Archbishop Lefebvre Interview in 1975 On The Apostasy In The Church
This has been LOOSELY translated from the original spanish
Where do we go? What will be the term of all the current changes? It
is not so much a question of wars, of atomic or ecological
catastrophes, but especially of the revolution outside and within the
Church, of the apostasy, in short, that gains entire peoples, once
Catholics, and even the Hierarchy of the Church to its top.
Rome
seems submerged in a complete blindness, the Roma of always is reduced
to the silence, paralyzed by the other Rome, the liberal Rome that
occupies it. The
sources of divine grace and faith are exhausted, and the veins of the
Church channel the deadly poison of naturalism all over her body.
It
is impossible to understand this deep crisis without taking into
account the central fact of this century: the Second Vatican Council. I
think that my feeling in relation to him is well known so that I can
say, without bluntness, the substance of my thinking: without rejecting
the whole of that council (meaning all the texts, he taught to reject the Council as a whole due to heresies), I think it is the greatest disaster of this
century and of all the centuries since The foundation of the Church. In this, I do no more than judge him by his fruits, using the criterion that Our Lord has given us (Mat 7:16).
When Card. Ratzinger who shows some good fruits of the Council, does not know what to answer (1) ; And when he asked Card. Garrone
how a "good" council had been able to produce such bad fruits, he
replied: "It is not the Council, they are the mass media! (2)". [Nothing
new under the sun: thirty years later, the liberals and modernists who
occupy Rome maintain exactly the same false speech, as it happens with
the "great friend" of the SSPX, Mgr Pozzo, who a few days ago said : "The
Pope Benedict XVI spoke of a "true council" and a "virtual council",
the latter being the fruit of the power of the mass media, the modernist
current in theology, in other words, the "conciliar ideology" that has
been superimposed To the true "mens" of the council's parents. " ] Here,
a little reflection can help common sense: if the post-conciliar epoch
is dominated by revolution in the Church, is it not simply because the
Council itself gave it entrance? "The Council is 1789 in the Church," Card. Suenens. "The problem of the Council was to assimilate the values of two centuries of liberal culture," said Card. Ratzinger. And
he explains: Pius IX with the Syllabus, had definitively rejected the
world arising from the Revolution, condemning this proposal: "The Roman
Pontiff can and must reconcile and accommodate himself with progress,
with liberalism and with modern civilization" (No. 80).
The
Council, openly says Joseph Ratzinger, has been a "Contra Syllabus" in
effecting this reconciliation of the Church with liberalism,
particularly through the Gaudium et Spes, the longest conciliar
document. This
leaves the impression that the Popes of the nineteenth century could
not discern in the Revolution of 1789 the part of Christian truth
assimilated by the Church. Such a statement is absolutely dramatic, especially in the mouths of representatives of the Magisterium of the Church! In fact and essentially what was the Revolution of 1789? It was the naturalism and subjectivism of Protestantism, translated into legal norms and taxes to a still Catholic society. Hence the proclamation of the rights of man without God; Hence the exaltation of the subjectivity of each, at the expense of objective truth; Hence, to put all religious beliefs before the law on the same level; From there, in short, the organization of society without God and without Our Lord Jesus Christ. A single word designates this monstrous theory: liberalism. Unfortunately there we truly touch the "mystery of iniquity" (2 Thessalonians 2: 7).
After
the Vatican II Revolution, the devil raised in the Church men full of the spirit
of pride and novelty, presenting themselves as inspired reformers who,
in the hope of reconciling the Church with liberalism, tried to make an
adulterous union between the Church and the principles of the Revolution
. Now
how can we reconcile Our Lord Jesus Christ with a swarm of errors that
are so diametrically opposed to His grace, His truth, His divinity, and
His universal royalty? We Do not; The
Popes were not mistaken when, supported by tradition and assisted by
the Holy Spirit, they condemned with great supreme authority and with
great continuity the great liberal Catholic betrayal. So how did the liberal sect impose its views on an ecumenical council? How has the unnatural union between the Church and
the Revolution been able to give birth to the monster whose ramblings
now fill even their most fervent followers with terror?
It
is these questions that I try to answer in these talks about
liberalism, showing that once it penetrated into the Church, the poison
of liberalism leads to apostasy by logical consequence.
From Liberalism to Apostasy; Such is the theme of these chapters. Certainly, living in a time of apostasy has nothing pleasant in it! Let
us think, however, that all times and all centuries belong to Our Lord
Jesus Christ: "Ipsius sunt tempora et saecula", makes us say the Easter
liturgy. This century of apostasy, undoubtedly different from the centuries of faith, belongs to Jesus Christ. On the one hand, the apostasy of the majority reveals the heroic fidelity of the small number; So
it was in the days of the prophet Elijah in Israel, when only seven
thousand men preserved by God refused to bend their knees to Baal (III
Kings 19:18). Let us not therefore bend our knee before the idol of the "cult of man ," "established in the sanctuary and dwelling as if he were God" (2 Thessalonians 2: 4). Let us remain Catholics, worshipers of the one True God, our Lord Jesus Christ, with the Father and the Holy Spirit!
On
the other hand, as the history of the Church testifies, every age of
crisis prepares an age of faith and, in fidelity to tradition, a true
renewal. To
all of you, it is your duty to contribute, dear readers, humbly
receiving what the Church has transmitted to us until the eve of Vatican
II, through the mouths of the Popes, and which I transmit to you. It
is this constant teaching of the Church that I have received
unreservedly, the one I communicate to you without reserve "quam sine
fictione dedici, sine invidia communico" (Wisdom 7:13).
____________
(1) Joseph Card. Ratzinger, Report on the Faith, Popular BAC, Madrid, 1985, pp. 45-48.
(2) Interview of January 13, 1975.
TCK Presents: A Saint vs. Modernist Rome