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QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
Q. Is it true to say that now there is a "conciliar" Church?
The term "conciliar" is an adjective that has long been used to describe those things that relate to the Second Vatican Council, such as the documents, commissions, or novel teachings such as Religious Liberty and Ecumenism. The question raises the objection as to whether this adjective can be used to describe the Catholic Church after the Second Vatican Council.
In order to respond to the question a clear distinction has to be made. If by the term "church" is understood the visible, hierarchical structure, founded upon the rock of St. Peter, then clearly there can only be one Church, the Catholic Church. If we were to call the Catholic Church after Vatican II "conciliar" in this sense, then we would claim that it is no longer Catholic at all, but instead a separate visible, hierarchical structure. However, this is manifestly false, both because the adepts of Vatican II have hijacked the visible hierarchical structure of the Catholic Church, and because they profess publicly to be Catholics.
However, there is another sense in which the term "conciliar" can rightly be applied to the majority of persons who profess to be Catholic, as well as to their ideas and opinions, profoundly influenced as they are by the Second Vatican Council. In this sense "conciliar" refers to the persons who have embraced and who promote the novelties of Vatican II, as well as to the novelties themselves. There are varying degrees of influence of the modern errors, from liberal Catholicism through rash opposition to Tradition to outright apostasy. The term conciliar or post-conciliar can consequently be applied to the modernist church, not as it is a canonical institution, but inasmuch and to the degree that it promotes the revolutionary errors of Vatican II.
Archbishop Lefebvre understood this reality very clearly, and the grave danger brought about by the infiltration of all these modernist principles within the very bosom of the Catholic Church. He had this to say of Rome in 1974, in his famous declaration of November 21:
We hold fast, with all our heart and with all our soul, to Catholic Rome, Guardian of the Catholic Faith and of the traditions necessary to preserve this Faith, to Eternal Rome, Mistress of wisdom and truth.We refuse, on the other hand, and have always refused to follow the Rome of neo-Modernist and neo-Protestant tendencies which were clearly evident in the Second Vatican Council and, after the Council, in all the reforms which issued from it.
In his book Spiritual Journey, Archbishop Lefebvre explained how the end result of this conciliar Church is to separate its members little by little from the true Catholic Church established by Our Lord. By this he means that its revolutionary principles of freedom at all cost separate the clergy and faithful little by little from Tradition and produce indifferentism for all religions, eventually destroying the Catholic faith in the one true Church, and bringing about a generalized apostasy, even of those persons who outwardly appear to still be members of the Catholic Church.
Certainly, the Church itself guards its sanctity and its sources of sanctification, but the control of its institutions by unfaithful popes and apostate bishops ruins the faith of the faithful and the clergy, sterilizes the instruments of grace, and favors the assault of all the powers of Hell which seem to triumph. This apostasy makes its members adulterers, schismatics opposed to all Tradition, separated from the past of the Church, and thus separated from the Church of today, in the measure that it remains faithful to the Church of Our Lord. (p. 54)
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