Marcel De Corte Lauwens was a neo-Thomist who taught philosophy at the University of Liège, specializing in ancient philosophy and moral philosophy. Like many Catholic intellectuals, Marcel De Corte was deeply troubled by the reforms following Vatican II. In February 1970, he wrote a letter to his friend, the journalist Jean Madiran (1920-2013), who at that time was chief editor of the traditional Catholic journal Itineraries, which Madiran had founded in 1956 to combat the errors of progressivism. The following letter was published in Itineraries, wherein De Corte describes his disgust with the New Mass as he witnessed it's early implementation in Belgium in the fall of 1969 and his disillusionment with the pontificate of Pope Paul VI, whom he sees as a man of frustrating contradictions.
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I must confess, my dear Jean Madiran, that on more than one occasion I was tempted to leave the Catholic Church into which I was born. If I haven't done so, I'm grateful to God and to the peasant common sense with which he graced me. The Church—I'm whispering to myself at the moment—is like a sack of wheat full of weevils. As numerous as the parasites are—and from the looks of it, they're swarming!—they haven't sterilized all the kernels. A few, and their number doesn't matter, remain fertile. They will germinate. And the weevils will die once they've devoured all the others: Bon appétit, Messieurs: you're eating your own death.
In the meantime, we're suffering from famine, famine of the supernatural. The number of priests distributing the bread of the soul is dwindling appallingly. In the Hierarchy, it's even worse. And at the summit, where we might have expected some comfort, it's a catastrophe.
I confess I was fooled by Paul VI for a long time. I thought he was trying to save what was essential. I kept repeating to myself Louis XIV's words to the Dauphin: "I'm not afraid to tell you that the higher the place, the more objects it has that cannot be seen or known except by occupying it." Being neither Pope nor even a cleric, I said to myself: "He sees what I cannot see, by position. So I trust him, even though I don't like most of his gestures, attitudes and declarations, and his perpetual (apparently perpetual) game makes my head spin. Poor guy, he's to be pitied, especially as he's obviously no match for me... But then, with God's help... "
Only, and this is to the glory of the human species, there is no example in history of a deceiver who doesn't end up unmasking himself. By dint of wanting to appear other than what you are, you end up showing that you're not. Too much virtuosity is detrimental. Men will admit to a little deception, especially in the Italian style. But not beyond a certain measure, beyond a measure beyond which one is no longer a good actor, but the prisoner of one's character, entangled in one's feats of illusion.
That moment came with the Holy Mass affair. Previously, you could be fooled, cheated, fooled. That was the ransom of the honors due to the powers that be. Now, no more "playing with me", as my old schoolteacher used to say (we were in the country, where greenness is quite natural, and he was much more energetic: Fr. Cardonnel, stuffed with literature and disgorging it at every turn, ignores this delightful spontaneity of language, this proud, male affirmation of a man who can't stand to be mystified for a single moment).
I say it very calmly, very calmly, with all the assurance of a man of peasant stock, where one is Catholic from father to son, where the supernatural is itself carnal, who has passed from the cultivation of the fields practiced by his forefathers (of which he is quite unworthy) to the cultivation of the spirits, from whom God has taken a son devoted to the Church, and who feels, from the root to the crest, implanted in the Church, I say it resolutely, without the slightest hesitation: "NO. I've had enough. I will no longer be taken for a ride, nor will I take bladders for lanterns and Paul VI for a new Saint Pius V, having undergone a very strong mutation, for the better of course, as befits our progressive times."
How dare anyone proclaim that this is not a "new Mass", that "nothing has changed", that "everything is as it was before", when there is little or nothing left of the Mass in which so many saints have fallen out of love, when the "experts" who have been employed in this demolition project for the public good have said over and over again that this is a genuine liturgical "revolution"? while the simple conscience of the faithful is shaken by this upheaval, and an old lady, leaving church on the first Sunday of Advent, after having been lamed with the "new rite" (the adjective comes from Paul VI, who juggles with contradiction), exclaimed: "We don't recognize ourselves in Mass anymore!" It was so true that the officiant had absent-mindedly or hastily omitted the consecration of the wine! How important can this be in a Mass where the notion of Sacrifice is by definition absent?
I won't repeat the trial of this new liturgy here. Others, enlightened, competent and confident, have done so, and done it well. When enlightenment meets common sense, there's no need to add a grain of salt. Everything has been said by illustrious experts, by tried and tested theologians and canonists, by priests and religious of solid piety, by a good woman of the people representing the most lively and profound protest of the Christian peasantry against this "mutation": "We don't recognize ourselves in it anymore." It's all there: "We don't recognize ourselves anymore." The faithful instinctively feel it: "There's nothing Catholic about it anymore."
[Cardinal Ottaviani said] "This Mass departs impressively, both overall and in detail, from the Catholic theology of the Holy Mass, as formulated at the XXth Session of the Council of Trent, which, by definitively fixing the canons of the ritual, raised an impassable barrier against any heresy that might undermine the integrity of the Mystery." There's no one in good faith who doesn't take these harsh words of Cardinal Ottaviani to heart, after studying the Novus Ordo Missæ and weighing up its every word. There's no one in good faith who doesn't feel their terrible truth after hearing, as we have in Belgium since November 30, the "new Mass" prefabricated by the technocrats of the faith, every Sunday and on Christmas Day: squeezed between a pompous, theatrical liturgy of the Word and a self-service liturgy of the Meal, the HOLY SACRIFICE OF THE MASS, in other words the ESSENTIAL, is dispatched in the blink of an eye by a cleric who, nine times out of ten, in my experience, doesn't for a moment seem to believe in what he's doing.
I repeat: this has been shown and demonstrated, and in the face of these evidences and arguments, only serpentine rhetoric and jeremiads have been opposed.
For my part, I carefully block my ears with wax; I hide at the back of the church behind a curtain whose thickness I increase by sitting on the lowest chair I can find; I read the Holy Mass in the Missal I received from my holy mother when the previous one she had already given me was in shreds; I read the Imitation of Christ in Latin during the spiel that today replaces the sermon; I participate wholeheartedly in the renewal of the Sacrifice of Calvary; I oblige the priest who takes communion from the hands of the "sheep" he has, by order, domesticated, to give me communion at the communion bench where I kneel, and, during the final din, I go outside to meditate, while praying to the Lord to make me more deaf than I am to the clatter of the world, both literally and figuratively.
I must say that it sometimes angers me to hear the cornichonnerie [lit: "pickle making," a French expression for something stupid] reach my ears, including this one, whose authenticity I guarantee: "Let us pray, my brothers, that between young men and young women brought together by a community of hair and garments (sic) there may henceforth be no difference of sex." But you can get used to anything, even the most bloated of vesanies [insanities]. "One must be sparing with one's contempt," Bloy rightly said, "because of the great number of the needy."
Let's not hide it. Our refusal implies a judgment on the actions and words, on the person of Paul VI, towards whom we are obliged, in spite of ourselves, to practice that virtue of "fraternal correction" which Saint Thomas Aquinas sees as annexed to the virtue of almsgiving and the virtue of charity, and which he even says should sometimes be practiced, in a public way, towards one's superiors, after having exhausted the secret means of doing so (STh, II-II, Q. 33). It is safe to assume that an inferior as respectful of pontifical authority as Cardinal Ottaviani did not make his memorable letter to Paul VI public without using all the temporizing prudence we know. "If the superior is virtuous," writes a commentator on the Summa, "he will accept with gratitude the warnings that come to enlighten him; he will be the first to recognize that it is well to warn him and that he is not intangible in everything." And he adds, after St. Thomas, that the warning must be public, "when, for example, a superior publicly pronounces manifest heresies or gives great scandal, thus endangering the faith and salvation of his subordinates".
Cardinal Ottaviani is certainly not alone in thinking that Paul VI, by his words and deeds, is "moving impressively away from the Catholic theology of the Holy Mass." Indeed, the Pope cannot be suspected of having scratched the surface of such a crucial text, and of having carelessly put his signature to it. The Ordo Missæ and the New Mass, which we repudiate with all our might, are desired and imposed by Paul VI on all Catholics.
How is such an attitude possible in a Pope at a dramatic moment in the history of the Church? I can't help asking myself this question. Nor can I withhold my answer. The cause at stake is too serious for the laity to leave priests of any rank to fight alone, without the help of a few faithful warned by them of the danger, against the "scandal" of the new Mass.
It's not a question of indignation—although one is tempted to do so—but of understanding.
Paul VI is a man full of contradictions. He is the man who glorifies the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass in grandiose, classical terms in his Credo for the Year of Faith, and then downplays it in the new Mass he is imposing on Catholic Christianity. This is the man who signs and promulgates the Council's official declarations on Latin, "liturgical language par excellence", and on Gregorian chant, a treasure to be zealously saved, and who repeatedly makes a public commitment to maintain them, and yet, on such an important matter as the mode of expression of worship to God, he reneges on his signature and his word by consulting only liturgical experts, some of whom are suspect, while others belong to dissident Christian communities. This is the man who disapproves the Dutch Catechism and tolerates the dissemination of the dogmatic errors it contains. This is the man who authorizes the French Catechism, whose errors, omissions and distortions of revealed truth are even more serious since it is intended for children, and who has the world investigate deviations from the faith. This is the man who proclaims Mary to be Mother of the Church, and yet allows the purity of her name to be profaned by countless clerics, high and low. This is the man who prays in St. Peter's and also in the Masonic-style Chamber of Reflection at the U.N. This is the man who receives in audience two actresses cleverly and publicly stripped down to miniskirts, and speaks out against the tide of eroticism in the world. This is the man who tells Pastor Boegner that Catholics are not yet mature enough to adopt birth control by "the pill," and who publishes Humanæ vitæ, while allowing the Encyclical to be contested by entire Episcopates.
This is the man who proclaims that the law of ecclesiastical celibacy will never be repealed, and allows it to be discussed ad infinitum, while making it easy for priests to marry. This is the man who forbids Communion in the hand and yet allows it, even authorizing certain Churches, by special indult, to have the Holy Hosts distributed by lay people. This is the man who laments the "self-demolition of the Church", and who, being the head of the Church, does nothing to prevent its self-demolition, which thus passes through his own consent. This is the man who had the Nota praevia published concerning his powers, and who admitted at the recent Synod of Rome that it was considered obsolete and discarded, and so on.
The list of the Pope's contradictions is endless. The man in him is permanent contradiction and versatility, a fundamental ambiguity.
So, one of two things.
A man who is incapable of overcoming his own inner contradictions, and who flaunts them for all to see and hear, is incapable of overcoming the outer contradictions he encounters in governing the Church. He is a weak, irresolute Pope, as there have been others in the history of the Church, who conceals his swaying in a flood of rhetoric of which the emperor Julian, known as the Apostate, said, of the Arian bishops of his time, who wielded it with skill, said that it was "the art of taking away all importance from what is important, of giving it to what is not, and of substituting the artifice of words for the reality of things." Sometimes, in the same sentence of a pontifical address, white and black are associated and reconciled by a syntactical machination.
Another hypothesis is no less likely: the Pope knows what he wants, and the contradictions he displays are simply those that a man of action, fascinated by the goal he wants to achieve, encounters along the way, and of which he is not the least bit concerned, carried away as he is by the momentum of his desire.
In this respect, we can presume, especially since the Novus Ordo Missæ and the new Mass, that Paul VI's intention is to unite clerics and laypeople of the various Christian confessions in the same liturgical action. Like all "politicians," the Pope knows that it is possible to unite in a common action men whose "philosophical and religious opinions," as we used to say at meetings in my youth, are fundamentally different. If this is so, we can expect to see further manifestations of pontifical ecumenical action in the near future, altered from political maneuvering.
It's true that the two interpretations of Paul VI's behavior can be combined. The weak man runs away from his weakness or, more precisely, runs away from himself and rushes into action, where contradictions are only different moments of the change essential to the action itself. Such temperaments are obviously focused on the world, on the metamorphoses that the world implies and that have an impact on the action to be taken on it. It's easy to accept, then, that there's a "new catechism," irreconcilable with the catechism of old, "because there's a new world," as the French bishops say, and because, in the language of the world, "a new world" has nothing in common with the previous world, any more than a new fashion has with a previous fashion. It is therefore no longer possible," they add, "at a time when the world is changing rapidly, to consider rites as definitively fixed." So we've been warned: the new Mass is like the Permanent Revolution that all teenagers, and adults who haven't yet resolved their puberty crisis, are in love with, because it masks the contradictions they can't get rid of, and for good reason: they're part and parcel of them.
It's in the epigones [imitations] that this character trait is best seen, through exaggeration. Marx described history as comically repeating the tragedy of Napoleon I under Napoleon III. Likewise, a certain Belgian bishop, who I see as a sort of Paul VI reduced in size, has just been asked to present the new Mass to the astonished public: "This one," he declared in hilarious terms, "puts the first period to the liturgical reform underway since Vatican II." There will be, we are promised, a second period, then a third, and so on ad infinitum. The man who runs away from change never catches up, despite his sometimes buffoonish efforts.
From this point of view, perhaps no two popes in history differ more radically than St. Pius X and Paul VI.
I was recently re-reading the Encyclical Pascendi. On almost every page, I notice that what the former rejects, the latter admits, tolerates and accredits.
Saint Pius X is the rock of doctrine, the man who never abandons his post or his people in the storm, and who never shirks any of his responsibilities, as Paul VI confessed in his extraordinary address of December 7, 1968: "Many expect dramatic gestures from the Pope, energetic and decisive interventions. The only line the Pope believes he must follow is that of trust in Jesus Christ, to whom his Church remains entrusted more than to anyone else: it is up to Him to calm the storm."
St. Pius X is not the man of the sole pastoral government of the Church claimed by Paul VI in his allocution of February 17, 1969, in which he said he was "open to intelligence and indulgence," but the Pope attentive to the example of his predecessors, who defended sound doctrine with extreme vigilance and unshakeable firmness, concerned to preserve it from all harm "remembering the Apostle's precept: "Keep the good deposit" (II Tim. I, 14, in Actes de S.S. Pie X, Paris, s. d., vol. III, p. 203).
For St. Pius X, "Jesus Christ taught that the first duty of Popes is to guard with jealous care the traditional deposit of the faith, against profane novelties of language" (p. 85), against "those contemptuous of all authority who, based on a distorted conscience, cause to be attributed to the pure zeal of truth that which is the work only of obstinacy and pride" (p. 89). It was not he who would have granted, as Paul VI repeatedly implied, that "truth is also to be found in the religious experiences" of other religions, and that the same God is common to Jews, Muslims and Christians (p. 103). He has never "paid homage to the coryphae of error" of the Chenu and Cie type, "thus lending the impression that what is meant to be honored by this is less the men themselves, not unworthy perhaps of consideration, than the errors by them openly professed and of which they have made themselves the champions" (p. 105).
Saint Pius X would never have claimed that "worship is born of a need, for necessity, need is, in the modernist system, the great and universal explanation". How many directly opposed texts by Paul VI could we not cite here, and in particular the sole reason he gives in his address of November 26, 1969, when he justifies the repudiation of Latin and Gregorian chant in the new Mass by invoking the need for the people to understand their prayer and participate in the Office "in their everyday language." It wasn't St. Pius X who approved of "the great concern of modernists to seek a way of reconciling the authority of the Church and the freedom of believers," as Paul VI constantly did. It was not he who professed "that pernicious doctrine which seeks to make the laity in the Church a factor of progress," nor who sought "compromises and transactions between the conservative force in the Church and the progressive force, so that the changes and progress required by our times may be realized" (p. 127). Nor does St. Pius X use the "purely subjective" process that leads modernists "to clothe themselves in the personality of Jesus Christ" and "not hesitate to attribute to him all that they themselves would have done in similar circumstances" (p. 133), as Paul VI does when, after having single-handedly decreed the use of the new Mass, he states that his will "is the Will of Christ, it is the breath of the Spirit calling the Church to this mutation," pathetically adding, to make it clear that his inspiration coincides with divine inspiration (although he makes it clear that this is not the case in his Creed) that "this prophetic moment which passes through the Mystical Body of Christ, which is precisely the Church, shakes her, awakens her and obliges her to renew the mysterious art of her prayer" (November 26, 1969). The most certain and assured thing," said St. John of the Cross, "is to shun prophecies and revelations, and if anything new were revealed to us concerning the faith—[the lex orandi is also lex credendi, and every manifest novelty in worship is novelty in the faith]—we should by no means consent to it" (Montée du Mont Carmel, 1. II, chap. XIX and XXVII).
Finally, in the background of Paul VI's interventions in the great theater of the world, is there not the conviction, which Saint Pius X rejects as pernicious, that "the Kingdom of God will develop slowly in the course of history, adapting itself successively to the various environments it passes through, borrowing from them, by vital assimilation, all the forms...that may suit it?" (p. 141).
There can be no doubt, as John H. Knox observes in a penetrating article in the National Review (October 21, 1969), that "there has never been, and probably never will be, a pope who has tried so hard to please the progressives and who shares so sincerely so many of their convictions." And yet, in a supreme contradiction, Paul VI calls this progressivism modernismus redivivus!
In any case, Paul VI clearly shares the major concern of modernists to make the Catholic Church acceptable to non-Catholic churches and even to all atheistic regimes, as his recent Christmas address (and many other earlier attempts) suggest: China and Russia are now entitled to Catholic deference and esteem! Let's not forget his applause for the Chinese youth launched by Mao in the "cultural revolution"!
It's a dream, a chimera, the vanity of which the Gospel itself tells us: no matter how aimable the Church makes herself, she will never be loved by the world. However cruel the diagnosis we must make of Paul VI, in the final analysis it must be said that, despite undoubted qualities of heart, the present Pope consistently sees things differently from how they are. He is a false spirit.
Like all false minds, he is unconsciously cruel. Whereas the contemplative is gentle, the man of action who, like Paul VI, places the end of action in a dreamlike perspective, has no pity for the poor men of soul, flesh, and bone whom it is impossible for him to see, or who, if seen, are obstacles for him. This explains the inflexible side of Paul VI's character, which at first glance is irreconcilable with his inability to govern the Church. The man of action is almost always inhuman, but when the man of action moves in a millenarian atmosphere and in a kind of spiritual triumphalism, then everything is to be feared... Paul VI will go ahead, without return, crushing all resistance...
Unless God opens his eyes... That would be a miracle.
All we have to do now is try to bring into our lives the obligation spoken of by Saint John of the Cross in one of his letters: "In order that we may have God in all things, we must have nothing in all things." The Church has entered the Night of the Senses and Spirit, the gateway to Dawn. Its state invites us to enter our own.
This eternal source is well hidden,
And yet I have found its home,
But it's by night!
Marcel De Corte,
Professor at the University of Liège.
