THE
POPES HAVE ALREADY SPOKEN
Dear Friends and
Benefactors of the Society in Ireland,
It is almost perfunctory at the start of a calendar year
to ponder about the fragile stability of the world and the state of
things in the Church. Pope John XXIII, at the very end of the year
1961, issued the official call to a Council with the Apostolic
Constitution Humanae Salutis
(25 December 1961), pointing to the signs of what
he thought was to be "a better age for the Church and for mankind."
Forty years after the conclusion of the Second Vatican Council we
are still scrutinizing the "signs of the times," and nobody can blame
us for saying that they indicate a grim reality which is far from
matching those triumphalist expectations. Buffeted between hope and
anxiety, the postconciliar Church tried to gain the respect of a
world which rejects or ignores Our Lord Jesus Christ; cemented upon
a new theology, the Church of Vatican II faces in 2007 the most
ominous signs. If indeed "vox temporis, vox Dei" (the voice
of the times is the voice of God), a look at the theatre of human
affairs reveals a dismal situation: Catholicism has become a
minority in a pluralist society, in which religious indifferentism
and nihilism are the norm, so that to be a practicing Catholic in
2007 is, to say the least, a disadvantage.
Faced with the fast annihilation of the remnants of
Christianity in the Western world, by way of collective suicide or
by active persecution, it is time to realize that the new theology
is a great fiasco, and to rediscover the wise Magisterium of the
modern popes, from Gregory XVI to Pius XII. Their great encyclicals
contain all the necessary elements to achieve the peace, order, and
prosperity that every man and nation rightly desire.
The first step is the one of diagnosing the source of
the present evils. The good news is that the work was already
done by the exceptional minds of the modern popes. An exhaustive
study of every problem affecting mankind today, from philosophy to
economics, can be found in Gregory XVI "Mirari Vos" (15
August 1832), Leo XIII "Rerum Novarum" (15 May 1891), and
Blessed Pius IX "Quanta Cura" (8 December 1984) with the
detailed "Syllabus Errorum." Our holy patron, St. Pius X,
exposed the mindset lurking under the guise of intellectual
modernity, by studying and condemning the heresy of Modernism in the
Decree "Lamentabili" (3 July 1907) and in his luminous
Encyclical "Pascendi" (8 September 1907) of which we
celebrate the centennial this year 2007. Along with those documents,
St. Pius X prepares us for the antimodernistic battle with "Sacrorum
Antistitum" (1 September 1910) and "Praestantia Scripturae
Sacrae" (18 November 1907). Read their doctrine, and the popes
will open your eyes and allow you to understand the reasons of the
present calamities. You find the documents in our bookstores and
online at what is arguably the best site on the
net
www.papalencyclicals.net
Let me give you some highlights of those writings, in
which shines the clarity and the objectivity of a Magisterium now
forgotten:
ˇ
Gregory XVI "Mirari Vos":
"Depravity exults;
science is impudent; liberty, dissolute. The holiness of the sacred
is despised; the majesty of divine worship is not only disapproved
by evil men, but defiled and held up to ridicule. Hence sound
doctrine is perverted and errors of all kinds spread boldly. The
laws of the sacred, the rights, institutions, and discipline -- none
are safe from the audacity of those speaking evil. [...] Thus, by
institutions and by the example of teachers, the minds of the youth
are corrupted and a tremendous blow is dealt to religion and the
perversion of morals is spread. So the restraints of religion are
thrown off, by which alone kingdoms stand. We see the destruction of
public order, the fall of principalities, and the overturning of all
legitimate power approaching."
ˇ
Leo XIII
"Rerum Novarum":
"The great mistake
made in regard to the matter now under consideration is to take up
with the notion that class is naturally hostile to class, and that
the wealthy and the working men are intended by nature to live in
mutual conflict. [...] There is no intermediary more powerful than
religion (whereof the Church is the interpreter and guardian) in
drawing the rich and the working class together, by reminding each
of its duties to the other, and especially of the obligations of
justice."
ˇ Pius
IX "Quanta Cura":
"Where religion has
been removed from civil society, and the doctrine and authority of
divine revelation repudiated, the genuine notion itself of justice
and human right is darkened and lost, and the place of true justice
and legitimate right is supplied by material force, thence it
appears why it is that some, utterly neglecting and disregarding the
surest principles of sound reason, dare to proclaim that "the
people's will, manifested by what is called public opinion or in
some other way, constitutes a supreme law, free from all divine and
human control; and that in the political order accomplished facts,
from the very circumstance that they are accomplished, have the
force of right.'"
ˇ
Pius X "Pascendi": "Every religion, even
that of paganism, must be held to be true! What is to prevent such
experiences from being found in any religion? In fact, that they are
so is maintained by not a few. On what grounds can Modernists deny
the truth of an experience affirmed by a follower of Islam? Will
they claim a monopoly of true experiences for Catholics alone?
Indeed, Modernists do not deny, but actually maintain, some
confusedly, others frankly, that all religions are true. [...]
There
is yet another element in this part of their teaching which is
absolutely contrary to Catholic truth. For what is laid down as to
experience is also applied with destructive effect to tradition,
which has always been maintained by the Catholic Church. Tradition,
as understood by the Modernists, is a communication with others of
an original experience, through preaching by means of the
intellectual formula. To this formula, in addition to its
representative value they attribute a species of suggestive efficacy
which acts firstly in the believer by stimulating the religious
sense, should it happen to have grown sluggish, and by renewing the
experience once acquired, and secondly, in those who do not yet
believe by awakening in them for the first time the religious sense
and producing the experience. In this way is religious experience
spread abroad among the nations; and not merely among contemporaries
by preaching, but among future generations both by books and by oral
transmission from one to another. Sometimes this communication of
religious experience takes root and thrives, at other times it
withers at once and dies. For the Modernists, to live is a proof of
truth, since for them life and truth are one and the same thing.
Thus we are once more led to infer that all existing religions are
equally true, for otherwise they would not survive."
After the diagnose, the solution:
Pope Pius XI
condemned the modern idea of ecumenism as "a false Christianity,
quite alien to the one Church of Christ" in "Mortalium Animos"
(6 January 1928), and called for a restoration of the Kingship
of Christ in his Encyclical "Quas Primas" (11 December 1925):
"When once men recognize, both in private and in public life, that
Christ is King, society will at last receive the great blessings of
real liberty, well-ordered discipline, peace and harmony."
One decade before Vatican II, Pius XII wrote in "Humani Generis"
(12 August 1950) what should have been the blueprint of the Council
Fathers: "With regard to new questions, which modern culture and
progress have brought to the foreground, let them engage in most
careful research, but with the necessary prudence and caution;
finally, let them not think, indulging in a false "irenism," that
the dissident and erring can happily be brought back to the bosom of
the Church, if the whole truth found in the Church is not sincerely
taught to all without corruption or diminution."
The same
pope, in "Summi Pontificatus" (10 October 1939) makes a
vibrant appeal to the soldiers of Christ the King: "Can there be
a greater or more urgent duty than to preach the unsearchable riches
of Christ to the men of our time? Can there be anything nobler than
to unfurl the banner of the King before those who have followed and
still follow a false standard, and to win back to the victorious
banner of the Cross those who have abandoned it? What heart is not
inflamed, is not swept forward to help at the sight of so many
brothers and sisters who, misled by error, passion, temptation and
prejudice, have strayed away from faith in the true God and have
lost contact with the joyful and life-giving message of Christ?"
Any impartial
observer can attest to the fact that the words of the popes were not
echoed by the Catholic hierarchy of the postconciliar years. The
admirable tenacity of Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre made it possible
for a small phalanx of priests and faithful to maintain the purity
of the Catholic doctrine throughout the confusion of the past four
decades. Confident that Our Lord has not abandoned His Church, we
must continue to pray for our Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI, that he may speak to
the Church and the world with the authority and the inspired wisdom
of his valiant predecessors, and that we may see at last the peace
of Christ in the kingdom of Christ through Mary.
I encourage you to read and study the papal encyclicals during 2007;
it would be a very beneficial resolution for the new year. This is
why I intend, in the spirit of the centennial of "Pascendi,"
to present in all my letters of 2007 some considerations on the
Magisterium of the Roman Pontiffs concerning the problems of today.
May this instil in you a greater appreciation of this treasure of
wisdom.
At the beginning of the new year, receive the best
wishes and blessings of your priests in Ireland. Our prayers go to
the Holy Family, that 2007 may be for you and for your dear ones a
prosperous year, in the grace and the peace of those who serve God
with a pure heart. Give us your prayers and support in return, so
that we may continue to be faithful "ministers of Christ and
dispensers of the mysteries of God" (I Corinthians, IV,
1-2).
May we all serve Him in that cheerfulness which is a consequence
of our Faith, Hope, and Charity, and which lasts forever.
In the joy of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph at Christmastide,
Father Ramón
Anglés
