The Flying Buttress: What Inquisitors' Minds Want to Know

An archive for issues of The Flying Buttress newswire, whose purpose is to comment satirically on dissent within and relating to the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Cincinnati. Disclaimer: These publications are works of satirical fiction. Any similarity to persons living or dead is purely coincidental, but it all depends on what you mean by the word "is." May the Lord bless you and keep you!

Saturday, January 05, 2008

The End of Progress

+A visitor to the Carousel of Progress at Walt Disney World will find himself entertained with a song as his seat revolves through decades of domestic technological wonders. The song begins as follows:

“There's a great, big, beautiful tomorrow, Shining at the end of every day; There's a great, big, beautiful tomorrow, and tomorrow’s just a dream away…”

+This Disney exhibit and its soundtrack exemplify and enshrine the once-irrepressible optimism of modern Western man as he created his paradise on earth: the pursuit of the limitless possibilities of his inventiveness, resourcefulness, intelligence, imagination, and power.

+Born in the Age of Reason and fed the steroids of the Protestant Ethic, the Industrial Revolution, the mastery of fractional reserve banking (“capital”) and the American and French Revolutions, “progress” has been the de facto religion of modern times, pursued with an unflagging messianic zeal that has swept aside everything in its path.

+The Church was one of many institutions, and by far the most important, to be overwhelmed by this display of man’s power and self-confidence. Progress, in fact, has overshadowed the Church for more than 200 years, diminished its light (as seen through the eyes of men), and pushed it to the sidelines of civilization, where it could only watch and protest as the human race drove itself from one pinnacle of earthly achievement to the next.

+The Church protested because man, invincibly convinced of the goodness and inevitability of his utopian visions, dismissed God and anointed himself the sole and undisputed master of his own destiny and designer of his own salvation. Here in America, more than any other the land of boundless progress and opportunity, we were told by one of our more popular novelists of the 20th century that we believed in “the green light.”

+But the light we see before us is no longer green: it is whatever terrorist threat level is issued by the Department of Homeland Security. In other words, out confidence in our worldly religion has been stopped dead in its tracks.

+What stopped it? A progressive decay since the 1960s: the assassinations of our leaders, the disgrace of Vietnam and Watergate, the disappearance of our manufacturing base, massive waves of illegal immigration, energy prices spiraling out of control, religious beliefs and customs pushed out of the public square, terrorism and radical Islam, new and strange epidemics sweeping across the landscape, declining birth rates, the narcissism of moral decadence…a universal sense that we have lost control of our lives to a comprehensive, inescapable and shrill juggernaut of quickening insanity.

+The West – in particular, its champion, America - no longer looks forward; it now looks over its shoulder in fear and apprehension. Incremental erosion has crossed the subliminal threshold into consciousness of a full-bore crumbling. Strange foreboding slogans and warnings bombard us daily: we live in a world where everything is scarce and will rapidly become more so. Our standard of living is much too high, and since investors are more important than employees, our jobs are outsourced to the Third World. We have been negligent stewards of the earth: now we must pay for having created “climate change.” Not only has our progress religion disappeared, but we are now asked to feel guilty for having had so much progress in the first place! Progress has run its course, and has turned to self-destruction and self-recrimination. Tomorrow can no longer be better than today – only worse.

+The greatest popes of the 19th and 20th centuries issued warning after warning about this, about where mankind would end if it abandoned Christ and the Christian social order. They were correct, but they were ignored or pushed aside.

+Our Lady issued warning after warning about these errors. She was correct, but she was ignored or pushed aside.

+Why do we bring these gloomy thoughts before you? Because when man no longer believes in himself or in his creations, when all his proud powers have deflated into delusions, when science and technology can no longer save him and in fact are used to debase him, there are two places he will turn: either to self-indulgence and depravity (which might be described as satiating oneself on the fruits of progress, without contributing to further progress), or back to God.

+The vast majority are ready to turn back to God. This turning creates a unique and decisive opportunity for the Roman Catholic Church, who once built and nurtured the most extraordinary civilization the world has ever seen, a civilization that glorified God.

+Is the Church aware that Her time has come once again to meet the barbarians at the gates, and wield the truth of the social kingship of Christ? Or are Her leaders still groping blindly in the fog which has been cast over them since 1960 – the fog of a buried Third Secret, the fog of aggiornamento, the fog of Vatican II, the fog of the errors of Russia?

For a CHILD IS BORN to us, and a son is given to us,

and the government is upon his shoulder…

Contra "Countersyllabus" II

+In our last issue, we juxtaposed Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger’s 1987 remarks about the Church in relation to the French Revolution - his justification for a “countersyllabus” - with the background and true nature of the Revolution itself.

+We also pointed out that the progressives’ Ostpolitik orientation toward the world after 1789, an orientation toward which Ratzinger helped to steer the entire Church at Vatican II, was based on weakness and a false version of Catholic charity.

+This week, we will consider how selected articles of the Declaration of the Rights of Man are further proof that “the world after 1789” is something to be lamented and conquered for Christ, not something to be reckoned with as if from a position of unenlightened inferiority, inadequacy, or deficiency.

A General Observation

+Nowhere in this document do the worda “God,” “Christ,” or “the Church” appear; only a desultory reference to “the Supreme Being” (usually a Masonic moniker) in the preamble. The sole reference to religion is in Article 10, but that reduces faith to mere “religious views.” In other words, man has become, in this Declaration, the measure of all things. How shall the Church “reconcile” Herself to that?

Article 1

“Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be founded only upon the general good.”

Response

+ This is lifted directly from the fervid gibberish of Jean Jacques Rousseau. God grants each of us the same essential dignity, but we are only free if we use that dignity to move within the realm of holiness and obedience. Beyond equality of dignity, there is no such thing as equality of personhood or of personal circumstances. It might be claimed that men are equal in the eyes of secular law, but that is another fantasy reserved for nonexistent utopian states. In reality, the laws of men are always perverted, either in their codification or their application, to serve some selfish or nefarious end, resulting in inequality (for example, the Reign of Terror, which followed shortly after this document was enacted). Further, if “social distinctions” are allowed, that immediately leads to inequality of “rights.” Whether social distinctions are founded “upon the general good” is deceptive and irrelevant, since the “general good” can be defined by whoever has the power to define it, enforce their definition, and misrepresent it as “good.”

Article 3

“The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation. No body nor individual may exercise authority which does not proceed directly from the nation.”

Response

+Here we have the overt seeds of Communism, Nazism, and all other forms of totalitarianism: the individual exists for the purposes of the state. The human cornerstone of a Christian state, on the other hand, is the sacred and dignified nature of the individual and the family, who are granted that nature by the grace of God. Further, the principle of sovereignty does not reside in a nation, but in God, who grants his sovereignty to the nation’s leader in holy stewardship.

Article 4

Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights. These limits can only be determined by law.”

Response

+More Rousseau. This false definition of liberty is really the definition of license, which is one of the keys to anarchy. What is meant by “injury”? Physical? Legal? Spiritual? Note the stark contradiction between this Article, which proposes “liberty,” and Article 3, which lowers the fist of tyranny by placing the individual at the disposal of the state. Note also that injury or offense to God – i.e. sin – is omitted. If the limits of license can only be determined by law (that is, not by the teachings of the Church), then we must ask: by what standards are these laws enacted? Answer: by whatever standards best serve anarchy and tyranny.

Article 5

“Law can only prohibit such actions as are hurtful to society. Nothing may be prevented which is not forbidden by law, and no one may be forced to do anything not provided for by law.”

Response

+Note the phrase “hurtful to society,” and the continued absence of the phrase “hurtful to God.” This Article completely destroys the moral teaching authority of the Church. Since many of those teachings are enacted into Western civil law, it also destroys the basis for that law (see: anarchy). And what if the foundations of society – the laws of godless men - are evil? Will not the teachings of the Church then be deemed “hurtful” to society? This is the selfsame inverted and perverted – i.e. satanic - foundation of the radical homosexual agenda: good is now evil and evil is now good. Therefore, good is a “hate crime.”

Article 7

“No person shall be accused, arrested, or imprisoned except in the cases and according to the forms prescribed by law…”

Response

+…except for the victims, royal or otherwise, of the Reign of Terror, which in and of itself exemplified lawlessness and anarchy. In other words, it did not take very long for the Masonic thugs to ignore their own “lofty” principles.

Article 10

“No one shall be disquieted on account of his opinions, including his religious views, provided their manifestation does not disturb the public order established by law.”

Response

+See: Reign of Terror. In other words, everyone has freedom of speech unless the “public order established by law” has criminalized any part of it. Once again, we are left with unanswered questions: how is the law established, what does it legalize, and how is the public order defined? What constitutes a “disturbance”? What if the law and public order are inimical to the Church?

Summary

+It should be glaringly evident from this sampling that the French Revolution was based upon principles which were not only intrinsically anti-Christian, but calculated to completely destroy Christian civilization. Their poisonous intent aside, these articles are in and of themselves completely fraudulent, as they are not only rife with circular arguments and inconsistencies, but are comprised of vague generalities which permit any number of interpretations – most typically, tyrannical and anti-Catholic ones.

+Fraudulent too is the infamous battle cry of the Revolution: “Liberté, égalité, fraternité.” We have already exposed liberty and equality – what about fraternity? Isn’t the “brotherhood of man” a noble ideal? That depends on how you define it, and the applicable definition here is Masonic. +The Masonic definition of this slogan is that all men are brothers because they all seek light and spiritual truth (our readers may recognize in this the basis for post-Conciliar “ecumenism”). However, while requiring all initiates to profess belief in the existence of a Supreme Being, Masonry does not require its members to profess one particular religious creed, for it believes that all religions are equal:

"The true Mason is not creed-bound. He realizes with the Divine Illumination of his lodge that as a Mason his religion must be universal: Christ, Buddha or Mohammed, the name means little, for he recognizes only the light and not the bearer. He worships at every shrine, bows before every altar, whether in temple, mosque or cathedral, realizing with his truer understanding the oneness of all spiritual truth." - Manly Hall, "The Lost Keys of Freemasonry" That these sentiments are the polar opposite of Christianity could not be clearer.

+As Catholics we have been taught, by the greatest Popes of old, that Modernism advances by the exploitation of vague language, such as the language which appears in the documents of Vatican II. Vague language is the final nail in the Declaration’s coffin, as it employs the following terms – pleasing to the ear, but undefined - as the basis for its propositions:

FREE……EQUAL……RIGHTS……

GENERAL GOOD……SOVEREIGNTY……LIBERTY

+Finally, a full and accurate understanding of the French Revolution allows us to grasp the real import of Fr. Wiltgen’s famous “Rhine Flows into the Tiber” analogy. It points directly backward to that calamitous event by describing the attempt to graft the Masonic lies of 1789 onto our sacred and Apostolic deposit of faith. What can possibly result from this but schizophrenic madness, and ultimately, collapse from an extraordinary hubris? So we ask again: how is it that the Church must reconcile Herself to this?

Miscellanea CATHOLICA

+As the old joke goes, “If you remember the 60s, you probably weren’t there.” Here is a grim reminder of what was unfolding early in this grafting process, in 1967: the first fruits of schizophrenia.

+An appeal by the same author to Pope Paul VI.

+Some of our readers have accused us of publishing, in these French Revolution issues, a broadside against Pope Benedict. Not so. However, there are some astounding anomalies in his pre-papal writings which deserve to be challenged – or rather, challenged again – such statements having already been condemned by the great popes of the last two centuries. For example:

“Hence, these followers of liberalism deny the existence of any divine authority to which obedience is due, and proclaim that every man is the law to himself; from which arises that ethical system which they style independent morality, and which, under the guise of liberty, exonerates man from any obedience to the commands of God, and substitutes a boundless license." – Pope Leo XIII, Libertas, June 20, 1888.

+The Bishop of La Crosse, WI, the Most Rev. Jerome Listecki, warns his flock against the movie “The Golden Compass.”

+If you would like to inquire as to why USCCB movie critic Harry Forbes still has a job, you might e-mail his supervisor, Ms. Helen Osman, USCCB Secretary of Communications: hosman@usccb.org .

Contra "Countersyllabus"

+We apologize in advance to our readers for beginning the liturgical year with overt (rather than subliminal) gravity, but we have come across a deeply disturbing statement in a 1987 work by then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, “Principles of Catholic Theology,” which requires some extensive and direct rebuttal.

+Ratzinger, defending the Vatican II document Gaudium et Spes, had this to say, pp. 381-382 (this excerpt is quoted in “The Devil’s Final Battle,” Chapter 6):

If it is desirable to offer a diagnosis of the text (Gaudium et Spes) as a whole, we might say that (in conjunction with the texts on religious liberty, and world religions) it is a revision of the Syllabus of Pius IX, a kind of countersyllabus ... Let us be content to say here that the text serves as a countersyllabus and, as such, represents on the part of the Church, an attempt at an official reconciliation with the new era inaugurated in 1789. … the one-sidedness of the position adopted by the Church under Pius IX and Pius X in response to the situation created by the new phase of history inaugurated by the French Revolution was, to a large extent, corrected via facti, especially in Central Europe, but there was still no basic statement of the relationship that should exist between the Church and the world that had come into existence after 1789.”

+In response, some background is necessary. “The new era inaugurated in 1789” refers of course to the French Revolution. Contrary to the propaganda taught to us all in “school,” the French Revolution was not a “popular uprising” against Louis XVI and the French aristocracy. It was an event carefully planned by Freemasonry at the Masonic Congress of Wilhelmsbad in 1782, and executed through their front groups known as Jacobin Clubs.

+This brutal attack on the Old Catholic Order, and the French Crown which exemplified it, was engineered with two purposes in mind: first, as the fulfillment of revenge sworn by the Knights Templar for their suppression in France in 1307, on false charges, and the burning at the stake of Jacques de Molay, Templar Grand Master, in 1314. These indefensible acts were the responsibility of King Philip the Fair of France and Pope Clement V, who, though he absolved the Templars, was blackmailed by Philip into suppressing them (yes, the Freemasons and the Knights Templar are one and the same).

+But the French Revolution was much more than revenge. It was the first step in replacing the visible aristocracy with a hidden aristocracy of banking dynasties, who would rule the entire globe through the manipulation of paper money – specifically, the manipulation of debt through a fractional reserve system first perfected in the Bank of England. The Templars, after all, had distinguished themselves much more as the bankers of Europe than as Crusaders: it was their enormous wealth that had made them the target of King Philip.

+How would this hidden aristocracy rule? It would use two principles: one, the introduction of paper currencies which would gradually replace and empty the old wealth until it collapsed (hastened, to be sure, by wars which profited the manipulators of debt), and two, the promotion and enforcement of anarchy and its intermediate phase, “democracy.”1 Emptying of wealth was initiated simply by applying this new banking system to the financing of governments. The promotion of anarchy was accomplished by various ruses, chief among them two. The first was Marxism, which re-cast, expanded and reinvigorated the principles of the French Revolution after they failed to catch fire throughout Europe. Marxism not only supplied a “philosophical” basis for anarchy, but also justified and supposedly ennobled the emptying process by calling for the “redistribution of wealth.”

(Where does all the “redistributed wealth” go? A tiny dribble of it ends up in the hands of the poor, the object of so much slavish utopian affection and middle class guilt. The rest ends up in the hands of bankers.)

+The second method of cultivating anarchy we will call the “Pleasure Island Deception.” Our readers may remember the allegory of Pleasure Island in the Walt Disney version of Pinocchio: Pinocchio and Lampwick, along with other urchins, are carried off with extravagant promises to Pleasure Island, a place where all boys are encouraged to act as they please, eat whatever they please until they are gorged, destroy anything they please, do and say anything they please. After engaging in this behavior for a certain period of time, they begin to transform into donkeys. When the transformation is complete, they are shipped off to the mines for a life of slavery.

+In other words, anarchy, which is really slavery, is created by appealing to the basest instincts of humanity, while labeling the unlimited indulgence of those instincts “freedom.” The more we are seduced by this, the more we indulge in “freedom,” the more enslaved we become.

+Why anarchy? As the enlightened despots well knew, anarchy among the populace is necessary to ensure the success of tyranny.

+Thus the background of the French “Revolution.” How is it, then, that the Church must “reconcile” herself to this, the work of Her enemies? How is it that She must do the very thing against which so many saintly Popes warned? How is it that Joseph Ratzinger, a learned man, convinced himself that either (a) the fruits of the French “Revolution” (the Reign of Terror, perhaps? Napoleon?) were benevolent and beneficial for mankind, and must be embraced in order for the Church renew itself and save more souls, or (b) the French Revolution unleashed forces too powerful for the Church to resist?

+Finally, what exactly was this “relationship that should exist between the Church and the world that had come into existence after 1789”? It was that very orientation that surfaced and took control of the Church at Vatican II: aggiornamento, openness, cooperation, dialogue, ecumenism, Ostpolitik, the hand of “mercy” instead of “condemnation” (mercy, that is, toward everyone except those who attempted to preserve their Catholic traditions).

+We know now (though many knew it from the beginning) that this new attitude was nothing more than appeasement, the diplomacy of weakness, and it has failed as miserably as Neville Chamberlain failed with Hitler. It is, in fact, the “smoke of Satan” swirling through the Church: a diabolical doppelganger which disorients weak minds and inspires them to chase after what is merely an ersatz version of Catholic charity. In grasping at nothingness, they abandon truth, and so abandon their faith.

+The “fortress mentality” was too “one-sided”? The firm defense of truth in the face of evil is too “one-sided”? Perhaps all the post-Conciliar Neville Chamberlains have forgotten their politically correct manners, since pejorative references to the “fortress” would surely be offensive to all the Protestants who sing “A Mighty Fortress is Our God.”

+In our next issue we will look at the “Declaration of the Rights of Man,” the so-called French Bill of Rights, to see if any of those 17 articles might prompt a new relationship between the Church and the world.

1. That democracy is an intermediate phase of anarchy is being demonstrated by the rapid balkanization and deterioration of the political, economic, and cultural structure of the United States.

Miscellanea CATHOLICA: A CALL TO SCHOLARS

+The Flying Buttress would be most interested in obtaining access to the original schema of Vatican II, carefully prepared before the Council but tossed out by the Masonic/Communist/liberal cabal once the Council was underway. If any of our readers knows if these documents are still extant, please reply. We would like to publish them, so that the faithful may compare them to the vague and self-contradictory mush that replaced them.

+We offer our gratitude to the Most Reverend Kevin Rhoades, Bishop of Harrisburg, PA, for establishing an ecclesial community to worship using the Missal of 1962.

+For our readers who prefer to see the humor in all things, here is what the popular mind can do with revised history (requires Rhapsody/Real Player).