Yes. That’s right. Try, even for one moment, to imagine the old SSPX of Archbishop Lefebvre sounding like this...
Fr. Paul Robinson, SSPX:Government Restrictions Good, ‘Conspiracy Theories’ Bad!
This thirty minute interview was posted on the “SSPX News” ‘youtube’ channel at the start of April. The interview begins with the interviewer asking whether the coronavirus ought to be seen as a chastisement from God. The answer almost immediately is a ‘no’ and not only that, but we ought, according to Fr. Robinson, to see everything that is happening now as a good thing.
Fr. Robinson then goes on to elaborate on this at some length, by pointing out that one appreciates ordinary things much more when there is a chance that they might be taken away.
So the coronavirus is helping us. More specifically, enforced measures, the government curfews and all the rest. These are good things which are “helping us” too. Fr. Robinson then goes on to more or less repeat the same propaganda trotted out by governments around the world, that these measures are necessary in order to keep hospitals from being overwhelmed, and so forth.
Notice a few things in this. There is not a hint of scepticism of the official mainstream media narrative. Fr. Robinson says twice that this is all about preventing “the overloading of the hospitals.” Already as I write this, there is an ocean of evidence out there that hospitals are empty. Hospital ships in New York with 1,000 spaces have had a grand total of 80 patients so far. Doctors and nurses seem to be spending their time at work making music videos. This naivety on the part of Fr. Robinson will not stand the test of time: it is already being proved false a mere week or two after he spoke these words. But it is fairly clear that he believes the official narrative. Not only is there not the slightest hint that the mainstream media narrative might be a tad exaggerated, it is clear that Fr. Robinson has fallen for it wholesale and worse, is trying to spread it abroad in the SSPX.
Notice too that there is no mention whatever of how governments using the force of law to forbid public Mass and forbid Easter and Holy week ceremonies goes against the rights of Christ the King. Nor, on a purely natural level is there any consideration of the injustice of causing so many to lose their jobs and livelihoods and become unemployed, never mind the self-employed and small business owners who have lost everything.
Nor is there any mention whatever of the people pushing this “18 month lockdown” global pandemic narrative, (Bill Gates, the United Nations, the World Health Organisation, et al.) are the very same ones who have been pushing abortion, contraception, sterilisation, ‘women’s lib,’ forced vaccination with vaccines made from aborted babies, and so many other evils throughout the world. On the contrary, what we see here is the SSPX in the person of Fr. Robinson, effectively becoming a willing mouthpiece for these same people and organisations, helping to spread the unjustified fear and panic. Not the tiniest hint of a conspiracy at work. That is because Fr. Robinson thinks conspiracy theories are dangerous, as we shall see shortly.
As though that already weren’t enough, Fr. Robinson then goes on to offer his audience yet more reasons why he considers the current government shut-ins and shut downs and power grabs to be a good thing.
Isn’t it great! You may have lost your job, your livelihood, be looking at losing your home... even your right to free assembly and to publicly worship God (and God, too, apparently has no right to be publicly worshipped!) -but look on the bright side! You all get to spend so much more time getting to appreciate each other! This is so nail-bitingly embarrassing and cringe-worthy that even the interviewer cannot quite bring himself to agree with but resorts to remark-ing, in a joking tone but with a serious undertone, about how “familiarity breeds contempt” when one is forced to stay “in the house with your kids all day, all night, no activities, no nothing.”
Fr. Robinson’s response is to laughingly say that this whole situation reminds him of G K Chesterton’s novel “Manlive,” which, he says, is Chesterton’s version of Fulton Sheen’s “Life is Worth Living.” (On a point of pedantry: surely that is the wrong way around? ‘Manalive’ was published in 1912, and Chesterton died in 1936, whereas Sheen’s broadcasts took place after the Second World War... oh, never mind!). I have read and enjoyed ‘Manalive,’ and agree it is typically Chestertonian and contains a lot of his typical joie de vivre. But I am not sure that this current situation has anything in common that: if anything, the opposite. I cannot see Chesterton for one moment being on the side of the po-faced, virtue signalling, mask-wearing “save our NHS!” social distancers. (“You sat on a park bench! How DARE you! How selfish! It’s people like you who are putting strain on our hospitals!”) On the contrary, G K Chesterton’s whole message in ‘Manalive’ as well as elsewhere, in my opinion, is precisely the opposite of that. People ought to be allowed to get on with their ordinary lives unmolested by the high-and-mighty social planners, the forces of big government and big science who always know better than the rest of us. Because their ‘ordinary lives’ are worth so much more than the high and mighty could ever realise or appreciate. Chesterton goes out of his way to make the busy-bodies of this world (the sort of people who denounce their neighbours for sitting on a park bench, one might almost say!) appear every bit as ridiculous and selfish as they really are. That is my opinion, for what it is worth. Equally, might the same not be said of Mgr. Fulton Sheen? If, as per the title of his show, ‘Life is Worth Living,’ then shouldn’t we be allowed to get on with living it..?! Again, this is only my opinion, but it seems to me that ‘Life is Worth Living’ and ‘Stay in Your Homes! You are Only Allowed To Do What We Tell You To Do!’ are two messages fundamentally at odds with each other. But perhaps that’s just me.
By the middle of the video, Fr. Robinson is talking about how people who normally show up late for Mass are being made to appreciate their Mass. “They are just so grateful just to have confession and Holy Communion,” he says,
Of course, I’m sure this is to some extent true, and it is never a bad thing when people appreci-ate Mass and the sacraments more. But there is also more than a little bit of self praise going on here, a SSPX priest and an employee of the SSPX talking about how much everyone should value the SSPX school and Mass at the SSPX chapel. One finds it almost a bit too much.
Most of the second half of the video is largely the same. “Why does God permit bad things to happen?” (such as the father of a Catholic family losing his job, for example). Even when what is said is true, as discussed above, it does tend rather to miss the point, and also to gloss over the very great evil of what exactly is going on right now, the lies in the media, the power grab by the elites, and all the rest. Most of what Fr. Robinson says is a repetition of the same senti-ments mentioned earlier ([18:00] “So when you have something like a coronavirus lock-down, it really has a way of purifying our intentions and we sort of say to ourselves: ‘What really is important here in my life?’ ”).
Likewise, that “Americans are praying more,” or that “people are thirsty for a Tuesday morning Mass.” -sure, that, in and of itself that is a good thing. But it is a good side effect of the evil happening now. That doesn’t mean that what is happening now is a good thing!
To see why this matters, ask yourself the following question. What is likely to be the effect of encouraging everyone to think of this evil situation of a good thing, as Fr. Robinson does here? Won’t one of the side effects be to kill any resistance to what is happening? We still don’t know what will happen when (if!) things go back to normal again. If there were any justice in the world, the power-hungry manipulators and high-level scare-mongers would be put on trial and held accountable for their misdeeds and heads would roll. Better still, lessons would be learned and measures taken to prevent anything like this happening again. But will any of that happen? We mustn’t get our hopes up. But the point is this: that such talk on the part of priest like Fr. Robinson and the mentality he promotes here would, if adopted en masse, ensure that nothing like that would ever happen, that nobody would be held accountable and no lessons learned. It is a manifesto for docility and passiveness.
And it is also a manifesto for selfishness, because it encourages people to think of themselves and those close to them, me, my family... whereas every Catholic father should know that he is his neighbour’s keeper, and that Catholic Action is his imperative. No Catholic man has the right to look no further than his own family’s welfare. To do so is purely selfish, and if that is how supposedly Traditional Catholics act, then -heaven help us! -we deserve to live under a Freemasonic tyranny. Yes, it is nice to appreciate having Mass and a school. But if that is where it stops then it is selfish, and you deserve to have neither. What about the three-hundred and something odd million other Americans, who don’t have that, who don’t even have the Faith? What about the rights of Christ the King, what about his right to be publicly recognised, worshipped and obeyed? What are we going to do to get these abortion laws overturned and make public reparation, as a country, everyone, from the highest to the lowest, for the huge evil of abortion and the many other public evils? How will that ever happen if I am encouraged to just go to my Mass and be grateful for it and think how lucky I am, and other than that, content myself with reflecting that this is what God wants so I shouldn’t do anything or even try to understand what has happened or why...? The answer is, of course, that it won’t.
The last six minutes of the video are undoubtedly the worst and should show, beyond doubt, that I am not reading too much into what Fr. Robinson says and what he omits to say. If you watch no other portion of the video, watch this! Let us quote at some length, and let the words speak for themselves.
Wow. Where does one even begin..?
Well, Father, Andrew. First things first, read my lips: This. Should. Not. Happen. And Andrew, saying that we “conspiracy theorists” don’t accept that God is in charge and saying that we don’t trust in Providence, those two things are basically the same. Besides, even if you don’t want to say it, Fr. Robinson already did. So you really needn’t worry.
Now that I’ve got that off my chest, let us have a look at the dishonest sleight of hand which is being set up here. Firstly, notice that anyone who disagrees with Fr. Robinson must be “bitter,” and not just regular “bitter” either, but positively “wrapped up in bitterness”..! How convenient. Furthermore, we are resisting the Providence of God, it seems. Fr. Robinson is very keen, it seems, to tell us that this situation, “is not a mistake in the plan of God.” But nobody is saying that it is. As someone who must have studied the Summa in seminary, Fr. Robinson knows very well that God has a permissive will, by which He permits evil and uses it to bring good out of it. The evil does not come from God, it is not what He would have wanted, and it is not a good thing in itself, just because God can bring evil out of it. Nor does that mean that we are not to resist it or try to overturn it or that we ought not to prevent it from happening in future, just because God can bring good out of it.
To take just one example, the Communist occupation of the Eastern part of Austria after the Second World War was an evil. Doubtless God brought a lot of good out of that evil, maybe Austrian Catholics in the Soviet-occupied zone started to pray more, maybe many were able to suffer for Christ or even to become martyrs. The Austrian Catholics, however, did not passively accept the occupation of part of their country; they worked tirelessly and vigorously against it. And finally, following a rosary crusade in which virtually the whole country participated, after a decade of occupation the Soviet army finally left. Were those Catholics “wrapped up in bitterness”..? Did they “not have a supernatural perspective”..? Were they being “purely naturalistic” by “assigning some cause” (in their case, the Red Army) to the evil? Ought they to have done nothing but say to themselves “This is the situation that God has arranged and therefore I have to submit myself to Divine Providence”...? It is ridiculous.
The truth is that we do have to sanctify ourselves in whatever situation or circumstance in which we find ourselves. Yes, this situation is, as Fr. Robinson says, “a means [from] God for me to sanctify myself.” That part of what he says is true: Fr. Robinson is telling a half truth. Everything one does, one’s daily activities are a way of sanctifying oneself “in this situation.” Dare I say it, even “reading internet articles” and “figuring out explanations” are “means for me to sanctify myself.” Remember the Saint who told St. John Bosco that even if he knew for certain that the world would end in a few minutes he would nevertheless continue playing because it was recreation hour and therefore the time when he ought to be playing..? That is really how it is. If it is the time for me to be saying my morning prayers on my knees before a crucifix, then I ought to be saying my morning prayers on my knees before a crucifix. If it’s time for me to be making a cup of tea, then I sanctify myself by making a cup of tea. And drinking it. If it is time for me to be reading internet conspiracy theory articles, then I ought to be reading internet conspiracy theory articles, and it is by reading internet conspiracy theory articles at that very moment that I am sanctifying myself. Laborare est orareis a concept that everyone understood very well in the middle ages: working is praying. The false dichotomy, the “either/or fallacy” which Fr. Robinson here presents is to suggest that submitting oneself to Providence, self-sanctification and prayer are somehow at odds with looking for a natural explanation for something which, let’s face it, is a purely natural act with human agents (after all, we are talking about government restrictions, not a tornado or earthquake, or some other ‘act of God’). There is absolutely no reason why “figuring out explanations” means “missing that opportunity of grace.” Were the Christeros in 1920s Mexico missing an opportunity of grace by taking up arms against their own Masonic government? Perhaps they started fighting only because they lacked “supernatural perspective” and were “wrapped up in bitterness”..?
Incidentally, one really has to watch the video to see the look of pure contempt on his face as Fr. Robinson talks of an “army of internet conspiracy theorists.” As for the explanations which he presents while part-laughing, as though to ridicule it, please notice that one of those crazy conspiracy theories is the idea that powerful men wish to reduce the population. Would somebody please point out to him that several of those very same powerful men have said openly that that is precisely what they aim to do? Another ridiculous (in his eyes) explanation, that what we are witnessing is “some sort of attempt of the government to control our lives,” is not a theory at all, but a simple matter of fact. Look around you. The government is controlling all our lives! Can anyone deny it? The fact that it is not just one government but lots and lots of different governments, different governments who are all supposed to be completely independent of each other but who have all decided to take the same drastic, unprecedented actions, even the ones who quite obviously didn’t want to take those actions but who ended up taking them anyway -does that not further suggest somebody conspiring at a very high level, beyond even national boundaries? Is it not at least a possibility? Fr. Robinson seems certain that there cannot be the slightest truth in any of this, though I cannot myself see why he is so certain. The idea that governments want more and more control over our daily lives is a manifest fact: that they are always seeking to pass ever more invasive legislation, whilst occasionally being thwarted in that goal, surely attests to this. That the Democrats might try to use this as an opportunity to try to unseat President Trump is, I am sure, also true, though as to the question of causality, it may simply be a question of unscrupulous opportunists knowing a good bandwagon when they see one and jumping at the opportunity. Is it really so far fetched? Is it conceivable that the Democratic party would not try somehow to turn this to their advantage in the upcoming election? That sounds perfectly reasonably to me, it is what I would expect.
All of that is neither crazy nor unreasonable. And, importantly, it does not mean that you are “trying to think your way out of this” and thereby resisting God’s grace, as Fr. Robinson is suggesting. Finally, the careful reader may wish to consider that a long line of Popes from Clement XII in 1738 right the way through the 19th century and into the 20th century, and including Pope St. Pius X, Fr. Robinson’s own patron, were themselves “conspiracy theorists” who warned the Church against the occult conspiracies of powerful men, and in particular the danger posed by the Freemasons. Those Popes did not content themselves with sitting idly by and telling people to appreciate their Catholic school all the more because one day they might not have it! We will have to include a selection of quotes from them, so that you can see for yourself. While we are at it, we might also include Archbishop Lefebvre in the ranks of us “bitter” and “naturalistic” conspiracy theorists. Who would have thought that we would so soon be seeing one of his own spiritual descendants talking and speaking in such a disgraceful manner in public.
One final point, if I may, on what the interviewer (who we gather is an SSPX employee named Andrew) says on the impossibility of any conspiracy. “They’re not that smart,” he says, “no politician is that smart [enough] to think forty steps ahead like this.” No politician, perhaps, yes. But who said anything about a politician being the main conspirator? The politi-cians are only responsible in that they are going along with it and are not standing up to it. But secret societies never like to show their hand. Part of how they manage to stay in the back-ground is that the front man, the one who you get to see as being apparently in charge, is never the one who is really deciding what happens next. Remember Disraeli’s “hidden hand.” The politician is only the front man. Someone else in the background is pulling the strings, but because he is standing in the shadows, we cannot see who he is. And is “thinking forty steps ahead” too much for any one human being? Perhaps, Andrew. Perhaps. It’s almost as though there were some super-human intelligence doing the planning ahead, one might almost say an angelicintelligence, which is directing everything. The beauty of a secret army is that being secret even to its own members, as long a there is a strict discipline and obedience, only the very top level leaders need ever come into direct contact with such an intelligence; the rank and file can be allowed to think that they’re in a charitable club for likeable old duffers.
The remainder of this car-crash interview is much of the same.
This “What’s the meaning..?” navel-gazing is exactly the same sentiment expressed by Fr. Wegner in his “Message to the Faithful During Pandemic” (see p.5). And as above, please notice how it encourages a self-absorbed outlook. What is the meaning of my family, my church, my children, the SSPX school..? What do they mean to me? Nothing so much as that if I love any of them more than Our Lord, then I am not worthy of Him (Matt. 10:37).
Think of how many souls achieved holiness and heaven through suffering under Communism these past hundred years. And now imagine them saying “God bless Communism!” Think of the huge amount of poverty and starvation across Europe at the end of the Second World War, and now imagine the poor survivors of that catastrophe sitting starving in the rubble of their homes, saying “God bless the Second World War!” What sort of a priest would get up into the pulpit of his half bombed-out church in war-torn Europe and tell that to his congregation of homeless, starving parishioners? “God bless the war! I’m really glad this all happened to you! Without it, you’d all be so much more worldly!” Yes, there’s a way in which it is true. But what a crass thing to say, even so. Yes, God can bring good out of an evil situation, but still it remains an evil situation. Why is that so hard to understand? And the interviewer’s response to this closing remark?
So just be passive and take it, in other words. To illustrate just how wrong this is, let’s try substituting coronavirus for abortion. Well, look, I wish there weren’t any abortions, I don’t like it either, but it is what it is. We can’t be like these bitter people who are always thinking on a purely natural level, always seeing bad guys and trying to connect the dots and strings. It’s not what matters. We need to support our local SSPX school, that’s what matters. God allowed us to live in a country with abortion, that’s part of his plan, so stop worrying about it. No. The numbers are false, Andrew. And it does matter. And we’re only angry in the same way that Archbishop Lefebvre was angry. To paraphrase the great Archbishop: “The SSPX has lost the Faith my friends! The SSPX has lost the faith! These are not just words I am saying to you...”
St. Pius X, ora pro nobis!
