Bishop Antonio de Castro Mayer - The Lion of Campos + 4/25/1991
Orphan at 6 years old
Born in 1904 in the city of Campinas (state of São Paulo), the son of a German immigrant and a Brazilian, he had a very poor childhood. Orphaned at the age of 6, he and his eleven brothers inherited only one valuable asset: the Catholic Faith. Two of his sisters became nuns and Antonio joined the seminary at the age of 12. A brilliant student, he was sent to Rome, to the Gregorian University, where he completed his studies. He was ordained a priest by Cardinal Basilio Pompilj in 1927, and the following year he received the title of Doctor of Theology by the same university. Returning to Brazil, he taught at the archdiocesan seminary of São Paulo for 13 years. In 1940 he was appointed canon and treasurer of São Paulo’s Metropolitan Cathedral and, in the following year, he became vicar general of the same Archdiocese.
With the death of the Archbishop of São Paulo, Bishop José Gaspar D’Afonseca e Silva, in a plane crash in Rio de Janeiro in 1943, Carlos Carmelo de Vasconcelos Motta assumed the archdiocese, the following year. Soon afterwards Antonio de Castro Mayer is removed from his post and appointed parish priest of the church St. Joseph of Bethlehem, in a poor neighborhood on the outskirts of São Paulo. Although only conjectures can be made about his evident demotion after the arrival of Carlos Carmelo, it is known that the new bishop was from the episcopal lineage of the influential Cardinal Rampolla, which is suspected to be the origin of Masonic infiltration inside the Church. Carlos Carmelo was also the founder of the National Conference of Brazilian Bishops (CNBB), which in the following decades will become a huge enemy of Bishop Antonio and has revealed itself today as the driving force of Marxism and Modernism in Brazil.
Bishop of Campos dos Goytacazes
Despite this, he did not revolt. He exercised his episcopate exemplarily, as a father and pastor. He had an ability to move among his faithful and mix with them in their everyday life without in any way diminishing or disfiguring his authority. He lived the life of his diocese with the faithful in all its most ordinary aspects, yet he always maintained his dignity as a bishop. He would serve as an acolyte at the Mass of his newly ordained young priests. He did it without false humility and without ever making them feel awkward. There was nothing about his own Mass that made it extraordinary, nothing that distinguished it.
One of his priests described him in these words: “He was a man of great simplicity. He had the soul of a child”. He never spoke ill of others and refused to believe, sometimes to his sadness, that others would think or speak ill of him. He loved children and used the occasions when he could be with them. He was, in his easy way, one of them.
A devotee of Mary
Bishop Antonio's incessant and intense devotion to the Holy Mother of God marked his reign in Campos. One of his first actions when he became Bishop of Campos dos Goytacazes was to publish a special order for his priests: from now on in the diocese, at the end of every Mass, three additional Hail Marys would be prayed by the priest and faithful to Our Holy Mother with the intention that she preserve the true Catholic Faith and that heresy would never find a home in the diocese. Such devotion was rewarded.
He himself would say the rosary at all hours of the day or night. His priests report that when they traveled with him, he often woke them up at unusual times to pray the rosary because he loved to pray accompanied. Once, during a visit to the seminary of the Fraternity of Saint Pius X in Écône, Switzerland, the bishop woke his fellow travelers after “lights out” in the seminary, an hour of strictly obligatory silence, and announced his desire to say the rosary. They reminded him that it was late and that the seminary was observing a period of silence and rest, but his devotion to Our Lady would not be deterred. They went with him as soon as he started walking down the halls of the seminary with his voice echoing the Hail Marys. The heads of the angry seminarians began to pop up as more and more doors opened abruptly. Upon finding the vibrantly fervent bishop as the praying culprit, they gently closed their doors and ashamedly returned to their beds.
The storm approaches
The final quality of Bishop Antonio de Castro Mayer that defined his character is obvious - his great intelligence. Anticipating the great crisis of the Church, already infiltrated by so many unfaithful religious and their heresies, in the 1950s and 1960s he wrote pastoral letters attacking modernism and communism, which only made him more enemies - in Brazil and in Rome. During the Second Vatican Council, he helped to found and direct the group “Coetus Internationalis Patrum”, formed by more than 250 Council Fathers, who tried to prevent the Magisterium and the Tradition of the Church from being annihilated by the modernist party during the deliberations. The group even collected the signatures of more than 500 Council Father asking the Holy Father for an express refutation of communism, which was never answered.
In the spring of 1969, the sword struck from Rome. Pope Paul VI decreed that a new Mass would be instituted. This was not just a scandal; the preface to the description of the “novus ordo missae” gave a new definition of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass that bordered on an unthinkable deviation into heresy. The immense Sacrifice of the Mass had become a simple supper. The change in the nature of the sacrament can be understood quickly by simply counting the number of references to "sacrifice" in the Tridentine rite and comparing it to the number of references in the new Mass. This was not just new; it was the crushing of the old ritual of sacrifice and the replacement with a new vision.
But this would not change his sense of duty. He had been given a task to fulfill, and he would continue to do it. The situation was now, in a way, clarified. The modernists then came to this extent in their fury of demolition, their carnival of freedom, their orgy of sacrilege. The shepherds were in the service of the wolves, and the flock was surrounded. Soon the bloody corpses would spread across the landscape under an empty sky devoid of light. Bishop Castro Mayer would not consent to this savagery. He had his own flock to guard. He should make a solid guard and preserve now not only the Faith in his diocese, but, God help him, also the Mass. He armed himself with the weapons of a bishop: mitre, crosier and ring, signs of authority given to him at his ordination, and took up his pen. Exhausted and saddened, he fought.
The Lion roars
In 1973, Paul VI ordered him to express his opinion freely, if in conscience he was not in agreement with acts of the current ordinary Magisterium of the Church. Bishop Antonio de Castro Mayer then wrote, in January 1974, the following letter to Paul VI:
[…] "As the years have gone by, has been growing in my spirit the conviction that Your Holiness' official acts do not have, with those of the Pontiffs who preceded you, the consonance that with all my soul I would like to see in them.
They are not, of course, acts guaranteed by the charism of infallibility. So my conviction in no way undermines my unrestricted and enraptured belief in the definitions of the First Vatican Council. Fearing to abuse the valuable time of the Vicar of Christ, I excuse myself from further considerations and limit myself to submitting to your Holiness' attention three studies:
1. About “Octogésima Adveniens”;
2. About Religious Freedom.
3. About the new “Ordo Missae”.
(The latter authored by lawyer Arnaldo Vidigal Xavier da Silveira, whose content I associate with).
It will be superfluous to add, that in this step, as in others of my life, I will fulfill, in all the measure prescribed by the laws of the Church, the Sacred Duty of Obedience. And in this spirit, with the heart of an ardent and most devoted son of the Pope and the Holy Church, I will welcome any word of Your Holiness on this material. In a special way I beg Your Holiness to declare me:
A. If there is an error in the doctrine exposed in the three attached studies;
B. If you see in the attitude assumed in the said studies towards the documents of the Supreme Magisterium, something that disagrees with the respect that I owe to them as bishop. […]”
Bishop de Castro Mayer never received a reply to this letter. But he continued being the shepherd of his sheep. And celebrating the Latin Mass until his forced retirement, at the age of 75, in 1981. Thus, Campos was the only diocese in the world where traditional Latin Mass continued to be celebrated uninterruptedly by all his clergy despite the advent of the “novus ordo”. And, as the father does not retire from his paternity, Bishop de Castro Mayer did not abandon his sheep either after being forced to retire: he founded the St. John Mary Vianney Priestly Union, where he welcomed the majority of the priests of his diocese (336 of them!) and more than 40,000 faithful who lost their parishes when the wolf who took over the diocese decided to forcibly implement Vatican II, eliminating everything that recalled the Catholic Tradition.
Antonio de Castro Mayer and Marcel Lefebvre
Most of his former partners in the defense of the Church gave in over time, preferring a false and comfortable obedience to the defense of the truth, and causing the destruction of the faith in the once largest Catholic country in the world, now a breeding ground for Pentecostals, agnostics and the superstitious.
The only remnant was the French bishop Monsignor Marcel Lefebvre, with whom, after repeated unanswered pleas by John Paul II to ordain bishops respectful of tradition, and after the scandalous ecumenical meeting in Assisi in 1986, where the same unhappy pope was seen kissing the Koran and introducing into the Temple of God all sorts of pagan deities, considering the state of necessity of the Church, they ordained four bishops in Écône, Switzerland, in 1988.
This state of necessity, according to Bishop Antonio, could be explained, among other reasons, by the nullity of all priestly and episcopal ordinations in which the ritual of Paul VI was observed, which suppressed essential parts of it, such as the invocation of the Holy Spirit, the power to forgive sins, the order to celebrate the sacrifice of the Mass and, in the case of bishops, the power to ordain priests. With this, there would be a risk that within a generation there would be no more validly ordained priests, and therefore no more validly dispensed sacraments.
Bishop de Castro Mayer in communion with the Church of Jesus Christ or with a Masonic church?
Were Marxists Boff, Gutiérrez and Sobrino excommunicated? Were the Gnostics Rahner and Zundel, the heretics Kasper, Küng, Schillebeeckx excommunicated or at least removed from their positions? With all these, the popes were strangely "merciful". In line, of course, with their own actions: kissing the Quran, kissing the feet of the schismatic bishop of Constantinople, allowing women with bare breasts on the altar during a pontifical mass, receiving blessings from shamans, erasing the mention of Freemasonry among the secret societies that give cause for excommunication, etc.
What once seemed like an exaggeration of a minority is becoming more and more real: priests who do not believe in Christ, empty churches, lack of vocations, closed convents. Compare this church of the "Vatican II springtime" with the Church of Tradition: packed churches, affluence of vocations, religious fervor, obedience to the commandments, fear of God.
The Code of Canon Law requires, for the penalty of excommunication, a manifestation from the Apostolic See, that is, from the pope, which never occurred. What happened was a declaration of excommunication of six bishops by another bishop, Card. Gantin, in a document where there was no papal signature. Now, a bishop has no jurisdiction to excommunicate another bishop, which is reserved to the Pope. The motu proprio “Ecclesia Dei adflicta”, published by John Paul II himself, concerning the ordination of the four bishops, omits the name of Bishop Antonio de Castro Mayer and mentions that the other five bishops incurred the penalty of excommunication declared by Gantin, who had no legal competence to do so, and without clarifying the allegation of state of necessity. Was this a sequence of grave misunderstandings or deliberate errors?
This was confirmed by Benedict XVI's gesture, who annulled all excommunications related to the Écône episcopal ordinations, without those involved having expressed any retraction or recognition of having acted wrongly. Why? Perhaps because it was the Pope who did wrong. Perhaps because even John Paul II was forced to acknowledge the heroicity of these two Catholic bishops but, held hostage by his modernist friends, lacked the courage to do so.
Souces:
Book: "The Mouth of the Lion: Bishop Antonio de Castro Mayer & the Last Catholic Diocese", by David Allen White
Bishop de Castro Mayer letter on Novus Ordo Missae
Bishop Antonio de Castro Mayer: In Memorium
Was Archbishop Lefebvre Really Excommunicated?