SELECTIONS BY PAULY FONGEMIE
From The Church Before The Council
Despite the abysmal state of the post-conciliar Church, which
should be evident to anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear, there
are still those who claim that we are living in a period of
exhilarating renewal in happy contrast with the moribund Church of
pre-conciliar days. It seems that even in this age of sophisticated and
instant communication there is still truth in the old saying: there are
none so blind as those who will not see. Thus in an editorial published
on Friday, 2 April 1976, the London
Universe was able to proclaim that "the Holy Father is leading
the Church forward to a new age of spirituality" and to reproach
Archbishop Lefebvre for his "refusal to move forward with the Church of
the seventies." It would have been interesting had the editor of The Universe added a few words on
precisely where he thought the Church of the seventies was moving. He
clearly considers that his paper is in the vanguard of this movement
and this is something with which no one could disagree. The Universe had a circulation of
311,512 in 1963 which had declined to 156,872 by August of 1976 - a
decrease of 50 per cent.
... Pope John XXIII most certainly did not believe the Church to be in
any sort of decline when he convoked the Council. Indeed, when he
issued his apostolic constitution Humanae
Salutis convoking Vatican II he made a special point of paying
tribute to the vitality of the Church as it then existed. It has, he
said, ... followed step by step the evolution of peoples, scientific
progress, and social revolution. It has opposed decisively the
materialistic ideologies which deny faith. Lastly, It has witnessed the
rise and growth of the immense energies of the apostolate of in prayer,
of action in all fields. It has seen the emergence of a clergy
constantly better equipped in learning and virtue for its mission; and
of a laity which has become ever more conscious of its responsibilities
within the bosom of the Church, and, in a special way, of its duty to
collaborate with the Church hierarchy. To this should be added the
immense suffering of entire Christian communities, through which a
multitude of admirable bishops, priests, and laymen seal their
adherence to the faith, bearing persecutions of all kinds and revealing
forms of heroism which certainly equal those of the most glorious
periods of the Church.
When Pope John wrote this in 1961 who
could have imagined that his Council would be prevented from condemning
atheistic Communism, which was responsible for this immense
suffering? [Emphasis in bold added by the Web Master.] And
prevented from condemning it by a process of calculated fraud
perpetrated by some of its members, an incident which will be fully
documented in Chapter
XI.
In the same apostolic constitution, Pope John points out the contrast
between "a world which reveals a grave state of spiritual poverty and
the Church of Christ which is still so vibrant with vitality." A Church vibrant with vitality in 1961,
according to Pope John, and a Church in a process of self-destruction
in 1968, according to Pope Paul. Who would have believed that a
debacle of such proportions could occur in so short a time? The Arian and Protestant heresies were
gradual processes compared with this. The answer can only be found, as Pope Paul
claims, by the entry of the Enemy of man into the Church, an entry
which the Prince of this world made through the window to the world
opened by Pope John. "I am certain," remarked Cardinal Felici,
Secretary General to the Council, "that when in the Council I
pronounced the ritual words 'Exeant
Omnes' (Everyone out) which all remember, one who did not obey
was the Devil ... He is always where confusion triumphs, to stir it up
and take advantage of it." [Letters
from Vatican City, p. 10]
It is fashionable for Catholic liberals to decry the pre-conciliar
Church as concerned with little more than personal piety and
indifferent to the injustice and suffering in the world. This is a monstrous travesty of the truth
as every adult Catholic must surely know. Never in the history of our
planet las so much concern been shown for the material needs of all
humanity as that displayed by the Catholic Church in this present
century. All over the world selfless priests, members of
religious orders, and lay Catholics have established countless schools,
hospitals, orphanages, homes for old people; wherever need existed
Catholic relief agencies could be found ministering to the hungry, the
homeless, the victims of famine, pestilence, or earthquakes. But in the pre-conciliar Church there was
never any confusion about what the prime duty of ;he Church was, to
preach the Kingdom of God - and when the kingdom of God is preached all
else will follow. And there can be no doubt that the service
rendered to the material needs of men, incalculable though this most
certainly was, pales into insignificance beside the spiritual solace
brought by the Church to hundreds of millions of men and women of all
races and all nations: the beauty and comfort of Her liturgy, the grace
of Her sacraments, the inspiration of Her teaching - these gave meaning
to a life which for millions would otherwise have been meaningless;
they gave the strength to endure in a life that would otherwise have
been unendurable. And above all, the
Church was concerned with the truth, the truth that is Christ, the
truth that is His Gospel, the truth that we have a Father in Heaven Who
loves us. Who sent His Son to die for us so that we can live with Him
for ever in the happiness of Heaven.
...
Mgr. Lefebvre considers that:
the master-stroke achieved by
Satan is to have thrown everyone into disobedience by virtue of
obedience. The most typical example of this fact is that of the
"aggiornamento" of religious orders. Through obedience religious are
made to disobey the very laws and constitutions of their founders which
they pledged to observe when they took their vows. This is the cause of
the profound confusion which has spread through these communities and
in the heart of the Church.
In this case, obedience should be refused categorically. Even
legitimate authority cannot demand the execution of evil or
dishonourable acts. No one can oblige us to transform our vows into
solemn promises. No one can force us to become Protestants or
Modernists. The consequences of this blindness are evident and tragic.
[The Rhine Flows into the Tiber,
p. 59]
The prevailing attitude among so many of the clergy is to accept
a particular belief or practice not because it has an inherent and
enduring truth or value but because it happens to be the current
policy. Thus the very clergy who would have denounced (and rightly so)
any layman who had attended a Protestant service before the Council
will now denounce any layman who suggests that the faith could be in
any way compromised by attending such services. Attendance at
Protestant services, although a matter of discipline, most certainly
involves vital doctrinal principles. Thus a matter touching upon the
very nature of the Church Christ founded is seen in itself as something
neutral; all that matters is the current instruction issued by whoever
is one rank higher up the hierarchical scale. ...
Another sphere in which there was great scope for advance was the
application of Catholic social teaching in the temporal order,
primarily the responsibility of an informed laity. The fact of the
matter is that the majority of the laity were, and still are, very
uninformed - in fact frequently quite ignorant of the fact that the
Church has any social teaching. Far too many laymen tended to
compartmentalize their religion and failed to realize that being a
Catholic involved grave responsibilities regarding their obligations in
the temporal order. To give one obvious example, far too few Catholic
employers or trade unionists allowed the teaching of the Popes in their
social encyclicals to influence the manner in which they co ducted
themselves in, say, pay negotiations. Little thought was given to the
common good, little thought to justice, to equity, to the effect of a
particular settlement on the national economy. For most Catholic
employers, just as for non-Catholic employers, the object was to give
"them" as little as they possibly could without provoking a strike. For
most Catholic workers the object was to get as much as possible out of
"them" even if it meant going on strike. When one considers the extent
of the Catholic school system in the United Kingdom there can be no
doubt that the absence of a large and articulate body of Catholics on
both sides of industry intent upon implementing Catholic social
teaching indicates a widespread and culpable failure to teach young
Catholics their duties in the temporal order. The fact that so many Catholics concerned
to bring about social justice, and motivated by sincere idealism, now
imagine that the only way they can achieve this is by espousing or at
least co-operating with some form of Marxism can be traced back to no
small extent to the preconciliar neglect of Catholic social teaching.
Truly prophetic voices such as those of Fr. Paul Crane or Hamish
Fraser, who tried to combat the almost total apathy with regard to the
social teaching of the Church, remained for the most part unheeded -
the common lot of prophets.
Similarly, in some nominally Catholic countries before the Council, the
complete lack of social justice constituted a scandal. Some Catholics
from the more privileged classes felt that they were fulfilling their
duties in the social sphere simply by being anti-Communist in a sterile
and negative sense. While Catholics
clearly have a duty to oppose Communism in the political sphere, the
most effective way to overcome it is by working to remove the
conditions of injustice which cause so many of the least privileged
members of society to look upon Communism as their only hope of
achieving a standard of living consistent with human dignity.
There was also a definite need for a widespread liturgical
renewal in the pre-conciliar Church - but
a renewal on the lines advocated by the liturgical movement and
approved by such Popes as St. Pius X or Pius XII, a renewal based on
the principles set out in Chapter
IX of Cranmer's Godly Order.
The pseudo-renewal which has followed
Vatican II has nothing in common with the authentic spirit of the
papally approved liturgical movement, as Fr. Louis Bouyer, one of its
leading advocates, has testified. True liturgical renewal would not
have involved discarding the traditional liturgy to be replaced by a
continually evolving and ecumenically inspired series of gimmicks - it
would have involved utilizing the existing liturgy to its fullest
potential, and this potential was infinite.
In a parish where the liturgy came alive the parish came alive
in Mesnil St. Loup in France, for example, between the years 1849 and
1903, the saintly Père
Emmanuel transformed his parish into what could
truly be described as a religious community, mainly through bringing
his people to know, to love, and to play their proper part in the
liturgy - above all by the use of Gregorian chant. If Père
Emmanuel's
peasant parishioners could sing Latin vespers in their church each
evening - joyfully and easily - then any parish could have done the
same. If such parishes had been the
rule rather than the only too rare exception, then the history not only
of the Church but of the world would have been different.
What has been written here with regard
to the need for liturgical renewal in no way conflicts with the
reference to the beauty and dignity of the pre-conciliar liturgy made
earlier in this chapter. While there were some cases of priests
who tended to "gabble" their Mass in a manner which made it unedifying,
the majority conformed to the rubrics and this, in view of the nature
of the traditional Mass, made it impossible for it not to be an
impressive and inspiring ceremony. I well remember how, as a convert
with wide experience of very vocal and emotional evangelical Protestant
services, as well as several varieties of Anglican liturgy, the first
experience of real worship that I encountered was at a low Mass in a
working class parish. Only the server made the responses in the packed
church, few present had a missal, but the atmosphere of reverence and,
at the consecration, of palpable adoration was something which I had
never experienced before and which I shall never forget. ...
Finally, when considering the state of
the Church before the Council, mention must be made of the Modernist
fifth column, the "pernicious adversaries" condemned by St. Pius X in
his encyclical Pascendi Gregis, men lodged within the "very bosom" of the
Church, determined to destroy her "vital energy" and "utterly to
subvert the very Kingdom of Christ". Much will be written of
these pernicious adversaries during the course of this book,
adversaries whose advance St. Pius X and his successors had been able
to contain but whose presence they had been unable to eliminate from
the Mystical Body within which, like some malignant virus, they waited
for the right conditions to enable them to proliferate and infect the
entire organism. Before the Council the Church was indeed, as Pope John
claimed, "vibrant with vitality"; there are few signs of vitality
in the decomposing body of the post-conciliar Church - but the forces
which drained her vitality away existed long before the Council was
called. As this book will make clear,
the Council created the climate which enabled these forces to launch
the attack which has come near to destroying the "vital energy" of the
Church in the western countries at least.
Those who have read Dr. von Hildebrand's Trojan Horse in the City of God,
and it is worth repeating that this is one of the small number of books
which every concerned Catholic should own, will find that he makes a
distinction between the official documents of the Council and the
so-called "Spirit of Vatican II." He says a great deal in praise of the
Council itself, its aims, and its documents. However, as his book was
written 1965 such an attitude is hardly surprising. In my own case, the
realization that not only the Council itself as an event, but even its
official documents, cannot be absolved from responsibility for the
present deplorable state of the Church, did not come until 1972 when I
read the Abbe de Nantes' very radical criticisms of the conciliar
texts: Until this point, as I could prove by citing many articles and
pamphlets, I had, like Dr. von Hildebrand, always taken the line that
the Council documents were beyond reproach and that the present chaos
was the result of their being contradicted or ignored. Indeed, it was
with the object of establishing, if only for my own benefit, that the
criticisms made by the Abbe de Nantes could not be justified that I
began to study the documents more closely. While I still remain a long
way from accepting all his arguments - the case made in this book is
mildness itself in comparison with his critique - he has made it quite
clear that these documents are most certainly far from being the
irreproachable and even sublime restatement of Catholic truth which so
many of us had at first taken them to be. This view was confirmed when
I had the good fortune to obtain a copy of Fr. Wiltgen's book, The Rhine Flows into The Tiber.
More will be said regarding this book in Chapter VII. When I read Fr. Wiltgen's book, in 1973,
and discovered the background to the formulation of the Council texts,
a clear pattern began to merge, a definite and logical progression from
the circumstances in which the documents were formulated, the documents
themselves, and the events which followed the Council.
In view of the manner in which my own enthusiasm for the Council
had been modified I wrote to Dr. von Hildebrand and asked him if his
own views had undergone any changes particularly with regard to such
instances as his praise for the official documents and "the greatness
of the Second Vatican Council" found on page 1 of his book. He has
informed me that he has indeed greatly modified his views concerning
the documents of the Second Vatican Council, and that while there are
still certain points in them which he welcomes, though only a few, a
more detailed study has revealed that such harmful tendencies as
horizontalism, communitarianism, and
false ecumenism can be detected in some of the documents. This
was not apparent to him in 1965 when he wrote his book and it would
have been hard not to react positively to the official documents when
contrasting them with the deplorable books, articles, and lectures of
priests and theologians who claimed to be interpreting the "Spirit of
the Council." Dr. von Hildebrand has authorized me to mention the fact
that he has modified his opinion concerning Vatican II and that he will
be making textual changes in the next edition of Trojan Horse in the City of God.
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