MARTIN JESUITS

The Jesuits by Malachi Martin

Limits of Papal Power

“The brutal fact of life for John Paul, as for any Pope who is not highly endowed with ruthlessness and skilled in Vatican moves, is that he cannot force his will on every powerful member of his Vatican administration. And the brutal fact is, too, that John Paul, like Popes before him, is constrained by far-reaching actions of his predecessors on the Throne of Peter.”

Romanita, the style of Vatican
“Romanita, that particular brand of power is called. It is axiomatic that any Pope who hopes to succeed must be at least two things: iron-willed, and skilled in Romanita.

Romanita rests upon one basic principle: Cunctando regitur mundus. If you can out wait all, you can rule all. The hallmark of Romanita is understatement in action and in all forms of expression. It is, in a way, power in whispers. Essential to it are a sense of timing reamed with patience, a ruthlessness that excludes the hesitation of emotions, and an almost messianic conviction of ultimate success. Few are born with it. Most genuine “Romans” who flourish must learn it over time.

Horizontal vs Hierarchical
“Father Arrupe (the head of the Jesuits) had freely acknowledged that the Society of Jesus had changed since the Second Vatican Council. And he had also given a good reason for that change: The church herself had changed. Catholics since the Council had come to realize that the Church is “the people of God” not a hierarchical body. Pope Paul VI had made this new outlook on the church - this new ecclesiology - his own. Theologians and bishops had enthusiastically adopted this new point of view.”

The Cosmic War between God and Lucifer
“For him, everything traced back to the single element common throughout the vast sea of change; the single element that, in its essence, never changed: the cosmic war between God and Lucifer. Just as it had in every age before his, that war was still being waged everywhere and daily. It permeated ever event, every element of turmoil, of expansion. And it concerned just one thing: the eternal salvation of each human being. Through the sacrificial death and resurrection of Christ, and by the founding of the Roman Catholic Church, God had made it possible for each man and woman to make godly choices in life, and by those choices to attain Heaven after death. In that cosmic and constant war, Christ was the leader of God’s campaign; and Christ’s personal, visible representative among men was the Roman Pope.

Lucifer’s aim in the war- the aim of Satan as adversary - was to ensure that as many human beings as possible missed that eternal after - life goal.”

Two Hurricanes
“But picture yourself turning that corner and being suddenly seized from behind by a blasting high wind the seemingly comes from nowhere and in its hurricane passage shatters buildings, leveling some of them, throwing people about, littering pavements, uprooting trees and traffic lights, transforming the very skies above your head with a twilight color, and blending the clear -vision straightness of the avenue into corkscrew twist, as it carries you off willy-nilly with everyone and everything else in dizzying directions. This is a change so total, so abrupt, so irresistible, in fact, that you no longer know where you are, where you’re going what is happening.

Before you have time even to reckon that you can’t get your bearings, another high wind interlacing with the first comes screaming incoherently around your ears and, to your further panic, seems to affect most people around you with a sort of ecstatic joy, so that they throw themselves unresistingly into the rushing streams of those two winds that now carry everyone, yourself included, out of sight of all the old familiar landmarks. So eerie is the effect of the second blast that even all this violence and turmoil, the most disorienting thing of all for you is the strange euphoria of expectation and of joyous confidence that seems to grip most of the people who are being tossed about as you and they are hustled forward on an unknown and uncharted journey”.

Epic Change in the Church
“Such a scenario, wild and surreal as it seems, is barely enough to convey the completeness and the suddenness of the change, and the strange euphoria, that overpowered Roman Catholics - and surprisingly, Jesuits along with them - in the 1960s. For an entire traditional way of religious life and practice was seemingly killed off just that suddenly, without warning. A centuries - old mentality was flushed out in a hurricane of change. In one sense, a certain world of though, feeling attitude, ceased to exist - the old Catholic world centered on the authority of the Roman Pontiff; the cast-iron “either-or” of Catholic dogma and morality; the frequentation of Mass, Confession, Holy Communion; the Rosary and the various pieties and devotions of parish life; the militancy of the Roman Catholic laity in defense of traditional Catholic values. That entire world was swept away, as it were, overnight.

When the violence of the winds had passed and the new day dawned, people looked about and found that suddenly the universal Latin of the Mass was gone. Stranger still: The Roman Mass itself was gone. In its place, there was a new rite that resembled the old immemorial Mass as a lean -to shanty resembles a Palladian mansion. the new rite was said in babel of languages, each one saying different things. Things that sounded un-Catholic. That only God the Father was God, for example; and that the new rite was a “community supper,” not an enactment of Christ’s death on the Cross; and that priests were no longer priests of sacrifice, but ministers at table serving guests at a common meal of fellowship.”

True, the Pope who presided over such enormities of doctrinal aberration, Paul VI, tried to backtrack somewhat in the direction of the one and only Roman Mass. But it was too late. The un-Catholic character of that new rite persisted.

Devastation
The devastation of those hurricane winds had not stopped there. Churches and chapels, convents and monasteries had been denuded of statues. Altars of sacrifice had been removed or at least abandoned, and four legged tables were planted in front of the people instead, as for a pleasant meal. Tabernacles were removed along with the fixed belief about Christ’s Sacrifice as the essence of the Mass. Vestments were modified or laid aside completely. Communion rails were removed. The faithful were told not to kneel any longer when receiving Holy Communion, but to stand like free men and women, and to take the Bread of Communion and the Cup of the Grape of Fellowship in their own democratic hands. In many churches, members of the Congregation were immediately expelled for “public disturbance of worship” if they dared to genuflect, or worst still, to kneel, for Holy Communion in the new rite. Police were called in to eject the worst offenders, those who refused to cooperate and refused to leave.

Statues gone
Outside the churches and chapels, Roman missals, Mass cards, prayer book, crucifixes, altar cloths, Mass vestments, Communion rails, even pulpits, statues, and kneelers as well as Station of the Cross were either consigned to bonfires and city dumps or sold off at public auctions where interior designers picked them up at bargain prices and launched and “ecclesiastical look” in the decoration of high-rise apartments and the elegant homes of suburbia. A carved oak altar made such and unusual “vanity” table.”

Euphoric Delusion
To heighten the twilight color of this storm-blown scene, there came the second storm, the blast of euphoria. There arose among those who were left the brave if not always convincing idea that the future of Catholicism, so abruptly reduced in its practice and in its numbers, was now somehow brighter than ever before. What seemed a shamble was really a vast Pentecostal renewal under way; the real Church of Christ was about to emerge in all its beauty and truth.”

Freemasonry
The last element is what still remains a historical puzzle is provided by European Freemasonry in the context of the European Enlightenment of the 1700s. In those days, the most powerful chief advisers to the Bourbon princes were ardent members of the Lodge. The Marquis de Pombal, royal adviser in Portugal; the de Villot and the Duc de Choiseul in France; Prince von Kaunitz and Gerard von Swieten at the Habsburg court of Maria Theresa of Austria. These are names that no longer mean anything to us moderns, but they were and still are held in honor of Masonic memberships lists. Each one of those men held a position of trust and death of the Society. they saw in the Jesuits “the sworn enemies of Freemasonry” the “most cunning enemies of tolerance,” and “the worst corruptors of freedom.” Hatred of the Jesuits was intense and as far as words go, noble: “I know the pains they (the Jesuits) have taken,” Choiseul wrote to Joseph of Austria, “to spread darkness over the surface of the earth, and to dominate and confuse Europe from Cape Finisterre to the North Sea.”

The greatest note of pathos in those last years of the pre- Suppression Society is struck by Jesuits themselves: Clearly, from letters and documents of the time, you know they knew who was endeavoring to kill them off. There is no doubt that they papacy saw in European Freemasonry a mortal enemy, and for very good reason. By 1735, if not earlier, the main European Lodges were avowedly enemies of papal centralized jurisdiction and Roam Catholic dogmatic teaching. The general aims of the Lodge as such from the second two-thirds of the eighteenth century onward were founded on several premises unacceptable to Catholicism.

Jesus was not God; there was no heaven or hell; there was no Trinity of divine Person - just the Great Architect of the Cosmos, he being part of that cosmos; human beings were perfectible during their lives on this earth. What ruined human culture and perverted civilization was the claimed authority of the Roman Church.

Vatican II
The Council which was convened on October 11, 1962, met in Rome for four separate months-long sessions, spread over a period of four years. By the time Session I was over, John already knew with his peasant’s realism that “the substance of the ancient doctrine” of his Church, which he had believed would be protected, was under severe attack from within the council itself; and he knew he would not live to defend it. Before the second session was convened, Pope John XXIII was dead.

Guided both by his sentimental principles and by advisers of his own who were perhaps less sentimental, Paul VI led Vatican II through the three remaining sessions. If Paul was sincere - and he was - he was also profoundly ignorant and philosophically of the shallowest understanding. On the other hand, most of the bishops had come to the Council with a quiescent, conservative mentality little leavened by theological study and reflection. By the middle of the Council, however, there had been developed in them a consensus in favor of opening all except the essentials to change and adaptation.

This leavening of the bishop’s outlook was mainly accomplished not in obedience to John’s original intentions or because they understood the vision that had led John to call the Council, but by the influence of the 280 theological experts, or Council periti, as they were called. These were, in the main, professors of theology in various Catholic seminaries; over three-quarters of them came from Europe and North America. An individual bishop chose one, two, sometimes three theologians he knew and took them to Rome as his theology advisers. The purpose of the periti was to supplement the bishops lack of knowledge in theology. Inevitably, of course, they formed the bishop’s opinions.

In addition, the periti represented their bishops in the various committees, subcommittees, and commissions which prepared drafts of the various documents that were discussed by the bishops during the actual sittings of the Council. The periti also took part in the continuously sustained informal discussions outside the Council; they gave series of lectures; they composed position papers. They had, in effect, enormous influence on the final votes cast by the bishops.

The periti, therefore, were the perfect agents for change. Traditionally, they were cast in the role of “elbow-men,” the ones who sat next to the elbow of bishop or cardinal during Council discussions and ensured that the great man in questions understood the theological issues at stake and answered to them correctly. During the Second Vatican Council, they had a ubiquitous, all-pervasive influence. There seems to be unanimity among students of the Council that those periti of the Vatican II were, in the main, of a liberal-progressive frame of mind.

One can now add, in hindsight, that many of the more influential periti-men such as Hans Küng and Edward Schillebeeckx - were modernist in the fullest sense of that word. Clearly, both types of periti were determined to promote a more loosely governed Church, a relaxation of traditional Catholic exclusiveness, and a more ambiguous interpretation of basic catholic doctrines -in particular those safeguarding the prerogatives of the Roman Pope and the nature of the Church. It is equally clear that the “brotherhood” of Modernists among Jesuits and others was, for the first time in its history, able to climb above ground and advocate -sometimes subtly by ambiguous language, sometimes openly - the outlook that had up to then flowed silently and secretly.

Modernist Attack
Someday, some historian of Second Vatican Council affairs will have access to all the relevant documents - the correspondence between the periti, the private position papers drawn up, the policy outlines - and established beyond doubt that the Council of John XXIII was the object of a concerted, and, as it turned out, a successful attack by the Modernist leaders among Roman Catholics. For now, this remains a tantalizing presumption justified by what evidence we have, but no proven beyond a shadow of doubt. Paul drops Oath Against Modernism.

It remains a puzzling fact that even as late as 1967, when he had had time to review the Council and, presumably, recognize the Modernist trend among theologians, bishops, and Jesuits, Pope Paul blindly and foolishly did away with a universal rule that imposed an all theologians a solemn oath to combat Modernism. Who persuaded the Pope to do this? Then again, as late as 1969, when already the first ragged edges of the coming shambles in his Church and in the Jesuits were becoming painfully apparent, Paul VI could still refer breathlessly to the “wave of serenity and optimism” spreading through his Church.

So Befuddled
Those are the words of a man so befuddled on essentials that in the same year, 1969, he was preparing a document which would omit all reference to the immemorial sacrificial character of the Roman Mass; and change the function of the priest as offeror of Christ’s sacrifice to that of a minister at a communal “memorial meal” complete with a table and bread of fellowship. Mad Years, Agony years.

With reason has it been said of Paul Vi that the first seven years of his reign were his “mad years” and the last eight were his “agony years.” When “the spirit of Vatican II” took vigorous hold during the last eight years of his pontificate, even Montini’s liberal mind was not prepared for the onslaught of change that billowed over his Church.

The extent of the damage produced in the Church by the hurricane mentality let loose after 1965 can be gauged a mere twenty years later. Pope John Paul II now presides over a Church organization that is in shambles, a rebellious and decadent clergy, an ignorant and recalcitrant body of bishops, and a confused and divided assembly of believers. The Roman Catholic Church, which used to present itself as the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church, appears now as pluralistic, permissive, ecumenical, and evolutionary ecclesial group.