Bishops’
Declaration – I
We have a
third Resistance bishop now.
A
Declaration told the why and how.
On March 19 a little over one month ago Dom Thomas
Aquinas was quietly consecrated bishop for the benefit of souls all over the
world wishing to keep the true Catholic faith. As when Bishop Faure was
consecrated just one year before, the ceremony was beautifully organized by the
monks of the Monastery of the Holy Cross in the mountains behind Rio de
Janeiro, in the Monastery’s steel barn cathedral, handsomely decorated for the
occasion as last year. The weather was dry and warm without being too warm. St
Joseph made everything run smoothly. We owe him great thanks.
There were slightly more people attending than last
year, but more of them were from nearby in Brazil. There were no journalists
present and the event passed with barely a mention even in Traditional Catholic
news sources. Was there a conspiracy of silence? Had a word gone out to pay no
attention? It does not matter. What does matter is what Almighty God may be
suggesting, namely the survival of the Faith is not right now calling for
publicity or for making oneself known but rather perhaps for sliding into the
shadows, from which the Church can gently lower itself into the catacombs to
wait for its resurrection after the storm in the world, which promises to be
humanly terrible, has played itself out.
In any case we have now another bishop, firmly in the
line of Archbishop Lefebvre, and on the western side of the Atlantic. Like
Bishop Faure he knew the Archbishop well and was a confidant of his. Bishop
Thomas Aquinas never worked with the Archbishop directly from within the SSPX,
but because he was not a member of the Society, the Archbishop may have felt
that much more free to share his thoughts and ideas with him. Certainly he gave
to the young monk invaluable advice on more than one occasion, which Bishop
Thomas has never forgotten. Believing Catholics are not mistaken – there have
been few exceptions to their overwhelmingly positive reaction to God’s gift of
another true shepherd of souls.
At the time of the consecration the two consecrating
bishops made a Declaration which has not yet had much publicity. It gives the
in-depth background of the consecration, showing how such an apparently strange
event is not really strange at all, but quite natural in the circumstances.
Here is the first part of the Declaration. The second part will have to follow
in next week’s “Eleison Comments.”
Our Lord Jesus Christ having warned us that at his
Second Coming the faith will almost have disappeared from the face of the earth
(Lk. XVIII, 8), it follows that from the Church’s triumph in the Middle Ages
onwards it could only experience a long decline down to the end of the world.
Three upheavals in particular marked out stages of this decline: Protestantism
refusing the Church in the 16th century; Liberalism refusing Jesus Christ in
the 18th century; and Communism refusing God altogether in the 20th century.
Worst of all, however, was when this Revolution by
stages managed to penetrate inside the Church, thanks to the Second Vatican
Council (1962–1965). Wishing to bring the Church back in contact with the
modern world that had moved so far away from it, Paul VI succeeded in getting
the Council Fathers to adopt “the values of 200 years of liberal culture” (Cardinal
Ratzinger).
What the Fathers adopted was the triple ideal of the
French Revolution in particular: liberty, equality and fraternity, in the
triple form of religious liberty whose emphasis on human dignity implied
lifting man above God; collegiality whose promotion of democracy undermined and
levelled down all authority within the Church; and ecumenism whose praise of
false religions implied the denial of the divinity of Our Lord Jesus Christ.
And in the half-century following Vatican II the deadly consequences for the
Church of adopting the Revolutionary “values” have become only more and more
obvious, culminating in the appalling scandals disgracing almost day by day the
pontificate of the reigning Pope.
Kyrie eleison.
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