Infiltration
Page 9
The instructions given by the Blessed Mother at Fatima to Lúcia regarded a specific consecration of Russia, and not a general consecration of the world.59 And yet, on the following dates, popes have refrained from doing so because of the great pressure that Russia placed on Europe and on the Catholic Church beginning in the 1940s and up through our own time:
Pius XII on 31 October 1942
Paul VI on 21 November 1964
John Paul II on 13 May 1982
John Paul II on 25 March 1984 with all the bishops
Francis on 13 October 2013
All of these were general-mode consecrations of the world to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, and, as such, they were gracious, good, and beneficial to the Catholic Church and, by extension, to all humanity. “Remember, O most gracious Virgin Mary, that never was it known that anyone who fled to your protection, implored your help, or sought your intercession, was left unaided.” And yet, it is not an exact papal consecration of Russia to the Immaculate Heart.
There is one and only one papal consecration in the history of the Catholic Church that comes close to meeting the specific consecration of Russia to the Immaculate Heart, and it is found in Pius XII’s Apostolic Letter Sacro vergente, dated 7 July 1952. There, Pius XII recounts the thousand-year relationship of Rome with the Russian people, beginning with the missionary efforts of Saints Cyril and Methodius (on whose feast this letter was written), who were sent by Pope Adrian II to the Slavic peoples. Pius recounts the happy fellowship of Rome and Russia and mentions the relief provided (through his own mediation as Cardinal Pacelli) by Pope Benedict XV and Pope Pius XI. Without apology, he notes that Pius XI assigned the traditional Leonine Prayers after Low Mass to be prayed for “the unhappy conditions of religion in Russia.” Then he specifically consecrates Russia to the Immaculate Heart:
We, therefore, so that Our prayers may be more readily granted, and to give you a singular attestation of Our particular benevolence, as we a few years ago have consecrated the whole world to the Immaculate Heart of the virgin Mother of God, so now, so very special, we consecrate all the peoples of Russia to the same Immaculate Heart, in the sure trust that with the most powerful patronage of the Virgin Mary the vows are fulfilled as soon as possible, that we — that all the good ones — form for true peace, for a fraternal concord and for the due freedom to all and first of all to the church; so that, through the prayer that We raise together with you and with all Christians, the saving kingdom of Christ, which is the kingdom of truth and life, the kingdom of holiness and grace, the reign of justice, in all parts of the earth may triumph and steadily grow.60
Pius XII explicitly refers to the international consecration of all nations in 1942, and here in 1952 he renews it again, but this time for Russia specifically: “We consecrate all the peoples of Russia to the same Immaculate Heart, in the sure trust that with the most powerful patronage of the Virgin Mary the vows are fulfilled as soon as possible.” This, in fact, appears to be a specific and precise papal consecration of Russia to the Immaculate Heart and in some way fulfills the request of Mary in 1917 — but it did not include the participation of the bishops of the world. Hence, it does not fulfill the precise instructions of Our Lady.
Less than two months later, on 2 September 1952, Pope Pius XII sent Father Joseph Schweigl to Coimbra, Portugal, to interview Sister Lúcia in her convent about the Third Secret. On his return to the Russicum in Rome, Father Schweigl confided this to one of his colleagues: “I cannot reveal anything of what I learned at Fatima concerning the Third Secret, but I can say that it has two parts: One concerns the Pope. The other, logically — although I must say nothing — would have to be the continuation of the words ‘In Portugal, the dogma of the Faith will always be preserved.’ ”61
58 Apostoli, Fatima for Today, 71.
59 Concerning this request, Sister Lucia told Professor William Thomas Walsh during a 15 July 1946 interview: “What Our Lady wants is that the Pope and all the bishops in the world shall consecrate Russia to her Immaculate Heart on one special day. If this is done, she will convert Russia and there will be peace. If it is not done, the errors of Russia will spread through every country in the world.”
[Walsh:] “Does this mean, in your opinion, that every country, without exception, will be overcome by Communism?”
[Lucia:] “Yes.”
William Thomas Walsh, Our Lady of Fatima (New York: Image Books, 1990), 221.
60 Pius XII, Sacro Vergente, 9. Emphasis added.
61 Michael of the Holy Trinity, The Whole Truth about Fatima, vol. 3, The Third Secret (Buffalo, NY: Immaculate Heart Publishing, 1990), 710.
12
Communist Infiltration of the Liturgy
Unfortunately, the second half of the pontificate of Pius XII is not as brilliant as the first half. In 1948, Pius XII appointed the controversial priest Father Annibale Bugnini to the Commission for Liturgical Reform.
The commission was tasked with restoring the liturgy for the Mass of Holy Saturday, usually celebrated in the morning, to that of a Paschal Vigil celebrated into the night in anticipation of Easter the following morning. In A.D. 800, the Holy Saturday Mass was celebrated just before nightfall. By 1076, the Holy Saturday Mass was celebrated in the afternoon. By the 1500s, this Holy Saturday Mass with the triple candle, the paschal candle, and twelve readings was universally celebrated in the early morning of Holy Saturday. Pope Saint Pius V even decreed in his 1566 bull Sanctissimus that all priests were banned from celebrating the Holy Saturday Mass after noon.
Liturgists had long noted that the “Exultet” hymn, chanted by the deacon in the blessing of the paschal candle, spoke of the chant occurring in the nighttime:
Therefore, the hallowing of this night putteth wickedness to flight, washeth away sins, and restoreth innocence to the fallen, and joy to the sorrowful; it banisheth hatred, and prepareth peace, and maketh sovereignties to yield. Therefore, in favor of this night, receive, O holy Father . . .
Since the liturgy itself is ancient and refers to the context as “this night,” liturgists of the 1940s wanted to resituate the liturgy in the nighttime of Holy Saturday just before Easter Day. Previous theologians, such as Saint Thomas Aquinas and Saint Pius V, had defended the daytime celebration of Holy Saturday. The morning argument for Holy Saturday Vigil Mass was that fasting required an earlier time and that most laymen would not be able to attend a late-night Saturday Mass and a Sunday Morning Mass — since there was not yet any notion of fulfilling one’s Sunday obligation with a Saturday-evening Vigil Mass. Interestingly enough, it was thought to be a “pastoral” concession to celebrate the Holy Saturday Mass on Saturday morning and not late on Saturday night. Traditional theologians also noted that the liturgy is full of “temporal rescheduling.” Our Lord Jesus Christ celebrated the first Eucharist at night, but we almost universally celebrate it in the morning. The Last Supper was on Thursday, but our obligation is for Sunday. And so on.
The Liturgical Movement would hear none of it and wanted to resituate this Holy Saturday Mass as a late-night Paschal Vigil. But they immediately realized that this was not “pastoral” for laymen (which had been known for centuries). So, these liturgical innovators concluded that they would need to rewrite the entire Holy Saturday Mass to conform Holy Saturday to this nighttime slot.
Sadly, Pope Pius XII unwisely chose Father Annibale Bugnini to accomplish a “restoration” of something that never previously existed.
Annibale, whose name means “gift of Baal,” was born in Civitella del Lago in Umbria in 1912. At age twenty-four, he was ordained a priest for the Congregation of the Mission. He earned his doctorate in sacred theology at the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas (Angelicum) by defending his dissertation on the liturgy and the Council of Trent. He became the editor of Ephemerides Liturgicae, a Catholic journal dedicated to the Liturgical Movement, when he caught the attention of Pope Pius XII. Unbeknownst to Pope Pius XII, he was rumored to be a Freemason.
The revise
d Holy Saturday liturgy of 1951 turned into a revised Holy Week in 1955. And in 1956, Bugnini convinced Pius XII to allow concelebration, in which priests could celebrate Mass together in a group around the altar — a custom rarely practiced in the Roman Rite.62 Already, Bugnini was at work on what others would later identify as “Protestantization” of the Catholic liturgy:
Blessings (such as of palms) were reduced or eliminated.
The priest prayed from the chair and not from the altar.
The triple candle, representing the Blessed Trinity and the three Marys arriving at the tomb, was suppressed.
The traditional folded chasubles and vesture were suppressed or simplified.
The priest began to face more toward the people.
Vernacular language was introduced.
The number of lessons was reduced from twelve to four (to make the Paschal Vigil shorter for laypeople).
The Litany of Saints was modified.
Contrary to tradition, the laity were asked to kneel for the prayer for the Jews on Good Friday.
Holy water was blessed in front of the people and not at the baptismal font.
Renewal of baptismal vows was added (in the vernacular) so that the laity could “participate.”
Tenebrae was suppressed.
Evening celebrations for Maundy Thursday and Holy Saturday were enforced.
Beyond Holy Week, Bugnini suppressed many of the octaves and vigils, abolished the First Vespers of many feasts, and made the “Dies Irae” optional at funeral Masses.
Clearly, this was no longer the ancient and received rite. The Holy Week liturgy in the Roman Rite is the oldest liturgy in the world, and Bugnini slashed it to pieces as an experiment. Those in the Liturgical Movement rejoiced about these “restorations” that restored nothing but time slots at the expense of the actual texts and rubrics of the ancient liturgies.
Worst of all, this inspired Bugnini and others to press for even more radical changes to the Mass itself. They called for the suppression of the prayers at the foot of the altar, the offertory prayers, the Last Gospel, and the Leonine Prayers. Everything was up for grabs.
The original 1951 Holy Saturday revision began merely as an “experiment,” but it became the required norm. This set the agenda. Their modus operandi was to propose changes as an “experiment” and then press for the changes to be required under pain of sin. What became the Novus Ordo Missae of 1969–1970 arose from the seeds planted by Bugnini in Holy Week of 1955.
62 In A.D. 619 the Council of Seville decreed that priests could not concelebrate Mass with a bishop present. An exception may have been made in Rome for cardinals to concelebrate with the Pope on feast days as late as the 1100s. Concelebration was allowed in the Roman Rite at the ordination of a priest so that the new priest concelebrated with the ordaining bishop, and similarly at the consecration of a bishop so that the newly consecrated bishop concelebrated with the consecrating bishop.
13
Woeful Illness of Pius XII: Three Crypto-Modernists
It’s difficult to understand why Pope Pius XII softened in his later years and how he was ostensibly manipulated by the likes of Father Bugnini. His friends and acquaintances noted a drastic change in his personality beginning in 1954, when the pope succumbed to a serious case of gastritis. Photos reveal that Pope Pius XII deeply enjoyed the ceremony of the Roman Rite and enjoyed the pomp and glory of the papal liturgies. He is often depicted with his arms extended and jaw tilted upward. Perhaps the most glorious depictions of the papacy in human history are photos of Pius XII.
Yet beginning with his extreme illness in 1954, the pope eschewed the ceremonial of the Catholic Church. Unlike his younger self as nuncio in Germany and as a younger pope, he became reluctant about making decisions. Perhaps because of his poor health, he also avoided long liturgies and papal responsibilities. From 1955 to 1958, he succumbed to night terrors and hallucinations and seems to have resigned himself to death.
With the onset of illness, Pope Pius XII, on 17 May 1955, sent his trusted Cardinal Ottaviani, head of the Vatican’s Holy Office, to interrogate Sister Lúcia concerning the sealed contents of the Third Secret of Fatima. As a result of Ottaviani’s interview with Lúcia, the Holy See asked Lúcia’s bishop to transfer the Third Secret, still sealed in an envelope, to the Vatican in April 1957. Just before sending the Third Secret to the Vatican, Bishop John Venancio held the sealed envelope up to his lamp. He noted that the sealed envelope contained one sheet of paper with twenty-five lines of written text with ¾-centimeter margins on both sides. When the Third Secret came to the Vatican, it was placed in a safe in the papal apartments, as shown in a photograph in Paris Match magazine. Pius XII, as a good and obedient pope, did not open the sealed envelope but submitted to the inscription on the envelope that it should be opened in 1960.
Meanwhile, three clerics exercised immense influence over the dying Pius XII: Bugnini, Montini, and the German Jesuit Augustin Bea. These three crypto-Modernists used the final three years of the pontificate to hatch their plot for a new style of pope, a new council, and new liturgy. Pius XII had not appointed a cardinal secretary of state. He innovated by bifurcating the office of secretary of state and appointing Montini (future Pope Paul VI) as his interior Vatican City affairs secretary and Domenico Cardinal Tardini as his exterior foreign affairs secretary. In effect, it was Montini who ran the Holy See and the papacy from 1955 until the death of Pius XII in 1958. For example, Montini allowed the disgraced papal physician to enter the Papal apartment and photograph the dying Pius XII — photos he sold to newspapers for a profit.
Montini had a dark side, as demonstrated by his friendship with Saul Alinsky. In the late spring of 1958 (months before the death of Pius XII on 9 October 1958), Montini met three times with Jewish-American Leftist and Chicago infiltrator Alinsky through the arrangement of the French philosopher Jacques Maritain. Maritain was a pseudo-Thomist who had penned the Modernist book Integral Humanism in 1935. In this book, Maritain proposed a “new form” of Christendom, rooted in his philosophical, political, and religious pluralism. In brief, it was a prototype for the ideals and goals of Vatican II. (Incidentally, Maritain was the ghost-writer of the Credo of the People of God, solemnly proclaimed by Pope Paul VI on 30 June 1968.)
In the mid-1940s, Jacques Maritain became Saul Alinsky’s friend and collaborator. Alinksy had worked as a soft-socialist “community organizer” in Chicago since the 1940s, and he had made it his goal to establish fronts of social justice with Protestant and Catholic clergy. Dishonestly, Maritain canonized the agnostic Alinsky as a “practical Thomist.”63 Sadly, Maritain also encouraged Alinsky to publish his infamous infiltration manifesto Rules for Radicals, which was dedicated to “the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom — Lucifer.”64 So much for Alinsky as a “practical Thomist.” The book later became the handbook for Chicago community organizers, especially for the future United States president Barack Obama. The thesis of Alinsky is that a perceived noble end always justifies the means, no matter how vicious or pernicious the means may be. Maritain praised Rules for Radicals as, “A great book, admirably free, absolutely fearless, radically revolutionary,”65 and Maritain received exclusive rights to the French translation. Regarding his admiration for Saul Alinsky, Maritain wrote:
I see in the Western world no more than three revolutionaries worthy of the name — Eduardo Frei in Chile, Saul Alinsky in America, . . . and myself in France, who am not worth beans, since my call as a philosopher has obliterated my possibilities as an agitator. . . . Saul Alinsky, who is a great friend of mine, is a courageous and admirably staunch organizer of “people’s communities” and an anti-racist leader whose methods are as effective as they are unorthodox.66
Maritain loved Alinsky; as a teacher to Montini, Maritain wanted Montini to meet Alinsky.
Before the first meeting between Alinksy and Montini in 1958, Maritain wrote to Alinsky assuri
ng him of Montini’s enthusiasm: “the new cardinal was reading Saul’s books and would contact him soon.”67 Why was Cardinal Montini of Milan studying the books of a Jewish-American agnostic? Montini bore some interest in the ways of organized infiltration and revolution, because he wanted to meet Alinsky in person. We know that at least three personal meetings occurred between the two, because Alinksy says so in a letter to Maritain dated 20 June 1958: “I had three wonderful meetings with Montini and I am sure that you have heard from him since.”68 We don’t know what was discussed at these meetings, but the admiration between the two men was mutual. That same year, after the death of Pius XII, Alinsky wrote to a friend as follows: “No, I don’t know who the next Pope will be, but if it’s to be Montini, the drinks will be on me for years to come.”69 In other words, the author of the Rules for Radicals could think of no better “radical” pope than Montini. But Montini was not the only radical cardinal undermining the final days of ailing Pope Pius XII.
Since 1946, Pope Pius XII had fallen under the influence of his chosen confessor and spiritual director, Augustine Cardinal Bea, S.J., who, after the death of Pius XII, took as his personal secretary the young Irish priest Father Malachi Martin, S.J. Prior to Bea, the confessor of Pope Pius XII had been the stalwart Thomist theologian Michel-Louis Guérard des Lauriers, O.P., who had helped to write the 1950 dogmatic decree on the bodily Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. For some reason, Pius XII removed his trusted Guérard des Lauriers and began confessing to and receiving spiritual direction from the Jesuit Cardinal Bea.