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"Pray and do penance"

Fourth Sunday of February 2012:
Quadragesima Sunday

This is the conclusion of a pastoral letter written by Archbishop Lefebvre in 1964 denouncing the gravest errors of the Council. He had titled the letter:

"To Remain a Good Catholic Must One Become a Protestant?"

We believe its conclusions are still accurate and welcome today.

Pray and do penance. Pray to the Virgin Mary, Mother of the Church, for she is at the heart of all these disputes and she has always defeated heresies. It is in her that the Council Fathers will find themselves of one mind and heart as do children about their mother. It is she who watches over the Successor of Peter and will always ensure that Peter shall be he who confirms his brethren in the faith, which was that of the Apostles, especially Peter, and his successors.

If we are to deserve the help of Our Lord's grace, we must do penance; penance in carrying out the duties of our state with no flinching, yielding nothing, undiscouraged. This we must do despite the infernal background of license, immodesty, scorn of authority, failure of respect for oneself and for one's neighbor. Let us trust. God is all powerful and He has given Our Lord all power in heaven and on earth. Is this omnipotence less in nineteen hundred and sixty-four than in eighteen hundred and seventy at the time of the last Council, or in the time of all the other Councils? Our Lord will never break the promises of everlastingness that He has made to the Holy Roman Catholic Church.

Confidite, ego sum, nolite temere.

+ Marcel Lefebvre
October 11, 1964
Feast of the Motherhood of the Virgin Mary

The New Persecution

Third Sunday of February 2012:
Quinquagesima Sunday

The Obama Administration’s recent mandate that all employers provide insurance coverage that pays for the costs of abortion inducing drugs, contraception and sterilization is a striking example of the new persecution of the Church.

Although the world has, for the moment, laid aside the physical instruments of persecution, the beast of the Coliseum, the scaffold and cauldron of the hanging, drawing and quartering, or the Guillotine, persecution itself has not been laid aside.

Whereas, in the past the persecution focused primarily on the physical level of the pain of sense, today’s persecution focuses on the spiritual and moral aspect of Man’s nature. Rather than demanding that he offer incense to a false god or face death, today’s persecutors demand violation of the Natural and Divine Law or face loss of government funds and their largest weapon, fear of the loss of human respect.

These new persecutions are wrought by the point of a pen rather than the point of a sword, but their intent is as sharp as in centuries past. The desire is to force Catholics into contradiction. They must be forced to betray basic principles to be allowed to retain their little allotted space in the public square. The root desire of this new persecution is to force the Church and Catholics to abandon their tenacious grasp of immutable moral principles. Abortion, contraception and sterilization violate the Natural Law, as has always and everywhere been taught by the Church. To maintain the right to participate in the freedoms of American pluralistic public life, Catholic institutions must compromise these immutable truths. The nature of this compromise is most devious. Catholics may still prattle on in their little corner of the public square about their “private” belief that these unnatural practices are immoral but they can do nothing more. Their public hospitals and schools must comply with the public choices that declare these immoral acts to be basic freedoms. To stay in the public space, they must act contrary to their “private” beliefs in public. They must pay (either directly according to the administration’s original plan or indirectly according to their latest “accommodation”) for their employees’ violations of Natural Law.

Sadly, modern Church leaders have fashioned their own rod of persecution. The premise of the new persecution can be found in the Vatican II document, Digitatis Humani. One of the essential flaws of the document is its underlying treatment of religion as a private matter of conscience. DH proclaims a private right to practice whatever religious beliefs one’s private conscience might choose as long as in public you leave everyone else alone to practice his own choice. This novelty makes religion and religious belief purely private. It gives credence to the lie that Men can live double lives. They can have private religious beliefs but must be willing to abandon them in their public life. Catholic hospitals and schools can have their own private belief about abortion, contraception and sterilization but the new persecution demands that they respect the “religious freedom” of everyone else to believe the opposite. They must therefore provide access to these evils through the mandated insurance. If some members of the American hierarchy are to be commended for their strong words denouncing this regulation (and the strong letter of Bishop Slattery of Tulsa, Oklahoma is noteworthy), it must not be forgotten that it has been their relentless preaching of this false dichotomy of public/private religious belief through their embrace of religious freedom that has resulted in the current crisis.

The chickens have come home to roost. The embrace of religious freedom has fueled the consolidation of a godless government and society which rejects an objective moral order. Now the whimpering cries for their own religious freedom go unheard in the bureaucracies of the new world order in Washington.

What are traditional Catholics to do in the face of such flagrant flouting of the Natural and Divine Law?  Our reaction must be on three levels: spiritual, social and political. Spiritually, we must offer prayer and penance to God first in reparation for our leaders’ flouting of the moral law. Secondly we must pray for the gift of fortitude for the bishops of this country that they may echo the words of the great popes “We have heard enough of the rights of Man and need to hear more of the rights of God.” May they be granted the fortitude to stay the course and continue to operate Catholic hospitals and schools without complying with the legal requirement, come what may.

Next, we have a social duty to our neighbor to live our religion publicly and privately. We must maintain that all Men are whole beings who cannot be divided into private and public dimensions. We must live consistently our whole lives, in our private homes and in our workplaces. We must not accept technical rationalizations to join in the sins of others through consent, assistance or encouragement.

Politically, we must boldly stand (hopefully behind the hierarchy) before our political leaders, whose authority comes from God, and defend the Truth. Like the martyrs of the past we must make clear that an unjust law, as this one, is no law at all. We must defend Catholic schools, hospitals and other institutions and make clear to our governors that they shall not close their public doors nor shall they compromise to buy the peace of this world.

Spiritual Journey

Second Sunday of February 2012:
Sexagesima Sunday

Following is an extract from the conclusion of Archbishop Lefebvre’s last work, which is also his spiritual testament.

The providential choice of Rome as the Seat of Peter, and the blessings of this choice for the growth of the Mystical Body of Our Lord Jesus Christ.

I believe I must add some words to draw the attention of our priests and our seminarians to the indisputable fact of the Roman influences on our spirituality, on our liturgy, and even on our theology.

One cannot deny that this is a providential fact. God, Who leads all things, has in His infinite wisdom prepared Rome to become the Seat of Peter and center for the radiation of the Gospel. Hence the adage: Unde Christo e Romano.

Dom Gueranger, in his Histoire de sainte Cecile, recounts the great part which members of great Roman families played in the foundation of the Church, giving their goods and their blood for the victory and the reign of Jesus Christ. Our Roman liturgy is the faithful witness of this.

"Romanitas"¾"to be Roman"¾is not a vain word. The Latin language is an important example. It has brought the expression of the Faith and of Catholic worship to the ends of the world. And the converted people were proud to sing their Faith in this language, a real symbol of the unity of the Catholic Faith.

Schisms and heresies are often begun by a rupture with Romanitas, a rupture with the Roman liturgy, with Latin, with the theology of the Latin and Roman Fathers and theologians.

It is this force of the Catholic Faith rooted in Romanitas that Freemasonry wished to eliminate by occupying the pontifical States and enclosing Catholic Rome in Vatican City. This occupation of Rome by the Masons permitted infiltration of the Church by Modernism and the destruction of Catholic Rome by Modernist clergy and popes who hasten to destroy every vestige of "Romanitas": the Latin language, the Roman liturgy. The Slavic Pope is the most determined to change the little which was kept by the Lateran Treaty and the Concordat. Rome is no longer a sacred city. He encourages the establishing of false religions in Rome itself, accomplishing there scandalous ecumenical meetings. He everywhere pushes for the inculturation in the liturgy, destroying the last vestiges of the Roman liturgy. He has modified in practice the status of the Vatican State. He has renounced coronation, thus refusing to be a Head of State. This relentlessness against "Romanitas" is an infallible sign of rupture with the Catholic Faith that he no longer defends.

The Roman pontifical universities have become chairs of Modernist pestilence. The coeducation of the Gregorian is a perpetual scandal.

All must be restored in Christo Domino¾"in Christ the Lord," in Rome as elsewhere.

Let us love to see how the ways of Divine Providence and Wisdom pass by Rome. We will conclude that one cannot be Catholic without being Roman. This applies also to Catholics who have neither the Latin language nor the Roman liturgy. If they remain Catholic, it is because they remain Roman like the Maronites, for example, by the ties to the Catholic and Roman French culture which formed them.

It is, moreover, an error to speak of Roman culture as Western. The converts from Judaism brought with them from the Orient all that was Christian, all that which in the Old Testament was preparation and could be a component of Christianity, all that which Our Lord had assumed and that the Holy Ghost had inspired the Apostles to adopt. How many times do the epistles of St. Paul teach us on this subject!

God willed that Christianity, cast in a certain way in the Roman mold, receive from it a vigorous and exceptional expansion. All is grace in the divine plan and Our Divine Savior disposes all as the Romans are said to act, that is, "cum consilio et patientia or suaviter et fortiter¾"with counsel and patience, sweetly and mightily" (Wis 8:1).

Ours is the duty to guard this Roman Tradition desired by Our Lord, as He wished us to have Mary as our Mother.

Marian dispositions

First Sunday of February 2012:
Septuagesima Sunday

In honor of yesterday's Feast of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary (February 2) and the SSPX priestly ordination that will take place tomorrow in St. Mary's, KS, we offer some excerpts from an ordination sermon given by Archbishop Lefebvre in 1981 at Econe.

Since the priest truly participates in the mysteries of Our Lord in such an intimate and profound manner it is easily understood why he is called an alter Christus;  "another Christ." It is indeed true. If, therefore, he must be another Christ, he must have in his soul the particular dispositions necessary to receive these graces. In order to know what these dispositions must be, these dispositions which must be in the hearts of all priests in order that they be well disposed to profit from the grace of the priesthood, let us address ourselves to the Blessed Virgin Mary, for she also is associated intimately with Our Lord Jesus Christ. She is associated in a manner even more sublime than that of the priest. Although she did not have the particular graces of the priesthood she nevertheless participated greatly in the Mission of God, for without her, God would not have descended to earth. It was necessary that she pronounce her fiat in order that the mission of God be accomplished here on earth. She participated in an essential manner in the salvation of the world and Our Lord is of course The Savior, but if there is one person who greatly participated in the salvation of the world, it is indeed the Blessed Virgin Mary, and if there is one person who is the Co-Redemptrix and who participated in the Redemption, it would also be the Blessed Virgin Mary.

The first disposition of the Blessed Mother is that she remained a Virgin. This is perhaps not the essential disposition for the priest since exceptions have been made through the course of the centuries; it is however, justice. It is a normal consequence and required by the priesthood. The Church has always considered the celibate state necessary for the priest precisely because he approaches Our Lord in such an intimate manner. He no longer must have concerns other than those of and for Our Lord Jesus Christ. All of his thoughts, all of his heart, all of his activities must be oriented towards Our Lord just as the Blessed Virgin Mary, just as St. Joseph, just as St. John. Those who were closest to Our Lord were all virgins.

The second quality which the Blessed Mother teaches us is humility; “respexit humilitatem meam,” says the Blessed Virgin in her Magnificat, "He has looked upon my humility and He has exalted the humble." Twice she insists upon this quality of humility which is especially required and she says that it is due to her humility that she has been chosen. This is precisely because humility is the disposition which best enables us to see God, to comprehend God, to have the wisdom of God, to be with God. Pride blinds, pride closes the heart, closes the intellect, closes the mind; it limits them to creatures. Humility, on the contrary, is as a great opening to the omnipotence of God, to the greatness of God, to all the attributes of God. The humble soul is filled with God and it is for this reason that the Blessed Virgin Mary teaches us humility: “Et exaltavit humiles.”

The third consideration to be made concerning the Blessed Mother is taken as well from the Magnificat: “Esurientes implevit bonis,” says she. “Esurientes.” What does she mean by esurientesl Souls of desire, souls which aspire to God: “Esurientes” those who thirst for God, who desire God, who live of God, these souls Almighty God has filled with good things, “et divites dimisit manes”; "and the rich He has dismissed with nothing."

Those whose hearts are filled with things of this world, those who are attached to things of this world, they also have their heart closed, their heart hardened by all the goods of this world. It is for this reason that the grace of God does not descend upon them: “et dimisit inanes!” Almighty God has sent them away with nothing. They are deprived of all. Deprived of God, they will remain without God. Is this not what we see all too often unfortunately, in the world: souls so attached to things of this world that they have forgotten God? The priest must therefore imitate the Blessed Virgin. He must have a pure soul entirely attached to God. He must have a soul entirely detached from things of this world in order that his soul be filled with God. This is what the priest must be in order that he be able to give God to others.

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