The Tablet

The Tablet, the favourite read of that malign spirit that describe itselves without any consciouse irony as "liberal" - this august publication used to be known affectionately by Catholics as "The Pill"; today, few can be bothered even to insult it. At the moment they are churning out hysterical articles suggesting that Rome is in meltdown owing to the overdue lifting of the contested excommunications on the SSPX.

If a former Muslim held the Koran in contempt and believed Mohammad was a false prophet, he would cease, if he had a scrap of personal integrity, to claim to be a Muslim. Yet former Catholics, who have long abandoned the faith of the Church in favour of the godless secular creed of the present-day North Atlantic civilisations, insist on continuing to describe themselves as Catholics, or more specifically, liberal Catholics.

It is difficult to understand the raison d’être of this seemingly bizarre humbug. Nevertheless, “Liberal Catholic” remains the label of choice of those who, too drunk on their own ignorance and pride to notice that they staggered into the wrong church, insist on continuing to live parasitic like on the Body of Christ. The Tablet serves this constituency - it should come as no surprise therefore to any informed Catholic that it is the favourite read of many of the hirelings who currently occupy English sees.

In so far as a lapsed Catholic who becomes a liberal Catholic can be said to have returned to the faith (which is self-evidently problematic), the Tablet’s current editor returned to the Catholic faith, having been through the Landings program at Ealing Abbey. Landings is a twelve step program designed in the United States for sensitive, middle-class lapsed Catholics of the sort to be found in the Ealing Abbey parish. As a "program", it's a vague and somewhat belated recognition that all is not well with the Catholic Church. Within seven years of her return, Catherine Pepinster was the Tablet's editor.

What separates Catholicism from all other “isms” is that the Church was founded by God in person when He walked the earth for the explicit purpose of carrying on His mission of sanctifying, ruling and teaching until the end of time. In order to be able to fulfil this assignment the Church has been given the charism of infallibility. Where it otherwise there could be no moral obligation to either embrace Catholicism or remain a Catholic, for the Church would have no more inherent right to claim our allegiance to her teachings than a drunk slumped on a bar stool putting the world to rights. Because the Church has been divinely commissioned, disagreeing with what she clearly and firmly teaches is not an option; indeed, it is not even an option merely to agree with what she teaches, one must simply and without reservations assent to it. J.R.R Tolkien summed it up when he wrote, "Catholicism is not a set of opinions to which one subscribes, but a reality to which one submits."

Strangely, Liberals “Catholics” never dispute such doctrines as the Trinity or the Incarnation. This is decidedly odd, for if the Church is not infallible, she is just as capable, and indeed if anything more likely, to be wrong about the Trinity and the Incarnation as she is about contraception. This oddity is explained by the fact that all liberal heresies have their epicentre about 6” below the belt buckle. This is not as bizarre as it would at first seem, because what they have done is simply swap the doctrines of the Faith for the various articles of blind faith of the present godless secular culture, a culture self-evidently preoccupied with sex.

Liberal “Catholics” appear to be aware in some obscure way of the irrationality in their creed and are consequently forced to resort to all sorts of painful mental gymnastics and self-deception to paper over the cracks. They are prone, for example, to clichés such as “moving with the times”. Quite why a Church that is the guardian of sacred truths revealed by God would want to dump those truths for the latest fashions of the godless is never of course explained. Indeed, if all Catholics have to do is embrace the latest moral fads of modern secularists, why on earth do we need a Church in the first place - especially one that judged by the liberal yardstick is promoting multiply grave errors?

Another obviously transparent trick is to pretend to perceive some sort of dichotomy between love and truth. One can only assume that when Christ said, “I am the way, the truth and the life,” He was being unloving! To tell a sodomite the truth that indulging in buggery is a short one-way ticket to hell is a loving thing to do. To leave him in ignorance to perish in his depravity is neither loving nor just; on the contrary, it is cruelly irresponsible.

“Christ was not a rigid rule follower” is yet another red herring liberal “Catholics” routinely trot out. But this is not exactly true, Christ was scrupulous in keeping the commandments and the just demands of the Jewish religious establishment, and encouraged others to be equally observant. What he objected to was the burden of the minutia of man-made rules and endless embellishments that had been laid over these just obligations by the Pharisees and others.

Yet another liberal decoy is to try and pass off their dissent from the clear and settled teachings of the Church as mere “squabbles among Catholics”. No well instructed Catholic could possibly be taken in by such patently deceitful gobbledygook, and it is doubtful to be honest that many liberals are so cerebrally challenged that they actually fully succeed in conning themselves with this line.

When public speaking at Catholic gatherings, the body language of liberal “Catholics” is very illuminating. They often appear uncomfortable with their own answers, and will give this away by involuntarily dropping their voices. They are also inclined to waffle and to lack clarity in responding to questions. This is not dishonesty; it arises from the genuine confusion and dialectic contradictions at the heart of their creed, rather than from any conscious intent to be evasive.

Catherine Pepinster has a MA in philosophy and religion from Heythrop College, London University. Nevertheless, she is clearly a lady who has only the vaguest grasp of Catholic doctrine (if she has any at all) and who holds heretical opinions on many serious issues of faith. She is a personable woman and honest according to her own confused lights and is young enough to learn, but it is not obvious where the motivation to do so will come from.

We have received legal threats and posturing from Catherine Pepinster’s solicitors concerning an earlier and shorter version of the above essay. Yet more evidence of the thin skins and illiberality of so called liberals, or perhaps one more spin-off from the insecurity inherent in embracing an irrational creed. To read the solicitor’s letter click here.

Answers on a postcard please.

Following the overdue lifting of the contested excommunications of the SSPX bishops, there is now much blather in neo-Catholic land to the effect that the SSPX bishops will have to formally accept Vatican II before they can be fully reinserted into mainstream Catholicism.

Can someone tell me what specific article of faith is rejected by the SSPX that was unambiguous defined and formally imposed on the faithful by Vatican II, that was not part of the Catholic faith prior to Vatican II?

Answers on a postcard please.

GOD BLESS OUR POPE: The contested excommunications are finally lifted

with acknowledgment to Gerald Warner

Benedict XVI grows in stature by the minute. To the achievement of the Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum, he has now added the sensible and overdue lifting of the always contested excommunications imposed on the four bishops of the SSPX. Although there was always widespread skepticism about the validity of those censures, their lifting removes a major roadblock to the restoration of the Church.

In the children’s animated cartoon, the Ice Age, a wooly mammoth, one of the principle characters, believes that he is the last of his species. However, half way through the story he is dlighted to find a female wooly mammoth to which he immediately takes a shine. Unfortunately, the female wooly mammoth his suffering from the delusion that she is a sloth and spends her time hanging upside down from trees, with disastrous consequences! Happily, with the aid of friends, she is persuaded over time that she is a mammoth. The final eureka moment comes when she realizes that her shadow is similar to that of the male wooly mammoth and they both live happy ever after.

What I found fascinating was watching the reaction of my grandchildren. They were fidgeting with frustration with this animal’s delusion. When the mist cleared and she accepted her “God given” nature, the collective relief was palpable.

The Church is the Ark of Salvation, the Body of Christ, the one true faith, the one true Church, founded by the God who threw the stars into their orbits and knit you and me together in our mother’s wombs; indeed, she is the very reason for the existence of the universe.

Yet for the past forty years, the Bride of Christ has been behaving as if there was no such thing as truth and error, right and falsehood, she was merely another religious tradition or one church among many. This widespread delusion and apparent insanity of our mother caused many orthodox Catholics to squirm with frustration. The lifting of the excommunications suggest that our mother is recovering from these delusions and her eureka moment may not now be far away. Then we shall all be able to breathe an enormous sigh of collective relief.

Not everyone will be dancing in the street of course: the Staff of the Tablet will probably need counseling - poor dears. Anything that moves the malign spirit of those who, without any conscious irony denominate themselves "liberals" to misery has to be great news.

Recently, a handful of Catholics, more noted for their mad optimism than solid faith, have been striving to persuade us to throw a party to "celebrate" the 50th anniversary of the calling of the Second Vatican Council. What sort of Catholic, one wonders, wants to celebrate the fact that in England and Wales in 1964, at the end of the Council, there were 137,673 Catholic baptisms; in 2003 the figure was 56,180. In 1964 there were 45,592 Catholic marriages, in 2003 there were 11,013. Mass attendance has fallen by 40 per cent. In "Holy" Ireland, only 48 per cent of so-called Catholics go to Mass. In France, there were 35,000 priests in 1980; today there are fewer than 19,000.

In the United States, in 1965, there were 1,575 priestly ordinations; in 2002 there were 450 - a 350 per cent decline. In 1965 there were 49,000 seminarians, in 2002 just 4,700. Today 15 per cent of US parishes are without priests. Only 25 per cent of America's nominal Catholics attend Mass. Worse still is the erosion of faith among those who ludicrously describe themselves as Catholics. Among US Catholics aged 18-44 (the children of Vatican II) as many as 70 per cent say they believe the Eucharist is merely a "symbolic reminder" of Christ.

To call this unparalleled implosion of the Church a "renewal" is a sign that one is as close to being a raving lunatic as one can get short of eating one’s own shirt - and to attribute it to the Holy Ghost is blasphemous.

The Catholic Church is in the same position as an alcoholic: until she admits that she has a problem, no cure is possible. The lifting of the contested excommunications is a sign that the Church is returning to mental health. Hopefully once the SSPX is back fully in the fold, they will be able to help prod our mother towards that final eureka moment when she once again fully and openly acknowledges and confesses her own God given nature.

Further down the road, another exciting prospect is that, once the final agreement is worked out, it opens the door to the canonization of Archbishop Lefebvre; that sadly I will not live to see.

In the meantime we can all look forward to sitting back and enjoying some innocent fun reading all the revisionist history being written by those who have been calumniating the SSPX for 20 years. Funniest of all will be the mental gymnastics of the post-Conciliar popeologist. These are the folk who if the Pope was to declare the sky green, would be peddling round excitedly telling everyone what a delightful shade of green the sky actually is.

Bishop Williamson's Outburst

I was seven years old when WWII ended and the images that emerged from Nazi Germany shortly after the war of the Concentration Camps and their victims have seared themselves on my memory. Anyone who seek to minimise or make light of the suffering of The Jewish people, and indeed many others, at the hand of the Nazis (pagans and self-proclaimed heirs of the Enlightenment) during this dark period in the history of modernity, displays prima facie signs of criminal insanity.

That said, I do not support the sort of holocaust denial legislation in place in Germany. The problem is that what is being criminalized is precariously close to a thought crime. Once we hand these sorts of sanctions to liberal governments, it is only a matter of time before they are using them to persecute those who expose truths they find uncomfortable. One can find oneself in trouble in Turkey for example for drawing attention to Turkey’s role in the massacre of millions of Catholic Armenians. In Canada, a Christian minister can find himself in serious trouble for merely pointing out that sodomy is one of the sins crying to Heaven for vengeance.

Neither does it follow that I cannot acknowledge that the godless secular left’s preoccupation with the Holocaust is for the most part mendacious. It is driven by their desire to divert our attention away from the fact that their hands are dripping with innocent blood: the millions who died in the cruel purges of Stalin (a man idolized in his time by the British left) and his henchmen (all militant atheists) are but one of numerous examples.

The willingness of the secular left to sanction massacres, on a scale unknown before the age of Enlightenment, to advance their agenda is also born testament to by the current abortion holocaust. Indeed, if you want to drive a secular liberal apoplectic with rage, point out to him the similarities between the Nazi’s attitude to the Jews and the pro-aborts’ attitude to the unborn. Both have arbitrarily decided to define a sub-set of humanity as sub-human. Both have then equally arbitrarily decided that they may murder this sub-set if it serves their “laudable” purposes.

Neither should we ever forget that one of the first acts of the Christophobic Masons behind the French Revolution, the midwives in at the birth of modernity, was to organize a genocidal massacre of all Catholics in north west France. By the time this came to an end some 300,000 Catholics had been butchered by musket, rapier or drowning. So meticulous did the Infernal Columns carry out their “duties” that not even our pets and livestock were spared: whole villages were left full of our corpses: men, women, children and beast lay rotting side by side. The secular left, true to its mendacious form, has managed to entirely expunge that inconvenient little truth from the history books and the collective memory.

The recent decision of Edinburgh Social Services to remove two children from the care of their grandparent and place them with a brace of sodomites united in a sham marriage by nothing more holy than a mutual commitment to a disordered sexuality is merely one more illustration of the continual willingness of secular left ideologues to sacrifice the innocent on the altars of their distorted agendas.

No Catholic should ever watch television with his brains in his lap like a secularist. The mainstream media is controlled by the Christophobic left and even when they tell the truth they are lying. Just consider the recent saturation coverage of the murder of some two-hundred innocent Indians by Islamists in Mumbai. What was wrong with that you may ask? Nothing, except that an even larger number of Christians have suffered a similar fate at the hands of Hindu-fascists in the same country and of that the main stream media has reported absolutely nothing! To report such matters for the godless secularists who massage our news would clearly be the equivalent of reporting that so many flies had been swatted.

Nevertheless, the evidence for the cruel fate of the Jews under the Nazis, like the evidence for the crucifixion, death and resurrection of Our Blessed Lord, rest on the solid testimony of contemporary witnesses who were close to and even personally involved in these events. Further, just as the Apostles and others maintained their testimony in the face of persecution and cruel death, so some of the leading Nazis maintained their testimony while facing the hangman’s noose. Consequently, any traditionalist who seeks to seriously question the Holocaust, either with regard to the number of its victims or its methodology, is in danger of sawing off one of the main branch on which his own faith rests.

Against this background, when I read Bishop Williamson’s outburst on Swedish television, my jaw dropped. The Bishop confirmed his earlier infamous remark in Canada that “there was not one Jew killed by the gas chambers; it was all lies, lies, lies.” The Bishop further declares on camera that “I believe there were no gas chambers” and that “the historical evidence… is hugely against six million Jews having been gassed in gas chambers as a deliberate policy of Adolf Hitler… I think that 200,000 to 300,000 Jews died in Nazi concentration camps, but none of them in gas chambers.”

“Jaw dropping” aside, I was not entirely surprised for I had a year or two earlier out of curiosity attended one of the Bishop’s lectures. My gut reaction, which has more often than not served me well, was that he was a vain man who clearly revelled in the notoriety (and the following) that his crackpot opinions gained for him. He had clearly never met a conspiracy theory that he didn’t absolutely adore. Further, this array of way-out opinions were seemingly held with the sort of moral certainty that Catholics normally reserves for dogmas of the faith - yet the evidence marshaled to support them seldom rose above knowing winks, nods and nose tapping in the general direction of some sort of Gnostic knowledge of his inner circle.

I recently wrote that the next decade or two is shaping up from the Devil’s perspective to be one of the most decisive battles of history. It is a matter of enormous regret that the Devil has been handed an easy victory on a plate, in one of the first skirmishes in this gathering cosmic war, by a level of stupidity seldom found in nature in one of our own “generals”. Indeed, were Bishop Williamson a military man, he would now be facing a court marshal for negligently aiding the enemy.

Hopefully, once the SSPX position is regularized, entirely admirable men like Bishop Fellay who has already moved swiftly to distance the Society from Williamson, will be in a position to deal with such matters both effectively and decisively. In the meantime, if Bishop Williamson had the love for the Church and tradition that he claims, he would fall on his sword - and today rather than tomorrow.