Steroids are on the way to Angelus Press. Like steroids for the brain. German steroids. Fr. Markus Heggenberger, most recently from a professorship at St. Thomas Aquinas Seminary and, before that, St. Mary’s Academy and College, will join the Angelus Press staff in September in order to someday lead it. On behalf of those who depend on Angelus Press and those who are coming to depend on it in the days of the lingering crisis and the Summorum Pontificum kickstart, I thank Bishop Fellay and Fr. John Fullerton for their attention and graciousness. For myself, I tell you, Fr. Heggenberger will be most welcome.
From this desk, over the last 16 years, little seems to have changed. The Church’s enemies have become more refined, but Angelus Press has stayed a few footsteps ahead of them by simply broadcasting and applying the perennial principles in order to make distinctions and provide clarity to its ever-growing audience. In the first issue under my editorship (October 1992), The Angelus published the sermon of Archbishop Lefebvre given on the day of the priestly ordinations at Ecône on June 29, 1978:
A decade of silence on the anathemas of the Council of Trent and of Pius VI against the Council of Pistoia; silence on the documents of the Church’s social teaching–the Syllabus of Pius IX, Libertas and Immortale Dei of Leo XIII, Pascendi Dominici Gregis and the condemnation of the Sillon made by Pope St. Pius X, Quas Primas and Divini Redemptoris of Pius XI–to quote a few of the documents which treat of the authority of the Popes. This silence increases the suspicion that the Church is occupied by a “counter-Church” of protestant origin and committed to spreading all the errors which the popes have condemned for more than four centuries.
Make that four decades, Archbishop. The suspicion unfortunately remains even 30 years later.
Heck, in this issue, you’ll read how the Holy Father told Americans on his April 2008 tour that he believes the fundamental American model of secular society is the pattern for Europe to imitate. (Read our overview of all the US papal addresses starting on p.3.) I remind you, reader, our US is founded in rebellion against the Catholic Faith–read authentic US history–and Europe, home of the Pope, no longer is synonymous with It… The good news is that the Holy Father, in this case, implicates himself to believe in a hermeneutic of rupture when it comes to cultures. The bad news is that he insists there is a hermeneutic of continuity when it comes to pre- and post-Vatican II (see SiSiNoNo, p.19ff.), a logical impossibility defying the law of non-contradiction. But he is blinded by their being connected. And the recently “liberated” 1962 Latin Mass, held up to be the same as the Novus Ordo, is used as a pawn to prove this “hermeneutic of continuity.” Happy days are not here again; more confusion is. At best, he builds with one hand and tears down with the other.
What would Pope Leo XIII say?
…[T]he true liberty of human society does not consist in every man doing what he pleases, for this would simply end in turmoil and confusion, and bring the overthrow of the State: but rather in this, that through the injunction of the civil law all may more easily conform to the prescriptions of the eternal law.
So much for California’s “legal gay marriage”–itself a contradiction–signed into law by a nominally Catholic governor. By the way, tell me what State concerns itself about being “overthrown” which no longer has a population? Please, Holy Father, do not praise American independence and personal autonomy to us on one hand, and sorely lament the lack of Catholic communities in our country on the other (“Address to the Bishops of the United States,” April 16, 2008). How do you understand causality? Read Popes Pius IX, Leo XIII, Pius X, and Pius XI, not the stuff you wrote when you were a Cardinal. Here’s a secret: America thinks of itself as completely modern and profoundly religious at the same time. Read that again. It’s a society in contradiction. Why?–Because to be “completely modern” is to be essentially evolving and rebellious, and to be “profoundly religious” (that is, to be of the One and Only True Religion–all others are imposters) is to be essentially changeless in substance and obedient. America lives in contradiction and your head lives here, Holy Father. Let us praise the Word of the Gospel of Gettysburg. In any case, you are hitching your cart to a dying horse. The last century was America’s; this one is China’s.
Cardinal Pie (1815-80) is not in contradiction. Here is an excerpt from his writings on Naturalism freshly translated into English for the first time by seminarian Todd Anderson for Angelus Press:
A morality that consciously and deliberately holds to the basic laws of nature will henceforth offer salvation neither to individuals nor to societies, neither in this life nor the life to come. For that morality is insufficient and incomplete; moreover, it cannot be observed integrally without the supernatural help of grace. Now, God does not pour out His blessings on those who have contempt for His Son. You philosophers who proclaim the dethroning of Jesus Christ will not take His place, and if it were true that all Catholic societies disappeared from the face of the earth, you would still be unable to re-establish a society of upstanding pagans. After human passions have managed to throw off the yoke of Jesus Christ, they will not stop there. If philosophy comes to the conclusion that there are no longer any plausible motives keeping it from claiming for itself the ancient and legitimate sovereignty of religion, be certain that philosophy’s recent usurpation of sovereignty will in turn find itself contradicted and despised by others. The masses that your impious doctrines have perverted will be but little touched by your platonic homilies. And since the only barriers you set up before them are those of the natural law, you are going to find out that certain leanings of nature will not be stopped by such barriers. For nearly a century, philosophical ideologies have covered the world in blood, tears, and ruins. The revolutions that have so shaken society are the fruits of such ideologies. They will produce in the future what they produced in the past.
In 1978, as Archbishop Lefebvre was gaining traction worldwide, The Angelus began publishing Catholic Truth in Dickinson, Texas. Thirty years later in 2008, it still does the same as yesterday, for today, and–please God–forever. Thanks for the ride.
By the way, Fr. Emil Kapaun’s (The Angelus, Feb. 2008) cause for sainthood was officially opened on Sunday, June 29, at his hometown church of St. John Nepomucene in Pilsen, Kansas.