WEB TEAM / PEEP

The FLOCK received the following letter from a reader in response to a recent issue. We have decided to publish it in full, because it provides a Heaven-sent opportunity to nail a number of post-Conciliar memes promoted by neo-Catholics. Our response follows.

Dear Mr Moorhouse/PEEP,

Packed as it is with wit, information and some sound argument, I have read your Spring/Summer 2015 issue of The Flock with great interest. It is, however, necessary to pick you up on a number of points.

1) To refer to people like Martin Pendergast as “homofascists” is simply abusive and meaningless rhetoric. You reduce yourself to the same level as people on the so-called left who call traditional Catholics “fascists”. What’s more, you are doing a cruel injustice to the millions of our brothers and sisters who suffered under fascism proper.

2) On page 2, and elsewhere in the issue, you and other contributors make unsubstantiated claims about the nature of “truth”. No allowance is made for the fact that the concept is a difficult and rightly controversial one, and extremely hard to pin down. What’s more, it appears exceedingly unlikely that any of us can ever know the absolute truth about anything with total certainty: in the end, all we can do is pray and hope.

3) On page 3 you refer to the Tridentine Rite as “the rite of our forefathers, saints and martyrs”. Since this particular rite was introduced only in the 16th century, and even after that was not in universal use, an awful lot of “our forefathers, saints and martyrs” have worshipped in other ways.

4) Later in the issue Luther is said to have been “neurotic, impure, disobedient, heretical”, Neurotic – quite possibly, but a neurosis is a psychiatric problem: it has nothing to do virtue or otherwise. Many of our greatest saints have almost certainly been to a greater or lesser extent neurotic. Disobedient – yes, but isn’t it up to all of us to try to follow one’s conscience. If conscience tells us to be disobedient we have a duty to be disobedient. Many PEEP supporters in particular must surely agree with this. As for “foul-mouthed” and “impure”, even our greatest saints have been human. This has not invalidated their saintliness, quite the contrary. We all have our faults.

5) On page 27 you make some excellent points about music in the liturgy. But it’s comically inaccurate to claim that Christ and the Apostles were familiar with Gregorian chant. It wasn’t even in use till about the 9th and 10th centuries, and then only in central and western Europe.

Keep up the, mostly, good work.

Yours very sincerely: Alex Geoffroy (not his real name)

PEEP'S RESPONSE

Dear Alex,

Thank you for taking the trouble to write to us at such length. However, you are factually wrong in a number, if not all, of your points.

"HOMOFASCIST"

I did not refer to all homosexuals as homofascists as you suggest; I was clearly speaking of a particular group, the militant homofascist collective. To quote C.J. Doyle, director of Boston’s Catholic Action League, "Organised homosexualism is an aggressive, neo-totalitarian movement which seeks to censor, silence, and penalize anyone opposed to it, drive out of political life and public employment all those who support traditional morality, demonize as bigots, haters, and homophobes anyone who expresses the slightest reservations towards homosexual behaviour, and use state power to coerce, oppress and penalise individuals and businesses who refuse to service same gender sham marriages. We need to organise a resistance to this growing thuggery, rather than mouthing pandering banalities about their alleged gifts". Indeed, many homosexuals and ex-homosexuals are themselves the innocent victims of the homofascist collective.

The militant homofascist collective has recently put a Christian baker out of business merely because he was unwilling to write a sodomy-promoting slogan on a cake, they have similarly destroyed the livelihoods of many other small businesses. They have overruled the democratic vote of some thirty American states. They forced the American medical profession to remove homosexuality from its list of mental disorders by threatening to trash their headquarters if they did not comply with their demands. This they did almost forty years to the day from when Nazi stormtroopers, led by homosexual officers, trashed the headquarters of the German Institute for the treatment of aberrosexuals.

Further, the first concentration camp, as well as the system for training its brutal guards, was established by Ernst Röhm, a notorious homosexual. Kristallnacht, the first large-scale violent mob violence against the Jews was orchestrated in 1938 by the homosexual Reinhard Heydrich. And it was the transvestite Goering, who, with an order to the homosexual Heydrich dated the 24th January 1939, opened up the Pandora’s Box of the “Final Solution” to the Jewish question.

And, last by no means least, almost the entire officer corps of the SS and the Brown Shirts, plus some twenty percent of the sadistic death camp guards, (according to camp survivors) were all sodomites. So "homofascist" is right on the nail.

As for Martin Pendergast, we are talking of an ex-priest who has made it his business to go into Catholic schools preaching the wonders of sodomy. In a sane world, he would not merely be denounced as a "homofascist", he would be lynched by the outraged parents of the children concerned.

And as for homosexual adoption, the last man to become infamous for experimenting on children was Josef Mengele, another Fascist, and he ended his life as a hunted Nazi war criminal. And as for same-sex sham marriage, the state clearly does not have the power to define that which it did not create.

Christians have always stood against state tyranny: we stood against pagan Rome, we stood against the Masonic slave trade and we will stand against the state sponsored lie of same-sex sham marriage. Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God.

THE NATURE OF TRUTH

When it comes to the nature of truth, in the perennial conflict between Christ and Pontius Pilate, you appear to have come down firmly on the side of Pilate! For it was Pilate who infamously said, "What is truth?". This was in response to Christ statement, "I came into the world; that I should give testimony to the truth. Every one that is of the truth, heareth my voice." Christ also, of course, famously stated, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No man cometh to the Father, but by me.”

The statement that the nature of truth is controversial is, in fact, an oxymoron for the statement itself purports to be an absolute truth. It is merely a restatement of that other piece of oft-heard modern gibberish: "There is no such thing as absolute truth;" a statement which similarly claims itself to be a statement of absolute truth! I prefer personally to protect my sanity by not embracing the intellectual equivalent of square circles.

The nature of truth is not controversial. What is true in any given circumstances may be controversial, but the nature of truth is not controversial. It can be defined as that which is regardless of what you and I may think. Furthermore, truth is singular, error is unbounded. Truth is not an opinion.

THE TRIDENTINE RITE

The Tridentine Rite was not introduced in the 16th century. Pope St Pius V merely codified the existing Roman Rite, which, in essence, goes back to Apostolic times. To claim that Trent conjured up the Tridentine rite is as asinine as suggesting that the authors of the Oxford dictionary invented the English language. Indeed, one can observe much of the liturgy of the synagogue in the classical Roman Rite.

The neo-Catholic myth goes something like this: after the Resurrection, Christians just organised spontaneous feasts on their kitchen table, sort of DIY Last Suppers. This continued for several hundred years, until (quite when they are not sure, rather like pro-aborts are not sure when human life begins) along came some obsessive, rigorous liturgist who wrote a complicated ritual to which everyone had to now scrupulously conform. And thus all spontaneity was killed off. It is, we are further supposed to believe, just an amazing coincidence that this new liturgy reflects so closely the liturgy of the synagogue where Christ and His apostles worshipped.

I suggest that you visit a Jewish book shop sometime and purchase a copy of the liturgy of the Passover. I did this some twenty-five years ago and was amazed at the similarities with a Tridentine missal.

The story of Rosalind Moss, a regular contributor to EWTN is also very enlightening. Rosalind was a young Jewish woman who converted to Protestantism. She was so in love with her new faith that she trained as a missionary and went to South America to convert all those poor ignorant Catholics. One day, much to her alarm, she learned that her brother back in New York was also converting but, to Rosalind's horror, to traditional Catholicism. Rosalind wasted no time in returning to New York to save her brother from a fate, in her opinion, worse than death. However, her brother managed to persuade her to attend a Tridentine Mass with him. After the Mass, she relates that her brother asked her for her reaction. She explained that initially she was too shocked to speak, however, she then blurted out, "Benyamin! That was not a Christian service, that was a synagogue service!"

One factor invariably overlooked is the invention of the printing press. Prior to the invention of the printing press it would have been impossible for Rome to impose any major liturgical novelty, because it would have involved thousands of scribes hand-writing millions of Missals and other liturgical books - a task that would have involved literally tens of millions of man-hours.

In his 1912 book on the Roman Mass, the liturgical scholar, Adrian Fortescue, wrote: "Essentially the Missal of Pius V is the Gregorian Sacramentary; that again is formed from the Gelasian book, which depends on the Leonine collection. We find the prayers of our Canon in the treatise “de Sacramentis” and allusions to it in the 4th century. So our Mass goes back, without essential change, to the age when it first developed out of the oldest liturgy of all. It is still redolent of that liturgy, of the days when Caesar ruled the world and thought he could stamp out the faith of Christ, when our fathers met together before dawn and sang a hymn to Christ as to a God. The final result of our inquiry is that, in spite of unsolved problems, in spite of later changes, there is not in Christendom another rite so venerable as ours."

As we know that the classical Roman Rite goes back essentially unchanged to the 4th/5th century, therefore, isn’t suggesting that it could not go back to Apostolic times a prime example of swallowing a camel while straining on a gnat?

LUTHER AND THE RIGHTS OF A MALFORMED CONSCIENCE

After the Council, "Conscience is King" became La Marseillaise, the marching anthem of the Revolution, with the hordes of effete bishops spawned by the Revolution falling over one another to see who could whistle it the loudest. It was all part of that dethroning of God and enthronement of man in His place that was and is the principle reactionary raison d'être of the Conciliar mutiny; which is but the latest incarnation of that ancient "I will not serve" that witnessed Satan flung "like lightning" from Heaven (Luke 10:18).

We do not have a right to do what an ill-informed conscience dictates. If we did, a Muslim fanatic beheading innocent Christians and sodomising twelve-year-old girls captured in war would have a free pass to Heaven on the grounds that the Koran condones and encourages such behaviour in the name of Allah. Even atheists must act in accord with the natural law that God has written on all men's hearts, or they will certainly be damned.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church is very clear and states unambiguously that a person is morally responsible for acting according to an erroneous, ignorant conscience, and is "culpable for the evil he commits".

There is a parallel in man's laws. Imagine you are stopped by a traffic policeman for being well over the drink-driving limit, exceeding the speed limit and running a red light. When you are up before the judge, try saying, "Well my Lord, I sincerely believe that I drive better drunk than sober, so my conscience is perfectly comfortable with driving recklessly. So, because my conscience is clear, you ought, in strict justice, let me off scot-free." You may well find that your malformed conscience earns you extra punishment.

An erroneous conscience is not a get out of Hell free card, anymore than it is a get out of gaol free card. Christ Himself states that those who do wrong in ignorance will be punished, howbeit less severely than those who do wrong knowingly - He significantly does not say that they will escape divine retribution.

Human beings clearly have a moral obligation to form their conscience in conformity to truth, divine revelation and the natural law, and not to deform their consciences merely to prop up some personal agenda.

GREGORIAN CHANT

It is not "comically inaccurate" to describe the Gregorian chant as music that would be familiar to Christ, the Apostles and the Blessed Mother. Pope St Gregory the Great, who codified Gregorian Chant (and from whom it takes its name), was Pope from 3 September 590 to his death in 604. He did not invent Gregorian chant, he merely codified what had been handed down.

Many years ago, I asked an elderly orthodox rabbi what sort of music was used in synagogue worship, his immediate reply was, "It is almost identical to your Gregorian chant." Again, if we can accept that Gregorian chant is essentially unchanged since it was codified (note: "codified" - not fabricated) in the 6th century, do we not have yet one more example of swallowing a camel and then straining on a gnat? For, if it can remain unchanged for fifteen centuries, why not twenty-one centuries?