How an avowedly papal-submissive organization views Vatican II…….

……and the revolution in the Church.  When the Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family, and Property (TFP) was formed by Plinio Correa de Oliveira in 1950s Brazil, the organization was at pains to indicate its total submission to the will and desire of the Holy Father.  Under Pope Pius XII, that posed the organization no particular problems.  However, as the fallout from Vatican II began to emerge in the mid-1960s, the organization – according to Oliveira’s book Revolution and Counter-Revolution – had to come to grips both the with the failure of Vatican II to condemn what TFP viewed as the single greatest threat to Christendom at that time – atheistic communism – and the raging “spirit of the council,” which seemed to cause most of the Church hierarchy to war with the Church they had known just a few short years before.

I found the analysis of the Council and its impact from Revolution and Counter-Revolution quite incisive.  Yes much of it will be old hat to some readers, but, then again, it doesn’t hurt to know that another substantial body of Catholics comprehends and fights against the crisis afflicting the Church.  I also found the below, especially the last few paragraphs, a very good example of faithful opposition to what our sensus fidei tells us to be the disastrous decision of even the highest levels of leadership in the Church.

Begin quote:

………the greatest success attained by the smiling post-Stalinist communism was the Second Vatican Council’s enigmatic, disconcerting, incredible, and apocalyptically tragic silence about communism.

It was the desire of this Council to be pastoral and not dogmatic.  And, in fact, it did not have a dogmatic scope.  But its omission regarding communism might make it go down in history as the apastoral Council……..

…….Imagine an immense flock languishing in poor, arid fields and being attacked on all sides by swarms of bees and wasps and birds of prey.  The shepherds begin to irrigate the fields and drive away the swarms and birds.  Can this activity be termed pastoral?  In theory, certainly.

However, if at the same time the flock were under attack by packs of voracious wolves, many of them covered with sheepskins, and the pastors fought against the insects and birds without making any effort to unmask or drive away the wolves, could their work be considered pastoral, proper to good and faithful shepherds?

In other words, did those in the Second Vatican Council who wished to scare away the lesser adversaries but gave free rein – by their silence – to the greatest adversary act as pastors?  

Using “aggiornate” tactics (about which the least that can be said is that they are contestable in theory and proving ruinous in practice), the Second Vatican Council tried to scare away, let us say, bees and wasps.  But its silence about communism left full liberty to the wolves.  The work of this Council cannot be inscribed as effectively pastoral either in history or in the Book of Life.  [Ouch. We know what happens to those whose name is not inscribed in the Book of Life, although eternal damnation is another belief that has been effectively rejected by many, many souls in the Church, including far too many leaders, as being ill-suited to the times, so they believe in pretensions like universal salvation and mercy utterly squashing justice]

It is painful to say this.  But in this sense, the evidence singles out Vatican II as one of the greatest calamities, if not the greatest, in the history of the Church.  From the Council on, the “smoke of satan” penetrated the Church in unbelievable proportions.  And this smoke is spreading day by day, with the terrible force of gasses in expansion.  To the scandal of uncountable souls, the Mystical Body of Christ entered a sinister process of self-destruction, as it were.  [Tens if not hundreds of millions have left the Church as a result.  I have a brother-in-law who was one of them. He believed the strong catechism he was taught as a child in the 50s and early 60s, only to suddenly be told all that old stuff was wrong and now there was a new set of “doctrine” to believe, much of it entirely contrary to the previous doctrine.  It scandalized him right out of the Church.  He still goes to Mass at times, but his faith in the Church as Christ’s Mystical Body containing all the Truth necessary for salvation is gone, he thinks it a farce.]

……..History narrates the innumerable dramas the Church has suffered in the twenty centuries of her existence: oppositions that germinated outside her and tried to destroy her from outside; malignancies that formed within her, were cut off by her, and thereafter ferociously tried to destroy her from outside.

When, however, has history witnessed an attempted auto-demolition of the Church like the present one?  No longer undertaken by an adversary, it was termed a “self-destruction” in a most lofty pronouncement having worldwide repercussion (Allocution of Paul VI to the Lombard Seminary, Dec. 7 1965).

From this resulted an immense debacle for the Church and what still remains of Christian civilization.  The Ostpolitik of the Vatican, for example, and the massive infiltration of communism into Catholic circles are effects of all these calamities.  And they constitute additional successes of the psychological offensive of the Third Revolution against the Church. [The Third Revolution being the communist onslaught, after the First (protestant revolt) and second (French) Revolutions.  But they are all part of the same Revolution against God.]

……In 1959, when we wrote Revolution and Counter-Revolution, the Church was considered the great spiritual force against the worldwide expansion of the communist sect.

In 1976, numerous ecclesiastics, including bishops, figure as accomplices by omission, as collaborators, and even as driving forces of the Revolution.  Progressivism, installed almost everywhere, is converting the formerly verdant forest of the Catholic Church into wood that can easily burst into Revolutionary flame.  

In a word, the extent of this change is such that we do not hesitate to affirm that the center – the most sensitive and truly decisive point in the fight between the Revolution and the Counter-Revolution – has shifted from the temporal to the spiritual society.  

The Holy Church is now this center.  In her, progressivists, cryptocommunists, and procommunists confront the remaining faithful souls…….[Some of us hoped, or deluded ourselves into thinking, that the progressive forces were in decisive retreat during the pontificate of Benedict XVI.  I have been amazed to see their incredible resurgence. Indeed, progressives and communists confront the faithful today.  They’ve come forth from their lairs and are bound and determined to remake the Church in their Gramscian, de Chardinian image]

….In 1968, the TFPs then existing in South America……..organized national petition drives addressed to Paul VI, requesting measures against leftist infiltration into the Catholic clergy and the laity of South America.

Altogether, 2,060,368 people in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay singed the petition in a 58 day period………

The answer of Paul VI was not merely silence and inaction.  It was – how it pains us to say it – a series of acts whose effect continues to give prestige and facility of action to many promoters of Catholic leftism today.  

At the sight of this rising tide of communist infiltration into the Holy Church…….TFP…..in 1974 ……published a declaration expressing their non-conformity with the Vatican Ostpolitik and their resolve to “resist to the face” (Gal ii:11):

On our knees, gazing with veneration at the person of His Holiness Paul VI, we express all our fidelity to him. In this filial act we say to the Pastor of Pastors; “Our soul in Yours, our life is Yours. Order us to do whatever you wish.  Only do not order us to cross our arms in the face of the assailing Red wolf.  To this our conscience is opposed.”

———End Quote———-

“Resist to the face.”  That is indeed what Saint Paul felt compelled to do to Saint Peter.  I don’t think any of us with grave concerns over this pontificate think we are anything like Saint Paul, yet we feel the same compulsion to resist error and threats to souls no matter the source, no matter how well- (or ill-) intentioned.  TFP was lambasted at one time as an ultra-montanist organization for its defense of the Faith (and this post is not a commentary on TFP right or wrong), and yet they felt compelled to indicate their inability to go along with some of Paul VI’s agenda and actions, just as they have done with Pope Francis and another petition drive they’ve initiated.