Rorate Caeli

The Council and the Eclipse of God by Don Pietro Leone – CHAPTER 11 (part 4) : The Effects of Council Teaching in terms of Chastisement

 


B.     The Effects of Council Teaching in terms of Chastisement

 

In this section we consider the effect of antirealist subjectivism in its theological form of self-deifying atheism. Clearly the most notable effect of this sacrilege consists in chastisement. We consequently here investigate:


1.  The Motive for the Chastisement of the Church and the World;

2.  The Nature of Chastisement Consequent on Man’s Repudiation of God in General;

3. The Nature of Chastisement Consequent on the Council’s Repudiation of God.

 

 

1.  The Motive for the Chastisement of the Church and the World

 

The motive for the chastisement that the Church and the World are now undergoing, stated more fully, is undoubtedly the Council’s failure to fulfill its duty both to God and to man. It failed in its duty to God in disobeying His mandate to exercise the munera; it failed in its duty to man in not exercising them for man’s good. We may describe this double failure of the Council as the negative motive for the chastisement; the positive motive being the self-deifying atheism in which this failure consists.

 

In order to understand the Council’s failure in its duty towards man, we must first place this duty in the context of the Economy of Salvation. God, according to the principle of order with which He operates in all things, desires to save man by the agency of man, and through the structure of the Church.


‘The Arcadian State’

From ‘The Course of Empire’ series of paintings by Thomas Cole - 1834

 

He has given the Church the entire Faith and all the sacraments [1]; He has entrusted Her with the three munera: with the task of teaching the Faith, of administering the sacraments, and of guiding man with pastoral care so that he might lead a life formed by the same Faith and sacraments, and thereby attain the Heavenly Kingdom. These munera are exercised by the ministers of the Church for the benefit, that is to say for the sanctification and salvation, of all men: not only of the members of the Church, but also of the whole World.

 

God transmits through the Church not only the entire Faith and the Sacraments, but also what are called ‘Actual Graces’, being those individual graces which enlighten the mind and strengthen the will, such as the inspiration to conversion and the strength to follow it, graces which are bestowed not only upon the members of the Church, but also upon the whole World. As the giver of all these benefits to the World, the Church is known as the ‘Light of the World.’

 

By entrusting the three munera to the Church and by transmitting Actual Graces to Her for the benefit of the Church and the World, God charges Her with responsibility for the Church and for the World: He places them under Her care. It follows that if the ministers of the Church abuse this responsibility, then they will be committing an act of grave disobedience to God and an act of grave injustice both towards the Church and the World.

 

In the case of the Council, the ministers of the Church in the form of the Pope and the entire Episcopacy committed just such an act of disobedience towards God and of injustice towards those in their care, which was punished by a commensurately grave chastisement. The grave chastisement was meted out both on the Church and the World, because the Council represented the interests of, and acted for, the whole Church and for the whole World.

 

Since the positive and essential motive for the chastisement in question is the Council’s self-deifying atheism, we proceed to analyze it in the light of man’s repudiation of God in general.

 

 

2. The Nature of Chastisement Consequent on Man’s Repudiation of God in General

 

The Holy Scriptures teach us clearly how God punishes those who repudiate Him, as we may see in the three following passages:

 

i) ‘There was no-one that triumphed over this people, but when they departed from the worship of the Lord their God. But as often as beside their own God they worshipped any other, they were given to spoil and to the sword and to reproach’ [2].

 

ii) [in relation to the Jews’ rejection of God in the Old Testament, and of Christ in the New:] ‘Go and thou shalt say this to the people: Hearing, hear and understand not: and see the vision and know it not. Blind the heart of this people, and make their ears heavy and shut their eyes…’ [3]

 

iii) ‘… when they knew God, they have not glorified him as God or given thanks: but became vain in their thoughts. And their foolish heart was darkened. For professing themselves to be wise, they became fools. And they changed the glory of the incorruptible God into the likeness of the image of a corruptible man… Wherefore God gave them up to the desires of their heart, unto uncleanness: to dishonor their own bodies among themselves. Who changed the truth of God into a lie and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen. For this cause God delivered them up to shameless affections. For their women have changed the natural use into that use which is against nature. And in like manner, the men also…’ [4]

 

We analyze the content of these passages as follows:

 

 The Occasion for the Chastisement

 

-           - the repudiation of God in general (text i); or in particular

-           -  the failure to worship Him (text i), and the recourse to idolatry (texts i & ii);

-           -  the failure to glorify Him and give Him thanks (text iii).

 

 

The Types of Chastisement

 

-      an internal type such as blindness of the heart (texts ii & iii) and impurity, especially unnatural (text iii);

-      an external type such as war (text i).

 

 

The Mode of Chastisement

 

The mode of punishment was the consignment of man to harmful internal or external forces, the consignment to internal forces in the passage of the Epistle to the Romans quoted above being understood by Tradition as God’s withdrawal of Grace from the sinner.

 

 

4.   The Nature of the Chastisement Consequent on the Council’s Repudiation of God

  

‘The Consummation of Empire’  

From ‘The Course of Empire’ series of paintings by Thomas Cole – 1836

 

Now the formal principle of the Council’s evil, as we have explained above, was the repudiation of God as concretized in the various instances of repudiation of Christ that we have listed above. In the remaining part of the present section we shall see how the repudiation of Christ in its various instances offered the occasion for punishment, and how it explains the type of punishment inflicted. We shall subsequently consider in greater detail the mode in which this punishment is being meted out to-day, according to the scheme that we have just sketched out above:

 

a     a)  The Occasion for the Chastisement;

       b)  The Types of Chastisement;

       c)  The Mode of Chastisement. 

 

 

a)      The Occasion for the Chastisement

 

The program for the Novus Ordo Missae proposed by the Council deserves a special mention here, since it was to become the very paradigm of failure to worship, glorify, and thank God (especially when we consider that the term Eucharist means ‘thanksgiving’); further and palpable examples of its repudiation of God are seen in its dishonor towards the One True God by Ecumenism and by the conciliatory attitudes it adopted towards other Religions, and in its distancing from Christ in the religious life. Reading in Josephus of the terrible punishment inflicted on the Jewish people for their repudiation of Christ, we might well have expected some comparable chastisement in our present day. 

  

b)     The Types of Chastisement

 

Following the argumentation above, we specify may identify the two following types of chastisement and add a third type which is the suffering of the faithful:

 

i)    Blindness and Impurity;

ii)   War;

iii)  The Suffering of the faithful.

 

 

         i)   Blindness and Impurity

 

The vision of the Council’s evil just described furnishes us with a simple explanation for the effects of this evil: namely the blindness and the impurity of the hierarchy and of the clergy in subsequent years. By their blindness we mean their inability to comprehend the Faith in its totality, or fully to comprehend the deficiency of the Council and of the Novus Ordo; and then their moral blindness, notably concerning the evil of impurity; by their impurity we mean clerical scandals, particularly those involving unnatural impurity. The impulse towards unnatural impurity should also be seen against the background of the Council’s emasculated teaching, which has moved the clergy to seek psychological masculinity in other fields – fields, however, both illicit and fruitless.

 

So much for the effects on the members of the Church; as for the contemporary world, we witness an ever deeper blindness to the Faith, to the existence of God, and even to the existence of objective reality, as official, even diocesan, forms, for instance, adopt an antirealist ideology in offering the public in the ‘Gender’ section with the options ‘Male’, ‘Female’, and ‘Other’ [5]; equally we witness an ever deeper inundation in the dark ocean of impurity: of concubinage, cohabitation, and fornication of all types, especially against nature; we have seen a great upsurge in the feminist movement. We take the Council’s reversal of the finalities of marriage and its suppression of Catholic teaching on the man’s headship of the wife and of the family as the principal causes of such evils. As to the suppression of the teaching of man’s headship in particular, we may say that if the devil may enter a marriage by the mere fact of the wife usurping her husband’s power [6], then how much more readily may he enter it when it is the Church authorities that encourage her to usurp it.

 

We understand the falsehood, and particularly the eroticism, of the Council’s marital teaching to have initiated such offenses against the bonum conjugum. The falsehood of its marital teaching appears equally to have engendered the offenses against the bonum prolis  [7], with contraception and abortion, with the exploitation, and finally the consumption, of foetal tissue, of which ‘the vaccine’ has now become the most infamous example [8]. The world thereby has assumed the appearance of pan-cannibalism, as one half of it consumes the other, and as the nightmare scenario of Kronos devouring his children becomes a global reality [9].

Detail from Saturn (Kronos) Devouring a Son, by Peter Paul Rubens, 1636.
'[...]The world thereby has assumed the appearance of pan-cannibalism, as one half of it consumes the other [...]'

 

A further attack on the bonum prolis of recent date is that against the educative finality of marriage, as children from birth onwards, in other words the youngest, most vulnerable, and most innocent members of society are subjected by the state to ever graver and more shameful educational initiatives, even in (nominally) Catholic schools, while ‘home-schooling’ (at least in Germany) is prohibited - evils facilitated and exacerbated by the Council’s advocacy of ‘sex education’ and by the bizarre posturings of Amoris Laetitiae.

 

The state is here assuming the proportions of totalitarianism, of the tyrant state, which claims the children born within its confines as its own property, to dispose of as it wills: here it is appropriate to mention in particular the state murder of the infant Alfie Evans. The Council’s eagerness to separate Church and State, or rather the abandonment of its duty of care for the State, examined above in chapter 4, has certainly paved the way for such totalitarianism.

 

         ii)     War

 

We have recently witnessed the idolatrous veneration of a ‘fertility goddess’ in St. Peter’s, Rome, the consequence, as we have argued above, of Conciliar teachings. We ask ourselves: Does it mark a spiritual re-opening of the Pantheon to the ‘gods of the gentiles’, admitting this idol to one niche, Priapus to another [10] and the God of the Christians to yet another? Does it mark a return of Paganism to the Holy City? Is this the Second Fall of Rome [11] ?

 

We must expect yet further blindness and impurity in its wake, and we are already suffering a chastisement in the form of the immediately ensuing global virus-vaccine scourge: a chemical war if there ever was one. This has led to a further upsurge of totalitarianism, as States have promoted, and  now are even imposing, injections of material taken from aborted children on their subjects, and have been at pains to control the lives of their citizens on the ‘micro-level’ with all the lies, informers, and suppression of the Truth characteristic of revolutionary societies.


‘Destruction

From ‘The Course of Empire ‘series of paintings by Thomas Cole 1834

(The artist’s own words: ‘The picture represents the Vicious State, or State of Destruction.)

 

The Hierarchy of the Church, meanwhile, has respected State decisions and attitudes, and even anticipated them [12], with Church closure together with measures unworthy of the Temple of God and His Christ, including the unlawful imposition of Communion on the hand. It has hereby degraded the Church to a level yet lower than that which Churchmen claimed for Her at the Council: Before the Council, the men of the Church presented Her as superior to the state; with the Council they presented Her as equal to it; in the present epoch they present Her as inferior to it: and so the evil unleashed by the Council expands. Viewing this expansion of evil as part of the Revolution we may agree with Professor Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira [13] that the Revolution is indeed ‘processive’ in its nature.

 

 

         iii)    The Suffering of the Faithful

 

As for the effects of the abuse of the office of teaching on the faithful as well as that of the offices of ruling and sanctifying, the years following the Council have been dark indeed: orthodox doctrine, sanctification (especially through the Holy Mass in its authentic form), and spiritual guidance on the part of the hierarchy and the clergy have dwindled almost to nothing. In this way we may understand the chastisement to consist at least in part in ‘bad priests ’ [14].

 

After a brief rinascimento of Catholicism mainly under Pope Benedict, the Church authorities, at the time of writing, seem to be at pains to re-implement a policy of suppression. We might well repeat the disciples’ question: ‘From whence can any-one fill them here with bread in the wilderness?’ [15]. And indeed the faithful are dying from a lack of spiritual nourishment and from an excess of spiritual pain: for two whole generations they have been most woefully and brutally mishandled.  

 

         c)      The Mode of Chastisement

 

As for the mode in which God has punished, and continues to punish, the Church and the World, we understand it as a withdrawal of Grace, delivering man over to destructive forces, whether internal, such as those of Fallen Nature and those of perverse desires, or external, such as those of his surrounding enemies; such destructive forces are exacerbated in their turn by the devils. Grace is withdrawn first from the hierarchy, then from the clergy, next from the faithful, and lastly from the World. 

 

The Will of God that all men should be saved and His consequent entrustment to the Church of all means of salvation: Faith, Sacraments, and Actual Graces, lends a uniform structure to the whole of humanity, as actual or potential members of the Church. This uniform structure constitutes a hierarchy, namely:

 

-          -   Our Lord Jesus Christ, the God-Man;

-         -  The Church united to the God-Man as His Body, consisting of the clergy and the faithful;

-          - The Rest of Humanity.

 

Through this hierarchical structure Grace passes from Christ to the Church, from the clergy to the faithful, and from the clergy to the rest of humanity. If God withdraws His grace, it will be communicated neither to the Church nor to the World. As Tradition expresses it: omne bonum a clero, omne malum a clero [16].

 

Looking now at that great Dispenser of Grace which is the Holy Mass, we must affirm that the reduction of Grace has been augmented by the replacement of the Old Rite of Mass by the New, and that on a number of counts [17]. According to Church teaching, the fruits of the Holy Mass are applied to the entire Church: giving joy to the Church Triumphant in Heaven, consolation to the Church Suffering in Purgatory, and light to the Church Militant on earth; giving Actual Graces to the rest of humanity. With the New Rite of Mass, as programmed by the Council, these graces are lessened, and the Church and the World are left in all the greater darkness.

 

C.  The Effects of Council Teaching in terms of Demonology

 

We have argued above to the devil’s agency in the Council. The result of this agency we can only describe as a form of demonic possession of the Mystical Body of the Church in its visible dimension [18]. Demonic possession of an individual may result from malediction, from occultism, or from other sins of the utmost gravity, and if we compare the individual with the Church, we cannot but picture the abuse of the Church’s munera on the part of the Pope and of the entire Episcopacy as a sin of equal magnitude, leading to a sort of demonic possession, foreshadowed by the famous vision of Pope Leo XIII of the devils to whom power was being given over the Church [19].

 

The possession is manifest in postconciliar years in the mocking perversion of the munera: in the divulgation of heresy, in the frustration of sanctity, in the abandonment of authority, and in consequence, in the demonic frustration of the Church’s very raison d’être, her final end, to which these munera are oriented, namely Her salvation and sanctification of all mankind.  

 

-   if the devil wants to mock Our Lord Jesus Christ in His Real Presence in the Holy Mass by Communion in the hand and in all the multitude of abuses of the New Rite, he does so;

-    - if he wants to mock Him as a false King, he does so [20];

-   if he wants to mock Him by degrading Him to the level of a mere man, and indeed  a man such as the hedonist Buddha, or the common brigand Mohammed, he does so;


-   if he wants the Pope and his prelates to venerate a fetish in the Basilica of St. Peter’s in Rome, he does so;  

-   if he wants the highest prelates of the Church to act in a manner that is scandalous, undignified, and foolish, he does so;

-   if he wants to perpetuate the image of the Church as of a corrupt and purely natural society, he does so;


-    -  if he wants to make the German Bishops condone abortion, he does so;

-   - if he wants to make the President of the Congregation for the Family promote abortion and perversion, and look for ways to justify contraception, he does so;

    - if he wants that same Congregation to publish obscenity [21], he does so;


-   - if he wants to make Brasilian Bishops dance on the beach, he does so;

-   - if he wants to make French Bishops dance with Jews in New York, he does so;

-   -  if he wants to make Curial Prelates dance in the Vatican, he does so [22].


 

‘Desolation’

From ‘The Course of Empire’ series of painting by Thomas Cole – 1836

‘We are in fact witnessing a trajectory from Being to Nothingness, from Reality to Madness, from the Object to the Subject, from Truth to Falsehood, from Light to Darkness.’

 


Conclusion to Chapter 11


Were we to ask ourselves what is the effect of the Council teaching at the deepest level: where the conciliar dynamic is ultimately tending, we would have to reply that since the dynamic is essentially antirealist, it is oriented not towards Being but away from Being. It follows that it must be understood not in terms of its terminus ad quem (whither it is tending) but of its terminus a quo (whence it is proceeding): it must be understood in terms of the Being that it repudiates.

 

We are in fact witnessing a trajectory from Being to Nothingness, from Reality to Madness, from the Object to the Subject, from Truth to Falsehood, from Light to Darkness. All things, and particularly human life, are no longer presented as being ordered to an End, to a Goal, to the immutable and Absolute Good which gives them meaning, but rather there is only disintegration of unity, disorder, flux, falsehood, meaninglessness, atheism, and a falling away into the bottomless abyss of chaos and nothingness, like the trajectory of the adulterous woman of the Proverbs, and of the Chosen People in their idolatrous apostasy from God.  

 

‘Her feet… walk not by the path of life: her steps are wandering and unaccountable…’ [23];  ‘talkative and wandering; not bearing to be quiet, not able to abide still at home… She entangled him with many words, and drew him away with the flattery of her lips… Now therefore, my son, hear me, and attend to the words of my mouth. Let not thy mind be drawn away in her ways: neither be thou deceived with her paths. For she has cast down many wounded: and the strongest have been slain by her. Her house is the way to Hell, reaching even to the inner chambers of death’ [24].

 

 

 



[1] as we noted in our exposition of the Note of Catholicism in chapter 1

[2] Judith 5. 17, summarizing the history of the people of Israel

[3] Isaiah 6. 9-10, quoted by St. Paul, Acts 28, 26-7

[4] Romans 1. 21-7. We have undertaken to expound this passage and the verses subsequent to it in our article ‘Apostasy’ on Rorate Caeli.

[5]  official forms are for gathering objective facts, whereas the claim that there are more than two human sexes is pure fantasy. The form might just as well have asked the person compiling it what type of animal he would like to be

[6] Father Chad Ripperger, Dominion, sensus traditionis press, 2022, Chapter 4, B. II (a), p.155

[7] The Hungarian intellectual Thomas Molnar considers the Council’s marital heterodoxy as the occasion for such offences in the world, in Du Mal moderne. Symptomes et antidotes. Cinq entretiens avec Jean Renaud. Beffroi, Québec, 1996 p.138-9

[8] we have written about this on Rorate Caeli in the article ‘Chains of Evil’

[9] we are thinking of the nightmarish representation by Francisco Goya

[10] at another event in the idolatrous program of those days, this minor deity of Ancient Rome, and male counterpart to the female idol, put in an appearance on the cloth spread out for her in the Vatican gardens, under the gaze of the Pope and four high-ranking prelates, whose attire and gravitas are the only Catholic elements to be descried on the scene 

[11] Rome Rume ‘Rome – Fall’ according to the Ancient Greek adage

[12] as in Milan for example

[13] Revolution and Counter-Revolution op.cit. ch. III, 5

[14] corresponding to the teaching of St. John Eudes

[15] Mk 8.4. In the author’s current apostolate, one collaborator described the faithful as ‘desperate’, another as ‘dying.’

[16] all good from the clergy, all bad from the clergy

[17] see our book ‘The Destruction of the Roman Rite’ op.cit.

[18] In other words of the Church in Her visible, physical, dimension as opposed to her supernatural, invisible dimension, that of Grace and holiness

[19] the occasion for his introduction of the prayer to St. Michael after the Low Mass, abolished with the Novus Ordo

[20]  see ch. 9. B, 2

[21] cf. our article ‘The Church and Asmodeus’ on Rorate Coeli

[22] the various abuses enumerated here to which we have not already referred in the book, may readily be found on the ‘internet’. The last indignity occurred in a recent youth gathering in the Vatican - although in all fairness and with no offence meant to the youth, the movements were more akin to ‘physical jerks’ than to dancing; the penultimate indignity (of which the author has seen photographs) does not appear, however, yet to have left a trace on the ‘internet’

[23] Proverbs 5. 5-6

[24] Proverbs 7. 10-11, 21, 24-7; see also the end of Proverbs 9. The end of Proverbs 7 recalls the first verses of Homer’s Iliad in its description of the ravages of the Trojan War