Le Tocsin

“The true friends of the people are neither revolutionaries nor innovators, but men of Tradition”– Pope St Pius X

The Pilgrimage to Chartres is fire in the darkness that covers modern Europe

The following essay is adapted and abridged from an article by Michal Matt, the editor of the Remnant. The Remnant is simply the best English language Catholic paper in the world today. To visit the Remnant website click here.

France, the eldest daughter of the Church, has recently legalized, God help us, sodomitical “marriage”.  The abomination of desolation is upon us.  Humanly speaking there is no hope.  God, prayer, penance, family, pilgrimage - these are the only realities that matter anymore.

The Pilgrimage to Chartres starts the day before Pentecost when thousands of traditional Catholics from the five continents join their French brothers and sisters at sunrise beneath the spires of the cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris. It ends three days later beneath the spires of the cathedral of Notre Dame de Chartres, as around fifteen thousand dust-covered, weary traditionalists complete the gruelling march of some seventy-two miles. This year we were honoured to have a chapter of convent Muslins walking with us as well as an unusually large German contingent.

Europe is in the process of banishing the one true Faith.  She’s slaughtering her babies on an industrial scale, euthanizing her old folk, and is hell bent on destroying the Christian family, while legalizing every depravity known to man.  And in the midst of all this moral sewage that so effectively insulates modern men from the four last things, along comes a jubilant band of traditional Catholics, fifteen thousand strong, six abreast, stretching for miles, announcing to the whole world that the faith of our forefathers, saints and martyrs is not merely alive, but in robust good health.  It is for God that we march - and for His Blessed Mother. 

So why do Catholics from the four corners of the globe make the journey to France every year?  Because their hearts are heavy, their families are divided, their countries are dying, and the Faith is under relentless attack.  But on the road to Chartres, for three whole days they can escape from the secular asylum in a living, breathing act of Faith and unashamed Catholic militancy, and find balm for their souls and recharge their spiritual batteries.

Even secular France can’t ignore this strange and wonderful pilgrim parade, flanked as it is by countless priests in muddied cassocks and purple stoles - the all but forgotten keepers of Europe’s broken altars.  One of the enduring and delightful memories this year was stumbling upon Fr Nicolas du Chaxel FSSP conducting a makeshift choir he’d cobbled together from the patrons sitting outside a cafe in the suburbs of Paris that we just happened to be passing.  He was conducting three or four tables belting out some long forgotten Latin hymn, while seemingly oblivious to half a dozen customers scowling hatefully at him from the sidelines - no doubt viewing these collaborators as counter-Revolutionaries who deserve to be sent to the guillotine - it could only happen in France.  I recalled that some years ago Father had told me that his vocation was to “sacramentalise” the whole of life.

We join in with our rugged French comrades as they sing the Hail Mary, “Je vous salue, Marie”, in stirring harmony.  Our boots are caked with mud; white bandages identified the walking wounded, flags and banners, emblazoned with images of the Sacred Heart and Our Lady, snap in the breeze.  This is a raw manifestation of faith and tradition that is Catholic to the marrow.  Throngs of scouts lovingly bear statues of Our Lady on their shoulders; banners of the saints raised high flutter in the breeze; pilgrims sing forgotten hymns, renew broken vows, and worship at old-world Latin Masses.

This is what the Revolution has laboured for five-hundred years to obliterate from the face of the earth.  It’s not just the Mass - it’s the Faith, whole and entire, which includes the music, traditions, hallowed customs and moral precepts of the most transcendent cultural heritage the world has ever known.  I fight back tears of joy when I realise that the average age of the pilgrims can’t be much more than twenty.  This is a children’s crusade!  The future belongs to them.  The Revolution has failed.

The Chartres pilgrimage is one of the most sublime manifestations of Catholic Faith one will ever see.  This year it was unusually wet and cold but I have never been more proud to be Catholic than when kneeling shivering in wet grass alongside fifteen thousands devout youngster on the Plain de Beauce.  Vatican II! - what Vatican II? 

The Pilgrimage to Chartres is fire in the darkness that covers modern Europe.

Pro-abortion scientists, politicians and media pundits promised us a glittering crop of miracle cures from embryonic stem cell research, if only those pesky, backwards Catholics would just step aside and stop hindering scientific progress with their "Medieval" morality.

An article by HLI's director of research and education Dr. Brian Clowes (abridged by Graham Moorhouse)

The government and private corporations have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into ESCR, which has yielded zero cures, while adult stem cell research (supported by the Church) has produced successful treatments for a host of diseases.

Stem cells are immature cells that are undifferentiated (i.e., they have not yet "decided" what kind of cell to be).  A stem cell divides into two cells: (1) a duplicate of itself and (2) a cell that develops into a more specialized cell type (i.e., an eye, liver, skin or blood cell).  Since stem cells replace themselves every time they divide, they are capable of long-term self-renewal.[i] 

Because they are immature, stem cells can be used to treat injuries or diseases.  Scientists can make stem cells reach their full healing potential by developing procedures that mature them into the correct type of stable tissue that functions normally, then by making them safe for transplantation, and finally by developing surgical procedures that maximize their ability to treat or cure diseases or injuries.

The instruction Dignitas personae provides guidance on which types of stem cells may be used for research and treatment: "Methods which do not cause serious harm to the subject from whom the stem cells are taken are licit. This is generally the case when tissues are taken from: a) an adult organism; b) the blood of the umbilical cord at the time of birth; c) fetuses who have died of natural causes" [32].  It should be noted that the tissues of unborn children who have died due to miscarriage are generally unsuitable for research, since they deteriorate rapidly after death.

Human Embryonic Stem Cells (HESCs)

HESCs are harvested from human embryos that are typically between three and six days old.  At this point, the blastocyst consists of about 140 cells. Most of these will form the placenta, and a small interior cluster of cells are "pluripotent" stem cells -- able to produce all of the many different types of cell in the human body. This feature of HESCs makes them very attractive to scientists.

Harvesting HESCs involves removing the inner cell cluster from the blastocyst and culturing it with various growth factors to produce specific types of cells. This procedure always results in the destruction of the early human being. This means that this procedure is morally equivalent to an abortion and can never be allowed [Dignitas personae, 32].

There are also extremely serious medical problems with HESCs. Their growth is very difficult to control, and they usually produce fatal tumours or convert themselves into cancer cells.[ii] Theoretically, this might not be the case if the embryonic cells were matured into adult cells, but this has proven to be almost impossible to achieve. Even matured HESCs continue to produce tumours.[iii]  Further, cells transplanted from an embryo are always attacked by the recipient's immune system, and so the patient must be treated with immunosuppressive drugs that have a variety of side effects. Since these difficult problems have not been overcome, all that embryonic stem cell research currently offers is promises of future cures.

Some have suggested that scientists clone a human embryo from a patient's own cells, thereby overcoming the rejection problem, but this procedure is still illicit since it would involve the destruction of the embryo.
Although intensive research has been done on human embryonic stem cells since 1998, not a single workable cure has been found.

Adult Stem Cells

An adult stem cell is defined as any stem cell in a human being older than a seven-day embryo. These cells are found throughout the body and in the umbilical cord. Their purpose is to replace damaged or worn-out cells throughout a person's life. They are more limited in their capabilities than HESCs, because they can only differentiate into a limited number of cell types -- for example, a blood stem cell can become a lymphocyte, monocyte or some other type of blood cell, but it cannot become a non-blood cell such as a bone cell or an eye cell. These cells are "multipotent."

Unlike HESCs, adult stem cells show a lot more than mere "promise."  They have cured numerous people with serious diseases, and have been doing so for decades. Adult stem cells can currently cure more than seventy medical conditions, and there are more than 4,400 ongoing or recently completed government-funded clinical trials using adult stem cells in the USA.[iv]

The greatest moral advantage that adult stem cells have over embryonic stem cells is that no life is taken in acquiring them. There are also several other great advantages to using adult stem cells in therapeutic applications, which is what the entire field is supposed to be interested in: They are grown from the patient's own body, so there is no problem with immune reactions; they are much easier to harvest, since they exist all over the body, even in fat cells; and finally, they are much easier to control, and do not form cancerous tumours, as do HESCs.

Reprogrammed Somatic Cells

The third type of stem cell is the induced pluripotent stem cell, or iPSC. These are adult body ("somatic") cells that are reprogrammed into a state that is very similar to a human embryonic stem cell. They are not identical to HESCs, but have the same function, which means that they can produce any type of adult cell. One of the great advantages of these cells is that they are taken from the patient's own body, thereby making rejection impossible because they are "immune-matched" to the patient.

Another advantage of iPSCs is that they do not require the destruction of a human embryo. However, iPSCs may potentially grow tumours like HESCs, have low replication rates and suffer from premature aging. Importantly, some pro-life ethicists and leaders have raised serious questions about the nature of iPSCs, asking whether they are actually reprogrammed into becoming tiny embryos. We would do well to continue to be vigilant as this area of research continues to grow.

Anti-Scientific Hocus-Pocus

By now, we have all heard critics of the Catholic Church alleging that the Church is "anti-science" and is "holding up human progress."  Not surprisingly, the exact opposite is the truth, and the debate over embryonic stem cell research is probably the best example of this principle.

In the late 1990s, pro-abortion scientists and politicians promised a glittering crop of miracle cures from ESCR, if only those pesky, backwards pro-lifers would just step aside and stop hindering scientific progress with their "Medieval" morality. The government and private corporations have poured hundreds of millions of dollars of our money into embryonic stem cell research,  which has yielded zero cures, while adult stem cell research, supported by the Church, has produced successful treatments for a host of diseases.

In other words, the morally acceptable, Church supported, stem cell research option has actually been successful, yet scientists continue the unethical destruction of human embryos with their focus on ESCR. 

[i]Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Dignitas personae ["On Certain Bioethical Questions"], June 20, 2008, ¶31.
[ii] Rick Weiss. "Embryonic Stem Cells Found to Acquire Mutations."Washington Post, September 5, 2005.
[iii] Maureen L. Condic. "The Basics about Stem Cells." First Things, January 2002, pages 30 to 34; Maureen L. Condic. "A Comprehensive Primer on Stem Cells."  The National Catholic Bioethics Center, August 2009.
[iv] A May 8, 2013 search of the National Institute for Health's "Clinical Trials" database at www.clinicaltrials.gov shows 4,410 currently funded clinical trials using adult stem cells.

Christ's Extended Family

With Acknowledgment to Christopher Wong

The following snapshot of our Lord's extended family makes very satisfying sense of a number of scriptural verses, plus various texts from the early Church.

First up: St Joseph, our Lord's stepfather, had a brother named Cleophas.  It is reasonable to assume the Cleophas was a pious, steadfast rock of a man, like his brother St Joseph.  Cleophas' first wife (whose name is not mentioned in the Gospels) had borne him two sons: Simon and Jude.  Cleophas remarried a widow named Mary.  This Mary, who through this marriage becomes our Lady's sister-in-law, had previously been married to one Alpheus and had borne him two sons: James and Joseph.  In customs of the country and the age, there was nothing extraordinary in the marriage of a widow and a widower, each with children.

We do not hear of Cleophas or Joseph (Jesus' adopted father) in the Gospels during Jesus' adult life. We can speculate that after their deaths, the two families—deprived of their protectors and heads—came together under one roof.  This would further strengthen their ties: the two Marys as "sisters" and Jesus and His cousins as "brothers". Gospel and tradition are thus in harmony and without questioning Mary's perpetual virginity.

This scenario throws light on numerous biblical verses, for example, the reference to Jesus' brethren: James, Joseph, Simon and Jude (Mt 13:55).  We also know that His mother Mary had a "sister" called Mary, "And there were standing by the cross of Jesus His mother and His mother's sister, Mary of Cleophas, and Mary Magdalen."  This other Mary had a husband named Cleophas (Jn 19:25).  We can safely assume that Mary wife of Cleophas is not a true sister of the Virgin Mary, given that they both have the same name.

Mary wife of Cleophas is also described as the mother of James and Joseph (Mt 27:56 and Mk 15:40). On the other hand, James is described as the son of Alphaeus (Mt 10:3, Mk 3:18, Lk 6:15).

An historian named Hegesippus, a native of Palestine, sheds further light.  Hegesippus finished his Memoirs when he was an old man during the reign of Pope Eleutherius (AD 175-189).   He had been able to question surviving members of Jesus' family.  Hegesippus also tell us that: "After the martyrdom of James, it was unanimously decided that Simeon, son of Cleophas, was worthy to occupy the see of Jerusalem. He was, it is said, a cousin of the Saviour."  Hegesippus also confirms that Cleophas was a brother of Joseph (Eusebius, Hist. eccl., III, 11).

St Epiphanius (Haer., LXXVII, 7) says the same and adds (ibid., 14) "that this Simeon, the son of Cleophas, was a cousin of James the Just," as Hegesippus says in another passage. (Prat, Jesus Christ, p. 505).

Ferdinand Prat reasons: "We know, then that the mother of two of the brothers of the Lord was Mary of Cleophas, the sister of the Blessed Virgin. We also know that Cleophas, St Joseph's brother, was the father of a third, called Simon or Simeon. Since the remaining one, Jude, is always connected with Simon and is, like him, part of the family of David, it is reasonable to suppose that he was also a son of Cleophas."

This hypothesis also explains why James, Joseph, Simon and Jude are always named in that order, as brethren of the Lord; why James and Joseph are a pair distinct from Simon and Jude; why Mary, sister of the Blessed Virgin, is called the mother of James and Joseph and never the mother of Simon and Jude; why, according to Hegesippus, Simon and not James is the son of Cleophas; why, again according to Hegesippus, Simon and Jude are of the family of David; why, according to tradition, James was of sacerdotal ancestry; why the common opinion of Catholics identifies James, son of Mary, sister of the Blessed Virgin, with James the Apostle, the son of Alpheus; why Mary of Cleophas is called in the Gospel sister of the Blessed Virgin, when she was really her sister-in-law, being the wife of St. Joseph's brother; finally, why, after the deaths of Joseph and Cleophas, the two sisters brought their families together, so that thereafter the two families seemed to be but one. (Prat, Jesus Christ, p. 136-137).

When all is said and done, the Devil is no more than a bit of a nuisance.

An elderly French nun (when I say "elderly" I'm talking 110! - and still with all her faculties) was recently interviewed. In the course of which she was asked about the Devil. "Oh" she responded in that dismissive way of which the French are masters, "the Devil is no more than a bit of a nuisance."  Which is true; for the Devil is powerless against Christ, Our Lady, the saints and indeed the prayers of devout Catholics. 

Very few of course of out post-Conciliar shepherds are troubled with the Devil, but them why should they be?  Many if not most of them are modernists and are thus destroying souls far more effectively then the Devil could ever hope to achieve.

However, a good holy orthodox priest of my acquaintance related the following story to me. It was the morning of his ordination, which was to be conferred by JP2 in St Peters. He rose and went to the wash basin in his room. To his alarm, the second he tipped his head forward to splash water into his face there was an immediate heavy discharge from his nostrils. The discharge was a foul green colour and gave of a most dreadful odour. The second he lifted his head up it stopped as suddenly as if turning off a light switch. My priest friend was most distressed at this and spent the morning with his head tipped back, staring down his nose, which gave him a comic haughty appearance.

Come the ordination, he was required to kiss the altar.  Whilst all the other candidates bowed deeply from the waist and kissed the upper surface of the altar, my friend all but sunk to his knees so that he could kiss the edge without tipping his head forward.

At the point in the rite when candidates are required to prostrate themselves, while all the other young men had their foreheads on their hands, my friend lay with his chin on his hands with his head tilted back.

Amazingly, the moment JP2 laid his hands on him and spoke the words of ordination the discharge stopped as abruptly as it had started. 

I suspect that the Devil was trying to embarrass him so much that he would back out of his ordination, once it was clear that this plan had failed, he just gave up and went away.  As my elderly French sister said, when all is said and done, "The Devil's no more than a bit of a nuisance."

The main winners, as usual, are Brussels regulators.

The precautionary principle was dreamed up by eco-warriors as a way to thwart wicked corporations. It was always, if you think about it, a slightly silly concept, since it puts people in the impossible position of having to prove a negative. Now though – see following clip – those scheming capitalists have turned the notion back on its authors. The main winners, as usual, are Brussels regulators.

I invite readers to pray for the conversion of Daniel Hannan; he is a man who manifestly has a Catholic soul, but as yet does not have the faith.

The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley

I was recently at a meeting of the Inn Catholics in London to which Viscount Monckton had been invited to speak.  If this Catholic gentleman has not yet crossed you radar, its time he did.  He is one of the most interesting, informed and entertaining speakers I have ever had the pleasure to listen to.

He also send shivers down the spines of the climate change bed wetters. More than 3 million people have viewed his 2009 speech in the US giving details of the world “government” proposed by the UN in the draft Treaty of Copenhagen. The speech went platinum on YouTube in a week – the fastest-ever platinum for a political speech. In West Virginia on Labor Day, 2000, more than 100,000 attended a miners’ rally which he addressed live on a mountain-top – the only venue large enough. Tea Party rallies at which he spoke in Washington DC and in North Houston attracted 40,000 and 15,000 respectively.  His article on climate science in the Sunday Telegraph on 5 November 2006 attracted 127,000 hits in two hours, crashing the paper’s website.  His speeches at the St. Andrews and Oxford Unions were followed by student votes defeating climate alarmism for the first time in Scotland and England respectively.  Wordpress ranked his summary of the draft Durban climate agreement in December 2011 as having received more hits than any other among its 500,000 blog postings on all subjects worldwide that day.  A video of his talk to the Mannkal Foundation in Australia in July 2011 became the most-watched video in Australia in February 2012.   In August 2012 his address to the World Federation of Scientists on climate economics drew praise from President Vaclav Klaus of the Czech Republic and led the Federation’s president, Professor Antonino Zichichi, to establish a permanent monitoring panel on the subject.

Suggestion 1, view a video of his interview on Canadian TV by clicking below:

Suggestion 2, Visit Viscount Monckton's website by clicking HERE

Suggestion 3, Get your self on the mailing list of the Inn Catholics so that you are informed of future meeting.  Simply email Piers D'Arcy at piersdarcy@yahoo.com with a request to be put on their mailing list.

Why are everyone and his dog entitled to equality and diversity sensitivity, except Christians?

In the secular asylum there are more counsellors than there are victims to be counselled, now we are seemingly on track to have more diversity sensitising Fascists than there are members of diverse groups for us to be diversity sensitized about.

Why are the devotees of the militant secularist religion entitled to force the latest doctrines of their faith down our throats, at taxpayers' expense, while a Christian promoting the doctrines of his faith is very likely to find himself sacked? 

An elderly and very kind lady friend of mine is a care assistant in a nursing home.  Her faith is such that she regards washing and dressing a recently deceased patient as a privilege, an opportunity to see and serve Christ in others. 

She was recently sent on an "equality and diversity" training session - I sure you can imagine the content.  They were shown, by the obviously homosexual tutor, pictures of the Christian registrar who refused to officiate at civil partnerships, and were gleefully advised that she had been sacked.  The tutor then spoke equally gleefully about the couple who owned a guest house and had to pay £1800 compensation to a homosexual couple for refusing to allow them to sodomise one another under their roof.  This particular diversity and sensitivity tutor was obviously particularly insensitive to the diversity of Christians - but there's no surprise there of course.

“What,” my friend enquired, “has all this gay rights rubbish have to do with washing and feeding the elderly and treating them with kindness?” and “Why," she added, "is everyone, except Christians, allowed a conscience?” 

Later, my friend spoke up again and said, “St Thomas More had it right when he said that he was the king’s good servant, but God’s first - and the people that you (the tutor) are lampooning had done the right thing.”  My friend, who is one of the most caring and kind people I know now faces the sack for “homophobia”, a totally spurious label invented by the diversity Nazis and their captive media.

Meanwhile, in New York a group of thirteen years old girls were forced, i.e. bullied - paradoxically, in the course of an anti-bullying lesson - by yet another diversity Fascist into giving one another “lesbian” kisses!  For a superb take on this outrage, see Michael Matt’s talk here:

If that was not enough diversity crap for one week, in the Pentagon, one Mikey Weinstein of the Military Religion Freedom organization met with department officials and wrote that Christians in the military are “monsters” who must be stopped from talking about their faith.  Weinstein said the military needs to begin prosecuting Christians who share their faith, “Until the Air Force or Army or Navy or Marine Corps punishes a member of the military for unconstitutional religious proselytizing and oppression, we will never have the ability to stop this horrible, horrendous, dehumanizing behaviour,”  he wined.  Weinstein told officials at a private meeting between himself and Pentagon officials, that U.S. troops who evangelize are guilty of sedition and treason and should be punished, by the hundreds if necessary.

It seemed the military was listening because one Lt. Cmdr. Nathan Christensen issued a memo stating that military personnel who share their faith could be subject to court-martial. 

However, some members of Congress expressed outraged, and the Pentagon did a volte face a few days later and said that military members who want to talk about their faith with other members have every right to do so, backtracking on its previous warning against “proselytizing” that could be subject to court-martial.

But the six million dollar question is, why would the military leadership be meeting with one of the most rabid hate-spewing atheists in America to discuss religious freedom in the military in the first place?  Isn't that like consulting Genghis Khan on care and compassion in the NHS?

The Impossible "Road Map" of Peace with the Lefebvrists

By Sandro Magister (edited and abridged by Graham Moorhouse)

In a new book, unfortunately currently only available in Italian, Professor Enrico Maria Radaelli - philosopher, theologian, and beloved disciple of one of the greatest traditionalist Catholic thinkers of the twentieth century, the Swiss Romano Amerio - cites three passages taken from the unpublished diaries of Fr. Divo Barsotti (1914-2006).

In them, this brilliant and esteemed mystic and spiritual master - who in 1971 was called to preach the Lenten exercises to the pope and to the Roman curia - expressed strong criticisms of Vatican Council II.  Fr. Barsotti wrote:

"I am perplexed with regard to the Council: the plethora of documents, their length, often their language, these frightened me. They are documents that bear witness to a purely human assurance more than to a simple firmness of faith.  But above all I am outraged by the behaviour of the theologians.”

"The Council is the supreme exercise of the magisterium, and is justified only by a supreme necessity. Could not the fearful gravity of the present situation of the Church stem precisely from the foolishness of having wanted to provoke and tempt the Lord?  Was there the desire, perhaps, to constrain God to speak when there was not this supreme necessity?  Is that the way it is?   In order to justify a Council that presumed to renew all things, it had to be affirmed that everything was going poorly, something that is done constantly, if not by the episcopate then by the theologians.”

"Nothing seems to me graver, contrary to the holiness of God, than the presumption of clerics who believe, with a pride that is purely diabolical, that they can manipulate the truth, who presume to renew the Church and to save the world without renewing themselves.  In all the history of the Church nothing is comparable to the latest Council, at which the Catholic episcopate believed that it could renew all things by obeying nothing other than its own pride, without the effort of holiness, in such open opposition to the law of the gospel that it requires us to believe how the humanity of Christ was the instrument of the omnipotence of the love that saves, in his death.”

These words of Fr. Divo Barsotti are striking in two respects.  First of all, these criticisms come from a person of profound theological vision, with the reputation of sanctity, most obedient to the Church.  And in the second place, the criticisms are not aimed against the deviations following the Council, but against the Council in itself. [my emphasis]

They are the same two impressions that can be gathered from reading the new book by Radaelli, entitled: “The tomorrow - terrible or radiant? - of dogma.”  Radaelli's argues that the current crisis of the Church is not the result of a mistaken application of the Council, but of an original sin committed by the Council itself.

This original sin is claimed to be the abandoning of dogmatic language - proper to all of the previous councils, with the affirmation of the truth and the condemnation of errors - and its replacement with a vague new “pastoral” language.

But while for the progressives, the new language adopted by the Council is judged in an entirely positive light, for Radaelli, for Roberto de Mattei, and for other representatives of traditionalist thought - as for Romano Amerio before them - pastoral language is the root of all evil.

According to them, in fact, the Council presumed - wrongfully - that the obedience due to the dogmatic teaching of the Church also applied to pastoral language, thus elevating to unquestionable “superdogmas" affirmations and arguments devoid of a real dogmatic foundation, about which instead it is said to be legitimate and obligatory to advance criticisms and reservations.

From the two opposed languages, dogmatic and pastoral, Radaelli sees the emergence and separation "almost of two Churches.”

In the first, that of the most consistent traditionalists, he also includes the Lefebvrists, fully “Catholic by doctrine and by rite” and “obedient to dogma,” even if they are disobedient to the pope to the point of having been excommunicated for 25 years.  It is the Church that, precisely because of its fidelity to dogma, “rejects Vatican II as an assembly in total rupture with Tradition.”

He assigns to the second Church all of the others, meaning almost all of the bishops, priests, and faithful, including the current pope. It is the Church that has renounced dogmatic language and “is in everything the daughter of Vatican II, proclaiming it - even from the highest throne, but without ever setting out proof of this - in total continuity with the pre-Conciliar Church, albeit within the setting of a certain reform.”

How does Radaelli see the healing of this opposition?  In his judgment, “it is not the model of Church obedient to dogma that must once again submit to the pope,” but “it is rather the model obedient to the pope that must once again submit to dogma.”

In other words: "It is not Ecône [editor's note: the SSPX] that must submit to Rome, but Rome to Heaven: every difficulty between Ecône and Rome will be resolved only after the return of the Church to the dogmatic language that is proper to it.”

In order for this goal to be reached, Radaelli presupposes two things: - that Rome would guarantee to the Lefebvrists the right to celebrate the Mass and the sacraments exclusively according to the rite of St. Pius V; - and that the obedience required for Vatican II would be brought back within the limits of its “false-pastoral” language, and therefore be subject to criticisms and reservations.

But before this culmination - Radaelli adds - two other requests would have to be granted: - the first, advanced in December of 2011 by the bishop of Astana in Kazakistan, Athanasius Schneider, is the publication on the part of the pope of a sort of new "Syllabus,” which would strike with anathemas all of the "modern-day errors"; - The second, already proposed by the theologian Brunero Gherardini to the supreme magisterium of the Church, is a “revision of the conciliar and magisterial documents of the last half century,” to be done “in the light of Tradition.”

Even with the traditionalists who have remained in communion with the Church - from Radaelli to de Mattei to Gherardini - the rift is getting wider. They no longer conceal their disappointment with the pontificate of Benedict XVI, in which they had initially placed some hopes. In their judgment, only a decisive return of the magisterium of the pope and the bishops to dogmatic pronouncements can bring the Church back to the right path, with the resulting correction of all of the errors propagated by the pastoral language of the Council.

Errors that Radaelli lists on a page of his book as follows, calling them “real and proper heresies”: “Ecclesiology, collegiality, single source of Revelation, ecumenism, syncretism, irenicism (especially toward Protestantism, Islamism, and Judaism), the modification of the 'doctrine of replacement' of the Synagogue with the Church into the 'doctrine of the two parallel salvations,' anthropocentrism, loss of the last things (and of both limbo and hell), of proper theodicy (leading to much atheism as a 'flight from a bad Father'), of the meaning of sin and grace, liturgical de-dogmatization, aniconology, subversion of religious freedom, in addition to the 'dislocation of the divine Monotriad' by which freedom dethrones the truth.”

But in a nutshell, he seems to identify the hoped-for pacification with an all-encompassing victory for the Lefebvrists and for those who, like them, see themselves as the last and sole defenders of dogma.

One can't affirm his delusion, so smile benignly and change the subject.

Running is a healthy and pleasant pastime.  It is so unfair therefore that people with no legs can't run.  So, because it is committed to equality, the government plans to redefine running to include sitting down.  Indeed, I am going to put forward an amendment myself to redefine running to also include laying down perfectly still, that way even the dead will be able to enjoy running.

This is precisely the logic David Cameron was using when he stated that it was because he was passionate about marriage that he was going to legalise gay “marriage”.   Only an inmate of the secular asylum could assert with a straight face that by redefining a word that means something, to mean many things or anything one fancy, you in some unspecified way enhance its meaning.  The Queen of Hearts in Alice in wonderland springs to mind, "Words mean what I say they mean."

Marriage is called marriage because of the marriage act.  Two men cannot perform the marriage act.  Therefore, two men cannot be married - period.  Granted they can, and do, perform some depraved parody of the marriage act, but I doubt even David Cameron has slipped so far down the slope into liberal la la land that he is actually capable of believing that the lower bowel is a sex organ.

There is a serious side issue here: how do those of us who refuse to sacrifice their sanity to this gobbledegook react when confronted with two hairy fellows claiming to be married?  I suggest we react exactly the same way as one would react if a fellow comes up to you in a lunatic asylum and claims he is Napoleon Bonaparte.  You can't affirm his delusion (that would be unkind) so just smile benignly and change the subject - while trying desperately hard not to laugh out loud.

On the Lighter Side

This is a true story.  An Australian priest was staying at a well known church in south London to learn how to celebrate the traditional rite.

It was explained to him that at own point in the ceremony the deacon or sub-deacon takes hold of the priest and kisses his hands.  There is a Latin name for this, but I've forgotten it.  The Australian exclaimed [and you have to do this in an Australian accent to achieve its full comedic effect], "Listen mate, I'm an Aussie, you don't touch me and you certainly don't kiss me!"

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