The following letter was sent to The Remnant a couple of weeks ago. It is not atypical of the thousands like it that we’ve received in recent months, posing similar questions. Perhaps posting it here will help instigate a constructive exchange of ideas about the question every one of us must answer, sooner or later: Where do we go from here?

Editor, The Remnant: I am grateful for your strong defense of this order on Remnant TV http://youtu.be/tn2nF_b76WA. It has dismayed me to learn of their dismantling under the Vatican’s Fr. Volpi. Your perspective and defense of the friars has helped me to deal with this blow.

To know the friars personally is to love and respect them. It is to wish to emulate them, if you love Jesus Christ and His true Church. I first encountered the friars in New Bedford, Massachusetts. I used to visit their chapel sometimes during lunch hour or after work and was amazed at their reverence for Jesus Christ in the Holy Eucharist. I learned much from their homilies and example about the goodness of true adoration, reverence and devotion for our Lord, present in the tabernacle. Later, I encountered them in their little, dirt-floored chapel in Baltic, Connecticut. There I learned of the friars’ commitment to humility, sacrifice, and poverty. Later, by God’s grace, they would have a church built in Griswold, Connecticut. I was never able to attend Mass there regularly because of the distance from my home, but I continued to hear about their work from time to time; seeing them in the news for their pro-life witness, for example.

By the time this goes to print the most solemn of secular feast days will have passed. The winner of Super Bowl XLVIII will have been decided and the engine of mass culture will have moved on to the next over-hyped sporting event or cause celebre. Fortunately for them the Winter Olympics is being hosted by a country known for its intolerance toward homosexuals and Islamic Jihadists and it’s sympathy for U.S. expats who leak dirty NSA secrets. It would be the perfect storm if only Russia were full of Catholics instead of Russian Orthodox, whom whatever other criticism liberalism can assail them with are at least formally opposed to the Bishop of Rome. This is less important now that Benedict XVI has abdicated, but a fact in their favor nonetheless.

Update: Brian McCall Answers His Critics at the End of this Article

It is easy to sit here in 2014 and criticize the general populace of Nazi Germany. How could they allow such insanity? How could doctors participate in the torture and execution of the helpless and innocent? We need look no further than a neighborhood hospital today to find the answers.

The secular media loves to denounce with righteous indignation the human atrocities committed by the Nazis before and during World War II. Now the problem with their self-righteous indignation is not the condemnation of these atrocities, which deserve denunciation, but rather the utter hypocrisy of the oligarchy that rules our country with its ink (or more recently digital) fist. As it drones on about the past it repeats it all over again in the present.

THE LORD JESUS teaches us through His Church, that death marks the end of the earthly pilgrimage of man. Death marks the end of this life as the time when we can accept divine grace which is given to us in Christ. Death brings the end of the time of grace and mercy which God offers to us, so that we can realize the purpose of our existence. It is God’s plan that this life is when we decide our ultimate destiny. When “the unique course of our earthly life” has ended, we will not return to other earthly lives. “Man dies only once”. There is no “reincarnation” after this life.

After this life human beings will themselves be either among those who have responded to the love and mercy of God, or among those who have refused to accept grace right up to the end.

Part II

The New Beginning of the Church

The Cardinal then outlines his vision of the “new evangelization” which involves the Church starting anew from the beginning. In doing so he makes several shocking statements. First he states:

The calling of the Church, in the likeness of Jesus, is to proclaim the Kingdom of God. Even Christ himself did not proclaim or preach Himself, but the Kingdom. The Church, as His disciple and His servant, ought to do the same. Her calling is to serve, not to rule: “Servant of Humanity,” called her Pope Paul VI. She must do this service living in the world, herself a part of the world and in solidarity with it, because “the world is the only subject that interests God.

Part I

“The Second Vatican Council was the main event in the Church in the 20th Century. In principle, it meant an end to the hostilities between the Church and modernism, which was condemned in the First Vatican Council”…Cardinal Oscar Andrés Rodríguez Maradiaga

Cardinal Oscar Andrés Rodríguez Maradiaga is a very important man in today’s Catholic Church.  In addition to being the Archbishop of Tegucigalpa, Honduras, he is the pope’s principal advisor and the chair of a group of eight advising cardinals established by Pope Francis to revise the Apostolic Constitution on the Roman Curia.  He also serves as the president of Caritas Internationalis, is a member of the Congregation for Catholic Education, and was considered a serious contender for the papacy during the last conclave. What he says matters.

The ongoing saga of the unjust and tragic persecution of the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate has demonstrated once again what is actually at the root of the post-conciliar liturgical crisis – namely the issue of doctrine in relation to the traditional Roman Mass versus the Novus Ordo Missae. Like cream rising to the top of a milk pail, recent news has affirmed initial speculations that the friars and sisters were being treated in a heavy-hand fashion because some members were harboring “crypto-lefebvrian and definitely traditionalist drift” as related in a letter by Apostolic Commissar – err, Commissioner - Fr. Fidenzio Volpi.[1]

What follows is my translation of the rather sensational article by Messrs. Gnocchi and Palmari, a pair of Italian Catholic intellectuals, in which the authors leveled profound and quite scathing public criticisms of the current pontificate under a title that could not be more provocative. After the article was published in the Italian daily Il Foglio on October 9, however, Pope Francis personally telephoned Palmaro to assure him “that he had understood that those criticisms had been made with love, and how important it had been for him to receive them.”

Let that be a lesson to the neo-Catholic proponents of abject silence and submission in the face of every papal word or deed­—including those who run Radio Maria, which dismissed both authors from their positions as Catholic commentators immediately after the article appeared. Silence in the face of public scandal, even if it be the scandal of a Pope, has never been the Catholic way, as anyone with even a passing familiarity with the turbulent epochs of Church history would know.