uesday, September 11, 2007
Gerry Matatic's sedevacantism
Why the FACTS Simply Support "Sedevacantism"
My objective in... is the same: to
deliver in that city or town what I truly believe to be the most
important talk I have ever given in my entire life.
At each venue I speak on "Counterfeit
Catholicism: Why Vatican II, the New Mass, and Benedict XVI Are Not
What They Claim to Be." I try to provide everything necessary
to help the audience understand the magnitude of the current crisis in
Catholicism, the worst ever in the 2,000-year history of the Church.
My message, summed up in one sentence, is
that a) the Catholic Faith and the Catholic Church are the one true Faith and the one true Church,
outside of which there is no salvation (as both Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition repeatedly affirm
and as the Sacred Magisterium (Teaching Office) of the Church has
infallibly defined many times), but that b) that authentic
Catholic Faith and that authentic Catholic Church are no longer found at
the local parish, in the local diocese, or even ruling from Rome in
our day.
Since I know from experience that many
people's initial reaction to this message is, "But God wouldn't let
this happen!", in my talk I thoroughly demonstrate that, in fact, God
already HAS let this happen several times before in Church
history (though never on such a sweeping scale as today), and that God
repeatedly warned us that He would let it happen again in the
last days, this time on an unprecedented global scale.
In my talk I stick to easily provable
facts, some of which facts many people in my audiences say
they have never heard before:
Fact #1: The
Vatican II Church, though it has much in common with the Catholic
Church, does teach doctrines, offer worship and sacraments, and
promulgate laws that have all been previously condemned by the Catholic
Church as being fundamentally incompatible with the Catholic Faith.
Because there is no salvation outside of Christ (John 14:6, Acts 4:12, 1
John 5:12), and to be "in Christ" means, in Biblical terms, to be in
His Mystical Body, there is thus no salvation outside of the Roman Catholic Church (extra
ecclesiam nulla salus), which is Christ's Mystical Body,
nor is there salvation outside the Catholic Faith perennially professed
by His Church.
(Note: the Roman Catholic Church,
down through Pius XII, has always unambiguously taught that She is
Christ's Mystical Body; She is not merely an entity in which Christ's
Mystical Body fully "subsists," so that His Body might also "subsist"
-- partially but sufficiently for salvation -- in other "churches" as
well. The latter is an ecclesiological novelty, and heresy, taught at
Vatican II.)
Because Christ
established His Mystical Body to continue His saving presence and
mission in the world, and because He indwells His Church, She thus has a
three-fold mission to teach, sanctify, and govern, corresponding to
His three-fold office as Prophet, Priest, and King.
To
effect the salvation of His elect, Christ's Church must therefore
always 1) teach the same doctrines, 2) offer the same holy sacrifice of
the Mass and sacraments, and 3) enforce the same divine law until the
end of time, without obscurantism, distortion, violation, or pollution.
As Pius XII states in his 1943 encyclical Mystici Corporis
Christi, paragraph 66, "Certainly the loving Mother [Holy Mother
Church] is spotless in the Sacraments, by which she gives birth
to and nourishes her children; in the faith which she has always
preserved inviolate; in her sacred laws imposed upon all,"
and similar magisterial statements.
And yet what purports to be the
Catholic Church in our day -- the entity currently in possession of
the infrastructure of the Church at the parish level, the diocesan
level, and in Rome itself, i.e. in possession of the "real estate"
formerly owned and operated by Christ's one, holy, Catholic and
Apostolic Church -- manifestly violates the immutable integrity of
Catholicism in all three areas:
1) The Vatican II Church teaches doctrines
previously condemned by the Church as being antithetical to
Catholicism, such as ecumenism, religious liberty, the salvific
efficacy of Talmudic Judaism and Islam, denial of the historicity of
fundamental narratives of Sacred Scripture, etc, etc. (See Fact #5 below.)
2) The Vatican II Church provides worship
and sacraments that flagrantly violate the two-thousand-year teaching
of the Church on what constitutes worship acceptable to God and valid
and efficacious for man, such as the New Mass's radically altered words
of consecration, altar girls, communion in the hand, the invalid new
rite of episcopal ordination, etc., etc. (See Facts #7 and 8 below.)
3) The Vatican II Church promulgates
legislation that permits things previously abominated by the Church as
utterly immoral, such as cremation, membership in Freemasonry,
interfaith worship and attendance at non-Catholic worship, giving
sacraments to non-Catholics, etc., etc.
How can this be? To assert that this is
the same Church which formerly denounced and abominated these things is
to attack the divine origin, the infallibility, the indefectibility,
the very credibility of the Church. It is also to speak
blasphemy, to accuse the spotless Bride of Christ of spiritual
adultery, of infidelity to her heavenly Bridegroom. To those reluctant
to come to the logical conclusions which my talk demonstrates are
unavoidable by the intellectually honest, I point out that the
moment they admit that such things as the promotion of ecumenism, or
altar girls, or communion in the hand are contrary to Catholic
Tradition and are undesirable, they already concede the point that the
Church which promotes these things CANNOT be the Catholic Church,
since that Church would no longer be "spotless" in its teaching,
worship, and laws, as Pius XII asserts the Catholic Church always has
been and always will be.
Fact #2: The rise of such a
counterfeit "church," successfully masquerading as the Catholic Church
because a) composed of nearly all the former clergy and laity of the
Catholic Church who lost their membership (and, in the case of the
clergy, their offices) in the true Church by being spiritually seduced
into subscribing to heresy, and b) possessing the real estate and
controlling the infrastructure (chanceries, marriage tribunals,
schools, colleges, universities and seminaries, publishing houses,
etc.) formerly owned and operated by the true Church, has been foretold
by numerous prophecies given, not only in Sacred Scripture but also by
Our Lady and numerous saints -- including, Popes, Fathers, and Doctors
of the Church.
In these prophecies God clearly warns us
that prior to the Second Coming of Christ we will witness the greatest
apostasy (falling away) of all time from the True Church and the True
Faith, and that it will be so enormously successful precisely because
it will be a "disguised apostasy," one in which God will permit a
counterfeit Catholic Church to a) arise -- complete with counterfeit
popes and a counterfeit hierarchy, a counterfeit Mass and sacraments --
and to b) persuade nearly all (Luke 18:8) the remaining Catholics to
migrate, subtly and gradually -- "on the installment plan" -- from the
real Catholic Church to the counterfeit one. This
is exactly what has been going on over the last 50 years, as I
show in my talk.
To prepare us for this Great Apostasy of
the last days, God has permitted previous apostasies, crises, and
schisms to trouble and test His Covenant People, His Church, down
through the ages. Each of these foreshadows one or more aspects of
the final apostasy, so that this final crisis would simply be the
combination of all these previous crises, and would involve no element
that had not already been undergone by the Church before, although in
piecemeal fashion.
These prophecies and types fall into
several logical subdivisions:
I. Biblical Prophecies and Types
Just as God provided throughout Old Testament history various
prophecies and types (foreshadowings) of His Son's first coming, and of
the accompanying circumstances of that advent, so that His elect would
be prepared for it, so too God in His mercy has provided, throughout
the Old and New Testaments, various prophecies and types of His Son's
Second Coming and of its accompanying circumstances, including the
great apostasy that must precede His coming.
A. Old Testament
1. Prophecies, e.g., the
apocalyptic visions of chapters 7-12 of the Book of Daniel, which
describe the reign of Antichrist, his suppression of the Holy Sacrifice
of the Mass by replacing it with "the abomination of desolation," and
the consequent apostasy of nearly all of those who profess to be "the
people of God".
2. Types, e.g., the fall
of Lucifer, who was the head or "pope" of the angelic church; the fall of Adam and
Eve, and in them the whole of humanity; the slaying of Abel by Cain, and the Scriptural
type this provides of the persecution of the True Church by the
Antichrist; the destruction of nearly the entire human
race by the Flood in Noah's day, from which -- by means of the
Ark, a type of the Church -- only a handful were saved, which Our Lord warns
us foreshadows a similar situation at His return (Matthew 24:37); the destruction of
Sodom and Gomorrah, whose all-too-obvious parallels to our time need no explanation; the pagan worship of the golden calf led by the high priest Aaron,
the "pope" of the Old Testament church, which resulted in the
deaths of thousands of Israelites; the
extinction of all but two (Joshua and Caleb) of the adults of the
Exodus generation during 40 years of wandering in the desert; the Babylonian
Captivity, during which for 70 years the Israelites lost their Temple and the priesthood
became non-functioning, so that the people were deprived of their
normal "sacramental" life; the attempted
imposition of syncretism by Antiochus (IV) Epiphanes and the Maccabean
resistance to this; and various miscellaneous apostasies of Israel throughout their
history in the Promised Land, culminating in her definitive apostasy at the time of Our
Lord's first advent -- designed to be a type in many ways of His second
advent -- with usurpers in both Church and State.
(The high priests of Christ's day ere not descended from Zadok, nor
were the Herodian dynasty descended from David, nor even of the tribe
of Judah, nor were they even Jews!)
St. Paul teaches us in 1 Corinthians 10:1-13
that these various apostasies of the Old Testament
era were written down for the instruction of Catholics --
especially the final generation of Catholics, those who will see the
"ends of the ages."
B. New Testament prophecies (e.g.,
Matthew 24, Luke 18:8; 2 Thessalonians 2, the Apocalypse of St. John)
II. Extra-biblical
types and prophecies
A. Types in the form of previous
crises in the Church:
Here I discuss elements of the Arian
crisis, the Nestorian crisis, the reign of antipopes (over 40 before
the twentieth century),
the Eastern Schism of 1054, the Great Western Schism, the various
Protestant "Reformations" (Lutheran,
Calvinist, English, etc.), the martyrdom of the clergy in the Japanese
Church so that Japanese
Catholics had no priests for over 200 years (and the similar situation
in Korea), etc.
B. Specific prophecies of the end
times
1. Our Lady's appearance and prophecies at
LaSalette, France, on September 19, 1846: "In the last days,
Rome itself will lose the Faith and become the seat of the Antichrist
... the Church will be in eclipse."
2. St. Nicholas of Flue (15th century): "The Church will sink deeper and deeper until
she will at last seem to be extinguished, and the succession of Peter and the other Apostles will seem to
have expired."
3. The vision of Pope
Leo XIII in 1888 and his prayer to St. Michael (long, original
version)
4. Prophecies and visions of the Venerable Anne
Catherine Emmerich
5. Prophecies and visions
of the Venerable Mary of Agreda
6. Prophecies
and visions/locutions of Blessed Marie-Julie Jahenny
7. A
remarkable prediction of Bishop Fulton Sheen in his 1948 book, Communism
and the Conscience of the West
8. Other miscellaneous prophecies
Fact #3:
The Book of Job, Pope Leo XIII's vision, and other prophecies we look
at earlier in the talk make it clear that God brings about this
universal apostasy by granting His enemies unprecedented access to and
control over His Church, in order to bring the remnant of the end times
to the ultimate testing of their Faith. The instruments of this final
apostasy, under God's permissive Providence, are the long-standing plans of Talmudic Judaism, Freemasonry,
Communism, Modernism, and other occult and revolutionary groups to
infiltrate and subvert the Church, plans revealed in various public
documents, such as the Masonic Permanent Instruction of the Alta
Vendita, which I provide to my audiences, and which serve to
corroborate what God's prophecies warn us to expect in the last days.
Fact #4: Since, as was mentioned above in Fact #2,
section II.A, one of the crises the Church has had to undergo in her
past is the reign of antipopes -- a feature we would therefore
expect to reappear during the final crisis -- next in the talk we
examine the beliefs of the men who have sat on the throne of St. Peter
since the death of Pius XII in 1958: John XXIII, Paul VI, John Paul I
& II, and Benedict XVI.
An examination of their writings,
speeches, and actions readily reveals that these men were not
orthodox Catholics -- even before their elections -- but modernists and
manifest heretics, Freemasons, and abettors of Communism (yes, even
John Paul II) and Talmudic Judaism.
As Leo XIII's 1896 encyclical Satis
Cognitum, Pius XII's 1943 encyclical Mystici Corporis Christi,
and many other authorities I cite clearly prove, the Church has
consistently taught that anyone who knowingly embraces even a single heresy automatically severs
himself from membership in the Church. That is why Pope
Paul IV's 1559 bull Cum Ex Apostolatus Officio and many other
authoritative statements teach that a heretic cannot be validly elected to the papacy, even if
elected by the unanimous consent of all the cardinals, and even if
acclaimed as pope by the whole world: one simply cannot be the head of
that of which he is not even a member!
This same impossibility of membership in
the Catholic Church for heretics applies also to Freemasons,
Communists, and Talmudic Judaizers, by the way, so that all of these
modern-day antipopes actually have several strikes against them,
as stated above.
The alarming but inescapable conclusion
which emerges from this is that, according to the constant teaching of
the Catholic Church, John XXIII through Benedict XVI cannot be
lawful successors to St. Peter, i.e. valid occupants of his papal
throne. The see of Peter is thus vacant, not de facto
but de jure, i.e., not actually but legally.
From the Latin legal term, sede vacante ("the seat being
vacant"), used by the Church to describe such a period between the
previous legal papal reign and the next legal one (such a period occurs
every time a pope dies, for example), the nickname "sedevacantist" has
been inappropriately and inaccurately (as I show in my talk) applied
to those who recognize the unlawful character of the reign of these
five usurpers. (I prefer the term "consistent Catholic," for reasons I
explain in the talk.)
Each of these five men is thus an example
of "the Man of Lawlessness" described by St. Paul in 2 Thessalonians 2
as "sitting in the Temple of God" (i.e., the Church, which is the
temple of God under the New Covenant; see, e.g., 1 Corinthians 3:16),
wreaking havoc on the faithful and fomenting the Great Deception
described in that chapter, one that leads nearly all Catholics into
what has rightly been called the "silent apostasy" of the post-Vatican
II era.
Fact #5: This in turn
means that, as unlawful usurpers of the papacy, John XXIII had no
authority to call, and Paul VI no authority to consummate, a
lawful and valid general council of the Church. The therefore
illicit and invalid council John XXIII and Paul VI did, respectively,
call and conclude would not and could not enjoy the
protection and infallibility of the Holy Ghost.
A careful examination of the teachings
of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) shows them to contain
numerous errors previously condemned by the Magisterium of the
Catholic Church. These errors -- officially promulgated in the sixteen
documents of Vatican II and eventually codified in the New Catechism
of the Catholic (sic) Church promulgated by John Paul II
in 1992 -- include, as their root error, a new ecclesiology (doctrine of the
Church), by which the Church of Jesus Christ is no longer equated with
the Catholic Church (as it is in all previous magisterial teaching) but
is said rather to "subsist" in the Catholic Church, but to also be
sufficiently present in heretical churches and even pagan religions so
as to be able to impart salvation to practitioners of these false,
diabolically-inspired religions. Flowing from this novel ecclesiology
are several consequent errors, such as ecumenism; religious liberty; the ongoing validity of the Old Covenant
today; the "truth, beauty, and
goodness" of such blasphemous religions as Talmudic Judaism, Islam,
Buddhism, Hinduism, Voodoo, animism, etc., and too many other heresies to mention.
Vatican II's official promulgation of
heresies -- something a true ecumenical council of the Church,
even a "pastoral" one, is incapable of doing -- shows it to be but
another "robber council" like 17 others previously condemned by the
Church.
Fact #6: The Church's constant teaching is that public
heresy automatically excommunicates & deposes all office holders in the Church -- up to and including even a pope -- from their
offices, as we've seen in the case of a pope in fact #4 above, and as
Canon 188.4 of the 1917 Code of Canon Law and other proof texts make
clear.
Applying
this to the bishops who signed the heretical decrees of Vatican II, we
conclude that, though they may have come to the Council as bishops of
the Catholic Church (some had clearly become heretics even before the
council), they would nevertheless have ceased to be bishops of the true
Church and instead returned home to their respective dioceses as
bishops of the new, counterfeit (pseudo-Catholic) church -- just as all
the Catholic bishops in England during the English "Reformation" of
the 1500's (except St. John Fisher, who refused to subscribe to Henry
VIII's proposed schism and was martyred as a result) ceased to be
bishops of the Catholic Church once they embraced the new religion and
became instead the bishops of the Anglican Church, while wearing the
same miters, occupying the same sees, owning the same real estate,
controlling the same infrastructure, and holding sway over the same
priests and laity (or claiming to) as before.
Fact #7: Moving from
doctrine to worship and sacraments, we see that the Mass has been
illicitly subjected to radical revisions in the wake of Vatican II.
These revisions are in many cases identical to, and in some cases even
worse than, the revisions made by the Protestant Reformers, all of
which revisions were condemned for all time by the Catholic Church.
These revisions even include tampering with the form of the sacrament,
the very words which must be pronounced to make the sacrament take
place. This change alone has rendered the New Mass invalid, making
it the "abomination of desolation" predicted by the prophet Daniel
and Our Lord. This is proven from numerous documents of the Magisterium
(teaching office) of the Church.
As an aside, not only do all the
Rome-approved "traditionalist" groups, such as the Priestly Fraternity
of St. Peter (FSSP) and the Institute of Christ the King (ICK), use the
1962 Missal when they "celebrate the Tridentine Mass," so do the
priests of the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) and many other
non-Rome-approved "traditionalist" clergy. As I show in my talk, the
1962 Missal is not the Tridentine Mass promulgated by Pope St.
Pius V in his 1570 bull Quo Primum, but an unauthorized
revision of the Mass by antipope John XXIII, which therefore provokes
"the wrath of God and of the blessed Apostles Peter and Paul, as Pope
St. Pius V warned in that bull.
Fact #8: Similar changes
to the other sacraments render the validity of several of them suspect
as well. Particularly alarming is Paul VI’s new (1968) rite for consecrating
bishops, which mimics the rite composed by apostate Archbishop
Thomas Cranmer during the 16th-century English
“Reformation,” a rite officially declared “absolutely null and utterly void” by Pope Leo XIII in his 1895 encyclical Apostolicae
Curae. Furthermore, any such revision as Paul VI's new
rite is already declared invalid in advance by Pius XII in his
1947 Apostolic Constitution Sacramentum Ordinis, as by several
other theological considerations which I outline in my talk.
The logical consequences of
this are disturbing but undeniable. The invalid "bishops" produced by this new rite cannot help but ordain invalid "priests" (since one must be a real bishop in order
to ordain a priest). And invalid "priests" -- even if they use the
valid pre-Vatican II rites, as do the priests of the FSSP, the ICK, and
other clergy (ordained since 1968) who offer "indult Masses" -- in
turn cannot help but celebrate invalid "Masses," confer invalid
absolutions, and perform invalid "extreme unctions" (since one must be a
real priest to do these things). (Baptisms and marriages could, if
performed properly, still be valid, since they do not require a priest.
Thus, even a layman who thinks he's a "priest" would still validly
dispense these sacraments, provided he does them with proper matter,
form, and intention.)
Fact #9:
Moving from worship and sacraments to laws, the Vatican II revolution
produced not only new (previously condemned) doctrines and new
(invalid) sacraments, but also new but immoral laws, finally
codified in the New Code of Canon Law promulgated by John Paul
II in 1984. These new laws drop the Church's historic condemnations
and prohibitions of Freemasonry (membership in which meant automatic
excommunication under the old 1917 Code), of mixed marriages, of
intercommunion and participation in non-Catholic worship, of cremation,
etc. etc.
Fact
#10: The logical conclusion of all of the above is
inescapable: The Vatican II
church currently occupying Rome, the dioceses of the world, and the
local parishes, thus teaches a different faith, offers different
worship and sacraments, and imposes different laws than
does the Catholic Church. By all accounts it offers a faith, worship,
sacraments and laws that would not have been considered "spotless" by
all the popes of the past, as Pius XII said the Church's faith, worship
and sacraments, and laws will always be. Unless we are to (heretically
and blasphemously) accuse the Church herself of adulterously betraying
her husband (Christ) and ceasing to be the faithful steward of the
message, grace, and morality He has entrusted to her, the only possible
conclusion is that what is found in Rome, in your diocese, and at
your local parish is no longer the Catholic Church, but the
above-mentioned clever counterfeit that God Himself has permitted
to take over the infrastructure of the Church, in order to fulfill His
prophecies and plans.
One
who denies this conclusion by arguing that, while these modern
doctrines, worship, and laws are not fully Catholic, the Vatican II
Church which offers them is nevertheless the Catholic Church, rejects
the teaching of Pius XII (and other popes) that the true Church
can never offer such aberrations. In thus rejecting the Church's
authoritative teaching regarding its own fidelity and purity, such a
person shows he is not a Catholic at all -- he himself has become
a "counterfeit Catholic".
After fully
demonstrating the above ten facts, I conclude my talk by showing that
there is nothing in this "sedevacantist" position that is in any way
contrary to the teachings of the Catholic Church. (On the contrary, it
is the only position that is logically consistent with those
teachings, and preserves those teachings from corruption or
compromise.)
Christ's promise that “the gates of hell will not prevail against the Church” (Matthew 16:18), for example, in no way
precludes either the reign of antipopes (over
40 in the history of the Church, by everyone's agreement), nor the
absence of a valid pope for 50 years, nor the complete usurpation of Catholic parishes,
dioceses, and whole national hierarchies by heretics and schismatics (as happened during the Arian
heresy, the Nestorian heresy, the Eastern Schism of
1054, the English “Reformation,” etc.). Nor has
the Church's indefectibility ever been understood to mean that Catholics will always be able everywhere to conveniently get
sacraments at the local parish. (The English recusants of the 16th,
17th, and 18th centuries who had no Catholic parishes anymore to go to
in their homeland would certainly be surprised to hear of such a
notion, as would the Japanese Catholics of the 17th and 18th centuries
who went over two hundred years without a priest or a Mass, or the
upholders of Nicene orthodoxy in the East during the Arian crisis, when
heretics occupied 99% of the episcopal sees of the Church, or -- to
revert to an Old Testament example -- the Israelites during the 70
years of the Babylonian Captivity of the seventh century, who had no
Temple and no functioning priesthood.) During such times of trial and
tribulation, the Church still exists, and consists of those who
hold fast to the traditional Faith, even if they have lost all their
buildings, as St. Athanasius famously reminded the faithful of his
flock during the aforementioned Arian crisis. ...
Gerry Matatics
See GerryMatatics.org
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