Rorate is pleased to share the English version of an article by an important Italian writer, first published at Aldo Maria Valli’s site Duc in altum and then published in English by Robert Moynihan; reproduced here with permission.—PAK
Note by Aldo Maria Valli: “Dear friends of Duc in altum, Massimo Viglione has written this article after the publication of Traditionis Custodes. It is one of the most complete and lucid analyses that we have read commenting on the papal provision against the Mass of the Ages. In addition to a comprehensive analysis (in which the liturgical problem is joined to that of the imposition of the New World Order), I would like to draw your attention to his reflection on the question of obedience.”
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| Mariotto Albertinelli, The Sacrifice of Cain and Abel |
“They Will Throw You out of the Synagogues” (Jn 16:2):The Hermeneutic of Cain’s Envy against Abel
by Massimo Viglione
(Published at Duc in altum, July 21, 2021)
There have been many comments, one after the other, in these days following the official declaration of war—a war made by Francis himself—of the ecclesiastical hierarchy against the Holy Mass of the Ages. And more than one comment has revealed the not-at-all concealed contempt and the simultaneous absolute clarity of content and form that marks the motu proprio Traditionis Custodes, written in a style and formality that is political more than theological or spiritual. It is, in effect, a declaration of war.
It is noteworthy that there is a formal difference and also a difference in tone found in the various documents with which Paul VI, beginning in 1964, announced, planned, and implemented his liturgical reform, which was finally made official with the Apostolic Constitution Missale Romanum issued on 3 April 1969, by which the ancient Roman Rite was de facto replaced (this is the most appropriate term both from the point of view of intentions as well as facts) with the new vulgar Rite. In the Montinian documents we find, on several occasions, hypocritical but evident pain, regret, and remorse, and paradoxically the beauty and sacredness of the ancient Rite are celebrated. In short, it is as if Montini had said: “Dear Rite of all time, I am sending you away, but you were so beautiful!” In contrast, in the Bergoglian document, as many have noted, sarcasm and hatred for the ancient Rite shine through. A hatred such that it cannot be contained.
Naturally, Francis is not the initiator of this war, which was begun by the modernist liturgical movement (or, if you like, with Protestantism), but rather, on the official and operative level, it was Paul VI himself. Bergoglio has only—to use the strong and popular metaphor—“shot madly” in an effort to kill once and for all a mortally wounded thing that in the course of the post-conciliar decades not only did not die but returned to life, dragging along with it, with an exponential crescendo in the last fourteen years, an incalculable number of faithful all over the world.
And this is the crux of the whole matter.
The progressive and more convinced modernist clergy had to suffer Benedict XVI’s motu proprio, dragged by the neck, but at the same time they constantly worked against the Mass of the Ages through hostile resistance by the majority of the world episcopate, which has always openly disobeyed what Summorum Pontificum established, beginning right in the years of the Ratzingerian pontificate, and then all the more so after the resignation up until today. The hostility of the bishops meant that in the end the task of putting the motu proprio into action very often fell to the courage of a few priests celebrating it anyway, even without the permission of the bishop (which was specifically not necessary according to the provisions of Summorum Pontificum).
Now, those bishops who have been constantly and undauntedly disobedient to the Supreme Pontiff of the Catholic Church and one of his motu proprios, now in the name of obedience to the Supreme Pontiff of the Catholic Church and one of his motu proprios will be able not only to continue but even to intensify their censorship, in the war that is no longer hidden but is now blatant, as is in fact already happening.
But Francis has not limited himself to “shooting” the immortal victim. He wanted to take a further step, that of a fast and furious—to say nothing of monstruous—“burying alive” of the ancient rite, affirming that the new rite is the [sole] lex orandi of the Catholic Church. From which it should be deduced that the Mass of the Ages is no longer the lex orandi.
It is well known that Our Friend [Bergoglio] doesn’t have a clue about theology (which is a bit like saying that a doctor doesn’t have a clue about medicine, or that a blacksmith doesn’t know how to use fire and iron). The lex orandi of the Church, in fact, is not a “precept” of positive law voted on by a parliament or prescribed by a sovereign, which can always be retracted, changed, replaced, improved, or worsened. The lex orandi of the Church, furthermore, is not a specific and determined “thing” in time and space, as much as it is the collective whole of theological and spiritual norms and liturgical and pastoral practices of the entire history of the Church, from evangelical times—and specifically from Pentecost—up to today. Although it obviously lives in the present, it is rooted in the entire past of the Church. Therefore, we are not talking here about something human—exclusively human—that the latest boss can change at his pleasure. The lex orandi comprises all twenty centuries of the history of the Church, and there is no man or group of men in the world who can change this twenty-century-old deposit. There is no pope, council, or episcopate that can change the Gospel, the Depositum Fidei, or the universal Magisterium of the Church. Nor can the Liturgy of all time be [decisively] changed.
And if it is true that the ancient Rite had an essential apostolic core that then harmonically grew over the course of the centuries, with progressive mutations (even up to the time of Pius XII and John XXIII), it is also true that these mutations—at times more appropriate, at other times less so, and sometimes perhaps not appropriate at all—have nevertheless always been harmonically structured in a continuum of faith, sacredness, tradition, and beauty.
The Montinian reform broke all this apart, improvisedly inventing a new rite adapted to the needs of the modern world and transforming the sacred Catholic Liturgy from being theocentric to being anthropocentric. From the Holy Sacrifice of the Cross repeated in an unbloody manner through the action of the sacerdos, we transitioned to the assembly of the faithful led by its “presider.” From a salvific and even exorcistic instrument, we passed to a horizontal populist gathering, susceptible to continual autocephalous and relativistic changes and adaptations that are more or less “festive” and whose supposed “value” is based on winning mass consensus, as if it were a political instrument aimed at the audience—an audience that is, however, progressively completely disappearing.
It is useless to continue on this path: the very results of this liturgical subversion speak to minds and hearts and cannot lie.
What it is important to clarify however is the reason for this transition from Montinian hypocrisy to Bergoglian sincerity. What has changed?
The general climate has changed. It has literally turned upside down. Montini believed that in a few years no one would remember the Mass of the Ages. Already John Paul II, faced with the evidence that the enemy did not die at all, was constrained—he, too, dragged by the neck—to grant an “indult” (as if the Sacred Catholic Liturgy of all time needed to be forgiven for something in order to continue to exist), which (no one ever says this) was even more restrictive than this latest Bergoglian document, although devoid of the hatred that characterizes the latter. But above all, it was the uncontainable success among the people—and in particular, among young people—that the Mass of the Ages found after Benedict XVI’s motu proprio that was the triggering factor for this hatred.
The “new Mass” has lost in the face of history and the evidence of the facts. The churches are empty, ever more empty; the religious orders—even, and perhaps above all, the most ancient and glorious ones—are disappearing; monasteries and convents are deserted, inhabited only by religious who are now very advanced in years, and upon whose death the doors will be shuttered; vocations are reduced to nothing; even the “otto per mille” [Italian church tax] has been cut in half, despite the obsessive cloying and pathetic third-worldesque publicity it receives; priestly vocations are scarce—everywhere we see pastors with three, four, or at times even five parishes to run. The mathematics of the Council and of the “new Mass” is the most merciless thing that can exist.
But the failure is above all qualitative, from the theological, spiritual and moral point of view. Even the clergy that exists and resists [the decay] is in large part openly heretical or in any case tolerant of heresy and error in the exact measure that it is intolerant towards the Tradition, no longer recognizing any objective value in the Magisterium of the Church (except for what pleases it), living instead on theological and dogmatic improvisation, and liturgical and pastoral improvisation as well, all based on doctrinal and moral relativism, accompanied by an immense flood of chatter and empty and inane slogans; nor have we even mentioned the devastating—when it is not monstruous—moral situation of a good part of this clergy.
It’s true, there are the so-called “movements” that save the situation a little. But they save it at the cost, once again, of doctrinal relativism, liturgical relativism (guitars, tambourines, entertainment, “participation”), and moral relativism (the only sin is to go against the dictates of this society—today, to go against the vaccine; everything else is more or less permitted). Are these movements still Catholic? And in what measure and quality? If we were to analyze their fidelity with theological and doctrinal precision, how many would pass the examination?
“Lex orandi, lex credendi,” the Church teaches. And in fact, the lex orandi of the nineteen centuries prior to Vatican II and the Montinian liturgical reform have produced one type of faith, and the fifty years following it have produced another type of faith—and another type of Catholic. “You will know them by their fruits” (Mt 7:16), the Founder of the Church taught.
Exactly.
The fruits of the total failure of modernism (or, if you like—for the most attentive and intelligent—the triumph of the true purposes of modernism), the fruits of the Second Vatican Council, the fruits of the post-council. Where did the hermeneutic of continuity shipwreck? It shipwrecked, along with “Mercy,” in the hermeneutic of hatred.
The Mass of the Ages, on the other hand, is the exact antithesis of all this. It is disruptive in its propagation, despite all of the constant hostility and episcopal censorship; it is sanctifying in its perfection; it is engaging precisely because it is the expression of the Eternal and Unchanging, of the Church of all time, of the theology and spirituality of all time, of the liturgy of all time, of the morality of all time.
It is loved because it is divine, sacred, and hierarchically ordered, not human, “democratic” or liberal-egalitarian. It is both divine and human together, like its Founder on the day of the Last Supper. It is loved above all by young people, both the laity who frequent it as well as among those are approaching the priesthood: while the seminaries of the new rite (the lex orandi of Bergoglio) are dens of heresy and apostasy (and it is better to be silent about what else…), the seminaries and novitiates of the world of Tradition overflow with vocations, both male and female, in an unstoppable stream.
The explanation of this incontrovertible fact is found in the one lex orandi of the Catholic Church, which is the one willed by God Himself and from which no rebel may escape.
Here is the root of the hatred. It is the worldwide and multi-generational consensus against the enemy who must die, in the face of the failure of that which was supposed to bring new life and instead is withered and dying, because the lifeblood of Grace is missing. It is hatred of kneeling girls wearing white veils, hatred of ladies with many children wearing black veils; hatred of men kneeling in prayer and recollection, perhaps with the rosary in their hands; hatred of priests in cassocks who are faithful to the doctrine and spirituality of all time; hatred of families that are large and peaceful despite the difficulties of this society; hatred of fidelity, of seriousness, of the thirst for the sacred. It is hatred of an entire world, ever more numerous, that has not fallen—or no longer falls—into the humanistic and globalist trap of the “New Pentecost.”
At its root, that mad shooting is nothing other than a new murder of Abel by an envious Cain. And in fact, in the new Rite what is offered to God is “the fruit of the earth and the work of human hands (Cain), while in the Rite of all time what is offered is “hanc immaculatam Ostiam” (the firstborn Lamb of Abel: Gen 4:2–4). Cain always wins momentarily through violence, but then without fail he suffers the punishment of his hatred and his envy. Abel dies momentarily, but then he lives forever in the sequela Christi [following of Christ].
***
What will happen now? This is a more interesting and inevitable question than anyone can believe, and at many levels. Since we cannot know the future, let’s ask ourselves some fundamental questions in the meantime.
Will all the bishops obey? It seems not.
Apart from the great majority of them, who will fall in line quite willingly either because they share their boss’s hatred (almost all of them) or because they are afraid for their personal future, we think that there will be not a few of them who could also oppose the Bergoglian “machine gun,” as already appears to be happening in various cases in the USA and in France (we have little hope for the Italians, who are the most fearful and flattened as always), either because they are not hostile in principle [to the ancient rite] or else out of friendship with the various orders tied to the Mass of the Ages, or else perhaps—is this a vain hope?—out of a jolt of just pride in response to the humiliation, which could even be called grotesque, that they have received at the hands of this document, wherein first it says that the decision regarding the granting of permission falls to them, but then not only does it restrict every liberty of action, placing conditions on any minimal possibility of choice, but it also falls into the most blatant contradiction, affirming that in every case they must receive the permission of the Holy See! Will everyone really obey blindly, or will some cracks start to make the system of hatred shake?
And what will happen in the so-called “traditionalist” world? “We will see some good ones,” to use a popular expression. Without excluding historical twists. There are those who will fall, who will survive, who perhaps will benefit from it (but beware of the poisoned meatballs of the servants of the Father of Lies!).
Instead, let us trust in divine Grace, so that the faithful not only remain faithful but also grow.
All this will be confirmed above all by an aspect that up until now no one has highlighted: the true goal of this multi-decade war against the Sacred Catholic Liturgy, which then is the true goal of the creation of the New Rite ex nihilo (better to say a tavolino [improvised at a little table]), is the dissolution of the Catholic Liturgy in itself, of every form of the Holy Sacrifice, of doctrine itself, of the Church herself in the great globalist current of the universal religion of the New World Order.
Concepts like the Most Holy Trinity, the Cross, Original Sin, good and evil understood in the Christian and traditional sense, the Incarnation, the Resurrection and thus the Redemption, the Marian privileges and the very figure of the Mother of God who is the Immaculate Conception, the Eucharist and the Sacraments, Christian morality with its Ten Commandments and the doctrine of the universal Magisterium (defense of life, of the family, of rightly-ordered sexuality in all its forms, with all the consequent condemnations of today’s follies)—all of this must disappear into the universal and monist cult of the future.
And, in this perspective, the Mass of the Ages is the first element that must disappear, since it is the absolute bulwark of all that they want to make disappear: it is the first obstacle to every form of ecumenism. Over time, this will inevitably involve a gradual movement closer to the Sacred Liturgy of All Time by the body of the faithful who still linger in attendance at the new Rite, perhaps trying to go to those priests who celebrate it with dignity. Because in the end, sooner or later, even those priests will find themselves at the crossroads of having to choose between obedience to evil or disobedience to evil in order to remain faithful to the Good. The comb of the Revolution, in society as in the Church, does not leave any knots: sooner or later they all fall out—if not here, then there. And this will involve the search by the good ones, who are still confused, for Truth and Grace—that is, for the Mass of Ages. Those who still linger today [at the new rite], so as not to have to deal with these “questions,” following these bishops and parish priests, know that, if they want to remain truly Catholic and truly avail themselves of the Body and Blood of the Redeemer…their days are numbered. Soon, they will have to choose.
We have now touched on the central problem of this entire situation: How do we behave in the face of a hierarchy that hates the True, the Good, the Beautiful, the Tradition, which fights against the one true lex orandi in order to impose another one that is pleasing not to God but to the prince of this world and his “controller” servants (in a certain sense, his “bishops”)?
It is the key problem of obedience, over which even in the world of Tradition a dirty game is often played, often incited not by a sincere search for what is best and for the truth but by personal wars, which have today become more acute in the face of the rift caused by health totalitarianism and vaccination.
Obedience—and this is an error that finds its deepest roots even in the pre-conciliar Church, it must be said—is not an end. It is a means of sanctification. Therefore, it is not an absolute value, but rather an instrumental one. It is a positive value, very positive, if it is ordered towards God. But if one obeys Satan, or his servants, or error, or apostasy, then obedience is no longer a good, but rather a deliberate participation in evil.
Exactly like peace. Peace—the divinity of today’s subversion—is not an end, but rather an instrument of the good and the just, if it is aimed at creating a good and just society. If it is ordered towards creating or favoring a society that is Satanic, malignant, erroneous, and subversive, then “peace” becomes the instrument of hell.
We must be “pleasing not to men, but to God, who tests our hearts” (1 Thess 2:4). Exactly! Therefore, whoever obeys men while being aware of facilitating evil and obstructing the Good, whoever they may be—including the ecclesiastical hierarchy, including the pope—in reality becomes an accomplice of evil, of lies, and of error. Whoever obeys in these conditions disobeys God. “Because no slave is greater than his master” (Mt 10:24). Even Judas was part of the apostolic college. Or else he falls into hypocrisy.
As if—just to give an example from academia—a Catholic traditionalist, self-erected as the dispenser and judge of the seriousness of others, would openly criticize the present pontiff for Amoris Laetitiae or this latest document, but then, as regards the submission—even obligatory submission!—to vaccinism in itself and the acceptance of the use of human cell lines obtained from fetuses that are the victims of voluntary abortion, he would declare, in order to defend himself in the face of just and obvious general indignation, that he is obedient to what the “Sovereign Pontiff” says on this matter.[1]
The conditio sine qua non of all seriousness lies not so much in the “tones” used (also, this is an important aspect but absolutely not primary and above all it remains subjective) but first and foremost in the doctrinal, ideal, and intellectual coherence of the Good and the Truth in their integrity, in every aspect and circumstance.
In other words, we must understand whether the one who guides the Church today wishes to be a faithful servant of God or a faithful servant of the Prince of this world. In the first hypothesis, obedience is due to him and obedience is the instrument of sanctification. In the second, the consequences have to be drawn out. Clearly, in respect for the norms codified by the Church and as children of the Church and also with the proper education and serenity of tone. But one must always draw out the consequences: the first concern ought to be to always follow and defend the Truth, not the cloying, obsequious, and scrupulous groveling which is the spoiled fruit of a misunderstood Tridentinism. Neither pope nor hierarchy can be used as a referent of truth, in fits and starts, according to one’s personal ends.
***
We are in the most decisive days of human history and also of the history of the Church.
All of the authors who have commented in these days invite their readers to prayer and hope. We will obviously do this too, in the full conviction that everything that is happening in these days and, more generally, since February 2020, is the unequivocal sign that the times are drawing near in which God will intervene to save His Mystical Body and humanity, as well as the order that He Himself has given to creation and to human coexistence, in the measure He wishes to give it, in the way and time of His choosing.
Let us pray; let us hope; let us keep vigil, and let us choose to be on the right side. The enemy helps us in the choice: in fact, he is always the same everywhere.
[1] Note by Robert Moynihan: Viglione in this paragraph seems to be making an oblique reference to statements made by Italian Catholic historian Dr. Roberto de Mattei, who proposed the theory that Archbishop Viganò was not the true author of the letters he was publishing under his name (and so “not serious”— this is the reference to “the seriousness of others”), a charge Viganò vigorously denied (link); Dr. de Mattei has also changed his position in recent on the morality of using certain vaccines, even if they derive, perhaps remotely, from aborted human fetal cells.
