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To pique your interest in subscribing, I’d like to introduce you to a new feature that's only available to our print- and e-subscribers called “Lost in the Fifties, Too.” Most of the installments were written by my father in the pages of our family newspaper, The Wanderer, back in the ‘50s.  And it is my hope that this series will help foster a better understanding of what the traditional Catholic counterrevolution is all about.

Critics of traditional Catholics enjoy claiming that we all sit around pining for the good old days of the 1950s, when God was still in His heaven and all was right with the world. If only we could get back to the pre-conciliar days of Leave It To Beaver there would be nothing but peace and harmony, daffodils and happy thoughts. 

It’s a nice fantasy, but that’s all it is. Yes, God was still in His heaven in the 1950s but all was certainly not right with the world.

Still, this fits into a larger false narrative which claims that traditionalists see Vatican II as the epitome of all evil, since it was the genesis of the takeover of the human element of Christ’s Church we lament so bitterly.

While it’s certainly true that we lament Vatican II and all of its works and pomps, the informed traditional Catholic will readily admit that the Second Vatican Council was much more the Modernist coming-out party than anything else. They’d been blasting away at the holy mountain of Tradition for centuries, and it was only at Vatican II that they finally felt confident enough to go public, if you will, with their agenda.

If Vatican II was the beginning of it all, what in heaven’s name was St. Pius X going on about 50 years before Pope John convened the ill-fated event? 

In any case, now that Francis is singlehandedly exposing the colossal folly that is the Second Vatican Council, it seems we have an opportunity to look back beyond Vatican II and the New Mass to the actual origins of the worst crisis in the history of the Church.

For us the war did not begin at Vatican II. It had its origins centuries earlier under the Masonic auspices of an Enlightenment that uncrowned Christ the King, severed Christendom, beheaded the Catholic monarchy, destroyed the Catholic confessional state, and eventually crushed the Roman Rite, leaving Catholic culture and family in the shambles we see today.

Nostalgia buffs, pining for the 1950s? Hardly!

The chaos we see in the streets today— the murder of police officers, terrorism, civil unrest everywhere, the breakup of the family—was inevitable once the war on Christ the King had been declared. Such chaos was predicated by St. Thomas More, for example, a half millennium ago, when he warned that Martin Luther and his revolutionaries were not reformers but rather “agents of demons” hell bent on anarchy.

The chaos of our day was inevitable to Louis Veuillot back in 1866 when he warned in The Liberal Illusion that Liberal Catholicism will not work, cannot work, and that disaster would follow any attempt to make it work.

It was inevitable to St. Pius X at the turn of the last century when he wrote: “The present wickedness of the world is only the beginning of the sorrows which must take place before the end of the world.” And to Pope Pius XII in 1950: “We believe that the present hour is a dread phase of the events foretold by Christ. It seems that darkness is about to fall on the world. Humanity is in the grip of a supreme crisis.”

The rise of today's Christophobic chaos was inevitable to Belloc, Chesterton and many Catholic warriors of the last century who tried to warn the world that this day was coming if men insisted on uncrowning Christ the King. And it was inevitable to my own father, writing in the pages of The Wanderer, back in the 1950s, in the twilight of the ‘good old days’--thus our new series.

Here's one of the first responses to "Lost In The Fifties". It's a letter to the editor which will appear in the next 'Remnant Speaks' column -- another one of the many features that only appears in the Print/E-edition of The Remnant:

Editor, The Remnant:

Walter Matt's article (Signs of the Times, “Lost in the Fifties, Too”, July 29, 2016, The Remnant) written in 1951, is prophetic in many ways. The striking thing in that article was the hysteria over the death of Bushman the monkey. How many times in the news recently have we seen excessive amounts of coverage over dead animals? The world described there is not far from our own, culturally. 
 
I believe that the follies of the modern world, as described in the above article and accompanying letter by Michael Matt, enable our current cultural rot.

The recent killing of Father Hamel in France by a Muslim shows how impotent the modern Church is. Pope Francis fails to realize that the current invasion of Muslims to the European continent is anything but refugees fleeing poverty. This is something which, I believe, is deliberate. Muslims, I'm sure, know their history very well. They resent the Reconquista of Spain and ISIS has always said its main objective is to capture Rome itself. ISIS is the same exact people that Christendom has fought against for centuries. ISIS members see clearly that Europe has lost all morals, the Church is in shambles, homosexuality is rampant, and the birth rate is at an all-time low due to contraception, and the breakdown of the family. This is occurring throughout the West in general. They are taking advantage of that and are trying to take over Europe. They are unfortunately succeeding. Have the great leaders of old Christendom fought in vain? Did Jan Sobieski fight in vain to avoid the conquest of Vienna from the 17th century manifestation of ISIS in the form of the Turks?

Hillaire Belloc said that, “Europe is the faith, and the faith is Europe”. This ultimately means that were Europe to lose the faith it would collapse. Well, it has lost the faith and, as is plainly clear, it is collapsing and it is being overrun by the ancient archenemy of Christendom, Islam.

I shudder at the thought that perhaps we may be living through the times that many apparitions of Our Lady, especially in the true contents of the Third secret of Fatima that I believe was never released, warned about all along. I fear that the killing of Father Hamel may just be the tip of the iceberg foreshadowing many more horrors to come. 
 
We need to stay strong in the True Faith in these terrible times.

Jim Jones
Hoboken, NJ

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