Catholic Candle note: Below are the charming recollections we received from one of our senior readers. Her account speaks from her heart and shows her love of what is truly Catholic and normal. This is an edifying memoire of a faithful Catholic, rather than a work of meticulously-researched history. So, we have left her words intact without footnotes or qualifications.
Catholic Candle encourages other readers to submit articles for the glory of God and the salvation of souls.
Reminiscences of
Pre-Vatican II Life and
How It Came to Ruin
Chicago neighborhoods in the fifties and several decades before, were a clean, orderly, quiet patchwork of cottages, bungalows, and modest apartment buildings populated by nuclear families. The fathers, even in the Depression of the ‘30s, went to work early in the mornings, freeing the mothers to maintain the home and nurture the children, who walked with their friends to school and then home again for lunch. At 2:45, the children again walked home—the boys to play games like “cops and robbers”, “war”, “Cowboys and Indians”, etc., the girls to ride their bikes, or roller skate, or perhaps to walk their beloved dolls in their “doll buggies”.
In the morning the mothers could leisurely comb the girls’ hair into “long curls” (unseen, of course, since pre-1940s). A 1939 survey found the main complaint of Chicago Public High Schools to be “gum-chewing”.
Among the hundreds of large parish churches in Pre-Vatican II Chicago, some seated a thousand or more congregants. Sunday Mass times were 6:00, 7:00, 8:00, 9:00 (Children’s Mass), 10:00 High Mass, 11:00, and 12:00 p.m. The parishioners, suitably attired, would walk in silent contemplation to the parish church (few had cars until the fifties), filling the pews for the 9:00, 10:00, 11:00, and 12:00 Masses – the noon Mass stretching to standing room only, to accommodate the young Saturday night revelers, who stood and knelt as appropriate throughout the forty-five-minute service.
My husband has told me that in the earlier days of the Vietnam War—on the battlefields, when a priest could get through – the Catholic soldiers would race to the Mass site. I’ve never seen anyone race to a novus ordo mass. The rallying cry of the fifteenth century English Catholic martyrs was, “It’s the Mass that matters”, (as opposed to the Protestant Novus Ordo, which finally at Vatican II, took down almost all of the rest of the Catholic world, leaving fewer than ever Traditional Catholics, who now await the proper Consecration of Russia and its effects).
The Schools
Educators came from around the country to study the Chicago Public Schools – staffed mainly by teachers educated, as I was, by the Catholic Religious. The many Catholic public-school teachers in Chicago founded the Aquin Guild, with a monthly Mass (Tridentine, of course), and conference. The students paid the remarkable low price of $1.00 per month for their tuition.
At my typical pre-Vatican II Catholic elementary school, staffed by Adrian Dominican Sisters, we prayed at the beginning of the day, and again to begin afternoon classes. After morning prayers, the Sister would call the children alphabetically – who would reply, “Present, Sister”. (For whatever reason the total number of children in my classroom always seemed to be 42). Next came, as necessary, Catechism class in which the Sister called on the children individually to respond from memory to the Baltimore Catechism questions from their homework. Math, reading, spelling, history/geography, English grammar, and sometimes art or music, completed the school day.
In all eight years of grammar school, I can remember only one instance of “discipline”. In fourth grade, the Sister left the room for a few minutes, and a few boys began to chat. When she returned she directed the boys to hit their hands several times with their rulers.
The girls had their playground and the boys had theirs. Inside the school building and out, the atmosphere was peaceful – playful on the playground, but peaceful.
In the earlier days of the SSPX, priests commented that in a classroom, children without a T.V. at home stood out as self-controlled and “normal.”
Subversion of Curriculum
The pre-Vatican II period was also, until the late 1940s, pre-television; in general, the population thought more clearly than now – but of “Liberty & Freedom”; not so much. Misguided patriotism seems to have blinded the people. Here is an example of the contradictory messages taught in Catholic schools:
In the morning, we learned, substantially, that the purpose of free will, enabled by grace, was to choose the good. In the afternoon history class, we would learn – for example, from Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, that “Our Fathers brought forth on this Continent, a new-nation, conceived in liberty” – as indeed the revolutionaries had done, as they immediately removed the cross from the flag – (which, by the way, the Confederates from the next century, did not remove).
Indeed, the Catholic French and Spanish spiritual forefathers of those American Catholic children had already brought forth on this Continent, (as originally mapped by the devout Catholic Americus Vespucci) – thriving Catholic civilizations, from the university level down, before Lincoln’s forefathers even got here.
The (Traditional) Catholic Church of the Middle Ages conceived and executed the very idea of a “university,” – at Paris, Cambridge, Oxford, Bologna, Salamanca, the Sorbonne, Louvain, etc. The French and Spanish governments made strenuous efforts to continue the process of establishing and encouraging education, sending ten thousand consecrated religious at a time to civilize, assimilate, educate the Indians of North, South, and Central America. (This was in contrast to the Puritan forefathers who liked to shoot Indians for sport, while their [Puritan] cousins martyred the starving Catholics of Ireland by trampling them under the hooves of horses).
Before Vatican II, graces available in the Church somewhat elevated and permeated U.S. society at large. Women’s skirt lengths generally extended below the knee, with special occasions requiring hat and gloves. (Hats and silence, of course, were mandatory for women in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament.) Before John F. Kennedy, men wore hats often and not just for special occasions.
From the beginning of Vatican II until I discovered Archbishop Lefebvre’s Society of St. Pius X (unfortunately liberalized after his death), I forced myself to attend the Novus Ordo Mass, at which I never saw the pews filled.
About women’s skirt lengths: I read in my post-graduate research, an 1820s extract from The Masonic Journal – I think that was its title – that though it seems absurd, the first step in the necessary corruption of women was to raise skirts from the floor. I read this piece in the early heyday of the miniskirt.
Researching further to account for the apparently sudden collapse in the 1960s of the remnants of Christian civilization, I learned that in the 1920s the Vatican had forbidden women to make spectacles of themselves by performing athletics in public.
As readers know, in 1917, Our Lady of Fatima (correctly) predicted, “Fashions which offend My Son very much will be introduced”. I read that Our Lady’s words compelled the Vatican that same year to finally explain for the first time that, among other obvious requirements – skirts should extend several inches below the knee. (Padre Pio required of his penitents’ skirts and dresses to be at least eight inches below the knee.)
As far as I have learned, no U.S. bishop disseminated either of the Vatican’s directives (viz., about women as public spectacles and concerning skirt-length).
Speaking of women’s decorum in public – I once saw a picture in a magazine of mobs of men filling the streets of Sicily, in celebration of the allied World War II victory in 1945. There were no women in the streets. (In Chicago, men and women indiscriminately mobbed State Street for the same occasion.)
All this doesn’t begin to address the massive semi-nudity on the beaches and streets. Such semi-nudity was directly caused by Vatican II serving its demonic purpose of virtually annihilating the Tridentine Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, that had acted as the chief restraint against the forces of hell.
A major demonic preliminary to Vatican II and major offense against Our Lord, was the destruction which Robert Oppenheimer demanded of the only two Catholic enclaves in Japan: Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Popular consensus, which was giddy with the Atom bomb and the unconditional surrender of the Axis side in World War II, celebrated with a new swim suit style of enhanced public semi-nudity, unseen since the Church civilized the barbaric hordes of Europe in the early Middle Ages. Their new fashion icon “Bikini,” was named after an unpopulated Pacific atoll Bikini, which was destroyed by a then-experimental atomic bomb. Indeed “Bikini” has become, over the decades, a catchword joke for women’s beachwear which covers almost nothing. The U.S. bomber nuking Hiroshima sported on its fuselage, a large graphic of a voluptuous woman in a pre-Bikini, World War I vintage swim suit.
Eight German Jesuit missionary priests lived near the small Hiroshima Cathedral, probably in the immediate area of the nuclear blast in Hiroshima – which Robert Oppenheimer demanded, and which the Freemason Truman readily authorized. (He earned his honorary 33rd Masonic degree by his consent.) The priests could see the flash as they cut their breakfast grapefruit, but felt no personal pain. Medical examinations cleared all of these priests. One of them (I think Father Schiffer was his name) traveled the world for decades, explaining that the Jesuit missionaries were merely living the Jesuit rule, incorporating the daily Rosary, as Our Lady of Fatima requested of everyone, and that they specifically had devotion to the Fatima message. They were known as the “Amazing Hiroshima Eight”. They not only survived the bombing, but also survived the radiation poisoning aftermath.
U.S. Hierarchy and Laity Refuse to Resist
Before Vatican II, people generally lived at home with their families – each girl building her “hope chest” of accessories for her future home; and the boys saving their money to support their future families. In the ordinary middle-class standards of the era, I never encountered the various four letter-words now seemingly heard everywhere but which, before Vatican II, were not in common use.
The Vatican II blitzkrieg of the mid-sixties took no prisoners. Women wore mini-skirts or trousers almost everywhere; crucifixes disappeared from school walls; consecrated altars and statuary appeared in second-hand stores. I read that one of Pope Paul VI’s tiaras turned up in a resale shop. Religious Sisters abandoned their sacred habit for uniforms reminiscent of the blue jumpers of the postulancy; college administrators crumbled before girl-terrorists demanding Get Out of Vietnam Now or Else. I read that the year Vatican II ended, the Vatican granted sixty-five annulments worldwide and, not many years afterwards, they granted sixty-five thousand worldwide.
B’nai B’rith required that the Second Vatican Council repudiate its doctrine of “no salvation outside the Church”, and so it was. The “Council Fathers” set in motion the request that nine Protestant ministers would help to gut the Tridentine Sacrifice and this happened, replacing it (of course) with their own Luther/Cranmer Novus Ordo of the 1500s.
The religion itself having been thrown out, the Church buildings came to resemble semi-empty railroad stations with disheveled, slouching congregants in the pews. I once saw a college-level guy sitting in pew – eating an apple, in the otherwise-empty Holy Name Cathedral in Chicago. I’ve seen twenty-something Marquette students squatting on the floor, attending, (or not) to the novus ordo mass at the Jesu Church in Milwaukee.
Vatican II: The French
Revolution within the Church
(As Arch. Lefebvre used to say.)
Having completed my many history-related courses in the best immediately Pre-Vatican II schools, I never encountered there, as far as I can recall, the words “Talmud”, “goyim”, “mason”, or “Free-mason.” In general, the early English-speaking U.S. Bishops folded themselves and their compliant sheep eagerly into the Masonic pantheon of thirty-six thousand-plus sects of all religions, or no religion(s).
The Catholic school history books even today, for example, largely mirror the books of the “public” schools. Had the early U.S. Bishops alerted the Catholic immigrants of the Luciferian-Talmudic-“Enlightenment” and its determination to eradicate the Traditional Catholic Church from the earth, perhaps the human element of the U.S. Catholic Church of the 1960s would not have almost-totally collapsed as it did at Vatican II.
Indeed, Vatican II continued on a trajectory that began before the Masonic U.S. existed. The century before the American and French revolutions, Our Lord, to defend against the coming onslaught, directed King Louis XIV to inscribe on the French flag, the image of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. However, Louis XIV, Louis XV, and Louis XVI demurred; and then one hundred years later – to the day – after Our Lord gave this command to King Louis XIV, the French Assembly deposed Louis XVI from his throne. In a street of Paris, the Masonic mob assassinated Louis XVI and his always-libeled wife, Queen Marie Antoinette.
Phi Beta Kappa researcher Solange Hertz reports that in her study of the French journalistic output of the era, nowhere does “Let them eat cake” appear. Queen Marie Antoinette had ordered the expulsion of the spectacularly libertarian publishers, Franklin and Jefferson. Perhaps this indignity provoked them to concoct and spread the “Let them eat cake” libel, which continues to this day.
Jefferson and Madison, in their journal Citizen’s Gazette, had egged on their French Masonic brethren to the “Mother of all revolutions,” viz., the French Revolution. The Masonic mob, after relieving the Bastille of its fourteen never-do-wells, enthroned a prostitute as “goddess of reason” on the desecrated main altar of Notre Dame (Our Lady) Cathedral in Paris.
This prostitute – the “goddess of reason” is the precursor of the eventually-created “Statue of Liberty”, which holds aloft the classic “light” of Luciferian/illuminist iconography. This abomination is a gift of the Masonic French government to their brethren in the Masonic U.S. government, for unflagging support for the genocidal massacre totaling hundreds of thousands: of Bishops, priests, consecrated nuns and other religious; fathers, mothers, children, infants – and even farm animals and pets as occurred in the Vendee region of northern France.
From the beginning, it was Franklin who brought Voltaire into Masonry, and not the reverse. Voltaire was and is most admired for proclaiming, “I don’t agree with a word you say, but I defend to the death your right to say it” – except, of course, for the truths taught by the Catholic Church, which he was determined to annihilate.
Voltaire died a screaming madman, gulping down the contents of his chamber pot, with brother Masons, including Franklin in attendance. (Franklin, at the U.S. Constitutional Convention, warned his brethren that in their obsession to obliterate the Church of Rome, they were overlooking “the Jews,” “who” if admitted to the U.S. would usurp all the power in the U.S. within two hundred years.)
This emphasis on the destruction of Catholic France sprang from the unpleasant reality that France was the leading Catholic power and the dominant political power of Europe. Jefferson’s desire on his deathbed was that other nations follow the U.S./French lead in the destruction of “monkish ignorance and superstition”, as he put it. This goal of destroying what is Catholic has been largely achieved in the Church’s human element, up to and including in the citadel of the Vatican, by Vatican II and its implementation, including the Vatican pressuring the few remaining Catholic nations to succumb.
In addition to his four legitimate children, Jefferson fathered at least six illegitimate children by a slave he inherited from his father-in-law. The affluent Jefferson rages in his writings against “monkish ignorance and superstition.” The Protestant William Cobbett, an English contemporary who published his own book at about the time Jefferson died, wrote that since the 1500s, English children had been imbued from their mothers’ knees with gratitude for having been freed from “monkish ignorance and superstition.” Cobbett himself had enjoyed no such freedom, having spent his Dickensonian childhood as a rabbit chaser, and probably a weed-picker, on the estate (previously part of the public patrimony of the monasteries) of an Anglican Bishop and his family as well as his entourage. The word “pauper” entered the English language under Henry VIII and his illegitimate daughter Elizabeth, the original plunderers of the public patrimony of the monasteries. The descendants of some of those who were kicked off the stolen monastic lands, migrated to London where, years later, Charles Dickens described their plight.
From his youth, Cobbett researched the phrase “monkish ignorance and superstition”; eventually publishing a one hundred-sixty-page book, the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland – concluding that it was monkish knowledge and wisdom (rooted in the means of grace), which throughout the Middle Ages elevated the barbarous European hordes into Christian civilization.
One of the six causi belli (“causes of war”) of the U. S. revolution was the non-Mason King George’s permission to the citizens of Quebec to freely practice their Traditional Catholic Faith, in land adjacent to the New England colonies. The Archbishop of Quebec excommunicated John Carroll, S.J., one of the rebel legates vainly pressuring Quebec to join the revolt – which was generously financed by wealthy Masons, according to the debriefings of General Howe.
The Catholic establishment in the U.S., obsequious from the first to their Masonic masters, submitted to – in fact originally suggested – the Masonic requirement that for citizenship, all must first accept the objective legitimacy and equality of all “religions” – thus gutting the core of the Catholic Faith.
Our Lord, having established His Church at the price of His atrocious sufferings, mandates His Church as essential to salvation. Obviously what Our Lord has established is true and anything “protesting” this is false. The ten million Catholic martyrs of the first three centuries of the Christian era, under the popes of this period – almost all of them martyrs also – refused the absurdity of the then–pantheon of false gods of the self-proclaimed 30,000 “religions” at the time.
Had the U.S. founding fathers crafted a First Amendment of Mutual Tolerance to Prevent Violence, as had been forged at the Treaty of Westphalia, for example, or as warring nations have forged a truce to stop bloodshed, all “religions” and “nonreligions” could at least maintain a semblance of intellectual honesty. The Traditional Catholic Church condemns Protestantism for its determination to supplant the Church. The Protestants condemn the Church for claiming to be infallible in Faith and Morals – especially morals.
Again, Jefferson desired to obliterate Catholicism and this was the goal of the Luciferian/Talmudic/Masonic/“Enlightenment” establishment. Perhaps this goal would not have been so well fulfilled at Vatican II (as to the Church’s human element), if the early U.S. Catholic Bishops had warned the early Catholic immigrants about this plot.
At this point, the only solution to obtain world peace remains: the Pope and Bishops together must consecrate Russia to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary as Our Lord directed through Our Lady, and Sister Lucia and her superiors in 1929.
In 1931, Our Lord expressed His exasperation to Sister Lucia that virtually nothing had been done to accomplish the Consecration. The intransigent refusal of the Popes and Bishops since 1929, to consecrate Russia precisely and simply, as Our Lord directed, has of course provoked the magnitude of the world’s horrors since then. Our Lord told Sister Lucia that the Consecration would be done, but it would be “late”. When the Consecration is performed, she then said that the resulting blessings would last “for a time.”
Sister Lucia, in her memoirs of 1957, wrote that Our Lady had revealed that in response to the escalating corruption engulfing the world from the Papacy down (including Vatican II), Our Lord was making the rosary – which is accessible to all – more efficacious than ever. Our Lady told Sister Lucia, “There is no problem which cannot be solved” by seriously praying the daily rosary, the “rosary” being a chronological series of meditations on redemptive events in the lives of Our Lord and Our Lady. Our Lord told Sister Lucia that the Consecration would be done when a sufficient number of souls were praying the daily rosary for this intention.
Photographs of Sister Lucia before 1957 bear no resemblance to “photographs” of her after then.
About the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, as codified at Trent: the Papal decree enforcing the Tridentine Sacrifice of all time admonishes the world that anyone attempting to alter this Sacrifice of all time, would “incur the wrath of the holy apostles Peter and Paul.”
Among the scores of caskets of canonized saints in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, only two caskets remain open: those of the incorrupt bodies of Pope St. Pius V, who implemented the Council of Trent and the Tridentine Sacrifice; and of Pope St. Pius X, who more than four hundred years later, would advise Theodore Herzl that the unrepentant descendants of the Talmudic Jews who engineered the crucifixion of Our Lord, should never exercise authority in the Holy Land. (The perennial Talmudic/Islamic chaos in the Holy Land since 1947, of course, speaks for itself).
The French Revolutionary Army General Francois Westermann wrote the following:
There is no Vendee …. According to the orders that you gave me, I crushed the children under the hooves of the horses, massacred the women who at least for these will not give birth to any more brigands. I do not have a prisoner to reproach me. I have exterminated all, including farm animal and family pets.
Quoted from a letter to the French Committee of Public Safety, 1794.
In delighted response to the final Masonic victory, Jefferson wrote:
The liberty of the whole earth was depending on the issue of this contest (the French Revolution) and was ever a prize (hundreds of thousands of guillotined Catholics) won with so little innocent [Masonic] blood? I have expressed to you my sentiments, because they are really those of 99 of a hundred of our citizens. The universal feasts and rejoicings which have lately been had on account of the successes of the French showed the genuine effusions of their hearts.
Quoted from http/founders. archives.gov/document/Jefferson01-25-02-001
Thomas Jefferson wrote this concerning Our Lord Jesus Christ:
If we could believe that he (Jesus) really countenanced the follies, the falsehoods, and the charlatanism which his biographers (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) claim he taught, and (if we could) admit the misconstructions, interpretations, and theorizations of the fathers of the early ages (St. Augustine, St. Jerome, etc.) and fanatics of the latter ages, the conclusion would be irresistible by every sound mind that he (Jesus) was an imposter.
Jefferson, Memoirs, Correspondence and Private Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 1829, p. 333.
Meanwhile, the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe continues to reign in humility, modesty, and dignity, at the geographic center of the Americas, as it has since 1531 A.D., as we see so many North, South, and Central Americans continue to pervert their reason and free will and repudiate Our Lady and her Divine Son Whom she brings us in His Traditional Catholic Church.
May God help us and them!