Operation Sabotage!

Operation Sabotage!

Let’s take just one example of this to illustrate the point. A few months ago Bishop Tomas Aquinas agreed to come and do confirmations at a chapel in Ireland. He admitted explicitly that the reason he had not done so before was due to the need to obtain Bishop Williamson’s permission before going ahead. When he had not had Bishop Williamson’s permission to come to Ireland, he had not come. Once Bishop Williamson gave his permission, Bishop Tomas Aquinas was able to visit, thus confirming what many had suspected for quite a while already. And yet, listen to Bishop Williamson’s sermon at the consecration of that very same Bishop Tomas Aquinas, and what do we hear? “There can be no organisation, no structure.” “The era of structures is yesterday.” Just as in Canada a couple of years earlier, he insisted: “I don’t have authority! I cannot have authority!”

For someone who claims that he doesn’t believe in structures or organisations or authority, this is very odd. Why is it that Bishop Tomas Aquinas needed his permission to do confirmations in Ireland? Doesn’t that look rather like authority? What about when the same Bishop Tomas Aquinas denied a Benedictine welcome to Fr. Cardozo in 2016 and told the faithful not to attend his Mass, because “criticising Bishop Williamson has consequences”…? What on earth is going on? Here is one possibility. To make sense of the seeming illogicality and contradictory nature of the Fake Resistance one has to see it in the context of the betrayal of the SSPX, and to see that in the wider context of the plot against the Church. We tend to think of Rome as having somehow “tricked” the SSPX leadership through some kind of sudden foul-play, and there is some truth in this, although that is a rather simplistic and naïve way of seeing things. The truth is that Bishop Fellay’s fall and the betrayal of the SSPX which took place in 2012 did not suddenly happen out of the blue nor were they the fruit of one act of deception or trickery. Rather, they were the fruit of carefully laid and well organised plans going back decades. Plans which literally spanned generations and which required a lot of foresight and careful planning. We know already that this is how the enemy operates: various clues have been given to us in recent times (read, for example, the document known as the Permanent Instruction of the Alta Vendita). We know that they brought about the Revolution inside the Church at Vatican II, just as they promised they would. With hindsight, we can see that they will have been working for the past 40 years to bring about the submission of the SSPX in like manner. They almost certainly foresaw the SSPX before it happened and had already prepared a plan for just such a contingency, which they only had to take down off the shelf and put into effect.

Ask yourself this. Is it likely, is it at all remotely probable, that an enemy who is so wellorganised, so patient and so far-sighted would simply overlook the possibility that the same thing would not happen again? That when the SSPX succumbed to their nefarious designs, there would be an SSPX-of-the-SSPX, i.e. a Traditionalist Resistance to novelty which would simply denounce the betrayal, remove themselves from it and carry on the fight? Of course they foresaw it. They knew what would happen before we did! To think otherwise is naïve in the extreme. And what might their contingency for that (entirely predictable) outcome be, do you think? Rinse and repeat.

That is why we have a Fake Resistance. Because the enemy knows that right now is when we are at our most vulnerable. The early days, the “Wild West” of any movement, are always the most crucial and formative, and we are still in those early days of the Resistance, when everything counts as a scrabble “triple-word score” and the good or bad which we do is amplified into the future. Those of you who are gardeners will know that even if you grow seedlings in pots inside the house until they are too big for the pots, putting them outside in the ground can often be touch-and-go. Will they be eaten by pests or killed off by the frost? If they can make it a few weeks and manage to grow a bit bigger, they will be OK, but those first few days and weeks are crucial. That is where the Resistance is now.

Am I accusing every priest and faithful of the Fake Resistance of being a Masonic plant to destroy the Church? Not at all. Many, the majority even, I am sure, are allowing themselves to be used by someone else for ends which, ultimately, even they do not properly understand or do not want to think about. Like so many priests who stayed inside the SSPX, they are guilty of weakness, and through weakness, in going along with something which they ought to oppose. But aiding and abetting the enemy through weakness is still aiding and abetting the enemy.

One of the hallmarks of the enemy is subversion, deception, secrecy, saying one thing and doing the other, or not saying anything at all and acting in such a way very few people can see what you are doing. I put it to you dear reader that these are characteristics which the Fake Resistance has written all over it, the description fits the Fake Resistance like a glove.

To give one more example, from across the pond comes a story of a wedding presided at by Bishop Zendejas. The ceremony was being filmed from the choir loft. Zendejas ran up to the choir loft in full vestments, to tell the person filming in person and with urgency that they were not allowed to film the sermon. Please tell me: is such behaviour normal? Every one of his sermons since he left the SSPX have been private with the exception of two which were recorded without his consent (in October 2014). His newsletters have not been publicly available since 2015, and even his Mass times are only made known to an elite inner-circle of those in-the-know. Is that normal?  Are we not allowed to wonder, at least a little, at what might motivate this sort of behaviour? What did Our Lord say about confessing him? “He who confesses me before men, I will confess him before the Father.” Before men. That means publicly. The Church confesses Christ publicly. Any organisation or setup which involves confessing Him secretly is always to be avoided, if for that reason alone.

This need to confess Christ “before men” is also why, when considering the apostolate of a priest and what he stands for, anything which the priest tells you in private does not count. If a Resistance priest is tempted by sedevacantism and begins to become sedevacantist privately, in his own mind, then he is still a Resistance priest as long as that is the last public position he has taken. The moment he makes his sedevacantism public, then it is a different matter of course. The same applies to a Resistance priest who tells you in private that he does not agree with Bishop Williamson’s novelties and scandals. Very well and good. But as long as it is done in private only, it does not count. What about the other faithful, don’t they also have a right to know where he stands?  If he is not prepared to say anything distancing himself from Bishop Williamson in public, then he is guilty of silence. “In private” does not count. Only “in public” counts.

Here is another example from closer to home. On the proverbial grapevine comes news that Fr. Paul Morgan is now saying Sunday Mass in South East England (near St. Michael’s school). There was no public announcement, and as far as I can see there is no way for interested parties to acquire details of this apostolate. This feels very like what happened in the USA four years back with Fr. Zendejas, whose Masses were invitation only, only for a select few, for those in the know. Not a good sign.

Now, leaving aside the obvious point that this not and never was how the Church operates, there is the further question of who exactly Fr. Morgan is and what he thinks he is doing. Last I recall he was our District Superior, the one who took part in the 2012 General Chapter, where he failed to remove or in any way sanction Bishop Fellay and ultimately confirmed him as Superior General. The same Fr. Morgan who signed the General Chapter Statement with its scandalous six conditions (three of which were only “desirable,” remember?). The same one who then came back to London and spent the next three years telling anyone who would listen that everything was now fine in the SSPX, things are back to normal, we haven’t changed, and above all don’t have anything to do with those Resistance people! The same one who was ready to refuse communion to faithful guilty of criticising Bishop Fellay and who ordered a notice placed in the back of all SSPX chapels denouncing this very newsletter and forbidding anyone to give or receive a copy of it (even though he himself had praised it in private shortly before). That one. The same Fr. Morgan who wrote in his last ever District Newsletter editorial (August 2015) that he was really pleased that it was Fr. Robert Brucciani who was taking over and recommended him warmly to the faithful. Suddenly, a mere two or three years later, that same Fr. Morgan is somehow magically transformed into a “Resistance” priest with not a word about any of those things? To put it mildly, I think we are entitled to be a little sceptical.  Something is not right.  For our American readers, the equivalent would be if Fr. Arnaud Rostand were suddenly to pop up and start behaving as though he were a Resistance priest, acting as though he hadn’t been fighting the Resistance just a few years before, and without any hint that he had changed his mind since then or regretted the part he had played.  Can you imagine?

For the record, I have no way of knowing exactly what Fr. Morgan thinks he is up to, but I think one can reasonably conclude the following. First, that it is highly unlikely that Fr. Morgan would operate in the South East of England without at least having checked-in with a certain episcopal personality who lives in an eight-bedroom house in Broadstairs. Nor, I think, it safe to say, would he currently be ministering to English faithful if the aforementioned Broadstairs personality were against it. I think, then, it is probably safe to say that he has his tacit approval at the very least, even if not an explicit charter. Secondly, that since leaving the SSPX he is now short of a constituency of supporters amongst the faithful. His target constituency, therefore, it seems to me, would be precisely the sort of people who are either already involved in the Resistance or are thinking seriously about it. Thirdly, that if I know Fr. Morgan at all, he is not the sort of priest who is adventurous enough or courageous enough to launch out unaided into the great unknown, trusting only to Divine Providence, and make a go of it from scratch (this is not a criticism, very few priests are); and that therefore he will have received or be receiving some sort of at least moral support and encouragement from somewhere, if not support of a more substantial, material nature. A small group of faithful freshly departed from the SSPX will not be able to offer substantial material support. The irony here is that those of us who have been in the Resistance from the early days are probably better placed  to support a resident priest, though we have none to support; whereas it always seems to be that the “newcomer” priests, the ones who spring up suddenly though nobody is quite sure where they stand, are always, it seems, quite able to look after themselves materially, almost as though they have support and backing from someone else in the background. But there, maybe I am just seeing things?

Fourthly, it seems fairly likely to me that whoever has been or is providing him with such “moral support” (if not material support also) will be doing so for a reason and with a motive in mind. We do not know what that motive may be, but it must exist. Finally, I will point out that there would be no need for anyone to speculate or surmise anything about anything were Fr. Morgan not operating in secrecy and without declaring himself openly.

Let me say once again - and this is true with or without Fr. Morgan’s contribution to events - we can be reasonably sure that the enemy is seeking to subvert the Resistance and neutralise it, and moreover, that they are seeking to do so by secret, silent and undeclared means. The enemies of the Church know that they cannot keep everyone from leaving the SSPX, that a certain number will inevitably leave whatever they do. Their purpose is to ‘take care of’ them by leading them up the garden path. This is why the Fake Resistance exists. The Fake Resistance is not just a collection of people who are not clear about what they believe, bumbling about in a disorganised and haphazard fashion. They are something far worse: a deliberate counterfeit, designed to deceive and mislead. If the SSPX in 2012 became “Operation Suicide” and the Resistance since then has been “Operation Survival,” then the Fake Resistance truly is “Operation Sabotage.”  That is its goal, its purpose and its reason for existing.

We are therefore entirely justified in being extremely wary of secrecy and silence and undeclared actions and intentions. Our Lord tells us that the true shepherd is he who enters in through the front door, but whoever climbs in over the wall is a robber (see John 10:1).  As Fr. Hewko recently said in his sermon in London, we are sick and tired of people playing games with the Faith. We are not after as many Masses as possible: what we want is the Faith without compromise, without any dalliance with liberalism, whether it be SSPX liberalism or Bishop Williamson’s liberalism. We want nothing to do with the Council, with the New Mass, or the bogus, fake conciliar “miracles,” or any of that nonsense. We want only to preserve what Archbishop Lefebvre handed down to us, and hand it down to others in turn. Any priest or faithful is welcome with the Resistance, there is nothing which could not be easily forgiven, but we have had enough of secrecy and politics and lack of clarity. By all means, write to Fr. Morgan, ask him what on earth he thinks he’s up to and impress on him the need to make a clear stand in the line of Archbishop Lefebvre and to confess Christ before men. It may be that he is simply unthinking or ignorant of what has been going on. Or he may be giving in to weakness. In the end it does not matter. Like all of us, he must decide what he stands for, what his purpose and goal is, and then say so clearly and publicly.  He must confess Christ before men.  But be firm in insisting that, until he does, his presence serves no useful purpose.

From The Recusant  Issue 49