Rorate Caeli

'The Council and The Eclipse’ of God by Don Pietro Leone: CHAPTER 11 - The Effects of Council Teaching (part 3) regarding: The Holy Mass, Man, Anti-Realist Subjectivism, The Council’s Subjectivism

 

‘[…]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



A Rake's Progress: 'Bedlam'  by William Hogarth  (1697-1764) 


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!