THE
ENEMY WITHIN
Dear Friends and Benefactors of the Society in
Ireland,
Archbishop Lefebvre established in the curriculum for the first-year
seminarians of our priestly Society a special course on the Acts of
the Magisterium. My class was fortunate enough to have it taught by
the Archbishop himself, and it is a pleasure to come back often to
the notes he gave us almost thirty years ago. In the first day of
classes he reminded us that all the popes of the past three
centuries until Pope Pius XII did not cease to proclaim the truth
and to condemn unanimously the very errors which nowadays poison the
souls and the institutions. I remember vividly his emphatic reading
of the first paragraph of Pope Pius IX's "Quanta Cura": "Our
Predecessors, have, with Apostolic fortitude, constantly resisted
the nefarious enterprises of wicked men, who, like raging waves of
the sea foaming out their own confusion, and promising liberty
whereas they are the slaves of corruption, have striven by their
deceptive opinions and most pernicious writings to raze the
foundations of the Catholic religion and of civil society, to remove
from among men all virtue and justice, to deprave persons, and
especially inexperienced youth, to lead it into the snares of error,
and at length to tear it from the bosom of the Catholic Church."
The Archbishop then said
that the study of these documents would provide us future priests
with the understanding of the continuous papal doctrine on the
modern errors, and it would also shed light on the postconciliar
crisis, since after Vatican II not only was the constant combat
suddenly abandoned, but a pact was established with the heirs of the
promoters of those condemned errors. He called it "a betrayal of
truth in the name of a false ecumenical spirit."
In this centennial year of
St. Pius X's Encyclical "Pascendi" I would like to bring to
your attention every month some of those treasures of doctrine with
which the modern popes have answered to the problems of today. I
cannot imagine a better manner to celebrate this anniversary than to
encourage you to read those monuments of faith and lucidity.
A hidden pearl of our holy
Patron's magisterium is the short Allocution "Il Grave Dolore,"
pronounced at the secret consistory of May 27, 1914. The pope speaks
of the clandestine war led against the Church from within its ranks.
St. Pius X does not mince his words when he asks the newly created
cardinals to be at his side "in order to maintain intact the deposit
of the faith, to keep the ecclesiastical discipline, and to
resist the concealed assaults made against the Church, not only by
her declared enemies, but especially by her own children." He
warns them that, despite all apparent good intentions, those who
look with sympathy upon the modern spirit end by
losing completely their faith. "How many sailors, how many
navigators, and –alas!- how many captains have put their trust in
profane novelties and instead of leading the ship into a safe
harbour, they have sunk miserably!" It is clear that the pope is
referring to the clergy, and he admonishes the cardinals, in their
capacity of first masters of the truth, to preach especially to the
priests and religious "that nothing is more repellent to Our Lord
than the discord in matters of doctrine [...] in which only Satan
triumphs."
Another
little-known document is the Encyclical "Communium Rerum" of
April 29, 1909, published on the occasion of the eight hundredth
anniversary of St. Anselm's death. St. Pius X makes a splendid
panegyric of the saint as the example for every Catholic bishop, in
those times when a double war is made against the Church, from
without and from within.
The
similarities with the present times are uncanny; it seems as if St.
Pius X describes the accelerated decomposition of Spain, Italy,
France, and even of our own country: "What more unnatural sight
could be witnessed than that of some of those children whom the
Church has nourished and cherished as her first-born, her flower and
her strength, in their rage turning their weapons against the very
bosom of the Mother that has loved them so much! And there are other
countries which give us but little cause for consolation, in which
the same war, under a different form, has either broken out already
or is being prepared by dark machinations. For there is a movement
in those nations which have benefited most from Christian
civilization to deprive the Church of her rights, to treat her as
though she were not by nature and by right the perfect society that
she is, instituted by Christ Himself, the Redeemer of our nature,
and to destroy her reign, which, although primarily and directly
affecting souls, is not less helpful for their eternal salvation
than for the welfare of human society; efforts of all kinds are
being made to supplant the kingdom of God by a reign of license
under the lying name of liberty. And to bring about by the rule
of vices and lusts the triumph of the worst of all slaveries and
bring the people headlong to their ruin - "for sin makes peoples
wretched" (Proverbs XIV, 34) - the cry is ever raised: "We will not
have this man reign over us" (Luke XIX, 14). And the authors of this
war, cunning and pitiless as it is, boast that they are waging it through
love of liberty, civilization, and progress, and, were you to
believe them, through a spirit of patriotism - in this lie too
resembling their father, who "was a murderer from the beginning, and
when he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own, for he is a liar"
(John VII, 44), and raging with hate insatiable against God and the
human race."
One
wonders what would the reaction be today if Pope Benedict XVI
repeated the words of his holy predecessor, pointing the supreme
finger at the conspiracy within the ranks: "With no less severity
and sorrow have We been obliged to denounce and to put down another
species of war, intestine and domestic, and all the more disastrous
the more hidden it is. Waged by unnatural children, nestling in the
very bosom of the Church in order to rend it in silence, this war
aims more directly at the very root and the soul of the Church.
They are trying to corrupt the springs of Christian life and
teaching, to scatter the sacred deposit of the faith, to overthrow
the foundations of the divine constitution by their contempt for all
authority, pontifical as well as episcopal, to put a new form on the
Church, new laws, new principles, according to the tenets of
monstrous systems, in short to deface all the beauty of the Spouse
of Christ for the empty glamour of a new culture, falsely called
science, against which the Apostle frequently puts us on our guard:
"Beware lest any man cheat you by philosophy and vain deceit,
according to the traditions of men, according to the elements of the
world, and not according to Christ (Colossians II, 8)." [...] But
the error is worse when men deceive themselves with the idea of
gaining an ephemeral peace by cloaking the rights and interests of
the Church, by sacrificing them to private interests, by minimizing
them unjustly, by truckling to the world, "the whole of which is
seated in wickedness" (I John V, 19) on the pretext of
reconciling the followers of novelties and bringing them back to the
Church, as though any composition were possible between light
and darkness, between Christ and Belial."
To
avoid subterfuges or misinterpretations, the pope clarifies the
identity of the internal enemy: "For even still there continues to
circulate that poison which has been inoculated into many even among
the clergy, and especially the young clergy, who have, as We have
said, become infected by the pestilential atmosphere, in their
unbridled craving for novelty which is drawing them to the abyss and
drowning them." And this was written in 1909!
The infiltration of Modernism in the clergy was already exposed in
Pascendi with the same vigourous language:
"... the
partisans of error are to be sought not only among the Church's open
enemies; they lie hid, a thing to be deeply deplored and feared, in
her very bosom and heart, and are the more mischievous, the less
conspicuously they appear. We allude, Venerable Brethren, to many
who belong to the Catholic laity, nay, and this is far more
lamentable, to the ranks of the priesthood itself, who,
feigning a love for the Church, lacking the firm protection of
philosophy and theology, nay more, thoroughly imbued with the
poisonous doctrines taught by the enemies of the Church, and lost to
all sense of modesty, vaunt themselves as reformers of the Church..."
Strengthened by these luminous words and alerted by the papal
warnings, we remain firmly attached
to the unchangeable doctrine of the anti-liberal pontiffs and we storm
Heaven with prayers and sacrifices for our Holy Father, since only
the Vicar of Christ can put an end to the lunacy which afflicts the
Church and the world today. Let us receive as directed to us, Catholics of
the third millennium, the closing words of Communium Rerum:
"This hallucination is as old as the world, but it is always modern
and always present so long as there are soldiers who are timid or
treacherous, and at the first onset ready to throw down their arms
or open negotiations with the enemy, who is the irreconcilable enemy
of God and man." Hard words for modern minds to accept, yet
probably more
necessary than ever.
A crisis of the faith is a doctrinal crisis. The antidote: the
Magisterium of the popes. I invite you again and again to
familiarize yourselves with the writings of the Roman Pontiffs. Find
them online in the excellent site
www.papalencyclicals.net
.
May Our
Blessed Mother, who alone has destroyed all heresies throughout the
world, keep us always vigilant and loyal soldiers, in Faith, Hope,
and above all in the Charity of Jesus Christ Our Lord.
Father Ramón
Anglés
