Posted on 06/13/2003 7:25:56 PM PDT by Land of the Irish
Editor's Note: Father Charles Fiore, a good friend of CFN, died on February 18 this year (2003). A month before his death, at his own expense, he mailed the book The Devil's Final Battle to a hundred of his friends and accountancies (I helped organized the mailing). What follows is the heartfelt cover-letter he sent with the book.
By God's Providence, I was ordained to the priesthood as a Dominican in 1961, a year before the beginning of Vatican Council II.
I was 27, had grown up and was educated in the pre-Conciliar Church, so that at the Council's opening I stood between Tradition and the changes that would implode Catholicism over the next forty years.
I loved the Church of my baptism, youth and ordination. But I was inexperienced, and indiscriminately deferential to authority, so that I uncritically followed the Council's new ways ... for a time.
But by the decade's end, I saw clearly (and was increasingly disturbed by) the first fruits of the Council's supposed "reform and renewal" that I found inconsistent with and even contradictory to the Church's unbroken Tradition.
For example, despite decrees of St. Pius V that forbade changes in the Roman rite, and the explicit directives of Sacrosanctum Concilium (1963), the Council's first document (on the liturgy) that never mandated a novus ordo (the now, vernacular rite) of the Mass, Paul VI's post-Conciliar commission (1969) -- with its six Protestant experts -- concocted three insipid (and likely unCatholic) Canons of the Mass, and emasculated the Roman Canon. It also effected the beginning of the "reform" (deconstruction) of the rites of the other six sacraments, even the rites of ordination of priests and bishops, and of exorcism.
By its end, in 1965, with 16 deliberately "ambiguous" documents (As their authors later freely admitted; cf. In the Murky Waters of Vatican II, Guimaraes), the results of the Council were clear: the Church's Tradition was interpreted in a manner consonant with Modernism, condemned by Blessed Pope Pius IX's Syllabus of Errors and St. Pius X's Pascendi Domini Gregis. Virtually everything -- from dogmas to devotions -- was questioned and trashed or mothballed, informally by clerical enthusiasts" or officially by masonic bureaucrats!
What John XXIII in his opening address had assured us was to be a "pastoral" Council, not called to change teachings of the Church, but simply to make them more understandable to the world (remember aggiornamento?), became the playground of "experts" who questioned every dogma, discipline and practice, invoking "the spirit" of the Council -- eventually a poltergeist (or worse)!
The 1961 Vatican directive to bishops and religious superiors not to admit homosexuals to seminaries and houses of formation -- and not to ordain them (since reiterated 4 times) -- was largely ignored, planting the seeds of the (mostly homosexual) sex abuse harvest that blossomed in the 1970s, '80s and '90s.
And who that lived through them can forget the endless "dialogues" and consultations that preceded promulgation of the prophetic Humanae Vitae (1968), and the virulent dissent from it by theologians and secularists who flexed their muscle and were encouraged by heterodox bishops, while others simply ran like lemmings for cover, and later preached "false conscience" from their pulpits?
More recently, in Ut Unim Sint, (1996), John Paul II reached out to Anglicans and Orthodox by suggesting a new look at the papal primacy, and at Assisi I and II appeared to condone syncretisim. And everywhere Pope and bishops kiss the Koran, get "smoked" in pagan ceremonies at World Youth day, have their foreheads marked with Hindu fertility symbols, and "inculturate" Aztec dances into canonization Masses in Mexico. But try to find a Traditional Mass in most diocese!
So too, Cardinal Walter Kasper Kasper -- elevated at the February 2001 Consistory -- denied acceptance of Jesus and conversion to the Catholic faith as necessary for salvation; and last August a USCCB commission led by Baltimore's Carinal Keeler invoked Kasper's thesis re the Jews! The bishops of the USCCB failed to speak of it in November just as they ignored the pro-homosexual Always Our Children, or as at Dallas they focused on priest sex abusers, ignored dissent and the gay seminaries, and evaded their personally covering up the rot for so many years.
Does anybody really doubt that great numbers of the bishops, clergy, religious and laity are in de facto schism? Where is our Saint Athanasius now?
In 1992, in Rome while leaving the Dominicans, I had a long, frank conversation with a revered Curial Cardinal who said to me: "Father, the corruption in the Church reaches the highest level!" I believed it then; I believe it now.
But I also believe that the suffering One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church will perdure in some form despite the "darkened intellects" of many leaders and forty years of "dumbing down" believers. Obviously, the next Pontificate will be pivotal, and prayerful families will suffer to preserve the Faith!
In 1972, my late friend Father Malachi Martin, in the opening lines of Three Popes and a Cardinal, wrote that the institutional Church we knew then would no longer exist in the year 2000. At the Council, he saw firsthand what it had wrought, where it pointed and the disintegration of the Faith then already underway.
Clearly, the "auto-demolition" of the Church (Paul VI) will continue until Cardinal Sodano's falsification of the Third Fatima Secret (May 13, 2000) and Cardinal Ratzinger and Archbishop Bertone's "explanation" (June 26, 2000) are rejected, by revealing verbatim what Our Lady said -- exactly as Sister Lucy wrote it down at Her command. Why won't they let us read the words of Our Mother?
The Mother of God doesn't need interpreters or "spin doctors". How dare they muzzle Her and quarantine Her actual words, for more than forty years!
Please read every page and footnote of The Devil's Final Battle: it's that important. And purchase a copy for a friend -- an act of mercy for someone confused or lost in ignorance.
Make the Five First Saturdays, go to confession and do penance, and say the Rosary daily. (And in your kindness, please pray for me!).
O my Jesus, forgive us our sins, and sae from the fires of hell. Lead all souls to Heaven espeically those in most need of Thy mercy! (Prayer the Angel taught the children of Fatima).
- Father Charles C. Fiore
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