‘Canto fermo’ is the term for an existing melody used as the basis for a new composition.
The prose and poetry of mystics like John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila and Edith Stein – all informed by the Gospel – is my ‘melody’. The ‘new composition’ is this blog and my indie novel ‘The Age for Love’. To buy my book go to amazon.com or smashwords.com and download to your kindle, iPad, phone or any reading device.
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Let's get this straight. The Society of St Pius X (SSPX) is NOT IN SCHISM. Faithful Catholics who attend the Mass of Ages - the Traditional Latin Mass - in an SSPX parish are NOT IN SCHISM.
Catholics who repeat this calumny have been hoodwinked by the new religion now installed in the Vatican, a regime which began at Vatican II by pulling the wool over the face of the One, Holy and Apostolic Church and has survived since only by ambiguities, prevarication and downright, egregious falsehood.
It is in fact the Conciliar Church - the Novus Ordo, Synodal, Bergoglian/Leonine cult - which IS IN SCHISM. Were it not for Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre's heroic act in 1988 of consecrating bishops without approval from Rome, in order to ensure a continued supply of good, faithful priests, millions more souls would have been lost by a hierarchy which busies itself with enthroning Protestant monarchs and a pagan goddess in St Peter's, demoting the Mother of God and devolving their priestly duties to the Susans and Karens who run their parishes and even the Curia, and tell them what's what.
The SSPX is right: there is a "state of emergency" in the Church, created fundamentally by Jorge Bergoglio, who deserted the helm of the Barque of Peter to serve worldly, global interests, thus proving that he was no Vicar of Christ. His successor and imitator Robert Prevost continues in the same vein, managing the Church like a business instead of cherishing her as the Bride of Christ, and Him crucified.
But the SSPX is wrong in kowtowing to these men. Going cap in hand to a pretender pope, hanging his image in their churches and including his name in their Masses is to give credence to a stupendous lie. On the one hand the SSPX is - as even Vatican II states - "a means of salvation". On the other, the Society fails to acknowledge that the Holy See is now held by enemies of Christ.
In the story below, James Green (Grain of Wheat) puts his finger on what went wrong with Vatican II and how it robs Catholics of what they want: the Sacraments, the Faith and Salvation.
SSPX Superior-General Fr Davide Pagliarani: “I do not see how the Pope could fear a greater danger to souls coming from the Society than from the government in Beijing.”
Handing over de facto power and administration in the Church to lay administrators, turning the bishops into middle managers, and cozying up to governments was actually a rational response to the problems faced by the Church after the Council.
A massive decline in religious orders, increasing shortage of priests, and many of the most faithful laity being filtered out after the revolution indicated that increased managerialism and secularism was the solution, even for those who weren’t modernist ideologues.
If you don’t have enough nuns to run the Catholic schools, enough lay involvement to run the local, or enough priests to minister in every parish, you move the goalposts by closing Catholic institutions and parishes, or prop up those that remain by allying with governments, and subtly changing their mission.
These next few charts encapsulate this as the real supercharger of the crisis in the Church:
(Nota Bene: Not only do parishes have fewer priests, they are also larger than they were in 1950, making the situation worse than the 1950 status quo.)
Vatican II and the spirit thereof just crushed the numbers of priests and religious and led to a permanent decline in vocations, with no recovery in sight.
While lots of attention is put on the strain on priests and on religious orders from the massive declines they’ve endured over the last 60 years, and also on the closures of parishes due to these declines, fewer priests per parish also has massive effects on the provision of the Sacraments, the ability of Catholics to seek spiritual direction from their priest, or priests' having any meaningful relationship with their flock.
Compare this Church schedule from 1950, shared by Nico Fassino (admittedly in New York City), to those of an average, even large, parish today, and a key cause of the managerialist distraction and infiltration within the Church is evident.
There just aren’t enough priests to preach the Faith, offer the Sacraments, and keep the faithful in line, nor religious to assist them and carry out the mission of the Church.
Since there weren’t enough priests, they hired Susans from the Parish Council to ration the time and priorities of the few priests left, to professionalize the Church to make it more “efficient”, and to paper over lagging fervor with “transformation plans” and similar ideas from the secular corporate world.
It’s a vicious cycle where decline begets decline, and crisis begets crisis by replacing the life of the Church in the post-conciliar “New Springtime”, while making it far harder for those who want to practise their faith to do so.
State of Necessity
These managerialists and their solutions, as much as I decry them as infiltrators and the key cause of so many of the issues in the Church from the Council onwards, were kind of inevitable.
Catholicism in early 20th-century America had its flaws, infiltrators, and issues . But it was at least stable and in the ascendant. Vatican II hit just as a secular cultural change - vast moves from the cities to the suburbs uprooted those communities that supported thriving local ethnic parishes built up over generations by Catholic fervor alone.
As Colleen McDannell recounts in her book The Spirit of Vatican II, the revolution in the Church can’t be separated from demographic changes in broader 20th-century society. As masses of people moved to the sprawl of the suburbs in the 1960s, new, distant, large, and less-local parishes sprouted up to serve them.
The migrations of the '50s and '60s begat their own problems, creating a situation where neither the suburb nor the downtown (post-suburbanization) is a complete society.Each is schizophrenically isolated and incomplete. People live in one, work in the other, and don’t have a true and complete love or responsibility 24/7 for both.
Both call on systems and large-scale structures to replace freely-working societal habits. Industrialization created the impersonal scale of human associations that justified managerialism and the managerial revolutions that swept the world culturally between World War I and the 1950s. Suburbanization and the scattering of human associations merely consolidated managerial holds on power, replacing natural culture with the mediated reality of misological marketing, cultural destruction, and extraction that has ruled the West since.
Parishes founded in this environment were no longer grounded in local tradition, clanship, or community. They no longer had a Catholic life for their pastors merely to guide and assist. Instead and at the same time as the Council was “implementing” its changes and the sinews of Catholic culture were collapsing from lack of priests, religious, and motivated laity, the result was a one-two punch that reduced Catholicism as a faith more and more to merely Catholicism and the parish as an institution.
Furthermore, Vatican II also supercharged this trend by legitimizing it. Whereas active cooperation with secular governments would have been suspect at any time earlier in Church history, it was, under Dignitatis Humanae, merely cooperation for human fraternity, the bureaucratization of parishes, and the sidelining of their relationships with their people in lieu of a "parish structure” justified as “active participation”, “lay involvement”, and “anti-clericalism.”
Incorporate managerial methods, such as large staffs of laymen focused on “managing” various ministries or departments, and you subtly start to incorporate managerial ends. Success gets redefined from saving souls to the next budget cycle, to ensuring that there’s a baptismal process rather than baptism numbers, that there’s online engagement with the parish rather than retention in the faith, and from relationships with the saints and the Church’s tradition to relationships with the federal government.1
There are, of course, darker aspects to how this managerial aspect of the modernist revolution(s) came to pass. But many people who participated in the process that brought about “Diocesan Inc.” after the Council and which filtered out many of the most faithful members of the Church by inducing psychosis in many a faithful Catholic,thought that they were doing what they had to do in a “state of necessity” brought about by the declining metrics of the Church’s core mission.
Perhaps they were…
Managerial “Solutions”
There’s not really much you can do when you’re in a declining situation where you’re short on priests, and especially on ones for whom true care of souls, in a system that rotates them around like machines and stifles any boldness in proclaiming as “dangerous.” Bureaucratic systems in parishes that make it difficult to receive the Sacramental help of the Church like what Sam Rhodes (Sam) commented on experiencing, are the end state of a long state of “managed decline”:
My diocese consolidated parishes and I could no longer go to my old pastor for baptisms for my kids. When my younger daughter was born, I approached the new pastor of the parish group and was told to go through the secretary who told me that I needed to take baptism classes and wait over a month along with pay a $100 fee to have my child baptized.
When I protested that I never had to do this at my old parish, the secretary said that my old pastor broke the rules and she wouldn't make any exception. I asked to test out of the classes and she told me no that I had to take them.I went to the local SSPX and with some quick vetting they had my daughter baptized the week after she was born.2
I have a friend who is trying to get her civil marriage convalidated by the church before her husband deploys. (He was raised Catholic and left the church for a while but has recently returned since having a son. She was raised Baptist and is in RCIA.) She was told that they needed to have their papers in 8 weeks before their meeting to SCHEDULE their con-validation.
Neither of them were divorced prior to their civil marriage. In a church not overrun by managerialism, they would be able to go in and get their marriage convalidated next week.
I have another friend who is going through RCIA with her husband and family. Both grew up Baptist and are baptized Christians. They have six children and only the oldest is baptized. The youngest is five. She went to the church to request Baptism for her children and was told this summer that none of them could be baptized before Easter and that the older children may even have to wait until the next Easter.
She and her husband have to go to RCIA classes every week until Easter for this to happen. She homeschools and her kids are better catechized than almost all of the other kids in the class.
I personally know the pastor, who even considers himself traditional, and have discussed these things with him, but of course, he puts his faith in his all powerful secretary who isn’t even Catholic. This is what managerialism looks like in practice.
I have at least ten stories like this. People say Vatican II made it easier for the laity to participate. Really, it made the basic things, like obtaining the sacraments, much much more difficult.3
For many an average bishop, priest, or lay parish employee over the last 60 years, embracing managerialism seemed like the easy solution to making the crisis they didn’t want to admit what was happening go away.
It was, perhaps in their view, a state of necessity in these “Modern Times” that the old ways be replaced even the more with rational, managerial, and professional approaches.
Since success for the Church had already been largely redefined on purely managerial, that is, instrumental and process-focused, rather than purpose-driven (Sacraments, Faith, and Salvation) lines, this gave ever more power to the spawning Diocesan and Parish Industrial Complexes, which proffered managerial and business training for profit while sidelining anyone who objected to the spirit of the Council as a threat to what “had to be done” in the “state of necessity” of the Church.
Darkly ironically, even though decline was baked into the picture by the same leaders who were turning toward managerialist and secularizing influences, they used that very decline as an argument that the revolution hadn’t gone far enough: Real reform hasn’t been tried yet.
The Church is still too harsh on moral issues. If only we change x or start allowing y or give more power to lay institutions, or get government funding to support Catholic schools, etc….
Lowering the standards due to a state of necessity creates new problems, however, that require new managerial solutions, such as vast court settlements due to victims of abuse, which only worsen the institutionalized distractions from the Church’s core mission due to the need to gin up more money.
A similar situation, of course, has hit the Church before. The 14th-century plague known as the Black Death disproportionately killed off priests and ministering religious, nearly 50% on average, with some areas losing 90%, creating a shortage of priests.
To address this, the Church at the time lowered standards for ordination, advanced many less than qualified men to higher permissions, with an English Bishop even allowing, as an emergency measure, laymen to hear the confessions of the dying if no priest was available, with the long term trend that there was a less faithful and moral clergy, a Church more dependent upon governments and lay people, and a decline in the status and perception of the Church, already deprecated due to scandals of the Avignon Captivity of the papacy at the time.
Within a few decades, this environment created the conditions for the crisis of the Great Western Schism, and within another century, this decline in the clergy cascaded to the chaos of the Protestant Revolution.
Our situation today is somewhat of a repeat of this period of crisis. The spiral of decay that began with a decline in the priesthood and religious orders after the Council thus supercharged existing cultural trends, allowing, and then justifying the takeover of more and more of the Church by managerial methods and motives that have only further backfired into increased decline.
Decline justifies the rule of those managing the decline by giving them a crisis to manage and an excuse for their own failures. A shortage of priests, while it’s been papered over for years with managerialist solutions to ration out the spiritual resources of the Church, is a primary enabler of the crisis in the Church.
The primary question behind this decline, one that I will soon cover, is precisely why the religious orders and vocations to the priesthood declined so abruptly after the Council, as so much of the other declines in the Church can be traced back to it. (The short answer: Psychologists, “Professionalization”, Drugs, and Blackmail, but more to come soon).
self-explanatory
The managerial spiral of decline in response to the shortage of priests and religious focused on properly fulfilling the spiritual needs of their people has as its penultimate culmination, Fr. James Martin.
He came from a “corporate finance and human resources” background but now serves from his high status near the Vatican as the ambassador and cheerleader for all things revolutionary in and outside the Church, preaching a gospel of good feelings in order to keep the Church’s relationships with the powerful in the world well greased.
For, with regard to Martin and those in the hierarchy who prop him up, the “state of necessity” today that justifies their power and the continued revolution is stronger than ever. The decline continues because no one wants their shallow bureaucratic product of platitudes, banalities, and meaningless marketing slogans.
Instead, like Amelia McKee, Sam Rhodes (Sam) and millions of others, they want what the Church was established for: the Sacraments, the Faith, and Salvation.
This is the real state of necessity in the Church. Besides, of course, all the obvious practices one can perform on their own, it’s hard for those who want to practise their faith and be supported by the Church in doing so, to do so.
Service to God—and Salvation, are the ultimate necessities outside of which nothing else matters, so it’s no surprise that people, like Sam, look for alternatives to the regular, now heavily bureaucratized structure that seems determined to hold the Sacraments hostage.
Though most known for their defense of the Traditional Latin Mass, as without them we probably would have lost that and many other aspects of the Church’s tradition, they were founded, primarily, for the formation and support of priests.
Doctrinal heterodoxy and liturgical revolution are also important, but the decline in vocations to and the formation of those in the priesthood and religious orders, as Archbishop Lefebvre saw already in the 1960s,5 was a key supercharger of all the problems faced by the Church over the last century. I agree.
I’m just glad I’m not the person forced to make the choice that their bishops and superior general, like Archbishop Lefebvre, just did. The SSPX, whatever they might do wrong, are trying to address this problem in a way that next to no other diocese or religious order is trying to do. Without them, it would be worse, far worse.
Even still, truly fixing the crisis requires more than they are doing, with smaller, more localized parishes where priests actually have a chance of knowing their faithful, a Church that is poorer, more independent, and less distracted by the bribes of secular powers, alongside a broader mimetic revival of the prospect and idea of the religious life and the priesthood, making it actually strike people as an option.
Like Stalin’s Holodomor and de-kulakization, the revolutionaries first went after the most successful in the Church, to ensure a state of dependence and shortages so that their revolutionaries would hold sway over those who remained.
Truly fixing the Church’s crises, no matter what else we do, requires addressing and reversing this, not by lowering the standards of the priesthood, or by making compromises with sketchy heterodox outfits that supply them, nor by stealing them from other countries, but by nurturing now the seeds of future religious and priestly vocations,not destroying them the way that so much of the managerial bosses within the Church seem so bent on doing.
No priests, or even too few of them, and no Faith.
I admit again that I have qualms about the SSPX, but I can’t argue that there isn’t a state of necessity that might justify their upcoming consecrations.
Certainly, if there’s a state of necessity door wide enough to justify handing control of the Chinese Church over to the CCP, it’s also wide enough to justify quite a bit besides.
Indeed, I recently learned that my own parish council is studying the “Total Quality Management” principles of the avuncular business guru, W. Edwards Deming, the Teilhard of corporate America. TQM is the most fully developed specimen of corporate therapeutics yet devised, replete with faux-zen aphorisms, hosannas to interrelatedness, optimization, and system, and lots of amiable psycho-noodling about flow. (Deming also refers a lot to Saint Paul’s notion of the Mystical Body, which becomes in TQM an exemplary model of corporate structure.)
Now I don’t know if or how the parish council intends to actually use this stuff, but I think it suggests two things. Given opportunity by the priest shortage and legitimation by Vatican II, the professional-managerial laity now possesses a wrestler’s hold on the clerical imagination.
Moreover, the laity who will be inheriting even more of the real power in the U.S. Catholic church are well-schooled in the therapeutic, increasingly “spiritualized” culture of corporate life.
