Some interesting information for the parishioners of the OLVC

Is the Vatican using Jiu-Jitsu on the SSPX?

“ I myself saw, in the years after 1988, how the return of communities which had been separated from Rome changed their interior attitudes; I saw how returning to the bigger and broader Church enabled them to move beyond one-sided positions and broke down rigidity so that positive energies could emerge for the whole.” – Benedict XVI’s 2009 Letter to World’s on the “Remission” of SSPX “Excommunications”

By John Vennari

Jiu-Jitsu is a form of Martial Arts where you use your opponent’s strengths against him. I cannot help but wonder whether this is the tactic used by today’s Vatican against the Society of St. Pius X.

What is the strength of the Traditional if not a desire to be obedient; love of the papacy; filial piety; good order, and the longing to be instrumental in helping to bring an end to today’s unprecedented crisis of Faith.

We now hear unofficially – that is, not directly from Pope Benedict himself – that for “regularization,” the SSPX will not be required to accept the and the New . We hear the Pope is ready to grant this because he wants the SSPX to help him correct the crisis in the Church.

Indeed, as I have said in the past: if it is true the SSPX does not have to accept the Council, this could be a real game-changer. It could mark the effective end of Vatican II. For it is impossible that one group of Catholics in the world could be considered “exempt” from embracing the Council, and other Catholics are still bound to accept it.

It is for this reason, however, that I believe we will never see Pope Benedict XVI give a written guarantee that the SSPX does not have to accept the Council. And if such guarantees are not carved in stone, publicly for all to see, then any agreement is fraught with peril.

None of us can predict the future, and I will be happy if proven wrong. But if I were a betting man, I would place my little stack on Benedict protecting Vatican II to the end.

We also hear rumors that Pope Benedict has somehow changed, that he is more traditional than he was in the past.

I was privileged to study philosophy with Dr. Raphael Waters, one of the top Thomists in . It was he who insisted that, in the realm of philosophy, the argument from authority is always the weakest. Evidence alone matters.

I cannot help but apply this same dictum to the rumor that Benedict has become more traditional. Maybe it’s true, but since “the mode of acting follows the mode of being,” the recent actions of Pope Benedict lead us to believe there is not much change.

First of all, we have heard this type of claim in the past, as far back as 1988.

This is not intended to pick on any one group, but I well remember going to see one of the first Fraternity of St. Peter give a lecture in the summer of 1988 in North Jersey. He was full of high praise for Cardinal Ratzinger. When someone from the audience brought up Cardinal Ratzinger’s modernism, the froze the audience with a stare and said haughtily, “Well, you don’t know the new Cardinal Ratzinger!” As time proved, there wasn’t much new.

As for Pope Benedict: we will look at what he has said in the past, which indicates his mindset his entire career, and then look at recent actions to see if we note any considerable change.

Consistent Progressivism

Before I start with my observations, I would urge the to resist an emotional response. When I point out these simple facts, I’ve seen people go shrieking into the snowbanks, “You’re attacking the Pope,” or “You’re flirting with .”

None of what I say is an attack. I simply lay out the facts without emotion. Further, I have never even been tempted toward the sedevacantist position. I see sedevacantism as a kind of despair that ends up asking more questions than it answers.

Cardinal Ratzinger published some shocking statements in his 1986 work, Principles of Catholic Theology, a book I would never use to teach the Catholic Faith. This is not the only book that contains disturbing passages from the Cardinal, but it will suffice for the sake of examples.

On page 202, Cardinal Ratzinger says, “The Catholic does not insist on the dissolution of the Protestant confession and the demolition of their churches, but hopes rather that they will be strengthened in their confessions and in their ecclesial reality”. The obvious conclusion: the writer hopes that Protestants will become strong and cling even more tightly to heretical creeds solemnly anathematized by the infallible .

On page 381, Cardinal Ratzinger writes, “[] as a whole, we might say that (in conjunction with the texts on religious liberty and world religions) it is a revision of the Syllabus of Pius IX, a kind of countersyllabus ... Let us be content to say here that the text serves as a countersyllabus and, as such, represents on the part of the Church, an attempt at an official reconciliation with the new era inaugurated in 1789. …”

He speaks of the “one-sidedness of the position adopted by the Church under Pius IX and Pius X” and claims the Syllabus represents “an obsolete Church-state relationship.”

In other the words, the writer is calling two of the greatest in Church history “one-sided” in their efforts to protect the Church from the errors of and modernism. The Cardinal goes on to celebrate that Vatican II made an “attempt” to “correct” and “counter” the teaching of Blessed Pope Pius IX and Pope Saint Pius X, and to reconcile Herself instead with the Masonic French Revolution and the Enlightenment.

On page 191 of the same book, we read, “There can be no return to the Syllabus” of Blessed Pope Pius IX. This can only please Freemasons who have worked to overthrow the great Syllabus since it first appeared in 1864

The fact that he recognizes Vatican II as a countersyllabus demonstrates the Council as a rupture with the past. Any talk of the Council being understood within a “hermeneutic of continuity” is not realistic.

Cardinal Ratzinger says on page 334, “The impetus given by Teilhard de Chardin exerted a wide influence. With daring vision, it incorporated the historical movement of Christianity into the great cosmic process of evolution.”

Teilhard was a pantheist and evolutionist, and was admired and defended by Ratzinger’s mentor, Father Henri de Lubac. The Cardinal goes on to rejoice that this Teilhardian evolutionary influence was particularly evident in the Council document, Gaudium et spes.

“We can not resist them too firmly”

Of traditional Catholics who oppose Vatican II, Cardinal Ratzinger says on page 389: “Was the Council a wrong road that we must now retrace if we are to save the Church? The voices of those who say that it is are becoming louder and their followers more numerous. Among the more obvious phenomena of the last years must be counted the increasing number of integralist [traditionalist] groups in which the desire for piety, for the sense of the mystery, is finding satisfaction. We must be on our guard against minimizing these movements. Without a doubt, they represent a sectarian zealotry that is the antithesis of Catholicity. We can not resist them too firmly.”

We see similar sentiments on the same point from Cardinal Ratzinger - now Benedict XVI – only three years ago.

On March 10, 2009, writing to the world’s bishops about the lifting of the alleged “excommunication” of the SSPX, Pope Benedict reveals what he regards as positive elements to “regularization” of Traditional groups; they tend to soften their stand:

“I myself saw, in the years after 1988, how the return of communities which had been separated from Rome changed their interior attitudes; I saw how returning to the bigger and broader Church enabled them to move beyond one-sided positions and broke down rigidity so that positive energies could emerge for the whole.”

Wait a minute. Did we not hear Cardinal Ratzinger use the term “one-sidedness” before?

Yes, it was in his denunciation of Pius IX and his 1864 , the “one-sidedness of the position adopted by the Church under Pius IX and Pius X”.

It is the same terminology we heard from him in his 1986 Principles of Catholic Theology.

And what do the traditional groups – especially the Society of St. Pius X – represent but fierce adhesion to the teaching of Popes Pius IX and Pius X?

On this point, I wish to recount that I had gone to the office in 1994. I was then with a group that wanted to learn first-hand what “regularization” entailed. The priest at the Ecclesia Dei office boasted with pride that the newly “regularized” Society of Saint Vincent Ferrer was “now writing articles defending Vatican II’s religious liberty.”

Likewise the monks at Le Barroux, not long after their “regularization,” began producing works defending the Council’s religious liberty, and even defending the New Catechism.

So when Pope Benedict recently celebrates that “regularized” groups “change their interior attitudes”, and “break down their rigidity” and “move beyond one-sidedness”, I can’t see any other way to interpret this than his delight that once-traditional orders now defend the very points about the Council they opposed prior to “regularization”.

Synagogues and Assisi

In 2007 Pope Benedict made the important step of admitting the was never forbidden. But in 2008, Pope Benedict shocked the Traditional Catholic world by changing the Tridentine Mass’ Good Friday Prayer for the Jews.

On page 106 of his 2010 book Light of the World, Benedict himself admits the change was enacted because it was offensive to Jews, and because the prayer, he claimed, was theologically inaccurate.

When the interviewer asks Benedict why in February 2008 he changed the Old Good Friday prayer, he answered:

“…in the old liturgy this point seemed to me to require a modification. The old formulation really was offensive to Jews and failed to express the positively overall intrinsic unity between the Old and New Testaments. I believed that a modification of this passage of the old liturgy was necessary, especially, as I have already said, out of consideration for our relation with our Jewish friends. I altered the text in such a way as to express our faith that Christ is the Savior for all, that there are not two channels of salvation, so that Christ is also the redeemer of the Jews, and not just of the Gentiles. But the new formulation also shifts the focus from a direct petition for the conversion of the Jews in a missionary sense to a plea that the Lord might bring about the hour in history when we may all be united.”

Nowhere do we see in his new formula a prayer for the Jews’ conversion (I detailed this and more in my April 2011 article, “Common Mission and ‘Significant Silence’”)

Pope Benedict has also made a point to visit synagogues.

Whereas John Paul II visited one synagogue during 26 years as Pope, Benedict visited three synagogues in the space of 6 years. On his last visit to the Rome Synagogue in January 2010, Rabbi David Rosen exulted that “Pope Benedict has institutionalized revolution.”

Then we come to the latest meeting of Assisi, October, 2011.Here Pope Benedict called the leaders of the world religions together for the cause of peace. I attended the event. In the Basilica of Saint Mary’s of the Holy Angels, the fourth most venerated shrine in the Catholic world, Wanda Abimbola was allowed to invoke the god and goddesses of the Yaruba religion from inside the Church’s sanctuary. A Hindu also invoked his own version of god “I see you in each hand and in each foot… I bow down to you in all them,” The Hindu went on to announce the relativist principle that “the truth is one,” but “announced in different ways.”

These invocations took no one by surprise. They were printed in the full color booklet I received at the Press Office the day prior to the event.

The Assisi event gives visual expression to the greatest heresy of our time, that any religion is good enough for salvation. It is religious enfleshed.

One final point about Assisi. I was recently on a webradio talk show with Colleen Hammond, Louis Verrechio and others. Louis Verrechio is a true gentleman, is no sedevacantist, and is most respectful of Pope Benedict XVI.

Yet Assisi was so scandalous that he felt compelled to admit on the air: “Even prior to the meeting the Holy Father announced in the first general audience of 2011 his intentions to go to Assisi and to convene this third gathering ... And he said that the aim of this event was to invite peoples of many different religions, the ones that John just named, to gather with him ‘to solemnly renew the commitment of believers of every religion to live their own religious faith as a service to the cause of peace’.

“Now this is an indication of a couple of things to me,” continued Mr. Verrechio. “One, is how much we have to pray for our Holy Father, he is surrounded by enemies, he’s pulled in all sorts of different directions, and he needs our prayers for strength. But it’s an indication of how far we have fallen over the last two millennia, [especially] in the last four decades or so. It would have been absolutely unthinkable for a Roman Pontiff to suggest that non-Catholics do well to persist in their false religion for any reason, much less with the implication that doing so could possibly render a service to the cause of peace. And as John said, it is simply not a Catholic thought.”

Thus I would be perfectly happy to learn that Pope Benedict has secretly – very secretly – become more Traditional. But as Dr. Waters rightly said, “evidence alone matters.”

The Council

Add to these difficulties the opposition from most of the Curia and modern Catholics around the world to anything that would diminish Vatican II.

As noted last month, Cardinal Koch from the Vatican already stated publicly that all Catholics – SSPX included – are bound to accept the Council. Abraham Foxman, from the Anti-Defamation League, issued a May 31 press release criticizing Cardinal Brandmuller who suggested that Nostre Aetate, Vatican II’s Decree on the Jews, is not a binding document, and praising Cardinal Koch for his claim that Catholics are bound to accept all of the Council, Nostre Aetate included.

Jewish groups such as the ADL do not want to see the SSPX “regularized”. As I reported two months ago in CFN, a local rabbi told a Buffalo reporter that he and his fellow rabbis are nervous about a possible “regularization” of the SSPX. They fear it may end up with the Vatican returning to the Traditional Catholic doctrine that the Old Covenant is superseded by the New. It seems these Rabbis have a better grasp of some of the issues at stake than do many traditional Catholics. There is little doubt the rabbis and Jewish groups are voicing their concerns to Rome.

SSPX and Diocesan Bishops

We will now touch upon the “shock heard round the world”.

Though nothing is yet finalized, it appears Rome insists a “regularized” SSPX can not set up new foundations without the permission of the local .

In his recent DICI interview of June 8, discussing the Personal Prelature offered by Rome, Bishop said, “However, and let us say this clearly, if a personal prelature were granted to us, our situation would not be the same [as the Opus Dei]. In order to understand better what would happen, we must reflect that our status would be much more similar to that of a military ordinariate, because we would have ordinary jurisdiction over the faithful. Thus we would be like a sort of diocese, the jurisdiction of which extends to all its faithful regardless of their territorial situation. All the chapels, churches, priories, schools, and works of the Society and of the affiliated religious congregations would be recognized with a real autonomy for their ministry. It is still true — since it is Church law — that in order to open a new chapel or to found a work, it would be necessary to have the permission of the local ordinary. We have quite obviously reported to Rome how difficult our present situation was in the dioceses, and Rome is still working on it. Here or there, this difficulty will be real, but since when is life without difficulties?”

SSPX Bishop Tissier de Mallerais takes a dim view of this proposal. In a June 1 interview with the French journal Rivarol, Bishop Tissier said, “According to the project of prelature, we would not be free to create new priories without the permission of the local bishops and, additionally, all our recent foundations would have to be confirmed by these same bishops. It would thus mean subjugating us quite unnecessarily to an overall Modernist episcopate.”

Finally, on the doctrinal level, it appears nothing is signed, nothing is yet public, nothing is carved in stone.

On June 13, a meeting was held between Bishop Fellay and the Vatican’s Cardinal Levada. Reports indicate there is still no agreement on the doctrinal preamble.

A press release from Menzingan the following day said Bishop Fellay “spelled out the doctrinal difficulties posed by the Second Vatican Council and the Novus Ordo Missae” to Cardinal Levada. “The desire for additional clarifications could result in a new phase of discussions.”

Also on June 14, for what it’s worth, Le Figaro reported that Bishop Fellay returned from the Vatican “with a Rome dossier that is heavier than what had been foreseen.”

Cardinal Joachim Meisner of Cologne recently said he could imagine a good working relationship between the Church and the Society of St. Pius X, although there was “still a long way to go.”

The General Chapter

From July 1 to 14, the Society of St. Pius X will hold its General Chapter where these issues will be discussed. It is common knowledge that not everyone in the SSPX thinks regularization at this time is a good move. As is now public news, Bishop Williamson, Bishop Tissier de Mallerais and Bishop de Galarreta collectively voiced their concerns against it to Bishop Fellay.

On May 1, 2005, twelve days after the election of Pope Benedict XVI, in a speech I gave about the new Pope, I made the observation: “I believe he [Benedict XVI] has the potential to split the traditionalist camp right in half, and to split traditionalist groups right in half, because so many are enamored with those good things he has said about the Mass.”

I also said at the time what I believe to be still the case today: Pope Benedict XVI is first and foremost a man of Vatican II.

Thus we should redouble our prayers for a happy outcome of the upcoming General Chapter. My own prayers for the SSPX — now and during the crucial meeting in July — is that they will approach this latest overture from Rome with caution, caution and more caution.

--- The Post-Conciliar Church... A New Religion? [Featured in the Q&A section of the April 2003 issue of The Angelus]

Q: Is it possible to say that the post-Conciliar Church is a new religion, and if so, how can it be considered as Catholic?

A: The answer to this question is found in the final declaration of the International Symposium of Theology organized by the Society of St. Pius X and attended by 62 traditional Catholic theologians in Paris in October 2002. The purpose of the statement was to put together a synthesis of the teaching of Vatican II, and to clarify the main principles upon which it differs from the teaching of the . These broad lines can be helpful for us in interpreting the documents of the post-Conciliar Church, and refuting its errors. They demonstrate beyond all doubt that Archbishop Lefebvre was right when he affirmed that the spirit of Vatican II is not just an abuse of some liberal theologians and bishops, but that it is contained in the very texts of the Council itself. If the liberals continually refer to the texts of Vatican II, it is because from these texts themselves emanates, under the sweet appearance of kindness and dialogue, the stench of naturalism, of the corruption of the Faith.

The theologians affirmed that there are eight main, fundamental attitudes that underlie all the post- Conciliar changes, which eight philosophical principles masquerading as religion make of Vatican II the introduction of a new religion, all within the exterior structure, hierarchy, language and ceremonies of the . Allow me to list them for you.

1) Novelty

There is no attempt to hide the desire for newness, that is of a new and different religion, despite the assertion that the Faith has not changed. A transformation is required "too on the religious level," following the "real social and cultural transformation" of our "new age of history" (Gaudium et Spes, §4). Hence the need for an , bringing religion up to date with our times. One of the great means for bringing about this novelty, whilst appearing to profess the same doctrines, is the teaching "that in Catholic doctrine there exists an order or ‘hierarchy’ of truths" (, §11). It is consequently possible, they say, to hold on to only the most fundamental truths, discarding or putting the others aside. This is the basis of the novelty of and dialogue, which is truly a new religion, for it requires Catholics to accept the beliefs of other believers.

2) The Overturning of Ends

The heart of our holy religion is man’s vocation to "praise, reverence and serve God," as the catechism teaches us. Not so for Vatican II. Man is no longer ordered to God, but to man. It is the service of man rather than the service of God which is its final end; "it is man, therefore, who is the key to this discussion" (GS, §3), for "man is the only creature on earth that God has wanted for its own sake" (ibid., §24), and so consequently the purpose of religion is for man to "fully discover his true self" (ibid.). How could it be any differently, since the very same document on the Church and the Modern World declares that: "Believers and unbelievers agree almost unanimously that all things on earth should be ordained to man as to their center and summit" (§12). The dignity of the human person has been so far inflated as to deny the obvious fact that man is entirely ordered to the greater honor and glory of Almighty God. This is the basis of the new religion of man proclaimed by Paul VI on December 7, 1965, during his discourse for the closing of Vatican II: "We more than anyone else practice the worship of man."

3) "Conscience" Is the Source of Religion

No longer must the Catholic make an act of Faith, based upon the authority of God who reveals, who can neither deceive nor be deceived. The deliberate elimination of this concept from the Vatican II document on Divine Revelation () is not accidental. Tradition is no longer a separate source of Revelation, handing down an unchanging, objective content, but is now a "life-giving presence," "the intimate sense of spiritual realities which they (i.e., believers) experience" (ibid. §8), and thus it "makes progress in the Church" and consequently "the Church is always advancing towards the plenitude of divine truth." Such an evolving and changing concept of Tradition would not be possible unless religious truth, like right and wrong itself, were to find it source in the personal conscience of each man. This is the clear presupposition of the document on religious liberty, , as Archbishop Lefebvre himself pointed out (cf. They Have Uncrowned Him, p.172). Examples of statements to this effect are that "truth can impose itself on the mind of man only in virtue of its own truth" (Dignitatis Humanae, §2), which forbids any authoritative teaching by the Church or its representatives, or any exclusive promotion of objective truth by a Catholic state. Conscience must discover its own truth internally. Likewise the statement that "it is through his conscience that man sees and recognizes the demands of the divine law" (ibid., §3). Truly it is a new religion that substitutes personal conscience for the teaching of the Magisterium.

4) The Liturgy is a Celebration

A memorial is celebrated, whereas a sacrifice is offered. The celebration of the community, otherwise called the memorial of the Last Supper, has taken the place of the sacrifice of the Cross in post-Conciliar theology. Consequently it is the congregation of the people that is the principal agent for the celebration in the new rite, no longer simply participating or cooperating in the priest’s sacrifice. If the ministerial priesthood is indeed distinguished from the priesthood of the faithful, in practice its functions are absorbed into those of the general priesthood of the faithful, whom they simply represent in a celebration. Hence such statements as this, concerning those who have been "incorporated into the Church by baptism": "The sacred nature and organic structure of the priestly community is brought into operation through the and the exercise of virtues" (, §11). Consequently, if the New Mass is the expression of a new religion, it is because it obliterates the true, sacrificial function of the hierarchical priesthood, submerging it as a part of a community celebration.

5) The Church has Become a ""

The revolutionary definition with which the document on the Church, Lumen Gentium, begins is the key to the undermining of the whole supernatural order. Instead of the traditional definition of Church as the "congregation of all baptized persons united in the same true faith, the same sacrifice, and the same sacraments, under the authority of the Sovereign Pontiff" is substituted a whole new definition that "the Church …is in the nature of a sacrament —a sign and instrument, that is, of communion with God and of unity among all men" (§1). The Church is consequently only a sign or a means of salvation, and is no longer the only Ark of Salvation. Hence it is no longer considered as being identical to the visible Roman Catholic Church, but extends as far as all humanity, without which it could not be a sign of unity among all men. This is the meaning of the statements that the Church of Christ "subsists in the Catholic Church" (ibid., §8) and that "many elements of sanctification and truth are found outside its visible confines" (ibid.). According to these principles, the Catholic Church can no longer maintain the unique privilege of her divine constitution and mission. It is a sign of a new religion that all that the post-Conciliar Church can ask for is freedom, and not for the recognition of the truth, nor for the commandments of God, nor for her divine mission to teach, govern, and sanctify. This is explicitly stated in Vatican II’s message to the world’s governments of December 8, 1965: "She [the Church] only asks you for freedom."

6) "Humanity" Coincides with the Kingdom of God

This is a direct consequence of the distinction that is made between the Church of Christ and the Catholic Church. The Church of Christ is the sign of the unity of all mankind because of what it symbolizes: "It shows to the world that social and exterior union comes from a union of hearts and minds" (GS, §42). However, it is manifestly not a supernatural union of grace which is here symbolized. It would not make any sense, for such a union can only be brought about inside and through the Catholic Church. The social and exterior union that is aimed at has nothing to do with the supernatural union of grace, but is "the good to be found in the social dynamism of today, particularly progress towards unity, healthy socialization and civil and economic cooperation" (ibid.). Such is the new universality of a Church whose function has become the promotion of human values, all founded on the rights of man, and falsely based upon the Gospel: "In virtue of the Gospel entrusted to it the Church proclaims the rights of man: she acknowledges and holds in high esteem the dynamic approach of today which is fostering these rights all over the world" (ibid. §41). Amongst other things, this new concept of the Church’s role with respect to humanity is a denial of the Social Kingship of Christ, and an official approval of the secularization of states. The new mission to promote the "union of the family of man" (ibid. §42), i.e., One World Order, is another aspect of a new religion.

7) The Spiritual Unity of Mankind

A direct consequence of the identification of mankind and the kingdom of God, it is presented in the form of different degrees of Communion or belonging to the Church. Despite the "differences that exist in varying degrees," concerning doctrine, discipline, or the structure of the Church, the decree on Ecumenism declares of non-Catholics: "Men who believe in Christ and have been properly baptized are put in some, though imperfect, communion with the Catholic Church" (UG, §3). The immediate consequences are:

the Church’s repentance "ceaselessly renewing and purifying herself" (GS, §21) for its own past faults (and not just for those of its members), and that conversion is no longer to be imposed on non-Catholics, baptized or not, because all Christians are already united to Christ through baptism, as is stated by the Decree on the Church: "these Christians are indeed in some real way joined to us in the Holy Spirit" (LG, §15), and non-Christians are ordered towards the people of God, for "those who have not yet received the Gospel are related to the People of God in various ways" (ibid., §16) and they possess in their religion the "seeds of the word" (, §11).

This practical denial of the doctrine "Outside the Church no salvation" is also one of the key elements of a new religion, and changes the whole way that Catholics see themselves and their Faith.

8) Salvation

There is an explanation of the supposed unity of the human race. It is the teaching on salvation contained in the document on the Church and the modern world, Gaudium et Spes, in the infamous §22 that proclaims the new humanism. The thesis is that by His Incarnation God saved every human being, uniting every man to Himself by taking our human nature: "For, by his incarnation, he, the son of God, has in a certain way united himself with each man." No longer is there any need for faith, the keeping of the commandments, or for love of the Cross to be united with God. Vatican II claims that by taking our human nature Christ "fully reveals man to himself" so "that the mystery of man truly becomes clear." The role of the Incarnation is consequently purely natural. It supposedly saves man by showing himself what it is to be a man. Man’s natural knowing of his human nature is substituted for eternal salvation. One is reminded of the words of Our Lord: "For what does it profit a man if he gain the whole world, but suffer the loss of his soul" (Mt. 16:26). Here the substitution of a new religion is absolutely radical. In such an optic-salvation has nothing to do with being saved from original or actual sin or being delivered from the everlasting punishments that we have merited. It is simply an awareness of what it is to be a man.

Conclusion

It consequently cannot be denied that Vatican II attempts to constitute a new religion in radical rupture with all of Catholic Tradition and teaching, a new religion whose principal purpose is to exalt the natural dignity of the human person and to bring about a "religious" unity of mankind. However, the subtle cleverness of this operation must also be noted. It is the traditional hierarchical structure of the Church, its Mass, its devotions and prayers, its catechisms and teachings, and now even its Rosary that have all been infiltrated with the principles of the new religion. This new religion has been swallowed down unwittingly by many Catholics precisely because it hides, as a caricature, behind the outward appearance of Catholicism. The end result is a strange mixture of Catholicism and the new religion.

This is the reason for which we have every right to condemn the post-Conciliar revolution for the new religion that it is, while at the same time we must respect the offices and functions of those who hold positions in the Church. Likewise, we must admit that many Catholics in good faith still retain the true Faith in their hearts, believing on the authority of God, Who reveals divine truth through the Catholic Church, although it is often tainted to varying degrees by the principles of the new religion. Consequently, it does not at all follow from the fact that the Vatican II religion is truly a new religion, that we should maintain that we are the only Catholics left, that the bishops and the pope have necessarily lost the Faith, and that we must not pray for them or respect their position in the Church. This false assertion of the sedevacantists is much too simple, and does not account for the complicated mixture of the new religion and the elements of Catholic Faith and life that is the reality that is actually happening in the Novus Ordo. Our duty is not to condemn and excommunicate, but to help Catholics of good faith in the modern Church to make the necessary discernment, in order to totally abandon the new religion, embrace Tradition, and remain Catholic. Such must be the goal of our conversations on the subject. [Answered by Fr. Peter Scott]