The White Lily Blog

SSPX on US Politics: Brilliant and Brave

 As it turns out, SSPX politics, expressed at the October Kansas City conference featuring Bishop Bernard Tissier de Mallerais, matches its theology.  In religion, reject Vatican II’s compromises with the sects.   In politics, reject compromises with secularism and its ‘solutions’ that deny the necessity of Christ the King in both the temporal and spiritual realms. Or put another way, SSPX rejects the theological notion of ‘religious liberty,’ and rejects correspondingly the political expression of that notion, secularism. Pursue instead, they taught us in Kansas City, the straight path of the Restoration of Christ the King into our market places and courtrooms, schools and voting booths.  Restore it!

They made one hell of an argument.

For liberal US Catholics, voting Democratic in spite of that party’s support for abortion, homosexuality, and euthanasia (to name just three policies in flaming contradiction even to the most liberal Catholic teaching), SSPX’s direction would give a new prospective and perhaps, given time to ripen, a new voting option.  SSPX is traditional, and traditional Catholicism is generous as Christ was with the poor, and the left will like that. I like that, although I do not like the left’s approach at all, and neither do the poor with whom I am acquainted.

In addition, the traditional policy shares very many features with the ‘sustainables,’ that is, the small-is-better movement that overlaps the greens. In fact, on cursory examination, the policy feels ‘leftish’ in spite of the inescapable fact that they put Christ at the center of it.  Of course it’s not leftist; it’s only Catholic, the way it really was before, heavily tilted toward the needs and even the desires of the humble, not the haughty.

That’s why they killed it, you know. Because it was good, and put people before profits.

Before the Reformation ruined everything,  ordinary people had fully one third of the year off in feastdays, and it was enforced; there was virtually no unemployment; no business was permitted to get ‘too big to fail’; health care was run, and run well by all accounts, by huge orders of unpaid nuns as a non-profit charity; the priest had authority in disputes with the masters; and the grog allowance was too generous.  We ordinary people would count it a good life now. Of course, that was all before the Reformation, and the ruin of the ordinary working person for the elevation of greed.

There were not any liberal Catholics at the conference this year (except one teenager named Jim dragged there by his mother, and he turned out to be  only a ‘libertarian,’ so you know what he’s smoking).

There were plenty of Republicans there, however. It is safe to say almost 100% of the packed banquet room at Kansas City’s airport Hilton were registered Republicans. It is not possible to say how many of them agree with the whole Republican package, since surely most of us are affiliated Republican because of that party’s pro-life stance, however weak and wavering it flickers, and not for the economic platform Republican candidates favor, which address the issues of the crisis we now face no more than those solutions put forward by the Democratic party .

But conversation at the coffee breaks revealed varying degrees of accommodation with the other standard Republican, and tea party, principles.  That these principles are actually liberal, are actually more liberal philosophically than the Democrats, are  protestant, are one-for-one the economic theories of the rabble that overthrew the Catholic world five hundred years gone now, is obscured by these faithfuls’ truly commendable pity for the babies being slaughtered daily across our country.

Fifty four million babies so far, and counting–that’s Planned Parenthood’s official figure of aborted fetuses since abortion was unleashed.

So I, for one, forgive my fellow SSPX Catholics for their blindness–I mean for our blindness. I too voted for McCain, even though I cried leaving the building.

And in fact, if by some slim convergence of forces–I put it that way because most of the current crop of Republican candidates stupidly appear to be embarrassed to discuss such mundane ‘life-style choices,’ as if those issues, killing babies or failing ever to conceive them, had nothing to do with the meat and potatoes job issues, when of course it has everything to do with economics–I say, if by some slim convergence of forces (that could easily include awakened fascist forces who see the delayed toxic effect of abortion on the economy), abortion were, as we fervently seek, criminalized again, that alone would do more for our economy than either party’s sad efforts in any other direction. So, speaking even just for the poor, let alone all those dead babies, my vote was for the Republican presidential candidate might have been justified. Nothing would do us more good than ‘a freshening of our internal markets,’ for that’s what they call baby souls on Wall Street. The single best economic thing we could do now is re-criminalize abortion.

It goes without saying, however, and please tell me you understand, that re-criminalizing abortion must be accompanied by other restorative measures that ameliorate the present social situation for women, or we’ll be part of a new, far more savage scenario, in which women are completely sexualized baby machines, without the benefit of love, or marriage, without respect, without economic security, forced to bear and work as well, ala a revised Handmaiden’s Tale. That is the situation now for most African-American women, and we look the other way, may God forgive us.

But we are not recognizing the danger. It is crucial to fight contraception,  abortion, divorce, and gay, temporary ‘marriage’ together as a piece.  Those who want to recriminalize abortion yet at the same time keep all the rest of the features of a secularism they have been taught by their Church since Vatican II to admire, need to revisit the barbarianism practiced in England by English protestants upon English Catholics to see how bad it can get  in the most civilized of societies, and what is possible still. It is hell now, for huge numbers of women! And then eternal damnation to follow, since every single pro-life organization now saves the baby’s life, but refuses on Vatican II protestant ecumenical principles to encourage baptism and life in the Faith.

Okay, if that paragraph is too dense, here’s the takeaway: we can’t help the dead babies, or their mothers, without the complete restoration of Christ as King and His Church.

We can’t. All the other political roads lead into darkness. Follow them down, you’ll see.  Neither the Democratic party nor the Republican party’s agendas can solve the situation, get us out of bondage to the banks, give our children a future.

If pro-life issues alone are keeping us tied to the Republican party, as opposed to striking out in an independent political direction that would address the full crisis that faces us, even to its moral aspects, we need to re-think that.

In any case, we’re still dead in the water even on just the issue of abortion. We’ve had so many years of no progress, and the small movements forward we see now can be explained by a dawning consciousness in minds which not only do not “love them both,” but love them neither, which love only the profits that now dwindle. Their sudden new interest ought to scare us, who say we love both the woman and the child, in the name of Christ.

No speaker at the conference in Kansas City discussed any of these points, nor should they have, nor could they have, as only those who have worked in the pro-life movement day in and day out, on the ground, and who worked the same, before, in the civil rights movement, and before that for labor unions and who know how even the most perfectly decent movements and initiatives can be corrupted by secularism, will understand it so well. In Kansas City they spoke only of one point, except at the very end. They spoke only of the justice of the recognition of Christ as King in every society everywhere. It was a spiritual discussion in vocabulary, in delivery, and surely in intention, if we’re speaking of surfaces.  But spiritual ripples swell into social waves, and waves into national battering rams, if the original energy behind them is strong enough. The energy here is nothing less than Truth. It’s strong. It’s strong enough.

That’s because Christ as King is the lynchpin to a good society. Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre saw it and saw this principle denied at Vatican II, and led the fight against denying Him when Vatican II chose to uncrown Him and elevate in His place the secular state. Lefebvre always saw this as the central question, speaker after speaker emphasized the fact.

The keynote speaker, Bishop Tissier de Mallerais’,  said that in seminary Bishop Lefebvre taught them that the three Masonic goals, to banish Christ from governments by secularization, to suppress the Holy Mass, to banish Christ from souls through promotion of ecumenism, had to be countered by three goals of our own. Bishop Lefebvre, Tissier said, characterized them this way: we must restore the mass, as the only fitting liturgical expression of the reign of Jesus Christ; we must build up a cadre of dedicated Catholic souls living in the state of grace;  these souls must work in public institutions and in ecclesiastical organizations to re-crown our Lord Jesus Christ in society. In society! And it was clear from the remainder of Bishop Tissier de Mallerais’ remarks that there is no metaphorical contortion our modern sophists can put on the word crown to make it unreactive against secularism so that we can convince ourselves that we’re doing both here in the good old USA, and die (as another speaker, Dr. John Rao, remarked twice, and I must say it was chilling) with ‘a comfortable smile on our faces.’ Catholicism and secularism just don’t go, like bleach and ammonia. Right? Right?

But we Americans try to make them go. Rao addressed this error by summarizing first the struggle between the Socratists and the Sophists, and then asserting that the same rhetorical game-playing is being engaged in by American Catholics in our continued support of American Pluralism, the particular name for our version of secularism, which Rao said is the single most destructive element against the Kingship of Christ functioning today. We must break from the notion, Dr. Rao said, that the US Founding Fathers and the ‘free society’ they promoted were right.  That is a bold statement to make to American traditionalists.

And lest anyone think that Dr. Rao was a wild card in the speakers lineup, Father Rostand’s (SSPX’s American superior) concluding remarks validate them entirely, for the suggestions he made for Catholic Action are most emphatically not on the Tea Party’s agenda. He told us to go out and build us some guilds in the name of Christ the King.  They don’t want to hear about any damn guilds, as those traditionally function against the false god of the Free Market.  The very purpose of cross-class guilds were to make the market serve the majority of the people, not only the rich. That is not the Tea Party agenda.

Instead, SSPX has, in perfect consistency with the premise that Christ, not the Free Market, is King  stepped up to promote Catholic distributism, the vast, rich collection of economic and social practices that characterized Catholic civilization before the Reformation brought us aggressive capitalism and overthrew the market restraints of the Catholic age. It is a brave move, in the face of their American faithful. In fact, it predicts more than any press release or affirmation,  that SSPX will stand up to the heresies hiding and breeding inside the walls of Rome as well.

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