MATER POPULI FIDELIS - THE ATTACK ON THE MOTHER OF GOD

 

PART III – ‘VATICAN II’[1]

 

 Here [in ‘Mater Populi fidelis’] we are faced with a vicious circle bordering on the absurd: we are warned against a supposedly excessive means of attaining an end when that means has been given us precisely for that end.

Don Davide Pagliarani[2]

 

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     In the Votive Mass of the Blessed Virgin and in the Little Office of the Blessed Virgin, God’s Holy Church invokes liturgically the force of the words in Genesis 3: 15, “She will crush thy head…”, as it proclaims of her, “Thou alone hast destroyed all the heresies in the whole world…”  In his prayer of consecration to her under the title - evoking the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception – the Immaculata, St Maximilian Kolbe adopts this passage as he appeals to her in these terms:

“For upon whatever place you enter, you implore the grace of conversion and sanctification, for all grace comes to us from the Sacred Heart of Jesus only through your hands.”

 

In his encyclical marking the fiftieth anniversary of Pius IX’s definition of the Immaculate Conception, Ad Diem Illum Laetissimum (February 2^nd, 1904), Pius X said that the plague which denies Original Sin and its consequences—

“is equally fatal to society at large and to Christianity, finds its ruin in the dogma of the Immaculate Conception by the obligation it imposes of recognizing in the Church a power before which not only has [human] will to bow, but intelligence to subject itself….  It is from this… that the Christian people sing the praise of the Mother of God: Thou art all fair, O Mary, and the stain of original sin is not in thee (Mass of the Immaculate Conception).  And… once again there is justified what the Church attributes to this august Virgin that she has exterminated all heresies in the world.”

 

The title ‘destroyer of all heresies’ is endorsed in the Tract after Septuagesima from the Common of the Blessed Virgin Mary and in the Votive Mass and Office in honour of Mary, Mediatrix of All Graces instituted by Benedict XV at the request of Cardinal Mercier on January, 12^th, 1921.[3]  This followed the Pope’s 1918 apostolic letter Inter Sodalicia (March 22^nd, 1918) issued to a Roman sodality commemorating the Confraternity of Our Lady of a Good Death - the Addolorata, or Sorrowful Virgin, where he said this:

“[T]he Doctors of the Church by common consent profess that, if the Most Blessed Virgin did not apparently have any participation in the public life of Jesus Christ, and then suddenly reappeared on the path to Calvary and under the Cross, she could not have been present without Divine design.  For, as she suffered and almost died together with her suffering and dying Son, she gave up her rights as mother over this Son for the salvation of men and, to appease Divine justice inasmuch as it pertained to her [quantum ad se pertinebat] she immolated Him, so that it can be said appropriately that she has, together with Christ, redeemed the human race [ipsam cum Christo humanum genus redemisse]…”

 

Benedict’s successor, Pius XI, condemned in Mortalium Animos (January 6^th, 1928), movements outside Christ’s Church – Protestant, Modernist, heretical – which hijacked Christ’s words ut unum sint (John 17: 11) in support of their indifferentism, and called in aid of their confounding—

“the prayers of the Blessed Mary, the Virgin, Mother of divine grace, victorious over all heresies and Help of Christians” [n. 12].

 

In a recent paper on the Rorate Caeli website[4] Canadian lay theologian, Dr John Lamont, has exposed the heterodoxy of Mater Populi fidelis.  (If he garnishes it with quotes from the ersatz council with its problematic expressions, and from Paul VI, and uses the occasion to insist that ‘the Council’ was a work of the Catholic Church, his arguments are nevertheless sound.)[5]  Dr Lamont says that the document propounds an anti-Catholic theology of grace and he exposes the debility of its reasoning with the following—

• It claims that Our Lady adds nothing to Christ’s communication of sanctifying grace, which does not exclude the possibility of her instrumentality in its bestowal;
• it asserts that she should not be regarded as the instrumental agent of the free bestowal of sanctifying grace, yet,
• it claims she may be regarded as an agent of the bestowal of actual graces.

 

These arguments in Mater Populi fidelis misconceive the nature of an instrument which possesses no power of its own so if God elects to use an instrument His action does not depend on it.  Moreover, if Our Lady is conceded as an instrument in respect of actual graces, it is irrational to deny her instrumentality in respect of sanctifying grace.  Lamont concludes:

“If [Our Blessed Lady] cannot influence the salvation of sinners, a fortiori other human beings cannot do so either…  It is thus futile for anyone to pray for the salvation of anyone else, or to ask for prayers for anyone’s salvation.  No-one can influence God to forgive a sinner and give [him] sanctifying grace through [his] prayers… Not only is it futile to pray for someone else… it is futile for anyone except for Jesus Christ to pray to receive sanctifying grace for himself…”

 

Needless to say, this conclusion not only reflects the Protestant position on Our Lady, but the Protestant denial of the power of impetrative prayer.

 

Let us summarise the effect of Part II of our study.

 

 

Modernists do not behave like the heretics of old who, once departure from the Church’s teachings became apparent, would abandon her.  They insist on remaining within the Church, hide their heterodoxy, persist in claiming they are Catholic and speak almost as if they are Catholic - though with altered terminology.  They strive to reduce the faithful to their views, to divert them from what the Church intends, their eternal salvation.  Their mode is dissimulation.  The Modernist priest, in sermons and counselling in the confessional, white-ants the Church’s teaching. 

 

It may be objected that those suspected of being Modernists appear committed Catholics, that they do not condemn religion, that at worst, they have some funny views and use language in curious ways.  But theirs is a long campaign, a strategy with many steps, such as—

• to encourage doubt;
• to recast Catholic truths so as to alter the meanings the Church maintains;
• to insist that doctrine (dogma) must adapt to current conditions;
• to insist that the Church’s directions in moral matters be moderated to suit the world’s demands;
• to say we must focus, in our dealings with non-Catholics, on what unites rather than what divides and endorse the false, neo-Protestant, understanding of the term ‘ecumenism’.[7]
• to remove, in emulation of Protestantism, preoccupation of the faithful with Mary.

The reader will find each of these characteristics in the teachings of the ersatz council and exemplified in its alumni, the popes - including the current Pope – cardinals and bishops.

 

Of all the heresies the Catholic Church has had to address down the centuries, Modernism is, at once, the worst and most difficult to isolate because of its distorted way of thinking, confusing mental being (what exists in mind) with real being (reality).  Like the chameleon (on land) or the octopus (in the sea) it alters appearance to suit its surroundings.  The speech of Modernist Bishop X may satisfy his orthodox congregation in one church today and be blatantly heterodox when he addresses a more receptive audience tomorrow.

 

From 1907 to 1962

After Pius X had excommunicated arch-Modernists Fr George Tyrell SJ, in 1907, and Fr Albert Loisy, in 1908, the heresy went into hiding, submerged as it were, in the Church’s broad sea, whence it would surface episodically.  One of its guises was liturgical experiment whose proponents, such as Dom Lambert Beauduin (1873 - 1960), were untroubled by occasional condemnations.  It is regrettable, in retrospect, the Popes and bishops of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s did not pay more attention to the principle lex orandi statuat legem credendi - “the law of what is to be prayed determines the law of what is to be believed”.  It has a corollary: falsify the Church’s liturgy and you invent a new, and false, religion.  This, as we will see, is what transpired.

 

The upheavals wrought by the Second World War (1939 - 1945) facilitated spread of the heresy.  Theories promoted by progressive theologians adopted Tyrell’s nouvelle théologie.  These so concerned Pius XII that he had one of the Church’s principal theologians, Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, publish a criticism.[8]  In August 1950 the Pope condemned the new theological mood and the philosophical errors underpinning it in Humani Generis (August 12^th, 1950).  Modernism’s growing band ignored him: they knew better than the Pope, knew better than the Church.  Pius XII’s death in 1958 and the choice of Angelo Cardinal Roncalli to replace him removed the fetters.   The doubts Pius had entertained over the orthodoxy of his cardinals were shown to have been justified when they elected as his successor one who had long disobeyed the Magisterium.  With John XXIII came an opportunity to reinvent the Church, or to attempt it.  The vehicle for this revolution was his convocation of the world’s bishops in 1962.

 

‘The Second Vatican Council’

For a synod of bishops to be reckoned an ecumenical, or general, council of the Catholic Church, it must, after the fashion of a valid sacrament, have appropriate matter, form and intention.  It is simply not to the point to consider what the attending bishops thought about this synod, what the Pope who convoked it thought, or what the Pope who oversaw it thought; if any of these three was missing, the synod’s utterances would, to paraphrase St Paul, be no more than “sounding brass and tinkling cymbal” (I Cor. 13: 1).  The presence of the three guaranteed the influence upon it of the Holy Spirit and an accompanying charity which is the mark of His influence.  The absence of any one of the three would ensure the synod was malicious, and a fraud.

 

Why these three?  The reason is that every action has four causes, material, efficient, final and formal.  The efficient cause, the cause which causes by acting, is in the case of a sacrament, the priest officiating: in the case of a synod, it is the bishops acting.  The material cause (the matter) is the bishops present.  The final cause is their (collective) intention, the reason they are gathered.  The formal cause, which determines just what sort of gathering it is, turns on that intention, why they are gathered.

 

Clearly there was no problem with the matter: the bishops were there.  What about the form, what sort of gathering was it?  Formality follows on finality: what something is, its quiddity, is determined by the end the thing exists to serve.  What, then was the end for which the synod was summoned?  Or, better put, what were the intentions of the Pope who summoned it and of the Pope who oversaw it?

 

The two Popes, John XXIII and Paul VI, were each infected with the Modernist virus and shared (no doubt quite unconsciously) a euphoria over the prospect of submitting the Church to its demands.  No surprise, then, to find that they agreed on the end intended - expressed by John XXIII in his Opening Address (October 11^th, 1962), confirmed by Paul VI in his Closing Address (December 7^th, 1965).  Its end was not the good of the Church but something else.  It was to adjust her teachings to the world’s demands in line with the preconceptions of the Modernist heresy.  We laid out these preconceptions in Part II of this paper.

 

The end of the convocation of the synod being defective, so also was the form the two purported to impose on it reflected in its title: “an ecumenical, or general, council” of the Catholic Church.  In this, shared, ineptitude we see the signal characteristic of modern philosophy (and the heresy it fathered), the confusion of mental being—what they thought they were doing—with real being, what in fact they did.

 

For three years, under the pretext of conducting a work of the Church, the attending bishops—some knowingly and viciously, many negligently and unconcernedly, most unheedingly,—passed resolutions which served the Modernist agenda.  These, the Modernists driving the synod so interlarded with extracts from the Church’s teaching as to give the appearance of orthodoxy.  These Catholic currants in the Modernist pudding have served their purposes well, for they have persuaded otherwise orthodox Catholics, such as Dr Lamont, to engage in its vigorous defence.

 

When the synod closed in December 1965 and the bishops returned to their dioceses, they put the disruptions of the faith they had embraced into practice, leading astray a vast majority of the clergy, religious and faithful.  Objectively taken, each of ‘the Council’s’ bishops was responsible for the chaos.  But the one primarily responsible for that harm was the Pope who brought it to conclusion, the one who had aided and abetted its Modernist agenda from the outset – Paul VI. 

 

Modernist Errors Condemned by Pius X proclaimed in ‘the Council’

Having demonstrated in the above analysis that in its causes the synod was not an ecumenical, or general, council of the Catholic Church, we will now prove it through its effects.  It can be said of the departures from Catholic orthodoxy in which ‘the Council’s’ bishops indulged that ‘their name is legion’.  We will content ourselves here with thirty-five.

 

In a paper issued on this website in March 2021, we listed extracts from six of the documents promulgated by this defective synod - those on the liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium, on the Protestant-inspired novelty which reinvented the term ‘ecumenism’, Unitatis Redintegratio, on the Church, Lumen Gentium, on divine revelation, Dei Verbum, on the Church in the modern world, Gaudium et Spes, and on ‘religious freedom’, Dignitatis Humanae.  Each contains propositions, Modernist in inspiration, which are destructive of Catholic principle.[9]  The reader is invited to turn to that paper, study the criticisms offered and the authorities, additional to those set forth by Pius X in Pascendi, which prove their heterodoxy. 

 

Positions advanced by the ‘Council’ in derogation of the Integrity of Catholic Truth

1. That the unity of faith and government in the Church is deficient.
2. That the Church’s sacred liturgy needs to be reformed because unsuitable to the needs of the present time.
3. That the Church must change her sacred liturgy to facilitate the admittance to the Church of those outside her fold who believe in Christ.
4. That the efficacy of the sacred liturgy is dependent on full and active participation of the people attending.
5. That, absent a general restoration to remove what is out of harmony with it or unsuited to it, the effectiveness ex opere operato of the sacred liturgy is lacking.
6. The Catholic Church is blamable for dissensions that led to some becoming separated from her.
7. There have been deficiencies in the way the Church’s teaching has been formulated.
8. Those who believe in Christ and have been baptised are, though their communion be imperfect, in communion with the Catholic Church; they have a right to be called Christian, and are correctly accepted as brothers by Catholics.
9. Many of the significant elements and endowments which together go to build up and give life to the Catholic Church can exist outside the visible boundaries of the Church.
10. Many outside the Church use liturgical actions that truly engender a life of grace and must be regarded as giving access to the community of salvation.
11. Those separated from the Catholic Church are by no means deprived of salvation.
12. The Spirit of Christ has used [liturgical actions of separated churches and communities] as means of salvation.
13. The said means derive their efficacy from the fulness of grace and truth entrusted to the Church.
14. Christ summons His Church to continual reformation.
15. The Church is always in need of reformation.
16. The Catholic Church is in the nature of a sacrament or instrument of union with God of all men.
17. The Church of Christ is not—it only underlies—the Catholic Church.
18. The Church is joined to baptised Christians who do not adhere to her.
19. The Holy Spirit exercises His sanctifying power in them.
20. The Holy Spirit has strengthened them even to the point of martyrdom.
21. Jews who have not forsaken their Jewish faith are related to the faithful of the Church.
22. Muslims adore Almighty God in the same way as Catholics do.
23. The definition of the Church’s tradition is that set out in Dei Verbum n. 8 and not that laid down by the Council of Trent and confirmed in 1870 by the Vatican Council.
24. Those who believe with a divine and Catholic faith (inter alios) are among those who hold almost unanimously that the things of earth should be ordained solely to man, that is, to the exclusion of God and His glory.
25. God created all things on earth solely for man’s good.
26. God created man for man’s own good.
27. God intended man to be the centre and summit of His material creation.
28. God did not create the earth and all it contains for His own glory.
29. Christ by His incarnation intended to awaken man to his own talents and his vocation.
30. Christ by His incarnation intended to raise human nature to a high dignity.
31. Christ by His incarnation intended to unite Himself with each man. 
32. Man’s dignity is inherent in his humanity alone (and not in the power bestowed on him through faith of becoming sons of God through Sanctifying Grace).
33. Man’s liberty to choose any religion, or no religion, is a supreme principle of his worth.
34. There is no conflict between the liberty to choose any religion, or no religion, and the command of Christ to follow His teaching exclusively.
35. There is no conflict between the liberty to choose any religion, or no religion, and the obligations binding in conscience to follow the command of Christ to follow His teaching exclusively.

 

If the assembled bishops had endorsed only one of these heterodox propositions, it would have been sufficient to cast doubt on the assertion that the synod was a work of the Catholic Church, let alone an ecumenical or general council. 

 

Nothing – NOTHING! – uttered by that pseudo-synod binds the Catholic Church or the faithful.  This is not to say that everything the attending bishops said there was reprehensible, for its Modernist promoters were careful, as remarked, to ensure it contained elements of the Church’s established teaching.  Accordingly, while it cannot be condemned in everything—for the sake of the elements of orthodoxy it contains—yet it is to be condemned as a whole, as an entity devoted to the destruction of the integrity of the Church and her teaching – non in omnibus damnandum est, sed in toto.  It should not need saying that the Church’s prior teaching stands on its own feet and needs no endorsement by an heretical synod to buttress its authority.

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     Because its determinations claimed to be determinations of the Church, there is one notable error of that pseudo-synod whose adoption by those in Christ’s Church has been used as a vehicle for further harm.  That is the contention in the synod’s document Lumen Gentium n. 21 that on episcopal consecration the power of jurisdiction is conferred together with the power of order (Holy Order in its fulness).  The claim is false.  The two powers differ in nature and in their modes of transmission.

• The power of order is a participation in the Priesthood of Christ, as St Thomas makes clear (Summa Theologiae III, q. 63, a, 3).  It imposes an indelible character (as do the sacraments of baptism and confirmation) which character abides even if its subject abandons the faith or goes into schism.
• The power of jurisdiction is a share in Christ’s Kingship, (III, q. 8, a. 6).  The power is a moral authority, for the preaching of Christian truth.  It is lost as soon as its subject leaves the Church.  Thus, the heretic, the schismatic, loses any jurisdiction he may have had on his departure.[10] 

 

The embrace of this error by the synod’s bishops, and its adoption by their successors and the Popes who succeeded Paul VI is significant for this reason.  It provides an excuse for the assertion that if, in order to preserve the Catholic faith free of Modernist taint, bishops should consecrate a priest as bishop without a papal mandate, they would be endowing that bishop with jurisdiction as well.  That is, it may be claimed that the bishops consecrating, and the bishops consecrated, are arrogating to themselves a power which belongs to the Vicar of Christ alone, and, are therefore in schism.  It is on this defective foundation that it will be alleged that the actions taken by the bishops of the Society of St Pius X to consecrate bishops to assist, and eventually succeed, them to secure the Catholic faith will inevitably be grounded.

 

Paul VI’s Attempt to ‘set in stone’ the Modernist Imposition

Paul VI’s attempt to impose on the Church and the faithful a novel rite of Holy Mass was, as we have shown elsewhere, a breach of the Church’s prohibition against anyone doing so.  That prohibition, which did not involve a mere matter of discipline, concerned the faith itself and was therefore irreformable.  Paul VI’s novus ordo missae is an illicit rite – because in breach of the terms of Session 7 canon 13 of the Council of Trent and Pius V’s bull Quo Primum (July 14^th 1570).[11]   But, not only is it an illicit rite, it is a schismatic rite because it teaches a false religion, a religion other than the Catholic faith.  Here is the application, by negation (in its advancement of a false religion), of the theological maxim lex orandi statuat legem credendi referred to above.

 

Let us hasten to add this caveat for the doubtful reader: it is possible for a Catholic to retain his faith while frequenting Mass in this illicit rite.  The problem that confronts him is that the rite militates against the orthodoxy of his faith, urges him to conformity with Modernism’s protocols and facile postulates.  Moreover, it presses him to persist in what is objectively sinful, namely, attending a false and illicit rite of Mass.

 

There is another, and associated, matter.  It is precisely because the vast majority of the Church’s bishops and clergy offer this false rite of Mass every day, that they are so utterly ineffectual.  Their silence when they should speak, their conformity to the social and the moral defects of the secular world, are eloquent of the fact that they behave not as Catholics, but as Modernist heretics.

 

The Leonine Mindset

Modernists cleave only to what is palpable; to this present life; to the modern world; to what is popular; no scope in their doctrine for belief as a rational response to facts whose cause transcends what the senses report.  Though they never say so explicitly, they reject all assertion of the immaterial, of the supernatural.  ‘Belief’, even the belief in God many Protestants profess is, for them, no more than a feeling whose source is personal consciousness.[12]  In lieu of what is fundamental to the faith—significant and eternal—the Modernist focuses on the temporal, the trivial and shallow.

 

This defect was well illustrated by Pope Leo’s fatuous action, on October 1^st, 2025, of blessing a block of ice harvested from Antarctica and using the occasion to sermonize against the alleged perils of ‘climate change’!   He diminished to inconsequence the trust the Church and her faithful place in God and His Providence revealed in Psalms 23, 92, 103 and elsewhere.  It demonstrated the Pope’s insouciance, if not utter ignorance, of God’s mockery (in Psalm 52) of those who refuse to acknowledge God and His providence - illic trepidaverunt timore, ubi not erat timor - as “indulging in agitation and fear where there is nothing to fear”.  It showed, moreover, his rooted incomprehension of the meaning of the words of the Pater Noster, fiat voluntas tua sicut in caelo et in terra, where the Latin noun caelum signifies not that realm convertible with the Godhead, but the entity, whose creation, expressed in the very first verse of Genesis, contains the whole of material creation.[13]

 

God’s Infinite and Benevolent Will rules all creation.  He has anticipated, from all eternity, the harm man might attempt to creation.  He has, likewise, anticipated the harm faithless Catholics would attempt to impose on His Church, and preordained how it will be circumvented.

 

Leo’s Denigration of the Blessed Virgin

Though he makes sure to keep his thoughts to himself, the Modernist deprecates the doctrines of the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin.  He takes the more subtle approach of denouncing titles those doctrines imply, such as Co-Redemptrix and Mediatrix of Graces.  The attitude was manifest during the ersatz Council where attempts by orthodox bishops to persuade the synod to dedicate a document to Our Lady and proclaim these titles formally were suppressed by the Modernist ukase.  The reader who doubts this claim should study the Letter of theologian, Fr Luigi Villa, exposing the shortcomings of Cardinal Angelo Roncalli who became Pope John XXIII for his privately expressed rejection of the doctrine of the Assumption.[14]

 

Let the reader observe how far from orthodoxy in faith and morals the Church seems to have come under ‘Pope Francis’ and Pope Leo XIV.  The Church’s moral stands against divorce, against sexual immorality and against the sanctity of life in the womb have largely been abandoned.  Leo has played fast and loose with the central principle of the Creed embodied in the Latin expression filioque.  The Church’s opposition to the principles of indifferentism, embodied in the false ecumenism embraced by the ersatz council and the popes who have succeeded Paul VI, has seemingly evaporated.   

 

The answer to the dilemma presented by these facts is, we have argued elsewhere, only solved with the realisation that since 1965 there has existed in the Vatican along with the Catholic Church, another ‘Church’.  The Catholic Church is of God, divine: the other ‘Church’, the Church of Vatican II, is of man and the devil.                  

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     The Modernist attack upon Our Lady is necessary, for the devil must do what he can to diminish the power given her by the Almighty, and what instrument could be more fitting to his purpose than the Vicar of Christ?

 

Mary has overcome every heresy to date.  In the fulness of time, once she has convinced the faithful of its poison, she will destroy the heresy of Modernism also.

 

 

Michael Baker

March 25^th, 2026—The Annunciation of the Lord