Infiltration

  Pope Paul VI received the so-called Ottaviani Intervention coolly. The Holy See issued a response on 12 November 1969, replying that the “critical study” contained claims that were “superficial, exaggerated, inexact, emotional, and false.”104 Pope Paul VI moved forward and published the Novus Ordo Missale on 26 March 1970. Cardinal Ottaviani backed down and accepted the reform. Cardinal Bacci and Archbishop Lefebvre, however, did not accept the Novus Ordo Missae.

  103 De Mattei, Second Vatican Council, 202.

  104 Christophe Geffroy and Philippe Maxence, Enquête sur la messe traditionnelle (Montfort l’Amaury, France: La Nef, 1988), 21.

  22

  Archbishop Lefebvre and the Traditionalist Resistance

  Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, founding father of the Coetus Internationalis Patrum (CIP) or “International Group of Fathers,” had been one of the leading anti-Modernist bishops who participated at the Second Vatican Council. He vocally rejected what he called “false ecumenism” that sought ecclesial union in any way other than conversion to the Catholic Faith. He opposed the Council’s decree on religious liberty. He opposed episcopal collegiality in favor of papal supremacy. As a French Catholic, he vehemently opposed Freemasonry and the spirit of the French Revolution. But Archbishop Lefebvre would become known chiefly for his rejection of the Novus Ordo Mass of Paul VI. The liturgy was the line in the sand that set him apart from the rest.

  Archbishop Lefebvre, as superior of the Holy Ghost Fathers, was greatly disappointed by the outcomes of Vatican II and even more concerned about the liturgies being crafted by Bugnini under Pope Paul VI. To seek consolation in his vocation, he traveled to Pietrelcina, Italy, in April 1967 to meet and seek the prayers and blessing of Padre Pio for the forthcoming general chapter of the Holy Ghost Fathers, fearing that the Vatican II spirit of aggiornamento would infect his religious order. Padre Pio instead asked for Lefebvre’s blessing, kissed his episcopal ring, and headed to the confessional.

  Unfortunately, most of the Holy Ghost Fathers were eager to implement the new reforms of Vatican II. Already an old man, Lefebvre decided it best to tender his resignation as superior in 1968.

  During the dustup of the Ottaviani Intervention of 1969 (which was actually the project of Lefebvre and not Ottaviani), Lefebvre received permission from the local bishop of Fribourg to establish a seminary in Fribourg with nine seminarians. In November 1970, the bishop established for Archbishop Lefebvre the International Priestly Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX) as a pious union on a provisional basis for six years. This was the only seminary in the world that did not celebrate the Novus Ordo Mass of Pope Paul VI. Archbishop Lefebvre celebrated only the liturgies of 1962, using the missal last issued by Pope John XXIII before he called Vatican II. The seminary formation also included traditional theological training in Saint Thomas Aquinas and moral theology following Saint Alphonsus Liguori.

  23

  Resistance to the Novus Ordo Missae

  Cardinal Ottaviani and Archbishop Lefebvre were not the only intellectuals displeased with the Novus Ordo Mass. A petition was circulated among prominent laymen who asked for permission to continue attending the traditional or Tridentine Latin Mass. Signers included Graham Greene, Romano Amerio, Malcolm Muggeridge, Jorge Luis Borges, Marcel Brion, Agatha Christie, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Kenneth Clark, Robert Graves, F. R. Leavis, Cecil Day-Lewis, Nancy Mitford, Iris Murdoch, Yehudi Menuhin, and Joan Sutherland.105 Fantasy author J. R. R. Tolkien was also opposed to the Novus Ordo Mass. Simon Tolkien recalls his grandfather’s protest to the Novus Ordo:

  I vividly remember going to church with him in Bournemouth. He was a devout Roman Catholic and it was soon after the Church had changed the liturgy from Latin to English. My grandfather obviously didn’t agree with this and made all the responses very loudly in Latin while the rest of the congregation answered in English. I found the whole experience quite excruciating, but my grandfather was oblivious. He simply had to do what he believed to be right.106

  Eminent philosopher Dietrich von Hildebrand also objected to the Novus Ordo Mass as “pedestrian”:

  My concern is not with the legal status of the changes. And I emphatically do not wish to be understood as regretting that the Constitution has permitted the vernacular to complement the Latin. What I deplore is that the new mass is replacing the Latin Mass, that the old liturgy is being recklessly scrapped, and denied to most of the People of God. . . .

  The basic error of most of the innovations is to imagine that the new liturgy brings the holy sacrifice of the Mass nearer to the faithful, that shorn of its old rituals the mass now enters into the substance of our lives. For the question is whether we better meet Christ in the mass by soaring up to Him, or by dragging Him down into our own pedestrian, workaday world. The innovators would replace holy intimacy with Christ by an unbecoming familiarity. The new liturgy actually threatens to frustrate the confrontation with Christ, for it discourages reverence in the face of mystery, precludes awe, and all but extinguishes a sense of sacredness. What really matters, surely, is not whether the faithful feel at home at mass, but whether they are drawn out of their ordinary lives into the world of Christ — whether their attitude is the response of ultimate reverence: whether they are imbued with the reality of Christ.107

  On behalf of those longing for the traditional Latin Mass, John Cardinal Heenan of Westminster asked Pope Paul VI for an indult for the Tridentine Mass. Pope Paul VI read the letter in sober silence and then exclaimed, “Ah, Agatha Christie” and then signed the indult. Although she was not a Catholic, the novelist Agatha Christie was opposed to the Novus Ordo Mass for cultural and literary reasons. And thanks to her name catching the eye of Pope Paul VI, the indult has been known ever since as the “Agatha Christie indult.”108

  Except for the Agatha Christie indult, the Novus Ordo Mass was issued in 1970, and Pope Paul VI issued a series of canonical and liturgical changes that magnified what became known as the “spirit of Vatican II”:

  1971: Paul VI excludes cardinals over eighty years from voting in papal elections.

  1972: Clerical tonsure, minor orders of porter, exorcist, acolyte, and subdeacon are abolished by Pope Paul VI in Ministeria quaedam.

  1973: Extraordinary Lay Ministers of Holy Communion are allowed.

  1977: The indult to receive Communion in the hand is granted to the United States.

  The suppression of clerical tonsure, minor orders (porter, lector, exorcist, acolyte), and subdeacon went against the clear teaching of the Council of Trent that stated:

  From the very beginning of the church, the names of the following orders, and the ministrations proper to each one of them, are known to have been in use; to wit, those of subdeacon, acolyte, exorcist, lector, and porter; though these were not of equal rank: for the subdiaconate is classed amongst the greater orders by the Fathers and sacred Councils, wherein also we very often read of the other inferior orders.109

  And, their rejection carried an anathema:

  Can. 2. If anyone says that besides the priesthood there are in the Catholic Church no other orders, both major and minor, by which as by certain grades, there is an advance to the priesthood: let him be anathema.110

  Pope Paul VI’s decision to authorize laymen as Extraordinary Ministers of Holy Communion broke with Western and Eastern tradition, which absolutely forbade anyone but a priest from administering Holy Communion. In the Roman Rite, only a deacon or a subdeacon could touch the sacred Eucharistic vessels. The Church Fathers confirm this tradition. Paul VI set it aside.

  Paul VI also extended to the laity the permission to receive Holy Communion in the hand. These changes had two negative consequences. One was that they reduced belief in transubstantiation. The Protestant Reformers Martin Luther, John Calvin, Martin Bucer, and Thomas Cranmer had each insisted that people receive Communion in the hand because it signified that the Eucharist was ordinary bread and not Christ Himself. The other negative consequence of Communion in the hand is that it allowed for Hosts to be d
ropped on the floor more easily or, worse, for people to steal Hosts for desecration and occult potions. It is difficult to understand how Pope Paul VI would lament the demonic infiltration of the Church while he promoted reforms that encouraged it: “We would say that, through some mysterious crack — no, it’s not mysterious; through some crack, the smoke of Satan has entered the Church of God. There is doubt, uncertainty, problems, unrest, dissatisfaction, confrontation.”111

  The liturgical, theological, and philosophical changes of Vatican II and Pope Paul VI were detrimental to the laity. In 2003, Kenneth C. Jones published his Index of Leading Catholic Indicators: The Church Since Vatican II, documenting the collapse of Catholic practice since the close of the Council in 1965 (these numbers are limited to America):112

  Sunday Mass Attendance

  1958: 74 percent of Catholics went to Sunday Mass.

  2000: 25 percent of Catholics went to Sunday Mass.

  Infant Baptisms

  1965: There were 1.3 million infant baptisms.

  2002: There were 1 million infant baptisms, despite the population rise.

  Adult Baptisms (Converts)

  1965: There were 126,000 adult baptisms.

  2002: There were 80,000 adult baptisms.

  Catholic Marriages

  1965: There were 352,000 Catholic marriages.

  2002: There were 256,000 Catholic marriages, despite the population rise.

  Annulments

  1965: There were 338 annulments.

  2002: There were about 50,000 annulments!

  Priests

  1965: 58,000 priests.

  2002: 45,000 priests.

  Ordinations

  1965: There were 1,575 ordinations to the priesthood.

  2002: There were 450 ordinations to the priesthood.

  Priestless Parishes

  1965: 1 percent of parishes were priestless. There were 549 parishes without a resident priest.

  2002: 15 percent of parishes were priestless. There were 2,928 parishes without a resident priest.

  Seminarians

  1965: 49,000 seminarians enrolled.

  2002: 4,700 seminarians enrolled.

  Nuns and Religious Sisters

  1965: 180,000 religious sisters.

  2002: 75,000 religious sisters (with an average age of 68).

  Nonordained Religious Brothers

  1965: 12,000 religious brothers.

  2002: 5,700 religious brothers.

  Jesuits

  1965: There were 5,277 Jesuit priests and 3,559 seminarians.

  2000: There were 3,172 Jesuit priests and 38 seminarians.

  Franciscans

  1965: There were 2,534 OFM Franciscan priests and 2,251 seminarians.

  2000: There were 1,492 priests and 60 seminarians.

  Christian Brothers

  1965: There were 2,434 Christian brothers and 912 seminarians.

  2000: There were 959 Christian brothers and 7 seminarians!

  Redemptorists

  1965: There were 1,148 Redemptorist priests and 1,128 seminarians.

  2000: There were 349 priests and 24 seminarians.

  Catholic High Schools

  1965: 1,566 Catholic high schools.

  2002: 786 Catholic high schools.

  Parochial Grade Schools

  1965: 10,503 parochial grade schools.

  2002: 6,623 parochial grade schools.

  Catholic Parochial Students

  1965: 4.5 million students

  2002: 1.9 million students

  The numbers do not lie. The Catholic Church has been in a tailspin since Vatican II. Any business, club, or corporation with evidence of such declining numbers would fire management and return to their once-winning strategy. When Coca-Cola issued New Coke in 1985, it was met with consumer outcry and dismal sales numbers. Their leadership corrected course after only seventy-eight days of failure. After fifty years, the Catholic numbers for Mass attendance, priestly and religious vocations, baptisms, and marriages has declined, decade after decade. The updated numbers for 2015 are even worse. Yet the popes and the hierarchy keep telling the laity that this is the new Advent and the new springtime and that Vatican II brought about great renewal in the Church. The novus ordo Church is just as unpopular as New Coke: even though nobody wants to drink it, the bishops keep telling us how much better it is than Catholicism Classic.

  105 For the list of more than one hundred signers, see Una Voce 7 (1971): 1–10.

  106 Simon Tolkien, “My Grandfather JRR Tolkien” Simon Tolkien, http://www.simontolkien.com/mygrandfather.html.

  107 Dietrich von Hildebrand, “Case for the Latin Mass,” Triumph (October 1966).

  108 The so-called Agatha Christie indult was actually a preservation not of the 1962 missal, which traditionalists observe, but the 1965 missal with 1967 modifications: “The edition of the Missal to be used on these occasions should be that published again by the Decree of the Sacred Congregation of Rites (27 January 1965), and with the modifications indicated in the Instructio altera (4 May 1967).”

  109 Council of Trent. Session XXIII, ch. 2.

  110 Council of Trent, Session XXIII, canon 2.

  111 Pope Paul VI, Homily, 29 June 1972.

  112 Kenneth C. Jones, Index of Leading Catholic Indicators: The Church Since Vatican II (St. Louis: Oriens Publishing, 2003).

  24

  Infiltration of the Vatican Bank under Paul VI

  Infiltration was not limited to thinking or to liturgy. The post-conciliar Church was also plagued by the infiltration of her finances. The Vatican Bank is officially known as the Institute for the Works of Religion, which in Italian is the Istituto per le Opere di Religione (IOR). It was founded by papal decree of Pope Pius XII on 27 June 1942. It reorganized the Administration of the Works of Religion, or Amministrazione per le Opere di Religione (AOR), dating back to the pontificate of Pope Leo XIII in 1887 (the year after Leo composed the prayer to Saint Michael).

  Many ask, “Why does the Catholic Church have its own bank?” After the Catholic Church lost her temporal sovereignty in 1870, she also lost her wealth in the form of land holdings. Prior to modern banking and checking accounts, wealth was maintained and protected by land holdings. Without her sovereignty, any wealth she owned would be overseen and restricted by a temporal sovereign, such as the secular state of Italy. This was completely unacceptable, so the Church sought a way to guard her funds for the “administration of the works of religion.”

  The reformulation of the IOR in 1942 seems to have allowed it to be manipulated. By the 1960s and 1970s, there were serious concerns that the IOR was being used illicitly by organized crime for the purpose of money laundering. The contemporary or current IOR is still shrouded in mystery. It is not the property of the Holy See. Rather, it remains outside the jurisdiction of the Prefecture for the Economic Affairs of the Holy See. The IOR is currently governed by a commission of five cardinals and a lay board of superintendence.

  The written mission of the IOR is “to provide for the safekeeping and administration of movable and immovable property transferred or entrusted to it by physical or juridical persons and intended for works of religion or charity.”113 It is a charitable organization instituted to fund charitable work. Since 2013, the IOR claims that it does not use its deposits for purposes of money lending, and it does not issue securities.114 Currently, the IOR is estimated to hold billions of dollars on deposit.

  In 1968, after a six-year battle between Italy and Vatican City, Italy revoked the tax-exempt status on investment income received by the Holy See — the same year that Paul VI issued his final encyclical, Humanae vitae, condemning abortion and artificial contraception. To handle this new arrangement and diversify the Vatican’s assets, Pope Paul VI hired financial adviser Michele “the Shark” Sindona, who would be murdered by poisoning in 1986 while serving a prison sentence. Sindona was a notorious member of the Italian Freemasonic organization Propaganda Due (P2). He was also likely a member of the Sicilian Mafia. W
hy Pope Paul VI hired this monster remains a mystery, but it points to deep Freemasonic infiltration in the corridors of the Vatican by 1968, three years after Vatican II.

  Until his election as Pope Paul VI, Cardinal Montini had served as the archbishop of Milan since 1954. As archbishop, he became friends with Sindona who was also based in Milan — although some claim that Montini and Sindona were friends before Montini became archbishop of Milan.115 Sometime around 1957, the Mafioso Gambino family tasked Sindona with laundering their illegal profits from heroin sales. To accomplish this, Sindona purchased his first bank in Milan — at age thirty-eight. The Mafia continually seeks ways to appear legitimate in the eyes of the world and especially in the eyes of law enforcement. Sindona continued to acquire more banks in Milan and created a legitimate banking front for the Sicilian Mafia. As a young and successful “legitimate” banker, his relationship with Montini blossomed.

  Montini was elected pope in 1963 because he was well connected within the reforming arms of the Church during the illness of Pius XII, but perhaps also because of his deep connection to European banking. So, when Paul VI ran afoul of the Italian government because of the Church’s tax status, he turned to his banking friend Michele “the Shark” Sindona, who was more than eager to help with the Vatican Bank.

  By 1969, Sindona was allegedly moving money through the Vatican Bank to Swiss bank accounts and speculating against major currencies. Under Paul VI, the Vatican provided the perfect invisible tool by which to move money internationally. He was credited with saving the Italian currency in 1974 and had established himself as respected. Having major influence in Europe, Sindona cast his eyes across the Atlantic to the United States. In early 1974, he purchased a controlling interest in Long Island’s Franklin National Bank, but he had overpaid. Due to a dip in the stock market, he lost forty million dollars in his leveraged position. This triggered a cascade, and Sindona began to lose his European banks and holdings. This put him in a tight place because his wealth and portfolio were due not to brilliant banking but to bloating his banks with Mafia money derived chiefly from the drug trade. As the money disappeared, the Mafia wanted their money back as soon as possible. Back in Milan, a warrant was issued for Sindona’s arrest. He disappeared and then resurfaced hiding in Switzerland.