When Mel Gibson's movie The Passion of the Christ appeared, many people heard about "traditional Catholics" for the first time, since Gibson described himself as a true Catholic who didn't believe that the (then) Pope was genuine. Anybody who wants to know the difference between traditional and "Vatican" Catholics needs to read this book. A person who believes that religion is a matter of feeling not principle, and that religions are invented by human beings, not sent by God, will probably neither accept nor understand the argument of this book. But anyone who knows that true religions are revealed by God will discover just how far the present "Novus Ordo" Catholic Church has departed from what the Catholic Church has always been, from the day of its founding up to the early 1960's. Despite repeated denials by the Church hierarchy, the fact is that many basic theological principles have been radically altered, and the forms and intent of the sacraments - especially Eucharist and the Holy Orders, as well as the form for consecrating bishops - have been changed so much that, according to the author, anyone who knows what the Church's teaching and practice have been for two thousand years will be forced to conclude that their validity is now seriously in doubt. If Catholicism were a human creation, this would not be such a scandal: what human beings have created they are free to re-create. But if the Catholic Church was actually founded by God - and no-one who does not believe this can call him- or herself a Catholic - then a violation of the principles on which it is based, and the forms that express the principles, can only be compared to the violation of a natural law. We may be "free" to jump off a cliff, but this freedom in no way repeals the law of gravity. If a child is adopted rather than begotten in only one generation of a family tree, the whole original genetic heritage is lost. Likewise, if Bishops are not really bishops, and the priests they ordain therefore not really priests, then the "apostolic succession" springing directly from Jesus Christ and the apostles has been broken, and what we think of as the Catholic Church is no longer what it was. It has the buildings, the lands, the art objects, but it no longer possesses the true Magisterium, which is being kept in existence only by a compara-
tively small and half-underground (though quite widespread)
remnant. If what Rama Coomaraswamy says has happened to the Catholic Church has in fact happened - and his arguments are devastatingly convincing - then Christ is no more in the Vatican than he was in the tomb after His resurrection. As the angel said to the disciples who came to seek Him there on Easter morning, "Who are you looking for? He is not here."

~~ Charles Upton

Rama P. Coomaraswamy's "The Destruction of the Christian Tradition" contains an in-depth account of the post-Vatican II gutting of almost all that had been spiritually effective and metaphysically sound in the Roman Catholic Church. This is the story of an unbelievable suicide (perhaps assisted) of an "eternal" institution which is now infested with radical feminists, militant homosexuals and heretical "theologians".

Unfortunately, Coomaraswamy is not always quite objective or honest. He stresses the negative input of the post-conciliar popes but passes in near-silence their more traditional pronouncements. On occasion he even resorts to a mild innuendo as, for example, when he comments on Karol Wojtyla's (the future John Paul II) emplyment during WW2 that "all Polish chemical plants were geared to help the German war effort" (page 105.) First of all, these plants were not Polish since Poland did not then exist; second, every job in the occupied Polish territories of necessity helped the German war effort (Wojtyla did this hard physical work in order to be able to continue his underground seminary studies instead of being sent for forced labor in Germany proper.) I find comments like that petty and vindictive.

Let's hope that the upcoming new (revised and enlarged) edition of "The Destruction" will be purged of such unseemly elements.