The Judgment of Solomon: Open Letter to Latin Mass Catholics – Part III
“You must be wise enough to see who this woman is."
Previously in this open letter:
One of Francis’ stated reasons for depriving you and your children of the Roman Liturgy was the following:
“Ever more plain in the words and attitudes of many is the close connection between the choice of celebrations according to the liturgical books prior to Vatican II and the rejection of the Church and her institutions in the name of what is called the ‘true Church.’”1
Various non-mainstream traditional Catholics hold this view. But it is unjust, tyrannical and irrational for those at mainstream old rite Masses to be punished for our conclusions.
The purpose of all collective punishment is to divide and rule. Rather than falling for this tactic, mainstream “Latin Mass Catholics” should seriously consider the situation.
As discussed in the previous piece, Cardinal Roche is correct when he talks of “an ecclesiology that is not part of the Church’s Magisterium.”2
A common ecclesiology expressed by the various Latin Mass groups and influencers accepts a position as the “High Church” wing of a broad, divided church and is uncomfortably close to certain Anglican ecclesiologies.
Similarly prevalent is an “Old Testament ecclesiology,” in which prophetic activists try to save the Church through lecture circuits, book tours and YouTube livestreams.
These ideas are incompatible with true, Roman ecclesiology, which instead points to the truth of our claim: that the “Conciliar Church” is not identical with the Church of Christ – Christ’s Mystical Body, his immaculate Spouse, and our Mother.
Image: Wiki Commons Public Domain.
Open Letter to Latin Mass Catholics
Part I – Collective Punishment
Part II – “An ecclesiology that is not part of the Church’s Magisterium”
Part III – The Judgment of Solomon
To our dear friends attending “approved Latin Masses”, and suffering at the hands of those implementing Traditionis Custodes:
In the last piece, I asked you to recall the evident distaste that Francis, the Conciliar Church and its hierarchy has for you all.
Unlike these monsters, representing the body which you believe to be your Holy Mother the Church, we want to help you, and to ease your suffering and confusion.
As I said in the previous part, you who are trying to practice the traditional Catholic religion under the “authority” of Francis and his bishops are in a very similar situation to such High Church Anglicans.
Your situation is similar, I say, and not identical.
I am not suggesting that you are not Catholics, even if you are materially entangled with a body dominated by non-Catholics. The state of each person, and how far you conform to the requirements of membership in the Church, are outside of my knowledge, and therefore outside of my judgment.
Let’s consider each other brothers, until we have reason to think otherwise.
Nonetheless, let’s consider the reality of your situation in relation to the “Conciliar Church”.
The Old Religion and the New
The religion practiced at your Latin Mass chapels is – by and large – the same as that practiced by our grandparents when they were children.
We are not talking about some mythical golden age here. There are people alive – who are not even that old – who remember the time before the Council.
Within their living memory, the received religion practised by them and our recent forebears, many of whom we knew personally (e.g., parents, grandparents and great-grandparents), apparently underwent a wholesale revolution. This process changed nearly every aspect of their religion, which was deconstructed and reconstructed with a mixture of original and new materials.
If a house is demolished, and a new house is rebuilt with a mixture of original and new materials, even according to an identical design (which the Vatican II revolution did not do), can we really say that it is the same house? Not that the Catholic Church can be demolished: but anyone who presumes to deconstruct and reconstruct the true religion like this surely leaves it in the process.
This is why so many of those who experienced it said: “They changed the religion.”
While the religion in the average parish may be a different one to that practised by our grandparents, it is still found, more or less, in the doctrine, catechism, morals, habits and so on at various Latin Mass chapels.
That true and traditional religion has never ceased to be practiced, in the way that our recent forebears practised it; and it has never ceased to be practiced visibly and in public.
However, even if you have been practicing that same religion as our grandparents, your situation has always been very precarious – even if this is only apparent to you now.
It is a fact that, if your chapel was suppressed this week, and if you were forced to settle in the average Novus Ordo parish from this Sunday onwards, then you would be compelled to change the practice of your religion in many significant ways.
These changes would not be like those that you might experience if you came to live amongst Byzantine Catholics and were to be assimilated to their rite and practice. Even if there are some superficial similarities, such a comparison is risible, and we all know it.
You might think that these differences and changes do not bother you. But “what bothers you” is not primary here: the external fact is that these differences and changes are there. You might also deny that you are being compelled to change your religion, because (you might say) all these differences are accidental, and do not touch the substance.
But that is what is under question: Can all these points of difference between a) the religion found in most parishes, and b) that of our grandparents, which now tends to accompany the Latin Mass, be explained away as "accidental", or as “legitimate developments”, such that we can and should accept them?
In other words, is it true that a “core” of the unchangeable Catholic religion remain, despite the changes in doctrine, belief, thought, speech, habits, worship, rites, morals and practice?
But what would the “core” and “substance” of an unchangeable religion even be, if all these other things have changed?
Your Dependents
You might think that you could survive in the Novus Ordo parish setting.
But what about your spouse, and your children?
The reality – known all too well to those who have escaped the Novus Ordo regime – is that these parishes and dioceses have not just abandoned “disposable externals” of the Faith and kept an unchangeable core.
And in any case, if you try to raise your children in the average parish and subject to these authorities, then not even this ill-defined “core” will be transmitted to them.
In such a setting, your children will be taught to pray, believe and live in ways which are dramatically different to those which you have taught them in your Latin Mass chapels. Despite the bravado of the many naive young internet Catholics, you will quickly find that “Holy Mother Church” will be working against you in the religious upbringing of your children.
Moreover, this situation is not the result of a number of parishes going their own way: rather, it is the result of an international effort, imposed upon the Latin Rite, by what are – you believe – the highest authorities in the Church.
A few exceptional parishes are just that – exceptions; and this phenomenon itself manifests the Anglicanised ecclesiology discussed previously, which hold that the Church is divided in faith, and made up of differing wings. All of this is untenable.
Even writers associated with your communities concede the very point of a “new religion.” We have already seen Roberto de Mattei’s analysis:
“There is only one Catholic Church, in which today cohabitate in a confused and fragmentary way different and counterpoised theologies and philosophies. It is more correct to speak of a Bergoglian theology, of a Bergoglian philosophy, of Bergoglian morality, and, if one wishes, of a Bergoglian religion…”3
(As I asked in the previous part: Who ever heard of multiple religions cohabitating within the Church of Christ?)
The Church’s credentials
The question – that for which Francis says that he is restricting access to the traditional rite – is this: Is this “Conciliar Church” (or “Conciliar-Synodal Church”) really the Church of Christ, or something else?
To some, this question may seem nonsensical. If they choose to dismiss the following, then so be it.
To others, this question may seem terrifying. But it needn’t be.
After all, Catholic theology assumes that any society claiming to be the Church of Christ must prove its credentials.
To our duty to belong to Christ’s Church corresponds her true visibility – a visibility which the Wernz-Vidal commentary says “consists in such signs and identifying marks that, when moral diligence is used, she can be recognised and discerned, especially on the part of her legitimate officers.”4
In other words, out of the various claimants, the true Church is distinguished as such by her possession of the four marks of unity, holiness, catholicity and apostolicity. When addressing this topic, pre-conciliar works of theology demonstrate that the Roman Catholic Church is the only body that manifests them, and is therefore the true Church.
We accept these arguments and conclusion, and we do not question them.
But does the “Conciliar-Synodal Church” manifest these four marks? How can a church containing multiple religions be said to be “one”, and “united in faith”? You are justified in asking this question – the facts discussed compel you to do so.
Let’s be completely clear again that the Roman Catholic Church – the Church which counted as her members the Apostles, St Augustine, St Thomas, St Ignatius, and Pope St Pius X – this Church is the Mystical Body of Christ, and his one, true Church.
May we all live and die in her maternal embrace.
If the Conciliar-Synodal Church is indeed the true Church, then so it will be proved when you investigate the matter. I urge you to do so: look at your catechisms, look at the theologians, look at the acts of the pre-conciliar magisterium, and see if the Conciliar Church matches the descriptions you find there.
On the other hand, if it is unable to substantiate the claims to be the Roman Catholic Church, then we must do as Faber said:
“If the result of that investigation is to cast over you a horrible overwhelming doubt as to whether you are not in a position most disadvantageous to your soul, then act as a man would act who cares for nothing else but his soul.”5
But perhaps you still have this nagging sense, that such an investigation could be disloyal, ungrateful, or dangerous. You are afraid to leave your Mother, the Holy Catholic Church, outside of which there is no salvation.
You might think that questioning any part of this could be dangerous and disloyal to the Holy Trinity, to the Church, and to the communities in which you learnt the faith.
These concerns are worth taking seriously. To answer these concerns and others, let’s return to Fr Faber’s 1846 pamphlet Grounds for Remaining in the Anglican Communion.
Baptism and Loyalty
This pamphlet was written soon after his conversion and is aimed at convincing High Church Anglicans – his former co-religionists – of the untenability of their position, and persuading them to withdraw from danger into safety. We’ve already seen some of the challenging questions it asks:
Are you trying to live the liturgical, devotional and spiritual life of a Catholic, against the will of your supposed superiors?
Are you trying to hold the Catholic faith in a church which wants to teach you something different?
Are you trying to find pious explanations to defend an anti-Catholic church?
Are you trying to be Catholics in a church which doesn’t want you to be Catholic – and in fact, doesn’t want you at all?
Faber addresses the nagging sense of disloyalty which you might be feeling, and his initial answer turns on the nature of baptism itself.
The sacrament of baptism incorporates a person into the Catholic Church – that is, providing no obstacle is presented to prevent this effect. But infants cannot present an obstacle, and so any baptised infant – regardless of the religion of his parents – is reckoned to be a Catholic, and a son of the true Church, until he attains a certain age, and is deemed to have left her by adhering to the non-Catholic religion.
As Louis Cardinal Billot writes:
“It is therefore absurd to say that anyone is a Protestant, a Lutheran, a Calvinist or an Anglican by baptism. For by baptism each person receives the character of Christianity; but the whole of Christianity is in the Catholic Church which alone is the army of Christ the emperor, while the sects as such are no more than groups of deserters and rebels. […]
“Hence all children validly baptised among heretics or schismatics, until such time as, reaching the age of discernment, they voluntarily adhere to their sect, and join themselves to it by the bond of voluntary communion, pertain not only to the soul but also to the body of the true Church as Catholics in the full sense of the term. […]
“It is an established fact that this consideration can be of great weight to hesitant protestants or schismatics; for it is helpful to them to understand that in coming to the Catholic Church they are by no means renouncing their baptism which they had formerly received according to family custom, but rather, having detected their error, returning to the very Church to which they had initially belonged both de jure and de facto.”6
This is why such persons in heretical or schismatic groups are said to “return” to Holy Mother Church, even if they were never conscious of being her members.7
It is on such grounds that Faber develops his answer to the charge of disloyalty:
“Where do I owe my Christian allegiance? Is it not to the Church of my Baptism? And surely you at least cannot be so foolish as to suppose that any one is baptized into any particular, insular, national or provincial part or branch of the Church, or into anything short of the Catholic Church of Christ.
“It is there my allegiance is due, and it is there your allegiance is due also.
“A false system took me from my Mother, as soon as I had either sense to do overt acts of schism or wilfulness to commit a mortal sin: that system nurtured me in hatred of the Holy See; it nurtured me in false doctrine; it has had the strength of my youth, and formed the character of my mind, and educated me in strange neglect as well of doctrinal instruction as of moral safeguards.
“And now, do I owe allegiance to the Mother from whose breasts I was torn, and whose face was so long strange to me? or to her who tore me from her, and usurped a name that was not hers, and whose fraud I have discovered?
“No! I owe my allegiance to the Church into which I was baptized, the Church where in my old forefathers died, the Church where I can help my later fathers who died away from her in their helpless ignorance; and, like the stolen child who has found his mother, her loving reception and the outbreak, the happy outbreak, of his own instinct tell him, and have told him, more truly than all the legal proofs of parentage can do, that this, and this only, is the true Mother who bore him years ago to God, and welcomes him now, in a way that humbles him most of all — without suspicion, probation, or reproof.”8
If we are right in the claims which we have been discussing, then it is not the Church which is currently persecuting you.
Rather, it was a false system which long ago usurped the name of “Mother”, despite its lack of the four special marks identifying her from other claimants.
It was this false system which neglected your education in doctrine and morals.
Even if you found true doctrine and morals in your Latin Mass chapels (or even elsewhere), it was in spite of this system.
It was in this system that you may have been – in your own way – “nurtured in hatred of the Holy See”, to the point of being tempted to “rethink the papacy.”
Again, Faber’s High Anglican situation may not be the same as yours, and I am not saying that you are heretics or schismatics; but rather that situation is close enough to be relevant.
It is like the great “Judgment of Solomon”: you must be wise enough to see who this woman is, who is content to see your soul cut in two.
She is not your mother.
Conclusion
So, to our dear friends: do not be afraid.
You are not being called to change your religion, to move from one religion or club to another.
For a start, the “Conciliar Church” is not exactly a sect from which you must convert, but rather seems to be a sort of social reality which includes Catholics and non-Catholics, whilst being dominated by those who have openly ceased to be Catholic, but have not yet been expelled by authority.
Rather than a moment of fear, or a moment of conversion, perhaps this is a “moment of grace” whereby you can see that you have been materially entangled with those who are not Catholics – and that you must extricate yourself.
Rather than telling you to become Catholics, or to join some other group, I am telling you to understand what you already are, and whom to avoid.
You must acknowledge your dignity and that of your Mother, the Church of Christ.
You must understand that many of the men claiming to represent the authority of your Mother are in fact a heterogenous body of ex-Catholics, only apparently occupying her offices, obscuring her true nature, and working to corrode her doctrine.
Thus understood, you must remove yourself wholly and entirely from their influence, and have as much fear of their threats, fulminations, prohibitions and penalties as you would of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s.
To paraphrase St Leo the Great, whose words refer to the life of grace, but are nonetheless relevant:
“Christian, acknowledge your dignity, and becoming a partner in the Divine nature, refuse to return to the old baseness by degenerate conduct.
“Remember the Head and the Body of which you are a member. Recollect that you were rescued from the power of darkness and brought out into God’s light and kingdom.
“By the mystery of Baptism you were made the temple of the Holy Ghost: do not put such a denizen to flight from you by base acts, and subject yourself once more to the devil’s thraldom: because your purchase money is the blood of Christ, because He shall judge you in truth Who ransomed you in mercy, who with the Father and the Holy Spirit reigns for ever and ever. Amen.”9
The road ahead will probably be hard, and perhaps demand many sacrifices, but we will be with you – as, we hope, will be Almighty God.
You will soon see that the time has come for you to throw off everything from Vatican II.
The time has come for a categorical refusal to accept this Reformation and the Conciliar Church, with its new rites, new sacraments, new priesthood, new holy orders, new hierarchy, new doctrine, new catechisms, new theology – new everything.
The time has come to recognise the face of your Mother.
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Further Reading:
Open Letter to Latin Mass Catholics
Part I – Collective Punishment
Part II – “An ecclesiology that is not part of the Church’s Magisterium”
Part III – The Judgment of Solomon
The Anglicanisation of Catholics – are we the “high-church wing”?
A Note for Confused Catholics – Apologetics and Dogmatic Theology
Archbishop Lefebvre and the Conciliar Church – The Archbishop’s Words
Archbishop Lefebvre and the Conciliar Church – Visibility, the Four Marks and Membership
The Roman Liturgy: Septuagesima – The Babylonian Captivity and the Crisis in the Church
On the immorality of labelling other Catholics as “radical traditionalists”
Visible Unity of Faith – Part I: How is the Church “visibly united in faith,” according to Cardinal Billot?
Visible Unity of Faith – Part II: Why is it essential that the Church is visibly united in faith?
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Francis, Letter to the Bishops accompanying Traditionis Custodes, 2021. Available at https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/letters/2021/documents/20210716-lettera-vescovi-liturgia.html
Arthur Roche, Letter to Vincent Cardinal Nichols, dated 4 August 2021, p 3. Available at https://onepeterfive.com/a-letter-from-the-vatican-on-traditionis-custodes/
Roberto de Mattei, Love for the Papacy and Filial Resistance to the Pope in the History of the Church (henceforth LPFR), Angelico Press, Brooklyn NY, 2019. Ebook version, pp 202
Wernz, P. F-X, and Vidal, P. Petri,. Ius Canonicum ad Codicis Normam Exactum, Universitatis Gregorianae Universitas Gregoriana, Rome, 1938. The translator of this text could not be identified, but it has been checked against the original by Mr Cristian Jacobo. A screenshot of the Latin, along with the translation, is available in this thread: https://web.archive.org/web/20210226071737/http://www.strobertbellarmine.net/viewtopic.php?p=10051
Frederick William Faber, Grounds for Remaining in The Anglican Communion, James Toovey, London, 1846, p 4.
Cf. the full quote:
“It is therefore absurd to say that anyone is a Protestant, a Lutheran, a Calvinist or an Anglican by baptism. For by baptism each person receives the character of Christianity; but the whole of Christianity is in the Catholic Church which alone is the army of Christ the emperor, while the sects as such are no more than groups of deserters and rebels. So just as it is impossible for a man to be incorporated into a legion of rebels by the emperor’s own character, so it is impossible to enrol a man in a heretical sect by the sacrament itself. But if he is in fact so enrolled, this arises exclusively through his voluntary adherence thereto, contradicting the intrinsic virtue of the character and by no means suffices to release him from the obligations of that character.
“Hence all children validly baptised among heretics or schismatics, until such time as, reaching the age of discernment, they voluntarily adhere to their sect, and join themselves to it by the bond of voluntary communion, pertain not only to the soul but also to the body of the true Church as Catholics in the full sense of the term. And the reason for this is evident; for there can be no act in them contradicting the natural force of the character and sacrament. Thus it is that if it should later happen that they are in doubt about which is the way of salvation, it may justly be said to them that by leaving their sect they would be returning to the church of their baptism. And it is an established fact that this consideration can be of great weight to hesitant protestants or schismatics; for it is helpful to them to understand that in coming to the Catholic Church they are by no means renouncing their baptism which they had formerly received according to family custom, but rather, having detected their error, returning to the very Church to which they had initially belonged both de jure and de facto.”
Louis Cardinal Billot, De ecclesiae sacramentis: commentarius in tertiam partem s. Thomae, Ex Typographia Pontificia in Instituto Pii IX, Rome, 1914. Vol. I, pp 187-8. Anon. translation, confirmed by Mr C. Jacobo.
Ibid.
Faber 8-9
St Leo the Great, Sermon 21, trans. Charles Lett Feltoe, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, Vol. 12. Edited by Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, Buffalo, NY, Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1895. Revised and edited for New Advent by Kevin Knight, available at http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/360321.htm