Bishop Williamson, "Bleeding Church"

Bleeding Church

While Christ was dead, Our Lady alone believed.
By our strong faith now may She be relieved.

A colleague resisting the change of Archbishop Lefebvre’s Society of St Pius X into Menzingen’s Newsociety, just like the change of the Catholic Church of Tradition into the Newchurch of Vatican II, has written some interesting considerations, translated here below. They were private, but they are too precious not to be shared more widely. A colleague of his had written to him expressing the hope for Easter that “the Church (and the SSPX) might soon rise from the dead.” He replied:—



A 60-year old man who I take to be wise, said to me on Holy Saturday, “The Church must be crucified as was her divine Master on Good Friday . . . we are now living through Good Friday . . . . Holy Saturday is still to come, and it will last a while yet.”
To which I would like to add a few thoughts.
The Church is by no means about to rise again, rather it is going to bleed to death in a most painful way until it even seems to be no longer there. Whether the SSPX (above all its priests) will be part of this glorious bleeding to death, Heaven alone knows. In any case it is the death by bleeding which is sowing seed for the resurrection.
If the SSPX refuses to belong to the bleeding Church by wanting to continue to work its way little by little into the multi-religious community presided over by Pope (?) Francis – and Menzingen and Fr Schmidberger have been at work for years to turn the Society into another such Fraternity of St Peter – then the Society will still bleed to death, because one way or another the persecution is probably coming for everybody, especially for people wearing the cassock. However, the Society will not then be suffering as glorious Apostles of the end-times, but rather, alas, as a punishment for their material comfort, lukewarmness and unfaithfulness to the Archbishop who founded their Society . . .
(If there is above a question mark against “Pope Francis,” it is because for objective reasons there is at the least some uncertainty, some doubt, as to whether he is Pope. That is precisely why in 1988 in the gentlest of ways Heaven separated the Society from a Rome which had become somewhat schismatic . . . . Indeed we have no communion in the Faith with the present authorities in the Vatican, we are truly outside of their communion, or ex-communicated – which is our good fortune and to our honour – just as on the afternoon of the first Good Friday, the Church severely reduced in numbers was also to be found only outside of Jerusalem, on Calvary . . . )
In truth, nothing throws so much light on the present state of the Church as the Gospel narrative of the Passion of Christ, and conversely one can say that nothing throws so much light on the Gospel narrative as the present desolation of the Church. And just as then the Apostles themselves, even after being repeatedly warned by O ur Lord of his coming Passion (Mt. XVI, 21; XVII, 21; XX, 17–19) could still not believe it was real when it came upon them, so too now many a good Catholic can hardly believe that it is the Church of Christ which has such tormenting problems and such inadequate Popes.
But God’s purpose in creating the universe was to share His divine happiness by populating His Heaven with rational creatures, angelic or human, that would freely choose to join Him in His Heaven. The key word here is “freely.” With the faculty of reason God gives to every human being capable of using it, also free-will, and He so balances circumstances for each of us as to make the choice real between Heaven and Hell. Therefore He allows as much freedom as possible for human beings to kill His own Son or to pull down His Son’s Church, but never so much freedom as completely to frustrate His Son or His Church. Therefore He allows unimaginable tribulations for His Church such as only time will fully tell between now and world’s end, but the wisdom of God reaches way beyond our little imaginations (Is. LV, 8,9).
Kyrie eleison.