Nostra Aetate Dolorosa

Death on the Pale Horse by Gustave Dore

[GUEST POST.  We are pleased to present this original article on the Vatican's December 2015 Statement on relations with the Jews, from the pen of a respected author and scholar.

                                                                                                                      Aged Parent
                                                                                               Septuagesima Sunday, 2016]

NOSTRA  AETATE  DOLOROSA

(Our Sorrowful Age)

Unveiling the Fruits of Vatican II’s Nostra Aetate

By William P. Fall

When Jews and Christians make a joint contribution through concrete humanitarian aid for justice and peace in the world, they bear witness to the loving care of God. No longer in confrontational opposition but cooperating side by side, Jews and Christians should seek to strive for a better world.

From the December 15, 2015 Statement by the Vatican Commission For Religious Relations with Jews

To whom it may concern:

You are addressed in this way, dear reader, because frankly, as a guest contributor here, this writer has no real knowledge of who you are, how much you may or may not understand of issues implicated by the Vatican Commission’s recent statement on Jewish relations, or even to what degree you may or not feel concerned about them.  So, it’s therefore necessary on our part to assume on yours perhaps a lesser degree of awareness and understanding, in offering a more ample examination of rather critical truths.  And we do so presuming upon the kind and patient indulgence of those many readers likely possessing greater knowledge and wisdom than this humble scribe.

In reading, among other, things the Vatican Commission’s report of sunny humanitarian relations  between Jews and Christians, we found  it all rather bewildering, to say the least.  Bewilderment, we dare say, is in fact a common (perhaps intended) affliction resulting from reading many diffusively murky, but warm and fuzzy publishings from the Vatican in these times.  It’s a pattern exactly contrary to the strong, clear, precise moral guidance the world was ever accustomed to receive from Rome – until the years that prefaced the Second Vatican Council.

When the Vatican Commission says Jews and Christians are “no longer in confrontational opposition but cooperating side by side” for world justice and peace, its blurred generalities tell more about what’s being hidden than revealed.  Of whom is the Commission speaking?  It’s left to the Statement’s reading audience to decide who was in confrontational opposition to whom.  With all the one-sided apologizing and conciliatory back-pedaling coming from Rome since Vatican II, the pre-conditioned conclusion Catholics are expected to draw is, that “the fault, dear Brutus, lies not in the stars, but in ourselves.”  (Indeed, one might reasonably wonder how soon some Vatican commission will undertake to redact the New Testament, purging it of “objectionable” references to Jews, Pharisees, etc.)  It also seems implied that the reversal of all this imputed unilateral provocation only began since Vatican II and the formation of its Commission for Religious Relations with Jews.

In what’s become typical Vaticanesque fashion, the Commission is beclouding the fact that it is really referring to inter-relations between the Vatican itself (followed, certainly, by many amongst the Catholic hierarchy and clergy) and Jewish religious leaders.  

Alright, fine.  If this is a truly worthy venture, if this is a legitimate mission Christ gave the Church, if cozy camaraderie between Jewish leaders and Vatican authorities for humanitarian ends is genuinely intended to bring about “a better world,” then why hide in obscurities who are the real principals in so virtuous an endeavor?  Why not, instead, openly and plainly boast their wonderful handiwork to the whole world?

Rabbi Rosen and Cardinal Koch

New Direction for a New Church

In the December 2015 Statement, the Commission makes clear that its purpose is to celebrate rapturously the fiftieth anniversary of Nostra Aetate, a declaration promulgated by Vatican II that marked a dramatic reversal in ecclesiastical policy, and implicitly undermined the Faith itself.  In the Commission’s own words, Article Number 4 of Nostra Aetate “is rightly counted among those documents of the Second Vatican Council which have been able to effect, in a particularly striking manner, a new direction of the Catholic Church since then.”  (A telling statement, given that under divine guidance, the singular direction of the Church for almost two millennia had been toward saving souls, by propagating and safeguarding the Faith.)  As the Commission Statement candidly admits of Nostra Aetate: “Its fourth article presents the relationship between the Catholic Church and the Jewish people in a new theological framework.”  (Emphasis added.)

The Commission then adds: “Stressing once again the unique status of this relationship within the wider ambit of interreligious dialogue, theological questions are further discussed, such as the relevance of revelation, the relationship between the Old and the New Covenant, the relationship between the universality of salvation in Jesus Christ and the affirmation that the covenant of God with Israel has never been revoked, and the Church’s mandate to evangelize in relation to Judaism.”

The extremely bold departures from Church governance and de fide teachings contained in that sentence are not in the least mitigated by disguising them as mere “questions” for discussion, because they augur grave mischief concealed in their intent.  Take, for instance, the term “interreligious dialogue” itself, which first gained popular currency in ecclesiastical parlance during the last century (an era in which the Faith already was being eroded increasingly by the heresies of Modernism).  As used in the present context, the term virtually suggests that sacred Catholic teachings are subject to ratification or rejection within a forum of non-Catholic, un-Catholic, “democratic” debate – theologically, not unlike the United Nations in which tin-pot Marxist dictatorships, sitting as America’s voting equals, constantly strive to annul our laws and Constitution while picking our pockets.  Interreligious dialogue is just an unctuous, slippery Modernist term to make sound more palatable, more “reasonable,” the compromising of absolute Catholic truths of the Church’s Deposit of Faith, with non-Catholic (really, anti-Catholic) errors of false religions.

The first instance of interreligious dialogue, of sorts, to be proposed to the Church was when St. Paul was invited to include his Christian God in the Roman Pantheon of false deities and false worship, thus to enjoy tolerance and respectability instead of contemptuous demonization and bloody persecution.  St. Paul, of course, flatly rejected it – could not possibly have done otherwise.  For, ours is not a God among equals; nor is such the Faith He gave us.  Ours is the one true God; ours the One True Faith.  Consequently, the Church has ever followed St. Paul’s example, jealously defending its divinely established and enlightened religion, and thus protecting her flock against the merest hint of weakening or error – until the age of “ecumenism,” that is.

Next on the list: Just what on earth is meant by “the relevance of revelation,” noted as one of the “theological questions” for Jewish-Catholic interreligious assessment? Neither the worst of Jewish religious leaders nor Vatican Modernists would likely be so brazen – yet – as to frontally attack divine revelation in religious tradition (though one can never be sure these days).  No, more likely what are in the crosshairs here are the warnings to the whole world from latter-day Marian apparitions – foremost, from Fatima. The Church and, tacitly, several popes long since have approved and reapproved the visions and messages of Fatima.  (Unfolding history, as well, continues to confirm the reliability of more and more of the prophetic revelations of Our Lady of Fatima.)  Despite that, having witnessed a decades-old campaign orchestrated within the Vatican against the Fatima message, it’s reasonable to expect the only question for Vatican operatives in their group-hugging interreligious confabs is: how to stifle and suppress that message completely?

More menacing still

Then come more serious dangers posed by way of interreligious review.  To wit: “[T]he relationship between the universality of salvation in Jesus Christ and the affirmation that the covenant of God with Israel has never been revoked, and the Church’s mandate to evangelize in relation to Judaism.”  It’s hard to know whether the Commission, in the intentionally inexact language it uses here, could be referencing universal salvation as a teaching on its own, or as it vaguely relates to some mutual salvation imputed to Jews in the Christian era by virtue of the Old Covenant.  Either notion is a grave error.

Simply to raise the notion of universal salvation for reconsideration would be anathema. Yet, observe that the Commission’s words here actually could indeed be understood as accepting as established truth “the universality of salvation in Jesus Christ” – the heretical teaching that all are saved through Christ’s redemption, irrespective of religious beliefs or lack thereof.  (That error comports rather well with one of Freemasonry’s own three theological virtues – that of Equality.)

The New Israel

Likewise to be condemned is the intimated “affirmation” that God’s covenant with the Jews was not nullified.  The Church has never professed that!  To the contrary, the Old Covenant with the Jews had been a conditional one: But this thing I commanded them, saying: Hearken to my voice, and I will be your God, and you shall be my people: and walk ye in all the way that I have commanded you, that it may be well with you (Jer. 7:23). They had indeed been chosen – principally to bring forth the Messiah, Jesus Christ, the world’s Savior.  But the condition on the part of the Jews, for their ever remaining God’s chosen ones, was that they be a faithful and holy people.

They violated that condition over and over and over again, repeatedly turning to idolatry with the heathens, even offering human sacrifice to idols.  For now they shall say: We have no king: because we fear not the Lord: and what shall a king do to us? (Osee 10:3.) While God forgave them each time after severely chastising them, the final straw came when, as prophesied, they rejected their promised King and Redeemer, the Son of God Himself, and had Him crucified.  Upon Our Lord’s death on the cross, the temple veil was rent completely, signifying the end of the Old Covenant.  And with it, the end of the Jews’ status as God’s chosen people: My God will cast them away, because they hearkened not to him; and they shall be wanderers among the nations (Osee 9:17).  The mantle of Chosen Ones now would fall to gentiles who, with a small remnant of Jews, would become faithful members of the Mystical Body of Christ, and of “the new and everlasting covenant.”  In such wise, these became the true spiritual children and heirs of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob (Israel), as spoken of in the Old Testament:  And I will say to that which was not my people: Thou art my people: and they shall say: Thou art my God (Osee 2:24).  And think not to say within yourselves, We have Abraham for our father. For I tell you that God is able of these stones to raise up children to Abraham (Matt. 3:9).

This has always been the Church’s teaching.  The account of Jacob and Esau has little meaning without realizing it represents, in figures, the Jews of the Old Testament and the Christians in the New.  Jacob, whose name means “supplanter,” was the junior twin of Esau who enjoyed, with all its status and honored privilege, the legal primacy of birthright as firstborn heir of their father Isaac.  But Esau, hungry for earthly things, forfeited that birthright, by surrendering it to Jacob for a mere mess of pottage and, before God, by living an unworthy, unholy life.  Thus, Jacob (renamed by God “Israel”) supplanted Esau as firstborn, receiving his birthright and Isaac’s blessing as spiritual father to God’s chosen people.  Faithful Catholic Christians alone can now be called the true Israel – the true spiritual sons of Jacob, the true chosen ones of God.  Since the founding of the Church, the only way Jews can again enjoy the same holy status is, to enter into the fold of the Church, Christ’s Mystical Body.

For which reason there is, and will remain till the end of time, the Church’s immutable mandate from Our Lord Jesus Christ to evangelize not only Jews, but all who languish outside of His One True Church.  To suggest that this mandate is debatable in the case of Jews – to imply that they are somehow exempted by virtue of the Old Covenant, which their fathers, like Esau, forfeited – is not only rank heresy, but a monstrous lie perpetrated on Jews themselves!

Even Jewish historian Anna Foa recognized the December 2015 Commission Statement as an “unprecedented breach,” in her article in the Vatican’s L’Osservatore Romano: “I don’t think that it is a change of little consequence that the Church has altogether given up on the mission to the Jews.”

Rembrandt: Two Old Men Disputing, the painting said to depict the Incident at Antioch, where Paul rebukes Peter to his face

Next in the Commission Statement . . .

“The fundamental esteem for Judaism expressed in Nostra Aetate (No.4) however has enabled communities that once faced one another with scepticism [sic] to become – step by step over the years – reliable partners and even good friends, capable of weathering crises together and negotiating conflicts positively.” What insidious chicanery!  This newspeak is nothing but a slick literary device, rampantly practiced by modern Vatican operatives.  A device to try to reduce the Church Militant’s 2000-year struggle against theological error, false religions, and more militant anti-Catholicism, down to a mere Hatfield-McCoy feud that could so easily be resolved if the Church – the presumed principal belligerent – would, through friendly dialogue and understanding, only shake hands with, and apologize to, other religious leaders for being so stubbornly pugnacious!  

Their purpose for doing so, very simply, is to shunt and override preventive solemn Articles of the Faith with cunning artifice – to do an end run around Church law, sovereignty and changeless truth so as, under the guise of working together for some feigned temporal good, to sanitize the Church of all things objectionable to Jews who reject Christ and Christianity altogether.  It is tantamount to crucifying Our Lord all over again.

And there’s much more and worse to follow in the Commission Statement.  But we’re scarcely past page one of that Statement’s many in our mounting list.  Which means a full-blown book would be needed to respond to them comprehensively, point-by-point. That, of course, isn’t doable for our purposes here.

Besides, we’ve already established enough theological vandalism being perpetrated by the Vatican Commission – all under the aegis of Vatican II – that the questions scream out in full throat: Why? And who is behind all this?

Behind it All

This recalls Our Lord’s parable of the man who sowed good seed in his field.  His adversary then came and “oversowed cockle among the wheat,” and when both began to sprout, the goodman’s servants said to him: Sir, didst thou not sow good seed in thy field? Whence then hath it cockle?  And he said to them: An enemy hath done this. (Matt. 13:24-27.)

All the scripted theater of developing good fellowship with the Jewish community has nothing to do with partnership in authentic humanitarian work.  (Or, as the Commission calls it, “joint humanitarian aid for justice and peace in the world”— which is a good deal more ominous, when deciphered.)  If it did, why would the Committee document be at all concerned with questioning Catholic teachings?  If indeed performing good works did require interreligious organization –it really doesn’t, but let’s suppose it did – couldn't we organize without having to raise spurious issues about our own Faith?  (And do notice that it's only Catholic doctrines that are to be re-evaluated, not anti-Christian Jewish teachings.)  Suppose, for example, a synod of Calvinist bishops wanted to work with the same Jewish elders, say, to help the poor in Africa.  Would anyone logically expect the Calvinists to begin by offering to re-examine their Christian beliefs?  Of course not.  

Note well, too, that the Commission’s name is not the Vatican Commission for Joint Christian-Jewish Humanitarian Works, but “for Religious Relations with Jews.”  Obviously, so-called humanitarian matters are merely a pretext for joining hands with Jewish leaders, to further Modernist objectives of sabotaging traditional teachings of Catholicism.  Its leading characters do so by employing the grandeur and pomp of their high offices to lend the appearance of authority equal if not superior to the unique majesty of the Supreme Magisterium, which they contradict and seek to overrun.  

So then, just who are “they”?

Unmasking the Enemy

Pope St. Pius X (d. 1914), if he did not in fact invent Modernism’s name, exposed it with extraordinary comprehension and detail in his 1907 encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis, in which he defined Modernism, in simple but chilling summary, as “the synthesis of all heresies.”  In actually reading Pascendi (which is strongly urged, and it can easily be found on line) it soon becomes evident that in Modernism, however, we’re not dealing with just some other heretical cult led by another charismatic heresiarch like Arius, Pelagius or Luther.   Instead, we discover a very dark, subversive secret society – “an underground group” of “occult” character, in Saint Pius’s words.

"Moreover they lay the axe not to the branches and shoots, but to the very root, that is, to the faith and its deepest fires. And having struck at this root of immortality, they proceed to disseminate poison through the whole tree, so that there is no part of Catholic Truth from which they hold their hand, none that they do not strive to corrupt,” wrote Pius, adding more emphatically that "there is no part of Catholic Truth which they do not strive to destroy.”

"Certainly this suffices to show superabundantly by how many roads Modernism leads to the annihilation of all religion. The first step in this direction was taken by Protestantism; the second is made by Modernism; the next will plunge headlong into atheism."(Pascendi.) (Emphasis added.)

The saint’s minute dissection and brilliant indictment of Modernism, its devilishly devious methods, and its horrific ultimate goals, would compare its furtive forces strikingly well with other sinister powers – too well not to recognize in all of them a common heritage and affinity.

The War on the Church

Freemasonry was organized in 1717, 200 years after the Protestant revolution against the Church, and it would have as its true purpose to revolt against Christ, dethroning the revealed Truths of His Church and enthroning in their place Reason – Rationalism – as a natural religion.  In 1762, the Freemason philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, wrote The Social Contract, his blueprint for replacing the old order of Church and State with a more “democratic,” “enlightened” one.  His political philosophy is so readily recognized for empowering the anarchistic and horrendously bloody French Revolution, that its vile leaders had the then-deceased Rousseau disinterred and placed for veneration “as a national hero in the Pantheon in Paris.” In The Social Contract, Freemason Rousseau wrote: "Whoever dares to say: 'Outside the Church is no salvation,' ought to be driven from the State."  The French Revolutionaries were inspired to take words to mean slaughtering priests and religious by the thousands.

Now, it needs to be interjected here that Extra ecclesiam nulla salus (“outside the Church there is no salvation”) is more than a teaching of the Church.  It is a dogma of the Faith solemnized in definitions by three popes and one ecumenical council (Florence), infallibly reaffirmed by another council (Trent), and proclaimed by other popes, councils, church doctors and saints innumerable as a solemn teaching from Jesus Christ, handed down through sacred tradition from the Apostles.  The Jesuits’ renowned Scriptural commentator, Cornelius à Lapide, described it as “the all-important dogma”; Blessed Pius IX called it “the great dogma of our holy religion”; and 19th century Bishop George Hay said it is “the very fence and barrier of the true religion.” Which is why the Church’s hidden enemies for centuries have brought their full contempt and rage to bear against this one dogma above all others as the primary obstacle to their subverting of Church teachings.  Thus, in the late 19thcentury, and again even more so in the mid-20thcentury, they mounted largescale campaigns to humiliate, stigmatize and defame two widely popular and respected Catholic theologians – the Redemptorist Father Michael Mueller and the Jesuit Father Leonard Feeney – who steadfastly defended the dogma.  The purpose was to make conspicuous examples of these priests as a warning to others who might dare to profess this solemn doctrine in like manner.  But let’s return to our timeline.

In 1776, two years before Rousseau’s death, Adam Weishaupt founded in Bavaria the Order of the Illuminati (Enlightened Ones), a subversive secret society whose summary purpose, taken from Freemasonry, was to erect a “new world order.”   Six years later, the Congress of Wilhelmsbad was convened as a convention of international Freemasonry.  By the end of the convention Weishaupt had succeeded in consolidating virtually all of European Freemasonry under his Illuminati.  In secret correspondence uncovered by the Bavarian government, Weishaupt had written to a fellow high-ranking Illuminist: “We will infiltrate into that place [the Vatican] and once inside we will never come out.  We will bore from within until it remains nothing but an empty shell."  He further boasted that one day the Illuminati "will place one of our own" on the throne of Peter.

The Freemason Giuseppe Garibaldi, admirer of Abraham Lincoln, who with his "red shirts" fought for "union" and "independence" in Italy - by attacking the Papal States

In the mid-19th Century, Blessed Pius IX became aware of a secret document called The Permanent Instruction of the Alta Vendita.  The Alta Vendita was described as the supreme lodge of the Italian Carbonari, a secret society tied to Freemasonry and very powerful in Europe.  So frightening were the schemes outlined in the document that the saintly pope had copies printed and distributed, in hopes of exposing and thwarting the Alta Vendita’s plot.  Much of its brazenly subversive designs can be summarized by one sentence from The Permanent Instruction: "Our ultimate end is that of Voltaire and of the French Revolution – the final destruction of Catholicism and even of the Christian idea."

In 1917, 200 years now after the birth of Freemasonry, Communism had finally achieved state power with the Russian Revolution, overthrowing and murdering every member of the Czar's family. Communism is attributed to the rabid mind of Karl Marx, the son of a rabbi, but a Satanist who, in 1844, wrote: "Religion is.....the opium of the people," and therefore, "The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness." Like the French Revolution, Communism is a natural, unharnessed, tyrannical enfant terrible of its auspiciously more "respectable" forebear, Freemasonry. Keeping in mind Weishaupt's menacing design to destroy the Church from within the Vatican, read this from a reliable Catholic source:

“Ex-Communist and celebrated convert Douglas Hyde revealed long ago that in the 1930s the Communist leadership issued a worldwide directive about infiltrating the Catholic Church.  While in the early 1950s, Mrs. Bella Dodd was also providing detailed explanations of the Communist subversion of the Church.  Speaking as a former high ranking official of the American Communist Party, Mrs. Dodd said: ‘In the 1930s we put eleven hundred men into the priesthood in order to destroy the Church from within.’ [A separate source says that, all told, 30,000 Communists infiltrated the priesthood under this directive.] The idea was for these men to be ordained and progress to positions of influence and authority as Monsignors and Bishops.  A dozen years before Vatican II she stated that: ‘Right now they are in the highest places in the Church’ – where they were working to bring about change in order to weaken the Church's effectiveness against Communism. She also said that these changes would be so drastic that ‘you will not recognize the Catholic Church.’

“Mrs. Dodd, who converted to the Faith at the end of her life, was personally acquainted with this diabolic project since, as a Communist agent, part of her brief was to encourage young radicals (not always card-carrying Communists) to enter Catholic seminaries. She alone had encouraged nearly 1,000 such youngsters to infiltrate the seminaries and religious orders!  One monk who attended a Bella Dodd lecture in the early 1950s recalled:

“‘I listened to that woman for four hours and she had my hair standing on end. Everything she said has been fulfilled to the letter. You would think she was the world's greatest prophet, but she was no prophet. She was merely exposing the step-by-step battle plan of Communist subversion of the Catholic Church. She explained that of all the world's religions, the Catholic Church was the only one feared by the Communists, for it was its only effective opponent. The whole idea was to destroy, not the institution of the Church, but rather the Faith of the people, and even use the institution of the Church, if possible, to destroy the Faith through the promotion of a pseudo-religion: something that resembled Catholicism but was not the real thing. Once the Faith was destroyed, she explained that there would be a guilt complex introduced into the Church ... to label the “Church of the past” as being oppressive, authoritarian, full of prejudices, arrogant in claiming to be the sole possessor of truth, and responsible for the divisions of religious bodies throughout the centuries. This would be necessary in order to shame Church leaders into an 'openness to the world,' and to a more flexible attitude toward all religions and philosophies. The Communists would then exploit this openness in order to undermine the Church’." (Emphasis added.)

What may be concluded?

Now then, isn’t it rather plain from the paragraphs immediately above that the designs of these several secret forces correlate directly to all the unmistakable misdirection in the Commission Statement we’ve been discussing?  Don’t they explain what is behind so much of what we find coming from the post-conciliar Church in these, our sorrowful times?

How deadly accurate were the words of St. Pius X in 1907: “Still it must be confessed that the number of the enemies of the Cross of Christ has in this day increased exceedingly, who are striving, by arts entirely new and full of subtlety, to destroy the vital energy of the Church, and, if they can, to overthrow utterly Christ’s kingdom itself.”  The Modernist enemies, he said, “lie hid, a thing to be deeply deplored and feared, in her very bosom and heart, and are the more mischievous, the less conspicuous they appear.” (Emphasis added.)

Promises to be Kept

Having reviewed all of the foregoing pages, therefore, it can’t escape notice that the sinister subversive powers we named not only share much philosophy and methodology in common, but also the same determined goal: the destruction of the Catholic Church. Thus, it is not at all unreasonable to conclude – in fact it can be fairly demonstrated – that all have been, and are facets of one self-perpetuating, clandestine entity:  Freemasonry.

In fact, Our Lady of Good Success confirmed as much in revelations made to Venerable Mariana de Jesus Torres, about the state of the Church and the world in the late 19^th and the 20^th centuries: “Masonry . . . will then be in power,” She said.  Our Lady’s revelations, all of them approved as valid by the Church, were given in the 1630s, eighty years before Masonry even came into existence!

What is the most frightening reality of all is that, through the agency of heretical Modernism, the Church’s enemies appear to be succeeding in their objective, to utterly destroy the Church. “The Christian spirit will rapidly decay, extinguishing the precious light of Faith until it reaches the point that there will be an almost total and general corruption of customs,” Our Lady told Mother Mariana. “How the Church will suffer during this dark night! Lacking a Prelate and Father to guide them with paternal love, gentleness, strength, wisdom and prudence, many priests will lose their spirit, placing their souls in great danger.”

Indeed, the situation would surely seem fatal, only for the loving promises of hope given by the Mother of God, first, to Venerable Mariana:  Just at that darkest hour will come “the happy beginning of the complete restoration. This will mark the arrival of My hour, when I, in a marvelous way, will dethrone the proud and cursed Satan, trampling him under my feet and fettering him in the infernal abyss.” 

Then three centuries later, Our Lady gave more succinct reassurance to the young visionaries of Fatima, promising that, however late it may be, “In the end my Immaculate Heart will triumph!”

Our Lady of the Most Holy Rosary,

Pray for us!