Meet the Traditional Redemptorists who CALLED OUT the Synodal Church
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Summary
In October, a Catholic order of priests and monks called the Sons of the Most Holy Redeemer, a traditional order of Catholics, sent out an open letter to the Catholic hierarchy. What does this mean for the future of the Catholic Church? And what does it mean for their community? In this episode, we speak with Fr. Michael Mary, the leader of the order.
Transcript
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The old nun who taught me, she used to say, if it's Catholic, you can kick it.
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So we've given it a good kick to see what's this all about, you know.
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Hello, my friends. Welcome to the John Henry Weston Show.
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We've got something very interesting for you today.
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You know, over the past, well, over 13 years now, we've had Catholics,
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and not only Catholics in the laity, but Catholics in the hierarchy,
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priests, and even religious orders, wondering what to do in our very, very confusing situation.
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Just in October, right around October 16th, a Catholic order of priests and monks called
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the Sons of the Most Holy Redeemer, they're a traditional congregation.
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They decided to issue an open letter to the Catholic bishops, priests and religious and faithful.
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And basically, what they did was they repudiated what they called the Synodal Church.
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We're going to speak now with Fr. Michael Mary.
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Fr. Michael Mary, thanks for joining us. God bless you.
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Let's begin, as we always do, with the Son of the Cross.
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I have an editor in Scotland, and so she's told me about you.
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But if you could tell us a little bit about your community.
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We started here in Scotland in 1999 when we bought this island.
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But before that, previously, we'd lived in England and in France.
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England first, and then later France, then here in Papastronzee.
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Papastronzee is a small island in the Orkneys, and it's about a mile by a mile.
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It's a little island we own it ourselves, and we come here by our own fishing boat across
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to the neighbouring island, and there we catch a boat.
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So we're about an hour and a half directly by sea north of mainland Orkney, and that's
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about another couple of hours north of mainland Scotland.
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We've got, in our congregation, we're about 30 members, and here in this monastery we're
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We like to live a life that's recollected, according to St.
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Alphonsus, who wanted us to be recollected in the home and apostles outside.
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So it's a life here of prayer and silence and work.
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A lot of bad weather, you know, but you know about that in Canada, so we can't talk about
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External ministry would be preaching missions when we're invited.
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These days, that's a lot rarer than you'd imagine.
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And we have a chaplaincy, or we had a chaplaincy, in Christchurch in New Zealand, which has been
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And we also have a little foundation over in Montana in America.
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You were at one point associated with the SSPX, the Society of Pius X, and then after
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Samorum Pontificum, the document from Pope Benedict, you became more mainstream, I guess you could
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And then I went to Econ in Switzerland in 1987.
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And the following year, which was the year of the Consecrations of the Four Bishops, it
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was planned that we'd make a community for this English-speaking world in the UK.
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We worked with the Society of St. Pius X preaching missions.
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When Pope Benedict XVI put out his Modu Proprosum Pontificum, he said that we would be able to
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And he said also that we shouldn't have a schism if we can avoid it.
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Well, we didn't think we were in schism, that's for sure.
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But the thought of being joined up with the Church and being able to live tradition in
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In 2008, we started the work of having what they call the reconciliation with Rome.
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We were able to prepare constitutions and get everything ready.
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We met a little bit of obstacle from part of the hierarchy who weren't very happy with
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But we persevered and it came to fruit in 2012.
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It all changed really, I think, with the coming of Francis when everything started to close
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down and it got more and more bleak as his time went on to the point where we thought, we've done it.
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We had, because he was closing things down, we had the Bishop in Christ which wanted to close us down, which was a pretty bad move on his part because, you know, we had gone there with an invitation in the end.
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In the beginning, we went out there as part of like SSPX under the umbrella of SSPX.
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We were there for about a year and I think they wanted to flush us out.
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They invited the SSP in, but the priest who came was actually a good friend and we got on very well.
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And so in the end, the SSP said, well, you know, we haven't got room for two priests there.
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And the Bishop at the time, gruff, lovely guy, straight as a die.
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And he eventually, Bishop Barry Jones, God rest him, he gave us a canonical invitation to come into the diocese and start a house.
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Well, that's the idea of a canonical invitation is that you're there until the Day of Judgment.
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Now we've got a house and we've got space in New Zealand, which is very good because I'm a New Zealander myself and I'm from the South Island.
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And they needed the old mass there in the South Island, of course.
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And then Bishop Barry Jones also offered us the chaplaincy.
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I think we've got half a priest's pay to be a chaplain.
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We lived on half a priest's pay and anything else we could scrape together.
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And lots of vocations, you know, lovely people coming forward.
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We have never had a vocation pamphlet to really speak of.
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Of course, you can't have something good and not have enemies.
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And I assume we must have had some people who were looking the wrong way at us, which is fine.
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Then we had this famous canonical visitation, apostolic visitation, by an old bishop from Australia who was quite well known for closing down and having successful visitations.
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He never really asked us any questions at all concerning what they were talking about, that we had done illegal, illegal exorcisms.
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You know, anything about exorcisms, you'd have to have something wrong with your head to want to do a formal exorcism without the authority of the authority of a bishop or someone.
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So it was a lot of smoke, but no fire, as far as I know.
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And it was decided that, no, he came to visit us.
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Some of the brothers said, well, what's it all about?
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But in fact, you know, the good bishop there, well, I hope he's a good bishop, whoever he is, he had written three times in success or contact with the Holy See, needing an apostolic visitation, needing an apostolic visitation three times.
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In short, like a couple of weeks apart, 14th of August, end of August, a few days into September, he'd gone to the Holy See saying, we need an apostolic visitation here.
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It had all the flavor of a massive crime syndicate.
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So he got the visitation, but it ended up being that we had a contract that the bishop said the contract had expired and therefore we were no longer wanted.
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We had already bought a property in the country, which is where the seat for the canonical house.
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And we had the church, it was an old Protestant church, meeting hall for the closed brethren.
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We turned it into a little chapel there, an oratory, and we have a house and a place for people to have cups of tea and whatnot.
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We've got about, I'd say, a couple of hundred people, 200 people.
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That's about our best, but I'd say 150, 200 people coming regularly every Sunday, beautiful choir and everything quite peaceful from our point of view.
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I suppose with three priests out there, you've got about, you know, at least 21 to 24 masses a week, which I don't suppose is very good for the statistics if you're against the old mass.
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You know, 21 masses here is far too many, so they sent us, trying to send us away.
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But there's a question, you know, South Island is, I suppose, very small for Canada, but South Island for people in Europe, it's the same size as England and Wales.
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And if you wanted to find another old mass, okay, the bishop's putting one on.
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It's just there for the, you know, it's there for, well, we're there, there'll be an old mass.
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But when we go, I would say that would be going too anyway.
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To go to another mass, you'd have to go to Auckland.
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Australia is the same distance as Scotland to Moscow.
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When people have been there, some people have moved their houses from other parts of the island to come all the way up to Christchurch,
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to buy a house, invest their money, find a job for the mass, for the catechism, for their kids.
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We had a jolly nice, got a nice boy in Australia who's done a great amount of work for us.
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I went to Rome once, met a priest there who was going to help us.
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He said, well, you know, like 50,000 for a mass to offer to the cardinal.
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But apparently that was considered to be a way.
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So, that's how it's, that's a bit of the scenery we're coming from.
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Some people say there's a process for everything, but the processes aren't working so well, I don't think.
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I wanted to ask you about the timing of your letter.
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We're going to get into the letter as well, but the timing of it's very interesting.
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You sort of survived through the Francis pontificate with a lot of hardship.
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But a lot of the people who were watching, especially the faithful, were thinking, how are so many of the orders, and for that matter, the bishops and cardinals, how are they just sort of going with this and not doing a Vigano or a Father Altman?
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And then, into the Leo pontificate, you guys issued this letter.
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It was a long time, and you guys already suffered much.
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What was that, what was the straw that broke the camel's back, or what was your thinking in terms of, now we have to do this?
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It's very slow, because this is a kind of a bit of a build-up.
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So, I would pinpoint the build-up, partly to do with Christchurch.
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But specifically, if I had my 9-11, it was Francis in Singapore telling those children, is my God bigger than your God?
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I was in Rome at the time, and I thought, what the heck is going on?
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And then, to look to the side, there was a shot to the side.
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There was a bit of a, not a grandstand, but a whole lot of seats there, with religious dignitaries all sitting there listening.
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There was a young interpreter to his side, interpreting from Italian to English.
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He should have said, in the middle of the year, what is this about?
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Now, yesterday I was watching the Pope in Rome with the foreign religions.
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I listened to the speech, and he's in English, so we can understand him very clearly.
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And he's saying, to foreign religions, to Buddhists and Shintos and Muslims and Jews, to a lot of them.
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You know, as I said before, many a time now, the old nun who taught me, she used to say, if it's Catholic, you can kick it.
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So, we've given it a good kick to see, what's this all about, you know?
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And I think the whole thing percolated and percolated, and people thought, and eventually, we had to say, well, we'd better sit down and talk and see what we think about all of this.
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So, you can say it's at least probably nearly a year old, early in the coming.
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And the big question that stems from that is, weren't you afraid of the punishments that would come from issuing the open letter?
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Because I think, I personally think, because I know a lot of the cardinals and the bishops, and I know them to have known.
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I've talked with them personally about issues of the exact same kind in the pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict,
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where they railed publicly on the side of the Pope against the exact same, I want to say heresies, but I'm not a theologian,
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the exact same issues that are not Catholic, and they would speak very forthrightly against them.
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Some of them even told me, I won't talk to journalists about these things.
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And I had been talking with them as friends for a decade.
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I don't know if I should ascribe to that fear of retaliation or concern for a schism or something.
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Was there any kind of fear of punishment for signing the open letter?
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If you're honest, no one wants to be ostracized.
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We're in a position where we own what we own, so they can't throw us onto the street exactly.
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But they can do, I suppose, if we have enemies or people who want to punish us,
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You could be lay-aside, you could be excommunicated, you could be suspended, you could be suppressed.
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What's the good of being a religious if you can't stand up for what you know is the truth?
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Oh, by the way, there's no Blessed Sarkin here.
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This is just a place where we say Massive and there's an overflow of priests.
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You know, we have the red vestments of the martyrs and we love the martyrs.
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We're afraid of being thrown on the street or we're afraid of being ostracized or afraid of being punished.
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The apostles were happy to be scourged for the love of Jesus.
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Now, Jesus is the one who's missing out on this whole business.
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We're talking with these people from foreign religions and not even mention the holy name of Jesus,
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saying that, you know, we haven't got the truth now in the church.
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Well, for goodness sake, if we haven't got the truth, I've got the...
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Oh, my God, who art the infallible truth, who can neither deceive nor be deceived.
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I believe all that the holy church proposes to my belief because thou hast revealed it to her.
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Now, if the Catholic church isn't the foundation of truth, yeah, I agree.
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Then tell all the Buddhists, tell the Shintos, tell the whole lot of them that there's no...
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He wasted his time and the martyrs wasted their lives and the missionaries wasted their lives.
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And the priests today might as well go off and become some other religion and do something else.
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And if we can't have that, then you can take the whole lot away.
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And he tells you, he says, this is one of the worst things, this religious indifference-ism.
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This getting all these religions together and making out all the same is one of the worst things you can have.
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He says, number 13, Marari Vos on indifference-ism.
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This perverse opinion is spread on all sides by the fraud of the wicked.
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Gregory XVI say, that's the fraud of the wicked you're spreading, who claim that it is possible to obtain the eternal salvation of the soul by the profession of any kind of religion, as long as morality is maintained.
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And he tells the bishops, drive this deadly error away.
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So we can't say the Catholic Church hasn't got the truth.
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If the Catholic Church hasn't got the truth, it's got nothing.
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I want to thank you so much for your prayers, for your support for Life State News.
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We're going to continue to fight despite everything they throw at us.
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I would beg for your support so that we can continue this work.
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Please consider Life State News and your giving.
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I want to press you on one other thing because, Father, this affects not only the priests and
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religious, it affects the laity as well, particularly those of us who are speaking out.
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And I've been asked by even my wife and others, what are you going to do if?
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We were told already years ago that, you know, should you continue to speak out?
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Despite the fact that we're trying to speak out charitably and for the sake of the Church,
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for the sake of the Pope even, and his soul, because I believe very firmly in our Lord's
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And I have, I don't even know what to make of that because I survive on sacraments.
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I love our Lord, love going to daily mass, but I don't know that I could survive without
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So someone's going to shoot you or someone's going to, yeah, that's more of a concern for
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But when they talk about you'll be excommunicated or something like that, or denied the sacraments,
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And what, what are we, how are we supposed to make sense of that?
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You can't be, you can't be excommunicated for loving Christ.
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You can't be loving, you can't be excommunicated for loving the Catholic Church.
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You can't be excommunicated for sticking up for the Catholic Church.
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If that's so, it's the excommunicator who is in fault.
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It's the excommunicator because he's the, he is then the persecutor of our Lord's church,
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And if Pius X said, you read in Pashendi in 19.7, he's saying the enemies are within the
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church, right into a vital organs or something to the center of that, right into the
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If those enemies weren't got out and if they continue to grow, and we know they did, they've
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And now it's becoming, not exactly, but it's kind of like physical now because now we can
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say, you know, you can say that letter, you just take, I would like to see this happen.
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So this, if you could say, I repudiate Amoris Laetitiae, Fiducia Suplicans, and document
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On a postcard, sign it and send it to a priest and say, will you sign with me on these things?
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Are you one also, where are you in this great, in this great shamozzle that we've got and
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You'll find out who are the Catholics because you can't be a Catholic and go along with these
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Well, we might as well just join the Shintos now.
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This is all part, our Lord says it's the infallible truth.
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If this truth from the beginning is now out of step and has expired, that's not the truth
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So we just need to find out who are the people we're living with?
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Say, do you or don't you go along with Amoris Laetitiae?
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And if he doesn't sign it or if he's silent, silence is consent.
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Then you need to wipe them off, tick them off and find out where the bishops are that we
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can trust, where the priests that we can actually trust, find where they are.
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If there's a movement of it in the church, I think it'd be a wonderful thing.
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We'd see where we are because at the moment we're all in a fog.
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By implication, you're saying something very similar to what Bishop Schneider told me once.
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Bishop Athanasius Schneider was on a program with me where he discussed the access to the
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He was one of the official visitators for the Vatican under Benedict to the SSPX.
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And he came out saying, yeah, they're just Catholics.
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In fact, he said the SSPX would be a sort of a safe house for or a escape route for Catholics
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But in addition, he gave sort of his blessing to an independent monastery that was being
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set up outside of the local bishops' official jurisdiction, which I thought was very interesting.
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Because it does basically say that if you're in this weird situation and punished for it,
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that these things aren't real and that you can still receive the sacraments.
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But sorry, it's just difficult to discern, especially for the laity who think, I don't know,
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You're trying to discern, trying to serve the church faithfully and yet trying to stay
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But it's very heartening to at least see that you might still have the sacraments despite
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being officially or unofficially or however it would go denied.
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You raised something else, Father, which I think is very important.
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And I would encourage everybody to go and look at your open letter, because I think the
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open letter itself was very helpful because it outlined, and I'll go through a little bit
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We repudiate amoris laetitia permitting Holy Communion to couples to live in sin.
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We repudiate traditionis custodos persecution of the mass and Catholics.
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We repudiate fiducius supplicans permitting the blessing of same-sex couples.
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We repudiate the document on human fraternity stating that God wills all religions.
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It's a beautiful summary of the errors and very concise.
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And so I think there's, by the way, it's a great work.
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It sees at least her simple faithful who are just trying to get a handle on things.
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So just a big thank you for that and for your work in making that document with your brothers.
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And that is, I think some people will think, oh, controversial, controversial.
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But say that you were ordained a priest sub condizione by Archbishop Lefebvre.
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And what would you have to say about that in light of what's going on in the church today?
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I remember one night we were there with the prefect of the students who was a fairly well-known.
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He'd written some books and he had a chair at Fordham University.
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And he was having a drink and we were standing together, about three or four of us.
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And he looked over at a group of priests and he said, hmm, they don't know that they're not priests yet.
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I came into some trouble when I started to read Michael Davies on the crisis in the church.
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And I had some bad experiences with Pope John Paul II when he came to New Zealand because I was at the mass and I had a great love of the Pope.
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And just kind of like, well, someone said that you're like a wide-eyed sheep, you know, kind of like kind of a bit innocent in a way.
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They don't know anything about what's going on behind the scenes.
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So I was at this mass in Athletic Park in Christchurch.
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And I went up to give, I was mostly saying, I was learning the old mass, you see.
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And so I was having to say masses out in the shed out the back of the monastery and sound the words out.
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I was saying a low mass was taking about two and a half hours.
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And I didn't, I couldn't say I particularly wanted to be a traditional priest at all.
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But I was convinced by the truth of what I'd read.
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And I knew that there was something in the old mass and I had to do it.
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And then along came John Paul II for his visit to New Zealand in November 1986, I think it was.
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I broke, I just decided, well, I'd better go to this mass.
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We were all given these pottles of holy communion for consecration with cling film over them.
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And as I went down in a procession to give out holy communion with all the whole row of priests,
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a few of us were there from the same community.
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A man came up to me young, not young, but a 20-year-old or something,
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came up to me with a head of red hair and a ring in his ear at the time.
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I said, you know, only certain people were picked.
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Got to the place where I was supposed to give out holy communion.
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Tell you what, it was one of the worst things you'd ever go through as a priest.
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We're down on the ground trying to find particles in the grass,
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myself and Father Donnie Fraser, who was beside me, passed away now.
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I look up and hear this man is doing the same thing to somebody else
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I just wrapped up the host I had in my potter with the stole I was wearing
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and went back to the place where the Blessed Ark was being reposed.
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And here are a couple of priests holding Ken Bean's box.
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And people were tipping their hosts into this box, right?
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what is the distance between Rome and Christ's church?
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That night, we had a 30-bedroom retreat house there.
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And I said, what do you mean it happened to me?
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it kind of was innocent compared with tipping our Lord
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So this is a very confusing time for a young priest.
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well, I've got to get this from here up into the chapel.
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so that people couldn't see what books I was reading,
00:34:19.540
And I said, how am I going to get it up to the chapel?
00:34:46.700
So I had the same mass upstairs by now in the chapel.
00:34:59.560
because I was probably only up to the offertory
00:36:05.360
And you said the name of the person who ordained me.
00:36:29.320
and one of the priests who knew what I was doing
00:36:31.420
and probably must have known what I was thinking,
00:36:46.180
Go through a stage then of saying mass and things
00:37:01.560
In fact, I did it through telling the provincial
00:37:08.600
if I could borrow the chalice while I was away.
00:37:31.860
And I was ordained again by Archbishop Lefebvre
00:37:37.240
That means that if the first ordination was all right,
00:37:43.200
If it wasn't, then that would have made me a priest.
00:37:49.840
So you see there are a lot of confusion, can't you?
00:37:54.680
I don't know whether this is worth saying or not,
00:38:02.540
Let's look at this whole thing just culturally.
00:38:10.380
Do you remember when they were going to abandon the old mass
00:38:18.860
Agatha Christie started this petition to the Pope
00:38:25.440
because you could say that the mass was part of the,
00:38:39.540
just because people make their own conclusions.
00:38:41.300
But culturally, I looked this up the other day.
00:38:50.240
those people who are part of what was laughed at once