■ First they came for the Roman Rite, which they destroyed. Then they came for the Church Militant, which they disarmed and surrendered to the spirit of the age. Now, at the Synod, which threatens to become Vatican II rebooted, progressivist bishops and their apparatchiks will be coming for the moral law itself under the guise of a search for “pastoral solutions” to “challenges facing the family”


The Return of Vatican II Fever

The symptoms are unmistakable: after a period of relative remission during the years of Pope Benedict’s mysteriously self-terminated reign, the postconciliar “process of decay” remarked by the former Cardinal Ratzinger has resumed with a vengeance, like a rebound infection after an incomplete course of antibiotics. The progressivist priests and prelates who are the disease-causing agents of Vatican II Fever are now running amok throughout the ecclesiastical bloodstream. They have been let loose by a Pope who is so fond of publicly staged “surprises,” all tending to the diminution of traditional Roman Catholicism, that Respice in Me (look at me) could serve as the motto of this pontificate.

Since the 1980s The Remnant has been proud to publish the powerful insights and commentary of the incomparable Solange Hertz. A close friend of Remnant founder Walter L. Matt (RIP) for many years, she was with the Remnant almost from the beginning. In her own right, Mrs. Hertz came to be regarded as the matriarch of traditional Catholicism in the English-speaking world (although her writings appeared not infrequently in French, as well).

She was so far ahead of the curve in exposing the fundamental errors afflicting the modern Church and State that newcomers to the traditionalist movement sometimes fail to realize that it was Mrs. Hertz who pioneered the early and in-depth exposés of feminism, democracy gone awry, Americanism, Natural Family Planning, and the myriad attacks on Sacred Scripture by the forces of scientism. (In fact, if you’re interested in the questions of biblical inerrancy, for example, or the Galileo case, evolution and geocentrism, if is largely because Mrs. Hertz was tackling such 900-pound gorillas long before it became fashionable to do so.)

Editor's Note: The following article appeared in The Remnant's December 31, 2010 issue. It is part of a decade-long series of Remnant articles which vigorously and unapologetically opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq for violating the Church's teaching on what constitutes just war. For that editorial position, which continued from 2003 onward, we lost thousands of subscribers.

In recent weeks and months it has become very fashionable in neo-Catholic circles to finally begin to speak out against the genocide of Christians in Iraq at the hands of the Islamic extremists that took over after the U.S.-led “coalition of the willing” had finished bombing the living daylights out of Iraq for reasons even Fox News no longer cares to defend. That's all well and good, but I guess I'm curious to know where these neo-Catholic heroes were ten years ago when something might  have been done to sandbag the lunatical U.S. foreign policy that would give us the insufferable Barack Obama and lead to the present crisis in Iraq, leaving millions homeless, tens of thousands dead, with our Christian brothers and sisters (those that survived the "shock and awe" of which we Americans were so embarrassingly proud at the time) driven from their homes, banished from their country and separated from their families forever. 

On the Council and the Duties of the Pope

Rome, December, 20 1966

Your Eminence,

Your letter of July 24, concerning the questioning of certain truths was communicated through the good offices of our secretariat to all our major superiors.

Few replies have reached us. Those which have come to us from Africa do not deny that there is great confusion of mind at the present time. Even if these truths do not appear to be called in question, we are witnessing in practice a diminution of fervor and of regularity in receiving the sacraments, above all the Sacrament of Penance. A greatly diminished respect for the Holy Eucharist is found, above all on the part of priests, and a scarcity of priestly vocations in French-speaking missions: vocations in the English and Portuguese-speaking missions are less affected by the new spirit, but already the magazines and newspapers are spreading the most advanced theories.

Introduction

by Michael J. Matt

The following article was published in The Remnant back in 1987. It was written by the late, great Dr. John Senior, and it is so excellent that I fear I lack the necessary skills to sum it up with due justice in a few words. It is long, very long—so, alas, I suppose most bloggers and tweeters working diligently in the cyber vineyard will likely not bother with it -- the days of the thoughtful, well-developed article having long since passed in order to make room for the video clip, the meme and the one-sentence paragraph.

The article is so inherently Catholic, however, that it makes one wonder: What has happened to us? We spend our days and nights on the Internet rummaging through the ruins of Christendom in a cyberspace filled to capacity with sound bites and pointless proofs of lingering consciousness around the globe, but we never really seem to get anywhere. The most valiant among us make Quixotic attempts to combat the ubiquitous effects of social and spiritual revolution in our world and Church, but even we are too overwhelmed by disinformation and apathy to confront the actual causes anymore.  We expend almost all of our energies combatting the heinous crime of abortion as if that were the fundamental cause of all that's gone wrong in the world.  But is it?  Abortion is much less of a cause than an effect, and until we can learn to target the root causes of such evils I wonder if we will ever really eradicate any of them.

While Francis perplexes faithful Catholics and delights the world almost daily by saying and doing whatever occurs to him as a good idea, a surprising voice in defense of sound orthodoxy has emerged in the midst of the vast confusion this Pope is causing: Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

In a book-length interview just published in Spain, Italy, and the United States, Müller has resoundingly reaffirmed his opposition to Cardinal Kasper’s evil proposal to admit a supposedly small number of divorced and “remarried” Catholics to Holy Communion without any commitment to end their adulterous relations. Recall that this blatant attack on the indissolubility of marriage was part of Kasper’s address to the “Extraordinary Consistory on the Family” back in February, and that Francis praised the address as “beautiful and profound.” Recall also that Kasper, with no objection from Francis, is now being identified as “the Pope’s theologian.” Indeed, Francis made it a point to praise Kasper as “a talented theologian, a good theologian” on no less an occasion than his first Angelus address as Pope.