In Medio Stat Veritas

 Most of what is wrong with the world occurs when people cling to an extreme on either side of a spectrum regarding behaviors or belief. On a practical level, I have a friend who can tell you the exact day and hour he will retire. He virtually has his entire life mapped out in his daily planner. If something unforeseen changes his schedule, he is visibly upset for days. I have another friend who makes no provisions for his future, doesn't know what he'll be doing from one day to the next, and when life throws him a problem, he runs to me for help. Neither is a good way to live.

 One Protestant preacher, Mr. Barger, recently commented that Antipope Francis' June prayer meeting with the Jews and Moslems was "ecumenism's finest hour." He meant it as a condemnation, and he is correct. Barger later goes on to discuss his "reckless statement" about atheists going to Heaven. ("Reckless" is far too charitable a word). Then, Mr. Barger's own heresy comes forth:

... if I were a Roman Catholic I would be most disturbed by the pope's comments. After all, why should a Catholic strive to carry out all of the works-oriented ordinances that Catholicism demands just to hear their leader, the alleged mouthpiece for God in the world, announce that, like them, the atheists are redeemed (i.e. "saved")? Won't many Catholics take it that, by adding enough good works to their life's portfolio, in reality he or she could have lived like the devil and still have made it through the Pearly Gates in the end? Isn't Pope Francis signaling that Catholics can actually indulge in any and every worldly pleasure, vice, or conceivable darkness and ignore all the RCC rules? Just add enough good works and like the atheists, pagan Catholics can make it to Paradise in the end? Why toe the line in abiding with the many rules and rituals that Romanism has saddled its people with? Though I can imagine that the confession booth might be noticeably empty as a result of the pope's May 22 sermon, let's pray that Catholics abandon the rituals of Rome and come to true saving faith that depends solely on Jesus' substitutionary sacrifice for them.

I can't blame Mr. Barger, a life-long Protestant, for thinking the Vatican II sect is the Roman Catholic Church. His big mistake is thinking that you can "live like the devil" and yet get to Heaven with "good works."Which is it? How can one be a self-serving heathen, yet have meritorious good works? What Mr. Barger doesn't realize is that Francis and his Modernist brethren have emptied the traditional rules of the Church of all their substance. "Who am I to judge" if sodomy is a sin? Let's give "communion" to notorious adulterers. Good works in Francis-speak means being a "nice guy/gal." Nice by the world's standards, so as not to get bogged down with "narrow-minded rules."

Mr. Barger doesn't appreciate that his "justification by Faith alone" (sole fide) is the real licence to sin. He exhorts Catholics (sic) to "abandon the ritual of Rome" and rely on "saving faith that depends solely on Jesus' substitutionary sacrifice for them." If my faith in Jesus as "my personal Lord and Savior" is all I need, I can't lose my place in Heaven no matter what I do. As Martin Luther said, "Sin boldly, but believe more boldly." Here, you can actually know something is evil, choose to do it (the requirements for mortal sin) and yet get to Heaven because you believe in Jesus ("Do I hear Amen, my brothers and sisters?"). Of course, Mr. Barger will counter by saying if someone TRULY believes they would not want to offend God.  Nice try, but if someone is intellectually convinced that Jesus is Lord, they are impeccable? Where does their private interpretation of Scripture teach that doctrine? Since they jettison all distinction between venial and mortal sin, wouldn't the mass murderer be just as "saved" as the one who tells "little white lies" provided they both believe in Jesus?

 One Protestant told me God would "chastise" a Christian who habitually sins by cutting short their life. I asked him, "But they still go to Heaven because they believe, right?" "Of course, once saved always saved," was his response. "How then is that a 'chastisement' since being in Heaven is better than being on Earth? Isn't it a reward? If no sin can cause you to lose salvation, why not commit suicide and get to Heaven faster?" He had no response. The bottom line is that Protestantism, by its heretical notion of faith, gives the green light to doing whatever you please without consequence. Conversely, Mr. Begoglio, by denigrating the True Faith and replacing true morals with "being nice" has the same effect. Having too much sugar in your blood (hyperglycemia) and having too little (hypoglycemia) both have the same end result---death.

 There's an old Latin adage, "In medio stat veritas", i.e. "in the middle is the Truth." In the middle of Mr. Barger's "salvation by faith alone" and Mr. Begoglio's "just be a nice guy" lies the Truth of the Catholic Faith where the role of True faith and role of good works is spelled out in the Council of Trent. Stay in the middle with the Truth or else you will inevitably get pulled into the extremes where awaits the Father of Lies and your eternal demise.

The Primary Problem

 In California, old time Democratic Congressman Henry Waxman (pro-abortion, pro-sodomite politician) decided to retire from office. That's the good news. In the Democratic primary to replace him, one Marianne Williamson ran (unsuccessfully) to take his seat. The fact that she was well received and was a serious contender should send chill's down one's spine if you aren't a total apostate. Who is Marianne Williamson?

 Born July 8, 1952, Williamson is a self-proclaimed "New Age guru." She has published ten books, including four New York Times #1 bestsellers. She has sold more than 3,000,000 copies of her books. A college drop out, Williamson wanted to be a cabaret singer, but when that didn't pan out, she open a "metaphysical bookstore" wherein she became encompassed by New Age  religion and philosophy. In 1990, she had her only child (a daughter named India) by a man whose identity she refuses to reveal, and calls herself an "unwed Jewish mother." Williamson bases her teaching and writing on a set of books called A Course in Miracles, a self-study program of "spiritual psychotherapy", based on universal spiritual themes.These books were "channeled" by the author, Helen Schucman (meaning she was possessed by demonic forces). (Some info from Wikipedia)

 Most recently, Williamson is also the force behind Sister Giant, a series of seminars and teaching sessions that provides women with the information and tools needed to be political candidates. Through these seminars, she encourages women to run for office and align their politics with their decidedly New Age "spiritual values." (Christian values would allegedly violate the First Amendment, but the ACLU is conspicuously absent when New Ageism is espoused).  Williamson was supported and funded by the New Age "queen" Oprah Winfrey.

Not since Shirley MacLaine has any single person done so much to promote and normalize New Age mysticism to the public, as has Oprah. Her biggest venture is promoting Eckhart Tolle, a German "mystic" who resides in Vancouver, British Columbia.
According to Tolle himself, his influences include:

•  Sufism, which is a mystical form of Islam

• Zen Buddhism

•  The Australian turned Hindu mystic, Barry Long whose teaching includes 20 books most of which focus in detail about sexuality between man and woman and its use to purify them both and rid them of personal, human love.

•  Tolle acknowledges that his teachings are a synthesis of the teachings of Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi, one of the most famous of Hindu Yogi's and J. Krishnamurti. (Krishnamurti was once declared the "Messiah" and was proclaimed as the new incarnation of the Maitreya Buddha by the Madame Blavatsky's Theosophical Society.)

• The aforementioned A Course in Miracles.

   When asked during a webcast how she has reconciled Tolle's spiritualist teachings with her previous Christian background Oprah responded as follows.

"I've reconciled it because I was able to open my mind about the, ah, absolute, indescribable hugeness of that which we call 'God.' Ah, I took God out of the box, cause, I grew up in the Baptist church and there were you know, rules and belief systems, doctrine. And, I happened to be, ah, sitting in church in my late twenties, and I was going to this church where you had to get there at eight o'clock in the morning or you couldn't get a seat and a very charismatic minister, and everybody was, you know, into the sermon. And this great minister was preaching about how great God was and how omniscient and omnipresent and God is everything. And then he said 'The Lord thy God is a jealous God.' And I was, you know, caught up in the rapture of that moment until he said 'jealous.' And, something struck me, I was I think about twenty-seven or twenty-eight, I was thinking, 'God is all. God is omnipresent and God’s also jealous? God is jealous of me?' Something about that didn't feel right in my spirit because I believe that God is love, that God is in all things. And so, that's when the search for something more than doctrine began to stir within me."

Oprah then asks her guru, Eckhart Tolle, what happens to humans at death. Tolle responds "I don't give it any thought." Oprah further pontificates that "God, in the essence of all consciousness, isn't something to believe. God is! God 'is' and God is a feeling experience not a believing experience. And if your religion is a believing experience, if God for you is still about a belief, then it's not truly God." (See, e.g. Edwin W. Lutzer, Oprah, Miracles, and The New Earth Moody Publishers 2009).

  Now compare what Pope St. Pius X  wrote in his great encyclical Pascendi about Modernist teaching:
"Hence the principle of religious immanence is formulated. Moreover, the first actuation, so to say, of every vital phenomenon, and religion, as has been said, belongs to this category, is due to a certain necessity or impulsion; but it has its origin, speaking more particularly of life, in a movement of the heart, which movement is called a sentiment. Therefore, since God is the object of religion, we must conclude that faith, which is the basis and the foundation of all religion, consists in a sentiment which originates from a need of the divine. This need of the divine, which is experienced only in special and favorable circumstances, cannot, of itself, appertain to the domain of consciousness; it is at first latent within the consciousness, or, to borrow a term from modern philosophy, in the subconsciousness, where also its roots lies hidden and undetected.

Should anyone ask how it is that this need of the divine which man experiences within himself grows up into a religion, the Modernists reply thus: Science and history, they say, are confined within two limits, the one external, namely, the visible world, the other internal, which is consciousness. When one or other of these boundaries has been reached, there can be no further progress, for beyond is the unknowable. In presence of this unknowable, whether it is outside man and beyond the visible world of nature, or lies hidden within in the subconsciousness, the need of the divine, according to the principles of Fideism, excites in a soul with a propensity towards religion a certain special sentiment, without any previous advertence of the mind: and this sentiment possesses, implied within itself both as its own object and as its intrinsic cause, the reality of the divine, and in a way unites man with God. It is this sentiment to which Modernists give the name of faith, and this it is which they consider the beginning of religion." (para. #7).

  Modernism, like it's cousin, New Ageism, teaches that religion is a search for spiritual feelings - but not absolute truth. For experiences - but without foundation. Now the same people who hijacked the Church are slowly infiltrating all areas of government. The Vatican II sect did nothing to warn people of Williamson's candidacy, and why would they do that? Their end goal is the same, and propelled by by the same Satanic ideology, just repackaged a little differently. Some Protestant preachers warned people about Marianne Williamson, and she came up short--this time. We can never prevail unless and until we realize that the primary problem is not the elections but the false doctrines of Vatican II which unleashed the powers of Hell.

Consecrated To The Service Of God And Ordained To Fight Vatican II

 Traditionalist Catholics are often accused of being members of a "small cult." H.L. Mencken once observed, "A cult is any religion except for my own." While I do not hesitate to call Protestants, the adherents of Vatican II, and any other false system a "sect" (in opposition to the One True Church), I will not call them a "cult." Originally, the word cult signified a means of worship and the Church Herself applied it to the liturgy. Now it is used in a pejorative manner for any religious activity someone doesn't like. The term does, and should, have a restricted meaning for those organizations which use coercion to get and/or keep members.

  According to Janja Lalich, Ph.D. and  Michael D. Langone, Ph.D., there are several characteristics of a cult some of which are:

• The group displays excessively zealous and unquestioning commitment to its leader and (whether he is alive or dead) regards his belief system, ideology, and practices as the Truth, as law.‪ Questioning, doubt, and dissent are discouraged or even punished.
• ‪ Mind-altering practices (such as meditation, chanting, speaking in tongues, denunciation sessions, and debilitating work routines) are used in excess and serve to suppress doubts about the group and its leader(s).
• ‪ The leadership dictates, sometimes in great detail, how members should think, act, and feel (for example, members must get permission to date, change jobs, marry—or leaders prescribe what types of clothes to wear, where to live, whether or not to have children, how to discipline children, and so forth).
• ‪ The group is elitist, claiming a special, exalted status for itself, its leader(s) and members (for example, the leader is considered the Messiah, a special being, an avatar—or the group and/or the leader is on a special mission to save humanity).
• ‪ The group has a polarized us-versus-them mentality, which may cause conflict with the wider society.(See http://www.csj.org/infoserv_cult101/checklis.htm)

 Using this as a guide, we can call Scientology a cult, but not the Vatican II sect. Ironically, some members of the Vatican II sect refer to Traditionalists as a "cult." The reason is clear: We believe in objective truth, and we possess it exclusively.

Is there such a thing as objective truth - truth which has always been and always will be the same - unchanging and constant - hence a truth which is absolute? Now, either words have meaning or they don't. If truth is only a matter of personal taste, if one is convinced that all reality is relative, there is hardly any point in continuing either discussion or search for truth. One is caught in the self-contradiction of proclaiming that the only truth there is---is that there is no truth. Unless we deny all logic and meaning we must conclude that Truth, as such, exists. Such a statement may seem puerile to a Traditionalist, but once an agnostic admits the possibility of truth, he is logically committed to seeking and adhering to this entity.

 Once we accept the possibility of objective truth we can seek it out from only three possible sources. These are 1) the ancient and always constant Truths embodied in the Catholic Religion and demonstrated by right reason; 2) our own or someone else's gut feelings or psychological experiences as to what is true; and 3) some mixture of these two extremes. Either we accept objective criteria, or we accept subjective criteria, or we create a mixture of the two that for some reason or another we find personally satisfactory.  We see here displayed the spectrum between Traditional Catholicism which offers us objectively defined truths, the beliefs of modern man which approach absolute subjectivity and Protestantism which is a mixture of some objective truths combined with subjective opinions. Vatican II, with its novel doctrine on religious liberty, places the post-Conciliar position on the nature of truth in the middle or modern category for it proclaims that man is free to believe anything he wants and that his very dignity lies in this freedom. How can man's dignity lie in his freedom to believe error?

 But, the Vatican II sect will protest, if you're Catholics, then why are there so many splinter groups? Your just like Protestants. I've dealt with this charge before in other posts. It's glib, but it doesn't get you very far. Without a pope, it's only natural that when the Shepard is struck, the sheep will be scattered. We DO agree on far more than we don't agree. The Vatican II sect, which has an alleged pope, has disunity and there should be NONE. Ask any three Traditionalist priests if homosexuality is always wrong, or what is Transubstantiation, and you will get three identical answers. Ask the same of three Vatican II sect "priests" and you will likely get three different answers, depending on whether they are "conservative," "moderate," or "liberal." 

 The reason for my post today is to suggest something bold for Traditionalists. One way we could get more united to see our way through this time of the Great Apostasy, is to have universal recognition of each others Orders. All Traditionalist clergy, ordained after Vatican II obtain their Apostolic Succession from one of three Episcopal Lineages: Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre (SSPX and SSPX-SO), Archbishop Peter Thuc (CMRI), and Bishop Alfred Mendez (SSPV). 

 Due to bickering and pride, some question the validity of the other lines. The Society of St Pius V (SSPV) will not recognize those ordained/consecrated by Thuc. The Society of St Pius X-Strict Observance (SSPX-SO) will recognize only Vatican II orders (!) and their own. They shun SSPV and CMRI. To their credit CMRI will recognize all three lineages. Rather than get bogged down with the reasons behind the "doubts" that were cooked up, I have a suggestion:

1. Have Bishop Santay (SSPV), Bishop Pivarunas (CMRI), and Bishop Williamson (SSPX-SO) begin talking to each other via Skype to work out some differnces.
2. To prevent any  further aspersions against their Orders, IN AN ACT OF SUPREME HUMILITY FOR THE SALVATION OF SOULS, agree to meet and a designated place and time to conditionally re-ordain and conditionally re-consecrate each other! 
3. In this way, those who only recognize the Lefebvre lineage would now have to recognize the other two. Likewise, the Mendez and Thuc devotees, would have to recognize the other two lines.
4. By achieving mutual recognition, Traditionalists will inch closer to the day when perhaps we can get as close to a unified front until the papacy is restored.
5. Perhaps, in so doing, we would hasten the day when a pope comes to replace His Holiness Pope Pius XII (d. 1958).

 I urge any Traditionalists who read my blog to bring this to the attention of your priests (and even Bishop) to let them ponder the potential good that could come from this act. I also wish to thank my friend Mike at www.dailycatholic.org for discussing this issue with me. He's a man strong in the true Faith. (Please say a prayer for the repose of the soul of his dear wife Cyndi, who recently passed.) There are those who say the fate of the Church is in God's Hands. True enough. But as St. Teresa of Avila observed, "God has no hands but ours." (Lit. "Yours are the hands, with which He blesses all the world.")