| My Brothers in Christ and My Friends,
With great sorrow I read today that you are now "considered perfectly
inserted in the Holy Roman Catholic Apostolic Church." I never knew you
left. During those memorable days when I visited you in 1991 while doing
research for my book on your great and honored Bishop Antonio de Castro
Mayer, I had the privilege of witnessing the Catholic life of your diocese,
the most perfect embodiment of the Catholic life in a contemporary setting
which I have ever witnessed and so much more than I could ever imagine. What
a blessing you have been granted! What extraordinary graces you have
received, undoubtedly through the prayers and sacrifices and work of the
unique bishop who tended the flock of Campos as shepherd for so many
decades. In what way were you not then Catholic? In what way were you
separated from the Church?
Your announcement that the Holy Father has
signed a "letter of entrance," welcoming you "in full ecclesial
communion" along with "the Catholic faithful (you) assist"
suggests that there had been some separation with Rome, that you were in
fact in some sort of schism. Had not the Catholic Faith been handed down
intact and in perfect fullness from Our Lord Jesus Christ through His
Apostles and through the bishops of His Church until it came to be passed
throughout the Diocese of Campos in our time by the fully Catholic Bishop
Antonio de Castro Mayer? What did he teach you which was not Catholic? Where
did he lead you that left you separated from Rome and thus needing to
"return"?
The sad fact is clear, even
though the details are not yet fully revealed. You have signed an agreement
with Modernist Rome and thereby turned your back on the great legacy of your
great and beloved bishop who left you in April of 1991, left you because God
called him home, left you secure and Catholic and well provided for. His
legacy has now been compromised through the compromise which must have been
made with the current power players in Modernist and Progressive Rome,
distinct and separate itself from Eternal Rome. To affect a compromise, one
must assume leaving one’s position and moving toward a middle ground. The
position you must leave is the fullness of the Tradition of the Catholic
Faith; the new position you must reach is closer to the outskirts of the New
Rome, the Rome of bureaucrats and ambiguous talk and ecumenism and
collegiality and religious liberty, all the temptations and errors against
which your good pastor so courageously and so comprehensively warned and
instructed you.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his memorable and
insightful address at the Harvard commencement ceremonies in 1978 stated
that "a decline in courage may be the most striking feature which an
outsider observer notices in the West in our days." For many years the
name of the Diocese of Campos has brought to Catholic souls battling error
and decay in their own parishes, the clear and resounding call to Catholic
courage. In our apostate times, perseverance becomes an act of courage. The
colossal moral and spiritual stature of the small human man who was your
bishop stood as a model for Catholic courage. Do you now cut his memory and
legacy down to merely human size? Will the name of Campos no longer loudly
ring with courage but echo distantly with compromise?
Who can doubt your discomfort or not sympathize
with the loneliness you must have felt over the years? A small group of
priests, organized together as the Priestly Society of St. Jean Marie Vianney, carrying on the work of Mother Church in isolation, unnoticed,
ignored, except when vilified by the voices of those who long ago made their
compromises. But what could be more indicative of your true role as alter
Christi if not your work in loneliness and sorrow, with those mocking
and derisive voices assailing you? To imagine yourselves now "inserted in
the Holy Roman Catholic Apostolic Church" is no solution. You may have a
few moments in bonhomie with red and scarlet and purple in the cool marble
palaces of the Eternal City, but will Tradition continue in the Diocese of
Campos after the compromising and celebrating? How have all other
traditional groups fared once they have put themselves under the sway of
Modernist Rome? I will not give you the litany of loss and change for you
are already aware of it; I will just ask you where is the traditional bishop
promised to the Fraternity of St. Peter fourteen years ago? Are the
prelates in Modernist Rome to be trusted? Will they deliver to you on the
promises they have made? I quote the wise Solzhenitsyn again, "Should one
point out that from ancient times decline in courage has been considered the
beginning of the end?"
You have announced that in a solemn ceremony to
be held in the Cathedral of the Most Holy Savior by His Eminence, Cardinal
Dario Castrillon, Prefect of the Holy Congregation for the Clergy, in
the name of the Holy Father, the pope, on the 18th January, there
will be a reading of documents and the singing of the Te Deum. The
18th of January also begins the "Week of Prayer for Christian
Unity" decreed by Rome which will culminate in the Day of Prayer for
Peace in Assisi on January 24th, the second such ecumenical
outrage in recent years, a kind of gathering condemned, as you well know, by
earlier popes. Bishop Antonio de Castro Mayer in a joint statement with
Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre spoke with the voice of Roman Catholic Tradition
in condemning the gathering of religions at Assisi in October of 1987 [sic;
the event actually occurred in 1986], the
first such outrageous ecumenical prayer venture. Have you forgotten his wise
and proscriptive words? Will you now join your hands in prayer with
Modernist Rome as it openly violates the First Commandment of God and prays
with Lutherans and Anglicans and Muslims and Deists and animists in defiance
of Catholic Tradition and then will you pretend still to be traditionalists?
Have you forgotten your own words when in your public Profession of Faith in
1982 you rejected "the ecumenism that makes the Faith grow cold and makes
us forget our Catholic identity, seeking to negate the antagonism between
light and darkness, between Christ and Belial..." ?
You may protest that you will maintain
Traditionalism in your diocese, that you will still celebrate the Mass of
All Time and teach the old catechisms and carry on in the traditional ways.
But do you not understand that in compromising you accept an absurd
contradiction, an illogical proposition that any sane mind must condemn - that Mother Church in Her Divine Authority can teach contradictory ideas at
different times and pretend they are both true. How can your Traditionalism
co-exist with Modernism? How can the Mass of All Time be equivalent with the
newfangled human contrivance? How can Catholics be forbidden from ecumenical
prayer at one time and then encouraged in such actions at a later time? As
Hamlet says, when staring at the skull of Yorick, the "gorge rises at
it." Such a stark and deadly affront to reason is horrifying. Are you
now willing to play this absurd Modernist game with Modernist Rome? Many
weary and troubled Catholics will feel the weight of your decision. Already
the remarks are circulating that you have "sold out" and "caved in" and
"given up". The truth is you have abandoned reason. May I remind you of the
words of a prayer you have often prayed? "...Sicut erat in principio et
nunc et semper et in saecula saeculorum..." As it was in the beginning
is now and ever shall be, world without end.
In his courageous statement of June 30, 1988, in Econe, on the occasion of the consecration of
traditional bishops by
Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, your courageous Bishop Antonio de Castro Mayer
in his message of support and unity spoke the following words:
It is sorrowful to see the
lamentable blindness of so many confreres in the Episcopacy and the
priesthood, who do not see, or who do not wish to see, the present crisis
in order to be faithful to the mission which God has confided to us, to
resist the modernism at present ruling.
You no longer "wish to see the present
crisis"; you no longer wish "to resist the modernism at present
ruling." By your action of compromise with the "modernism at present
ruling," you have increased the sorrow of your great bishop; you have
increased the sorrow of your devoted friends. Our Lord in His agony in the
garden certainly suffered from the hatred of His enemies, but such suffering
was nothing compared to the certain knowledge that He would be betrayed and
denied by His friends and disciples.
Be assured of my prayers.
In Christ,
David Allen White |
