To Believe a Lie

Fr Teilhard de Chardin SJ

Written by  Susan Claire Potts

Ideo mittit illis Deus operationem erroris ut credant mendacio

There is a shadow over the world. It darkens societies and snuffs the candles in the sanctuary. It creeps around corners and billows over houses. Good people see it, but they don’t know what to do. How do you fight a shadow?  How do you crush a phantasm? There’s no substance there, nothing to push or shove. Nothing works.

So what is this strange amorphous thing, this Mystery of Iniquity? How can we understand it?

Sometimes, the most complex, inexplicable things are not so hard to understand once the blinders are off. I’m a counseling psychologist—no theologian or scientist—but, like all who hold the Catholic Faith, I have eyes to see. After nearly forty years of studying the human mind, analyzing the root of emotional conflict, moral perversions, and intellectual error, this is how it looks to me:

Quite simply, the darkness is the result of a thought process disorder. Masquerading as philosophy and science, the disorientation has spread through the Church from top to bottom, corrupting minds and shaking the intellectual and philosophical foundations of Western civilization.

A new religion has the world in its grip.

The closest thing to it was the fourth-century Arian crisis, when the whole world groaned and found itself Arian. But at least then people knew what the argument was. The point of debate was clear. It was one thing or the other: Was Christ the co-eternal Son of the Father or not?

But this Shadow is more than heresy. It is the reinterpretation of Truth—which is no interpretation at all, but a denial and repudiation. People say it is Modernism, but horrid as that synthesis of all heresies, is, the nebulous New Religion is worse because it’s not a heresy. Rather, it is systemic apostasy, a total renunciation of the Deposit of Faith, a “standing off” from Revelation. It is the substitution of a lie for the Truth. Like all evil things, it has no life of its own, but it has attached itself like a blood-sucking leech to the Mystical Body of Christ.

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Archbishop Lefebvre -v- the papacy, St Pius X -v- Benedict XVI - Vat 2 has splintered the Catholic Church into factions; and, as in any conflict, truth is the first casualty. On cue, the history of the Artians and St Athanasius is currently being urgently re-written by neo-Catholics to fit their regime of novelties

Neo-Catholics are often obsessed with the SSPX (If you need a definition of “neo-Catholic” you can do no better than follow this LINK).  A certain Mr Robert William’s personal obsession with the SSPX has assumed the nature of the sort of vendetta against them that was condemned so forcefully by Benedict XVI in his letter of the 7 July 2007 (which accompanied his Motu Proprio, Summorum Pontificum), but nevertheless the Catholic Herald regularly publish his letters on the subject.

Mr Williams never misses an opportunity to work the word “excommunicated” into any sentence containing Archbishop Lefebvre’s name.  However, when Benedict XVI lifted the censure of the four SSPX bishops on 21st Jan. 2009, his document giving it juridical force, finished by pronouncing the censure of excommunication promulgated on 1st July, 1988 to be “void of juridical effects …”   Perhaps one of our many amateur canon lawyers can explain how one can be excommunicated by a decree that has been declared “void of juridical effects” by the highest authority in the Church?   

Neo-Catholics naturally object to the similarity between Archbishop Lefebvre and St Athanasius being pointed out.  To counter this rather obvious comparison, Mr Williams asserts that the Church and the papacy “remained resolute” throughout the Arian crisis.  He further claims that this novel view is proved by some unnamed “19th century disputants.” 

St Jerome writing at the time of the Arian crisis (admittedly without the benefit of unnamed "19th century disputants" to draw upon) famously lamented, "The whole world groaned and marvelled to find itself Arian".   One of the popes at the time, Liberius, whose instincts were undoubtedly orthodox, was plucky at first, but torn from his see and banished to Thrace, signed a Semi-Arian creed and, under pressure from the Arians, renounced the champion of the orthodox party, St Athanasius.  If that is an example of “remaining resolute”, it is somewhat difficult to imagine what Mr Williams would regard as “irresolute.”

Can anyone explain why St Paul is a saint when, in his own words, “… when Cephas [i.e. the Pope] was come to Antioch, I withstood him to the face, because he was to be blamed,” (Galatians 2:11), whilst Archbishop Lefebvre is a villain for doing the same (and with much greater cause) vis-à-vis Cephas’s successor?  I have no doubt that Robert William with his forte for legalistic hair-splitting will be able to explain away these episcopal double standards - leastways to his own satisfaction and that of his fellow neo-Catholics.