The Recusant
An unofficial SSPX newsletter, fighting a guerilla war for the soul of Tradition!
Introduction:
Source: La Sapiniere
"The Captain of the Titanic is going to sink us!"
Fr. Faure was one of the first members of the SSPX and is therefore one of its oldest members. He has participated in all the Chapters of the Society and has spent many years as a District Superior (Mexico, Argentina).
Archbishop Lefebvre even asked him if he would accept to be consecrated a bishop in 1988. He told us that he refused, proposing Fr. de Galarreta instead. He thought that he lacked the necessary qualities of a Bishop. But he has assured us that in every case he would never have betrayed the cause nor the Faith nor the anti-liberal combat.
Fr. Faure talks to us about the betrayals that he has witnessed, and in particular, the most recent one: the General Chapter of July 2012. He rose up against the way in which Menzingen is manipulating text, facts and people (in particular, Bishop Tissier).
Fr. Faure is a betrayed member of the Chapter, who for his own honour and that of the truth, will unmask the dishonesty of Menzingen. In order better to understand the interview with Fr. Faure, it may be helpful to recall the following facts: on April 15th, 2012, Bishop Fellay wrote a theological declaration intended to reconcile the irreconcilable. This declaration is a staggering acceptance fo the Council, the New Mass and the new Code of Canon Law.
During the Chapter of 2012, Fr. de Journa distributed and commented on a single front-and-back sheet which demonstrated before all the Chapter members (except Bishop Williamson who had been excluded from the Chapter) that Bishop Fellay’s Declaration was nothing less than the Hermeneutic of Continuity. After this exposé from the rector of Écône which took place without any reaction and in a deep silence, the conclusion self-evident: this declaration had to be rejected by its author. After a little while, the rector of the seminary in La Reja (Argentine) stood up to break the silence. Fr. Pagliarani (in a pre-arranged plan of the General House?) intervened in favour of Bishop Fellay: “Dear colleagues! We’re not going to give a slap in the face to our Superior General by forcing him to retract it! The retraction will be implicit in the final declaration of the Chapter.” Then, after this intervention, another Chapter member raised another topic as a diversion, and the Chapter passed on to other business...
That was a master stroke on the part of Bishop Fellay and his partisans. The General House manoeuvred the Chapter so that it didn’t punish the Superior General and succeeded in fooling the Chapter members by leaving them to believe that the Doctrinal Declaration was buried by the implicit disapproval of its author. Bishop Tissier was fooled, just like all the others (except the partisans of Bishop Fellay). In a letter of 29th March, 2013, he tells of how “It was tacitly agreed that there would be no need to insist on this subject, given that it was obvious that the Superior General regretted his mistake.” And yet, the official line which came out of the General House was that this Doctrinal Declaration was “a minimalist text which led to some confusion amongst us” (Cor Unum 102). A “sufficiently clear” text “which avoided – what do you call it? – ambiguities” (Econe, 7th September, 2012). In the “Note concerning the Doctrinal Declaration of 15th April 2012”, which was composed by Bishop Fellay himself, he affirmed that “all ambiguity was set aside as regards our judgement of the Council, including the hermeneutic of continuity.” He claimed that his thinking “was not understood by several eminent members of the Society, who saw in it an ambiguity, or even a compromise with the theory of the hermeneutic of continuity.” (Cor Unum 104). And, just recently, Bishop Fellay took up this cry once again: “It’s an extremely delicate text, and one can even say that in the Society it didn’t cause unanimity so much so that I said to Rome I take it back, it’s not going to be any use if it’s not even understood by people on our side... er... because it was perhaps too subtle, well , there we are, too bad, I take it back. And that’s what I said to Rome, and Mgr Di Noia said, I understand, of course, completely, your text that you make has to create unity amongst your own.” (Bp. Fellay’s conference in Lille, 7th May, 2013)
[N.B. He said the same thing in Burgclere, England on June 2nd, 2013 “Even amongst our priests, I realised that they did not follow my demonstration, the way I built up this text, which was – and this is probably my conclusion – too subtle.” - Ed.]
Archbishop Lefebvre even asked him if he would accept to be consecrated a bishop in 1988. He told us that he refused, proposing Fr. de Galarreta instead. He thought that he lacked the necessary qualities of a Bishop. But he has assured us that in every case he would never have betrayed the cause nor the Faith nor the anti-liberal combat.
Fr. Faure talks to us about the betrayals that he has witnessed, and in particular, the most recent one: the General Chapter of July 2012. He rose up against the way in which Menzingen is manipulating text, facts and people (in particular, Bishop Tissier).
Fr. Faure is a betrayed member of the Chapter, who for his own honour and that of the truth, will unmask the dishonesty of Menzingen. In order better to understand the interview with Fr. Faure, it may be helpful to recall the following facts: on April 15th, 2012, Bishop Fellay wrote a theological declaration intended to reconcile the irreconcilable. This declaration is a staggering acceptance fo the Council, the New Mass and the new Code of Canon Law.
During the Chapter of 2012, Fr. de Journa distributed and commented on a single front-and-back sheet which demonstrated before all the Chapter members (except Bishop Williamson who had been excluded from the Chapter) that Bishop Fellay’s Declaration was nothing less than the Hermeneutic of Continuity. After this exposé from the rector of Écône which took place without any reaction and in a deep silence, the conclusion self-evident: this declaration had to be rejected by its author. After a little while, the rector of the seminary in La Reja (Argentine) stood up to break the silence. Fr. Pagliarani (in a pre-arranged plan of the General House?) intervened in favour of Bishop Fellay: “Dear colleagues! We’re not going to give a slap in the face to our Superior General by forcing him to retract it! The retraction will be implicit in the final declaration of the Chapter.” Then, after this intervention, another Chapter member raised another topic as a diversion, and the Chapter passed on to other business...
That was a master stroke on the part of Bishop Fellay and his partisans. The General House manoeuvred the Chapter so that it didn’t punish the Superior General and succeeded in fooling the Chapter members by leaving them to believe that the Doctrinal Declaration was buried by the implicit disapproval of its author. Bishop Tissier was fooled, just like all the others (except the partisans of Bishop Fellay). In a letter of 29th March, 2013, he tells of how “It was tacitly agreed that there would be no need to insist on this subject, given that it was obvious that the Superior General regretted his mistake.” And yet, the official line which came out of the General House was that this Doctrinal Declaration was “a minimalist text which led to some confusion amongst us” (Cor Unum 102). A “sufficiently clear” text “which avoided – what do you call it? – ambiguities” (Econe, 7th September, 2012). In the “Note concerning the Doctrinal Declaration of 15th April 2012”, which was composed by Bishop Fellay himself, he affirmed that “all ambiguity was set aside as regards our judgement of the Council, including the hermeneutic of continuity.” He claimed that his thinking “was not understood by several eminent members of the Society, who saw in it an ambiguity, or even a compromise with the theory of the hermeneutic of continuity.” (Cor Unum 104). And, just recently, Bishop Fellay took up this cry once again: “It’s an extremely delicate text, and one can even say that in the Society it didn’t cause unanimity so much so that I said to Rome I take it back, it’s not going to be any use if it’s not even understood by people on our side... er... because it was perhaps too subtle, well , there we are, too bad, I take it back. And that’s what I said to Rome, and Mgr Di Noia said, I understand, of course, completely, your text that you make has to create unity amongst your own.” (Bp. Fellay’s conference in Lille, 7th May, 2013)
[N.B. He said the same thing in Burgclere, England on June 2nd, 2013 “Even amongst our priests, I realised that they did not follow my demonstration, the way I built up this text, which was – and this is probably my conclusion – too subtle.” - Ed.]
Conference by Fr. Faure
Conference by Fr. Faure
Part I:
Several people have asked me where I stand regarding the Society of St. Pius X. Certain priests of the Society find themselves under surveillance or house arrest.
One of them, Fr. Pinaud, is confined in castle Jaidhof and awaits the illegal judgement of an illegal ecclesiastical tribunal.
When a case comes before a tribunal, it is useful to retrace the life of the accused. We will all go before the tribunal of history and above all the tribunal of God, even our superiors.
In order to explain what my position is I will briefly retrace my life story as a way of explaining to the history of these last few decades, as far as it concerns me.
On the subject of tribunals, the commander of Helie Saint-Marc, Helie with a “H”, a hero of the two wars in Indo-China and Algeria, recipient of the Grand-Croix of the Legion d’Honneur and 13 citations, died a few days ago on 26th August, 2013. He entered in 1961, with the seven commanders of the Foreign Legion Parachute Regiment, in Algiers. How did he come to risk himself in such an affair, such a risk that it seems incredible today; in an affair so contrary to obedience and discipline! He explained it before the military tribunal in this way: “M. le President, you can ask a lot of a soldier, in particular you can ask him to die, that’s his job; you can’t ask him to cheat, to foreswear himself, to contradict himself, to lie, to disavow, to perjure himself.” And today, we could add in the case of a priest of Archbishop Lefebvre, you cannot ask him to betray, to compromise with the enemies of the Faith in the name of a fabled ‘sense of the Church’ to avoid schism or Sedevacantism which exists only inside Bishop Fellay’s head and in the letter of reply to the three Bishops, and which is basically only a pretext, an alibi.
Archbishop Lefebvre used to say that his life was marked by three world wars: 14-18, 39-45 and 1962-65; in other words Vatican II was in his opinion worse than the two previous wars in the consequences it had for the Church and for Society. Archbishop Lefebvre used to say that Vatican II was the greatest catastrophe in the history of the Church.
In my own little way, I can say that my life has been marked by three immense betrayals, the third of which, thanks be to God did not totally succeed, but whose consequences are already catastrophic for the future of the work of Archbishop Lefebvre. The Society of St. Pius X was the last bastion in the struggle against modernism and liberalism in the Church.
So, I was born in Algeria, in Algiers, in 1941, right in the middle of the war. My father and my five uncles participated in this war from beginning to end. One of them, in France, after the battle of the North in May 1940, escaped twice and managed to get back to Algeria. In 1942, after the American landings in Algeria, they were able to continue the fight: Tunisia, Italy, France, Germany. Some years later, one of them was killed in Indo-China, then another in Algeria. My earliest memories are from about this time. I was educated 40km away from the town of Saint-Augustin, in the East of Algeria, in a Catholic school the headmaster of which was Fr. Barbara, the future publisher of a newsletter of the Catholic resistance “Fort dans la foi”. My Greek teacher, Fr. Malcher, also stayed faithful to the resistance to the Council in the Pyrenees at Pau, after Algerian independence. I studied in Paris at Satin-Croix de Neuilly, then in Algiers in 1960, the year of the barricades. First betrayal, small historical memory: in 1958 in order to achieve power, after the Algerian uprising which was followed by a coup organised by the friends of General de Gaulle, this same General de Gaulle therefore formally promised, after 13th May 1958, in front of the Army and several thousand French and European Muslims, to obtain whichever solution in Algeria would be the most in line with French interests and the interests of the population concerned.
However, General de Gaulle, in four short years, through a complete reversal of the situation, managed to impose the worst solution to the Algerian problem, with catastrophic consequences for Algeria and for France which is becoming more and more Algerian. It is with this complete reversal that I find a similarity with what has been going on for the last ten years inside the SSPX. This complete reversal was achieved with consummate skill, by an unprecedented feat. Despite all the oaths, all the promises, all the guarantees, through a series of ambiguities, ambiguous formulas, skilfully and carefully staggered and gradual, constituting a Machiavelian deception without precedent, the General managed to oppose a strong opposition, through using relentless repression, through using numerous changes to the Army and the Civil Service, and he also sent to death and to torture thousands of Europeans and tens of thousands of Harkis loyal to French civilisation. In this drama, the favoured weapon of the devil for deceiving men, as always, was ambiguity, ambiguous formulas, words with a double meaning. We can understand why, in the Bible, the God of Truth says: “I hate a double tongue”, words with a double meaning, “os bilingue detestor.”
Are we not witnessing today a complete reversal of the situation in the Society of St. Pius X? On the contrary – in the opposite sense – Archbishop Lefebvre helped us to stay separate, to keep our distance, he put us on our guard against the conciliar Church which is no longer Catholic, so he said, and against liberal and modernist Rome which has lost the faith, so he also said.
Bishop Fellay however, says that there is no such thing as the conciliar Church, that there is only one visible Church, only one Rome and that he can make an agreement with it, that he can trust it to keep its promises and the guarantees offered to us that we can stay as we are. Recently, the Franciscans of the Immaculate trusted in the gauarantee of Benedict XVI's Motu Proprio, authorising (supposedly) the True Mass.
Part II:
One of them, Fr. Pinaud, is confined in castle Jaidhof and awaits the illegal judgement of an illegal ecclesiastical tribunal.
When a case comes before a tribunal, it is useful to retrace the life of the accused. We will all go before the tribunal of history and above all the tribunal of God, even our superiors.
In order to explain what my position is I will briefly retrace my life story as a way of explaining to the history of these last few decades, as far as it concerns me.
On the subject of tribunals, the commander of Helie Saint-Marc, Helie with a “H”, a hero of the two wars in Indo-China and Algeria, recipient of the Grand-Croix of the Legion d’Honneur and 13 citations, died a few days ago on 26th August, 2013. He entered in 1961, with the seven commanders of the Foreign Legion Parachute Regiment, in Algiers. How did he come to risk himself in such an affair, such a risk that it seems incredible today; in an affair so contrary to obedience and discipline! He explained it before the military tribunal in this way: “M. le President, you can ask a lot of a soldier, in particular you can ask him to die, that’s his job; you can’t ask him to cheat, to foreswear himself, to contradict himself, to lie, to disavow, to perjure himself.” And today, we could add in the case of a priest of Archbishop Lefebvre, you cannot ask him to betray, to compromise with the enemies of the Faith in the name of a fabled ‘sense of the Church’ to avoid schism or Sedevacantism which exists only inside Bishop Fellay’s head and in the letter of reply to the three Bishops, and which is basically only a pretext, an alibi.
Archbishop Lefebvre used to say that his life was marked by three world wars: 14-18, 39-45 and 1962-65; in other words Vatican II was in his opinion worse than the two previous wars in the consequences it had for the Church and for Society. Archbishop Lefebvre used to say that Vatican II was the greatest catastrophe in the history of the Church.
In my own little way, I can say that my life has been marked by three immense betrayals, the third of which, thanks be to God did not totally succeed, but whose consequences are already catastrophic for the future of the work of Archbishop Lefebvre. The Society of St. Pius X was the last bastion in the struggle against modernism and liberalism in the Church.
So, I was born in Algeria, in Algiers, in 1941, right in the middle of the war. My father and my five uncles participated in this war from beginning to end. One of them, in France, after the battle of the North in May 1940, escaped twice and managed to get back to Algeria. In 1942, after the American landings in Algeria, they were able to continue the fight: Tunisia, Italy, France, Germany. Some years later, one of them was killed in Indo-China, then another in Algeria. My earliest memories are from about this time. I was educated 40km away from the town of Saint-Augustin, in the East of Algeria, in a Catholic school the headmaster of which was Fr. Barbara, the future publisher of a newsletter of the Catholic resistance “Fort dans la foi”. My Greek teacher, Fr. Malcher, also stayed faithful to the resistance to the Council in the Pyrenees at Pau, after Algerian independence. I studied in Paris at Satin-Croix de Neuilly, then in Algiers in 1960, the year of the barricades. First betrayal, small historical memory: in 1958 in order to achieve power, after the Algerian uprising which was followed by a coup organised by the friends of General de Gaulle, this same General de Gaulle therefore formally promised, after 13th May 1958, in front of the Army and several thousand French and European Muslims, to obtain whichever solution in Algeria would be the most in line with French interests and the interests of the population concerned.
However, General de Gaulle, in four short years, through a complete reversal of the situation, managed to impose the worst solution to the Algerian problem, with catastrophic consequences for Algeria and for France which is becoming more and more Algerian. It is with this complete reversal that I find a similarity with what has been going on for the last ten years inside the SSPX. This complete reversal was achieved with consummate skill, by an unprecedented feat. Despite all the oaths, all the promises, all the guarantees, through a series of ambiguities, ambiguous formulas, skilfully and carefully staggered and gradual, constituting a Machiavelian deception without precedent, the General managed to oppose a strong opposition, through using relentless repression, through using numerous changes to the Army and the Civil Service, and he also sent to death and to torture thousands of Europeans and tens of thousands of Harkis loyal to French civilisation. In this drama, the favoured weapon of the devil for deceiving men, as always, was ambiguity, ambiguous formulas, words with a double meaning. We can understand why, in the Bible, the God of Truth says: “I hate a double tongue”, words with a double meaning, “os bilingue detestor.”
Are we not witnessing today a complete reversal of the situation in the Society of St. Pius X? On the contrary – in the opposite sense – Archbishop Lefebvre helped us to stay separate, to keep our distance, he put us on our guard against the conciliar Church which is no longer Catholic, so he said, and against liberal and modernist Rome which has lost the faith, so he also said.
Bishop Fellay however, says that there is no such thing as the conciliar Church, that there is only one visible Church, only one Rome and that he can make an agreement with it, that he can trust it to keep its promises and the guarantees offered to us that we can stay as we are. Recently, the Franciscans of the Immaculate trusted in the gauarantee of Benedict XVI's Motu Proprio, authorising (supposedly) the True Mass.
Part II:
The successor of Benedict XVI
blithely tears up his predecessor's Motu Proprio, forbidding the these
Franciscans the Mass, at least without a problematic authorisation from
nobody is quite sure who. There you can see, unfortunately, what the
guarantees of the successor of Peter are worth. And if Benedict XVI had accepted Bishop Fellay’s doctrinal declaration of 15th April 2012, what would the guarantees of Benedict XVI be worth today? How would we be able to stay as we are? Archbishop Lefebvre, on the other hand, asked: ‘How are we supposed to trust those people? The ones who justify the denial of Quanta Cura, Pascendi, the Syllabus etc.’ But Bishop Fellay tells us that today the situation is no longer like 1988, that things have changed – who would have thought it? As a Swiss Guard at the Vatican told Archbishop Lefebvre, “But Monsignor, do you really expect anything else from these people?” It’s there, in the biography of Archbishop Lefebvre by Bishop Tissier, on page 506. It just goes to show that there are still some Swiss with a sense of reality.
I’ll continue my little history. In 1962 I went into exile, to Mexico. There I discovered the hidden history of another great betrayal. The freemasonic Mexican government attacked the Church and provoked a ‘Vendee war,’ a Catholic popular uprising which ended with the murder of the President of the Republic, Obregon and also with an agreement with Rome... Which contained the following clause: on pain of excommunication, the Cristeros had to lay down their arms and surrender to the Masonic republic. In spite of guarantees and promises their leaders were then one by one assassinated and a good number of their men too. It just proves that the successor of Peter, in this case Pius XI, can make some pretty serious mistakes. 1926 was also the year of that Catholic tragedy which saw the condemnation of Action Francaise, the triumph of the left in the episcopacy, thanks to the chaplains of Catholic Action who started becoming Bishops, and started preparing their Council, as Cardinal Marty said in Paris. This year also saw the defection over to the left of Jacques Maritain, one of the intellectual fathers of Vatican II.
So the second betrayal of 1962 was Algerian Independence, but also the start of a new betrayal, this time of the Church and the Faith, with Vatican II which began by a coup d’etat, like the Revolution of 1789, whose ideas the Council would introduce into the Church, as testified by several bishops, Congar, Suenens, and in particular Cardinal Ratzinger who spoke of ‘two centuries of liberal culture’ that the Church had to ‘make its own’ at Vatican II. Everyone knows what happened, or ought to. You just have to re-read the works of Archbishop Lefebvre. At the Council, as always, the devil’s favourite weapon when it comes to deceiving men is ambiguity. Ambiguous formulas, phrases with a double meaning. Our Lord told us “What is, is; what is not, is not. Everything else comes from the devil.” But in the Council, one finds numerous expressions of this type: nevertheless, and yet, but, however, and also, in certain cases, etc. Latin must be preserved in the Mass, and yet, however, in certain cases we should perhaps translate it... we know what happened next. Those are the time-bombs of Vatican II, the deliberate ambiguities, which were calculatingly put there for future use. The people who did it said so themselves afterwards!
I’ll continue my little history. In 1969, after a retreat in Argentina I went to see the Archbishop of Parana to whom I confided my wish to continue the Tradition of the Church, which I was sure was my priestly vocation. “So go and see Archbishop Lefebvre!” he told me. That was the first time I had heard of Archbishop Lefebvre. It was therefore the Church who sent me to Archbishop Lefebvre, to preserve the Tradition of the Church. And it was Archbishop Lefebvre who preached the Holy Week retreat at Écône. I was on that retreat, and I entered the seminary in October 1972. On 29th June previously, I had been in Rome for the feast of Saints Peter and Paul, and there I had heard with my own ears Pope Paul VI say: “After Vatican II, the smoke of Satan entered into the Church.” After, or because of it? I therefore lived at Écône during the decisive years of Archbishop Lefebvre’s fight for the Faith. He did me the great and quite undeserved honour of confiding in me and trusting me to the point of allowing me complete access to his correspondence. During my years in the seminary, I noted the sense of combat which the Archbishop had. He followed Providence, of course, but he sometimes looked back to see if the faithful were fighting, if his faithful combatants were following him, as the battles intensified and one fight succeeded another. To reassure his troops, he explained to them that, of course, we’re in the Church, that we recognise the Pope, etc. etc. He even went as far as signing an agreement which he immediately renounced. But just so that everyone understands the situation: these precautions cannot now be used now to justify doing today the exact opposite of what he told us and said not to do, in other words wait until Rome returns to Tradition before making an agreement. Realist or not, that will all happen whenever God decides, it’s not for us to commit suicide.
So Archbishop Lefebvre kept us up to date with all his goings on with Rome, and his reasons for continuing. He denounced forcefully all the errors, especially those of the Pope. And Archbishop Lefebvre spent the last three years of his life warning us against the dangers and traps which the modernist authorities would not cease trying to bait us with, dangling in front of us all the advantages of an agreement with modernist Rome. In particular in his last conference to the seminarians at Écône! Smoke and mirrors by which so many of our comrades in arms have succumbed, and have thus been condemned to silence and the abdication of the fight for the Faith. As Scripture says: those who ought to have barked against the wolf, to save the flock, to save souls, have become mute dogs. Third betrayal. And it’s in this direction that the Superior General of the Society, Bishop Fellay, has been turning us for years now, in the hope of reaching an agreement with Rome. In preparing people’s minds for this volte-face, for this capitulation, all means are justified. First of all, the scandalous expulsion of Bishop Williamson.
If Bishop Williamson didn’t agree with Bishop Fellay, it was because Bishop Fellay was taking the wrong path. And because Bishop Williamson showed what was in agreement with the thinking of Archbishop Lefebvre, the right path to take. Thereafter followed the aberrant reply of Bishop Fellay to the letter which the three bishops wrote to him. Then the expulsion of numerous priests and faithful from the Society or from its works. For example, they even expelled children from Society schools, in the USA particularly. The blackmail threat of transfers used against priests who weren’t happy about an agreement, such as the recent case of Fr. Beauvais from St. Nicolas du Chardonnet in Paris.
I’ll continue my little history. In 1962 I went into exile, to Mexico. There I discovered the hidden history of another great betrayal. The freemasonic Mexican government attacked the Church and provoked a ‘Vendee war,’ a Catholic popular uprising which ended with the murder of the President of the Republic, Obregon and also with an agreement with Rome... Which contained the following clause: on pain of excommunication, the Cristeros had to lay down their arms and surrender to the Masonic republic. In spite of guarantees and promises their leaders were then one by one assassinated and a good number of their men too. It just proves that the successor of Peter, in this case Pius XI, can make some pretty serious mistakes. 1926 was also the year of that Catholic tragedy which saw the condemnation of Action Francaise, the triumph of the left in the episcopacy, thanks to the chaplains of Catholic Action who started becoming Bishops, and started preparing their Council, as Cardinal Marty said in Paris. This year also saw the defection over to the left of Jacques Maritain, one of the intellectual fathers of Vatican II.
So the second betrayal of 1962 was Algerian Independence, but also the start of a new betrayal, this time of the Church and the Faith, with Vatican II which began by a coup d’etat, like the Revolution of 1789, whose ideas the Council would introduce into the Church, as testified by several bishops, Congar, Suenens, and in particular Cardinal Ratzinger who spoke of ‘two centuries of liberal culture’ that the Church had to ‘make its own’ at Vatican II. Everyone knows what happened, or ought to. You just have to re-read the works of Archbishop Lefebvre. At the Council, as always, the devil’s favourite weapon when it comes to deceiving men is ambiguity. Ambiguous formulas, phrases with a double meaning. Our Lord told us “What is, is; what is not, is not. Everything else comes from the devil.” But in the Council, one finds numerous expressions of this type: nevertheless, and yet, but, however, and also, in certain cases, etc. Latin must be preserved in the Mass, and yet, however, in certain cases we should perhaps translate it... we know what happened next. Those are the time-bombs of Vatican II, the deliberate ambiguities, which were calculatingly put there for future use. The people who did it said so themselves afterwards!
I’ll continue my little history. In 1969, after a retreat in Argentina I went to see the Archbishop of Parana to whom I confided my wish to continue the Tradition of the Church, which I was sure was my priestly vocation. “So go and see Archbishop Lefebvre!” he told me. That was the first time I had heard of Archbishop Lefebvre. It was therefore the Church who sent me to Archbishop Lefebvre, to preserve the Tradition of the Church. And it was Archbishop Lefebvre who preached the Holy Week retreat at Écône. I was on that retreat, and I entered the seminary in October 1972. On 29th June previously, I had been in Rome for the feast of Saints Peter and Paul, and there I had heard with my own ears Pope Paul VI say: “After Vatican II, the smoke of Satan entered into the Church.” After, or because of it? I therefore lived at Écône during the decisive years of Archbishop Lefebvre’s fight for the Faith. He did me the great and quite undeserved honour of confiding in me and trusting me to the point of allowing me complete access to his correspondence. During my years in the seminary, I noted the sense of combat which the Archbishop had. He followed Providence, of course, but he sometimes looked back to see if the faithful were fighting, if his faithful combatants were following him, as the battles intensified and one fight succeeded another. To reassure his troops, he explained to them that, of course, we’re in the Church, that we recognise the Pope, etc. etc. He even went as far as signing an agreement which he immediately renounced. But just so that everyone understands the situation: these precautions cannot now be used now to justify doing today the exact opposite of what he told us and said not to do, in other words wait until Rome returns to Tradition before making an agreement. Realist or not, that will all happen whenever God decides, it’s not for us to commit suicide.
So Archbishop Lefebvre kept us up to date with all his goings on with Rome, and his reasons for continuing. He denounced forcefully all the errors, especially those of the Pope. And Archbishop Lefebvre spent the last three years of his life warning us against the dangers and traps which the modernist authorities would not cease trying to bait us with, dangling in front of us all the advantages of an agreement with modernist Rome. In particular in his last conference to the seminarians at Écône! Smoke and mirrors by which so many of our comrades in arms have succumbed, and have thus been condemned to silence and the abdication of the fight for the Faith. As Scripture says: those who ought to have barked against the wolf, to save the flock, to save souls, have become mute dogs. Third betrayal. And it’s in this direction that the Superior General of the Society, Bishop Fellay, has been turning us for years now, in the hope of reaching an agreement with Rome. In preparing people’s minds for this volte-face, for this capitulation, all means are justified. First of all, the scandalous expulsion of Bishop Williamson.
If Bishop Williamson didn’t agree with Bishop Fellay, it was because Bishop Fellay was taking the wrong path. And because Bishop Williamson showed what was in agreement with the thinking of Archbishop Lefebvre, the right path to take. Thereafter followed the aberrant reply of Bishop Fellay to the letter which the three bishops wrote to him. Then the expulsion of numerous priests and faithful from the Society or from its works. For example, they even expelled children from Society schools, in the USA particularly. The blackmail threat of transfers used against priests who weren’t happy about an agreement, such as the recent case of Fr. Beauvais from St. Nicolas du Chardonnet in Paris.
There was the threat of excommunication or denial of the sacraments for those who wished to inform themselves about the real situation of the Society on the internet, which constitutes according to certain priests, a mortal sin. Supposedly. Or for those who refused to shut down their website, for example in England, in Mexico, in Italy, etc. These different threats expressed a fear of those who didn’t accept the suicide and who considered themselves obliged to remain anonymous so as not to lose their participation in goods which belong not to Bishop Fellay but to Our Lord Jesus Christ and the Church. Goods which previously had been offered to the Society at the cost of huge sacrifices. For example, those people who, through their generosity built churches, chapels, schools, for the good fight for the Faith and who found themselves, one way or another, excluded.
Threats of expulsion whose expression consists, for example with Bishop Williamson and the uncooperative priests, in finding themselves on the street, deprived of any means of subsistence, no pension, health insurance, social security etc. etc.
Threats of finding oneself excommunicated de facto, forbidden for example from assisting at the profession of vows of a child of some friends of ours, whom we remember newborn. Threats of refusal of priestly ordination, as in the case of the Dominicans, Capuchins, and Benedictines in 2012.
Nominations as well, that is an essential point, to key positions in the Society. Seminary Rectors, professors, District Superiors, who will be the members of the Chapter next time. All of which, and a lot of other things besides, caused turmoil, trouble, fear for many people. Nobody ever feels tempted by the Gulag Archipelago or the psychiatric hospital.
They’ve begun badmouthing people, calling them imprudent, subversive, revolutionary, disobedient, in summary we’re being tricked with the same talk of obedience as forty years ago: obey, otherwise your schismatic, sedevacantist, you’re dividing the Society. In exactly the same way, Archbishop Lefebvre in his time was said to be dividing the Church. And much more seriously, the consequence of this single-minded policy spread over more than ten years, transfers, appointments of fellow travellers who fit the bill, etc., is that seminarians, priests and faithful have lost their convictions and are ripe for a suicidal agreement of the Fraternity of St. Peter / Campos type. Today in our schools, a pupil who does not think that an agreement would be a miraculous solution to all our difficulties is the exception to the rule. The tragic example over the last thirty years of thirteen groups, sometimes important monasteries, convents, a whole diocese in the case of Campos, the Fraternity of St. Peter, etc. reduced to silence, sometimes transformed into accomplices, defending religious liberty and the Council, like the monastery of Le Barroux, and we now even hear Bishop Fellay telling us that the religious liberty of the Council is very, very limited, that it is like lots of other errors which we have supposedly attributed incorrectly to the Council, but which, as Pope Benedict XVI said, are really only a bad hermeneutic or interpretation of the Council. Our Lord said: “A good tree cannot bring forth bad fruit,” in other words bad results. If the tree is bad, then cut it down and throw it on the fire! It’s Our Lord who says so.
All of the foregoing is evidence that the fight for the Faith handed down though Archbishop Lefebvre has been subverted and betrayed. It would have been on the point of disappearance if the hoped-for agreement, the object of so many efforts, so much pertinacity, had succeeded in June 2012 as Bishop Fellay hoped. Let’s not forget, Mgr. Pozzo has come back to Rome. It’s not for no reason that he has been called back to Rome! And he has to keep working at creating a baited hook of a kind that might interest Bishop Fellay. We are told, ‘But look, the agreement wasn’t signed in the end!’ Well alright, the Titanic passed right alongside the iceberg, it was a near thing, let’s see if that lasts. But the Captain of the Titanic has not altered course, and so the next iceberg is going to sink us all, goods and passengers, body and soul. The coup nearly came off in this fateful month of June 2012. Apart from that, the Chapter which followed immediately went on to endorse the agreement and to settle the final details of ‘normalisation,’ in other words the Personal Prelature of St. Pius X - see, it’s already been baptised with a name! – Ooof! We narrowly avoided death, but the captain is still there and his plan as well, as proven by the latest declaration of Bishop Fellay and the two other bishops, from 27th June 2013, and the new transfer of Fr. Beauvais, as we were saying. He’s got to leave St. Nicolas du Chardonnet, to say nothing of the latest nominations of seminary rectors in Germany and Argentina.
Let’s say a little bit now about the General Chapter at which I was present last year. Well, of course, there’s the question of secrecy. Conspirators who are plotting something will swear an oath of secrecy. Fine. But obviously secrecy has its limits.
When you realise that you’ve been manipulated, that your superior wanted to make you take responsibility for his decisions, positions which you have never accepted, never voted on, for example to give him carte blanche to expel Bishop Williamson, then you’re free to tell the truth. Later on we read in the official newsletter of the French District that the superior general in April 2013 allowed the Secretary General to reproduce a letter from Bishop Tissier de Mallerais to the Superior General, written on 29th March 2013, about which the secretary general declares, “This letter was written so as to defend the honour of the superior general and the Chapter members.” But in reality, the letter just attacks the honour of Bishop Williamson as it says itself, explicitly, in its conclusion. It is said in this letter that Bishop Williamson waited for a year before criticising Bishop Fellay’s Doctrinal Declaration, which doesn’t correspond to reality.
In reality, what it’s talking about is paragraphs 4 and 5 of Bishop Fellay’s doctrinal declaration of 15th April 2012, which were made public by Fr. Pfluger in May 2012 in southern France. It says in the letter, “The General Chapter studied this text,” of the declaration, “the Chapter members had complete liberty to denounce its weaknesses,” something which I myself did not neglect to do, and that it was tacitly decided that there was no need to insist on this subject, that it was obvious that the superior general regretted it. As to the term ‘tacitly,’ we could add that one of the Chapter members, Fr. Pagliarani, seminary rector of La Reja in Argentina, spoke up to say that the chapter wouldn’t in any case be giving a slap to the superior general by asking him to recognise his error, but that this would come about as a result of the final declaration of the chapter.
To return to Bishop Williamson, the truth is that each chapter member found waiting for him at his place at breakfast, just before the chapter began, a registered letter from Bishop Williamson addressed to him personally, in which was to be found a very strong critique of paragraphs 4 and 5 of the doctrinal declaration which had been made public about a month previously by Fr. Pfluger. So perhaps Bishop Tissier didn’t receive his or didn’t read it, but the truth is that Bishop Williamson didn’t wait one year to criticise Bishop Fellay’s doctrinal declaration. In a general way, I can say that at the general chapter I understood the position which Archbishop Lefebvre and his Traditionalists found themselves in: the majority at the Council was manipulated by a strong, liberal minority through the authority of Popes Jean XXIII and Paul VI.
In the same way, at the Chapter, the only one with sufficient authority to orientate the debate in the right direction was Bishop Williamson, and that’s the very reason why the superiors excluded him. Now at least he is free to say what he thinks, and he makes use of that. Just before the Chapter, the question was over the legality or illegality of the expulsion of Bishop Williamson, which he himself had just put before our very eyes by his letter. What does canon law say about it? Well, canon law says that a bishop is judged by the Pope, not by bishop Fellay, and yet it is we who are accused of being sedevacantists. So we voted for or against the expulsion of Bishop Williamson. Two hours after the result of the vote, we found on the internet: nine chapter members were against the expulsion. That means that several judged it to be illegal and therefore that it led to the Chapter being considered null.
It is to the shame of the majority of members that they accepted the expulsion of Bishop Williamson and gave carte blanche to Bishop Fellay to expel him from the Society. He was the only one who had shoulders broad enough to save the Chapter and the Society from the planned suicide; someone else did do that, in a certain way, and for a mysterious reason, Pope Benedict XVI. In his “benevolence” to the Society, he renewed for the umpteenth time his requirement that Bishop Fellay accept unconditionally the Council, the New Mass and the conciliar Magisterium which contradicts the Magisterium of the Catholic Church. How did we arrive at such a confusing situation? What ought we have done to avoid it?
Once more it is Bishop Williamson who needs to be quoted: after he finished reading the book by Emmanuel Barbier, Archbishop Lefebvre said, ‘If I had read this book before founding Écône, I would have given my seminary a different orientation.’ That is, more of a counter-revolutionary orientation, and that’s the same as the advice which Mgr. De Proenca Sigaud gave in 1959 to Pope John XXIII and to the Council, when he was responding to the Pope’s invitation to share his desires on the question of what Vatican II ought to decide. So we’ll quote a few words of his expose:
Threats of expulsion whose expression consists, for example with Bishop Williamson and the uncooperative priests, in finding themselves on the street, deprived of any means of subsistence, no pension, health insurance, social security etc. etc.
Threats of finding oneself excommunicated de facto, forbidden for example from assisting at the profession of vows of a child of some friends of ours, whom we remember newborn. Threats of refusal of priestly ordination, as in the case of the Dominicans, Capuchins, and Benedictines in 2012.
Nominations as well, that is an essential point, to key positions in the Society. Seminary Rectors, professors, District Superiors, who will be the members of the Chapter next time. All of which, and a lot of other things besides, caused turmoil, trouble, fear for many people. Nobody ever feels tempted by the Gulag Archipelago or the psychiatric hospital.
They’ve begun badmouthing people, calling them imprudent, subversive, revolutionary, disobedient, in summary we’re being tricked with the same talk of obedience as forty years ago: obey, otherwise your schismatic, sedevacantist, you’re dividing the Society. In exactly the same way, Archbishop Lefebvre in his time was said to be dividing the Church. And much more seriously, the consequence of this single-minded policy spread over more than ten years, transfers, appointments of fellow travellers who fit the bill, etc., is that seminarians, priests and faithful have lost their convictions and are ripe for a suicidal agreement of the Fraternity of St. Peter / Campos type. Today in our schools, a pupil who does not think that an agreement would be a miraculous solution to all our difficulties is the exception to the rule. The tragic example over the last thirty years of thirteen groups, sometimes important monasteries, convents, a whole diocese in the case of Campos, the Fraternity of St. Peter, etc. reduced to silence, sometimes transformed into accomplices, defending religious liberty and the Council, like the monastery of Le Barroux, and we now even hear Bishop Fellay telling us that the religious liberty of the Council is very, very limited, that it is like lots of other errors which we have supposedly attributed incorrectly to the Council, but which, as Pope Benedict XVI said, are really only a bad hermeneutic or interpretation of the Council. Our Lord said: “A good tree cannot bring forth bad fruit,” in other words bad results. If the tree is bad, then cut it down and throw it on the fire! It’s Our Lord who says so.
All of the foregoing is evidence that the fight for the Faith handed down though Archbishop Lefebvre has been subverted and betrayed. It would have been on the point of disappearance if the hoped-for agreement, the object of so many efforts, so much pertinacity, had succeeded in June 2012 as Bishop Fellay hoped. Let’s not forget, Mgr. Pozzo has come back to Rome. It’s not for no reason that he has been called back to Rome! And he has to keep working at creating a baited hook of a kind that might interest Bishop Fellay. We are told, ‘But look, the agreement wasn’t signed in the end!’ Well alright, the Titanic passed right alongside the iceberg, it was a near thing, let’s see if that lasts. But the Captain of the Titanic has not altered course, and so the next iceberg is going to sink us all, goods and passengers, body and soul. The coup nearly came off in this fateful month of June 2012. Apart from that, the Chapter which followed immediately went on to endorse the agreement and to settle the final details of ‘normalisation,’ in other words the Personal Prelature of St. Pius X - see, it’s already been baptised with a name! – Ooof! We narrowly avoided death, but the captain is still there and his plan as well, as proven by the latest declaration of Bishop Fellay and the two other bishops, from 27th June 2013, and the new transfer of Fr. Beauvais, as we were saying. He’s got to leave St. Nicolas du Chardonnet, to say nothing of the latest nominations of seminary rectors in Germany and Argentina.
Let’s say a little bit now about the General Chapter at which I was present last year. Well, of course, there’s the question of secrecy. Conspirators who are plotting something will swear an oath of secrecy. Fine. But obviously secrecy has its limits.
When you realise that you’ve been manipulated, that your superior wanted to make you take responsibility for his decisions, positions which you have never accepted, never voted on, for example to give him carte blanche to expel Bishop Williamson, then you’re free to tell the truth. Later on we read in the official newsletter of the French District that the superior general in April 2013 allowed the Secretary General to reproduce a letter from Bishop Tissier de Mallerais to the Superior General, written on 29th March 2013, about which the secretary general declares, “This letter was written so as to defend the honour of the superior general and the Chapter members.” But in reality, the letter just attacks the honour of Bishop Williamson as it says itself, explicitly, in its conclusion. It is said in this letter that Bishop Williamson waited for a year before criticising Bishop Fellay’s Doctrinal Declaration, which doesn’t correspond to reality.
In reality, what it’s talking about is paragraphs 4 and 5 of Bishop Fellay’s doctrinal declaration of 15th April 2012, which were made public by Fr. Pfluger in May 2012 in southern France. It says in the letter, “The General Chapter studied this text,” of the declaration, “the Chapter members had complete liberty to denounce its weaknesses,” something which I myself did not neglect to do, and that it was tacitly decided that there was no need to insist on this subject, that it was obvious that the superior general regretted it. As to the term ‘tacitly,’ we could add that one of the Chapter members, Fr. Pagliarani, seminary rector of La Reja in Argentina, spoke up to say that the chapter wouldn’t in any case be giving a slap to the superior general by asking him to recognise his error, but that this would come about as a result of the final declaration of the chapter.
To return to Bishop Williamson, the truth is that each chapter member found waiting for him at his place at breakfast, just before the chapter began, a registered letter from Bishop Williamson addressed to him personally, in which was to be found a very strong critique of paragraphs 4 and 5 of the doctrinal declaration which had been made public about a month previously by Fr. Pfluger. So perhaps Bishop Tissier didn’t receive his or didn’t read it, but the truth is that Bishop Williamson didn’t wait one year to criticise Bishop Fellay’s doctrinal declaration. In a general way, I can say that at the general chapter I understood the position which Archbishop Lefebvre and his Traditionalists found themselves in: the majority at the Council was manipulated by a strong, liberal minority through the authority of Popes Jean XXIII and Paul VI.
In the same way, at the Chapter, the only one with sufficient authority to orientate the debate in the right direction was Bishop Williamson, and that’s the very reason why the superiors excluded him. Now at least he is free to say what he thinks, and he makes use of that. Just before the Chapter, the question was over the legality or illegality of the expulsion of Bishop Williamson, which he himself had just put before our very eyes by his letter. What does canon law say about it? Well, canon law says that a bishop is judged by the Pope, not by bishop Fellay, and yet it is we who are accused of being sedevacantists. So we voted for or against the expulsion of Bishop Williamson. Two hours after the result of the vote, we found on the internet: nine chapter members were against the expulsion. That means that several judged it to be illegal and therefore that it led to the Chapter being considered null.
It is to the shame of the majority of members that they accepted the expulsion of Bishop Williamson and gave carte blanche to Bishop Fellay to expel him from the Society. He was the only one who had shoulders broad enough to save the Chapter and the Society from the planned suicide; someone else did do that, in a certain way, and for a mysterious reason, Pope Benedict XVI. In his “benevolence” to the Society, he renewed for the umpteenth time his requirement that Bishop Fellay accept unconditionally the Council, the New Mass and the conciliar Magisterium which contradicts the Magisterium of the Catholic Church. How did we arrive at such a confusing situation? What ought we have done to avoid it?
Once more it is Bishop Williamson who needs to be quoted: after he finished reading the book by Emmanuel Barbier, Archbishop Lefebvre said, ‘If I had read this book before founding Écône, I would have given my seminary a different orientation.’ That is, more of a counter-revolutionary orientation, and that’s the same as the advice which Mgr. De Proenca Sigaud gave in 1959 to Pope John XXIII and to the Council, when he was responding to the Pope’s invitation to share his desires on the question of what Vatican II ought to decide. So we’ll quote a few words of his expose:
“Nonetheless I see other things in the Church which cause me great anguish, they are so serious that I think them worthy of being considered by the ante-preparatory Pontifical Commission, by the ecumenical Council and finally by the Council itself. I see that principles and spirit which calls itself revolutionary has penetrated the ranks of the clergy and the Christian people just as the principles, doctrine spirit and love of paganism did once before, at the moment of the Renaissance, preparing society for the Protestant reformation. Quite a number of the clergy don’t see the errors of the Revolution and they don’t oppose them. To some other priests, the Revolution is a pleasant ideal and they propagate it, the work with it, they harass the opponents of the Revolution, calumniating them and putting obstacles in the way of their apostolate. Many pastors keep silence, others adhere to the errors, to the spirit of the Revolution.”
Well, obviously as far as
Mgr. Sigaud is concerned, the enemy of the Church is the Revolution,
Freemasonry, Protestantism, etc. And even, yes, International Judaism,
for example. You can really see in this document that it was the
formation of ‘La Cite Catholique’ which inspired this bishop. This
movement which produced so many excellent fruits in the fifties, and out
of which came, among other things, the essential part of the resistance
to the council. So that’s the area in which we really ought to have
been making an effort. I have been trying to use the opportunities to
say so, for several years now, whenever there was a meeting, but
obviously it hasn’t been taken on board. Of course Archbishop Lefebvre
thought of counter-revolutionary formation and he thought that the acts
of the Magisterium, that is to say the encyclicals which followed the
Revolution, were sufficient to arm us in the anti-liberal combat, but
unfortunately we’re obliged to conclude that that isn’t the case. And so
we would have needed to add to these acts of the Magisterium a more
systematic formation, based on the books of la Cite Catholique, in
particular the early editions of the book by Jean Ousset “Pour Qu’Il
Regne” (‘He Must Reign’) and that’s how one day the Church will rebuild
the Social Reign of Our Lord Jesus Christ. May Our Lady, guardian of the
Faith, protect us and give us the courage to confront these constantly
increasing difficulties.