Sons of the Church in a time of crisis
By the Reverend Fr. Roger-Thomas Calmel, O.P.
(Prologue to Apologia for the Everlasting Church)
Prelates who occupy the most important posts in the Church, misled by the grand chimera of their own desire to find easy, infallible means to achieving once and for all the religious unity of mankind, are working to invent a church without borders in which all men, unconditionally dispensed from renouncing the world and Satan, will soon be united in the bonds of brotherly love.
Dogmas, rites, hierarchy, discipline, should one insist, would all be carried over from the first Church, but everything would be bereft of the safeguards willed by the Lord and specified by Tradition. By that very fact, everything would be drained of Catholic vitality, namely grace and holiness. The adepts of the most divers beliefs, and even those who refuse to have any, would enter as equals, but they would enter on equal footing into a dummy church. Such is the present endeavor of the prestigious Master of lies and illusions.
Behold the masterwork, of Masonic inspiration, to which he commits his minions—faithless priests promoted as eminent theologians; oblivious or disloyal bishops, if not disguised apostates, rapidly elevated to the choicest honors and invested with the highest prelatures. They spend their lives and lose their souls building a postconciliar Church under the star of Satan.
— Dogmas, affected by relativism because of the new pastoral praxis that refuses to condemn heresy, no longer propose any precise supernatural object. Consequently, in order to accept them, even supposing that the notion still means anything in this case, neither intellectual assent nor purity of heart is required.
— The sacraments are placed within reach of those who do not believe; almost nothing keeps even unbelievers and the unworthy from approaching them, so far have the new ecclesiastical rites, by their instability and fluidity, become alienated from the sacramental sign efficacious in and of itself, divinely fixed by the Saviour once and for all “until He comes again.”
— As for the hierarchy, it is dissolving insensibly into the people of God, of which it is tending to become a democratic emanation, elected by universal suffrage for a provisional function.
Thanks to these unprecedented innovations, their instigators are congratulating themselves for having torn down the barriers that kept out of the Church those who even yesterday, in the recent ante-conciliar period, rejected the Church’s dogmas, spurned the sacraments, and defied the hierarchy. Undoubtedly, as they were understood before the Council, dogmas, sacraments, government, a needful inward conversion, gave the Church the aspect of a fortified city—Jerusalem quae aedificatur ut civitas (Ps. 121:3)—with well-guarded doors and impregnable ramparts. No-one was permitted across the sacred threshold who had not converted.
Henceforth, however, things have been changing before our eyes: doctrines, liturgy, interior life have been subjected to a treatment of dissolution so violent, universal, and perfected that they no longer admit the distinction between Catholics and non-Catholics. Since yes and no, the definite and the definitive, are held to have been surpassed, one wonders what would prevent the non-Christian religions themselves from being a part of the new universal Church, continually updated by ecumenical interpretations.
One wonders about it, at least if one accepts the point of view so many former Council Fathers, circumvented by Vatican II, allowed to be imposed upon them: to forge a heretofore unknown system and a new apparatus in order to win over the world without being exposed to failure, nor suffering, nor persecution, beginning with relativizing the supernatural. But that means nothing, for:
- On one hand Jesus Christ has said: The servant is not greater than his master; if they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you; if they have kept my word, they will keep yours also (John 15:20).
- On the other hand the supernatural is not formless or modifiable; it is firm and precise; it presents a determined aspect; it has an achieved, definitive configuration; since the Incarnation of the Word, since Redemption by the Cross and the sending of the Holy Ghost, the only supernatural that exists is Christian and Catholic. It has no reality except in Christo Jesu, et Virgine Maria et Ecclesia Christi. That is why if one keeps in one’s soul the viewpoint of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the first twenty Councils, one sees quite well what routs the chimera of ecumenical unity: the duty to bend the knee before the Son of man, author and sovereign dispenser of salvation, but only in the one Church He established.
(To be continued)
Sons of the Church in a time of crisis - Father Roger Calmel, O.P. ...
