Le Tocsin

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

 

A quick apology to readers for publishing June's edition well into July; it has just been a manic month - Ed

On Boiling Frogs “They cry peace, peace; when there is no peace …” (Jeremiah 6:14)

 

"We live in exciting times, when the vision of Vatican II is beginning to be realised in the Church" Solitudinem Faciunt, Pacem Appellant (They make a wilderness and call it peace.)

The following essay has been simmering below the surface of my mind for a couple of years.  It was brought to the boil by a superb article by Michael O'Halloran, entitled "A Blind and Unchecked Passion for Novelty" that appeared in the May 2013 volume of Christian Order.  In a few places in the following essay I have plagiarised Michael O'Halloran's work unashamedly.  Michael's extensive apologetical work can be found at http://rationalfaith-book.blogspot.co.uk  

Most readers will be familiar with the parable of the frogs that were placed in a saucepan of cold water on the hob.  The temperature of the water was then raised half a degree Fahrenheit per day until a few months later the frogs boil to death without making any effort to jump out of the saucepan.  We are those frogs; we have been boiled slowly to near spiritual death by the Modernists who have had a life sapping grip on the Church’s throat for the last forty years.

It is the contention of this essay that the Novus Ordo establishment is now so moribund and so corrupt that the only principled option left for a genuine Catholic is to head for the exit and brush the dust from his sandals. Is this realistic?  Of course - just reflect: 10% of all ordernations in France this year were for the SSPX, and when you add in the Ecclesia Dei communities, 25% of all ordinations in France were for traditional priests!  When Christ said, "The fruitful shall inherit the earth," He was stating little more than a truism.

“Moribund” is indeed something of an understatement

When I became a Catholic over half a century ago, there were three million souls at Mass in England every Sunday.  Furthermore that number was steadily growing year on year.  Today, we have 900,000 at Mass and even that pitiful number is in rapid decline.

And this is not the end of this miserable story.  Around a third of the 900,000 are immigrants, mainly Filipinos and Poles.  Further, around two thirds of the remainder are heretics, Roman Protestants, who reject even such basic Catholic truths as the Real Presence.  This leaves us with around 200,000 genuine indigenous Catholics at Mass.

The Fruits of the Revolution in Graph Form

This tale of woe does not even end here because Novus Ordo congregations - the revolution having driven away men, the working classes and our intelligentsia - consist mainly of middle-class elderly ladies served by an aging clergy unable to replicate themselves.

When confronted with their devastated vineyard, the first ruse of the Modernists - and their witless allies, the useful idiots from the neo-Catholic camp - is to claim that at least it is better than what went before.  This must come as something of a surprise to a vast army of pre-Conciliar saints, holy martyrs and great popes of yesteryear.

When this crap began to wear thin, one of our Grinning Mitred Modernists came up with the brilliant line that the Church was in decline anyway and Vatican II had succeeded in slowing the decline.  As usual, there was not a scrap of evidence advanced to support this latest Modernist drivel.

The most recent propaganda line goes something like this, “Well we admit that the Church in the UK is in decline, but it’s doing splendidly in Africa.”  Once again, not a shred of evidence is produced to support the assertion, and it is invariably trotted out by someone who has never set foot on African soil.

My wife and I spent a fortnight in Africa in 2011.  I well recall a Novus Ordo Mass where the priest preached for forty minutes.  The gist of the sermon was that we had to worship God not only with our souls but with our whole body; this was seemingly to justify the dancing girls in the offertory procession.  The sermon was obviously very entertaining, as he had them rocking in the aisles for most of the forty minutes.  The priest then announced that he had run out of time so cancelled the distribution of Holy Communion!

Some of the time we were in Kenya we spent working alongside the Missionaries of the Poor in the slums of Nairobi.  The missionary brothers have no priests and organised some sort of Sunday Eucharistic service.  I expressed objections to this on the ground that it discouraged Catholics from going to Mass in the parish church a mere couple of miles away (in Africa a couple of miles is literally round the corner, these guy cheerfully walk eleven miles to work each day).  The reply was eye opening, “In an ideal world Graham I would agree with you, but the average African Catholic can see so little difference between the Mass [the Novus Ordo] and Protestant worship that he will go to the nearest church, be it Pentecostal, Seven Day Adventist or Catholic.” 

Meanwhile, a few miles down the road, the SSPX were building a large monastery to accommodate all the young African women seeking a contemplative vocation.  Vatican II and its child, the Novus Ordo, have devastated the Church in Africa, just as they have devastated the Church in Europe.

And as for corruption …

As for corruption, in a fortnight in which our friend Cardinal Godfried Danneels has spoken in support of sodomitical marriage and it is revealed that Barcelona’s “Catholic” Sant Pau Hospital killed an unborn child earlier this month in a pre-arranged abortion, it is difficult to know where to start.  The corruption of the Novus Ordo church is now so advanced that like those frogs few of us even notice it any more.  I will cite but one recent example among literally thousands one could cite: take the “Catholic” primary school in Wimbledon that a few weeks ago invited in a speaker from Stonewall, with the blessing of Archbishop Peter Smith!  Stonewall is an organisation dedicated to promoting same-sex anal copulating. 

Our forefathers in faith would have dragged the archbishop from his bed and had him publicly flogged, or maybe even lynched, for so recklessly exposing Christ’s little ones to such degenerate individuals, yet we can barely summon up the energy to shrug our shoulders anymore.  Like those frogs; we have been slowly boiled to spiritual death by the Novus Ordo church to the point that even the betrayal of small children by yet another post-Conciliar Judas no longer has the power to seriously outrage us. 

Novus Ordo wolves no longer even dress in sheep’s clothing, so spiritually desensitised have we become, they can safely move among us dressed as wolves, and the “faithful” will go on doffing their caps, filling his lordship’s coffers and clapping his inane Modernist babble, while all the while assuaging their consciences by rationalising that they are honouring the office not the person.

In Novus Ordo la la land even the best constantly disappoint.  Archbishop Nicholls was welcomed as someone who just may sort out the mess left by Cormac O'Conner, but within days he was pimping for the militant perverts at Warwick Street and its been downhill ever since. Cardinal Pell was at one time our great white hope, yet in a recent debate with Richard Dawkins he came close to denying the doctrine of original sin, which left even Dawkins gob smacked.  Cardinal Burke chickened out of giving a lecture in 2012 in England in case it was perceived as critical of the anti-Catholics who have usurped English sees.  Archbishop Charles Chaput has stated that he finds the Novus Ordo, properly celebrated, a much richer expression of worship [to the traditional rite]”.  This clearly implies that he finds the traditional Latin Mass a much poorer expression of worship.  How tragic that all our great saints did not have the good fortune to have Archbishop Chaput to lead them away from their liturgical impoverishment!  The latest man to be hailed by traditional Catholics as our savour is Bishop Mark Davis; yet he has recently invited the bizarre Neo-Cats into his diocese!

The curse on all these men is that they have Vatican II, the council that precipitated the headlong downward spiral of the Church into near oblivion in the West, chained to one leg, like a cast-iron ball on the leg of a Victorian convict.  The problem of having a heavy cast-iron ball shackled to your leg is that you are doomed to perpetually walk in circles.  I well remember a sermon given by Bishop Mark David to a congregation of traditionalists at Walsingham in 2012 in which he lauded Vatican II.  As soon as he mentioned the Council, the eyes of the entire congregation glazed over and half of them slipped into a coma. If you are one of those traditionalists who is still ambivalent about Vatican II, just reflect how much it is adored by the Church's enemies: the Modernists, the Freemasons and radical Left outfits like the Southern Poverty Law Centre, to name but three.

Traditionalists hailed Benedict XVI's Summa Pontifica as if it was the best thing since sliced bread.  Here in summary is what Summa Pontifica said:

"The Church, which is supposed to be the pillar and ground of the truth, has been conning the baptised for the last forty years.  I'm here to fess up.  The traditional Mass has never been abrogated, and indeed cannot be abrogated.  So in spite of every prelate, Rome and the entire curia telling you otherwise, you are free to celebrate it, and always have been. 

Nevertheless, having kicked that particular scam into the long grass, I'm going to launch yet another scam as a fop to the Modernists: Celebrating the Mass that your forefathers, saints and martyrs have celebrated for the last 2000 years is henceforth to be considered "extraordinary".  Whereas, celebrating a doctrinally dumbed down Mass fabricated by a committee, with six heresiarchs as consultant, and chaired by a Freemason, is henceforth to be considered "ordinary", i.e. "normal"

"Normal"!  Given that no pope or council in the previous 2000 years has dared to impose such a patently bizarre novelty on the Church, not even close, what Benedict would consider "abnormal", one can only speculate.

The Novus Ordo church is defined by its rabid mania for never-ending novelty.

The Novus Ordo church is a clearly identifiable entity, with its new Mass, new sacraments, new Breviary, new Rosary, new exorcism, new catechism, new code of canon law, new council, new ecumenism, new super-dogmas, new rules for religious orders, new seminary training, new evangelisation (which actually has nothing to do with evangelisation at all because the ecumenically-castrated prelates promoting it are not allowed to mention the “C” word [conversion]), the new movements, the new saint-makingitis churning out millions of saintlettes on the backs of Mickey Mouse miracles (it surely can only be a matter of time before a post-Conciliar pope is canonised on the back of having alleviated the discomfort of an elderly nun’s in-growing toe-nail), the new drive to canonize every post-Conciliar pope who says something vaguely nice about Vat2, the new hermeneutics of continuity, the new open-plan de-sacredtised sanctuaries, the new irreverent mode of receiving holy communion, the new openness to militant sodomites in the ministry leading inexorably to new scandals, the new all but universal loss of the sense of the sacred, the new catechesis (resulting in a ninety per cent plus lapse rate among our young), the new marriage-annulment mass-production lines, the new take on the death penalty, the new “theology of the body”, the new – need I go on?  The Novus Ordo church is defined by its rabid mania for never-ending novelty.

But from whence comes this mania, this ravenous thirst, for novelty?  - manifestly from a deep hatred of all things Catholics.  That being plainly so, what has a genuine Catholic, who loves the traditions, orthodoxy and orthopraxis of his forefathers, saints and martyrs have in common with the Novus Ordo establishment?  The answer is, absolutely nothing! 

How did we allow these haters of all that we are and all that defines us so comprehensively to overrun the fort and capture unchallenged even the high ground?  The truth is we were slumbering, and while slumbering, we were comprehensively outwitted by the enemy, so that even much of Rome fell to them without a shot fired in anger.  Truth is we were psyched up to repel an attack from without, and seeing no significant sign of it, we fell asleep at our post, allowing the enemy to launch the devastating attack he had been planning for decades from within the fort.

Pollyanna Catholics can mock us at every opportunity, slander us and accuse us of fearing change, but is not change per say that we fear; indeed traditional Catholics have been at the forefront of every positive change throughout history.  It is traditionalists who have taken the light of the Gospel to the four corners of the planet.  It is traditionalists who have driven unprecedented examples of active charity for the poor and needy: setting up hospitals, schools, universities, fostering the arts and sciences, and inspiring thousands to take up joyful discipleship and bear witness to the liberating love of God even unto martyrdom itself.

Modernists on the other hand are focused on building an earthly paradise.  Witness the sodomitically disgraced Cardinal Keith O'Brien's carbon belching world tour to green the planet, or Bishop John Arnold's recent decision not to purchase meat.  This, not because he's a vegetarian (presumable, had he been vegetarian he would have been happy to share the world's resources with cows) but because cows eat a lot of grass and corn, and thus deplete valuable resources.  He could also have added that their constant farting contributes to global warming - a significant issue surely, given that more of our post-Conciliar Modernists believe in global warming than believe in the Real Presense?

It is not change per say that traditionalists reject, but the changes driven by the anti-Catholicism of the Modernists.  Pope St Pius X posed the rhetorical question, “... with which part of Catholic life do Modernists not wish to tamper?”   In the light of the last forty years, one can safely answer, “There is truly no areas of Catholic life which they do not crave to refashion in there own likeness.”

"... in the affairs of man, there is a time for peace and a time for war."

In the affairs of man, there is a time for peace and a time for war.  Chesterton wrote that men go to war not because they hate what is in front of them, but because they love what is behind them. We love what is behind us, and have nothing in common with the Novus Ordo establishment that hates everything that is behind us?  If we are to save the Church, all traditionalists must move onto a war footing.  The faithful remnant is now in a life and death battle for the soul of the Catholic Church.  All Catholics have a duty to understand the battle lines and to choose sides.  The battle lines are between Modernists, described by Pope St Pius X as the adherents of the heresy of all heresies, and the hordes of useful idiots who, either by action or inaction, stand with them and do their dirty work, and those who love the faith of our forefathers, saints and martyrs that has been handed down to us from the Apostles.  At this hour, humanly speaking, the Modernists have the field and have swept all before them and have the faithful remnant on its knees.  But never forget: one man with his back to the wall and his sword drawn, if God is on his side, is a majority.

All Wars Need Rules of Engagement

Rule 1: Avoid those traditionalists who cry, “Peace, peace, when there is no peace,” and can be no peace.  The desire for peace at this hour is unprincipled and hence impossible for men of integrity.  There must always be a battle between traditionalists and the proponents of novelty.  As St Thomas taught, the desire for change always implies that what one seeks to change is in some way undesirable or imperfect.  Consequently, the very attempt of the Modernists to throw away everything that formed the staple of pre-Conciliar Catholic life is a standing, implicit, and often explicit, expression of contempt for the faith, orthodoxy and orthopraxis of our forefathers; if they loved and revered our Catholic patrimony as we do, why do they beaver away unceasingly to eliminate it from the face of the earth?  Because they neither love nor revere it, there can be no peace between us.  Tragically, in this war, members of the same family will find themselves on opposing sides – Our Lord warned us that it would ever be thus.

Rule 2: Do not waste your ammunition on Pollyanna Catholics, the sort that spend their time jumping up and down excitedly telling us how wonderful it all is, and can’t even write a pudding recipe without working in a cheap dig at traditionalists.  They are like a young leggy girls with pom-poms dancing a trite rah-rah routine on the deck of the Titanic.  Such Pollyanna Catholics are at worse an utter irrelevancy, while at best they serve tradition by spreading a soporific self-satisfaction within the enemy camp.

Rule 3: Do not witlessly alienate potential allies.  Many Catholics who feel trapped in Novus Ordo la la land and indeed even some lapsed Catholics know in the deepest recesses of their souls that this cannot be it, there has to be something more, could God really have became man and died on the Cross to bring into being Novus Ordo land?  This is why disillusioned Catholics flock to such bizarre movements as the Neo-Cats and diabolical scams such as Medjugorje; they are sick to death of Fr Flapdoodle’s, Sr Snakebite's and Bishop Bubble's Catholicism lite; so desperately searching for a Catholicism with more spiritual “meat” on it, they tragically finish up with snake oil salesmen.  Such people need to be wooed and prayed to tradition, not alienated yet further.

Rule 4: Bi-ritual clerics should be treated with respect but prudence.  Some clearly full under rule 3, they are men struggling towards the light, but who feel trapped in Novus Ordo la la land, and cannot see a way out, or lack the courage or integrity to completely extricate themselves from it.  Yet other can be judged to be fifth columnists working to undermine the enemy camp from within.  Nevertheless, many, with a foot in both camps, are men who seek peace at any price no matter how unprincipled; these must be treated with caution, just as one would treat any quisling or collaborator in time of war.  In a war, any supposed ally who is comfortable to live cheek-by-jowl with the enemy must be approached with prudence.

Rule 5: Get rid of our legalism and sort out where our true allegiance lies.  Legalism has been the most deadly weapon in the arsenal of the Modernists for neutralising the traditionalists’ resistance.  The law of the Church, Canon law, has one over-riding purpose: the salvation of souls, all cannons must be read in the light of this paramount rationale.  For a far deeper study of this issue click HERE.  The Modernists and their neo-Catholic camp followers are like petty bureaucrats who persist in prosecuting a doctor for parking on a double yellow line, even when they know full well that he had only stopped to administer CPC to an elderly lady having a heart attack. 

Rule 6: Save your ammunition for your enemies, not your brothers in arms.  Whatever you personal feelings for example about the SSPX, they are allies in the battle for the restoration of tradition; postpone any quarrels you have with them until after the battle has been won.  And don’t parrot the calumnies trotted out by the Modernists about the SSPX.  Without the SSPX there would be no Priestly Fraternity of St Peter, no Institute of the Good Shepherd, no Personal prelature of St John Mary Vianney, no Sons of the Most Holy Redeemer and many others, plus of course many orders of female religious.

Likewise the sedevacantists; whilst I share the conviction that they are in serious error, they are clearly on the side of tradition.  We have to be big enough to accept that it is possible for a man to be in honest error, yet still be on the side of the angels.  St Vicente Ferrer is a classic example; he was one of the greatest saints of the fifteenth century, one of the greatest miracle workers of all time, and a preacher responsible for the conversion of thousands of Jews and Muslims to Christ.  St Vicente Ferrer was canonised within forty years of his death, notwithstanding the fact that he spent most of his life supporting a man we now acknowledge to be an anti-pope!

What of the Post-Conciliar Popes?

The post-Conciliar popes are like Théoden (The king of Rohan – The Lord of the Rings).  Théoden had become an elderly and decrepit king, nearly out of his mind, doing the bidding of his advisor Wormtongue, the archetypal sycophant, flatterer, liar, and manipulator.  Théoden’s madness and decrepitude, however, are merely the symptoms of the disease of being under the spell of Saruman, whose spokesman Wormtongue is.  Where I part company with the sedevacantist however, is that I believe that in spite of Théoden’s decrepitude, he remained king of Rohan, with a right to the prayers and, where possible, the principled support of his subjects. 

I have absolutely no doubt that one day God will raise up a great saint, most likely a slip of a girl, who will confront Pope Théoden, as Joan of Arc confronted Charles VII of France, and in doing so will break Wormtongue’s spell over him.  On that glorious day, the pope will rise up and once again unashamedly don all the accoutrements of his great office; he will then take Wormtongue by the throat and publicly hurl him from the top steps of St Peters.  Théoden will then truly become Peter again, a strong, holy, wise, courageous Catholic leader.

He will then bravely leads his people in the battle to restore all things Catholic, and will show his true mettle by answering the Virgin’s call for the consecration of Russia to her Immaculate Heart.  Peter, like Théoden, may well die in the ensuing battle to restore the Church and Western civilisation, but not before he will have proved himself a worthy servant of the King of Kings.

In the meantime the faithful remnant, until that glorious day arrives, must continue to fight a guerrilla war.

On Man Who Is Never Afraid to Draw His Sword - Michael Voris Confronts the Lavender Mafia, and the Sycophants in the Catholic Press, Head on.

How come the late great Malcolm Muggeridge could spot it seventeen years before he became a Catholic, when neo-Catholics can't see it even when it punches them on the nose?

Referring to the upheaval in the Church 1966, orchestrated by the 'Spirit of Vatican II', the late, great Malcolm Muggeridge, under the guise of a future historian looking back, wrote the following, some 17 years before he would be received into the Church:

“My historian’s astonishment would be all the greater that the Roman Catholic Church itself, having witnessed the ruinous consequences to its Protestant rivals of compounding with contemporary trends, should now seem set upon following a like course.  Just when the Reformation appears to be fizzling out, another, it seems, is incubating in Rome. Luther escapes from John Osborne’s hands into – of all places – the Vatican. The Church’s profound pessimism about human life, miraculously preserved through the long false dawn of science, is about to be shed at the precise historical moment that it is most relevant and most urgently needed to save men’s reason, if not their souls” (From the essay, "Backward Christian Soldiers", by Malcolm Muggeridge, 1966).

NEW BOOK ON VATICAN II

By Fr Dominique Bourmaud SSPX (Abridged and adapted by Donald McGovern)

In the jubilee year of Vatican II, a distinguished Roman historian has set the cat among the post-Conciliar pigeons.  Whilst numerous books purport to provide in depth analysis of the major Conciliar documents, few have attempted to paint the bigger picture.  Instead, proponents of the “hermeneutic of continuality” treat the Council as something distinct and separate from the post-Conciliar anarchy.  For such, the post-Conciliar period is seen as a pathology that developed in spite of, rather than because of, the Council.  But this is a naive interpretation of history that ignores the fact that history is a series of interconnected events, cause and effect.  Hence, for good reason, Dr Mattei’s study encompasses the waning years of Pius XII reign as well as the aftermath of the Council.

The historian task is to explore the seemingly unconnected elements to find the thread that explains them.  Romano Amerio’s Iota Unum and Fr Ralph Wiltgen’s The Rhine Flows into the Tiber where of this genre.   De Mattei’s work unravels before our eyes a story with a beginning, a middle and an end, where it all begins to make sense.  Scholars will particularly appreciate the bio-bibliography footnoted to any name mentioned in a very comprehensive work of 600 pages.

We have waited a long time for this concise and joined-up account of Vatican II.  Iota Unam [A book that once I had picked it up, I couldn't put it down - Ed] gave us the philosophical approach; The Rhine Flows into the Tiber gave us a chronological approach, whereas Benedict XVI and Msgr Brunero Gherardini (The Second Vatican Council: A Much Needed Discussion) have provided a theological approach.  Dr Mattei on the other hand has give us the who, what, when, where, why and how of the years proceeding and following the Council, placing it in the midst of the heady optimism of the 1950s and the destructive revolutionary attitudes of the 1960s.

De Mattei demonstrates how revolutionary the Second Vatican Council was, judged in the context of the previous twenty councils.  Never before had any Church council promoted the leitmotif of aggiornamento - bringing the "Church up to date".  The result is now tragically evident.  Instead of challenging the world to conform to Christ, the Church conformed to the world.  The organised campaign of the Modernists to emasculate the Church in the name of ecumenism is a matter of public record and makes for jaw-dropping reading.

Dr Mattei gives considerable attention to the international group of bishops, including cardinals, who mobilised - tragically too late - to halt the deadly attacks on the Church from within.  The reason the traditionalists ultimately failed to stop the Modernist advance boiled down to organisation.  Had the traditionalists arrived at the Council as well prepared and organized as the Modernists, the last fifty years would have been much less devastatingly cruel to the Church.

This book strikes at the very heart of the Council and exposes it for the profound failure it was and remains, and is now increasingly seen to have been.  No wonder Dr Mattei is attached fiercely by both the Modernists and the neo-Catholic camps, since both are equally committed to the anti-rational proposition that the Council is untouchable.  Fifty years after the Council, mercifully, such absurd presuppositions are increasingly disappearing from serious debate - leastways among Catholic scholars.

Young French Teenager Seeking Accommodation With Traditionalist Family in England.

The mother of French traditionalist family approached me for help during the Chartres pilgrimage this year, and explained that she was seeking accommodation in England for one month sometime during the summer for her sixteen years old daughter, so that her daughter could improve her English.

Pascale Falicon, the mother, has two requirements: the family should contain a young women not too dissimilar in age from her daughter, and that it must be a traditionalist family.

A big bonus for the English side of the arrangement is that Pascal is willing to reciprocate; and the family live in a very beautiful part of France: near Samur, in the Loire Valley; and normally take their holidays in Bretagne by the sea.

If you are interested in exploring this possibility further, contact me on grahamcud@gmail.com or 0132-240-9231 and I will put you in touch.  Pascale speaks tolerably good English.

Daniel Hannan - The Truth on Foreign Aid - Youtube

It has been demonstrated very convincingly by numerous experts that foreign aid is not just ineffectual, but that it is positively harmful.  Why then do secular liberals like Cameron and Clegg insist on dolling it out?  I suspect it is way of buying power over foreign governments and bypassing foreign democracies.  In other words, it is just the latest form of white colonialism.  David Cameron's recent threat to withdraw foreign aid from one of the African governments if they did not repeal their laws criminalising sodomy was very revealing.  Here you have write large the contempt of the metropolitan liberal elite for both democracy and national sovereignty.  Click on the image below to see a superb take on this subject.

"God Exist, I Have Seen Him" - The Frenchman who Became a Catholic in Under 10 Seconds.

I have a friend who wanted to become a Catholic.  He took himself off to the local priest for instruction.  Very soon he realised that the local priest was just another dreary post-Conciliar Modernist.  So my friend sold his home in order to move to an area where the parish priest was a genuine Catholic.  Such an amazing story can only be explained by grace.  How does a non-Catholic spot a Modernist?  You and I may be able to spot them a mile off, but someone struggling to extricate themselves from the errors of Protestantism - that's another story!

An even more amazing story is the conversion of André Frossard.  André was a young French atheist, a journalist by trade, and the son of a leading light in the French communist party.  Saint Augustine wrote, “Thou hast created us for Thyself, and our heart is not quiet until it rests in Thee.”  Nevertheless, André Frossard, just like me in my pre-Catholic days, was blissfully unaware of any unrequited longing.  Indeed, he, as I had been, was rather smugly content with his unbelief.

André had a friend, Willemin, and, on the occasion in question, they were traversing Paris together in a car.  Willemin, a Catholic, stopped the car to nip into a chapel.  The chapel served a convent of contemplative nuns of perpetual adoration.  André opted to remain in the car; he wrote, “I had no curiosity about things relating to religion, for religion seemed to me to belong to another age”. 

However, bored by waiting while Willemin was busy with his devotions, which were keeping him longer than he had expected, André decided to  have a look at the building into which Willemin had disappeared.  His interest in it was that of a lover of architecture or perhaps that of a tourist.  The rest can only be recorded in André Frossard own words:

“It is now ten minutes past five. In two minutes’ time I shall be a Christian.”

“The end of the chapel was rather brightly lit. The high altar was draped in white and covered with a great many plants and candelabra and a variety of ornaments. Above it hung a large metal cross; at its centre there was a white disc, and three others that were slightly different were fixed to the extremities of the cross.

In the interest of art, I had previously visited churches but I had never before seen a host, much less a monstrance with a host in it. I was therefore quite unaware that before me was the Blessed Sacrament below which many candles were burning. The other discs, the complicated gilt ornaments, all contributed to making identification of this distant sun still more difficult.

I didn’t see the point of all this, naturally, since I was not looking for it. Standing by the door, I looked out for my friend, but I was not able to identify him among the kneeling figures.  My glance went from the dimness to the light, fell on the congregation, travelled from the faithful to the nuns, and from the nuns to the altar without any thought consciously crossing my mind. Then, for no particular reason, I fixed my eyes on the second candle on the left-hand side of the cross.

It was at this moment that, suddenly, the series of extraordinary events was set in motion whose extreme violence was about to dismantle the absurd creature that I had been until that moment and give birth to the dazzled child I had never been. First, were the words: spiritual life.  They were not said to me nor did I form them in my mind; it was as though they were being spoken by someone close to me who was seeing something which I had not yet seen.

The last syllable had hardly brushed my conscious mind when an avalanche descended upon me. I am not saying that the heavens opened; they didn’t open - they were hurled at me, they rose suddenly flashing silently from the depths of this innocent chapel in which they were mysteriously present.

How can I describe what took place in words which refuse to carry the sense, which indeed do worse, for they threaten to intercept what I have to say and in doing so to relegate my meaning to the land of fancy?  Were a painter to be given the gift of seeing colours that are unknown to man what would he use to paint them with?

What can I say to describe that which I apprehended? It was an indestructible crystal, totally transparent, luminous (to such a degree that any further intensity would have destroyed me), with a colour near to blue; a different world, whose brilliance and density made our world seem like the wraith of an unfulfilled dream. What I saw was reality; this was truth and I was seeing it from the dim shore on which I still stood. Now I knew that there is order in the universe and at its beginning, beyond the shining mists, the manifestation of God: a manifestation which is a presence, which is a person, the person whose existence I should have denied a moment ago, the presence of him whom the Christians call Our Father. And I knew that he was gentle, that his gentleness was unparalleled and that his was not the passive quality that is sometimes called by the name of gentleness, but an active shattering gentleness, far outstripping violence, able to smash the hardest stone and to smash something often harder than stone, the human heart.

This surging, overwhelming invasion brought with it a sense of joy comparable to that of a drowning man who is rescued at the last moment, but with this difference that it was at the moment in which I was being hauled to safety that I became aware of the mud in which, without noticing it, I had till then been stuck; and now I wondered how I had ever been able to breathe and to live in it.”

To read more of Frossard’s account of his conversion, visit: http://www.faceup.co.za/Frossard

If you believe that God has stopped calling men to the priesthood, check this link out.

 

 

Did You Know This?

Lady birds are called lady birds because they have seven spots (or the most common ones do) and that was seen by out Catholic ancestors as a symbol of Our Lady's seven sorrows and seven joys.

The parallel does not end with the spots. Lady birds are very efficient destroyers of aphids. Aphids sap the strength and turn ugly beautiful things like roses. Our Blessed Lady is a powerful ally in the destruction of Modernists, who like the aphids spend their time sapping the strength and turning ugly beautiful things like the bride of Christ, the Church.

The Seven Sorrows of Our Lady	The Seven Joys of Our Lady
The Prophecy of Simeon. (Luke 2:34-35) or the Circumcision of Christ The Flight into Egypt. (Matthew 2:13) The loss of the child Jesus in the Temple. (Luke 2:43-45) Mary meets Jesus on the way to Calvary. Jesus dies on the cross. (John 19:25) Mary receives the body of Jesus in her arms. (Matthew 27:57-59) The body of Jesus is placed in the tomb. (John 19:40-42)	The Annunciation The Nativity of Jesus The Adoration of the Magi The Resurrection of Christ The Ascension of Christ to Heaven The Pentecost or Descent of the Holy Spirit upon the Apostles and Mary The Coronation of the Virgin in Heaven [1][2]

On the Lighter Side

High Tech Jesus

I asked Isabelle (aged 8) if she knew why the red light glowed in the sanctuary. 

“No” she responded.

“It is to tell us that Jesus is in the tabernacle,” I explained.

“Does it go on automatically when He goes in there?” she inquired

 

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