As an SSPX freak yourself, what's your take on the following paper depicting your fellow Catholic fanatics?
The Society of St. Pius X Gets Sick
by Thomas W. Case (October 1992)
Fidelity Magazine - 206 Marquette Avenue - South Bend, IN 46617 - Phone: 219-289-9786
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Excerpt:
[Lefebvrite Bishop] Williamson, according to Fr. Abel, blames America for ever separating from the British Empire. (In which case we would have an established Anglican Church?) He also calls Indians (from India) "wogs," and believes that subcontinent should also have remained under British domination. He blames Americans for the unemployment problem in England. As good colonials, we should devote our wealth and industry to the English overlords.
The bishop's attacks on Rome and on the United States have become more and more unfettered. This year he spoke to a group of the faithful in Colorado. He said that "this pope is making Rome the spearhead of the 'All Religions Church.'" He said that this "New World Church will then use the power of the State against the Society. It will be in perfect sync with the New World Order ... then the police will come for you and me."
Well, the police may come for Richard Williamson and hand him over for deportation proceedings; for just afterwards, he said: "President Bush is a terrible traitor to this country. He is doing everything he can to dismantle the U.S. A. and integrate it into Russia and the New World Order, to the benefit of the Anti-Christ and to the absolute destruction of all that's best in the U.S.A."
Is it an exaggeration to say that this is the speech of a cult leader verging on paranoia? First he says "they" are going to come down on us, and a moment later he gives a reason why "they" might indeed come down on him. It won't be because his speech might be considered an incitement to political violence, and thus make him persona non grata to the Justice Department, but because "they" are the anti-Christ, necessarily out to persecute the last remnant of true believers.
Extremist politics flourishes at the Pius X Academy (the K-12 boarding school) and at the college in St. Mary's, Kansas. Since 1989, Fr. Ramon Angles has been rector of the combined institutions. The children in St. Mary's Academy learn to hate the American form of government. American icons are mocked. The Statue of Liberty is ridiculed as "a French prostitute." The only good government, the only Catholic government, is monarchy.
Democracy is evil. But Fr. Angles carries the critique further. It seems that good government comes to fruition in the anti-Semitic dictatorship of Nazi Germany. In an absurd transformation of good and evil, the mass murderer, demon worshiping, anti-Catholic, Adolf Hitler is metamorphosed into a type of Christian King. Fr. Angles has an apartment full of Nazi paraphernalia which he shows to favored boys. He shows them the Nazi ceremonial daggers worn by officers of the Third Reich. He is proud of the vintage Mercedes owned by his family, which once was owned by Adolf Hitler. A one-time student at the academy was favored by a special meeting with Fr. Angles a couple of years ago. In his private room on campus, Angles treated him and a friend to a pizza and a showing of the Nazi propaganda film, Triumph of the Will.
He played the film back, stopping it in places, commenting with fervor and reading from the stack of Hitler speech transcripts he had at his side. Leni Riefenstahl, the film's producer and a chief propagandist for the Third Reich, is still alive and resides in South America. Fr. Angles visits her often (he informs his students), and boasts of the association.
St. Mary's, Kansas, is a town driven by fear and controversy. When one father of a student at the academy talked of "Gestapo tactics," he meant that a moral tyranny rules the campus, that children are intimidated, brow-beaten, and informed upon by other children belonging to a perfectionist cadre called the Children of Mary. He means that people who disagree with Fr. Angles or cross him in any way are condemned from the pulpit, shunned and even physically threatened. Thirteen Academy students were expelled or suspended in the academic year 1990-91 for various imperfections in themselves or in their parents. Another 37 were withdrawn by distraught or shunned parents. A grandmother was refused Communion because her daughter had been shunned. A child was forced to kneel in the snow in the dead of winter for an hour as punishment for some minor infraction. Informants tell Fr. Angles if they spot a Society woman wearing pants in town. She and her family are then condemned from the pulpit. Children are taught to follow the rule of the priests and not their parents. If they follow their parents' authority instead, they are told that they are going to hell. They are told that their parents have satanic minds."
If you have read previous articles describing pernicious cults, you will recognize all the marks of a cult in the fortress at St. Mary's. A 10-year-old boy was brought to the clinic for a checkup. The doctor told the mother, "if I thought it would do any good, I'd turn you in for child abuse if you send that boy back to St. Mary's." The parents removed the boy from St. Mary's and placed him in public school, even though the priests taught the children that a child sent to public school would go to hell.
Psychological tests given public school entrants revealed a boy so traumatized that he was judged unable to function in a classroom setting. The family has now left the Society and left town.
Sandy Cossette's daughter planned to marry a young man from town who was not a Society member. She was denounced publicly from the pulpit. Her family was shunned. Now that family, still living in the town, is condemned to hell, according to the priests at St. Mary's. This type of supernatural sanction, perpetrated on strongly faithful Catholics, who know there is a heaven and a hell, and who have been taught that "Father is always right," is what brings St. Mary's right into line with the Moonies, the Hare Krishnas, the cult at Mount St. Michael, and all the other destructive cults that wield the stick of damnation over their flocks. "Outside the Society, there is no salvation," and anyone who crosses Fr. Angles is outside the Society. It is no wonder that one priest formerly associated with the Society describes St. Mary's as "a Jonestown waiting to happen."
A few members in the growing army of the ostracized, sick and tired of being threatened by Fr. Angles, have bought guns to protect their families. Meanwhile, a stalwart in the pro-Angles faction says that if criticism continues, "there will be blood on the streets of St. Mary's."
How have things comes to this pass? Not too long ago, a woman who had dared criticize Fr. Angles had an accident and went to the hospital. When she returned, she found her house had been burnt to the ground. There is no evidence that Fr. Angles and his henchmen were responsible, but they take a kind of spiritual credit for it. A woman caught wearing slacks received a letter from the administration saying "anyone who crosses Fr. Angles meets with tragedy," a reference to the house burning. This is the message that comes from the pulpit and spreads across the town to breed fear and, increasingly, a kind of desperate rage.
A couple months ago, a crony of Fr. Angles purchased a shipment of 15 or 20 SKS (Chinese) automatic rifles from a local gun dealer. An observer tells me that these guns are reappearing, one by one, in the hands of devoted Society members in the town. Not long ago, a friend went target shooting out by the Kansas river and ran into a bunch of these amateur marksmen trying to hone their skills. St. Mary's is not a happy town. It is a town face-to-face with the possibility of bloodshed.
The rehabilitation of Adolf Hitler is not just an aberration of Fr. Angles. The first American priest ordained into the Society of St. Pius X was one Father Gregory Post. One day, he took a plane flight and arrived at the San Jose, California, airport dressed in the fun regalia of an SS German army officer, complete with helmet, boots and swastika arm band. San Jose Pius X members who picked him up at the airport were indignant, and the then district superior of the society had to fly out to San Jose to reprimand the priest and cool off the situation.
There is a virulent sickness of hatred and Hitlerism running through the traditional Catholic movement. Why these folks have taken on the clothes of the very devil they detest is a matter for God to sort out. The strain runs through the Society of St. Pius X in France, whose priests see Marshall Petain as a hero and his pro-Nazi Vichy government of World War II as a paragon of virtue.
Catholic traditionalism as a whole in France is imbued with extreme right-wing politics. On the one side is the historical dream of a restored Catholic Monarchy, allied with pro-Hitler, anti-Semitic fascism. On the other side is Communism, liberalism democracy, the French Revolution, the Resistance and the Free French of World War II, and Charles de Gaulle. And this odd alliance of past Catholic glory and present right-wing extremism in politics finds a home in the special education program offered at St. Mary's Academy.
Both in France and in the United States, there is a question in traditional Catholic movements whether religion is informing politics or the other way around. Early in this century, the anti-Semitic Action Française supported the Catholic Church as a bastion against liberalism and socialism, but many in the Action Française were simply right-wing atheists who used the Church for their own purposes. Many of the priests in the United States who were to form the kernel of the traditionalist sectarians
were originally members of the Orthodox Roman Catholic Movement (ORCM). The ORCM was founded and run by Father Francis E. Fenton, who was also on the governing board of the John Birch Society. Now defunct as an organization, it was ripped apart by internal dissension, the ORCM's paranoid notions of wholesale Communist infiltration of U.S. Government and educational structures still motivates many in the traditional movement. Fenton is now a sede vacantist, while the John Birch Society has been branded an Americanist heresy by the leaders of the Society of St. Pius X. In sectarian movements, political or religious, your closest allies soon become your most dangerous enemies. Exaggerated political fears are often a deeper credo for some people than is the belief in God.
Impugning a person's religion because of his politics is a bad business, except when the religion disappears beneath the politics. This point was reached on the left when parish priests in Nicaragua took up arms for the Sandinistas, and when liberation theologians stole Catholic forms and rites and attached them to Marxist sacraments of revolutionary violence. It is reached on the right when children are taught that Adolph Hitler was a kind of saint and that his "Final Solution, if there ever was such a program, was an appropriate Christian solution to the 'Jewish Problem.'" With virulent anti-Semitism taught at St. Mary's and Winona, with other deranged doctrines concerning the U.S. Government and the Bill of Rights, with the belief that all women are damned eternally, it is no doubt true that Richard Williamson and his clique are ruining the Society.
But it might be truer to say that the Society as a whole is ruining Catholicism in its members. I've talked to several Pius X parishioners locally. After 10 or 20 years of propaganda, most are so imbued with a hatred for Rome that they seem content to remain forever in schism. They don't realize it, but they have found their identity as new Protestants.
To say "Protestant" in this connection is to say that the Society is preparing to complete its schism by establishing a fully separate church. How will this come about? Williamson suggests the way in a bulletin of October 1, 1989: "In the 1970s He [God] inspired an archbishop [Lefebvre] to give the laity a fresh start of priests, and in the late 1980s fresh bishops. There is no way all these can give themselves a new Pope, but if they stay with the Truth, God will finally give them a Pope of Truth. Within the Truth is within the Church, and without the Truth is without the Church."
The letter is certainly suggestive. Williamson is now (1992) strenuously lobbying for Fr. Schmidberger's position as superior general of the order (Note: he lost the vote in 1993 to Bernard Fellay; one of the Society's excommunicated bishops), and may succeed to that status in the next convocation. Will the convocation end up turning into a Papal Conclave? Will the pope of Truth descend from heaven? Will it be Williamson?
It will have been a meteoric rise for the Englishman. A student of languages at Cambridge, he was baptized at Econe in 1973. Three years later he was ordained a priest, and in 1988 he was consecrated a bishop. Will he soon join the club of anti-Popes that decorate the lunatic fringe of Catholicism?
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