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 TWO CHURCHES

Quia non relinquet Dominus virgam peccatorum super sortem
iustorum: ut non extendant iusti ad iniquitatem manus suas.

Ps. 124: 3

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     The French have an expression—les extremes se touchent—‘the extremes meet’.   In the persons of Pope Paul VI and the members of a vigorous minority of the attending bishops, two extremes, two evils, freemasonry and modernism, met at the Second Vatican Council.  These two derived from the same source, the Protestant Revolt, but came via different routes.  The one began shortly after that disaster; the other took centuries for its malevolence to appear. 

Freemasonry was a ‘natural’ effect of Luther’s rejection of God’s authority in favour of that of the ‘believer’.  The bastardised ‘belief’ to which it gave rise soon descended into Deism (which respects a God that exists only in the believer’s mind) and ended in a practical atheism.  Freemasonry adopted the Protestant protocol of vain oaths by which tyrants such as Henry Tudor (King Henry VIII, via his creature Thomas Cromwell) compelled his subjects out of fear to swear solemnly that what was false was true.[1]

Modernism’s appearance involved a different course.  It did not develop until the philosophical ills to which Luther’s revolt had given rise began to flourish.  The first of these, with Bacon, was materialism - nothing exists but what is material.  The other appeared with Descartes’ turning of reality on its head, subjectivism.  These two distortions dominated the thinking of the Enlightenment and, in due course, produced the heresy which attacks all belief in God.  All claim of the existence of a transcendent God, its adherents maintain, is ephemeral for nothing exists which is not material or detectable by the senses.  Religious belief is reduced to an affectation, a subjective preoccupation of ‘the believer’.

Pius X condemned the modernist heresy in 1907 (Pascendi Dominici Gregis) but it reappeared among rebellious priests and theologians in the decades that followed to be given expression in the 1940s in the vaunted nouvelle théologie whose tenets Pius XII condemned in 1950 in Humani Generis.[2]

Masons and modernists, not so much by their numbers but by the pertinacity of their ideas and their control of both John XXIII (implicitly) and Paul VI (explicitly), dominated the gathering at the Second Vatican Council to divert the honour due to Almighty God—from Whom all authority derives—to man.  They did so via the modernist protocols syncretism (all religions are the same) and humanism (if religion is to have any focus, it is on man, not God).  The masons’ contribution was to apply the atheistic triduum of the French Revolution, liberty, equality and fraternity.  In the Council’s documents these became religious liberty, collegiality and ecumenism.

By Council’s end Paul VI and the Council’s bishops thought they had altered the direction, teaching and end of the Catholic Church.  They had not.  Since Christ’s Church is of God Who is immutable, her direction, teaching and end are likewise immutable.  What Pope and bishops had done was something else: they had produced a Counterfeit, an entity which, while pretending to be the Catholic Church, proclaimed a new religion with a false direction, false teaching and a false end.  Their ‘Church’ became confused with the Catholic Church, its operations intermingled with her operations, its teachings advanced as her teachings, its administration asserted to be her administration.

In consequence the popes and bishops who followed the Council found themselves possessed of an office additional to that each received on his consecration, that of a superior of this counterfeit Church.  And, as the thing Paul VI and the Council’s bishops had created was malevolent—of the devil (who delights in confusion)—so was the additional office bestowed on them.  And just as malevolent were the effects it was to work in the decades that followed.

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    The two Popes together with the Council’s bishops – complaisant, or unthinking, or just plain negligent – permitted the malevolent vocal minority in their midst to drive them to embrace modern philosophy’s facile tenets in substitution for the perennial philosophy of the Catholic Church.   It will assist if we elaborate the consequences of this collective action on the thinking of its proponents and on the faithful who depended on them.

Men of common sense have little difficulty recognising distinctions to solve problems.  Modern philosophy prefers simple, i.e., simplistic, answers.  The preference is logical for distinctions involve formalities, immaterial realities, and modern philosophy rejects any reality that is not material or not physically detectable.  Hence, the modernist, confuses,—

• act and potency—what does be / what does not yet be but can be;
• form and matter—that in a thing which determines it / that in it which is determined;
• objective and subjective—what is real / what is only conceived of as real;
• validity and licitness—whether something is done / whether it is allowed to be done;
• what is of faith (and immutable) / what is only of discipline (and alterable);
• what in human affairs is fixed / what is variable;
• the natural (which is of God) / the voluntary, or wilful (which is of man);
• divine faith, gift of God and Catholic / merely human faith of any other religion.[3]

The modus operandi adopted by the operatives at Vatican II was to close their minds to the reality exemplified by the Catholic Church manifest in her history over twenty centuries, in favour of ‘a concept’ of the Church at which they arrived collectively.  As noted above, this ‘concept’ was syncretistic as to religion and humanistic as to focus.  Via syncretism they did away with the exclusivity that belongs to the one and only Church founded by God—or so they thought.  Via humanism they reduced the end of the Church to the service of mankind—or so they thought.

The Two Churches

It must first be insisted that the rot which precipitated the emergence of the Counterfeit began with Pope John XXIII.  In him there first appeared a carelessness over departure from the principle embodied in the papal oath instituted by Pope St Agatho (678 – 681)—

“I vow to change nothing of the received Tradition, nothing thereof I have found guarded by my God-pleasing predecessors before me, to encroach upon, to alter, or to permit any innovation therein…”

John XXIII’s foolish decision to call a synod of the Church’s bishops to ‘update’ the Church - as if the Church was not eo ipso timeless - and to bestow on it the title ‘ecumenical council’ was his principal error.  He seemed to think it sufficient to call a synod ‘ecumenical’ to make it so.[4]  But what something is, its essence or nature, is a function of why it is: finality determines formality.  The only reason that can justify the calling of a general, or ecumenical, council of the Catholic Church is the need to address some issue crucial to her good.  There was no such issue.  John XXIII admitted as much in his opening speech.[5]  Three years later, his successor, Paul VI, confirmed in the Council’s closing speech that there was no such issue.[6]

By this shared act of papal incompetence a way was opened for the invasion of the sanctuary of God by the devil.  Paul VI was to lament the fact publicly some seven years after the Council’s closing, utterly blind to the extent of his own contribution.[7]

It is possible to identify ‘the Church’ produced by Paul VI and the Council’s bishops and give it a name, or names.  One was supplied by the Pope’s Deputy Secretary of State, Archbishop Giovanni Benelli in June 1976 when, at the bidding of his principal, Jean Cardinal Villot, he sought to divert Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, one of the ‘rebel’ bishops at the Council, from the intention of ordaining candidates to the priesthood dedicated to offering Mass in the millennial Roman rite.  Benelli promised the Archbishop that Rome would look after his seminarians if they were “seriously prepared for a priestly ministry in true loyalty to the Conciliar Church”.

The Archbishop ignored him and ordained the priests on June 29^th.  Three weeks later the Secretary of the Sacred Congregation of Bishops advised him that Paul VI had imposed on him the punishment of suspension a divinis, depriving him of the right to confect the sacraments.  The Archbishop’s reaction is instructive:

“When all is said and done, this suspension forbids me… to say the New Mass or to give the new sacraments.  I am asked to obey the ‘Conciliar Church’, as Archbishop Benelli calls it.  But this Conciliar Church is schismatic because it breaks with the Catholic Church of all time.  It has its new dogmas… its new priesthood, its new institutions, and its new liturgy which have… been condemned in so many official and definitive documents.”[8]

Here the Archbishop exposed for us the reality of the two Churches.

Despite the claim implicit in Paul VI’s conduct, that he had acted as Pope in imposing this penalty, he had acted in another capacity, that of superior of the Conciliar Church.  Since this entity was a merely human enterprise, its operations and direction contrary to those of the Catholic Church, it was quite incapable of providing the Pope with the power he had purported to exercise.

Paul VI died just over two years later, in August 1978.  In March the following year his successor, Pope John Paul II, in his first encyclical, Redemptor Hominis, gave the counterfeit Church another name.  He called it the Church of the New Advent.  But it is perhaps best identified as the Church of Vatican II.

Two Churches, then, the one of God, the other of man.  Once this duopoly and the confusion the Popes and the Council’s bishops generated are acknowledged there appears a solution for the innumerable dilemmas that have confronted the Catholic faithful ever since.

*   It explains the confusion wrought by the opposition of John XXIII to the Church’s bi-millennial condemnation of the Jews over Christ’s execution at their hands, and his endeavour to emasculate the Church’s Divine Office to accord with his preoccupation.  The root of the Pope’s problem was the modernist refusal to make distinctions.  The Church’s regard for the Jews is spelled out by St Paul in Romans Ch. 9:

“I would willingly be condemned and be cut off from Christ if it could help my brothers of Israel, my own flesh and blood.  They were adopted as sons, they were given the glory and the covenants; the Law and the ritual were drawn up for them, and the promises were made to them.  They are descended from the patriarchs and from their flesh and blood came Christ who is above all, God for ever blessed!”

But the Church’s desire to awaken them to the reality that the long expected Saviour had appeared among them in the person of Jesus Christ did not operate to diminish the reality that their malice had brought about His suffering and death, for which sin they were justly condemned.   For fifteen centuries the Church had invoked the teaching of St Augustine on the topic, reproduced in Matins during the Easter Triduum, but John XXIII knew better than Christ’s Church!  How rightly did Pius X remark of its exponents: “Pride sits in modernism as in its own house”.

*     It explains how Paul VI could think himself entitled to invent a Mass departing from the millennial form of Mass in the Roman Rite.  The applicable liturgical principle is lex orandi statuit legem credendi - ‘the law of what is to be prayed determines the law of what is to be believed’.  The Pope having assisted in the creation of a different Church, principle demanded that this Church should have a different liturgical rite.  This new - this different - rite of Mass, the novus ordo missae, dictates the new and schismatic law of belief of that Church.

*     It explains how Paul VI could think he could suitably replace the millennial Roman Rite in breach of the clear terms laid down by Trent and by Pius V in the 1570 bull Quo Primum involving a matter of faith, and carry the bishops with him.  Pope and bishops were at one in rejecting the distinction mentioned above between matters of faith, which are immutable, and matters of discipline, which are not.

*   It explains why the Church’s bishops today are so ineffectual, why one never hears one of them speak out on any of the innumerable disorders in society that arise every week.  Since each celebrates daily this defective rite of Mass, he is compelled to conform himself to its defective law of belief an element of which is its heterodox attitude to absolute and moral liberty.[9]  Though each bishop maintains and insists upon his episcopal dignity and authority, the vast majority conduct themselves as superiors of the schismatic Church of Vatican II.  The heterodox teachings of this entity have effectively neutered them.

*    It explains the confusion among traditional Catholics who think that the authorisation of priests to offer, and of faithful to attend, the millennial form of the Roman Rite of Mass comes from the current Pope - whoever he be - rather than from the Church herself granted once, and forever, by Trent and Quo Primum.  When they concede, as a condition of their adherence to the millennial rite, the legitimacy of the Second Vatican Council they fall into a trap.  For they concede the principle that the mode of offering Mass is never more than a matter of discipline.  This error leads them into another, and worse, error, one of self-contradiction.  When they complain that they should be able to follow the ‘permission’ given for celebration of the millennial rite by Benedict XVI in Summorum Pontificum and ignore withdrawal of that ‘permission’ by Pope Francis in Traditiones Custodes, they behave irrationally.  If the manner in which Mass is offered is only a matter of discipline, Pope Francis is entitled to suppress it!

*     It explains the avalanche of ‘saints’ canonised after Pope John Paul II abandoned the rigour of the Church’s examination of causes on January 25^th, 1983.  Of course they are saints - saints of the schismatic Church of Vatican II!  It remains to be seen how many will survive the proper investigation of their causes when, untrammelled by the demands of its Counterfeit, Christ’s Church resumes the exclusive authority over her operations.

*     It explains the endeavours of recent popes and bishops to foist the nonsense of synodality on the faithful, an evil begun by Paul VI in 1967.  The abuse is grounded in two errors promoted by the Council and embraced by the Church of Vatican II: that the Catholic Church should be a democratic rather than hierarchical institution, and that the laity should have a voice in her management and government.  Vatican II’s denial of the reality (despite its bishops’ protestations to the contrary) that she has a living Head in Jesus Christ and that she is subservient to Him and therefore hierarchical in structure, coupled with abandonment of the explicit teaching of Pius X in Pascendi n. 27, illustrates once again the illegitimacy of the claim that that Council was a work of the Catholic Church.

*    It explains the omissions, and departures from, Catholic principle manifest in the 1994 Catechism of the Catholic Church.  The document makes no mention of the contributions to the Church’s teaching of the only Pope canonised in 400 years, St Pius X, on the significant issue of admission to Holy Communion of those who reach the age of reason.  It makes no mention of the Pope’s syllabus condemning the errors of the modernists, Lamentabili Sane (July 3^rd, 1907), or of his encyclical on the doctrine of the modernists, Pascendi Dominici Gregis (September 8^th, 1907).  These lacunae and Paul VI’s unilateral decision, against Catholic principle, to abolish the anti-modernist oath required of all priests and religious, demonstrate that the Catechism is not so much a work of the Catholic Church as of the Church of Vatican II.

*     It explains Pope Francis’s direction that the Catholic Church’s teaching on the death penalty be reversed and that the 1994 Catechism be amended accordingly.  The issue, a fetish of the Church of Vatican II, was shared by his predecessors, John Paul II and Benedict XVI.  John Paul had called for its abolition as early as 1999, labouring the point in public utterances throughout his pontificate.  Benedict repeated the call in his 2011 Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation Africae Munus.  The Catholic Church’s teaching remains what it has ever been, that there are circumstances where the good of society demands that a man be put to death:

“[T]he common good is better than the particular good of one person.  So, a particular good should be removed in order to preserve the common good.  But the life of certain pestiferous men is an impediment of the common good which is the concord of human society.  Therefore, certain men must be removed by death from the society of men…

“[Just as] the physician properly and beneficially removes a diseased organ if the corruption of the body is threatened… the ruler of a state executes pestiferous men justly and sinlessly in order that the peace of the state may not be disrupted.”[10]

But in the confused and comingled operations of the two Churches, and thanks to its capture of the person of the Pope himself, the Church of Vatican II is the dominant of the ‘partners’ in the Vatican and able to demand that Catholic orthodoxy be compromised little by little.

*      It explains the aberrance of the teachings of Pope Francis throughout the course of his reign.  When he utters these heterodox statements he is not speaking as Pope but as superior of the schismatic Church of Vatican II.

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Communicatio in Sacris

Perhaps nothing better distinguishes the two Churches—that the one is of God, the other of man—than their respective attitudes to communicatio in sacris, the sharing by priests or faithful of the holy things of God with unbelievers, or the sharing by priests or faithful in the services or ‘sacraments’ of unbelievers.  St Paul in II Corinthians (6: 15-16) is explicit:

“For what have Christ and Belial in common?  Or what does the believer share with the unbeliever?  And what has the temple of God in common with idols?  For you are the temple of the living God, as God says: I will dwell in them and walk among them, and I will be their God and they shall be my people.”

The Catholic Church’s teaching is set forth in the 1917 Code of Canon Law, Canon 1258 § 1:

It is unlawful for the faithful to assist in any active manner, or to take part in the services of non-Catholics.

To which Canon 2316 adds this force:

He who voluntarily and knowingly aids the propagation of heresy or who takes part in services with heretics against the command of can. 1258 is suspect of heresy.

In contrast the new Code, designed by Paul VI’s advisers inter alia to pass into law the errors promoted by Vatican II—which was to be published under Pope Paul, then under Pope John Paul, finally promulgated by John Paul II on January 25^th, 1983—contains provisions, Canons 844 § 2, 3 and 4, which allow communicatio in sacris explicitly.  Thus, Canon 844 § 4—

If there is a danger of death or if, in the judgement of the diocesan bishop or of the episcopal conference, there is some other grave and pressing need, catholic ministers may lawfully administer these same sacraments to other Christians not in full communion with the catholic Church who cannot approach a minister of their own community and who spontaneously ask for them, provided they demonstrate the Catholic faith in respect of these sacraments and are properly disposed.

Since these provisions traduce the constant teaching of the Catholic Church, it is impossible that they could be part of a Code of Canon Law of the Catholic Church.  They can only be provisions of a Code for the Church of Vatican II.[11]

It is essential, once Christ’s Church has returned to the position of command in her household and the schismatic interloper and its pernicious influence has been removed, that the 1983 Code be purified of each and every contentious provision, and that it be revised faithfully to reflect the Church’s teachings, after the fashion of the 1917 Code.

Michael Baker

November 30^th, 2024—St Andrew, Apostle