…. Western society,” the Holy Father said, “seems to have lost direction and is  feeling its way forward.  The Church, thanks to the word of God, see beyond the  shadows. She does not possess technical solutions but she has her gaze turned to the final destination offering the light of the gospel to all men and women of  goodwill, of whatever nation or culture.”

But the Church must do more than keep Her gaze turned to a future destination, with all due respect and affection for our Holy Father.  She was established by Christ to care for us in the here and now,  whatever our civic circumstances.  Wherever we live, our society  must help us live serene and secure lives during our time on earth, and then live with God in heaven, or, if on the contrary, our society hinders or hampers us from those two goals, we are obligated to try to change society, to change those unhelpful laws and policies–not give up and wait for our ‘final destination.’ The Church has always taught that, until Vatican II.  Pius XII wrote in his letter of October 19, 1945, when ordinary secularism such as we suffer in the United States was rising in Italy:

Every Catholic will readily understand that the question which, before every  other,  ought at present to attract his attention and to spur him to action, is that of securing for this and future generations the benefit of a fundamental law of the State, which is not opposed to sound religious and moral principles, but which rather draws vigorous inspiration from them and proclaims and  pursues their lofty aims.”  (primary source not available in English, secondary source here ) Cardinal Brunero Ottaviani, the champion of tradition, the sworn enemy of liberalism and leftism, our trusted guide, excoriated those who would keep the Church ‘shut up in the four walls of the Temple”! (same source)

Pius XII was not speaking here of restraining our civic behavior either to merely ‘forming consciences,’ a phrase often on the lips of old Council II supporters, or, that failing,  waiting for future end times for justice to be done.  Pius XII was speaking of changing the laws of the state here and now to fit Catholic teaching. (same source)

Besides, we have technical solutions! We have apps! We even have a platform!  Our operating system kicks –!  Suppose the Holy Father recommended Catholics concentrate their political efforts on a  return to the Catholic religious state?  He could reasonably specify this political structure in those areas where Catholics have a majority of the electorate (that is how the popes before Vatican II and after the Reformation put it). In some countries we already have this majority, in others we could potentially regain a lost majority by renewed evangelical efforts and by the growth of Catholic families, as the muslims are accomplishing the growth of their families in islamic nations not practicing the contraceptive mentality, and the Church teaches that we are within our rights to desire and arrange a cooperative unity between the state and the Church.

We could  call a return to the Catholic religious state the restore point. Techies call the ‘restore point’ a good technical solution that one uses when one’s machine has been infected by viruses and malware. One surveys the situation to determine more or less when the problems began to be intrusive, and then one chooses a point where the machine was working well and selects it as the new now. The restoration scrubs all of the bad stuff away, and leaves you with your functionality. Viruses all gone.

There’s a solution for you! We could do that! We must do that! The Holy Father must authorize us to work for that, not defer our justice to the Last Judgement! We are literally dying for lack of solutions that would be available to us in a Catholic state!

When is the healthy restore point for western civilization? When was it, speaking just of the present on-going economic crisis, that uncontrolled profit-taking was unleashed on the world?  Not in the Catholic state! That’s why they rebelled against it!  The bitterest enemy of Catholicism would not identify the Catholic state as the one in which that particular anti-social behavior was allowed. The criticism of the Catholic state was that they did not allow it. Businesses were not allowed to become too big to fail. Individuals were not allowed to exploit others. There were limits on profits, a sense of reasonable and unreasonable, and it was enforced. There were limits on advertising (it was forbidden!). There were limits on the interest rates lenders could charge.  This was not socialism–no state protected private property so loyally as the Catholic religious states, and the profit-worshipping rebels are still struggling to undo or dilute the common law coming from those ages that protect the concept of private property.

Take those features of the Catholic religious state to the Occupy protesters and ask them if they would like to see a system of state where businesses were not allowed to become too big to fail, and in which, after one’s own bread for oneself and one’s family was earned, it was expected that one would pass business on to one’s brothers, so that they too could enjoy their lives.  See if Occupy would like a system in which profits could not outstrip wages, and in which that delicate balance was actually discussed on-the-job, in cross-class guilds, rather than in the clearly moribund union system we now suffer, where nobody talks to anybody, nobody plans anything, and the wages of the unorganized are insufficient. Tell Occupy the poor were cared for, in the Catholic state (and still are now by Catholic charities, although there are so many more of them beggared and unhoused by the profit-worshipping rebels that the task is greater than mere philanthropy can accomplish).  Tell them health care was affordable in the Catholic state, not because people paid through the nose for it through privatized insurance, or the only other option we are offered now, went to unhappy state-run warehouses; health care was affordable in the middle ages because of the skilled work of volunteer religious orders expressing their boundless love for Christ (Who deserves it, as our presidents so seldom do) through their love for His poor.  Ask Occupy if they would like more cooperatives where the profits go to the employees,  and some price protections on some essential commodities.

Take those solutions regarding health care and profits and wages, in fact, to just about any American besides the Occupy movement, and you would get an assent in a New York minute. You would get an assent in Europe, too, if some of the discussion we are hearing is accurate, in which housewives scream at their legislatures to stop putting profits before people.  That is what Catholics want!  And what Christ promised. Apparently it has already been demonstrated you can get assent to such a platform in Hungary, although the extent is not so broad yet;  still, they are on the move, although they need our prayers. The Catholic state is the alternative to both communism/socialism and the Free Market folks. It is green without the bogus population- explosion hypothesis, it is sustainable, it is local, it is democratic in the best sense, not just in the voting booth every four years. It is kind.

Listen to the screaming. No no no, the paid plants chant, we must have religious freedom! (Which means no religion has any official weight or presence in the state, of course, and thus the state has no coherent moral standard.)  No no no, we must have abortion and birth control and gay marriage and women must work for a living just like men! No, no, they will scream, we must put mankind at the center of everything, not God. And we must be able to vote on anything our hearts desire–that’s what we’ll call democracy! And we’ll kill others if they do not agree with us!

And those within the Church still in love with the Vatican II notions and novelties will scream, too. The church is spiritual, they will say, no politics allowed!   They agree completely that the Church’s eyes should be ‘fixed on the final destination,’ as the Holy Father said at Epiphany. Because that will keep our eyes off their swollen bank accounts and our unemployed brothers and our ruined cities.

But Cardinal Brunero Ottaviani wrote against this liberal notion by saying, “Today some maintain that there is in the church only a spiritual order,” and then he quotes from an encyclical letter of Pius XII, Mystici Corporis,  in which the Holy Father deplores and condemns those who

“fail to understand that it was one and the same purpose – namely that of  perpetuating  on this earth the solitary work of the redemption – which caused  the divine Redeemer both to give the community of human beings founded  by him the Constitution of the society perfect in its own order, provided with all its juridical and social elements, and also, with the same ending view, to have it enriched by the Holy Spirit with heavenly gifts and powers.” [emphasis added]

Ottaviani adds, ” The Church does not desire to be a state, but Her divine founder has constituted the Church a perfect society, enriched with all the powers inherent in such a juridical condition, in order to accomplish its mission in every state, without conflicts between the two societies of which He is, though in different ways, the author and the support.”

If only the Holy Father would give us the option, and restore the teaching of the traditional Church. Things are overdue for just such a change. The muslims never cease calling for an islamic religious state. Now it appears the hindus will have theirs, too. But we Catholics gave away our right to ask for ours, at Vatican II, on the basis that times had changed, secularism was the wave of the future.  During the sixties, It looked as if Europe could go on forever aborting and contracepting its young,  the rich fattening on the new labor market of women, and importing workers to cover the loss of indigenous population. It looked, too, as the US would never stop getting richer and richer and richer with the Free Market scam. Now we know better. The liberal game is up, after five hundred years.

Holy Father, download that Savior app! And that Christ the King  one!

But there are less broad technical solutions we can use to help us get back our Catholic religious state. There are interim apps.

For example, there is a rosary app. In fact there are several. You can have the rosary on your android, your laptop, the television, and your bedside radio.  The rosary, that ancient prayer, addresses problems the Church and Her people face in all times.  It was given to us by Our Lady to combat the precise problems that Benedict has been speaking of so very often lately, the incredible rise of bloody violence against Catholics. Pope Leo XIII specifically recommended the use of the rosary to defend the church in just such times of oppression (in Supremi apostolatus officio). “Nothing is surer and more effective in obtaining God’s help in defending the rights of the church as devotion to the Virgin Mary,” the Holy Father wrote.

Pope Leo then points out Dominic’s immediate application of the rosary as a solution to the problems facing the church in his time, characterized as  ”the violence of errors, the intolerable corruption of morals, and the attacks of powerful adversaries.” Commenting that the church was just as much in need of divine help in the present, he stated, “Enlightened by heavenly inspiration, this great saint saw clearly that no other remedy would be as efficacious as this which would bring men back to Jesus Christ.”

It is cruel to fail to remind us of this remedy when we are suffering so, in our times.

But of course Pope Leo is suggesting the rosary as a supernatural technical solution, and our August Pontiff Gloriously Reigning may have overlooked it, in favor of the natural kind. Or perhaps it could be because he is following in the footsteps of Pope John Paul II and thus failing to see it as a sharp sword in our defense.  John Paul did not see it so.  John Paul wrote an apostolic letter on the rosary in 2001 in which he did not present the rosary as a weapon of defense or a tool to bring men back to Christ, as Pope Leo did. He presented the rosary to be, instead, evidence of the modern world’s new ecumenical advances, “the flowering of a new call for spirituality, due also to the influence of other religions” (paragraph 5–for an SSPX commentary on this letter, and link to the primary source, click here). The rosary is seen as the result of laudable modern religious pluralism, not a weapon to defend ourselves against it as pluralism in all its naked violence tries to stab, shoot, and strangle us.

There is another tool we could use apparently ignored even before Vatican II. There is a social aspect of Catholicism. This aspect is referred to as the Mystical Body of Christ, or the Catholic brotherhood will do equally well, with more contemporary cache.  Or call it an operating system, if you want to, since it is, a social one. The concept of Catholic brotherhood is one of incalculable benefit, but modern times have seen an absence of attention to it. We find interesting passage  in the journal The  Ecclesiastical Review in 1919. A letter to the editor praised a previous article by the Rev. Dr. Mc Mahon on Eucharistic preaching. The article said that the Eucharistic preaching present in the United States had an overly restrained view, and neglected, while teaching Holy Communion as food for individual souls, to preach it as a banquet of brotherhood.

“At this banquet” (the writer quotes Pope Leo the 13th’s encyclical on the Blessed Eucharist), “we find the spectacle of Christian brotherhood and social equality which is afforded when men of all conditions, gentle and simple, rich and poor, learned and unlearned, gather round the holy altar, all sharing the like in these heavenly banquet.” And of what matter is that “the preaching of individualistic religion has been so common that the social side of Catholicism seems strange to us, and the word ‘charity’ is being restricted to mean nothing more than the giving of alms. If Catholicism as applicable to all relations of life had been upheld among us during the 19th century [and the 21st!], the world would now be turning to Catholics as experts in brotherhood, and the reaction against industrial individualism and in the sore need of voluntary cooperation for the well-being of society.”

Holy Communion is a tool for social sanctity the world could use now! It is our way to build up an army of men and women in the state of grace. It is a solution the Holy Father could have mentioned, while keeping his eyes firmly fixed on the future. If we had such an army, we might have such a future.

That leaves intact the vicious system that creates them, leaves retribution only to the dumb ones who get caught with their pants down outside the protections they’ve bought and bribed.

Sachs points out that we simply cannot afford, even if we tax the rich,  Obama’s government-mandated, government-platformed (in terms of absent moral values) but completely privatized solution.  The profits make it too expensive.  Sachs instead casually endorses, the only alternative he can imagine, single- payer health care–in other words, government-run health care.

But we all know how that story ends, too: crappy, cranky, niggling care in dimly lit paint-peeling facilities with waiting lists for the good procedures, as it is in those countries which presently fund health care that way. Low standards have been the rule in government-run health facilities even in good times,  and how can we now expect more, in our staggering economy? The government, like Greece, is cutting back, not adding expenses as astronomical as those required by our ‘sick’ population.  This government running these hospitals in this economy is a recommendation for horrific care on all levels and eventually, of course, euthanasia, still illegal but being practiced to just about the same degree that still-illegal marijuana is being smoked, with the quasi-permission now being obtained on-the-spot in informal confereces with family members or through senior citizens’ centers’ “free” health care power of attorney services. (I have the one being distributed to senior citizens in Chicago’s senior service centers,  which  gives hospitals the right to pull the plug for everything, including ’expense,’ explicitly stated. Sign here, lady, right here on the dotted line, the pro-bono lawyer crooned–except then he wanted fifty bucks. Icertainly  didn’t sign it, but instead searched for and found a pro-life one available on-line, where you tell them they can’t pull the plug when you run out of money and that you do want all care for your condition . They can’t pull the plug –legally–if you don’t give them permission. Google will-to-live power of attorney.)

So neither solution works, not privatized health care, nor government-run health care. And yet Sachs, and myself, and all the rest of us, want health care.  So it must be solved. And it can be solved.

The thing is, we can’t get there from here.

If we want humane health care that is also affordable, we must re-set our cultures to a clean point before the virus of modern civilization took hold. We must restore Catholicism, its dominant (and tolerant) Church, and its economics, loosely called distributism, which made as many people owners as possible by regulating things so that nobody got too big to fail.

Even now, in our secular society, we know intuitively that health care and religion go together. Marilyn Gaston, Assistant Surgeon General of the Public Health Service, recommended in 2001 that privatized health care form alliances with religious organizations of various persuasions in order to deliver care to the poor. On the ground, very often religious organizations deliver health care as the provider of last resort, in towns like Bakersfield, California. These efforts will not fill the gap, however, because they lack one essential career path that was present in the Middle Ages, but not now: volunteer health care provider via religious orders.  And this path may be the necessary piece of the puzzle, the one that makes health care to the very sick and very poor afforcable.

In the area of health care, the expense was manageable because very large numbers of the health care workers were unmarried, consecrated men and women giving their entire lives to Christ in religious orders and expressing that love in health care for no salary. They worked free (made possible by the absence of children to support, while their orders provided for their personal needs, in case of illness or age, as children would have), and vowed to live poor and obedient and chaste. They didn’t all live up to their vows, but enough did, notably generation after generation of saints. These were the orders that the so-called Reformation of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries sought to destroy by any means necessary, starting with seizing and parceling out the ancient properties of the orders. They dismantled and doled out the very foundation stones.

Do you know the first act of ‘reformist’ Henry VIII’s ‘health care plan’? To privatize St. Bartholemew’s, a hospital that had functioned free to all since the fourth century, but especially welcome had been the poor who were served there (in hospital rooms larger than those currently allowed in new hospital construction) in the name of Christ, in the person of Christ, by generations of saints. To privatize it.

They say the poor wandered England looking for a hospital in the days of the new religion, as each in turn was privatized and their nursing nuns turned out from those safe and sacred walls. And each hospital in all the new secular societies in turn has suffered it, the gradual re-writing of the wonderfully persistent dream of the poor that when they are hurt bad, society will help them, like they ‘used to do,’ until we come to now.  (England itself had to return to free care, this time government run.  You surely have read the same articles as I on the level of care available there.) Even the so-called Catholic hospitals, now, function like little profit machines, just as protestantism and the reformation wanted, and worked for. They are now your stinking tea party. (It is their system, though, and not their rich, which is the enemy. Sachs still doesn’t see it, and I admit it takes a really radical eye–or a mother’s, whose sons have no health care. Either one.)

The government playing the role of the Church and the religious orders and the parent and all the rest, because of course secular government wants all those roles, cannot restore health care without restoring all those other necessary conditions. We have to re-build the bridge we burned, and restore, first, Christ at the center of our laws, our governments, and our lives, and then restore the Church and let the Church, and all churches, and all charities, begin to ‘manage’ health care. Yes, some services, like abortion, will have to go. Because you don’t get loving care unless all humans get loving care, and everyone knows now those tiny little bodies are so fully human. That’s not to mention at all the economic effect of killing them.  That’s not to suggest that us having killed fully one-sixth of the American population has anything to do with slumping home sales.

This restore point–forgive me, but the metaphor is so apt–is the same in economics. We have to dial back interest–which was illegal, back in the day–restore guilds as management tools that go across class, unlike labor unions, which forbid participation by management and owners, let guilds handle education (they will know what industries are in growth mode, which not, because their leadership will include members from the whole process, from raw materials to transport of finished products; that is simply how guilds functioned); we have to control monopolization, simply taxing into unprofitability enterprises that grow too big to fail; and so forth.

There are a thousand good techniques, too many to even begin to discuss in one post, but this is true of all of them: they only function in a coherent, not a multi-religious, society, they only function in a society where dishonesty and all the other deadly sins are taught from the beginning, are shamed from the beginning, and, at the personal level, have a heaven and a hell even if society does not punish every transgression. I do not want to reduce the Faith to that, but perhaps some people could see the point who otherwise will not listen to the Voice of the God who created them calling out across time, to live well on earth and then come to live with Him, as in the original plan until sin and death ruined it.

In any case, in our own society, we have lost that personal level; we foolishly expect honesty to begin and end in the board room, rather than in the heart and root of our society, which of course must be in our homes and schools, in our willingness to honor our God, the totally dynamic and awesome Trinity from which our great civilization has sprung. But we do not. We let ourselves be led by a handful of men who wish, themselves, to be god. They like it. (When I think of the beauty of God and the ugliness of their cruel, proud faces, it makes me want to cry.)

So I am arguing that we have to go back, to go forward. There is simply no other possible solution. The ideal that we have, which is health care for all (a wonderful ideal, a necessary ideal for a stable society, an ideal born in Christian civilization) is only possible under some circumstances, circumstances that are both moral and economic, and as it appears to be turning out, we had those circumstances five hundred years ago, but we ‘reformed it.’  The virus of Too Big to Fail began right then, on Henry VIII’s fat paunch, around which men were waiting, had been waiting for some centuries, breaking out of their sleep here and then in medievalism to take a profit, to make a killing, then suppressed by that mean old Catholic Church. They were waiting, and they whispered it in his royal ear: freedom.  He meant by it a woman, they meant by it a world open for plunder. And it is their song, still. You’d think we’d learn the words by now and stop whistling it with them.

Restore Catholicism and the ideal and goal of the restoration of the Catholic state. Viva Cristo Rey. Don’t be afraid.

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 liberal Catholic teaching), SSPX’s direction would be a new prospective on these liberal Catholics’ purported reason for voting Democratic in the first place: to help the poor, which the Republican party puts on the margins. And therefore SSPX’s political direction might be attractive.

In addition, the 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 the man-God and a King to boot at the center of it.  Of course it’s not actually; 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.

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 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 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 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. 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, we need to re-think that. In any case, we’re still dead in the water 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.

They’re desperate. Their game is almost up. Most of the world, they freely admit it, is sick to death of the new mass, with or without abuses. And from their point of view, even worse,  theologians are finally beginning to examine the language of the Council and finding that critics have been right all along. Benedict must make good his claim that Vatican II was no rupture with tradition, and to keep safe the liberal ideas of ecumenism, collegiality, and secularism, he’s prepared to throw both their new mass and the traditional mass under the bus, if that’s what it takes to get the world to finally accept the Council.

Because now they get it.

In a ghostly parallel to development among traditionalists, who in the beginning felt most keenly the ugliness of the new mass and fled to churches that kept the traditional liturgy, but over time began to realize that the differences were more than just liturgical, and finally, ultimately, that the very constitutions of the Council pushed the same poisonous, sugar-coated un-Catholic teaching as the new mass, liberals have made the same journey, only backwards. They began by hating the humility of the old mass, and loving the pride of the new mass; but they have begun to understand that the heart of the change is in the new doctrines, ecumenism, collegiality, and ‘freedom’ of false religions, and now they finally get it: these novel teachings can be followed almost as easily from within the old liturgy as from the new, as long as you’re only acting a part anyway, as long as it’s historical mummery and not sincere. Their indult sites, with marvelous traditional music delivered by paid gay choirs, with the sanctuaries given over to chatter as soon as the lace comes off, prove that.

It is as if our liberals are the kind of naive devils who once believed holy water would sting–but finally realize they can bathe in it. Or say, put the cross on Italy’s  secular walls. As long as you think of it as window dressing, just a historical note, it can’t hurt, and it helps quiet the chumps.

The highest circles confirm that recent events represent only desperation, not a return to tradition, not a change of heart. Cardinal Kurt Koch, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, is quoted by Zenit in his address to a meeting of that body regarding Summorum Pontificum on May 15, admitting that, “The post-conciliar liturgical reform is considered in large circles of the Catholic Church as a rupture with tradition, and as a new creation,” and that, for the survival of the Novus Ordo, the “sacredness that attracts many to the old use must manifest itself more forcefully.”

They will try to steal this ‘sacredness’ from the old mass; they plan to gut it, and then discard it, according to Koch. Before the present crisis, liberals had shown the good home training of demanding that the 1962 missal be used as is, or not at all–in other words, not mixed with the new. Now, in typical liberal double-speak, the new instructions still pay lip service to the concept, in one spot saying the old mass must not be altered (III/p. 24), but then in another promise alteration–’enrichment.’

The gloves are off. Barring a miracle, they mean to kill the old mass for good, as soon as it credentials them as the true traditionalists. It’ll be a two-fer, using it and then killing it, since it really is, after all, a constant living rebuke.

Proof: Cardinal Koch was explicit in his analysis of the ultimate goal of the new instructions: the traditional and new Masses will eventually evolve together into a common rite; both are to disappear: “Benedict XVI knows well that in the long term we cannot remain with a coexistence between the ordinary and extraordinary forms in the Roman rite, but that the Church will again need in the future a common rite. However, given that a new liturgical form cannot be decided in an office, as it requires a process of growth and purification, for the time being the Pope stresses above all that the two forms of use of the Roman rite can and must enrich one another mutually.” (Ibid.) Interesting but typically liberal: first say the old mass was never abrogated, whip it out and dust it off, and then disappear it again!

So the mass is a hostage, unless SSPX shuts up.

That won’t happen. SSPX has made its position quite clear, following the new instructions, by posting everything critics of the new mass have ever written, from Lefebvre on. Is the New Mass Legit? they ask. And the answer is, No, not too much.  

And as SSPX points out, the old mass teaches that Christ is really present, it’s the essence and center of the TLM,  and the novus ordo hides this doctrine:  “The Novus Ordo expresses no dogma with which the Protestants are in disagreement,”  SSPX writers say, a goal unfortunately endorsed by Paul VI, as reported by his friend Max Thurian (op cit).

Read my mens, Benedict says to his comrades. Trust me, it will be okay. Look, I will send you a sign!  I will appoint Kiko Arguello, the head of the Neocatecumenical Way, as a member of the Committee for the “New Evangelization”!  I will make sure it is headed by the equally liberal Archbishop Rino Fischiella. (remember him from the abortion scandal in Brazil 2 years ago?).  And I will appoint other liberal priests and groups as members of this “New Evangelization” committee, like the Superior General of the Salesians, the Communione, and Liberation leaders, and others. You will see, the liturgy is nothing! We will hang on to the liberal essentials!

Most of all, I will banish SSPX forever! I will isolate them, I will ignore their incessant rosary crusades  and I will stonewall their precious talks, until they and all their stubborn faithful grow old and tired.

The mens of Benedict XVI is hideously clear.

And wrong (as popes have been in the past).  So we must pray he changes it. We faithful Catholics are praying the rosary again. We are not tired. We will increase our insistence on traditional doctrine, not shut up, and we will not, God help us, let them change the old mass. If you, reader, have no place to send your rosary crusade totals, send them here.

US author and expert on the Islamic world Stephen Schwartz has written that secularism (and its theological counterpart, “religious freedom”) fuels the most radical elements in islam by spreading “confusion” among Chistians, creating an opportunity for radicals to agitate for the practice of sharia law. Opposing the liberalization of divorce laws in formerly Catholic Malta, Schwartz, himself a so-called moderate muslim, stresses in an EWTN interview that radicals target secularized countries with islamic minorities, fully aware of secularism’s weakness against them.

Nevertheless, Rome continues to push the old script. Last October 10, Benedict XVI opened a special assembly in Rome with 177 bishops and about 70 priests, called  “The Catholic Church in the Middle East: Communion and Witness.” 

Patriarch Gregorios III Laham of Antioch of the Melkite Greek Catholic Church  summed up the liberal agenda for of the October meeting for Muslims present at a December follow-up at the 1st International Congress of the ‘Christian-Muslim Brotherhood,’ held in Damascus, Syria, thus:

“The following themes were the special subject of the Synod: living together, life together, citizenship, modernity, faithful laity, human rights, including those of women, religious freedom of worship and conscience, the construction of churches and places of worship, especially in Saudi Arabia, respect for others and their beliefs, plurality, diversity, rejection of fanaticism, violence, negative fundamentalism, extremism, terrorism, exploitation of others, especially weaker folk and minorities…”

The laundry list sorts into fewer categories, principally modernity and its opposite, fundamentalism or fanaticism. This is what the Synod said of modernity:

” ‘Modernity’ to most Muslim believers is perceived to be atheistic and immoral and a cultural invasion, threatening them and upsetting their value-system. Many do not know how to react to this phenomenon, while some fight against it with every fibre [sic] of their being. ‘Modernity’ has the power of attracting and repelling at one and the same time. [Only if your conscience is warped!] The Church’s role in schools and the media is to form persons who can distinguish the good from the bad in this area, in order to retain only what is the good.” (104).

So, it’s simple ignorance on the part of Muslims, that they protest when they see the ‘phenomenon’ of modernism coming down the street in the parade–they just don’t know how to react to it.  Let’s teach them.

What must Muslims living side by side with middle eastern Catholics make of this statement, “The Church’s role in schools and the media is to form persons who can distinguish the good from the bad in this area, in order to retain only what is the good” when they can see with their own eyes the church’s ‘expertise’ in this area?  The church in the Middle East has no vocations, for example, and they admit it in the working document, like this:

“Despite these initiatives [to foster vocations], various factors have contributed to a vocation crisis: families emigrating; a declining birth rate; and a youth culture which is increasingly becoming devoid of Gospel values.” (Synod working document, op cit, p 14, # 22)

With that statement, the Church admits what any Muslim can witness daily: Catholics pushing ‘good’ modernism are unable to ‘form’ their own Catholic women from practicing birth control and abortion, and their numbers are being seriously affected.  Modernist Catholicism cannot teach its own people to ‘distinguish the good from the bad’ in spite of the Church’s former consistent traditional teaching on this issue, and Catholic women abort as often as any other populations, and often more. Modernist bishops are unable to teach their youth to ‘distinguish the good from the bad’ in popular culture, they cannot convince them to become priests, brothers, and nuns, even where unemployment is high, but they can teach Muslims how to do it. It is simply as if the bishops said, Hey, we’re losing our kids, why don’t you lose yours too?

Here’s what else Muslims hear: And if you don’t volunteer to let us teach you these ‘new Catholic truths,’ well, the US military is right behind us.

The lure of secular society is unspeakably strong, Church leaders would be the first to admit. Yet they insist that Muslims may not do the more intelligent thing and, using democracy and not violence,  simply allow Muslims to make practices contrary to Islam illegal in their own state, that is, where they are in the clear majority and exercise their democratic rights to select such a state. Here is what the bishops wrote at the Synod regarding the Islamicist religious state, and it should be noted at the outset that this has become the teaching of the Catholic Church only since the disputed Vatican II:

“Catholics, together with other Christian citizens and Muslim thinkers and reformers, ought to be able to support initiatives at examining thoroughly the concept of the “positive laicity” of the State. This could help eliminate the theocratic character of government and allow for greater Equality among citizens of different religions, thereby fostering the promotion of a sound democracy, positively secular in nature, which fully acknowledges the role of religion, also in public life, while completely respecting the distinction between the religious and civic orders.” (p. 15, item 25, op cit)

Here the bishops have rallied Catholics in the middle east to the public action of supporting concrete initiatives that the bishops know full well Muslims will “fight against” with “every fiber of their being,” the systematic and conscious elimination of the possibility of the government that has a theocratic character. It is to pit Catholics against Muslims without ever demonstrating the truth of the assertion that they have no right to a theocracy where they form the majority of citizens, under the very rules of democracy that the West says it practices, and rarely does, and the church says it supports, ignoring the obvious contradiction. (The West needs God in its own governments, needs to “acknowledge the role in religion even in public life” in its own governments, to make them practice what they spout. They do not; because it is a lie, or rather an impossibility, a fantasy about secularism, not the reality.)

The Church also exhorts Muslims living in the West to stop rocking the boat, because they are making traffic jams and upsetting commerce.  Father Samir Khali Samir, the Vatican’s mouthpiece to Islam, recently addressed the European problem of Muslims blocking streets surrounding mosques at Friday noon to pray together. They are aware that they are causing traffic problems and ask for the loan of Christian churches in the area. Here is his response:  hell no, Islam must change its prayer requirement to fit in with secularism, like we did. ”The Second Vatican Council, the Catholic Church authorized the anticipation of Sunday Mass to Saturday evening, contrary to the whole Tradition, to allow as many faithful as possible to participate in the Eucharist” and Islam should do the same (interesting he sees it’s contrary to our whole Tradition!).  He continues:  “I think the Muslim community must make a serious attempt to accept that the religious phenomenon remains, as far as possible, a private affair. The more Islam moves in this direction, the less opposition it will find. This does not mean being less Muslim, far from it, it means being Muslim in a different, more inner, way.”

Let’s see. Our churches were not empty Sunday mornings, and now they are, and Saturdays too. Our society had a model of reserving Sunday mornings for worship, now there is no observation of any kind, and workers are forced to work all seven dfays a week, and statistics show they do. Kids little league games are scheduled Sunday mornings, always. We lost our concept of a sacred day, and Muslims must lose it, too. Father Samir’s solution is purely liberal, that faith must always yield to secularism’s uninterrupted traffic flow, and yet this approach has emptied our churches both Saturday afternoons and Sunday mornings as Catholics practice their ‘inner’ Catholicism. Islam is listening, Islam sees the reality of our empty churches. If only Samir would challenge us to fill our churches with Catholics! But no, although he does alude to some kind of flowering of the Council ‘in the future.’ (Yeah, right.)

Some are caving in to this seduction. It really sharpens the debate. Liberalism is strengthening in Islam and using the Catholic church to do it. Islamic liberals are conscious of the liberal ascendency in the Catholic Church, are communicating with it,  and are using it as a tool in their struggle against their own traditionalists, the ‘Islamicists.’  In January, influential liberal Muslim theologians released a document calling for Islam to move “toward modernity,” the same loaded term used by liberal Catholics, and the synod of middle eastern bishops, to avoid the term liberalism, already energetically condemned by the Church. The document called for twenty one points of modernization that might have come straight from the Vatican II playbook. Proposed was a truncated women’s lib platform, including more fraternization among the sexes, the elimination of those inconvenient prohibitions regarding charging interest, the interesting demand that non-Muslims ought to be able to be at the very head of Muslim countries, and of course, always the center of it all, the disavowal of the religious state.  This salvo directed toward Rome was cheered on by liberal Catholic AsiaNews, who noted and dismissed that, of the comments blogged after the publication of the document online, eighty eight percent of respondents largely Muslims disagreed with the modernization document: ” This means that the path of renewal will be long and require much time and effort,” wrote (Father) Samir Khali Samir. (And bloody. And expensive. On secularism’s side –no, ‘renewal’s side– largely American blood, largely American taxpayer money.)

The alignment of objectives between liberal Muslims and liberal Catholics only re-focuses traditional Islam’s fury on those Catholic communities in their midst which have, prior to Christianity’s  capitulation to secularism,  lived for centuries in peace with, and generally, in spite of colonial residue, giving western faiths a heavier influence than their sheer numbers warrant,under the cultural and political dominance of Muslims whose faith is more or less represented in their respective governments, just as a pale Christianity is visible in the US constitution. Now Muslims want unambiguous religious states and are rejecting the quasi-democratic governments inherited from the break-up of the explicit colonial empires.

That muslims want religious states is not unknown to us, if we look. The Gallup Poll, Who Speaks for Islam, what a Billion Muslims Really Think from 2008, in which a billion Muslims in all countries were sampled, summarise their findings this way:  the majority of those surveyed want religious leaders to have no direct role in crafting a constitution, yet favor religious law as a source of legislation.  

And how do the liberal bishops answer them? With the received answer from Vatican II, as cited above: you have no right to this, you must learn to value a secular, pluralistic society like we do.   Furthermore, we as Catholics will work against you politically in united action. Item 25, p 10, op cit:

“Catholics, together with other Christian citizens and Muslim thinkers and reformers, ought to be able to support initiatives at examining thoroughly the concept of the “positive laicity” of the State. This could help eliminate the theocratic character of government and allow for greater equality among citizens of different religions, thereby fostering the promotion of a sound democracy, positively secular in nature, which fully acknowledges the role of religion, also in public life, while completely respecting the distinction between the religious and civic orders.”

The western reader knows very well that a state that is positively secular in nature will never acknowledge the role of religion in the life of the state,  because it must preserve equality among all the religions is allows to operate ‘in the open,’ which is the meaning of “public life.”  The reader knows the court cases that one by one have taken down the crucifixes from the walls of our civic buildings. They know the most recent case in which a grandparently Christian couple were denied the role of foster caregivers by a fully-grown secular state, explicitly because they were Christians and thus inexorably poised against homosexuality. The number of ways Christians are marginalized in their secular cultures grows every day.

As a related aside: one must beware of the use of the Church as an accessory legitimizing secularism, as in the most recent ruling in northern Italy permitting the crucifix to remain on classroom walls .  Rome expressed great ‘satisfaction’ at the decision, as the Vatican Information Services (March 19-21 digest) because the decision recognizes Christianity’s cultural, historic contribution to Europe,’ which is not a bit different than the old priest at the lovely (and empty) little mission church in Mascota, Mexico, telling the elder ladies they’d better be seen praying the rosary Saturday afternoons, because ‘the tourists expect it.’  It makes no difference–it is worse, in fact, a mutated fascism–that a cross is on the wall of a classroom where secular values are being taught. We know what those values are, self indulgent sexuality,  professional, life-long agnosticism, indifference, and castration of religious fervor–spiritual death. How does it matter that the next thug who mugs you is wearing a cross? That the Holy Father expresses his satisfation with such emptiness is heart-breaking.

Much more persuasive is the force of secularism, whatever icon is permitted in the decorating.  The reader knows equally well also what happens to the public perception of the truth of any particular religion as a result of the forced equality in a secular state. If they are’ all equal,’ they are all equally unimportant, is how our children like to put it,  just before moving in with the samesex boyfriend, or into concubinage, unencumbered by a single civic protest, thanks to our wonderful free society. (Next stop, hell.)

But here we have all trotted out again, in the liberal synod of bishops of the middle east, the same Vatican II language and solutions to modern problems which have not worked at all in the West. We have no peace, in the West.  In the West, we never rest from our weary efforts at ‘forming consciences.’ And now, thanks to the fruits of an uncontrollable laicity, we have no economy either, having aborted all our future buyers and producers, over fifty million in the US alone. But let’s offer it anyway, that being the party line since–and only since–Vatican II.

And if the western reader knows this, have much more do Muslims know it? Because it is being offered to them on a bayonet, which does tend to bring out the sharpness of the focus on a subject.

A better solution? Just as the Church called back the traditional mass from oblivion, let us also call back the approval in principle of the religious state, with a new motu proprio that spells out the essentials regarding the True Faith’s primary right to the religious state, but acknowledges other religions’ legitimate desire for the order and security afforded by this civic form.. As with the traditional mass, let the religious state be a legitimate option in the eyes of the Church where the majority of the population wishes it. It was not only a legitimate option before the Council, it was the only option of choice for Catholics, if they had a choice in the matter. Hold as a requirement Islam’s own promises regarding tolerance of other faiths (here is a link  that summarizes these explicit promises, which the synod acknowledges throughout the working document are already honored in most places in the middle east under the various ‘shades’ of ‘theocracy’ presently existing; basically one may worship but not evangelize, and a link below shows functioning, not fantasy, workarounds of evangelization at least as robust as those found in Western society).

In practice, this means the Church should stop criticizing ‘fundamentalism’ among Muslims, should stop calling for ‘religious freedom,’ should if pressed explain that they expect the religious state to be an option for Christianity wherever it may be attained. (This is not to say that the Church should stop criticizing terrorism.)  The Church should begin to support Muslims’ struggle against secularism wherever these coincide with Catholicism’s, which are many: anti-abortion, anti-birth control, anti-pornography, generally pro-marriage although Islam tolerates divorce so that we would have to educate them by the fidelity of our marriages. In Pakistan one of the groups in the loose coalition that form the public opinion base (enabling the kind of assasinations suffered recently by the Catholic minister of government) the Catholic church in the area is not a supporter of the anti-pornography campaign being pressed forward by ‘fundamental’ Islam,  and the Holy Father’s loud recent criticism of the principle of a blasphemy law (rather than the alternative, pleading for mercy in its strongest applications)  is well known, just as well-known as his crocodile tears over the loss of respect for God in Europe. His comments have fueled enormous demonstrations in Pakistan in support of the law.

Such a policy, admittedly, would put the Church in a society dominated by another religion, one which will restrict the Church’s evangelization. This fact should not make the alternative, war with Islam, a given. In terms of restriction of proselytism, there is some evidence (from the practices in the authentic Islamic state of Kelantan in Malaysia) the Church would suffer little in an Islamic state with which She enjoys good relations, especially given that the Church’s own guidelines in place in the middle east and in the whole world, in fact (various places in the previously cited working document of the synod, is that nothing should ever be uttered or written that another religion might find ‘offensive’ [section on Ecumensim, working document op cit], and also that most evangelization should by principle be performed through deeds, not words, in service to one’s family and community.  That self-imposed restriction is tighter than the Islamic practice in Kelantan, which formally forbides evangelization yet tolerates various initiatives. Here is a link as to how Buddhists manage to evangelize anyway, through means accepted by Islamic government state of Kelantan.

Such a policy would force the Church to awaken from its dependence on the historical role of Christianity in Europe, and realize that St. Paul was not joking, it’s a horse-race, and we’d better be in it to win it. Are they praying in the streets and upsetting traffic because their mosques are full and they’ve had the nerve to ask for the loan of an empty church or two? Better fill up those churches with Christians. And if we can’t, at least stop whining about Islam and admit the liberal policies of Vatican II are a failure and have come close to destroying our Faith.

Traditional Catholics in particular ought to be parsing the situation quite differently from our novus ordo compatriots, after a warning given by Bishop Bernard Tissier de Mallerais in an as-yet unpublished manuscript fortuitously available to the author.

“These two motives for condemnation [of rejection of the very concept of the religious stateas discussed by Pius IX and Leo XIII] are absolutely general; they follow from the truth of Christ and of his Church, from the duty of the State to recognize it, and from its indirect duty to promote the eternal salvation of the citizens, not indeed by constraining them to believe in spite of themselves, but by protecting them against the influence of socially professed error, all things taught by Pius IX and Leo XIII.

“If today, circumstances having changed, religious plurality demands, in the name of political prudence, civil measures for tolerance even of legal equality between diverse cults, religious liberty as a natural right of the person, in the name of justice, should not be invoked. It remains a condemned error.”

The author hopes by this incomplete post to raise the issue among traditional Catholics, which presently may be said to make of Islam an exception, just as the liberal Church does; for the liberal Vatican, Islam is the exception to their determined and idiotic ecumenism, and the proof of the lie, as DICI just pointed out;  for traditional Catholicism, apparently Islam is the exception to the otherwise just principle of the horror of the secular state, the justice in principle of the religious state in fighting it. No citations will be offered, but the evidence showing traditional Catholics promoting religious freedom as long as it is in Islamic territory is not too difficult to find on otherwise laudatory websites.  One must wonder what enables this kind of approach to the problem. Is it racism, this automatic hatred of all things Islamic?   If traditionalists yield principle in the drunken euphoria of sharing ‘one with the boys,’ this little  crumb of common bond with Rome in the long exile, it will come back to haunt us.

Wiltgen called their association a “midget alliance” (opposition to the liberal European bloc did not completely organize itself until the third session) but he asked Archbishop Lefebvre for an interview. After discussing Archbishop Lefebvre’s concern for the authority and pastoral responsibility of individual bishops,  whom Lefebvre believed could easily be bullied in the name of collegiality by a few aggressive members on a national committee (a matter on which Wiltgen asserts the Archbishop ‘spoke with authority,’ having been for 11 years the founder of episcopal conferences throughout Africa while serving as apostolic delegate for French speaking Africa), Wiltgen reports a comment by the Archbishop during the interview that is as useful to us today as it was then. What was needed, the Archbishop said, “at this Catholic Council” was not a grouping of Council fathers on national or linguistic lines, as hitherto, “but a grouping. . . on international lines, by schools of thought and special tendencies.” In that way it would be possible to see what the bishops thought, rather than what the ‘nations’ thought. “For is the bishops, not the nations, that make up the Council.” (op cit, 90)

This formulation does not reveal if the Archbishop grasped the darkly cynical tactic of using former colonies as spokespersons for their former European handlers, one way liberals developed their arguments of smoke and mirrors.   But anyone involved in an apostolate of flesh and blood will appreciate the profound practicality of Archbishop Lefebvre’s insight.  Name the school. Name the antecedents. Name the fellow travelers.  Name the problem right. Make or break can very often depend on a single magical term, and the ability to link to it, google it (the equivalent, back in the day), and sort with it. Without the potent term, there is no link, either to history or to authority. Without the correct term, the message is lost, and the crowd goes to hell hungry, and quiescent. 

Archbishop Lefebvre’s suggestion to the Council was not taken. The Council instead used a trick that would become a favorite tactic of leftist movements. They manipulated the discussion so that ideas  already condemned by the Church were presented under a different guise as the innocent thought of a nation, a people, even a tribe, not as a rejected philosophical concept. Any criticism would have to be read as an attack upon those peoples and nations, not an attack on an idea. It was easy to suggest that an ‘attack on people’ was–racism; fascism; at the very least an abuse of common courtesy.  Discussion is easily stifled in this way.

The liberal idea, for example, that “Every man is free to embrace and profess that religion which, guided by the light of reason, he shall consider true,” had been thoroughly deconstructed by Catholic theologians, and condemned in various terms by Pius IX, Pius X, Pius XI, Pius XII, and Leo XIII.  But the liberal bloc at the Council presented it as a new idea championed by the Americans, the ones who saved Europe and beat Hitler in the Great War. And those Americans should know if a concept worked or not!  The churches there were bursting with Catholics, nowhere had the Faith grown more luxuriantly than the place where it was free. To gainsay the liberal European alliance would be to insult those dear Americans! (They used Bishop Meyers of Chicago often. Cardinal Spellman sometimes upset their stereotype, though!)  Anyway, it was not embracing whatever religion, it was a new thing altogether, ‘laicity,’ that’s more religious, it’s nuanced.

One wing wished to use ‘religious freedom’ to wave at communism under which the Church was persecuted; the other wished to use it to satisfy their fever for unity with protestantism. Only the traditionalists wished to resolve the matter in continuity.  Cardinal Ottaviani, of all who spoke, made sense: quoting Wiltgen (164): “He said that the declaration stated a principle which had always been recongized, namely, that no one could be forced in religious matters. But the text was guilty of exaggeration in stating that ‘he is worthy of honor’ who obeys his own conscience. It would be better to say that such a person was deserving of tolerance or of respect and charity. ‘The principle that each individual has the right to follow his own conscience must suppose that the conscience is not contrary to the divine law, he [Ottaviani] asserted. There was missing in the text ‘an explicit and solemn affirmation of the first and genuine right to religious freedom, which objectively belongs to those who are members of the true revealed religion.’  Their right was at once an objective and a subjective right, he said, while for those in error there was only a subjective right.”

The particular term that Council fathers wished to stifle was the designation ‘liberal.’  The previous two centuries had seen the explicit Catholic denunciation of the school of thought represented by that word. The church had already spoken on liberalism: liberalism is a sin, and Catholics are not permitted to practice it. Pius IX first said it in his Allocution “Jamdudum cernimus” and then forcefully repeated it in the Syllabus of Errors, which, because it is teaching ex cathedra, is required for Catholics, unlike the Council, to obey both exteriorly and interiorly. The Syllabus is published still, as it must be, on the Vatican website side by side with the Council’s own counter-Syllabus, Gaudium et Spes, its complete opposite, according to Joseph Ratzinger, quoted on the cover of his Les Principes de la Theologie Catholique, 1982, where he evidently bragged of the fact. The reader is invited to compare the two. One is clear as water; the other — not so much.

It is urgent that we heed the Archbishop’s words and continue to press for the discussion of issues around “schools of thought and special tendencies.” We should not suffer quietly anymore announcements such as ‘German bishops call for married clergy,’ last week’s headline. We should write our little fingers off: not German bishops: liberal bishops.  Now that SSPX’s talks with the Vatican are drawing to a close, without any movement on the liberal side, it may be that our task (for some sad and undetermined time) to simply begin to give the faithful, in a fervent evangelical outreach to deliver only one lesson, a new syllabus developed from the talks themselves. ‘Here on the one side is Liberalism. This is what the popes say about it. Here is how it has affected us. And here on the other is Tradition. This is how tradition would make the crooked ways straight.’ And we may have to spend our Saturday afternoons passing out educational and invitational leaflets at the mall and the sports arena and in our neighborhoods, until the people themselves rise and up and say, not to a civic oppressor, but to our very own Church: No more. Get the liberalism out!

Protest seems to be in season now, and muslims seem to be opening a door Vatican II was certain was closed, in islam’s strong desire for a religious state. In spite of attempts to always characterize islam’s teaching on the religious state as identical to terrorism, the US media nevertheless inadvertently discloses enough to potentially arouse curiosity among our own citizens. It could give us a platform for discussion, if we can take advantage of the opening, for as many Americans want the Christian religion to be a part of the constitution, as they told Gallup in 2008, as the people in Iran want sharia to be a part of theirs, and comparably to most other countries where muslims are in the majority. We too want a religious state; we just don’t know what to call it yet. Let’s teach us. Now that the talks are over, it would seem we have some time to fill.

 Half of it admires Vatican II for its traditionalism, the other half mentions just a couple of little problems, ignoring the most difficult bits.

Schneider’s Council is continuous with Tradition.  To summarize the initial thesis, for which he gives the appropriate counciliar quotes, he asserts that the Church’s mission is stated by Vatican II as always, the salvation of souls; that all the Church’s actions flow toward and away from the liturgy; and that the Council clearly admits the duty to proclaim the Gospel to faithful and non-faithful alike, to preach repentance, and to prepare the faithful to receive the sacraments. Then, Schneider again reiterates the Council’s fidelity to tradition in naming the sacred liturgy as the true and necessary font of the Christian spirit. Moving on to a new element in which the Council was continuous with Tradition, he says that morally the Council only reaffirms the duty of the Church to teach the faithful the commandments of God, and to promote among them the apostolate of charity and piety.

But there were some errors, some ruptures, Schneider says. They were due to the excesses of the times, the tumultuous sixties, and also due to a lack of wise Pastors of the Church who were ready to defend the purity and integrity of the faith.

This is what Schneider says of the times, but not of the Council itself:  “It is necessary to remember the time in which it was realized: a time which everyone admits is orientated toward the conquest of the kingdom of earth rather than of that of heaven; a time in which forgetfulness of God has become habitual, and seems, quite wrongly, to be prompted by the progress of science; a time in which the fundamental act of the human person, more conscious now of himself and of his liberty, tends to pronounce in favor of his own absolute autonomy, in emancipation from every transcendent law; a time in which secularism seems the legitimate consequence of modern thought and the highest wisdom in the temporal ordering of society.”

Of this quote, Schneider asserts that the Council condemns secularism without using the word, and cites but does not quote Leo XIII ‘s Immortale Dei, 166ff, and also Pius XII’s discourse Alla Vostra Filiale’s exact words, “the legitimate healthy laicity of the State is one of the principles of Catholic doctrine.” (This is a really arguable justification, a real stretch, just to note. )

Schneider names three liturgical errors: loss of Latin, reception in the hand,  standing, and orientation toward each other rather than to God.

The bishop names one doctrinal error, the manifestation stemming from a ‘confused interpretation’ of the Council in the Theology of Liberation, even though Schneider asserts that the Council clearly taught that “the proper mission that Christ has entrusted to His Church is not of the political, economic, or social order: in fact, the end that he has set is in the order of religion.” (GS, 42) (Another note for an additional post: Schneider seems correct to say this–the Council did separate the Faith from the State, meaning the political, economic, and social order; it abandoned the religious state in calling for “religious freedom” rather than the traditional call, since the reformation unleashed secularism, for religious tolerance. But this withdrawal left a vacuum, and Liberation Theology filled it, for that twisted movement is the attempt to achieve the kind of fruitful society in the secular realm, through secular means, what the religious state achieves for God and through the Church: a world that helps us get to heaven.)

So the single only doctrinal confusion Schneider names as resulting from VII, Liberation Theology, is already at least identified, if not (tellingly) resolved in the areas where it most affected the faithful. He says nothing of collegiality, or the confusion regarding authority in the Church since the Council which result in errors like Liberation Theology persisting without challenge from frightened or co-opted local authority (just as it has in the cases of sexual misconduct, subsequent to the Council).  He says nothing either of problems resulting from the substitution of the liberal demand for ‘religious liberty’ for the traditional ‘religious tolerance,’ or problems stemming from ecumenism. Assisi III is okay with him.

And even in liturgical matters, he does not address the changed content of the mass in the elimination of almost all of the collect prayers  from the old mass which explicitly teach the faithful to resist the very errors he named–excluding God from society, and an orientation toward a merely earthly kingdom (here’s one source detailing this massive prayer re-write). The new collects teach man’s reliance on man and were explicitly written to appease and attract our protestant brothers. The Church always knew that our prayers at mass were teaching us in small bites what to believe; they still do. Now they teach us liberalism, and they will still teach us liberalism whether we are actually turned toward each other, or physically turned to God. We’ll be mentally turned toward each other still. The the most primitive spam eliminator searching for specific words would show every tenet of liberalism, of feminism, of pro-choice, of the “absolute autonomy” that Schneider understands marks the Sixties (he will not call it liberalism so we can fight it!).

Nevertheless, Schneider does call for a re-interpretation of the Council, necessitated by “the confusion of pastoral and liturgical applications,”  a “syllabus” directed “not so much against errors coming from outside the Church, but against errors spread within the Church on the part of those who maintain a thesis of discontinuity and rupture.” This syllabus could have two parts, a part marking errors, and a positive part with propositions of doctrinal clarification, completion, and precision.” This syllabus would have to issue from the supreme Magisterium of the Pope, or a future council.

The syllabus would be directed against those who maintain the theory of rupture, which has two groups: those who try “to protestantize the life of the Church doctrinally, liturgically, and pastorally,” and those who “reject the Council, and avoid submission to the supreme living Magisterium of the Church . . . waiting for better times.”

Bishop Schneider sidesteps here another trying discussion that would bring in the word obey; SSPX “avoids submission” to the ‘living’ Magisterium, “waiting for better times.” That’s one way to put it, and it pretty well describes many poor SSPX chapels. That they might possibly have acted like  the “wise Pastors of the Church who would be ready to defend the purity and integrity of the faith” the bishop laments the lack of, immediately following the Council, does not occur to him. But his use of terms does indicate an appreciation of the fact that he’d not be able to limit his liturgical problems to three had not they spent so much of their youth and fortunes just holding on to that precious God-ward orientation, that gold-standard Latin. “Avoid submission” is a tip of the hat, it seems. They have kept the mass alive for him.

Nevertheless, Bishop Schneider must hold himself ready to pay a high price for his timid assessment of the Council. Slowly, day by day, unchallenged, the poison is mutating. First tolerated, buried in the sweets of the brazen collects and sermons and catechisms and RCIA material and all the rest, then customary. We will learn to swallow contradiction. We will no longer recognize the true Faith and our Catholic instincts against heresy will be confused.  Finally it will feel right to say that a child is a child only if the mother says it is, and divorce isn’t so bad, and God has to love gays, she made them, and it’s better for old people to go quickly,  because we’ve evolved spiritually, see, and don’t need any rules, just like the Council said.  Isn’t freedom wonderful.  Long live Halliburton’s.

And then the forces of greed and lust will be free to roll out the most unspeakable attack on the bodies and souls of the poor and weak. They have only begun.

The Church was always our only knight.

Collegiality was one of the innovations of Vatican II that began as a heresy in the Renaissance in the 14th century.  The Church had been, during all the preceding ages, a successful monarchy. Only the pope exercised Peter’s infallibility. Then ambitious bishops tried to change the Church to an oligarchy ruled by the bishops, with the pope as their mouthpiece. Three councils intended to end the Great Schism were only in part orthodox and pushed always to curtail Peter’s power in favor of the bishops and to place the authority of a general council above the pope.  In the struggles against the heresy, known by various names in different nations, supporters of tradition and the centralized authority of Rome became known as ‘Ultramontanists” and their fightback as “Ultramontanism” as they faithfully resisted the ideas that papal decisions were not infallible without the consent of the bishops, councils are superior to the pope, or that the pope has no authority to intervene in temporal affairs. They understood always that to weaken the pope was not what Christ wanted when he gave Peter the keys.

The struggle went on for some centuries. In one notable form, Joseph II in France, during the decade 1780-1790, demanded the right to form his own national church with complete control over  liturgy, religious orders, the consecration of bishops, and even the length and content of sermons. This extreme form (called Ceasaro-papism) found its theoretical base in the push over the preceding centuries for what came to be known as collegiality. 

Modern times brought no respite.  Pius IX’s struggle against liberalism was much hampered by resistance in the ‘national churches,’ but Vatican I, called at his behest, emphatically rejected collegiality, stating that “if anyone should say that the Roman Pontiff has only the office of inspecting or directing, and not the full and supreme power of jurisdiction over the whole Church . . . .let him be anathema.” (De Ecclesia Christi, can. 3) This doctrinal council stated unequivocally that the pope, when speaking ex cathedra, speaks infallibly through power received from the divine Redeemer, not by consent of the Church. (De Romani Pontificis infallibili magisterio, cap. 4, can. 4.)  Vatican I identified those schools of thought comprising collegiality as heresy. It reemerged in Modernism and we are fighting it still. 

After Vatican I, the Church embarked on a remarkable run of success, under the guidance of a series of popes, from Pius IX to Pius XII. There was an attack from Modernism around the turn of the century, but it was routed and driven underground by the resolute action of St. Pius X. There it remained until the day when a fateful opportunity and a monstrous conspiracy would deliver the whole structure of the Church into Modernist hands during Vatican II.

Father Ralph Wiltgen, the author of The Rhine Flows into the Tiber, called the fight over collegiality the most important and dramatic battle at Vatican II. The political strength of liberalism at Vatican II in the struggle for collegiality set the stage for the victory of liberalism in other areas like ecumenism and religious liberty. Father Wiltgen discusses three movements in the battle. The first was called the ultra- montane and was the traditional Catholic view: that the pope alone has supreme authority, but may share it temporarily with a general council, as an extraordinary measure. Wiltgen says that this position was probably that of the silent majority of the bishops, as far as they took any position.

The liberal movement maintained that the only supreme authority in the Church was the collect of bishops in union with the pope. The pope exercised his authority only when representing the college. He was bound in duty to consult the bishops before any important decision. The bishops exercised supreme authority by divine right, in virtue of their consecration. General councils were an ordinary, not an extraordinary, exercise of this authority, and should be of frequent and regular occurrence. This view is simply the heresy fought over the previous ages and specifically rejected by Vatican I.

The third position was an extremely vague compromise, a confusing mixture of all positions. The pope had divine authority and was always free to use it. The college of bishops also had divine authority but was not always free to use it. The college had authority only when allowed to do so by the pope. It was this position that was finally adopted by the Council, with an important preface, after heated political machinations. Those protesting the moderate movement, as did Archbishop Staffa of the Curia, predicted a breakdown of ecclesiastical discipline in the power vacuum caused by shared authority, but Paul VI sided with the liberals until a secret memo by one of the most extreme radicals was made public. The memo discussed the most ambiguous passages in the current resolution (which was about to be passed) and celebrated how the liberal bishops intended to interpret them in the future, thanks to the loopholes the deliberately vague language allowed. This blew the liberal cover, and Paul VI acted, and a preface was attached to chapter 3 of Lumen Gentium asserting that the traditional policy, in which the pope may temporarily grant power to the bishops at extraordinary general councils, was the teaching intended.

The liberal wing, by now incredibly strong and active, was infuriated by the preface, which negated their position. As they were to do with the liturgy, they simply acted as if the liberal position had passed, and set up administrative initiatives as if it had. They subsequently created a permanent Synod of Bishops in each nation, with real, not just advisory powers,  in effect establishing national churches to which individual bishops, previously the sole authorities in their own dioceses, were to be subjected.  The seat of practical authority was shifted away from both Rome and from individual bishops in their own dioceses, to the newly empowered episcopal conferences. These simple administrative changes contradicted in practice the preface to Lumen Gentium. It was all done as if the liberal language of collegiality had won; even the term collegiality, with all it communicated, continued to be used without censure, as it does today.

So who’s in charge? As with the constitution on the liturgy in Vatican II, the actual text, the actual teaching of the Church, did not change. Yet the vague wording, the use of terms carrying other meanings, and then the subsequent administrative actions following the Council in which power was taken from the Curia and distributed, changed the Church. And not for the better! Strange and bitter fruit born! 

Now the Holy Father wishes to take some of it back, as in disciplinary power in punishing sexual behaviors among the clergy, so badly dealt with by the episcopal conferences that it has brought the Church to her knees.  Too late–and what about all those other areas in which Catholic identity has been so altered as to make the Church unrecognizable and incoherent?

So the next time you wish to complain about this or that entity calling itself Catholic without being so, or about the on-going, unreformed liturgical abuses, rather than general complaining, call attention to the real problem: pray for an end to collegiality.  Then write the Holy Father and ask him to exercise his authority in whatever issue is at stake.  Remind him that he has the power and that we want him to use it. Ask him to re-state the traditional definition with both words and actions, to work to centralize authority administratively, on all the important issues, not just the sex abuse issues.  Ask him to cooperate with SSPX in clarifying this question. Collegiality is on the table, in the doctrinal discussions between the Vatican and SSPX, and is less a sleeper issue than you might have previously imagined. We never needed a stronger papacy than now.

 When one uses the term ‘increased’ one indicates that there was a preceding period in which there was less violence, and it is true that there preceded this period one in which Catholics and Muslims, and Catholics and Hindus, lived in a state of mutual tolerance occasionally punctuated by breaks in that norm. This escalation is recent. It is new, and it is well to ask ourselves why.

 The reason is Vatican II. Don’t sigh! Read on!

 At Vatican II, we abandoned the traditional teaching that the state and the Church had a mutual interest in agreeing upon a shared framework of values covering not only morals, but also economics. The Western world, torn by protestant heresy, had abandoned the model in sections long before Vatican II, but the Church had never explicitly renounced what had been Her goal since Henry VIII destroyed England with his lust and pride.  It was not an illusary goal, even in the 1960′s; there were still Catholic states living and thriving when Vatican II hit–the Church voluntarily dissolved them in favor of the secular model! The traditional goal in the sixteenth century had been the restoration of the Church as the official and only recognized church in England. Later, a certain section of the British priesthood, weary of martyrdoms and suckers for a good cigar, opted for a novel solution that would enable them to return to their comfortable lives; they wisely called it ‘freedom of religion,’ knowing what suckers we are for the term.  That has been a banner of liberal political and religious groups ever since. But the Church had held on, and not only had never adopted ‘freedom of religion,’ many popes wrote passionate encyclicals warning against it. At Vatican II it became almost by slight of hand the banner of the Catholic Church.  

Freedom of religion is not the same thing as tolerance, it’s important to note. The Western world tolerated other religions within its borders when the Catholic Church was officially the one Church with which the state fully cooperated in their single mission of making the best of living a full life and getting to heaven. There were periods, it is true, when under extreme deformation by political pressures, in certain sections of the world, tolerance was violated. But there is no historian who argues that the pax romana Christiana was illusionary. It was a rich, amiable, durable civilization. Freedom of religion on the other hand, means that no matter how crazy the spiritualist or cannibalist or terrorist “the faith” is, it’s allowed. That’s secularism. It is not sustainable, and we are caught in its death agony. Islam rightly rejects secularism and the chaos-causing, society-destroying, faith-killing idiocacy of “freedom of religion.”

In Pakistan, the Taliban has issued a fatwa against a Catholic cabinet minister, according to Catholiculture. The minister, Shabhaz Bhatti, is leading an effort to change the strict blasphemy law in place there. “My life mission is to protect religious freedom, minority rights, justice and equality,” Bhatti told the Fides news agency in the interview cited.  That mission derives from Vatican II, not from Catholicism. It carries a cultural message: we will make evil equal, just as it is in the West. We will make all religions equal–equally meaningless. That is what secularism does, according to, not the Taliban, but Pius IX, Leo XIII, Pius X, Pius XI, and Pius XII. The Taliban agrees. What Muslims hear when they hear “religious freedom” is “religious riot” and eventually, in reaction, an atheistic society, as in the West,  and who are we, with our falling religious populations and our flailing doctrines, to disagree?  Let us observe the blasphemy law, not dismantle it so that Pakistani art exhibits can feature ants crawling over Mohammad as ours feature them crawling over Christ.  Let us enact a few of our own!  Bhatti is representing liberalism’s agenda, not the traditional Faith’s. But his Church pinned him to it with the changes that clicked into place in Vatican II.

Before Vatican II, Christianity  tolerated Islam.  And Islam tolerated Christians. Saddam Hussein tolerated Christians. Those Christians never called for ‘religious freedom’ there.  It is a bitter cliché that things were better for Catholics in Iraq before Bush’s war. (If it’s fair to call it a cliché now with the spilled blood in Baghdad still wet.  What shall we call it now?) 

Islam rejects freedom of religion. They also reject the notion of ‘free market’. Very many behaviors come under those two broad categories – family life and financial life, but we know more about the one.  We are all aware of the ‘horror’ of veiled women, but less of the financial practices that our war is waged to change. Lending money at interest is forbidden under sharia law,  only one policy that Western banks can’t wait to undo.  The war’s not just “about oil.” It’s about an entire market that heretofore has been closed to the West. The Western financial world calls the economics of Islam primitive,’ and primitive means there are just too many little capitalists selling their roles and spices and fabrics from too many little stores. By God, they need a Walmart or two. But that’s not Catholic economic policy–up until Vatican II, that is. Catholics also prefer (used to prefer) lots of little capitalists selling their locally made products from lots of little stores.

Referencing last year’s Gallup poll of 1 billion Muslims from around the world, hatred of the religious points of other faiths was not the perceived reason among Muslims for Islam’s war on the West. The Gallup poll designers managed to ask enough of the right kind of questions for us to be able to say that Islam is not rejecting Catholicism, it is rejecting secularism, but Catholics put themselves entirely in that camp with Vatican II. Islam’s contentions with Catholicism over theological points of the Faith, which are very important to us both, are not on the table, it is the tenets of secularism – democracy, liberalism, loosened morals, family planning, ruinous lending practices, concentration of ownership, oligarchy style and a hundred more indicators – with which Islam is at war. The Church itself influenced the state, in the heyday when the two cooperated, to forbid lending at interest in Europe. That was the standard economic practice during medievalism and it amounts to the Catholic economic preference, along with other policies loosely grouped under the heading of distributism. One thing for sure: traditional Catholicism never supported the free market philosophy that is driving our war now by both parties. It is simply a protestant philosophy. But Vatican II bewitched us. We’ve been had.

The best the Vatican has to offer now is the kind of advice the Holy Father recently offered to the leaders of the G 20 summit in Seoul: “Some countries should not be favored at the expense of others,” not very helpful, since absolute equality is infinitely harder to achieve than developing a list of solid indicators based on those abandoned Catholic economic principles (they were abandoned when secularism was embraced, because they do not work in a secularist state, because the valueless secularist state is as dangerous as a loaded gun, as every 20th-century pope taught until the hippie era) that would give us a basis for a wise discrimination in the allocation of whatever assets will be left after the shooting is over.

 But they are killing Catholics. They are killing Catholics at the foot of the altar. The Vatican is talking martyrdom, for the cause of ‘freedom of religion.’ And that would be accurate. But that is not our cause. Our cause is Christ, the Alpha and the Omega. Before Vatican II, we would  have died for that cause. Now we are expected to die for a consortium of gods in the name of religious freedom. And had Vatican II left the traditional teaching in place, which was the clear rejection of liberalism and specifically of freedom of religion, as it was charged to do, the Church could now persuasively plead with Islam for the lives of Her people, and vow Her stateless neutrality in the struggle between Islam and the West. The Vatican could have called for the tolerance it demonstrates toward Islam to be reciprocated.

 We closed our cause with secularism’s, at Vatican II, when the americanist term “religious freedom” replaced “religious tolerance.”  And thus those Catholics, those Iraqi Catholics  (lying there in their blood with their rosaries still clutched in their hands, looking like somebody’s nice uncles and aunties) died for the West’s cause. They died so that homosexuals can be ‘free’ in Iraq. They died so that women can be ‘free’ there to dress like the poor whores here at home.  Those Iraqi Catholics died for abortion rights. They died so that raw porn can greet the shopper at the door at the local magazine store, as it does here, right off the busy Metra stop in Evanston in the center of town. They died so that religious chaos can reign in Iraq as it does here. They died so that their children can as easily desert their faith and lose their immoral souls there as they do here at home– because an’ equal faith’ is a useless and disposable one, as the popes warned. They died so that banks can engage in predatory lending practices, and so that an incoherent political “democracy” can prevail, a democracy that is as great a mockery of democracy as calling what we have a “free market”  when compared to the true free market of broad small ownership. They died so that Planned Parenthood can come in and wreck Iraq like it’s wrecked South Korea, among others. It is secondary that these men and women and children are Catholic. They did not die because they are Catholic; they died because they represent ‘religious freedom’ to Islam  when they should represent if anything only the tolerance that worked far better than the absolute right that secularism makes of it.

Except their Church sold them out. And now will sell them out again, some elements among us using them to whip up more hatred,  possibly to support horrible actions. Their deaths may lead to the last cataclysm.

We must pray again that the policies of Vatican II are completely clarified and its evil spirit banished once and for all. We must pray again that the reasoned protests of so many good theologians prevails. We must pray for the Holy Father, that the good in him wins. We might pray also for a third political party that offers Catholics the traditional Faith’s moral and financial alternatives to secularism, including the restoration of small capitalism.  If we were working on that, rather than throwing ourselves into the soft dead arms of secularism, at least we’d be dying well. Now? Not so much.

 What ought to sound a note of alarm among Catholics, especially those who have not yet understood the role of the Council in the troubles of the world today, is the amount of support given to this new contraceptive mentality being pushed in the Philippines by Catholic legislators. Not only are they supporting it, they are explicitly doing so by the authority of Vatican II.

 So do legislators in the United States. When Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi was interviewed on Meet the Press during the Obama campaign, she was asked about her support for abortion, and she gave her answer in terms of Vatican II and its new teaching on religious freedom: “This isn’t about abortion on demand, it’s about a careful, careful consideration of all factors and–to–that a woman has to make with her doctor and her god.”  In other words, the choice of abortion is a religious choice protected by the Church itself.

Philippine Senator Miriam Defensor-Santiago was equally explicit, when asked to comment on the possibility that Philipino legislators who supported the bill risk the possibility of excommunication –“Since God is a loving Father, who rejoices when he regains his lost children in the Kingdom of God, then there should be no excommunication for a senator like me who is merely exercising freedom of individual conscience as preached by Vatican II,” she said.  

President Aquino announced his aggressive policy following a week-long visit in the United States, where he met with President Obama; Obama offered aid to the Philippines in exchange for promises to reduce the Philippine population in what Philippine bishops are calling “contraceptive colonization.”

The CBCP has been joined in its  opposition to the HR bill by Muslim leadership. Muslims are about 10% of the population in the Philippines. The Imam Council of the Philippines said they are against birth control pills and condoms even among married couples.

 The chairman of the CBCP, Bishop Nereo Odchimar, had issued a statement threatening excommunication for President Aquino should he persist with his plan to push contraceptives among the  poor, and to mandate Planned Parenthood-style “sex education” of the young.  The uproar over the bishops’ warning of excommunication demonstrates how Catholic the Philippines remains, since it was the consensus of various media sources that the possibility of excommunication constituted unbearable pressure on President Aquino, as it would separate him from his family, from his friends, from his social and spiritual life (in the US, the same threat against a Catholic politician would be–has been– met with yawns).

Later, CBCP secretary general Monsignor Juanito Figura  followed the excommunication bombshell with the threat of civil disobedience. However, church leaders’  last move, as of Tuesday, October 5,  was to agree to a ‘ceasefire’ of further statements to the media until after a formal meeting with President Aquino. The CBCP will thus voluntarily relinquish the spotlight and opportunity to ‘form consciences,’ as Benedict XVI often exhorts the faithful to do, during this fruitful moment, with fickle media attention fleetingly focused on the Philippines. Meanwhile, the forces against them will organize, and are, of course, bound by no promise to pull back and will exploit the breather.

Philippine politicians, a Catholic majority in the legislature,  have  insisted that their cooperation with Aquino’s campaign to promote contraception is not opening the door for abortion in the future, in an attempt to silence the bishops with what they hope will be seen as a larger issue. The bishops have argued back that, as a clear matter of accepted fact many so-called birth control devices are actually abortion devices, because they prevent not conception but the implantation of a fertilized egg into the uterine wall, as current authority now recognizes. Morning after pills, intrauterine devices, and low dosage birth control pills are all classified as ‘contragestive’ devices which prevent conception by killing a very tiny but fully human creature before it finds its way to the safety of the womb.

Given the present level of technological understanding of the complexity of the gamete, the fertilized egg, it will be impossible, now, for politicians to argue that they “support contraception but do not support abortion,” or “support contraception as a way to combat abortion.”

 There are other powerful arguments the CBCP could make, based on the US’s experience. Birth control pills and sex hormones have been found to be dangerous to other species, too. Contraceptives are a major component in a particular type of marine contamination, which experts agree is causing widespread deformation of marine life as the chemicals pass by means of urine into the water supply. Up to now, the Philippines have been spared this specific source of contamination.  Because birth control pills are available only from private doctors, their general use and resulting environmental contamination has been limited.

Aquino has not demonstrated that the Philippine population is excessive, to even try to justify the important policy change, and the bishops could draw on data to demonstrate that the Philippine population is its greatest asset. The economy’s strongest sector and only major export is precisely the orderly export of its population (a government agency known for its efficiency coordinates contact between workers and employers and sets standards for employment that most agree have made the Philippine worker least represented among the ranks of the immigrant exploited). Philippine workers are known to be particularly  well-trained and are in demand for temporary jobs in over 220 countries, including as support to US military. The remittances sent home, taxed, spent, and saved form the basis of the Philippine economy.  The popularity of the Philippine laborer and resulting benefits to the entire country has put the Philippines into Asia’s baby tiger lineup.

Commentators have run the gamut from loudly lamenting the Philippine birth rate (before the recent world-wide recession), to criticizing the growth rate as too ‘slow’ as opposed to a more desirable ‘dynamic’ growth (speculative?)  to pointing out with mild surprise over how well the Philippines weathered the economic crash, doubtless due to their ‘strong internal markets,’ which is another name for growing population, a condition not shared by other baby tigers, who tanked with the rest. Now, with pressure from outside vested interests like Obama’s, Aquino is betting the family farm. He is going down the road of other Asian nations, who have lived to regret it (South Korea, for example, has publically regretted Planned Parenthood. The bishops’ remark that attacking this most effective sector of the effective if slow Philippine economy is truly a form of colonization on America’s part is insightful, to say the least.  The Ugly American, selling his dangerous pills soon to be followed by a dangerous collapse!

 And Vatican II at the living, breathing heart of it, giving Catholic politicians the chance to sign on. 

Not all see it this way. There are many Catholics who see the current struggle over Vatican II as an unimportant ‘paper’ issue. They cite the 95% of good traditional Catholic teaching evident in the documents of Vatican II (the percentage Bishop Fellay is said to have assigned) and argue that SSPX and others are obsessive, or somehow remote from day-to-day Catholicism, in focusing on the minutiae of doctrinal issues instead of on the very many fronts where they could be devoting their lives–pro-life work, economic justice, and many other worthy causes. As one commenter wrote on Regina Coeli on October 7:  ”Bringing Rome to the table to dialogue is the least likely way to bring about any change. Toiling in the devastated vineyard is more likely to bear fruit.” On the contrary! To those of us toiling in the devastated pro-life vineyard, the defection of Catholic politicians under the pass of Vatican II’s teaching on ‘freedom of conscience’ is why we are losing. So, let us put it this way: the five percent of poison doctrine in Vatican II has cost fifty million lives in the last forty years in the United States alone. That’s how many babies were killed while we lacked the handful of votes needed to overturn Roe V. Wade.  It will also be why we lose the coming battle over euthanasia, and the battle over completely legitimizing homosexuality.  Vatican II, or the applied ‘spirit of Vatican II’ present in post-council moral/pastoral directives (as those related to homosexuality, for example), has completely confused the issues and given us the loss. You need a straight-ahead program to win in the vineyard. Did the Vatican direct US bishops to deny Ted Kennedy a full-fledged Catholic funeral, and rebuke those who disobeyed? Did the Vatican rebuke Notre Dame? No, Benedict XVI praises Barack Obama and American democracy to the skies–part of the poison five percent, that abandoned centuries of traditional teaching to embrace the secular state. Even China!

 Statements like these, pro-choice and anti-Catholic, from Catholic politicians like Pelosi and Defensor-Santiago only highlight the bitter truth: that the few but toxic doctrinal changes in Vatican II wreck the pro-life movement on every single front. A similar argument could be developed regarding the demise of Catholic education–victim to the 5% toxin that robbed them of their doctrinal energy and substituted ecumenism for enthusiasm for the faith. A similar argument could be developed regarding specifically Catholic evangelization–it has been submerged into simple political agitation, or social work. Mother Teresa did not offer her dying the Faith, just physical comfort. This fact isn’t usually shared, as if it were not important (it’s actually because the powers that be, that market Mother Teresa, are ashamed of it). But there is a small shy new idea in Vatican II that suggests so sweetly that all of us, Hindu and Jew and Protestant and Buddhist, enjoy a mystical union in a larger church, so that whatever faith a person has, or no faith at all, they are just as good as anybody else, damn it, and don’t you dare insult by offering them your Faith, and baptism, and Our Lord’s Sacred Body.

That sweet idea is poison. If it were 1% by word count of a document that said over and over, the Catholic Faith is the one true faith, the Catholic Faith is the One True Faith,  that ripe little nugget would still infect the dough. It’s such an important lie, that’s why.

Everyone needs Our Lord’s Sacred Body. No one else and nothing else substitutes for Him! But who needs Him most? Not those going through the rounds of a comfortable life. Those to whom His Body could be the only hand reaching out to them, when the waters are about to engulf them. The poor. The abused. The orphan and widow and divorced and infected and foreclosed and the dying. It is those who when they are not offered the Faith suffer the greatest indignity, the worst racist blow, of their entire lives.

Isn’t that how it is for you, reader? If we don’t love Him that much, use Him that much, need Him that much, why are we Catholic? And if we don’t love them that much, to offer this irreplaceable gift? Oh!

 It’s apostasy. It’s in Vatican II, a few sentences, a few changes, to spare us, of course, because if we offer the world the faith, they will kill us. Mother Teresa knew that. They really would have killed her.  And that would have been fine. Anyone who consistently, clearly, and effectively enunciates any doctrine besides secularism now has to see martyrdom down the road–and we Catholics will also get it from the Muslim side, although the expression of solidarity in the Philippines over the HR bill is promising, and the Hindu side as well. To name just a couple.

Although some of the teachings of Vatican II result from contradictory statements within the constitutions, the particular pro-choice interpretation is based on the uncharacteristically clear and novel teaching contained in Dignitatis Humanae, which calls for religious freedom for all under the administration of a secular state. Paragraph 2 of this Constitution explicitly forbids any authoritative teaching by the Church or its representatives, or any exclusive promotion of objective truth by a Catholic state. The individual’s conscience must “discover its own truths” internally, according to Vatican II. And thus the politicians of the world, including Catholic ones, can find shelter for their attacks on the working poor and women under its banner of personal truths. There is no question that the lives of women are worsened as they are “freed” from the “horror” of marriage and motherhood. One can find a short and clear criticism of Vatican II here.

The proof of the pudding, that those Catholic politicians who interpret the teaching of Vatican II on religious freedom interpret it correctly, by definition as the Vatican interprets it,  will be clear when the Vatican fails to rebuke Aquino just as the Vatican has failed to rebuke Obama and fails to rebuke even China. The Church fails to sanction the odious Chinese Official State Church by refusing cooperation, and advises Catholics there to cooperate and dismantle the Chinese underground church which resists the state . If the Church will not fail to cooperate with a state that not only permits abortion but forces abortion, and forces involuntary sterilization (10,000 as recently as last April), the Church will cooperate with Aquino over “mere” birth control, about which (like divorce) is generally maintained a stunning silence since Vatican II, from pulpit to papal palace. It is this compromise to the Church’s traditional and consistent and unconfusing teaching that SSPX is resisting, and clearly the issue is not limited to words on a page. How much more clearly can we understand the  effect of a few words of theology on reality than a woman running for the life in her womb in an empty Chinese dawn?

An excellent posting of the pro-life fightback in the Philippines may be found at the Monk’s Hobbit, here.