Peter and the New World Order

Now I think that it is high time to review and

re-evaluate such good practices and, if necessary,

to abandon [communion in the hand].

Archbishop Malcolm Ranjith

(Posted Januar 29, 2008 www.RemnantNewspaper.com) Within days of the posting of my article calling on Roman Catholic traditionalists to recognize the sea change between this pontificate and the last one, two more positive developments have occurred.

The first is the publication of a “trial balloon” book preface by Archbishop Malcolm Ranjith, Secretary of the Congregation for Divine Worship and a known friend of the Society of Saint Pius X. The preface, written for the book Dominus Est by Bishop Athansius Schneidier, a critique of communion in the hand, contains this withering indictment of the abuse improvidently authorized by Paul VI:

Whatever the reasons for this practice, we cannot ignore what is happening worldwide where this practice has been implemented. This gesture has contributed to a gradual weakening of the attitude of reverence towards the sacred Eucharistic species whereas the previous practice had better safeguarded that sense of reverence. There instead arose an alarming lack of recollection and a general spirit of carelessness. We see communicants who often return to their seats as if nothing extraordinary has happened... In many cases, one cannot discern that sense of seriousness and inner silence that must signal the presence of God in the soul.

Then there are those who take away the sacred species to keep them as souvenirs, those who sell, or worse yet, who take them away to desecrate it in Satanic rituals. Even in large concelebrations, also in Rome, several times the sacred species has been found thrown onto the ground.

The Archbishop’s conclusion, which can only have had the prior approbation of the Pope himself, is as follows:

Now I think that it is high time to review and re-evaluate such good practices and, if necessary, to abandon the current practice that was not called for by Sacrosanctum Concilium, nor by the Fathers, but was only accepted after its illegitimate introduction in some countries. Now, more than ever, we must help the faithful to renew a deep faith in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharistic species in order to strengthen the life of the Church and defend it in the midst of dangerous distortions of the faith that this situation continues to cause.

One cannot underestimate the significance of these devastating admissions by the Secretary of the very congregation that oversees the liturgy throughout the world. Nothing of the kind was even hinted at by the Congregation for Divine Worship during the pontificate of John Paul II, who continually insisted that, apart from few “shadows” here and there, his pontificate was marked by a great liturgical renewal.

The second development is the announcement by Cardinal Alfonso López Trujillo, president of the Pontifical Council for the Family, that “the Vatican will begin a global campaign to institute a United Nations moratorium on abortion, which will begin in Latin America.” (LSNews.com January 25, 2008).

According to LSNews.com, “Trujillo will be going directly to heads of national governments as well as organizations throughout Latin America, in an attempt to convince them to sign a petition to the United Nations to halt abortions worldwide. The Cardinal intends to continue from Latin America to the United States, Canada, and then to Africa, the Middle East, and Europe.” LSNews notes that the campaign was suggested by Giuliano Ferrara (no relation), a non-Catholic who is none other than former head of the Italian Communist Party in Turin (most definitely no relation). Ferrara “pointed out that the United Nations was calling for a moratorium on the death penalty, and that, based on the same concern for human life, it made sense to also call for a moratorium on abortion.” I certainly don’t agree with Ferrara’s moral equation of the two issues, but the polemical point is certainly well taken.

Now of course the United Nations will reject the petition because the U.N. is a locus of evil and indeed the very temple of the New World Order. So what is the point of the exercise? The point, obviously, is to stage a provocation that will expose the U.N. for what it is: a major facilitator of the worldwide holocaust of abortion according to the “philosophy of the new man and new world” condemned by the currently reigning Pope when he was Cardinal Ratzinger. Seven years ago, in a dramatic contrast with the praise John Paul II heaped on the U.N., Ratzinger warned that it was promoting “a real and proper philosophy of the new man and new world” that is dangerous precisely because it “no longer has the utopian burden that characterized the Marxist dream,” but rather “is very realistic” in its program to “reduce the number of guests at the table of humanity, so that the presumed happiness they have attained will not be affected.”

The U.N., said Ratzinger, has promoted “this new anthropology” at such gatherings as the Cairo conference on population in 1994, and the Beijing conference on women 1995, where “the ideology of ‘Women’s Empowerment’” was unveiled, according to which “the principal obstacles to [a woman’s] fulfillment are the family and maternity” and “Woman must be liberated especially of what characterizes her, namely, her feminine specificity. This must be annulled before a ‘Gender equity' and ‘equality,’ before an indistinct and uniform human being, in whose life sexuality has no other meaning than a voluptuous drug, that can be used without any criteria.”

This U.N.-promoted ideology, Ratzinger went on to say, breeds “the fear of maternity that has taken hold of a great part of our contemporaries,” so that “today there is no longer a ‘philosophy of love,’ but only a ‘philosophy of selfishness.’ It is precisely here that people are deceived. In fact, at the moment they are advised not to love, they are advised, in the final analysis, not to be human. For this reason, at this stage of the development of the new image of the new world, Christians – and not just them but in any case even more than others – have the duty to protest.”

This assessment of the U.N. was a far cry from the positively mawkish tribute by John Paul II during his address to the General Assembly in 1995—the very year of the Beijing conference whose evil was diagnosed by Ratzinger. On that occasion John Paul II declared:

Ladies and Gentlemen! On the threshold of a new millennium we are witnessing an extraordinary global acceleration of that quest for freedom which is one of the great dynamics of human history…. This universal longing for freedom is truly one of the distinguishing marks of our time…. During my previous Visit to the United Nations on 2 October 1979, I noted that the quest for freedom in our time has its basis in those universal rights which human beings enjoy by the very fact of their humanity. It was precisely outrages against human dignity which led the United Nations organization to formulate, barely three years after its establishment, that Universal Declaration of Human Rights which remains one of the highest expressions of the human conscience of our time….

While hailing the aridly humanistic Universal Declaration of Human Rights, John Paul said not one word about abortion or the U.N.’s role in promoting it throughout the world. Instead, the Pope called upon the U.N. to “build the civilization of love, founded on the universal values of peace, solidarity, justice, and liberty.”

As Tracey Rowland and other Catholic scholars have indicated, this appeal to “universal values,” so much a product of the “opening to the world” provoked by the fatuous optimism of Gaudium et spes, is ultimately futile, as “values” have meaning only with reference to the tradition in which they are embodied, and if a given tradition does not recognize the natural and eternal law as expounded by the Catholic Church, then its “values” will not be in accord with the requirements of Christian civilization. For a Catholic to speak of building a “civilization of love” based on “universal values” with an audience that has no Catholic faith, generally approves of abortion, contraception and divorce, and indeed rejects practically everything the Church teaches on faith and morals is, quite simply, a waste of time, if not downright silly. In his 1979 address to the United Nations, John Paul II declared: “I wish that the United Nations Organization will always remain the supreme forum of peace and justice: authentic seat of the liberty of peoples in their aspirations for a better future.” But what are peace, justice, and liberty without Christ as their standard and the Church as their guarantor? They are either empty words or slogans for the destruction of the good.

We can be thankful that Benedict has apparently abandoned the “civilization of love” mantra recited endlessly and vainly during the pontificates of Paul VI and John Paul II, and that he seems to have found a better use for the U.N.—that of an arena for provocations designed, for once, to confront the New World Order instead of attempting to reconcile with it.

Meanwhile, as LSNews observes, “Trujillo's first stop will be Santo Domingo, capital of the Dominican Republic, where Catholics and Protestants united successfully in recent months to stop the legalization of abortion. The Dominican Republic is one of several nations in Latin America where direct abortion is completely illegal, a list that includes El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Chile.”

If joining with Protestants in a movement to keep abortion totally illegal is the kind of ecumenism Benedict has in mind, we cannot fail to support it. As even the 1949 Holy Office monitum severely restricting early “ecumenical activities” noted: “Neither does the said <Monitum> apply to those mixed meetings of Catholics and non-Catholics in which the discussion does not turn upon faith and morals but upon ways and means of defending the fundamental principles of the natural law or of the Christian religion against the enemies of God who are now leagued together, or where the question is how to restore social order, or other topics of that nature.” (Of course, the Holy Office added, even in such undertakings “Catholics may not approve or concede anything which is in conflict with divine revelation or with the doctrine of the Church even on social questions.”)

Will Pope Benedict XVI become another Blessed Pius IX, whose miter he wore when he made 23 new cardinals at the consistory last November? That would be poetic justice of the highest order, given that it was the former Cardinal Ratzinger who once wrote “there can be no return to the Syllabus.” I don’t know the answer to that question, as I am only a scrivener for The Remnant and not a prophet. But I do know that Pius IX began as a darling of the liberals of his time and ended as the object of their hatred, once he came to realize—as Benedict seems to have realized—that behind the mask of tolerance that Liberty wears is a desire to destroy the Catholic Church and everything she stands for.

Add these two developments to the list of the signs that our situation has changed dramatically for the better. We should pray the Rosary every day for the intention that Pope Benedict continue to move away from the ridiculous “civilization of love” and the pernicious conciliar “opening to the world” and toward a restoration of all things in Christ. We should pray that all the news to come from Rome in the crucial days ahead will be cause for rejoicing, rather than the bitter disappointment to which we have for so long been accustomed. And we should pray that, at long last, the Pope will reveal the entirety of the Third Secret and consecrate Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. I will have much more to report on that score in the weeks to come.