Texts for our Times
'Peace, peace: when there was no peace.'
'God shall send them the operation of error, to believe lying.'
The Prophet Isaias
Woe to you that call evil good, and good evil: that put darkness for light, and light for darkness: that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter.
Woe to you that are wise in your own eyes, and prudent in your own conceits.
Is. 5.20-1
The Prophet Jeremias
The wise men are confounded, they are dismayed, and taken: for they have cast away the word of the Lord, and there is no wisdom in them.
Therefore will I give their women to strangers, their fields to others for an inheritance: because from the least even to the greatest all follow covetousness: from the prophet even to the priest all deal deceitfully.
And they healed the breach of the daughter of my people disgracefully, saying: Peace, peace: when there was no peace.
Jeremias 8.9-11
The Prophet Ezekiel
And if the watchman see the sword coming, and sound not the trumpet: and the people look not to themselves, and the sword come, and cut off a soul from among them: he indeed is taken away in his iniquity, but I will require his blood at the hand of the watchman.
Ezekiel 33.6
St Paul
They receive not the love of the truth, that they might be saved.
Therefore God shall send them the operation of error, to believe lying:
That all may be judged who have not believed the truth but have consented to iniquity.
2 Thess. 2.10
St John the Evangelist
They went out from us but they were not of us.
For if they had been of us, they would no doubt have remained with us: but that they may be manifest, that they are not all of us.
1 John 2.19
Henry V (in Shakespeare’s play)
[P]roclaim it, Westmoreland, through my host,
That he which hath no stomach to this fight,
Let him depart; his passport shall be made
And crowns for convoy put into his purse:
We would not die in that man’s company
That fears his fellowship to die with us.Henry V, Act IV, Scene III
Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre:
For I think that many Traditional Catholics enjoy the traditions; they like the old Mass, they like the old sacraments, they like the old teaching of the Church, but they do not really believe in Jesus Christ as the one and only Saviour, God and Creator.
The Angelus, July 1986, Vol. IX, n. 7
Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre:
Bishop Tissier de Mallerais recounts a conversation between Lefebvre and Cardinal Ratzinger:
“Eminence, even if you give us everything—a bishop, some autonomy from the bishops, the 1962 liturgy, allow us to continue our seminaries—we cannot work together because we are going in different directions. You are working to dechristianize society and the Church, and we are working to Christianize them.
“For us, our Lord Jesus Christ is everything, He is our life. The Church is our Lord Jesus Christ; the priest is another Christ; the Mass is the triumph of Jesus Christ on the cross; in our seminaries everything tends towards the reign of our Lord Jesus Christ. But you! You are doing the opposite: you have just wanted to prove to me that our Lord Jesus Christ cannot, and must not, reign over society.”
Recounting this incident, the Archbishop described the Cardinal’s attitude: “Motionless, he looked at me, his eyes expressionless, as if I had just suggested something incomprehensible or unheard of.”
Then Ratzinger tried to argue that “the Church can still say whatever she wants to the State,” while Lefebvre, the intuitive master of Catholic metaphysics, did not lose sight of the true end of human societies: the Reign of Christ. Fr. de Tinguy hit the nail on the head when he said of Marcel Lefebvre: “His faith defies those who love theological quibbles.”
On a conversation with Cardinal Ratzinger, in Marcel Lefebvre, The Biography, Bernard Tissier de Mallerais
Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre
I can’t speak much of the future, mine is behind me, but if I live a little while, supposing that Rome calls for a renewed dialogue, then, I will put conditions. I shall not accept being in the position where I was put during the dialogue. No more.
I will place the discussion at the doctrinal level: “Do you agree with the great encyclicals of all the popes who preceded you? Do you agree with Quanta Cura of Pius IX, Immortale Dei and Libertas of Leo XIII, Pascendi Gregis of Pius X, Quas Primas of Pius XI, Humani Generis of Pius XII? Are you in full communion with these Popes and their teachings? Do you still accept the entire Anti-Modernist Oath? Are you in favor of the social reign of Our Lord Jesus Christ? If you do not accept the doctrine of your predecessors, it is useless to talk! As long as you do not accept the correction of the Council, in consideration of the doctrine of these Popes, your predecessors, no dialogue is possible. It is useless.”
Thus, the positions will be clear.
The stakes are not small. We are not content when they say to us, “You may say the traditional Mass, but you must accept the Council.” What opposes us is doctrine; it is clear.
This is what Dom Gérard did not see, and what confused him. Dom Gérard has always seen the liturgy and the monastic life, but he does not clearly see the theological problems of the Council, especially Religious Liberty. He does not see the malice of these errors. He was never too much worried about this. What touched him was the liturgical reform and the reform of the Benedictine monasteries. He left Tournay, saying, “I cannot accept this.”
Then, he founded a community of monks with the liturgy and with a Benedictine spirit. Very well, wonderful. But he did not appreciate enough that these reforms which led him to leave his monastery were the consequences of errors in the Council itself.
As long as they grant him what he wanted—this monastic spirit and the traditional liturgy—he has what he wants and is indifferent to the rest. But he has fallen into a snare: the others have given up nothing of their false principles.
Interview given to Fideliter, Nov-Dec 1988.1
Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre
And we must not waver for one moment either in not being with those who are in the process of betraying us. Some people are always admiring the grass in the neighbor’s field. Instead of looking to their friends, to the Church’s defenders, to those fighting on the battlefield, they look to our enemies on the other side.
“After all, we must be charitable, we must be kind, we must not be divisive, after all, they are celebrating the Tridentine Mass, they are not as bad as everyone says”—but THEY ARE BETRAYING US—betraying us! They are shaking hands with the Church’s destroyers. They are shaking hands with people holding modernist and liberal ideas condemned by the Church. So they are doing the devil’s work.
Thus those who were with us and were working with us for the rights of Our Lord, for the salvation of souls, are now saying, “So long as they grant us the old Mass, we can shake hands with Rome, no problem.” But we are seeing how it works out. They are in an impossible situation. Impossible. One cannot both shake hands with modernists and keep following Tradition. Not possible. Not possible.
Now, stay in touch with them to bring them back, to convert them to Tradition, yes, if you like, that's the right kind of ecumenism! But give the impression that after all one almost regrets any break, that one likes talking to them? No way! These are people who call us corpse-like traditionalists, they are saying that we are as rigid as corpses, ours is not a living Tradition, we are glum-faced, ours is a glum Tradition! Unbelievable! Unimaginable! What kind of relations can you have with people like that?
‘Address to his Priests’ (Two Years after the Consecrations), Econe, 19902
St Thomas Aquinas
If any one, however, boastfully claiming a pseudo-science, wishes to say anything in contradiction to what we have written, let him not do his talking in out-of-the-way corners, or before mere boys who know not how to judge of difficult problems.
But, if he dares, let him write an answer to what has been here written. He will find not me alone, who am the least, but many others who know and foster the truth, by whom his error may be refuted or his ignorance enlightened.
On the Unity of the Intellect against the Averroists, Chapter 5, 29.3
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
No longer does violence always and necessarily lunge straight for your throat; more often than not it demands of its subjects only that they pledge allegiance to lies, that they participate in falsehood.
The simple act of an ordinary brave man is not to participate in lies, not to support false actions! His rule: Let that come into the world, let it even reign supreme—only not through me.
Nobel Lecture, 1974.4
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