.....
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 ..... Nor are
superiors, administrators, canons, chaplains, and other secular priests, or
religious, of whatever title designated, obliged to celebrate the Mass
otherwise than as enjoined by Us.
..... 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 traditional Roman Rite of the Mass.
Sunday after the Ascension
Our Lady
Help of Christians
Within
the Octave
May 24, 2020
“Today,” says St. Augustine, “we shall
keep the Ascension of our Lord in a fitting manner, with devotion, sanctity and
piety, if we ascend with Him and keep our hearts on high,” “Let our thoughts be there where He is, and
here on earth there will be peace,” “Let
us ascend with Him now, with our hearts, and when His promised day comes, we
shall follow Him also with our bodies; but we should know that neither pride,
nor avarice, nor lust ascend with Christ.
If we wish to follow our Healer in His Ascension, we must put off the
burden of our vices and sins” (Matins).
This Sunday is a preparation for Pentecost. Before ascending to heaven, our Lord had
promised, at the Last Supper, that He would not leave us orphans, but would
send us His Holy Spirit, the Paraclete (Gospel,
Alleluia); that in all things we might glorify God, through Jesus Christ our
Lord (Gospel). Therefore, like the
Apostles assembled in the Cenacle, we must prepare by prayer and charity
(Epistle) for the holy Day of Pentecost, when Christ, who is “our Advocate with
the Father” (First Nocturn), will obtain for us from
Him the Holy Ghost.
INTROIT:
Ps. 26. Hear, O Lord, my voice with which I have
cried to Thee, alleluia: my heart hath said to Thee, I have sought Thy face;
Thy face, O Lord, I will seek: turn not away Thy face from me, alleluia,
alleluia.
Ps. The Lord is my light and my salvation: whom
shall I fear? Glory be, etc. Hear, O Lord, my voice with which, etc.
COLLECT:
Almighty, everlasting God, grant that we may always
have a will devoted to Thee, and a sincere heart to serve Thy majesty. Through our Lord, etc.
Almighty and merciful God, Who for the defense of the Christian people, didst
in a marvelous manner establish a perpetual help in the most blessed Virgin
Mary; mercifully grant, that we, who in life do battle protected by such a
help, may, in death, obtain the victory over our malignant foe. Through the
same Lord, etc.
Grant, we beseech Thee, almighty God, that as we
believe that Thy only-begotten Son our Redeemer this day ascended into heaven,
so we may ourselves also mentally dwell in heavenly places. Through our Lord, etc.
EPISTLE: 1 Peter 4, 7-11.
Dearly beloved, Be ye prudent and
watch in prayers. But before all things have a constant mutual charity among
yourselves: for charity coevereth a multitude of
sins. Using hospitality one towards another, without murmuring: as every man
hath received grace, ministering the same one to another, as good stewards of
the manifold grace of God. If any man speak, let him speak, as the words of
God: if any minister, let him do it, as of the power which God administereth: that in all things God may be honored
through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Practice: The
virtues here recommended are excellent preparatives
for receiving the Holy Ghost, for nothing makes us more worthy of His grace
than temperance, prayer, charity, unity, and hospitality towards our neighbors.
Endeavor, therefore, to exercise these virtues, and every day during the
following week pray fervently to the Holy Ghost for help in your endeavors.
GREAT ALLELUIA: Alleluia, alleluia.
Ps. 46. The Lord hath reigned over all the nations;
God sitteth on His holy throne, alleluia.
John 14. I will not leave you orphans; I go and I come
to you, and your heart shall rejoice, alleluia.
GOSPEL: John 15, 26-16, 4.
At that time, Jesus said to His
disciples: When the Paraclete cometh, whom I will
send you from the Father, the Spirit of truth, who proceedeth
from the Father, He shall give testimony of Me: and you shall give testimony
because you are with Me from the beginning. These things I have spoken to you,
that you may not be scandalized. They will put you out of the synagogues: yea,
the hour cometh, that whosoever killeth you will
think that he doth a service to God. And these things will they do to you,
because they have not known the Father, nor Me. But these things I have told
you, that, when the hour shall come, you may remember that I told you of them.
What kind of sin is scandal?
It is a frightful sin. By it countless sins are
occasioned, thousands of souls are carried to perdition, while the loving
design of God for the salvation of men is frustrated.
How, in general, is scandal
given?
By saying, doing, or neglecting to do something which
becomes the occasion of sin to another.
When do parents give scandal?
When they set a bad example to their children. When
they do not correct them for doing wrong, neglect to keep them from what is
bad, or to teach them that which is good.
How do employers give
scandal?
In much the same way that parents give scandal to their
children: when, by bad example or by command, they keep their servants or other
employees from divine service, or neglect to make them attend it; when they
themselves use, or give to others, flesh-meat on days of abstinence; when they
order the commission of sin.
OFFERTORY:
Ps. 46. God is ascended with jubilee; and the Lord
with the sound of trumpet, alleluia.
SECRET:
May
these unspotted sacrifices purify us, O Lord, and give to our minds the vigor
of grace from above. Through our Lord,
etc.
We offer unto Thee, O Lord, this sacrifice of propitiation for the triumph
of the Christian religion: and that it may profit us, O let the Virgin come to
our aid as helper: she through whom so great a victory was obtained. Through
the same Lord, etc.
Receive, O Lord, the gifts which
we offer for the glorious ascension of Thy Son, and mercifully grant that we
may be delivered from present dangers and attain eternal life. Through our Lord, etc.
PREFACE FOR ASCENSION:
It is truly meet and just, right
and profitable unto salvation, that we should at all times and in all places
give thanks unto Thee, O holy Lord, Father almighty, everlasting God, through
Christ our Lord. Who after His
resurrection appeared and showed Himself to all his disciples; and while they beheld Him, was lifted up into heaven, so that He might
make us partakers of His Godhead. And
therefore with the angels and archangels, the thrones and dominions, and the
whole host of heavenly army we sing a hymn of Thy glory, saying again and
again: Holy, holy, holy, etc.
COMMUNION:
John 17. Father, while I was with them, I kept
them whom Thou gavest Me, alleluia; but now I come to
Thee: I pray not that Thou shouldst take them out of
the world, but that Thou shouldst keep them from
evil, alleluia, alleluia.
POSTCOMMUNION:
Filled, O Lord, with sacred gifts, grant, we beseech Thee, that we may
ever continue in thanksgiving. Through
our Lord, etc.
Be present, O Lord, with the people who are being refreshed by the
participation of Thy body and blood:
that by the help of Thy most holy Mother, they may be delivered from
every evil and danger, and be preserved in the pursuit of every good work. Who livest and reignest, etc.
Grant us, we beseech thee,
almighty and merciful God, that what we have taken and received in visible
mysteries, may profit us by its invisible effect. Through our Lord, etc.
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
What shall be given
unto Thee, or what shall be added unto Thee, to a deceitful tongue? Sharp arrows of the mighty One, with
destroying coals.
Ps. 119
Remember:
Iconoclasm, the destruction of the images of our holy faith, is a defined and
condemned heresy!
PROPER OF THE SAINTS FOR THE
WEEK OF MAY 24th:
|
24
|
Sun
|
Sunday within the Octave of the Ascension
Our Lady Help of Christians
Within the Octave
|
sd
|
W
|
|
Mass 9:00 AM; Members Ss. Peter & Paul; Rosary
of Reparation 8:30 AM; Confessions 8:00 AM
|
|
25
|
Mon
|
St. Gregory VII, PC
Within the
Octave
St. Urban
I, PM
|
d
|
W
|
|
Mass 8:30 AM; Rosary of Reparation before Mass
|
|
26
|
Tue
|
St. Philip Neri, C
Within the
Octave
St. Eleutherius, PM
|
d
|
R
|
|
Mass 8:30 AM; Rosary of Reparation before Mass
|
|
27
|
Wed
|
St. Bede the Venerable, CD
Within the
Octave
St. John I,
PM
|
d
|
R
|
|
Mass 8:30 AM; Rosary of Reparation before Mass
|
|
28
|
Thu
|
Octave Day of the Ascension
St.
Augustine of Canterbury, BpC
|
dm
|
W
|
|
Mass 8:30 AM; Rosary of Reparation before Mass
|
|
29
|
Fri
|
St. Mary Magdalen dei Pazzi, V
|
sd
|
W
|
A
|
Mass 8:30 AM; Rosary of Reparation before Mass
|
|
30
|
Sat
|
Vigil of Pentecost
St. Felix
I, PM
BVM Queen
of Apostles
St.
Ferdinand III, King of Castile
St. Joan of
Arc (local)
|
|
V
R
|
F
|
Mass 9:00 AM; Rosary of Reparation & Confessions
8:30 AM
|
|
31
|
Sun
|
Pentecost Sunday
(BVM Queen of all Saints & Mother of Fair Love)
(BVM Mediatrix of All
Grace)
|
d1cl
|
R
|
|
Mass 9:00 AM; Members Ss. Peter & Paul; Rosary of
Reparation 8:30 AM; Confessions 8:00 AM
|
Jesus exercises over
all nations the royal power, which He received, as Man, on the day of His
Ascension. He redeemed us all by His
Blood; we are therefore His people, and He is our King. He is, and He calls Himself, ‘King of kings
and Lord of lords.’ The kings of the
earth reign not either by their own prowess, or by the boasted social compact;
they lawfully reign by Christ alone. Peoples
and nations are not their own masters; they belong to Christ and are His
subjects. His law requires no sanction
from man; it is above all human laws, and should be their guide and
controller. ‘Why have the nations raged,
and the people devised vain things? The
kings of the earth stood up and the princes met together, against the Lord and
against His Christ.’ How vain all these
efforts! For, as the apostle says, ‘He
must reign, until He hath put all His enemies under His feet.’
Dom Gueranger,
The Liturgical Year, Sunday within the Octave of the Ascension
“Yea, the hour
cometh, that whosoever killeth you will think that he
doth a service to God. And these things will they do to you, because they have
not known the Father, nor Me.”
“Not to resist
an error is to approve of it – not to defend a truth is to reject it.”
St.
Augustine’s dictum, codified in the Decretum Gratiani
INSTRUCTION ON SCANDAL
These things have I spoken to
you, that you may not be scandalized (John 16, 1).
How is scandal given?
By speaking, doing or omitting
that which will be, to others an occasion, of sin: Scandal is given in
different ways, for instance: if you dress improperly, speak improper words, or
sing bad songs; by which you can see, that your neighbor will be tempted to
think, desire or act wrongly; or what is worse, if you act sinfully, in the
presence of, others, or bring bad books., books against good morals, or against
the holy faith, among people; if you incite others to anger, cursing, and
vengeance, or if you prevent them from attending church, the sermon, or
catechetical instruction, etc. In all these things you become guilty of
scandal, as well as of all the sins to which it gives rise. If at the Last
judgment we will be unable to give an account of our own sins, how, then can we
answer for the innumerable sins caused by the scandal we have given? Therefore
Christ pronounces a terrible, woe upon those who give scandal. Woe to that man,
He says, by whom the scandal cometh! It were better for him, that a millstone
should be hanged about his neck, and that he should be drowned in the depth of
the sea (Matt. 18).
How do parents give scandal?
By giving their children bad
example; by excessive anger, cursing and swearing; by avarice, injustice and
cheating; by discord and quarrels; by gluttony in eating and drinking; by
extravagance and vanity in dress; by sneering at religion, good morals, etc.;
by not keeping their children from evil company, but sometimes even bringing
them into it; by not punishing and endeavoring to eradicate their children’s
vices. How much parents sin, through such scandals, cannot be expressed; at the
Day of judgment their children will be their accusers!
How do masters give scandal
to their servants and those under their care?
In the same way as parents do to
their children; by keeping them away from, or not urging them by their own
example or command to attend church on Sundays and holy-days; by giving them
meat on fast-days; by commanding them to do sinful things, such as stealing,
etc.
Who has given me the
power to judge my brethren? When I thus constitute myself their judge and in
the tribunal of my thoughts condemn first one and then another, I am usurping
an authority I do not possess and which belongs to God alone: “For God is
Judge” [Ps. 49, 6]. And if this is not pride, what is pride? In punishment of
such arrogance God often permits us to fall into the very faults that we have
condemned in others, and it is well for us to remember the teaching of St.
Paul: “Wherefore thou art inexcusable, O man, whosoever thou art that judgest. For wherein thou judgest
another thou condemnest thyself.” [Rom. 2, 1].
Fr. Cajetan
Mary da Bergamo, Humility of Heart
Man has a twofold nature, the one superior, the other inferior. The first
is generally termed reason, the second is called appetite, sensuality, or
passion. Reason is the distinguishing property of man, and he is not considered
responsible for the primary impulses of his appetite unless his superior
faculty confirms the choice.
The entire spiritual warfare, consequently, consists in this: the
rational faculty is placed between the Divine will above it and the sensitive
appetite below it, and is attacked from both sides------God moving it by His
grace, and the flesh by its appetites strive for victory…. No one should delude
himself that he can acquire virtue and serve God in the proper way, unless he
is willing to undergo a violent struggle. He must conquer the difficulty he
will experience when he deprives himself of the pleasures, great or small, to
which he has been viciously attached.
Dom Lorenzo Scupoli, The Spiritual Combat
St. Thomas gives us a
profound reason for this. All sin, he says, proceeds from self-love, for we
never commit sin without coveting some gratification for self. From self-love
spring those three branches of sin mentioned by St. John: “the concupiscence of
the flesh, the concupiscence of the eyes, and the pride of life” (1 Jn. 2:16),
which are love of pleasure, love of riches, and love of honors. Three of the
deadly sins, lust, gluttony, and sloth, spring from love of pleasure, pride
springs from love of honors, and covetousness from love of riches. The
remaining two, anger and envy, serve all these unlawful loves. Anger is aroused
by any obstacle which prevents us from attaining what we desire, and envy is
excited when we behold anyone possessing what our self-love claims. These are
the three roots of the seven deadly sins, and consequently of all the others.
Let these chiefs be destroyed and the whole army will soon be routed. Hence we
must vigorously attack these mighty giants who dispute our entrance to the
promised land.
Ven. Louis of Granada, The
Sinner’s Guide
Among the works comprised in charity to our neighbor the following are
the most important: advice, counsel, succor, forbearance, pardon, edification.
These are so strongly linked with charity that the practice of them indicates
the progress we have made in the practice of charity.
Ven. Louis of Granada, The Sinner’s Guide
Neither genius, fame,
nor love show the greatness of the soul.
Only kindness can do that…. Kindness is a virtue that does not think
about its own interest; does not wait for the call of duty; has no need of
aesthetic attraction to solicit it; but is instinctively the more drawn towards
its object, the more the object is wretched, poor, forsaken, and, humanly
speaking, contemptible. But before all
things have a constant mutual charity among yourselves: for charity covereth a multitude of sins (I Peter 4:8).
Rev. Jean Baptiste Henri Lacordaire, O.
P.
Peter is subject to the duties of the
Office; otherwise, neither is the [Apostolic] Church in him, nor is he in the
Church.
St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 11a, q. 39, Art 1, ad 6
“But before all things have a constant mutual charity among yourselves:
for charity covereth a multitude of sins.”
1 Peter 4, 8
Jesus, Son of God and Son of Man, King of
Angels and of men, is not only your God, your Saviour
and your Sovereign Lord, but is also your head and you are “members of His
Body,” as St. Paul says: “of His flesh and of His bones” (Eph. 5, 30).
You are consequently united with Him
in the most intimate union possible, that is, the union of members with their
head.
You are united with Him spiritually by faith and by the grace He gave you in
Holy Baptism. You are united with Him corporally in the union of His Most
Sacred Body with yours in the Blessed Eucharist.
It necessarily follows that, just as
the members are animated by the spirit of the head, and live the same life, so
you must also be animated by the spirit of Jesus, live His life, walk in His
ways, be clothed with His sentiments and inclinations, and perform all your
actions in the dispositions and intentions that actuated His.
In a word, you must carry on and perpetuate
the life, religion and devotion which He exercised upon earth.
St. John Eudes, The Four Foundations of Sanctity
People often say, ‘It is better to be a good Protestant than a bad
Catholic.’ That is not true! That would mean that one could be saved without
the true faith. No. A bad Catholic remains a child of the family, although a
prodigal, and however great a sinner he may be, he still has a right to mercy.
Through his faith, a bad Catholic is nearer to God than a Protestant, for he is
a member of the household, whereas the heretic is not. And how hard it is to
make him become one!
St. Peter Julian Eymard
This shameful font of indifferentism gives rise to that absurd and
erroneous proposition which claims that liberty of conscience must be
maintained for everyone. It spreads ruin in sacred and civil affairs, though
some repeat over and over again with the greatest impudence that some advantage
accrues to religion from it. “But the death of the soul is worse than freedom
of error,” as Augustine was wont to say.
When all restraints are removed by which men are kept on the narrow path
of truth, their nature, which is already inclined to evil, propels them to
ruin. Then truly “the bottomless pit” is open from which John saw smoke
ascending which obscured the sun, and out of which locusts flew forth to
devastate the earth. Thence comes transformation of minds, corruption of
youths, contempt of sacred things and holy laws--in other words, a pestilence
more deadly to the state than any other. Experience shows, even from earliest
times, that cities renowned for wealth, dominion, and glory perished as a
result of this single evil, namely immoderate freedom of opinion, license of
free speech, and desire for novelty.
Pope Gregory XVI, Mirari Vos
It is an intolerable
travail for someone to drudge at amassing riches and then, once they have been
acquired, never enjoy them. It is an
even worse misfortune to devote much time to prayer and get no use from it in
situations where it applies. It is
pitiful when, after ten or twenty years of mental prayer and of dealing with
God and meditating on the life of our Lord Jesus Christ, you complain with
impatience and unrestrained criticism about any adversity that befalls
you. You may be sure that for the whole
time that you spent on prayer you were digging in a barren mine and extracting
not silver or gold but sand and gravel.
Rev. Antonio Ruiz de
Montoya, S. J., Jesuit missionary to the native Indians of Paraguay
WAITING SUNDAY
AFTER ASCENSION
PRESENCE OF GOD ‑
Grant Lord, that my heart may ever be turned toward heaven where You await me.
MEDITATION:
I. This Sunday is like a prolongation of
the Feast of the Ascension. The Introit reflects the feelings which the
Apostles must have experienced during the time between the departure of Jesus
and the descent of the Holy Spirit “Hear, O Lord, my voice calling to You ....
I seek Your face, O Lord, do not hide Your face from me.” As on the day of the
Ascension, the eyes of the Apostles are turned toward heaven, where they saw
their Master disappear, and their hearts sigh after Him. As long as we are on
our earthly pilgrimage, far from God, He must be the constant yearning of our
souls. But we should not remain idle while we are waiting to go to our
fatherland. In the Epistle of the day (1 Pt 4, 7‑11), Peter
teaches us what we must do to make our life on earth a real preparation for our
meeting with God: “Watch in prayers. But before all things, have a constant
mutual charity among yourselves.” This is exactly what the Apostles did as they
waited for the Holy Spirit: together in the Cenacle they were persevering in
prayer in the unity of fraternal love. God does not look with favor on the
prayers and sacrifices of one who does not love his neighbor‑ no matter
who he may be‑ with sincere benevolence. Jesus has expressly said: “If
therefore thou offer thy gift at the altar, and there thou remember that thy
brother hath anything against thee; leave there thy offering. . . and go first
to be reconciled to thy brother” (Mt 5, 23-24). Prayer alone will not
suffice to draw down divine graces, nor will it acquire eternal life for us.
Fraternal charity, the surest pledge of the sincerity of our love for God, is
an absolute requisite. The Holy Spirit, who is the spirit of charity, who is
substantial love, cannot enter a heart which is narrow and mean in its
relations with its neighbor; lack of charity is one of the greatest obstacles
to His action, because it is directly opposed to His essence. Just as water
paralyzes the action of fire, so does lack of charity paralyze the action of
the Holy Spirit. Furthermore, as long as we live on earth, we are all liable to
fall; all of us, therefore, need pardon; “charity,” says the Epistle, “covers a
multitude of sins.”
2. In today’s Gospel (Jn 15, 26-27; 16, 1‑4) Jesus reiterates
His promise concerning the descent of the Holy Spirit “When the Paraclete cometh, whom I will send you from the Father . .
. you shall give testimony [of Me].” As on the day of His Ascension, He
connects the coming of the Holy Spirit with the mission of the Apostles, that
mission which will consist essentially in giving testimony of Christ. “You shall
receive the power of the Holy Spirit... and you shall be witnesses unto Me . .
. even to the uttermost part of the earth” (Ep:
Feast of the Ascension). Today’s Gospel explains the scope of this testimony
which the Apostles, as well as all future Christians, will be called upon to
give. “They will put you out of the synagogues: yea, the hour cometh that
whosoever killeth you, will think that he doth a
service to God.” Jesus died on the Cross to give testimony to the Father; His
disciples will have to suffer, undergo persecution, and even death itself, to
give testimony to Him. We cannot follow a road different from the one which
Jesus has trodden: “If any man will come after Me, let him... take up his cross
and follow Me” (Mt 16,24), He repeats to us. A calm, tranquil testimony,
which is made without facing danger‑ still less of risking life‑
will always have only relative value and ordinarily gives no guarantee of its
genuineness or its strength; on the contrary, the more it costs, the greater
its value in proving the fidelity of him who renders it. To witness to Christ,
without regarding the difficulties, sufferings or struggles that may be
encountered, is the program of the true Christian. But who will give us
courage? To us as to the Apostles, courage will come from the Holy Spirit, from
His gift of fortitude; it will come from assiduous meditation on the example
which Christ has given us; it will also come from His own words, spoken of
coming persecutions: “I have told you these things, that you may not be
scandalized in Me.”
COLLOQUY:
O Lord, make me worthy to give testimony of You, not only in words, but
especially in deeds, in spite of the difficulties and sufferings I may
encounter. The Apostles gave testimony of You to the extent of facing death for
love of You; grant that I may give testimony of You at least by a life worthy
of You.
To give testimony of You, O Lord, “I would travel the world over to
preach Your name, O my Beloved, and raise on heathen soil the glorious standard
of the Cross! One mission alone would not satisfy my longings. I would spread
the Gospel in all parts of the world, even in the farthest isles. I would be a
missionary, but not for a few years only. Were it possible, I should wish to
have been one from the world’s creation and to remain one till the end of time.
But the greatest of all my desires is to win the martyr’s palm ....
“When I think of the fearful torments awaiting Christians at the time of
Antichrist, my heart thrills within me and I wish that these torments could be
reserved for me. Open, O Jesus, the book of life in which are written the deeds
of all Your saints; each one of those deeds I long to accomplish for You ....
Great deeds are forbidden me; I can neither preach the Gospel nor shed my blood
. . . but what does it matter? My brothers labor in my stead while . . . I
remain close to the throne and love You for all those who are in the strife”
(cf. T.C.J. St, 13).
Yes, O Lord, grant me a true love, so that I may always be faithful to
You in little things, since it is not given me to perform great ones. Grant
especially that I may always give You the testimony of a sincere profession of
faith, of behavior which is wholly conformed to Your law, no matter where or in
what circumstance I may be, never letting myself deviate through human respect.
Conformity
to Christ Crucified
In truth, the wounds were... open, deep, his (St. Francis) hands and
feet pierced through and through, each by a dark rust-colored nail. The heads
protruded, the points inside were as though bent and hammered, in such a way
that one could insert a finger within the hook. The cluster of nerves, muscles
and tendons were left free, but on setting his foot on the ground they caused
excruciating torture and, for that reason, from then on Francis had to use a
staff and, for his journeys, a donkey. St. Clare devised some ingenious grooved
shoes to mitigate the Saint’s pains. The nails were like sinewy flesh, hard,
tough, solid and so much a single piece that, by pushing on the head, the point
stuck out more… Fresh and copious blood
flowed from all the wounds. Leo was the one assigned to stanch it, applying
cloths he changed frequently. The wound in his side, that had abundant
hemorrhages, measured three fingers in width. These details, so dramatically
realistic and recorded by authors contemporary with Francis, help one to
understand the state of physical annihilation he suffered until his
death...
Emilia Pardo Bazan,
St. Francis of Assisi, 13th Century
The definition of a revealed dogma is one of the greatest benefits God
can accord His Church. All of the truths which Jesus Christ taught are life and
light, and their explicit declaration in the course of centuries each time
brings to Christianity a new degree of strength and splendor. The sentiment of
faith must therefore cause the faithful to desire development of the Creed, in
order to enter more and more into possession of the truth which the Son of God
brought to earth. The happiness of Heaven will consist in seeing the whole truth;
the increasing richness of the Symbolum of revealed
dogmas joins us ever closer to it here below.
Dom Guéranger, The Pontifical Monarchy
Sometimes, when I urge the Catholics here to be bold, and not to
stagger in the profession of their faith, they say that it is very easy for me
to talk, who am not exposed to the same dangers and loss of fortune as they
are. To that I reply— “Just consider whether your King can ever reduce you to a
life of greater poverty than I am leading, and should it even come to that, you
would be consoled by the love of your country, which is the strongest feeling a
person can have. You would still be surrounded by your relatives and friends.
And, moreover, you were not born in Spain, and do not know what it is to
exchange it for England. Nothing can go beyond that!”
Blessed Luisa de Carvajal, Martyr, The First
& Only Woman Jesuit Missionary, Letter from London, 1606
INSTRUCTION ON
PREPARATION FOR PENTECOST
1) We should withdraw, after
the example of the Blessed Virgin and the apostles, to some solitary place, or
at least avoid, intercourse with others, as much as possible; speak but little,
and apply ourselves to earnest and persevering prayer; for in solitude God
speaks to man.
2) We should purify our
conscience by a contrite confession, become reconciled to our neighbor, it we
have lived in enmity; for the Holy Ghost, as a spirit of peace and purity,
lives only in pure and peaceful souls (Ps. 35, 3).
3) We should give alms
according to our means, for it is said in the Acts of the Apostles (Acts 10) of
the Gentile centurion Cornelius, that by prayer and alms-deeds he made himself
worthy of the gifts of the Holy Ghost.
4) We should fervently
desire to receive the Holy Ghost, and should give expression to this longing by
frequent aspirations to God, making use of the prayer: “Come, O Holy Ghost,
etc.”
My children, why are there no Sacraments in other religions? Because
there is no salvation there! We have the Sacraments at our disposal because we
belong to the religion of salvation. We are bound to give thanks to God for
them from our hearts, for the Sacraments are the sources of salvation. It is
not so in other religions.
St. John Vianney, Cure d’Ars
We declare that the greater part of those who are damned have brought
the calamity on themselves by ignorance of the mysteries of the Faith, which
they should have known and believed, in order to be united with the elect.
St. Pope Pius X, Acerbo Nimis
“The Jews are enemies
of God and foes of our holy religion.”
St. Pio of Pietrelicina
[American Jewish Committee’s interfaith
affairs director Rabbi David] Rosen said. “Those who said Benedict was the last
pope who would be a pope that lived through the Shoah,
or that said there would not be another pope who had a personal connection to
the Jewish people, they were wrong,” Rosen said.... Israel Singer, the former
head of the World Jewish Congress, said he spent time working with Bergoglio when the two were distributing aid to the poor in
Buenos Aires in the early 2000s, part of a joint Jewish-Catholic program called
Tzedaka.... Bergoglio also
wrote the foreward of a book by Rabbi Sergio Bergman,
a Buenos Aires legislator, and referred to him as “one of my teachers.”.... Bergoglio attended Rosh Hashanah services at the Benei Tikva Slijot
synagogue in September 2007.... Last November, Bergoglio
hosted a Kristallnacht memorial event at the Buenos
Aires Metropolitan Cathedral with Rabbi Alejandro Avruj
from the NCI-Emanuel World Masorti congregation. He also has worked with the Latin American
Jewish Congress and held meetings with Jewish youth who participate in its New
Generations program.... In his visit to the Buenos Aires synagogue, according to
the Catholic Zenit news agency, Bergoglio
told the congregation that he was there to examine his heart “like a pilgrim,
together with you, my elder brothers.”....
Jewish Telegraphic Agency, March 13, 2015
“It would seem as if this lady had been sent here for the express purpose
of shaming our want of courage. The example she sets us by her bold profession
of the Catholic faith, and her desires of martyrdom, are a rebuke to our
timidity.”
Jesuit Father commenting on Ven. Luisa de Carvajal,
a Spanish lady of nobility who came to England at the time of the Gunpowder
Plot to encourage Catholics in the practice, profession and defense of their
faith. She died from injuries suffered
from an anti-Catholic mob directed by King James’ government.
Only Those in the State of Grace Can Be “Numbered Among
the Children of God.”
Saying within themselves, repenting, and groaning for anguish of
spirit: These are they, whom we had some time in derision, and for a parable of
reproach. We fools esteemed their life madness, and their end without honour. Behold how they are numbered among the children
of God, and their lot is among the saints. Therefore we have erred from the
way of truth, and the light of justice hath not shined unto us, and the sun of
understanding hath not risen upon us. We wearied ourselves in the way of
iniquity and destruction, and have walked through hard ways, but the way of the
Lord we have not known. What hath pride profited us? or what advantage hath the
boasting of riches brought us? All those things are passed away like a shadow,
and like a post that runneth on, And as a ship that passeth through the waves: whereof when it is gone by, the
trace cannot be found, nor the path of its keel in the waters: Or as when a
bird flieth through the air, of the passage of which
no mark can be found, but only the sound of the wings beating the light air,
and parting it by the force of her flight; she moved her wings, and hath flown
through, and there is no mark found afterwards of her way: Or as when an arrow
is shot at a mark, the divided air presently cometh together again, so that the
passage thereof is not known: So we also being born, forthwith ceased to be:
and have been able to shew no mark of virtue: but are
consumed in our wickedness. Such things as these the sinners said in hell: For
the hope of the wicked is as dust, which is blown away with the wind, and as a
thin froth which is dispersed by the storm: and a smoke that is scattered
abroad by the wind: and as the remembrance of a guest of one day that passeth by.
Wisdom 5:3-15
How happy I would have been to fight at the time of the Crusades or,
later on, to fight against the heretics! Be assured that I would not have been
afraid… I want to be a warrior, a priest, a Doctor of the Church, a martyr! I
want to go to the ends of the earth to preach Your name, O Jesus, to plant Your
glorious cross on pagan shores!
St. Teresa of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face
Did
one of the main Vatican II documents distort the Words of Our Lord in the
Gospel?
Those who wish to
apply a ‘hermeneutic of continuity’ to Vatican II, or who deny that there can
be any opposition or rupture between the documents of that council and Catholic
tradition, or who claim that the assertion that the authentic teachings of
Vatican II formally contradict the tradition of the Church is false, might
consider the following passage from the council’s pastoral constitution Gaudium et Spes:
Gaudium et Spes 24: ‘Quapropter dilectio Dei
et proximi primum et
maximum mandatum est.’
For
non-Latinists, this claim (it is a complete sentence in the conciliar
document) can be translated as follows: ‘For love of God and of neighbour is the first and greatest commandment’. No Latin
is needed to realise that this is a flat
contradiction of the teaching of Christ. There is a deliberate allusion in Gaudium et Spes 24
to the wording of the divine teaching it is contradicting, as can be seen from
looking at the Vulgate text of that teaching:
Matthew 22:35-39: “Et interrogavit eum unus ex eis
legis doctor, temptans eum; ‘Magister, quod est mandatum magnum in lege? Ait illi Iesus:
‘diliges Dominum Deum tuum ex toto corde
tuo, et in tota anima tua, et in tota mente tua. Hoc est maximum et primum mandatum. Secundum autem simile est huic: diliges proximum
tuum, sicut teipsum.’”
This text from Gaudium et Spes suffices to prove
that the teachings of the Second Vatican Council are not without error, and
that fidelity to Christ’s teaching requires that parts of it be rejected. It is
also a fruitful starting point for reflection and investigation into the
ideology and motivations of the progressive leadership of that council, and
into the degree to which the Council Fathers as a whole accepted their
responsibility for preserving the divine deposit of faith. (This text was pointed out to me by a Catholic professor of theology
who must remain anonymous.)
Dr. John Lamont, posted by Rorate Caeli
From Adam to this day, divine worship that is acceptable to God has
always been, without exception, the creation of God.
Christ chose the Cenacle
In which to celebrate the Passover, because there lived, died, and were buried Melchisedech, David, Solomon and all the kings of David’s
family till the Babylonian Captivity.
Melchisedech
comes into history under this name in the account of the four Mesopotamian
kings, who went into Palestine, captured Lot, Abraham’s nephew, and started for
home. Abraham roused his servants, fell on them at night, rescued Lot, took
their spoils, and returning passed by Salem, as Jerusalem then was named.
“But Melchisedech,
the king of Salem, bringing forth bread and wine, for he was a priest of the
most high God, blessed him and said: ‘Blessed be the most high God by whose
protection thy enemies are in thy band.’ And be gave him tithes of all.”
Here for the first time
in Holy Writ we find a priest “of the most high God” offering the “bread and
wine” of the Passover and Mass. Eight centuries of silence pass, and 1,100
years before Christ, David wrote of Christ’s priesthood: “Thou are a priest
forever according to the order of Melchisedech.” Then
this great pontiff-king appears no more, in Holy Writ, till St. Paul in his
Epistle to the Hebrews mentions him eight times as a type of Christ. [.....]
But here for the first
time in history, comes forth another order of priests, this mysterious Melchisedech offering bread and wine of the Last Supper and
Mass. To him Abraham offered tithes—the tenth part of the fruits of his
victory. Therefore Melchisedech’s priesthood was higher than that of Abraham;
it was to be eternal; it pointed to Christ’s priesthood of the Last Supper and
of the Catholic Church. The whole prophetic scene in that vale beside the
sacred city was emblematic of the future.
[.....] Who was Melchisedech? St. Paul says: “Without father, without
mother without genealogy, having neither beginning of days, nor end of life,
but likened unto the Son of God, continueth a priest
forever.” [.....] Melchisedech was the patriarch Sem, sole survivor of the flood, eldest son and heir of Noe, king and high priest of the world. Noe established the
right of primogeniture, that the eldest son should succeed the father in his
property, kingship and priesthood, a custom coming down to our day.
Fr. James L. Meagher, D.D., How
Christ Said the First Mass
Iconoclasm Revisited: The Great Neo-Modernist Heresy – The
belief that there exists a merely accidental relationship between the “revealed
truths” and the dogmatic “manner of stating those truths and theological
doctrines.”
Students must learn to distinguish between
on the one hand revealed truths, which all require the same assent of faith,
and on the other hand the manner of stating those truths and theological
doctrines. As far as the formulation of revealed truths is concerned, account
will be taken of what is said by, among others, the declaration of the
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s Mysterium
Ecclesiae, n. 5: “The truths which the Church intends actually to teach
through its dogmatic formularies are, without doubt, distinct from the changing
conceptions proper to a given age and can be expressed without them, but it can
nonetheless happen that they will be expressed by the magisterium,
in terms that bear traces of those conceptions. Account having been taken of
these considerations, it must also be said that from the beginning the dogmatic
formularies of the magisterium have always been
appropriate for communicating revealed truth and that, remaining unchanged,
they will always communicate it to those who interpret them properly”. Students
should therefore learn to make the distinction between the “deposit of faith
itself or the truths which are contained in our venerable doctrine”, and the
way in which these truths are formulated; between the truths to be proclaimed
and the various ways of perceiving them and shedding light upon them; between
the apostolic Tradition and strictly ecclesiastical traditions, and at the same
time they should learn to recognize and respect the permanent value of dogmatic
formulations. From the time of their philosophical formation, students should
be prepared to appreciate the legitimate diversity in theology which derives
from the different methods and language theologians use in penetrating the
divine mysteries. From which it follows that different theological formulations
are often more complementary than contradictory.
The Ecumenical Directory
Daily
Reception of Holy Communion
St Basil states, that to communicate daily, to partake every day of the
Body and Blood of Jesus, is good and wholesome, as Christ himself has said, Whoso eats My flesh and drinks My blood
shall have everlasting life. St Ambrose, treating of the Holy Eucharist,
would have us receive It daily. “Receive daily this sacred Food, that It may
daily strengthen thee. Live so, however, as to deserve to receive it every
day.” He further observes, that if a person be not worthy to partake of the
Sacrament daily, neither will he be worthy after the lapse of a year. St
Augustine too wishes, as far as depends on himself, that the faithful should
daily receive Holy Communion; and he expresses this desire most unmistakably in
these words, “This Eucharistic Bread is our daily bread; partake then of It
every day, so that It help thee every day.”
Fr. John Baptist Scaramelli, Guide to the Spiritual Life
“It is beyond
question that the Pope can err even in matters touching the faith.... Many
pontiffs were heretics... The last of them was Pope John XXII
(1522-1523).”
Pope Adrian
VI, quoted by Fr. Paul Trinchard, One, Holy Catholic, Apostolic
Why is it that only Catholics like the Franciscans of the Immaculate
can possess “schismatic tendencies”? Is
there any example of religious orders being destroyed because of “liberal
tendencies,” “modernist tendencies,” “heretical tendencies”? The answer is known by everyone but not
publically stated. Modernist Rome hates
the Catholic faith and any sign of its material manifestation because those
signs are analogous to the sign of Noe. The sign of the Ark condemned a sinful
world!
To live together as brother and sister? Of course I have high respect
for those who are doing this. But it’s a heroic act, and heroism is not for the
average Christian. I would say that people must do what is possible in their
situation. We cannot as human beings always do the ideal, the best. We must do
the best possible in a given situation.
Cardinal Kasper, Commonweal, May 7, 2016
If a divorced and remarried person is truly sorry that he or she failed
in the first marriage, if the commitments from the first marriage are clarified
and a return is definitively out of the question, if he or she cannot undo the
commitments that were assumed in the second civil marriage without new guilt,
if he or she strives to the best of his or her abilities to live out the second
civil marriage on the basis of faith and to raise their children in the faith,
if he or she longs for the sacraments as a source of strength in his or her
situation, do we then have to refuse or can we refuse him or her the sacrament
of penance and communion, after a period of reorientation? [.....]
Cardinal Walter Kasper, The
Gospel of the Family
Pope
Francis makes the error of Kasper his own!
49. In such difficult situations of need, the Church must be
particularly concerned to offer understanding, comfort and acceptance, rather
than imposing straightaway a set of rules that only lead people to feel judged
and abandoned by the very Mother called to show them God’s mercy. Rather than
offering the healing power of grace and the light of the Gospel message, some
would “indoctrinate” that message, turning it into “dead stones to be hurled at
others.”
122. We should not however confuse different levels: there is no need
to lay upon two limited persons the tremendous burden of having to reproduce perfectly
the union existing between Christ and his Church, for marriage as a sign
entails “a dynamic process…, one which advances gradually with the progressive
integration of the gifts of God.”
Pope Francis, Amoris Laetitia
Summing up all his
energy, he solemnly forbade them (the cardinals) to recognize anyone as Pope
unless he were elected canonically and in accordance with the rules laid down
by the holy Fathers. Then, after a
moment of devout recollectedness, he expressed his
conformity to the divine Will, which had ordained that his pontificate should
be one long martyrdom, and said: ‘I have loved justice and hated iniquity: for
which cause, I die in exile!’ One of the
bishops who were present, respectfully made him this reply: “No, my lord, you
cannot die in exile: for, holding the place of Christ and the holy Apostles,
you have had given to you the nations for your inheritance, and the utmost
parts of the earth for your possessions.”
Dom Gueranger,
The Liturgical Year, Feast of St.
Gregory VII
Luther and Calvin had
called our Holy Church the harlot of Babylon; and yet she had, at the
very time, such children as Teresa of Spain, and Philip Neri
of Rome, to offer to the admiration of mankind.
But Protestantism cared little or nothing for piety or charity; its
great object was the throwing off the yoke of restraint. Under pretence of religious liberty, it
persecuted them that adhered to the true faith; it forced itself by violence
where it could not enter by seduction; but it never aimed at or thought of
leading men to love their God. The
result was that wheresoever it imposed its errors,
devotedness was at an end - we mean that devotedness which leads man to make
sacrifices for God or for his neighbour.
Dom Gueranger,
The Liturgical Year, Feast of St. Philip Neri
I am a
priest of the monastery of the blessed Apostles Peter and Paul. I was born on their land, and ever since my
seventh year I have always lived in their house, observing the Rule, singing
day by day in their church, and making it my delight to learn, to teach or to
write. Since I was made a priest, I have
written commentaries on the holy Scripture for myself and my brethren, using
the words of our venerated Fathers and following their method of
interpretation. And now, good Jesus, I
beseech thee, thou who hast given me in thy mercy to drink of the sweetness of
thy word, grant me now to attain to the source, the fount of wisdom, and to
gaze upon thee for ever and ever.
St. Bede
the Venerable
His life was one of
exploits, and each was a victory, Cordova, the city of the Caliphs, was
conquered by this warrior Saint. At once
its Alhambra ceased to be a palace of Mahometan
effeminacy and crime. Its splendid
Mosque was consecrated to the divine service, and afterwards became the Cathedral
of the City. The followers of Mahomet,
500 years previous, had robbed the
Church of St. James at Compostella of its bells, and
had them brought in triumph to Cordova; Ferdinand ordered them to be carried
thither again, on the backs of the Moors.
Dom Gueranger,
The Liturgical Year, Feast of St. Ferdinand of Castile
“I am more afraid of the curse of one poor woman,
than of all the Saracen armies together.”
St. Ferdinand of Castile
The landing of the
Roman missioners, and their marching through the country, to the chant of the
Litany; the willing and almost kind welcome given them by king Ethelbert; the
influence exercised by queen Bertha, a French Catholic, in the establishment of
the faith among the Saxons; the baptism of ten thousand neophytes, on Christmas
day, and in the bed of a river; the foundation of the metropolitan see of
Canterbury, one of the most illustrious Churches of Christendom on account of
the holiness and noble doing of its Archbishops; all these episodes of
England’s conversion are eloquent proofs of God’s predilection…. But who can
help feeling sad at the thought that a country, favored as England has been
with such graces, should have apostatized from the faith; have repaid with
hatred that Rome which made her Christian; and have persecuted with unheard-of
cruelties the Benedictine Order to which she owed so much of her glory?
Dom Gueranger,
The Liturgical Year, The Feast of St. Augustine of Canterbury
He decreed that the Holy
Sacrifice should be offered up on their tombs.
The Church still keeps this law in mind by requiring that all altars,
whether fixed or portable, must have, amongst the relics that are placed in
them, a portion of some belonging to the martyrs.
Dom Gueranger,
The Liturgical Year, Feast of St. Felix I, Pope and Martyr
“For,” as she declared
to the Baudricourt, the Dauphin’s representative,
“the kingdom does not appertain to the Dauphin, but to my Lord. But it is the will of my Lord that the
Dauphin should be made king and should hold the kingdom in commendam.” “And
who is thy Lord?,” asked Baudricourt. “My Lord is the King of heaven,” replied
Joan….. To the Dauphin Charles she said: “I am called Joan the Virgin, and
through me does the King of heaven give you to understand that you shall be
vice-regent of the King of heaven who is King of France. To the Duke of Burgundy, who was in alliance
with the enemy, she said: “I tell you by
order of the King of heaven, that all who make war on the said holy kingdom,
make war on the King Jesus, the King of heaven and of all the earth.”
St. Joan of Arc, Virgin
In our time more than
ever before, the greatest asset of those disposed toward evil is the cowardice
and weakness of good men, and all the vigor of Satan’s reign is due to the
easygoing weakness of Catholics. Oh! if I might ask the Divine Redeemer, as the
Prophet Zachary did in spirit (Zach. 13:6a): ‘What are those wounds in the
midst of Thy hands?’ The answer would not be doubtful: ‘… With these I was
wounded in the house of them that loved me’ (Zach. 13:6b). I was wounded by my
friends, who did nothing to defend me, and who, on every occasion, made
themselves the accomplices of my adversaries. And this reproach can be leveled
at the weak and timid Catholic of all countries.
St. Pope Pius X, at the
beatification of Joan of Arc, December 13, 1908
If thou observe any vice in thy brother, correct him secretly; if he
will not hear thee, correct him openly.
For such reproofs are good, and often better than silent friendships. And though thy friend deem himself aggrieved,
do thou yet correct him; for the wounds of friends are easier to bear than the
kisses of flatterers.
St. Ambrose
But
yet the Son of man, when he cometh, shall he find, think you, faith on earth? (Luke
18:8)
The survey of 1,007
self-identified adult Catholics was commissioned by the U.S. bishops’
Department of Communications and conducted by the Center for Applied Research
in the Apostolate at Georgetown University in Washington. A 178-page report on
the results was released April 13…. Only 2 percent of Catholics across all
generations said they participated in the sacrament of reconciliation once a
month or more, 12 percent said they did several times a year, 12 percent said
they did once a year, 30 percent said less than once a year and 45 percent said
they never made a sacramental confession… However, the study found that only 36
percent of the younger Catholics attend Mass at least once a month, compared
with 64 percent of the older generation.
Sixty-eight percent of all Catholics surveyed said they agreed that they
believed they could be in good standing with the Church without going to weekly
Mass. Only 43% of Catholics say they look to Church teachings, the pope and
their bishops “in deciding what is morally acceptable.”
Reprint from 2008:
Thoughts on the recent papal visit...
by John Vennari
The Kingdom of God vs. the Civilization of Love
Post-conciliar Church leaders have succeeded in creating new categories
that eclipse true categories established by 2000 years of Catholic teaching.
One such instance is a new dichotomy that distinguishes between the
“Civilization of Love” (the good guys) vs. the “Culture of Death” (the bad
guys). This terminology, and the interreligious ideology that shapes it, is
foreign to our Catholic patrimony. It is a rupture with the past, not
continuity. The true Catholic teaching on this matter is found in the perennial
Catholic doctrine of the two Kingdoms: the Kingdom of God vs. the kingdom of
Satan
According to the magisterial
teaching of Pope Leo XIII, who reiterates the doctrine of Saint Augustine:
1.
The world is divided into two opposing camps: the
kingdom of God vs. the kingdom of Satan;
2.
Every human being belongs to either one or the other of
these two camps;
3.
Since the fall of Adam, these two kingdoms have been in
conflict with one another, and will continue to be in conflict with one another
until the end of time.
The eminent theologian Msgr. Joseph Clifford Fenton explains
that the Kingdom of God is the Catholic Church; for this is what the term
“church” actually means. It is the Kingdom of God on earth, the people of the
Divine Covenant, the one and only social unit outside of which salvation cannot
be found. The word ‘church’ has a distinct definition not applicable to any
other religious body.
The Kingdom of God, Fenton
elaborates, is the Church Triumphant in Heaven; the Church suffering in
Purgatory; and the Church Militant on earth. This “supernatural kingdom of God”
is the Catholic Church, the Mystical Body of Christ.
Opposed to this Kingdom,
Fenton explains, is another kingdom, a kingdom of evil. “We must not lose sight
of the fact”, writes Fenton, “that people in the condition of aversion from
God, in the state of original or mortal sin, belong in some way to the kingdom
or an eccleisa [church] under the leadership of satan, the moving spirit among the enemies of God.”
It is the perennial teaching of
the Catholic Church that those who are not part of the true Church of Christ:
heretics, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Jains, Buddhists and
all other pagan religions, are not part of the Kingdom of God. Jews and members
of pagan religions, speaking in the objective order, are still in the state of
original sin. Heretics (Protestants, etc.), in the objective order, are outside
the Church of Jesus Christ, as defined infallibly by the Council of Florence.
It must be reiterated that everything said here is stated in the objective
order.
All those outside the Kingdom of
God stand in need of being saved. The Catholic concept of salvation, explains
Msgr. Fenton, “involves necessarily the transfer of an individual from the one
social unit to another, from the kingdom of satan to
the true and supernatural Kingdom of God.”
But along comes Vatican II and
its new policy of ecumenism and interreligious dialogue. The 2000-year-old
Catholic categories of “Kingdom of God” vs. the “kingdom of satan”
will no longer do, as they stand in the way of the new social order based on
religious pluralism.
So new categories are
invented: the “Civilization of Love” vs. the “Culture of Death”. The
Civilization of Love may contain members of all religions provided that each
member of this new civilization strives to incorporate moral virtues in themselves
and in society. The “Culture of Death” is the work of the baddies, the
anti-life forces of abortion and eugenics, the homosexual collective, the
purveyors of pornography, and those who advance social injustice and physical
evil.
Yet the “Civilization of Love” is a utopian
dream born from the modernist revolution of Vatican II. It eclipses the true
dichotomy between the Kingdom of God and the kingdom of satan.
It wants members of the Kingdom of God and kingdom of satan
to downplay the primacy of salvation, of baptism, of sanctifying grace, in
order to work together to enhance mutual understanding and to serve society at
large.
The new pan-religious
civilization of love stands condemned by the perennial magisterium
of the Church. In 1910, Pope St. Pius X condemned the notion of “an
inter-denominational association that is to work for the reform of
civilization, an undertaking which is above all religious in character; for
there is no true civilization without a moral civilization, and no true moral civilization
without the true religion [the Catholic Faith]: it is a proven truth, a
historical fact.”
By “moral civilization”, Pius
does not mean simply the Catholic religion as a dynamic contributor to a
secular state, but the establishment of “Christian civilization”, of the
“Catholic city”; in other words, the Social Kingship of Christ.
According to all appearances,
Pope Benedict XVI came to the United States primarily as an emissary for the
Civilization of Love.
Benedict’s April 17 Address to
non-Christian religious leaders encouraged interreligious activity. He also
called upon Jews, Muslims, Jains, Hindus, Buddhists
and others to join with Catholics to “bear witness to those moral truths which
they hold in common with all men and women of good will” so that “religious
groups will exert a positive influence on the wider culture, and inspire
neighbors, co-workers and fellow citizens to join in the task of strengthening
the ties of solidarity.”
Pope Benedict then said, “In the
words of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt: ‘no greater thing could come to
our land than a revival of the spirit of Faith’.”
This is a rallying cry for the
pan-religious civilization of love, not the Kingdom of God. Yet the theme of
interreligious solidarity was repeated time and time again in his recent US
trip, including the Papal Address to interreligious Leaders, the Address to the
United Nations, the Address at the Ecumenical Prayer Service, and the visit to
the Synagogue.
Nowhere in any of these speeches
did Pope Benedict indicate that members of false religious are in danger of
damnation by clinging to their false sects. Nowhere in his speech to the
collection of non-Christian religious leader did he quote Jesus Christ.
Instead, he chose to quote the Freemason Franklin D. Roosevelt whose definition
of the “spirit of Faith” comes straight from the Masonic lodge – a generic
spirit of religion allegedly common to practitioners of every opposing creed.
In all this, as in most other areas, Benedict XVI showed himself to be first
and foremost a man of Vatican II.
Granted, it is not easy to
preach the Social Kingship of Christ. It is not easy to tell non-Catholics they
can only save their souls by abandoning their present position and joining
Christ’s one and only true Church. Yet how can a faithful Vicar of Christ do
anything else but preach these truths, which flow not from changeable law, but
from the very essence of God and of the Faith itself?
The more our Church leaders promote a
pan-religious “healthy secularity”, the more difficult it will be for a future
Pope to stand up for Our Lord’s Kingly rights in the social order. Thanks to
modern Papal trips and statements that constantly endorse ecumenism and
interreligious collaboration, present and future generations will regard the
true doctrine of the Social Kingship of Jesus Christ as alien to their
understanding of Catholicism; as something “un-Catholic”.
Despite the thousands who
cheered and wept during the latest Papal visit, there can be no lasting hope
except in a return to the perennial magisterium of
the centuries. Heaven cannot bless a religious camaraderie between the Kingdom
of God and the kingdom of satan. The new spirit of
ecumenism and interreligious dialogue is foreign to the spirit of Catholicism
and to the consistent teaching of the Church. It will only bring about more
chaos and ruin.
Let us pray for Pope Benedict
XVI. Let us also pray fervently that God will soon grant us a Pope who will
resurrect the true teaching of the Kingdom of God vs. the kingdom of satan, and discard the counterfeit “Civilization of Love
vs. Culture of Death” dichotomy.
COMMENT:
Pope Leo XIII explains in his
magnificent encyclical against Freemasonry, Humanum
Genus: “The race of man after its miserable fall from God, the Creator and
the Giver of Heavenly gifts, ‘through the envy of the devil,’ separated into
two diverse parts, of which the one steadfastly contends for truth and
virtue, the other for those things which are contrary to virtue and to truth. The
one is the Kingdom of God on earth, the true Church of Jesus
Christ; and those who desire from their heart to be united with it so as to
gain salvation must of necessity serve God and His only-begotten Son with their
whole mind and with an entire will. The other is the kingdom of satan, in whose possession and control are all
whosoever follow the fatal example of their leader and of our first parents,
those who refuse to obey the divine and eternal law, and who have many aims of
their own in contempt of God, and many aims also against God. This twofold
kingdom St. Augustine keenly discerned and described after the manner of two
cities, contrary in their laws because striving for contrary objects; and with
subtle brevity he expressed the efficient cause of each in these words: ‘Two loves
formed two cities: the love of self, reaching even to contempt of God, an
earthly city; and the love of God, reaching even to contempt of self, a
Heavenly one.’ At every period of time each has been in conflict with the
other…” [emphasis added]. Even if post-Conciliar
Church leaders use the term “Kingdom of God”, they never define it as did Pope
Leo XIII; and they simultaneously advance the new pan-religious “Civilization
of Love”. http://www.cfnews.org/cfn.htm
Prophecy
and our times!
An unhappy time is coming of revolt and dissension in the Church.
Oh my children, do not let yourselves be led astray by innovations. Rally
and hold fast. Stay on the same road, the same footpaths as your pious fathers
trod. Preserve and maintain what they have taught you. It will be
enough if you resist the attacks, the tempests, the hurricanes that will arise
with such violence.
The Church will be punished because the majority of her members, high
and low, will become so perverted. The Church will sink deeper and deeper
until she will at last seem to be extinguished, and the succession of Peter and
the Apostles to have expired. But, after this, she will be victoriously
exalted in the sight of all doubters.
St. Nicholas of Flu, 15th Century
During the fifth period, we saw only calamities and devastation;
oppression of Catholics by tyrants and heretics; execution of Kings, and
conspiracies to set up republics . . . Are we not to fear, during this period,
that the Mohammedans will come again, working out their sinister schemes
against the Latin Church? . . . During this period men will abuse the freedom
of conscience conceded to them . . . there will be laxity in divine and human
precepts. Discipline will suffer. The holy canons will be
completely disregarded, and the clergy will not respect the laws of the
Church. Everyone will be carried away and led to believe and to do what
he fancies, according to the manner of the flesh. . . But, by the hand of God
Almighty, there occurs so wondrous a change during the sixth period that no one
can humanly visualize it.
The sixth period of the Church will begin with the powerful Monarch and
the holy Pontiff . . . and it will last until the revelation of
Antichrist. In this period, God will console His Holy Church for the
affliction and great tribulation she has endured during the fifth period.
All nations will become Catholic. Vocations will be abundant as never
before, and all men will seek only the Kingdom of God and His justice.
Men will live in peace, and this will be granted because people will make their
peace with God. They will live under the protection of the Great Monarch
and his successors.
All nations will come to worship God in the true Catholic and Roman faith.
There will be many Saints and Doctors on earth. Peace will reign over the
whole earth because God will bind Satan for a number of years until the days of
the Son of Perdition. No one will be able to pervert the Word of
God since, during the sixth period, there will be an Ecumenical Council which
will be the greatest of all councils. By the grace of God, by the power
of the Great Monarch, by the authority of the Holy Pontiff, and by the union of
all the most devout princes, atheism and every heresy will be banished from the
earth. The Council will define the true sense of Holy Scripture, and this
will be believed and accepted by everyone.
Venerable Bartholomew Holzhauser, holy priest
of the seventeenth century
In the twentieth century there will be a time of great corruption of
customs, and this devotion will be the safeguard of this land during the times
to come when it will no longer be a colony, but a free and libertine
republic. Let us weep, pray, and do penance so that this time will not be
of long duration.
The secular clergy will leave much to be desired because priests will
become careless in their sacred duties. Lacking the divine compass, they
will stray from the road traced by God for the priestly ministry, and they will
become attached to wealth and riches, which they will unduly strive to
obtain. How the Church will suffer during this dark night! Lacking
a Prelate and Father to guide them with paternal love, gentleness, strength,
wisdom and prudence, many priests will lose their spirit, placing their souls
in great danger. This will mark the arrival of My hour.
Therefore, clamor insistently without tiring and weep with bitter tears
in the privacy of your heart, imploring the Celestial Father that, for love of
the Eucharistic Heart of my Most Holy Son and His Precious Blood shed with such
generosity and the profound bitterness and sufferings of His cruel Passion and
Death, He might take pity on His ministers and bring to an end those Ominous
times, sending to this Church the Prelate who will restore the spirit of its
priests. . . [When all seems lost, it will be] the happy beginning of the
complete restoration. This will mark the arrival of my hour, when I, in a
marvelous way, will dethrone the proud and cursed Satan, trampling him under my
feet and fettering him in the infernal abyss.
Blessed Virgin Mary, Our Lady of Good Success, to Venerable Marianne de
Jesus Torres (1563-1635)
It was revealed to me that through the intercession of the Mother of
God all heresies will disappear. The victory over heresies has been reserved by
Christ for his Blessed Mother… The power of Mary in the latter days will be
very conspicuous. Mary will extend the reign of Christ over the heathens and
the Mohammedans, and it will be a time of great joy when Mary is enthroned as
Mistress and Queen of hearts.
Venerable Maria of Agreda, seventeenth
century
Rene
Descartes, the Catholic, and Immanuel Kant, the Protestant, the twin pillars of
modern philosophical atheism!
I cannot forgive Descartes; in all his philosophy he did his best to
dispense with God. But he could not avoid making Him set the world in motion
with a flip of His thumb; after that he had no more use for God.
Blaise Pascal, Pensees
Remember in
your charity the following pray requests:
Remember
the welfare of our expectant mother: Victoria
Dimmel and Vanessa LoStrocco,
Marieann Reuter, recovery of her health, request of Philip Thees,
Thomas Thees,
recently hospitalized,
Thomas A. Nelson, long time faithful traditional Catholic the founder
and former owner of TAN Books & Publishing, suffered a recent stroke,
The
Joseph Cox Family, their
spiritual welfare,
The
Thomas Dube
Family, for their conversion and spiritual welfare,
Luis Rafael Zelaya, the brother of Claudia Drew, who is seriously ill,
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,
John
and Joann DeMarco, for their health and spiritual welfare,
Regina (Manidis)
Miller, her spiritual welfare and
health,
Melissa Elena Levitt, her health and conversion, and welfare of her
children,
For
the grace of a holy death, Nancy
Marie Claycomb,
The
health and spiritual welfare of Tom
Grow, Amanda Gardner, and Alex Estrada,
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 Donahy, who is recovering from a stroke,
Kimberly Ann, the daughter of John and Joann DeMarco,
for her health and spiritual welfare,
Mufide Rende, a
traditional Catholic from India has asked our prayers for her welfare,
Mary and Bill Glatz, the welfare of their family,
Barbara Harmon, who is gravely ill, and still cares for her ailing parents,
Jason Green, a father of ten children who has been seriously
injured,
For
the health and welfare of Kolinsky
and Sorace families,
Fr.
Waters asks our prayers for the health and spiritual welfare of Brian Abramowitz,
Janine Mullen, for her health and help for her family,
Thomas Schiltz
family, in grateful appreciation
for their contribution to the beauty of our chapel,
Carlo A. De Porto, who is in failing health,
Welfare
of Bishop Richard Williamson,
for strength and courage in the greater battles to come,
John Rhoad, for his health and spiritual welfare,
Angelina Montesano family & Helen
Snyder, for their health and
spiritual welfare,
Kathy Boyle, requests our prayers for her welfare,
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, Scott Osborn, Lori Kerr, Cary Shipman and family, David
Bash, Crystal and family, Larry Reinhart, and Costanzo
Family, are the petitions of Gene Peters,
The
Drews ask your intercession for the welfare of Brendan McGuire, a young father
of three, who has been diagnosed with cancer,
For
the conversion of Ben & Tina
Boettcher family, Karin Fraessdorf, Eckhard Ebert, and Fahnauer
family,
Fr.
Waters requests our prayers for Br.
Rene, SSPX who has been ill, and for Fr. Thomas Blute,
Rose Cuono, who is in failing health,
For
the health and welfare of Kathryn Lederhos, the aunt of David Drew,
Fr.
Peterson asks our prayers for Charles
Valenti, and his wife, Julia,
For
the welfare of Fr. Paul DaDamio and Fr. William T. Welsh,
The
Drew’s ask our prayers for the welfare of Joe
& Tracy 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, prayers for his mother,
the Mission of St. Philomena in Miami, and the welfare of 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,
For
the welfare of Anthony & Joyce Paglia, who are responsible for the beautiful
statuary in our chapel,
Philip
Thees asks our prayers for his family, for McLaughlin Family, the
conversion of Bruce Heller, &
Janet Gardner, the welfare
of Dan Polly Weand,
the conversion of Sophia Herman,
Tony Rosky,
and Carl Ropeter,
the welfare Nancy Erdeck,
the wife of the late Deacon Erdeck, and the welfare of Frank D’Agustino who
is ill, the health of Charles Kanaskie, and the health of his brother, Thomas Thees,
John Calasanctis,
Stephen Cagorski,
Tony Rosky,
John Bogda, Maryann Reutter, James Parvenski, Kathleen Gorry,
and Cecilia LeBow.
Pray for the
Repose of the Souls:
Hutton Gibson, died May 12,
Sr. Regina Cordis, Immaculate Heart of Mary religious for sixty-five
years, died May 12,
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,
Joyce Laughman
and Robert Twist, for their
conversions,
Roland H. Allard, a friend of the Drew’s, died September 28,
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 17, 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,
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 Haigh, died October 21, 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,
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,and Rev. Hector Bolduc, who died September 10,
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,
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 Wather, 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.
Novena to the
Holy Ghost for the feast of Pentecost
The
novena of the Holy Ghost is the chief of all the novenas, because it was the
first that was ever celebrated, and that by the holy apostles and the most holy
Mary in the supper-room, being distinguished by so many remarkable wonders and
gifts; principally by the gift of the same Holy Ghost, a gift merited for us by
the Passion of Jesus Christ Himself.
Jesus Himself made this known to us when He said to His disciples that
if he did not die he could not send us the Holy Ghost: “If I go not, the Paraclete will not come to you; but if I go, I will send
Him to You” (John 16,7). We know well by
faith that the Holy Ghost is the love that the Father and the Eternal Word bear
one to the other; and therefore the gift of love, which the Lord infuses into
our souls, and which is the greatest of all gifts, is particularly attributed
to the Holy Ghost. As St. Paul says,
“The charity of God is poured forth in our hearts by the Holy Ghost, Who is
given to us” (Rom. 5,5). In this novena,
therefore, we must consider, above all, the great value of divine love, in
order that we may desire to obtain it, and endeavor, by devout exercises, and
especially by prayer, to be made partakers of it, since God has promised, it to
him who asks for it with humility: “Your Father from heaven will give the good
Spirit to them that ask Him” (Lk. 11,13).
CONSECRATION TO THE HOLY
GHOST
O Holy Ghost, divine Spirit of light and
love, I consecrate to Thee my understanding, my heart, my will, my whole being
for time and for eternity. May my
understanding be ever submissive to Thy heavenly inspirations and to the
teachings of the Catholic Church of which Thou art the infallible guide. May my heart ever be inflamed with the love
of God and my neighbor. May my will ever
be conformed to the Divine Will. And may
my whole life be a faithful imitation of the life and virtues of my Lord and
Savior, Jesus Christ, Who with Thee and the Father be all honor and glory
forever. Amen
NOVENA TO THE HOLY GHOST
1)
Come, O Holy
Ghost, the Lord and Lifegiver; take up Thy dwelling
within my soul, and make of it Thy sacred temple. Make me live by grace as an adopted son of
God. Pervade all the energies of my
soul, and create in me a fountain of living water springing up into life
everlasting. Our Father, Hail Mary , Glory be to the Father.
2) Come, O Spirit of Holy Fear, penetrate my inmost
heart, that I may set Thee, my Lord and God, before my face forever; and shun
all things that can offend Thee, so that I may be made worthy to appear before
the pure eyes of Thy divine Majesty in the heaven of heavens, where Thou livest and reignest in the unity
of the Ever-blessed Trinity, God, world without end. Our
Father, Hail Mary , Glory be to the Father.
3)
Come, O
Spirit of Piety, posses my heart; incline it to a true faith in Thee, to a holy love of Thee, my God, that with my whole
soul I may seek Thee, and find Thee my best, my truest joy. Our
Father, Hail Mary , Glory be to the Father.
4)
Come, O
Spirit of Knowledge and make us understand and despise the emptiness and nothingness
of the world. Give us grace to use the
world only for Thy glory and the salvation of Thy creatures. May we always be very faithful in putting Thy
rewards before every earthly gift. Our
Father, Hail Mary , Glory be to the Father.
5)
Come, O Spirit
of Fortitude, and give fortitude to our souls. Make our hearts strong in all
trials and in all distress, pouring forth abundantly into them the gifts of
strength, that we may be able to resist the attacks of the devil. Our Father, Hail Mary , Glory be to the
Father.
6)
Come, O
Spirit of Counsel, help and guide me in all my ways, that I may always do Thy
holy will. Incline my heart to that
which is good, turn it away form all that is evil,
and direct me by the path of Thy commandments to the goal of eternal life for
which I long. Our Father, Hail Mary ,
Glory be to the Father.
7)
Come, O
Spirit of Understanding, and enlighten our minds, that we may know and believe
all the mysteries of salvation, and may merit at last to see the eternal light
in Thy light and in the light of glory to have the clear vision of Thee and the
Father and the Son. Our Father, Hail Mary
, Glory be to the Father.
8)
Come, O
Spirit of Wisdom, and reveal to my soul the mysteries of heavenly things, their
exceeding greatness, and power, and beauty.
Teach me to love them above and beyond all the passing joys and
satisfactions of earth. Show me the way
by which I may be able to attain to them, and possess them, and hold them
hereafter, my own forever. Our Father,
Hail Mary, Glory be to the Father.
9) Come, O Holy Comforter, and grant us a relish for
heavenly things. Produce in our souls
the flowers and fruits of virtue, so that, being filled with all sweetness and
joy in the pursuit of good, we may attain unto eternal blessedness. Our Father, Hail Mary , Glory be to the
Father.
COME HOLY GHOST
Come Holy Ghost, creator blest, and in our hearts,
take up Thy rest.
Come with Thy grace and heavenly aid, to fill the
hearts which Thou hast made
O Comforter, to Thee we cry. O heavenly gift of God
most high.
O font of life and fire of love, and sweet anointing
from above.
Thou in Thy sevenfold gifts art
known. The finger of God’s hand we own.
The promise of the Father, Thou! Who dost the tongue
with power endow.
Kindle our senses from above, and make our hearts
overflow with love;
With patience firm and virtue high, the weakness of
our flesh supply.
Drive far away the deadly foe, and peace forevermore
bestow.
If Thou be our preventing Guide, no evil can our steps
betide.
Oh, may Thy grace on us bestow, the Father and the Son
to know,
And Thee through endless times confessed, of both the
eternal Spirit blest.
All glory while the ages run, be to the Father and the
Son,
Who rose from death; the same to Thee, O Holy Ghost,
eternally. Amen
PRAYER
O Holy Ghost, O my God, I adore Thee, and
acknowledge, here in Thy divine presence, that I am nothing and can do nothing
without Thee. Come, great Paraclete, Thou Father of the poor, Thou Comforter the
best, fulfill the promise of our blessed Saviour, Who
would not leave us orphans, and come into the mind and the heart of Thy poor,
unworthy creature, as Thou didst descend on the sacred day of Pentecost on the
holy Mother of Jesus and on His first disciples. Grant that I may participate in those gifts
which Thou didst communicate to them so wonderfully, and with so much mercy and
generosity. Take from my heart whatever
is not pleasing to Thee, and make of it a worthy dwelling-place for
Thyself. Illumine my mind, that I may
see and understand the things that are for my eternal good. Inflame my heart with pure love of Thee, that
it may be cleansed from the dross of all inordinate attachments, and that my
whole life may be hidden with Jesus in God.
Strengthen my will, that it may be made conformable to Thy divine will,
and be guided by Thy holy inspirations.
Aid me by Thy grace to practice the divine lessons of humility, poverty,
obedience, and contempt of the world, which Jesus taught us in His mortal life.
Oh, rend the heavens, and come down,
consoling Spirit! That inspired and encouraged by Thee, I may faithfully comply
with the duties of my holy state in life, carry my daily cross most patiently,
and endeavor to accomplish the divine will with the utmost perfection. Spirit of love! Spirit of peace! sanctify my
soul more and more, and give me that heavenly peace which the world cannot
give. Bless our Holy Father, the Pope,
bless the Church, bless our bishops, our priests, all Religious Orders, and all
the faithful, that they may be filled with the spirit of Christ, and labor
earnestly for the spread of His kingdom.
O Holy Ghost, Thou Giver of every good and
perfect gift, grant me, I beseech Thee, the intentions of this novena. May Thy will be done in me and through
me. Mayest
Thou be praised and glorified for evermore!
AMEN
“The Devil is
fighting a decisive battle”
Sr. Lucy also told me:
“Father, the Devil is fighting a decisive battle against the Virgin
and, as you know, what most offends God and what will gain him the greatest
number of souls in the shortest time is to gain the souls consecrated to God.
For this also leaves unprotected the field of the laity and the Devil can more
easily seize them.
“Also, Father, tell them that my cousins Francisco and Jacinta made sacrifices
because they always saw the Blessed Virgin was very sad in all her apparitions.
She never smiled at us. This anguish that we saw in her, caused by offenses to
God and the chastisements that threaten sinners, penetrated our souls. And
being children, we did not know what measures to devise except to pray and make
sacrifices. …”
Referring to the
vision of Hell that Our Lady showed her and Jacinta and Francisco, she said:
“For this reason, Father, it is my mission not just to tell about the material
punishments that will certainly come over the earth if the world does not pray
and do penance. No, my mission is to tell everyone the imminent danger we are
in of losing our souls for all eternity if we remain fixed in sin.
“Father, we should not wait for a call to the world from Rome on the part of
the Holy Father to do penance. Nor should we wait for a call for penance to
come from the Bishops in our Dioceses, nor from our Religious Congregations.
No, Our Lord has often used these means, and the world has not paid heed. So,
now each one of us must begin to reform himself spiritually. Each one has to
save not only his own soul, but also all the souls that God has placed on his
pathway.
“Father, the Blessed Virgin did not tell me that we are in the last times of
the world, but I understood this for three reasons:
“The first is because she told me that the Devil is engaging in a battle with
the Virgin, a decisive battle. It is a final battle where one party will be
victorious and the other will suffer defeat. So, from now on, we are either
with God or we are with the Devil; there is no middle ground.
“The second reason is because
she told me, as well as my cousins, that God is giving two last remedies to the
world: the Holy Rosary and devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary.
And, being the last remedies, that is to say, they are the final ones, means
that there will be no others.
“And the third, because in the plans of the Divine Providence, when God
is going to chastise the world He always first exhausts all other remedies.
When He sees that the world pays no attention whatsoever, then, as we say in
our imperfect way of talking, with a certain fear He presents us the last means
of salvation, His Blessed Mother.
If we despise and reject this last means, Heaven will no longer pardon
us, because we will have committed a sin that the Gospel calls a sin against
the Holy Spirit. This sin consists in openly rejecting – with full knowledge
and will – the salvation that is put in our hands.
”Also, since Our Lord is a very good Son, He will not permit that we
offend and despise His Blessed Mother. We have as obvious testimony the history
of different centuries where Our Lord has shown us with terrible examples how
He has always defended the honor of His Blessed Mother.
”Prayer and sacrifice are the two means to save the world. As for the
Holy Rosary, Father, in these last times in which we are living, the Blessed
Virgin has given a new efficacy to the praying of the Holy Rosary. This in such
a way that there is no problem that cannot be resolved by praying the Rosary,
no matter how difficult it is - be it temporal or above all spiritual - in the
spiritual life of each of us or the lives of our families, be they our families
in the world or Religious Communities, or even in the lives of peoples and
nations.
”I repeat, there is no problem, as difficult as it may be, that we cannot
resolve at this time by praying the Holy Rosary. With the Holy Rosary we will
save ourselves, sanctify ourselves, console Our Lord and obtain the salvation
of many souls.
”Then, there is devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, our Most Holy
Mother, holding her as the seat of mercy, goodness and pardon and the sure door
to enter Heaven. This is the first part of the Message referring to Our Lady of
Fatima, and the second part, which is briefer but no less important, refers to
the Holy Father.”
Sister Lucy of Fatima to Fr. Augustin Fuentes
in 1957
Benedict/Ratzinger: Claims to have resigned the Papacy while
retaining a “spiritual dimension” of the Office!
It is here that Pope Benedict then draws a comparison with the papacy.
For, such a retired bishop, he adds, “does not anymore actively have an episcopal seat, but, still finds himself in a special
relationship of a former bishop to his seat.” This retired bishop, however,
thereby “does not become a second bishop of his diocese,” explains Benedict.
Such a bishop had “fully given up his office, yet the spiritual connection with
his former seat was now being acknowledged, also as a legal quality.” This “new
relationship with a seat” is “given as a reality, but lies outside of the
concrete legal substance of the episcopal office.” At the same time, adds the
retired Pope, the “spiritual connection” is being regarded as a “reality.”
“Thus,” he
continues, “there are not two bishops, but one with a spiritual mandate, whose
essence it is to serve his former diocese from within, from the Lord, by being
present and available in prayer.”
“It is not
conceivable why such a legal concept should not also be applied to the bishop
of Rome,” Pope Benedict explicitly states, thus making it clear that according
to his own ideas, he fully resigned his papal office while maintaining a
“spiritual dimension” of his office.
Peter Seewald, Excerpt from book length
interview with the ever talkative Benedict/Ratzinger
to be published fall of 2020
COMMENT by Don Nicoal Bux
“In my opinion, one of the most problematic aspects would be the idea,
implicit in Pope Ratzinger’s act, that the papacy is
not a single and indivisible office, but, on the contrary, a divisible office
that can be ‘unpacked’, in the sense that a Pope may choose to give up some
functions, keeping for himself others, which would not then be passed on to his
successor. A clearly erroneous idea.” […]
“The comparison of the papal office with the episcopal
office in what regards the abdication of the papal office is not correct. The episcopal office is conferred by episcopal
ordination or consecration, imprinting an indelible character on the soul of
the bishop. Thus, while he may be relieved of a particular pastoral
responsibility, he remains always a bishop. The papal office is conferred by
the acceptance of the election to the See of Peter,
that is, by an act of the will of the person elected, accepting the call to be
the Vicar of Christ on earth. From the moment that the person elected consents
he has the full jurisdiction of the Roman Pontiff.”
If the person elected is not a Bishop,” Monsignor Bux
continued, “he must be immediately consecrated a Bishop because the papacy
entails the exercise of the episcopal office, but he
is Pope from the moment he consents to the election. If the same person, at a
certain point, declares that he can no longer fulfill the call to be the Vicar
of Christ on earth, he loses the papal office and returns to the condition in
which he was before giving the consent to be the Vicar of Christ on earth.”
Don Nicola Bux, Vatican theologian and former
consultor to Congregation for the Doctrine of the
Faith
COMMENT:
The Comment from Msgr. Bux is very good but
insufficiently critical of the imposter Benedict/Ratzinger’s
running around in his white cassock constantly looking for someone to
uncritically publish his latest musings. The very idea, the absurd notion, that
he could retain a “spiritual dimension” of the papacy while resigning the
office evidences further insight into this coward’s philosophical foundations
which he has plainly expressed in his voluminous writings. Benedict/Ratzinger is an apologist of the modernist reductionist
philosophy of scientism. He believes that the fundamental reality consists of atoms and the void in constant
evolution. And since nothing is in a fixed state, he closes his mind to the
reality of substance. In place of being, he affirms the process of becoming and makes the accident of relationship the foundation
of his reality. He denies that the papacy has a substantial existence.
This is heresy plain and simple. Why? Because it is a direct denial of Dogma
regarding the immutability of the papal office which will exist as Jesus Christ
established it until the end of time. It is indirect heresy because the
philosophical principle of substance,
and the principle of hylomorphism,
that is, that material substantial being is composed of form and matter, have
been incorporated in Dogmatic definitions and are therefore necessarily a true
descriptions of reality as God Himself has created and revealed it. Any
separation of form and matter necessarily causes a substantial change. The substance ceases
to be what it was and becomes something else. By denying the truth of
substantial reality, it is impossible to believe the literal meaning of such
Dogmas as those regarding the consubstantial
relationship of the Father and the Son, as well as those dogmas regarding
transubstantiation and the True Presence. This blabber about the “spiritual
dimension” of the papacy existing apart from the actual office is just another
example of the same problem. He denies the substantial reality, drives a wedge
between the substantial form and the matter, destroys the substantial reality
and then pretends that he can reconstitute the evolving reality in his own
image. Benedict/Ratzinger, like all Modernists, is a Nominalist by default. Nominalists
believe that we can only know sense perceptions and not intellectual
perceptions. He becomes a Nominalist by default
because he denies there is any substantial essence to intellectually perceive.
They deny that any substantial reality can exist or if it does exist, can be
known. He believes that we can only know the accidents of anything by sense
perception and that these are in perpetual state of evolution in the reconstitution
of atoms within the void.
Whether or not this is due to Benedict/Ratzinger’s
vanity or his malice makes no difference. The result is a direct denial and
attack upon the Dogma of the papacy and a scandal to all Catholics.
Let nothing disturb thee, Nothing affright thee;
All things are passing; God never changeth;
Patient endurance attaineth to all things;
Who God possesseth in nothing is wanting;
Alone God sufficeth.
Bookmark of St. Teresa of Jesus
How beauteous is the courage which we find,
with childlike confidence in God combined!
Who fears his God shall know no other fear -
He heeds not pitying smile, nor unkind sneer.
“The virtue of fortitude protects a person from
loving his life so much that he loses it.”
Josef Pieper, A
Brief Reader on the Virtues of the Human Heart
“Prayer draws
its merits from charity; but its imperative efficacy
comes from faith and confidence.”
St. Thomas
“Only take heed to yourself
and guard your soul diligently.” (Deut 4:9)
“It is a sin to
believe there is salvation outside the Catholic Church!”
Blessed
Pope Pius IX
PREVIOUS BULLETIN POSTS BELOW THAT REMAIN TIMELY:
All
our Ecclesiastical Traditions are Signs, Images which signify a greater
Truth. It is this “Greater Truth” that
the Novus Ordo attacks.
“Whoever venerates an image venerates the person portrayed in it.” St. Basil, De Spiritu
Sancto 18, 45
“The beauty of the images moves me to contemplation, as a meadow
delights the eyes and subtly infuses the soul with the glory of God.”
St. John Damascene, De Imag 1, 27
More people have been imprisoned for Liberty, humiliated and tortured
for Equality, and slaughtered for Fraternity in this century, than for any less
hypocritical motives, during the Middle Ages.
Roy Campbell, poet, journalist, Catholic convert, footnote appended to
his poem Flowering Rifle.
THE ONE THING NECESSARY
As everyone can easily understand,
the interior life is an elevated form of intimate conversation which everyone
has with himself as soon as he is alone, even in the tumult of a great city.
From the moment he ceases to converse with his fellow men, man converses
interiorly with himself about what preoccupies him most. This conversation
varies greatly according to the different ages of life; that of an old man is
not that of a youth. It also varies greatly according as a man is good or bad.
As soon as a man
seriously seeks truth and goodness, this intimate conversation with himself
tends to become conversation with God. Little by little, instead of seeking
himself in everything, instead of tending more or less consciously to make
himself a center, man tends to seek God in everything, and to substitute for
egoism love of God and of souls in Him. This constitutes the interior life. No
sincere man will have any difficulty in recognizing it. The one thing necessary
which Jesus spoke of to Martha and Mary consists in hearing the word of God and
living by it.
Rev. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P., The Three Ages of the Interior
Life
Hermeneutics of Continuity/Discontinuity
Martin Luther:
“God does not save factious sinners. Be a sinner and sin boldly, but believe and
rejoice in Christ every more boldly. No
sin will separate us form the Lamb, even though we commit fornication and
murder a thousand times a day.” Martin
Luther
When I awoke last night the Devil came and
wanted to debate with me arguing that I was a sinner. To this I replied, “Tell me something new,
Devil! I already know that perfectly well; I have committed many a solid and
real sin. Indeed there must be good honest sins not fabricated and invented
ones for God to forgive.” Martin Luther
In translating St. Paul, “We account a man
to be justified by faith” (Romans 3:28), Luther added the word, “alone.” In answer to those who objected to his
mutilating Sacred Scripture, he answered:
“If your Papist annoys you with the word (alone), tell him straightway:
Dr. Martin Luther will have it so. Whoever will not have my translation, let
him give it the go-by; the devil’s thanks to him who censures it without my
will and knowledge. Dr. Martin Luther will have it so, and he is a doctor above
all the doctors in Popedom.”
Pope Francis the Lutheran:
“I think that Marin Luther's intentions
were not mistaken. He was a reformer....
And today, Luther and Catholics, Protestants, all of us agree on the doctrine
of justification. On this point which is very important, he did not err.”
Pope Francis, public interview, June 26,
2016
Catholic Faith:
Council of Trent: Selected Canons on Justification
CANON IX.-If any one saith,
that by faith alone the impious is justified; in such wise as to mean, that
nothing else is required to co-operate in order to the obtaining the grace of
Justification, and that it is not in any way necessary, that he be prepared and
disposed by the movement of his own will; let him be anathema.
CANON XII.-If any one saith,
that justifying faith is nothing else but confidence in the divine mercy which
remits sins for Christ's sake; or, that this confidence alone is that whereby
we are justified; let him be anathema.
CANON XIV.-If any one saith,
that man is truly absolved from his sins and justified, because that he
assuredly believed himself absolved and justified; or, that no one is truly
justified but he who believes himself justified; and that, by this faith alone,
absolution and justification are effected; let him be anathema.
CANON XV.-If any one saith,
that a man, who is born again and justified, is bound of faith to believe that
he is assuredly in the number of the predestinate; let him be anathema.
CANON XII.-If any one saith,
that justifying faith is nothing else but confidence in the divine mercy which
remits sins for Christ's sake; or, that this confidence alone is that whereby
we are justified; let him be anathema.
CANON XIII.-If any one saith,
that it is necessary for every one, for the obtaining
the remission of sins, that he believe for certain, and without any wavering
arising from his own infirmity and disposition, that his sins are forgiven him;
let him be anathema.
CANON XIV.-If any one saith,
that man is truly absolved from his sins and justified, because that he assuredly
believed himself absolved and justified; or, that no one is truly justified but
he who believes himself justified; and that, by this faith alone, absolution
and justification are effected; let him be anathema.
CANON XV.-If any one saith,
that a man, who is born again and justified, is bound of faith to believe that
he is assuredly in the number of the predestinate; let him be anathema.
CANON XIX.-If any one saith,
that nothing besides faith is commanded in the Gospel; that other things are
indifferent, neither commanded nor prohibited, but free; or, that the ten
commandments nowise appertain to Christians; let him be anathema.
CANON XXIX.-If any one saith,
that he, who has fallen after baptism, is not able by the grace of God to rise
again; or, that he is able indeed to recover the justice which he has lost, but
by faith alone without the sacrament of Penance, contrary to what the holy
Roman and universal Church-instructed by Christ and his Apostles-has hitherto
professed, observed, and taugh; let him be anathema.
CANON XXXIII.-If any one saith, that, by the Catholic doctrine touching
Justification, by this holy Synod inset forth in this present decree, the glory
of God, or the merits of our Lord Jesus Christ are in any way derogated from,
and not rather that the truth of our faith, and the glory in fine of God and of
Jesus Christ are rendered (more) illustrious; let him be anathema.
Amazing! Martyrdom is a barrier to ecumenical unity!
If you have a Church that considers martyrs, that sets them off against
the others, this in itself contains the pebbles of a rocky road to disunity.
Sure I appreciated [Cardinal Joseph Zen’s] concerns and sufferings… You have to
be proud of the Church that suffers, but also worried that a Church that
suffers allows that suffering to be a barrier to the common union to which the
Lord has called us.
Cardinal Theodore McCarrick the Homosexual
Pervert, criticizing Cardinal Zen and the faithful Catholics of China for
resisting a forced unity with the Catholic Patriotic Association (CPA) founded
by the communist government.
Hermeneutics
of Continuity/Discontinuity
A
Illustrative Example of the Heresy of Neo-Modernism
It is not enough to find a new language in which to articulate our
perennial faith; it is also urgent, in the light of the new challenges and
prospects facing humanity, that the Church be able to express the ‘new things’
of Christ’s Gospel, that, albeit present in the word of God, have not yet come
to light. Pope Francis the Destroyer,
Address, October 11, 2018
A
Illustrative Example of the Catholic Faith
If there are any present-day teachers making every effort to produce
and develop new ideas, but not to repeat “that which has been handed down,” and
if this is their whole aim, they should reflect calmly on those words which
Benedict XV proposes for their consideration: “We wish this maxim of our elders
held in reverence: Nihil
innovetur nisi quod traditum — let nothing new be introduced,
but only what has been handed down; it must be held as an inviolable law in
matters of faith, and should also control those points which allow of change,
though in these latter for the most part the rule holds: non nova sed noviter—not new things but in a new way.”
Pope Pius XII,
Si Diligis,
Allocution to Cardinals, Archbishops, and Bishops on the Canonization of St
Pius X, May 31, 1954.
But would it not be enough for
one to be a Catholic in heart only, without professing his religion publicly?
No, for Jesus Christ has solemnly declared that, “He who shall be
ashamed of Me and My words, of him the Son of Man shall be ashamed when He
shall come in His majesty, and that of His Father, and of the holy angels.”
(Luke 9:26) Fr. Michael Muller, C.SS.R,
Questions and Answers on Salvation
And since Jesus Christ,
the Son of God, morally obliges every Catholic the duty to profess his faith in
the public forum, every Catholic possesses by right the use of the
ecclesiastical traditions of our Church which constitute the perfect outward
expression of our holy faith.
Open Letter by “Papal favorite” calling for
End of Summorum Pontificum
OPEN
LETTER on the “State of Liturgical Exception” | Andrea Grillo,
April 29, 2020
To all theologians, scholars, and students
of theology:
The great liturgical tradition, which has
always accompanied and supported the Church in her history of grace and sin,
hears the groaning of individuals and nations in this pandemic crisis, which
brings suffering and affliction to those who are sick, and fear, isolation and loneliness
to everyone else. The ordinary rhythm of the Lenten and Paschal journey
is altered and subverted, in solidarity with our common suffering. We would
never have thought, however, that a small but not marginal suffering would also
come at the same time through the exercise of ecclesial authority and through
the decrees Quo magis e Cum sanctissima, which the
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith published on 25 March 2020.
It is no surprise that This Congregation
should devote its attention to the liturgy. But special and singular is the
fact that it modifies the ordines, introduces prefaces
and formularies for feasts, and modifies calendars and criteria of precedence.
And it does this on a 1962 missal. How is this possible? The Congregation, as is known,
in this case moves in the space of an exceptional authority, which dates
back 13 years, in accordance with motu proprio Summorum pontificum. But since time is greater than space, what is possible on
the regulatory level is not always appropriate. Therefore, it is crucial
to engage in critical reflection on the logic of this development.
Time, in fact, has unveiled to us the
paradox of a competence on the liturgy being taken away from the Bishops and
the Congregation of Worship: this was arranged, in Summorum
pontificum, with an intention of solemn
pacification and generous reconciliation, but soon it changed into a serious
division, a widespread conflict, and became the symbol of a “liturgical
rejection” of the Second Vatican Council. The greatest distortion of the
initial intentions of the motu proprio
can be seen today in those diocesan seminaries where it is expected that the
future ministers will be trained at the same time in two different rites: the conciliar rite and the one that denies it. All this reached
its most surreal point the day before yesterday, when the two Decrees were
released. They mark the culmination of a distortion which is no longer
tolerable, and which can be summed up as follows:
·
the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith acts as a
substitute in exercising competences conferred by the Second Vatican
Council on Bishops and the Congregation for Divine Worship;
·
it undertakes to elaborate ”liturgical
variants” of the ordines without
having the historical, textual, philological and pastoral competences;
· it seems to ignore, precisely on the dogmatic
level, a grave conflict between the lex
orandi and the lex credendi, since it is inevitable that a dual, conflictual ritual form will lead to a significant division
in the faith;
·
it seems to underestimate the disruptive effect this
“exception” will have on the ecclesial level, by immunizing a part of the
community from the “school of prayer” that the Second Vatican Council and the
liturgical reform have providentially given to the common ecclesial journey.
A “state of exception” is also happening
today on the civil level, in its harsh necessity, and this fact allows us
greater ecclesial foresight. To return to an ecclesial normality, we must
overcome the state of liturgical exception established 13 years ago in another
world, with other conditions and with other hopes, by Summorum pontificum. It
no longer makes sense to deprive diocesan bishops of their liturgical powers;
neither does it make sense to have an Ecclesia Dei Commission (which has in fact already been
suppressed), or a Section of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith
which take away authority from diocesan Bishops and the Congregation of Divine
Worship; it no longer makes sense to enact decrees to “reform” a rite that is
closed in the historical past, inert and crystallized, lifeless and without
vigor. There can be no resuscitation for it. The double regime is over; the
noble intention of SP has waned; the Lefebvrians have
raised the barhigher and higher and then run away,
insulting the Second Vatican Council and the present pope along with all three
of his predecessors. Continuing to nourish a “state of liturgical
exception” – one that was born to unite, but does nothing but divide – only
leads to the shattering, privatization, and distortion of the worship of the
Church. On the basis of these considerations, we resolve together to
request that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith immediately
withdraw the two decrees of 25/03/2020 and restore all powers concerning the
liturgy to the diocesan Bishops and the Congregation for Divine Worship. Obviously, we ask this
without prejudice to the powers that this Congregation retains in doctrinal
matters.
So let us leave the “state of
liturgical exception”. If not now, when?
With best wishes to all colleagues and
students, besieged but not conquered in life, during these bitter yet still
generous times.
COMMENT:
“Time is
greater than space” – The ideological lynchpin of Pope Francis the Great
Equivocator
This liturgical OPEN LETTER structures its argument around the phrase:
Time is Greater Than Space.” This enigmatic slogan of Pope Francis, “Time is
greater than space” (TGTS), appeared in his first two encyclicals, Lumen Fidei and Laudato
Si’. It surfaced again in the apostolic exhortations, Evangelii
Gaudium and Amoris
Laetitia.
From Lumen Fidei:
“Let us refuse to
be robbed of hope, or to allow our hope to be dimmed by facile answers and solutions
which block our progress, ‘fragmenting’ time and changing it into space.
Time is always much greater than space. Space hardens processes, whereas time
propels towards the future and encourages us to go forward in hope.”
Evangelii Gaudium is more revealing as to the cryptic meaning
of this phrase:
222. A constant
tension exists between fullness and limitation. Fullness evokes the desire for
complete possession, while limitation is a wall set before us. Broadly
speaking, “time” has to do with fullness as an expression of the horizon which
constantly opens before us, while each individual moment has to do with
limitation as an expression of enclosure. People live poised between each
individual moment and the greater, brighter horizon of the utopian future as
the final cause which draws us to itself. Here we see a first principle for
progress in building a people: time is greater than space.
223. This
principle enables us to work slowly but surely, without being obsessed with
immediate results. It helps us patiently to endure difficult and adverse situations,
or inevitable changes in our plans. It invites us to accept the tension between
fullness and limitation, and to give a priority to time. One of the faults
which we occasionally observe in sociopolitical activity is that spaces and
power are preferred to time and processes. Giving priority to space means madly
attempting to keep everything together in the present, trying to possess all
the spaces of power and of self-assertion; it is to crystallize processes and
presume to hold them back. Giving priority to time means being concerned about
initiating processes rather than possessing spaces. Time governs spaces,
illumines them and makes them links in a constantly expanding chain, with no
possibility of return. What we need, then, is to give priority to actions which
generate new processes in society and engage other persons and groups who can
develop them to the point where they bear fruit in significant historical
events. Without anxiety, but with clear convictions and tenacity.
St. Pius X said in Pascendi that Evolution
is the fundamental principle of the heresy of Modernism. This error is
practically applied when Modernists embrace Becoming
and reject Being. This neologism of
Francis, TGTS, is just a repacking of this old philosophical error of Modernism.
Francis is trying to sound clever by putting a little make-up and bow-tie on
the pig. But the pig remains a pig because that is his Being. Fr. Réginald Marie Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P. explained this error in his great
essay, Where is the New Theology Leading
Us?, that was published in the Angelicum in 1946.
It should be
remembered that on December 1, 1924, the Holy Office condemned 12 propositions
taken from the philosophy of action, among which was number 5, or the new
definition of truth: “Truth is not found in any particular act of the intellect
wherein conformity with the object would be had, as the Scholastics say, but
rather truth is always in a state of becoming, and consists in a progressive
alignment of the understanding with life, indeed a certain perpetual process,
by which the intellect strives to develop and explain that which experience
presents or action requires: by which principle, moreover, as in all
progression, nothing is ever determined or fixed.” The last of these condemned
propositions is: “Even after Faith has been received, man ought not to rest in
the dogmas of religion, and hold fast to them fixedly and immovably, but always
solicitous to remain moving ahead toward a deeper truth and even evolving into
new notions, and even correcting that which he believes.”
Many, who did not heed
these warnings, have now reverted to these errors.
……
It revisits modernism.
Because it accepted the proposition which was intrinsic to modernism: that of
substituting, as if it were illusory, the traditional definition of truth: aequatio rei et intellectus (the adequation of
intellect and reality), for the subjective definition: adequatio
realis mentis et vitae (the adequation
of intellect and life). That was more explicitly stated in the already cited
proposition, which emerged from the philosophy of action, and was condemned by
the Holy Office, December 1, 1924: “Truth is not found in any particular act of
the intellect wherein conformity with the object would be had, as the
Scholastics say, but rather truth is always in a state of becoming, and
consists in a progressive alignment of the understanding with life, indeed a
certain perpetual process, by which the intellect strives to develop and
explain that which experience presents or action requires: by which principle,
moreover, as in all progression, nothing is ever determined or fixed” (v. Monitore ecclesiastico, 1925. t.
I; p. 194.)
The truth is no longer
the conformity (of judgment) to the intuitive reality and its immutable laws
but the conformity of judgment to the exigencies of action, and of human life
which continues to evolve. The philosophy of being or ontology is substituted
by the philosophy of action which defines truth as no longer a function of
being but of action.
Thus is modernism reprised:
“Truth is no more immutable than man himself, inasmuch as it is evolved with
him, in him and through him. As well, Pius X said of the modernists, “they
pervert the eternal concept of truth.”
……
The traditional
definition truth is no longer for them the conformity of judgment to intuitive
being and the immutable laws of non-contradiction, of causality, etc. For them,
the truth is no longer that which is
but that which is becoming — and is
constantly and always changing.
For the Modernist heretic, Pope Francis, “Time is greater than space,”
“Time” means the process of becoming
through evolution and “Space” is the
limitation of static being. They
prefer the prusuit of truth over its actual
possession. A library could be filled with analyzing the implications of this
error but suffice for the present there are two obvious to everyone: Firstly,
the very definition of heresy is the rejection of DOGMA. For the faithful
Catholic, DOGMA is NECESSARILY the proximate rule of faith. This is directly
rejected by the Modernists. They replace Dogma with the person of the pope as
the proximate rule of faith and he is free to corrupt the revealed truth in
whatever manner he pleases. The second obvious error is that they deny the
philosophical meaning of substance.
They follow modern reductionist Scientism that resurrected the Greek
philosopher Democritus’ (460-370 B.C.) theory that the fundamental nature of
all that existed is “atoms and the void.” Since all reality is just the
recombination of atoms and the void between them, then there cannot be such
thing as a fixed substance in which accidents adhere. Consequently, we have
Benedict/Ratzinger denying substance altogether and, in its place, making the accident of relationship the fundamental ground of all reality. It is therefore
not surprising when he denies the Dogma of Transubstantiation. And what becomes
of the Dogma that the Father and the Son are Consubstantial? Francis follows in
the same manner and never kneels before the Blessed Sacrament. No argument can
touch these blighted minds, if you call a “mind” something that never thinks.
It matters not what wreckage and ruin that has followed since Vatican II
because the being of the wreckage
cannot overcome their ideological fantasy of becoming as Pope Francis looks to his “brighter horizon of the utopian future.”
The truth is just the opposite, ‘Space is Greater than Time.’ God
revealed His name to Moses, “I AM.” Jesus applied this name to Himself. God is
perfect BEING; He is perfect ACT: “Every best gift, and every perfect gift, is
from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no
change, nor shadow of alteration” (James 1:17). Ultimately time will end in a
changeless eternity where the faithful will be with God in a space
prepared by Him for each one of us. “In my Father's house there are many
mansions. If not, I would have told you: because I go to prepare a place
for you. And if I shall go, and prepare a place for you, I will come
again, and will take you to myself; that where I am, you also may be” (John
14:2-3).
Andrea Grillo
gives as a reason for the suppression of the Latin Mass granted to the Indult
crowd:
· it seems to ignore, precisely on the dogmatic
level, a grave conflict between the lex
orandi and the lex credendi, since it is inevitable that a dual, conflictual ritual form will lead to a significant division
in the faith;
He too believes with Francis that TGTS. Latin Mass Catholics are stuck
in space while the Catholic Church is
moving in time to a new “dogmatic level.” The two
rites he says represent a “grave conflict between the lex
orandi and the lex credenda.”
Are to congratulate Grillo for this insight? Cardinal
Alfredo Ottaviani, Prefect of the Congregation for
the Doctrine for the Faith
with his Interventionin in 1969 said
the same thing! This is a truth that faithful Catholics have known for more
than 50 years! Yet Indultists publicly deny this
truth professing that both the Novus Ordo and the
traditional Latin rite express an identity of “lex orandi /lex credendi.” This is the price
they have paid for their Indult.
Ss. Peter & Paul Roman Catholic Mission’s purpose is to make a
public profession of the Catholic faith before our local ordinary and Rome.
Foundational to this purpose is that DOGMA is divine revelation infallibly
defined by the Magisterium of the Church and irreformable in its terminology which becomes the “formal
object of divine and Catholic faith” and constitutes the proximate rule of
faith. Furthermore, our immemorial ecclesiastical traditions are necessary
attributes of the faith by which alone the faith can be known and communicated
to others. Since God has imposed a duty upon His faithful to profess their
faith and worship Him in the public forum, every Catholic possesses the
inalienable right to our immemorial traditions by which alone these duties can
be fulfilled. Those who have accepted the Latin Mass by virtue of Indult and/or
grant of legal privilege want a non-confrontational modus vivendi with Modernist heretics.
This has never worked in the past and it will not work now. Being neither ‘cold
nor hot’, they please no one and will soon learn that having traded their birth
right for bowl of pottage there is nothing left to eat.
Neo-Modernism
Postulates the grave error that there exists a disjunction between DOGMA and
the Words used to formulate the dogmatic definition. This error became the
overarching theme of Vatican II!
[…..] In theology some (i.e., Neo-Modernists) want to reduce to a minimum the meaning
of dogmas; and to free dogma itself from terminology long established in the
Church and from philosophical concepts held by Catholic teachers, to
bring about a return in the explanation of Catholic doctrine to the way of
speaking used in Holy Scripture and by the Fathers of the Church. They cherish
the hope that when dogma is stripped of the elements which they hold to be
extrinsic to divine revelation, it will compare advantageously with the
dogmatic opinions of those who are separated from the unity of the Church and
that in this way they will gradually arrive at a mutual assimilation of
Catholic dogma with the tenets of the dissidents.
Moreover, they assert that when Catholic doctrine has been reduced to
this condition, a way will be found to satisfy modern needs, that will permit
of dogma being expressed also by the concepts of modern philosophy, whether of immanentism or idealism or existentialism or any other
system. Some more audacious affirm that his can and must be done, because they
hold that the mysteries of faith are never expressed by truly adequate concepts
but only by approximate and ever changeable notions, in which the truth is to
some extent expressed, but is necessarily distorted. Wherefore they do not
consider it absurd, but altogether necessary, that theology should substitute
new concepts in place of the old ones in keeping with the various philosophies
which in the course of time it uses as its instruments, so that it should give
human expression to divine truths in various ways which are even somewhat
opposed, but still equivalent, as they say. They add that the history of dogmas
consists in the reporting of the various forms in which revealed truth has been
clothed, forms that have succeeded one another in accordance with the different
teachings and opinions that have arisen over the course of the centuries.
It is evident from what We have already said, that such tentatives not only lead to what they call dogmatic
relativism, but that they actually contain it. The contempt of doctrine commonly
taught and of the terms in which it is expressed strongly favor it. […..]
Pope Pius XII, Humani Generis
Humility
in human relations:
In man, two things have to be considered: that which is of God, and
that which is of man. . . But humility in the strict sense means the awe in
virtue of which man subjects himself to God. Consequently man, with regard to
that which is of himself, must subject himself to his neighbor with regard to
that which is of God in him. But humility does not require that one subject
that which is of God in himself to that which seems to be of God in the other.
. . Humility likewise does not require that one subject that which is of
himself to that which is of man in the other.
St. Thomas Aquinas
Novus
Ordo “Saint” John Paul II taught the novel doctrine
that by the Incarnation, when the “Word was made flesh,” all men became “Son(s)
of the living God” regardless of faith or reception of the sacraments. The
Catholic Church teaches that only by incorporation by grace with Jesus Christ
through faith and sacramental baptism does any individual person become an
adopted child of God!
All of you who are still seeking God, all of you who already have the
inestimable good fortune to believe, and also you who are tormented by doubt:
please listen once again, today in this sacred place, to the words uttered by
Simon Peter. In those words is the faith of the Church. In those same words is the new truth,
indeed, the ultimate and definitive truth about man: the son of the living God—
“You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”
John Paul II, first homily, October 27, 1978
The overthrow
of Christ the King and the enthronement of the kingship of Man
“Christ
is King in the sense that in Him, in the testimony that He rendered to the
truth, is manifested the ‘kingship’ of every human being, the expression of
every person’s transcendent character. Such is the Church’s proper
inheritance.” The kingship that Jesus claims before Pilate “is not
first of all to exercise authority over others; it is a manifestation of the
kingly character of man. This kingly
character is embedded within human nature, within the structure of the human
personality.”
Cardinal
Karol Wojtyla, Lenten Conference given to Pope Paul
VI and the Vatican Curia, 1979
Satan’s
Primary Target: The Family
“The final battle between the Lord and the reign of Satan will be about
marriage and the family.”
Sr. Lucia, letter to Cardinal Carlo Caffara
It is no accident that this Heresy which denies the Catholic doctrine
concerning Supernatural Charity is to be found in a document which purports to
encapsulate the teaching of the Synod on the Family.
Continuing the metaphor employed at the beginning of this article, we
may rightly say that, if the Catholic truth concerning Charity is the “Hub” of
the wheel of all true Catholic life, then the family is the lynch-pin which
holds this wheel in place as the foundational institution incarnating this
Charity in the life of both the Church and the world. The family is the place
where Charity is received through baptism. It is the place where it is
nourished through love. It is where it receives its foundations and bulwarks
through the educational process, and the place of support and protection where
it endures through the sufferings of this life. It is the Family, and the
question as to whether it is constituted as either a place of Charity or its
denial, which determines whether we live in a Christian civilization, or a
civilization turned away from God to the worship of Evil.
It is also therefore no accident that the chapter of Amoris Laetitia (Chapter VIII)
which attempts to enshrine this heresy within its teaching on the family is
called “Accompanying, discerning and integrating weakness.” The “weaknesses”
specifically addressed in this chapter are Catholics couples living in
objective mortal sin through cohabitation, those in a civil marriage without
the sacrament, and those who have gone through the process of civil divorce and
remarriage. Each of these are designated as “weaknesses” in this document, but
are in reality situations of objective mortal sins which are primary attacks
upon the family and the institution of marriage upon which it is founded. To
therefore speak of integrating such sins into the Church is to speak of
integrating evil into the very lifeblood of the Church, thereby violating the
entire Christian idea of what constitutes Charity within the family.
The key to this satanic strategy is the word “integration”. It is a
word which is absolutely central, not only to the agenda of a totally
anti-Christian occult worldview which now worships the evolutionary progress
and “salvation” of the entire world through an “integral ecology”, but also the
theology now dominant within the Church through the theology of Teilhard de Chardin and Pope
Benedict, and which is now being implemented through the words and pastoral
policies of Pope Francis and his supporters in the hierarchy. It views
Christian Revelation not as immutable and finished upon the death of the last
Apostle, but rather as an ongoing historical progression (containing no fixed
absolutes,) toward the Omega point of Teilhardian
evolution in which the truth will be fully revealed and incarnated.
James Larson, Excerpt from, A
Love That Maketh a Lie: Amoris
Laetitia and the Teilhardian
Agenda
Hermeneutics
of Continuity/Discontinuity
As Pope Pius XII explained in Humani Generis, it
is impossible to affirm the Catholic dogma of that “Lord Jesus Christ... is
consubstantial with the Father” or the Catholic dogma of Transubstantiation if
the concept of “substance”
is rejected in the same sense used by scholastic theologians found in the
perennial realist philosophical tradition and fixed forever by its usage in
dogma.
Benedict/Ratzinger denies the meaning of “substance” and then,
necessarily, denies the dogma of the True Presence. Benedict/Ratzinger’s entire “hermeneutic of reform” vs. the
“hermeneutic of rupture” is predicated upon accepting his Neo-Modernist
philosophy. There is no philosophical difference between Benedict/Ratzinger and his chosen replacement Francis who marks, as
Benedict/Ratzinger predicted in December before his
abdication, the “beginning of the new Church and the end of the old.” The only
difference between the two, apart from superficial style, is that Francis is
wholly formed by the Novus Ordo Church and suffers no
misgivings of conscience about the direction he is dragging the Church because
he knows no other way. Those conservative Catholic who are nostalgic for a
return of Benedict/Ratzinger or John Paul II in the
face of Francis’ infidelities are even more superficial than Francis!
Some even say that
the doctrine of transubstantiation, based on an antiquated philosophic notion
of substance, should be so modified that the real presence of Christ in the
Holy Eucharist be reduced to a kind of symbolism, whereby the consecrated
species would be merely efficacious signs of the spiritual presence of Christ
and of His intimate union with the faithful members of His Mystical Body.
Pope Pius XII, Humani Generis
“…the medieval concept of substance has long
since become inaccessible to us. In so far as we use the concept of
substance at all today we understand thereby the ultimate particles of matter,
and the chemically complex mixture that is bread certainly does not fall into
that category.”
Joseph Ratzinger, Faith and the Future, p. 14
“Eucharistic devotion such as is noted in the silent visit by the
devout in church must not be thought of as a conversation with God. This would
assume that God was present there locally and in a confined way. To justify
such an assertion shows a lack of understanding of the Christological mysteries
of the very concept of God. This is repugnant to the serious thinking of the
man who knows about the omnipresence of God. To go to church on the ground that
one can visit God who is present there is a senseless act which modern man
rightfully rejects.”
Joseph Ratzinger, Die Sacramentale Begrundung
Christliche Existenz
Our implacable
enemy, Satan, and the mystery of iniquity:
“What though
the field be lost?
All is not
lost: the unconquerable will,
And study of
revenge, immortal hate,
And the
courage never to submit or yield!”
John Milton,
Paradise Lost
A necessary consequence of the absolute dependence of the world on its
Maker is that the world must be governed by God, and conducted by Him to its
final destination. He owes it to His wisdom so to govern the world as to attain
the end which He Himself has ordained for it. The government of the world by
God is the function of Divine Providence, inasmuch as it consists in conducting
all things to their end by providing for each and all of them the good to which
they ultimately tend. The existence of an all-governing Providence is a
fundamental article of Faith. Our reason, our conscience cannot separate the
idea of an all-penetrating Providence from the idea of God. Holy Writ speaks of
Providence almost on every page. The Vatican Council has also defined it in
outline: “God watcheth over and governeth
by His Providence all things that He hath made, reaching from end to end mightly and ordering all things sweetly.”…. The government
of the world by God is both general and special; that is to say, it affects the
world as a whole as well as every creature in particular. It is not carried out by
intermediate agents: God Himself directly watches over, leads, and controls
every single thing and its every motion. He takes a special care of personal
beings whose end is supreme felicity and whose duration is everlasting.
Scheeben, Manual of Catholic Theology
Pope
Francis the Sophist: He believes in “Absolute Truth” but denies that it can be
know or communicated to other!
“We believers and of course above all we priests and we bishops believe
in the Absolute, but each in their own way because each one has his own head
and thought. So our absolute truth, shared by us all, is different from person
to person. We do not avoid discussions in the case where our different thoughts
confront each other. So there is a kind of relativism among us as well.”
Pope Francis, quoted by Eugenio Scalfari in
La Repubblica, 10-10-17
Pope
Francis equates illegal immigrant crisis with the Sin of Abortion!
Our defense of the innocent unborn, for example, needs to be clear,
firm and passionate. Equally sacred, however, are the lives of the poor, those
already born, the destitute, the abandoned..... Some Catholics consider it
[migrants] a secondary issue compared to the 'grave' bioethical
questions. That a politician looking for votes might say such a thing is
understandable, but not a Christian, for whom the only proper attitude is to
stand in the shoes of those brothers and sisters of ours who risk their lives
to offer a future to their children.
Pope Francis, Gaudette et Exsultate, On a Call to Holiness in Modern
World
Those who "corrupt
dogmas" are "heretics"; Those who keep dogma as there rule of
faith are the faithful!
St.
Thomas (II-II:11:1) defines heresy: “a species of infidelity in men who, having
professed the faith of Christ, corrupt its dogmas.” The right Christian faith
consists in giving one's voluntary assent to Christ in all that truly belongs
to His teaching. There are, therefore, two ways of deviating from Christianity:
the one by refusing to believe in Christ Himself, which is the way of
infidelity, common to Pagans and Jews; the other by restricting belief to
certain points of Christ's doctrine selected and fashioned at pleasure, which is
the way of heretics. The subject-matter
of both faith and heresy is, therefore, the deposit of the faith, that is, the
sum total of truths revealed in Scripture and Tradition as proposed to our
belief by the Church.
Catholic Encyclopedia, 1907
Judas
who turned heretic and traitor when Jesus announced the doctrine of the True
Presence
(Judas is) one of you, in number not merit: in appearance, not in
virtue; in corporal union, not in spiritual bonds; one by a union of flesh, not
a oneness of heart; therefore not one associate who is of us, but one who is to
go out from us.... according to one consideration he is of us, according to
another he is not of us; according to the communion of sacraments, he is of us;
according to his own sins, he is not of us.....
I say that others are in the house in such a manner as not to belong to
the structure of the house, nor to the society of the fruitful and peaceful
justice; but as chaff is said to be in the wheat: for we cannot deny that they
also are in the house, the Apostle saying, “In a great house there are not only
vessels of gold and of silver, but also of wood and of earth; and some indeed
unto honor, but some unto dishonor.”
St. Augustine
“No
one can be condemned forever, because that is not the logic of the Gospel!”
Pope
Francis, Amoris Laetitia
While St. Francesco de Geronimo
(Francis Jerome), S.J. (1642-1716, feast day May 11) was preaching to
abandoned women in the streets of Naples, one of their number insulted him from
her window and ridiculed his discourse.
The Saint warned her that within eight days God would punish her, and on
the eighth day he invited his audience, who had assembled at the same place, to
visit the woman that had interrupted him.
She was found by them lying dead upon the floor of her room. 'Catherine,' said the Saint, addressing the
dead body, 'for the greater glory of God and the edification of those standing
by, answer me, Where are you?' The
departed soul returned for an instant, and gave an answer distinctly heard by
all present - 'In hell, for eternity.'
Rev. Henry S. Bowden, St. Francesco
de Geronimo, The Apostle of Naples, Lives of the Saints
The
Cardinal Virtue of Justice is now replaced by the Novus Ordo “virtue” of
Equality!
“Inequality is the root of social evil.”
Pope Francis, April 28, 2014
Pope dreams of post-virus world where inequalities abolished
ASSOCIATED
PRESS | NICOLE WINFIELD | April 19, 2020
ROME (AP) — Pope Francis is urging the faithful to use the coronavirus
pandemic’s “time of trial” to prepare for a future where inequalities are abolished and the
poorest are no longer left behind.
“This is not some
ideology,” Francis said. “It is Christianity.”
Francis traveled a few blocks outside the Vatican walls on Sunday to
celebrate Mass at a nearby church to mark a special feast day dedicated to
mercy. Only a few priests were in the pews given Italy’s strict virus lockdown.
In his homily, Francis said the grave, global toll of the pandemic has
reminded the world that there are no borders between those who suffer, no differences in
nationalities among those who are struck or spared.
“We are all frail, all
equal, all precious,” he said.
“May we be profoundly shaken by what is happening all around us,” he
said from the altar of the Santo Spirito church. “The time has come to eliminate inequalities, to
heal the injustice that is undermining the health of the entire human family!”
While people infected with the coronavirus often experience mild or
moderate symptoms, possible complications like pneumonia can put their lives at
risk.
Francis has been using his daily livestreamed Masses in the Vatican hotel
where he lives to single out a particular group of people for prayers during
the pandemic: the elderly, doctors and nurses, prisoners and those with
disabilities.
On Sunday, he
delivered a broader message about inequality and the need for a
post-virus world to rethink its priorities. It’s a theme that echoes the
pre-pandemic preaching of the world’s first Latin American pope, who has
constantly demanded greater solidarity among rich and poor.
In recent days, Francis has proposed the creation of a universal basic
wage to help those who have lost their jobs as a result of the virus economic
shutdown to survive. On Sunday, he said there is a grave risk that while
COVID-19 might eventually be tamed, the virus of “selfishness indifference”
could take its place.
To combat that risk, he said: “Let us welcome this time of trial as an
opportunity to prepare for our
collective future. Because without an all-embracing vision, there will
be no future for anyone.”
COMMENT: The inequality of God is
evident everywhere in His creation. “And he said to them that stood by: Take
the pound away from him, and give it to him that hath ten pounds. And they said
to him: Lord, he hath ten pounds. But I say to you, that to every one that hath
shall be given, and he shall abound: and from him that hath not, even that
which he hath, shall be taken from him. But as for those my enemies, who would
not have me reign over them, bring them hither, and kill them before me. And
having said these things, he went before, going up to Jerusalem” (Luke
19:24-28).
But when the first also
came, they thought that they should receive more: and they also received every
man a penny. And receiving it they murmured against the master of the house,
Saying: These last have worked but one hour, and thou hast made them equal to
us, that have borne the burden of the day and the heats. But he answering said
to one of them: Friend, I do thee no wrong: didst thou not agree with me for a
penny? Take what is thine, and go thy way: I will also give to this last even
as to thee. Or, is it not lawful for me to do what I will? is thy eye evil,
because I am good? So shall the last be first, and the first last. For many are
called, but few chosen” (Matt. 20:10-16).
Pope Francis is crude
communist ideologue who views the gospel through the lens of liberation
theology. It was only a year ago in May 2019 that Pope Francis called for a
one-world government saying, “When a supranational common good is clearly
identified, there is need for a special legally constituted authority capable
of facilitating its implementation. Think of the great contemporary
challenges of climate change, new slavery and peace.” He censored sharply the
nation state saying that it leads to “excluding and hating others, when it
becomes conflictual nationalism that builds walls, indeed even racism
or anti-Semitism.” In this talk he supported the United Nations Sustainable
Development Goals which includes abortion and, in its earlier drafts, called
for a world population of 500 million. He also censored “ideological
colonization” which was a code word for converting others to Jesus Christ.
Pope Francis is an
apostate. Unless there is repentance, he will suffer the same fate as those who
refuse the rule of Jesus Christ. Even what he thinks he has will be taken away.
WHO are the “many” and how do we insure
that we are not among them?
“Not every one that saith to me,
Lord, Lord,” says the Son of God, “shall
enter into the kingdom of heaven, but he that doth the will of my Father Who is
in heaven”. “Many,” continues our divine Master, “will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have not we prophesied in Thy
Name? and cast out devils in Thy
Name? and done many miracles in Thy Name?” And He will say to them in a
loud voice: “I never knew you; depart
from me.” [….]
It would be well if we were thoroughly convinced that the love of Jesus
Christ, true devotion, Christian virtue, and solid piety properly consist in sincere humility,
universal and constant mortification, and perfect conformity of our will to the
will of God. If any one of these three virtues be wanting, all the rest is mere
deceit and affectation. There is no devotion. There can be no virtue.
This is the opinion of the Apostle, and of all the masters of the spiritual
life. Or rather, it is the opinion of all true Christians, for it is the
sentiment of Christ Himself. It must consequently be the sentiment of all who
have the true spirit of Jesus Christ. In our designs and undertakings, says a great servant of
God, it is better to propose to ourselves, to do the will of God, than to
procure the glory of God. For, by doing God’s will, we infallibly
procure His glory also. But, in proposing to ourselves the glory of God, as the
motive of our actions, we are sometimes deceived, and do our own will under the
specious pretext of the glory of God. This delusion is not uncommon in those
who employ themselves in good works and in ministering to the salvation of
souls. True perfection, which is open to no deception, is to fulfill in all
things the holy will of God. But there are very few souls sufficiently
enlightened to know the excellence of this perfection, as there are also few
who experience the happiness which results from it.
God has loved us too much, says a faithful friend of Jesus Christ, to
allow of our being niggardly towards Him. The mere thought of not being wholly
His should horrify us. Shall I not belong wholly to God, after the mercy He
daily shows me? Shall I refuse Him anything, seeing that I have received all
from Him? My heart will not allow it.
Father John
Croiset, S.J., Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus
“Dearly
beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits if they be of God:
because many false prophets are gone out into the world.” (I John 4:1)
“But let your
speech be yea, yea: no, no: and that which is over and above these, is of
evil.” (Matt 5:37)
The
Spirit of Intended Ambiguity that animated Vatican II
It would be most inconvenient for the articles of our Constitution to
be rejected by the Central Commission or by the Council itself. That is why we
must tread carefully and discreetly. Carefully, so that proposals be …
formulated in such a way that much is said without seeming to say
anything: let many things be said in embryo and in this way let the door remain
open to legitimate and possible postconciliar deductions and applications:
let nothing be said that suggests excessive novelty and might invalidate all
the rest.
Archbishop Annibale Bugnini, L’Osservatore Romano, March 19, 1965
“They Are
Trying to Establish a ‘Neo-Church’” – New Interview with Archbishop Carlo Maria
Vigano
In a new interview, Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano
criticizes the fact that a connubium of modernists and Freemasonry wants to
create a “neo-church”.
Benedict XVI also confirmed the topicality of the message of the Virgin
Mary, although according to the interpretation spread by the Vatican, it is to
be regarded as complete. (N.B., Benedict/Ratzinger with the CDF and Cardinal
Tarcisio Bertone as Secretary of State were the primary promoters of this
Vatican position that the Fatima message is to be regarded as an historical
event.) Those who have
read the Third Secret said in all clarity that it concerns the apostasy of the
Church, which began at the very beginning of the 1960s and has now reached such
an obvious stage that it is recognized even by inexperienced observers.
This almost compulsive insistence on issues that the Church has always
condemned, such as relativism and religious indifferentism, false ecumenism,
Malthusian ecology, homoheresy and mass immigration, has found in the Abu Dhabi
Declaration the fulfilment of
a plan conceived by secret sects for more than two centuries. [….]
A church that
presents itself as new in contrast to the Church of Christ is simply
not the Church of Christ! The Mosaic religion, that is, the “Church of
the Old Law”, which was wanted by God to lead His people to the coming of the
Messiah, has found its fulfillment and completion in the New Covenant and was
finally revoked on Calvary by the sacrifice of Christ. From his open side came
the New and Eternal Covenant, which replaced the synagogue. It seems that
the post-Conciliar, modernist and Freemason Church also aims to
transform, overcome, and replace the Church of Christ with a “neo-church”, a
disfigured and monstrous creature that does not come from God.
The purpose of this neo-church is not to get the chosen people to
recognize the Messiah, just as it is not the purpose for the synagogue to
convert and save all peoples from the second coming of Christ, which is the
purpose of the Catholic Church. Its purpose is rather to constitute itself as the spiritual
arm of the New World Order and to promote the One World
Religion. In this sense, the Council Revolution first had to
destroy the heritage of the Church, its thousand-year-old tradition from which
it drew its vitality and authority as the mystical body of Christ. Then it was
a matter of getting rid of the representative of the old hierarchy, and only
recently she began to show herself to be what she wants to be, without pretense
or camouflage.
What you
call utopia is in fact a dystopia, because it represents
the concreteization of the plan of Freemasonry and prepares the appearance of
the Antichrist.
I am also convinced that the majority of my confreres, and especially
almost all priests and believers, are not fully aware of this hellish plan, and
that recent events have opened the eyes of many. Their faith will enable our
Lord to gather the pusillus grex,
the small flock, before the final confrontation around the true shepherd.
Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, excerpt from new interview published
April 22, 2020
COMMENT: A characteristic attribute with all conservative Catholics is
that they think the problems with the Church began when they discovered them.
Therefore, everyone that figured it out before they did were precipitously
rash, radical, acting without sufficient evidence or motive, drawing
conclusions without sufficient cause or reason. They then recommend that they
Church needs a restoration to the way everything was before they became
unsettled. This first cause of this is pride. Therefore they do not trouble
themselves for a deeper understanding of how and why the Church has come to a
condition of generalized apostasy. The second cause that follows from the first
is ingratitude and indifference toward those who have been defending the faith
for the last fifty-plus years. With all due respect, Archbishop Carlo Maria
Vigano, who is already a member of the ‘Neo-Church’, has exhibited this same
quality as other conservative Catholics, but there are indications in these
comments above that he is discovering Catholic tradition. We are always pleased
to see conservative Catholics begin to figure out that things are not as they
should be, but as a rule, when you are lost, you should ask directions from
others who know the lay of the land, who know where you are, and who know how
you can get to where you need to be going. That apparently is what Archbishop
Vigano is now doing.
Who
Owns Parish Property?
Should
we buy or rent?
And
just why do Indultists pay $6,889.00/week rental fees for the use of “stolen
property” to obtain services that are in fact the bishop’s duty to provide???
Bishop Ronald Gainer in Harrisburg is
tied up in bankruptcy court and apparently does not know why. In an effort to
exclude individual parish properties from creditors, his lawyers argue that the
bishop is only a trustee for the individual parishes acting in their best
interests and not the owner, and therefore parish assets should not be included
as part of the diocese’s. If that is true, then Bishop Gainer’s predecessors
were certainly guilty of theft when they closed 33 parishes in the diocese,
sold off their assets, and pocketed their bank accounts into the general
diocesan fund against the expressed wills of the parishioners which includes
the parish of St. Lawrence in Harrisburg. Normally, bankruptcy court requires
the business to submit a restructured business plan that demonstrates an
understanding as to why the business failed, that will correct previous
financial mismanagement, keep the business solvent, satisfy its creditors, and
still permit it to accomplish the ends for which it is constituted. Does anyone
think that Bishop Gainer will publically admit that it is the failure of his
predecessors to remove homosexual priests from the clergy and prohibit
homosexuals from entering Catholic seminaries that is responsible for the
crisis of pederasty that has cost faithful Catholics millions of dollars in
damages and injured countless souls? Poor Bishop Gainer does not even know what
the Mission of the Church is. If Indultists ever do the math, they might learn that they can buy
their Church from the bankruptcy court for far less than they are renting from
the diocese, but that is a dirty little secret that we are expected to be quiet
about.
“That’s the real Holy Water!”
Pope Francis/Bergoglio, to Scottish seminarians who presented him with
a bottle of Scotch Whiskey
The
Spirit of Vatican II smells just as bad as its rotting corpse!
In 1968, Canada’s justice minister was John Turner, a Catholic. The
Catholic Conference of Canadian Bishops (CCCB), citing the Vatican II document
on religious liberty, assured Mr. Turner that he did not have the right to
impose Catholic sexual morality as the basis of Canadian law, as this would be
“an unfair spirit of partisanship.” Under their pastoral guidance, Turner
joyfully passed laws such as the “Criminal Law Amendment Act” of 1968–69, which
allowed the culture of death to consume the country. Abortion, homosexuality,
divorce, prostitution, and pornography were all legalized under the country’s
“Catholic” justice, while the head of the CCCB remarked, “Gentlemen, I think
John has convinced us. Let’s have a drink”. This is not the mythical Spirit of
Vatican II. This is the legitimate pastoral implementation of Vatican II, and
it has deadly consequences.
Kenneth Dobbs, Vatican II Cannot Be Separated from Its ‘Spirit’
In his “Summa Theologiae,” in which St. Thomas treats this question (on
the infallibility of the pope) ex
professo, he lays it down as non-controvertible that the Pope cannot err,
provided that be teaches as the Head of the Church, with the intention to
oblige the faithful to believe. In any other case this special prerogative is
not necessary for the Unity of the Church, and, therefore, not necessary at
all, because it was not conferred on St. Peter for any personal advantage, but
for the benefit of the Church, whose very existence requires the strict Unity.
Rev. F. X. Weninger, D.D., On the Apostolical and Infallible Authority
of the Pope when Teaching the Faithful
“As soon as men decide that all means are permitted to fight an evil,
then their good becomes indistinguishable from the evil that they set out to
destroy.”
Christopher H. Dawson, Catholic historian
Cardinals,
bishops ask pope to dogmatically declare Mary ‘spiritual Mother’ in face of
pandemic
Mary should be
declared 'Mother of all Peoples' to release grace on humanity, they write.
LifeSiteNews | April 15, 2020 — Cardinals and bishops representing each
continent begged Pope Francis in an Easter 
letter to dogmatically proclaim Mary as “Spiritual Mother of all
Peoples” as the world faces the “historic” coronavirus pandemic.
The letter states that the signatories made this same request of the
Holy Father in August 2019, but felt the “pastoral and moral imperative” to
appeal to him again as the “world faces exponentially greater disaster on
personal, social, political, economic, and humanitarian aspects” because of the
coronavirus pandemic.
“[B]ehind all these external events, a spiritual battle is taking
place, more than ever, between good and evil, light and darkness, in the hearts
of humanity,” they state.
“Here, the real battle must be fought. Humanity is in great need of conversion,
and of supernatural help which can only come from the Lord Jesus, and from his
Mother.”
The two cardinals and six bishops who signed the letter believe God is
waiting for the Church “to dogmatically proclaim Mary as the ‘Spiritual Mother
of all Peoples’, in a solemn declaration of her unique cooperation with Jesus
in the Redemption, and her consequential roles in the distribution of grace and
intercession for humanity, for which he will respond with a historic new
outpouring of his Holy Spirit and the eventual grace of world peace.” […..]
COMMENT: The Blessed Virgin Mary gives God’s plan for “world peace” at Fatima
and these clerics, turning their back on God, come up with what they think to
be a better idea. What is just as bad, the Blessed Virgin Mary is not the
“spiritual mother of all peoples.” And
this title of “mother of all peoples” is not equivalent to or consequent from
her titles as “Co-Redemptrix” and “Mother of all Grace.” The Blessed Virgin
Mary is the Mother of all those who “have been baptized in Christ, (and have)
have put on Christ” (Galatians 3:27). Because she is the Mother of Jesus
Christ, she is the Mother of all those who by grace are united with her divine
Son. She is the Mother of all those “who keep the commandments of God,” as St.
John so perfectly said: “And the dragon was angry against the woman: and went
to make war with the rest of her seed, who keep the commandments of God, and
have the testimony of Jesus Christ” (Apoc. 12:17). The Church liturgically
attributes to her from the prophecy from Sirach: “Let thy dwelling be in Jacob,
and thy inheritance in Israel, and take root in my elect... And so was I established in Sion, and in the
holy city likewise I rested, and my power was in Jerusalem. And I took root in
an honorable people, and in the portion of my God his inheritance, and my abode
is in the full assembly of saints.” These clerics could not be sufficiently
insulted because they are aggravating the problem for which they claim to be
offering a relief. As the Blessed Virgin Mary said at Fatima, “The good will
have much to suffer.”
I mean the monstrous wars about small points of theology, the
earthquakes of emotion about a gesture or a word. It was only a matter on an
inch; but an inch is everything when you are balancing….. The Church had to be
careful, if only that the world might be careless. This is the thrilling
romance of Orthodoxy. People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of
orthodoxy as something heavy, hum-drum, and safe. There never was anything so
perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. It was sanity: and to be sane is more
dramatic than to be mad. It was equilibrium of a man behind madly rushing
horses…. The orthodox Church never took the tame course or accepted the
conventions; the orthodox Church was never respectable…. It is easy to be a madman: it is easy to be a
heretic. It is always easy to let the age have its head; the difficult thing is
to keep one’s own. It is always easy to be a modernist; as it is easy to be a
snob. To have fallen into any of those open traps of error and exaggeration
which fashion after fashion and sect after sect set along the historic path of
Christendom - that would indeed have been simple. It is always simple to fall;
there are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one
stands. To have fallen into any one of the fads from Gnosticism to Christian
Science (or Modernism) would indeed have been obvious and tame. But to have
avoided them all has been one whirling adventure; and in my vision the heavenly
chariot flies thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and
prostrate, the wild truth reeling but erect.
G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
The
Resurrection of Jesus Christ Is a Dogma
“The dogmas of
the faith are to be held only according to a practical sense, that is, as
preceptive norms for action, but not as norms for believing.” Condemned,
St. Pius X, Lamentabili
This
condemned proposition distinguishes between “preceptive
norms for action” and “norms for believing.”
All
commands, laws, injunctions, admonitions, counsels, and other “perceptive norms for action,” are hierarchical, must
be reasonable, must be directed toward the common good, do not bind in cases of
necessity or impossibility, do not bind in cases of invincible ignorance, and
must be properly promulgated by competent authority. The science of moral theology guides us in
the formation of correct consciences to fulfill these “preceptive
norms for action.”
Dogmas
are primarily “norms for believing” and only
secondarily and indirectly, “preceptive norms for
action” in the sense that our actions must be conformable to truth. A dogma is that part of Divine Revelation
that has been infallibly defined and constitute a formal object of Divine and
Catholic Faith. Dogma expresses a truth
that is universally true, that is, true for all times, places, persons and
circumstances. Dogma in itself is
sufficient for the faith. Dogma does not
forbid elucidation but the elucidation is not necessary to the faith. A child can profess the Catholic Faith in the
Trinity in a more perfect manner that best theologian. We as Catholics are required to believe in
the Trinity for our salvation, no one has to understand any theology about
it. St. Augustine said, “Seek not to
understand that you may believe, but believe that you may understand”. We begin with the dogma, which is simple; the
understanding is not necessary but may be very beneficial since we are rational
creatures. Understanding is the Gift of
the Holy Ghost related to the virtue of Faith and can be of great support to
the faith. Still, St. Teresa of Avila
said regarding the dogma of the Holy Trinity that she more gloried in dogmas of
the faith where she understood very little because the exercise of the faith
was then far more meritorious.
St. Pius
X, in Lamentabili, condemned the
modernist practice of limiting dogmatic truth with the moral restrictions that
apply to commands, laws, injunctions, admonitions, counsels, etc.
[Modernism is the] synthesis of
all heresies [whose] system means the destruction not of the Catholic religion
alone, but of all religion....
[Modernists] partisans of error are to be sought not only among the
Church’s open enemies; but what is to be most dreaded and deplored, in her very
bosom, and are all the more mischievous the less they keep in the open.... They
put themselves forward as reformers of the Church [though they are] thoroughly
imbued with the poisonous doctrines taught by the enemies of the
Church.... They assail all that is most
sacred in the work of Christ.... [They are] the most pernicious of all the
adversaries of the Church... They lay the axe not to the branches and shoots,
but to the very root, that is, to the Faith and its deepest fibers.... The
most absurd tenet of the Modernists, that every religion according to the
different aspect under which it is viewed, must be considered as both natural
and supernatural. It is thus that they
make consciousness and revelation synonymous.
From this they derive the law laid down as the universal standard,
according to which religious consciousness is to be put on an equal footing
with revelation, and that to it all must submit, even the supreme authority of
the Church. St. Pius X, Pascendi
Therefore: In the Novus Ordo Church of
Sweet Dreams where harshness is always frowned upon harshly!
·
Religious Liberty is the doctrinal validation of
“Religious Consciousness.”
·
Ecumenism is the collectivization and synthesis through
dialogue of the individual’s “Religious Consciousness.”
·
“Faith” is the affirmation of the subjective
“Religiousness Consciousness” on the authority of the believer.
·
“Dogma” is the historical and transitory expression of
“Religiousness Consciousness” for a particular age.
·
“Tradition” is the historical experience from which the
present “Religious Consciousness” has evolved.
The
Holy Office Letter of 1949 –
The
Novel Doctrine of Salvation by Implicit Desire
This Heretical Letter Is the Doctrinal Foundation for Modernist
Ecclesiology and Ecumenism
It is not always
required that one be actually incorporated as a member of the Church (for
salvation), but this at least is required: that one adhere to it in wish and
desire. It is not always necessary that this be explicit . . . but when a man labors under invincible
ignorance, God accepts even an implicit will, called by that name because it is
contained in the good disposition of soul in which a man wills to conform his
will to the will of God.
Holy Office letter to
Cardinal Richard Cushing of Boston, August 9, 1949, DS 3870
NOTE: The Holy Office letter of 1949 was never
entered into the Acta Apostolicae Sedis
and therefore it has no greater authority than a private letter from one bishop
to another. The quote provided authoritatively referenced a citation from the
encyclical of Pope Pius XII, Mystici
Corporis. The citation was
mistranslated to entirely corrupt the meaning of what Pope Pius XII said. The 1949 Letter was then published by
Cardinal Cushing of Boston, MA in 1952, one year after the death of its author,
Francesco Cardinal Marchetti-Selvaggiani. The letter was included in the 1962
edition of Denzinger, not by virtue of the authority of the letter, but rather
by the modernist agenda of its editor, Rev. Karl Rahner. This letter has come
to be the doctrinal foundation for the new Ecumenical Ecclesiology being cited
in the decree Lumen Gentium at
Vatican II. The new Ecumenical
Ecclesiology has replaced St. Robert Bellarmine’s traditional definition that
the Catholic Church “is the society of Christian believers united in the
profession of the one Christian faith and the participation in the one
sacramental system under the government of the Roman Pontiff.” It is this new
Ecclesiology that is the underpinning for the Ecumenical transmutation of
nearly every Tradition in the Latin rite since Vatican II, the most important
of which is the traditional Roman rite of the Mass. The 1949 letter is the foundation of sand on
which John Paul II’s ecumenical prayer meeting at Assisi stands.
Around
four o’clock in the afternoon on January 3rd 1944, in the convent
chapel of Tuy, in front of the Tabernacle, Our Lady urged Sister Lucia to write
the text of the Third Secret and Sister Lucia recounts:
“I felt my spirit inundated by
a mystery of light that is God and in Him I saw and heard the point of a lance
like a flame that is detached touch the axis of the earth and it trembles:
mountains, cities, towns and villages with their inhabitants are buried. The
sea, the rivers and clouds exceed their boundaries, inundating and dragging
with them in a vortex, houses and people in a number that cannot be counted; it
is the purification of the world from the sin in which it is immersed. Hatred,
ambition, provoke the destructive war. After I felt my heart racing and in my
spirit a soft voice that said: ‘In time, one faith, one baptism, one Church,
Holy, Catholic, Apostolic. In eternity, Heaven!’ This word ‘Heaven’ filled my
heart with peace and happiness in such a way that, almost without being aware
of it, I kept repeating to myself for a long time: Heaven, Heaven!!”
Um Caminho
sob o olhar de Maria (A Path Under the
Eyes of Mary), published in 2013 by the sisters of the Carmel of Coimbra
Fr.
Waters - persecuted by those who hope that “true Liturgy shall become extinct.”
The holy Fathers who have written upon the subject of anti-Christ, and of
the prophecies of Daniel, without a single exception, as far as I know - and
they are the Fathers both of the East and of the West, the Greek and the Latin
Church - all of them unanimously say that in the latter end of the world,
during the reign of anti-Christ, the Holy sacrifice of the Altar will
cease. In the work of the end of the
world ascribed to St. Hippolytus, after a long description of the afflictions
of the last days, we read as follows: “The Churches shall lament with a great
lamentation, for there shall be offered no more oblation nor worship acceptable
to God. The sacred buildings of the
churches shall be as hovels; and the precious Body and Blood of Christ shall
not be manifest in those days; the true Liturgy shall become extinct.... Such
is the universal testimony of the Fathers of the early centuries.”
Cardinal Henry Edward Manning
Our Lady of
Good Success to the Catholics of Today
My Beloved Daughter, I am Mary of
Good Success, your Mother and your Protectress, I carry my most Holy Son in my
left arm and the scepter of the world in my right arm…. The sanctuary lamp which you just saw go out has several meanings.
Firstly, towards the end of the
nineteenth century and during a large part if the twentieth century there will
arise various errors and the whole universe will become Republican. The
precious light of faith will be going out following on the almost complete
destruction of morals; in that time there will be many tribulations, moral
tribulations also, both public and private. The little group of people who keep
the true worship of faith and the virtues will have to suffer cruelly and
indescribably. The constant martyrdom will bring many to an early death, they
will be counted amongst the martyrs, they have sacrificed themselves for Church
and country. In order to deliver oneself from the slavery of these errors one
will need great strength of will, perseverance, courage and a great trust in
God. These are gifts of the merciful love of my Divine Son, He has provided
them for the renewal. In order to test the faith and the trust of the just and
good men there will be moments when everything seems to be lost and paralyzed
but that is the moment in which the happy beginning of the complete renewal
starts.
Secondly, my communities will be
abandoned, sunk in an abyss, a deep ocean of bitterness and they will seem to
be satiated with sufferings and afflictions. How many good vocations are lost
because of lack of good and prudent spiritual direction; the Novice Mistresses
should take great care of the prayers of the novices and they should show
understanding of souls.
The Third reason for the
extinguishing of the sanctuary lamp is the spirit of impurity of those times,
the air will be filled with this unclean spirit. A flood of filth will overflow
the streets, the squares, and all public places so that there will be no
virginal souls left in the world.
Fourthly, in all layers of society
errors will strive with great cunning to penetrate into the families in order
to corrupt the youth too; Satan will congratulate himself that he can feed
himself in the fouled way on the hearts of the children. The innocence of
children will hardly exist anymore. Priestly vocations will be lost. That will
be a true misfortune and priests will turn away from their holy duties and
enter upon a false, wrong course, and therefore the Church will go dark. No
prelate and father will be watching any longer with love, strength and prudence
over this flock, and many of the prelates will lose the spirit of God and bring
their own souls into danger. Pray constantly, call upon heaven without tiring,
and weep without ceasing inwardly in your heart and pray to the Heavenly Father
through the Eucharistic Heart of my Divine Son Who has nobly shed blood.
Out of the bitterness and pains of His
sufferings and death, pray that He will have compassion upon His servants, that
He will bring an end to this terrible scourge by sending to the Church a
prelate to renew the spirit of His priests. My Divine Son and I will surround
this beloved son with a special love, we shall pour out a heap of many graces
of humility of heart and docility towards God’s inspirations, and the strength
to defend the rights of the Church so that he will know how to defend the
rights of the Church with a heart which enables him to behave like another
Christ towards the mighty people of this world and the little people of this
world without despising the unfortunate ones. He will, with a divine
gentleness, lead into the convents and monasteries souls consecrated to God for
the service of God without making the yoke of the Lord heavy upon them. He
holds in his hands the scales of sanctity in order that everything happen
according to the weight and measure so that God be glorified.
This prelate and father will form a
counter-weight against the lukewarmness of priests and religious who are meant
to be dedicated to God. As a result of the guilt of these faithless men, Satan
will gain upon earth control of this world like a dark cloud which darkens the
sky and darkens all of the people who are consecrated to the Most Holy Heart of
my Divine Son. All will have to suffer chastisements because all kinds of
crimes have been allowed. They will suffer pestilence, hunger, civil strife,
degeneration of morals and the loss of countless souls. In order to blow away
the black clouds which block the shining holiness and the freedom of the Church
there will be a fearful war in which much blood will flow of priests and
religious. This night will be so terrible that people will think that
wickedness is conquering. Then strikes my heart and in a most sudden way I
shall annihilate the pride of Satan, I shall assist and liberate the Church and
country from his cruel tyranny.
The Fifth reason why the sanctuary
lamp went out is that influential men will watch with indifference, uncaringly,
the oppression of the Church, the persecution of virtue and the triumph of
wickedness. Because these influential people will not use their position of
influence in order to combat evil or to renew the faith, the people will
gradually become indifferent to the demands of God, they will take on an evil
spirit and let themselves be swept away in all kinds of passion and vice. My
beloved daughter, were you to live that terrible time you would die of pain or
grief over the circumstances which I have described to you. The love of my Holy
Son and mine which we have for this world which is our property demand from now
on sacrifices and good works in order that the duration of this terrible
catastrophe will be shortened.
The Blessed and ever Virgin Mary, under the title of Our Lady of Good
Success, to Sister Maria Anna of Jesus, in the Convent of the Immaculate
Conception in Quito on the 2nd February, 1634. Sister was praying in front of the Blessed
Sacrament when suddenly the sanctuary lamp went out.
Unintended
blessings from Pandemic
De Mattei: Is
the Corona Virus “the black swan” of 2020?
Roberto de
Mattei | Corrispondenza Romana | March 25, 2020
“Our Lady
asked for something more: the specific consecration of Russia, done by the
Pope, in union with all the bishops of the world. It is this act, until now
never done, that everyone is waiting for, before it is too late.”
[……]The world’s interconnected economy is proving itself to be a
precarious system, but the impact of the Corona Virus is not only economical
and sanitary, it is also religious and ideological. The Utopia of
Globalization, which until September 2019, seemed to prevail, is [now] undergoing
an irremediable debacle. On September 12, 2019, Pope Francis had invited the
leaders of the major religions, and the international exponents of the
economic, political and cultural world, to participate in a solemn event which
was to take place in the Vatican on May 14, 2020: the Global Compact on
Education. Around the same time “the prophetess” of deep ecology, Greta
Thunberg, arrived in New York for the U.N. Climate Change Summit 2019, and Pope
Francis on the eve of the Amazon Synod, sent a video- message to her and the
participants at the summit, manifesting his full consonance with the globalist
aims.
On January 20, 2020, the Pope addressed a message to Klaus Schwab,
Executive President of the World Economic Forum (WEF), of Davos, underlining
the importance of an “integral ecology”, which takes into account “the
complexity of the interconnection of our common home”. But by then a mysterious
virus had already begun to inflict a deadly blow on “the global village”.
A few months later, we find ourselves faced with an absolutely
unprecedented situation. Greta is forgotten, the Amazon Synod a failure, the
world’s political leaders reveal their incapacity in dealing with the
emergency, the Global Compact is off and St. Peter’s Square, spiritual centre
of the world, is empty. The ecclesiastical authorities conform to (sometimes
anticipating) the restrictive decrees from the civil authorities who forbid
Masses and religious ceremonies of any kind. The most symbolic and paradoxical
event is perhaps the closing of the Sanctuary in Lourdes, par excellence place
of physical and spiritual healing, that barred its doors, for fear that someone
might get ill there, praying to God for his health. Is it all a maneuver? Do we find ourselves
faced with a totalitarian power that is restricting the freedom of citizens and
is persecuting Christians? […..]
Fruits
of Feminism: The Catholic Historian, Christopher Dawson, says that no
matriarchal society has ever produced a high culture in the history of mankind!
In the U. S. 68% of all children are born to an unwed mother or to a
mother that will soon be divorced. The
Catholic family that was the building block for Catholic culture and thus
western civilization is gone and leaving only crumbling husk that cannot
continue.
The
true Catholic Faith: “Grounded and Settled, and Immovable”
Yet now he hath reconciled in the body of his flesh through death, to
present you holy and unspotted, and blameless before him: If so ye continue in the faith, grounded and settled, and immoveable
from the hope of the gospel which you have heard… (Col 1:22-23).
St. Paul
Pope Francis –
his “most gentle manner”!
They (our most holy predecessors)
knew the capacity of innovators in the art of deception. In order not to shock
the ears of Catholics, the innovators sought to hide the subtleties of
their tortuous maneuvers by the use of seemingly innocuous words such as would
allow them to insinuate error into souls in the most gentle manner. Once the truth had been compromised, they could, by means of slight
changes or additions in phraseology, distort the confession of the faith that
is necessary for our salvation, and lead the faithful by subtle errors to their
eternal damnation. This
manner of dissimulating and lying is vicious, regardless of the circumstances
under which it is used. For very good reasons it can never be tolerated in a
synod of which the principal glory consists above all in teaching the truth
with clarity and excluding all danger of error. Moreover, if all this is sinful, it cannot be excused in the
way that one sees it being done, under the erroneous pretext that the seemingly
shocking affirmations in one place are further developed along orthodox lines
in other places, and even in yet other places corrected; as
if allowing for the possibility of either affirming or denying the statement,
or of leaving it up the personal inclinations of the individual – such has
always been the fraudulent and daring method used by innovators to establish
error. It allows for both the possibility of promoting error and of
excusing it. It is a most reprehensible technique for the insinuation of
doctrinal errors and one condemned long ago by our predecessor St. Celestine,
who found it used in the writings of Nestorius, bishop of Constantinople, and
which he exposed in order to condemn it with the greatest possible severity.
Once these texts were examined carefully, the impostor was exposed and
confounded, for he expressed himself in a plethora of words, mixing true things with others that were
obscure; mixing at times one with the other in such a way that he
was also able to confess those things which were denied while at the same time
possessing a basis for denying those very sentences which he confessed.
Pope Pius VI, Auctorem Fidei, 1794 papal bull
addressed to all the faithful condemning 85 propositions from the Council of
Pistoia, 1786
The Sacrifice of the
Cross wrought the remission of sin in general; in Holy Mass the virtue of
Christ’s Blood is applied to this and that person individually. By His death and Passion Christ collected the
riches which in the Mass are dealt out to us.
His death is a treasury, Mass the key that unlocks it… Observe,
therefore, what it really means to say or to hear Mass. To do so is equivalent to causing God, who
once died for all mankind, to die over again in a mystical manner for me and
you, and for each one present, just as if He suffered death for the sake of
each one individually.
Paolo Segneri, SJ,
1624-1694, famous Jesuit preacher who was made the theologian of the Paenitentiaria by Pope Innocent XII.
That fabled (Judeo-Christian) tradition does not exist, nor does the
“Judeo-Christian ethic.” Though sharing a common origin in the Hebrew
Scriptures, the two faiths read the scriptural texts differently. They believe
in God, but view Him through different lenses. They each have a story, but they
are not the same. They each have a concept of man, but they are not the same.
They are both ethical religions, but with separate ideas of man’s nature,
salvation and destiny.
Raymond Apple, emeritus rabbi of the Great Synagogue, Sydney,
Australia. Published in Jerusalem Post
Situation
Ethics: PEW POLL: 95% of Jewish
Leaders support abortion and “same-sex marriage” for the U.S. but not for
Israel!
The Jewish question of our time does not differ greatly from the one
which affected the Christian peoples of the Middle Ages. In a foolish way it is
said to arise from hatred towards the Jewish tribe. Mosaism in itself could not
become an object of hate for Christians, since, until the coming of Christ, it
was the only true religion, a prefiguration of and preparation for
Christianity, which, according to God’s Will, was to be its successor. But the
Judaism of the centuries [after Christ] turned its back on the Mosaic law,
replacing it with the Talmud (ii.),
the very quintessence of that Pharisaism which in so many ways has been
shattered through its rejection by Christ, the Messiah and Redeemer. And
although Talmudism is an important element of the Jewish question, it cannot be
said, strictly speaking, to give that question a religious character, because
what the Christian nations despise in Talmudism is not so much its virtually
non-existent theological element, but rather, its morals, which are at variance
with the most elementary principles of natural ethics.
On the Jewish Question in Europe; La
Civiltà Cattolica, Series XIV, Vol. VII, 23;10; October 1890
He
preserved “the basic elements, the bread, the wine,” but so did every Protestant
sect. The question is, ‘Did he preserve
the Sacrifice? Did he preserve the True
Presence?
“Certainly, we will preserve the basic elements, the bread, the wine,
but all else will be changed according to local traditions: words, gestures,
colours, vestments, chants, architecture, decor. The problem of liturgical
reform is immense.”
Msgr. Mieczyslaw Malinksi, Mon
Ami: Karol Wojtyla, Le Centurion, 1980, p.220, quoting Cardinal Karol
Wojtyla during informal meeting with fellow Poles during the Vatican II Council
Planning
A Novel Church from the Top Down! It is a problem in that Western culture is
entirely the product of Catholic formation. The problem with the Church of the
New Advent is that it has adopted the destroying concept of Nominalism that has
been a destructive solvent of Catholic culture since the renaissance. They want faithful Catholics to turn their
backs on the faith and accept their fundamental errors of reductive scientism
to which all dogma must be reformulated.
They then impose the errors of pagan cultures to which the Catholic
faith is expected to conform itself!
This has nothing in common with legitimate cultural variations of
Catholic rites within the self-same faith, or the spirituality and works of
charity that differ between various religious orders within the Church.
Wojtyla’s presupposition is pure naturalism.
IT is nothing but modernist apostasy!
Question - What problems will be oriented differently
by the Council, Your Emminence?
Wojtyla’s Answer - Above all, it will serve to give more value
to the authority of each Bishop and to promote decentralization within the
Church, as well as to return to the principle of collegiality, re-evaluate pastoral methods in
force until now, and effectively introduce new methods and ways - at times most
audacious ones.
There is also the question of the
universal character of the Church; there is a change of attitude toward the
ancient cultures of the non-European peoples. It is necessary to de-Westernize
Christendom. The peoples possessing their own ancient cultures have
understandable psychological barriers against Christianism when it presents
itself in its European trappings! The Africanization, Indianization,
Japonization, etc. of Catholicism reveals itself necessary. This consists of
making Christian substances germinate in their cultures. We know that all this
is neither simple nor easy to accomplish.
It is the end of the Constantine
era, which was characterized by a strict accord between the Altar and the
Throne, between the Church and the State, illustrated in its highest point by
the birth of the Holy Roman Empire in the 9th century. We face a grave problem:
to elaborate new forms for relations between the Church and the State, the
right of the Church to religious liberty.
Going further, it is necessary to speak of giving new
importance to the lay people in the Church, and, finally, to develop ecumenical
ideas on a scale unknown until now in the History of the Church.
Msgr. Mieczyslaw Malinksi, Mon Ami: Karol
Wojtyla, Le Centurion, 1980, p.190-191, quoting Cardinal Karol Wojtyla
during informal meeting with fellow Poles during the Vatican II Council
The
Judgment of the Church against a Heretical Pope
“Further we declare that there are two wills and principles of action,
in accordance with what is proper to each of the natures in Christ, in the way
that the sixth synod, that at (6) Constantinople, proclaimed, when it also publicly rejected
Sergius, Honorius,
Cyrus, Pyrrhus, Macarius, those
uninterested in true holiness, and their like-minded followers.
“To summarize, we
declare that we defend free from any innovations all the—written and—unwritten
ecclesiastical traditions that have been entrusted to us.”
Seventh Ecumenical Council, reaffirming the condemnation of Monothelitism and the monothelite heretics by
the Sixth Ecumenical Council, including Pope Honorius
“Further, we accept the sixth, holy and universal synod (6
Constantinople III), which shares the same beliefs and is in harmony with the
previously mentioned synods in that it wisely laid down that in the two natures
of the one Christ there are, as a consequence, two principles of action and the
same number of wills. So, we anathematize Theodore who was bishop of Pharan,
Sergius, Pyrrhus, Paul and Peter, the unholy prelates of the church of
Constantinople, and with
these, Honorius of Rome, Cyrus of Alexandria as well as Macarius of
Antioch and his disciple Stephen, who followed the false teachings of the unholy heresiarchs
Apollinarius, Eutyches and Severus and proclaimed that the flesh of God, while
being animated by a rational and intellectual soul, was without a principle of
action and without a will, they themselves being impaired in their senses and
truly without reason.” [……]
Eight Ecumenical Council, reaffirming the condemnation of Monothelitism and the monothelite heretics by
the Sixth Ecumenical Council which included the Councils judgment and
condemnation of Pope Honorius
“On earth, no
mortal should presume to reproach (redarguere) any faults to the
Pontiff, because he who has to judge (judicaturus) others, should not be
judged (judicandus) by anyone, unless he is found deviating from the Faith.”
Gratian, the
‘Father of Canon Law,’ Decree of
Gratian, (Pars I, D 40, c. 6)
Pope Francis:
An Eschatological Overview
The massive
emphasis on mercy–giving and receiving–is the key to understanding the
eschatological dimension of his pontificate
Vatican Insider | Stephen
Walford | February 8, 2020
[….]This teaching on divine mercy is one
example where a beautiful convergence between authentic private revelation and
the magisterium has enabled the faithful to grasp an essential element of what
it means to live an authentic Christian life. But there is more to it than
that. In the Diary of St Faustina Kowalska, there is a little talked of, but
undeniable theme running through it: the Lord makes clear the season of divine
mercy is for the end times. St Faustina herself was told she would prepare the
world for the Lord’s second coming, while St John Paul II in 2002 referred to
the promise of Jesus to St Faustina that “a spark from Poland will prepare the
world for my final coming” as binding.
It is surely the case that Pope Francis
has–with the prompting of the Holy Spirit–taken what was in part embryonic in
the pontificate of St John Paul II, and placed mercy as the absolute key for
the future of the Church and the world. Its salvific message is plastered
across almost every page of the Holy Father’s writings in one way or another,
as the antidote to the ever increasing evil that offers only death and
destruction.
Fr Spadaro in his essay also touches upon
several teachings and attitudes that I too have long considered as of having great
importance in understanding this Pope: Francis shuns a millenarian view of the future of
humanity where some golden age of peace within history rules; his focus rests
solely on the criteria for a blessed Final Judgement as found in the
Beatitudes. The criteria, therefore is Jesus himself, since the Beatitudes are
in essence, a portrait of the Lord. Furthermore, the Pope sees
opportunities everywhere to build bridges and to invite reconciliation. No
situation or soul is beyond help or redemption in the time God allows for
conversion.
This charism of the Pope is the great dividing line between those who
understand him and those who do not. How can he sting like St John the Baptist,
yet at other times appear far too generous? In reality, he is following the
criteria of Jesus to the letter–some may say even rigidly! He condemns
hypocrisy, narcissism, self- love, and a pharisaical attitude that divides
between “them” and “us.” He continually invites, even demands help for the poor
and marginalised. His constant criticisms in Santa Marta simply warn us
that we will be judged on love, and that no defence attorney will be present if
we live now as armchair Christians with a Jonah syndrome. No, the Holy Father
cares deeply, he knows Jesus recoils at hypocrisy and spiritual apathy and
therefore in his heart, he must give the Church some tough love. What Pope
Francis is obviously aware of, is the sad reality that for even many Catholics,
Jesus’ warning concerning “love growing cold” (cf. Matt 24:12) applies now more
than ever. How many refuse to forgive, to apologise, to give of themselves
generously? How many create their own moral code, with excuses and exemptions?
How many prefer to look after their own interests no matter how much suffering
they leave in their wake? This
in reality is apostasy from the central Christian message: to love God and
neighbour. And thus charity, repentance, mercy are watered down to such an
extent that they become meaningless.
In an eschatological sense, I see Francis trying to form a Church that
is far more conformed to Jesus himself; one that is authentically evangelical;
one that has its foundations in the dirt and dust of its precious flock; one in
which love and humility are never again overshadowed by the lust for prestige,
power and worldly success. In short, this is the vision of a Church that is
being prepared as the Bride fit for her meeting with the Bridegroom.
Many Traditionalists are right though: there is a war, there is a
powerful enemy, there is an apocalyptic battle being waged, but they are being
seduced by that same enemy. The enemy is Satan, not Pope Francis, or other
Catholics who they don’t agree with. Pope Francis, as a realist, knows the
depth of this spiritual war, but he also knows wounded souls (no matter how those
wounds came about) need love and mercy. They need salvation and are not to be
seen as enemies fighting for the other side. This attitude of mercy is entirely
in line with Jesus rebuking James and John, who suggested sending down fire
from heaven on those who did not welcome the Lord (Lk 9:54).
The division being caused by those opposed to the Holy Father, does
nothing other than serve the cause of Satan in creating confusion and doubt in
the hearts of ordinary Catholics. Satan, of course, does not care too much with
“the world” –he desires far more to destroy the Lord’s work in His Church; to
suffocate the sacramental life from souls and to present preaching as
hypocritical nonsense. He despises this Pope because Francis shines a
light on his deviousness, and because the Holy Father is willing to take risks
for the sake of the lost sheep.
Pope Francis has also contributed to the
Marian Era that began in the mid nineteenth century; a period of time
prophesied by St Louis de Montfort as preparation for the second coming of
Jesus. Not only his very personal Marian devotion, but his emphasis on the
church as Mother in imitation of Mary– including the new Feast of Mary Mother
of the Church– has enabled the Church to reflect ever more the Marian dimension
in its mission to bring the salvation of her Son to all. The Pope’s protection of
Medjugorje should also be seen in this context. This Marian dimension is
essential in the years ahead because it prepares for the Triumph of the
Immaculate Heart of Mary, when divine love will proclaim the final victory; it
moulds the faithful into humble souls who imitate Mary, and who follow her
command to “do whatever He tells you” (Jn 2:5).
Of course, Pope Francis, like his
predecessors shuns idle speculation and sees a danger in spending time immersed
in apocalyptic literature especially from private revelation. What is
important, is to keep an Advent spirit of watchfulness; to continually discern
the signs of the times, but always with a vision of hope for eschatological glory,
and not some intra historical era that will never come. Faith tells us that we
can see a dawn breaking on the horizon, from the East; we can see the signs
that summer is near (Matt 24:32), but we also know that until that Day arrives,
the spiritual war will become more intense. To remain loyal to the Pope and his magisterium is to
have a sure guide for what is still to come; it is to help avoid the pitfalls
that will inevitably hurt us, but above all, it will keep us close to Jesus
Christ.
In the magisterium and prophetic voice of Pope Francis, we are told to
strip ourselves of all that hinders a full adherence to the Gospel:
“Along this journey, the cultivation of all that is good, progress in the
spiritual life and growth in love are the best counterbalance to evil. Those
who choose to remain neutral, who are satisfied with little, who renounce the
ideal of giving themselves generously to the Lord, will never hold out. Even
less if they fall into defeatism, for “if we start without confidence, we have already
lost half the battle and we bury our talents… Christian triumph is always a
cross, yet a cross which is at the same time a victorious banner, borne with
aggressive tenderness against the assaults of evil”
Even if we do not know the day or the hour,
we do know how to keep our lamps lit; we know how to prepare. A revolution of love, tenderness
and mercy is Pope Francis’ answer to the reality of the Last Judgment, from
which no one can escape, and which in a very real sense is already in progress.
If holiness is grasped with both hands, then the apocalypse holds no fears; in
fact it presents a wealth of opportunities to serve the Lord.
Maranatha is the prayer that can and should live joyfully in the hearts
of the faithful in this season of mercy. We can take it to the poor, the sick,
the lonely, announcing that their liberation is near. And even if centuries are
still to pass by, the Church will live by a new evangelical urgency that will
ensure the torch of hope burns bright until the true light comes to illuminate
a transfigured creation. Pope Francis is playing a vital part in ensuring the
Church prepares well for whatever the Lords asks it to go through in the
future. Let us pray for him and his immensely important task.
COMMENTARY on Overview of the
Eschatology of Francis:
The first problem with
the theologian Stephen
Walford, and it is a huge problem, is that he makes the pope his
proximate rule of faith and not Dogma. He therefore cannot distinguish between
the pope’s personal magisterium based upon his grace of state and the
Magisterium of the Church based upon the attribute of Infallibility that Jesus
Christ endowed His Church. Whatever the current pope says or does becomes his
rule of faith and is necessarily, in his estimation, the work of the Holy
Ghost. Beginning with this colossal error, he works to build a bridge between
the teaching of a heretical pope and the Catholic faithful.
But putting this error
aside, he brings up a question that the Catholic faithful must be able to
answer clearly with the revealed truth of God. So what is wrong with the modern
popes emphasis of divine mercy? The problem is essentially that they emphasize
divine mercy in opposition to divine justice and not as a different facet of
the same jewel. Walford seems to be correct in that the popes of the Church of
the New Advent believe that we are in the last age of the Church before the
second coming of Jesus Christ. They also believe that this age is the time of
mercy (as if other ages were not) and not justice (as if other ages were).
Benedict/Ratzinger held an interview with
Jacques Servais, S.J. conducted in October of 2015 on questions of Faith and
Justification. The interview was read by the Prefect of the Pontifical
Household, Archbishop Georg Gänswein, to a subsequent Conference in November
2015 on Justification and published in March of 2016. In this interview
Benedict/Ratzinger places in constant opposition the attributes of God’s mercy
and God’s justice repeatedly characterizing His justice as “cruelty.” He quotes
in support of his theology John Paul II who was “deeply impregnated with this
impulse,” and Pope Francis whom he praises for his “pastoral practice (that) is
expressed in the fact that he continually speaks to us of God’s mercy.” These
popes all point to the gospel description of the last judgment in which the
criteria for salvation or condemnation are the corporal works of mercy.
Therefore they conclude, what one believes is of no importance but rather what
one does for his fellow man. Thus, after dividing justice and mercy, they drive
a wedge between faith and charity. It is from this that the term
“evangelization” is redefined and distinguished from “proselytism,” heretofore
they have always been considered as necessary compliments as a cause is to its
direct effect. Proselytism, the traditional fruit of evangelization, converting
others to the true faith, is condemned as “solemn nonsense” and the new
evangelization becomes only dialogue to exchange opinions for the end of
promoting corporal works of mercy (which never materialize).
Wisdom is the perfect
knowledge of the most important things in their right order of reference.
Discounting malice, Pope Francis has no wisdom because he has no right order of
reference. “Without faith it is impossible to please God” (Heb 11:6). Charity,
which is the friendship between God and man, is greater than Faith, which is
believing what God has revealed on the authority of God, but without Faith,
Charity is impossible. No one can have the friendship of God who does not
believe His Truth. Acts of Charity are an extension of the virtue of Charity
because they are entirely grounded upon seeing the image of God in other men.
There can be no Charity without Faith, and although Charity is greater than
Faith, Faith takes precedence in time. St. Thomas considers sins against Faith
as the greatest of all sins because they radically separate the person from
God. In the Acts of the Apostles, the apostles began the work of evangelization
by making proselytes out of the Jews and pagans. When the Faithful of the
Church grew from these labors, the obligation for works of Charity
correspondingly increased. What did the apostles do? They established the
deaconate to attend to works of Charity so that these works of Charity would
not impede the work of evangelization to make new proselytes.
The second coming of
Jesus Christ will be characterized by the Great Apostasy from the Faith as
described by St. Paul: “Let no man deceive you by any means, for unless there come a revolt first,
and the man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition...” (2 Thess. 2:3). Jesus
said, “Will not God revenge his elect who cry to him day and night: and will he
have patience in their regard? I say to you, that he will quickly revenge them.
But yet the Son of man,
when he cometh, shall he find, think you, faith on earth” (Luke 18:7-8)?
We are now in the Great Apostasy for at no time in history has the apostasy
been so generalized and extended to the summit of Church authority.
It is impossible to
drive a wedge between God’s justice and God’s mercy. God is perfect Act and
infinite Simplicity. He is present wherever He acts. There are no distinguished
parts in God. Mercy is only possible in the context of justice and vice versa,
otherwise the entire Passion of Jesus Christ becomes meaningless. Jesus does
not suffer the cruelty of His passion from the direct will of the Father but
from sinful men by the Father’s permissive will. It is not the cruelty of God
but cruelty of sinful men. Jesus as the Son of Man willingly suffers His
Passion firstly to give honor and glory to the Father in the name of mankind to
the end of redeeming man from sin.
“Without faith it is
impossible to please God.” It is only through Faith that Charity can exist
without which the merits of the redemptive suffering of Christ’s passions
cannot be personally gained. “Therefore I said to you, that you shall die in
your sins. For if you
believe not that I AM he, you shall die in your sin. They said therefore
to him: Who art thou? Jesus said to them: The beginning (I AM), who also speak
unto you” (John 8:24-25).
In the last judgment
when God makes a radical public distinction between “them” and “us,” Jesus
Christ will say, “When I was thirsty and you gave me to drink” (Matt
35:25). The faithful will ask, “Lord,
when did we see thee… thirsty and give thee to drink?” (37). Jesus will say,
“Amen I say to you, as long as you did it to one of these my least brethren [that is, ‘As many
of you as have been baptized in Christ, (who) have put on Christ’ (Gal 3:27)
when they were ‘born again by water and the Holy Ghost’ (John 3:5),] you did it
to me.” Only the faithful can see the
image of God in the other and the
likeness restored by the grace of
Jesus Christ in the “brethren.”
Then He will say to
those on His left condemned to hell, “Amen I say to you, as long as you did it
not to one of these least (that is, the “brethren” of Christ), neither did you
do it to me” (45). Christ dwells in the souls of the faithful by Charity. Those
condemned did not see Christ in the faithful. Those who are condemned may have
given a drink to the thirsty but without faith, they did not see the image of
God in the other, and therefore, they
did not do it for Him. They were not works of Charity but works of human
philanthropy. Works of mercy do not profit for salvation without Faith. While
Faith can exist without Charity, Charity cannot exist without Faith in this
world. Faith will pass with death but Charity will remain. That is why the last
judgment is determined by acts of mercy and not articles of Faith because at
the Last Judgment everyone will believe.
The modern Church of the
New Advent is in true apostasy which is, by definition, the actual denial of
revealed truth. They do not do works of mercy that profit for eternal salvation
because they do not have faith. Yet Walford claims, in a remarkable inversion
of divine Wisdom, that
apostasy is failure in works of mercy. The rank hypocrisy in this claim
is evident in that Catholic institutions doing works of mercy have crumbled
since Vatican II when the age of mercy supposedly got underway. And still, the
popes of the Church of the New Advent do not get it. Only by preaching the
faith will acts of mercy again abound. Jesus said to St. John the Baptist who
resisted baptizing Him, “For so it becometh us to fulfill all justice” (Matt
3:15). The Church of the New Advent cannot have part in the mercy of God
because they have no part with Him to “fulfill all justice.” The blasphemy is
this: the modern popes believe they are more merciful than God.
They proclaim the era of
mercy in opposition to God’s “cruel” justice while essentially removing all
penitential practices during Lent while accusing traditionalist Catholics of being “seduced by
Satan” and “serving the cause of Satan” by the “division… creating confusion and doubt in the hearts of
ordinary Catholics” when they oppose the rank heresy of Pope Francis.
The implications of this division between justice-mercy and charity-faith
overturn the Catholic dogmas on justification. The Church of the New Advent has
a Lutheran conception of justification. In the Servais interview
Benedict/Ratzinger said:
“It seems to me that in the theme
of divine mercy is expressed in a new way what is meant by justification by
faith. Starting from the mercy of God, which everyone is looking for, it is
possible even today to interpret anew the fundamental nucleus of the doctrine
of justification, and have it appear again in all its relevance.”
Benedict/Ratzinger “interprets
anew” by mischaracterizing the Catholic dogmatic teaching on
justification as “the conceptuality of St. Anselm” which he says “has now
become for us incomprehensible” because it necessarily includes the justice of God. He then adds:
“Only where
there is mercy does cruelty end, only with mercy do evil and violence end. Pope
Francis is totally in agreement with this line. His pastoral practice is
expressed in the fact that he continually speaks to us of God’s mercy. It is
mercy that moves us toward God, while justice frightens us before Him.”
What is worse, Benedict/Ratzinger adds that God “simply cannot
leave 'as is' the mass of evil that comes from the freedom that he himself has
granted. Only He, coming to share in the world's suffering, can redeem the
world.” So God becomes responsible for the “mass of evil” in the world because He is responsible for
granting man “freedom” and is therefore compelled by
justice “to share in
the world's suffering” to “redeem the world”! The end of this is that God has
an obligation in justice for mercy. The corollary to this is that man has an
unconditional right to divine mercy.
God is not compelled to
anything outside Himself. He cannot positively will evil. He can and does
permit evil only because He and He alone is capable of bring good out of evil.
No man can earn God's mercy and eternal salvation on their own merits.
“Charity is man’s
friendship with God based on man’s share in the Divine Life, in the happiness
of God Himself. But man cannot naturally share in God’s own life. Man’s
participation in the Divine Life is a free supernatural gift which God gives to
man. Charity then cannot be acquired by any purely human effort. It is a gift
of God infused in man’s soul by God’s goodness and generosity. Charity, like
the other theological virtues, is a supernatural virtue infused in the will by
God Himself. Who can give man a share in the Divine Love except God Himself?”
Rev. Walter Farrell,
O. P., My Way of Life, Pocket Edition
of St. Thomas
A faithful Catholic in
the state of grace is able to merit eternal life and atone for his sins because
of his union by grace with Jesus Christ in Charity. This is what gives value to
his prayers, penances, and mortifications without which they have no value at
all. This union of Charity with Christ by grace permits the faithful to not
only atone for their own sins but also for the sins of others as St. Paul said,
“Who now rejoice in my sufferings for you, and fill up those things that are
wanting of the sufferings of Christ, in my flesh, for his body, which is the
church” (Col 1:24). And thus:
“The observance of Lent is the very badge of
the Christian warfare. By it, we prove ourselves not to be enemies of the Cross
of Christ. By it, we avert the scourges of divine justice. By it we gain
strength against the princes of darkness, for it shields us with heavenly help.
Should mankind grow remiss in their observance of Lent, it would be a detriment
to God’s glory, a disgrace to the Catholic religion, and a danger to Christian
souls. Neither can it be doubted, but that such negligence would become the
source of misery to the world, of public calamity, and of private woe.”
Pope Benedict XIV,
encyclical, May 30, 1741
Without the justice of
God there could be no mercy. The faithful rejoice in the justice of God for by
it we are made children of God and can merit eternal life. Those who divide
God's mercy from His justice and believe that eternal life awaits them without
the necessity of Faith and penance are whistling in the wind. There will not
have any part with God in eternal life. May God in His mercy keep us in the
right Faith, a burning Charity and a penitential spirit until our last breath.
Pope Francis never kneels before the Blessed Sacrament!
Why?
Then Jesus said to them: Amen, amen I say unto you: Except you eat the
flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, you shall not have life in you.
He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath everlasting life: and I
will raise him up in the last day. For my flesh is meat indeed: and my blood is
drink indeed. He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, abideth in me,
and I in him. As the living Father hath sent me, and I live by the Father; so
he that eateth me, the same also shall live by me. This is the bread that came
down from heaven. Not as your fathers did eat manna, and are dead. He that
eateth this bread, shall live for ever. John 6:54-59
For as often as you shall eat this bread, and drink the chalice, you
shall shew the death of the Lord, until he come. 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. 1 Cor 11:26-29
Because for Francis, 'This is a hard
saying; who can listen to it?' (John 6:60)
And
if anyone would know, it would be Benedict!
“The greatest persecution of the Church comes not from her enemies
without, but arises from sin within the Church.”
Pope Benedict XVI
As we suffer under the moral and doctrinal
Novelties of Pope Francis, it is evident why he wanted the Novelty Master, Paul
VI, to become another novel Novus Ordo saint.
Montini is the man who defined the Spirit of Vatican II in one word:
NOVELTY in order to please men.
The
Church Teaches:
“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.”
St. Paul, Galatians 1,
8-10
“Blind that they are,
and leaders of the blind,
inflated with a boastful science, they have reached that pitch of folly where
they pervert the eternal concept of truth and the true nature of the religious
sentiment; with that new system of theirs they are seen to be under the
sway of a blind and unchecked passion for novelty, thinking not at all of finding some solid foundation of truth, but
despising the holy and apostolic traditions, they embrace other vain, futile,
uncertain doctrines, condemned by the Church, on which, in the height of their
vanity, they think they can rest and maintain truth itself.”
St. Pius X, Pascendi
“A lamentable spectacle is that presented by the aberrations of human
reason when it yields to the spirit of novelty, when against the warning of the Apostle it seeks to know beyond what
it is meant to know, and when relying too much on itself it thinks it can find
the fruit outside the Church wherein truth is found without the slightest
shadow of error.”
Pope Gregory XVI, Singulari nos, 1834, quoted by St. Pius X in Pascendi
“It is impossible to approve in Catholic publications of a style
inspired by unsound novelty which seems to deride the piety of the faithful and
dwells on the introduction of a new order of Christian life, on new directions of the Church, on new
aspirations of the modern soul, on a new vocation of the clergy, on a new
Christian civilisation.”
Leo XIII, Jan 27, 1902,
quoted by St. Pius X in Pascendi
Paul
VI Replys:
“... 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;
then, the Apocalypse: I am making everything new. 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...– 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.”
Paul VI, General
Audience, July 2, 1969
And
we remember the “miracles” attributed to Paul VI that provided “evidence” for
the “sanctity” of this Novelty Master! Two cases where the medical prognosis of
morally degenerate abortionists proved to be incorrect are regarded as a
“miracles”!
“This second miracle attributed to Pope Paul VI concerned the healing
of an unborn in the fifth month of pregnancy. According to the Catholic News
Agency the mother, from Verona in Italy, had an illness that risked her own
life and the life of her unborn and was advised to have an abortion.
A few days after the beatification of Paul VI by Pope Francis in
October 2014, the mother prayed to the now Blessed Paul VI at a shrine in
Lombardy and the baby girl was later born in good health.
The first miracle involving Pope Paul VI took place in California in
the 1990s. It also concerned an unborn which was found to have a serious health
problem that could mean brain damage. Doctors advised that it be aborted, but
the mother entrusted her pregnancy to Paul VI. The child was born healthy. Irish Times, Feb 6, 2018
Heretics
welcome for Novus Ordo Communion! What has been done sub rosa for years is now open practice.
At their spring conference in Ingolstadt, the German bishops conference
agreed that a Protestant partner of a Catholic can receive the Eucharist after
having made a serious examination of conscience with a priest or another person
with pastoral responsibilities, affirms the faith of the Catholic Church,
wishes to end serious spiritual distress, and has a longing to satisfy a hunger
for the Eucharist.
Edward Pentin, National Catholic Register
Pope Francis complains of Political Decay in the West – The
cause? The failure of the Catholic Church to teach Catholic doctrine and
Catholic morals!
Providence is the proper
instrument for change, and the test of a statesman is his cognizance of the real
tendency of providential social forces… it acts through the instincts and
intuitions of our feeble flesh, [demonstrating] that religion and politics are
inseparable, that the decay of one must produce the decay of the other.
Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind
Wisdom
is the most perfect knowledge, of the most important things, in their right
order of reference. Without the “right
order of reference”, Wisdom is impossible. Pope Francis has no Wisdom. He does not even know the “greatest commandment
in the law”!
Master, which is
the greatest commandment in the law? Jesus said to him: Thou shalt love the
Lord thy God with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with thy whole
mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment.
Matt. 22:36-38
Along with the virtues, this means above all the new commandment, the first and the greatest of
the commandments, and the one that best identifies us as Christ’s disciples:
“This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you”
(Jn. 15:12).
Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium, (161) On the Proclamation of the
Gospel in Today’s World
COMMENT: In Mystici Corporis Pope Pius XII said that
“only those are to be included as members of the Church who have been baptized
and profess the true faith, and who have not been so unfortunate as to separate
themselves from the unity of the Body, or been excluded by legitimate authority
for grave faults committed.”
This definition of those who are members of the Church founded by Jesus
Christ, outside of which there is neither the forgiveness of sins nor the
possibility of salvation, authoritatively affirms the definition formulated by
St. Robert Bellarmine. This teaching guides the practical implications of the
three dogmas regarding salvation, that is: the necessity of receiving the
sacraments; the necessity of professing the true faith (cannot be a heretic);
and the necessity of being a subject of the Roman pontiff (cannot be a
schismatic). A necessary correlative of these dogmas follows that the true
obedience of those subject to the Roman pontiff is conditional upon the Roman
pontiff defending the true faith and the true sacraments. Just as a child who
disobeys the unjust command of a parent who commands sin does not cease thereby
to being a subject of his parent, no Catholic who defends the true faith and
the true sacraments when attacked by the Roman pontiff ceases to being his
subject.
What Cardinal Zen needs to do (but is surely unable) is to affirm that
Dogma is the proximate rule of faith, and therefore, he cannot in conscience
permit faithful Catholics in China to be forced under the jurisdiction of the
formally heretical bishops that make up the Communist government Patriotic
Catholic Church in China. He should then
consecrate bishops for the faithful Catholics in China without a papal
mandate. He can even justify his actions
by using the same argument offered by Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re in his open
letter to Cardinal Zen, that is, “the expression independent
Church can no longer be interpreted in an absolute manner as ‘separation’
from the Pope, as was the case in the past.” If this can be applied to
the Communist government Church, it can applied to the those who profess the
true faith in the underground Catholic Church.
Ss. Peter & Paul Roman Catholic Mission denies that we are an
“independent” Church although this is what we are accused of by the hierarchy
and ‘devout’ members of the Church of the New Advent. It is not an argument but
a form of ad hominem attack as a
means to beg the real questions regarding our public defense of Catholic truth.
We can be grateful that Cardinal Re has scuttled their hypocritical posturing. But putting that aside, who do
we think is telling the truth in this article posted below? Did
Benedict/Ratzinger really play the major role in this betrayal of the Chinese
Catholics as Cardinal Re claims and not Pope Francis? We expect that soon
everyone will learn that Cardinal Re is telling the truth and Benedict/Ratzinger
is perhaps a whole lot worse than Pope Francis. Extra-ordinary Pope
Benedict/Ratzinger will prove to be the Ringmaster of this scandal; Ordinary
Pope Francis will prove to be just another clown.
Vatican letter
attacks Cardinal Zen, says Chinese 'patriotic' church is no longer
'independent'
LifeSiteNews | Riccardo Cascioli | Feb 29, 2020 | Reprint from The
Daily Compass
The Daily Compass has been
shown an explosive letter signed by the Dean of the College of Cardinals,
Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, that fiercely attacks Cardinal Joseph Zen, the
Archbishop Emeritus of Hong Kong, who has been critical of the secret agreement
between China and the Holy See that has resulted in the increased persecution
of Catholics. The letter contains misleading statements, affirming that there
is a continuity between the approach of this pontificate with that of previous
pontificates, when in fact no such continuity exists. Furthermore, it makes
very grave misrepresentations, attributing the authorship of the present secret
agreement to Benedict XVI and declaring a change in doctrine regarding the
possibility of independent Churches.
Cardinal Joseph
Zen is an obstacle for the Church in China, and from now on the Catholic Church
can be formed by independent churches. This is the essence of
an explosive and incredible letter sent on February 26 to all the
cardinals by the Dean of the Sacred College, Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re,
that The Daily Compass has been shown exclusively. It marks a fierce
and unheard of frontal attack on the 88-year-old archbishop emeritus of Hong
Kong, the intrepid opponent of the secret agreement between China and the Holy
See signed in Beijing on September 22, 2018.
It is an
unprecedented gesture, made even more significant by the fact that is the
first official act (protocol number 1/2020) of the new Dean of the Sacred
College. Re was appointed as Dean on January 18 as a result of the Motu Proprio by which Pope Francis
surprisingly made the deanship a position that now has a 5-year term limit,
thereby retiring Cardinal Angelo Sodano.
The letter is intended to be a response to the letter that Cardinal Zen
addressed to his brother cardinals last September 27, but Cardinal Re also
makes explicit reference to various other interventions by Zen. The cardinal is well-known for
speaking out boldly on behalf of so-called “clandestine” Chinese Catholics who
are being humiliated and condemned by the 2018 agreement that still remains
secret.
The first point of
the letter declares the alleged continuity between Pope Francis and his
predecessors regarding possible agreements with China: “In their
approach to the situation of the Catholic Church in China, there is a profound
symphony of the thought and action of the last three pontificates, which out of
respect for the truth have favored dialogue between the two parties, not
opposition.” Thus it attributes to Saint John Paul II “the idea of reaching a
formal agreement with the governmental authorities on the appointment of
bishops,” recalling that he “favored the return to full communion of bishops
consecrated illicitly over the years, beginning in 1958.”
Cardinal Re then
launches into a direct attack on Cardinal Zen, whose crime is that he has said
many times that “it would be better to have no agreement rather than a ‘bad
agreement.’” According to Re, “the last three popes did not share this position
and supported and accompanied the drafting of the agreement that, at the
present time, seemed to be the only one possible.”
These affirmations made by Cardinal Re constitute a grave distortion of
reality, because it is obvious that Saint (sic) John Paul II and Benedict
XVI took an approach that is markedly different from that of the present
pontificate. If it is true that they had a great desire for dialogue with China
and dedicated many efforts to it, it is equally true that this dialogue was
exclusively a function of their goal of helping the Chinese Church – divided
between the “patriotic” church and the “clandestine” church – to be
reconciled.
At the same time, they consistently reaffirmed the non-negotiable
points for an agreement, which had to respect religious freedom and the
identity of the Church, including the freedom to appoint bishops. The harsh
responses of Saint (sic) John Paul II to Chinese provocations over the
appointment of bishops bears witness to this, as does his decision to proceed
with the canonizations of the Chinese martyrs on October 1, 2000, despite the
harsh objections of Beijing, and also Benedict XVI’s May 27, 2007 Letter to
Chinese Catholics, to cite only a few of the most egregious examples.
Cardinal Re then
goes on to deny a statement by Cardinal Zen that the agreement signed in
September 2018 could be “the same one that Pope Benedict had at the time
refused to sign.” The Dean assures his fellow cardinals that he has verified
this in the Archive of the Secretariat of State and makes an astounding
declaration: “Pope Benedict XVI had approved the draft of the Agreement on the
appointment of Bishops in China, which it was only possible to sign in 2018.”
And so, according
to Cardinal Re, the secret Agreement also bears the signature of Benedict
XVI, a sensational revelation that at this point requires proof: the documents
of the Secretariat of State cited by Cardinal Re and the secret agreement of 2018
need to be made public so as to verify such affirmations. If this were
shown to be true, one could only deduce that Pope Benedict XVI had reneged on
everything he had publicly written, such as for example in his famous
already-mentioned May 2007 Letter to Chinese Catholics, whose radical
difference to the approach laid out by Re we show in another article. Moreover,
Re does not explain why, if Benedict XVI had given his placet to the
Agreement, it was not already signed ten years ago.
Immediately after this,
there is the passage that is most pregnant with consequences for the
universal Church: “The Agreement provides for the intervention of the authority
of the Pope in the process of the appointment of Bishops in China. Even
starting from this certain fact, the expression independent Church can no longer be interpreted in an absolute
manner as “separation” from the Pope, as was the case in the past.”
These affirmations leave one speechless: “independent Churches” can be
simultaneously in communion with the Pope, a declaration that has implications
far beyond the Chinese Church and proposes a new ecclesiology. But this is
exactly what Pope Benedict XVI denied in the Letter to Chinese
Catholics, declaring the statutes of the Patriotic Association to be “irreconcilable
with Catholic doctrine.” And yet, as far as we can tell, the secret Agreement
has legitimized them.
Cardinal Re is clearly aware of the implications of these
statements, so much so that immediately afterwards he explains that we are
at a moment of “epochal change” which gives rise to consequences “both on the
doctrinal and practical level.” Thus he explicitly says that doctrinal changes
have been enacted in order to arrive at the Agreement with the Chinese
government. This is a very serious affirmation, as one can easily guess: it is
the exact opposite approach to the one expressed publicly by Saint John Paul II
and Benedict XVI.
The rest of the letter goes on to cite the harshest criticisms of the
Agreement made by Cardinal Zen, declaring them to be “objections” to the
“pastoral guidance of the Holy Father toward “clandestine” Catholics,” making a
reference to the fact that the Pope has repeatedly listened to Cardinal Zen’s
reasoning and read “his many missives.” Cardinal Zen thus becomes the easy
scapegoat for the prolongation of “tensions and painful situations” that divide
the Chinese Church despite the efforts of the pope and his collaborators.
In other words, the letter of Cardinal Re – who obviously did not
write on his own initiative – is truly a call to his brother cardinals to
isolate Cardinal Zen, even to the point of making one think that the
elimination of the Archbishop emeritus of Hong Kong is part of the secret
agreement. But Cardinal Re should explain to us why it is that persecution
against Catholics in China has intensified since the agreement was signed while
the Holy See has remained completely silent. And he should also explain why the
Patriotic Association, now recognized by the Holy See, has never expressed so
much as a desire for communion with Rome.
Archbishop
Viganò responds to criticism of Cardinal Zen: Vatican has delivered the Chinese
Church to the enemy
Full text of
letter by Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò to Cardinal Joseph Zen
Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò | LifeSiteNews | Feb 29, 2020
Dearest Eminence,
This is Archbishop Carlo Maria
Viganò, former Apostolic Nuncio to the United States of America.
I have followed
deeply — sharing in prayer your suffering — your many heartfelt appeals to Pope
Bergoglio concerning the tragic situation of the Martyr Church in China, which
he himself has culpably aggravated through the treacherous and wicked secret
Agreement signed by Holy See with the Chinese Communist Government.
Your heartfelt appeals, dear Brother in Christ, have systematically
been unheeded and even mocked in a hypocritical and perverse way. As for
Cardinal Parolin, he has acted as a mere reckless executor of an evil order
from above.
I read this
morning the ignominious and shameful letter that Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re
has addressed to all the cardinals against you. I am deeply saddened and
indignant, and I wish to express to you all my affection, prayer and fraternal
solidarity in the episcopate.
You are a courageous Confessor of the Faith and you have all my esteem
and veneration!
Unfortunately, in
the Vatican lying has been set into the system, truth has been totally
overturned, and the most perverse deception is shamelessly practiced even by
the most unsuspected figures, who have now given themselves over to acting as
accomplices of the Adversary. They have even gone so far as to say that
“Pope Benedict XVI had approved the draft Agreement” signed in 2018, when
instead we all know of his strenuous resistance and repeated disapproval of the
conditions imposed by a persecutory and bloody regime.
The Vatican has
done everything and more to deliver the Chinese Martyr Church into the hands of
the Enemy: it did so by signing the Secret Pact; it did so by legitimizing
excommunicated “bishops” who are agents of the regime; it did so by the
deposition of legitimate bishops; it did so by forcing faithful priests to
register with a church that has succumbed to the Communist dictatorship; it
does so on a daily basis by keeping silent about the persecutory fury that has
gained unprecedented strength, precisely since the signing of that unfortunate
Agreement. It is now doing so with this ignoble letter to all the cardinals,
which is aimed at accusing you, denigrating you, and isolating you.
Our Lord assures us that nothing and no one will ever be able to snatch
from His hands those who resist the infernal enemy and his acolytes, conquering
them “by the Blood of the Lamb” and by the testimony of their martyrdom (cf.
Rev. 12:11).
Your example, dear Cardinal, and the very high price you are paying to
defend the Cause of God and His Church, gives us a salutary jolt, it rips us
from the inertia and habituation with which we are passively witnessing the
surrender of the Catholic Church, at its highest levels and in its hierarchy,
to heresy and apostasy, by following the Prince of this world, who is a liar
and murderer from the beginning (cf. Jn 8:44).
Parce, Domine, parce populo tuo, quem redemisti, Christe, sanguine tuo,
ne in aeternum irascaris nobis.
+ Carlo Maria Viganò
Titular Archbishop of Ulpiana Apostolic Nuncio
How
Queer! Secretary of the HomoLobby redefines Lenten ‘penitential’ practices for
the Church of the New Advent. He makes
fasting taste appetizing!
Pro-gay (sic)
priest James Martin: ‘Lent is a time to engage more deeply with LGBT people’
The Jesuit
suggested that 'spiritual exercises' focus on 'LGBT people.'
LifeSiteNews | Doug Mainwaring | March 2, 2020 – Pro-homosexual Jesuit
priest James Martin redefined the meaning of Lent in an interview for the Human
Rights Campaign (HRC), the powerhouse LGBT lobbying organization in Washington,
D.C.
Martin said that
Lent is a time to prepare for Easter and to understand the sufferings of
Christ, but then quickly switched gears and suggested that the lives of LGBT
persons reflect the suffering of Christ.
“So one of the
invitations for Catholics (during Lent) is to unite yourself with people who
are suffering, including LGBT people,” Martin said.
Lent is “a time
for people to engage more deeply with LGBT people,” he declared.
The remainder of the published interview focused not on a
Christocentric understanding of Lent but on how homosexual and the
gender-confused people can be made to feel more comfortable about continuing
their self-proclaimed sexual/gender identities and activities within the
Catholic Church.
The Jesuit suggested Lenten “spiritual exercises” in the form of
questions for Catholics, focusing not on their relationship with Jesus Christ,
but on their relationships with LGBT persons.
“Can you exercise
humility, which is a virtue during Lent, and listen to people that you might
not understand?” said Martin, pushing the idea that any negative impressions
about the goodness of homosexuality and transgenderism are nothing more than
“misunderstanding” based on “old stereotypes.”
He also suggested
that God might want to reveal himself to Catholics through
homosexuals.
“Can you be open
to the fact that God may want to meet you through this LGBT person?” asked
Martin, adding, “the person you thought was other is actually the person who
reveals God to you.”
As for “LGBT Catholics,” Martin pointed out that Jesus healed many
people, and what he wants to do in the lives of self-identified homosexuals and
the transgendered today is not to heal their proclivities or find God-given
strength to master their same-sex inclinations, which the Church teaches are
“disordered,” but to have them feel like they are no longer “on the margins” of
the Church.
“I hope … that the
LGBTQ community can feel welcome in their own church,” he concluded. […..]
Pope
Francis comments on the Resistance to his Heresy
“But when I realize that there is real resistance, of course it
displeases me. Some people tell me that resistance is normal when someone wants
to make changes. The famous ‘we’ve always done it this way’ reigns everywhere,
it is a great temptation that we have all faced. … I cannot deny that there is
resistance. I see it and I am aware of it. There is doctrinal resistance, which
you all know better than I do. For the sake of mental health, I do not read the
websites of this so-called “resistance.” I know who they are, I am familiar
with the groups, but I do not read them, simply for my mental health. If there
is something very serious, they inform me so that I know about it. You all know
them … It is a displeasure, but we must move ahead. Historians say that it
takes a century before a Council puts down roots. We are halfway there.
“When I perceive resistance, I try to dialogue, when dialogue is
possible. But some resistance comes from people who believe they possess the
true doctrine and accuse you of being a heretic. When I do not find spiritual
goodness in these people, because of what they say or write, I simply pray for
them. It pains me, but I do not dwell on this feeling for the sake of mental
hygiene.
Pope Francis the Destroyer, addressing a private meeting with ninety
fellow Jesuits, January 16, 2018, Santiago de Chile. Their conversation was
transcribed by Fr. Antonio Spadaro, editor of La Civilta Cattolicà, and was published in Italian with the
Pope’s approval.”
COMMENT: “True doctrine” is
possessed by all faithful Catholics who hold DOGMA as their rule of
faith. Pope Francis does not. He believes that he is the rule of faith.
Whatever he says and does is what every Catholic must say and do. Francis
rejects DOGMA and that is why he is a heretic. He judges those who hold DOGMA
as their rule of faith as a sign that “these people” are without “spiritual
goodness.” What is evident is that Francis, who babbles that “time is greater
than space,” cannot be dissuaded from his commitment to destroy. He will not
listen to those who offer filial correction and he does not accept evidence of
the rotten fruits from Vatican II because it takes “a century before a Council
puts down roots.” We are supposed to believe that in another fifty years we
will really see the springtime of Vatican II? Unfortunately, at the current
rate of decline there will not be a Catholic Church in another fifty years. God
being God, this will not happen. Unfortunately for Francis, since he cannot
repent, he will pay awful price for all eternity.
The observance of Lent is the very badge of the Christian warfare. By
it, we prove ourselves not to be enemies of the Cross of Christ. By it, we
avert the scourges of divine justice. By it we gain strength against the
princes of darkness, for it shields us with heavenly help. Should mankind grow
remiss in their observance of Lent, it would be a detriment to God’s glory, a
disgrace to the Catholic religion, and a danger to Christian souls. Neither can
it be doubted, but that such negligence would become the source of misery to
the world, of public calamity, and of private woe.
Pope Benedict XIV, encyclical, May 30, 1741
“Liberalism is the belief that any part of God's creation
is not subject to His to domain.”
Fr. Denis Fahey
“Don’t get me
wrong Sisters. I am sure your hearts are
in the right place. OK, but you know,
somebody has got to lift the scab, the festering scab that is the
Vatican.”
Jerry
Fletcher, Conspiracy Theory,
addressing two nuns, 1997
If
anyone says that baptism is optional, that is, not necessary for salvation,
ANATHAMA SIT.
Council
of Trent, Canon 5, On the Sacrament of Baptism
St. Martin restores a Catechumen to Life so
that he may be Baptized
AS Hilarius had already gone away, so Martin followed in his footsteps;
and having been most joyously welcomed by him, he established for himself a
monastery not far from the town. At this time a certain catechumen joined him,
being desirous of becoming instructed in the doctrines and habits of the most
holy man. But, after the lapse only of a few days, the catechumen, seized with
a languor, began to suffer from a violent fever. It so happened that Martin had
then left home, and having remained away three days, he found on his return
that life had departed from the catechumen; and so suddenly had death occurred,
that he had left this world without receiving baptism. The body being laid out
in public was being honored by the last sad offices on the part of the mourning
brethren, when Martin hurries up to them with tears and lamentations. But then
laying hold; as it were, of the Holy Spirit, with the whole powers of his mind,
he orders the others to quit the cell in which the body was lying; and bolting
the door, he stretches himself at full length on the dead limbs of the departed
brother. Having given himself for some time to earnest prayer, and perceiving
by means of the Spirit of God that power was present, he then rose up for a
little, and gazing on the countenance of the deceased, he waited without
misgiving for the result of his prayer and of the mercy of the Lord. And
scarcely had the space of two hours elapsed, when he saw the dead man begin to
move a little in all his members, and to tremble with his eyes opened for the
practice of sight. Then indeed, turning to the Lord with a loud voice and
giving thanks, he filled the cell with his ejaculations. Hearing the noise,
those who had been standing at the door immediately rush inside. And truly a
marvelous spectacle met them, for they beheld the man alive whom they had
formerly left dead. Thus being restored to life, and having immediately
obtained baptism, he lived for many years afterwards; and he was the first who
offered himself to us both as a subject that had experienced the virtues of
Martin, and as a witness to their existence. The same man was wont to relate
that, when he left the body, he was brought before the tribunal of the Judge,
and being assigned to gloomy regions and vulgar crowds, he received a severe
sentence. Then, however, he added, it was suggested by two angels of the Judge
that he was the man for whom Martin was praying; and that, on this account, he
was ordered to be led back by the same angels, and given up to Martin, and
restored to his former life. From this time forward, the name of the sainted
man became illustrious, so that, as being reckoned holy by all, he was also
deemed powerful and truly apostolical.
SULPITIUS SEVERUS, ON THE LIFE OF ST. MARTIN (note: Sulpitius Severus
was a contemporary of St. Martin of Tours, knew the Saint and obtained his
information on the life of St. Martin entirely from primary and reliable
sources.)
Do penance:
for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.[.....] Ye brood of vipers, who hath
shewed you to flee from the wrath to come? Bring forth therefore fruit
worthy of penance.[.....] For now the axe is laid to the root of the trees.
Every tree therefore that doth not yield good fruit, shall be cut down, and
cast into the fire. I indeed baptize you in the water unto penance, but he that
shall come after me, is mightier than I, whose shoes I am not worthy to bear;
he shall baptize you in the Holy Ghost and fire.
St. John the Baptist
Note: Do penance (Paenitentiam agite). Which word, according to the use of the
scriptures and the holy fathers, does not only signify repentance and amendment
of life, but also punishing past sins by fasting, and such like penitential
exercises.
Catholic
saints and the religious that have followed their examples have done more for
the poor, for children, for exploited women than all others throughout all of
history. We own no apology to anyone for
Catholic charity! Is Francis, the class
warior, begging for an apology because he was mistreated?
“I believe that the church not only should apologize to the person who
is gay whom it has offended, but has to apologize to the poor, to exploited
women, to children exploited for labor; it has to ask forgiveness for having
blessed many weapons.”
Pope Francis
Friends
of Pope Francis claim, those who oppose sodomy are “corrosive and repugnant.”
“We have to face the fact that there is a group of people across all
religious views that are particularly antagonistic to LGBT people. That comes
from deep within the human soul, and it’s really corrosive and repugnant.”
The Jesuit trained and Pope Francis appointed San Diego Bishop Robert
McElroy, who endorsed the book by the Sodomophile James Martin. S.J., author of
the book, Building a Bridge, that
endorses the LGBT agenda claiming that God created homosexuals as they are and
that chastity is not required of them, that Catholics should reverence gay
(sic) marriages and support transgenderism in children. He even endorses the
aberrant displays of homosexuals kissing at the sign of peace during Novus Ordo
services.
Once
Again, Pope Francis Corrupts the Literal Meaning of Holy Scripture. This time
to overthrow all Catholic Morality!
He set out from there and
went into the district of Judea [and] across the Jordan. Again crowds gathered
around him and, as was his custom, he again taught them. The Pharisees
approached and asked, “Is it lawful for a husband to divorce his wife?” They
were testing him. He said to them in reply, “What did Moses command you?” They replied, “Moses permitted him to
write a bill of divorce and dismiss her.” But Jesus told them,
“Because of the hardness of your hearts he wrote you this commandment. But
from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female. For this
reason a man shall leave his father and mother [and be joined to his
wife], and the two shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two but
one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, no human being must
separate.” In the house the disciples again questioned him about
this. He said to them, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another
commits adultery against her; and if she divorces her husband and marries
another, she commits adultery.”
Mark 10:1-12
Commentary of Pope Francis on Mark 10, 1-12:
Jesus does not answer whether it (divorce) is permitted or not. He does
not enter into their (the Pharisees’) classic casuistry. Because they (the
Pharisees) thought of faith merely in the framework of “one may not” or “one
may” – up to which point one may, up to which point one may not. Thus logic of
casuistry: Jesus does not enter into it. And He Himself poses a question: “Now,
what did Moses command you? What is written in your law?” And they explain the
permission which Moses gave to write a divorce certificate and to dismiss a
woman from marriage; and it is they who went into a trap, yes. Because Jesus
calls them “hard hearted”: “only because you are so hard hearted, he has given
you this law,” and He spoke the truth. Without casuistry, without permissions.
The truth.
This is the way of Jesus – it is quite clear – it is the path from
casuistry to truth and mercy. Jesus leaves aside the logic of casuistry. To
those who wanted to test him, to those who thought of this logic of ‘it is
possible’, he termed them – not here, but in another passage of the Gospel –
hypocrites. Even with the fourth commandment, they denied assistance to their
relatives with the excuse that they had given a good offer to the Church.
Hypocrites. The casuistry is hypocritical. It is a form of hypocrisy. ‘You can
– you cannot’ … which then becomes more subtle, more evil: I? I can up to this
point but from here to here, I cannot. This is the deception of casuistry.
Pope Francis, commentary on Mark 10:1-12
Commentary on Pope Francis’ Commentary on Mark 10,
1-12:
It is hardly possible to be this ignorant. Even a person without faith simply reading
the words of this scripture passage and reporting on the literal meaning would
articulate a better understand than Pope Francis. The only alternative possible
is a willful corruption of the text to bring it into the service of a perverse
ideology.
Firstly, Jesus does not beg the question of the Pharisees. He answers it directly and forcefully on a
much higher plane. The simple answer is,
“it is lawful in your law because
Moses permitted it” because of the “hardness of your hearts.” But the higher answer is given by Jesus
wherein He indirectly declares his divinity to the Pharisees by asserting His
authority to set aside the law of Moses and reestablish the original intent of
God for His creation. Only God can give
this answer to the Pharisees' question.
The reason Francis does not find an answer in Jesus' reply is because he
does not believe that Jesus is God any more than the Pharisees did. Divorce was an indult granted by God through
Moses to the Jews because of their “hardness of hearts.” His followers would by the grace of God rise
above this “hardness of heart” and will be able to keep the law of God. Therefore, the indult granted by Moses is
made void by the Word of God. The final
answer is divorce is not permitted by the law of God and those who divorce and
remarry are guilty of adultery.
Secondly, the science of moral theology concerns what one must do or
not do to avoid sin. It is the science
of limits which cannot be crossed without offending God either venially or
mortally. The science of mystical and
aesthetical theology deals with what one must do or not do to become a
saint. Casuistry is a scholastic method
of case study to help understand and apply the actual principles of moral
theology in particular cases where conflicting obligations exist. Casuistry, like all human acts, can be
perverted from its proper end which is to avoid sin. When its end become to
permit sin it becomes the science of the Pharisees which can be studied today
in the Jewish Talmud. Francis’ morality
is Talmudic and not Catholic. The
example provided by Francis of the perverse Jewish casuistry that permitted the
Jews to break the 4th commandment by claiming that their personal wealth could
not be used to support their needy parents because it was set aside for the
temple is analogous to what Francis has done by permitting Catholics to live in
unrepentant adultery and receive the sacraments of Penance and Holy
Communion. In both cases, the law of God
is overturned. The hypocrisy of Francis
is oozing from his every pore. That is
what a perverted casuistry is. Francis
the Hypocrite is characterizing all good and necessary moral inquiry as a
perverted casuistry which he opposes to “truth and mercy.” He is making war on all morality. There is no opposition between “truth and
mercy” and its practical application in moral theology. The very science of
moral theology deals with what “one may not” or “one may” do to keep the
friendship of God. It was Jesus who
said, “If you love me, keep my commandments.”
The sign of the love of God is the keeping of His commandments. Francis by trashing the entire field of moral
theology is heaping contempt on the law of God.
He embodies everything that Jesus condemned so severely in the
Pharisees. The condemnations that Jesus
leveled at the Pharisees can be heaped upon this most perverse man.
Lastly, this is the morality of Martin Luther and his sect. Luther taught that it was impossible to keep
the law of God and no one should even try.
This was specifically condemned at the Council of Trent.
"For
all the gods of the Gentiles are devils: but the Lord made the
heavens." Psalm 95:5
IT
is blasphemy to attribute evil to the positive divine will of GOD!
“Freedom is a right of every person: each individual enjoys the freedom
of belief, thought, expression and action. The pluralism and the diversity of religions,
colour, sex, race and language are willed by God in His wisdom, through which
He created human beings. This divine wisdom is the source from which the
rights, and saw that it was good also.”
Excerpt from document signed and endorsed by Pope Francis, “Human
Fraternity for World Peace and Living Together,” during his pilgrimage to the
United Arab Emirates
The
use of the “received and approved rites customarily used in the solemn
administration of the sacraments” for the worship of God is a DOGMA of Catholic
faith defined at the Council of Trent!
“Since, then,
no one is allowed to be remiss in the service due to God … we are bound
absolutely to worship God in that way which He has shown to be His will …. ”
Pope Leo XIII,
Immortale dei, On the Christian
Constitution of States
Just
a reminder just to whom Pope Francis has betrayed the Catholic faithful of
China by placing them under the jurisdiction of the CPCA!
Francis-approved
communist parallel Chinese ‘church’ approves abortion, contraception
The
government-established 'church' cannot deviate from the Communist Party's
position, which includes support for forced abortion.
LifeSiteNews | Dorothy Cummings McLean | BEIJING, China, February 20,
2020 ― The confusion around the Vatican’s concordat with China and its state-founded version of the Catholic
Church has been compounded by the failure of the so-called Chinese Patriotic
Catholic Association (CPCA) to transmit the Gospel of Life.
According to expert Steven Mosher, the Chinese Patriotic Catholic
Association is in lockstep with the pro-abortion, pro-contraception Chinese
Communist government when it comes to life issues.
“The CPCA cannot deviate from the Party's position, since it is
controlled by the Party,” Mosher told LifeSiteNews yesterday.
“Moreover, the CPCA has affirmed that national laws supercede Church,
or canon, law,” he added.
“And the Party's position is that contraception, abortion and
euthanasia are moral.”
An American consultant to the Vatican on China, Msgr. Anthony
Figueiredo, now 55, admitted to the National Catholic Register early in 2018
that the government-appointed bishops of the CPCA support China’s totalitarian
two-child policy.
“I spoke with some of these bishops and some of the officials at the
bishops’ conference on issues such as abortion, the two-child family policy;
and certainly in those areas, and I won’t hide this, they do back the
government on those areas, because I think they feel they need to,” Figueiredo
said.
“They need to because they’re part of [the Patriotic Association],
there’s a loyalty to the government,” he continued. […..]
To
Conservative Catholics who are Enamored with Appearance and Indifferent to
Substance
They (Benedict XVI and Francis) are different, sometimes very
different, in expression. But they are united by substance, of content, to
proclaiming to propagation and defense of the deposit of faith.
Curial Archbishop George Gänswein, liaison cleric between the Ordinary
and Extra-ordinary popes
Catholics
progressively uncomfortable in the progressive Church of the New Advent
Polish church
silences Kazakhstan bishop
The Tablet | Johnathana Luxmoore | February 24, 2020
The former Archbishop of Karaganda in Kazakhstan, Jan Lenga, has been
banned from preaching and celebrating Mass by the Polish Church for describing
Pope Francis as the antichrist and refusing to include him in prayers.
"Canon Law empowers the local diocesan bishop to take disciplinary
steps which might halt the spread of scandal among the faithful," Fr Artur
Niemira, chancellor of the central Wloclawek diocese, said in a statement to
Poland's Catholic Information Agency, KAI.
"Archbishop Lenga is to refrain from delivering sermons and
publicly conducting the liturgy. This same ban also applies to contacts with
the media."
The ruling was made public following a series of declarations by the
69-year-old retired Ukrainian-born archbishop, a member of the Marian order,
who quit his Kazakhstan see in 2011 and now lives in an order house at Lichen
in central Poland, by arrangement with the Vatican.
The KAI agency said Lenga had "issued controversial claims
undermining the authority of the reigning Pope Francis, and refusing to name
him during Masses". It added that the ban on public appearances had been
imposed by Bishop Wieslaw Mering of Wloclawek and would remain in place until
further restrictions were announced by the Vatican.
In May 2019, Archbishop Lenga co-signed a 40-point "Declaration of
Truths" opposing aspects of the Pope's teaching, alongside the American
Cardinal Raymond Burke, the Polish-born Archbishop Tomasz Peta of Astana in
Kazakhstan, and the retired Polish-speaking Cardinal Janis Pujats of Latvia.
In a book-length
interview, still circulating in Polish on YouTube, he said he still recognised
Benedict XVI as Pope and had dropped the name of the "usurper and
heretic" Francis from his Mass prayer intentions.
"Bergoglio
has not confirmed himself in the faith and is not passing that faith to others,
he is leading the world astray," said the archbishop, who trained secretly
in Soviet-ruled Latvia and Lithuania and was appointed Kazakhstan's first bishop
in 1991 and Archbishop of Karaganda in 1999. "He proclaims untruths and
sins, not the tradition which has endured for 2000 years... He proclaims the
truth of this world, which is precisely the truth the devil".
“But
it did not last long.”
I saw many pastors cherishing dangerous ideas against the Church. . . .
They built a large, singular, extravagant church which was to embrace all
creeds with equal rights: Evangelicals, Catholics, and all denominations, a
true communion of the unholy with one shepherd and one flock. There was to be a
Pope, a salaried Pope, without possessions. All was made ready, many things
finished; but, in place of an altar, were only abomination and desolation. Such
was the new church to be, and it was for it that he had set fire to the old
one; but God designed otherwise.
Blessed Anna Katherine Emmerich
I saw also the relationship between the two popes.... I saw how baleful would
be the consequences of this false church. I saw it increase in size; heretics
of every kind came into the city of Rome. The local clergy grew lukewarm, and I
saw a great darkness... Then, the vision seemed to extend on every side. Whole
Catholic communities were being oppressed, harassed, confined, and deprived of
their freedom. I saw many churches close down, great miseries everywhere, wars
and bloodshed. A wild and ignorant mob took to violent action. But it did not
last long.
Blessed Anna Katherine Emmerich, May 13, 1820
“From this definition it can be easily
gathered what men belong to the Church and what men do not. For there are three parts of
this definition: the profession of the true Faith, the communion of the
Sacraments, and the subjection to the legitimate Pastor, the Roman Pontiff.
By reason of the first part are excluded all infidels, as much those who have
never been in the Church, like the Jews, Turks and Pagans; as those who have
been and have fallen away, like heretics and apostates. By reason of the
second, are excluded catechumens and excommunicates, because the former are not
to be admitted to the communion of the sacraments, the latter have been cut off
from it. By reason of the third, are excluded schismatics, who have faith and
the sacraments, but are not subject to the lawful pastor, and therefore they
profess the Faith outside, and receive the Sacraments outside. However, all
others are included, even if they be reprobate, sinful and wicked.”
St. Robert Bellarmine
Necessity
of Baptism for Salvation and the Church Fathers
“We have to admit . . . that the
testimony of the Fathers, with regard to the possibility of salvation for
someone outside the Church, is very weak. Certainly even the ancient Church
knew that the grace of God can be found also outside the Church and even before
Faith. But the view that such divine grace can lead man to his final salvation
without leading him first into the visible Church, is something, at any rate,
which met with very little approval in the ancient Church. For, with reference
to the optimistic views on the salvation of catechumens as found in many of the
Fathers, it must be noted that such a candidate for baptism was regarded in
some sense or other as already ‘Christianus,’ and also that certain Fathers,
such as Gregory Nazianzen and Gregory of Nyssa deny altogether the justifying power
of love or of the desire for baptism. Hence it will be impossible to speak of a
consensus dogmaticus in the early Church regarding the possibility of salvation
for the non-baptized, and especially for someone who is not even a catechumen.
In fact, even St. Augustine, in his last (Anti-Pelagian) period, no longer
maintained the possibility of a baptism by desire.”
Rev. Karl Rahner, Theological Investigations, Volume II, Man in the
Church
“In the Third Secret it is foretold, among other things,
that the Great Apostasy in the Church will begin at the top.”
Cardinal Luigi Ciappi
The
‘Bergoglio Business Plan’! Now that “apologetics” is nothing more than “subtle
theoretical discussions” over “opinions” and “proselytism is solemn nonsense,”
how do they measure “strong Christian
witness,” “effective evangelization,”
“fruitful ecumenical spirit,” and “constructive dialogue”? If the “Mission
of the Church in the World” is the supreme law… the salus animarum, how does any of this contribute towards fulfilling
this “Mission”? It is never “easy to achieve such a goal” under the best of
conditions because to obtain salvation is to enter by the “narrow gate.” Now
that every material sign to measure success toward this goal has been destroyed
by the modern Church how can they possibly have any idea what they are
doing?
Today we will present a
summary of the work done in recent months to develop the new Apostolic
Constitution for the reform of the Curia. The goal to be reached is always that
of promoting greater harmony in the work of the various Dicasteries and
Offices, in order to achieve a more effective collaboration in that absolute
transparency which builds authentic synodality and collegiality.
The reform is not an end in
itself, but a means to give a strong Christian witness; to promote a more
effective evangelization; to promote a more fruitful ecumenical spirit; to
encourage a more constructive dialogue with all.
The reform, strongly
advocated by the majority of the Cardinals in the context of the general
congregations before the conclave, will further perfect the identity of the
same Roman Curia, which is to assist the Successor of Peter in the exercise of
his supreme pastoral office for the good of and in the service of the universal
Church and the particular Churches. This exercise serves to strengthen the
unity of faith and communion of the people of God and promote the mission of
the Church in the world.
Certainly, it is not easy to
achieve such a goal. It requires time, determination and above all everyone’s
cooperation. But to achieve this we must first entrust ourselves to the Holy
Spirit, the true guide of the Church, imploring the gift of authentic
discernment in prayer.
It is in this spirit of
collaboration that our meeting begins, which will be fruitful thanks to the
contribution which each of us can express with parrhesía, fidelity to the
Magisterium and the knowledge that all of this contributes to the supreme law,
that being the salus animarum. Thank
You.
Pope Francis, on the agenda of the Consistory for the Reform of the
Roman Curia
St. Thomas for Lent: Ultimately, to know God
better to love God more perfectly
“This humility, therefore, combined with the purity of heart We have
mentioned, and sedulous devotion to prayer, disposed the mind of Thomas to
docility in receiving the inspirations of the Holy Ghost and following His
illuminations, which are the first principles of contemplation. To obtain them
from above, he would frequently fast, spend whole nights in prayer, lean his
head in the fervor of his unaffected piety against the tabernacle containing
the august Sacrament, constantly turn his eyes and mind in sorrow to the image
of the crucified Jesus; and he confessed to his intimate friend St. Bonaventura
that it was from that Book especially that he derived all his learning. it may,
therefore, be truly said of Thomas what is commonly reported of St. Dominic,
Father and Lawgiver, that in his conversation he never spoke but about God or
with God.
…“The aim of the whole theology
of St. Thomas is to bring us into close living intimacy with God.”
Pope Pius XI, Sudiorum
Ducem
Modernists,
looking for their evolving god of ‘relationaltiy’, will not see the God ‘Who
is’, now, or forever!
On the contrary, It is
written: In thy light we shall see light. (Ps. xxxv.
10).
I answer that: Everything which is raised up to what exceeds its
nature, must be prepared by some disposition above its nature; as, for example,
if air is to receive the form of fire, it must be prepared by some disposition
for such a form. But when
any created intellect sees the essence of God, the essence of God itself
becomes the intelligible form of the intellect. …And this is the light spoken
of in the Apocalypse (xxi. 23). The glory of God hath enlightened it – vis. the
society of the blessed who see God. By this light the blessed are made deiform
– that is, like to God, according to the saying: When He shall appear we shall
be like to Him, because we shall see Him as He is. (1 John, ii. 2).
But the blessed possess these three things in God; because they
see Him, and in seeing Him, possess Him as present, having the power to see Him
always; and possessing Him, they enjoy Him as the ultimate fulfillment of
desire.
St. Thomas, Summa Theologica
Hermeneutics of Continuity/Discontinuity
Explains why Novus Ordo Catholics have dumped the
season of Septuagesima and do not do penance for Lent – they have dialogued
themselves out of Original Sin!
Original Sin:
Benedict/Ratzinger teaches:
The account (of Genesis 3) tells us that sin begets
sin, and that therefore all the sins of history are interlinked. Theology
refers to this state of affairs by the
certainly misleading and imprecise term ‘original sin’. What does this mean? Nothing
seems to us today to be stranger or, indeed, more absurd than to insist upon
original sin, since, according to our way of thinking, guilt can only be
something very personal, and since God does not run a concentration camp, in
which one’s relatives are imprisoned because he is a liberating God of love,
who calls each one by name. What does original sin mean, then, when we interpret it
correctly?
Finding an answer to
this requires nothing less than trying to understand the human person better. It must once again be stressed
that no human being is closed in upon himself or herself and that no one can
live of or for himself or herself alone. We receive our life not only at the
moment of birth but every day from without – from others who are not ourselves
but who nonetheless somehow pertain to us. Human beings have their selves not
only in themselves but also outside of themselves: they live in those whom they
love and in those who love them and to whom they are ‘present.’ Human beings
are relational, and they possess their lives –
themselves – only by way of relationship. I alone am not myself, but only
in and with you am I myself. To be truly a human being means to be related in love, to be of and for. But
sin means the damaging or the destruction of relationality. Sin is a rejection of relationality because it wants to make the
human being a god. Sin is loss of relationship, disturbance of relationship, and therefore it is not
restricted to the individual. When I destroy a relationship, then this event – sin – touches
the other person involved in the relationship. Consequently sin is always an
offense that touches others, that alters the world and damages it. To the
extent that this is true, when the network of human relationships is damaged from the very
beginning, then every human being enters into a world that is marked by relational damage. At the very moment that
a person begins human existence, which is a good, he or she is confronted by a
sin- damaged world. Each of us enters into a situation in which relationality has been hurt. Consequently each
person is, from the very start, damaged in relationships and does not engage in them as
he or she ought. Sin pursues the human being, and he or she capitulates to it.”
Benedict XVI/Ratzinger, Catholic
Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall (1995)
Catholic
Church teaches divine Truth with precision and clarity:
“For that which the
Apostle has said, ‘By one man, sin entered into this world, and by sin death,
and so death passed upon all men in whom all have sinned.’ (Rom 5:12), is not
to be understood otherwise than as the Catholic Church spread everywhere hath
always understood it. For, by reason of
this rule of faith, from a tradition of the Apostles, even infants who could
not as yet commit any sin of themselves, are for this cause truly baptized for
the remission of sins, that in them that may be cleansed away by regeneration
which they have contracted by generation. For, ‘unless a man be born again
of water and the Holy Ghost, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.’”
(John 3:5).
Council of Trent, Decree on Original Sin
“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).
COMMENT: And where does “relationality”
lead? Benedict/Ratzinger believes in an “essential” Christianity, that is, a
religion of the imagination that has no real doctrinal or moral impediments
that prevent anyone from jumping onboard the ‘Church of Relationality’. But then,
why would anyone what to join such a religion? - Which explains why the Novus
Ordo Church has massive defections and few conversions. It also explains why
“proselytism is solemn nonsense.” How
can you “proselytize” for a religion that does not know what it believes or
what is its purpose?
The trouble then with faithful Catholics
who keep our traditions is that they will not be “educated” by heretics and
apostates or follow the advice of “great ecumenists” who have already denied
what is “essential” in betraying Jesus Christ for the “invention” of their
man-made, man-centered church. As for “relations,” just what really is
“essential”? “If any man
come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and
brethren, and sisters, yea and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple”
(Luke 14:26). The “essential… relation” is with Jesus Christ, not man,
and this “relation” is only possible by believing what Jesus Christ has
revealed and doing what Jesus Christ commands.
Seewald: “The Church
prays for Christians to be reunited. But who ought to join up with whom?”
Benedict/Ratzinger: “The formula that the great ecumenists
have invented is that we go forward together. It’s not a matter of our wanting
to achieve certain processes of integration, but we hope that the Lord will
awaken people’s faith everywhere in such a way that it overflows from one to
the other, and the one Church is there. As Catholics, we are persuaded that the
basic shape of this one Church is given us in the Catholic Church, but that she
is moving toward the future and will allow herself to be educated and led by
the Lord. In that sense we do not picture for ourselves any particular modes of
integration, but simply look to march on in faith under the leadership of the
Lord – who knows the way.”
“We can only humbly seek to essentialize our faith, that is, to
recognize what are the really essential elements in it – the things we have not
made but have received from the Lord – and in this attitude of turning to the
Lord and to the center, to open ourselves in this essentializing so that he may
lead us onward, he alone.”
Benedict/Ratzinger, God and the
World, interviewed by Peter Seewald, pp 452-453
Lastly,
if there is no Original Sin and the Church of Jesus Christ lies somewhere in
the unknown future, the sacrament of Baptism becomes meaningless! What the
Church has taught always and everywhere is now regarded as “unenlightened” and
“problematic” for him.
Mr. Seewald:
“In canon 849 of Church canon law it says: ‘Baptism… [is] necessary to
salvation in fact or at least in intention.’ But what happens, when a man dies
unbaptized? And what happens to the millions of children who are killed in
their mothers’ wombs?”
Benedict/Ratzinger: “The question of what it means to say
that baptism is necessary for salvation has become ever more hotly debated in
modern times. The Second Vatican Council said on this point that men who are
seeking for God and who are inwardly striving toward that which constitutes
baptism will also receive salvation. That is to say that a seeking after God
already represents an inward participation in baptism, in the Church, in
Christ.
To that extent, the
question concerning the necessity of baptism for salvation seems to have been
answered, but the question about children who could not be baptized because
they were aborted then presses upon us that much more urgently.
Earlier ages had devised a teaching that seems to me
rather unenlightened. They said that baptism endows us, by means of sanctifying
grace, with the capacity to gaze upon God. Now, certainly, the state of
original sin, from which we are freed by baptism, consists in a lack of
sanctifying grace. Children who die in this way are indeed without any personal
sin, so they cannot be sent to hell, but, on the other hand, they lack
sanctifying grace and thus the potential for beholding God that this bestows.
They will simply enjoy a state of natural blessedness, in which they will be
happy. This state people called limbo.
In the course of our century, that has gradually come to
seem problematic to us.
This was one way in which people sought to justify the necessity of baptizing
infants as early as possible, but the solution is itself questionable. Finally,
the Pope made a decisive turn in the encyclical Evangelium Vitae, a change
already anticipated by the Catechism of the Catholic Church (Note: Not so, even
the compromised CCC teaches the necessity of Baptism for salvation), when he
expressed the simple hope that God is powerful enough to draw to himself all
those who were unable to receive the sacrament.”
Benedict/Ratzinger, God and the World, interviewed by Peter Seewald, pp
401-402
Catholic
Church teaches divine Truth with precision and clarity:
Amen, amen I say to thee, unless a man be born again, he cannot see the
kingdom of God….. 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.”
Jesus Christ, (John 3:3, 5)
If any one saith, that true and natural water is not of necessity for
baptism, and, on that account, wrests, to some sort of metaphor, those words of
our Lord Jesus Christ; Unless a man be born again of water and the Holy Ghost;
let him be anathema.
Council of Trent, Canon II on the sacrament of Baptism
If anyone saith, that Baptism is optional, that is, not necessary for
salvation, let him be anathema.
Council of Trent, Canon V on the sacrament of Baptism
FOOTNOTE for LENT:
This Sunday
is the last in the season of Septuagesima whose purpose is to prepare us for
Lent. We have covered during the last
weeks the Sin of Adam and our consequent fallen nature with Original Sin; the
general corruption of mankind and its destruction in the flood sparing only
Noah and his family where the Ark is a type of the Church; and, beginning this
week of Quinquagesima, the promise made to our patriarch Abraham for the
Redeemer to come after his willing sacrifice of his “only-begotten son” Isaac.
The Novus Ordo has thrown out this entire season
ultimately because the deny Original Sin and the consequences of a fallen human
nature. It follows quite reasonable that the Novus Ordo
prescribes no penance for Lent outside of the meaningless abstinence from meat
on Fridays, and fasting on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday. Jesus Christ said,
“Unless you shall do penance, you shall all likewise perish.…. No, I say to you; but except you do penance,
you shall all likewise perish” (Luke 13: 3, 5). The Church has always and
everywhere in every rite prescribed the necessary penance for “all” the
faithful so that we may not “all likewise perish.” Penance is not prescribed in
the Novus Ordo Church because Dogma is not their rule of faith. The faithful
must keep a holy Lent not only so that they may not “perish,” but also because
prayer and penance are needed as reparation for those Catholics who do not.
Just
a reminder to faithful Catholics just to whom Pope Francis has betrayed the
Catholics of China placing them under the jurisdiction of the CPCA!
Francis-approved
communist parallel Chinese ‘church’ approves abortion, contraception
The
government-established 'church' cannot deviate from the Communist Party's
position, which includes support for forced abortion.
LifeSiteNews | Dorothy Cummings McLean | BEIJING, China, February 20,
2020 ― The confusion around the Vatican’s concordat with China and its state-founded version of the Catholic
Church has been compounded by the failure of the so-called Chinese Patriotic
Catholic Association (CPCA) to transmit the Gospel of Life.
According to expert Steven Mosher, the Chinese Patriotic Catholic
Association is in lockstep with the pro-abortion, pro-contraception Chinese
Communist government when it comes to life issues.
“The CPCA cannot deviate from the Party's position, since it is
controlled by the Party,” Mosher told LifeSiteNews yesterday.
“Moreover, the CPCA has affirmed that national laws supercede Church,
or canon, law,” he added.
“And the Party's position is that contraception, abortion and
euthanasia are moral.”
An American consultant to the Vatican on China, Msgr. Anthony
Figueiredo, now 55, admitted to the National
Catholic Register early in 2018 that the government-appointed bishops of
the CPCA support China’s totalitarian two-child policy.
“I spoke with some of these bishops and some of the officials at the
bishops’ conference on issues such as abortion, the two-child family policy;
and certainly in those areas, and I won’t hide this, they do back the
government on those areas, because I think they feel they need to,” Figueiredo
said.
“They need to because they’re part of [the Patriotic Association],
there’s a loyalty to the government,” he continued.
“I think that conversion, that opening, can only take place if there is
a first step and there is dialogue that’s opened. Again, it’s very much I think
within Pope Francis’ thinking: ‘We’re not going to wait until everything is
absolutely perfect in order to say, well, we’re now going to approve these
bishops.’”
[…..]
Those
who could have, but have not, made the First Saturday Reparation will have no
excuse!
Father, the
Blessed Virgin is very sad because no one has paid attention to her Message,
neither the good nor the bad. The good, because they continue on the
road of goodness, but without paying mind to this Message. The bad, because of
their sins, do not see God’s chastisement already falling on them presently;
they also continue on their path of badness, ignoring the Message. But, Father,
you must believe me that God is going to punish the world and chastise it in a
tremendous way.
The chastisement from
Heaven is imminent. The year 1960 is on us, and then what will happen?
It will be very sad for everyone, and far from a happy thing if the world does
not pray and do penance before then. I cannot give more details, because it is
still a secret. By the will of the Blessed Virgin, only the Holy Father and the
Bishop of Fatima can know the secret. Both have chosen, however, not to open it
in order not to be influenced by it.
This is the third part of the Message of Our Lady, which still remains secret
until 1960. Tell them, Father, that the Blessed Virgin said repeatedly – to my
cousins Francisco and Jacinta as well as to me – that many nations would
disappear from the face of the earth, that Russia would be the instrument of
chastisement from Heaven for the whole world if the conversion of that poor
Nation is not obtained beforehand. …
Father, the Devil is fighting a decisive battle against the Virgin and,
as you know, what most offends God and what will gain him the greatest number
of souls in the shortest time is to gain the souls consecrated to God. For this
also leaves unprotected the field of the laity and the Devil can more easily
seize them.
Also, Father, tell them that my cousins Francisco and Jacinta made sacrifices
because they always saw the Blessed Virgin was very sad in all her apparitions.
She never smiled at us. This anguish that we saw in her, caused by offenses to
God and the chastisements that threaten sinners, penetrated our souls. And
being children, we did not know what measures to devise except to pray and make
sacrifices. …
For this reason, Father, it is my mission not just to tell about the
material punishments that will certainly come over the earth if the world does
not pray and do penance. No, my mission is to tell everyone the imminent danger
we are in of losing our souls for all eternity if we remain fixed in sin.
Father, we should not wait
for a call to the world from Rome on the part of the Holy Father to do penance.
Nor should we wait for a call for penance to come from the Bishops in our
Dioceses, nor from our Religious Congregations. No, Our Lord has often used
these means, and the world has not paid heed. So, now each one of us must begin
to reform himself spiritually. Each one has to save not only his own soul, but
also all the souls that God has placed on his pathway.
Father, the
Blessed Virgin did not tell me that we are in the last times of the world, but
I understood this for three reasons:
The first is because she told me that the Devil is engaging in a battle with
the Virgin, a decisive battle. It is a final battle where one party will be
victorious and the other will suffer defeat. So, from now on, we are either
with God or we are with the Devil; there is no middle ground.
The second reason is because she told me, as well as my cousins, that God is
giving two last remedies to the world: the Holy Rosary and devotion to the
Immaculate Heart of Mary. And, being the last remedies, that is to say, they
are the final ones, means that there will be no others.
And the third,
because in the plans of the Divine Providence, when God is going to chastise
the world He always first exhausts all other remedies. When He sees that the
world pays no attention whatsoever, then, as we say in our imperfect way of
talking, with a certain fear He presents us the last means of salvation, His
Blessed Mother.
If we despise and reject
this last means, Heaven will no longer pardon us, because we will have
committed a sin that the Gospel calls a sin against the Holy Spirit. This sin
consists in openly rejecting – with full knowledge and will – the salvation
that is put in our hands.
Also, since Our Lord is a
very good Son, He will not permit that we offend and despise His Blessed
Mother. We have as obvious testimony the history of different centuries
where Our Lord has shown us with terrible examples how He has always defended
the honor of His Blessed Mother.
Prayer and sacrifice are
the two means to save the world. As for the Holy Rosary, Father, in these last
times in which we are living, the Blessed Virgin has given a new efficacy to
the praying of the Holy Rosary. This in such a way that there is no
problem that cannot be resolved by praying the Rosary, no matter how difficult
it is - be it temporal or above all spiritual - in the spiritual life of each
of us or the lives of our families, be they our families in the world or
Religious Communities, or even in the lives of peoples and nations.
I repeat, there is no problem, as difficult as it may be, that we cannot
resolve at this time by praying the Holy Rosary. With the Holy Rosary we will
save ourselves, sanctify ourselves, console Our Lord and obtain the salvation
of many souls.
Then, there is devotion to
the Immaculate Heart of Mary, our Most Holy Mother, holding her as the seat of
mercy, goodness and pardon and the sure door to enter Heaven. This is
the first part of the Message referring to Our Lady of Fatima, and the second
part, which is briefer but no less important, refers to the Holy Father.
Sr. Lucia of Fatima, last
public interview, with Fr. Augustin Fuentes, 1957
Jesus Christ addressing the Jews:
Whither
I go, you cannot come… You are from beneath, I am from above. You are of this
world, I am not of this world. Therefore I said to you,
that you shall die in your sins. For if you believe not that I am he, you shall
die in your sin. (John 8, 22-24)
Pope Benedict XVI addressing
the Jews:
I come among you to express to you the esteem and the
affection which the Bishop and the Church of Rome, as well as the entire
Catholic Church, have towards this Community and all Jewish communities around
the world… Second Vatican Council… gave a strong impetus to our irrevocable commitment to pursue the path of dialogue,
fraternity and friendship, a journey which has been deepened and developed
in the last forty years, through important steps and significant gestures…. I
too, in the course of my Pontificate, have wanted to demonstrate my closeness
to and my affection for the people of the Covenant.
I cherish in my heart each moment of the pilgrimage that I had the joy of
making to the Holy Land in May of last year, along with the memories of
numerous meetings with Jewish Communities and Organizations, in particular my
visits to the Synagogues of Cologne and New York. Furthermore, the Church
has not failed to deplore the failings of her sons and daughters, begging
forgiveness for all that could in any way have contributed to the scourge of
anti-Semitism and anti-Judaism. May
these wounds be healed forever! The heartfelt prayer which Pope John Paul II
offered at the Western Wall on 26 March 2000 comes back to my mind, and it
calls forth a profound echo in our hearts: "God of our Fathers, you
chose Abraham and his descendants to bring your Name to the nations: we are
deeply saddened by the behaviour of those who in the course of history have
caused these children of yours to suffer, and asking your forgiveness we wish
to commit ourselves to genuine brotherhood with the people of the Covenant."…
In exercising justice and mercy, Jews and Christians
are called to announce and to bear witness to the coming Kingdom of the Most
High, for which we pray and work in hope each day… Christians and
Jews share to a great extent a common spiritual patrimony, they pray to the
same Lord, they have the same roots, and yet they often remain unknown to each
other.
Pope Benedict XVI, address at the Great Synagogue of the Jews of Rome,
January 17, 2010
Modernism
vs. Neo-modernism: A difference in method, an agreement in ends!
The heresy of Modernism denies dogma directly. Neo-modernism is a more
subtle heresy. The end remains the
denial of dogma but the method of denial is indirect. Dogma, the revelation of God that forms the
formal objects of divine and Catholic faith, is formulated in categorical
propositions that are always and everywhere true or false. There are two methods the Neo-modernist
employs to destroy dogma. The first method is to change the category of dogma
from truth-falsehood to the category of authority-obedience. They treat dogma as if it were laws,
commands, precepts, injunctions, etc., etc., etc., and then limit the universal
truth with all the moral restrictions that apply to laws, etc. For example, the dogma that the sacrament of
baptism is necessary for salvation is treated as a law and therefore as a law,
it does not bind in cases of impossibility, necessity, unreasonable burden,
psychological impediment, etc., etc.
The second method is to corrupt the dogmatic proposition be changing
the meaning of the terms OR altering the universality of the copula. An
excellent example of this corruption of terminology can be seen in
Benedict/Ratzinger’s treatment of the word, substance.
“…the medieval concept of substance has long since become inaccessible
to us. In so far as we use the concept of substance at all today we understand
thereby the ultimate particles of matter, and the chemically complex mixture
that is bread certainly does not fall into that category.”
Joseph Ratzinger, Faith and the Future, p. 14
It is impossible to affirm the Catholic dogma that “Lord Jesus
Christ... is consubstantial with the Father” or the Catholic dogma of
Transubstantiation if the concept of “substance” is rejected in the sense as
used by scholastic theologians found in the perennial realist philosophical
tradition. And so we have
Benedict/Ratzinger writing:
“Eucharistic devotion such as is noted in the silent visit by the
devout in church must not be thought of as a conversation with God. This would
assume that God was present there locally and in a confined way. To justify
such an assertion shows a lack of understanding of the Christological mysteries
of the very concept of God. This is repugnant to the serious thinking of the
man who knows about the omnipresence of God. To go to church on the ground that
one can visit God who is present there is a senseless act which modern man
rightfully rejects.”
Joseph Ratzinger, Die Sacramentale
Begrundung Christliche Existenz
The
Catholic Church infallibly teaches:
“By the consecration of the bread and wine there takes place a change
of the whole substance of the
bread into the substance of the body
of Christ our Lord and of the whole substance
of the wine into the substance of his blood. This change the holy Catholic
Church has fittingly and properly called transubstantiation.”
Council of Trent, Session XIII, chapter IV
“If anyone denies that in the sacrament of the most Holy Eucharist are
contained truly, really and substantially
the body and blood together with the soul and divinity of our Lord Jesus
Christ, and consequently the whole Christ, but says that He is in it only
as in a sign, or figure or force, let him be anathema.” Council of Trent, Session XII, Canon I
Benedict/Ratzinger’s affirmation of these dogmas is done within the
corrupted context of mutilating the meaning of the terms. The entire
hermeneutic of discontinuity/rupture vs. the hermeneutic of reform proposed by
Benedict/Ratzinger is predicated upon accepting or rejecting his false
philosophy which ultimately elevates the accident of relationship to overthrow the concept of substance. Reciting the Credo is no longer evidence of the Catholic
faith without clearly defining every term.
Modern
Novus Ordo Church embraces the “revolutionary state of mind” of the new
theology governed by “science and human reason” which, based upon evolution
denies the very concept of substance and
the existence of any fixed nature of creation, and not on the truthfulness of God!
Freemasonry is a body of superimposed secret societies spread
throughout the world.
Its aim is to destroy the present civilization based on Christian
principles, to establish in its place an atheistic rationalist society which,
in fact, leads straight to materialism although it is supposed to have science
and reason as a religion. Appearances have often changed but this aim has
remained unalterable.
The inner nature of the struggle is spiritual. It is a conflict between
rationalism and the Christian idea, between the rights of God and the rights of
man, who will become a man-god, directed by a state-god. In order to reach this
final aim it was necessary to begin by undertaking the overthrow of monarchies
representing the principles of authority and tradition, and to replace them,
little by little, by the universal atheist Masonic republic.
The role of Freemasonry is to create the revolutionary state of mind
rather than to act directly. [.....]
Freemasonry cannot do less than thank the sovereign Pontiff for his
last encyclical. Leo XIII with incontestable authority and a wealth of proofs,
has just informed us once more that there exists an impossible abyss between
the Church, of which he is the representative, and the revolution of which
Freemasonry is the right arm. It is better for those who are hesitating not to
keep up vain hopes. All must come to understand that the time has arrived for
choosing between the order, which rests upon Revelation, and the new order
which knows no other foundation but science and human reason, between the
spirit of authority and the spirit of liberty.
Vicomte Leon de Poncins, The Secret Powers behind Revolution,
Freemasonry and Judaism
Cardinal
Henry Edward Manning –
The
true Revelation of God is both a Definite and Certain participation in God’s
own knowledge. IT is this fundamental
truth of revelation that our Neo-Modernist hierarchy reject!
What, then, is the knowledge which God has restored to man through
revelation but a definite knowledge, a participation of His own? The
truth which has been revealed, what is it in the mind of God who reveals it,
but one, harmonious and distinct? What was that know ledge as revealed by the
Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost, but one, harmonious and distinct? What was
the conception of that knowledge in inspired men, but one, harmonious and
distinct also? And what was that knowledge when communicated by those who were
inspired to those who believed, but one, harmonious and distinct as before? And what is this unity and
harmony and distinctness of knowledge, which God revealed of Himself through
Jesus Christ, but the faith we confess in our creed? Our baptismal faith, its
substance and its letter, the explicit and the implicit meaning, article by
article, is as definite, severe, and precise, as any problem in science. It is
of the nature of truth to be so; and where definiteness ends, knowledge ceases.
Observe, then, the distinction between finite knowledge and definite knowledge.
Is not science definite? And yet it is also finite. The theory of gravitation,
definite as it is, it is finite too. [……] Go through the whole range of
physical sciences, what is it but an example of the same condition of
knowledge, definiteness in conception with finiteness of reach? [….] If we have not a definite
knowledge of what we believe, we may be sure we have no true knowledge of it.
But, further, it is evident that knowledge must also be certain.
When we speak of certainty, we mean one of two things. Sometimes we say, that a
thing is certain; at other times, that we are certain. When we say a truth is
certain, we mean, that the proofs of that truth are either self-evident, or so
clear as to exclude all doubt. This is certainty on the part of the object
proposed to our intelligence. But when we say we are certain, we mean that we
are inwardly convinced, by the application of our reason to the matter before
us, of the sufficiency of the evidence to prove the truth of it. In us,
certainty is rather a moral feeling, a complex state of mind. As light manifests itself by its
own nature, but sight is the illumination of the eye; so certainty means truth
with its evidences illuminating the intelligence, or, in other words, the
intelligence possessed by truth with its evidences.
This we call certainty. I ask, then, is there not this twofold
certainty in the revelation which God has given? Was not the revelation
which God gave of Himself through Jesus Christ made certain on His part by
direct evidence of the divine act which revealed it? Is it not also certain on
our part by the apprehension and faith of the Church? Was not God manifest in
the flesh that He might reveal Himself? Did not God dwell on earth that He
might teach His truth? Has not God spoken to man that man might know Him? Did
not God work miracles that man might believe that He was present? What evidence
on the part of God was wanting that men might know that Jesus Christ was indeed
the Son of God? And if
there was certainty on the part of God who revealed, was there not certainty
also on the part of those that heard? Look back into the sacred history.
Had not Prophets and Seers certainty of that which they beheld and heard? […..]
What, then, is the first
condition of faith but certainty? He that has not certain faith has no faith.
We are told that to crave for certainty implies a morbid disposition. Did not
Abraham, and Moses, and Daniel, the Apostles and Evangelists desire certainty
in faith, and crave to know beyond doubt that God spake to them, and know with
definite clearness what God said? Was this a morbid craving? Surely this is not
to reproved. But rather
the contrary disposition worthy of rebuke. How can we venture to content
ourselves with uncertainty in matters where the truth and honour of God and the
salvation of our own souls are at stake? This truly is not without sin.
[…..] And yet, what is the very idea of Revelation but a Divine assurance of
Truth? Where faith begins uncertainty ends. Because faith terminates upon the
veracity of God; and what God has spoken and authenticated to us by Divine
authority cannot be uncertain.
Cardinal Henry Edward Manning, Grounds of
Faith
With friends like Pope Francis,
who needs enemies?
“Pope Francis asked me not to convert.”
Eugenio Scalfari, nearly 95 year old atheist, journalist, former editor
of L’espresso, former member of the Italian Chamber of Deputies, founder of La Repubblica
newspaper, friend of the pope.
When
to set aside the sword, and when to pick it up!
Pope Francis has no clue!
It was from this advent of Charity, then, that all these essentially
Christian virtues of generosity and meekness and self-sacrifice sprang which
Nietzsche condemned as hostile to material progress.
For, from henceforth, if a man take thy coat, let him take thy cloak
also; if he will compel thee to go with him one mile, go two; if he strike thee
on one cheek, turn to him the other also. The Law of Natural Justice is
transcended and the Law of Charity and Sacrifice reigns instead. Resist not
evil; do not insist always, that is to say, on your natural rights; give
men more than their due, and be yourself content with less. Learn of Me, for
I am meek and lowly of heart, and find rest to your souls. Forgive one another
your trespasses with the same generous charity with which God has forgiven
and will forgive you yours. Judge not and you shall not be judged. Do
not, in personal matters, insist upon bare justice for yourself, but act on
that scale and by those principles by which God Himself has dealt with you.
Meekness, then, is undoubtedly a Christian virtue. Sometimes it is
obligatory, sometimes it is but a Counsel of Perfection; it stands, in any
case, high among those ideals which it has been the glory of Christianity to
create.
But there are other elements in life besides the human and the natural,
beyond those personal rights and claims which a Christian may, if he is aiming
at perfection, set aside out of charity. The Church is Divine
as well as Human.
For the Church has entrusted to her, besides the rights of men, which
may be sacrificed by their possessors, the rights and claims of God, which none
but He can set aside. He has given into her keeping, for example, a Revelation
of truths and principles which, springing out of His own Nature or of His Will,
are as immutable and eternal as Himself. And it is precisely in defence of
these truths and principles that the Church exhibits that which the world calls
intransigeance and Jesus Christ violence.
Here, for example, is the right of a baptized Catholic child to be
educated in his religion, or rather, the right of God Himself to teach that
child in the manner He has ordained. Here is the revealed truth that marriage
is indissoluble; here that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. Now these are not
human rights or opinions at all -- rights and opinions which men, urged by
charity or humility, can set aside or waive in the face of opposition. They
rest on an entirely different basis; they are, so to speak, the inalienable
possessions of God; and it would neither be charity nor humility, but sheer
treachery, for the Church to exhibit meekness or pliancy in matters such as
these, given to her as they are, not to dispose of, but to guard intact. On the
contrary here, exactly, comes the command, He that hath not, let him sell
his cloak and buy a sword, for here comes the line between
the Divine and the Human; let all personal possessions go, all merely natural
rights and claims be yielded, and let a sword take their place. For here is a
matter that must be resisted, even unto blood.
The Catholic Church then is, and always will be, violent and
intransigeant when the rights of God are in question. She will be absolutely
ruthless, for example, towards heresy, for heresy affects not personal matters
on which Charity may yield, but a Divine right on which there must be no
yielding. Yet, simultaneously, she will be infinitely kind towards the heretic,
since a thousand human motives and circumstances may come in and modify his
responsibility. At a word of repentance she will readmit his person into her
treasury of souls, but not his heresy into her treasury of wisdom; she will
strike his name eagerly and freely from her black list of the rebellious, but
not his book from the pages of her Index. She exhibits meekness towards him and
violence towards his error; since he is human, but her Truth is Divine.
[……]
She will give up all that is merely human, if the world will have it
so, and will resist not evil if it merely concerns herself. But there is
one thing which she will not renounce, one thing she will claim, even with violence
and "intransigeance," and that is the Royalty with which God Himself
has crowned her.
Msgr. Robert Hugh Benson, excerpt from Palm Sunday Sermon
For
unless there come a revolt first,
and the man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition…. 2 Thes 2:3
“The divorced and
remarried, de facto couples, those cohabitating, are certainly
not models of unions in sync with Catholic Doctrine, but the Church cannot look
the other way. Therefore, the
sacraments of Reconciliation and Communion should be given even
to those so-called wounded families and to however many who, despite living in
situations not in line with traditional matrimonial canons, express the sincere
desire to approach the sacraments after an appropriate period of discernment.”
Cardinal
Francesco Coccopalmerio, president of the Pontifical Council for
Legislative Texts, his new book entitled, The Eighth Chapter of the
Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation Amoris Laetitia
The Necessity of
Baptism for Salvation
“Here there are altogether seven towns of
Christians, all of which I went through and baptized all the newborn infants and
the children not yet baptized. A great many of them died soon after their
baptism, so that it was clear enough that their life had only been preserved by
God until the entrance to eternal life should be opened to them.”
St. Francis Xavier, May Letter,1546
“The thing which I wish to commend to you above everything else is that you
should employ special diligence and watchfulness in the baptism of little
children, so as not to leave any lately born child not regenerated in the
saving laver of Christ in any of the villages… Make search and inquiry for
yourselves, and baptize with your own hands all those whom you find in want of
that most necessary Sacrament.”
St. Francis Xavier, February Letter, 1548
“Inflated
expectation,” such as, the Church hierarchy might actually identify the cause
of the sex abuse problem as a homosexual clergy problem, adapt effective
policies to prevent homosexuals from entering the religious state, and
implement effective procedures to get the homosexuals out of the clerical
state. Unfortunately, the HomoLobby is running the Synod!
“I permit myself to say that I’ve perceived a bit of an inflated
expectation. We need to deflate the expectations to these points that I’m saying,
because the problem of abuse will continue. It’s a human problem, but human
everywhere.”
Pope Francis, commenting before the sex-abuse synod that did nothing to
end the homosexual crisis in the Church
Dogma
is the Proximate Rule of Faith!
Grasping these authentic notions relating to the preservation,
elucidation, and transmission of Catholic doctrine, both on questions of
dogmatic Faith and Christian morals, is absolutely essential in our day, when
wicked or ignorant ecclesiastics seek to undermine the Sacred Deposit. Learning
and treasuring these truths will help us to accomplish what St. Jude exhorts
the faithful to do in his canonical epistle: “To contend earnestly for the
faith once delivered to the saints” (Jude 1:3).
If this seems like an impossible task in our day, we should take heart
and recall that St. Jude is, along with St. Rita, the patron saints of the
impossible.
Br. Andre Marie, MICM
The most evident mark of God’s anger, and the most terrible castigation
He can inflict on the world, is manifest when He permits His people to fall
into the hands of a clergy who are more in name than in deed, priests who
practice the cruelty of ravening wolves rather than the charity and affection
of devoted shepherds. They abandon the
things of God to devote themselves to the things of the world, and instead of
their saintly call to holiness, they spend their time in profane and worldly
pursuits. When God permits such things
it is a very positive proof that He is thoroughly angry with His people, and is
visiting His dreadful wrath upon them.
St. John Eudes
Hermeneutics
of Continuity/Discontinuity
Pope
Francis Believes:
In the call to be evangelisers, all the Churches and Ecclesial
Communities discover a privileged setting for closer cooperation. For this to
be effective, we need to stop being self-enclosed, exclusive, and bent on
imposing a uniformity based on merely human calculations. Our shared commitment
to proclaiming the Gospel enables us to overcome proselytism and competition in
all their forms. All of us are at the service of the one Gospel.
In this moment of prayer for unity, I would also like to remember our
martyrs, the martyrs of today. They are witnesses to Jesus Christ, and they are
persecuted and killed because they are Christians. Those who persecute them
make no distinction between the religious communities to which they belong.
They are Christians and for that they are persecuted. This, brothers and
sisters, is the ecumenism of blood.
Mindful of this testimony given by our martyrs today, and with this
joyful certainty, I offer a cordial and fraternal greeting to His Eminence
Metropolitan Gennadios, the representative of the Ecumenical Patriarch, His
Grace David Moxon, the personal representative in Rome of the Archbishop of
Canterbury, and all the representatives of the various Churches and Ecclesial
Communions gathered here to celebrate the Feast of the Conversion of Saint
Paul.
Pope Francis addressing “ecumenical” gathering
The
Catholic Infallibly Teaches:
The most Holy Roman Church firmly believes, professes and preaches that
none of those existing outside the Catholic Church, not only pagans, but also
Jews and heretics and schismatics, can have a share in life eternal; but that
they will go into the “eternal fire which was prepared for the devil and his
angels” (Matthew 25:41), unless before death they are joined with Her; and that
so important is the unity of this ecclesiastical body that only those remaining
within this unity can profit by the sacraments of the Church unto salvation,
and they alone can receive an eternal recompense for their fasts, their
almsgivings, their other works of Christian piety and the duties of a Christian
soldier. No one, let his almsgiving be as great as it may, no one, even if he
pour out his blood for the Name of Christ, can be saved, unless he remain
within the bosom and the unity of the Catholic Church.
Pope Eugene IV, Cantate Domino (1441)
“A
Dark Cloud of Fog Instead of a Head”
I saw a strange
church being built against every rule.... No angels were supervising the
building operations. In that church,
nothing came from high above... There was only division and chaos. It is probably a church of human creation,
following the latest fashion, as well as the new heterodox church of Rome,
which seems of the same kind... I saw
all sorts of people, things, doctrines, and opinions. There was something proud, presumptuous, and
violent about it, and they seemed to be very successful. I did not see a single Angel or a single
saint helping in the work. But far away
in the background, I saw a laughing figure which said: 'Do build it as solid as
you can; we will pull it to the ground'.... Among the strangest things that I
saw, were long processions of bishops. Their thoughts and utterances were made
known to me through images issuing from their mouths. Their faults towards
religion were shown by external deformities. A few had only a body, with a dark
cloud of fog instead of a head. Others had only a head, their bodies and hearts
were like thick vapors. Some were lame; others were paralytics; others were
asleep or staggering.
Blessed
Anna-Katarina Emmerick, Yves Dupont, Catholic
Prophecy
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.
St. Paul, Letter
to the Galatians, 1:8-9
Proselytism
is “solemn non-sense,” for Pope Francis the “Common Good” and the “Best
Solution for Everyone” is not their salvation! The end for dialogue is always
Opinion, not Truth. Opinion never excludes the possibility of doubt, the
possibility of error.
“Dialogue is not negotiating in order to try and get one’s piece of the
cake. Dialogue is to seek the common good, for everyone; it is to discuss
together and think of the best solutions for everyone.”
Pope Francis, defining “dialogue” to the Italian Episcopal Conference
(CEI)
“And if Satan
also be divided against himself, how shall his kingdom stand?”
“Mutual
respect… Freedom to practice one’s religion… Freedom to follow one’s conscience
without suffering ostracism or persecution,” is extended to every error but,
has and will never be extended by the Novus Ordo hypocrites toward Catholic
tradition and truth.
Ever since the
Second Vatican Council, the Catholic Church has placed special emphasis on the
importance of dialogue and cooperation with the followers of other religions.
In order to be fruitful, this requires reciprocity on the part of all partners
in dialogue and the followers of other religions. I am thinking in particular
of situations in some parts of the world, where cooperation and dialogue
between religions calls for mutual respect, the freedom to practise one’s
religion and to engage in acts of public worship, and the freedom to follow
one’s conscience without suffering ostracism or persecution, even after
conversion from one religion to another. Once such a respect and openness has
been established, peoples of all religions will work together effectively for
peace and mutual understanding, and so give a convincing witness before the
world.
Pope Benedict XVI, St. Mary’s University College, London, September 17,
2010
Pope
Francis has denied his faith and the duty of his office. Dialogue, whose end is
opinion never free from the possibility of error, without Proselytism, whose
end is truth, cannot dissolve the essential difference between heretics and
Catholics. Ultimately, that essential difference will result, as Father Abraham
said, “And besides all this, between us and you, there is fixed a great chaos:
so that they who would pass from hence to you, cannot, nor from thence come
hither.” Luke 16:26
Question from a young girl: Eighty
percent of locals do not belong to any Christian denomination. Should I
convince these friends, who are good and happy people, of my faith?
Pope Francis Reply: It's not licit
to convince someone of your faith. Proselytism is the strongest venom against
the path of ecumenism. The Apostle Paul tells us that, by virtue of our
baptism, we all form the one Body of Christ. The different members, in fact,
are one body. This is why we belong to each other and when one suffers, all
suffer, when one rejoices, all rejoice. Let us continue with confidence on our
ecumenical journey, because we know that, beyond the many open questions that
still separate us, we are already united. What unites us is much more than what
divides us.
Pope Francis, October 13, 2016, to a group of Lutherans in Rome
No
one is “attracted” by opinion but rather by Catholic Truth!
Possibly, this uniqueness of our present crisis is best illustrated by what
has been called Pope Francis’ “Ten Commandments for Happiness”, which he stated
in an interview with the Argentine magazine Viva. The first of these has been translated as “Live and
Let Live” – a premier, colloquial expression of relativism and indifference.
But the ninth “commandment” is much more explicit: “We can inspire others
through witness so that one grows together in communicating. But the worst
thing of all is religious proselytism, which paralyzes: ‘I am talking with you
in order to persuade you’, No. Each person dialogues, starting with his and her
own identity. The church grows by attraction, not proselytizing.”
This ninth “commandment” of Pope Francis is a brutal attack upon the
heart of the Gospel. Proselytism is of course the attempt to convert others to
Christ and His Mystical Body, the Church. Its aim is to bring others to a
conversion to all the Truths of Christ in order for them to be liberated from
darkness, sin, and destructive error. Christ’s last words in the Gospel of
Matthew to His Disciples contained the instruction: “Going therefore, teach ye
all nations…” Paul summarizes our Gospel mission in the following words:
“For the weapons
of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty to God unto the pulling down of
fortifications, destroying counsels, and every understanding unto the obedience
of Christ…”
The Church and the Gospel are not primarily about “attraction” through
dialogue, but rather about Truth. It is Truth which is the Life of Christ, and
therefore the light of souls. It is this Truth that must be the primary form of
“attraction” for souls: “You
shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” (John 8:32).
James Larson, Our Lady of Good Success, And God’s Secret Designs of
Victory
What
was soon to be called, “The Spirit of Vatican II” - the corruption of faith and
worship
Religion must be renovated. That
is the persuasion of all those who, today, are still dealing with religion,
whether they be outside of its concrete expression: a faith, and observance, a
community, or be within a religious profession or discussion. It all depends on what one intends for
renovation.
Pope Paul VI, August 12, 1964
The
Catholic meaning of the “scribe... who bringeth forth out of his treasure new
things and old.” Those who bring forth new things by corrupting that which is old are those who are not “instructed in
the Kingdom of Heaven” and reveal themselves to be not a “householder” of the
House of God but a house-destroyer!
The Catholic
Church, by enforcing firm belief in her dogmas—which are not her inventions,
but were given by Jesus Christ—places them as a bar before the human mind to
prevent it from going astray and to attach it to the truth; but it does
not prevent the mind from exercising its functions when it has secured the
treasure of divine truth, and a “scribe thus instructed in the kingdom of
heaven is truly like a man that is a householder, who bringeth forth out of his
treasure new things and old.” He may bring forth new illustrations, new
arguments and proofs; he may show new applications of the same truths,
according to times and circumstances; he may show new links which connect the
mysteries of religion with each other or with the natural sciences— as there
can be no discord between the true faith and true science; God, being the
author of both, cannot contradict Himself and teach something by revelation as
true which He teaches by the true light of reason as false. In all these cases
the householder “brings forth from his treasure new things and old.” They are new inasmuch as they are the result of new investigations; and old because they are contained in the
old articles of faith and doctrine as legitimate deductions from their old
principles.
Joseph Prachensky, S.J., The Church of the Parables & True Spouse
of the Suffering Saviour
ON ACCOMODATION OF
CATHOLIC TRUTH TO THE WORLD
Vatican II pastoral opinion:
May the faithful,
therefore, live in very close union with the men of their time. Let them strive
to understand perfectly their way of thinking and feeling as expressed in their
culture. Let them blend modern science and its theories and the understanding
of the most recent discoveries with Christian morality and doctrine.... Thus
their religious practice and morality can keep pace with their scientific
knowledge and with an ever - advancing technology...
Decree on
the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes
Catholic Doctrine:
The Roman
pontiff can and must reconcile himself with human progress, with liberalism and
with modern and human culture. – condemned.
Blessed Pope
Pius IX, Syllabus of Errors
Cardinal
Henry Edward Manning explaining what would happen when the pope embraces the
errors of liberalism: For "where the Head acts, all act with him."
And because "God has ordained that these two societies should be united as
in their action to become one," either the Church will sanctify the world
or the world will corrupt the Church as in a man entirely given over to
concupiscence.
The last error condemned (in the Syllabus of Errors by Pope Pius IX) is
this: it had been asserted that the Roman Pontiff can, if he will, and ought
therefore, to reconcile himself and to conform himself to liberalism, progress,
and modern civilization. He condemned this assertion as false; which is,
therefore, to say that the Roman Pontiff ought not, and cannot, reconcile or
conform himself to liberalism, progress, and 
modern
civilization. A bold error, and a bold condemnation.
Like the two fleets drawn up on the waters of Lepanto front to front,
we have here a long array of falsehoods, and their condemnations direct and
authoritative by the Head of the Christian Church. He declares that he cannot,
ought not, and will not conform himself to this world in its mutabilities and
changes.
This shall be our subject, and to make the matter plain, I will recite
what is contained in the Encyclical to which the Syllabus is attached,
describing the nature of the modern civilization, to the progress of which the
Roman Pontiff is invited to conform himself.
The Encyclical describes the claims of modern civilization in the
following propositions. First, the political society of men ought to be
constituted entirely on the foundation of nature, without any regard to
religion, or, at least, in perfect indifference to all religions. Secondly,
that an unlimited freedom is possessed by every man, not only to believe as he
likes, but to speak as he likes, and to write as he likes; and that, because he
has the liberty to think as he likes. He may therefore publish, by writing or
printing, anything he chooses on any subject, and on all subjects, and in every
sense. Thirdly, that the family or the domestic life belongs to the order of
nature, and therefore belongs to the state; that households and families are
under the authority of the civil government in this sense—that the civil
government has a right to determine the question of marriage and divorce, and
also to control and to decide on the nature of the education of children.
Now, in order to show clearly, why the Roman Pontiff—that is, the whole
Church of God; for it is all contained in him, and where the Head acts, all act
with him—ought not to conform himself to this liberalism and progress and
modern civilization, it will be necessary to describe in outline what are the
two societies that now stand face to face the civil society, and the Christian
society of the world. (.....) And such was the will of God. He ordained that
these two societies should be so united as in their action to become one. Just
as man is perfect in his own nature,
though fallen by original sin, and needs to be elevated to a supernatural order
by regeneration and grace, remaining the same individual, but receiving a
perfection above his nature; so it is with the natural society of the world;
and when the Church of God, like the heavenly city coming down from heaven,
perfect in its beauty, symmetry, splendor, and unity, descended on the face of
the world, it took up into itself all the elements of human society that were pure
and true, and incorporated them with itself.
“And blessed is he that shall not be scandalized in Me” (Matt. 11:6).
We can think
of nothing more glorious, more noble, and more honorable than membership in the
Holy Roman Catholic Church, by which we become members of such a holy Body (the
Mystical Body of Christ), are guided by one and so sublime a Head (Jesus
Christ), are guided by one divine Spirit (the Holy Ghost), and finally, are
nourished in this earthly exile with one doctrine and one same heavenly Bread
(the Holy Eucharist) until we are permitted to share the one eternal beatitude
in heaven.... (the Church is) the most perfect Image of Christ.
Pope Pius XII,
Mystici Corporis