Keeping Calm Amid The Storm Part II - Fr. Regis de Cacqueray District Superior of France SSPX

Keeping calm amid the storm (2) 

The Pope is a revolutionary: part 2 From the Savoyard Vicar [Rousseau] to the Vicar of Christ: Pope Francis, like his predecessors since the Council, is a revolutionary.

If we desire such a leader for our earthly homeland, we desire it all the more for Holy Church. God has always sent saints, at especially dramatic times of its history, so that she may continue her mission of salvation. If virtuous men on this earth never abandon their spouses, remain faithful to them and give them children, so much the more will the Divine Spouse remain with the divine society He has founded and preserve it in fruitfulness, without stain or wrinkle, until eternity. Have we not seen for ourselves how Our Lord Jesus Christ, in this age where the pulpit of the Gospel is besieged by preachers of lies, raised up His faithful servant, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, to ensure the continued transmission of the deposit of Faith? We believe that we will always be able to count on Divine Providence to send us men chosen by God, guides and beacons who will keep us in the truth of the Catholic Faith.

But at the same time, we have no way of knowing to what point God will allow the human part of the Church to be damaged and sucked into the fury of heresy. We have seen the destroyers’ blows tear down dogma and liturgy, code and catechism. Only the conclusions of Catholic moral law have survived until now in the words of the pope. If the world was still roaring at the Church, it was for the very reason that she still upheld a part of the moral law. But why for the last few months has the world ceased its snarling? What is the meaning of this respite?

In a short time, the new pope, Francis, has severely undermined the remnants of Catholic morality with incredibly relativist statements. Where Vatican II had already elevated the role of the human conscience to the detriment of the law, the current Vicar of Christ, in words that could be taken verbatim from “The Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar” [a nickname for Rousseau], makes conscience divine. Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote:

Conscience! Conscience! Divine instinct, immortal and celestial voice; sure guide of an ignorant and limited being, who is also intelligent and free; infallible judge of good and evil, who makes man like God, it is you who make the excellence of man’s nature and the morality of his actions…[3] 

and Pope Francis echoes him:

Each of us has a vision of good and of evil. We have to encourage people to move towards what they think is good… And I repeat it here. Everyone has his own idea of good and evil and must choose to follow the good and fight evil as he conceives them. That would be enough to make the world a better place.[4] 

Even though these disgraceful remarks were removed from the Vatican website over a month after their appearance, Vatican spokesman Fr. Federico Lombardi took pains to clarify that the interview from which these remarks are taken was nonetheless “worthy of faith in its general sense.”[5] This idea of the new pope’s is confirmed in his apostolic exhortation, Evangelii gaudium, published November 24, 2013, where he expresses his fundamentally evolutionary perspective on truth and the form of its expression:

We should not think, however, that the Gospel message must always be communicated by fixed formulations learned by heart or by specific words which express an absolutely invariable content.[6]

The pope is hardly speaking with more restraint here, no longer of good and evil, but of truth and falsehood. If the content of the Gospel message is not immutable, it is because Catholic dogma is susceptible to evolution over time. Nothing remains and what was true yesterday will no longer be so tomorrow. Religion evolves at the tempo of religious sentiment.

We thought that we could not see any more lamentable spectacle in Rome that that of the pontificates of the last few popes, those of John XXIII and John Paul II in particular. But the worst is before us, now that their “canonizations” have been announced. If it is already an unheard-of scandal that popes should propagate error and indifferentism, it is infinitely more grave to present them now as heroes of the truth and of the Gospel, as models and saints to whom we can address prayers in heaven, where these “canonizations” guarantee their presence! It is a triumph of evolutionary of thought and of modernism that we reject with all our strength!

Pope Francis, like all his predecessors since the Council, is a revolutionary. He is in rupture with the immutable Tradition of the Church and he is teaching in its stead a new doctrine that is poisoning souls.

The murkier doctrine becomes, the more we recall the promises Our Lord Jesus Christ made to His Church. They seemed to us such that the Church would be forever preserved from suffering this agony and this apparent death “But I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not: and thou, being once converted, confirm thy brethren.”[7] Our Lord also added:

But the Paraclete, the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things, and bring all things to your mind, whatsoever I shall have said to you.[8] 

But we, like the apostles in the bottom of the board, we cry out in our turn, “Lord, save us, we perish!”[9] and our hearts and heads buzz with the question of the Son of God Himself on the cross: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”[10] How long, Lord, wilt thou permit iniquity to triumph?

When we consider today’s difficulty and the tomorrows that will perhaps be darker yet, let us be certain at the same time that the grace of the good God will never fail us and that we will be given divine help every day of our life to journey onward to eternal happiness. Therefore we must not live in fear of the events to come but rather in a constant serenity of soul that will draw us to live in truth and sanctify ourselves in the fleeting moment, that is, the moment where God resides. 

Footnotes

3 Emile, or on Education, IV. “The Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar” is a part of Book IV in Emile, or on Education that is often published separately. In it Jean-Jacques Rousseau critiques the institution of the Church, dogmatism and heteronomy.

4 Interview of Pope Francis by La Repubblica, October 5, 2013.

5 Fr. Federico Lombardi, November 16, 2013.

6 Evangelii gaudium, November 24, 2013. 7 Luke 22:32.