Editorial
August 2014
In times of perilous confusion we should take a step
back.
Isn’t that perhaps what we do in life? Faced with a
confusing situation, difficult to untangle, which makes us worried and
perplexed, we pause and then take a step back, avoiding the advance into
danger.
It is what we have done with regard to the faith.
Yes, we believe that illustration renders the idea of
our choices. We love the Church, the Mystical Body of Christ and our Mother, we
love the Pope and the Bishop, but faced all around us with the evident
confusion in Christian life, we reject an advance into ambiguity and
uncertainty and we ask for the grace to stay with true Christianity.
Essentially our position is that. Consequently we believe,
and we have always believed, that we are not in disobedience.
We would be in disobedience if we had invented
“another [type of] Christianity”, if we had invented “our Mass”, “our pastoral
work”, our catechism”, if we had recognized “other superiors” outside the ones
that the Church has given us in the Pope and Bishop.
We do nothing of this sort. Judging the new pastoral, the new rite and the
new catechesis to be filled with confusion, we have simply availed ourselves of
the rights that the Church has always recognized to souls at times of crisis:
we follow past praxis and doctrine of the
Church i.e. the sure one, the one before the crisis exploded.
In fact, regarding the Mass, we don’t go looking for any
ancient rite whatever, but we follow the Missal of 1962, the one promulgated by
Pope John XXIII, seeing as the slight modifications and additions made to that
reform didn’t touch the substance of the Mass of Ages. We haven’t run off in search for something
that we like, but we obey the reforms of the Church, the sure ones and only
the sure ones. And this is what we are doing with all the other aspects of
discipline regarding the Sacraments and the entire apostolate.
Doing so, we are certain of not going outside the Church, which is the
same one as yesterday and today. We
don’t have two Churches, one before and one after the Council. No, there is
only one Church! However, in that same Church, we have acceptable and
unacceptable reforms; the reforms that
place the faith and Christian life in danger, in conscience, are unacceptable. And since the Faith is the supreme good,
no-one in the Church is permitted to expose it to dangers.
We are fully
aware of expressing a harsh judgment about the changes made by the “modern
church”. On the other hand, a dispassionate look at the disastrous results of “modernization” in the Church over the last decades are
undeniable. The last reform of the Missal, and subsequently of all Catholic
life, is killing Catholicism in our
countries. To deny it is ideology.
Let’s ask and live for the freedom of God’s children, who loving Holy Mother
Church, say to Her legitimate Pastors: we continue with what you once taught us, and continuing
in Tradition we are certain, despite our poverty, of our contribution to the
edification of the Church Herself.
We link then two positions that in conscience seem to
us to be indistinguishable:
1. A great love and respect for the Church
2.
A vigilance in never mixing the great Tradition
of the Church with the ambiguities of the post-conciliar reforms and not only
concerning the Rite of the Mass.
Love and rigorousness, together.
Moreover, loving the Church concretely means
preserving Her treasure which was constituted
by Divine Revelation i.e. Tradition and Scripture together. Revelation
has declared and transmitted what the
Church has always believed in and practiced , starting with the Catholic Mass.
We err then, having understood the terrible danger
inside Catholicism today, by crying in private and not intervening out of
respect for the Church. The one who
truly loves the Church defends Her.
What appears to be disobedience is not. On the contrary, it is the greatest service
that a believer can give to Her Mother.
Those who talk of disobedience with regard to the
“Traditionalists” (not a nice term but we use it to convey the idea) , are
doing so out of ignorance: they think the Church has absolute authority over
everything. No, the Church obeys Jesus
Christ - it is His Body; She must guard what the Lord has consigned to Her –
Truth and Grace. The Church doesn’t invent, She transmits.
For this then,
the decision to stay within the surest Tradition [of the Church] cannot
be illegitimate.
The one who stays with the past is not outside the
Church. On the other hand, the one who invents a new Christianity is out.
Translation by Rorate's Francesca Romana.