Various heresies from the False Traditionalists in The Remnant

Various heresies from the False Traditionalists in The Remnant

By Bro. Peter Dimond, O.S.B.

-9/3/04-

Comment: We planned on making John Paul II’s statement praising the Buddhists for the “Coming of the Lord Buddha” the Heresy of the Week for this week (see it in our Photo Gallery). But after reading through the recent issue of The Remnant there were a few things that were extremely bothersome (and actually outrageous) that it became necessary to include them in this column. Some may say that we seem to pick on publications such as the one described above. The fact is that it is not our desire to pick on the compromises and the heresies present in this publication, which are not a few, but the fact remains that there are only a few organizations in the “traditional movement” which possess a significant influence over a large number of those professing to be “traditional Catholics.” These organizations effectively dominate what most hear about what is happening, and what to think of it. One of the reasons that so few people were Sedevacantists until recently, and knew almost nothing about the true teaching of the Church on the loss of Papal Office through heresy, is because the voices which dominate the so-called “traditional” media (the SSPX, Catholic Family News, The Angelus, The Remnant, The Fatima Crusader) almost never told anyone about even the following quotation:

St. Robert Bellarmine (1610), Doctor of the Church: "A pope who is a manifest heretic automatically (per se) ceases to be pope and head, just as he ceases automatically to be a Christian and a member of the Church. Wherefore, he can be judged and punished by the Church. This is the teaching of all the ancient Fathers who teach that manifest heretics immediately lose all jurisdiction."

Sure, there were a few Sedevacantist priests writing articles since the 1980’s pointing out this fact, but these articles were almost completely unknown save to those people who may have attended one of their chapels. And frankly, these priests did a very poor job of disseminating this information to large numbers. The fact is that it was when our apostolate, which has moved hundreds of thousands of videos, audio tapes and magazines, shared this with the people on a wide-scale that most were awakened to the actual facts regarding Sedevacantism, which they had never heard before – facts that the SSPX “and friends” deliberately hid from them for years. To this day, have you ever seen the above quotation prominently displayed in any of the above publications? So, if you were reading The Remnant or the Catholic Family News for years, you would probably never know that all of the Fathers and Doctors who addressed the issue taught that a manifest heretic cannot be Pope. You won’t see the quote (with possibly a few exceptions over a period of decades), simply because if they prominently printed it without comment, many would come to the appropriate conclusion about Antipope John Paul II (which is what these people don’t want).

This clique of false traditionalist publications which, with a few exceptions (such as our apostolate), steer the “traditional” media, basically all hold the same line. So, what is stated about The Remnant holds true, for the most part, for Catholic Family News, etc. – as well as the many independent websites, etc. which promote these groups. If you don’t at least accept or tolerate the views propounded in these heretical publications, you are ostracized from their clique. And they are all friendly with one another, so that they brush their theological differences aside to tout the same basic line, which is why you will have a writer for the Catholic Family News who believes that the Society of St. Pius X is in schism (such as Bob Sungenis) writing for a publication which vehemently defends them from such a charge. So, I guess schism doesn’t matter? One is free to “hold either position,” I suppose, as long as they agree on the Latin Mass? Schism or no schism, it doesn’t matter, as long as we agree on the Latin Mass. This type of disgusting doctrinal liberalism is what characterizes their heretical commentary and their heretical conclusions regarding the important issues of our day, and that is where I begin.

The Worst “Pontificate” in History

In the recent issue of The Remnant there is an article entitled “The Worst Pontificate in History” by John Rao. Mr. Rao thinks that John Paul II’s “Pontificate” is probably the worst one ever. Regarding the confusion about heresy and schism which has been sown by John Paul II, he states: “And on that score, the pontificates of men like Alexander VI barely enter into the competition, in light of the misdeeds of the current regime.” Rao implores help for the Church “which has been placed by the murkiness of his [John Paul II’s] pontificate under the daily control of illegitimate warlords dedicated to its annihilation.”

So, you would think, then, that Mr. Rao believes that John Paul II is at least a bad man, wouldn’t you? After all, John Paul II is responsible for the “worst pontificate in history,” according to him, and John Paul II has given control to “illegitimate warlords dedicated to its [the Church’s] annihilation.” But no…

John Rao, “The Worst Pontificate in History,” The Remnant, Aug. 31, 2004, p. 13: “I, personally, am still inclined to believe that the Pope is an honest slave of Enlightenment rhetoric and its corollaries rather than its sinister master.”

So, John Paul II is an “honest” slave, i.e., he is mistaken in good faith; he is of good will. This is simply a ridiculous, wicked and heretical conclusion, which reflects the disgusting doctrinal liberalism rampant in false traditionalist publications such as this. Again and again they tell us that the most wicked enemies of the Faith are just honest and sincere people. They mix apostasy with Catholicism by equating apostates with sincere Catholics.

In the same article, Mr. Rao speaks of the false teachings of John Paul II which are supposedly too ambiguous for anyone to grasp:

John Rao, “The Worst Pontificate in History,” The Remnant, p. 13: “But, again, such concepts are torturously foggy and pseudo-mystical rather than refreshingly limpid in their heretical connotations. One reduces them to anathema proportions only through a mountain range of commentary…”

In other words, John Paul II’s statements are so foggy and “pseudo-mystical” that you can’t “reduce them to anathema” (i.e., find a clear heresy) without incredible effort, “a mountain range of commentary.” This is completely ridiculous and stupid. In an address to Jews in West Germany, Nov. 17, 1980, Antipope John Paul II spoke of, “the Old Covenant, never revoked by God…” That the Old Covenant is in force is directly condemned by the Council of Florence. So, we have reduced John Paul II’s statement to an “anathema proposition” in one sentence. It does not require “a mountain range of commentary,” as these heretics want us to believe, so that they can continue to assert that the Vatican II sect of Antipope John Paul II is the Catholic Church. They, and the devil guiding them, want people to believe that “it’s just so complex,” so that people remain in communion with an apostate “Church.”

By the way, I must say the following because the heresies spread by this publication and these authors are getting very tiresome. This article by Mr. Rao is one of the worst articles I’ve read in a while – not because Mr. Rao is not a capable writer. Not at all. The article is terrible because it is filled with big words which don’t communicate anything on the topic; it is filled with grandiose nonsense – and no substance. It is a prime example of the person who is “ever learning, and never coming to the knowledge of the truth” (2 Tim. 3:7), a person who is, sadly, blinded by his pride and his liberalism so that he cannot communicate a simple truth or get to the point. In the course of the article on “The Worst Pontificate in History,” there was not one example of heresy given from Antipope John Paul II, but just a mass of big words and complex sentences which mean nothing.

The Apostate Chris Ferrara on the Apostate George Sim Johnston

In the recent issue of The Remnant, the apostate Chris Ferrara is critiquing the views of Novus Ordo writer George Sim Johnston. For those who think it is unfair to label Mr. Ferrara an apostate, I offer the following reminder (all the bolding and underlining are my own).

Thomas Woods and Christopher Ferrara, The Great Façade, pp. 206-207: “In late 2001, the Pontifical Biblical Commission released a book entitled The Jewish People and the Holy Scriptures in the Christian Bible that confirmed the radical (but non-Magisterial) drift of Rome’s position vis-à-vis the Jews. The book argues that the Jews’ continued wait for the Messiah is validated and justified by the Old Testament. ‘The expectancy of the Messiah was justified in the Old Testament,’ papal spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls explained, ‘and if the Old Testament keeps its value, then it keeps that as a value, too. It says you cannot just say all the Jews are wrong and we are right.’ Asked by reporters whether his statements might be taken to suggest that the Messiah may not in fact have come, Navarro-Valls replied, ‘It means it would be wrong for a Catholic to wait for the Messiah, but not for a Jew.’ The latest position of the Vatican apparatus (not to be confused with the Church’s constant Magisterium) is, in essence, that the Jews are perfectly entitled to live as if Christ had never come.”

The authors of The Great Façade, Thomas Woods and Christopher Ferrara, admit in their book that the present position of the Vatican is that “the Jews are perfectly entitled to live as if Christ had never come.” Is the Vatican’s position heresy? Of course it is heresy. Any Catholic knows that it is a denial of the entire Gospel; it is UTTER APOSTASY. But what do Woods and Ferrara say about the Vatican’s position that “the Jews are perfectly entitled to live as if Christ had never come”? What do they say about the Vatican’s abominable denial of the core message of the Christian faith and the Gospel (that all who wish to be saved [including the Jews] must believe in Christ for salvation)? Do the authors of The Great Façade think that this is heresy? The authors of The Great Façade say no! On page 57 of their book, the authors comment on a series of post-Vatican II novelties which they documented on pages 42-57, one of which was Kasper’s teaching that the Old Covenant is valid and salvific for the Jews. And here is what they say about these novelties, including Kasper’s abominable and heretical statement on the Jews which is quoted on page 46 of their book.

Thomas Woods and Christopher Ferrara, The Great Façade, p. 57: “Now, for someone who is willing to overlook crucial distinctions and leap to unwarranted conclusions about the present crisis, it would be easy to say, with the sedevacantists, that all of these novelties and apparent contradictions of past teaching are ‘heresy,’… But a careful examination of these novelties and apparent contradictions, one by one, shows that none of them involves the formal denial of an article of divine and Catholic faith… Not even John Paul II’s recent statement ‘May St. John the Baptist protect Islam’ is heresy, properly speaking, since the Pope’s public expression of a wish that a false religion receive divine protection, while certainly scandalous and even stupefying, does not translate into a direct denial of any article of divine and Catholic faith.”

Just imagine if the authors of The Great Façade were in a debate with a fundamentalist Protestant and the Protestant said to them,

“Your bishops and the Vatican don’t even believe that the Jews should believe in Jesus. They aren’t even Christians. Your bishops whom you follow and with whom you are in communion (and whom you call ‘Your Excellency’ ) are not even Christian.”

And just imagine the authors of The Great Façade responding,

“Yes, it is true that the Catholic Bishops believe that Jews don’t need to believe in Jesus, but the Bishops haven’t formally rejected the faith.”

The Protestant would laugh right in their faces and say, “then your false faith is truly not Christian, as it doesn’t even require you to believe that Jesus is necessary for salvation! You Catholics are truly Christ-deniers, just as I believed all along.”

Or what is perhaps more illustrative of the significance of this issue, imagine someone before the Judgment Seat of Jesus Christ and trying to explain to Him:

“Lord, the Vatican said that Jews did not need to believe in You and I told everyone that the Vatican wasn’t repudiating the Faith.”

Perhaps only with this in mind can some people see that the assertion of the authors of The Great Façade – that it is not a formal repudiation of any article of divine and Catholic faith to hold that Jews don’t need to believe in Jesus Christ for salvation – is actually an abomination. It is heresy and it is a blasphemy against Our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Savior of all men, the author and finisher of our faith.

That having been reiterated, I return to Ferrara’s article on George Sim Johnston. George Sim Johnston’s defenses of the new, Vatican II religion (Johnston, of course, doesn’t label it such) are so bad that even Ferrara is calling it “a Neo-Catholic Heresy.” So, then, does Ferrara think that Johnston is a heretic? No, of course not.

Chris Ferrara, “The Neo-Catholic Heresy,” The Remnant, August 31, 2004, p. 7: “By this I do not mean to suggest that neo-Catholics like Johnston are subjectively heretical in intention, but rather that their extreme defense of novelty in the Church leads to a grave objective error against faith.”

No, of course not… because Ferrara is an apostate who thinks that the Vatican’s rejection of Christ is not even a formal rejection of the Faith. Again we see that these heretics tell us that deniers of the Faith are just honest and sincere people. They mix apostasy with Catholicism by equating apostates with sincere Catholics. And this brings me to a comment that I didn’t make in my review of the heretical book The Great Façade (the article is available on our website). On page 236 of the book, Ferrara and Thomas Woods demonstrate their perplexity at what could possibly be the reason why the defenders of the new religion could be so inconsistent. They posit that the “neo-Catholics” may be inconsistent because they interiorly know they should have resisted the changes but didn’t. Other than that, they cannot explain why on earth these “neo-Catholics” defend heresy while they denounce people who point it out as heretics, or why they defend schism and then denounce those who point it out as schismatics. What could possibly be the reason that these people are so inconsistent! Can anyone on earth possibly explain this “mystery”!

Chris Ferrara and Thomas Woods, The Great Façade, p. 236: “We can think of no other answer to the mystery of why neo-Catholics are so eager to accuse traditionalists of the crime of schism, yet so loathe to make the same accusation against any of the neo-modernists who are dismantling the Church before their very eyes… If there is another explanation for the mystery, we would like to hear it.”

Yes, there is a very simple explanation. It is an explanation which a Catholic who is not a slave to liberalism and sickening human respect would immediately recognize, but which you don’t mention because you mix apostasy with Catholicism. The explanation is that these people are bad willed, insincere heretics, who don’t want the truth, and who are not Catholics, but are, unfortunately, guided by the devil. That is the “mystery” of their inconsistency; it is the mystery of their iniquity.