Changeling Church: A Humanist Council Produced a Humanist Church; It Is Now Collapsing

Friends,

St. Matthew 7:24-27 reports Our Lord telling the parable of the man who built his house on rock as opposed to the man who built his house on sand. The Vatican II Church built itself on sand, i.e. Humanism. Kennedy Hall has reported on this Humanism aspect to Vatican II, and his podcast is well worth listening to. (See below for link.)

But is the Vatican II Church coming to its end because it was ill founded on an almost pure Humanism? A "Man is the measure of all things" humanism that draped itself in a bit of Catholic bunting? It is a great insight. Are not the most important segments of its most important decrees just that? Humanism with Catholic bunting? 

This Vat II Church bears a boat-load of issues, problems and wounds: most self-inflicted. And its agonized spasms often drive one to ask: "Is the Church suicidal, or what?" What are we to make of it trying to kill of the most exciting, laity-driven reform since time-out-of-mind: the TLM revival, and madly sacking orthodox bishops while promoting the heterodox (to be polite) into high office? All this self-flagellation drives millions away from the Church.

How odd a situation we are in that we have to demand of the Church to stop its self-destruction, cease being incoherent, and most of all to stop robbing us of our Catholic inheritance. The Traditional Latin Mass IS our inheritance, our spiritual inheritance going back to the beginning. Give it back to us! Give us back our traditional prayers and liturgy and theology. It isn't something anyone – Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Muslim, Humanist, Communist, etc. – has any right to take from us, any more than the Confederacy had the right to strip the South's poor whites of their American citizenship (then kill them for four years to keep the theft in place).

The Church's self-demolition exists because the Vatican II Church was founded on Humanism, not the Gospel, not Church Tradition that embodies the Gospel. To conjure Irish folklore, it is a Changeling Church. At first, it was more Catholic than not, but slowly, then more quickly, like a Changeling, since 1964 it has shown itself to be NOT the Church we thought it was. 

"The True Spirit of Vatican II and Apostasy"

Find Kennedy Hall's excellent podcast on this Humanist revelation here. "The True Spirit of Vatican II and Apostasy". As such, I would argue that this is quite true and thus this historical Church version we have to suffer through, a Humanist-grounded ecclesiastical "avatar", quite naturally didn't take three-score and ten to crumple in upon itself. It's a house built on sandy Humanism.

Note that by "Vatican II Church" I mean, in the first instance, merely the Church of our time, but in the second instance, I mean a Church veering off the course set by Tradition (which, as Archbishop Lefebvre said, IS the Deposit of Faith), and which is now morphing into the notorious "Ape of the Church" foretold by Archbishop Fulton Sheen: a.k.a. the Synodal Church.

1. The Vatican II Council began the Vatican II Church. 
2. That Council infamously pretended to be only a "pastoral council" (said ad nauseam) but since it ended, Modernists have treated it as the Dogmatic Council of ALL TIME. 
3. It remains the ONLY Council of any import. The others? What Councils? There's only THE Council. (Paul VI and John Paul II both lauded it in this manner via hyper absurd praise.)
   
4. Holding high its voluminous writings and decrees, its verbose, rambling documents that no one can read (I've thoroughly read short ones like Nostra Aetate and Dignitatis Humanae: effusive efforts at wrapping heresy in twaddle) that sound – give or take – sorta Catholic...
   
5. ...But reading seriously, one realizes that as always, and here literally, the Devil is in the details.

Modernism = Evolution

The basic argument of Modernism is evolution. This remains very well hidden (much of the time) by the Neo-Modernists. But the core idea of it is that people evolve, as taught by Darwin, that hammer-wielding, animal skull-crushing atheist who invented eugenics. 

• Our relationships, duties, family structures, cultures also evolve. 
• No timeless truths exist. "Truth" is an illusion. 
• Our understanding of the world, via the new religion, "science", evolves us. (Just read Yuval Noah Harari, and other such futurist mavens.)
  
• And certainly, in terms of religion, our theology evolves, our sense of the divine develops in all sorts of ways.
  
• That's the attraction of this to so many: they get to "Invent Church". Sound familiar?
  
• Finally: the penultimate revelation is that God Himself evolves. He is not the God of Hebrews 13:8-9 "Jesus Christ, yesterday, and today: and the same for ever. Be not led away with various and strange doctrines." Or of course Exodus 3:14 "God said to Moses: I AM WHO AM. He said: Thus shalt thou say to the children of Israel: HE WHO IS, hath sent me to you." 
• But the ultimate revelation of all that only gets revealed to the highest Gnostic geniuses is that God Himself doesn't exist; i.e. that we make Him up. (This is so Freemasonic, isn't it?)
  

All of the above shows how literally "Gnostic" evolution and humanism both are; how Gnostic so much of modernity is. So, Humanism (Christian veneer or not) always remains "Man is the measure of all things", and certainly the measure of God. In other words: God is completed, fulfilled, perfected through the perfection of man. Kennedy Hall mentions this as well.

History

The Vatican I Church was a tough, no-nonsense Church, really; a sort of Katholische Festung that survived Napoleon, Marx, loss of the Papal States, and two World Wars. It had its problems, sure, but basically it was doing great. So, for many: Modernists, yes, and always the Masons, many Protestants, certainly the Communists of all stripes, and even certain Jewish groups (such as got the Easter Good Friday Liturgy changed in 1955), it had to be bagged. Brought down. Stopped.

1. Note: These ecclesiastical "avatars" follow one another through history: the Counter-Reformation Church – one of the Church's high points in its 2,000-year history – existed from about 1540 to the Thirty Years War a century later...
2. ...when the Bourbon dynasts of France, Spain and Italy replaced it with the Bourbon Church until 1789, when in turn, the French Revolution ended the Bourbon Church (and many of the Bourbons). 
3. Each avatar has its essential mood or cast of spirit, its good points and its failures, its great saints and its sinners. The Vatican I Church really began with Pope Pius VII's resistance to Napoleon, and thereafter it continued to resist the modern world.
   

But all had the Traditional Latin Mass. Let me repeat that: ALL Catholic Church versions had the Latin Mass, the core elements of which go back to the "Dreamtime" of the early Faith. (Read 1 Corinthians, starting at 11:17.) All had the traditional theology. All stood fundamentally for orthodoxy. Certainly, none of these Church avatars, even the relatively corrupt earlier one in the 1000s, has ever produced a series of popes failing the basic Deposit of Faith. I don't mean popes exhibiting basic moral failings in themselves: many at certain times were great sinners. I mean failing to hold the traditional and ancient universal (Catholic) teaching such as the Vatican II Church has consistently veered away from – and of course NONE of them produced a Jorge Bergoglio. Not remotely.

Bottom Line

Watch the Kennedy Hall podcast. Take notes. He's working from a book, Prometheus, published by Angelus press. Note Pope Paul VI's speech that ended the council. At 8:05 into the podcast, Mr. Hall reads from Paul VI, "This entire Council may be reduced to its definitive religious significance which is none other other than a powerful and friendly invitation to the humanity of today and to find God once more through the path of Brotherly Love." Kennedy Hall comments that the entire council is reduced to "the spirit of fraternity", and that this sounds like Bergoglio. And Paul does, doesn't he? Remember Bergoglio's disastrous roll out of a "fraternity" event at the Vatican some months ago? No one came? Bergoglio has always hustled fraternal Humanism, as Elizabeth Yore writes here at Lifesite News. Kennedy Hall opines, "People think Pope Francis is really liberal; Pope Francis is not really that much different than Paul VI." Neither, ultimately, were John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Mr. Hall discusses this, and how Benedict's idea that the ancient Vetus Ordo and the modernist Novus Ordo would "enrich" each other. That's pure Hegelism, Kennedy points out: thesis, antithesis, and a resulting synthesis. (From this Humanistic insight I'm discussing, one would think great minds like JP2 and B16 would have seen the Novus Ordo for the pallid, Humanistic, horizontal liturgy it is. Maybe they did, but then they were true papal Humanists, apparently.)

Therefore, comprehending the reality of the Humanist Council and its Humanist tendrils wriggling through the Church's subsoil, we are seeing today the necessary, and I mean NECESSARY denouement of the Vatican II Church and its fully Humanist creed. How else could it have ended? It has produced a great multitude of Apostates. Tens of millions. Although many join other churches, separating themselves from the Holy Sacraments necessary for salvation that way, the majority leave the Church, as Mr Hall says, not to join Protestant churches, but to just stop religious practices. "Self-satisfied prigs" the kids in the Narnia Chronicles would label them. No wonder the murderous Anthony Fauci doesn't feel the need to attend Mass, as he's pontificated recently. That freak thinks he's been perfected. Totally immersed in all his post-Vatican II education (much of it Jesuit), he's a true "self-satisfied prig," a "know it all" snot who has obtained a higher plane of existence. Fauci thought nothing of killing millions. Humanists do that. (Doesn't this sound like Yuval Noah Harari and so many of "our betters" who want to refashion the world? It's hardly a Catholic-only failing.)

Good riddance, Vatican II Church; the Synodal Church, the "Ape of the Church" is next up. Yet it won't have Catholics in it. Many middle-of-the-road Catholics of today, mainly those who insist the Second Vatican Council was great and necessary, and who insist Bergoglio is pope, will under the wheels of the Synodal bus just stop practicing the Faith. That is, after all, the goal of the Modernists. But alas, notice how they're so often closing parishes and taking down good church buildings as they "clear outta town", closing them forever? That's to make sure no TLM can replace them. They want to leave a desert and sow it with salt, because, after all, they've achieved a nigher Gnostic enlightenment than the troglodytes they're leaving behind.

Doesn't that sound Masonic-like? Hmmm. 

           AnP

Violence, Hamas attacks, Israel, Bergoglio's Church Deconstruction

Yes, all four are closely related. Five, if you include the overthrow of the U.S. government that's going on. (Beware, my friends, the officially 7 million plus illegals who have entered the U.S. under Biden are quite possibly more like double that number or more, the majority being men of military age, many from the Mid-East. See at bottom for a thought on this.*)

Amici,

Violence, Hamas attacks, Israel, Bergoglio's church deconstruction – not to mentioned the Left's ongoing seizure of power in the United States from the American people – are all indeed enmeshed in the dehumanizing will to power: to get what is wanted and to stop at nothing to get it. 

• This is pure paganism, pure Islam, itself a Gnostic religion wherein 95 percent of the Muslims have no clue they're really worshiping Aliyat, the ancient Semitic Moon Goddess, not "Allah". (See Kennedy Hall interview Lloyd De Jongh here for details.)
• Hamas has shown both an unprecedented and unbelievable level of organized sophistication in this attack. 
• They have also demonstrated an unbelievable level of pure Satanic violence. The Mainstream Media will refrain from calling it that, but it is true. They hate the Jews and Israel in classic Muslim fashion. Muhammad is said to have murdered Jews non-stop, he hated them so; the Islamic tradition makes it plain that at a certain time Jews are to be killed outright: as Sahih al-Bukhari related in an infamous hadith quoted for the past millennium, Judgment Day comes about when Muslims rise to kill Jews: "The stones and trees will say 'O Muslims, O Abdullah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him'."
  
• And they're forcing Israel to reply with unfettered violence themselves. The Israelis must do so if they are to survive. Remember, for 1300 years Islam has taught non-Muslims, especially Christians and Jews, may exist as "dhimmis", powerless third-class subjects, but that status can – and has been – rescinded at will. 
• Now new calls are being made for a general Muslim uprising en mass against Israel this Friday, October 13.
• Kill or be killed. The absolute law of the absolute jungle. All our civilized niceties done away with. World War II actually taught us all that much, but we seem to have forgotten.

This is actually our world

Hamas – which some argue Israeli Intelligence created decades ago from religious fanatics to counter Yasser Arafat's secular Palestinian group, and is obviously now a mortal enemy to Jewish people everywhere – has attacked in the most savage, barbarian seventh-century Arab pagan-Islamic extreme style, slaughtering women, children, the aged, men, all and everyone, and taking others captive to use as human shields. 

Important: No matter whatever grievances the attackers might have, or think they have, no matter the complicated and bloody history engulfing that region of the world, this utterly, utterly heartless level of atrocity has to be met with an equal savagery, if it is to be ended. Not very Christian of me, I confess; had Our Sovereign Christ been listened to 2,000 years ago, we wouldn't be in this mess. 

And I think the world would be very different indeed had Pope Paul VI not surrendered Christ's Social Kingship of the world in 1964, abandoning the Tiara Crown of the Vicar of the Universal King on the altar in the Vatican after a Mass on November 13, 1964, ostensibly to sell it to "feed the poor" (had he never read: "The poor you will always have with you, but not me"? Matt 26:11). By this act, Paul VI in reality de-enthroned both himself as Christ's vicar, and Christ Himself. The symbolism could not be missed. Abdicating kings toss off their crowns. Typical of his own idiocy and the Vatican II Church's shallow but always misinterpreted gestures, Paul thought he was being overtly pious, but in reality the hapless fool merely imitated Judas: (see John 12:5-6).

The Uses of Violence

Consider World War II. It has still lessons to teach. Had we and the Soviets not met German barbarity with its equivalent, the war might have gone on. Had we not met militaristic Japanese bloodthirstiness with its equivalent, they would have dragged out the war. They were actually counting on precisely that. They thought the more brutally they acted, the more horrified America would be. The Japanese leaders thought the USA was too multi-racial, too lazy, too interested in money (as it may now indeed be) to fight the level of warfare they calculated they needed to unleash in order to achieve their goals. 

On the other side of the world, at the same time, Hitler himself certainly thought so. It wasn't until near the end that he realized the Americans and Russians were not going to stop or be deterred, and when he did realize it, Hitler infamously ordered the destruction of Germany by the Nazis in order to punish the German people for being losers. (Albert Speer didn't carry out those orders.) Hitler also ordered Paris blown up earlier when the Allies were about to take it, but the German general involved refused to do it. This is the path of madmen: if they can't get their way, if they can't luxuriate in their narcissistic unbridled will, they'll destroy everything so no one else can have it. (What better simulacrum of Satan could there be?) Iranian leaders have boasted they'll use nuclear weapons to destroy Israel, which of course would kill millions of Palestinians. They don't care, or they think it will bring on the end of the world, Muslim Judgement Day. (It just might, but not the one they want.) Or they just say and do stupid things because they think tomorrow will be yet another copy of today. They are the damned. The "Flying Dutchman" of religions.

Where is the Church?

These are the times we live in. And in this Hell-fraught times, when the Church should be in the forefront of these crises, preaching Christ, Him Crucified, and that the world is His, and that to survive, we need to live by His teachings and repudiate our narcissistic lusts; instead of that, on the very cusp of Armageddon (this Israeli invasion of Gaza could easily lead to a much larger war, very easily, depending on how the Arab factions and states react) we have an absolute oaf in the Vatican issuing the pathetic NGO "encyclical" "Laudate Deum", a follow-up of his infamous Laudato Si' from 2015. Christ is hardly mentioned, the Faith is not mentioned, none of this Global Warming claptrap they're so besotted with has anything to do with a pope's work or the Deposit of Faith. It is all a hideous violence against EVERYTHING Catholic. And here's also this unspeakably ridiculous "Synod on Synodality" that's ditching the very Deposit of Faith – forcibly so – in favor of spoiled Westerners and their demented and deviant carnal urges. That's it. That's the dying, being replaced Vatican II Church and its successor, the limp-whispered homosexualist Synoldal Church. We are being robbed of our religious heritage, before our very eyes.

Simply insane.

Such is our world.

Pray. Fast. Recite the Rosary.

We weren't going to live forever, anyway.

Not on this Earth.

*About the flooding of America with millions of fighting-age men, many from the Middle East

Muhammad probably didn't exist. There's one reference in one ancient document (i.e. Doctrina Jacobi) contemporary to his times that references an "Arab prophet with a sword" but no details, no name, no actions does it record. For the first century of the Arab Conquest of the Persian Empire and its near conquest of the Byzantine Empire, no commentator living at that time mentions Muhammad, Islam, Muslim, or the Koran. Coins minted by the Conquerors exhibited crosses and figures of kings, all absolutely verboten by the Islam we know. So, it is likely that Islam was invented by the Umayyad leaders toward the end of that Seventh Century to give them a divine sanction for their conquest and murder and enslavement of entire peoples. (Curiously, the succeeding Abbasid dynasty, 750-1258, always said the preceding Umayyads were not real Muslims! That might be more true than we know.)

Where did the Arab conquerors come from, then? They were already there. The Arabian peninsula never at any time had the population necessary to conqueror populous and prosperous empires like the Persians and the Byzantines. Or Egypt. Or North Africa. Nor India. But we know that thousands of Arabs began migrating from the lower peninsula into both Byzantium and Persia after the Romans emptied historic Israel of its Jewish population via three horrific wars against the Jews, the first of which began forty years after Jesus Christ's death, and it destroyed the Temple and all of Jerusalem.

So, for a couple of hundred years then, parts of Persia and Byzantium, what's now Iraq and Syria and Jordan, began to host large Arab populations. Today mostly unknown or uncommented on, the great Byzantine-Sasanian War began in 602 A.D. and lasted incredibly to 628. This existential conflict had deep roots going all the way back to Alexander the Great, truth be told. It even echoed the foundational legend of the Greeks against Troy. It turned out to be the final, most devastating of all those wars, and wrecked the Sasanian Empire of Iran. Muslims begin counting their years from the Christian year of 622, which is toward the end of the Sasanian-Byzantine war. Assuming Muhammad's passage from Mecca to Medina in 622 didn't actually happen (the usual reason for starting the Muslim calendar), this date does indicate an important time for the Arabs. Certain scholars posit that this commemorates when the Arabs began to seize sections of the two empires, displacing or subjugating the indigenous peoples.

That can easily happen now in the U.S. We are broke, bitterly divided, our military is "woke" and we've given away our military resources to Ukraine and now Israel. Our country-hating Leftists are already calling for the "decolonization of America". We can have Hammas and Hezbollaha and all the rest seizing the U.S., beginning at any time now. Why can't we "get our minds around" this? The same with France. The same with Britain and Germany, Sweden and so many of the Western European countries. (Thank God for Hungary!) It could easily happen, and probably will. The invaders would be just repeating what happened in the Seventh Century.

  An Préachán

Cardinl Sticker's post Vatican II Confessions, the New Mass, destruction of the TLM

Amici,

Alfons Cardinal Stickler's essay a about the shock of seeing his Vatican II actual Council work being undone, indeed, eviscerated, in the later 1960s has been republished just now by the New Liturgical Movement. 

I couldn't read all of it – I just go rabid-dog crazy. Stickler and his contemporaries KNEW by 1967 that what was going down was adult male bovine excrement. They knew – precisely because they had their heads so far up Vat II's derrière – that Montini and Bugnini were screwing them over. Sticker reports on his going to see old Cardinal Benno Gut, and they sit around, like so many others, shaking their heads, wringing their hands, crying in their soup, a bunch of helpless prey for obvious mountebanks and charlatans. (And Freemasons, of course.) And Montini (if that guy's an actual saint, I'm the Prophet Muhammad – "peace be upon me") would cry around even more than the others, and complain when confronted with the Bug's liturgical realities, but never reverse the mess, and exiling the Bug to Iran was far, far, far too little too late.

Did you ever hear of the time Archbishop Lefebvre tried to actually see that miserable Montini? Montini was absolutely terrified of Lefebvre. Just terrified. And had his major lackys keep Lefebvre away until the most important one of those was on vacation and inside-the-Vatican friends of Lefebvre got him into the pope's presence. Montini had to see him briefly and was visibly in utter terror. Absolutely, utterly, comprehensibly pathetic. And Lefebvre, known for his kind demeanor, was a real man – had spent most of his career in Africa in the missions. His father had been in the Resistance and was murdered by the Nazis.

So then after "The Weeper" Montini, we get John Paul I, who got himself killed only 33 days in, and then Karol Karol Wojtyła, an actual man (imagine!) and hero against both Nazis and Commies, him they tried to bump him off three years after electing him (okay, the Russians tried it via the Bulgarians, but still), leaving him half the man he had been, going about kissing the Koran and apologizing to all and sundry, especially Jews, who took it to mean apologizing for trying to convert any Jews in the last two millenna! And then we get Benedict, Ratzinger the Intellectual, smartest man in the office since Leo III. Ratziger knows the score; he prays for protection from the wolves after he's elected, and HE gets tossed for promulgating Summorum Pontificum. And THEN THEY INSTALL BERGI! THE OGRE Peronista! This recent, pathetically written, utterly asinine new Bergoglio document, the impossible to pronounce Desiderio Desideravi, full of lies, direct lies, and repeated old hoary lies like a drunk's vomit is full of puke, as see here. 

My friends, this dying Vatican II church is one huge SNAFU mess, and its decline has happened and is happening right before our eyes. 

Just unbelievable. But reality.

AnP

The Traditional Latin Mass as Training for Heaven

Sometimes I’m asked “Why the Latin?” in regards to the Traditional Latin Mass, or more rarely, “Why all the rigmarole?” I remember a youngish nun (some thirty years ago now) asking in a very acidic tone, “What’s the point of praying in Latin?” Such questions, especially asked in that acerbic tone, remind me of a scene in one of those juvenile Austin Powers movies (I forget which one) where in Dr. Evil has concocted some bizarre method of doing away with Austin Powers, and Dr. Evil’s very American-like teenage son says in exasperation, “Just shoot him. Don’t go to all this trouble; he’ll likely escape anyway. Just shoot him.” (I’m paraphrasing from distant memory.) Dr. Evil stares in disgust at his son and says, “You just don’t get it, do you?”

I no longer remember now what I said to the nun, if anything, but perhaps, in that context and with that particular individual, this answer is as good as any: “You just don’t get it, do you?” In other words, she wasn’t disposed to hear a real reason; it was self-evidently stupid to her and she wouldn’t have been inclined to consider an explanation. It was inherently unreasonable to her. She was also a nun in the modern nun sense, no habit, no apparent religious status or affiliation at all. (I would never have guessed she was a nun if she hadn’t been introduced to me as such by an aunt.) But for everyone else in the world, for those Catholics or Protestants who might bring up why Traditional Catholics (and the Orthodox) prefer “all the rigmarole”, there is a very simple answer: the Mass is preparation for Heaven.

It’s not rocket science to figure this out, although it is spiritual science. God is a mystery; indeed, THE Mystery, and both humans and angels can easily spend all eternity in an eternal contemplation and communion with God and never remotely “know all there is to know.” (We can loosely “image” eternity with God, but we can’t really conceive it, any more than we can conceive of God.) That’s what the Old Mass – and of course the Orthodox liturgies – convey: we’re entering into the Eternal Presence and utter Mystery that is God. Yet it is essential to note that for Christians, God is in no way unknowable to us. In Islam, God is unknowable: the Islamic afterlife for men is a carnal one, and a man’s women from this life must endure forever their husband’s carnal frolicking with the legendary 72 virgins; but Allah is not there. Wherever Allah is; he’s far above the “Garden of Allah”. In the religions further Eastward, all human individuals lose their individual selves in maya, a spiritual non-existence of spiritual existence soup, with some of them perhaps to be reborn on Earth once again to do it all over.

In Christianity, however, God is a Person, indeed, Three Persons in one God, and we’ll spend forever in a most personal knowing – an eternal getting acquainted – of this Absolute Being. Angels do this already. Their minds are mirrored back to them in God, each of the nearly innumerable angels having his own presence in and with God. And they thus reflect the glory of God. The higher angels in the nine choirs shine more brightly than the lower ones because the hierarchy of Heaven gives each his unique place, closer in to or farther out from God, and of course all angels, being pure spirits, greatly reflect in their natures the received glory of the Absolute Spirit. (Even devils, according to one old tradition, can’t escape from the glory of God: the fires of Hell are nothing more than the very presence of God endured by those who have eternally rejected Him; I’ll pass on opining whether this idea is true or not, but it certainly makes sense: their rejection of God is eternal, but since God Himself is eternal, they can never escape His presence).

Human beings, those admitted to Heaven, can now participate in this Beatific Vision because of the Incarnation. The Second Person of the Holy Trinity is now a Man, both Man and God. But why was that necessary? God took on human nature in order to elevate human nature to the point where it could take on God’s divine nature, making us “new creations in Christ.” This teaching is stated in many ways throughout the New Testament. Examples: John 1:12 “But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God; 13 who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.” (Obviously, a new creation.) St. Paul states it succinctly in 2 Cor 5:17, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!” The chief of the Apostles puts it best in 2 Peter 1:4: “By whom He hath given us most great and precious promises: that by these you may be made partakers of the divine nature: flying the corruption of that concupiscence which is in the world.” “Partakers of the Divine Nature.” (BTW, St. Paul mentions the idea quite often: see Romans 6:4, 7:6, 12:2; Galatians 3:27; Ephesians 4:22-24; Colossians 3:8-12.) And to return to St. John for a moment, he goes into great detail, not only for the necessity of the Most Holy Eucharist in the 6^th chapter of his gospel, but – with this new creation idea in mind, reread the 3^rd chapter of his gospel about being “born again”.

In the Eastern Churches, this transformation in Christ is called Theosis, and in the West, Divinization, or more likely you’ll have encountered it as the “infusion of grace” by which we are saved. As “Divinization” may seem outlandish to some Catholics, recall St. Athanasius: "For the Son of God became man so that we might become God." (De inc. 54, 3: PG 25, 192B) and [CCC 460] and of course St. Thomas Aquinas: "The only-begotten Son of God, wanting to make us sharers in his divinity, assumed our nature, so that he, made man, might make men gods." (Opusc. 57, 1-4) [CCC 460]. The Incarnation made this infusion of grace possible, as through baptism Original Sin is removed, and then through the Holy Eucharist, we can receive into ourselves God Himself, transforming our nature to a higher form, one that can endure the Beatific Vision experienced by the Angelic Host. God’s Real Presence in the Holy Eucharist is the New Covenant, for the New Testament isn’t the 27 books of the Christian Bible but the Holy Eucharist itself. (The New Testament came to be called that because it describes God’s saving work through the Holy Eucharist.)

Of course, Orthodoxy and Catholicism have their differences, which in a mostly cultural and linguistic way existed before the split in 1054, and which has grown since, but both are “Christianity of the Real Presence”, unlike Protestantism, which although it is a direct offspring of Catholicism, is proudly the Christianity of the Real Absence. From Luther and Calvin on, the Real Presence of God in the Holy Eucharist is denied: whereas in Catholicism Christ is ontologically present, in Protestantism Christ is present only in a  mnemic sense – the memory of His life and death on Earth 2,000 years ago, so it exhibits quite a different understanding of the importance for the Incarnation. Whereas Historical Christianity teaches we are changed in our nature, Protestantism (generally) teaches our nature remains sinful and fallen, but God allows us into Heaven even so: thus Luther’s famous Simul Justus et Peccator, simultaneously justified with God and going to Heaven, but yet a sinner in our nature, as in Luther’s analogy of a manure pile covered with snow. (N.B. C.S. Lewis contested this idea in his 10^th letter in his Letters to Malcom, Chiefly on Prayer.)

Now, all this is truly a Mysterium Fidei, a Mystery of Faith, and the old Mass (and Eastern Liturgies) are our introduction to it, just as in them we receive Our Blessed Lord intimately, in Holy Communion. The old liturgy seems to the newcomer – especially a newcomer raised in the New Mass of Paul VI or the generalized Protestant worship services – to be arcane, esoteric, impenetrable, and mysterious. Latin itself is only one element of all of this profundity. Yet the Old Mass existed to introduce you to the Mystery that is God. (And the New Mass exists to remove the Mystery. But that’s a subject for another essay.) God is all these profound mysteries to us, and far more. The Old Mass is our boot camp, our basic training, for God’s eternity. And just as God is not “plain English”, not something “taken in at a glance”, so neither is the Old Mass.

Must Read: Great Roberto de Mattei Article on Vat 2 and other current articles of importance

Professor Roberto de Mattei has a great article here about Vatican II. (See also OnePeterFive here.)

An excerpt:
On the historical level, however, Vatican II constitutes a non-decomposable block: It has its own unity, its essence, its nature. Considered in its origins, its implementation and consequences, it can be described as a Revolution in mentality and language, which has profoundly changed the life of the Church, initiating a moral and religious crisis without precedent. If the theological judgment may be vague and comprehensive, the judgment of history is merciless and without appeal. The Second Vatican Council was not only unsuccessful or a failure: it was a catastrophe for the Church.

End of excerpt.
 
An Préachán – Indeed, that first quoted paragraph is a concentrated knock-out punch, a "right cross" to the jaw of anyone who wants to argue that Vatican II, and its still churning, decomposing aftermath, was anything but a true "crash and burn." Three recent essays are important to mention in this regard:

✔First, Martin Mosebach: Pope Benedict’s Red Thread

https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2017/08/pope-benedicts-red-thread

N.B This is now the Foreward in Peter Kwasniewsk's Noble Beauty, Transcendent Holiness: Why the Modern Age Needs the Mass of Ages, where it is titled For Pope Benedict XVI, On His Ninetieth Birthday.

✔Second, Eric Sammons' challenge: Evangelization, Vatican II, and Censorship

http://www.crisismagazine.com/2017/evangelization-vatican-ii-censorship

 

✔And thirdly, Phil Lawler takes up Eric Sammons’ challenge:

https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/otn.cfm?id=1236

 
I highly recommend all three, in order.

Back to Professor De Mattei; he writes, "...The judgment of history is merciless and without appeal." It is, for those who are willing to see it. As Anthony Esolen writes here:

"When people praise me for perspicacity, I shake my head and reply that almost all of what I do is to notice what is in front of my nose, and write about it. Almost all of what I do is to refrain from shutting my eyes toward what is right there, plain as day. It’s not that I notice it and others don’t. It’s that I won’t un-notice it. I won’t pretend not to see what I do see, and what everybody else sees too."

                   

For some reason, no doubt involving spiritual forces primarily, but also simple human stubbornness and a overwhelming embarrassment to admit they were wrong, many, many people are "shutting their eyes toward what is right there, plain as day".  Well, that's not honest, wise, or maintainable: we must NOT pretend not to see it. 

For example, basically, from what one can glean from the various reports and studies, half the Catholics of the U.S. (to give a pretty well-known example) just left. I myself have talked to "old folks" who tell me they were just getting out of school in the early 1960s, and they just left. Twelve years of Catholic Ed and poof, they're outta there. Never looked back. "Good riddance to nonsense" kind of attitude.

And think a moment about why: Image the mind's shock at what happened in the '60s: you, your parents, your grand-parents and so on were probably immigrants within the 150 years previous to Vatican II. Most Catholics were ethnics, such as Esolen, an Italian, or my people from Ireland. That and their papist religion set them back in Protestant America. For every cocky soulless "Catholic" character who became a Protestant and then a Mason, there were millions of "salt-of-the-earth" types who kept the Faith, whatever it cost them. And it cost 'em a lot, from a worldly point of view.

As with millions of others, Esolen's parents and grand-parents worked like Trojans to provide for their families AND the Church. Catholic churches had to be built, furnished, decorated, oftentimes by bringing the necessary experts from the Old Country. Schools had to be built and maintained. Religious orders had to be supported to do the teaching. The whole Catholic American infrastructure took serious coin. And along with the financial cost, chronological and spiritual sacrifices were made: ALL to maintain a Mass in Latin, a specialized, set-apart clergy and religious who spoke and taught the same Latin, all to support that whole "Catholic thing". 

And then one day they were told: "Hey, turns out that wasn't necessary after all! Toss it!" 

Remember what old Hannibal Bugnini is quoted as saying:

“We must strip from our Catholic prayers and our Catholic liturgies everything which can be the shadow of a stumbling block for our separated brethren, that is, Protestants.

L’Osseratore Romano, 19 March 1965, quoted in Michael Davies.

Nine years later the Bug expressed satisfaction that the ensuing reform was “…a major conquest of the Roman Catholic Church.”

 The psychological shock must have been devastating. I've heard stories of kids who watched as their parents took out their Latin-English missals and burned them in the backyard because the local priest told them to. Could a kid ever forget that? Try to imagine the shock of seeing what you were told was immemorial and eternal and see it replaced with the worst sort of chintzy banality that the wretched '60s and 70s could produce. (And that's saying something, because those decades were as shallow and empty-souled as any time in history! Incredibly, they even make the Bourbons look classy.)

It was the Vatican I Church, (that avatar of the Church from the election of Pope Pius IX in 1846 and culminating in Vatican I, and which lasted to Vatican II), hadn't drilled into lay Catholics the idea that priests and the hierarchy were NEVER to be questioned, and that bishops were just secretaries to the pope, get-the-coffee types even though the Vatican I council reaffirmed bishops were direct successors of the Apostles. The Vat2 Revolution could not have happened without that conditioning. The "Reformers" cynically used 100 years of "Do not question us" to further their ends.

“So in the Libyan fable it is told
That once an eagle, stricken with a dart,
Said, when he saw the fashion of the shaft,
With our own feathers, not by others' hands,
Are we now smitten.”
―Aeschylus

(The Greeks knew everything.) 

Being of the Irish-speaking persuasion, I have the attitude: "These (insert unprintable description here) don't have the right now, and they didn't then, to deprive me of my religious heritage." I've just sort of been waiting for some hierarch to tell me X, or Y, or Z, as in the old Modernist party line about the TLM and the old Church: I've just been waiting. And of course that's not charitable, and according to Canon 212 we have to be polite with the clergy. But Grrr, grrrr, grrr. Somehow, someway, the spirit of St. Columbanus runs in me. (And see also here.)

Indeed, when I'm in the exquisite TLM I attend here in Budapest, once in while the thought occurs to me (not as much now as early on in my TLM attendance) and it's a shocking thought: "Those people, the "reformers" wanted to take this away from meself AND me kids, all this spiritual, soul-filling beauty; they wanted to make it extinct." Of course, that's not going to happen now.  But the restoration, the reconquista, is going to be long. From God's point of view, that's fine. A lot of time for charity, from his perspective, especially from Trad Catholics to the other sorts. And that's not going to be easy.

It's just our penance. Bergoglio is our penance. It could be worse.

An Préachán