Skandal verursacht und damit den Glauben und das Seelenheil seiner Untergebenen gefährdet.“
Kardinal Ottaviani ist sicherlich nicht der Einzige, der denkt, daß Paul VI. mit seinen Worten und Taten "auffallend von der katholischen Theologie der Heiligen Messe abweicht“. Es ist in der Tat unvorstellbar, daß der Papst ein so wichtiges Dokument nur überflogen und es nachlässig unterzeichnet hat. Der Ordo Missæ und die Neue Messe, die wir entschieden ablehnen, wurden von Paul VI. allen Katholiken aufgezwungen.
Wie kann eine solche Haltung eines Papstes in einer so kritischen Zeit der Kirchengeschichte möglich sein? Ich kann nicht anders, als mir diese Frage zu stellen. Und ich kann meine Antwort nicht länger für mich behalten. Es steht zu viel auf dem Spiel, als daß Laien Priester aller Ränge allein und ohne die Unterstützung einiger Gläubiger, die sie vor der Gefahr gewarnt haben, gegen den "Skandal“ der neuen Messe kämpfen lassen könnten.
Es geht nicht darum, sich zu empören – so verlockend das auch sein mag –, sondern darum, zu verstehen.
Paul VI. ist ein Mann voller Widersprüche. Er ist ein Mann, der das heilige Messopfer in seinem "Credo des Volkes Gottes“ in großen und traditionellen Worten preist, es aber in der Neuen Messe, die er der katholischen Christenheit auferlegt, herunterspielt. Dies ist ein Mann, der die offiziellen Erklärungen des Konzils über Latein, "die liturgische Sprache schlechthin“, und den Gregorianischen Gesang, einen Schatz, der eifrig bewahrt werden muss, unterzeichnet und verkündet und sich darüber hinaus öffentlich zu deren Bewahrung verpflichtet, der jedoch seine Unterschrift und sein Wort bricht, nachdem er in einer so wichtigen Angelegenheit, nämlich der Ausdrucksweise der Anbetung Gottes, nur Liturgieexperten konsultiert hat, von denen einige verdächtig sind, während andere dissidenten christlichen Gemeinschaften angehören. Dies ist ein Mann, der dafür sorgt, dass der niederländische Katechismus zensiert wird, der jedoch die Verbreitung der darin enthaltenen dogmatischen Irrtümer duldet. Dies ist der Mann, der den französischen Katechismus autorisiert, dessen Irrtümer, Auslassungen und Verzerrungen der offenbarten Wahrheit umso schwerwiegender sind, da er für Kinder bestimmt ist, der jedoch Abweichungen vom Glauben auf der ganzen Welt untersucht. Dies ist der Mann, der Maria zur Mutter der Kirche erklärt, der jedoch zulässt, dass zahllose Kleriker aller Ränge die Reinheit ihres Namens beschmutzen. Dies ist der Mann, der im Petersdom und in der freimaurerischen Besinnungskammer der Vereinten Nationen betet. Dies ist der Mann, der zwei Schauspielerinnen Audienz gewährt, die bewusst und provokativ in Miniröcke gekleidet sind, sich dann aber gegen die wachsende Welle der Sexualisierung in der Welt ausspricht. Dies ist der Mann, der Pastor Boegner sagt, Katholiken seien nicht reif genug für die Empfängnisverhütung mit "der Pille“, der aber Humanæ vitæ veröffentlicht und gleichzeitig zulässt, dass es von ganzen Bischofskonferenzen in Frage gestellt wird.
Dies ist der Mann, der verkündet, daß das Gesetz zum Zölibat der Priester niemals abgeschafft werden wird, der jedoch zulässt, dass es endlos in Frage gestellt wird, während er es Priestern, die heiraten möchten, leicht macht, dies zu tun. Dies ist der Mann, der die Handkommunion verbietet, sie aber zulässt und sogar bestimmten Kirchen durch ein besonderes Indult erlaubt, Laien die heiligen Hostien austeilen zu lassen. Das ist der Mann, der die "Selbstzerstörung der Kirche“ beklagt, der aber, obwohl er ihr Chef und Oberhaupt ist, nichts unternimmt, um sie zu stoppen, und sie somit mit seinem eigenen Einverständnis geschehen lässt. Das ist der Mann, der die Nota prævia bezüglich seiner Befugnisse erlässt, der aber zulässt, dass sie auf der Synode von Rom als überholt und in Vergessenheit geraten abgetan wird usw.
Man könnte die Widersprüche des Papstes endlos aufzählen. Der Mann selbst ist ein permanenter Widerspruch und eine ständige Vielseitigkeit sowie eine grundlegende Zweideutigkeit.
Ein Mann, der seine eigenen inneren Widersprüche nicht überwinden kann und sie offen zur Schau stellt, ist auch nicht in der Lage, die äußeren Widersprüche zu überwinden, denen er bei der Leitung der Kirche begegnet. Er ist ein schwacher und unentschlossener Papst, wie andere in der Geschichte der Kirche, der seine Unentschlossenheit hinter einer Flut von Rhetorik verbirgt, die Kaiser Julian, der Apostat genannt wurde, in Bezug auf die arianischen Bischöfe seiner Zeit, die sie so geschickt praktizierten, als „die Kunst bezeichnete, das Wichtige herunterzuspielen, das Unwichtige zu übertreiben und die Realität der Dinge durch die Künstlichkeit der Worte zu ersetzen“. Manchmal werden in einer einzigen Phrase einer päpstlichen Ansprache Schwarz und Weiß durch syntaktische Tricks kombiniert und in Einklang gebracht.
Die zweite Hypothese ist nicht weniger wahrscheinlich: Der Papst weiß, was er will, und die Widersprüche, die er zeigt, sind lediglich jene, denen ein Mann der Tat, der von dem Ziel, das er erreichen will, getrieben wird, auf seinem Weg begegnet und die ihn nicht im Geringsten beunruhigen, da er von der Kraft seines Ehrgeizes mitgerissen wird.
In dieser Hinsicht kann man, insbesondere nach dem neuen Ordo Missæ und der neuen Messe, davon ausgehen, daß es Paul VI. Absicht ist, in einer einzigen liturgischen Aktion Klerus und Laien aus den verschiedenen christlichen Konfessionen zusammenzubringen. Wie jeder erfahrene Politiker weiß der Papst, dass es möglich ist, Menschen mit grundlegend unterschiedlichen „philosophischen und religiösen Ansichten“ zu vereinen, wie wir bei Treffen in meiner Jugend sagten. Wenn dies der Fall ist, können wir in naher Zukunft weitere Manifestationen päpstlichen ökumenischen Handelns erwarten, die dem politischen Manövrieren nachempfunden sind.
Es stimmt, daß die beiden Interpretationen des Verhaltens von Paul VI. kombiniert werden können. Ein schwacher Mensch flieht vor seiner Schwäche oder, genauer gesagt, vor sich selbst und stürzt sich in Handlungen, bei denen Widersprüche lediglich verschiedene Phasen der für die Handlung selbst wesentlichen Veränderungen sind. Solche Temperamente sind klar auf die Welt und die mit ihr verbundenen Metamorphosen ausgerichtet, die das eigene Handeln darin beeinflussen. Man kann dann ohne Schwierigkeiten einen „neuen Katechismus“ akzeptieren, der mit dem alten Katechismus unvereinbar ist, „weil es eine neue Welt gibt“, wie die französischen Bischöfe sagen, und in der Sprache der Welt hat „eine neue Welt“ nichts mit der vorherigen gemeinsam, so wie eine neue Mode nichts mit einer alten gemeinsam hat. „Es ist daher nicht mehr möglich“, fügen sie hinzu, „Riten als dauerhaft festgelegt in einer sich rasch entwickelnden Welt zu betrachten.“ Man hat uns gewarnt: Die neue Messe ist wie eine permanente Revolution, die alle Jugendlichen und Erwachsenen anspricht, die ihre Pubertätskrisen noch nicht hinter sich gelassen haben, denn sie verdeckt die Widersprüche, die sie nicht überwinden können, gerade weil diese Widersprüche zu ihnen gehören.
Epigonen zeigen diese Eigenschaft am deutlichsten, sogar übertrieben. Marx sagte, die Geschichte habe die Tragödie Napoleons I. als Komödie unter Napoleon III. wiederholt. Ebenso wurde einem gewissen belgischen Bischof, der mir wie eine Art Mini-Paul VI. vorkommt, gerade die Aufgabe übertragen, der verblüfften Öffentlichkeit die neue Messe vorzustellen. "Dies“, erklärte er in lächerlichen Worten, "markiert das erste letzte Kapitel der seit dem Zweiten Vatikanischen Konzil laufenden Liturgiereform.“ Uns wird versichert, daß es ein zweites letztes Kapitel geben wird, und dann ein drittes, und so endlos weiter. Der Mensch, der versucht, durch Veränderung vor sich selbst zu fliehen, holt nie auf, trotz seiner manchmal komischen Bemühungen.
Aus dieser Perspektive ist es schwer, in der Geschichte zwei Päpste zu finden, die sich radikaler unterscheiden als der heilige Pius X. und Paul VI.
Ich habe kürzlich die Enzyklika Pascendi erneut gelesen. Auf fast jeder Seite stelle ich fest, dass der erstere das akzeptiert, toleriert und gutheißt, was der erstere ablehnt.
Der heilige Pius X. war der Fels der Lehre, ein Mann, der seinen Posten und sein Volk während des Sturms nicht im Stich ließ und der sich keiner seiner Verantwortungen entzog, wie Paul VI. in seiner bemerkenswerten Rede vom 7. Dezember 1968 zugab: "Viele erwarten vom Papst dramatische Gesten und energische und entschlossene Eingriffe. Der Papst glaubt, daß er keiner anderen Linie folgen sollte als der des Vertrauens in Jesus Christus, dem seine Kirche mehr als jedem anderen anvertraut ist. Er ist es, der den Sturm beruhigen wird.“
Der heilige Pius X. war nicht der Mann der ausschließlich pastoralen Leitung, wie Paul VI. in seiner Rede vom 17. Februar 1979 behauptete, er sei "offen für Verständnis und Nachsicht“. Vielmehr war er ein Papst, der dem Beispiel seiner Vorgänger folgte, die die gesunde Lehre mit äußerster Wachsamkeit und unerschütterlicher Entschlossenheit verteidigten und sich verpflichteten, sie vor jeglichem Schaden zu bewahren, "indem sie des Gebots des Apostels eingedenk waren: ‚Bewahre das gute Gut‘“ (2. Timotheus 1:14).
Für den heiligen Pius X. "lehrte Jesus Christus, dass die erste Pflicht der Päpste darin besteht, das traditionelle Glaubensgut mit größter Wachsamkeit zu bewahren und profane Wortneuheiten abzulehnen“, gegenüber "denen, die jede Autorität verachten und, sich auf ein falsches Gewissen verlassend, versuchen, der Liebe zur Wahrheit das zuzuschreiben, was in Wirklichkeit das Ergebnis von Stolz und Sturheit ist.“ Er hätte nie zugegeben, wie Paul VI. oft angedeutet hat, dass "die Wahrheit in den religiösen Erfahrungen“ anderer Religionen gleichermaßen zu finden ist und dass Juden, Muslimen und Christen derselbe Gott gemeinsam ist. Er hat "Lehrern des Irrtums“ wie Marie-Dominique Chenu und seinesgleichen nie Ehrungen zuteilwerden lassen, "um den Glauben zu erwecken, ihre Bewunderung gelte nicht nur den Personen, die vielleicht nicht ohne Verdienste sind, sondern vielmehr den Irrtümern, die sie offen bekennen und verteidigen.“
Der heilige Pius X. hätte nie behauptet, daß "der Gottesdienst aus einem Bedürfnis geboren wird, denn im System der Modernisten erklärt sich alles durch innere Impulse oder Notwendigkeiten“. Wie viele Texte von Paul VI. könnten wir hier auflisten, die das genaue Gegenteil behaupten, insbesondere seine Rede vom 26. November 1969, in der er seine Ablehnung des lateinischen und gregorianischen Gesangs in der neuen Messe damit rechtfertigte, daß die Menschen angeblich ihr Gebet verstehen und am Gottesdienst "in ihrer Alltagssprache“ teilnehmen müssten. Der heilige Pius X. billigte die "große Besorgnis der Modernisten, einen Weg der Versöhnung zwischen der Autorität der Kirche und der Freiheit der Gläubigen zu finden“, nicht, wie es Paul VI. ständig tut. Er bekannte sich nicht zu "jener höchst schädlichen Lehre, die die Laien zu einem Faktor des Fortschritts in der Kirche machen würde“, noch suchte er "Kompromisse und Verhandlungen zwischen den Kräften der Bewahrung und des Fortschritts in der Kirche, um die von unserer Zeit geforderten Veränderungen und Fortschritte herbeizuführen“. Ebenso wenig folgte der heilige Pius X. der "rein subjektiven“ Methode, die die Modernisten dazu treibt, "sich in die Lage und Person Christi zu versetzen und ihm dann zuzuschreiben, was sie unter ähnlichen Umständen getan hätten“, wie dies Paul VI. tut, der, nachdem er einseitig den Gebrauch der neuen Messe angeordnet hatte, bekräftigte, dass sein Wille „der Wille Christi ist, der Hauch des Geistes, der die Kirche zu dieser Umwandlung aufruft“. Und er fügte pathetisch hinzu, um zu zeigen, daß seine Inspiration mit der göttlichen Inspiration übereinstimmt (obwohl er in seinem Credo klarstellt, daß dies nicht der Fall ist): "Dieser prophetische Augenblick, der durch den mystischen Leib Christi, der die Kirche ist, geht, erschüttert, weckt und zwingt, die geheimnisvolle Kunst ihres Gebets zu erneuern“ (26. November 1969). "Das Sicherste und Geschützteste“, sagte der heilige Johannes vom Kreuz, "ist, Prophezeiungen und Offenbarungen zu meiden, und wenn uns irgendetwas Neues im Hinblick auf den Glauben offenbart wird [die lex orandi ist auch lex credendi, und jede offensichtliche Neuheit im Gottesdienst ist Neuheit im Glauben], sollte man dem auf keinen Fall zustimmen“ (Aufstieg auf den Berg Karmel, 1. II, Kap. 19 und 27).
Ist es schließlich nicht offensichtlich, dass hinter den Interventionen Pauls VI. auf der Weltbühne die Überzeugung steht, die der heilige Pius X. als schädlich zurückwies, dass "das Reich Gottes sich im Laufe der Geschichte langsam weiterentwickelt hat, indem es sich nach und nach an die verschiedenen Medien angepasst hat, durch die es gegangen ist, und durch lebenswichtige Assimilation alle […] Formen übernommen hat, die seinem Zweck dienten“?
Fortsetzung folgt...
Quelle. Marcel de Cortes Rosate Caeli,
Saint Pius X would never have suggested that “worship is born from a need, for everything in the modernists’ system is explained by inner impulses or necessities.” How many texts by Paul VI we could list here that state the exact opposite, especially his speech of 26 November 1969, where he justified his repudiation of Latin and Gregorian chant in the new Mass by invoking the people’s supposed need to understand their prayer and participate in the office “in their everyday language.” Saint Pius X did not approve of the modernists’ “great anxiety to find a way of conciliation between the authority of the Church and the liberty of believers,” as Paul VI constantly does. He did not profess “that most pernicious doctrine which would make of the laity a factor of progress in the Church” nor did he seek “compromises and transactions between the forces of conservation and of progress in the Church in order to bring about the changes and progress demanded by our times.” Similarly, Saint Pius X did not follow the “purely subjective” method that drives modernists “to put themselves in to the position and person of Christ and then to attribute to him what they would have done under like circumstances,” as Paul VI does when he affirms, having unilaterally decreed the use of the new Mass, that his will “is the Will of Christ, the breath of the Spirit calling the Church to this transformation,” adding, pathetically, to show that his inspiration coincides with divine inspiration (although he specifies that it is not the case in his Credo), that “this prophetic moment passing through the mystical Body of Christ, which is the Church, shakes her, wakes her, and compels her to renew the mysterious art of her prayer” (26 November 1969). “What is safest and most secure,” said Saint John of the Cross, “is to flee from prophecies and revelations, and if anything new regarding the faith is revealed to us [the lex orandi is also lex credendi, and any manifest novelty in worship is novelty in the faith] it should in no way be consented to” (Ascent of Mount Carmel, 1. II, ch. 19 and 27).
Finally, is it not evident that behind Paul VI’s interventions on the world stage there lies the conviction, which Saint Paul X rejected as pernicious, that “God’s kingdom has gone on slowly developing in the course of history, adapting itself successively to the different mediums through which it has passed, borrowing from them by vital assimilation all the […] forms that served its purpose”?
As John H. Knox noticed in a penetrating article in National Review (21 October 1969), there is no doubt that “there never was and probably never will be a pope who has tried so hard to please the liberals and who so sincerely shares so many of their beliefs.” And yet Paul VI, in an act of supreme contradiction, labels this progressivism as modernismus redivivus!
In any case, Paul VI evidently shares the modernists’ main goal of making the Catholic Church acceptable to non-Catholic churches and even to all atheist régimes, as his recent Christmas address (and many previous ones) suggests: China and Russia now deserve Catholics’ deference and esteem! Let us remember his enthusiastic support for the Chinese youth Mao mobilized in the “Cultural Revolution”!
This is a dream, an illusion whose vanity the Gospel itself reveals to us: the Church, no matter how appealing she might try to make herself, will never be loved by the world. As harsh as our assessment of Paul VI might be, we must say, in the final analysis, that despite the undeniable qualities of his heart, the current Pope consistently sees things differently than they are. His is a false spirit.
Like all false spirits, he is unconsciously cruel. While a contemplative is gentle, a man of action who, like Paul VI, views the goal of his action through a dreamlike lens, is pitiless towards the poor souls of flesh and bone he cannot see or, if he does, considers to be obstacles. This explains the inflexible nature of Paul VI’s character, seemingly at odds with his inability to govern the Church. A man of action is almost always inhuman, but when he moves in a millenarian and spiritually triumphant atmosphere, one must then be afraid… Paul VI will move forward, without looking back, crushing all resistance…
Unless God opens his eyes… That would be a miracle…
*
Nothing remains but to try to incorporate into our lives the obligation Saint John of the Cross mentions in one of his letters: “In order to have God in all things, we must have nothing in all things.” The Church has entered the Dark Night of the senses and of the spirit, the gateway to the Dawn. Her condition invites us to enter into our own.
This eternal fountain is hidden deep,
Well I know where it has its spring,
Though it is night!
Sie werden aussprossen und die Rüsselkäfer werden sterben- wenn sie mal alle andren gefressen haben.
Marcel De Corte's 1970 Letter to Jean Madiran “On the New Mass” - First Translation into English - "Paul VI is a man full of contradictions"
I must admit to you, my dear Jean Madiran, that I have been tempted more than once to leave the Catholic Church wherein I was born. If I have not done so, I give thanks to God and to the good peasant’s common sense with which he has blessed me. The Church—I murmur to myself at this moment—is like a sack of wheat infested with weevils. However numerous the parasites are—and at first glance, they are swarming!—they have not sterilized all the kernels. Some, no matter how few, remain fertile. They will sprout and the weevils will die once they have devoured all the others. Bon appétit, gentlemen, you are eating your own death.
Meanwhile, we suffer from famine, starving for the supernatural. The number of priests who distribute the bread of the soul to us dwindles at an alarming rate. In the hierarchy, things are even worse. And at the very top, whence we might expect some solace, they are disastrous.
I confess that I was fooled by Paul VI for a long time. I thought he was trying to preserve what is essential. I kept repeating to myself Louis XIV’s words to the Dauphin: “I fear not telling you that the higher the position, the more things there are one cannot see or know except when holding it.” Being neither a pope nor even a cleric, I told myself, “He sees what I cannot see, because of his position. Therefore, I trust him, even if most of his deeds, attitudes, and statements do not sit well with me, and his constant (seemingly constant) manœuvering makes my head spin. Poor man, he is to be pitied, especially since he is obviously not up to the task… But still, with God’s help…”
However—and this is to the glory of mankind—there is no example in history of a deceiver who does not eventually unmask himself. By trying too hard to be what one is not, one ultimately reveals one’s true nature. Too much cunning backfires. Men are willing to tolerate a bit of trickery, especially when it has an Italian flair. But there is a limit, and beyond it one stops being a good actor and becomes a prisoner of one’s own charade, entangled in one’s own feats of illusion.
The turning point for me came with the controversy over the Holy Mass. Until then, one could be fooled, deceived, and duped. That was the price of the honours owed to established powers. But now the time for “playing games with me,” as my old teacher used to say, is over. It is a phrase he used when we were in the countryside, where such bluntness comes naturally, and he was much more energetic. Father Cardonnel, filled with literature and spewing it out at everyone, lacks this delightful spontaneity of language, that proud and manly assertion of one who can no longer stand being deceived for even a moment. “It’s over. It’s. O. VER. OVER,” he would go on to say to the imprudent fellow who had pushed things too far.
I say this very calmly and thoughtfully, with all the confidence of a man of peasant stock, where Catholicism is passed down from father to son, where the supernatural is itself tangible, who has moved from cultivating fields like his ancestors (of whom he is quite unworthy) to cultivating minds, from whom God has taken a son dedicated to the Church, and who feels himself, from head to foot, deeply rooted in the Church. I say so firmly, without the least hesitation: “NO. I have had enough. I will not be taken for a ride. I will not be led up the garden path. I will not pretend that Paul VI is a new Saint Pius X, profoundly transformed, for the better of course, as befits our progressive era.”
How dare one proclaim that there is no “new Mass,” that “nothing has changed,” that “everything is as it was before,” when nothing or almost nothing remains of the Mass that so many saints cherished with love? When the “experts” appointed to work on this demolition project for reasons of public utility have described it time and time again as a veritable liturgical “revolution”? When the simple consciences of the ordinary faithful have been shaken by this upheaval? As an old lady exclaimed when leaving church on the first Sunday of Advent, crushed by the “new rite” (the adjective is Paul VI’s, who likes to play with contradictions), “That! A Mass? You can’t recognize it anymore!” That was so evident that the celebrant, either by distraction or haste, had omitted the consecration of the wine! But what does it matter in a Mass where the concept of sacrifice is, by definition, absent?
I will not repeat here the case against this new liturgy. Others, who are well-informed, competent, and reliable, have already done so and done it well. When expert opinions line up with the common sense of an ordinary Christian, there is no need to add one’s own comments. Everything has already been said by illustrious specialists, experienced theologians and canonists, priests and devout religious, and even by that good common woman who expressed the deepest and most heartfelt protest of the Christian masses against this “transformation”: “You can’t recognize it anymore!” That sums it up perfectly: “You can’t recognize it anymore.” The faithful sense it by instinct: “There’s nothing Catholic about it anymore.”
“This Mass represents, both as a whole and in its details, a striking departure from the Catholic theology of the Holy Mass, as it was formulated in the twenty-second session of the Council of Trent, which, by definitively fixing the ‘canons’ of the rite, erected an insurmountable barrier against any heresy that might attack the integrity of the Mystery.” Cardinal Ottaviani’s stern words can hardly be disputed by anyone of good faith who has studied the new Ordo Missæ and considered all its details. No one of good faith can ignore their grim reality after having heard, as we did in Belgium after 30 November, every Sunday and on Christmas, “the new Mass,” prefabricated by technocrats of the faith. Squeezed between a pompous and theatrical Liturgy of the Word and a “self-service” Liturgy of the Meal, the HOLY SACRIFICE OF THE MASS, in other words, the ESSENTIAL, is dispatched in the blink of an eye by a cleric who, nine times out of ten, in my experience, does not seem to believe in what he is doing for a single moment.
I repeat: this has been thoroughly demonstrated, and against this evidence and arguments nothing has been offered in response but serpentine rhetoric and jeremiads.
This “new Mass” MUST BE REJECTED with all the energy and courage of Father Roger-Thomas Calmel, O.P. and according to the guidelines set by Jean Madiran, even if they need to be adjusted individually as needed, with due caution and depending on the circumstances, with the twofold intention, always present in mind, to reject what is heretical in the Office and to accept only what is orthodox.
For my part, I carefully block my ears with wax. I hide at the back of the church behind a curtain, which screen I thicken by sitting in the lowest chair I can find. I read the Holy Mass in the Missal my saintly mother gave me after the previous one she had already given me had been used to shreds. I read the Imitation of Christ in Latin during the drivel that now passes for a sermon. I participate with all my heart at the renewal of the Sacrifice of Calvary. I force the priest who distributes communion into the hands of the “sheep” he has been instructed to domesticate to give it to me at the communion rail, where I kneel. And during the final racket, I go outside to meditate, praying that the Lord might make me even more deaf to the world’s clamour, both literally and figuratively.
I must say that I sometimes rage when I hear some idiocy reach my ears, like this one, whose authenticity I guarantee: “Let us pray, my brothers, that among young men and women gathered together by their similar hairstyles and clothing, there may be no longer any difference of sex.” But one can get used to anything, even to the most ridiculous nonsense. As Léon Bloy rightly said, one must be sparing with one’s contempt, because there are so many who deserve it.
Let us not disguise the truth. Our refusal implies a judgement on Paul VI’s actions and words, and even on his person, with whom we are must, against our will, practise the virtue of “fraternal correction,” which Saint Thomas Aquinas considered an extension of the virtues of almsgiving and of charity, and which, he says, one must even carry out publicly with one’s superiors, after having exhausted all hidden means of doing so (II-IIae, q. 33). One can safely presume that an inferior as respectful of papal authority as Cardinal Ottaviani did not make his memorial letter to Paul VI public without having first exercised all possible diplomatic prudence. “If a superior is virtuous,” writes a commentator on the Summa, “he will gratefully accept any warnings that might give him clarity. He will be the first to admit that it is right to warn him and that he is not untouchable in every regard.” And he adds, following Saint Thomas, that the warning must be public “when, for instance, a superior publicly declares manifest heresies or causes great scandal, thus endangering the faith and salvation of his subordinates.”
Cardinal Ottaviani is certainly not alone in thinking that Paul VI, by his words and deeds, is “departing strikingly from the Catholic theology of the Holy Mass.” It is indeed inconceivable that the Pope merely skimmed over such an important document and carelessly signed it. The Ordo Missæ and the New Mass we vigorously reject are willed and imposed by Paul VI upon all Catholics.
How can such an attitude be possible from a Pope during such a critical time in the Church’s history? I cannot help but ask myself this question. And I can no longer keep my answer silent. The stakes are too high for laymen to let priests of all ranks to fight alone, without the support of some of the faithful they have alerted to the danger, against the “scandal” of the new Mass.
The point is not to get outraged—however tempting that might be—but to understand.
Paul VI is a man full of contradictions. This is a man who extols the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass in grand and traditional terms in his “Credo of the People of God,” but who downplays it in the new Mass he imposes on Catholic Christendom. This a man who signs and promulgates the Council’s official declarations regarding Latin, “the liturgical language par excellence,” and Gregorian chant, a treasure to be zealously preserved, and who, moreover, commits publicly to preserving them, but who reneges on his signature and word after consulting, in a matter as important the mode of expression of the worship offered to God, only liturgical experts, some of which are suspect while others belong to dissident Christian communities. This is a man who sees to it that the Dutch Catechism is censured, but who tolerates the spread of the dogmatic errors it contains. This is the man who authorizes the French Catechism, whose errors, omissions, and distortions of revealed Truth are all the more serious since it is intended for children, but who investigates deviations from the faith around the world. This is the man who proclaims Mary Mother of the Church, but who allows countless clerics of all ranks to tarnish the purity of her name. This the man who prays at Saint Peter’s and in the Masonic-style Chamber of Reflection at the United Nations. This is the man who gives audience to two actresses deliberately and provocatively dressed in miniskirts, but who then speaks out against the growing wave of sexualization in the world. This is the man who tells Pastor Boegner that Catholics are not mature enough for birth control with “the pill,” but who publishes Humanæ vitæ, while allowing it to be challenged by entire bishops’ conferences.
This is the man who proclaims that the law on clerical celibacy will never be abolished, but allows it to be questioned endlessly, while making it easy for priests wishing to marry to do so. This is the man who forbids communion in the hand, but who permits it, even authorizing certain churches, by special indult, to have laymen to distribute the holy Hosts. This is the man who bemoans the “self-destruction of the Church,” but who, despite being its chief and head, does nothing to stop it, thus letting it happen through his own consent. This is the man who issues the Nota prævia regarding his powers, but who allows it to be dismissed at the Synod of Rome as outdated and consigned to oblivion, etc.
One could go endlessly listing the Pope’s contradictions. The man himself is permanent contradiction and versatility, as well as fundamental ambiguity.
Hence, there are two possibilities.
A man who is unable to overcome his own internal contradictions and who openly displays them for all to see is unable to overcome the external contradictions he encounters in governing the Church. He is a weak and indecisive Pope, like others in the history of the Church, who conceals his vacillations behind a flood of the rhetoric that the emperor Julian, called the Apostate, called, speaking of the Arian bishops of his time who practised it so skilfully, “the art of downplaying what matters, exaggerating what does not, and substituting the artifice of words for the reality of things.” Sometimes, in a single phrase of a papal address, black and white are combined and reconciled by syntactical tricks.
The second hypothesis is no less probable: the Pope knows what he wants and the contradictions he shows are merely those that a man of action, driven by the goal he wants to achieve, encounters along his path and is not in the least concerned about, carried away as he is by the force of his ambition.
In this respect, one can presume, especially after the new Ordo Missæ and the new Mass, that Paul VI’s intention is to bring together in a single liturgical action clergy and laity from the various Christian denominations. Like any seasoned politician, the Pope knows that it is possible to unite people with fundamentally different “philosophical and religious opinions,” as we said at meetings in my youth. If this is the case, we can expect in the near future further manifestations of pontifical ecumenical action, modelled on political manœuvering.
It is true that the two interpretations of Paul VI’s behaviour can be combined. A weak man flees from his weakness or, more precisely, from himself, and plunges into action where contradictions are merely different phases of the changes essential to the action itself. Such temperaments are clearly focused on the world and the metamorphoses it implies, which influence one’s actions therein. One can then without any difficulty accept a “new catechism,” irreconcilable with the catechism of old, “because there is a new world,” as the French bishops say, and, in the language of the world, “a new world” has nothing in common with the previous one, just as a new fashion has nothing in common with a old one. “It is therefore no longer possible,” they add, “to view rites as permanently fixed in a rapidly evolving world.” We have been put on notice: the new Mass is akin to the permanent revolution that appeals to all adolescents and adults who have not yet moved past their crises of puberty, since it masks the contradictions they cannot overcome, precisely because these contradictions are integral to them.
Epigones manifest this trait most clearly, even exaggeratedly. Marx said that history repeated the tragedy of Napoleon I as a comedy under Napoleon III. Likewise, a certain Belgian bishop, who seems to me a sort of mini-Paul VI, has just been given the task of introducing the new Mass to the bewildered public. “This,” he declared in laughable terms, “marks the first final chapter of the liturgical reform ongoing since Vatican II.” We are assured there will be a second final chapter, and then third one, and so on endlessly. The man who tries to flee from himself through change never catches up, despite his sometimes comical efforts.
From this perspective, it is hard to find two popes in history who differ more radically than Saint Pius X and Paul VI.
I recently re-read the encyclical Pascendi. On nearly every page, I notice that what the former rejects, the latter accepts, tolerates, and endorses.
Saint Pius X was the rock of doctrine, a man who did not abandon his post or his people during the storm, and who evaded none of his responsibilities, as Paul VI admits doing in the remarkable speech he delivered on 7 December 1968: “Many expect dramatic gestures and energetic and decisive interventions from the pope. The Pope does not believe he should follow any line other than that of trust in Jesus Christ, to whom his Church is entrusted more than to anyone else. It is he who will calm the storm.”
Saint Pius X was not the man of solely pastoral government Paul VI claimed to be in his speech of 17 February 1979, where he said he was “open to understanding and indulgence.” Rather, he was a pope who heeded the example of his predecessors, who defended sound doctrine with extreme vigilance and unwavering firmness, committed to safeguarding it from any harm, “remembering the Apostle’s command: ‘Guard the good deposit’” (2 Timothy 1:14)
For Saint Pius X, “Jesus Christ taught that the first duty of the popes is to guard with the greatest vigilance the traditional deposit of the faith, rejecting the profane novelties of words,” against “those who disdain all authority and, relying upon a false conscience, attempt to ascribe to a love of truth that which is in reality the result of pride and obstinacy.”. He would never have conceded, as Paul VI has often implied, that “truth is equally found in the religious experiences” of other religions, and that the same God is common to Jews, Muslims, and Christians. He never “bestowed honours on the teachers of error,” such as Marie-Dominique Chenu and his ilk, “so as to give rise to the belief that their admiration is not meant merely for the persons, who are perhaps not devoid of merit, but rather the errors they openly profess and champion.”
Saint Pius X would never have suggested that “worship is born from a need, for everything in the modernists’ system is explained by inner impulses or necessities.” How many texts by Paul VI we could list here that state the exact opposite, especially his speech of 26 November 1969, where he justified his repudiation of Latin and Gregorian chant in the new Mass by invoking the people’s supposed need to understand their prayer and participate in the office “in their everyday language.” Saint Pius X did not approve of the modernists’ “great anxiety to find a way of conciliation between the authority of the Church and the liberty of believers,” as Paul VI constantly does. He did not profess “that most pernicious doctrine which would make of the laity a factor of progress in the Church” nor did he seek “compromises and transactions between the forces of conservation and of progress in the Church in order to bring about the changes and progress demanded by our times.” Similarly, Saint Pius X did not follow the “purely subjective” method that drives modernists “to put themselves in to the position and person of Christ and then to attribute to him what they would have done under like circumstances,” as Paul VI does when he affirms, having unilaterally decreed the use of the new Mass, that his will “is the Will of Christ, the breath of the Spirit calling the Church to this transformation,” adding, pathetically, to show that his inspiration coincides with divine inspiration (although he specifies that it is not the case in his Credo), that “this prophetic moment passing through the mystical Body of Christ, which is the Church, shakes her, wakes her, and compels her to renew the mysterious art of her prayer” (26 November 1969). “What is safest and most secure,” said Saint John of the Cross, “is to flee from prophecies and revelations, and if anything new regarding the faith is revealed to us [the lex orandi is also lex credendi, and any manifest novelty in worship is novelty in the faith] it should in no way be consented to” (Ascent of Mount Carmel, 1. II, ch. 19 and 27).
Finally, is it not evident that behind Paul VI’s interventions on the world stage there lies the conviction, which Saint Paul X rejected as pernicious, that “God’s kingdom has gone on slowly developing in the course of history, adapting itself successively to the different mediums through which it has passed, borrowing from them by vital assimilation all the […] forms that served its purpose”?
As John H. Knox noticed in a penetrating article in National Review (21 October 1969), there is no doubt that “there never was and probably never will be a pope who has tried so hard to please the liberals and who so sincerely shares so many of their beliefs.” And yet Paul VI, in an act of supreme contradiction, labels this progressivism as modernismus redivivus!
In any case, Paul VI evidently shares the modernists’ main goal of making the Catholic Church acceptable to non-Catholic churches and even to all atheist régimes, as his recent Christmas address (and many previous ones) suggests: China and Russia now deserve Catholics’ deference and esteem! Let us remember his enthusiastic support for the Chinese youth Mao mobilized in the “Cultural Revolution”!
This is a dream, an illusion whose vanity the Gospel itself reveals to us: the Church, no matter how appealing she might try to make herself, will never be loved by the world. As harsh as our assessment of Paul VI might be, we must say, in the final analysis, that despite the undeniable qualities of his heart, the current Pope consistently sees things differently than they are. His is a false spirit.
Like all false spirits, he is unconsciously cruel. While a contemplative is gentle, a man of action who, like Paul VI, views the goal of his action through a dreamlike lens, is pitiless towards the poor souls of flesh and bone he cannot see or, if he does, considers to be obstacles. This explains the inflexible nature of Paul VI’s character, seemingly at odds with his inability to govern the Church. A man of action is almost always inhuman, but when he moves in a millenarian and spiritually triumphant atmosphere, one must then be afraid… Paul VI will move forward, without looking back, crushing all resistance…
Unless God opens his eyes… That would be a miracle…
Nothing remains but to try to incorporate into our lives the obligation Saint John of the Cross mentions in one of his letters: “In order to have God in all things, we must have nothing in all things.” The Church has entered the Dark Night of the senses and of the spirit, the gateway to the Dawn. Her condition invites us to enter into our own.
This eternal fountain is hidden deep,
Well I know where it has its spring,
Though it is night!
*
This “new Mass” MUST BE REJECTED with all the energy and courage of Father Roger-Thomas Calmel, O.P. and according to the guidelines set by Jean Madiran, even if they need to be adjusted individually as needed, with due caution and depending on the circumstances, with the twofold intention, always present in mind, to reject what is heretical in the Office and to accept only what is orthodox.
*
For my part, I carefully block my ears with wax. I hide at the back of the church behind a curtain, which screen I thicken by sitting in the lowest chair I can find. I read the Holy Mass in the Missal my saintly mother gave me after the previous one she had already given me had been used to shreds. I read the Imitation of Christ in Latin during the drivel that now passes for a sermon. I participate with all my heart at the renewal of the Sacrifice of Calvary. I force the priest who distributes communion into the hands of the “sheep” he has been instructed to domesticate to give it to me at the communion rail, where I kneel. And during the final racket, I go outside to meditate, praying that the Lord might make me even more deaf to the world’s clamour, both literally and figuratively.
*
I must say that I sometimes rage when I hear some idiocy reach my ears, like this one, whose authenticity I guarantee: “Let us pray, my brothers, that among young men and women gathered together by their similar hairstyles and clothing, there may be no longer any difference of sex.” But one can get used to anything, even to the most ridiculous nonsense. As Léon Bloy rightly said, one must be sparing with one’s contempt, because there are so many who deserve it.
Let us not disguise the truth. Our refusal implies a judgement on Paul VI’s actions and words, and even on his person, with whom we are must, against our will, practise the virtue of “fraternal correction,” which Saint Thomas Aquinas considered an extension of the virtues of almsgiving and of charity, and which, he says, one must even carry out publicly with one’s superiors, after having exhausted all hidden means of doing so (II-IIae, q. 33). One can safely presume that an inferior as respectful of papal authority as Cardinal Ottaviani did not make his memorial letter to Paul VI public without having first exercised all possible diplomatic prudence. “If a superior is virtuous,” writes a commentator on the Summa, “he will gratefully accept any warnings that might give him clarity. He will be the first to admit that it is right to warn him and that he is not untouchable in every regard.” And he adds, following Saint Thomas, that the warning must be public “when, for instance, a superior publicly declares manifest heresies or causes great scandal, thus endangering the faith and salvation of his subordinates.”
Cardinal Ottaviani is certainly not alone in thinking that Paul VI, by his words and deeds, is “departing strikingly from the Catholic theology of the Holy Mass.” It is indeed inconceivable that the Pope merely skimmed over such an important document and carelessly signed it. The Ordo Missæ and the New Mass we vigorously reject are willed and imposed by Paul VI upon all Catholics.
How can such an attitude be possible from a Pope during such a critical time in the Church’s history? I cannot help but ask myself this question. And I can no longer keep my answer silent. The stakes are too high for laymen to let priests of all ranks to fight alone, without the support of some of the faithful they have alerted to the danger, against the “scandal” of the new Mass.
The point is not to get outraged—however tempting that might be—but to understand.
*
Paul VI is a man full of contradictions. This is a man who extols the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass in grand and traditional terms in his “Credo of the People of God,” but who downplays it in the new Mass he imposes on Catholic Christendom. This a man who signs and promulgates the Council’s official declarations regarding Latin, “the liturgical language par excellence,” and Gregorian chant, a treasure to be zealously preserved, and who, moreover, commits publicly to preserving them, but who reneges on his signature and word after consulting, in a matter as important the mode of expression of the worship offered to God, only liturgical experts, some of which are suspect while others belong to dissident Christian communities. This is a man who sees to it that the Dutch Catechism is censured, but who tolerates the spread of the dogmatic errors it contains. This is the man who authorizes the French Catechism, whose errors, omissions, and distortions of revealed Truth are all the more serious since it is intended for children, but who investigates deviations from the faith around the world. This is the man who proclaims Mary Mother of the Church, but who allows countless clerics of all ranks to tarnish the purity of her name. This the man who prays at Saint Peter’s and in the Masonic-style Chamber of Reflection at the United Nations. This is the man who gives audience to two actresses deliberately and provocatively dressed in miniskirts, but who then speaks out against the growing wave of sexualization in the world. This is the man who tells Pastor Boegner that Catholics are not mature enough for birth control with “the pill,” but who publishes Humanæ vitæ, while allowing it to be challenged by entire bishops’ conferences.
This is the man who proclaims that the law on clerical celibacy will never be abolished, but allows it to be questioned endlessly, while making it easy for priests wishing to marry to do so. This is the man who forbids communion in the hand, but who permits it, even authorizing certain churches, by special indult, to have laymen to distribute the holy Hosts. This is the man who bemoans the “self-destruction of the Church,” but who, despite being its chief and head, does nothing to stop it, thus letting it happen through his own consent. This is the man who issues the Nota prævia regarding his powers, but who allows it to be dismissed at the Synod of Rome as outdated and consigned to oblivion, etc.
One could go endlessly listing the Pope’s contradictions. The man himself is permanent contradiction and versatility, as well as fundamental ambiguity.
Hence, there are two possibilities.
A man who is unable to overcome his own internal contradictions and who openly displays them for all to see is unable to overcome the external contradictions he encounters in governing the Church. He is a weak and indecisive Pope, like others in the history of the Church, who conceals his vacillations behind a flood of the rhetoric that the emperor Julian, called the Apostate, called, speaking of the Arian bishops of his time who practised it so skilfully, “the art of downplaying what matters, exaggerating what does not, and substituting the artifice of words for the reality of things.” Sometimes, in a single phrase of a papal address, black and white are combined and reconciled by syntactical tricks.
The second hypothesis is no less probable: the Pope knows what he wants and the contradictions he shows are merely those that a man of action, driven by the goal he wants to achieve, encounters along his path and is not in the least concerned about, carried away as he is by the force of his ambition.
In this respect, one can presume, especially after the new Ordo Missæ and the new Mass, that Paul VI’s intention is to bring together in a single liturgical action clergy and laity from the various Christian denominations. Like any seasoned politician, the Pope knows that it is possible to unite people with fundamentally different “philosophical and religious opinions,” as we said at meetings in my youth. If this is the case, we can expect in the near future further manifestations of pontifical ecumenical action, modelled on political manœuvering.
It is true that the two interpretations of Paul VI’s behaviour can be combined. A weak man flees from his weakness or, more precisely, from himself, and plunges into action where contradictions are merely different phases of the changes essential to the action itself. Such temperaments are clearly focused on the world and the metamorphoses it implies, which influence one’s actions therein. One can then without any difficulty accept a “new catechism,” irreconcilable with the catechism of old, “because there is a new world,” as the French bishops say, and, in the language of the world, “a new world” has nothing in common with the previous one, just as a new fashion has nothing in common with a old one. “It is therefore no longer possible,” they add, “to view rites as permanently fixed in a rapidly evolving world.” We have been put on notice: the new Mass is akin to the permanent revolution that appeals to all adolescents and adults who have not yet moved past their crises of puberty, since it masks the contradictions they cannot overcome, precisely because these contradictions are integral to them.
Epigones manifest this trait most clearly, even exaggeratedly. Marx said that history repeated the tragedy of Napoleon I as a comedy under Napoleon III. Likewise, a certain Belgian bishop, who seems to me a sort of mini-Paul VI, has just been given the task of introducing the new Mass to the bewildered public. “This,” he declared in laughable terms, “marks the first final chapter of the liturgical reform ongoing since Vatican II.” We are assured there will be a second final chapter, and then third one, and so on endlessly. The man who tries to flee from himself through change never catches up, despite his sometimes comical efforts.
*
From this perspective, it is hard to find two popes in history who differ more radically than Saint Pius X and Paul VI.
I recently re-read the encyclical Pascendi. On nearly every page, I notice that what the former rejects, the latter accepts, tolerates, and endorses.
Saint Pius X was the rock of doctrine, a man who did not abandon his post or his people during the storm, and who evaded none of his responsibilities, as Paul VI admits doing in the remarkable speech he delivered on 7 December 1968: “Many expect dramatic gestures and energetic and decisive interventions from the pope. The Pope does not believe he should follow any line other than that of trust in Jesus Christ, to whom his Church is entrusted more than to anyone else. It is he who will calm the storm.”
Saint Pius X was not the man of solely pastoral government Paul VI claimed to be in his speech of 17 February 1979, where he said he was “open to understanding and indulgence.” Rather, he was a pope who heeded the example of his predecessors, who defended sound doctrine with extreme vigilance and unwavering firmness, committed to safeguarding it from any harm, “remembering the Apostle’s command: ‘Guard the good deposit’” (2 Timothy 1:14)
For Saint Pius X, “Jesus Christ taught that the first duty of the popes is to guard with the greatest vigilance the traditional deposit of the faith, rejecting the profane novelties of words,” against “those who disdain all authority and, relying upon a false conscience, attempt to ascribe to a love of truth that which is in reality the result of pride and obstinacy.”. He would never have conceded, as Paul VI has often implied, that “truth is equally found in the religious experiences” of other religions, and that the same God is common to Jews, Muslims, and Christians. He never “bestowed honours on the teachers of error,” such as Marie-Dominique Chenu and his ilk, “so as to give rise to the belief that their admiration is not meant merely for the persons, who are perhaps not devoid of merit, but rather the errors they openly profess and champion.”
Saint Pius X would never have suggested that “worship is born from a need, for everything in the modernists’ system is explained by inner impulses or necessities.” How many texts by Paul VI we could list here that state the exact opposite, especially his speech of 26 November 1969, where he justified his repudiation of Latin and Gregorian chant in the new Mass by invoking the people’s supposed need to understand their prayer and participate in the office “in their everyday language.” Saint Pius X did not approve of the modernists’ “great anxiety to find a way of conciliation between the authority of the Church and the liberty of believers,” as Paul VI constantly does. He did not profess “that most pernicious doctrine which would make of the laity a factor of progress in the Church” nor did he seek “compromises and transactions between the forces of conservation and of progress in the Church in order to bring about the changes and progress demanded by our times.” Similarly, Saint Pius X did not follow the “purely subjective” method that drives modernists “to put themselves in to the position and person of Christ and then to attribute to him what they would have done under like circumstances,” as Paul VI does when he affirms, having unilaterally decreed the use of the new Mass, that his will “is the Will of Christ, the breath of the Spirit calling the Church to this transformation,” adding, pathetically, to show that his inspiration coincides with divine inspiration (although he specifies that it is not the case in his Credo), that “this prophetic moment passing through the mystical Body of Christ, which is the Church, shakes her, wakes her, and compels her to renew the mysterious art of her prayer” (26 November 1969). “What is safest and most secure,” said Saint John of the Cross, “is to flee from prophecies and revelations, and if anything new regarding the faith is revealed to us [the lex orandi is also lex credendi, and any manifest novelty in worship is novelty in the faith] it should in no way be consented to” (Ascent of Mount Carmel, 1. II, ch. 19 and 27).
Finally, is it not evident that behind Paul VI’s interventions on the world stage there lies the conviction, which Saint Paul X rejected as pernicious, that “God’s kingdom has gone on slowly developing in the course of history, adapting itself successively to the different mediums through which it has passed, borrowing from them by vital assimilation all the […] forms that served its purpose”?
As John H. Knox noticed in a penetrating article in National Review (21 October 1969), there is no doubt that “there never was and probably never will be a pope who has tried so hard to please the liberals and who so sincerely shares so many of their beliefs.” And yet Paul VI, in an act of supreme contradiction, labels this progressivism as modernismus redivivus!
In any case, Paul VI evidently shares the modernists’ main goal of making the Catholic Church acceptable to non-Catholic churches and even to all atheist régimes, as his recent Christmas address (and many previous ones) suggests: China and Russia now deserve Catholics’ deference and esteem! Let us remember his enthusiastic support for the Chinese youth Mao mobilized in the “Cultural Revolution”!
This is a dream, an illusion whose vanity the Gospel itself reveals to us: the Church, no matter how appealing she might try to make herself, will never be loved by the world. As harsh as our assessment of Paul VI might be, we must say, in the final analysis, that despite the undeniable qualities of his heart, the current Pope consistently sees things differently than they are. His is a false spirit.
Like all false spirits, he is unconsciously cruel. While a contemplative is gentle, a man of action who, like Paul VI, views the goal of his action through a dreamlike lens, is pitiless towards the poor souls of flesh and bone he cannot see or, if he does, considers to be obstacles. This explains the inflexible nature of Paul VI’s character, seemingly at odds with his inability to govern the Church. A man of action is almost always inhuman, but when he moves in a millenarian and spiritually triumphant atmosphere, one must then be afraid… Paul VI will move forward, without looking back, crushing all resistance…
Unless God opens his eyes… That would be a miracle…
*
Nothing remains but to try to incorporate into our lives the obligation Saint John of the Cross mentions in one of his letters: “In order to have God in all things, we must have nothing in all things.” The Church has entered the Dark Night of the senses and of the spirit, the gateway to the Dawn. Her condition invites us to enter into our own.
This eternal fountain is hidden deep,
Well I know where it has its spring,
Though it is night!
I must admit to you, my dear Jean Madiran, that I have been tempted more than once to leave the Catholic Church wherein I was born. If I have not done so, I give thanks to God and to the good peasant’s common sense with which he has blessed me. The Church—I murmur to myself at this moment—is like a sack of wheat infested with weevils. However numerous the parasites are—and at first glance, they are swarming!—they have not sterilized all the kernels. Some, no matter how few, remain fertile. They will sprout and the weevils will die once they have devoured all the others. Bon appétit, gentlemen, you are eating your own death.
Meanwhile, we suffer from famine, starving for the supernatural. The number of priests who distribute the bread of the soul to us dwindles at an alarming rate. In the hierarchy, things are even worse. And at the very top, whence we might expect some solace, they are disastrous.
I confess that I was fooled by Paul VI for a long time. I thought he was trying to preserve what is essential. I kept repeating to myself Louis XIV’s words to the Dauphin: “I fear not telling you that the higher the position, the more things there are one cannot see or know except when holding it.” Being neither a pope nor even a cleric, I told myself, “He sees what I cannot see, because of his position. Therefore, I trust him, even if most of his deeds, attitudes, and statements do not sit well with me, and his constant (seemingly constant) manœuvering makes my head spin. Poor man, he is to be pitied, especially since he is obviously not up to the task… But still, with God’s help…”
However—and this is to the glory of mankind—there is no example in history of a deceiver who does not eventually unmask himself. By trying too hard to be what one is not, one ultimately reveals one’s true nature. Too much cunning backfires. Men are willing to tolerate a bit of trickery, especially when it has an Italian flair. But there is a limit, and beyond it one stops being a good actor and becomes a prisoner of one’s own charade, entangled in one’s own feats of illusion.
The turning point for me came with the controversy over the Holy Mass. Until then, one could be fooled, deceived, and duped. That was the price of the honours owed to established powers. But now the time for “playing games with me,” as my old teacher used to say, is over. It is a phrase he used when we were in the countryside, where such bluntness comes naturally, and he was much more energetic. Father Cardonnel, filled with literature and spewing it out at everyone, lacks this delightful spontaneity of language, that proud and manly assertion of one who can no longer stand being deceived for even a moment. “It’s over. It’s. O. VER. OVER,” he would go on to say to the imprudent fellow who had pushed things too far.
I say this very calmly and thoughtfully, with all the confidence of a man of peasant stock, where Catholicism is passed down from father to son, where the supernatural is itself tangible, who has moved from cultivating fields like his ancestors (of whom he is quite unworthy) to cultivating minds, from whom God has taken a son dedicated to the Church, and who feels himself, from head to foot, deeply rooted in the Church. I say so firmly, without the least hesitation: “NO. I have had enough. I will not be taken for a ride. I will not be led up the garden path. I will not pretend that Paul VI is a new Saint Pius X, profoundly transformed, for the better of course, as befits our progressive era.”
How dare one proclaim that there is no “new Mass,” that “nothing has changed,” that “everything is as it was before,” when nothing or almost nothing remains of the Mass that so many saints cherished with love? When the “experts” appointed to work on this demolition project for reasons of public utility have described it time and time again as a veritable liturgical “revolution”? When the simple consciences of the ordinary faithful have been shaken by this upheaval? As an old lady exclaimed when leaving church on the first Sunday of Advent, crushed by the “new rite” (the adjective is Paul VI’s, who likes to play with contradictions), “That! A Mass? You can’t recognize it anymore!” That was so evident that the celebrant, either by distraction or haste, had omitted the consecration of the wine! But what does it matter in a Mass where the concept of sacrifice is, by definition, absent?
I will not repeat here the case against this new liturgy. Others, who are well-informed, competent, and reliable, have already done so and done it well. When expert opinions line up with the common sense of an ordinary Christian, there is no need to add one’s own comments. Everything has already been said by illustrious specialists, experienced theologians and canonists, priests and devout religious, and even by that good common woman who expressed the deepest and most heartfelt protest of the Christian masses against this “transformation”: “You can’t recognize it anymore!” That sums it up perfectly: “You can’t recognize it anymore.” The faithful sense it by instinct: “There’s nothing Catholic about it anymore.”
“This Mass represents, both as a whole and in its details, a striking departure from the Catholic theology of the Holy Mass, as it was formulated in the twenty-second session of the Council of Trent, which, by definitively fixing the ‘canons’ of the rite, erected an insurmountable barrier against any heresy that might attack the integrity of the Mystery.” Cardinal Ottaviani’s stern words can hardly be disputed by anyone of good faith who has studied the new Ordo Missæ and considered all its details. No one of good faith can ignore their grim reality after having heard, as we did in Belgium after 30 November, every Sunday and on Christmas, “the new Mass,” prefabricated by technocrats of the faith. Squeezed between a pompous and theatrical Liturgy of the Word and a “self-service” Liturgy of the Meal, the HOLY SACRIFICE OF THE MASS, in other words, the ESSENTIAL, is dispatched in the blink of an eye by a cleric who, nine times out of ten, in my experience, does not seem to believe in what he is doing for a single moment.
I repeat: this has been thoroughly demonstrated, and against this evidence and arguments nothing has been offered in response but serpentine rhetoric and jeremiads.
This “new Mass” MUST BE REJECTED with all the energy and courage of Father Roger-Thomas Calmel, O.P. and according to the guidelines set by Jean Madiran, even if they need to be adjusted individually as needed, with due caution and depending on the circumstances, with the twofold intention, always present in mind, to reject what is heretical in the Office and to accept only what is orthodox.
For my part, I carefully block my ears with wax. I hide at the back of the church behind a curtain, which screen I thicken by sitting in the lowest chair I can find. I read the Holy Mass in the Missal my saintly mother gave me after the previous one she had already given me had been used to shreds. I read the Imitation of Christ in Latin during the drivel that now passes for a sermon. I participate with all my heart at the renewal of the Sacrifice of Calvary. I force the priest who distributes communion into the hands of the “sheep” he has been instructed to domesticate to give it to me at the communion rail, where I kneel. And during the final racket, I go outside to meditate, praying that the Lord might make me even more deaf to the world’s clamour, both literally and figuratively.
I must say that I sometimes rage when I hear some idiocy reach my ears, like this one, whose authenticity I guarantee: “Let us pray, my brothers, that among young men and women gathered together by their similar hairstyles and clothing, there may be no longer any difference of sex.” But one can get used to anything, even to the most ridiculous nonsense. As Léon Bloy rightly said, one must be sparing with one’s contempt, because there are so many who deserve it.
Let us not disguise the truth. Our refusal implies a judgement on Paul VI’s actions and words, and even on his person, with whom we are must, against our will, practise the virtue of “fraternal correction,” which Saint Thomas Aquinas considered an extension of the virtues of almsgiving and of charity, and which, he says, one must even carry out publicly with one’s superiors, after having exhausted all hidden means of doing so (II-IIae, q. 33). One can safely presume that an inferior as respectful of papal authority as Cardinal Ottaviani did not make his memorial letter to Paul VI public without having first exercised all possible diplomatic prudence. “If a superior is virtuous,” writes a commentator on the Summa, “he will gratefully accept any warnings that might give him clarity. He will be the first to admit that it is right to warn him and that he is not untouchable in every regard.” And he adds, following Saint Thomas, that the warning must be public “when, for instance, a superior publicly declares manifest heresies or causes great scandal, thus endangering the faith and salvation of his subordinates.”
Cardinal Ottaviani is certainly not alone in thinking that Paul VI, by his words and deeds, is “departing strikingly from the Catholic theology of the Holy Mass.” It is indeed inconceivable that the Pope merely skimmed over such an important document and carelessly signed it. The Ordo Missæ and the New Mass we vigorously reject are willed and imposed by Paul VI upon all Catholics.
How can such an attitude be possible from a Pope during such a critical time in the Church’s history? I cannot help but ask myself this question. And I can no longer keep my answer silent. The stakes are too high for laymen to let priests of all ranks to fight alone, without the support of some of the faithful they have alerted to the danger, against the “scandal” of the new Mass.
The point is not to get outraged—however tempting that might be—but to understand.
Paul VI is a man full of contradictions. This is a man who extols the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass in grand and traditional terms in his “Credo of the People of God,” but who downplays it in the new Mass he imposes on Catholic Christendom. This a man who signs and promulgates the Council’s official declarations regarding Latin, “the liturgical language par excellence,” and Gregorian chant, a treasure to be zealously preserved, and who, moreover, commits publicly to preserving them, but who reneges on his signature and word after consulting, in a matter as important the mode of expression of the worship offered to God, only liturgical experts, some of which are suspect while others belong to dissident Christian communities. This is a man who sees to it that the Dutch Catechism is censured, but who tolerates the spread of the dogmatic errors it contains. This is the man who authorizes the French Catechism, whose errors, omissions, and distortions of revealed Truth are all the more serious since it is intended for children, but who investigates deviations from the faith around the world. This is the man who proclaims Mary Mother of the Church, but who allows countless clerics of all ranks to tarnish the purity of her name. This the man who prays at Saint Peter’s and in the Masonic-style Chamber of Reflection at the United Nations. This is the man who gives audience to two actresses deliberately and provocatively dressed in miniskirts, but who then speaks out against the growing wave of sexualization in the world. This is the man who tells Pastor Boegner that Catholics are not mature enough for birth control with “the pill,” but who publishes Humanæ vitæ, while allowing it to be challenged by entire bishops’ conferences.
This is the man who proclaims that the law on clerical celibacy will never be abolished, but allows it to be questioned endlessly, while making it easy for priests wishing to marry to do so. This is the man who forbids communion in the hand, but who permits it, even authorizing certain churches, by special indult, to have laymen to distribute the holy Hosts. This is the man who bemoans the “self-destruction of the Church,” but who, despite being its chief and head, does nothing to stop it, thus letting it happen through his own consent. This is the man who issues the Nota prævia regarding his powers, but who allows it to be dismissed at the Synod of Rome as outdated and consigned to oblivion, etc.
One could go endlessly listing the Pope’s contradictions. The man himself is permanent contradiction and versatility, as well as fundamental ambiguity.
Hence, there are two possibilities.
A man who is unable to overcome his own internal contradictions and who openly displays them for all to see is unable to overcome the external contradictions he encounters in governing the Church. He is a weak and indecisive Pope, like others in the history of the Church, who conceals his vacillations behind a flood of the rhetoric that the emperor Julian, called the Apostate, called, speaking of the Arian bishops of his time who practised it so skilfully, “the art of downplaying what matters, exaggerating what does not, and substituting the artifice of words for the reality of things.” Sometimes, in a single phrase of a papal address, black and white are combined and reconciled by syntactical tricks.
The second hypothesis is no less probable: the Pope knows what he wants and the contradictions he shows are merely those that a man of action, driven by the goal he wants to achieve, encounters along his path and is not in the least concerned about, carried away as he is by the force of his ambition.
In this respect, one can presume, especially after the new Ordo Missæ and the new Mass, that Paul VI’s intention is to bring together in a single liturgical action clergy and laity from the various Christian denominations. Like any seasoned politician, the Pope knows that it is possible to unite people with fundamentally different “philosophical and religious opinions,” as we said at meetings in my youth. If this is the case, we can expect in the near future further manifestations of pontifical ecumenical action, modelled on political manœuvering.
It is true that the two interpretations of Paul VI’s behaviour can be combined. A weak man flees from his weakness or, more precisely, from himself, and plunges into action where contradictions are merely different phases of the changes essential to the action itself. Such temperaments are clearly focused on the world and the metamorphoses it implies, which influence one’s actions therein. One can then without any difficulty accept a “new catechism,” irreconcilable with the catechism of old, “because there is a new world,” as the French bishops say, and, in the language of the world, “a new world” has nothing in common with the previous one, just as a new fashion has nothing in common with a old one. “It is therefore no longer possible,” they add, “to view rites as permanently fixed in a rapidly evolving world.” We have been put on notice: the new Mass is akin to the permanent revolution that appeals to all adolescents and adults who have not yet moved past their crises of puberty, since it masks the contradictions they cannot overcome, precisely because these contradictions are integral to them.
Epigones manifest this trait most clearly, even exaggeratedly. Marx said that history repeated the tragedy of Napoleon I as a comedy under Napoleon III. Likewise, a certain Belgian bishop, who seems to me a sort of mini-Paul VI, has just been given the task of introducing the new Mass to the bewildered public. “This,” he declared in laughable terms, “marks the first final chapter of the liturgical reform ongoing since Vatican II.” We are assured there will be a second final chapter, and then third one, and so on endlessly. The man who tries to flee from himself through change never catches up, despite his sometimes comical efforts.
From this perspective, it is hard to find two popes in history who differ more radically than Saint Pius X and Paul VI.
I recently re-read the encyclical Pascendi. On nearly every page, I notice that what the former rejects, the latter accepts, tolerates, and endorses.
Saint Pius X was the rock of doctrine, a man who did not abandon his post or his people during the storm, and who evaded none of his responsibilities, as Paul VI admits doing in the remarkable speech he delivered on 7 December 1968: “Many expect dramatic gestures and energetic and decisive interventions from the pope. The Pope does not believe he should follow any line other than that of trust in Jesus Christ, to whom his Church is entrusted more than to anyone else. It is he who will calm the storm.”
Saint Pius X was not the man of solely pastoral government Paul VI claimed to be in his speech of 17 February 1979, where he said he was “open to understanding and indulgence.” Rather, he was a pope who heeded the example of his predecessors, who defended sound doctrine with extreme vigilance and unwavering firmness, committed to safeguarding it from any harm, “remembering the Apostle’s command: ‘Guard the good deposit’” (2 Timothy 1:14)
For Saint Pius X, “Jesus Christ taught that the first duty of the popes is to guard with the greatest vigilance the traditional deposit of the faith, rejecting the profane novelties of words,” against “those who disdain all authority and, relying upon a false conscience, attempt to ascribe to a love of truth that which is in reality the result of pride and obstinacy.”. He would never have conceded, as Paul VI has often implied, that “truth is equally found in the religious experiences” of other religions, and that the same God is common to Jews, Muslims, and Christians. He never “bestowed honours on the teachers of error,” such as Marie-Dominique Chenu and his ilk, “so as to give rise to the belief that their admiration is not meant merely for the persons, who are perhaps not devoid of merit, but rather the errors they openly profess and champion.”
Saint Pius X would never have suggested that “worship is born from a need, for everything in the modernists’ system is explained by inner impulses or necessities.” How many texts by Paul VI we could list here that state the exact opposite, especially his speech of 26 November 1969, where he justified his repudiation of Latin and Gregorian chant in the new Mass by invoking the people’s supposed need to understand their prayer and participate in the office “in their everyday language.” Saint Pius X did not approve of the modernists’ “great anxiety to find a way of conciliation between the authority of the Church and the liberty of believers,” as Paul VI constantly does. He did not profess “that most pernicious doctrine which would make of the laity a factor of progress in the Church” nor did he seek “compromises and transactions between the forces of conservation and of progress in the Church in order to bring about the changes and progress demanded by our times.” Similarly, Saint Pius X did not follow the “purely subjective” method that drives modernists “to put themselves in to the position and person of Christ and then to attribute to him what they would have done under like circumstances,” as Paul VI does when he affirms, having unilaterally decreed the use of the new Mass, that his will “is the Will of Christ, the breath of the Spirit calling the Church to this transformation,” adding, pathetically, to show that his inspiration coincides with divine inspiration (although he specifies that it is not the case in his Credo), that “this prophetic moment passing through the mystical Body of Christ, which is the Church, shakes her, wakes her, and compels her to renew the mysterious art of her prayer” (26 November 1969). “What is safest and most secure,” said Saint John of the Cross, “is to flee from prophecies and revelations, and if anything new regarding the faith is revealed to us [the lex orandi is also lex credendi, and any manifest novelty in worship is novelty in the faith] it should in no way be consented to” (Ascent of Mount Carmel, 1. II, ch. 19 and 27).
Finally, is it not evident that behind Paul VI’s interventions on the world stage there lies the conviction, which Saint Paul X rejected as pernicious, that “God’s kingdom has gone on slowly developing in the course of history, adapting itself successively to the different mediums through which it has passed, borrowing from them by vital assimilation all the […] forms that served its purpose”?
As John H. Knox noticed in a penetrating article in National Review (21 October 1969), there is no doubt that “there never was and probably never will be a pope who has tried so hard to please the liberals and who so sincerely shares so many of their beliefs.” And yet Paul VI, in an act of supreme contradiction, labels this progressivism as modernismus redivivus!
In any case, Paul VI evidently shares the modernists’ main goal of making the Catholic Church acceptable to non-Catholic churches and even to all atheist régimes, as his recent Christmas address (and many previous ones) suggests: China and Russia now deserve Catholics’ deference and esteem! Let us remember his enthusiastic support for the Chinese youth Mao mobilized in the “Cultural Revolution”!
This is a dream, an illusion whose vanity the Gospel itself reveals to us: the Church, no matter how appealing she might try to make herself, will never be loved by the world. As harsh as our assessment of Paul VI might be, we must say, in the final analysis, that despite the undeniable qualities of his heart, the current Pope consistently sees things differently than they are. His is a false spirit.
Like all false spirits, he is unconsciously cruel. While a contemplative is gentle, a man of action who, like Paul VI, views the goal of his action through a dreamlike lens, is pitiless towards the poor souls of flesh and bone he cannot see or, if he does, considers to be obstacles. This explains the inflexible nature of Paul VI’s character, seemingly at odds with his inability to govern the Church. A man of action is almost always inhuman, but when he moves in a millenarian and spiritually triumphant atmosphere, one must then be afraid… Paul VI will move forward, without looking back, crushing all resistance…
Unless God opens his eyes… That would be a miracle…
Nothing remains but to try to incorporate into our lives the obligation Saint John of the Cross mentions in one of his letters: “In order to have God in all things, we must have nothing in all things.” The Church has entered the Dark Night of the senses and of the spirit, the gateway to the Dawn. Her condition invites us to enter into our own.
This eternal fountain is hidden deep,
Well I know where it has its spring,
Though it is night!
*
This “new Mass” MUST BE REJECTED with all the energy and courage of Father Roger-Thomas Calmel, O.P. and according to the guidelines set by Jean Madiran, even if they need to be adjusted individually as needed, with due caution and depending on the circumstances, with the twofold intention, always present in mind, to reject what is heretical in the Office and to accept only what is orthodox.
*
For my part, I carefully block my ears with wax. I hide at the back of the church behind a curtain, which screen I thicken by sitting in the lowest chair I can find. I read the Holy Mass in the Missal my saintly mother gave me after the previous one she had already given me had been used to shreds. I read the Imitation of Christ in Latin during the drivel that now passes for a sermon. I participate with all my heart at the renewal of the Sacrifice of Calvary. I force the priest who distributes communion into the hands of the “sheep” he has been instructed to domesticate to give it to me at the communion rail, where I kneel. And during the final racket, I go outside to meditate, praying that the Lord might make me even more deaf to the world’s clamour, both literally and figuratively.
*
I must say that I sometimes rage when I hear some idiocy reach my ears, like this one, whose authenticity I guarantee: “Let us pray, my brothers, that among young men and women gathered together by their similar hairstyles and clothing, there may be no longer any difference of sex.” But one can get used to anything, even to the most ridiculous nonsense. As Léon Bloy rightly said, one must be sparing with one’s contempt, because there are so many who deserve it.
Let us not disguise the truth. Our refusal implies a judgement on Paul VI’s actions and words, and even on his person, with whom we are must, against our will, practise the virtue of “fraternal correction,” which Saint Thomas Aquinas considered an extension of the virtues of almsgiving and of charity, and which, he says, one must even carry out publicly with one’s superiors, after having exhausted all hidden means of doing so (II-IIae, q. 33). One can safely presume that an inferior as respectful of papal authority as Cardinal Ottaviani did not make his memorial letter to Paul VI public without having first exercised all possible diplomatic prudence. “If a superior is virtuous,” writes a commentator on the Summa, “he will gratefully accept any warnings that might give him clarity. He will be the first to admit that it is right to warn him and that he is not untouchable in every regard.” And he adds, following Saint Thomas, that the warning must be public “when, for instance, a superior publicly declares manifest heresies or causes great scandal, thus endangering the faith and salvation of his subordinates.”
Cardinal Ottaviani is certainly not alone in thinking that Paul VI, by his words and deeds, is “departing strikingly from the Catholic theology of the Holy Mass.” It is indeed inconceivable that the Pope merely skimmed over such an important document and carelessly signed it. The Ordo Missæ and the New Mass we vigorously reject are willed and imposed by Paul VI upon all Catholics.
How can such an attitude be possible from a Pope during such a critical time in the Church’s history? I cannot help but ask myself this question. And I can no longer keep my answer silent. The stakes are too high for laymen to let priests of all ranks to fight alone, without the support of some of the faithful they have alerted to the danger, against the “scandal” of the new Mass.
The point is not to get outraged—however tempting that might be—but to understand.
*
Paul VI is a man full of contradictions. This is a man who extols the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass in grand and traditional terms in his “Credo of the People of God,” but who downplays it in the new Mass he imposes on Catholic Christendom. This a man who signs and promulgates the Council’s official declarations regarding Latin, “the liturgical language par excellence,” and Gregorian chant, a treasure to be zealously preserved, and who, moreover, commits publicly to preserving them, but who reneges on his signature and word after consulting, in a matter as important the mode of expression of the worship offered to God, only liturgical experts, some of which are suspect while others belong to dissident Christian communities. This is a man who sees to it that the Dutch Catechism is censured, but who tolerates the spread of the dogmatic errors it contains. This is the man who authorizes the French Catechism, whose errors, omissions, and distortions of revealed Truth are all the more serious since it is intended for children, but who investigates deviations from the faith around the world. This is the man who proclaims Mary Mother of the Church, but who allows countless clerics of all ranks to tarnish the purity of her name. This the man who prays at Saint Peter’s and in the Masonic-style Chamber of Reflection at the United Nations. This is the man who gives audience to two actresses deliberately and provocatively dressed in miniskirts, but who then speaks out against the growing wave of sexualization in the world. This is the man who tells Pastor Boegner that Catholics are not mature enough for birth control with “the pill,” but who publishes Humanæ vitæ, while allowing it to be challenged by entire bishops’ conferences.
This is the man who proclaims that the law on clerical celibacy will never be abolished, but allows it to be questioned endlessly, while making it easy for priests wishing to marry to do so. This is the man who forbids communion in the hand, but who permits it, even authorizing certain churches, by special indult, to have laymen to distribute the holy Hosts. This is the man who bemoans the “self-destruction of the Church,” but who, despite being its chief and head, does nothing to stop it, thus letting it happen through his own consent. This is the man who issues the Nota prævia regarding his powers, but who allows it to be dismissed at the Synod of Rome as outdated and consigned to oblivion, etc.
One could go endlessly listing the Pope’s contradictions. The man himself is permanent contradiction and versatility, as well as fundamental ambiguity.
Hence, there are two possibilities.
A man who is unable to overcome his own internal contradictions and who openly displays them for all to see is unable to overcome the external contradictions he encounters in governing the Church. He is a weak and indecisive Pope, like others in the history of the Church, who conceals his vacillations behind a flood of the rhetoric that the emperor Julian, called the Apostate, called, speaking of the Arian bishops of his time who practised it so skilfully, “the art of downplaying what matters, exaggerating what does not, and substituting the artifice of words for the reality of things.” Sometimes, in a single phrase of a papal address, black and white are combined and reconciled by syntactical tricks.
The second hypothesis is no less probable: the Pope knows what he wants and the contradictions he shows are merely those that a man of action, driven by the goal he wants to achieve, encounters along his path and is not in the least concerned about, carried away as he is by the force of his ambition.
In this respect, one can presume, especially after the new Ordo Missæ and the new Mass, that Paul VI’s intention is to bring together in a single liturgical action clergy and laity from the various Christian denominations. Like any seasoned politician, the Pope knows that it is possible to unite people with fundamentally different “philosophical and religious opinions,” as we said at meetings in my youth. If this is the case, we can expect in the near future further manifestations of pontifical ecumenical action, modelled on political manœuvering.
It is true that the two interpretations of Paul VI’s behaviour can be combined. A weak man flees from his weakness or, more precisely, from himself, and plunges into action where contradictions are merely different phases of the changes essential to the action itself. Such temperaments are clearly focused on the world and the metamorphoses it implies, which influence one’s actions therein. One can then without any difficulty accept a “new catechism,” irreconcilable with the catechism of old, “because there is a new world,” as the French bishops say, and, in the language of the world, “a new world” has nothing in common with the previous one, just as a new fashion has nothing in common with a old one. “It is therefore no longer possible,” they add, “to view rites as permanently fixed in a rapidly evolving world.” We have been put on notice: the new Mass is akin to the permanent revolution that appeals to all adolescents and adults who have not yet moved past their crises of puberty, since it masks the contradictions they cannot overcome, precisely because these contradictions are integral to them.
Epigones manifest this trait most clearly, even exaggeratedly. Marx said that history repeated the tragedy of Napoleon I as a comedy under Napoleon III. Likewise, a certain Belgian bishop, who seems to me a sort of mini-Paul VI, has just been given the task of introducing the new Mass to the bewildered public. “This,” he declared in laughable terms, “marks the first final chapter of the liturgical reform ongoing since Vatican II.” We are assured there will be a second final chapter, and then third one, and so on endlessly. The man who tries to flee from himself through change never catches up, despite his sometimes comical efforts.
*
From this perspective, it is hard to find two popes in history who differ more radically than Saint Pius X and Paul VI.
I recently re-read the encyclical Pascendi. On nearly every page, I notice that what the former rejects, the latter accepts, tolerates, and endorses.
Saint Pius X was the rock of doctrine, a man who did not abandon his post or his people during the storm, and who evaded none of his responsibilities, as Paul VI admits doing in the remarkable speech he delivered on 7 December 1968: “Many expect dramatic gestures and energetic and decisive interventions from the pope. The Pope does not believe he should follow any line other than that of trust in Jesus Christ, to whom his Church is entrusted more than to anyone else. It is he who will calm the storm.”
Saint Pius X was not the man of solely pastoral government Paul VI claimed to be in his speech of 17 February 1979, where he said he was “open to understanding and indulgence.” Rather, he was a pope who heeded the example of his predecessors, who defended sound doctrine with extreme vigilance and unwavering firmness, committed to safeguarding it from any harm, “remembering the Apostle’s command: ‘Guard the good deposit’” (2 Timothy 1:14)
For Saint Pius X, “Jesus Christ taught that the first duty of the popes is to guard with the greatest vigilance the traditional deposit of the faith, rejecting the profane novelties of words,” against “those who disdain all authority and, relying upon a false conscience, attempt to ascribe to a love of truth that which is in reality the result of pride and obstinacy.”. He would never have conceded, as Paul VI has often implied, that “truth is equally found in the religious experiences” of other religions, and that the same God is common to Jews, Muslims, and Christians. He never “bestowed honours on the teachers of error,” such as Marie-Dominique Chenu and his ilk, “so as to give rise to the belief that their admiration is not meant merely for the persons, who are perhaps not devoid of merit, but rather the errors they openly profess and champion.”
Saint Pius X would never have suggested that “worship is born from a need, for everything in the modernists’ system is explained by inner impulses or necessities.” How many texts by Paul VI we could list here that state the exact opposite, especially his speech of 26 November 1969, where he justified his repudiation of Latin and Gregorian chant in the new Mass by invoking the people’s supposed need to understand their prayer and participate in the office “in their everyday language.” Saint Pius X did not approve of the modernists’ “great anxiety to find a way of conciliation between the authority of the Church and the liberty of believers,” as Paul VI constantly does. He did not profess “that most pernicious doctrine which would make of the laity a factor of progress in the Church” nor did he seek “compromises and transactions between the forces of conservation and of progress in the Church in order to bring about the changes and progress demanded by our times.” Similarly, Saint Pius X did not follow the “purely subjective” method that drives modernists “to put themselves in to the position and person of Christ and then to attribute to him what they would have done under like circumstances,” as Paul VI does when he affirms, having unilaterally decreed the use of the new Mass, that his will “is the Will of Christ, the breath of the Spirit calling the Church to this transformation,” adding, pathetically, to show that his inspiration coincides with divine inspiration (although he specifies that it is not the case in his Credo), that “this prophetic moment passing through the mystical Body of Christ, which is the Church, shakes her, wakes her, and compels her to renew the mysterious art of her prayer” (26 November 1969). “What is safest and most secure,” said Saint John of the Cross, “is to flee from prophecies and revelations, and if anything new regarding the faith is revealed to us [the lex orandi is also lex credendi, and any manifest novelty in worship is novelty in the faith] it should in no way be consented to” (Ascent of Mount Carmel, 1. II, ch. 19 and 27).
Finally, is it not evident that behind Paul VI’s interventions on the world stage there lies the conviction, which Saint Paul X rejected as pernicious, that “God’s kingdom has gone on slowly developing in the course of history, adapting itself successively to the different mediums through which it has passed, borrowing from them by vital assimilation all the […] forms that served its purpose”?
As John H. Knox noticed in a penetrating article in National Review (21 October 1969), there is no doubt that “there never was and probably never will be a pope who has tried so hard to please the liberals and who so sincerely shares so many of their beliefs.” And yet Paul VI, in an act of supreme contradiction, labels this progressivism as modernismus redivivus!
In any case, Paul VI evidently shares the modernists’ main goal of making the Catholic Church acceptable to non-Catholic churches and even to all atheist régimes, as his recent Christmas address (and many previous ones) suggests: China and Russia now deserve Catholics’ deference and esteem! Let us remember his enthusiastic support for the Chinese youth Mao mobilized in the “Cultural Revolution”!
This is a dream, an illusion whose vanity the Gospel itself reveals to us: the Church, no matter how appealing she might try to make herself, will never be loved by the world. As harsh as our assessment of Paul VI might be, we must say, in the final analysis, that despite the undeniable qualities of his heart, the current Pope consistently sees things differently than they are. His is a false spirit.
Like all false spirits, he is unconsciously cruel. While a contemplative is gentle, a man of action who, like Paul VI, views the goal of his action through a dreamlike lens, is pitiless towards the poor souls of flesh and bone he cannot see or, if he does, considers to be obstacles. This explains the inflexible nature of Paul VI’s character, seemingly at odds with his inability to govern the Church. A man of action is almost always inhuman, but when he moves in a millenarian and spiritually triumphant atmosphere, one must then be afraid… Paul VI will move forward, without looking back, crushing all resistance…
Unless God opens his eyes… That would be a miracle…
*
Nothing remains but to try to incorporate into our lives the obligation Saint John of the Cross mentions in one of his letters: “In order to have God in all things, we must have nothing in all things.” The Church has entered the Dark Night of the senses and of the spirit, the gateway to the Dawn. Her condition invites us to enter into our own.
This eternal fountain is hidden deep,
Well I know where it has its spring,
Though it is night!
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