Have you ever wondered how the new changes in the Catholic Mass came about? Why some churches have removed statues of the saints and Stations of the Cross?
Why we now offer Holy Mass at a table instead of an altar? Why the Tabernacle was removed from its place of honor and moved to another spot of less importance? Why we no longer sing the beautiful, reverent hymns of the past centuries but instead sing "songs" that pretty much could be sung anywhere?
Why priests and nuns no longer encourage praying the Rosary, prayers to the Saints, or novenas? Why hardly anyone genuflects before the Blessed Sacrament before entering a pew in church (or exiting from that pew)?
Why everyone was encouraged, practically mandated, to receive Holy Communion in the hand while standing? Why we are not allowed to kneel to receive Communion at the altar? Why altars and cruxifixes were ripped out of our churches in the 1960's and 70's?
Why so many priests and nuns left their orders and why there are so few new seminarians and novices ?
In order to get some idea of what is going on in our Churches and our Faith, we need to go back to the 1800's.
In order to get some idea of what is going on in our Churches and our Faith, we need to go back to the 1800's.
Enter Henri Bremond, George Tyrrell and Teilhard de Chardin
Skeptical thinking became popular in Germany in the 18th century and eventually spread over the border into France. By the end of the 19th century it had gained considerable acceptance there and its chief disciple was a French Jesuit, Henri Bremond. Bremond was a teacher at the College de Mongre and taught his skepticism regarding the Catholic Church to his students.
One of his students, George Tyrrell, was a close friend of Bremond and was much affected by his modernist/liberal rationale.
At the age of 14 Teilhard de Chardin attended the same high school that George Tyrrell attended and was also taught and influenced by Bremond, so one can see that from his earliest years he was exposed to grave errors of thought.
Between 1893 and 1899 (the year de Chardin entered the Seminary) the Pope had been compelled to issue four different encyclicals which condemned this skepticism about basic truths, and the skepticism about the Bible itself. In 1907 the Holy Office released the famous decree Lamentabili, containing 65 propositions against Modernism and on Sept. 8, 1907, Pope Pius X warned the Catholic world to beware of the venomous effects of Modernism. From the Vatican's strong reaction, we get some idea of the gravity of the situation. This insidious skepticism was being propagated in many European schools.
The heart and soul of the movement was Henri Bremond, S.J. whose protege was George Tyrrell, S.J., whose prize student was Teilhard de Chardin, S.J. All Jesuit priests.
Has the Catholic church benefited from the changes introduced at the Vatican II council? Has the faith been advanced in any meaningful way? Is our Mass more sacred or less sacred? Are we one as Jesus commanded? The answer to these and other corresponding questions is an unequivocal no! I've yet to meet a priest, nun or even a serious theologian who can make a legitimate case that the lofty sounding "fruits of Vatican II" have achieved their stated goal of uniting a faithful Christian community. As a matter of fact, the "fruits of Vatican II" by all accounts has achieved exactly the opposite: a falling away of devotion; a profound lack of unity among what is left of the flock; closing of ninety percent of our Seminaries and Convents. By every measure we have failed our God. I close with two reminders; "By their fruits, ye shall know them." (Matt 7:16) and finally,
Much of the information regarding the Modernist movement has been taken from "Christ Denied", Origin Of The Present Day Problems In The Catholic Church, by Rev. Paul A. Wickens; Published by TAN Publishers, 1982.
One of his students, George Tyrrell, was a close friend of Bremond and was much affected by his modernist/liberal rationale.
At the age of 14 Teilhard de Chardin attended the same high school that George Tyrrell attended and was also taught and influenced by Bremond, so one can see that from his earliest years he was exposed to grave errors of thought.
The heart and soul of the movement was Henri Bremond, S.J. whose protege was George Tyrrell, S.J., whose prize student was Teilhard de Chardin, S.J. All Jesuit priests.
George Tyrrell
Errors Examined
Lately we see that Tyrrell's work is being re-studied and praised in England as well as in the United States. When one reads Tyrrell, he cannot help but think he is reading Karl Rahner today, or de Chardin of yesterday, because the thinking is always the same.
A. No commitment to dogma.
Modernists go to great lengths to use religious language which carefully avoids any commitment whatsoever to (most) Catholic dogmas.
They will rarely deny, flat out, a Catholic doctrine -- at least not in public. What they will do is this:
1. Either not mention certain dogmas at all, e.g. Papal infallibility, Immaculate Conception, Original Sin -- as if they did not exist!
2. Or they will use a genuine Catholic term, for example, "Spirit" -- but take pains not to define it clearly as "the Holy Spirit, the Third Person of the Holy Trinity". (How many times have we heard priests and nuns refer to "in the spirit of Vatican II" when they are changing something we have been doing for hundreds of years.)
To illustrate other examples of this technique observe how modernists talk about Baptism and the Eucharist. They concentrate their catechesis on the secondary effects of these sacraments, thereby implicitly denying the primary (and de fide) effects. Baptism becomes "Initiation" rather than "Regeneration from Original Sin", and the Mass becomes a "Meal" or "Liturgy", rather than the Holy Sacrifice. (As a CCD teacher I once attended a class for CCD teachers being run by a local priest. He asked what the purpose of Baptism was and when I stated "the removal of Original Sin", he stated that I was wrong and it was "the initiation of the child into the church". When I disagreed with him, he told me "the best thing you can do for your church is to get out of it". This from a priest who was training CCD teachers who would teach your children and grandchildren!)
Usually the word "Eucharist" or "Liturgy" is substituted for the word "Mass", while scarcely identifying this Eucharist as the Holy Eucharist, the Real Presence, the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of Our Lord Jesus Christ.
B. Down with external religion
The basic idea seems to be this: that Christ is within us -- which means that He is not outside us -- which means that the hierarchy cannot speak for Christ now. This idea is put forward over and over again.
George Tyrrell does not directly attack the Church, but he engages in a great deal of talk about the unimportance of (what he calls) external religion. External religion, to him, means practically anything Catholic. The Rosary is part of external religion; blessed statues and medals, and holy water and altar rails. So are bishops, and the Vatican, and so on. Anything which is out there and not here, deep inside of you is external religion and he urged people to get away from these things. (Now you know why the altar rail was removed from your church).
C. Making God and man one entity
To quote Karl Rahner, a disciple of Chardenism, "We are all Anonymous Christians". Early 19th century skeptics always preferred the term "Christian" to "Catholic". History repeats itself. (When was the last time you heard a priest speak from the pulpit and use the word Catholic when referring to people of our faith.) Rahner's idea of Anonymous Christians is: People are Christian even if they do not know it, even if they do not want to be, even if they do not care.
Chardin put forward: that the universe has been transubstantiated.
Note: When the orthodox Catholic people wonder why some Modernist Catholics will not worship the Eucharist; why they will not have Benediction or 40 Hours; why any worship of the Blessed Sacrament holds no interest for them -- the reason is that they believe that Christ is everywhere in the same sense that He is in the Eucharist. As one liberal spokesman expressed it: "Christ's presence in each other is the only presence that counts".
These ideas have been advanced in the seminaries for a long time now. In the middle 1960's, they came out of the closet, so to speak, but, if one studies history, he will soon conclude that these heresies were there all along.
Later on, in the early and mid 1960's during the sessions of the Ecumenical Council (called by Pope John XXIII) all the Tyrrell, de Chardin, and Rahner rhetoric came out of the mouths of the left-wing faction of Vatican II, viz., the French bishops, the Belgians, the Germans, joining ranks with the Canadian bishops and some midwestern prelates in America.
A Voice of Orthodoxy
In 1950 Pope Pius XII published his encyclical Humani Generis for the whole world and the Pope definitely referred to Teilhard among others, when he reproved those who "imprudently and indiscreetly hold that evolution explains the origin of all things and audaciously support the monistic and pantheistic opinion that the world is in continual evolution."
It is difficult to explain all the damaging things that the Liberals were doing for this simple reason: they deliberately set about going into every field of priestly study and turning everything upside down. We know of this "game plan" because we have de Chardin's letter of 1916 in which he proposed to found what he called "The Factory" which would be sort of an "intellectual factory" (or think tank), in which men with liberating ideas in various fields would work closely together. In this way all sorts of liberating ideas could easily be spread, so that Catholics could be liberated on every level. This includes moral theology, dogmatic theology, Canon Law, Biblical Studies, etc.
Victory For de Chardin
By 1947, de Chardin was going around saying, very publicly, things like "I do not think God should be worshipped" and "Very definitely there was no Adam and Eve and no Original Sin". He was throwing caution to the winds. He was a man past sixty years of age now, and very brazen about his approach to religion. In one of his letters to a friend he wrote: "I have so many friends now, in good strategic positions, that I have no fear of the future. I have won the game." And the unflappable de Chardin was right. There was no doubt about it. He wanted to corrupt the seminaries, and he did. He wished to plant the seeds of Modernism and Skepticism just about everywhere, and he succeeded. (He had friends in the office of the Archbishop of Paris, and other collaborators throughout Belgium, Holland and Scandinavia including Karl Rahner, S.J. in Germany.)
(After the Vatican II Council, our catechisms for teaching the Catholic Faith to our children were published in Holland, which had completely lost the Catholic Faith.)
Karl Rahner, another skeptic and liberal Jesuit, worked right along with de Chardin. In 1947 he was appointed head professor of Fundamental Theology at the School of Innsbruck. What this meant was that the Jesuits turned over the formation of the German-speaking seminarians (and future priests) to the clutches of Karl Rahner.
After World War II, the inevitable results of Modernist thinking became plainly visible. Many parts of the Continent witnessed a drastic decline in the Faith.
The once ripe fields were almost bare. De Chardin and Rahner had done their work very well.
Turning Point in America
In 1945, many American bishops and religious superiors had the bright idea of sending their most promising seminarians to Europe to complete their education. Whether all of these bishops suspected the Modernist dangers on the Continent, or not -- God only knows! But keep in mind that Pope Pius X did warn the Catholic hierarchy that this insidious heresy was well organized within the Body of the Church. Some went to Rome, others to Louvain; still others went to the Institute Catholique in Paris, which had been the institute for skeptics and atheists for many years; and still others went to Innsbruck, Austria -- and waiting for them there was Karl Rahner.
It is no surprise then, in retrospect, that a high percentage of seminarians lost their orthodox faith. And no surprise that, world-wide, 32,000 priests preferred to be laymen and take steps to leave the active ministry. These unfortunate clerics did not know whether they were coming or going. Skepticism, uncertainty, relativism of truth created almost irreversible confusion in basic things, such as the purpose of life, the necessity of the Church, and the Sacramental system. And many of these confused people who remained in the Church passed on their confusion to others. Bright young men came back from Europe and were placed into positions of great influence. Many became seminary professors, university officials, and indeed some became bishops.
The Single Act
St. Alphonsus of Liguori preached that those who are in heaven are there because on earth they prayed; and those who are in hell are there because they did not pray. To be a priest or a nun at all you have to believe in this. But thanks to Bremond, de Chardin and Tyrrell and their long string of successors, radical new ideas about spirituality were put into circulation, which ideas denigrated the need for a prayer life. These ideas were in reality spin-offs of the Single Act concept which was condemned during the 17th century.
The Single Act comes down to "something has happened to make you like God". You and God become one. Therefore you do not have to do a lot of things that you used to do:
Don't examine your conscience
Don't make preparation for Holy Communion
Don't make a thanksgiving prayer after Communion
Don't be devoted to the saints
Don't meditate on the crucifix
Don't think about the unique, divine and/or human natures of Christ.
Something has happened, which sets your soul free from these obligations. The Modernists claim: "Vatican Council II has eliminated all these things". But they use the phrase "they were done in the spirit of Vatican II". (How many times have you heard that phrase to explain why something was changed in our Churches?)
Teilhard's one fundamental tenet is: There was no Adam! Hence, there was no Original Sin. If there is no Original Sin, there is no need to be redeemed from Original Sin. If there was no need for Redemption, then what happened on Calvary? The Cruxifixion was a waste of time! If there is no Original Sin then there is no fall from grace. Thus, whatever the Mass is, if there is no Sacrifice on Calvary, there is no Sacrifice of the Mass.
This is really the root of all the nonsense in the liturgy today!
If we admit that Adam and Eve are just myths, we can easily conclude that human nature here and now, in the concrete, is really the way it should be --except for some natural perfection still to come through evolution. Therefore your instincts are trustworthy. Don't mortify yourself, don't repress yourself. Do not observe the mortifications of Lent; forget about the practice of abstaining from meat on Fridays, do not enter those medieval religious communities -- where you must get up at two A.M. and wear musty old habits, and give up freedom, and practice self-denial, and generally miss out on what is going on in life. Not only do not do these things, but do not even respect those who do. Do not have respect for traditional religious, nor even for the Saints who founded the Orders. Karl Rahner has taken over the place that orthodox theologians like Thomas Aquinas used to have. People, clergy and religious say we can now enter into "Joy". Usually it's the joy of Playboy Magazine, the joy of sex and all the hedonist things we see around us.
God and Man are One
Karl Rahner teaches that God and man are one and the same thing. We have, in fact, been transubstantiated. This means that we can practically do no wrong. No wrong means no sin. Whenever you deal with man you deal with God. Therefore:
a. You do not have to worship the Eucharist. God is within you.
b. If you are attracted to someone, you may love him/her and have a "meaningful" divine relationship by engaging in sex acts.
c. Just love anybody in any sense that you wish, including your love of the poor -- even if you live in the upper class suburbs and the poor are miles away in the ghetto -- then you are always loving God.
d. Become a person, i.e., give vent to all instincts and inclinations. Don't worry about the old church rules and regulations.
And there we have it! This "new" theology is confusing, ambiguous, draws upon some truths (in part) and it is absurd and is probably from Satan. Yet it sells!
No Such Thing As Sin
According to the "new" theology:
There is no Adam. There is no such thing as sin. The Cruxifion was a waste of time. Christ never died for our sins. There is no Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. Christ is not present in our tabernacles. There is no reason to worship Christ. We are all gods. There is no reason to pray to Saints as they were simply fools who were taken in by the old Catholic theology. Do away with all external things like Novenas, the Rosary, the Stations of the Cross. No sin -- no confession. No need to bow or kneel before the tabernacle since Christ is not there. No need to kneel for reception of Holy Communion. No need to worry about only the priest should touch the Sacred Host, we being equal to God can touch the Host anytime we want, hence, Communion in the hand.
If you're confused as to what Catholics are being taught in CCD classes today it's no wonder. Children are being taught that Jesus is "their friend", "their buddy". We all share in the divinity of Christ. That makes us all little gods. If you don't think something is a sin, then it's not. No need to confess it any more. Really no need for confession because you don't really do anything that is seriously wrong. Children are no longer taught to proceed to the altar to receive Holy Communion with their hands folded in a prayer like manner. No need to receive Communion on the tongue as we are equal to God so what's the problem of everyone touching the Host? No need to genuflect anytime you enter church or pass the Tabernacle. No need to kneel to receive Communion.
Before Vatican II, it would be unheard of to witness any of the above.
Vatican II
Basically what happened at Vatican II was that Modernist theologians were present, Protestant ministers were invited to attend along with all our Catholic bishops. Modernist theologians who had studied in the universities mentioned above and who were given prestigious positions in the Catholic Church had been keeping their ideas under wraps waiting for the right moment to introduce them into the Church. Vatican II was the right moment. Some bishops disagreed with them vehemently and some bishops, who were not theologians themselves, listened and believed that some of the ideas were good. The Modernists had their foot in the door and they made the most of it.
Communion in the hand, standing to receive Communion, removing altar rails and statues and all signs of external religion were not in any of the papers of Vatican II. Nor were discontinuing praying the Rosary, praying to saints, praying to Mary. These things were introduced after the council and were introduced "in the spirit of Vatican II". They were implemented a little at a time and the bishops, priests and people were completely fooled.
By Their Fruits Ye Shall Know Them
Mathew 7:16 By their fruits ye shall know them:
1 Thessalonians 5:21 Test everything, hold fast to what is good.
Has anything good come from Vatican II? Has attendance at Holy Mass increased? Have there been more conversions to the Catholic Faith? Has there been an increase of young people in our seminaries and convents? Has there been an increase of belief in the True Presence in the Holy Eucharist?
Here are some facts regarding the fruits of the Vatican II Council:
Between 1965 and 2002, the number of total U.S. priests declined from 58,632 to 45,713, a decrease of 22 percent, and is expected to drop to 30,992 by 2020.
In 1999 there were more total U.S. priests in the 65 to 69 age group than in any other five-year age group. There were more priests age 80 to 84 than age 30 to 34.
In the 1940's and 50's each parish had 3 or 4 priests to attend to their flock. Now we have less than 1 priest per parish and many churches have been forced to merge as there weren't enough priests to take care of even one parish.
Between 1965 and 2002, the number of total U.S. seminarians decreased by 90 percent. In 1965 there were 10.73 total seminarians for every 10,000 Catholics. In 2002 there was .72 -- a decline of 93 percent.
Between 1965 and 2002, the number of brothers declined from 12,271 to 5,690, a decrease of 54 percent and will drop to 3,098 in 2020.
Between 1965 and 2002, the number of sisters declined from 179,954 to 75,500, a decrease of 58 percent and will drop to 39,282 in 2020.
Between 1965 and 2002, the number of diocesan high schools decreased by 50 percent.
Between 1965 and 2002, the number of parochial grade schools decrease by 37 percent.
In 1965 there were 22.9 sisters teaching for every 10,000 Catholics, in 2002 there were 1.26 -- a decline of 94 percent.
In 1965 there were 27.7 converts (adult baptisms) for every 10,000 Catholics, in 2002 there were 12.2 -- a decline of 56 percent.
Only 10 percent of Catholics go to confession at least once a year. And 10 percent say they have never been to confession.
In 1958 74 percent of Catholics attended Mass every Sunday. In 1999 it was 37 percent.
Another poll shows: You can be a good Catholic without performing the following actions:
Without going to Church every Sunday ---77%
Without obeying Church teaching re birth control -- 72%
Without obeying Church teaching re divorce and remarriage -- 65%
Without obeying Church teaching re abortion --- 53%
Without believing in the True Presence in the Eucharist -- 38%
Without believing Jesus rose from the dead -- 23%
Of Catholics who attend Mass every Sunday who believe the Eucharist is merely a symbol of Jesus --- 51%
Figures taken from "Index of Leading Catholic Indicators: The Church Since Vatican II" by Kenneth C. Jones
Has the Catholic church benefited from the changes introduced at the Vatican II council? Has the faith been advanced in any meaningful way? Is our Mass more sacred or less sacred? Are we one as Jesus commanded? The answer to these and other corresponding questions is an unequivocal no! I've yet to meet a priest, nun or even a serious theologian who can make a legitimate case that the lofty sounding "fruits of Vatican II" have achieved their stated goal of uniting a faithful Christian community. As a matter of fact, the "fruits of Vatican II" by all accounts has achieved exactly the opposite: a falling away of devotion; a profound lack of unity among what is left of the flock; closing of ninety percent of our Seminaries and Convents. By every measure we have failed our God. I close with two reminders; "By their fruits, ye shall know them." (Matt 7:16) and finally,
"We believed that after the Council would come a day of sunshine in the history of the Church. But instead there has come a day of clouds and storms, and of darkness ... And how did this come about? We will confide to you the thought that may be, we ourselves admit in free discussion, that may be unfounded, and that is that there has been a power, an adversary power. Let us call him by his name: the devil. It is as if from some mysterious crack, no, it is not mysterious, from some crack the smoke of satan has entered the temple of God."(Pope Paul VI, June 29, 1972) . . .
Much of the information regarding the Modernist movement has been taken from "Christ Denied", Origin Of The Present Day Problems In The Catholic Church, by Rev. Paul A. Wickens; Published by TAN Publishers, 1982.
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