In 1970 Pope Paul VI established across the worldwide Catholic Church the "New Mass". The cover story was that this liturgy was developed at the request of the Fathers of Vatican II to reform the rites of Holy Mother Church and make them relevant to the modern world, which was bored with squalid ceremonies where the priest spoke Latin and the common man could neither understand nor participate.
But that is just the cover story. The True Story of the Road to the New Mass began much earlier- perhaps centuries earlier, but we will begin our story with the pontificate of Pius IX, an enigma if ever there was one, a pope who on the one hand wrote to the Austrian bishops about the possibility of the Noble Pagan while on the other issuing Quanta Cura and the Syllabus of Errors against the Enlightenment and also presiding over Vatican I and its famous declaration of the dogma of papal infallibility.
Evidence exists that before becoming Pope, Pius IX, as Cardinal Giovanni Ferretti Mastai, was initiated into the lodge of Eterna Catena of Palermo on 15th August 1839. Now, yes, the Masons are evil and not to be trusted, but they insist his signature was placed on the enrollment papers. The source for this information was written in 1922, and the current authors could not verify by any photographic evidence. So take all with a grain of salt. But this evidence does seem consistent with the actions of this pontiff, and the history that follows.
The election of Cardinal Mastai to the papacy was interesting. In the first round of voting, he received only 15 votes. But then rumors circulated that the famous liberal politician Metternich of Austria-Hungary would urge the Emperor to veto the election of the most popular candidate favored by France, and the ensuing turmoil led to his being chosen.
To say the papacy of Pius IX was tumultuous would be putting it mildly. This papacy began on the eve of the "Revolutions of 1848" in 1846. Pius IX was said to be a liberal who favored revolutionary change- his first act was to give the papal states a railroad, which his predecessor, Gregory XVI, had famously said "chemin de fer, chemin d'enfer" ("road of iron, road of hell"). After the Papacy was rattled in 1848 by the shortlived "Roman Republic", which was put down by the French Army in 1850, Pius IX allegedly became "ultra-conservative". Now, to be sure, Pius IX condemned Freemasonry in his first encyclical, Qui Pluribus, in 1846. But his seminal condemnation and most famous encyclical would be Quanta Cura of 1864, accompanied by the famous "Syllabus of Errors", a list anametizing many propositions of modern society, including freedom of the press, freedom of religion, and propositions fundamental to the political philosophy especially of the United States, especially regarding "separation of church and state" and the power of civil authorities. (Then Father Karl Ratzinger would call Vatican II a "counter-syllabus", but we are getting way, way ahead of the story.)
Meanwhile, the most interesting- to our purposes here- event of this pontificate is the publication of the "Permanent Instruction of the Alta Vendita by Jacques Crétineau-Joly's book "L'Église romaine en face de la Révolution" in 1859. (Monsignor George Dillon would tender an English Translation puplished in his book (1885) War of Anti-Christ with the Church and Christian Civilization.
What concerns us most is the following: "We do not intend to win the Popes to our cause, to make them neophytes of our principles, propagators of our ideas. That would be a ridiculous dream: and if events lurn out in some way. if Cardinals or prelates, for example. of their own free will or by surprise, should enter into a part of our secrets, this is not at all an incentive for desiring their elevation to the See of Peter. That elevation. would ruin us. Ambition alone would have led them to apostasy, the requirements of power would force them to sacrifice us. What we must ask for, what we should look for and wait for, as the Jews wait for the Messiah. is a Pope according to our needs." This has always been taken as a sort of "dogma", emanating from the Masonic Lodges, that they would never allow a rabid Freemason to become pope, and so even Catholics who should know better pooh-pooh the idea that an out-and-out Freemason (or worse) could become pope, but that rather they would ensure that only a "useful idiot" would sit on the Chair of Peter.
First off, of course, is that the lodges have little or no control of who might be elected pope, unless the majority of the cardinals in a conclave were conspiring Masons themselves. But more to the point, the Masons are, after all, the acolytes of their Father Lucifer, who, as Our Lord Jesus Christ points out multiple times, was a liar and a murderer from the beginning. Now, the spiritual warfare, to be sure, is all about the Black Hats versus the White Hats, but life is not a spaghetti western. Rather, the evil powers often create a false dichotomy, as in White Magic against Black Magic, where both are bad and forbidden but one is portrayed as good, and work their diabolical designs amid the "clash" of the two, the classic example being the controversies between the Democrats and Republicans in United States politics. (Both are essentially derived from the liberal principles of the revolution, and Republicans have often been described as "Democrats in Slow Motion".) With that thesis, we can postulate that the Alta Vendita might be a magnificent Red Herring, and that the majority of Cardinals since at least 1725 might have been inducted into the lodges, and they willingly elected one of their number to be pope. Meanwhile, what is interesting here is that Pius IX would not allow any of the names associated with the Alta Vendita, which supposedly came from the Grand Lodge Italy and written by the Carbonari "Little Tiger". For this reason, it is most difficult to establish the "pedigree" for this document and latch onto the "paper trail" which might give valuable insights into the machinations of the lodges. (This is but one example of a fantastically consistent modus operandi of all the modern popes- their stubborn refusal to indulge in the minutia of "conspiracy theories" but rather to adhere to the axioms of modern society while all the while purportedly condemning them. We will see this in spades with Pius XII later.)
And this brings us to the famous Vatican Council One. Before delving into specifics, a little background is necessary. As Catholics should know, the last Great Council of Holy Mother Church was Trent, which closed in 1583 after spanning three pontificates, and whose magnificent decrees were promulgated by Pius V in 1870. Since then, all attempts at councils had been magnificent debacles, culminating with the little-known Council of Pistoia, which was a strange brew indeed. On the one hand it insisted the church had no power to promulgate novel dogmas and that commerce should cease on Sundays. On the other it wanted vernacular liturgies and insisted the Holy Mother Church had no political or secular power (sound familiar?) The Whole Steaming Mess was condemned by Pius VI in the bull Auctorem fidei of August 28, 1794. Recalling this, the most traditional Catholic prelates, led by the renowned Cardinal Pie of Poitiers, were apprehensive, to put it mildly, of the coming council, given the rampant liberalism among many clerics. Cardinal Pie would posthumously be proven correct. The flow and force of events clearly demonstrate that it took Vatican I to allow Vatican II to inflict the damage it did.
The crux of the matter is the definition of papal infallibility, over which a river of ink would flow in subsequent years. Ontological analysis would show this definition to be circular. The Pope is Infallible only when defining a doctrine always and everywhere taught by Holy Mother Church. How do we know a proclamation is infallible? Because we can test it with church history. We can discern the Constant Teaching of the Deposit of Faith from the days of the Apostles, though not always couched in precisely the same language. (For example, the terms "Immaculate Conception" and "Transubstantiation" were never used by the Church Fathers and Doctors, but were implicit through all their writings.) Tragically, the vast majority of simple Catholics were unable to grasp the subtleties of the definition, and for them the pope had been endowed with a new "superpower" such that the Holy Ghost would not allow the pope to err in any matter whatsoever, including administration, appointments, and daily utterances. The "ultramontanes" would prevail in their opinion that the papacy would never, and could never fail, and this would do tremendous damage to Holy Mother Church, as we shall see.
Meanwhile, Pius IX presided over the "unification" of Italy under the Masonic King Victor Emmanual at the expense of the Kingdom of Sardinia and the Papal States. Pius IX would die an embittered "prisoner in the Vatican", surrounded by the Revolution, a state of affairs that would persist until the Lateran Treaty of 1929. However, Pius XI had an "advisor" Marcantonio Pacelli, a little acorn from which a mighty oak would grow- as we shall see. Marcantonio Pacelli had an obscure history and connections to the Rothschild Banking dynasty, the seat of many Tinfoil Hat Conspiracy Theories. We now take our leave of Pius IX and move to his successor, Leo XIII.
The plot thickens.
(Before we proceed, two digressions will be discussed, and hopefully the reader will see the pertinence as our story progresses. The first has to do with the modus operandi of the Ancient Serpent. So let us go straight to the Horses Mouth, where he tells Eve, concerning the Forbidden Fruit: "No, you shall not die the death. For God doth know that in what day soever you shall eat thereof, your eyes shall be opened: and you shall be as Gods, knowing good and evil." Now, every last word here is true, for Lucifer in his profound wisdom discerned the Incarnation and Redemption and probably even the institution of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, for Satan, like God, dwells in Eternity. That is why a demon, during a famous exorcism where the priest told him he and his fellows are damned forever could laconically reply "THAT has not been determined YET" even though Our Lord Jesus Christ said concerning the Prince of Darkness: "He is already judged". Now the Serpent chose Eve because women are more wont to see things from a worldly perspective. Had he told Adam, we can well imagine the response would have been: "That is very, very interesting Mister Serpent. This afternoon, we walk with God, and I solemnly assure you that this will be the first topic of discussion. I will get back to you first thing tomorrow morning." But Lucifer led Eve into proximity of the tree, asked a question, elicited a response, then told her what was quoted above, and the rest, as they say, is history. The Devil still proceeds in like manner. He gives his disciples a huge dose of esoteric truth, promises them delights, and thus ensnares them in the web of the occult. For that very reason, we must not become immersed in emotions or worldly wisdom but study attentively the Gospels and apply them to everything in our lives, omitting NOTHING.
The next digression is going to be a little longer, and will focus on the relationship of the papacy to that fledgling Masonic creation, the United States of America. Few people are familiar with the person of Bishop John Carroll, a flaming liberal Jesuit advocating for vernacular liturgies and dialog with the separated Protestant brethren who also hobnobbed with Masonic luminaries such as Benjamin Franklin, and was acquainted with the French Episcopacy to boot. None of this, however, impeded Pius VI from heeding his protestations that the Little Church in America was different from those Evil Canadian Frenchmen and so needed its own jurisdiction. Or, as Pius XII would famously put it in his allocation to the American Bishops: "Thus the Father of His Country -George Washington- and the pioneer pastor of the Church -John Carroll- in that land so dear to Us, bound together by the ties of friendship and clasping, so to speak, each the other’s hand, form a picture for their descendants, a lesson to all future generations, and a proof that reverence for the Faith of Christ is a holy and established principle of the American people, seeing that it is the foundation of morality and decency, consequently the source of prosperity and progress." These words are a magnificent summary of that strange, strange relationship of the papacy to a country that warred with Christendom, especially in Mexico, at every turn.)
Now, one would have thought that Leo XIII would have inherited a church thoroughly cleansed of liberal bishops in the longest pontificate in the history of Holy Mother Church which had just preceded. All of those prelates who attended the condemned council of Pistoia and also participated in the Tennis Court Oaths of 1789 should have been banished to monasteries in Outer Mongolia or relegated to librarians at the Vatican archives but, no, indefatigably, the liberalism persisted in every sinew of Holy Mother Church. Like his predecessor, Leo XIII would write encyclical after encyclical against it, but also like his predecessor, Leo XIII had a propensity not to lift a finger against those liberals under his very nose, namely, in this case, James Gibbons and Mariano Rampolla.
James Gibbons was another very ecumenical prelate who had an absolutely meteoric rise to bishop after serving as a curate for SIX WEEKS, being, at age 34, the youngest bishop at Vatican Council I. He was welcomed at Protestant Churches all across North Carolina to give sermons, none of which, apparently, were offensive to the Separated Brethren. (One supposes he abstained from such divisive topics as the perpetual virginity of Our Lady, the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, and No Salvation Outside Holy Mother Church.) At any rate, Leo XIII created him cardinal on June 7, 1886, fairly early in his pontificate. As for the latter, his rise was even more meteoric, finally being appointed a cardinal priest in 1887. Superficially, Cardinal Rampolla did all right things. He sought the re-creation of the Papal States. He supported the French Monarchy. He supported Catholic Organizations in Austria-Hungary contra the liberal Franz Josef. But, uncharacteristically, while he opposed the liberals on the European Continent, he was a great fan of James Gibbons. This might have had less to do with political affinities and more to do with the fact that both prelates were rumored to be members of the blatantly Satanic Ordo Templi Orientis- Rampolla more famously so. Rampolla also had Giacomo della Chiesa, the future Benedict XV, as his personal secretary. And late in life, he would hover as a father figure over a very young Eugenio Pacelli, about whom more, much more, will be said later.
Meanwhile, it was Leo XIII who first told the world about the Plot to Destroy the Mass. He did so in a roundabout way. As the story goes, on Oct. 1st, 1884, he had a deeply disturbing "mystical" experience at Mass. He suddenly stood transfixed in front of the altarof his private chapel. For perhaps 10 minutes he stood there as if in a trance, his face drained of color. (Or so they say) He explained that he had heard two voices in the vicinity of the tabernacle of Our Lord and of Satan, who boasted that he could destroy the Church in 75 or 100 years, if given the opportunity. Our Lord give Satan permission to try. (Or so he said.) Is it just possible that Pope Leo XIII was simply giving us the Masonic plan for the destruction of the Mass, which had already been formulated in the somber dens of iniquity of the Lodges some years before? (Oh no sir you are completely off your rocker and out of your gourd. How could you even possibly imagine such a thing possible in the hallowed halls of the Vatican!!) Well, be that as it may, as we shall see, this certainly appeared to be the proverbial "kickoff" for the plot to destroy the Mass.
And of all places where would the incubation of this plot be found but at a little, newly established Benedictine Monastery in France chartered by Pope Gregory XVI in 1835, namely, Solesmes, shortly after the resignation of the Abbot Dom Prosper Gueranger. The newly flowering use of Gregorian Chant would be the vehicle hijacked by the reformers to inject their poisonous penchant for reform into the Monasteries in Bavaria, and a Grand Convergence would quietly begin, all the while quietly monitored by Rome. Back at the Eternal City, Cardinal Rampolla would be famously vetoed by Franz Jospeh, allegedly after a certain Monsignor Ernest Jouin, one of the most famous batshit anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists, informed the emperor of his Masonic affiliations. And, consequently, the first of the Great Reformers, the Son of Polish Immigrants, Guiseppi Sarto, would be elected Pope in his stead.
Now, obviously, if one is going to carry out the Great Reform, one must do it, to paraphrase the Permanent Instruction of the Alta Vendita, "always while marching under the banner of the Apostolic keys." And so, if anybody embodies the image of the Vatican I Superpope, it is Pius X. The following quote is typical of how he viewed the papacy: "When people love the pope, they do not discuss his order. They do not question the extent of their obedience, nor in what matters they are to obey. When people love the pope, they do not pretend that he has not spoken clearly enough. One cannot cast a doubt upon his orders under the pretexts of those who are so unwilling to obey..." This sort of hyper-obedience expostulated by Pius X would persist among the Faithful until the eve of Vatican II, creating vast confusion and the perfect cover for the coming reforms. The mantra that would be drummed into Catholic Ears for decades would be "The pope says... the pope says..." And so the Great Reform, like acidic water dripping on a rock, would deform the church, imperceptibly, over time.
The Great Reform must start small. And so it did. Pius X would allow Mass without a server. He would abolish Holy Days of Obligation under the pretext modern man needed more time for work. He would place vernacular missals, forbidden by the Council of Trent, into the hands of the Faithful. And he would reform the Divine Office. About this, we have this most pregnant quote: "As the arrangement of the psaltery has a certain intimate connection with all the divine office and the liturgy, it will be clear to everybody that by what we have here decreed we have taken the FIRST STEP to the emendation of the Roman breviary AND THE MISSAL, but for this we shall appoint shortly a special council or commission.” Now, Pope Pius X never got around to appointing this commission. He said two years later: "In the judgment of wise and learned persons, all this ('reform' of the liturgy) would require considerable work and time. For this reason, many years will have to pass before this type of liturgical edifice, composed with intelligent care for the spouse of Christ to express her piety and faith, can appear PURIFIED OF THE SQUALIDNESS brought by time, newly resplendent with dignity and fitting order." And here, dear reader, hidden under the cloak of the Terror of the Modernists, are the first tremulous strains of the themes of Vatican II. Of course, we should ask how the Eternal Sacrifice, of the Eternal High Priest, could become "squalid" with the passage of time. Do we really need to ask?
The Pontificate of Pius X was cut short, so it is said, by the impending storm that would become World War I, which caused his heart to bleed for humanity. At any rate, he was followed by the relatively uneventful Benedict XV, and then the very eventful Pius XI. But at this point, we bid adios to Rome and resume our story in the mountains of Bavaria.
One fine day in 1933, now Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli was engaged in conversation with Count Enrico Pietro Galeazzi over tea and crumpets, when he blurted out, probably unknowingly, the gaffe of the 2nd Millennia after Christ. He began: "Suppose, dear friend, that Communism is the most visible among the organs of subversion against the Church and the Tradition of Divine Revelation. Thus, we will witness the invasion of everything that is spiritual: philosophy, science, law, teaching, the arts, the media, literature, theater, and religion... [Yes, the Cardinal should know. He was operating in the very bosom of the movement.]
"I am concerned about the confidences of the Virgin to the little Lucia of Fatima. This persistence of the Good Lady in face of the danger that threatens the Church is a divine warning against the suicide that the alteration of the Faith, in its liturgy, its theology, and its soul, would represent." Now, at this point, as Fatima scholars know, St Sr Lucia had written none of her memoirs, and the only public knowledge of the prophecies of Fatima concerned the end of World War One, the First Saturday Devotion, and the request for the Collegial Consecration of Russia. Over a decade would ensue before St Sr Lucia would commit to writing the first sentence of the "third secret": "In Portugal the Dogma of the Faith will always be preserved." Cardinal Pacelli could have known none of this, except in a supernatural manner. But, if he had been given such revelations, why would he refer to it so nonchalantly?
"I hear around me innovators who wish to dismantle the Sacred Chapel, destroy the universal flame of the Church, reject her ornaments, and make her remorseful for her historical past. Well, my dear friend, I am convinced that the Church of Peter must affirm her past, or else she will dig her own grave." The Cardinal was well acquainted with said innovators, as we shall see shortly.
"I will fight this battle with the greatest energy on the inside of the Church, just as outside of it, even if the forces of evil may one day take advantage of my person, my actions, or my writings, as they try today to deform the history of the Church. All human heresies which alter the word of God are so that a greater light might appear.” That last sentence might have been garbled in a translation. If not, it can only have an occult meaning.
"These underdeveloped [a decidedly modernist word] peoples will save the Church, Eminence. A day will come when the civilized world will deny its God, when the Church will doubt as Peter doubted. She will be tempted to believe that man has become God, that His Son is only a symbol, a philosophy like so many others. And in churches, Christians will search for the red lamp where Jesus awaits them, like the sinful woman crying out before the empty tomb: ‘Where have they taken Him?'" Are these famous words a prophecy, or a boast about what is about to transpire under the pontificate for which he clearly had been groomed?
"Then, priests will rise up from Africa, from Asia, from America, formed here in this seminary of the Missions, who will say and who will proclaim that the ‘bread of life’ is not ordinary bread, that the mother of the God-man is not a mother like others. And they will be cut to pieces to testify that Christianity is not a religion like others, since her head is the Son of God, and the Church is His Church."
Those last words would hardly come to pass, of course, proving that this cannot be a supernatural prophecy, but mere conjecture, and grossly inaccurate at that, for the priests of Africa, Asia, and especially America, are perhaps the most corrupt and modernist of all.
But meanwhile, in the hills of Westphalia, deep in the heart of Germany, liturgical anarchy was rising in the person of a Benedictine Monk, Odo Johannes Casel, whose philosophy was a strange blend of Greek mythological ideas, introduced into his liturgy a "scriptural teaching and a more positive evaluation of Old Testament worship", whatever that exactly means. What we know for sure is that, in Benedictine monasteries in the 1920's and 1930's in Bavaria, under the watchful eye of Papal Nuncio Cardinal Pacelli, vernacular "Masses" were being said on "tables", guitars were being strummed while German folk songs were sung, and the attendees were holding hands and engaging in the "Rite of Peace". Now, granted, this was not widespread, but rather in a few ultra-liberal encampments. Much more widespread were the so-called "dialog Masses", where congregants recited prayers (in Latin or the vernacular) with the servers, or sung various parts of the liturgy, such as the Gloria or Credo, sometimes in Latin, sometimes in German. What we also know for sure is that this "revolution in tiara and cope" was spreading far and wide, over continents and across oceans. In a little monastery in Missouri, this author saw with his own eyes, pictures archived long before Vatican II, of altars denuded of the tabernacle and covered with that stark artistic style that would become so prevalent in the 1970's, which were clearly designed for "Mass facing the people".
Back at Rome, Pius XI, meanwhile, was decidedly ecumenical. He would allow the Orthodox to attend a Mass and, for their convenience, had the words "and the son" concerning the procession of the Holy Ghost deleted from the recitation of the creed. But this was merely a distant portent of things to come. Pius XI also gave us the Feast of Christ the King so that, at long last, Catholics had something to celebrate on Martin Luther Day. He also began a trend that would blossom shortly under Pius XII, the politicization of the Holy Liturgy.
But the liturgical revolution would have to put on hold for ten long years when the Great Sign heralded by Our Lady of Fatima appeared in the night skies across Europe, Asia, and America. The second, worse world war prophesied by the sad mother had been launched by the Lodges.
On the 27th of March 1948, in what might have been an ominous portent, Fr Odo Casel suffered a severe stroke while celebrating the Easter Vigil and died the next day, Easter Sunday. Barely two months later, on May 28th, Pope Pius XII appointed the Great Architect of the Novus Ordo Missae, Fr Annibale Bugnini, to be secretary to the Commission for Liturgical Reform. In 1951, that commission gave Holy Mother Church a "revised" Easter Vigil. In 1955, the commission unleashed their "revision" of the rest of Holy Week, with "reformed liturgies" for Palm Sunday, Holy Thursday, and Good Friday. For Palm Sunday, the Processional Mass was suppressed and replaced with a simple blessing of the palms. For Holy Thursday, the vespers ceremony of the Washing of the Feet was incorporated into the Mass, and the word "hodie" ("This Day") added to the Roman Canon, the first step for turning the Canon into a narrative of the Last Supper, and the Mass into a Community Meal. For Good Friday, the Mass of the Presanctified would be suppressed, replaced with, of all things, a Communion Service. (The reception of Holy Communion on Good Friday had traditionally been banned for centuries.) The Liturgical Committee also ran roughshod over other things too vast and sundry to list here, but including the suppression of octaves and vigils, the Feast of St Joseph the Worker for the Communist MayDay, and the transference of the Chair of St Peter to February 22nd. The Great Architect, in an utterance in 1958, said that this was just the beginning of a comprehensive reform that would touch every aspect of the missal.
Pius XII would also allow the introduction of the "dialog mass" to warm congregations for coming attractions. In fact, so successful were the partisans of the "dialog" Mass at insisting the people needed to "participate" by being of One Voice that Pius XII had to reassure the dissenters with Mediator Dei, affirming that, yes, they could say their rosary at Mass and that they need not fear all this talk of reverting to the Early Church, which he condemned as "Antiquarianism", whatever that exactly means. But the pontiff did seem convinced that the Altar had "an ancient form as a table". That was a portent of things to come.
And meanwhile St Sr Lucia had insisted that the "Third Secret" of Fatima be released by 1960 because things would become "more clear". They did, indeed, the moment Good Pope John announced that he would convoke The Second Vatican Council.