August 2002

During the past 12 years, I have had the honor of serving traditional Catholics throughout the U.S., the joy of supervising the Society’s work in 103 chapels in 40 states nationwide, the consolation of being able to see so many hopes and dreams come to fruition: two new retreat houses and four new priories established, 41 churches and chapels acquired, a further 8 churches built from the ground up, 22 new Catholic schools opened and others expanded, and so much more. In all this I have been little more than a constant witness to the edifying generosity and the spirit of self-sacrifice of so many of our faithful. Compared to the indifference to religion that we see all around us, it is an indescribable privilege to be a priest in the Society of Saint Pius X as we live through this mortal combat for the Faith.

Yet all of these efforts have only one purpose and one objective, that it is so easy to forget, the salvation of souls: "For what shall it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, and suffer the loss of his soul?" (Mk 8:36). This is the entirely supernatural perspective of our Faith, which sees our lives, our activities and even our efforts to promote the Social Kingship of Our Lord Jesus Christ, as purely and simply means towards the final goal of everlasting life, for which God made us. If this supernatural perspective has always been difficult for Catholics to maintain, if the natural tendency to become preoccupied with material and physical things has always been a challenge to overcome, if our superficiality has always been reluctant to meditate on divine truths, if our poor fallen human nature has always preferred to forget the thoughts of judgement and eternity, it is all the more the case now.

For this is precisely the error of the modern world, that Vatican II so effectively infiltrated into the post-Conciliar Church, the omission of the supernatural order of grace and divinely revealed truth. You might wonder why it is that an omission would be such a big deal. You can always add in what is missing from the recipe. It is the argument of conservatives that insist on staying in the modernist churches, blinded to the fact that their Faith is gradually whittled away and their docility to grace entirely blunted. However, it is the total omission of the distinction between nature and grace, between the natural order and the supernatural order, that is the most characteristic mark of Vatican II.

It is precisely this omission that is at the origin of the struggle towards a "kingdom of God" in earthly dimensions that so characterizes the modernist church. Why, in fact, the incessant struggle for the rights of man, the freedom of all religions, worldwide peace and justice among all men, and the good of humanity, if it not be to constitute an earthly kingdom, a universal brotherhood of mankind? All the abuses and betrayals of the modern church, all of its sacrileges, ecumenism, indifferentism and syncretism ultimately come down to this one simple omission. It is not the invoking of the name of God that will correct such an omission.

This omission is of the most essential good that there is, the preaching of the necessity for eternal salvation of believing the divinely revealed truths of the catechism, and of maintaining the state of sanctifying grace and being docile to all the actual graces that the Good Lord bestows upon us. However, Saint Thomas Aquinas rightly defines evil as the omission of the good that is due. Consequently, we have every right to call this omission from Vatican II evil, and a grave evil at that, just as we have the duty to call the New Mass evil.

This omission can be difficult for the untrained eye to detect. Take, for example, the Vatican II document Gaudium et spes or the Church in the modern world. Speaking of how our human activity has as its goal, not eternal salvation, but to create a new humanity that will finally promote as the fruits of its own nature and efforts, the liberal and revolutionary values of fraternity, equality and liberty, it has this to say: "Far from diminishing our concern to develop this earth, the expectancy of a new earth (note the deliberate ambiguity) should spur us on (i.e., by our own efforts to create a better world), for it is here that the body of a new human family grows (this new humanity is the solidarity of all mankind, all of which is considered renewed or redeemed) foreshadowing in some way the age which is to come (note again the ambiguity). That is why, although we must be careful to distinguish earthly progress clearly from the increase of the kingdom of Christ, such progress is of vital concern to the kingdom of God, (Why would earthly progress be of such vital concern if it were eternal life that were being spoken of?) insofar as it can contribute to the better ordering of human society." (If progress is a part of the kingdom of God inasmuch as it orders society, then this kingdom cannot be anything but terrestrial).

"When we have spread on earth the fruits of our nature and our enterprise – human dignity, brotherly communion, and freedom - …we will find them once again, cleansed this time from the stain of sin…an eternal and universal kingdom…" (§39) The kingdom of God to be looked for always and everywhere is consequently the product of our own nature and efforts, and it consists in the liberal and revolutionary values of those who do not believe in sin, the redemption or the divinity of Christ. The reference to sin here is not personal, as we understand it, but the corporate fault of a society that does not practice the godless values of equality, fraternity and liberty.

It is hardly surprising that the same document of Vatican II states that because all men are equal in the sense that Christ died for all (true), then they are all efficaciously redeemed (false) and that all have the same destiny (radically false, since many will be condemned to hell): "All men…have the same nature and origin and, being redeemed by Christ, they enjoy the same divine calling and destiny" (§29) Similarly ludicrous is the statement in §22: "For , by his incarnation, he, the son of God, has in a certain way united himself with every man". Consequently the whole idea of the universal redemption of mankind, so essential to the agenda of the modernists and ecumenists, is entirely based upon the denial of the supernatural order of truth and grace, and the subsequent reinterpretation of all Catholic doctrines in this light.

If the denial of the supernatural is the root of the present day crisis in the Church, then we must be committed to fight against it to death. We cannot love God, who is all Good, without hating evil, and especially this evil that destroys every effort to obtain eternal salvation. We cannot love and serve the Church without fighting against this undermining of the very basis of the Faith. The failure to do this underlies the compromise of those who stay within the Novus Ordo system or the Indult.

Without the supernatural order our lives are meaningless and our Faith empty, our prayers are powerless and our efforts sterile, our works without merit and our desires unrealizable. If the Society is committed to restoring all things in Christ, it can only do so by preaching and living this supernatural order, that we have received as a precious gift, entirely gratuitously, without any merit of our own, and which, alas, is not shared by the majority of men, nor even by the majority of people who call themselves Catholic.

If over these years I have seen numerous priests and faithful abandon the Society in its combat, it is quite simply because they forgot this most basic principle. It is so easy to get bogged down in canonical arguments, so attractive to want to be accepted, so comfortable to chose an independent or Indult Mass. However, when we keep the perspective of the supernatural, when we remember how much we have received through the Society from the Church, when we recall to mind the eternal gravity of the stakes, it becomes much easier to overcome the trivial turmoil, the passing disturbances, the hurt feelings and humiliations, and to be faithful to our priests and to our priesthood, to our daily meditations and rosaries, to our annual retreats and pilgrimages, to our Third Order obligations, to our study of the writings of the two centuries of Popes who preceded Vatican II, to the tranquillity of the divine order which is the preparation for the everlasting peace of heaven. This is the grace that I wish for all of you as I leave to take up my new assignment at Holy Cross Seminary in Goulburn, Australia, for which also I ask for your prayers.

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