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

THE NEXT STEP TO SCHISM ?

“One of the primary obligations assigned by Christ to the office divinely committed to Our care of feeding the Lord’s flock is that of guarding with the greatest vigilance the deposit of the faith... rejecting profane novelties... and repudiating knowledge falsely so called.  There has never been a time when this watchfulness of the supreme pastor was not necesary... for, such is the diligence of the enemy of the human race, there have never been lacking men speaking perverse things, vain talkers and seducers, those who err and who drive others to err...”
Pope Pius X, Pascendi Dominici Gregis, 8th September, 1907.

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An article on The Catholic Thing website by Fr Mark A Pilon entitled A ‘Lambeth Moment‘ for the Synod is timely.  It may be viewed there via a search under 16th October 2014.[1]   It is reproduced here in the Appendix.

The preoccupation of the bishops of the Second Vatican Council in making the Catholic faith more accessible to members of the various Protestant sects and to unbelievers brought with it the peril of compromise of elements of the faith and of the Church’s teaching on morals.  The novelties of collegiality, of ecumenism and ‘religious freedom’ served to entrench a disturbance of right order among the faithful.  Loss of faith and the loss of two generations of Catholic children attending nominally ‘Catholic’ schools, are part of its effects.  The distinction bruited among the bishops at the recent Synod between the Church’s doctrine and her pastoral practice, a conceptual not a real distinction, derives from the Council and is driven by the Council’s ethos.

The very title ‘Synod’ smacks of Anglicanism and its Protestant view that faith and morals fall to be determined by democratic vote.[2]   There is, then, hardly reason for us to be surprised at finding errors enunciated by Anglicans more than 80 years ago promoted now by Catholic bishops.  In 1930 the Anglican bishop of Oxford Dr Gore, to whom Fr Pilon refers, saw the truth : once a principle is admitted consequences flow.  So deeply was Pope Pius XI moved by the folly of the Lambeth Conference resolutions that he ensured they were answered within the year of their utterance―on 31st December―in the encyclical Casti Connubii.

One survey says a majority of the bishops attending the Synod was in favour of admitting the divorced and remarried to reception of the Eucharist and to recognising the ‘union’ of homosexual pairs.[3]   If this record is accurate, it demonstrates a lack of concern over the contradiction of Catholic principle by a majority of those participating.  The precipitating cause of this abandonment of Catholic principle was the same as attended the irregularities of Vatican II, lack of papal leadership.  Schism, my dear fellow Catholics, is just around the corner.

Without seeming to be unduly pessimistic over the direction in which a great number of the Church’s bishops are heading―to say nothing of that of the Pope―let us review the private revelations accepted by the Church which speak of catastrophic happenings in the household of the Church.

On 2nd February 1634, in an apparition to a nun, Sister Maria Anna of Jesus, at the Convent of the Immaculate Conception in Quito, Ecuador, Our Blessed Lady revealed herself as Mary of Good Fortune (Buen Suceso).[4]   The sanctuary light had gone out and the nun had gone to relight it when the chapel was filled with light as the Blessed Virgin appeared.  The extinguishment of the lamp, she said, was a sign.  In the 19th and 20th centuries various errors would flourish among the members of the faithful.  Morals would become corrupt and the faith almost disappear.  The innocence of children would be largely compromised.  Priests would abandon their holy duties and lose true direction.  No prelate would be watching any longer over his flock with love and prudence and many would lose the spirit of God and bring their own souls into danger.  Satan would appear to gain control of the world and darken the minds of people consecrated to God.

At La Salette-Fallavaut in France, on 19th September 1846, the Blessed Virgin appeared to two children, Maximin Giraud and Melanie Calvat.[5]   In the course of her revelations she warned that there would be an eclipse of the faith in Rome.  “Rome will lose the faith and become the seat of anti-Christ.”
On 13th October 1884, Leo XIII learned in a prophetic vision that the Devil would be given power for upwards of one hundred years to attempt to destroy Christ’s Church.

What better way to try and destroy the Church than from within !

Michael Baker
25th October, 2014―Memorial of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales
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APPENDIX

A ‘LAMBETH MOMENT’ FOR THE SYNOD

Fr Mark A Pilon
The Catholic Thing, 16 October, 2014

In 1920, the Anglican Church’s Lambeth Conference solidly condemned the use of contraceptives for whatever motives. Ten years later, a new Lambeth Conference gave a restricted approval in Resolution 15 to the use of contraceptives – by married people only, and only for the most serious morally upright motives, not “from motives of selfishness, luxury, or mere convenience.”

That same year the Anglican Bishop of Oxford, Dr. Charles Gore, wrote a carefully argued pamphlet refuting the reasoning and the conclusions of Resolution 15. The 1930 Lambeth Conference was a moment of truth for the Church of England, and Dr. Gore was terribly worried that this conference had yielded to the spirit of the world in its half-hearted reversal of the Church’s constant tradition on contraception.  His argument is based upon Tradition more than natural law, and he is very appreciative of the Roman Catholic fidelity to the Tradition on this moral teaching.

Dr. Gore realistically read the context within which this acceptance of birth prevention by a major religious communion, no matter how limited in intent, has to be viewed. Already in that time, he and others clearly saw the threat of birth control to marriage itself and to the very existence of civilization. He refers to the threat of what he calls the unbridled “tide of sensualism” in western societies, which can only be made worse by this collapse of moral opposition to one of the key threats to our civilization.

Likewise he refers several times to the threat of national suicide or race-suicide, as he calls it, thus anticipating the demographic suicide that St. John Paul II would later recognize – and is underway in our time. He also anticipates the harm that all forms of contraception do to women, and this was long before the Pill and other intrusive means promoted today by pharmaceutical giants and the medical profession.

But most interesting is the fact that this same Lambeth Conference also dealt with allowing the divorced and remarried to receive Communion, and did so in much the same language we are now hearing from some bishops and theologians at the ongoing Extraordinary Synod on the Family. In Lambeth’s Resolution 11, the wording is interesting: “The Conference believes that it is with this ideal in view that the Church must deal with questions of divorce and with whatever threatens the security of women and the stability of the home.”

Note the word “ideal,” which is popping up today in some reports about the Synod, and the ideal is the indissolubility of marriage. In a second paragraph of Resolution 11, we read: “Where an innocent person has remarried under civil sanction and desires to receive the Holy Communion, it recommends that the case should be referred for consideration to the bishop, subject to provincial regulations.”

That is exactly what some participants at the Synod are suggesting today as an alternative to the annulment process, including a couple of very highly placed Cardinals. It should be a warning that we are in dangerous waters when Catholic bishops and cardinals in 2014 start speaking the exact words of Anglican clerics and laity at Lambeth in 1930. Those well-intentioned solutions ended in disaster for Anglicans.

But it also should be a warning that the Anglicans dealt with this latter problem of Communion for the divorced and remarried along side the problem of contraception. Something similar may well be underway at the present Synod. While one of the main subjects seems to be pastoral charity toward the divorced and remarried, there are clearly those who want to reopen the “pastoral” issue related to contraception as well. Cardinal Kasper, for all his dancing around the subject, clearly is of this mindset as is his former assistant, Bishop Bonny of Antwerp, along with members of the German and other European episcopates.

Just as the declaration of Lambeth in 1920 did not end the contraception issue for the dissenters who came back and won the day in 1930, so the dissenters from Humanae Vitae and the constant teaching of the Church on contraception have for years been strategically quiet. They are now coming back to try to change the teaching. They have never honestly accepted the constant teaching of the Church on “birth prevention” as irreformable and infallibly taught – and powerfully confirmed by Pius XI, Pius XII, Paul VI, John Paul II, Benedict XVI and now Francis. Indeed, many of these dissenters think no moral teaching can be taught infallibly.

And now they’re back: very outspoken and very central in the Synod.

This has been abundantly clear in the writings of men like Bishop Bonny and now in an article by a German theologian, Eberhard Schockenhoff, who has supported the infamous and revolutionary declaration called Church 2011: A necessary departure. The departure is from Church doctrine and discipline, including, surprise, its teaching on divorce and same sex marriage.

In a recent article, Schockenhoff, after denigrating the Church’s reliance on natural law for the issue of contraception, summarily asserts, “the Church’s teaching on artificial birth control has prevented people from receiving the positive messages the Gospel has to give about every human being’s vocation to love.” He then concludes, “Failure to deal with problems that remain unresolved [emphasis added] on a doctrinal level, will simply lead to the Church’s teaching being seen as rigid and lacking in credibility.”

The “unresolved” doctrinal problem, make no mistake, is “the Church’s teaching” on things like artificial birth control, and divorce and remarriage.  These dissenters are astoundingly blind to what Dr. Gore saw eighty-four years ago: that contraception profoundly undermines marriage and causes demographic suicide.

And it’s before their very eyes in Europe today !

This is a moment of truth for the Synod of 2014. Let’s hope it will not end for the participants as in that Bridge on the River Kwai moment when Colonel Nicholson despairingly asks, “What have I done ?”

Fr. Mark A. Pilon, a priest of the Diocese of Arlington, Virginia, received a Doctorate in Sacred Theology from Santa Croce University in Rome. He is a former Chair of Systematic Theology at Mount St. Mary Seminary, a former contributing editor of Triumph magazine, and a retired and visiting professor at the Notre Dame Graduate School of Christendom College.
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