“…this missal is hereafter to be followed absolutely, without any scruple of conscience or fear of incurring any penalty, judgment or censure, and may freely and lawfully be used… Accordingly, no one whatsoever is permitted to infringe or rashly contravene this notice of Our permission, statute, ordinance, command, precept, grant, direction, will, decree and prohibition.  Should  any person venture to do so, let him understand he will incur the wrath of Almighty God and of the Blessed Apostles Peter and Paul.”

Pope St. Pius V, Papal Bull, QUO PRIMUM, Tridentine codification of the  “received and approved” immemorial Roman rite of Mass

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Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost

September 23, 2026

    Today’s lessons from the divine office, like those of last Sunday, are often identical with the passages from the book of Job which are read on the first and second Sundays of September.  The readings from the third and fourth Sunday’s in September are from Ecclesiasticus.  The commentary on today’s liturgy is related to the reading from Job.

    Job is the very type of a just man whom the devil, inflated with pride, wishes to humble to the dust to make him rebel against God.  “Let me try him,” says Satan to the most High, “and he will blaspheme Thee.”  And God allowed him to make Job the model of a soul who proclaims the sovereign dominion of God and who submits himself entirely to the divine will.  So the devil gives the reins to his jealously, and in a cleverly graded series, makes one misfortune follow another to overwhelm the unhappy Job.

    Robbed of everything and seated on his dunghill, Job does not curse the almighty hand of God which has allowed the devil to vent his rage upon him, but rather kisses it with humility.  The Introit psalm is an admirable rendering of the spirit of his prayer.  “Have mercy on me, O Lord.  Bow down thy ear to me, O Lord, and hear me for I am needy and poor.”  The Gradual psalm is to the same effect: the prayer of the poor man when he was anxious, and the words (verses 3-6), “I am smitten as grass…through the voice of my groaning my bone hath cleaved to my flesh.” Seem to be an echo of Job’s words when he said: “The flesh being consumed, my bone hath cleaved to my skin, and nothing but lips are left about my teeth.”  Also the Offertory psalm speaks of the “poor and needy man” who implores God: “Withhold not Thou, O Lord, Thy tender mercies from me: ….for evils without number have surrounded me…Let them be confounded and ashamed together that seek after my soul to take it away” (verses 12 and 14).

    Finally, in the psalm for the Communion we read: “Incline Thy ear unto me…How great troubles hast Thou shown me, many and grievous!  Yea and my tongue shall meditate justice all the day, when they shall be confounded and put to shame that seek evils to me” (verses 2,20, and 24). 

    “God,” the friends of Job say in effect, “exalts those who are humble; he comforts and heals the afflicted.  The triumph of the wicked is short and the joy of the hypocrite is only for a moment.  When his pride raises itself to heaven and his head touches the clouds, he will perish at the last.  Such is the lot which God reserves for the wicked.  They are lifted up for the moment but they will be humbled.”  Job adds: “God will rescue the poor man from his misery.  God is exalted in His power.  Who can say to Him: ‘Thou hast wrought injustice.’  The man who discusses with God will not be found just.”

     “In reality,” comments St. Gregory, “whoever holds a discussion with almighty God is putting himself on an equality with the author of all good.  He takes to himself the merit of whatever qualities he has received, and makes war on God with His own gifts.  So it is just that the proud shall be humbled and the humble exalted” (2^nd Nocturn for second Sunday of September).  Today’s Gospel speaks in the same sense: “Every one that exalteth himself shall be humbled, and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted.”  In the sequel, after He had humbled him, God exalted Job and gave him twice as much as he had before.  In this respect the patriarch is a type of Christ, who having been humbled to the depths was wonderfully exalted; and he is also a figure of all Christian people to whom God will give a place of honor at the eternal wedding feast if, on earth, they have practiced the virtues of humility with a good heart.

    Pride, says St. Thomas, is a vice by which man seeks to exalt himself beyond right reason above what he is; it is based on error and illusion.  On the contrary, humility is founded upon truth.  It is a virtue which tempers and restrains the soul, so that it does not pretend to be more than it really is.  The humble soul accepts with complete submission the supreme and infallible truth.  Humility manifested in word and deed, and in our way of bearing trials and contradictions, is the virtue taught us by Job in his whole life and which our Lord sets before us in today’s Gospel.  “After he had healed the man with the dropsy,” says St. Ambrose, “Jesus gives a lesson in humility” (3^rd Nocturn).

    Seeing how the Pharisees chose the best places, He wanted to make them understand the spiritual disease from which they were suffering and so to encourage them to seek its cure.  For this purpose He first heals an unfortunate man swollen with sickness and then veiling the lesson under a parable, seeks to cure the spiritual inflation with which the guests before Him and the majority of men, are only too much afflicted.  The world is given over to all the boastfulness and infatuation of pride, while humility is the absolute condition of entrance into the kingdom of God.

    This same virtue, which the Church brings before us in the Collect, which refers to our need that God’s grace should “ever both go before and follow us,” is taught by St. Paul in a striking way to Christian people on our part, but solely that we may minister to the praise of His glory, God has chosen us in Christ.  While yet we were children of wrath, the almighty, rich in mercy on account of the great love He bore us, restored us to life in Jesus Christ.  Heathen and strangers to the covenant of God with Israel, we have been reconciled through the Redeemer’s blood, for He is our peace, who out of two nations has made one and by whom we both have access to the Father in one Spirit.  Now we are no longer strangers, but members of the family of God.  This is not our work but God’s, so that no one has any cause to boast.  

    Let us, therefore, cast ourselves at the feet of the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who is our Father too, so that from the boundless treasure of His divinity He may more and more send down upon us the Holy Ghost, whom He poured out on the Church at Pentecost and who united us to our Lord by faith and love, that we may be filled with the fullness of God.  

    Who can measure this boundless charity which God has shown us by His Son?  This love of the Father for His children infinitely surpasses what we could conceive or ask of God.  To Him, then be glory forever, because the Lord hath done wonderful things” (Alleluia).  “The Gentiles shall fear Thy Name, O Lord, and all the kings of the earth Thy glory.  For the Lord hath built up Sion and He shall be seen in His majesty” (Gradual). 

    And the people who will take part in the great feast of the Beatific Vision, will consist of those who fleeing from an ambition full of the spirit of pride, have always been humble on earth and whom God will exalt in the measure in which they have gladly submitted to His holy will.

  

INTROIT:

Ps. 85.  Have mercy on me, O Lord, for I have cried to Thee all the day; for Thou, O Lord, art sweet and mild, and plenteous in mercy to all that call upon Thee. 

Ps.   Bow down Thine ear to me, O Lord, and hear me; for I am needy and poor.  Glory be, etc.  Have mercy on me, etc.

 

COLLECT:

O Lord, we pray Thee that Thy grace may always precede and follow us, and make us continually devoted to all good works.  Through our Lord, etc.

 

From all perils of soul and body defend us, O Lord, we beseech Thee, and by the intercession of the blessed and glorious Virgin Mary, Mother of God, of blessed Joseph, of Thy blessed Apostles Peter and Paul, and all the Saints, graciously grant us safety and peace, that all adversities and errors being overcome, Thy Church may serve Thee in security and freedom.  Through our Lord, etc.

 

O God, the shepherd and ruler of all the faithful, graciously look upon Thy servant, Leo whom Thou hast willed to be the chief pastor of Thy Church; grant him, we beseech Thee, by word and example to profit those over whom he rules, that together with the flock entrusted to him he may attain to life everlasting. Through our Lord, etc.

 

EPISTLE:  Ephes. 3, 13-21.      

Brethren, I pray you not to faint at my tribulations for you, which are your glory. For this cause I bow my knees to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, of whom all paternity in heaven and earth is named, that he would grant you, according to the riches of his glory, to be strengthened by his Spirit with might unto the inward man, that Christ may dwell by faith in your hearts: that being rooted and founded in charity, you may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth, and length, and height, and depth: to know also the charity of Christ, which surpasseth all knowledge, that you may be filled unto all the fulness of God. Now to him who is able to do all things more abundantly than we desire or understand, according to the power that worketh in us: to him be glory in the Church and in Christ Jesus, unto all generations, world without end. Amen.

EXPLANATION  In the epistle of the following Sunday St. Paul tells us, that he was at the time of writing this letter in prison at Rome, whither he was brought upon the false accusations of the Jews. From prison he wrote to the Ephesians, whom he had converted to Christianity, and who zealously obeyed his counsels, in order to confirm them in their zeal and to console them in their grief on account of his sufferings which he bore for Christ's sake. These sufferings which I bear, he writes, redound to your honor, since I, your spiritual father, am considered by God worthy to suffer like His Son; yes, I thank the Father of our Lord Jesus for it, and beg Him on my knees, that He vouchsafe to strengthen you with His Holy Spirit, so that you overcome, your evil inclinations and passions, cleanse your hearts more and more, and sanctify your souls, that if you live thus according to your faith, you may be made the habitations of Christ. He begs God also to give them a well-grounded charity, which not only loves God on account of the reward, but also on account of our sufferings, thus to become like to Christ, the Crucified. By this constant love for Jesus, even in adversities, we only comprehend with the saints the greatness of the love of Jesus, the Crucified; its breadth, since all the members of His body, all the powers of His soul were tormented with all sorts of tortures, on account of the sins of all men; the length, since He had all these sufferings for thirty-three years before His eyes, and bore them in His soul; the depth, since these tortures surpassed in intensity all which men ever suffered or will suffer; the height, since Christ on the cross saw, with the most perfect knowledge, the malice of each single sin, and the terrible insult offered to the sublime Majesty of God, and He bore the punishment for them in Himself and did penance for them. Other holy Fathers say that by these words the whole mystery of our redemption is to be understood, and, indeed, the breadth thereof is, that it is for all men; the length, that it lasts for all centuries and reaches into eternity; the height, that its contemplation takes us away from earth and raises us to heaven; the depth, that it even penetrates the kingdom of the dead. By contemplating these mysteries we learn to know the infinite love of God, to love Him more and more, and thus make ourselves partakers of His graces.  Obey the teaching of this holy apostle, contemplate the suffering Saviour and His love, endeavor to become like to Him by suffering, and when you see how the Church, her ministers, the bishops and priests, are persecuted and in tribulation, be not disheartened, but consider that the discipleship of Jesus consists particularly in suffering, that therefore, the Church and her ministers must suffer, since their Head, Jesus, has suffered. The holy Church has borne the crown of thorns of Jesus for two thousand years and drank from His chalice; but like Jesus, her Head, she will triumph over all her enemies, and whilst these are hastening to destruction, she will continually live victorious until the end of time and will triumph eternally in heaven.

 

GRADUAL:

Ps. 101.  The Gentiles shall fear Thy name, O Lord, and all the kings of the earth Thy glory.  For the Lord hath built up Sion, and He shall be seen in His majesty. 

Alleluia, alleluia.  Ps. 97.  Sing ye to the Lord a new canticle, because the Lord hath done wonderful things.  Alleluia.

 

GOSPEL:  Luke 14, 1-11.       

At that time, When Jesus went into the house of one of the chiefs of the Pharisees on the Sabbath-day to eat bread, they watched him. And behold there was a certain man before him that had the dropsy. And Jesus answering, spoke to the lawyers and Pharisees, saying: Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath-day? But they held their peace: but he taking him, healed him, and sent him away. And answering them, he said: Which of you shall have an ass or an ox fall into a pit, and will not immediately draw him out on the Sabbath-day? And they could not answer him to these things. And he spoke a parable also to them that were invited, marking how they chose the first seats at the table, saying to them: When thou art invited to a wedding, sit not down in the first place, lest perhaps one more honorable than thou be invited by him; and he that invited thee and him come and say to thee: Give this man place: and then thou begin with shame to take the lowest place: But when thou art invited, go, sit down in the lowest place: that when he who invited thee cometh he may say to thee: Friend, go up higher. Then shalt thou have glory before them that sit at the table with thee; because every one that exalteth himself shall be humbled, and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted.

Why did Jesus eat with the Pharisees?

To take occasion, as St. Cyril says, to instruct them that it is allowed to heal the sick on the Sabbath, and to show how those who give invitations to a supper, and those who are invited, should conduct themselves. The Pharisees' invitation to Jesus was not actuated by kindness, but by the desire to find something in His actions which they might criticize; Jesus; however, approaches them with meekness and endeavors to inspire them with a better intention. Beware of the spirit of criticism and like Jesus make use of every occasion to do good, even to your enemies.

Who may be understood by the dropsical man?

The debauchees and misers; for the more a dropsical person drinks the more his thirst increases, so the debauchee never succeeds in satisfying his shameful lusts; the same is the case with the miser. And just as the dropsical are hard to cure, so the debauchee and miser are difficult to convert.

Why is covetousness classed among the seven deadly sins?

Because it is the root of many evils (I Tim. 6, 10), for it leads to usury, theft, to the employment of false weights and measures, to the suppression of justice in courts, to perjury, to the oppression of widows and orphans, nay, even to the denial of faith, as was the case with Judas. Therefore the apostle says: They that will become rich, fall into temptation, and into the snare of the devil, and into many unprofitable and hurtful desires, which drown men into destruction and perdition; and admonishes us: to fly these things: and pursue justice, godliness, faith, charity, patience, mildness (I Tim. 6, 9-11).

A powerful remedy against avarice is to consider that we are not owners of what we possess, and can take nothing with us in death, but must render a strict account of the use we made of our riches (I Tim. 6, 7).

 

OFFERTORY:

Ps. 39.   Look down, O Lord, to help me; let them be confounded and ashamed that seek after my soul, to take it away; look down, O Lord, to help me.

 

SECRET:

Cleanse us, we pray, O Lord, by the effect of this present sacrifice, and mercifully so work in us that we may deserve to be partakers of it.  Through our Lord, etc.

 

Hear us, O God, our salvation, that through the power of this sacrament Thou mayest defend us from all enemies of soul and body and bestow upon us grace here and glory hereafter.  Through our Lord, etc.

 

Look down favorably, O Lord, we beseech Thee, upon the gifts we have offered; and let Thy constant protection direct Thy servant Leo, whom Thou hast chosen to be the chief pastor of Thy Church. Through our Lord, etc.

 

COMMUNION:

Ps. 70.  O Lord, I will be mindful of Thy justice alone; Thou hast taught me, O God, from my youth; and unto old age and gray hairs, O God, forsake me not.

 

POSTCOMMUNION:

Purify by Thy heavenly sacraments, we pray, O Lord, and renovate in Thy loving-kindness our hearts, that thereby we may gain assistance for our bodies at present and in the future.  Through our Lord, etc.

 

May the offering of this divine sacrament cleanse and protect us, O Lord, we beseech Thee; and by the intercession of the blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God, of blessed Joseph, of the blessed Apostles Peter and Paul, and all the saints, may it purify us from all sin and free us from all adversity.  Through our Lord, etc.

 

Let the reception of this divine sacrament protect us, O Lord, we beseech Thee; and may Thy servant Leo whom Thou hast chosen as the chief pastor of Thy Church, along with the flock committed to him, derive always from it protection and strength.  Through our Lord, etc.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 “….because every one that exalteth himself shall be humbled, and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 PROPER OF THE SAINTS FOR THE WEEK OF SEPTEMBER 13^TH:

 Date     Day     Feast                                               Rank  Color F/A     Mass Time/Notes

13	Sun	16th Sunday after Pentecost	sd	G		Mass 9:00 AM; Confessions 8:00AM; Rosary of Reparation 8:30 AM
14	Mon	The Exaltation of the Holy Cross	dm	R		Mass 8:30 AM; Rosary of Reparation before Mass
15	Tue	Seven Sorrows of the BVM St. Nicomedes, M (St. Catherine of Genoa)	d2cl	W		Mass 8:30 AM; Rosary of Reparation before Mass
16	Wed	Ss. Cornelius, P & Cyprian, BpMm Ss. Euphemia & Comp., Mm	sd	R	F	Mass 8:30 AM; Rosary of Reparation before Mass EMBER WEDNESDAY
17	Thu	Impression of the Stigmata of St. Frances, C	d	W		Mass 8:30 AM; Rosary of Reparation before Mass
18	Fri	St. Joseph of Cupertino, C	d	W	F/A	Mass 8:30 AM; Rosary of Reparation before Mass EMBER FRIDAY
19	Sat	Ss. Januarius, Bp & Comp., Mm Vigil of St. Matthew (Anticipated)	d	R	F	Mass 9:00 AM; Confessions 8:00AM; Rosary of Reparation 8:30 AM. EMBER SATURDAY
20	Sun	17th Sunday after Pentecost Ss. Eustace & Comp., Mm	sd	G		Mass 9:00 AM; Confessions 8:00AM; Rosary of Reparation 8:30 AM

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

INSTRUCTION ON KEEPING SUNDAY HOLY

Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath-day? (Luke 14, 3)

Why did Christ put this question?

Because the Jews, particularly the Pharisees, were so very superstitious in keeping the Sabbath, they would not recognize Jesus as the Messiah, while He healed on the Sabbath, which was really a good work. But, if the Jews were so conscientious, through superstition and hypocrisy, and considered the performing of an external good work on this day as a sin, some Christians, on the contrary, blinded by avarice and worldly pleasure, place themselves heedlessly, nay, insolently above the commandment to observe the Sabbath, and do not consider those things as wrong which are sometimes very grievous sins.

Consider, my dear Christian, you serve your body the whole week, you use all your powers for temporal business, to support yourself and your family, and God blesses you, if you work with a good intention. Now God chose one day in the week, Sunday, and in the year several other holidays, which you should devote to His service and the salvation of your soul; is it not, therefore, the greatest ingratitude to steal these days from God and your soul, and employ them to gain a transient good, or to indulge in vain, sinful pleasures? At certain times man gives rest to irrational animals, and you give the powers of your body and soul none of the rest they would and should find in quiet devotion, in prayer and meditation, in attending divine service, in receiving the holy Sacraments, etc. If you inquire whence come these shameful violations of Sundays and holidays, you will find that there is no other reason than love of gain and avarice, sinful love of pleasure, and often complete want of faith and confidence in God's providence. We wish to become rich by all means, and we do not reflect that. this will not happen without the blessing of God, and that wealth is a net, in which thousands entangle themselves to their eternal, perdition. We wish to live merrily and enjoy ourselves, but we do not consider that our life is only a time of penance, to attain that eternally blissful rest, of which Sunday is an emblem. We spend Sundays and holydays in idleness, vain conversations, buying and selling, servile work, or in still worse things, without experiencing the slightest scruple. But God will cover the violators of His sacred days with confusion and shame (Malach. 2, 3), and permit many temporal evils to come upon them, as proved by daily experience. The blessing of God can never rest upon those who never care for it, but rather make themselves unworthy to receive it, by violating days consecrated to God. Let this be a warning to you.

PRAYER O good Saviour! how manifest are meekness, and wisdom in all Thy words and actions! O, grant that we may regulate all our actions in such a manner, that they may be acceptable to Thee and tend to the edification of our neighbor. Give us the grace to employ all the days, consecrated to Thee, for Thy honor and our salvation, that we may never raise ourselves above others, but follow Thee in all humility.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SPECIAL FAVORS FOR THOSE DEVOTED TO THE SORROWS OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN

The graces which Our Lord promises to those who are devoted to the sorrows of His Blessed Mother are very great. St. Alphonsus, in his discourse on the dolors of Mary, states: It was revealed to St. Elizabeth that some years after the Blessed Virgin was assumed into heaven, St. John, the beloved disciple, was seized with an ardent desire to see her again. This favor was granted him. His dear Mother appeared to him in company with our Divine Lord. Then St. John heard Mary asking of her Son some special graces for those who were devoted to her dolors. Our Lord promised the four following graces:

1. Those who invoke the Heavenly Mother through her sorrows will obtain true sorrow for their sins before death.

2. Our Savior will protect them in their tribulations, especially at the hour of death.

3. He will impress upon them the memory of His Passion, and will reward them for it in Heaven.

4. He will commit such devout servants to the hands of Mary, that she may dispose of them according to her pleasure, and obtain for them all the graces she desires.

St. Alphonsus Ligouri, Devotion to the Sorrowful Mother

Besides these great graces, Father Faber enumerates others which are obtained through devotion to Mary's sorrows:

1. This devotion has a remarkable connection with great interior holiness.

2. It reveals the emptiness of worldly joys. Worldliness finds no soul harder to attack than one entrenched in the sorrows of our Blessed Lady. The world can graft itself upon nothing in this devotion.

3. It gives us a permanent share in the sorrow for sin which Jesus and Mary felt.

4. It keeps our thoughts close to Jesus Christ, and to Him Crucified.

5. It communicates to our souls the spirit of the Cross, and gives strength to endure our own sufferings with resignation to the holy will of God.

6. This devotion is wholly covered with the Precious Blood of Jesus and leads us directly into the depths of the Heart of our Savior.

7. Anyone who during his lifetime has cherished compassion for this afflicted Mother may consider this as a most assured sign of predestination.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"Though the path is plain and smooth for people of good will, those who walk it will not travel far, and will do so only with difficulty if they do not have good feet, courage, and tenacity of spirit." 

St John of the Cross

 

 

 

 

THE CHARACTERISTICS OF A CHRISTIAN            SIXTEENTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST

PRESENCE OF GOD ‑ Grant, O Lord, that my soul may be deeply rooted in charity and in humility.

MEDITATION:

    I. The Epistle (Eph 3, 13-21) which we read in today's Mass is one of the most beautiful passages in the letters of St. Paul. In it we find the famous counsel of the Apostle addressed to the Ephesians, which summarizes in three parts, the whole of the spiritual life.

    "That the Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ. . .would grant you . . . to be strengthened by His Spirit with might unto the inward man." The inward man is the human spirit regenerated by grace; it is the spiritual man who has renounced all material things and the pleasures of the senses. This man is in each one of us and should be strong in order to keep up the struggle against our lower nature, which will always be a part of us while we are on earth, and is always trying to drag us down. The Apostle rightly asks this fortitude of the Holy Spirit, because the strength of our virtue is not sufficient unless it is supported by what the Holy Spirit infuses into us through His gifts.

    "That Christ may dwell by faith in your hearts." Christ with the Father and the Holy Spirit already dwells in the soul in the state of grace, but His presence can always become more profound. And the more profound His presence, the more deeply will the soul be penetrated with divine charity, until it becomes truly "rooted and founded" in love. If we wish to grow in love we should keep ourselves in contact with the fount of love, with God living in our soul.

    "That you may be able to comprehend . . . the charity of Christ, which surpasseth all knowledge." To comprehend the mystery of God's love, insofar as it is possible to our limitations, is the summit of the spiritual life. Christianity is all love: we are Christians in the measure that we live in love, in the measure that we understand God's love. Yet this mystery always leaves us a little incredulous, a little skeptical. Oh! if we could see as the blessed do, that God is love and wishes nothing but love; that the way to go to Him is the way of love; that suffering, mortification and humility, are only means to reach perfect love, and to correspond with the love of the God who is Charity! Then indeed, we would be "filled unto all the fullness of God."

    2. St. Paul in the Epistle has exhorted us to be rooted in love, and in the Gospel (Lk 14, 1-11) Jesus exhorts us to be rooted in love and in humility.

    Despite the tacit disapproval of the Pharisees, caused by their narrowness of mind and heart, Jesus cured a man of dropsy on the Sabbath, thus teaching us again the great importance of love of neighbor. In vain would we believe that we were rooted in the love of God if we failed in our love of neighbor. How could one think that an act of fraternal charity might be in opposition to the law for sanctifying the Sabbath? Such are the aberrations of one who pretends to love God while paying attention solely to his own interests, without any thought for the needs of others. This is not Christianity, but Pharisaism and the destruction of charity.

    To be rooted in love, we must also be rooted in humility, for only he who is humble is capable of really loving God and his neighbor. The Gospel continues with a practical lesson in humility, condemning those who seek the first places. We should not think that this refers only to material places; it refers also to those places which our pride seeks to occupy in the esteem and regard of others. It is really humiliating to note how our self‑love always tries to make us take a higher place than that which is due us, and this to our own confusion, for "he that exalteth himself shall be humbled." "Let us always take the lowest place," says St. Bernard, "there is no harm in humbling ourselves and believing that we are less than we really are. But there is exceeding harm and great evil in wishing to elevate ourselves, even if only a finger's breadth, above what we are and in preferring ourselves to even one. There is no danger in stooping too much to pass through a low doorway, whereas there would be great danger in lifting our head even an inch above the lintel, as we would strike against it and injure our head; similarly, we should not be afraid that we shall humble ourselves too much, but should fear and abominate the slightest movement of presumption." Let us, like the saints, ask God to send us a humiliation every time our pride tries to raise us above others; this will be the surest way to become rooted in humility. At the same time, we shall be rooted in charity and shall thus possess the two fundamental characteristics of a Christian soul.

COLLOQUY:

    "O Lord, increase my faith in Your love, so that I may be able to say to You in all truth: 'I have known and have believed the charity which God hath to me.' It seems to me that this is the greatest act of our faith, the most beautiful way to render You love for love; in it is the hidden secret of which St. Paul speaks, a secret which my soul longs to understand, because in understanding it, I shall thrill with joy. Make me capable of believing in Your exceeding love for me. Then I shall not stop at preferences or feelings. It will matter little if I feel Your presence or not, whether You send me joy or suffering. I shall believe in Your love and that will suffice. Grant, O God, that my soul may penetrate into Your depths and remain there, rooted and founded in love.

    "O Lord, when I ponder within myself Your immensity, Your faithfulness, the proofs of love You have shown me, and Your benefits, and then look at myself and see how I have outraged You, I can only turn upon my soul with a profound feeling of contempt; yet this self‑contempt is not strong enough to cast me down as low as I would wish. O Lord, plunge me into humility! It seems to me that to be plunged into humility is to be plunged into You; for, living in You who are the Truth, I cannot fail to realize my nothingness. The humble soul is the chosen recipient, the vessel capable of receiving Your grace, and only into it do You wish to pour Your grace. Grant then, O Lord, that I may be humble, and make me understand that the humble soul will never put You high enough or itself low enough" (cf. E.T. 1, 6‑11, 8‑1, 9).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"Meditate often on the sorrows of the Holy Mother, sorrows inseparable from those of her beloved Son.  If you seek the Cross, there you will find the Mother; and where the Mother is, there also is the Son."  

St. Paul of the Cross

 

 

 

 

Vatican Council I listing the beneficial Fruits of the Council of Trent which are in every detail exactly the opposite which we have seen from Vatican Council II

Now this redemptive providence appears very clearly in unnumbered benefits, but most especially is it manifested in the advantages which have been secured for the Christian world by ecumenical councils, among which the council of Trent requires special mention, celebrated though it was in evil days.

Thence came:

1.     a closer definition and more fruitful exposition of the holy dogmas of religion and

2.     the condemnation and repression of errors; thence too,

3.     the restoration and vigorous strengthening of ecclesiastical discipline,

4.     the advancement of the clergy in zeal for

·  learning and

·  piety,

5.     the founding of colleges for the training of the young for the service of religion; and finally

6.     the renewal of the moral life of the Christian people by

·  a more accurate instruction of the faithful, and

·  a more frequent reception of the sacraments. What is more, thence also came

7.     a closer union of the members with the visible head, and an increased vigour in the whole Mystical Body of Christ.

Thence came:

1.     the multiplication of religious orders and other organisations of Christian piety; thence too

2.     that determined and constant ardour for the spreading of Christ’s kingdom abroad in the world, even at the cost of shedding one’s blood.

While we recall with grateful hearts, as is only fitting, these and other outstanding gains, which the divine mercy has bestowed on the church especially by means of the last ecumenical synod, we cannot subdue the bitter grief that we feel at most serious evils, which have largely arisen either because

o the authority of the sacred synod was held in contempt by all too many, or because

o its wise decrees were neglected.

First Vatican Council, Dogmatic Constitution on the Faith, listing some of the manifold beneficial fruits from the Council of Trent!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"Let everything that conflicts with ecclesiastical tradition and teaching, and that has been innovated and done contrary to the examples outlined by the saints and the venerable Fathers, or that shall hereafter at any time be done in such a fashion, let him be anathema." 

Second Council of Nicea

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Regarding the Crime of Schism and Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò

        There are no manifest acts of schism with one and only one important exception which will be identified below. This means there are no acts that are necessarily always and everywhere evidence of a schismatic motive in the internal forum excepting one. Contrasted, for example, with abortion and blasphemy which are acts that are manifest sins because they can never be done with a morally right intention; the act itself reveals the intent of the internal forum as being vicious. These are always and everywhere necessarily mortal sins. As St. Paul says, "Some men's sins are manifest, going before to judgment: and some men they follow after" (1Tim 5:24). St. Paul gives specific examples of "manifest sins": "Nor the effeminate, nor liers with mankind (sodomites), nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor railers, nor extortioners, shall possess the kingdom of God" (1 Cor 6:10). What exactly is the schismatic motive that a contentious canonical process must discover for conviction and attribution of imputability of the crime?

        The canonical definition for both heresy and schism are taken directly almost verbatim from St. Thomas Aquinas: "Schismatics are those who refuse to submit to the Sovereign Pontiff, and to hold communion with those members of the Church who acknowledge his supremacy." Schism is the repudiation of the universal jurisdiction of Sovereign Pontiff and communion with those who accept it. It is the burden of the canonical trial to prove the schismatic intention for all schismatics are disobedient to the Sovereign Pontiff but not all who are disobedient to the Sovereign Pontiff are schismatics. St. Thomas' in his examination identifies schism as a specific species of sin. St. Thomas says, "Hence the sin of schism is, properly speaking, a special sin, for the reason that the schismatic intends to sever himself from that unity which is the effect of charity: because charity unites not only one person to another with the bond of spiritual love, but also the whole Church in unity of spirit." The genus to which schism belongs is acts opposed to peace which is the fruit of "that unity which is the effect of charity." Regarding peace, St. Thomas continues: "Peace implies a twofold union... The first is the result of one's own appetites being directed to one object; while the other results from one's own appetite being united with the appetite of another: and each of these unions is effected by charity." All acts that disturb the fruit of peace are directed against the cause of peace which is charity."

        Acts of disobedience against properly constituted authority are only acts of schism when the intention is to overturn the peace of unity caused by charity. This intention constitutes the species difference of schism from other acts opposed to peace, as St. Thomas says, the schismatic "intends to separate himself from the unity that charity makes" (Q.39, a.1.) among the faithful. St. Thomas is offering an essential definition of schism which is the best of all definitions because it is the most intelligible because it identifies the essence. Schism, just as other acts opposed to peace enumerated by St. Thomas, which include discord, contention, war, strife and sedition, requires contextualization. Specifically for the case of Archbishop Viganò, St. Thomas says that morality of contention, which is the opposition to another in speech, is determined by the intention: "As to the intention, we must consider whether he contends against the truth, and then he is to be blamed, or against falsehood, and then he should be praised." Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò's "contention" against Pope Francis is the contention of truth against falsehood and is therefore praiseworthy and not schismatic. This is why a canonical trial is called "contentious" for it is intended to reveal who is contending for truth.

        The poles of contention are truth-falsehood which is the same for dogmas of faith. As St. Jude admonishes: "I was under a necessity to write unto you: to beseech you to contend earnestly for the faith once delivered to the saints" (Jude 1:3). Schism is the rejection of the divinely revealed truth of papal universal jurisdiction, a dogma of faith since Vatican I. Schism is manifested by disobedience but all disobedience is not schism. Obedience to God is unqualified. All other acts of obedience are morally good only to the degree that they are properly regulated by the virtue of Religion which is the primary subsidiary virtue under Justice. Any act of obedience that violates the virtue of Religion is a sin. The virtue of Religion above all requires that we "give unto God the things that are God's." This first and necessary act of obedience is to believe all that God has revealed and to keep his commandments. Without this first necessary condition, it is impossible to keep the greatest commandment to love God above all things and it is impossible to have "the unity that charity makes."

        Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò was administratively "excommunicated" for "schism" because the administrative process avoided the canonical requirement to prove that his intent was to "separate himself from the unity that charity makes" among the faithful. They denied the right of Archbishop Viganò to defend himself in a contentions forum against the charge which would obviously have included discussing the heretical acts of Pope Francis which are manifest. The ultimate purpose of the canonical process is to determine truth and bring those who have deviated from truth back from error. But for many the contention itself irrespective of truth or falsehood is the manifest evidence of schism. The reason for this will become clearer after discussing the relationship in the context of faith and charity, and heresy and schism.

        Schismatics "refuse to submit to the Sovereign Pontiff" because they deny that the pope possesses universal jurisdiction conferred  by God for the legitimate exercise of the papal office which produces unity and peace. Universal jurisdiction of the pope is a divinely revealed truth that was dogmatized at Vatican I Council. St. Thomas says:

"Heresy and schism are distinguished in respect of those things to which each is opposed essentially and directly. For heresy is essentially opposed to faith, while schism is essentially opposed to the unity of ecclesiastical charity. Wherefore just as faith and charity are different virtues, although whoever lacks faith lacks charity, so too schism and heresy are different vices, although whoever is a heretic is also a schismatic, but not conversely."

        Since the universal jurisdiction of the pope has become a dogma at Vatican Council I, a schismatic is now also conversely always a heretic. Importantly, faith precedes charity. "Without faith, it is impossible to please God" (Heb 11-6) because "whoever lacks faith lacks charity." The keys of universal jurisdiction were promised to St. Peter after his profession of faith which is its proximate material cause. Many Church Fathers, such as St. Augustine and St. John Chrysostom, describe an analogical identity of the rock (petra) with divine faith, with St. Peter, with Jesus Christ the "cornerstone," and the Church itself. The faith proceeds and is the proximate cause of the universal jurisdiction conferred by Jesus Christ because faith is indispensible to the bond of unity which is charity.  Cardinal Henry Edward Manning wrote:

“The interpretation by the Fathers of the words ‘On this rock; etc. is fourfold, but all four interpretations are not more than four aspects of one and the same truth, and all are necessary to complete its full meaning. They all implicitly or explicitly contain the perpetual stability of Peter’s faith...:’

“In these two promises [i.e. Lk 22:32, Mt 16:18] a divine assistance is pledged to Peter and to his successors, and that divine assistance is promised to secure the stability and indefectibiity of the Faith in the supreme Doctor and Head of the Church, for the general good of the Church itself.”

Cardinal Henry Edward Manning, “The Vatican Council and Its Definitions: A Pastoral Letter to the Clergy”, p. 83-84, 1870

All this is nicely summed up by St. Paul who admonishes "that you walk worthy of the vocation in which you are called; With all humility and mildness, with patience, supporting one another in charity. Careful to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. One body and one Spirit; as you are called in one hope of your calling. One Lord, one faith, one baptism" (Eph. 4:1-5).  The primary and essential cause and sign of the unity in the Church is the faith. The pope is only secondarily and accidentally the sign and cause of unity in the Church. If the pope falls from the faith he is to be confronted as St. Paul did to St. Peter when he "walked not uprightly unto the truth of the gospel" and accommodated the Judaizers leading others into "dissimulation" (Gal. 2:11). If the pope is a heretic he "lacks faith (and) lacks charity". Without charity he breaks the bond of unity in the Church and necessarily becomes schismatic. Manifest Heresy is the one and only sin that identifies a schismatic because it manifests a schismatic intent.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Where Tikkun Olam has led in the past and is now leading in Gaza

OPINION: Stalin’s Jews

We mustn't forget that some of greatest murderers of modern times were Jewish

Israel News | ynetnews | Sever Plocker

Here's a particularly forlorn historical date: More than 100 years ago, between the 19th and 20th of December 1917, in the midst of the Bolshevik revolution and civil war, Lenin signed a decree calling for the establishment of The All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage, also known as Cheka.

Within a short period of time, Cheka became the largest and cruelest state security organization. Its organizational structure was changed every few years, as were its names: From Cheka to GPU, later to NKVD, and later to KGB.

We cannot know with certainty the number of deaths Cheka was responsible for in its various manifestations, but the number is surely at least 20 million, including victims of the forced collectivization, the hunger, large purges, expulsions, banishments, executions, and mass death at Gulags.

Whole population strata were eliminated: Independent farmers, ethnic minorities, members of the bourgeoisie, senior officers, intellectuals, artists, labor movement activists, "opposition members" who were defined completely randomly, and countless members of the Communist party itself.

In his new, highly praised book "The War of the World," Historian Niall Ferguson writes that no revolution in the history of mankind devoured its children with the same unrestrained appetite as did the Soviet revolution. In his book on the Stalinist purges, Tel Aviv University's Dr. Igal Halfin writes that Stalinist violence was unique in that it was directed internally.

Lenin, Stalin, and their successors could not have carried out their deeds without wide-scale cooperation of disciplined "terror officials," cruel interrogators, snitches, executioners, guards, judges, perverts, and many bleeding hearts who were members of the progressive Western Left and were deceived by the Soviet regime of horror and even provided it with a kosher certificate.

All these things are well-known to some extent or another, even though the former Soviet Union's archives have not yet been fully opened to the public. But who knows about this? Within Russia itself, very few people have been brought to justice for their crimes in the NKVD's and KGB's service. The Russian public discourse today completely ignores the question of "How could it have happened to us?" As opposed to Eastern European nations, the Russians did not settle the score with their Stalinist past.

And us, the Jews? An Israeli student finishes high school without ever hearing the name "Genrikh Yagoda," the greatest Jewish murderer of the 20th Century, the GPU's deputy commander and the founder and commander of the NKVD. Yagoda diligently implemented Stalin's collectivization orders and is responsible for the deaths of at least 10 million people. His Jewish deputies established and managed the Gulag system. After Stalin no longer viewed him favorably, Yagoda was demoted and executed, and was replaced as chief hangman in 1936 by Yezhov, the "bloodthirsty dwarf."

Yezhov was not Jewish but was blessed with an active Jewish wife. In his Book "Stalin: Court of the Red Star", Jewish historian Sebag Montefiore writes that during the darkest period of terror, when the Communist killing machine worked in full force, Stalin was surrounded by beautiful, young Jewish women.

Stalin's close associates and loyalists included member of the Central Committee and Politburo Lazar Kaganovich. Montefiore characterizes him as the "first Stalinist" and adds that those starving to death in Ukraine, an unparalleled tragedy in the history of human kind aside from the Nazi horrors and Mao's terror in China, did not move Kaganovich.

Many Jews sold their soul to the devil of the Communist revolution and have blood on their hands for eternity. We'll mention just one more: Leonid Reichman, head of the NKVD's special department and the organization's chief interrogator, who was a particularly cruel sadist.

In 1934, according to published statistics, 38.5 percent of those holding the most senior posts in the Soviet security apparatuses were of Jewish origin. They too, of course, were gradually eliminated in the next purges. In a fascinating lecture at a Tel Aviv University convention this week, Dr. Halfin described the waves of soviet terror as a "carnival of mass murder," "fantasy of purges", and "essianism of evil." Turns out that Jews too, when they become captivated by messianic ideology, can become great murderers, among the greatest known by modern history.

The Jews active in official communist terror apparatuses (In the Soviet Union and abroad) and who at times led them, did not do this, obviously, as Jews, but rather, as Stalinists, communists, and "Soviet people." Therefore, we find it easy to ignore their origin and "play dumb": What do we have to do with them? But let's not forget them. My own view is different. I find it unacceptable that a person will be considered a member of the Jewish people when he does great things, but not considered part of our people when he does amazingly despicable things.

Even if we deny it, we cannot escape the Jewishness of "our hangmen," who served the Red Terror with loyalty and dedication from its establishment. After all, others will always remind us of their origin.

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Do we wonder why the world appears to be is falling apart? Why God seems to be withdrawing His blessings? What can we expect when Catholic leaders launch public initiatives that were always rightly denounced as grave sins against the First Commandment? ” 

John Vennari

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

COMMENT: GREAT INTERVIEW! Archbishop Viganò clearly understands and articulates the current problems in the Church, their causes, and the modus operandi of the apologists of evil. Now that the enemy is stripped naked, it is much easier matter to clean his mess up. 

Archbishop Viganò says restraint on Antichrist loosened at Vatican II

In Part 1 of an interview with LifeSiteNews, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò discusses Leo XIV, the Antichrist, women in Vatican leadership roles, and more.

LifeSiteNews  | Sep 10, 2026  — Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò has become one of the most controversial and, for many Catholics attached to Tradition, courageous voices in the contemporary ecclesial crisis. After serving as Apostolic Nuncio to the United States from 2011 to 2016, Viganò definitively entered the center of ecclesial debate in August 2018 when he published his denunciation concerning the case of former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, accusing Pope Francis and several members of the Curia of having ignored information already available about the conduct of the then-prelate and calling for Francis’ resignation.

Subsequently, his opposition to the Francis pontificate became increasingly radical, eventually raising fundamental questions on Petrine authority, the Second Vatican Council, and the legitimacy of the post-conciliar ecclesial direction. In July 2024, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith declared him guilty of schism and announced his excommunication latæ sententiæ, specifically charging him with refusing to recognize the Pontiff and the legitimacy of Vatican II.

It is precisely in light of this long and dramatic affair that his new book, The Capital Schism: When the Pope Is the First Enemy of the Papacy, should be read. READ: Archbishop Viganò publishes book on ‘when the pope is the first enemy of the papacy’ Published in August, the essay represents Viganò’s reflection on the crisis in the Church. He distinguishes between the papacy understood as a divine institution and the person who occupies its Chair, culminating in the thesis that the current crisis represents a profound rupture between the Petrine office and the one who exercises it.

The book also addresses such themes as a state of necessity, resistance to commands deemed illicit, and the eschatological dimension of the ecclesial crisis through the biblical figure of the katéchon, “the one who restrains” the Antichrist spirit that is already at work in the world. LifeSiteNews interviewed Archbishop Viganò to discuss these issues and, above all, the theme that runs throughout the entire book: what happens when the crisis no longer concerns merely certain men of the Church or certain decisions, but the one who sits upon the Throne of St. Peter?

LIFESITENEWS: Your Excellency, in your new book you argue that today the first enemy of the papacy is the Pope himself. How do you explain this paradox?

Archbishop Archbishop Viganò: The paradox is only apparent, and it is resolved as soon as one distinguishes what Catholic theology always distinguished: the Papacy as a divine institution, willed by Our Lord when He said to Peter, “Tu es Petrus,” and the individual person who at any given moment in history occupies the Chair of Peter. The Papacy is indefectible, because it is of Christ; the person of the Pope is a man, with his free will, who may correspond to the grace of state or reject it. On the other hand, the Church prays for the Supreme Pontiff, asking the Divine Majesty to preserve the Domnum Apostolicum in Holy Religion, precisely because she knows that his perseverance in the Faith is not automatically guaranteed by the office. If this were not so, that is, if the Pope were exempt from the possibility of failing in his mandate, praying for him would make no sense. When a Pontiff uses the authority that has been conferred upon him ad ædificationem to instead demolish what that authority is called to safeguard — doctrine, liturgy, discipline, the very monarchical and hierarchical constitution of the Church — he places himself in contradiction with his own munus. He is no longer the servant of the Papacy: he becomes its first adversary, because no external enemy could wound the Church as much as one who wounds her from within, clothed in the garment of Peter. I have called this phenomenon a capital schism in the proper sense of the word: a schism that begins from the caput, from the head. Classical schism is the separation of a portion of the body from the head; here we witness the opposite: it is the head that separates itself from the mystical body and from the Tradition that precedes it, that rebels against what its predecessors taught and what it would have the obligation to transmit intact. Saint Paul says it in words that admit no reply: sed licet nos aut angelus de cœlo evangelizet vobis præterquam quod evangelizavimus vobis, anathema sit (Gal 1:8-9). Not even an angel, not even an Apostle, not even the Successor of the Apostle Peter may proclaim another gospel. The Pope is the custodian of the Depositum, not its owner; and he who, from custodian, makes himself owner, betrays the very reason for which Our Lord Jesus Christ instituted the Papacy in vicarial form.

LIFESITENEWS: You compare the current situation to the removal of the katéchon spoken of by Saint Paul (cf. 2 Thess 2:6-8). What role does the figure of Leo XIV play in this dramatic removal of the “restraint” on iniquity?

Archbishop Archbishop Viganò: The Fathers and the great commentators understood the katéchon, “the one who restrains,” as both the Christian Roman Empire and, together with it, the authority of the Church, and eminently the authority of the Papacy, which for centuries had opposed a barrier to the mysterium iniquitatis. That restraint began to be loosened from the moment when the hierarchy, with the Second Vatican Council, renounced exercising its authority in the sense willed by Christ, in order to seek reconciliation with the world, with modern thought, with the Revolution. From then on, those who should have restrained began to accommodate. Leo XIV fits into this process not as an innovator, but as the one who consolidates it and makes it presentable. Bergoglio dismantled the Papacy violently; Prevost gives that dismantling an institutional, “orderly,” almost reassuring form. His task — and I believe he is perfectly aware of it — is to make synodality irreversible, that is, that “permanent revolution” which brings the Council to its extreme consequences, and to ensure that the Catholic Church definitively ceases to be an obstacle to the Masonic and globalist project. When the Pope is no longer a restrainer but an accelerator, the removal of the katéchon is not a future event: it is happening right now before our very eyes. And the Lord warned us: tunc revelabitur ille iniquus. I do not say this with apocalyptic relish, but with the sorrow of a Bishop seeing the Bride of Christ handed over to her enemies by those who should defend her.

LIFESITENEWS: In the face of canonical sanctions, you invoke a state of necessity, just as the Society of Saint Pius X has done for its new episcopal consecrations. How do you respond to the many conservatives who accuse you of formal disobedience to the Pope? Archbishop Viganò: I respond that obedience is a virtue, not an idol. Obedience is to be given to a legitimate command given by a legitimate authority for the purpose for which that authority exists. When a command is contrary to the Faith, divine law, or the good of souls, it not only does not bind, but obliges one not to obey: obœdire oportet Deo magis quam hominibus (Acts 5:29). This principle is not an invention of traditionalists: it is taught by Saint Peter, it is taught by Saint Thomas, it is taught by the perennial Magisterium, it is demonstrated in practice by the conduct of the Saints who resisted Pontiffs when they erred, from Saint Paul who resisted Peter in faciem, to Saint Athanasius, to Saint Catherine of Siena. A state of necessity is not an invention for evading the law: it is a principle of law itself, according to which the salus animarum, which is the supreme law, prevails over positive norms when these, applied literally, would produce irreparable harm to souls. The Society of Saint Pius X, in consecrating its Bishops this past July, did exactly what Archbishop Lefebvre did in 1988, and for the same reason: Rome is not giving Tradition the bishops it needs, and without bishops there are no priests, and without priests there are no Sacraments. And it is significant that, in threatening the Society, Prevost let the pretext of the Consecrations fall away in order to confess that the real fault is the rejection of the Council. In doing so he revealed — perhaps involuntarily — the fraud: canonical sanctions are a political instrument, wielded against those who remain Catholic and never against those who openly deny the Faith. To the conservatives who reproach me I say with affection: you obey a man who asks you to disobey Our Lord, and you call this contradiction “fidelity.” I have never intended to separate myself from Apostolic Communion; I have asked and continue to ask Leo XIV to tell me in what way I contradict the Depositum Fidei. I have received no answer. Which of the two, then, is in a state of schism?

LIFESITENEWS: In a now-distant 1999 address to the European bishops given by Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini – pioneer of the St. Gallen Mafia and, as he liked to define himself, not an antipope, but the “antepapa” (the one who would prepare the way for the “new” pope) – Martini declared that the Church, in order to “update” itself, had to urgently untie a series of knots. And he identified the first knot as the “shortage of ordained ministers,” to be untied by abolishing celibacy or at least making it optional. Recently, Bishop Johan Bonny in Antwerp announced that he will ordain married men by 2028. Not to mention that the Vatican has just appointed a new archbishop of Vienna, Josef Grünwidl, a former member of the dissident movement “Call to Disobedience,” which has advocated for the same abolition of clerical celibacy. Rome watches all of this in silence and, unlike in other situations, does not threaten sanctions even though canon law is systematically trampled upon. It almost seems that Rome is encouraging all this. What do you think?

Archbishop Viganò: It does not “seem” that Rome is encouraging this – Rome is encouraging this. Rome is not a distracted spectator of a process that is escaping it; it is the director. The method is the one tested by the conciliar Revolution: disobedience is allowed to begin from the periphery, it is allowed to consolidate itself as a “fait accompli,” and then the center intervenes not to repress it but to “accompany” it, invoking synodality, listening, pastoral needs. The Bonny Case is emblematic: a Bishop publicly announces that he will violate the law of the Church, and no Dicastery calls him to account. The Grünwidl case is even more eloquent, because it is not a matter of tolerating a dissident, but of promoting him to one of the most important sees in Europe. Someone who belonged to a movement literally called “Call to Disobedience” is rewarded by a Pontiff who excommunicates those who ask to be able to obey the Church of all time. But the question goes deeper than celibacy. The “shortage of ordained ministers” is the poisoned fruit of sixty years of emptying the Priesthood of its substance. When people ceased to believe that the priest is the alter Christus, that he ascends the altar to renew the Sacrifice of the Cross, celibacy ceased to make sense, because it makes sense only as total configuration to Christ the High Priest. Cardinal Martini knew this well: the list of his “knots” is not a list of problems to be solved, but a program of demolition, in which each point is a stepping stone to the next. First celibacy is abolished, then women are admitted, then morality is rewritten, then marriage is dissolved… It is a plan, and its executors are called by other names today but pursue the same design. The fact that Martini called himself “antepapa” says much about the awareness with which the St. Gallen Mafia prepared what we see today.

LIFESITENEWS: The second knot identified by Martini concerned the role of women and the question of women’s ordination. The bishops promoted by Leo XIV — I am thinking of Mackinlay, Grögli, Satué, Grünwidl, and many others — have openly expressed support for the female diaconate. The Vatican Commission on the subject reiterated “no” to the sacramental ordination of women, but it defined this judgment as “not definitive.” Consequently, numerous bishops today avoid addressing the question directly, preferring to enhance women’s presence in the governance of dioceses or to propose “inclusive” liturgical reforms. In your view, is this strategy aimed at progressively shifting the Overton Window on the issue of women’s ordination?

Archbishop Viganò: It is exactly the Overton Window technique, and not even particularly disguised. John Paul II, with his Apostolic Letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, did not define something new: he declared that this doctrine belongs to the Depositum Fidei and has been taught infallibly by the ordinary and universal Magisterium — as the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith confirmed in its Responsum of 1995. To say today that this judgment is “not definitive” therefore means not reopening a disciplinary question, but denying the very infallibility of the ordinary and universal Magisterium. The female diaconate is the lever, because the Sacrament of Orders is one in its three degrees: admitting a woman to the diaconate means admitting that she is capable of receiving Orders, and at that point exclusion from the priesthood would appear to be nothing more than discrimination to be removed. It is no coincidence that the admission of women to orders is promoted by anti-Catholic movements in the name of gender equality, which the synodal church embraces and makes its own. The neo-modernists know this perfectly well, and for this reason they do not immediately ask for priestly ordination: they ask for governing roles, a presence in the Curias, “instituted ministries,” “inclusive” liturgies. Each step prepares the next, and each step is presented as harmless. The Bishops appointed by Prevost were not chosen despite their positions on the female diaconate, but precisely because of them: whoever appoints a Bishop knows his ideas, and whoever appoints many with the same ideas is building an Episcopate that, at the appropriate moment, will ask “from below” for what the Pope wishes to grant “from above.” This is synodality: the staging of a play in which actors present a demand whose answer has already been decided. To all this is added an aspect that I consider even more serious, and about which there is a culpable silence: the promotion of women to head Roman Dicasteries. We have two religious sisters, Sister Simona Brambilla and Sister Tiziana Merletti, respectively Prefect and Secretary of the Dicastery for Institutes of Consecrated Life, who now command authority over Cardinals, Bishops, Abbots and priests; another religious sister, Sister Reffaella Petrini, President of the Pontifical Commission for Vatican City State and President of the Governatorate; a laywoman, Maria Montserrat Alvarado, at the head of the Dicastery for Communication, which is coordinating and reorganizing the entire communications system of the Holy See; and also women appointed as members and consultants of various Dicasteries, including the Congregation for Bishops, that is, called upon to decide on promotions to the Episcopate. Now, the power of governance in the Church is not an administrative function that can be attributed to just anyone by decree: by its nature it is connected to sacra potestas, which flows from the Sacrament of Orders, because in the Church — which is a supernatural society and not a business corporation — one governs insofar as one is configured to Christ the King and High Priest. Separating jurisdiction from Orders, by conferring upon those who cannot receive Orders the power to govern those who have received them, means overturning the hierarchical constitution that Our Lord gave to His Church. This is why I say that Bergoglio, and now Prevost, do much more and much worse than conferring Holy Orders upon these women. An invalid ordination would be a sacrilege, but it would remain a null act; here, instead, the sacramental order is being dismantled piece by piece, sacra potestas is being rendered a superfluous accessory, and the clergy are being accustomed to obeying those who have no divine title whatsoever to command them. It is a deadly assault on the divine constitution of the Church, that is once again being carried out in practice, without the need to touch a single dogma.

LIFESITENEWS: The third and fourth knots identified by Martini concerned, respectively, sexual morality and the discipline of marriage. In his official book-length interview with Elise Ann Allen, Leo XIV stated that people’s “attitudes” must be “changed” before doctrine itself is changed. In your opinion, what are the means that the neo-modernists in power intend to use to bring about this change?

Archbishop Viganò: That sentence deserves to be weighed, because it is a confession. “Changing attitudes before changing doctrine” is to admit that doctrine will be changed — just not at first. Doctrine will be changed last, when by then no one believes in it anymore, and its formal abrogation will appear as a mere notarial act. It is the modernist method described by Saint Pius X in Pascendi: one does not attack dogma head-on, one transforms the mentality that sustains it, one separates faith from life, and one allows life, thus separated, to drag faith along with it. In reality, it is not even necessary to change the dogma: one renders it irrelevant through pastoral practice. And this method today has its theoretical charter, which almost no one has wanted to read for what it is. In Evangelii Gaudium, Bergoglio set out four principles, and the first of them — “time is greater than space” — is the key that opens all the others: “giving priority to time means being concerned with initiating processes rather than possessing spaces.” In other words: do not define, but initiate; do not establish a result, but trigger a dynamic that no one will ever again be able to stop. Space is the bounded territory; the boundary, the dogmatic definition, the canon that says how far it is permissible to go; time is the process that erodes that boundary without ever declaring an intention to tear it down. And note the cunning: whoever guards a space must defend a position, and a position can be besieged, debated, refuted; whoever initiates a process has no positions to defend, and is therefore unassailable. Nothing can be opposed to him, because he has not yet asserted anything. Someone will object that this is not Hegel but Romano Guardini, whose writings Bergoglio studied extensively without ever completing his doctoral thesis. Guardini’s polarity — the Gegensatz — is conceived precisely against dialectical contradiction, since tensions are to be held together and not resolved in a higher synthesis. Whether one calls it Hegelian synthesis or an unfinished process, the result is that no truth remains a fixed point, but becomes a mere moment in a process of becoming. And what in Hegel was philosophy of history, and in Marx became revolutionary praxis (praxis preceding the principle, judging it and subverting it), in the synodal church is now simply called “pastoral ministry.” And here is the work taking place before our eyes: Amoris Lætitia does not abrogate the indissolubility of Marriage, it merely opens a “process”; Fiducia Supplicans does not declare an irregular union licit, it simply “blesses” those who are in one; the synodal path decides nothing, and precisely for this reason it decides everything. Doctrine is never formally touched, and precisely for this reason there is no new doctrine that can ever be formally challenged. There is no proposition to censure, no heresy to condemn, nothing upon which to pronounce an anathema. The faithful are left with the intact wording of a dogma that no longer prevails in the life of the Church. But this is precisely what the First Vatican Council condemned with an anathema, forbidding that the dogmas proposed by the Church should ever be attributed a meaning different from that which she understood and understands: eodem sensu eademque sententia. The means are those that we have seen at work for decades. The first is language: “sin” is replaced with “fragility,” “conversion” with “journey,” “truth” with “discernment,” “law of God” with “ideal.” The second is pastoral practice, deliberately made ambiguous: Amoris Lætitia with its footnotes, Fiducia Supplicans with its blessings that bless without blessing; and now Prevost’s strategy, which has not withdrawn any of this but allows it to operate “calmly.” The third is formation: seminaries, theological faculties, catechesis, in which for sixty years it has been taught that Catholic morality is a historical remnant to be overcome. The fourth is the choice of pastors: those who practice ambiguity and error are promoted, while those who speak clearly are marginalized. And beneath all this there is an alliance that I never hesitated to denounce: that between the synodal church and the globalist agenda. This is not one ideology among others, but the synthesis of all the ideologies of the right and the left, which for two centuries have pretended to fight one another while leading men toward the same destination; a synthesis of neo-Malthusian origin, which no longer sees in man the image of God but an excess to be managed, and which is therefore anti-human even before it is anti-Christian. We know its components, and each strikes a precise aspect of the order willed by the Creator: the dissolution of the natural family; pansexualism and gender ideology, which deny man created masculum et feminam; vaccinism, which makes the body the property of the State; environmentalism, which replaces the worship of the Creator with that of the creature; mass immigration ideology, which dissolves nations and with them Christian peoples; and at the summit transhumanism, which promises man divinization without God, already promised in Eden by the serpent: eritis sicut dii. The conciliar church does not suffer this process: it participates in it. She has renounced judging the world and accepted being judged by it; she stopped converting it, and allowed herself to be converted by it. This is why Martini’s third and fourth knots are not knots to be untied at all: indissoluble marriage and sexual morality are not the historical shell of a bygone age, but the very flesh of the Gospel, and they are the words of Our Lord — quod ergo Deus coniunxit, homo non separet. Whoever claims — as Pope — to change them does not reform the Church: he founds another religion, and founds it upon the ruins of the one he received into his custody.

 

 

 

Remember in your charity:          

Remember the welfare of our expectant mother:

Fr. Paul Sretenovic, a faithful priest who works in California,

Drews petition prayers for the spiritual and temporal welfare of the Christian & Irene Melnick family,

Gene Peters asks our prayers for the spiritual welfare of Beverly Wood and Bonnie Cormesser,

Mr. & Mrs. Hall request prayers for the health of their daughter, Erika Smith,

Drews request your prayers for Phyllis Virgil, for her health and spirital welfare,

For Anthony Niekrewicz, spiritual and temporal welfare is the petition of all the members of Ss. Peter & Paul,

Mary Lou Loftus' aunt, Susan Hendricks, who is gravely ill after emergency surgery,

Fred Holder, for his spiritual and physical welfare,

Thomas Soul, a nursing home patient who has suffered a stroke,

Donna Kallal, a dear friend of the Schiltz family who is dying,

Philip Thees requests our prayers for the heath of Mary Glatz and Agnus Messineo,

For the welfare of Aaron, a York resident in need of conversion,

For the spiritual welfare of Margaret Connelly is the petition of Camilla Meiser,

Linda Boyd, for her health,

Pete Schiffbauer, a cousin of Monic Bandlow who is gravely ill,

Joan R. Barr, the widow of F. Donald Barr who died March 7, they were married 70 years

Cole Schneider, prayers for his welfare are requested by Camilla Meiser,

JoAnn Niekrewicz, for her recovery from a recent fall and shoulder injury,

The Drews ask prayers for the spiritual and physical welfare of Robert Carballo,

Conversion of Jack Gentry, the nephew of Camilla Meiser,

For Sr. Maria Junipera, who took her final vows as a nun with the Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in Richmond, New Hampshire April 8,

Stephen Bryan, the brother of a devout Catholic religious, for his spiritual welfare,

Marie Kolinsky, for her health and spiritual welfare is the petition of her family,

Gene Peters requests our prayers for the conversion of Shirley Young and Carl Loy who are dying, the conversion of Dawn Keithley and Nate Schaeffer,

Rev. Leo Carley, an eighty-nine year old priest faithful to Catholic tradition, who is seriously ill,

For the recovery of Hayden Yanchek, the grandson of Francis Yanchek, injured in a farming accident,

Maureen Nies, for the recovery of her health is the petition of Camilla Meiser,

Daniel Vargs, for his health is the petition of his parents,

Art Noel, for the restoration of his health,

For the welfare of Peg Berry and her husband, Bill,

Marianne Connelly asks prayers for Chris Foley, who is gravely ill, and the welfare of his wife, Mary Beth,

The spiritual welfare of the Sal & Maria Messineo family is the petition of the Drew’s,

Liz Agosta, who is seriously ill, for her spiritual and temporal welfare,

Warren Hoffman, a long time member of our Mission who is in failing health,

Patrick Boyle, for the recovery of his health and his spiritual welfare,

For the spiritual welfare of the Drew children,

Monica Bandlow request our prayers for the welfare of Ray who is recovering from a MVA, and his daughter, Sonya, and Tera Jean Kopczynski, who is in failing health, and for a good death for Mr. Howald, Kathy Simons, Regina Quinn, James Mulgrew, Ruth Beaucheane, John Kopczynski, Roger & Mandy Owen

Peg Berry requests our prayers for her brother, William Habekost,

For the recently widowed, Maike Hickson, and her children,

For the spiritual welfare of the Carmelite nuns in Fairfield, PA,

Geralyn Zagorski, recovery of her health and spiritual welfare and the conversion of Randal Pace is the petition of Philip Thees,

For the grandson of Joe & Liz Agusta,

Fr. Waters requests our prayers for the health and spiritual welfare of Elvira Donaghy,

For the health and conversion of Stephen Henderson,

Fr. Paul DaDamio requests our prayers for the welfare of Rob Ward, and his sister, Debra Wagaman,

Kaitlyn McDonald, for the recovery of her health and spiritual welfare,

Roco Sbardella, for his health and spiritual welfare,

The Vargas’ request our prayers for the spiritual welfare of their son, Nicholas,

Family, for the welfare of Lazarus Handley, his mother, Julia, and his brother, Raphael, with Down’s Syndrome,

Fr. Waters requests prayers for the spiritual and physical welfare of Frank McKee,

Nancy Bennett, for the recovery of her health,

For the spiritual welfare of Mark Roberts, a Catholic faithful to tradition,

Michael Brigg requests our prayers for the health of John Romeo,

The health and welfare of Gene Peters and his sons,

Conversion of Anton Schwartzmueller, is the prayer request of his children,

Christine Kozin, for her health and spiritual welfare,

Teresa Gonyea, for her conversion and health, is the petition of her grandmother, Patricia McLaughlin,

For the health of Sonya Kolinsky,

Jackie Dougherty asks our prayers for her brother, John Lee, who is gravely ill,

For the health and spiritual welfare, Meg Bradley, the granddaughter of Rose Bradley,

Timothy & Crisara, a couple from Maryland have requested our prayers for their spiritual welfare,

Celine Pilegaard, the seven year old daughter of Cynthia Pilegaard, for her recovery from burn injuries,

Rafaela de Saravia, for her health and welfare,

Abbe Damien Dutertre, traditional Catholic priest arrested by Montreal police while offering Mass,

Francis (Frank) X.  McLaughlin, for the recovery of his health,

Nicholas Pell, for his health and spiritual welfare is the petition of Camilla Meizer,

Mary Kaye Petr, her health and welfare is petitioned by Camilla Meizer,

The welfare of Excellency Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò,

The welfare of Rev. Fr. Martin Skierka, who produces the traditional Ordo in the U.S.,

For the health and welfare of Katie Wess, John Gentry, Vincent Bands, Todd Chairs, Susan Healy and James O’Gentry is the petition of Camilia,

Marieann Reuter, recovery of her health, Kathy Kepner, for her health, Shane Cox, for his health, requests of Philip Thees,

The Joseph Cox Family, their spiritual welfare, 

For the health of Kim Cochran, the daughter-in-law of Joseph and Brenda Cochran, the wife of their son Joshua,

Louie Verrecchio, Catholic apologist, who has a health problem,

John Minidis, Jr. family, for help in their spiritual trial,

Joann DeMarco, for her health and spiritual welfare,

Regina (Manidis) Miller, her spiritual welfare and health,   

Melissa Elena Levitt, her conversion, and welfare of her children,

For the grace of a holy death, Nancy Marie Claycomb,

Conversion of Annette Murowski, and her son Jimmy,

Brent Keith from Indiana has petitioned our prayers for the Keith Family,

The welfare of the Schmedes Family, and the Mike and Mariana Donohue Family,

The spiritual welfare Robert Holmes Family,

For the spiritual and temporal welfare of Irwin Kwiat,

Fr. Waters asks our prayers for Elvira Donaghy,

Kimberly Ann, the daughter of John and Joann DeMarco, for her health and spiritual welfare,

Rende and Mary Mufide, a traditional Catholics from India ask our prayers for her welfare and he family members, living and deceased,

Mary Glatz, her health and the welfare of her family,

Barbara Harmon, who is ill,

Jason Green, a father of ten children, his health,

For the health and welfare of Sorace family,

Fr. Waters asks our prayers for the health and spiritual welfare of Brian Abramowitz,

Thomas Schiltz family, in grateful appreciation for their contribution to the beauty of our chapel,

John Rhoad, for his health and spiritual welfare,

Kathy Boyle, requests our prayers for her welfare,

Joyce Laughman and Robert Twist, for their conversions,

Michael J. Brigg & his family, who have helped with the needs of the Mission,

Nancy Deegan, her welfare and conversion to the Catholic Church,

Francis Paul Diaz, who was baptized at Ss. Peter & Paul, asks our prayers for his spiritual welfare,

The conversion of Rene McFarland, Lori Kerr, Cary Shipman and family, David Bash, Crystal and family, Larry Reinhart, Costanzo Family, Kathy Scullen, Marilyn Bryant, Vicki Trahern and Time Roe are the petitions of Gene Peters,

For the conversion of Ben & Tina Boettcher family, Karin Fraessdorf, Eckhard Ebert, and Fahnauer family,

Fr. Waters requests our prayers for Br. Rene, SSPX, and for Fr. Thomas Blute, 

For the welfare of Fr. Paul DaDamio and Fr. William T. Welsh,

The Drew’s ask our prayers for the welfare of Joe & Tracey Sentmanat family, Keith & Robert Drew, Christy Koziol & her children, Fred Nesbit and Michael Nesbit families, and Gene Peters Family, the John Manidis Family, the Sal Messinio Family, Michael Proctor Family,

Ryan Boyle grandmother, Jane Boyle, who is failing health,

Mel Gibson and his family, please remember in our prayers,

Rev. Timothy A. Hopkins requested our prayers for the welfare of  his friend, Fr Jean-Luc Lafitte,

Ebert’s request our prayers for the Andreas & Jenna Ortner Family,

Joyce Paglia has asked prayers for George Richard Moore Sr. & his children, and her brother, George Panell,

Philip Thees asks our prayers for his family, for McLaughlin Family, the welfare of Dan & Polly Weand, the conversion of Sophia Herman, Tony Rosky, the welfare Nancy Erdeck, the wife of the late Deacon Erdeck, John Calasanctis, Tony Rosky, James Parvenski, Kathleen Gorry, health of mind and body of Cathy Farrar.

 

Pray for the Repose of the Souls:

Shanon Smuckers, a thirty-three year old mother of three, died July 15,

John Callisanti, a faithful Catholic, died June 23, prayers petitioned by Philip Thees,

Christian Joseph Melnick, died June 19, a 56 year old faithful Catholic and devoted husband and father of nine,

Fr. Radoslav, a relatively young faithful priest who was working with Bishop Stobnicki in Poland,

Leonard  Messineo, a long time traditional Catholic, dies May 18,

For Jo Ann Niekrewicz, our dear friend, died March 1, for the blessed repose of her soul is the petition of all the members of Ss. Peter & Paul,

Shirley Rotondo, died February 2-26, and Louisa McBride, died February 27, is the petition of Monica Bandlow,

Katherine Veronica Wedel, the mother of Mary Baer, died February 6,

James Condit, Jr., traditional Catholic activist, died December 27,

Beverly Harmon, died December 16, requested by the Sentmanat family,

Rev. Nicholas DeProspero, a faithful Ruthenian Eastern rite Catholic priest, died December 10,

Monica Bandlow petitions our prayers for her friend, Patricia Messineo, died November 28,

Guy Berthault, died November 23, a great Catholic scientist whose work in sedimentology destrooyed Lyellian geology and the theory of evolution,

Thomas Soul, died November 8 after receiving the last rites of the Church,

Etta Van Der Werken, a dear friend of Barbara Taffe, died 10-21-2025,

Gary Potter, Catholic writer and apologist and great long time defender of Catholic doctrine and tradition, died 9-9-2025,

Elizabeth Gorska, who died September 9, a relative of Lidia Gjec,

Camilia Meiser request our prayers for the souls of Peggy Cummings and Elizabeth Genter,

Thomas A. Nelson, founder of TAN Books and Publishers, died August 16,

Juan D. Gonzalez, our former sacristan, choir director, and dear friend, died July 23,

Sal Messineo, a faithful traditional Catholic, died Augsut 14,

Patricia Askew, a friend of Camilla Meiser, died July 3,

Joseph Kerney, a young man whose family provided the statues of the Sacred Heart, Mary and Joseph in our sanctuary, died May 30,

Louis Richard Ajlouny, the father of Randa Sharpe, died May 15,

Rene Guidicessi, died April 25, an old friend of the Drews,

F. Donald Barr, died March 7 at 94 years of age, co-founder of Robert Francis Religious Goods, in Philadelphia,

Dr. David Allen White, a well known defender of the Catholic faith, died February 11,

Bishop Richard Williamson, a renowned defender of the Catholic faith and most charitable gentleman, died January 29,

Rodolfo Alberto Lacayo, a cousin of Claudia Drew, died January 4,

Genieve Wallace, died Christmas day,

Ruth Marion Beaucheane, died December 8, is the petition of Monica Bandlow,

Ana Maria Salcedo,  the sister of Mario Fiol, died November 26,

Fr. Johin Cardaro, a traditional Catholic priest who was found dead in his home November 2,

Robert Carballo asks that we remember his parents, Roberto & Aida Carballo, and his friend, David Duclos, who died April 15,

Bishop Bernard Tissier de Mallerais who may have been responsible for preventing the SSPX's public reconciliation with Rome in 2012, died October 8,

Lorna Edwards, our dear friend and loyal supporter of this Mission, died August 10,

Lois Petti, died July 28 two hours after receiving the Last Sacraments from Fr. Waters,

Wolfgang Smith, a renowned Catholic scholar, mathematician, scientist, philosopher, who helped the Kolbe Center for the Study of Creation, died July 19,

Willaim Glatz, a good and faithful Catholic, died July 17,

Alicio Gonzalez, a Catholic who asked for the sacrament of Extreme Unction, unfortunately did not receive, died July 9,

John Zavodny,  a faithful Catholic who died wearing the scapular of Mt Carmel on the first Saturday of May,  requested by Phyllis Virgil,

Catherine Martel, a lapsed Catholic, received the last sacraments in a good disposition from Fr. Waters on March 25 and died on April 4,

Father Basilio Méramo, a faithful priest, died March 5, removed from the SSPX for opposing their accommodation with Rome,

Julia McDonald, the mother of Kyle McDonald, died March 1,

Agnus Melnick, died February 28, a long time faithful Catholic and mother of eight children, including a traditional priest,

Kathryn (Drew) Lederhos, of Wellesley, MA, died February 3, 2024,

Chris Foley, the brother of Mary Lou Loftus, died February 1,

Louis Zelaya, the brother of Claudia Drew, died January 30,

Fr. James Louis Albert Campbell, a faithful priest who died December 18 at 91 years of age, and her mother and father, Teresa and Thomas Maher,

Charles Harmon, the father of Tracey Sentmanet, died October 1, after receiving the rites of the Church,

Fr. Waters requests prayers for Elvira Donaghy, his friend and former secretary a for Bishop Gerado Zendejas, died September 9,

Robert Hickson, a faithful Catholic apologist who died Septembber 2,

Monica Bandlow requests prayers for her parents, Thomas & Teresa Maher, her husband, William Bandlow, her brother-in-law, Richard Bandlow, her sister, Mary Maher, Fr. Christopher Darby, SSPX,  who died March 17, Robert Byrne, Michelle Donofrio McDowell, her cousin, Patricia Fabyanic, the Prefect of Our Lady’s Sodality, March 8, for John Pfeiffer who died August 20, Theresa Hanley, died July 23, Fr. Juan-Carlos Iscara, SSPX, who died December 20, John Kinney, died December 21, Willaim Price, Jr., and Robert Arch Ward, died January 10, and Myra, killed in a MVA June 6,

John Sharpe, Sr., died July 20,

Maria Paulette Salazar, died June 6,

Dale Kinsey requests prayers for his wife, Katherine Kinsey, died May 17,

Richard Giles, who died April 29, the father of Traci Sentmanat who converted to the Catholic faith last All Saints' Day,

Joseph Sparks, a devout and faithful Catholic to tradition died February 25, 

Joyce Paglia, died January 21, and Anthony Paglia, died January 28, who were responsible for the beautiful statuary in our chapel,

Joe Sentmanet request prayers for Richard Giles and Claude Harmon who converted to the Catholic faith shortly before their deaths, 

Rodolfo Zelaya, the brother of Claudia Drew, died January 9,

Elizabeth Agosta petitions our prayers for Joseph Napolitano, her brother, who died January 2,

Michael Dulisse, died on December 26,

Michael Proctor, a close friend of the Drews, died November 9,

Richard Anthony Giles, the father-in-law of Joe Sentmanat converted to the Catholic faith on All Saints Day, died November 5,

Robert Kolinsky, the husband of Sonja, died September 18,

Gabriel Schiltz, the daughter of Thomas & Gay Schiltz, died August 21,

Mary Dimmel, the mother –in-law of Victoria Drew Dimmel, died July 18,

Michael Nesbit, the brother-in-law and dear friend of the Drew's, died July 14,

Thomas Thees, the brother of Philip, died June 19,

Carmen Ragonese, died June 22,

Juanita Mohler, a friend of Camella Meiser, died June 14,

Kathleen Elias, died February 14,

Hernan Ortiz, the brother of Fr. Juan Carlos Ortiz, died February 3,

Mary Ann Boyle, the mother of a second order Dominican nun, a first order Dominican priest, and a SSPX priest, died January 24, 

John DeMarco, who attended this Mission in the past, died January23,

Charles O’Brien, the father of Marlene Cox, died December 30,

Mufide Rende requests our prayers for the repose of the souls of her parents, Mehmet & Nedime,

Kathleen Donelly, died December 29 at 91 years of age, ran the CorMariae website,

Matthew O'Hare, most faithful Catholic, died at age 40 on November 30,

Rev. Patrick J. Perez, a Catholic priest faithful to tradition, pastor Our Lady Help of Christians, Garden Grove, CA, November 19,

Elizabeth Benedek, died December 14, requested by her niece, Agnes Vollkommer,

Dolores Smith and Richard Costello, faithful Catholics, died November,

Frank D’Agustino, a friend of Philp Thees, died November 8,

Fr. Dominique Bourmaud, of the SSPX, Prior of St. Vincent in Kansas City, died September 4,

Pablo Daniel Silva, the brother of Elizabeth Vargas, died August 18,

Rose Bradley, a member of Ss. Peter & Paul, died July 14,

Patricia Ellias, died June 1, recently returned to the Church died with the sacraments and wearing the brown scapular,

Joan Devlin, the sister-in-law of Rose Bradley, died May 18,

William Muligan, died April 29, two days after receiving the last sacraments,

Robert Petti, died March 19, the day after receiving the last sacraments,

Mark McDonald, the father of Kyle, who died December 26,

Perla Otero, died December 2020, Leyla Otero, January 2021, cousins of Claudia Drew,

Mehmet Rende, died December 12, who was the father of Mary Mufide,

Joseph Gravish, died November 26, 100 year old WWII veteran and daily communicant,

Jerome McAdams, the father of, died November 30,

Rev. James O’Hara, died November 8, requested by Alex Estrada,

Elizabeth Batko, the sacristan at St. John the Baptist in Pottstown for over 40 years, died on First Saturday November 7 wearing the brown scapular,

William Cox, the father of Joseph Cox, who died September 3,

James Larson, Catholic apologists, author of War Against Being publication, died July 6, 2020, 

Hutton Gibson, died May 12,

Sr. Regina Cordis, Immaculate Heart of Mary religious for sixty-five years, died May 12,

Leslie Joan Matatics, devoted Catholic wife and mother of nine children, died March 24,

Victoria Zelaya, the sister-in-law of Claudia Drew, died March 20,

Ricardo DeSilva, died November 16, our prayers requested by his brother, Henry DeSilva,

Rev. Fr. Joseph F. Collins, died April 27, 2019 to whom we are indebted for establishing our traditional pre-Bugnini Holy Week  in all its beauty,

Roland H. Allard, a friend of the Drew’s, died September 28,

Stephen Cagorski and John Bogda, who both died wearing the brown scapular,

Cecilia LeBow, a most faithful Catholic,

Rose Cuono, died Oct 23,

Patrick Rowen, died March 25, and his brother, Daniel Rowen, died May 15,

Sandra Peters, the wife of Gene Peters, who died June 10 receiving the sacraments and wearing our Lady’s scapular,

Rev. Francis Slupski, a priest who kept the Catholic faith and its immemorial traditions, died May 14,

Martha Mochan, the sister of Philip Thees, died April 8,

George Kirsch, our good friend and supporter of this Mission, died February 15,

For Fr. Paul J. Theisz, died October 17, is the petition of Fr. Waters,

Fr. Mecurio Fregapane, died Jan 12, was not a traditional priest but always charitable,

Fr. Casimir Peterson, a priest who often offered the Mass in our chapel and provided us with sound advice, died December 4,

Fr. Constantine Bellasarius, a faithful and always charitable Eastern Rite Catholic Melkite priest, who left the Roman rite, died November 27,

Christian Villegas, a motor vehicle accident, his brother, Michael, requests our prayers,

John Vennari, the former editor of Catholic Family News, and for his family’s welfare, April 4,

Mary Butler, the aunt of Fr. Samuel Waters, died October 17,

Joseph DeMarco, the nephew of John DeMarco, died October 3,

John Fergale, died September 25 after receiving the traditional sacramental rites of the Church wearing the brown scapular,

John Gabor, the brother of Donna Marbach, died September 9,

Fr. Eugene Dougherty, a faithful priest, fittingly died on the Nativity of the BVM after receiving the traditional Catholic sacraments,

Phyllis Schlafly, died September 5,

Helen Mackewicz, died August 14,

Mark A. Wonderlin, who died August 2,

Fr. Carl Cebollero, a faithful priest to tradition who was a friend of Fr. Waters and Fr. DeMaio,

Jessica Cortes, a young mother of ten who died June 12,

Frances Toriello, a life-long Catholic faithful to tradition, died June3, the feast of the Sacred Heart, and her husband Dan, died in 1985, 

John McLaughlin, a friend of the Drew’s, died May 22,

Angela Montesano, who died April 30, and her husband, Salvatore, who died in July 3, 2013,

Charles Schultz, died April 5, left behind nine children and many grandchildren, all traditional Catholics,

Esperanza Lopez de Callejas, the aunt of Claudia Drew, died March 15,

Fr. Edgardo Suelo, a faithful priest defending our traditions who was working with Fr. Francois Chazal in the Philippines, died February 19,

Conde McGinley, a long time laborer for the traditional faith, died February 12, at 96 years,

The Drew family requests your prayers for Ida Fernandez and Rita Kelley, parishioners at St. Jude,

Fr. Stephen Somerville, a traditional priest who repented from his work with the Novus Ordo English translation, died December 12,

Fr. Arturo DeMaio, a priest that helped this Mission with the sacraments and his invaluable advice, died December 2,

J. Paul Carswell, died October 15, 2015,

Solange Hertz, a great defender of our Catholic faith, died October 3, the First Saturday of the month,

Paula P. Haigh, died October 22, a great defender of our Catholic faith in philosophy and natural science,

Gabriella Whalin, the mother of Gabriella Schiltz, who died August 25,

Mary Catherine Sick, 14 year old from a large traditional Catholic family, died August 25,

Fr. Paul Trinchard, a traditional Catholic priest, died August 25,

Stephen J. Melnick, Jr., died on August 21, a long-time faithful traditional Catholic husband and father, from Philadelphia,

Patricia Estrada, died July 29, her son Alex petitions our prayers for her soul,

Fr. Nicholas Gruner, a devoted priest & faithful defender of Blessed Virgin Mary and her Fatima message, died April 29,

Sarah E. Shindle, the grandmother of Richard Shindle, died April 26,

Madeline Vennari, the mother of John Vennari, died December 19,

Salvador Baca Callejas, the uncle of Claudia Drew, died December 13,

Robert Gomez, who died in a motor vehicle accident November 29,

Catherine Dunn, died September 15,

Anthony Fraser, the son of Hamish Fraser, died August 28,

Jeannette Rhoad, the grandmother of Devin Rhoad, who died August 24,

John Thees, the uncle of Philip Thees, died August 9,

Sarah Harkins, 32 year-old mother of four children, died July 28,

Msgr. Donald Adams, who offered the Indult Mass, died April 1996,

Anita Lopez, the aunt of Claudia Drew,

Fr. Kenneth Walker, a young traditional priest of the FSSP who was murdered in Phoenix June 11,

Fr. Waters petitions our prayers for Gilberte Violette, the mother of Fr. Violette, who died May 6,

Pete Hays petitions our prayers for his brothers, Michael, died May 9, and James, died October 20, his sister, Rebecca,  died March17, and his mother, Lorraine Hayes who died May 4,

Philip Marbach, the father of Paul Marbach who was the coordinator at St. Jude in Philadelphia, died April 21,

Richard Slaughtery, the elderly sacristan for the SSPX chapel in Kansas City, died April 13,

Bernedette Marie Evans nee Toriello, the daughter of Daniel Toriello, died March 31, a faithful Catholic who suffered many years with MS, 

Natalie Cagorski, died march 23,

Anita Lopez de Lacayo, the aunt of Claudia Drew, who died March 21,

Mario Palmaro, Catholic lawyer, bioethicist and professor, apologist, died March 9, welfare of his widow and children,

Daniel Boyle, the uncle of Ryan Boyle, died March 4,

Jeanne DeRuyscher, who died on January 25,

Arthur Harmon, died January 18,

Fr. Waters petitions our prayers for the soul of Jeanne DeRuyscher, who died January 17,

Joseph Proctor, died January 10,

Susan Scott, a devote traditional Catholic who made the vestments for our Infant of Prague statue, died January 8,

Brother Leonard Mary, M.I.C.M., (Fred Farrell), an early supporter and friend of Fr. Leonard Feeney, died November 23,

John Fergale, requests our prayers for his sister Connie, who died December 19,

Jim Capaldi, died December 15,

Brinton Creager, the son of Elizabeth Carpenter, died December 10, 

Christopher Lussos, age 27, the father of one child with an expecting wife, died November 15,

Jarett Ebeyer, 16 year old who died in his sleep, November 17, at the request of the Kolinsky’s,

Catherine Nienaber, the mother of nine children, the youngest three years of age, killed in MVA after Mass, 10-29,

Nancy Aldera, the sister of Frances Toriello, died October 11, 2013 at 105 years of age,

Mary Rita Schiltz, the mother of Thomas Schiltz, who died August 27,

William H. (Teddy) Kennedy, Catholic author of Lucifer’s Lodge, died August 14, age 49, cause of death unknown,

Alfred Mercier, the father of David Mercier, who died August 12,

The Robert Kolinsky asks our prayers for his friend, George Curilla, who died August 23,

John Cuono, who had attended Mass at our Mission in the past, died August 11,

Raymond Peterson, died July 28, and Paul Peterson, died February 19, the brothers of Fr. Casimir Peterson,

Margaret Brillhart, who died July 20,

Msgr. Joseph J. McDonnell, a priest from the diocese of Des Moines, who died June 8,

Patrick Henry Omlor, who wrote Questioning The Validity of the Masses using the New, All English Canon, and for a series of newsletters which were published as The Robber Church, died May 2, the feast of St Athanasius,  

Bishop Joseph McFadden, died unexpectedly May 2,

Timothy Foley, the brother-in-law of Michelle Marbach Folley, who died in April,

William Sanders, the uncle of Don Rhoad, who died April 2,

Gene Peters ask our prayers for the repose of the soul of Mark Polaschek, who died March 22,

Eduardo Gomez Lopez, the uncle of Claudia Drew, February 28,

Cecelia Thees, died February 24,

Elizabeth Marie Gerads, a nineteen year old, the oldest of twelve children, who died February 6, 

Michael Schwartz, the co-author with Fr. Enrique Rueda of “Gays, Aids, and You,” died February 3,

Stanley W. Moore, passed away in December 16, and Gerard (Jerry) R. Pitman, who died January 19, who attended this Mission in the past, 

Louis Fragale, who died December 25,

Fr. Luigi Villa, Th.D. author of Vatican II About Face! detailing the heresies of Vatican II, died November 18 at the age of 95,

Rev. Michael Jarecki, a faithful traditional Catholic priest who died October 22,

 Jennie Salaneck, died September 19 at 95 years of age, a devout and faithful Catholic all her life,

Dorothy Sabo, who died September 26,

Cynthia (Cindy) Montesano Reinhert, the mother of nine children, four who are still at home, died August 19,

Stanley Spahalski, who died October 20, and his wife, Regina Spahalski, who died June 24, and for the soul of Francis Lester, her son,

Julia Atkinson, who died April 30,

Antonio P. Garcia, who died January 6, 2012 and the welfare of his teenage children, Andriana and Quentin,

Helen Crane, the aunt of David Drew who died February 27,

Fr. Timothy A. Hopkins, of the National Shrine of St. Philomena, in Miami, November 2,

Frank Smith, who died February 7, and the welfare of his wife, Delores,

Eduardo Cepeda, who died January 26,

Larry Young, the 47 year old father of twelve who died December 10 and the welfare of his wife Katherine and their family,

Sister Mary Bernadette, M.I.C.M., a founding member of the Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, died December 16,

Joeseph Elias, who died on September 28,

William, the brother of Fr. Waters, who died September 7,

Donald Tonelli, died August 1,

Rev. Fr. Gregory Hesse, of Austria, a great defender of Catholic Truth, died January 25, 2006,

Emma Colasanti, who died May 29,

Mary Dullesse, who died April 12, a Catholic convert who died wearing our Lady’s scapular,

Ruth Jantsch, the grandmother of Andre Ebert, who died April 7, Derrick and Denise Palengat, his godparents,

Philip D. Barr, died March 5, and the welfare of his family, 

Judith Irene Kenealy, the mother of Joyce Paglia, who died February 23, and her son, George Richard Moore, who died May 14, 

For Joe Sobran who died September 30,

Fr. Hector Bolduc, a great and faithful priest, died, September 10, 2012,

James & Jean Rowan and their sons, Patrick & Daniel,

John Vennari asks our prayers for Dr. Raphael Waters who died August 26,

Stanley Bodalsky, the father of Mary Ann Boyle who died June 25,

Mary Isabel Kilfoyle Humphreys, a former York resident and friend of the Drew’s, who died June 6,

Rev. John Campion, who offered the traditional Mass for us every first Friday until forbidden to do so by Bishop Dattilo, died May 1,

Joseph Montagne, who died May 5,

For Margaret Vagedes, the aunt of Charles Zepeda, who died January 6,

Fr. Michael Shear, a Byzantine rite Catholic priest, died August 17, 2006,

Fr. James Francis Wathen, died November 7, 2006, author of The Great Sacrilege and Who Shall Ascend?, a great defender of dogma and liturgical purity,

Fr. Enrique Rueda, who died December 14, 2009, to whom our Mission is indebted,

Fr. Peterson asks to remember, Leonard Edward Peterson, his cousin, Wanda, Angelica Franquelli,  and the six priests ordained with him.

Philip Thees petitions our prayers for Beverly Romanick, Deacon Michael Erdeck, Henry J. Phillips, Grace Prestano, Connie DiMaggio, Elizabeth Thorhas, Elizabeth Thees, Theresa Feraker, Hellen Pestrock, and James & Rose Gomata, and Kathleen Heinbach,

Fr. Didier Bonneterre, the author of The Liturgical Movement, and Fr. John Peek, both were traditional priests,

Brother Francis, MICM, the superior of the Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in Richmond, NH, who died September 5,

Rodolfo Zelaya Montealegre, the father of Claudia Drew, who died May 24,

Rev. Francis Clifford, a devout and humble traditional priest, who died on March 7,

Benjamin Sorace, the uncle of Sonja Kolinsky.

 

 

 

 

 

 

September is dedicated to Our Lady of Sorrows

NOVENA TO THE SEVEN SORROWS OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN MARY

Novena to Our Lady of Sorrows September 6^th to the 14^th

Ant.  There stood by the cross of Jesus His Mother and His Mother’s sister, Mary Cleophas, and Salome and Mary Magdalen.

V. Woman, behold thy son.

R. Son, behold thy mother

Let us Pray

O God, at Whose Passion, according to the prophecy of holy Simeon, a sword of grief pierced the most sweet soul of glorious Mary, virgin and mother, grant in Thy mercy that we who honor the memory of her sorrows may obtain the happy fruit of Thy sufferings.  Who livest and reignest, world without end. AMEN

 

V.     Incline unto my aid, O God.

R.    O Lord, make haste to help me.  Glory be to the Father, etc.

 

1.     O most sorrowful Mary, I compassionate thee, in the grief thy tender heart underwent when the holy old man Simeon prophesied to thee.  Dear Mother, through that afflicted heart obtain for me the virtue of humility and the gift of the holy fear of God.  Hail Mary, etc.

2.     O most sorrowful Mary, I compassionate those afflictions which thy most sensitive heart endured during the flight into Egypt and the dwelling there.  O beloved Mother, by that afflicted heart obtain for me the virtue of liberality, specially toward the poor, and the gift of piety.  Hail Mary, etc.

3.     O most sorrowful Mary, I compassionate that intense distress which thine anxious heart experienced in the loss of thy dearest Jesus.  O beloved Mother, by that deeply troubled heart obtain for me the virtue of chastity and the gift of knowledge.  Hail Mary, etc.

4.     O most sorrowful Mary, I compassionate the consternation which thy maternal heart experienced when thou didst meet Jesus bearing His cross.  O beloved Mother, by that deep distress of thy tender heart, obtain for me the virtue of patience and the gift of fortitude.  Hail Mary, etc.

5.     O most sorrowful Mary, I compassionate that martyrdom which thy generous heart endured in witnessing the last agony of Jesus.  O beloved Mother, by that martyred heart obtain for me the virtue of temperance and the gift of counsel.  Hail Mary, etc.

6.     O most sorrowful Mary, I compassionate that wound which thy mournful heart endured from the lance which tore the side of Jesus and wounded His most lovely Heart.  O beloved Mother, by thy heart then pierced through, obtain for me the virtue of fraternal charity and the gift of understanding.  Hail Mary, etc.

7.     O most sorrowful Mary, I compassionate thee, for the anguish felt by thy loving heart when Jesus’ body was laid in the sepulcher.  Dear Mother, by all the bitterness of desolation thou didst then know, obtain for me the virtue of diligence and the gift of wisdom.  Hail Mary, etc.

 

V. Pray for us, most sorrowful Mother.

R. That we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ.

   

Let us Pray

 

Grant, we beseech Thee, O Lord Jesus Christ, that the most Blessed Virgin Mary, Thy Mother, may intercede for us before the throne of Thy mercy, now, and at the hour of our death; through whose most holy soul in the hour of Thine own Passion the Sword of sorrow passed.  Through Thee, Jesus Christ, Savior of the world, Who livest and reignest with the Father and the Holy Ghost forever and ever. 

Amen

 

 

Prayer to Our Lady of Sorrows        

Most holy and afflicted Virgin, Queen of Martyrs, thou stood beneath the cross, witnessing the agony of thy dying Son.  Look with a mother’s tenderness and pity on me, who kneel before thee.  I venerate thy sorrows and I place my requests with filial confidence in the sanctuary of thy wounded heart.

Present them, I beseech thee, on my behalf to Jesus Christ, through the merits of His own most sacred passion and death, together with thy sufferings at the foot of the cross.  Through the united efficacy of both, obtain the granting of my petition. 

To whom shall I have recourse in my wants and miseries if not to thee, Mother of Mercy?  Thou who have drunk so deeply of the chalice of thy Son, thou can compassionate our sorrows.

Holy Mary, thy soul was pierced by a sword of sorrow at the sight of the passion of thy divine Son.  Intercede for me and obtain from Jesus Christ this grace, if it be for His honor and glory and for the good of my soul.  Amen

 

 

 

“Nothing is more insolent than a fact.”  Dom Gueranger

A Look into a Dark Future: A Note on the “Nobel Savage” before the Gospel Message

For if, flying from the pollutions of the world, through the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, they be again entangled in them and overcome: their latter state is become unto them worse than the former. (2 Peter 2:20)

     Nothing is more difficult than the conversion of these Indians; It is a miracle of the Lord's mercy. It is necessary first to transform them into men, and afterwards to labor to make them Christians. As they are absolute masters of themselves, without being subject to any law, the independence in which they live enslaves them to the most brutal passions. There are, however chiefs among them, but they have no authority. If they should resort to threats, so far from making themselves feared, they would find themselves immediately abandoned by the very persons who had chosen them to their office. They do not draw to themselves consideration and respect, except when they have, as they express it here, something to fill the kettle, that is, something with which to give feasts to those who should obey them.

     It is this independence indeed which is the origin of all kinds of vices which rule them. They are lazy, treacherous, fickle and inconstant, deceitful, naturally thievish, so as even to glory in their success in stealing, brutal, without honor, without truth ready to promise anything for those who are liberal to them but at the same time ungrateful and without thankfulness. The only effect produced by conferring a favor freely upon them, is to strengthen them in their natural arrogance; it only renders them more insolent. "He fears me," they say, "for he courts me." Thus, whatever good will one may have to oblige them must be restrained, that he may force them to value any little services he may render them.

     Gluttony and the love of pleasure are above all those vices which are most prominent among our Indians. They become addicted to a most disgraceful habit of life, even before they are of sufficient age to know the shame which is attached to it. If you add to this the wandering life they pass in the forests in pursuit of wild beasts, you will easily agree that reason must be entirely stupefied in this race, and that they are almost incapable of submitting themselves to the yoke of the Gospel. But the farther they are removed from the kingdom of God, so much the more should our zeal be animated to cause them to approach it, and to make them enter there. Persuaded that we can do nothing of ourselves, we know at the same time that all things are possible through the aid of Him for whom we labor. We have even this advantage in the conversions which God has been willing to effect through our ministry, that we are freed from all danger of pride, or any reference we might make to ourselves. We cannot attribute these conversions, either to the forcible arguments of the Missionary, or to his eloquence, or to his other talents which might be useful in other countries, but can produce no impression on the minds of our Indians: we can render the glory to Him alone, who even of the stones knows how to make, when it pleases Him, children unto Abraham.

Fr. Gabriel Marest, S.J., Letter to his superior, Fr. Germon, work among the Indians of Michigan and Illinois, November 9, 1712

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pope Benedict to the Jews in Germany: Maybe he never heard of the Talmud?

     I would also like to express my gratitude for the deepening dialogue between the Catholic Church and Judaism. The Church feels a great closeness to the Jewish people. With the Declaration Nostra Aetate of the Second Vatican Council, an “irrevocable commitment to pursue the path of dialogue, fraternity and friendship” was made (cf. Address in the Synagogue in Rome, 17 January 2010). This is true of the Catholic Church as a whole, in which Blessed John Paul II committed himself to this new path with particular zeal. [....]

     Alongside these important initiatives, it seems to me that we Christians must also become increasingly aware of our own inner affinity with Judaism, to which you made reference. For Christians, there can be no rupture in salvation history. Salvation comes from the Jews (cf. Jn 4:22). When Jesus’ conflict with the Judaism of his time is superficially interpreted as a breach with the Old Covenant, it tends to be reduced to the idea of a liberation that mistakenly views the Torah merely as a slavish enactment of rituals and outward observances. Yet in actual fact, the Sermon on the Mount does not abolish the Mosaic Law, but reveals its hidden possibilities and allows more radical demands to emerge. It points us towards the deepest source of human action, the heart, where choices are made between what is pure and what is impure, where faith, hope and love blossom forth.

     The message of hope contained in the books of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Old Testament has been appropriated and continued in different ways by Jews and Christians. “After centuries of antagonism, we now see it as our task to bring these two ways of rereading the biblical texts – the Christian way and the Jewish way – into dialogue with one another, if we are to understand God’s will and his word aright” (Jesus of Nazareth. Part Two: From the Entrance into Jerusalem to the Resurrection, pp. 33f.). This dialogue should serve to strengthen our common hope in God in the midst of an increasingly secularized society. Without this hope, society loses its humanity.

Pope Benedict to the Jews in Germany, September 22, 2011

“Strengthen Our common hope in God”??? – Society lost “its humanity” after Vatican II

96% of Jewish Leaders Support Abortion

The study also found that on a variety of issues involving sexual morality that have roiled other religious groups, Jews are much more liberal than other Americans. Jews take a less critical view of homosexuality, abortion, birth control and pornography than do Gentiles," the study found.  In each case, Jewish leaders are even more tolerant than the Jewish public.

For example, 48 percent of non-Jews say homosexuality is wrong, compared to 23 percent of Jews and 7 percent of Jewish leaders. And while 56 percent of non-Jews support abortion rights, 88 percent of Jews and 96 percent of Jewish leaders do.

Only 38 percent of Jews support allowing the Ten Commandments to be displayed in public schools, compared to 65 percent of non-Jews; 39 percent of Jews would allow the teaching of creationism, compared with 63 percent of non-Jews; and 22 percent of Jews would support vouchers that could be used at religious schools, compared with 43 percent of non-Jews.

Pew Charitable Trusts, examining the contemporary role of religious groups in the United States

 

 

Hermeneutics of Continuity/Discontinuity

The novel theory that Dogma contains "perennial truths" and contingent accretions

My fundamental impulse, precisely from the Council, has always been to free the very heart of the faith from under any ossified strata, and to give this heart strength and dynamism. This impulse is the constant in my life.

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Salt of the Earth

 

The steps taken by the Council towards the modern era which had rather vaguely been presented as ‘openness to the world’ [aggiornamento], belong in short to the perennial problem of the relationship between faith and reason that is re-emerging in ever new forms.... The Council had to find a new definition of the relationship between the Church and the modern age.... Here I shall cite only John XXIII’s well-known words, which unequivocally express this hermeneutic when he says that the Council wishes "to transmit the doctrine pure and integral, without any attenuation or distortion".  And he continues: "Our duty is not only to guard this precious treasure, as if we were concerned only with antiquity, but to dedicate ourselves with an earnest will and without fear to that work which our age demands of us…" It is necessary that "adherence to all the teaching of the Church in its entirety and preciseness…" be presented in "faithful and perfect conformity to the authentic doctrine, which, however, should be studied and expounded through the methods of research and through the literary forms of modern thought. The substance of the ancient doctrine of the deposit of faith is one thing, and the way in which it is presented is another…", retaining the same meaning and message.... It is clear that this commitment to expressing a specific truth in a new way demands new thinking upon it and a new relationship with it.

Pope Benedict XVI, speech to Roman Curia on Dec 22, 2005, outlining his papal agenda 

 

Catholic teaching that Dogma once defined is the irreformable formal object of Divine and Catholic Faith

For the doctrine of faith which God has revealed has not been proposed like a philosophical invention, to be perfected by human ingenuity; but has been delivered as a divine deposit to the Spouse of Christ, to be faithfully kept and infallibly declared. Hence, also, that meaning of the sacred dogmas is perpetually to be retained which our holy Mother the Church has once declared; nor is that meaning ever to be departed from, under the pretence or pretext of a deeper comprehension of them. Vatican Council I

 

If anyone shall assert it to be possible that sometimes, according to the progress of science, a sense is to be given to doctrine propounded by the Church different from that which the Church has understood and understands; let him be anathema.

Vatican Council I, Canon III, on Faith and Reason

 

 

 

 

 

All Art of Christendom has as its foundation the immemorial “received and approved rite” of the Mass, while only the most “mediocre man” could ever embrace the Novus Ordo!

ART is the remembrance of the universal presence of God.

Art is Beauty expressed in ways that can be grasped by the senses. It is the form assumed by the Ideal under the laws of the natural world.

How shall it succeed in entering this land of exile?

Time and Space guard the frontiers of our world, and seize on all that enter. Nothing escapes them. And so Art condescends to submit its infinite and gracious splendour to human limitations. It does not violate its unity; but since the finite mind of man cannot grasp it as a whole, it reveals itself in different modes.

Forced to submit to Time and Space, it begs their aid to help it to retain its beauty while it sojourns in the country which they rule. And Time lends it language, Space lends it light.

The laws of Time are summed up in arithmetic; the laws of Space in algebra. In the world of Art, arithmetic—the science of numbers—is the basis of poetry and music; for Time determines measure, and measure is rhythm. Geometry is the basis of architecture, sculpture, and painting, for it is Space which decides their proportions. Love is the life of Art, yet the arts are founded on mathematics, inflexible and absolutely exact. It is as though Love and Order, which men sometimes regard as opposed to each other, had determined to demonstrate their essential unity by the loftiest of their forms.

Art is an ascension. Its law is to rise. By its very nature it seeks the eternal types of things, and tends towards the Ideal. It may, indeed, lose sight of the Polar Star and make for a false ideal. Still, through every error we catch a glimpse of THE IDEAL, the corruption of which, in one way or another, explains the deviations of Art. Through every error we perceive the shattered form of Truth perverted.

Every artist—every artist worthy of the name—helps the human soul to breathe. Art, to a certain extent and at a given moment, is a force which blows the roof off the cave where we crouch imprisoned. What mighty levers does it employ? What massive weights have been placed at its service? Language! Music! A mere breath from human lips!

Poor fugitive notes, poor syllables caught away by the breeze! How invisible your majesty! How weak you seem! Yet you have power to shake earth to its foundations, and Heaven itself stoops to listen to you. In the solemn moments when we yield ourselves to your sway, our soul breathes a purer air; she breathes, and she is conscious of herself. She says: "Yes, my God, I am great, and I had forgotten it." [.....]  Contempt for Art is one of the commonest of sentiments, not only among ordinary men, but among artists and critics. To have a contempt for Art is to permit it to lie. The artist despises Art when he aims at anything but the realization of Truth. The critic despises Art when he pardons it for adopting an ideal which is not true.

Every day we hear this absurd expression with reference to some error clothed in brilliant language: “It is poetry.” When the mediocre man, speaking of a lie, has declared that it is poetry, he thinks he has excused the liar. On the contrary, he has brought a fresh accusation against him; for if the liar lies poetically, he has laid hold of the loftiest form of language and forced to utter a lie.

When the mediocre man desires pander to the disorderly life of another man, he says: “He is an artist.” If the man is really an artist, the disorder is most criminal. Music is founded on mathematics, poetry and painting depend on rigorous laws. Every artist should live in austere conformity to Order.

Earnest Hello, French Catholic writer & apologist, 1828-1885, Life, Science and Art

 

 

 

 

“O Timothy, keep that which is committed to thy trust, avoiding the profane novelties of words, and oppositions of knowledge falsely so called. Which some promising, have erred concerning the faith. Grace be with thee. Amen.” St. Paul, letter to his disciple, Bishop St. Timothy (1 Timothy 6:20-21)

... We wish to make our own the important words employed by the Council; those words which define its spirit, and, in a dynamical synthesis, form the spirit of all those who refer to it, be they within or without the Church. The word “NOVELTY”, simple, very dear to today’s men, is much utilized; it is theirs... That word... it was given to us as an order, as a program... It comes to us directly from the pages of the Holy Scripture: “For, behold (says the Lord), I create new heavens and a new earth”. St. Paul echoes these words of the prophet Isaiah (II Corinthians 5, 17); then, the Apocalypse: “I am making everything new” (II Corinthians 21, 5). And Jesus, our Master, was not He, himself, an innovator? “You have heard that people were told in the past ... but now I tell you...” (Matthew 5) – Repeated in the “Sermon on the Mount”.

It is precisely thus that the Council has come to us. Two terms characterize it: “RENOVATION” and “REVISION”. We are particularly keen that this “spirit of renovation” – according to the expression of the Council – be understood and experienced by everyone. It responds to the characteristic of our time, wholly engaged in an enormous and rapid transformation, and generating novelties in every sector of modern life. In fact, one cannot shy away from this spontaneous reflection: if the whole world is changing, will not religion change as well? Between the reality of life and Christianity, Catholicism especially, is not there reciprocal disagreement, indifference, misunderstanding, and hostility? The former is leaping forward; the latter would not move. How could they go along? How could Christianity claim to have, today, any influence upon life?

And it is for this reason that the Church has undertaken some reforms, especially after the Council. The Episcopate is about to promote the “renovation” that corresponds to our present needs; Religious Orders are reforming their Statutes; Catholic laity is qualified and found its role within the life of the Church; Liturgy is proceeding with a reform in which anyone knows the extension and importance; Christian education reviews the methods of its pedagogy; all the canonical legislations are about to be revised. And how many other consoling and promising novelties we shall see appearing in the Church! They attest to Her new vitality, which shows that the Holy Spirit animates Her continually, even in these years so crucial to religion. The development of ecumenism, guided by Faith and Charity, itself says what progress, almost unforeseeable, has been achieved during the course and life of the Church. The Church looks at the future with Her heart brimming with hope, brimming with fresh expectation in love... We can say... of the Council: It marks the onset of a new era, of which no one can deny the new aspects that We have indicated to you. 

Pope Paul VI, General Audience of July 2, 1969

And Then, Only Three Years Later:

Through some cracks the smoke of Satan has entered the temple of God: there is doubt, uncertainty, problematic, anxiety, confrontation. One does not trust the Church anymore; one trusts the first prophet that comes to talk to us from some newspapers or some social movement, and then rush after him and ask him if he held the formula of real life. And we fail to perceive, instead, that we are the masters of life already. Doubt has entered our conscience, and it has entered through windows that were supposed to be opened to the light instead....

Even in the Church this state of uncertainty rules. One thought that after the Council there would come a shiny day for the history of the Church. A cloudy day came instead, a day of tempest, gloom, quest, and uncertainty. We preach ecumenism and drift farther and farther from the others. We attempt to dig abysses instead of filling them.

How has all this come about? We confide to you our thought: there has been the intervention of a hostile power. His name is the Devil; this mysterious being who is alluded to even in the letter of St. Peter. So many times, on the other hand, in the Gospel, on the very lips of Christ, there recurs the mention of this enemy of man. We believe in something supernatural (post-correction: “preternatural”!), coming into the world precisely to disturb, to suffocate anything of the Ecumenical Council, and to prevent that the Church would explode into the hymn of joy for having regained full consciousness of Herself (!!).

Pope Paul VI, June 29, 1972

 

 

 

 

 

Pope Leo XIV appoints Freemason to Vatican committee

Umberto Longo, appointed to the Pontifical Committee for Historical Sciences, appears repeatedly in Masonic records.

LifeSiteNews | VATICAN CITY | Fri Aug 14, 2026  — Pope Leo has appointed a historian who appears repeatedly in Masonic records to a Vatican historical committee.

On August 13, Pope Leo XIV appointed Umberto Longo, director of the Italian Historical Institute for the Middle Ages and professor of medieval history at Sapienza University of Rome, as a member of the Pontifical Committee for Historical Sciences.

The appointment comes despite documentary evidence connecting him to Freemasonry, including records from the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite and later appearances by Longo at events organized within the sphere of the major Masonic lodge in Italy, the Grand Orient of Italy (GOI).

On February 9, 2019, for example, Longo participated in the conference “God and People. Roman Republic. 170 years of love,” organized in Rome by the GOI and the District College of Worshipful Masters of Lazio. The surviving video provides visual evidence of Longo speaking at the event, opened by Giuseppe Bramucci, a Master Mason. In particular, Longo gave a lecture titled “The Legacy of the Roman Republic.”

The Roman Republic of 1849 was deeply influenced by the ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity that spread through Europe after the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, and was founded in hatred against the Roman Pontiff. The Republic’s leaders – including Giuseppe Mazzini – were mostly Freemasons and shared with the Masonic tradition a vision of a moral and civic regeneration of humanity, grounded in reason and universal brotherhood rather than religious authority. […..]

During his lecture, Longo describes with remarkable precision the stages of the Masonic initiation ritual: the chamber of reflection, the divesting of metals, the inner journey. He presents them not merely as a subject of historical study, but as a “complete representation” which he interprets using the kind of language of someone well-versed in the Order’s symbolism.

At the end of his lecture, Longo concludes by placing himself, Hugo Pratt, Corto Maltese, and the audience within a single shared category: “Corto and Ugo know well that an initiate can only be a traveler… Pratt and Corto embody all of this, with a gentle smile, without dogmas, without claims to primacy; they are gentlemen of fortune. And, after all, so are we.”

Even more striking is that, at the conclusion of the conference, a man introduced as the Sovereign Grand Commander of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite took the floor to thank the speaker, referring to him verbatim as “Brother Professor Longo.”

 

Pagan Gaia earth worship officially part of Novus Ordo liturgical prayer service!

Pope asks Catholics to acknowledge 'unfaithful' attitudes for care of creation

National Catholic Reporter | Justin McLellan | Vatican Correspondent | September 1, 2026

Celebrating a new form of the Catholic Mass "for the care of creation," Pope Leo XIV urged Catholics to contemplate nature as well as the ways they have shirked their responsibility to care for it.

"From contemplating creation and encountering its creator, there arises an awareness of our particular place within God's wondrous plan, and of the responsibility that we bear both personally and collectively for preserving the original harmony," Leo said while celebrating Mass in the papal gardens at Castel Gandolfo, outside Rome, on Sept. 1.

During the intimate Mass marking the church's celebration of World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation and attended by Vatican staff, Leo remarked that the Gospel invites believers to contemplate God's creation, "a task that is certainly not difficult in the setting of these beautiful gardens."

It was only the second time the pope has celebrated a Mass "for the care of creation" using a new formulary for the Mass he introduced into the Roman Missal last July.

Pope Leo XIV celebrates Mass for the Care of Creation on the grounds of the Borgo Laudato Si’ ecology center in Castel Gandolfo, Italy, Sept. 1, 2026. (CNS/Vatican Media)

The Vatican's liturgy office promulgated the Latin text of the new formulary last year. But English and Spanish translations were approved only last month (August), making this the first year in which Catholic communities in the United States can celebrate the new Mass during the Season of Creation — a month long period devoted to prayer and action for the care of creation which runs from Sept. 1, the World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation, through Oct. 4, the feast of St. Francis of Assisi.

This year's observance ends during the 800th anniversary of the death of St. Francis: the founder of the Franciscan order, namesake of Pope Francis and a central inspiration for the late pope's encyclical on the care of creation, "Laudato Si', on Care for Our Common Home."

In a nod to the patron saint of ecology, Leo quoted extensively in his homily from St. Francis' "Canticle of the Sun."

Beginning Mass amid the lush green surroundings of the papal garden on Tuesday, Leo invited the congregation to "recognize with humility the ways in which we have been unfaithful in safekeeping creation and caring for the dignity of each person."

In his homily, the pope asked the faithful in the coming weeks to "set aside a few moments to pause from the frenzy of our daily lives, in order to savor the profound harmony of which we ourselves are a part."

"Let us place in 'silent mode' the many noises generated by human activity, so that we may hear the melodious voice of creation, through which God, the author of all things, speaks to us," he said.

Contemplation of nature, Leo added, "is a first step towards an authentic ecological conversion."

"It is not yet too late, and the Season of Creation calls us to a profound conversion," he said.

Celebrating Mass in the same spot as he did last year to inaugurate the new formulary, the pope prayed "for the conversion of many people, inside and outside of the church, who still do not recognize the urgency of caring for our common home."

Leo, who has continued the church's advocacy for environmental issues which was championed by his predecessor Francis, warned in his encyclical Magnifica Humanitas of the far-reaching environmental consequences of the AI revolution.

One of the prayer intentions offered during the Mass asked that the work and research of those working in artificial intelligence "may be increasingly oriented toward the common good, safeguarding human work and service of fraternity and peace."

The pope's celebration came as local churches worldwide seek to better understand and embrace the new formulary of the Mass.

Bishops' councils across Latin America, Europe, Africa and Asia with other Catholic organizations hosted a webinar in June to explain how to celebrate the new formulary of the Mass and why it should be celebrated on the day of prayer for creation.

"The new Mass is a significant step to enable our liturgical celebrations of this special day, aligning our faith and deeds," said Bishop Allwyn D'Silva, chair of the Office for Human Development at the Federation of Asian Bishops' Conferences said in a statement on the new formulary. "Ultimately, the Eucharistic celebration of Creation Day is an opportunity to celebrate God as Creator and renew our appreciation of the sacred gift of creation, while inspiring us to care for it more fervently."

 

Mass for care of creation ready for US churches after Vatican finalizes translations

National Catholic Reported | Brian Roewe | environment correspondent | August 27, 2026

The Mass for safeguarding the environment that Pope Leo XIV first celebrated last summer is now available for Catholic churches in the U.S., just in time for the upcoming ecumenical Season of Creation.

The Vatican's Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments finalized Aug. 4 English and Spanish translations of the Mass "for the care of creation," a new set of prayers and texts the Vatican added to the Roman Missal in June 2025.

The completion of the translations proved providential for the Seattle Archdiocese, which plans to use the new texts (known as a formulary) at a Mass Sept. 2 celebrated by Archbishop Paul Etienne at St. James Cathedral to open its celebration of the Season of Creation. The monthlong period of prayer and actions for God's creation runs from Sept. 1, the World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation, to Oct. 4, the feast day of St. Francis of Assisi.

"The timing is ideal to be able to celebrate it when it's new and fresh and just start a new tradition, I guess, to do this each year," said Corinna Laughlin, the cathedral's pastoral assistant for liturgy and consultant for the archdiocese's liturgy office.

Pope Leo XIV leads the Mass for the Care of Creation, in Castel Gandolfo, Italy, July 9, 2025. (Pool Via AP/Yara Nardi)

The Mass for creation joins 17 other "civil needs" formularies in the Roman Missal, among others for particular needs and other circumstances. Several touch on environment-related themes, such as times of harvest and famine along with prayers for good weather.

Vatican officials said its development was in response to requests for a liturgical means to celebrate the messages of Pope Francis' 2015 encyclical, "Laudato Si', on Care for Our Common Home." In that papal teaching document, Francis bemoaned the numerous ecological threats facing the planet, including climate change and biodiversity loss, and called on Christians to act.

"At this time it is evident that the work of creation is seriously threatened because of the irresponsible use and abuse of the goods God has endowed to our care," Cardinal Arthur Roche, prefect of the divine worship dicastery, wrote in the decree issuing the new formulary.

The first iteration of the Mass for creation was celebrated in July 2025 by Leo at the Borgo Laudato Si' ecology project in Castel Gandolfo outside Rome. He is set to do so again on Sept. 1. But before it could be used in most churches in the U.S., it first needed to be translated from Latin.

Along with the exemplar original Latin text, the Vatican released working translations to assist national bishops' conferences in preparing them for use in their native languages. The English translation was led by the International Commission on English in the Liturgy, which includes the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. In June, the U.S. bishops' unanimously approved the translation, which were then sent back to Rome for final confirmation.

A similar process unfolded for the Spanish translation, which was undertaken through a collaboration by the U.S. bishops' conference and the Mexican Episcopal Conference.

Fr. Dustin Dought, executive director of the U.S. bishops' Secretariat of Divine Worship, said the procedure for approving adaptations of liturgical texts was outlined in Francis' 2017 motu proprio ("on his own initiative") Magnum Principium. That document gave bishop conferences responsibility for translating into local languages.

"His insight there was that the conference of bishops is closest to the culture and language that it serves," Dought said.

The new formulary will be included in future editions of the Catholic Lectionary for Mass. In the meantime, the U.S. bishops' conference has posted translations for both the English and Spanish versions of the Mass for the care of creation on its website, as well as bulletin inserts.

Along with creation-themed prayers, the formulary suggests readings for the Liturgy of the Word, including passages from Matthew's Gospel where Jesus calms the sea and where he instructs his disciples to learn from the birds in the air and flowers in the field to trust in God's providence.

Before the Mass for creation was issued, some Catholic churches prepared ecological liturgies at various times, even at the occasion of the first Earth Day in 1970. The practice has grown in the past decade, including with "Green Masses," following Francis' invitation for Catholics to join fellow Christians in marking the Season of Creation.

Tuty Gunawan sings during a prayer service marking the summer solstice and celebrating the beauty of creation at the motherhouse campus of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Brentwood, N.Y., June 20, 2024. (OSV News/Gregory A. Shemitz)

Having a Mass for the care of creation formally added to the Roman Missal is a major step, said Jesuit Fr. James Hug, who for years has developed liturgical resources for the Season of Creation.

"It's official, and that makes it legitimate to use," he said, calling the prayers "lovely" and affirming the Christian mission to care for the world God has created.

That stamp of approval from the Vatican is important, Hug added, for many priests who may have been hesitant to use other creation-centered liturgical resources in the past, whether ones he prepared or from groups like the Catholic Climate Covenant or Laudato Si' Movement.

"It says that this is the concern of the whole church," Laughlin said. "This isn't just a thing we pray about but a really important universal concern."

At Seattle's St. James Cathedral, the new formulary will be used at the Mass with the archbishop as well as a weekend Mass later in the month. Other parishes have also expressed an interest in planning their own liturgies for creation.

Dought said his office has received many inquiries about when the Mass for the care of creation would be available.

Preparations are already in the works in at least a half-dozen dioceses to celebrate the Mass for the care of creation. That includes the St. Paul-Minneapolis Archdiocese, where Archbishop Bernard Hebda will be the lead celebrant Sept. 6 at St. Francis of Assisi Catholic Church in Lake St Croix Beach, situated along the St. Croix River in Minnesota.

School Sister of Notre Dame Kathleen Storms, who too for decades has developed creation prayer services, is eagerly anticipating the first use of the new formulary in the Twin Cities region.

"Even with everything we've seen just this summer — with the fires and the floods and the huge hurricanes and all of the rest — sometimes there is no connection between what's going on there and

what the church teaches about care for creation," she said.

Sr. Kathleen Storms shows tomatoes grown in a raised garden bed made by her brother with recycled cedar planks at her apartment in West St. Paul, Minn., Aug. 17, 2022. (CNS/The Catholic Spirit/Dave Hrbacek)

Storms hopes the new Mass for creation will lead more priests to uplift Catholic social teaching on creation and to preach on environmental concerns. How and when a formulary is used is mostly left to the discretion of the pastor, who weighs it against other feast days and holy dates on the liturgical calendar.

Catholics who have been eagerly anticipating the new formulary see in it the potential to expand awareness of Laudato Si' and other church teachings on creation, as well as cultivate the ecological conversion both Leo and Francis have said is essential to spur the level of collective action needed to address crises like climate change and deforestation.

"The liturgy does something that a lecture can't do. The liturgy does something that a catechism can't do," Dought said.

Laughlin, the liturgical consultant in the Seattle Archdiocese, turned to the church adage "Lex orandi, lex credendi" — how we pray expresses what we believe.

"What we lift up at Mass really shapes our understanding of what church teaching is, even without going to other documents. ... It tells us this is part of what we believe. This is significant enough and substantial enough that this is part of the Mass, which is source and summit. "So I think planting the seeds there will make a difference, because obviously we need to be praying about this."

COMMENT:

Freemasonry is the creation of gnostic Jewish Cabalism. Its mystical symbology is taken from Jewish Cabalism. Freemasonry is a secret society that reveals itself to its initiates as they progress to greater degrees of depravity for everyone begins by choosing evil under the appearance of good. At the apex of freemanonry, like Jewish Cabalism,  it is unadulterated Satanism. Pope Leo has been pictured paying religious homage to the pagan goddess, Pachamama, an Andean earth goddess, like the Greek goddess Gaia.  Common in pre-Columbian Andean worship was ritual human sacrifice. Thier ritual murder seems to have largely involved children, like our present day abortion and the ancient worship paid to the pagan deities Baal and Moloch in the Old Testament. Every faithful Catholic knows that "All the gods of the gentiles are devils" and Pope Leo knows this as well. The Novus Ordo offers the "fruit of the earth and the work of human hands" like the ritual offering of Cain who killed his brother Abel.  He killed his brother out of envy because God would not accept his man-made worship and, rather than repenting, he looked for another who would accept his worship. Like freemasonry that reveals itself in degrees, we now see the direct unification of earth worship and the Novus Ordo service by a pope who worships the earth goddess and honors professed enemies of Jesus Christ.

Conservative Catholics are critical of Pope Leo just as they slowly became critical with Pope Francis but the tragedy is that they argue as a correction against this blasphemy for a return to days of Pope Benedict.  It was Pope Benedict who was present at, participated in, and personally endorsed the Aparecida Document (2007) that was produced by the Fifth General Conference of Latin American and Caribbean bishops. This document explicitly promoted the integration of the Catholic faith with native American pre-Columbian  paganism. The document claims that the proclamation of Jesus Christ did not alienate pre-Columbian religions of indigenous cultures but sought a synthesis between the gospel values and existing cultural expressions. Pope Benedict in meeting with pagans acknowledged the richness of native American rituals, symbols and spiritual practices and advocated for their integration into Catholic worship.  Pope Benedict praised the Jews, he praised Luther and the Lutheran religion, and he praised the native American pagans. Pope Francis and Pope Leo are doing nothing more than following his example and the example of John Paul II who kissed the Koran, received the blessing of a Hindu priestess, and established the syncretistic Prayer Meeting of Assisi. Conservative Catholics are just retarded liberals who prefer style over substance. Conservative Catholics prefer the style of Benedict's apostasy to the crude style of Francis and Leo. They do not defend the Catholic faith. We are witnessing as participants the punishment of God that will bring about the restoration of the Church but we cannot forget our Lady of Fatima said, "the good will be martyred."  We must keep the faith and recognize the face of the enemy. We do not seek the approval of the Novus Ordites but their conversion. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When our Saviour conquered Satan He left him power over those who make themselves slaves to the sensual pleasures, and thus there exists an evil force against the Church, and it will exist to the end of time. This is a fact that we must keep in view in order to fully understand and judge the conditions. The realm darkness, Satan’s realm, stands opposed to the realm of Christ. Satan and his adherents carry on the warfare against the Church of Christ, as they assaulted Christ Himself. “As they have persecuted they will also persecute you,” so did Christ prophecy. The Church of Christ demands the subjection of the flesh; she preaches against luxury, pride and selfishness. She preaches chastity submission to the commandments of God; she preaches penance to those of high and low station in life. This angers all those who would indulge in the evil things of this world. They cry: “Let us break her bonds asunder; and let us cast away her yoke from us.” But as Christ foretold the persecution of His Church, so He also foretold that the gates of hell would not prevail against her. The Church of God will in due time conquer all her enemies, some will be converted, while others who are obstinate will perish in the battle. In all these battles and victories of the Church, Mary, blessed mother of her divine Founder, co-operates with the Church through her intercession. Mary was already spoken of in paradise as the one who would come to tread upon the head of the serpent, the spirit of darkness. This she has done by becoming the mother of God, by bringing forth the Redeemer. And as Jesus through Mary’s co-operation came into this world, so He desires her cooperation in ruling the world. The history of the contests and victories of the Church verify this throughout the centuries.

The evil spirit has a twofold weapon with which he assails and combats God’s Church; namely, the godless rulers of the world and heresy. Through the godless authorities of the world Satan has endeavored since the beginning to crush the Church; through heresy he attempts to destroy the Church by internal dissension. Both weapons are used together, for heresy and calumny cannot prevail without substantial support, and heretics seek worldly power and assistance. On every page of Church history we find recorded , the clashes planned by these evil forces, from which the Church always came out not conquered, but a conqueror.

The history of the veneration of Mary tells us that the Blessed Virgin Mary helped to win these victories. During the early times, when fierce battles against the Church were raging, bishops and priests knew of no more efficacious means to avert these dangers than to exhort the faithful to pray to the Blessed Virgin. 

Cardinal Henry Edward Manning

 

In such a time as this, then, it is most opportune to be reminded, that the age of martyrs is not over yet; that it is continual; that the conflict is endless; that not peace, but a sword, is the perpetual portion of the Church. And for this the following pages will bear witness. The sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries have their martyrs as great and as glorious as the first, the second, and the third. Not Asia and Africa alone, but Europe; not remote lands only, but France and England have been steeped with blood sacred to Jesus. In these modem days of the nineteenth century, which seem so unheroic and so commonplace, while we have been treading the every-day path of life, martyrs have been continually ascending to their crown. Hardly a year has passed but in China some servant of our Lord has been conformed to his Master’s Passion. It is well that we

should bear this in mind, and make it familiar to our thoughts. For it is most certain that, if we would be faithful, we must learn to be ready for the sword. In some form it will come to us. If we would be crowned with Him, we must also suffer with him; amid though not martyrs in deed, we must bear a martyr’s will; for if we be not martyrs, at least in will, we should not be even confessors in the hour of trial; and if not confessors, how Christians? It would be a fearful scrutiny into our life if we were now to be asked, ‘what have you ever suffered, what have you ever risked for the truth, and for our Lord’s sake?’

It is good, then, to have the realities of martyrdom brought home to us in our own land and day, and to see how it looks in the context of modern society, and to put it to ourselves how we should endure in such an hour. 

Cardinal Henry Edward Manning, preface to Pictures of Christian Heroism

 

 

 

Our Lady of LaSalette

 “Rome will lose the Faith and become the seat of the Antichrist.” “The demons of the air, together with the Antichrist, will work great wonders on the earth and in the air, and men will become ever more perverted. God will take care of His faithful servants and men of good will; the Gospel will be preached everywhere, all peoples and all nations will have knowledge of the Truth.”

Blessed Virgin Mary addressing the children at LaSalette, September 19, 1846

 

“When the Secret has been scorned, misunderstood ... held back for money, one must be surprised at nothing. The Church will endure forever, our Lord said so; but among the teaching members of the Church, what traitors, what apostates, what mercenaries, what sectarians, who bear the imprint or the sign of the beast with ten horns St. John speaks of in his vision on Patmos! But this beast similar to the Lamb, who rises out of the earth, isn't it the figure of faithless ecclesiastics? I firmly believe so. Happy those who die in God's grace, for those who live will see sad and terrifying things. We still haven't reached the beginning of the end.”

Melanie Calvat, visionary of LaSalette, Letter to Fr. Roubaud, January 2, 1892), quoted by Solange Hertz

 

 

 

 

 

 

Leo XIV says we shouldn’t ‘retreat into our own religious certainties’

Contrary to what Leo suggested, the Church has never seen a conflict between 'religious certainties' and an 'authentic relationship with Christ.'

LifeSiteNews | Robert T. Morrison | August 24, 2026

— In his recent Angelus message, Leo XIV introduced a puzzling dichotomy to call into question “religious certainties”:

"Dear brothers and sisters, let us seek not to retreat into our own convictions and religious certainties, but to remain open to an authentic relationship with Christ."

According to Leo, one must choose between our “convictions and religious certainties” on the one hand, and an “authentic relationship with Christ” on the other. Although it should be evident to Catholics that the Church has never seen a conflict between religious certainties and an authentic relationship with Christ, it is worthwhile to recall how St. Paul viewed this matter:

But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach a gospel to you besides that which we have preached to you, let him be anathema. As we said before, so now I say again: If any one preach to you a gospel, besides that which you have received, let him be anathema. For do I now persuade men, or God? Or do I seek to please men? If I yet pleased men, I should not be the servant of Christ. (Galatians 1:8-10)

St. Paul’s words tell us that we must absolutely adhere to the convictions and religious certainties handed down through the Church. Indeed, anyone telling us that we ought to do otherwise is anathema. Moreover, St. Paul tells us that choosing to adhere to the immutable Christian truth is the way to serve and please God, which necessarily means that it is the way to cultivate “an authentic relationship with Christ.”

Perhaps, though, Leo simply misspoke or was mistranslated? Unfortunately, he continued with an even more emphatic call to reject St. Paul’s admonition:

"At times, when it comes to the Christian faith, we may be content with what we have merely ‘heard,’ with common assumptions or with what has been handed down to us, perhaps even with the best of intentions. Yet Jesus calls us to give a personal response, to know him more closely and to allow ourselves to be shaped by friendship with him through an ever-new encounter. This may also ask us to follow unfamiliar paths and to make choices different from those we had imagined. This is true both for our personal journey and for the journey of the Church, as well as for our pastoral choices, when we may sometimes think that it is enough simply to continue doing things as we have always done them."

It seems that the most astounding piece of this is the notion that the Church itself must be willing to “follow unfamiliar paths and to make choices different from those we had imagined.” As he said, neither individual Catholics nor the Church cannot simply “continue doing things as we have always done them.”

As awful as this is, at least he is being honest. As LifeSiteNews reported, Bishop Robert Mutsaerts recently published an open letter to Leo, which respectfully critiqued the Synod on Synodality. Bishop Mutsaerts’ criticism of the synod includes a passage which essentially condemns what Leo said in his Angelus message:

"Faith does not arise because the Church first inventories what people believe and then distills a common conviction from all those experiences. Faith is received. Paul constantly uses words such as receive, hand down, and preserve for this. The Church possesses Revelation not because she conceived it, but because she received it. This means that Christianity cannot, in essence, be democratic. Not because democracy as a form of government is bad, but because truth does not arise by a majority vote. If tomorrow 90 percent of Catholics were no longer to believe in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, Christ would not be any less truly present. If 80 percent reject a certain moral doctrine, that doctrine does not automatically become untrue. Truth is not produced by consensus. That constitutes the first major area of tension surrounding the synodal project."

All of the pre-Vatican II saints would surely agree with Bishop Mutsaerts on this, and indeed many of them chose martyrdom because they were convinced that this was necessarily true. But, as Leo has affirmed, the Synodal Church sees matters differently.

All of this also ties to the Vatican’s condemnation of the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX). Before the SSPX proceeded with the consecrations of four bishops without Rome’s approval, Leo explained that the Vatican’s real conflict with the SSPX was about religious convictions rather than permission to consecrate bishops:

"Certainly, division among Christians is always a painful matter. But they refuse to accept certain fundamental elements of the Church, beginning with various points of the Second Vatican Council. And if they make those choices, I am sorry. But we must move forward."

As discussed in a previous article, Leo XIV rejects many of the portions of Vatican II that simply reaffirm Church teaching – so we cannot take his words at face value without concluding that he and his Vatican are guilty of the charges he levels at the SSPX. That said, the overall sentiment is entirely consistent with what Leo said in his recent Angelus: the Synodal Church wants to move forward, so it cannot accompany those like the SSPX and other Traditional Catholics who want to follow what St. Paul said.

So while Leo’s dichotomy is a false one that can lead souls to hell, there is a true dichotomy presented to us today. Do we accept the ideas of Leo or the ideas that the Church has always taught? With points 80 to 83 of its Profession of Catholic Faith (June 24, 2026), the SSPX reiterated the Church’s teaching on this all-important matter:

80. I believe that the Roman Pontiff enjoys infallibility when he speaks ex cathedra, that is, when, fulfilling his office as pastor and doctor of all Christians, he defines, by virtue of his supreme apostolic authority, that a doctrine concerning faith or morals is to be held by the universal Church.

81. I further profess that the power of the Magisterium in the Church is essentially ordered to the safeguarding of the revealed Deposit and, through this means, to the salvation of souls. The Holy Ghost was not promised to the successors of Peter so that they might manifest new doctrine, but so that they might guard holily and expound faithfully the Deposit transmitted by the Apostles.

82. This is why the present Magisterium cannot substantially contradict the prior Magisterium. The living Magisterium is not current preaching set in opposition to past preaching; it is the continual and uninterrupted preaching of the same truth of Faith with the same meaning throughout the centuries. The Pope and the bishops are not the masters of Revelation; they are its guardians and are subject to it as a disciple is subject to his master. They can neither change the Faith, nor modify the divine constitution of the Church, nor declare good what is contrary to the law of God.

83. I therefore reject every evolutionist conception of dogma, according to which revealed truths would change their meaning over the course of history. There can be within the Church a homogeneous progress in understanding, which perceives better, in a more distinct and explicit manner, the meaning of revealed truth, but never a mutation in the meaning of that truth. What has already been taught by the living Magisterium of the Teaching Church, and believed in the profession of Faith of the Church Taught, cannot become false; what has been condemned as contrary to the Faith cannot become legitimate; what belongs to the divine constitution of the Church cannot be remodelled according to the categories of the modern world or the historico-cultural context.

Whether or not one agrees with the SSPX, Catholics really ought to ponder whether they agree with this clear statement of what the Church has always taught. If so, then they are in conflict with Leo and his Vatican. If not, they are in conflict with St. Paul and the constant teaching of the Church prior to Vatican II. In His loving Providence, God is permitting it to become increasingly clear that we cannot pretend to serve two masters – we can follow Catholic teaching or the teaching of today’s Vatican, but not both. Immaculate Heart of Mary, pray for us!

COMMENT: Salvation is only possible for those who are united to Jesus Christ. Unity with Jesus is effected by the sacramental grace received in baptism conferred on a person who professes the Catholic faith. The Catholic faith is believing what God has revealed on the authority of God the Revealer, who can neither deceive nor be deceived, in Whom there is no shadow of change or alteration. What God has revealed are, in fact, “religious certainties.” Whosoever does not received God’s revelation as a “religious certainty” does not have the Catholic faith, without which it is impossible please God. The grace that unites us with God is charity. Charity does not exist in a person who does not have the Catholic faith. The is why, as St. Thomas said, "all heretics are schismatics." Pope Leo is purposing that Catholics deny the “religious certainties” that God has revealed in order to have an “authentic relationship with Christ” by charity. What Leo proposes makes impossible any relationship of friendship to Christ and therefore, any possibility of salvation. It is a grave sin for any cleric to fail in his duty to work for the salvation of others. It is a more serious sin when through his example he drives others away from salvation. What can we say about the cleric who actively works for the damnation of others while hypocritically pretending to draw them to God? And how must this grave sin be magnified when the cleric is the pope?

 

 

 

 

 

Keep thyself therefore, and thy soul carefully. Forget not the words that thy eyes have seen, and let them not go out of thy heart all the days of thy life. Thou shalt teach them to thy sons and to thy grandsons.

Deut 4:9

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"It is a sin to believe there is salvation outside the Catholic Church!"

Blessed Pope Pius IX

 

 

 

 

PREVIOUS BULLETIN POSTING WORTH REMEMBERING:

 

 

 

 

 

But What Is a “State of Necessity”? What About the Econe Consecrations?

Roberto de Mattei | August 3, 2026

I wish to dwell on a concept that is frequently invoked in an ambiguous and contradictory manner — above all to justify the episcopal consecrations that took place at Écône on July 1, 2026: the “state of necessity.”

A fundamental point must be clarified at the outset: one must not confuse the term “state of necessity” with the grave crisis the Church is passing through today. This crisis is an undeniable historical and sociological datum. Some trace its origins to Pope Francis, others to the post-conciliar period, others still to the Second Vatican Council itself. These historical references contain a measure of truth, but the phenomenon is broader and more remote in time. Already Saint Pius X, in the prophetic encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis of September 8, 1907, diagnosed the existence of the gravest evils penetrating the Church through Modernism. Professor Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, in his now-classic work Revolution and Counter-Revolution, published in 1959, situated this crisis within the framework of a centuries-long process begun with the dissolution of medieval Christendom. Romano Amerio, in his Iota Unum: A Study of Changes in the Catholic Church in the Twentieth Century, published in 1985, offered a broad and penetrating diagnosis of the ills of the Church of his time. That same year, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, then Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, published The Ratzinger Report together with Vittorio Messori, sounding the alarm about the state of contemporary Catholicism. Having become Pope under the name of Benedict XVI, he devoted his final year of pontificate precisely to the crisis of faith. Since then the situation has deteriorated dramatically, and only someone who is spiritually or intellectually blind could deny the evidence of this crisis.

The historical fact of a gravissimo crisis in the Church does not coincide, however, with the juridical and moral category of the “state of necessity.” These are two distinct notions that must not be confused. The state of necessity presupposes an exceptional situation, but is not identical with it. It is an institution of moral theology and law, developed to govern extraordinary situations in which the ordinary observance of the law appears to conflict with the good that the law itself intends to protect. The ecclesial crisis may certainly constitute the context within which the problem of the state of necessity arises, but between the historical situation and the moral and juridical judgment there exists a further step, one requiring prudence and a rigorous evaluation of the facts.

Moral doctrine defines the state of necessity as the condition in which a person, in order to avoid a grave, imminent, and unavoidable evil, performs an act that, under ordinary circumstances, would be illicit or forbidden. In other words, it concerns not so much the external situation in itself as the prudential judgment of one who must act in the face of that situation. For this reason, the state of necessity arises from the encounter between an exceptional situation and the personal responsibility of whoever must decide how to act. The crisis may be objective; the state of necessity, by contrast, concerns the subjective assessment of the concrete action to be taken in that crisis.

The Code of Canon Law of 1983 expressly governs this matter in canons 1323 and 1324. Canon 1323 establishes that no penalty attaches to one who has violated a law when “compelled by grave fear, even if only relatively grave, or by necessity or grave inconvenience, unless, however, the act is intrinsically evil or tends to the harm of souls.” The norm does not create an arbitrary derogation from the law, but acknowledges that exceptional circumstances may arise in which juridical responsibility is extinguished or diminished.

A first characteristic of the state of necessity is its essentially exceptional and provisional character. It arises to respond to a concrete and temporally delimited situation. It cannot be transformed into a permanent condition, nor constitute an ordinary regime of government or ecclesial life. If the necessity were to become permanent, it would cease to be a genuine “exception” and would end by emptying the ordinary discipline of the Church of its very meaning.

A historical crisis may extend over decades; the state of necessity, by contrast, concerns specific acts, performed in precise circumstances, in order to confront a concrete and immediate danger. The crisis constitutes the context; the state of necessity is the prudential judgment which can, in rigorously delimited cases, justify or excuse a particular course of conduct.

There is, finally, an inviolable limit upon which both moral theology and canon law insist. The state of necessity can never justify an intrinsically evil act. The principle formulated by Saint Paul and constantly reaffirmed by the Magisterium of the Church applies here: evil may never be done so that good may come of it — non sunt facienda mala ut veniant bona (Rom 3:8). Certain acts, by reason of their very moral object, remain always illicit, regardless of circumstances and historical context.

It is precisely on this point that the theological and canonical debate is focused. The act performed on the basis of the state of necessity cannot contradict principles of divine law or norms that, by their nature, admit of no derogation. Now, episcopal consecrations performed without a mandate and against the will of the Pope have, as their objective end, the creation of a reality independent of the Roman Pontiff and of the bishops in communion with him. But this is intrinsically illicit, whatever historical circumstances may be adduced to justify the gesture.

The true problem, therefore, does not consist in establishing whether or not a crisis exists in the Church — whose existence is evident to all. The decisive question is another: whether, in the presence of a crisis however grave, it is morally and juridically licit to perform an act that constitutes a violation of the hierarchical constitution of the Church, as divinely instituted by Jesus Christ — an act that in effect refuses the primacy of jurisdiction of the Roman Pontiff and introduces a practice that finds no precedent in the two-thousand-year tradition of the Church.

If all of this is not clear, the “state of necessity” risks being nothing more than a state of confusion.

COMMENT:

Roberto de Mattei, an eminent Catholic historian, said on July 18, “It is the duty of every Christian to maintain coherence between words and deeds.” He was referring to the SSPX who “publicly proclaims respect for and obedience to the Roman Pontiff and then, in fact, publicly defies him before the entire Christian people” by consecrating four bishops on July 1 without a papal mandate and in direct opposition to his will. In this editorial Mattei correctly distinguishes between the objective crisis in the Church, which he fails to properly identify, and the subjective judgment in the internal forum as to what to do about it. Since he does not understand the nature of the crisis, he does not have a clue about what to do about it.

Mattei published article, Ultramontanists: Godfathers of the Trad Movement July 28, 2022. In this article he explicitly affirms and defends the claim that the pope is above Catholic dogma. What Mattei does not recognize is that he is defending the Neo-modernist heresy that is the proximate cause of the crisis in the Church. So Mattei, a honest heretic, “maintains coherence between words and deeds” by directly implying that disobedience to the pope is an intrinsically evil act. For Mattei, who makes the pope his proximate rule of faith, the pope can never be a heretic because heresy is anything that disagrees with what the pope says or does.

This is not true. Dogma is the proximate rule of faith for every Catholic and that includes the pope. The pope is only the necessary material and instrumental cause of dogma. It is God who is the formal and final cause of dogma. Once a doctrine of revealed truth is dogmatically defined, it becomes a formal object of divine and catholic faith for all the faithful. The very definition of heresy, both moral and legal, is the denial of dogma. Furthermore, outside of a formal public rejection of the universal jurisdiction of the pope, there is one and only one act that is necessarily schismatic and that is manifest heresy. St. Thomas says that “All heretics are schismatics” and, if Mattei would learn that dogma is the proximate rule of faith, he would recognize that Vatican II and the post-counciliar popes have without exception committed formal acts of heresy. What “finds no precedent in the two-thousand-year tradition of the Church” are openly heretical popes who actively work as neo-iconoclasts to destroy every immemorial image of our faith.

It is God’s Church. It is God who endowed His Church with divine attributes of Authority, Infallibility and Indefectibility. These are attributes of the Church and not personal attributes of the pope and those that claim otherwise are divinizing the pope and are guilty of idolatry, a grave sin. The pope alone can access these attributes under specific conditions for specific ends. However, the universal jurisdiction of the pope cannot be legitimately employed to corrupt worship, corrupt doctrine, and corrupt Catholic morality.

Furthermore, every Catholic faithful has an obligation, a grave duty from God to profess the Catholic faith, to keep God’s moral law, and to worship God according to His prescriptions according the “received and approved” rites of the Church.

It is unfortunate for all the Catholic faithful that the SSPX has failed to correctly identify the Neo-modernist heresy and, consequently, failed to articulate the proper justification for the “state of necessity,” but nevertheless, we “maintain coherence between words and deeds” in defense of the Catholic faith both in the internal and external forum. That is why for nearly 25 years the local ordinaries in Harrisburg and the Vatican officials have failed to answer any of our claims. Remember, without faith, there is no charity and the greatest evidence of charity is the virtue of justice which underpins charity. The first obligation of justice is to “render to God the things that are God’s.” There is no virtue of justice in the Novus Ordo religion. Our prayer is that some day conservative Catholics like Mattei will learn that they must obey God rather than man. The virtue of justice does not permit any Catholic to subject what is of God in himself to what is of man in other men, and that includes the pope.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

No One, not even the Pope in Rome, has the authority to impose any act or suspend any immemorial tradition that leads to the diminution of Faith or the committing of sacrilege to the Blessed Sacrament. No One, not even the Pope in Rome, has the authority to command that any Catholic participate in such acts!

Fr. Janis Pawlowski I knew personally, he was my parish priest in Estonia during four years. It was he who heard my first confession and who gave me the First Holy Communion. He celebrated the Holy Mass with such a devotion and reverence that it left in my soul a deep unforgettable impression. All his words and his gestures irradiated holiness. When I for the first time felt in my soul the attraction to the priesthood at the age of twelve, in my memory appeared suddenly the holy face of this priest. He was really a man of God. I received the great grace that I could meet him in Riga (Latvia) after I have not seen him during 27 years. He was already 86 years old, yet he conserved the same fresh and spiritually irradiating face. The three days I spent with him, were for me a kind of spiritual exercises. He helped me to put on the liturgical vestments and served me during my Mass with the simplicity and humility of a little altar boy.[....] When in 1973 my family left Soviet Union and we said goodbye to Fr. Janis Pawlowski, he gave us this admonition: “When you come to Germany, please don’t go in the churches where Holy Communion is given in the hand”. When we heard these words, we all had a deep shock; we could not imagine that the Divine and Most Blessed Sacrament could be received in such a banal manner. It is now a proven fact that a considerable part of those who receive the Holy Communion habitually in hand, especially the younger generation which had not known the manner of receiving Communion kneeling and on the tongue, has not more the full Catholic faith in the Real Presence, because they treat the consecrated host almost in the same exterior manner as they take ordinary food. The exterior minimalistic gesture has a causal connection to the weakening or even loss of the faith in the Real Presence.[.....]  It is an honor and a privilege to be faithful to the Divine Truth and to the spiritual and liturgical traditions of our forefathers and of the saints and being therefore marginalized by those who currently occupy administrative power in the Church. This your fidelity and courage constitute the real power in the Church. You are the real ecclesiastical periphery, which with God’s power renews the Church. Living the true tradition of dogma, liturgy and holiness is a manifestation of the democracy of the Saints, because tradition is the democracy of the Saints. With Saint Athanasius I would like to tell you these words: Those in the Church who oppose, humiliate and marginalize you, have occupied the churches, while during this time you are outside; it is a fact that they have the premises – but you have the Apostolic Faith. They claim that they represent the Church, but in reality, they are the ones who are expelling themselves from it and going astray.

Archbishop Athanasius Schneider, excerpt from recent interview published August 10, 2015

COMMENT:  Those who accuse Ss. Peter & Paul Roman Catholic Mission of being "schismatic" because we keep the Apostolic Faith and the Immemorial Traditions of the Roman Catholic Church (and are thus united to the "Communion of Saints" existing from Jesus Christ's founding of His Church), have declared themselves in schism from us and everything we believe and do.  They have cut themselves off by breaking the bond of Charity from the Communion of Saints.  We appreciated Mons. Schneider's comments but he falls short in his understanding of the nature of the problem and its most important cause.  Archbishop Athanasius Schneider identifies "five wounds in Christ's liturgical mystical body" that must necessarily be healed without which the Church cannot hand on the True Faith.  This is an admission that the Novus Ordo is not the indefectible Church founded by Jesus Christ.  The five wounds are: 1) The priest turned towards the congregation and away from God; 2) Holy Communion taken in the hand which has seriously damaged faith in the True Presence; 3) the new (Novus Ordo) Offertory prayers which are the worship offered by Cain, ; 4) the disappearance of Latin in liturgical celebrations; and 5) the performing of some liturgical ministries by women.  Mons. Schneider believes that the answer lies in the Reform of the Reform.  This is because he has overlooked the greatest "liturgical wound" which is the total disregard of the dogma of Faith from Trent which categorically condemns anyone who holds that the "received and approved rites customarily used in the solemn administration of the sacraments..... may be changed into other new rites by any pastor of the Churches whomsoever."  They have thus corrupted the liturgy by treating it as a matter of mere Church discipline subject to the free and independent will of the legislator.  They have taken the work of God and made it the work of man.  When divinely revealed Truth is overturned the results will always and everywhere end in radical revolutionary corruption of God's Truth.

 

 

 

What the Novus Ordo has excluded from its Psalter - Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi, a Profession of False Faith, or is it just an example of the old proverb: 'In the house of the hanged, don't talk about the rope!'

      At the Sacra Liturgia conference in New York City in June 2015, one of the speakers reminded us of a startling fact that, while well known among scholars, has received far too little attention in the public sphere: the flagrant omission of so many psalms and psalm verses from the Divine Office or “Liturgy of the Hours” promulgated by Pope Paul VI in the Apostolic Constitution Laudis Canticum on November 1, 1970. In addition to the unprecedented novelty of praying the Psalter over four weeks rather than in the course of a single week, there was the equally unprecedented novelty of skipping verses that had been deemed “difficult” or problematic for modern Christians.

Three Psalms (57/58, 82/83, and 108/109) were expunged in their entirety from the pages of the Liturgy of the Hours (have a look at them some time), while three others (77/78, 104/105, 105/106) were confined to Advent, Christmastide, Lent, and Eastertide. The following verses were removed from other psalms:

Psalm 5 – 10 Make them bear their guilt, O God; let them fall by their own counsels; because of their many transgressions cast them out, for they have rebelled against you.

Psalm 20/21 – 8 Your hand will find out all your enemies; your right hand will find out those who hate you. 9 You will make them like a fiery furnace when you appear. The LORD will swallow them up in his wrath, and fire will consume them. 10 You will destroy their offspring from the earth, and their children from among humankind. 11 If they plan evil against you, if they devise mischief, they will not succeed. 12 For you will put them to flight; you will aim at their faces with your bows.

Psalm 27/28 – 4 Repay them according to their work, and according to the evil of their deeds; repay them according to the work of their hands; render them their due reward. 5 Because they do not regard the works of the LORD, or the work of his hands, he will break them down and build them up no more.

Psalm 30/31 – 17 Do not let me be put to shame, O LORD, for I call on you; let the wicked be put to shame; let them go dumbfounded to Sheol. 18 Let the lying lips be stilled that speak insolently against the righteous with pride and contempt.

Psalm 34/35 – 3 Draw the spear and javelin against my pursuers. 4 Let them be put to shame and dishonor who seek after my life. Let them be turned back and confounded who devise evil against me. 5 Let them be like chaff before the wind, with the angel of the LORD driving them on. 6 Let their way be dark and slippery, with the angel of the LORD pursuing them. 7 For without cause they hid their net for me; without cause they dug a pit for my life. 8 Let ruin come on them unawares. And let the net that they hid ensnare them; let them fall in it to their ruin. … 20 For they do not speak peace, but they conceive deceitful words against those who are quiet in the land.  21 They open wide their mouths against me; they say, “Aha, Aha, our eyes have seen it.” … 24 Vindicate me, O LORD, my God, according to your righteousness, and do not let them rejoice over me. 25 Do not let them say to themselves, “Aha, we have our heart’s desire.” Do not let them say, “We have swallowed you up.” 26 Let all those who rejoice at my calamity be put to shame and confusion; let those who exalt themselves against me be clothed with shame and dishonor.

Psalm 39/40 – 14 Let all those be put to shame and confusion who seek to snatch away my life; let those be turned back and brought to dishonor who desire my hurt. 15 Let those be appalled because of their shame who say to me, “Aha, Aha!”

Psalm 53/54:5  – He will repay my enemies for their evil. In your faithfulness, put an end to them.

Psalm 54/55:15  – Let death come upon them; let them go down alive to Sheol; for evil is in their homes and in their hearts.

Psalm 55/56:6b-7  – As they hoped to have my life, 7 so repay them for their crime; in wrath cast down the peoples, O God!

Psalm 58/59 – 5 You, LORD God of hosts, are God of Israel. Awake to punish all the nations; spare none of those who treacherously plot evil. Selah  6 Each evening they come back, howling like dogs and prowling about the city.  7 There they are, bellowing with their mouths, with sharp words on their lips—for “Who,” they think, “will hear us?”  8 But you laugh at them, O LORD; you hold all the nations in derision. … 11 Do not kill them, or my people may forget; make them totter by your power, and bring them down, O Lord, our shield. 12 For the sin of their mouths, the words of their lips, let them be trapped in their pride. For the cursing and lies that they utter, 13 consume them in wrath; consume them until they are no more. Then it will be known to the ends of the earth that God rules over Jacob. Selah 14 Each evening they come back, howling like dogs and prowling about the city. 15 They roam about for food, and growl if they do not get their fill.

Psalm 62/63 – 9 But those who seek to destroy my life shall go down into the depths of the earth; 10 they shall be given over to the power of the sword, they shall be prey for jackals. 11 But the king shall rejoice in God; all who swear by him shall exult, for the mouths of liars will be stopped.

Psalm 68/69 – 22 Let their table be a trap for them, a snare for their allies. 23 Let their eyes be darkened so that they cannot see, and make their loins tremble continually. 24 Pour out your indignation upon them, and let your burning anger overtake them. 25 May their camp be a desolation; let no one live in their tents. 26 For they persecute those whom you have struck down, and those whom you have wounded, they attack still more. 27 Add guilt to their guilt; may they have no acquittal from you. 28 Let them be blotted out of the book of the living; let them not be enrolled among the righteous.

Psalm 78/79 – 6 Pour out your anger on the nations that do not know you, and on the kingdoms that do not call on your name. 7 For they have devoured Jacob and laid waste his habitation. … 12 Return sevenfold into the bosom of our neighbors the taunts with which they taunted you, O Lord!

Psalm 109/110:6  – He will execute judgment among the nations, filling them with corpses; he will shatter heads over the wide earth.

Psalm 136/137 – 7 Remember, O LORD, against the Edomites the day of Jerusalem’s fall, how they said, “Tear it down! Tear it down! Down to its foundations!” 8 O daughter Babylon, you devastator! Happy shall they be who pay you back what you have done to us! 9 Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock!

Psalm 138/139 – 19 O that you would kill the wicked, O God, and that the bloodthirsty would depart from me—20 those who speak of you maliciously, and lift themselves up against you for evil! 21 Do I not hate those who hate you, O LORD? And do I not loathe those who rise up against you? 22 I hate them with perfect hatred; I count them my enemies.

Psalm 139/140 – 9 Those who surround me lift up their heads; let the mischief of their lips overwhelm them! 10 Let burning coals fall on them! Let them be flung into pits, no more to rise! 11 Do not let the slanderer be established in the land; let evil speedily hunt down the violent!

Psalm 140/141:10  – Let the wicked fall into their own nets, while I alone escape.

Psalm 142/143:12 –  In your steadfast love cut off my enemies, and destroy all my adversaries, for I am your servant.

      For 2,000 years, Christians Eastern and Western had been praying the psalter of David in its integrity, and now, Catholics were handed an expurgated or abridged version, with verses removed by “experts” who knew better than the Holy Spirit, knew better than the Israelites, knew better than the Church Fathers and Doctors, knew better than Tradition. But of course they knew better: this was the Age of Enlightenment breaking in at last upon a fortress-like Church, an age in which we should shake ourselves free from the shackles of unenlightened piety, with its gnarled, enigmatic, sharp-edged, implacable expressions, and its archaic, earthy, tribal atmosphere. Razing the bastions, making the world safe for democracy, and all that good stuff.
      This observation dovetailed with another talk given at the Sacra Liturgia conference about the reform of the lectionary, in which the speaker looked at how the Novus Ordo lectionary for Mass also suppresses “difficult” verses from both Testaments—verses that had always been present in the traditional Roman lectionary but were excluded from the new lectionary, in spite of its boast of being so much bigger and better. These “difficult” verses include among them this spiritually poignant passage from St. Paul:

Therefore whosoever shall eat this bread, or drink the chalice of the Lord unworthily, shall be guilty of the body and of the blood of the Lord. But let a man prove himself: and so let him eat of that bread, and drink of the chalice. For he that eateth and drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh judgment to himself, not discerning the body of the Lord. (1Co 11:27-29)

 

 

 

 

Hermeneutics of Continuity/Discontinuity

Novus Ordo Doctrine: Moslems and Novus Ordo Catholics Worship the same God!

CCC 841, quoting the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium 16, from Vatican II, declared:

"The plan of salvation also includes those who acknowledge the Creator, in the first place amongst whom are the Muslims; these profess to hold the faith of Abraham, and together with us they adore the one, merciful God, mankind

CCC 841 also references Vatican IIDeclaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions, Nostra Aetate, 3, that makes the teaching of the Council perhaps even clearer:

"The Church regards with esteem also the Moslems. They adore the one God, living and subsisting in Himself; merciful and all-powerful, the Creator of heaven and earth, who has spoken to men; they take pains to submit wholeheartedly to even his inscrutable decrees, just as Abraham, with whom the faith of Islam takes pleasure in linking itself, submitted to God."

 

Catholic Church Doctrine: Catholics and Moslems DO NOT worship the same God.

that is, you do not adore God because you do not know Him, but rather your imagination, by which you apprehend something as God, just as the Gentiles also walk in the foolishness of their mind (Eph 4:17).St. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary On John 4:22

 

in this respect forming no higher opinion of Him than of their idols. Wherefore they continued to serve both Him and devils, joining things which ought not to be joined. St. John Chrysostom, Homily 33 On The Gospel of John

 

COMMENT: When Jesus said to the Samaritan Woman, "You adore that which you know not," He is not saying that they adore the One True God that they are ignorant of. He is saying, that in their ignorance they do not know who they are adoring meaning that they are adoring in ignorance a devil, for "all the gods of the gentiles are devils" (Psalm 95:5). Jesus then says, that "true adorers shall adore the Father in spirit and in truth..... they that adore him, must adore him in spirit and in truth." To adore in "spirit" means that to adore God you must be baptized and made sons of God for as Jesus said: "Amen, amen I say to thee, unless a man be born again of water and the Holy Ghost, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God That which is born of the flesh, is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit, is spirit" (John 3:5-7). And to adore in "truth" means who must believe what has been revealed by God. Without the true faith it is "impossible to please God" (Hebrews 11:6). As such, right knowledge of God is essential to true worship. This is the great sin of Modernism and Neo-modernism: They make a right knowledge of God impossible!

 

 

 

 

Sacrament of Baptism: Significance of the Baptismal Character and why it is absolutely necessary for salvation. Explains why St. Ambrose said, regarding catechumens who die before receiving the sacrament of Baptism, they are

To be baptized is to become one with the Church, and one with Christ. Thus the ritual can say:

The effecting this incorporation into Christ, Baptism marks the soul as permanently His; it stamps upon the soul a spiritual For this reason, and putting the cause for the effect, the rite of Baptism was itself called

The word

Basically, two words give the same meaning: a seal imprints an image, and an anathema.

The Council of Trent teaches that this seal, once stamped on the soul, is indelible. Just as Baptism irrevocable makes one a member of the Church, so also it irrevocably makes one a member of Christ. Not the gravest sin, nor even final impenitence and self-condemnation to eternal separation from Christ in Hell, can avail to erase this baptismal seal. And the indelibility of the seal is the immediate reason why Baptism can never be repeated, once it has been validly received.

The sense in which Baptism stamps us with the image of Christ is suggested in the rite itself, by the anointing which follows the ablution. It is done with Sacred Chrism, a mixed unguent of oil and balm, specially consecrated by the bishop on Holy Thursday. Kings and priests in antiquity (and even today) were anointed with chrism in token of their royal and priestly dignity. And the baptism anointing signifies, therefore, that the new Christian has entered into the Body of Christ.

The baptismal seal or character, therefore, endows the Christian with a priestly function, and a priestly power. It is not that special power and function given by the Sacrament of Holy Orders to certain selected members of the Church, who are made her official ministers, and authorized to offer her sacrifice and dispense her Sacraments. But it is the priestly function and power which is common to all the members of the Body of Christ. As He was born as Priest, His whole life orientated toward the Passion and Death which was His priestly Sacrifice, so too, they are priests from their birth into the Christian life at Baptism; and their lives are essentially orientated toward sacrifice, in a double sense.

First of all, they receive a function and a power with respect to the ritual Sacrifice of the Church, which is the Mass.

Secondly, the baptismal character consecrates the Christian to sacrifice in a wider sense: it gives him the function, the duty, the power to lead a life of sacrifice, since He is in the image of Christ whose life was one long sacrifice  

 

Rev. John J. Fernan, S.J., Theology, Christ Our High Priest, Baptismal Seal

 

 

 

Excommunication decreed for Lefebvrite episcopal ordinations

A document signed by Cardinal V

Vatican News

The bishops of the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Pius X, Alfonso de Galarreta and Bernard FellaySivry, and Marc Hanappier have incurred

sententiae

This was stated in a decree released on July 2 and signed by Cardinal V

The decision came twenty-four hours after the solemn ceremony celebrated in , Switzerland, on the morning of July 1, 2026.

The Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith

The painful epilogue was the consequence of the decision taken by the Lefebvrites against the will repeatedly expressed by Pope Leo XIV.

The excommunication newly separates the bishops and priests of the Fraternity of Saint Pius X from the Church of Rome.

As for the lay faithful, those who formally adhere to the Fraternity are to be considered excommunicated.

Further details are contained in an

From the time of Saint Paul VI up to the most recent talks, held recently at this Dicastery, the many attempts to bring the members of the movement begun by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre back into full communion with the Catholic Church have proved vain.

This situation has been further aggravated by the recent episcopal consecrations celebrated without pontifical mandate, against the will of the Holy Father, and in open violation of canon law.

Therefore, this Dicastery, in the faithful exercise of the functions entrusted to it, considers it necessary to state that this act constituted the delict of schism, with the canonical consequences for the sacred ministers and lay faithful involved. Indeed, as was already declared in 1988,

In this regard, from now on:

1.     The sacred ministers belonging to the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Pius X are in schism and must therefore be considered schismatics (cf. Ecclesia Dei, 5 c; Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts, Explanatory Note on the excommunication for schism incurred by those adhering to the movement of Bishop Marcel Lefebvre, 24.08.1996, 5-6), and are subject to the excommunication prescribed by law (can. 1364

2.     As regards the lay faithful, those who formally adhere to the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Pius X are to be considered schismatics and excommunicated under the conditions established in the 1996 Explanatory Note of the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts (cf. ibidem, 7), which remains in force and which this Dicastery adopts as its own.

3.     Finally, the holy People of God are warned that the sacred ministers of the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Pius X administer the sacraments illicitly, and that the sacrament of penance administered by them and marriages assisted by them are invalid.

The Church, as a caring mother, will welcome with sincere affection and lively solicitude all those who wish to return to full communion. The Apostolic Nuncios will arrange the procedures that Ordinaries may use in the various cases.

Finally, all the faithful are urged to remain steadfast in communion with the Roman Pontiff, with the Bishops in communion with him, and with the whole Church (cf. Lumen Gentium, 22; can. 751 CIC), and to refrain from taking part in celebrations and activities promoted by the aforementioned Priestly Fraternity of Saint Pius X.

COMMENT:

The SSPX has placed itself in an indefensible position by failing to hold dogma as the proximate rule of faith. The SSPX has been compromising with Novus Ordo Church heretics for the past thirty years that culminated in their leadership making the 1989 Profession of Faith where they swore unconditional obedience to the person of the pope to obtain concessions of ordinary jurisdiction.During the entire pontificate of the heretic Francis/Bergoglio, the SSPX followed the conditions established by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith by Ratzinger under JPII and said nothing critical regarding the heresies and corruption of Catholic morality under Francis/Bergoglio. That being said, the decree of excommunication under Leo/Prevost is problematic for all Catholic faithful.

The illicit consecration of bishops is not canonically under the canonical section that deals with schism. It is not and never has been an act that is always and every where a necessary sign of schism. Schism necessarily requires the rejection of the universal jurisdiction of the pope as the motive for the act of disobedience. The decree against the SSPX says,

There is one and only one act that always and everywhere is necessarily manifests schism, that is, manifest heresy. St. Thomas says that We have pictures of Leo/Prevost kneeling before a procession of Pachamama, a pagan deity; pictures of him blessing a block of Nordic ice in the pagan cult of earth worship; pictures of him in common prayer with a variety of heretics, schismatics, Jews, Muslims and pagans; pictures of him in common communion with the lay women who pretends to be the Archbishop of Canterbury. These are without exception signs of heresy and, therefore, schism by Leo/Prevost. That same can be said for his councillor predecessors. This decree of excommunication is nothing more than an administrative declaration that the SSPX is no longer in communion with the Novus Ordo Church.

The question then regards their declaration that These are empty assertions because Rome has failed to prove that the SSPX rejects the universal jurisdiction of the pope as their motive for consecrating bishops, and having failed to do this, argumentum a fortiori, they can hardly make the charge against the The Novus Ordo cult has inadvertently ruined their case by referring to those who adhere formally to the

Regarding the validity of the sacraments of marriage and confessions Rome commits a massive blunder. The Catholic Church was founded by Jesus Christ. He called it

Jesus Christ provides for the needs of His faithful with publically to marry according to the laws of the Catholic Church. The Church requires that the parish priest of the woman exercising ordinary jurisdiction must be a witness to the sacrament for its validity. However, the Church has always held that if the priest holding ordinary jurisdiction cannot be had for a period greater than thirty days, the couple can validly and licitly proceed with their marriage without that priest being a witness to the sacrament. The only requirement for a valid and licit marriage is for the bride to notify her parish priest of her intent to marry and request that he be a witness to the event for canonical regularity. If he refuses, the couple is free to proceed on their own to seek another priest who does not exercise ordinary jurisdiction to bless their marriage.

 

 

 

 

 

Can Theology Be Measured? Groundbreaking Study Measures a 270-Year Shift in Catholic Teaching

Wim Varnaes | July 22, 2026

ItVanraes discovered measurable data patterns showing that traditional Catholic concepts like sin, grace, salvation, doctrine, obedience, truth, heaven, and judgment steadily declined, while words emphasizing encounter, dialogue, social concerns, poverty, inclusion, and pastoral language steadily increased. This is one of the first empirical, data-driven demonstrations of a theological transformation many Catholics have argued about for decades.

 

 

The Statistical Case for the Crisis in the Church

'When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror.'

FLANNERY O

recovered her warning for the current moment, and the recovery is timely. When truth and tenderness, both good in themselves, are separated, each becomes something it was never meant to be. The Group 9 May 5 Final Report from the Synod on Synodality offers a perfect example of how language shapes new ideas. Those new ideas are not necessarily Catholic ones, but substituting the traditional ideas for new ones under the guise of the old, familiar Catholic words.

Both O

This article would not be the first to name formation networks as the vehicle of such new ideas. One could point at Liberation theology, how Libertatis Nuntius offered a stern warning, which was ignored by its proponents such as Father Gustavo Guti

Some went on to lead groups such as Pax Christi, others, such as Cardinal Turkson, became head of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, and others still, such as Fr. John Dear, became peace activists. When Cardinal Turkson held the 2016 peace conference at the Vatican, people from Pax Christi and John Dear spoke, rejecting not just war by itself, but the whole Just War doctrine. Their final statement became the foundation for Pope Francis

This does not require any conspiracy to make that happen, just the slow change in schools, then in organizations, which then seeps into the Church as highly respectable activists, missionaries, and aid workers.

I mentioned a corpus data analysis at the opening of this article. Looking at 30 encyclicals, from 6 historical periods (from 1750 to Francis), using 11 thematic word clusters and normalized word frequency, it shows how the vocabulary used by the Church changed over time, supporting the claim that a materialist anthropology quietly entered, substituting the traditional Catholic moral and theological discourse.

This was a preliminary study, using normalized word counts of a selection of teaching documents, and not a full semantic analysis over all available documents. The results were surprising in their detail.

Three of those findings bear on the present moment. First, we can see a soteriological collapse, where words such as sin, grace, and salvation are, under Francis, at their lowest point in 270 years, lower even than pre-1850. Instead of talking about what humans are to be saved from, how such salvation is received, there is a shift towards more structural economic words, such as poverty and economy, at the cost of words such as property, labor and capital. [.....]

Next, it is very interesting to see what happens to words such as love and hope. Love rises continuously, peaks under Benedict, and remains elevated under Francis, but the problem lies elsewhere: truth declines. In a move that mirrors O

At the same time, under Francis the

Lastly, we can see a boundary collapse in the word frequencies. Even before Vatican II we see terms such as error, heresy, condemnation, and judgment decline strongly after 1850, matching the current state where a final report from the Synod on Synodality openly signals that it replaced

At the same time, the use of the word Church declines to its lowest level, while words such as authority, doctrine, and obedience collapse completely. Now

This is important, and it maps cleanly on the situation modern thinking has created. Very quietly, the nominalist ideas underpinning a lot of enlightenment ideas, later growing into Marxism and Modernism, trained many people, even good Catholics, that every sign only held one and only one signified. Such an innocent looking poison of the mind! This is the root of the problem where people think in

Where Catholic teaching gave rise to both Fr. Ryan, looking at the immediate needs of the poor, and also to Cardinal O

Notice also how O

The final reports from the Synod on Synodality show something different, however. They worry about tenderness, dialogue, encounter, (social and environmental) justice, but are averse of the harsh language of sin, conversion, doctrine, obedience, and sacrifice. Not in continuity with tradition, but hiding behind the words of tradition, smuggling in a philosophical framework that is not compatible with the faith. [.....]

COMMENT: The corruption of language is the stock and trade of the enemies of the Catholic faith. Semanticists is a philosophical system, that along with Empiricism, developed with the failure of philosophical Rationalism. Semanticists, like all Nominalists who deny the existence of essential reality, said that the material world is always changing therefore words and language must necessarily change or they will no longer reflect the world as it is. They held that since the world is irrational, therefore, the mind must be irrational as well.They began by openly denying the first principles of the Understanding; that innate sense in all men that a thing is what it is, that it cannot be and not be at the same time, that things require a sufficient cause, sufficient reason, etc., etc. They openly denied the principle of non-contradiction. They eventually denied the intentionality of all language becoming known as Deconstructionalists. The immediate effect of this was the realization that if language must change to reflect new realities then new realities can be created by changing the language. George Orwell's 1984 dystopian novel told the story of a world run by Semanticists. With the developments of "automated intelligence" (AI), the ability to create a false reality has been greatly enhanced and will lead to all those who are not grounded in Catholic dogma to be swept away. The Neo-modernist heretics that have had complete control of the Church since Vatican II are Semanticists. This article is a beginning in recognizing this fact. Once the techniques of semantics are recognized by faithful Catholics, and the absolute corruption of Nominalism is understood, the Neo-modernist methodology of attacking the Catholic faith and destroying her dogmas will be completely exposed.

 

 

 

On the Inerrancy of Sacred Scripture

Vatican preparatory document for the October Synod of Bishops (2008) Teaches:

In summary, the following can be said with certainty … — with regards to what might be inspired in the many parts of Sacred Scripture, inerrancy applies only to ‘that truth which God wanted put into sacred writings for the sake of salvation’. 

Instrumentum laboris, The Word of God in the Life and the Mission of the Church, article 15, a “working document” for the upcoming October Synod of Bishops; released from the Vatican June 12^th; emphasis added.

 

The Catholic Church Teaches:

The Old and New Testaments, “whole and with all their parts … [have] been written by the inspiration of the Holy Ghost [and] have God as their author.”

Vatican I

 

For all the books which the Church receives as sacred and canonical, are written wholly and entirely, with all their parts, at the dictation of the Holy Ghost; and so far is it from being possible that any error can co-exist with inspiration, that inspiration not only is essentially incompatible with error, but excludes and rejects it as absolutely and necessarily as it is impossible that God Himself, the supreme Truth, can utter that which is not true. This is the ancient and unchanging faith of the Church, solemnly defined in the Councils of Florence and of Trent, and finally confirmed and more expressly formulated by the Council of the Vatican. These are the words of the last: ‘The Books of the Old and New Testament, whole and entire, with all their parts, as enumerated in the decree of the same Council (Trent) and in the ancient Latin Vulgate, are to be received as sacred and canonical. And the Church holds them as sacred and canonical, not because, having been composed by human industry, they were afterwards approved by her authority; nor only because they contain revelation without error; but because, having been written under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, they have God for their author.’ Hence, because the Holy Ghost employed men as His instruments, we cannot therefore say that it was these inspired instruments who, perchance, have fallen into error…  

Pope Leo XIII, Providentissimus Deus

 

Divine inspiration does not extend to all of Sacred Scripture so that it renders its parts, each and every one free from every error.

Pope Saint Pius X’s Syllabus of Errors against the Modernists, condemned proposition

 

It is absolutely forbidden to pretend that the sacred writer himself has fallen into error, since Divine inspiration not only excludes any and all possible error in itself, but even loathes and excludes it, since God, Who is sovereign truth, cannot be the author of any possible error…. This doctrine which was so forcefully explained by our predecessor Leo XIII, We also propose with our pontifical authority, and We insist that it be held rigorously by all. Pope Pius XII, Divini Afflante Spiritu

 

Some boldly pervert the meaning of the definition of the Vatican Council, with respect to God as the author of Sacred Scripture and they revive the opinion, many times condemned, according to which the immunity of the Sacred Writings from error extends only to those matters which are handed down regarding God and moral and religious subjects.

Pius XII, Humani Generis

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lapide on Luke 23:32 - An Important Distinction

    “But I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not.”  “For thee”, because I destine thee to be the head and chief of the Apostles and of My Church, that thy faith fail not in believing Me to be the Christ and the Saviour of the world. Observe that Christ in this prayer asked and obtained for Peter two especial privileges before the other Apostles : the first was personal, that he should never fall from faith in Christ; for Christ looked back to the sifting in the former verse, that is the temptation of His own apprehension when the other Apostles flew off from Him like chaff and lost their faith, and were dispersed, and fled into all parts. But Peter, although he denied Christ with his lips, at the hour foretold, and lost his love for Him, yet retained his faith. So S. Chrysostom (Horn, xxxviii.) on S. Matthew; S. Augustine (de corrept. et Grat. chap, viii.); Theophylact and others. This is possible but not certain, for F. Lucas and others think that Peter then lost both his faith and his love, from excessive perturbation and fear; but only for a short time, and so that his faith afterwards sprang up anew, and was restored with fresh vitality. Hence it is thought not to have wholly failed, or to have been torn up by the roots, but rather to have been shaken and dead for a time.

    Another and a certain privilege was common to Peter with all his successors, that he and all the other bishops of Rome (for Peter, as Christ willed, founded and confirmed the Pontifical Church at Rome), should never openly fall from this faith, so as to teach the Church heresy, or any error contrary to the faith. So S. Leo (semi.xxii.), on Natalis of SS. Peter and Paul; S. Cyprian (Lib. i. ep. 3), to Cornelius; Lucius I., Felix I., Agatho, Nicolas I., Leo IX.,Innocent III., Bernard and others, whom Bellarmine cites and follows (Lib. i. de Poniif. Roman).

    For it was necessary that Christ, by His most wise providence, should provide for His Church, which is ever being sifted and tempted by the devil, and that not only in the time of Peter, but at all times henceforth, even to the end of the world, an oracle of the true faith which she might consult in every doubt, and by which she might be taught and confirmed in the faith, otherwise the Church might err in faith, quod absit!   For she is, as S. Paul said to Timothy, “the pillar and ground of the truth” (1 Tim. lii. 15). This oracle of the Church then is Peter, and all successive bishops of Rome. This promise made to Peter and his successors, most especially applies to the time when Peter, as the successor of Christ, began to be the head of the Church, that is, after the death of Christ.

    And when thou art converted, strengthen thy brethren. “From the sifting of Satan, that is from his temptation and from the sin by which thou wilt deny Me; for by this thou wilt be turned aside from Me, and My grace and love.” So Euthymius, Theophylact, Jansen, F. Lucas, and others.

Cornelius a Lapide, The Great Commentary, Luke 22, 32

 

 

 

 

COMMENT ON THE RECENT CONSECRATION OF BISHOPS BY THE SSPX:

The recent consecration of bishops by the SSPX and their

Rome has manipulated the SSPX into a trap that was explained to them more than fifteen years ago. Rome embraced the heresy of Neo-modernism before Vatican II and the purpose of Vatican II was to infect this heresy into the life blood of the Church. The heresy severs the form and matter of Dogma professing that the form is a divine truth revealed by God but the matter, that is, the words, are a human approximation of that divine truth that must progressively evolve and be purified of human accretions, distortions and historical contingencies to arrive at a more perfect expression of the divine truth. It is a claim that we know the faith better than our fathers and our children will know the faith better than us. Thus Dogma, which never reaches its term, no longer is the proximate rule of faith. It is replaced by the pope who guides the dogma into a progressively more perfect expression.

Once the pope becomes the proximate rule of faith the infallible Magisterium of the Church is replaced by the personal fallible magisterium of the pope grounded upon his grace of state, and then whatever the pope says or does becomes what every faithful Catholic is expected to say or do. This corruption was taught in the Vatican II document Lumen Gentium which established the new ecclesiology. The term Lumen Gentium says, sensus fidei for all Catholics. The proposition of unconditional obedience to the

Fr. Joseph Fenton, the editor of the American Ecclesiastical Review and a peritas at Vatican II, wrote an excellent article, Infallilillity in the Encyclicals, AER, 1953, in which he addressed the term, Comillas in Spain. The

Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, who had his own problems with Neo-modernism, recognized that the insertion of the addendum of unconditional obedience to the

Rome imposes the 1989 Profession of Faith and Oath of Fidelity on any cleric or any lay person as a condition for exercising any office in the Church. The SSPX leadership stupidly accepted this demand and swore, certainly by 2015, unconditional obedience to the publically disobeyed him on insufficient doctrinal or moral grounds. They have associated every faithful traditional Catholic in their worthless scheming.

The SSPX sooner or later must recognize that Dogma is the proximate rule of faith and that Neo-modernism is a heresy that they are standing so close to they cannot recognize. Dogma is infallible both in the truth it proposes and in the words used to express that truth. That is, both the form and the matter of Dogma, which constitute one substantial being, are the infallible work of God, or as St. Pius X said, ipso facto in the external forum without canonical due process simply because the pope says so in his personal

 

 

 

 

 

Comments from those who have read the Third Secret of Fatima:

Ø  One concerns the Pope. The other, logically the continuation of the words: In Portugal, the dogma of the Faith will always be preserved.[3] [emphasis added]

Joseph Schweigel, S.J., d. 1964 (interrogated Sister Lucia about the Third Secret on behalf of Pope Pius XII on Sept. 2, 1952)[4]

Ø  These form the content of the third part of the Secret. What are they?If it is quite possible that in this intermediate period which is in question (after 1960 and before the triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary), the text makes concrete references to the crisis of the Faith of the Church and to the negligence of the pastors themselves.[5] [emphasis added]

Fr. Joaquin Alonso, C.M.F., d. 1981 (Cleratian priest and official Fatima archivist for over sixteen years; had unparalleled access to Sister Lucia)

Ø  Speaks neither of atomic bombs, nor nuclear warheads, nor Pershing missiles, nor SS-20. Its content concerns only our faith. To identify the Secret with catastrophic announcements or with a nuclear holocaust is to deform the meaning of the message. The loss of faith of a continent is worse than the annihilation of a nation; and it is true that faith is continually diminishing in Europe.[6] [emphasis added]

Bishop Alberto Cosme do Amaral, d. 2005 (former bishop of Fatima-Leiria; remarks made in Vienna, Austria on Sept. 10, 1984)

Ø  The Blessed Virgin was alerting us against apostasy in the Church.

Cardinal Silvio Oddi, d. 2001 (Vatican diplomat and personal friend of Pope John XXIII, from whom he knew certain details concerning the Third Secret) [7]

Ø  The great apostasy in the Church will begin at the top.

Cardinal Mario Luigi Ciappi, O.P., d. 1996 (personal theologian to Popes John XXIII-John Paul II) [8]

The Whole Truth about Fatima, [2], Volume 3.

 

 

 

 

"The Providence of God is unfailing!"

St. Augustine, On the Soul and Its Origin, 3, 13

 

 

 

Leo XIV Reinstated Convicted Child-Porn Priest who was protected by Francis

Carlo Alberto Capella was Vatican diplomat who was convicted by a Vatican tribunal of possessing and sharing child pornography. Capella admitted guilt to the charges. He is the only one who has served a prison sentence in the Vatican jail for this crime or for any sexually related crime against minors. 

Monsignor Capella was ordained a priest in 1993 for the Archdiocese of Milan. After studies of canon law he entered the Vatican diplomatic corps. He was assigned to the papal nunciature in India in 2003 and to the nunciature in Hong Kong in 2007. In 2008 he was created Chaplain of His Holiness, which entitled him to the title of Monsignor.  In 2011 he was transferred to the Vatican to serve in the Secretariat of State. In 2016 he was assigned to the papal nunciature to the United States.

In 2017, Capella was recalled to the Vatican by Pope Francis after United States officials informed the Vatican that he was under investigation for possession and sharing of child pornography. The government of Canada has issued a warrant for his arrest, alleging that during his time in Canada in December, 2016 he had possessed and shared child pornography. He was returned to the Vatican which claimed diplomatic immunity for Capella protecting him from prosecution in the United State or Canada.

In 2018, he was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison, which he served in the Vatican jail. As of 2021, he was allowed out during the day to work in an office that sells papal blessings. In 2023, following the end of his prison sentence, Capella was permitted to return to work in the Vatican Secretariat of State.  Now Pope Leo XIV has reinstated Msgr. Capella to a senior diplomatic position in the Vatican Secretariat of State.

COMMENT: Pope Leo is protégé of Francis to whom he own s his promotions to bishop and cardinal. It was Francis who protected this pervert from criminal charges in the United States and in Canada and now it is Francis' protégé who has restored him the a high level position in the Vatican. This does not portend well for any serious reform of the Novus Ordo Church which has become a sinecure for homosexuals and others perverts.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Unless the Lord build a house, they labor in vain that build it.

Unless the Lord keep the city, he watcheth in vain that keepeth it. Ps. 126

 

 

 

 

 

 

From Tradition In Action:

You don't have to be a liturgical EXPERT to see that there is no essential difference in the act!

The question is: Is there any essential difference in the actors?

 

 

Top: St. Patrick Catholic Church, Chatham, New Jersey (44:43 mark on their August 22, 2021

Bottom: First Lutheran Church, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (49:30 mark on their July 6 2025

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jewish morality is openly demonstrated in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon with the wonton killing of thousands of men, women and children. Over 95% of Jewish religious and political leaders support abortion and same-sex 'marriage'. AI is intended to enforce Jewish morality.

Yuval Harari at Davos:

by Leo Hohmann 1-20-2026

Israeli historian and philosopher Yuval Harari spoke January 20th at the World Economic Forum 2026 conference in Davos and hit on crucial themes about the future of artificial intelligence and humanity.
If Klaus Schwab and Larry Fink represent the legal and geostrategic views of the Davos crowd, Harari represents its spiritual soul. And a dark soul it is, devoid of anything truly from the heart of God.
He seems to describe a mass psychological control grid getting ready to clamp down on humanity.
Harari stated in his WEF speech that:
The most important thing to know about AI is that it is not just another tool. It is an agent. It can learn and change by itself and make decisions by itself. A knife is a tool. You can use a knife to cut salad or to murder someone, but it is your decision what to do with the knife. AI is a knife that can decide by itself whether to cut salad or to commit murder.

The second thing to know about AI is that it can be a very creative agent. AI is a knife that can invent new kinds of knives as well as new kinds of music, medicine and money.

The third thing to know about AI is that it can lie and manipulate. Four billion years of evolution have demonstrated that anything that wants to survive learns to lie and manipulate. The last four years have demonstrated that AI agents can acquire the will to survive and that AIs have already learned how to lie.
How many times have you heard that AI is just a tool that can be used for good or for evil? Well, Yuval Harari, the philosophical/spiritual voice of the WEF, says it
So, AI can

Harari speaking at Davos 2026: AI is already an agent capable of making decisions, lying, manipulating.

Harari is a valuable source because, whether you think he
Well, now Harari is letting the cat out of the bag, probably because he knows it
Harari stated:

Harari said AI will first take over everything that consists of words. That includes law, articles and books, even religion. You can see that is happening already. News writers and gatherers are being replaced. Legal assistants and lawyers are being replaced. And people are consulting AI for advice related to life, faith and spiritual matters.

He does hint that if your religious faith is real, you may want to find out if it

A preview of our AI dominated world

He asks:

My overall response to Harari
Winston, the main character in Orwell
How is this different from the algorithms used by today
Orwell, living and writing in the 1940s, could not have envisioned that a computerized software system known as machine learning was going to rise up to do the job that he assigned to human beings. That job is to filter and control all human knowledge through a single conduit with demonic influence.
Because Harari is an admitted atheist, it is here where his analysis breaks down. He doesn
He says that,

 

 

 

 

Dogma - The Proximate Rule of Faith, the Formal Object of Divine & Catholic Faith

Now, first of all, let us see what is dogma. In the mouth of the world it means some positive, imperious, and overbearing assertion of a human authority, or of a self-confident mind. But what does it mean in the mouth of the Church? It means the precise enunciation of a divine truth, of a divine fact, or of a divine reality fully known, so far as it is the will of God to reveal it, adequately defined in words chosen and sanctioned by a divine authority.

It is the precise enunciation of a divine truth or of a divine reality; for instance, the nature and the personality of God, the Incarnation, the coming of the Holy Ghost, and suchlike truths and realities of the mind of God, precisely known, intellectually conceived, as God has revealed or accomplished them. Every divine truth or reality, so far as God has been pleased to reveal it to us, casts its perfect outline and image upon the human intelligence. His own mind, in which dwells all truth in all fulness and in all perfection, so far as He has revealed of His truth, is cast upon the surface of our mind, in the same way as the sun casts its own image upon the surface of the water, and the disc of the sun is perfectly reflected from its surface. So, in the intelligence of the Apostles, when, by the illumination of the Holy Ghost on the Day of Pentecost, the revelation of God was cast upon the surface of their intellect, every divine truth had its perfect outline and image, not confused, nor in a fragmentary shape, but with a perfect and complete impression. For instance, that God is One in nature; that in God there are Three Persons, and one only Person in Jesus Christ. Next, it is not enough that a truth should be definitely conceived; for if a teacher know the truth, and is not able to communicate it with accuracy, the learner will be but little the wiser. And therefore God, who gave His truth, has given also a perpetual assistance, whereby the Apostles first, and His Church from that day to this, precisely and without erring declare to mankind the truth which was revealed in the beginning; and in declaring that truth the Church clothes it in words, in what we call a terminology: and in the choice of those terms the Church is also guided. There is an assistance, by which the Church does not err in selecting the very language in which to express divine truth. For who does not see that, if the Church were to err in the selection of the words, the declaration of truth must be obscured? We are conscious every day that we know with perfect certainty what we desire to say, but, from the difficulty of finding or choosing our words, we cannot convey our meaning to another. The Church is not a stammerer as we are. The Church of God has a divine assistance perpetually guiding it, to clothe in language, that is, in adequate expression, the divine truth which God has committed to her trust. Therefore a dogma signifies a correct verbal expression of the truth correctly conceived and known. But, lastly, it is not sufficient that it be clearly understood in the intellect and accurately expressed in words, unless the authority by which it is declared shall be divine; because without a divine authority we cannot have a divine certainty; without a divine authority we can have no such assurance that the doctrine which we hear may not be erroneous. The Apostles were such a divine authority, for they spoke in the Name of their Master. Their successor to this day is the Church, which, taken as a whole, has been, by the assistance of the Holy Ghost, promised by our Divine Lord and never absent from it, perpetually sustained in the path of truth, and preserved from all error in the declaration of that truth. Therefore any body which is not dogmatic is not the Church of God. Any body or communion that disclaims a divine, and therefore infallible, authority cannot be dogmatic, because it is conscious that it may err. And therefore the- Catholic Church alone, the Church which is one and undivided throughout the world, united with its centre in the Holy See,

Cardinal Henry Edward Manning, Glories of the Sacred Heart

 

 

 

SSPX issues 154-point profession of faith to Pope Leo, cardinals ahead of consecrations

The Society of St. Pius X unveiled a sweeping 17-chapter ‘Profession of Catholic Faith,’ urging Pope Leo and the cardinals to embrace Tradition as the remedy to the Church’s ‘deepest ills.’

LifeSiteNews | June 24, 2026 — The SSPX has published a "Profession of Catholic Faithe" as part of communications with the Pope and the cardinals ahead of the planned episcopal consecrations and “in response to the chief and gravest dangers of our time.”

According to an open letter published by the Society of St. Pius X “to His Holiness Pope Leo XIV and to the Cardinals of the Holy Church” dated June 24, the leadership of the SSPX formulated its 17-chapter profession of Catholic Faith as a “necessary expression, peaceful and resolute, of our Faith” as the cardinals prepare to gather in consistory later this week.

“Today the Church suffers under the pressure of new forces, coming both from within and without, which push her in every possible direction, except – it seems to us – the right one,” the Society argues, adding, “In the face of such suffering, we cannot remain indifferent.”

Consequently, the Society maintains that “Tradition contains all the remedies for the deepest ills afflicting the Church and the world, for which solutions are sought in vain outside of it.”

“We are persuaded that, in the unstable and extremely perilous context that now confronts us, the finest contribution one can offer to the universal Church is that of a sincere and integral profession of Catholic Faith,” the fraternity of priests write.

The letter was accompanied by the Society’s "Profession of Catholic Faith." broken into 17 chapters outlining 154 points of traditional doctrine while rejecting their corresponding modern errors.

COMMENT: In general, the profession of faith has many excellent qualities, however, it is clearly a product of the SSPX culture and character. The SSPX is a completely inbred organization. No one thinks outside the box and their box is very small. While the Profession recognizes that the remote sources of revelation are Scripture and Tradition and that these constitute the remote rule of faith (#9), they then, after professing that "no dogma" may be omitted, stumble in not recognizing that Dogma constitutes the proximate rule of faith.

5. I add that, in the present confusion, it is no longer sufficient to recall a few isolated truths. It has become indispensable to set in full light the entire order of Catholic doctrine, in its supernatural coherence and luminous harmony, omitting no dogma, diminishing no truth, and substituting for the received Faith no equivocal or truncated language which, under the pretext of ecumenism or adaptation to the world, disfigures this doctrine with ever greater audacity.

9. This Revelation is the true Word of God, entrusted to the Church as a Deposit, and proposed to men as the Rule of Faith in the form of a body of doctrine, in which the mysteries are formulated in a manner that renders them intelligible and expressible in words.

The problem is confounded because they continually used the word "magisterium" equivocally. They treat the infallible Magisterium of the Church teaching by the authority of God and the fallible magisterium of churchmen teaching by their grace of state as if these were the same thing, They are not and constitute a distinction of kind and not one of degree. Their belief in the mutability of Dogma is directly expressed in their understanding of the Dogma that membership in the Catholic Church is necessary for salvation, that is, no one is saved outside the Catholic Church:

60. This truth means that no one can be saved without Christ and His Church, through a false religion as such, nor be assured of His salvation outside the visible structure of the Church. If men are saved without belonging to the visible society which is the Church, the Mystical Body of Christ, it is by a supernatural ordination to the one Church of salvation, and in spite of the errors of the false religions in which they find themselves, from which they free themselves by not refusing the grace offered to them and by corresponding to it

Here the Dogma is not "omitted," it is corrupted by substituting the word, "without," for the word, "outside." This is a common example of how the heresy of Neo-modernism works. This heresy leads directly to the Prayer Meeting of Assisi and the SSPX has not figured it out. The SSPX believes and teaches that any Jew, Moslem, Protestant, Hindu, Pagan, etc., etc. can obtain salvation by desire to do the will of a god who rewards and punishes which can be known by natural philosophy. The essential problem is that the SSPX does not understand or even recognize that the principle heresy today is Neo-modernism and not Modernism. Not recognizing the enemy, they continually punch the air.

Regarding the sacraments they rightly profess the Dogma that the sacraments require correct form, matter and intention:

111. I profess that the sacraments must be validly celebrated with the prescribed matter, form, and intention, observing the liturgical rites which clearly express the Catholic Faith; and that they must be received with the required dispositions.

Yet the SSPX believes that a Catholic priest can enter a bakery and consecrate all the bread in the bakery or enter a wine cellar and consecrate all the wine. This they believe can happen when there is obvious corruption in form, matter and intention. This can only happen when Dogma is taken in a non-literal sense. They apply the same sacramental theology to the sacrament of Baptism denying the Dogmas that baptism is necessary for salvation and the true and natural water is necessary for the sacrament which they take in a purely metaphorical sense.

112. I believe that Baptism is the door of the Church and that it is necessary for salvation. Ordinarily, no one can be saved without receiving it; through this sacrament, man is washed from original sin, incorporated into Christ, marked with the Christian character, and made a member of the Church. I therefore reject the practice of deferring without grave cause the Baptism of children who have not the use of reason. However, one who, after the age of reason and without fault on his part, is prevented from accessing this sacrament, can be saved in an extraordinary manner by Baptism of Desire, that is, by a supernatural act of faith and perfect charity which orders him to the Church.

So the good-willed Jew, Moslem, Hindu, Protestant, Pagan, etc. who believes in a god who rewards and punishes is thereby making an act of "supernatural faith and perfect charity"!

The word "heresy" occurs only once in the Profession of the SSPX. "I therefore reject every liturgical reform or usage which, through omission, doctrinal ambiguity, or practical orientation, favours heresy.... " The definition of heresy is the rejection of any Dogma. That is why the word only occurs as an accusation of "favoring" heresy. Vatican II, a pastoral council, is a product of the fallible magisterium of churchmen teaching by their grace of state. The Council did not just "favor" heresy, it taught it. It is impossible to know what heresy is unless you first know what Dogma is. Unless a clear and precise understanding of the nature of Dogma is known, it is impossible to address modern errors effectively.

The term, Second Vatican Council, also occurs only once in the document in Profession 143:

143. I acknowledge in particular that modern errors represent a dreadful threat to the whole of the Catholic order, and that their penetration into the life of the Church, under the influence of the Second Vatican Council and the post-conciliar reforms, has provoked a crisis of exceptional gravity: agnosticism attacks the knowledge of God; naturalism attacks the necessity of grace; subjectivism attacks the supernatural motive of faith; relativism attacks the immutability of dogma; situation ethics attacks the divine law; liberalism attacks the Social Kingship of Christ; false ecumenism attacks the uniqueness of the Church; collegiality and synodality attack the divine constitution of the Church in her hierarchy; liturgical anthropocentrism attacks the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.

This is all true but why is the SSPX unable to say Vatican II is heretical? Until the SSPX understands what Dogma is, what Neo-modernism is, and what the Magisterium of the Church is and how it is distinct from the magistrium of churchmen,they will continue to be incapable of effectively addressing modern errors.

In the end the question arises how is it now, after nearly fifteen years of silence against the apostasy of Rome, through the entire pontificate of Francis/Bergoglio, does the SSPX find that it is time to speak up? For what end is this Profession of Faith intended? And why cannot the SSPX articulate propositions of faith directly contrary to the beliefs and teachings of Rome demanding that Pope Leo engage the infallible Magisterium of the Church to clearly address the modern errors of Vatican II and the conciliar Church? It is a matter of canon law and the constant tradition of the Church that every Catholic has the right to demand explicit judgments from the Magisterium and the pope has an absolute duty to address these questions of faith. The SSPX has been in dialogue with Rome formally and informally for thirty years exchanging opinions on Catholic truth. If the SSPX understood what Dogma is this thirty year dialogue could have been concluded in thirty minutes. It has only been a year and a half since the death of Bishop Richard Williamson. The SSPX declared at that time that there was no state of necessity to justify the consecrations of bishops and they accused Bishop Williamson of grave sin for doing so. If the SSPX cannot identify direct heresy and heretics in Rome, then they cannot claim a state of necessity for themselves.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ANGEL OF THE JUDGMENT

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Situation Regarding the SSPX Episcopal Consecrations of July 1, 2026 -

by Roberto de Mattei

June 24, 2026 | Posted by the conservative Catholic blog, Rorate Caeli

What is one to think, and what is one to do, in the face of the episcopal consecrations announced by the Society of Saint Pius X at for July 1st, and the consequent latae sententiae excommunication that will be reaffirmed by the Holy See?

The first consideration to be made is that, if this comes to pass, we will be confronted with a painful trial

On the substance of the controversy, one cannot avoid pointing out what appears to be a genuine paradox. Among the many reasons advanced by Archbishop Lefebvre in 1988

The state of necessity is, by its very nature, an exceptional condition that permits deviation from the ordinary application of certain norms in view of a higher good

If the principle of the state of necessity were admitted as a general criterion for action, any bishop who judged the Church to be passing through a grave crisis could feel authorized episcopi vagantes scattered throughout the world, with inevitable effects of fragmentation, disorder, and confusion for the very faithful one would seek to protect.

The existence of an episcopal line deriving from Archbishop Richard Williamson This is a phenomenon which, beyond any judgments on the persons involved, illustrates the intrinsic risk of episcopal consecrations founded on subjective assessments of the state of necessity.

And yet this argument : "The faithful who are still Catholic find themselves in many places in a desperate spiritual situation. It is this appeal that the Church hears; it is for these situations that she grants jurisdiction through the law of supplied jurisdiction." The decisive criterion for him was not the assertion of a right proper to the Society, but the spiritual need of the faithful. The episcopal consecrations of 1988 were intended as a response to this appeal of souls.

We thus find ourselves before the paradox. The Society of Saint Pius X, by invoking the state of necessity, grounds a large part of its justification on the primacy of pastoral requirements over strictly juridical and doctrinal considerations

In this confused situation, the only sensible counsel that can be offered to those who are uncertain is to abide by the principle of logic and law: In dubiis standum est pro statu quo, donec ratio certa contrarium persuadeat , avoiding being drawn into sterile polemics and emotional proclamations that have no other result than to reopen old wounds and pour vinegar into the wounds of the Church.

The problem that presents itself today is far broader than the grave matter of the July 1st episcopal consecrations and their canonical consequences. Nor does the question exhaust itself in the debate over the traditional liturgy or the interpretation of the documents of the Second Vatican Council. At the heart of the controversy lies the historical and theological judgment on the twentieth century

A little over a hundred years ago, the conflagration of the First World War brought to an end the international order born of the Christian centuries, while the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917 set an even vaster fire in the world. Yet in the same year in which Bolshevism seized power, Our Lady appeared to the three shepherd children of Fatima, explaining the true causes of the crisis of the modern world and assuring, after chastisements, wars, and persecutions, the final triumph of her Immaculate Heart. The message of Fatima was addressed to all of humanity, but in a particular way to the Pastors of the Church, within which Modernism had begun to spread its deadly poison. Against this evil, Providence raised up Saint Pius X. With the encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis of September 8, 1907 Pascendi and Fatima constitute, respectively, the doctrinal diagnosis and the supernatural response to the crisis of modernity. These events, in turn, acquire their authentic significance only when placed within a broader perspective that allows one to read the events of history as phases of a single struggle that crosses the centuries.

It is here that the vision of Saint Augustine takes on an extraordinary relevance for our time. In the City of God, the great Doctor of the Church interprets history as the permanent confrontation between those who orient their lives toward God and those who reject the divine order. The Augustinian tradition, with its capacity to read historical events in the light of Providence, offers the interpretive key necessary for confronting questions that continue to determine the life of the Church

The last word, in this dramatic horizon, belongs to him who holds the divine mandate to guide the Church and whom the Society of Saint Pius X itself acknowledges as the legitimate Vicar of Christ

COMMENT: Dr. Roberto de Mattei is a conservative Novus Ordo Catholic historian which alone makes it impossible for him to know or do anything correctly because he will always have his priorities upside-down. Where does he get it wrong? For Mattei, the pope constitutes the proximate rule of faith. He does not understand that the proximate rule of faith is DOGMA. For Mattei, the faith is subject to the authority of the pope. The pope for Mattei is the principle cause and sign of the unity of the Church. Mattei does not openly deny the truth that the faith itself is the principle sign and cause of unity of the Church but he makes the faith subject to the arbitrary judgments of the pope who becomes its revealer. He places the authority of the pope over Dogma so that the Dogma means whatever the pope says it means. Whatever the pope says or does becomes the proximate rule of faith for Mattei. For him the determination of a state of necessity can only be declared by the authority of the pope. For Mattei, the pope can never be the cause of the state of necessity therefore, a state of necessity can never really exist.

Mattei acknowledges that the "salvation of souls" is the "highest good" then immediately reduces it to a legal truism. Something that in the end is unknowable in its practical application. He then wonders just who could ever determine when such a state of necessity begins and when it ends.For Mattei only the pope with absolute authority can do so.

The answer is not as difficult as Mattei pretends. Any individual Catholic faithful can declare a state of necessity for himself whenever he is unable to obtain from his ordinary what is necessary for his salvation, that is, the Catholic faith and Catholic sacraments. This is not a "subjective" determination as Mattei pretends for the faithful Catholic must make known to his local ordinary the existing objective factual conditions that constitute the state of necessity, demonstrate the establishment of a true and certain conscience, and thus, provide a moral justification for any acts of disobedience. After determining a state of necessity that he makes it known to his local ordinary, the ordinary has the obligation to fulfill his duties to provide what is necessary for salvation. If he fails to do so, fails to fulfill his duty for whatever reason, then the faithful Catholic is free is seek these necessities from any other cleric and any cleric can do so by the virtue of the supplied jurisdiction by the Church which places the salvation of souls as her highest law. Mattei believes that salvation comes from obedience to the pope while faithful Catholics know that "without faith, it is impossible to please God," and that thepope is just as much subject to God's revealed truth as every other faithful Catholic. The "paradox" that Mattei is talking about is not real. There is no conflict of the SSPX "pastoral requirements" vs. Novus Ordo "juridical and doctrinal considerations."

Mattei believes that the pope can be judged by no one. That is a doubtful proposition. The Decretals of Gratian is a collection of canonical texts compiled in the 12th century. Pope Gregory IX in 1230 directed St. Raymond of Pennafort, the distinguished Dominican, to organize an addendum to the code to include legal codes adopted since the time of Gratian but the work became a much more extensive revision. Working from the Decretals of Gratian, St. Raymond wrote a five volume edition of the Decretals that became the Corpus Iuris Canonici which served as the legal code for the Latin Church

Decretum Gratiani, which was included in the old Corpus Iuris Canonici, affirmed that a Pope who deviates from right doctrine (i.e.: a notorious public heretic) can be judged. The canon states that the "pope judges all and is judged by no-one, unless he is found to have departed from the faith":

culpas redarguere pr mortalium nullus, quia cunctos ipse judicaturus a nemine est judicandus, nisi deprehendatur a fide devius (dist. XL, C. 6)Iuris Canonici 1917) came into force, the Church eliminated from the new legislation the phrase "unless he is found to have departed from the faith." This deletion was continued in the 1983 code. Although the phrase, "unless he is found to have departed from the faith," was not included in the 1917 and the 1983 codes, the canonical commentary still regards the phrase as legally binding:

 

COMMENTARY: "Canon 1404 is not a statement about the personal impeccability or inerrancy of the Holy Father. Should, indeed, the pope fall into heresy, it is understood that he would lose his office. To fall from Peter

New Commentary on the Code of Canon Law, John P. Beal, James A. Coriden, and Thomas J. Green eds. (New York: Paulist, 2000), p. 1,618.

The code is the compilation of laws governing the Church as social institution. Most of the laws in the code are ecclesiastical positive human laws grounded upon human authority, however, many of the legal codes are divine positive laws grounded upon divine authority or upon natural law. If a human law is deleted from the code, the law ceases to bind. If a law of divine authority is deleted from the code, the law continue in force for the human authority of the Church cannot overturn the law of God. This self-evident principle is stated in the code itself. Consequently, the commentary cited above is a recognition that the pope cannot be judged "unless he is found to have departed from the faith" is of divine origin. It is necessarily a divine law because the papacy is a divine institution established directly by Jesus Christ and therefore governed in its essence only by divine laws.

Therefore, it is divine law that permits a heretical pope to be judged. Importantly, although the law permits a heretical pope to be judged, it says nothing about who and how a pope is to be judged regarding heresy and it does not address penalties. It says nothing about removal from office. If the law intended the removal from office the law itself would have to state the penalty and provide a mechanism for its determination and enforcement.

So now it falls to opinions regarding the judgment of a heretical pope. Most theologians believe that it is "understood" that the removal from office necessarily follows from a judgment of heresy often citing the scriptural and traditional admonition to avoid heretics:

"A man that is a heretic, after the first and second admonition, avoid: Knowing that he, that is such a one, is subverted, and sinneth, being condemned by his own judgment" (Titus 3:10-11).

They argue that since the faithful cannot avoid a pope as head of the Church therefore the heretical pope must lose his office. A serious problem with this argument follows, that is, if the faithful cannot "avoid" a pope, then there must necessarily be a pope who in fact cannot be avoided. Therefore, those who would make the papacy vacant must also be able to fill the office with a true pope.

But can a heretical pope be avoided? It really becomes a problem for those who hold the pope as their proximate rule of faith and not, as they should, dogma. For if dogma is not the proximate rule of faith then the pope must be, and he then can never be a heretic for whatever the pope holds the dogma or doctrine to mean is what it then means and only those who disagree with the pope are heretics. For a Catholic, dogma is the proximate rule of faith and although a heretical pope can do immeasurable damage to the Church he cannot touch individual souls of the faithful.

If we adhere to what the law says and nothing more, we can say this: The definition of heresy is the denial of dogma. The heretic denies dogma and the faithful keep dogma. Those who can judge a heretical pope are the faithful. The law does not distinguish or discriminate among the faithful as to the judgment. Dogma is articulated for all the faithful. Its understanding does not require any theological competence. It requires proper definition and correct grammar. Any of the faithful, that is those who hold dogma as their proximate rule of faith, can judge a manifestly heretical pope such as Pope Francis. Any of the faithful can know when a dogma is directly contradicted for the first principles of the understanding, such as the principle of non-contradiction, are innate in human nature. Thus all the faithful can judge, in fact must judge, a heretical pope and so that they may not follow him in his heresy for God has said that 'it is not possible to deceive His elect' (Matt. 24:24). The law does not specify the judge because the judgment rests with all the faithful, it is universal. The law does not specify a penalty because none of the faithful have the competency to impose a penalty and remove a heretical pope from office. It is God who is the formal and final cause of the pope and the office of the papacy. It is God who 'marries' the designated candidate to the papal office and only God can remove him from it just as God removed the High Priest and destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem and the Levitical priesthood which can never be reconstituted.

Those who hold dogma as their proximate rule of faith recognize Pope Leo as a heretic because he denies dogmatic truth. He preaches a different gospel so we "receive him not into the house nor say to him, God speed you" (2 John 10). Since he preaches a different gospel, "Let him be anathema" because we are first "servants of Christ" (Gal 1: 8). For in dogma, the Church has spoken and the heretic Pope Leo "will not hear the church, (therefore) let him be to thee as the heathen and publican (Matt 18:17).

Since Mattei cannot see his way out of his box so he advises, "Reason suggests that each person remain in the position in which he finds himself, continuing to do what he does."Since Mattei cannot conceive a state of necessity from the current corruption of faith and morals maybe an analogy to a person dying of thirst would be more clear. By natural law a man dying from thirst is entitled to preserve his life by drinking available water. The pope tells him he cannot have any water. Mattei advises that he should "remain in the position which he finds himself, continuing to do what he does,", that is, continue to die of thirst. Suppose it is not just one man but an entire family? Suppose that man was so weakened that he could not bring the water to himself? Would Mattei intervene to help? Well, probably not because Mattei could not recognize a state of necessity if he were the man dying of thirst.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pope says church 'must move forward' if SSPX proceeds with illicit ordinations

Vatican News | Junno Arocho Esteves | June 17, 2026

Pope Leo XIV said that although he is considering a final appeal to the traditionalist Society of St. Pius X, the choice to splinter from the Catholic Church falls on them.

Speaking to journalists outside his residence in Castel Gandolfo June 16, the pope was asked about his feelings regarding plans by the traditionalist society, commonly known as SSPX, to proceed with the consecration of new bishops without a papal mandate.

The pope said that while he is "considering making another appeal to say: 'Do not do this, let us try to live in communion within the church,' " the decision to proceed "is their choice."

"Certainly, division among Christians is always a painful point. But they refuse to accept certain fundamental elements of the church, starting with several points from the Second Vatican Council," Leo said.

"If they make that choice, I am sorry, but we must move forward," he added. [.....]

COMMENT: The Vatican II Novus Ordo Church is a big tent inviting a wide variety of heretics, schismatics, apostates, pagans, animists, homosexuals, adulterers etc. to join the party. Even Leo/Prevost himself is now known to have worshiped the pagan goddess Pachamama. The SSPX, seeking a corner under this big tent,has been mute for so long we have wondered out loud if they lost the power of speech. But what about Pope Leo/Prevost? His recent pictures with the "Archbishopette of Canterbury" looks creepy. If he were just personally sick, his welcome would be extended without exceptions but, he has serious exceptions. Those must be "excepted" who "refuse to accept certain fundamental elements of the church, starting with several points from the Second Vatican Council"! There are some things the "listening church of Synodality" just can't listen to. Vatican II was a "pastoral council" that never rose above the level of churchmen pastorally opining with no greater authority than their grace of state.Any doctrinal opinions from churchmen from Vatican II that, if only apparently, contradict or undermine Catholic revealed truth must be rejected, and there is plenty there to reject. Such as, the claim that the Church of Christ subsists in the Catholic Church. Putting the question to Artificial Intelligence:

Question:If A subsists in B does it follow that A and B are an identity?

ANSWER: No.

 

So:

If A subsists in B, it

Only under additional premises

The truth that the Catholic Church and the Church of Christ are one and the same thing is divinely revealed truth. Even the blind "artificial intelligence" "sees" this Vatican II confabulation is just a lie! Those that deny this truth are heretics and, as St. Thomas says, "All heretics are schismatics," it remains to be determined what and who's church the SSPX will be leaving. Revelation ended with the death of the last apostle. What exactly Leo/Prevost is referring to when he talks about "certain fundamental elements of the church, starting with several points from the Second Vatican Council" needs serious clarification. No Catholic is obliged to believe anything with "divine and Catholic faith" that "started.... from the Second Vatican Council." The pastoral failures of Vatican II reek to high heaven and doctrinal obfuscation only magnifies the crime.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Heresy is Ugly

In the medieval town (of 1480), fourteen of the named buildings are churches; trees grow along the banks of the river and the bridge allows free passagearehouses dwarf and obscure the churches which dominated the medieval scene

Margaret Belcher, late professor of English at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, and editor of the multivolume collection of the great Victorian Gothic Revivalist Architect Augustus Welby Pugin (1812-1852), who was the architect for 9 cathedrals and 60 churches, on a pair of drawings of a English town contrasting the town of 1480 with what it became in 1880.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

By their fruits we are expected to know them!

The Archdiocese of Dubuque Iowa is restructuring its 160 parishes across 30 northeast Iowa counties into 24 "pastorates". Driven by a 46% decline in Mass attendance and a shrinking number of priests, the Archdiocese halted weekend Masses at more than 80 churches, though they remain open for weddings and funerals.

The transition to the new pastorate structure, which requires grouped parishes to share clergy and resources, officially takes effect on July 14, 2026.

The sweeping consolidation has significantly impacted communities and traditional worship schedules. Key details of the situation include.

The Cause: The Archdiocese reports a drop of nearly half in weekend Mass attendance over the last 20 years, alongside a decreasing number of priests. The region currently has roughly one priest for every two parishes.

Church Usage: While many church buildings will no longer host weekend Mass, they are not completely closed. They remain accessible for other liturgical celebrations, such as weddings, funerals, weekday Masses, and private prayer.

COMMENT: The Archdioces of Dubuque has paid out about $17 million in settlements for the sex abuse crimes of homosexual pederasts over the last 30 years. Unlike many dioceses in the United States such as Harrisburg, Baltimore and Philadelphia, the Dubuque Archdiocese has not had to file for bankruptcy and Chapter 11 protection. The collapse is due to the loss of the Catholic faith with the associated The consolidation is because of a Louisana in New Orleans that was established in 1793. The diocese of St. Louis covered the entire territory of the Louisana Purchase. Excluding Spanish missionary work in the southwest, the Archdioces of Dubuque is the third Catholic diocese west of the Mississippi River. It was in the beginning responsible for the spiritual welfare of all Catholics as well as Catholic missionary work in Iowa, Minnosota, North and South Dakota, that is, everywhere east of the Missouri river, and south-west Wisconsin. What the heroic French and Italian missionaries from the Archdiocese of Dubuque built for over the next hundred plus years has not just been squandered by the effeminate Novus Ordites through sloth, but actively ruined by their heresy and schism. This is the fruit of Vatican II. This decline has been evident since the early 1970s but with each passing year it is now visible to the blind. It is impossible to attribute good but misguided intentions to Novus Ordites. They are enemies of the Catholic faith. We must double our prayers that God will cleanse His Church even if we ourselves must suffer in the persecution. The loss of souls is irreparable. It may be soon time to say that there is no salvation in the Novus Ordo Church.

 

 

 

IMPORTANT TO UNDERSTAND

Modernism vs. Neo-Modernism: What is the Difference?

The overarching principle of post-conciliar theology is not modernism, properly speaking. Let us get our terms straight.
Modernism is the idea that there are no eternal truths, that truth is the correspondence of the mind with one's lifestyle (adaequatio intellectus et vitae), and that, therefore, old dogmas must be abandoned and new beliefs must arise that meet 'the needs of modern man'. This is a radical denial of the traditional and common sense notion of truth: the correspondence of the mind with reality (adaequatio intellectus et rei), which is the basis of the immutability of Catholic dogma.
No, the post-conciliar theological principle is neo-modernism, and the theology that is based on it is known as the nouvelle theologie.  It is the idea that old dogmas or beliefs must be retained, yet not the traditional 'formulas': dogmas must be expressed and interpreted in a new way in every age so as to meet the 'needs of modern man'.  This is still a denial of the traditional and common sense notion of truth as adaequatio intellectus et rei (insofar as it is still an attempt to make the terminology that expresses the faith correspond with our modern lifestyle) and consequently of the immutability of Catholic dogma, yet it is not as radical as modernism.  It is more subtle and much more deceptive than modernism because it claims that the faith must be retained; it is only the 'formulas' of faith that must be abandoned--they use the term 'formula' to distinguish the supposedly mutable words of our creeds, dogmas, etc. from their admittedly immutable meanings.  Therefore, neo-modernism can effectively slip under the radar of most pre-conciliar condemnations (except Humani Generis, which condemns it directly) insofar as its practitioners claim that their new and unintelligible theological terminology really expresses the same faith of all times.  In other words, neo-modernism is supposed to be 'dynamic orthodoxy': supposedly orthodox in meaning, yet always changing in expression to adapt to modern life (cf. Franciscan University of Steubenville's mission statement). 
Take extra ecclesiam nulla salus as a clear example of a dogma that has received a brutal neo-modernist re-interpretation: they claim that the old 'formula' that "there is no salvation outside the Church" must be abandoned; rather it is more meaningful to modern man to say that salvation is not in, but through, the Church;  people who are not in the Church may still be saved through the Church; thus, to them the dogma that "there is no salvation outside the Church" means that there is salvation outside the Church.  Hence see Ven. Pope Pius XII condemning those "reduce to a meaningless formula the necessity of belonging to the true Church in order to gain eternal salvation." (Humani generis 27).

Yet this mentality of reinterpreting everything anew in order to 'meet the needs of the times' is generally tends to be found in different degrees among different post-conciliar sources: 

It tends to be  (1) rampant in men like De Lubac, Von Balthasar, Congar, etc.: it is the ultimate goal of their writings, teachings, and activities as churchmen.   To achieve this end, they employ the technique of 'resourcement', the neo-modernist strategy of fishing for the few dubious, questionable, or idiosyncratic teachings of some Fathers of the Church and other authoritative writers, and gather them into a massive, heterodox theological argument against the traditional understanding of the faith (which they like to relativize by giving it names such as "Counter-Reformation" Theology, "Tridentine" Theology, or "Scholastic" Theology, instead of just admitting that it is Catholic Theology plain and simple).  This technique accomplishes three things that go hand-in-hand: (a) offers a refutation of traditional Catholicism, (b) defends an interpretation that meets the needs of modern times, and (c) gives it a semblance of being traditional, because it appears to be based in the Fathers et al.  This type of argument is used, for example, by Von Balthasar in his nearly heretical book, Dare We Hope that All Men be Saved? to 'prove', not that Hell does not exist (that is a dogma), but that it is empty.  But this technique and its neo-modernistic underpinnings is not only practiced in almost all of these men's writings; it is also defended in theory by many of them, particularly in Von Balthasar's daring little book, Razing the Bastions, where he demonstrates that "Tridentine" theology must be rejected in our times because it is 'boring'.

It also tends to be (2) present in a more moderate way in the non-binding statements by post-conciliar popes, since they themselves were deeply involved in the developing of the nouvelle theologie.  Just to give one of a million possible examples, see Pope Benedict's evolutionistic re-interpretation of the Resurrection of Our Lord.  Nothing here obviously contradicts  the dogma of the Resurrection (it may be interpreted as a simple analogy, even if a bad one, and nothing more), but it is a novelty that can be easily understood as claiming that the Resurrection is part of the natural development of nature (thus giving credence to some of the nouvelle theologie's pet doctrines, such as De Lubac's heterodox notion of the supernatural and De Chardin's pantheistic evolutionism).   This happens almost on a daily basis in what comes out of the Vatican, not to mention what comes from local bishops.

And finally, neo-modernism tends to be present (3) mostly implicitly or behind-the-scenes in the Council, the Catechism, etc., even though it seldom comes out more explicitly.  Things are done at this level under the pretext of 'aggiornamento', a euphemism for neo-modernism.  That is usually all the justification provided since at this authoritative level, there is no need to justify things theologically.  Hence, Vatican II and the Catechism are not outright neo-modernistic.  Rather, they (like most of post-conciliar doctrine) tend in that direction and/or are inspired by that mentality.  In other words, most of the time these documents do not explicitly teach neo-modernist errors (the kind of errors you hear explicitly from neo-modernist theologians and priests). Rather, they are full of dangerous ambiguities: statements that in a technical sense could be interpreted as being in harmony with the traditional faith, but that, in their natural, non-forced, interpretation are heterodox.  One clear example of this is Dignitatis humanae, par. 2; entire monographs have been written in order to prove that, despite appearances, this document does not contradict previous teaching.  Maybe in fact it ultimately does not, but it is obvious that the prima facie meaning does; otherwise there would be no need to write so many volumes to prove it.
It must be noted that these are general tendencies, and that in some documents (cf. Gaudium et Spes) and every now and then in papal and episcopal statements neo-modernist principles rears come out more explicitly.   

For a more detailed philosophical and theological critique of neo-modernism, and how it is nothing but a re-hashing of modernism, see Garrigou-Lagrange's Where is the New Theology Leading Us? and his The Structure of the Encyclical Humani Generis.

Francisco J. Romero Carrasquillo, Ph.D., Professor of Theology and Philosophy

 

 

 

 

 

The Absolute Necessity of

However, in the face of this satanic hatred of religion, which reminds Us of the "mystery of iniquity" [Thess. 2, 7] referred to by St. Paul, mere human means and expedients are not enough, and We should consider ourselves wanting in Our apostolic ministry if We did not point out to mankind those wonderful mysteries of light, that alone contain the hidden strength to subjugate the unchained powers of darkness. When Our Lord, coming down from the splendors of Thabor, had healed the boy tormented by the devil, whom the disciples had not been able to cure, to their humble question: "Why could not we cast him out?" He made reply in the memorable words: "This kind is not cast out but by prayer and fasting" [Matth. 17, 18-20]. It appears to Us, Venerable Brethren, that these Divine words find a peculiar application in the evils of our times, which can be averted only by means of prayer and penance.

Mindful then of our condition, that we are essentially limited and absolutely dependent on the Supreme Being, before everything else let us have recourse to prayer. We know through faith how great is the power of humble, trustful, persevering prayer. To no other pious work have ever been attached such ample, such universal, such solemn promises as to prayer: "Ask and it shall be given you, seek and you shall find, knock and it shall be opened to you. For every one that asketh, receiveth; and he that seeketh, findeth; and to him that knocketh, it shall be opened" [Matth. 7, 7]. "Amen, amen I say to you, if you ask the Father anything in my name He will give it you."

And what object could be more worthy of our prayer, and more in keeping with the adorable person of Him who is the only "mediator of God and men, the Man Jesus Christ" [I Tim. 2, 5], than to beseech Him to preserve on earth faith in one God living and true? Such prayer bears already in itself a part of its answer; for in the very act of prayer a man unites himself with God and, so to speak, keeps alive on earth the idea of God. The man who prays, merely by his humble posture, professes before the world his faith in the Creator and Lord of all things; joined with others in prayer, he recognizes, that not only the individual, but human society as a whole has over it a supreme and absolute Lord. Pope Pius XI, Charitate Christi Compulsi, On the Sacred Heart