Truth and Authority – II

One may or may not agree with the statement by these “Comments” two weeks ago (#726, June 12) that at Vatican II (1962–1965), Catholic Truth was split, broadly speaking, from Catholic Authority, but it is in any case a position which goes a long way towards explaining the breadth and depth of the unprecedented confusion reigning inside the Catholic Church ever since. For indeed Catholics clinging to Truth cling fiercely because they know it is Catholic, while Catholics loyal to what looks like Authority are fiercely loyal because they too know that there is no Catholic Church if there is no Authority. As Archbishop Lefebvre used to say, it was the masterpiece of the Devil to have thrown Catholics through “obedience” (to Authority) into disobedience (to Truth). From this diagnosis follow important conclusions –

1 Since Catholic Truth is unchanging in its essentials, then it is Authority that will have to return to Tradition for the crisis and confusion caused by the split between Truth and Authority to come to an end. Now by its true definition, authority can come only from above – “If God does not exist, I have no reason to be an army officer,” says a character in Dostoyevsky’s Devils. Therefore God alone can put the Pope back on his feet, and He has told us through His Mother at Fatima how He will do it – through the Pope’s Consecrating Russia to Her Immaculate Heart in union with all the Catholic bishops of the world. But only when enough Catholics are praying for that Consecration will it happen.

2 In the meantime there is necessarily in the Church from top to bottom a state of disorder which in the words of the proverb, “must be endured because it cannot be cured.” Almighty God has not stopped looking after His Church, in fact He is using the crisis to shake the rotten fruit from the tree. He does know exactly what He is doing, so that it is no time to stop believing in the Catholic Church, any more than it would have been time to stop believing in the divinity of Our Lord if we had been spectators or bystanders at the very first Way of the Cross in Jerusalem while Our Lord was staggering past in front of us. And yet, humanly speaking, how much reason we would have had, in front of that spectacle, to disbelieve! Today, divinely speaking, how much reason we have to trust in the future of the Church. At world’s end it will be even more shaken than it is being shaken today, yet the Antichrist will bring about the Church’s greatest triumph in all its history.

3 Therefore Catholics need today a boundless confidence in the Wisdom and Omnipotence of God, despite all the appearances. One day the poor wretches now ruling the world and planning to complete their power over all mankind by a combination of injections from within and radiation from without, will, as the Psalmist says, melt like wax before the face of God. They have become like the machines they adore. So little notion do they have of God, or of spirit rising above matter, or of free-will, that they really plan on turning human beings into robots. God laughs at them, says again the Psalmist (Psalm 2). Up to us to give to God all the honour, love and glory that He is missing from them, and to his Mother all the Rosaries that She asks for to be able to intercede with God for their and our conversion and salvation.

4 And finally amidst all the present confusion and lack of authority, Catholics need that charity, specially towards our fellow Catholics, which covers a multitude of our own sins and which prepares for tomorrow’s restoration and reunion of the Church. I may know the Truth, but “knowledge puffs up, while charity builds up,” says St Paul. Even the globalists and banksters are not my real enemies today. These are still “principalities and powers,” “world rulers of this present darkness,” “spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places” (Eph. VI, 11). The real war is spiritual, between ourselves and fallen angels, and it takes place firstly inside my own soul.

Kyrie eleison.