My Dear Brethren,
1) Tomorrow is the feast of the great Pope St Pius X, the patron saint of our Society. Why did Archbishop Lefebvre chose him as the patron saint of this little army of priests which has an important role in the life of the Church at this moment?
There are many reasons. A general reason is that this pope, the last canonized pope, was given to us to prepare us for the many battles that we were going to have in the second half of the twentieth century and onwards. This is what Pope Pius XII said explicitly when he beatified Pius X in June 1951:
If today, Pius XII said, the Church of God, far from backing off in front of the powers destructive of spiritual values, suffers, fights, and by the divine power, progresses and redeems souls, this is due to the foreseeing action and the holiness of Pius X. It appears very clear today that his entire pontificate was supernaturally oriented, according to God¡¯s loving plan of redemption, to prepare souls to meet our own battles and to guarantee our victories and the victories of the generations to come.
¡°To guarantee our victories and the victories of the generations to come.¡± That is what Pope Pius XII said. That means this very time which we are living. We are these ¡°generations to come¡±.
2) St Pius X prepared us in many ways for our present battles. Let me insist especially on three battles: the battle for Christ the King, the battle for the Church and the battle for the faith.
His motto: ¡°To restore all things in Christ¡±, reminds us of the battle for the kingship of Christ the King. He fought with many governments who wanted the separation of Church and State, which is a terrible evil. This unfortunately has continued and has now become a truly violent battle with the Declaration on Religious Liberty of Vatican II and with the new liturgy. Archbishop Lefebvre wrote a book: ¡°They have uncrowned Him¡± to show what religious liberty has done to all the Catholic countries. Countries, such as Spain and Columbia, have rejected the kingship of Christ which was clearly written in their constitutions. Even more recently, the little country of East Timor which gained its independence from Indonesia in 1999, was told by the Vatican that they could not write in their new constitution that the religion of the state was the Catholic religion. And that country is Catholic at 94.5% ! St Pius X tells us that we have to stand up and defend the honor of Our Blessed Lord and give Him the first place. ¡°He must reign, says St Paul, and hold the first place in all things¡±.
3) Secondly, St Pius X fought for the liberty of the Church. At the beginning of the twentieth century, France, Portugal and some other countries wanted to control the Church. St Pius X stood firm to defend the honor, the structure, and the divine rights of the Holy Catholic Church, and of the Supreme Pontiff. He knew so well that outside this one true Church, there can be no salvation, and that the Church, in order to continue, also needs priests, holy priests. That is why St Pius X from his first encyclical until the end of his life did all he could to make sure priests would be holy, practice all the virtues that their vocation demands, especially self-denial, humility, obedience, chastity.
4) Archbishop Lefebvre believed the same thing: the Church needs holy priests. The crisis we are suffering now for the last 50 years is essentially a crisis of priests, priests who no longer understand what they are, and what the God Lord wants from them. In the Third Secret of Fatima, from the serious studies that have been made of it, it is clear that there must in it be a mention of this terrible crisis of the priesthood that would explode in the 1960s, which is the cause of the apostasy of Europe in particular . It is only with good and holy priests that we will be able to rebuild the Church. Thus, we need good seminaries. That is the very goal of the Society of St Pius X.
5) And finally, since I want to limit myself to only three points, St Pius X was chosen as our patron saint because of his fight against modernism. He studied modernism very carefully, even before he became pope in 1903, and condemned it in his famous encyclical called ¡°Pascendi¡±. What he said in it, again, is exactly what we are living today. He explained that the modernists teach that faith must evolve with time; even if that means that it must change with the times. Modernists say that what people believed in the past may not be relevant anymore today, because times have changed. For example, if a pope condemned errors in the past, it was good for that time, but this condemnation no longer applies to today because times have changed.
6) Well, that is exactly what we hear today with what is called ¡°living Tradition¡±, or ¡°the hermeneutic of continuity¡±, expressions constantly used nowadays by the Vatican authorities. These expressions are in reality pure modernism because they mean that what popes have taught in the past, and what people believed in the past, was good then, but may no longer be good today, that we have to accept blindly what the present authorities in the Church teach, even if it says the opposite of what was taught in the past. For example, Cardinal Ratzinger, the present pope, in a book written in 1982 said that the document ¡¯Gaudium et Spes¡¯, of Vatican II was the contrary of the document of pope Pius IX, the ¡®Syllabus¡¯, in 1864. He said ¡°it is an anti-Syllabus¡±. In other words, the ¡®Syllabus¡¯ of Pope Pius IX said that the Church and the pope should not follow the tendencies of the world. But Vatican II said that the Church and the pope should follow the tendencies of the world. This is a clear contradiction. For the modernists, this is not a problem, since they accept contradictions. For a Catholic, this is impossible, because what was true in the past, is still true today. ¡°Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever¡± says St Paul. God does not change.
7) My Dear Faithful, it is in line with these teachings of St Pius X that the General Chapter of the Society of St Pius X wrote its Declaration, last month. When you read it carefully you will see that, in it,
• we clearly condemn the modern errors of ecumenism, when we say that ¡°we reaffirm our faith in the Roman Catholic Church, the unique Church founded by Our Lord Jesus Christ, outside of which there is no salvation nor possibility to find the means leading to salvation¡±;
8) we also clearly condemn the error of collegiality, which attacks the very structure of the Church, which puts two heads on top of the Church: the first head is the pope alone, and the second head is the pope and the bishops together. We condemned this error when we wrote in the Declaration: we re-affirm ¡°our faith in its monarchical constitution, desired by Our Lord Himself, by which the supreme power of government over the universal Church belongs only to the Pope, Vicar of Christ on earth¡±;
9) we clearly condemn the errors of religious liberty which rejects the kingship of Christ over individual and over societies and governments when the Declaration states: we re-affirm ¡°our faith in the universal Kingship of Our Lord Jesus Christ, Creator of both the natural and the supernatural orders, to Whom every man and every society must submit¡±.
10) And with St Pius X, we clearly condemn this error of modernism, this false idea that faith must evolve even in a contradictory manner. No, we professed that: ¡°We find our sure guide in this uninterrupted Magisterium which, by its teaching authority, transmits the revealed Deposit of Faith in perfect harmony with the truths that the entire Church has professed, always and everywhere.¡± ¡®Perfect harmony¡¯ here means that we reject any contradiction in the Church¡¯s teaching. If a modern teaching contradicts a traditional teaching, we choose the traditional teaching and reject the modern one.
11) Last June 13, Bishop Fellay received a letter from the Vatican telling him and all of us that we have to accept Vatican II and the New Massif we wanted to be approved. When they gave him this letter they also told him that we could not say that there were errors in the Council, but only in the interpretation of the Council. When Bishop Fellay heard this, he said: no, we cannot accept what you are asking because for sure there are errors in the Council texts themselves, the errors of ecumenism, of collegiality, of religious liberty. We cannot accept the errors of the Council and the New Mass.
12) That is why on June 29th, Bishop Fellay said that we are back to ¡®square one¡¯ in our relation with Rome. That means, that if for a few months -- because of some information he had received from the inner circle of the pope -- that if for a few months Bishop Fellay had believed that the Holy Father was willing to accept us exactly as we are, without having to accept the errors of the Council and the New Mass, it is now clear that such is not the case, that the Holy Father wants us to accept Vatican II. And with the appointment of Archbishop Muller, last June, at the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Bishop Fellay said recently in Australia that nothing is going to happen, no recognition of the Society of St Pius X is going to happen under the present pope and certainly for many years to come.
13) My Dear Faithful let us then continue calmly our fight for the faith following the wise principles and guidelines of Archbishop Lefebvre, who himself followed closely the wise principles of St Pius X. And with the help of Our Blessed Lady, we will thus work day by day to ¡°restore all things in Christ¡±.
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
Fr. Couture