Conciliarism: Utterly Defenseless Against Its Own Falsehoods
Note: Not an endorsement for sedevacantism
For example, we are witnessing the collapse of the American experiment of pluralism that celebrates religious indifferentism as a "protection" even though the only thing that winds up being protected is irreligion, and the irreligious have little toleration for the spirit of "tolerance" for "believers." The very falsehood of "religious liberty" thus became the basis for promoting irreligion and a weapon against those who believe that it is their duty to use their religious beliefs as the foundation of how they transact their daily basis, including all public discussion of anything pertaining to bidning precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law as they have been entrusted by Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ to His true Church, the Catholic Church, for its eternal safekeeping and infallible explication.
A recent Pew Forum survey provided empirical evidence to support that which is pretty palpable to anyone who has been out and about in supermarkets and other places of business in the past few years:
Is the American public becoming less religious? Yes, at least by some key measures of what it means to be a religious person. An extensive new survey of more than 35,000 U.S. adults finds that the percentages who say they believe in God, pray daily and regularly go to church or other religious services all have declined modestly in recent years.
But the Pew Research Center study also finds a great deal of stability in the U.S. religious landscape. The recent decrease in religious beliefs and behaviors is largely attributable to the “nones” – the growing minority of Americans, particularly in the Millennial generation, who say they do not belong to any organized faith. Among the roughly three-quarters of U.S. adults who do claim a religion, there has been no discernible drop in most measures of religious commitment. Indeed, by some conventional measures, religiously affiliated Americans are, on average, even more devout than they were a few years ago.
The 2014 Religious Landscape Study is a follow-up to an equally extensive survey on religion in America, conducted in 2007. An initial report on the findings from the 2014 study, released in May 2015, described the changing size and demographic characteristics of the nation’s major religious groups. This report focuses on Americans’ religious beliefs and practices and assesses how they have changed in recent years.
The share of U.S. adults who say they believe in God, while still remarkably high by comparison with other advanced industrial countries, has declined modestly, from approximately 92% to 89%, since Pew Research Center conducted its first Landscape Study in 2007.1 The share of Americans who say they are “absolutely certain” God exists has dropped more sharply, from 71% in 2007 to 63% in 2014. And the percentages who say they pray every day, attend religious services regularly and consider religion to be very important in their lives also have ticked down by small but statistically significant margins.
The falloff in traditional religious beliefs and practices coincides with changes in the religious composition of the U.S. public. A growing share of Americans are religiously unaffiliated, including some who self-identify as atheists or agnostics as well as many who describe their religion as “nothing in particular.” Altogether, the religiously unaffiliated (also called the “nones”) now account for 23% of the adult population, up from 16% in 2007. (Pew Forum: The United States of America Is Becoming Less Religious.)
The same survey revealed that Catholics constitute the highest percentage of religiously-affiliated Americans to approve of unnatural vice in violation of the binding precepts of the Sixth and the Ninth Commandments. Seventy percent of self-identified Catholics now approve of the sin of Sodom, showing once again that the anti-Incarnational revolution of Modernity and the anti-Catholic revolution of Modernism have accomplished many of the important ends that the adversary, who hates Christ the King, has desired to accomplish. Secularism is the only logical result of "religious liberty," something that Pope Leo XIII prophesied would be the case:
To hold, therefore, that there is no difference in matters of religion between forms that are unlike each other, and even contrary to each other, most clearly leads in the end to the rejection of all religion in both theory and practice. And this is the same thing as atheism, however it may differ from it in name. Men who really believe in the existence of God must, in order to be consistent with themselves and to avoid absurd conclusions, understand that differing modes of divine worship involving dissimilarity and conflict even on most important points cannot all be equally probable, equally good, and equally acceptable to God. (Pope Leo XIII, Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885.)
That is, no matter the impossibility of having created a Catholic state in 1776 and 1787 in the former English colonies located up and down the Atlantic seaboard, the fact remains that the premise of a religious neutral civil state is false in and of itself and leads inevitably to the triumph of practical atheism over the course of time. Superstition and myth must take the place of the true religion in the lives of men and their nations when the true religion instituted by Christ the King Himself is ignored and despised as belonging to the age of the Crusades, which produced such great and valorous Catholic heroes, and “The Inquisition.” Ignorance and absurdity must replace both supernatural and natural truth when men and their nations refuse to submit to the teaching authority and sanctifying offices of the Catholic Church. We are now at a point when more and more act and speak as barbarians, something that was discussed briefly in Men Continue to Love the Darkness Rather Than The Light of the Gentiles, Christ the King.
Similarly, disastrous consequences are occurring within the structures of the counterfeit church of conciliarism as a result of its own false premises. This false church is experiencing the chaos that Father Martin Luther unleashed upon the world five hundred years ago this year, a chaos he did not foresee and could never accept was his own fault for revolting against the Divine Plan that God Himself instituted to effect man's return to Him through His Catholic Church.
Indeed, Father Cahill pointed out the immediate evil consequences that flowed in the aftermath of the Protestant Revolution:
The assumption that Protestantism brought a higher and purer moral life to the nations that came under its influence does not need elaborate refutation. It is a fact of uncontroverted history that "public morality did at once deteriorate to an appalling degree wherever Protestantism was introduced. Not to mention robberies of church goods, brutal treatment meted out to the clergy, secular and regular, who remained faithful, and the horrors of so many wars of religion," we have the express testimony of [Martin] Luther himself and several other leaders of the revolt, such as [Martin] Bucer and [Philip] Melancthon, as to the evil effects of their teaching; and this testimony is confirmed by contemporaries. Luther's own avowals on this matter are numberless. Thus he writes:
"There is not one of our Evangelicals, who is not seven times worse than before he belonged to us, stealing the goods of others, lying, deceiving, eating, getting drunk, and indulging in every vice, as if he had not received the Holy Word. If we have been delivered from one spirit of evil, seven others worse than the first have come to take its place."
And again:
Men who live under the Gospel are more uncharitable, more irascible, more greedy, more avaricious than they were before as Papists."
Even Erasmus, who had at first favoured Luther's movement, was soon disillusioned. Thus he writes:
"The New Gospel has at least the advantage of showing us a new race of men, haughty, impudent, cunning, blasphemous . . . quarrellers, seditious, furious, to whom I have, to say truth, so great an antipathy that if I knew a place in the world free of them, I would not hesitate to take refuge therein."
That these evil effects of Protestantism were not merely temporary—the accidental the accidental results of the excitement and confusion which are peculiar to a stage of transition (although they were no doubt intensified thereby)—is shown from present-day [1932] statistics. The condition of domestic morality is usually best indicated by the statistics of divorce, and of illegitimate births, and by the proportion of legitimate children to the number of marriages; while statistics of general criminality, where they can be had, would convey a fair idea of the individual and public morality in any given place. According to these tests Protestant countries are at the present day much inferior to Catholic countries in domestic and public morality. (Father Edward Cahill, S.J., The Framework of a Christian State, first published in 1932, republished by Roman Catholic Books, pp. 102-104.)
Father Denis Fahey made a similar point in The Mystical City of God in the Modern World:
The organization of the Europe of the thirteenth century furnishes us with one concrete realization of the Divine Plan. It is hardly necessary to add that there were then to be seen defects in the working of the Divine Plan., due to the character of fallen man, as well as to an imperfect mastery of physical nature. Yet, withal, the formal principle of ordered social organization in the world, the supremacy of the Mystical Body, was grasped and, in the main, accepted. The Lutheran revolt, prepared by the cult of pagan antiquity at the Renaissance, and by the favour enjoyed by the Nominalist philosophical theories, led to the rupture of that order.
“The great cardinal principle of Protestantism is that every man attains salvation by entering into an immediate relation with Christ, with the aid of that interior faith by which he believes that, though his sins persist, they are no longer imputed to him, thanks to the merits of our Lord Jesus Christ. All men are thus priests for themselves and carry out the work of their justification by treating directly and individually with God. The Life of Grace, being nothing else than the external favour of God, remains outside of us and we continue, in fact, in spite of Lutheran faith in Christ, corrupt and sinful. Each human being enters into an isolated relation with our Lord, and there is no transforming life all are called to share. Luther never understood the meaning of faith informed by sanctifying grace and charity. Accordingly, the one visible Church and the Mystical Body is done away with, as well as the priesthood and the sacrifice of the Mystical Body, the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. The only purpose of preaching and such ceremonies were retained by Protestants was to stir up the individual’s faith.”
Hence the True Church of Christ, according to the Protestant view, is noting else than the assembly of those who, on account of the confidence interiorly conceived of the remission of their sins, have the justice of God imputed to them by God and are accordingly predestined to eternal life. And this Church, known to God alone, is the unique Church of the promises of indefectibility, to which our Lord Jesus Christ promised His assistance to the consummation of the world. Since, however, true believers, instructed by the Holy Ghost, can manifest their faith exteriorly, can communicate their impressions and feelings to other and may employ the symbols of the Sacraments to stir up their faith, they give rise to a visible church which, nevertheless, is not the Church instituted by Christ. Membership of this Church is not necessary for salvation, and it may assume different forms according to different circumstances. The true invisible Church of Christ is always hidden, unseen in the multitude.
“Protestantism, therefore, substituted for the corporate organization of society, imbued with the spirit of the Mystical Body and reconciling the claims of personality and individuality in man, a merely isolated relation with our Divine Lord. This revolt of human individual against order on the supernatural level, this uprise of individualism, with its inevitable chaotic self-seeking, had dire consequences both in regard to ecclesiastical organization and in the realms of politics and economics. Let us take these in turn.”
The tide of revolt which broke away from the Catholic Church had the immediate effect of increasing the power of princes and rulers in Protestant countries. The Anabaptists and the peasants in Germany protested in the name of ‘evangelical liberty,’ but they were crushed. We behold the uprise of national churches, each of which organizes its own particular form of religion, mixture of supernatural and natural elements, as a department of State. The orthodox Church in Russia was also a department of State and as such exposed to the same evils. National life was thus withdrawn from ordered subjection to the Divine Plan and the distinction laid down by our Divine Lord Himself, between the things that are God’s and the things that are Caesar’s, utterly abolished. Given the principle of private judgment or of individual relation with Christ, it was inevitable that the right of every individual to arrange his own form of religion should cause the pendulum to swing from a Caesarinism supreme in Church and State to other concrete expressions of ‘evangelical liberty.’ One current leads to the direction of indefinite multiplication of sects. Pushed to its ultimate conclusion, this would, this would give rise to as many churches as there are individuals, that is, there would not be any church at all. As this is too opposed to man’s social nature, small groups tend to coalesce. The second current tends to the creation of what may be termed broad or multitudinist churches. The exigencies of the national churches are attenuated until they are no longer a burden to anybody. The Church of England is an example of this. As decay in the belief of the Divinity of Jesus continues to increase, the tendency will be to model church organization according to the political theories in favour at the moment. The democratic form of society will be extolled and a ‘Reunion of Christendom,’ for example, will be aimed at, along the a lines of the League of Nations. An increasing number of poor bewildered units will, of course, cease to bother about any ecclesiastical organization at all.
The first [political] result was an enormous increase in the power of the Temporal Rulers, in fact a rebirth of the pagan regime of Imperial Rome. The Spiritual Kingship of Christ, participated in by the Pope and the Bishops of the Catholic Church being no longer acknowledged, authority over spiritual affairs passed to Temporal Rulers. They were thus, in Protestant countries, supposed to share not only in His Temporal Kingship of Christ the King, but also in His spiritual Kingship. As there was no Infallible Guardian of order above the Temporal Rulers, the way was paved for the abuses of State Absolutism. The Protestant oligarchy who ruled England with undisputed sway, from Charles the Second’s time on, and who treated Ireland to the Penal Laws, may be cited, along with that cynical scoundrel, Frederick of Prussia, as typical examples of such rulers. Catholic monarchs, like Louis XIV of France and Joseph II of Austria, by their absolutist tendencies and pretensions to govern the Catholic Church show the influence of the neighboring Protestant countries. Gallicanism and Josephism are merely a revival of Roman paganism.
The rejection by Luther of the visible Catholic Church opened the door, not only to the abuses of absolute rulers, supreme in Church and State, but soon led to an indifference to all ecclesiastical organizations. As faith in the supernatural life of grace and the supernatural order grew dim and waned, the way was made smooth for the acceptance of Freemasonry. The widespread loss of faith in the existence of the supernatural life and the growing ignorance of the meaning of the Redemption permitted the apostles of Illuminism and Masonry to propagate the idea that the true religion of Jesus Christ had never been understood or been corrupted by His disciples, especially by the Church of Rome, the fact being that only a few sages in secret societies down the centuries had kept alive the true teaching of Jesus Christ. According to this ‘authentic’ teaching our Saviour had established a new religion, but had simply restored the religion of the state of nature, the religion of the goodness of human nature when left to itself, freed from the bonds and shackles of society. Jesus Christ died a martyr for liberty, put to death by the rulers and priests. Masons and revolutionary secret societies alone are working for the true salvation of the world. By them shall original sin be done away with and the Garden of Eden restored. But the present organization of society must disappear, by the elimination of the tyranny of priests, the despotism of princes and the slavery resulting from national distinctions, from family life and from private property. (Father Denis Fahey, The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World.)
Father Fahey went on to describe the Lutheran concept of the "separation of Church and State:"
The rending of the Mystical Body by the so-called Reformation movement has resulted in the pendulum swinging from the extreme error of Judaeo-Protestant Capitalism to the opposite extreme error of the Judaeo-Masonic-Communism of Karl Marx.
The uprise of individualism rapidly led to unbridled self-seeking. Law-makers who were arbiters of morality, as heads of the Churches, did not hesitate to favour their own enterprising spirit. The nobles and rich merchants in England, for example, who got possession of the monastery lands, which had maintained the poor, voted the poor laws in order to make the poor a charge on the nation at large. The enclosure of common lands in England and the development of the industrial system are a proof of what private judgment can do when transplanted into the realm of production and distribution. The Lutheran separation of Church from the Ruler and the Citizen shows the decay in the true idea of membership of our Lord's Mystical Body.
"Assuredly," said Luther, "a prince can be a Christian, but it is not as a Christian that he ought to govern. As a ruler, he is not called a Christian, but a prince. The man is Christian, but his function does not concern his religion." (Father Denis Fahey, The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World.)
Mainline Protestant sects have become veritable bastions of sin and pantheism as a result of the Protestant Revolution's false premises. The conciliar sect is simply experiencing the boomeranging effect of its own false premises that have creature wide fissures within its ranks as its revolutionaries now celebrate Mortal Sins, including perverse sins against nature, as expressions of "love" and engage in rank pantheism to worship the earth, which was given to man by God Himself to serve his needs. God created the earth to serve man, not man to serve the earth. This is what must happen when men are steeped in lives of unrepentant sins and/or enable such sinners as they seek to assuage their own consciences that they are "good" by doing "things" to provide for the temporal needs of others and to help to "save" the planet. It is as though they are saying, "Look at me! Don't condemn me! I condemn you moralizers as I moralize about the poor and the environment. I am doing good!"
It is with this in mind that one can understand how the notorious pro-abort and infallibly wrong "prophet" about the supposedly "diminishing" capacity of the earth to house and to feed all of the world's human beings, Paul Ehrlich, got invited to speak by the conciliar revolutionaries at a conference on "Biological Extinction" (see In the Face of the Daily Slaughter of the Preborn).
Ehrlich has certainly done much to undermine the stability and the fecundity of marriage by openly supporting one means of "birth control" after another, including the surgical execution of the innocent preborn, but his invitation to speak at the Vatican in its conciliar captivity is the direct result of Giovanni Battista Enrico Antonio Maria Montini/Paul VI's acceptance of the discredited Malthusian thesis that Ehrlich dusted off in Population Bomb and has been promoting ever since. The second in the current line of antipopes used the "population crisis" as the reason to promote natural means of family limitation, thereby accepting the basic premise of the population controllers.
Montini/Paul the Sicko demonstrated his acceptance of the discredited "population crisis" first in Populorum Progressio, March 26, 1967. Although he warned against compulsory means of limiting family size, one can see that he accepted the basic premise of family limitation:
37. It is true that too frequently an accelerated demographic increase adds its own difficulties to the problems of development: the size of the population increases more rapidly than available resources, and things are found to have reached apparently an impasse. From that moment the temptation is great to check the demographic increase by means of radical measures. It is certain that public authorities can intervene, within the limit of their competence, by favoring the availability of appropriate information and by adopting suitable measures, provided that these be in conformity with the moral law and that they respect the rightful freedom of married couples. Where the inalienable right to marriage and procreation is lacking, human dignity has ceased to exist. Finally, it is for the parents to decide, with full knowledge of the matter, on the number of their children, taking into account their responsibilities towards God, themselves, the children they have already brought into the world, and the community to which they belong. In all this they must follow the demands of their own conscience enlightened by God's law authentically interpreted, and sustained by confidence in Him. (Giovanni Battista Enrico Antonio Maria/Paul VI, Populorum Progressio, March 26, 1967.)
Wrong.
Parents decide nothing about how many children they are to have. "Family limitation" is a lie of the deceiver. To concede that it is belongs to parents to "determine" the number of children they are to have is to endorse Margaret Sanger's diabolical conspiracy against the fecundity of marriage even if one is proposing to achieve such limitation by "natural" means.
The notion of "family limitation" had been discussed at the "Second" Vatican Council, something that horrified the Pro-Prefect of the Holy Office, Alfredo Cardinal Ottaviani, the great foe of Father John Courtney Murray, S.J., and his Americanist efforts to make "religious liberty," termed as a heresy by Pope Pius VII in Post Tam Diuturnas, April 29, 1814, and as insanity by Pope Gregory XVI in Mirari Vos, August 15, 1832. Cardinal Ottaviani spoke as follows concerning "family limitation" at the "Second" Vatican Council:
"I am not pleased with the statement in the text that married couples may determine the number of children they are to have. Never has this been heard of in the Church. My father was a laborer, and the fear of having many children never entered my parents' minds, because they trusted in Providence. [I am amazed] that yesterday in the Council it should have been said that there was doubt whether a correct stand had been taken hitherto on the principles governing marriage. Does this not mean that the inerrancy of the Church will be called into question? Or was not the Holy Spirit with His Church in past centuries to illuminate minds on this point of doctrine?" (As found in Peter W. Miller, Substituting the Exception for the Rule; The Rhine Flows into the Tiber, by Father Ralph Wiltgen, The Rhine Flows Into the Tiber, Tan Books and Publishers, 1967, is cited as the source of this quotation.)
Cardinal Ottaviani prophetically anticipated Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s own smug belief that the objectively correct stand that had been taken by the Catholic Church prior to the “Second” Vatican was erroneous all along, especially the emphasis on the procreation and education of children as the primary end of marriage. Bergoglio's Amoris Laetitia, March 19, 2016, implied that the Catholic Church was wrong in the past, which is why it is necessary to admit “mistakes” and to make “adjustments” according to the circumstances of the times.
The conciliar inversion of the ends proper to the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony thus helped to prepare the way for one of the foremost population controllers the world has ever known, Paul Ehrlich, as to surrender to the false contentions that there is a lack of resources of feed the people of the world is to wind up blurring any distinction at all between those who want to limit family size by "natural" means and those who want to do by chemicals, devices and surgery.
Take a look, for example, at the following passage in Humanae Vitae, July 25, 1968:
2. The changes which have taken place are in fact noteworthy and of varied kinds. In the first place, there is the rapid demographic development. Fear is shown by many that world population is growing more rapidly than the available resources, with growing distress to many families and developing countries, so that the temptation for authorities to counter this danger with radical measures is great. Moreover, working and lodging conditions, as well as increased exigencies both in the economic field and in that of education, often make the proper education of a larger number of children difficult today. A change is also seen both in the manner of considering the person of woman and her place in society, and in the value to be attributed to conjugal love in marriage, and also in the appreciation to be made of the meaning of conjugal acts in relation to that love. (Giovanni Battista Enrico Antonio Maria/Paul VI, Humanae Vitae, July 25, 1968.)
This was almost identical to what he had written in Populorum Progessio sixteen months before, and the solution that Montini/Paul the Sick said in Humanae Vitae would work to alleviate the "problem" of "rapid demographic development" was "responsible parenthood," a slogan devised by Margaret Sanger, and what became known as "natural family planning," a phrase used constantly by Karol Josef Wojtyla/John Paul and other conciliar revolutionaries even though it was suggested to pro-life groups by a pro-abortion government bureaucrat in order to induce them into accepting Federal grant monies.
"Responsible Parenthood": A Slogan Designed by Population Controllers to Get Catholics to Adopt Their Policy of Family Limitation
Slogans are the means that all revolutionaries use to advance their agenda, and the slogan of "responsible parenthood" was the work of anti-family, anti-life population control propagandists for decades before a few Catholic moral theologians began to make favorable reference to the "necessity" of "responsibly" limiting the size of families.
Although Giovanni Montini/Paul The Sick was the conciliar "pope" who introduced the term "responsible parenthood" in his revolutionary "encyclical," Humanae Vitae, July 25, 1968, the Feast of Saint James the Greater, two Jesuit moral theologians, Fathers John C. Ford and Gerald Kelly, pushed the limits of their belief in family limitation as far as they could in the 1950s before the death of Pope Pius XII on October 9, 1958. Thereafter, however, they wrote freely, and Father Ford, in particular played a major role in the shaping of Humanae Vitae:
"Responsible parenthood," writes Dr. Richard Fagley, "in the context of population explosion, more often than not means restricted to limited procreation in view of the total responsibilities of parenthood." And again, " 'Responsible parenthood,' in fact, is becoming the preferred term throughout Protestantism for limiting the number of progeny." Dr. Fagley's words suggest the reasons why little seems to have been said about responsible parenthood fifty years ago and why today the words are becoming a popular slogan with the occasional connotation that Catholics favor irresponsible parenthood. Everyone has always agreed, however, that parenthood is a serious, responsible business. Catholics have not differed from their neighbors on that pint. The truth is fifty years ago we heard very little if anything about responsible parenthood, as that phrase is understood today, whether from Protestants, Catholics or non-believers. Why? (Father John C. Ford, S.J., and Father Gerald Kelly, S.J., Contemporary Moral Theology, Volume 2, The Newman Press, 1964, pp. 451-453. For a complete discussion of this, please see Planting Seeds of Revolutionary Change.)
It was a scant four years later that Giovanni Montini/Paul The Sick made this revolutionary phrase his very own:
And finally this love is fecund for it is not exhausted by the communion between husband and wife, but is destined to continue, raising up new lives. "Marriage and conjugal love are by their nature ordained toward the begetting and educating of children. Children are really the supreme gift of marriage and contribute very substantially to the welfare of their parents."8
10. Hence conjugal love requires in husband and wife an awareness of their mission of "responsible parenthood," which today is rightly much insisted upon, and which also must be exactly understood. Consequently it is to be considered under different aspects which are legitimate and connected with one another.
In relation to the biological processes, responsible parenthood means the knowledge and respect of their functions; human intellect discovers in the power of giving life biological laws which are part of the human person.
In relation to the tendencies of instinct or passion, responsible parenthood means that necessary dominion which reason and will must exercise over them.
In relation to physical, economic, psychological and social conditions, responsible parenthood is exercised, either by the deliberate and generous decision to raise a numerous family, or by the decision, made for grave motives and with due respect for the moral law, to avoid for the time being, or even for an indeterminate period, a new birth.
Responsible parenthood also and above all implies a more profound relationship to the objective moral order established by God, of which a right conscience is the faithful interpreter. The responsible exercise of parenthood implies, therefore, that husband and wife recognize fully their own duties towards God, towards themselves, towards the family and towards society, in a correct hierarchy of values.
In the task of transmitting life, therefore, they are not free to proceed completely at will, as if they could determine in a wholly autonomous way the honest path to follow; but they must conform their activity to the creative intention of God, expressed in the very nature of marriage and of its acts, and manifested by the constant teaching of the Church.
11. These acts, by which husband and wife are united in chaste intimacy, and by means of which human life is transmitted, are, as the Council recalled, "noble and worthy,"and they do not cease to be lawful if, for causes independent of the will of husband and wife, they are foreseen to be infecund, since they always remain ordained towards expressing and consolidating their union. In fact, as experience bears witness, not every conjugal act is followed by a new life. God has wisely disposed natural laws and rhythms of fecundity which, of themselves, cause a separation in the succession of births. Nonetheless the Church, calling men back to the observance of the norms of the natural law, as interpreted by their constant doctrine, teaches that each and every marriage act (quilibet matrimonii usus) must remain open to the transmission of life.
12. That teaching, often set forth by the magisterium, is founded upon the inseparable connection, willed by God and unable to be broken by man on his own initiative, between the two meanings of the conjugal act: the unitive meaning and the procreative meaning. Indeed, by its intimate structure, the conjugal act, while most closely uniting husband and wife, capacitates them for the generation of new lives, according to laws inscribed in the very being of man and of woman. By safeguarding both these essential aspects, the unitive and the procreative, the conjugal act preserves in its fullness the sense of true mutual love and its ordination towards man's most high calling to parenthood. We believe that the men of our day are particularly capable of seeing the deeply reasonable and human character of this fundamental principle. (Giovanni Montini/Paul VI, Humanae Vitae, July 25, 1968.)
Who had been calling for "responsible parenthood" for five decades prior to her death on September 6, 1966?
The nymphomaniac, racist and eugenicist named Margaret Sanger, the founder of the Birth Control League that became known as Planned Parenthood, that's who. Her followers continue to champion this shopworn slogan that found its way into the text of an alleged "papal" encyclical letter. Montini/Paul VI's acceptance of "responsible parenthood" slogan of Margaret Sanger and her diabolical minions, coupled with the inversion of the ends of marriage propagated by Father Herbert Doms and Dr. Dietrich von Hildebrand, constituted a revolution against the ends of marriage that have "baptized," if you will, a supposedly "natural" form of contraception that is to be used as a matter of routine, not in truly extraordinary cases, where is it only lawful, that is, permissible, and never mandated.
Pope Pius XII specifically condemned the personalist view of marriage that Montini/Paul VI and subsequent conciliar "popes" have proselytized so vigorously:
Certain publications concerning the purposes of matrimony, and their interrelationship and order, have come forth within these last years which either assert that the primary purpose of matrimony is not the generation of offspring, or that the secondary purposes are not subordinate to the primary purpose, but are independent of it.
In these works, different primary purposes of marriage are designated by other writers, as for example: the complement and personal perfection of the spouses through a complete mutual participation in life and action; mutual love and union of spouses to be nurtured and perfected the psychic and bodily surrender of one’s own person; and many other such things.
In the same writings a sense is sometimes attributed to words in the current documents of the Church (as for example, primary, secondary purpose), which does not agree with these words according to the common usage by theologians.
This revolutionary way of thinking and speaking aims to foster errors and uncertainties, to avoid which the Eminent and Very Fathers of this supreme Sacred Congregation, charged with the guarding of faith and morals, in a plenary session on Wednesday, the 29th of March, 1944, when the question was proposed to them: “Whether the opinion of certain writers can be admitted, who either deny that the primary purpose of matrimony is the generation of children and raising offspring, or teach that the secondary purposes are not essentially subordinate to the primary purpose, but are equally first and independent,” have decreed that the answer must be: In the negative. (As found in Henry Denzinger, Enchirdion Symbolorum, thirteenth edition, translated into English by Roy Deferrari and published in 1955 as The Sources of Catholic Dogma–referred to as “Denziger,” by B. Herder Book Company of St. Louis, Missouri, and London, England, No. 2295, pp. 624-625.)
Pope Pius XII amplified this condemnation when he delivered his Address to Italian Midwives on the Nature of their Profession, October 29, 1951:
"Personal values" and the need to respect such are a theme which, over the last twenty years or so, has been considered more and more by writers. In many of their works, even the specifically sexual act has its place assigned, that of serving the "person" of the married couple. The proper and most profound sense of the exercise of conjugal rights would consist in this, that the union of bodies is the expression and the realization of personal and affective union.
Articles, chapters, entire books, conferences, especially dealing with the "technique" of love, are composed to spread these ideas, to illustrate them with advice to the newly married as a guide in matrimony, in order that they may not neglect, through stupidity or a false sense of shame or unfounded scruples, that which God, Who also created natural inclinations, offers them. If from their complete reciprocal gift of husband and wife there results a new life, it is a result which remains outside, or, at the most, on the border of "personal values"; a result which is not denied, but neither is it desired as the center of marital relations.
According to these theories, your dedication for the welfare of the still hidden life in the womb of the mother, and your assisting its happy birth, would only have but a minor and secondary importance.
Now, if this relative evaluation were merely to place the emphasis on the personal values of husband and wife rather than on that of the offspring, it would be possible, strictly speaking, to put such a problem aside. But, however, it is a matter of a grave inversion of the order of values and of the ends imposed by the Creator Himself. We find Ourselves faced with the propagation of a number of ideas and sentiments directly opposed to the clarity, profundity, and seriousness of Christian thought. Here, once again, the need for your apostolate. It may happen that you receive the confidences of the mother and wife and are questioned on the more secret desires and intimacies of married life. How, then, will you be able, aware of your mission, to give weight to truth and right order in the appreciation and action of the married couple, if you yourselves are not furnished with the strength of character needed to uphold what you know to be true and just?
The primary end of marriage
Now, the truth is that matrimony, as an institution of nature, in virtue of the Creator's will, has not as a primary and intimate end the personal perfection of the married couple but the procreation and upbringing of a new life. The other ends, inasmuch as they are intended by nature, are not equally primary, much less superior to the primary end, but are essentially subordinated to it. This is true of every marriage, even if no offspring result, just as of every eye it can be said that it is destined and formed to see, even if, in abnormal cases arising from special internal or external conditions, it will never be possible to achieve visual perception.
It was precisely to end the uncertainties and deviations which threatened to diffuse errors regarding the scale of values of the purposes of matrimony and of their reciprocal relations, that a few years ago (March 10, 1944), We Ourselves drew up a declaration on the order of those ends, pointing out what the very internal structure of the natural disposition reveals. We showed what has been handed down by Christian tradition, what the Supreme Pontiffs have repeatedly taught, and what was then in due measure promulgated by the Code of Canon Law. Not long afterwards, to correct opposing opinions, the Holy See, by a public decree, proclaimed that it could not admit the opinion of some recent authors who denied that the primary end of marriage is the procreation and education of the offspring, or teach that the secondary ends are not essentially subordinated to the primary end, but are on an equal footing and independent of it.
Would this lead, perhaps, to Our denying or diminishing what is good and just in personal values resulting from matrimony and its realization? Certainly not, because the Creator has designed that for the procreation of a new life human beings made of flesh and blood, gifted with soul and heart, shall be called upon as men and not as animals deprived of reason to be the authors of their posterity. It is for this end that the Lord desires the union of husband and wife. Indeed, the Holy Scripture says of God that He created man to His image and He created him male and female, and willed—as is repeatedly affirmed in Holy Writ—that "a man shall leave mother and father, and shall cleave to his wife: and they shall be two in one flesh".
All this is therefore true and desired by God. But, on the other hand, it must not be divorced completely from the primary function of matrimony—the procreation of offspring. Not only the common work of external life, but even all personal enrichment—spiritual and intellectual—all that in married love as such is most spiritual and profound, has been placed by the will of the Creator and of nature at the service of posterity. The perfect married life, of its very nature, also signifies the total devotion of parents to the well-being of their children, and married love in its power and tenderness is itself a condition of the sincerest care of the offspring and the guarantee of its realization.
To reduce the common life of husband and wife and the conjugal act to a mere organic function for the transmission of seed would be but to convert the domestic hearth, the family sanctuary, into a biological laboratory. Therefore, in Our allocution of September 29, 1949, to the International Congress of Catholic Doctors, We expressly excluded artificial insemination in marriage. The conjugal act, in its natural structure, is a personal action, a simultaneous and immediate cooperation of husband and wife, which by the very nature of the agents and the propriety of the act, is the expression of the reciprocal gift, which, according to Holy Writ, effects the union "in one flesh".
That is much more than the union of two genes, which can be effected even by artificial means, that is, without the natural action of husband and wife. The conjugal act, ordained and desired by nature, is a personal cooperation, to which husband and wife, when contracting marriage, exchange the right.
Therefore, when this act in its natural form is from the beginning perpetually impossible, the object of the matrimonial contract is essentially vitiated. This is what we said on that occasion: "Let it not be forgotten: only the procreation of a new life according to the will and the design of the Creator carries with it in a stupendous degree of perfection the intended ends. It is at the same time in conformity with the spiritual and bodily nature and the dignity of the married couple, in conformity with the happy and normal development of the child".
Advise the fiancée or the young married woman who comes to seek your advice about the values of matrimonial life that these personal values, both in the sphere of the body and the senses and in the sphere of the spirit, are truly genuine, but that the Creator has placed them not in the first, but in the second degree of the scale of values. (Pope Pius XII, Address to Midwives on the Nature of Their Profession, October 29, 1951.)
This was a ringing condemnation of the very philosophical and theological foundations of the indiscriminate, institutionalized teaching and practice of "natural family planning" in the lives of Catholic married couples. It is also yet another papal condemnation of conciliarism's view of marriage.
Truly responsible Catholic parenthood is founded in a love for God's Holy Will and by training however many or few children in the truths of the Catholic Faith, which require parents to eschew worldliness and to arm them with the supernatural and natural means to live in a "popular culture" devoted to the glorification of the very thing that caused Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ to suffer in His Sacred Humanity during His Passion and Death and that caused those Seven Swords of Sorrow to be pierced through and through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary, that is, sin. That's truly responsible Catholic parenthood. Not that which is represented by "Paul the Sick" and Humanae Vitae, and that remains the foundation of the revolution against the family that Jorge Mario Bergoglio and friends have been using to undermine the indissolublity and fecundity of marriage as they to "accompany" fornicators and sodomites on their respective paths to eternal perdition.
The Origins of the "Natural Family Planning: Slogan and Mentality
Thus it is that the phrase "natural family planning," which refers to a concept that was foreign to the mind of the Catholic Church at any time in her history, as was noted at length two days ago, has become so commonly accepted as a part of popular discourse as to be used by Catholics all across and up and down the vast expanse of ecclesiastical divide, therefore signifying that "family planning" without use of contraception is part of the patrimony of the Holy Faith, if not part of the Sacred Deposit of Fait Itself.
As Mrs. Randy Engel explained five and one-half years ago now, "In any war, words are weapons." Mrs. Engel, whose study of Giovanni Montini/Paul VI's "birth control commission" has been at least six months in the making and will make a very important contribution when published to dispel once and for all the thought that the phrase has any relationship whatsoever to Catholic teaching, wrote the following about the origin of the phrase "natural family planning" in her great study about the pro-family planning work of a conciliar revolutionary, the late "Bishop" James T. McHugh, The McHugh Chronicles:
From the quotes of Rev. Daly and Rev. Rice cited at the beginning of this chapter, we can obtain a clearer understanding of the anti-child nature of so-called “family planning.” But where did the term “natural family planning” (NFP) originate? And how did it become part of the Catholic lexicon on marriage and family life?
As far as this writer can determine (from an NFP source present at the scene of the crime), credit for the term “natural family planning” or “NFP” goes to a pro-abort bureaucrat by the name of Dr. Philip Corfman, who made the suggestion at one of the grant-seeking expeditions of NFP leaders at the Agency for International Development (USAID) within the State Department in the early 1970s.
By adopting the “language of the enemy,” the NFP Movement also adopted the anti-baby ideology of the enemy. This was its first grave error. The second was to begin to feed from the government’s anti-life Title X trough. And the third and final error was to cooperate with compulsory programs of population control, but this was still some time in the future. (25) (www.newengelpublishing.com; you may order this book, whose chapters were published originally, if I recall correctly, in The Wanderer in the late-1980s, from Mrs. Engel's website.)
The use of the phrase "natural family planning" has thus ceded ground to the "population control" movement to such an extent that the acceptance of "family planning" by "moral" means has become so widespread amongst Catholics today Catholics who reject it and the ideology it represents are considered to be suspect of having defected from the Holy Faith.
It was not only the work of Dietrich von Hildebrand, whose Sign of Contradiction, published in 1969, gave him an opportunity to defend Humanae Vitae as a supporter of the "pope" while putting into wider circulation his condemned teaching that inverted the ends of marriage, that helped to give rise to the "natural family planning" mentality that is so widely accepted in Catholic circles today. Father John C. Ford, S.J., who opposed the von Hildebrand/Doms teaching on marriage and is considered to be largely responsible for convincing Montini/Paul VI to hold the line against contraception despite the majority report of the "Pontifical" Commission of Population Family and Birth Rate, did so in his own way in 1964 in a book he coauthored with Father Gerald Kelly, S.J., Contemporary Moral Theology, Volume 2, believing that God's moral law did not oblige parents to have more children than was necessary to preserve the human race:
There may be difficulty in determining the exact limit for various countries; but certainly today in the United States a family of four children would be sufficient to satisfy the duty. (Fathers John C. Ford, S.J., and Gerald Kelly, S.J., Contemporary Moral Problems, Volume 2, The Newman Press, 1964, p. 423.)
This was not the mind of Pope Pius XII, which is why Fathers Ford and Kelly, who wrote cautiously about the matter while our last true pope was alive, simply waited. And, yes, once again, I am not manufacturing any kind of "straw men." As hard as Father Ford worked against contraception and fought against those who supported it (he is considered to be largely responsible for convincing Montini/Paul VI to hold the line against contraception despite the majority report of the "Pontifical" Commission for Population Family and Birth Rate), he was on the "cutting edge" of theological thought in the 1950s. He just had to wait until the death of Pope Pius XII. Father Ford's own protege, Dr. Germain Grisez, has noted this as so in a glowing tribute to him that is filled with very interesting factual details of the work of the "papal" "birth control" commission:
Though Ford never publicly criticized Pius XII or the Roman Curia, he shared the dissatisfaction then common among theologians with the overly cautious attitude of the Holy See toward innovations of any sort. He also thought Pius XII had attempted to settle some difficult moral questions without adequate study and reflection. Thus, Ford was pleased by the more open approach of the new pontificate and looked forward to the coming Council in the hope that it would pave the way for needed renewal in the Church, not least in moral theology. (John C. Ford, S.J.)
What was that I was saying a few days ago about undercurrents in at least some of those old 1940s and 1950s theology manuals? The "Second" Vatican Council and the Protestant and Masonic Novus Ordo service did not materialize out of thin air. The groundwork had been prepared, proximately speaking, over the course of many decades, including by means of the liturgical changes of the 1950s that were meant, even though Pope Pius XII did not realize it as he accepted the false representations made to him about those changes by Fathers Annibale Bugnini, C.M., Ferdinando Antonelli, O.F.M., to lead to what Montini/Paul VI himself called the "contemporary mentality" when promulgating the Novus Ordo missal on April 3, 1969 (see Missale Romanum). Theologians bided their time. They got the "opening" that they had been hoping for with the "election" of Angelo Roncalli/John XXIII on October 28, 1958.
Father Ford, as bravely as he worked against contraception and abortion, was in the forefront of theological thought that resulted in what is called today "natural family planning," a term that he lived long enough to see used and which he himself endorsed according to the "teaching" of Giovanni Montini/Paul VI. He helped to pave the way for the "contemporary mentality" of family limitation by "natural" means that has hoodwinked Catholics all up and down the vast expanse of the ecclesiological divide as the adversary once again uses those who think they are opposing him to his bidding for him.
Father Ford took a view of marriage and the family, although decidedly different than that of Dietrich von Hildebrand and Father Herbert Doms, that is contrary to Catholic teaching.
The McHugh Chronicles conveys the thoroughly Catholic teaching of Dr. Herbert Ratner, who died in 1997, on marriage on the family:
Man proposes, but God disposes! While this truism applies to all human efforts, it appears to be particularly so in the matter of the procreation of children. God’s Master Plan for marriage and family life is revealed in Nature, in Holy Scripture and in the magisterial teachings of the Catholic Church.
In his literary masterpiece, The Natural Institution of The Family (Marriage: An Office of Nature), Dr. Herbert Ratner (whom this writer never tires of quoting) reminds us that:
There are two revelations: one found in the Book of Scriptures and the other in the Book of Nature; one communicated through the words of the Son (and His Vicar on earth), the other through nature from a lexicon written by the Father.... These teachings, with the help of grace, confirm, fortify, enrich and transform the teachings of Nature to help make good the promise of Nature. (1)
In the matter of reproduction, Ratner notes, each and every living species has a mode of reproduction which is characteristic of that species, and man is no exception. “... the mode of reproduction characteristic of man is a life long monogamy as exemplified by the traditional family,” writes Ratner. (2)
“Man is a relatively sterile animal,” Ratner continues, “therefore children are a gift biologically as well as theologically.”(3) This relative sterility is also why “couples flock to birth control clinics in their twenties and to sterility clinics in their thirties,” he continues. (4)
Noting that “Children mature parents more than parents mature children,” Ratner makes a persuasive case for young couples to have their children early in marriage when the sexual urge is at its peak and when Mother Nature, genetically and physically, favors youthful child-bearing and child-rearing.(5) Breast-feeding provides the nursing mother with a normative spacing of two years before other offspring come along. Such is God’s plan for the human family!
Dr. Ratner raises his voice against the small family system (one or two children at most), where family size is deliberately restricted for the sake of possessions and advantage. He warns that the adoption of such a norm would be a tragedy for society and for the family. From three (Ratner) to five (Sir James Spence, one of the greatest English physicians of this century) children appear to be the minimum family size necessary for the optimum rearing of children.(5)
Ratner is critical of the many so-called Catholic marriage and family life programs which “stand under indictment for neglecting to inculcate in couples the gift, the pleasures and the value of children.” Young couples need to be reminded of Soren Kierkegaard’s admonition: “The trouble with life is that we understand it backwards but have to live it forwards.” There is no worse regret in life, says Ratner, than the married woman who discovers toward the end of life that she should have had a child or more children. (6)
The tendency of “secularized prudence” (enshrined in the “planned-parenthood” philosophy) is to be “overly concerned with the price to be paid not the value received,” Ratner says. “True prudence approaches judgement-making with a trust in the providential order and includes hope in the final decision.” He reminds us that “The choicest gift one can bequeath to a child is not material possessions but another brother and sister,” and “the large family is the best prevention against loneliness which is so all-pervasive in modern society.” (7) (Randy Engel, The McHugh Chronicles.)
It is easy to become captive to the phrases of the day. I did so as a "conservative" Catholic when viewing "natural family planning" favorably, not breaking free from this captivity until around 2000. Bishop Cahal Daly, who was consecrated a bishop in 1967 and became the conciliar "archbishop" of Armagh in 1990, dying last year, was wrote the following about the whole mentality of "family planning":
In Morals, Law and Life, the Rev. Cahal B. Daly, M.D., D.D., takes a hard look at the “guilt-assuaging and moral-satisfaction-suggesting stimuli” which characterizes such euphemisms as the “planned family” or “wanted babies” or “planned babies.” (14)
It is important to realize just what is being done by the use of these phrases. They are being pervasively redefined, that is to say, the usual meaning of the phrases is being subtly changed so that the moral and emotional approval elicited by the words may be attached to a new form of behavior that it is desired to recommend. (15)
Under these new definitions, Daly explains, only habitual contraceptors or family planners can be called “voluntary” or “responsible” parents, and only babies from families of habitual contraceptors or family planners can be called “wanted” or “planned” babies. “Conversely, babies born to non-contraceptors or non-family planners are “accidental” or “unintended” pregnancies” and children born of such unions must be considered “accidental” or “unintended” babies. Hence, in Alice-in-Wonderland fashion, “wanted babies” are babies of couples who habitually do not want babies and use contraceptives regularly to avoid them and who, on a carefully restricted basis, occasionally suspend their contraception and cease to “unwant” for an occasion or two, a child.(16)
Such terms as “family planning,” says Daly, betrays the child, for a baby is not “a product” to be planned or manufactured or disposed of when found to be “defective,” but “a gift” from God to be loved and welcomed for his own sake all through life. (17) (Randy Engel, The McHugh Chronicles.)
The irony is clear as those Catholic theologians who were pushing for "family planning" in the 1950s were doing so even though Pope Pius XII had condemned the very mentality that is at the root of what it is known and practiced as "natural family planning."
Monsignor George A. Kelly (1916-2004) was a priest of the Archdiocese of New York and a co-founder of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars. I knew very well from personal contacts and professional conferences over the decades. Monsignor Kelly wrote the following in a chapter on "birth control and the rhythm method" in The Catholic Marriage Manual, explaining that the conditions listed by Pope Pius XII for the use of the rhythm method wereexceptions, not the norm, to married life:
Holy Father's statement on rhythm: Who may practice the rhythm method? A clear answer was given by Pope Pius XII in 1951 in an address to the Italian Catholic Union of Midwives. His Holiness pointed out that married couples are obliged to procreate and to help conserve the human race. In the Pontiffs words: "Matrimony obliges to a state of life which, while carrying with it certain rights, also imposes a fulfillment of positive work connected with that state of life." This means that rhythm is not to be used indiscriminately. The small-family or no-family state of mind is not necessarily good simply because contraceptives are not used. (Monsignor George A. Kelly, The Catholic Marriage Manual, published by Random House in 1958, pp. 55-56.)
It is only because most young Catholics today have been exposed to the "birth control mentality" in the world and to the counterfeit church of conciliarism's propagation of the ideology of "natural family planning" in reaction to that contraceptive mentality that the "planning" of families is now considered to be a "norm" that is almost beyond question, which is why even many traditionally minded engaged Catholic couples jump at the opportunity to "learn" about a method to avoid conception that is to be used in truly exceptional circumstances.
The Inversion of the Ends of Marriage Becomes Enshrined in the Conciliar Code of Canon Law
Here is the relevant provision from the counterfeit church of conciliarism's 1983 Code of Canon Law:
Can. 1055 §1. The matrimonial covenant, by which a man and a woman establish between themselves a partnership of the whole of life and which is ordered by its nature to the good of the spouses and the procreation and education of offspring, has been raised by Christ the Lord to the dignity of a sacrament between the baptized. Canon 1055.1.
As is so frequently the case, the conciliar revolutionaries have to boast of the "novelties" that their beloved revolution against the Catholic Faith have been enshrined into the law, the liturgy and the pastoral life of their false religious sect. This is what Francesco "Cardinal" Coccopalmerio of the "Pontifical" Council on Legislative Texts did on January 22, 2013, as he celebrated the thirtieth anniversary of the revolutionary 1983 Code of Canon Law:
The schedule for a Study Day titled “The Code: A Reform Desired and Requested by the Council” was unveiled Tuesday to journalists in the Vatican Press Office. It will take place on 25 January, in the Pius X Hall, Rome, marking the 30th anniversary of the promulgation of the Code of Canon Law.
The study day has been organized by the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts and the International Institute of Canon Law and Comparative Studies of Religion in Lugano, Switzerland and is sponsored by the Joseph Ratzinger (Benedict XVI) Vatican Foundation and the John Paul II Foundation. Participating in the conference were Cardinal Francesco Coccopalmerio, president of the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts, Bishop Juan Ignacio Arrieta, secretary of that dicastery, and Msgr. Giuseppe Antonio Scotti, president of the Joseph Ratzinger (Benedict XVI) Vatican Foundation.
Cardinal Coccopalmerio began his address with the recollection that Blessed John XXIII, in his speech convening Vatican Council II in 1959, explained that the Council’s legal scope was to bring about the awaited revision of the 1917 Code. “In his broad perspective, the Pope saw clearly that the revision of the Code had to be guided by the new ecclesiology that emerged from an ecumenical and a global summit such as the Council.” Blessed John Paul II, under whose pontificate the Code was promulgated, also repeated that “the council’s ecclesiological structure clearly required a renewed formulation of its laws”.
“As John Paul II emphasized at the beginning of the Apostolic Constitution ‘Sacrae disciplinae leges’, the reason for the close relationship between Vatican Council II and the Code of Canon Law was that the 1983 Code was the culmination of Vatican II … in two ways: on the one hand, it embraces the Council, solemnly reproposing fundamental institutions and major innovations and, on the other, establishing positive norms for implementing the Council.”
The president of the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts then cited various examples of the strong bond between Vatican Council II and the Code of Canon Law.
The first is the “doctrine regarding the episcopate and the relationship between the episcopate and the primate, that is, episcopal collegiality. This is not entirely new doctrine in the deep consciousness of the Church but rather a happy discovery. The Code firstly, in canons 330–341, represents this clearly, and secondly, in canons 342–348, accompanies it with the positive view that constitutes the structure of the Synod of Bishops, allowing effective implementation of the structure of episcopal collegiality.”
A second example is the “Council’s teaching on the laity and therefore on the appropriate and active mission of the lay faithful in the life of the Church. Once again, this is not absolutely new but more a rediscovery … through a series of regulations … regarding the diocesan pastoral council or … the parochial pastoral council. They are structures that allow the faithful laity to effectively participate in the pastoral decisions of the bishop or the pastor. This innovation is also the eloquent voice of the faithful relationship between Council and Code.”
“A third example may come from the conception of the parish as presented by the Council and implemented by the Code. Ultimately, the Council conceives of the parish as a community of believers, not as a structure or a territory. This represents an important innovation with respect to the previous point of view. The Code receives this concept, particularly in canon 515, and sanctions it with the positive regulations of the following canons.”
A final example of doctrine and innovation provided by the Council in the area of ecumenism “resides in the conciliar documents ‘Lumen gentium’, ‘Orientalium Ecclesiarum’, and ‘Unitatis redintegratio’, which show the doctrine of ecclesial communion as still imperfect yet real and existent between the Catholic Church and other Churches or non-Catholic communities. This is also a fact of incalculable value and scope already found in the Council and then later in the Code (cf. canon 844), with the possibility of welcoming non-Catholic Christians, even if under specific conditions, into the sacraments of the Catholic Church.
“In conclusion,” finished the cardinal, “we can affirm that the happy union between Vatican Council II and the Code of Canon Law has produced fruits of renewal in the life of the Church in many areas and on many levels." (Study day on reform of Code of Canon Law.)
Well, there you have it direct the mouth of a conciliar revolutionary, who even said that the "new ecclesiology" was the brainchild of the first of the current line of antipopes, Angelo Roncalli/John XXIII. Each of conciliarism's heresies and errors have brought this false religious sect to the point of internal schism and to the point of endless caricature by extending invitations to the likes of Dr. Paul Ehrlich, a sworn enemy of the binding precepts o the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law.
Alas, those binding precepts have been undermined long before the emergence of Jorge Mario Bergoglio on the balcony of the Basilica of Saint Peter on Wednesday, March 13, 2013. Bergoglio is simply putting the final touches on this apostasy by showing himself to the world to be what he has been throughout his career as a lay Jesuit revolutionary: A Man of Sin.
Monsignor Joseph Clifford Fenton's analysis, written in 1960, of Pope Saint Pius X's The Oath Against Modernism demonstrates very clearly that tthe “Second” Vatican Council and its afermath have produced “humanitarian,” “non-religious” “popes" whose names and words are interchangeable. Jorge Mario Bergoglio is really saying nothing different than Giovanni Enrico Antonio Maria/Paul the Sick, Karol Josef Wojtyla/John Paul II or Joseph Alois Ratzinger/Benedict XVI:
In this conclusion to the Sacrorum antistitum, St. Pius X expressly recognizes the fact that the Modernists and their sympathizers, the anti-anti-Modernists, were actually working, in agreement with the most-bitter enemies of the Catholic Church, for the destruction of the Catholic faith. It is interesting and highly important to note exactly what St. Pius X said. He definitely did not claim that these men were working directly to destroy the Church as a society. It is quite obvious that, given the intimate connection between the Church and the faith, a connection so close and perfect that the Church itself may be defined as the congregatio fidelium, the repudiation of the Catholic faith would inevitably lead to the dissolution of the Church. Yet, for the Modernists and for those who co-operated in their work, the immediate object of attack was always the faith itself. These individuals were perfectly willing that the Catholic Church should continue to exist as a religious society, as long as it did not insist upon the acceptance of that message which, all during the course of the previous centuries of its existence, it had proposed as a message supernaturally revealed by the Lord and Creator of heaven and earth. They were willing and even anxious to retain their membership in the Catholic Church, as long as they were not obliged to accept on the authority of divine faith such unfashionable dogmas as, for example, the truth that there is truly no salvation outside of the Church.
What these men were really working for was the transformation of the Catholic Church into an essentially non-doctrinal religious body. They considered that their era would be willing to accept the Church as a kind of humanitarian institution, vaguely religious, tastefully patriotic, and eminently cultural. And they definitely intended to tailor the Church to fit the needs and the tastes of their own era.
It must be understood, of course, that the Modernists and the men who aided their efforts did not expect the Catholic Church to repudiate its age-old formulas of belief. They did not want the Church to reject or to abandon the ancient creeds, or even any of those formularies in which the necessity of the faith and the necessity of the Church are so firmly and decisively stated. What they sought was a declaration on the part of the Church's magisteriumto the effect that these old formulas did not, during the first decade of the twentieth century, carry the same meaning for the believing Catholic that they had carried when these formulas had first been drawn up. Or, in other words, they sought to force or to delude the teaching authority of Christ's Church into coming out with the fatally erroneous proposition that what is accepted by divine faith in this century is objectively something different from what was believed in the Catholic Church on the authority of God revealing in previous times.
Thus the basic objective of Modernism was to reject the fact that, when he sets forth Catholic dogma, the Catholic teacher is acting precisely as an ambassador of Christ. The Modernists were men who were never quite able to grasp or to accept the truth that the teaching of the Catholic Church is, as the First Vatican Council designated the content of the Constitution Dei Films, actually "the salutary doctrine of Christ," and not merely some kind of doctrine, which has developed out of that teaching. And, in the final analysis, the position of the Modernists constituted the ultimate repudiation of the Catholic faith. If the teaching proposed by the Church as dogma is not actually and really the doctrine supernaturally revealed by God through Jesus Christ Our Lord, through the Prophets of the Old Testament who were His heralds, or through the Apostles who were His witnesses, then there could be nothing more pitifully inane than the work of the Catholic magisterium. (Sacrosanctum Antistitum: The Background of The Oath Against Modernism.)
The following passage, contained in the quotation from Monsignor Fenton's article of fifty-seven years ago, is an exact description of the conciliar "popes" and their stooges:
What these men were really working for was the transformation of the Catholic Church into an essentially non-doctrinal religious body. They considered that their era would be willing to accept the Church as a kind of humanitarian institution, vaguely religious, tastefully patriotic, and eminently cultural. And they definitely intended to tailor the Church to fit the needs and the tastes of their own era. (Sacrosanctum Antistitum: The Background of The Oath Against Modernism.)
Behold the non-doctrinal religious body that is nothing other than a kind of humanitarian institution, vagely religious and pantheistic, a veritable tool of Judeo-Masonic global naturalism.
Pope Saint Pius X warned us about such a false church:
We fear that worse is to come: the end result of this developing promiscuousness, the beneficiary of this cosmopolitan social action, can only be a Democracy which will be neither Catholic, nor Protestant, nor Jewish. It will be a religion (for Sillonism, so the leaders have said, is a religion) more universal than the Catholic Church, uniting all men become brothers and comrades at last in the "Kingdom of God". - "We do not work for the Church, we work for mankind."
And now, overwhelmed with the deepest sadness, We ask Ourselves, Venerable Brethren, what has become of the Catholicism of the Sillon?Alas! this organization which formerly afforded such promising expectations, this limpid and impetuous stream, has been harnessed in its course by the modern enemies of the Church, and is now no more than a miserable affluent of the great movement of apostasy being organized in every country for the establishment of a One-World Church which shall have neither dogmas, nor hierarchy, neither discipline for the mind, nor curb for the passions, and which, under the pretext of freedom and human dignity, would bring back to the world (if such a Church could overcome) the reign of legalized cunning and force, and the oppression of the weak, and of all those who toil and suffer. (Pope Saint Pius X, Notre Charge Apostolique, August 15, 1910.)
The “gospel” of the counterfeit church of conciliarism and its social program for secular salvation is the very embodiment of such a false church, and it stands condemned by Pope Saint Pius X in Notre Charge Apostolique, August 15, 1910:
We wish to draw your attention, Venerable Brethren, to this distortion of the Gospel and to the sacred character of Our Lord Jesus Christ, God and man, prevailing within the Sillon and elsewhere. As soon as the social question is being approached, it is the fashion in some quarters to first put aside the divinity of Jesus Christ, and then to mention only His unlimited clemency, His compassion for all human miseries, and His pressing exhortations to the love of our neighbor and to the brotherhood of men. True, Jesus has loved us with an immense, infinite love, and He came on earth to suffer and die so that, gathered around Him in justice and love, motivated by the same sentiments of mutual charity, all men might live in peace and happiness. But for the realization of this temporal and eternal happiness, He has laid down with supreme authority the condition that we must belong to His Flock, that we must accept His doctrine, that we must practice virtue, and that we must accept the teaching and guidance of Peter and his successors. Further, whilst Jesus was kind to sinners and to those who went astray, He did not respect their false ideas, however sincere they might have appeared. He loved them all, but He instructed them in order to convert them and save them. Whilst He called to Himself in order to comfort them, those who toiled and suffered, it was not to preach to them the jealousy of a chimerical equality. Whilst He lifted up the lowly, it was not to instill in them the sentiment of a dignity independent from, and rebellious against, the duty of obedience. Whilst His heart overflowed with gentleness for the souls of good-will, He could also arm Himself with holy indignation against the profaners of the House of God, against the wretched men who scandalized the little ones, against the authorities who crush the people with the weight of heavy burdens without putting out a hand to lift them. He was as strong as he was gentle. He reproved, threatened, chastised, knowing, and teaching us that fear is the beginning of wisdom, and that it is sometimes proper for a man to cut off an offending limb to save his body. Finally, He did not announce for future society the reign of an ideal happiness from which suffering would be banished; but, by His lessons and by His example, He traced the path of the happiness which is possible on earth and of the perfect happiness in heaven: the royal way of the Cross. These are teachings that it would be wrong to apply only to one's personal life in order to win eternal salvation; these are eminently social teachings, and they show in Our Lord Jesus Christ something quite different from an inconsistent and impotent humanitarianism. (Pope Saint Pius X, Notre Charge Apostolique, August 15, 1910.)
Let those who want to see the truth do so. The counterfeit church of conciliarism has never been, is not now nor can ever be the Catholic Church:
What part of the following papal statements about the Catholic Church's freedom from error and heresy is hard to understand or to accept?
In the Catholic Church Christianity is Incarnate. It identifies Itself with that perfect, spiritual, and, in its own order, sovereign society, which is the Mystical Body of Jesus Christ and which has for Its visible head the Roman Pontiff, successor of the Prince of the Apostles. It is the continuation of the mission of the Savior, the daughter and the heiress of His Redemption. It has preached the Gospel, and has defended it at the price of Its blood, and strong in the Divine assistance and of that immortality which has been promised it, It makes no terms with error but remains faithful to the commands which it has received, to carry the doctrine of Jesus Christ to the uttermost limits of the world and to the end of time, and to protect it in its inviolable integrity. (Pope Leo XIII, A Review of His Pontificate, March 19, 1902.)
Not least among the blessings which have resulted from the public and legitimate honor paid to the Blessed Virgin and the saints is the perfect and perpetual immunity of the Church from error and heresy. (Pope Pius XI, Quas Primas, December 11, 1925.)
For the teaching authority of the Church, which in the divine wisdom was constituted on earth in order that revealed doctrines might remain intact for ever, and that they might be brought with ease and security to the knowledge of men, and which is daily exercised through the Roman Pontiff and the Bishops who are in communion with him, has also the office of defining, when it sees fit, any truth with solemn rites and decrees, whenever this is necessary either to oppose the errors or the attacks of heretics, or more clearly and in greater detail to stamp the minds of the faithful with the articles of sacred doctrine which have been explained. (Pope Pius XI, Mortalium Animos, January 6, 1928.)
The Catholic Church is incapable of being touched by any kind of error, no less heresy, no, not even in her Universal Ordinary Magisterium.
On the Feast of Saint Antony of the Desert
Today is the Feast of Saint Antony of the Desert, a Church Father and the Founder of Monasticism, whose heroic austerities and penances should inspire each of us to try to be at least a little more mortified and to seek more voluntary penances so that we, following his example, can cooperate with the graces won for us by the shedding of every single drop of the Most Precious Blood of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ that flow into our souls through the loving hands of Our Lady, she who is the Mediatrix of All Graces, to rely upon the August Queen of Heaven to send her holy legions to drive the devils away, everywhere fight them, subduing their boldness and thrusting them down into the abyss.
Here is the account of the life and work of Saint Antony of the Desert as found in the readings for Matins in today's Divine Office:
Anthony was an Egyptian, the child of noble and Christian parents, whom he lost while yet very young. On one occasion he entered a Church, and heard these words of the Gospel, Matth. xix. 21, If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor. He took these words as if they were addressed to himself personally, for this was the obedience which he thought every word of the Lord Christ should meet with. He therefore sold his whole possessions, and gave the price to the poor. Being thus delivered from worldly entanglements, he set himself to lead on earth the life of an angel. Finding himself, as it were, about to enter the field of battle against Satan, he thought it wisest to add to the shield of faith, which he already possessed, all the rest of the armour of God, wherefore he observed all those who were eminent for any grace, and strove to copy them.
He was excelled by none in watchfulness and self-restraint. He surpassed all in long-suffering, meekness, tenderness, lowliness, perseverance, and continual study of the Holy Scriptures. He had such a loathing of the company and conversation of heretics and schismatics, especially Arians, that he used to say that a faithful Christian ought as far as possible never to come near any such. He took the sleep which was needful for the body lying on the ground. Such was his devotion to fasting, that he took nothing with his bread but salt, and drank only water; he never ate or drank before sunset; he often abstained from food altogether for two days at a time; and very often passed whole nights in prayer. Being so valiant a soldier of God, Anthony was attacked by the devil with divers temptations, but he overcame them all by prayer and fasting. Nevertheless, these frequent triumphs over Satan did not lull Anthony into security, for he was well aware of the numberless arts of assault possessed by the evil one.
Then he betook himself into the vast deserts of Africa that lie near Egypt. Day by day he advanced on the path to perfection. Day by day the attacks of the fiends became more violent, but day by day his' strength grew greater to strive against them. At length he came to mock at the powerlessness of the devils, against whom he stirred up his disciples to fight, teaching them with what arms to combat. Believe me, my brethren, he used to say, Satan is afraid of good men's watchings, and prayers, and fasts, and voluntary poverty, and mercifulness, and lowliness, but above all, of their warm love for Christ our Lord, the mere sign of Whose most holy Cross is enough to undo him and put him to flight. He became such an object of dread to the devils, that many persons throughout Egypt who were tormented by them, were delivered by calling on his name moreover the fame of his holiness was so spread abroad, that Constantine the Great and his sons wrote to him to commend themselves to his prayers. In the hundred and fifth year of his age, and the fulness of his reputation for piety and miracles, having roused up great numbers to follow his example, he gathered his monks around him, and when he had exhorted them to strive after Christian perfection, he passed to heaven on the 17th day of January, in the year of our Lord 356. (Matins, The Divine Office, Feast of Saint Antony of the Desert.)
Saint Antony's holiness and his pure love of the true God of Divine Revelation, the Most Blessed Trinity, was hated by the adversary, who sought to lead him away from his austere practices without success. Saint Antony hated everything to do with the devil, including the heresies that he inspired others to promote, and the great Desert Father warned one and all to keep no kind of communion with heretics. His biographer, none other than the great Saint Athanasius of Alexandria, explained this very clearly:
How he rejected the schism of Meletius and the heresies of Manes and Arius.
68. And he was altogether wonderful in faith and religious, for he never held communion with the Meletian schismatics, knowing their wickedness and apostacy from the beginning; nor had he friendly dealings with the Manichæans or any other heretics; or, if he had, only as far as advice that they should change to piety. For he thought and asserted that intercourse with these was harmful and destructive to the soul. In the same manner also he loathed the heresy of the Arians, and exhorted all neither to approach them nor to hold their erroneous belief. And once when certain Arian madmen came to him, when he had questioned them and learned their impiety, he drove them from the mountain, saying that their words were worse than the poison of serpents.
How he confuted the Arians.
69. And once also the Arians having lyingly asserted that Antony's opinions were the same as theirs, he was displeased and angry against them. Then being summoned by the bishops and all the brethren, he descended from the mountain, and having entered Alexandria , he denounced the Arians, saying that their heresy was the last of all and a forerunner of Antichrist. And he taught the people that the Son of God was not a created being, neither had He come into being from non-existence, but that He was the Eternal Word and Wisdom of the Essence of the Father. And therefore it was impious to say, 'there was a time when He was not,' for the Word was always co-existent with the Father. Wherefore have no fellowship with the most impious Arians. For there is no communion between light and darkness. 2 Corinthians 6:14 For you are good Christians, but they, when they say that the Son of the Father, the Word of God, is a created being, differ in nought from the heathen, since they worship that which is created, rather than God the creator. But believe that the Creation itself is angry with them because they number the Creator, the Lord of all, by whom all things came into being, with those things which were originated. (Saint Athanasius, Saint Antony of the Desert.)
This is a saltuary warning to us not to have any kind of fellowship with the most impious conciliar revolutionaries as there can never be any communion between light and darkness.
Obviously, we must, as always, spend time in prayer, if at all possible, which it is not for many Catholics around the world today in this time of apostasy and betrayal, before Our Lord's Real Presence in the Most Blessed Sacrament and pray as many Rosaries each day as our states-in-life permit, using the shield of Our Lady's Brown Scapular of Mount Carmel and the weapon of her Rosary to protect us from the contagion of apostasy and betrayal that is all around us. We must also, of course, make reparation for our own many sins by offering up all of our prayers and sufferings and sacrifices and humiliations and penances and mortifications and fastings to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary.
The final victory belongs to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. We must pray to her so that we can be instruments, unworthy though we may be, of planting the seeds for the restoration of Holy Mother Church and of the Social Reign of Christ the King so that everyone in the whole will exclaim with hearts consecrated to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary.
Viva Cristo Rey! Vivat Christus Rex!
Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us.
Saint Joseph, pray for us.
Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.
Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.
Saint John the Evangelist, pray for us.
Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.
Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.
Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.
Saints Joachim and Anne, pray for us.
Saints Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar, pray for us.
Saint Antony of the Desert, pray for us.
