Fatima and the
Great Chastisement

by John Vennari

This past year — 2007 — marked the anniversary of three important events of the 20th Century:

1) It was the 100th Anniversary of Pope Saint Pius X’s landmark documents against Modernism: that is, the Syllabus of Errors of the Modernist issued on July 4, 1907 — and Pascendi, the Encyclical Against Modernism, issued on September 8, 1907;

2) It was the 90th anniversary of Our Lady’s visitations to Fatima in 1917;

3) It was the 50th anniversary of Sister Lucy’s famous interview with Father Fuentes.

We will talk about all three of these events in this presentation, and I want to start by focusing on the Father Fuentes interview with Sister Lucy that took place at the Coimbra convent on December 26, 1957. Here, Sister Lucy said:

“Father, the Most Holy Virgin is very sad because no one has paid any attention to Her Message, neither the good nor the bad. The good continue on their way, but without giving any importance to Her Message. The bad, not seeing the punishment of God actually falling on them, continue their life of sin without even caring about the Message.  But believe me Father, God will chastise the world, and this will be in a terrible manner. The punishment from Heaven is imminent.”¹

Let us take a look at this “punishment from Heaven”, this terrible chastisement Sister Lucy speaks of.

The chastisement Sister Lucy speaks of here appears to be something even more than that which Our Lady spoke of at Her July 13, 1917 visitation at Fatima.

In the apparition of July 13, Our Lady warned the three children — Jacinta, Francisco and Lucy — that if people did not stop offending God, He would punish the world “by means of war, hunger and persecution of the Church and of the Holy Father”, and that Russia would be His chosen instrument of chastisement.

Our Lady said, “to prevent this, I shall come to ask for the Consecration of Russia to My Immaculate Heart”, and that if this were done, Russia would be converted and a period of peace given to the world. 

Our Lady also warned that if Her requests were not granted, “Russia will spread its errors throughout the world, raising up wars and persecutions of the Church. The good will be martyred, the Holy Father will have much to suffer and various nations will be annihilated.”

So we see that the punishments Our Lady spoke of on July 13 were:

• war



• hunger



• persecution of the Church



• persecution of the Holy Father



• the annihilation of nations.

Regarding the annihilation of nations: it is important to note that during the Father Fuentes interview, Sister Lucy said that Our Blessed Mother had told herself, Jacinta and Francisco “many times ... that many nations will disappear from the face of the earth.”² We only have the one recorded instance in July 1917, but Lucy said Our Lady spoke of the annihilation of many nations “many times!”

This aspect of the chastisement, however, is not what I will focus on. I want to focus on what appears to be another aspect of the chastisement that Sister Lucy alludes to in the Father Fuentes interview.

In 1957, just a few years before the Second Vatican Council and the crisis of Faith that followed, and just a few years before that revolutionary decade of the 1960s, the consequences of which we are still living through, Sister Lucy said:

“Father, the devil is about to wage a decisive battle with the Blessed Virgin, as he knows what it is that offends God the most, and in a short space of time will gain for him the greatest number of souls. Thus the devil does everything to overcome the souls consecrated to God, because in this way he will succeed in leaving the souls of the faithful abandoned by their leaders, thereby the more easily will he seize them.”

Now, in the 1950s, there was little indication that there would be this massive falling away of the clergy. There was little indication we would be deprived of good, solid Catholic leadership, which would result in a confusion and a falling away among a great number of the Catholic Faithful.

Yet Sister Lucy, in a veiled sort of manner, seemed to predict precisely what happened: the devil overcoming the souls consecrated to God, which results in leaving the souls of the faithful abandoned by their leaders, which makes them easy prey for the devil.

Chastisement

Now, the question is: Would God chastise mankind in this manner? Would He permit a “deceiving influence” to overcome the souls consecrated to God?

The answer is yes.

We know this from a number of sources.

First of all, we have the testimony of Saint John Eudes, one of the foremost proponents of Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and to what he called the “Admirable” Heart of Mary.

Saint John Eudes said that when God is angry with His people, He sends them bad priests as a chastisement.

Here is what he wrote in his book, The Priest, His Dignity and Obligations:

“The most evident mark of God’s anger and the most terrible castigation He can inflict upon the world are manifested when He permits His people to fall into the hands of clergy who are priests more in name than in deed, priests who practice the cruelty of ravening wolves rather than charity and affection of devoted shepherds ...

“When God permits such things, it is a very positive proof that He is thoroughly angry with His people, and is visiting His most dreadful anger upon them. That is why He cries unceasingly to Christians, ‘Return O ye revolting children ... and I will give you pastors according to My own heart’. (Jer. 3:14,15) Thus, irregularities in the lives of priests constitute a scourge upon the people in consequence of sin.”⁴

Saint John Eudes warns us that as punishment for man’s sins, God will send us priests who are not according to His own heart, who have a different spirit from that of the Sacred Heart of Our Lord, who have a different heart from that of Our Lady’s Immaculate Heart.

Another example we have of how God chastises His people is for them to have their churches and sacred objects destroyed.

In a beautiful booklet about the Icon of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, the Redemptorist Father Benedict D’Orazio explains:

“When God wishes to make known His displeasure toward a disobedient people, He usually rejects the sacred gifts they have presented to Him and sometimes allows even altars and consecrated images to be taken away or destroyed.”

The context in which Father D’Orazio says this is within the context of Eastern Orthodox’s rejection of the Divine Institution of the Papacy. As a result the Eastern Orthodox

• lost its famous picture of the Blessed Virgin known as “Our Lady of Victory”.  It was carried away from the East by the Venetians and placed in the Basilica of Saint Mark in Venice.

Father D’Orazio explains that likewise:

• the Holy House of Loreto passed from the Eastern to the Western Church, it was moved miraculously;



• the picture of Our Lady of Good Counsel passed from the Eastern to the Western Church;



• the Holy Icon of Our Lady of Perpetual Help passed from the Eastern to the Western Church.

Father D’Orazio points out that this was a punishment that befell “a people who were blinded and hardened by the constant abuse of graces which God has bestowed upon them in rich abundance.”⁵

So here, from the writings of Saint John Eudes and Father D’Orazio, we see that God will punish His people by allowing the sacred material things of Catholicism to be destroyed. God will sometimes allow “even altars and consecrated images to be taken away or destroyed”; and God will punish His people by sending them bad priests — priests who are not according to His heart, but of the spirit of the world or of anti-Christ.

Now I don’t think it takes a tremendous amount of explanation to point out that the marks of this type of chastisement from God is the hallmark of our beleaguered Church since Vatican II.

Practically every church has had its altar destroyed, or at least replaced in usage, by a Protestant styled altar-table.  Practically every church has experienced, in some form or another, what is called the wreckovation of its interior — modern, ugly church furnishings and images that do not transmit the truths of the faith.

Or oftentimes the churches are stripped bare. This was the case with Saint Leo’s, my own parish church in northeast Philadelphia where I grew up. It once had a beautiful interior, a soaring high altar with many little points like praying hands up to the sky; two matching side altars; beautiful statues; impressive communion rail, handsome black and white tile floor, huge octagon lectern with carved images and cherub heads adorning it.

In the mid 1960s, a priest named Father Quinn was appointed pastor. He seemed to come from nowhere. He stayed for about five years, and completely renovated — that is, wreckovated — the church’s interior, so that it now looks like a barren, empty Protestant meeting hall. The magnificent pulpit is gone, all but two statues are gone, the high altar was removed and replaced by a Novus Ordo altar that looks like a wooden ironing board.

This type of destruction happened in parish after parish;  it occurred not even ten years after Sister Lucy said, “God will chastise the world, and this will be in a terrible manner. The punishment from Heaven is imminent.”

Then there is the falling away of the consecrated souls. Here I am not talking about those who have left the priesthood or left the religious life and returned to the world in unprecedented numbers since the Council. No, I am talking about those who have stayed in and adopted a new modernized version of “Catholicism”, a kind of “un-Catholic Catholicism”, a “Liberal Catholicism” that would have been condemned by every Pope before 1958. These clergymen adopted and foisted on the people the very liberal Catholicism that Blessed Pope Pius IX warned would “destroy us,” would “be the ruin of religion,” and would “prevent us from meriting the blessings of God.”⁶

This worldwide destruction of the Faith, caused by liberal Catholicism, started just a few years after Sister Lucy said, “The punishment from Heaven is imminent.”

We are in a great chastisement right now. We’ve been in it for the last forty years, and, humanly speaking, there is no end in sight.

The Operation of Error

Yet this is not all. We have had more than our “altars and consecrated images taken away or destroyed. “What we have lost is far more precious, far more important, far more fundamental.

I want to tell you what I believe is the real nature of the chastisement we are now under, and it is something that will lead to all of the other material chastisements that Our Lady warned about at Fatima.

What we have lost, and what a staggering number of Catholic churchmen have lost, is the recognition of the immutability of objective truth.

It is immutability truth — that is — unchangeable Catholic faith that informs our intellect that gives us the ability to appreciate the value of the Holy Icons of Our Lady; that gives us the ability to reverence the altars.

And I truly believe that this loss of the recognition of the immutability of objective truth is the deceiving influence of our time, and that this deceiving influence is a punishment from God.

What does Scripture warn regarding the coming of anti-Christ — and by extension, the coming of the spirit of anti-Christ as it appears in any age?

“For they have not received the love of the truth that they might be saved. Therefore God sends them a deceiving influence [the Douay-Rheims calls it ‘an operation of error’] that they may believe a falsehood.”(2 Thess. 2-10)

Thus I believe the deceiving influence of our time, the operation of error of our time, is the loss of the recognition of the immutability of objective truth.

How does this manifest itself?

It manifests itself in statements such as,

• Oh, the Church always taught that there is only one true Church, outside of which there is no salvation – but now we believe that a person can save his soul in any religion.



• The Church always taught that all human beings are born with Original Sin, and the only way to be cleansed of Original Sin and to receive sanctifying grace is Baptism, but now modern scholars (such as Father Richard McBrien) believe that all souls are born without Original Sin and are born into the life of grace, so we can dispense with Limbo.⁷



• The Church always taught that the Bible contains no errors, but now we believe that the Bible contains historical, scientific and factual errors, even though we still regard it as a Holy Book.



• The Popes have taught continuously that the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas is the perennial philosophy of the Church, that his metaphysics are without error, and that the method, doctrine and principles of St. Thomas Aquinas should be held as “sacred” and must have the primacy of place; but now we believe that Thomism is “narrow and rigid”, and we have to abandon St. Thomas and instead incorporate modern philosophical systems to make Catholicism “relevant” to modern man;



• The Church always taught that Mass is primarily a sacrifice — the unbloody re-presentation of Calvary, with the priest acting in the person of Christ. But now we believe that the Mass is simply a commemoration of the Last Supper, a holy meal that we all celebrate in Christ’s memory; so we need a new Mass based on the Protestant mode of worship, which is exactly what the New Mass is, as pointed out by Cardinal Ottaviani in 1969.⁸

Archbishop Bugnini, the architect of the New Mass, bluntly stated the principles on which he would build his new liturgy. He said:

“We must strip from our Catholic prayers and from the Catholic liturgy everything which can be the shadow of a stumbling block for our separated brethren, that is, for the Protestants.”⁹

Thus, in order to serve this new understanding of liturgy, a liturgy not at the service of Catholicism, but at the service of ecumenism, we will reconstruct the Mass for the sake of those who do not believe that the Mass is a sacrifice; for those who do not believe in a sacrificing priesthood; for those who do not believe that Christ is present in the Blessed Sacrament.

Update! This is the new order of the day since the Council:  change, change, change.

This failure to recognize the immutability of objective truth manifests itself in the heresy of Modernism; the belief that there is some portion of Catholic dogma that changes over time; the belief that religion must change with the times; the belief that what the Church taught 100 years ago has to be retooled, or repackaged, or updated into new “Catholic” teachings of today.

It is the buzzword of Vatican II: Aggiornamento! Update!

Papal Warnings

Now, when it comes to the observation that present-day clergymen have lost the proper understanding of truth, I want to make it clear that this is not my own musings on the subject. For the past 100 years, the great Popes — particularly Popes St. Pius X, Pius XI and Pius XII — recognized that this failure to recognize the immutability of objective truth was coming to be a major problem. It manifested itself in too many among the Catholic clergy, and in too many Catholic “intellectuals.”

When Pope Saint Pius X condemned Modernism in his magnificent Encyclical Pascendi, what did he say of the Modernists? He said, “they pervert the eternal concept of truth.”¹⁰

In his magnificent Syllabus of Errors Against Modernism, in which he condemned 65 of the central doctrines of the modernists, Pope Saint Pius X condemned the proposition that “Truth is no more immutable than man himself, since it evolved with him, in him, and through him.”¹¹

Why did the Pope have to issue this condemnation?

Because modernist priests, modernist bishops, modernist theologians had in effect rejected the fact that truth is unchangeable. And Pope Saint Pius X had to issue a Syllabus and write an encyclical against this most fundamental error. But even this was not enough. Three years later, St. Pius X had to issue an Oath Against Modernism, because he said that the modernists had not corrected themselves. St. Pius X said that these “wily modernists” have formed a secret alliance, and were continuing to pervert Catholic doctrine.¹²

Now this trouble did not go away. The rejection of the recognition of the immutability of truth did not die with Pope St. Pius X. There were still too many priests, bishops, religious and theologians who were infected with this “operation of error”.

So much so that 14 years after Pope St. Pius X had issued the Oath Against Modernism, his successor, Pope Pius XI instructed the Vatican’s Holy Office to condemn 12 false propositions of philosophy then gaining sway among priests and theologians. This happened on December 1, 1924.

One of the twelve propositions condemned was the new definition of truth, which, to sum up, rejected the fact that truth is the conformity of the intellect with the external reality. Rather, it held the hazy notion that truth is simply the conformity of our intellect with life and its ever-changing circumstances, so that everything is in a state of flux and progression. Truth is always in a state of “becoming”.¹³

We see that the Pope still has to correct the false notion, all too rampant among certain priests and theologians, that truth is not immutable, that there is no such thing as an immutable, objective truth.

Fast forward to the 1930s and 40s, the same problem still exists and is getting worse. The catastrophe of World War II distracted even the good bishops from their vigilance in watching the growth of modern heretical tendencies.

At this time, the error that truth is always in a state of flux was increasingly applied to religion. So much so that the Jesuit Father Henri Boulliard, who was a proponent of something called the “New Theology”, said “a theology that is not current [does not keep changing] will be a false theology.”¹⁴

Pope Pius XII raised his voice against this false understanding of truth. In 1946, he complained of this new theology saying,

“There is a good deal of talk (but without the necessary clarity of concept) about a ‘new theology’, which must be in a constant transformation, following the example of all other things in the world, which are in a constant state of flux and movement, without ever reaching their term. If we were to accept such an opinion, what would become of the unchangeable dogmas of the Catholic Faith; and what would become of the unity and stability of that Faith?”¹⁵

This is a rhetorical question; for the Pope to ask this question is to answer it. Pius XII is warning us that the unity of the faith, the stability of the faith, the unchangeable dogmas of the Catholic Faith will be destroyed under the system of this New Theology,  where truth is always in the process of becoming, in which there is no immutable truth, and where religion must change for the sake of changing time.

That is why Father Garrigou-Lagrange, one of the greatest Thomists of the 20th Century, fought the New Theology. In a landmark 1946 article “Where is new theology leading us?” he correctly warned that the so-called “new theology” is leading us straight back to Modernism.¹⁶

The main proponents of the New Theology were: Father Dominque Chenu; Father Karl Rahner; Father Yves Congar; and Father Henri de Lubac. These men were either condemned or deemed theologically suspect by the Holy Office of Pope Pius XII.

To make a long story short, just before and during Vatican II — which was a pastoral Council that did not define anything — these same men were invited by Pope John XXIII to become theological experts at the Council, advising the liberal bishops who gained the upper hand at Vatican II. These men had never retracted or revoked their heterodox views. And it was these men who drafted the ambiguous Council documents. In short, it was the modernist new theology that triumphed at Vatican II.

Father Henrici, a disciple of the “New Theology” boasted that the New Theology of Lyon (cradle of de Lubac’s theology) “has become the official theology of Vatican II”.¹⁷

Marcel Prelot, liberal senator of the Dobbs region of France, boasted:

“We had struggled for a century and a half to bring our opinions to prevail within the Church and had not succeeded. Finally there came Vatican II and we triumphed. From then on the propositions and principles of Liberal Catholicism have been definitively and officially accepted by Holy Church.”¹⁸

Remember what Pius IX warned. This liberal Catholicism, said Pius IX, would destroy us, would lead to the ruin of religion, would prevent us from meriting the blessings of God. This is the true nature of what Vatican II wrought.

It all stems from that operation of error, that deceiving influence, which rejects the recognition of the immutability of objective truth. As I said, I believe this is the main spiritual chastisement of our time, and it is this perversion of the truth that destroys the true Faith and will lead to the material chastisements warned of by Our Lady of Fatima.

The New Approach

I want to give a brief example of this false conception of truth by spotlighting some current statements made by some of those who, as Sister Lucy described, “occupy places of responsibility within the Church”.

On May 12, 2007 at a conference in Moscow to mark the 90th Anniversary of Our Lady’s visitations to Fatima, Archbishop Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz, Catholic metropolitan of Moscow, publicly claimed that the conversion of Russia predicted by Our Lady does not mean the conversion of the Russian Orthodox to the Catholic Faith.

“It is completely wrong”, he said, to think that the Virgin’s prediction about the conversion of Russia means its conversion to Catholicism.

“Russia is above all an Orthodox country and it is the Russian Orthodox Church that is responsible in the first place for converting people to Christianity”, he said.¹⁹

He repeated the same error thirteen days later on May 25, 2007. The Archbishop said:

“Our Lady of Fatima spoke of the conversion of Russia to God; She didn’t say that it had to be exclusively Catholic. As the Catholic Church, we help our Orthodox brethren and we work together to continue and develop dialogue between us.”²⁰

The following month, the Vatican’s Cardinal Poupard said virtually the same thing. In his ecumenical enthusiasm, he even blurted out the historical error that “the Vatican never wanted to make Russia a Catholic nation.”²¹

Now, this not only undermines the Fatima Message regarding the prophecy of the conversion of Russia, but it also defies the Catholic Faith of all time.²²

The Council of Florence and Pius X

It is clear that members of what is called the “Russian Orthodox Church” are schismatics. This should not be regarded so much as a derogatory term, but as a factual description of the position these religious bodies are in. They are separated from the Catholic Church since the 10th Century and this schism has yet to be healed.

And the Council of Florence taught infallibly that schismatics are outside the Church, and cannot be saved unless they convert to the one and only true Church of Jesus Christ, the Catholic Church.²³

This truth was reiterated by Pope Saint Pius X, the greatest Pope of the 20th Century.

Pope Saint Pius X spoke specifically of the need for the schismatic Orthodox to return to the Catholic Church. In a little-known 1910 Encyclical Ex Quo, he wrote that all work for the reunion of the schismatic Orthodox “will be in vain unless first, and above all, they (the Eastern Orthodox) hold the true and whole Catholic Faith as it has been handed down and consecrated in Holy Scripture, the tradition of the Fathers, the consent of the Church, general councils and the decrees of the Supreme Pontiffs.”

Saint Pius X prayed that God will “hasten the day when the nations of the East shall return to Catholic unity and, united to the Apostolic See, after casting away their errors, shall enter the port of everlasting salvation.”²⁴

We see Saint Pius X reiterates that the Eastern Orthodox:

1) Embrace heretical teachings that they must abandon;

2) are not united to the true Church of Christ due to their schism;

3) will not arrive at the port of salvation unless they cast away their errors and join Christ’s one true Church, by submitting to the legitimate Apostolic Authority of the Papacy.

Contrary to the ecumenical teaching now prevalent among Church leaders, and propounded by Archbishop Kondrusiewicz and Cardinal Poupard, conversion can only have one meaning: the return of the schismatics, heretics and dissidents to the true Church established by Jesus Christ, the Catholic Church.

The new definition of conversion is simply Modernism’s Catholic words with un-Catholic meanings. To adhere to such a notion is to succumb to Modernism.

Modernism Must Be Resisted

As mentioned, Modernism is the belief in some transformation of the Church’s dogmatic message over time. It is the belief that the Catholic truths of yesterday have to be reworked or retooled or repackaged to make way for the new Catholic “truths” of today. It is the erroneous belief that religion must change for the sake of changing times. Pope Saint Pius X — one hundred years ago — condemned this heresy with this Syllabus of Errors against Modernism (July 4, 1907), his encyclical against modernism — (Sept. 8, 1907); and with the establishment of the Oath Against Modernism (Sept. 1, 1910).

In the Oath Against Modernism, the man makes a solemn Oath to God:

“I sincerely receive the doctrine of faith handed down to us from the Apostles through the orthodox Fathers, with the same meaning and in the same explanation (eodem sensu eodem que sententia); and consequently I completely reject the heretical fiction of an evolution of dogmas, changing from one meaning to another, different from that which the Church first held.”

Now it can be said that this does not bind only the man who takes the Oath Against Modernism. In fact, Pope St. Pius X lifted the terminology for the dogmatic Vatican Council I which teaches infallibly in de Filius:

“Let therefore, the understanding, the knowledge, and the wisdom of the individual man, and of all men; of one man, and of the entire Church grow, and advance greatly and powerfully over the course of the years and the ages, but only in its own class (in suo dumtaxat genre), in the same dogma, with the same meaning and in the same explanation (sententia).”²⁵

All Catholics are bound to believe that dogma does not change, that we have to believe Catholic truth “in the same meaning and in the same explanation” as it has always been taught.

The great tragedy is that we are in a unique point in history wherein most of those who occupy places of responsibility in the Church have fallen victim to the error of Modernism, the belief that some aspects of Catholic doctrine can change over time. It is a problem that comes from the very top of the Church.

So now we can better understand why Cardinal Ciappi, the papal theologian to five consecutive Popes, said, “In the Third Secret we read, among other things, that the great apostasy in the Church begins at the top.”²⁶

We can also better understand Sister Lucy’s warning to Father Fuentes in 1957 that God was about to chastise the world, and that “the devil does everything to overcome the souls consecrated to God, because in this way he will succeed in leaving the souls of the faithful abandoned by their leaders, thereby the more easily will he seize them.”

We are living this prophecy right now: the chastisement of those who occupy places of responsibility in the Church who no longer recognize the immutability of objective truth; who in various ways teach a new doctrine contrary to and different from that which the Church always held. We are thus abandoned by our leaders, because we cannot rely on them to uphold Catholic doctrine and discipline. We cannot rely on them to teach us the full Catholic Faith, as the Athanasian Creed commands, “whole and undefiled”.

A clear proof of this is the fact that thousands of Catholic parents must take upon themselves the duty of home schooling their children because of the perverse curriculum today’s “Catholic” bishops allow in diocesan schools.

The Holy Apostle St. Paul warned St. Timothy:

“For there will come a time when they will not endure sound doctrine; but having itching ears, will heap up to themselves teachers according to their own lusts, and they will turn away their hearing from the truth and turn aside rather to fables.” (2 Timothy 4:3,4)

Since it is obvious that we live in a time of a great “turning away” from the truth, we counter this by doing all in our power to promote a great “turning back”.

We must

1) Accept the immutability of objective truth;

2) Accept the fact that Catholic truth does not change; and keep Catholic doctrine as it was always taught “in the same meaning and in the same explanation”;

3) Pray for those infected with modern errors, and publicly resist them;

4) Live the Fatima Message of daily Rosary, Five First Saturdays of Reparation, offering daily duty to God as an act of sacrifice.

In this struggle, in which we know Our Lady will be the ultimate Victor, we can draw strength from the words of Sister Lucy to Father Fuentes,
“That is why now it is necessary for each one of us to begin to reform himself spiritually. Each person must not only save his own soul but also help all the souls that God has placed on our path.”²⁷

1. Frère François, Tragedy and Triumph, [Buffalo: Immaculate Heart Publications, 1994],p. 27.



2. Ibid.



3. Ibid.



4. Saint John Eudes, The Priest: His Dignity and Obligations, (New York: P.J. Kenedy & Sons, 1947) pp. 9-10.



5. Our Lady of Perpetual Help, Father D’Orazio, translated by Father Francis J. Connell, [reprinted by Loretto Publications], pp. 5-6.



6. This is explained more fully in the 8 part CD/Cassette series “Vatican II and the Components of Liberal Catholicism” by John Vennari, available from Oltyn Library Services, 2316 Delaware Ave., PMB 325, Buffalo, NY 14216.



7. “Pope Revises ‘Limbo’, Says There Is Hope For Babies Who Are Not Baptized”, Asssociated Press, April 21, 2007.



8. See the Ottaviani Intervention.



9. L’Osservatore Romano, March 19, 1965.



10. 1Denz. 2080.



11. Denz. 2058.



12. Quoted from “The Sacrorum Antistitum and the Background to the Oath Against Modernism”, Msgr. Joseph Clifford Fenton, American Ecclesiastical Review, October 1960.



13. The exact condemned proposition reads: “Truth is not found in any particular act of the intellect wherein conformity with the object would be had, as the Scholastics say, but rather truth is always in a state of becoming, and consists in a progressive alignment of the understanding with life, indeed a certain perpetual process, by which the intellect strives to develop and explain that which experience presents or action requires: by which principle, moreover, as in all progression, nothing is ever determined or fixed.” Quoted from “Where is the New Theology Leading Us?” by Father Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P. Originally published in 1946 in Rome’s Angelicum, translated into English by CFN and published in August, 1988. On the web at www.cfnews.org/gg-newtheo.htm



14. Ibid.



15. Quoted from “Thomism and the New Theology”, Father David Greenstock, The Thomist, October 1950, p. 568.



16. “Where is the New Theology Leading Us”, op. cit.



17. Full quote from Father Henrici reads “Our allegiance is to that tradition in the line of the ‘new theology’ of Lyon [cradle of de Lubac’s theology] which insists on the non-opposition between nature and super-nature, that is, nature and super-nature are really identical things (and consequently) between faith and culture, and which has become the official theology of Vatican II.” Fr. Henrici in his interview with 30 Days of December 1991, quoted from “They Think They Have Won,” Part VIII, see footnote 8. On the web at: www.sspxasia.com/Documents/SiSiNoNo/1994_October/
    They_Think_Theyve_Won_PartVIII.htm



18.   Quoted from Open Letter to Confused Catholics, Marcel Lefebvre [Kansas City: Angelus Press, 1992], p. 100.



19. “Russia’s Conversion Does Not Require Leaving Orthodox Faith: Catholic Prelate”, Catholic World News, May 14, 2007; “Catholic Archbishop Rejects the Practice of Proselytism in Russia”, Interfax, May 14, 2007.



20. “Russia Marks Fatima Anniversary”, Zenit, May 25, 2007.



21. “Vatican Has No Plans to Convert Russia to Catholicism — Cardinal Poupard”, Interfax, June 18, 2007. In answer to Cardinal Poupard’s theological and historical error, see Dr. Peter Chojnowski’s lecture “The Politics of ‘Prudence’ vs. the Politics of Trust: Ostpolitik and the Message of Tuy”, given at the Fatima Peace Conference in Brazil, 2007 (available on cassette or CD). Call 1-800-263-8160.



22. A fuller treatment of this appeared in September 2007 CFN. I repeat a section of it here to make the piece self-contained.



23. “The Most Holy Roman Church firmly believes, professes and preaches that none of those existing outside the Catholic Church, not only pagans, but also Jews, heretics, and schismatics can ever be partakers of eternal life, but that they are to go into the eternal fire ‘which was prepared for the devil and his angels,’ (Mt. 25:41) unless before death they are joined with Her; and that so important is the unity of this Ecclesiastical Body, that only those remaining within this unity can profit from the sacraments of the Church unto salvation, and that they alone can receive an eternal recompense for their fasts, almsdeeds, and other works of Christian piety and duties of a Christian soldier. No one, let his almsgiving be as great as it may, no one, even if he pour out his blood for the Name of Christ, can be saved unless they abide within the bosom and unity of the Catholic Church.” Pope Eugene IV, Council of Florence, February 4, 1442.  



24.   See Ex Quo, by Pope Saint Pius X, December 26, 1910.



25. Translation of both the Oath Against Modernism and Vatican I taken from “Two Statements About the Necessity of the Church for the Attainment of Eternal Salvation,” Msgr. Joseph Clifford Fenton, American Ecclesiastical Review, June, 1962. Emphasis added.



26. The Devil’s Final Battle, edited by Father Paul Kramer, [Terryville: The Missionary Association, 2002], p. 33.



27. Tragedy and Triumph, p. 28.