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(LifeSiteNews) — Bishop Rudolf Graber’s Athanasius and the Church of Our Time was first published in English in 1974 and, over fifty years later, still offers us some of the most uniquely valuable insights into the ongoing crisis in the Catholic Church. Although much of Bishop Graber’s short book relates to diabolical assaults on the Church, he ends his description of the anti-Catholic plots with a note of optimism: 

We know what we are up against. Lucifer’s plan is laid out clearly and openly before us. (p. 72) 

For those interested in combatting the evils plaguing the Church, the enemy’s battle plan is invaluable. When we couple the knowledge of the enemy’s plan with the reality that God will ultimately prevail, we are better prepared to remain faithful to the immutable Catholic Faith, while Satan and his minions do all they can to spur us to flee in despair. 

In this light, we can consider one of the more sobering passages from Bishop Graber’s book, about a Freemasonic assessment of the state of the Church in 1968:

In this vein the Paris journal of the Grand Orient de France, ‘L’Humanisme’ wrote quite openly in 1968: ‘Among the pillars which collapse most easily we note the Magisterium; the infallibility, which was held to be firmly established by the First Vatican Council and which has just had to face being stormed by married people on the occasion of the publication of the encyclical Humanae vitae; the Real Eucharistic Presence, which the Church was able to impose on the medieval masses and which will disappear with the increasing inter-communion and inter-celebration of Catholic priests and Protestant pastors; the hallowed character of the priest, which comes from the institution of the Sacrament of Ordination and which will be replaced by a decision for the priesthood for a trial period; the differentiation between the direction-giving Church and the black-clad (lower) clergy, whereas from now on the directions will proceed from the base of the pyramid upwards as in any democracy; the gradual disappearance of the ontological and metaphysical character of the sacraments and then the subsequent death of confession now that sin in our days has become a completely anachronistic concept handed down to us by the rigorous medieval philosophy which was in turn the heritage of Biblical pessimism.’ (p. 70)

All of the ultimate objectives forecasted and championed by the Freemasonic journal have been at least partially achieved, even if the specific details for achieving those victories differ from what we have witnessed so far. We can briefly consider those Freemasonic victories below.

Apparent collapse of the Magisterium. With Vatican II, the official teaching authority of the Church appeared to contradict what it had previously taught. Yves Congar expressed the reality well in his Challenge to the Church: The Case of Archbishop Lefebvre: 

By the Declaration on Religious Liberty, by the Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et spes, On the Church in the Modern World, — a significant title, this! — the Church of Vatican II has openly placed herself in the pluralist world of today; and, without disowning anything great that there may have been, has cut the ropes which were mooring her to the banks of the Middle Ages. You cannot stay stuck at a particular moment of history. (p. 46)

The true Catholic Church can never actually change in this way, but the majority of Catholics have been deceived into believing that the immutable Faith can mutate to contradict what it once was, signaling a functional collapse of the Magisterium. 

Assault on infallibility. It was clear before Paul VI issued his 1968 encyclical on the “regulation of birth,” Humanae Vitae, that a significant portion of the clergy and laity would rebel against any affirmation of Catholic teaching on the subject of birth control. Certainly this reality should not have prompted Paul VI to deny what the Church had always taught. However, it should have been obvious at the time that he needed to not only guide Catholics about the birth control pill but also safeguard the Church from the predictable rebellion against papal authority. Unfortunately, though, the widespread dismissal of Humanae Vitae normalized the open rejection of settled Catholic teaching and helped make “cafeteria Catholicism” into a dominant and malignant force.  

Denial of the Real Presence. If we can trust prominent surveys and anecdotal evidence, we know that a significant percentage of nominal Catholics reject the Real Presence of Jesus in the Holy Eucharist. While this tragic development has been exacerbated by Communion in the hand, lay Eucharistic ministers, and removal of altar rails, the so-called Ottaviani Intervention from 1969 identified the ways in which the Novus Ordo Missae itself repudiated the dogma of the Real Presence, before any of those abuses were popularized: 

The suppression of the invocation to the Third Person of the Most Holy Trinity (Veni Sanctificator) that He may descend upon the oblations, as once before into the womb of the Most Blessed Virgin to accomplish the miracle of the divine Presence, is yet one more instance of the systematic and tacit negation of the Real Presence. Note, too, the eliminations: of the genuflections (no more than three remain to the priest, and one, with certain exceptions, to the people, at the Consecration); of the purification of the priest’s fingers in the chalice; of the preservation from all profane contact of the priest’s fingers after the Consecration; of the purification of the vessels, which need not be immediate, nor made on the corporal; of the pall protecting the chalice; of the internal gilding of sacred vessels; of the consecration of movable altars; of the sacred stone and relics in the movable altar or upon the mensa—when celebration does not occur in sacred precincts (this distinction leads straight to ‘eucharistic suppers’ in private houses); of the three altar cloths, reduced to one only; of thanksgiving kneeling (replaced by a thanksgiving, seated, on the part of priest and people, a logical enough complement to Communion standing); of all the ancient prescriptions in the case of the consecrated Host falling, which are now reduced to a single, casual direction: ‘reverenter accipiatur’ (no. 239); all these things only serve to emphasize how outrageously faith in the dogma of the Real Presence is implicitly repudiated.

As with so many other evils we have seen since the Council, warnings such as these were ignored by the hierarchy. The only rational explanation is that the harms we have witnessed were indeed intended. 

Diminishment of the hallowed character of the priesthood. We have not seen the “trial period” for ordination that the Freemasonic journal forecasted, but we can all recognize numerous ways in which the dignity of the priesthood has been diminished after the Council. Many (perhaps most) priests no longer dress or act like priests; their roles in the liturgy and parish leadership have been supplanted by the laity to a large extent; and it seems that many of them no longer have any interest in following or teaching the Catholic Faith. All of this was by design. 

Inversion of the Church’s hierarchical structure. The most obvious example of the inversion of the Church’s hierarchical structure has been the Synod on Synodality, in which the “Synodal Church” discovers its religious beliefs through a process of listening to laity and priests. As discussed in a previous article, the International Theological Commission’s study from 2017 entitled “Synodality in the Life and Mission of the Church” affirmed that the Synodal process consists of an inversion of the Church’s actual hierarchical structure: 

Taking up the ecclesiological perspective of Vatican II, Pope Francis sketches the image of a synodal Church as ‘an inverted pyramid’ which comprises the People of God and the College of Bishops, one of whose members, the Successor of Peter, has a specific ministry of unity. Here the summit is below the base. ‘Synodality, as a constitutive element of the Church, offers us the most appropriate interpretative framework for understanding the hierarchical ministry itself . . .  Jesus founded the Church by setting at her head the College of Apostles, in which the Apostle Peter is the ‘rock’ (cf. Matthew 16,18), the one who must ‘confirm’ his brethren in the faith (cf. Luke 22,32). But in this Church, as in an inverted pyramid, the top is located below the base. Consequently, those who exercise authority are called ‘ministers,’ because, in the original meaning of the word, they are the least of all.

This may be a surprise to us today but, in hindsight, we can see that many changes have contributed to this inversion, most prominently the increased role for the laity and attacks on the immutability of Catholic truth.  

Assaults on the sacraments. The Freemasonic assessment from L’Humanisme spoke of “the gradual disappearance of the ontological and metaphysical character of the sacraments and then the subsequent death of confession.” Many of the tragic developments described above have contributed to this, but the overarching focus on false ecumenism has also played a dominant role in undermining the sacraments. If, as the false shepherds in Rome have told us for decades, the Protestant religions are pleasing to God and lead souls to Heaven, then the Catholic sacraments cannot be nearly as important as the Church has always taught. 

None of this is a cause for despair, but it does emphasize the real need for sincere Catholics to recognize the full extent of the crisis afflicting the Mystical Body of Christ. If the Freemasons were celebrating these evils in 1968, we cannot overlook them today without giving the Church’s enemies further reason to celebrate. We may scoff at an enemy’s battle plan before the fighting begins; but once we recognize that the enemy is achieving its battle objectives, we must strive to properly understand what is happening.

So we naturally want to know what we can do to combat these evils. Fortunately, we can look to a document written around the same time that Bishop Graber published his book: Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre’s famous 1974 Declaration, which Bishop Joseph Strickland recently quoted in its entirety. Whether or not we agree with Archbishop Lefebvre’s decision to consecrate bishops in 1988 without Rome’s approval, we should all be able to recognize the holy wisdom so evident in the 1974 Declaration:

We hold fast, with all our heart and with all our soul, to Catholic Rome, Guardian of the Catholic Faith and of the traditions necessary to preserve this faith, to Eternal Rome, Mistress of wisdom and truth. We refuse, on the other hand, and have always refused to follow the Rome of neo-Modernist and neo-Protestant tendencies which were clearly evident in the Second Vatican Council and, after the Council, in all the reforms which issued from it. All these reforms, indeed, have contributed and are still contributing to the destruction of the Church, to the ruin of the priesthood, to the abolition of the Sacrifice of the Mass and of the sacraments, to the disappearance of religious life, to a naturalist and Teilhardian teaching in universities, seminaries and catechectics; a teaching derived from Liberalism and Protestantism, many times condemned by the solemn Magisterium of the Church. No authority, not even the highest in the hierarchy, can force us to abandon or diminish our Catholic Faith, so clearly expressed and professed by the Church’s Magisterium for nineteen centuries…

Those who share the beliefs articulated by Archbishop Lefebvre in 1974 will not readily surrender to Satan or the globalist tyrants, which is why the Church’s enemies had to attack this unwavering Faith. Any of us can take Archbishop Lefebvre’s call to battle as our own today, even if we have no allegiance to the Society of St. Pius X he founded. If we “hold fast, with all our heart and with all our soul, to Catholic Rome, Guardian of the Catholic Faith and of the traditions necessary to preserve this faith, to Eternal Rome, Mistress of wisdom and truth,” then we will save our souls, and do our part to thwart the demonic plans of the Church’s enemies. God will prevail — the most important question for us is whether we will join in the victory. Immaculate Heart of Mary, pray for us! 

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