'The Devil Entering Through A Window In The Church'(Detail from St. Anthony the Hermit in the Isenheim Altarpiece)by Matthias Grünewald (late 15th early 16th century)
II
The Principal Agents of the Council
Here we consider:
1. The Devil;
2. The Bishops;
3. The Freemasons;
4. The Protestants;
5. The Periti;
6. The Press.
1. The Devil
We proceed to examine:
a) The Devil’s Agency
in General;
b b) Marks of the
Devil’s Agency in the Council.
a a) The Devil’s Agency
in General
We
here consider:
i) The Motive of the Devil’s Agency in General;
ii) The Devil’s Target;
iii)
The Devil’s Weapons;
i)
The Motive of the Devil’s Agency in General
To understand more precisely
the devil’s agency in the Council, we shall first attempt to identify its
cause, or motivation, in general. To do so, we need do no more than reflect on
his original act of rebellion against God. This act was motivated by pride: by
the love and adoration of himself in the place of God. This act of pride, in
its turn, made him fall and transformed him definitively into a devil.
Pride is then the devil’s
original motivation, but it does not explain his agency entirely, representing
only a part of it and only the first stage in its development. How then does
his pride develop? His pride leads him to envy God, Whom he knows to
possess the Infinity of all perfection which he attributes to himself; this
envy in its turn leads to hatred; the hatred leads at last to an all-consuming
desire to destroy the object of this hatred.
ii)
The Devil’s Target
The devil’s primary target is
God; his secondary target is man. Now God enjoys both internal and external
glory. His internal glory consists of His Divinity which cannot be attacked,
since God in His Divinity is immune to all evil; His external glory by
contrast, which consists of His manifestation in creation, can be attacked:
- - through the Most Sacred Humanity of Our Lord Jesus Christ,
in the earthly life of Our Lord, and in the Holy Eucharist (by which we mean
both the Holy Mass and the Blessed Sacrament);
- - through heresy, blasphemy, or sacrilege;
- - through attacking the rest of creation.
The Devil’s Target: The Most Sacred Humanity of Our Lord Jesus Christ
As to the devil’s attack on
God through the rest of creation, we can readily see that the more intimately a
creature is related to God, the more it will manifest His glory, and the more
cherished a target it will become for the devil:
- -A man, as made in the image and likeness of God, will
be a more interesting target for the devil than any other creature such a
horse, which is only a ‘vestige’ of God;
- -A baptized man will be more interesting than a
non-baptized man;
- -A baptized man who is a saint will be more interesting
than a baptized man who is not;
- -The totality of all the baptized which is the Church,
the Mystical Body of Christ, will be more interesting than the rest of
humanity.
We noted above that the devil
is interested in attacking the Mystical Body of Christ in view of its intimate
relation to Him. In fact what gives the greatest glory to God in creation,
second to Our Lord Jesus Christ Himself and His sacrificial death on the Cross
on Mount Calvary and in the Holy Mass, is the perfection of the Church, that is
the perfection of His rational creatures, angels and men: the sanctification of
the elect. In order to obstruct and diminish this glory, the devil is intent on
thwarting the perfection and sanctification of rational creatures. To this end
he induced a great quantity of angels to join him in his rebellion against God
at the beginning of time; and to this end he seeks to seduce into Hell all
mankind, or at least to reduce the degree of glory that each individual man
will render to God in Heaven for all eternity.
The Devil’s Target: ‘A man, as made in the image and
likeness of God, will be a more interesting target for the devil than any other
creature such a horse, which is only a ‘vestige’ of God[...]
The devil has a secondary
intention in attacking the Church which is his hatred for man. This hatred,
like his hatred for God, is also born of envy. For man, created like himself
with a spiritual intellect and will after the image and likeness of God, is able
to bring this image and likeness to its fulfilment and to be like God, not by
pride, by unaided efforts, and by self-adoration, according to the devil’s
program, but by the true knowledge and love of God, through humility, and with
the assistance of Divine Grace.
The devil hates man as we
should love him. He hates him and desires to harm him by diverting him from his
final end in Heaven. We should love him and desire to benefit him, above all by
helping him to attain this same final end in Heaven. We love God in man, and
man in God and in his orientation to God; the devil hates God in man, and man
in God and in his orientation to God.
The devil envies, hates, and
wishes to harm angels and men in themselves, but ultimately as images of God.
In this he is like an evil man who conceives love for a woman, and consequently
envy, hatred, and the desire to destroy the man whom she loves. He sees the
image of his rival in her house and would like to destroy it, but he would
prefer to destroy the man himself.
The Devil’s Target: Holy Mass and the Blessed Sacrament (The 1875 painting by Aloysius O’Kelly is titled Mass in a Connemara Cabin. )
iii)
The Devil’s Weapons
The parable of the house blown
by the wind and poured on by the rain is interpreted by the Fathers as the
Church afflicted by persecution and heresy. St. Augustine understands in the
same way the verse of Psalm 9.9: ‘He lieth in wait in secret, like a lion in
his den. By the lion in his den the Psalmist means one who will use
both violence and trickery. The first persecution of the Church was by
violence, when the Christians were compelled to sacrifice by dint of
proscriptions, torture, and bloodshed. The second persecution is by means of
trickery, practiced these days by heretics of all sorts and false brethren… lion
referring to violence, in his den to his evil ruses. This is now
repeated in the reverse order. ‘He lieth in ambush’ declares the
Psalmist, that he may catch the poor. Here you have the trickery. What
follows: that he may catch the poor whilst he draweth him to him,
indicates the violence.’
We may characterize the two
forms of attack in the following way: violence is an attack on the body,
trickery on the soul; the former is a physical evil for the person attacked,
but a spiritual good for his eternal life and for others for whom his suffering
will sow a seed of spiritual life; the latter, by contrast, is a spiritual evil
for the following reasons:
- - it weakens Faith in a given doctrine,
- -it weakens Faith in the Church Herself as Teacher of
immutable Truth; and so
- - it makes the person affected progressively less
certain of all other Truths;
- - if the trickery concerns morality, it fosters
sin;
- - if a person embraces it entirely, he loses the Faith
entirely.
-
b) Marks of
the Devil’s Agency in the Council
Reflecting
on the last section, we may identify the devil’s agency in the Council in his
attack on God and man, in trickery, and in various other fields which we shall
now proceed to investigate:
i) The Attack on God;
ii) The Attack on Man;
iii) Trickery;
iv) Destruction;
v) Mockery;
vi) Antirealist Subjectivism;
vi) Universal and Systematic Scope.
i) The Attack on God
We
have already explained that the devil’s primary target is God, and have
enumerated the Council’s attack on the God-Man on twelve counts.
ii) The Attack on Man
We have seen that the heresies
that the Council teaches concern the nature of Faith, Salvation, the Church,
and the Sacraments, in other words Salvation and the means of salvation. The
choice of target reveals the devil’s intent to seduce man away from his final
end: from the salvation of his soul.
iii) Trickery
The devil’s attack on the
Church in the Council consists in trickery; not precisely in heresy, as we have
said above, since no formal heresy has yet been demonstrated in the Council,
but rather in heterodoxy: in silencing dogmas or in doctrines that entail or
favor heresy. Particular ways in which a doctrine may favour heresy we have
described above in terms of changes of accents, of contradictions, and of the
effacement of causality. We add to the devil’s doctrinal trickery the
procedural trickery that we have noted in our historical sketches above.
The devil’s trickery is like a
work of sabotage on a signpost pointing to Rome. If the signpost represents the
means for attaining Heaven, the trickery consist in removing the sign, or
concealing the sign, or twisting it in another direction, defacing it, altering
its letters, standing in front of it and saying: “Rome is not that way, it is
this way”, or saying: “Rome is that way and
this way.”
The subtlety of the trickery
corresponds to a growing refinement in the devil’s attacks on the Church in the
curse of the centuries, as Bishop Graber explains [1].
In the first centuries of the Church, he uses physical violence, then he turns
to heresy; in the Reformation the heresy infects a whole half of the Catholic
world who then separate themselves from the Church. The heresy is, however, so
blatant at that time and the hierarchy so grounded in the Faith, that it can be
extirpated and its proponents excommunicated.
In the 20th
century, by contrast, the heresy is covert and the hierarchy weak or already
infected by its false principles, so that it is not extirpated and there are no
sanctions; its proponents remain in the Church, and offer the faithful a
heretical agenda of life corresponding to Fallen Nature. A divide similar to that
effected by Martin Luther is again effected in the Church, then, but this time
the heretics remain in the Church and call themselves Catholics.
Under the Franciscan
Pontificate we now witness ever more heretics entering the Hierarchy, usurping
the mantle of orthodoxy in the place of the orthodox, and tending, as we have
noted above, to ostracize true Catholics as ‘heretics’ and ‘schismatics’, on
the basis that they have departed from the conciliar Church.
We conclude this subsection
with the following quotation from St. Cyprian [2]:
‘And
what can be more crafty or more subtle, than for the enemy… to devise a new
fraud, and under the very title of the Christian name, to deceive the
incautious? He has invented heresies and schisms, whereby he might subvert the
faith, might corrupt the truth, might divide the unity. Those whom he cannot
keep in the darkness of the old way, he circumvents and deceives by the error
of a new way. He snatches men from the Church itself; and while they seem to
themselves to have already approached the light, and to have escaped the night
of the world, he pours over them again, in their unconsciousness, new darkness;
so that, although they do not stand firm with the Gospel of Christ, and with
the observation and law of Christ, they still call themselves Christians, and
walking in darkness, they think that they have the light… who maintain night
instead of day, death for salvation, despair under the offer of hope, perfidy under the pretext of faith, antichrist under the name
of Christ; so that, while they feign things like the truth, they make void the
truth by their subtelty….’
iv) Destruction
Even
if the devil preferred trickery to violence in his attack on the Church in the Council,
destruction is the ultimate aim of this spirit whose name is also ‘the murderer
from the beginning’: the destruction of man’s immortal soul by heresy and by
the mortal sin to which it may lead. We have reason to fear that many souls
have been lost to God by the heterodoxy of the Council.
The ‘spirit of mockery’ emerged from the Council.
(Christ with mocking soldier (1880) Carl Henrich Bloch
v) Mockery
When we subject the Council to
the Remote Rule of Faith as we have undertaken to do in this book, we observe
that spirit of mockery emerge with which the devil is pleased to treat God and
the things of God, of which we proceed to give the following examples:
1. Our Lord Jesus Christ is mocked;
2.
The Faith is mocked;
3.
Truth is mocked;
4.
Dogma is mocked;
5.
The Chuch’s munera are mocked;
6.
The most Glorious Mother of God is mocked;
7. The Church is mocked;
8.
The Papacy is mocked;
9. The Priesthood is mocked;
10.
The Religious Life is mocked;
11.
Sacred Virginity is mocked;
12.
The Sacraments in general are mocked;
13.
The Holy Mass is mocked;
14.
Marriage is mocked.
[1] translated into English as ‘Athanasius and the Church
of Our Times’, London 1974
[2] de Unitate Ecclesiae, 3
