THE GATES OF HELL (No. 21)
The phrase "gates of hell" needs some explanation. According to a scholarly article at hand, "gates in Hebrew is often used of the fortified city itself (Gen. 22:17; 24:60; Is 14:31, etc.). 'Hell' (Hades) the dwelling place of demons (four times in this sense in the Apocalypse; Lk 16:23) is not merely 'death' (an idea which would confuse the warlike image) but the activity of the forces hostile to the cause of Good."
How to interpret Christ's promise that the gates of hell will not prevail against the Church, even to the end of time? The Catholic who has not wondered about that doctrine today is spiritually or intellectually asleep or dead.
The promise that the gates of hell will not prevail is theologically expressed by the word "indefectibility" -- "that quality of unfailingness in the Church, her constitution and ministration, promised by Jesus Christ in the words 'Behold I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world'. Her indefectibility is seen externally by her triumph over the most terrible trials and dangers and her abounding life and health after nineteen hundred years of history; internally it has preserved her supernatural life and channels of grace through all the dangerous possibilities arising from human indifference, carelessness and ill-will. This special providence of God is called assisentia; we are aware of it both by faith and sight, but the manner in which it works is a matter of speculation." This from "A Catholic Dictionary", editor Donald Attwater.
Yes, a matter of speculation, especially with regard to that age of the Church generally called the Latter Days. The reality of the post-Vatican II Church does not conform the generally held expectation of an unbroken line of papal defenders of the Faith until the End. But let us have another opinion of the kind which appears to uphold this idea of an unbroken line of orthodox popes and available true sacraments, from a long article on the Church in the 1907 Catholic Encyclopedia, which reads as follows -- all boldface emphasis by the present writer:
INDEFECTIBILITY OF THE CHURCH -- Among the prerogatives conferred on His Church by Christ is the gift of indefectibility. By this term is signified, not merely that the Church will persist to the end of time, but further, that it will preserve unimpaired its essential characteristics. The Church can never undergo any constitutional change which will make it, as a social organism, something different from what it was originally. It can never become corrupt in faith or morals; nor can it ever lose the Apostolic hierarchy, or the sacraments through which Christ communicates grace to men. The gift of indefectibility is expressly promised to the Church by Christ, in the words in which He declares that the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. It is manifest that, could the storms which the Church encounters so shake it as to alter its essential characteristics and make it other than Christ intended it to be, the gates of hell, i.e. the powers of evil, would have prevailed. It is clear, too, that could the Church suffer substantial change, it would no longer be an instrument capable of accomplishing the work for which God called it into being. He established it that it might be to all men the school of holiness. This it would cease to be if ever it could set up a false and corrupt moral standard. He established it that it might proclaim revelation to the world, and charged it to warn all men that unless they accepted that message they would perish everlastingly. Could the Church in defining the truths of revelation err in the smallest point, such a charge would be impossible. No body could enforce under such a penalty the acceptance of what might be erroneous. By the hierarchy and the sacraments, Christ, further, made the Church depository of the graces of the Passion. Were it to lose either of these, it could no longer dispense to men the treasures of grace." End of excerpt from the old Catholic Encyclopedia, article on the Church by Fr. George Hayward Joyce, S.J.
Few Catholics have thought to question the complete correctness of this line of thinking in its most consoling sense. However great the Great Apostasy (if we thought of it at all) might be, nearly all Catholics, I'm sure, visualized the Holy Pope and his mostly faithful bishops and priests standing firm at all times against the forces of evil. This is the theme of at least one well known book by a Catholic priest on the Latter Days. Not a single writer or theologian that I have ever heard of, has imagined the frightful near-total apostasy and insanity of today. We see the signs of this insanity and apostasy in both "Catholic" and secular publications, in catechisms and other manuals of instruction, in parish churches, and in the enactments of pope and bishops. The latest works by the Hierarchy are their new Rite of Penance, their condoning of divorce, and from the Vatican "annulments" by the bushel, so that we must certainly doubt the truth of several assumptions in Fr. Joyce's optimistic opinion about the meaning of indefectibility.
Since Vatican II, has the Catholic Church "preserved its essential characteristics"? -- as Fr. Joyce wrote that it would do until the end of time. Has it lost the Apostolic hierarchy , or the sacraments through which Christ communicates grace to men? Has it suffered substantial change? The Vatican announced a few years ago the end of conversions, which accords with the "ecumenical" program of Vatican II and Paul 6. The Catholic hierarchy thus no longer proclaims to men the message that they might "perish everlastingly", as Fr. Joyce expressed it, but preaches a gospel of service to this world. Has the Church erred "in defining the truths of revelation"? There are many Catholics today who will answer "yes" to all these questions. Who can blame the weaker members? Certainly not the mod Clergy. The spectacle of our updated clergy and their antics is bad enough; perhaps even more discouraging to informed Catholics is the silence and compromise of those priests who at least appear to be their old respectable selves. With regard to the sacraments, which Fr. Joyce sees as permanent and effective, the bishops are now in the last stage of phasing out the Sacrament of Penance. All the others have been tampered with, so as to distort and make ambiguous their once-Catholic signification.
In September 1969, Cardinal Ottaviani, then head of the Holy Office, sent a Study of the New Order of the Mass (Novus Ordo) to Paul 6, copies of which were circulated in all countries. This Study was made by Cardinals Ottaviani and Bacci and other Roman theologians, a point-by-point statement on Pope Paul's "New Mass". I give here only a few summary excerpts:
In this Novus Ordo "the real presence of Christ is never alluded to and belief in it is implicitly repudiated. . . The position of priest and people is falsified and the Celebrant appears as nothing more than a Protestant minister, while the true nature of the Church is intolerably misrepresented. . . The Novus Ordo teems with insinuations or manifest errors against the purity of the Catholic religion and dismantles all defenses of the Faith." In this critique sent to Paul 6 there are about three times the amount of typespace as will be contained in this Letter, pointing out the various departures from the Catholic theology of the Mass in Pope Paul's Novus Ordo. The whole is summed up in these words: "It is evident that the Novus Ordo has no intention of presenting the faith as taught by the Council of Trent, to which, nonetheless, the Catholic conscience is bound forever." So from this too it would appear that the speculations of Fr. Joyce and others about how to interpret "the gates of Hell will not prevail", must not be taken at face value.
As mentioned above, this Study, or Ottaviani Intervention, as it came to be called, was sent to Paul 6 in September 1969. Paul did not reply. Was he bound to do so? Not absolutely as pope. But this public admonition had come from the one man, head of the Holy Office, whose official duty it was to admonish a pope in a matter of doctrine. The matter having been called to the attention of Paul 6 and all the Clergy and laity who cared to listen, grave scandal and disturbed consciences must be presumed as a result. On both these counts Paul 6 was morally obliged as priest and bishop, if not as pope, to answer such grave public charges. But he did not then and has not since, unless we accept totally inadequate offhand remarks of Paul 6 about his Novus Ordo, such as, "Absolutely nothing has been changed," which is manifestly false.
It would appear then that those (including the Abbe Georges de Nantes) who hold that "indefectibility" means that the sacraments can never be lost, are not necessarily correct. That opinion seems false, too, when we consider the Scriptural prophecy of a time when the continual Sacrifice will be taken away.
What then will remain? The Church will not err in her doctrine -- within the limits defined by the First Vatican Council. Not even a false pope, The Antichrist, will attempt to deceive ex cathedra. (Incidentally, Pope Benedict XIV wrote that the Popes are not necessarily infallible in their canonization of Saints.) What has been taught in the past, then, of doctrine, remains intact. Christ does not abandon His Church, but nearly all the Clergy and laity abandon the Faith.
To destroy all the sacraments, or to render them ineffective in the parish churches, would be, of course, top priority on the program of The Antichrist, it being necessary to that perfect imperfection, or "perfection in evil", as St. Thomas expressed it, symbolized by the number 666 St. John applied to him in his Apocalypse.
For further reading on this subject I suggest my Letters 4, 7, 8, 9 and 11, preferably in that order. I know of no other attempt of this kind to arrive at a satisfactory understanding of "indefectibility" in the light of the present widespread apostasy. I say that such a study is necessary if we are to hold to Catholic orthodoxy concerning the doctrines of a visible Church, lasting to the end of time. That not much more than doctrine will remain is indicated by St. Paul's prophecy that in the Latter Days only those will be saved who have loved the truth. St. Paul did not say those who love the Church or the sacraments, possibly because selfish interest might be too much of a motive in such love; or it might be because only the Truth will remain, along with Christ the invisible Head of the Church. And of course the Law of God and the Church's laws derived from Christ's promise to Peter of the Power of the Keys.
It is true, of course, that the gates of hell cannot prevail, for this is the promise of our Lord Jesus Christ. But the hour of darkness can be dark indeed. It can bring many to despair, which is the reason why we must give thought to the prophecies concerning the Great Apostasy, a general spiritual blindness, and the coming of the "son of perdition". We need to do this so as to remain orthodox in our belief about the Papacy and Christ's promise to remain always with us. Unless we look to the Scriptural prophecies there is no way that one can doctrinally explain a pope who sets in motion a total reform of all discipline, of the sacramental forms and, indirectly, of doctrine -- a "reforming mania" which Pope St. Pius X warned against but which only a very few of the Clergy care to consider as such.
It is not a sufficient answer to say that the man is an invalidly elected pope, thereby implying that Christ had overlooked this possibility. However elected, he has occupied the papal chair now for fourteen or so years, long enough to cause heresy and confusion unbounded. The general apostasy which has resulted exceeds, I'm sure, what any theological writer has ever imagined.
I do not pretend here to give a complete explanation of this whole matter; far from it. I mainly intend to point out that we need not close our eyes to the present reality in order to hold faithfully to Catholic doctrine concerning Christ's care of His Church, and that no institution of men could have survived for nearly two thousand years on its own wisdom and strength.
The papal guardianship of the Faith has become worse than meaningless in regard to Paul 6 and his Vatican II bishops. Yet we may not say that the visible Church is gone. There is only one reasonable answer: the visible Church remains, as the Temple and Sanhedrin remained in the time of Christ, corrupted in head and members. The Son of Perdition occupies the Holy Chair, one totally opposed to Christ's supernatural mission of the Church, which Paul 6 has distorted into a "this world" gospel, a "Cult of Man" as he has openly said. The gates of Hell shall not prevail against the Church but, as Holy Scripture has predicted, in a time of a great apostasy men will abandon the Church's doctrine, and so will lose the sacraments for a time through their errors, in a general watering-down of the Catholic Faith. On this quote from my Letter no. 4, taken from Fr. Coleridge's "The Return of the King", concerning the Scriptural references to a great blindness in the latter days.
You will observe, my brethren, that here we find no mention made of distinct heresies or false doctrines. There is rather to be a general decay or denial of all faith, and a sort of practical paganism. And thus we are prepared for what some old Christian writers tell us on this very subject of the future restoration of heathenism. There is a mysterious vision in the Apocalypse, of a beast that was wounded, and, it seemed, slain, but which was brought to life again by the power of the false prophet, and adored by all men on earth whose names are not written in the Book of Life. This vision is interpreted, by the writers to whom I allude, of heathenism, which has been, as it were, put to death by the Christian religion, but which will hereafter revive and reign for a short time.
Fr. Coleridge appears to believe that after a short reign of heathenism there will be a revival of the Faith. This he possibly derives from St. John's Apocalypse in which it is said that the Beast, which I take to be the secret world powers, will reign for "an hour", that is, in the language of apocalypse, for a very short time. But I need not go into that matter, for my present purpose is not to predict the End but rather to find an explanation of the present in terms of Catholic orthodoxy.
On the other hand I need not leave it at that. In the foregoing paragraphs I have viewed the present and probably near future in the darkest light; elsewhere I have given doctrinal reasons against predictions of a millennium of peace and universal acceptance of the Faith. But it does seem the full triumph of Christ requires that at the end, however small the number of her earthly members, the Church will again be visibly One, Holy and Apostolic, with a true pope at her head*.
A last word on this subject: there are Catholics who, wanting to keep the Faith, demand immediate action, a human intervention in this affair of divine providence. They talk and act as if God were dead. I am not of their company. I'm sure God will intervene in His own good time. I do not profess to know how, but only that it will not be outside the juridical order Christ established, and which even in this time of neglect and abuse survives. Were Christ to inspire any member of the Clergy to act outside that Order which He himself established, He would be acting in opposition to His own Divine Person and Purpose.
However corrupt the hierarchy, it is both foolish and perilous to look for rescue and the sacraments outside the juridical order established by Christ. To do so would be to follow one who comes in his own name, without authority. No matter what office such a person might have held at one time, or however much he may profess Catholic orthodoxy, or how holy he may contrive to appear, such a one ought not to be trusted, for the Church was founded on Authority, not on spiritual elitism.
MASONS IN THE VATICAN
For the past several months I have been receiving lists of Masons in the Vatican. Not having mentioned this matter in my Letters, several readers have written to inquire if I don't believe it. I haven't mentioned it because the outcry at this time comes from those I do not trust, who have their own thing to promote, and so their lists are not complete, leaving out Number One. A young man sends the following: "I wrote to SI SI NO NO asking if they had any evidence of Montini being a Mason. Their reply was brief: 'The person you refer to is not on the Masonic roll'." Maybe not, but SI SI NO NO surely knows about Montini and his U.N.O. speech. The editor cannot be unaware that Popes John and Paul are highly praised in the foreword of a well known book on Masonic Ecumenism, which is the program Montini has been promoting. They surely know it was Montini who has practically done away with the Church's strict laws against membership in secret societies, and so on. So I don't get excited by these "revelations".
I have thought for some time past that the secret world powers, as they come into the open, would gradually do away with secret lodges -- that these plotters who now dominate the lodges, would be most fearful of those who might later plot against them in secret, that this is part of what is behind the present froth about Vatican II Masons. Masonic ecumenism is Vatican II ecumenism for a world church, using the Catholic Church as a base -- the "Roman Stem" as Fr. Teilhard de Chardin called it for that purpose, in one of his private letters later published.
In my papers I have frequently used the term "counter church", of the Vatican II takeover, an idea which has lately been confirmed by the revelation that Cardinal Leinart, leader of the "progressive" revolution at the Vatican II Council, was a 33 degree Mason. In his "Papacy and Freemasonry" Mgr. Jouin quotes Freemason F. Limousin from his Masonic review "L'ACACIA", of October 1902. Using the pen name Hiram, Limousin gives the following characteristic definition:
"Freemasonry is an association. . . an institution. . . so it is said. . . but it is not that at all. Let us lift up the veils, risking even to evoke numberless protestations. FREEMASONRY IS A CHURCH: It is the Counter-Church, Counter-Catholicism: It is the other church -- the church of HERESY, of Freethought.
"The Catholic Church is considered as the arch-type church, the first church, church of dogmatism and of orthodoxy." So wrote this French Freemason many years ago.
Since the time this was written, the plan of the lodges has been to take over the Catholic Church, which is what J.B. Montini is doing. Those who know anything at all about Masons in the Vatican, know this too. So why are they silent about Montini?
My reply, then, to those who have written to inquire about this matter, is: the recent outcry against Masons in the Vatican has been raised by a fake opposition, which I decline to help along. It is that fake opposition which upholds Paul 6, pointing at the bishops and others but never at Montini.
PAUL 6 AND THE ANGLICANS AGAIN
I have combined and reprinted my "Dark Night of the Church", part one, with "The Silencing of Catholics". Written in January 1974, "Dark Night" contains comments on Theosophy and the Anglican clergy, and the dealings of Paul 6 with their top men. A copy of this paper will be enclosed. After about fifteen years of Vatican II, the new Reformers are now coming into final agreement with the Anglicans in England, at the same time in which they are beginning to rope off confessionals in America. If that doesn't tell you something, what will? I have also had reprinted "Vatican II: A New Sanhedrin", parts one and two together. This may be obtained free by those who send one self-addressed long envelope with 24 cents stamp. To the "Dark Night" reprint I have added three long paragraphs from my Letter No. 1, October 1974, on the book by Bishop Graver, "Athanasius and the Church in our Time". This book is another work of the fake opposition to the Reform of Paul 6. I have included it because of word that certain "moderates" in the U.S. are now promoting this deceitful work. The publisher in his Preface writes of "such a delicate subject as is discussed in this book." Why delicate? And he "feels that Bishop Graber will one day be remembered for having effectively brought to a halt the excesses of extremist views." What are these extremist views? Surely he means the views of those of us who speak the plain self-evident truths about the responsibility of Paul 6 for the present "autodemolition" of the Church. Later I read a news item concerning an ecumenical meeting of Protestant ministers to which Bishop Graber played host.
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* From Letter No. 92: "In my "Last Days" booklet, April 1978, a collection of some early Letters, I gave it as my opinion that "however small the number of her earthly members, the Church will again be visibly One, with a true pope at her head." ... But I soon changed my mind. Other considerations led me to the certainty that St. John's "hour" must come at the End, and that we had seen the last of the true popes."
