Scandal

MOST Holy Father,

There can be no question here of criticising in any way the purely private life of the Sovereign Pontiff. That is a matter solely for God and his own conscience. To this there could only be one exception, the imaginary case of a Pope who, following certain scandals in his private life, was being blackmailed to the extent of being inhibited in the free exercise of his function. In such a case, the consequences of purely private offences would indeed be of concern to the whole Church, and it would be the duty of anyone having knowledge of such a state of affairs to do all within his power – even at the pain of incurring excommunication – to obtain the resignation of such a Pope.

It is with an entirely different sort of scandal that we are concerned here – with public acts of the Pontiff calculated to set a bad example to the faithful or in other ways to make the practice of their religion difficult for them... Your Pontificate, Most Holy Father, has been marked since 1964 by an unending succession of decisions and gestures intended to appeal to public opinion; many of them left us entirely in the dark regarding your motives, or else the explanation which you proffered at the time, though apparently adequate, turned out later to have been misleading, when the real – and often unexpected – motive was allowed to come to light. Often the intention became clear only when the enemies of the Faith showed us how delighted they were. Gradually, through an endless succession of novelties, some dramatic and unexpected, some of apparently little immediate significance, the people are being reduced to a state of bewilderment. They no longer have any idea whither they are being led.

The scandal of a sinful private life is a relatively slight one compared with that caused on a much larger, world-wide scale, by certain “ acts of the Pontiff ” – liable to be interpreted as “ Pontifical Acts ” – which can hardly be viewed in a good light, even with the greatest effort of mental gymnastics. For it would seem that the Pope is going out of his way to shock, challenging his subjects to follow him in his extraordinary ways. Everything possible is done to discourage opposition, which proves difficult even to formulate when the intentions underlying the acts are so well disguised. Yet all who do not offer active opposition find themselves becoming accomplices before they know where they are.

Once we have grasped the concept of this Great Design which you are following, methodically and without hesitation, the reasons underlying the series of scandals which we are about to list – however incompletely – become easy to fathom. They represent a succession of acts undertaken on your own initiative and with the aim of bringing turmoil into a static situation – rather like breaking up the ice on a frozen expanse of water by a succession of carefully timed blasts. Apparently unexpected, they are not a series of chance acts, but part of a methodical plan whose excellent marksmanship fills us with admiration ! This is HERESY IN ACTION, SCHISM IN THE MAKING, proceeding to the creation of a new, humanistic, “ universal ” Christianity. But we cannot help seeing it as the ruin of the Church and of Christian civilisation and their replacement by a Utopia in whose shadow is advancing the Kingdom of Satan.