So the title of my talk this evening is The Corruption of the Best is the Worst.
When Obedience Becomes the Devil's Tool.
A key insight for me was realizing years ago that every century of the church
brings with it something fundamentally new.
Something that has not been seen before and
that has to be dealt with on its own terms.
Not that we ever face any situation for which we entirely lack the principles to deal with it,
but that there is no exact parallel to the new situation,
some sort of easy equivalency that would permit a formulaic response.
For example, when Arianism arose in the 4th century and spread like wildfire,
including among the episcopacy,
the Church was facing a new state of emergency and had to respond accordingly.
Humanly speaking, it was a close call.
As St. Jerome famously said, the whole world groaned and was astonished to find itself
Aryan.
But equally new was the sudden and violent arrival of
Islam, which swept away many of the most ancient,
even original Christian communities in
North Africa and Asia Minor.
Another unwelcome novelty was
the so-called Pornocracy of the Dark Ages,
when the Pope's chair in Rome was
bought and sold by fornicators.
Then there was the Great Western Schism, when at one point three rivals claimed to be pope.
And each had substantial backings of cardinals, bishops, and secular rulers.
The Protestant Revolt, too, though it was prepared for by a couple of centuries of rumblings,
burst onto the scene as something unprecedented in the severity of its rejection of the Catholic tradition
and its rapid multiplication of man-made doctrines.
Church history is nothing if not full of surprises,
of hair-raising crises, razor-thin escapes,
devastating tragedies, and altogether unexpected resurrections.
I maintain that the crisis after the Second Vatican Council is precisely one of these fundamentally new situations.
The whole church groaned and was astonished to find itself modernist.
Indeed, this crisis is greater than any that came before
because to use Pope Pius X's exact phrase,
modernism is the collection of all heresies.
Omnium heresion con lectum.
And this modernism in a soft and elegant form,
though sometimes also with the jackhammers of iconoclasm,
established itself in all the seats of learning and power.
The age we are passing through is characterized
by an incredibly arrogant rejection
of centuries of church tradition,
of historical rights, customs, monuments, laws,
even settled dogmas and morals.
called into question not by raving wild-eyed reformers
at the margins of civilization,
but by cardinals, bishops, and even popes,
let alone countless sympathizers
at every level of the church.
So great is the rupture that occurred in the 60s and 70s, for those who experienced it
or who have studied it subsequently, that there are still days when one can find it
hard to believe that the so-called liturgical reform actually happened or could have happened.
For it should strike any call observer as the most freakish betrayal of Catholicism
in the entire history of the Church.
It's almost too shocking to comprehend.
The scale of the disaster beggars the imagination.
This is also why neo-Catholic coping mechanisms like there's always confusion after a council
or we've had rough times before are so weak and unconvincing.
We have not been here before.
We are in terra incognita, in the fearful unknown.
We can't always interpret what we encounter with reference to ancient paradigms,
because it doesn't always align.
Sometimes we have to figure things out for the first time.
There is a first time for every major error in Christian history, and the error of our
day, the rejection of tradition as good, right, normative, trustworthy, and providential,
is an error that never existed before in this naked, austere, unmitigated form.
As a consequence, our crisis raises questions about authority and obedience,
for the simple reason that the revolution that took place and continues to dominate
was initiated and consolidated by so-called authorities
who claimed the unquestioning allegiance or obedience of all subordinates.
Just as every earlier crisis in church history led to the clarification of certain hitherto
ambiguous or underdeveloped concepts, so too our crisis will eventually lead to, and indeed
has already begun to produce, a far better, more nuanced, realistic, transfigured understanding
of church authority, especially the nature and limits of the papal office, and the corresponding
virtue of obedience.
There will come a time when the laity and parochial clergy will no longer be expected
to swallow unsatisfying and self-injuring absurdities for breakfast, while an abusive
clericalism consumes the Church's inheritance and replaces it with nothing of value.
The question of the relationship of authority to obedience is central to our present situation,
and that is why I have chosen to address it tonight.
Let there be no mistake about it.
Properly understood and lived, obedience is a supreme virtue, modeled by Christ Himself.
Our Lord and the saints practiced obedience, and so must we.
A rebellious mentality is foreign to Christianity and to natural ethics.
However, obedience has also been weaponized by tyrants, manipulators, and abusers of all
sorts to the extent that it's acquired a bad reputation.
It is time to rehabilitate the virtue by looking carefully at what it is and isn't.
True obedience is never blind or unconditional.
It must be based on truth and charity, in the sense that we must be commanded to do
what is truly good and for the sake of growing in love for the good.
This is why it is not obedience that comes first, but truth and charity.
The relationship of superior and subordinate always takes place within the context of God's revealed will as authoritatively taught by the Church.
Demands for obedience that flow from falsehood, hatred, envy, or any other evil foundation
are destructive and should be resisted in proportion to the damage they are causing
or threatening to cause.
If one has a serious and well-founded doubt about whether a particular human command is
compatible with divine, natural, or ecclesiastical law, one should not obey it.
Authority is born to serve and promote the shared good of many, that is what we call the common good.
If a particular wielder of authority deploys his office overtly against the common good,
then that command lacks moral binding power.
The Church's common good is the divine life of Jesus Christ, her head, and the divinization of souls by the sacramental life and prayer.
Crucially, the traditional liturgy is inherent to the Church's common good. Why?
Because the traditional rites of the Church are not merely human works, but works conjointly of God and men, of the Church moved by the Holy Spirit.
The traditional liturgical worship of the church, what is called her lex orandi, is a basic, normative, stable expression of her creed, or lex credendi, and cannot be contradicted or abolished or heavily rewritten without rejecting the spirit-led continuity of the Catholic Church as a whole.
Only two groups have ever rejected the traditional Lex Orandi,
the Protestants, who did so because they openly dissented from the creed it expressed,
and the modernists, who maintained that as the meaning of the creed perpetually evolves,
so too should the prayer that reflects it.
In reality, we know from Pope Pius V's quo primum that the classical Roman right he
canonized after the Council of Trent contains and transmits the Catholic faith as do all
venerable Christian rites, and as such cannot be abolished or abrogated.
Rather, it remains a permanent treasure and testimonial, guaranteed to Latin rite clergy
and laity in perpetuity.
We must be absolutely clear about this.
Any attack on the traditional Latin Mass is an attack on the providence of God the Father,
who guided his church to develop and exalt this liturgy,
the better part of her 2,000-year pilgrimage on earth.
A rejection of the work of Christ,
the King and Lord of history who is adored in it.
a blasphemy against the fruitfulness of the Holy Ghost in the Church's life of prayer,
a stance against the unanimous practice of every age of the Latin Church,
of every saint, council, and pope prior to the 20th century.
A rejection of the dogmatic confession of faith contained in this traditional liturgy
as it organically developed over two millennia.
A rejection of the communion of the Western saints who share a common lineage and patrimony
of ecclesiastical worship.
So this is grave matter indeed.
Because of the tight connection between prayer and creed,
history and providence, ecclesial communion
and dogmatic confession, it follows that abolishing
or prohibiting or working against the immemorial
Roman right is a notorious and damaging attack
on the church's common good.
This is why Pope Francis' attempt in traditiones custodes to restrict and eventually repeal the traditional Roman right embodies a profoundly uncatholic, indeed anti-Catholic point of view.
for as Francesco Suarez states.
If the Pope lays down an order contrary to right customs,
one does not have to obey him.
If he tries to do something manifestly opposed to justice
and to the common good, it would be licit to resist him.
That's the great scholastic Francisco Suarez.
Though liturgical reform, its subsequent implementation, and Pope Francis' renewed efforts to extinguish
the preceding tradition are unreasonable, unjust, and unholy, and therefore cannot be
accepted as legitimate or embraced as the will of God.
As a matter of fact, and contrary to these smears of our opponents, it is for love of the office of the Pope and for the Pope's immortal soul that moves us to denounce the abuse of papal authority wielded against the good of the faithful.
You don't love somebody by letting them run roughshod over you.
Yes, ordinary Catholics are capable of recognizing when authorities are acting against the common
good.
A 2014 document from the International Theological Commission bore witness to the Catholic faithful's
instinct for truth.
The census fidei confers on the believer the capacity to discern whether or not a teaching
or practice is coherent with the true faith by which he or she already lives.
The census fidei also enables individual believers to perceive any disharmony, incoherence or contradiction between a teaching or practice and the authentic Christian faith by which they live.
Alerted by their sense of fidelity, individual believers may deny assent even to the teaching of legitimate pastors if they do not recognize in that teaching the voice of Christ, the Good Shepherd."
Note this language, even our legitimate pastors, Pope, Bishop, local pastor, fail to speak
with the voice of the Good Shepherd when they impose disharmony, incoherence, or contradiction
on the faithful.
It was none other than St. Thomas Aquinas who famously said that unjust laws are acts
of violence rather than laws, wherefor they do not bind in conscience.
If we are convinced that something essential, something decisive in the faith is under attack from the Pope or any other pastor,
we may and must refuse to do what is being asked or commanded, refuse to give up what is being unjustly taken away or forbidden.
Any penalty or punishment meted out for disobedience to the revolutionaries would be illicit, having no force.
If a punishment is given on false theological or canonical premises, it is null and void.
Ultimately, it is for the salus animarum, the salvation of souls, that the entire structure
of ecclesiastical law exists.
It has no other purpose than to protect and advance the sharing of the life of Christ
with mankind.
There can be situations of anarchy or breakdown, corruption or apostasy, where the ordinary
structures become impediments to, not facilitators of, the Church's mission.
In these cases, the voice of conscience dictates that one should do what needs to be done in
prudence and charity for the achievement of the sovereign law.
It is a necessity, not a luxury, for some priests and religious in the Church to bear
witness by their very lives, by their consistent, principled, integral fidelity to tradition,
that the Catholic Church must be the same today as she ever was, and that what was sacred
and great in the past can never fail to be so in the present and until the end of time.
The moment tradition is proscribed, so is the Church's substantive continuity and with it the basis of ecclesiastical authority itself,
since the episcopacy and the papacy are themselves transmitted to us by tradition.
No office holder in either the church or the state – I'm not going to talk about the state much but what I'm saying would apply to the state –
no office holder in either the church or the state has the authority before God to prohibit mass or refuse the sacraments to otherwise well disposed Catholic faithful.
This is the framework. Now we have to drill deeper.
Consider the sheer spiritual power of the traditional Latin Mass.
Over the years, I've heard from or read accounts of many priests whose discovery of the TLM has transformed their priesthood and their entire spiritual life.
It's amazing the number who go through this conversion experience.
Typically, they start by saying the TLM once in a while, then it moves up to once a week on their day off.
Then they find a way, or found a way, prior to Trudizino's Custodas,
to get it into the parish schedule, even adding a Sunday Mass.
And in some cases, more than most people realize,
they reach a point where they say before God,
I wish I could do this all the time.
Or even, I can't do the modern right anymore.
They have found a pearl of great price and are ready to sell everything to buy the field
where it lies buried.
Sometimes this conversion story has a happy ending.
For instance, a bishop appoints a priest as a Latin mass chaplain, or puts him in charge
of a rural shrine far away.
Sometimes, alas, especially in the current climate, this conversion story has a tragic
ending.
The priest is called on the carpet of the chancery, stripped of his faculties, hung out
to dry.
Because, don't you know, we have so many extra clergy on our hands that we can afford
to retire them early if they don't fit the mold.
Here's a million-dollar question. Do you ever hear about a priest starting with
the TLM and then discovering the greatness of the Novos Ordo and moving
over more and more to it until he offers it exclusively?
until he has a longing in his heart and in his hands to offer just the Nova's
ordo, even to the point of suffering for it and possibly losing everything.
Once in a blue moon, one hears of a traditionalist priest who enters the
diocese and presbyterates and alternates between the two rights for pastoral
reasons, but never the spiritually transformative experience that I
described. To me, this says more about the reality as we are dealing with than
a thousand documents from the Vatican could ever tell us.
We know, moreover, that it is not only priests and religious, but in far greater
numbers, the lay faithful, who find their encounter with the traditional liturgical
life of the church utterly transformative.
The testimonials are now impossible to keep track of.
There are so many of them online and in print.
Last Christmas Day, as I gazed out from the choir loft at all of the families and children
in the pews, and the sanctuary covered with candles, poinsettias, and pine trees, and
as I followed the awesome beauty of a solemn high mass clothed in gold vestments and the
otherworldly music of chant, using the same prayers, antiphons, readings, and ceremonies
that the Roman Church has used for well over a thousand years.
Seeing all this, it was brought home to me with renewed force that any attack on this
glorious patrimony and on the faithful who love it is and cannot be other than satanic.
The sooner and better we grasp this, the sooner we will see that our response must be a total
repudiation of not only Tridiziones Christodes and the follow-up documents based on it, but
of the entire liturgical revolution spearheaded by Anabale Bounini,
and Giovanni Battista Montini Inter-Alia,
and now revived by its last convicted disciples.
Newly empowered after a deceptively peaceful interlude
when live and let live was the operative attitude,
meant to begin a long process of healing
by allowing God and his people to sort things out
instead of seeking a top-down solution.
What we are seeing today is certainly more malicious than the naive attitude of the 1960s.
Captured in the slogan, man has come of age, so should the mass.
But it is no different in kind from the initial rupture from tradition
engineered by the concillium and executed by Paul VI.
Perhaps that is the greatest grace of this present moment, to shake us awake from slumber
about the issues that are really at stake, beneath the surface squalls of so-called preferences
and tastes and opinions.
Let's not mince words, the enemies of tradition would rather see a shortage of priests than
to have an abundance of Latin-mass priests.
They would rather see monasteries and convents go into hospice and shudder their doors than
to be revitalized with religious who joyfully embraced tradition.
They would rather see contraceptive families than families with many children reared in
the traditional faith.
Isn't that enough and more than enough to show that the father of this anti-traditional
movement is not God but the devil?
Bishops who accept and implement the Modu Proprio,
Treditsi and Hiscustodas, and the Decastry for Divine Worship's responses
align themselves with the Father of Lies.
Priests who willingly accept these irrational, unjust, and harmful restrictions
sin against the virtue of obedience to God's law and to the sovereign law of the church,
which is the good of souls.
Therefore, also against Christ, the model of obedience,
and against His Father, who establishes authority and obedience
for the advancement of the church's mission in life,
for the advancement of it, not for their derailment or distortion.
If the tradition of the church is so fruitful in graces and other spiritual goods, then we
can see instantly why the enemy of God and of human nature, Satan, would be so keen to
see it suppressed.
and work sleeplessly as only angels can do to move his human instruments to wage war against it.
Indeed, we were warned many times that this ecclesiastical auto-immune disorder,
in which the church's own leaders attack the body of Christ, would come to pass in our days.
Remember Pope Leo XIII's vision in which he saw the devil ask for time to overthrow the church?
We know that the church can never be overthrown,
but we also know from the record of Scripture and from subsequent church history
that Almighty God at times for our testing and our purification
allows matters to reach the brink of disaster.
How striking, then, are the words written by Leo XIII in the little known longer form
of the St. Michael Prayer that he composed after that vision, and that was included in
both the octa of Estolice Seides of 1890 and the Rittu-Alle-Rumanum of 1898.
You can go and find it there in Latin.
He is speaking of men whom the primeval slayer and wicked dragon—that's a phrase from
the prayer—has induced to take his side.
And here's what the prayer says at that point.
These most crafty enemies have filled and inebriated with gall and bitterness the church,
the spouse of the Immaculate Lamb, and have laid impious hands on her most sacred possessions.
In the holy place itself, where the sea of Holy Peter and the chair of truth has been set up as the light of the world,
they have raised the throne of their abominable impiety,
with the iniquitous design that when the shepherd has been struck, the sheep may be scattered."
Unquote. I'm telling you, that's much more relevant now than it was in 1898 or 1890.
Now, we all know what our opponents always say to us.
Aren't we Catholics supposed to let ourselves be guided by the Pope and the bishops in regard to liturgical law?
The answer is yes and no.
Yes, in regard to all that concerns the devout, fitting, and edifying celebration of the received
and approved traditional rites of the Church.
No, if that guidance leads us to turn against that sublime inheritance which comes down to
us from innumerable saints.
This is something quite beyond the authority of any hierarchy of the Church.
As Alan Fimmister explains,
If the church's rights are patristic monuments ultimately traceable to the apostolic age,
then they would quite naturally be immune to the vicissitudes of ecclesiastical positive
law.
As St. Jerome observed in such matters, each province may follow its own inclinations,
and the traditions which have been handed down should be regarded as apostolic laws.
Even if each of the particular elements of each tradition cannot be traced with certainty
or even plausibility to the apostles themselves, the fact remains that as monuments to the
church's unwritten tradition, they cannot be abrogated by ecclesiastical authority, just
as the authority of St. Athanasius, St. Augustine, or St. John Chrysostom cannot be abrogated.
The divinely instituted matter of many of the sacraments, olive oil, wine, bread, are
taken from the staple crops of the Mediterranean world, and the rites which transmitted them
objectively form part of the witness to the deposit of faith.
The Church cannot repudiate them without repudiating herself and her Lord."
In other words, it is not just a reductively understood form and matter of the sacraments
that constitute the tradition to be upheld, but the entirety of the rites that surround,
interpret, and mediate the sacraments to the faithful, forming and informing them with
the Lex Orandi's witness to the Catholic faith.
These, handed down rights, are not incidental and indifferent constructs that each generation
may judge, rewrite, or discard as it pleases, with the attitude of someone superior to what
he evaluates.
Instead, the generations that follow recognize with grateful humility their need to be formed
by and the accompanying indebtedness to and duty towards the accumulated prayers and practices
of their forefathers.
That is simply the way Catholics have always acted and will always act.
A church that has no place of unquestioned honor for hallowed tradition, but only room
for power and submission is not the church founded by Jesus Christ.
The papacy, the hierarchy, all the structures that pertain to the visible society we call
the Catholic Church, exist from and for tradition.
They themselves are part of what is handed down, together with the dogmatic and moral teaching,
the liturgy and sacraments, the ascetical and mystical doctrine,
all forming a mutually reinforcing totality.
The Church exists to receive, preserve, and hand on this sum total of divine wisdom in
the service of man's union with the Triune God.
Any attempt to defraud the faithful of this inheritance,
to subvert it, deface it, suppress it, or mingle it with
alien ideas and goals, as we see happening with the synodal process leading up to
the synod on synodality,
counts as a move away from Christ and his church,
regardless of the specious legal forms in which it may be dressed.
Such an attempt, and we have seen a record number of attempts during the past decade,
but also cumulatively in the past 60 years, points to the existence of a parallel body
that subsists parasitically on the Catholic Church, a man-made seamalachrum or virtual
schism masquerading as the Church.
A frontal attack, on that which was once central, unquestioned, exalted, jealously guarded,
and always handed down in the life of the Church.
I refer, of course, to the Roman right, as restored and canonized by Pius V in perfect
fidelity to the dogmatic teaching of the Council of Trent, is in and of itself a dead giveaway
that we are dealing with an outrageous abuse of power that not only may but must be resisted
for the good of souls.
It is therefore not a burden but a privilege and honor for us to be able to refuse this
diabolic obedience, to refuse a renegade vicar of Christ who irrigates to Himself the right
contradicting the truth and wounding the common good, and thus to give our unconditional allegiance
to Christ our King, the Lord of history, the head and ruler of His Church, who will prepare
in due time the deliverance and the restoration for which we long and pray.
However, did we reach this point?
That is a long and complicated story.
Ideas, practices, assumptions, attitudes, emerging in the Protestant revolt.
sharpened in the Enlightenment period, radicalized in the Age of Revolutions,
and popularized in the secularism of the 20th century
have all played their part in the reshaping of the Catholic Church,
sociologically speaking. I'm not talking about the mystical body and
Immaculate Bride of Christ
in her interior purity and heavenly glory.
But about the visible institution on Earth, which
as our Lord illustrated in his parable of the wheat and the terrors,
is made up of both true Christians and false ones,
so that the body of Christ and the body of the devil, so to speak,
are commingled until the end of time. That's the teaching of Christ,
that's the teaching of St. Augustine, of Taconius, and of many others.
There can be, there should be, no surprise, when I say that it is entirely possible for
the hierarchy of the Church at a given time to be occupied more by false Christians than
by true ones.
That is, to be occupied by those who do not profess the Catholic faith in its dogmatic,
moral, and liturgical fullness.
but who are, to a greater or lesser extent, material heretics and material schismatics in regard to it,
or let us say, who carry with them, perhaps not even realizing it, the weight and the harm
of the heretical ideas that are so plentiful in modern times, as well as schismatic tendencies
drawing them apart from the great communion of the Church of all ages.
But here, I wish to focus on what I will call Satan's Master Stroke.
There's an old adage, curupxio optimi passima.
The corruption of the best is the worst.
Aristotle illustrates this adage in the political sphere when he says that monarchy, that's
rule by one virtuous man, is the best form of government.
But its corruption, tyranny, rule by one vicious man, is the worst form of government.
St. Thomas Aquinas argues that, in a certain way, obedience is the foremost virtue because
all good things that we do can be done out of obedience to the implicit or explicit command
or request of those who are in authority over us.
God, of course, as well as all superiors who stand in His place, such as rulers, fathers,
and pastors.
But if this is true, obedience could also become the foremost vice.
Corruptio optimi pacima.
As far as I can see, the devil uses three main methods for leading Christians away from
the path of life.
The first is the blunt method of open-bloody persecution.
is the seed of Christianity, and the church tends to spread all the more when openly persecuted,
so the devil reaches for a second and more subtle method.
Internal moral corruption in the form of the seven deadly vices.
Yet even moral corruption is at times too repulsive in its outward manifestations to be successful.
And so the devil lays hands on the most subtle weapon of all, the twisting of obedience,
until it becomes a means of spiritual suicide or bureaucratic euthanasia.
Historically speaking, this last strategy required a long preparation before it could be launched.
The devil had to build up a skewed notion of blind obedience over the course of many centuries,
because only in this way could the overthrow of Catholic liturgy, doctrine, morals, and culture be brought about.
That is, the destruction had to come, or at least seem to come, from the pope and the hierarchy,
so that it could be plausibly presented as God's will,
imposed on people who would already be conditioned to go along with it.
Once this demonic deception is set up, it's hard to overcome it because any attempt at overcoming it is deemed to be rebellious pride.
Who are you to question this or that church leader?
Indeed, since many spiritual writers over the centuries had equated the essence of holiness
with a total and blind obedience equivalent to a death to self, it followed that the slightest
doubt or hesitation about obeying the order of a superior could be seen as selfish or
even sinful.
Catholics in search of spiritual perfection were trained to choke down their difficulties,
stifle their supernatural common sense, the sense of svededium, and silence the voice
of their consciences.
As a result, obedience, given to ideas or ways of life contrary to our Catholic tradition,
turned, in fact, into a rebellious pride, like that of Satan, who hates tradition,
while the reception and transmission of Catholic tradition by those who still believe the faith
got labeled as rebellion, and then punished as if it were truly such.
The deception is shrewd. You need to grow in humility, right?
So what better way than to obediently accept whatever God's own representative on earth demands?
And it will be even more meritorious when it's repulsive.
The more repulsive, the more meritorious.
You have to admit, this is a masterful ploy for one who wishes to undermine the church.
We can do a virtue analysis to help make the strategy clear.
God positively wills the virtues we have.
That should not be a controversial statement.
But He can make use of our vices, too,
as okay.
for humiliating us and bringing us to conversion. So, for example, the Lord does
not will the drunkenness of the drunkard, but he can make use of the drunkards
down and out despair to affect a conversion.
In this way, he brings good out of evil, as only God can do.
In contrast, the devil positively wills the vices we have, lust, gluttony, avarice, pride,
etc.
These are his stock in trade, and as long as we're acting by them, he's quite content
with our performance.
But for those who are not in the grip of vices, he has a more subtle strategy to urge them
to misuse their virtues.
Those who are obedient can be tempted to a blind obedience to teachers who are teaching
or shepherds who are abusing their sheep.
He can urge the humble to a false humility
that fails to acknowledge rights and duties,
or accept humiliations that are self-destructive
and destructive of those who do the humiliating.
He can urge the meek to a refusal to be justly angry or to fight and resist when that is the virtuous thing to do.
In themselves, obedience, humility, meekness are virtues and are therefore good,
but it is in the nature of any created good to be able to be abused,
and virtues too can be abused when they are misused, misapplied, misdirected.
To be obedient to one who is himself disobedient to God is to become guilty of disobedience.
To be humble by letting one's rights be dashed to the ground by another who abuses his office
is to make humility and accomplice of someone else's sin.
This is the way that the devil, when he cannot tempt someone to obvious vices,
tempts them rather by the very virtues they hold dear.
In this way, rather than bringing good out of evil as God does, Satan brings evil out of good, which is his specialty.
We know from Aristotle that there are two kinds of vices relative to every virtue.
Courage or fortitude is a mean or middle between the extreme of cowardice,
which is a deficiency in facing danger, and the extreme of rashness,
which is facing danger excessively or recklessly.
However, Aristotle makes the astute observation that one of these extremes is closer to the
mean and resembles it more.
Thus, recklessness resembles courage more than cowardice does.
And similarly, not enjoying food and drink enough is closer to temperance than gluttony
is.
Thus, for Aristotle, too much of a good thing becomes a bad thing.
And so it is with obedience.
Too much obedience paid to earthly figures, an indiscriminate and total adherence to their
will is a vice, and yet it looks more like the virtuous mean than rebelliousness does.
And so it tends to be confused with the virtue.
That confusion, that is the confusion between blind obedience and truly virtuous obedience,
is a key part of the devil's strategy.
A book called AA1025, Memoirs of the Communist Infiltration into the Church, gives us the
posthumous memoirs of a Communist agent who entered the seminary and was ordained a priest,
but who all along forwarded the agenda of the Communists for whom he worked, with a view
to the auto-demolition of the Church.
That such infiltrators existed is no longer disputed.
The only question is how many were there, and how high did they rise?
Those who have read Malachi Martin's Wind Swept House
and who have followed the reporting about Cardinal Bernadine's involvement in satanic rituals
will have some idea of the kind of things that happened.
The editor of the AA1025 manuscript, Marie Carre, writes,
Quote, the holy virtue of obedience is today the extremely powerful weapon that our enemies
who pretend to be our friends make use of against what we were to put up in its stead
what they have decided to have us become.
Let me read that again.
The holy virtue of obedience is today the extremely powerful weapon that our
enemies, who pretend to be our friends, make use of against what we were, to put
up in its stead what they have decided to have us become."
Carre's assertion implies that there is a substitute or air-sats Catholicism, some call
it neo-Catholicism, that our enemies seek to impose on us.
Dr. Thaddeus Kaczynski has well explained what this substitute is and how it functions.
The intimate encounter with God, think about the experience of a devout low mass, is that
The intimate encounter with God immunizes us to nothing worship.
The robust encounter with real being is the prerequisite for divine encounter, and authentic
tradition enables the intelligible encounter with reality.
The devil knows all this, being an expert logician, and so he desires above all the annihilation of authentic tradition.
His main target, of course, is Catholic tradition, for it provides the surest means to an intimate encounter with both natural and supernatural reality.
Realizing that any authentic tradition, even a barely breathing one, is a receiver and
transmitter of the divine, his stroke of genius was to inspire the construction and establishment
of an abstract anti-tradition that would receive and transmit nothing.
Although similar in its unreality to the abstractions of Communism, Fascism, and Nazism,
it would bear such a striking resemblance to the Christian tradition that it would escape
detection.
Implemented surreptitiously and cloaking itself in the form of its host, it would
serve as the tradition to end all tradition.
Not only would there be no counter-attack this time, men of goodwill would have no idea
what hit them, or even that they had been hit."
The tradition to end all tradition is a haunting phrase.
What Ryan Topping says about the vocabulary reassignment surgery of modern times applies
above all to words like obedience, tradition, and even church.
Quote, old words that carry the gravitas of tradition and centuries of revered usage
are reminted into other tokens.
The reassignments will not at first be evident.
To say this in other words, the meanings of terms within a counterfeit culture break
down the semantic web established under the former dispensation to achieve newly desired
ends.
Words become weapons.
It was Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, who on October 13, 1974, gave the fullest and clearest
exposition of this strategy.
In a homily, quote, Satan's master stroke will therefore be to spread the revolutionary
principles introduced into the church by the authority of the church itself, placing
this authority in a situation of incoherence and permanent contradiction.
So long as this ambiguity has not been dispersed, disasters will multiply within the church.
That's 1974, friends.
Satan reigns through ambiguity and incoherence,
which are his means of combat,
and which deceive men of little faith.
We must acknowledge that the trick has been well played
and that Satan's lie has been masterfully utilized.
This is still Archbishop Lefebvre.
The church will destroy herself through obedience.
You must obey.
Whom or what must we obey?
We don't know exactly.
Woe to the man who does not consent to this false obedience.
He thereby earns the right to be trampled underfoot by its agents,
to be columbinated, to be deprived of everything which allowed him to live.
He is branded a heretic, a schismatic.
Let him die. That is all he deserves."
that was Lefebvre in his early embattled period.
The anti-traditional actions of Pope Francis and Cardinal Roach, among others, reveal a new one of the deep sicknesses of the Roman Catholic Church at this time.
A multi-layered sickness that places law above persons, legalism above devotion, compliance above pastorality, uniformity above unity, micromanagement above prudence, presentism above tradition.
This sickness thrives on the blindness of blind obedience and the passivity of the supposedly
post-consilearly reactivated laity and clergy.
It is a sickness fed by those who tolerate it, exonerate it, or surrender to it, which
they do on account of ignorance of what is at stake, laziness about pushing back, fear
of consequences, opportunism, or despairing resignation.
In the current assault on the immemorial Roman liturgy,
blind obedience and legal positivism will reveal their deadliest potential as instruments
by which the common good of the people of God is directly assaulted and wounded,
yet under the guise of mere administrative regulation, done by proper authority with proper forms.
Canon law, in the hands of unscrupulous ideologues,
too easily becomes a tool of dehumanization,
depersonalization, and decatholization.
As a modern philosopher writes, quote,
Where was there ever a regime that did not have a host of lawyers at its disposal, to
help it as it were to legalize itself?
The same lawyers who served the Revolutionary Republic in France later worked for the Emperor
Napoleon in order to create his code Seville and to put it into practice.
But even when Louis XVIII was restored to the throne, there was no lack of compliant
lawyers who supported his rule by means of law just as Napoleon's rule had earlier been
supported, and just as before that, the mobs and the demagogues reign of terror had been
lawful and been advocated for by means of legal concepts. One might truly say only
lay your hands on power and on people who can construct a legal basis for your
power and you will never lack for anything.
hard and unbending in petty matters, in formalities,
spineless and servile with respect to great matters,
with respect to what is essential,
this is how a lawyer who is a product of a law that has emancipated itself
from an ethics that is itself without religion is shown to be in the light of day.
Unquote.
In the Gospel of Luke chapter 11 our Lord says
If a son shall ask bread of any of you that is a father, will he give him a stone?
Or if he asks a fish, will he for a fish give him a serpent?
Or if he shall ask an egg, will he offer him a scorpion?
If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children,
how much more shall your heavenly father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him?
Even bad parents still want to give their children good things,
and do give them good things, at least what seems good to them,
even if they're mistaken about it. So if there were a father who actually deprived
his children of good things,
or who gave them evil things in place of good, he would be on our Lord's account
worse than evil. What could that mean?
We would in that case be looking at satanic evil, at a diabolic pride that seeks to cut
people off from what is good, fruitful, holy, nourishing.
Is the word diabolic too strong?
Diabolos means in Greek the one who divides.
A pope who acts against the tradition of the church
and against the faithful attached to it
is dividing the church from herself,
dividing the faithful from what is rightfully theirs
as members of the body of Christ.
Is the word satanic too strong? No. Satanas means the accuser. And here we have a man, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, constantly accusing Catholics who love the Lord, love their faith, love the traditions of the church, accusing them of divisiveness, of rejecting the Holy Spirit, of rigidity, of lovelessness, of mental illness, and on and on.
Pope Francis should hold a mirror up to himself and find the one who divides, the one who accuses.
One may imagine Christ our Savior speaking to the successors of His apostles and to their
often compliant, manipulative and pharisaical canon lawyers, the same words He spoke to
the Jewish lawyers of His day.
Woe to you lawyers!
For you took away the key of knowledge.
You did not enter in yourselves and those who were entering in, you hindered.
Ye corrupt canon lawyers, you try to take away the key of the knowledge of divine worship
in accord with tradition and truth.
You do not enter it yourselves, and those who were entering in, young and old, singles
and married, families with children, the future priestly in religious vocations, these you
hindered.
ye hierarchs, ye refuse to humble yourselves before the truth of history, the truth of
tradition, the truth of the Holy Spirit's work in the traditional movement.
You failed to seek the spiritual good of the people of God, and on the contrary, you worked
against their good, which is the sole justification for your authority.
In the words of the book of Daniel in the story of Susanna,
iniquity came forth from Babylon, from elders who were judges,
who were supposed to govern the people. And they perverted their minds and turned
away their eyes from looking to heaven
or remembering righteous judgments.
As we have seen, a bishop, every bishop, including the bishop of Rome, is entrusted with the care of the common good, that is the sole rationale for his authority.
If he acts directly against the spiritual nourishment that the faithful receive from the old rites,
If he acts against the continuity of the church's received and approved rights,
he is acting unjustly and ultra-virus, and any such determinations do not bind us in conscience.
They bind neither the priests nor the people.
Like Christ, who came not to be served but to serve,
so too should our priests continue to serve God's people first and foremost.
That is what they were ordained to do.
And the pope, above all, is required before God to live up to his title,
Servos Servorum Dei, the Servant of the Servants of God.
It is already a sign of divine mercy, of the fulfillment of God's promise that the church would
never fail until He came again, until He comes again, that there are Catholics everywhere in the
world, a minority to be sure but not negligible and growing in every nation, who have been given
the grace to recognize the anti-tradition, the tradition to end all tradition, the tradition of
nothing worship.
who recognize it for what it is, and to hold fast to the tradition or to rediscover it later in life
so that it may continue. Such Catholics see that many are in the grip of a distorted and harmful
notion of obedience, which in fact injures the clergy even more than it does the faithful.
If your concept of obedience is such that you will be ready to change your opinions on the whim of the pope or the bishop,
that can only mean that your attachment is solely to obedience itself.
There is no content behind it. No. There. There.
you will never be able to truly love something because you may be asked to
reject it at any moment and you will be expected to reject it with as much
willingness as that with which you once embraced it. This is how we end up with
psychologically damaged automatons instead of shepherds who care for souls
with intelligent and loving hearts.
It is a self-perpetuating system, one that is designed to be unbreakable and inescapable.
This destructive cycle can be broken in only two ways, both of which are needed, as they complement one another.
The top-down solution, for which we ardently pray, is when a future pope inaugurates a genuine root and branch reform of the Church,
clearing out the episcopacy of its cowards, modernists, and homosexuals,
and re-instant.
traditional liturgy and doctrine. Needless to say, this may require a whole
series of popes, as was the case in the 16th century. The counter-reformation was
not the work of one pope, it was the work of many, many popes.
The bottom-up solution is what clergy and laity can do right now.
Exercise our God-given rights to live according to faith, reason, and tradition,
ignoring penalties administered by and in service of the self-perpetuating closed system of false obedience,
and thus clearing the way for the healing and rejuvenation of the Church.
This is not doing evil that good may come of it.
It is doing good by adhering to truth and tradition
and rejecting the evil of complicity with destroyers
of the vineyard.
One of my favorite writers from the period right after the council is the great American publisher and conservative pundit Neil McCaffrey.
Here's what he was telling his fellow Catholics when the revolution against them first broke out.
And his words from the 1970s ring out with a strange relevance in 2023.
I often think that the motto of the current pontificate is back to the 70s.
Who are the backwardists, right?
Anyway, Neil McCaffrey wrote in the 70s,
traditional Catholics find themselves bewildered in disarray.
Part of the disarray, I suspect,
springs from an error most of us fell heir to.
Not much burdened with the knowledge of Catholic history,
we have assumed that authority could do no wrong.
Well, very little wrong.
Well, at least nothing seriously wrong.
And so we found ourselves disarmed.
I hope no one will read this appeal to non-conformity as an invitation to schism, even an oblique
invitation.
This is our church.
Like a family, we may not always be proud of its elders or its members, but it is still
ours.
We owe it filial love, it is our hope.
We owe it loyalty, too, and not just in fair weather.
Once, the loyalty came easier.
Once the yoke was sweet, the burdened light, now we are in a tunnel or rather a madhouse.
The constellations are gone.
Our home is in the hands of strangers, strangers who hate us, who tell us to conform or die.
This is still McCaffrey.
Let us turn their own non-conformity against them.
If they have the freedom to preach contempt of the church we know and love, surely we
have the freedom to defend, to resist, to cherish what is part of ourselves.
As Americans, we are accustomed to exercise generous freedoms in the temporal sphere.
We are not used to having to use them in the church.
Now we must or be swept away.
And the radicals do mean to sweep us away.
They preach freedom, but only their own brand of it.
They leave in their wake a totalitarian stink.
Unquote.
Neil McCaffrey, 1970s.
I would like to conclude my reflections this evening with some comforting words of wisdom
from Father Roger Tomac Calmel, a great and courageous Dominican priest who stalwartly
resisted the conciliar and post-conciliar revolution until his death in 1975, and who
has inspired generations of French traditionalists.
Having posed the question, what can we do? He writes, quote,
obviously, hold fast to tradition. Be it the mass, the mass of St. Pius V, Latin in the
liturgy, the catechism, the tried and true customs of Catholic prayer, especially the
rosary, and temporal Christian institutions, at least whatever remains of them.
Even so doing, it is not out of the question that we may experience the temptation.
What's the use?
What is out of the question is that we should take this temptation seriously, or let it
gain a foothold in our hearts, or impinge on our resolutions by a fraction of an inch.
It is impossible to say what's the use.
When one knows that it is always going to be