'The Recusant' Summer 2020: SSPX Watch

Taken from The Recusant, Issue 52 (Summer 2020)

See for yourself: stas.org/en/publications/newsletters/palm-sunday-2020-fly-or-bee-57055

Let us quote several extracts. I promise, I am not making this up.
The threat which “hangs over our heads” is not “the virus” but that of our own governments and the dishonest designs of wicked men. The virus may be “quite real,” but it is also vastly exaggerated, meaning that this deadly “black death” - type virus which we were told was so deadly it would kill millions turned out not to be real at all! And has it really been spreading “desolation and death in its wake”..?! Methinks Fr. Le Roux writeth fiction again!
Here we go again, good old “conspiracy theories”! Didn’t you know, haven’t you heard? There are no conspiracies! All those Popes (not to mention Archbishop Lefebvre) got it wrong! Aren’t you glad?

And if you’re going to try to name the “conspiracy theories,” at least get it right! People are not saying that Covid-19 is a conspiracy “to exterminate half the planet” any more than they are saying that it “does not exist.” What lots of people are saying is that it exists but its impact has been exaggerated far out of proportion for nakedly political motives. Is that so very hard to understand? By the way, are we to take it that the conspiracy theorists causing “panic” and “alarmist depression” (see below) include men such as Prof. Sucharit Bhakdi, Prof. Knut Wittowski, Prof. John Ioannidis, Prof. Sunetra Gupta, retired Chief Justice Lord Sumption or the US Attorney General, to name but a few (see Recusant 51 for a few more!). Poor people, they must not have had the benefit of Fr. Le Roux’s counsel or they would realise that their “theories” are just “part of a general panic” and nothing more.
The problem is precisely that certain men have a great deal too much control! When was there ever a time in human history when governments forcibly quarantined healthy people? If everyone all round had less control at this point, I think we’d all be a lot happier. “Consuming an excess of information” - sounds very 2013 SSPX (“Don’t listen to what people are saying on the internet about Bishop Fellay and Rome!”) don’t you think? And of course -conspiracy theories! Again! Twice in one letter! Was there a memo from HQ which listed this as a talking point? As for “terror” which “paralyses souls,” anyone living in the real world knows instantly that it is the mainstream media with their fraudulent “pandemic” narrative which has caused terror. Reading naughty “conspiracy theories,” by contrast, can be quite a calming and even liberating experience. Discovering that this latest “pandemic” crisis narrative is all a lot of unfounded media hype and propaganda has been, for many, something quite reassuring.
The end of the letter is fairly boring. Hmmm. Let’s try to give Fr. Le Roux a helping hand here, and see if we can’t finish off this letter for him, the way I’m sure he meant to end it. (Let’s see... lots of silly adjectives and metaphors which somehow don’t quite work, that seems to be his style...) Perhaps what he meant to say was something along the lines of:

* * *

SSPX Watch: Mitteilungsblatt

The SSPX’s handling of the Covid 19 fake “crisis” drew criticism across the world.

Not many of us, perhaps, had realised just what an impact that criticism had made, however. Over on the European continent, the June 2020 German District Newsletter (“Mitteilungsblatt” here: fsspx.de/sites/sspx/files/media/ger-district/pub-magazine/mb_2020-06_d_web.pdf) is largely used to defend their own actions in this regard. They are, alas, trying to defend the indefensible.

In his article “Covid 19 and the Sacraments” (p.10) Fr. Pascal Schreiber begins by describing a female tuberculosis patient’s visit to Lourdes in 1902. The staff won’t let her bathe in the water. She is so weak and ill that if submersed in the water they fear she “will not survive the cold shock. Therefore, they only wet the stomach of the seriously ill patient with the healing water.” He then says that this is “very relevant to the topic of Covid 19.” Is it, though? They didn’t refuse her any contact at all with the water. And nobody on their way into an SSPX chapel is asking to be submersed in Holy Water, just to be allowed to use a little bit, as normal. His choice of Lourdes as an example is interesting, however, since Lourdes actually shut down completely for the first time ever in its history due to the fake “epidemic.” How’s that for scandalous? Fr. Schreiber, however, does not seem aware of this fact; or at any rate, he does not discuss it.

He then points out that with Holy Communion, Transubstantiation changes the whole substance but does not change the accidence of bread and wine. This is true. The relevant question is this: will God allow even the accidence of Holy Communion to cause harm to the one who receives Him? Furthermore, even if one were convinced that this were so, which is the better choice: to receive Holy Communion at the risk of suffering or even death, or to not risk it in order to protect the body? These questions, once again, we feel are not dealt with properly. Instead Fr. Schreiber draws another unsatisfactory parallel. With someone suffering from Coeliac disease, he says, the priest must “either give the communicant a tiny part of the host or, if there is an intolerance for even a tiny part of the host, give them the precious blood” from the chalice. Again, he the comparison does not work: nobody is saying that a person with Coeliac disease can’t ever be given communion again in their life as long as they still have that illness. “The same applies to holy water,” he says:
True. The problem, both with Holy Water as with Holy Communion, lies in his pitting the accidental properties against the supernatural ones. Which properties more truly represent the purpose of Holy Water, the accidental properties or the supernatural properties? And would God wish for the two to be in competition, as though the accidental could thwart the supernatural? As though in answer to this, Fr. Schreiber seems not to have noticed that he himself has just given away the truth. Look again at his list of supernatural effects of holy water. The last one is, “help against diseases.” How then can he or anyone justify removing holy water from chapels because of the imagined ill effects or possible transmission of a “disease” which in reality is slightly less deadly than normal flu? To prevent people from using holy water at the entrance to the chapel on “health grounds” when one of the effects of holy water is preventing ill health... The mind boggles.

...except that the Church does share that view, as Fr. Schreiber himself unwittingly shows in the very same article! Given all of which, an important question still needs answering. How can we not see empty holy water stoops as a symbol of a lack of faith..?

In the same issue, in his District Superior’s Letter (p.6), Fr. Stefan Pfluger also deals with the Covid 19 “crisis” and is an absolute “classic” of liberal SSPX propaganda, indeed one wonders if he wrote it after reading the same memo as Fr. Wegner, Fr. Robinson, Fr. Yves Le Roux, for it contains exactly the same talking points and is just as facile.At the start of the crisis, he says, some of his priests predicted “that the lukewarm would become more lukewarm, but the zealous would also become more zealous.” Aha. Interesting. I wonder where that “lukewarmness” came from? It certainly wasn’t always there, just ask anyone who remembers the SSPX of yesteryear. 

Of course, it did not help that the folks who left for the Resistance after 2012 tended to be the more zealous ones and that those who stayed have been encouraged since that time into an increasing dependency on the SSPX, encouraged to believe that they could not possibly survive for five minutes without their chapel, their daily Mass, their school... That would make for a really interesting article.

Fr. Pfluger does not look into any of those things, however. In fact most of what he has to say is what we have seen in these pages often enough before. People are now making more fervent confessions, he says, and appreciating family life more -as though nobody has lost their job, their house, their livelihood... or as though the German government did not say recently that they are going to start tracking people! Then there are also a few passive-aggressive digs which he aims at his critics (don’t you just love those?), such as:
-Err... I don’t know, both? -And:
I agree. And my inner peace is tip-top, thank you for asking, however distressing it is to see priests losing the Faith and putting Mammon before God. Let’s hope he can turn this criticism on himself, put Our Lord first and argue objectively!

Fr. Pfluger then goes on to say that three main points challenge “us” (the SSPX?) in the current crisis are the emptying of holy water fonts, the banning of Mass and what he calls a “lack of charity about what is really going on.”

As to the final point, on the whole it is nothing other than what we saw Fr. Robinson saying last issue, and what we see Fr. Le Roux saying in this one, albeit with a little more detailed an explanation than those two gave us. “Unfortunately, information is now primarily obtained via the Internet,” he says, and this is unfortunate because, “When I inform myself on the Internet, there is no personal encounter. I personally cannot get an idea of the other person and their credibility.” To give Fr. Pfluger his due, what he says can be true, the internet does have pitfalls, and it can be hard to tell who to trust -but not always. And in this case many of the most important sources of information are videos of Doctors, Scientists and others (Prof. Knut Wittowski, for example, or Dr. John Ioannidis) where one can both hear and see the speaker, as it were, face to face. And even with plain old websites (such as “A Swiss Doctor on Covid 19” or “Covid 19 In Proportion”), the information speaks for itself. One can often recognise a truth said clearly without the need to know who is saying it.

One suspects that Fr. Pfluger has not looked at any of the wealth of information out there concerning Covid 19, otherwise he would realise that what he says about credibility simply does not hold true. Furthermore, the opposite can also be true: it can happen that a person can be impressive, physically dominating or even suave and charming enough that they manage to deceive others in person in a way that would never have been possible had their argument been confined to words on a page. But the overruling guide, according to Fr. Pfluger is -you’ve guessed it! -“peace of mind”..! Or heart. Or both.
Oh my. Notice the clear implication that fulfilling your “duties of state” requires that you have “peace of mind”; also that your duty is to “pay, pray and obey,” be a good little obedient global citizen and not worry about what the baddies are up to. There is no discussion, no hint at all that your duties of state might actually involve finding out whether or why not to have your children vaccinated. What about the duty to know whether you can trust your government? Whether you can trust the mainstream media? Are those not the clear duty of every Catholic, family fathers most of all? In Germany, a country where laws created by Adolf Hitler to ensure the state’s absolute control over the family (such as the law against home-schooling) are still rigorously enforced to this day, this is arguably even more important.

As for “what steals the hearts’ peace is not a good thing” -how often have we heard that one over the last few years? One would think that any self-respecting SSPX priest would be embarrassed to utter anything so fatuous! It’s almost as though someone has been reading Fr. Yves Le Roux and is now trying to imitate his style! Your house may be on fire, your wife and children may be about to suffocate in their sleep, but don’t worry! Go back to sleep! After all, you don’t want it to disturb your peace of heart, do you? Any true solider of Christ wants to know just how bad things are, no matter how distressing the reality may be. And in any case, true peace of soul comes from doing the will of God. It frequently goes hand-in-hand with suffering and can rarely be found among the wealthy and powerful. But one would never guess that from reading this sort of trite nonsense. And there’s more:
Fr. Pfluger’s first quote is misleadingly selective. For in Book 3, Ch.25 of the Imitation, the passage he has quoted continues immediately with the following words which rather under-mine his whole point: “
...which, really, is just common sense, isn’t it? Forget about feelings, feeling “peaceful,” not feeling upset, or depressed, never experiencing any disturbance, only ever “sweetness and devotion” -forget it! All that has nothing to do with it! If your life is just rosy and everything goes your way and nothing ever causes you distress, then you need to be worried! The Second quote, that we should “not concern ourselves with what others say and do” is good, sound advice. It is also completely irrelevant to any discussion of Covid 19, the New World Order, vaccinations, government lockdowns, the SSPX’s loss of Faith or anything connected with those things. It is quite clearly talking about the natural human tendency to gossip and stick their nose into their neighbour’s affairs, like the nosey parkers we all are (once in a while!). The clue that gives it away -it’s not hard! -is the phrase -“no concern of ours,” and again, “who meddles in affairs not his own.” Is the question of whether or not the government are going to force your children to be injected with a potentially dangerous and life-altering vaccine really an affair not your own? Is the question of who rules your country, who passes its laws and what their motives, intentions and goals might be, really no concern of yours? This is ridiculous. Clearly that is not what Thomas a Kempis is talking about, and as a priest the chances of Fr. Pfluger not realising that must surely be extremely small.

We must add that it is extremely irresponsible not to say dishonest for a priest, a District Superior no less, to misuse and misquote the Imitation and mislead his audience in such a deceitful way. Let the above serve as a little example. We have caught them at it here, but can you guarantee that you will always spot every such deception in future? The lesson to be learned is that you cannot trust the SSPX. So stop trusting them. Stop listening to them. Stop supporting them. Otherwise, you almost deserve to be deceived.

Fr. Pfluger finishes by recommending the article by Fr. Schreiber which we have already looked at, but before that his final point is that from late 1576 until January 1577 St. Charles Borromeo imposed a quarantine on the city of Milan for forty days. “At that time the Mass was celebrated in the streets and squares of the city and people could follow it from inside the houses.” Like Fr. Schreiber’s examples of Lourdes and communion for people with Coeliac disease, this example should do little to reassure the attentive reader. In fact, like Fr. Schreiber, he has not chosen a very apt parallel.

•That was a genuine plague which killed and incapacitated lots of people. There was no doubt about it because people could see its effects daily with   their own eyes. Can one really compare that to Covid 19 which is less deadly than the flu in a given year?

•That was only one city: today we are talking about whole countries across the world;

•Forty days: our “lockdown” is at ninety days ago and in most places it is not gone yet;

•The same authority which ordered the quarantine provided for Mass “in the streets and squares of the city” so that as many as possible could assist.

Can we say that our secular authorities care so much about our spiritual welfare? Is not the opposite the case?

•I am willing to bet that in 1576 there were dissenting voices who questioned whether such an approach was necessary. I doubt whether such voices would have been viewed as “dangerous” denounced as “far right,” nor did the Church ever require blind obedience to herself, let alone to the secular authority, even in the days when that secular authority was Catholic and was not (as today) continually proving itself the enemy of Christendom.

The fact that Fr. Pfluger must rely on such a poor example shows how desperate is the cause which he must defend: that is the best example he could find! He is trying to defend the indefensible. Precautions are always a question of judgement, but if our so-called “precautions” are never allowed to be questioned, how on earth can we ever hope to get it right, even if those behind them really meant well? What our governments are doing to us is indefensible. The media too: “the enemy of the people,” as someone once said. The SSPX now sides with them.

[Red font emphasis mine.]