A big, dreary rain cloud is staring me in the face as I sit here at the entrance to St. Peter’s Square, awaiting the results of today’s first votes. I am right next to the door of a bar inside which I can escape should it come pelting down. I can enter the bar whenever I would like, but, at least for the moment, it is pleasant enough on the outside, and certainly much more so than it must be in the Sistine Chapel.
I can say that with conviction because I, like all of you, am inside the Conclave as a member of the Mystical Body of Christ, represented there by the angels and saints who are interceding with the cardinals on behalf of all of us for the election of an honest-to-goodness Catholic pope. And just as sure as there is a St. Michael the Archangel who defends us in battle—the Feast of whose Apparition in 492 is celebrated today—there are demonic thunderbolts and lightning being hurled by the opposing squad against our team and their prayers. Forget about possible pelting rain. The storm that they arouse must be truly frightful indeed.
Nevertheless, the cardinals’ great shield against this hellish tempest is the knowledge that our champions are armed with the prayerful supernatural weapons that are proper to a Catholic Army; not those fraudulently foisted on us by the enemy. For such “borrowed armor”, as the great apologist, Louis Veuillot, passionately argued in the nineteenth century, does nothing but “choke us”, blowing up in our face and smoothing the path for the army of the anti-Catholic cause to take a leisurely stroll to an all too easy victory. What we need from the present Conclave is a pope who understands this basic truth and adopts its consequences as a guide to his entire pontificate.
The “borrowed armor” theme is so central to my understanding of the problem that the Church faces, that I feel like Cato the Elder in my constant return to it in lectures and in print. Cato was so concerned about the possibility of a Carthaginian revival after the Second Punic War that he ended every speech in the Senate by saying: “and, by the way, Carthage must be destroyed”. If I must take the repetitive Roman Senator as my model, who cares! Let me say it and say it again, now using the full words of an insistent nineteenth century Catholic Cato—Louis Veuillot—-to do so:
The right tactic for us is to be visibly and always what we are, nothing more, nothing less. We defend a citadel which cannot be taken except when the garrison itself brings in the enemy. Combatting with our own arms, we only receive minor wounds. All borrowed armor troubles us and often chokes us.”
Alas, it is only borrowed armor that we now rely on!
Unfortunately, I can give you the tragic assurance that this error is not something new in the history of Christendom. We have often been guilty of what St. Cyril of Alexandria called dypsychia—the possession of two minds and souls: one that is professedly Christian and another which battles against the message of Redemption and destroys it. The seemingly Christian whitewash prevents the heinous fraud from being revealed…at least until some heroic Catholics unveil it. Frauds of this sort have enabled bad popes, bad cardinals, bad bishops, bad clerics, “Apostolic Emperors”, “Most Catholic Kings” and “Most Christian Republics” to wreak havoc with the true work of the Church Militant throughout the ages.
Our dypsychia today comes from attempting to make Catholicism what certain supporters of what historians call the Moderate or the Radical Enlightenment would like it to be. This is a project that began in Protestant circles in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in England and the new United States. While already influential in the Catholic world by the 1700s, the arguments on its behalf really gained a special charism after the French Revolution. One popular intellectual expression for what amounted to a nasty kidnapping of the Faith was the term palingenesis, signifying the “rebirth” of Christianity in each age in a different, unique form, which somehow supposedly always captures the essence of its real meaning.
By the 1800s, fear of the Radical Enlightenment, which meant Marxist Communism or Anarchism more than anything else, gave the Moderate Enlightenment direction an edge among authoritative clerics and laymen. Many Catholics were eager to make a “Party of Order” alliance with a “conservative” form of Liberalism which proclaimed an equal horror regarding those two atheist and anti-property movements. The one catch here was that Catholics were summoned not only to turn a blind idea to the underlying principles of liberal individualism—which ultimately makes of it only a “holding action” against extreme radicalization—but also even to go so far as to baptize them as downright “Christian”. And given that the dominant form of conservative Liberalism after the Second World War was that represented by Americanist Pluralism, this, too, was presented as the most secure arm to shoulder in defense of the Catholic Faith.
But a Radical Enlightenment vision, one of Rousseauian character—- translated into a Catholic idiom first by the Abbé de Lamennais in the nineteenth century, and then by a battery of missionaries, social activists, pastoral liturgical reformers, and personalist intellectuals in the twentieth—-also gained a powerful support. Its promoters argued that the Holy Spirit manifested Himself in history through the vital, energetic, action of democratic leaders and communities. What Catholics had to do was to “dive into” this vitality and “witness” to it, so as to help such vibrant, Spirit-favored leaders and societies to complete and perfect their unique “mystiques.
In order to “witness” properly, believers had to abandon whatever weapons stood in the way of their enthusiastic cooperation with the mystiques in question: namely, their substantive Catholic formation, with all of its presuppositions about how to express what was True, Good, and Beautiful. Yes, these vital communities might seem, at first glance, to be in many ways hostile to one another in belief and behavior. Nevertheless, their success proved that they all had the Holy Spirit behind them. Therefore, one could have absolute faith that their contemporary, outwardly clashing mystiques would somehow providentially “converge” in the future. In short, the victory of the Kingship of Christ would be assured by dismantling all defenses against what traditionally it actually meant and what traditionally it might entail in the way of correction of the outside world.
Both a non-racist Fascism of a Mussolini sort as well as Marxism were the first favorites of these “vitalists”. Still, one did have to admit that the impact of America’s vital energy was evident everywhere in the postwar world. A number of Catholic enthusiasts therefore argued for the need to “dive into” and help perfect the American community and those shaped by it. But what, exactly, were the underlying principles and standard operating procedure of that community? And what would a Catholic “witness” to its peculiar “mystique” really mean in practice? It would mean a witness to basic, John Lockean, Liberal individualist principles.
And this is a disaster, which, as the first citation below, from the journal La Civiltà Cattolica in the 1850s, indicates, can lead anywhere. It is a disaster which the second passage, from Louis Veuillot but a decade or two later, demonstrates has in fact led to the creation of a drab Empire of the World of a mish mash of libertine and egalitarian totalitarian characteristics; a mish mash of Radical Enlightenment dreams whose path to victory was prepared by the “nice and easy does it” approach of its “Christian” Moderate Enlightenment brother-in-arms.
Starting with the words “I am free” and their new-found spirit of independence, men began to believe in the infallibility of whatever seemed natural to them, and then to call “nature” everything that is sickness and weakness; to want sickness and weakness to be encouraged instead of healed; to suppose that encouraging weakness makes men healthier and happy; to conclude, finally, that human nature {conceived of as sickness and weakness} possesses the means to render man and society blissful on earth, and this without faith, grace, authority, or supernatural community…since “nature” gives us the feeling that it must be so.
The universal Empire will be the administrative Empire par excellence. Thus perfected, administration will satisfy simultaneously its own genius and the design of its master in applying itself to two main works: the realization of equality and of material well-being to an unheard of degree; the suppression of liberty to an unheard of degree….The police will take care that one is amused and that its reins never trouble the flesh. The administration will dispense the citizen of all care. It will fix his situation, his habitation, his vocation, his occupations. It will dress him and allot to him the quantity of air that he must breathe. It will have chosen him his mother; it will choose him his temporary wife; it will raise his children; it will take care of him in his illnesses; it will bury and burn his body, and dispose of his ashes in a record box with his name and his number….There will no longer be different places or climates, or any curiosity anywhere. Man will everywhere find the same moderate temperature, the same customs, the same administrative rules, and infallibly the same police taking the same care of him. Everywhere the same language will be spoken, the same ballerinas will everywhere dance the same ballet. The old diversity will be a memory of the old liberty, an outrage to the new equality, a greater outrage to the bureaucracy, which would be suspected of not being able to establish uniformity everywhere. Their pride will not suffer that. Everything will be done in the image of the main city of the Empire and of the World.
Sadly, the Catholic Church, tossing away its defenses and borrowing the arms of her enemies, has, especially since the Council, adopted the principles behind this reality as though they were the teachings of Christ, and as though the Empire of the World were His Social Kingdom. Dypsychia reigns supreme. Moreover, the popes, especially Francis, have become the chaplains for this caricature of fallen Christendom. Everything that promotes and defends the fraud is treated as eminently good; everything that fends off its victory as imprudent at best and evil at worst. So effective has been the disarmament that even the most committed “outsider” guerrilla fighters, over time, are simply too exhausted to indulge the luxury of criticizing the system in the few hours of repose left to them by the ever increasing demand for material labor that it requires to survive each day.
We fully believing Catholics who cherish the entirety of our Tradition and think that none of it has been rendered useless through a numerology making 2025 pangenesistically different from 1378, are the only ones not suffering from dypsychia regarding our religion. This is why some years ago, Russian Orthodox bishops engaged in ecumenical discussions with representatives sent from Rome asked that next time real Catholics from the SSPX should be their interlocutors. And because we are the only ones that shoulder the arms that are proper to our Faith, our enemies, weak as we know we are, target us—-as Biden did through the FBI—-as the only force that can, must—-and, of course inevitably will—-fend off the horrors of the insane asylum of the Empire of the World.
Make no mistake about it. Should the cardinals “card” and the pope they elect “pope”; should Traditionalists actually move from the outside to the inside; there will literally be hell to pay. As I indicated in my first article, I think that the terrible spread of heresy and the already existing but unadmitted schisms within the Church will become more open and enthusiastically embraced. Also, just as I do not see how the current suicidal tendencies of the West can in any way be thwarted without violence, I do not exclude even violent opposition to a truly Catholic pope and his policies. But should the center of Christendom throw away its borrowed armor and take proper arms against a sea of troubles, Peter, finally once again “awakened” and militantly doing the business of Christ and not the “business as usual” of the Grand Coalition of the Status Quo, will be looked to attentively by all who have been jolted back to their senses by the horror of the hellish slumber which is the product of global wokedom. He will be looked to as the answer to our prayers on their behalf.
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