In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
A couple of things today. This is what we call Passion Sunday, and it begins a period in the Church which we call Passiontide or Passion time. Tide is an old way of saying time, the time of year. And what it refers to is, the word passion does not have anything to do really with lust like it means today. Oh, you know, crimes of passion or whatever, things like that. Passion is a word which comes from the Latin passio, passera, which means to suffer. And Passiontide refers to the fact that liturgically beginning on this Sunday until and through really Holy Week, the Church commemorates through its’ liturgy the suffering, the events that led to Our Lord’s death and crucifixion on the cross, dying for our redemption, His time of suffering.
Now, you notice that the images of the saints and of Our Lord, the crucifix, everything, are covered in violet veils. The reason is because from this point in the gospels we are using in the liturgy and through Holy Week, Christ never walks again in the open. It says here, “He hid Himself”, and in another gospel it says, “He did not walk amongst them anymore”. Now, He wasn’t hiding for fear. He was hiding because His chosen time to offer Himself to the Father had not yet arrived. And, so, He was not walking in public anymore until such time as He would offer Himself on the cross for our redemption.
So, this signifies Our Lord hiding Himself, but also the saints, because they were servants of the Lord and friends of the Lord. They are covered because they would not go about in public when their Master did not. And, so, it is signifying that they have gone into hiding with Our Lord. So that is what Passiontide is all about, celebrating in different countries, differently, according to their particular customs. In some countries, for example, the images are veiled in white with a red cross on them, a little red cross. In some countries the statues and crucifixes were veiled from Ash Wednesday all through Lent. But our particular custom here is that of most of the Latin Rite of the Church, which is the violet beginning this Sunday. The crucifixes will be revealed briefly on Good Friday with the veneration of the cross, covered again, and then all the veils will be removed on Holy Saturday. So that’s Passiontide.
There’s another thing I just wanted to kind of share because we as traditional Catholics especially are having our time of passion in the Church, our time of suffering. And it may get worse very soon. But I do like people to be apprised of certain events.
Now, as you know, we are not a Society of Pius X parish, we are not members of that organization. But certainly we are not opposed to them. We are friendly with them and we support them mainly for the same reason the that the Vatican fears them in a particular way, which is because they have bishops, they have clout, they have genuine bishops, four of them, that were consecrated by Archbishop Lefebvre. And for that reason the Vatican will not ignore them. Because in a sense they are self-sustaining. Parishes like this, for example, to a certain extent we rely on those bishops for certain sacraments, such as Confirmation and Ordination and whatnot. So, events that concern them concern us.
Now, as you are aware for the last year or so they have been in a dialogue, so to speak, with the Pope’s men, people he chose, theologians that he chose to represent the Vatican II side of things. And at the end of it, the Society was presented with somewhat of an ultimatum and it was called the Doctrinal Preamble. And they said, Well, you have to accept this or there’s going to be problems. So Bishop Fellay went off and consulted with his counselors there, and they rejected it in every Article. It essentially said you have to accept Vatican II, boiling the whole thing down. And the whole point is that they can’t accept Vatican II. But Bishop Fellay, they were all bound by secrecy. They imposed secrecy on the involved parties. But Bishop Fellay kind of hinted at it, and what he said was the problem became apparent very early which is that the Pope in Rome, modern Rome, they don’t speak Catholic anymore. They don’t understand the language of our faith. Anybody who has ever tried to read anything by Father and later Cardinal Ratzinger and now Pope Benedict XVI, will realize he has invented a theological new speak which is just confusing and ridiculous. The former Popes were right to the point. They said, This is what we teach, you don’t believe it, you’re excommunicated. Fine. Are we clear now?
But they talk about this hermeneutic of continuity. Now, not even the Pope seems to know what this hermeneutic of continuity is. A hermeneutic of continuity — I’m not sure, it sounds like something from an operating room. I don’t know. But he has never defined it. But you see the school of so-called theology that the Pope and Hans Kung and these other people come from, they deal in gobbledy gook. Okay? So, basically Bishop Fellay said they don’t speak Catholic anymore. And we have nothing to talk about because they don’t pretend to understand us. And we can’t even begin to understand them.
And they’ve changed the definitions of everything. For example, one of the things that the modern Vatican, the Pope, have changed the definitions of is tradition itself. What is tradition? Traditio, you hand it to somebody as you received it. That is tradition. Literally in Latin it means handing something over. The nature of tradition is you preserve intact what you received from the Church and you give it to the successors, to the next ones.
Well, that has always been what tradition means. What are we doing here? We’re doing what they’ve done for two thousand years. We are living tradition. The Vatican, on the other hand, since Vatican II, has this definition of tradition as something that is always changing. Well, I don’t care what you say, you can’t make tradition equal to something that always changes. Tradition can’t change. There can be no such thing as a changed tradition. If I hand this on, I’m not going to say, Well, I’m going to rip the cover off and half the book, I’m going to fill it in with gobbledy gook and give it to you, and that’s handing on what I received. No, that’s not tradition.
So, anyway, recently in response to this Cardinal Levada, who is the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Ratzinger’s old job, came up with a secret memo that somehow got leaked to the Italian Press saying that Bishop Fellay has to come to Rome immediately to explain himself, because the reasons he gave for rejecting their ultimatum were not sufficient to avoid a rupture, this upcoming rupture, which also belongs in the operating room. So he has to come now and further define and clarify his position because they are totally unsure of what he means. Well, of course they are totally unsure of what he means. He is saying, If you are going to bring Vatican II into this, no dice. Vatican II, in fact, contains heresy. And we are going to have to work on that. And Vatican II is saying, What? What’s heresy anyway? You know, there’s none of that in Vatican II. Vatican II gives us transports of joy. It’s better than LSD when we think of Vatican II.
So, they have no common point. So he has been summoned and told, You have to come and explain this. There was a secret Vatican communication. So, anyway, Chris Ferrara, who writes for The Remnant and Catholic Family News sometimes — he is a good guy and very intense, very well spoken, very traditional. He has had enough of this kind of talk so he wrote kind of an op-ed article for The Remnant. And I want to kind of share with you the main points of that, because it is what most of us are feeling. It’s like, Vatican, Popes, you hypocrites, you absolute hypocrites. You are calling to task only Traditional Catholics. The Pope this year, within the last two months, approved, officially gave Papal recognition and Church recognition to a new religious order called the Catechumenal Way which denies every doctrine practically of Catholicism. They don’t believe that Christ redeemed us, they don’t believe in the real presence of the Blessed Sacrament, their liturgies by their own constitutions, must be performed sitting down. Now, I can only imagine, but it probably looks like the little mushrooms around the toad stool and, you know, their so-called priests wearing a sport shirt with some sort of multicolored stole on it. But that’s okay. They are given official recognition.
But an order that has done nothing but do what the Church has always done and teach what the Church has always taught and believe what the Church has always believed, is now being called to task, the only one in the world. So Chris wrote this article. I just want to share parts of it with you. It’s kind of longish so I won’t do the whole thing. He said,
Chris Ferrara: “On March 16,”
Msgr. Perez: It would have to happen on my birthday.
Chris Ferrara: “2012, an unsigned communique from the Vatican Press Office advised that a secret “evaluation” of Bishop Fellay’s secret response to the secret “Doctrinal Preamble,” emanating from the secret proceedings of the Vatican-SSPX conferences, has determined (in secret) that the response is “not sufficient to overcome the doctrinal problems”
Msgr. Perez: This is all in quotes because there are no doctrinal problems with the society.
Chris Ferrara: “that are at the basis of the rift between the Holy See and the aforesaid Society.” Bishop Fellay was “invited to be so kind as to clarify his position so as to heal the existing rift, as Pope Benedict XVI wished.”
Msgr. Perez: We don’t know exactly what these “doctrinal problems” are because the Vatican doesn’t say, Well, we have problems with you because you believe what the Church has always taught. How could they say that. So the real problem has to do with their belief that there is something wrong with Vatican II. Now, just remember that virtually everyone in the Church is totally enamored and inebriated by the spirit of Vatican II. As long as you give lip service to Vatican II, you will have no problem with Rome, no matter what else you do, no matter what else you do.
For example, even those organizations that are supposedly traditional, like the Fraternity of St. Peter, why can they exist? Well, they are allowed to exist because they are no threat to the Pope or the bishops or Vatican II, because they have to agree to shut up in the first place, pretend that nothing is wrong with Vatican II, and, in fact, they have to sign a document which says they believe it’s perfectly traditional. The wording they use is, I accept Vatican II when viewed in the light of tradition. Now, what’s wrong with that? Because if you view Vatican II in the light of tradition, you reject it. So, accepting Vatican II in the light of tradition means you reject it. But they don’t say that. What they say is they accept it in the light of tradition, which means that they give the impression that they believe everything is fine with Vatican II, and somehow in line with tradition in spite of its’ own wording to the contrary.
And not only are there doctrinal problems with the documents of Vatican II. I’ll give you the reference sometime and you can look this up. This is a total aside. But the bishops, and the Ecumenical Council of the Church which is not infallible — this was a pastoral council — but together wrote a document, and it’s in the Vatican II documents. In this document they call for a one-world order with a central government to be policed by the U.N. That is in the documents of Vatican II. So this is one of the things that you are accepting if you accept the Vatican II documents, is that the Church is cooperating and working towards a one-world government, a New World Order, with the U.N. as our policemen. That is in the official documents of the Church. Okay? So lucky they are not infallible.
Anyway, he goes on about several other things, and he’s saying, You know, none of these other people are being called to mend their rifts and ruptures and this kind of thing. He says, for example
Chris Ferrara: “Nor does it appear that the Vatican is concerned about rifts, ruptures, or recomposition as to the legions of Catholics on every continent, including numerous bishops and priests, who no longer assent to any Church teaching that does not meet with their personal approval.”
Msgr. Perez: I have to say that this is true of every Novus Ordo Catholic practically that I’ve encountered. They choose which of the Catholic doctrines they are going to believe and which ones they are not going to believe. This isn’t allowed of a Catholic. Catholicism and its’ doctrines form a monolithic body which you accept or you reject. St. Augustine said, “If you reject even one doctrine of the Church, you are no longer a Catholic”. And, so, what we see is largely the Church is populated by people who are nominal Catholics. In fact, one news commentator, who I don’t even think was Catholic just recently said, Did you know what the second largest Christian denomination in the U.S. is? The first largest is Catholicism. The second largest are apostate Catholics who have left the Church. And that is because of the Pope and the bishops and Vatican II. Put the blame right where it belongs.
Msgr. Perez: Okay, so, he said…
Chris Ferrara: “… consider also the refusal of the entire hierarchies of Italy and Germany, for example, to adopt the mandated corrections to the errant vernacular translations of the Novus Ordo Missae that plagued the Church for forty years before the Vatican finally ordered the corrections.
Then there is that movement of priests in Austria, led by Cardinal Schönborn’s one-time vicar general, Helmut Schüller, which, as this reporter reports, “has among its objectives… the abolition of clerical celibacy and the reintegration into priestly ministry of ‘married’ priests and their concubines.”
Msgr. Perez: Now, this isn’t one or two little priests over there.
Chris Ferrara: “The revolt, which is “openly supported…”
Msgr. Perez: This is quotes, the reporter is saying this.
Chris Ferrara: “… by 329 priests, and it threatened a split in the Austrian Church weeks before Pope Benedict’s September visit to neighboring Germany.” These dissidents have issued a “Call to Disobedience,” which demands “married clergy, women priests and other reforms” and has the support of “three-quarters of the people polled in that traditionally Roman Catholic country…”
Msgr. Perez: So, 329 — that’s probably almost all the priests in that country. There are about 14 priests per diocese right now over there, if that. So that is probably all the priests in Austria supporting this thing which calls for married priests. Did they get their theology out of a Cracker Jack Box? It’s not a matter of rules. The Pope can’t say, We’re changing the rules. Women can be priests now. It’s not a matter of rules. He might as well say, We’re changing the rules, men can get pregnant now. Because that’s really what it is. Women are not priests because a female is not capable of becoming a priest by God’s Divine Plan. Male souls are the only ones that can be ordained and transformed into the soul of a priest. So they don’t even know that? So that virtually every priest in Austria supporting this thing where they want women priests and whatnot. His point is, Is the Vatican calling them to task? Are they? Are they even being asked to explain themselves?
Chris Ferrara: “I could go on forever cataloguing the institutionalized dissent from doctrine and praxis that has arisen in the Church since Vatican II. Several books would be required merely to survey it all. The Vatican does nothing, or next to nothing to punish it. But then, we have all heard the neo-Catholic line: Pope [fill in name] fears any confrontation with dissenters in the national hierarchies, lest he provoke schisms. Or is it rifts and ruptures?”
Msgr. Perez: Provoke schisms? These people are in schism. Pretty much all the bishops in the world and the Pope, according to the definition of the Council of Trent, and the definition of schism are in schism. What are you going to provoke? It’s there. Now you have to do something about it.
Chris Ferrara: “But as to the Society of St. Pius X, however, oddly enough there is no fear of provoking a rift, a rupture, a schism, a whatever. They have been given until April 15 to clarify their doctrinal problems. Or else. Or else what? A re-excommunication of the four bishops? How could that be seen as anything but farcical, even by the mass media that have been agitating for the Society’s permanent ostracization in the name of the Council? A declaration of schism? On what grounds? The Society bishops have not even been accused of a refusal of submission to the Roman Pontiff, but only a failure to provide a “sufficient” clarification of unspecified and secretly discussed doctrinal problems. The Society hastens to Rome whenever summoned to discuss the matter. How could its conduct possibly constitute schism?”
Msgr. Perez: Remember, I mentioned this a few weeks ago. If you are doing what the Church has always done, and teaching what the Church has always taught, and believing what the Church has always believed, that is what makes you Catholic. If you don’t, that is what makes you schismatic. Liturgy, for example. The liturgy done in every parish in this diocese practically, I’m older than that liturgy. It was written by a group of people that the president of the committee and his secretary were both found out to be Freemasons, plants in the Church to do damage, and Paul VI believed the accusations. They were six Protestant ministers who were there to assure that there was nothing in the new Mass which would offend Protestants, that was not Protestant, as a matter of fact. And this was released in 1969 without due process. But somebody who does the old Mass is schismatic? No, guess who is schismatic. That the liturgy done in every parish in this diocese was condemned by the Council of Trent, and forbidden in perpetuam by Quo Primum of Pope St. Pius V. But that doesn’t seem to bother anybody, including and especially Rome, who does the same liturgy, this concocted beast of a liturgy.
Chris Ferrera: “This suggests a paradox: the Society is facing veiled threats of discipline precisely because it obeys and takes such threats seriously. This targeting of the Society reminds me of the rationale for waging war against Iraq in order to “fight terrorism”: the conquest of Iraq was an “achievable objective” even if there were not actually any Al Qaeda camps there. By crushing a petty dictatorship that would offer little resistance, America could pretend to be fighting “the evildoers.”
“Perhaps after April 15 something not very pleasant will happen to the Society. Something secret. A heavy canonical mechanism might go bump in the night. Perhaps some sort of ultra-excommunication is being contemplated, as ludicrous as that would be. More likely, however, is that nothing at all will happen. The Vatican will simply go on deploring the rift that could become a rupture, when everyone knows the Society and its adherents are simply Catholics who are being made to jump through hoops that no one else in the history of the Church has ever had to jump through.”
Msgr. Perez: What a point. They are being made to jump through these hoops that no one in the history of the Church has ever had to jump through. We are accusing you of being Catholic and you’d better explain yourself. When has that ever happened in the Church?
Chris Ferrera: “Meanwhile, there will be no talk from the Vatican of rift or rupture in Austria or anywhere else where fundamental teachings of the Magisterium and papal directives are being flouted.”
Msgr. Perez: So what is the real problem? The problem is that all these dissident groups, whether it be the Austrian clergy or the neo catechumenal way, one thing they all have in common, they all adore Vatican II.
Chris Ferrera: “None of them has any “doctrinal problems” with the Council. Quite the contrary. The Council gives them transports of joy. They celebrate the Council as the Magna Carta of their liberation from Church. Their “doctrinal problems” concern only some aspect of what the Church constantly taught and believed before the Council. You know, define dogmas, that sort of thing.”
Msgr. Perez: So, skipping a little bit more, the Council — what it comes down to with the Pope and the modern hierarchy, the Vatican, is the Council. That is all that counts. You know, some people ask me, Oh, well, you know, this Pope, he issued Summorum Pontificum, do you think he’s really coming back to Tradition? Absolutely not! He’s not going to do anything about Vatican II. Why? Remember Father Ratzinger, who later became Pope Benedict XVI, running around Vatican II with documents that he helped write or wrote himself, and pushing them through in secret to make sure that his agenda and the agenda of the modernists that he represented were accepted. Remember him in his coat and tie. Never a collar on Ratzinger. Un-unh, never a collar on him, but, you know, he’s now a Pope. He’s forced to wear a collar. He’s probably not very happy about that. That darned collar (Msg. laughing) — he probably thought of turning down the election because he had to wear a collar. But, anyway, he will never, never do anything about Vatican II. Why? Pride, saving face. He made Vatican II. He was one of the people who made it, who foisted it upon us, who plagued us with it, who implemented it. He’s invested and he does not have the humility or probably doesn’t even know to say that I was wrong, and go back on that.
So, to end this up, Chris Ferrera goes through this, and he says,
Chris Ferrera: “Well, since we’re talking about their opinion of whether Bishop Fellay’s response was not sufficient, maybe I should suggest some other matters that might properly belong in the Vatican’s “not sufficient” file.
“Not sufficient”: the faith of many millions of Catholics, including rebellious bishops and priests, who no longer care what the Popes or the Councils have taught perennially regarding matters of faith and morals on which they have made up their own minds to the contrary.
· “Not sufficient”: a Roman liturgy that, as the Pope said when he was Cardinal Ratzinger, has “collapsed” because of a “break in the history of the liturgy” whose “consequences of the Novus Ordo could only be tragic.”
Msgr. Perez: This was the man who is now Pope acknowledging that the Novus Ordo was an unmitigated disaster. And I know where he did this. He did a Forward in the German edition of Klaus Gamber’s book on the reform of the liturgy. And he said in that German Forward that the New Mass was an unmitigated disaster, it was a break with the tradition of the Church, a rupture, all this kind of stuff. But when it came to translations, he kind of realized what he had said and would not allow that to be in the translations. It had to stay in the German edition. Of course, what does it matter in the German edition, because the German bishops are all heretics anyway and think it’s great. But that’s where they are getting this.
Chris Ferrera: · “Not sufficient”: the Catholic hierarchy’s defense of what they call “hard sayings”, which would be dogma, in the face of popular rejection of them, and its feeble-to-nonexistent witness against the soft tyranny of the modern nation-state, to which Churchmen have completely surrendered according to the program of “dialogue,” “ecumenism,” “religious liberty” and the “opening to the world” that Vatican II inaugurated—reflecting the “doctrinal problems” the Society has been called upon to “clarify.”
· “Not sufficient”: the effort to rid the dioceses of homosexuals, heretics, heretical catechisms, and depraved “sex education” programs, as well as disobedient clergy. You could go on and on about that one.
· “Not sufficient”: the absurd attempts to effect the “consecration of Russia” while deliberately failing to mention Russia, because Vatican bureaucrats think it imprudent to honor the request of the Virgin Most Prudent.
· “Not sufficient”: an overall condition of the Church in which, after more than forty years of so-called “conciliar renewal,” vast numbers of nominal Catholics exhibit what John Paul II described as “silent apostasy” and much of the hierarchy exhibits what Sister Lucia of Fatima called “diabolical disorientation.”
· “Not sufficient”: the Vatican’s so-called disclosure of the Third Secret of Fatima in 2000, which lacks the Virgin’s explanation of a vision as ambiguous as the documents of Vatican II.
And, finally, there is the Vatican’s entire approach to the Society of Saint Pius X. The Society should be regularized immediately—unilaterally and unconditionally, with permission to operate independent of bishops who are singing the praises of Vatican II as they close schools, suppress parishes, evade or defy Summorum Pontificum, cozy up to “gay Catholic” groups, administer the Blessed Sacrament to public heretics, and grin like fools as they throttle the life out of the Church.”
Msgr. Perez: I love it. The hierarchy, the bishops and the hierarchy of the Church grinning like fools as they throttle the life out of the Church. Isn’t that just what they are like. Just what they are like.
Chris Ferrera: “Only a Catholic revival like the one produced by the independent, papally supported monasteries of Cluny can restore the Church now. The Society is poised to take a leading role in such a revival. To deny them that role solely in order to continue dickering over the ambiguities of a Council nobody seems to be able to clarify is not sufficient. Let us pray that the Pope will bring this ridiculous spectacle to an end for the good of the Church and the world.”
Msgr. Perez: In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.