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| Vatican welcomes ‘LGBT pilgrims’ as it scrubs references to SSPX pilgrimage |
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Posted by: Stone - 09-02-2025, 07:06 AM - Forum: Vatican II and the Fruits of Modernism
- Replies (3)
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Vatican welcomes ‘LGBT pilgrims’ as it scrubs references to SSPX pilgrimage
In the very city of Rome, under the shadow of St. Peter's Basilica, a sin that cries to heaven for vengeance is celebrated under the name of 'inclusion.'
Aug 29, 2025
(LifeSiteNews [slightly adapted - not all hyperlinks included from original]) — Friends, what does it mean when the Vatican welcomes open promoters of sexual perversion into its Jubilee celebrations?
That’s right, a group of over 1,000 so-called “LGBTQ Catholics” are about to descend upon Rome next week for the Jubilee year.
It’s organized by an Italian group called “La Tenda di Gionata” – the Tent of Jonathan, now that is likely a repugnant and disgusting reference to the friendship between Jonathan and King David – and this group has been very active over the years. It’s not the first time they’ve been to Rome as a group either. On their website, there are articles about their experiences at Pride festivals, including in Rome.
But before we can really dig into this pilgrimage, let’s begin as we always do with the Sign of the Cross – and consider another pilgrimage that’s just taken place over in Rome.
Many of us were delighted when we saw the Vatican Jubilee website include a listing for the Traditional Latin Mass SSPX pilgrimage to Rome, which just took place a few days ago.
Some said that such a listing wasn’t significant: that the Italian language Jubilaeum 2025 site just included everything that was happening, without regard for approval or disapproval on the part of the site.
Not so, said others. The Catholic Herald in the UK referred to it as “a rare moment of visible accord.”
The pilgrimage itself was an amazing sight. LifeSiteNews’ Dr. Maike Hickson was there, and witnessed nearly 8,000 Catholics and 680 priests and religious of the SSPX entering the Holy Doors of St. Peters Basilica there, singing the Creed and Te Deum and other beautiful hymns.
St Peter’s Basilica even put out seating for them, and let them use the microphone system. The day before, the SSPX pilgrims had Masses in the catacombs, and in the Park behind the Colosseum. [...]So, it’s understandable that many were also dismayed when the reference to the SSPX was removed from the Vatican Jubilee website.
Now, the point here is the LGBT “pilgrimage,” not the SSPX one – but stay with me. The removal definitely seemed like a de-legitimization, and undermined the idea, expressed by the Vatican office itself around the same time, that “inclusion” – on the website – “does not imply endorsement.”
But if that’s so, why delete the SSPX pilgrimage?
It’s also obviously false to say that inclusion doesn’t imply endorsement. If the KKK or the American Nazi Party were planning a Jubilee pilgrimage to Rome this year, with 8,000 pilgrims like that SSPX pilgrimage, do we really think they’d be included in the website event listings? Of course not.
Obviously I’m not comparing the SSPX to those groups. I’m just saying that, even if inclusion does not imply endorsement, it does imply something. It implies that a group is basically inside the Overton Window of acceptable thought. It means they’re “allowed,” while others are pushed out.
And that is why it is so troubling that this Tent of Jonathan, this La Tenda di Gionata group, is being listed on the Vatican Jubilee website.
While the SSPX is outside the window of acceptable thought, this homosexualist group is clearly inside it for the Leo XIV Vatican.
Alessandro Previti, one of the organisers of the event, told the “LGBTQ Catholic Ministry” Outreach:
Quote:“The core objective is to be there, to pray, to pray together and to feel part of the church, to be welcome as we are, for who we are.”
The Mass for this group – oh, yes, there is a Mass for them – will be celebrated inside the Church of the Gesù by Bishop Francesco Savino, vice president of the Italian Bishops’ Conference. Savino himself called the event:
Quote:“[an] irreversible sign reminding us that the Gospel is not a manifesto for chosen few, but a love letter addressed to the whole human family.”
This sort of event even got an endorsement from Cardinal Cobo, vice president of the Spanish bishops’ conference. Cobo wrote a letter to the Global Network of Rainbow Catholics – another LGBT group, which met in Madrid last week, and is supporting the Jubilee events.
Here’s what he said:
“In the context of the Jubilee Year, in which the Church opens its doors to those who journey together in hope, I hope that the event you are preparing will help prepare you more deeply to ‘enter the Holy Door’ and that it will lead to a deeper encounter with Christ.”
Here’s another interesting thing: last year, Tenda di Gionata was also deleted from the Vatican Jubilee website temporarily – before being reinstated. And when confronted with criticism over these listings, Archbishop Rino Fisichella, the Vatican’s Jubilee coordinator, declared:
“We include all those who ask us to experience faith… Therefore, I don’t see why anyone should be excluded.”
What does it say about the so-called “Church of inclusion,” when the Society of Saint Pius X is first listed, then deleted, while LGBTQ activists are celebrated as honored pilgrims – and reinstated after they were deleted?
And as the SSPX News site asked: “Does Fisichella believe that the pilgrims who came with the Society of Saint Pius X were not there to experience faith? Why were they there then? What does he criticize them for?”
As I said before, this is really not about the SSPX. It’s not like we’re calling for the Jubilee website to relist their event, or for the Church to be like a circus or a zoo, made up of groups which hold diametrically opposed beliefs, and practice diametrically opposed religions. We’re not begging the Vatican to give the SSPX a corner in their big tent in which they can do their little thing.
No, it’s about us saying clearly: under Leo XIV, the Vatican is making space for homosexualist groups, and celebrating them as honored pilgrims, and treating their heterodoxy and heresy as if they were legitimate opinions – and this is unacceptable. [Emphasis The Catacombs] The treatment of the SSPX – and what I said about the KKK – simply makes that worse and more obvious.
It’s unacceptable, but it isn’t a surprise. Leo XIV himself said, as Cardinal Prevost in 2023, that his earlier condemnations of the “homosexual lifestyle” had shifted under Francis – “there’s been a development” he said, such that “we are looking to be more welcoming and more open, and to say all people are welcome in the Church.”
I’m sorry, we all know what that means. He even attributed this “development” to Francis and made clear that he had adopted it for himself.
No, friends. God does not bless sin – let alone one of the four sins that cry to heaven for vengeance. The Church does not hand over her altars to those who deny her moral teaching and publicly celebrate sin. As Saint Paul warned: “You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons. You cannot partake of the table of the Lord and the table of demons.” (1 Cor. 10:21)
Yet there, in the very city of Rome, under the shadow of St. Peter’s Basilica, a sin that cries to heaven for vengeance is celebrated under the name of “inclusion.”
All are included. Anyone can walk through the Holy Doors for the Jubilee. But the Holy Door of eternal life is not open to anyone who feels like it – it’s open only to those who have the supernatural faith, hope and charity of Christ, and persevere in the grace of God.
Whatever these churchmen do, let’s resolve for ourselves to walk through that door, whatever it costs us – and offer reparation for these sins and our own, and pray for the conversion of those involved in this sordid story.
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| The Catholic Trumpet: Neo-SSPX Confirms What Resistance Catholics Have Always Known |
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Posted by: Stone - 08-29-2025, 08:39 AM - Forum: The Catholic Trumpet
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Neo-SSPX Confirms What Resistance Catholics Have Always Known
![[Image: rs=w:1280]](https://img1.wsimg.com/isteam/ip/df55e1a9-c854-4d0b-a2a9-94177954436c/IMG_0029.png/:/cr=t:0%25,l:0%25,w:100%25,h:100%25/rs=w:1280)
The Catholic Trumpet [slightly adapted and reformatted] | August 27, 2025
Note: On 22 August 2025, the Neo-SSPX issued an open letter to Cardinal Arborelius in response to his statements of 15 August 2025. This letter confirms many of the positions long defended by faithful Catholics and illustrates of the True SSPX Resistance that no matter how much one compromises in pursuit of recognition or security, Modernist Rome and the devil will always strike, demonstrating the necessity of steadfast fidelity to the true Catholic Faith.
For decades, Catholics outside the post-2012 Neo-SSPX have consistently warned of a profound crisis in the Church. They exposed the infiltration of the Society and the practical agreement made with Rome under then Superior Bishop Fellay, an arrangement that accepted the Novus Ordo Mass as legitimately promulgated and endorsed the Second Vatican Council in a condemned spirit of evolution cloaked as tradition. Archbishop Lefebvre explicitly refused to subject his priests or the faithful to such compromises.
Lefebvre understood that true obedience to the Church cannot include submission to error or heresy. Catholics have a duty to separate themselves from the conciliar Church, which is no longer the Catholic Church, and to preserve the integrity of the Faith. As he declared in 1974: “It is therefore impossible for any conscientious and faithful Catholic to espouse this reformation and to submit to it in any way whatsoever. The only attitude of fidelity to the Church and to Catholic doctrine appropriate for our salvation is a categorical refusal to accept this reformation.” Faithful Catholics have always defended this principle, recognizing that the salvation of souls depends upon access to the sacraments administered according to the traditional rites and the unwavering teaching of the Catholic Faith.
These warnings were dismissed by the Neo-SSPX, its supporters, and those who unquestioningly follow it, often portrayed as mere preference or obstinacy. In reality, these Catholics acted to protect the Church from the infiltration of Modernist doctrine and to ensure the integrity of the priesthood that was meant to safeguard the traditional Faith.
The Neo-SSPX letter to Cardinal Arborelius, issued on 22 August 2025, now confirms what these faithful Catholics long understood. The Society openly acknowledges that it has relied upon modernist popes to legitimize its activities. Faculties granted by Popes Benedict XVI and Francis for hearing confessions and celebrating marriages are cited as justification for their pastoral work. These privileges were obtained through long-standing dialogue and practical arrangements with Rome, demonstrating that the Neo-SSPX has relied upon conciliar authority to maintain its operations.
The letter also emphasizes support from conciliar bishops. Bishop Athanasius Schneider is invoked to dismiss claims of schism, while Bishop Vitus Huonder is highlighted for his personal connection to the Society, his public admiration of Lefebvre, and the affirmation from Pope Francis that the Neo-SSPX is not in schism. These admissions reveal the Society’s dependence on compromised figures to establish legitimacy. The reliance on Modernist authority to defend their existence and activities confirms the very compromise that faithful Catholics have consistently opposed.
Through these acknowledgments, the Neo-SSPX demonstrates the consequences of the post-2012 trajectory: practical acceptance of Vatican II, alignment with modernist Rome, and justification of their presence using faculties and endorsements from authorities whose fidelity to Tradition is doubtful. Every claim of pastoral care or canonical standing is inseparably linked to this compromise. The letter, in its own words, confirms the warnings the faithful have tirelessly issued for decades.
The 2025 letter is therefore not merely a statement of fact. It is an inadvertent admission that the post-2012 Neo-SSPX has followed a path Archbishop Lefebvre refused to sanction. It underscores the duty of Catholics to avoid compromising with Modernist structures and to reject any allegiance to a conciliar Church that denies fundamental Catholic truths. For the salvation of souls, Catholics must maintain clear separation from this conciliar Church, adhering instead to the unadulterated teachings and sacraments of the true Catholic Faith.
As +Archbishop Lefebvre stated:
Quote:“That Conciliar Church is a schismatic church because it breaks with the Catholic Church that has always been. It has its new dogmas, its new priesthood, its new institutions, its new worship… The Church that affirms such errors is at once schismatic and heretical. This Conciliar Church is, therefore, not Catholic. To whatever extent Pope, Bishops, priests, or the faithful adhere to this new church, they separate themselves from the Catholic Church.” (Archbishop Lefebvre, Reflections on his suspension a divinis, July 29, 1976)
The Neo-SSPX letter follows in full. Its contents speak for themselves, confirming the positions long held by faithful the True Resistance Catholics and providing a clear example of the compromises inherent in the post-2012 Society. The letter is both a warning and a vindication: a warning that reliance on conciliar authorities undermines the Faith, and a vindication of those who have resisted compromise and defended the traditional priesthood, the sacraments, and the integrity of the Catholic Church.
Your Eminence,
We have taken note of the two statements concerning our priestly fraternity that were made public by Your Eminence on the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
Animated by the zeal for the salvation of souls and in the spirit of filial devotion to our Holy Mother the Church and Her institutions we would like to make our thoughts and intentions known in the form of an open letter that we hope will foster a greater understanding for the nature of our work and benefit many of the Catholic faithful in Sweden.
Standing of the pastoral activities of the FSSPX according to Church authorities
No. 6 of Your Eminence's Clarification states that the sacraments celebrated by our priests are “valida sed illicita” - valid but illicit (i.e. inadmissible). We are grateful for this clarification, which shows, for the benefit of all the faithful, that Your Eminence agrees with us that all our sacraments are valid.
Concerning the liceity (admissibility) of the sacraments celebrated by our priests, we would like to point out that on 1st September 2015 “motivated by the need to respond to the good of these faithful”, the Holy Father Pope Francis granted faculties for hearing confessions validly and licitly to all the priests of our priestly fraternity. At first, this was granted for the duration of one year (the Year of Mercy) and then in the Apostolic Letter Misericordia et misera, dated 20 November 2016, extended until further notice for “the pastoral benefit” of the faithful who attend our churches. These faculties have not been revoked by the Holy See to date.
The Church and the Holy Father certainly do not consider it a “good of the faithful” or a “pastoral benefit” to reassure those faithful who are about to do what is objectionable or inadmissible. But as Confessions are usually heard immediately before Holy Mass, it stands to reason that most of the faithful who come to our priests for Confession have the intention of attending Holy Mass celebrated by one of our priests immediately afterwards.
Furthermore, in the letter of the Pontifical Commission “Ecclesia Dei” signed 27 March and published 4 April 2017, the Holy Father's decision to authorize Local Ordinaries the possibility to grant faculties for the celebration of marriages of faithful who follow the pastoral activity of the FSSPX was promulgated. The letter explicitly mentions that the purpose of this decision was “to reassure the conscience of the faithful” and that the Mass celebrated following such a marriage ceremony, “may” or “is to be” celebrated by a priest of the FSSPX. Now, the Church and the Holy Father do not reassure the conscience of those who do something inadmissible or objectionable.
Therefore, it is evidently not the view of the Holy See that it is inadmissible or objectionable to follow the pastoral activities of the FSSPX.
In No. 2 of Your Eminence's Clarification, it is stated that the FSSPX does not live and work in communion with the Holy See. This statement is manifestly false and amounts to a grave calumny. The members of the FSSPX are Catholics in virtue of their baptism, Catholic faith and submission to the authority of the pope. This submission, however, does not imply a limitless obedience.
Your Eminence's use of the expression “not living and working in communion with the Holy See” amounts to the accusation that we are in schism. As false as this accusation is, it is at least a clear and precise statement concerning canonical status: someone in schism is separated from the Church. But in the very same sentence it is also said that our canonical status is unclear. How can we at the same time be in schism and in a canonical status that is “unclear”?
Statements by the Holy Fathers Benedict XVI and Francis, and especially their way of dealing with matters concerning our priestly fraternity as matters internal to the Church, clearly show that they considered us as Catholics and part of the Church. Examples of this are the doctrinal discussions between the Vatican and the FSSPX from 2009 to 2012 and the faculties granted by Pope Francis in 2015, 2016 and 2017.
It has been clearly emphasized, especially by Pope Benedict XVI, that the “problem” between the Holy See and the FSSPX is of a doctrinal, not disciplinary nature. In other words, the reason why our fraternity is denied an official canonical status is not some refusal on our part to recognize the pope, to live in communion with the rest of the Church, that we keep doing things without permission, or in bad faith or anything of that nature. Pope Benedict XVI stated in the Letter to the Bishops of 10 March 2009: “the problems now to be addressed are essentially doctrinal in nature and concern primarily the acceptance of the Second Vatican Council and the post-conciliar magisterium of the Popes”. In the letter of 1 September 2015, Pope Francis stated concerning the FSSPX: “From various quarters, several Brother Bishops have told me of their good faith and sacramental practice”.
Well-respected bishops of the Church have expressed support for the FSSPX, defended its adherence to the Church's traditional teachings and advocated its recognition by Church authorities.
Bishop Athanasius Schneider has been reported in the press as stating that only “a very narrow, legalistic view of the reality of the Church” could lead one to believe the FSSPX is schismatic and that those who state as much are “putting the letter of the Canon Law above the importance, the primary importance of the fullness of the Catholic faith and of the traditional liturgy.” Further, that the FSSPX continually exhibits “canonical community with the Pope” by praying for the pope during Mass and offering other public prayers for him and that the lack of a canonical recognition is not a barrier to Catholics receiving sacraments from FSSPX clergy.
Particularly telling is the story of Bishop Vitus Huonder, former diocesan Bishop of Chur in Switzerland, who was tasked by Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller, then Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, to initiate dialogue with the FSSPX. This mandate led to regular contact with members of the FSSPX, allowing him to understand our fraternity from within, moving beyond media portrayals. His journey culminated in his retirement to our house in Wangs, Switzerland, a decision made with the explicit permission and blessing of Pope Francis. In a series of video talks, he expressed deep admiration for our founder, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre. He also stated that Pope Francis personally told him the FSSPX is not in schism. Bishop Huonder died on Easter Wednesday, 2024, and was buried in Écône alongside Archbishop Lefebvre.
In No. 3 of the Clarification, the often-heard contention is made that the FSSPX is not in full communion with the Holy See and the Pope. The use of the expression “full communion” in this context is a novelty and the distinction between “full” and “imperfect” communion is an innovation of the second Vatican Council. The Church's traditional teaching is very simple: Catholics belong to the Church by fulfilling the three classic conditions: baptism, Catholic faith, submission to the hierarchy. The FSSPX acknowledges the authority of the pope, and its priests pray for him at every Mass. True obedience consists in accepting the authority of the pope as pope, in praying for him, and respecting his person while actively resisting any bad orientations he might wish to impart to the Church. Such is the attitude of the FSSPX, and we are therefore indeed in a state of submission to the pope.
Obligation of registering sacraments
In No. 5 of the Clarification it is stated that sacraments celebrated by our priests (which are admitted to be valid - see above) cannot be entered into the sacramental records of the diocese and that this will affect the possibility for the faithful to receive baptismal and confirmation certificates.
Catholic sacramental theology and Canon Law impose an unequivocal obligation to keep track of the reception of certain sacraments, especially those that can only be received once without sacrilege, such as Baptism, Confirmation and Holy Orders.
Canon law (535 §2) prescribes that notations of confirmation, marriage, reception of sacred orders, etc. are always to be noted on a baptismal certificate.
We cannot imagine that Your Eminence really intends to forbid valid confirmations to be entered in the sacramental records and included on baptismal certificates, as this will inevitably lead to confusion and uncertainty as to whether a member of the faithful has or has not received the sacrament of Confirmation and therefore pose the risk of sacrilegious repetition of the conferral of Confirmation. Such a policy would clearly be against the prescriptions of Canon Law and would amount to an abuse of power making life difficult and causing fear and uncertainly for Catholic faithful who have no other wish than to profess their Catholic Faith and live in full accordance with it.
We will of course assure the faithful concerned that a confirmation certificate can always be obtained directly from us, should the Catholic Diocese of Stockholm actually choose to ignore the theology and Law of the Church in this matter.
State of grave spiritual necessity
The Priestly Fraternity of St. Pius X considers the carrying out of those of its pastoral activities that lack the approval of church authorities to be justified by the existence of a state of grave spiritual necessity caused by the current crisis in the Church.
For their salvation and sanctification souls are in need of the true, unadulterated Catholic Faith and the sacraments of the Catholic Church celebrated in the dignified, awe-inspiring and uplifting rites of the traditional Missal, Ritual and Pontifical that truly lead hearts and minds to the realm of the supernatural and the things of God, as they have done for centuries for so many of the Church's most loved and venerated Saints.
Every member of the Church has the right to receive from it the doctrine and the sacraments necessary for salvation. This includes the right to be warned against errors that put the faith in danger as well as the right to be taught the fulness of the Catholic faith.
In the Church of today, many errors previously condemned by the Church's magisterium are being allowed to spread practically unchecked, with an immense number of contemporary theologians and even bishops and cardinals openly denying or questioning the dogmas of the Catholic Church. The liturgical reforms have led to a loss of respect for the sacred, as the new forms largely fail to lift the soul to God and rather bring what should be considered sacred and approached with respect and awe down to the level of the mundane and everyday. The practice of receiving Holy Communion in the hand and standing not only occasions many sacrileges, but is also at least partly responsible for the loss of faith of many Catholics in Christ's Real Presence in the Blessed Sacrament.
Referring to the situation of the Church in 1972, Pope Paul VI said in a homily that “from some fissure the smoke of Satan has entered the temple of God”. In his 2003 apostolic exhortation Ecclesia in Europa, Pope John Paul II lamented a widespread erosion of faith marked by practical agnosticism, religious indifference and a forgetting of Christian heritage – describing it as a silent apostasy on the part of people who have all that they need and who live as if God does not exist. Benedict XVI publicly decried the “process of secularization” that “has produced a grave crisis of the sense of the Christian faith and of belonging to the Church”.
In our view, the preaching of modern Ecumenism and Religious Liberty have been especially far-reaching in its harmful consequences. A true ecumenism aims to lead souls to enter into the true Church founded by Jesus Christ, but the modern and false type of ecumenism which was promoted by the Second Vatican Council is concerned with achieving a purely human reconciliation, ignoring the need to reconcile men with God by leading souls to the means of salvation found only in the Catholic Church. Religious liberty, as taught by the Second Vatican Council, denies the rights of Our Lord Jesus Christ as King.
Many fundamental truths of the Catholic Faith are unfortunately ignored or denied in large parts of the Church, such as the infallibility of divine revelation, the importance of sanctifying grace, the reality of Hell, the power of the devil, the need for spiritual fight and the social Kingship of Our Lord Jesus Christ.
If the normal hierarchy (pastor, bishop, etc.) do not fulfill their duty, the faithful find themselves in a state of necessity that allows them to have recourse to any Catholic priest. Because of the necessity, this priest then receives directly from the Church what is called supplied jurisdiction, in order to minister to the faithful. We have always maintained that in the current crisis, supplied jurisdiction empowers traditional priests to baptize, hear the confessions of, marry, etc., Catholics who otherwise would not depend on them.
The fact that some errors are condemned, (parts of) Catholic truth is preached and the traditional liturgy is allowed to be celebrated in some places especially provided, often in an unstable manner, for faithful who have a “personal preference” or happen to be “attached to the vetus ordo”, as it is often expressed, clearly does not change the fact that the state of grave spiritual necessity remains. For the defense of the liturgical and doctrinal Tradition of the Church is nothing more nor less than the defense of the integrity of the Catholic Faith, which is the common good of the Church; by this very fact it entails the fight against modern errors which challenge fundamental truths of the Faith and thus endanger the common good of the Church. When this common good of the Catholic Faith is considered by the authorities as the object of a simple personal attachment, a state of necessity exists.
The supreme Law of the Church is the salvation of souls. The Law of the Church, just like any other just law, allows for exceptions in exceptional circumstances. Civil law forbids breaking windows, but it is not wrong to break a window in order to save an infant from a burning building. It is similarly not wrong to help feed the starving flock even if it can only be done at the cost of the disapproval of Church authorities, whose approval would have been required in normal circumstances. In the light of this, we cannot agree with Your Eminence's statement in No. 6 of the Clarification that sacraments celebrated by our priests are unauthorised and therefore should never be celebrated and avoided by the faithful. The circumstances themselves give the authorisation that is lacking from responsible authorities, making these celebrations both valid and licit.
The FSSPX provides access to the mentioned means of salvation to many thousands of Catholic faithful around the world with its priories, churches, chapels, novitiates and priestly seminaries, and we strive to do the same for souls hungry and thirsty for sanctification in Sweden and the other Scandinavian countries as well. We are especially eager to find worthy vocations to the Catholic priesthood and religious life and help them on their path to a life consecrated to God.
Our priests always pray for the Pope and the local Bishop at the beginning of the Canon of Holy Mass. We do what we do, not in the spirit of division or rebellion, but with the sole aim of the glory of God, the preservation of the invaluable treasures of the Catholic Faith and Sacraments, handed to our Mother the Church by Almighty God Himself, and the salvation and sanctification of souls. We have no other wish than to help Your Eminence and the other responsible pastors fulfil Your holy duty in the care for souls.
Most respectfully, Your humble servants in Christ the King and Mary Immaculate,
Father Karl Stehlin FSSPX
District Superior for Poland and Scandinavia
Father Håkan Lindström FSSPX
Priest responsible for the Scandinavian apostolate
22 August 2025, on the Feast of the Immaculate Heart of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
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| Cardinal Cupich, Fr. James Martin ignore Minnesota shooter’s transgenderism |
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Posted by: Stone - 08-29-2025, 08:31 AM - Forum: Vatican II and the Fruits of Modernism
- No Replies
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Cardinal Cupich, Fr. James Martin ignore Minnesota shooter’s transgenderism, call for more gun control
The clergymen called for more gun laws after the Minnesota church shooting, but ignored the perpetrator’s gender confusion,
anti-Christian hatred, and potential demonic possession.
![[Image: GettyImages-624344378.jpg]](https://www.lifesitenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/GettyImages-624344378.jpg)
Cardinal Blase Cupich
Franco Origlia/Getty Images
Aug 28, 2025
(LifeSiteNews [not all hyperlinks from original included]) — Cardinal Blase Cupich and Father James Martin, S.J., have called for stricter gun control laws in the wake of the deadly shooting of schoolchildren in Minnesota, without referencing the shooter’s “transgender” identity and mental illness or the spiritual roots of his attack.
“Robin” Westman, born Robert Westman, on Wednesday morning fired into Annunciation Catholic Church where schoolchildren were gathered, killing two and injuring 17 others, leaving one adult and five children in critical condition as of Thursday morning. Westman killed himself following the shooting.
Videos and writings from Westman show he was consumed by leftist hatred and mentally ill by his own admission. Footage he filmed captures him laughing maniacally as he focuses with his camera on an image of the face of Jesus Christ, crowned with thorns, atop a shooting target on his wall.
The video footage shows him proceeding to pick up an array of gun magazines painted with messages such as “Where is your God?” and “Pain and hate.” One gun reads, “Take this, all of you, and eat,” in a mockery of Christ’s words at the Last Supper said at the consecration during Mass.
In his manifesto, he apologizes to his family and friends but commits to his homicidal and suicidal intention, which he said he had been contemplating for years: “Unfortunately, due to my depression, anger, and twisted mind, I want to fulfill a final act that has been in the back of my head for years,” he wrote.
His mother, who used to work at Annunciation Catholic School according to CBS News, applied for his name change from Robert to “Robin” on his behalf as part of his effort to identify as a female in 2020, when he was still a minor.
A number of observers believe Westman demonstrated demonic influence, if not outright possession. Podcaster Will Spencer has shared a picture from Westman’s journal in which the young man depicted himself facing a demon in the mirror. He wrote as a caption in Russian, “Who?” “When will this end?” “Help me!” and “I don’t want to.”
A former classmate of his, Josefina Sanchez, told ABC5 she had seen red flags in the past. “When you see something erratic, it doesn’t leave your mind … so he would put up his hand and praise Hitler,” Sanchez said.
“I think that’s a spiritual battle,” Sanchez said of the manifesto videos. “I don’t think it’s this world, it’s demonic, I’m sorry, it is. I think we need Jesus. He needed Him.”
Catholic author Daniel O’Connor referred to Westman as “possessed” and lamented that his mother had signed off on his name change. “Cooperating with another’s sin or deception is not love, it is hatred. It hands that person over to his demons,” remarked O’Connor on X.
Instead of raising questions about Westman’s gender dysphoria, a manifestation of mental illness, or about the state of his soul, the heterodox Jesuit priest Fr. Martin and Cdl. Cupich of Chicago responded to the shooting by calling for more restrictive gun control laws.
“Pray for an end to gun violence and for sensible gun control laws,” wrote Fr. Martin, also calling for prayers for the children killed and their family and friends.
The archbishop of Chicago issued a statement following the shooting suggesting the availability of guns should be restricted and that social service programs should be more amply funded by the government, without referring to Westman’s gender dysphoria or spiritual maladies.
“The facts are clear. Guns are plentiful and common sense attempts to limit their availability have been largely rejected in the name of a freedom not found in our constitution,” claimed Cupich in a statement shared to X by liberal Catholic theologian Rich Raho. “Cutbacks in funding for healthcare and for social service programs will only exacerbate a national mental health crisis and increase alienation.”
“Please pray and please act. Now,” Cupich added at the end of his statement.
Cardinal Timothy Dolan was criticized for saying the Minnesota shooting was caused by “gun violence” without mentioning Westman’s transgenderism or anti-Christian sentiments. He wrote on X, “We join in compassionate solidarity with the countless families of the city of Minneapolis, Annunciation Catholic School, and beyond who have been touched by an unthinkable grief caused by mind numbing gun violence which has become all too common.”
A remarkably high number of mass murderers (or aspiring murderers) of late have not identified with their sex. This summer, 18-year-old “Felix” Winter, a girl identifying as male, was sentenced to six years in prison after admitting to two charges related to planning a school shooting in the U.K. In 2023, gender-confused female Audrey “Aidan” Hale murdered six people at a Presbyterian private school in Tennessee.
The Aberdeen shooter Snochia Mosley also identified as “transgender”; the Colorado Springs shooter Anderson Lee Aldrich identified as “non-binary”; the Iowa shooter Dylan Butler identified as “gender fluid”; Denver shooter Alec McKinney identified as “transgender”; and Philadelphia shooter Kimbrady Carriker photographed himself wearing female clothing and jewelry, and with a feminine hairstyle.
The identification with a “gender” other than one’s own sex meets the most basic criterion for mental illness, as a self-perception that defies and contradicts reality – although a cultural shift among leftists have led to the denial that transgenderism is a mental illness.
However, studies and anecdotal evidence still indicate that transgender identification often stems from mental health issues, including trauma. One such study concluded, as a number of detransitioners have attested, that “[T]here is strong evidence that children and adolescents who identify as transgender have experienced significant psychological trauma leading to their gender dysphoria.”
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| The Recusant: Is John Henry Newman a Saint? Is He a Doctor of the Church? |
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Posted by: Stone - 08-28-2025, 07:41 AM - Forum: In Defense of Tradition
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The following is taken from pages 30-42 of this issue of The Recusant [slightly adapted and reformatted]:
Is John Henry Newman a Saint?
Is He a Doctor of the Church?
The short answer is, no. There is enough to be wary of with Newman, enough to at least give any sensible Catholic pause for thought and in any case, Novus Ordo conciliar canonisations aren’t worth the paper they’re written on. These modern canonisations are proposed to us by men who don’t believe in real Saints, just as the miracles which confirm them are not real miracles and are proposed to us by men who don’t believe in real miracles. John Henry Newman is as much a Saint as Paul VI or John Paul II. The first part of this article will deal with the question of real Saints and conciliar “Saints”; the second part with Newman himself.
Part 1: When is a Saint not a Saint?
Remember that [the] Novus Ordo calendar removed many genuine Saints as though they no longer existed and were therefore no longer to be venerated. Take, for instance, the Fourteen Holy Helpers: few modern Catholics have even heard of them today, although they were venerated for centuries and were the object of widespread popular devotion across Christendom. Their feast was removed from the calendar and some of them lost individual feast days too and became in effect “un-canonised,” including some very popular Saints. That did not stop modernist Rome casting doubt on whether they had ever even existed to begin with, declaring that the stories about them were mere fables, not really worthy of belief in other words. Here, for instance, is what Paul VI’s Rome had to say concerning St. Barbara:
Quote:“Memoria S. Barbarae, Saeculo XII in Calendario romano ascripta, deletur: acta S. Barbarae sunt omnino fabulosa et etiam de loco ubi passa sit summa inter peritos est dissentio.”
[“The feast of St. Barbara, added to the Roman Calendar in the Twelfth Century, is to be removed. The life of St. Barbara is totally legendary and even the place of her martyrdom is not agreed-upon by experts.”] (Calendarium Romanum, 1969, p.147).
And similarly, concerning St. Catherine of Alexandria:
Quote:“Memoria S. Catharinae, saeculo XII in Calendario romano ascripta, deletur: non solum Passio S. Catharinae est omnino fabulosa, sed de ipsa persona Catharinae nihil certum affirmari potest.”
[“The feast of St. Catherine, added to the Roman Calendar in the Twelfth Century, is to be removed. Not only is the martyrdom of St. Catherine entirely legendary, but nothing certain can be asserted about the person of Catherine herself.”] (Ibid.)
By the way, it is difficult to appreciate what is conveyed by those words “omnino fabulosa” which keep cropping up. A total fable. A complete fairytale. Not in any way true, in other words, not just an exaggeration, but a total, utter fabrication. And it is not just St. Catherine of Alexandria and St. Barbara who are treated his way: St. Christopher is another example of a very popular Saint who was nonetheless removed completely from the calendar, as well as St. Dorothy, St. Pius I, and many more besides. Others, such as St. George and St. Valentine, were demoted to a commemoration in certain local places only, which had much the same effect as removing them altogether. In the motu proprio presenting his new calendar (Mysterii Paschalis, 1969), Paul VI cites - you’ve guessed it! - Vatican II as his justification, quoting the following passage from Sacrosanctum Concilium, §111:
Quote:“Lest the feasts of the saints should take precedence over the feasts which commemorate the very mysteries of salvation, many of them should be left to be celebrated by a particular Church or nation or family of religious; only those should be extended to the universal Church which commemorate saints who are truly of universal importance.”
Even the secular media has picked up on this from time to time. Here, for instance, is a 2014 article from ABC News:
Quote:“The Catholic Church removed 93 saints from the universal calendar and revoked their feast days in 1969 when Pope Paul VI revised the canon of saints and determined that some of the names had only ever been alive as legends or not enough was known about them to determine their status. […] Among Catholicism’s most popular saints, Christopher was listed as a martyr. […] But there wasn’t enough historical evidence the man ever existed, so Pope Paul VI dropped him.” (‘Once a Saint, Always a Saint? Kind Of - Unless You're Demoted’ - here)
Another remarkable victim of the modernists is St. Philomena. One of the most popular Saints of the last two centuries, the Curé of Ars, St. John Vianney, had a particularly strong devotion to her. She was not only removed from the calendar, but modern Rome since then has cast doubt on whether she even existed at all to being with! And yet, like St. Christopher, St. Barbara and the others she still has her own following and devotion to her is still alive and well today, despite her attempted assassination and un-canonisation by modernist unbelievers. One of the important proofs of Sainthood is a cultus, a following, and an enduring
one.
John Paul II had plenty of flatterers and sycophants while he was still alive, and he died adored and praised by the world. Not a good sign! Tony Blair and Bill Clinton were among those who attended his requiem. Hence there was no shortage of people who wanted him declared a Saint immediately (“Santo Subito!” - remember?). But a mere twenty years on, how often does one hear his name mentioned? Outside of Polish Novus Ordo Catholic parishes, is he not all-but forgotten already? And who has ever had a devotion to Paul VI or John XXIII..!? The very idea is absurd! Those men never had a cultus and never will! And yet we are asked to believe that they are Saints, by the very same modernists who tell us that St. Christopher, St. Catherine, St Philomena and others not only aren’t Saints, but weren’t even real people…? Does that sound reasonable to you? The men who openly admit that they don’t believe in real Saints are nonetheless going to tell us who is to be regarded as a Saint from now on! And whom do they propose for our veneration? Men such as John XXIII, Paul VI, John Paul II…! No thanks. You can keep your bogus, conciliar “Saints” - I’ll stick with the real ones, the ones which generations of our forefathers venerated for hundreds of years, thank you very much!
Regarding the details of the removal of Saints from the calendar and general “de-canonisation” which went on in the 1960s (some of which was already happening on the eve of Vatican II in the Tridentine calendar!) a great deal more could be said, but we shall not spend too long on it since it was not really meant to be the focus of this article, fascinating and horrifying though it is.
Suffice it to say that the usual suspects are not very hard to find. An article from late 2020 by one Peter Kwasniewski which appeared on the website of the conservative / novus “New Liturgical Movement” provides some interesting and useful insight on this question and is perhaps worth quoting from here briefly. Among other things, the article identifies more than 300 Saints who were removed or demoted and provides tables showing which changes were made on which days of the year. And just see how long it takes before you spot the name which you knew all along was going to pop up!
Quote:“That the thinning out of the sanctoral cycle had long been on Bugnini’s mind is evident from his 1949 article in Ephemerides Liturgicae, “Per una riforma liturgica generale” (“Towards a General Liturgical Reform”). Bugnini pressed the need for “a reduction of the Sanctoral . . . which requires not only a reduction of the present calendar, but also fixed and prescriptive norms to prevent new Saints’ days from piling up again.”
Yves Chiron summarizes:
Quote:‘A list of thirteen saints or groups of saints was already drawn up for elimination from the universal calendar, with no justification for any of them (Saint Martin for example), whereas the calendar was supposed to abbinare (“pair together”) fourteen more Saints “because their life and work were alike or close to it,” for example Saint Thomas Becket and Saint Stanislaus or Saint Peter Canisius and Saint Robert Bellarmine.’ (Annibale Bugnini: Reformer of the Liturgy, p.34)”
(https://www.newliturgicalmovement.org/20...moval.html)
By the way, next time you visit continental Europe keep an eye out for St. Martin: you see his name everywhere. France is covered with hundreds, if not thousands of churches, chapels and shrines to him and there are dozens of villages and towns named after him in Southern Germany and Austria. In that part of the world at least, it is hard to imagine a Saint who is more deeply embedded within Catholic culture! But then, this is the infamous Fr. Annibale Bugnini and his friends whom we are talking about, so it probably shouldn’t surprise us that much…
The same article quotes the memoires of the well-known “liturgical reformer” Fr. Louis Bouyer, who was nonetheless horrified to see just how far some on his own side were taking things (also found in the excellent article by Dr Carol Byrne, here):
Quote:“I prefer to say nothing, or little, about the new calendar, the handiwork of a trio of maniacs who suppressed, with no good reason, Septuagesima and the Octave of Pentecost and who scattered three quarters of the Saints higgledypiggledy, all based on notions of their own devising! Because these three hotheads obstinately refused to change anything in their work and because the pope wanted to finish up quickly to avoid letting the chaos get out of hand, their project, however insane, was accepted!” (Ibid.)
What is Canonisation?
Behind all this, underlying the question, is something which it is difficult to put one’s finger on, an attitude which itself is wrong. There is more than a whiff of the “because I say so” type of argument which reeks of voluntarism and nominalism. Let us remind ourselves: it is the Saint that makes the canonisation, not the canonisation which makes the Saint. Let that sink in for just a moment. Is a Saint a Saint because Rome says he’s a Saint? Or does Rome say he’s a Saint because he is one? Which comes first, the reality, or the word, the pronouncement, the description of the reality? In previous centuries canonisation was simply a matter of popular acclamation; then it was done more formally, at a diocesan level by the local bishop; in the middle ages it became something reserved to the Holy See.
Over time, the requirements understandably became stricter. The process which emerged in the modern era was something resembling a court case. The soul in question had to be proven a Saint beyond all doubt and was regarded almost as though guilty until proven innocent: not a Saint until proven a Saint. The prosecution, so to speak, was the famous advocatus diaboli. But that was not all. Several other criteria had to be met which were regarded as sine qua non, the first of which was a popular cultus among the faithful; another was some miracles. These things, if they exist, are facts. The canonisation itself was nothing more than a formal recognition of those already-existing facts.
Therefore, the real Saints are the ones who have a real following, who have worked real miracles, whom Divine Providence allows to become known and prayed-to all over the world and to become a central part of Catholic life and culture. The old, recently-removed Saints, in whom modern Rome appears no longer to believe, all pass the test with flying colours. Despite the machinations of the modernists, Catholics all over the world still give their children names such as Catherine, Philomena or Christopher; many people still pray to them, still wear their sacramentals and ask them for aid. Schools and parishes all over the world still bear their names, some of the finest artwork ever created depicts their lives and deaths and in some cases even whole nations, states or cities are under their patronage or have been named after them.
And there is no shortage of modern-day miracles either: as mentioned above, the Curé of Ars alone procured many miracles through the intercession of St. Philomena. More than eleven years ago, these pages (“On Recent Canonisations” - Recusant 16, May 2014) cast doubt on the supposed canonisations of the late popes John XXIII and John Paul II.
It was pointed out that the lives of these men were very far from being that of a Saint and that they were each a very bad example to follow. It was further pointed out that several ominous “coincidences” (if such they be) had accompanied the “canonisation” of John Paul II. The ugly bent-forwards crucifix which stood atop a hill as a memorial of his visit had suddenly collapsed, killing a man who was praying to him beneath it; that when his relics visited Lourdes, the sanctuary was soon underwater following the worst flooding in its history.
The same article suggested good reasons why one cannot simply say, “Canonisations are infallible!” and leave it at that - far from it. The object of infallibility is doctrine, that is, things to be believed by us, and necessary for our salvation. A canonisation on the other hand, is not a matter of doctrine necessary for our salvation: it is a saying that someone is a Saint, which means not only that the person in question is in heaven, but that he or she is an example which you or I can follow and learn from as a means of achieving heaven ourselves. That is why not one single baptised infant has ever been canonised, despite there being presumably tens– or even hundreds-of-thousands of candidates (newly baptised babies die all the time, there is even one in our family). They are certainly in heaven, you can pray to them, but they are never canonised, no statues of them will ever be seen in churches, no feast days in the calendar. Why? Because there is no life to follow: they died too young to give an example for anyone to follow. That is also why it is such a scandal for even the conciliar church to claim that Paul VI or John Paul II are Saints.
If that were true, then we can get to heaven is by kissing the koran, inviting pagans and devilworshippers into a Catholic church to pray to their false gods, putting statues of Buddha on top of tabernacles; punishing good men such as Marcel Lefebvre while simultaneously promoting sexual predators like Marcial Maciel or MarieDominique Philippe; suppressing the true Mass which nourished countless true Saints, and giving everyone a Masonic, Protestant communion service with a Jewish offertory prayer… we could go on. The very thought is monstrous.
So on the question of a cultus, a genuine following and devotion among the faithful, the real, old-fashioned Saints win hands down, despite the disadvantage of their having been removed from calendars, their demotion and all the rest. The conciliar Vatican II “Saints” usually have little or no cultus, despite the fact that it always used to be regarded as a sine qua non, an essential prerequisite to becoming a Saint.
Likewise, on the question of leading a life of heroic virtue, a life which is such a good example that if followed by you and I it will lead us to heaven too, we see the same thing. Many of these the conciliar “Saints” (the conciliar Popes, Faustina, Escriva, et al.) fail spectacularly. Their lives were such that they would never, could never have been canonised before Vatican II. The real Saints, by contrast, led such exemplary lives that many today find it hard to believe and doubt is cast not only on their lives and deaths, but even on their very existence.
The soundness of their teaching is something which will no doubt be at the forefront of the minds of many readers, and so it should be. Unsound teaching, let alone actual heresy, is something which in saner times meant that an investigation into the candidate’s life could not go ahead, never mind the beatification or canonisation itself, as the John Vennari article makes clear elsewhere in these pages. Strictly speaking, the false teaching of these bogus “Saints” is itself enough to say with certainty that they are not Saints. But since many of our acquaintance will not accept that, and since many of us will at some point experience doubt or scruples, let us continue to spell it out in detail. Miracles are the last thing to consider.
A real canonisation in the old days used to require two miracles, after all the other criteria had been met. Two genuine miracles. The new, bogus “canonisations” require only one, and often it is a “miracle” of highly dubious quality. Again, refer to the John Vennari article elsewhere in these pages to see details of the “miracle” used for Mother Theresa: it was as dodgy as a nine-bob note, the doctors involved and even the lady’s husband said it wasn’t a miracle!
In previous years, these pages have contained a close-up look into other conciliar “miracles”- long-time readers might recall our examination of the Buenos Aires “eucharistic miracle” from the 1990s (in Recusant 34, p.26) and that it most certainly did not stand up to close scrutiny! We have neither the time, nor the resources, nor even the patience to examine each and every so-called “miracle” approved by the conciliar authorities, but should it be necessary? How many definitely bogus “miracles” do we need to see until we decide to treat them all with extreme caution? Finally let us consider this. The men approving these “miracles” don’t believe in actual real miracles, even when they are contained in Sacred Scripture! The feeding of the five-thousand? No, you see, what the gospel-writer wished to emphasise in telling this story was that the real miracle was when everyone learned to share. The crossing of the Red Sea? No, you see it was really called the “Reed Sea” because it was like a marsh… Those are things I have heard from conciliar priests with my own ears (as have many of you too, no doubt). We could go on. The point to bear in mind here is this. Just as we are being asked to accept new “Saints” from men who don’t believe in real Saints, we also are being asked to believe in bogus “miracles” by men who cast doubt on real miracles.
In case all of that is all a bit much to remember, below is a handy table for ease of reference! It is of course worth remembering that the other scandal regarding conciliar “canonisations” is the sheer number. John Paul II earned a reputation as a veritable “Saint factory,” canonising hundreds in one go. His successors are no better. Not only does this practice severely damage the prestige and credibility of the Church in the eyes of Catholics and non-Catholics alike, it also defeats the very point of a canonisation: how can you possibly have a devotion to these new “Saints” when it would take forever just to read their names, never mind learn a bit about
them? The whole point of Saints is that they are held out to us as an example to follow; you can’t hold out a couple of hundred examples in one go and expect to be taken seriously.
The Recusant patent “How-Bogus-Is-My-Saint?” Calculator
![[Image: Capture2.png]](https://i.postimg.cc/cJQMRnkq/Capture2.png)
But beyond that, it has yet another unfortunate side-effect, in that it means that many genuine Saints may well be mixed in with the conciliar “Saints.” The first canonisation done by Pope Francis, for instance, was of more than 800 people in one go. They were the inhabitants of Otranto who were killed by the Turks in 1480 for refusing to convert to Islam: martyrs. At a cursory glance, it may well be that some or all of them really are martyrs, and therefore Saints.
But can we be certain? And which ones? Does anyone have the time or patience to try to find out? To take one more example, in 2001 John Paul II canonised a group of 233 martyrs of the Spanish Civil War. Again, there were many Catholics who died for the Faith at the hands of the communists at that time, so it is not inconceivable that at least some of them, many of them even, are genuine Saints and martyrs. But again, doesn’t it just leave one frustrated and demoralised? How certain can anyone be that there wasn’t the odd semi-degenerate “rightwinger” whom the reds rounded up with a load of Catholics into the same firing-squad and buried in the same pit? So the answer is it is probably a mixture, but very difficult to say.
And then there are men such as Padre Pio. Well, they couldn’t very well not canonise him, could they? They know full well that his presence in amongst all those other conciliar “Saints” will lend them credibility. And what about the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales? Well, they were of course martyrs at the hands of the English Protestant regime, they were beatified in 1929 and most of the work for their canonisations was surely done before the Council, so despite the fact that the actual canonisation wasn’t done until 1970, surely one can take them as being genuine Saints who were always going to be canonised, even had Vatican II and the crisis in the Church never happened.
We could go on, but all this really means is that the conciliar “Saints” are a bit of a mixed bag, to put it mildly. Some unmistakably genuine Saints have probably been given a conciliar “canonisation” (what an insult to them - they’ll need to be given a real canonisation when the crisis is over!). Then there are others who may well have been Saints. Then there are a lot of highly dubious “Saints” and finally there are those who are definitely not Saints. So a conciliar canonisation doesn’t necessarily mean that the person is a Saint. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that he isn’t a Saint either. What a mess.
Where does Newman fit into all this?
All of which is by way of demonstrating that just because the conciliar church says that Newman is a Saint, that doesn’t really mean anything. It means is that he is somewhere on the spectrum of conciliar Saints, somewhere between Padre Pio at one end and Paul VI at the other. Newman may not be a Paul VI, but he may not necessarily be a Padre Pio either. So what are we to make of him? It doesn’t help that he has long been someone whom all sides seem to be trying to claim. The liberals and modernists claim that he is one of them. The “conservatives” of various sorts say that the liberals are twisting things and that really, Newman is on their side. Readers of a certain age who made their way out of the Novus Ordo to Tradition may well be reminded of similar debates which used to surround John Paul II and Benedict XVI while they were alive and on the papal throne. In the 1980s, 90s and early-2000s, John Paul II’s encyclicals would have the more orthodox soundbites quoted by people who were still trying to remain faithful inside the Novus Ordo (a shrinking constituency which has now all-but disappeared in this country); whereas out-and-out modernists and politically correct semiMarxists could quote other passages from the very same encyclical. Many conservative Novus Ordo people became Traditionalists after realising that the liberals and modernists actually had a point: John Paul II really was a modernist and a liberal, and not the conservative they had always thought him to be. Well, is it possible that something similar is going on with John Henry Newman? With that in mind, let us briefly look at some of the criteria mentioned above.
1. An Exemplary Life of Heroic Virtue
Compared to many of the worst conciliar “Saints” Newman comes out looking pretty good here. He certainly didn’t have the love of luxury, or outbursts of bad temper of a Josemaria Escriva, for instance. But then, he was a Victorian, who lived (1801-1890) a good three generations before the latter, so that is as one might expect: people back then knew far better how to behave. Nor does one find in his writing the shameless self-praise of a “Saint” Faustina, whose fake apparition made her sound more exulted than even the Blessed Virgin Mary. That is as it should be, too; but then, we are setting the bar rather low, aren’t we?
One thing which does need mentioning here is the accusations of some kind of latent homosexuality. A not very flattering picture of him was painted by Geoffrey Faber, the nephew of Newman’s colleague Fr. Frederick Faber. Since then, all sorts of “gay rights” people (Peter Tatchell, for instance) have tried to claim Newman as one of their own. Critics point to his friendship with Fr. Ambrose St. John, one of his disciples who together with him left the Anglican religion, entered the Catholic Church and became an Oratorian priest. They often point to the fact that Newman asked to be buried in his friend’s grave. His defenders say that it was a passionate friendship and nothing more. Well, it is true that there can be such a thing as a passionate friendship and it is also true that we shouldn’t always go to the lowest common denominator and assume something sexual which might have been nothing of the sort. The Victorian era, an age not that long past and yet unimaginably more innocent than our own, understood this far better than we do today: only a degenerate age such as our own will automatically equate love with lust. And it is true that the endorsement of “gay rights” activists such as Tatchell means very little. And Geoffrey Faber, by the way, was a non-Catholic who seems to have been a disciple of Sigmund Freud; furthermore, one of the things he seems to have a problem with, in common with many Anglicans of Newman’s day (Charles Kinglsley, for instance), is the very idea itself of clerical celibacy. So we can probably take what he says with a pinch of salt.
All of which is to say that Newman is almost certainly not guilty of this particular charge, but in passing we should perhaps add that it would have been nice to known for certain, and that had there been a proper, thorough investigation of his life and morals, with a Devil’s Advocate and all the rest, greater certainty might have been possible. As things stand, however, since the modern Vatican changed the entire process, the matter won’t have been looked-into as it once would have been, effectively robbing the man himself of a proper defence.
Other than that, the main points of Newman’s life seem to be what one would expect. He sacrificed his position in the establishment of his day, and undoubtedly lost friends and family connections when he converted. This is what one would expect and is what happened to all English converts in those days, but it is still something which counts in his favour. There are others who point to the fact that he had already got himself into trouble within the (so-called) Church of England due to his position within the Oxford Movement and Tract 90 in particular, and that therefore he didn’t give up as much as, say, Henry (later Cardinal) Manning who had been at the height of his popularity when he left the Anglican religion and became a Catholic. There is doubtless some truth in that, too.
Finally, it is perhaps worth mentioning that for the life of a Saint, although one expects to find controversy, one does not expect to find quite so much and with all the wrong people. It has been said of Newman that during the latter (Catholic) part of his life, his friends and admirers were all liberals and his enemies anti-liberals. There is some truth to that. And having read some of his correspondence with Fr. Faber (more about whom later), the tone and content of many of his letters is not edifying and betrays a petulance bordering on selfpity which somehow one cannot imagine witnessing from the pen of a genuine Saint. That is, however, only my opinion - the reader may take it or leave it as he wishes.
2. A Popular [u]Cultus[/u]
Even Newman’s promoters have admitted that it is alarming how little devotion to him there is or has ever been in his own country. I have heard it said that he has more of a following in the USA, which is interesting: perhaps a case of a prophet never being accepted in his own home? But it still ought to be a concern to anyone interested, and ought to have been of great interest and great concern to anyone involved in his cause for canonisation. It is not merely that he didn’t have much of a following in England: he had none at all! Nobody was praying to him, nobody had a devotion to him. In this aspect at least, he appears to be more in the Paul VI camp and all the other definitely bogus conciliar “Saints”. And since, as mentioned above, this one really is (or used to be and ought still to be) the first pre-requisite, that ought to concern us all the more. (Perhaps we ought to have made this number 1, instead of 2..?)
What popularity or respect Newman does have today, as in his own day, seems to some degree to arise from the prestige which he brought with him into the Church. Imagine: at a time when Catholics were still a vanishingly small minority in England (maybe two percent, and most of those were Irish immigrant labourers, unskilled and largely un-educated, who had come over for work), and before the steady flow of converts which would follow his own conversion, he was one of the first “big catches” for a Catholic Church which was only just being re-established in England. One can understand and sympathise with an English Catholic in those days who might be pleased and proud of such a well-known, high-profile academic leaving it all behind to enter the Catholic Church. But that doesn’t really help us. In the late-19th and early 20th Centuries, there was no suggestion that Newman had been a Saint and no devotion to him anywhere, from what we can see. What very little exists in recent years appears to have been drummed up by conciliar liberals in the wake of Vatican II.
In summary then: in the old days, before the Vatican II revolution, the lack of a cultus would have meant that Newman would not even have been considered for beatification or canonisation in the first place. And in the days before Vatican II, he had no cultus at all. Therefore, he ought never to have been considered to begin with and on these grounds alone there is good cause to doubt whether he is a real Saint, even if he is a conciliar “Saint.”
3. Genuine Miracles
Oh dear. Have you ever noticed how all the bogus conciliar “Saints” always seem to work medical “miracles”? Both miracles allegedly worked by Paul VI, for instance, involved an unborn child: the doctors predicted it would have a defect but in the end it was born healthy.
Anyone with any experience of these things will tell you that doctors continually make dire predictions about unborn babies which turn out not to be true, especially when they are using it to push the mother into getting an abortion (as was the case here). I have even known it within my own immediate family circle, as I am sure many of you will have too. That the baby is then born perfectly fine and healthy does not in any way mean that a miracle has taken place: it means you can’t trust modern doctors! In a similar vein there is the medical “miracle” allegedly worked by Mother Theresa, details of which are given in the John Vennari article found elsewhere in these pages.
Regrettably, Newman’s “miracles” do appear to be of a similar kind: more of these medical miracles which seem to take place whenever a conciliar “Saint” is made. His beatification miracle was curing a Novus Ordo married deacon of a spinal condition. But details of this supposed “miracle” are surprisingly hard to find in both Catholic and secular press and even the official Oratorian website (https://www.newmancanonisation.com/newmans-miracle) which gives a detailed account of his canonisation “miracle” is silent regarding the prior “miracle” used to beatify him. Why might that be? Well, our suspicions, it seems, are wellfounded and we can be grateful to SSPX priest Fr. Paul Kimball for including them in the introduction to his 2019 book on Newman:
Quote:“On July 3, 2009, Pope Benedict XVI recognised the healing of Deacon Jack Sullivan in 2001 as a miracle for Newman’s beatification, which occurred on September 19, 2010. Now, Mr. Sullivan underwent the operation of ‘...a laminectomy to remove part of the spinal bones that was causing the problem… Although successfully performed in August 2001, this operation left Jack Sullivan in immense pain and he was warned a full recovery might take months. With the new term approaching, Mr. Sullivan was becoming increasingly anxious about returning to class, and just a few days after his operation he tried to get out of bed. Having taken an excruciating few minutes, with a nurse’s help, to get his feet on the floor, he said he leant on his forearms and recited his prayer to Newman. Michael Powell, a consultant neurosurgeon at London’s University College Hospital, said a typical laminectomy took ‘about 40 minutes, and most patients … walk out happy at two days.’ ’ ” (Michael Hirst, Papal Visit: Cardinal Newman’s ‘miracle cure,’ BBC News, September 13, 2010)
Furthermore, the directive de Canonizatione of Prospero Cardinal Lambertini, who was later crowned Benedict XIV, spelt out the rules for working out if a healing was really a miracle from heaven. It is astounding that this miracle has been approved, for it directly violates the third rule of Benedict XIV for the verification of miracles during the process of canonization of Saints, namely, ‘The patient should not be getting medical treatment around the time of the cure.’ (Doctrina de servorum Dei beatificatione et beatorum canonizatione, lib. 4, p.1, c.7, n.1-2.).”
(Cardinal Newman: Trojan Horse in the Church, Fr. Paul Kimball)
This alone was used by the enemies of the Church to pour scorn and ridicule. John Cornwell, author of “Hitler’s Pope,” wrote an article for The Times spelling out in great detail how this miracle did not abide by the Vatican’s own rules and making it look totally ridiculous. Though far too long to quote here, it is well worth a read and we encourage the reader to take a look. The author is a well-known antiCatholic but the worst thing is, he isn’t being dishonest and has clearly done his homework. As to Michael Powell, the London consultant neurosurgeon mentioned above, in 2010 he appeared in a brief segment during a BBC documentary. About 7 minutes in, he can be seen telling Ann Widdecombe:
Quote:“The events that occurred in Jack Sullivan’s case are all explicable, perhaps not so frequently that it would be commonplace, but certainly all of them perfectly reasonable. … To us British neurosurgeons, these are events that don’t at all sound [so] surprising or un-commonplace that it should be considered miraculous.”
Newman’s canonisation miracle appears to be not much better and, like that of Paul VI, it involves a pregnant lady and her unborn child. In this case the mother suffered bleeding during the pregnancy. She stopped bleeding after she prayed to him, and although the doctors said there was a chance that the baby would be born premature, in the end it was born at the right time and was healthy. As Fr. Kimball points out, this too violates the old rules for canonisation miracles, namely the sixth rule, that: “The cure must not come at a time when some natural cause could make the patient think he is cured or which stimulates a cure.”
There is also the fact that at least one of the doctors who lent his name to this “miracle” is a Novus Ordo Catholic who gave a gushing interview to the Novus Ordo press in which he described his deposition in favour of the miracle as a “spiritual experience”:
Quote:“The true spiritual experience was in the stages of the depositions. I literally cried when we were deposing her. It struck to my very heart…”
(https://www.archbalt.org/illinois-doctor...periences/)
Yuck. Now, it might be objected that all this still doesn’t mean that it definitely wasn’t a miracle, that despite all those less-than-encouraging circumstances, it might still have been a miracle anyway. But that would be missing the point: what is required is not a “might-havebeen-a” miracle but an absolutely bullet-proof miracle, one which cannot be explained any other way, since the credibility of the entire process and with it the credibility of the Church (or in this case, the conciliar church) is at stake. And besides which, given all that we have already seen from the conciliar church, do we not have, at the very least, the right, or even the duty, to be a little sceptical? Let us just say that it is a very great shame that these miracle couldn’t have been a little more… unimpeachable. Ah well.
4. Sound doctrine
Newman’s canonisation is almost certainly due to the fact that the modernists recognise in him a man whose thinking paved the way for Vatican II. As mentioned above, “conservative” Novus Ordo Catholics and even some Traditionalists say that he is being misrepresented and “claimed,” in much the same way as the “gay rights” lobby claim him for themselves. On the other hand, that is not the whole story. Despite what his supporters say, there undoubtedly is something not quite right with his teaching, but this is so important that it is worth examining at some length.
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| The Catholic Trumpet: Leaked Voicemail - Bishop Williamson |
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Posted by: Stone - 08-27-2025, 07:59 AM - Forum: The Catholic Trumpet
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The Catholic Trumpet reminds us of what was revealed by Fr. Pfeiffer a few years ago, of a voicemail he received from Bp. Williamson (RIP) in 2012 that made the impression that he (Bp. Williamson) was being offered a secret deal if he made an 'amiable' separation from the SSPX, suggesting that the Bishop's leaving of the SSPX was a mutually agreed upon deal and was not the 'selfless fight for tradition' as has been implied.
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| Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: A Reflection on the Vendée Uprising |
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Posted by: Stone - 08-25-2025, 12:39 PM - Forum: General Commentary
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While the Vendée Uprising is a familiar topic for many traditional Catholics, what may be surprising to know is that this war was omitted from official French history, as noted here:
Quote:The history of the Vendée Wars was not written by the victors, it was completely written out of French history, and until recently denied by the French government, it is still not part of the school history curriculum, but is well documented. When Solzhenitsyn opened the official Vendée Memorial at Les Lucs-sur-Boulogne in 1993 the event was ignored by central government, as well as by most of the mainstream French media. The war was the first 'total war' in modern history, in which men, women and children were involved. It was also the first modern war in which regular troops were repeatedly beaten by mainly unarmed (no firearms) peasants.
A Reflection on the Vendée Uprising
Address at the dedication of a memorial to the Vendée uprising
by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Lucs-sur-Boulogne, France
25 September 1993
Mr. President of the General Council of the Vendée,
Respected Vendéans:
Two thirds of a century ago, while still a boy, I read with admiration about the courageous and desperate uprising of the Vendée. But never could I have even dreamed that in my later years I would have the honor of dedicating a memorial to the heroes and victims of that uprising.
Twenty decades have now passed, and throughout that period the Vendée uprising and its bloody suppression have been viewed in ever new ways, in France and elsewhere. Indeed, historical events are never fully understood in the heat of their own time, but only at a great distance, after a cooling of passions. For all too long, we did not want to hear or admit what cried out with the voices of those who perished, or were burned alive: that the peasants of a hard-working region, driven to the extremes of oppression and humiliation by a revolution supposedly carried out for their sake – that these peasants had risen up against the revolution!
That revolution brings out instincts of primordial barbarism, the sinister forces of envy, greed, and hatred – this even its contemporaries could see all too well. They paid a terrible enough price for the mass psychosis of the day, when merely moderate behavior, or even the perception of such, already appeared to be a crime. But the twentieth century has done especially much to tarnish the romantic luster of revolution which still prevailed in the eighteenth century. As half-centuries and centuries have passed, people have learned from their own misfortunes that revolutions demolish the organic structures of society, disrupt the natural flow of life, destroy the best elements of the population and give free rein to the worst; that a revolution never brings prosperity to a nation, but benefits only a few shameless opportunists, while to the country as a whole it heralds countless deaths, widespread impoverishment, and, in the gravest cases, a long-lasting degeneration of the people.
The very word "revolution" (from the Latin revolvo) means "to roll back," "to go back," "to experience anew," "to re-ignite," or at best "to turn over" – hardly a promising list. Today, if the attribute "great" is ever attached to a revolution, this is done very cautiously, and not infrequently with much bitterness.
It is now better and better understood that the social improvements which we all so passionately desire can be achieved through normal evolutionary development – with immeasurably fewer losses and without all-encompassing decay. We must be able to improve, patiently, that which we have in any given "today".
It would be vain to hope that revolution can improve human nature, yet your revolution, and especially our Russian Revolution, hoped for this very effect. The French Revolution unfolded under the banner of a self-contradictory and unrealizable slogan, "liberty, equality, fraternity." But in the life of society, liberty and equality are mutually exclusive, even hostile concepts. Liberty, by its very nature, undermines social equality, and equality suppresses liberty – for how else could it be attained? Fraternity, meanwhile, is of entirely different stock; in this instance it is merely a catchy addition to the slogan. True fraternity is achieved by means not social, but spiritual. Furthermore, the ominous words "or death!" were added to the threefold slogan, thereby effectively destroying its meaning.
I would not wish a "great revolution" upon any nation. Only the arrival of Thermidor prevented the eighteenth-century revolution from destroying France. But the revolution in Russia was not restrained by any Thermidor as it drove our people on the straight path to a bitter end, to an abyss, to the depths of ruin.
It is a pity that there is no one here today who could speak of the suffering endured in the depths of China, Cambodia, or Vietnam, and could describe the price they had to pay for revolution.
One might have thought that the experience of the French revolution would have provided enough of a lesson for the rationalist builders of "the people's happiness" in Russia. But no, the events in Russia were grimmer yet, and incomparably more enormous in scale. Lenin's Communists and International Socialists studiously reenacted on the body of Russia many of the French revolution's cruelest methods – only they possessed a much greater and more systematic level of organizational control than the Jacobins.
We had no Thermidor, but to our spiritual credit we did have our Vendée, in fact more than one. These were the large peasant uprisings: Tambov (1920-21), western Siberia (1921). We know of the following episode: crowds of peasants in handmade shoes, armed with clubs and pitchforks, converged on Tambov, summoned by church bells in the surrounding villages – and were cut down by machine-gun fire. For eleven months the Tambov uprising held out, despite the Communists' effort to crush it with armored trucks, armored trains, and airplanes, as well as by taking families of the rebels hostage. They were even preparing to use poison gas. The Cossacks, too – from the Ural, the Don, the Kuban, the Terek – met Bolshevism with intransigent resistance that finally drowned in the blood of genocide.
And so, in dedicating this memorial to your heroic Vendée, I see double in my mind's eye – for I can also visualize the memorials which will one day rise in Russia, monuments to our Russian resistance against the onslaught of Communism and its atrocities.
We all have lived through the twentieth century, a century of terror, the chilling culmination of that Progress about which so many dreamed in the eighteenth century. And now, I think, more and more citizens of France, with increasing understanding and pride, will remember and value the resistance and the sacrifice of the Vendée.
- translation by Stephan Solzhenitsyn and Ignat Solzhenitsyn
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| John Vennari - Doubt and Confusion: The New “Canonizations” |
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Posted by: Stone - 08-25-2025, 11:03 AM - Forum: In Defense of Tradition
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The following is taken from the Autumn 2025 issue of The Recusant, pages 18-26 [slightly adapted and reformatted]:
The following article appeared in the August 2013 Catholic Family News and can be found here: https://catholicfamilynews.com/blog/2014...nizations/
Doubt and Confusion: The New “Canonizations”
By John Vennari
Speaking of the rigorous pre-Vatican II procedure for beatifications, eminent Catholic historian William Thomas Walsh, who died in 1949, wrote the following:
Quote:“No secular court trying a man for his life is more thorough and scrupulous than the Congregation of Rites in seeking to establish whether or not the servant of God practiced virtues both theological and cardinal, and to a heroic degree. If that is established, the advocate of the cause must next prove that his presence in Heaven has been indicated by at least two miracles, while a cardinal who is an expert theologian does all he can to discredit the evidence - hence his popular title of advocatus diaboli, or Devil’s Advocate. If the evidence survives every attempt to destroy it after months, years and sometimes centuries of discussion, he is then beatified, that is, he is declared to be blessed.”
We will later note the new 1983 process of canonization dispenses with the Devil’s Advocate and eliminates the stringent juridical method in favor of an academic approach. The discarding of the “thorough and scrupulous” procedure praised by Mr. Walsh cannot help but introduce doubt to the integrity of the entire new process—especially in the case of “fast-track” canonizations. Mr. Walsh further noted the following about the traditional process:
Quote:“The final stage of canonization, the last of twenty distinct steps, may take even more years or centuries. It must be proved beyond any reasonable doubt that two additional miracles have been performed through the instance of the servant of God, since the beatification. When and if this is done, the Pope issues a bull (a sealed letter) of canonization.”
Sound Orthodoxy
Walsh also stressed the demand for sound orthodoxy regarding anyone considered for canonization:
Quote:“Theologians carefully scrutinize all the available writings - books, letters and so on - of the servant of God whose claim to holiness is being urged, together with all the depositions obtainable from those who spoke with him and knew him well. If nothing contrary to faith or morals is found, a decree is published authorizing further investigation.” [1]
If we begin with the criteria that “nothing contrary to faith or morals” can be found in any legitimate claim to beatification, we read with concern an invocation uttered by one who is now slated for “canonization” [and who was, indeed, “canonized” in 2014]: “Hear our prayers for the intention of the Jewish people, which You continue to cherish according to the Patriarchs.…Be mindful of the new generation, the young and the children: may they persevere in fidelity to You, in what is the exceptional mystery of their vocation.” [2]
Note: the man who offers this prayer does not indicate that Jews should convert to Our Lord’s one true Church for salvation but prays they “persevere in fidelity” to a counterfeit religious system that formally rejects Jesus Christ.
Commenting on The Book of the Dead at Auschwicz, the same man says:
Quote:“Persons whose names are contained in these books were incarcerated, they underwent tortures and were finally deprived of life solely, in most cases, because they belonged to a certain nation rather than another.…In the light of faith, we see the witness of heroic fidelity, which united them to God in eternity, and a seed of peace for future generations.” [3]
While we grieve for anyone who undergoes persecution and torture, our speaker indicates that the Jewish people who suffered at Auschwitz suffered a kind of Jewish martyrdom “which united them to God in eternity,” a concept unheard of in Church history. In days of doctrinal sanity, these radical statements - and there are countless more such utterances from the same man - would have stopped any process of beatification in its tracks and disqualified the candidate permanently.
The Catholic who made these questionable remarks was Pope John Paul II, whom Pope Francis has just approved for “canonization.” [4] In our post-Conciliar period of ecclesiastical sentimentality, the age-old truths of the Faith no longer stand as the central criteria for determining heroic virtue. As Fr. Patrick de La Rocque notes,
Quote:“Far from practicing the theological virtue of Faith to a heroic degree, the late pope [John Paul II] departed from it dangerously in a number of his teachings.” [5]
Nor do we see with John Paul II the virtue of true Charity, since John Paul throughout his entire pontificate refused to remind non-Catholics - Jews included - that they must convert to Christ’s one true Church for salvation. While presenting an entire chapter full of such quotes from the Polish pope, [6] Fr. La Rocque notes:
Quote:“By systematically concealing the [objective] sin of disbelief that is involved in formal adherence to Judaism, so as to praise instead the [alleged] fidelity to God of present-day Judaism…Pope John Paul II was seriously lacking in that delicate but important pastoral charity that consists in denouncing sin so as to allow the conversion of the sinner.” [7]
Yet Fr. La Rocque, or anyone else, who advances reasoned objections to John Paul II’s orthodoxy and objections to the claim that John Paul practiced heroic virtue, is simply ignored. The challenges are neither acknowledged nor answered. “We in the Vatican have decided that John Paul II is a saint, and that is that!” This type of thinking is due primarily to the laxer system of canonization introduced in 1983, as well as to the “new understanding” of what it means to be Catholic that was spawned by the Second Vatican Council, and by its most zealous evangelist, Pope John Paul II.
The New Process
On January 25, 1983, Pope John Paul II issued the Apostolic Constitution Divinus Perfectionis Magister, the long-awaited revision of the beatification and canonization process. Cardinal Suenens, Paul VI, and other progressivists since the Council had encouraged such an update. John Paul brought it to fruition.[8]
The change was part of the alleged goal to make the canonization process “simpler, faster, cheaper, more ‘collegial’ and ultimately more productive.” [9] In the new system, the Devil’s Advocate has been eliminated. The “Promoter of the Faith,” as the Devil’s Advocate has been called, is given the new title “Prelate Theologian.” His main task is to choose the theological consulters and preside at the meetings. Catholic journalist Kenneth L. Woodward spotlights the root difference between the old and new systems:
Quote:“At the core of the reform is a striking paradigm shift: no longer would the Church look to the courtroom as its model for arriving at the truth of a saint’s life; instead, it would employ the academic model of researching and writing a doctoral dissertation.”
Woodward continues,
Quote:“In effect, then, the relator had replaced both the Devil’s Advocate and the defense lawyer. He alone was responsible for establishing martyrdom or heroic virtue, and it was up to the theological and historical consultants to give his work a passing or failing grade.” [10]
Though there may have been some abuses by the lawyers over the centuries, the elimination of lawyers radically transforms the procedure that had been at the heart of the saint-making process for half a millennium: a system deemed necessary by the great master of ascetical and mystical theology, Pope Benedict XIV (1740-58) in his monumental work, The Beatification and Canonization of Saints. [11]
Though many in the post-Conciliar Vatican welcomed John Paul II’s new method, not all were thrilled. Msgr. Luigi Porsi, a 20-year veteran of the Church’s legal system, decried the elimination of the Devil’s Advocate and the accompanying lawyers as part of the beatification process. In an unanswered letter to Pope John Paul II, Porsi complained the reform went too far:
Quote:“There is no longer any room for an adversarial function.” [12]
Thus, a central question arises: if there is a radical change in what was the rigorous procedure for making saints, how can we expect the same secure results? Indeed, the “fast-track” beatifications of the past few decades already introduce doubt to the integrity of the process. The two cases that first come to mind are that of Mother Teresa of Calcutta and Opus Dei Founder Josemaria Escriva de Balaguer.
Mother Teresa: Doctors Insist, No Miracle
Mother Teresa of Calcutta was a popular figure recognized as a “saint” while she was still alive, even though, despite her many good works, she seemed to embrace a theology of indifferentism. She is on record saying,
Quote:“I’ve always said we should help a Hindu become a better Hindu, a Muslim become a better Muslim, a Catholic become a better Catholic.” [13]
In 1976, Mother Teresa organized a 25th anniversary celebration of the Missionaries of Charity. As part of the celebration, she obtained permission from the Archbishop of Calcutta for her and her sisters to pray in some pagan temples - non-Christian houses of worship - each day of the jubilee.
Quote:“Her desire was for each group to hold its own worship service of thanksgiving. Hindus, Sikhs, Zoroastrians, Buddhists, Jains, Jews, Catholics, Orthodox, Protestants and so forth joined her and her sisters to thank the one true God in their own way. She and her sisters prayed at eighteen different worship sites,” including Hindu temples. [14]
The central “miracle” employed to justify Mother Teresa’s 2003 “beatification” was the alleged cure of Monica Besra in September 1998. Besra, from Dangram, 460 miles northeast of Calcutta, claimed to have been cured of a tumor after praying to Mother Teresa while pressing a medallion of Mother Teresa’s image to her side.
Despite this claim, Besra’s doctors insist the cure had nothing miraculous about it, but was the result of strong anti-TB drugs administered over a period of nine months. “This miraculous claim is absolute nonsense and should be condemned by everyone,” said Dr. R. K. Musafi. “She had a medium-sized tumor in her lower abdomen caused by tuberculosis. The drugs she was given eventually reduced the cystic mass and it disappeared after a year’s treatment.”
Likewise, Dr. T. K. Biswas, the first doctor to treat Besra, said, “With all due respect to Mother Teresa, there should not be any talk of a miracle by her. We advised her a prolonged anti-tubercular treatment and she was cured.”
Remember, the Catholic Church has always demanded that a miraculous cure requires rigorous proof beyond any reasonable doubt. The integrity of the Mother Teresa “miracle” is thus seriously compromised. Dr. Manju Murshet, Superintendent of the Balurghat Hospital, complained that the doctorswere under pressure from Church members to declare a miraculous cure:
Quote:“They want us to say Monica Besra’s recovery was a miracle and beyond the comprehension of medical science.” [15]
Besra’s husband Deiku also challenges the claim of a miraculous cure. “It is much ado about nothing,” he said, “My wife was cured by the doctors, not by any miracle.” [16]
Further, Besra’s medical records have disappeared from the hospital. The records containing her physician’s notes, prescriptions, and sonograms were taken by Sister Betta of the Missionaries of Charity. When Time magazine contacted Sister Betta to ask about Besra’s medical records, the only response was “no comment.” [17]
Besra herself now claims she has been abandoned by the Missionary sisters who flocked to her home at the time of the alleged miracle and promised support. “My hut was frequented by nuns of the Missionaries of Charity before the beatification of Mother Teresa,” said Mrs. Besra, squatting on the floor of her thatched and mud house.
Quote:“They made a lot of promises to me and assured me of financial help for my livelihood and my children’s education. After that, they forgot me. I am living in penury. My husband is sick. My children have stopped going to school as I have no money. I have to work in the fields to feed my husband and five children.” [18]
It is not our intention to pass a judgment on these events. We merely wish to observe the following: it is hard to imagine this flurry of questions and abuses occurring under the former rigorous system of canonization. With the Devil’s Advocate now eliminated, abuse and suspicion sully not only Mother Teresa’s case, but the entire new beatification process itself. Once again, regarding the integrity of the new process, we encounter doubt.
Monsignor Escriva
Msgr. Josemaria Escriva de Balaguer, the founder of the controversial Opus Dei organization who died in 1975, was also placed on the fast track. Fr. Peter Scott, the then rector of SSPX’s Holy Cross Seminary in Australia, wrote in November 2002 of what he called Escriva’s “shameful” and “highly questionable canonization.”
Noting that due process was not followed, Father Scott objected that the procedure contained no Devil’s Advocate, and that
Quote: “former members of Opus Dei who personally knew Msgr. Escriva and who attempted to register their objections, were not allowed to express their opinion.”
In a last-ditch effort to provide more objective thinking regarding the hasty canonization, a group of former Opus Dei members wrote an Open Letter to Pope John Paul II in which they said:
Quote:“It is because we believe that the truth has been in large part hidden that we now give our testimony in order to avoid a danger for the Faith brought about by the unjustifiable reverence for the man that you have the intention of canonizing soon.”
They went on to explain that the authors of this Open Letter include:
Quote:“people who have intimately known Msgr. Escriva and who can testify to his arrogance, to his evil character, to his improper seeking of a title (Marquise of Peralta), to his dishonesty, to his indifference towards the poor, to his love of luxury and ostentation, to his lack of compassion, and to his idolatrous devotion towards ‘Opus Dei.’ ” [19]
After having pointed out that the process was uncanonical and dishonest, they had this to say:
Quote:“It [the canonization] will offend God. It will stain the Church forever. It will take away from the saints their special holiness. It will call into question the credibility of all the canonizations made during your Papacy. It will undermine the future authority of the Papacy.”
Father Scott notes that those who wrote the Open Letter were not traditionalists; they were former members of Escriva’s organization,
Quote:“but their supplication was not heard, and the ceremony took place as arranged on October 6, 2002.
“Their letter will certainly turn out to be prophetic, for in time they will be proven to be right in their assessment concerning Escriva as well as concerning Opus Dei that they so aptly compare to the liberal Sillon movement, rightly condemned by St. Pius X in 1910. This kind of last-minute objection is unheard of in the history of the Church. How could Catholics possibly regard such a man as heroic in virtue, as an extraordinary model of Catholic spirituality, as a saint must be? For all the reasons that they give, we cannot possibly consider this ‘canonization’ as a valid, infallible papal pronouncement.” [20]
In a similar vein, Catholic author Kenneth Woodward expressed grave reservations about the procedure regarding Escriva’s rapid “beatification.” When Fr. Richard John Neuhaus criticized this negative assessment, claiming the liberal-leaning Woodward was always unfavorable to Opus Dei, Woodward responded,
Quote:“My writing about Opus Dei has focused almost entirely on the beatification of its founder, not the organization itself. On this point, the only fair-minded conclusion I can reach, given the evidence of the positio itself and interviews with people in Rome involved in the process, is that Opus Dei subverted the canonization process to get its man beatified. In a word, it was a scandal - from the conduct of the tribunals through the writing of the positio to the high-handed treatment of the experts picked to judge the cause. That Newsweek caught Opus Dei officials making claims that were not true is a matter of record. Escriva may have been a saint - who am I to judge? But you could never tell from the way his cause was handled.”[21]
Once again, regarding the integrity of the process, we encounter doubt and more doubt.
Assisi: Catholic Youngsters Can’t Believe It
It seems clear that the real purpose of the upcoming “canonizations” of John XXIII and John Paul II [NB: Once again, they took place in 2014] is to “canonize” Vatican II and its entire liberal orientation of religious liberty, ecumenism, and pan-religious activity. For now, we will content ourselves with another objection to John Paul’s canonization.
At the time of the 2011 “beatification” of John Paul II, I learned of a homeschool online discussion taking place among sixth to ninth graders. A traditional Catholic youth (whom I know) was telling non-traditionalist Catholic acquaintances about Pope John Paul II’s panreligious meeting at Assisi; that John Paul invited Hindus, Jews, Muslims, Jains, and pagans to pray together at the event in October 1986. He also posted photos of the Assisi gathering.
The homeschooled youngsters refused to believe it. They claimed it could not be true; that the John Paul II / Assisi photos were doctored, that no pope - especially one “beatified” by the allegedly conservative Benedict XVI - would perform this act of ecclesiastical treason.
The young traditional Catholic who told his acquaintances about Assisi was accused of making up the account; of trying to defame the name of “Blessed” Pope John Paul II; of inventing a malicious story about a pagan-packed, pan-religious prayer-fest that no pope would countenance.
Here, then, is the striking point: The children knew the Assisi prayer meeting was not Catholic. The children knew it was not a manifestation of heroic virtue. The children knew it was a scandal of colossal dimension, and thus refused to believe John Paul could be guilty of it. To their credit, these youngsters displayed a better sensus Catholicus than today’s Vatican leaders. If Catholic homeschool children, age 13 and under, recognize the outrage of the pan-religious meeting at Assisi, why did not Pope Benedict XVI, who placed Papa Wojtyla on the fast-track to beatification? Why does not Pope Francis, who on July 5 [NB: 2013] approved John Paul II’s “canonization”? Under today’s streamlined procedure, these crucial questions are ignored as irrelevant.
Once again regarding the integrity of the process, we encounter doubt, doubt and more doubt.
Defect in Procedure
There is an apparent quick-fix solution to the modern canonization dilemma: it is to declare that today’s popes are not popes at all; that they have lost their office due to heresy, and that we have not had a true pope since Pius XII. Yet this Sedevacantist reaction, I believe, merely substitutes one collection of thorny questions with others of greater magnitude. A thorough response to the details of our unprecedented situation calls for the genius of a Bellarmine or a Garrigou-Lagrange - genius seemingly lacking in our post-Conciliar period. [22]
To conclude: Fast-track beatifications, where the will to beatify supersedes the worthiness of the proposed candidate, are a dangerous and questionable development. This is what we see with the determined push to rapidly canonize John XXIII and John Paul II. Under the new system that eliminates the Devil’s Advocate, legitimate challenges to the sanctity, orthodoxy, and miraculous intervention of the candidate are left unaddressed. As Vatican postulator Msgr. Luigi Porsi warned, “There is no longer any room for an adversarial function.”
Everything in the Catholic Faith conforms to reason. [23] It seems unreasonable, then, to assume that a drastic loosening in the procedure for canonization would yield the same secure results as the “thorough and scrupulous” method that had been in place for centuries. [24]
Thus, I believe modern beatifications and canonizations are at best doubtful due to defect in procedure, and due to a new criteria for holiness engendered by the new “ecumenical Catholicism” of Vatican II.
Notes:
[1] William Thomas Walsh, The Saints in Action (New York: Hanover, 1961), p. 14 (emphasis added). Though Walsh died in 1949, The Saints in Action was not published until 1961.
[2] Fr. Patrick de La Rocque, FSSPX, Pope John Paul II: Doubts about a Beatification (Kansas City: Angelus Press, 2011), p. 99.
[3] Ibid., p. 10.
[4] “Pope Francis Signs Canonization Decrees for John XXIII and John Paul II,” Vatican Radio, July 5, 2013. Pope Francis “waived” the second necessary miracle for the “canonization” of John XXIII.
[5] La Rocque, Doubts about a Beatification, p. xviii.
[6] See Chapter III (pp. 89-113), “John Paul II and the Virtue of Charity,” Pope John Paul II: Doubts about a Beatification.
[7] Ibid., p. 97.
[8] Some background: In the year 1234, Pope Gregory IX established procedures to investigate the life of a candidate saint and any attributed miracles. In 1588, Pope Sixtus V entrusted the Congregation of Rites (later named the Congregation for the Causes of the Saints) to oversee the entire process. Beginning with Pope Urban VIII in 1634, various Popes have revised and improved the norms and procedures for canonization. Prospero Lambertini, a brilliant canonist who had come from the ranks of the Congregation of Rites to become Pope Benedict XIV, set himself the task of reviewing and clarifying the Church’s practice of making saints. His long and masterful work in five volumes, De Servorum Dei Beatificatione et Beatorum Canonizatione (On the Beatification of the Servants of God and the Canonization of the Blesseds), published between 1734 and 1738, is the touchstone text for the making of saints.
[9] Kenneth L. Woodward, Making Saints: How the Catholic Church Determines Who Becomes a Saint, Who Doesn’t, and Why (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), p. 91.
[10] Ibid.
[11] See “Advocatus Diaboli” (Devil’s Advocate), Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. I, Robert Appleton Company, 1907.
[12] Woodward, Making Saints, p. 95.
[13] Mark Zima, Mother Teresa: The Case for the Cause (Is Mother Teresa of Calcutta a Saint?) (Nashville: Cold Tree Press, 2007), p. 29.
[14] Ibid., p. 65.
[15] Quotes from Doctors Musafi, Biswas, and Murshet are taken from Zima’s Mother Teresa: The Case for the Cause, pp. 190-191.
[16] “Mother Teresa ‘miracle’ patient accuses nuns,” Telegraph, Sept. 5, 2007.
[17] “What’s Mother Teresa Got to Do with It?” Time.com, Oct. 14, 2002.
[18] “Mother Teresa ‘miracle’ patient accuses nuns.” It should be noted that Besra still believes she was miraculously cured by Mother Teresa. Her doctors, however, testify that there was nothing miraculous about it.
[19] These complaints about Escriva surface elsewhere, including the book by a former Opus Dei
member, Beyond the Threshold—A Life in Opus Dei: The True, Unfinished Story (Maria del Carmen Tapia, 1998); and were also mentioned by Fr. Gregory Hesse in speeches at our CFN conference, 1998.
[20] Holy Cross Seminary Newsletter, Nov. 1, 2002.
[21] “Fair to Opus Dei?” Letter to the Editor of First Things, No. 61, March 1996, pp. 2-7. [Note: Woodward’s response was written after Escriva’s “beatification” but prior to his “canonization”].
Posted on Opus Dei Awareness Network webpage, updated June 20, 2005.
[22] For example, it is argued that any “infallibility” that deals with canonization would not extend beyond the fact that the soul of the saint is in Heaven. Period. Yet the way in which the Church would judge that the soul is in Heaven is by means of authentic miracles attributed to the “saint’s” intercession. This is why the old system for determining this was, as William Thomas
Walsh noted, “thorough and scrupulous.” Yet if the stringent procedure for determining a miracle is not followed—such as what appears to be the case with the “miracle” attributed to Mother Teresa of Calcutta—how is the “saint’s” presence in Heaven determined beyond the pronouncement of a post-Conciliar pope and his will to canonize a given individual?
[23] Though the mysteries, such as the Blessed Trinity and Transubstantiation, are said to be above reason, but not contrary to it.
[24] Fr. Joseph de Sainte Marie was a capable Carmelite theologian who worked in Rome in the 1970s and ’80s. An expert on Fatima and a loyal son of Pope John Paul II, he helped compose the formula for the Pope’s 1982 Consecration of the World to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Despite this, Father de Saint Marie issued the following warning about the unfortunate present state of the Church and those at its highest levels: “In our time, and it is one of the most obvious signs of the extraordinarily abnormal character of the current state of the Church, it is very often the case that the acts of the Holy See demand of us prudence and discernment.” (Cited from Apropos, Isle of Sky, No. 16, 1994, p. 5.) Fr. Joseph de Saint Marie thus tells in a respectful and gentlemanly manner, that our Holy Church now passes through an extraordinary period of history. He uses the word “abnormal.” Yet in the face of this “extraordinarily abnormal character of the current state of the Church,” he does not advise us to follow the Pope blindly. Aligning himself, rather, with the traditional teaching of Popes and Saints (for example, that of Pope Innocent III, St. Robert Bellarmine, St. Francis de Sales, John of St. Thomas and others) Father de Saint Marie cautions us that “in our time,” we have to be careful. We have to exercise “prudence and discernment” when it comes to the actions of the Holy See itself; that is, even when it comes to papal actions. Further,
he tells us it is “very often the case” that we have to now exercise this caution.
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| The Recusant - Fr. Robinson: It’s All Valid, Trust Us! |
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Posted by: Stone - 08-25-2025, 10:10 AM - Forum: The New-Conciliar SSPX
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The following is taken from pages 10-17 of the Autumn 2025 issue of The Recusant [slightly adapted and reformatted]:
Fr. Robinson: It’s All Valid, Trust Us!
Fr. Paul Robinson and his obsequious sidekick are being wheeled-out again…!
Yes that title is an exaggeration. But only a slight one. Like his previous podcast videos, this was a penance to watch, and not just because there are YouTube adverts every few minutes! In this “SSPX Podcast” video, released in July 2025, we are told in the introduction that: “Fr. Paul Robinson responds to objections surrounding the Society of St. Pius X’s decision not to conditionally ordain every priest ordained in the Novus Ordo rite who joins the Society. Why doesn’t the SSPX re-ordain across the board?”
This is already misleading the audience. The real question ought to be why the SSPX has so radically changed its approach to this question: conditional ordination is now the exception whereas it used to be the rule. The real question which needs looking into, then, is what has changed. Why is the SSPX now so reluctant to conditionally ordain Novus Ordo priests?
Fr. Robinson begins by telling his listeners that: “We do believe that the new rites are valid. … And then secondly, we believe that you need to have serious grounds before repeating a non-repeatable sacrament,” which, he says, means, “you have to have a positive doubt.” This is, of course: a straw man. Nobody is claiming that conditional ordinations should be done without a good reason. The issue then is whether there are serious grounds, whether there is a positive doubt and if so, what it might look like. Incredibly, this question is not actually addressed in the entire hour-long video.
“Case by case”
Archbishop Lefebvre, Fr. Robinson admits, wanted to go case-by-case and he claims that that is what the SSPX does today. But the more he says, the more it becomes clear that what the Archbishop meant by “case by case” and what the SSPX does today are quite different. What the SSPX does today, it seems, is to look at the actual ceremony in which the priest was ordained by watching a video of it. That, according to what Fr. Robinson says, is what the present-day SSPX calls looking at an ordination “case by case.”
Quote:“So, you know, when we have a new priest who comes to us, we typically receive the ordination video and then I send that on to [US District Superior] Fr. Fullerton and Bishop Fellay and they make the judgement, they assess what they think.”
He then adds that “The last thing anyone wants us to do is to change our principles” which he says haven’t changed “for the last fifty years” - (God forbid that that should ever happen!) - adding that those who don’t like it are taking a sedevacantist line, before going on to discuss “the nine” sedevacantist priests in 1983 as though that is what this is really all about.
Andrew then raises as an objection the claim that “Archbishop Lefebvre always conditionally re-ordained any priest ordained in the new rite who came to him: another straw man! To this, Fr. Robinson replies: “This is an easy objection to answer because it’s just not true.” You write your own objections and then you find them easy to answer? Fancy that! It is true that the Archbishop, when looking at Novus Ordo priests case-by-case did sometimes come across one whose ordination gave no real grounds for doubt. This is largely because the new rite of priestly ordination, at least in Latin, is so similar to the Traditional Rite (the only difference being “ut” - a word whose absence does not obscure what is taking place) and because in the 1970s and 80s many Novus Ordo ordinations were still being done by men who had become bishops before the changes to the rite of episcopal consecration in 1968.
This was the case with Fr. Glover, one of the examples brought up by Fr. Robinson (the other being a Fr. Stark, presumably an American?). Fr. Glover was an Oratorian ordained in the new rite of [ordination] in Latin, by a bishop consecrated in the Traditional Rite before 1968. A doctor of canon law and member of the Roman Rota, he was a larger than life character whom plenty of people in England still remember.
The same is true of the late Fr. Gregory Hesse who was ordained in the new rite of priestly ordination in 1981 by Archbishop Sabattini, who himself had been consecrated as a bishop before the changes. And there were others too in those days; but clearly, as time progressed, such cases would become less likely. Archbishop Lefebvre himself as good as said that the situation surrounding doubtful conciliar sacraments was becoming worse. What he would have said in 2025, fully fifty-seven years after the changes to the rite of episcopal consecration, is anyone’s guess, but something tells me he wouldn’t be more favourably inclined towards it!
“Invalid” or “Doubtful”…?
Andrew brings up the 1988 letter from Archbishop Lefebvre to a Mr. Wilson, reproduced in these pages a few years ago (Recusant 50, p.16). We will quote it again, not only because Fr. Robinson was unable to deal with it properly, but also because it speaks for itself in all its simplicity. It reads:
Quote:“Very dear Mr. Wilson, thank you very much for your kind letter. I agree with your desire to re-ordain conditionally these priests, and I have done this reordination many times. All sacraments from the modernists bishops or priests are doubtful now. The changes are increasing and their intentions are no more [i.e. no longer] Catholic. We are in the time of great apostasy. […]”
This letter is so clear and straightforward that it ought not to surprise us that Fr. Robinson struggles to deal with it properly at all. In the end, he simply comments:
Quote:“This letter does not prove that Archbishop Lefebvre decided that he was going to universally conditionally ordain all [Novus Ordo] priests.”
Well no, but it does, at the very least, show that his position, and that of the SSPX, was that the “rule” was to conditionally ordain and the “exception,” those who did not require conditional ordination, were a small and ever-shrinking minority. By contrast, the SSPX of today appear to have exactly the opposite approach: to assume that the ordination is valid unless they happen to become aware of an obvious defect in the actual ceremony of priestly ordination itself. At one point Fr. Robinson even admits that:
Quote:“He [i.e. Lefebvre] did consider the new rites doubtful. Not invalid, but doubtful.”
But then, not long after, he confuses the issue by saying:
Quote:“Like, even in that letter, Archbishop Lefebvre says they’re doubtful. So if they’re doubtful, that means some of them are valid, right?”
Like, no, that’s not what it means. “Doubtful” means that although we can’t be sure, there’s a real possibility that it didn’t happen, so the sacrament (or in this case, the priest) must be avoided, and that the way to fix it is for the sacrament (in this case, the ordination) to be done again conditionally, so that one can be certain. Even if, for argument’s sake, some of those “doubtful” holy orders are in fact valid, as Fr. Robinson says, what use is that if you can’t know which ones? But this seems to be lost on Fr. Robinson: his approach throughout the entire interview is to talk terms of: “whether it’s valid or invalid” - which misses the point.
A doubtful sacrament might be valid, yes, but “might be” isn’t enough because when it comes to sacraments one must always take the pars tutior - play it safe, in other words. After the Wilson letter, Andrew brings up an extract from a sermon by the late Bishop Tissier de Mallerais which also ends up being dismissed far too flippantly and unconvincingly by Fr. Robinson. In a sermon given at the 2016 ordinations in Écône, Bishop Tissier said:
Quote:“We cannot, of course, accept this new sabotaged rite of ordination which poses doubts about the validity of many ordinations according to the new rite. … So this new rite of ordination is not Catholic. And so we will of course continue faithfully transmitting the real and valid priesthood – made valid by the traditional rite of ordination.”
Take note: Bishop Tissier clearly says that “many” of these new priests are doubtful. This is, as noted above, in contrast to the new SSPX policy. Fr. Robinson, however, merely remarks:
Quote:“He’s not saying ‘We think its invalid’. … So he’s not really saying anything different here from Archbishop Lefebvre and the position of the SSPX. … Again, this is not the position of the SSPX, that the new rite is invalid.”
Notice the dishonesty, the changing of terms. “That the new rite is invalid”? It doesn’t have to be invalid, it only has to be doubtful! Fr. Robinson continues:
Quote:“If people want to find quotations that will establish that sort of position, they have to find a quote that says the new rites are intrinsically invalid or all the ordinations in the new rites are invalid.”
Nonsense! Firstly, nobody is saying that, at least in our corner. Secondly, it only has to be doubtful, not invalid. In fact, to be alarmed at the SSPX’s new approach one doesn’t even have to regard all new rite ordinations as are doubtful, merely a sufficient number of them and on sufficiently diverse grounds (not just when wacky things happen during the actual ceremony itself) to begin to see conditional ordination as necessary.
“Investigation” means watching a video!
With this in mind, it is concerning to note that during this entire hour-long video the question of the new rite of episcopal consecration is never raised, never even acknowledged, never once even given a passing nod. And yet it ought to be central to the discussion, since only a bishop can ordain a priest and therefore a doubtful bishop can only ordain priests at best only doubtfully.
What other grounds for doubt might there be far beyond what happened on the day during the ceremony itself? Well, for instance: who was the bishop? If he was a man given to telling people that he didn’t believe in mediaeval superstitions, that no magic takes place, it’s all just a community leadership rite of passage (Novus Ordo bishops have been known to say such things!), then might that not affect his intention? What exactly does such a man think he is doing? What if his intention is above suspicion, but he was himself made a bishop using the 1968 new rite of episcopal consecration? Does not the very fact of the new rite of episcopal consecration being substantially different from the Traditional one (the Catholic one!) itself raise questions of its own? How about the priest - were his baptism and confirmation valid?
What about those public cases in recent years where a Novus Ordo priest discovered that his own baptism as a baby had been performed using a do-it-yourself, made-up formula of words? Even modern Rome ordered it to be done again, meaning that the ordination had to be done again too, because priestly ordination is invalid if the candidate is unbaptised. We could go on. But none of these things are even acknowledged, much less discussed by Fr. Robinson and Andrew. Why is that? It is as though they haven’t considered that when it comes to Novus Ordo ordinations there are some issues which aren’t visible on a video of the ceremony. Or perhaps they don’t want us to be aware of that. Fr. Robinson even admits at one point that the SSPX conditionally ordains far fewer ex–Novus Ordo priests today than used to be the case.
His facile justification for this is that in the old days, priests didn’t used to possess a video of their own ordination. Consider the implications: wouldn’t that mean that the SSPX (including Archbishop Lefebvre) conditionally ordained far too many men who ought never to have had it done? And that their only justification for doing so was that, not being able to see a video of the ceremony, they couldn’t be certain that the conciliar ritual had been followed correctly, and nothing more? Later on in the video, Fr. Robinson condemns this approach as “not safe.” As though to underline the fact that watching a video of the ceremony is the only “investigation” being done by today’s SSPX, Fr. Robinson offers Andrew this reflection:
Quote:“If you watch the video of the ordination and you see nothing wrong, then you shouldn’t conditionally ordain. And sometimes I say to people: if you came to me and said, ‘Please re-baptise me, I was baptised in the new rite,’ and you give me a video of your baptism and I look at it and I was like, there’s nothing wrong, then it would obviously be wrong for me to re-baptise you.”
Who can spot the fallacy here? The person performing the baptism does not himself need to have been baptised. Of course, it is fitting for a priest to do it, but it isn’t necessary as such. The sacrament of baptism can be performed validly by a anyone, a Muslim, a Jew or an atheist can do it, as Fr. Robinson himself says later in the video. The sacrament of Holy Orders, on the other hand, requires a bishop who in turn must himself have been validly ordained and consecrated by another real bishop, and so on, which is why the new rite of Episcopal Consecration will always be central to questions of doubtful sacraments. It should trouble everyone a great deal that the modern SSPX’s official spokesman on this question cannot see that obvious distinction, or alternately, that he should be deliberately seeking to hide it from his audience.
Anyone Who Disagrees With Me Is A Sedevacantist!
All of the above is in the first half of the video. The second half includes a lot of talk about other things, such as whether Archbishop Lefebvre was a sedevacantist, Traditional Catholics falling prey to bitterness and hatred and a discussion about Archbishop Thuc and the history of Palmar de Troya. Just how relevant this is in a video entitled: “Why the SSPX Doesn’t Always Conditionally Ordain” is unclear. The fairly obvious explanation is that this is just more guilt-by-association and “what-aboutism” - the same sort of dishonest ploy to which we have seen Fr. Robinson so often resort in his past discussion of “realist science,” in other words.
The attempt has worked on some, it seems. “Very grateful for you all addressing this.” reads one YouTube comment,
Quote:“Seems the gnostic tendency is creeping from the Sedevacanist [sic] to deny the reality of things and thus a continued doubt and uncertainty arises.”
Not everyone has been fooled, however. Another comment reads:
Quote:“Misleading title. It should say, ‘Why the SSPX Rarely Conditionally Ordains after Nearly Reconciling with Rome in 2012’ ”
And another asks:
Quote:“Would the SSPX have Traditional SSPX friendly Novus Ordo Bishops consecrate new Bishops for the SSPX?”
That is almost certainly what is really going on here. The answer, by the way, is surely a resounding “yes” hence the need for the sort of propaganda contained in this video: they are preparing everyone for the day when the SSPX asks permission for new bishops and modernist Rome insists on their own candidates, their own consecrators, if not their own rites.
Doctrine > Validity
There is one final thing which is troubling about this video, and here let us end on a familiar (in these pages at least!) note: validity is one thing, doctrine is another. Yes, validity matters, but doctrine matters more. Priests who come out of the Novus Ordo are often very badly formed. But don’t worry, the SSPX has a programme for their formation, which in the USA is run by…? Yes, Fr. Paul Robinson! That little admission is buried near the start of the interview: blink and you’ll miss it! So at the SSPX in America there will no doubt be ex–Novus Ordo priests not only saying the Traditional Mass with doubtful orders, but also telling people that the earth is billions of years old, that Genesis was “written for a primitive people,” that you should just go ahead and get the latest vaccine, that you must avoid conspiracy theories and be a good little obedient citizen of the New World Order... and more besides.
Lest anyone doubt that valid holy orders is not enough, consider the fact that priests such as Fr. Robinson have holy orders which are beyond any doubt valid, and yet look at the result. The spirit of the New SSPX, so different from what it used to be pervades this entire video. There is a lot of talk, for instance, about how Bishop Fellay, Fr. Fullerton, the SSPX superiors in general have “the grace of state” to decide things - a seriously flawed argument which will be familiar to anyone who lived through the 2012 SSPX crisis. The faithful are told “you’re not trained in this” and that instead of concerning themselves, they “should just pursue peace of soul” – yes, those are exact quotes.
Quote:“It’s just not the position of the faithful to tell us what to do in that case. Because we’re the ones who have to be responsible for that, just as we have to be responsible for what we say in the confessional of what we say from the pulpit and how we guide the faithful. So it’s just, I guess, one of the purposes here is to say: this is our position and you can agree with it or not agree with it but that’s what it is. So if you come to our chapels, it’s just expected that you’re going to accept the priests that we have say public Mass and trust that we’re making good decisions.”
I agree with Fr. Robinson here, although not in a way with which he would be happy. He is right in that you do need to decide whether or not you trust the SSPX as an institution, and that if the answer is “no” then you should stop going there. This interview is yet one more serious piece of evidence (the “x+1”) for why one cannot trust them and why one ought no longer to go there. As he says, if you can’t trust them on the question of Novus Ordo Holy Orders (or evolutionary cosmology, covid vaccines, and so much more besides…), how far can you really trust their advice in the confessional, their sermons, their guidance on retreats, etc? It is a long
established fact, to take just one example, that in America, in Germany and elsewhere, their advice to newly-weds is to avoid having too many children, “It’s not a race!” and so forth. For once Fr. Robinson is quite right: you can’t just pick and choose, you either trust the SSPX or you don’t. As he himself comments,
Quote:“I do understand there’s a lack of trust today. The Church has lost credibility, priests have lost credibility…”
Although spoken about the conciliar church (of course, he himself never actually uses that term because, like the institution which he represents, it is a distinction which he doesn’t recognise), these words apply to the modern SSPX. What he and others ought to be asking is why the SSPX has lost credibility, how that has happened and what the implications might be. Indeed, ironically, if there is one thing which represents in stark relief the difference between the SSPX before and after its Rome-friendly makeover, it is this attitude. The old SSPX used to tell the faithful: You need to read, to study, don’t just take our word for it, read this book, look at this interview, do your homework, see for yourselves!
By contrast, the new SSPX tells them: Who do you think you are? You’re just a layman! Go back to sleep! Leave this to us, we’re the experts, you wouldn’t understand, don’t worry you’re pretty little head about it! Let us close with a comment from Andrew which we think sums it up nicely.
Quote:“You have to trust. There’s something to be said for just accepting that sometimes things are OK. … Sometimes we just have to be able to trust that Christ is watching over the Church still.”
Alright then - *yawn* - I must have just imagined the crisis in the Church, the worst crisis in human history which is still getting worse every day. Goodnight everyone!
Further Reading:
General:
Novus Ordo Bishops - Two Opposing Views:
Novus Ordo Holy Orders: Are they Doubtful and Why?
“All agree that the Sacraments of the New Law, as sensible signs which produce invisible grace, must both signify the grace which they produce and produce the grace which they signify. Now the effects which must be produced and hence also signified by Sacred Ordination to the Diaconate, the Priesthood, and the Episcopacy, namely power and grace, in all the rites of various times and places in the universal Church, are found to be sufficiently signified by the imposition of hands and the words which determine it. […]
Wherefore, after invoking the divine light, We of Our Apostolic Authority and from certain knowledge declare, and as far as may be necessary decree and provide: that the matter, and the only matter, of the Sacred Orders of the Diaconate, the Priesthood, and the Episcopacy is the imposition of hands; and that the form, and the only form, is the words which determine the application of this matter, which univocally signify the sacramental effects – namely the power of Order and the grace of the Holy Spirit – and which are accepted and used by the Church in that sense. ”
- Pius XII, Sacramentum Ordinis, 1947
“But the words which until recently were commonly held by Anglicans to constitute the proper form of priestly ordination namely, “Receive the Holy Ghost,” certainly do not in the least definitely express the sacred Order of Priesthood (sacerdotium) or its grace and power … This form had, indeed, afterwards added to it the words “for the office and work of a priest,” etc.; but this rather shows that the Anglicans themselves perceived that the first form was defective and inadequate.”
- Leo XIII, Apostolicae Curae, 1896
We all learn in catechism that a sacrament is “an outward sign of inward grace” but what does that mean in practice? It means that the entire ceremony and in particular the essential form - the words which make the sacrament happen and without which no sacrament can take place - must signify outwardly what is invisibly taking place. The form: “I baptise you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost” clearly signifies that a baptism is taking place. On hearing those words, an ignorant pagan, stumbling into a church half-way through a strange ceremony, could, in theory, understand that a baptism is taking place.
The same is true of the sacrament of Holy Orders. The words can be expected to describe, or represent outwardly, what is inwardly taking place in that sacrament. So what, precisely, is taking place at the consecration of a bishop? The priest is being given the episcopacy, that is, the fullness of the priesthood. He may or may not be going to “govern” - that would signify his being appointed to a diocese and given ordinary jurisdiction - but even if he is an auxiliary bishop and has no jurisdiction, he will still exercise the fullness of the ministry of a priest.
A sacramental form is valid because the words clearly signify what is taking place; therefore, to the extent that they fail to signify it, its validity is put in doubt. That is why the Church decided (and Leo XIII repeated the decision) that Anglican holy orders are invalid. The essential form used by the Anglicans for a hundred years had said only “Receive the Holy Ghost” which is a true but inadequate description of what is happening at an ordination: it doesn’t sufficiently signify what is taking place because there is no mention of the priesthood.
Essential Form of Priestly Ordination:
What does this signify? In both cases, a man is being given “the dignity of the priesthood,” an “office which comes from” God and is the next one down from that of a bishop.
Essential Form of Episcopal Consecration:
What does this signify? In the traditional form a “priest” being given “the fullness of thy ministry” which is the definition of a bishop. In the Novus Ordo form a “candidate” is being given “power” which is “the governing spirit” given to the apostles. Is that the same as the fullness of the priesthood, i.e. the episcopacy, or might it conceivably be something distinct?
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![[Image: Episcopal.png]](https://i.postimg.cc/nh2mGPV6/Episcopal.png)
