Fr Basilio Meramo writes an open letter to Bishop Fellay

Traditionalist Issues

Polemic inside SSPX

Fellay’s Decision to Merge Confronted by Intellectual Priest

After publishing the sermon of Fr. Basilio Méramo of February 2, 2009, we realized that there is no English version of his open letter to Bishop Bernard Fellay of January 26, 2009, as we wrongly indicated at the bottom of the sermon translation. Only a summary of it is available in English, framed by dissenting commentaries and thoughts.

In order to make available to our readers the entire document in English – which has been forbidden to be spoken about in various media milieus of the SSPX – we translated it and are posting it here today.

To facilitate its reading, we added subtitles that are not in the original. Anyone may check our translation with the Spanish text here.

We hope it will help our English-speaking public to know both sides in this controversy.

The Editor

Open Letter to the General Superior of the Society of St. Pius X,
Bishop Bernard Fellay,

Fr. Basilio Méramo
Priory of Blessed Raphael Guizar y Valencia
Calle Sur 11 n. 1114
C.P. 94390
Orizaba - Veracruz - Mexico

Dear Monsignor:

Given the events that regard our whole Society (SSPX), both members and the faithful, it is with great sorrow and pain that I find myself obliged to direct this public letter to you. I cannot be silent in face of the lifting of the decree of excommunication by apostate Rome – called as such on more than one occasion by Msgr. Lefebvre – which had been requested by means of a crusade of one million rosaries delivered to Rome for this end. This is to at least implicitly acknowledge, whether we want to or not, that we have been excommunicated, notwithstanding the puerile excuses to prove the opposite.

You recognized this in your sermon at Flavigny (February 2, 2006) when you said: “We have requested the lifting of the decree of excommunication, its annulment; but to say annul is already to say that we acknowledge something.”

JPII opens the Jubilee 2000 alongside heretics and schismatics

Among heretics and schismatics JPII opens the Jubillee 2000. In that year SSPX Bishops also started to merge.

Personally and in conscience, as a perpetual member of the Society, I feel myself obliged to manifest my total disagreement with this act. I speak out clearly and publicly before God and the Catholic Church, the sole Ark of Salvation, the exclusive and sole Spouse of Christ. She is not, as the reigning ecumenism desires, just another religion inside the Pantheon where all false religions dwell, each one with its own altar and rights, living together in a pacific and abominable coexistence similar to the reign of the Anti-Christ.

The bouquet of flowers (one million rosaries) delivered to the modernist and apostate Rome – the great red harlot riding the Beast, i.e., the prostituted, corrupted and adulterated religion, as Fr. Castellani used to call it – was an act of a saccharine, concealed concession

It was this [apostasy] which astonished the pure and virginal Apostle St. John the Evangelist, the most beloved, because it was the Gordian knot of the mystery of iniquity inside the Holy Place and an abominable desolation in the Temple: the falsified religion cohabitating with the worldly powers and fornicating with the kings of earth.

To ask for the lifting the excommunication implies recognizing its validity

To lift or to annul the decree of excommunication is not the same thing as declaring its invalidity and nullity from the start. Further, if one can annul and consequently declare the annulment from a decree that was until now valid and legitimate, it only serves to express and ratify that it was up to now valid and legitimate. It is only from this time onward that such excommunication ceases.

In short, while one can annul and considered annulled a just law that lost its reason for being, the same does not occur with an unjust law, such as the sanction of excommunication of Tradition [SSPX Bishops], because it is invalid and null given its lack of legitimacy, veracity, justice and right. An unjust law is per se invalid and null; it was never a law. Only a valid, legitimate and just law can be annulled. These two things may seem alike but they are two different things.

To request the lifting of the decree of excommunication is not the same thing as to ask or demand the acknowledgement of its absolute nullity and total invalidity. These are distinct things, even though similar. Not to recognize this reveals a lack of understanding. Whoever does not accept this distinction is either a naïve fool or a malevolent man. No one can confuse nullity with the annulment of a decree.

It is clear that for modernist Rome this act means the remission of a punishment - the censure of excommunication – since the corrective penalties, as is the case of the censures, are lifted as set out in the Canon Law for the remission of a penalty. Therefore, it is very clear that the one who accepts this lifting of a penalty does so because he considers himself guilty of it in juridical terms. And it is logical that the one censured should rejoice that, with the remission of the sanction, he is pardoned.

When a Bishop, son of Msgr. Lefebvre, requests this, he denies his father in the Episcopate, because he acknowledges that that act [of excommunication] was a due punishment. There is no other alternative in juridical terms. Yes is yes, and no is no. And as the saying goes: He who proves too much, proves nothing.

Archbishop Lefebvre and Bishop Mayer continue to be excommunicated

If one analyzes it well, the excommunication that fell over the two consecrating Bishops - Archbishop Lefebvre and Bishop Castro Mayer - was not lifted. The only excommunication lifted was that which fell on the consecrated Bishops - Bishops Tissier de Mallerais, Williamson, Fellay and de Galarreta. It is very clear that the excommunication was lifted only for those who requested it as a show of filial good will with the aim of moving the paternal feelings of Benedict XVI. There was absolutely no retraction on the part of Rome, which showed simply a paternal indulgence toward the four Bishops who filially asked the lifting of the excommunication from the magnanimous Benedict XVI.

Archbishop Lefebvre and Bishop Castro Mayer continue to be entirely excommunicated, unless they rise from their graves and also filially request - as a show of good will - the lifting of their excommunications, which Rome obviously considers just and legitimate. This is crystal clear.

Rome is deactivating the SSPX resistance

Actually, all the reasons alleged for this action have no weight and are superfluous. The basic question is the Faith. Protestantized and modernist Rome has managed to deactivate the resistance centered on the Society and Msgr. Lefebvre, 18 years after his death. Now the process of handing over [the SSPX] that started to manifest itself publicly in the Jubilee of 2000 reaches its end.

The 'paternal benignity' of Benedict XVI was to deactivate the SSPX resistance

I am in disagreement with this and always will be. I cannot prostitute myself intellectually and religiously to the power of evil that entered the Church and wants to pervert and invert everything. This is to be spiritually and religiously sodomized. This is the attitude of the Pharisees - a special corruption of religion - which governs today with all the prestige that comes from power to the detriment of the Truth. Let us not forget that the greatest victory of the Anti-Christian World Revolution is to transform men into “intellectual prostitutes.”

A bomb cannot be deactivated with blows of a hammer or axe, but requires a subtle maneuver to undo its internal mechanism. This is what is happening now with the Society of St. Pius X in order to neutralize it in its combat and heroic resistance against the errors of modernist and apostate Rome, as Msgr. Lefebvre called it in his time. Under a false mask and a false paternal benignity, the resistance and the combat against the ecumenical new Church - which cohabitates with world globalism subject to the empire of the prince of this world, Satan and his followers - has been de-activated.

It is inexplicable that the other three Bishops have said nothing and thus consent with their silence. For he who is silent, sanctions, and he who sanctions, accepts error, the deception and the lie contained in all this.

Our obligation to remain faithful to the Catholic Faith

These are difficult times. Even more, these are apocalyptic times, where each one of the faithful must be a soldier of Christ to heroically and valiantly defend his Faith, as the martyrs of the early Church did without any human help, facing their torturers alone with God.

Our sole duty is to remain firm in the Faith, faithful to Christ and to His divine Roman, Catholic and Apostolic Church, which is eclipsed today (De Labore Solis, as St. Malachi refers to the previous pontificate). As an apex of the evil we are witnessing, according to the Biblical language, the abomination of desolation established in the Holy Place, the destruction of everything that is sacred and invading the Temple, which is under the iron dominion of the Synagogue of Satan (De Gloria Olivae refers to this pontificate). Thus, we have the fulfillment of the prophecy of Our Lady of La Salette: “Rome will lose the Faith and will become the see of the Anti-Christ.” Today this is a fact, but to acknowledge it demands fortitude and a solid, erudite faith, which is rare in today’s world filled with darkness and apostasy.

We are not discouraged for we know with certainty that “the gates of Hell will not prevail,” that is, “They will wage war against you but they will not win,” as St. Thomas explains in his commentary of the Creed. He also knows by Faith that the one true Church, the virginal spouse of Christ, will remain, even though she be reduced to a small flock (pusillus grex, Lk 12:32), dispersed around the world. As St. Augustine says and the Council of Trent (Art. 9) confirms, “It is the faithful people dispersed throughout the world” awaiting their ransom and sustained by the blessed hope - of which St. Peter (2 Pet 3:12) and St. Paul (Tit 2:13) speak - who will see the return of Christ the King in glory and majesty.

We must be “firm in the Faith” as St. Peter exhorts us, since, as St. Paul says, “everything that does not proceed from the Faith is sin” (Rom 14:23), and “the just will live from the Faith” (Heb 10:38), and “we were saved gratuitously through the Faith” (Eph 2:8). This is what we have to do, remain brave and firm soldiers confirmed in the Faith by Baptism so that those words of St. Paul will be fulfilled in us: “Placed on trial for the testimony of the Faith, they were found faithful to Our Lord Jesus Christ” (Heb 12:39).

False pretexts to merge: to remedy the crisis and to give rights to Tradition

It is inconceivable that someone should say that the Society (SSPX) wishes to help the Pope to remedy the crisis since the modernist Popes are the first who are responsible and culpable for this unprecedented crisis - never before seen in History.

Leaders of false religions gathering at Rome

Rome transformed into a Pantheon of false religions

And, worst of all evils, Joseph Ratzinger throughout his whole life - either as an expert theologian in Vatican II or as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith during the nefarious pontificate of John Paul II, and now as Benedict XVI – has consciously sustained those same errors [that have caused the crisis] instead of condemning them.

Great diseases cannot be cured with half-measures. To speak of a crisis without pointing to its cause - the crisis in the Faith – does not lead anywhere. To point out the crises in vocations, religious practice, catechism, frequency of the Sacraments is just to point out effects. If one does not give their cause, one inverts and confuses the cause and the effects.

It is also wrong to speak of the rights of Tradition as if they were any other rights. If we are going to speak of rights, then we must say that only the Church, her Tradition and her Truth have exclusive rights. The rights of the human person, liberty of conscience and religious liberty - which includes liberty for Buddhists, animists, Muslims, Jews, Protestants etc - constitute a liberal and modernist conception of rights. They are false rights of man in consonance with the Anti- Christian Revolution.

The words of Msgr. Lefebvre confirm this position

Let us not forget that speaking about the invalid, null and Pharisaic excommunication, Msgr. Lefebvre said:

* “All the modernists were excommunicated by St. Pius X. Those imbued with the modernist principles are the ones who excommunicated us, while they were the ones who were excommunicated by St. Pius X. Why do they excommunicate us? It is because we want to remain Catholic, because we do not want to follow them in this spirit of destruction of the Church. ‘Since you don’t want to come with us, we excommunicate you.’ ‘Very well, thank you. We prefer to be excommunicated. We do not want to participate in this shocking work in the Church that has been carried out in the last 20 years” (Sermon in the Mass of July 10, 1988 - cf. Fideliter n. 65, 1988).

* “We never desired to belong to this system that calls itself the conciliar Church. … We have no place in the Pantheon of religions. Our excommunication by a decree of Your Eminence would only be an irrefutable proof of this. We ask nothing except to be declared ex-communicated from the adult spirit that has inspired the Church for the last 25 years; to be excluded from an unfaithful and impious communion (Letter to Cardinal Gantin, July 6, 1988 - cf. Fideliter n. 64, 1988).

* In Ecône Msgr. Lefebvre said this to a journalist who asked him about the excommunications: “If anyone is excommunicated it is not I, but the excommunicators.”

All these texts of Msgr. Lefebvre appear to have been treated the same way as the preparatory schemes of Vatican II, which ended in the wastebasket, so that everything would be done in a different way.

* Further, referring to Msgr. Castro Mayer and to himself, Msgr. Lefebvre affirmed: “Those who consider it a duty to diminish and even deny these riches [of Tradition] can do nothing else but condemn these two Bishops. Doing so, they confirm themselves in their schism with Our Lord and His Kingdom, because of their laicism and apostate ecumenism (Itinéraire Spirituel, p. 9). And he confirmed this further on: “This apostasy transforms the members [of the Church] into adulterers and schismatics opposed to all Tradition, breaking with the Church of the past (Itinéraire Spirituel, p. 70).

Vatican II is filled with errors and heresies

Finally, it is necessary to stress that regarding Vatican Council II, there is much more than the “reservations” that you affirmed. Because this atypical Council, which pretends not to be infallible, is as contradictory as a square circle, and for this reason pregnant with error and heresies (time bombs) to the point that Msgr. Lefebvre considered it an apostate Council for its ecumenism (text quoted above), and also schismatic. In fact he said: “This Council represents – to the eyes of the Roman authorities as well as ours - a new Church, called the conciliar Church.”

Analyzing the texts of this Council and its details in a critique - either internal or external - we believe we can affirm that it is a schismatic Council for it denied Tradition of the Church and broke with her past. The tree is judged by its fruits.

“All those who cooperate in the application of this metamorphosis accept and adhere to the new conciliar Church, as it was designated by His Excellence Msgr. Benelli in the letter he addressed to me in name of the Holy Father last July 25. They enter into schism … How could we, moved by a servile and blind obedience, play into the hands of these schismatics who ask us to cooperate in their task of destroying the Church?” (Un Évèque Parle, pp. 97-99)

In face of all this, we can only say: non possumus.

     In Christo et Maria Virgine
     Basilio Méramo, perpetual member of the SSPX and Prior de Orizaba
     Monday, January 26, 2009

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Posted March 16, 2009

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