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].
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
