under the patronage of St Joseph and St Dominic

By the rivers of Babylon there we sat and wept, remembering Zion;
on the poplars that grew there we hung up our harps. . . Ps 136

FIFTY THREE AND A HALF YEARS IT’S TAKEN

“The gift of free will with which God the Creator endowed the human person grants man the natural right to choose only the good and the true.  No human person has, therefore, a natural right to offend God in choosing the moral evil of sin, the religious error of idolatry, blasphemy, or a false religion.”[1]

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After two generations of silence on the part of the episcopacy of the Catholic Church—a silence which has provided tacit consent to the heterodoxy of its claims—the Catholic faithful have, at last, found some bishops prepared formally to reject the central plank of Dignitatis Humanae, Vatican II’s ‘Declaration on Religious Freedom’ promulgated on 7^th December 1965.

Cardinals Raymond Burke and Janis Pujats and Bishops Tomash Peta, Jan Pawel Lenga and Athanasius Schnieder issued their Declaration of the truths relating to some of the most common errors in the life of the Church of our time on May 31, 2019.

In countering various of the theological errors uttered by Pope Francis and his refusal to acknowledge them as errors or to resile from them, the five bishops have restated the Church’s constant teaching.  It was inevitable they would find there the principle that there is only one true religion whereby men may be saved, the Catholic religion; inevitable also that they would condemn its denial—a denial taught by the Council’s bishops in Dignitatis Humanae—that men have a natural right to choose any other religion.

Despite its use of the neologisms of Pope John Paul II, a consequence of his subjectivism and besotted-ness with Feminist ideology and his deference, in the spirit of Vatican II, to the secular, the bishops’ Declaration of Truths deserves our admiration.[2]  

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It is timely to recall that we owe the intervention of these bishops not only to the misconduct of Pope Francis but to that of his predecessor.

While Joseph Ratzinger’s record as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was not such as to inspire confidence the orthodox Catholic faithful were hopeful that, as Pope Benedict XVI, he might address the disorders that flowed from the Second Vatican Council and from the idiosyncrasies of Pope John Paul II.  Their hopes received a check when, in September 2005, they learned that he had spent a day fraternising with the heretic theologian Hans Küng.  The protocol of failure to exercise the Church’s discipline, adopted by John XXIII and continued by each of his successors, was not about to be altered.

Pope Benedict brought some improvements especially with his acknowledgement of the lawfulness of demands of the faithful for access to the usus antiquior in the liturgy in the Apostolic Letter Summorum pontificum (July 2007).  But he proved that far from being a solution to the problems we faced he was a part of them when he took the egregious decision to abandon the papacy in mid-course.  This action reduced the office of pope to the level of that of chief executive of some secular corporation, an attitude entirely consistent with Vatican II’s embrace of the secular.

The Pope’s abandonment of the family of which he was the father brought, as occurs in the natural order, a shaking of the family’s foundations.  It matters not that he could not foresee that a Modernist would take his place; that his family would be left to the uncertain influence of a step-father who was not at all interested in their welfare.  Once a man embraces a defective principle he is bound by its consequences.

In a recent article on the website OnePeterFive its principal, Steve Skojec, agreed with this assessment but was pessimistic about the future:

“We have two men in Rome who are dressed as popes, and both are complicit.  One promotes these errors, and the other praises him while refusing to raise his voice against the endless scandals.

“They are both guilty, and nobody in the Church is going to save us.”[3]

We beg to disagree.  There are great goods abroad to balance the great evils.  Australian cantor, Ronan Reilly, summarized it with a comment to the writer after a splendid Nuptial Mass at the church of the Maternal Heart in the Sydney suburb of Lewisham at the end of April: “We are living in a time of great extremes”.

The Catholic Church is the Church of God—she is not a human thing; she is Divine.  Men are merely the instruments of her activity.  The soul of the Church is the Holy Spirit and, when He is ready, a leader, or leaders will emerge to restore the Church’s influence in the world—for the gates of hell will not prevail against it.  Hilaire Belloc put it succinctly:

“One thing in this world is different from all other.  It has a personality and a force.  It is recognised, and (when recognised) most violently loved or hated.  It is the Catholic Church.  Within that household the human spirit has roof and hearth.  Outside it is the Night.”[4]

These five bishops have given us heart for the battle ahead.

Michael Baker

June 23, 2019—Corpus Christi