Archbishop Lefebvre and Remnant Founder, Walter Matt, 1976

The following article was written by my father, Walter L. Matt, in the December 31, 1969 issue of The Remnant. In it, my father (RIP) offers a sample of how early traditionalists reacted immediately and vehemently against the New Mass. I would direct our readers’ attention, however, to the tone of fealty which permeates my father’s supplications to the Holy Father at the time, begging him not to destroy the old Mass. And yet my father was certainly no fan of Pope Paul VI! These men were not renegades, obviously. They were loyal sons of the Church who were witnessing the auto-demolition of the Catholic Church they’d loved and served all their lives.

As his pontificate nears its fourth anniversary, Pope Francis ever more clearly reveals a megalomaniacal conviction that the Church and her teaching are his to remake as he sees fit. Praising his own rather absurdly denominated “Apostolic” Exhortation opening the door to Holy Communion for public adulterers, Francis told the Jesuit general congregation gathered in Rome last October that Amoris Laetitia represents nothing less than a radical change in the Church’s view of “the whole moral sphere,” which at the time he was a seminarian “was restricted to ‘you can,’ ‘you cannot,’ ‘up to here, yes, but not there.’ It was a morality very foreign to discernment.”

Saint Padre Pio was the first stigmatized Priest in the Church, sent from God to be a sign for our times. Francesco Forgione (born 1887) received the five wounds of Christ only after ordination (1910) when he began offering the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass and became known as Padre Pio. These visible and bleeding wounds of Christ, which he had received on September 20, 1918, had disappeared from Padre Pio by the time that he completed his last Mass on September 22, 1968 – two days after the 50th Anniversary. The wounds were related to the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.

REMNANT CARTOON

Raymond Cardinal Burke told an Italian television program this week that he does not believe his recent assignment to Guam to preside over an investigation of a Church trial of an archbishop accused of abusing altar boys back in the 1970s is, in fact, a punishment from Pope Francis. The Cardinal's statements can be read here.

In the interview, Cardinal Burke insists that his assignment came from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, on which he still serves as president of the Apostolic Tribunal. Cardinal Muller, who heads the CDF, has become an outspoken defender of Amoris Laetitia -- Pope Francis’ controversial post-synodal exhortation that calls for divorced and remarried Catholics to be allowed to receive Holy Communion—the same document, by the way, to which Cardinal Burke and three other cardinals will raise formal corrections if Pope Francis refuses to answer five dubia, or questions, regarding its orthodoxy and apparent errors. 

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MSNBC enlists the aid of radically liberal Jesuit, Father James Martin, to try to target and destroy the "radical Traditionalism" which is allegedly rising up from St. Peter's Square to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave and beyond. In his eagerness to lend a hand, Fr. Martin proceeds to equate what he calls "rad trads" with – wait for it – the entire Church Militant on earth. (Finally, he got something right.) Michael Matt comments on this bombshell, and then shares his opinion on an SSPX- Vatican regularization in the midst of the chaos and destruction of arguably the most destructive pontificate in history.