‘[…]subjectivism has additionally been seen in the fantasy at play in the Council’s entire construct of a brave, new Catholic Church, Faith, and Religion.’
6. The Holy Mass
As we said above, the Council’s Eucharistic heterodoxy was to be put into practice with the subsequent New Rite of Mass, thereby revealing its deeply anthropocentric character and transforming the doctrinal liturgical attack on Our Blessed Lord into an attack on His Very Person: Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity.
The anthropocentricity of the New Rite was in later
years to engender ‘Communion in the hand’, a practice originally designed by
the Protestants to efface belief in the Real Presence. The virus-vaccine
scourge has been illogically and illicitly exploited to apply this sacrilege
more widely, not only in the New Rite where it is only optional, but also in
the Old Rite where it is forbidden.
Furthermore, the process of constant change or flux in
the liturgy heralded in by the New Rite has recently led to changes to the Pater Noster and to other parts of the
Mass which have the effect, above all, of destabilizing the faithful. Some have
claimed that the process is heading, yet more deleteriously, towards the
promulgation of an ulterior Rite lacking the words of consecration and
therefore also invalid.
7. Man
Anthropocentrism has characterized not only the
liturgy since the Council, but also Catholic doctrine in general, particularly
in the Magisterium of Pope John Paul II where it vies for pre-eminence with
Christocentrism (as we see in the Encyclical Evangelium Vitae for instance) and in the Magisterium of Pope
Francis, where it seems to be conforming itself rather to the anti-Christian
humanism characteristic of the World.
8. Antirealist Subjectivism
We here consider the
effects of the conciliar principle of antirealist subjectivism in the Church
and the World in postconciliar years by way of a brief synthesis of the:
a) a) The Nature and
Properties of Being;
b) b) The Council’s
Antirealist Subjectivism.
a)
The Nature and
Properties of Being
1. 1.Being is objective
reality;
2. 2.Being in itself is
One;
3. 3.Being, as the
object of knowledge, is the True;
4. 4.Being, as the
object of love, is the Good;
5. 5.Being, as the Good,
is the basis of morality;
6. 6.Being, as the Good
to which all things are oriented, is their Goal;
7. 7.Being, as the Goal
of all things, is that which gives them their meaning;
8. 8.Being is immutable;
9. 9.Being is
supernatural [1];
1 10.Being is God.
b)
The Council’s
Antirealist Subjectivism
i) The Council's Antirealism
The Council distances itself from the nature and from
the various properties of Being:
- - from objective
reality, Truth, and Goodness to
subjectivism;
-
- from the
oneness of Being to the Multiple;
- - from the
immutability of Being to flux and evolution;
-
- from the
supernatural to the natural.
ii) The Council’s Subjectivism
Antirealism is subjectivist, for, as we have noted
above, opposition to objective reality must necessarily correspond to an
attachment to the self, which is why Antirealism and Subjectivism constitute
that seamless unity which we have treated in this book. We shall here recall
some of the principal subjectivist doctrines that we have noted above.
The Council’s subjectivism has been seen in the
ascendancy that it has given to the senses over reason [2]:
most notably in the emotion of sense-love (sentimentality or ‘sensibilities’ [3])
featuring in the Council’s marital teaching, in Ecumenism, Indifferentism, and
in its relations with the World; but also in the emotion of fear in the face of
the Fallen World [4],
of Communism, of the Protestant observers, the fear of sanctioning heretics [5],
the fear in the domestic foyer of the
wife herself [6];
subjectivism has additionally been seen in the fantasy [7] at
play in the Council’s entire construct of a brave, new Catholic Church, Faith,
and Religion.
The outcome of the
Council’s skeptical lack of absolute certainties together with the consequent
ascendancy of sentimentality, gives the conciliar texts as a whole the
appearance of the befuddled, after-dinner ramblings of an Anglican Vicar.
c) Antirealist Subjectivism in the Church and the World Subsequent to the Council
.png)
As above, we consider in turn:
i) Postconciliar Antirealism
ii) Postconciliar Subjectivism
i) Postconciliar
Antirealism
- in regard to the True;
- in regard to the Good;
- in regard both to the True
and the Good.
- in regard to Truth
In regard to Being as Truth
(whether natural, supernatural, or whether God Himself), we witness the
following widespread forms of antirealism in the Church and the World of
to-day, in the:
- - skepticism concerning
objective reality and truth as such;
- - pretention to what to-day
is dubbed as ‘subjective reality’;
- - skepticism, even amongst
Catholics, that the Catholic Faith is true;
- - almost universal ignorance
that the object of Faith is Truth Itself, the whole Truth [8];
- - distaste, even amongst
Catholics, for dogma and for all that it implies;
- aversion to evangelization [9];
- atheism, both negative (agnosticism) and positive (the denial of God) in
the World.
- in regard to the Good
In regard to Being as Good,
we witness the following widespread forms of antirealism in the Church and the
World, consisting in
the ignorance of:
- The nature of objective Goodness;
- - Goodness as the basis of morality;
- - Goodness as the Goal of all things;
- - Goodness as the meaning of life [10].
- in regard both to the True and the Good
Here we briefly consider how modern man attempts, with
the approval and even sponsorship of the state, to exercise the absolute, or
divine, freedom to which the Council texts lay claim. We see this most notably
in his pretention to be the Creator Himself.
God Creating Adam and Eve
(Etching by Antonio Tempesta (Italy, Florence, 1555-1630)
‘And God created man to his own image… Male and female
he created them. And God blessed them, saying: increase and multiply…’ [11];
‘…Wherefore man shall leave his father and mother and shall cleave to his wife,
and they shall be two in one flesh’ [12].
In the two accounts of the creation of man in Genesis, as the culmination of
His work on the last day of the Hexameron
[13],
we see God, the Lord of life, make man according to two distinct sexes for the
purpose of procreation. The union here referred to is expounded by Our Blessed
Lord as belonging within the married state [14],
as indeed is already clear from a consideration of the Natural Law itself. In
our days we have witnessed man usurping the creative power of God: generating
human life in test-tubes and purporting to change male into female and female
into male; we have seen him usurping God’s own lordship over life and death by
the use of contraception and abortion; we have seen him substituting the
natural law for an unnatural law removing legal sanctions from perversion and
even providing for ‘same-sex marriages.’ Such unions, far from promoting Being
in accordance with the primary finality of marriage which is procreation and
the sanctification of children, and by extension the sanctification of spouses,
society, and indeed of the whole world, both negates and thwarts it. Clearly
such practices, being evil, offend against the Good, but also most notably
against the True, inasmuch as they egregiously defy the most basic principles
of the Natural Law.
ii) Postconciliar Subjectivism
Subsequent to the Council we have seen the ascendancy
of the senses over reason. We have witnessed a rapid growth of sense-love and
fear amongst Churchmen, as well as anger for those who presume to maintain
Catholicism in its only genuine, Traditional form; while the sense of fantasy
seems, as we write, to be overflowing ever more abundantly into madness, as,
for example, we are informed by the highest authorities of the Church that it
is ‘a mortal sin’ to convert Protestants, and that those who refuse ‘the
vaccine’ are automatically excommunicated [15].
And so it is that ‘…Error deceives, as the adversary rages more and more;
senselessness lifts up, envy inflames, covetousness makes blind, impiety
depraves, pride puffs up, discord exasperates, anger hurries headlong’ [16].
Professor de Oliviera's penetrating analysis of
tribalism [17]
affords us a vision of the ascendancy of the senses over reason in the social
domain, where in the Rousseauist
state consisting of the collective and divinized 'I's, reason is overcome by
sensuality: by instincts, by the image, by imagination and eroticism, and where
sensuality in its turn is directed by preternatural forces emanating from
Satan. He calls tribal life ‘an illusory
synthesis between the height of individual liberty and of consentaneous
collectivism, in which the latter ends up devouring liberty.
‘It belongs to the witch
doctor to maintain, on a mystical level, this collective psychic life by means
of totemic cults charged with confused ‘messages’...
‘In this collectivism, the various ‘I’s’ or the
individual persons, with their intelligence, will, and sensibility… merge and
dissolve in the collective personality of the tribe, which generates one
thought, one will, and one style of being intensely common to all… 'Savage
thought' [18],
the thought that does not think and is turned only to what is concrete - such
is the price of the tribal collectivist fusion.
‘It belongs to the witch doctor to maintain, on a
mystical level, this collective psychic life by means of totemic cults charged
with confused ‘messages’ but rich in the ignes
fatui or even fulgurations emanating from the mysterious world of
transpsychology or parapsychology. By acquiring these ‘riches’ man would
compensate for the atrophy of reason. Reason, formerly hypertrophied by free
interpretation of the Scriptures, Cartesianism and other causes, [has been]
divinized by the French Revolution…. [where the Catholic may discern] the
deceitful flashes, the canticle (at once sinister and attractive, soothing and
delirious, atheistic and fetishistically credulous) with which, from the
bottomless abysses where he lies eternally, the Prince of Darkness attracts
those who have denied Jesus Christ and His Church…’
In the context of tribalism, the Professor mentions the overthrow of the traditions of dress in the West, increasingly eroded by nudism, and tending in the final stage to mere plumage; the overthrow of rules of courtesy tending to the absolute simplicity of tribal manners; the overthrow of reason, structure, and systematization tending to ‘the perpetual and fanciful vagabondage of jungle life, alternating likewise, with the instinctive and almost mechanical performance of some activities absolutely indispensable to life’;… the aversion to intellectual effort, notably to abstraction, theorization, and doctrinal thought, tending to ‘a hypertrophy of the senses and of the imagination, resulting in the ‘civilization of the image’ [19]…’ Is this not the outcome of the death of civilization itself [20], the living image of the world of to-day, with the witch doctor wearing the electronic garb of the Media Moghul? [21]
‘Other (minor,
if telling) signs of the subjectivism of contemporary society may be seen in
the proliferation of mirrors in public places, [...], and the stubborn
insistence on first names, without regard
to the interlocutor’s possible dignity by consecration, nobility, or
age, and on the supposition of an intimacy, or even acquaintance, which does
not exist’ (see footnote 21)
Conclusion to Section A
As we have stated above, the spirit that informed all
the changes that we have enumerated in this section is the Spirit of the World;
the World has hereafter acknowledged the spirit to be its own, and has been
encouraged by the Church to promote it still further. And so the poisonous
flower unfolds.
[1] though see our remarks above
[2] see ch.8, B above in our
discussion of anguish and the path from skepticism to emotivity
[3] when the author suggested
hearing confessions in the Basilica of the first city in which he exercised his
priestly ministry, he had to wait until the matter had been adjudicated
according to Canons’ ‘sensibilities.’ Thankfully the sensibilities were positive,
although the Seminary Rector forbade seminarians to confess to him. ‘He has a
different view of the priesthood and the Mass’ he informed them. Too true.
[4] we are thinking of the
expansion of impurity in the 1960’s
[5] we give the example of Father
Hans Küng whom the Congregation for the
Doctrine of the Faith asked to come to Rome to explain his views in person. His
replied that he was ‘too busy’. When the Congregation complained that he had
not responded to their requests a number of times, again inviting him to
explain himself, he announced: ‘I shall not let myself be prevented from
further performing my theological service to mankind in an ecumenical spirit.’
And there the matter rested. MD pjc p.50
[6] we refer to the silencing of
the doctrine that the husband is the head of the wife and of the family.
Subsequent to the Council we have seen this fear in the home overflowing into a
fear of the child and of the displeasure of the child.
[7] one of the internal senses as opposed to the five external senses
[8] a notable example are recent statements by
the highest authorities of the Church that a Catholic should not think that he
possesses the whole Truth, whereas, as we noted above, Catholic means
‘whole’, which refers inter alia to
Her possession of the whole Truth. The statement from Rome thus signifies that
one who has the whole truth should not think that he has the whole
truth, which entails not only the denial of Faith but also that of Reason.
[9] one hears such opinions as ‘even if the
Catholic Faith is true, one should not say so’, or ‘one should respect the
sensibilities of others.’
[10] see ch.8, B; ch.9, B.2, b
(ii) on the meaning of life as Christ in the form of moral Truth.
[11] Gn 1. 27-8
[12] Gn 2. 24
[13] the six days of creation
[14] Mt.19. 5-6
[15] a stronger case can be made
that those who take the vaccine are automatically excommunicated, in
participating in a chain of evil which extends from the original abortions to
the injection of the resultant product. As for the statements referred to: when
the highest authorities of the Church speak of supernatural realities such as
mortal sin and excommunication in a superficial, irreligious manner, it makes a
mockery of such realities, of the highest authorities of the Church themselves,
and of the supernatural order altogether.
[16] St. Cyprian, de Unitate Ecclesiae,
16
[17] at the end of Revolution and
Counter-Revolution ch 3.2
[18] Lévy-Strauss, la Pensée Sauvage
[19] a term used by Pope Paul VI.
To-day it is almost impossible to have a conversation without the interlocutor
punctuating (or rather puncturing) the conversation by producing an image of
what he is talking about from his pocket telephone (even at table), as if the
visual image is more real than the mental image. See Travels in Hyperreality by
Umberto Eco for similar phenomena; Harcourt, Bruce, Jovanovich Publishers,
1986.
[20] see ch. 9, conclusion to
Section A
[21] other (minor, if telling)
signs of the subjectivism of contemporary society may be seen in the
proliferation of mirrors in public places, in the labelling of modern mass
products in terms of ‘I...me...my... you’, and the stubborn insistence on first
names, without regard to the interlocutor’s possible dignity by consecration,
nobility, or age, and on the supposition of an intimacy, or even acquaintance,
which does not exist. The author, recently organising a trip at a travel
agent’s was addressed by his Christian name no less than 7 times - ma scherziamo!
