TWO KINDS OF BISHOP – V
by His Excellency Richard N. Williamson
August 12, 2023
Getting to Heaven is a major enterprise,
Excluding even the shadow of compromise.
It is time to tie together and bring to an end this series of five issues of these “Comments,” because, circling around the theme of what kind of bishops are needed today for the survival of the Catholic Faith tomorrow, the first four issues have ranged over a variety of topics. Here they are in brief:—
July 15: To obtain good bishops, changeless Catholic Truth outweighs today’s Catholic Authority.
July 22: Archbishop Lefebvre put Truth first. His re-oriented Society of St Pius X prefers Authority.
July 29: All of us must pray for that Authority, none of us may act as though we can take its place.
Aug.05: Nor can any ambiguous compromise with today’s Rome truly serve the interests of God.
The conclusion to be drawn from these four issues of the “Comments” is that Archbishop Lefebvre was not only right in 1988 when he consecrated four bishops against Rome’s express disapproval, but his re-oriented Newsociety (as it may be called because of its re-orientation officially adopted in 2012) was wrong when it then chose to wait upon Rome’s approval to obtain the new bishops it so much needs. It needs them to protect the Faith of a multitude of far-flung souls turning to it as a refuge from the many and resolute heresies of a Rome held in the vice-like grip of the enemies of God. But the Newsociety will hardly serve as a refuge if it insists on negotiating with these destroyers of the Faith. Can the Newsociety Superiors really not see what liberal crusaders for evil, God has allowed, justly, to take over Rome? The grave underestimation of the evil around them is at the heart of these Superiors’ re-orientation.
Archbishop Lefebvre had an idea of the danger when he resigned in 1982 as Superior General of what was still then the Society, and put its Superiorate in the hands of younger successors. For at the same time he reserved to himself all questions of relations with Rome. With his long years of direct experience of dealing as Apostolic Delegate to French Africa with Vatican officials, he suspected that the young priests of his Society might prove to be like babes in the wood amidst the wolves and sharks at work in the Vatican, and so it turned out, because the Big Bad Wolf had such lovely teeth, as Little Red Riding Hood told him! “All the better with which to devour you, my darling,” came the answer. And since modernist minds have lost objective truth, all the more power to deceive do the “sincere” lies of Roman officials have. Subjectively, they are “sincere,” especially lovely teeth! Objectively, they are deadly.
Young priests of the Newsociety, have you been given to believe that the Society of 2012 is the true Society of Archbishop Lefebvre? If so, you resemble many young priests of the mainstream Church who were only ever taught that Vatican II is the true Catholic Church. But by the grace of God and by their own good will, a number of them are now waking up to the fact that they were sold a dummy, and they are looking for the truth, and you may know how some of them are even looking towards what was the Archbishop’s Society. By the continuing grace of God, they may realise, like yourselves, that his Society is running a grave risk by wanting to rejoin apostate Rome – and that is a grave risk because if anyone wants something for long enough, he is liable to get what he wants. Young man, beware of your wishes!
What was the wisdom of the Archbishop himself? He said, it is Superiors who mould subjects, not the other way round, so to dream of rejoining Rome in order to convert it, is a dangerous dream. And on Vatican II he said, its danger is not so much even in the grave particular errors of religious liberty, collegiality or ecumenism, it is in the all-pervading subjectivism which radically undermines all objective truth together with any of the demands it makes upon us. What can possibly remain of the Catholic Faith?
Dear young priests, get hold of any texts of the Archbishop himself, and devour them, but beware of editions so doctored by the Newsociety as to cut out anything running contrary to its Newness . . .
Kyrie eleison
