I republish some blog postings I wrote about the election of Benedict XVI in 2005, now twenty years ago. I had not yet joined the Traditional Anglican Communion and I was quite disenchanted by the various options around me. I had spent a few days with an independent priest by the name of Bernard Duvert and the idea of joining an oriental church was studied. With me without any experience of the oriental rites! I was in a state of suspense, and I tried to see signs of hope and optimism. One such was Pope Benedict XVI.

Twenty years of history have unrolled between my reflections and these early days of Pope Leo XIV. We hope and try to see the bright side. Hope is a virtue with faith and charity.

5th April 2005 – Sede Vacante

As the media chafe at the bit in furious speculation as to the future Pope, I allow myself even at this stage to give a few reflections about this time of emptiness, hope and clamouring for knowledge of what is to come.

As I write, thousands of Catholics are paying their respects to the late Pope John Paul II as he lies in state in the Vatican Basilica. With the whole Church, I will observe the novena of Masses and prayers for the repose of his soul. Unlike the temerous statements of journalists and misguided bishops, Pope John Paul II is not a canonised saint, and he needs our prayers. If he has millions of faithful praying for him, he needs these prayers, for the prospect of a Pope facing God’s Judgement fills us with great foreboding as we redouble our prayers and supplications.

In our mourning, we cannot but think about the future as we react to the asinine stupidities of press reporters who know so little about the Faith and Catholic customs. The bookmakers begin to take bets, like so many crows waiting for their share of the carrion. For this reason, I permit myself these reflections.

Some are asking for the Church no longer to be the Church. In modern Anglicanism, everything is allowed as the “revisionists” want: moral permissivity, women “priests”, lay people taking the place of priests, and so forth. The religious practice of Anglicans in England and Episcopalians in America has plummeted even lower than in Catholicism. This is sure proof that the solution to the crisis in the Church is not the curing of a strep throat with an injection of cancer cells.

The notion of a dictator Pope à la Opus Dei is going to alienate the Roman Curia even more from the long-suffering faithful. Why impose family / sexual morality and priestly celibacy when the very purpose of these noble ideals is undermined? Who wants to be a celibate priest (or even a married one), devoting his whole life in a sacrifice for his flock, when the life of parishes is blocked by bureaucracy and petty-minded pseudo-clerical laity wanting the “power”? We are no longer in those far-off days of 1978. Who still talks about P2 and the Vatican Bank, or the tortured agonies of the dying Paul VI bewailing that the smoke of the devil had entered the Church? Twenty-six years have passed, and the concerns are no longer the same, nor are the Cardinals (only a couple remain from the Paul VI era). Over these last years of the John Paul II pontificate, we have felt the stagnation, the waiting, the loss of hope. The page must turn and something must move.

It is no longer about conservatism and liberalism like in the old days, those mythical beasts Scylla and Charybdis on opposite coasts of the sea waiting to swallow straying ships whole. We need to return to transparency, the simplicity of the Gospel, freedom for the practice of our Faith in the celebration of the liturgy, the promotion of an authentic Christian culture, eons away from the 1960’s and 70’s. We need to be able to find beauty in worship far from the Mega-Masses and loud brashness of mass hysteria. The beauty of holiness is an icon of Truth and Love. Cardinal Ratzinger said a few years ago that the only apologia of Christianity is the beauty of worship and the holiness of the Saints.

The pressmen regurgitate the old litany of permissiveness, divorce, contraception, women priests, the old worn-out anti-clericalism, the equally exhausted Marxist class struggle. They come out with the same oppositions between the revisionists and political radicals versus the Curial conservatives. They have forgotten that what is at stake is the Mystical Body of Christ. If they don’t believe in Christ, how can the Church make any sense to them?

I look at the parade of papabili, see their faces and look at their profiles, and my heart is heavy. Going by the old Roman saying, Chi entra in conclave papa ne esce cardinale. I indeed hope that the more papabili they are, the least likely they are to get elected! We can only be grateful that the Conclave will be held in secret behind locked doors, the trash and clamour of the world shut out, away from the influence of the media – and our curiosity.

In the absence of an obvious solution for this eclipse of the Church, we can only pray with increased fervour, knowing that we are probably at the end of the “Constantinian” Church – not the end of the Church (et portae inferi non praevalebunt adversus eam) – but the end of a certain institution.

As on Holy Saturday, the statues are as if veiled, the tabernacle is empty, the altar is bare and gathering cobwebs, the Daughter of Sion stands desolate. We pray, we wait and we hope for the first striking of the New Fire and the singing of the Lumen Christi. We have at this point to ask ourselves: What do we believe in? As our senses fail us, faith alone will bring us through the trials to come.

19th April 2005 – Election of Benedict XVI

HABEMUS PAPAM !

POPE BENEDICT XVI

I extend my humble welcome to the new Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI. Indeed, I have read many of Cardinal Ratzinger’s works since my early seminary days, particularly in regard to the liturgy. I could say that Benedict XVI is one of the last of the great theologians of the twentieth century – an intellectual giant who is truly worthy of the task of bringing light and joy to the Church.

Time alone will reveal the urgent reforms he is certainly planning for the future of the Catholic Church in the modern world. As Europe was liberated from the boot of the Nazis in 1945, we look to our German Pope to lead the Faith and the Church to Victory. I am confident that our new Holy Father, who has written so much in favour of the traditional Roman Rite, will remove all restrictions from our Catholic Mass that has never been legally abrogated. He is committed to the Reform of the Reform, and we can only humbly thank God for giving us Josef Ratzinger as His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI.

What of my own future as a priest or a bishop? Only time will tell, and I will continue to be faithful to the Orders I have received, seeking to promote this potentially great Pope’s work even though I have no official mission to do so. I may never receive such a mission, and my words may be those of the Prophet Simeon : Nunc dimittis servum tuum… Our new Holy Father has my humble prayers and the Sacrifice of the Mass I offer each day for his Pontificate in the Church that has suffered for so many years from compromise, the dictatorship of relativism and infidelity.

Du bist Petrus, der Fels, und auf diesen Felsen will ich meine Kirche bauen, und die Pforten der Hölle werden sie nicht überwältigen.

26th April 2005 – To the Catacombs?

“We might have to part with the notion of a popular Church. It is possible that we are on the verge of a new era in the history of the Church, under circumstances very different from those we have faced in the past, when Christianity will resemble the mustard seed, that is, will continue only in the form of small and seemingly insignificant groups, which yet will oppose evil with all their strength and bring Good into this world.” Pope Benedict XVI, Salt of the Earth (1996).

These words have hung in my mind over the past few days since having seen them quoted on my consecrator’s website. Am I trying the “justify the unjustifiable” as the first signs of disappointment appear on some e-mail lists and forums? What were they expecting, that we would wake up one morning and find ourselves thrown back through a time-warp into the 1930’s?

Even were he to issue decrees right away ordering the town to be cleaned up, the Mass restored, abuses abolished, he would not be obeyed. The question is not what will happen in Rome, but here in France, the USA, England, Spain and everywhere else. I think what is likely is that the various episcopates will pay lip-service to the Pope, and go on as under John Paul II. The attrition will continue and the parishes will be sparser and sparser in terms of faithful. Maybe, there will be a traditional or conservative diocese here or there like the Archdiocese of Vaduz, Leichtenstein, under Bishop Wolfgang Haas.

Benedict XVI was silent about his exact agenda, other than telling us that he wished to be a bringer of peace and to work for the reconciliation of Christians. We know today from a news article that the Patriarchate of Moscow is much happier with Benedict XVI, and that more progress can be made than under John Paul II. Benedict XVI “agreed that there is a need for the two churches to promote cooperation in standing for the Christian values common to present-day Europe“. The words are beginning to be turned into actions. Imagine the spiritual force of a united Orthodox and Catholic Church!

However, many other matters in the Church, including the open hand to the traditionalists, will take time. The work of reform may take a very long time, and the numbers of practicing Catholics will become smaller. This renews my conviction that I should continue in a modest and discreet ministry of service to my scattered flock of those who are for one reason or another alienated from both the institutional Church and the totalitarian traditionalist organisations. However little we are, we should see the big picture and work in our own areas for these holy goals of peace, reconciliation and conversion to Christ.

The real enemy today is militant and fundamentalist Islam, not the ordinary Muslim people who live and pray peacefully, respecting the countries where they have been admitted as refugees, but those who want to rule Europe, commit atrocities and eradicate Christianity. There’s the real enemy. Indeed a martyr Church will no longer be popular, nor will she pander to liberal and secular agendas. The time has come to put on the armour of God, with the beastplate of faith and the sword of the spirit. Will our faith withstand the test of martyrdom? Gott hilf uns, Maria hilf!

24th April 2005 – Inauguration of Pope Benedict XVI and 4th Sunday after Easter

I have recently received several e-mails criticising my enthusiatic welcome of Pope Benedict XVI. The question is whether I am right in seeking to see the Tradition in a vision such as that of the “orthodox modernist” school (to qualify this term, theologians working according to methods similar to those of the Modernists but without being heretical). The essential point in this vision is that the Church has no apologetic defence other than holiness and beauty. Casel, Bouyer and Ratzinger, among many others sought what underpinned Vatican II. Casel died in 1948, but Bouyer, Ratzinger and others “stopped” in about 1968 when they saw that the noble aspirations of the theological and liturgical movements were being shattered by the 1968 “pop revolution” – nihilism and ararchy set in, producing what has scandalized Catholics ever since. John Paul II’s theology was essentially existentialist (that’s why nobody could read his encyclicals), and could do nothing against modern nihilism. On the other hand, the earlier theological movement were bringing in elements of Platonism and neo-patristics – what have gone into a recent English theological movement called “Radical Orthodoxy”. I have an understanding of the way these men think, having known old country priests who in 1962 welcomed Vatican II but who said the traditional Mass to the end of their lives, having been to Fribourg University where most of my friends were Germans. Cardinal (then Father) Christoph von Schönborn was one of my professors, whose classes were meditations on God’s love in the rigour of his intellect.

I suffered considerably with the backward-looking vision of the SSPX and even some of the indult communities like the Institute of Christ the King to which I once belonged – which was the least fundamentalist, most “baroque” and most cultured. As a former Anglican, influenced by Newman and Bouyer, I became interested in the Russian School (Lossky, Berdiaev, Bobrinskoy, etc.) and found Casel, Ratzinger, De Lubac and Urs von Balthasar thinking along practically the same lines. The concern was the same: the end of the Renaissance heritage and the transition of man into the Great Unknown. I have nothing of the intellectual stature of these men, but I am perfectly restless with the emasculated theology and spirituality of Ecône and those who would have us live in shadows and illusions.

Had the SSPX and parallel movements been able to create a unified movement without a totalitarian and sectarian spirit, being able to produce a sense of light instead of darkness and fear, then I would have followed it. The SSPX is in shreds, especially here in France. The sedevacantists continue their snivelling attitude, and I have come to the stage where I want to know no more about them. Novus Ordo Watch and Fr. Morrison’s Traditio disappoint me – I will keep these people in my prayers.

Faith is a theologal virtue, a supernatural gift. Theology is fides quaerens intellectum in the words of St Anselm. I don’t think Cardinal Ratzinger, now Benedict XVI, would deny this. But, faith is not something static, marking the “saved” out from the “unsaved”. The basis must remain the same: the Liturgy, the Scriptures, the Fathers, St Thomas Aquinas – but we have to admit that there was little real speculation about the Church until Möhler in the 19th century, bringing out the mystical dimension of the Church over the canonical and institutional aspects. We must beware of anti-intellectualism as much as excessive intellectualism – I recommend the reading of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose: the abbey library, the Venerable Jorge, whose conservatism leads him to pure evil. This book is deliberately unhistorical – it is a parable. Cardinal Ratzinger, when he was in hospital in the early 1990’s, read Dostoievsky’s The Karamazov Brothers, containing the Legend of the Great Inquisitor. That little parable has always fascinated me. Yes, I am a traditionalist, but I read Urs von Balthasar, Henri de Lubac, Yves Congar, Louis Bouyer, Dom Odo Casel, Msgr Klaus Gamber – and Ratzinger. One never ceases to learn from these great men of faith and intellect.

What is now coming out of Cardinal Ratzinger’s election is the fact that the revolutionaries, nihilists, anti-clericals and “progressives” are coming out of the woodwork, and they cannot tolerate this Pope. If they cannot go on with their work of destruction, they will have to announce their colours and create their own schismatic churches or join the Old Catholics or Anglicans. It may make the Catholic much smaller. Benedict XVI is resigned to the fact that the Church will now hold a minority position in society. The abscess has come to maturity, and all the surgeon had to do was to bring out the pus so that the wound can heal.

The problem of the Novus Ordo rites is a serious one, and I don’t know if the issue will be addressed, other than by the work of a “reform of the reform” and liberating the Tridentine rite. But the sedevacantists and radical traditionalists have failed to offer a unified resistance or offer anything original and positive. Perhaps we face the End of Days, but some seem to be looking for it – just as nihilistically as the 1968 revolutionaries. Can we not at least try to work towards a world that offers a future, rather than seeking our death?

Another thing I see in the Church: the nihilist revolutionary system is exhausted. The “progressives” were unable to muster a credible line in the Conclave, even the glitzy and “charismatic” Tettamanzi of Milan. Had a South American been elected, it would have been time to sell my house and move away from Europe, as nothing would prevent what may still be the inevitable. Newchurch is exhausted and dying, and Benedict XVI knows that if this goes on, there will be no institutional Church in Europe in 20 years at the most. The only thing that can fill the vacuum of secularism is either Islam or Catholicism. That is the real issue. Can the sedevacantists and the SSPX do anything? They have done nothing so far other than to squabble between themselves. John Paul II left the Church to rot but he brought the Berlin Wall down – I think Benedict XVI is going to do the same thing inside the Church.

There were signs this morning at the Papal Mass, too small to be noticed but so full of meaning : the restoration of the ancient Papal pallium, the beautiful golden Fisherman’s Ring that stands out in contrast to the ugly pieces of metalwork Paul VI and John Paul II wore, the pectoral cross of St Pius X inside the chasuble, the gentle and convinced words of his sermon. We have so much to look forward to!

I want to hope and work for a future against all odds. There are dire prophecies, but prophecy is always conditional – man can change his future by calling on the Names of Jesus and Mary, and returning to the Truth. To quote Job, Man that is born of a women hath but a short time to live… We are only here to plant a few seeds.

25th April 2005 – The Future

I lay no claim to being a prophet, but I have read articles that “ring true” and have done much thinking for myself. Too many Christian communities – Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant – adopt a refuge mentality, withdrawing from culture and building the walls thicker and higher. They see the outside world as the enemy and live in their own sub-culture. They deceive themselves into believing they are a potent force. The “progressives” have gone to the other extreme – selling out. They cast all their pearls befor swine, and have none left. Both have missed the essential point.

The Church was never intended to exist for her own sake, but to join with God in His redemptive mission in the world. The Church is but a means to an end; bringing the Kingdom of God to earth. Her vocation is the Mission. When Jesus came to this earth, He entered a world similar to our own. No one really believed the Greek and Roman pantheon of gods, and Judaism was exhausted. The collapse of the old institutions was followed by a renewal of personal spiritual quests for God and salvation. In this context, Jesus taught His disciples about the Kingdom of God and how everyone could find access to it. No longer was salvation to be reserved to the “chosen ones” – the Pharisees.

Jesus looked beyond externals to the inward movements of the heart, for faith has an internal life-transforming experience at its heart. This is where our new Pope has to meet the world, not by reaffirming the old imperial Papacy, nor the sell-out policies of Paul VI and John Paul II, but by delivering an internal message of love: If we let Christ into our lives, we lose nothing, nothing, absolutely nothing of what makes life free, beautiful and great. No! Only in this friendship are the doors of life opened wide. Only in this friendship is the great potential of human existence truly revealed. Only in this friendship do we experience beauty and liberation.

Our response to this call is a renewal of Christ’s mission, firstly our own conversion, then the filling of the world with light and grace. We must lose ourselves rather than be self-serving, be concerned to serve and sacrifice ourselves before being concerned about putting over our “style”. This new style of the Papacy suggests that the Church is ready to lose in quantity what she will gain in quality. Benedict XVI does not dream of mass conversion to tomorrow’s Church, but a creative minority Christianity with the strength to convert. We have left the era of timid dialogue with non-believers, non-Christians and non-Catholics – and have entered a period of mission and the preaching of the truth.

The era of multi-religious meetings at Assisi (and other places) and of so many of the misplaced gestures of John Paul II, is over, as are the self-celebrating mega-liturgies that left the ground littered with consecrated hosts. The restoration of the ancient Papal pallium speaks volumes – a sign of diminished Roman centralism and a return to true episcopal collegiality and the road to reconciliation between the two “lungs” of the Church: the Latin west and the Orthodox orient. Rome will demand from the Orthodox Churches nothing more than was established and practiced during the first millenium.

The Church is still in a transitional phase as the new Pope garners the support of as many bishops, priests and lay people as possible. The progressives are manifesting their opposition, and the institutional Church will certainly become much smaller. We are entering a true paradigm shift from institution to mission, where the values preached by John Paul II are being transfigured and put to new effect.

The election of Cardinal Ratzinger, a European, is symbolic. The Church has not given up on our beloved Christian Europe, threatened by the voting of a godless constitution and a possible admission of Turkey. If Rome falls, the world will fall. We may expect a true renewal of the Church’s liturgical life and an emphasis on spirituality. These are the weapons by which the Church can combat the menace and inhumanity of fundamentalist Islam, the ultimate chastisement of humanist pride. May God hear our prayers for the New Renaissance!

29th April 2005 – Traditionalist illusions and the Benedictine vision

This came up in an e-mail list : Laissez donc benoît XVI arranger tout ça, il va le faire vite et bien, vous allez voir…Aulagnier évêque, Fellay et Tissier de M. cardinaux, Pozzeto et Coiffet évêques, pourquoi pas? Tout le monde serait réconcilié ! (Translation: Let Benedict XVI sort all that out. He’s going to do it quickly and well. Aulagnier a bishop, Fellay and Tissier de Mallerais Cardinals, Pozzetto and Coiffet bishops, why not? Everyone would be reconciled!)

I have been observing the different reactions, from the euphoria of the Indult Catholics to the digging and sifting of the sedevacantists, looking for old heresies and any muck-raking they can find or quote out of context. There is even an accusation of complicity in the covering up of a pedophia case! Truly, this is the stuff of myths and legends. We have got to get away from such superficial illusions. This Papacy is something entirely new, one that will not fit into the usual categories. On one hand, Benedict XVI has done away with the imperial Papacy by abolishing the Tiara, even in his coat of arms, but he is not going to follow the “liberation” agendas. I believe him to be more than a neo-conservative. As Vladimir Soloviev expressed at the end of the 19th century, the key to the big picture is the healing of the thousand-year-old schism between the Orthodox Churches and Rome. Everything else would then fall into place.

It seems time for us to get real. If the written work of Benedict XVI, written whilst he was at the head of the CDF, has any meaning, it denotes a prudent restoration of the Church’s liturgical life, a reform of the reform. The open attitude towards the old rite is conceived as a bridge towards the reform of the liturgical life of the whole Church. By this, I doubt that the Pope would intend to use the Indult movement as a means to an end and then abolish it. I would hope that the traditional rite will find again its full rights, since its perpetual canonical status was confirmed by Quo primum of St Pius V, and the Roman Curia privately re-confirms this status. What I believe to be in his intentions is that the Tridentine rite cannot yet be imposed on the whole Church. The rite intended to be celebrated in the majority of parishes will, in all likelihood, be a reformed and theologically corrected Novus Ordo, or perhaps something like the 1965 rite, with vernacular options and simplified ceremonies. But, we are unlikely to see improvements in our parishes for decades!

What is my prognostic? Very simply, most of the country parishes in France will be gone within ten years, the churches closed and re-used for other purposes by their owners, the local secular authorities. People who are not numbed, indifferent and brain-dead will have to get used to driving for several hours to get to Mass in a city parish or a monastery. That is certainly what Benedict XVI meant when he wrote “We might have to part with the notion of a popular Church.“

This is why I doubt that important charges are going to be given to such controversial figures as the bishops and priests of the Society of St Pius X. That the SSPX could be regularised and given a role in the Church alongside the Fraternity of St Peter, the Apostolic Administration of Campos, the Institute of Christ the King and others is not impossible. It depends on the willingness and vision of each to see the big picture and not merely their private agendas and vested interests.

Pope Benedict XVI obviously has a great devotion to St Benedict and the Order of Benedictine monks and nuns. I do believe the renewal can come out of the contemplative life and the silent labours of the monks. The Abbey of Fontgombault in France and its daughter houses, many of which are abbeys in their own right, has a tremendous influence in France. Personally, I find the austere style of these abbeys a little “miltary” for my tastes: take the novice, break him and rebuild him, like in the Army. I do believe that the monastic life needs to become more human and more based on building the original personality rather than destroying it to produce a stereotype, or at least what appears to be such.

I would hope that the new Pope will encourage the founding of more monasteries – of diverse spiritualities and approaches to forming their novices and those who genuinely enter in order to find God. I strongly believe in the need for contemplative communities and the work monks have always done in the past: theological research and writing, publishing, using modern media like the Internet to spread the Gospel to those who hunger and thirst for the Absolute, art and culture, the possibilities are limitless. Above all, in a monastery, nothing is preferred to the Opus Dei – not the Spanish cult-like movement – but the Work of God, the liturgy of the Office and the Mass. Only the monastic vision is capable of bringing about a new liturgical movement and a real restoration.

Rather than bishops and priests of the traditionalist fraternities, I would see more monks and religious appointed to high offices in the Vatican and placed in charge of matters like the liturgy and the doctrine of the faith. The monastic vocation is a radical step, and monastic theology has done nothing to pander to the whims of “popular devotions” and emasculated spirituality. The Pope has asked of us an adult act of faith – we need to grow up in order to eat meat instead of continuing to drink milk. It is not by accident that all bishops of the Eastern Orthodox Church are monks. Perhaps the situation in the Catholic Church would be tremendously improved if more monks were appointed as bishops.

Perhaps it is time for us to blow the dust off our Rule of Saint Benedict! Most of us are not monks, but we would be surprised to find out how much of it can be applied in the lives of ordinary Catholics and secular clerics.