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 ‘PLENARY COUNCIL’ CIRCUS

Modernism leads to atheism and to the annihilation of all religion.

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   The ‘Plenary Council’ being conducted in Sydney at the moment has the support of almost all, if not all, of Australia’s Catholic bishops, as well as that of the Apostolic Nuncio.  The bishops together with clergy, religious and members of the laity who are attending this confab, think they are performing a work for the Catholic Church.  They are not.

In their efforts to submit the spotless Bride of Christ to the demands of the pagan and the secular they are not serving God but the devil.  They are labouring not for the good of God’s Church but for the advancement of another entity, a counterfeit schismatic ‘church’.  That successors of the Apostles are engaged in this exercise is a great scandal.

Since Vatican II every Catholic bishop finds himself exercising two offices.  He is a bishop, duly consecrated, of the Catholic Church.  But he is also a functionary (a ‘bishop’?) of this counterfeit church whose existence derives from ruminations of the bishops of Vatican II.  This reality places the bishop in a dilemma, for no man can serve two masters.  His solution is to treat the two as if they were one.  But the truth is that he has allowed his oath to Christ and to His Church to become subverted to loyalty to this ersatz entity.

Sacred Tradition

The Catholic Church’s apostolic tradition, which concluded with the death of the last Apostle, St John, was defined by the Fathers of the (First) Vatican Council (invoking the Council of Trent, Session IV) in Dei Filius, the Dogmatic Constitution on the Catholic Faith, as—

“that which has been received by the Church from the mouth of Christ Himself, or through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, and has been handed down by the Apostles themselves and thus come to us.”[1]

When they addressed the interaction between faith and reason the Council Fathers called in aid the teaching of St Vincent of Lerins [in his Commonitorium, 23, 3]:

“For, the doctrine of faith which God revealed has not been handed down as a philosophic invention to the human mind to be perfected, but has been entrusted as a divine deposit… to be faithfully guarded and infallibly interpreted.  Hence, also, that understanding of its sacred dogmas must be perpetually retained which Holy Mother Church has once declared; and there must never be recession from that meaning under the specious name of a deeper understanding ‘Therefore… let the understanding, the knowledge, and wisdom of individuals as of all, of one as of the whole Church, grow and progress strongly with the passage of the ages and the centuries; but in its own genus alone, namely in the same teaching, with the same sense and same understanding (eodem sensu, eademque sententia)’.”[2]

The Church’s tradition is one, and it is complete.  A pope, and the bishops in union with him, can do no more than seek a deeper understanding of what has been revealed, clarifying it and making it more explicit, as happened with the Doctrines of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin in the 19^th Century, and of her bodily Assumption into heaven in the 20^th. 

At the Second Vatican Council the assembled bishops sought to re-invent the Church’s teaching.  In their Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation Dei Verbum n. 8, they said this:

"The Tradition that comes from the apostles progresses in the Church with the help of the Holy Spirit.  There is a growth in insight into the realities and words that are being passed on. This comes about in various ways. It comes through the contemplation and study of believers who ponder these things in their hearts.  It comes from the intimate sense of spiritual realities which they experience.  And it comes from the preaching of those who have received, along with their right of succession in the episcopate, the sure charism of truth."

The statement is erroneous and savours of heresy (propositio haeresim sapiens aut de haeresi suspecta).  The Church’s tradition does not ‘progress’; it was complete with the death of the last Apostle.  The only development, the only growth, that can occur is in understanding, knowledge and wisdom of what the Church has always held, and then only in the same teaching, with the same sense and the same understanding.

The error in Dei Verbum n. 8 was driven by the Council’s more radical members to embrace the heresy of Modernism and carry the body of the bishops with them.  What it expressed had been condemned implicitly by Pius X on September 8^th, 1907:

“Modernists… lay down the general principle that in a living religion everything is subject to change, and must in fact be changed.  In this way they pass to what is practically their principal doctrine… evolution, to whose laws everything is subject… dogma, Church, worship, the Sacred books, the faith itself…”  [Pascendi Dominici Gregis, n. 26]

The saintly Pope condemned another aspect of the heresy which the radicals at Vatican II had fostered whose exercise may be seen in the proceedings of the ‘Plenary Council’, namely—

“the introduction of that most pernicious doctrine which would make of the laity the factor of progress in the Church…”  [n. 27]

The error in Dei Verbum n. 8 is the source of the confusion of the bishops’ loyalties.  They think they are serving God’s Church when they are serving its counterfeit, a schismatic church which hides its identity behind the skirts of the Church, a ‘church’ which might be termed The Synodal Church of Vatican II.

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    There are signs of reaction among the faithful to what the Australian bishops are essaying in their ‘Plenary Council’.   In the Catholic Weekly of July 8^th, 2022 Sandy Wallace laid down the gauntlet:

“What has been taking place under the guise of a ‘Plenary Council’… is a betrayal of most basic and fundamental understanding of the nature of the Catholic Church.  The path that has been followed… is not a legitimate ‘development’ of tradition, it is not a ‘new’ interpretation, consistent with the Canon Law or tradition.  It is nothing less than a rejection of the authentic Christ given teaching of the nature of the Catholic Church.”[3]

This article followed earlier criticism of what was proposed by Archbishop Julian Porteous of Hobart printed in the same journal in the April previous.[4]

In a piece for Australia’s Family Life International last week, journalist Kathy Clubb claimed that what was occurring at the ‘Plenary Council’ amounted to a Catholic identity crisis[5]—

“Sunday’s Opening Mass demonstrated the result of surrendering our Catholic identity to the chic spiritual currents of the day.  The Mass showcased some of the liturgical novelties with which we are apparently to become familiar: an acknowledgment of the traditional occupants of the land, complete with didgeridoo and requisite smoking ceremony, all topped off with a fashionably-inclusive invocation of both male and female spirits…”

And Melbourne academic lawyer, Rocco Loiacono, in an article in the Spectator Australia of July 4^th, 2022, blamed the decline in the number of the Church’s adherents on practices this ‘Plenary Council’ is hell-bent on pursuing:

“In my experience in the Catholic Church, the rush to mingle with the dominant culture that the world offers – in other words, Marxism – has not kept the faithful in the Church, but, in fact, has had the opposite effect, except in places that are faithful to doctrine and traditional precepts and practices…”

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    Where does all this leave the Catholic faithful?  What are we to do in response to this systematic attack on our faith fostered by those who should be our shepherds, urging us to embrace Modernistic protocols which must lead to loss of all belief in God?  Our duty is to Christ and His Holy Church.  We must reject anything that works to attack God and His reign on earth.  We must reject the ‘Plenary Council’ as we have promised to reject Satan, and all its works, and all its empty promises.

The duty to keep holy the Sabbath Day does not extend to attendance at false or illicit Masses.[6]  The manifest problems of Paul VI’s novus ordo will only be compounded by the pagan and secular paraphernalia proposed to be added by the ‘Plenary Council’.  The Church’s teaching is clear: if one is in doubt about the licitness of a sacrament he may not attend it, and one must entertain the gravest doubts about any celebration of Mass that defers to ‘indigenous rituals’.

The faithful Catholic could do no better than to abandon the novus ordo now before it is further degraded and return to the Roman Rite of Mass canonised by Pope Pius V in 1570.  He should inform his parish priest and his bishop that he will treat any celebration of Mass which defers to indigenous ritual as rendering it illicit if not invalid and will refuse to attend, consistent with the Church’s clear teaching against doubtful sacraments and his duty to serve God first and above all things.

Michael Baker

July 14^th, 2022—St Bonaventure