Have you ever wondered how to respond to those who equate the efficacy of the Traditional Mass and the Novus Ordo by directing the argument to the level of validity? They rightly point out that any valid Mass is a renewal of Our Lord’s Sacrifice on Calvary, which was of infinite value, and then conclude that as long as a Mass is valid, it, too, is of infinite worth, and therefore equally efficacious for those who attend. They might concede that a scandalously celebrated Mass will have a negative effect on the subjective disposition of those present, which could perhaps lessen the amount of grace they receive, but they will insist (or at least imply) that neither liturgical abuses, nor an unworthy priest, nor watered down prayers or profane music, per se, will lessen the efficacy of the Mass or the fruit to be derived there from.

An underground Roman Catholic priest, unlawfully detained by the Chinese Communists for the last eight years, was released on August 9, 2014, as reported by AsiaNews.

Political prisoner of conscience, Father Gen-Jun “Joseph” Lu, 52, of the Baoding diocese, Hebei province, was last seen on February 17, 2006, when he and Father Yan-Li Guo went to meet another underground priest at the Baoding Train Station.

As Lu and Guo walked down a narrow residential byway to the local bus station, they hugged close to the buildings, when a car speeding down the lane screeched to a halt, nearly hitting them. The doors popped open, and several men, shouting and screaming, scrambled out and headed for the two.

When they were asked by (visiting) Christians whereof they give to their deities these diversified forms, they answered that their fathers did so before them. "Those who preceded us left them such, and such shall we transmit them to our posterity." This discussion centered around the natives' custom of cannibalism…The Travels of Marco Polo in Zipangu– current day Japan)

The Trappist Nuns of Azeir, Syria 2013

It is not often that video clips viewed on the Internet will call attention to the presence of evil, but on three recent occasions I have viewed videos that have turned my stomach. Both the moral philosophers and Church Fathers knew man is capable of evil, but also believed that a strong and important religious life would reduce and/or eliminate those tendencies for most people, for they recognized that God is the final judge our actions.

■ First they came for the Roman Rite, which they destroyed. Then they came for the Church Militant, which they disarmed and surrendered to the spirit of the age. Now, at the Synod, which threatens to become Vatican II rebooted, progressivist bishops and their apparatchiks will be coming for the moral law itself under the guise of a search for “pastoral solutions” to “challenges facing the family”


The Return of Vatican II Fever

The symptoms are unmistakable: after a period of relative remission during the years of Pope Benedict’s mysteriously self-terminated reign, the postconciliar “process of decay” remarked by the former Cardinal Ratzinger has resumed with a vengeance, like a rebound infection after an incomplete course of antibiotics. The progressivist priests and prelates who are the disease-causing agents of Vatican II Fever are now running amok throughout the ecclesiastical bloodstream. They have been let loose by a Pope who is so fond of publicly staged “surprises,” all tending to the diminution of traditional Roman Catholicism, that Respice in Me (look at me) could serve as the motto of this pontificate.

Since the 1980s The Remnant has been proud to publish the powerful insights and commentary of the incomparable Solange Hertz. A close friend of Remnant founder Walter L. Matt (RIP) for many years, she was with the Remnant almost from the beginning. In her own right, Mrs. Hertz came to be regarded as the matriarch of traditional Catholicism in the English-speaking world (although her writings appeared not infrequently in French, as well).

She was so far ahead of the curve in exposing the fundamental errors afflicting the modern Church and State that newcomers to the traditionalist movement sometimes fail to realize that it was Mrs. Hertz who pioneered the early and in-depth exposés of feminism, democracy gone awry, Americanism, Natural Family Planning, and the myriad attacks on Sacred Scripture by the forces of scientism. (In fact, if you’re interested in the questions of biblical inerrancy, for example, or the Galileo case, evolution and geocentrism, if is largely because Mrs. Hertz was tackling such 900-pound gorillas long before it became fashionable to do so.)

Editor’s Note: We’re pleased to publish the following homage to the great Pope Pius XII.  Submitted to us for publication by its author, it was presented as the keynote address at The Angelus Press’s 2012 Conference for Catholic Tradition: The Papacy.  When it comes to the defense of the great wartime Pope of Peace, Ven. Pius XII, we believe no effort should be spared nor stone unturned, for in defending Pius we defend the papal embodiment of the Tradition,  history and sacred liturgy of the Catholic Church which today are everywhere under scurrilous and incessant attack. We’re thus pleased to offer this study in its entirety. Special thanks to Professor Clarendon.  MJM

Introduction

Editor's Note: The following article appeared in The Remnant's December 31, 2010 issue. It is part of a decade-long series of Remnant articles which vigorously and unapologetically opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq for violating the Church's teaching on what constitutes just war. For that editorial position, which continued from 2003 onward, we lost thousands of subscribers.

In recent weeks and months it has become very fashionable in neo-Catholic circles to finally begin to speak out against the genocide of Christians in Iraq at the hands of the Islamic extremists that took over after the U.S.-led “coalition of the willing” had finished bombing the living daylights out of Iraq for reasons even Fox News no longer cares to defend. That's all well and good, but I guess I'm curious to know where these neo-Catholic heroes were ten years ago when something might  have been done to sandbag the lunatical U.S. foreign policy that would give us the insufferable Barack Obama and lead to the present crisis in Iraq, leaving millions homeless, tens of thousands dead, with our Christian brothers and sisters (those that survived the "shock and awe" of which we Americans were so embarrassingly proud at the time) driven from their homes, banished from their country and separated from their families forever. 

Remnant readers are surely aware of the recent news surrounding two planned Satanic rituals, or Black Masses, and the condemnations they have elicited from Catholics throughout the country. However, a certain irony in this entire affair may have been missed by many.

During the five decades that have followed Vatican II’s “Declaration on Religious Freedom” (Dignitatis Humanae),[1] the post-conciliar hierarchy has repeatedly and emphatically stated that religious liberty is fundamental to human dignity. Thus while they fawn over backwards to accord religious liberty to an entire spectrum of false religions, they nevertheless deny this “right” to Satanists.

On the Council and the Duties of the Pope

Rome, December, 20 1966

Your Eminence,

Your letter of July 24, concerning the questioning of certain truths was communicated through the good offices of our secretariat to all our major superiors.

Few replies have reached us. Those which have come to us from Africa do not deny that there is great confusion of mind at the present time. Even if these truths do not appear to be called in question, we are witnessing in practice a diminution of fervor and of regularity in receiving the sacraments, above all the Sacrament of Penance. A greatly diminished respect for the Holy Eucharist is found, above all on the part of priests, and a scarcity of priestly vocations in French-speaking missions: vocations in the English and Portuguese-speaking missions are less affected by the new spirit, but already the magazines and newspapers are spreading the most advanced theories.

Introduction

by Michael J. Matt

The following article was published in The Remnant back in 1987. It was written by the late, great Dr. John Senior, and it is so excellent that I fear I lack the necessary skills to sum it up with due justice in a few words. It is long, very long—so, alas, I suppose most bloggers and tweeters working diligently in the cyber vineyard will likely not bother with it -- the days of the thoughtful, well-developed article having long since passed in order to make room for the video clip, the meme and the one-sentence paragraph.

The article is so inherently Catholic, however, that it makes one wonder: What has happened to us? We spend our days and nights on the Internet rummaging through the ruins of Christendom in a cyberspace filled to capacity with sound bites and pointless proofs of lingering consciousness around the globe, but we never really seem to get anywhere. The most valiant among us make Quixotic attempts to combat the ubiquitous effects of social and spiritual revolution in our world and Church, but even we are too overwhelmed by disinformation and apathy to confront the actual causes anymore.  We expend almost all of our energies combatting the heinous crime of abortion as if that were the fundamental cause of all that's gone wrong in the world.  But is it?  Abortion is much less of a cause than an effect, and until we can learn to target the root causes of such evils I wonder if we will ever really eradicate any of them.