AS HOSTILE
TO THE TRUTH NOW AS IN THE FIRST CENTURY
Thomas
A. Droleskey, PhD
REMNANT
COLUMNIST
The December 27, 2003,
Associated Press story written by Rachel Zoll, “Controversy over Gibson film
puts spotlight on conservative Catholic movement,” is replete with
disinformation and bad reporting. A bit of time needs to be spent on the story,
which is another hit piece on Mel Gibson prior to the release of The Passion of Christ on Ash Wednesday,
February 25, 2004. A review of a few selected paragraphs of Rachel Zoll’s story
will reveal the distortions and inaccuracies.
Zoll began her story by
writing: “They attend Mass in Latin, using a liturgy
1) The
Furthermore, by
these presents and by virtue of Our Apostolic authority We give and grant in
perpetuity that for the singing or reading of Mass in any church whatsoever,
this Missal may be followed absolutely, without any scruple of conscience or fear of
incurring any penalty, judgment or censure, and may be freely and lawfully used.
Nor shall bishops, administrators, canons, chaplains, and other secular priests,
or religious of whatsoever Order or by whatsoever title designated, be obliged
to celebrate Mass otherwise than enjoined by Us. We likewise order and
declare that no one whosoever shall be forced or coerced into altering this
Missal and that this present Constitution can never be revoked or modified, but
shall for ever remain valid and have the force of law, notwithstanding previous
constitutions or edicts of provincial or synodal councils, and notwithstanding
the usage of the churches aforesaid, established by very long and even
immemorial prescription, saving only usage of more than 200
years.
2) Reporter Zoll makes
it appear as though traditional Catholics have been very secretive about their
activities, claiming that they have been “quietly worshipping in ways the
Quietly? Surely, she
jests. Father Gommar DePauw, who founded the Catholic Traditionalist Movement in
this country in 1964, opened his own chapel in Westbury,
Quietly? The late
Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre founded the Society of Pope Saint Pius X in 1970,
with ecclesiastical approval, by the way, to promote the Mass of Tradition. The
disciplinary measures imposed upon him by Pope Paul VI in 1973 were quite a
matter of public record.
Quietly? Abandon? Pope
John Paul II himself issued two indults, in 1984 and 1988, to “permit” the
offering of the Traditional Latin Mass under certain conditions. Many learned
scholars have noted that the indults are unnecessary in that Quo Primum is the only universal and
perpetual indult a Catholic needs to assist at the Mass of Tradition. These same
scholars have noted that the conditions attached to the indults are unjust and
invalid on their face in light of the universally and perpetually binding nature
of Quo Primum. Nevertheless, the
indults have permitted the Traditional Latin Mass to grow quite publicly around
the world. Thousands upon thousands of traditional Catholics made their way to
Again, to Rachel Zoll:
“Now their ultraconservative beliefs are under scrutiny as the man they count as
their most famous adherent, actor-director Mel Gibson, prepares to release a
movie about the crucifixion of Jesus Christ that's already stirring
controversy.”
3) Notice the use of
the pejorative: ultraconservative. A
label widely viewed as pejorative must be applied to traditional Catholics in
order to disparage them in the minds of “progressive” Americans of all
denominations. Traditional Catholics are simply Catholics, people who hold fast
to the Faith as it was revealed by the God-Man to the Apostles and taught
unceasingly and uncompromisingly from Pentecost Sunday until the advent of the
pontificate of Pope John XXIII.
4) As appreciative as
most traditional Catholics are of Mel Gibson’s efforts to portray the Passion
and Death of Our Blessed Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, they do not consider Mel
Gibson to be their most famous adherent or even their champion. This is Zoll’s
efforts to project onto traditional Catholics her own perception of the
situation, which is quite erroneous.
Back to Zoll: “The
council altered Catholic practices and teachings in myriad ways to make it more
relevant to the wider world, such as having Mass said in local languages after
centuries in which it was recited in Latin, having the priest celebrate Mass
facing parishioners and distributing communion in the hand instead of the
mouth.”
5) The Second Vatican
Council was a pastoral council. It defined nothing dogmatically. Nothing new or
novel that it declared is binding on Catholics. It certainly set into motion the
processes by which the traditions of the Church were altered beyond all
recognition. There has indeed been a de
facto rejection of many items contained in the Deposit of Faith. However,
not even the Church herself has the authority to bind upon the faithful
novelties that are alien to her authentic tradition and doctrine, as both
Christopher Ferrara and Thomas Woods point out in The Great Facade. The teaching of Christ
is unchanging.
6) Admitting that the
“time bombs” Michael Davies describes in his new book were planted in Sacrosanctum Concilium in 1963, the
actual outline of the Novus Ordo was
not determined by the Second Vatican Council. It was the creation of the
Consilium, a committee established by Pope Paul VI. Reporter Zoll can cite no
document of the Second Vatican Council mandating distribution of Communion in
the hand, for example. She leads her readers to believe that all of the
postconciliar changes were spelled out in great detail by the Second Vatican
Council. Again, admitting that the Council is responsible for setting things in
motion, it is simply sloppy and irresponsible journalism not to report the
actual facts.
Zoll continues: “The
council decreed that Christians other than Catholics can be saved. It also
declared that Jews were not collectively responsible for Christ's death: The
notion of Jewish guilt had fueled anti-Semitism for centuries. But
traditionalists reject what the council decided. Traditionalists believe that
only Catholicism is the true path to salvation —— and that by adhering to church
teaching as it was before the council they are the only true Catholics,
according to William Dinges, an expert on traditionalists and a professor at
Catholic University of America.”
This is a mother lode
of propaganda!
7) The doctrine that
“outside of the Catholic Church there is no salvation” is as binding today as it
has been from the moment Our Lord founded His Church upon the rock of Peter, the
Pope. To assert that only traditionalists believe in this immutable doctrine,
one has to reject the defined teaching of the Church, enunciated on numerous
occasions over the centuries. John Vennari recently catalogued several of these
occasions in a recent update to his marvelous reporting on the heresy being
spouted by apologists for turning the Shrine of Our Lady of Fatima into a center
of inter-religious “dialogue”:
The Catechism of the Council of Trent,
faithful to this truth, teaches, ‘infidels, heretics, schismatics and
excommunicated persons" are "excluded from the Church's pale’. In other words,
Protestants, Jews, Mohammedans, Hindus, Buddhists, etc., are not part of the
Catholic Church, which is the
The Catechism of Pope Saint Pius X,
centuries later, presents the same truth without change. It teaches,
“Outside the true Church are: Infidels, Jews, heretics, apostates, schismatics
and excommunicated persons”. It states further, “No one can be saved outside the
Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman Church, just as no one could be saved from the
flood outside the Ark of Noah, which was a figure of the
Church.”
Although the Second
Vatican Council is responsible for the undermining and de facto superseding of this immutable
teaching, it was incapable of dogmatically reversing that which is immutable.
Reporter Zoll is confusing the appearance that the Second Vatican Council had
the authority to change everything in the Catholic Church with the reality that
not even the Church herself has the authority to change anything in the Deposit
of Faith. As the Bride of Christ, she receives from her Divine Bridegroom what
He has deposited in her, being able to utter authoritatively only those things
and none other. To the extent that Vatican II and various popes and
postconciliar documents have taught other than that which Our Lord has revealed
or have put into place novelties that have undermined and redefined the Faith,
then it is reason informed by the true Faith that impels one to reject these
novelties as not of Christ and therefore injurious to the sanctification and
salvation of souls.
The final matter to be
dealt with in Zoll’s AP story concerns Gibson himself. Zoll’s article states
that Mel Gibson’s own leanings in the traditionalist movement are hard to
discern. This is both sloppy reporting and the use of an emotional red herring.
It is sloppy reporting in that Gibson stated in the Fall of 2002 that he no
longer believed in an “institutional Church.” This was reported in ZENIT at the
time. This author knows that a traditionally minded Franciscan priest, Father
Richard Trezza, who was under consideration for offering the Traditional Mass on
the set of what was then called The
Passion in the Spring of 2003, was told that he had been ordained too late
(1986) to satisfy Gibson’s concern about the validity of a man’s ordination to
the priesthood. That seems pretty clear to me where Mel Gibson has allied
himself. And it doesn’t take a particularly arduous amount of work to uncover
these facts.
Alas, the whole issue
of Gibson’s leanings in the traditionalist movement is an irrelevancy. Has he
produced an accurate depiction of the Passion and Death and Resurrection of the
God-Man? Catholics of all backgrounds, traditionalists and those who attend the
Novus Ordo, have been moved by what
they have been shown The Passion of
Christ in private screenings. The Holy Father himself has said, “It is as it
was.” Pope John Paul II is not unaware of Mel Gibson’s tilt in the direction of
sedevacantism. That did nothing to deter him from viewing the film and
commenting on it objectively.
The question is,
therefore, why does the allegedly “small” traditionalist movement, so
misrepresented in Zoll’s story, have any bearing at all on the truth contained
in The Passion of Christ? If it is
good enough for the Pope, who is not a traditionalist by any stretch of the
imagination, why should Gibson’s traditionalism and/or the existence and
activities of the disparate group of people known as traditional Catholics be at
all relevant to an Associated Press story about Mel Gibson’s movie?
Could it be that the
images evoked in The Passion of
Christ are evoked best only in the Mass of Tradition, wherein there is no
mistake that the priest acting in persona
Christi is indeed offering the unbloody representation of the Sacrifice of
the Cross? Could it be that the new Mass, full of community self-congratulations
and an emphasis on our thirst for self-affirmation, does not evoke the images of
the horror of human sin and the solemnity of Our Lord’s self-immolation on
Golgotha that are conveyed in The Passion
of Christ? Could it be that The
Passion of Christ will reignite a desire on the part of at least a few
Catholics for the fullness of the Catholic Faith, thereby subverting in a small
way with a few people here and there the whole structure of the novelties of the
past forty years? Could it be that a few non-Catholics might actually be
converted to the true Faith by watching the movie?
I guess the answers to
those questions are self-evident, aren’t they? As has been the case since Our
Lord become Flesh, lived anonymously in Nazareth, and taught for three years
prior to undergoing His fearful Passion and Death to win for us the possibility
of an unending Easter Sunday of glory, His Sacred Divinity and the Holy truths
He has entrusted to His true Church must be attacked as the work of a small band
of dangerous lunatics who are not open to the ways of this passing world. It is
as though the Acts of the Apostles is being relived in its
entirety.
Our Lady of Sorrows,
pray for us.