The tragedy of Charlie Gard, which was discussed several weeks ago in Finding Nuance Where There Is No Nuance to be Found, has not ended with his court-ordered execution that snuffed out his young life on Friday, July 28, 2017, the Feast of Saints Nazarius, Celsus, Victor, and Innocent.
Sadly, there are many aspects of this tragedy that serve as very painful reminders that were are living through a time in salvation history in which what appears to be the Catholic Church seeks to make "complex" what a mere pagan, Hippocrates, understood was simple. That is, physicians have a moral obligation to "do no harm," which means that one whose profession is to save lives and to treat the sick must never do anything directly to kill an innocent human being.
The lords of the counterfeit church of conciliarism, however, must find "nuance" and "complexity" where none exist. This is very ironic when one considers the simple fact that these apostates find nothing nuanced or complex about their crusade to "save the planet" or to advance a Marxist view of politics and economics. They are moral absolutists when it comes to "climate change" and "economic justice." Ah, but they are moral relativists and equivocators of the first order when it comes to the bindng precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law, and this is why the conciliar "bishops" of England and Wales issued a statement that actually praised the merchants of death at Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) for the "professionalism" in the care of "severely ill children" despite the fact that its officials consistently sought to kill off Charlie Gard:
(Vatican Radio) The parents of terminally-ill British baby Charlie Gard have ended their legal battle to take him from London to the U.S. for experimental treatment. The decision was announced on Monday after scans confirmed the 11 month old child had suffered from irreversible brain damage.
Following the decision, a spokesperson for the Catholic Bishops Conference of England and Wales expressed deepest sympathy and prayers for the family.
In a statement, the bishops said “at this moment it is important to remember that all involved in these agonising decisions have sought to act with integrity and for Charlie’s good as they see it”.
Pope's heart touched by tragedy
Calling for Charlie’s parents to be given support and space “to find peace in the days ahead”, the bishops said: “Their farewell to their tiny and precious baby touches the hearts of all who, like Pope Francis, have followed this sad and complex story. Charlie’s life will be lovingly cherished until its natural end”.
Praise for Great Ormond Street Hospital
The bishops added that “the professionalism, love and care for severely ill children consistently shown at the Great Ormond Street Hospital is also to be recognised and applauded”.
The Gard family’s lawyer said that Charlie’s father and mother would hold talks with doctors at the hospital about how to end the baby’s life- support treatment. Charlie was born with a rare genetic condition called mitochondrial depletion syndrome, which causes progressive muscle weakness and brain damage. (English and Welsh Apostates Praise Those Who Sought to Kill Off Charlie Gard.)
Before offering a few comments on this piece of moral equivocation, perhaps it is best to contrast praise offered by the conciliar "bishops" of England and Wales about the "professionalism" of those who run The Great Ormond Street Hospital with a Lifesite.com report that summarizes the hospital's relentless efforts to deny Charlie Gard's parents their basic Natural Law right to care for their child:
LONDON, England, July 27, 2017 (LifeSiteNews) – Charlie Gard's last hours will be spent in a hospice, not at his parents' home, a judge decided today.
For months, Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) argued in court that its staff, rather than Charlie's parents, be allowed to decide his fate. Charlie, who is 11 months old, has a rare mitochondrial disease and is breathing with the help of a ventilator.
After Charlie's parents, Chris Gard and Connie Yates, eventually ended their legal battle to save their son's life because the hospital didn't treat him soon enough, the hospital refused to allow them to take Charlie home to die.
The court gave Chris and Connie until 12:00 p.m. on July 27 to set up their home to the hospital's liking. This was difficult to do given the need for various medical equipment and the hospital's insistence that it was against Charlie's interests to go home.
The ruling of Mr. Justice Francis today indicates that Charlie will be sent to a hospice to have his life support removed. His order doesn't specify how soon Charlie will go into the hospice or which hospice it will be, noting these details are set out in a "Confidential Annexe" to the order.
Chris and Connie have expressed their desire to spend more time with Charlie. The hospital wants his breathing tube removed within hours of hospice entry.
Charlie was baptized and his parents "trust that soon" he "will be in the hands of his loving God and savior," a Presbyterian minister working with them said. (The "Professionalism" of The Great Ormond Street Hospital".)
So much for the "professionalism" of The Great Ormond Street Hospital that was praised by the conciliar "bishops" of England and Wales. As was the case with the late Mrs. Theresa Maria Schindler-Schiavo, the officials of The Great Ormond Street Hospital used one delaying tactic after another to prevent Charlie Gard from receiving the sort of care and treatment that could have proven effective. Efforts by Charlie's parents to bring him to the United States of America for experimental treatments were deemed by the hospital's officials and by judges to be a "cruel" prolongation of his life. Thus it is that Charlie Gard was subjected to a cruel death by asphyxiation after the court overseeing his case had assigned an advocate of euthanasia to serve as his legal representative and after his own parents were denied the courtesy of bringing him home to die his court-ordered death.
Yes, this is what the conciliar "bishops" of England and Wales found worthy of such praise.
As noted in Finding Nuance Where There Is No Nuance to be Found nearly three weeks ago now, the lords of conciliarism have accepted every premise of the anti-life forces that have pushed the "quality of life" rationale as the moral justification for dispatching living human beings under various false pretexts, including "brain death," vital organ "donation" and the use of hospices as the instruments for putting chronically or terminally ill human beings on a "pathway" to their own execution under cover of the civil law (see Chronicling the Adversary's Global Takeover of the Healthcare Industry). It is now considered "extraordinary" to provide an innocent child with the basic care that he needs while praising those who seek to remove what is "extrordinary" for their "concern" for his well-being and "quality of life."
Moreover, we are fast approaching the day when child killing after birth will receive the sanction of the civil law in more and more supposedly "civilized" countries of the "free" West. This is not preposterous. Indeed, child-killing after birth is just the logical extension of contraception's overthrow of the Sovereignty of God over the sanctity and fecundity of marriage and thus of the dehumanization of the preborn child by means of abortion, which is why a supposed professor of biology at the University of Chicago could be so bold as to push for child-killing after birth of the sort that ended Charlie Gard's life:
The question of whether one should be able to euthanize newborns who have horrible conditions or deformities, or are doomed to a life that cannot by any reasonable light afford happiness, has sparked heated debate. Philosopher Peter Singer has argued that euthanasia is the merciful action in such cases, and I agree with him. If you are allowed to abort a fetus that has a severe genetic defect, microcephaly, spina bifida, or so on, then why aren’t you able to euthanize that same fetus just after it’s born? I see no substantive difference that would make the former act moral and the latter immoral. After all, newborn babies aren’t aware of death, aren’t nearly as sentient as an older child or adult, and have no rational faculties to make judgments (and if there’s severe mental disability, would never develop such faculties). It makes little sense to keep alive a suffering child who is doomed to die or suffer life in a vegetative or horribly painful state. After all, doctors and parents face no legal penalty for simply withdrawing care from such newborns, like turning off a respirator, but Singer suggests that we should be allowed, with the parents’ and doctors’ consent, to painlessly end their life with an injection. I agree.
This is one area in which philosophy has a big contribution to make (and science can play an ancillary role, telling us the likelihood that a child will survive such conditions). Peter Singer’s utilitarian views on the issue can be seen in a 2005 op-ed at the Los Angeles Times, “Pulling back the curtain on the mercy killing of newborns“. This is apparently already allowed in the Netherlands. As Singer wrote:
In Thursday’s New England Journal of Medicine, two doctors from the University Medical Center Groningen in the Netherlands outline the circumstances in which doctors in their hospital have, in 22 cases over seven years, carried out euthanasia on newborn infants. All of these cases were reported to a district attorney’s office in the Netherlands. None of the doctors were prosecuted.
Eduard Verhagen and Pieter Sauer divide into three groups the newborns for whom decisions about ending life might be made.
The first consists of infants who would die soon after birth even if all existing medical resources were employed to prolong their lives.
In the second group are infants who require intensive care, such as a respirator, to keep them alive, and for whom the expectations regarding their future are “very grim.” These are infants with severe brain damage. If they can survive beyond intensive care, they will still have a very poor quality of life.
The third group includes infants with a “hopeless prognosis” and who also are victims of “unbearable suffering.” For example, in the third group was “a child with the most serious form of spina bifida,” the failure of the spinal cord to form and close properly. Yet infants in group three may no longer be dependent on intensive care.
It is this third group that creates the controversy because their lives cannot be ended simply by withdrawing intensive care. Instead, at the University Medical Center Groningen, if suffering cannot be relieved and no improvement can be expected, the physicians will discuss with the parents whether this is a case in which death “would be more humane than continued life.” If the parents agree that this is the case, and the team of physicians also agrees — as well as an independent physician not otherwise associated with the patient — the infant’s life may be ended.
. . . One thing is undisputed: Infants with severe problems are allowed to die in the U.S. These are infants in the first two of the three groups identified by Verhagen and Sauer. Some of them — those in the second group — can live for many years if intensive care is continued. Nevertheless, U.S. doctors, usually in consultation with parents, make decisions to withdraw intensive care. This happens openly, in Catholic as well as non-Catholic hospitals.
. . .I believe the Groningen protocol to be based on the sound ethical perception that the means by which death occurs is less significant, ethically, than the decision that it is better that an infant’s life should end. If it is sometimes acceptable to end the lives of infants in group two — and virtually no one denies this — then it is also sometimes acceptable to end the lives of infants in group three.
For these views Singer has been demonized by disability rights advocates, who have called for his firing and disrupted his talks (see my post about that here). All for just raising a reasonable ethical question that should be considered and discussed! After all, fifty years ago the same kind of opprobrium would have been leveled at those calling for voluntary euthanasia (assisted suicide) of terminally ill adults, but now that’s legal in several places in the world; as Wikipedia notes, “As of June 2016, human euthanasia is legal in the Netherlands, Belgium, Colombia, and Luxembourg. Assisted suicide is legal in Switzerland, Germany, Japan, Canada, and in the US states of Washington, Oregon, Colorado, Vermont, Montana, Washington DC, and California.” (I’ve heard from several doctors that humane euthanasia of adults is in fact practiced in the US: doctors will give patients an overdose of morphine to ease their suffering, knowing it will kill them.)
This change in views about euthanasia and assisted suicide are the result of a tide of increasing morality in our world, a tide described and explained by Steve Pinker in his superb book The Better Angels of Our Nature (yes, it’s long, but you really must read it!). It’s time to add to the discussion the euthanasia of newborns, who have no ability or faculties to decide whether to end their lives. Although discussing the topic seems verboten now, I believe some day the practice will be widespread, and it will be for the better. After all, we euthanize our dogs and cats when to prolong their lives would be torture, so why not extend that to humans? Dogs and cats, like newborns, can’t make such a decision, and so their caregivers take the responsibility. (I have done this myself to a pet, as have many of you, and firmly believe it’s the right thing to do. Our pain at making such a decision is lessened knowing that dogs and cats, like newborns, don’t know about death and thus don’t fear it.)
The reason we don’t allow euthanasia of newborns is because humans are seen as special, and I think this comes from religion—in particular, the view that humans, unlike animals, are endowed with a soul. It’s the same mindset that, in many places, won’t allow abortion of fetuses that have severe deformities. When religion vanishes, as it will, so will much of the opposition to both adult and newborn euthanasia.
My view, then, aligns with Singer’s: a child falling in any of the classes above should be considered as a subject for euthanasia, and it should be legal if the doctors and parents concur. As for the “slippery slope” argument—that this will lead to Nazi-like eugenics—well, this hasn’t come to pass in places where assisted suicide or euthanasia of adults is legal. Since the newborn can’t decide, it’s up to the parents, with advice (and maybe consent) of the doctors.
The pain of these newborns, and of making these decisions, is evident in a piece in yesterday’s New York Times’ “The Stone” section (a philosophy column), provocatively called “You should not have let your baby die.” (What the author means is that “you should have killed your baby.”) It describes the situation of parents whose baby was born with “trisomy 18”: three rather than the normal two copies of chromosome 18. Trisomy 21, three copies of the smaller 21st chromosome, is what produces Down Syndrome. But unlike the Down case, trisomy 18, involving imbalance of a larger chromosome, produces a severe condition, with most children dying horrible deaths soon after birth. A few, though, can live into their 20s and 30s.
Therein lies the dilemma. Should you take that chance? The child described by author Gary Comstock, a philosophy professor at North Carolina State University, was in dire shape, forced to breathe on a respirator and unable to survive without one. The odds that that child could live in a decent state were nil. After agonizing over what to do, the parents decided to take the legal course of withdrawing care: removing the respirator. The child slowly suffocates. I want to put up the end of the column, as it shows the case for euthanasia of a newborn like this:
The nurse comes in, mute. You look at him, sleeping. He seems at peace. You nod your head. She gently pulls the tube. It slides out quickly, as though he were helping to expel it. Without his lifeline, he does not move. A minute later, his eyes open. It is the first time you have seen them. His head jerks slightly forward. He does not cry. He gasps silently for breath. His eyes close. You almost yell for the nurse, to beg her to put it back in. To keep from doing so, you pray, arguing with God that letting him die is best for him. After five minutes, his face pales, then turns a sickly purple. His tiny chest convulses irregularly in an unsuccessful attempt to draw air into the lungs. After 20 minutes, he lies still. His fingers turn gray.
Thirty minutes. There are no visible signs of life. You rock his limp body as tears fall on the blue blanket. You wonder what sort of beast you are. Forty-five minutes. Grandma looks in, ashen faced, seeing in a glance that it is over. Shortly your wife appears. She immediately takes her son’s body in her arms and coddles him. She sits there with him for three hours.
You should not have let your baby die. You should have killed him.
This thought occurs to you years later, thinking about the gruesome struggle of his last 20 minutes. You are not sure whether it makes sense to talk about his life, because he never seemed to have the things that make a life: thoughts, wants, desires, interests, memories, a future. But supposing that he had thoughts, his strongest thought during those last minutes certainly appeared to be: “This hurts. Can’t someone help it stop?” He didn’t know your name, but if he had, he would have said: “Daddy? Please. Now.”
It seems the medical community has few options to offer parents of newborns likely to die. We can leave our babies on respirators and hope for the best. Or remove the hose and watch the child die a tortured death. Shouldn’t we have another choice? Shouldn’t we be allowed the swift humane option afforded the owners of dogs, a lethal dose of a painkiller?
For years you repress the thought. Then, early one morning, remembering again those last minutes, you realize that the repugnant has become reasonable. The unthinkable has become the right, the good. Painlessly. Quickly. With the assistance of a trained physician.
You should have killed your baby.
Indeed, child-killing after birth and up to the age of eighteen was "legalized" in Belgium in 2014 without a word of protest from Jorge Mario Bergoglio, whose reaction to the Charlie Gard tragedy is purely affective, that is, emotional, and not based on a simple recognition that Charlie Gard's fate did not belong to the officials of The Great Ormond Street Hospital, the British courts or to the judges of the European Union. Everyone involved, including Chris Gard and Connie Yates, was bound to do nothing to kill off Charlie Gard as was done two days ago now.
As tragic as this is, and it is very tragic indeed, it should come as no surprise that the apostates of England and Wales who are thought to be Successors of the Apostles, having indemnified the undermining of parental rights by the officials of The Great Ormond Street Hospital and praised these heartless monsters who fought legal battle after legal battle to prevent Charlie Gard from receiving the treatment that could have helped him, did nothing to advance the salvation of Charlie Gard's immortal soul before he died. It was left to a spiritual descendant, abeit many times removed, ofd John Calvin, a Presbyterian "minister," to baptized Charlie Gard before he died.
It is very important to dwell on this point for a few moments.
Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ shed every single drop of His Most Precious Blood during His Passion and Death on the wood of the Holy Cross on Good Friday to pay back in His Sacred Humanity the debt of human sin that was owed to Him in His Infinity as God. Our Lord's perfect, propiatory offering of Himself to His Co-Equal and Co-Eternal God the Father in Spirit and in Truth, which is extended in time in an unbloody manner whenver a true priest offers the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, effected the redemption of the human race. The graces Our Divine Redeemer won for us during His Passsion and Death on Good Friday thus make it possible for sinners to sanctify and to save their souls as members of His true Church that He founded upon the Rock of Peter, the Pope. The first law of the Catholic Church is the salvation of souls.
It would appear that no one in the counterfeit church of conciliarism thought of baptizing Charlie Gard even though his life was in imminent peril of court-ordered execution. This is yet another correlative proof of the counterfeit nature of the conciliar sect. The lords of conciliarism presume that everyone, Catholic and non-Catholic alike, goes to Heaven, and the only people who have to "convert" are those Catholics who are unwiling to accept doctrinal heresy and moral equivocation as binding upon their consciences. Believing Catholics in Bergoglio's false religious sect must undergo a "pastoral conversion" to "adapt" themselves to the "times" (see L'Osservatore Romano article says pseudo-priests are main obstacle to Jorge's agenda of a "pastoral conversion").
Charlie Gard certainly was a victim of what Dr. Paul Byrne calls the "system of death" that exists in the world-at-large, but this innocent baby's immortal soul was nearly a victim of the counterfeit church of conciliarism's system of spiritual death that is content to leave the souls of infants unbaptized before they die and to leave non-Catholics in their false religious sects until the moment of their own deaths, to say nothing of how this system of spiritual death actually reaffirms hardened sinners in their lives of perdition, up to and including the scandalous celebration of unnatural vice as expressive of "love."
Additionally, it should be remembered that the supposedly "traditional" Joseph Alois Ratzinger/Benedict XVI gave full support to the International Theological Commission's The Hope of Salvation for Infants Who Die Without Being Baptized, April 19, 2007, on reaffirming women, Catholics and non-Catholics alike, in the most erroneous belief that the souls of unbaptized babies, including aborted babies, go to Heaven. Perhaps no one in the counterfeit church of conciliarism thought of attending to Charlie Gard's immortal soul because they believed that he would go to Heaven even if he was unbaptized. Then again, it is more likely the case that no thought was given to the salvation of his soul whatsoever.
It was documented ten years ago that at least two women killed their babies after listening to a conciliar "bishop" in the United States of America give a talk on this subject in which he said that all aborted babies go to Heaven. Please spare me the sophistry that the report of the International Theological Commission was not a "magisterial" act of the Catholic Church. The man who endorsed the International Theological Commission’s findings, the now retired Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, said as long ago as the early 1980s that he did not "like" the Church's teaching on Limbo, which was reaffirmed by Pope Saint Pius X as follows: “Children who die without being baptized go to limbo, where they don't enjoy God, but don't suffer either because whilst carrying the original sin...they don't deserve paradise but neither do they deserve hell or purgatory.”
What Ratzinger did not “like,” of course, he jettisoned, and this is exactly what his successor, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, has done with almost everything to do with Catholic Faith, Worship, and Morals.
The attempt to "nuance" and to make "complex" the case of Charlie Gard has served to further scandalize many "evangelical" and "fundamentalist" Protestants, whose innate anti-Catholicism has been reaffirmed numerous times by Bergoglio's embrace of leftist/Marxist politicians and causes and his lavender-friendly policies that have permitted apologists for and practitioners of unnatural vice to identify themselves openly without fear of "papal" retribution. We know many Protestants, including family members on both sides of our family, who are even more convinced now than they have been in the past that what they think is the Catholic Church is the "whore of Babylon."
The indifference about Charlie Gard's salvation and that of his own parents exhibited by the lords of conciliarism stands in great contrast with the zeal for souls that possessed Popes Pius IX, Leo XIII, and Pius XI to seek the unconditional conversion of Catholics to the true Church, outside of which there is no salvation and without which there can be no genuine social order:
It is for this reason that so many who do not share 'the communion and the truth of the Catholic Church' must make use of the occasion of the Council, by the means of the Catholic Church, which received in Her bosom their ancestors, proposes [further] demonstration of profound unity and of firm vital force; hear the requirements [demands] of her heart, they must engage themselves to leave this state that does not guarantee for them the security of salvation. She does not hesitate to raise to the Lord of mercy most fervent prayers to tear down of the walls of division, to dissipate the haze of errors, and lead them back within holy Mother Church, where their Ancestors found salutary pastures of life; where, in an exclusive way, is conserved and transmitted whole the doctrine of Jesus Christ and wherein is dispensed the mysteries of heavenly grace.
It is therefore by force of the right of Our supreme Apostolic ministry, entrusted to us by the same Christ the Lord, which, having to carry out with [supreme] participation all the duties of the good Shepherd and to follow and embrace with paternal love all the men of the world, we send this Letter of Ours to all the Christians from whom We are separated, with which we exhort them warmly and beseech them with insistence to hasten to return to the one fold of Christ; we desire in fact from the depths of the heart their salvation in Christ Jesus, and we fear having to render an account one day to Him, Our Judge, if, through some possibility, we have not pointed out and prepared the way for them to attain eternal salvation. In all Our prayers and supplications, with thankfulness, day and night we never omit to ask for them, with humble insistence, from the eternal Shepherd of souls the abundance of goods and heavenly graces. And since, if also, we fulfill in the earth the office of vicar, with all our heart we await with open arms the return of the wayward sons to the Catholic Church, in order to receive them with infinite fondness into the house of the Heavenly Father and to enrich them with its inexhaustible treasures. By our greatest wish for the return to the truth and the communion with the Catholic Church, upon which depends not only the salvation of all of them, but above all also of the whole Christian society: the entire world in fact cannot enjoy true peace if it is not of one fold and one shepherd. (Pope Pius IX, Iam Vos Omnes, September 13, 1868.)
Weigh carefully in your minds and before God the nature of Our request. It is not for any human motive, but impelled by Divine Charity and a desire for the salvation of all, that We advise the reconciliation and union with the Church of Rome; and We mean a perfect and complete union, such as could not subsist in any way if nothing else was brought about but a certain kind of agreement in the Tenets of Belief and an intercourse of Fraternal love. The True Union between Christians is that which Jesus Christ, the Author of the Church, instituted and desired, and which consists in a Unity of Faith and Unity of Government. (Pope Leo XIII, referring to the Orthodox in Praeclara Gratulationis Publicae, June 20, 1884.)
Let, therefore, the separated children draw nigh to the Apostolic See, set up in the City which Peter and Paul, the Princes of the Apostles, consecrated by their blood; to that See, We repeat, which is "the root and womb whence the Church of God springs," not with the intention and the hope that "the Church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth" will cast aside the integrity of the faith and tolerate their errors, but, on the contrary, that they themselves submit to its teaching and government. Would that it were Our happy lot to do that which so many of Our predecessors could not, to embrace with fatherly affection those children, whose unhappy separation from Us We now bewail. Would that God our Savior, "Who will have all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth,"[29] would hear us when We humbly beg that He would deign to recall all who stray to the unity of the Church! In this most important undertaking We ask and wish that others should ask the prayers of Blessed Mary the Virgin, Mother of divine grace, victorious over all heresies and Help of Christians, that She may implore for Us the speedy coming of the much hoped-for day, when all men shall hear the voice of Her divine Son, and shall be "careful to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace." (Pope Pius XI, Mortalium Animos, January 6, 1928.)
The conciliar “popes” have used no such language, have they?
This is because they do not possess the Catholic Faith, which one must possess in Its entirety or be considered a heathen or a publican, a truth that our true popes have taught us so frequently, including as it was expressed by Pope Pius XII in Mystici Corporis, June 29, 1943:
Actually only those are to be included as members of the Church who have been baptized and profess the true faith, and who have not been so unfortunate as to separate themselves from the unity of the Body, or been excluded by legitimate authority for grave faults committed. "For in one spirit" says the Apostle, "were we all baptized into one Body, whether Jews or Gentiles, whether bond or free." As therefore in the true Christian community there is only one Body, one Spirit, one Lord, and one Baptism, so there can be only one faith. And therefore, if a man refuse to hear the Church, let him be considered - so the Lord commands - as a heathen and a publican. It follows that those who are divided in faith or government cannot be living in the unity of such a Body, nor can they be living the life of its one Divine Spirit. (Pope Pius XII, Mystici Corporis, June 29, 1943.)
The conciliar "popes" and their "bishops" do not believe word of this immutable Catholic Church, and it is this lack of belief in the Catholic Fthat that they claim to possess that contributed to the spiritual neglect shown by the conciliar "bishops" of Engand and Wales towards Charlie Gard's immortal soul and his parents, who have not been exhorted by anyone, Catholic or non-Catholic, to get married.
As noted in Finding Nuance Where There Is No Nuance to be Found three weeks ago, we are eyewitnesses to events that are the result, proximately speaking, of the Protestant Revolution five centuries ago and the subsequent rise and triumph of Judeo-Masonic naturalism. Figures of Antichrist abound. Every manner of immoral behavior has received the sanction of the civil law in the supposedly "civilized" West. Those who defend the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law are said to "haters," and those who practice modesty of dress and decency in their speech are considered to be freaks and possible child-abusers.
Yet it is that this world awash in the blood of the innocent and that celebrates perversity, immorality, indecency, impurity, obscenity, profanity and decadent "music" and "entertainment" is actually celebrated by the lords of conciliarism, many of whom find no problem with and/or are active participants in the moral sicknesses of our wicked age.
Pope Pius IX condemned the proposition that a true Successor of Saint Peter must be "reconciled" to the "modern world" that celebrates heresy, error and every type of personal sin imaginable. Two other popes named Pius, St. Pius X and Pius XII, also condemned the Modernist effort to extol human progress and to adapt the Holy Faith to the times:
80. The Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization.- -Allocution "Jamdudum cernimus," March 18, 1861. (Pope Pius IX, The Syllabus of Errors, December 8, 1864.)
It is thus, Venerable Brethren, that for the Modernists, whether as authors or propagandists, there is to be nothing stable, nothing immutable in the Church. Nor, indeed, are they without forerunners in their doctrines, for it was of these that Our predecessor Pius IX wrote: 'These enemies of divine revelation extol human progress to the skies, and with rash and sacrilegious daring would have it introduced into the Catholic religion as if this religion were not the work of God but of man, or some kind of philosophical discovery susceptible of perfection by human efforts.' On the subject of revelation and dogma in particular, the doctrine of the Modernists offers nothing new. We find it condemned in the Syllabus of Pius IX, where it is enunciated in these terms: ''Divine revelation is imperfect, and therefore subject to continual and indefinite progress, corresponding with the progress of human reason'; and condemned still more solemnly in the Vatican Council: ''The doctrine of the faith which God has revealed has not been proposed to human intelligences to be perfected by them as if it were a philosophical system, but as a divine deposit entrusted to the Spouse of Christ to be faithfully guarded and infallibly interpreted. Hence also that sense of the sacred dogmas is to be perpetually retained which our Holy Mother the Church has once declared, nor is this sense ever to be abandoned on plea or pretext of a more profound comprehension of the truth.' Nor is the development of our knowledge, even concerning the faith, barred by this pronouncement; on the contrary, it is supported and maintained. For the same Council continues: 'Let intelligence and science and wisdom, therefore, increase and progress abundantly and vigorously in individuals, and in the mass, in the believer and in the whole Church, throughout the ages and the centuries -- but only in its own kind, that is, according to the same dogma, the same sense, the same acceptation.' (Pope Saint Pius X, Pascendi Dominci Gregis, September 8, 1907.)
Moreover they assert that when Catholic doctrine has been reduced to this condition, a way will be found to satisfy modern needs, that will permit of dogma being expressed also by the concepts of modern philosophy, whether of immanentism or idealism or existentialism or any other system. Some more audacious affirm that this can and must be done, because they hold that the mysteries of faith are never expressed by truly adequate concepts but only by approximate and ever changeable notions, in which the truth is to some extent expressed, but is necessarily distorted. Wherefore they do not consider it absurd, but altogether necessary,that theology should substitute new concepts in place of the old ones in keeping with the various philosophies which in the course of time it uses as its instruments, so that it should give human expression to divine truths in various ways which are even somewhat opposed, but still equivalent, as they say. They add that the history of dogmas consists in the reporting of the various forms in which revealed truth has been clothed, forms that have succeeded one another in accordance with the different teachings and opinions that have arisen over the course of the centuries. (Pope Pius XII, Humani Generis, August 12, 1950.)
The entire false spirit of conciliarism's celebrating the anti-Incarnational spirit of Modernity that has produced antipopes and pseudo-bishops is nothing other than the recrudescence of the efforts of the Sillon to reconcile the Catholic Church in France with the spirit of the French Revolution:
The breath of the Revolution has passed this way, and We can conclude that, whilst the social doctrines of the Sillon are erroneous, its spirit is dangerous and its education disastrous.
But then, what are we to think of its action in the Church? What are we to think of a movement so punctilious in its brand of Catholicism that, unless you embrace its cause, you would almost be regarded as an internal enemy of the Church, and you would understand nothing of the Gospel and of Jesus Christ! We deem it necessary to insist on that point because it is precisely its Catholic ardor which has secured for the Sillon until quite recently, valuable encouragements and the support of distinguished persons. Well now! judging the words and the deeds, We feel compelled to say that in its actions as well as in its doctrine, the Sillon does not give satisfaction to the Church.
In the first place, its brand of Catholicism accepts only the democratic form of government which it considers the most favorable to the Church and, so to speak, identifies it with her. The Sillon , therefore, subjects its religion to a political party. We do not have to demonstrate here that the advent of universal Democracy is of no concern to the action of the Church in the world; we have already recalled that the Church has always left to the nations the care of giving themselves the form of government which they think most suited to their needs. What We wish to affirm once again, after Our Predecessor, is that it is an error and a danger to bind down Catholicism by principle to a particular form of government. This error and this danger are all the greater when Religion is associated with a kind of Democracy whose doctrines are false. But this is what the Sillon is doing. For the sake of a particular political form, it compromises the Church, it sows division among Catholics, snatches away young people and even priests and seminarists from purely Catholic action, and is wasting away as a dead loss part of the living forces of the nation.. . .
Here we have, founded by Catholics, an inter-denominational association that is to work for the reform of civilization, an undertaking which is above all religious in character; for there is no true civilization without a moral civilization, and no true moral civilization without the true religion: it is a proven truth, a historical fact. The new Sillonists cannot pretend that they are merely working on “the ground of practical realities” where differences of belief do not matter. Their leader is so conscious of the influence which the convictions of the mind have upon the result of the action, that he invites them, whatever religion they may belong to, “to provide on the ground of practical realities, the proof of the excellence of their personal convictions.” And with good reason: indeed, all practical results reflect the nature of one’s religious convictions, just as the limbs of a man down to his finger-tips, owe their very shape to the principle of life that dwells in his body.
This being said, what must be thought of the promiscuity in which young Catholics will be caught up with heterodox and unbelieving folk in a work of this nature? Is it not a thousand-fold more dangerous for them than a neutral association? What are we to think of this appeal to all the heterodox, and to all the unbelievers, to prove the excellence of their convictions in the social sphere in a sort of apologetic contest? Has not this contest lasted for nineteen centuries in conditions less dangerous for the faith of Catholics? And was it not all to the credit of the Catholic Church? What are we to think of this respect for all errors, and of this strange invitation, 11 made by a Catholic to all the dissidents to strengthen their convictions through study so that they may have more and more abundant sources of fresh forces? What are we to think of an association in which all religions and even Free-Thought may express themselves openly and in complete freedom? For the Sillonists who, in public lectures and elsewhere, proudly proclaim their personal faith, certainly do not intend to silence others nor do they intend to prevent a Protestant from asserting his Protestantism, and the skeptic from affirming his skepticism. Finally, what are we to think of a Catholic who, on entering his study group, leaves his Catholicism outside the door so as not to alarm his comrades who, “dreaming of disinterested social action, are not inclined to make it serve the triumph of interests, coteries and even convictions whatever they may be”? Such is the profession of faith of the New Democratic Committee for Social Action which has taken over the main objective of the previous organization and which, they say, “breaking the double meaning which surround the Greater Sillon both in reactionary and anti-clerical circles”, is now open to all men “who respect moral and religious forces and who are convinced that no genuine social emancipation is possible without the leaven of generous idealism" . . . .
We fear that worse is to come: the end result of this developing promiscuousness, the beneficiary of this cosmopolitan social action, can only be a Democracy which will be neither Catholic, nor Protestant, nor Jewish. It will be a religion (for Sillonism, so the leaders have said, is a religion) more universal than the Catholic Church, uniting all men become brothers and comrades at last in the "Kingdom of God". - "We do not work for the Church, we work for mankind."
And now, overwhelmed with the deepest sadness, We ask Ourselves, Venerable Brethren, what has become of the Catholicism of the Sillon? Alas! this organization which formerly afforded such promising expectations, this limpid and impetuous stream, has been harnessed in its course by the modern enemies of the Church, and is now no more than a miserable affluent of the great movement of apostasy being organized in every country for the establishment of a One-World Church which shall have neither dogmas, nor hierarchy, neither discipline for the mind, nor curb for the passions, and which, under the pretext of freedom and human dignity, would bring back to the world (if such a Church could overcome) the reign of legalized cunning and force, and the oppression of the weak, and of all those who toil and suffer.
We know only too well the dark workshops in which are elaborated these mischievous doctrines which ought not to seduce clear-thinking minds. The leaders of the Sillon have not been able to guard against these doctrines. The exaltation of their sentiments, the undiscriminating good-will of their hearts, their philosophical mysticism, mixed with a measure of illuminism, have carried them away towards another Gospel which they thought was the true Gospel of Our Savior. To such an extent that they speak of Our Lord Jesus Christ with a familiarity supremely disrespectful, and that - their ideal being akin to that of the Revolution - they fear not to draw between the Gospel and the Revolution blasphemous comparisons for which the excuse cannot be made that they are due to some confused and over-hasty composition.
We wish to draw your attention, Venerable Brethren, to this distortion of the Gospel and to the sacred character of Our Lord Jesus Christ, God and man, prevailing within the Sillon and elsewhere. As soon as the social question is being approached, it is the fashion in some quarters to first put aside the divinity of Jesus Christ, and then to mention only His unlimited clemency, His compassion for all human miseries, and His pressing exhortations to the love of our neighbor and to the brotherhood of men. True, Jesus has loved us with an immense, infinite love, and He came on earth to suffer and die so that, gathered around Him in justice and love, motivated by the same sentiments of mutual charity, all men might live in peace and happiness. But for the realization of this temporal and eternal happiness, He has laid down with supreme authority the condition that we must belong to His Flock, that we must accept His doctrine, that we must practice virtue, and that we must accept the teaching and guidance of Peter and his successors. Further, whilst Jesus was kind to sinners and to those who went astray, He did not respect their false ideas, however sincere they might have appeared. He loved them all, but He instructed them in order to convert them and save them. Whilst He called to Himself in order to comfort them, those who toiled and suffered, it was not to preach to them the jealousy of a chimerical equality. Whilst He lifted up the lowly, it was not to instill in them the sentiment of a dignity independent from, and rebellious against, the duty of obedience. Whilst His heart overflowed with gentleness for the souls of good-will, He could also arm Himself with holy indignation against the profaners of the House of God, against the wretched men who scandalized the little ones, against the authorities who crush the people with the weight of heavy burdens without putting out a hand to lift them. He was as strong as he was gentle. He reproved, threatened, chastised, knowing, and teaching us that fear is the beginning of wisdom, and that it is sometimes proper for a man to cut off an offending limb to save his body. Finally, He did not announce for future society the reign of an ideal happiness from which suffering would be banished; but, by His lessons and by His example, He traced the path of the happiness which is possible on earth and of the perfect happiness in heaven: the royal way of the Cross. These are teachings that it would be wrong to apply only to one's personal life in order to win eternal salvation; these are eminently social teachings, and they show in Our Lord Jesus Christ something quite different from an inconsistent and impotent humanitarianism. (Pope Saint Pius X, Notre Charge Apostolique, August 15, 1910.)
Yes, The Sillon was an effort, supported even after its condemnation by Pope Saint Pius X by none other than Father Angelo Roncalli, who would, as Antipope John XXIII (the second antipope of that name and number), convene the "Second" Vatican Council, whose documents represented what a peritus at its proceedings called an "official reconciliation" with the principles of the "new era" inaugurated in 1789. In other words, the peritus in question was saying that the "Second" Vatican Council was an endorsement of the principles of The Sillon to seek a reconciliation with the anti-Incarnational principles of Modernity:
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. Only from this perspective can we understand, on the one hand, the ghetto-mentality, of which we have spoken above; only from this perspective can we understand, on the other hand, the meaning of the remarkable meeting of the Church and the world. Basically, the word "world" means the spirit of the modern era, in contrast to which the Church's group-consciousness saw itself as a separate subject that now, after a war that had been in turn both hot and cold, was intent on dialogue and cooperation. From this perspective, too, we can understand the different emphases with which the individual parts of the Church entered into the discussion of the text. While German theologians were satisfied that their exegetical and ecumenical concepts had been incorporated, representatives of Latin American countries, in particular, felt that their concerns, too, had been addressed, topics proposed by Anglo-Saxon theologians likewise found strong expression, and representatives of Third World countries saw, in the emphasis on social questions, a consideration of their particular problems. (Joseph Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology, pp. 381-382)
Pope Leo XIII denounced efforts to "reconcile the maxims of the Gospel with those of the revolution" that seeks to "reocncile Christ and Belial, the Church of God and the state without God":
Everyone should avoid familiarity or friendship with anyone suspected of belonging to masonry or to affiliated groups. Know them by their fruits and avoid them. Every familiarity should be avoided, not only with those impious libertines who openly promote the character of the sect, but also with those who hide under the mask of universal tolerance, respect for all religions, and the craving to reconcile the maxims of the Gospel with those of the revolution. These men seek to reconcile Christ and Belial, the Church of God and the state without God. (Pope Leo XIII, Custodi Di Quella Fede, December 8, 1892.)
Ah, the “reconciliation” celebrated by the “restorer of tradition,” Joseph Alois Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, who eschewed the supposed more radical elements of the French Revolution as opposed to the American Revolution, which readers of this site undermined the integrity of the Holy Faith in this country by lulling Catholics into silence about their Faith in public in exchange for the ability to live without overt, state-sponsored persecution (noting that great acts of violence were committed by mobs against Catholics in this country in the Nineteenth Century), was nothing other than a reconciliation between Christ and Belial.
The blood of innocent human beings that is being shed throughout the "civilized" world in hospitals, hospices and abortuaries is but a continuation the bloodletting that has been taking place in Paris ever since the storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, that inaugurated a supposedly “new era” to which the counterfeit church of conciliarism made its “official reconciliation” by means of Gaudium et Spes, December 7, 1965, the Feast of Saint Ambrose and the Commemoration of the Vigil of the Feast of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary. No matter their different styles, both Ratzinger and Bergoglio have heralded the era of Modernity that was made possible by the Protestant Revolution's overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King.
The brave new world in which we live and with which Jorge Mario Bergoglio and his "bishops" are at such unholy peace as innocent human beings such as Charlie Gard are put to death under the cover of civil law will pass, although not without great chastisements of the sort that will make our current circumstances seem relatively tame by way of comparison. We must, therefore, continue our resourse to Our Lady, especially by means of praying her Most Holy Rosary, knowing that her Immaculate Heart will triumph in the end.
May it be our own blessed privilege to suffer whatever crosses we are asked to bear, including estrangement from relatives and former friends and acquaintances, as we seek to make a bit of reparation for our sins by offering up whatever merit we might bear from the patient endurance of those crosses as the consecrated slaves of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary.
In the immortal words of Pope Saint Pius X contained at the end of The Oath Against Modernism, September 1, 1910, pray for the restoration to come!
Vivat Christus Rex! Viva Cristo Rey!
Our Lady of the the Rosary, pray for us.
Saint Joseph, pray for us.
Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.
Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.
Saint John the Evangelist, pray for us.
Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.
Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.
Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.
Saints Joachim and Anne, pray for us.
Saints Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar, pray for us.
Saint Ignatius of Loyola, pray for us.