FATHER PHILIP SHELMERDINE 1909–1987CHAPTER 1 : PROTESTANTISM, PRISON AND THE PRIESTHOOD

The life of traditional Catholic priest Father Philip Shelmerdine (1909-1987) was both fascinating and instructive. Convert, husband and father, anti-Judeo-Masonic activist, prisoner, army officer, doctor, Roman seminarian, priest, missionary, “rebel traditionalist”, and finally, convinced sedevacantist. It is hoped that this series of articles will make him better known and that his edifying life may inspire those who did not have the opportunity to know him personally.

Philip Shelmerdine was born into a comfortable Protestant family in the English midlands. When he was fourteen his father died, naming an uncle guardian. Young Philip’s future seemed already clear: after his education at London’s famous Charterhouse school he was to follow his uncle into the family textile-manufacturing business…and into Freemasonry. But this was to count without young Philip’s streak of obstinate integrity – a trait which was to baffle those who surrounded him throughout his life.

It was no special religious motive that made Philip baulk when invited to become a Freemason: he just insisted on knowing what he was getting involved in before taking a solemn oath to keep it secret. And when told that the oath must precede any information, he disappointed his uncle by an unshakable refusal.

Apart from that, he followed the path mapped out for him and in his early twenties proposed marriage to a beautiful girl of his own class. Rita Duxbury was a Catholic and it was explained to Philip that no dispensation for a mixed marriage could be obtained without a sincere guarantee that all children would be raised in the Catholic Faith. This seemed quite unreasonable to the young Englishman who favoured a compromise in which the boys would be Protestants and the girls Catholics. Exasperated by his fiancée’s insistence, he straddled his bicycle and set off to visit the local vicar to ask his advice on what attitude a Protestant should take before the exclusivist pretensions of the Roman Catholic Church. Unsatisfied by his first visit, he pressed on to the next vicarage where the incumbent offered theories and advice quite opposed to those of the first, but equally unconvincing. A third minister only compounded the problem. At the end of a long day of listening to the confused and contradictory views about Catholicism of all the Protestant ministers in the neighbourhood, Philip peddled home, weary but certain of one thing: the Catholic religion alone is true and he must therefore join it, which, after instruction, he did. His younger brother Roger, outraged, refused to speak to him for several years, until he in turn was converted. (Years later, their mother also was under instruction in the faith at the time of her death.)

Philip and Rita’s marriage was a happy one. A boy and a girl were born. Their father took up bee-keeping. In these years preceding the second world war, he also read insatiably about his new faith, and about the forces of organised subversion opposing the Church’s efforts to bring every man and every society under the sweet and supernaturalising yoke of Christ. The works of Fr. Denis Fahey formed his politico-religious views. He understood who was truly behind the imminent war. Aided by his wife, he took his stand with those who were resisting their manoeuvres. He addressed public meetings, showing the grounds for his conviction that war between England and Germany would ultimately benefit only Jews and their Communist puppets. When war broke out in September 1939 he continued to speak out, but took care to avoid giving any impression of favouring the Nazi enemy. However, under the tyrannical regulation 18B of the Defence of the Realm Act whereby the British Home Secretary could intern anyone for any period without assigning any motive, he and his wife were arrested and imprisoned in often unspeakable conditions. Rita was in Holloway Women’s prison, leaving her young children without their mother. Philip was at first at York Racecourse Internment Camp, then at >XXX but was moved to other prisons where he mixed with other 18B internees including an admiral, a Member of Parliament and a baronet: all equally

opposed to the action of Judeo-Masonic subversion which they saw behind the war. Philip was grilled at MI5’s notorious Latchmere House centre which the public supposed was reserved for the interrogation of enemy prisoners. For weeks at a time he was unable to go to Mass. His wife was released after four months but Philip was still behind bars. His Member of Parliament objected before the House that in the absence of any assigned motive for his detention there might be a simple confusion. Had someone misunderstood a memo in Shelmerdine’s private notebook saying, “British queen must be replaced by fertile young Italian”? If so, the Home Secretary should take note that it was a beekeeper’s notebook! The House laughed and Shelmerdine was eventually released in January 1941. His library of over 2000 books had been confiscated and was never returned, but at least he was free.

Initially Philip considered the war unjust from the British point of view, since the Axis powers had made no attack on the British Empire and the treaty to oppose the invasion of Poland had been no more than an unconvincing pretext, trumped up at the last minute. But when the British Empire was attacked (in the Pacific), he had no further scruple and decided to enlist. The recruitment committee, aware of his imprisonment, requested him to satisfy them that he was not, as they had been led to believe, a traitor to his country. When Philip had finished explaining his convictions and their grounds, he had the satisfaction not only of seeing the cloud of suspicion dissipated, but even of being discreetly assured that some of the committee’s members were in sympathy with his views. He was admitted to the officer training centre and in due course passed out, receiving the King’s commission.

The June 1944 allied invasion of Normandy found the 33 year-old Philip, now an artillery captain and regimental interpreter in French and German, serving in the first regiment to land on French soil. They were dark days in more than one way for the allied troops, as in addition to the rigours of warfare there was constant anxiety for loved ones at home. This anxiety did not concern only their physical welfare. Often enough one or other of Philip’s comrades-in-arms would receive a letter announcing that his wife was leaving him for another man. Philip was inwardly comforted by the thought that Rita was a Catholic, but the comfort was short-lived. Rita had succumbed to the charms of a US officer then located in the UK and one day Philip too received out of the blue the appalling news that his much-loved wife had decided to leave him.

The letter making this painful announcement was aggravated by a form of blackmail. Having no readily admissible pretext on which to sue her husband for divorce, Rita had decided to force Philip to initiate divorce proceedings against her on grounds of her admitted adultery, which the British divorce courts would readily accept, thereby giving her civil freedom for a sacrilegious “re-marriage”. Rita’s Catholic convictions were entirely eclipsed by her adulterous passion. Foreseeing Philip’s objection, as a good Catholic, to such a step, she announced that she was taking the children and would return them only if and when a divorce was granted.

While his wife had been sliding away from her religious duties, Philip had become exemplary in the Faith. A testimonial from the military chaplain attests that he was a daily communicant during his war service. Heartbroken at his wife’s infidelity to him and to her faith, Philip’s reaction was edifying. He would not, at any cost, initiate divorce proceedings in defiance of Catholic teaching, he would – above and beyond the call of duty – forgive his wife and accept her back if she could be prevailed on by any means to repent, and if not he would by God’s grace persevere in celibacy.

However as time passed and any hope of Rita’s amendment evaporated, he discovered that there was no invincible objection to his taking out divorce proceedings for the sake of the children, provided he first signed, before the bishop’s representative, an undertaking that he was acting only to obtain custody, without condoning his wife’s adultery, and with the firm intention of never re-marrying himself during his wife’s lifetime.

The arrangements for this step brought Philip into contact with the Leeds diocesan curia, and we find that already he seized the opportunity to mention an extraordinary idea. His wife had left him through no fault of his own and departed to

another continent. His bishop had consented to his obtaining a civil divorce. He was not now obliged to receive Rita back even if she did repent. This being so, a revolutionary thought was dawning in his mind: might it ever be possible for him to become a priest?

In the correspondence with the bishop’s office relative to his civil divorce (pronounced on 13th August 1947) we find that Philip had already raised the possibility that he might have a vocation and had been advised that the Holy See would have to dispense from the impediment of the married state, but might do so in the circumstances. However, he must first bring up his young children. There would be time enough to think of a possible vocation when he had fulfilled his duties as sole remaining parent.

Meanwhile Philip wondered how he could usefully spend the coming years. He tried out some property investment and business activities with no great success or satisfaction. Eager to do something positive, he thought of opening a bookshop, but finally, on the advice of his spiritual director, began medical studies at St George’s Hospital Medical School, affiliated to London University. In 1953, aged 44, he qualified as a medical doctor. He then spent some time in surgical training as house surgeon at Birmingham Accident Hospital, and was ready in 1955 to take up a permanent position, but life was not to prove simple. Philip’s past returned to haunt him.

At an interview with one of the most senior figures in British medicine, a Jew, Dr. Shelmerdine was surprised to be asked whether he were any relation of a certain Shelmerdine who had been imprisoned as he had been “confused about the causes of the war”. On a lightning inspiration, the young doctor tried to bluff it out: “No sir, I have never been in any confusion about the causes of the war,” he declared. But the equivocation was too transparent and, suppressing a half-smile at the humour, the man on whom Philip’s future in British medicine depended informed him that he considered him unsuitable and would frustrate any attempt on his part to pursue his career in the medical profession.

After the initial disappointment, Philip was proud to have further persecutions to suffer for his defence of reality and of course his conviction of the malign influence of Judeo-masonry was not diminished by finding himself for the second time a victim of its machinations. The result of this providential opposition in the UK was that Philip took the only course open to him: emigration.

April 1956 found Philip a resident in Rhodesia where he entered general practice in Salisbury and undertook a circuit in the Bush, bringing medical aid to uncivilised tribesfolk. It was a far cry from the status of London surgeon for which he had trained and for which he had been eminently qualified, but on the other hand his talents were all needed in regions where his visits brought the only medical aid known and he had to practise medicine of every branch from dentistry to gynaecology.

One day in a temporary bush practice, a blood-streaked white man came running in to ask for emergency surgery – would it be possible to sew back on his nose, which had been kicked off by a horse? Unperturbed, Dr Shelmerdine set to work, but to distract his patient during the painful and delicate operation, he chatted with him about various subjects and explained in simple layman’s language the details of the operation he was performing. Towards the end, he asked his patient’s profession, to be informed that he was a plastic surgeon! Happily the operation was successful. The natives also appreciated the doctor’s passage: on one occasion a black child was even given the Christian name “Shelmerdine” in his honour.

Soon, Shelmerdine’s son and daughter were adult and independent and he was able to pursue his yearning for the priesthood. To this end he had first to find a bishop prepared to accept him and to apply to the Holy See for a dispensation from the impediment of being a married man. This was not easy. In 1958 Archbishop Markall S.J. of Salisbury backed an application to the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith to obtain this dispensation, but it was refused. Unfazed,

Shelmerdine’s Roman canonist, Fr A. Smetsers S.J. recommended a second attempt, but the Archbishop felt obliged to accept the refusal as final.

Burning with a desire for the priesthood that was no mere human velleity, Shelmerdine, was not so easily discouraged. Seeking information on all sides, he was advised that Archbishop McCann of Cape Town, South Africa, “collected priests like postage stamps” and would be particularly interested in one with a medical degree. The future cardinal had no hesitation in backing a new appeal to Rome for the necessary dispensation, on condition that Shelmerdine agreed, if accepted, to be ordained for the Cape Town Archdiocese. Fr Smetsers worked on the case in tandem with the celebrated canonist Fr Bouscaren and it was decided this time to approach directly the Holy Office, the highest of the Roman congregations. The case was ably presented: Dr Philip Shelmerdine was an exemplary Catholic, he was not responsible for the departure of his wife, there was no likelihood of her wishing to return to him nor any obligation on him to accept her if she did, his children were independent, there was no scandal as his wife had never been known in the African continent, he possessed the necessary aptitudes and the upright supernatural desire for the priesthood and was called by his bishop, subject only to Rome’s dispensation. Fervent prayers were offered and in early May 1959 the dispensation was received. Shelmerdine spent the Summer months revising his Latin and began his seminary studies in September at the Venerable Beda College, in Rome, where English late vocations were “fast-tracked” to ordination. Little did the joyful seminarian realise, as he contemplated the splendour of Rome, that the rotund figure who had recently been elected to succeed Pope Pius XII was to set in motion a revolution that, in a few short years, would all but annihilate the Church and would leave Shelmerdine himself the sole priest of his diocese to persevere.

CHAPTER 2 : A PRIEST AT LASTPhilip Shelmerdine arrived at Rome’s celebrated Pontifical Beda College in 1959.

This institution had been established by Pope Pius IX in 1852 to enable English convert clergymen and other late vocations already equipped with a sound basic education to be prepared for the priesthood in just four years. The theory behind this was not, in fact, that the latecomers to the priesthood could get by with less knowledge. It was (rightly or wrongly) that they had already acquired maturity and could learn the rest in less time by studying more intensely. The college had recently moved to new buildings, adjacent to the ancient basilica of Saint Paul’s Outside the Walls, raised by the emperor Constantine over Saint Paul’s burial place. There, under the strict but kindly supervision of Mgr Charles Duchemin, the fifty-year old doctor, retired soldier and ex-prisoner began his theological studies.

Among his contemporaries he recognised a name and a face which reminded him of one of his fellow 18B internees with whom, nearly twenty years earlier, he had been grilled for five weeks at MI5’s notorious Latchmere House centre (which the public supposed to be reserved for the interrogation of enemy prisoners). On asking whether his new classmate was indeed the man he thought, the latter replied with embarrassment that he had “put all that behind him” and did not wish to be ashamed by being reminded of it. Philip was of a different mind : “My unjust internment under 18B for defending the true interests of my country is the one thing in my life I’m really proud of,” he replied. For Philip Shelmerdine, opposition to the action of the Judeo-Masonic conspiracy was part of a seamless whole with the generous integrity that had brought him, in the teeth of so many difficulties, to dedicate his life to God in the priesthood.

Happily the seminary professors were of the old school and there was no truck with Modernism. One of them, as moral theology teacher, was to have a lasting influence on the new student : Dom Peter Flood, O.S.B., M.D., M.Ch., B.A., B.Comm., J.C.D. Both medical doctors and surgeons, the two warmed to one another at once, and Shelmerdine was to learn much from the world-renowned Benedictine scholar who discovered in his new student a natural aptitude for moral theology.

Philip Shelmerdine was an exemplary seminarian: intelligent, hard-working, pious, respectful of the rules and without singularity. There was only one occasion when he made himself conspicuous: by declining to join his fellow-students in a coach-journey to Pietrelcina to see in the flesh the miracle-working stigmatist Padre Pio. His motive was not disbelief in the phenomena surrounding Padre Pio, but an act of faith in the Church. Seminarian Shelmerdine recalled the story of Saint Louis who had been summoned from court to see a eucharistic miracle, but declined to go, observing that he would not believe in the Church’s teaching about the Blessed Sacrament one whit more for observing the miracle, for he already believed it with firm and unquestioning faith. In the same way, Shelmerdine left his fellow-seminarians to fortify their faith by their excursion, while himself feeling no such need. It is remarkable, of course, that when subjected to the test of the Vatican II apostasy, he alone was to stand firm.

While the internal seminary life remained traditional and lectures were orthodox, it was impossible for the seminarians not to be aware that the wind of change was blowing. Seminary Rector Mgr Duchemin had been in place for many years and was in no hurry to oblige the novelty-lovers by relaxing any of the rules and regulations. But the rotund new occupant of the Holy See, John XXIII, proved a very different character from his predecessor, Pius XII, who had received Philip Shelmerdine in one of the last audiences he granted before his death in 1958.

One day Dom Peter Flood expounded to the students the Catholic doctrine that the sacrament of Extreme Unction cannot be validly administered to one who is not sick, even if he is about to die, for instance in war or by the death penalty. Hardly any time elapsed before it became public knowledge in Rome that John XXIII had himself administered Extreme Unction to a condemned criminal who was not known to have any health problems. Dom Peter, not easily flustered, charitably suggested that the Holy Father had observed that the criminal was in the throes of life-threatening fear at the contemplation of his impending execution. Such far-fetched explanations were to become increasingly necessary, but decreasingly credible, as the new régime became established.

Soon news reached the seminarians that a council had been called, but their superiors ensured that the excitement and the extraordinary events should not interfere with the calm fidelity necessary for all serious studies. Only on special occasions did the seminarians come into contact with the majestic ceremonies of the council that was to put an end to all majesty and all ceremony.

Philip’s seminary years rushed by: cassock and broad-brimmed roman hat, tonsure and minor orders (1961), studies, examinations, retreats, double renewal of his dispensation from the impediments arising from his having a wife still living (Canon 987§2) and from his being a convert from heresy (Canon 985§1), sub-diaconate, with the obligation of the breviary (thanks to the Vatican II sessions, each day’s Divine Office text was sold as a cheap broadsheet at Rome’s newspaper stands!), the diaconate in late 1962 and finally the great day arrived. It was on 30th

March 1963, in the neighbouring basilica that Philip Shelmerdine was raised to the priesthood to which he had so long felt himself called.

The ordaining bishop was Cesario d’Amato O.S.B., Abbot of San Paolo fuori le Mura, who had been appointed titular bishop of Sebaste in Cilicia by Pope Pius XII and consecrated bishop in 1955. Abbot Amato acted on the strength of dimissorial letters from Shelmerdine’s ordinary, Archbishop McCann of Cape Town, for it was in the diocese of Cape Town that the new priest was incardinated. Some years later Philip Shelmerdine was to wonder what had become of Abbot Amato and asked his former professor Mgr J J Curtin for information. Curtin replied that Abbot Amato had retired to Monte Cassino and there died, being replaced at Saint Paul’s by one Abbot Franzoni, who was, in Curtin’s words, “way out” and had to be deprived of his abbacy, after which he “ran some species of charismatic and corybantic conventicle on the Via Ostiense”. But in one respect at least Mgr Curtin was mistaken, for while Philip Shelmerdine was to die in 1987, thinking that Amato had pre-deceased him, the latter in fact survived him by 13 years, dying at the age of 96 in 2000. Having

retired from any episcopal office, he had for years no longer appeared in the Annuario Pontificio—one wonders whether there are other unknown bishops of like antiquity still living.

The newly ordained Father Philip Shelmerdine was equipped at once with a Roman celebret (in fact it was dated two days in advance of his ordination!). It is perhaps worth clarifying what is meant by a celebret, for it is a subject about which there is much confusion. Any priest regularly ordained and in good standing has the right to say Mass. There are priests in good standing who are not yet approved for confessions or for preaching, but there is no such thing as a regularly-ordained priest in good standing who has no right to say Mass: the Church ordains her priests for them to say Mass and by the fact of ordaining them she gives them not only the power but also the right to do so. The testimonial known as a celebret (Latin for “let him celebrate”) is thus decidedly not an authorisation to say Mass. It is a proof that one possesses that right – a proof of being a regularly ordained priest of the Catholic Church under no censure. Priests in their own diocese where they are well known to the other clergy have no need of a celebret – its role is to attest their status should they wish to say Mass in the church of a priest to whom they are unknown. A priest such as Saint John Vianney, the curé of Ars, spending all his priestly life in the same place, had no need of one. At Rome, it was needed, but years were to pass before Shelmerdine needed another.

His ordination did not spell the end of his formal studies. He now had several months of intensive preparation for pastoral work, especially the grave and demanding task of hearing confessions and judging cases of conscience in the sacramental forum. In due course he passed before the Apostolic Examiners and on 10th June he received his faculties to hear confessions from Cardinal Micara, Vicar General of the Roman Curia. At last his student days were over and Fr. Shelmerdine sailed for South Africa, armed with an indult to say Mass on shipboard. Little did he imagine that in a few short years he would be back in Rome to challenge the validity of a new rite of Mass which was already being plotted but of which he himself as yet had no inkling.

The new priest’s arrival in South Africa raised the question of potential scandal arising from the fact that his wife was still alive, especially as he could not easily disguise the fact that he had two adult children. It was decided that in response to any enquiry he would reply that he had “lost his wife in the war,” a statement undeniably true, though not in its obvious meaning. Archbishop McCann assigned him first the curacy of a parish where he could gain pastoral experience. Unfortunately the parish priest’s idea of pastoral activity was to play cards as often as possible, expecting his curate to join him. Disappointed and disedified, the new priest attempted to satisfy the demands of his superior without allowing his apostolic spirit to be dampened.

The trial of the card-playing parish priest did not last long. In early 1966, McCann, recently named cardinal by Paul VI at the end of the second Vatican Council in which he had participated as a “moderate progressive”, deputed Fr Philip Shelmerdine to Umlamli Mission Hospital as medical missionary. Now Shelmerdine, who had already spent years giving medical service to the poor blacks of Rhodesia, could simultaneously do good to bodies and souls in the more impoverished parts of the Cape Town diocese. In view of his frequent travels in difficult situations, he received an abundant series of canonical privileges and indults, derived from the bishop’s quinquennial faculties, including the exceptional right to say Mass alone, and that of using a Greek corporal or antimensium in place of the normal altar stone, as well as the right to replace all liturgical colours except black by gold vestments and the right to say the rosary instead of the Divine Office. He could also bless rosaries and other indulgenced objects with a single blessing – a privilege normally reserved to cardinals.

New trials soon arrived. In South Africa the new wave of theological and liturgical modernism found fertile soil in the Communist-inspired anti-apartheid movement. Fr Shelmerdine had no illusions as to what was taking place behind the scenes. He

accepted, without enthusiasm, the initial liturgical changes including a considerable use of the vernacular and the introduction of “bidding prayers” for various intentions, but he opposed a stark refusal when all priests of South Africa were instructed to pray publicly for an end to “discrimination of all kinds”. It may seem a slight event, but for a man of Philip Shelmerdine’s temperament and convictions nothing but outright moral impossibility could justify the refusal of a superior’s order. He patiently explained to his bishop that even as a babe at the breast he had been obliged to “discriminate” first against his mother’s left breast when suckling on the right and then against the right breast when suckling on the left. For the time being he was left unmolested, but he sensed that the situation was worsening and that the authorities were not prepared to defend the faith.

When it came to his attention that a fellow-priest was abusing the confessional to encourage Catholic married couples to practise contraception, Shelmerdine denounced him to McCann, but was greeted with an ironic chuckle. Cardinal McCann was far more concerned to secure voting rights for millions of illiterate piccaninnies, than to maintain the sacredness of the divine law governing the transmission of human life. Knowing well that bishops like Denis Hurley of Durban were openly denying the Church’s immemorial teaching that contraception is a deadly sin, McCann was not about to make the same offence the occasion for depriving himself of one of those priests whom he “collected like postage stamps”.

There were further occasional conflicts – nothing grave, but enough to ensure that Fr. Shelmerdine was kept in humble situations and given no permanent office.

In 1969 the contraception controversies deliberately ignited by Paul VI still occupied the greater part of the pages of the supposedly Catholic press, but the New Mass was known to be imminent. The rupture between those who were determined to keep the faith and those who had adopted the agenda of organised naturalism was about to become public. It was at this juncture that Fr. Shelmerdine providentially fell ill – a liver condition necessitated a prolonged hospitalisation, and while he was ill and had little to do but read and pray, he was passed a copy a of a controversial new book: Patrick Henry Omlor’s Questioning The Validity of the Masses Using the New, All English Canon. Reading it made a profound impression on him. He saw at once the inadmissibility of the translation “for all men” in the new form of consecration and the impossibility of using a liturgy that included it.

While convalescing, Fr Shelmerdine visited England, France and the U.S.A., talking about the impending crisis to those he respected. In the U.S., Fr. Charles Coughlin was pleased to recognise in Shelmerdine an old friend of the late Fr. Denis Fahey. The two talked at length, but Coughlin’s advice to him – “Make yourself financially independent” – was not exactly evangelical in inspiration. On return to South Africa, Shelmerdine sought out his ordinary, and informed Cardinal McCann that he had doubts as to the validity of the new rite and would not in conscience be able to adopt it unless and until these doubts were entirely cleared up. McCann’s first thought concerned neither the grounds of his priest’s doubts nor the needs of the troubled priest himself, but public relations: he sternly ordered his subordinate to speak of his doubts to no one, but relented so far as to permit him to mention the matter in confession if necessary.

On Sunday 30th November 1969 the New Mass came officially into force. On Sunday 30th November 1969 Fr. Philip Shelmerdine resigned his post at the Umlamli Mission Hospital.

CHAPTER 3 : BEARDING BUGNINI IN HIS DENLet us take a step back and describe Philip Shelmerdine as the arrival of the new

liturgy found him. At sixty years of age, he was still a “young” priest, in the sense that he had been ordained only six years and had no permanent ecclesiastical office. And while his seminary education had been sound, he made no pretence to exceptional theological learning. As a former military officer, a medical doctor, an accomplished campaigner against the forces of organised subversion, well-educated,

from a respected family, he was undoubtedly a man of competence, serious and generally taken seriously. In character, his single most notable trait was humility: Philip Shelmerdine was the last man to draw attention to himself, to seek the limelight, to wish to be different, to rebel against accepted practice. But there was nothing feeble about his humility, for it accompanied keen perceptiveness in the detection of incoherence, and resolute integrity in refusing it.

We have seen in last month’s instalment Fr. Shelmerdine’s initial conscientious refusal of the Novus Ordo, but to a character like his, mere refusal was insufficient. If Patrick Henry Omlor’s arguments against the new form of consecration were convincing, they ought to convince all sensible and upright men. If, on the other hand, they could be answered, no time must be lost in seeking the answer.

And it will distress some readers to learn that Fr. Shelmerdine by no means ruled out the possibility that an answer might be found to Omlor’s objections. He did not at once launch a public campaign to denounce the invalidity of the New Mass. Instead, he acted in accordance with the normal rules of prudence, presenting his objections as clearly as possible to his Ordinary, to his former seminary professors, to the most learned of his colleagues, and to the highest and most competent authorities he could find. He approached them with neither the bravado of one who knows he is right, nor with the obsequiousness who regards himself as probably wrong: he wanted a man-to-man discussion in which the difficulty would be tackled head-on and answered if it could be.

It will be as well to remind ourselves what the chief difficulty was.The traditional formula of consecration says, in the words of Christ, that the

chalice contains “My Blood...which shall be shed for you and for many”. The Novus Ordo, in nearly all its vernacular versions says “for you and for all”.

Now in theological reality, Christ’s Blood was shed in His desire, and in its intrinsic sufficiency, for the salvation of all, but in its efficacy, in its objective fruitfulness, it was shed for many, but not all, since not all men are saved. Thus the two statements “Christ’s Blood was shed for many” and “Christ’s Blood was shed for all” can both be considered true, but only in a different sense. In the same way, to use an everyday parallel, the gardener may say, “I grow vegetables for the whole family,” referring to his intention, or he may say, “I grow vegetables mostly for slugs, snails and cutworms,” referring to the outcome.

In the case of the formula of consecration, while both statements may be true, in their different senses, both cannot have been made by Our Lord at the Last Supper. Either Our Lord’s meaning was “many” because he was referring to the outcome of His Passion, or it was “all” if He was referring to its sufficiency. And as a matter of fact, the Gospels (all written in Greek), St Paul, and all the variant liturgical forms ever approved by the Church, agree in saying that He used the word “many”, because, as the Catechism of the Council of Trent puts it: “With reason, therefore, were the words for all not used, as in this place the fruits of the Passion are alone spoken of, and to the elect only did His Passion bring the fruit of salvation.”

Inevitably, the mistranslation “for all” used in the vernacular versions of the Novus Ordo led to doubts about its validity. To these doubts, a sort of reply was made.

To justify its mistranslation, the ICEL (the international profit-making committee charged with translating the new liturgical texts) explained that Our Lord would have spoken the original formula in Hebrew or Aramaic, in which languages the word translated many in Latin and Greek in fact often means all: “Neither Hebrew nor Aramaic possess [sic] a word for all,” it solemnly asserted. “The word rabbim or ‘multitude’ thus served also in the inclusive sense for ‘the whole,’ even though the corresponding Greek and the Latin appear to have an exclusive sense, i.e., ‘the many’ rather than ‘the all.’” The ICEL cited Protestant scholar Joachim Jeremias, in support of this claim. And in 1970 the same argument was advanced in Notitiæ, the organ of the Conciliar Church’s Sacred Congregation for the Sacraments and Divine Worship.

Dr. Shelmerdine stared in astonishment at the claim that neither Hebrew nor Aramaic possesses a word capable of distinguishing the concept of all from many. He recalled that as a physician serving the poorest and most ignorant tribal natives in the African continent, using one of the world’s most inadequate languages, he had never noticed that they were unable to distinguish such elementary concepts as many and all. He tried to imagine one tribal hunter returning to camp and announcing to his companions that he had killed “all the waterbuck” at the lake, and his companions departing at once in pursuit of the others, since they had not been able to understand from his account whether there were any left or not. The idea was incredible.

Then Shelmerdine drafted a hilarious pastiche in which he imagined a conversation in Hebrew among the Rothschild brothers and cousins in 1875 about their purchases of shares in the Suez Canal. “Ah, Jacob,” declared one, “I have just bought all the shares in the Suez Canal!” Replied the other, “Indeed, my dear, and are there many left?”

However much the ICEL allegation outraged his common sense, Shelmerdine knew that a serious researcher must consult competent authorities. With that extraordinary energy and determination to get to the bottom of any important issue which characterised him throughout his life, he made an appointment to see the Professor of Semitic Languages at the University of Johannesburg. The professor, not a Catholic, read carefully the claims made by Joachim Jeremias and those who relied on him, and delivered his verdict: “It is so ridiculous as to be preposterous.”

Fr. Shelmerdine was now satisfied beyond a shadow of a doubt that there was no basis for the justification advanced for the mistranslation. And well he might be, for even if Our Lord had indeed spoken those words in Aramaic (and it is a very big if), there is no doubt that the three evangelists who recount them unhesitatingly rendered them by the Greek word for “many”, not that for “all”. And there is no doubt that the Church’s official Latin version “pro multis” must accurately reflect the sense.

The question remained: did this gross error in the most sacred part of the “New Mass” render it invalid? Many who vehemently deplored the mistranslation held that validity at least was intact, since the words “This is My Blood” alone in their view are essential. But Mr Patrick Henry Omlor—ad multos annos!—had done his work too thoroughly for this claim to carry weight. It has against it the clear testimony of St. Thomas, the rubrics of the Missal, the very typography of the Missal, the testimony of the Fathers, the Catechism of the Council of Trent (in its obvious sense, unfuddied and unduddied) and numerous other authorities. The tendency in recent years for minor theological manualists to oppose the traditional view had been in its turn overturned by the massive scholarship of Fr. Maurice de la Taille in his Mysterium Fidei.

Fr. Shelmerdine studied the texts, typed them out, committed them to memory, discussed them with all those who agreed to listen, and finally betook himself to Rome.

The attraction that brings students back to the city and institution in which they made their studies is ancient and universal, but Fr. Philip Shelmerdine was not in Rome to indulge sentimentality and recall old times. He was there to meet Archbishop Bugnini in the offices of the Sacred Congregation for Divine Worship, and he had carefully planned how to present his case.

He had no intention of aggressiveness or of denunciation. He remained entirely open to any serious argument that might be found to defend the Catholicity and validity of the new vernacular consecration. Cardinal McCann had approved his idea of setting out to consult those best equipped to “resolve his doubts”.

Unfortunately, when Fr. Shelmerdine arrived at the offices of the Congregation responsible for foisting the neo-Protestant liturgy on the Church, its secretary was absent (perhaps at a lodge meeting). He was instead invited to meet, by way of substitute for Bugnini himself, a high-ranking English-speaking Monsignore. History does not record the name of this paragon of liturgical scholarship, but since he was

there to defend the translation “for all”, let us call him by the latinized name Mgr. Omnibus. Here is the substance of the dialogue which ensued.

Fr. Shelmerdine: I am deeply disquieted by the widespread translation of “pro multis” as “for all men”.

Mgr. Omnibus: I assure you that there is nothing to be worried about. The Holy Father himself, Pope Paul VI, freely uses that translation.

Fr. Shelmerdine: But when the Holy Father offers Mass in Latin, does he say “pro omnibus”?

Mgr. Omnibus: Not at all. When saying Mass in Latin, His Holiness says “pro multis”.

Fr. Shelmerdine: And when he says Mass in Italian, what does he say?Mgr. Omnibus: He says “per tutti”—“for all”.Fr. Shelmerdine: But surely there is a contradiction? Either the consecration

affirms that Our Lord’s Precious Blood was shed for many or it affirms that is was shed for all. It cannot mean both.

Mgr. Omnibus (tumbling naïvely into the trap of presuming that the objection was one of doctrinal orthodoxy): You misunderstand, Father. Both statements can be understood in a perfectly orthodox sense. When the Holy Father says Mass in Latin, he means that the Passion was effective in securing the salvation of many. But when he says Mass in vernacular languages, he means that the Passion was sufficient to obtain the salvation of all.

Fr. Shelmerdine: You mean that the orthodoxy of the new translation depends on the fact that there is a radical change of meaning between it and the Latin it has replaced?

Mgr. Omnibus (avuncular): Precisely, Father. There lies the explanation of your difficulties.

Fr. Shelmerdine (drawing from his document case a photocopy of the rubrics of the Roman missal as promulgated by Pope St. Pius V and reading aloud in Latin): “If anyone...should change anything in the form of the consecration...so that the words so changed no longer meant the same thing, he would not confect the Sacrament.”

Mgr. Omnibus (after pausing just long enough to realise that he has already conceded that the vernacular form precisely comprises a change of meaning, precisely what the rubrics declare to cause invalidity...): Well, I’m sorry, Father, but that’s all the time I can spare you...

And Fr. Philip Shelmerdine was unceremoniously ushered to the door!Emerging from the Palazzo delle Congregazione, and not having yet said his

Mass, he crossed the Piazza San Pietro to the Basilica of St Peter and presented himself at the sacristy with his celebret. A young altar-boy was at once available to serve him and, after he had vested, preceded him to the altar at which he was to celebrate where he presented him with a Novus Ordo altar missal. Fr. Shelmerdine gave him a gruff order to take it away and fetch “a good one”, whereupon the astute lad returned promptly with a Tridentine missal and served his Mass flawlessly.

From Rome, where Mgr. Bugnini’s understudy had achieved the reverse of satisfying him, Fr. Shelmerdine flew to England, to consult with the Jesuits at Farm Steet, London, and with the theological faculty of St. John’s seminary at Wonersh.

The Jesuits were hospitable and charming and offered the astonishing theological argument that as they were all using the Novus Ordo, it surely must be all right. At the seminary, one professor, having attentively listened to the proofs of the invalidity of the Novus Ordo, patiently informed his troubled fellow-priest that he (Shelmerdine) was suffering from spiritual pride. Never a man to be side-tracked, Shelmerdine did not deny the accusation but reminded the speaker that if changing the meaning of the words of consecration did not invalidate the Mass, there must be some way of proving this independently of the spiritual defects of those discussing it.

The noted Jesuit scholar Fr. Crehan maintained to Fr. Shelmerdine that history attests the existence of valid liturgical rites not containing “pro multis”. But his examples came from the Syro-Jacobite liturgical family, as used by Monophysite

heretics, the validity of which has never been recognised by the Church. The best he could find in Catholic liturgies was the ancient Irish Sacramentary which has “for many and for you”, which is merely a change of order and not of meaning. Crehan also, while granting that Hebrew had a word for all, maintained that this was only an adjective, and could not be used alone, for which reason Our Lord was constrained to use the word for many. He had not taken the trouble to ask a native speaker of modern Syriac how the Gospel texts were rendered in that language!

Fr Shelmerdine’s debates took up much time and he went over the arguments again and again with various opponents, ranging from the ignorant to the quixotic, but no reply of worth was made to the objections immortalised by Mr. Patrick Omlor and by writers such as the late Hugh Ross Williamson.

Returning to South Africa, Fr. Philip Shelmerdine reported to his ordinary. “Well,” enquired Cardinal McCann, paternally, “Have you resolved your doubts?”

“Yes, Your Eminence,” came the reply. “I have no remaining doubt: I will never use the new rite of Mass.”

“In that case,” rejoined McCann, “there can be no further employment for you in the Church of South Africa.”

“Very well, Your Eminence, I accept the challenge.”

CHAPTER 4 : A PRIEST AGAINST THE BISHOPSWe left Fr. Philip Shelmerdine in the early seventies, certain that he could never

in conscience say the Novus Ordo Mass, and informed by his Ordinary that there could be no further employment for him in the Church of South Africa until he did so. He was not under censure, he was not deprived of his faculties to hear confessions, Cardinal McCann had no objection to his continuing to say Mass alone (he already had an indult to say Mass without a server), but he was “out of work”. What was he to do?

With hindsight, the answer comes unbidden that he should put himself at the disposal of the traditional Catholic movement in South Africa, offering Mass, teaching true doctrine and denouncing the bishops and the false Mass and religion of Vatican II. What could be plainer? It should come as a sharp reality-check that it did not even occur to Fr Shelmerdine to do anything of the kind. There was no traditional Catholic movement. Nor was there any forum in which it would have been possible to “speak out”. Nor was it at all clear what to say if the opportunity had been given. A nuclear bomb had exploded, but the shock-waves were still reverberating. It was too early for serious damage-assessment. Moreover, Fr. Shelmerdine was acutely aware of the moral dimension of the crisis: throughout the world the major onslaught seemed to be against chastity and the family. Many surviving conservative bishops and priests who had adopted the Novus Ordo in good faith were still at that time actively defending sound morals. Inevitably one hesitates to launch all out war on a new front with the perspective of losing almost all one’s allies on another.

What Shelmerdine in fact did was to go out and get a job! Armed with an indult to practise medicine and to wear lay-clothes when doing so, he took employment as a medical officer in South Africa’s diamond mines. The distant relations of the Jews who had refused him a future as a London surgeon were delighted to have him in their employ in South Africa. Thus his daily existence was one of living in hotels and being on call at any moment, night or day, to don his overalls and safety helmet and descend into that darkest part of darkest Africa which lies underground and whence man’s most precious minerals are excavated in abundance.

By so acting he effectively opposed McCann’s crude attempt to starve him into submission. But of course Fr Philip Shelmerdine was always above all else a priest. Every morning, very early and all alone, he said Mass, suffering from the frustrated yearning to exercise his priestly ministry on behalf of souls. He contacted missionary congregations such as the Society of the Divine Word to offer them his services. Despite his insistence on using only the Tridentine Mass they showed some interest, especially in view of his medical qualifications. The late Fr Harold Rigney S.V.D.,

former prisoner for the faith and author of Four Years in a Red Hell, discussed the possibility of employing him in India, in Ghana or in New Guinea, but eventually the local bishops blocked any such attempt. Archbishop Noser of Madang in New Guinea assured Shelmerdine that “our people would no longer be happy about having only a Latin Mass” and the project had to be abandoned. While Philip Shelmerdine would certainly not have accepted to use the Novus Ordo in Latin, it is interesting to note that the idea was at no stage suggested to him.

By the mid-70s the broad dividing lines between the different conservative and traditional groups were becoming clearer. Traditionalist periodicals were springing up. Returning to his native England for a few weeks in 1975 Fr Shelmerdine collaborated with other traditional priests, including the larval SSPX. But before preaching or hearing confessions he dutifully called at the diocesan chancery offices, showing proof of being a priest in good standing in South Africa and obtaining faculties from the Novus Ordo bishops. While well aware that the Church was in grave crisis, he would still have considered any attempt to give absolution without a demonstrable source of jurisdiction as sacrilegious and invalid.

Already his collaboration with the SSPX led to difficulties: saying Mass for a small group of layfolk in a garage he did not feel able to follow the example of the SSPX priest who normally left them the Blessed Sacrament in these insecure and makeshift conditions. Offence was taken and some troublemaker managed to discover that Fr. Shelmerdine had been imprisoned during the war and to put into circulation rumours that he was a traitor and should be avoided. The English SSPX had no further use for him, but in 1978 he received a direct solicitation from Fr Hector Bolduc to collaborate with the SSPX in the US. Despite, or perhaps because of, Bolduc’s ingenuous emphasis on the financial security offered by the Society, Shelmerdine did not pursue the invitation.

In the late 1970s he moved out of the diocese of his incardination. He now resided in the diocese of Lydenburg-Witbank (Eastern Transvaal) where he had bought a small farm and lived alone. One day a gang of tribal thugs broke in and tied him up while ransacking the house looking for valuables. By chance they opened a wardrobe in which they found a set of priest’s vestments, sacred vessels and other equipment for saying Mass. Instead of stealing it, as might have been feared, they were overwhelmed by the realisation that their victim was no ordinary man but a wizard having the power to exercise powerful magic. They panicked and fled empty-handed. It is doubtful whether they would have sensed the same awe if they had chanced on the ornaments of a Novus Ordo president-of-the-assembly.

At last, in 1980, some other South Africans, waking up to the necessity of return to the traditional Mass if they were to safeguard their Catholic faith, entered into contact with Fr Shelmerdine. Initially one or two private individuals visited him for Mass. Then he was formally requested to say Mass for groups, first in White River, and then to make regular visits to Durban, Johannesburg, Pretoria and Cape Town to offer Mass in public and tend to the spiritual needs of the abandoned faithful of those cities. (He had been formally notified, as a priest in good standing of the diocese of Cape Town, that his faculties for confession were now valid for all the dioceses of the Republic.)

While delighted at the request and only too willing to oblige, Shelmerdine considered it the obvious course to write and request the authorisation of the local ordinaries to function in their dioceses. From our present perspective, this may seem tiresomely docile to men who were engaged in destroying the faith. But it should be borne in mind that the very idea that these men had ceased to be legitimate members of the hierarchy had never occurred to Philip Shelmerdine and that he had never heard it mentioned by anyone else. The default attitude of the Catholic clergy is one of obedience to legitimate authority, even if this authority behaves deplorably. The authorisation he requested was refused and it was only after consulting a traditionalist Canon Lawyer in England that Fr Philip Shelmerdine was reassured that he could in good conscience say Mass in public and he began to do so. The results were spectacular. In Mass centres founded in South Africa’s major cities he soon

found himself with a total of some three hundred faithful. Weekdays saw him practising medicine while on Sundays he would travel by air from city to city as a physician of souls.

The local ordinary of his residence, Bishop Reiterer, was swift to act. After a canonical warning he proceeded to declare Fr. Shelmerdine suspended. Since it is not in fact a delict for a priest in good standing to say Mass in public, Reiterer had to find a canonical delict to serve as the grounds of his censure. Showing great imaginative powers, he had recourse to Canon 2378 (which punishes clerics who defy the Church’s liturgical rites and ceremonies) and even Canon 2315 (concerning the suspicion of heresy—the alleged heresy being Shelmerdine’s doubt of the real presence in Masses celebrated according to the Novus Ordo) as well as Canon 2331 concerning disobedience to the legitimate orders of one’s ordinary. Reiterer also obligingly informed Shelmerdine that this censure bound him not only in the diocese of Lydenburg-Witbank, but everywhere else too. It is hard not to chuckle at such arrant hypocrisy as one re-reads these stern missives addressed by a time-serving prelate to the only fully faithful priest in his diocese, while tolerating meanwhile from the other priests any number of outrages against faith, morals and liturgical law.

Shelmerdine again took the advice of a canonist who assured him that, as it was notoriously certain that he was not guilty of any of the delicts of which he was accused, the censure was invalid in both fora. Shelmerdine continued to offer Mass publicly in the homes and hired halls which had become his Mass centres.

Then in the early 1980s Fr Shelmerdine had the joy of seeing two young diocesan priests approach him with a view to returning to the traditional Mass. This raised a new issue, for both had been ordained in the new rite of ordination.

There are four different reasons why some Catholics have questioned the validity of orders conferred according to the new rite:

1. Nearly all of the grounds on which Pope Leo XIII condemned Anglican Orders as invalid (Apostolicæ Curæ, 1896) apply to the Conciliar Church’s 1968 ordination rite. And the one thing that would have definitely safeguarded validity despite this—perfect fidelity to the essential form designated by Pope Pius XII (Sacramentum Ordinis, 1947)—was deliberately made to appear present without actually being so, for a single tiny word (the Latin “ut” which means “in order that”) was suppressed. Whatever individual opinions may be, it is impossible to prove that the suppression of “ut” is not a substantial change, as it suppresses the causal connection between the two halves of the operative sentence. Moreover, despite occasional claims to the contrary, there is no historical precedent for the form without “ut” as the 1968 rite has it. (See the present writer’s, The Validity of the 1968 New Rite of Ordination.)

2. Vernacular translations of the new rite are even more distant from Pius XII’s essential form than the 1968 Latin. It is quite possible, of course, that there may exist valid forms of ordination which differ from that designated by Pope Pius XII. But they would have to specify unequivocally the substance of the sacrament and it is not at all clear that the new rite does this even in Latin, let alone in slapdash translations. The simple fact is that the Conciliar Church cannot be relied on either for sound doctrine or for valid sacraments.

3. Even if the new ordination rite were in itself unquestionably valid, it is notoriously common for Conciliar Church ministers to allow themselves considerable liberty in carrying out their rites. Some essential point may have been omitted.

4. The ordaining bishop himself may never have been validly consecrated, for the new rite of episcopal consecration is even harder to defend than that of priestly ordination. That is why the late Mr Michael Davies, in his book The Order of Melchisedech, argues—tenuously—for the validity of the new rites of ordination of priests and deacons but is silent about the new rite of episcopal consecration.

It was the first of the above considerations which at the time carried weight with Shelmerdine. Gently explaining the problem to the two young priests, he advised them to travel urgently to Écône in Switzerland and have themselves re-ordained by Archbishop Lefebvre at his earliest convenience.

Naturally Fr Shelmerdine had been relying on Archbishop Lefebvre’s co-operation, but the Archbishop did not take the same view. Lefebvre had himself used the new rite of ordination for Fr Cottard, and several priests in his Society had been ordained in the new rite and never re-ordained. Moreover, as Michael Davies informs us, Lefebvre had initially failed to detect the omission of the word “ut” and had thus made some serious decisions (difficult to reverse) while under a misapprehension.

In the event, Lefebvre asked each of the two South Africans: “Do you feel ordained?” Richard Bedingfeld replied in the negative and was conditionally re-ordained on 29th June 1982, but his colleague did “feel ordained” and was therefore sent back to South Africa without re-ordination.

Now Fr Shelmerdine was not what is understood by a great intellectual, nor had he any pretence to be an outstanding theologian. Indeed his life would have been a very ordinary and uneventful one but for his clarity of thought and obstinate, unshakable integrity in the face of what he could see to be true or false. He had just reached yet another of the turning points of his life into which this integrity led him. We have already seen his refusal to become a Freemason, his refusal to remain a Protestant, his refusal to acquiesce in or approve of the original casus belli of the Second World War and his refusal of the New Mass. Now his conscience imposes on him, to his great dismay, the duty of public dissent from Archbishop Lefebvre. For he could see that, whatever his other merits, Lefebvre’s judgment was in this case indefensible, and he had no choice but to say so, in order to help the faithful to form their consciences in deciding from whom to receive the sacraments.

Fr Shelmerdine drafted a short article in which he recounted the facts of the abortive re-ordination attempt and pointed out that the validity or invalidity of a sacrament simply cannot be felt but depends on objective criteria. He advanced the hypothesis of two identical twins, ordained on the same day by the same bishop, one of whom “felt” ordained and the other of whom didn’t, and enquired whether the archbishop would really consider it correct to re-ordain one and not the other. He wryly confided that he himself did not even “feel” baptised and wondered whether Archbishop Lefebvre would consider that good grounds for re-baptising him. He pointed out that although “ut” is a short word, the presence or absence of “in order that” can make a great difference to a sentence. The example he offered was that the statement “I have a gun...you may die”, does not constitute a threat as long as the words “in order that” are not inserted between the two clauses.

Archbishop Lefebvre was throughout his life unhesitant in his fidelity to the sound doctrines he had learnt at the Séminaire Pontifical Français at Rome, but after the death of his adviser Fr Berto in 1968 the archbishop’s judgment of new issues presented by the crisis was often weak and foggy on abstract or theological issues, while remaining clear on practical matters. Here, on the grave issue of sacramental validity, the Archbishop lacked Shelmerdine’s clarity of thought. He left his Society a dangerous legacy, leading to the continuing inconsistency by which it reconfirms those confirmed in the new rite but, in the case of ordinations, allegedly “evaluates each case on its merits”—an act which is quite impossible in the absence of clear, agreed and certainly true principles against which to make such evaluations. The sad truth is that the Society even today “evaluates each case” not on principles that all are agreed on (the gulf between Bishop Tissier de Mallerais and Bishop Fellay on this issue is notorious) but on feelings, expediency and subjective factors.

Fr Shelmerdine, of course, observed to the letter the requirements of courtesy and respect due to a valiant prelate. He in no way condemned the Archbishop or attacked his Society. He respectfully expressed disagreement on a grave theological issue, and explained the grounds of his disagreement in terms so lucid that few readers could have any doubt but that he was right. The affair might have been

forgotten except that someone, somewhere, decided that Shelmerdine must pay for his independence of judgement.

A short time afterwards, the SSPX announced that it was setting up Mass centres in South Africa. A dynamic young priest was sent to speak in public, addressing meetings of traditional Catholics and other interested parties. He explained to them that at last the traditional Mass was to return to South Africa, as though the Republic had up to that point been but one vast Novus Ordo desert without a single Tridentine oasis. At last, at one major meeting, a layman rose to enquire tentatively why no mention had been made of Fr Shelmerdine who already said the traditional Mass regularly in the major cities of South Africa. The answer given, in honeyed tones, by the SSPX representative was that Fr Shelmerdine was an admirable old priest who had rendered good service, but that rather than go to his Masses it would be better to stay at home and say the rosary! The representative’s name was Fr Richard Williamson. He has since risen to greater things. As Fr Shelmerdine watched his Mass attendances plummeting on all sides, leaving him with but a sixth of the former number, he had the consolation of perfect and well-justified tranquillity of conscience. We must hope that those responsible have the same comfort.

CHAPTER 5 : THE POPE ISSUEAs we have observed, Philip Shelmerdine was not an extraordinary man or an

extraordinary priest except in one respect: his utter integrity. We have seen him manifest this feature of his character as a youth, refusing his guardian’s wish that he become a Freemason; as a young man, choosing to become a Catholic; as a citizen, investigating and opposing Judeo-Masonic subversion to the point of being unjustly imprisoned; as a priest, refusing the Novus Ordo, and refusing the new rite of ordination. Now we are to see how a priest of integrity reacts when confronted by “the pope issue”.

Up until 1983 Father Shelmerdine had quite literally never heard the least suggestion that Paul VI or the John-Pauls might not have been valid popes, nor had the idea ever crossed his mind spontaneously. It is a curious fact that most traditional Catholic literature in those days, particularly in the English-language, hardly ever adverted to the theological difficulties raised by simultaneously refusing Vatican II and the new rites which emerged from it while nevertheless recognising as legitimate popes those who imposed them.

Let us remind ourselves of the most obvious difficulty entailed by Father Shelmerdine’s position. It is that Father Shelmerdine believed the Novus Ordo to be injurious to the faith, injurious to reverence, injurious to souls and invalid. But if Paul VI had been a true pope, this would be simply impossible. In his celebrated Liturgical Institutions (tom. 2, p. 10, ed. 1878) Dom Guéranger writes that if it were permissible to contest liturgical laws, “…it would follow that the Church had erred in a general discipline, which is heretical.” In Quo graviora (1833) Pope Gregory XVI rhetorically enquires, “Could the Church, which is the pillar and ground of the truth1 and manifestly receives without interruption from the Holy Ghost the teaching of all truth, command, grant or permit what would bring harm to souls and contempt or injury to a sacrament instituted by Christ?” All theologians agree that the council of Trent and Pope Pius VI’s Auctorem Fidei teach the infallibility of the Church’s liturgical dispositions, in the sense that these, even where merely approved and not obligatory, cannot be unfaithful to sound doctrine or to the Church’s sanctifying mission.

From this it follows that there was a logical incompatibility in Shelmerdine’s continuing recognition of Paul VI, and then of John-Paul II, and his rejection of the Novus Ordo. But he had not yet adverted to this incompatibility.

It was in late 1983 that a stranger visiting one of his Mass centres showed him photographs allegedly showing that Paul VI had been replaced by an impostor. Calling on his medical training, Shelmerdine examined the photos with the greatest 1 1 Tim. 3: 15.

care and concluded that the evidence he had been shown proved nothing of the sort and that the photos of the “two Paul VIs” were undoubtedly of the same man. But a seed of doubt had been sown in his mind, nonetheless: was John-Paul II truly the Vicar of Christ?

A few months later, one of his regular Afrikaner faithful lent him a photocopied text of an article by Mr. N. M. Gwynne of Britons Catholic Library which claimed to constitute theological proof of the vacancy of the Holy See. Shelmerdine devoured it with interest. The arguments it contained did not suffice to convince him, but they were sufficiently persuasive to constitute a positive doubt which he felt duty-bound to resolve. He would not be able to rest until he had thoroughly explored the claim that the crisis in the Church was explained by the illegitimacy, through public heresy, of recent claimants to the papacy.

Upon enquiry he found that in addition to Mr. Gwynne, the sedevacantist position was also held by Father Oswald Baker, of Downham Market, with whom he had already been in occasional correspondence, and both Gwynne and Baker lived in England. Though now in his 75th year, Philip Shelmerdine reacted exactly as he had done when, as a young man, he had realised he had to find out the truth about the Catholic Church, or when, as a priest ordained for just a few years, he had gone to see Archbishop Bugnini to find out if there was an answer to the objections to the Novus Ordo Missæ. He set out to visit those best placed to discuss the matter with, and in this case that meant flying to England.

His meeting with Father Baker brought him no new light on the question of the vacancy of the Holy See, and Father Baker complicated Fr Shelmerdine’s research project by advising him against visiting Britons Catholic Library, then run by Mr Gwynne with the assistance of the present writer.

Father Baker had had good reason for his advice, but upon reflection, Shelmerdine decided not to follow it. However, he had no contact address for Britons Catholic Library and was reduced to telephoning at random from the London telephone directory in the hope of falling on the right N.M. Gwynne, a task complicated by the fact that Gwynne used his second Christian name, Martin, for writing under, but his two initials, N.M., in the telephone directory. And when he finally reached the correct home address, the telephone was answered by a daily woman with a severe speech impediment and in any event Mr Gwynne happened to be out of the country at the time. A less tenacious enquirer would certainly have given up, but in the pursuit of a truth which he believed he had to attain, Father Philip Shelmerdine was not a man to yield easily. Eventually he obtained the telephone number of the Britons Catholic Library office and, dialling it, found himself talking to the present writer, then (spring 1984) 21 years old.

Once we had spoken on the telephone, Father Shelmerdine came straight to our Kensington Church Street offices and we talked not only of sedevacantism but also of Catholic books and of the action of the organised forces of subversion. Shelmerdine was delighted, and reassured, to find that books by his old friends Admiral Domvile, Captain Ramsay, Father Denis Fahey and others lined our shelves. Unfortunately he no longer had as much time was he could have wished as he had to catch a train to go and say Mass for a long-standing traditional Catholic friend in the South-West of England, Miss Restieaux, a relative of the then bishop of Plymouth. So I loaded him with as many documents as I could find setting out the arguments for the vacancy of the Holy See: copies of Pope Paul IV’s bull Cum Ex Apostolatus declaring null the election of a heretic to the Holy See irrespective of the number or status of those who might fail to recognise the reality; Saint Robert Bellarmine’s study of the axiom that a heretical pope is deposed; articles about Canon 188§4, which enshrines the principle that a public heretic, even if not officially condemned, forfeits ipso facto all offices in the Church; Cardinal de Lugo’s explanation that the Church does not in practice always require prior admonishment of the culprit as a condition of his being a heretic; comparisons of the doctrines of Vatican II with previous Catholic teaching, and much more that I cannot recall.

Father Philip Shelmerdine ensconced himself in a railway carriage to travel from London to the West Country and sat down to read all these documents. Their effect was swift. On arrival at his host’s, before beginning Mass, he said to her, “Miss Restieaux, I think I am bound in conscience to tell you that, for the first time in my priestly life (other than between the death of a pope and the election of the next) I will not be including the name of any reigning pope in the Canon of my Mass. Miss Restieaux replied that she had recently been reading the writings of Father Noel Barbara and had reached the same conclusion.

CHAPTER 6 : THE FINAL YEARSAs we have seen, Father Philip Shelmerdine concluded, in 1984, that John-Paul II

was not a true pope. It would be very satisfying to record that Father Shelmerdine’s adoption of sedevacantism brought him to the satisfying end of his long voyage of discovery and that he devoted the three years of life which remained to him defending the true explanation of the present crisis and to exercising a peaceful, fruitful and widespread ministry, but this, as we shall see, would be incomplete and misleading.

In October-November 1984 Father Shelmerdine made a round-the-world-trip to bring the sacraments to sedevacantists who had no other source for them which their conscience permitted them to approach. He stopped in Australia (staying for a week in Sydney), the United States where in the space of a few days he offered Mass in California, Indiana, Kansas, Minnesota, Michigan and New York, with a brief hop up to Toronto, Canada, before stopping for a few days in the UK with the group associated with Britons Catholic Library, and then returning to South Africa. At home, his new convictions went down badly with most of his already dwindling group of faithful and he was soon reduced to just four persons who assisted at his Mass.

Though seventy-five years old he had still been practising medicine at the Brewelskloof Hospital. Unhappy with the moral state of his profession and beginning to doubt the validity of his 1966 indult to practise medicine, he now retired from practice.

It must be understood that by contacting the little group associated with Britons Catholic Library, of which the present writer was one member, Father Shelmerdine did not merely reach the sedevacantist conviction. He entered on a momentous relationship of which he certainly did not anticipate all the consequences at the time. This I must now recount, and I do so as an eye-witness, albeit one now having considerable misgivings about many aspects of the role I played at the time.

In rejecting John-Paul II, Shelmerdine did not immediately make any other changes to his life, his apostolate or his convictions concerning the crisis in the Church, for it had not occurred to him that there was any reason to do so. But he was not to remain long in his quiescence. For he had not just encountered sedevacantism : those of us who had convinced him of sedevacantism were also determined to convince him of many other things too and set out to do so. The likelihood that this would take place no doubt had much to do with Father Baker’s advice that he should not visit Britons Catholic Library.

Before proceeding I must try to give the reader some impression of the sedevacantist milieu which Father Shelmerdine had encountered in the shape of Britons Catholic Library and its associates, who were so anxious to win him not only to sedevacantism but also to their own particular brand of sedevacantism and to a thousand other opinions concerning religious and secular matters. Mr Martin Gwynne, with his Britons Catholic library publishing and bookselling business and his team of associates, was the founder of this milieu or movement, and I was myself closely involved in it. But while I certainly know the facts, I am uncertain of my ability to give a completely accurate impression of a world which, if accurately described, would seem hardly credible.

Rather than shirk the issue altogether, I propose to offer a simple list of the convictions Britons Catholic Library held to be true, important and demonstrable. This

list will at least give the reader the flavour of the little London-based group that Father Shelmerdine had run into.

For instance, we were convinced that the medical profession was an institution which existed for the express purpose of propagating sickness and successfully did so. Vaccinations, fluoridation, chemotherapy, radiotherapy, nearly all operations and mercury fillings were bad; so were homeopathy and radiesthesia. Organic food was good, and even obligatory, provided it was not also biodynamic. The new age was bad, but the new age type diet (vegetarian, salt-free, sugar-free, low protein, raw food, whole food, no alcohol, very little dairy) was good, and in most respects obligatory, but if you felt unwell despite (or because of) following it, you could add enemas, fasting, herbal medicine and prodigious quantities of vegetable juice. Such methods could cure all diseases including cancer. But they could not cure nervous breakdowns or mental illness, for such phenomena were mortally sinful acts calling not for cure but for repentance.

Home birth and home school were good or obligatory. Indeed whatever was good normally turned out to be obligatory too.

The works of Shakespeare were written by Bacon and were bad. Indeed nearly all well-known writers were bad, including even such respected Catholic authors as Thomas à Kempis and Fr. Faber. Galileo, Newton and Einstein were all wrong (and probably conscious conspirators), as were most scientists. Pasteur was bad, not because his discoveries were false but because they were not his. Nuclear bombs and energy were a hoax (the destruction of Hiroshima, a wooden city, attested no special virtue in the bombs which ignited it). Nearly all major events in world history were the work of a maleficent secret society, founded by Cain and transmitted through Noah’s flood by Cham—a sect which was at the origin of Freemasonry and all other organized forces of subversion. Membership of these diabolical secret societies included practically all politicians and churchmen, notably Archbishop Lefebvre who was believed to “plan his act” in concert with Paul VI (another member). Practically all wars were organised by this conspiracy for their own purposes. There was no “holocaust” in the Second World War. There were no landings on the moon.

Television was bad, and indeed it was mortally sinful to watch it at all since even programmes with no overtly bad content probably conveyed corrupting subliminal messages. Classical music was also bad, as were (for reasons which I do not recall) integral calculus and double-entry book-keeping.

The world was created in six days, four thousand years before the Incarnation and the reign of Antichrist was to occur two thousand years after it, so that the history of the world would comprise six thousand-year periods mirroring the six days of Creation. Thus Antichrist would appear in time to begin his global reign in 1997 at the latest (allowing 3½ years before the end of the year 2000) and since these dates were imminent, it was wise to prepare by self-sufficiency.

Children should be brought up with the generous use of corporal punishment. Indeed the failure to administer condign punishment on even one occasion was likely to be condemned as necessarily a mortal sin. Omitting one’s daily mental prayer was also seriously sinful.

Women should not wear pants, but must wear dresses covering the whole leg down to the ankle inclusive. Alexander VI was a good and holy pope, perhaps the most calumniated man in history. I spare you our thoughts on Atlantis and the great Pyramid.

As to the state of the Catholic Church, we held not only the vacancy of the Holy See, but also (an entirely distinct proposition) that the rejection of John-Paul II was an absolute condition of being a Catholic, so that a sedevacantist priest could not admit non-sedevacantists to the sacraments, and if he did so, was himself flirting with schism and could not be approached for the sacraments by genuine Catholics, i.e. ourselves and a tiny handful of others.

Priests had to insist that the laity, as a condition of reception of the sacraments, agree to numerous propositions, including the rejection of all clergy ordained later than Vatican II, by whomsoever, and especially the Thuc-line. Not even in private was

it permitted to pray in common with anyone who (like Father Baker) approved of or frequented the Thuc-derived clergy, but we should certainly have disapproved no less of the Mendez line had it existed at the time.

We held that all the bishops had apostatised at Vatican II and, even if they repented, would not recover the right to function as bishops. There was no more hierarchy, no cardinals, no bishops and no possibility that there could ever again be a new pope.

Now of course among the opinions listed above, some are true, some are false, some are somewhere between the two and no two Catholics, however learned and prudent and however much time they devote to studying the evidence will agree on all of them. The sheer number of these opinions, as I re-read the list today (and the above is only a sample), brings forcibly to mind the words of the Imitation of Christ : “cui æternum Verbum loquitur a multis opinionibus expeditur : he to whom the eternal Word speaks is set free from a multitude of opinions.” The words of à Kempis, which today seem to me so refreshing, would have made little sense to us at the time : we had no wish to be set free from opinions. We wanted to multiply them, and anyway we didn’t like hearing our opinions called “opinions”. We held the opinion that they were something more than that.

In addition to the specific convictions we held, our group was also decidedly in the grip of certain attitudes which were not expressed in the terms I am about to use, but which governed our thoughts and acts as surely as if they had been revealed truths.

We allowed very little scope for epikeia, insisting on obedience to the letter of most laws.

We allowed very little scope for “material sin”: while theoretically accepting the notion that a man might do wrong while innocently believing it to be right, and without incurring guilt before God, in practice almost every act we believed to be wrong we also judged to be subjectively culpable.

We allowed very little scope for innocent error, and no possibility at all that a man might still not be culpable in error after “objectively sufficient” evidence had been supplied to him. And we were ready to vouch for the “objective sufficiency” of any evidence that had convinced us. In particular, we believed – quite mistakenly – that Canon Law presumes that any Catholic actually holding a heretical doctrine be presumed pertinacious, even if in fact he is determined to believe what the Church teaches and had erred merely by inadvertence on a point of fact as to what Catholic doctrine is on a particular subject. And while this judgement was held to belong to the external forum, we had little hesitation in regularly judging the internal forum also: we could spot a mortal sinner a mile off notwithstanding his hypocritical profession of orthodoxy and virtue. There was no charitable leaning in defence of the suspect – we were already being highly charitable in warning him to get out of mortal sin; the thought that he might not be in mortal sin would be not charity but liberalism.

Gentle reader, your first reaction to the foregoing description may be astonishment at the fact that we failed to add Feeneyism to our list of convictions, and to found a sect for gullible Catholics in New Mexico, thereby depriving Richard Ibranyi of his future vocation.

Your second reaction may be to wonder what a nice boy like me (wry smile) was doing in such a weird outfit. And your third reaction might well be one of sheer astonishment at the thought that so wise, well-informed and judicious a character as Father Shelmerdine could for a moment have contemplated involvement with us.

I have no desire to excuse my own folly in those far-off days. I have long since turned my back on the belief I held in the 1980s that would make sedevacantism or adhesion to any other proposition (true or false) a condition of Catholicism or of admissibility to the sacraments unless and until that proposition has been directly and explicitly proposed by the Church for the compulsory acceptance of all her children. And, irrespective of which of the above controversial secular opinions I still hold, I have long since rejected the importance we then associated with so many of

these issues. I disown the attitude that a person who holds “the truth” on all of these questions is better educated and a more complete man, or more likely to save his soul, than one who has mastered the philosophy and theology of Saint Thomas without taking much interest in secondary subjects. All the more do I reject the opinionated, contentious attitudes we inculcated, insisting that others either refute or accept our alleged proofs on these topics and many others.

But it is only fair to Father Shelmerdine’s memory to observe that amid this maelstrom of dogmatically held opinions on every subject under the sun and the welter of unchristian attitudes that accompanied them and informed our lives in those days, there were positive features which explain his decision to join forces with us. These included his antecedent agreement with a number of our views, our obvious sincerity and the piety or even fervour of some of those associated with us, his respect for the intelligence of the group’s two “intellectuals” and—perhaps more than all—his own profound humility, which filled him with self-distrust and grateful confidence in those who had shown him the important and genuinely demonstrable truth that the Church has had no true visible head since Vatican II.

After retiring from medicine, Shelmerdine spent most of the next year (1985) at home in the Transvaal studying literature supplied by us about religion and the countless other controversial subjects mentioned above and in November 1985 he returned to London for two weeks of discussions with Messrs Gwynne and Daly of Britons Catholic Library. In the course of these discussions, he made the decision to leave South Africa and return to his native England and in January 1986 he carried out this intention.

Throughout his life Father Philip Shelmerdine had been passionately interested in the pursuit of truth, particularly on any subject concerning which it was obscured in the public mind or replaced by error. While we young zealots succeeded in convincing him of many of our controversial opinions, I do not think—and today I am very glad of it—that we ever succeeded in infecting him with our underlying attitudes. For instance, while always willing to debate, he was not naturally dogmatic: his approach in discussing any subject (other than what is divinely revealed) was always: this is what I think and here are my reasons for thinking it; if I am wrong, please show me where I am wrong. And his tone was always one of sincere meekness and humility. For that reason he remained warmly loved even by many of those he disagreed with, whereas the chief protagonists at Britons Catholic Library had in those days a not wholly unmerited reputation for “bitter zeal” and for preferring the apologetics of gall and wormwood to milder alternatives.

The year 1987 saw a decline in Father Philip Shelmerdine’s health. His success in losing excess weight on arriving in England had initially proved beneficial, but he now seemed weakened and began to look older. He suffered from back problems and immobility which was followed by other disquieting symptoms. After his death, the post-mortem examination was to reveal that he had been suffering from prostatic hyperplasia which, by constriction, had provoked the kidney problems which brought about his death, but none of this was known at the time. How the skilful diagnostician he was failed to recognise his own symptoms and managed to suffer gradual kidney failure without apparently even suspecting what was wrong is a mystery I have never resolved.

The beginning of July found Father Shelmerdine weaker still and bed-ridden and brought occasional bouts of delirium. But there was an extraordinary spiritual quality about this priest’s delirium. On one occasion I observed him while his mind was wandering and his words seemed meaningless, but after an hour or two he recovered his lucidity and seemed very moved by something he had seen. He spoke to me of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour (or “Perpetual Help” as Americans say) whose image he had always close to his bed. It seemed that in his wandering he had been in danger and she had intervened to rescue him. He referred to her “small, wise mouth” and, then, becoming more fully conscious, and realising perhaps that he had been indiscreet, he ceased to speak of what he had experienced.

About the tenth of the month, it became clear that Father Shelmerdine was in a state of total kidney failure. He took the deliberate decision not to seek surgery, but rather to dispose himself for death. He was advised not to call in a priest, on the grounds that, although it is valid and lawful for a dying man to confess to a priest from whom it would otherwise be unlawful to receive the sacraments, it was nevertheless more prudent and more edifying not to take advantage of this tolerance. He accepted this advice.

The reader will rightly be shocked at the thought of a priest dying without the sacraments, especially when the arguments used to show the unacceptability of (for example) Father Oswald Baker (who lived about one hundred miles away) were so weak. But those were our sincere beliefs at the time and the clearest evidence that Father Shelmerdine was blameless in acting on them is the fact that his death was a most edifying one. His acts of the theological virtues and his outstanding resignation and devotion were such as to leave no doubt that he was in the friendship of God. Shelmerdine waited for death with as much calm as if he had been waiting for a bus, taking the opportunity to converse, to pray, to read the lives of the saints and to study Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy.

Several friends, myself included, took it in turns to be close to the dying priest. On the morning of Tuesday 14th July 1987 at about 9 a.m. it was my turn and the patient was exceptionally lucid, but obviously very weak. We spoke of devotion to Our Lady and in particular of Saint Louis de Montfort’s doctrine of “slavery” to Mary. There and then, Philip Shelmerdine made a total consecration of himself as the slave of Mary, giving to God’s Mother all that was his, his goods, temporal and spiritual, his body and soul, his family and reputation, his heart and mind, his life and his death. While we were still speaking of these things, he lost the power of speech, and was reduced to symbolising by gesture his consecration to Mary. Then we began the sorrowful mysteries of the Rosary, but before we had finished, it became apparent to me that the soul’s passage into eternity was imminent. Two others joined us in the sick-room, and we began to recite the prayers for the dying. “Go forth O Christian soul out of this world, in the name of God the Father who created thee, in the name of Jesus Christ who suffered for thee, in the name of the Holy Ghost who was poured out upon thee, in the name of the glorious and holy Virgin Mary Mother of God...May thy place be this day in peace and thine abode in holy Sion.”

His breathing became shallower, and gradually imperceptible. We suggested a few final invocations to Jesus and Mary. Only his alert eyes told us that he was still in this world. Then a look of faint surprise traversed his features and the eyes darkened. His soul, bearing the indelible characters of Baptism, Confirmation and the sacred Priesthood and clothed (I have no doubt) in the nuptial garment of divine charity, stood before Jesus Christ.

© J S Daly 2008