‘The evil of our day is less a pandemic than a pandemonium.'
5. Man in his Choice of Life
We here consider, as we have
done above:
a)
Marriage;
b)
The Priesthood;
c) The Religious Life.
a) Marriage
We have shown above how the
Council’s eroticism was to influence the subsequent Magisterium: Humanae
Vitae of Pope Paul VI, the new rite of marriage, Familiaris Consortio and the ‘Theology of the Body’ of Pope John
Paul II, Canon law, the New Catechism, and finally Amoris Laetitia of Pope Francis, where ‘love’ is finally given
priority over procreation, pre-marital ‘love’ and the Gender ‘theory’ are
lauded, adulterous liaisons are accepted, and adulterers permitted to receive
sacrilegious Communion [1].
As we said above, to give priority to ‘love’ is effectively to divinize it, a
conceit which was later to be underpinned in theory by ‘Theology of the Body’.
As to contraception in
particular, Humanae Vitae was to
re-inforce the perennial Catholic teaching as to its intrinsic evil, although
the Council’s spirit of liberalism manifest in ambiguous language and in the
failure to condemn it explicitly, and in eroticism was to inform the teaching
of the clergy to the present day. Likewise the Council’s innovative advocacy of
small families, of the equality of the spouses and of the putative need for
‘sex education’ has likewise been taken up and insisted upon by the subsequent
Magisterium.
The Council’s failure
explicitly to condemn either contraception (although later corrected in Humanae Vitae) or, more generally, the
burgeoning impurity of the 1960’s, certainly opened the floodgates to the
depravity of the modern world. Had the Council spoken out clearly on these
issues, what light and what Graces would not have inundated the World? - even
to the extent of preventing the ‘Revolution of the 1960’s’.
Man’s mind is darkened; his
will is diverted from the love of the Creator to the love of the creature; it
is diverted from the greatest purely human love, that of marriage, to unnatural
practices (including contraception) and to the killing, perversion [2],
and consumption [3] of
his own children, so that the primary finality of marriage, the conservation of
the human race, is no longer striven for by raising children in a family, but
by devouring them. The evil of our day is less a pandemic than a pandemonium [4].
b) The
Priesthood
The same secular vision of the
priesthood that was envisaged by the Council has become the norm in years
succeeding it: his Christological identity and his Eucharistic orientation have
been silenced in favor of a secularized, protestantized ideal of a lay and
non-celibate president and teacher; the secular vision of his formation
envisaged by the Council has been imposed on the seminaries: with their
openness to the World, with their philosophical and theological relativism, and
with their psychologism.
We have seen many priests
abandon the priestly state of life in favor of marriage in these years; we have
seen many a traditional seminarian expelled from the seminary or contaminated
by remaining in it; and many a vocation destroyed by Freudian psychology. We
have seen the admission of Anglican married clergy to the priesthood without
requiring perfect chastity of them, a movement to promote married clergy, as
well as ‘women deacons and priests’; and lastly the tendency of priests to
abandon clerical dress - an error not only disciplinary, moral [5],
but also theological, since the clergy belongs to the Church Visible.
c) The Religious Life
The provisions for the
‘up-to-date renewal’ of religious life have been applied subsequent to the
Council in all their rigor: the result has been less a renewal than a
decimation. Between 1966 and 1976 the total number of nuns declined by 50,000 [6]; between 1976 and
2002 by approximately the same figure [7].
Under the Franciscan
Pontificate one of the most vital, Catholic, and admirable of all the new
religious foundations, the ‘Franciscans of the Immaculate’, encompassing both
friars and nuns, was suppressed or disfigured; documents prejudicial to
religious life such as Cor Orans were
issued by the Vatican; a period of suppression was inaugurated for convents
viewed as obsolescent [8]
and a subsequent process of promiscuous amalgamation for surviving religious irrespective
of the orders to which they belonged. It is worth noting that it was a similar
process with which Cardinal Wolsey initiated the ‘Dissolution of the
Monasteries’ under King Henry VIII.
We have equally witnessed an
enormous decline in vocations to the priesthood and in commitment to
sacramental marriage [9].
This whole decline has of course been augmented by the Council's promotion of
the small family. Mais que voulez-vous?
[10]
If the teaching of modern Churchmen on marriage, priesthood, and the Religious Life is no longer
authentic, how can you expect young people to embrace them?
[1] Amoris Laetitia, 300
with note 336; 298 with note 329. See The Church and Asmodeus, Rorate Caeli.
In that essay we also show the deceit of the encyclical’s author in pretending
in manipulated footnotes that the heterodox, novel teaching is orthodox and
traditional. We have seen similar manipulations of footnotes in regard to
Religious Liberty ch.4 III (a).
[2] by current educational programs
[3] by ‘the vaccine’
[4] or plandemonium. We shall return to such themes
in our more general treatment of impurity in B 3 (b) i.
[5] the author, by wearing traditional clerical dress in
public, has given scandal to the clergy but consolation to the faithful. It
enabled him, on a number of occasions, to hear confessions which would not
otherwise have been made, including one of extraordinary gravity: 'I saw you
turn into the street like a light', said the penitent.
[6] MD pjc, Appendix 8
[7] Infiltration op.cit. p.163 which provides other comparable statistics
for those interested in pursuing further this unhappy enquiry.
[8] the author knows one such community in Italy which
survived the persecution. He can only describe its members as white lilies,
placed on their entry into the convent in a vase of stagnant conciliar water,
who, having miraculously survived, were then threatened to be thrown out onto
the street to be trampled underfoot by passers-by. They survived this latter
destiny only due to the heroic determination of their Mother Superior to save
them from an expulsion which she perceived would incur their certain death
[9] see Infiltration op.cit.
[10] What do you expect?
