Never Lose Focus on the Complete Picture

by Thomas A. Droleskey

A strange phenomenon occurred about a year after I turned forty years of age in 1991. I noticed that the print in newspapers and books was getting smaller and smaller. I could no longer extend my arms, which are pretty long, to be able to focus on this seemingly smaller print. "Oh, oh, I said to myself in the little apartment I called home in Sioux City, Iowa, while I was teaching at Morningside College there in the 1992-1993 academic year. "I need glasses." Indeed, I did. I could no longer read with the natural eyesight God had given me. And that was not the end of it. The sharpness of the distance vision had deteriorated so much by 1999 that I needed what are known as "progressive" lenses, which I have used ever since.

Well, my actual eyesight was not the only "vision" problems I had in the early-1990s. Although favorably disposed to the Traditional Latin Mass and assisting at it as frequently as I could find it in its "indult" variety, I did not see the complete picture of the Church, writing about bad bishops and liturgical abuses in the Novus Ordo Missae with alarm and as much outrage as I could muster. I pounded away at the possibility of altar girls, never believing that Pope John Paul II would permit such a thing. I hammered Joseph Cardinal Bernardin for giving an address at Hebrew University in which he said that Saint John the Evangelist was the "source" of anti-Semitism. I took John Cardinal O'Connor to task for telling a B'Nai Brith meeting in Florida in 1998 that "Judaism and Catholicism are meant to co-exist side by side until the end of time" and in 1999 for reaffirming a young man's decision to convert from Catholicism to Judaism. I got all wrapped up in the seeming excitement of a 1993 National Conference of Catholic Bishops meeting in which it appeared as though the translation abuses of the International Committee for English in the Liturgy (ICEL) had come to an end, this just weeks after a lengthy interview I conducted with John Page, ICEL's executive director. The reputation thus earned as a "bishop basher" was such by the early summer of 1995 that the Archbishop of Louisville, Kentucky, the Most Reverend Thomas Kelly, O.P., actually banned me from speaking in the undercroft of his cathedral, where non-Catholics had gathered on occasion for prayer and reflection.

For all of the accuracy of the little pieces of the picture I had seen with sharpness of focus, I did not see the larger picture: that each and every single one of the ecclesiastical problems I chronicled during my eight years with The Wanderer was the result of the infestation of Modernism in the Church as a consequence of the forces let loose by the devil's minions during and after Vatican II. I was an ecclesiastical Mister Magoo. ("Road hog!!!!") All of the liturgical abuses I catalogued so meticulously were the result of the liturgical abuse par excellence: the Novus Ordo Missae.

While I encouraged people to assist at the "indult" Masses, I had yet to come to realize that the offering of the Immemorial Mass of Tradition did not and does not depend upon any grant of permission from a contemporary pope or bishop, replete with conditions demanding adherence to an ecumenical council that has sown nothing but confusion and disarray in the true Sheepfold of the Good Shepherd, Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Yes, I read the words in Quo Primum, putting the contradiction between the words "in perpetuity" and the heavily conditioned Ecclesia Dei motu proprio of Pope John Paul II out of my little pea-brain. It was not until the altar girl fiasco in 1994 that I began to realize just how impossible it is to bring order to a synthetic concoction that has no precedent at any point in the history of the Church. By the time I started my analysis of the General Instruction to the Roman Missal in 2000 and 2001 (which is being published later this month under the title G.I.R.M. Warfare), I knew that I would never be able to see the true state of the Church until I stopped attending the Novus Ordo entirely, which exit was expedited thanks to the fact that my wonderful wife, who had converted to the Faith as a result of the Traditional Mass about eighteen months before I met her and who loves God much more wholly and purely than I do, was horrified by it whenever we went to one on a weekday.

What applies to the Church has relevance also to the state of the world. As I have explained in other commentaries in the past, it is not until one reads the great encyclical letters on the State of Popes Leo XIII and Pius XI that one can begin the process of seeing the world more clearly through the eyes of the true Faith. The entire foundation of the modern state, including that of the United States of America, is based on the premise that the Incarnation is irrelevant to the good ordering of individual lives and the larger life of a nation. If the Incarnation is irrelevant, then man will come to believe that he is self-redemptive, that he can manufacture "solutions" to problems that have their remote cause in Original Sin and manifest themselves in many different ways by means of Actual Sins and can only be ameliorated if individual men cooperate with the graces made available to them by the one, true Church the God-Man founded upon the Rock of Peter, the Pope. Any nation that does not recognize the Incarnation and the authority Our Lord gave to Holy Mother Church to be the ultimate arbiter on matters pertaining to the administration of justice and the fostering of social conditions that are conducive to the sanctification and salvation of human souls is bound to deteriorate over the course of time into abject barbarism, which will result in more and more power being seized unjustly by the state.

Even in this, though, it took me years to shed my Americanist notions that the founding of this nation was compatible with Catholicism or, at the very least, permitted the Faith to flourish so that we could compete in a "market-place" of ideas. It was not until the middle to late-1980s that I began to drink from the wisdom found in Immortale Dei, Sapientiae Christianae, Libertas, Rerum Novarum, Testem Benevolentiae, Ubi Arcani Dei Consilio, Quas Primas, Qudaregismo Anno and Divini Redemptoris, to name just a few of the encyclical letters that lifted the scales off of my eyes and led me to see in secular partisan politics nothing but a trap and a sideshow that had a vested interest in increasing the power of government so as to aggrandize career politicians and to make them appear to be our secular saviors. Secular saviors, I should add, who are enabled by bombastic radio and television commentators who know nothing of actual history and who are actually contemptuous of the glories of Christendom, if not apologists for the novus ordo secolorum that is the logical, inexorable consequence of the Protestant Revolt and the rise of Freemasonry (and all of the mutations that spun off from these two fountainheads of contemporary evils).

Those who do not see the problems of the world through the eyes of the true Faith are thus prone to be as agitated about this or that crisis as I used to be about liturgical abuses or bad bishops. One secular villain after another comes along (Walter Mondale, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry) who must be vanquished by a secular saviour (Ronald Reagan, Bob Dole, George W. Bush). Countless billions of dollars are raised and spent to convince us of how our lives will be better if we vote for one instead of the other. After all of the years of excitement and energy and fund-raising, though, guess what? Babies are still dying from surgical abortions at more or less the same rate now as they were in 1973 when the Supreme Court issued its decision in the case of Roe v. Wade. Both Republican and Democrat administrations fund chemical abortions overseas and put pro-aborts in key positions in the executive and judicial branches of the government. More and more of our legitimate freedoms, including our right to denounce moral evils, are being eroded, if not taken away entirely in some instances.

Forgetting about the past, even many Catholics get worked up as each election cycle brings with it a new burst of energy, enthusiasm and great predictions of utter doom if the villain is not defeated and the saviour is not elected. The only real winners in this are the corporate barons who contribute exorbitantly to both major political parties while they shift American jobs overseas, employ slave labor abroad, engage in price gouging in times of national emergencies and who have allegiance to nothing but their own corporate bottom lines, shamelessly doing business with the enemies of this nation's legitimate national security interests. Meanwhile, our state and local governments cannot keep our streets repaired, engage in the mis-education of the young in an unjust usurpation of parental authority known as public schooling and believe that we exist in order to enable its officers to pick our pockets in order for them to stay in power. One cannot see this, however, if one is focused only on individual problems and does not realize that this is all the result of the diabolically systematic de-Catholicization of the world.

There is thus a convergence of the inability to see the truth of the situation in the Church and in the world, resulting in good people becoming sidetracked in certainly important matters but ones that are only symptoms of much larger problems that can only be addressed by a return of individual men and their nations to the authentic patrimony and tradition of the Catholic Church, which is why the confusion and disarray in the Church at present is much more serious and demands more of our attention and prayer. As goes the Church, so goes the world. The devil knows this. It is time for us to see this clearly.

That is, there is little hope for the world when bishops who are in full communion with the Vicar of Christ can suspend a priest for associating with a "schismatic" group that rejects ecumenism and the "enduring validity of the Old Covenant God made with the people of Israel." This belief, stated by the Most Reverend Joseph Fiorenza, the Bishop of Galveston-Houston, in his July 2004 suspension letter to Father Stephen Zigrang, is not consonant with the Catholic Faith. There is going to have to come a time when all traditional Catholics are going to have to realize that the cavalry is not coming from Rome at this time. Even if Rome granted an Apostolic Administration for the Traditional Latin Mass, obeisance would still have to be paid to the disaster that is the Second Vatican Council and the horror that is the Novus Ordo Missae. Rome itself must reject the regime of novelty of the past forty years, which is itself an ecclesial embrace of the very errors of modernity that coalesced into Modernism, critiqued so thoroughly by Pope Saint Pius X in Pascendi Domenici Gregis in 1907.

Our only hope for seeing the world clearly is to cling closely to Our Lady as slaves who are consecrated to her Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart. Her Divine Son, Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, has entrusted the cause of world peace to her Immaculate Heart. The triumph of Our Lady's Immaculate Heart will come about only when some pope actually consecrates Russia to it with all of the world's bishops. The errors which began in the world and have spread into the highest reaches of the Church will then cease. The fruit of this will be the restoration of the Tradition within the Church, starting with the Immemorial Mass of Tradition in the Latin Rite, and the Social Reign of Christ the King in the world. While there will always be the disorder caused by fallen human nature, people will live in a world of less disorder as more and more people will be rightly ordered to First and Last Things, availing themselves of the supernatural helps provided by the sacraments, making them good citizens of whatever country in which they live in this vale of tears because they have chosen be good citizens of the Catholic Church first.

Although we should be concerned about the individual problems that beset us, we must realize that we can be called to our own Particular Judgments at any time. The most effective way that we can build up the Kingdom of God here on earth is to build it up in our own lives by means of assisting at the daily offering of the Traditional Latin Mass (and fleeing permanently from the Novus Ordo Missae), spending time before the Blessed Sacrament in prayer on a regular basis, becoming, as mentioned above, consecrated slaves of Our Lady's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart—praying her Most Holy Rosary every day without fail, and living the traditional liturgical life of the Church in a setting that places us and our own families as far as is possible from the influences of a world that is not only un-Catholic but decidedly anti-Catholic.

We must never lose the supernatural virtues of Faith, Hope and Charity. Our Lord wants to use us and all of the crosses that come our way to refine us so that we might play some small role in helping to bring about the triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, a victory that will be noted when men in all nations exclaim in their own tongues, Vivat Christus Rex!

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This, then, is my final contribution to the Seattle Catholic site, which is such a vital source of news and information on the Internet. I am grateful to Mr. Peter W. Miller for running my articles these past two years. I am grateful to him for the labor he expended in building my own Christ or Chaos and Christ the King College sites. As I must concentrate on the work of the College and fulfill my duties as a husband and a father, I will be reducing the output even for my Christ or Chaos site to as little as three or four articles a month, although I will still try to produce articles twice a month for The Remnant.