I haven’t seen you for many days, I am very concerned about you, and you may be very worried about me. Today I will report to you my current situation: The funeral of Pope Benedict is very important to me; and like a miracle, God allowed me to go to Rome to attend: the court approved the police to let me get back my passport; the airline just had a flight so that I could catch the funeral in time, Therefore, I felt that I couldn’t give up this opportunity and decided to go. When I went to Rome, I felt that I represented the whole of Hong Kong and the whole of China, expressing our respect and love to Pope Benedict XVI. Those four days were a miracle, not only because I was able to attend this funeral mass, but because I was able to kiss Benedict’s coffin and lay my head on it before the mass; Underneath Peter’s Basilica, where Benedict’s coffin is placed to pay respects and pray. I’m really grateful to be able to go and participate. Those happy four days were also very hard four days. Before I left, my shoulders were inflamed, my back was aching, and my hands were numb, so I was a patient in the seminary for more than ten days after I came back, and it was impossible to come out to visit friends. But I always thought that these problems would gradually improve and recover. As expected, the physical condition continued to deteriorate, and both hands became more swollen. On the night of the first day of the new year, I even started to have difficulty breathing, which reminded me of the bacteria that attacked my lungs in 2016 (I had to stay in the hospital for three weeks), which made me nervous and decided to go to the hospital. Fortunately, after the examination Not the germs of six years ago. Thanks to the nuns and doctors in the hospital, they cared about me very much, conducted various examinations for me, and insisted on thoroughly checking the physical condition of this 90-year-old. Because I have been staying in the hospital, you have not heard much about me until today. But don’t worry, I can say that the most senior doctor in Hong Kong is taking care of me, but I still don’t know when I will be able to visit you. But don’t forget that we will never be separated in prayer. I will continue to pray for you, and please remember me in your prayers. At the beginning of this new year, I dare not wish everyone a happy, but I hope you are safe. God must give us the grace of peace in our hearts—Jesus was born as a man, “God is glorified in heaven, and those whom the Lord loves enjoy peace on earth.” I wish you all peace.
I have been following with interest the current debate on Traditionis Custodes and Dom Alcuin Reid’s commentary (here) in which he refutes Cavadini, Healy and Weinandy without, however, reaching a solution to the problems noted. With this contribution of mine I wish to indicate a possible outlet for the present crisis.
Vatican II, not being a dogmatic Council, did not intend to define any doctrinal truths, merely reiterating indirectly – and moreover in an often-equivocal form – doctrines previously clearly and unequivocally defined by the infallible authority of the Magisterium. It was unduly and forcibly regarded as “the” Council, the “superdogma” of the new “conciliar church,” to the point of defining it in relation to that event. There is no explicit mention in the Council texts of what was later done in the liturgical sphere, passing it off as a fulfillment of the Constitution Sacrosanctum Concilium. Instead, there are many criticisms of the so-called “reform,” which is a betrayal of the will of the Council Fathers and the preconciliar liturgical heritage.
Rather, we should ask ourselves what value we should give to an act that is not what it wants to appear to be: that is, whether we can morally consider “Council” an act that, beyond its official premises – that is, in the preparatory outlines long and detailed formulated by the Holy Office – proved subversive in its unmentionable intentions and malicious in the means to be employed by those who, as later happened, wanted to use it for a purpose totally opposed to what the Church instituted Ecumenical Councils for. This premise is indispensable in order then to be able to objectively evaluate the other events and acts of Church government that stem from it or refer to it.
Let me explain further. We know that a law is enacted on the basis of a mens, that is, a very specific purpose, which cannot disregard the entire legal system within which it arises. These at least are the basis of that Law which the wisdom of the Church acquired from the Roman Empire. The legislator enacts a law with a purpose and formulates it in such a way that it is applicable only for that specific purpose; he will therefore avoid any element that might make the law equivocal with respect to the addressee, the purpose, the result. The purpose of calling an Ecumenical Council is to solemnly convene the bishops of the Church, under the authority of the Roman Pontiff, to define particular aspects of doctrine, morals, liturgy or ecclesiastical discipline. But what each Council defines must in any case fall within the framework of Tradition and cannot in any way contradict the unchanging Magisterium, for if it did it would go against the purpose that legitimizes authority in the Church. The same applies to the Pope, who has full, immediate and direct power over the entire Church only within the confines of his mandate: to confirm the brethren in the Faith, to shepherd the lambs and sheep of the flock that the Lord has entrusted to him.
In the history of the Church, until Vatican II, it never happened that a Council could de facto cancel the Councils that preceded it, nor that a pastoral Council-a ἅπαξ of Vatican II-could have more authority than twenty dogmatic Councils. Yet it happened, in the silence of the majority of the Episcopate and with the approval of no less than five Roman Pontiffs, from John XXIII to Benedict XVI. In these fifty years of permanent revolution, no pope has ever questioned the “magisterium” of Vatican II, let alone dared to condemn its heretical theses or clarify its equivocal ones. On the contrary, all popes since Paul VI have made Vatican II and its implementation the programmatic focus of their pontificate, subordinating and binding their apostolic authority to the conciliar diktats. They have distinguished themselves by a clear distancing from their Predecessors and a marked self-referentiality from Roncalli to Bergoglio: their “magisterium” begins with Vatican II and ends there, and their Successors proclaim their immediate Predecessors saints merely because they called, concluded or implemented the Council. Even the theological language has adapted to the equivocality of the Council texts, going so far as to adopt as definite doctrines that before the Council were considered heretical: think of the secularism of the State, today taken for granted and praiseworthy; of the irenistic ecumenism of Assisi and Astana; of the parliamentarism of the Commissions, of the Synod of Bishops, of the “synodal way” of the German Church.
All of this stems from a postulate that almost everyone takes for granted: that Vatican II can claim the authority of an Ecumenical Council, before which the faithful should suspend all judgment and humbly bow their heads to the will of Christ, expressed infallibly by the Sacred Pastors, albeit in pastoral and not dogmatic form. But this is not the case, because the Sacred Pastors can be misled by a colossal conspiracy aimed at the subversive use of a Council.
What happened globally with Vatican II happened locally with the Synod of Pistoia in 1786, where Bishop Scipione de’ Ricci’s authority-which he could legitimately exercise by convening a diocesan synod-was declared null and void by Pius VI on the grounds that he used it in fraudem legis, that is, against the ratio that presides over and orients any law of the Church[1]: because authority in the Church belongs to Our Lord, who is its Head, who grants it in vicarious form to Peter and his legitimate Successors only within the framework of Sacred Tradition. It is therefore not a bold hypothesis to suppose that a conventicle of heretics may have organized a real coup d’état in the ecclesial body, with the aim of imposing that revolution which with similar methods was organized by Freemasonry, in 1789, against the Monarchy of France, and which the modernist Card. Suenens hailed as accomplished at the Council. Nor does this conflict with the certainty of Christ’s divine assistance over His Church: the non prævalebunt does not promise us the absence of conflict, persecution, or apostasy; it reassures us that in the furious battle of the portæ inferi against the Bride of the Lamb these will not succeed in destroying the Church of Christ. The Church will not be defeated as long as she remains as Her Eternal Pontiff commanded her to be. Moreover, the Holy Spirit’s special assistance on papal infallibility is not questioned when the Pope has no intention of committing it, as in the case of approving the acts of a pastoral council. From a theoretical standpoint, therefore, the subversive and malicious use of a Council is possible; not least because the pseudochrists and pseudoprophetæ mentioned in Scripture (Mk. 13:22) could deceive even the very elect, including a good part of the Council Fathers, and with them a multitude of clerics and faithful.
If, therefore, Vatican II was, as is evident, an instrument whose authority was fraudulently used to impose heterodox doctrines and Protestantized rites, we can hope that sooner or later the return to the Throne of a holy and orthodox Pontiff will heal this situation by declaring it illegitimate, invalid, null and void, on a par with the Council of Pistoia. And if the reformed liturgy expresses those doctrinal errors and that ecclesiological approach that Vatican II contained in nuce, the architects of which promised to make manifest in their devastating scope only after its promulgation, no pastoral reason-as Dom Alcuin Reid would have it-can ever justify any retention of that spurious, equivocal rite, favens hæresim and utterly disastrous in its effects on God’s holy people. Therefore, the Novus Ordo deserves no amendment, no “reform of the reform,” but only suppression and abrogation, as a consequence of its irreconcilable heterogeneity with respect to the Catholic Liturgy, the Roman Rite of which it would presumptuously like to be the only expression, and the immutable doctrine of the Church. “The lie is to be refuted, as St. Paul insists, but he who is caught in its snares must be saved, not lost,” says Dom Alcuin: but not to the detriment of revealed Truth and the honor due to the Most Holy Trinity in the supreme act of worship; for in giving excessive weight to pastorality one ends up placing man at the center of the sacred action, when he should instead place God there and prostrate himself before Him in adoring silence.
And while this may cause astonishment to the proponents of the hermeneutic of continuity as conceived by Benedict XVI, I believe that Bergoglio is for once perfectly right to regard the Tridentine Mass as an intolerable threat to Vatican II, since that Mass is so Catholic, it disavows any attempt at peaceful coexistence between the two forms of the same Roman Rite. Indeed, it is an absurdity to be able to conceive of a Montinian Ordinary Form and a Tridentine Extraordinary Form for a Rite that, as such, must represent the sole voice of the Roman Church-a voce dicentes-with the very limited exception of the venerable rites for antiquity such as the Ambrosian, Lyonnais, Mozarabic, and the minimal variations of the Dominican Rite and the like. I repeat: the writer of Traditionis Custodes knows full well that the Novus Ordo is the cultic expression of another religion – that of the “conciliar church” – than the Religion of the Catholic Church of which the Mass of St. Pius V is a perfect prayerful translation. There is no desire in Bergoglio to settle the disagreement between the lineage of Tradition and the lineage of Vatican II. On the contrary, the idea of provoking a rupture is functional to the ouster of traditional Catholics, whether clerics or laity, from the “conciliar church” that has replaced the Catholic Church and barely (and grudgingly) retains its name. The schism desired by St. Martha’s is not that of the heretical synodal path of the German dioceses, but that of traditional Catholics exasperated by Bergoglian provocations, his court scandals, and his intemperate and divisive statements (here and here). To achieve which, Bergoglio will not hesitate to take to extremes the principles posited by Vatican II, to which he unconditionally adheres: consider the Novus Ordo as the only form of the post-conciliar Roman Rite, and consistently abrogate any celebration in the ancient Roman Rite, as it is completely alien to the Council’s dogmatic framework.
And it is very true, beyond refutation, that there is no possibility of reconciliation between two heterogeneous, indeed opposite, ecclesiological visions. Either one survives and the other succumbs, or one succumbs and the other survives. The chimera of a coexistence between Vetus and Novus Ordo is impossible, contrived, deceptive: for what the celebrant accomplishes perfectly in the Apostolic Mass leads him naturally and infallibly to accomplish what the Church wants; while what the president of the assembly accomplishes in the Reformed Mass is almost always marred by the variations authorized by the same rite, even if the Holy Sacrifice is validly realized in it. And it is precisely in this that the conciliar matrix of the New Mass consists: its fluidity, its ability to adapt to the needs of the most diverse “assemblies,” to be able to be celebrated as much by a priest who believes in Transubstantiation and manifests it with the prescribed genuflections as by one who believes in Transignification and gives Communion in the hands of the faithful.
Therefore, I would not be surprised if, in the very near future, those who are abusing apostolic authority to demolish the Holy Church and provoke the mass exodus of “preconciliar” Catholics, would not hesitate not only to restrict the celebration of the ancient Mass, but even go so far as to prohibit it altogether, for in that prohibition is embodied the sectarian hatred against the True, the Good, the Beautiful that has animated the Modernists’ conspiracy since the first Session of their idol, Vatican II. Let us not forget that, consistent with this fanatical and tyrannical approach, the Tridentine Mass was casually abrogated with the promulgation of Paul VI’s Missale Romanum, and that those who continued to celebrate it were literally persecuted, ostracized, made to die of a broken heart and buried with funerals in the new rite, as if to seal a miserable victory over a past to be forgotten for good. And in those days no one cared about the pastoral motives for derogating from the harshness of canon law, just as today no one cares about the pastoral motives that might induce many bishops to grant that celebration in the ancient rite to which clerics and faithful show particular attachment.
Benedict XVI’s conciliatory attempt, praiseworthy in its temporary effects of liberalizing the Usus Antiquior, was doomed to failure precisely because it stemmed from the illusion that the synthesis of Summorum Pontificum could be applied to the Tridentine thesis and Bugnini’s antithesis: that philosophical vision influenced by Hegelian thought could not succeed because of the very nature of the Church (and the Mass), which is either Catholic or it is not. And that it cannot be at the same time firmly anchored in Tradition and shaken by the billows of secularized mentality.
This is why I feel great dismay when I read that the Apostolic Mass is considered by Dom Reid to be “an expression of that legitimate plurality which is part of the Church of Christ,” because the plurality of voices is expressed in the overall symphony, and not in the co-presence of harmony and strident din. There is here a misunderstanding that needs to be clarified as soon as possible, and which in all likelihood will be healed not so much by the timid and composed dissent of those who ask for tolerance for themselves while acknowledging it in turn to those who claim diametrically opposed principles, but by the intolerant and vexatious action of those who believe they can impose their will by going against the will of Christ the Head of the Church, presuming that they can govern the Mystical Body on a par with a multinational corporation, as Cardinal rightly pointed out. Mueller in a recent speech.
Yet, upon closer inspection, what is happening today and what will happen in the near future are nothing more than the logical consequence of the premises laid in the past, the next step in a long series of more or less slow steps, upon overcoming which many have been silent, have accepted, have been blackmailed. For those who celebrate the Tridentine Mass habitually but continue to occasionally celebrate the Novus Ordo – and I am not speaking of the priests subjected to blackmail but of those who could impose themselves or had the freedom to choose – have already succumbed on the principled front, accepting that they can celebrate either one or the other indifferently, as if both were equivalent, as if – precisely – one were the extraordinary form and one the ordinary form of the same Rite. And isn’t that what, with similar methods, happened in the civil sphere, with the imposition of restrictions and violation of fundamental rights, accepted in silence by the majority of the population, terrified by the threat of a pandemic? Even in those circumstances, with different motives but similar purposes, citizens were subjected to blackmail: “Either you get vaccinated or you cannot work, travel, go out to restaurants.” And how many, even though they knew it was an abuse of authority, obeyed? Do you think consensus manipulation systems are very different when those who adopt them come from the same enemy ranks and are led by the same Serpent? Do you think that the Great Reset plan devised by Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum has different purposes from those of the Bergoglian sect? The blackmail will not be on the sanitary state but on the doctrinal one, and it will demand to accept only Vatican II and the Novus Ordo Missæ in order to have rights in the conciliar church; traditionalists will be branded as fanatics on a par with the no-vax.
When the celebration of the ancient Mass should be proscribed by Rome in all the churches of the Orbe, those who thought they could serve two masters – the Church of Christ and the conciliar church – will discover that they have been deceived, as happened before them to the Council Fathers. At that point they will have to make that choice they had deluded themselves into thinking they could evade, which will force them to disobey an unlawful order in order to obey the Lord, or bow their heads to the tyrant’s will by failing in their duties as God’s ministers. Let those who avoided supporting the few, very few brethren who were faithful to their Priesthood when they were singled out as disobedient or inflexible just because they foresaw deception and blackmail, think twice in their examination of conscience.
Here it is not a matter of disguising the Montinian Mass as an ancient Mass, trying to conceal with vestments and Gregorian chants the Pharisaic hypocrisy that conceived it; it is not a matter of removing the Prex eucharistica II or celebrating ad orientem: the battle is fought over the ontological difference between the theocentric vision of the Tridentine Mass and the anthropocentric vision of its Conciliar counterfeit.
This is nothing less than the battle between Christ and Satan. A battle for the Mass, which is the heart of our Faith, the throne where the divine Eucharistic King descends, the Calvary on which the immolation of the spotless Lamb is renewed in bloodless form. Not a dinner, not a concert, not a review of eccentricities or a pulpit for heresiarchs, not a podium for rallies.
A battle that will be spiritually reinforced in the hiding of Christ-faithful priests, considered excommunicated and schismatic, while in the churches along with the Reformed rite infidelity, error, hypocrisy will triumph. And absence: absence of God, absence of holy priests, absence of good believers. The absence – I said this in my Homily for the Chair of St. Peter’s in Rome (here) – of that unity between the Chair and the Altar, between the sacred authority of the Pastors and their very raison d’être, on the model of Christ, ready to ascend Golgotha first, to immolate themselves for the flock. Those who reject this mystical vision of their Priesthood end up exercising the authority they hold without the ratification that comes only from the Altar, from the Sacrifice, from the Cross: from Christ who on that Cross reigns as King and Pontiff even over temporal and spiritual rulers.
If this is what Bergoglio wants in order to assert his overwhelming power in the deafening silence of the Sacred College and the Episcopate, he knows that he will encounter the firm and decisive opposition of many good souls, willing to fight for love of the Lord and for the salvation of their own souls and determined not to yield, at such a tremendous time for the fate of the Church and the world, to those who would like to cancel the Perennial Sacrifice, as if to make it easier for the Antichrist to ascend to the top of the New World Order. We will soon understand the meaning of the tremendous words of the Gospel (Mt. 24:15), in which the Lord speaks of the abomination of desolation in the temple: the abominable horror of seeing the treasure of the Mass proscribed, of seeing our altars stripped, our churches closed, our services forced into hiding. This is the abomination of desolation: the end of the Holy Apostolic Mass.
When, on January 21, 304, 13-year-old Agnes was led to Martyrdom, many among the faithful and among the priests had apostatized the Faith before Diocletian’s persecution. Should we fear the ostracism of the Council sect when a little girl gave us the example of fidelity and fortitude before the executioner? That heroic fidelity was praised by St. Ambrose and St. Damasus: let us make sure that we can merit, even if unworthy, the future praise of the Church as we prepare for these trials in which to witness our belonging to Christ.
Yesterday an absolute bombshell was released, something completely unprecedented in the history of the Catholic Church. No English speaking news outlets have discussed it, and I believe we are witnessing mass media censorship. Benedict XVI published a posthumous book pic.twitter.com/XjDTC0rITP
You cannot be absolved from sins in the confessional unless you have the intention to go forth and sin no more. Not that Francis seems to care about that.
The Charge of Heresy coming from the very top of the Church seems provocative but Marian apparitions appear to have warned of this going back to at least the 19th century, if not earlier.