NON EXPEDIT

Dear Dr. Valli,

I have read the comment by Archbishop Viganò (here) on the words of the Holy Father in Paris, which you published.

In short, according to the champions of tradition, the Pope ought to have gone to the French capital and said that freedom of conscience does not exist; that the State should not “open itself to every form of worship” but only to the true religion; that the 1948 Declaration of Human Rights is so much waste paper; that liberty, equality and fraternity are Masonic words which cannot find their ultimate inspiration in the Gospel.

It was not enough for the traditionalist world to see, in the revolutionary heart of Paris, 800,000 people devoutly taking part in Holy Mass; 80,000 young people singing the Salve Regina in Latin at the Stade de France in Saint-Denis; droves of priests hearing confessions in the street (as had not been seen for a long time); and, in the Élysée Palace, the Holy Father defending the right to life as the foundation of every other human right and condemning surrogate motherhood – all this right in front of a wretched President who chose to enshrine the right to abortion in the Constitution.

I certainly do not possess the learning of Archbishop Viganò, but I believe that defending tradition is one thing, and entrenching oneself in preconceived positions is quite another: demanding self-referential stances that place us outside reality and against common sense, denying the just effort – a duty for the Church in every age – to find points of convergence between the faith and the history of a people, which does not mean repudiating the Gospel of Christ or compromising with the spirit of the age.

The Holy Father must proclaim Christ to modern man, respecting his sensibility and his capacity for understanding, without necessarily placing himself on the defensive through words of lapidary condemnation whose sole effect would be to remain misunderstood and to scatter the flock.

With all my heart I invite those who truly love the Church to work for her unity, avoiding everything that might rend the seamless garment of the Lord; and let us pray together for the lasting fruits of this extraordinary apostolic journey to France, in which we have touched with our own hands the grace of God that converts the heart of man, in spite of our shortcomings.

This is our precise responsibility before God: and it is so — all the more — for those who believe that tradition is a perennial source of the Church’s life in an ever-new dynamic.

With esteem,

Pietro Piciocchi

+

• They have acknowledged iniquity
  and granted it citizenship.

2 Thess 2:11-12

Dear Mr. Piciocchi,

I have read with attention the letter you addressed to Dr. Aldo Maria Valli, which he forwarded to me, concerning my comment on the address of Leo XIV at the Élysée. I know that Aldo Maria has already published an exemplary reply on his blog (here). For my part, I do not wish to shirk the task of addressing your letter: without indulging the caricature, without allowing ourselves to be dragged onto the emotional terrain of the crowds, and without surrendering principle in exchange for applause at some agreeable phrase.

Your letter opens with a paraphrase: according to the “champions of tradition,” the Pope “ought to have gone and said” in Paris that freedom of conscience does not exist, that the State must not open itself to every form of worship, that the 1948 Declaration is waste paper, that liberty, equality and fraternity are Masonic words and cannot find inspiration in the Gospel. My answer is that no one asked Leo to go to the Élysée to recite the Syllabus [of Errors] aloud in front of Macron. What was asked – and it is a different thing – is that a Roman Pontiff not contradict, in the very capital of the Revolution, the constant teaching of his Predecessors about what that Revolution was and about what that motto signifies. It is not the same act. The former is a piece of theater that you attribute to us in order to make us look ridiculous; the latter is the bare minimum owed by one who sits upon the Chair of Peter.

The formula is simple: we do not demand of the Pope a diplomatically inopportune anathema; we demand that he not ratify and extol what the Popes have called a plague. Once this distinction has been re-established, your letter loses its pivot.

The second argument is that of the crowd: eight hundred thousand people in the Place de la Concorde, eighty thousand young people at Saint-Denis singing the Salve Regina, priests hearing confessions in the street. It is the most effective argument on the emotional and sentimental plane, and the weakest on the plane of the Faith.

No one despises those gestures; on the contrary: they show that Grace is still at work among the people, in spite of the speeches, not thanks to them. A young man who sings the Salve Regina in Latin does not validate the thesis according to which Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité find in the Gospel “an inexhaustible source of inspiration.” To confuse the piety of the faithful with the orthodoxy of an address to the authorities is a sophism. If the number of those present sufficed to judge a pontificate, we should have had to canonize every World Youth Day, even those at which what cannot be passed over in silence was passed over in silence. The streets of Paris were packed thirty years ago for John Paul II as well, yet that did not prevent the eventual approval of abortion as a right, the burning of Notre Dame, the blasphemous opening ceremony of the 2024 Summer Olympics, and state-sanctioned euthanasia.

I would add that precisely those young people deserved to hear from the Pope not the blessing of a motto born to dethrone Christ, but the distinction – elementary and paternal – between the liberty of the children of God and revolutionary liberty, between the equality of redeemed souls and collectivist egalitarianism, between fraternity in Christ and a brotherhood without God the Father. To deprive them of that distinction is not “respecting their capacity for understanding”: it is rather taking away from them the key to understanding the times in which they live. Indeed, it is passing off a false reading of events as valid and true.

In defence of Leo’s address you cite the protection of the right to life as the foundation of every other right and the condemnation of surrogate motherhood, pronounced “to the face” of a President who has inscribed abortion in the Constitution. Here one must be precise, for this is the point on which conservatives feel duty-bound to applaud.

I do not deny the fact: what I deny is the conclusion you draw from it. A condemnation of surrogate motherhood and a passing mention of life, set within a framework that adopts the Enlightenment “rights of man” and the 1948 Declaration as a “milestone of moral progress,” remain abstract concepts. Or rather: they remain in that Hyperuranion [Plato’s far-away world of the forms] to which the functionaries of the synodal church would confine doctrine, while they adapt pastoral practice to the mentality of the world. That same revolutionary matrix of “rights” – severed from the law of God and from the Kingship of Our Lord Jesus Christ – is precisely what made it possible to declare abortion a “right,” and then to enshrine it in the Constitution. He who praises the principle and deplores one of its fruits does not straighten the tree: he gathers its poisoned fruits while pretending not to see the brambles.

The useful answer, then, is this: it is not enough to speak the truth about an effect if one blesses the cause. Pius XI, in Quas Primas, taught that peace and dignity are not born of the rebellion of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, but of the social Kingship of Christ. So long as that lesson is passed over in silence, the “pro-life” phrases uttered at the Élysée are a cosmetic corrective applied to an edifice built without its cornerstone. And no one should know better than the Vicar of Christ how true are the words of the Saviour: Sine me nihil potestis facere (Jn 15:5).

Against Tradition you set “the just effort – a duty for the Church in every age – to find points of convergence between the faith and the history of a people.” This is the most insidious formula in your letter, because it sounds pastoral and reasonable. It must be confronted head-on.

You are not unaware of the magisterial acts, up to Pius XII, that condemn without appeal the Revolution and its infernal principles. These texts are not “preconceived positions”: they are the Magisterium. And he who recalls them is not entrenching himself: he is reminding a Pope that he is the custodian of revealed Truth, not its master. If today that reminder “places one outside reality,” so much the worse for a reality that has been built in opposition to them. It is not for the Magisterium to apologize to the Élysée, nor for the heir of Pius VI to humble himself before the heir of Jules Grévy, who keeps company with a man in a wig in the most grotesque charade of normality.

Let me quote to you, word for word, the passage in question. Leo said that the Enlightenment brought “genuine achievements”; that among these is “the recognition of human rights inherent in the nature of the human person, in particular religious freedom”; that liberty, equality and fraternity “refer to universal ethical imperatives that also find in the Gospel message an inexhaustible source of inspiration and fulfilment”; and that the 1948 Declaration is, echoing John Paul II, “a milestone on the path of the moral progress of humanity.” These are the phrases under discussion – not the fact that Latin was sung at Saint-Denis.

You close by invoking unity and the seamless garment, laying the responsibility for rending it upon those who criticize the papal address. This is the argument that conservatives have used for sixty years whenever someone touches the nerve of the Council, of the Montinian Mass, of synodality: it must be turned on its head.

The garment is rent by him who introduces into the Church a different Gospel from the one received, not by him who refuses to ratify it. Saint Paul does not invite the Thessalonians to “work for unity” at the cost of Tradition: he exhorts them to stand firm and to hold fast to the traditions they have been taught (2 Thess 2,15). Catholic unity is communion in the Faith; it is not a truce between those who bless the Revolution and those who call it by its name.

Here I would remind you of the distinction I drew in my essay “Capital Schism.” When he who sits upon the Chair accepts and promotes a notion of his office – and, with it, a notion of society and of liberty – incompatible with that defined by the perennial Magisterium, he is no longer simply a Pope who errs in an occasional speech: he places an obex, an obstacle to the very exercise of the Papacy. Those who resists such a man in what is illicit do not rend the Church: they are serving Her. And those who instead, so as not to «scatter the flock», consent to the equivocation find themselves in the position of those of whom Saint Paul says εὐδοκήσαντες τῇ ἀδικίᾳ: they have acknowledged iniquity and granted it citizenship (2 Thess 2,11-12).

My answer to you, therefore, is that unity cannot be built upon silence about the decisive point: it must be built upon the rock of Peter. Every attempt to «reset» reality is founded upon the sand of a dialogue that borrows the vocabulary of those who guillotined Mother Church’s children. To invoke the seamless garment in order to cover up the contradiction is, quite literally, to sew a new patch onto an old garment.

You fear «words of lapidary condemnation» that would remain misunderstood. Even supposing, without conceding, that this were so, I dare say that Catholics would for once breathe a sigh of relief on hearing not a mediator, a conciliator, a diplomat, an ecumenist, a philanthropist, a globalist, an immigrationist, a Freemason or a pagan, but a Pope who at last speaks as a Pope. Yet even granting you that there is today a need for pedagogy, I cannot grant you that pedagogy obliges one to say what is false.

A Pontiff could, at the Élysée, have recalled the Christian heritage of France – Clovis, Saint Louis, Saint Joan of Arc, the Carmelites of Compiègne – and added, with meekness, that Christian liberty is not the liberty of 1789; that the equality of souls before God is not the egalitarianism that levelled altars and thrones; that evangelical fraternity has a heavenly Father, and that without that Father it becomes the brotherhood of the Lodges. He could have said that “just secularism” does not consist in placing the true Religion on the same rank as the false ones, and that Our Lord is King even of those nations governed by a republican regime that professes itself secular. He could, while venerating the Crown of Thorns at Notre-Dame, have recalled that this Crown belongs to a King, and that this King cannot be reconciled with the motto coined to depose Him.

None of this is “self-referential.” It is the catechism. If today it sounds unheard-of, it is because for decades the applause of the Élysée has been preferred to the voice of Pius VI.

Dear Mr. Piciocchi, I do not treat you as an adversary. Your letter is sincere in its fear of a Church that “places herself outside reality,” even though for decades the embarrassing attempts to please the world have made her mitred promoters pathetic. That fear deserves respect, but it must be corrected: the reality of the Church is not the mirror of the world; it is the judgment of Christ upon the world. He who truly loves the Church does not ask her to become credible in the eyes of a President who has made abortion a constitutional norm; he asks her to remain credible before God. For the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom (Prov 9:10).

In closing, I remind you that Tradition is not “a perennial source in an ever-new dynamic,” if by dynamic one means reconciliation with liberalism, which the Syllabus declared impossible. Tradition is the integral transmission of the Depositum fidei, without cuts and without grafts. He who guards it does not rend the garment: he prevents it from being exchanged for the tricolour livery.

The martyrs of the Vendée, the priests of the September Massacres, the peasant women of Angers have no need for us to wield them as a cudgel. What they need is a Pope who, walking over the stones drenched in their blood, does not praise the motto in whose name they were martyred. If this reminder “scatters the flock,” then that flock had already been scattered by those who taught it that obeying error is a virtue and that resisting falsehood is schism.

I have written to you because your letter is not an isolated case: it constitutes, so to speak, the handbook with which, after every “positive” gesture of this pontificate, Catholics will be asked to let themselves be swayed by the emotion of the crowd without looking at the principles that are meanwhile being subverted. This is precisely the mechanism described in “Capital Schism.” It is well to dismantle it now, calmly and with doctrine, before it becomes the common sense even of those who call themselves friends of Tradition.

With gratitude for the frankness with which you have written,