THE MASS ENDED (No. 90)

On prayer methods. Philosopher Karol Wojtyla. Excerpts from "The Enemy Within".

In this Letter I intend to explain further what I wrote in Letters 80 and 89, on the Mass having been ended by the action of Paul VI and the Council.  The destruction of the Mass would, of course, be central in the work of establishing the Religion of Man.

   My first paper (March, 1971), before I began to call them Letters, I named "The New Mass Invalid Because of Defect of Intention".  This paper is still available, under the title "The Modern False Mass."  In that paper I mentioned what a priest and layman had already argued convincingly, that the change of the words in the Consecration Form caused the New Mass to be invalid -- no Mass at all.  I wrote that this change by a pope from the fixed Form of the Mass indicated a wrong intention on the part of those who made it.  I pointed out that the Act of Consecration had been changed to narrative, and that the rite as a whole signified falsely.  There was all that and more to show the destructive intent of the innovators.  That this Mass could not be made valid by the personal intention of priests who performed the New Rite, was shown by the priest and layman I speak of, and by myself.  I did not know it then, that we had uncovered the fulfillment of a Biblical prophecy, that of Daniel which predicted a time when the perpetual sacrifice would be taken away.

   We can be sure that God would not take away the Mass miraculously.  No political tyrant could do it, or even suppress it effectively.  How, then, was it to be done?  We had our answer from a man in the papal chair, the one who spoke of his Cult of Man.  As time went by and the table replaced the altar, and a new spirit of irreverence began to show, the man-centered thrust of the New Liturgy became more open in the parishes.

   The Vatican Two innovators had given us every reason to be sure that the Mass had been taken away, as foretold.  But then we began to hear from those who styled themselves "Traditionalists", who said, "Oh no.  The Mass is not ended.  We have it, and will provide it for those who want it."

   So then, has the Mass been taken away in our time, or does a tiny minority of unattached priests, and priests of the Eastern rites, still have it?  If they do, how then in the future will anyone be sure that the Prophecy is being fulfilled?

   It may be said that the priest acts in the person of Christ, and therefore his ministerial functions have to be valid.  But the powers of the priesthood were given by Christ to Peter and his successors.

   "And Jesus coming, spoke to them, saying:  All power is given to me in heaven and on earth.

   "Going therefore, teach ye all nations: baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.

   "Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and behold I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world."

   The Gospel of St. Matthew contains these lines:  "And I say to thee:  "Thou art Peter; and upon this rock I will build My Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.

   "And I will give to thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven.  And whatsoever thou shalt bind upon earth, it shall be bound also in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth, it shall be loosed also in heaven."

   Peter and the other Apostles were to preach the Gospel and administer the Sacraments.  The common sense of these texts compels the belief that the integrity of the Sacraments, and sound doctrinal teaching, will last until very close to the end.  But that faith will fail we know from these words of Christ:  "Think you that when the Son of Man returns, will he find faith upon earth."  St. Paul foretells a Great Apostasy, a revolt and the coming of the Son of Perdition, a prediction repeated in our century by Pope St. Pius X.

   It is possible to raise a question about the exact meaning of "taken away", by saying that the words are not to be understood in their exact sense, and that a few priests will have the Mass until the End.  But such an interpretation renders the prophecy meaningless.

   Leaving Prophecy aside for the moment, and the occult influence which is at the bottom of the Traditionalist operation, perhaps we should restrict our question on the Mass to whether regularly ordained priests who have rejected the Novus Ordo can offer a valid Mass.

   In Letter No. 80 and one other I quoted from the 3-volume work of the eminent theologian Maurice de la Taille, S.J., who had thoroughly examined the writings on the Mass by all the most respected theologians.  I did not hold as conclusive Fr. de la Taille's opinion by itself, but a point on which all those he studied were agreed upon.  The question raised by Fr. de la Taille and the others concerned Masses offered by priests separate from the Church -- vagrant priests, schismatics, operators on their own.  They decided as follows:  The Mass as the Church's own sacrifice is always acceptable to God, even though the priest may sin by offering it illicitly.  It is the Church as the "essential font", as Fr. de la Taille states it, which validates even the Masses of priests detached from the Church.

   This is not a newly discovered principle, applicable to the Masses of schismatics mainly.  It is well known Catholic doctrine that the priest can act only as the Church's minister.  This is the point we must keep in mind.

   The Great Apostasy has been declared officially.  Pope and Council together, with all the bishops and most of the lower clergy and laity, make up the Great Apostasy, which has ended the officiating Church.  That is the reality of the affair, what all can see who want to see.  It is the Church of Darkness, the Counterchurch taking over.  Thus has been destroyed that true Magisterium which in the past has sustained all priestly functions -- the saying of Mass, the granting of absolution in the confessional, and the rest.  That the Forms and signification of the Sacramental rites were all radically changed is incontestable evidence of the Montini intention.

   It is here that Traditionalist confusion enters in, by quoting these words of Pope Paul IV (1559):  "Prelates and popes who turn out to have deviated from the Catholic Faith before their election are automatically deprived of any authority and office and their promotion is null and void and can by no means be validated."

   It is said that this doctrine is preserved in Canon 188-4.  Who would deny it?  But it cannot give unattached priests any special rights.

   The election of Montini was not contested by even those cardinals known to be orthodox.  He was not charged with pre-election heresy by those who would be responsible for presenting evidence of this kind.  And a pope-elect becomes pope immediately he accepts the office.  No man or body of men is required to validate the election.  All the bishops and most of the lower clergy and laity accepted him as pope.  And for fifteen years he sat on the papal chair, changing all laws.  It is upon such considerations as these that matters of Law are decided.

   Montini wanted no validation of his authority; he came to destroy Authority.  But he was elected in the regular way, and so held the Keys.

   In Letter No. 89 I reminded our readers that keys are not made to work in only one direction, and that Paul VI chose not to bind but to loose.  I wrote that Paul VI had legislated for the whole Church, repealing all laws by abrogation.  All priests would thus be bound to the Mass of the New Order.  This is the devil's own caricature of the Law, and of course no man is required to obey it.  But most priests have.

   My Letter No. 89 was intended as a concise summary for those who are uneasy about the New Order, not as an argument against the Traditionalists.  So I wrote simply (as I thought) that the Divine Promise of protection from error had come to an end because of Paul VI's deliberate teaching of error.  Again the Law:  It was Paul VI who signed the deed, the Articles of Vatican Two, and who radically changed all the Sacraments.  And God would not force men to turn back from the road to total apostasy.  But my main argument for the complete ending of the Mass is that which I refer to in Fr. de la Taille's book on the Mass as the Church's Sacrifice, with the Church as the "essential font" of validity.  It was by Paul VI's traitorous use of the Keys that the deed was done.

   I believe the Mass to have been immediately taken away upon the Great Betrayal, even before the Betrayer imposed his radical changes.

   The soundest of reasons compels the belief that from the time Paul VI signed the Articles of Vatican Two, thus making official his Cult of Man, God will take away the Divine Sacrifice.  Why should He wait for the savage desecrations of Montini?  For, "Whereas holy things ought to be administered in a holy manner, and of all holy things this sacrifice is the most holy . . . " (chapter IV, Council of Trent).  To leave the holiest of things that men can touch in the hands of a generally apostate clergy, to be taken up by lawless unattached clergy, does not seem to me according to what we know of the mind of God, as we read it in these lines from the Council of Trent, which spoke truly of the Divine Sacrifice.

   And apt too, form Cardinal Newman are lines I have quoted elsewhere, which read as follows.  "God works by human means.  As He employs individual men, and inspires them, and yet they die, so, doubtless, He might employ a body or society of men, which at length, after its course of two thousand years might come to an end.  It might be withdrawn, when abused."  Cardinal Newman is of course speaking here of the Catholic Church.  He but echoes St. Paul's prediction of an Operation of Error, which God will send near the end of time.

   The signing of the Articles of Vatican Two, of the Religion of Man, will end also the Papacy, St. Paul's "what withholdeth" (2 Thess).

   What about the doctrine of the Church's indefectibility?  We can no longer hold to the former general opinion on this, of a Pope and a number of bishops standing firm until the end.  That opinion has been disproved by events.  What will be the true state of affairs is contained in the text I have already quoted, about very little faith to remain near the end; in the prediction of a Man of Sin to come, the Lawless One who will "sit in the Temple of God, changing all laws"; and in this scriptural text:  Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words will not pass away.

   The Church is indefectible in the sense that any imperfection or seeming failure can only be the fault of men; and in this, that very grave fault will come only near the end, as foretold.

   It is not Christ in His Church who can fail or be at fault.  But men can grow weary of His doctrine, and cast off His burden, though light; and rejecting His graces become too much immersed in the things of this world, which is what St. Paul and others predicted would happen.  But the Divine Sower has broadcast His seed of Truth for centuries, He has reaped a great harvest of souls; and not all the hordes of hell, let loose near the end, can banish Truth from the earth.  It is as I've written in another Letter, that the war is over and Christ has won.

  And the visible Church?  I think there will remain until the end priests and bishops ordained before Vatican Two, who, though corrupt in morals and doctrine, will yet retain their valid orders.  The stones of our cathedrals and other churches will continue to cry out, and some priests and laymen will remain to profess the doctrine of the Faith without alteration.  Undoubtedly much more could be said on this subject.  But it would only be conjecture about details which we are not required to know.

   About the ending of the Mass, five points should perhaps be repeated.

1.  God does not take away the Mass miraculously, in a hidden manner.  A New Order is proclaimed and shows clear outward signs of departure from the Catholic liturgy of the Mass -- signs which all adult Catholics and some children will notice.  For priests and all who will concern themselves, it is evident that several theological principles have been deliberately violated.

2.  Man, in the person of one elected to the papal office, rejects that Church of which Christ is the real head.  This person, Paul VI, is leader of the Great Apostasy, as shown by the quite complete acceptance of the New Order by nearly all baptized Catholics.

3.  God, who is the God of Truth and of Justice, who has created man free, cannot tolerate this rejection by man of the Church Christ founded.

4.  The rejection of the sustaining Power, of the "essential font", makes impossible a valid Mass, however right a priest's intention might be.

5.  Christ will remain as the real head of the Church, his words to endure forever.

On Prayer Methods

We occasionally receive inquiries about books on prayer.  I'm not up on that subject, being rather heathenish, inclined in spiritual matters to qualify rather than excel.  But I do happen to know about Fr. Adolphe Tanquerey's The Spiritual Life, known worldwide, standard textbook, so I had heard, in American seminaries before Vatican Two.  It might be obtainable from one of the sellers of pre-Vatican Two books.  I have a copy from the Vatican Two book-burning, and can see that the book is excellent, well deserving of the high praise given to it in a Foreword by the Archbishop of Baltimore (May, 1930).  But I'm not sure that any book can do what the searchers after methods hope for.

   I recently re-read a paperback edition of Msgr. Ronald Knox's The Belief of Catholics, in which he has a chapter, "Liberty of the Spirit in Prayer".  Fr. Knox advises to pray as best pleases us -- that while of course there is such a thing as mortification, we aren't meant to go about our prayers in that spirit.  He quotes St. Francis de Sales as teaching that if we find we can pray best by lying down, then it is our job to pray lying down.  I'm sure St. Francis didn't think that many people need to lie down to pray -- that he was only pointing out what is least important in prayer.

   When the Apostles asked Christ to teach them to pray, He gave them the Lord's Prayer, which contains all the essential elements of prayer.  But of course we can say this prayer or any other more or less fervently.  Prayer is the lifting of the mind and heart to God, as we were taught as children.  So much depends on our individual temperaments, surely, plus persistent effort, and patience with ourselves.  To empty self as much as possible of disquieting activity, so prevalent in our time, to set if possible regular times for prayer, without hurry, most prayers to be read, thus engaging the mind through the visual sense, this much of simple "method" seems useful to me.

Philosopher Karol Wojtyla

We have received a copy of Karol Wojtyla's Existential Personalism, murky stuff, in which is pretended a new advance in knowledge and understanding of man.  This is a thin book by one Andrew N. Woznicki, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of San Francisco.  I wondered on reading the title how soon Woznicki would drag in St. Thomas, whose philosophy begins with what exists (existential).  He gets to it on his very first page, under "Announcement".  It reads in part:  "Practically overnight, the University of Lublin has been catapulted into world prominence when its leading Philosopher, Karol Wojtyla became Pope John Paul II.

   "Scholars in the Western world are beginning to learn, for the first time, that a new Christian Philosophy, known as Lublin Thomism, has been developed at this Catholic University of Poland  . . . This Lublin Thomism forms the basis of the curricula of all 24 diocesan major seminaries in Poland  . . . This philosophy is contained in some 15 books, authored by the Lublin masters.  Unfortunately, the works are still in their original Polish."

   The old Communist front again.  Author of books on the Vatican and Vatican reporter for 25 years, Avro Manhattan, who has taken a hard look at the products of the Polish seminaries, calls them Communists.  A late news report tells of a proposed debate of Catholics with Marxists in Moscow.

   The philosophy of St Thomas starts with what exists and leads to God the Creator and Sustainer of all life, and to the Church as teaching all Truth; that of Wojtyla to man as "the primary and fundamental way of the Church", as in the hotchpotch of Redemptor Hominis.

   On page 43 I read of something called a "Re-interpretation of Thomistic Axiology", and "praxis" and "beingness" and "man-person" -- "through which an individual man experiences himself in his own subjectivity."  Loony stuff for the New Age man, it is likely to take in (as did Teilhard) the intellectually pretentious.  But it is not in the usual Wojtyla style.

   The press has built up an image of Wojtyla as worker, athlete, poet, linguist, philosopher.  I have not seen real evidence that he is any of these things, least of all philosopher.  Consider his hair raising growls before 20,000 school children in Madison Square Garden, how he stomps and sweats (Newsweek report) with African dancing girls, loudly applauds near-naked male dancers on a night out in Tokyo, join an Australian youth group in their foot shuffling, weird upward reaching gestures.  He exhibits his liking for all such things, most of all for black African Voodooists, following his "revered father" Paul VI, who said in 1967:  "The Church must take a new look at the pagan religions of African origin and cherish aspects that might bring about a new approximation of the Church."  (TIME-LIFE Great Cities series, Rio de Janeiro.)  Strange philosopher, stranger pope.

   The Lublin master.  Surely this is the last Gnostic twist of the Father of Lies, his time being now short.

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Postscript, excerpts from my second short paper (1971) "The Enemy Within The Catholic Church".

   The holy Father, Pius X, warned in 1907 that "the partisans of error are to be sought not only among the Church's open enemies; they lie hid, a thing to be deeply explored and feared, in her very bosom and heart, and are the more mischievous, the less conspicuously they appear. . ."  Pius X accounted them "the most pernicious of all the adversaries of the Church.  For they put their designs for her ruin into operations not from without but from within."

   Defining their philosophy, Pius X notes that the Modernists teach that all religion, the Catholic no exception, must be sought for in man, that it begins with a "special sentiment."  According to their teaching on the Evolution of Dogma the Modernists believe that dogmas do not express absolute truth, but must be adapted to the religious sentiment in its relation to man.  "Dogma is not only able, but ought to evolve and to be changed.  This is strongly affirmed by the Modernists, and as clearly flows from their principles," wrote Pius X.

   Probably the identification of Modernism with Vatican II can most readily be seen in the current Ecumenism.  On this subject the following from Pascendi:  "It is well to note at once that, given this doctrine of experience united with that other doctrine of symbolism, every religion, even that of paganism, must be held true. . .  In the conflict between different religions, the most that the Modernists maintain is that the Catholic religion has more of truth because it is more living. . ."  By the usual half-truth, double-speak method, the Vatican II decrees maintain no more than this "more-of-the-truth" doctrine of the Modernists.

   What follows is from Paul's sermon at his 1969 Christmas midnight 'mass'.  "This celebration in the night has a symbolic character.  Symbolic of what?  Of man walking in the night and searching:  searching for light, searching for a point of orientation, searching for an encounter with a Man who is necessary, a Man whom it is imperative to find.  "There would be cause for weeping and despair if we were not supported by a wonderful interior force, that of seeking . . the hope of finding.  Finding whom?  Finding, as I have said, the Man who is necessary, the Man who knows all about us, the Man who can save us."  To those who are unaware of Paul's Religion of Man, this sounds like gibberish.  But it is fundamental Modernist doctrine, that religion is to be sought for in man.

   In Osservatore Romano (the official Vatican newspaper), 8 May 1969, appeared the following in boldface type: " 'There are no true riches but MAN!' -- Pope Paul VI."

   So then, behind "personalist" Wojtyla stands Paul VI in his search for man -- a search which will take in African witch doctors for "a new approximation of the Church".  Trained in communist Poland, Wojtyla will "enter the papacy".  The expression is his, from Redemptor Hominis.