Paul Craig Roberts

Institute for Political Economy

Vaccinated People Are Dying of All Causes 6-1 Over Unvaccinated

Vaccinated People Are Dying of All Causes 6-1 Over Unvaccinated

The last 7 Public Health England / UK Health Security Agency ‘Vaccine Surveillance’ report figures on Covid-19 cases show that double vaccinated 40-79 year-olds have now lost 50% of their immune system capability and are consistently losing a further 5% every week (between 3.9% and 8.8%).

Projections, therefore, suggest that 40-79 year-olds will have zero Covid / Viral defense at best, or a form of vaccine-mediated acquired immunodeficiency syndrome at worst, by Christmas and all double vaccinated people over 30 will have completely lost that part of their immune system which deals with Covid-19 within the next 13 weeks.

Then we have this chart which shows the comparison of cases of vaccinated and unvaccinated. Look at the last two columns for the 30 and over. It appears that the vaccinated are catching Delta at a greater rate than the unvaccinated by week 41.

3 Reasons UK Vaccination Data Might Raise Some Eyebrows – Updated

The UK Government’s own data does not support the claims made for Covid-19 Vaccine Safety & Effectiveness

https://theexpose.uk/2021/10/26/the-uk-governments-own-data-does-not-support-the-claims-made-for-covid-19-vaccine-safety-effectiveness/

Double Jabbed die rate is Six Times higher than Unvaccinated, new data finds

Herland Report: Double Jabbed die rate Six Times higher: Recent data from the U.K. Office of National Statistics reveals people who have been double jabbed against COVID-19 are dying from all causes at a rate six times higher than the unvaccinated.

In the U.S., meanwhile, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is propping up the official narrative with two manipulated studies — one suggesting the jab reduces all-cause mortality, and another claiming the shot is five times more protective than natural immunity.

https://hannenabintuherland.com/news/double-jabbed-die-rate-is-six-times-higher-than-unvaccinated-new-data-finds/?utm_source=mailpoet&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=herland-report-independent-cultural-analysis-week-46-2019_70

The Inversion of the Shemaby Edward J. Barr

You shall love the Lord, you God, with your entire soul, heart, and mind

October 27, 2021 (Edward J. Barr) – The aggressive pace of atheistic modernity to replace the worship of God with the cult of Man has moved into high gear.  Like the original Tower of Babel where Man tried to reach heaven and its eternity, modern scientists believe that they can remake Man into an immortal being.  In this construct, man decides what he is his based on his own imagination. totally devoid of God’s design of Man. Religion, especially Christianity, has been relegated to a private practice increasingly excluded from any impact, or participation in the public square. Multiple polls show the rise of atheism and satanism at the expense of Christianity. Reality has not fared well in its battle against relativism. 

In the Shema (Deuteronomy 6:2-6), which will be read at Mass this weekend (34^th Sunday in Ordinary time), Israel was given the prescription for gaining eternal joy.  By loving the Lord above all else, with every part of one’s being, man can fulfill who he truly is, a son or daughter of God.  Jesus gave the perfect example of the selfless love that all should seek when he willingly offered himself on the cross.  In his humanity he experienced many challenges that we all face, yet in the end emphasized “thy will be done” when praying to the Father in the Garden of Gethsemane.  His kenosis, the selfless outpouring of love for mankind, is offered to all who faithfully follow Him.  

The modernist Shema makes a mockery of the Deuteronomic guidance.  Its mantra is “You shall love yourself with your entire heart and mind.”  There is no recognition of the soul in a materialistic world, other than treating it as a heart-like feeling.  As the Shema is turned upside down, so is the perception of the human person.  Christians know that we are made in the image and likeness of God.  We are granted an intellect through the generosity of our Creator.  A similarity, infinitesimally weak in comparison, to the perfect intellect of God.  The intellect allows us to inform our will, so that we will choose the good.  If we have a properly formed conscience the will can guide our emotions. Intellect, will, then emotions is the order of rational man.  Such order is in short supply today.

The modern world embraces concupiscence and places emotions at the pinnacle of human “reasoning.”  Everything focuses on pleasure, power and possessions.  The extent of this insanity is seen throughout society.  Food is no longer something to provide nutrients and keep us alive.  It is a pseudo-religion.  Adherents of the faith center their lives on acquiring unique culinary experiences, spending on one meal enough money to feed a soup kitchen for a week.  The raw power of Mixed Martial Arts fighting captivates consumers to spend over a billion dollars a year.  That number is dwarfed by the power money provides the barons of Wall Street, where the phrase “the house always wins” rings true.  Our consumer society bombards us with advertisements that try to convince us that material things are what brings happiness.  The one who has the most toys, wins.  Yet, what do they win?

Most every study of happiness demonstrates the bankruptcy of the modern message.  Those most happy are those who go to religious services.  They have lower incidents of mental illness and addictions.  They are more optimistic and understanding.  They face challenges with positive attitudes.  Despite this the masters of deception seek to hide and/or ignore the evidence.  Why would they do this?  Follow the money is one potential reason.  Yet, it alone is not sufficient.  For example, the movie industry repeatedly sees the success of religious and morally focused films, yet continues to provide primarily violent, sex-filled content to its audiences.  Something is more powerful than money.

The reason is that the modernist Shema has been successful in imprinting the superiority of human emotions into the culture.  For modernity the heart means the emotions.  They inform the mind.  There is no will that seeks the good, only the mind directing the will to follow the emotions.  The complete inversion of God’s design leads to the complete inversion of reality.  Insanity rules!  The “pleasures” of sex are injected into every element of society.  No one can escape the overt and subtle message that sex is the most important element of the human person. From hard core pornography to glorification of sexual sin in movies and TV shows, to the creation of new genders and personal pronouns, the message is clear.  Everything is about sex.  So, if a youngster is having emotional problems, it must be because of a sexual issue.  Therefore, the problems aren’t caused by personal and societal stresses, they are manifest because he is really a girl inside, or she is really a boy.  Secular studies that show the damage of sex changes are ignored, though Sweden and Finland have ended youth sex change programs based on the overwhelming evidence of the damage it does to children.  When biological reality is disputed, more than just medical and psychological problems occur.  There have already been cases where police haven’t been able to find criminals since they were looking for males and all the suspects were female.  Except they weren’t.  The truth of DNA was hidden by the falsity of the “sex” change.  

The societal mental block of sin is also a component of the false Shema. Since all that matters is a person’s emotional happiness, there can be no sin.  If I believe something is true, it is!  How many times have you heard, “that’s your truth, not mine?”  Christians know that Jesus is the “way, the truth, and the life.”  Modernity says it is the individual.  Having worked in the intelligence and law enforcement communities I like to watch shows outlining criminal investigations.  Nearly all the murder cases involve individuals who were living a life of sexual sin.  Watch some of these shows and you will see the truth that, “the wages of sin are death.”  Of course, there is no mention of sin, or even the dangers of risky behavior.  There is no personal accountability for actions, if those actions made you “feel good”, oh well.”

It makes sense that our society is becoming increasingly insane. Rampant relativism has seeped into all parts of our culture.  Even positive Christian teachings have been twisted to support the Culture of Death.  “Judge not, lest ye be judged,” “turn the other cheek,” and “just love” have been appropriated by those who seek to justify sin and extinguish God from the public square. They have been quite successful.  The numbers of Americans who attend services and affiliate with Christianity continues to fall.  Even the modernist religion of Moralistic, Therapeutic Deism identified by theologian Christian Pinckers is being weakened. When mankind disputes reality, the only result can be insanity.  So, modernists truly believe that a biological male is a female.  They really believe that there is no sin.  They really believe that the there is no hell.  The only reality is what I believe is real, for me.  No two modern realities are the same. 

God will only be mocked for so long.  For how long, no one knows. The history of Israel shows that whenever she fell into idolatry, a day of reckoning would follow.  The Western world has certainly fell into idolatry.  The day or reckoning may be upon us.  The Tower of Babel built upon the false Shema cannot reach heaven, no matter how hard modern man believes it can.  Embracing the miracles of modernity may lead to your demise.  We can remain steadfast in the teachings of Christ and his Church, or we can bow down to the false gods of scientism. “As for me and my house, we shall serve the Lord.” (Joshua 24:15)

Edward J Barr is a Catechist, an attorney, an intelligence officer, and a Marine. He earned a Master of Theology degree from the Augustine Institute. Mr. Barr is a contributing writer for the Roma Locuta Est blog (www.RomaLocutaEst.com)Edward J. Barr | October 26, 2021 at 10:53 pm | Categories: Uncategorized | URL: https://wp.me/p7YMML-70n

New comment waiting approval on ABYSSUS ABYSSUM INVOCAT / DEEP CALLS TO DEEP

Kate R. commented on OH THE HORROR, THE HORROR!! AND IT NOT HALOWEEN, IT’S FOR REAL !!!11 of 45 Dr. Carrie Madej took a look at the Moderna, Pfizer, and J&J shot contents under a microscope, and …On Vlad Tepes Dr. Richard M. Fleming does a nice presentation of his scientific (under the microscope) examination of the Pfizer vax, and what happens when the Pfizer vax meets your red blood cells. He did not see life forms in his batch, nor graphene, but he did observe reliably that when red blood cells meet the Vax, there is a loss of oxygen in the cell, they start to clump together, and there is “garbage” in the cell he cannot identify. He is calling for an immediate halt to all the vaccines until the vaxxes are evaluated, as he said these “should not be put into a human being”. See the demonstration there before it is gone, and share it. To think of this going into people is terrible, to put this into any child is truly a horror. God protect our children.

Perspective:

 The Looming Peasant State

 The disappearance of the middle class

is the erosion of an American ideal

By Victor Davis Hanson

November 8, 2021

The ideal of an independent middle class, originally agrarian, rather than a subservient peasantry was the American ideal, at least until recently. All politicians still praise the middle class, but few have sought or found ways to preserve it in a radically changing globalized world. 

The result is the emergence of a new American peasantry, of millions of Americans who own little or no property. The new majority has scant, if any, savings. Fifty-eight percent of Americans have less than $1,000 in the bank. A missed paycheck renders them destitute, completely unable to service sizable debt. Most of what they buy, from cars to electronic appurtenances, they charge on credit cards. The credit card indebtedness is over $8,000 per household and over $2,000 per individual — paid through monthly installments at average annual interest rates of between 15% and 19%, at a time when most home mortgages are usually below 4%. 

Such short-term debt is often roughly commensurate with the payments and share-cropping arrangements that premodern peasants once entered with lords and made it impossible for the serf to exercise political independence or hope for upward mobility. The chief contemporary difference, of course, is that the modern American peasant is the beneficiary of a sophisticated technological society that allows him instant communications, advanced health care, televised and computer-driven entertainment, inexpensive food, and a social welfare state. These material blessings often mask an otherwise shrinking middle class without confidence that it is in control of its own destiny. 

A fifth of America receives direct government public assistance. Well over half the country depends on some sort of state subsidy or government transfer money, explaining why about 60% of Americans collect more payments from the government than they pay out in federal income taxes, in health care entitlements, tax credits and exemptions, federally backed student and commercial loans, housing supplements, food subsidies, disability and unemployment assistance, and legal help. 

Such social insulation, along with science fueled by free market capitalism, has succeeded in ending starvation, dying in one’s 30s and 40s and, for the most part, chronic malnourishment, as well as ensured access to a wealth of material appurtenances. 

But otherwise, 21st century American “peasants” — currently perhaps about 46% of the population — usually die with a net worth of less than $10,000, both receiving and bequeathing little, if any, inheritance. 

Drive on El Camino Real on the perimeter of Stanford University’s elite campus and witness hundreds living in curbside trailers in the manner of the poor of Cairo or visit the side streets near the Google headquarters in nearby Mountain View where thousands live in their cars, or walk among the homeless on tony University Avenue in Palo Alto. Then juxtapose their lifestyles with estates in nearby Woodside, Atherton or Portola Valley, and the Mercedes-Benzes and BMWs of those in their early 20s parked in the student lots at Stanford University. 

The natural historical referent for this dichotomy is certainly not the booming middle classes emerging following World War II. Instead, the image is one of the manors and keeps of medieval Europe amid peasant huts outside the walls. 

For all practical purposes, it is almost impossible for young families to buy a home anywhere in California’s 500-mile progressive coastal corridor from San Diego to Berkeley or in the greater Portland and Seattle areas. The same is largely true in the metropolitan and suburban areas from Boston to Washington, D.C. Whatever this bifurcated new culture is — and it is new and different from that of a half-century ago — it is not so conducive anymore to classical citizenship. 

Even those of the middle class who can be thrifty, who save some of their income and develop modest passbook savings accounts, are now targeted by institutionalized cheap interest. The result of massive and chronic trillion-dollar annual budget deficits — the national debt is now near $30 trillion — and the zero interest rates of the often jittery Federal Reserve is the destruction of any interest income on savings accounts. 

The modest, middle-class citizen saver thus faces daunting options just to preserve the value of his money. He can engage in risky real estate speculation or invest in a booming stock market, fueled not by business performance, per se, but often by those who have nowhere else to park their money. So middle-class families, to be safe, often keep their modest savings in passbook accounts or buy federal bonds, where interest payouts below 1% do not cover the erosion in value of their principal due to annual inflation. 

Yet American citizenship always differed even from the Western tradition found in the Europe of the last three centuries. The founding of America saw an entire array of newly expanded rights, responsibilities, and privileges for the vast majority of the resident population. This late-18th century new birth of citizenship arose in part because of an almost limitless supply of land, in part because colonial America lacked many of the European mainland’s traditions of class distinctions, primogeniture, peasantry and serfdom, in part because of the parliamentary traditions that Britain had implanted in North America, and in part because of the protections of the Constitution of the newly formed United States. America would soon become the freest and most egalitarian society in the history of civilization. 

The point is not that late-18th century America was perfect at birth or could even approach what we now enshrine as 21st century moral values. Rather, the new United States was unlike, or rather superior to, most contemporary nations. Indeed, almost alone of governments, America had hit upon a mechanism that would allow constant self-criticism, legal amendments to its founding documents and moral improvement. Such change came without the necessity of collective suicide or permanent revolution — and yet within the boundaries of constitutional absolutes that transcended time and space, and all made possible only by an empowered and autonomous middle class. 

_____________________

THE CATHOLIC MONITOR

SEARCH

SkyNews reported “It’s Becoming a Real Clown Show”: Biden is Senile, Pelosi looks “Drunk” & Biden’s Replacement Kamala has the “Charisma of a Wet Sock” 

November 11, 2021

The Eponymous Flower website posted a SkyNews analysis of the Democrat regime’s hilarious crisis in its so-called leadership called It’s becoming a real clown show:

SkyNews on YouTube in a news segment seriously and humorously graphically illustrated that Joe Biden is senile, hand waving Nancy Pelosi looks “drunk” and Kamala Harris has the “charisma of a wet sock” [https://www.theeponymousflower.com/2021/11/its-becoming-real-clown-show.html]

And “Kamala Harris is a record-breaker. She is the least popular VP in 50 years. Bravo”:McKayla J likedKambree@KamVTVKamala Harris is a record-breaker. She is the least popular VP in 50 years. Bravo. [https://twitter.com/KamVTV/status/1458641359540310020] With that in mind, here is a post from earlier in the year on Biden’s apparent “clown show” replacement:
Is soon to be President “[Wall Street] Kamala… the Pinup Girl” of the “Facist-Communist Corporate Model” that is “Crony Capitalism”?March 08, 2021

The Epoch Times reported here “in the United States, we’re on the verge of The Year of the Three Presidents. After all, 2021 began with Trump in the White House, followed by Biden on Jan. 20, with Harris now the odds-on favorite to supplant Sundown Joe once his deterioration becomes impossible even for the lickspittle robinettes in the media to ignore”:

We’re now six weeks or so into the sham presidency of Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., and already the end of the Biden era seems near.

A bumbling shell of a man, constantly attended by his wife, Jill, and with the lengthening shadow of his vice president, Kamala Harris, looming in the background, Biden seems incapable of doing anything except signing the slew of executive orders his handlers shove under his nose until at last, exhausted, his team “calls a lid” on his workday and packs him back off upstairs at the White House for a nice lie-down before noontime…

…  A month before the election last year, Nancy Pelosi mysteriously brought up the subject of the 25th amendment, which allows for the replacement of an incapable president by means of a Cabinet-level coup or via a commission of doctors, shrinks, and has-been politicians. Lest you think the House speaker was thinking of Trump, think again. “This is not about President Trump,” she said flatly.

And just last week, a group of Democrats, led by two House members, called for Biden to be stripped of his sole authority to launch a nuclear strike, calling for the vice president and the House speaker to concur in any such decision. (Do they know something we, officially, don’t?) The fact that Harris is the vice president and Pelosi is the speaker is entirely coincidental.

Expect similar motions to diminish Biden’s waning authority to increase as his mental capacity decreases. [https://www.theepochtimes.com/bidens-presidency-seems-ready-to-end_3716806.html]

Who is Kamala Harris?

“Kamala Harris… is the pinup girl of the corrupt corporate crony capitalist state.” – The American Conservative 

Finance Yahoo reported that there is bi-partisan outrage over how the “cards are stacked against the little guy in favor of billionaire Wall Street Traders” in what Donald Trump Jr. and Candace Owensattacked as the “criminals” of Wall Street over the top market manipulation against GameStop. [https://finance.yahoo.com/news/this-is-unacceptable-aoc-and-others-side-with-retail-investors-slam-robinhood-and-wall-street-amid-game-stop-mania-171906758.html and http://www.thecatholicmonitor.com/2021/01/trump-jr-candace-owens-attack-criminals.html]

The Joe Biden/Kamala Harris administration, however, is remaining silent over the outrage against the “billionaire Wall Street Traders” possibly because as the Wall Street Journal said Harris is their girl: “As Kamala Harris Joins Biden Ticket, Wall Street Sighs in Relief – WSJ.” [https://www.wsj.com/articles/kamala-harris-has-taken-on-wall-street-wall-street-doesnt-seem-to-mind-11597254609 and https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/26/kamala-harris-has-complicated-history-with-wall-street.html]

It appears that the Biden/Harris regime is following the Chinese model of economics which The Epoch Times called the “Facist-Communist corporate model.” [https://www.theepochtimes.com/on-the-21st-anniversary-of-the-persecution-of-falun-gong-by-the-chinese-communist-party_3439161.html]

Another name for the “Facist-Communist corporate model” is “Crony Capitalism.”

In a piece titled “Kamala Harris: Queen of the Crony Capitalists,” The American Conservative revealed:

By 2012, Harris was already a rising Democratic star and a potential gubernatorial candidate. When she announced that California would receive by far the largest share of the $26 billion during the initial announcement of the National Mortgage Settlement, it signaled her arrival to national politics… 

Michael Hiltzik, a business columnist for the Los Angeles Times, called… the duplicity displayed by Harris and the other state AGs during the settlement negotiations was monumental. The AGs made common cause with big Wall Street firms that were selling the shares of the banks short in the pubic equity markets before each salacious headline appeared in the New York Times…

… Kamala Harris and President Obama refused to prosecute the guilty, but they were happy to use their legal powers to tax the shareholders of the big banks. The pension funds of public employee unions and teachers’ unions paid for Kamala Harris’ political career. There is nothing pro-consumer or even mildly progressive about Kamala Harris. She is the pinup girl of the corrupt corporate crony capitalist state. [https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/kamala-harris-queen-of-the-crony-capitalists/]

Pray an Our Father now for reparation for the sins committed because of Francis’s Amoris Laetitia. 

Pray an Our Father now for the restoration of the Church as well as the Triumph of the Kingdom of the Sacred Heart and the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

Stop for a moment of silence, ask Jesus Christ what He wants you to do now and next. In this silence remember God, Father, Son and Holy Ghost – Three Divine Persons yet One God, has an ordered universe where you can know truth and falsehood as well as never forget that He wants you to have eternal happiness with Him as his son or daughter by grace. Make this a practice. By doing this you are doing more good than reading anything here or anywhere else on the Internet.

Francis Notes:

– Doctor of the Church St. Francis de Sales totally confirmed beyond any doubt the possibility of a heretical pope and what must be done by the Church in such a situation:

“[T]he Pope… WHEN he is EXPLICITLY a heretic, he falls ipso facto from his dignity and out of the Church, and the Church MUST either deprive him, or, as some say, declare him deprived, of his Apostolic See.”
(The Catholic Controversy, by St. Francis de Sales, Pages 305-306)

Saint Robert Bellarmine, also, said “the Pope heretic is not deposed ipso facto, but must be declared deposed by the Church.”
[https://archive.org/stream/SilveiraImplicationsOfNewMissaeAndHereticPopes/Silveira%20Implications%20of%20New%20Missae%20and%20Heretic%20Popes_djvu.txt]

– “If Francis is a Heretic, What should Canonically happen to him?”: http://www.thecatholicmonitor.com/2020/12/if-francis-is-heretic-what-should.html

– “Could Francis be a Antipope even though the Majority of Cardinals claim he is Pope?”: http://www.thecatholicmonitor.com/2019/03/could-francis-be-antipope-even-though.html

 –  LifeSiteNews, “Confusion explodes as Pope Francis throws magisterial weight behind communion for adulterers,” December 4, 2017:

The AAS guidelines explicitly allows “sexually active adulterous couples facing ‘complex circumstances’ to ‘access the sacraments of Reconciliation and the Eucharist.'”

–  On February 2018, in Rorate Caeli, Catholic theologian Dr. John Lamont:

“The AAS statement… establishes that Pope Francis in Amoris Laetitia has affirmed propositions that are heretical in the strict sense.”

– On December 2, 2017, Bishop Rene Gracida:

“Francis’ heterodoxy is now official. He has published his letter to the Argentina bishops in Acta Apostlica Series making those letters magisterial documents.”

Pray an Our Father now for the restoration of the Church by the bishops by the grace of God.

Election Notes: 

– Intel Cryptanalyst-Mathematician on Biden Steal: “212Million Registered Voters & 66.2% Voting,140.344 M Voted…Trump got 74 M, that leaves only 66.344 M for Biden” [http://catholicmonitor.blogspot.com/2020/12/intel-cryptanalyst-mathematician-on.html?m=1]

– Will US be Venezuela?: Ex-CIA Official told Epoch Times “Chávez started to Focus on [Smartmatic] Voting Machines to Ensure Victory as early as 2003”: http://catholicmonitor.blogspot.com/2020/12/will-us-be-venezuela-ex-cia-official.html– Tucker Carlson’s Conservatism Inc. Biden Steal Betrayal is explained by “One of the Greatest Columns ever Written” according to Rush: http://catholicmonitor.blogspot.com/2021/01/tucker-carlsons-conservatism-inc-biden.html?m=1 – A Hour which will Live in Infamy: 10:01pm November 3, 2020: 
http://www.thecatholicmonitor.com/2021/01/a-hour-which-will-live-in-infamy-1001pm.html?m=1 What is needed right now to save America from those who would destroy our God given rights is to pray at home or in church and if called to even go to outdoor prayer rallies in every town and city across the United States for God to pour out His grace on our country to save us from those who would use a Reichstag Fire-like incident to destroy our civil liberties. [Is the DC Capitol Incident Comparable to the Nazi Reichstag Fire Incident where the German People Lost their Civil Liberties?: http://catholicmonitor.blogspot.com/2021/01/is-dc-capital-incident-comparable-to.html?m=1 and Epoch Times Show Crossroads on Capitol Incident: “Anitfa ‘Agent Provocateurs‘”: 
http://catholicmonitor.blogspot.com/2021/01/epoch-times-show-crossroads-on-capital.html?m=1] 
Pray an Our Father now for the grace to know God’s Will and to do it. Pray an Our Father now for America. Pray an Our Father now for the restoration of the Church as well as the Triumph of the Kingdom of the Sacred Heart and the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

• HE HAS GOT TO GO
• Open letter by Dominican theologian Fr. Wojciech Gołaski: “I must bear witness to the treasure of the holy rites of the Church”
• Response to the Letter of the Vicariate of Rome

Open letter by Dominican theologian Fr. Wojciech Gołaski: “I must bear witness to the treasure of the holy rites of the Church”

The following open letter to Pope Francis was composed by Fr. Wojciech Gołaski O.P. and has been published already in Polish. Below is the English translation that was provided to Rorate Caeli by the author. Regardless of where one stands on the question of the SSPX, it deserves an attentive reading for its formidable critique of “Traditionis Custodes.”   Fr. Wojciech Gołaski O.P.
Jamna, August 17, 2021                                                                        His Holiness Pope Francis                                                                        Domus Sanctae Marthae                                                                        The Holy See                                                                        Vatican City
For the attention of:Rev. General Master of the Order, Gerard Francisco Timoner III OPRev. Provincial of the Polish Province, Paweł Kozacki OPH.E. Bishop of the Tarnów Diocese, Andrzej JeżRev. Superior of the House in Jamna, Andrzej Chlewicki OPBrothers and Sisters in the OrderRev. Superior of the Polish District of the Fraternity of St Pius X, Karl Stehlin FSSPXOmnes quos res tangit
Most Holy Father,
I was born 57 years ago and joined the Dominican Order 35 years ago. I took my perpetual vows 29 years ago and have been a priest now for 28 years. I had only vague recollections from my early childhood of the Holy Mass in its form predating the reforms of 1970. Sixteen years after my ordination, two lay friends (unknown to each other) urged me to learn how to celebrate the Holy Mass in its traditional form. I listened to them.
It was a shock to me. I discovered that the Holy Mass in its classical form:- directs the entire attention of both priest and faithful towards the Mystery,- expresses, with great precision of words and gestures, the faith of the Church in what is happening here and now on the altar,- reinforces, with a power equal to its precision, the faith of the celebrant and of the people,- does not lead either priest or faithful towards any invention or creativity of their own during the liturgy,- places them, quite on the contrary, on a path of silence and contemplation,- offers by the number and nature of its gestures the possibility of incessant acts of piety and love towards God,- unites the priest and faithful, placing them on the same side of the altar and turning them in the same direction: versus Crucem, versus Deum.
I said to myself: so this is what the Holy Mass is! And I, a priest of 16 years, did not know it! It was a powerful eureka, a discovery, after which my idea of the Mass could not remain the same.
From the beginning it had struck me that this rite is the opposite of the stereotype. Instead of formalism, free expression of the soul before God. Instead of frigidity, the fervour of divine cult. Instead of distance, closeness. Instead of strangeness, intimacy. Instead of rigidity, security. Instead of the passivity of the laity, their deep and living connection to the mystery (it was through the laity, after all, that I was led to the traditional Mass). Instead of a chasm between priest and the faithful, a close spiritual union between all those present, protected and expressed by the silence of the Canon. In making this discovery it became clear to me: this very form is our bridge to the generations who lived before us and passed on the faith. My joy in this ecclesial unity which transcends all time was enormous.
From the beginning, I experienced the powerful force of spiritual attraction of the Mass in its traditional form. It was not the signs in themselves which attracted me, but their significance, which the soul knows how to read. The very thought of the next celebration filled me with joy. I sought every opportunity to celebrate with eagerness and longing. Very soon a complete certainty matured within me, that, were I to celebrate Mass (as well as every Sacrament and ceremony) only in its traditional form till the end of my days, I would not miss the post-conciliar form in the least.
Had someone asked me to express with a single word my feelings about the traditional celebration in the context of the reformed rite, I would have replied “relief.” For it was indeed a relief, one of indescribable depth. It was like that of someone who, having walked all his life in shoes with a pebble in them that rubs and irritates his feet, but who has no other experience of walking, is offered, 16 years later, a pair of shoes with no pebble and the words: “Here,” “Put them on,” “try them!” Not only did I rediscover the Holy Mass, but also the astounding difference between the two forms: that which had been in use for centuries and the post-conciliar one. I had not known this difference because I had not known the earlier form. I cannot compare my encounter with the traditional liturgy to a meeting with someone who has adopted me and has become my adoptive parent. It was a meeting with a Mother who has always been my Mother, yet I had not known her.
I was accompanied in all this by the blessing of the Supreme Pontiffs. They had taught that the missal of 1962 “had never been legally abrogated and remained therefore, in principle, always permitted,” adding that “what had been sacred for previous generations remained sacred and great also for us, and could not suddenly become completely forbidden nor even considered harmful.  It behooves all of us to preserve the riches which have developed through the faith and prayer of the Church and to give them their proper place” (Benedict XVI, Letter to the Bishops, 2007). The faithful were also taught: “On account of its venerable and ancient use, the forma extraordinaria is to be maintained with the honour due to it”; it has been described as “a precious treasure to be preserved” (Instruction Universae Ecclesiae, 2011). These words followed earlier documents which made it possible for the faithful to use the traditional liturgy after the reforms of 1970, the first being Quattuor abhinc annos of 1984. The foundation and source for all these documents remains the Bull of Saint Pius V, Quo primum tempore (1570).
Holy Father, if, without forgetting the solemn document of Pope Pius V, we take into consideration the lapse of time covering the declarations of your immediate predecessors we have a duration of 37 years, from 1984 to 2021, during which the Church said to the faithful, concerning the traditional liturgy, and ever more strongly: “There is such a way. You may walk along it.”
I therefore took the path offered to me by the Church.
Whoever takes this road—whoever wants this rite, which is the vessel of divine Presence and divine Oblation, to bear fruit within his own life—should open himself entirely so as to entrust himself and others to God, present and acting within us through the vessel of this holy rite. This I did, with complete confidence.
Then came the 16th of July 2021.
From your documents, Holy Father, I learnt that the path I had been walking on for 12 years had ceased to exist.
We have affirmations of two Popes. His Holiness Benedict XVI had said that the Roman Missal promulgated by Saint Pius V “must be considered the extraordinary expression of the lex orandi of the Catholic Church of the Roman Rite.” Yet His Holiness Pope Francis says that “the liturgical books promulgated by Popes St. Paul VI and St. John Paul II (…) are the only expression of the lex orandi of the Roman Rite.”  The affirmation of the successor thus denies that of his still-living predecessor.
Can a certain manner of celebrating Mass, confirmed by immemorial, centuries-old Tradition, recognized by every Pope, including yourself, Holy Father, until the 16th of July of 2021, and sanctified by its practice over so many centuries, suddenly cease to be the lex orandi of the Roman Rite? If this were the case, it would mean that such a characteristic is not intrinsic to the rite but is an external attribute, subject to the decisions of those who occupy places of high authority. In reality, the traditional liturgy expresses the lex orandi of the Roman Rite by its every gesture and every sentence and by the whole that they compose. It is guaranteed also to express this lex orandi, as the Church has always held, on account of its uninterrupted use, since time immemorial. We must conclude that the first papal affirmation [of Benedict] has solid foundations and is true and that the second [of Francis] is groundless and is false. But despite its being false, it is nevertheless given power of law. This has consequences about which I will write below.
Concessions regarding the use of the Missal of 1962 now have a different character than earlier ones. It is no longer about responding to the love with which the faithful adhere to the traditional form, but about giving the faithful time—how much time, we are not told—to “return” to the reformed liturgy. The words of the Motu Proprio and your Letter to the Bishops make it entirely clear that the decision has been taken, and is already being implemented, to remove the traditional liturgy from the life of the Church and cast it into the abyss of oblivion: it may not be used in parish churches, new groups must not be formed, Rome must be consulted if new priests are to say it. The bishops are now indeed to be Traditionis Custodes, “custodians of Tradition,” yet not in the sense of guardians who protect it, but rather in the sense of custodians of a jail.
Allow me to express my conviction that this will not happen, and that the operation will fail. What are the grounds for this conviction? A careful analysis of both Letters of July 16th exposes four components: Hegelianism, nominalism, belief in the Pope’s omnipotence, and collective responsibility. Each one is an essential component of your message and none of them can be reconciled with the deposit of the Catholic faith. Since they cannot be reconciled with the faith, they will not be integrated into it either in theory or in practice. Let us examine each of them in turn.
1) Hegelianism. The term is a conventional one: it does not mean literally the system of the German philosopher Hegel, but something that derives from this system, namely the understanding of history as a good, rational, and inevitable process of continuous changes. This way of thinking has a long history, from Heraclitus and Plotinus, to Joachim of Fiore, down to Hegel, Marx, and their modern heirs. The characteristic of this approach is to divide history into phases, such that the beginning of each new phase is joined to the end of the preceding one. Attempts to “baptize” Hegelianism are nothing other than attempts to endow these supposed historical phases with the authority of the Holy Spirit. It is assumed that the Holy Spirit communicates to the next generation something that He has not spoken of to the preceding one, or even that He imparts something that contradicts what He has said before. In the latter case, we must accept one of three things: either in certain phases the Church failed to obey the Holy Spirit, or the Holy Spirit is subject to change, or He carries contradictions within Him.
Another consequence of this world-view is a change in how we understand the Church and Tradition. The Church is no longer seen as a community uniting the faithful by transcending time, as the Catholic faith holds, but as a set of groups belonging to the various phases. These groups no longer have a common language: our ancestors had no access to what the Holy Spirit says to us today. Tradition itself is no longer one message that is continuously studied; it consists rather in receiving again and again new things from the Holy Spirit. We then come to hear instead, as in Your Letter to the Bishops, Holy Father, of “the dynamic of Tradition,” often with an application to specific events. An example of this is when you write that this dynamic’s “last stage is the Second Vatican Council, during which Catholic bishops gathered in order to listen and discern the way shown to the Church by the Holy Spirit.” This line of reasoning implies that a new phase requires new liturgical forms, because the former ones were suited to the previous stage, which is over. Since this sequence of stages is sanctioned by the Holy Spirit, through the Council, those who hold on to the old forms despite having access to new ones oppose the Holy Spirit.
Such views, however, are contrary to the faith. Holy Scripture, the norm of Catholic faith, provides no grounds for such an understanding of history. Rather, it teaches us an altogether different understanding. King Josiah, having learned about the discovery of the old book of the Law, ordered that the celebration of Passover be conducted in accordance with it, despite an interruption of half a century (2 Kgs 22-23). In the same way, Ezra and Nehemiah on their return from the Babylonian captivity celebrated the Feast of Tabernacles with the entire people, strictly according to the ancient records of the Law, despite many decades having passed since the previous celebration (Neh 8). In each case, the old documents of the law were used to renew the divine worship after a period of turmoil. No one demanded a change in the ritual on the ground that new times had arrived.
2) Nominalism. While Hegelianism influences one’s understanding of history, nominalism affects one’s understanding of unity. Nominalism implies that introducing outward unity (by means of a top-down administrative decision) is equivalent to achieving real unity. This is because nominalism abolishes spiritual reality by seeking to grasp and regulate it with material measures. You write, Holy Father, that: “It is to defend the unity of the Body of Christ that I am forced to withdraw the faculty granted by my predecessors.” But to reach this goal, true unity, your predecessors made the opposite decision, and not without reason. When one understands that true unity includes something spiritual and internal, and thus differs from mere external unity, one no longer seeks it simply by uniformity of external signs. We do not obtain true unity in this way, but rather, impoverishment, and the opposite of unity: division.
Unity does not result from the withdrawal of faculties, the revocation of consent, and the imposition of limitations. King Rehoboam of Judah, before deciding how to treat the Israelites, who wished him to improve their lot, consulted two groups of advisors. The older ones recommended leniency and a reduction of the people’s burdens: age, in Holy Scripture, often symbolises maturity. The young, who were contemporaries of the king, recommended increasing their burdens and the use of harsh words: youth, in Scripture, often symbolises immaturity. The king followed the advice of the young. This failed to bring unity between Judah and Israel. On the contrary, it started the division of the country into two kingdoms (1 Kgs 12). Our Lord healed this division through mildness, knowing that the lack of this virtue had caused the split.
Before Pentecost, the apostles assessed unity by external criteria. This approach was corrected by the Saviour Himself, who, in reply to the words of St. John: “Master, we saw a man driving out evil spirits in your name, and we did not let him do it, because he was not one of us,” answered “Let him do so, for he who is not against you is with you” (Lk 9,49-50, cf. Mt 9,38-41). Holy Father, you had many hundreds of thousands of the faithful who “were not against” you. And you have done so much to make things difficult for them! Would it not have been better to follow the words of the Saviour indicating a deeper, spiritual foundation of unity? Hegelianism and nominalism frequently become allies, since the materialistic understanding of history leads to the conviction that each stage must irrevocably end.
3) Belief in the Pope’s omnipotence. When Pope Benedict XVI granted greater freedom to the use of the classic form of liturgy, he referred to a centuries-old custom and usus. These provided a solid basis for his resolve. The decision of Your Holiness is based on no such foundations. On the contrary, it revokes something that has existed and endured for a very long time. You write, Holy Father, that you find support in the decisions of St. Pius V, but he applied criteria which are exactly the opposite of your own. According to him, what had existed and lasted for centuries would continue undisturbed; only what was newer was abrogated. The sole basis left for your decision is therefore the will of one person endowed with papal authority. Can this authority, though, however great it may be, prevent ancient liturgical customs from being an expression of the lex orandi of the Roman Church? Saint Thomas Aquinas asks himself whether God can cause something which once existed, never to have existed. The answer is no, because contradiction is not part of God’s omnipotence (Summa Theologiae, p. I, qu. 25, art. 4). In a similar way, papal authority cannot cause traditional rituals that have expressed the faith of the Church (lex credendi) for centuries, suddenly, one day, no longer to express the law of the prayer of the same Church (lex orandi). The Pope may make decisions, but not ones that violate a unity which extends to the past and to the future, far beyond the duration of his pontificate. The Pope is at the service of a unity greater than his own authority. For it is a God-given unity and not one of human origin. It is therefore unity which takes precedence over authority, and not authority over unity.
4) Collective responsibility. Indicating the motives of your decision, Holy Father, you make various and grave allegations against those who exercise the faculties recognised by Pope Benedict XVI. It is not specified, however, who perpetrates these abuses, or where, or in what number. There are only the words “often” and “many.” We do not even know whether it is a majority. Probably not. Yet not a majority, but all those who make use of the above-mentioned faculties have been affected by a draconian penal sanction. They have been deprived of their spiritual path, either immediately or at some unspecified future time. There are certainly people who misuse knives. Should the production and distribution of knives therefore be banned? Your decision, Holy Father, is far more grievous than would be the hypothetical absurdity of a universal prohibition against making knives.
Holy Father: why are you doing this? Why have you attacked the holy practice of the ancient form of celebrating the Most Holy Sacrifice of Our Lord? The abuses committed in other forms, widespread or universal though they are, lead to nothing beyond words, to declarations expressed in general terms. But how can one teach with authority that “the disappearance of a culture can be just as serious, or even more serious, than the disappearance of a species of plant or animal” (Laudato si 145), and then a few years later, with a single act, destine a great part of the Church’s own spiritual and cultural heritage to extinction? Why do the rules of “deep ecology” formulated by you fail to apply in this case? Why did you not instead ask whether the constantly growing number of the faithful assisting at the traditional liturgy could be a sign from the Holy Spirit? You did not follow the advice of Gamaliel (Acts 5). Instead, you struck them with a ban that had not even a vacatio legis.
The Lord God, the model for earthly rulers and, in the first place, for church authorities, does not use His power in this way. Holy Scripture speaks thus to God: “For thy power is the beginning of justice: and because thou art Lord to all, thou makest thyself gracious to all (…) But thou being master of power, judgest, and with great favour disposest of us: for thy power is at hand when thy wilt” (Wis 12, 16-18). Real power does not need to prove itself by harshness. And harshness is not an attribute of any authority which follows the divine model. Our Saviour Himself left us a precise and reliable teaching on this (Mt 20, 24-28). Not only has the carpet been pulled, so to speak, from beneath the feet of people who were walking towards God; an attempt has been made to deprive them of the very ground they walk on. This attempt will not succeed. Nothing which is in conflict with Catholicism will be accepted in God’s Church.
Holy Father, it is impossible to experience the ground under one’s feet for 12 years and suddenly assert that it is no longer there. It is impossible to conclude that my own Mother, found after many long years, is not my Mother. Papal authority is immense. But even this authority cannot make my Mother cease to be my Mother! A single life cannot bear two mutually exclusive ruptures, one of which opens a treasure, whilst the other claims that this treasure must be abandoned because its value has expired. If I were to accept these contradictions I should no longer be able to have any intellectual life, nor, therefore, any spiritual life either. From two contradictory statements, any affirmation, true or false, may be made to follow. This means the end of rational thinking, the end of any notion of reality, the end of effective communication of anything to anyone. But all these things are basic components of human life in general, and of Dominican life in particular.
I have no doubts about my vocation. I am firmly resolved to continue my life and service within the Order of St Dominic. But to do so I must be able to reason correctly and logically. After the 16th of July 2021 this is no longer possible for me within the existing structures. I see with complete clarity that the treasure of the holy rites of the Church, the ground under the feet of those who practice them, and the mother of their piety, continues to exist. It has become equally clear to me that I must bear witness to it.
I have been left no choice now but to turn to those who from the very beginning of the radical changes (changes, let it be noted, that go far beyond the will of the Second Vatican Council) have defended the Tradition of the Church, together with the Church’s respect for the requirements of reason, and who continue to pass on the unchangeable deposit of Catholic faith to the faithful: the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Pius X. The SSPX has shown a readiness to accept me, whilst fully respecting my Dominican identity. It is providing me not only with a life of service to God and the Church, a service not impeded by contradictions, but also with an opportunity to oppose those contradictions which are an enemy to Truth, and which have attacked the Church so vigorously.
There is a state of controversy between the SSPX and the official structures of the Church. It is an internal dispute within the Church, and it concerns matters of great importance. The documents and the decisions of the 16th of July have caused my position on this subject to converge with that of the SSPX. As in the case of any important dispute, this one too must be resolved. I am determined to devote my efforts towards this end. I intend this letter to be part of this effort. The means used can only be a humble respect for Truth, and gentleness, both springing from a supernatural source. Thus we can hope for the solution of the controversy and the rebuilding of a unity that will embrace not only those living now but also all generations, both past and future.
I thank you for the attention you have granted to my words and beg, Most Holy Father, for your apostolic blessing.
With filial devotion in Christ,
Fr. Wojciech Gołaski, O.P.Labels: “God of Surprises”, Development of Doctrine, Hegel, SSPX, Summorum, Traditionalist Unity, Wojciech GołaskiBy Peter Kwasniewski at 11/10/2021 11:00:00 AM

Perspective:

 The Looming Peasant State

 The disappearance of the middle class

is the erosion of an American ideal

By Victor Davis Hanson

November 8, 2021

The ideal of an independent middle class, originally agrarian, rather than a subservient peasantry was the American ideal, at least until recently. All politicians still praise the middle class, but few have sought or found ways to preserve it in a radically changing globalized world. 

The result is the emergence of a new American peasantry, of millions of Americans who own little or no property. The new majority has scant, if any, savings. Fifty-eight percent of Americans have less than $1,000 in the bank. A missed paycheck renders them destitute, completely unable to service sizable debt. Most of what they buy, from cars to electronic appurtenances, they charge on credit cards. The credit card indebtedness is over $8,000 per household and over $2,000 per individual — paid through monthly installments at average annual interest rates of between 15% and 19%, at a time when most home mortgages are usually below 4%. 

Such short-term debt is often roughly commensurate with the payments and share-cropping arrangements that premodern peasants once entered with lords and made it impossible for the serf to exercise political independence or hope for upward mobility. The chief contemporary difference, of course, is that the modern American peasant is the beneficiary of a sophisticated technological society that allows him instant communications, advanced health care, televised and computer-driven entertainment, inexpensive food, and a social welfare state. These material blessings often mask an otherwise shrinking middle class without confidence that it is in control of its own destiny. 

A fifth of America receives direct government public assistance. Well over half the country depends on some sort of state subsidy or government transfer money, explaining why about 60% of Americans collect more payments from the government than they pay out in federal income taxes, in health care entitlements, tax credits and exemptions, federally backed student and commercial loans, housing supplements, food subsidies, disability and unemployment assistance, and legal help. 

Such social insulation, along with science fueled by free market capitalism, has succeeded in ending starvation, dying in one’s 30s and 40s and, for the most part, chronic malnourishment, as well as ensured access to a wealth of material appurtenances. 

But otherwise, 21st century American “peasants” — currently perhaps about 46% of the population — usually die with a net worth of less than $10,000, both receiving and bequeathing little, if any, inheritance. 

Drive on El Camino Real on the perimeter of Stanford University’s elite campus and witness hundreds living in curbside trailers in the manner of the poor of Cairo or visit the side streets near the Google headquarters in nearby Mountain View where thousands live in their cars, or walk among the homeless on tony University Avenue in Palo Alto. Then juxtapose their lifestyles with estates in nearby Woodside, Atherton or Portola Valley, and the Mercedes-Benzes and BMWs of those in their early 20s parked in the student lots at Stanford University. 

The natural historical referent for this dichotomy is certainly not the booming middle classes emerging following World War II. Instead, the image is one of the manors and keeps of medieval Europe amid peasant huts outside the walls. 

For all practical purposes, it is almost impossible for young families to buy a home anywhere in California’s 500-mile progressive coastal corridor from San Diego to Berkeley or in the greater Portland and Seattle areas. The same is largely true in the metropolitan and suburban areas from Boston to Washington, D.C. Whatever this bifurcated new culture is — and it is new and different from that of a half-century ago — it is not so conducive anymore to classical citizenship. 

Even those of the middle class who can be thrifty, who save some of their income and develop modest passbook savings accounts, are now targeted by institutionalized cheap interest. The result of massive and chronic trillion-dollar annual budget deficits — the national debt is now near $30 trillion — and the zero interest rates of the often jittery Federal Reserve is the destruction of any interest income on savings accounts. 

The modest, middle-class citizen saver thus faces daunting options just to preserve the value of his money. He can engage in risky real estate speculation or invest in a booming stock market, fueled not by business performance, per se, but often by those who have nowhere else to park their money. So middle-class families, to be safe, often keep their modest savings in passbook accounts or buy federal bonds, where interest payouts below 1% do not cover the erosion in value of their principal due to annual inflation. 

Yet American citizenship always differed even from the Western tradition found in the Europe of the last three centuries. The founding of America saw an entire array of newly expanded rights, responsibilities, and privileges for the vast majority of the resident population. This late-18th century new birth of citizenship arose in part because of an almost limitless supply of land, in part because colonial America lacked many of the European mainland’s traditions of class distinctions, primogeniture, peasantry and serfdom, in part because of the parliamentary traditions that Britain had implanted in North America, and in part because of the protections of the Constitution of the newly formed United States. America would soon become the freest and most egalitarian society in the history of civilization. 

The point is not that late-18th century America was perfect at birth or could even approach what we now enshrine as 21st century moral values. Rather, the new United States was unlike, or rather superior to, most contemporary nations. Indeed, almost alone of governments, America had hit upon a mechanism that would allow constant self-criticism, legal amendments to its founding documents and moral improvement. Such change came without the necessity of collective suicide or permanent revolution — and yet within the boundaries of constitutional absolutes that transcended time and space, and all made possible only by an empowered and autonomous middle class. 

___________________________________________________

Weak but Willingby charliej373By Charlie JohnstonMy dear friend, Fr. Regis Scanlon, OFM, passed on Saturday night in Denver. He worked with St. Mr. Teresa, doing Eucharistic Formation for her nuns. What a glorious man with a lively sense of humor. Thank God we got to visit just before I hit the road – but it had to be at his residence rather than at his favorite little restaurant where I would co-conspire with him to cheat his diet. I pray he has a tub of ice cream for me today. I will repeat a piece I did on him to honor his memory and his love for God and His people later this week.People are kind enough to seek updates on me. Speaking with my lead doctor on Friday (and my good friend of over forty years) he said I am mending, but I should expect a good five weeks of recovery. That is largely what I expected – and is not near as difficult or as dangerous as my recovery from my neurological damage 18 years ago. I suspect my expectations are different than those of a lot of good folks.While it is certainly true that Jesus can heal anything in an instant, it seems to me that votive suffering can be a truly great privilege. We are always asking the Lord for consolation and help. Votive suffering, accepted with docility, seems to me to be our one opportunity to climb up onto the cross with Jesus for a time and offer Him consolation.It is written that there is a way which seems right to a man, but its end is the way to death (Prov 14:12). Often in my life I have thought I have known, but have been wrong. The Lord is merciful, indeed, to those who seek to do the most right thing they can, even when they err. But fullness of wisdom is to be found in waiting on the Lord and hearkening for His voice – especially when He would show you His better way.On Saturday I removed myself from the chain of command of CORAC and appointed Deputy Director Michael Murray (our own MP) to take my place. We will review matters in early December. We have done a very good thing in forming the nationwide network of CORAC – giving people a way to work together as true Christians, lifting each other up and helping those who are assaulted by our now demonic government and culture. But if it is a very good thing, does it not make sense that the Lord is now preparing how to deploy those who are devoted to Him to renew the faith and face of the world? I think I have been a competent captain, but the Lord is my general and king – and how good to wait on His instruction!Too often when we say we trust the Lord, we mean we trust Him to do what is easiest for us or to give us our way. Why not trust Him to know what is best for us, for those around us, for gaining souls to Him, and for deploying us most efficiently? I just think, “You lead, Lord, and give me the grace to follow – even into the most unexpected places.” It is such a secure way to live. I don’t know the route the Lord is taking me, but I know He will get me there safely. It is why, though I grieve over family members and loved ones who don’t love the faith or even hold it in contempt, I don’t worry much for I trust that in His time the Lord will offer them extraordinary graces. That is His job, not mine. Mine is to live fidelity and trust to Him and expect all good things through that.I’ve had a few surprises. Several people wanted to push me to accept hospitalization. Alas, since Obamacare, our hospitals have become the primary support system for the culture of death. Oh, they still do some good things, but that is not their primary purpose anymore. Their primary protocols are three now: 1) to enforce government narratives 2) to punish dissent from same and 3) above all, act as primary support system for the culture of death. Thus, no longer will I participate with them. Some friends apparently assumed that this was just mule-headedness on my part, that principles are just things you stand on until they become personally inconvenient. I guess my experience of forming and living principles is different than some. First, I narrowly construe them and apply them only to myself. It is why I am usually rather quiet about them. Despite the perversion of the hospital system, I think young families should be open to them in a way I am not. Further, I don’t expect anyone but me to live my conscience: I expect others to live their own honorably-formed consciences. From a practical standpoint, on the rare occasions I have been persuaded to violate my own principles, disaster has almost always ensued – disasters that don’t happen when I live clean. There was a moment of grace in it all. My doctor, who knows me so well, recommended hospitalization, as well. I told him my objection and that it was out of the question. He chuckled gently, said this is where we disagreed but set the parameters, and that we have always done well together once we know the borders.Another staggering moment of grace came from a dear friend who walked with me through five years of sorrows leading into my dire neurological damage in which they lost me twice in surgery. This friend and his brother saw to it that I did not sink into the abyss – and was witness to my sorrows and my lengthy recovery. I told him my doctor told me I would have a tough recovery. This is what my friend wrote – my friend who was witness to all before:“Doctor to Charlie: Well. Sir gallant knight, you are a very sick man.Charlie to Doctor: Did I ever tell you of the time God wrang my neck and, just to show him, I walked across the country!Doctor to Charlie: You are facing at least five weeks tough convalescence.Charlie to Doctor: ‘Tis merely a flesh wound. And finally, my friend to me: May you have a blessed convalescence gallant knight.” I couldn’t help it. That exchange from one who was constant witness brought me to tears.Some have wondered since I have been hit so hard if I have changed my mind on the experimental gene therapy they call vaccines. Absurd! Having gotten seriously sick does not magically change the very bad science of the vaxxes into good science. I am not a leftist, pounded about by how I feel at a given moment. I think these things through carefully and go by the evidence. One of my favorite old research institutes, the Heartland Institute, espouses the scientific method as taking no one’s word for it. You’ve got to do the hard work of sifting and examining the evidence or you are merely choosing a preferred narrative and falsely calling it science.A few weeks ago, I responded to what turned out to be a very honorable, but misinformed, fellow about the scientific deficiencies of this gene therapy in this manner: “You may be sincere, but your “method” would result in an unending series of thalidomide holocausts in which no one would even know there was a problem until a full-scale disaster had already unfolded. As you have continued, it has become clear that you do not understand the sequencing and protocols – or even the fundamental purpose of clinical trials at all and have no grasp of the role of statistical analysis in analyzing unfolding dynamic scenarios in which there are substantial variables and unknowns.First, medical clinical trials are NOT designed to prove the dangers of a widespread practice. Rather, they are required to prove the safety of a new therapy before allowing it into widespread practice to begin with. They start with animal trials. Before any experimentation with humans is even allowed, there must be substantial success in animal trials. Complete fail here – the animal trials were almost universal failures – an occasional okay spot in a sea of disaster.Second, human trials may not begin until there is substantial success in animal trials. An exception can be made if there is a genuinely critical emergency in which no other effective therapy is easily available. Failure on all counts here. A) a disease with over a 99% survival rate for all but the very oldest and sickest does not constitute such an emergency. B) the cheap and easily availability of hydroxy-zinc protocols and ivermectin have worked to almost completely suppress the most dangerous symptoms of the disease wherever they are used – India, Africa and Sweden – but inexplicably have been forcibly suppressed and even outlawed here in the States. The basic justification for emergency use authorization is completely non-existent. C) in any such emergency trial, all data must be entirely transparent so that the conclusions drawn flow freely from all the evidence rather than the evidence being shaped to support a pre-conceived conclusion. In this case, both government officials and media have collaborated to censor any information that does not support their favored conclusion and doctors who dissent have their very medical licenses threatened or revoked. Complete and comprehensive failure on all counts.Third, once human trials begin, all subjects must be volunteers. No person can be coerced into participating in a clinical trial for an experimental therapy. Notwithstanding that this experimental trial did not clear ANY of the hurdles for human trials to begin, even the minimal standard for human trials has been turned on its head. Rather than making such a trial completely voluntary, the government seeks to make it mandatory on all persons. Both a complete failure AND a violation of the Nuremberg Protocols.Now, for the proper use of statistical analysis in predicting early warnings of long-term dysfunction. In an ongoing, dynamic situation where the long-term consequences are not known, statistical analysis is used as a predictor of probable long-term dysfunctions. This completely bypasses the correlation/causation conundrum because, at the early stages causation is very difficult, sometimes even impossible, to establish. Yet it is unacceptable and irresponsible to wait for extensive disaster to reveal itself because, by then, the damage is irreversible. What is most commonly used is a “variation from norm” analysis when compared to similar situations where a protocol for the acceptable norm is established. This is important because, even when there is a substantial variation from norm, it is usually a statistically small number of people affected. That is important because, even while early adverse events that are wildly out of whack are contained to a small subset, the variation from norm is a very reliable predictor of a potential cascade of much larger long-term adverse reactions. This is why experimental therapies with substantial variations from norm are sent back to the drawing board rather than allowed to continue, until they are refined enough to work within historical norms. Catch and contain the problem while it is still small rather than waiting for absolute disaster or absolute proof.The experimental gene therapy shots have failed on every metric. But even under your very loose, gauzy standards that have never been the norm for experimental standards, they fail. You cite the personal, observational evidence and that there is none in your suburb. Notwithstanding that doctors are likely to lose their license or be severely ostracized if they actually reported such data, you are still wrong. There is the small subset of prominent celebrities known to most people – and it is always useful to look at reportable adverse events there. Start with former wrestler Marvin Hagler and baseball star Hank Aaron, both otherwise healthy who died within days of taking the shot. Then there is Eric Clapton, who suffered paralysis after taking the shot. Then there is Australian gold medal swimmer Madi Wilson who developed lung and chest problems for which she had to be hospitalized and may end her career. These occurred after she was double vaccinated. She blames it on Covid, not withstanding that it did not happen until shortly after her second shot. There is NBA player Brandon Goodwin who developed blood clots after the vaccine – whose season is over now. Other examples are abundant, though you have to screen shot them as quickly as possible, for search engines bury them down the memory hole as quickly as they can. Perhaps your community is an outlier, but when information is being suppressed as quick as it becomes available that is a risky proposition to believe at best.You may very well be entirely sincere in your belief that you are being objective and scientific, but that does not change the fact that your method turns every standard protocol in such matters on its head. I don’t think you have cited a single horse you have not put a cart before. Your method, as you have described it, would never notice a problem at all until it had become a complete disaster – and defies both logic and what was standard scientific practice before the Covid panic arose. If you are sincere, I suggest you go back to the drawing board on your knowledge of logic and evidence. I am not being snarky, but entirely sincere. You have succumbed to the most dangerous form of sophistry in your analysis, positing things that sound reasonable on the surface but, upon deeper examination, violate basic rules of logic and evidence.”So much of the narrative has changed in the last year. A year ago, the jab supposedly immunized you from Covid infection. Now the story is that it was never intended and cannot protect you from infection or transmission: that it only reduces the severity of symptoms. Think about that: it means the vaxxed have nothing to fear from the unvaxxed – for the unvaxxed know when they are sick and stay home (trust me on this!), but the vaxxed often don’t even know they are sick and contagious, so we are creating an army of super-spreaders. Now we are starting to forcefully jab young children. We KNOW that children are in more danger from vaxx injuries by at least a factor of five than from Covid, but stupid, virtue-signaling parents are putting their own children’s health at serious risk to show how woke they are.I am going to link to the problems with the animal studies on mRNA gene therapy from the perspective of a doctor who was extensively involved in those studies. On Tuesday, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said that people who criticize the vaxxes are criminals.  To the contrary, it is not the people asking questions who are criminals, but those suppressing evidence, suppressing effective treatments, and refusing to answer serious questions to facilitate their making trillions of dollars in profits who are criminals and belong on yardarms – and that most assuredly includes Bourda.I said a year ago that this experimental gene therapy was likely to be the biggest medical disaster in history. It goes beyond that. This now has the potential, without God’s active intervention, to become a near extinction-level event. Fortunately, I have also said that God is going to use this as part of His plan to set things right and bring us back to the safety that can only be found in Him. Again, in summary to my honest correspondent a few weeks ago, I wrote, “From what you say here, you did what you did in complete submission to God. I don’t think there are going to be any ill effects because of that. I have a Priest friend in some significant authority in Chicago. He hates the idea of the shot. But he was not going to be able to continue to minister to his people there without accepting it. He told me he accepted that he might become a martyr, but that he took it so as not to have to abandon his people. I have another Priest friend in some authority on one of the coasts. He primarily ministers to the ministers. He decided he will not take it because there are those who could almost seamlessly replace him. Both, I think, are doing the will of God as best they can.I do NOT think that almost all who took it will die within three years. Divine intervention is such a given for me I usually underestimate how hard it is for others to accept it as a commonplace, given the proper disposition. I expect enough to succumb that it will become clear what a disaster this is, and then most to turn to Him – as you have already done – and receive the Divine exemption from our earthly hubris. I have two scientists I am in regular contact with who are deeply concerned with the trajectory of these shots (one here and one in Europe). Both fear that, from their research, over a billion could die from the long-term effects. Recently I assured them that, if it comes, it will be a MUCH smaller number than that, a tiny fraction of that amount (without pretending it won’t be an objectively large amount). That this dysfunction, created irresponsibly by man, will instead be used to manifest the glory and mercy of God, along with His sovereignty.So Philip, in the end, I suspect that five or 10 years from now we will have a cup of coffee together and laugh at how frantic the crazy times were. For the decisive thing is not – and will not be – whether you got the shot or not, but whether you submitted to God in everything you do, whether you erred objectively or not.This exchange has been helpful in another way, too. Many who have gotten the shot, as evidence of serious problems mount, have been in fear of it – with that fear sometimes manifesting as spirited defense of the shot. Some good people have gone into despair and think they are doomed. I had one lady who was waiting for me to get home this spring who had gotten it and was fearful that she had doomed herself – and nervously confessed the same to me. I assured her that God does not strike us for our weakness, only for our defiance – and that she would be fine. She was genuinely reassured.I can’t hide that many will die – and already have. But I can say with absolute confidence that God has poured forth extraordinary graces over those who submit to Him before all is revealed…and that this is NOT for our destruction, but for our reclamation. I accept and expect divine intervention as a commonplace. When this is all over, a whole multitude will do the same. God will not strike us for either our errors or our weakness, only for our hubris – and those who become collateral damage to this earth on the way to that unveiling will be given extraordinary graces.”In the last week I have listened to Joe Biden speak on this – and he shows not a vestige of understanding of the scientific method or the science behind this. I heard him speak about the supply chain problems – and reveal that he has absolutely no understanding of what it is or how it works. I have listened to Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm laugh at the very idea that government can do anything about energy prices – and that she wishes she had that magic wand. Perhaps she should ask Donald Trump to lend it to her, for he made us energy independent – and restored a lot of manufacturing that Barack Obama said he would need a magic wand to get done. Democrats think they are very smart because they give long explanations for why they can’t do anything to make things better. A lot of Republicans are just as stupid. But the best of conservatives, like Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis, just get it done, earning the vicious hatred of the left which can only explain why nothing can be done.The left has come to think that America gets to elect its own boss. That is not how it has ever worked. We don’t elect our own boss to push us around. We elect a clerk to serve us. That clerk does not get to tell us what medical procedures we must take or whether we can have a job or make a living. It does not work that way even when we have a legitimate and competent leader; it most certainly does not work that way when we have an illegitimate usurper who is non compos mentis.All these battles, in which ignorant, vain people relentlessly choose propaganda over solid evidence and logic signify something much larger than people yet grasp. We have entered into a full-fledged spiritual war in which the dark forces of the satan are determined to rule the lives of men and destroy faith in God. We were a country built on Judeo-Christian principles, dedicated to faith, family and freedom that was tolerant of other attitudes. We have been captured, for a time, by pagan Orcs and Visigoths, committed to the rule of raw power with no tolerance for any dissent. It is the final confrontation between good and evil – and there can be no compromise, no acceptable result other than unconditional surrender by the forces of satan.  We will not be rescued by Republicans or other temporal conservatives. They are more feeble than I am in my sickbed. There are some very good religious leaders – but not even a fraction of what is needed. Most busy themselves figuring what articles of faith they can toss overboard to curry favor with those who loathe them. Leadership must come, this time, from ordinary people who are completely committed to the Lord, Our God – no apologies, no hedging, no negotiating the fundamentals. When ordinary people stand, people who hold formal positions of leadership (though they just seek their own pathetic influence) will ultimately be inspired to stand, too. But we must stand guard to make sure there is no hedging, that only a Godly worldview will stand. Man is made in God’s own image, male and female He makes them – and He is sovereign over all. Any cleric who seeks to correct the “many errors” of Christ and His Apostles must be banished to outer darkness. Enough already.I say this battle begins to turn with the Feast Day of the Immaculate Conception this year. May Our Lady the Immaculate Conception and St. Joseph go forth in tandem to lead us to the restoration of God’s Kingdom on Earth now. Much we value will be lost – mainly because we value so many dead things. But much will be restored. After so much strain and assault, the circle between God and our families will NOT be broken, but restored. Begin to prepare now for the Novena to the Immaculate Conception beginning Nov. 30, and then midway through, beginning Dec. 4, add the Novena to Our Lady of Tepeyac (Guadalupe). If your life is turned upside down now, be of good cheer. God is deploying His assets to renew the faith and the face of the world. No prisoners, no compromise, only unconditional surrender. There will be war, but you are to prepare for victory under God in the way He chooses to deploy you. For God and country! Fr. John Wang, assisted by Beckita Hesse, celebrated Mass in my hotel room Sunday

Trickle-Down Bidenism

This Biden socialist cadre who engineered these self-induced calamities has no clue about the damage they have done to America.

By Victor Davis Hanson

American Greatness

November 7, 2021

(Emphasis added)

Can 10 months really make a real difference in America? 

Not normally.

But weld together a hard-left socialist agenda with the control of the White House and Congress onto the combined forces of progressive woke media, Silicon Valley, the corporate boardrooms, the entertainment industry, academia, and the Wall Street borg—all in the age of instant and intrusive communications—and it’s no wonder a country, even a nation as resilient as the United States, can descend quite quickly in ways that make America almost unrecognizable.

In other words, 40 weeks of relentless Bidenism finally permeates most of the nation.

Fuel Prices, Inflation, and Border Chaos

Out in the California foothills and Central Valley, relatively “cheap” propane now has more than doubled to a rate of $3.91 a gallon.

At about the same time that I got the propane bill, I filled up the truck with diesel fuel. It was $4.87 a gallon with a credit card, up in price almost $2 a gallon from over a year ago. I thought myself lucky since the week prior in Palo Alto it was about $5.29 a gallon.

I spoke not long ago in Bakersfield to an oil man. He described impending California new rules on the horizon concerning almost every aspect of horizontal drilling and fracking—as part of his own larger fears that the entire industry is shrinking even as demands and profits soar, and consumers need more natural gas and gasoline than ever.

Has anyone ever heard of liberal Americans deliberately not pumping oil and gas, but still needing so much more output that they beg the illiberal Saudis and Russians to bail us out? At other times in our history, we have suffered plenty of fossil fuel scarcities due to war, embargoes, and declining reserves. But never has America deliberately created shortages amid a sea of our own gas and oil.

What has been the reaction from those who slashed natural gas and oil production by cancelling new federal leases and pipelines, and oil fields in Alaska, or warned frackers that new regulations and taxes were just the prerequisites to a rapid phase out of their existence altogether—on the pathway to a wind and solar nirvana?

When asked if the United States would at least increase (e.g., restore previous levels of) oil production, Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm laughed, “That is hilarious.”

To whom is that comical? The guy with an older model pickup doing daily landscape work for his wealthy clients? The waitress who drives 20 miles to work? The broke student who commutes to campus?

I drove today along a rural avenue next to my farm. Both sides of the street were littered—far more than usually so—with trash. They were not just the usual garbage bags and tires, but washers, dryers, refrigerators, car seats, furniture—and mattresses of all shapes and sizes. It was an intensification of the now old story of rural California as an open dumping ground of refuse.

I stopped to inspect the flotsam and jetsam. The dumpers are careful to glean out their personal addresses. They rarely leave traceable material. But all the magazines, newspapers, and printed material were in Spanish. Note there are no green regulators out here who patrol rural avenues to stop the pollution and desecration of the natural landscape; in the hierarchy of wokeness, illegal immigration trumps the environment.

So, I assumed, as is the case when I find people in the actual act of dumping their garbage and refuse on my property (like last week), that they are likely illegally here (no English). And the current clutter may represent recent spikes in crossings from a nonexistent border and redirects of illegal aliens from Texas. (If 2 million illegal entrants will cross the current fiscal year, and if they are being bused or dispersed by the Biden Administration throughout the United States, then small communities of recent immigrants will likely feel the surge).

The reaction? The Biden Administration is planning to settle “claims” of “wrong” treatment lodged by those who feel that after crossing illegally into the United States, and continuing to reside illegally in America, that they are entitled to $450,000 per person. Otherwise, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas preened of the nonexistent border that it “is no less secure than before.” 

“No less secure” means 2 million will cross this year?

When acting White House deputy press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was asked why the Biden Administration would lavish nearly a half a million dollars on illegal aliens who broke federal law, but not upon legal immigrants who obey America’s laws, she seemed bewildered at any criticism of rewarding only the unlawful: “Why would we be giving people who are coming here the right way money?”

Ms. Jean-Pierre gave a rare unguarded summation of the essence of woke progressivism: If we are going to give free stuff to Americans, those who do things the “right way” deserve nothing; those who do things the wrong way certainly do. Asymmetrical application of the law is the hallmark of wokeism.

I have been looking at new cars at the large regional car dealers. Whereas a year ago there were 200 or so new ones on lots to inspect, now there are not more than 10 or so—mostly subcompacts with prices upon inquiry well over the sticker MSRP figure. Almost overnight the lots have changed from premium new car marts into vast used car dealerships, but with a twist: today’s used cars sell at last year’s new car prices.

Wood is now a bit cheaper than three months ago, but still about triple the price of a year ago. I talked to a Mexican American contractor I know not long ago at Home Depot who was sorting and sifting through a small pile of what was left of overpriced 2’x6’s. “Just the junk left. It’s all junk,” he said.

When pressed about these disruptions in the supply chain, empty shelves, scarce inventories, delayed or cancelled shipments, and soaring prices, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki snarked, “The tragedy of the treadmill that’s delayed.”

Yes: cars, lumber, food—all the irrelevant treadmill trinkets that people don’t need.

After disappearing in the midst of the crisis due to his paternity leave, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg returned to weigh in with:

I think there have always been two kinds of Christmas shoppers. There is the ones who have all their list completed by Halloween, and then there’s people like me who show up at the mall on Christmas Eve . . . .   [I]f you’re in that latter bucket, obviously there’s going to be more challenges.   

Yes, that’s it, Pete. The bucket of self-employed handymen who make their living repairing roofs will just have to plan ahead better and quit waiting to fix eaves and gutters on Christmas Eve.

Farmers are not procrastinating but they still aren’t always being paid.  Some hear their almond containers are stuck at Asian ports abroad, rotting for lack of longshoreman—and months after shipping the grower is getting nothing for his crop. Other payments freeze because California crops can’t get onto ships to cross the Pacific from Los Angeles or Long Beach. Growers are not whining about late-arriving Pelotons.

I’ve been looking at house prices too, again partly out of curiosity, partly because a family member is looking for a home. Homes in a development in October 2020 that were outrageously priced at $850,000 for a 2,400 square foot home near the central California coast are now listed between $1.3-4 million!

Interest may be about 2-3 percent, and so monthly mortgage costs don’t fully or immediately reflect the burdensome sale prices. Nonetheless, who could afford the $15,000-20,000 minimum property tax, the soaring insurance, the exorbitant cost to landscape the dirt lot in the backyard—and with a price increase on what we used to call a “middle-class home” of some $400,000 plus in just a year? Translated, the house went up over $1,000 a day, from unaffordable to a sick joke.

Medical bills are skyrocketing. A daughter’s health insurance deductible is $5,0000—per person in a five-person family. This year almost every family member’s bill will exceed that deductible. Of such spiraling prices, White House chief of staff Ron Klain retweeted former Obama advisor and Harvard professor Jason Furman’s shrug about the soaring inflation, “Most of the economic problems we’re facing (inflation, supply chains, etc.) are high class problems.”

Ron and Jason are right: Rent, a ruptured appendix, and mammograms are just the “high class problems” stuff of America.

Retribalizing America

The country is rapidly retribalizing—the most toxic and sickest of all of Joe Biden disastrous gifts to America over the last 10 months. The Biden fixation with race reverberates throughout the intelligence agencies, the bureaucracy, the Pentagon, and the White House, as left-wing furies are unleashed shrieking and searching for mythical “white rage” and “white supremacy.” The Left’s new message is that of Bull Connor and Lester Maddox to the core: you are what you look like. Your race defines you and everyone who looks like you—and as well all those who don’t look like you. Individuals don’t exist; the tribe tolerates no exceptions, no traitors to their racial allegiances.

When I go into local large national discount retail stores, I notice that in the early morning hours one group of Americans shops. And by 10 a.m. they are replaced by quite another. Another strange new development: someone of your own race, a total stranger, will abruptly greet you with enthusiasm, as if some new tie, some previously unrecognized bond, now exists between you at a time when apparently the “color of your skin” fixation is supposedly the new normal.

Critical race theory’s legacy will entail the complete destruction of the message of Martin Luther King, Jr. When asked about the consequences of mandating the teaching of critical race theory racism to “combat” racism in Virginia, and the statewide pushback against Democratic candidates who endorsed such retrograde tribalism, Deputy Press Secretary Jean-Pierre scoffed, “Great countries are honest, right? They have to be honest with themselves about the history, which is good and the bad. And our kids should be proud to be Americans after learning that history.”

Yes, of course, that explains the Democratic implosion in Virginia: Those poor dishonest Virginians who were previously deluding themselves that their country was only half good!

The electoral anger in New Jersey and Virginia, but also throughout the country, reflects not just the chaos of the Biden first year, but the way in which the nearly 10 months of disasters have so rapidly damaged millions of American lives. The Biden team’s smug responses to the messes they made remind us that socialists care little for the millions of broken eggs necessary to cook a vast toxic omelet.

Does the Biden socialist cadre who engineered these self-induced calamities have any clue about the damage they have done to America? Or do they believe the chaos is tolerable collateral destruction to achieve an otherwise unattainable socialist paradise?

Or do they assume that their own wealth, power, and influence will provide them exemption from the baleful, concrete consequences of their own abstract ideologies?

Will trickle-down Bidenism always harm someone else, someone poorer, someone less important, someone culturally repugnant to them—like Joe Biden’s dregs and chumps, Barack Obama’s clingers, and Hillary Clinton’s deplorables and irredeemables?

_______________________

OnePeterFive

Rebuilding Catholic Culture. Restoring Catholic Tradition.

• TRADITIONIS CUSTODES

50 Years Ago: Non-Catholics Petitioned the Pope for the Latin Mass

 Joseph Shaw, PhDNovember 8, 20210 Comments

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Vladimir Ashkenazy and the “Agatha Christie” Petitioners

What do the writers W.H. Auden, Evelyn Waugh, Jorge Borges and Francois Mauriac, have in common with the composer Benjamin Britten, the guitarist Andrés Segovia, and the philosophers Augusto Del Noce and Jacques Maritain? They all signed an international petition in 1966 begging the Holy See not to destroy the ancient Latin Mass.

Better known is another petition, organised from England by Alfred Marnau of the Latin Mass Society, seeking the same thing in 1971. This was signed by an impressive selection of Britain’s cultural elite—the editor of the Times, the President of the British Academy, the Duke of Norfolk, a brace of Anglican bishops, and most memorably the crime-writer Agatha Christie. Often forgotten is the fact that to the 57 names of Marnau’s petition, another 42 were added in a list published in Italy, including a whole selection of Jorge Borges’ Argentinian literary friends, and three Americans: the artist Djuno Barnes, the poet Robert Lowell, and the American-turned French Academician, Julien Green. A new crop of petitioners appealed to Rome in 2006 to lend moral support to Pope Benedict XVI who was preparing to loosen restrictions on the ancient Mass. These included the film director Franco Zeffirelli, the philosopher René Girard, and the actor Jean Piat, who voiced Scar in the The Lion King.Advertisement – Continue Reading Below

It is an eclectic mix, including figures from business, diplomacy, politics, and academia. But it is the artists, musicians, novelists and poets who stand out. Among these petitioners are eight composers, four conductors, three members of the Académie française, and two winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature. By no means are all Catholic: lapsed Catholics like Graham Greene signed up, new converts like Malcolm Muggeridge, and also many with no particular connection with the Church, like the writer Nancy Mitford, the sculptor Barbara Hepworth, and the soprano Joan Sutherland.

Why did they interest themselves in the question of the reform of the Catholic liturgy? The 1971 petition text explained:

The rite in question, in its magnificent Latin text, has…inspired a host of priceless achievements in the arts—not only mystical works, but works by poets, philosophers, musicians, architects, painters and sculptors in all countries and epochs. Thus, it belongs to universal culture as well as to churchmen and formal Christians. In the materialistic and technocratic civilisation that is increasingly threatening the life of mind and spirit in its original creative expression—the word—it seems particularly inhuman to deprive man of word-forms in one of their most grandiose manifestations.

It is now the 50th anniversary of this petition, and of the rather limited concession made to it by Pope Paul VI: the “English Indult”, conveyed to the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, John Heenan, in a letter signed by Annibale Bugnini dated 5^th November 1971. It is worth emphasising the motivation of these petitioners: not nostalgia, not lack of imagination or a rigid inability to accept change, but a recognition, very often from outside the Church, of the incomparable cultural and spiritual value of this liturgical form.

Non-Catholics, even in a non-Catholic country like Britain, who are people of education and culture and wide social contacts, are inevitably going to encounter the Catholic liturgy. They will attend Catholic weddings and funerals; they will find it in books, paintings, and even popular films—today, they will see images on the internet. Up to 1970 they were conscious that what they were encountering was something ancient, mysterious, and profound. They were often moved by it. In the Picture of Dorian Grey, Oscar Wilde put into the heart of his decadent anti-hero a yearning for the beauty of this liturgy:

The daily sacrifice, more awful really than all the sacrifices of the antique world, stirred him as much by its superb rejection of the evidence of the senses as by the primitive simplicity of its elements and the eternal pathos of the human tragedy that it sought to symbolize.

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It was this liturgy, indeed, which inspired countless conversions in the generations before the liturgical reform. Wilde himself briefly sought reception into the Church in his youth, and finally made it on his deathbed.

The only surviving signatory of the 1971 “Agatha Christie Petition” today is the Russian pianist and conductor, Vladimir Ashkenazy. At the age of 84, he is living in retirement in Switzerland. In my role with the Una Voce Federation, I was able to get in touch with him, and he accepted an honour which the Federation can bestow on those who have made a special contribution to the movement for the Traditional Mass: the De Saventhem Medal, named after the Federation’s founding President, Erich de Saventhem. Mr Ashkenazy wrote, in accepting the medal:

My personal view of the matter is, that it is of great spiritual value and importance that the more ancient Latin Catholic Liturgy, with its associated cultural and musical traditions, be preserved for all those who are concerned with strengthening, or at least maintaining, our connection with the Divine; the ancient liturgies, be they Catholic or Orthodox (I am baptized in the Russian Orthodox Church) are, by default, bound to represent a much purer spiritual relationship with Christ in particular, and with the world in general, than do, to quote Dr. Erich Vermehren De Saventhem: “the flat, prosaic, philistine or delirious liturgies which will soon overgrow and finally smother even the recently revised rites…”

Being a musician, I am fully in agreement with the idea that the ancient/traditional Roman Catholic Mass will have inspired a plethora of invaluable artistic achievements over the ages: mystical works, poetry, philosophical treatises, musical works of genius, magnificent edifices, wonderful paintings, incredible sculptures, and even the construction of marvellous musical instruments like the organ and the piano!

Regarding the piano, the great composers who were inspired by the Christian faith include Bach, Beethoven, Liszt, Mozart, and Rachmaninoff, who were also wonderful pianists; the point being that our Faith has inspired countless true believers to achieve great artistic and spiritual heights, and the preservation of the Ancient, and more Authentic, Liturgies, which are immeasurably closer to the original spiritual source than the more banal ones of today, could go a long way towards continuing to inspire us all, both culturally and spiritually.

Beauty and Aestheticism

The attraction to the ancient liturgical tradition which is felt by those sensitive to beauty in words and in music, and for that matter in architecture, painting, sculpture and the vestments used in Mass, is impossible to deny. Occasionally, this reality is used against supporters of the Vetus Ordo, who are accused of being “aesthetes.” In Trojan Horse in the City of God, Dietrich von Hildebrand defined the aesthete as follows: “The aesthete enjoys beautiful things as one enjoys good wine. He does not approach them with reverence and with an understanding of the intrinsic value calling for an adequate response, but as sources of subjective satisfaction merely.”

Such an attitude to the liturgy is certainly possible, but it would hardly flourish among Traditional Catholics today, who are obliged to attend Masses in a range of aesthetic settings which only on rare occasions could compete with the aesthetic delights of a decent regional art gallery or a cultured person’s private music collection. For different reasons, the same is true of the liturgy celebrated in England at the eve of the liturgical reform. Catholic church buildings and sacred music were a pale imitation of what was available in many Anglican churches down the road. The reason Catholics and non-Catholics alike appreciated and continue to appreciate the efforts of a humble chant schola or the slightly scruffy ceremonies of a Low Mass is that the aesthetic qualities which these display serve something else. Whether the worshipper can articulate it or not, the experience of this liturgy speaks of what von Hildebrand called “the other values that may inhere in the object”: moral and spiritual values. These are not brought out more clearly when the aesthetics are dumbed down, on the contrary. Von Hildebrand continues:

It is the antithesis of aestheticism to appreciate the great function of beauty in religion, to understand both the legitimate role it should play in the cult and the desire of religious men to invest the greatest beauty in all things pertaining to the worship of God. This correct appreciation of beauty is rather an organic outgrowth of reverence, of love of Christ, of the very act of adoration.

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To von Hildebrand’s observations we can add one of Pope John Paul II: “artistic beauty, as a sort of echo of the Spirit of God, is a symbol pointing to the mystery, an invitation to seek out the face of God made visible in Jesus of Nazareth” (Ecclesia in Europa [2003], 60).

Oscar Wilde’s conflicted creation Dorian Grey was precisely an aesthete. Wilde’s book is about how Grey’s unnatural separation of artistic and natural beauty, from the values they grow out of and manifest, comes to destroy him. Nevertheless, Grey was mesmerised by the Mass, not because of its artistic perfection as a human performance, but because it spoke to him of something really profound, something inexpressible, which gives the soul air to breath in the spiritually stifling atmosphere of the industrial and, now, post-industrial, era. It was perhaps Grey’s chance of redemption, which slipped from his fingers.

Art and Rigidity

When not accusing Traditional Catholics of aestheticism, the opponents of the ancient Latin Mass often appeal to a contrasting stereotype. Readers may find the following description oddly familiar:

…a type of individual who needs to feel that his environment is highly predictable … he needs to know where he stands; and so he fastens on to norms: he does not ‘let himself go,’ for fear of where this might lead; he looks to authority as a guide … [He also] relies very heavily on stereotypes in [his] perception of the social environment.

This is a description of the “rigid” or “authoritarian” personality, by the British psychologist Peter Kelvin (in his The Bases of Social Behaviour, 1970). Kelvin was developing a theory set out by Theodor Adorno, who had tried to explain fascism in Freudian fashion, in terms of the suppression of sexuality in childhood (The Authoritarian Personality, 1950).Advertisement – Continue Reading Below

The association of fascism, psychological rigidity, attachment to rules particularly on sexual morality, and morbid risk-aversion, was being applied to Catholics attached to the Traditional Mass long before Pope Francis was elected. As a psychological theory it is about as up-to-date as the paddle steamer, but it made a strong impression on those educated in the middle to late decades of the 20^th century, because it was so useful for damning anyone who opposed the destruction of any kind of tradition.

The Adorno-Kelvin theory has it that artistic risk-taking is incompatible with “rigidity.” However, the association of defenders of tradition with fear of change and lack of imagination breaks down completely when one considers the people who signed the petitions to save the Vetus Ordo. As Alfred Marnau’s petition text expressed it:

One of the axioms of contemporary publicity, religious as well as secular, is that modern man in general, and intellectuals in particular, have become intolerant of all forms of tradition and are anxious to suppress them and put something else in their place. But, like many other affirmations of our publicity machines, this axiom is false. Today, as in times gone by, educated people are in the vanguard where recognition of the value of tradition in concerned, and are the first to raise the alarm when it is threatened.

Marnau himself was a poet and novelist, one, moreover, who in 1939 had been obliged to flee the Nazis when they threatened his homeland (he was born in Bratislava). He had this in common with the two intellectual giants of the early Traditionalist movement already mentioned in this essay, Dietrich von Hildebrand, who fled Austria as the Germans invaded it because of his anti-Nazi activities, and Erich von Saventhem, who managed to defect to the British from a posting in the German embassy in Istanbul in 1942, being implicated in the plot to assassinate Hitler.

The petitioners, similarly, are neither fascists nor stuck-in-the-mud reactionaries. Just as the modernist poet T.S. Eliot defended the traditional Anglican Book of Common Prayer, so ground-breaking artists of all kinds defended the ancient Catholic liturgy. Artistic creativity requires the courage and imagination to do something new: it does not require the destruction of the old. On the contrary, to remove from the common cultural experience classical artistic expressions does not stimulate creativity, but takes away precious sources of inspiration. No writer or artist of real worth wants new generations of children to be deprived of the great literature and art of the past: not only do artists recognise their value, but these works provide the context in which their own achievements make sense.Advertisement – Continue Reading Below

What the cultural petitioners of half a century ago, and before and since, recognised, is that the ancient Latin liturgy of the Catholic Church is an irreplaceable part of the cultural landscape, the landscape which forms the background to all artistic endeavour. To a greater or lesser extent they also understood that its role in this landscape was about the expression of deep spiritual values: indeed, as we who are attached to it know, it has a unique power to draw in to those values even those first attracted to it for superficial reasons.

At a moment when the ancient Mass is again under threat, we should remember the petitioners with gratitude.

Photo: Agatha Christie in 1967 via Wikipedia Commons.

Joseph Shaw, PhD

Dr Joseph Shaw has a Doctorate in Philosophy from Oxford University, where he also gained a first degree in Politics and Philosophy and a graduate Diploma in Theology. He has published on Ethics and Philosophy of Religion and has edited The Case for Liturgical Restoration: Una Voce Position Papers on the Extraordinary Form(Angelico Press). He is the Chairman of the Latin Mass Society of England and Wales and President of Una Voce International. He teaches Philosophy at Oxford University and lives nearby with his wife and nine children.www.lmschairman.org