The Arian Heresy was an extraordinary affair. It is the closest parallel in Church history to what is going on today, although what is happening today goes a lot further than the Arian Heresy.

Why would Schonmetzer include the letters of Pope Liberius? To show that the Pope can err. That is why he would have put it in. Some people claim the letters are fraudulent, but I very much doubt it, because the truth is that in 369, Liberius did excommunicate Athanasius.

It is true that Arianism began getting going after the Council of Nicaea, which was in 325. So if you count from 325 to 381, well, that is longer. It took a little while for Arianism to really get underway. The Council of Nicaea was against Arianism. Athanasius attended the council as a deacon. Arius, a priest in Alexandria, started publishing his heresy. It seems Arianism was there before Nicaea, which is why Nicaea nailed it, but it only really got going afterwards. That is my impression, though I am not a historian.

Michael Davis has written a little book about Athanasius, which would almost certainly cover the Arian heresy as well. He is a good historian. That booklet would be well worth reading.

Hilary was a defender of the true doctrine of the Holy Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, absolutely equal, co-eternal, and consubstantial, as in the creed of St. Athanasius.

Louis Veuillot was a layman, but he was also an acquaintance of another great anti-liberal combatant from France in that same period, 1850 to 1880, during the pontificate of Pope Pius IX: Dom Guéranger. Dom Guéranger was another great anti-liberal. Louis Veuillot used to go to Dom Guéranger’s monastery at Solesmes and do retreats there.

Louis Veuillot had enormous good sense, supernatural and natural. He was just a sane man, through and through, naturally and supernaturally. Of peasant or working stock, but a prince of the Church as far as fighting for the Church is concerned, though a layman. Like many good laymen, he depended upon a priest. I do not think you will find in the history of the Church a layman who did great things for the Church without being guided by a priest. The priest could not do what Veuillot did, in a newspaper office with all its distractions. But I am sure the influence of Dom Guéranger was decisive for Louis Veuillot.

Bishop de Castro Mayer only broke with TFP in 1983. There are some very interesting documents about why Bishop de Castro Mayer broke with Plinio. He knew him a long way back and supported TFP initially because it was Catholic and anti-communist. Dr. Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira started TFP back in the 1940s or 1950s, a lay organization of combatant Catholics to resist the revolution. They did valiant work to protect Brazil from communism by nourishing Brazilian Catholics with good doctrine.

To start a lay organization because of the practical necessity of not leaning on the clergy is one thing, but to make a principle of not leaning on the clergy is quite another. Laicism is the implicit heresy of TFP. TFP pulls a lot of young men into its service, making them live chastely without marrying, and effectively stops them from going to the priesthood. TFP paralyzes and has always paralyzed vocations. It is a grave fault to pretend to defend the Catholic Church and then, at the same time, to paralyze vocations.

If Plinio had wanted to listen to Bishop de Castro Mayer, God had placed him there. Plinio cannot claim he was abandoned by the clergy. When Plinio went before his maker a few years ago, he would not have been able to say, „Lord God, you did not give me a priest to guide me,‟ because God did. If anybody, at any time, wants to know the will of God, it will be findable. God will never leave souls without the possibility of reaching Him.

Bishop de Castro Mayer knew that people needed doctrine to stay Catholic. In his little diocese, glorious by its fidelity, he set up a catechism system whereby all the people got to know their doctrine, the real doctrine. So when Vatican II came, he gave all his priests the option: they could either say the New Mass or stay with the Old Mass. As bishop, he would cover them. Most of his priests stayed with the Old Mass. Those who stayed with him and the Old Mass formed the group of priests still saying the Old Mass in that diocese today.

Bishop de Castro Mayer was a great bishop primarily because he was a doctrinal bishop. He knew his doctrines through and through. He had taught in the seminary and would come into lessons without any notes, teaching dogma purely out of his head. He was very humble, physically small, someone you would not notice in a crowd. I remember seeing him in La Reja, Argentina, quietly praying his rosary.

Plinio went wrong and got into an absurd, ridiculous, blasphemous cult of his own personality by the end. This is mostly hidden from most people in TFP, and TFP vigorously denies any such thing. But facts are facts, and it is known for certain that in the inner circles of TFP, it is a dangerous and absurd cult. It is a great shame because Plinio was a great mind, an anti-liberal, and an anti-revolutionary. His book Revolution and Counter-Revolution is very good.

He slid from an understandable practice of avoiding flawed clergy into a false principle of refusing the clergy in principle, and that is a no-no. The real answer was, of course, Archbishop Lefebvre, who, confronted with the same problem of false clergy, decided, „Well, we’ll start again. We’ll remake good clergy.‟ A layman could not do that, true. But a layman could at least have abstained from building an organization around the principle that we do not need the clergy or vocations. It is an understandable error given how wrong many clergy were in the ‚40s and ’50s.

Bishop de Castro Mayer, in documents that will appear, attacks this heresy of laicism. He says it is heresy because it is of faith that Our Lord founded the Church on this clergy. Our Lord took into account that clergy are human and make mistakes. That is why Catholics always have to distinguish between the human and divine in the Church. Our Lord Himself is human and divine. His Church is human and divine. The human part of Our Lord was never in sin or error, a slight difference with the Church, whose human part is often in sin and error. But that does not touch the principles of the Church and the teaching of Our Lord.

As today’s Gospel of St. Hilary, a Doctor of the Church, says (Matthew 5:18): „Amen I say unto you, till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall not pass of the Law till all be fulfilled.‟ This applies even to the moral part of the Old Law.

Secondly, some other doctor like Athanasius and Hilary will be maintaining the doctrine while the popes go wrong. Athanasius, Hilary, and others like them were like the temporary carriers of the Church’s indefectibility. The normal carrier is the Pope, but he is not the indispensable carrier. The Pope can go very wrong.

Why are Sedevacantists closer? Because the better Sedevacantists do have the faith. If they did not have the faith, there would be no problem with the Pope being off his head. For them, it is a real problem because they believe in the papacy, the Church, and Our Lord.

Sedevacantism is a trap, the right-hand trap as opposed to the left-hand trap of Liberalism. On a golf course, you have sand traps on both sides of the fairway. Most golfers hook (left) rather than slice (right), so Liberalism is a much more common error than Sedevacantism.

The moderate Sedevacantists keep quiet about it. The rabid ones are like Feeneyites; it is their dogma of faith: if you do not think these popes are not popes, or if you believe in baptism of desire, you are not Catholic. Crazy. But between Liberalism and Catholicism, there is a great gulf fixed.

We saw verse 14: „And there were given to the woman two wings of a great eagle, that she might fly into the desert unto her place, where she is nourished for a time and times and a half a time.‟ The two wings represent wisdom to unravel heresies and patience to endure persecution by fleeing to the desert (verse 6), where she is nourished. Time equals one year, so three and a half times equals 1,260 days, the duration of the persecution, with the Anti-Christ standing for any persecution. The Church hides inside souls, and souls hide with God. The Church is disappearing from the outside structures and taking refuge inside souls, exactly what is happening today. Cardinal Mindszenty, when the communists took over his episcopal palace, the Church was still in his soul inside the communist prison.

Verse 15: „And the serpent cast out of his mouth after the woman, water as it were a river; that he might cause her to be carried away by the river.‟ This water is a flood, not of living water, but of false doctrine to sweep souls away from Mother Church. We see that today, a flood of false doctrine from the media.

There are multiple levels of interpretation. One: the woman is the Church. Two: the woman is the Blessed Virgin Mary. Three (moral sense): the woman is holy souls, saintly souls yearning for heaven.

In the moral sense (explanation three), saintly souls under persecution engender Christ, give birth to Christ. They become more Christian, closer to Christ. The saintly soul flies with devotion and patience to contemplation. The dragon pursues the saintly soul. The two wings (verse 14) are devotion and patience, flying to the desert of contemplation. The Devil lets loose after it a flood of sensual memories. For example, St. Benedict fled the world and lived in a cave near Subiaco. Tempted by sensual memories of Rome, he jumped into a thorn bush and was freed from then on.

Verse 18 (or end of 17 in some versions): „And he stood upon the sand of the sea.‟ The sand represents men enslaved to the world, who are as light as sand and as unstable as the sea. Upon such men, the devil stands; he dominates them. You have the expression „stairs of sand‟—something utterly unreliable.

Any questions on chapter 12? A question about verse 4: „And his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven, and cast them to the earth.‟ Could this refer to fallen angels? Yes, that might be, if you are thinking of the fourth level of explanation, Lucifer against Michael. I would think so.

We previously discussed the locust neo-modernists in chapter 9, which also very much applies. Sister Lucia of Fatima said that the Third Secret overlaps chapters 8 to 13 of the Apocalypse. Cardinal Ratzinger said something like, „It’s all in scripture.‟ But Sister Lucy specified chapters 8 to 13. So it is these very chapters that concern what is going on today. The first beast is the Antichrist, and the second beast, the false lamb, assists him. That would be the false church. Someone suggested Pope Francis for the false lamb. He is a genuine skunk, not a false lamb. The false lamb is the false church.