Conciliar Popes I
The world has
always known bad Popes, but never
As in today’s
world more corrupt than ever.
Whenever the claim is put forward that the
Conciliar Popes may be at least partly in good faith, there are usually
Catholics that protest. They will say that the Popes are intelligent and
educated churchmen, so it is impossible that they do not fully realize what
they are doing. The “mentevacantist” theory, according to which these Popes
have vacant minds, partly ignorant of the consequences of their own actions, is
for these critics absurd. One can understand the protest, but let me quote a
friend who understands “mentevacantism” as it needs to be understood:—
“The idea that Popes can be mistaken in
good faith because they hold that certain errors are not opposed to the Faith,
gets little serious attention, because people have a concept of the papacy too
detached from the world, whereas the whole history of the Popes is a history of
men of their time being liable to share in all the good and bad habits and
vices of their time. The difference lies in the power of the error, which has
never been so mighty as it is today, mankind never having been, as one must not
forget, so degenerate as today.
“For indeed liberalism is now everywhere
and it is overwhelming, no longer a mere thought, or way of thinking, but a
very way of being that permeates every man alive, be he an absolute liberal in
himself, or an agent of liberalism and its subversion, or merely one of its
tools. Such is the case of the Conciliar Popes. They think they are drawing
close to the world to heal it. They do not realize that it is the world which
is drawing them to itself to infect and control them.
“In such a situation as this, one can
certainly speak of liberal Popes but not of non-Catholic Popes, insofar as
there is lacking the prime requisite for such a condemnation, namely the
personal will on their part to be liberals and not Catholics. All one can do is
recognize the fact that in these Popes there is the personal will to be
Catholics and not anti-Catholic liberals, since for them there is no
contradiction between the two, far from it. According to their theologian and
thinker, Joseph Ratzinger, liberalism is one of the good by-products of
Catholicism, needing only to be cleansed of certain alien distortions imported
into it. And so as for destroying the Church, it stands to reason that Popes
believing in such a compromised Catholicism cannot help one of the consequences
of their actions being the destruction of the Church.
“Concerning Archbishop Lefebvre, given that
he grew up in a Church quite different from today’s Church, I can only conclude
that for him it was impossible for a Catholic acting as an instrument of
subversion not to realize what he was doing. Still less could a Pope not
realize. From reading between the lines of certain of the Archbishop’s writings,
I do believe that while his vision of the world certainly included the process
of degeneration reaching down to the end of time, it did not include that
process involving in any clear manner the Church as well.”
I can just hear readers objecting to this
kind of analysis: “Oh, Excellency, please stop defending the Conciliar Popes.
It’s black or white. If they’re black, I’ll be a happy sedevacantist. If
they’re white, I’ll be a happy liberal. Your greys do nothing but confuse me!”
Dear reader, black is black, white is
white, but rarely in real life do we find pure white, and never pure black
(whatever is, has the goodness of being). If you want to understand this
relative excusing of the Conciliar Popes, the key is to grasp that the world
has never been so deeply bad as it is today. From this unprecedented degeneracy
it is obvious that Conciliar Popes are in this respect more excusable for going
astray in the Faith than any of their predecessors.
Kyrie eleison.
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