THE BUGNINI FILE (Le dossier Bugnini)

THE BUGNINI FILE: A STUDY IN ECCLESIAL SUBVERSION

John Kenneth Weiskittel


Hannibal Bugninius, magnus architectus novae liturgiae, non solum Novi Ordinis Missae sed etiam Hebdomadae Sanctae "instauratae" anni 1955, ipse iam vivens colendi Magnum Architectum Universi accusatus est. Quamvis evidentia non sit certa, nihilominus gravia argumenta mentem inducunt ad credendum Bugninium massonem fuisse, et conscienter, tamquam agentem inimicorum Ecclesiae, sacram liturgiam diruisse. Evidentiam huius accusationis auctor loannes Weiskittel adducit, simul cum ea praebens historiam coniurationum societatum secretarum quae ut se inter clerum Ecclesiae Catholicae insinuerent iam abhinc ducenti annos sibi proposuerunt.

In April 1976, a book stunned Italian Catholics, and sent shock waves throughout Christendom. The work, printed in Florence and entitled Nel Fumo di Satana. Verso l'ultimo scontro ("In the Smoke of Satan. Towards the Final Clash."), was a penetrating critique on the state of the Church since the Second Vatican Council. 1 Singled out for direct strike was "Archbishop" Annibale Bugnini, C.M. (1912-1982), the Secretary of the Conciliar Congregation for Divine Worship who had presided over the fateful "reform" of the liturgy.

"The reform has been conducted," charged the book, "by this Bugnini who has been unmasked at last; he is indeed what we long expected: a Freemason." 2 Few allegations made since Vatican II have been more biting -- a top Church official accused of being an enemy of the very Church he is sworn to defend. What makes it all the more credible is the author. Tito Casini was no muckraker, but a writer of good reputation, particularly noted for his works on the Mass.3

This revelation did not originate with Casini, however, who was merely reporting an incident from the previous summer, when a priest visited "Pope" Paul VI’s office, plopped on his desk a dossier identifying Bugnini as a Lodge brother, and warned he would go public with the information if action was not taken immediately. Paul appointed Bugnini to the post of Pro - Nuncio of Iran, an assignment as far from scrutiny as was possible, and dissolved the Congregation.

To no one's surprise, this "papal" solution did not rest well with traditionalists, and the threatened disclosures were forthcoming. A month before Casini's blockbuster, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre declared in his Letter to Friends and Benefactors: "Now, when we hear in Rome that he who was the heart and soul of the liturgical reform is a Freemason, we may think that he is not the only one. The veil covering the greatest deceit ever to have mystified the clergy and baffled the faithful, is doubtless beginning to be torn asunder." 4 In addition, the June 1976 issue of the Italian publication SI, SI, No, No, and four months later, the October edition of the French journal La Contre-reforme catholique, among others, carried the news. 5

Meanwhile, Bugnini (pronounced Boo nyee' nee], who vehemently denied ever having set foot in a lodge, was getting acclimated to life in the Islamic country where he was to remain until shortly before his death.6 The controversy soon abated and was forgotten, but, as he writes in his memoirs, there were some intent on beating a "dead horse":

The "bomb" thus fizzled out, but in the ensuing years there was still a desire, especially on the part of the authorities, to conduct a thorough examination of the charges. It was not possible, after all, simply to let doubts, hesitations, and suspicions stand unchallenged; justice and a love of truth [sic] could not accept that. V. Levi's denial, "Riflessioni di fine settirnana," L'Osservatore Romano, October 10,1976, elicited further charges in Si, Si, No, No. (The question arises of how such a poisonous, anti-conciliar publication, filled with lies and calumnies, could have prospered, even if directed by a priest, at Grottaferrata, so close to Rome.)7

But last year, a decade after the death of the much-maligned "archbishop," signs of life have been detected in the old nag, and the bomb is heard ticking again. An Italian-based Conciliar magazine, 30 Days, raised the issue over the summer. A twelve page section, intriguingly entitled "Dossier: Freemasonry and the Application of Liturgical Reform," promised to answer the controverted question. Did it?


Code Name: "Buan"


"Dear Buan [alleged Masonic code name of Bugnini — JKW] ," the letter, dated July 14, 1964, began:
[W]e inform you of the task that the Council of Brothers has established for you in agreement with the Grand Master and the Princes to the throne and we charge you:.,.to spread de-Christianization by confusing rites and languages and to set priests, bishops and cardinals against each other. Linguistic and ritualistic babel means victory for us, since linguistic and ritual unity has been the strength of the Church...Everything must happen within a decade. 8

An incriminating document to be sure, perhaps damning. But even more so was the reply allegedly made on July 2, 1967, by Bugnini:

Peerless Grand Master...the steps towards deconsecration are being taken rapidly. Another Instruction has been issued which went into effect on June 19 last. By now we can claim victory, as the vernacular is sovereign in the whole of the liturgy, even in the most essential parts...There is maximum freedom of choice in the various formularies, allowing for even personal initiative and...chaos...In brief, I believe I have sown the seeds of maximum license with the document, according to your instructions. I had to fight bitterly and make use of every wile to have it approved by the Pope, in the face of my enemies in the Congregation for Rites. Fortunately for us, we won immediate backing from our friends and brothers in the Universa laus, who are loyal. I thank you for the sum sent and in the hope of seeing you soon, I send you my embrace. Your Brother Buan. 9

And what does the article's author, Andrea Tornielli, think of the documents? He at first voices the same uncertainty that many would have in evaluating them:

Are these documents — highly compromising for the man involved, who always denied any contact with Freemasonry — authentic or forgeries? It is impossible to know since the letters were typewritten, then photocopied by a mysterious "mole" said to have leaked them to certain bishops and cardinals, including the Archbishop of Genoa, Cardinal Giuseppe Siri and the Prefect of the Apostolic Signatura, Dino Staffa. If they are authentic, the letters denote a deliberate attempt to erode Catholic doctrine and liturgy from the inside. But they might also be forgeries, cunningly leaked by someone eager to create rival "factions" within the Curia. There is no doubt that the wording of the two missives seems too crude and blunt. But the outcome of Bugnini's reforms fully matches the intention expressed in them. 10

In the course of the study, however, these ambivalent features are neatly, if obliquely, "resolved" to absolve Bugnini, Paul VI, and company from any wrong doing (mention is made of the "valuable diplomatic work" by Bugnini during his exile in Iran, coincidently the same period of time in which the Shah was overthrown by the Ayatollah Khomeini). In fact, before the article is half over the whole issue seems to be forgotten by the writer. Far more space is devoted to examining how the post—Conciliar liturgy switched from Latin to the vernacular than in exploring the Bugnini affair (Tornielli, having reflected that the "reforms" matched the stated intention of the "Dear Buan" letter, could have gone into this in more depth when talking about the Conciliar liturgy).

Not that the discussion is uninteresting. Quite the contrary, for the material covered includes incidents from Bugnini's earlier career, as well as his working relationship with Paul VI. Tornielli writes:

Immediately after the Second World War, Fr. Annibale Bugnini was Secretary of the Liturgical Commission set up by Pius XII to shape the reform of the Holy Week rites. But his reformist bent was of earlier. In 1944 he had asked Msgr. Arrigo Pintonello to translate certain texts on renewal of the liturgy written by German Catholics and Protestants.... 11

In 1962, Bugnini, who was Secretary of the Pontifical Preparatory Commission on the Liturgy, suffered what he called "my first exile," when first, the Commission's head, Cardinal Arcadio Larraona, dismissed him, and then Pope John XXIII "relieved [him| of his post as teacher of Liturgy at the Pontifical Pastoral Institute of the Lateran University." 12  An unidentified "elderly prelate" told 30 Days:

"They got rid of the secretary because he wanted to change things that were not to be touched [italics added — JKW] and especially because he was not fit tor the task."13 The "exile" would be brief, however, and Bugnini would later be able to state: "I was a faithful executor of the wishes of Paul VI and of the Council."14

At times, though, it appeared that Paul VI was the faithful executor of Bugnini's wishes. Tornielli recalled how in 1967 the "pontiff" requested (through the Vatican Secretariat of State) that "daily and feastday missals should always contain, if in a smaller font, the Latin text alongside the vernacular translation." 15 This intervention was rejected for "technical reasons." Why? The answer is supplied by Paul's loyal innovator, Annibale Bugnini: "The principle, good in itself, ran into enormous difficulties: the excessive size of liturgical books, technical difficulties, especially for certain countries that do not even use Latin characters...." 16 In the end, the latter position won out.

This episode is enlightening for a number of reasons. From the standpoint of the "reformers," the faster Latin was jettisoned, the faster their novel lex orandi could fully replace the real Catholic liturgy. Since an all-vernacular new "Mass" was the ultimate goal, and ancient, venerable Latin prayers were cast aside to make way for modern ones (which had, at best, only a tenuous relationship with former traditional orations), why should these liturgical editors even consider the additional fuss and expense involved with publishing bilingual volumes? If the whole purpose of the "reform" was to dispense with Latin completely, why bother to include it in the new sacramentaries at all? As for Paul VI's reaction, it was the subterfuge typical of Conciliar "popes" in every area of religious life. Despite the fact that he lived for more than a decade after this intervention, "Pope" Montini did nothing to halt the liturgical revolution. Far from making anything resembling a comeback, Latin was pushed further and further into the background, a policy that John Paul II — his televised Latin Christmas "Masses" notwithstanding— has done nothing to change.

The 30 Days feature also includes a brief interview with Bugnini's friend and liturgical collaborator "Father" Gottardo Pasqualetti, who helped him edit his memoirs and supplied a foreword for them. In response to a question from Andrea Tornielli concerning the details of the Iran exile, he states:

It was a real tragedy for Bugnini. The most painful thing about it for him was that he was removed without being told the reasons for it. Even when the Pope [sic] gave him an audience no mention was made of it. According to Bugnini the decision was brought about by a conspiracy based on forged documents concerning his alleged Masonic membership. 17

Pasqualetti dismisses the suggestion that Paul VI signed the notorious General Instruction to the New Order of the Mass without carefully reading it. While allowing for the possibility "that something slipped the Pope's attention [such as the heretical Article 7, perhaps?— JKW]," he emphasizes the fact that Bugnini and Paul VI "spent many hours together revising all the texts." 18 Despite such close collaboration, Pasqualetti maintains that part of the reason for Bugnini's exile had to do with pressure the Vatican was experiencing over the Novus Ordo Missae, and that afterwards a campaign was launched to undo the secretary's work. "In 1975," he says, "not only was the former secretary of the Consilium ousted, but every trace of him was obliterated and what he had created was destroyed. Still today, when prelates in the Congregation for Divine Worship speak of the years of the liturgical reform, they avoid mentioning Bugnini. 19 And Tornielli concludes his article on a similar note, writing how Bugnini's departure supposedly signaled a marked contrast from the earlier "glory years" of liturgical "reform": "Something went irremediably wrong after that period. It was Paul VI, once so trusting of Bugnini, who ousted him in the years after the Council. The reform could be said to have well and truly come to an end." 20

In the final analysis, the 30 Days cover story proves to be less an expose than a tease. Little of the text deals with the provocative topic promised in the title; instead, the reader is furnished with details of the "reform" in light of Vatican II, how missals and breviaries became "delatinized," and a history of the Consilium, The subject of Freemasonry and its infiltration of the Church receive only a passing glance. What could have been an in-depth examination of the scandal and just how "the outcome of Bugnini's reforms fully matches the intentions expressed in [the two contested letters]," as well as a valuable contribution to understanding Masonic machinations, ends up as merely an exercise in journalistic sleight of hand that reveals nothing really new about the subject.

The Occupied Church

Unlike the 30 Days spread, the present article will not flinch when confronted with the issue. Although Bugnini's involvement with, secret societies may be forever shrouded in the darkness associated with those cabals, it is still possible to make educated inferences based upon what is known. It is far too important for Catholics to be able to identify the contours of the shadow army that is waging a relentless war against the Church to dismiss such allegations without a careful consideration of these facts.

So what is to be concluded about Bugnini? While many reputable sources readily believed his guilt, the charges did not go unchallenged. "Was he a Mason, or wasn't he? (Perhaps only his Grand Master, assuming he had one, knew for sure.) Was he sincere in his denial or merely covering his tracks? Bugnini's secret — if there was one — went with him to the grave. Given the lack of a public confession on his part, and a similar lack of uncontested evidence linking him to the group, the natural conclusion is to declare the issue stalemated, and leave it at that.

It is true that, aside from the disputed dossier, there is no direct proof of Bugnini's involvement with the Lodge. Still, there are other avenues of investigation that can be made. If his membership cannot be definitively proven, there is substantial indirect evidence to link him with the Lodge or, at least, to demonstrate that what he implemented bears a striking resemblance to the stated goals of the Church's declared enemies.

In 1975, the French author Jacques Ploncard d'Assac wrote a book with the provocative title, L'Eglise Occupee (The Occupied Church). The thesis of the study is explained by him as follows: "If one succeeds in demonstrating that all the 'novelties' which trouble the Church today are nothing but past errors which have repeatedly been condemned by Rome, one will be able to conclude that the Church, at this end of the 20th century, is occupied by a strange sect, exactly as a country is able to be occupied by art enemy army [italics added]." 21 He begins a chapter entitled "A Secret Society Within The Church?" by stating:

The idea of infiltrating the Church, in order to sway its doctrine and control its hierarchy, strange as it may seem, has never ceased to obsess the various occult sects. The best—known attempts of accomplishing this end were those of the "Illuminati" of Bavaria in the 18th century, and that of the Alta Vendita in the 19th.

In 1906 there appeared in Paris the French translation of a book by the Italian author Antonio Fogazzaro entitled Il Santo — The Saint. Only mediocre by novelistic standards, the book would undoubtedly have passed into oblivion were it not that it served to propagate the tenets and methods of the modernist sect.

And these were astonishing enough; the plan consisted in nothing less than establishing a secret society [italics added] within the very bosom of the Church, in view of seizing control of the highest positions in the hierarchy, so as to bring about an evolution of the Church in conformity with the ideas of the modern age. 22


It is upon this demonstrable premise (of enemies seeking to burrow into the Church, the better to destroy her) that any consideration of the Bugnini case must begin. Otherwise, critics will readily dismiss talk of a Masonic prelate as simply the paranoid fantasy of traditional Catholics. Regarding the assembling of the following evidence, there are certain points to be kept in mind. First, nothing was used that could reasonably be rejected as fraudulent or questionable. Much of it is taken from pre-Conciliar Vatican sources, or captured secret society documents that the Holy See deemed authentic, and ordered the publication thereof. Second, other documents are cited that, though not ruled on by the Church, are public in nature. These include printed statements by the Masons and their professed allies. In short, what is to be considered is fact, and it is from this fact that some rays of light can be cast on the Bugnini affair.

Planned Subversion by Christ's Enemies

The modern movement to eradicate the Roman Catholic Church can be traced to the mid-1700s, when a group of fervent and vocal apostates came together during the so-called Enlightenment. While "freethinkers" could be found at that time throughout Europe ridiculing every Church teaching and practice, the foul center from which the attacks emanated was France, particularly in those false intellectuals responsible for writing and editing the infamous Encyclopedie (or, in English, Encyclopedia). The guiding light of the Encyclopaedists was one François Marie Arouet, better known to the world by his nom de plume — Voltaire.

Like many of the Encyclopaedists, Voltaire was a Freemason. For fifty years he invariably closed his letters to fellow radicals with the motto, "ecrasons nous l'infame" ("let us crush the wretch" — meaning defeat Christ and His Church). This infernal hatred of Catholicism to which, nevertheless, he nominally adhered, wedded to literary genius, led the celebrated Catholic writer, Jacques Cretineau-Joly to describe him as "the most perfect incarnation of Satan the world ever saw." 23  The following incident involving Voltaire is related by Monsignor George Dillon: "A lieutenant of police once said to him that, notwithstanding all he wrote, he should never be able to destroy Christianity. 'That is exactly what we shall see' [italics added], he replied." 24

The attacks of Voltaire and the Encyclopaedists had a profound effect on the intellectual climate of France, and helped spark the social fomentation that would culminate in the great bloodletting of the 1789 Revolution. Their contribution in so advancing the aims of Freemasonry has not been lost on the Lodge. Father Clarence Kelly, in his study Conspiracy Against God & Man, quotes from an address given at the 1904 Congress of the Grand Orient as follows:

In the eighteenth century the glorious line of Encyclopaedists formed in our temples a fervent audience which was then alone in invoking the radiant device as yet unknown to the crowd: "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity." The revolutionary seed quickly germinated amid this elite. Our illustrious Freemasons d'Alembert, Diderot, Helevcius, d'Holbach, Voltaire, Condorcet, completed the evolution of minds and prepared the new era. And when the Bastille fell, Freemasonry had the supreme honour of giving to humanity the charter (i.e., the Declaration of the Rights of Man) which it had elaborated with devotion. (Applause.) 25

And yet, despite the scarlet sea they helped precipitate, these antichrists never failed to hide behind pious affectations or veiled language when the occasion warranted such duplicity. Monsignor Dillon writes of Voltaire:

Voltaire, "the most perfect incarnation of Satan the world ever saw. "

He was also, as the school he left behind has been ever since, a hypocrite. Infidel to the heart's core, he could, whenever it suited his purpose, both practice, and even feign a zeal for religion. On the expectation of a pension from the King, he wrote M. Argental, a disciple of his, who reproached him with his hypocrisy and contradictions in conduct. "If I had a hundred thousand men I know well what I would do; but as I have not got them I will go to communion at Easter and you may call me a hypocrite as long as you wish." And Voltaire, on getting his pension, went to communion the year following....26

Following the lead of their mentor, the Encylopaedists were quite skilled in the art of artifice, their impious lies hidden in a forest of ambiguities and code words. Gustave Combes, in his book Revival of Paganism, states that they employed all their ingenuity in veiling their attacks so that the state authorities might not become alarmed or the general reader be on his guard. One of the most illustrious of the compilers, d'Alembert, speaks of "this secret war" which stealthily undermined that it might better destroy. Naigeon and Condorcet speak of "those insinuating articles" where "one tramples religious prejudices under foot without seeming to do so at all," where "the respected errors" are betrayed systematically by the "weakness of their proofs," where they are staggered by "the proximity of truths which penetrate to the very roots of their falsity." 27

This all sounds very reminiscent of the Modernists' methods a century later. 28 Although the careful Catholic of today could see through much of the Encyclopedia's mendacity, it nevertheless deceived many in its era. Cornbes writes:

The reader cannot help feeling that atheism taints every line. But on the whole the Encyclopedia is so discreet and good-natured that he feels reluctant to condemn it as subversive unless he reads so attentively that he discovers its true meaning and the savage nature of the attack. Furthermore, this atheism appears in places where the reader would least expect it; for example, under headings that have no bearing on any religious subject. In these scholarly articles, essentially harmless, the Encyclopedia displays its most venomous criticisms of "Christian fanaticism."

But whether its doctrine is expressed stealthily or openly, whether it takes the form of irony or invective, in any case it has but one purpose: to smite Christianity on every flank, to undermine the foundations of civilization without a thought of mercy, to destroy all authority and every sound principle. To accomplish this purpose, it marshaled all the forces of irreligion that had been secretly spreading through the world during the previous two centuries, and turned to their own account all the charges that had been made against the Church. The Encyclopedia brought into one place all the arguments and refutations by the anti-religious philosophers, forming a vast summa that set itself up triumphantly against the Summa of St. Thomas; a new gospel sprung from the depths of the human mind, which was intended to supplant that Gospel supposedly revealed by God. It was, in fact, to be the herald of a new era which it would bring to the world. 29

Corrupting the Faithful through Bad Clergy

The point of this rather lengthy digression is to emphasize that with the Enlightenment Satan's war against Christ moved into a new phase. Through most of the Church's history, a heretic, when exposed, would then openly commence to assail her. But this changed with Voltaire and his disciples. No longer (with a few notable exceptions) would the enemies of the Church launch into frontal attacks against her; henceforth the plan would be to subtly deride her teachings and authority — and, when possible, to internally subvert her. Instead of rattling off the usual string of vituperations, they would remain like a viper at the bosom of the Church, and, when confronted with their errors, throw up their hands in mock surprise, exclaiming, "Surely, you can't believe I meant that." Then, unless thoroughly exposed, they steadfastly (if falsely) professed the orthodoxy of their beliefs and their undying fidelity with Rome. Just a bit more elucidation on this point in order to show its progression up to Vatican II.

This change was manifested almost immediately. During the French Revolution, when most faithful bishops and priests were going underground to save their heads, a new breed of clergy emerged, who had no scruples about trying to tie the Revolutionary — and utterly un-Catholic — slogan "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" with the Church. While these "Constitutional clergy," as they were called, made the pretense of loyalty to all things Catholic, the ruse did not last very long. Pope Pius VI suspended them, and forbade the faithful to receive the sacraments from them. As early as 1775, with his first encyclical Inscrutabile, the same pontiff had warned about Masonry's infiltration, not only in the highest levels of civil government, but even into the clerical ranks. 30 Nine years before this, Pope Clement XIII, in his antimasonic encyclical, Christianas Reipubliciz Salus, strongly suggested the same: "The enemy of all Good has sown the evil seed in the field of the Lord and the evil has grown rapidly, to such an extent that it threatens to destroy the harvest. It is time to cut it down," 31 Pius' immediate successor, Pius VII, seeing the rise of a related secret society, the Carbonari, exposed their duplicity when he wrote: "They affect a special obedience and wondrous zeal for the Catholic faith, and for the person and teaching of Our Lord Jesus Christ, whom they sometimes impiously dare to call the ruler of their society, and their great teacher." 32 Nevertheless, despite the Vatican's crackdown on the "Constitutional clergy" (which was perhaps too mild), a pernicious pattern was set, and the enemies saw no reason to abandon it.

The revolutionary clerics in France were but the outward manifestation of a larger clandestine movement radiating through all of Europe. Their transformation, in fact, mirrors what was also being propagated in Germany. Bavarian police in 1785 seized and published documents of a radical anti-christian group it had suppressed, the secret Illuminati cult. In those writings, Adam Weishaupt, an apostate ex-university professor, and the leader of the Illuminati, taught a form of "liberation theology" almost two hundred years before it became fashionable in Conciliar circles:

Let Christians believe that our Lord Jesus Christ was the great inventor of the Masonic trinomial, "liberty, equality, and fraternity,"that this is the doctrine He taught, but that it must be understood with the teachings of the sects. Our doctrine is the very divine doctrine Jesus Christ taught His disciples [sic — JKW] and whose intimate and real meaning belongs to the secret discourses of the lodges....[Here we have the cabala.] This doctrine gives the whole human race the means to attain complete freedom....Nobody has opened ways so safe to freedom as our great Jesus of Nazareth. 33

The suppression of the Illuminati, however, did not spell an end to such activities. In 1846 Pope Pius IX authorized the publication of the documents of the Alta Vendita, which had been confiscated by the Pontifical Government. This group, commonly thought to be the governing body of continental Freemasonry at the time, made the following prediction: "Our ultimate end is that of Voltaire and of the French Revolution — the final destruction of Catholicism, and even of the Christian idea. The work we have undertaken is not the work of a day, nor of a month, nor of a year. It may last many years, a century, perhaps; in our ranks the soldier dies; but the fight goes on.... 34 What could have stimulated it to have made such a bold long-range forecast? The answer: The commitment to a prolonged infestation of the Church.

This Permanent Instruction, as it was called, made it clear to the initiates that to achieve its goal the Lodge must triumph over and utterly destroy the Holy See, because anything short of this would mean "the Christian idea..., if left standing on the ruins of Rome, would be the resuscitation of Christianity later on." 35 How did the Alta Vendita think it could accomplish such an objective? A key to the scheme involved initiating behind the scenes what today would be called smear (or disinformation) campaigns against the most ardent defenders of the Faith amongst Church hierarchy. Noting that "a word can sometimes kill a man," the conspirators suggest that meddlesome clergy be dealt with in the following manner:

If he is in advance, a declared enemy,...envelope him in all the snares which you can place beneath his feet; create for him one of those reputations which will frighten little children and old women; paint him cruel and sanguinary; recount, regarding him, some traits of cruelty which can easily be engraved in the minds of the people. When foreign journals shall gather for us these recitals [planted, of course, by the Lodge itself—JKW), which they will embellish in their turn (inevitably because of their respect for truth [sic]), show, or rather cause to be shown, by some respectable fool those papers where the names and the excesses of the personages implicated are related. As France and England, so Italy will never be wanting in facile pens which know how to employ themselves in these lies so useful to a good cause. With a newspaper, the language of which they do not understand, but in which they will see the name of their delegate or judge, the people have no need of other proofs. They are in the infancy of liberalism; they believe in liberals, as later on, they will believe in us, not knowing very well why.-" 36

A Freemasonic Altar

Lest there, be any mistake, "members" of the Alta Vendita were obliged to make every effort to appear as faithtul Catholics. In mapping out their plan for the destruction of the Catholic Church, the secret masters ot this dark brotherhood taught:

[T]o attain more certainly to that result,...we must not pay attention to those braggarts of Frenchmen, those cloudy Germans, those melancholy Englishmen, all of who imagine they can kill Catholicism, now with an impure song, then with an illogical deduction; at another time, with a sarcasm smuggled in like the cottons of Great Britain, Catholicism has a life much more tenacious than that. It has seen the most implacable, most terrible adversaries, and it has often had the malignant pleasure of throwing holy water on the tombs of the most enraged. Let us permit, then, our brethren of these countries to give themselves up to the sterile intemperance of their anti-Catholic zeal. Let them mock at our Madonnas and our apparent devotion. With this passport we can conspire at our ease, and arrive little by little at the end we have in view. 37

Further on, the point is again hammered home:

"If it pleases you, in order the better to deceive the inquisitorial eye, to go often to confession, you are as by right authorized to preserve the most absolute silence regarding these things. You know that the least revelation, that the slightest indication escaped from you in the tribunal of penance, or elsewhere, can bring on great calamities and that the sentence of death is already pronounced upon the revealer, whether voluntary or involuntary." 38

Here, then, are the methods by which the Church's enemies sought to bring her to nought: feign devotion, but subtly sow seeds of contempt for those in positions of authority, with the aim of subverting her. There is even more to this devilry, for the Permanent Instruction, all the while emphasizing this mock Catholicism, continues:

That reputation will open the way for our doctrines to pass to the bosoms of the young clergy, and go even to the depths of convents. In a few years the young clergy will have, by force of events, invaded all the functions. They will form the council of the Sovereign. They will be called upon to choose the Pontiff who will reign; and that Pontiff, like the greater part of his contemporaries, will be necessarily imbued with the Italian and humanitarian principles which we are about to put into circulation.... 38A to be exact).

But the plot against the Church was, of course, already in full stride. As early as 1806, the Abbé Augustin Barruel, a "papist" priest who was forced to flee France during the Revolution, presented to Pius VII details of the anti-catholic conspiracy's program, which had been obtained from a former member of the sect. His Holiness not only acknowledged their authenticity, but went so far as to warn the faithful by quoting from them. Relevant to the study in question is the following article derived therefrom:

4. That, on our Italian soil, they had already recruited as members more than 800 ecclesiastics [italics added — JKW], both secular and regular, among whom there were many parsons, professors, prelates, and some bishops and cardinals; and that, as a result, they did not relinquish having a Pope of their own party. 39

Then in 1845, Pope Gregory XVI's Secretary of State, Cardinal Tommaso Pernetti, revealed in a letter the awful reality:

Our young clergy is already imbued with liberal ideas. ...They have abandoned serious studies. Most of the priests who will succeed us in the leading positions are a thousand times more plagued by the liberal vice...; most of them do not know the nature of the things that are taking place and let themselves be influenced by suggestions from which spring forth the great crises of the Church. The same spirit of discord is to be found everywhere among the priests,...They have broken with the past to become new men. The spirit of the sects replaces the true love of neighbor, and individual pride is growing in the dark. 40

And who, objectively examining these remarks (and the spiritual fallout of Vatican II), cannot instantly see a parallel with the following Alta Vendita command:

"Make men's hearts vicious and corrupt, and you will no longer have Catholics. Draw away the priests from the altars, and from the the practice of virtue. Strive to fill their time with other matters...it is the corruption of the masses we have undertaken — the corruption of the people through the clergy, and the clergy by us — the corruption which ought one day to enable us to lay the Church in the tomb.... 41

The preceding excerpts from the Church and her enemies make it clear that a protracted war was the intent; a conflict that would ultimately lead to the Church's dissolution. Equally evident is the fact that these infidels would attempt to destroy her from within. And that long before Vatican II they had already made considerable headway in their intrigue.

TO BE CONTINUED...

Setting Their Sights on Rome

How successful have they been? Before going on, a point raised in the previous texts needs to be underscored: The goal of these subversives was to penetrate to the highest levels of the Church, and, if possible, to set up a pseudo-hierarchy of their own choosing. "The Pope," they maintain, "will never come to the secret societies. It is for the secret societies to come first to the Church, in the resolve to conquer the two." 42 What they desired was nothing short of a controlling interest in how the Holy See would be ruled, but they did not allow themselves to expect too much:

'We do not mean to win die Popes to our cause, to make them neophytes of our principles, and propagators of our ideals. That would be a ridiculous dream, no matter what manner of events may turn. Should cardinals or prelates, for example, enter, willingly or by surprise, in some manner, into some part of our secrets, it would be by no means a motive to desire their elevation to the See of Peter. That elevation would destroy us....' 43

What was sought was "a Pope according to our wants" — in other words, a Pope who could be swayed and manipulated to their ends. 44 While that subject is worthy of note (and perhaps can be explored in depth on another occasion), its relevance to the current discussion is how it was to be brought about. As shown above, the means of execution would be a generation of clergy imbued with the poisonous doctrines of the Lodge — a stratagem that was already being implemented a century-and-a-half ago, at a time [shudder] when strong Popes sat upon the Chair of Peter!

The statements of one such priest, an Abbé Roca (1830-1893), are of great importance to an understanding of conspiratorial thinking, as he wrote and spoke openly and at great length about these aims. Read in light of what has occurred since Vatican II, much of what he had to say sounds almost prophetic. He was, to quote, the worst kind of apostate, and was a member of the most important secret societies, and an element consciously disposed to destroy the Church." 45

According to Dr. Rudolf Graber, a traditionally-oriented Conciliar bishop in Germany:

'[Roca's] name is not to be found in either theological and ecclesiastical dictionaries or the Freemason's Dictionary. He was born in Perpignan in France, where he attended the Carmelite school, was ordained to the priesthood in 1858 and made an honorary canon in 1869. He travelled to Spain, the United States of America, Switzerland and Italy. He was very well—versed in the occult sciences and disseminated extensive propaganda, in particular among the youth. Because of this he came into conflict with Rome. Despite being excommunicated he continued his activities, preached revolution and proclaimed the coming of the "divine synarchy [a term coined by Roca to signify rule by his hoped—for occult "Catholic" church — jfcw]" under a Pope converted to scientific Christianity. He speaks of a new, enlightened Church influenced by the socialism of Jesus and the Apostles....' 46

TO BE CONTINUED...

Roca's version of Christ had much in common with the later evolutionary pantheism of Teilhard de Chardin; so similar are they that one could easily mistake one for the other. For example, speaking in 1889 in Paris at the International Spiritualist Congress, sponsored by the Grand Orient Masons of France, Roca declared:

"With the world and because He is the world, Christ evolves and becomes transformed. Nobody will ever be able to stop Christ's whirlwind. Nobody will be able to brake the course of evolution that Christ leads all over the world and [that] will overwhelm everything. The dogmas evolve with it, since they are living things, like the world, like man, like all organic beings. Since they are echoes of the collective conscience, they follow, as it does, the course of history." 47

In like manner, he claimed about the Savior's Person: "An incarnation of the uncreated reason to the created reason, a manifestation of the absolute in the relative, the personal Christ is a central symbol, a sort of physical hieroglyph who always speaks and acts in a peculiar [sic] way. He is the Man-Book mentioned by both the Kabbala and the Apocalypse." 48

The notion of dogmas evolving is, of course, textbook Modernism, as is the premise that Jesus' life is more important in its subjective symbolism for believers than in its objective reality. 49 Such an unexpected harmony of teachings gives all the more reason to leave open the very real possibility of a hidden bond between Masonry and Modernism (the latter, say, being specifically devised in the Synagogue of Satan as a particularly formidable weapon with which to wound the Church). Roca once boasted that a thousand apostate priests like him had remained inside the Church to sow the seeds of her downfall. 50 An exaggeration? Perhaps. But before it be too hastily dismissed, other points need to be considered that strengthen its credibility.

First, there are testimonies given by such loyal Catholic clergymen as Cardinal Bernetti and Abbé Barruel of a massive number of priests in the Church who were either conscious infiltrators, or else utterly saturated in their thinking with errors being spread by the Lodges. And second, the extent to which Modernists were found to have proliferated less than twenty years after Roca's claim must not be forgotten. Saint Pius X, in Pascendi, alludes to a situation which could never have occurred had there not already been a significant penetration of this fifth column into Catholic seminaries. The Modernists, he writes, "are the more mischievous the less they keep in the open," and include "many...[in] the ranks of the priesthood itself, who, animated by a false zeal for the Church, [are] lacking the solid safeguards of philosophy and theology, nay more, thoroughly imbued with the poisonous doctrines taught by the enemies of the Church [italics added]." 51 When many priests are discovered, who not only are deficient in such crucial subjects, but who also sound like Freemasons and the like in their pronouncements, it is hardly rash to question the seminaries. Were it but a handful of such priests identified, they could be considered anomalies that had somehow managed to get themselves ordained. But when it becomes evident that many of them existed, the onus must fall principally on seminaries for having given them a false formation. During Saint Pius X's war against Modernism, he ordered apostolic visitations of every diocese in Italy. Carlo Falconi writes: "many [of these visits] resulted in the closing down of seminaries [italics added], the removal of eminent ecclesiastics, and uncompromising reports on the bishops." 52 Such a process of uprooting the noxious weeds needed to be carried out on a thorough worldwide basis, but this program of purifying the seminaries effectively came to an end with the saint's death in 1914.

TBC...

If, for the sake of argument, Pius X had done nothing else of real significance during his years as Pope besides engaging these subversives in combat the way he did, such an heroic effort certainly would be of itself a strong reason for his canonization, and equally compelling grounds for according him status as one of the greatest defenders of the faith of all time. But his attempt to expose the perpetrators was, alas, a question of too little, too late. Unfortunately, he was trying to fight in little more than a decade, a condition that had a century or more to fester. However valiantly Saint Pius strove to remedy the situation, he was faced with a task that, humanly speaking, was next to impossible. Even with divine aid, the work was arduous, as already he was faced with a sizable part of the hierarchy that viewed the crisis with relative indifference, and others who, in varying degrees, actually supported the calls for change. The Modernists' triumph finally took place after his death, for not one of his successors exhibited his attentiveness, his fighting spirit, or his profound insights into the truly grave state in which the Church found herself (perhaps they were deluded by the widespread false reports, believed by far too many, that the fight was over — a deceit that, arguably, was the Modernists' greatest victory) . But these traits were absolutely obligatory for a Vicar of Christ in those crucial years, if the battle was to be won by the forces of good. Sadly, they were largely found wanting in those pontiffs. Whatever praise justly can be given his successors, the fact remains that the utmost degree of vigilance was not maintained, and, consequently, the very cradles of the priesthood had become nurseries of the revolution.

Roca foresaw this to a great extent. The infiltrators, he taught, would soon be strong enough to cause a split within the Church. They were to create a faction to do battle with traditional priests: "By now they [traditional and subversive priests] form a ring, which will break in the middle, and each of its halves will form a new ring. The schism is about to occur whereby there will be a 'progressivism' ring and a 'reactionary' ring." 53 While no literal schism occurred, there is ample evidence that a virtual one was already forming. 54 But only in 1962, with the commencement of Vatican II, would this rupture begin to make itself fully manifest.

Far more telling as far as Bugnini is concerned, Roca, in a book entitled "Abbé Gabriel", saw into the future with a truly diabolical foreknowledge:

"I feel that divine worship, as regulated by the liturgy, ceremonies, rites, and rulings of the Roman Church, will suffer a transformation soon, at an ecumenical council [italics added]. It will return the Church to the venerable simplicity of the apostolic golden age, and will harmonize it with the new stage of modern conscience and civilization.'' 55

TBC...

Vianney a écrit:Dommage que je ne suis pas fort en anglais ça semble très intéressant :/

Vianney a écrit:Bonjour et Merci à vous cher ami Roger et bonne et sainte année a vous

Elsewhere, he would declare:

"And we priests, let us pray for, bless, and glorify the wonderful task of bringing about the scientific, economic, and social transfiguration of our religious mysteries, symbols, dogmas, and sacraments [italics added]. Maybe you do not realize our forms are outdated and we are worn out, abandoned by the Spirit and alone; our hands are full of empty shells and dead letters." 56

Correspondingly, the agenda presented in Modernist Antonio Fogazzaro's "Il Santo" includes many clandestine elements of its own. The novel's conspirators realize that to accomplish their "renewal" of the Church, absolute secrecy is required until sufficient numbers have been won over to the cause. In one passage, a member outlines both the group's objectives and fears to "Il Santo's" hero," Giovanni Selva:

'We probably all agree that the Catholic Church can be compared to an old temple which, originally of noble simplicity and great religious spirituality, has been disfigured and overloaded with all kinds of ornamentation and stucco-work during the course of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries....But I cannot believe that we all agree as to the quality and quantity of the remedial measures. And I should therefore hold it to be more appropriate to come to an agreement on the nature of the reforms before proceeding to the establishment of this Catholic Freemasonry. Indeed, I wish to go further. I believe that even if your ideas were in complete agreement, I should not advise you to bind yourselves by a tangible bond. My misgivings are of a very delicate nature. You confidently believe that you can swim under water like cautious fish and do not bear in mind that the sharp eye of the exalted Fisherman or one of his representatives can very well detect you and catch you with a well-aimed harpoon....' 57

Selva responds that strength is to be found in unity:

"Isolated, each of us can be struck down: today, for example, Professor Dane; tomorrow, Dom Fare"; the day after, Dom Clement. But the day when the imaginary harpoon is launched, and upon being drawn back is found to have attached to it not only prominent lay persons, but also priests, monks, some bishops and perhaps even cardinals, who, pray tell, will be the fisherman, great as he may be, that will not out of fright let the harpoon fall back into the water with all that is attached to it?" 58

Jacques Plocard d'Assac writes:

'The plan is clear: they must influence enough minds with their ideas that Rome (i.e., the Pope, referred to as the Great Fisherman) will hesitate to condemn. When that day comes, the Church will have been conquered from within, the victim of public opinion — and the modernists know only too well that they are able to forge such public opinion, and that is their task.' 59

TBC...

While Fogazzaro places his characters in then-contemporary society, he would almost certainly have known that he was not the first to advance such views. He calls for a prolonged struggle, spelled out so many times before in conspiratorial literature:

'We are only a small group of Catholics, both in Italy and outside of Italy, clergy and laity, who desire a reform in the Church...In order to achieve this, we must CREATE AN OPINION WHICH WILL LEAD THE LEGITIMATE AUTHORITY OF THE CHURCH TO ACT ACCORDING TO OUR VIEWS, be it in twenty, thirty, or even fifty years...' 60

In 1908, Freemasonry was sufficiently confident of realizing its objective that one of its leaders, J.M. Jourdan, could publicly declare: "The goal is no longer the destruction of the Church but rather to make use of it by infiltrating it." 61  By the end of Vatican II, the Lodge was positively ecstatic. Yves Marsaudon, State Minister of the Supreme Council of France (Scottish Rite Masons), would then exalt:

'The sense of universalism that is rampant in Rome these days is very close to our purpose of existence. Thus, we are unable to ignore the Second Vatican Council and its consequences... With all our hearts we support the "Revolution of John XXIII" ...This courageous concept of the Freedom of Thought that lies at the core of our Freemasonic lodges, has spread in a truly magnificent manner right under the Dome of Saint Peter's...' 62 But Marsaudon does not stop with this. Even more incriminating is the following:

'Born in our Masonic Lodges, freedom of expression has now spread over the Dome of St. Peter's...this is the Revolution of Paul VI. It is clear that Paul VI, not content merely to follow the policy of his predecessor, does in fact go much further... [italics added — JKW]' 63

TBC...

Treason in the Church

When Archbishop Lefebvre ordained 16 priests at Econe Switzerland in June 1978, an article appeared with this byline in the Italian daily, Giornale di Bergamo. Entitled "Why We Rebel", it was a defense of his stand against Conciliar Rome and a rejection of its attacks on him and his Society of Saint Pius X. The article contained some of the Archbishop's strongest criticisms of Vatican II, including this scathing accusation of betrayal in high places:

'We say in all conscience we are not obliged to submit to the suppression of Econe because we see behind the way in which the order originated a hand which is not that of the Church, an attitude lacking in all respect for Canon Law which is not the attitude of the Church. We are forced to believe it is the enemy penetrated into the Church which orders this suppression and that the enemy is Freemasonry.'

'The constant progress of heresy and apostasy forces us to recognize Masonic influence in the Roman Curia and even the presence of a Masonic lodge within the Vatican itself. There is now... a veritable occupation of the Vatican by a counter—Church born of Protestantism and determined to spread all the errors which the popes have condemned for the last 400 years.' 64

If Archbishop Lefebvre was right in his contention, the foulest plot ever launched against the Church has achieved much of its objective. Surely, considering the substantial destruction of Christian tradition experienced in the last three decades, it would be, in Michael Davies' words, "stretching coincidence a little too far to insist that the correspondence of what is happening now with what the secret societies have been aiming at is mere chance." 65 Before tying all of this in directly with the Bugnini controversy, two more examples from the twentieth century are in order to demonstrate how the Church has been infiltrated.

The first case is famous, due to the unusual use of a veto from a secular ruler to decide a papal election. In 1903, three years before "Il Santo" was condemned by Rome, a conclave was convoked to elect a successor to Pope Leo XIII. In early balloting, the leading candidate was Cardinal Mariano Rampolla, Leo's Secretary of State. Although he received enough votes for election, Rampolla never uttered the Accepto required to make him Pope. For, before he was given the opportunity, Poland's Cardinal Jan Puzyna of Cracow, acting in behalf of Austro—Hungarian Emperor Franz Joseph, rose to invoke a veto, which, all but forgotten, was nevertheless honored.

No explanation for the veto was asked at that time, nor was any given. Some speculated that there were political motives, as Rampolla had used his office to encourage — among other things — friendlier relations between the Holy See and France, and no doubt such considerations factored into the decision to oppose him. Years later, however, an even more significant reason emerged: Franz Joseph, it was said, had discovered that Rampolla was a Mason. There is little, if anything, to show that Cardinal Giuseppe Sarto, who was then elected Pope Saint Pius X, knew of this membership. But it is instructive to consider that one of his very first acts as Pope was to replace Rampolla as Secretary of State with the Spanish prelate, Cardinal Raphael Merry del Val.

Admittedly, nothing can be made of this per se, except that Pius did not accept the claims of the pro-Rampolla camp that he was irreplaceable as a papal diplomat. And yet, the election of Saint Pius and Rampolla's dismissal, providential acts of the Holy Ghost, assured the condemnation of Modernism. Just as importantly, this, in turn, has proven crucial in giving today's Catholic resistance the infallible footing upon which to attack the whole Vatican II-engendered religion.

TBC...

Cardinal Rampolla is not the only cleric with ties to the Holy See who has been accused of being an infiltrator. Approximately half a century after the fateful 1903 conclave an incident took place that, while less celebrated than the Rampolla affair, was far more verifiable. In his book on Communism's war against Christianity, "The Church in Today's Catacombs", Sergiu Grossu, a Paris-based Rumanian refugee, quotes Pierre de Villemarest (from a study entitled "Soviet Espionage in France") concerning an all but forgotten — but extremely important — episode in recent Church history. The full text will be given because it not only illuminates a crucial discovery in the pre-Conciliar Church and evidence of a continuation of this subversion after the Council, but also because it demonstrates that enemies of the Church (Communist; Masonic; Modernist) have employed a similar — and, perhaps, interlocking— strategy to destroy her:

'In the early fifties NATO Secret Services discovered that, within the usual network of espionage and counter—espionage, the Soviets had set up a department especially for the penetration of churches. In satellite countries the goal had been set in 1945: infiltrate the churches in order to control, if not dissolve, them [italics added throughout — JKW], In 1949 a second objective was grafted to the first: penetrate the Western, Catholic, and Orthodox churches exactly as other specialists penetrate Moslem, Protestant, and other groups; then on the one hand look for fellow travelers, on the other to recruit agents.

This slow penetration of the churches in order to dissolve them from inside and lead them to revise the foundations of their dogma is a doubly subversive task and depends exclusively on espionage. Agents are, of course, selected with extreme care...

At the beginning of the fifties, a Jesuit priest and professor of theology at the Gregorian University was caught in the act of stealing documents from the vault where the secret records of the Vatican are kept. His name is Alighiero Tondi. He was the secretary of Msgr. Montini, who was then a direct collaborator of Pius XII and is today no less a figure than "Pope" [sic] Paul VI.

An investigation has been going on for some time under the direction of a French priest associated with the Vatican who had been an officer of the Second French Bureau in Algiers during the war. For two years each time priests were secretly sent to the Eastern countries to replace those confined, deported, or shot by the regimes, a Communist welcome committee was immediately on the spot to arrest them too, even before they could take office. In addition, certain secret resolutions were obviously leaked once in a while to the Italian Communist Party in matters of managing the assets of the church.

When Alighiero Tondi was caught, he admitted that he became a priest in 1936 under orders of a special division of the Italian Communist Party and that during his training he even took a course at the Lenin University of Moscow, where the chief spies are trained. Since 1944 he had been sending his information directly to Palmiro Togliatti, general secretary of the Italian Communist Party.

The Vatican has its laws. Tondi was simply expelled from the order and its sacred confines. The following year he married Carmen Zanti, a Communist militant. Since then he travels all over Europe: in March 1965 he stayed in East Germany to advise Walter Ulbricht in matters of religious policy. Since Msgr. Montini became "Pope", Alighiero Tondi declares, rightly or wrongly, that he has been pardoned because "those in high places" were able to understand that he has always had one goal: to work for peace and the reconciliation of souls [through espionage, betrayal of trust, theft of secret documents, disgracing the priesthood, etc.? — JKW]. 67

Lest the specifics of Tondi's crime be unclear, a French semi-traditional priest, Abbé Georges de Nantes, in an open letter to Paul VI, reports that "he [Tondi] had been accused, in the presence of Pius XII, of having given the Russians the names of priests sent to work behind the Iron Curtain." 68 Elsewhere in the Abbé de Nantes' publications is the following statement:

'During a dramatic confrontation with Cardinal N., ... [Tondi] An early Freemasonic Apron admitted having given the Soviets [the] names of priests sent clandestinely to the U.S.S.R.; these were all subsequently arrested and killed [emphasis added — JKW].

It is known that Tondi was granted Church marriage by favor of Paul VI after he became Pope [sic]', he found 'work' again in Rome in 1965. 69

One last point about Tondi adds insult to injury. In 1984 a study on the Jesuits by German author Manfred Barthel was published in English. Essentially a history, the book devotes its later chapters to up-to-date reporting of the order. Barthel quotes from a 1961 exposé entitled Confessions of an Ex-Jesuit, that "describe the horrors of the author's novitiate some time during the late 1940s..." 70 He says that it was published by an East Berlin publisher, and written by...Alighiero Tondi. Whether through design or ignorance, no mention is made of Tondi's other career, and so many readers would lose the choice irony in Tondi's recollections (here by way of Barthel's paraphrase): "Special permission was...required to send a letter or even a postcard;...and incoming as well as outgoing mail was censored." 71

That the methods of the Communists resemble those of the Masons should hardly come as a surprise. In Humanum Genus, Pope Leo XIII points out that both strive to replace Christian civilization with a neo-pagan world order: "Yea, this change is deliberately planned and put forward by many associations of Communists and Socialists; and to their undertakings the sect of Freemasons is not hostile, but greatly favors their designs, and holds in common with them their chief opinions." 72 Earlier in the same letter, Leo writes: "At this period..., the partisans of evil seem to be combining together, and to be struggling with united vehemence, led on or assisted by that strongly organized and widespread associations called the Freemasons." 73 Joint efforts by these forces in the twentieth century have included the bloody persecution of Catholics in Mexico during the 1920s, and the Spanish Civil War a decade later. More directly related to the subject at hand, and of profoundest significance even today, Masons and Communists around the world joined in praising the Second Vatican Council. How telling that the two leading anti-Catholic forces in the world, which should have been condemned by the Council, ended up being among its greatest apologists! 74

TBC...

The War Against the Mass

"Justly," writes Saint Alphonsus de Liguori, "has St. Bonaventure called the Mass a compendium of all God's love and of all his benefits to men. Hence the devil has always sought to deprive the world of the Mass by means of heretics, constituting them precursors of Antichrist, whose first efforts shall be to abolish the holy sacrifice of the altar, and according to the prophet Daniel, in punishment of the sins of men, his efforts shall be successful: And strength was given him against the continual sacrifice because of sins" 75

For many Catholics the prophecy of Daniel was fulfilled in 1969, when Paul VI promulgated the publication of a "new order of the Mass." There can be no question that with the introduction of the new "Mass" the Conciliar revolution shifted into a higher gear. All of the errors of the Council now more quickly became apparent and spread with greater ease; the Novus Ordo Missae constituting their very embodiment. Whereas the Latin Mass is a sacramental action aimed at giving glory to God, the object of the new "Mass" is a social action centered around the congregation.

The Latin Mass is one thing, and one thing only, the perfect mode of divine worship. For the "reformers," however, this was precisely the problem with it. Therefore, they pushed the idea that the Mass had to be made more "relevant" and "understandable" to the man in the pew, and that a "return to ancient liturgical forms" was the way to accomplish this. 76 But, in truth, there was only one real reason for eliminating the Tridentine Mass: Its continued survival constituted a major obstacle to the imposition of a new belief system on Catholics; hence, it had to go. Dr. Rama Coomaraswamy summed this up well, when he wrote:

'One final problem remained. The Reformers feared that "nothing would come out of the Council." Even though they had managed to insert into the "official" Documents of the Council their false ideas, they knew that this alone was insufficient....Change would occur far too slowly for the impatient innovators. The greater majority of the faithful had never asked for the Council (the Curia had opposed it also), and were perfectly content with the way the Church had always been. Even John XXIII had acknowledged and praised it as being "vibrant with vitality." For most people things would have gone on much as before. It was absolutely necessary to introduce into the fabric of the everyday life of the Christian, all these new ideas, the "new economy of the Gospel." How then to achieve this? The answer was obvious. One had to "reform" the liturgy.' 77

This is in line with the apostate Abbé Roca's thinking, who, along with calling for "the scientific, economic, and social transfiguration of our... sacraments," writes:

'As long as Christian ideas remained in a state of sacramental incubation, in our hands and under the veil of liturgy, they were unable to exert any efficacious and scientifically decisive social effect upon the organic and public government of human societies.' 78

The new "Mass," likewise, would need to reflect the "ecumenical," "humanistic," "universalist," "socially relevant" activism of the Conciliar Church — abominations like the civil rights "Mass," the farm workers' "Mass," the Marxist "Mass," the feminist "Mass," the homosexual "Mass," which removed the focus from God to "special interest groups" required a fitting service for their "social gospel" messages. And they got just that with the "reformed" rite. While these are extreme manifestations, to be sure, they are accepted extremes in the Conciliar religion and serve to underscore the doctrinal gulf that separates the true Catholic faith from the new "Catholic" faith.

TBC...

The reputation of "Archbishop" Annibale Bugnini ultimately stands or falls with the Novus Ordo Missile. Either the rite for which he is universally regarded as "architect" is orthodox, and hence obliging to all Catholics, or it is an impious "ecumenical" sacrilege, for the Church has never allowed "middle ground" or "gray areas" when the salvation of souls is at stake. Either it is Catholic or it is not — the faithful may not "roll dice" when a fundamental of the Faith is involved.

Bugnini was no "supporting player" in the area of "reform," but one of the prime movers for a period of nearly thirty years. His singular career in the field began in 1948, when, as a 36 year-old priest, he had gained sufficient support in the Holy See to be named Secretary of the Commission for General Liturgical Restoration, a post he held until 1960. After this, he successively became: Secretary, Pontifical Preparatory Commission on the Liturgy (1960-1961); Peritus, Conciliar Commission on the Liturgy (1962-1964); Secretary, Consilium for the Implementation of the Constitution of the Liturgy (1964-1969); and Secretary, Congregation for Divine Worship (1965-1975). And as mentioned earlier, he had shown interest in Protestant writings on liturgical "reform" as early as 1944. Nowhere is there any clearer example than the Bugnini resumé of how the seeds that produced the wicked harvest of Vatican II were being secretly sown in high places many years in advance.

While the question of the new "Mass" has been dealt with at length by many authors, a brief passage on its orations (Collects, Secrets, and Postcommunion) is sufficient to demonstrate its radical departure from Catholic tradition. On the back cover of Father Anthony Cekada's booklet, The Problems with the Prayers of the New Mass, appears the charge that the Bugnini "Mass" is a "systematically de—Catholicised" rite, and the following examples are given:

'Gone from these [Novus Ordo Missae — JKW] prayers are such Catholic concepts as "sacrifice," "reparation," "hell," "the gravity of sin," "snares of wickedness," "the burden of evil," "adversities," "enemies," "evils," "tribulations," "afflictions," "infirmities of soul," "obstinacy of heart," "concupiscence of the flesh and the eyes," "unworthiness," "temptations," "wicked thoughts," "grave offenses," "loss of heaven," "everlasting death," "eternal punishment," "hidden fruits," "guilt," "eternal rest," "true faith," "merits," "intercession," "heavenly fellowship," "fires of hell," etc. 79'

When these omissions are considered tout ensemble, the mentality that emerges is precisely what Pope Leo stated to be the teaching of the Lodge in Humanum Genus:

"But the...Freemasons, having no faith in those things which we have learned by the revelation of God, deny that our first parents sinned [italics added throughout — JKW] , and consequently think that free will is not at all weakened and inclined to evil.

On the contrary, exaggerating rather our natural virtue and excellence and placing therein alone the principle and rule of justice, they cannot even imagine that there is any need at all to overcome the violence and rule of our passions." 80

TBC...

Father Cekada's findings are damning, to say the least, as are other critiques of the new "Mass," but Bugnini never wavered from the position that he and his "reform" of the Mass were thoroughly Catholic. In the May 1980 issue of Homiletic and Pastoral Review, a letter of his appeared in which he took to task the writer of a previous letter to the editor. Bugnini stated:

'1) By the grace of God my faith in the Holy Eucharist was and is that of the Holy Catholic Church. I challenge [name of his critic — JKW]...to find a single expression in the liturgical reform that puts in doubt faith in the Holy Eucharist. 2) As for the "liturgical revolution," which would have alienated "millions" of people from the faith, he makes a gratuitous claim. The author knows very well that the causes of the weakening of faith in our time are many and complex. The liturgical reform not only [has] not deviated from the faith, but has been the most valid factor, has given the faithful a faith more convincing, strong and operative in charity.' 81

This denial is absurd, to say the least. The "causes of the weakening of the faith" are not "many and complex," as claimed, but are such as can be directed, quite simply, to one source, and only one — the Second Vatican Council. At no time in Church history have designations such as "pre-Conciliar" and "post-Conciliar" had the sort of relevance that they do today. Conciliar "reforms" — liturgical and otherwise — utterly transformed the way Catholics viewed their Church, and did, in fact, alienate millions of them. But, far worse, when the Mass was taken from them, and the mockery substituted in its place, confusion, alienation, and corruption rose exponentially in direct proportion with the spread of that substitution.

By 1980, however, Bugnini could say anything he pleased. The celebrated Ottaviani intervention, eleven years before, which properly attacked the new "Mass" as "teem[ing] with insinuations or manifest errors against the integrity of the Catholic faith," received nothing in the way of recognition from Paul VI except a cosmetic touching up of the General Instruction of the Order of the New Mass. The revolutionaries had won the battle, and Bugnini's letter is more on the order of a mopping up operation than anything approximating actual combat.

The arguments that have been repeatedly used to defend the Liturgical "reforms" bear an eerie resemblance to those already quoted of the Mason Roca, who, nearly one hundred years before the fact, called for a "transformation...at an ecumenical council" so that the liturgy would "return the Church to the venerable simplicity of the apostolic golden age, and harmonize it with the new stage of modern conscience and civilization." The Council justified altering the liturgy so that a "noble simplicity [its term]" could be achieved, or in Bugnini's words:

"Rediscovery of the spirit, then, and the effort to make the rites speak the language of our time so that the men and women may understand the language of the rites, which is both mysterious and sacred." 82 The zeal of the "reformers" was so pronounced that the Benedictine Dom Cipriano Vagaggini, peritus ("expert") at Vatican II who helped draft its Constitution on the Liturgy (praised by Bugnini for his "brilliant, clear exposition" of the issues), dares write in his book, "The Canon of the Mass and Liturgical Reform": "The present Roman [i.e., Tridentine — JKW] canon sins in a number of ways against the requirements of good liturgical composition and sound liturgical sense that were emphasized by the Second Vatican Council." 83 Well worth citing in this discussion are remarks by Pope Pius XII, who is held up by Bugnini as having "put the seal of his authority on this whole movement..." 84 While it is true that Pius XII favored some liturgical reform, never would he have countenanced revolution. In fact, in his 1947 encyclical on the Sacred Liturgy, Mediator Dei, he condemns innovations that some were then introducing into the Church — innovations that both harken back to those proposed by Roca and the Modernists, and point straight ahead to the Novus Ordo Missae. While Pius could have been stronger in denouncing them, his condemnation, nonetheless, places a great burden of proof on those upholding the new "Mass." For among the novelties His Holiness singles out for censure are:

'[T]hose who make use of the vernacular in the celebration of the august Eucharistic Sacrifice; those who transfer certain feast—days —which have been appointed and established after mature deliberation — to other dates; those...who delete from the prayer-books approved for public use the Sacred texts of the Old Testaments, deeming them little suited and inopportune for modern times.' 85

TBC...

Pope Pius XII also attacks those who argue for "the restoration of all the ancient rites" on the grounds that such ceremonies carry "the savor and aroma of antiquity" and have "significance for latter times and new situations." 86 Finally, he warns against the notion of the laity "concelebrating" Mass with the priest, and against the innovator who would:

"...wish the altar restored to its primitive table-form;...want black excluded as a colour for the liturgical vestments;...forbid the use of sacred images and statues in churches;...order the crucifix so designed that the Divine Redeemer's Body shows no trace of His cruel sufferings; and lastly,...disdain and reject polyphonic music or singing in parts, even where it conforms to regulations issued by the Holy See...." 87

When viewed with the luxury of hindsight, it seems as though Paul VI, Bugnini, Vagaggini, and the other "reformers" drew up a list of these proscribed ideas and practices, and proceeded to do all that was possible to work them all into the Novus Ordo Missae and its rubrics. Bugnini used Pope Pius' commitment to genuine reform as a pretext to advance his own career and to justify his utterly destructive pseudo-Mass. In the end, however, his machinations had already been condemned by the very pontiff he claims had given "the seal of his authority" to said "reforms."

TBC...